Taking a Little Break

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a place for my stuff, a plot for pridemore, blog, blogging, current events, fiction, Stephen Roth

I started my blog, A Place for My Stuff, back in January of 2013. Today, 119 posts later, I still have so many things I want to share with you all. I hesitated for years to launch a writer’s blog because I thought it would turn into a grind, and that I would quickly run out of things to write about.

Boy, was I wrong.

Over the past 22 months, I have written about a diverse array of subjects, including parenthood, book reviews, current events, sports, social media and the occasional quirky work of fiction. I have averaged at least one post a week during a period when I lost my father, got laid off from Hallmark, found a new job, published my first novel and, of course, continued to be a husband and a father and a pet owner. Despite all the complications of modern life, I managed to find new, interesting things to write about. I discovered that maintaining a blog was actually fun, and served as a creative spark for my writing. It has also been gratifying to receive comments and feedback from my 163 subscribers, as well as others who have visited the blog.

That being said, I am going to take a little time away from A Place for My Stuff in order to concentrate on writing my second novel. I am about 130 pages into the new book, but my progress has stalled as I have focused most of my creative energy on promoting A Plot for Pridemore and updating the blog. I will still post from time to time but, for the next three months or so, I want to focus my limited “writing time” on the new book.

In the meantime, thanks for reading and following my blog. Feel free to check back anytime to see if there is anything new. I look forward to sharing some more information about my next novel when I feel that I have something worthwhile to report.

Thanks!

Stephen

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Here’s Boomer!

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current events, dogs, gary matthews, government, here's boomer, humor, media, news, observations, pittsburgh, Stephen Roth, television

When I was a kid, there was a show on NBC called “Here’s Boomer,” about a likeable, shaggy dog who led this wandering, hobo life. It was an unremarkable series, a kind of knock-off on the more popular Benji films of the day. The show had become such an arcane piece of TV trivia, in fact, that I actually thought I might be the only person alive who even remembered or thought about “Here’s Boomer.”

Then I read this article a few days ago, about a Pittsburgh man who was so affected by the show, that he actually decided to become a shaggy dog himself and have his named legally changed to “Boomer.” My first impression upon reading this was, “Boy, the people of Pittsburgh have changed a lot from the tough, hardscrabble steelworkers of the industrial age.” My second thought was, “What a sad, lonely man.” My third thought was, “Well, why not become a dog, if that’s what he wants to do?”

Pittsburgh’s Gary Matthews

I guess you could say I’m a little conflicted about this story. Part of me thinks that, as long as you aren’t doing something that’s destructive, criminal or harmful to somebody else, you should be free to do it. By all accounts, Gary Matthews, or Boomer, just enjoys barking, eating from a bowl on the floor and occasionally sleeping in his dog house. What harm is there in that?

Another part of me, the “judgy” part, thinks perhaps Boomer should get some psychiatric help, and also worries if this story isn’t indicative of a larger trend. There is, after all, a sub-culture of people called Furries who like to wear animal suits and pretend that they are cute, cuddly creatures. Most Furries treat this as a hobby, but what if many of them, like Gary Matthews, decided to pursue their passion full-time? A lot of kids, like Gary and myself, loved “Here’s Boomer,” and the 1976 Disney movie, The Shaggy D.A. Could these media now be considered gateways to a mid-life crisis spent chasing garbage trucks, digging holes in the yard, and marking territory on various hydrants and mailboxes?

The original Boomer

Finally, how does local government respond to activities by men who decide they want to become dogs? Does a leash law go into effect? We can’t just have these Boomers running loose on the city streets, can we?

“It won’t come to that,” you might tell me. “This is an isolated incident,” you might add. But, in this age of social media and attention-seeking me-too-ism, is there really such a thing as an isolated incident? Gary Matthews may be the first American to attempt the transition from man to Man’s Best Friend, but will he be the last?

I think we better have some extra Pooper Scoopers on hand, just in case.

Painful to Recall, Impossible to Forget

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9/11, attacks, current events, history, new york, sept. 11

What were you doing the moment you learned that two jet airliners had hit the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001? I posed that question this morning on Facebook, and this response from a high school friend sent a chill down my spine:

“I was in my Manhattan apartment, which was above a fire station. Despite seeing the second plane hit on live TV, I still headed for work, where I knew I’d have a landline phone and internet access. As I left my building, I saw the fire engines roar out of the station, heading downtown. Hours later, when I returned, candles and flowers already adorned the sidewalk in front of the station, and teary-eyed people stood around comforting each other. Just about all of the men I watched depart never made it back.”

My own recollections of that day are not nearly as powerful, but they are as crisp in my mind as if they had happened last week. My wife and I had returned from our honeymoon just a few days prior, and were settling into our life together in south Kansas City. The morning of Sept. 11, I got into my car around 7:30 a.m. and turned on the local sports talk radio show. The discussion about the Chiefs’ home opener quickly turned to a plane that had crashed into the World Trade Center. From the way it was being reported, I thought that a small aircraft had hit the skyscraper. When I arrived at The Kansas City Business Journal, my coworkers were watching a television in the conference room, which beamed footage of smoke and fire coming from the North Tower. Moments later, a very large commercial jet hit the South Tower, and all of us rushed into the newsroom to figure out how to cover the story from our eighth floor office in the middle of the country.

The rest of the day was a flurry of phone calls to public officials and updates to our web site, punctuated by one tower collapsing, then the other, then the attack on the Pentagon, then the crash in Pennsylvania. At one point, all the government buildings in our city were closed and cordoned off from traffic. It sounds silly now, but it seemed very possible that, at any moment, a hijacked airliner could suddenly crash into downtown Kansas City. At some point I returned home from work, and we watched the news late into the evening.

Thinking back on the events of that day, it’s hard to believe that it happened 12 years ago. The memories are still fresh, still painful, and most of what I experienced came from television footage. I can only imagine what it was like to be in New York or Washington on that day. Sept. 11 changed everything. Its anniversary is another annual reminder that we still have yet to recover from it.

Image from Washingtonpost.com.

Where Have You Gone, Billy Mays?

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advertising, billy mays, cable news, current events, media, Mindy McCready, news, Oscar Pistorius

“But, wait! There’s more!”

One Monday morning a few years ago, I was settling into my office cubicle when my co-worker Dave popped his head over the wall and shared some sad news.

“You hear that Billy Mays died over the weekend?”

“Really? No way!”

“Yep. They think it was a heart attack.”

“Wow,” I said, wondering if my father had heard about this. “That’s big news.”

“I guess.”

“So, the Say-Hey Kid is no more.”

“What?”

“The Say-Hey Kid,” I said. “That’s what they called him in his playing days.”

Dave laughed. “Not Willie Mays. Billy Mays.”

“Who the hell is Billy Mays?” I asked.

“You know, the guy on the Home Shopping Network. The OxiClean guy.”

I had no idea who Dave was talking about. I soon would, however, as the cable news networks and celebrity gossip shows reported on the death nonstop for the next several days. I learned that Billy Mays was a fast-talking, charismatic TV pitchman who worked his way up from selling cleaning products and even had his own reality show for a while. I still didn’t know why his death was especially important, other than inspiring this mildly tasteless joke:

First Guy: “Did you hear that Billy Mays died?”

Second Guy: “Why, no, I—”

First Guy: “—But wait! There’s more!”

A couple of recent news stories reminded me of Billy Mays and my cold indifference to his death. Last week, South African Olympian Oscar Pistorius was charged with murdering his girlfriend. And on Sunday, former country star Mindy McCready was found dead in an apparent suicide. My first reaction to both events was, “Gosh, that’s terrible.” My second reaction was, “Who are these people again?” I had never heard of either one of them.

Of course, thanks to electronic media, I know now that Nike has decided to drop Pistorius from its advertising campaign and that McCready once starred on “Celebrity Rehab.” I know that Pistorius’ girlfriend was a supermodel who spoke out against domestic abuse, and that McCready and her boyfriend both died this year, leaving behind a son who hasn’t even reached his first birthday. I should point out I learned all of this without actively watching or reading any of the news coverage. The awareness seeped into me as if it were part of the atmosphere–a sound byte about the disgraced Olympian from the TV in the next room; a headline about Dr. Drew’s reaction to the country star’s death at the top of Google News.

I don’t mean to make light of these two stories. Both are tragic beyond words. But I have a hard time understanding the intense coverage and hourly updates. Is this the kind of news people really care about and want to follow? Or are we trained to take an interest in these stories because the cable networks have been feeding us a steady diet of them for so long? How many viewers knew who Oscar Pistorius was a week ago?

The irony of the 24-hour news cycle is that there isn’t enough real news to fill the cycle. And who wants to be hit over the head all day with stories about budget shortfalls, unemployment, Afghanistan, gun violence and immigration reform? You know, the stuff that really matters and could make a difference in our lives? We want a diversion from all that, and what better way than to fill us up with murder mysteries, courtroom dramas and turbulent lives that allow us to say, “Well, at least I’m not that guy?” Doesn’t really matter if it’s O.J. Simpson or the jerk who slapped an 19-month-old child yesterday on a Delta Airlines flight.

Okay, so I admit to reading a CNN.com article about the guy slapping the toddler. We all have our weaknesses. And, like a late-night salesman hawking cleaning supplies, the news media will keep pitching until it has something our sleep-deprived craniums absolutely, positively cannot resist.