Ramblings from the Lunatic Lounge

“Daddy, I’m gonna be 3 on my birthday.”

“Yep.”

“But my birthday isn’t today.”

“You’re right.  It’s next week.”

“That’s later than tomorrow, right?”

“Exactly.”

(a minute of hard-thinking goes by…)

“Hey Daddy, I thought of something.  There were days before yesterday, right?”

“Yes.  Alot of them.”

“How many days were before yesterday?”

“Time goes back indefinitely, kiddo.  Too many days to count.”

“Yeah, there were alot of days before yesterday.  Hmmm… probably more than 3.”

When I go back and think about what it took to bring some of the most memorable movies to life, I try to picture the original movie pitch-man trying selling its plot to a group of movie executives.

“Okay there’s this nun who gets on all the other nuns’ nerves because she runs around like a loon in the mountains, and she’s a hot redhead.  So they get together and conspire about how to get her outta there.  They hook her up as the babysitter for this rich widower with a million kids.  He acts like a turd at first, but then comes around and they fall in love.”

“That sounds kinda racy.  Are nuns supposed to be shacking up with rich employers?”

“Oh that’s just a minor detail –  nobody will notice.  Trust me, this thing will be a hit.”

“Hmmm… that sounds good, but we were really wanting to do a movie about Nazis this year.  Or a musical.”

“I tell you what – Let’s add both of those to it.  The hot nun and the rich kids will sing and dance, and later the whole family will run from the Nazis.”

“You got yourself a movie, mister.  We’ll call it the “The Sound of Musical Nazis,” or something close to that.

It seems as though my neighborhood is full of interesting characters, but I can’t tell if I live on a goofy street, or if I live in a wacky part of the world, or if it is an all-humans thing.

Depending on what time you drive through my neighborhood, there’s a good chance that you’ll hear my teenage neighbor banging on his drums in his garage.  He hits them randomly like he’s just now sitting down at a drum-set for the first time, bangs around really fast for four seconds, taps a few times, and then rests.  Then it starts all over.  The funny part isn’t that he’s an awful drummer – instead, I’m amazed that he’s been drumming out there for years like this and hasn’t gotten any better.  He might even somehow be getting worse.  I fear a head injury has taken place over there.

My other neighbors across the street go all-out to decorate their house for Halloween, with orange lights, tombstones, and the like. Those decorations make it out about October 1^st and then they’re more extravagant than any other neighbors’ Christmas decorations in December. The parents, kids, and pets end up dressing together as a group theme. The funny part is, when you ask either the husband or the wife about all the excitement about this particular holiday, they each say it’s the other one who is dialing Halloween up to an 11, and they each roll their eyes and act as though they’re not the interested party.

Exploring my neighborhood, there’s also a good chance that at least once a month, you’ll catch a grown man hurrying trash cans out to the curb in his underwear late at night.  I cannot confirm nor deny if that person is me.

Another unforgettable neighborhood character who you might see trolling up and down my street is Franks, the gentleman who picks up scrap metal to turn them in at a recycling facility.  The unforgettable part isn’t his old beaten truck or his Depression-era hardship stories – he does a crazy thing with his tongue where it flicks around like a snake, whether not he’s talking.

Franks will occasionally stop you on the street and ask about your excess metal situation while he mesmerizes you with the amazing flicking tongue.  It seems to operate completely independently from the rest of him, dancing around in a half-open mouth.  Even if you don’t have any scrap metal, like an unwanted BBQ grill or rusty lawn chairs to send with him, you’re hypnotized by the tongue and you find yourself starting to consider letting him recycle your whole pickup truck.

It’s probably rude, yet impossible not to stare right at the tongue.  You quickly accept that there is a different life form that is merely visiting Franks’ mouth, and you wonder about its intentions and language capabilities.

One bummer about his scrap metal haul-off service is that Franks doesn’t mention until you’ve lugged all your large metallic junk to the curb that he also needs you to put it inside his truck for him.  Oh – and by the way, his truck is always full, so you might have to do some removal and sorting of your other neighbors’ items to cram your stuff in there.  What seemed like a 2-minute exercise is now a 20-minute ordeal, with you climbing around in the bed of Franks’ truck while he stands there and licks the air at you.

On a rare evening that I remembered to get the trash out to the curb before I stripped down to my underpants, I ran into a group of competitor scrap-metal guys, trolling up and down the street for unwanted junk to recycle.  But these folks provided a full-fledged service, offering to do all the heavy lifting and disassembly.  With impressive flair, a whole family piled out of the truck, disassembled and carried out all my unwanted scrap in record time with a smile, and left me with a handshake and a “Gracias!”  I was half-tempted to talk them into taking the drum-set from the goofy teenage musician.

I initially felt good about offering my recycling to the super-efficient family, but later on I felt like I had let Franks down.  The way my mind takes things too far, I imagined that the lack of earnings from my recycled junk would be the last straw that sent Franks into absolute poverty, ultimately leaving him laying cold and lifeless in a ditch somewhere.

… with his tongue still dancing around, of course.

“Daddy?  I want fruit snacks.  Please.”

“Okay, here we go … oops, we’re all out.  See this box?  It’s empty.”

“Let’s go get some more at the store, Daddy.”

“Do you have any money to buy those fruit snacks?”

“Yep, I have some in my pocket.”

“Oh really?  Let me see.”

(She peeks in here pocket, looks around a bit….)

“There’s something wrong with my pocket.  All the money falled out.”

“Oh well, we don’t have to go to the store now.”

“But you have money, Daddy.  Let’s use your money for fruit snacks.”

“Do I have money, Jules?  Where do I get it?”

“At the store?”

“No, they take money at the store.  They don’t give it to us.”

“Did you find money on the ground?”

“Nope, not on the ground.  They give me money at work.”

“Oh really?  That’s nice of them.”

“I saw Santa Claus!”

“Really?  What did he say?”

“He said he wants to bring me presents.”

“Cool!  What did you ask him to bring you?”

“Toys!”

“Toys?  What kind of toys?”

“I don’t know.  I just like toys.”

“Me too.  How did you get to be such an easy-going kid?”

“Because yeah.”

Dear Farmville,

We’ve spent an extraordinary amount of time together over the past few months, but I think my days as a virtual farmer are coming to a close. I am breaking up with you.

I still remember how we met through a friend. Over the course of about a week, I was fascinated to watch my buddy James transform from “Farmville is so lame, I can’t believe people play this thing,” to “Hey I checked out Farmville and it’s pretty cool,” to “I haven’t eaten or slept in two days and I made a second Facebook persona just to play this thing more!”

The early days off our fling were a magical time, harvesting electronic crops, plowing imaginary land, and then planting new make-believe seeds. In the beginning, the leveling was captivating – I’d anxiously await the next new sets of available seeds and decorations, double-fist-pumping in the air when I’d hit a new level. I figured out the trick of trapping my little farmer in hay bales so that I wouldn’t have to wait for him to walk around to each square. Life was good… or at least, this awkward “second life” was good (in the strange world where seasonal patterns and watering weren’t necessary to make crops grow).

But then I got hooked on you. I started setting alarm clocks to remind me to harvest blueberries. I befriended dozens of Facebook friends just to get more gifts. I fell asleep at my computer. I talked real people into playing. I pleaded with Farmville friends to send me more orange fences. I ordered novelty business cards that said “Badass” for my title, just to score a few FarmVille bucks to buy Sweet Haiti seeds.

I started to question where our relationship was heading after I bought that stupid million-coin villa, seemingly the highest achievement I could find to try to justify all the ludicrous wasted hours. Oh, I had so many questions… Why were pesky raccoons perpetually ransacking my cousin’s garden every time I visited? And why do I get 86 coins for brushing my cat? And why is my horse bigger than my tractor? And if I’m reminded every 42 seconds to fertilize other people’s crops, why couldn’t I fertilize my own damn crops?

We were caught in an endless cycle of planting and harvesting again and again to get more abilities to plant more and harvest more, a dangling carrot to keep me clicking and clicking. Sometimes, when I’d be 93 clicks into a crop cycle, you’d lock down because you’d been “enhanced.” And then I’d go back and re-click all those little squares. You were a cruel mistress, FarmVille.

Finally, I got to level 36 and realized that I didn’t care if I could plant asparagus at level 37. Like the creepy kid said in the Matrix, “there is no spoon,” I realized that there is no asparagus! It’s a video game about farming! We might as well be watching electronic paint dry! The amount of time that 70,476,996 people are cumulatively spending playing this game right now, addicted to continuous synthetic achievements instead of making the world better, makes my brain hurt.

So goodbye, my old friend. I am leaving you for a real woman. I’ll always remember the soybeans we grew together.

- Jeff Young, former FarmVille addict

“Daddy? I have a boo-boo. Look at it. It hurts. Right here.”

“I don’t see it.”

“Oh. It’s on the other leg. Here it is.”

(A week later…)

“Daddy, see my boo-boo? It’s on my leg.”

“I don’t see it, Jules. It must have healed.”

“Yeah…. It fell off my leg. My boo-boo is gone now.  It died.”

As I was headed across the country on a roadtrip last week, I saw a sign on a Louisiana bridge that said “Do not cross double yellow line.” I started thinking, hey, this is a one-lane-each-way bridge. If somebody was dumb enough to drive into oncoming traffic, then the sign probably wouldn’t help. It’s not like somebody has considered crossing the double yellow line to the other side, saw the sign and then thought, “What the… ?!? Thank goodness that sign was there! I was going to do that!”

As I looked around at the new signs in each state, I was stunned at the sheer volume of signage. So then when I got back to Texas, I had a fresh perspective on the amazing multitude of things we’re expected to read while driving. It is freaky how many there are. If you were to actually look at each sign, there wouldn’t be any time left to make sure your car is still facing the right direction with no children or adorable animals in front of it.

I realized that if the landscape is littered with signs every 10 feet, they lose their effectiveness and we just don’t notice them anymore — the same way you don’t feel a shirt after you’ve worn it for a few minutes. The signs are just part of the scenery now, so I really only notice them when I whack one with my head while bicycling or when an officer points out some silly rule that I missed, like no driving 70 mph in a school zone.

I’ll concede that some signs are necessary, like street names to find directions. Or signs that show very specific information. A stop sign is a good example – it has a simple message: Hey you — this is the specific spot where you are supposed to stop your vehicle, or at least slow down to a crawl and look for cops before continuing.

Another good sign with information we need to know would be “The goats on this cliffside are kinda clumsy and tend to leave a huge dent. Try to swerve around them if you see one plummeting.” I might put up one of those just to see drivers looking up.

Another observation from my roadtrip was that the signs take all kinds of crazy grammar license. The sign that said “No Driving On Shoulder” in Mississippi had plenty of room to say “No Driving On The Shoulder.” But instead, they chopped up the command, using a sentence structure we don’t regularly use.

“No Driving On Shoulder. Me Tarzan, You Jane. Ooga Booga..”

Of course I understand the need to keep the signs short, or they’d be gigantic. The “Fines Double When Workers Present” sign doesn’t sound very good when spoken aloud. (Try to slip that one in casual conversation today.) But it would go too far to say “Hello there, Mister or Missus Driver. I hope you remember to obey traffic laws today, because if there are any workers out here, the police officer hiding behind this sign will give you a ticket with super nasty little fine. You sexy thing.” That sign would be 17 feet wide.

I saw a sign in Florida that said “Obey Posted Traffic Speeds.” C’mon, Florida. Was that worth posting? If somebody is going to speed, that little reminder isn’t going to change their mind. But this got me thinking about general-purpose signs… we could replace all these silly signs every 10 feet with one all-encompassing sign, something that reminds us every once in a while to remember the traffic rules and try to avoid killing each other. I considered “Try Not To Drive Like Your Grandmother” or “Don’t Hit Anybody With Your Vehicle Today” or “Feel Free To Honk At Any Drivers You See Not Doing What You Want Them To,” but those were all too long.

But then I found it, the perfect sign. We should take down all the unimportant signs and replace them with this one simple, encouraging message.

“Be Good.”

This ran in the Dallas Morning News on July 23, 2009: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN-young_25edi.State.Edition1.1c3bdc1.html

(Kudos to Mike Harnisch for the great supporting art. Fans, stay tuned for more of Mike’s artistic stylings.)

New Urbanism

Whenever I’m at a social function and somebody throws out a term like “new urbanism,” there’s a pretty decent chance that I don’t know what it is, unless it somehow showed up on MythBusters or SportsCenter . But unlike most people, who might use this opportunity to nod and be generally agreeable, I choose to feign an opposing viewpoint just to stir things up.

“So, Jeff, what do you think of all the new urbanism projects popping up in Dallas?”

“I’m against it. It’s going to kill us all.”

“What? Why? Don’t you think it’s a great way to reduce our dependence on automobiles?”

“Yes, but – you won’t believe this – I think somebody brought queso. You guys keep talking about the evils of new burbanism. … I’ll get a read on the queso situation.” And then I’ll run home and search dallasnews.com and Wikipedia to find out what the heck everybody is talking about.

It turns out that new urbanism is an inspired concept of community structure, where you combine mixed-use development with pedestrian-friendly walkways to condense sprawling suburbs into little microcosm neighborhoods. You mix in some trees, hide all the cars and, ta-da, you have a little Truman Show-type world where people can eat, sleep, work, play and go on dates, all within 17 feet of one another. You get extra points if you live on top of a bakery, next door to a dental office and across the walkway from a yoga studio. (Pssst … good luck finding a dollar store.)

The idea is that you no longer hop in your car and drive 20 minutes to Target, then drive another 20 minutes to the oil change place, then sit through seven red lights to reach the video rental place, then go back for that one thing you forgot at Target, zig-zagging across town like you hate gasoline and want to personally deplete every last drop.

The new urbanism movement has been a little slow to take hold in North Texas because, well, to be honest, we sure do love our motor vehicles. The quaint little communities like Addison Circle or Mockingbird Station are modern marvels, but if you look closely, they’re surrounded by parking garages. The same folks who want to meander the scenic walkways and enjoy all of life’s offerings in one tidy spot also want to get the heck out of there and drive to Ikea in Frisco on Saturday.

I imagine that if you really followed the whole concept, you’d ditch your car, embrace light rail or use a bicycle or scooter to go anywhere else. But then after a while, you’d realize that you’ve had every item, on every menu, at every restaurant within walking distance, and you might one day run out of there screaming.

I think I’d get tired of the same scenery and interacting with the same people every day. And I can assure you that they’d get tired of me pretty quick, too. I think long before my corner bakery’s special cinnamon scones lose their zest, the people who work there would be plenty tired of hearing the only four jokes I know (none of which are appropriate to be published in a major newspaper).

Here’s where I’m really going to drop a culture bomb on you – imagine no more garage sales. Eep! Where would you host your garage sale when you no longer own a car – or a garage, for that matter – and your front yard becomes a manicured walkway with a pizzeria? Without garage sales, where would you go to buy the stuff that you’re going to get rid of in your own future garage sales? That is a life that is not worth living.

So all in all, I call new urbanism an interesting and groundbreaking concept. But I maintain my original position – it will kill us all.

As I watched my brother Ben nonchalantly take his silverware tray out of his dishwasher and dump it into his silverware drawer, I audibly gasped.  How could he be so cavalier?  This was going to take 20 minutes to fix!  Everybody I know – even rebels and hooligans – stack their silverware in neat little rows in trays.  I now feared for the sanity of my younger brother.He saw the panic on my face and said, “Yep.  Been doing this for about three months.  Pretty awesome, huh?” 

I couldn’t speak.  Did he say awesome or awful?  My obsessive-compulsive brain, which might be even more obsessivey-compulsivey than most folks, was sounding off alarms in my head in a deafening roar.  I muttered something that sounded like a high-pitched “Whadjuh? Howdjoo?” while staring at the closed drawer. 

Ben gave me a knowing glance and opened the drawer back up, revealing the array of scattered chrome, just as I had feared.  “Find me a fork, brother,” he said. 

I found a fork.  Then another.  Then another.  I found all the forks, stacking them in a neat little interlocking stack in my hand as I went, intending to help my brother sort this back out.  But it shocked me how fast it went.  When you’re looking for a specific shape in a little two-by-two foot area, it’s not hard to find.  He explained, “I know this sounds crazy, but you won’t believe how much time it saves.”  It was then that I realized how much of my life I’d wasted needlessly sorting forks, knives, and spoons into neat little stacks. 

So I became a believer.  I went home, took the tray out of my silverware drawer, and then flipped it upside-down with great satisfaction.  Then I slammed the drawer shut and did the double fist pump in the air. 

Let’s do some math.  The two minutes it takes to distribute from the dishwasher tray into the appropriate little slots is time that adds up.  Two minutes a day, 14 minutes a week, 730 minutes a year.  That’s a total of 12.16 hours — MORE THAN HALF A DAY STOLEN AWAY FROM YOUR LIFE EACH YEAR.  That is the face of insanity.  Not my face.   

At first, I kept my new silverware religion a secret.  When people came over, I usually got forks out for everybody, so nobody ever needed to know about my little Drawer of Chaos.  But over time, I grew prouder of my incredible amazing efficiency.  I showed my inner circle, who each responded with great distress, as I had similarly done in my younger, unenlightened ways.  Now this is the very first thing you see on the tour of my house.  I drag people into the kitchen, whip open the drawer, and yell “Check this s*** out!” 

Maybe my alternative silverware lifestyle isn’t for everybody.  Maybe some people need the comfort of knowing that each of their forks is all facing the same way.  I won’t judge.  But the next time you’re sorting your utensils into neat little stacks, maybe you’ll imagine yourself flipping the tray upside down, slamming that drawer shut, and then fist-pump in the air.   

Hell yeah.

Some of you have stopped and asked me various questions about my budding side-hobby as a humor writer, questions such as “How does one become a writer?” and “When is the right time to use parentheses?” (hint: Shazam – right here) and “Why are you digging through my trash?”

I’m here to help you gain a more fantastic grasp, a fantasticker grasp, of the English language. If you just follow these principles, you will be on your way to composing amazing, successful, orgasmic grammar.

Whoever vs. whomever

This seems like a tricky subject but it is actually quite simple. You say “whoever” in reference to a person who is the nonspecific subject of your sentence, as in “Whoever ate my last cookie deserves to get incurable itchy butthole worms.”

There is never a correct time to use “whomever.” It is a made-up word, and if you speak it aloud you look like a real turd.

Letter Writing

In the address of your letter, the phrase “To whom it may concern” is much too formal and anonymous. Your reader will digest this line as “I am not smart enough to know who I’m writing to, so I want you, Mr. or Mrs. Stranger, to make the effort and drop this off with the right person.” It is actually less offensive to start your letter with “Hey you with the fat face.”

A more effective approach is, if you can’t find the person’s name, to use that person’s title. For example, you can begin a letter with “To the district director of research for hamster mating rituals” or “To the cute girl on the bus who guffaws like an old man when you sneeze.”

A good way to end a letter is “Sincerely,” but “Get ‘er Done” and “True Dat” carry more impact. It is usually inappropriate to color in all the loops in each lower case “e” or to draw cool spiderweb designs in the margins on your letter prior to sending. This is only considered acceptable behavior if you are stuck in a meeting or on the phone.

Semicolons

Semi means “half”, and colon means “ass.” Just start a new sentence.

Acronyms

Everybody stop it with all the acronyms. You might think it saves time, but your reader or listener still has to stop and figure out what the heck you’re talking about. It took me half a CSI episode (also an acronym) to figure out what “G.S.W.” meant, and then I was irritated to realize that “gun shot wound” requires two less syllables to say than its abbreviation.

I sent an email to a coworker, and she replied “LOL”, but she sits 10 feet away and I didn’t hear her laugh. Either she is a quiet laugher or she misrepresented her response for my benefit. I think “LOL” has been so overused that it now actually means “that thing you said mildly amused me” or “I barely cracked a grin.” Now we have much more exciting acronyms to represent actual laughter. For example, “ROFL” means “rolling on the floor laughing” and “ILSHIPAL” means “I laughed so hard I peed a little.”

When it got to the part of the move where we carried the aquarium out to the truck, my brother Ben seemed nervous. He was stalling, obviously not excited about the last significant part of this move. For new readers to this column, I’ll remind you that this is the same brother who I’ve seen sprinting down a residential street in the nude on a dare, and the same brother who I once caught making out with two girls he didn’t know at a party… three minutes after we arrived. There isn’t much in the world that makes him nervous.

Ben reminded me that 55 gallons of water weighs well over 400 lbs, and it’s a delicate balance between dropping the water level to reduce weight and keeping enough water in there to save his prized fish. Plus, it’s a huge glass box, so it naturally wants to shatter into seven million pieces.

The move had been perfect so far. I’m used to showing up to help people move where I’m the only helper and the person has nothing packed. Usually I’m the one developing hernias dragging somebody’s junk out to my truck while the owner scrambles to throw stuff in boxes, or just now remembers they need to get the key for the new place, or chooses that moment to struggle to get his or her life in order. But not Ben – he and his fiancée were the perfect movers, with everything packed and ready to go. All we had left was this bigass aquarium.

The official recommended method to moving a aquarium is to leave the water a little bit dirty for the weeks leading up to the move. This preserves the natural bacteria in the water and helps reduce shock later when you refill the tank at the new place. But it also means that this gigantic and delicate glass box smells exactly like the dumpster at a seafood restaurant.

I gave all kinds of false reassurances — which I’m prone to do — and convinced Ben that we could do this, even though I internally gave it a pretty high chance of exploding somehow. He siphoned the first half off the top of the tank into buckets while I ferried them out to be dumped on the grass – that way the whole neighborhood could enjoy the smell. While we lowered the tank level, the fish swam around and looked confused.

“Something seems weird in here. Is our ceiling dropping?”

“You’re such a conspiracy nut, Larry. I don’t believe anything you say.”

“I’m serious – look how small our room looks.”

“Larry, I want a divorce.”

Our test lift was an embarrassing attempt – the aquarium still weighed a ton. We realized that we were going to have to drop the level to right about the height of the fish and hope they didn’t flip out (literally). As Ben went to siphon again, I stood there leaning on the tube like a big dummy, accidentally pinching it off. So when he inhaled to draw the air through the tube a second time, he didn’t realize there was still a large amount of water in there… and he inhaled a mouthful of that nasty, nasty liquid.

I wasn’t sure what to expect in this aquarium move beforehand, but I did not picture my brother puking and retching in his kitchen sink while I laughed maniacally.

“See what you did, Larry? Look how upset Ben is.”

We eventually moved the fish over to the new place in an ice chest, with a hasty transfer of fish on the shoulder of the road. I tried to balance driving quickly to limit their transport time, while also maneuvering the crazy drivers in Austin, and inching delicately over bumps to avoid cracking the big fragile aquarium. But when we took our first turn, the nasty fish water splashed out of the ice chest and drenched Ben’s shirt.

As of the time of this report, all the fish made it. And Ben brushed his teeth.

If you’re familiar with church communities, you already know that if you volunteer for something and do a passable job on it, you’re likely to be asked to do that thing again for the rest of your life. For example, I sang with the band one time, and then never got invited again. Ha!

But apparently I did a decent job one time painting kids’ faces for an after-church social event, because now I’m the designated painter of all tiny chubby faces when the occasion requires it. It’s not as lucrative a task as the hunky guy who greets people at the front door, but I can work up to that in time if I continue to grow hunkier somehow.

Prior to my first foray into drawing on kids’ faces, long before I became a seasoned professional, I was worried that I’d need to learn how to draw 1,000 different objects. But on the first day, I realized that whatever icon or symbol the first kid gets, everybody wants. One time it was all scorpions and hearts, the next time it was lightning bolts and kitty cats, and another time it was skulls and lily flowers (Any combination of those, by the way, makes a cool band name.)

The skulls got me in trouble. For one kid, before I could even finish asking him what he wanted, he shouted “I want a skull! Yay!” and threw a fist in the air. I was like, heck yeah, this kid’s getting a cool skull with that kind of energy. He was excited about it too, and grinned like a little maniac while I painted a green skull with crisscrossing bones behind it. The next three kids in line happened to be boys, so they all wanted skulls too (of course) and I gave them all different colors. But then the first kid’s mom exploded onto the face painting scene, barking at her kid, “I told you not to get a skull, and then you did it anyway!” (and then to me: ) “Why are you drawing skulls on kids’ faces?!” She reacted as if I had drawn a curse word on the kid’s face or something. Flustered, I pointed at my forehead and answered, “Um, because we all have a skull?” I would have said something cleverer, but I had a line of kids gawking at me getting in trouble.

After that, even the girls wanted skulls. “I’m sorry kiddo, no more skulls today.”

I also learned that no two kids have the same wigglyness, texture, or face density. You might get a calm kid with a dry bony cheek (perfect for painting) or you might get a chubby cheek on a oily-faced kid with the attention span of a cat at a laser light show. You try not to over-handle the kids’ faces while you’re painting, to keep your professional distance – the parents would probably freak out if they look over and you’ve got their kid in a headlock so you can paint a decent Tyrannosaurus Rex on his cheek. Instead, you just chase their little hyper faces around with your paintbrush and hope for the best. I could never be a tattoo artist – “Oops, sorry there pal, your little twitch made this eagle look like Oscar the Grouch.”

I’d like to think I’m pretty talented at this one thing in life, but sometimes the face paintings don’t work out as intended. Sometimes a dog ends up looking like a floppy-eared rabbit, and you have to add in scary teeth so that the boy doesn’t get beaten up in the bounce-house later for having a cute bunny on his face.

The good news is that every kid likes their painting, or at least plays it up for the crowd as the new best face painting ever designed. They all look in the mirror afterwards and say “Ooh, neat – everybody, look how great my face is! This is awesome!” and then smudge it a little with a finger.

Seeing as how all kids are undaunted by an occasional mistake, I started seeing how far I could push that. One time I accidentally drew a yellow lily flower that looked more like a corn-on-the-cob, and the girl went on to exclaim that it was the best flower ever painted by human hands on this planet. The next girl in line requested a yellow lily too (of course), so I painted one that looked even more like a corn-on-the-cob. She also faked a grin in the mirror and feigned excitement over her yellow lily. Over the next few kids, I slowly perfected my corn-on-the-cob, and started adding the little square of butter and corncob holders on the ends. Eventually we had a whole church full of kids with perfect cornstalks and buttered corncobs on their cheeks.

I think some of the other parents started catching on, but they didn’t dare say anything. That’s how you become the new Facepainter for Life.

(Published in the Dallas Morning News on May 1, 2009):  http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN-young_02edi.State.Edition1.182d250.html

I recently found myself at work without my mobile phone – and the world shouldn’t be like this – but I experienced a fleeting moment of utter shock and panic. I grieved its temporary loss as though I had left my artificial heart at home, and then I internally deemed that day to be the worst day ever.

It was through this experience that I learned two critical things about myself. One is that I have a terrible short term memory. I’d reach into my pocket to check my messages, and oh yeah, I left that thing at home. Then literally three seconds later, I’d reach into the same pocket to find my phone again, this time to peek at what time it is. Oh yeah, it is still at home. Step 1: Throw head back. Step 2: Slap forehead with hand.

I did this about 37 times through the rest of the day for various reasons. I’d be telling a story about my amazing 2-year-old daughter Jules, and would say “Hold on, I’ll be a good Daddy here and show you a picture of her. Oops again, no phone today. Dangit.” Or I’d go to send a message to Current Wife to remind her that we need dog food. Or I’d check the time… again. Nope, it didn’t magically fly here and then sneak back into my pocket. I considered rushing home at lunch to repeat my commute twice and get the darn thing.

The second thing I learned is that I don’t know anybody’s phone numbers. I went to call my cousin/babysitter, but oops, no phone. I started a mental tally (in which I always say the numbers dramatically in my head like the Count from Sesame Street: One! Twooo! Threeee! Ah, ah ah ah…) and it only totaled five numbers memorized.

Fiiiiive! Ah, ah ah ah …

In summary, without my phone I’m pretty much worthless, I can’t call anybody, and then I’m reminded all day how terrible my memory is.

I see approaching the same problem with car navigation systems. I know people who will punch in the address out of habit, even for a routine trip to a place they already know, like a grocery store that is four blocks away. Maybe they just like the comforting voice and feedback of the electronic navigator. “You have reached your destination, you big sexy devil you.” My friend has a nav system that, when you switch it to Spanish, she has a sexy flair to her voice.

Over time, we will continue to become so dependent on the navigation systems that we can’t even find our own way back home. It reminds me of my friend Crazy Mike during college, who was terrible at directions. He only knew how to find his way home from the tower (yes, that tower) at the University of Texas. So as long as he could still see the tower, he could make it home – he’d drive towards it and then go home. But the problem with this was, his system fell apart if he couldn’t see the tower.

What happens when the navigation system breaks, or just gets ornery one day? “Calculating your destina… oh screw it. Hey man, I’m taking the day off. Find your own way to Home Depot.” If you’ve relied on that thing for every trip for the last year, now you’ll have to explore the world like people did in the ancient 1990s. Technology is making us dumber than ever!

Extrapolate this to future advances in technology and you can see where this is headed. One day a famous rapper or charismatic actor will start wearing a nametag that automatically plays your theme song as you approach new people, and then introduces you.

Most people will probably have a little song intro, like the first few licks of a rock song that they play when a batter steps up to the plate in baseball. But I’m going to pick out a theme song that is two or three minutes long, so when I walk up to somebody, we’ll stand there and have a nice long awkward pause and smile at each other until the nametag finally makes the introduction.

But here’s the problem with the nametag introductions – just like phone numbers, you forget the details over time. Eventually we’ll forget our own names.

“Hi, my name is … hold on a minute. Oh crud, I left my nametag thingy at home. I think it’s Joe, or Jeb, or something? I should have written this down somewhere. Let me call home and see if they know my name.”

“Oh wait, I left my phone at home too.”

http://www.star-telegram.com/245/story/1300364.html

Published on Monday, 4/6/09 in the Star Telegram

(This column was first published in the Star-Telegram in March 2009).

The bunny with the gimpy leg works his way through the meadow, struggling along to get back to his den in his old and familiar lop-sided hop.  A quick flash of a shadow alerts his flight instinct – he knows he’s been spotted by the hawk.  With wide eyes and terrified leaps, he races to find shelter under the closest thorny shrub.  But thanks to the gimpy leg, his strides are ill-timed and don’t offer him the lightning speed of his other bunny brethren. 

The bunny doesn’t see the hawk closing in on him, but he sees the shadow becoming larger, diving rapidly towards Earth.  Suddenly, the hawk shrieks, and the bunny is paralyzed with fear – he won’t reach cover in time.  As the hawk opens his talons for the kill grab …

Obama’s gigantic spending package jumps in and saves the day.  The bunny lives long enough to mate, and eventually the meadow is littered with bunnies that also hop sideways.  Hooray for progress!  Oh wait, you didn’t want a meadow full of gimpy bunnies? 

You’re allowed to feel bad for the bunny who doesn’t make it.  After the hawk gets his talons around him, it’s a terrible sight for everybody (except the hawk) to see a meadow covered with whiskers and bits of rabbit fur.  But over time, the hawk is doing the bunny community a favor by fine-tuning their lineage so that only the most successful live on. 

If we violate the rules of the natural order of success and demise, we reward the ignorance that got those companies where they are in the first place.  Here you go, you big dummy — congratulations for not being ready for the inevitabilities of business hardships in the global market:  Here is a fat wad of money that we took away from taxpayers who earned it. 

It’s a sad tale, but the gimpy bunny is supposed to die.  The company who leans on tradition, who lives with fat operating costs and a stubborn corporate vision, who can’t reform when the world changes and won’t look ahead, is supposed to go away.  Even if you save the gimpy bunny from the hawk this time, what about next time, and the time after that?  Not only will our children have to pay the bill for all these business rescue plans, we’ll have to explain to them why their meadow is full of gimpy bunnies and tragic bits of rabbit fur all the time. 

A few days later, the hawk is hungry again.  She circles the sky, ready for another chewy bunny morsel.  She spots another bunny in the meadow and turns around for the kill dive.  Silly rabbits.

Unfortunately for the hawk, this bunny isn’t like his gimpy brother.  He’s lean, his legs are lightning fast, and he remembers his poor brother’s demise.  In fact, this time, he’s ready for the hawk.  He was watching the skies and saw the hawk long before she saw him. 

As the hawk tucks her wings in for the dive, the lean brother takes two hops and ducks into a new burrow that he dug last week, one of many that he dug across the meadow.  This bunny decided that he isn’t going to vanish, to leave an idiot-shaped hole in the world economy and become a lesson to others.  He is proactive, he’s lightning-fast, he adapts, and so he will live on to litter his meadow with lean, smart little bunnies. 

The bailout plan may save a few companies this year, but it’s a very temporary solution because it doesn’t fix the problem.  We need smarter bunnies.

Thanks to all of those who emailed me and expressed outrage and disbelief in my blog being down for a few days. I won’t go into the details of how I fixed it, because it’s awfully boring, but it was the equivalent of rebuilding a whole engine when all I needed was a new sparkplug.

I’m interested in hearing what you think of the new look!

jeffyoungtheauthor@gmail.com

From the Driver’s Seat:

http://www.star-telegram.com/242/story/1122741.html

How to Haggle:

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/city/collin/opinion/stories/DN-west_young_0330edi.ART.West.Edition1.470add7.html

Drivers Wanted:

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN-west_young_12edi.ART.West.Edition1.4b2e489.html

Hamburger Helper:

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN-west_young_04edi.State.Edition1.3e6b7a.html

My first published non-humor article, about the passing of my dog Emily:

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/city/collin/opinion/stories/DN-west_young_08edi.ART.West.Edition1.4b019a4.html

Going to Medieval Times is kinda like going through puberty. It’s awkward, but it seems to be part of the essential human experience.

When you show up at the big castle-shaped building, you pay a very decent-sized chunk of money to people wearing corsets and typing on computers, and then you’re cattle-corralled into a big waiting area. One of the first things I noticed was that there are two bars in the waiting area, only 30 yards apart. Gathered all around the bars were people slamming drinkypoos. I wondered at first if the kinds of people who came to Medieval Times just coincidentally happened to be the types to chug large amounts of dragon-named drinks out of little plastic knight helmets. Only later would I realize why some people would choose to include just a wee bit of inebriation with their Medieval Times experience. I’d realize later that these people were the veterans — they were getting prepared for all the silliness on the other side of those doors.

A guy showed up with a long trumpet thing, held it to his mouth while speakers blared out recorded music from several trumpets, and a guy ushered us into our appropriate sections. My group happened to be seated the Green Knight section, which meant that for the duration of the evening, we were supposed to support the Green Knight unconditionally, even if he fell off his horse or turned out to be the bad guy in the plot or if he was caught hosting dogfights.

With the other people seated in the Green Knight area, we shouted our heads off to support him, along with derogatory shouts against the other knights. “The Green Knight rules! The Yellow Knight drives slowly in the fast lane! The Black and White Knight doesn’t fold his laundry until several days after it comes out of the dryer!”

I’m not afraid to admit here that I’m apprehensive around horses. It is not because of their huge size or because they can kick your head right off, but rather because they’re so smart. My previous run-ins with horses have been some negative experiences. They can tell I’m a bit shy, so they follow me around and mess with me, biting at my neck and trying to steal my wallet. I tried to explain to this one horse that I’m supposed to be the more-intelligent species, and he bit off a little bushel of weeds from next to my truck and plopped them down on top of my head, just to be a jerk.

About half of the Medieval Times entertainment was watching horses do tricks. Horses would come out, strafe sideways, walk in crisscross patterns, dance in little circles, and do jumping kicks. The crowd loved it, but not me. While they politely clapped, I sat in my chair in the fetal position and covered my eyes.

Then the falcon guy came out. Unlike the horsemen and other assorted cast, the falconer guy seemed disturbingly genuine, like this was his whole life. You could picture this guy sitting in a chicken coop after the show and feeding birds out of his bellybutton.

There are two kinds of plot actors in the Medieval Times cast — the Ponytail Guys and everybody else. Apparently, to be one of the knights, you have to have a certain “look” : skinny arms and legs, sporting a ponytail, able to ride a horse, and walk with a certain heroic swagger. The other guys with shorter hair, or chubby, or who run like my wife with her arms out front, like she’s about to slide into second base — they’re the flag carriers and other miscellaneous cast.

The Ponytail Guys came out swinging. I wondered if it would be like old-school WWF wrestling, where the manager pulls them aside at the last minute and says “Okay, listen up guys. Red Knight wins today. Make it convincing.” But instead, it was more like the newer WWE wrestling, with very intricate plots. Luckily for the crowd, the plot was centered around constant violence — it was a friendly arena event, which thanks to the “bad guy” being the organizer, turned into a non-friendly battle. Each colored-knight had some kind of victory throughout the day. They kept the excitement pretty balanced between the colored groups so that one wouldn’t get heckled in the parking lot on the way out. “Hey Blue Knight, way to go on dying in the first round there. Next time we’ll make sure not to sit in your section. You ought to hit the medieval gym sometime.”

For the next two hours, the Ponytail Guys swung swords and axes in dramatic paths that would connect with shields and other weapons from other Ponytail Guys, making loud clanging noises. At times, the choreography seemed pretty convincing, but as the skirmishes rotated around to side-views, you could see that they never swung the swords in a path that would hit the opponent. There were some moments that it was very clear they weren’t even really trying to kill each other. Whenever there was a fight centered around a major plot element, the other fights would dissipate. You’d see the good guys and bad guys, who were previously supposed to be fighting to the death, lean on their swords and talk about something they saw on YouTube. Or a guy would drop his sword with his opponent closing in on him… and instead of killing him, the attacker would back off, making dramatic poses until the first guy could pick up his weapon to go back to clanging.

I secretly found myself rooting not for the Green Knight, but instead for an accidental stabbing.

Overall, it was a fun experience, and the food was surprisingly tasty. But after a couple hours of these shenanigans, we found ourselves peeking at our watches, wondering when what medieval-time this thing was going to end. At this one table near us, however, in the opposing Red-and-Yellow Knight section, the group kept up their intensity throughout the night. Everytime something would happen, they’d be on their feet, roaring with applause, occasionally doing fist pumps, and high-fiving each other quite impressively. It was then that I realized that these were the earlier folks from the bar. They had gotten sufficiently liquored up to the point that they didn’t notice or care that some parts were silly and unrealistic. I envied their drunkenness and promised to do the same if I ever returned. That should be their slogan: “Medieval Times — Better If You’re Loaded.”

We completed our awkward essential human experience and drove home from the big castle-shaped building. Like the majority of the other patrons did, I’m positive, my friends went home afterwards, drank too much wine, and duked it out in the backyard with rakes and shovels.