Monthly Archives: January 2011

Today’s word of the day is stop, get down, don’t climb on that, put that down, and oh shit.

It’s amazing how quickly milestones go from being celebrated to dreaded. In today’s gremlin news, my daughter has figured out how to pull herself up. It’s almost like watching one of those extreme mountain climbers. You know, the kind who have no ropes or tools, just a pocket of gripping chalk. Just as they do, my daughter finds the smallest nooks and crannies to pull herself up.

Prime example: Electric plug covers

Now who in the hell would suspect that a baby would be able to pull up on the cover that goes over the plugs in the wall? There are two stools over at the bar. She put her hand around the leg of the stool to lift up off the ground to her knees, and somehow gripped the socket cover and used that to pull all the way up. By the time I got to her, she was standing up flat against the wall crying for me to lower her back to the ground.

So now I find myself working on my speech to the child protective service people. Oh, how did she manage to get up on the ceiling light fixture in the first place? Well, that’s a funny story…

I cannot believe in a god who wants to be praised all of the time. (Nietzsche)

My wife shared this quote with me today and immediately my insane train of thought took off. One of my beliefs as an agnostic is that god–in whatever form–is just too powerful and too “godly” to be swayed by someone’s devotion. In my opinion, it’s more of a humility builder for us than a pep rally for God. I think that whatever deity exists could care less if you pray, praise or thumb your nose his/her/its direction. But what if I’m wrong. What if God were a glory hog?

I could see God holding his own version of MacWorld every year. It would be held in a big convention center somewhere and people would sleep on the street to get tickets. There would be exhibits and the different religions would have booths set up. Of course, God would deliver the keynote address. I’m not sure who would bring him onto the stage. Maybe Jesus, maybe Muhammad. My money is on Jesus because he’d be more entertaining. Kind of like a magic show. He could multiply some fish, turn everyone’s Deer Park bottle into a champagne. Maybe bring out a water tank and tap dance on it. Anyway, at the end of his opening act, he could say…

And now, the man that you all came to see. He hails from heaven! He is the inspiration behind three of the best selling books in history (Torah, Koran, Bible). GodWorld, put your hands together for the Alpha, the Omega, the one and only Goooooooood!

Then God would come out from behind the curtain–or they could do an Arsenio Hall thing with the vertical sheet of glass and funk band–and he would walk out with one of those headset mics. He’d have on a black shirt like Steve Jobs and instead of the Apple Logo in the back, it’d just be an atom or something.

Thank you, thank you! Please (thunderous applause). You’re too kind (more applause). You know, when we first launched the Adam 1 millenia ago, people thought that I was crazy. They said ‘God this will never work.’ Then came Eve. Today, there are over seven billion people populating the planet. (applause) Wait until you see what we’ve got in store off-planet.

Then God would announce some new inhabited planet that he’s been working on for the past year and everyone would go crazy. Shares of God would soar in the market and He’d be on every magazine cover for weeks to come. Then there’d be a flood or something somewhere and the tabloids would be abuzz saying God was falling off.

I’m sitting here watching Aladdin with my daughter and I realize now that I really need to get out more. Is there a predefined limit to how much children’s programming an adult can take before he snaps? I know this sounds crazy but I feel like my subconscious is trying to relate to this movie on an adult level and that is totally ruining my feelings towards something that I loved as a kid.

When I was little, Aladdin was just a funny cartoon. Now that I’m watching it as an adult I’m thinking to myself, Somebody had to write this story and draw the movie. I’m 100% sure that it wasn’t a kid. So what motivation did the adult have when they wrote it. I mean, that’s the basic truth behind any cartoon, old or new. An adult wrote it. Shrek is great because it appeals to both kid and adult humor without the kids picking up on the adult message. So with all of this said, what are those bastards at Disney trying to say to me?

The way I see it, Aladdin is glorifying slavery. (I told you that I’ve snapped.) I keep telling myself that it isn’t true but…c’mon! You have a guy who’s been imprisoned inside a lamp for ten thousand years and the first thing he does when he gets free is become excited that he has a new master. He sings this elaborate song about how you aint never had a friend like me. Are we really calling it friendship these days? You’ve had several masters of the past few millenia and each time they use you like a wet wipe and send you back to your prison and you’re happy about it?

I know it sounds crazy and I may be reaching but the whole movie mirrors American history. Aladdin is stuck in the cave and needs to get out. He tricks the genie into getting him out without using a wish. Didn’t the Native Americans rescue the settlers scott-free one winter? They didn’t get a single thing for it but smallpox.

Aladdin wants to become a prince so that he could get Jasmine. Princes have power, wealth and influence. Is it not true that America became a wealthy nation because of its free labor (slaves)?

Aladdin gets tossed in the river and almost drowns but the genie uses his second wish to save his life. Remember the Civil War? When the North started losing Lincoln switched gears and said that he’d end slavery altogether if they won. This got Europe to join our side AND incentivized slaves to fight too thus saving the country’s life.

Aladdin reneges on his promise to free the genie. Lincoln freed the slaves but he got popped before they could get equal rights, land and education. This left free Blacks to work the same plantations while Jim Crow laws ensured that nothing changed.

The genie rescues Aladdin one last time and then he gets his long overdue freedom. Blacks fought in WWI, WWII, The Korean War and were in the middle of the Vietnam War before the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964.

Doesn’t really sound like a whole new world anymore, does it? Yeah…I’m tripping. It’s just a movie.

This morning someone tried to rob a bank near DC. Who the hell still robs banks? What, were stage coaches not available? Please tell me the last time a bank heist worked in someone’s favor. For those who are short on time, I’ll save you a click and just tell you what happened.

Idiot runs up in bank before they open, tries to rob the bank. Cops show up, he grabs an employee and uses her as a human shield. Fifty cops follow him with their guns as he tries to walk out and the dye pack goes off surrounding him in a cloud of smoke like a Prince concert. Then, get this, the fool trips on a mound of snow and lets go of the hostage as he tries to catch his balance. She hauls ass, he chases her with about as much speed as an octogenarian and those fifty cops that I mentioned earlier unload their clips on him. Game over.

I used to work at a bank, actually several. I was a floater which meant that I worked at a different bank basically everyday. Now I hope the FBI isn’t reading this, but I’m about to break the teller rule and share with you the inner workings of a bank. First and foremost…

1) This is not a movie. Banks don’t have millions of dollars in a vault sitting in neat stacks waiting for some criminal to shove into a duffel bag. The average vault looks like a closet on the inside. The big metal door is just to keep you out. In fact, we kept as little cash as possible just in case someone robbed us.  Even if you had an hour alone inside a bank vault, you wouldn’t get anywhere near a million dollars unless you hit some huge branch and those tend to be heavily monitored.

2) Tellers don’t have any money either. Tellers keep their money in drawers. These drawers are about the size of a typical register at McDonalds. How much do you think you can fit in one of those? Keep in mind that the average person doesn’t withdraw a stack of hundreds. They withdraw tens, twenties, fives and ones. That means more small bills than anything else.

3) The alarm button…I’m guessing that most people who rob banks say something like, don’t push the alarm button or I’ll kill you. Trust me when I say that no one outside of emergency and military personnel are willing to die for their job. With that said, you could go in a bank, slip a note and get the money with very little chance of the teller tripping the alarm. The cops will still come. Wanna know why?

3a) The alarm isn’t just a button. Yeah there is a button to push and Lord knows I’ve accidentally hit it with my knee, hand, cell phone many a day. There are also buttons inside the drawer under the money. If you were to play Heat and jump over the counter, you could actually trip the alarm yourself by picking up the wrong stack of money. If you accidentally grab the dye pack, that could trip an alarm when it crosses the threshold of the bank door. Also, there are cameras inside the bank that lead to monitors all over the place including upstairs in the employee break room or downstairs in the bathroom. Guess what’s next to those monitors? Alarm buttons! So basically you’d need to know what was a dye pack, what was bait money, what was the alarm button and where all the staff was at all times. Good luck with that.

4) If you thought the police were rough…have you ever dealt with the Federal Bureau of Investigation? They lock people up for downloading movies. Movies! What do you think will happen when you take their Uncle’s money (Uncle Sam)?

Think of it this way: Everybody knows someone who steals from work. It could be something small like a stapler and paper clips from the office, sneaking a soda or sandwich from a fast food joint or something bigger like taking shoes from foot locker or CDs from Walmart. I’m not condoning any of that, but we all know someone who’s done it. You NEVER hear anyone say that their bank-teller-friend stole five bucks from work. You know why? Because tellers know that shit is impossible. If they can’t steal money and they work there…imagine what chance you have.

Good luck.

A friend of mine took off work Monday and Tuesday because her four year old daughter had a fever as a result of a sinus and ear infection. She’s a horrible parent. What kind of parent keeps their kid home from school because they’re sick? It’s just shameful. When I was growing up, you had to be shot in order to stay home and unless they couldn’t get the bullet out (and it was resting near a major artery) my mother wasn’t taking off to stay home with me. Parents these days are just soft.

I remember when I was three years old (by now you should know that I have an insanely good memory) and I ate a few handfuls of Arm and Hammer laundry detergent. My mother made me drink three big ass glasses of water and then told me to go to sleep. There was no emergency room visit–not even a call to the poison control hotline. My family strongly believes in survival of the fittest. Now, why did I eat laundry detergent? I wasn’t a stupid child. My stomach hurt and I thought it was baking soda. You’re thinking, what? I know you’re wondering what baking soda has to do with a stomach ache. Well, in my family baking soda is penicillin.

When I was eight I ate some undercooked bacon. It caused me to throw up violently two or three times an hour for about six straight hours. Some would call that food poisoning. My grandmother called it a job for baking soda. She stuck a butter knife in box, pulled out a large mound of soda and told me to eat it. Then she gave me a small cup of water and told me to let that sit on my stomach for a while. She left and went around the corner to the liquor store and came back with a bottle of Rock Creek Ginger Ale. For those unfamiliar with the brand, Rock Creek sodas are native to the DC area. They are a mixture of high fructose corn syrup and battery acid. In fact, the Chilean government used three two-liter Rock Creek sodas to cut through the ground to free those miners last year. Anyway, I drank the 16 oz ginger ale and about ten minutes later I threw up one last good time and passed out. I woke up 20 hours later feeling like sunshine.

That not doing it for you? Okay, here’s another example. When I was nine I closed my finger in the door and shattered the entire nail bed. My entire finger turned purple. After two days, it appeared to be getting worse. My grandmother soaked my finger in some peroxide, held a sewing needle over an open flame on the stove for a few minutes and then came back and (while simultaneously holding me down) surgically removed the fingernail herself. She bandaged my finger and the next day it was like Jesus with the lepers…I was healed.

I have a lifetime of these stories and none of them involve going to a doctor even though we had full medical insurance. I saw a doctor only for required vaccines and school physicals. If something small happened like, I don’t know, falling off my bike without a helmet and slamming my head against a concrete curb, waking up a few minutes later with a bunch of people standing over me asking if I was okay…then my grandmother would just tell me to go sit down somewhere and try not to fall asleep.

The point is ladies and gentlemen of the jury…only bad parents involve doctors in their personal matters. If something hasn’t fallen off that can’t be sewn back on, then a doctor visit is just a waste of a copay (and PTO).

I swear this damn girl has been here before. The things she does and the way she moves around is like a combination of Chucky and the brain gremlin from Gremlins 2. While washing dishes in the kitchen this morning I made sure that I peeked over the bar periodically to keep an eye on her. I picked up a plate, washed it, rinsed it off and placed it in the dishwasher to dry. That took maybe 30 seconds. I looked up at her and she was on the floor near the DVD shelf pulling out DVDs. That’s fine. It’ll be more work for me later but for now it’s keeping her quiet. I washed another plate, rinsed, put it in the dishwasher and then looked back to see what she was doing. My Xbox is standing up beside the entertainment center. She crawled over from the DVD shelf and made her way to the Xbox and was trying to pull it over.

That didn’t bother me because I wised up a long time ago and carefully placed it between the entertainment center and the DVD shelf so that no matter how hard she pushed/pulled left or right…it couldn’t fall over. I went back to washing dishes. I washed another plate. That’s 30 seconds in Earth time. I don’t know how much time that is in alien/gremlin baby time because when I looked up, my daughter was standing up holding on to the entertainment center about six feet away from where I’d just seen her.

She’s only six months. She can’t stand up on her own, but she’s figured out how to pull herself up. I had no clue how the hell she did what she did so I had to recreate the scene. I put her back on all fours and in front of the DVD shelf and I waited. It took ten minutes for her to do it again, but I didn’t care. I had to know. Remember, my living room layout is as follows…DVD shelf–one inch of space–XBOX–one inch of space–TV Stand/Entertainment Center.Here’s what she did:

Using the bottom shelf on the DVD stand, she pulled herself up onto her knees. She couldn’t reach the shelf above that one so she held on to the bottom shelf and “walked on her knees” four feet to the right until she got to the inch of space. She then pulled the Xbox closer to her and then used that to pull herself a little bit higher. She then lunged forward (dangerous as hell I might add since my TV stand is made of glass) and grabbed the middle shelf on the TV stand that was slightly higher than the Xbox and pulled herself up into a full standing position. From there, she walked the four foot length of the TV stand until she got near the subwoofer which is where I came in.

Now why was she doing this? As I write this I notice that there is a pack of Peanut Butter M&M’s on top of the subwoofer. I believe the red wrapper caught her attention and she wanted to know what it was.

It starts with getting a pack of M&Ms. In no time she’ll be plotting casino robberies a la Oceans Eleven.

Today we continue yesterday’s post:

After the second near drowning I took a four year break from swimming. No pool parties, no trips to the beach, not even as much as a slip n slide. Then I graduated elementary school…

It was the sixth grade class trip to Kings Dominion. There was a girl that I liked. (There’s always a girl.) She wanted to get on the water slides. I thought that she was feeling me a little, so in all of my 11 year old coolness, I decided to give water another shot. We stood in line for about forty-five minutes to get on what looked like the water slide to hell. Lucky for me (or so I thought) this was a dual slide. There was an easy one and a gateway to hell one. The girl kept talking about how she couldn’t wait to get on the daredevil one so secretly I was doing cartwheels like, Thank God!

We get all the way to the top and just as we’re about to sit down, she chickens out. Women have an In Case of Emergency voice that they can break out to get men to do stupid shit. She batted her eyes at me the right way and convinced me to be the big, strong man and switch slides with her. I went down the slide and for the first few seconds, it wasn’t half bad. Then a stream of water went over my face and I panicked. I did a huge no-no for a tunnel-type water slide: I sat up. I hit my head on the top of the slide which dazed me for a second. I started choking on the water and my reflexes made me try to sit up again. This time there was no tunnel wall. I opened my eyes just to see myself approaching the end of the slide and nearing the five foot drop into the water.

There was a huge splash and I started choking even more. I kicked my legs and flailed my arms. I started screaming for the life guard and the whole time I’m yelling with my eyes closed, Help, I can’t swim!!! A woman in a bathing suit came up beside me and yelled for me to calm down. All the while I’m screaming. Finally she yelled back, stand up! I stood up to find the water at my waist and the girl was just staring at me like I was a damned fool. It would be sixteen years before I’d see her again on Facebook.

After that I left swimming alone for a LONG time. Eight years to be exact.

I needed an elective in college, so I figured that I’d finally conquer my fears. Here I was, twenty years old and still afraid of water. This time would be different. This time, I was paying out of pocket to learn to swim. I knew damn well that my cheap ass wouldn’t let that money go to waste. For three quarters of the semester, I was right. I was the perfect student. Everything the instructor said was gospel to me. I knew that my life depended on it. Then, something happened. He fell ill for a week. He had a substitute come in and he was out of his fucking mind. He told us that we were behind so he wanted us to just skip a few things. The way he saw it, our instructor was holding our hand too much. He and I had words, so I sat on the side of the pool everyday that week refusing to do anything.

When the real instructor came back, he was on some other shit. The temp teacher must’ve gotten to him because he said something similar like, I have been going too slow and in order to pass the final, we’re gonna have to speed up. We left the safety of our five-foot maximum depth pool to go to the other pool…the one with the 15 foot depth and the diving boards.

Jump in from the side of the pool, when you reach the bottom just kick off and ride the momentum to the surface. That’s what he said out of his mouth. No joke. Last week, we were learning to float in four feet of water. This week you want us to do what!? I took him the entire class to convince me to do that shit. Have I ever let you down before, he said. I will be here the whole time, he said. I decided to trust this man because he even had his teaching assistant–who was a lifeguard by the way–get in the pool with me as backup.

I jumped in. I went down. I almost made it to the bottom. To this day I don’t know what went wrong. All I know is that I came to an abrupt stop about four inches from the bottom of the pool. Time slowed down and my brain turned into a boardroom with different parts of my mind debating what to do next. The board agreed that I should exhale the last pocket of air from my lungs and use my arms to push myself downward. It worked well enough to get my big toe to touch the bottom of the pool. Despite my best effort, the big toe just wasn’t strong enough to push my body back up. I moved maybe a foot. So I tried again. Still nothing. By this point, I’m looking up toward the surface expecting Aquaman to come rescue me and all I saw was that scary ass image of light rippling off the surface of the water.

I freaked the hell out. I tried one more time to make it to the bottom and when that didn’t work, I just started kicking and doing my best to swim to the surface. I don’t know how much time passed on land, but under the sea…according to mermaid time, like a whole week passed while I tried to stay alive. I was out of breath, out of energy and with my last bit of strength I pushed upward and then I felt my hand touch the air right before my head popped out the water.

I took one long breath of air and immediately exhaled it with curse word after curse word for the instructor–Aquaman was actually walking toward the platform when I broke the surface with a big stick that had a hook attached to it. It took no time for me to process what was going on and even less time for me to verbalize it:

Are you JUST coming to help me. Do you have a fucking hook!? What happened to you jumping in? Why the hell didn’t the lifeguard/ assistant swim down to get me?

His response:
I wanted to see how you handled the situation. I know CPR so I was prepared to revive you if the situation called for it. Look at the bigger picture…you’re treading water!

My response (as I doggie paddled to the side of the pool and climbed out):
I didn’t come to this class to learn to tread, I came to learn to swim. I already knew how to tread.

I stormed out of the pool, made my way to the locker room and haven’t been in a pool since. Oh…and I failed the class due to not taking the final.

My apartment complex sent out an email reminding us to take advantage of the indoor pool across the street. Let me explain my philosophy on swimming. There are two rules of Swim Club.

#1 First rule of swim club… You do not go swimming in 16 degree wind chill. Even if the pool is inside, you still have to come OUTSIDE to get back to your apartment.

#2 If you’re me, you stay the hell away from swimming pools.

Number one is self explanatory. Number two requires a little background.

My first experience with swimming came at the ripe old age of three. My Head Start class went to the indoor pool and I’ll never forget the man giving us all the basic preliminary information about how fun swimming was. He convinced us to get on the little board and kick across the pool. If you slip off, it’s okay. I’ll catch you. I put my faith in this man. I haven’t trusted anyone sense. I made it about two feet from the wall before I slipped off the board. I expected the man to catch me. He wasn’t paying attention because he was talking to some woman walking by. All I remember is waking up on the side of the pool. I’m not going to say I got CPR. I don’t know what happened. I think my subconscious blacked that part out. I just remember the man telling my grandmother, I’m so sorry ma’am. You really should make him get back in the water. If you let her leave now, he’ll be afraid of water for the rest of his life.

He was right.

Flash forward to 1990. I was eight. I’d been to a few swimming pools since my near drowning, but I limited myself to bouncing up and down in the shallow end and putting my head underwater for five seconds when I really wanted to be daring. My father took me to Wild World, a water park in Maryland. My father shelled out ten bucks for one of those big yellow tubes. I didn’t want to let him down. We didn’t live together so he didn’t know that I was terrified of water. I decided to get in the pool called The Wild Wave.

Keep in mind: This was my first time at a water park. I had no idea what a wave pool was. I sat on the tube near the shallow end and I floated around for a while. In my head I’m thinking, This isn’t so bad. Why was I afraid of water for so long? While I enjoyed the float around the pool, I noticed that I was moving further toward the deep end. There were life guards on a little tower in the center of the pool but they probably assumed I could swim. Rather than risk embarrassment, I decided to just paddle with my had until I made it to the back of the pool by the big picture of the wave. My plan was to kick off of that and make my way back to the shallow end. That’s when it happened.

A bell started ringing and people started getting excited, bouncing up and down, while other people were swimming away from the very direction I was going. I was about a foot away from the back wall when the water started rising. My little ass was perplexed. What’s going on? Then the water started getting higher and higher. The idea finally popped into my head, Are these waves in a swimming pool? How are there waves in a swimming pool??? That’s when I put two and two together: Wild Wave, picture of a wave, people running away. Oh shit! I started paddling with my hands like there was no tomorrow. Everytime I moved a foot, a wave would come and pull me right back to the same spot. I panicked and that’s when my tube flipped over.

If you thought I was panicking before on the raft, imagine what happened in the water. I tried my best to swim and everytime I made it up to the surface of the water, a wave would come and knock me right back under. I screamed for the lifeguards but they miraculously disappeared from their perch. My survival instincts kicked in and I realized that all I had to do was just hold on to the tube. I came back up, saw my tube and kicked and flapped my arms until I got to the tube. I was like an inch away and I used my last bit of energy to fling myself onto the tube. Thank God! I’m safe. Nope.

This was PG County, Maryland where broke ass people flocked to Wild World for recreation and apparently the sight of a seemingly-unoccupied tube was like finding a free ten dollars on the ground. Some little bastard grabbed my tube and snatched it right out of my arms. I screamed, Give it back!!!! At least I tried. I went right back under the water and with no more energy and no lifeguards coming my way, I gave up. I stopped trying to swim, I stopped trying to get the raft and I just let my body go limp. I opened my eyes–something I never did out of fear that the chlorine would burn my eyes from their sockets or something–and I exhaled what little air I had left in my lungs. In all seriousness, I made the decision to inhale and just give up. In that same moment, something yanked me out of the water.

I felt myself lift up out of the water and I looked back to see a middle aged Hispanic woman looking at me like only a worried parent would when they see someone else’s kid in trouble. She held me in one arm and grabbed the raft from the little bastard who had it and she pulled me all the way back to the shallow end. She didn’t speak much English, but she managed to kind of tell me in sign language what I already knew…Get out of the water, you can’t swim.

For the next four years, I stayed away. Part two tomorrow…