Rapping at the Raddisson: A barefoot journey with porn, beef jerky and Lil' Boosie

Walking around the hotel at 4am and wondering if I'm still sane. I am comforted by a huge black man--he kind of looks like a preacher--and I walk by him and see he's surfing porn on his phone. So there's that, I think to myself, as my bare feet pad along the carpeted floor. There's a certain breezing motion you get in a hotel hallway; lots of benchmarks, door after door, vending machine, and it feels like you're going somewhere. It's a mouse maze and you'll probably just end up at some food, as I did, trying to quietly drop quarters into the machine. It's right next to a room and I'm imagining me in there trying to sleep while some douchebag empties his piggy bank one coin at a time into a metal drawer. I get to what should be the 1.25 for the jerky but nothing happens. I push the change release and the clanking sound has me cussing louder than the coins crashing. One of them it turns out is an arcade token. Gotta do it again. And while the little turnstile spins its snack hostage to its death drop, I catch my reflection in the glass. "You can't eat this stuff forever," I think as I eye the Rice Krispie treats.

It's easy being me. In theory, it's easy being me. I wonder if that's the same for everyone. The idea of being themselves is pretty awesome. I get the clearest picture of it when I'm on an airplane or in a hotel room. None of my junk is scattered around. There's no work to do or house to fix. It's just me in this little rented space and I can feel what it would be like to shed that skin.

An airplane and a hotel? This should be the clearest I've thought in years. It's an easy thought. Get up early to write, get the kids to school, take some time to learn something new, go to work and then come home to bliss. My brain would be so free. It would, I swear, and I'm not just saying that. So I gotta do it. And I scold myself for comparing myself to the porn surfing preacher in the lobby. Taking a guy at his low point and holding him up as measuring stick is probably not the standard for achievement. But barefoot and eating some nasty processed meat before killing the Rice Krispie treat in a hotel lobby at 4am is probably a nice low place from which to look up.

So I sit down to tap out some words and a horde of people pour into the lobby. It's clearly a tour of some sort. Weary looking pretty people on bejeweled cell phones and pulling leopard print bags scatter about. A husky guy takes care of the front desk business and I get a tall black woman with natural hair and crazy eyelash extensions--some glitter and lots of makeup--sitting next to me. She asks me if I know anyone named Webbie and Lil Boosie. I run through the titles of PBS Kids but can't think of it. They're rappers it turns out, and she's the manager. Assistant manager, she stresses in a correction, like the manager is listening. This is her first major tour and she's learning a lot. She gets yelled at all the time, but she doesn't mind it. She also has three kids, one of whom is working on her doctorate in health management, and another who's on the tour with her. There are 45 people in the entourage (and for a moment I think of MC Hammer going broke toting his friends and family around the country) and she's staying up until everyone gets a place to sleep before she goes back to the bus and gets as much rest as possible. She shares with me some pictures of last night's show. Looks packed and successful. There are deejays and rappers and singers. She also tells me of her love of music, and how big and ominous the clouds are up here. Her "down there" is Atlanta. Seems hot to me. She gets my card, follows me on Twitter and drags herself back to the bus. (I want to offer her a shower...and I smile again thinking of my wife and kids waking to the noise and I'm like, "don't worry...she's with Webbie and Lil' Boosie...")

It's been two and a half hours since I woke up to get the boys to pee. The bright heat lamp in the bathroom confused Otto, and he tried to cover his eyes while spraying the bathroom down. Quin was easier, but the commotion turned my brain on just enough to keep me awake. And then my conscience kicks in and I do that thing where I obsess on needing to improve. I know a lady who just died of a heart attack. And I'm spending way too much time thinking about my work. And I'm out of shape. I need to get back on my game. So I'm in a Raddison in Colorado Springs, and I'm up and I'm thinking. And I remember how I told this rap tour manager that the clouds only look scary.

Goddamn Cat

There is not a more complicated relationship than the one I have with our cat. I actually think part of the definition of "complicated relationship" is one where you wake up with a scratch on your nipple. She's a decent gal, but kind of a hussy. She'll make love to anyone or anything at any time of the day. Only slightly more awkward than a feminine hygeine commercial during family time is our grey and white stray purring, drooling and rubbing your chest with seductive paw strokes. It gets so intense I have to use our safe word "goddamn it you crazy cat" and make a swift move to avoid the aforementioined nipple snag. Paco can't take it, which often leads to more pain, when he lunges at her for infringing on his cuddle time, and she reacts as a scared animal does, by piercing the flesh of the nearest human.

She's nuts. I'm not even sure she's all cat. Her tail suggests lemur, and her habit of walking to the dog park suggests masochist. What animal willingly goes to a place where she can get killed? And this isn't some perilous and necessary Incredible Journey for which she's risking her life, but just to get the attention of a hundred hounds cornering her in a tree. Several times people have asked, "who in their right mind would bring a cat here?" And I dutifully reply, "I have no idea." 

Allie did not want to be photographed for this piece.We have friends who found this cat and took her in. And I'd like to stress that we still consider them our friends. We took over because she wasn't quite the right fit at their house, and it kind of makes me sad that she might be a better fit here. What does that say about us that a horny tyrant works well in your home? But she does and in kind of an annoying way--the kind of way that has me talking to an animal like I'm making diplomatic headway. "Listen, Allie, I love you," I plea beyond bloodshot eyes, "but you gotta stop meowing at 5am." And that's when I hear myself talking louder than she is.

Everyone with pets or kids or families--so I guess everyone--has a hard time explaining just how crazy their pets or kids or family are. Some are successful with one or two shining examples. Like my family, for example, took baths in a horse trough. That usually helps my storytelling. But with Allie there's not one major example of crazy to illuminate her nuttiness. It's just this strange, ongoing leaping and running about, constant meowing and her creepy Mafia-style takeover of every surface in the home. She's good that way, having moved from her first week under the couch, to a few weeks later in Paco's chair, to something like bestiality in our bed. Paco can only stare and whimper. He did all he could to scare her. As a matter of fact for two years he bolted around the house trying to break her. It was as if his brain reset every ten seconds and every time he saw her was the first time. Now, though, it's set in: there's another animal in the house, and to Allie, that's Paco. She's the queen, or whatever lemur monkeys call their leader. But she's that, and she proves it every morning at about 5am, when I curse aloud at an animal who must think I'm nuts.

Boston Bombings and Bad Media

We don't watch local news and we don't watch evening news. Of course there are those instances when the game is over and it rolls right into the news and we're not quite ready to move away from the screen and into the reality of a Sunday night. That is then when my wife and I relish one of the greatest advantages of marriage: you have someone to sit and make fun of the news and all its poorly interviewed victims, witnesses and miscreants. 

The news deserves it. It long ago lost its way, and more and more the organizations that have been entrusted with the public airwaves have slipped into their own private voyeurism. Whenever there's a shooting, those helicopters sure remind me of vultures. And whenever a kid goes missing, well you'd better book some time at your therapist because you're about to wake up to an America that uses its exploited children to sell cheeseburgers. Well, as long as the kid is blonde and female. 

The sad thing about televised news is that it's simply rehashing home videos and copying and pasting from Twitter. These are all things we could see online and through our own filters and bias, not the one the middle-aged guy with the good hair gives us. My wife comes home and tells me of the stories that we need to hear, like Time magazine's "Bitter Pill" and of all the bills sneaking through Congress while we were distracted by gay marriage. We might hear about those things on CNN, but not for weeks, if ever, and only when the blood ratings stop rolling in from the Boston bombing. 

Yes, we need to know about Boston. But we need to know how to help those who need it and...this is the sucky part...we need to have the conversations about why it happened and how we can prevent it. And by that I don't mean armed guards by every trash can, but about the tone of the broadcast conversation lending itself to more violence. Sure, there are motives galore, but when a country's media glamorizes the very thing that's killing it...well that's a fricken news story. 

Your Welcome from a self-aggrandizing a-hole

A prologue.

Oh sweet big-eyed/eyelashed Quin, I'm sorry to be missing your first play; your first on-stage performance.  I was kind of hoping you'd throw a fit and kick a chair because I couldn't make it, but you were just painfully chill. I like how you added, "but mom will be there anyway." Business is dumb. You're cool. Now go out there and have fun telling the story of Arty the Horse and his Rules for Living.

Annoying Middle Part:

Lifting up over Denver and then the mountains is fantastic. The word "fantastic" has made me cry. In airplanes I do this ridiculously self-aggrandizing thing where my brain takes over and I start thinking about dying. It's actually a superstition where I believe that I must think about dying to avoid dying. It goes back to carving my name in the bathroom wall at the Cookhouse Bar and Grill in Gould, Colorado. The school bus would drop us off there, and often my dad would take a long time to finish those last few beers. (To be completely non-James-Frey honest, we were dropped off across the highway, but the old Trading Post had long been closed so we'd migrate to the only open business in town.) On one of those occasions, after I'd washed all the bar glasses, tied cherry stems with my tongue and done possibly everything an 8 year old can do to kill time at a drinking establishment, I walked around poking things with a thumbtack.

I'd found the tiny implement on the bathroom floor, and it felt oddly satisfying poking it into the soft wood of the bar. It wasn't the enitre bar, but just that extra few inches of trim that was an organic segue from humanity to alcohol--a soft ledge on which the drinker could hang onto the world. After poking that grew old, I wandered around looking for something else that provided the same gratification; not finding it I went to the dining room bathroom and on the wood-paneled wall etched my signature. It's a pretty ugly effort, and a sad indictment of my intelligence. Because there aren't that many Jared Ewys in the world, and there are even fewer in a town of ten people. So scratching JARED EWY in large block letters in the only business in the city limits pretty much narrows down the perpetrator. It didn't take me long to realize my mistake (or at least I hope so) and once I did, every day on the bus ride home from Walden I'd be terrified that Tim, the owner of the Cookhouse, would notify his best customer, my father, and I'd die.

It didn't happen and it did not happen. Entire months and then years passed and no one said anything. But to protect myself from certain death, I would imagine that every bus trip home would be my last. This way I was protected--or at least letting the universe know of my conscious resolve--against letting my guard down. In short, I wasn't going to get cocky. That worked until one day, unguarded by pessimism and passing through the kitchen, my dad would snag me and pick me up by my shirt. He would ask me about the dumbest thing he'd ever heard. At eye level I could see he was pretty disappointed with his DNA. But by then I was over it. I'd eaten a hole in my young soul contemplating every angle with which I was going to meet my graffiti-inspired demise. So from my father's grasp I hung limply awaiting the paternal guillotine.

I did not die. He gave me a quick toss and my mom came in to offer a more diplomatic solution. I'd meet with Tim, she'd say, and make arrangements to sand and stain the bathroom wall. I got on my bike and bounced down the two miles of dirt road to talk to him. He was pretty cool about it, and even marveled at how long my name had been there without him noticing. I told him it had been two years, and I told him why it had been that long. I explained the power of negative thinking and my daily routine of believing I was going to get caught. He inhaled off his cigarette, nodded his head, and then let it go.

My name is still engraved in the bathroom of the only business in Gould, CO. But the story I had been telling was my pre-flight routine of my imagined death--all of our deaths--and part of that routine is keeping a pocket recorder handy to get any message that an impending airplane tragedy would bring. It is my hope that it will be a perfect bit of unfiltered prose. I will say what the brain has yet to reveal to me: its untapped purity. And it will jar people into a teary-eyed stupor as they stare at the engraving at the base of the memorial. It is with this arrogant time immemorial thing that I will finally unthread the tangled core of the human struggle. (I'm not worried about my legacy because I chew my nails and I think that's all future alien visitors will find of our recklessly self-destructive selves. In a terrible irony, from my bad habit the human race will rise again.)

I get so involved in airplane death scenario that I really get crying, which is why I choose window seats because I need that place to hide my face. It can't be comforting to see a guy bawling and mouthing the words "I'm going to miss everybody." So, yes, there are some emotional problems. Today, here's what I would have or will record if we go down:

"This isn't the sound of people dying. This is the sound of people missing you. We already miss you because you're fantastic. The worst part is that I just realized I'm fantastic. Beast (Sarah), boys…everyone…Don't be afraid to be fantastic."

God I hope I don't say that. That's pretty cheesy, but today it's what's keeping this hundred thousand pounds of metal, people and in-flight beverages afloat. You're welcome.

Epilogue

Remember, just listen for Xavier's line "And he turned off the TV…A LOT!" And then you're on. It's probably best I'm not there to disrupt the play with a round of high fives. If anything goes wrong, we've made you practice enough that Otto knows your line, too. You both make me proud.

If mom doesn't get video of it now, I'm pretty sure I'll one day catch it on Before They Were Stars.

Paco, you're the best dog in the whole damn world

Maybe best creature overall. I'll write more about you, bud, as well as your human counterparts and the whole candy swirl of life's goodness. And its shit. But I'm just days away from finishing this thesis and cannot write anything else but this crazy paper. In the meantime, see what Paco spends his time doing while I'm out of town.

Yah, I'm on the road, but jeez pup, just for a day.

The Boys and the Like

I cannot compel you enough to know how amazing it is to have these boys right now (and here's hoping for forever.) Quin has entered a stage of constant, delusional smack talking, and Otto is emerging from his little brother shell as the most excitable commentator I've ever known. You've most likely heard Dick Vitale during March Madness, well imagine if he were small and cute and trying to tell you about the fox he saw outside our window. He's got this thing where he has trouble getting off the first word.

Dream big burger boy.Here's an example:

"May...maybe...maybe...maybe...

...maybe..." and this gets increasingly louder as if each attempt is turning over a new and more exciting revelation. When the rest of the words are finally assembled, he rolls: "MAYBE...MAYBE...it's a mommy fox AND SHE WANTS TO EAT A MOUSE!" Sometimes that last louder bit is accompanied by stabbing his fist into the air. As if getting that together is the gold medal achievement of the day, and being just 3 and the younger brother to a communication juggernaut, it is a huge deal getting something out into the open.

Of lawyers and liability: Two very different animals.Quin, you see, is full of disarming little missives about how much bigger and smarter he is than Otto. It may be MAYBE MAYBE MAYBE a well-planned counter offensive to Otto gaining in size. So after Otto's fox epiphany, Quin will reply to conversation that had not existed in the room. "I'm five, and go to five-year-old school, but Otto's just three. He'll be five one day, but by then I'll be seven." Otto is left hanging, his fist stuck in the air; his rising star snagged on Quin's reality check.

This is not to say that Quin is mean or mean spirited; it's just how he rolls right now. He's a package of older brother responsibility of which he takes very seriously, along with a ridiculous amount of childlike fantasy. We've never seen him tie his shoes in anything other than a mound of knots, but he insists that he teaches the other kids at school how to do it. There's a lot of pressure knowing everything, I guess. And if he is teaching them how to tie their shoes, other parents must be doubting the school system. Of course I've been delusional all my life, so at least his self misperceptions are mostly benevolent.

One of my delusions flaking away like old wood paneling is that "I'm good with people." Enough people have told me that that I actually started to believe it. I've had my moments with intercommunication, but I got it in my head that I'm infallible. This despite daily tourettes-like attacks on myself for interactions gone wrong. "Sweet Christ, Jared, why did you have to keep talking?" I'll berate myself with self-inflicted interrogation over small talk gone awry. And it happens most often after I try and communicate with Quin's kindergarten teacher. Another delusion I've harbored, or that has harbored me, is that I'm good with teachers. I like teachers and Iove what they do, and that sentiment has traditionally spilled over into good relations with any of the kid's instructors. Now, however, I have no idea how to work myself out of a tailspin with Mrs. K, as I'll call her.

She's experienced and runs a tight ship with the 19 kindergartners that tromp their way into her daily life. I respect and admire that, but I thought that I'd get some kind of free pass as the parent of a new student--like maybe MAYBE MAYBE MAYBE there'd be some kind of recognized achievement of a father delivering his child straight into the classroom. No, no there's not. My extra effort to get Quin to school was met with a scolding. I got scolded in front of the kindergartners. "You don't need to come into the classroom," she said, pointing where I could find my way out. I understand. I was still in a preschool frame of mind where you get your kid as close to the intended target as possible so they don't get lost chasing a butterfly, but not in "big kid school," as Quin calls it.

Smack talk will wear a guy out.

The upside to getting rebuked in front of your son's class is that you feel like you have an opportunity to redeem yourself. The downside is that I've been trying to redeem myself. Each effort has been met with disappointment. And it's a thing I have, where if someone gets the upper hand, I have a hard time getting the words. The latest effort to impress Mrs. K went off much like Otto trying to articulate his dinner announcements, and was inspired by delusions similar to Quin's. I'd found the Christmas gift we'd wrapped for Mrs. K and thought getting it to her better late than never would help bridge our communication gap. Instead of taking risks with improvised communication, Quin and I wrote a note. And instead of taking it directly to her, I figured I'd drop it off at the office where she could be surprised by it later.

I have said that there is a tiny version of me in my head. He's in a glass bubble, and I can barely hear what he says. Often he's screaming at the top of his lungs and beating on the glass, doing whatever he can to stop me. Like when I told that joke on the radio about "Color Fest" in Mancos, Colorado not actually having any people of color. And this would be the case when I dropped off her gift in the office. The receptionist kindly pointed out that, "There's Mrs. K with her class right now!" The implication was that I could just hand the gift to her myself. And the little guy in the bubble was screaming something.

I burst out of the office and into the line of Mrs. K's children. In doing do I disrupted decades of teaching experience; the successes and failures, the late nights lying awake and the early mornings making it work. I'd walked right into the teeth of Mrs. K's delicate routine--one in which interruption does not seem to be an option. The children, who had been lined up single file in a crisp response to her rigid rules, broke ranks and gathered around me. Quin greeted me but with concern. "Sweet god, what are you doing?" begged his tiny face.

Mrs. K did her best to smile. You know the smile you see when patience has been lost and stabbing someone is illegal.

"What can I do for you," she asked above the growing din of children's voices. The bubble guy mumbled, "Don't apologize. Don't explain. Just give her the gift and get out."

"I'm sorry," I said. "Didn't mean to interrupt your class but---"

'Daaaaaad," Quin said in the agonized twisting of the word.

And I spiraled. I do. Especially in the dark light of the in-lieu-of-stabbing smile. The kids voices grew, some wanting to give me high fives, a thing I'd started that has grown to be a bane around any group of small children, especially at Otto's school where one kid missed my hand and hit another kid in the face.

"We got this gift..."

"OK, OK, fine," Mrs. K said with a stern delicateness. "Hand it to me and thank you."

Bubble guy was trying to end his life with a shard of glass.

"Anyway, we got it and never got around to giving it to you--" And the thing is I get to a point where I can clearly hear myself failing, but the words aren't stopping, like something is broken. And then, turning inward watching myself, the external part goes unfiltered. So I chattered, and Mrs. K demanded I give the gift to Quin so he could give it to me. And that's bad. She had to bring in a five year old to help me out of the situation. I could hear myself finishing up something about how excited we were about the gift (Santa earrings) when I came back to awareness and the class was in line and marching its way down the hall. Quin waved and smiled.

"Good," I thought, "I still have him on my side." And I think next time I'm just going to give her a high five.

Despite his father, Quin has truly found himself at big kid school.

While we wait: something I wrote during a seminar at a conference

Here I am at a conference in the Orange County Hyatt. Several partitions have been folded away to make room for our presence. Each quadrant, on its own, gets four light fixtures. We have 16! I'm looking up at one. They look like giant jellyfish--a giant jellyfish that has had its tentacles used to make rock candy. And they are brown. I'd like to think it was a local couple who landed on this design, and after hitting the craft show circuit, got enough attention to have their product picked up by the Hyatt. I've imagined them in their modest home near the beach. It's not on the beach because they sold the place they inherited from her mother because: A) they were tired of the kind of people moving in and B) they were broke.

But there they are savoring tea and Quinoa, and having just done yoga, feel relaxed to the point of being tired. Then everything changes via the cheap Chinese circuitry of their Cricket cell phone. They never use it, so when it chimed the factory chime, both were equally surprised and suspicious. The man jumped to get it. He felt a little satisfaction at the opportunity to protect his wife. Just a few nights prior he'd been drinking with a friend and saying he wished he had a dragon to slay because getting this business off the ground was a whole lot harder way to impress her.

A dragon, however, would have killed him as he had trouble answering the phone. The small, slick, hinged device nearly snapped shut and hung up on the guy from the Hyatt. Turns out the slick guy named Chad envied their lifestyle and wanted to promote their work, and would have called back anyway. So they danced around the room and didn't at all mind that they'd broken a vase. They hugged and pulled away to look at each other. From this moment--after the apologies for things said during leaner times--began the new era. The hiring of down-and-out friends. The niece who made the website and the story in the regional newspaper. Soon the brown, rock candy squids dangled from hotels everywhere, even the big Hyatt in Portland. Things were not always easy, especially firing some of their down-and-out friends, but they hired Chad to consult them to success.

That's what I'd like to think. I'd like to think these light fixtures weren't secreted from a dingy faraway factory. I'd like to think that. But I already did. Because Chad finally got them to come to their senses and ship manufacturing overseas. So now I sit under this alien invasion, brown shards of plastic crowding the light out of oval openings. They're frozen in attack mode. They left so many light years ago with a mission they've now forgotten. They're just stuck there, detached and feeling quite dumb. And somewhere there's a lady picking up the pieces of a broken vase.