Our Road Trip to Hawaii: Part 1

You know your road trip is in trouble when a small town sheriff says, "I ain't you, but if I were, I'd go north and find a place to stay." Well he wasn't me, and he didn't have a hotel in Vegas booked on airline miles. You can't get those back.

But first let me tell you of my road trip vision. It was of fulfilling Quin's strange, trippy dream to drive to California and ride a Ferris wheel (he'd get a chance in Vegas but balk). It was of a happy family singing songs together in a rental car that is clean and new and doesn't smell like clutter and debt. And eventually, I dreamed of two little boys seeing the ocean for the first time. I saw them frolicking in the sand and running up and down the beach in the shallow tide. By driving to LA and then flying to Hawaii we could have it all.

Much of the trip was good. I got to see Sarah sit and do nothing but look at the world through sunglasses. The boys kicked back in our rented Crown Victoria scanning for oddities and resuscitating the mundane. In Utah the scenery can be pretty awesome, but for true appreciation of everything, like an animal carcass or a bag of trash, we needed the boys. I'd be in my road trip combat gaze, the horizon spitting out with the exhaust, but Quin and Otto, with their arms behind their heads and in total carseat comfort, brought life to the benign. How flattered would that guy in the Nevada pickup be that so much attention was paid to the size of his tires? Or all those motorcyclists that Quin pointed out weren't wearing helmets. Maybe next time not at a stoplight with the windows down. Even those massive red rocks, those jagged disruptions to the landscape, would have only gotten a passing glance, until the boys would shout them into awesomeness. "That mountain is like 11-hundred thousand feet tall." And then it would grow right out of the ground and into something I couldn't believe I was seeing.

But here's the problem: I too often only see the good. I see big wide murals of goodness and can't believe for one moment that there would be one stroke of bad. When, for example, the family is hungry and we haven't prepared a meal, I tell them to get in the car because in my head there's the perfect restaurant somewhere. I don't know exaclty where, but old ideas and new visions combine into a comforting delusion. We'll get lost or end up at some intersection where there once was a great family diner that went out of business in the 90s. This makes my wife sad, but the kids delight because they know we're desperate and going McDonald's.

And that's where we ended up. It was a Mickey D's in Richfield, Utah, and it's where huge Mormon families dominate the Playplace. Beautiful Aryan children shot out of the tube slide like it was a giant fallopian. It was here where I'd learn another lesson: Don't make fun of Mormons in Utah. It's not like I openly bashed anyone or made anybody feel bad. I simply mumbled to Sarah, "These people put the More in Mormon." You don't do that. It's their state. Their god lives there. I believe my little one liner set off a chain of events that would lead to a surprise snowstorm and something close to a marriage dissolution on a mountain pass.

This might not have been such an emotional affair had we not thought that we'd already paid our penance. On day one, about thirty minutes after leaving the house, we got stuck in traffic on I-70. It would take nearly four hours to go 60 miles.

On day 2, shortly after making fun of the Mormons, the children got an opportunity to see their father lose his mind and wrestle a delineator post to the ground. That's about when the sheriff shared with me his wisdom.

He didn't know my passion. He also didn't know how dumb a guy sounds when on a mountain pass in Utah he says, "I had no idea there'd be a blizzard" to a wife who's wondering why she's not already in Hawaii. I resolved that my family was not going to be stranded. The wife and kids were not going to go Alfred Packer on me (although Sarah is a veggie I can see her enjoying a well-earned leg bone.) I wasn't going to concede that the whole road trip was a failure. Maybe a little more knuckle-biting and divorce-propogating than I'd anticipated, but dammit it was a road trip and from what I remember road trips are supposed to be awesome. And to me it was awesome indeed that we weaved our way through stuck vehicles, the car-casses of those who had given up hope, and made it to the head of the pack.

We'd get stuck too, and Sarah would say she wanted to vomit as several friendly motorists pushed our rented Crown Victoria over the post I'd victimized and just inches from bumper of a jack-knifed truck. We made it around the blockage and back onto the roadway. I screamed, “I love you guys!” into the silence of the mountain dusk. A few people we'd never see again watched our tail lights disappear as we rolled away from the miles of wintry wreckage.

It started to feel like destiny.

With Tebowing fading...

Try Manninging!

 

Happy Mothers Day: A Tribute to Tolerance

I don't have giardia. I'm disappointed by that. I thought the lab would fish from my stool a praying mantis-sized giardia and after some medicinal napalm everything would be better. So for now I'm staying gluten-free (although I don't even like to mention it out of self-loathing) and concocting up other issues in my head. The giardia, however, was at one point very real. I got lost in the mountains and became so dehydrated that I had to drink out of a river. What really makes me mad is that we walked forever to find a pristine spot in the water, something that was moving really fast and kicking up rapids. We found this little waterfall and chugged and chugged. It wasn't until we were safe at home when i realized something was wrong. I was getting ready to go to work when I heard a gurgling sound. It was so loud and unfamiliar that I looked around the house in Ninja mode wondering what in the hell awful creature I was going to find, before realizing it was me. At about the same time a little clock popped in my head. It was actually a countdown timer and it said I had about five seconds to get somewhere other than where I was.

The result was so alarming and so throttling that it took me a long time to be able stand up. Part of it was shame, and part of it was actual physical exhaustion. It was like I'd just had ten babies that didn't live. I would, however, continue to find reasons to go on, mostly to find bathrooms, where I'd burst in like the Kool Aid Man and tear at my pants like a frightened raccoon.

It wasn't only happening to me. Chad, a co-worker and high school friend, also got it. We had actually gotten lost together wandering around the Never Summer mountain range. Colorado's taxpayers were paying us to do trail maintenance to Kelly Lake, when while camping we ended up getting really, really drunk. We drank everything. I mean everything. We ate everything too, and then to add to our regret, vomited much of it. So we were hungry and tired and hot and lost. And eventually we'd be, as my smirking boss would say, "shitting through a screen door at thirty paces."

Chad went to the doctor and got on an antibiotic regiment that made him better. I never did. That was in 1992, so when I went to the doctor last week she was excited to see the guy who thought he had giardia for twenty years. Christ, twenty years.

But I don't. Right now my stomach is going ape shit and I don't even have my imaginary bugs to blame. Of course there were a couple trips to Mexico; that could be a whole different test.

There's not much of a point to telling you that story, other than it reminds me of why we read books and watch movies: to comfort us that we're not alone. It actually wasn't a book, but an article in a health magazine  about a woman who discovered she couldn't eat pizza because she had parasites. I love pizza and would love to stop eating the cheese and leaving the entire crust as evidence of how ugly Americans are. I'm sorry America. And Somalia. So when my wife shared that story of the giardia girl, I felt normal. Or at least more so.

And tonight there was solace again as Sarah and I watched a movie called Submarine. Very good. It's a sweet little love story of a kid trying to save his parent's marriage while kindling some passion with his own girlfriend. It's foreign (Welsh) and has that sweet indie flick feel that is good when it's real and downright awful when Hollywood tries to fake it. Well this movie is so real--or I should say the story is--that I felt comforted by the narrator saying he spends his spare time thinking of how people will react when he dies. For him there's lots of sadness, tributes and a constant local news presence following the story of his forlorn family and friends. For me there's not much sadness, but a lot of embarrassing inspiration. In my latest death montage, I'm in ashes at the front of my high school gymnasium when colorful Native American dancers burst through the double doors and do some amazing, synchronized leaping. Here all my country-white high school friends are settling in for a few quick Psalms (please god no) and a goodbye when colored people of color come charging in, shrieking and going above and beyond Indian tradition by throwing in some cool Cirque du Soleil stuff. The Tribal outreach coordinator for whom I worked with the 2010 Census will calmly walk through the flinging homage to explain my efforts to help count tribal nations. He'll also mention that he served four tours of duty in Vietnam as a Navy Seal. Everyone will be blown away by my associations.

That's one of the latest, and it's completely harmless, if you don't count all the time I think about dying. It's something I've done forever, and it's not even in the top 5 of the things I'm thinking about when Sarah asks me what I'm thinking about. Top contenders include: 1) Nazi-like invaders and our escape 2) A giant, I mean moon-like huge ball rolling across the plains and at our neighborhood and I must get my family out of the way and 3) I'm about to die so get back on the radio which leads to a re-energized comedy career that ends right before I'm dead with a performance at Carnegie Hall.

That last one actually translates to life, as it's helped me see "what I really want to do" in the vein of professions. Not sure about the Carnegie Hall thing though. I think that was poached from the Andy Kaufman story.

Before I sound like a depressed teen, let me qualify this...a little. And I should say it's going to get worse before it gets better.

Anyway, because I'm not in radio or doing comedy or even writing much right now, I tend to get a little sad. Oh, and I need to exercise.

In this sadness I was compelled to tell Sarah (my wife and mother of our awesome children) my plans to kill myself while making it look like an accident so she still gets insurance money. Now I told her this on an unusually down day, and I clearly wasn't thinking about what it all really means. For god sakes am I writing this? Anyway, as I was sharing this scheme, and the little me in my head was banging on the glass and yelling at me to stop, I realized that this is one of those things (ironically) that you take with you to the grave. You DON'T tell your wife and mother of your amazing children your plan to die. And this is the thing, it's not a plan to die, but a little daydream thing that pops into my head when I'm really hungry and haven't produced anything of merit. So a lot lately, but it's really just porn--a fake scenario that flickers against the wall while I wait out the storm.

When I finished talking--Sarah took it in stride, way too much in stride--I found myself changing the subject to the kids and their day at school. Because to the male mind I'd just violated one of the top penal codes in the maniverse: if you've got anything, it's that you can be reliable. Be reliable.

What I'd just poured out like a Judy Blume character was that I was not at all reliable. I was thinking about leaving. Permanently. So invoking some more penal code, I didn't talk about it for twenty-four hours and would bring it up at the most awkward time. We'd be wrestling through a family outing at Beau Jos Pizza. The kids were whining and spilling milk and demanding their mother and I just shot this soft diatribe across the table about how I realized I wasn't reliable and it was really dumb to say the things I said. With Otto trying to climb into her lap Sarah multi-tasked an answer that A) agreed with my dumbness and B) highlighted the difference between my brain and her brain. Instead of reliability, she turned the whole damn thing into an exercise in her extraordinary selflessness. If this were a game I'd be getting trounced.

She never looked more badass than when she calmly calmed our youngest child, and between lifting a slice of cheese and pepper pizza and biting it said, "It just says you're unhappy with your life."

I've always thought that if there's a hell, it's that final realization the second you die that stretches out for an eternity. "Oh my god I'm an asssssssshoooooooolllllllleeeeeeeternity."
If you're heaven bound you go out eternally as "I'm the goddamn (wo)maaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnirvana."

Try saying "that's not it at all" to the woman with whom you're married and have had two of the best children in the world and you've recently shared a plan to end your life.

And don't get all soft on me. I'm not going to die now. I'm pretty sure it'll be my colon attacking me. Can you die of a colon attack? But I can see it and it won't be for a while. Although tonight I had to Kook Aid Man it to the bathroom like three times. So who knows.

Or, it could be my wife who kills me. She's reading this and calling bullshit, or at least half bullshit. She needs to see proof that I'm not just whimpering away from the edge. No, I screwed up. And now if I do die, no matter how genuine or heroic, she'll be like, "that motherfucker."

My point is that I don't want to die; I'm just obsessed with death. All it takes is a few dead bodies in your life and your putting your ear over your sleeping wife's mouth hoping there's hot air. I have images in my head and they go like this: 1) My dead mom who was so cold and so heavy 2) That one Holocaust documentary I watched as a kid and 3) my high school friend Scott who was all fixed up to almost look like himself in his coffin. All I remember when I saw him was not knowing what to do, and not liking what I saw. My finger twitched, and that was all that was left of my impulse to drag that fucker out of the box and try to make him walk.

Yah, so I'm scared. In twenty minutes I'll sprint up the stairs because ever since I was a kid I've been certain something is going to materialize in the dark and come after me. I'll hover over the boys and tuck stuffed animals into the cracks of their beds. And I'll look really closely at Sarah who, when I'm lucky, is actually awake and asks how I'm doing. I'll also feel if the dog is alive. So what. A little death thing. If I were to want to die it would be so I don't ever have to deal with anyone else ever dying again.

Still I'm pretty practical about it all. We're here, we go and the best we can do after that is feed a tree. I know mortality. I've seen the shortness of life and not too long ago I had to dig through my own feces with a tiny spoon. So in between now and then we have to rock this fucking place like it is Carnegie Hall...wherever that may be.