I Moved

Due to the heavy advertising and the new miserable layout of this site, I have decided after 4 years to move my BLOG. If it does not work out I might be back here but for now please go to:
http://mrdvmp.wordpress.com/
Thank you... hope to see you at the new digs.

New Blog Site

Hello,

Because of a lack of readership here, I have moved my weekly blog to MYSPACE

http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.ListAll&friendID=76519202

and LIVEJOURNAL.COM

http://dvmp.livejournal.com/

Thank you

MrDVMP

MID LIFE CRISIS

Shouldn’t I be having a mid-life crisis or something? I am a married, heavily mortgaged home owning, drone-job working, multi pet owning, mid-forties white man. Shouldn’t I be feeling boxed in by my responsibilities and want to run free in a semi-naked state on some always sunny idealistic beach with a brainless 21 year-old bimbo while I pursue my new stimulating creative career as a metaphysical therapist?

It’s just plain weird but I think I am the exception to the rule. I am pretty much happy and content in my life. Maybe it’s that I just do not look good in a bright yellow Corvette or that I have never had any tolerance for 21 year-old bimbos or possibly I was born without the ‘vain’ gene that causes some men to suddenly start using large quantities of male beauty products at the first sign of a wrinkle. (I guess here is where I must confess to using a matte finish moisturizer for my shaved head…aaaaaaaaaaaaa… I use ‘product’!!!! I hope the ‘sensitive’ male is still more popular then the macho bad boy he-man. I could never pull that crap off. I like cartoons, books, and crosswords too much.) When Rogain first came out my buddy Eric and I did the ‘I’ll try it if you try it’ thing. We both got prescriptions for it. After a month I grew a little peach fuzz but I started feeling silly and vain and soon after discontinued.

The truth is I am happy with my life. Mind you it is not perfect but what do I really have to complain about. I ran around like a maniac for 39 years. This settling down stuff is just not that bad. Sure I suffer from the occasional ‘grass is always greener’ moments but I remember the deep loneliness of my past. Sitting around a bar after a couple of beers I can pull out dozens of fun exciting stories from my past (the funeral home outside of Warren Ohio comes to mind but I will save that story for another day) but what I always remember as I wax (hmmm wax makes me think of that funeral home again) nostalgic about my somewhat crazy less then normal bachelor days is the intense isolation of my nomadic past. No matter whom I was with or where I was I always felt a bit lost.

These days I feel good in my skin. Things feel right. Of course I am always afraid to say stuff like that; sure enough if I let that phrase leave my face I will no doubt get run off the road on my way to work by a pig farmer’s truck which will careen off the road next to me filling my convertible with it’s smelly snorky contents. Then when I call into work to say I’ll be late due to being shoulder deep in hog and hog byproduct they will tell me not to come at all because I have been replaced with a dancing monkey and horn tooting seal (the combo might not be able to do my job as well as me but it would sure be a hell of a duet to watch). Then I will walk home only to discover that my house is about to be torn down to make way for a bypass (and I do not know anyone named Ford Prefect to save me from the obvious imminent destruction).
I think my wife worries that one-day I might wake up with the ‘I’m wasting away my life in this rut’ feeling. I just don’t think so. I believe I have gotten all the running around out of my system that I need to. A couple of times a year I zip away for a weekend to Vegas or football game with a bunch of old friends. It is always a wildly fun bash and a great mini reminder of my past craziness, but it always feels good to get home afterwards. I guess that is actually the key. For 16 years I never truly felt like I had a home. At the risk of sounding like Moses after wandering around for forty years in the desert (dude should have had a compass then he might have split the sea and gotten the tablets before anyone had a chance to even think about making an idol… not to mention a couple of decades less of unleavened bread would not have sucked), I have found my holy land. No wonder I am pope of the house (see entry from 5/9/07)! The only crisis I expect to face in the near future is trying to explain the Warren funeral home to my wife when she finally gets around to reading this blog.

DAD AND DOGS

I love my Dad. My family does not say stuff like that very often. We are not a very mushy talking huggy family. I give my Mom a hug when I see her but that's about it. If I tried to hug my sister she would probably assume I was either trying to hang a 'kick me' sign on her back or hiding a can of Spam in her purse (my family has been hiding the same 2 cans of Spam in each others belongings when we visit for about 20 years). When I see my siblings we tend to give each other a 'I know that you know that I know that I care about you' knowing nod. That said we all know how we feel about each other. As for Dad, well now that he is in his 80s I figure I better learn to deal with saying the occasional 'I love you' because I know some day I will regret not doing it more.


Like most kids, I grew up I repeatedly saying I hoped I would not turn out like my father. As I have gotten older I realize being like my Dad is not such a bad thing. I know it would be easy to pick apart the bad things but he really is a nice guy who truly does mean well. I could easily dig into the bag of old family stories about my Father but I will save those for another time. Today's blog is about dogs. Really. Don't worry; I'll get there. But to quote my Dad "to make a long story longer…"

One trait I definitely inherited from my Father is his warped sense of humor (Yes, now you all know who to blame). He might not be as 'over the top' or 'in your face' (feel free to insert your own hackneyed expression here) as me but he is a bit unique. My sister and I want to start a quote book of stuff my Dad has said. I am most amused by his request of me to repeat something I quickly told him with the line "whoa, whoa whoa, slow it down to a waltz". My sister's favorite Dad'ism' is when he got into a verbal debate with someone about aeronautics during a holiday dinner and he loudly proclaimed "what you know about airplanes you could stick in a thimble, shove it into your eye, and it would not blind you."

My Dad's favorite watch is an elegant old Omega that he put the hands from a Mickey Mouse watch on it. Of course this makes sense if you know that when his father turned 90 he said he was tired of time going by so fast so he reversed the movement in one of his pocket watches so it would run backwards. That watch is the only thing I have asked my parents for after they… well… you know. When my grandmother passed away all I asked for was an old wooden ruler of hers that she got free as a gift from the Colombia Savings Bank. I used to play with it when I was very little and it reminds me of her whenever I see it. Memories do not need to be attached to some fancy expensive item; that ruler means as much to me as anything sitting in my safe deposit box.

One of the good ways to describe my Dad's sense of humor is to mention the names he has given dogs over the years. Whereas my Uncle Lester stuck to one name and every dog he ever had was named Rowdy, my Dad was a bit more creative (interesting, odd) when picking a pet's name. When a friend of his was trying to come up with a name for a brown mutt he picked up at the pound my Dad suggested the accurate but bizarre name Brown Dog. For years his owner had to explain that his name really was Brown Dog and often had to show his tags to prove it (or so I was once told by my Dad, so you just never know. What I know about Brown Dog I could stick in a thimble, shove in my eye and it would not blind me).

The dog I grew up with was named Pussycat. A family friend went to the pound in search of a puppy with the potential to grow up into a huge guard dog for his auto-body shop. My Dad got one look at this Shepard/Husky mix dog cleaning himself like a cat and dubbed him Pussycat. I do not know if the name was all too accurate or if he simply just lived up to it, but at two years old Pussycat was retired from the guard dog business and this big goofy dog with the wacky name became a member of our household. Instead of teaching him to 'sit' my Father taught him to 'park'. My Dad often referred to him as Bonehead a term I have affectionately used for dogs for years as well.

I have come up with some good pet names (granted not as good as my friend Allyson's kitten in 1983 Elvis Catstello), but none quite from the same warped prospective of my Father. I have often thought I would get a kick out of having my Dad name my next dog. Unfortunately that is not going to happen right now.
My wife and I just got a new pup but he came already named. I have always loved big goofy dogs like golden retrievers and Irish setters but through an interesting chain of events we now have a five-year-old wiener pup. His name is Brisco. He does not look like a Brisco. I am not sure what a Brisco looks like but it is certainly not a 13lb Dachshund. So we are trying to come up with names with similar sounds or syllables so as to not confuse him. More then likely he will end up staying Brisco. My wife took him to the vet today and told them his name is Brisco Jones but his nickname is BJ. That way he will fit in with our two cats and fish named respectively Max, Rader, Zelmo, Francis and Sparky. I hope my Dad approves of the name.

BLOG READER

Last week I was pestering my buddy Mike, one of my oldest and dearest friends in the world (and possibly the only person crazy enough to voluntarily put up with my insanity for 30 years), about his lack of readership when it comes to my blog. I have posted an entry every week for almost two years now (and some of them are even remotely entertaining). Although I would certainly like to have a lot more readers, each week my page usually gets anywhere from 10 to 40 anonymous hits but apparently Mike is not often one of them.

My oldest friend in the world had not even glanced at my page in over a year. Humph and for shame. Just because Mike is about the best Dad to his two kids that I have ever seen in terms of the amount of quality time he spends with them. Plus he owns/runs a restaurant and works out daily. Oh yeah and he also makes time each week to spend just with his wife, his friends and get in a few rounds of golf. Yeah, so just because of all that he thinks that is an excuse.

Well actually it is a pretty good excuse now that I just typed all that, but screw it. Hey, coming up with 52 solid blog topics a year is tough so if I want to fluff through this one whining about Mike, well just like Bobby Brown, it’s my prerogative. (My wife just finished watching some sadistic movie [Hard Candy…oooch, if you are a guy DO NOT WATCH IT… I am not keen on any movie with a castration scene] and asked me what my blog topic is about. I just read her the previous sentence to which she yawned and said, “well I guess you know my feelings on that one”. I will have to work a bit harder on my topics the next 51 weeks. Oh well… back to the whining)

Well I say that the fact that Mike is not a weekly reader is a slap in the face. This from the man that almost got suspended with me for proudly displaying signs at one of our high school football games that featured motivating slogans like ‘Ear Wax’, ‘Nose Hair’, ‘Circumcise The Band’ and ‘Eat Me’. This from the man who had a casual lunch with me at the only open Italian restaurant in Boston’s Little Italy during the gale force winds and rain of Hurricane Bob. This from the man that let me cut his hair in his backyard after a late night bar-b-q. This from the man that took most of my male and female family and friends to a sleazy strip joint the night before my wedding.


Aw shucks, I guess I can’t be mad at Mike. In his defense, he had read some of the entries last year and he did offer me constructive criticism that unfortunately has put me in a bit of a quandary. He mentioned that my blog tends to be a little sappy with cutesy endings and stuff. He is right. When I am around Mike I am very relaxed and I tend not to use as much decorum as I might when I am talking to my family or business associates. Should I hold back in my writing here? The people very close to me know I will say just about anything and often the more taboo the subject the harder I will try to incorporate it into an over the top joke. They also know what I actually feel in my heart and know that I truly am just kidding.

Should I not worry about who I might offend with my writing? You always hear about someone not getting a job or promotion because of the nonsense they posted on their own website. Not to mention am I really comfortable with my mother reading a joke that starts with the line ‘how do you know if someone is a narcoleptic necrophilia pedophile?’ (I’ll e-mail anyone that wants to know the punch line… it’s not a pretty image.)

Some people are the exact same no matter what company they keep. I kind of wish I was a little more like that but I definitely do adjust how I speak and what I say based on whom I am around. Not quite talk like a homeboy around my friends and talk like an English Prince at work, night and day different, but defiantly different. The somewhat bible-belt semi religious folks I work with have repeatedly said that ‘they expect me to be hit by lightning’ for the stuff I say. My wife just says that ‘it’s amazing I do not get hit more.” Yet my blogs have all avoided hot topics like politics, religion and sex.

Maybe Mike would read this damn thing more if I talked a bit more salty. I mean back in High school he and I drove around in my car listening to songs like ‘Dead Puppies Aren’t Much Fun’, ‘Kinko The Kid Loving Clown’ and ‘Something’s In The Bag’. Well then I guess I should rap this crammed colon bloated bowel of an entry up.
(Since I brought this up to Mike he has gone back to read more of my blog and has even left some comments on the LIVEJOURNAL version. Thanks bubba, love you man. eeeeeeeee)

CLICK TO SEE DAN AND MIKE IN THIER FSU DORM ROOM
CLICK TO SEE MIKE AND DAN IN VEGAS

FLY

Both my brother and sister have written blogs about flying so last week while I scrambled to get to my destination, after American Airlines cancelled my flight along with 3300 other ones, I thought maybe it was time for me to chime in on the subject. I used to enjoy flying but lately it feels more like a Greyhound in the sky. I half expect to see Ratso Rizzo in the seat in front of me having 'a little rest stop that wasn't on the schedule'.

I was a little kid the first time I ever rode in a plane; it was a National Airlines flight from New York to Atlanta. Although my brother Neil teased me for years about my death grip on the armrests as we took off, what I recall the most is playing with the barf bags and the seat occupant card (man I'm old National Airlines shut down in 1980 and I have not seen a seat occupant card in about as long). The flight did not scare me near as much as David (the family friend's kid I had to share a room with while we visited Atlanta) talking in his sleep. He creeped the daylights out of me with his all night muttering.

My Dad got his pilots license when I was in High School. He used to love flying littlefour-seater Cessnas. He was always amused that in some states you have to be 18 to get a driver's license but you can get a license to fly at 16. He once asked me if I wanted to get one but I think I was a bit too intimidated by it all. Especially at 15 when my main goal in life was to overcome my mega dorkdom in order to meet girls (insert your own obvious 'still trying' joke).
Like everyone else I have had my share of great flights and miserable ones. Years ago when the rules of flying were a bit more lax, I ended up sitting near a guy that had 2 shopping bags at his feet filled with clothes, scuba gear, a boom box, dozens of music tapes and several bottles of Appleton Estates rum. Needless to say if you are sitting next to someone for three hours with a 'party to go' bag there is a good chance it will be a fun flight. An example of a miserable trip would be the time my wife and I ended up across the aisle from a grossly unprepared and overwhelmed Dad and his 4 year old daughter. For almost an hour, as he figured out when and how to set up a DVD on his computer, the girl loudly repeatedly yelled non stop "I wanna watch a movie, I wanna watch a movie, I wanna watch a movie noooooowwwwwww!". Trapped in a middle seat amongst a large Filipino family full of small unruly children for 7 hours on a flight from Guam was definitely not a party. The plane was a packed with people that looked like they had never flown before. You almost expected to see an old man lead a goat tied to a rope with livestock milling around his feet as he wandered up the aisle. Of course if you want to learn about a really bad flight, read my hijacked blogs from 4/15/2007 & 4/21/2007.

My sister wrote about her stressful anxiety about flying being tied to the 'lack of control' you have on a plane. My brother wrote about the pleasure of surrendering control and compared flying to a mini vacation because of it. As for me, I do not stress over the time in the air; I stress over missing a flight because my schedule rarely has any room for flexibility if I miss the plane. I do not fear a plane crash but I fear what condition my back will be in when I unfold myself out of the ill designed oft broken chairs that I have uncomfortably been crammed into for hours.

Last week when I learned that my flight had been cancelled I scrambled to find a different flight on Southwest Airlines. Southwest is more relaxed then American. It's like hanging out with your Uncle verses your Dad; you still have to follow some rules but everything is a lot more laid back. The Southwest flight attendant kept serving me free beers (like a good uncle would). I think she appreciated that I kept the cantankerous old man next to me occupied. He was pestering her a bit until I sat next to him and let him regale me with stories about 'cutting a man from appetite to asshole' for not paying his $12 space rental fee at the farmer's market he manages or about bribing cops when he owned a bar by offering them a cigar and slipping them a $20 bill folded in the accompanying match pack.

I do not mind all the extra time getting through security especially now that I have a new driver's license. I used to look quite a bit like a shady terrorist on my old Florida license and often got pulled aside for some extra interrogation to make sure I was not Osama Dan Laden. I do not miss the bad airline food or the little extras that have slowly been phased out. I do miss customer service, clean updated planes, leg room, courtesy and the feeling that I am not on a city bus with wings. Of course with fuel prices going up and industry competition going down I guess I will soon not be able to afford to fly anyway.

THE LAWN

Well it’s been a quiet week here in Lake Wobegon…sorry… almost every time I sit down to write my weekly blog that line runs through my head. So no I do not live nor was I born in a fictitious Minnesotan town. I grew up in Queens, New York. So did a few million other people so that might not be that special, but this is my blog and it’s my warped prospective of the universe that counts here, so deal with it.

My wife and I have had a bit of company the past couple of weeks so there has been lots of chatting. Inevitably I end up digging up some old stories from my childhood. Just today I was talking about the lawn at the new house and comparing it to what I grew up with. As a little kid my four older siblings got to mow while I always had to rake or sweep. There is no fun in raking. As a matter of fact, compared to the glory and splendor of mowing I might as well have been sweeping up the poop in a circus parade while they rode the exotic animals through the big top. To this day I despise raking.

With each year that passed I thought maybe it would be my time to advance up the family grunt-chore ladder and get to shine as the man behind the mower but alas once enough older siblings had left the nest, my folks and I moved to a condo in Florida and I never got my chance to be the mow-master. This story gets me a lot more pity until people see how small the lawns are in Queens New York. The kitchen in my new house is bigger then the lawn that I bemoan having to tragically rake. I recall some friends from high school in Florida traveling to New York with me years later and upon seeing the miniscule front lawn and tinier concrete backyard they blurted “is this postage stamp of green what you complained about for all these years?”

The deep childhood scaring caused by the whole raking calamity and the fact that I am a city boy at heart have made me less then excited about spring in the new house. The lawn here feels as big as the Ponderosa compared to where I grew up. Every other house I have lived in has either had a lawn service or was someone else’s responsibility. Before we moved in my wife and I discussed getting a lawn service but after we moved in she suggested we give it a shot ourselves. I hope by August our neighbors are not referring to us as ‘the jungle house’. I agreed to try but only if I got to be the official mower and she take care of the detail stuff (like raking, sweeping and edging) that remind me too much of my childhood hardship.

Once the new sod started to turn green, we purchased a fancy new somewhat eco-friendly grossly overpriced Cordless Electric Mower (I still have to make some modifications to it like adding the cocktail glass sized cup holder). I did some reading about what height the grass should be before it’s virgin mowing. Sunday I announced that I was going out to ‘measure the lawn’ but the only parts long enough to mow were the increasingly dense weeds that seem intent on overpowering our stubbly green grass nubs.

My wife and her visiting sister decided to do their best to eradicate our back yard of the pesky weeds. After ripping out several zillion in just a small area of what must have felt like the ‘back forty’, they shifted to a technique called ‘Zen gardening’ which I believe consisted of sitting in the only shady patch and plucking whatever happens to be in arms reach.

My wife seemed to be a bit frustrated with our weed to grass ratio so I told her a story about my friend Allyson’s battle with squirrels. She spent hundreds of dollars on various complex designed bird feeders and baffles in an unsuccessful effort to keep the persistent squirrels out of the birdseed. I suggested the simpler less expensive solution of just calling it a ‘squirrel and bird feeder’. My wife quickly connected the dots and told me we were not going to have a ‘weed garden’. “But you don’t have to rake weeds” I replied.

So I am the mowing and my wife is in charge of the detail stuff. I feel good about my mowing position but I think she got the easy end of the deal. Sometime since I was a kid it was decided that grass clippings are no longer called ‘trash’ and are now called ‘mulch’. I assume some other kid came up with this idea in an effort to get out of raking up the mess and it somehow stuck. Now it is recommended to just leave the mess all over the lawn. No more raking up the clippings and junk; all the mowers now have an attachable clippings bag. Pretty soon I will have to make the first pass with the mower and a new era of my life will begin.