Metro Diner review...

Rave! Metro Diner...

Carla came home at 7am this morning when her graveyard shift at the nursing home was over. She does a similar health care job all week, another live-in position, so we don't see each other very much these days. With two hours between jobs, and before I had to leave for work myself, I suggested that we go to Metro Diner. Both of us wanted the comfort of a hot breakfast, and a little time together. As she fixed her hair, getting ready to go, looking into the big oval mirror in the hall, I stepped up behind her, pulling her close and burying my face into her hair at the back of her neck. Breathing deeply, drinking in her scent, I slipped my warm hands up under her clothes, pulling her even closer, lost in the moment that I wanted to freeze in time. But the demands of the clock broke my spell. So we straightened up and headed out to Metro.

Carla snuggled into a warm booth, wrapped up in a new, used coat from Goodwill. Basically a comforter with pockets. Perfect for a chilly morning. She got a huge plate of Southern style biscuits and gravy with a fresh berry lemonade. Her drink dripped cold sweat rings onto a napkin as the waitress served me my Eggs Benedict, one with crab a cake, one with steak. The home fries were topped with green peppers, onions, and cheese. Everything was cooked perfectly, the poached eggs releasing their liquid yokes with the first stab of my fork. Our waitress couldn't have been more friendly or professional, my coffee cup never got less than half full. It was just so good to be able to sit and talk. I've always been proud of the fact that even after 36 years of marriage, when Carla would come home at three in the morning after work and slip into bed next to me, we could talk for hours. I want, need, to hear her voice, share our feelings and thoughts, both of us excited to be together. That's what we had this morning in that booth, accompanied by great food, excellent service, and an overall blanket of much needed familiarity... like air to a person who has been underwater too long.

Many thanks to Metro Diner for the hospitality, an exceptional breakfast, and the privacy of a warm booth to share with my favorite person on this planet. I had been starving for all of it.

Wanted: Dead or Alive

I watched a 1959 episode of “Wanted: Dead or Alive” early this morning. Steve McQueen plays bounty hunter Josh Randall. Don't believe for a moment that bounty hunting hardens you to the point of losing your humanity. Just look at Josh. In this installment, Josh finds a boy out in a field, passed out and feverish. He does the right thing and immediately takes him into the doctor in town. (The doctor was also a school teacher on “Leave it to Beaver” and a prosecuting attorney on “Perry Mason”...so apparently he was a very accomplished man.) Anyway, the doctor knows the boy and knows that the boy's dad hates doctors ever since his own father died on the operating table when a different doctor couldn't save him from a fatal disease. Says that this “Appendicitis” the doctor is talking about is no more than “a bunch of fancy words”. Now only the crazy old medicine woman is allowed to touch the boy. She wears rags and talks to herself, uses frogs to make her potions. Dad had rescued the boy from the doc's clutches and brought him back home on a rough road for the old crone to hover over. But Josh won't stand still and watch the boy die. That's the kind of guy he is. Josh fights the boy's Dad and keeps him outside the cabin after Mom gives permission to operate. They need to do it right there on the kitchen table, the boy is just too weak to go back into the doc's office in town again since Dad “rescued” him and weakened him even more (thanks Dad!). Mom asks: “What can I do to help” Doc says: (here's a surprise) “I'll need plenty of hot water!” Mom can do that and even stands by and dutifully hands the scalpel to the Doc (with her bare hands) No anesthesia, no alcohol, no sutures, clamps, needles, thread for stitches, just plenty of hot water. I guess Doc always carries that scalpel in his back pocket, uses it to clean under his nails. Dad is still outside, mad as a hornet at Josh for his meddling, until the doc finally comes out and says the boy will be OK, thanks to Josh Randall. Dad rushes in and sees his son, clean, looking like he just took a shower back at the actor's trailer, now tucked into a warm bed. The son opens his eyes at his father's touch and smiles at his Dad. Music swells, Dad is contrite, Josh is humbled. Mom is proud that her hubby realizes what a turd he has been and she makes a mental note to not let dad use Mr Happy on her at any time in the near future.

This is not light stuff. There's lots to be learned from all of this. Like the fact that Josh Randall is more than just a bounty hunter, he's a tough guy with a heart of gold.

Fade into commercial: Bonomo's Turkish Taffy. “B-O-n-O-m-O Bonomo's O! O! O! it's Turkish Taffy. Candy!”

BodiArt

Shivering. Not so much from the cold as simply from standing there in line, exposed, my white briefs hanging loosely on my skinny seven-year-old body. I stood with my nose almost touching the boy in front of me, his shoulder blades protruding like freakish wings. The doctor quietly repeated his mantra as each boy stepped to the front of the line: “turn your head and cough”.

I knew the routine. 

The school gave us these physical exams every year in the auxiliary room next to the principal’s office at Franklin Elementary. It wasn't that I minded so much, it was usually over quickly, but this time was different. I had taken my mother's indelible ink pen that she used to write my name on clothes prior to my going off to Camp Waywayyonda, and had been channeling all things Popeye. I drew a large, black anchor on my chest. Having worn it for weeks, a secret emblem of manly seafaring men with forearms the size of Virginia hams, I didn't want to draw attention to it now. Then, with one more step forward, it was my time to turn my head and cough. The doctor looked at me as I stepped up close, dropping his eyes to my tattoo. He smiled briefly, tapped my anchor with his forefinger and gave me a conspiratorial wink before handling my shriveled scrotum as I coughed to one side.

I loved my tattoo, loved knowing it was right there under my shirt...a bold testament to my exotic secret life away from my hood, the white bread streets of a bedroom community, flanked by manicured lawns that were themselves a reflection of my own exterior, manicured, generic, and safe.

Ink transfer tattoos started showing up as prizes in Cracker Jack boxes around that time as well, but they smeared and looked cheap. An indelible ink pen was the way to go.

Fast forward 10 years to the mid 1960's when David Carradine's character in Kung Fu, sported a tattoo Tiger on one forearm and a Dragon on the other. Just cool as hell to me. But they were burn scars from the time Kwai Chang Caine was at his company picnic and picked up the hibachi with his forearms when he saw the hot dogs starting to burn. He had beers in each hand and improvised. Mainly he was trying to impress sweet young Heather Harvey but she just thought he was an idiot.

I had no plans to burn anything, much less myself, but I loved the images.

In college, I asked my roommate, an art major, to use markers to design an elaborate “tattoo” on my left forearm. I really liked that body art and wore it for weeks, washing everything but my forearm when I took a shower. That was in the late 1960's. Little did either of us know that an inked forearm, a “sleeve” would become quite common 45 years later.

In another 10 years, the late 1980's, I started a company called BodiArt Removable Tattoos. We were the first company in the USA to package and sell removable tattoos in retail stores. Up until that time, a guy in Chicago imported removable tattoos from Japan and sold them to vendors who set up tattoo parlors, application stands on boardwalks and at fairs. My partner and I paid a private detective in Chicago $2,000 to find the source. Our guy jumped into the  dumpster of the American distributer and found the contact information for the Japanese manufacturer. Several expensive phone calls and a translator took us one step to the next. Soon, we were in the wholesale business of selling removable tattoos to stores for retail use. In our first month, a motorcycle accessory shop on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, sold over $9,000. of those suckers. But life, and my primary business, took me off in another direction and that was that. For about a year there, my family my friends, my kids and I wore the leftover stock.

My kids looked like circus people.

In the picture here with Ruth, I'm sporting BodiArt tats in an homage to David Carridene's alter ego, Kwai Chang Caine, while Ruth has a lipstick kiss on her cheek. Hannah was only about 4 then, but just as hard headed as now, insisting on wearing the same black ink, big boobed, biker girl sporting a high 80's mop of black hair, every day.

In 1992 I finally got my first real tattoos, two actually, an ant on my forearm and a circular cuff on the right arm. I had seen a surfer wearing a cuff as I was running Manhattan Beach while visiting my sister in Malibu. I thought it was about the coolest thing ever and immediately designed my own and went for it. That tattoo was a real conversation starter back then. Within 7 years, they were popping up all over. Now, they are simply a prerequisite for employment of any kind. At work, no one could see the cuff, but the ant stuck out. Whenever we had a sit down meeting or I met with clients, I wore a long-sleeved shirt. The first time my boss saw it she said: “You'll always have to wear a long sleeve shirt or you'll never be able to get a job in the future.

Now, of course, tattoos are mainstream, and being an average American guy, I have a bunch. Just like more than 30% of all adults in this country. But in my case, I use the term “adult” very loosely...mostly I just think they're cool.

Skin art. And after all, art is art, regardless of the canvas. It’s may be a little painful to produce, but worth it, even if you have to be use a magic marker to make it happen.

Christian Soldiers

When I was seven years old, singing "Onward Christian Soldiers, marching as to war" dressed in choir robes, goose stepping with the other choristers, single file, toward the stalls, an alter boy lead the procession with the “cross of Jesus” held high. A dead man on a pole. I couldn't help but think that nothing could be much more ridiculous than that. The image of a man nailed to crossed boards leading us into “war” with anyone who didn't believe the same silliness that we were being force fed and trying so desperately to believe.

This is supposed to be about love and acceptance? It's anything but that. Judgement-filled, exclusionary, demanding, demeaning, narrow, perverted. "Original sin?" oh please. The church invented the concept of sin as a way to extort money from the masses. There's nothing that money can't buy.

I thought: “What if God is actually the devil, a great deceiver? Always pointing the finger of blame in the other direction?” How can people swallow this stuff, why do they give it any credence at all?

It's early childhood indoctrination. Although it may not have worked so well on some, it does for most. We eat the foods of the culture we're born into, wear the clothes, and worship the gods. We generally don't question any of it very much. We think we're right, and we're ready to go to war to prove it. Lets fight some more over the name of god.

If I had been born in Japan, I would be Shinto. You would too.

 "Religion is a jumble of primitive folklore that humankind drags through the ages like a cosmic security blanket. Religion is passionate and irrational and messy. But philosophy is the flower of human intellect. It is reasonable and civilized. Religion inspires war and atrocity; at worst, philosophy incites mild arguments over coffee and dessert".

So when someone offered the fact that the alter and cross were undamaged in the Notre Dame fire as proof of God, I couldn't help thinking “step back from the trees, out of the forest, and look around”

Try a nice glass of water for a change and leave the red wine & bloody Kool Aid on the table.

You wish a mild intervention would put the poster on a path to the deprogramming she needs. But if her world is full of others drinkers of the Kool Aid that they've been raised on, don't expect too much.

It's next to impossible to get a cigarette smoker who lives in a house full of fellow smokers, to quit. Especially when the others are constantly sliding another cigarette across the coffee table to her when she pauses to simply catch her breath.

Even if I was God...

If I was God, had the power to intervene, change things. Perhaps nothing more than little tweaks here and there. You would get none of it. I believe your life could be no more full, celebratory and earned. You made it happen. We usually get what we deserve in this world based on what we've done up to the moment in question, good or bad. Your cup is full any way you look at it. I couldn't be more proud of who you are, luminescent as you go...  

Happy Thanksgiving?

Most of us will have a happy Thanksgiving, but I can't help thinking about many others who won't...

Once the dogs bugged me enough to take them for a run at Moses Creek preserve, I went ahead and loaded all three into the truck, as we do most mornings, and headed South to our somewhat isolated spot. A cloudless sky allowed an unfettered sunshine to nip at my skin. Vibrant greens and browns splashed the pines and scrub that flank our path leading to an open field. A light breeze seemed to be caught in transition, hot summer to cool winter, without too much lingering in between. Twenty minutes into our walk, the dogs were still lost in finding new scat, maybe that day old pile of hay left there after processing by whatever horse it is that regularly leaves tracks in the damp areas near a swampy place in the trail. The wind picked up and called for my attention as clouds moved silently in, completely blanketing the sky with gray. The rain started lightly at first but within minutes it poured in a way on which Florida seems to hold a patent. Giants overhead emptying buckets, a river falling from the sky. The four of us had no choice but to turn and head back without any possibility of cover. Soaked to the skin, the rain bouncing off of my bare head, Chica, the little firecracker of a terrier mix, sat down. Normally pointed ears lay flat. She was miserable and didn't know what to do about it. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. We plodded on as I thought about the last time I had walked, uncovered, in a downpour. Nothing came to mind. That brief exposure was bearable because I knew that the dry truck was waiting for us, just a few miles ahead. But what of the homeless? What of the Syrian refugees? What if there was no truck waiting, no home for me with its closets full of dry clothes and refrigerator stocked with too much food? I remembered a picture someone had posted of a refugee, a big man in his forties dressed in clothes that made him look like anyone I may pass on the street. He was clutching his little daughter to his chest. Both were crying. The father crying out of frustration that he could no longer feed and house his child. What else had he lost to the violence? His wife? Other children? He had lost almost everything and he had no place to go. Terrified, exposed, almost in shock. No warm truck waiting at the end of the trail, his home a memory, lost.

This perspective helps me to be very thankful today, my plate is so full. But I want the Statue of Liberty to stand tall as it always has, welcoming: "Give me your tired, your poor,your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

I hope we still mean it.

On the ride back it was immediately obvious that we had picked up a fifth passenger...myself, the three dogs, and the overwhelming stink of wet dogs with generous amounts of horeshit perfume rolled vigorously behind their ears. And I was, I am, a very grateful, thankful, man.

Bio

I̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶ ̶b̶o̶r̶n̶ ̶a̶ ̶p̶o̶o̶r̶ ̶b̶l̶a̶c̶k̶ ̶c̶h̶i̶l̶d̶.̶ ̶ Sorry, that was Steve Martin. We weren't poor. Dad was a successful attorney with his own law practice at 25 Broadway in Manhattan. He was top of his class at Johns Hopkins and at Harvard Law. A very pleasant man, a walking encyclopedia, who didn't care much for kids. He cared very much for Mom though, and kids happened. Four of us. Our house was just like the Beaver's house. Mom wore dresses and pearls. She even looked a bit like June Cleaver. Dad read the paper and smoked Kent cigarettes. All that proper behavior gave me the hives though, so I went over to my buddy, David Callahan's house. Chaos ruled there. A Black Racer escaped from its cage and zipped all over the place and half-way up the walls, trying to bite people at every opportunity. Antique rifles were stacked in most corners. Many were loaded. A babysitter blew a hole through the living room floor and into the basement. We made bombs and blew stuff up. Mrs Callahan stocked the kitchen cabinets with Twinkies, chips, and all the wonderful “junk food” items that my mother never bought. If my house was like a library, David's was like a carnival.
College in North Alabama was an eye opener. I only went there because when my freshman year ended at the University of Georgia, they didn't invite me back. At Athens College, the entry requirements were not so tough. If you could fog a mirror, you were in. After four years of insanity dealing with all the social changes that Robert Zimmerman had been croaking heresies about while I was in a town straight out of the 1930's, I graduated in spite of it all.
But first, I lost a game of Ping-Pong to Howard Rau and was too bored to wait for my next chance to be up. Very stoned, impatient for life to start happening, I slipped around the corner and into a phone booth to call my college girlfriend who had already gone home. I asked her to marry me because I thought that was just what people did when they got out of college and I had at least another ten minutes before it was my turn back at the Ping Pong table anyway. That call set in motion a nightmare of events that included a huge church wedding, which I especially hated, and an old man three piece band that I hated even more. We divorced two years later.
Having drawn a low lottery number and with the Army breathing down my neck, I ran over to the Air Force recruiter and got myself signed up. DIA, Defense Intelligence Agency. Four years in the bowels of the Pentagon keeping records on Red Chinese missile sites and Jane Fonda. I witnessed shockingly few examples of any kind of intelligence at all.
Four years of bachelorhood in a huge lakeside townhouse shared with three other bachelors was one big, fantastic party. I was like Snoopy on top of his dog house, dancing feet a blur. So happy not to be married, every morning was Christmas when the fog cleared and the thought of being single came rushing back to embrace me, like waking up a millionaire with Heather Locklear next to me (remember, this was some 35 years ago. She was hot!).
But fate had other plans for my time. Working at The Reston Times newspaper, where I had been for a year or two, Carla started working in the classified department and we hit it off. I fell hard and we eloped within six months of meeting. Now, 36 years later, we have two unique and wonderful daughters.
Ruth is 33, a professional assistant and show nanny for some rich people in Hollywierd. The old, ugly nanny has to stay home when they travel. Ruth's life is all about private jets, personal chefs, trainers, bodyguards, and multiple estates. Tough duty.
Hannah is 28, a gypsy hippie yoga instructor who has been on her own since she was 15. She just didn't come home one day, called me, and told me that she had rented a condo on the beach, was safe and happy and didn't need my support. We've always been close and she's always been her own boss. That determination has taken her all over the world, solo. Dancing on tables in a tapas bar in Spain, surfing the coast of Rio, living in South Africa, Australia, SE Asia...and now in Medellin, Columbia. She's such a breath of fresh air.
Largely, her mom is responsible. Carla home schooled the girls. Threw out the rule book and listened very carefully to the girls needs. No TV, lots of books, field trips, chickens, country living at it's best. I worked in a variety of roles. Rising up through the ranks of a national air courier business in the 1980's, software development and sales in the early 1990's.
That's when we moved to Florida. I launched a magazine: “New Homes and Communities” recognizing the benefit of chasing the new construction market in Florida. That went well and lead me to the proverbial “offer I couldn't refuse”. I went to work as a realtor for a large home-builder that had been a print advertising client. The money got crazy and we bought investment houses. The recession put an end to all that. I'm a genius Realtor, I buy high and sell low.
Now the dust has settled and we're relatively poor again. I still work for a builder, but only part time. We live in what had been our smallest rental, and life is very, very good. Sometimes it's more about what you save than what you earn.
All in all, an average, uneventful life. Like most people, we spent the first half of our lives acquiring two of everything we never really needed, and the second half trying to get rid of that stuff. Life is simpler now, my give-a-shit levels are almost bottomed out. I care a lot more about a very few things, family, friends, and a lot less about most other things. But we've never had to deal with tragedy, lost a child, faced cancer or major illness. We've just had a very long string of warm, wonderful days full of great food and lots of laughter... days that turned into years, a lifetime. Maybe that's not so average after all.