Scott Cramer wrote this.

The people who make a difference are the ones who get bored. – Brian Eno

I imagine it’s like the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly. Bear with me… You’re all happy being a caterpillar, walking around and eating leaves. Watching out for birds, hanging out with non-threatening bugs, doin’ your caterpillar thing. After a while you don’t feel too right with the way the world is and you wall yourself up from it, watching from the inside as all the other caterpillars breeze on by, eating the leaves you used to munch on, running from the birds you used to hide from, hanging with your old non-threatening bug-friends. You just don’t belong anymore. You’ve got a grander vision. You’ve changed. You tear down the wall and discover that you’re no longer tied down to the leafy stems. You’ve traded earthly legs for colorful airy wings.

You fly away, thumbing your butterfly nose at the blissfully ignorant crowd below you – still munching away on their mundane earthbound leaves. Poor fools.

And you’re snatched out of the air by a rather large bird and swallowed whole.

I want to tag a little bit on to Mr. Eno’s quote at the top of the page.

The people who make a difference are the ones who get bored – without falling prey to laziness and arrogance.

Just when you think you’ve seen everything in the grocery…

Half-popped popcorn kernals. In a can. Factory-sealed fresh.

You know the kernels in your microwave bag that didn’t quite have enough oomph to pop out of the popcorn shell and were kind of half shell with a little popcorn whiteness peaking out. The ones (most of us) left in the bottom of the bag… Now it’s a luxury snack product.

What’s next? Bag-o-crushed-chips? That congealed layer on top of home-made pudding when you get it out of the fridge – New pudding skins, “Just like Mom’s!”?

Wait! I’ve got it! Chunky-style Milk! Mmm…

I think I’ll stick with my sugar-coma breakfast cereals. Of course… if they were to put celebrity movie magnets with every carton of Chunky-style Milk………

Cosmic Catch-22 – A married man taking care of a baby is the most desirable to a woman. Same man, no ring or baby, is just another guy who wouldn’t stand a chance with her.

Explain that one, Darwin.

So, we go into a fancy restaurant and the receptionist asks how many in our party.

“Two, and a baby,” I reply.

The waiter asks that we follow him and we proceed to walk about twenty miles to the back of the restaurant in a corner room – filled with several other couples with babies, and a few teenagers in shabby clothing. A kid’s menu and a high-chair were already at the table when we got there.

Back of the bus – again.

Every year that goes by it seems my electric shaver gets more and more use further away from my beard.

My beard is a little tough anyway, so much that I considered rigging a gas-powered weed-whacker as a substitute shaver – except the handle would hit the shower stall and I’d only finish about half my face. Besides, if the nylon cord in the weed-whacker snapped every time I hit gravel (hey, there are weeds to whack in gravel) then it wouldn’t stand a chance as my shaver – and they just don’t make diamond-tipped steel trimming wheels. Maybe something with kryptonite…

Anyway, this whole thought process started when I had to trim some hair from my auricular areas (get a dictionary you pervs!) this morning and I asked my wife if they did electrolysis on ears (if you missed it, auricular = ears… pay attention).

She said, “If they do it on your pubic area they’ll do it on your ears.”

Pubic areas? I didn’t ask about pubic areas – heck, I didn’t even use the term “auricular” out loud! Besides, I get squirmy when the barber uses the electric shaver to trim my neck!

If I did go for this possibility – on the ears, jeez – it would be my luck to be flying out of country (because, well, that happens so often) and, in the middle of nowhere, my plane would go down and strand me on a desert island. It happened to Tom Hanks in Cast-Away so just play along.

After a couple monthes I’d be nothing but a pile of hair – and two glaring white naked ears.

Anyone stumbling across my little island would be laughing so hard they’d probably forget to rescue me.

The Pop-Tart breakfast consortium got me again!

Insidious, I tell you. A grown man walking out of the grocery with a double-pack of Power Puff Girls Pop-Tarts – purple frosted with brightly colored candy stars and characters on top.

And I didn’t even get the cool magnet in the box! @#$%^&

They taste good too… but that doesn’t stop me from imagining the inside jelly is actually melted Power Puff Girls. Bwahaha! If I’m going to eat cutsey cartoon super heroine breakfast pastries, at LEAST I’m going to be the super villain. Mmmm…

If an alien spaceship landed on the road in front of you and the occupants stepped out and approached you to join them on their return into space, would you go?

Remember “Close Encounters of the Third Kind?” Richard Dreyfuss’s character took the opportunity. What became of him? He had a family and kids. Aside from the fact he ruined the living room with a giant mud sculpture of a mountain and convinced all the neighbors he was stark raving mad with his other worldly visions, I’d think they would miss him quite a lot – the family that is; neighbors would gossip the same either way, that’s just what they do.

In any case, would you step away from family and friends (coworkers and the boss, no problem) to become a missing person statistic, or the subject of some sleezy supermarket tabloid?

I can make the decision easier on most of you.

Scenario One – The aliens are slimey wart covered beings who smell of sour milk. Your answer is a definitive “No”. Your excuse, “I’m sorry, I have family and a close network of friends whom I’d miss and who would miss me. Although the opportunity tittilates me intellectually, I sadly must turn down your offer.” You rationalize afterwards that it all had to do with anal probes anyway.

Scenario Two – The aliens look like Sports Illustrated swimsuit models and you can smell flowers when they come close to you. You stutter, forgetting your name, sure of the fact you are an only child, orphan bachelor (despite the band on your left ring-finger), who leads a hermit existence and doesn’t have a job anyway. If you could remember how to speak you might answer, “Yes, for the good of science with little regard to my own personal sacrifice, I will join you on your mission!”

Scenario One – You go home and try to convince your friends and family you didn’t fall asleep driving, hit a tree, and lapse into delirium. Nobody believes you and you eventually convince yourself it was all just a dream.

Scenario Two – The aliens, taking into account your incoherence and drooling problem, retract their offer. The last you see of them, they are leading a cow into the mothership. You go home and dream of anal probes.

One whole grocery aisle dedicated to potato chips. Another for colas (or pop, or soft drinks, whatever you like to call them). Yet another just for breakfast cereals – many of which come out with special “limited edition” packaging named after the cool cartoon or movie in the public popularity spotlight. Several yards worth of frozen pizza brands. Freezer after freezer of ice cream – including twelve kinds of vanilla (c’mon folks, there’s only so much you can do to a vanilla bean!) all the way up to glow-in-the-dark choco-nuggets in every bite! Okay, maybe not quite on that last one, but close. I did see pop-rocks (you remember, the candy that explodes when you put it in your mouth?) mixed into a new flavor – I just can’t figure out how they keep the containers from blowing up when they start to melt.

And this is just at the local gas station quicky-mart.

I always know what year it is.

So long as it’s not within a few days of the beginning or end, I know the month.

Oftentimes I’m confused as to what day it is.

If I didn’t wear a watch I would only know the time by the presence or absence of sunlight.

I forget how old I am. I have forgotten to eat for an entire day because it just didn’t occur to me at the time. I never seem to leave on time. I’m alway late or, at best, barely on time. I believe that the laws of physics don’t apply to me – if I try hard enough I can make the drive in five minutes, not twenty. My fourteen month old daughter was born just yesterday. Christmas Eve still lasts an eternity – especially when quiet descends and you are waiting for morning!

People call me Mister and Sir, and when I look in the mirror I still see a naieve wide-eyed little kid.

“adult”, noun, One who has attained maturity or legal age.

Well, I guess I can get into bars…

Reality TV shows…

I’ve never been to bootcamp. I’ve never had to survive being stranded on an island or stuck in the Australian outback. Temptation Island? Yeah, right.

Unless you’re Angela Lansbury it’s doubtful you’ll really be solving a murder in smalltown America.

And for everyone who believes those Big Brother people aren’t just following the script… well, all those “hand written” advertisements in the mail with your name at the top (don’t mind that it’s been inserted in a totally different font and size), those really are personalized just for you.

Oops, gotta go! Jerry Springer’s on!

Okay, so I let my backyard grass grow a little high. There were fox-tails waving in the wind and my dogs looked like they were roaming the African veldt when I let them out to do their personal doggie work. It started out that I was busy, then it kept raining at the wrong times, or I was too tired, going out for the evening, leaving for the weekend, a good show was on television, alone at home with the baby, and finally, the ultimate in procrastination excuses – I kinda liked the way it looked!

It was kind of neat to call for the dogs and see the greyhound’s head pop up from somewhere in the middle of the yard – kind of like that whack-a-mole game. The little dog, well all you could see of him was the tip of his tail at the top of the grass moving toward you as he ran for the back-door, blades parting before it like water parting around a shark’s fin. Truthfully the entire backyard looked cleaner too – mostly because you couldn’t see that it needed trimmed. Not to mention the fact that the dogs would have to dutifully do their duty in the same spot for a week in order for it to be seen over the grass-top. Considering I don’t own a Great Dane I felt pretty safe on that count.

So I let it grow.

It finally came down to taking out the garbage one week… I was leaving a trail of crusty breadcrumbs in order to find my way back again to the house, when I noticed half-way between door and alley that my trail was gone. I spied the tail-end of what appeared to be a kangaroo-sized mouse diving back into the side wall of grass. I couldn’t see the house. I couldn’t see the alley. Lucky for me I’d just put new batteries in the lantern or I’d have been really screwed. Even in brightest daylight I’d have been lucky to get a few rays at ground level. I told myself not to panic – even though I could swear I heard drums beating in the not too far off distance. I plodded onwards – eventually I’d reach a fence, the garage, or something! After a few minutes I tripped over something. Looking down I saw it was a clipboard. “City Electric” was emblazoned in blocky bold type at the top of the page. Scribbled underneath was a message. It read, “Lost for days in this heart of darkness… If found, deliver these meter readings to City Electric. -Kurtz.” I guess that explained why we hadn’t received an electric bill recently.

In any case, I’d make it out! I had planted the very seed for this grass – it would not be my undoing! It was then that I heard it – a faint calling, but coming closer. I yelled back in reply.

It rang out again, louder this time, “Marco?”

“POLO!” I cried out.

Within minutes my wife appeared through a nearby thicket of crabgrass, a gardenhose lifeline stretched tight behind her. My saviour! She started to speak and I was about to cut her off and tell her how much I appreciated her concern when she noticed I was missing and how brave and devoted she must be to single-handedly forage out to rescue me!

But before I could utter the first syllable, she thrust a bag into my hands. “Here. You forgot to take out the recyclables.”

Ah yes… My hero.

I’ve heard they’ve got spray-on tans now. You go into a booth and spray nozzles hose you down in a golden shower (of tanning solution). I wonder if they make little touch-up bottles that you can dab on an elbow when you bump into someone in the elevator and chip your paint-job…

So, I’m going through the McDonald’s drive-thru, and I order my wife a Coke-Float. Pretty simple, really.

The first thing they ask me is, “What do you want in that?”

Err… “Coke.”

They rang it up as a “Rootbeer-Float with Coke”.

Next time through, I made sure to specify hamburgers w/beef and ice w/water too. Guess I’ve been pretty lucky winging it all these years.

Cold hearted orb that rules the night,
Removes the colours from our sight.
Red is grey and yellow white,
But we decide which is right.
And which is an illusion?
-Moody Blues song lyrics

Sounds an awful lot like freelancing web design to me. Up every night until the wee hours tweaking text, code, images… until you can’t tell which way is up anymore. Oh yeah, and eating pop-tarts. They forgot that part, but hey, I’m betting the record company made ’em take it out.

I’m walking out of the grocery after a quick surgical strike trip for some odds and ends needed for dinner. Erin and little Maddie were waiting in the car. I’ve grabbed the necessities and a few other things on the way up to the check-out lanes.

The necessities are all in the back of the store, so 90% of the run is a corporate-planned walk-through of impulse buy items, like half-price 30% more-for-free celebrity-endorsed low-cal not-enough-room-on-the-box for a product-name snacks, Platinum-Chef cooking utensils, kid’s toys, and hygiene products – and that’s just the first aisle. Three more aisles of breakfast cereals, including the latest Happy Happy Corn Pops with free life-sized statues of Broadway Stars in specially marked boxes. Then the gauntlet of bulk-food barrels where the siren song of endless pantry staples has been known to suck in happless shoppers never to be seen again.

Relatively unscathed, I survey the bowling alley length of check-out aisles for my quickest escape route. Of the three open lanes, two are lined up back to the clearance meat freezer (conveniently located next to the Pepto Bismol and Immodium AD – go figure) and the last requires you to have the Big-Brother Grocery Key-Chain card.

I opt for the increasingly more popular self-check-out lanes. Anyone who can fly a high performance fighter jet and knit a sweater at the same time will have no problem with these babies. Just follow the instructions completely and you won’t set off the shoplifter alarms and have to talk your way out of the full-cavity body search from the overweight Charles Bronson rent-a-cop.

But, as I was saying, Erin and little Maddie were waiting in the car. I’m walking up to the car and my wife looks out the window and says to me, “Those are the biggest buns I’ve ever seen!”

As a dozen other parking lot patrons within hearing distance blatantly gawk at my posterior region, I realize she’s talking about the fact I was going to purchase one bag of hamburger buns, and I’m walking toward the car, with an additional load of pickles, mystery-snacks, two varieties of soda (pop, cola, whatever!), and of course, Happy Happy Corn Pops.

I opened the trunk and, without bending over to offer a better view to the still staring parking lot cart-retrieval-technician managed to put everything inside, slide sideways into the driver’s seat and drive away.

My wife told me I shouldn’t be so self-concious, but I still had to put my lifesize Phantom of The Opera statue in the basement. It just brought back too many bad memories…

Whistling – Part II

I’m working away on the computer, whistling and really into what I’m doing. In the zone…

My wife walks in singing some really old poppy, hurry-up-and-turn-the-radio-station-to-something-else tune. She says, “Now you’ve got me singing it.”

I gave her my patented, “What are you talking about?” look. Actually, I may have just said, “What are you talking about?” which sort of defeats the need for a patented look. But hey, I was working, I was in the zone. The zone can be forgiven.

She followed up with, “That’s the tune you were whistling.”

“Woman!” I exclaimed – once again, in the zone, so it’s forgiven – “that’s Metallica I’m whistling! That’s not some old poppy hurry-up-and-turn-the-radio-station-to-something-else tune!” Spoken, of course, with complete hyphenation.

“Funny,” she says, “it sounded just like an old poppy hurry-up-and-turn-the-radio-station-to-something-else tune.” Mimicking my complete hyphenation, I might add. The nerve. “Oh well, I’ll bet in your head you were really cool.”

Grrr. So much for being in the zone.

Okay, I love the heat. I cut my hair short enough to see my scalp peaking through around all the edges. I switched back to anti-perspirant, even though there are enough extra chemicals in it to shield the space shuttle on re-entry.

* DISCLAIMER – GRAPHIC IMAGERY AHEAD *
I even compute in my underwear in my old not-too-well air-conditioned two-story house. You get used to the “shrrrik!” sound as your flesh rips up off the faux-leather Sam’s Club chair.

I’ve got a huge glass of water sitting by and I’m even eating my pop-tarts untoasted. Hell, I’ll take all this over snow any day. You know what I can’t stand?

“It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.”

Ahhh! If I have to hear one more sweaty-browed, pit-stained person say this to me like it’s some sort of heat-miser epiphany, I’m going to freaking kill somebody!

And I’ll get off on the charges too, man… Because it’s the heat, you know…

It makes you crazy.

When you get a new haircut and everybody comes up to you and says, “Hey, your new hair cut looks really good!”, you start to wonder what you looked like before…

Did you ever think about pulling a hang-nail? What if it were like pulling a loose thread on a sweater? I mean, suddenly everything starts to unravel until you’ve got nothing but an ex-sweater.

What if you pulled a hangnail and you were wearing a sweater at the same time?

What does it all really mean? Probably that I should have paid more attention to the expiration on that jar of pickles in the fridge a few minutes ago…

I came to the conclusion while driving that my daughter is going to love roller coasters.

If I had any passengers I think they’d agree.