I think I have reached the official “hey-kids-get-off-my-lawn” age.
I do not think of myself as being a curmudgeon but I am starting to embrace being curmudgeonly. I revel in the things that annoy me and enjoy being self-righteous about it.
So in the best spirit of the late Andy Rooney from “60 Minutes,” here is the list of things that irk me:
Movies that insult my intelligence.
People with earbuds on the subway who play their music so loudly I can dance to it.
When Siri malfunctions on my iPhone, which feels like all the time.
“Siri, what is the weather in New York City today.”
“Hmmmm…Let me think about that. Here is a recipe for matzo ball soup.”
People who walk on the sidewalk without paying attention because they have their noses in their smartphones.
People who crowd the sidewalk by walking too slowly, two abreast or at a full stop with luggage. Lead, follow or get the hell out of the way!
The manbun, especially the ones tied at the top of the head. Please. I just want to pull on those things like the strings of my former talking G.I. Joe action figures to see what happens.
The use of “guyses.” I do not know where this started but I swear I have heard it more than once. The most cringe worthy moment came in a conference call when a company executive used it to be plural possessive. And yes, he was in the communications field. (Side note: Not my current employer.)
People who carry on cellphone conversations without a care for who can hear them. I have recently heard conversations going on in the stalls of a public men’s room. I so wish I were kidding.
Lukewarm coffee.
Those ridiculous “Happy Birthday” chants you hear in chain restaurants. Stop it.
Catcallers on the summer sidewalks of New York City. Dude on the corner, do you really think saying “Thank you, beautiful” to the woman walking by you is meaningful conversation?
Texting and social media shorthand that mangles the English language. And I am not taking about shorthand such as BRB for Be Right Back, BTW for By The Way or even SMH for Shaking My Head.
No, I am talking about “words” like “prolly” for probably and “tryna” for “trying to” and “tho” for “though.”
People who carry umbrellas and poke you with them. Put them away and just get wet.
Drivers who use their high beams for no good reason.
People who drive recklessly, tailgate, switch lanes without signaling and never get pulled over by the police.
Trying to find a terrestrial radio station that will keep its signal while I am traveling AND have worthwhile programming.
Man spreading. That is guys who sit on the subway with a wide stance, making it all but impossible to take the seat next to them.
A recent survey listed the worst job in the country, and for the third year in a row, newspaper reporter was at the top — or the bottom, depending on your view — of the list.
As someone who has been in that career for 30 years, I take that kind of news personally.
Yes, the industry has been battered by layoffs and eroding readership and swamped by technological advances, but worst job? No way!
I was a fry cook, dining room clean-up staffer and eventually a manager.
There was nothing quite like working with superheated peanut oil, splattered batter and garbage to teach you lessons in humility — and a career path to stay away from!
I would go home at midnight on Fridays — our busiest day of the week — with the stench of oil in my nostrils and a combination of oil and batter matted to my hair. Wearing the cap as part of the uniform did nothing to help.
At the end of each shift, we would run the used oil through a contraption that was part vacuum and part filtering machine.
You would line up the machine beneath the frying vat, open a valve, and the oil, which was still hot, would gush into a holding tank, go through various filters and be discharged through a hose back into the vat.
Peanut oil was very expensive, the owner would constantly remind us, so you would try to extend its life by filtering out the fried crud.
One night as I was running the machine, I felt something burning my toes.
My right shoe was positioned beneath the big metal box of the machine that held the oil.
I looked down and the corner of the box had sprung a small leak, allowing the oil to dribble onto my shoes, burn through them and onto my foot!
That was bad but dealing with the garbage was the worst.
If you worked the shift before the garbage was collected, it meant you had to drag the heavy, dripping, smelly bags to the curb.
And that meant you had to enter a room – yes, a room about the size of a small bedroom – filled floor to ceiling with garbage accumulated over the week.
The room was not vented, but for a drain on the floor. It attracted roaches and waterbugs the size of the ants in “Them!”
I would be so skeeved out!
Clearing the room was easy to start since you could grab the bags closest to the door, but then as the pile thinned, you had to step deeper and deeper into the room.
I would hold my breath and dash in to get the remaining bags.
Ugh.
But you know, upon reflection, I look around me and see jobs that are far worse. Take for instance the sites in New York City.
There are those people who stand with signs or pamphleting for tour buses and nightclubs in all kinds of miserable heat and cold. Or people who work in sewers.
Yikes!
What was the worst job you had? Share your stories.
It was about 10 minutes after leaving the starting line at the Warrior Dash at Pocono Raceway – keeping pace with the top third of my wave of fellow dashers – that I really, really wished I had had a second cup of coffee.
I knew there would be a dozen obstacles that included climbing through channels of mud and through pits of mud and wading through muddy water with barbed wire inches above your head, but this running thing?
That was going to get old quickly.
Notably, though, within about 15 minutes after starting, participants were not running like they were in a marathon.
Instead, they were walking and talking with each other and enjoying the experience.
What I learned was that this “race” was not really a race at all.
The competition was inside your head.
Could you clamber up the side of a tall barn-shaped structure and climb down the other side?
Could you walk across a narrow board spanning a pool of muddy water and not lose your balance?
Could you take a rope and climb a steep incline and then use a rope to get yourself down? (I felt like Batman and Robin from the 1960s television series where they scale the side of a building.)
I truly was not sure how I would perform until I got out there.
Each obstacle was marked with a sign that read “Danger: Obstacle Ahead.”
“Danger”?
Holy crap. That was intimidating.
Reading the fine print on the waiver I signed was also not exactly reassuring.
It said that I understood the dash was a test of my physical and mental limits and “an inherently dangerous activity” that included extreme obstacles of fire, mud pits, barbed wire, cargo nets, heights, climbing and jumping into water, among other feats of derring-do.
It went on to say that the course might include plants, insects and wild animals.
It even mentioned death three times for crying out loud!
I will say though that the course was infused with a sense of humor. The obstacles were dotted with signs like “Yes, we wish you had trained too” and “If your ex could see you now.”
The thing that I came to appreciate as I climbed and crawled was that if you kept your mind focused on the fun, you could have a good time.
Yes, I had poured myself into some tight-fitting bike shorts that made me feel like a sausage. There were plenty of muscled shirtless guys who easily lapped me.
But you know what?
There were also people of every shape and size and a few guys of a certain age like me out there giving it their all.
Driving home I was a bit sore, hungry and had some muddy grit in my ears even after showering.
Still, I was elated because:
a.) I made it.
b.) The median age of the participants had to be like 27.
c.) And I got through the course in respectable time.
Maybe as A.A. Milne said: “You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem…”
I recently had my annual physical and I was like pffffft….I’ve got this thing in the bag.
Heart? Sounded A-OK.
Lungs? All clear.
Yes, I wear my safety belt. I drink alcohol in moderation. And no, I don’t smoke.
I was sailing toward a bill of health cleaner than my mother’s kitchen when…
The doctor looked over my paperwork and saw my weight. Hmmmm, she said, for your height and weight, your BMI is high and you are very close to being obese.
For those of you who are not familiar with BMI, or body mass index, it is a conspiracy cooked up by health professionals to figure out new ways to guilt you into losing weight.
It takes into account your height and weight and then comes up with a score to determine if you are like porridge in a Goldilocks fairy tale: Underweight, overweight or just right.
But even at the news about my BMI, I was not fazed.
Then I raised the question that I should have left unasked.
So, doctor, how much weight do I need to lose? (I figured five pounds would be a reasonable answer.)
“Fifteen pounds” came her reply.
The room started to spin.
My righteous indignation started to rise.
Protests began to form on my lips.
Fifteen pounds! Now look here, I work out religiously four to five days a week, at least 30 minutes of hardcore exercise each time.
She acknowledged that was good but said the issue was probably my food intake.
You mean the processed snack bars that are promoted as healthy but are still loaded with a bit too much sugar and carbs? Or my less-than-optimal daily intake of vegetables?
In the Supreme Court of Calories, I want to strike a plea bargain.
BMI is an imperfect measure of body fat that was originally intended to assess the obesity rates of a population of people. Applied to individuals, one size does not fit all.
Further, it does not differentiate between fat and muscle, so if you work out with weights (which I do) you could be penalized.
How do your clothes fit? Do you have trouble making it up a flight of stairs? What do you see when you look in the mirror?
Now, it is true that what you eat matters more in some ways than how much you exercise. That is an area where I do have room to improve.
So I’m resolving to try to cut back on my sweets and maybe watch my portion control a little more closely. And maybe extend my workouts a bit each day.
I figure what I have got to lose — except 15 pounds.
It’s the day before I “participate” (read: run, fall down, scrape my knees, get wet, get muddy and fall down some more) in a so-called mud run, this one the Warrior Dash at Pocono Raceway in Long Pond, Pa.
For those not familiar with these races, they feature a series of obstacles, including rope tunnels to climb through, large inclined ramps to scale and mud pits with names like Chaotic Cargo and Deadman’s Drop.
And, oh yeah, this is for fun and charity. It benefits the St. Jude Children’s Hospital.
I had signed up for my first Warrior Dash last year but ultimately had to be a no-show because I could not get off the time from work.
But this year I have no such excuse.
The crazy thing is I’ve not run in a competitive event since I was a freshman in high school which was … (*takes out abacus, calculator and counts on his fingers and toes*) … a long time ago.
Further, you’re talking about a guy who did not like gym class in high school because I would sweat too much. (By contrast, however, as a kid, I would spend afternoons running around the neighborhood, playing “army,” climbing rocks and rolling around in the grass. So go figure.)
My wife has asked me several times in the past week or so if I was growing nervous as race day approached.
No, I said with a shrug. I’ve been working out regularly and even though I am nearly 52, I’m pretty sure I can hack this.
But her questions have prompted me to look more closely at the race course.
A dozen obstacles consisting of mud, fire, rope nets, climbing, balancing on a board and crawling under barbed wire.
That’s scary enough but even scarier is that I will be impersonating an athlete, pouring my body into one of those forming-fitting biker shorts, which will accent my muffin-top (you’re welcome for that image), shorts and one of those sleek shirt tops.
So come tomorrow, after an hour, I will emerge muddy, sweaty, bloodied but victorious.
Quite soon, my stepson and his wife are expecting their first baby. (Spoiler alert: It’s either a girl or a boy.)
I’m so over-the-moon excited for them.
It harkens me back to the days leading up to the arrival of my first son more than 20 years ago. It was a time filled with excitement and anxiety.
To help Garth and Krista prepare for their new arrival, I offer this collection of advice that I call “What to REALLY to Expect When You’re Expecting: The Straight Dope.”
Lesson No. 1: It’s very important that you come up with a name for the baby but here is one way NOT to handle it:
My then-wife and I were returning from a party in New Jersey and had about a two-hour car ride home. She was in her first trimester and, um, a little cranky.
I cheerfully (read: blissfully stupidly) suggested we spend the two hours going through the alphabet to explore names, like “A is for Adam, Anthony, etc.”
This went relatively smoothly until we were just about to pull into the driveway. We were near the end of our name search and I was pressing for possible suggestions for the letter “Z”: Zachary, Zachariah, etc.
At this point, she was having none of it.
She wheeled on me Linda Blair “Exorcist”-style and growled: “Why don’t we just name him a****** after the father?!”
Lesson No. 2: I recall Garth’s mother, my late fiancée, telling me of a panicked phone call she made to the doctor’s office when she was convinced that Garth was hemorrhaging internally because she changed a diaper filled with purple poop.
Diagnosis: She had fed him blueberries.
Lesson No. 3: Do not be fooled by an infant’s size. The amount of poop that a baby can produce and propel with ferocity defies laws of physics. Those cute onesies or pajamas with feet? They are merely vessels for containing the discharge, which you will find up the baby’s back, down his legs –- pretty much everywhere.
Lesson No. 4: It cannot be emphasized enough the amount of sleep deprivation that comes with having a newborn.
I say this with authority because we filled an entire hard-covered marble notebook after our first son was born. In it, we chronicled every burp, nap, diaper change, feeding, bath, etc.
Among the notable entries was this one from 3:15 a.m. on July 4, 1993 – when Michael was not quite a month old:
“Mommy sleeps…Daddy thinks he hears weird noises downstairs. Michael bravely goes with Daddy. They find nothing. All secure. 3:45 a.m. back to sleep.”
New entry: “And the hallucinations continue, with Daddy thinking he saw a moth in the room.”
(I had taken the notebook, swatting at this “moth,” and pirouetted around the room until I got so dizzy, I fell.)
New entry, this one in the handwriting of Michael’s mother:
“Poor Daddy, he scared Mommy when she woke up and saw him on the floor (I thought he had Michael in his arms.) Thank goodness he did not! By the way, we never did find the moth…”
The lessons here: Beware of blueberries. And phantom moths.
It is hard to know when I first noticed that my parents were aging.
The closer you are to a subject, the more your perceptions are distorted and you don’t see as clearly.
For example, my mother and the mother of a childhood friend of mine both grew up in Germany.
When I would visit my friend, I was always struck by how thick his mother’s accent was so many decades after living in the states.
One day my friend remarked on how thick my mom’s German accent was, and I was like: What accent?
So too it has been in discovering that my parents have gotten older.
The revelation was most forcefully driven home after they had been traveling with a bus tour and Dad tripped in a parking lot and fell, fracturing his arm.
A trip to the emergency room and later his own doctor back at home left his arm in a convoluted sling that rendered the arm immobile and pretty much useless.
I learned that Mom had to feed Dad because his dominant arm was out of commission. He was also having difficulty sleeping because of the discomfort and pain.
When my wife and I visited a few weeks after Dad was on the mend, it was shocking to see Mom sticking a napkin under his collar while he ate with his non-dominant hand.
And a month after that, Dad fell off a chair while reaching for something on the floor while visiting us. I was in the kitchen when I heard a noise and the next thing I saw was Dad on his side on the floor.
It was quite the shock to see Dad — an authority figure who commanded respect and who I remember from childhood as being the strong guy I turned to for leadership — out of commission like that.
My reflections on all of this resurfaced after my brother-in-law’s father recently died at age 90. Ed’s dad was an energetic go-getter who unexpectedly took a bad turn after heart surgery.
And within weeks of his death, my former father-in-law, a contemporary of my Dad’s, also died years after learning he had Parkinson’s disease.
Dad has had a heart attack, a defibrillator installed and significantly slowed down over the past six years. There have also been a couple of medical crises set off by high heat and lack of hydration.
All of that said, Dad, who will be 79 in the fall, is in good spirits and will soon have physical therapy. He is even driving again.
Mom looked a little worse for the wear immediately after all of the strain of his fall but things seem be more settled. Though she complains about being old, there’s not much slowing her down.
They live in a retirement community that residents euphemistically call “God’s waiting room.” While there’s a bit of gallows humor about that, there is no escaping that, in the end, time claims everyone, including your parents.
With the encouragement of my childhood friends who make up the About Men Radio crew, I’ve decided to fully embrace the AMR Fitness Challenge.
It’s not that I haven’t tried to eat right and exercise.
I’ve been working out consistently for nearly 15 years but I would say in the past two or so, I’ve slowed down.
Instead of working out for 45 or 50 minutes a day for six days a week, I started to do 30 minutes of exercise four days a week.
And with a desk job and being in the car four hours a day, that made a difference.
My doctor recently told me she wanted me to lose 15 pounds because my body mass index was too high.
So I am using the Fitness Challenge to get back to my old better habits.
After a July filled with travel, vacations and plenty of eating and drinking (and being sidelined with a medical issue for five weeks), I’ve started August off right.
I’m going old school with my workouts — relying on tried-and-true routines, such as circuits with weights and a Crunch Cardio Boot Camp DVD that has always served me well.
Now, here is the absolutely crazy thing: The harder I’ve pushed myself by extending my workouts, the better I feel, the more energy I have, especially at night when I’m working, and the better I sleep.
When I was only working out 30 minutes a day, I did not get those benefits.
I’ve also taken up MyFitnessPal.com to help me keep track of what I’m eating. It’s really simple math: You need to burn more calories than you take in.
When I was working out 30 minutes a day, I was just drawing even with my intake or eating more than I was burning.
I’ve tried a couple of different strategies: Eating more protein. Skipping sugar with my coffee. Eating more celery, carrots and peppers as snacks, sometimes with hummus.
I’ve signed up to run in a Warrior Dash in three weeks, so there’s more than the usual motivation to get going!
I’ll keep you posted…
If you want to share your tips and ideas — or to send words of encouragement — post on our Facebook page or write us at amr@aboutmenshow.com.
New York City’s subway system is a microcosm — or Petri dish, depending on your view — of humanity.
Nowhere was this more evident than as I made my way recently from Queens into Manhattan and observed the following all within the span of 40 minutes:
* A stranger (a man) helping a woman carry an ungainly stroller up a steep flight of stairs to a subway station.
* Two teenagers (both boys) rushing to grab the few available seats on the subway when there was clearly an older man who was eyeing a seat and certainly could have used one.
* A man entering the subway car, struggling with a stroller and awkwardly carrying his daughter, who was maybe a year old. A young woman offered her seat to the guy, who accepted it with a mixture of relief and gratitude.
Big props to the guy who helped the lady with the stroller and the woman who offered her seat to the guy with his young daughter. And a smack with a hard-cover book of manners for the two dolts who were oblivious to anybody but themselves.
It reminded me of the old Goofus and Gallant comics that were a feature of “Highlights” magazine when I was a kid. Presented with the same set of circumstances, Goofus would choose the path that was either rude or selfish and Gallant would do the thing that was chivalrous or polite.
What I am seeing increasingly in the world is too many Goofuses and too few Gallants.
I am not saying I am a perfect gentleman all the time but I think I have some sense of courtesy. Maybe it is the product of 12 years of Catholic education.
Seared in my memory is an episode from seventh-grade math class with Sister Margaret Marion.
A bunch of math equations were on the blackboard and myself and another student, Corrine Cortes, at the board to solve them. When we were done, I erased my work and handed Corrine the eraser.
In a voice that still echoes in my head, Sister Margaret boomed: “A real gentleman would have erased the board for her.”
Duly noted, sister. But being courteous is a practice that is gender-neutral.
I feel like a fossil saying this, but everyday manners seem to be as antiquated as Internet Explorer or black-and-white TV.
Gestures, such as holding the door for someone or offering a stranger a hand with their bags, seem like relics that belong in a museum for future generations to marvel at.
Maybe we are averse to interacting with strangers because the world is an unpredictable place filled with outbursts of violence.
Maybe we are too absorbed in our damn smartphones to ever look up and see a person in need.
Or maybe there is an entire generation that is too socially awkward to interact with others because it grew up spending so much time in front of computer screens.
I am not sure of the underlying causes but I do know that it costs nothing to be courteous but it can invaluable to the recipient.
So let’s see if we can all do our part, even just a little bit, to improve how we act toward others.
It was 40 years ago today that serial killer David Berkowitz murdered his first victim in the Bronx, the start of a yearlong reign of terror that left New Yorkers both on edge and fixated with what became known as the Son of Sam murders.
At the time I was 12 years old. A few months later I started to deliver The Daily News to apartment buildings in the Bronx.
The killings, which also came to be known as the work of the .44-Caliber Killer, because of the weapon he used, were ready-made fodder for the city tabloids and TV stations.
The serial murders came at a time that I was coming of age. I was asserting my independence – I was working and starting to ride the subways by myself.
So for me, the city was both exciting and dangerous. (Remember, New York was just coming out of its dismal fiscal crisis and crime, poverty and drugs were tearing at the fabric of its communities.)
It was against this backdrop that the Son of Sam killings gripped the city’s attention. Over the course of more than a year, he shot 13 people in cold blood, killing six.
Berkowitz, who later claimed he was acting on instructions given to him by a neighbor’s dog, played cat and mouse with the cops, taunting them with handwritten letters to Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin.
The murders were intermittent. This was not a one-time spree killer like the mass shootings now all too familiar to us today.
Instead, Berkowitz targeted young couples, often in parked cars, and frequently young attractive women with long brown hair. (This reportedly prompted many young women in the city to run to salons to get their hair dyed a different color.)
As a newspaper delivery boy, I would get stacks of The Daily News delivered outside our apartment door for me to then distribute to my customers.
That, in turn, meant I got a jump on all the latest developments in the case.
I would voraciously read the stories before I headed out on my route.
Among the headlines: “Breslin to .44 Killer: Give Up! It’s the Only Way Out!’ “Cops: .44-Caliber Killer ‘Is Taunting Us.’” “New Note: Can’t Stop Killing.” “Killer to Cops: I’ll Do It Again.”
The day after cops arrested Berkowitz – Aug. 11, 1977 – The Daily News featured this headline: “Nab Mailman as .44 Killer.”
I rushed into my parents’ bedroom and breathlessly woke my mother.
“They got him! They got the .44-Caliber Killer!” I told her.
Indeed they had.
And a 13-month reign of terror had finally come to an end.
You know, as a parent, you can be wracked with self-doubt and anxiety about what kind of job you’ve done raising your kids.
Did you instill in them the right values? How do they treat others? Do they respect themselves?
Will they only remember the stupid things you did wrong when they were younger?
Did you give them enough support? Did you not give them enough?
My “boys” have just turned 23 and 18.
The older one is on his own after graduating from college last year. He’s a manager-in-training in the hospitality industry, working for a major hotel chain and making more money than his old man did right out of college.
He’s living independently, owns a car, buys his own groceries, is well-regarded by his co-workers and really enjoys his work.
The younger son just graduated from high school, has been a stellar student and an even more stellar friend to his wide circle of friends, has held a number of offices in school groups and activities and will be working four summer jobs.
So, yeah, I think the kids are all right.
And if I needed any more affirmation about whether they learned the right things, I turn for some comfort to this essay my younger son wrote last year:
Ten years ago, my family moved from the streets of New York to the wilderness of the Poconos.
With it, came many challenges such as dealing with the extreme winters. My father, being conscious of this, made a rule that my brother and I had to abide by: wear your boots to school.
After the first month of winter, wearing my boots to school every day became tiresome and uncomfortable.
Becoming irritated by the bulky footwear, I decided to do something about it.
One night, I put my Nike sneakers in a plastic bag and placed them in the backseat of my dad’s car.
The next morning, I put on my boots, as instructed, and got into my dad’s car to head to the bus stop.
In the three-minute ride from my house to the bus stop, I quietly changed from my boots to my sneakers. I then proceeded to board the bus with pride in the chicanery I just pulled off.
Later that morning, my dad found the infamous boots sitting on the floor in the backseat of his car.
Safe to say he was displeased. In the grand scheme of things, it was just one day I didn’t wear my boots.
However, in that same day I did learn that Nike sneakers do not have favorable insulation. In fact, I did not wear my sneakers again until the following March.
The clunkiness of the boots was worth the warmth they gave me. I was fortunate to learn from this situation at a young age that I am not always right.
It was at that moment I realized that there are people who know me better than I know myself — and those people are my parents.
Early in July, my wife and I set out for a vacation to New Hampshire and Maine, part of which included plans to go on a moose expedition.
As you may recall, I have been on a 30-year odyssey to see a moose in the wild.
Three previous attempts – two with a wildlife biologist in New York and one with an outdoors guide in Maine – were fruitless.
Ditto our impromptu efforts driving the highways and byways of places called “Moose Alley” and crisscrossing Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire.
Seeing a bear on our way out of town at our local Dunkin’ Donuts in the Poconos struck me as a good omen.
The bear was foraging for food in the parking lot dumpster and lingered for so long that a crowd gathered to shoot photos and videos.
Surely, I thought, the wildlife gods were signaling me that my quest to see a moose would be successful.
We trekked to Lincoln, N.H., for a night tour of the “wallows” – hot spots where moose gather near the roadside to forage for vegetation or lap up the sodium-rich road salt left over from winter.
Our intrepid guides, Larry and Tony, boasted of a 97 percent moose sighting rate over 18 years.
Ninety-seven percent!
Plus, with their native New Hampshire accents (“wicked smaht”), I felt like we were in the hands of true moose whisperers.
Granted, the night before, their excursion only saw two moose, but hell, that would be two more than I’ve seen in the wild.
I was undaunted.
About 30 of us piled into a small but comfortable bus and we left at 9 p.m. for a three-hour tour.
Our guides emphasized that moose are not animatronic characters who perform on command like the animals at Disney World attractions.
That said, they said they would work hard to find moose – and that they did.
Using spotlights, our guides scanned the roadside places where moose were known to congregate.
The vibe in the bus early in the trip was upbeat and jovial as they cracked hokey jokes. About 90 minutes into the trip, we stopped at a general store for a bathroom break and some sweet treats.
No moose.
No problem, they said. The night before they did not see one until after the break.
But as the night wore on, and our stops became more frequent and less fruitful, the mood grew more quiet and less cheery.
Thankfully we were sitting on the right side of the bus to catch a glimpse of the face of a young moose cow. But that was it – a glimpse – after three and a half hours.
It is hardly what I would consider a full-fledged moose sighting but it did technically break my 30-year drought.
Still, it was a bit like being promised a hamburger from Shake Shack and getting one from White Castle instead.
In this latest episode of About Men Radio shenanigans, Pedro and Chris talk about men’s health — no, not the magazine — but what it takes for men our age to be of sound bodies. (Forget about our minds, those are shot!)
Partly the discussion was spurred on by recent medical procedures we both endured (read: colonoscopies) and the order by Chris’s doctor to drop 15 pounds.
That, in turn, led to a conversation about…well, never mind. Just give it all a listen and then tell your friends about it.
The AMR crew will soon have a big announcement about a project we’re working on, so you will have to stay tuned for future episodes!
I got married on July 4, 2010, to Meg, who is gorgeous, tall and fiercely, fiercely bright.
I was then and continue now to be one lucky guy. Talk about marrying up…
The wedding itself was a relatively easy event compared to getting engaged.
Meg loves waterfalls and what better setting than in the Poconos of Pennsylvania to find a waterfall where I could propose?
Ring? Got it.
Knowing what I was going to say? Pretty well rehearsed.
Finding a waterfall. The Poconos is dotted with them, so I figured this all should be easy-peasy.
But our route to getting engaged had a few detours along the way.
My plan was for Meg and I to go exploring the countryside for a “unique” waterfall, that is, one that we had not visited together or one that we had not seen in some time.
Meg recalled a waterfall at the estate of Marie Zimmermann, who was famous for her metal works and jewelry design and who had a home and farm in what is now the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area in the Poconos.
Great!
We can head there and then I can pop the question. And how perfect that Zimmermann was known for jewelry and I have a ring to offer.
Surely this was a good sign, right?
Except that Meg could not recall where exactly the Zimmermann estate was. She had been there many years earlier with a friend.
Maybe it was this way.
No. Wait.
Maybe it was in the other direction.
Or maybe …
Of course, we were in West Nowhere and there was no cell service to be had so looking something up on our smartphones was not an option.
Throughout though, Meg was carefree and enjoying the pretty scenery and pleasant drive.
As for me, I was getting a major case of flop sweat from nervousness about popping the question and anxiety about finding a waterfall.
This went on for the better part of an hour.
By this point, I was ready to pull over, get on bended knee, use a watering can for a waterfall and declare mission accomplished.
We pressed on if for no other reason than we both were now motivated — for different reasons — to find a waterfall, damnit!
Say what you want about the Brexit vote and about Donald Trump (and let’s face it, there’s a lot to say about both) but the most important development to arise from the intersection of these two newsmakers was the hilariously inventive invective streamed at Trump during his post-Brexit visit to Scotland.
A quick refresher:
British voters decided in a referendum that they were going to quit the European Union, a decision that deeply divided Britain along political, economic and demographic lines.
The day after the vote, Trump visited a golf course he owns in Scotland and offered this on Twitter:
“Just arrived in Scotland. Place is going wild over the vote. They took their country back, just like we will take America back. No games!”
Just one problem: Scotland voted overwhelmingly to REMAIN with the EU.
And thus it began on Twitter: The most brilliant insults the likes of which the world has not seen since the Insulting Frenchman on “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” (Recall: “Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!”)
Some of these are so superb that I am going to have to incorporate them into my daily swearing vocabulary:
Twitter users referred to Trump as a “mangled apricot hellbeast”; a “weapons-grade plum”; “clueless numpty” and “bloviating flesh bag.”
Then of course, are those super-excellent ones that are the nuclear option for when you really want to call someone out, such as:
And..
But what this underscores to me is something I have long suspected, that is, anything the British, Scottish or Irish say sounds so much smarter and better than Americans.
In fairness, the Brits do have William Shakespeare on their side and he was known to toss off a good insult or two.
Consider: “lump of foul deformity”; “a fusty nut with no kernel” and “beetle-headed, flap-ear’d knave.”
I mean c’mon. The best I could do in matching wits with someone like that would be to go: “Oh yeah?! Well, you’re mother dresses you funny.”
It just doesn’t have the same panache.
But this also reminds me that the Brits, Scots and Irish almost speak the same language as we do.
I have a dear friend who is from Ireland and when we first started to work together she would drop phrases that I often had to ask her to interpret, such as “a month of Sundays,” a “bull’s look” and “wouldn’t touch that with a barge pole.”
My wife, Meg, lived in England for 10 years and often sprinkles Britishisms into conversation that give me pause, such as referring to the car’s “windscreen” or “bonnet” or traveling to “collect” someone.
Meg’s dad was Scottish. A few years ago we met four of her Scottish cousins who came to New York City for a visit. We spent a summer Sunday afternoon exploring Manhattan.
We had a great time. But with their thick burrs, I understood about 40 percent of what they said.
No matter.
After the way the Scots told off Donald Trump and after Brexit, I’m proposing a referendum to make Scotland our 51st state.
I got a FitBit for Father’s Day, so I am hoping to get a bit fit.
For the six of you who have not heard of this electronic geegaw, it is the latest example of better living through technology.
It straps to your wrist, and like a watch, it will display the time, but it also tracks your heart rate, number of steps you take, stairs you climb, calories burned and miles walked.
My younger son was so in love with his FitBit and I was equally impressed, so I asked for one for Father’s Day.
What I have found so far is that as a middle-aged guy, it is yet another way for me to discover how I don’t measure up.
Fitness experts recommend you walk at least 10,000 steps a day. If I break about 6,000, that is a good day.
My first time breaking 10,000 steps! Hurray!
As someone who spends four-plus hours in the car five days a week, getting to that goal would be a challenge, unless of course I drove a Fred Flintstone-type car where you pedal furiously with your feet to get started.
But I am finding that I am making adjustments in light of the FitBit. For instance, today I walked an extra block out of my way just so I could rack up extra steps toward my total.
I also make it a point to take the stairs instead of an escalator when I have the option. With its attractive graphics, FitBit gives me encouragement for climbing more flights of stairs.
The one feature I am fascinated with — and at the same time a bit creeped out by — is the one that tells me how much I have slept.
FitBit is like Santa Claus that way: It knows when you are sleeping. If it starts telling me whether I have been naughty or nice, it’s coming off my wrist.
I have also been using an app called MyFitnessPal in which you track what you are eating, total calories consumed and your exercise.
You set a weight loss goal and it gives you an ideal daily caloric intake based on your height, weight and time you have set to lose the weight.
You enter your food and it keeps diligent track of your progress.
This too has been unnerving and eye-opening.
You mean my medium hot Dunkin’ Donuts coffee with milk and sugar is 112 calories?
Fine.
Out goes the sugar. Milk only from now on with my coffee. A net savings of 77 calories. I feel thinner already.
What I have discovered is that calories are a lot like time and money: Once you have consumed them, there is no getting them back so it is important to be judicious
FitBit and MyFitnessPal are merely tools to help keep me on track toward a healthy, balanced me. Of course, they are no substitute for sensible eating, exercise and a good night’s sleep.
But if FitBit wanted to be really helpful, it could give me a low dose of electric current, like a cattle prod, every time I reach for a cookie.
For Father’s Day, I thought I would share some of my father’s sayings and pearls of wisdom.
As the oldest child, I have been exposed to these the longest of my siblings and thus they are part of my DNA.
What follows is a blend of Borscht Belt kitsch and Old World philosophy.
Think of it as the World According to My Dad.
About his mental health:
I’m not well you know.
Bad jokes:
You know why electricity is cheaper in Lower Manhattan? It’s near the Battery.
When I die, there will be a sign outside our building and do you know what that sign will say? Apartment for rent!
I got called for a Charles Atlas ad. They want me to be the model for the “before” look.
You heard about the couple that planned to elope? The girl called it off at the last minute. You know how the guy knew? She threw a cantaloupe out the window.
If I go bald, I’ll just comb my eyebrows back.
How can you tell the bride is pregnant at a wedding? The guests throw puffed rice.
(My mom emigrated from Germany in the 1960s): Winnie was sent here by her government to marry the smartest man in America. She failed in her mission.
I’m going bald because my brains are making my head grow.
You look good. Who’s your undertaker?
How tall are you? Wow, I didn’t know they piled shit that high!
Italian
Con la rosa arriva le spine. (With the rose comes the thorns.)
Basta! (Enough!)
Don’t be a scooch! (Pest/pain in the butt.)
Ah, bah-fungoo!
It was really skeevatz. (Disgusting)
Stop being a gavone! (A pig/someone who is greedy about food.)
About food:
Are you going to eat that?
Are you going to finish that?
Let me just have a little taste.
If you go home hungry, it’s your own fault. (Said after hosting a big holiday spread of food.)
Let me taste it first to make sure it’s not poison.
It would be a sin to let that go to waste.
What did you have to eat?
Just a touch…Whoa! That’s good.
Discipline:
(After giving me a smack in the head): That was for nothing. Imagine if you did something!
Reliving his Navy days:
Attention on deck!
All hands on deck.
Philosophy:
I want you to have a clean living: No cigarettes, no booze and no women: It’s clean, but is it living?
The older I get, the less use I have for people.
You know what they say about marriage: The first 30 years are the roughest.
Tomorrow is another day.
Rome was not built in a day.
You’re my favorite horse even if you’ve never won a race.
I like to keep a low-profile — by remaining horizontal.
What sins did you commit that you have to work here?
Remember, always shoot for 200 percent, this way if you fall 100 short, you will still have a hundred.
Getting old sucks. I don’t recommend it.
My all-time favorite Christmas morning photo of my old man and one of my sisters, Lorraine.
Working in a job you don’t like is like taking sandpaper to your soul.
You know if I were not this crazy, your life would be boring.
And finally…
I’m proud of you buddy. Keep up the good work. Love you.
Unlike television characters, our parenting efforts lack a script.
We make it up as we go along, drawing on what experiences we recall from our parents.
The results are far from flawless.
We stumble and fall. Pick ourselves up and stumble again.
In the beginning of fatherhood, it’s comparatively easy because you are a towering figure of authority in their lives.
You can pretty much do no wrong.
And then they become teenagers and you suddenly have become an asshole.
In this episode of About Men Radio, the four members of the AMR posse who are dads take inventory of how we’ve done/are doing as fathers.
Have we broken our children? Have we crushed their dreams because we took away their iPads for an hour? How do we rate ourselves as dads on a scale of 1 to 10?
As usual, the discussion is brutally honest and funny. Give it a listen and happy Father’s Day!
An Instagram account called “miserable_men” documents the silent suffering that is the scourge of all men: Shadowing their wives or girlfriends as they go shopping.
You know the scene I am talking about, or perhaps you have lived this nightmare yourself.
Your significant other wants you to go shopping at the mall, which means you sit at the edge of a raised display stand, sharing what little space you have with a mannequin, as she peruses the racks of clothes.
If you are really, really lucky, there is a bench somewhere you can park yourself and people-watch to kill time.
But to complete the humiliation, you are asked to hold the purse or handbag of your wife/girlfriend/partner while she ducks into a dressing room to “just try on a few things.”
Time passes as slowly as a turtle on Quaaludes. All the while you are trying not to make eye contact with your fellow man.
But members of our tribe will not judge you harshly. They will look at you and silently say a prayer of thanksgiving: “Dude, better you than me.”
I am relieved to say that my wife has not once ever asked me to go shopping with her for clothes. She is content to make a marathon solo bid for what she is looking for. She will make a strategic strike at a particular department store, scoop up dozens of outfits to try in one swoop and then get out.
And in further proof that she is a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Patience, she has gone shopping for clothes not only with me but with my two sons as well.
My late fiancée, on the other hand, was a shopper extraordinaire. A visit to the mall was like a hobby to her. She would eye the latest styles, check the feel of fabrics, look for sales and then bring an envelope full of coupons to the register.
I recall one time we were at the mall for eight straight hours. Yes, eight hours. Elephant pregnancies take less time.
Too many men are afflicted with SAD, Shopping Adjustment Disorder, as captured in the miserable_men Instagram account.
A report in The New York Daily News summed it up: “The feed features miserable men of all shapes and sizes — despondent dads, bummed-out boyfriends and even a couple of gloomy granddads — painstakingly waiting to escape from the insufferable purgatory that is the mall.”
This is why today I am founding an organization called CRITICAL MASS: Coalition of Responsible Individuals Taking Into Consideration Always Leading Men Against Superfluous Shopping.
We need to demand that outlet malls truly have outlets for men: Wet bars. Big TVs. Arcade games. Nap rooms.
Think of it as a daddy daycare where men could be dropped off for hours at a time.
Join with me and together we can raise our voices to ask the question that is burning on the lips of all men who are made to endure trips to the mall:
“Does this handbag I have to hold make me look fat?”
This sure as heck is not your father’s economy or job market.
Gone are the days when a person could expect to start, stay and retire from the same company after 30 or more years of service.
You are likely to switch jobs any number of times as opportunities — and companies — ebb and flow.
A gold watch upon retiring? Forget it.
Today you’re lucky if a company gives you the time of day.
Further, as men of a certain age, we feel a certain vulnerability creeping up on us about how secure we are in our careers.
Technology, productivity and flexibility are all the rage — the buzzwords by which we live or die in our employment.
As Pedro and I discuss in this latest podcast of About Men Radio, men today enjoy about as much job security as a leading character on “Game of Thrones.”
We explore how we got to this point, how it affects us emotionally and in our relationships, and, naturally, we veer off into other topics, including snotty bathroom towels.
Just trust me on this. You’ll have to give it a listen. Which you should do.
A scene in the movie “London Has Fallen” features the president and his trusted Secret Service agent, whose wife is pregnant with their first child.
The agent asks the president for advice about fatherhood and parenting.
You just need to keep two things in mind, the president replies: Teach your kid the Golden Rule and encourage them to pursue their passions in life.
That latter part really resonated with me.
When I was growing up, if I heard from my dad once, I heard a thousand times:
Follow your passions in life. Don’t be like your old man. A man who loves his job never works a day in his life.
And my favorite: “If you are happy diapering piss clams, diaper piss clams.” Forty years later I still have NO IDEA what he was talking about but I got his drift.
From about the time that I was 8 or 9, I wanted to be a newsman.
I had an avid interest in current affairs, a love for writing and a curiosity about the world.
I routinely would race down three flights of stairs from our apartment in the Bronx if I heard the fire trucks turning onto our street.
I’d write mock scripts, relying on accounts from the newspapers, and then tape myself on my cassette recorder pretending to be a television newscaster.
And when I got my very own camera — well! That opened up a whole new world of possibilities for me. I took photos of crashes, blizzards and crime scenes.
On one memorable occasion when I was about 11, my buddy told me there had been a shooting the night before about 20 minutes from where we lived.
We furiously biked to the scene, where we learned the car had been towed to our local police station.
We got to the station, and there it was in the garage: A blue car with bullet holes in the windshield and bloody bandages still on its hood.
I snapped a bunch of photos, which I still have.
I never gave up on my pursuit of news as a career. Every opportunity I had to write, to learn or to network, I seized with both hands.
I earned a degree in journalism at New York University, and got an internship at what was then New York Newsday, working with some of the sharpest reporting minds of the time.
I mention all of this because of a 9-year-old girl in Selinsgrove, Pa., named Hilde Kate Lysiak. She publishes and reports for her own homegrown neighborhood newspaper and website, The Orange Street News.
She became a media sensation when she broke the news of a murder in her neighborhood and then responded to critics who questioned what a 9-year-old girl was doing covering killings.
In her video rebuttal, Hilde pointedly spoke back at those who suggested she should be playing with dolls or having tea parties instead.
What came across so strongly was that Hilde was passionately dedicated to her work.
She reminded me of myself at her age.
And 30 years into my career, I can say that passion has paid off.
I’ve come full circle in a way because I was able to write a story about Hilde as a staff reporter at The New York Times.
So you go, Hilde! Take it from me, whatever your passion is, never give up on it.
Just because Pedro and I are men does not mean we can explain everything about what our gender does.
Take for instance “mansplaining,” the way men will insert themselves into a conversation and talk to a woman like she was a 4-year-old and the man was the Great Wizard of Oz.
Or at least that is the way Pedro explained it to me. And that is his understanding.
But the truth is, neither one of us quite understand it, though we are both pretty sure we have at one time or another (or maybe still do) engaged in this kind of behavior.
Mansplaining is one of the many tangents — I mean topics! — that Pedro and I explore in this week’s show.
We somehow veered from mansplaining to a freewheeling conversation about white privilege and other timely subjects.
With the About Men Radio crew, you just never can tell where we are headed. In fact, neither can we! But hell, that is half the fun.
So buckle up cowboy, put your ear buds in, press play and listen to the greatest podcast about and for men where we have the uncomfortable conversations others do not.
A sign in our kitchen reads: “If it walks out of the refrigerator, let it go.”
I cannot for the life of me imagine why that sign is there.
Ahem.
Ever since my wife and I first got together, my cooking and eating habits (lack thereof and abundance of, in that order) have been the source of rich commentary.
For instance, my wife was horrified — absolutely horrified — when she discovered that I would brew a pot of coffee and then each subsequent morning pour myself a mug of Joe and microwave it.
Within days, she had gotten a plastic coffee filter holder and filters to fit so that I could brew a fresh cup of coffee each morning.
See, the thing with me is that when it comes to food I want to avoid fuss — a four-letter word that begins with F-U and is just as profane.
For quite a while I lived by a recipe book — a term I will use generously — called “A Can, a Man, a Plan.”
It was put out by the same publishers as Men’s Health magazine and offered to simplify healthy meals.
For example, boil up some pasta, open a can of tuna fish, pour onto the pasta, sprinkle it with tomato sauce and shredded cheese and nuke in the microwave.
Presto!
Instructions so simple that even I could follow them. Plus, the meal hardly required much preparation and it was relatively nutritious.
I admire people who are adept in the kitchen and can follow recipes and cook up a storm.
Me?
I will bring into work 3-day-old salad that is seriously past its prime. When my wife Meg protests, I will usually just say with a dismissive wave of the hand, “Oh, it’s fine.”
Leftovers.
Food with freezer burn.
Food that is beyond its expiration (except for meat).
It’s all pretty much fair game for me.
If it passes the sniff test, I’m good.
So you can imagine how grateful and blessed I am to have Meg in my life. Among her abundance of fine qualities, she is an amazingly adept and adventurous cook. My dinners are flavorful and complex and never boring.
Of course, when she is away and I am left to my own devices, I will revert to my sorry ways and fix a bowl of oatmeal for dinner.
I recently bought a low-grade of turkey from the supermarket deli and when I tried to defend it as being equal to a brand name, such as Boar’s Head, Meg said to me: “I love you, but you are no judge.”
She’s right of course.
Well, now if you will excuse me, I have a cup of coffee to microwave.
There has not been this much news coverage and public conversation about penises since Anthony Weiner’s campaign for New York City mayor flamed out over some too-revealing selfies.
Donald Trump’s allusion to his manhood — in no less a setting than a Republican presidential debate — and Hulk Hogan’s recently concluded trial against Gawker (“Hulk Hogan lied about his penis size”) propelled penises into people’s living rooms and into water cooler chatter.
So I feel it is my current-events duty to tell you about our visit to what is billed as the world’s only penis museum.
I say “our” because my wife and I visited.
During our honeymoon.
Yeah, I know, I’m just a hopeless romantic.
My wife Meg checking out the goods.
Here’s the background:
About 30 miles from the Arctic Circle in the fishing village of Húsavik (population 2,200) is the Icelandic Phallological Museum.
It is housed in a non-descript two-story building. There is no hint about what is inside except for perhaps the giant wooden phallus standing sentry outside.
The museum has a collection of more than 200 penises and “penile parts” (ouch!) that belonged to almost all of the land and sea mammals found on Iceland.
Among those on display are ones from a polar bear, seals, walrus and 17 different kinds of whales.
I’ve got to say that I’ve never given much thought to the male anatomy of mammals but this was truly eye-opening.
And let’s just say that some mammals are quite, um, gifted.
Sure, the museum is a bit of gimmick (I’ll leave it to your imagination about the souvenirs on sale) but still, it was genuinely informative and certainly unique.
Years after our visit there in 2010, I heard of a documentary called “The Final Member” about the museum curator’s quest for a donation from a homo sapien.
The movie took some peculiar turns.
For instance, there were two donors vying for bragging rights to be the first to have their member enshrined in the museum, including an American who named his “Elmo.”
The other donor was a 90-plus-year-old Icelandic man who went so far as to have a mold made of his privates.
Let’s just say that was painful to watch.
The museum’s curator, a guy named Sigurour “Siggi” Hjartarson, had two requirements for the donation of a human specimen: A legal document (letter of donation) signed by three witnesses, and proof that the penis was of “legal length” — at least 5 inches.
He based the minimum length requirement on an Icelandic folk tale called “A Legal Length,” in which a woman requested a divorce from her husband because his penis was less than 5 inches long.
The documentary does, unfortunately, perpetuate a myth of masculinity that links the length of a guy’s member with his character and standing in society.
To which I say, don’t confuse the measure of a man with the size of his penis: A leading presidential candidate is proof of that.
Seeing Verizon workers on strike picketing outside company offices made me think about 1971.
My dad was working for what was then New York Telephone Company (this was years before the breakup of AT&T into the “Baby Bells”) and the union he belonged to, the Communications Workers of America, went on strike.
It ended up dragging on for seven months.
I was 7 at the time but I can recall well the feeling of stress in the household over making ends meet. Dad collected picket duty pay from the union, and after nine weeks, he got unemployment benefits and qualified for food stamps, but even then, things were financially squeaky.
Me with a picket sign.
Dad hustled whatever odd jobs he could — cleaning windows, for instance — and Mom was already babysitting kids in our Bronx building.
It’s bad enough to face job insecurity when you are young and have a family. What I have discovered though is that it’s even worse to face that kind of unpredictable future when guys hit middle age.
I recall in the mid-1990s reading news accounts of layoffs at IBM in New York and stories quoting guys who had been with the company for 25 years who wondered where they were going to get a job now that they were in their 50s.
I was not quite yet 30 and I remember thinking: What could possibly be so bad? How tough could this be?
Now that I am 51, I have a deeper appreciation and understanding for the stresses and worries of job insecurity. I work in news, an industry that is undergoing titanic changes and is shedding jobs faster than cat hair.
Like many men, I have equated my career with my life. But beyond that is the overwhelmingly sense of responsibility imbued in us to be the breadwinner. (Yeah, I know it’s an antiquated term but it’s one I grew up with.)
So many guys my age that I personally know have either lost jobs, faced the prospect of losing their job, been demoted or lived in the fear of any one of those things happening.
I asked a friend, Joe McNulty, who is a Verizon worker now on strike, to share his thoughts on job insecurity. This is what he wrote:
Joe McNulty on the picket line.
Today I walked approximately six miles around a tight picket line in front of a Verizon Wireless store in Portchester, N.Y. At 51 years of age and 20 years on the job, I am not the senior man or close to it. I am better off than most in that my wife has a good-paying job, we live in a modest apartment in the Bronx and have no children. Still, I am anxious.
During the Great Recession, the stories on the nightly news that always tugged at my heart strings were the middle-aged workers who ended up out of work after years at one job and not a clue what to do next. There was no way I could find a job with the same pay and benefits, not to mention the thought of leaving my dear co-workers.
Working for the phone company gave me an identity. I was the phone guy. Whenever family or friends need something phone-related, they call me. Now I’m thinking those poor middle-aged workers on the nightly news were also victims of a kind of identity theft. How awful to be asked 10 years before retirement, “So, what do you do?” and have to start your reply with “I was….”
This strike will end and I will continue to be a phone man. Everyone walking the line knows that technology can make us obsolete at any moment. We just want to be the last dinosaurs to die a natural death before the mass extinction.
We here at About Men Radio are nothing if not a full-service podcast and website.
We invited readers and listeners to submit their most burning questions about men and some of our peculiar behaviors.
Among the questions put to us:
Jacqueline Damian: Why can men never find anything in the house? Why do so many conversations start with “Do you know where the ((fill in the blanks)) is?” After 18 years in this house, why does my husband still not know where “I” keep the bath soap? And why does he think it’s *my* bath soap? Like, do you guys live here or are you just passing through?
And…
Andrea Higgins: Why do you need us to tell you everything three times?
And…
Erin DeRosa: Why is it so hard for men to say they are scared? Why don’t they ever cop to worrying that they are frightened that everything is NOT going to be all right. Why can’t you people be vulnerable?
Yeah, we can be a breed apart and sometimes as inscrutable as the sphinx.
In this latest podcast, we try to break things down and, we hope, shed a little light into the inner minds of men.
I recently tried one of those newly popular “escape room” attractions and let’s just say Houdini I am not.
If you enjoy puzzles, thinking on your feet and working with others under pressure, you will have a thrilling time.
With its hidden clues and riddles to solve, being in an escape room is like playing a real-life version of “Scooby-Doo,” except at the end you are not unmasking the caretaker as the villain who dressed up as a ghost to scare those damn meddling kids away.
For those unfamiliar with escape rooms, here’s the concept: You are locked in a room with your teammates (in my case, three friends) filled with props, decorations and furniture.
You scour the room for clues, which can take the form of scraps of paper with numbers or words, which in turn send you to other clues, and so on.
I don’t want to give too much away about the specifics since it would spoil some of the fun, but the room where we played in Orlando, Fla., featured several locked cabinets and trunks.
Finding the key (or the combinations for the locks) required using math, looking at messages that could only be seen under a black light, and relying on our smarts to solve problems.
You have to think creatively – and fast.
There are different themes for each room. In my case, my friends and I played “Classified.” The room had a Middle Eastern feel to the décor.
(My wife and younger son and I recently played at a different escape room in the Poconos and in that one the premise was we awoke to find ourselves locked in a cabin in the woods. That room featured a bearskin rug and deer’s head on the wall.)
In the “Classified” room, the orientation video described our team as being covertly inserted into hostile territory. We had 60 minutes to deduce the time, date and place of a terrorist attack.
Failure on our part meant the terrorist would win.
We had three “free” clues, that is, clues that would be given to us and not count against our time. For every additional clue given, we would have minutes added to our time.
If you ever played the highly addictive computer game “Myst” from years ago, you will have an idea of how immersed you can get into an escape room. Secret passageways, enticing clues and cryptic messages were all there.
And much like the hit TV series “24,” there was a monitor with a countdown clock showing how much time we had left.
As we progressed and the time ticked away, we grew more frenetic.
“Go over there!”
“Where is the flashlight?!”
“What was that clue again?!”
We had three of the four elements solved: The date, the place and the hour of the attack but we could not determine the minutes after the hour.
My heart was pounding. The mission was at stake!
In the end, we came really, really close but we failed.
Jack Bauer would have disowned us, but we had a helluva good time!
There is a memorable story told about my late fiancée and her son that goes like this:
Garth was in his 20s and headed out for a night on the town.
He was primping himself in front of a mirror.
His mother, (my late fiancée), Carla said something to him and he cracked wise or sarcastic.
She came up behind him and smacked him in the back of the head — even though he had about five inches on her.
Garth wheeled around and angrily asked: “Whatdidja do that for?!”
Her reply?
“You will never be too old or too big that I’m not your mother!”
It remains a memorable story because it speaks to Carla’s spirit (let’s just say she did not take guff from anyone) but it also embodies an important lesson I am learning as a dad who will soon face an empty nest.
Our younger son is a high school senior and will be in college by the late summer.
He has his own car, a wide circle of friends and is active in numerous extracurricular activities.
Translation: My wife and I don’t see too much of him. When we do, we try to make the most of the time together.
Our older son graduated from college in the spring, landed a job 10 days before graduation and has been on his own and out of state since last July.
The days of us having to hand-hold or ferry “the boys” around to different school events or social engagements are over.
And in many ways, at least right now, I miss that.
As a dad, being there for them and being the one who looked out for them day-to-day was my raison d’être.
The core missions of looking out for the lads’ well-being, care, feeding and upbringing defined my role as a parent for two decades.
Now, suddenly — poof!
It feels as if I am wearing a pair of those “beer goggles” they give kids in driver’s education to mimic the feel of drunken driving: My view of reality has been twisted and distorted.
So it came as something of a relief (and a sense of still being needed) when No. 1 son recently called and emailed about a low-level emergency after being locked out of his first apartment.
Much to his credit, he was collected and clear-headed and was merely looking for some advice about navigating the situation with his landlord. (It turned out that the lock was installed incorrectly and malfunctioned.)
I recall once when I was standing on line at a supermarket with the boys when they were about 12 and 7.
A veteran parent ahead of me struck up a conversation.
I recall well what she said: “The older kids get, the more complicated and more expensive the problems become.”
Yes, that is certainly true.
But what I’m also learning is that they’ll never get too old or too big that I’ll ever stop being their dad.
She held it somewhere around her cheek to emphasize her point.
“You know if you don’t do this, she will come back and haunt you every day of your life.”
We were in a waiting room at Horton Hospital in Middletown, N.Y., and my fiancée Carla had fallen into what doctors were telling us was an irreversible coma related to complications from Hepatitis C.
Arleen was talking to me and Carla’s son, Garth.
Arleen was Carla’s best friend.
And she was speaking the truth.
And Garth and I both knew it.
She was warning us to make the right choice about a decision that no one should have to confront: Should we sign a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) order, directing doctors NOT to take any extraordinary measures to keep Carla alive?
The decision legally fell to Garth as Carla’s next of kin, but we had teamed up and convinced ourselves that Carla would pull through and therefore we would not sign the DNR. We felt there was still hope.
Done with our little caucus, Garth and I returned to the waiting room and told Arleen of our decision.
And that’s when she warned us about keeping in mind Carla’s wishes. We knew in our bones that Carla would not have wanted to be kept alive artificially.
But here was the problem: Carla never filed any medical directives with explicit instructions about what to do in a circumstance like this.
Had such a document existed, it would have relieved Garth and me of the enormous burden of making that decision.
We ultimately told the doctors not to take any extraordinary measures, and Carla died a few days later.
As if grieving her loss was not overwhelming enough, I then discovered that Carla had no will! In the aftermath of her death, I tried the best I could to tie up the loose ends of her estate.
It was a heavy, heavy lift.
The experience left an indelible impression on me, and I set about right away to get my own medical directive organized as well as a will.
When I got married in 2010, my wife Meg and I talked often of the need to get our will done. We finally did and it was a HUGE relief.
I’ve gone even further and organized detailed information about all of my finances, my wishes for my funeral and a prewritten obituary and collected it all in a huge file labeled “I Am Dead.”
A refrain in “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” from “The Wizard of Oz” has Judy Garland singing wistfully: “Why, oh why can’t I?”
It is something that I hear in my own head (minus the singing) when I confront self-image issues related to my workouts.
For the past 14 years, I have been a dedicated exerciser, working out an average of four to five times a week.
It has taken all forms: Cardio, running, weight-lifting, circuit training, and for the past seven years, a devotion to the various P90X workouts led by Tony Horton.
But it seems no matter how much dedication and drive I invest in my exercise, I cannot get the body I’m looking for.
So, why oh why can’t I have a broad chest?
Ripped abs?
Biceps the size of my thighs?
When I look at celebrities like Hugh Jackman, who plays Wolverine in the X-Men series, or Daniel Craig, who is currently playing James Bond, or Bradley Cooper in “American Sniper,” I am immediately plunged into a vat of molten envy that, when it cools, hardens around my brain.
I mean, look at those guys!
They are in incredible shape.
It’s not like I have not put in the time and commitment to getting fit, so why oh why can’t I look like them?
Well, there might be the fact that they have professional trainers who put these actors through their paces for grueling hours a day whereas my exercise routine is a DIY system at home for 30 to 45 minutes.
And they likely have gourmet-cooked, high-protein, nutrient-rich meals prepared for them around the clock, with snacks properly proportioned served to them by personal chefs.
Me? I eat as cleanly as I can but I am a slave to cookies and prone to indulging in sugary snacks when I’m anxious.
Nonetheless, I fight the nagging internal voice that says I am not pushing myself hard enough.
See that woman in the exercise video? She’s doing more push-ups than you, you panty-waist wuss!
As a working stiff who has a family and a job, there is only so much time and energy I can dedicate to exercising before I overtrain and risk getting hurt or burning myself out.
It was not until I heard Tony Horton’s first law of fitness that I started to gain some acceptance for my limitations.
“Do your best and forget the rest,” he says.
In other words, show up and do what you can on any given day.
That could be four push-ups or 40, or a multiple of that if you’ve really got something in the tank that day.
But you’ve got to chase away those mental couldas and shouldas that get in the way.
This is the time of year when we’re all looking to start the slate clean: A new year, a new you, right?
Before you start worrying about fixing your body, think about getting your mind right first.
So in 2016, I’m going to change my tune and find a new anthem.
The About Men Radio posse recently got together for the first time as a group since 1985.
Thankfully, the intervening decades have not changed us: Stupid jokes, endless ball-busting and side-splitting laughing were all the rage for our get-together.
Here then is an array of the photos from our get-together, with my snarky captions.
Rich is like: “Whatchoo talkin’ ’bout Willis?!”Manly men in Silvio’s backyard.Do these headphones make my head look fat?Be the Buddha!Do not mess with these Sith Lord Dads.Is that a pink drink Pedro has? Why yes. Yes, I think it is.Just pucker your lips and whistle.Before we set out on a Florida fan boat ride through an alligator-infested lake.And if you don’t survive, tip your captain overboard.Our ride.Holy crap. They were not kidding about the gators.The ear protection is so I cannot hear myself screaming.Pedro evidently had something in his eye.Good friends and good times!
Say what you want about Robert Crawley (aka Lord Grantham on “Downton Abbey”), but for all of his formal wear and and fussy lifestyle, he’s at heart a guy’s guy.
I can hear a collective “Say what!?” But hear me out.
For so long, the concept of a “guy’s guy” has been seen as someone whose sole interests are guzzling beer and spending time in a man cave watching sports on TV or porn online.
I think there is nothing wrong with any of those activities, but it misses the larger — more complex — makeup of what men are about.
For that reason, if you look beyond Robert’s dinner jacket, you will be surprised to see how much of his character aligns with being a guy’s guy.
He is prideful and has a frail ego: A veteran of the Boer War, Robert has hurt feelings when he is not called up to active duty on the front lines in World War I. He is instead relegated to wearing a uniform to serve merely as “a mascot,” he says, back at home.
He is loyal: Robert demonstrates his loyalty any number of times and ways: In hiring Bates and in finding it in his heart to keep Barrows on staff after his suicide attempt. When William Mason, a footman, is confronted by protesters who give him a white feather for allegedly being a coward for not serving in WW I, Robert throws them out of the house.
He knows how to keep confidences: He gets wise to the connection between Edith and Marigold but he knows how to acknowledge it with his wife and daughter but at the same time keep it within the family. Among men, exercising discretion and keeping information under wraps is a trait that is highly valued.
He has foibles: Robert dabbled in a dalliance with a lady’s maid. Robert is not without his shortcomings but he demonstrates that over the long haul, his set point is to be someone with a good heart.
He likes his drink: Hey, who does not like to have a good adult beverage once in a while?
He is crappy about taking care of his health: Not saying necessarily that this is an admirable trait. It is just one that a lot of guys share in common. (Bonus points: Robert is also a lousy patient. I can relate to that.)
He loves his family: Through any number of trials and tribulations, he has gone to lengths to help his daughters. Look at the way he softened his heart to welcome Tom into the family after first bristling at the idea of him as his son-in-law.
He’s willing to throw down when the moment calls for it: Robert got white-hot jealous (though turns out with justification) over the undue interest that an art collector showed in Cora. When Robert finds the collector, Robert Bricker, and his wife in their boudoir, he proceeded to sock it to the guy.
He is a good boss: While a clear hierarchy exists between servants and those served, Robert does not treat the staff as merely the hired help. He’s reserved around them perhaps but he does treat them well and with compassion. Look at what he did for Miss Patmore for her nephew, who was a deserter in World War I. While Robert did not include the nephew in the main war memorial, he did commission a separate plaque honoring his service and sacrifice. It was a touching and moving gesture.
He loves his dogs: Look at the way he mourned the death of Isis and then melted when his mother left him with a new puppy that Robert named Tiaa.
For me, fear is an invisible emotional or mental “weakness” that I have historically refused myself permission to give in to.
My attitude has long been that it’s an effort of will: You can push through fear and pretend it’s not really there.
But I learned something recently that turned that line of thinking on its head.
Here is my story:
I have had a lifetime fear of heights, with many a social engagement marred by my acrophobia
It’s one reason why, for instance, I can barely watch a trailer for “The Walk” about Philippe Petit’s high-wire walk between the World Trade Center towers in 1974, much less think about seeing the entire movie.
The very first Broadway play I saw was “Deathtrap” at the Music Box Theater in the late ’70s with my mom. I was very excited until we got there and I realized we had mezzanine seats.
I was OK when the lights went out and we could focus on the play but when the lights were back on and I could see where we were, well, to borrow a phrase from my younger son: I think I threw up a little in my mouth.
Same thing when I bought tickets for a Cirque du Soleil show at the Prudential Center in Newark, N.J. When we got there, I discovered the seats were so high and on such a steep pitch that I could not stay.
My wife and son watched the show as I climbed the stairs — almost on all fours — and waited in the hallway for the performance to finish.
So when my wife was planning a visit to Big Sur in California along the Pacific Coast Highway, she emphasized that she wanted me to be OK with the heights and narrow, curving roads.
I watched a YouTube video of a drive along the road and thought: “Yeah, I can handle this. I don’t want to be a party pooper on our trip and she is excited to show this to me.”
You can figure out the rest.
About an hour into the drive, we reached the serpentine cliffs. I was white-knuckled, my palms sweaty.
The low point came when we crossed the narrow Bixby Bridge, which seems to levitate over this canyon. I wanted to kiss the pavement when we made it to the other side.
I never relinquish the wheel because I am a lousy passenger — I get car sick easily.
So when we headed out for another two hours on these steep, cliffside roads, my wife knew I was in trouble when I abruptly pulled over and asked her to drive.
I could not go on. And here’s the thing: I did not stop being afraid just because I stopped driving.
I was curled up in the back seat, my face buried into my shoulder, one hand gripping the door handle until I had no feeling in my fingers and rhythmically praying.
I’ve long resisted limitations – either of my own doing or outside forces — being placed on my ability to get things done.
You’re talking about a guy whose signature phrase is “It’s fine” or “I’ll be fine” when confronted with an illness, a physical injury, lack of sleep or some kind of emotional hurt.
My act of bravery here was having the confidence to give into my fear instead of trying to pretend I could persevere.
What I learned was that it’s sometimes OK not to “man up” but to instead ask for help.
The series finale of “Downton Abbey” is Sunday night but that does not mean the characters do not carry on with their lives.
Here is a glimpse of what happened with some of the major players post-DA:
Mrs. Patmore: Moved to Nevada where brothels are legal, and opened her own house of ill repute, Patmore’s Playpen.
Mr. Carson: Became an eyebrow transplant donor.
Mrs. Hughes: Was acquitted of assault after beating Carson within an inch of his life with a spatula after he complained one too many times about her cooking.
Anna and Mr. Bates: They lived happily ever after. No, seriously. Really.
Mary: Underwent heart transplant surgery to install the one she did not have.
Cora: Successfully underwent surgery to have more than one facial expression.
Mr. Barrows: Joined a punk goth band. (Tell me you can’t see it…)
Edith: Founded an app dating service called Losr that connects people who are destined to be in ruined relationships.
Lord Grantham: Known for his financial acumen, Robert became homeless after investing with Bernie Madoff.
Mr. Molesly: Became a rugby player after deciding it was less of a contact sport than teaching the children from the village.
Marigold: Pressed stalking charges against her mother.
Tom: Presidential campaign manager for socialist candidate Bernie Sanders.
Spratt: Moved to the United States where he started a successful advice column under the nom de plume “Ann Landers.”
Denker: Joined Darth Vader’s Imperial forces as a stormtrooper and was killed in her first battle. No one misses her.
The Dowager: Became chief ruthlessness officer in the Nixon White House.
Dr. Clarkson: Exasperated and frustrated, he decided humans were way too much of a pain to deal with and became a veterinarian.
Daisy: Became a double O agent for MI6, with 34 confirmed kills.
Lady Rosamund: Runs a home for wayward single mothers.
Isobel: Created a line of bobble head dolls that say “I told you so.”
It is not every day that the entire About Men Radio posse gets together.
In fact, it took a bit of carbon-dating to determine that the last time Silvio, Rich, Pedro, John and I were all in the same room together was 1985!
It is almost hard to believe that it has been that long and that so much time has gone by in what feels like an instant.
To celebrate the occasion, we got together and memorialized our thoughts about our enduring friendship and its origins in a free-wheeling but sincere conversation presented to you here in this podcast.
The talk was revealing in how much Silvio can remember from yesteryear, how tenderly we feel about each other (please read that carefully as I did NOT say we felt each other tenderly) and what these connections mean to us as middle-aged men looking down the long barrel of families, careers and other pressures.
What the conversation underscores is the importance of having and maintaining these kinds of connections into male adulthood.
What are your friendships like and what do you do to nurture them? Tell us your story in our comments section on our website, on our Facebook page or write us at amr@aboutmenshow.com
I mean close friends — not just co-workers, a brother-in-law or virtual friends on Facebook. And I don’t mean your “bros” with whom you might watch a game once in a while.
I mean flesh-and-blood friends whose numbers you have programmed on your phone and who you could call and rely on to help you out of a jam at 2:30 in the morning?
I bet that most of you can count on one hand – or less — the number of friends who truly qualify.
A recent story in The Telegraph from the UK reported that 11 percent of single men said they had no friends to turn to in a “serious situation” and that figure rose to 15 percent among married men.
Those numbers came from research conducted by the Movember Foundation, which is raising awareness of mental health issues among men.
It’s a stunning statistic but one that I can readily attest to.
I had about a 14-year stretch where my friends from my childhood — truly my only friends — were out of my life.
It was, to borrow a cliché, “just one of those things.”
I had gotten married and moved 300 miles away, and then when I moved closer to my friends, so much time had passed that it felt difficult to pick up their trail. Plus, I was busy raising a family, advancing my career, etc.
You get the picture.
I would pick up morsels of news from my mother, who was still living in my old neighborhood and remained plugged in about whose parents had died, who was working where, etc.
I pined to reconnect but somehow just could not get out of my own way to make it happen.
Then a crazy thing happened: Unbeknownst to me, my then-fiancée connected with Pedro and John by email and arranged for them to make a surprise visit at home.
The night of their arrival, she was acting all kinds of peculiar. I wanted to go to bed early and, she was like: “Don’t you dare! Stay up!”
Meanwhile, she would leave the room and have these furtive phone conversations with the guys, who in keeping with a time-honored tradition, were lost and late.
If memory serves, I think they were supposed to arrive at around 8:30 p.m. and instead showed up at 10:30 p.m.
It could have been 2:30 in the morning and I would have been just as thrilled.
In the years since, my circle of friends and I have made it a point to be in contact and to get together regularly. One of the side benefits of the About Men Radio podcast and website is that it bonds us and allows us to share our feelings for one another in a way that is funny and genuine.
A photo that Carla took of me the night of their surprise visit captured the absolute shock and joy I felt at seeing them as they came up the stairs.
Doing my best to be an impromptu host, I got out the grill and whipped up barbecue hamburgers and hot dogs, all the while Pedro busted my stones: “What? We come to your house at 10:30 at night and there’s no lobster and filet mignon?”
It was as if nothing had changed and I knew then that a great hole in my life had been filled.
While these exchanges are teasing in nature, they do not take the form of malicious putdowns or “snaps” such as “Your mother is so dumb, she takes an hour to make minute rice.”
No, our repartee has roots in the expression: “Do a good job and you won’t hear a thing, but screw up once and you will never hear the end of it!”
Such are the ways with us. It’s a harmless method for us to bond and show affection but to also have fun — at each other’s expense, of course.
There is the chop-buster and the bustee, the person who is on the receiving end of getting his shoes squeezed.
For instance, my friend John has a home in the Poconos where we have crashed many weekends and engaged in our customary goofy antics.
On one of our very first visits, the house was sparsely furnished but a kitchen cabinet was brimming with boxes and boxes of Gevalia gourmet coffee.
At some point, I asked for a cup of coffee, and John busted out a jar of some cruddy freeze-dried instant grinds.
Well, not one to let a fertile moment go by, the No. 1 horn-breaker in our group, Pedro, seized it. He mockingly berated John for making us feel unworthy of his quality stash.
The whole weekend, the leitmotif became: “Gee, I really could use a cup up of coffee.” Or: “Wow, I would love some Gevalia. Do you know John where I might get some?”
There are a bounty of moments like these that get dusted off and replayed. We are equal-opportunity in our teasing. There are no sacred cows.
And all it takes is one event – just one – for a chop-busting theme to take hold. There is no statute of limitations.
Just ask my dad.
Sixty years ago when he was in the Navy, he was put in charge of showing a movie to the crew one night and installed the reels in the incorrect order, forever earning him the moniker “Wrong Reel.”
For John, it might be about the coffee, or his lead foot driving, which has earned him the title of “Mannix,” or his many DIY talents with a soldering gun and duct tape, leading to his “MacGyver” nickname.
For Pedro, there is fodder in his Casanova-like ways of flirting with waitresses. Rich and Silvio find way too much pleasure in horror and gore movies – Rich especially, who, disturbingly to us, has been known to laugh through most slasher flicks.
And me?
Well, let’s just say I have a well-earned reputation for being a fraidy-cat of horror movies and scary haunted Halloween attractions.
So naturally, to show they love me, horror meisters Rich and Silvio want to lock me in a room for three days, strap me in a chair, pry open my eyeballs “A Clockwork Orange”-style and subject me to the worst horror films imaginable.
My wife and I talk often about life and how, in an instant, it can be randomly snuffed out.
A driver blows through a red light and runs into another car.
An undiagnosed medical condition takes the life of a young man.
A freak accident at home kills an infant.
Maybe it’s because Meg and I have decades-long backgrounds in news that our exposure to the unpredictability of death ranks above average. We also have both experienced the loss of someone close to us.
It certainly makes for grim dinnertime conversation, but it also serves as a reminder to appreciate what we have in our lives.
No matter how much wealth, material possessions or professional success we amass, it’s all immaterial in the end.
It is said that during Roman times, a slave stood behind a triumphant returning general or emperor and whispered in his ear: “Remember, thou art mortal.”
This comes to mind because tomorrow marks three years since Meg and I and my son Daniel were driving back from visiting Skytop Lodge in the Poconos.
As we got on Route 390, it began to snow. The road was covered quickly and there was not yet a chance for the plows to get out.
I was driving about 35 mph when I saw a car coming around a curve in the opposite direction way too fast – fishtailing like mad – and making a beeline right for us.
To avoid a head-on crash, I pulled over to the side of the road as far as I could.
It wasn’t enough.
I found myself screaming: “Brace for impact!” (Yes, for real.)
With that, the other car slammed into our driver’s side with a teeth-rattling, body-jolting impact. I can still hear the noise.
Both driver’s-side doors were pushed forcefully shut and we could not escape from the passenger side because the car was now wedged tightly against a rock.
Thankfully, passers-by and rescuers got a door open and we escaped – unharmed.
It was scary how close that came to being a head-on collision.
There it was: We randomly happened to be there when this knucklehead (who was ticketed BTW) was driving way too fast for the road conditions.
Any one of us could have been killed or seriously injured.
More recently, Meg emailed me while she was running errands in Middletown, N.Y.:
“I was driving on 211 — just left the mall and passed a giant collection of cop cars and ambulance, etc, just at the turn I would make to go into the strip mall where Starbucks is.
A minute or two earlier and I would have been one of those vehicles. I thought ‘Thank God’ and then of how many near misses there are in our lives that we don’t even know about.
Then I knew that I wanted to tell you that I love you — and I want you to save this one if ever there’s a time when I can’t say it — know that it’s in my heart always.”
With the news today that Mattel is updating its line of Barbie dolls to be more diverse and realistically representative of the population at large, I bring you these updates on popular boys’ action figures from yesteryear:
* Action Jackson: Now in his late 60s, AJ ain’t getting any action without the help of a little blue pill. But he still makes the ladies swoon in his one-piece jump suit.
* Big Jim: The epitome of a hunk, Jim was muscle-bound, ripped and had a full head of hair. Today, Jim is divorced, beer-bellied and balding. He still answers fan mail, however.
* Six Million Dollar Man: His bionic eye developed cataracts and his bionic leg short-circuited, giving him cramps. The special effects sounds you heard and saw of Steve Austin moving in slow motion when he was doing superhuman feats is the way he is now all the time: In slow motion.
* Planet of the Apes: Cornelius left Zira for an ape 20 years his junior and went on to have offspring who refer to Cornelius as “gramps.” Zira became a millionaire marketing frozen bananas on a stick.
*GI Joe With Kung Fu Grip: Sidelined with arthritis, GIJWKFG opened a pottery shop.
*Stretch Armstrong: Became homeless and an alcoholic after being repeatedly mistaken and abused as a substitution for Silly Putty.
* Major Matt Mason the Man in Space: Following budget cutbacks at NASA, he retired and is now working as a guest services representative at Disney’s World of Tomorrow.
* Evel Knievel: Went on to write his autobiography, “Bag of Bones.”
* Ben Kenobi: After watching the “Star Wars” prequels, was arrested after threatening to “go all Death Star on George Lucas’s ass.”
* GI Joe: After valiantly serving his country, still trying to collect proper veterans’ benefits for the government.
* Ken doll: Lacking any male genitalia, was divorced by Barbie and later underwent reconstructive surgery and now goes by “Kenya.”
Maybe by now you’ve heard of this movie called “The Revenant.”
It’s gained a fair amount of notice after being nominated for 12 Oscars (including best picture, best actor and best director) and after it won three awards at the Golden Globes.
“The Revenant” – a reference to a person who has returned, especially from the dead – depicts Leonardo DiCaprio as a top-notch frontiersman leading a troupe of trappers.
They confront Indian attacks, ferocious weather and each other in a tale of survival, greed and revenge.
Think “Death Wish” meets “Dances With Wolves.”
DiCaprio’s character, after being viciously mauled in a grizzly bear attack, is left for dead by his fellow travelers, particularly one who is expertly depicted by Tom Hardy.
(Hardy, in my opinion, was the best performance of the movie and justifiably got an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.)
Given the considerable buzz about “The Revenant,” I was looking forward to being swept off my feet the way I was in watching “Spotlight” or “Mad Max: Fury Road.”
Alas, what I was treated to was two-plus hours of pretty scenery, a computer-generated bear attack and a depiction of brutal living conditions in the woods.
I thought the movie was solid but just not worthy of Oscar contention.
Much has been made about how the cast, DiCaprio in particular, subjected themselves to extremes for the sake of the film: Wading into icy rivers and coping with temperatures well below zero.
Well bully for them, I say.
But the movie felt like one giant stunt after another meant to call attention to how difficult it was to shoot. For that reason, I found it rather self-indulgent.
How did what the “The Revenant” cast and crew put up with in the Canadian Rockies and in Argentina any different than the extremes the cast and crew of “Mad Max” endured in the south African desert?
Don’t misunderstand me: From a technical point of view, the natural beauty and visuals in “The Revenant” are stunning. But I could get those in a calendar. And stunning visuals do not an Oscar contender make.
My real gripe about the movie is that I was not emotionally invested in the story or DiCaprio’s character. I found myself not caring what happened to him.
I was a big fan of “The Revenant” director A.G. Iñárritu, whose “Birdman” last year was, I thought, masterful and original.
Yes, “The Revenant” had some memorable scenes, such as the well-publicized bear attack, which I had hard time believing DiCaprio’s character would truly be able to survive.
For an idea of how detached I felt from the movie consider this: The very final scene is of DiCaprio, bearded, bedraggled and bloodied. He looks right into the camera and all I could think of was how it reminded me of Michael Palin’s bearded man delivering the opening of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.”
Bottom line: “The Revenant” struck me as the product of extraordinary movie-making simply for the sake of extraordinary movie-making.
I feel I owe you an apology. And while I say this speaking strictly for myself, I suspect there is a wider swath of men who might feel the way I do.
You recently came under attack by social media trolls who criticized you for — gasp! — having the temerity to look older since the last time you appeared in a “Star Wars” movie.
The shaming you were subjected to came after your appearances as General Leia Organa in “The Force Awakens.”
Some of the comments, which I read on Twitter, were vitriolic. I was stunned at how base some people were.
But then again, I should have known better: That’s because I’m guilty of contributing to this kind of mentality.
There’s a generation of us men who grew up unenlightened about women. In our childhood and adolescence, we knew Hollywood actresses only to be young and pretty.
I’m thinking here of an age of “Charlie’s Angels” or “Wonder Woman,” for example.
I suppose Hollywood has always placed a premium on youth and good looks, with the scales unfairly tilted against actresses.
My wife and I have had this discussion numerous times, with her pointing out that beyond a certain age, the opportunities for an actress shrink as her perceived value (read good looks) fades.
For a long time I argued – in a Pollyannaish way – that was not the case. I realize, of course, that is very much the reality and that guys like me have contributed to that ethos.
It is a culture that the comedian Amy Schumer so perfectly skewed in a sketch on her show that parodied “Twelve Angry Men.” The all-male jury’s deliberations focused on whether Schumer was “hot enough” to have her own show.
While the sketch was brilliantly subversive and spot-on hilarious, it also exposed an uncomfortable truth:
Terms like “objectify” are not part of the cultural vocabulary of many men when it comes to women. Instead, we use descriptions like “hot,” “cute,” “babe” or worse.
I’ve been a fan of yours since “Star Wars” came out in 1977 and, yes, as an 18-year-old when “Return of the Jedi” was released, lusted after you when you appeared in that bikini outfit.
But that’s a long time ago and it’s belatedly clear to me that women in general and particularly in Hollywood are held to a different set of standards that are linked almost exclusively to their appearances.
Your response to the social media trolls struck a nerve with me:
“Please stop debating about whether or not [I] aged well. Unfortunately it hurts all 3 of my feelings. My body hasn’t aged as well as I have. Blow us.”
Those comments were an epiphany.
I sensed a genuine hurt beneath the layer of sarcasm. Also, there’s something about the fact that I grew up with you, my admiration for your forthright public battle with mental illness and addictions and the head-on way you addressed the trolls that spoke to me.
On screen, you’ve played a princess and a general and in real life you are a mother, daughter, author and actress.
Not one in particular, just ANY moose. And for the record, not to spear, eat or shoot, but to merely glimpse one of these magnificent creatures in the wild.
It is an obsession that took root when I was a reporter in the Adirondacks in 1990 and participated in a search with wildlife biologists for a moose nicknamed Big Richard (more on that in a minute).
Since then I have been to Maine (three times, including to Moosehead Lake twice, most recently this summer), gone on a moose-spotting adventure tour and traveled to Vermont and New Hampshire (including to a section of roadway known as “Moose Alley”).
Do you think that in all of those trips to places heavily populated by members of the deer family that I have spotted a single one?
Nope. Every time, they have flipped me the hoof.
In Moose Alley and yes, I am wearing a moose T-shirt.
My enthusiasm for moose started when I was a reporter at the Press-Republican, a newspaper based in Plattsburgh, N.Y.
I was invited by a wildlife biologist from the state Department of Environmental Conservation to tag along with a contingent of researchers who were tracking a moose to change the battery on its radio collar.
As a kid who grew up in the Bronx, my experiences with wildlife were limited to squirrels and pigeons, animals I saw at the Bronx Zoo and whatever I encountered on the subway.
My collection of moose friends at home.
So when the chance arose to observe a moose in the woods, I seized it.
My first revelation was about the name of our quarry.
When I asked the researchers why he was called Big Richard, they gave me a look that conveyed “Are you that naive?”
And in that moment I had an Edith Bunker epiphany and went “Oooooohhhhh! OH! OH! NOW I get it!”
Yes, this is a bona fide moose antler that I bought at a taxidermy shop in the Adirondacks.
Yeah, right. Didn’t see a single moose, much less crash into one.
A contingent of researchers trailed by reporters tromped through the thick woods in a tropical downpour. We were soaked, having taken on more water than the Titanic.
Nonetheless, we trudged on as radio signals indicated we were getting closer to Richard.
But at that point I had to break off from the search since my wife at the time needed to get to her graduate class in Plattsburgh, and we only had one car.
Of course, after I left, the search party spotted Richard. The researcher raised his tranquilizer rifle, aimed and fired. The shot went wide. Richard, spooked by the noise, took off.
A second search for him that I joined weeks later was equally fruitless. Alas, his remains were found about a year later, apparently having succumbed to natural causes.
Despite my absolute dismal record for finding moose, I remain fascinated by these creatures and as interested as ever in seeing one in the wild.
When the rut is on, they are quite active and can travel vast distances in search of a mate.
My no-fail plan?
Hitting the woods during the mating season, bathed in Eau de Mrs. Bullwinkle.
My wife and I have a simple rule when we travel by car: I drive and she navigates.
The reason for this is twofold: I am a lousy passenger who turns green riding shotgun and I have a sense of direction worthy of Christopher Columbus. (Dude was headed to the East Indies and landed in the Bahamas. Truly a man I can relate to.)
I am, to be charitable, directionally challenged.
That might play into the male stereotype of guys who get lost and never ask for directions.
That is not me.
I am unafraid to ask for directions. Where I run afoul is in following them.
My internal compass is like a pinwheel in a hurricane.
I recall having to earn a badge as a Cub Scout and one of the assignments was to give directions to various landmarks, including a hospital. I recall telling my mother that the patient would be dead by the time I would be done giving directions.
“I am pretty sure you make a right at the dry cleaners. Or is it a left? You will see the Carvel on the corner. Oh. You know what? That’s now a burger joint. Say, have you thought about maybe just calling an ambulance?”
Before the introduction of GPS devices, I would get even more lost than I do now.
I would print out the directions from MapQuest, confident in my route.
But one of two things would happen:
1. I would be driving at night and unable to properly read the directions without turning on the overhead lamp and blinding myself.
2. I would have to peer over my glasses (which I need for driving) in order to properly read the text and I would be unable to do more than just take a glimpse because I was driving, which, in turn, would mean I would miss my turn or exit.
On more than one occasion I have called Meg and asked her to consult directions online and help me untangle the travel knot I had tied myself into.
It was not uncommon for 60-minute trips to last 90.
I fare better on mass transit, particularly New York City’s subway system, but once I emerge above ground, it’s like I have been blindfolded and spun around.
My dad, who knew the city like his own name, would give directions like: “You want to proceed west on 44th Street and then we will meet at the southeast corner of…”
I lost him as soon as he said “proceed west.”
I am much more a visual learner.
Tell me that if I suddenly get to the East River that I have gone the wrong way, and I will understand. But directions? Utterly meaningless to me.
Thanks to the introduction of smartphones, and improvements in the way apps deliver real-time traffic information and directions, I am slowly better about getting from here to there.
Certainly without a GPS or smartphone, I’d be lost.
Come to think of it, I AM lost.
I am somewhere in Columbus, the city named after the patron saint of the directionally challenged.
All of the members of the About Men Radio posse have now seen the latest installment in the “Star Wars” franchise, “The Force Awakens,” but there are shades of disagreement about how TFA ranks compared to the previous six installments.
As you will hear in in this episode of the podcast, Pedro and I rank TFA as No. 1 among the seven episodes.
I’ve now seen it four times and I am more in love with it with each viewing.
Rich and Silvio, while deeply impressed with the new movie, rank it as No. 3 in the pecking order of all things “Star Wars” and John merely thought it was good but not mind-blowing.
How do you rank TFA?
For hardcore fans who were around in the 70s and 80s, “The Empire Strikes Back” holds a special place in the No. 1 slot.
But recently having viewed “Empire” (as well as the rest of the preceding movies), I just don’t think they hold up as well TFA.
What do you think? Share your thoughts and reasoning on our Facebook page or write us at amr@aboutmenshow.com.
We’ll publish a roundup of opinions. Who knows? Maybe you will change some minds — but no Jedi mind tricks allowed!
I wish I could say I was blown away by “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.”
Instead I was — and this is going to sound odd — delighted with it.
You know that feeling you get putting on a favorite pair of broken-in jeans or when you look forward to a favorite cousin or uncle coming over a visit? Or maybe the sensation you get when you catch the scent of your mom’s cooking or baking?
That’s what my experience was like watching TFA in a Times Square theater in the wee hours of Friday morning with about 20 other fans.
It was that feeling of excitement and comfort to see the shimmering Lucasfilm logo appear and “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” and to hear the familiar chords of the “Star Wars” overtures we have come to know and love.
TFA did better than blow me away the way “Mad Max: Fury Road” did.
It instead stirred deep inside me the emotions and memories of a 12-year-old boy turned middle-age man.
In many, many ways, TFA represents a passage of time and of the torch (or should I say light saber?) to a new generation of actors and fans.
Seeing Harrison Ford (73!) and Carrie Fisher (59!) with their wrinkles and hearing their throaty not-so-young voices was a reminder that I am not a kid myself anymore.
But God! There was such a great joy in seeing them!
(Having just watched “Return of the Jedi” and Fisher’s infamous slave girl bikini scene, it is hard to believe it’s the same person! Carrie’s has had a hard go of it but I’m still carrying a torch for her.)
So, yeah. I cried at some parts.
And laughed out loud at others.
And jumped in my seat at yet others.
J.J. Abrams delivered the anti-prequels. TFA is, to borrow a phrase from a one-time leading “Star Wars” character: “Impressive. Most impressive.”
Without giving anything away, I must say that Harrison Ford is flawless and I think turns in his best Han Solo performance ever. And the lead actors — largely unknowns — were enthralling. The movie’s sense of humor was a wonderful, unexpected touch.
TFA is filled throughout with nods to its predecessors (prequels excluded). For “Star Wars” cognoscenti, there are ample callbacks to the first three movies that my generation grew up with.
And that is not a criticism. Abrams did not do that as cheat or a crutch. Instead he expertly renews past known relationships and builds new ones.
“The Force Awakens” is a stirring movie-going experience that harkens to familiar themes while introducing a host of new characters.
And for this 12-year-old boy in a 51-year-old man’s body, I could not ask for anything better.
Since it debuted not quite 40 years ago, “Star Wars” has held a special place in my childhood-stunted heart.
I can remember my mother, who was not exactly what you would call an avid fan of pop culture much less science fiction, telling me that she heard of this movie that I might like to go see.
I was 12.
I had grown up watching TV shows like “Thunderbirds,” “U.F.O.” and “Lost in Space.”
For a kid of the ‘60s and ‘70s, these shows represented the best that Hollywood had to offer in the way of production values and special effects.
So when I saw a clip of “Star Wars” on the morning news in 1977, I was gobsmacked.
The blasters! The droids! The Millennium Falcon!
My mom took me to the Loews movie theater on East 86th Street in Manhattan to see it.
I was mesmerized.
As childhood milestones go, seeing “Star Wars” for the first time ranked up there with getting a G.I. Joe Mobile Support Unit when I was 8.
In other words, this was a really, really big deal.
Overnight, I became a “Star Wars” geek.
Original movie program?
Got it.
Trading cards from both Topps AND Wonder Bread?
Yeah, got those too.
And posters?
About those posters…
I had many, many posters and I was hellbent to display all of them except that I quickly ran out of wall space on my side of the room, which I shared with my two sisters. And there was no convincing my sisters to part with some of their precious wall space.
But then inspiration struck.
My bed had a headboard. It was attached to the bed frame by two wooden uprights and the headboard itself was large, white and padded.
This headboard took up valuable real estate, aka wall space. So obviously, it had to go to make way for my “Star Wars” posters.
One night – I think my parents were out – I did what any enterprising 12-year-old would do: I got out a hand saw and cut the headboard off.
Voila! More wall space! Problem solved!
Except, of course, what I did not anticipate was that the headboard was, in fact, keeping the entire bed frame together.
Without it, the mattress rested on the equivalent of two stilts.
(I “solved” this problem by taking reams of rope and tying what remained of the two uprights together to keep the bed from rattling like a scene from “The Exorcist.”)
All of this comes to mind as “The Force Awakens” – the much-anticipated seventh installment in the “Star Wars” franchise – opens this week.
I am so stoked.
I’ve already bought my tickets in advance. I’ve got my “Star Wars” tie ready to wear and I’m looking to buy movie memorabilia and merchandise.
Pretty soon the house will be overrun with all kinds of “Star Wars” goodness.
Hmmm…
You know, the bedroom set I have now has a wooden headboard.
When I read that a former colleague of mine, Germain Lussier, had interviewed Harrison Ford – among other leading lights from the new “Star Wars” movie – I could not think of a more worthy person to celebrate such a professional milestone.
Germain Lussier and Harrison Ford (Used with permission)
I knew Germain from my time as an editor at The Times Herald-Record in Middletown, N.Y. I was a news editor and he was an entertainment/features reporter.
He was quiet, diligent and dedicated. And above all, he was passionate about his craft and the beat he covered.
He pulled up stakes from his native New York to California for what he thought would be a career at a national magazine.
As you will read below, things took a different turn.
Germain graciously agreed to this Q/A for About Men Radio.
Apart from sharing in his reflective glory of rubbing elbows with Harrison friggin’ Ford (!), I wanted to tell his story because it is an excellent reminder to us all to pursue our passions with all our might.
There’s no telling the places you’ll go or the people you will meet.
Work does not have to be drudgery.
It can be a labor of love – something that Germain exemplifies here.
— Chris Mele
Tell readers a little about yourself: Where you grew up and a little
about your career path.
I grew up in Monroe, N.Y.
And from as early as I can remember, I wanted to be a movie critic. I thought getting paid to watch movies would be the best job in the world.
As I got older, I realized that there were other ways to do that too. So I went to New York University and majored in Cinema Studies, where I just studied, analyzed and wrote about film and film history.
That led me to internships with magazines such as Premiere, Us Weekly and Entertainment Weekly.
Eventually, I got a job as an entertainment reporter at my local newspaper, The Times Herald-Record. I worked there for six years before deciding I wanted to move away from where I grew up.
So I moved to Los Angeles and found a niche working on movie blogs.
For five years I worked on a site called Slashfilm and was able to write about movie news every single day, visit the sets of films like “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” “Anchorman 2,” “Ender’s Game” and so many more.
It was a dream come true.
After a few years though, I got an offer to move to a bigger site, io9.com, and that’s where I am now.
Germain Lussier
Tell us about your passion for films: What are its roots and what is it about movies that fascinates you?
Honestly, I don’t know where my love for film comes from.
Neither of my parents love movies that much, but somehow by the age of 8 or so I already knew what I wanted to be when I grew up.
Now though, the passion comes from so many places.
First, the ability to go into a dark theater and be transported somewhere else emotionally never ever gets old.
Also, when you write about movies you have something new and exciting to look forward to every single week.
There are always new movies. Of course some are more highly anticipated than others but there’s always something exciting on the horizon.
Tell us about your current position at io9.com: How long have you been there, your title and duties.
I moved to California in June of 2009.
I started working at Slashfilm in September of 2010 and I started at io9 in June of 2015.
On the site, I’m the primary entertainment reporter, meaning if there’s news or an assignment having to do with movies or TV, I usually get first crack at it.
On a daily basis, I’m expected to write however many news stories are necessary and develop longer feature stories, which can be about almost anything.
Tell us about what led up to securing one-on-one interviews with the leading players connected to “The Force Awakens,” including Harrison Ford: How did that come about?
Everything lead up to it. Seriously.
I’ve been a “Star Wars” freak for as long as I can remember.
It was anticipation of Episode I that led me into the depths of the Internet and familiarized me with the websites that would become my livelihood a decade later.
It was those “Star Wars” websites that gave me my first opportunities as a college student to get a glimpse of the life of a Hollywood journalist.
As a college student, I interviewed the cast of the first two “Harry Potter” movies, as well as John Travolta, Halle Berry, Don Cheadle and Hugh Jackman for “Swordfish.”
My college graduation was in May 2002, the day Episode II was released in theaters and on that day, I set a goal for myself to be working somewhere I’d be able to write about the next movie, Episode III.
That happened in 2005 at The Times Herald-Record.
And ever since 2012, when Disney bought Lucasfilm and Star Wars, I had been developing relationships with people at that studio and in the industry not ONLY to prime myself for this event, but it was always on my mind.
So, as we got close to the release of the movie and I was invited to cover the press junket, I requested interviews with every single actor and filmmaker available.
I expected to maybe get one or two and I knew Harrison Ford was a long shot.
But, those relationships and my unrelenting passion for the franchise got me not just one interview, but five (four on the day as one got cancelled), including Ford.
And talking to Ford was a dream come true.
As long as I’ve been a “Star Wars” fan, I’ve been a bigger Han Solo fan. I also love Indiana Jones, so he’s always been my favorite actor and kind of an idol.
Plus, I collect Han Solo stuff so Harrison Ford is never too far from my face.
So actually getting to sit down with him was kind of a culmination of everything both in my personal and professional life, stuffed into eight short minutes.
Describe the interviews themselves. You openly expressed a certain disbelief that they were happening/did happen. What were those moments like for you?
These interviews are always extremely weird.
They take place in very sterile environments (hotels, offices, etc.) and are kind of an assembly line as a star sits in a room and then a string of journalists just walk in, talk to them, and leave.
For “Star Wars,” it was even odder as we were at a massive convention center and the interview rooms were bigger than most houses.
So you’d wait outside, walk in, sit on a white couch and talk for 8-10 minutes. And even more odd, with “Star Wars,” it’s the first press junket I’ve ever done without seeing the movie.
Sometimes there are “long lead” days where a company will show you a few minutes of a movie and then you do interviews but a week away from release, you always see the movie so you have something to talk to the actors about.
With “Star Wars,” you hadn’t seen anything and they were unable to talk about anything directly related to the movie.
It made for an interesting challenge.
Thankfully, I’ve been following this film since the second it was announced — literally — and I had plenty of questions for the likes of J.J. Abrams, Oscar Isaac, Gwendoline Christie and Mr. Ford.
Things only got weird on a few occasions with Isaac and Christie when they told me they weren’t allowed to answer a few questions.
I think my disbelief at being there was just kind of the resonance of feeling that so much of my life had led to this.
I’d finally arrived.
You have posted video of how you turned over your apartment to just about every piece of “Star Wars” memorabilia you own. As such a diehard fan and as a film critic, what are your expectations and hopes for the new movie?
My hopes are for something that makes me feel the way I do when I still watch the originals.
Those are my expectations too. I just want it to be something that’s worthy of “Star Wars,” that spawns conversation and answers questions I’ve had for decades about what happens next.
I mean I was ULTRA excited for the prequels.
I saw “The Phantom Menace” nine times in the theater I was so hyped for it. But with those movies, ultimately, you knew how they had to end.
Anakin becomes Darth Vader and his kids get separated.
But now, finally, after 32 years, we finally are going to find out what happens after “Return of the Jedi.”
We don’t know how it’s going to end, who the characters are, etc.
It’s all a mystery.
And that infinite possibility just gives me goosebumps.
Note: Today marks the fourth anniversary of the mass shootings in Newtown, Conn., which took 27 lives.
I wrote this column when I was executive editor at the Pocono Record in Stroudsburg, Pa. It appeared in the paper on Dec. 27, 2012.
Weeks before the mass murders made Newtown, Conn., a household name, we had planned to spend Christmas Day with a friend there.
She had recently finished months of chemotherapy and radiation and we thought it a good idea to visit. Then the shootings happened and suddenly our plans to go to Connecticut took on a different meaning.
The visit became more of a mission trip: I had a calling to do something since we would be within five minutes of Sandy Hook.
My wife, son Daniel and I brought the makings of a hearty kale soup, dessert and pick-ons and spent a relaxing, affable afternoon with our friend and her cat, Joey.
I had packed a small tin of homemade cookies that I had decided I would give to whatever poor flatfoot had to work sentry duty on Christmas Day in downtown Sandy Hook.
Against the enormity of what had happened there, this would be the merest of gestures. But it felt like a tangible offering that might say something to a stranger for a moment.
After we left our friend’s, we stopped at a makeshift shrine/memorial housed in a large white tent off I-84’s Exit 10.
Just across from the Newtown Diner, the memorial was unmistakably marked by a huge American flag hanging from a bucket truck.
Meg opted to stay in the car with Dan.
I went in. I was tentative.
A friendly young man wearing an ID tag around his neck assured me it was OK to go in, that it was a place to meditate, to pray or just observe.
Inside, piled high were collections of flowers and stuffed animals. Large white posters were available to sign. A wave of grief struck me with such ferocity, it literally left me breathless.
I signed a card and scanned the displays, my eyes looking but not really seeing.
We then drove into downtown Sandy Hook. There were few Christmas lights in Newtown, but only a mile down the road, we came on an oasis of light.
Candles, notes, stuffed animals, cards and flowers over-filled the width and length of sidewalks of Sandy Hook’s downtown.
I had not seen anything like it or felt anything as powerful since a visit to Ground Zero on Sept. 25, 2001.
Live Christmas music filled the quiet street. A young man, oblivious to the cold, played a piano perched outside a storefront.
It was a scene both surreal and comforting.
And there they were: Two cops bundled against the cold wearing reflective vests, keeping an eye on traffic and visitors.
Overwhelmed, Meg opted again to stay in the car. To my admiration, my 14-year-old son flanked me, carrying the tin of cookies, as we approached the cops.
I tried to talk but, overcome by emotion, my voice cracked like a boy going through puberty.
They at first demurred when we offered the cookies, but when we said we had come from Pennsylvania, one of their faces lit up.
Where in Pennsylvania, one asked. The Poconos. Oh, he said, beautiful country. I ran a marathon there this summer and golfed there.
They graciously accepted our humble offerings, his partner taking the tin to a nearby patrol car.
Taking off his glove, the Pocono marathoner offered a warm handshake and wished us a Merry Christmas.
Maybe those cops were not exactly the shepherds tending their flock, and we were not exactly the three kings bringing gifts, but in the overwhelming darkness that had befallen us all, Sandy Hook on Christmas night offered me a glimmer of light and the promise of hope.
And, apart from my growling stomach, you cannot hear me.
I am dressed in camouflage, covered in scent-killing spray, perched about 17 feet off the ground in a tree stand near the Delaware State Forest in the Poconos woods of Pennsylvania.
It’s late October and my guide to all things deer hunting is Mike Kuhns, sports editor for the Pocono Record in Stroudsburg, Pa., and a lifelong sportsman.
I am a mere Padawan to Mike, a Master Jedi of the outdoors.
On this day, Mike is hunting deer with a compound bow. Me? I am armed with a smartphone and a recorder.
This time of year is the beginning of the “chase” season. It’s the prequel to the full-on, raging-hormone-fueled rut in which male deer will range for miles seeking a one-night stand.
Before we set out, Mike inventories various noise-making devices, including a bundle of sticks in a bag that he rubs between his palms. The noise, which mimics the sound of two bucks banging antlers for territory, is designed to arouse their curiosity and draw them closer.
As Mike outfits me in a camo jacket, he explains that he washes his hunting gear in special fragrant-free detergent. He sprays us, including the bottom of our boots, with a scent-killing spray.
“The key to deer hunting is beating their nose,” he says.
The sounds of our feet kicking through fallen leaves and the sight of our breath, illuminated by our headlamps, are the only things disturbing the predawn stillness of the forest.
We stop and Mike takes out a long cord called a drag rope. At its end are thick strands that he dips into a small bottle of pungent deer estrus.
I drag the rope behind me to mask our scent and leave an inviting, c’mere-big-boy smell for bucks. The aroma of doe pheromone faintly clings to my clothes.
I learn a lot about deer habits from Mike. It’s all very “Wildlife: CSI.”
He points to telltale signs of deer activity that I walked right past: a clearing where bucks scraped away leaves and dirt and urinated to mark their territory or where one rubbed his antlers against a tree, stripping away some of the bark.
We’re in our perches by 6:22 a.m., a solid hour before sunrise. Although we are above the sight and scent lines of the deer, “it doesn’t mean you can sing and dance up there,” Mike says.
So I try to remain as still as possible. Hunting is not for the fidgety.
I hear the thrum of traffic from nearby Route 402. I also swear that several times I hear the heavy movement of leaves, as if something was approaching, but nothing ever appears in my line of sight.
Mike tells me later that with the way sound travels in the stillness of the woods, a deer or bear a distance away could have been passing through and it would have sounded like it was over my shoulder.
But Mike is brimming with enthusiasm about the morning’s outing.
Hunting is not always about the kill, he says. (What he does successfully hunt goes to the butcher. Some he keeps and some he donates to Hunters Sharing the Harvest.)
Hunting is about being out in nature, he says. It’s about the chance to hear owls talking to one another, or seeing a bear or watching a fawn get milk from its mother.
Indeed, the experience is extraordinary.
The stars fade to pinpricks of light as the black sky gives way to a bluish hue and the outlines of the trees become more pronounced.
As I take it all in, I have a deeper appreciation for the grandeur of nature and the wonders of the universe.
Yes, I am invisible as I sit in the tree stand. But watching the changing sky, I am also infinitesimal.
The tree stand where I was perched.
Mike Kuhns carries his deer stand into the woods. What a contraption!
Mike was in a stand about 25 feet away from mine.
Practically invisible.
Mike shows a different kind of stand.
Mike creates a “mock scrape,” pouring deer urine into an area he has cleared.
A compound bow.
Mike has two trail cams he uses to shoot photos of wildlife.
One of the other cams.
Getting it adjusted.
Pointing out where a curious bear had gnawed at it.
It was nine years ago today that my fiancée Carla died.
The weeks immediately after her death were a blend of profound sorrow and emptiness.
Carla, who led a colorful and sometimes pain-filled life, used to joke: “Growth experiences are a bitch.”
Yeah, that about described it.
Looking back on those early months after her death opens a window unto my state of mind and how I was coping. Below is an excerpt from an email I wrote a little less than four months after she died.
I think of it as a meditation on a man in mourning.
March 18, 2007
Mom and Dad came up to help me go through Carla’s footwear (Imelda Marcos was such a rank amateur), coats, jackets, pants, sweaters, tops and her bling.
Mom also ably went through what we used to refer to as the “foofoo bathroom,” the one upstairs that I ceded to Carla and that she promptly turned into a “girlie” bathroom with all the perfumes, sprays, lotions and other female-y stuff to match.
Mom was able to fill something like nine black garbage bags with clothes and shoes to donate to charity. Wow, did Carla have good taste – albeit a bit weird at times — in clothes and accessories. Of course, that would match her taste in men! LOL
I came back to the house today after dropping Mom and Dad off at my sister’s and went into the foofoo bathroom. Sure, it’s the same but it is something less now.
Carla’s crazy, chaotic style of stocking the shelves has been replaced with organized groupings of stuff that’s worth keeping.
Her dresser, once a hodge-podge of décor is now a bunch of jewelry boxes, stacked.
And the closet? Devoid of her nutty, weirdly stylish array of clothes.
The sense of loss came back as if you were at the beach and had your back turned to the ocean and a wave crashes over you and knocks you down. You suddenly are below water, and then break through, cursing and wondering what the hell just happened.
And then it came back again: How dare she leave me and the boys? Who the hell did she think she was, not taking care of herself like that? Why didn’t she get to the doctor sooner?
So much for forward momentum.
And then came this: Come home from grocery shopping with the boys. Stowing the food and came across an open bag of her beloved Sun Chips. And with audible apologies to her, I took it and tossed it in the trash.
But then came time for Mike to help me put away cans of my soda.
And there they were: Two 12 packs of her goddamned Pepsi, squirreled away in a narrow little cabinet by the stove. The Pepsi that I was in charge of stocking in the fridge, the Pepsi that she would start the day off with a “pffffft” as she pulled back the can’s tab, the Pepsis she carried EVERY-friggin’-WHERE with her – doctor’s offices, fairs, shopping, you name it.
And so Mike asked such a simple, but profound question at that moment: What are we going to do with the Pepsi?
Damned Mike if I know.
Much in the same way I still have the cooler that was packed with her Pepsi on Nov. 6 – the day we headed to the doc’s and then the hospital – still sitting in the truck, untouched, unopened.
So, yeah, where do you put the Pepsi and the pain?
The answer I think lies in not mourning Carla’s death but continuing to celebrate her life.
She had no use for the pity pot and would probably kick my ass from here to next Tuesday if she thought I was wallowing in self-pity.
Doesn’t necessarily make it any easier, but there it is.
The older you get, the closer your mortality appears to be gaining on you in your rear-view mirror.
Once you cross the threshold of 50, you’ve lived enough of life to have experienced some losses personally, seen others who have suffered them or just simply are more aware that no one gets out of here alive.
I recall as a kid my dad watching old movies, and when certain actors and actresses would appear on screen, he would run through a check list aloud:
(As an aside, for those concerned about the actor Abe Vigoda, who has been prematurely declared dead, there’s a website dedicated to keeping tabs on his breathing: http://www.abevigoda.com/)
Hollywood stars aside, I’ve mulled over the question of how long I want to live in a previous blog post.
And in a recent conversation, my mom lamented aging as being a pointless process of biding your time. There again, my folks live in a retirement community that they not-so-euphemistically call “God’s Waiting Room.”
In this latest podcast of About Men Radio, Pedro and I explore the question of death, dying, facing our mortality and what, as grown-ups, we should do about preparing for it in terms of wills, medical directives and other cheery stuff like that.
Don’t shuffle off this mortal coil without giving it a listen.
Having spent a week in May in the San Francisco Bay area, I have these observations to report:
* The weather is consistently cool and comfortable.
* The locals are unfailingly polite and helpful.
* Colorful flowers grow easily and in abundance.
* The restaurants are diverse and the food is fresh and flavorful.
* It has accessible, far-reaching mass transit.
There is not a Dunkin’ Donuts in sight.
I’ve never visited a place so inhospitable.
For me, DD is the purveyor of chalices of liquid gold.
Even my wife knows to refer to the familiar pink-and-orange logo as “the holy of holies.”
Indeed, coffee for me is not merely a hot, caffeinated beverage, it is a religion.
I worship at the Church of DD where the first commandment is “Thou shalt have no other coffee before DD; thou shall not brew for yourself any false coffee.”
My wife is dedicated to drinking Starbucks, which I find pretentious and foo-foo. (The coffee, not her.)
She even goes as far as to ascribe certain qualities to Starbucks patrons.
On a recent afternoon, for instance, she was driving and was waiting to make a turn when a considerate motorist yielded so that she could turn.
“Oh,” my wife said. “You are such a nice person. You must be going to Starbucks.”
Sure enough, that is exactly where this driver was headed.
I love my wife but we have a real divergence of opinions when it comes to DD vs. Starbucks.
For me, I do not want any artisanal, free-range coffee beans collected by white-gloved hipsters wearing skinny jeans who put the beans into a satin-line burlap bag and then grind them by hand.
I also do not want my coffee orders to sound like some form of pig Latin: “I’ll have a veni, vidi, vici grande soy latte with a half gainer and a twist.”
Yes, I do in fact own — and proudly wear — a T-shirt that reads “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drink Starbucks.”
I tend to be pretty proletariat about coffee.
It is a commodity for the masses and rightly ought to be treated and marketed as such.
Coffee is too important to the public well-being to be treated as some upscale elixir that only coffee cognisanti can order.
Recent news coverage affirming once and for all that coffee is not harmful to your health and can actually be beneficial was cause for rejoicing.
So for the sake of your health, and to demonstrate you have good taste, raise a cup of DD coffee to your lips.
If you really must drink Starbucks, treat it as you would a wine tasting: Sip. Swish. Spit.
And then keep on spitting until you’ve reached a Dunkin’ Donuts.
I remember the date well because I still have the hospital discharge paperwork.
My first wife and I were living in Saranac Lake in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. She was a teacher and we became good friends with her school principal and his girlfriend (later to be wife).
Christine was an artist who lived in a small upstairs apartment on the village’s Main Street. She had a pair of saw horses and resting atop them was a large rectangular piece of glass that had come from a New York City bus shelter.
(How she came into possession of New York City Transit Authority property, I am still not sure.)
The glass on the saw horses served as a flat space for Christine, who would paint and draw. She was moving in with Dan and he asked if I could help carry the glass to a van.
Sure, I said. What could possibly go wrong?
It was summer, and even though we were in the mountains, it was sweltering hot. I sized up the glass and swallowed hard but was confident we could do the job.
Leading to Christine’s walk-up was a very narrow, serpentine staircase.
Dan and I grunted and carefully maneuvered the big pane (that should more appropriately read “big pain”) down the stairs, sweating bullets the whole time.
We got out the downstairs doorway — home free! — and made our way to the van. Dan was closer to the van’s rear doors.
Nearly done!
First I heard the noise. It sounded something less than a gunshot but more than a firecracker.
And then my eyes fixed on what caused it: thousands of bits of glass, like flecks of Styrofoam, blanketed the van, the street and the sidewalk.
Somehow we must’ve just tapped the edge of the glass against the van with the right amount of harmonic convergence to cause it to explode.
The noise and the mess were so great that people literally stopped in their tracks.
My forearms were pockmarked with blood as tiny glass meteorites shot into my flesh. But Christine’s arm was a full rivulet of blood as the glass had cut her more deeply.
Dan, who incredibly escaped largely unscathed, took one look at us and whisked us to his car and headed pedal-to-the-metal to the hospital ER.
My problem was not that I was bleeding out but was almost PASSING out from the sight of my own blood.
My face looked like it had been bleached.
Yes, truly.
In the end, the doctor elevated my feet, got me some Band-Aids for my boo-boos and gauzed up Christine like the second coming of the Mummy.
This all came to mind recently when my wife and I had to take a large broken mirror to our garbage center and the attendant there saw what I was doing and said to me: “Don’t cut yourself.”
Don’t worry, pal.
Been there, done that and have the mental scars to prove it!
Playboy without nude women? It’s like peanut butter without jelly.
As a subscriber to Playboy for more than a dozen years, I can say, though, I will not miss the naked pictorials, which the magazine announced it will discontinue in March.
There is the old joke that men get the magazine to read the articles. Well, the older I’ve gotten, the more truth there is to that!
But let’s start with the pictorials.
For one thing, the models are so glammed up, so exquisitely photographed in exotic locales and so airbrushed, they’re like the shiny red apples sold in supermarkets: unnatural.
In the photos, there is nary a hair out of place, a stretch mark, a blemish or a make-up smudge to be found.
Gimme a break!
They are what saccharin is to sugar: a poor artificial substitute for the real thing.
Sexy is a real woman whose hair is tousled from rolling out of bed in the morning, eyes poufy from sleep and padding around in her PJs and her body warm from the covers, not some naked young lady on the beach, with the sun setting in the background, the wind in her hair — and her mascara perfectly in place.
Oh please.
Here’s the other thing: As I have gotten older, these models have gotten younger.
A LOT younger.
This is totally true: I look at the centerfold’s dates of birth and almost always I think: Holy crap! My career is older than they are!
In some cases I graduated college long before they were born or I’m old enough to be their dad.
Ewwwwww……
I also can barely contain my laughter at the descriptions of their turn-ons and turn-offs and the introductory text leading up to their layouts.
I am not saying these women are not smart, but the magazine writers take ridiculous liberties in overstuffing the quotes attributed to these models with navel-gazing hyperbole — a point underscored in a hilarious stand-up routine by the late comedian Charlie Callas.
While I have never been a fan of Playboy’s fiction, (being a hardcore addict of news and nonfiction), I do spend a lot of time reading its columnists, interviews, 20 Qs and libertarian views on privacy, government, laws and sex.
Those pieces are thought-provoking, engaging and often well written.
Yeah, sure, with its ads and some articles, the magazine still promotes some kind of throwback frozen-in-time bachelor lifestyle that features fancy cars, cigars, drinks and travel. It’s a mindset worthy of the “Mad Men” era.
That’s fine. I have always taken Playboy’s sense of itself with a grain of salt anyway, knowing full well I would never live that life of leisure and wealth.
For its part, Playboy said the decision to end the nude pictorials reflects a business decision in an era when thousands of photos and videos of naked women are a mouse click away on the Internet.
I get it. I’m cool with that.
I wonder now if my mailman will finally stop dog-earing the pages.
When it comes to visiting Halloween haunted houses, let’s just say that I sprout feathers and Frank Perdue is sizing me up.
My earliest recollection of visiting a spooky attraction came when I was about four years old. My dad and I went with a neighbor to the Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey.
It was Casper the FRIENDLY Ghost, for crying out loud.
Fast-forward almost 50 years, and little has changed.
For example, my friend Silvio posted on Facebook a story about a California attraction that is so scary that you need to sign a waiver and it has a safe word, “mercy,” to let you exit.
He asked when we could go. I replied: “Does ‘never’ work for you?”
So you have to wonder what I was thinking when I suggested to my About Men Radio brethren that we visit a Halloween attraction in Wharton, N.J., called the Haunted Scarehouse.
(They called my bluff since I never thought anyone would actually take me up on the idea!)
So it was that John and Rich, accompanied by one of Rich’s daughters and two of her friends, plus my brother-in-law Ed gathered at a warehouse transformed into what Scarehouse described as “two terrifying attractions…spread over two floors of fear.”
My first mistake was somehow ending up at the head of our group as we made our way through darkened mazes, creepy sets and blind turns.
So I did what any full-blooded, macho manly man would do: I pushed the three 14-year-old girls to the head of our group.
Haha! Just kidding: No, instead, I pushed John to the front and then held onto his jacket like a security blanket.
John was fearless, moving through the corridors like a linebacker. But my admiration wore off when he began cackling like the Wicked Witch of the West from “The Wizard of Oz” and making all kinds of spooky noises in an effort to freak me out further.
This, in turn, prompted me to frequently threaten to kill him.
(Sorry about that, John.)
The sets had high production values, with moving walls and floors, huge hydraulic-powered monsters jumping forward at you, strobe lights and loud sound effects that left you disoriented and breathing heavy.
I was sweating and my heart felt like I had just gotten off a treadmill.
As we pushed onward, more and more costumed characters jumped out at us, from behind, from the sides and from hiding places.
Photo courtesy of The Haunted Scarehouse
While some of them scared you silly by screaming or revving up a chainsaw, others just silently got in your face, like this one actress with a crooked Joker-like smile caressing a headless doll.
What. The. Hell?!
The real trick came when you saw what you thought was a mannequin – was it a mannequin or was it a costumed character staying real still? I made a several wrong calls and the damned fright they gave me had me doing plyometric cardio.
It also prompted me to swear. Colorfully. Often. And loudly. Very, very loudly.
(Sorry about that, girls.)
When we got to the second floor, the attraction operators split up our group, so that it was now just Ed, John and I. Yeah, just like in the horror movies, the group gets split up and you know what happens next!
Photo courtesy of The Haunted Scarehouse
I tried at this point to keep a sense of humor, such as when a character with a stump of a wrist waved it in my face and I told him I could not lend a hand.
But in the end, I did a lot more screaming (OK, shrieking) than I did laughing.
What I discovered was that yes, things really DO go bump in the night — though actually that was me stomping on my brother-in-law’s foot when I jumped back in fright.
And I discussed my training for the Warrior Dash extreme race. (Unfortunately my work schedule kept me from competing but there is always next year!)
I also recounted my excitement about meeting and working out with exercise guru and man crush Tony Horton and explained how it’s never too late to burn off the goo.
Getting the right amount of rest, eating as close to healthy as you can and exercising take on a whole new level of importance when you reach, ahem, a certain age.
I know I’ve told this story before, but I want to repeat here today, partly to reinforce the lesson to myself after 14 years, but also to tell my brethren (and sistren) that it is NEVER too late to get started.
I was 37, woefully out of shape, stressed to the max and eating like a maniac.
My routine was a doughnut and coffee at 3 p.m., which would send my sugar levels spiking and then crashing, taking my energy levels with it.
Late nights featured chocolate dipped in peanut butter with a Kahlua-and-milk chaser, topped off with maybe five or six hours of sleep each night.
Rinse and repeat.
My fiancée at the time bought me a pair of push-up bars, a VHS exercise tape and a sit-up bar. They sat off in the corner for many, many months.
She never nagged me or even said a word about the equipment but I knew they were there.
My epiphany came after a dinner of three (or was it four?) slices of pizza followed by truly yummy Italian pastries from one of the local bakeries.
I am still not sure what happened, but something clicked (or snapped) and on my 37th birthday, I popped in the boot camp exercise VHS tape.
I had to quit after about 15 minutes.
I was winded and frustrated that I could not keep up. But I tried it the next day. And the next and the next and the next.
By the end of the week, I was getting through the entire 30-minute video.
Over time, I began biking, lifting weights, running and doing other forms of cardio. I dropped 40 pounds, about half of which, over time, I’ve put back on.
But that does not discourage me.
For about the last seven years, I’ve been doing P90x workouts with my man Tony Horton. He’s a good coach and I find him inspiring.
Do I fall short of my goals? Hell yes. Am I ready to grace the cover of “Men’s Health” magazine? Hell no!
But I’m averaging four to five days a week of exercise, and I keep just showing up and that’s more than half the battle.
If you’re looking to make changes in your life, start with small steps.
You will be amazed at the strides you will make.
Take it from someone who’s been there.
If I can do it, so can you.
Drop me a line at amr@aboutmenradio.com and tell me about how you’re coping. We can swap ideas and give a little support to each other.
Rich gets limbered up before our rail bike adventure.
Why are these men smiling? (Hint: they are not wearing any pants.)
All aboard!
A view from the rail bike in the Adirondacks. Gorgeous!
Rich commanding our car.
Crossing the berm at Lake Colby outside of Saranac Lake.
A view of the wilderness aboard a rail bike.
View of Lake Clear.
Gorgeous view!
John strikes a pose.
John shows off his secret utility belt. Still not sure what he was carrying around.
If you want to gauge who your true friends are, come up with a ridiculous idea for an adventure that requires five hours of driving (one way) to visit an attraction for 90 minutes and then see how many of your buddies raise their hands.
In my case, it was a perfect score: Three out of three.
That says three things about my friends: They are committed to maintaining and keeping alive connections among us that date back 40 years. They are giving of themselves. And they’re completely nuts.
Last fall, I convinced two of my buds to come with me to Minnesota to drive a tank at a place cleverly called Drive A Tank.
This fall, it was the (railroad) ties that bind.
I read a story in The New York Times about this rail biking adventure in my former stomping grounds in Saranac Lake and Lake Clear, N.Y.
Rail Explorers puts you on open-air cars the deep red color of Radio Flyers that are equipped with seats, safety belts and pedals. The cars can accommodate from one to four passengers.
The premise is simple: You pedal six miles along a section of an old rail line through the Adirondack wilderness, passing lakes, ponds and woodlands during the fall foliage.
Now picture four middle-aged guys on one of these contraptions. We were not exactly the “Fast and Furious.” More like the “Evenly Paced and Moderately Angry.”
Rail bikes like the ones we rode have been operating in South Korea for about 10 years, according to Alex Catchpoole, the owner/managing director of Rail Explorers.
The ones in the Adirondacks mark the first operation to bring these specially engineered and designed vehicles outside of South Korea, he said.
Since its start in July, the company has hosted 10,000 riders.
It’s easy to see why: The scenery is magnificent and you get to easily access parts of the woodlands that ordinarily would require you to hike.
The big question we faced before we got to Rail Explorers was whether two of the About Men Radio crew – Rich and John – were going to make it on time.
Pedro and I drove up the night before and stayed at a hotel. But Rich and John were going to have to get up at zero-dark-thirty to drive five hours to make our 11:30 a.m. start time.
Not only were they on time, but John – aka “Mannix” – got them there early! (Talk about pedal power! He applied it to both his car AND the rail bike!)
The outing was a chance to enjoy a glorious day in the breathtaking outdoors of the Adirondacks. We also enjoyed a delicious homemade lunch overlooking the lake at the Lake Clear Lodge and Retreat courtesy of Ernest and Cathy Hohmeyer.
But more important, it was a day punctuated by ceaseless chop-busting, laughter bordering on tears and great company.
I got a chance to spend five hours in a car with Pedro heading north and got caught up on things in his life, and then five hours back with Rich catching up on things in his life.
For busy career guys/dads/husbands, this was important time we had together.
Much the same way we enjoyed the rail biking from Lake Clear to Saranac Lake, this trip was not about reaching our destination, but very much about the journey.
The testosterone-fueled tellers (there were several college-age male tellers, present company included), would spy a pretty woman on line and try to time our transactions so that we would be the one to call “Next!” and have the fair maiden at our window.
Those strategies sometimes called for speeding up the work you were doing with your current customer or walking away briefly from your station to get the timing just right.
We got to know our customers well, many of whom were cops, firefighters, senior citizens and blue-collar working stiffs. One account holder routinely would bring us candy and slip it into the metal coin tray.
The place was populated with a lovable cast of co-workers: There was our Saturday head teller, Mike, an engineer by profession who was a huge “Star Trek” fan.
On Saturdays, he would disconnect the Muzak and pipe in a classic rock station from a radio for those working behind the thick glass windows to enjoy.
Among my colleagues was a guy named Charlie. Charlie was, um, crazy.
At night, when we were the only two tellers working, he would be in a tearing hurry to “prove” — reconcile our cash and the deposits and withdrawals and other transactions — so he could get out and spend time with his girlfriend.
Charlie was short in stature but a wiry guy with a kinetic energy. When he was counting bills, it was a blur of fingers and paper.
Since I was newbie, I was slower and more prone to errors, which would delay Charlie’s exit. (He was my senior, so he had to make sure I was reconciled. In addition, both tellers had to leave at the same time.)
This was a frequent scene:
Charlie hectoring me “Did you prove?! Did you prove?!” And I would get more flustered and prone to making mistakes, which would mean he would yell at me more and I would get more flustered.
Well, one night, not only did I prove, but I did so in record time.
I can still see and hear Charlie going excitedly: “You proved?! You proved?!”
And in a gesture of celebration (or insanity) he picked up one of the cushioned bar stools for tellers and heaved it, legs first, into a wall. The stool’s feet left four distinct puncture marks in the plaster wall.
I was aghast and convinced we would be fired.
Thankfully the next day was a Saturday, and the bank manager on duty was a mellow Irishman named Bob who spied the holes and when I told him what had happened, just chuckled, shook his head and said: “Crazy Charlie.”
The lesson?
Money might not buy you everything, but working with it sure generates some good stories!
No, not THAT bulge, you perv! Get your mind outta the gutter!
I’m talking about the bulge ABOVE your belt.
The spare tire.
The love handles.
The beer gut.
Whatever you call it, by the time a guy reaches middle age, his metabolism isn’t what it used to be.
Take me, for instance.
I watch what my teenage son eats at home and I am positively aghast at what he inhales. And when his older brother was home, his butt was constantly sticking out of the fridge, his muffled voice crying out that there was nothing to eat.
But then I recall what I used to eat and drink when I was a teenager.
Back in the day, it was nothing for me to chug almost an entire 64-ounce bottle of Coke.
My food pyramid looked more like a pie chart, with the emphasis on “pie.”
Pizza. McDonald’s. Hot dogs. Fudge brownies.
And Friendly’s ice cream. Those Reese’s peanut butter cup sundaes that come in a goblet big enough to fit both of your fists? Oh yeah, that was my go-to dessert when I was in college.
Through my early to mid-20s, I was able to keep my weight fairly under control. But then came kids, long hours at a stressful job, home ownership and more stress.
Doughnuts and coffee at 3 p.m. followed by peanut butter and chocolate with a Kahlúa-and-milk chaser at midnight did little for my health or waistline.
And here’s the thing: Deep down, I knew I was doing destructive things to my body. I felt it in my bones (literally), my clothes and my energy.
By 2001, I was around 220 pounds and feeling every last ounce of it. I was getting winded going up the stairs.
I buckled down and on my 37th birthday, I put on a 30-minute exercise video. I got through 10 minutes of it and – as Roseanne-Roseannadanna used to say on “Saturday Night Live” – “I thought I was gonna die!”
Fast-forward, and next month I’ll mark my 14th year of my “exercise sobriety.”
I work out an average of four to five times a week. I’m doing P90X and Tony Horton workouts, lifting weights and doing a variety of cardio and other exercises.
Pedro is a similar success story. He’s literally half the man he once was, having lost about 130 pounds. He looks great and dresses like a boss!
In this episode of About Men Radio, Pedro and I discuss our struggles with our weight, what our stress eating habits are like and how we modified our lifestyle to live better.
None of this is easy but it’s to point out that Pedro and I are just like you — dads, husbands and worker-bees with a thousand different push-me-pull-me stresses in our lives.
Share with us stories of your struggles, setbacks and successes at amr@aboutmenshow.com
You’ve heard the expression “Cafeteria Catholic” to describe someone who picks and chooses the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church they want to believe in or adhere to.
Me? I’m a Drive-Thru Catholic.
Here are my (lapsed) credentials: Attended and graduated Catholic elementary school and a Catholic all-boys high school; altar boy for five years; and briefly flirted with the priesthood.
Somewhere around my senior year of high school was the first parting of ways I had with the Church.
That schism did not happen because of Church doctrines on issues such as abortion, divorce, women being excluded from the priesthood, etc.
I think it grew out of a natural restlessness of being a teenager and of being ready to move on.
That time of young adulthood left me believing in some of the principles of the Church — think of the Beatitudes as a good road map — but I was indifferent toward the Church teachings about the existence of God, Jesus Christ and the ceremonial trappings of the Church.
(Truth be told, I was a doubting Thomas from even a young age. I drove my mother nuts when, at the age of five or so, I declared that I did not believe in God because I could not see him.)
The last straw came about seven years ago when our oldest son came out as being gay. He was a sophomore in high school and active in a youth group in our local church.
We got complaints from parish officials about him talking about his homosexuality with other kids. I took it as disapproval of his sexual orientation and I was plenty angry about it.
But what frosted my rage cake came just a few weeks later.
I’m paraphrasing, but he defended the priest as being a good guy and said, after all, it was not like this priest was touching kids or that any kids got hurt.
In that moment, I lost my mind. We stopped attending church. We pulled our youngest son out of CCD.
I haven’t looked back.
But why do I feel as though I am missing out somehow?
On Facebook I see friends, particularly classmates from my Catholic elementary school, who live a life filled with a deep abiding faith.
There’s some part of me that’s envious and wonders how they do it.
And now Pope Francis’ visit to the United States is stirring up more confusion for me.
He seems to have a more welcoming and less judgmental view of the world. It’s heartening to see the example he’s set to literally embrace the poor, the imprisoned and the disenfranchised.
But in the end, I’m left with questions:
Can I practice what the Church preaches about charity toward all without the obligation of faith in its theological teachings?
Can I be a good person without believing in God?
Can you pursue a path of goodness without religion?
If I believe that the answer to all three is a hearty yes — what is it then that I’m looking for?
It started out as a single get-together about three years ago.
My buddy Rich, who lives about an hour away, was going through a challenging time, so we got together for a breakfast to talk.
That might not seem so monumental on its face but consider that for us to meet, we each have to travel about 40 minutes to reach a place somewhere convenient for both of us in rural New Jersey.
But the travel was worth it since the purpose was to talk — about our jobs, our families and our anxieties.
That meeting turned out to be just as important for me as it was for him.
One of the things that I’ve come to realize as a guy north of 50 is the almost impossible challenge of cultivating new friendships and the importance of maintaining existing ones.
At this age, there is so much history and so little time to get involved with others, thanks to the commitments of work and family.
By contrast, with Rich, who I’ve known for close to 40 years, there is a built-in intimacy and understanding of our shared experiences.
That breakfast meeting has led to many more since then.
The one-on-one conversations have a different dynamic than when the larger group of my buddies – the About Men Radio posse — gets together.
In a group of three or more, the conversations will inevitably devolve into hilarity of penis jokes, double entendres or a marathon of chop-busting but seldom anything heavy.
But when there is time and space for just two of us to talk, a stillness pervades, the kinetic energy subsides and a focus on more serious topics takes over.
Rich and I do not solve all of our problems over omelets and toast, but we do engage in connected conversations about our families, jobs, aspirations, limitations, etc.
How the hell are we paying for our kids’ college?
What roles are we playing as dads? As breadwinners?
What do our futures look like? What keeps us up at night?
The meetings were an epiphany that it’s O.K. to ask for help or simply just vent.
During our last get-together, Rich replied to a note I sent:
“Good to see you too. …It’ll be interesting 20 years from now when we walk into a place with our canes or walkers to have toast and coffee together. Need to keep taking pics so we’ll have a chronicle of our meetings.”
Introducing a new feature at About Men Radio we call “Ask Us Men.”
The concept is simple and is offered especially as a service to our female listeners and readers:
What do you want explained about inexplicable guy behavior? What questions have you always had but were too afraid to ask? What things about what we do and how we do them just leaves you mystified?
We invite you to raise any topic — no matter how far-ranging or embarrassing.
Why we like porn? Bring it.
Why we don’t open up much emotionally? Sure thing.
Why we are genetically incapable of asking for directions? HEY! Wait a minute! Now that’s crossing a line…!
Anyway, send us your questions, comments and unwanted Halloween candy to amr@aboutmenshow.com or post your questions on our Facebook page.
As a kid growing up in the Bronx, amusement park rides were a foreign concept.
The tram or the skyline ride at the Bronx Zoo or maybe the carousel at Central Park were the rides I was most familiar with.
Later, I was introduced to Rye Playland in Westchester County, N.Y. For me at the time, it was a wide-eyed wonderland of rides, attractions and carnival games.
The park, operated by the county, was relatively small and tame compared to its bigger competitors — the biggest of which for New Yorkers was Great Adventure in Jackson, N.J.
I recall well GA advertising on television to lure city residents to make the roughly three-hour trip.
I’ve gone to this amusement park several times, mostly with OK experiences but the height of my misadventures at Great Adventure came in 2002. I was with my mother and sons, then 9 and 4.
We were driving through the safari, having a fine old time. The animals were close and fun to watch.
At the very end of the attraction, you had a choice to take a detour that would go around a section filled with baboons and lead you to the exit, or you could drive through the crowd of baboons.
Why the detour?
Because these cute adorable creatures could strip your car faster than a NASCAR pit crew. The open area they occupied was littered with car parts – hubcaps, windshield wipers, mirrors, etc.
They were nimble, intelligent and curious. And oh, yeah: strong.
Naturally, I was undeterred by all the warning signs about proceeding. My car then was a 10-year-old Ford Escort station wagon.
As the result of someone who had hit my parked car, one of my headlights and signal lamps was loose.
It was still operable but it was not installed correctly because, me being a guy, I had just hot-glued-gunned the piece into place and called it a day.
You can guess the rest.
Sure enough, the baboons swarmed my car. And at first it was cute.
But then one of them yanked that headlight out and held it like a trophy.
My kids’ laughing turned to stark terror crying because they feared what the baboons might do to the rest of the car. It was not quite as terrifying as the baboon scene from “The Omen” but close.
I was laughing because the outcome was so predictable and inevitable.
Best of all was my mother who took a photo of a baboon sucking on the light bulb it had plucked from the headlight.
When she sent me the photo, it included this modern-art-like caption in her handwriting on the back: “Baboon with car light bulb.”
A blowout reunion of fans and cast members of “The Warriors” is set to take place Sunday in Coney Island, the home turf of the fictional gang from the 1979 cult classic.
One of the gang’s leading men — memorable for his flirtatious overtures with the ladies and his comedic touches — was a character named Vermin, played by Terence Michos.
Christopher Mele of About Men Radio interviewed Michos in his native Poughkeepsie, N.Y., about his life as an actor, the staying power of “The Warriors,” how God called to him and transformed his life and some funny behind-the-scenes stories about the filming of the movie.
We met an outdoor pavilion in a park in the Town of Poughkeepsie neighborhood where he grew up. (Special shoutout to one of Poughkeepsie’s finest, Detective Garth Mason, for connecting us with Michos.)
Michos was gracious and down-to-earth, the kind of guy with whom you could get lost in conversation and not realize how much time had gone by.
Indeed, daylight was waning as our late afternoon chat was wrapping up.
One of the humorous asides to emerge in the interview: How Vermin’s character came to repeat things twice when he was excited or in a jam.
Fans of the movie will recall Vermin saying things like “Hurt me, hurt me,” or “OK, OK.”
Michos said he was imitating a verbal tic from a character who was a sidekick in the 1960s animated series “The Mighty Hercules.”
The sidekick, a young centaur named Newton, had a distinctive speech pattern of saying everything twice.
Michos talks about this source of inspiration and other nuggets in this latest podcast of About Men Radio, about which all we can say is: Listen, listen!
Terence Michos walks from the parking lot wearing an aqua blue V-neck shirt, khaki pants and sunglasses.
From a distance, it’s hard to reconcile that the man headed toward you is, in fact, the actor who played Vermin in the hit 1979 movie “The Warriors.”
Gone is the baby fat in the face. The curly locks are missing. The shoulders are not quite as broad.
But when he gets closer, and he smiles, the disarming and mischievous face of the lothario that Michos once played is unmistakable.
At 61, Michos would be the envy of men half his age.
He’s fit and trim. His midriff is even more flat now than when he bared it while wearing the leather vest of the Warriors. And even with crow’s feet at play around his eyes, his face exudes a youthful vitality.
Expect to see a huge turnout of fans, many replicating the costumes of some of the colorful gangs featured in the movie.
Think of it as cosplay for hardcore junkies of “The Warriors.”
But what’s not to like about this gritty, of-its-era depiction of New York City at its nadir in the 1970s?
The movie, with its haunting nighttime footage set against a foot-tapping syntho soundtrack, was a safe way for non-New Yorkers to view the stew of the city’s graffiti-covered subways, runaway crime and the specter of street violence.
And for those who grew up in the city in that decade, it was a chance to glimpse real-life neighborhoods and subway stations on film while rooting for underdogs.
(The Warriors are falsely accused of fatally shooting a charismatic leader who, at a summit in the Bronx, seeks to unite all the city’s gangs. The Warriors then have to make their way from the Bronx to their home turf in Coney Island, all the while crossing through rival gang territory and being pursued by the cops.)
For Michos, the all-day appearance at “The Warriors: Back to Coney,” signing autographs and interacting with fans will be a throwback to the intense experience of what it was like to make the movie.
“It was a wild, wild grueling time,” he recalled of the filming, which took place at numerous New York City locales.
The crew filmed in the middle of the night and the physical demands on the actors were not for the faint of heart.
Those scenes of Michos and other members of the Warriors being chased by other gang members and running at a full-out sprint?
Scenes like those were shot over and over again, 20 or 30 times a night, to get it just right.
And the scene at the Lizzies’ hangout where a night of amorous adventure turns to gunfire and mayhem?
Michos was hurling himself over that couch 15 or 20 times – without the benefit of padding.
In fact, he said he did all of his own stunts, with the exception of when his character got thrown into the mirror in the subway station men’s room.
He recalled going with some of his co-stars, hat brims pulled low, to theaters where the movie was playing and watching as movie-goers erupted in cheers and excitement at the fisticuffs.
Laughing, Michos remembers seeing real-life gang members sitting in the theater and saying to their girlfriends: “I can fight, but I can’t fight like those guys do!”
Michos was relieved not to be recognized, lest real life imitate fiction and he and his co-stars be challenged to a brawl.
Michos was 25 when the movie was shot. His co-stars were also young.
It was a time of heavy partying, Studio 54 and cocaine, he said.
But not for him.
“I was probably more boring than all the other guys on the set,” he said.
He would tell his movie mates: “‘I’m going home. You guys hold it together.’ I would be telling them about my relationship with God. They loved me. They wouldn’t bring me to their parties, but they loved me.”
But lest you think he was all a goody two-shoes, Michos was quick to note that he shared with his character a weakness for the ladies.
“That was always there,” he said with a grin.
For Michos, the role of Vermin was almost not to be. He’s got the hit TV show “Taxi” to thank with propelling him to “Warriors” fame.
Here’s what happened: The movie auditioned thousands and originally did not pick Michos.
The actor Tony Danza also tried out, and those doing the casting liked him, so he got the part.
Michos went home, had dinner with his girlfriend and cried.
While coming to terms with the rejection, he said he prayed. “I said, ‘Lord, I’m yours.’”
Danza got a starring role in “Taxi,” which pulled him out of “Warriors” and Michos was called back for a second audition.
The movie-makers settled on him for Vermin, who, while a lover, was also a fighter.
“I think it was a good role for me because I think the film was enhanced by that little comedic twist, those little jokes that lightened things up a little.”
He said it’s not unusual six times a day to hear fans recite their favorite pieces of his dialogue back to him:
“Those cats were some desperate dudes.”
“I got the big one.”
“I’m sick of waiting for trains.”
His sense of comedic timing was nowhere better on display than in the tense moments leading up to the brawl in the men’s room.
Mercy, played by Deborah Van Valkenburgh, objects to being led into the restroom by the Warriors’ warlord, Swan.
“Wait a minute,” she says. “I can’t go in there. It’s a men’s room.”
Vermin’s retort is “Are you kidding?” but Michos said the line lacked punch.
So he delivered the line but also improvised.
“I just reached out and grabbed her and she went flying and the house came down.”
He grew up in what was then a much more rural Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
He was interviewed at a playground and recreational field in the Town of Poughkeepsie in his old neighborhood.
He pointed to the field and recalled how he and his friends would play ball and use a beer can as first base, an empty beer case as second base “and, if we found one, a dead skunk for third base.”
It was a community of IBM and Central Hudson workers, professors and doctors. Growing up, he had no ambition to be a member of a gang much less exposure to one.
Still, Michos described himself as a punk.
“I had a chip on my shoulder. If people talked to me wrong, I hit them in the nose, hit them in the face. I hit teachers.”
He was raised Catholic but was less than observant. (He recalled being an altar boy and pilfering the sacramental wine to try to get a buzz.)
He said he had a spiritual awakening in the year that “The Exorcist” was released. Michos said he was fearful — “don’t ask me why or how” — of becoming demonically possessed.
“One night the presence of God came into my room and totally transformed me in a way I could never, ever imagine.”
He said he became a whole new person.
“I committed my life to Christ,” said Michos, who is a pastor at an evangelical church. “I tripped and fell a number of times but I picked myself up and I press on towards the mark.”
Michos, who enjoyed a career on stage and in TV, turned his attention from acting to being a husband and father. He and his wife have four children, including one who is developmentally disabled.
For 16 years, he served as a news director and anchor for a cable TV station that covered the Hudson Valley and then was communications director for former U.S. Rep. Nan Hayworth in her Washington, D.C., and district offices.
Now, among other things, he does political consulting.
But for better or for worse, Michos will long be remembered as Vermin.
He said he remains close to his castmates and has appeared at numerous reunion events but none that have caught on like the one taking place on Sunday.
He described the first time they got together in more than 20 years: “The minute we saw each other, it was like nothing had passed, not a beat had passed. We get together and we just care about each other.”
And as for the movie’s appealing legacy?
“We were likeable bad guys,” he said, citing a comparison of “The Warriors” to “The Wizard of Oz”: It’s all about trying to get home.
Do you remember when you were a kid and you did as you were told and you didn’t get into mischief and do stupid stuff?
Yeah. Me neither.
In fact, as it turns out, the entire About Men Radio posse has quite a history of engaging in first-degree stupidity both as kids and as not-so-much-kids.
If being a knucklehead were a crime, we’d be serving life sentences.
What kinds of crimes against intelligence are we talking about?
Richard Rodriguez throwing batteries from his eighth-floor apartment window and hitting a buddy in the head.
Pedro Rafael Rosado kicking in the doors of abandoned buildings in the South Bronx and getting chased by junkies.
Christopher Mele building “squirrel traps” of holes dug into the ground, laced with thorns from a bush and camouflaged with a layer of grass on top.
And, oh yeah, there’s the story of a huge box of gay porn exploding open before a group of New York City firefighters.
To learn more, you will need to listen to the latest episode of About Men Radio.
Give it a listen and see how your shenanigans match up to ours.
And remember: Let he without shenanigans throw the first battery from a window.
Today for something different, we bring you a gallery of the many faces of AMR contributor Father John.
Step right up and be prepared to be amazed and bedazzled.
We certainly were!
Sporting the silver fox look. Go John!What can you say about this photo? Nice dining room set in the background.Before the silver fox, there was this dashing look.Heavy metal hair band member. Ron Jeremy doppleganger. Words fail us.Look deeply into my eyes…you’re getting sleepy, sleepy…Who is this tyke?!Glasses made from the bottoms of Coke bottles.Ruh-roh Shaggy!
In our latest podcast of About Men Radio, AMR posse members Richard Rodriguez, Pedro Rosado and Christopher Mele discuss discipline.
No, wait. Not discipline in a BDSM kind of way. Though, of course, there’s nothing WRONG with that. Just sayin’… (By the way, Rich, you left your whips and gimp mask at my house.)
The discipline we’re discussing is the kind we were subjected to as kids growing up at home and at school. Some of that has been discussed in previous blog posts by me and by guest blogger John Roche, who shared his experiences as a student at a Catholic high school in the Bronx.
In this show, we revisit those bygone days when Pedro and his older brother would be told by their 4-foot-tall grandmother to stoop down so she could smack them in the head.
Or listen to stories of one of Rich’s older brothers getting a whuppin’ with a bamboo stick by their mom.
(Rich, for the record, professes to have been such a goody-goody that he was not subjected to such punishment, but does say that his mother merely raising her voice was enough to make him tremble and toe the line.)
As for me? Well, let’s say I was a smart-alecky, moody kid who met the business end of a spatula or a belt. Once or twice. OK, maybe more…
“This is going to hurt me more than it’s going to hurt you,” the saying goes. Really? I’m pretty sure I’m the one walking (barely) around with a sore behind.
We also address what kind of discipline we have meted out as parents. Can there be too much of the “tough” in tough love? Do we regret some of the steps we’ve taken in the name of enforcing order? And what triggers us as fathers to engage in such behavior?
On a less serious note, for the first time ever, we provide a (way too-belated) parental advisory about our content and use of bad language on the show.
This advisory leads to a diatribe by Pedro that, in turn, leads to me hyperventilating from laughing so hard. Seriously, I’m pretty sure I passed out at some point.
So put on your headphones, get a paper bag to breathe into and press play.
The footage led with remarks by the station’s general manager, Jeffrey Marks, who looked straight into the camera and delivered the news to viewers.
Clearly, Marks and the three anchors were distraught.
Their voices cracked with emotion. One anchor alluded to studio workers crying in the background. But they were composed and set about their jobs with the utmost professionalism.
The shootings touched me profoundly, and not just because of the loss of such young lives in such a public, abrupt and senseless way, but because, I realized, it touched close to home.
A little over two years ago, I was the executive editor of the Pocono Record in Stroudsburg, Pa.
On the night of Aug. 5, 2013, reporter Chris Reber was covering a township meeting when 23 shots strafed the small municipal building.
Reber had been at the Pocono Record a little less than three months in his first full-time staff reporting job.
His beat: The “West End,” a collection of mostly rural communities sprawled across Monroe County’s countryside that included Ross, a square-shaped locality of about 6,400 residents that historically had been a low generator of news.
“Nothing ever happens there,” Marta Gouger, at the time my top lieutenant, warned him.
But Reber, being new and desiring to be thorough, wanted to develop sources and get acquainted with his community.
It was the first Ross Township meeting he had ever covered.
Nineteen minutes into the meeting, gunfire erupted.
Reber would later report in a firsthand account that plaster was blowing out from the walls as gunshots ripped into the building.
He crawled to safety, exited the building and called the newsroom with dispatches from the scene.
I was at home when I got the phone call. I bolted and arrived in the newsroom in a T-shirt, sweatpants and slippers. I alerted our publisher, who made it to the newsroom in 45 minutes for a trip that ordinarily takes 90.
For a brief time, we did not know whether Chris had survived and I was beside myself. Chris was only a few years older than my oldest son and I was overwhelmed with a sense of responsibility and paternal, protective feelings.
In the chaos, I did get this email from one of my editors: “Reber is (at) the meeting. … Reber is OK, but dead guy on the floor in the meeting. Reber is shook, but said he can work.”
(Three people were killed and one seriously injured by a crazed resident who had had a 20-year feud with the township over his debris-cluttered property.)
In a note later to the staff, I told them that their journalism that night represented a high-water mark for breaking news coverage. I went so far as to nominate it for a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking Local News.
We had a therapist come in to debrief the news staff.
We had a “thanksgiving” luncheon “to give thanks for Chris’ safety and a way of giving thanks for the professionalism and personal support in a time of crisis that you’ve all demonstrated in a big way,” I wrote.
Chris has since left the Pocono Record but remains in journalism.
Newsrooms are like other workplaces but perhaps a bit more tight-knit. In them, we laugh, bicker and celebrate like other families.
And when there is an inexplicable loss like this in one newsroom, it’s felt in others elsewhere.
Today I ordered a basket of cookies to be delivered to WDBJ. It is a small gesture to express condolences but, more importantly, to show support.
In the days after the Ross shooting, I was deeply touched by the outpouring of support that flowed to our newsroom by colleagues and strangers alike.
For those who wish to pay their respects, the station’s address is:
Digital Broadcast Center
WDBJ Television
2807 Hershberger Road
Roanoke, VA 24017
A recent issue of “Entertainment Weekly” featured a cover story about a reboot of “The X-Files” with the series’ original stars, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson.
The news fills me with a mix of excitement and dread.
I was a late-comer to “The X-Files” in the 1990s, but once I was introduced to the series, I plunged into it like a scalpel in an alien autopsy.
As a kid, pre-“X-Files,” I had a particular fascination for all things unexplained.
I devoured books on UFOs and articles on Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, alien abductions, etc.
I was a big fan of the late Leonard Nimoy’s series “In Search of…” that explored the mysteries of the world.
“The X-Files,” with its combination of creepy, paranoid, funny and inventive plot twists, coupled with the witty repartee between Mulder and Scully, made for a great escape for one hour a week on Sunday nights.
I hesitate though to think about a reboot.
In many ways, “The X-Files” was a product of its time:
There were deepening divisions and a growing distrust about Washington, an uncertainty about the world as the school shootings in Columbine and the stand-off in Waco, Texas, dominated headlines and as the U.S. sought to redefine itself in the world after the end of the Cold War.
Somehow the show tapped into those uncertainties by presenting story lines that challenged your beliefs about the “known world” and your confidence in institutions like the government and schools.
Viewers could take a perverse pleasure in “The X-Files” as a safe outlet for these anxieties.
“The X-Files” was also just good, fun television.
The young Mulder as the believer in things mysterious and Scully as his skeptical science-grounded partner made for a terrific contrast and interplay of ideas.
Add a dose of simmering sexual tension (when will they ever get it on?!), conspiracy-laden plot lines (hello Cigarette-Smoking Man!) and some loveable but smart goofballs (The Lone Gunmen), and you had the equivalent of television potato chips: You kept coming back for more.
Part of the fun for me was getting on the phone with a friend immediately after an episode and trying to unravel what had just happened.
So, yes count me as a big fan.
But…the movies were an affront to all that the TV series had built. And, not to engage in ageism, but part of the appeal of the original was having the baby-faced (bordering on naïve), Scully and Mulder teaming up to uncover the truth.
I think Duchovny and Anderson have only matured in their acting chops, but will a series about mid-to-late career FBI agents investigating the paranormal in a modern age of Google, smartphones and social media be as engaging as the original, which was technologically in the Stone Age?
At a time of NSA spying and a pervasive cynicism about government, the kinds of bogeymen that were the signature of “The X-Files” would likely be overshadowed by real-life world events.
As excited as I would be by a reboot, and as much as I want to believe in it, it might just be best to X-out a reprise of this excellent TV series.
Watching Amy Schumer’s brand of comedy is a bit like my visits to the chiropractor: She drives her fingers into your most tender pressure points.
In the case of Schumer, she hits those spots to bring about comedic relief to topics that are fundamentally damn serious.
Misogyny. Gender inequality. Misperceptions about women perpetuated in our culture.
I have only been recently exposed to Schumer’s work in the summer movie “Trainwreck,” written by Schumer and directed by Judd Apatow.
(A disarming, delightful movie that felt a bit too much like listening to a Schumer stand-up act but nonetheless charmingly romantic in the end. And spoiler: LeBron James, playing himself, utterly steals the movie.)
I have not watched Schumer’s hit show “Inside Amy Schumer,” but watched a couple of her sketches, including “Last F**kable Day” and the parody black-and-white sketch of “Twelve Angry Men,” where the premise is a jury has to decide whether she is “hot enough” to merit her own TV show.
My take based on what I have seen of her work so far?
Not since Bea Arthur appeared in the Norman Lear sitcom “Maude” in the 1979s and stoked debates about abortion, women’s rights and gender roles has there been a comedian as hilariously provocative on these topics as Schumer.
In this latest podcast of About Men Radio, Pedro and I discuss Schumer’s profile in the world of entertainment, her messages and how and if they are effectively delivered.
Is it the height of irony that two guys on a show called About Men Radio discuss someone like Schumer, who consistently does such a great job skewering how men view the world?
But wait! There’s more!
We also veer off into a conversation about what else we’re watching in the world of TV and streaming video.
We discuss “Deadwood,” “Game of Thrones,” “Orange Is the New Black,” “Transparent,” “Justified,” “The Shield” and Janet Jackson’ boob flying out at the Super Bowl.
What?!
If that’s not enough, we introduce the concept of the “pussycat list,” – those actresses and actors who are favorites because of their acting chops or simply because they are easy on the eyes.
And listen in vain as I try to recall the name of an actor and utterly suffer from mental vapor lock.
No, instead this will be me delivering a sloppy wet kiss to Tom Cruise for what he demonstrated in MI5.
The dude just crushed it in this movie and yet, to borrow a phrase from my father, “He’s showing his age.”
And therein lies my admiration.
To watch Cruise at age 53 – 53! – carry out the stunts he did was jaw-dropping.
(Only a mild spoiler since it’s already revealed in the trailers and on the movie poster, but he hangs off the friggin’ side of an Airbus 400 as it takes off! And yeah, so what if he was harnessed in and had all kinds of other safety precautions in place? The guy still hangs off the friggin’ side of an airplane!)
I won’t give away some of the other breathtaking (literally) set pieces in MI5 that Cruise also performed. You will have to see – and appreciate – them for yourself.
But consider that Jon Voight, who starred in the first “Mission: Impossible” movie in 1996, was only five years older than Cruise is now.
And let’s be honest: Jon Voight even at Cruise’s current age did not exactly look athletic.
(I am two years younger than Cruise and get winded pulling on the refrigerator door handle.)
In the current movie, there is the obligatory shot of Cruise shirtless and he’s in stunning shape.
There’s an escape scene that demonstrates his incredible physical prowess. The guy runs, leaps, fights and performs all kinds of other daredevilry that absolutely earned my admiration.
All of that said, though, here’s the thing I think I appreciated the most about the movie: The movie doesn’t try to portray him as the aw-shucks heartthrob of Cruise movies past, such as “All the Right Moves” or “Top Gun” or even some of his more recent starring roles.
Nope, for the first time ever, I found myself going: Yep, he’s showing his age.
Close-ups of his face (to my eyes anyway) revealed some of the wrinkles and plain weariness that comes with being a guy in his 50s.
No Botox here.
What I also appreciated was how in some situations in the movie he either needed to be rescued or his best effort to get a job done (as in a perilous motorcycle chase) does not work out exactly as planned.
In other words, real life happens.
Cruise came across as vulnerable and susceptible to the kind of overreach that guys are known for: “Oh, I can do this” or “I can fix this” and suddenly you are Chevy Chase in a scene from a “National Lampoon” movie, falling off a ladder or recovering from some other act of first-degree knuckle-headedness.
If I had been watching this movie in my 30s, none of these insights would have occurred to me. But being older gave me a different perspective on some of these subtleties.
For what it’s worth, MI5 was a top-notch summer tent pole of a movie but, in my opinion, not as good as the previous one, “Ghost Protocol.”
But if for nothing else gentlemen (and ladies) go watch it to see how Tom Cruise is showing his age but doing it with such style!
In a later interview, Maron described being a nervous wreck leading up to the presidential sitdown but how he sought to engage the president.
All of which reminded me of the worst interview experience of my nearly three-decade career as a newsman.
It happened in the first year of my career.
I worked in the Adirondack Mountains of New York and was assigned to interview the Woodsman of the Year (or maybe it was the grand marshal or Lumberjack of the Year — I cannot recall) for the Woodsmen’s Days event (“Celebrating the Logging Industry and Tupper Lake’s Roots”) that takes place each year in Tupper Lake, N.Y.
These festivities were a big deal involving tractor pulls, ax-throwing contests and other displays of manly skills.
I was a newbie reporter at the Adirondack Daily Enterprise, newly relocated from the Bronx, and still adapting to and learning the culture of the North Country.
So when I went to meet with this honoree, I was ill-prepared for his Canadian accent.
It was as thick as maple syrup on a cold day.
I could barely understand a word of what he was saying.
I kept asking him to repeat himself, hoping my ear would become attuned to his speech and I would pick up on what he was saying on the second pass.
Forget it. Nothing doing.
So here I was, with my Bronx accent, trying to interview this guy with his thick Canuck accent.
I recall sitting on his back porch and it was hot outside.
His wife came out with cold drinks and she saw (or heard) me struggling with the interview.
“Here, let me help,” she said, to my great relief.
Yes! I thought. Salvation!
She would translate my questions into French and then translate his answers into English.
Problem solved! Or so I thought.
Instead, what she did was loudly shout my questions at her husband as if he were hard of hearing! (For the record, I don’t think he had any trouble with his hearing.)
On paper, the summer movie “Inside Out” is the story of a prepubescent girl from the perspective of the emotions inside her mind as personified by Joy, Anger, Fear, Sadness and Disgust.
And on paper, the movie, by Pixar, is a kids’ flick.
In reality, it is a good excuse for adults to sit in a darkened theater and have a good cry.
I warn you that if you go to see this movie, bring a box of tissues.
Or, if you are prone to snotfests like me, bring a roll of paper towels! It’s a gusher!
Seeing the movie was a reminder of how much more prone — and open to — I am to having a good cry.
It was not always this way.
In my 20s and 30s, I would have turned my emotions inward, even if something was upsetting me or making me sad.
But as I entered my 40s and endured a divorce, the death of a loved one and other life events, I found myself more accepting of crying as a natural part of living and not a sign of weakness.
It’s clear that if you try to deny these emotions, they will come out in other ways anyway.
It’s like squeezing a balloon: The air bubble will shift but does not disappear.
In this podcast of About Men Radio, Pedro and I discuss the culture we grew up in (“Big Boys Don’t Cry”), what kinds of TV shows or movies tug at our heartstrings (one of Pedro’s triggers was a complete surprise) and how, even with our openness and acceptance of crying we still use terms like “wuss” and “man up” to deflect attention from what is a common human experience.
Case in point: We agreed that we have never discussed this topic before in 40 years of friendship and that even if we were sitting together in a movie and crying, we would never speak of it!
We also discuss what science and research has discovered about the differences between how men and women process their emotions.
So, get out your hankies, put in your earbuds and give a listen!
There are those movies that endure (“Airplane!” of course being one of them) and there are those dogs of a movie that are best forgotten.
But half the fun of recalling some of those godawful flicks is the chance for my friends to break my chops that it was MY idea to go see them.
Two that come to mind: “Squeeze Play,” a pseudo sex romp brought to you by the high-caliber Troma Films company, and “Vice Squad,” a violent, dark film with few redeeming qualities.
But for memorable movie watching — as in like impossible to erase the imprint for your brain — the first-place trophy goes to AMR crew member Rich Rodriguez who a few years ago brought to the man cave “Requiem for a Dream” and “Human Centipede.”
We were crowded into a small room to watch “Requiem,” of which I knew nothing. It was an incredible movie about addiction but so dark and heavy that I needed a drink when it was over.
And then, as if that did not harsh our mellow enough, Rich popped in the DVD for “Human Centipede,” which was so vile and disgusting and repulsive that we demanded we watch it on fast-forward! (For an idea of how bad it was, consider that its sequel was banned in Britain!)
On a more uplifting note, there was the time we gathered at Pedro’s to watch “Ted,” the story of the raunchy, foul-mouthed stuffed teddy bear who comes to life.
At points we were laughing so hard and loud that we had to stop the movie and replay scenes because we were missing dialogue. That was a good time!
On a recent visit to see my parents, the conversation turned to stories of how they enforced discipline with their three children.
Being the oldest, naturally, I was subjected to the worst of it.
Spatulas. Belts. Shoes.
They were all weapons of ass destruction.
They were used when I was being mouthy or disrespectful, which as I recall, was often.
But as much as my parents were enforcers of discipline, they were no match for the nuns, Christian brothers and lay teachers who made up the staff of the Catholic schools of my youth.
I recall my second-grade teacher who had “the lightning rod,” a steel ruler that was as thick as it was inflexible.
Another teacher used to grind his school ring into your skull.
I attended an all-boys Catholic high school in the Bronx where faculty members were liberal in doling out punishment and enforcing discipline.
For freshman algebra, I had Brother Tin, a Christian brother who stood about 4-foot nothing.
But his stature belied his speed.
I don’t recall why, but one day a classmate, Mike Wasilewski, who stood about 6-foot-2, got in trouble and was called to the front of the classroom.
In his heavily accented English, Brother Tin said: “Wasilewski, take off your glasses.”
I never saw Brother Tin’s hands even leave his sides but I vividly recall Wasilewski’s head recoiling from the sharp, loud smack he took across his face.
But perhaps the most memorable story came on an afternoon while we waited outside a locked classroom and were gathered in the hallway.
This one student, Mike, was recounting a story to a buddy and it was laced with F bombs.
“F bomb this and F bomb that…”
Unfortunately for him, he did not realize that the office of our assistant principal, Ron Patnosh, was scant feet away.
And his door was open. And he was inside. Listening.
The next thing I knew Patnosh materialized as if he were an apparition.
“Where do you think you are?! Do you think you are out on the streets?! How dare you talk that way!”
As he shouted at the F bomber, each sentence was punctuated with a loud smack across the kid’s kisser.
It was about 1 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 13, 2014, and I was driving back from my job in New York City along I-84 in Pike County, Pa., within a few miles of home.
In the coal-mine-at-midnight darkness came a burst of strobe lights atop the roofs of two cars in my rearview mirror.
They were closing in.
Fast.
Damnit, I thought. Was I speeding? Sometimes in these wee hours, I did have a tendency to leadfoot it.
But no, the two vehicles – one a Pike County sheriff’s patrol car and the other from the Pennsylvania State Police – went roaring by and never gave me, the lone motorist on a darkened highway, a second thought.
Hours later I would come to understand why.
***
The shrill ringing of our landline woke me out of a deep sleep. I had finally hit the rack around 1:30 a.m. and now through my blurry vision I could see it was about 8 a.m.
It was my wife, Meg, and she was taking our youngest son to track practice at school.
The words came pouring out of her like coffee beans from a torn burlap bag:
“I know you were sleeping, love, but I wanted to tell you that we were turned around on Route 402 getting to school because there was a shooting at the State Police barracks last night. Apparently two troopers were shot in an ambush. The place is crawling with cops and we had to take a detour.”
The news hit my brain like a jolt of electricity. Here? In the Poconos of Pennsylvania? Ten minutes from our house?
Not a month earlier, I had quit my job as executive editor of the local daily paper, the Pocono Record of Stroudsburg, Pa., to join the Metro desk as a staff editor at The New York Times.
I immediately called my successor at the Pocono Record to tell him the news and then stayed glued to my computer for updates.
For the next 48 days, being glued to the news for updates would be the MO for thousands of residents in the Poconos whose lives were disrupted in the huge dragnet for Eric Frein, the man sought in the sniper shootings that killed one trooper and seriously injured another at the State Police barracks in Blooming Grove, Pa.
Though the searches were sparked by different events — one an ambush shooting involving a single person and the other a breakout by two inmates from a maximum-security prison — the searches share a good deal in common.
Hence, my empathy for what North Country residents are enduring.
Like the Dannemora breakout, the Frein search drew national headlines and launched rounds of speculation on social media about his whereabouts.
And like the search for David Sweat and, up until yesterday, Richard Matt, there were armchair sleuths who criticized or second-guessed the work of the searchers.
Swamps, dense vegetation and greenways of no man’s land gave Frein ample places to hide. Plus, he was a practiced survivalist and war games re-enactor, so he was a bit on his home turf.
But for locals, this was anything but a game.
Posters with his face were plastered in stores, bulletin boards and even a huge electronic billboard approaching the Lincoln Tunnel in New York City.
For the first time since we moved into our house, I concerned myself with making sure our car doors were locked and our outdoor lights were left on overnight.
School schedules were disrupted as the search pressed on for a killer on the loose. My son lost an entire week that he had to make up at the end of the school year.
Meanwhile some residents were left shut out of their homes or in them as officers locked down certain roads during the most intensive searches.
It felt like every day was a game of Whack-a-Mole with new leads popping up, then being squashed and new ones surfacing to replace them.
Out of the highs and lows of the search emerged a sense of community spirit and support for law enforcement.
Blue ribbons were tied to trees as a symbol of community backing. Businesses, local residents and firehouses donated food, water and other needed supplies by the truckload to sustain the searchers.
All those descriptions are spot-on accurate. They are indeed facts. But what bugs me is that they belie a certain prejudice of geography.
That is, New York State revolves around New York City and anything outside of the city is viewed dimly as “other.”
The most popular tweet I’ve ever written — as measured by retweets and favorites — stemmed from the expansive search for the escapees, which has stretched from the North Country to the 2,000-resident town of Friendship in southwestern New York.
The tweet I wrote: “If nothing else, #nyprisonbreak is some lesson in the geography of NY for those who think the state ends at the Tappan Zee Bridge.”
I say all of this by way of confession: I was once one of these geographic ethnocentrics who thought the world not only revolved around New York City but that New York City revolved around my beloved Bronx!
I was so ignorant of New York’s geography that I honestly and truly thought there was Albany and then came Canada!
I consider myself reformed of my urban-centric ways, hence my sensitivity to slights I perceive that are aimed at rural counties.
The editor at the Enterprise at the time was Bill Doolittle. I responded to an ad for an opening and he offered to fly me from New York City to the Adirondack Regional Airport in Lake Clear, N.Y.
I booked the flight and told him I would be arriving at Gate 1. He laughed and assured me he would find me. (I discovered why when I landed: There was only one gate.)
I got the job that very day. It was on my return flight that I realized just how much this city mouse had to learn about living in the country.
The gentleman behind the counter who took my ticket at the airport was also the rental car sales agent. He also took my bag. And radioed the plane. And went to the runway with the orange-coned flashlights to taxi the plane to the terminal!
I was slack-jawed. Now, this was nearly 30 years ago and I am sure it’s not that way anymore. (Update: I am informed it still is!)
At the time, as a stranger in a strange land (correction: with my Bronx accent I was more like a foreigner in my native state), I could not have been more warmly welcomed by everyone.
People extended themselves in their hospitality and courtesies that was breathtaking for this hardened New Yorker. The small-town culture was infectious and comforting.
I spent five years working in the Adirondacks and loved every moment of it.
So when you read or hear some big-media accounts that describe the North Country as “remote,” “forbidding” or “inaccessible,” remember the folks who live there, and trade those adjectives for “friendly,” “generous” and “good people.”
Maybe it’s because I’ve been a newsman my entire adult life and I’m a chronicler of life events.
It might explain how I had the presence of mind to write down things my oldest son said and did as he was growing up that were cute, memorable or funny.
The first entry dates to when he was 3 ½ years old and continued until he was about 6 years old.
So for Father’s Day, indulge this old man by letting him share with you a sample of memorable “Michaelisms.”
Happy Father’s Day!
***
December 1996: Michael soaked Daddy while taking a bath. Daddy was not amused and said:
“Michael, I’m not laughing.”
“But I am,” said Michael.
***
December 1996: Michael came home with a Jewish star he made in school. It was hanging on the Christmas tree when Daddy got home from work.
“Oh,” said Daddy, “you made a Star of David.”
“No Daddy, it’s mine,” said Michael.
***
January 1997: Michael for breakfast has taken to eating chocolate-covered granola bars. He calls them “gorilla bars.”
***
January 1997: Michael and Daddy are heading into school. Daddy greets another parent good morning in the lobby. Michael turns to Daddy and says: “You can’t talk to strangers like that.”
***
Summer 1997: Michael says that heaven is in Disney World.
***
November 1997: Michael refers to nostrils as “smeller holes.” And told to put away his toys, he announced: “Let’s take a vote!”
***
January 1998: Michael goes to Daddy’s doctor with Daddy because Daddy is sick. Michael wants to know if grown-ups are good at the doctor’s, do they get stickers?
***
January 1998: Michael tells Daddy that he has had the same dream two nights in a row. But forgetful Daddy cannot recall what Michael had told him. (Michael had described the dream in Technicolor detail the day before but Daddy did not retain it.)
Michael says: “Daddy, your brain works slow. My brain works fast.”
He then put his hand to his forehead and then put the same hand to Daddy’s head.
With that gesture, Michael says: “Here, Dad, have some of my fast brains.”
***
July 1998: Michaels asks who Dino is. Dino? What do you mean? Michael says: “You know – someone’s in the kitchen with Dino…”
***
October 1998: Michael tells his babysitter that he watched the Fourth of July fireworks (“America’s birthday”) on TV because he couldn’t look out his window to see America because it was too far away.
***
August 1999: Michael spots the club Daddy keeps under the bed in case of intruders. Michael wants to know what it’s for.
Daddy tells him if there is anyone who comes to the house who doesn’t belong there, Daddy will greet them with this.
Wisely, Michael asks: “Why would you greet them if they don’t belong here?!”
***
June 2015: Michael turns 22, and, having just graduated from college, is about to begin his professional career at a job eight hours and five states away from home.
“Jeans that are no longer fashionable and are usually characterized by a tapered leg, high waist or brand name that was cool about 10 years ago. Dad jeans are typically worn by aging men with salt and pepper hair who are in denial that they are no longer hip, have children and drive a station wagon or SUV.”
I was blissfully ignorant of this derogatory term until recently, when my wife made reference to it.
It turned out that I was a dad jeans frequent flier. (“Clothes Really Do Make the Man” and “Daddy Jeans Revisited.”)
In my defense, I like to dress for comfort.
I am self-conscious about looking too paunchy in the poochey, which is why I tend to get pants that are a little looser in the waist.
With my height, though, it means they are saggier in the butt.
But when the pants are tighter in the butt, they tend to be tighter in the waist which, I think, accents my gut.
Hence the dad jeans look.
The last time I gave jeans style a thought was when I was a teenager and I owned — I can admit this now — a pair of Jordache jeans.
Hey, don’t judge! It was the ’80s! Everybody was doing it!
My wife, bless her besotted self, tells me I have a comely tush that I keep well hidden in what amounts to balloon clown pants.
Pedro tells me I could rent out the extra space I have in my pants and easily get $1,500 a month rent for it in New York City.
So as a present for Father’s Day, Meg and my youngest son Daniel, took me shopping for pants.
This trip required that I:
Try on each pair
And model them for approval from the judges.
I HATE clothes shopping. And the only thing I hate more is having to try stuff on in fitting rooms.
I much prefer to go to the rack or the shelves, find my size and proceed to checkout. Easy-peasy!
The trip to the mall is featured in our latest podcast, which pays tributes to dads, Father’s Day and, of course, dad jeans.
I will say that as a result of the shopping expedition (and Meg’s
abundant patience and encouragement), I am now outfitted with several pairs of good-fitting jeans.
The lesson I learned?
I will take the time to try on clothes and no longer shop for jeans by the seat of my pants.
These small rail cars in Germany serve many purposes
Checking out the lorrie before the trip
Other lorries in Germany.
Some are decorated
Mom in the lorrie
Getting ready to leave
Some have attachments
The lorrie I rode in.
The older I get, the more I have come to appreciate the phrase “boys and their toys.”
It is an allusion — not always flattering — to men’s affinity for things mechanical or on wheels.
I never really inhabited that territory.
Cars? Meh.
Boats? Nah.
But short line railroads? Now you’re talking!
I can recall as a kid going to Old McDonald’s Farm in Connecticut and Catskill Game Farm in New York and riding their mini railroads and being enchanted. Or bringing my sons to the Bergen County Zoo in New Jersey and riding the rail it has there.
The story explored this group that wants to put small open-air cars on tracks that are abandoned or seldom used.
When I posted a link to the story on Facebook, I called out the About Men Radio posse and suggested we should do this.
“Would so get our own car,” I wrote, “drinking, smoking, cussing, cellphones all permitted, and ride the wide open rails!”
My suggestion was met with immediate enthusiasm from the AMR crew.
Why?
Boys and their toys.
I mean, c’mon, the idea of riding in one of these old work rail cars, called a speeder, along the open rails of the Bronx?!
Suh-weeeet!
We could outfit it with a couch, a boom box to play 80s tunes and a wet bar! It would be a man cave on rails!
Before you ask “Does your train of thought have a caboose?” let me tell you why such personalized rail cars like these excite me: Because they do exist and I’ve ridden one!
I have cousins in Germany, some of whom live in Langeness, one of 10 halligs in the world. A hallig is an island without dikes that floods almost completely.
When the floods come, these hills become islands. The roads are impassable and they have to wait for the waters to recede.
One hundred year-round residents populate Langeness, which is made up of 18 big hills where the homes and farm buildings are perched.
You can take a ferry to reach the hallig but the most fascinating form of transit is a motorized rail car called a lorrie.
Think of a lorrie as a shed with bench seats that can seat six and that you can put on railroad tracks.
The lorrie line, which is three miles long, crosses land and sea and each inhabitant on the hallig has their own.
On the lorrie line, there are no radios, no track signals and no control tower.
This is a magical place that transported me back more than 30 years to a time before Wii, online gaming, Xbox and all manner of other sophisticated game systems.
The premise of video arcade games was simple: You stood in front of a machine the size of a refrigerator with a screen, a set of buttons and, depending on the game, a joystick.
I try to explain this concept to my sons and they look at me the same way they do when I speak of black-and-white television, rotary dial phones and hard copy encyclopedias.
I was struck by a sense of nostalgia in seeing some of my old (OK, very old) favorites like Donkey Kong, Asteroids and, of course, Pac-Man.
For myself and members of the About Men Radio posse, it was a daily after-school ritual: Go to the five-and-dime store in the Bronx on Castle Hill Avenue called Kress.
Some of us were players and some of us were watchers.
A knot of kids would collect around the machine as if we were metal and it was a gigantic magnet.
Players would wedge a quarter atop the buttons or line them up on the screen, upright, as a way of holding their place in line.
Hard to believe this was the way it was done. But this was organized on the honor system and each player waited for his turn, which could take a while depending on how advanced the current player was.
Another odd memory: Players would put their lit cigarettes (yes, this was long before indoor smoking bans) either atop the machine’s “roofs” or rest them against the buttons, where they would create small burn streaks on the machine’s dashboard.
The arcade games were in few places, mostly what we would refer to as “candy stores,” which were a combination of newsstand, cigar shop and/or ice cream parlor, complete with counter and swivel stools.
Back in the day, the mother lode of these machines, as measured by quality and diversity, was only to be found in Times Square.
So every once in a while, the fellas and I would trek down on a Saturday morning with rolls of quarters to play games we could not find in our Bronx neighborhood.
The occasion for the visit to the Barcade was to see old work colleagues, including April Hunt, who I wrote about in a previous blog post. (She is a die-hard, champion Ms. Pac-Man player.)
Some of the games lined up at Barcade.
Donkey Kong!
April Hunt rocking the Ms. Pac-Man like a boss!
Takes a quarter and a dream.
So enticing…
A list of the high scorers at Barcade.
Meg McGuire tries her hand at one of the games.
Wanna play?
Oliver Mackson plays as April looks on and mocks him!
I turned my attention to some old-time favorites, such as Asteroids and even a Star Wars game. Sure, the graphics and sound effects were clunky and dated compared with today’s almost-holographic games, but that is part of their charm.
But just like old times, I died inglorious deaths pretty quickly on the first rounds of almost every game l played.
With these old arcade games, it pays to have fast fingers.
It first happened about 14 months before I turned 50.
I went to a Dunkin’ Donuts, ordered my customary hot medium coffee and expected to pay about $2. I handed over two singles but when the cashier rang it up, I got back a handful of change.
I was surprised but chalked it up at the moment to the price fluctuations you sometimes see among different franchises and the fact that I was not paying close attention.
And then I looked at the receipt.
And there it was: A 10 percent “senior” discount.
I was flummoxed.
How dare they let me pay less! I want to pay full freight, damnit!
To hell with saving money! My ego needed saving!
It is not that I am vain about my looks (mostly, I really am not) it’s just that mentally I have the maturity of a 12-year-old.
Tony Horton, my exercise hero (think of him as this generation’s version of Jack LaLanne) addresses this often in his various exercise DVDs:
“Aging is for people who do not know better.”
“Aging is for idiots.”
“I’m 55 and hello! I feel like 12.”
This might sound Peter Pan-like (sing it with me: “I Won’t Grow Up!“), but on the occasion of one of my buddies turning 17, we got together at his place and took a semi-solemn vow to remain 17 forever.
Granted, this was *cough cough* 33 years ago and happened amid the imbibing of beer and some very strongly mixed Tom Collins drinks.
That image of us, crowded in the hallway of Silvio’s apartment, drinks raised, has stayed with me.
When I asked him about it recently, he wrote back:
“BTW, how did that pledge work out for us <<he asks as both knees pop, his neck creaks and typing this caused a shooting pain from his fingertip to his eyeball>>??? Oh you mean 17 at heart. Owww!”
Well, he has a point.
I guess I prefer to believe that we have no choice about growing older but that growing up is optional.
You will recall the freaky intruder we had with a bat invading the house. (“I’m Batman”) And that all unfolded while I was on the way back from work from New York City and could do nothing about it.
That was a walk in the woods compared to what happened while my wife and I were visiting her daughter in the San Francisco area.
My cellphone rings while we are visiting Alacatraz and it’s my oldest son, who just graduated from college.
He opens the conversation with “Hypothetically….”
Let me interrupt the narrative here to say that nothing good ever follows an opening like that. And, of course, there is never anything hypothetical about what is to come next.
“Hypothetically,” he says, “what should we do if we had a visit from a bear?”
He proceeds to tell me that the door to the large shed that houses our garbage cans was open and he could see garbage strewn about.
(Take a close look at the bite marks on that Hershey syrup bottle!)
He called public safety, which arrived and assured him that the bruin was gone.
But the thing that kills me is that for 10 years I have preached to the boys about the importance of keeping the lids on the cans securely attached and making sure the garbage bags go INTO the cans. What a concept!
So here I am, 3,000 miles away, trying to coach him through the steps of what to do, which led to this exchange:
My concern is that once a bear is imprinted on a site as a source of food, it will make repeat visits. (Each of the houses adjoining us had been broken into by bears repeatedly.)
Like lamb’s blood marked on thresholds during the first Passover, Michael essentially opened up a fire hose of ammonia (said to repel bears) on the door, the doorway, the footing outside the shed, the doorknob, etc.
That led to this text message:
Yeah, agreed. But it beats the smell of bear scat and rotting garbage.
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AMR contributor Richard Rodriguez offered a pretty good account of what can only be described as an epic camping trip from nearly 30 years ago, but there are some salient details he overlooked that I want to add or clarify based on my hazy memory of this adventure.
As I recall, Rich was in charge of getting the tent.
And as I recall, the manufacturer’s instructions recommended pitching the tent, wetting it down with a hose and letting it dry to help activate some kind of waterproofing.
The result was there were numerous wet spots that rendered parts of the tent inhospitable.
But that was not the end of it:
As I recall, John somehow got his hands on beer and ice cream and proceeded to fumigate the tent with a green fog that damn near gassed us the way an exterminator would if he were trying to rid a house of termites. (Picture the faux extermination scenes from “Breaking Bad.”)
Pedro and I ended up sleeping in Rich’s Dad’s station wagon because the tent was already overcrowded and did I mention that parts of the sleeping area were also now wet?
That Pedro and I were relegated to the car meant the two biggest guys in our group would be in the most confined space.
I do not remember which of us ended up sprawled across the front seats and contending with the steering wheel, but I do clearly recall that we needed chiropractors in the morning!
Of all of us, I think I was the only former Boy Scout and the one with the most experience outdoors and with camping.
But you would have had no idea of that based on the way I was behaving.
I was petrified/obsessed with raccoons that were foraging in a nearby garbage can. Every five minutes, I would poke my head out of the tent with a flashlight like some crazed movie usher to see what they were doing.
As Rich noted, there was a steel-cage belching contest that I recall Gary winning on the strength of a masterful performance, which featured quantity, volume and endurance.
Though I finished that weekend dethroned as a title-holding belcher, I went home with many great memories of this trip!
Read more blog posts at www.aboutmenradio.com and at http://aboutmenradio.net
A scene at the end of an episode of “Modern Family” has the character Claire (the mother of three) complaining that the kids unfriended her again on Facebook and how then is she supposed to know what is going on in the kids’ lives?
It crystallized for me something I have experienced with my sons: The oldest used to be pretty active on Facebook but has all but disappeared (he is away at college) and the youngest (soon to be 17), blocks me on Twitter!
When I asked about this recently, he emailed me to say that “I block with love, padre.”
It makes me awfully split-brained, with the conversation going something like this:
Rational Me: What do you expect? He is almost 17. When you were almost 17, would you have wanted to share your remarks with friends with your dad?
Emotional Me: No, of course not. But I am a cool dad. I understand social media and it’s not like I would stalk every tweet he posted.
Rational Me: Really?! I find that hard to believe…
Emotional Me: OK, well maybe I would look at every other one…Besides, it is another indication of how he is coming into his own and becoming his own person.
Rational Me: Yeah, dummy. You are the one always preaching that parenthood is about giving kids roots and wings.
Emotional Me: Oh yeah. Right.
What is your relationship like with your kids vis a vis social media?
Are you friends with them? Do you follow them on Twitter or Instagram? Or do they block out you in the virtual world as much they do in the real world?
Write us at amr@amrshow.com and share your story…assuming you have not blocked us on social media.
This is an accounting of what unfolded on Facebook when I thought I had escaped Daddy Jeans Syndrome.
Read on:
Was going to brag that I spurned the Daddy jeans look but then was told that these are Daddy shorts. Sigh. What is your opinion? Do I need to go all Richard Simmons?
Matt Smith unless you’re 83 years old, bag those fuckers.
On my cellphone, under contacts, is a listing labeled “boys.”
The contact is an artifact of 10 years ago when my sons got a cellphone for emergencies. It was a flip phone that they shared since they both went to the same school.
Then they were ages 12 and 7.
Today, of course, they are each outfitted with their own smartphones, in which they tweet, text, Facebook, Skype and engage in all manner of communications.
I have kept the entry “boys” as my contact for my oldest son even though it is hopelessly out of date.
He is no longer a boy but a young man on the cusp of graduating college and embarking on a career and life that will involve less and less of me and my wife.
Up to about five years ago, I felt that time was accelerating like a sled going down a steep hill but that time for my sons was moving at a languid pace.
Now, the pages in the chapters of their lives are flipping forward furiously like what you see in the opening credits of “Masterpiece Theater.” And the pace of my life suddenly feels like a leisurely thumbing through the pages of the newspaper.
In the second to last episode of this season’s “Downton Abbey,” Mary, the oldest daughter, remarks on the sweeping changes taking place in the household.
Though Mary was commenting on a fictional setting, she might well have been talking about real life.
In the early years, your role as a dad is defined around the waking hours of your kids: Breakfast, school, after school, dinner, bedtime, leisure time, weekend trips, time spent visiting with family, etc.
And then, one day, you discover that managing those activities has been taken away from you. Your kids have become self-actualized.
For me, the change is marked by the morning ritual of getting them to the school bus stop.
Ten years ago, when we first moved to our house and a new school district, I stood and waited with them for the bus.
Then it became just bringing them to the stop, minus waiting for the bus.
Then it became them piling out of the car, saying so long to me and me driving off.
And now? The oldest is at college and the youngest, a high school junior, is driving himself to school — in his own car.
The transition from needed dad to dad as optional accessory has left me feeling bereft. In the vacuum that has been created, what’s next?
That uncertainty is scary because now I have more time (and psychic space) to find out more about myself and who I am supposed to be in this next phase of my life.
My wife described it as parenting as planned obsolescence.
If you do your job right, you are no longer strictly defined as being a dad, although, of course, you still hold that title no matter how old your kids get. It’s just that how the role is defined is dramatically different.
Perhaps in recognition of this, the first thing I should do is change the entry on my phone contacts from “boys” to “men.”
I’ve never seen it but a quick look at its website reveals bizarre stories of a woman who drinks air freshners (yes, you read that correctly) and a guy who is addicted to looking like Justin Bieber.
My addiction is nowhere near as strange or unappetizing.
Nah, my addiction is to these monster cookies the size of a car steering wheel that are on sale the Jefferson Diner in Hopatong, N.J.
This place is right along my commute home from New York City, and with its bright neon-lit signs and gleaming chrome exterior, it calls to me practically every night.
“Come, stop in, and buy a cookie,” it whispers.
And there, on the counter, are three varieties of cookies: Chocolate chip, sprinkles and my new favorite, M&Ms.
I plunk down my $3.50 (worth every cent), carefully unwrap the cellophane covering, and snap one piece off at a time on my drive home as I happily listen to my podcasts.
It is a guilty pleasure and they are so yummy!
What are your guilty pleasures? What indulgences do you partake in? Do you have any strange obsessions?
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