The Blog

Can I get a little sympathy here?

I am the oldest of five kids in my family. As if that in itself isn’t burden enough, I was born at the end of October (no, not this past October), or about six weeks after school started. By the time I was four years old, I had a sister and a brother and another baby sister. It was a Catholic family, OK? My parents probably felt bad because they only had four kids in four years. (Another would arrive soon, but that’s a different story.)

So I was four, but because I would be turning five in a month and a half, my parents were given the choice of starting me in kindergarten at that tender age, or waiting until the following year, when I would be better prepared emotionally and physically to take on the rigors of kindergarten. Blitzed as they were by their self-created deluge of babies, what they decided was “Let’s get this one out of the house as soon as possible.” They probably would have let me get my own apartment if I’d wanted to, as long as they had one less toddler to worry about for a few hours a day. As it turns out, this was a bad decision.

I was not a big kid to begin with. And because of the bum’s rush my parents gave me out of the house at the age of four, all the other kids were older than me, anywhere from a few months to almost a whole year. A whole year! The fact that I was a genius would not come into play until late in high school. What matters to kids is self defense, and everybody, girls included, was bigger than me. So I was in the hole from day one. I just wasn’t big enough to compete in the vicious world of little kids. Throughout my formative years I was surrounded by peers who were a year older, a year bigger, a year stronger than me. We’re all grownups now and we can laugh at our childhood trials and frustrations, right? But when you’re in Little League in fourth grade and you’re throwing like a third-grader, you’ve got a world of hurt, let me tell you.

Of course, at the time I didn’t know why all the guys were studlier than me, or why all the girls seemed more interested in all the guys except me. I figured this out much later. The light started to dawn when I got cut from the baseball team in eighth grade. Actually, I didn’t get cut so much as told not to try out. By the coach. I’m sure he said something along the lines of “The roster is already set – we just don’t need any more players. Try out next year, why dontcha?” But since the school only went up to eighth grade, I figured he was blowing me off.

A guy’s got to have some way to salvage a little dignity in a situation like that, and so I came up with the theory that all the other eighth-grade boys were older than me, and thus bigger and stronger than me, and naturally it would be unfair for me even to try to compete with them. Someone might get hurt, and of course that would be me. Over the next several years I honed this excellent excuse, sharpening it to a razor’s edge, but that’s as far as my rationale went at the time, and actually, I started to feel pretty good about not playing baseball, especially when I discovered that Cathy Dinwiddie was not much into sports.

Cathy was Jay Hardin’s girlfriend. Jay happened to be the varsity quarterback, the center on the basketball team and the starting and only pitcher for the baseball team. He was tall for eighth grade – his parents had probably held him out of kindergarten until he was six – and even among the guys who had made the team he looked like an adult. I seem to remember that he had a five o’clock shadow at some of the games, but that could just be my mind playing tricks on me.

Cathy Dinwiddie was one of the smart ones, and this would be the last year that you could be smart and popular, which she was. She was slightly chunky, but at that age you could call it baby fat, and sometime during the school year the equipment had started to arrive. By baseball season it was in obvious evidence. When I picture her standing near the bleachers on the baseball field, pink-cheeked and vaguely blonde, in her plaid pleated skirt, white cotton blouse straining a little at the second button, little blue cardigan and those black-and-white oxfords with the knee socks over her plump, ripe calves… OK, you have to remember I was in eighth grade, people, and so was she.

I was bitter about not making the team, and Cathy was completely bored at the games, and during one seventh inning stretch on a blustery afternoon in April we discovered that we had something in common: we were both cold. In fact, Cathy was literally shivering. In the spirit of chivalry, I contrived to get her wrapped up in my arms and soon we were generating all the heat we needed, right there in the bleachers.

After a while Cathy said she’d like to walk back to the school, a couple of hundred yards away, and get her jacket from her locker. The bad news for me was that she’d no longer be “cold.” The good news was that I could walk her back to her locker, which seemed like a good idea since Jay had begun glaring at me between pitches, and he already had the first two batters out. Or maybe he’d just been looking in for a sign from the catcher. Considering what I ws doing with his girlfriend, I thought a walk to the school – before the inning was over – would be best.

I had no intention of returning to the game, and as it turned out, neither did Cathy Dinwiddie. We strolled back to her locker, and we held hands, and the wind died down a little and everything I said made her laugh, and her green eyes sparkled and the animals came out from their hiding places in the woods and gazed fondly at us, two beautiful young lovers in Catholic school uniforms who had somehow found each other, against all odds, through the crush of humanity, and we were still laughing and talking and touching when her father came to pick her up and he took me home, too, so I got to sit real close to her in the front seat for another fifteen minutes before they dropped me off and the green-eyed look she gave me as I stood outside the passenger window of her father’s car gave me a hardon that lasted all the way until my mom called us to supper.

Cathy went back with Jay the next day at school, which is the way it had to be. By morning I was worried that I might have to fight big Jay Hardin, but when the school bus let me off they were already sitting together in their usual places in the classroom, and it looked to me as if nothing at all had changed. When Cathy saw me, she stared at me for a few seconds, longer than she ever had before, and I thought she was going to say hello or something.

But Jay was making farting noises with his hand in his armpit, a bunch of his friends were snickering, and she finally turned back to him, and when she laughed it sounded completely genuine.

The things I write here are a combination of reminiscences, made-up stories, angry rants, half-baked political theories/complaints, ill-conceived philosophy and expressions of longing.

Sometimes I have an inspiration, and something flows. Often I think I should write something, and I try to force it out, an excercise that doesn’t always work. Most of the time I am aware that I have some readers, and I want to entertain you. Probably that’s because I don’t want to lose you.

There are few enough of you that I can sort of see you all. In some cases I know exactly what you look like, because I’ve seen your picture, but in every case I have an image in my mind, pieced together from your comments here and the things you write on your own blog. I don’t know what I expected when I started this, but I certainly didn’t think it would ever be as personal as it has become. I have actually written posts directly to you, all but calling you by name. I’m sure I have a lot of one-second visitors, next-bloggers who don’t see what they’re looking for, don’t read a word and move on. But I’m just as sure that a small contingent of you check back regularly, read what I write, get it or not, and leave comments to let me know you’ve been watching, and this touches my heart.

I’m not, as some of you might think, a geeky, introverted, antisocial loser. Sure, I spend time with this blog, and more time reading yours, but I also have a job where I am inexplicably well-liked, and real-life friends whom I see socially. I have a wife and a cat, and I take part in household activities. I play guitar and write songs as a hobby.

I tell you these things because I think that I write a lot of downer stuff on this blog, depressed stuff, and I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. I am pretty even-tempered and cheerful most of the time. But a lot of the things that make me feel like writing are the sad things, the injustice, the sense of loss, confusion and fear. In meatspace* when I find something broken, I fix it if I can, work around it if I can’t and worry (and worry, and worry) if I can’t do either.

That worry often comes out in negative blog-posting, because I’ve worn out my real-life friends and family on certain topics. They just won’t listen anymore, God bless ’em.

But here on revision99, when you see some kind of Jonesian bummer coming, you can skim it and bail if you want, or just skip it all together. Please don’t think less of me just because I can’t contain my angst at this imperfect world we’re forced to live in. Take my negative raps with a grain of salt, a spoonful of sugar and a tongue in cheek, and don’t go away mad, or disappointed in me.

As always, my heart sighs with the joy of just knowing you are there.

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I never know what the hell is going on.

I got lost in my local Big Box store (Costco) the other day, and I found myself in the pharmacy area, amid the bottles of 1,000 Exedrin Extra Strength Caplets, glucosamine and 55-gallon drums of shampoo, and I was trying to find my way out of the maze when I came upon this:

OK, even I didn’t think it was to make your lips explode, but really, how long has this been going on? My high school sweetheart had big lips, and since then I’ve had a thing for the fuller lips, not so much the look as the feel, you know? But I was completely unaware that such a product existed.

So when I got home, naturally, I googled it. Turns out, Lip Explosion does not have a monopoly. In fact, there’s a lot of competition in the non-surgical lip augmentation market. There’s CityLips, Lip Venom, Naked Kiss and Perfect Pout, to name but a few.

I learned from my research that “the most important thing you can do before bed is prepare to plump your pout.” Not sure why, since this stuff only works for a few hours. Oh, wait – is there a naughty connotation there?

I also learned that increased levels of estrogen, such as during ovulation, cause plumper lips, so there you go – all part of God’s Plan.

Now I know all I ever wanted to know about lip plumping, and more. But still, none of it explains this:

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UPDATE, MAY 4 – Warning!! Do NOT google “big lips” at work or in polite company. You have been warned.

I live in Long Beach, the biggest suburb of Los Angeles, unless you count San Diego.

Whenever you get in your car here, you are making a leap of faith. You are agreeing that a mutual desire on the part of you and all other drivers to survive the day is going to be adequate to keep the chaos on the roads from bringing a messy early end to your life. Because there is no way way in hell you can drive defensively enough to stay out of trouble if you don’t have the cooperation of pretty much everyone you run into encounter on the road. You’d have to stop every time you saw another car moving, so you’d get just about to the end of your driveway and that would be it for the day.

That would be OK with me – I could do about 75% of my job from home with a little planning. But I need food, so I have to go grocery shopping occasionally, and besides, The Man wouldn’t believe I was actually working if I didn’t show my pretty face around the office every day for eight hours or so. The notion that I must be involved in productive work just because they can see me couldn’t be farther from the truth, but hey – that’s what The Corporation wants to believe and who am I to say otherwise? Nobody, that’s who.

So I go out in my car and drive around places. A modest steel box with the power of 200 horses, hurtling down various streets and freeways within a few feet of other, usually bigger, steel boxes with even more horsepower, all of us assuming, hoping, sometimes praying, that all the rest of us will stay in our lanes, stop at the red lights and not try to merge into the exact same space that we are presently occupying.

Every now and then someone will execute a dangerous manuever right in front of me. I smile and offer a friendly gesture and a jaunty toot of my horn as I swerve violently to avoid disaster and the bloody mess that would ensue. Most of the time, these manuevers have some sort of reasoning behind them. Not smart thinking, exactly, but a clearly intended goal, like “Let’s make this left turn even though Jones is coming right at us and we will barely have time to get around the corner before he arrives – if he hits his brakes like right now.”

You see what I mean? Sure, it’s a stupid move and everyone could be killed, but at least you can see why the guy did it. Thus the friendly gesture.

But yesterday as I was driving home a woman drove her car out of a blind alley and despite my leaning on the horn and risking a head-on collision by pulling into the opposite lane, she just kept on coming and eventually there was nothing that could save us from bumping into each other.

Unlike in the example above, there didn’t seem to be any particular reason for her to do this. I would have been past her alley in another tenth of a second, and we both could have been on our ways. Oh, she could have stopped, if she’d been looking in front of her, where my bright red car was. In fact, for a second I thought she had stopped, in that way where you think the playground bully is only coming over to say hi, just before he punches you in the stomach and takes your lunch.

But instead of stopping, she just drove her car right into the side of my car and wrecked most of the right side of it. I know, you’re saying “My God, is Jones all right?” And yes, I’m fine. If you call paying my huge insurance deductible and renting a car for two weeks fine. Sure, I’m fine.

As my insurance agent said (because they all say this, don’t they?) “We can fix cars easily enough. People are a little harder.” And I suppose that’s true, but for about 24 hours I wished I were dead, instead of driving around in a wrecked car. I know what everybody’s thinking when they see me coming now: He was probably drunk. Pathetic loser. Look, he doesn’t even have the self-esteem to get his rattletrap repaired. Some people just shouldn’t be allowed to drive.

The shame. It makes me eager to spend all the rest of my money renting a nice new Chevy Lumina.

I was reading this story about how George W. Bush’s people are trying to book a hotel room in Austria for a summit meeting in June, but Mick Jagger’s already taken the room (because the Stones are playing there in June) and he won’t give it up. Of course I chuckled a bit, enjoying whatever frustration this might have cause The Decider in Chief.

But then I got to thinking, this room costs $5,000 per day! It’s reputed to be among the 100 best hotel rooms in the world, whatever that might mean. It has chandeliers and oil paintings. So what’s the President doing staying in a place like that? Is that right? I won’t even say how long I would have to work at my crummy job to make the amount of money Bush would spend on that room in one night (if he could book it, heh, heh…), but it seems to me that the head of a pluralistic democracy ought to be a little more careful with the taxpayers’ money. I mean, don’t you think?

And as long as I was thinking deep thoughts, this is what I pondered next: Mick Jagger staying in a $5,000 hotel room. Huh. Seems pretty cool at first. But work with me here. Mick’s been in the band for over forty years. They had it rough for maybe two years before what we now call The British Invasion. After that he was rich beyond any possible dream of a postwar working class Brit, and the party has never stopped.

For a few years there must have been a sense of unreality as the fame and money flowed in. Like any young guy with sudden unbelievable good fortune, he (and his bandmates) no doubt committed some excesses, although I’m not sure I ever believed that story about Keith Richard detoxing by having all his blood drained and replaced at a secret Swiss clinic in the seventies. I won’t go into all my suspicions. Let’s just say they probably tried everything at least once during those early years.

But it must have gotten progressively more difficult to be thrilled as time went on. How much blow can you do, how many groupies can you have, how many pairs of handmade Italian boots can you wear, how many Maseratis can you trash? And now here’s Mick, 40-plus years on, routinely staying at the Imperial Hotel in Vienna for $5,000 a day.

I’ve always thought I’d like to know how it feels to have more money than I’d know what to do with, and don’t get me wrong here: I think Jagger is smart enough to keep himself amused, but I wonder if sometimes, after everyone’s left and he’s alone sipping cognac in that room by the flickering light of a crystal chandelier, he doesn’t think back to the hardscrabble days, going to art school, buying imported American R&B 45’s, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee and talking the night away with his friends about blues and babes.

Do you ever think about stuff like that?