LONGWALKABOUT

Unappreciative Dogs

During the covid purgatory my wife came to me and said, “I think our neurotic black lab needs a friend.” To which I responded, “If we do this, I’m going to need some help taking care of the two of them.” She assured me that I would get the necessary help from our kids and herself.

So anyway, now I provide all care for two dogs. Two unappreciative dogs. Two dogs who love my wife more than anything. No matter what I do for them, if my wife is home, they will go straight to her with tails wagging. I have recently started to imagine their conversations with her. Here’s how it goes.

I take them on a two mile walk. We get home and they go straight to her. — “Can you believe this loser only took us on a two mile walk. I mean seriously, it’s not like he couldn’t stand to lose a few pounds. It really should’ve been at least a three mile walk.”

I feed them and give them water. They go straight to her. — “This guy we live with only gave us kibble. It’s really unbelievable how incompetent he is. We know you, our Queen, would have added some fresh chicken to our meal if you were here. You love us so much and we love you.”

I take them to the vet and give them their medication. We get home and they go straight to her. — “Our live-in help took us to that strange place where we get poked and prodded again. You should really look into that. We’re not sure it’s on the up and up. Do we know that these people are even licensed healthcare providers? I mean we trust you, but not the guy who took us there. He doesn’t look reliable at all.”

I scratch them behind the ears and give them belly rubs. My wife comes down the stairs. They make a bee line for her. — “Hey. The one who loves us is here.”

Long story short. At worst, my dogs hate me. At best, they tolerate me. Which is super rewarding.

Corporate Sports

Major league sports were a big part of growing up for me. I enjoyed watching the best players in the world play the games that as kids we all played. We knew all the players, their stat lines, where they were from. There was an emotional bond between you and your teams. It was special. As I’ve gotten older that bond has frayed. It has been a sad process to go through and it has made me wonder why it ended up that way. In fact, I’ve probably wasted too much time thinking about it. Here are my conclusions. Feel free to pass them on to the commissioners of the major sports.

Everything is impersonal and corporate. It was fun to go to games at stadiums that were named with personality. Veterans Stadium, Three Rivers Stadium, The Oakland Coliseum, Candlestick Park, The King Dome. Now, because everything is a sellout, we have the pleasure of going to see teams at Target Field, Crypto dot com Arena, LoanDepot Park, Climate Pledge Arena, and Acrisure Stadium. I still don’t know what an Acrisure is.

Players have no loyalty to the fans. Ownership has no loyalty to the fans. The owners, if they still are individual owners and not some private equity group, only have loyalty to the bottom line. The fans however, the fans are loyal. They are loyal to a fault. But not forever.

Everything is a money pit. “Hey fans, I see that you have bought our fifth alternate jersey, but do you have the sixth seventh and eighth ones? And we just traded you favorite player so you should probably pick another guy and buy his jersey.” “Hey fans. Would you like to be a season ticket holder to your favorite team? The team you’ve been following since childhood. But first, we’re going to need you to buy a personal seat license just so you have the right to buy season tickets. Hey, we don’t make the rules. Oh wait, yes we do.” “Hey fans, how do you feel about paying forty dollars to park your car? Just kidding, we don’t care how you feel.” “Hey fans, enjoy that seventeen dollar hot dog. Oh. You need something to wash it down with? How about a six dollar bottle of water?”

Major league corporate sports is a soulless machine. The true soul of sports still lives, but not there. It is in amateur and minor league sports. It’s a shame that I’d rather go watch minor league infielders commit six errors on a routine ground ball than watch the best guys in the world. But here we are.

My Wife the Nurse

This past winter (the season of my discontent) I was sick for what seemed like three months. I eventually found out I had Flu A. I would love to say that during this time my wife was my rock and doted on me like I was a war hero recovering from wounds I received while saving a busload of orphans from an evil communist monster. But that would be a lie. Instead I was treated like a prisoner of war. Okay, maybe thats a little dramatic.

Here’s how it went mostly. I would get up in the morning, do all the work I normally do, then in the evening I would say, “Wow I feel really run down.”

To which my wife would respond. “Dummy, you need to rest. It’s the only way you’re going to actually feel better.”

Me: “That’s not very doctorly of you.”

My beautiful wife: “I’m not that kind of doctor.”

Me: “Can you listen to my cough?”

My caring wife: “Again, I am not that kind of doctor. You really talk a lot when you aren’t feeling good.”

Me: “I should probably get up on the roof and check on the gutters.”

My wife who is more intelligent than me: “Are you dense? Please lay down and take a tylenol.”

Me: “Tylenol. Can I consider that a prescription?”

My wife who is a doctor, but not that kind: “Stop it. You actually should go to the doctor.”

Me later in the evening: moaning on the couch watching reruns of Bones.

My wife who if you haven’t figured it out by now, is very patient: “Can you stop making that noise, I’m trying to concentrate.”

This scene was repeated a few times before I actually went to the doctor who gave me a prescription for a chest x-ray that I never got. I eventually recovered because I’m very very tough. My wife, who again is not a medical doctor, has informed me that I could have cut my recovery time in half if I had just rested. She may be right we’ll never know. One thing we do know, never throughout this whole ordeal did she bring me soup.

Heights

I’m a lucky guy. Sometimes when my wife travels for work I get to tag along and while it’s a work trip for her my only jobs are to explore, find good restaurants, curate a list of interesting things to see, and bless her with my company. I’m kind of like a great male escort.

The great thing about traveling is not only do you learn things about your destination, you also learn things about yourself.

Here are things I learned about Chicago.

The Art Institute of Chicago is amazing. Easily the best art museum I’ve ever been to.
Chicago is really walkable. Nice wide sidewalks. Great design. I think the great fire afforded them a chance to start over and really put thought into the layout. Which begs the question, why don’t we burn down Philadelphia and start over?
The architecture is great.
It has the largest Starbucks in the world where you can overpay for coffee and overpay for coffee inspired cocktails.

Now, most importantly, here are the things I learned about myself in Chicago. I contain multitudes. 😄

I enjoy a good deep dish pizza. For me it’s the burned cheese around the edge. I’m glad I don’t have this available to me at home. It would be bad for my health.
Constant wind is really annoying to me. There were a few days while I was there that Chicago lived up to its nickname. If I was one of the founders of this town I would have called it quits early on. Three days into building my log cabin I would’ve paused and been like, “You guys think it’s always gonna be this windy? Cause if it is this is not going to work for me. I get that this is a good location for trade, and it’s right on the lake, but I’ve lost two hats already and I rarely if ever fly kites so…….”
The most important thing I learned is really something I already knew. I don’t like heights. The last thing I did before returning to the mediocre state of Pennsylvania was go to the top of the Willis (Sears) Tower. A big part of the attraction of going to the top is that you can stand in one of four glass Skyboxes that jut out from the building and look straight down 103 stories (1,353 ft.) to the ground. When my turn came to step into the box I moved right to the edge of the glass floor. The employee who’s job it is to take a picture of each visitor and try to sell it to them said, “Stand right in the middle and I’ll get your photo.” I looked back at him and said, “Yeah, I’m not gonna do that.” This is the point in my visit where I learned I really don’t like heights. Like at all. I’ve known too many builders to trust anything man made that high above the ground. I don’t know if you guys realize this but half of the crew that built the house you live in was definitely on some sort mind-altering substance. Why would this be any different?

There you go, many things learned on my Chicago trip. The last thing I learned is that if I tell my wife that I didn’t step into the Skybox she will call me a chicken and laugh.

Spiders

**Friendly tarantula from our recent travels.**

I don’t know how this happened, but I have two kids that are afraid of spiders. It makes me feel like a failure as a dad. I continually tell them things like, “Hey, spiders are our friends, they eat any other bugs that may be around.” It makes no difference. They come back with some nonsense like, “Did you know that daddy long legs are very poisonous, their fangs are just not big enough to deliver the poison to humans?” I say nonsense because that’s what it is. One google search will tell you that this is just as false as “spiders bite you in your sleep” or “every year you end up swallowing eight spiders while you are sleeping.” Daddy long legs are not poisonous and are not even technically spiders. My boys spend all day online but couldn’t be bothered to take ten seconds search this. But hey, they were up to date on the whole Drake dis track thing.

Kids these days aren’t outside enough. This is our fault parents. We should have kicked them out till the street lights came on as nature intended. I remember catching daddy long legs when I was a kid. According to my boys this makes me super brave. I also remember hunting yellow jackets with a fly swatter. That was more fun because there was an element of danger, if you missed the yellow jackets they would get angry and come after you. They were pretty quick, but most of the time I was quicker. Most of the time.

Now here I am stuck with a teenager who called me into our finished basement the other day to save him from a spider that had been terrorizing him. A spider that was in fact a cricket that evaded all my attempts to catch him. My son has since seen the cricket spider a few more times and offered me this gem. “Dad, the cricket in the basement, that guy’s a real trickster.”

Get your kids out to touch some grass my friends. Trust me.

Gentrification

The area that I live in is very pleasant for the most part. It has some great advantages. There is a Wegmans less than ten minutes away. There is an ice rink close by. You don’t have to drive too far to get away from suburbia and enjoy some nature.

But the people. Oh sometimes the people are a bit much. The other day when I was at my favorite supermarket (Wegmans) a young mom was there with her baby. As I pushed my cart past (my high quality cart, because as I mentioned, this is Wegmans) the baby’s bottle flew into the isle and smacked against the concrete floor. The top cracked and started to leak milk.

Mom said, “Oh Gentry, you broke it.”

I grinned and kept walking. Who names their kid Gentry? The Websters definition of the word is literally— “Upper or ruling class.” I’m used to this kind of thing around here by now. In a county that was at one time one of the 50 richest in the US you see stuff like this. Babies wearing onesies with the New Yorker logo on the front. Teenagers barely out of Driver’s Ed behind the wheel of sixty thousand dollar cars bearing bumper stickers for social causes that they have zero real world connections to. So of course one is tone deafly named Gentry. I picture a future Gentry in his suit complete with super skinny suit pants finalizing a deal to buy two blocks of row homes in an economically depressed area. He’ll push out the current residents and turn around and sell the homes to hipsters who will open coffee shops, book stores that don’t sell books that anyone actually reads, and vape shops. When he closes the deal he’ll hang up the phone and do finger guns and say something like “You’ve been Gentrified!” It’ll be a whole thing. Poor kid never had a chance.

My Triumphant Return/Back To School

Hi, how’s it going? I realize it’s been a while since I’ve posted here. I’m sorry. I know you’ve all missed me terribly. If any of you were worried I apologize. I assure you that I was okay. I wasn’t in jail, or kidnapped, or living in New Jersey, just taking a break while landscaping my yard and installing windows in my house. Many things have happened to the world in my absence. Most of them are not my fault. Although I may be responsible somewhat for the parmesan cheese shortage of late 2022.

So. Where were we? Right. College. My oldest kid is going away to college this fall. Luckily for mom and me, he chose a school that is only 277 miles away instead of the one that he had originally preferred which was 1299 miles away. We’re all excited for him. I already have two hoodies for his school and am exhibiting more school spirit than for any college I actually attended. My wife has been spending unseemly amounts of money trying to make sure that his dorm room is more well-equipped than our actual home. His younger brother is busy pretending that he won’t miss his big brother

It’s a little less than a month now until drop-off-day. I don’t like to think about that, so I’ve been filling my time with coming up with last bits of fatherly advice. Here are a few of my best.

“Always be on the lookout for events that include free food.”

“Don’t trust any student that ties a sweater around their neck. They’re most likely villains.”

“Don’t date dumb girls.”

“If you do it right, your college years are nowhere near the best years of your life.”

“Taco Bell is very underrated.”

I’m going to miss my big guy. He’s a good kid with a great big heart, and the school is lucky to have him. And they’ll be lucky to have me at all sporting events. I’m a legendary heckler.

Higher Learning

I’m getting old. My oldest son went on a southern college tour with my wife this summer. They went to four schools in two states and apparently only had two fights along the way. Not physical fights. My wife would have dominated those. I’m scared of her. You should be too. No, it was verbal sparring. I figured that just two was pretty good seeing as they are virtually the same person. I know that if I was trapped in a car with myself for extended periods of time I would probably get into numerous arguments. But then myself and I would have hashed it all out at a Mexican restaurant. My son is so much like his mom that they even look alike. They have the same nicely tanned Puerto Rican skin. The same eyes and nose. He has many of the mannerisms of my father-in-law. You have no idea how many times I’ve heard these kinds of things as he was growing up.

“Hey Marc, did you have anything at all to do with that kid?”

“Marc, it looks like your wife made him in a lab from her own DNA.”

For all of you who have said that to me over the years,,,,,,,, it’s completely annoying. Like cyclists in the middle of the road. Like all that watery mess that comes out of a mustard bottle before the mustard. Like someone putting a 5PM meeting on your calendar.

It’s ok, though. I forgive you all. (Not Really)

Before I started rambling my main point was supposed to be that I can’t believe I have a kid old enough to be going to college next year. The only time I feel that old is when my right knee acts up. Hopefully he’ll be ready for the challenge next year. He already is very familiar with Top Ramen and remembers to put deodorant on most days. So we’re off to a good start.

Memes I, umm,,,,,,,, harvested.

School Supplies

It’s that time of year again. The time when I search my email for an hour for the school supply lists that the school sent to me a month ago. At some point I start to question my sanity and if the list ever even existed at all. Then I get frustrated, go get a popsicle from the garage freezer, sit back down and find the lists in 30 seconds flat.

At that point the fun is just beginning because now I have to sort through the leftover supplies that I optimistically saved from last year. I test all the highlighters. I make an executive decision that wide rule paper and college rule paper aren’t all that different and that college rule will be just fine for my little geniuses. Then I marvel at how many bottles of Elmer’s glue and glue sticks I have. I mean. I kind of look like a doomsday prepper. But one who only hoards glue………. And Ellio’s pizza.

Now that I’ve been able to cross a few things off my list, (Ironically Elmer’s is not on this year’s list) it’s time to go to Target. Because school starts in (checks calendar) four days, Target is cleaned out of certain things. I head over to the office supply section and manage to make a huge score by grabbing one of the last three boxes of Ticonderoga pencils. The Ferrari of wooden pencils. All in all, the trip goes pretty well. I only have to go back in once, to get the boxes of tissues that were actually the very first thing on my list. The only thing l have left to find is the unicorn list item. You know what I’m talking about. The thing the teacher threw on the list out of spite. The thing that you wander around the store looking for, but probably doesn’t even exist. That “13 pack of colored pencils which must include the colors burnt sienna and silver.” No surprise, I couldn’t find it. So I bought more Elmer’s.

Easily the Big Easy

I’ll preface this post with the fact that I am emphatically not a city person. My personal space bubble usually extends to somewhere around half a mile. When someone asks if I would like to go to New York my usual response is, “Why? You haven’t smelled urine and three day old garbage in a while?” Now that you know that, I’m going to hit you with conflicting information. I love New Orleans. I am a contradiction seasoned with inconsistency wrapped in a tortilla.

A few years ago my wife had a conference in New Orleans and on the recommendation of some friends, I decided to join her. Since then we’ve been back two more times. I’ve never had a bad time. In a sea of cities that try to be something they’re not (I’m looking at you Philadelphia) New Orleans is comfortable in it’s own skin. It’s completely unique as an American city, having a slightly European feel without the pretentiousness. In 2019 it was reported that one out of every seven adults in the city had a warrant out for their arrest. I admire this group tactic. Like, “What are they gonna do, arrest all of us?” The place has a vaguely lawless undercurrent that stokes a sense of adventure in those comfortable with it.

A lot of places claim to be somewhere you can go and “be yourself.” In The Big Easy that just might be true. I’ve seen well to do party goers dressed to the nines walking barefoot down Canal Street in the rain. I’ve seen out of towners hammered out of their minds on Bourbon Street. I’ve seen drag queens and families and junkies and millionaires. I’ve seen that one dude who dresses like Darth Vader and dances to Cher and Milli Vanilli. No one pays too much attention to any of them and the reason it all works is because it feels like when you enter the city limits, you enter into an unspoken pact to not take life too seriously.

“Take everything you like seriously, except yourselves.”- Rudyard Kipling

The city has preserved a lot of the feel of the old south, mixed with the Caribbean, mixed with the new south. A subtle magic floats in the humid air. The food is amazing. The people are welcoming. But most of all good music is everywhere. It is the birthplace of jazz, a natural home to the blues, which also originated in the deep south, and a welcoming adoptive home to many other genres, and it is around every corner.

If you’ve never been, it should be high on your list. If you have been, don’t you think it’s time to go back?

Click here for the full Bob Dylan quote. It’s worth it.