My Graceful Exit - or - Gosh Darn Anti-Social Firewalls

Due to some inappropriate MySpacing by some co-workers, the firewall at work now prevents me from using Xanga, so I have started a new blog elsewhere.  I'll miss a lot of the people here at Xanga, but I think you'll like the new site.  There's a monkey with ridiculously long arms.  I drew it. 

 If you want to keep up with the adventures of PlainOleMike and crew, please check out the new digs.  Really, it's just as good even if it's not Xangariffic.  I'd love to keep hearing from you all, and I'll keep checking out your sites after work hours. 

Currently Watching Bad News Bears Triple Play (3-pack) By Walter Matthau, Chris Barnes (II), Tatum O'Neal, Ben Piazza, Vic Morrow see related

What food brings back fond childhood memories?

The Legend of Eddie Bubble Gum

There are a handful of moments every now and again that trigger some deep, long forgotten sense memory in me.  Once in a while, when the wind is just right, a neighbor will light up his barbeque and just a whiff of the coals will transport me back to a summer evening cooking out on the grill in our backyard.  Just the right smell of just the right kind of leather sparks visions of long hours spent patrolling the little league outfield, my glove to my face to smell the greatest smell on Earth – leather and baseball dirt.  Music can do it too.  The opening chords of Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong has me longing for my days in the college dorm, and while I’ve probably only heard it two or three times in the last fifteen years, just a note or two of Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam’s Lost in Emotion instantly sends me back to 1987, so much so that I’d swear that I can smell the fresh paint my dad and I spent that entire summer coating our new house with.  A nice rain, and the smell of worms, helps me recall family fishing trips.  Overripe tomatoes, for some reason, give me mental images of these big fat green hairless caterpillars that roamed the fields around my neighborhood – we must have found them on backyard tomato plants at some point, because cutting into an even slightly mushy tomato makes me wince, as a picture of these alieny green bugs that emitted some sort of funky stank from their heads while little red antennae popped out.  While these images that stem from smells and sounds are strong, nothing triggers sense memory for me quite like food.

When I start to think of specific foods from my childhood, memories flood my brain.  Just the mention of Fun Dip has me salivating, and even though it’s been two decades since I’ve had any, I could just about taste the poof of candy powder that erupts from the pouch when you tear into a packet of Fun Dip as I typed those words.  I can smell the artificial grape and strawberry chemical compounds that made Fun Dip so darn fun, and I can feel the grainy white stick slide across my tongue right now.  What a disgusting concept that product was.  While thoughts of Fun Dip have me planning a lunch hour trip to the local 7-11 to search for my old friend (or at the very least, snatch up a few packets of Smarties and Sweet Tarts that I can pound the crap out of with my stapler until I have my own homemade Fun Dip), that’s not even the food that conjures up the strongest memories.  For some reason, the top of my list is cluttered with a variety of tube shaped foods – hot dogs, the Super Rope licorice, Freeze Pops, Cow Tails, and beef jerky all hold a special place in the pantry of my mind, but the Granddaddy of edible memory triggers is Big Daddy Bubble Gum. 

I honestly don’t know if they make this anymore.  I don’t know if it was widely available.  I don’t know if it came from a crazed bubblegum fanatic who had a mini-gum factory in his basement.  The only place I ever saw Big Daddy Bubble Gum for sale was the concession stands of the little league baseball fields in my neighborhood.  For the uninitiated, Big Daddy Bubble Gum was indeed the big daddy of all bubblegum, not a stick like Big Red, or a hunk like Bubblicious, or a brick like Bazooka Joe, or a ball like you might chip your tooth on, or shredded like Big League Chew, or a nugget o’ gum like a Chicklet – Big Daddy was a rod of gum.  As pornographic as this entire paragraph is going to come across, we’re talking about a nine inch gum pipe.  I don’t remember which is a diameter and which is a circumference and what you multiply pi by to get the body mass index of a Big Daddy, but I’d have to guess that it was about as big around as one of those fatty pencils that they make you use in kindergarten, only it was about twice as long.  Packaged in a slick plastic sheath that you had to tear open with your teeth, Big Daddy was coated in a strange white powder that was more flour than sugar, but may just have been cocaine’s little brother for all the addictive properties a rod o’ Big Daddy had.  I don’t recall all the flavors they made, only that my preferred Big Daddy came in a bright blue wrapping that gets me excited just thinking about it. 

I can distinctly recall sprinting to the concessions after a hard fought little league battle just to get my little mitts on another Big Daddy.  Sitting here right now, twenty-five years after the fact, I can feel the smooth plastic, the soft gum inside, and the struggle I always had to tear into the wrapper.  I can smell the chemically enhanced fruity flavors burst out of the plastic.  I can just about feel the weird white powder on my fingers and the not-quite-as-soft-as-it-looks gum in my mouth.  I can taste the grapey, bubble gummy, and mystery fruit flavored goodness right now.  It makes my jaw hurt, my jaw which is probably twice the size as it was back in the day, just to think about the massive entire-pack-of-Bubble-Yum sized wad of goo I’d chomp on for seven innings at a time.  Then I start to remember my neighbor and teammate Eddie Mayer.  At one game little Eddie shoved an entire log of Big Daddy into his yap before taking the mound.  He pitched great, prompted Coach Lakaitis to dub him “Eddie Bubble Gum.”  Eddie liked the nickname so much, that despite the possibility of lockjaw (or, considering the Eddie to gum mass ratio, an entire locked head) he began a pregame ritual during which he would shove three or four Big Daddy Bubble Gums into his mouth. 

Unbelievably, it helped.  Eddie went from the worst player on the team to our top pitcher in the course of one nine inch gum branch.  His fastball had more pop.  His curveball was suddenly wicked.  He change-up changed so much that it changed, went back to being what it was initially, then changed again.  It was like the bubble gum had empowered his arm to make the ball miss bats.  Eddie Bubble Gum became a folk hero of sorts after he threw three straight no-hitters.  There was an article about him in the local paper.  There were kids asking for his autograph.  There was a teammate who wrote an Eddie Bubble Gum song that helped the legend grow.  Kids on other teams would breathe a sigh of relief on Eddie’s off days.  Coaches would resign themselves to a loss.  Opponents would see striking out against Bubble Gum as a badge of honor – something they would tell their grandkids about the day Eddie Bubble Gum was elected to the Hall of Fame. 

Eddie’s new found success was part luck and part the power of positive thinking and part a psychological advantage – at first.  Soon though, it inspired him, motivated him, pushed him.  In no time Eddie Bubble Gum was watching major leaguers, studying their pitching delivery.  He was reading books, trying to find any tips he could.  And, he was practicing, practicing, practicing.  He threw each and every day.  Being his next door neighbor, I was suddenly elected catcher, so that I could work with him at home before and after practice.  It was inspiring to see his dedication, but disgusting to see the little pink sugar crusties form on the corners of his mouth and the bubble gum juice erupt from his cheeks as he grunted with each fastball he threw. 

Soon his nice white uniform was streaked with spitty, fruity globs of pink, blue, and green.  This lasted most of a season, until Eddie’s mom made it to a game, she’d been home most of this time looking after a newborn baby brother (who several coaches had already called dibs on) then it stopped real quick.  The legend of Eddie Bubble Gum died because Mrs. Bubble had finally figured out what her son was doing that was making laundry day such a chore.  No more gum, that was the decree from above.  At first Eddie resisted, sneaking smaller wads (Jupiter would have been a smaller wad) into his cheek before gametime, but mom found him out.  Eddie Bubble Gum was no more.

Opponents, sure that the gum was the source of Eddie’s dominance, were suddenly confident that they could hit him.  Teammates began to question his ability.  Coaches grumbled about banning mom from the ballpark.  Eddie doubted himself.

The first game he started after the bubble gum ban was imposed was a disaster.  He hit the first batter, walked two more, gave up a three run triple, and felt a little pop in his shoulder.  Coach pulled him.   He pitched again a few days later and was back to domination, striking out the first ten kids he faced.  He kept it up, pitching great time after time all the way through high school and into college, but it wasn’t the same.  He was just Eddie, and later just Ed.  He wasn’t a legend anymore.  He wasn’t a folk hero.  He wasn’t Eddie Bubble Gum.  In fact, it wasn’t long before kids went back to calling him by his old nickname – an unfortunate label inflicted upon him due to a strange set of allergies that left him with a runny nose all year round – Eddie Bubble Gum went back to being known as “Booger Ed.” 

Until something triggered the memory of that gum, I’d forgotten about Eddie.  I moved out of that neighborhood a few years after that baseball season and over time we fell out of touch.  What a fun summer that was.  What a fantastic baseball season.  What a fastball.  What a memory.  What a bubble gum. 

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Currently Watching 9/11 - The Filmmakers' Commemorative Edition By Tony Benatatos, Jamal Braithwaite, Steve Buscemi, George W. Bush, Joseph Casaliggi see related

A Reflection on 9/11

I suppose I could go all tirade with the screaming and the yelling and the MOUNTAINS OF ANGER IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, but I’m just not feeling it.  I want to be angrier.  I want to go all tiradical.  I want to punch something in the pancreas or some other such oddly painful part of their person.  I just don’t have it in me today.

This anniversary – the anniversary of a day that changed the landscape of America – has me in a melancholy sort of mood.  Today I just sort of am.  I suppose considering the horrible things that happened around these parts seven years ago that I should consider myself lucky to simply be.  However, I’m not in a sit here and count my blessing sort of mood either. 

I try to look back to before I knew.  I try to remember what it was like to wake up that morning to the loud Spanish music eminating from the parking lot below my apartment window and how pissed off I was about that.  I try to remember that the satellite was out again and I couldn’t watch tv and how pissed off I was about that.  I try to remember the fact that my girlfriend at the time (who is now my wife) decided to let the dog sit and wait for me to wake up rather than letting him out herself and the subsequent mess and how pissed off I was about that.  I try to remember burnt toast and loud neighbors and that freaking light in the hallway that blinked so much I thought my apartment complex was trying to give me seizures and how fast the idiots drove through the parking lot and the cigarette butts everywhere around the front stoop and how much all of that pissed me off.  I remember the incidents, but I can’t bring back those emotions – the anger, the frustration, the annoyance – those are gone.

Those feelings died when I overheard the radio coming out of one of the first floor apartments.  Those feelings were flushed away when the words “plane crash” and “New York” and “terrorists” floated towards me.  Working nights at the time and having a crippling lack of cable television, I’d slept through the whole thing.  While the rest of the country sat in fear, mourned, and got angry – I was upset that my girlfriend went to Target, that the dog peed on the kitchen floor, and my wheat toast was a little too crispy on the edges. 

I ran inside to the only lifeline I had, the internet, and try to catch up with the rest of society.  All the images you saw that morning, I paged through them, waiting impatiently for my dial-up connection to show me what was going on.  All the phone calls you made that morning, I made them too, frantic to find my mom, who wasn’t answering home or work numbers, and my dad, who was sitting comfortably in the park across from his skyscraping office building waiting for the madness to die down, and my sister, who was busy walking her 3^rd grade students home, one by one, dealing with the fear and anger of others while trying to hide her own. 

Most of my day was spent waiting.  Waiting to hear from loved ones.  Waiting for the internet to load.  Waiting in line for an hour at the gas station because, just like a lot of us, I panicked.   Waiting for more news.  Waiting for all the planes to land.  Waiting for life to return to normal. 

The next day was somber.  I stood at work, managing a local restaurant, watching replay after replay of buildings falling and bodies dropping and planes crashing, completely numb.  The restaurant was nearly empty, and those that were there ate quickly and quietly, seeming to feel guilty about having a nice meal, unable to smile or laugh or show any sort of cheer. 

The following weeks were prideful.  I saw a small boy stand outside the fire station in town and salute.  People thought of cops as heroes and firemen as mini-gods.  I drove by memorials and reminders, but mostly I recall American flags everywhere – every front porch, every lamppost, every intersection – the flag flew.  It was like that for a while.  We were proud.  We were resilient.  We were banding together.  Slowly they began to disappear.  I don’t know when, and I couldn’t tell you who took them down first, but flag after flag after flag was gone from sight. 

Now, seven quick years gone, we’re back to the way it was before.  We’re yelling at each other about politics, divided again.  We’re pissed off and fired up about gas prices and the cost of war and drug addled athletes and satanic wizard kid’s books and fuel guzzling SUTanks and famous pregnant teen agers and OJ Simpson’s fued with baseball card collectors and airline checked bag fees and construction delays and injured football stars and who gets to go to what school in which part of town and the guy next door with the loud motorcycle and the spouse who doesn’t help around the house enough and interrupted TV seasons and the survivalist guy’s hotel reservations and the celebrity chef’s resume and our guy not being the American Idol and the baseball team that just won’t win and the long wait at the restaurant and Hillary hates Barack and Barack disses Bill and Michelle Obama’s national pride and who wears a lapel pin and John McCain Medicare status and Palin’s mistruths and that other guy whose name I can’t remember who hasn’t done a thing to stand out enough to make me upset that I can’t remember his stinkin’ name and the banana bread that I forgot to take out of the oven last night, so what in the holy heck am I supposed to do with a banana brick?

I want the flags back.  Where did they go?

I want the “yay America” back.  It’s not a belief anymore, but a campaign ploy.

I want to feel a part of something again.  I don’t.

Today I just kind of am. 

It’s better than the alternative.

Currently Reading Lamb Special Gift Ed: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal By Christopher Moore see related

Dr. Bunson Honeydew and the Creation of the Universe

I know it's been about a million years since I've posted, so I don't know if anyone who used to read this site is still around, or if the folks that are around still care about what I say, or if I'm just shouting into the vast emptyness of the internet.  All I know is that a friend got me thinking, and thinking leads to dangerous things, and dangerous things for me is writing, which is dangerous because of the carpal tunnel risk.  Anyhoo, here goes.  Hope some of you are still here.  Say hello if you are. 

When it comes the battle royale that happens when science and religion meet, I’ve always had this mental picture of God as a mad scientist.  Forgive me if this seems blasphemous, but as a child of the ‘70s and ‘80s many of life’s difficult to tackle topics take the form of Muppet skits in my television saturated brain.  I know Jim Henson lacked the desire/balls/career-suicidal-tendencies to attempt this one, but I can’t help but conjure up an image of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew (who I just now realized has a very honeydew melon like head) as our Lord Almighty.  Of course that would leave us with Beaker as Jesus, which takes this concept up the ladder to a much more blasphemous, yet entirely hilarious, level.  Anyway, a bumbling Christ with a test tube shaped head who lacks the ability to form coherent words aside, back in 1979, Dr. Honeydew mixing a little of this and a little of that, lighting the Bunsen burner, preventing Beaker from spilling some boiling concoction that is destined to become mankind all over the lab floor, pouring this solution into that compound in just the right proportions so that, despite the wacky antics of his meep-meep-meeping sidekick, he’s made the heavens, the Earth, and the platypus – all of this done with surprisingly nimble fingers considering the fact that he’s a felt puppet.  

To me the melding of science and religion has always been sort of a no-brainer.  It could be in part because Father Tom, the family priest, and Mrs. Robinson, my 5^th grade science teacher, resembled each other in such a way that that statement isn’t flattering to either of them.  It could also be because my mind has always had a strange gift for connecting different parts of my life – A sermon on Noah would have me conjuring up images of family zoo trips and my ridiculously huge stash of mail-ordered “Safari Cards.”  Daniel and the Lion’s Den sent me straight to PBS nature shows.  The concept of water into wine had me plotting midnight pantry raids to see just which herbs and spices from my mom’s cabinet would give me the same power (I never did figure out how to do it, but in case you ever wondered – chicken bouillon cubes and 7-Up, not so good). – It could also be because no one bothered to tell a curious young Mike that (just like chicken stock and lemon/lime soda) you aren’t supposed to mix religion and science.

I know there are creationists out there who deny science had any part in the origin of the world.  Like Newman and Kramer insisting that Keith Hernandez was indeed the “lone spitter,” these folks seem in constant denial – concocting all sorts of “they fabricated the dinosaurs/there was no moon landing/carbon dating is a ploy to brainwash us all into buying microwave ovens, strive for the perfect robot, and subscribe to OMNI magazine” conspiracy theories to discredit science.  Some of these religious extremists interpret the bible a wee bit more literally than perhaps it was intended.  Really, seven days for all this?

The authors of the bible, with all their songs and psalms and tales and yarns and fables, had a bit of a flair for the dramatic.  I don’t think it’s a stretch to think that many of them just may have taken a bit of poetic license with their stories, and just like Hansel and Gretel is an super-Xtreme-over the top “don’t take candy from strangers” tale, some of bible stories may amp up the “wow factor” a bit to get their point across.  Did God create the universe in 7 days?  Well it seems kind of convenient that he used the exact number of days that mankind would later come to know as a week.  Doesn’t it seem more plausible that Genesis is an allegory, a fable, a story based in fact, but written with a lesson in mind?  Doesn’t a protagonist with a magic zappy finger demanding light and water and earth and sky and zebras and bullion cubes and 7-Up into existence make for a much more riveting and awe inspiring story than an faceless power that uses a cosmic whisk to stir up the flour, butter, and sugar of the universe to make “existence cake” in some sort of higher power version of 30 Minute Solar Systems?  A boring story without a humanlike leading man might not have had the same affect.  A moment by moment play by play of evolution doesn’t have the same zing as voices from above willing creation to begin.

Now, on the other hand, there are scientists who question the existence of God and the power of Christ.  In a world where there are many inexplicable things: frogs that change gender mid-life (like an amphibian RuPaul, only with less mascara), male seahorses that give birth, creatures that regrow severed body parts, chemicals that cure disease, the sphincter, Georgie W. being elected twice…  Why do so many people find the possibility of one man being able to walk on water, heal the sick, and rise from the dead so unlikely?  To risk blasphemy once again for the sake of argument – say there is an explanation for Jesus’ strange abilities – say J.C. was the David Blaine of his time.  Say he wasn’t powerful, just super tricky.  Maybe he didn’t really reconfigure the water molecules into fermented grape juice.  Maybe he didn’t really take a stroll across the lake.  Maybe he didn’t have a magical bread multiplying ability.  Maybe he was just a really good showman with a special knack for the sleight of hand/foot/loaf/winejug.  Maybe he couldn’t heal with his hands; perhaps it was a skill with medicines.  Maybe he didn’t rise from the dead, but pulled some sort of switcheroo on us all.  Even if Jesus was an olden days version of David Copperfield, why is it difficult to believe that those skills, those abilities, that “which hand is the basket of fishies in” power was God’s gift?  How come there are so many out there willing to believe that aliens wander the universe, artificially intelligent robots are a possibility, man-made plagues can wipe out the planet, cool black guys (with a little effort) can teach even the most uncoordinated white guy to dance, and many other Will Smith movie plots, but they refuse to accept the possibility that there was a sentient being that stirred the initial pot?

It may not seem terribly clear which side I’m arguing for or against here, and that’s the point.  It’s like the concept of the egg and the chicken.  It doesn’t matter which came first – what matters is how did the first one get there? Did science create it?  Did God create it?  Did God create science or science create God?  You can’t have chickens without eggs, or eggs without chickens, or God without science, or science without God, or Dr. Bunsen Honeydew without Beaker, or bullion cubes without 7-Up.  It doesn’t matter which came first, what matters is they are.  They both are. 

Currently Reading Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroids Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports By Mark Fainaru-Wada, Lance Williams see related

Will the Real Home Run King Please Stand Up