Belated Easter Thoughts

I climb the ladder in darkness. The steps are lit by tiny pieces of glow in the dark tape. My feet are sticky and covered with colored corn syrup. To my left, in the darkness, is a gauntlet of beams, plywood, chicken wire and paper mache. Just on the other side, I can hear the hushed breath of hundreds of people, their eyes fixed on a spotlight far away from the trapdoor I stealthily slide open. I step up onto the structure. The cool air pickles my bare skin. I walk silently over to two pieces of wood and take my place in the darkness. A moment later, there are angry shouts and a mob marching their way across the room towards me. In the middle, there is a man also covered in colored corn syrup , panting and worn, carrying a cross. The mob reaches the paper mache mountain, and with the assistance of Roman Centurions, the man labors up the mountain. They lay him down beside me and one centurion hammers a piece of metal while the man screams with each hit. Meanwhile, the other soldier attaches a chain to the back of a belt on the man covered in corn syrup. Then they lift him up on the cross.

And that was how every Easter in high school, I had a front row seat to the crucifixion of Stunt Jesus Christ.

The yearly Easter Drama at Plum Creek Christian Church was a big deal every year.  And every year, I was a thief on the cross. A good one, at that.

It played to packed houses in a gym for two weeks. Dozens upon dozens of people played their part. Most put on robes and sandals, some darkening makeup to look more…um…”desert-y.” Then they went out and sang and danced and recited lines.

Always, always, always, the premiere part was obviously Actor Jesus. They spent hours working on his makeup, hair and costume before the show. Therefore, it wouldn’t do if he had to ruin all that meticulous work for one crucifixion scene and then reapply for his resurrection. Actor Jesus wasn’t Real Jesus. He couldn’t supernaturally remove makeup in the tomb. Enter Stunt Jesus.

Stunt Jesus’s real name was Rick. And he wasn’t a carpenter. He was a plumber. Once Actor Jesus left the makeup room, Stunt Jesus and his merry band of adolescent thieves (me and my friend Drew) sauntered in like kings of the castle. And we were. For the next hour, we sat back there and joked and laughed and lathered ourselves in red corn syrup. By the time we were done, we looked like Carrie after the bucket dropped on her head.

Mel Gibson would have been so proud of us.

And then we did our bit, came back down off the wall and waited backstage until Actor Jesus emerged from his paper mache tomb. Then we did the curtain call and celebrated backstage.  Stunt Jesus walked around in his crucifixion diapers, trying to hug other actors before he rinsed the syrup off. He flipped his long hair around like he was Axel Rose.  He yelled out “Stunt Jesus!” proudly when we all gathered for the director’s final speech for the night.

This will always be Easter to me.

Throughout my life, I have met many different versions of Jesus. Catholic Jesus. Baptist Jesus. Spanish Jesus. Rage against the Machine Jesus. Gentle Jesus. Frail and pale Jesus. Raptor Jesus.

No portrait had a bigger impact on me than Stunt Jesus.  I was fully aware that Stunt Jesus was really Rick the plumber, and yet, spending hours joking around and then fake dying next to a man in diapers has a way of creating bonds that went far beyond knowing Jesus through what I read in the Bible or what I heard from preachers. Here, I could imagine what Jesus was really like. Not as my savior, but as a person.

He bled and died for me, but he did so much more than that in his life. There is a much fuller picture to him that needs to be seen. He laughed with people. He hung out with him. He made jokes and quips. He responded with sarcasm to ridiculous comments. He told stories. People loved him not because he was God, but because he was their friend. And a good man.

People are inspired by Jesus when they meet him. They love him when they know him. Happy Belated Easter.

Kentucky’s recruiting class is the real March Madness this year

Somehow this doesn’t seem lopsided, does it?

 

The way it comes across on sports talk radio shows, the epic scrum between mighty Kentucky and lowly Robert Morris was an upset of biblical proportions. The scene was perfect. A storied program, hobbled and injured and malcontent, strolls into a tiny mousetrap of a gym expecting a feast. Instead, they get a cage fight, and just like all season, when they get punched in the mouth, the Wildcats turn into Mildcats, looking disarrayed and confused. And beaten. Court storming ensueth. College basketball fans rejoice! Calipari’s rotating cavalcade of one and one NBA prospects has just proven the formula wrong! David has beaten a humiliated Goliath! Heart trumps talent! Blah, blah, blah.

Sports radio explodes with chatter about how this proves the one and done factory at Kentucky has a major kink in the assembly line. Without experienced leadership, without giving it the old college try and having kids stay for four years, freshman, no matter how talented they are, simply can’t compete at this level.

But then, the next day, Julius Randle commits to UK, bolstering an already stellar incoming freshman class that includes the #1 point guard in the country (Aaron Harrison), his doppelganger, the #1 shooting guard in the country (his twin brother, Andrew), and the #1 center (Dakarin Johnson). In total, the incoming Wildcats take up a third of the McDonald’s All-American roster.

College basketball has never seen anything like this. They’re two deep at almost every position if some key players return. They’ll have two 6’5’’ guards built like COG soldiers from Gears of War and can swallow the entire lane with one swoop of a crossover. They have a silky smooth lefty shooter with range beginning at the locker room tunnel. And now they have Randle, a 6’9’’ bullchild, a Minotaur with handles and a jumper.

AND THEY’RE NOT DONE.

Rumors are swirling that the overall #1 rated prospect, Andrew Wiggins, is good chums with Randle and is strongly considering the Wildcats. If that’s the case, I know it doesn’t quite match up, but it’s Ender’s Game. Ever read that book? Yeah, well, the main character  (Andrew, “Ender”, Wiggin) is boy genius at war and goes to war training camp against the best and the brightest. And he never loses once, despite every challenge being thrown his way. If the Canadian Wiggins joins the Wildcat squad, well, I’m not saying 40-0 is likelihood. But it’s within the realm of possibility.

How is this possible? Surely Calipari must be cheating.

No. You know what happened?

Lebron James happened.

He became the ringing endorsement for a new era of basketball when he joined Wade and Bosh in South Beach. When that happened, the cool thing was no longer to be a phenom carrying your team. Now, it’s join a team of phenoms and carry the weight evenly.

Calipari promotes this relentlessly. Iron sharpens iron, so to speak, and there is no way to get better prepared for the NBA than to practice day in and day out against NBA caliber talent. That’s why the best come to Lexington. Because they don’t want to just play against the best for a few days over the course of the season. They want to play against the best every day between those few days.

Any coach who says they don’t want this collection of talent is lying. They’re all trying the same thing, except right now the market is cornered.

David might have beaten Goliath. Unfortunately for the rest of college basketball, Goliath will just reattach his head, dust himself off, and pummel David into chalk dust next season.

 

Dazed and Confused and Sweaty

I head out for my morning run at 9. Betty the partridge in a beech tree is sitting anxiously on her speckled eggs. The leaf blowers drone on, blowing wet leaves down the street so that tomorrow they can blow the leaves back across the street.  I stretch my arms, pump my legs, and head out.

After it rains, LA is a freshly polished diamond. Clouds hover over the mountains. Just beneath them, there’s a fresh dusting of snow. I turn the corner and head up the street.

Around the corner, there’s a group of guys sitting under the shade of a tree.

“Hey brother,” one of them says to me.

“Hey.”

He holds up his hand. In between two fingers, he’s holding a blunt the size of a pen. He says, “You smoke kush?”

“No.”

And I run on.

WTF. Did that really just happen?

It dawns on me that I have never once had the urge to try marijuana. I think about that and then remember that just moments before running into the High Times gang, I was imagining what it would be like if giant robots attacked the mall down the road.

Clearly, I don’t need to expand my mind.

Then, it further dawns on me that I have never smoked anything. Of any kind. Part of that is due in part to schoolroom lessons where we saw the blackened, charred lungs of smokers. They were like sponges dipped in charcoal. That terrified me. I didn’t want coal lungs. And then I moved to Los Angeles. Ten years here and my lungs probably look like that just from breathing. What would they look like if I smoked? For some reason, I think of burnt pork ribs.

 

Camping in a U2 Album is windy and cold

Where Joshua tree ranks on the national park hierarchy.

Last weekend, the missus and I drove our dusty little Honda Fit, filled to the brim with firewood, sleeping bags, tofurky and drinking water, up into Joshua Tree National Park. A little over two hours outside the hazy confines of Los Angeles, it’s a nice little weekend jaunt.

Just outside the park, we pulled into the visitor’s center where I found the above monopoly board. Monopoly has a monopoly on cashing on random crap. I even a board with the theme of Bass fishing one time. Bass fishing! My heart sank just a little, like it was tucked into a muddy puddle, when I saw that Joshua Tree got so little respect. Park Place and Boardwalk were Yosemite and Yellowstone, undoubtedly the crown jewels of the National Park System. But Joshua Tree gets ghettotastic Baltic Avenue? Oh no, I thought, we are slumming it this weekend.

But then we got into the park, and I was very pleased to see that being the Baltic Avenue of National Parks still pretty much means we were camping in a place that was 99% more beautiful than anything else on this planet. This was high desert at its finest.

Skull Rock, amidst a graveyard of boulders.

Rocks were everywhere. They lined the entrance to the park like grand portcullises to a castle. We drove into our campground, Indian Cove. Our tent site, reserved weeks ago, was neatly nestled into the side of a rock. We had a fire pit, a table and a nearby restroom. Being that this was the desert, the restroom was little more than a molded toilet seat over a hole filled with stratified layers of toilet paper caked in…well, I don’t need to talk about this. I just think it’s fun to wax poetic about poop. It’s worth mentioning that the first time I was in there, I had nightmares of my wedding ring slipping off my finger and falling into that crevasse of filth. I wasn’t sure what I’d do if that happened, so I kept my fingers clenched tight until the business was finished.

Michelle doing her best impersonation of a cute lizard.

I have no hesitation in saying that Michelle is more rugged than me. Right now, we’re what you call “aspiring campers.” This means that we like the general idea of the outdoors and we like the idea of camping, but we still have a lot to learn about the method of good camping. There’s a certain art to “roughing it” that takes time to master.

A good tent is essential. Which we botched. Our tent, a cheapish Coleman Hooligan tent with an orange rain fly, looked hardcore from the outside. It was nylon tortoise hugging the ground in pictures. In reality, it came in two parts. The outer rain fly covered the inner tent, which had bug screen walls…and that’s it. Not the ideal shelter for the high winds of the desert.

Also essential is good light. We didn’t have this either, because the cheap lantern we brought crapped out immediately after I turned it on. That first night, we tried tying a bike light I had stashed in my bag to a guide line of the tent, then hanging it over so we could read. We would have had better luck if we just tried to read under the light of the full moon hanging over our heads. Which I was tempted to do. The wind drove me back into the warm-ish confines of my sleeping bag.

Bad things always come in threes, and of course, the stove we bought nearly incinerated the thin, stainless steel cooking pans we brought alone to reheat our carefully blended mixes of ground turkey, rice and onions. Half the rice was charred, melted right into the bottom of the pans.

We were posers that first night. We roughed it too roughly.

Flowers over a viewpoint. I thought they looked like spaceships.

A whole bunch of Joshua trees…and one Kevin tree photobombing.

In the daylight, though, Joshua Tree was well worth the discomforts of the night. It looks like every western you’ve ever seen. Probably because this is just outside Los Angeles and nearly every western was probably filmed here. Every cheesy Martian sci-fi movie, too.

We hiked all day, climbing over rocks and discovering caveman petroglyphs. We looked down over the Coachella Valley and saw a hillside of windmills. We watched rock climbers building a slack line. We yelled at Boy Scouts, who had speakers blaring out dubstep that echoed off the rocks.

And then we spent another night in our Hooligan tent, trying to stay warm and not complaining because we were “tough.” It was a weekend well spent.

Fun times at the laundromat

I have a love/hate relationship with the laundromat. On the one hand, I love having clean clothes. On the other, I hate having to wash dirty clothes in order to have clean clothes. Something that adds to the fabric softened flavor is the random things that tend to happen once inside those dryer-festooned walls.

Take, for instance, the other day. I’m washing, drying and folding the laundry from the past MONTH that me and my wife have neglected. I’m sitting there, haphazardly folding my shirts in gigantic piles that are beginning to rise up above my head. This man comes up to me, casually hoists his arms up on top of the bar of my laundry cart like we’re going to catch up or something, and asks me for money for a pair of shoes.

“I need ten to twenty dollars to buy shoes for work,” he says. He’s stammering. His words are well rehearsed, like he practiced his approach outside. He even does this little side shuffle and foot flip to show me that his current shoes are not non-slip and therefore inadequate.

Smart play, dude. Smart play all around. Asking for change in a laundromat is probably the best place anyone could every ask for change. It’s kind of hard to say you don’t have any change when you continually have to hoist your sweatpants up because the wad of quarters in your left pocket is weighing them down like an anchor.

So I give him some change. 75 cents to be exact. The man promptly turns around, walks over to an ancient vending machine and deposits those three quarters into the machine. The clunk clunk clunk of the can of 7up dropping into the receptacle is a dead-on match for my jaw dropping.

What the?

The man turns around, walks back up to me, and without any shame, asks, “Do you have twenty dollars so I can get a pair of shoes?”

“No man! I just gave you some money for that!”

“It wasn’t enough.”

“You should have saved it. I don’t have anymore.”

“Oh yeah.”

Facepalm. He walks out of the laundromat, takes a chug of his ill-gotten 7up and makes a beeline for the Pavilion’s down the street. I continue folding my clothes, and decide that I’m going to begin saving my quarters too.

For a house with a washer and dryer.

How puppies can kill guns and other thoughts on the gun control debate

Yup, this about sums up my argument.

A couple of nights ago, I had an awesome dream. In my dream, I stayed up all night not sleeping and not dreaming because I was inventing a new, revolutionary, earth-shattering gun. I worked on it tirelessly throughout the night, and in the morning, I took my gun to the nearest gun store.

“Would you like to sell my gun?” I asked. “It’s going to change the world.”

“That’s a bold claim,” said the gun owner who looked like Burt Reynolds. “What’s so special about it?”

Smiling, I raise my awesome gun, aim it at the rack of guns on the wall, and fire. BANG! Out of the barrel, a rainbow beam shoots across the room. When it hits a shotgun, the shotgun transforms into a puppy. I shoot another rainbow at a pistol. BANG! Puppy. Rifle? BANG. Puppy. Burt Reynolds dream gun storeowner? BANG!…Nothing but rainbows.

“Holy hell!” Rainbow Burt Reynolds says. “That really might just change the world.”

And then we start a fund on kickstarter to start a gunpuppy pet store. We open our first store in California, rapidly expand nationally, then internationally. I’m like King Midas, except every gun I shoot turns into a puppy.

And the world is at peace…

Can we all agree that my puppygun is the best possible scenario in the gun control debate? Okay. Cool. Moving on.

Seeing as how puppyguns are only a figment of my imagination, I’ve been thinking about some realistic solutions to the problem of gun control. Because by and large, most of the potential solutions seem about as realistic and practical as my dreams. For further analysis, let’s look at some common stances.

1.    The over-reacting liberal: Guns should be illegal to own.

While this idea isn’t nearly as fun as the puppygun, it follows the same basic idea. If no one has any guns, then no one can fire any guns. It makes sense…if we were beginning an international colony on the moon or discovered Stargate technology and began terraforming other planets. This world already has guns, and they’re not going to go away. Particularly in a country where the right to own a gun is central to the founding of that country. America is a nation of rebels. And rebels have guns. The 2^nd amendment will never be changed. Move along.

2.    The paranoid conservative: We need guns to protect against a tyrannical government/criminals/zombies?

Huh. Okay. Let’s assume a Red Dawn Scenario happens and everyone is Patrick Swayze.  A foreign country invades your neighborhood and you’re bunkered in a Jack in the Box. You see a soldier on patrol coming down the street. He doesn’t see you because you’re behind a cash register and…BANG! Combo meal right between the eyes. Tango down. You pump your fists and then get incinerated in an explosion from a cannon shot from a tank.

When the founding fathers wrote the 2^nd amendment, there were muskets, cannons and sailboats. The range of weaponry was fairly limited.

Nowadays, we have tanks, drones, helicopters, jets and nuclear missiles. If there were a cage match between an American suburb and a military unit, ANY military unit, it would be a complete bloodbath. It would be like Lebron James and the Miami Heat squaring off against a fifth grade AAU team. On 8 foot rims. And with Dwayne Wade in full douchebag, nut tapping mode.

And if it is our government being tyrannical, as I’ve heard some say Obama plans to do, who is actually going to do the taking over? Last time I checked, the American military has American soldiers, raised in normal American towns. There is no Sparta. There is no warrior state where soldiers are trained from birth to follow orders. What soldier is going to follow orders to attack American territory? Maybe a clone, following order 66. Barring that, I think we’re safe. If we’re not, and America is overthrown by America, then we’re all doomed. Because that means democracy has failed.

Criminals? Okay. Obviously, criminals are going to have guns because they’re, um, criminals. The common argument I hear is that if criminals have assault rifles, then everyone else should be allowed to have them as well. However, in an arms race between criminals and ordinary citizens, here is what happens. People want guns to protect themselves against criminals. People are people so naturally they want the best money can buy. Assault rifles skyrocket in production. Gun manufacturers profit. People get assault rifles. Criminals siphon assault rifles along the supply line and more assault rifles enter the black market.

Zombies? You have a point.

3.    The WTF?: We should allow armed teachers in school.

The first time I read about this idea, I vomited a lot in my heart. This idea is the winner of the “Worst Possible Solutions to a Problem” Reality TV show that I just made up in my head. Just…on a fundamental level, guns do not belong in the educational system of a free society. On a practical one, there is so, so, so much potential for disaster. Where does the teacher or guard keep their sidearms? On their side? In a building full of teenagers? Yeah…that sounds like a good plan. And let’s say there is a crisis. What is the teacher supposed to do? What’s their tactical strategy? What’s their plan? Their training? And please don’t say they’ll get extra training in tactical situations so they’ll know what to do. Look, I’m trained in CPR and first aid on an annual basis for my job. I know what to do, and I also know that in the event of an emergency, I’m going to screw something up. That’s because I don’t have any real world experience in handling life-threatening emergencies. I’m not a paramedic. Likewise, a teacher is not a soldier. And a school is not a combat theater.

I hate this idea. I want to puppygun it in the face.

4.    The blamer: It’s ______________ fault.

Take your pick. Violent video games.  Lack of sensitivity to violence. Psychotropic medication. Culture.  Mental illness. Lack of good parenting. Gun free zones. The economy, etc, etc.

Trying to blame any one thing is both a cop out and a distraction. I don’t buy the excuse that it’s violent video games or violence in society. Human beings are inherently violent and have always been so. We’re one little protein away from being a chimpanzee. And an adult chimpanzee is a murdering rapist who will tear your dick off at the earliest convenience. We are not much better. And as the planet fills up with more and more of us, violence is inevitable.

Life is not an algebra equation. While most mass shootings have several similarities, there is no formula to figure out. It’s simply not that simple. The only thing that fits in the blank up there is “Yes, all of the above. And more.” Human beings are complex. Why should we expect our behaviors to be simple and easy to understand?

5. Actual real things

All that said, what can we do to help prevent future Sandy Hooks? Obama’s plan is a start. The ban on assault weapons probably won’t happen and increased vigilance regarding school security and emergency planning is a must.

Mental health is the key. It’s no coincidence that a lot of these recent shooters are in their early twenties. This is usually the biggest danger zone for the mentally ill, particularly when you consider a lot of mental illnesses don’t fully kick in until the onset of adulthood. And wouldn’t you know it, just as a lot of these young adults start to experience mental illnesses they weren’t even aware they had, they exit the public school system where it’s the easiest to detect.

I roll my eyes every time I read about the perpetrator of these horrible things. Part of the roll is to avoid reading about them because I can’t stand when the media draws attention to the criminal and not those who suffer from their crimes. The other part is because there’s always the random interviewee stating something like, “He was just so quiet. He seemed like such a nice guy.”

Yeah, but did anyone notice that this nice guy was relentlessly bullied? Did anyone notice that he was socially awkward (Asperger’s), or that he sometimes soiled himself in school (molestation)? Did anyone know that he liked to hurt animals (sociopath) or that he didn’t seem to care about anyone or have any empathy (conduct disorder)?

My dream is that eventually the only guns out there are puppyguns or on tv screens. Eventually may be a long, long time away, but the start of that eventually has to better than the present reality of idiocy and political bipolarity between a bunch of children in ties who just want their ball and only their ball. It’s getting old.

Start with mental health. Start with better background checks on gun sales and close the ridiculous loopholes where people can sell guns at gun shows with little to no accountability. Start somewhere. Dreams can come later.

 

I lost my phone in the desert and made it out alive

A little over a month ago, my iphone slipped out of my pocket and I lost it forever.

We were on our way to Vegas for a weekend. It was already memorable after a wrong turn on the 15. After getting gas in Baker, Michelle claimed she didn’t see the onramp to the 15 north and we hopped back on the 15 south. No big deal. Just a quick stop at the next exit and we could reroute. Except the next exit was Zyyxx road (yes, that’s really what it’s called) and it was about 5 miles away. Ten miles later and we were back to the gas station, pointing towards Vegas.

Except we stopped once more, in Primm. I wanted to ride Desperado, this giga coaster towering above Buffalo Bill’s casino. When we park the car, I briefly consider leaving my phone in the car, but decide against it because I want to take pictures.

Pictures you’ll never see, because somewhere between the incline hill and the last double helix into a stucco cavern, the phone slipped out of my pocket and fell to its untimely death.

This was the first and only time I lost my phone, and it was gone forever.

I spent the weekend kicking myself up and down Vegas Boulevard.

After doing some research, I found out I was eligible for an upgrade and thus did not have to pay for a full priced iphone. Rather than do this, though, I decided to wait until the new iphone came out in the fall so as not to be behind the inevitable tech curve. Smartphones are pretty dumb when it comes to not becoming obsolete when the next phone comes out.

The phone I have right now is anything but smart. It has buttons. It has a color screen. It can make and receive calls. I can text by pressing combinations of the numbers 1 through 9. It’s about as basic as you can get.

And…it’s all right. I’m fine. I might say I’m getting by, but really, come on. What does that even mean? People talk this when they lose important pieces of technology like they’re surviving without it.

I know I talked like this. I felt lost without constant access to my emails. To blogs. To Monsters Ate my Condo.

At first, I felt angry at myself for being so stupid. Then I felt depressed. Then I accepted. It was a truncated grieving process. I was attached to that phone far more than I realized. It’s true for a lot of people, isn’t it?
How many people have you seen in coffee shops with white earbuds plugged into their heads like their power sockets? How many times have you been in a circle of friends with each friend staring at a tiny glowing screen?

It strikes me as ironic that devices with the potential to connect us to the world are often used to uphold our very carefully constructed personal bubbles.

But the more time passed without my precious technology, the more I realized how much I didn’t need what I thought I needed. To a very basic point, I know that I don’t need a smartphone like I need food or water or shelter. It’s not essential to the basic necessities of life, but this is the first world, and first world problems tend to take on greater significance when things don’t go according to plan. What was I going to do? What about my information? My apps? My photos? My contacts?

When I told people I lost my phone on a roller coaster, they reacted like I just told them my dog died.

Needless to say, I will be buying a new phone whenever apple announces the iphone 5. I will also be investing in an insurance plan in case my phone decides to take any more freefalls into oblivion.

It’s just a tool. Something meant to be useful, not necessary.

What is absolutely not necessary is riding Desperado. It’s bumpy. It hurts your back. And it eats phones. DO NOT RIDE

But it’s just a tool. Something meant to be useful, not necessary.