The New Insecure Male Phallic Symbol

Since the dawn of time, men have felt it necessary to assert their male ego utilizing objects that show not only status, but that their “status” is bigger and better than other males.

In the cave man beginnings was the club. Then it became the sword. Then it was a gun. As we progressed into the previous century it became more intricate. Cars come to mind as the most prevalent of them. Now that we are in the 21st Century, it has moved to tech items – pocket games, iPods, laptops; all to show off status and to prove their “manhood” to other males. But none of them compare to the latest insecure male phallic symbol – the Bluetooth headset.

You see them everywhere; at the grocers, the shopping mall, at sporting events, the movie theater…all blinking their little blue LEDs. At times their wearer is deep in conversation, most times giving the appearance of mental instability as they seem to be talking to themselves. And each time I see one, it is worn by a male. I’m waiting for the day I actually see a woman wearing one. When I do, then I will truly wonder what “status” they are telegraphing with it.

I own a Bluetooth headset…actually two of them. I have two for the sole purpose of having one fully charged when the other one’s battery dies. They are small, inconspicuous ones, only an inch in length. I got them several years ago, way before the latest boom. Since I drive a stick shift, they are handy in taking a call while driving, not to mention that it is much safer driving with one.

Sometimes I use them at work so I can be “hands free” while using the computer, especially when I was booking guests for the morning show. People would joke, “You must be somebody important having to wear one.” So, whenever I am not on a call when I’m not driving, I turn it off and take it out of my ear.

It seems as of late that these Bluetooth headsets are becoming more like phallic symbols, increasing in size and number of features. Bigger with more blinking lights on them, some even with shiny chrome trim. All reminiscent of the hot rods that we souped up back in high school and college. And it’s obvious why guys get these…to have one bigger and better than everyone else to either state how “important” they are or to make up for their “short comings”.

Last week, I saw the largest Bluetooth headset ever, worn by the new “sheriff” in town at the station…the man who would tell me that they weren’t “retaining my services”. The thing was huge, hanging off his ear like a sideways icicle off a gutter in the winter, extending from his ear to just a fraction away from the side of his mouth. It looked like the facial tattoo Mike Tyson got years ago…so obvious that you couldn’t help but notice it. The thing was as big as the headset microphone Jesse Goldberg-Strassler wears in the booth when he is the radio voice of Lansing Lugnuts games.

All the time while wearing it, the new “sheriff” wasn’t on a call. He was just wearing it, seeming to do so to show it off. He was strolling the halls, talking to others, but not into the phone/headset. All the while smiling.

It makes me wonder in this case…is such a headset a statement of “importance”, or is it a way to make up for “short comings”?

The Toilet Paper Doppelganger

Being a single dad can be fun, but a lot of times it is exhausting. After time in at work and time with the kids there’s not much me time. What me time I do get I utilize to the fullest to enjoy things that I like…that are my life.

However, with such a hectic itinerary I tend to make shopping a low priority. Besides dealing with my packed schedule, the fact that I dislike large “super center” stores and their U-Scan lanes contribute to this prioritizing of shopping.

So, with this dislike in my psyche, I came home one night earlier this week from a long day. Along the way I was the strategist in taking care of the evening’s proclaimed tasks before settling in for the night; drop off leftovers at work for lunch the next day and pick up a pair of movie tickets for friends so that they can enjoy a movie out on me for their 1st wedding anniversary.

I get home after my extended time on the road, and like any single dad ran to the bathroom to seek relief from road rumble on my bladder. When I enter, I notice it immediately…the item I subconsciously put on the low priority rung of the ladder. I was out of toilet paper. So, with a sigh, I resigned myself to go back out in the car and make the quick drive to the local “super center” to get bathroom tissue on rolls.

Late evening trips to the super center store are always a joy; searching 10 minutes for a parking spot, being held up at the entrance by some fool standing in the middle of the entranceway staring up at the ceiling like they are lost and have never been in a super center ever before in their lives. And don’t get me started on trying to get past people waddling in the middle of the aisle, pushing their shopping cart at a negative 2 MPH.

I get to the aisle with the toilet paper, grab a Charmin™ 12 pack of double roll size because it’s on sale, and spin to head towards the registers up front. It was on the way to check out that I had an unnerving experience.

Halfway up to the check out, a man turns into the aisle in front of me. At first I don’t pay attention and continue my stride. But as I continue to head up front a cascade of thoughts hit me as he’s walking in front of me. He has a green shirt on…just like mine. He’s wearing tan dress slacks…just like mine. And under his arm he is carrying a 12 pack double roll size package of bathroom tissue that is on sale…just like mine! And in that moment, I came to the realization that walking in front of me was MY TOILET PAPER SHOPPING DOPPELGANGER!!!

A warning light flashed in my mind. He and I were walking in perfect lockstep…like marching in formation in the infantry. My brain flashed back to Air Force Basic Training in San Antonio and my T.I. with the thick Mexican accent as he called off cadence while we did marching drills. He also used to tell us constantly to “keep yur choos pit chined” (Keep your shoes spit-shined) and to not take forever in the latrine in the morning when we went to “chit and chave” (obvious…do I need to translate?). Add the fact we had similar clothes on and both of us the same 12 pack of toilet paper under our left arm, and you have a weird visual.

This was too freaky of a coincidence for me to want to be affiliated with. People just can’t process seeing such an occurrence as this without jumping to some oddball opinion. I’m mimicking the guy in front of me. I’m lost and following him to lead me back to the parking lot. Or we’re a two-man space alien army from another planet come to deplete Earth of all its bathroom tissue. In less than a second my brain freaked out and put into effect a plan of evasive action…execute a bob, weave and navigate away.

I immediately ducked left through the pallet sale items in the middle of the main aisle, nearly knocking over a methodically and artistically stacked mountain of chicken noodle soup cans – something some employee took hours of his day to create. Unfortunately, the maneuver put me in the path of a large woman in a power chair nearly running me over.

I then took the long way to the checkouts, into the frozen foods, through produce, a quick trot through the cleaning products aisle where I find they actually carry the replacement bulbs for my lava lamp, up through produce and past the bakery. The U-Scan is up ahead and no sign of my doppelganger. Home free!

As I stand in line for the U-Scan, I notice a young woman looking at me and smiling. So I smile back. Then, she smiles even bigger. I begin to wonder if she is really smiling back at me or someone else? My brain tells me to turn around and look behind me. Right behind me in line is my toilet paper doppelganger, smiling back at the young woman.

Automatically, my eyes darted to the ground. Of course, my “choos were pit chined”.

Do we really know everything?

It seems that we always have the right answers. However, it also seems we don’t use them to make the right decisions.

The previous stream of semi-conscious thought came on me this weekend like the first pain you feel when you realize you have a bad sunburn. And it gave me revelation, an epiphany of sorts.

It spawned from a conversation I had with my kids in the car on the way home from school Friday. The elder twin Jason needs to pass a test in Central and South America geography in order to “graduate” to 7th grade. So I started quizzing capitals of countries.

“What’s the capital of Argentina?” I fired.

“Buenos Aries.” He replied.

“Panama?”

“Panama City.”

“Nicaragua?”

A slight pause, “Ummm….Manyana?”

I smirked, “Close, but no cigar. Managua. The capital of Peru?”

Now Jason was stumped. You could see the cogs of his mind grinding away like someone trying to shift a manual 5-speed transmission into 1st gear without depressing the clutch.

“Lima.” I revealed, after seeing enough facial contortion from Jason racking his brain before I lost self-control and began to laugh out loud.

“I knew that!” Jason retorted, as if to imply I hadn’t given him enough time to answer. Hey, you only get 10 seconds to answer on Jeopardy. I gave him nearly 20.

From my view, the state of everything lately has become a big realization that we all knew the answers but failed to apply them. There’s the credit crisis of extending more than what people could pay off, then Washington bailing them out with a little “nod, nod, wink, wink”. Then the automotive sector gloom and doom. We keep saying we knew the answers, yet we still are in this mess.

Banks were overextending credit back in the mid to late 1920s that people couldn’t pay back. And anyone who paid attention in American History class knows what happened back then. Not to say things are as bad as during the Great Depression…yet. But things are pretty screwed up economically right now.

As a kid in school I remember several teachers over the years say the same quote, “As GM goes, so goes the nation.” Growing up in the Detroit area you were aware of GM’s standing in the economic stream; the number one corporation in the world. Yet the same cats in Washington that swooped in to save the financial sector are balking at the same swooping in to save the auto industry.

The reality is that we as a planet have progressed beyond any stretch of the imagination in just the past 150 years. Photography, telephony, motion pictures, recorded audio, video, satellites, computers, the Internet, breakthroughs in health and science and space exploration have been the meteoric rise of progress we have all seemed to grow accustomed to. Hell, we even have radio-controlled cars and battery powered toothbrushes! The rub it seems is that we can’t come up with a solution to keep things moving forward without backsliding every so often.

Part of backsliding is obsolescence that progress brings. The cotton gin did away with the hundreds of man-hours to separate cottonseed from raw cotton fibers. Slide rules met their maker with the advent of the hand-held electronic scientific calculator. And of course, digital audio recording, delivery and storage made boom boxes so passé. Everybody has their iPods now…even me. Too bad that hasn’t affected those “thump rides” that vibrate the entire house at 3 AM when they drive by…sometimes so much the windows rattle.

However, this is not the case across the board. Television didn’t cripple the movie industry like they said it would in the 1950s. Wendy’s hasn’t put Burger King out of business. And when I cook on the grill, I still prefer charcoal over LP gas.

I lived an adventurous life. One far from perfect, I had to climb and scrap for a lot of footing I’ve gained over the years…learning a lot of things by trial and error. Not listening to parental advice, making bad choices, relationships, fatherhood and divorce. But since I’ve been through all that life experience knowledge from the School of Hard Knocks, I have no excuse to not know the answers to the tough questions I have right now. Do I pursue a relationship with a woman again? Do I take on new creative projects that are a bit outside my current platforms? Do I switch to boxers from briefs?

By George, this could be the breakthrough I’ve been looking for all these years!...

…or maybe not.

Being single can suck

This past Tuesday marked the third anniversary of my return to single-dom…if that’s even a word. Not a momentous occasion by any stretch of the imagination.

There are no greeting cards for the anniversary of becoming single again. I could just see one in my mind’s eye, sitting in the rack in the card aisle at Meijer. The outside: “Happy Anniversary on being single…” Inside: “…LOSER!” You don’t get a cake, either, though you should. One of those Bill Knapps chocolate cakes with decorative frosting on top depicting a forehead with the universal thumb-and-forefinger at 90-degrees sign. You could market that and it would probably be a hot seller.

Best that one celebrating one’s anniversary of single-ness can do is go out and get drunk. Fortunately, this past Tuesday was St. Patrick’s Day. Which makes my anniversary of single-dom an international holiday where drinking is the acceptable celebratory behavior around the global community. Unfortunately, I had to do the radio thing the next morning and be as always sharp on my game, so the usual Bloody Mary was out. Thus my invention – the non-alcoholic Bloody Mary. Red Bull and V-8. Red Bull for that extra kick to get you started on an early morning after a night of straight shots of Irish whiskey…V-8 to help keep you regular through those same whiskey shots. Yummy.

After the morning show I like to go outside and decompress by watching the squirrels that live behind the station across the street in the woods. The same squirrels that Tim complains daily about on the show that pilfer food from his beloved bird feeder. The morning after my single-dom anniversary celebration of mirth and madness, I was witness to the aforementioned squirrels engaged in mating rituals. Though I'm normally unperturbed by my single-ness, I felt a twinge of jealousy. So, I yelled at them "Get a room!” They looked up at me for a second with an expression of annoyance as if to say, “Excuse me?!?” then continued on with their moment of raw animal husbandry.

As a single person, society and the trappings of media indoctrination has trained me to feel this way about my single-ness. I mean, look at Disney movies, which, unfortunately, I do quite a bit since not only am I single but a single dad whose kids love to go to these flicks. Whenever love is a focal point of the movie’s plot…which is about 95% of these vehicles…how many friggin’ animals are chasing each other? As least in Disney movies, they aren’t humping each other like crazed, sex starved rabbits on a mission to overpopulate the world. This is what Animal Planet on cable is for. This is why I don’t watch Animal Planet…I’d be throwing things at my TV.

You see, my problem with being single is that whenever I am interested in a woman, I wind up in the proverbial hell of single-dom known as “The Friend Zone”. And, of course, everyone around you has advice for you on how to beat this. Usually these well-meaning folk are younger that you and try to play themselves off as wise sages on the subject of getting the girl and having tons of sex. “You’ve gotta be the Alpha male, dude!” they say. Or “Let them pursue you.” No kidding! Having more years in the game than these wise sages for friends I’ve gone both routes, even using both in the same pursuit. Neither strategy has been a winner.

You can argue all you want…but men and women both want the same thing. The pinnacle of relationships. Finding a special person that is the perfect one, the perfect chemistry between the two of you, connection on all levels, and the most glorious sex two people could ever have for the rest of their natural lives. Dream on, people!!! In actuality our psyches tend to screw things up for us, thus rendering us clueless at times on how to pursue each other.

Guys tend to go overboard once they have experienced the “pretty parts” of a woman first-hand, and begin wearing their hearts on their sleeve, or as my uncle used to say, “…start thinking with the wrong head.” Then, blam! Women begin to think that all we want is the sex, even though deep down women do enjoy sex. And guys become all dejected and go home to porn and whiskey.

Or we tend to go after the wrong types. This usually is when we go after someone that doesn’t fit our criteria. Or someone who is not as into us as we first thought. The result? We then sabotage a potential good relationship that comes along with our fear that it will go bad. Then usually find a relationship that will eventually turn out bad. Problem here is once we wake up to this, the potential good relationship we blew off for the one we thought would be good, but went south, is now a gone prospect. Then we revert to spending the lonely evenings at home. Guys… booze and porn. Women…chocolate (or wine) and romance novels (or “chick flick” movie rentals)…which is just a woman’s version of booze and porn.

A guy meets a woman and they become friends. They get along great, go out on a social endeavor and wind up spending the night together. They seem to become close, until the dude expresses that always emotion-evoking sentiment “I love you”. Either in actual words or in actions. Then, all of a sudden it becomes a game of ying-yang. First she plays the “I’m just not that into you” card. Then the next moment spills her guts on what she wants in a relationship. Then, shazam! On to another guy and the first guy is given the silent treatment and treated like he’s not even a friend. Basically she’s stating to the first guy, “Well, now I have to find a new best friend." In my world that would tell me that I’m actually the one who needs to get a new best friend. Thanks for the heads-up. So much for the "got to be friends before you can be lovers" saying we've been fed by the likes of Delilah and other relationship experts.

So this weekend, I’m going to a Disney flick at the theater, and when the ‘love’ scenes come on, I’m throwing things at the screen. Then I’m taking a rifle to the station on Monday and have target practice on the frisky squirrels.

As my uncle used to say, “Women…you can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em, and you can’t shoot ‘em.”

Bringing back the old WWE days...

A courthouse in Clearwater, Florida was the scene of an old WWE-styled trash talkin' as Hulk Hogan (real name: Terry Bollea) took on his estranged wife's attorney Ray Rafool (gotta love the last name) in a verbal match while Rafool was talking to local reporters.

The spat started when lawyer Ray Rafool was answering questions about the divorce case for television cameras. He spoke after a hearing Thursday in which a judge granted the release of $225,000 in frozen assets for Hogan.

While Rafool spoke to the media, the towering Hogan tried to interject a comment from behind a row of cameras and reporters, and that's when the verbal smacking began:

Rafool: "Are you gonna to wrestle with me here? Are you gonna come across the cameras? Then be quiet."

Hogan: "It's a free world..."

Rafool: "No, it's not a free world, it's called professionalism."

Rafool (who had recently accepted an autograph from Hogan for his son, then delivered the stinging verbal blow that would rankle any World Wrestling Entertainment wrestler): "You're an actor. You're acting now."

Hogan (keeping his cool): "I hope your son enjoys the autograph. Thank you Hulkamaniac brother."

Then Hogan's attorney joined in and continued arguing with Rafool... just like any good WWE wrestler's manager would do.

I wonder if they have any of the old "Big Time Wrestling" shows out on DVD. The Shiek would clean both of these guy's clocks. Trust me... I know. He nearly kicked my butt years ago when I had him thrown out of a bar in Metro Detroit for being a drunken idiot.

A boy and his pet

Since the beginning of time, young boys have desired pets. However, once in awhile, the pet desired can be a bit out of our realm of understanding as far as an average pet.

I was not your 'average' boy growing up. Just ask my dad. He'll be sure to roll his eyes and say, "You've got that right!" I had a desired pet - a dachshund named Schätzchig (German for "Sweetheart"). Far from an average pet. Most of my friends had normal dog breeds - terrirer, Labrador, German Shepherd, Poodle - with normal names like Rover, Spot, Duke and Fifi. Not me. I had a wiener dog with a funny German name.

So when our Chocolate Lab, Cocoa, died this past summer, my kids were heartbroken. But, as kids are, they soon began to ask my ex and I if we could get another dog. The ex was not too keen on that idea.

My oldest twin boy Jason missed Cocoa the most. However, Jason has a unique taste in pets. Plus he has a "Dr. Doolittle" aire about him. He would capture fireflies, butterflies and frogs and was good at keeping them. He once caught a bird with his bare hands at age 4. As of late he has had some unique pets - crickets, hermit crabs and recently a box turtle.

So when Christmas came around, Jason asked for a pet. Not a dog, cat, hermit crab, turtle... or even a bird. He wanted a Leopard Gecko.

Jason first decided he wanted a Leopard Gecko this past summer not long after Cocoa died. I was doing a remote at the Oldtown Blues Festival for Classic Hits 92-X when an employee from the local pet store came down with a Monitor lizard. Jason was immediatly transfixed by the big lizard and began to ask the employee a ton of questions about the Monitor. The lizard guy told Jason that a good starter lizard to get would be a Gecko. Jason decided on a Leopard Gecko because "they look cool!"

So for this past Christmas, Jason got all the things he needed to keep a Gecko - terrerium tank, sand, heat lamps, dishes, calcium and all the equipment needed. Now all I have to get is the Gecko. I plan on doing this soon. Of course, the pet store where the Monitor Lizard guy works is the place Jason wants to get the Gecko, so that's where we will be purchasing it. After Christmas they ran out. A new shipment just recently came in, and now we are waiting for the 'observation period' to expire before the members of this new shipment of Geckos are available for purchase (one of the things I like about this pet store!).

And then, we can start a new chapter in pet history...a boy and his Leopard Gecko. Hopefully he won't name the thing Schätzchig.