Uncle Roger

My Uncle Roger, my mom’s little brother by six years, was, when I was growing up, one of the few sane adults in our family of extroverts and drunks.

Born during the year of the first big Wall Street crash in 1929, Roger’s main goal in life was safety. He wanted no surprises. He needed everything running smoothly. If order needed restoring, he would do everything in his power to restore it.

He was all about keeping control, probably because he grew up without a dad, around a pack of women and no shortage of loud chaos.  When I was a kid in the car with him, I knew it was my job to buckle my seatbelt and keep quiet. He wasn’t a hardass, he just made it clear he hated anything loud. And loud to him was about the same decibel level of kids yakking at each other.

While I didn’t get his need for quiet, his steady, controlled world was a welcome comfort to my two older sisters and myself. My dad, while loving and emotionally available when sober, was an alcoholic and an unreliable provider. As a kid, I always thought if anything ever happened to my mom, there was always Uncle Roger. I had no doubt he would take care of us if we needed a place to go.

But then, one of my sisters or me had a dream that he died. That possibility shook me up. Without him, I couldn’t see any safety net for we three. We’d be orphans for sure. The good thing was, it was only a bad dream. He was always there for many years, well into our adulthoods.  In fact, he was around until a few weeks ago, when he died at 82. He finally lost a nearly three-year battle with ALS.

I always liked being around Uncle Roger because he was always good for a few colorful stories.

One was of Gus, my dad’s older brother. Roger was fond of Gus and my dad, Henry. My dad married Lois, his sister and my mom. They all grew up together in the same neighborhood in Chicago near Wrigley Field. But Gus, as well as my dad and their sisters, were no strangers to high alcohol intake. And one time, Roger reported, Gus spent the night at his house, getting up at one point to pee. It wasn’t until some time later that Roger, still a kid at the time, discovered that Gus had filled up his Boy Scout’s canteen with some personal yellow liquid.

“Threw that in the garbage can,” said Roger, still wincing at the thought.

Roger always admired my dad. My dad served in the Navy in World War II, doing his tour in the South Pacific. And Roger, 12 years younger, followed in his footsteps. He served in the Navy in the early 50s, in Guam. He liked my dad’s humor and admired his creative abilities as a cabinetmaker and professional bass player.

“He can do anything with his hands,” he’d say about my dad, with no small bit of envy.

He told of a job he had as a bricklayer once. It didn’t last long.

“I couldn’t lay bricks in a straight line,” he said. “My wall would have veered into the next lot.”

Roger was always thin, athletic, medium height, auburn hair. He was a clean-cut man with beady brown eyes and a sharp featured, handsome face. He had the deep, resonant voice of a broadcaster, and did some radio announcing while in the Navy. He told one Navy story of reading copy over the air off a piece of paper that a prank-happy buddy decided to light on fire while he read. Roger was a focused guy, and became very determined whenever challenged. He was proud to report that he read through the whole message while the page burned, finishing before it was fully engulfed in flames.

Roger was a picky eater, and coming from a family that liked to cook and eat, he spent a lot of his time refusing repeated offers of food. I remember him more than a few times putting both palms out while saying, “No thanks.” His palms-out “halt” sign was an automatic response for him, his way of keeping a safe distance from things he didn’t like. He wanted nothing to do with cooking and eating fancy meals like those whipped up by my mom or others. His idea of a great dinner was soup and popcorn.

He and his big sister were polar opposites. She believed in home ownership, Roger believed in living in an apartment. She had kids. He never wanted kids. She loved to travel overseas. He wasn’t too wild about leaving the state. She liked Porsches, Audis, Volkswagens, Saabs. He liked Chevys, Fords and Oldsmobiles.

She loved the beach. He hated the beach. The beach at the ocean, he told me once, “Smells like a fish’s armpit.” My mom liked to party. He liked quiet and working crosswords. In fact, once at the beach when we yelled out, goofing around as kids, he told us to keep it down. Which annoyed me. I couldn’t understand it.

Still, he called me Tiger and paid me a buck to clean the sod and mud out of the cleats in his golf shoes.

He and my mom did have some things in common. They both liked nature and loved animals. And they both felt it very important to drive well-maintained, clean cars.

In the late 1940s Uncle Roger moved from Chicago to Burbank to live near his mom and step-dad, Bill Burns. He enrolled in business courses at UCLA and got himself a white and copper two-toned 1955 Chevy. In 1960 he married his first wife, Dottie, a pretty platinum blonde he met at a bus stop.

They lived in a Burbank apartment. Dottie had been a battered wife in a previous marriage. Her ex-husband was an alleged murderer, and she’d lost her kids, don’t know how many, to foster care. She looked at her marriage to Roger as her safe haven from the hellish life she’d lived.

She didn’t have a job, and preferred to sit on the end of their gold silk couch, chain smoke Herbert Tareyton filtered cigarettes, knit, drink tea with cream and sugar in it and watch soap operas – all day long, every day.

I know this because as a kid, when I was 7 or 8, a couple of times in the summer, my sisters and I took a Greyhound down from Tahoe to visit Roger and Dottie as our great adventure vacation away from home. I’d be bored in the apartment as she knitted and smoked and watched TV. So she took me along when she got her hair done, and when she went to the doctor. I waited for seemingly hours on end at the hair salon. Then I waited at the doctor’s office, then waited while she shoe shopped, where she flirted with a fawning shoe salesman. He couldn’t help fondling her bare foot with the delicate gold anklet on it. By then I was nearly comatose from the agonizing hours of stone cold boredom.

She must have felt guilty, because after this string of errands finally ended, she took me to a toy store and said I could get anything I wanted.

I was overwhelmed by the possibilities. It took me a long time to make a choice. But she waited for me. I got a mini plastic girder set to make little office buildings, bridges and streets, little metal cars and a small shiny palomino horse with a plastic Western saddle that snapped on under the horse’s belly.

 After the thrill of playing with those distractions wore off, I again found myself watching her smoke, knit, and drink her creamed and sugared tea while watching TV. I was so bored I asked her if she would teach me to knit, so I could knit a saddle blanket for my plastic horse. She didn’t bat an eye, and taught me the machinations of needles, yarn, knitting and purling. When my sisters heard of my knitting foray, they looked at me oddly. Apparently they thought my learning to knit wasn’t what normal boys did. I really didn’t care. I was bored, needed something to do. I knitted a miniature orange saddle blanket, and it turned out pretty nice. But that was enough for me. I hung up the knitting needles and yarn for good.

Roger took us to Pacific Ocean Park, a carnival with rides built on a pier at an LA beach. And he took me to Bat Night at a Dodger game. Every kid was given a bat, which they’ve long since stopped doing for understandable reasons. And of course, the bats were mercilessly pounded into the stadium concrete all game long by the sugar-riddled hyper kids, each dying to get enough room to really swing their new bats like the big leaguers do. Poor Uncle Roger probably considered the ceaseless pinging of bats banging down on concrete during Bat Night to be one of the worst experiences of his life.

He took us to the zoo in his brand new 1963 Chevy Impala, his company car that was replaced by a new model every two years. Dottie or Roger would take photos of us on these outings and Dottie would write witty captions on the backs of the photos in her neat penmanship. She’d make merry with comments when one of our heads were cut off by the edge of the shot. On the back of one unflattering photo of herself she wrote: “Mae West still trying.”

Coming home tired from his sales job, Roger bristled when he found out Dottie hadn’t bothered to make the bed. He needed order, and an unmade bed was a vexing sign of chaos to him. So, still in his shirt and tie, he’d fume and make the bed himself.

Once he and Dottie visited us in Tahoe for Christmas, and rented a vintage cabin with a large stone fireplace. They joined my parents, sisters and me on a road trip to a mountain top ski area that for some reason had some caged zoo animals on display: A loudly whooping chimpanzee and a disinterested lion.

It was sunny but cool with some snow still on the ground, and my fashion conscious mom wore a snug fitting lavender après ski outfit. Even though she didn’t ski much, with her long legs, bouffant hairdo and Jackie Kennedy sunglasses, she looked like she could pose for a magazine shot. Instead, as she walked past the lion’s cage, the lion turned around and shot a rocket-propelled stream of hot piss out of the cage. It arched about 20 feet, and landed with a direct splash on my mom and her outfit.

This sent her younger brother, Uncle Roger, into howling, catatonic laughter. He saw the surprised look on my mom’s face -- the post lion pee shot reaction -- and lost it. We kids weren’t sure if we should laugh or not. My mom was a tough customer and we didn’t want to incur her well known wrath. She didn’t seem to know what to do. It was one of the few times I can recall when my mom, who usually had something to say about everything, was speechless.

Roger howled mercilessly, and when he finally got his breath back, he blurted, “What are you going to tell the cleaners???!!!” then continued with his hyena-like laugh-jag.

Roger was a big fan of potty humor, which as a kid, I agreed, was incredibly hilarious. He once wrote the following in a neighbor’s joke sign-in book hanging on a string with a pen next to their toilet:

“House Rules: Anything weighing over six pounds must be let down with a rope.”

One Christmas card that Roger passed around showed Santa’s reindeer taking a smoke break on Christmas eve, standing on their hind legs like men, leaning against the big sleigh, sneering. The caption had one of them saying: “Here comes fatty and his big bag of crap.” My uncle laughed and laughed over that one.

Once while on a drive with him I told him how funny Cheech and Chong were. I said a line off one of their albums: “Happyhappyhappyhappy, aint too proud to bitch, onlymymamalovesme -- but she could be jivin’ too -- please welcome, Blind Melon Chitlin!”

He looked over at me, and broke up.

Roger and Dottie hosted Christmas at their rented Tahoe cabin, and Roger bought a Christmas tree so tall and wide it wouldn’t fit through the door of the cabin. This unexpected roadblock rattled Roger. He sprung into action. He got a saw, and with fierce determination, crawled on his belly and frantically sawed off the bigger lower branches, grunting and writhing under the tree in the doorway. We kids just watched, stunned by his intensity. Roger soon freed the tree from the door and once it was set up in the cabin’s living room, he happily turned things over to Dottie. As I remember, he was exhausted from the ordeal.

Dottie bought mountains of presents with Roger’s dough and showed us kids how to string popcorn and cranberries as garlands for the tree. She stuffed all our stockings with myriad little gifts that, to us, were magical. I got an ant farm, and still remember the miniature keychain pipe I got. For some reason, I was oddly fascinated by blowing air through it as I walked through all the debris of opened presents in my PJs, which had silly-ass slippers sewn into the PJ bottoms. My sister Lauren was ecstatic when she got a live white parakeet as a present. She named it Tootie after some goofy TV show screw-up cop.

Uncle Roger was unnerved by the mayhem of ripped open boxes and torn wrapping paper strewn everywhere around the tree on Christmas morning. He wanted none of it, and quickly made it his task to crumple up armfuls of cardboard and wrapping paper and throw them into the fire. It wasn’t long until he had it all feeding flames roaring halfway up the chimney. But because of Uncle Roger, the cabin floor reappeared, free of clutter. And for him, at least for the time being, order had been restored.

One time Uncle Roger came to Tahoe to ski, but on the night before he was to drive back to his LA job, it snowed a couple of feet. His luxury Chevy wasn’t too nimble in snow and icy conditions and it was parked at the top of our steep 100-foot driveway, buried under freshly fallen snow. He would have to back the Chevy down the driveway, then hope its tire chains would provide enough traction to make it up our steep street and over many miles of ice and snow-slicked roads leading out of the Sierra.

He panicked. He couldn’t stand the idea of being late back to work. All he knew was there was a whole lot of snow everywhere. There was only one thing he could think to do: Start shoveling.

He got a snow shovel and attacked the enemy, the snow, a man possessed. Snow flew off his shovel as if he were moving in fast forward. We all watched him from the kitchen window, but didn’t think there was much we could do to help. We weren’t in any hurry to shovel snow. We knew when it snowed this much, you better not plan on being anywhere in a hurry. Plus, we didn’t have to be back at work 500 miles away the next day. But somehow, Uncle Roger willed his path out of the snowbound mountains and drove back to LA. I think he was a day late. Which in itself was impressive. That was the thing about Uncle Roger. He got focused when the going was out of control and on the verge of making him blow a gasket. His focus was tempered in his steel will. It was his go-to weapon to deal with the chaos of life.

He divorced Dottie in 1966 and set about reinventing himself as an eligible bachelor in a Burbank singles apartment. He subscribed to Playboy magazine, equipped his bathroom with a tall can of Right Guard spray deodorant and a hair dryer, and occasionally even smoked cigars in his living room.

One summer afternoon it was family day at his apartment and kids were allowed to use the pool. I was 11 or 12. I told Roger I knew how to swim. He told me to swim across the pool for him and he’d watch. Of course I wanted to impress him. So I swam as fast as I could, wind-milling through the water, splashing and kicking violently. When I made it to the other side, completely winded, he looked down from poolside, laughing. “You just killed two people!” he said.

Later, a drunken, happy go lucky neighbor of Roger's was reeling around poolside and came up to us. Roger introduced me and quickly edged away. A few minutes later the guy saw me again away from the pool and for some reason – maybe he had a thing for little boys -- gave me a dollar. I told Roger about it and he had me hand over the dollar. As we walked away from the pool, Roger went up behind the guy and stuffed the buck in his back pocket. “He’ll find it in a few days and wonder where it came from,” said Roger as we walked out.

Roger was a thoughtful, loyal friend. But he hated public displays of affection. They creeped him out. When I graduated from college, my family threw a party for me and he attended. He was standing off by himself, looking like he would rather be anywhere else. My girlfriend at the time said to me, “Go give him a hug!”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Aw c’mon,” she said. “Show him you love him!”

I knew that was a bad idea, because I knew my Uncle Roger hated that kind of thing.

But I’d had a few beers, so I thought, well hell, I do love my uncle, so I AM gonna give him a hug. As I approached him with my arms out, he stood bolt upright, his arms rigidly at his sides, terrified as I hugged him. His scared face told me he thought I was insane, capable of any number of dangerous acts. I awkwardly pulled away.

He once told me of a party he went to that turned out to be a disaster. As he was coming up the walkway, he said all he heard a desperate shriek: “Someone get the dog!” as he saw a big German Shepard bolting toward him. My uncle instinctively crouched and threw an uppercut which caught the dog right on the nose. The dog was seriously hurt, blood everywhere, they had to call a dog ambulance. The owner, horrified and infuriated by what had taken place, walked up and declared to Roger that he was going to punch him for what he’d done. Roger, adrenaline flowing, said if he did, that would be a bad idea. Because he’d sue. That made the man think again, and he cooled his jets.  Roger went home, feeling tortured by the ordeal. He loved animals. But not those he thought were about to tear his face off. He’d felt threatened, and did what he had to do. No doubt about it, when his back was against the wall, Uncle Roger was one wolverine who was perfectly willing to throw down, all out. It was just a bad idea to mess with him.

This was especially true if he was the victim of someone breaking the rules. He had no tolerance for people that assumed rules didn’t apply to them. He told me that once on a flight before smoking was banned in all seats, he asked a guy who lit up next to him to put out his cigarette, since they were in a no smoking section. The guy just kept smoking as if nothing had been said. Roger, getting upset even as he recounted the story, asked the stewardess to please tell the guy to put out the cigarette. She didn’t want to do it and clearly hoped Roger would just drop it. But that wasn’t going to happen. Not with my Uncle Roger.

Then Roger said to the stewardess with a quavering low tone that barely disguised a man on the verge of murdering someone with a spatula: “You really better have him put it out, or else he’s going to eat it!”

His declaration was convincing. The man hurriedly stubbed out the cigarette.

Uncle Roger also told me the story of hiking with buddies out in the wilderness somewhere with heavy backpacks and new fishing poles, when on a cliff side trail, they realized they were lost. This kind of out of control scenario really irked my uncle. He was driven closer to the edge, literally, when the guy hiking in front of him said they needed to turn around and go back. His sudden and awkward attempt to turn around on the narrow, treacherous path caused his fishing pole and backpack to get tangled in the brush on the uphill side of the trail. This meant to Roger that things were rapidly spinning out of control. He was just about to lose it. Then he lost it. He had a sudden solution. He pulled the tangled fishing pole off the guy’s backpack in front of him, gathered it with his own new pole pulled from his own backpack, and in a raging fury, tossed the collected gear into the abyss below.

They eventually found their way back, Roger no doubt fuming the whole way. Don’t know if he made good on the tossed poles.

And Uncle Roger couldn’t stand it if his car didn’t run right. If he detected the smallest irregularity, he’d drive the car straight to the shop. He once took his car to a mechanic in Tahoe. Roger knew the car’s timing was off by how it sounded on the road. He was impressed with the mechanic, who replaced his spark plug wires. His work left his car running “perfect,” sounding to Roger just the way he knew it should.

In Burbank, he told me he once took his car to a mechanic for some unknown problem he’d heard. He took it back several times, each time the mechanic telling him the fix was something different. But he still heard the problem and would take it back. The last time he took the car in, the mechanic said it was the same problem he'd told Roger on the first visit.

“Full circle,” said Uncle Roger, with a pained look. Not sure if the original problem was ever fixed.

When his Ford was stolen out of the garage of his apartment, he bought a new 1977 Oldsmobile Cutlass for $7,000. That was the same car he drove more than 30 years. He kept it in top condition, filled it up and ran it through the car wash every week, and put 177,000 miles on it. He re-upholstered it with the original fabric. When he couldn’t drive it anymore because of his ALS, he sold it to a collector for $4,700.

Years ago, I stayed at his place a week or so while transferring to a Southern California university. I’d gone through a rough patch and he saw I was moping. He didn’t judge me. He just said, “What’s important is what you do from here forward.” That was what my uncle did. He helped out. His gentle words stayed with me and got me to move on.

While I was staying with him, he drove me to the nearby neighborhood where my family lived when I was a baby. I only remembered it mainly through old movies and photos. He seemed to sense beforehand that I would be curious to see the old family place.

During that visit we shot the bull for the first time, man to man. He told me his favorite writer was Ralph Waldo Emerson. When the subject turned to making a living, he said he’d thought about going into journalism, but that it didn’t pay enough.

And he told me the hardest thing about having a job was getting a boss you could get along with. Apparently his boss did something to him that he really didn’t like while he was a salesman at an aerospace firm. He went to the big boss and told him to either get rid of his boss or he was gone.

Don’t know the outcome of that. But he eventually became a self-employed investment adviser. And I’m sure it was because he didn’t want to work for anybody but himself. And over the years, I learned Uncle Roger was right. An A-hole boss makes any job not so great.

When my parents were getting close to a divorce, Roger was my mom’s counselor. She’d phone him and he’d listen, offering his thoughts. His was the steady voice of reason, a calming influence to my mom as she tried to cope with my dad’s alcoholism and threats to kill himself if she divorced him.

She eventually met the local city manager and divorced my dad. After she met John, who became my step-dad, Roger joked, “I didn’t get any calls from her anymore.”

But he was always the go-to guy of the family. He set up Uncle Leonard, his Aunt Esther’s surviving husband, at Leisure World in Seal Beach after Uncle Leonard retired from his job in Chicago. Because of Roger, Uncle Leonard lived out his life in style. He got a girlfriend, and was glad to have the Southern California change from his lonely life in Chicago.

Roger also looked in on his step-dad, Bill Burns, who lived to be 97. The last husband of Roger’s late mom, Bill lived alone in his old age. And Roger also watched over Uncle Walter, his mom’s younger brother, who lived nearby. Uncle Walter lived to 95.

In 1974, while living in a Burbank singles apartment named Oakwood, Uncle Roger met Joan. Little did he know then, when he was 45, that she would be by his side until he died nearly 38 years later. He was at a Sunday night poolside barbecue with a girlfriend and noticed Joan, an attractive strawberry blonde, sitting nearby. He quickly dropped his girlfriend and started taking Joan out on tennis dates. But he didn’t have the patience to teach her how to play.

She told him, “You can teach me to play tennis, or date me, but you can’t do both.” So he chose the latter. They didn’t live together until 1985. Still, not wanting to move too fast, he waited until Valentine’s Day 1999 to marry her.

He came down with symptoms of ALS in November of 2009. The disease slowly takes away control of the body. It forced him down a terrifying path of physical decline. For nearly three years it withered him, a perfectly healthy man his whole life, before taking his last breath. Joan stood by him through the horror and agony of it all, giving him all the comfort she could, while they both awaited the inescapable outcome.

When I asked her how she was doing while caring for him, she was resigned to deal with what fate had delivered.

“What are you going to do?” she’d say. She couldn’t do anything else but care for Roger for as long as he needed it. If ever there was a definition of love, that’s it. He, no doubt, would have done the same for her. But he couldn’t bring himself to say “I love you,” to Joan, after she'd make the declaration to him. Instead, he’d reply, “Thank you.”

“I know you love me Roger,” she’d say. “Aren’t you ever going to tell me?”

“Maybe.”

It wasn't until his hospice care that he declared he didn’t believe in God, which was news to Joan. She asked why he’d insisted they get married in a church, but never got an answer. He was touched by final days visits by my two sisters, emotionally telling Joan afterward that they really cared about him. I wasn’t able to visit.

The last time I saw my Uncle Roger at my sister’s house, he was  physically uncomfortable and needed a lot of sleep. But I got a photo of him and Joan hugging, where he gave his patented silly grin. I made a point of telling him how I treasured all the times I had with him as a kid. He looked at me, deadpan and said, “I think you’re trying to tell me I’m a nice guy or something.”

Even compliments seemed to bug him a little.

When the end finally came, Joan posted the news to her Facebook friends:

“My beloved husband and companion of nearly 38 years passed away in his sleep from ALS this morning at 6 a.m. He was the best friend anyone could have and I will miss him forever.”

So will all his family and friends. Uncle Roger was a keeper.

Mark Eric Larson has written two books of essays, "The NERVE...of Some People's Kids," and "Don't Force it, Get a Bigger Hammer. To read, visit: 
http://www.scribd.com/Mark%20Eric%20Larson/shelf

Glogg: Quite possibly, a life changer

      I’ve been drinking glogg, a very potent mulled wine made with equal parts of heated red wine and aquavit, spiced with raisins, cloves, cinnamon sticks, almonds, cardamom, fire and sugar, every Christmas as far back as I can remember. Just to make sure you’re not drinking pure rocket fuel, you light it on fire in a saucepan and pour the flaming brew over a strainer full of cubed sugar, back into the pot, until the sugar is gone.

     This burns off some alcohol, but really, not much. This recipe came from my Mom’s side of the family. It may be the booziest recipe of glogg (there are many) ever invented by Swedes or other Scandinavians trying to warm up after freezing their asses off ice fishing, herding reindeer, or just being out in the freakin’ snow too long.

      My mom always fired up a batch every Christmas, because her mom always made it when she and my uncle Roger were growing up in Chicago. I’ve always associated it with delivering an always welcome pre-Christmas buzz (literally).  In fact, glogg-centric parties have been my way of keeping these warm feelings alive with any friends brave enough to try it. To me, it’s really not Christmas without downing some glogg.  The first sip offers a powerful vapor that snaps the head back. After that initial shock, the sips that follow go down smooth and easy. If anything can warm the cockles from the inside out, it’s this stuff.

       But it wasn’t until a Thanksgiving a few years ago that my uncle Roger (my mom’s younger brother who I hadn’t seen since college) told of the time when he was a teenager (in the 40s) in Chicago with his two buddies. It was Christmas season and he and his pals went over to his house where his mom was hosting a small party and serving glogg. She asked the boys if they wanted to try some of this heated up Swedish Christmas drink. Uncle Roger was very familiar with it and knew caution was called for. He and one of the friends said they’d have a little. The other friend announced he couldn’t have any because he didn’t drink alcohol. And besides, he was due later that night to deliver a sermon at his church.

       Now, I never met my grandmother, since she passed a year before I was born, but Uncle Roger hinted that she was a bit of a troublemaker. She ladled some of the raisins out of the saucepan of glogg and put them in a cup. Then she asked the young man if instead he’d like to try the raisins. Well sure, why not, he said, and started popping them down. Understand, raisins that have been drenched in glogg for a day or so, soak it up like a sponge. They lose their wrinkles and turn back into juicy grapes; and in this case, booze-infused grapes. This young fellow couldn’t get enough of the tasty glogg grapes. He downed several more supplied by my grandmother. After a time, Uncle Roger and the other friend suddenly realized they would have to drive this guy to his church sermon. He was too sloshed to get behind the wheel.

        Outside, it was freezing cold and snowing hard. They made it to the church, but the young sermon-giver was very late. He got out of the car and peered through the blowing snow up a long set of steps leading to the church. He struggled up them, vaguely seeing a figure at the top of the stairs.  Whoever it was seemed to be extremely angry.         

        As he finally made it to the top, he focused on the outline of his girlfriend, who screamed, “Where the blank have you been? Do you realize you’ve embarrassed me and the whole church is waiting for you? I’ve never been so humiliated!”

        The staggering young man gathered himself at the top of the stairs and focused her face. “Oh yeah?” he snarled.

        He punched her in the nose. Her blood flowed onto the new-fallen snow. She wailed in pain and horror, causing a crowd to rush out of the church. This incident caused such an uproar that the young man was shunned by his church. His already-won scholarship to seminary school was revoked. He was made an example to deter others from such irresponsible, drunken, brutish acts.

        And to this day, it remains a mystery whether the above incident changed this young man’s life for better, or for worse. Only the glogg spirits know for sure. 

Bored Sons of Riches

Buns: Ya know what pisses me off, Jimmer?

Jimmer: No idea, Buns. Throw me a bone. You’ve been waiting too long to get served at the bar? Hey, watch and learn: (To bartender) Hi, can I get a pint of the amber ale? Thanks.

Buns: I’ll tell you what gets me. Rich kids. But not just any rich kids. I’m talking about the ones that grow up and kill people for power and fame.

Jimmer: Oh really? This been bothering you for a long time? What are you drinking? You need a shot? I don’t know about you, but I’m gonna have the meatball sandwich. Hey, what about dictators that came from poverty?

B: Aw, they’re just barbarians from day one. They don’t know anything else. The rich shits can take the high road. But they’re so spoiled, I mean really, they grow up bored, with everything taken care of and they want to have their own identity. They’re warped enough to try for fame by killing people for a cause.

J: What have we here? A peasant with a petition? Who you talking about?

B: You know, like bin Laden, or further back a few decades, Che Guevara.

J: What about ‘em? Richie Riches that were sons of bitches? You gonna order anything, or what?

B: Pretty much rich bitches. I mean these guys were real assholes that knew better, but couldn’t resist stirring up shit to have a shot at martyrdom. As Snoop would say, theys mo’ ova bitch than a bitch. Both bin Laden and Che were rich kids. Both were self-appointed messiahs of underdog loser causes who used violence to get their points across.

J: Just to get famous?

B: Oh yeah! They loved cultivating the image of the rogue badass, leaders of the downtrodden.

J: Martyrs ‘R Them?

B: So they got a following, and just to make sure everybody knew they were for real, knocked off their enemies with surprise high profile violence. They figured that would get them media attention and punch their ticket to fame and notoriety.

J: Well, it kinda did. You gonna order or what, Bitch Bitcherson?

B: Yeah. (to the bartender) I’ll have a pint of the stout and the pork sliders, please. (back to Jimmer) That’s why these guys were such bad news. If you’re rich and want to be famous, what’s so bad about doing something good with your money and influence?

J: Well that’s easy. Doing good stuff is just a yawner, man. It’s the bad stuff that gets media attention. Why, if I’m not mistaken, it’s a well traveled career path to fame. It’s infinitely more exciting than being a no-name rich guy who donates to battered women’s shelters.

B: You like that beer?

J: Sure, not bad at all. Shoulda had a shot of Jameson’s first. But hey, what about other rich kids that rose to fame and power? Like Donald Trump. He didn’t go out and knock off enemies, he just bribed his way to his own prime-time TV show.

B: Yeah, but he’s a different strain of rich kid ego-freak. He doesn’t go out and kill enemies. He just bores em’ to death!

J: Yeah, lots of money, none taste, boorish, wants to be president. What’s that spell? Fuckhead. And what's with his hair? Looks like an elaborate squirrel's nest.

B: He thinks it’s cool to be a bullying asshole. Like when he fires people. He loves to tell people they suck, then calmly shove in the knife with his patented soft-spoken, yet murderously cold, “You’re fired.” I bet he spent hours practicing his “you’re fireds” in front of the mirror.

J: Gotta admit, makes for great TV.

B: Maybe for one or two times. Not after that. He’s deluded. He has no idea everybody sees him for what he is: a pompous prick with bad hair. He’s a circus act. He should wear tights.

J: Still, at least he didn’t decide to actually kill people to become famous.

B: Yeah, but if by some disastrous turn of events he became president of the United States, don’t worry, he’d be itchin’ to send the troops somewhere to kick some ass.

J: I can see that. Hey, check out that guy comin’ in in the Viking horns and animal skins. Now that’s a definite cry for help. Wanna split an order of sweet potato fries?

B: Yeah, I’m in.

J: OK then, Mr. Bitch against the rich, how about Bill Gates? He grew up rich. He got famous and a lot richer building his company into a dominator. But he’s a stone cold nerd, man. Hey, lovin’ the lady bartender. Comin’ this way.

B: (to bartender) Can I have an order of sweet potato fries? True, he didn’t kill anybody. But even with his high little balls-free voice, Big Bill was a boardroom badass. He built a billion dollar monopoly by buying or blowing out any companies in his way.

J: But at least now he’s using some of his chump change to knock out malaria in Africa.

B: Yeah, got to admit, that’s a pretty high road way to get a tax write-off.

J: So OK Big Boy, what about bin Laden?

B: He was lost in the crowd of a shit-load of kids born to a Saudi royal. His family had a successful construction company. Filthy rich.

J: Must have been bored.

B: Totally, he wanted some action. He hated the American influence in the Middle East and he hated Israel. So he made them his personal enemies.

J: Must have hired an image-maker to show him how to be John Wayne in robes so he could stand up to America. Leak footage of his bad self, smiling and firing AK47s, serenely showing eager young recruits how to get their violence on.

B: He wanted to become the biggest, baddest leader in the Middle East. So he kills thousands of Americans with sneak attacks and goes into hiding.

J: What a brave man. Well, he could run, but in the end, he couldn’t hide.

B: No, he could not. Thank you Navy Seals. You dudes did a fine service to humanity.

J: Did you see the video they found at his compound? OBL’s hunkered down under a blanket, watching his own TV clips. It looked real, but you never know…

B: All he ever wanted was media coverage, and in the end he got the ultimate coverage.

J: Yeah, his obit. So what about Che? You need another one?

B: (Pointing to his empty glass, to bartender) Thanks. Che was a cocky upper class medical student from Buenos Aires. Remember? He wrote about his motorcycle trip through South America with a college buddy.

J: Yeah, I saw the movie. Made him out to be a real swell man of the people.

B: That was when he discovered he felt sorry for all the poor people he met on the trip. He blamed U.S. businesses for exploiting cheap labor in South America. But he really just felt guilty for being an elite rich kid on a continent filled with poor folks. It felt better to blame America.

J: A budding Commie!

B: Yes! He eventually met up with Fidel Castro and decided he was the savior of the poor. With guns. He was sure the commie way would help the poor not be poor any more. And he’d be a famous hero with power in the bargain.

J: Wow. Bad call. He ditched his white coat, lit a cigar and put on the beret and army fatigues with Castro, right? Sure that they were liberating Cubans from an evil American influenced system.

B: Yeah. A story the press couldn’t resist. Guevara and Castro got global coverage as heroes of the Cuban people. But their rag-tag guerrilla army takeover of Cuba was way lucky. They killed off a ridiculous bozo army of the U.S.-backed dictator.

J: Overnight rock stars.

B: All that sudden hero worship made Che extra bold. After taking Cuba, he thought it was somehow his job to free, or take over, the South American continent, country by country.

J: Yeah, piece of cake. Why not? Cuba went down no problem.

B: So he invades Bolivia. But he finds out before too long that Bolivia isn’t Cuba. He was tracked, captured and shot there by a CIA guy who had been after him for years. End of story.

J: Oops. Bad planning.

B: Yeah, but he got his wish. He became a folk hero, a souvenir seller’s dream for T-shirts and mugs with his photo showing his faraway gaze and cool beret. He was Hollywood ready. Most people in the U.S think he was cool, like Johnny Depp or something. That’s funny! He freakin’ hated the U.S.

J: Yeah, and the Cubans didn’t get such a good deal from Castro. Good cigars, though. Hey, was Carrot Top a rich kid? We need another round over here…

Mark Eric Larson has written two books of essays, "The NERVE...of Some People's Kids," and "Don't Force it, Get a Bigger Hammer. To read, visit: 
http://www.scribd.com/Mark%20Eric%20Larson/shelf

Andy Rooney: Bitchmaster

         I remember the first time I saw Andy Rooney do his “Ya know what’s annoying? Well, I’ll tellya” show-ending segment on 60 Minutes. It was many many moons ago, back when I regularly watched the show. Now I don’t watch it, and haven’t for more years than I can remember.

         But when I first saw Andy, I remember thinking, this old fart has a very rare job. He goes on prime-time network TV every week for a few minutes, and just yacks about what pisses him off. How did he get that job?

         He kept at it for several decades. He just recently retired from it at age 92. Wow. Now that’s longevity. But he was part of the successful programming formula of 60 Minutes, the perfect sideshow to its gravely serious stories.

         “Why do they call it a flight of stairs?” he’d rant. “They don’t fly anywhere.”

         His frustrated grumbling was funnier than whatever he couldn’t stand that week. He was old Crankypants, Old Daddy Bitchmaster, explainer of all needless pains in the ass.

         Sometimes, though, I find myself channeling ol’ Andy Rooney. Andy’s pestered worldview surfaces in my mind as I’m suddenly composing one of my own prime-time peeves.

         Why, just the other day, Andy’s high-pitched bitch-whine,  gave voice to a pet gripe of mine, and before I knew it, I was Andy Rooney, venting in his grand, fuck-all style. Andy dialogue suddenly spewed forth:

       The word “important” is one that pops up far too often. It’s annoying. But it bears review.

         As in book reviews.

         “Joe Pimpslap has written an important book,” a review will declare. Or, “JP is one of the most important authors of our time, offering rare insights into the plight of African skinks.”

         But how does any reviewer really know if anything is important or not? They don’t.

         The i-word is used so much in reviews that it has become a throwaway description. It’s almost as if reviewers know they’ll get paid more if they use it.         

         But reviewers don’t know what makes anything “important.” It’s not important just because they say it is. They’re not qualified to call anything universally important. Nobody is. What is important is up to the individual, not some opinionated bozo telling us what we should think is important.

         To some people, it’s important that they shower every day, so they don’t stink. To others it isn’t important at all. They like their own personal aura, even if the curled up noses of everybody around them is telling them something different.

         But it seems there’s an unwritten agreement among reviewers that the highest compliment they can bestow upon a book and/or author is to call one or both important.

         But if a book has been called important by Carrot Top, the reader must then make a decision. Could this book possibly be important enough to buy and read? If someone with no credibility calls a book important, how important could it be?

         On the other hand, if Einstein says something is important, there’s an outside chance it just might be. But even then it’s a crapshoot.

         Still, authors of works reviewed as important can’t help but think they have won well-deserved cultural status. They believe these throwaway compliments are actually fact. They then become self-important.

         But no, no, they’re really not.

         So I wonder, can somebody who is self-important actually be important?

         We book review readers need a way to cut through the hype of importance. Here’s what I suggest: Every time we see the word “important” in a book review, we should cross it out and insert the word “unimportant” in its place.

         Then we’ll be free from having to be told about “important” books, “important” authors, “important” issues, and  blah blah blah.

         Then we could read a self-edited review that says, for example, “This is an unimportant book by an unimportant author that reveals the hidden secretions of the morbidly obese.”

         Now that’s more like it. Let’s face it, most things aren’t so important. They’re mostly not so hot. Not so great.

         Now that’s accurate.

        

         Whew! That feels better. Thanks Andy Rooney. You know how to bitch and what to bitch about, all in a professional setting. Aww heck. We’ll miss ya, ya lovable ol’ crotchety-assed crank! 

Mark Eric Larson has written two books of essays, "The NERVE...of Some People's Kids," and "Don't Force it, Get a Bigger Hammer. To read, visit: 
http://www.scribd.com/Mark%20Eric%20Larson/shelf

A turd, a peanut and other mysteries

       When something happens that makes no sense, it can take some hard thinking before the mystery gets figured out.

       At the same time, it’s not so unusual when human or group action defies logic. In those cases, it’s a safe bet that bribery, kickbacks, and/or hush money are involved. “Follow the money,” often explains a lot.

       But other than unsolved crimes that keep even the best detectives scratching their heads, there are little mysteries that pop up in everyday life that at first, simply don’t add up. Even though they happened within the known physical laws of the universe.

       When we can’t explain something we’ve seen or heard, it makes us conjure up a parade of plausible explanations. We really want to know what happened because we’re curious. In that way, we’re like cats. Or monkeys.

       The small mysteries I’ve encountered involved a turd, an in-shell peanut, a scratching sound behind a bathroom wall, and a pilfered chocolate bar.

       One morning while backing my old Chevy out of the garage on the way to work, groggy and none to thrilled about the day ahead, I happened to notice a turd sitting in the center of the Chevy’s massive hood. The garage had been sealed up, with an automatic door and a locked side door.

       So I asked myself: How could a creature large enough to make the turd in question have gotten into the garage during the short time the garage door was opened and closed?

       There was no evidence anything living was in the garage. I filed that info away, and after careful removal of the turd, drove to work, still not convinced the turd scenario had actually happened. I thought somehow I might have dreamt it.

       But because the turd on the hood wasn’t at the top of my list of worries that day, I soon forgot about it.

       Then, several days after the turd’s appearance, I pulled the Chevy into the garage, only to hear a loud moan coming from the corner of the garage. It turned out to be Bubba, the neighbor’s big-ass gray and white cat.

       Scared, hungry and thirsty, he was huddled in the front corner of the garage. He must have wandered into the garage when the garage door was open during the usual in and out time for the car.      Once inside, he surely froze in terror upon hearing the racket of the car’s ignition followed by the ferocious whine, screech and rumble of the automatic garage door shutting.

       So there was Bubba in the dark of the garage, no way out.

I had come and gone twice a day for several days, opening the door, driving in, closing it, opening it, starting the car, driving out, closing it. Bubba didn’t want to risk a run for it during the few seconds when escape was possible.

       And at some point, he had to crap. For some reason, he decided to do so on the hood of the Chevy. Maybe he was mad at the Chevy, blaming it for keeping him hostage and scaring him. He must have been mad because cats have a landscaping gene. They like to cover up their poop with dirt or bark or leaves after they make a deposit, apparently in recognition of the unappealing look and smell of a freshly laid turd. 

        This time Bubba apparently didn’t care about conforming with the feline relief protocol. In this case, he was OK with leaving one out for any and all to see. Maybe he was just keeping warm on the hood and figured since he couldn’t detect any cover-up dirt in the garage, the hood would do as well as anywhere else.

        But the days with no food and water took a toll on poor Bubba. And when I heard him moan, it was his surrender, his cry for help. I opened the side door and he ran out as if running from ghosts. We left a note with the neighbors that Bubba was alive and free, and put out some food and water for him.

         It was only then that I realized Bubba’s owners had put up Lost Cat flyers all over the neighborhood with a photo of him on it. But somehow I’d never noticed them.

         It gave me pause to think how much of a zombie I was doing my daily go-to-work routine. It seemed that only a catastrophic event like an earthquake, flood or something requiring emergency action could have shaken me out of my 9 to 5 stupor.

         If I’d noticed the lost cat flyers in the first place, maybe I would have made the connection between hood turd and the likelihood Bubba was in the garage, long before his yowl clued me in.

        It had taken awhile, but the mystery of the cat turd on the hot car hood was finally solved. With a deep breath, life went on.

       Then one time I noticed a peanut sitting on the mat outside the door to the back yard. I pondered the peanut, because its presence didn’t make any sense. We never kept supplies of unshelled peanuts in the house. The back yard was closed off, so no person would have placed it there. Yet, there was this peanut in the middle of the mat.

        I never officially solved the mystery of the peanut on the mat. But eventually I imagined a scenario that seemed the most plausible explanation. I figured it came from a bowl of peanuts put out by some homeowner wanting to feed the local birds and squirrels.

        I imagined a bird flew overhead with the peanut. It somehow slipped out of its beak and just happened to land in the center of the mat.

        But wait. Why didn’t the bird fly back and retrieve the peanut, so it could crack the shell and eat the fabulously tasty nut?

        I pondered more. Then the light went on. The second part of this scenario featured a cat sitting in the backyard, since several neighbor cats came through occasionally. And the bird must have noticed the cat was too close to the peanut. Not wanting to be a snack itself, the bird opted against retrieving the peanut, and flew on. And because the peanut meant nothing to the cat, the cat moved on, leaving the nut where it had fallen -- in the middle of the mat.

       Case closed.

       And then there was the time I was in the bathroom and heard loud scratches coming from inside the wall above the bathtub. It sounded like someone with long fingernails was in the room, scratching the wall. It was definitely something alive, but I couldn’t think of anything living that could make that loud of a scratch from inside the wall. And nothing inanimate would make that sound. I  puzzled. But the mystery soon faded from memory because I only remember it happening once or twice over a few years.

       Then we remodeled the house. Walls were opened up, including the wall above the bathtub. Well looky here, in the open space between the tub’s outside wall and its basin, sat a cozy little possum’s nest. Aha!

       Possums were sometimes seen in the neighborhood. I saw our cat happen upon a possum once in the back yard. The cat realized confrontation was a bad idea. He made quick U-turn and beat a hasty retreat.

       That possum or one of his cousins was probably the keeper of the bathtub nest. The dexterous little long-nailed paws of a possum had no doubt made the scratching noise I’d heard on the wall. The contractor cleaned the nest out of the space and sealed it off with wire mesh.

       About this time another minor mystery cropped up.

I saw, on the dining room table, an unopened dark chocolate bar. But upon closer scrutiny I discovered, all of the sweet, rich chocolate had been craftily pulled out without leaving a mark on the paper wrapper or inner foil. Someone or something had peeled the foil from the end of the wrapper and deftly slid the chocolate bar out.

       Imagine my disappointment when I was ready to bite into some great dark chocolate, only to find an almost perfect wrapper enclosing not chocolate, but air. Who did such a sneaky, albeit crafty, underhanded deed?  My wife was not a suspect, because she wasn’t a dark chocolate fan. I would have been the prime suspect, but it surely wasn’t me. I wondered mightily.

       Again, about this time, in the middle of the remodel, I’m watching Monday Night Football, holed up in the bedroom, trying not to think of all the debt and construction all around, when I hear a loud scratching noise behind the dresser. I know immediately, something alive is under the dresser.

       I look over the end of the bed, only to see a nearly grown rat-tailed possum looking up bleary eyed, as if turning on the game had rudely awakened it from a deep sleep. He’d come into the house through a hole in the floor the builders had temporarily opened up near the kitchen so they could easily get under the house.

       For some reason I think I can lure the little fella out of the bedroom and out of the house with some shelled peanuts which, for some other inexplicable reason, I find after rooting around the kitchen. I reassure Elena, who is in the kitchen, not to panic, but there’s a live possum in our bedroom. She seems to handle the news better than I thought she would. 

       Of course I prefaced it by saying about five times, “You’re not going to believe this, but…”

       When she learns it’s only a live possum in the bedroom and not any other bad scenario racing through her mind, she is actually relieved.

       I return to the bedroom armed with peanuts only to find the possum under the bed.

       I think Mr. Possum, or Pete, as I later named him, will come out when he sees the peanuts I put on the floor. I figure he’ll be glad to follow a Little Red Riding Hood trail out of the house. He slowly ventures out and carefully takes the peanuts one by one in his little paws, and retreats. He patiently munches on them under the bed until finished.

       Then I try chocolate. He soon waddles out, takes a chunk of dark chocolate into his dexterous little paws, and ambles over to a corner of the room. He turns around and sits upright on his haunches, keeping a close eye on me as he feeds himself the chocolate. His jaws work fast. Pete loves dark chocolate as much as me.

       And he seems to like this arrangement. He’s never been  fed delicious foods. I soon realize he has no intention of going anywhere.

       So then I grab a broom and herd him out of the bedroom. He scoots out the door, down the hall, to the dining room. And even though the back door is wide open to help his exit, he opts to scamper down the nearby temporary hole in the floor.

       So Pete may have lost his nest, but he got some parting gifts. Thinking back to the pilfered chocolate bar, and Pete’s sinewy little paws, I figured he must have made earlier visits into the house via the hole in the floor. He’d sniffed out the chocolate bar on the table. He extracted the chocolate by carefully peeling the foil off one end of the bar, then, pulling the bar out little by little so he could nibble at it until there was no bar left at all. The wrapper was left behind perfectly intact.

       No doubt that if the house hadn’t been made possum proof, Pete’d be back to make another nest, and to sniff for the great, sweet dark brown stuff he’d sampled. But first he needed to find another place to set up shop. And, if he was lucky, he just might again experience the bliss he would never forget in his possum life. The bliss of eating chocolate.

Mark Eric Larson has written two books of essays, "The NERVE...of Some People's Kids," and "Don't Force it, Get a Bigger Hammer. To read, visit: 
http://www.scribd.com/Mark%20Eric%20Larson/shelf

Conan: the better remake

News flash: Conan the Barbarian, the remake of the 1982 film now in movie theaters, has been fairly well dismissed by critics, who give it on average a C-minus rating.

San Francisco Chronicle movie critic Mick LaSalle, who rated it a “D,” writes “..this movie does everything wrong,” adding, “By the way, to criticize the acting in a movie like this is a little like blaming gravity on a guy who gets thrown out a window. The actors are victims, too.”

I usually agree with LaSalle’s reviews, he’s not afraid to pin the tail on a crap movie.

So, to me, this means this second stab at the first Conan movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as the big bad ass, is just prettied up junk. Still, the original, while bad in its own right, had enough in it to make a lot of people think it was kinda good.

Hollywood noticed this, and figured it was time to dust off the Conan of Arnie past and put a new face on it.

Hollywood producers like to make remakes, because they think they’re a proven formula to score big at the box office. They figure if they introduce a recognized old title to a new generation, many people will go see it automatically.

But if the first wave of takers and the critics rip it mercilessly, word spreads fast. And pretty soon, there’s no more audience draw, and what we have is a big Hollywood whiff at hitting a box office grand slam. Like an overpaid home run hitter, the movie is just a multi-million dollar strikeout heading back to the dugout.

But in its haste to make remakes, Hollywood often forgets something important that will pull in big audiences: It has to give movie watchers what they want and expect. 

Now that doesn’t necessarily mean a remake or any other feature film has to be the best movie ever made. It just means that it shouldn’t suck, pretty much. Maybe have a coherent story line, with compelling dialogue and good acting. Throw in some cool high-tech chase scenes, a little hot romance, a smattering of somewhat sanitized violence, and that’ll go far to reel in a good chunk of the movie going masses. You know this is true, Hollywood. Movie watchers are a fairly forgiving bunch. They really don’t ask for much. But give ‘em junk, and you lose your ass. Big time.

Hollywood, you might want to use a little more imagination in your older movie remakes. Sure, keep the cool Conan brand. But why not make it into a franchise with a series of remakes that, rolled together, can’t help but generate enough money to buy South America?

So Hollywood, here’s some free advice on future titles in the Conan genre, which, let’s face it, is really sagging now and will need a major lift when it’s time for that second remake.

When that fated day comes, Hollywood, do yourself a favor. Get a new Conan. Find a lead actor who doesn’t have a tan body with rippling muscles from chest to toes and a square-jawed head the size of a cinderblock. You need a Conan who is a lovable, reasonably intelligent Neanderthal seeking self-knowledge. This is a no brainer: The new Conan should be Tommy Chong.

Hollywood, these new Conan sagas can be strung together as sequels made every six months or so. Kind of like a TV series, only at the movies. The opener could be when the new Conan, wanting to figure out the religion thing, trains to become a priest, a minister and a rabbi. This would be of course… Conan the Seminarian.

That eye-popping premiere would lead to Conan’s next decision to toss all that preacher mumbo jumbo out the window and become part of a close-knit group of fanatics who believe that lifting weights gets men dates. This second in the series could be billed as… Conan the Sectarian.

Having no success with dating, Conan decides he's a rebel, and that boorish, obnoxious behavior will make him sexy. He revels in belching out the alphabet, cutting loud farts in public places, and seeing what life is like without using soap and water, in... Conan the Vulgarian.
Conan then decides he needs to know more about books. Then maybe he can read more, and gain the wisdom contained within their pages. See how he struggles to learn to read English, then goes to college where he acquires the needed certificate to manage a large inventory of books. After mastering the technique of sshhhhing people who are supposed to be quiet, he makes his dynamic new career move in… Conan the Librarian.

After his stint at the Pacoima Public Library ends when a lack of funding shuts the place down, Conan hits the streets. He thinks hard and comes up with a life changing realization: Filmed true stories are the way to uncover bad things people do. They make the bad guys stop their blatant lawbreaking because of public embarrassment and FBI investigations. Thus a new twist is unveiled in our hero’s truth seeking in… Conan the Documentarian.

Still spiritually adrift, Conan furls his brow and does more contemplating, and it comes to him: Systematic repression of lustful desires, stuffiness and pompous conservatism just might be his cup of tea after all. Watch him try it on for size in… Conan the Victorian.

But all that repression and hot, tight clothing leads Conan to major frustrations and a nasty temper. He decides to blow off some steam with a trip to Jamaica. There he discovers the liberating effects of smoking many spliffs a day while listening to reggae music. He grows dreadlocks and enjoys a new appreciation for island life in… Conan the Rastafarian.

Still vaguely dispirited, our hero wants a philosophy that doesn’t morph his brain cells into bean dip. He is suddenly enamored with a new idea: Always do the opposite of what he used to do in the same situation. See what fireworks explode when opposite actions raise eyebrows everywhere in… Conan the Contrarian.

In the next movie, Conan discovers that not following rules reaps more rewards than most people realize. He crusades against paying any taxes and speaks out in favor of the heady notion of free will. This compelling rendition of institutionalized rebel-making is jaw dropping in… Conan the Libertarian.

Then, after finding Libertarians can be marginalized in the political arena, Conan decides to pursue a grass roots effort to convince others that even Libertarians can be civic minded. Everybody is stunned at a series of wacky attention-getting stunts he pulls in… Conan the Rotarian.

Part of his spiritual journey to enlightenment is Conan’s new appreciation for growing crops. He discovers fruits, nuts and vegetables taste really good without using pesticides to poison predatory bugs and grow bigger plants. He becomes a leader among Earth First farmers in this environmental thriller… Conan the Agrarian.

Our hero becomes even more involved in the movement toward healthy eating, even fanatical about it, deciding to eat only things growing out of the earth and nothing that ever had a pulse. This new conviction incurs the wrath of a band of rabid carnivores holding shields and wielding swords. The toughs confront Conan and threaten to make him eat a bacon cheeseburger cooked blood rare. See what happens in the digitally enhanced showdown of showdowns in… Conan the Vegetarian.

Eating lots of plants gets our contemplative hero to thinking about the life-giving qualities of water. He dreams of how great it would be to live in a van down by the river. Instead, he buys a used pickup with an ill-fitting camper on it and parks it close to his latest inspiration, a moving body of water called the Big Muddy. Lying in his cramped camper bunk, he finds an inner calm as he gazes out the window to see an ever-changing liquid brown surface. In this episode he’s found a metaphor for life that actually seems to make a little bit of sense in… Conan the Riparian.

The years go by and suddenly Conan discovers to his dismay that he’s an elderly Baby Boomer. But all his life he’s worked out, eaten healthy food, and taken his vitamins. He’s not morbidly obese. He doesn’t need diapers. He’s disease free. He’s a nonsmoking spelling bee champion in his age group, and has the chiseled physique of a much younger man without a tan. So he makes a statement about all this. He leads an impassioned crusade, chanting, “The 70s Are,” (bang-bang) “The New 40s,” (bang-bang) “The 70s Are,” (bang-bang) “The New 40s,” (bang-bang).

He catches the imaginations of like-minded Boomers across America and leads a million oldsters in a march on Washington in… Conan the Septuagenarian.

More years go by and Conan still feels as frisky as an untrainable, hee-honking jackass. Conan determines not to be shackled by age and starts another national campaign. This one is powered by his updated slogan, this time splashed across T-shirts: “The 80s are the new 50s/ so don’t call me Gramps/Granny, or I’ll kick YOU in the shins”

This time he figures he needs to show examples of his vitality. He ice dances. He ski jumps. He boxes a kangaroo. See what else he does in… Conan the Octogenarian.

And in the final story of Conan’s epic life as told in this unprecedented series of movies, he’s in his 90s. But he’s not shy about his regular growling appreciation of the fairer sex. See what creativity he has as a saucy old goat on the prowl in…

Conan the Viagrarian… the manliest old man pharmaceuticals ever produced…

C’mon, Hollywood, give it a shot.

Mark Eric Larson has written two books of essays, "The NERVE...of Some People's Kids," and "Don't Force it, Get a Bigger Hammer. To read, visit: 
http://www.scribd.com/Mark%20Eric%20Larson/shelf

A Twilight Zone kind of heat

It wasn’t until I lived in the Southern California desert of the Coachella Valley during the summer that I experienced first hand what it was like to deal with ridiculously hot weather.

People from the Midwest, the Eastern Seaboard and the Deep South always pooh-pooh high temperatures in the West. They say, “But it’s a dry heat.”

As if low humidity heat is somehow cooler than humid heat. Well, maybe that’s true, I don’t know. I’ve been in both types of heat. I spent a couple of steamy summers in New England, and I can testify, they’re no treat. But whether it’s wet heat, or dry heat, they both suck if you ask me. To me, too hot is too hot, any way you slice it.

Long ago as a young reporter in Palm Springs when I first experienced the peak heat of a low desert summer, I noticed a few things I hadn’t seen before. People put towels over the steering wheels of their cars. They had to, or driving was out of the question, the steering wheels were too hot to handle. Just opening the door to get in a sun-baked car was a challenge without burning your hands.

It was about this time that I noticed upon walking out of a refrigerator like, overly air-conditioned office, and into stifling heat outside, that my room temperature eyeballs immediately sensed the oven-hot air. It was as if my eyeballs were an early warning system telling me that I should turn around and go back to where it was cool.

Palm Springs’ high heat outside and the extra cool inside most of its buildings made for an odd man-made mixture of temperature extremes. If someone were to repeatedly cross between indoors and outdoors throughout the day, their bodies would surely retreat into convulsions and their brains would short circuit into useless mush. It must have happened on occasion, since I noticed everybody pretty much stayed indoors when the sun outside was broiling everything into one large mirage.

Native Americans were the first to settle in the desert of Palm Springs. These natives understood the simple fact that during the summer, the desert floor of what would become known as the Coachella Valley, was just too hot for comfortable living.

These people didn’t have electricity to power yet-to-be-invented air conditioners, or anything else for that matter.

But they did know one thing. If they hiked up into the higher altitudes of nearby canyons where there were cool water springs, palm trees and cooler air, summer was a pleasant experience. So that’s what they did. It made perfect sense.

Then white men came and settled the valley, and decided that, by golly, even if it was ungodly hot in the summer, why they were just going to stay and tough it out. After all, it was only for a few months, and then the weather was great the rest of the year.

These first white settlers didn’t have electricity either. But they had swamp coolers that helped humidify and theoretically cool their living areas. If these had been reasonable people in tune with nature, they would have left in the summer like the local natives did. They must have been desperate, out of money, running from the law, gluttons for punishment or all of the above to decide to stay put for the desert summer.

But then technology marched on, in came air conditioning and the year round population of the valley grew. And before long just about every indoor space in the valley was cooled with electricity-sucking air conditioning units.

After getting my job at the local newspaper, I found a small apartment near downtown Palm Springs. I’d come from living near the ocean in San Diego, so desert living was new to me.

One very hot Sunday morning in early summer I had nothing to do. It was already viciously hot outside, so hot that one colleague described it as “nuclear torque.” Other local desert heat descriptors I'd heard included Hellmouth and Parallel Hell.

So I figured I’d stroll downtown and watch a movie where the air conditioning was sure to be better than the lame little wall mounted metal box in my apartment. The thing rattled and droned as it impersonated an air conditioner and only slightly cooled the air within five feet of it.

I walked out my door and was immediately hit in the face with the merciless heat of a blast furnace. As I started to walk, I realized something. Even though the sun was high on this Sunday and it was close to noon, there were no cars driving around to speak of, and no people could be seen anywhere.

But there was an eerie duet of sound wafting in the hot, still air. It was a combination of whirring cicadas trying to cool themselves, and the hum of myriad air conditioning units on at full throttle in every apartment, store or office building in the area. The abandoned streets in full daylight of staggering heat made it seem like there had been a nuclear blast that eliminated all life. For all I knew I was the only survivor of a post apocalyptic world.

Suddenly I imagine Rod Serling walking toward me on the sidewalk, looking cool as a cucumber in the hot sun, wearing a black suit and tie, and shiny black dress shoes. His hair is black, his face oddly pale. His bushy black eyebrows furl as he speaks to me in his inimitable clipped speech. It was a narrative style all his own. Hard as Jack Webb tried, he could never master Serling’s riveting delivery when Webb starred in and narrated Dragnet, that lovable, stupid old TV cop show, in which he played the wooden Sgt. Joe Friday. I quickly refocus on Serling, who begins a mellifluous monologue:

 “You unlock this door with the key of imagination,” he says. His tone is serious, edgy. He speaks with absolute conviction. “Beyond it is another dimension,” he continues. “A dimension of sound. A dimension of sight. A dimension of mind.” Serling, it is clear, is a messenger.

“Hi Rod,” I say, waving, hoping he’s up for Raiders of the Lost Arc in the dark cool confines of the downtown movie theater.

I don’t think he hears me.

“You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance,” he says. “Of things and ideas. You just crossed over into…The Twilight Zone.”

Serling then disappears in a blink. I pick up the pace of my stride along the abandoned, sun-scorched sidewalks of Palm Canyon Drive. I finally make it to the theatre. I’m thirsty and soaked through with sweat. I find a seat in the half empty, refrigerated, popcorn-infused air of the darkened theater. My wet clothes soon turn clammy and cold as the movie starts. I’m still in…the twilight zone.

I learned a few things from living in that desert during the summer. I didn’t learn them from Rod Serling, but from trial and error. I learned that trying to sleep with poor air conditioning is an exercise in suffering. I learned it meant lying awake, uncomfortable, amid hot air that yielded sweat-dampened sheets and glistening heat at the base of my neck. I learned that electric fans could move the hot air of a room around, but they never managed to make it any cooler.

I eventually moved out of the desert and to California’s Central Valley. I bought a house there. The summers, while not offering as many mega-hot days as the desert, would typically feature about 10 days of triple-digit, stifling weather.

The house I bought was a no-frills, 1,000 square foot post-World War II stucco rectangle with a fireplace and detached garage. It had no insulation in its walls and the old double-hung windows let in plenty of air and sound from outside. Not only did this house not have any insulation, it had no air conditioning whatsoever.

So what we found out upon spending what turned out to be 12 consecutive summers in this house without air conditioning, was that on hot days, it managed to make the air inside even hotter than the air outside.

With its stucco shell, the house on hot days became an oven, or an externally heated pottery kiln, soaking in all the outside heat and efficiently radiating it inward into its rooms. Sleeping required wet dishrags on the forehead and a couple of electric fans at full blast.

Just like in the desert, we spent hot weekend days in the air conditioning of a movie theater or a mall.

If we didn’t get out of the house in the heat, we would slow cook like pork butts in a covered barbecue. Within a few hours we became motionless, knocked out. Like fully barbecued meat, a fork could be stuck in us, and it would indicate that we were done.

Eventually we improved the house with air conditioning and new windows. And when I look back at all those years without AC, I can hardly believe that at some point we weren’t found face down in the house, dead of heat stroke.

Once a friend had a backyard birthday party on one of the hottest days in memory for the area, probably around 110. I was tired of making small talk and sweating in the insufferable heat.

I saw a big tub of ice water cooling cans of beer. So I did what I needed to do. I stepped into the cold water with both bare feet and stood in the tub's icy water. And it did the trick. I may have looked idiotic standing in the tub of ice water meant for beer. But I didn’t care. I cooled off. I beat the heat, more than happy that I found a way to do it.

       It’s important to beat the heat when it’s just too hot outside. Yes, I know, air conditioning is bad for the environment, blah blah blah. But I like that it can beat the heat. And every time it’s mercilessly hot outside, and there’s somewhere to go with good air conditioning, I’m going there. Every time. Too much heat is bad for us. It dehydrates us. It keeps us from sleeping well. It scrambles our brains.

Just listen to what Rod Serling says next time you’re suffering in a heat wave and you see him. And there’s nobody around anywhere. He’ll tell you what’s going on.

Mark Eric Larson has written two books of essays, "The NERVE...of Some People's Kids," and "Don't Force it, Get a Bigger Hammer. To read, visit: 
http://www.scribd.com/Mark%20Eric%20Larson/shelf