Chapter 2: The Day My Butt Said Good-bye
Have you ever
noticed that there are these weird souls walking the earth, twisted beings who
have a habit of using the word “mister” in front of every noun, especially when
they speak to their children? If, in fact, these individuals do exist, it would
do my heart good to actually see one in the flesh. Such is the profound impact
that they have had on my life. Not a day goes by, it seems, that I don’t ponder
their actuality.
Surely at
some point in your existence you have heard strange statements such as these
emanating from the mouths of adults: “Come on, Johnny, we’re going bye-byes. Let’s
put on Mr. Jacket.” “We don’t want to
trip and fall! Shouldn’t we tie Mr. Shoe?”
“Eat Mr. Asparagus! You want to grow up to be big and
strong, don’t you?” “Now, Billy, tell
Mommy when you have to go tee-tee. Don’t pull on Mr. Penis!” Chatting with one such individual, at
this point, would be tantamount to exchanging barbs with a legend, not unlike
sitting down to tea and crumpets with the ever-elusive Bigfoot.
I don’t recall my parents ever
speaking to me in such a condescending manner, but there must be culprits out
there somewhere. I see you trying to hide. I demand that you show yourselves!
Don’t laugh!
No one is truly innocent here. How many times have you schooled your children
on the dangers of the toxic menace by placing one of those emphatic little
ugly-face stickers everywhere you stored cleaning supplies? I understand that
researchers actually polled a group of children while designing the sticker and
asked them which color and which face they found to be the most offensive. What
is that lovable but vile little fellow’s name? Isn’t it … Mr. Yuk? Okay, not quite the same thing,
but close!
Even the
corporate world has gotten into the act. Why would anyone—unless they were of a
certain suspicious mindset—name their coffee maker Mr. Coffee or market their
cleaning solution under the name Mr. Clean? Why, for the love of God, would a
company want to coin their outdoor portable toilet Mr. John? How about the
culinary expert who provides cooking tips to millions of TV viewers and goes by
the name Mr. Food?
You see, for years
now, I have been attaching the Mister prefix to just about any noun that would
stand still long enough to be lured into my web. I knew no
shame. I would direct full-grown adults to close “Mr. Door.” I cautioned my teenage girls to wash “Mr.
Hands” before dinner or warned them that there would be no dessert unless they
cleaned “Mr. Plate.” From the time they
were toddlers, I threatened my children with a menacing pincer movement
featuring my big toe and second toe and calling it “Mr. Lobster.” Since my kids are far too old and
sophisticated for my antics these days, I am now breaking in my grandchildren.
Unfortunately, since they are boys, they could give a rat’s hind-end.
I used the Mister prefix for no
reason in particular—just a long-running gag, a ploy to get a rise out of my
friends and family, an annoyance designed to rattle as many nerves as humanly
possible. And it’s worked to perfection; just ask any of them.
I meant nothing by
it—just a little something to take the edge off. The whole philosophy speaks to
my personality. I am what my wife commonly, albeit crudely, refers to as a real
“smart ass.” I am endowed with a kind of
wry, sarcastic, David-Letterman wit, a cynical sense of humor that often makes
people either stare at me in puzzlement or smile and shake their heads in
disbelief and say, “You’re bad!” My heart swells with pride when I elicit this
comment. Mission accomplished.
I’ll
also say or do anything for a laugh. My wife, Debbie, in fact, refuses to laugh
at these antics and often advises others to do the same. “Don’t laugh at him,”
she begs those who would even think of reinforcing my subtle attempts at humor.
“It will just make him worse.”
How could I have known that middle
age, the Mister designation, and gravity would one day form an unholy alliance?
Who would have suspected that they would join forces in an evil attempt to
pound me into submission? How does that old saying go? “What a tangled web we weave …”
My
thoughts take me back to the days of the early children’s shows, those ancient
forerunners to today’s whiz-bang kiddy fare. My earliest recollections center
on Romper Room and Captain Kangaroo, two of my favorite shows from the
(gulp) late fifties.
I’m
sure many of you sat mesmerized by one of the late-1950s, pre-technology-boom
television sets like I did. You probably recall that one worked these
televisions like rubbing two sticks together to get a picture going compared to
today’s state-of-the-art, digital, 55-inch, plasma, LCD (liquid-crystal
display), DLP (digital light processing), 3-D, high-definition wonders. By the
way, where would technology be without initials?
These
television sets also provided only three channels, no color, no remote, a tiny
little speaker that sat in until today’s state-of-the-art sound systems could
be created, and of course, who could forget the forerunner to today’s cable
systems, the irrepressible “rabbit ears.”
Ah yes, no TV was complete without
rabbit ears, that little gizmo, a fixture atop the TV set that required
constant adjustment to enable it to boldly, albeit meekly, go out into the airwaves
to seek out a signal. If there were a mantra for the brave new world of
harnessing TV reception it would no doubt have been “I know you’re out there
somewhere.”
Sometimes, you may recall, a member of
the family actually stood by the TV, manually adjusting, more like fidgeting
with, the metal rods—the rabbit’s ears, if you will—until the picture, like
today’s army recruit, was the “best that it could be.”
More often than not, it was a losing
battle. The picture fluctuated between low-grade and high-grade hard-to-see.
Remember how we put little pieces of aluminum foil on the tips of the rod-like
extensions? What was that about anyway?
But our expectations were low back
then. These days, the quality of a television picture is measured in futuristic
language like pixels and lines of resolution. Back in the fifties, the mark of
a good picture was determined by whether or not we could make out the images.
In general, it’s hard to fathom the
astounding leaps that technology has made since we walked the earth in the
fifties and early sixties. It’s actually difficult to draw comparisons between
then and now; it’s just not a fair fight. Talk about a time machine. Take this,
H. G. Wells.
Perhaps you’ll recall that we used
rotary telephones for communicating back then. Forget the notion of a personal
computer. Computers were in their infancy. There was no such option even when I
attended college in the early seventies. I often paid someone to type my theme papers
or, if push came to shove, wrote them out in longhand. It pains me to even say
that. Computers were of the mainframe variety and occupied entire rooms. Data
was represented by holes crudely punched onto cards and then stacked into a bin
and sucked into the vast system.
It almost ticks me off the way I
can push a button and save a manuscript on both 750 gigabytes of hard-drive
disk storage space and a 4-gigabyte USB “flash drive” when I was forced to
write eight-page college papers with an ink pen. I have an iPod that boasts 8 GB
of space. Who would have believed it?
In the same vein, I have seven hundred
photos stored on the compact flash card in my digital camera with space for
thousands more. I would never have dreamed this possible when I was taking
thirty-six pictures at a time on rolls of celluloid film and storing unused
rolls in the refrigerator.
Starbucks, McDonalds, and other
establishments lure the laptop generation into their facilities with the offer
of “WiFi” Internet availability—the ability to wirelessly stroll about in
cyberspace. The meaning is clear: “Come, eat our food, drink our beverages,
partake of our computer access. Stay a while. Take your shoes off. Y’all come
back now, ya’ hear?”
Compare the old vinyl record
album and its “snap, crackle, pop” sound qualities with MP3 music magic, which
isn’t even touched by human hands at any point; it’s just harnessed, digitally
coded, and compressed and then transferred right into your digital audio player
at your command like the force in Star
Wars—nothing to unwrap, nothing to store, nothing to throw away. Amazing!
I can still remember the first time I
heard a compact disc in about 1986. I bought one of the first CD players. It
was a surreal experience. As Lionel Ritchie sang “Dancing on the Ceiling,” I
felt as if the music was coming, not only from the ceiling, but from all around
me. How apropos.
Then we have that one technological
breakthrough that best exemplifies how far we’ve come as a technosociety—a
device that harnesses fifty years of aforementioned technology into one neat
little package. Yeah, that’s right, the cellular telephone, a palm-size,
mini-computer marvel.
You have one. I have one. Nowadays,
many of us even forsake our home phones in favor of cell phones. Imagine one
gadget that accepts those MP3 format digital tunes I spoke of and allows us to
takes digital photos; surf the web; check the weather in Madrid, Spain; watch
movies; send and receive e-mails and text messages; and access the Internet, which
I just met in the late nineties. As Ethel Merman once barked, “Who could ask
for anything more?” Oh, and by the way,
you can make calls with it too.
Truth is, despite all the modern-day hoopla,
I sometimes get a little nostalgic about the so-called good old days. When we
had had those three channels and manipulated those rabbit ears we weren’t
picky. We watched whatever programming was offered, including movies. We didn’t
have three hundred channels like we do now, but as my wife’s friend would say,
“We didn’t know for nothin.” I remember watching Saturday Night at the Movies together as a family. I wonder how
many families do that these days.
I have to ask myself, have we come too
far? Are we, in fact, in over our electronic heads? Are we brilliant, or is it
that we just don’t know when to quit? Do we really need to carry on
conversations, text our homeys, answer e-mails, watch movies, groove to Lady
Gaga and Prince, and check the weather in Zurich while we stand in line at the
grocery store? Do innocent bystanders really have to be held captive to our telephone
conversations as we stand in long lines at the bank?
I can’t help but think about the time
when my wife and I were dating and we sat in the car talking and swooning over
one another in the Eat’n Park restaurant parking lot. We put our headlights on—a
signal that we wanted service—and the waitress came to the car on roller skates
to take our order. Our food was placed on a tray, which sat propped up on the
car window. I recall how cozy and private it was. We didn’t feel the need to
hurry home to watch TV or e-mail or text, and neither one of us had a cell
phone that threatened to ring to the tune of some obnoxious rap song.
Sometimes I say to myself wistfully, Take me back to the telephone hung on the
wall, to the days of the princess phone, to the days when life was simple and
you had to rise from your seat to change the station. Take me back to the days
of three channels and the beloved rabbit ears with the mysterious aluminum foil
on the antlers.
Oh, that’s a lie. Who am I trying to
impress? I like Blu-ray DVD players and 60-inch DLP and razor-thin LCD TVs and laptops
as much as the next guy. I hate to admit it, but I’m a couch potato—I channel
surf with the best of them. I just get sick of seeing someone’s face stuck in
their Android when I’m trying to talk to them. And I don’t want to get
rear-ended by some sixteen-year-old girl texting her little friend.
I’m climbing out of that time
machine as we speak—tight fit.
Now where was I?
