Put On Your Big Boy Pants

We’re Sorry You Weren’t Thrilled

Carrie and I had put our twin two-year-olds to bed around 8:30 two nights ago. I then drove to the Del Amo Mall and had my friend who works there, Sean, re-fit my two Invicta Ocean Speedway watches, adding a half link as they had proved to be too snug.

When I got home, Carrie was in the kitchen standing over her smart phone. She looked pale and stricken. She said to me, “Listen to this message.”

“Who’s it from?” I asked.

“The owner of the restaurant,” she said.

I felt sick. Earlier that evening we had had a date night for our ten-year anniversary and the entrees at the upscale eatery had proven to be inedible, so bad in fact that we when we got home I posted my distaste on my blog with the title (and I now omit the name to protect my wife): “Restaurant XYZ Serves Hog Slop to My Wife and Me at Extravagant Prices.” I went on to say that the pasta tasted metallic and worse the meatloaf had a mealy texture evoking the taste and feel of Alpo. Because my wife paid on her credit card and made the reservation, the owner had her phone number and called her, not me.

As Carrie was fumbling with her phone to let me hear the message on the speaker, she said, “I’m mortified.”

Then she finally played me the owner’s frantic words: “Hello, Carrie, we saw your blog about how you weren’t thrilled with your dinner and we were absolutely horrified. If there’s anything we can do, to rectify the situation, please call me.  We’d be happy to reduce the charges on your credit card or give you a voucher for another meal, complements of our staff. Again, I must personally say that I was absolutely horrified by what I read on your blog. Please call me and see if we can work this out.”

Carrie looked up at me. “Why in the hell is she calling me? I didn’t write it. You did. I’ll never show my face there again.”

I called the restaurant, left a message telling the owner that it was I, not Carrie, who had posted the unflattering words, then promised to delete the post. I did so mainly for Carrie’s sake. I felt nothing wrong with telling the truth about the quality of the entrees. My critique was fair. I praised the server and the appetizers and the wines and the dessert, a Nutella chocolate cake with vanilla gelato. But I felt I had to be honest about the entrees, especially the disgusting meatloaf. In hindsight, I should have been forthright with the waiter when he came to the table in the middle of the meal and asked what I thought of it. My candor would have produced a better outcome than “horrifying” the owner with my blog post.

The one thing that stands out was the owner’s use of euphemism: “We’re sorry you weren’t thrilled with the meal.” Not thrilled? I never expected to be thrilled so much as I didn’t expect meatloaf to have the texture and flavor of something expectorated by a dog.

In any event, I lose Man Points for not graciously and honestly telling the waiter about my displeasure with the meal and for causing my wife embarrassment. I hope I learned a lesson. 

 

Dude, You're Lucky You're Alive

I'm fifty going on twelve evidenced by this explosive game I play with Julia and Natalie, a game that almost rendered me dead five days ago.

Let's call the game Catch the Duck. I take Natalie's duck and pretend to be sleeping with it while lying on the playroom floor. One of the girls snatches the duck as I fake snore. I explode upwards and chase them down the hall. They run into the living room and stand by the piano while I snarl in the hallway doorway threshold. I grab the door frame, bend my knees, squatting several times while making bear growls, and propel upward at a forty-five degree angle, exploding through the doorway and chasing the girls, tickling them, and grabbing the duck and returning to the baby room and  once again feigning sleep. This cycle goes on and on until one or all of us becomes fatigued. 

However, the game is on hiatus after a scary injury. Five days ago as I propelled myself in the doorway, my head directly hit the top of the door frame, leaving two bloody gashes on my pate that are still conspicuous as I write this.

After hitting my head, I collapsed, curled into the fetal position, and wondered if I had a concussion, was on the verge of a brain explosion or what. No headaches ensued. No dizziness. So I didn't go to a doctor.

But I feel very, very stupid. 

Having Your Ass Handed to You on a Stick

You haven’t really lived, haven’t really been cracked out of your cocoon of ignorance, haven’t been faced with a true test of your character until you have had your whining, sweaty ass handed to you on a thick, splintered, bloody stick, slammed into the mud like an exclamation point, done with drama like the Marines in that famous Joe Rosenthal World War II photo. The Marines, the victor, are raising the flag on Mount Suribachi in Iwo Jima.

You’re not the victor. You’re the recipient of absolute defeat and humiliation at the hands of your conqueror.

Your conqueror comes in many forms: rejection, loneliness, mockery, failure. You reach a point in your life in which you’re startled to find that your self-image wasn’t as grand and as invincible as you had once thought. You’re forced to re-evaluate who you are, respond to that re-evaluation and in the process choose if you’re going to be someone with no resilience and learning power and as such become a walking corpse or be someone who is made stronger and smarter.

I had my ass handed to me on a stick in 1984. My first girlfriend Laura, an aspiring singer, broke up with me and wasn’t content to leave me an abandoned sack of rejected zero self-esteem. She had this need to peel off my skin and pour battery acid on it after she dumped me. She achieved this in two ways. First, she explained that when she was my girlfriend, she was living in darkness, filth, and decrepitude. She had died, but luckily had found resurrection. The manner of her rebirth points to the second way she poured acid into my wounds: She explained that her new boyfriend made everything in her life better. She looked better. She felt better. Food tasted better. The oxygen that she breathed inhaled better. She had no choice but to marry this dude because after all compared to me he was just better.

For two years I believed her narrative and saw myself as a disease to not just her but to all women. I didn’t date. The only way a woman should even get close to me, I lamented, was if she was wearing a HAZMAT suit.

And then two years later Laura and her miracle man divorced and it hit me: Everything she had told me about a better life was, in spite of her sincerity, complete bullshit.

I learned that I was gullible and too quick to believe people’s condemning words of me. The experience left me skeptical about everything. Now if someone berates me, I nod and think, “Is that so?” If someone praises me,” I nod and think, “Is that so?” If I watch an Olive Garden commercial in which a voice with a thick Italian accent says, “Food so good, you’ll think your grandma made it,” I nod my head and think, “Is that so?”

Having my ass handed to me on a stick made me slow to believe the hype, negative or positive, about me or anything else. And it taught me that I can be my own worst enemy, joining evil forces in my own demise when I don’t challenge my nemesis.  

I’ve had my ass handed to me since then, but that was my first and in a perverse way my most treasured.

Manliness Requires an Accurate Assessment of Your Charisma

Over twenty years ago, late spring of 1990 to be exact, I was on Sunset Blvd. buying hipster shoes when I got into a conversation with the saleslady about the band The Cocteau Twins. She said the last song on their 1988 Blue Bell Knoll album was beautiful but depressing and it tormented her to listen to it. I walked out of the store thinking I must possess some rarified charisma to tease out people’s darkest secrets and innermost thoughts. The glories that awaited a man of my exceptional magnetism were no doubt too much to even imagine.

However, since that day not once has a salesperson conversed about anything but predictable banalities. The incident was a fluke and my “charisma” proved to be a dud.

Yet I slog on disillusioned and wiser. 

 

Manliness Requires Balance

Addressing my workout neurosis that makes me dread vacations, Jerry B writes:

Like most things in life; you need to maintain a balance. Just as sitting on a couch for 12 hours a day is detrimental to ones physical health; not experiencing other cultures because they don't have a nearby gym is detrimental to ones cultural health.

As long as you can get back into your routine once the trip is complete, you should take any opportunity to travel. I am a firm believer that as part of anyone's education, travel should be required.

Also consider the fact that you will most likely be doing a lot of walking on your trips. You can get some exercise that way.

 

When You Choose the Weight Bench Over Versailles, It's Time for a 12-Step Program

Addressing my post about dreading vacations because of missed workouts, Jack M writes:

While I applaud your dedication to your health and fitness (I'm... well, a couch potato), you'd think about forgoing a trip abroad to spend time inside a gym?!

Trade the Great Wall for another half-hour on the elliptical? Toss Versailles for the weight bench? Blow off Brasilia to work on your delts?

Sounds like a 12-step program might be in order.

 

I Need to Man Up to the Fact That I'm Not a Comedian; I'm a Clown

I was watching Ricky Gervais, Chris Rock, Louis CK, and Jerry Seinfeld on HBO's Talking Funny and I was bitter that I didn't become a successful comedian. These are relevant human beings who construct pithy, well constructed jokes. And they do what I have wanted to do all my life: They make people laugh.

So I tried to come up with a joke in the car on the way to our family's for Easter. I told my wife Carrie the premise for a joke: A pompous professor who changes his students' lives, helping them become hugely successful, and to show their appreciation after they become rich they offer him expensive cars, all of which he rejects because he brags that his profession is a "spiritual calling," a "priesthood."

"Not funny," my wife said.

"But I haven't come up with the punchline," I said, even though I was still working on that part.

"Doesn't matter," she said. "No one can relate to the premise. Comedy works because people can relate to the premise. No one can relate to some supercilious professor who won't accept his former students' lavish gifts."

"So I'm not funny?" I asked. "You laugh at me every day."

"Yeah, but you're not trying to be funny. You're being . . ."

I said it for her. "Stupid."

And there's the difference between a comedian and a clown. A clown can't try to be funny. He simply is funny by living out his life. 

 

What’s Worse Than a Colonoscopy? A Summer-Long Vacation

 

Unless there’s a nice hotel with a full gym, I find it impossible to enjoy a vacation, looking at trips abroad as a threat to my existence, a life dependent on routine, particularly working out. I have barely missed any workouts since I was bit by the exercise bug back in 1974 at the age of 13.

So with great dread a few days ago, I listened to my wife Carrie announce that when our baby girls are “old enough to appreciate it,” we are going to visit Carrie’s relatives in Croatia for the entire summer.

We are talking a remote island where there is no toilet paper, Internet, or Starbucks. We are talking no gyms. Carrie assures me there will be exercise in the form of “lots of walking.”

When will this vacation take place? Ten years from now. I’m already biting my nails, fearful that when I return from this 3-month trip, I won’t be able to bounce back to my workout routine, that missing my workouts for such a long period will push me into a bottomless abyss for which there is no return.

How could a man be a real man and worry about something that won’t take place, if at all, for another ten years?

I’m reminded of something my Grandma Mildred said to me when I was four years old: “You worry too much,” upon which I started worrying about my propensity to worry. My condition has only gotten worse. 

 

When the Back Turns to Silver

My contractor George was a very likeable man in the beginning when he put custom red tile in my kitchen in my beachside condo. “I’m a simple man,” he used to say. “All I need is some rice and beans on my plate.”

He became less simple as homeowners got wind of his immense talents and he started charging up to $500 day for labor. He also become so overworked—and now I speculate based on strong evidence that would come out later—that he became addicted to drugs.

Once a reliable worker, he started showing up randomly, late, or not at all, to the point that I was almost begging him to get his current job done, my new kitchen in my new home. With the kitchen half finished and with a $1,800 deposit I gave him for a large kitchen window that didn’t materialize after three months, I called the window company, asked about my order, and discovered that George had never ordered a window.

To add to my worries, another contractor who fabricated my granite counter tops, told me George was being flaky with other clients. I called my friends who used George and told them these revelations.

It was my fortune that George had left over $3,000 worth of tools in my garage and it was also a great leverage point that I knew George didn’t pay taxes, and I told him I would hold his tools hostage and I lied to him, threatening to use my "contacts" in the IRS to ruin his life.

I said this to him one day in the half rebuilt kitchen. I was wearing a tank top, had just got back from my Brazilian jiu-jitsu lesson, and was feeling a wide iridescent silver crest grow across my back.

Instead of saying sorry for stealing my money, George said, “I don’t appreciate you calling my clients and talking crap about me.”

I said, “You don’t steal my money, then give me a lecture on moral imperatives. Are we clear?”

Later my wife said she walked outside and and started shaking, for she could see in my Hulk body language that I was about to tear George’s head off.

George looked up at me and he realized my argument was veering in a direction he didn’t want to go to. The more fearful his eyes became, the more emboldened I became and I began shouting a spit-spraying vituperation while thumping my index finger into his chest.

I wanted my $1,800 the next day before 5 P.M. or else I would ruin his life, keep his tools, call my “friends” in the IRS, etc.

He showed up the next day with the money. Our final meeting was congenial. I haven’t seen him since and my silver streak on my back is now happily gone.

Social Inappropriate Behavior: I'm the First to Tear into the Dessert Tray

I told my wife Carrie about a dream I had last night in which I was at a funeral and before the service had ended, I was at the buffet table gorging on cinnamon rolls and cookies. 

Carrie said, "That is so you. At parties, you don't wait for the hosts to announce dessert. You're already tearing into it while people are still eating dinner." 

Carrie can't take me anywhere. Now that I think of it, she doesn't anymore.