Big Things in Small Packages

    Thirty-one years ago today I sat in a hospital room in Hanford in a state of almost total stupefaction. In my hands I held what most people refer to as a "bundle of joy". Don't get me wrong, babies are a bundle of joy, but the feeling I most remember is the anxiety of knowing that party was over; it was time to grow up.
     I was in the room when she entered into this world, and I was in something of a trance. Birth is amazing. Walking down the hall way to tell her grandparents, I felt like a 100 lb. bag of feed had been placed on my shoulders. It had to have been that heavy or I would have floated off.
    We named her Haley for some reason, (Haley Mills, I suspect) it means "the game changer" in the mother tongue. I entered the hospital that night a scared teenaged boy masquerading as a twenty-seven year old man. Walking out the door that morning, I took the first real steps on my path to manhood. I had help bring something rare and wonderful into the world and was given the task of nurturing and protecting it.
    Because I wanted to do what's right, I quit my wastrel ways. Because I didn't want her to be ashamed of her father, I went back to school and got my degree.  She has changed my life more than any other factor.
    Babies don't come with instruction manuals, and  they are often dropped willy-nilly into a world where almost any moron can take one out for a test drive. I know that haven't been the best father in the world, but it isn't from a lack of trying to do what's right. More often than not, I have so many times,  not really understood what I was supposed to do.   Looking back on my life, the advice that I would give a new parent to avoid making the mistakes I have made is, "Love your children with all your heart, and let them know all the time that you do."

Heads Gotta Roll!

    When Dante Alighierie wrote the Divine Comedy back in the fourteenth century, Hell was probably roomy enough. But surely, the ensuing seven centuries must have created a need for larger accommodations.  If the ninth circle was reserved for the fraudulent and those who were guilty of serious betrayal, how much deeper into the abyss would we have to journey to find a place for those who have killed their fellow man because they were texting while driving?
    This has not only created a new gold standard for stupidity, as well as a serious need for an addendum to one of the world's great pieces of literature,  it has also has enlarged our vocabulary as it has expanded the definition of the word ironic - "Killed by a driver who was texting." How much more ironic could it be to get  up one morning raring to go, get in a car, and then get murdered by a moron who was texting, "Duh, LOL"?
    I think this calls for the perpetrator to spend eternity in something like the 23rd circle where they would be embedded for eternity up to their neck in the frozen firmament with the their cell phones placed two feet in front of them, and miniature demonic versions of Snooki and the Situation gnawing on their fingers.
  Somewhere, someone has to be keeping score of this stuff. As Americans, we tend to think that none of  our stupid behavior really matters, but it is getting harder to ignore that we are getting a bit worn down at the edges. The whole country has become a tad bit manic. It used to be guys like Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda who were the Everyman, now it's Dennis Leary and James Wood.
   Someone has to be observing us somewhere with a clipboard and pencil stuck behind their ear, clucking and nodding sagely without explanation every time we exhibit some new form of idiotic behavior, and the thing is,  he/she has gotten progressively more and more jaded as we have gone from stuff like slavery, racism, mobsters, genocide, etc to ever more abstract forms of deviant behavior.
   This person would have been outraged at first while watching the Dutch bargaining for Manhattan with their fingers crossed behind their back and $24 worth of plastic beads. Then, they would have sobbed uncontrollably as they witnessed a passing fashion trend bring about the near extinction of the American buffalo. By now, however,  it has probably gotten to a point where they merely roll their eyes as the rest of the world struggles with the vagaries of human existence, and America sits in a overstuffed easy chair, beer in one hand, remote in the other, drooling while the people from TMZ laughingly discuss how one of their minions ambushed Jimmy Kimmel at his uncle's funeral.
  Getting back to Snooki. What must the rest of the world think of this country when someone, whose greatest creative achievement lies in the art of passing gas, is hired to speak at one of our most prestigious universities? We have become so used to having our distaste in these matters voiced by some eastern brahman type with a tweed suit with brown patches on the elbows, speaking with a nasally Harvard drawl while dangling a pipe to make his point. We always start to listen but end up saying, "Who gives a crap what this guy is saying."
   But in this case, it's the guy down taking down the Christmas (winter holiday if you prefer) decorations for the city who should be outraged. Our college students should also be outraged. Our beautiful college students, who so readily paint signs in bold day-glo colors screaming "No War for Oil" as they blithely ignore the fact that they drove a car to the protest. "But it's a hybrid", they say in defense pretending to believe that their mother's Prius runs on some mystical, magical blend of used coffee grounds, recycled sewage, and love.
  They did what? No, that couldn't be. I am stunned. Our college students wanted this? I couldn't see this coming. I mean just because they have taken what used to be a holiday associated with ultimate sacrifice, salvation and hope and changed it to mean in our current vernacular, "A time to vomit on friends and strew beer bottles and used condoms on Mexican beaches", surely does not mean that the best and the brightest that our country has to offer believes for one moment that Snooki has ever in her life said something that was worth $80,000.  If that was really the case, what would they pay to hear the winner of the Kansas's Ninth Region Championship Belch-Off?
    Then there is always someone masquerading as the responsible adult in the room who offers up a weak justification. "We are just giving them what they wanted." As if  trying to be cool is the new  get out of jail free card of the Internet Age. It's not enough. If these kids want to mate with primates while rolling down the freeway in stolen shopping carts, would if be our job to raid the Rite-Aid parking lot and bribe a corrupt security guard at the zoo?
 In the words of Robespierre, "Heads need to roll!"