New years, old attitudes

Whenever I feel an inkling to pursue the kind of rambunctious, drunken New Year’s Eve celebrations that were common in my early-to-mid 20s, I remember the time I spend most of the night flying high on Southern Comfort and violently shaking a plastic ice cream mixer. That usually brings me back down to earth.

I mean, you’re supposed to shake an ice cream mixer, but youthful, inebriated New Year’s parties tend to transform common banalities into delightfully embarrassing memories. Playing music on your computer? Banality. Playing Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean” on your computer while wearing a feather boa on your head and strumming a banjo in polka-dotted Bermuda shorts? Well, that’s New Year’s.

Over the past few years, I’ve become somewhat alarmed at signs that I’m already beginning the slow march to the Land of Fuddy-Duddy. Call it a symptom of growing older. I find myself bristling at the exuberant cries of sports-enthused teenagers; I scowl at passing cars emitting the bass-thumping tones of music that’s turned up too high. And if I catch you on my lawn, I might run outside in a bathrobe, waving a rolled-up magazine, and tell you to get the hell off it. I figure at this rate it’ll only be a couple of years before I start wearing tweed jackets with elbow patches and hissing at people who walk too loudly in the library.

So why the New Year’s nostalgia? Shouldn’t I embrace my ascension to the ranks of the occasionally mature? In a lot of ways, people in my age range – the range at which you stop telling people exactly when you were born – have it all over those barely post-pubescent spitfires, what with their Justin Bieber and their soda pop. We have more self-confidence, more experience, and more of a handle on how to conduct ourselves when our precious phones won’t play the streaming video of the cat with the Hitler mustache.

Of course, we also have more joint pain and nose hair, but that’s beside the point. Wait, what was the point? Oh yeah, it was this: Once past the age at which drunken New Year’s celebrations are acceptable, we should count our blessings and feel gratitude that we even survived those years in the first place.
But we don’t. Many of us (i.e., me) use this final week of the year as an opportunity to dwell on time’s inexorable passage. We make resolutions for the future while looking backward to the past, and we find comfort in adulthood while mourning that period of post-adolescence when we had the minds of grown-ups but the responsibilities and stamina of children.

Here’s what I’ve found: It’s okay. It’s okay to look back at periods of your life and miss them. It’s even healthy – providing you have a present that you’ll one day miss, as well. (I mean “present” in the temporal sense, in case you’ve got Christmas hangover. This parenthetical brought to you by the Coalition for a Confusion-Free Post.)

I think the reason a lot of adults try to deny their adultness and stage a rowdy, booze-soaked New Year’s is because it seems expected somehow – as if staying at home, cracking open a single beer, and passing out in front of the scrambled nudie channel isn’t even an option.

That’s why thousands show up to Times Square in New York City to freeze their tookuses, hoping for that big chance to tell Ryan Seacrest about their resolution to drop ten pounds. The teens and college-age kids in the crowd will be fine, because they have rapidly renewing cells and the totally not-lame music of One Direction to keep them warm. But if you’re watching the ball drop this year, take a close look at the older faces in the crowd, the ones with the crows feet and gray streaks in their walrus mustaches. Their smiles say “Party!” but their eyes say “I’m totally regretting this in the morning.”

And so, after a token flirtation with wistfulness, I’ll be doing what a sane, former spring chicken does on New Year’s Eve: Stopping my alcohol intake while I’m still vertical. That way, I start the year hangover-free, and avoid making the premature jump from young-but-not-eligible-for-

American-Idol, to dead-because-he’s-a-youth-chasing-idiot.
 

That would be my recommendation, but hey, if you are still young enough to binge drink without subsequently feeling like a headache wrapped in a smelly sock, then shoot me an e-mail sometime. I may have an ice cream mixer you can borrow.

 

Christmas lies and the heroes who tell them

This is the best time of year for a parent to lie to their child.

I say that with absolutely zero attempt at being facetious. Generally speaking, I’m not a proponent of lying to toddlers – unless they ask where babies come from, in which case the old stork bromide might get a good dusting-off. Or in the event they ask me if I have superpowers, in which case my reply will be, yes. Yes I do.

Otherwise, I try to follow Shakespeare’s time-worn assertion that honesty is the best policy. Lies can be confusing and damaging to a child, and can lead to resentment later in life; in the worst case scenario, it can lead to the Dr. Phil Show. Better to avoid that kind of thing.

But Christmas lies: Ahh, Christmas lies are the exception. The best lie I was ever told came from my mother when I was barely old enough to string two words together. She said that every year, a jolly, portly old man who lived at the North Pole would settle his considerable derrier into a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer. So equipped, this man would streak across the globe, entering people’s homes through their chimneys and depositing glittery packages under the dormant wee-hour lights of Christmas trees.

Later, when I was still young enough to believe in Santa Claus, but old enough to realize our house didn’t have a chimney, the fabrication got more complicated. Apparently, Mr. Kringle entered our home through the pipes in the basement. It was never quite explained to me how; in my young mind, I pictured Santa using his magical powers to turn himself into a slithering, taffy-like ooze and maneuvering through the pipes like... well, let’s just leave that analogy unfinished. Picturing St. Nick in such a state is decidedly unromantic compared to the chimney scenario, but come Christmas morning the milk glass was empty and the cookies were crumbs. And in a way, it made me trust that merry old fart even more – because if you can enter a house through sewer pipes, there’s nothing stopping you from making off with the TV, the stereo, and the autographed photo of Ernest Borgnine. Santa was a stand-up kinda guy.

There are a lot of bad lies you can tell your kids, like, “If you make that face for too long, it’ll freeze that way,” or, “Trigonometry is a valuable life skill.” I was told the former, and it freaked me out. I was told the latter, and later found out it’s only true if you’re an engineer or a GPS satellite.
However, there’s a breed of fib called “the white lie.” The Santa myth is the whitest of the white. It’s the lie of magic and belief in impossible things. It inspires children to dream a little, to flex their imaginations, and when they outgrow the story, its purpose has been served: To inject those first few Christmases with an electric thrill, one that’s only possible in the absence of cynicism. It’s only during that brief time that you can allow yourself to hear sleigh bells on the roof and believe it’s anything more than the wind.

A few years ago, a friend of mine and his wife were anticipating their first child. As all expectant parents do, they talked about strategies for raising him – where to send him to school, how to exact discipline, the whole shmear. While talking to me about it one night, my friend said that he and his wife would not be indulging their son in the Santa story, citing a desire never to lie to his own flesh and blood. I kept my mouth shut, because the last thing a soon-to-be-dad wants to hear is parenting advice from a single schlub who’s never raised anything more complex than a houseplant. And it was a well-intentioned declaration; in most circumstances, yes, of course, you shouldn’t lie to your kids.

Turns out I didn’t have to say a word. Four years later, my friend’s little boy wakes him up before dawn’s first light every Christmas morning, frenetic with desire to see what the elves had made in the workshop that year.

I never asked my friend why he pulled the about-face and indulged his son in the fantasy. None of my business, really. I’d like to think it’s because he remembered his own childhood, and the impossible innocence that can allow such a flight of fancy to enter into a child’s heart. It’s true that there exists a potential for heartbreak when they’re old enough to know the truth. But there’s a lesson in that, I think. And I know, for me at least, the memories were worth it.

Some Christmases I pine for that old innocence. It’s a sweet melancholy, somehow appropriate for the holiday. Far from being saddened by it, I’m thankful. And I owe it all to a white lie.

The great parking adventure

So I parallel parked last week. Successfully.

This is notable because it’s the first time I’ve done so since passing my license test in 1998. I wasn’t prepared for the sense of pride and elation I felt – but that all came crashing down when I realized the last time I did this, I had a full head of hair and knew how to dance the Macarena. The next time I parallel park, pandas will be extinct, and computers will be the size of Honey Nut Cheerios.

Like a lot of people, I tend not to parallel park – or even attempt to – unless it’s absolutely necessary. Mostly, this isn’t a problem. York County, Maine, after all, is not exactly a metropolis teeming with traffic congestion, nor does it lack its share of spacious parking lots, where a paranoid parker can find himself a nice far-away corner with nary a vehicle in sight. Anyone with a willing pair of legs can park their butt a little father away from their destination and avoid altogether the hassle of the pull-up, the wheel-turn, the angling in, and in my case, the senseless murder of squirrels.

Sometimes, though, it’s unavoidable. I’ll use downtown Biddeford as an example, because it’s the traffic-clogged exception that proves the rule: A narrow, claustrophobic corridor of multi-story buildings, about half of them tattoo parlors. Let’s say you wanted to drop by McArthur Public Library to see if they have that new Emeril cookbook with the recipe for butter-basted South American turducken. Now, McArthur has a lot of amenities – a huge book selection, a newly-built reading area, and plenty of places to plug in a laptop, in case you want to whittle away an afternoon scouring eBay for autographed Englebert Humperdinck records. But one thing the library doesn’t have is a parking area. It’s on-street parking, or no turducken. Those are your choices.

Okay. So you’re driving west along Main Street, and as you begin your approach toward McArthur’s stone arches, you scan the roadside for open spaces – always a crapshoot in Biddeford, where traffic patterns are as unpredictable as a meth addict’s mood swings. Right in front of the building, you spot an open space (eureka!), only to notice it’s sandwiched between a soccer mom’s minivan and an SUV the size of a small dinosaur. It’s parallel park or bust.

I’m aware there’s a contingent of drivers who would have no problem with this. Their skills are honed. Maybe they hail from a big city, or perhaps even a smallish city like Portland, that labyrinth of one-way streets and myriad metered parking. Perhaps they parallel park, even if they don’t strictly have to, just to keep their skills up, the way a pacifist karate master will still practice the high-kick. Or maybe they simply possess motor skills (no pun intended) and know they can pull off such a maneuver without destroying multiple two-ton hunks of metal. I call these people “jerks,” because I’m petty and jealous.

Obviously, I am not one of these drivers. I pull up to this intimidating scenario and think two things: 1) I wonder if I should park in a residential area and walk a quarter mile to the library, and 2) Who needs a cookbook when my kitchen is stocked with Raisin Bran and beer?

I don’t know what changed last week. I was driving down Adams Street on my way to Biddeford District Court, and right there in front of the courthouse was a space between two vehicles. Normally I’d pass it up, maybe try to find parking at City Hall or along nearby Main Street. But something in me said, “No. I am tired of being cowed by tricky parking. I’m going to parallel park like no one’s ever parallel parked. Mayor Casavant will walk over and shake my hand and give me a key to the city. Fireworks will ignite the sky, and the artists of Riverdance will stream out of the courthouse and perform a routine choreographed to Wild Cherry’s ‘Play That Funky Music.’”

Then it began: Pull-up, wheel-turn, angle-in, and boom. Like I’d been doing it my whole life.

It would probably be wise to chalk it up to blind luck, lest a false confidence set in and lead to the widespread destruction of people’s property. But hey, who knows? Maybe I’ve held the power this whole time, and have just been afraid to let it loose.

All I know for sure is that, tonight, I dine on turducken.

A bald man's lament

I’m here to talk about the plight of the bald man.

It’s one of the few demographics that doesn’t have its own advocacy group, probably because most people don’t give a crap. It’s not an affliction as daunting as poverty, or as heart-wrenching as a serious disease. Schools don’t start bottle drives to raise money for bald dudes; comedians don’t host telethons and ask for donations to the American Cueball Fund. Still, if there’s one thing an advocacy group is good at, it’s getting stuff. So I propose a coalition of baldies, hair-loss sympathizers, and spouses of the bare-headed – a group whose sole focus is to procure that one commodity essential to sufferers of feckless follicles.

Hats. It’s getting cold, man.

There’s disagreement over whether a person loses most of their body heat through their head, as the old saying goes. The latest research indicates that’s a myth, like Bigfoot, or a decent fruitcake. Regardless, a head without hair is like a sockless foot – without that warm, protective barrier, a slight chill translates into icebox conditions, enough to make a man feel like the hanging beef carcasses in a Siberian slaughterhouse.
Now, I was never that distressed, psychologically speaking, about my receding hairline. My hair began to thin, little by little, strand by strand, when I was as young as 15, and so I’ve had plenty of time to get used to the idea. I knew when I was a sophomore in high school that I would eventually shave my head completely, thus looking like some impossible lovechild of Howie Mandell and Stone Cold Steve Austin. Having been accustomed to the absurd aesthetic of my bare pate for about half my life now, it’s not the look that bothers me – it’s the feel. That post-Halloween, winter-chilled feel.

Admittedly, there are certain advantages to sporting a full-on chrome dome. Rain and wind, for instance, are far less of a bane than they used to be. There’s something liberating about walking out to the car in a raging spring rain and not having to readjust unruly cowlicks or storm-dampened curlicues. Split ends are a thing of the past. And the money I save on shampoo could be used to build a school in Haiti, with enough left over for a Sham-Wow and a Blu-ray box set of Battlestar Galactica.

That’s to say nothing of the time saved by not getting haircuts. I sat in a hair stylist’s chair for over 20 years and never felt fully comfortable. Part of it was the forced banter – “Oh, your son just had a boil lanced? Awesome!” – but mostly it was the feeling that I was an experiment of some kind, a special project. Truthfully, the back of my head was uncomfortable with such a high level of scrutiny, as if it were some fuzzy, fleshy diamond being inspected by a jeweler.

On balance, having no hair at all is a relief. Until the winds change.

You baldies out there know what I’m talking about.

Picture it: You’re walking around hatless all summer, your scalp a distinctive bronze (protected by sunblock, of course), your body temperature normal. You get up in the middle of the night to answer the call of nature, and the slightly cool air of the wee hours feels pleasant on your head, a background sensation felt through a haze of semi-consciousness. Then summer turns to fall, October leaves are piling around your feet, and you feel the very tips of Jack Frost’s fingers tracing lightly over your scalp, both a tease and a promise. Inevitably, one day, it happens: You walk outside and are blasted by winter wind, the skin on your hatless head pulls taught like a nylon stocking, and you spend the rest of the morning hunched over a space heater trying to feel your face.

Happens every year. You hairy people have no idea how good you’ve got it.

It’s a curious fact of human evolution that baldies have come to live in cold climes. You’d think they’d all be huddled down near the equator, with Maine and Canada and all the rest populated by pompadours and heat-trapping mullets. But we’re here, and we’re freezing. So as your contemplate gifts for your bald-headed loved ones this holiday season, consider something woolly, with earflaps. The outpouring of gratitude will last until May.

Thanks for mutton

Dear Thanksgiving: You’re great. But you made me feel like I was going to rip apart in a violent explosion of entrails and cranberry jelly. Do it again and I’ll kill you in your sleep. Love Jeff.

So reads my imaginary letter to a holiday. I can forgive Christmas its commercialization, and Easter its sheer pointlessness. But with me and Thanksgiving, it’s personal. There’s no other holiday that so brings out the masochist in me; no other at which I feel compelled to cram massive amounts of bird meat into my mouth and see how long it takes to slip into a coma.

Yeah, I know. Self-control. I should exercise it. But that’s easier said than done, isn’t it? Especially seated at a table shimmering in the heat of some of the most heavenly food ever concocted – to make no mention of the various pies and desserts, devised to send reckless souls to early graves with their unbearable goodness.
If there was ever a holiday that has evolved as a monument to gluttony, Thanksgiving is it.

Which is not to dump on it and strip it of its obvious merits. Take my most recent Thanksgiving, for example: A fine dinner at a lake house in Monmouth overlooking Tacoma, with family, football, and just enough alcohol so I wouldn’t mind the slobbering of the dog licking gravy off my fingers. That’s all good stuff. And it’s only stuff that could happen on that particular holiday – unless you’re one of those families that has postcard-perfect fireside dinners all the time, in which case I’d like to marry your daughter.

I’d just like to retain all of that heart-warming goodness and subtract the aching stomach and too-tight Wranglers. It’s a deceptively challenging assignment.

Two reasons.

First and foremost, there’s the food selection. Is it me, or has the spread become larger and more complex over the years? Every autumn, a couple of friends of mine host an event they call “Thanksgiving II” – which is kind of like Thanksgiving I, only a group of buddies all bring their leftovers and set about the task of clearing space in various refrigerators. Since each friend’s Thanksgiving I meal is slightly different, the Thanksgiving II meal is a hodgepodge of hors d’oeuvres and side dishes: Green bean casserole, applesauce, banana bread, zucchini bread, bread bread, and pasta salad take their place alongside the traditional trimmings. Afterward, various desserts rule the day – enough to send us all crawling back to our cars, pleading for a swift and merciful death.

Thanksgiving II has turned into a wonderful tradition, but the sheer volume of edibles illustrates how overeating has almost become a requirement of the holiday. You can’t face a table stocked with fifteen or twenty dishes and not sample them all. (Ridiculous!) The temptation is too great.

But if selection makes it hard to not overeat, it’s nothing next to food addiction.

That sounds like a strange phenomenon, and I’ll admit, even after seeing stories on food addiction run on 60 Minutes and in the Los Angeles Times, I was skeptical. How can you be addicted to something that you legitimately need in order to survive? But the science is sound: Certain foods, especially desserts, trigger dopamine production in the brain, not unlike what occurs when an alcoholic takes a drink, or when Rush Limbaugh passes a CVS pharmacy. And the revelation that two-thirds of Americans are overweight lends credence to the idea that, yeah, sometimes we can’t help ourselves.

In light of that, inviting a food addict to Thanksgiving dinner is rather like inviting an alcoholic to a kegger, or a cocaine addict to Charlie Sheen’s house. Even without an addiction to food, a meal that size amounts to a kind of punishment – a consignment to the treadmill, the sweatpants with the elastic waistband, or in extreme cases, the Maury Povich show.

Because of our commitment to indulgence, we often lose sight of what the holiday is about: Expressing thanks for the things that are positive in our lives. This year, among other things, I was thankful to have a button on my pants that could be undone. It’s not a solution to the food dilemma, but boy, does it help.