Hearing voices

Like a lot of people, I go into a karaoke situation with way more confidence than is justified. With the microphone in hand and the opening beat of some classic pop song thundering through the speakers, I wait for the lyrics to appear on the sing-a-long screen and think, “I’ve totally got this. The song is in my range, I know the words by heart – I’m gonna blow the doors off this joint, send everyone to their knees. Bring it on!”

 

Then I belt out the opening line, and everyone starts looking around in confusion, as if the sounds of a fire alarm with dying batteries were filling the room instead of the first verse of “Billy Jean.”

 

That’s when I remember: Oh yeah! I can’t sing!

 

When it comes to that initial false confidence, I can tell I’m not alone. A lot of people who do karaoke bellow a tune’s first syllables with the self-assuredness of a young, pre-cocaine-and-sideburns Elvis Presley. Unfortunately, they usually sound like a crow being zapped by an electrified fence, and follow their bold start with a meek, apologetic performance that at times is borderline inaudible. For which we, the audience, are grateful.

 

This is usually a drunken affair. In fact, were it not for alcohol, karaoke may not even exist, at least not to the extent it does today.

 

Think about what karaoke is for a second. A half-sloshed reveler gathers up his or her courage, stands at the front of a bar and selects a song performed by an artist who can actually sing. Then they – a person who, based on the law of averages, probably can’t sing at all – proceed to murder the song with vocal chops that make them sound like an owl being strangled by a mob goon with a fistful of piano wire. The audience that endures this display does so because they’re all half in the bag themselves, whooping and chortling their way through a rendition of “Heartbreaker” that could peel the chrome off a doorknob. Then cousin Betty drops the microphone and slinks back to her seat, calculating how long it’ll take for one of her smartphone-wielding friends to upload video evidence to YouTube. (Answer: 30 seconds, tops.)

 

To call this bizarre would be an understatement.

 

Yet there are people who live for this sort of thing. A few years ago, I attended a birthday shindig for a friend, “Bathsheba,” who was then in the throes of a full-on karaoke obsession. The event was held at a bar (where else?), and the crowd was divided into two distinct camps: Those who were excited to sing badly and hear others do the same, and those who huddled at the bar, hunching over sweaty beer mugs and ostensibly hoping they’d be graced with a swift and merciful visit from the Angel of Death. I straddled the line between the two factions, supportive of my friend on the one hand and deeply apprehensive on the other. Perhaps foolishly, I hoped that our would-be band of minstrels would choke under pressure, and we could enjoy “Sweet Caroline” as sung by Neil Diamond himself – the way it should be in any just universe.

 

My hopes were dashed when Bathsheba mounted the stage. She’s a curious one, Bathsheba. An exhibitionist even under ordinary circumstances, when fortified by booze she transforms into an unrestrained diva, basking in the spotlight with the self-assurance of an accomplished pop star – minus the entourage, wealth and record deal. Truth is, when she opens up her pipes to sing, the most positive reaction she gets is from the hippopotamuses at the zoo, who think a lustful mate is advertising for a late-night booty call.

 

She chose to sing a Matchbox Twenty track, “Real World,” and while I’m not typically a pop-rock guy, I actually kind of dig that tune. The problem is that any rendition by an amateur is the equivalent of warping a song in a funhouse mirror: It kind of resembles the original, and you sort of want to enjoy it, but its altered state makes you vaguely uncomfortable. You could tell that certain members of our group wanted to dance or move around, but were overpowered by the desire to watch Bathsheba’s hatchet job. The song was annihilated so thoroughly it was actually a little magical.

 

Love you, Bathsheba.

 

The fact that we all made it through the evening is a testament to how powerfully our behavior can be affected by a pitcher of beer. From an early age, you hear warnings about the dangers of alcohol, and rightly so; only a potent substance can alter our perceptions so completely. Under its influence we paint sports logos onto our faces, yell at inanimate objects and wake up next to members of the Pauly Shore Fan Club. Its ability to stretch and bend our judgment is maybe the best explanation we have for why karaoke enjoys such high levels of popularity. It’s either that, or alien beings are slowly filling our atmosphere with a delirium-inducing gas. They’ll soon rob us blind while we sway to a glass-shattering take on “Love is a Battlefield.”

 

I’ll say this about karaoke, though: It seems to make people happy. That’s more than you can say for some other hobbies, like collecting stamps or rooting for the Chicago Cubs. I’m happy to regard it as a curious oddity, providing there are no karaoke bars within a five-mile radius of my home. My windows rattle easily, and there’s only so much Top 40 butchery a man can take.

 

I'm (not) a PC

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld doesn’t perform on college campuses anymore. And I can’t say I blame him.

 

In a June appearance on “The Herd with Colin Cowherd,” a show on ESPN radio, Seinfeld revealed his aversion to playing for college crowds: The students, he said, are too politically correct, throwing around PC terms with often reckless abandon.

 

“They just want to use these words: ‘That’s racist,’ ‘That’s sexist,’ ‘That’s prejudice,’” said Seinfeld. “They don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.”

 

Now, if this were an edgier comedian – a Bill Maher, for example, or a George Carlin – you might look at a comment like that and say, “Well, his material is pretty avant garde, so I can see why people might take offense to his show.” But this is Jerry freakin’ Seinfeld we’re talking about here. His edgiest material is about airplane peanuts. He makes Jimmy Fallon look like Andrew Dice Clay. If his act was any more sanitized, you could use it to clean the lids on emergency room toilet bowls.

 

So when the King of Clean says that college students have become too PC, you start to wonder if maybe he has a point.

 

Political correctness started off with good intentions. The goal of the whole movement was to scale back on terms and labels that certain groups might find offensive, and on its surface, that seems noble enough. Aside from certain rodent-haired windbag presidential candidates (and the columnists who mock them), who wants to purposefully offend people? You’d have to be the twerpiest of twerps to get up in the morning and think, “Okay, I’m going to shower, make myself an omelet, and go out and insult an Asian guy! It’s gonna be a productive day!”

 

At some point, though, things started to get a bit silly. I was in middle school when I first became conscious of the politically correct movement. Certain words and terms, language I’d been using for the whole of my short life, started being replaced with their play-it-safe counterparts. Some of these linguistic changes made sense. At some point during my childhood, for instance, the term “stewardess” was supplanted with the more inclusive “flight attendant.” That’s a reasonable change. Not all flight attendants, after all, are women, and so any word capped by a gender-specific suffix isn’t very logical. Other outdated gender terms were also shelved, and rightly so; cavalier descriptors like “dame,” “filly” and “toots” have been justifiably shelved, stuffed way back in our collective culture closet next to the phonograph and the shockingly hideous beehive hairdo. You still occasionally hear a woman referred to as a “chick,” but usually by other women. Or else a man says it and is immediately given a ninja-style kick to the groin.

 

Other PC terms made less sense to me, even as a young teenager. “African American” is one of them. It’s confusing on a couple of different levels. Firstly, the very neutral-sounding “black person” contains nothing derogatory from what I can tell. It’s a simple descriptive term, like “tall,” or “bald.” Secondly, there’s the obvious problem that not all people of African descent are Americans. If you’re talking about a black American, then sure, “African American” is technically correct. But what about black people in Britain, or France – or for that matter, Africa? They’re definitely not African Americans. What PC culture has done is taken a word with no value judgment in its DNA – “black” – and inflated it, balloon-like, into a convoluted mess of extra, unwarranted syllables. And this is coming from a guy who makes his living based partly on word counts.

 

The term “senior citizen” is just as unnecessary. At some point, “old man” and “old woman” became offensive. I’m not really sure why. Seems to me the goal of each and every one of us is to eventually become an old person. It doesn’t take a MENSA-level genius to conclude that the alternative is premature death. I’ll admit, I always thought it would be kinda neat to have a really unique, attention-grabbing death story – “Did you hear about Jeff? He died wrestling a bear while parachuting from a gunned-down helicopter in the Ozarks!” – but I’d gladly trade that in for a good long run at this whole life thing. “Old” should be a badge of pride, not a source of shame. “Elderly” is an acceptable alternative, but “senior citizen” is a sterile, clinical term that’s had all its vitality sucked dry. Like the flavor from a butterscotch candy. 

 

Hey, zing! That right there was a joke, ladies and gentlemen.

 

A tame one, sure, and maybe you thought it was funny and maybe you didn’t. But if you actively found it offensive, then you are either 1) too easily offended, or 2) a millennial, which basically amounts to the same thing. Millenials – those young people born near the turn of the century – are the end product of decades of politically correct finger-wagging and language-tampering. Some words and phrases are indeed offensive, and that’s why political correctness in and of itself isn’t a bad thing; it seeks to mitigate unwarranted insult, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Where things went awry was in the level of degree. Now everything is considered offensive that isn’t dull, bland and safe. That’s a death knell for good comedy. And that’s what Seinfeld was talking about.

 

Carlin, one of my late, great heroes, once had a 10-minute bit about rape. In his act, he explained why joking about it was OK.

 

“I believe you can joke about anything,” he said. “It depends on how you construct the joke. What the exaggeration is. Because every joke needs one exaggeration. Every joke needs one thing to be way out of proportion.”

 

Spoken like a man who knew not everything should be taken seriously. I worry that subsequent generations may lose sight of that. What a sad, humorless world it would be if they do.

 

Which is all just another way of saying: Hey, kids. Take a joke.

 

Too pool for school

Summer birthdays are the best.

It makes it so much easier to plan stuff. I always felt bad for people who were born in the dead of winter; any potential celebrations you organize are always tentative, because nature could just up and gobsmack you with the kind of blizzard that makes one pine for a timeshare in the Galapagos. Activities are mostly limited to watching Cary Grant movies on AMC and venturing outside to see how long it takes to lose all feeling in your face. Happy birthday!

Crummy weather can alter summer plans, but never outright dash them – unless your plan was to go snorkeling off the coast of Nova Scotia, in which case I’m jealous and you’re a buttface. If it rains, you just move the party indoors and wait for a break in the clouds so you can skip through the dewy mist in a pair of flip-flops, thanking the gods of August that you don’t have to wear thermal underwear. When engaging in an indoor activity, like bowling, then traveling there is basically a lock, since nobody has to shovel rain from the driveway, or worry about getting stuck in a rainbank.

But these advantages are more pronounced when you're a child.

That's because birthdays are a much bigger deal amongst the younger set. For a grownup, it almost becomes a non-event, just another reminder that you're one year closer to taking medication for an inflamed something-or-other. (Not to mention doing the Jumble with a giant magnifying glass.) Your friends might make a fuss if your birthday is a multiple of five – 50 and 75 frequently herald some kind of semi-lavish hullabaloo – but otherwise we tend to mark the occasion wryly, with half-acknowledged foreboding of an impending senior discount at the local multiplex.

Kids live it up, and they should. The younger we are, the more we experience time as a slow slog through endless weeks and months; that makes each birthday feel like some kind of accomplishment, on a par with nailing down a Master's degree or landing a spacecraft on the craggy surface of the moon. We feel so. Much. Older. And wiser. To a six-year-old, a five-year-old is a laughable curiosity, a naive protege ripe for instruction on how to avoid those embarrassing Kool-Aid mustaches. Each birthday is a rite of passage, worthy of cake and toys that we play with once and never touch again.

So is it any wonder that a birthday in the summer is some kind of small miracle? It combines two totally rad concepts – parties and sunshine – and accomplishes this without the pesky consideration of school, that fearsome bane to any small child's contentment. It also makes two thrilling words flash in the gaudiest neon in our tiny, developing brains:

Pool party.

Among a certain age group, pool parties are the best parties of all, a 10-year-old's equivalent of a barnburning college kegger. Anyone feels like royalty who's the center of attention at a social gathering, but especially so for the host of a pool party, who gets to preside over a shindig replete with lemonade and leaky, dorky-looking swim goggles. As our minds evolve out of childhood, we graft complications onto the veneer of daily life, and even the simple things become knotted in a web of adolescent angst and emotion; teenagers, caught in an awkward midway point, tend to add complexity to things that are really pretty basic. A child doesn't have this problem. Give them a floating basketball hoop and a towel with a Super Mario theme, and they're as content as a cat curled up in a wedge of sunlight, albeit with less proclivity to pee on things. That's why a pool-themed birthday party is a kid's version of Valhalla: Everything is simple and good. When nothing else matters, the smell of chlorine and cut grass is a heady intoxicant.

I was 10 the last time I had a pool party for my birthday. Never one to be considered a “popular kid,” I nevertheless felt like a king that day, despite the fact that I was wearing Coke-bottle glasses and a Dick Tracy shirt. How could I not? The day was hot, but not oppressively so. The pool filter was gurgling invitingly, as if to say, “Come, fill me with children's fart bubbles.” And in a stroke of genius, my parents commissioned a guy to make me a birthday cake in the shape of Raphael – the Ninja Turtle, not the Renaissance painter. (What kind of kid do you think I was?) All this made me the envy of my friends, which, when you get right down to it, is what every young boy wants. Besides stink bombs and sugar packets.

Nearly a quarter-century has passed since that party, and yet the clarity of certain memories is borderline startling: Diving for rings, the post-swim game of touch football, top 40 hits blasting from a transistor radio the size of a large potato. The reason it's a highlight of childhood is because it represents a confluence of good fortune – the right people doing the right things at the right age at the right time of year. And all that wouldn't have happened if my parents hadn't felt frisky after splitting a case of Heineken one late-November evening, thereby ensuring that my birthday fell in the sweet spot between the Fourth of July and Labor Day. Amazing that I have Dutch beer to thank for so much of my childhood.

Birthdays may not mean quite what they used to. But they usually mean sunblock and shorts and frilly little Hawaiian shirts, and you know what? Considering our geography, that's all right with me.

Wishy washy

Three wishes. That’s all you ever get.

 

Why is that, I wonder? At some point, the genie just up and decided that three was his limit. Maybe that’s all he’s capable of before he loses his mojo; in that way, he’s sort of like Alanis Morisette, a few big hits and then silence for decades. (Take that, Alanis!) Or maybe there are cosmic rules the genie has to follow – “Gee, Aladdin, I’d love to give you more wishes, but corporate’s breathing down my neck, there’s a lot of talk about efficiency, and well, you know how it is.” Strange to think that a being who’s able to make dreams come true at the snap of a finger would still be answerable to a higher power.

 

Whatever the reasons, though, three’s the limit, and this makes knowing what to wish for a pretty tough endeavor. You’ve really got to prioritize and figure out what’s important to you. Maybe that’s the point.

 

As an adult, it’s impractical to think about such things. Genies in bottles, after all, don’t actually exist, and so there’s an element of pointlessness in mulling what my three wishes would be. To survive day-to-day life, I have to fill my head with adult-type things, like figuring out what to make for dinner, and planning a supplement regimen that makes it so I poop more easily. It’s exhausting being a grown-up.

 

Yet here I am, a man who’s retained more than his share of childishness, turning the issue over in his ol’ noodle regardless. The problem is that there are a lot of things I’d wish for that would be frivolous, and wouldn’t make the final cut.

 

So let’s modify the familiar scenario, shall we? Let’s say you stumble into a cave after yet another exhausting and fruitless attempt to take video of Bigfoot. Temporary shelter is all you seek, but you find something more: a gold-tinged lantern with “GENIE” written on the side, “Made in China” stamped on the bottom and a handle festooned with a large Wal-Mart logo. (These things don’t happen without corporate sponsorship. Let’s be realistic.) You give the artifact three good rubs, and poof! Out pops an ethereal genie wearing a diamond-studded turban, and for some inexplicable reason, a Def Leppard T-shirt with mustard stains on the collar. Apparently he’s been trapped in that thing for a while.

 

“Today’s your lucky day!” he exclaims. “Usually we grant only three wishes, but today we’re running a special – unlimited wishes with your purchase of a $20 gift card. The cards come in classic blue or with a Garfield theme. Your pick!”

 

Unlimited wishes. What would yours be? Here are a few of mine:

 

I’d wish for all of the world’s hairsprayed, fishnet-wearing, teeny-bopper bubblegum pop acts to be rounded up on a spaceship and sent to a special colony on Mars. There, there’d be free to croon and sway and “Oh baby” to an audience of ugly orange rocks and broken-down NASA rovers. The Miley Cyruses, the Justin Biebers, the One Directions – all banished to outer space, and replaced here on Earth with rockers who play instruments and sing without Autotune. Just once I’d like to flip on the Grammys and not endure a bunch of spoiled millionaires who, in a just world, would be flinging boogers in a middle school science class.

 

I’d wish for a Labrador retriever who could yodel and play the bagpipes. I’d finally have that viral Internet video I’ve always wanted. And at long last I could fulfill my lifelong dream of being interviewed on “Ellen.”

 

I’d wish for Swiss Army hands. Anyone familiar with the superhero Wolverine? He contracts the muscles in his forearms and a bunch of knife-like metal claws pop out just above his knuckles. I want something like that, only with an array of tools: Screwdriver, nail file, scissors, tape measure, tire pressure gage, bottle opener, maybe even a universal remote control and a tube of decongestant nasal spray. I’d be a hit at parties!

 

I’d wish for the ability to fly like Superman. Who wouldn’t wish for the ability to fly like Superman? I’d also wish for a flying assistant so I wouldn’t have to keep toting my luggage back and forth to Bora Bora. Because honestly, if I could skip body scans at customs and the awful Cold War-era chicken they serve on commercial airlines, Bora Bora is where I’d be spending most of my time.

 

I’d wish for superhuman metabolism so I could eat whatever I wanted to without gaining weight. The desire to fit into my one functional suit compels me to follow occasionally healthy dietary guidelines, but let’s face it, healthy eating stinks. Aside from keeping us alive, what fun is it? Guilt-free binge eating is a common fantasy, and once fulfilled, the floodgates would be opened. I’m talking cookies heaped with frosting, cupcakes the size of goiters, muffins that can be seen from the International Space Station, and a pile of Halloween candy so massive it has to be trucked to my home in the back of a giant U-Haul. Vacations would be spent sequestered in my apartment with a lobster bib and a gallon bottle of Pepto Bismol. If at the end of five days I can still move without the aid of a nurse and a bucket of smelling salts, then the entire venture would be a failure.

 

I’d wish for new sneakers. Mine are dirty.

 

Naturally, this is an incomplete list. How do you whittle down your dreams and fantasies, your idle whimsies, into a digestible form fit for a turban-wearing genie? It’s near impossible, and that’s why three’s the limit; it focuses our desires, hones them into a streamlined knife-blade of want. The scope of human imagination is too limitless to be comfortable with such boundaries, but here we are, forced to choose and choose wisely. We ditch our second-tier wishes but there they remain, lodged in the part of the brain that still believes all things are possible. Our capacity for this belief diminishes with age, but it’s important never to relinquish it entirely. Within each of us is the child we once were, eyes affixed to a boundless horizon.

 

Still, a list without limits? Yeah, you wish.

 

Post-it notes

Not everyone knows how to act. You know it. I know it. Emily Post knew it, which is why, beginning in the 1920s, she wrote a series of books dedicated almost solely to the art of etiquette. It was an era in which men occasionally blew their noses into their hands and spit tobacco onto women’s backs, so clearly something had to be done. Rather than write a book on manners, I might have found a few of these unsanitary lugs and given’ em a swift kick in the ribcage, but Post probably would’ve found that behavior uncouth in itself, and made me the subject of a musing on tact. (Chapter 4: Why Would-Be Prince Valiants May Need Anger Management Classes.)

 

Her work lent guidance to legions of uncouth slobs, many of whom chewed with their mouths open because they were no longer sure how to blow their honkers. In the early bits of the 21st Century, we’re in desperate need of another Emily Post, someone who came of age amidst our current technological revolution. With all these new-fangled gadgets dominating modern life, it would be nice to establish some guidelines – such as “Don’t play Candy Crush when someone’s talking to you,” or “Don’t sext someone if you’re wearing Ninja Turtle underwear.”

 

It’s problematic when nobody can agree on what’s rude. With smartphones especially, society is getting by on a patchwork of half-hearted conventions that dictate appropriate behavior. We all sort of agree, for example, that it’s rude to check messages while out to dinner with someone. But in other areas of life, the etiquette is less clear. Can you read texts during a lull in a business meeting? Can you peruse stock quotes while riding a unicycle through an aquarium? The lines get fuzzy.

 

So let’s attempt a little de-fuzzing.

 

To make things easier, let’s start with texting while driving, which in recent years has been placed on a par with operating under the influence in terms of frowned-upon road behavior. If defining etiquette comes down to establishing a “do” and “don’t” list, then texting in the car is a pretty obvious don’t. Every year, the Old Orchard Beach Police Department visits the nearby high school with two golf carts and a bunch of yellow road cones to demonstrate why this special breed of multitasking is Donald Trump-level stupid. One of the carts is designated as the “drunk” cart, in which students wear goggles that make their vision fuzzy; the other is the texting cart. Watching high schoolers try to navigate their way through the cones with a phone in their face is like watching a clumsy cat inching his way along a narrow windowsill. They all think they can do it at first, but it’s only a matter of time before someone looks like an ass.

 

So let it be written, so let it be done: No texting while driving.

 

Other areas aren’t quite as clear-cut – casual social interaction, for one. This has happened to me a few times, and maybe you recognize the scenario: You’re at a social gathering, scooping cheese dip with a handful of Ritz crackers, and your friend Lenny walks up to you and starts gabbing about the time his pants fell down while skiing at a resort in Aspen. He finishes his anecdote, and you launch into a story about the time you saw a chimpanzee buying scratch tickets at a gas station during an acid trip in Pittsburgh. Halfway through your story, Lenny’s eyes start to migrate southward to the phone in his hand. You’re just getting to the good part, where the chimp tries to pay for the tickets with a stolen debit card, and Lenny’s attention span has already died a silent death, hijacked by a phone app that teaches basic vocabulary in Mandarin Chinese. The phone, a metal-and-plastic contraption, has trumped a human being, a flesh-and-blood creature who grows toenails and thinks thoughts.

 

Hello, etiquette police? I’d like to report a transgression.

 

Lenny’s faux pas should be obvious. When confronted with an actual breathing person, it’s simply rude to divide one’s attention between said human and a glowing screen. Organic being always trumps no organic being. And so it shall be decreed: Don’t be an incessant phone-checking dip. With the exception of taking calls from a pregnant wife who’s about to burst, it’s not acceptable behavior, and is punishable by one harsh noogie and two medium-strength purple nurples. I believe there is international precedent for this.

 

My last little bit of advice is designed to benefit those of us who are fond of watching streaming videos online. Increasingly, you see videos that people have uploaded with their cell phones in which the only active part of the picture is a narrow, vertical band running down the center of the frame. It’s like the action is taking place on the other side of the world’s most boringly-shaped keyhole. It’s easy enough to figure out the reason – the people taking these videos are holding their phones at a vertical angle. This is obnoxious. It results in a picture that’s weird and uncomfortable to look at; you don’t go to the theater and see the projection screen turned on its side for the world’s most disorienting showing of “Citizen Kane.” It takes minimal effort to bend one’s wrist – it’s easier, even, than blowing your nose in your hand – and so wannabe Spielbergs would be well-advised to do so. It’s unclear whether that falls under “etiquette,” but it sure would make it easier to stomach all that shaky footage of nephew Zeke’s tapdancing performance at the school talent show. His choreography to “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” by Bananarama is especially impressive. Too bad it feels like we’re watching him through the window of a submarine.

 

These tips (read: gripes) only scratch the surface. Is this the beginning of a Post-like career helping out the behaviorally inept? That depends on how our gadgets – and gadget obsessions – evolve. Note to phone app developers: Whip up a piece of software that warns people when they’re violating these etiquette guidelines, would you? It’d sure save me a lot of work.