Just name it

One of the things that fascinates me about language is how it constantly shifts and morphs. Words change or fall out of favor; old ones come back inexplicably, like “whilst,” which I see all over Facebook (albeit in a mostly ironic context). Language is more a liquid than a solid, always sloshing around the gallon jug of culture and sending new bubbles to the surface.

 

It’s the same way with names. Funny how you can often estimate people’s age just based on their handle. Anyone named “Irene” or “Doris” is not likely to be catching major air on her skateboard at the X-Games. A male named “Flynn” probably isn’t getting mail from the AARP. When was the last time you met an Abraham? Bet it’s been a while.

 

A name, after all, is a word for which our personage provides the definition, and words are fickle things. Naming a child is a responsibility that affects the little tyke throughout his or her life – once a “Glenn,” always a “Glenn” – but it’s also an opportunity for creativity. And the creative zeitgeist is a feather blowing in the wind, subject to random gusts and variation. 

 

When I was in grade school, my class was silly with Richards and Justins. Seemingly every other boy was saddled with these monikers, and if my own school experience can serve as a microcosm of the popular naming trends of the time, that means my general age group is saturated with Richards and Justins in approximately the same proportions. Which I imagine makes things confusing at worksites and in board rooms throughout the country. “Justin, do you have that report ready on the mating habits of the duck-billed platypus? No, not you, Justin. The other Justin!”

 

Tracking down the origins of names is a tricky business. You’d think that researching the subject would simply be a matter of bellying up to the ol’ laptop and typing a search request into Google – “the history of names,” or “names throughout the centuries.” No such luck. People have been naming each other since before recorded history, so any information is at best scattered and speculative. The most clear-cut genesis of many popular modern names is the Bible; that’s where a lot of the “Johns” and “Davids” and “Josephs” come from, and those have had some staying power. (King David, meet David Caruso.) Other appellations seemingly come from nowhere, or certainly not from the Bible, at any rate. There’s no Book of Kimberly or Book of Jennifer. Jesus never had any contemporaries named Ashley or Melissa. And I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that there was never any Israelite power couple known throughout the land as Blake and Amber. You’d be more likely to hear about a pair like that through a scandalous news segment on Inside Edition.

 

Researching the history of surnames yields a little more success. While specifics are hard to come by, it’s estimated that last names became the norm in Western countries about 1,000 years ago, at the turn of the last millennium. Prior to that, only a relative handful of we Homo Sapiens roamed the Earth; a single name generally sufficed. Socrates. Plato. Caesar. They were, respectively, the only Socrates, Plato and Caesar in the known world, so there was no confusing them with, say, Socrates Lachance, or Plato O’Brien. There’s something kind of cool about having just a single label; like Bono or Cher, it seems to connote status and importance. It would also, I’d imagine, make it more difficult for their parents to discipline them, since mom and dad weren’t able to whip out a long string of names in times of serious transgressions. Here’s a sentence you never heard in 450 B.C.: “Socrates Toby Julio Garfield Christofferson! You get back here this instant!”

 

According to the esteemed website Crests.com, which is esteemed because I was able to find it, surnames were the result of a swelling population, which made it difficult to keep track of a rising number of Peters and Pauls. Peasants in particular were often assigned surnames based on their home village or a distinguishing geographical characteristic – that’s where “Newtown,” “Rivers” and “Atwood” got their beginnings. This revelation is a shining light on a murky history, but it also highlights the nature of chance, and how the whims of antiquity still affect us today in ways large and small. The last name “Greenwood” likely came about because the family lived near a particularly lush forest, but they could just as easily have been called “Bigtree,” or “Bunch-O-Leaves,” or “Beardroppings.” We could be witness to a presidential race featuring such candidates as “Donald Stumps” and “Hillary Rock-That-Looks-Like-A-Foot.” I shudder to think where “Lagasse” comes from. Maybe my family lived adjacent to a prairie overrun with flatulent horses.

 

Most people know about occupational names – those surnames that came from a person’s job, like Cook, Miller and Taylor. These perhaps have the most clear-cut origins in our asinine little name game, but again, they represent traditions of old that have become calcified into modern culture. If our species were inventing the surname just now, and used the same practices, it’s easy to envision whole families of Techsupports, Computerprogrammers and Couplestherapists. How fantastic would it be to have a name like Johnny Astronaut? Or Jenny Hygienist? I might have to legally change my name soon.

 

First names are still something of a mystery. Maybe they came down to whichever sounds felt pleasant coming out of their parents’ mouths – comforting syllables around which to wrap their lips while cooing to beloved young ones. That’s a nice thought. It also implies that, while the long train of humanity keeps chuggin’, these names will continue to evolve and change into versions more exotic than we can even imagine.

 

Maybe a thousand years from now, someone named Turquoise Jalapeno-Popper will read this musing and smile. Nice to meet you, Turq. Your handle’s got a hell of a ring to it.

 

The unsettling nature of half-naked men

They say it’s healthy to get things off your chest – that seeking help is a sign of strength. So allow me to unburden myself. This one’s been weighing on me for far too long.

 

I once cried during Wrestlemania.

 

It should be noted that I was 6 at the time. It’s still acceptable to bawl over ridiculously trivial matters when you believe in Santa Claus and your bedsheets are smattered with drawings of Superman. Nevertheless, I can imagine that, for my parents, it was quite the cringeworthy spectacle. They had to watch their pajamas-wearing son bury his face in a blanket because Hulk Hogan was pretending to get the snot knocked out him by Andre the Giant. Summoning my powers of empathy, I can understand how that may have been a less than ideal evening for them.

 

What can I say? I liked wrestling.

 

Notice that “liked” is in the past tense. It’s true that I’ve outgrown my obsession, and I frankly wouldn’t be able to live with myself if my emotions still hinged on the fate of Johnny Man-Bosoms and his gnat-sized tights. The whole enterprise has set a new standard for silly. Professional wrestling may not be as inane as, say, peeing on an electrified fence, but it’s definitely way more stupid than bungee jumping naked off an icy bridge in February. At least in that scenario you’ve got an interesting story to tell.

 

Stupid isn’t necessarily a bad thing in all situations; look no further than any Mel Brooks comedy for proof of that. Wrestling, though, is geared toward young people, and when you’re dealing with something dumb that’s marketed to youth, it had better also be wholesome (not to mention infrequent). When I was 6, wrestling was sort of wholesome – minus the chokeholds, taunting, and steel chair shots to the groin. Hogan was the face of this non-sport, and his oft-repeated message was to you say your prayers, eat your vitamins, and ... there was a third thing, but I can’t remember it. Floss your teeth with horsehair or something. Point being, it was wholesome.

 

Time would reveal Hogan to be an immoral, racist boogersnot. But we kids didn’t know that then. All we knew was that he had an upbeat message, and our parents seemed to think that some occasional stupidity was OK as long as there were positive role models involved.

 

That was almost 30 years ago. Have you seen wrestling lately? Holy crap!

 

Swearing. Beer drinking. Wanton semi-nudity. The works. It’s not that I’m a prude; in other contexts, each of these things can be quite terrific, especially if they’re combined, like when you have a foul-mouthed naked person quaffing Heineken through a straw in their hands-free beer hat. Youth programs, though, should be held to a different standard. You don’t see Big Bird crushing cans on his forehead while calling Elmo’s mother a hussy. That would be the strangest episode of Sesame Street ever. Likewise, you won’t see Dora the Explorer get into a fistfight with her backpack because the backpack had a tryst with her boyfriend and then set Dora’s hair on fire. Although that’d be a sure-fire way to boost ratings.

 

There’d surely be a loud and gap-toothed contingent of aficionados who’d be eager to point out that wrestling is for teens and up – that the rougher elements of this bizarre entertainment offering are only meant for certain sets of eyes. That contingent should be reminded that there exists such a thing as a DVR, which records programs much the same way VCRs did back in the Paleolithic Era. Even if the Goofball Wrestling League’s Monday night broadcast of “Steroids and Speedos Jamboree” airs at 11 p.m., a single flick of the remote will preserve it on a hard drive, turning into an on-demand affair. Young Benny Bongobopper can watch it when he gets home from school, safe in the knowledge that mom is at work and dad is passed out in the den next to a fifth of Johnny Walker and an open can of paint thinner.

 

Sometime during high school, I briefly re-discovered pro wrestling through some friends of mine. One in particular, “Marvin,” would tape the Monday broadcast so we could watch at our leisure. I hadn’t been a viewer since Hogan’s heyday, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect on that initial go-’round. Turns out it was a testosterone-rich soap opera straight from the lobotomized mind of a gas-huffing sea urchin. It’s a monster truck rally for people who prefer bad acting to monster trucks. That’s all well and good when you’re 16 years old on a Friday night, whittling away the wee hours in your friend’s basement with a two-litre bottle of Mountain Dew. It’s another thing altogether when you realize, later in life, that it’s prurient violence porn packaged as family fare.

 

You can look up old matches on video streaming websites. Recently I punched in “Wrestlemania III” and re-watched the title “bout” – the Hogan-versus-Andre affair that had me bawling as an impressionable tot. It was hard to suppress a smile. Hogan did appear to be getting shellacked for much of the proceeding, which of course was his job; you’ve got to build some suspense, milk it a little, before you bring it on home. My youthful tears were premature and reactionary, though. The match had a happy ending: My flaxen-haired hero scoop-slammed the massive Andre and pinned him for a three-count, and when it was over, there was no trash-talking, no adult beverages mockingly poured over the loser’s bloodied head. Just the odd joy of watching grown men play make-believe in silly costumes. Say your prayers and eat your vitamins, brother.

 

Maybe what’s happened to wrestling is a result of cultural forces. Youth, the supposed age of innocence, isn’t that innocent anymore. Simply good versus evil is no longer enough to grab kids’ attentions; you need attitude, shock value, something to make them gasp. What they’re exposed to in the process is unfortunate.

 

It’s enough to make a grown man cry.

 

Last call for mirrored halls

Feel the air outside. Getting a bit crisp at night, isn’t it? With autumn now divested of its back-to-school association, and all the gum-snapping, book-bags-and-Trapper-Keepers connotations that entails, I have to say, I’ve grown to love the season. Our air conditioning units can finally be given a rest, and if you don’t like pumpkin pies and Cortland apples, then you’ve obviously suffered some kind of traumatic head injury. Either that or you’re a Communist. Afraid those are the only two options.

 

But ring the alarm bells, folks. It also means time is running low if we’re ever going to make it to the amusement park.

 

Oh, sure, they’re not for everyone. Some people think of a roller coaster and remember the time in 6th grade they barfed on the Neck Snapper because they pre-loaded their gurgling belly with kiosk hot dogs that tasted like feet. Or they’re afraid of the pirate ship because it turns their innards into liquid poo. I get it. It took me until my teens before I was brave enough to attempt even the Excalibur at Funtown, and I only did it to impress a girl. Her admiration vanished when we made the first drop and I screamed loud enough to make all dogs within a five mile radius hurl themselves in front of the Amtrak.

 

Thing is, if you find yourself in the anti-amusement park camp, you’re sorely missing out. It’s only at such parks that you can eat a lump of fried dough the size of a trampoline and snap several of the vertebrae in your spine all within a five-hour window. These are exotic pleasures, and they have to be enjoyed before it’s cold enough to cut glass with your nipples.

 

A couple summers ago I was at a park in North Carolina called Carowinds, which dubs itself the “Thrill Capital of the Southeast,” probably because there’s not much going on in the southeast. Carowinds boasts an impressive selection of roller coasters, any of which could easily be registered as lethal weapons. A full half require bizarre bodily contortions just to board them, and you’re never quite sure in which direction you’ll be violently pulled – legs often dangling in a hanging configuration, always feeling like they’re about to be sheared off by a stray sheet of neon-colored metal. So of course I was hooked. Having gone with a fellow masochist, we each made it a point to hit as many of these contraptions as we could, which is the recreational equivalent of stuffing yourself in a washing machine programmed for a heavy load.

 

There’s a chance I’m not making this sound very appealing.

 

It totally was, though. Maybe you have to be a certain kind of person to appreciate it, but there’s something liberating about ceding control to a machine that looks like a giant caterpillar. The unpredictability of movement, the hard slap of a humid summer wind in your face – these things conspire to take one out of one’s self, to make a person forget about the worries of daily life. Bills? Gone. Rent? A distant memory. Heck, even that boil you need lanced takes second stage to the unique pleasure of hurtling through the air unnaturally, your spleen squashed snugly against the flattened coil of your lower intestine.

 

Conveniently enough, a typical amusement park has plenty of lower-octane attractions. Not everyone enjoys flying forcefully through exaggerated parabolas above asphalt parking lots. During childhood, when my cousin lived in New Hampshire, our families would make frequent visits to Canobie Lake Park in Salem – sort of an intermediate between Funtown and Six Flags, with the low-rent cartoon themes of the former and the over-the-top grandiosity of the latter. Our mothers, wanting desperately to hold onto their lunches, passed over the coasters in favor of more sedate offerings. This was fine by us. There was still plenty of mischief to be had in the low-adrenaline fare, and really, that’s what was important: The ability to ride that line between annoying our parents and ensuring they’d still pay for our Italian ice. Yeah, we were schmucks.

 

Schmucks love the hall of mirrors, apparently, because that’s where we’d frequently find ourselves. Fear was the appeal here. Despite park security providing a comforting safety net, there was always a vague sense that we’d become permanently lost, banging heads and shins against our reflected selves until the end of time. While I knew I’d eventually master the mirror-maze and emerge into daylight, the thought persisted that I’d come out on the other side a shriveled, malnourished old man, long beard and cane providing an odd counterpoint to my Spider-Man T-shirt and Kool-Aid mustache. Some days I felt like that’s exactly what would happen. You try to map out a route in your mind, but all focus is lost when you’re staring at a hundred different versions of yourself and listening to the breathless chatter of other kids, most of them jabbering in a high-pitched squeal that could snap the strings of a Stratovarius. The relief on our mothers’ faces was palpable when we stepped out of the exit, blinking in the harsh daylight. It felt like an accomplishment. And in a way, it was. We didn’t die! Time for more ice cream!

 

Maybe it’s that childhood connection which gives amusement parks their lasting appeal. Can someone ride the Tilt-A-Whirl for the first time as a 45-year-old and still get the same satisfaction from it? Perhaps not. There’s something about the whole concept – each park similar, but unique in their own way – that benefits from a specific lens of nostalgia, one that calls to mind all the haunted house rides, plastic Skee-ball prizes, and antique car jaunts of youth. Each ride is a time machine. That’s kinda cool.

 

Better hurry up if you’re going to make it, though. The top of the Ferris wheel will soon be one chilly place.

 

The incredible edible sandwich

Some events are lost to history. They remain mysteries, forever shrouded by speculation and conjecture. In 1937, pilot Amelia Earhart disappeared during an attempt to circumnavigate the globe in her Lockheed Model 10 Electra; something happened over the central Pacific Ocean that was known only to Earhart, and for nearly a century, her vanishing act has been the subject of debate. Similarly, it remains unknown what freakish natural force turned Donald Trump’s hair from a ho-hum set of everyday follicles to a rabid animal that feeds on the scalps of gasbag nincompoops. The parallels are uncanny.

 

And so it is with the World’s Greatest Sandwich.

 

Its origins are an enigma. Not even a full list of its ingredients remain. All I know is that, one ordinary day in college, I walked over to the sandwich bar and concocted a lunch so breathtaking, so utterly perfect in its conception, that time has transformed it into legend. To me, anyway. Actually, I may be the only one who knows about it. But still.

 

They say college is all about experimentation, and they’re right. Trying new things is what led to the World’s Greatest Sandwich. At my college, the sandwich bar was a cornucopia of all the standard fair, mixed in with a few oddities: deli meats, various salads, and a handful of trays brimming with what I can only assume were droppings from the sphincter of an extremely large and unhealthy cat. Somehow I took these simple foods and cobbled together a masterpiece, which statistically speaking should never have occurred. The fact that it did happen is some kind of miracle, on a par with witnessing a shooting star while sitting on the shoulders of a flying leprechaun.

 

That’s how it is sometimes with sandwiches, though. What an amazing concept they are. “Sandwich” is one of those words that doesn’t mean just one thing; one can be drastically different from the next, varying in quality, content, and its tendency to make our breath smell like a moldy rag dipped in bear saliva. You take two slices of bread, throw some random culinary detritus between them, and voila! Their adaptability is what makes them such a perfect food item. Not like meatloaf, which is generally consistent, or pineapple, which sucks.

 

Every sandwich is an opportunity to be creative, which is why there are roughly 10.3 bazillion amazing and ridiculous concoctions out there – like the baked bean French toast sandwich. Featured on Today.com, this dripping, oozing affront to health is basically a shovelful of baked beans and cheese shoehorned into a French toast bun, which altogether promises to stop the heart of a sub-Saharan elephant. While the beans are a nice nod to the human body’s need for protein, the rest is specifically designed to promote diabetes and cause breathless huffing during pilates. Any more calories and this beast would represent a full 100 percent of the average Victoria’s Secret model’s annual intake.

 

Yet it pales in comparison next to the Double Down. Anyone remember the launch of this bad boy? KFC unleashed this epic abomination just a few short months ago. It’s for people who love sandwiches but consider bread to be a pesky and unnecessary detail. Instead of bread, two fried chicken fillets are wrapped around a slimy wet ball of bacon and two kinds of cheese; this is considered so deleterious to one’s well-being that conspiracy theorists surmise it’s an extremist group’s attempt at subversive biological warfare. And by conspiracy theorists, I mean me. Seriously, airdrop a few dozen Double Downs into a small village and in short order it’ll be as void of life as a Martin O’Malley political rally. (You: “Who’s Martin O’Malley?” Me: “Exactly.”)

 

Luckily, not all sandwiches have to be unhealthy to represent a creative and artistic triumph. I encourage you to fire up your device of choice and Google “The Rubik’s Cubewich,” a culinary take on – what else? – the Rubik’s Cube. The history of this impressive dish is unfortunately another of our irksome mysteries, but the inventor was no doubt some sort of glasses-wearing, crazy-haired genius in the mold of an Einstein or a Doc Emmett Brown. (Google that reference, while you’re at it.) Like many genius-level ideas, this sandwich is simple enough. You cut up various meats and cheeses into cubes, and then cobble them together into the familiar 3x3x3 arrangement of the popular puzzle toy, bookended by bread as a stabilizer. Preparing it is probably a huge pain in the butt. Eating it is doubtless a huger pain in the butt – how do you keep the cubes from popping out? But sometimes we put up with a little inconvenience in order to bask in awesomeness. Whoever conceived this sandwich deserves a key to the city, unlimited free Swedish massage for a year, and the full list of cheat codes to “NBA Jam” for Super Nintendo.

 

Whoa. Nerded out there for a second.

 

If I had known on that fateful day that I’d be achieving new heights of sandwich superiority, I’d have written the ingredients down so its legacy could still be enjoyed. Whole wheat bread sounds about right. Iceberg lettuce was somewhere in the mix. I think egg salad may have been involved. Maybe ham. Skittles? Not sure. The rest is as gone as Earhart; which mystery has left the more painful scar is debatable.

 

What’s not debatable is that the sandwich is to perfect precisely because it’s such a chameleon, shifting and morphing to fit our wants and needs. I may make one today. No idea what’s going to be on it yet, but I’m sure whatever makes the cut will be fantastic.

 

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.