a fine journey left drifting

nothing slips the soul’s sea legs out from under quite like a fine journey left drifting.

( a year ago i wrote) 829. the man pecs to man breasts transition

it's started.
i can't deny it any more.
although keaton does, the mirror tells no lies.
i am in man pec to man breast transition and it hurts.
hurts deep my friends.
currently i'm in that no man's land of chest chunks.
no longer chiseled pecs, which i did proudly bare once upon a time thank you very much!
yet not quite man breasts—those gelatinous lumps or whatever description is the complete opposite of perky steel.

they are in transition and all those push-ups and bench-presses i do simply slow down the inevitable, full and complete deterioration.
they do not stop it.
they do not reverse it.
they only delay it.

so sad.
my chest chunks are well within the gravitational pull now.
not much i can do but release an occasional whimper or flip all the mirrors around or both.

alas, just another not so subtle attack on a new front in the deconstruction of bob.

[update 03/30/10: keaton has taken to discard her old bras in my underwear drawer. in most state jurisdictions i'm aware of that is tantamount to cruel and unusual punishment. and if she doesn't watch her p's and q's, she's gonna find her nicely preserved buttocks on the wrong side of a big fat lawsuit. that's what i'm talking about.]

good will stunting

keaton got back from her weekly massage, which by the way i'm beginning to think is the female version of a lap dance but that's a whole other man observation.
she said, noreen had an emergency so some guy eric filled in.
i said, eric?
keaton said, yeah, he's one of those blue-eyed, tall blond, slim nordic types. nice guy. a little firm but it still felt good. he did a good job.
i said, you don't say.
she said, well yeah, he was a little rough but even so. and he had big hands too.
i said, what did you expect from a male massagenist?
she said, from a what?
i said, you heard me, a male massagenist. with big hands no less. isn't that just what the doctor ordered?

keaton looked at me like i just came from the planet mars or something.

(from the files) 830. super hero "d" list: caption man

caption man saves young billy from a life of grammar crime!

i'm one bean away

o'neil said, "callihan do yeh knoow why irish bean soup has only two hundred and therty nine beans in it lad?"
callihan thought a moment and replied, "i doon't really knoow there nelly. is it because of thee fam ine we had during those harsh years a while agoo?"
o'neil answered, "noo sooch luck behjeesus. it's because if we aidded one moore bean it would be two farty."

and that's the story of me life these days.
i'm just a bean away from being too farty.
just ask the rabbit i chased off the lawn.
he'll tell ya sure as shootin'.

dangerous yoga

recently i discovered i have high blood pressure and thought maybe a little yoga might be just the ticket to reduce stress and invigorate my innards.
so i put on a pair of boxer shorts and rifled through keaton’s fourteen yoga videos—she collects them like i collect microbrewery t-shirts—until i found one that fit the bill.
it started out easy enough.
i just stood there like a lump, breathing in and moving my arms about.
i began to think that i am a natural at this yoga stuff.
i continued without problems until the yoga guy commenced with a triangle pose called "three legged blind dog at dusk", at which point my options were few: 1) try it and die in an isosceles heap, or 2) forget the whole thing and take my chances on a stroke.
so i grabbed some tortilla chips and cheese whiz, and watched the rest of the tape.

i did find the new age flute music to be quite peaceful and probably just what the doctor ordered for my high blood pressure.

puddles

it's been raining a lot lately.
and when it rains, there are puddles.
and i haven't met a puddle yet that i didn't get an urge to jump in like a six year old, except i don't anymore.
and when i ask myself why, i really don't have an answer other than this adulthood thing, which always seems to have a cloud of severity about it whenever i want to indulge in such matters.

the berkana women's leadership revival tour

keaton asked me to join her at an all day women's leadership conference in nyc yesterday called "the berkana women's leadership revival tour".
i accepted.
not for any high brow reason or nothin'.
but partly because villanova was out of march madness, my bracketology was in a shambles, and i had little else to do except write another dumb post for my fibomercials and scams blog, which i'm growing tired of.
besides, more notably and for reasons i will never understand, it was important to keaton, and usually that's good enough for me, whether comprehended or not (except when trumped by my beloved nova wildcats being in the thick of ... well you get the picture).

keaton also promised me that there would be other men there.
there were—i was told afterwards there were four.

so i went, as cheery as a dog on a car ride (albeit unknowingly to the vet's for a little anal gland expressionment).

rumors

i like spreading vicious rumors about myself.
that way when i hear them later, i’m not as shocked, which impresses people immensely.

fast-talkers

believe you me!
i sure do watch my fair share of those half hour infomercials.
it's sport to me, not much different than bass fishing really.
and one thing i've noticed.
infomercials are loaded with what my grandmother would have called "fast-talkers".
i'm pretty certain of this mainly because my grandmother told me once that fast-talkers need to talk fast so they can stay 30 minutes ahead of the facts.
and ain't that the slow talkin' truth!

myface and spacebook and fritter! oh my!

i consider myself to be somewhat 'with it' when it comes to the internets and the www.
so it troubles me that i don't get these social networks like myface and spacebook and fritter.
i have tried spacebook for over a year and i have to tell you, it gives me a good case of the jimmy legs every time i log in.
first, why would i be interested in becoming friends now with every high school kid i grew up with who shook me down for lunch money back in the day?
that's why i liked the idea of having a wall at first.
you know, to keep the riff raff out.
instead, i've got pictures on this so called "wall" of their dumb babies burping up strained carrots or their poor dogs dressed up like derek jeter or their drunken asses plopped in a strained and frayed lawn chair.
and nothin' for nothin', there are no annie leibovitzes in this crowd.

what part of that is social networking?
it's "i'm going to overwhelm you with my underwhelming life", if it's anything.
and that's the stuff of jimmy legs i tell ya.

and what's with that fritter thing?
oh i can't wait to see what billy bankworth up the road is gonna do next.
fritter, billy, fritter for god's sake!
i can't take not knowin' much longer!
"i'm just watch judge judy. she best."
holy cow!
thank you billy for frittering in a barely coherent selection of words because i've been sitting here wondering just what was going to happen next, you big nut you!
and now i know.
and now i'm socially networked.
and now i can get on with my life.

don't get me wrong.
i love looking at 439 pictures of a baby's first step as much as the next guy, especially, and i mean especially, when it's the offspring of a girl who friended me even though thirty years ago she told me she'd rather be eaten alive by killer hamsters than be seen in public with the likes of me.
i guess over the course of three decades with no contact, she's gotten use to the idea of me.
nice.

don't get me wrong.
i love knowing what glenn beck or sarah palin is thinking about at any moment on the big issues challenging us in less than 140 characters as much as the next patriotic simpleton.
who has the time or intellectual inquisitiveness to engage in fully thought out and expressed ideas any more?
i think i speak for the american people when i say, i'd rather be eaten alive by killer hamsters.

eh.
you know what?
do get me wrong.
i just don't get it.
and now, if you don't mind, i have to shake off a rather robust round of the jimmies in the leggies.

i'm a bad dad seed

alix, my pseudo step-daughter, is in london.
she calls it a semester abroad.
from all reports, she is learning a lot—some even from classes.
she's been gone about four weeks now, and i finally got a voicemail from her.
it was a reaching out of sorts to acknowledge my pseudo step-dad influence on her.
she called from a slot machine to tell me i was right, gambling sure can be fun.
except i'm pretty sure that's not exactly what i told her.
she had just won 15 pounds.
i think under today's exchange rate, that is about $900,050 or something.
she also mentioned that she wanted me to take her to Atlantic City the day she returns home.
between that and the so-called encouragement of my son to play online texas hold'em poker to earn college spending money, i’m pretty much qualified to be called a bad dad seed by any mother’s measure.

first day of spring

i hate the first day of spring.
that's when i take down the outdoor wreath, meaning christmas is officially over.

a resting place

just when i think i have an answer to all this life stuff, i think some more and realize, i don’t have an answer, just a resting place

the other side of the moon

when i look at a full moon, i wonder if the other side is where they stash all those wild “creations” from paris fashion shows, because they surely don't seem to be anywhere here on earth.

an art lesson from ma

[it's great having an artist in the family—my mom. that is until i took a lesson from her. that's when it became apparent that the welling pain from years of the brothers crane torturing her during our non-informative years still lies shallow, just below the surface, waiting for any reason to ooze out sideways. well, here. here's what happened. you be the judge.]

*****

mom is an accomplished professional artist.
her medium is oil paints.
she gave me my first art lesson the other day.

it didn't go so well.

after five hours, my mountains looked like the ocean, the ocean looked like the sky and the sky looked like nonfat milk.
but i think it was when i tried to patch the whole thing up by dropping in a heather field that ma snapped.

ma: bobby, what are you doing? what is that now?
me: a field of irish heather.
ma: a what?
me: a heather patch.
ma: not on this planet. let me see that for a second. give me your pallet.

she frantically tried to create the right color green from the goop on my pallet.

ma: your pallet is one big color, and it's gray brown at that. what the heck did you do?
me: yeah, it's drab. i like drab.
ma: heather can't be drab. i'll drab you.
ma (continued): i can't make green from these colors. i'm going to need art lessons myself after this is over. i can't continue this. it's ruining my art eye. you ever think that maybe you're better off sticking to the guitar?
me: wow! that bad! maybe i should go back to painting by numbers.
ma: yes! paint by numbers! that's a great idea! paint to 600,000 and come back in five years and we'll take it from there.
me: but i'll lose interest by then.
ma: exactly! and where's your father? i need a gimlet and i need it now!

when i dance best

when i dance best, it’s as if the soul of the music and the soles of my feet are but one, joined by some unifying force that flows through my very being.

[However, i'm quite certain that those nearby me would tell you i always separate the two quite completely.]

too many pieces of mom's mind

mom used to give us a piece of her mind almost on an hourly basis.
so much so that i began to worry that she was running out of brain, especially when she’d make wild claims about the "good old days", when there were no tvs and therefore no "man from u.n.c.l.e.", "the farmer's daugher", and "my mother the car" to be watched, which pulled the carpet right out from under the ”good old days”, making them just the “old days”—no different from the iron age really.

jan’s latest internet dating fiasco

keaton's friend jan was over last night.
she told us about her latest adventure in internet dating.
after exchanging several email pleasantries, she agreed to meet the internet match-up at a restaurant.
the moment they sat down, he said, so your profile says you like the theater.
she thought, hmmm ... he actually cares about what i like.
she replied, yes, i love it.
he asked, what do you think about puppet theater?
she said, geez, i don’t know.
he said, well, i hate it. do you?
she said, well i haven’t really seen one since i was nine.
he said, so you don’t hate it.
she said, well i haven’t really thought about it, but where do you even find a puppet theater these days?
he said, oh, they're all around us. They're insidious. it’s a puppeteering plague.
she said, well what’s wrong with it?
he said, i always feel gypped at the end because the actors aren't real, they're pine wood.
she said, i see.
then he said, i really love that tv show, deep space nine. do you?
she said, i'm sorry to say that i'd rather go to a puppet theater.
he said, hmm, well that sure is a show stopper.
then her cell phone rang, as she had prearranged with her sister.
she took the call.
after she hung up, she apologized but had to excuse herself and leave, departing under the guise that her dog had just been arrested for loitering while on a suspended dog license.

she told us that in retrospect she had a pretty good time, although usually she makes it through appetizers before deep space nine comes up and ruins the whole evening.

i'm pretty conflicted

if asked, i'd have to say that i'm a partly cloudy/glass half full type, which i think most would agree makes me pretty conflicted about most things.

fleeting self confidence

self confidence is fleeting.
i have plenty until i need it, and then it's harder to find than a roast beef carvery station at a vegan dinner buffet.

bully compounded interest

on the train the other morning, i calculated how much extra money i would have today if i had banked the money bullies took from me in eighth grade bathroom shakedowns
i used a simple compound interest formula over forty years.
the result, a sweet $24,339.16 in the pocket.

then i thought how i might broach the subject with them at our upcoming, forty-year, class reunion—the alive ones that is, specifically the alive ones who were able to obtain parole..

a failed feat of certainty

[click on radio to listen to audio version]

i was six when i tightened my cowboy belt a notch, then stepped off the asbury park beach towel, pinned at my shoulders and draped to the ground—about a foot too long.
i studied the stone marker i had placed ten well calculated paces ahead.

after a final swipe at my crusty nose with my sleeve, i took off like a bat out of hell, hands stiff to my side.
the new jersey beach front on my cape whirled majestically in my wake.
my eyes focused on the launch point.
i hit it perfectly, bringing both feet together, executing a precision not often carried out by my gangly limbs, the same limbs that would someday become my namesake—cranelegs.
bent at the knees, i sprung my body forward and up, as i raised my arms to point them just above the tree line ahead.
my rigid body became airborne.

i probably darted through space as much as three inches before i slammed to the ground like a collapsed ironing board.
i lay there for a moment.
the towel draped over my head.
my shirt yanked from my dungarees.
i could feel the cool morning grass on my belly.
i seemed to be in one piece as i rolled over on my back, arching my head backwards until i could see the tree line above, albeit upside down.

hmm.

i guess i had miscounted the required bowls of wheaties i needed to eat in preparation.
one bowl a day for ten days in a row to be exact.
it was quite possible that my newly acquired counting-to-ten skill needed some more work.
it was the only thing that made sense.
i must have been a bowl or two short in the end.
no telling what kind of impact that would have had on the whole operation.

yeah, that had to be it.
i would need to start all over again, but this time i would keep count of the bowls of wheaties on paper.

i rolled back over onto my stomach to get up before lesser kids spied me, especially any of my three younger brothers.
but before i sauntered back into the house to regroup, i studied a rather large, agitated earthworm resist being carried off by a much smaller, determined ant.
i thought, just like that ant, i too was determined, for there would be another attempt in my future.
after all, this was not a destined mishap resulting from the folly of imagination, but rather a manageable misstep resulting in a failed feat of certainty.

i just needed to get the wheaties count right and i'd be over those trees in no time flat.

status meeting

boss don held his dumb monday morning status meeting.
he barked, crane, tell me something i want to hear!
i said, you’re the man.
he yelled, tell me more!
i said, okay. you’re the man we make fun of.

hearing trees

there are times when i stare out back at the tree covered hilltop beyond.
but i don't see the trees really—i hear them.
and for a moment i allow myself to imagine if peace made a sound, this just might be it.

benny, the porn again christian

benny said, hey bob, my pc picked up some sort of virus. you’re a pc guy. ya gotta fix it for me. dori needs it to finish her weekly christian inspiration letter. she’ll get acrimonious if it is broken, and that’s not a pretty sight.
i said, what did i tell ya about downloading porn.
he said, i’m done with that. dori dragged me off to a baptist retreat last time. no way i’m going back. i’ve been clean ever since.
i said, you know what you are?
he said, what?
i said, you are a porn again christian. that's what you are.
benny said, i'm not! i swear!
i said, you wanna swear? then swear on the lives of your children?
he said, i don’t have children.
i said, yeah, true. that’s a problem.
benny thought a moment and then said, okay, i swear on the lives of my ping golf clubs. i love them as if they were my own kids.
i said, but those are mine when you die. remember? it's in your will. i’m not jeopardizing them because you have a sickness. swear on something else. how about your flat screen tv?
benny said, no way! wait! i know! i'll swear on that secret porn dvd i have.
i thought, and you want me to believe you aren't porn again.

so I said, sounds good. now let’s pop the hood on that pc of yours, and see what’s doin’, shall we.
benny said, yeah, pop the hood, i like that talk.

and as i reached deep into my pocket for my trusty pc swiss army knife, i sighed relief, for the ping golf clubs benny willed me were safe once again.

the postal job interview

during my job interview to be a mail carrier, the local postmaster asked, are there any situations in which you might shoot a fellow postal worker?
i said in jest (because i consider myself pretty jesty), well i suppose if someone sorted the mail in reverse alphabetical order using only the last name on the return address, i'd be so inclined.
he said, hmm, we have a few of those, when can you start?

the curse of gab

i’ve been told that i have the gift of gab.
i do but they're all wrong about the gift part.
it’s more like a curse, particularly when i go to parties and people say, hey there’s bob! he’s a gifted gabber. say something gabby, bob! c'mon!
and i say, so where’s everyone from?
and then they say, see what i mean, he’s killer gifted! just killer!
and that's exactly when I know it's a curse if it's anything.