The Wild (Black and) Blue Yonder!

Yup, that's me. Last Thursday morning, nearly a week after the accident. Notice the left eye (on the right) which is still swollen shut. This is just before the doctor removed the stitches. I still look like Baron Von Frankenstein's high-school science project. I look slightly better than that now.

A friend is flying from Newark to Cleveland this afternoon. He travels about as well as Southwest champagne, which is to say not well at all.

Like many American travelers he's convinced that if you worry hard enough in advance the plane won't crash.

I'm not much help when I reassure him that all the worry in the world will NOT keep a plane aloft. I know. I flew in the Navy for 4 years. Believe me, it takes talent to crash a plane (or a dedicated religious fanatic).

He'll be fine, of course, because even religious fanatics have no desire to enter Allah's Kingdom via Cleveland.

I, on the other hand, might not fare as well on Thursday when I wing my way from Newark (EWR) to Ft. Myers (RSW) for 72 hours of non-stop thrills and spills with mom and dad.

It would be cruel of me to ask God to send along a religious fanatic on the same flight. After all, none of the other people are going to visit my mom and dad. I'm sure all their moms and dads are just swell.

Actually, mom and dad are okay. I didn't know them until I was well into my 30's (I mean really know them -- long story but my birth mom was an alkie bitch with issues and I wasn't supposed to have contact with my dad and his new family... ever).

But they are getting quite old and quite set in their ways. I have a pretty good idea of how it will go. They'll be excited to see me for about 10 minutes. Then we'll get the early bird special someplace and head back to the house in order to get that all important "afternoon nap." This will be followed by dad wandering down to the clubhouse to hang out with his cronies and play pool while mom disappears into the computer room.

I'll be the unspoken of thing in the living room.

Friday morning I'll steal the family van and sneak off to a 12-Step meeting. The rest of the day will be an eerie recreation of the previous day.

On Saturday it will be more of the same except I will sneak off at the God awful hour of 7:00 p.m. to go to a LGBT 12-Step meeting at the MCC in Ft. Myers. I'll be living large that night.

On Sunday, God willing, I'll be on a plane by noon heading back north.

I love them. I know they love me. Age is taking it's toll on everybody I love, including me.

It's time to make every moment count. At last.

Go hug somebody you love. You both deserve it. It'll take you places. And you won't even need a plane to get there.

p.s. I haven't had the nerve to tell the folks what happened to me. I guess they're gonna crap themselves when I come walking off that plane.

Kidnapped!

I've been kidnapped. Starting next Monday I'm on jury duty in Mercer County New Jersey for a week, or a trial, whichever is more excruciating.

Every other county in New Jersey, and probably all the rest of the counties in the country, have a rule of "1 day or 1 trial" and then you're done. Not Mercer County. For, although the county is the home to Princeton University, it also has the misfortune of being home to the state capital, Trenton. And Trenton has some pretty unsavory neighborhoods, if you get my meaning, if you catch my drift.

With any luck I'll get some gangland killing but I've done this before and I know they hate having people on juries who work at law firms. Even if they are just measly assistants.

I'm hoping that jury duty ends at a decent hour every day next week because I have an appointment to see Every Man of a Certain Age's Best Friend, his urologist, next Thursday evening at 5:45 p.m. I see him once a year (I got another midriff x-ray last Saturday), so he can see how my kidney stones are doing. So far, so good. I haven't passed any and they seem to be benignly growing with no intent to escape.

Next Friday, if I live that long, will be my penultimate birthday in my 50's. I'm trying to decide between having birthday cake or cyanide.

My 50's really flew by, unlike my 40's. My 40's dragged, mostly because I was so drunk and unhappy. It turns out that the happier you are, the faster time flies. It reminds me of the very un-PC joke about the guy who was told by his doctor that he had six months to live. "Well," the guy said, "I guess in that case I'd better marry a Jewish American Princess and move to Duluth. At least it'll be the longest six months of my life."

My 50's, though, were all spent in recovery. And although there were days which I thought would never end, the years flew by.

So I'm trying (seriously now) to decide what to do for my birthday. I'll be in court that day, but I won't be in court next Saturday, and I'm thinking about doing something I really love to do.

Go to Six Flags/Great Adventure and ride Kingda-Ka until I puke! (My buddy Jake did a shout-out regarding Six Flags/Great America, boyfriends and roller coasters the other day.)

Nothing says "STILL A TEEN AT HEART (but not the knees)" louder than riding roller coasters until one needs a couple of hip replacements.

Or maybe I'll just schlep down to the gay beach in Belmar and lie, like a beached whale, upon the sun-drenched sand for hours on end, ogling the golden youth of NooJoyZee.

And if I see something I like, maybe I'll kidnap HIM and force him into a life of wanton debauchery... or debauched wantoness, whichever comes first.

It's a very good time for kidnappings. It brings out the "kid" in all of us.

Older than Dirt

I’ve been getting a lot of reminders, lately, of how old I’ve managed to become. I switched on Turner Classic Movies this past weekend and caught a few minutes of that Cecil B. DeMille 10-ton classic, “The Greatest Show on Earth” about the Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey (Combined Shows). It’s got a cast of … well, an entire circus PLUS Chuck Heston (see also: "Moses" and "cold dead hands") and a bunch of other clowns (well, Jimmy Stewart played the clown/doctor, on the lam from the law).

It’s always fun to watch. DeMille’s direction was utterly glacial, which is part of the fun.

At one point, though, he lovingly photographed and showed the “Big Parade” that circled the 3-rings of the show. Halfway through the parade the Ringmaster solemnly intoned, “And for all you boys and girls out there, our special guest star today is HOPALONG CASSIDY.”

And all of a sudden I felt older than dirt.

Hoppy was one of my childhood heroes, along with Roy and Dale, The Lone Ranger and Tonto, The Cisco Kid and Poncho and… “out of the night… when the full moon is bright… comes a horseman known as ZORRO…”

My childhood was lengthier than most, and extended long enough into the 60’s to capture such catch-phrases as “HOKEY-SMOKE, BULLWINKLE” and “HEY, ROCK. WATCH ME PULL A RABBIT OUT OF MY HAT! (again?)” Rocky & Bullwinkle actually had two shows, "Rocky & His Friends" followed by "The Bullwinkle Show"). They were sublime. The humor worked at the level of a 12 year-old and at the level of a college sophomore who'd smoked one blunt too many. Eventually they were succeeded in my sophomoric mind by The Firesign Theater and by the Granddaddies of Whacky Humor, Monty Python's Flying Circus. But to this day Rocky & Bullwinkle still slyly informs the inner workings of such shows as "The Simpsons" and "Family Guy", with tons of double-entendres and really rotten puns peppering the subtly sophisticated dialogue of these shows.

All of the first-runs of these shows had stopped by 1965. Even the re-runs had run out of steam by the mid-70’s.

It’s pointless to try to be relevant with youngsters (less than 40) by peppering my conversations with mentions and/or catch-phrases from the shows of these icons of my youth. My youth has long since flown the coop.

I am older than dirt. Certainly much older than I ever intended to get. I remember thinking, when I was 17, that 30 would be a very good age to die at. I sort of planned on it. And now here I am, staring down the barrel of 60, wondering how in God’s name I ever managed to get this old.

I have only one complaint about sobriety.

It’s made an old man out of me.