Blogalicious!

I started writing posts for several different topics, but then realized none of them were working for me. So, I thought, screw it. I'm just going to write whatever comes into my head.

Underdogs.
Hey, I just watched the movie, Invincible, in which some regular schmo from South Philly, who plays football with his buddies on weekends, tries out for the Philadelphia Eagles and makes the team. Not only does he make it, he becomes one of the team's all time favorite players. It's the whole underdog from Philly makes good story, made so famous by that other Italian guy. You know, the one with the boxing gloves and the cement skull. Sometimes these stories make me think about my own life and how I never really wound up as the victorious underdog. If I was the underdog in something, hell, I lost. So I try to avoid those underdog situations. Although I do like Underdog cartoons.

My Ears! Damnit! My EARS!
I have to endure American Idol every Wednesday night, because it's the night I have the kids, and my daughter loves it. Last night, the 10 female singers mangle classic songs from the '70s. Some frightening Lily Munster looking chick completely embarrassed herself singing Kansas' "Carry On My Wayward Son." I prayed the electricity would go out just to spare me the pain. The night before, I flipped it on only to see a few of the men slap on their incredibly annoying histrionics to such great songs as "Imagine." Okay, why can't anyone just sing anymore? Just sing the song. I don't need to hear every single note you can hit throughout the song. I mean, the kid sang well, but the song lost every single ounce of real feeling. John Lennon sang it with such simple conviction that it really meant something. This performance reduced the song to a series of voice exercises. Elvis actually shot the TV because Robert Goulet was on it, singing, as the King put it, "With all technique and no feeling." Too bad I didn't have a gun. Or a crossbow. Or even a water pistol.

Weather or not.
What is it about old people and weather? Where are they going that they need to be constantly interested in what it's doing out? While I'm on my old people thing, why do they insist on taking all the early appointments at doctors or dentists? I have somewhere to be, Rip Van Winkle! I have to go to work. You have to pass wind, eat saltines and watch the Weather Channel all day. Give me a break!

I like beer.
Really, I do. It's good. But not Bud. Bud gives me the winds. I avoid getting the winds as much as possible. Just as I spend most of my awake hours making sure no sharp objects come near my eyes and groin. Oh, and I like vodka too. Vodka tonics, vodka martini (a wee bit dirty), vodka vodka, White Russians. I'm no alcoholic, but I know what I like. And I don't like getting gas from Bud. Although farting can be funny.

Hold me closer, tiny digits.
I once took out this woman who had a really small fingers. Like, so small, they reminded me of those little cocktail wieners. But she had the nails manicured and perfectly painted with a bright red color. I wondered why she would want to draw any attention to those stubs stuck on the ends of her hands. If my fingers looked like that, I would try to keep all eyes away from my hands. I know, I'm no long-fingered godly-handed man, and she was very nice, and I guess I was being very mean and petty, but the fingers were just really creepy. I did try to call her for a second date, but she said we weren't a good match. She said she couldn't wrap her fingers around a reason why, it just wasn't there for her.

Ring-A-Ding-Ding!
My place of employment is doing some work for a local/regional snack cake company and we have samples of other brands all over the office. I am now eating a Ring Ding. Oh yes. And I've gotta tell ya, I haven't had one of these chocolate enrobed (love that word) cream filled goodies in a dog's age, but they have not changed at all. Not one bit. You know how Count Chocula and Alpha Bits and Coco Puffs all kind of changed their recipes to be a little more healthy or something. Well, those swell folks at Drakes gave the finger to the fat fighters and said, "We're not changing our ass swelling, gut growing goodness for you namby pamby joy killers. Our Ring Dings will stay exactly the same as they've always been!" And God said, Ring Dings are good. Going back for a Yodel. Let's hope they didn't fuck with those...

Until next time, when I'll have one topic to stick to, enjoy the weather before you get old and start complaining about it.

Sweet Jesus.

For Valentine's Day, the kids gave me a big Reese's Cup shaped like a heart. It's about the size of my fist and weighs about the same as a couple inches of ass fat. Of course, I'm eating it. Slowly. Eaten in one sitting, something like that could send a perfectly healthy person into permanent diabetic shock, and clog every artery in and outside of my body. Not only would my heart stop beating, and my brain stop functioning, but highways would be tied up for miles and the Hoover Dam would stop producing energy.

As a kid, chocolate was one of my four basic food groups, along with sugar-infused breakfast cereal, spaghetti, and Pixie Sticks. I remember licking the bowl and the mixer blades after my grandmother mixed the batter for her chocolate cake. Oh, crap, was that freakin' good. Except for the one time when the mixer was still on.

The family would pile in the car every summer and head out to Hersheypark, in Hershey, Pennsylvania. A whole damn town dedicated to the ideals and worldwide contributions of chocolate. Sweet Jesus! Yeah, they had one of those, too. You could eat the head off it, like the bunnies at Easter. Anyway, you would get within a mile of the chocolate factory and the air would be thick with the glorious scent of cocoa. The sweet, beautiful perfume that attracts pimpled-faced teens and flabby housewives from all over the country. Oh, sure, there were amusement rides and shows, but that all took a backseat to the tour of the chocolate factory. Pools of chocolate being mixed in giant vats. I imagined myself being Augustus Gloop, diving into the Willie Wonka's lake of chocolate. Okay, so I was a weird kid.

Easter was always a good time for ODing on chocolate. Even that cheap, waxy, imitation chocolate flavored chocolate they make those Dollar Store bunnies with would do in times of choco-crisis. I mean, it kind of felt like chocolate in your mouth, and there was a taste resembling chocolate, but when the Hershey's and Reese's were gone, a guy's gotta do what a guy's gotta do, right?

Today, chocoholics are trying to find any possible way to ensure that chocolate isn't relegated to the list of "stuff that's so bad for you we have to get the government to issue laws changing how you make it." I would hate to see chocolate go the way of movie popcorn, fried chicken and trans fats. So now, they've found that dark chocolate provides anti-oxidants, and it's good to have a little each day. I would have loved to be in that room when they came up with that one. What's next? Milk chocolate with almonds can help urinary tract infections? Baby Ruth bars restore hair? Mounds relieve gout?

So, I will go on enjoying this gift from my kids for as long as I can. A little in the morning, a bite in the afternoon. And probably will be done it just in time for the Easter candy to show up. Oh, sweet Jesus. Mmmmm, really sweet.

Life in a Wintry Mix.

Last night, the area was hit with what the faux-expert imbeciles we know as "weatherpeople" call a "wintry mix." What it consists of is snow, ice, sleet, freezing rain and kicks in the head with a steel-toed boot. It also comes with a heaping helping of brain-loss from every driver on the road. Suddenly, it's like no one behind the wheel ever took a driving lesson in their life. I really think that driving instructors should take the time to teach people how to drive in bad weather. If you can't pass the "wintry mix" driving portion of the test at the DMV, then hand over the keys and get your dumb ass back to driving school, schmuck.

My PT Cruiser has 93,000 miles on it, and frankly, I doubt if it will make it to 100,000. What with the vigorous commute everyday, I really think she's trying to tell me through osmosis that it's time to pull the plug. "Just stop the nonsense, Steve, and put me out of my misery. Why are you doing this to me? What did I do to you, other than provide a means of getting where you need to be...Damn you!" But she muddled through the slushy mess last evening at two miles an hour, and that was in the good spots. It was like I got the extended DVD edition of my commute. Usually 45 minutes, it was expanded to the complete two hour-45 minute director's cut, complete with deleted material and never-before-seen footage. Oh, and plenty of bloopers. If there was a bright side to the whole evening's festivities, it was that I wasn't on the other side of the road, where a tractor trailer was jackknifed across the highway, blocking all the lanes, with traffic at a complete standstill for miles. Nice going, good buddy. Should've put away the Carmen Electra hand-puppet and worried about driving instead. Of course, there was the whole rubberneckin' thing happening on my side of the road, but since traffic was back up anyway, it just made the whole thing more laughable.

So, how does one keep sane when puttering along, while the heavens spew the icy diarrhea down upon the area? Well, here's a quick diary of my commute:

Hour One was just dread. Okay, not that I had anything to do on this particular evening, except make some dinner, chat on the phone, go over some papers from class, watch Family Guy, throw a load of laundry into the wash, and pee, but there's nothing on that list that says sit in my car and wait for some jackass to hit me from behind because he doesn't understand the phrase "safe distance." I have the news channel on the radio, until I get tired of hearing about the traffic that I'm sitting in and the shitty weather all over. Why do I need weather updates from people on the scene in other parts of the area? It's a crappy night wherever you are. There. Report done, move onto the more pleasant shooting, robbery and extortion stories. So I put on a CD, but I don't feel like singing yet. I did yell a couple times. I curse at all the people around me and want to know what the hell makes them think they're allowed on my road to home. Stupid bastards. Oh yeah, and I have to pee, and it's getting worse with each press of the brake pedal.

Hour Two. Slowly, clarity takes over. I'm moving toward the light. I begin singing whatever I'm playing on the CD. Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Bobby Darin, Elvis, William Shatner. It doesn't matter. My mind has become a sloppy bowl of tapioca pudding. All I'm seeing are red brake lights and Jesus. I begin to laugh at the senselessness of it all. The utter insanity. I throw on Amy Winehouse, hoping some talented, yet coked-up wacko's cool music will bring me back to earth. It doesn't. And I still have to pee. I'm tasting uric acid at this point. And then, my low gas light dings on.

The final 45 minutes. My mother calls. I don't answer. I can't. My one hand is on the steering wheel, the other is on my crotch. If I move one, I crash. If I move the other, I pee myself. My mother has this uncanny ability to know exactly when the absolute worst time to call is, and she never fails. I've gone through most of the CDs in my car. I'm back to the weather reports and traffic updates. There is now traffic where there aren't even streets or roads. There is traffic going up the sides of buildings in Center City. There is traffic backed up down the cereal aisle at Pathmark. There is frigging traffic everywhere and my mother calls me. My bladder is the size of Idaho and the little gas light shaped like a gas pump on my dash is searing it's red light into my brain like a branding iron. Just then, a fat, bearded woman in a big gas-sucking SUV veers through two lanes of traffic and cuts in front of me. I wish I could hang my schlong out the window and spray her oversized Global Warming mobile with my piss, like a fire boat hosing down a burning tanker. In my mind, she's flipped over on the side of the road, because I'm Magneto and have the ability to lift even her monstrous vehicle and what I'm sure is a monstrous ass, and send them both flying into a mangled mess of twisted metal and broken bones with the waggle of my finger.

I get off the expressway, finally, and find that the two minute ride from there to my place is also backed up. It's another fifteen minutes to go three blocks. I grab the first parking spot I could find and make it into my apartment just in time to keep the urine from squirting out my eye sockets.

My car made it through. My bladder made it through. My sanity nearly intact. I sit down for a quick bite, and watch the news to see those poor bastards still out on the roads. Whoever said hell is hot never drove through a wintry mix.

Length and Girth.

We've all heard that "size matters" or that "it's not the size, it's what you do with it that counts." I believe both. Especially when it comes to blogs. Yeah, I know, you thought I was talking about something else. That's a trick us writers use. It's called "Bait and Switch." You thought you were going to read a blog about one thing and here, it's about something else. Now that's funny.

Okay, maybe not. Anyways, I think one of my problems with getting a post up here regularly is because I'm really concerned with the size and quality of what I'm posting. I worry that it may be too short, or not top-notch, grade-A quality. (Pretty much the way I worry about size and quality of other things. Like dinner, for example. See, Bait and Switch again. I kill me.) I like to take my time. I started writing the last one on January 26th, but didn't post it until early February. Just when I think I'm done and ready to post, I read it over and decide to change a few things. Like the first three paragraphs. And the last two. And the one in between. I finesse and fiddle with the words until I'm really happy. Then I hit "publish post." I read it again when it's up and go back and edit it again and republish. Yes. I can be anal. Retentive, that is. But it's all to bring you the Live Musings Nightly you've come to know and love, at the absolute best quality you expect from yours truly.

Maybe someday, I'll write a quick post, just a few lines and publish it without proofing it. But it might be a while before that happens. Most of my daily work routine is to crank out copy with impossibly short deadlines. So I pick up some old copy, write a few new transitions, churn out some workable headlines, shove it all in a dirty sock, spin it around and slap it into Word. There. Copy done. Move on to the next piece of marketing mumbo jumbo.

I don't want that to happen with this blog. I care too much about my subject and about you, my dear readers. Oh, you're welcome. I'm just glad you like it.

Of course, it doesn't help that my life has been busier than a crab louse in an Italian's groin. (Not that I know that situation personally, mind you...) There's always something keeping me from writing. Like other writing. I do freelance copywriting, which can be really fun, because you can spend time doing interesting things, send it off, and invoice them. Nice work if you can get it. And then, there's my class. As I may have mentioned in the past, I'm teaching a Continuing Education class called "Copywriting: Writing Effective Marketing Materials" at University of the Arts. I always thought I wanted to teach, and now, I'm glad I'm doing it. I have a great bunch of students who actually listen to me. I'm not used to people listening to me. I was the middle child. I didn't get listened to. I got the little nod, as if to say, "That's nice, Steve, can we move on to something more interesting? Like passing the ketchup for the meatloaf?" But, if I can help people become better writers, that's totally cool. I've been doing this job for almost 23 years, and it's about time to share the pain.

Okay, back on track. So, there's class lessons to put together and assignments to go over. Oh yeah, in between all that other stuff and time with the kids, I try to squeeze in a little social life that I like to think I have. That life, up till now, has just been a series of online dating and beer swilling with the boys. Not bad for a guy. Although, not great for a guy of 44.

So what I'm saying is, be patient with me. I love writing this blog and plan to continue. I hope you continue reading. It may not ever be live musings that are actually nightly, but rest assured, they'll be timely. And of great length and girth. Just to keep the women happy, of course.