Return of the Chewy

This was an hour of terrible "photo-shopping". 

Chewy's back and without any gawd-awful orange ruining his sleek facade.  We've had words; he promises never to do that to me again.

I Worship At the Altar of Bo

September is peeking around the corner which means I'm allowed to talk about Michigan football without odd looks and poorly disguised attempts to exit the room at the first mention of depth charts and returning starters.  It'll be nice to be able to wax eloquent about college football in public without people thinking I sound like Jeffrey Dahmers discussing human anatomy - all is right with the world.  Of course, now that football is mere days away, lines are drawn and allegiances are run up the flag pole.  When people ask "Why Michigan?" I usually give a terse off-hand response about being born in Flint and brain-washed from birth but to be honest, that's not at all the reason I fell in love with Michigan.  Much of it has to do with my father and a bit of it has to do with one Glenn E. "Bo" Schembechler.

Football first appeared in my consciousness at a pretty young age.  The family packed up and moved to South Bend, IN before I started school and from then on I was inundated with images, dogma and fanaticism surrounding the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame.  If nothing else, I am thankful for that experience because I was immediately aware of how much better college football was than pro football.  Give me marching bands and ancient rivalries over pyrotechnics and terrible rock music any day.  Besides, it was in the halls of colleges where this sport was born, nurtured and made; to transplant such a tradition into the sterile manufactured confines of professional sports arenas is simply a waste.  And while I'm thankful for all that living in a college town taught me, even if it was South Bend, I never once felt the pull towards Notre Dame.  That had a great deal to do with my father.

You have to understand a few things about my dad.  First, my father loves to call people by their first name, especially when he first meets you, especially before you've told him your name and most especially when you are a server at a restaurant walking on the other side of the dining area.  He has a "guy" for everything.  He is infinitely better at making friends than I am.  Second, my father will drop everything to help you out and I mean absolutely everything.  I have never met a person with a larger heart and more caring soul than my dad. He is infinitely more selfless than I am.  Last, my dad has an announcer voice that he turns on whenever he is excited.  The voice moves in a crescendo of exhilaration ending somewhere in a high-pitched falsetto that no longer produces discernible words.  He should probably be on the radio.

Dad

Catching college football on TV in the 90's was nothing like it is today.  What with ND's seeming ubiquitous presence on TV, thanks to their NBC contract, I remember seeing a lot of the Irish.  While no one in the family was a Notre Dame fan, it was football on a weekend and so that's what was on.  My dad would watch and he would comment.  His tone was almost always even-handed, his comments were respectful, it was clear he enjoyed the game but something was missing.  It wasn't until the first time I noticed Dad watching a Michigan game that I figured out what that was.  The announcer voice was out in force.  Much of Saturday afternoon would be punctuated by random spurts of loud high-pitched squeals.  He was alive and it was obvious and it was electric.  There was an honesty to the madness, a display of shear elation that I had never heard coming from another human being before and it was in those moments that my young elementary aged self was simultaneously intrigued and jealous by the reactions of my dad.  I smiled with him, I might have even clapped with him and I'm sure, at some point (even though I had no earthly idea what was going on or an attention span long enough to really care), I jumped up and down celebrating with him.  I wanted to know why and I eventually figured it out.

There was a name Dad used often when talking about Michigan, a name that would forever cement my love for the Wolverines and a name that is synonymous with the coaching greats of college football; Bo.  I bring this up because it's important to understand that my father never pushed his Michigan fanaticism on us.  It was never talked about without invitation; it was not force-fed.  Dad allowed us the opportunity and space to find our own paths through life which made some of the more important discoveries all the more meaningful.  So, when I heard the name "Bo" when talking about Michigan, usually in passing, I was intrigued, intrigued enough to listen to this speech the first time I saw it on television:

It was a sort of magical moment.  It struck something deep within me probably because it sounded exactly like things my dad had said and done before: not criticism, but encouragement; not me, but us; not for yourself, but for everyone together as a team.  It probably didn't hurt that it also appealed to my young budding socialist heart.  The funny part about all of this is that I didn't play organized sports in high school.  I spent much of my youth watching my brother's baseball games or my sister's softball games.  But what I heard in that speech, the thing that resonated because I had heard similar statements from my dad, was that the world was so much bigger than little ole' me.  That's probably the piece that I can point to and say, that's why Michigan.  Because Bo said things that I had heard from my dad, because my dad made sure to remind me that life isn't just about you and me (it's about us) and because my dad showed me that it was okay to be happy, embarrassingly happy, about something as seemingly meaningless as a college football game.  Sometimes I feel bad for people who can make it through a game without causing a scene.

So here's to another season of heartbreak and hope, euphoria and depression, new and inventive cuss words, beer, chex mix and Michigan vs. Nebraska with a few of the most amazing people in the world.

Why Lawnmowers are Ruining the World

Ye Old Time Mower

Anyone who knows me knows I can be a bit of a complainer enjoy righting wrongs via the use of surprising semantics and clever rhetoric, hence this post.  My beloved lawnmower, whom we will call Chewy, decided to take a giant steamy dump in the middle of mowing the lawn last week. Apparently it was time for it's nearly 10 year old battery to say goodbye. Well fuck you battery, you had one job in life, to hold a charge, and you fucking blew it right in the middle of mowing the lawn.  I don't blame Chewy.  Chewy has been good to me, I just think he could do a better job of picking and choosing who lives inside his little lawnmower heart.  To be fair, 10 years is a prodigious life for a lawnmower battery, but that doesn't excuse it's decision to really stick it to me in the end. And, also to be fair, I had a back-up reel mower that gamely picked up the slack after hitting Chewy with a few wrenches.

I would show you a picture of my beloved Chewy if I could find one floating somewhere in the vast reaches of the internet but it turns out my mower is so old that there's a recall on it and they have to pretty much replace the entirety of the mower's outer body and some of the electrical components.  When next I see Chewy (probably two weeks) it will look nothing like my old mower.  I'm sure it will feel something like picking up your ridiculously rich husband/wife from the plastic surgeon's office (minus all of the gauze, blood, and highly addictive pain meds).

Chewy's new digs, I can hardly stand
to look at him.

This disgusting looking thing (left) is what I will be handed when I pick up Chewy.  I'm sure the orange is some sort of safety precaution (you know, so you can dodge the oncoming mower in time) as Chewy was black where the orange is and green where the black is. Come to think of it, Chewy's recall probably had something to do with him being a stealth ninja mower seeing as he blended in so well with the grass and sounded like a vacuum.  Who would ever guess that a vacuum could be so deadly, thus sneak up on you and maim you, thus ninja mower, thus recall.  Flawless logic.

I wasn't really angry about taking Chewy to the plastic surgeon's office repair shop because of the old trusty reel mower and the fact that these old model electric cordless mowers are leaps and bounds better than the new ones.  I would survive a few weeks of mowing the old-fashioned way and perhaps even enjoy a boost in physical exertion and general well-being.  This was not to be as I am prone to the universal law of Shit Hitting the Fan All At Once, which makes for messy situations.  The old reel-mower took a dump as well (though not the explosive kind that requires you to clean up the toilet bowl afterwards).  It decided that I did not require it's handle to be attached to it's base anymore.  Why, you might ask?  Good fucking question to which it had no legitimate answer.  It was time to play hardball.

Then this happened

Under no circumstance was I going to throw in the towel and since we just dropped Chewy at the repair shop it was between me and the reel-mower.  After about an hour staring at various items in the garage it occurred to me how much faster my partner would have been able to come up with a solution.  Another hour later I had finally zero'd in on some crappy looking rope to tie to the handle so I could drag the reel-mower through the grass.  A few seconds in to plan B I gained unanimous consent from myself to declare this plan an absolute failure.  Plan C required me to acquire a tig torch, some oxygen and acetylene, and a crash-course in welding; this was not feasible.  Which left me with plan D, wait until the neighbor gets home and ask to borrow their lawnmower. Fucking piece of shit lawnmowers.

Fucking useless...

So basically, lawnmower's can fuck themselves, and grass can too.  Because, if we get right down to it, the only reason we have lawnmowers is because someone at some point decided that seeding one's property with grass was a great idea.  Fuck that guy too because now I'm stuck in this web of conspiracies and lies in which my neighbors call the village office if my grass is "unkempt".

I miss Chewy...


Update: Turns out the internet is vast and unending, you just need to know how to use it.  Anyway, a picture of Chewy in his prime that might help explain paragraph three:

The Trying and the Wanting and the Waiting

I was fortunate to have been raised by parents who, for all of their flaws and inconsistencies, couldn't have done a better job managing the struggles of life and raising three children.  My dad probably worked something like 100 hours a week and still managed to read my brother and I bedtime stories.  My mother, who was left with the enormous task of taming two rambunctious boys 14 months apart, somehow maintained her sanity while showering us with love and raising our much younger sister.  It was a tall order and us kids tended to not make it easy.  As is the cycle of life, I never really appreciated or understood what my parents did for us growing up until leaving home and beginning the process of becoming an adult.  And it's really only now, after nearly two years of trying to get pregnant and failing, that I'm beginning to understand a tiny bit of what it might mean to be a parent.

A curious thing happened to my memory over the long course of this endeavor to get pregnant.  I can still remember the excitement of those first few weeks and months after making the decision to try for a baby.  I can recall our optimism and the late night talks wondering what our future child might be.  It's all still there somewhere but there came a point when the optimism and expectation was replaced with something else.  At first it was confusion and frustration.  We were reassured by friends, family, and doctors that sometimes it takes time and so, despite the frustration, we soldiered on.  Eventually those emotions were compounded by miscommunications and arguments in which my partner and I struggled to express our own conflicted and painful feelings as those first few months turned into a year.  Soon after that year mark (and probably sometimes before then as well) the optimism was replaced with successful and unsuccessful attempts just to remain present in the month to month ordeal of tracking ovulation cycles, beginning the process of figuring out what could be wrong, and hoping beyond reason that damn blue line would show up.  The anticipation and expectation had been sapped from the process, replaced with a pall of unknown reasons and the specter of looming problems.  At times, it's difficult to even recall what the initial optimism and expectation felt like.  I still have the memories of it, I still recall those moments but it's like watching them through an old dusty window as if the lack of emotional connection leaves them in this strange detached place in my self.

When I was in seventh grade I began to experience a number of emotions that I neither knew how to identify nor manage.  I couldn't shake an overwhelming feeling of wanting to be alone.  I began spending most of my days cooped up in my room dwelling on god know's what and feeling desperately lonely.  It wasn't until my parents noticed some of the more obvious symptoms of my depression that I found myself at therapy with a man I had never met asking me questions I had never answered before.  I never did ask my parents what that experience was like for them, who they might have talked to or what they learned from it all and I think that had to do with the fact that I was acutely aware, perhaps for the first time, of the importance of my parent's presence in my life.

It's odd the places your mind takes you.  In the midst of this never-ending path to create a life, I've been unable to shake this memory of my parent's faces when I left my therapist's office for the last time.  There wasn't anything particularly special about that moment except that, in my mind, I have this wonderfully poignant and vivid image of my parents without any manufactured happiness attempting to mask the situation. They were concerned for sure (perhaps still a bit scared) but what I remember feeling from their faces was the warmth of their presence.  They were there.  They had been there at the beginning, they were there that day leaving the therapist's office for the last time and they've been there every day since then.  And the only thing I can think of now, in this moment, is that I think I can do that.  I think I can be good at that.

The first part of this experience ended with some pretty raw emotions drifting in a place somewhere between apathy and exhaustion which is neither a helpful or healthy state of mind for the having of children.  Waking up mornings and finding that your living with a person that is completely foreign to you is a scary experience for two people that have vowed to live their lives together.  You're forced to confront things never before imagined and ask questions that you may not want to hear answers to.  And you know what, it doesn't always end up okay.  Sometimes there isn't some magnificent plan (not least because if this is all part of a plan, then I have to interject that this is a horrifically shitty plan).  I'm thankful that we never had to traverse the road of ending our partnership together.  We've managed to come out of this in a good place and we at least have some answers and direction as to where we go from here.

Ghostbusters and the Quest to Become a Man

Men have a long history of infatuation with violence, overactive sex drives and an overwhelming need to spread their progeny.  We enjoy guns and UFC tournaments, have sex twice a day and measure our worth in life by the number of children we're able to sire.  Interestingly (probably only for my own self-awareness) none of this is true for me which, in turn, most likely means I'm not a man.  I'm fine with that, not least because the culture that we live in has constructed ideals of what it means to be a man (and a woman) that are completely idiotic and utterly lacking in any sort of realistic world in which actual people exist.  It probably helps that I don't really buy into the whole machismo thing anyway.  I bring all of this up by way of explaining the long and winding journey my partner and I have been on in order to get pregnant and have our own little bundle of poop and joy.  Part one of the Quest to Become a Man is probably more depressing than I'm willing to hash out currently so let's skip ahead to Part two: Finding out your sperm are stupid.

Towards the end of 2010 I was experiencing some minor pain in my side that was intermittent and barely noticeable.  The only reason I took note was because I have a history with a kidney stone that pretty much derailed an entire summer of my life.  Soon after that I had blood in my urine so off to the doctor I went.  The doc seemed completely unconcerned by the small amount of pain as it truly was a small amount of pain.  Anyone with any first-hand knowledge of kidney stones can tell you "small amount of pain" is not a phrase one would ever use during the process of having a kidney stone.  Instead the doc thought it was most likely some kind of prostate infection (It was, in fact, a kidney stone that I passed December 26, 2010 whilst in the middle of a cross-country trip to visit family, sorry guys!).  An entirely unexpected and unpleasant anal probe later we found ourselves chatting about the prostate and the possible problems an infection can cause.  I asked whether or not that can mess with two people's ability to get pregnant (we had already been trying for a year at this point, which is the magic number for most doctors and insurance people to start figuring out if anything is wrong).  And so began my quest.

The doc's instructions of collecting a sample of sperm were thorough and basically stressed that it is a time sensitive and procedurally sensitive process.  Get it to the hospital in 30 minutes and for god's sake don't miss.   We're talking about your standard pissing cup they hand out at the hospital mind you so right away you are questioning how it's even possible to fill this thing and if you don't, what is wrong with you.  It's essentially set up to make you feel like a failure even after you have successfully completed the procedure and delivered your sperm on time.  The best part is walking through the hospital with a clear plastic bag in which a clear plastic bottle with a sample of your sperm resides.  I wasn't shaking any hands or giving out high-fives.  My mission was simple: keep my eyes forward, walk fast and make it to the lab with as little fanfare as possible.  Thankfully this first time was relatively painless.  When the doc called a week or two later with the results he was sounding appropriately concerned and delivered the news that my analysis came back with some issues and he was referring me to a specialist.  Apparently, along with some lower than normal numbers my sperm are fond of swimming in circles and doing a whole lot of nothing.  Which is to say, they are about as stupid as thinking this whole business really is a quest to become a man.

Round two with the urologist for talking about my sperm came with another surprising anal probe (apparently even mentioning the fact that a previous doctor thought there was something wrong with my prostate, however incorrect, was an open invitation for him to make sure) and a request from the doc that I give a second sample for him so he can have some comparative data to talk about when next we meet.  Round two sperm collection did not go as smoothly as round one, of course, because that would require me to exist in an alternate universe in which I was not required to experience the more embarrassing things in life.

After a fair amount of runaround by the hospital as to where I was supposed to be delivering my sperm after collection I enjoyed the pleasure of being able to deliver said sperm in the company of others.  The nurse was with a few other people, one of which was an impressionable young girl; a situation in which my superbly honed instincts told me I would surely be waiting until this child was done getting blood drawn and out of sight before the nurse took care of my sperm.  Nope.  Instead she brought me into the next "room" (read: behind a mobile partition) and proceeded to ask me in a less than discrete manner a number of questions that made it more than obvious what I was there for.  My favorite was something along the lines of, "Did you collect this sample through masturbation without the use of any lubricants, spermicides, or condoms and were you able to collect all of your ejaculate in this vial."  She emphasized the words, masturbation, spermicides and ejaculate which puzzled me greatly but there I was.  After completing the questionnaire and signing the paper (because, ya know, signatures make everything official and more professional) I exited the "room" to realize that it wasn't just the young girl getting blood drawn.  Every seat was filled and every eye was on me.  I felt like I should say something or apologize or something.  Instead I just flashed an assuredly creepy looking smile and exited to go take care of some paperwork.  It was then I noticed the unfortunate shirt choice of the day bearing this wonderful logo:

To a lesser observer, one might immediately think, "Yes! Ghostbusters!" Unfortunately, at that moment, it was just a confused looking sperm with a no sign over it.  Thus concluded Part two of my quest in which the moral of the story is two-fold: everything they told you in high school about getting pregnant being easy is false and males, never mention your prostate while talking to your doctor lest s/he use it as an excuse to shove her/his hand unceremoniously up your rectum.

An Homage to Space

I would love to become an amateur astronomer.  I've never had a telescope, never lived in an area of the country where the night sky looks anything like this and have only seen a lunar eclipse (that I can remember with any vividness) once but I think I could do it.  Granted, I know nothing about telescopes, or where to point the thing to actually see something but I figure I could find something on the internet about it.  Which brings me to this little list of things in space that I love.  Starting with, perhaps, the most obvious of things in our sky:

The Moon - Our closest celestial neighbor (most of the time) in more ways than one.  I guess the moon is just kind of...well...the moon.  We've all grown up with it, lived with it, seen a gagillion pictures of it but it's also the only place not on this Earth that human beings have ever been.  It's our first step out into a whole new era in human history.  Without this little gem in the night sky, it's possible that life would have never been.  After all, the moon is us, most likely created from a large impact that sent this piece of the Earth sailing billions of years ago.  

Andromeda - Our nearest spiral galaxy neighbor in the cosmos at a mere 2.5 million light years and closing.  Andromeda has always featured in our night sky because it's so bright, but what makes Andromeda so interesting to me is the rate at which it is approaching the Milky Way and our little solar system.  In about 4.5 billion years, the two galaxies are expected to collide.  I have no idea what will happen when the collision occurs, but many scientists expect the galaxies to merge and became a gargantuan eliptical galaxy.  

  Colliding Galaxies - A glimpse into the future, here is a snapshot of a couple of galaxies in the process of collision.  We're actually looking at a couple of things here.  The colliding galaxies are at the top of the picture which, admittedly, looks like a mess of gas and stars and is difficult to distinguish one from the other (which makes sense if they're colliding).  The separate galaxy at the bottom is actually no where near the colliding galaxies and the trail of gas and dust in between the two pictures is somewhere over 100 light years long.

Exoplanets - An artist's rendition of the nearest exoplanet we know of that orbits nearby (about 10.5 light years) Epsilon Eridani.  I'm always overly thrilled by the discovery of new exoplanets, probably because I'm still waiting for that one definite sign of life (flashlight in hand) outside of our own terra firma.  A man can dream...

Horsehead Nebula - Properly known as Barnard 33, the Horsehead Nebula represents a curious and very human tendency to imagine things where they aren't.  I'm not sure if that's because we have a need to find the familiar in the stunningly alien or if it's just some odd sense of vanity left over from thinking that the Earth was the center of the universe, either way, it strikes me that we tend to do the same things with nebulae that we do with clouds on Earth.

Binary Stars - Perhaps because we live and exist in a single star system, I've always been fascinated by the existence of binary star systems.  In this picture we see two white dwarfs orbiting each other at the astonishingly shrinking speed of 321 seconds.  Eventually, they'll merge together and create a new stellar body.  Not all binary systems are doing this, some are in stable orbits and their planetary systems can orbit the gravitational center of the primary star and its companion star or just one of the binary stars.  It's all quite the dance.

Hubble Space Telescope - There's no better way to end this list than by paying homage to the thing that has given humanity its eye into the universe.  Most of the images in this post and most of the images of space we've seen comes from this single object.  Hubble has lifted the veil on nearly 15 billion light years worth of space and time.  It is, in a very real sense, our very own time machine and human knowledge will forever be indebted to it's magical mirrors.  

Yeah, space makes me want to be a poet.

An Homage to Earth and Earthling

I spent a good chunk of time in my formative undergraduate years in the concrete confines of Temple Hall.  Partly because it had a cozy nook at the ground level which I used for various study sessions and last minute reading and also because I minored in Geography.  I know, you thought that was a class you took in middle school, but apparently some people will let you get a degree in the subject. Geography allowed me to take my love of maps and topographic features to new, incredibly geeky, heights.  Here's just a few pictures of some of my favorite and most interesting things on Earth.

Mount Roraima - Is part of a larger plateau that marks the converging borders of Guyana, Brazil and Venezuela.  Mount Roraima is the highest elevation in that plateau chain.  Mountains have shaped the history and spread of human culture for the entirety of our short history on Earth.

Merapi - A stratovolcano in Indonesia known for some nasty eruptions complete with pyroclastic flows.  Beautifully deadly, the Javanese culture believe it to be the home of two spirits, Empu Rama and Empu Permadi. 

Cahokia, Monk's Mound - It may look quaint (and perhaps a bit unspectacular) but Cahokia was an ancient Native American city and this mound is the third largest pyramid in the world (by volume).  Cahokia serves as a reminder that cultures and civilizations use what is available to them.  The Mississippian culture didn't have ready access to iron or stone which is why there was no "iron-age" and their pyramids weren't made of stone which, in turn, is one of the reasons many people thought/think their civilization so "primitive"...this is incorrect.  It's population was larger than London at the time (c. 1250 CE) and the engineering that went into building the city would have rivaled anywhere else in the world.

An artist's rendering of Cahokia in it's prime, Monk's Mound being the big pyramid.  You can also see "woodhenge" on the left of the rendering which is reproduced at the site of Cahokia today.

Masai Mara National Reserve - The most well-known and acclaimed African reserve, Masai Mara also carries the distinction of maintaining a functioning Masai culture in the bounds of the reserve.  It's an interesting  contrast to the American notion of wilderness and nature in National Parks that maintains an absence of human settlement.

Aral Sea - The Aral Sea today is less than a fifth the size it was in the 60's when the Soviet Union began damming rivers that emptied into the sea.  The environmental degradation that resulted from human decisions stands as one of Earth's most poignant reminders of the ability of humans to affect this little planet.

A side by side comparison from 1977, 1989 and 2006.

Mount Washington - As mountains go, Washington isn't particularly high nor does it display any spectacularly original features.  What Washington is home to, however, is some of the most erratic weather ever recorded on Earth.  Temperatures have been recorded as low as -50 (that's without a wind chill) and the mountain held the record for highest surface wind speed at 231 mph from 1934 to 1996.  Things can get hairy up there.  

I imagine, for the majority of human beings, geography isn't the most stimulating of topics but the impact our world has on human interaction and vice versa should remind us of the power that place has on the human psyche.  To this day my first drive up a mountain still stands out in my memory.  It was the middle of summer in Colorado and we were able to drive high enough to find snow sitting on the ground.  I had found my paradise (I love snow).  Anyway, geography (and sometimes even geology...but only sometimes) is cool.  

Disclaimer: Most of the images were just google searched.  I was once told something about being a great writer and stealing from other people and that being okay.  I'm not a great writer so please don't sue me or shut down my little blog.