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.