Remembrance of Zzzzz's Past

A good nap is God's way of saying, "Stay out of My hair for a while."
                                                                    --Mark Fenster

I realize it's several weeks late to be compiling and publishing a "decade's top ten" list, but this is no ordinary list that can be compiled hastily or before the decade is actually over and done with. This is my list of the top ten naps I took from 2000-2009. I take my napping quite seriously, to the point that for more than two decades now I have assiduously kept a meticulous nap-log. Be-splattered with drool and stray eye-crumbs though it may be, it is the official record of my precious "me" time. For the past several weeks, as laundry has piled up, I have pored over the log, re-visiting naps great and lousy, making tentative lists, and finally paring down the list from well over 200 possibilities to this, the definitive, annotated list of The Best Naps of the 2000s (in chronological order).

1. January 12, 2000: Even so early in the decade, I had starred this nap as a potential "best of." So soon after Christmas break, I was in need of another free day, so I took a late afternoon nap with my pj's turned inside out, the universal good luck charm of hopeful students (and teachers) everywhere. Sure enough, upon waking the wind was howling and the snow was adrift. At 5:26 a.m. the next morning, I received a phone call: no school, snow day. I owed it all to the nap.
2. November 28, 2000: A nap well-remembered for its dream: for seemingly hours I kept jumping over a restless sheep, as he bahhed in what seemed to me like an ordered sequence. I woke up and drove straight to Best Steak and Gyro and chowwed down.
3. July 19, 2001: Perfect estivation. I didn't break 80 on the golf course that day, but aided by a Guinness at the 19th hole, and a smooth-running fan, I broke several sleep warps. And not a bead of sweat dampened the pillow.
4. February 5, 2003: Breaking a long spell of uneven, unsatisfying naps that in hindsight I either chalk up to 9/11 or the ensuing high opinion polls of George W., this nap, culminated by a waking moan of "Oh my Lord, now that's what I call dozing off!" rejuvenated my faith in siestas.
5. April 9, 2004: What just happened? What time is it? Where am I? Who am I?
6. April 11, 2004: In what is undoubtedly the greatest napping week of my life (4/8, 4/12, and 4/14 all made Top 50), this one, despite the puddle of drool on the pillow, was memorable for providing me, upon waking, with the name of the Little League teammate I had been trying--to the point of madness--to remember for six months.
7. December 2, 2005: I woke up at 5:45 p.m. My arm woke up at 8:03 p.m. Sawing logs? The Gobi was a forest when I fell asleep.
8. May 1, 2007: The Annual Hilda K. Memorial Nap, which I take every year in honor of my childhood babysitter who could never get me to nap, this year was a triumph. I heard spring birds throughout my slumber and woke up so refreshed I did all my spring cleaning in a three-hour burst of energized frenzy.
9. August 8, 2008: Amid mid-90 degree heat and a driveway outside my window being jackhammered apart, I slept like a baby.
10. January 11, 2009: Sometimes in a Cleveland winter, the only motivating force to get you out of bed in the morning is the thought of the nap you'll be taking later that day. This one did not disappoint. Then again, any dream involving bacon, Cheryl Tiegs, and an intimate performance by Sly and the Family Stone would never disappoint.

The Kinks-I Go To Sleep (demo)

The Wandering Lew

"September ninth, 1752, London, England--it was a hot, grimy day. You can look it up." The old guy had a habit of breaking tiny little pieces of his large chocolate chip cookie and chewing them thoroughly while he talked, all the while with his right hand poised near his mouth, as if waiting for a pit or some other inedible piece of jetsam to surface. "Why the guy was in that bog on that day doing what he was doing, let alone what the guy was even doing in England then, I still haven't figured out in more than two-hundred-fifty years. Curses!"

The guy, Isaac "Lew" Medequal ("Lew because my father wanted a Lew and couldn't stand my mother naming me Isaac") had walked into my life five minutes before. I was in the bookstore's bathroom, washing my hands as usual at the start of my hour lunch break. I heard the door squeak open, somebody come trundling in, then I heard the heaviest, most meaning-laden sigh I have ever heard in my life, an "Oy," to sever your will to live. Normally not being the employee-of-the-month type to offer a customer help in the bathroom, something about the sigh, even before I looked over at his general unkemptness, told me this guy was different. "Can I help you?" I said as I moved over to the towel dispenser.

"What makes you think you can help Old Lew when thousands before you haven't?"

"Because," rising to the challenge out of nothing but boredom, "I'm Dan the Man," I said cheerily, using the appellation I've hated my whole life.

"In lieu of other things," Old Lew chuckled to himself, "I need a cookie and some cold water."

"Come with me, then," I said, leading him out of the bathroom, figuring, what the hell, pay day's coming up, with my employee discount I can cover the cost of a cookie, and besides, this guy might be fun. As we walked (well, I walked, he kind of hobbled, though nimbly in a way, leaning on an old walking stick that reached to his shoulder) across the store to the cafe I detected a peculiar odor emanating from the man, not a make-you-gag old hobo stink, just a very well lived-in general musk.

"The ninth of September, 1752, seems like yesterday." I can't say I believed the guy at the start, as we settled down at a table and he began nibbling his cookie and taking big gulps of his water, but there was something so matter of fact about him, something so credible in his mien, that it wasn't like I sat there thinking, I'm listening to a madman here. "I had closed my cobbler shop as usual around four in the afternoon and was standing my regular two pints at Henley's Taverne, same as I had done for thirty-two years in the business. Naturally, as pints will do, I had to relieve myself, so I headed out back to Henley's outhouse, at the time one of the finest in London, a three-seater, with leg room. Room enough for some air to circulate, which on that day wasn't much.

"So I'm standing over the hole, doing my business like any gentleman, when I hear a strange noise coming from the corner. I look over and a fellow is bent over a bucket scrubbing clothes. Scrubbing clothes, in a bog, on the grimiest day of the year, September ninth, 1752. Now there's not much a man can do mid-stream, but I couldn't help my curiosity, so I call out, 'What the devil are ye doing man?'"

"'I'm washing my clothes, senor, what's it to you?'"

"'Senor,' I think. What's that? By this time I'm finished with my chore so I take a step over toward the man, wondering what kind of accent is this on these shores. I see he's got a couple pairs of pants and some shirts hanging on the wall, drying. 'What the bloody hell is this then?' I admit now, after years and years of contemplation of the pivotal, cursed moment of my life, that maybe the pints had roughened up the tone of my approach a wee bit."

"'I just need to wash my clothes, be ignorant of me.' As I got a closer look at him, I could tell he must have been from the Mediterranean, not that I really knew or had seen anybody from those parts, I just knew.

"'But in an outhouse man!?' I took a closer look at the clothes, which were nice, if a bit worn. On the tail of each shirt, in elaborate embroidery, was stitched, 'Jesus Algebueno.'

"'What is this Jesus stuff? You steal these shirts from a clergyman? How dare you!' Okay, so maybe on that day, September ninth, 1752, I had a few more than my usual two pints. It was a hot, grimy day."

"'Not Gee-zus, sir, but Hey Zeus, my name. My mother made me these shirts. She stitched my name in them. I am very proud of them. I wash them where I wash them.'"

"I tell you honestly, Dan the Man," Lew looked into my eyes with the saddest, oldest eyes I have ever seen, nibbled his last bit of chocolate chip cookie, and hung his head. "What I did next was horrible, inexcusable, not at all befitting a gentleman cobbler. Heat, grime, and my own xenophobia--it took me until the 1880s to discover that part of it--and pints all conspired within me and against me. I said to the man, who was sweating and just trying to wash his clothes, I said, 'Jesus, Zeus, get your deities straight you alien heathen. And never,' with this I took a drying shirt off the wall and flung it aimlessly; though long before basketball was ever invented, I made the first swish, right into a bog hole, 'never wash your clothes in an English loo again!'"

"He stared at the hole where one of his precious, and I do mean precious, I see that now, shirts had just disappeared down, and then he turned to me and hissed, a definite hiss, 'Sir, you have no idea what you have done. Because of how you have dishonored me and my mother's haberdashery skills, may you not rest until you find a loo, as you call it, a loo with laundering facilities. Bona fortuna!'"

After several minutes of silent sitting there, regarding this poor wretch, who just sat there with his head in his hands, all I could say was, "And..."

"Dan the Man, phooey! I knew you couldn't help me. Don't you know who you look upon with such a pitying, this-guy's-daft look? It is I, the legendary, tragic, mythic Wandering Lew, the three-hundred-year-old Wandering Lew who is doomed to walk the Earth until he finds the elusive, quite possibly non-existent Laundering Loo. I am the one who mocked Hey Zeus Algebueno, who was just trying to wash his clothes in an outhouse in London, England, on September ninth, 1752, and for my sin I have been walking the globe since, ever in search of a public restroom with clothes washing facilities. This is my twentieth pass through North America. I have been on all the continents, in every country, state, and province. Metropolises and villages, kingdoms and shanty towns. I know the historical evolution of plumbing in my bones. I have peed on dozens of iterations of the urinal cake. My tush is splintered and I have discovered ways to out-trick an automatic flusher sensor that would make your head spin. I have read more disgusting graffiti than your Library of Congress could ever catalog. Look at these hands: They've been scraped to rawness by forests of rough paper towels and been blown dry of any tenderness that once so lovingly made shoes. Take heed, Dan who calls himself a Man; be kind and respectful of your fellow man, from the boardroom to the bathroom, lest you end up like me, cursed to wander forever seeking redemption from, in my case, nothing more than a Sears Kenmore adjacent to a urinal."

With that he staggered to his feet and started walking away.

"But Lew, can't I buy you another cookie, at least?"

With that he lightened up a bit. "One for the road, perhaps. Those chocolate morsels are the best I've had since Siam, 1897. I'm heading over to Wal-Mart. For years now I've half-believed Sam Walton will be my savior. Sooner or later, I figure, he's gonna put some industrial-sized washer and dryers in his restrooms, don't you think?"

So I bought Lew another cookie and gave him my phone number. I told him to call me periodically. I also promised him that if I ever win Lotto, I'm going to start a chain of laundromats cum restrooms, Wash'n'Waste. It's the least I could do for the poor guy.

The Stanley Brothers-The Wandering Boy

Pssst! Have I Gotta Proposition For You

Yes, it's the big day. Time to engage in America's favorite pastime--no, not watching the Super Bowl; no, not watching the Super Bowl commercials; but, yes, contemplating and even making a few Super Bowl proposition bets, or exotic wagers, as the boys down at the local, um, donut shoppe like to say (the only "exotic" wager worth making in Cleveland on February 7 is whether or not I'll ever see a bikini-clad woman in these parts again).

Now if you're looking for the standard proposition bets, like heads or tails on the coin toss, the duration of the National Anthem, chances that either Roger Daltrey or Pete Townshend will have a heart attack during halftime (in fact, if you're looking for any cheap joke at the expense of the venerable and beloved Who), go elsewhere. If you're looking for some exclusive, really-put-the-props-in-proposition proposition bets, well, then, partner, sidle right up to my window (N.B. all bets are in drachmae and are merely figments of your imagination).

• odds on Bill Cowher alluding to Proust's In Search Of Lost Time while analyzing Peyton Manning's audible technique: 5-1
• odds on Jim Nantz, after being handed the microphone from James Brown, says, "Heckuva job, Brownie": 3-1
• odds on Joe Namath effecting a wardrobe malfunction on Carrie Underwood during the National Anthem: 2-1
• over/under, out-of-nowhere references by Jim Nantz to Freddie "Boom Boom" Couples: 3
• over/under, mentions of Archie Manning: 12
• over/under, mentions of Eli Manning: 7
• over/under, mentions of Cooper Manning: .5
• over/under, percentage of commercials that use women's breasts or male genitalia as the prime source of humor: 67
• over/under, Phil Simms pronouncing the word "him" as "eem": 256
• odds that the cerebral Norman "Boomer" Esiason will wonder aloud what the "erudite and always effervescent spitouyourgum blog will have to say about that": 7-5
• over/under, times Roger Daltrey will stutter the m and g in "My Generation": 23
• odds that a current NFL star will be arrested in or around Miami in the next 24 hours: 3-5
• odds that a field mic will pick up Peyton Manning doing a commercial while seemingly making an audible: 4-1
• odds that the combined final score will be an even number: 2-1
• odds that a Russian computer hacker will manage to substitute a clip from Cannonball Run 2 for a game-deciding instant replay challenge and thus do more damage to the American way of life than the secret confederation of Bin Laden, Obama, Dan Brown, The Fed, and married gay couples could ever dream of doing: pick 'em

BTW: Colts 27-Saints 23

Sweet-Action

Strange Things Are Happening Every Day

The other night I opened a can of soup, put it in a pot on the stove, fired it up, and started reading the paper. When it comes to cooking, I usually don't, so I'm a stickler for following directions. The can said to stir the soup occasionally, so that's what I did. Even with something as simple as soup, I'm still kind of mesmerized that through the marvel of heat (even electrically-generated) something that doesn't look too appetizing (a can of bean soup) can be transformed into something eminently delectable within minutes. So I stirred the pot, thrilled that the gunk would soon be so tasty, and delighted that in doing so, I was treated to emanations of heat to warm me up on a cold, snowy winter's night. I had places to go and people to meet that evening, so I cranked up the heat on the burner a notch or two to speed the process along and make the kitchen less chilly. After reading the local crime blotter and the death notices, and skimming the sports page to see which page I would devour word for word while I ate, I knew the time must be right for the soup. The heat off the stove was a warm blast as I stood above the teeming soup. Well, not quite teeming. I was surprised it wasn't bubbling a bit, and even more surprised when I spooned some out and it wasn't steaming. Not trusting my eyes, I bent over a little bit and contemplated tasting the soup, to make sure it was done. I caught myself as my face got closer to the spoon: don't be deceived Dan, how often have you put your lips to something that didn't seem that hot only to end up seconds later howling and cussing with a burning tongue? This time, however, it was not my tongue that got burned, but, figuratively, my eyes--as I hunkered down over the pot, I saw that the burner behind the one where my pot of soup sat was electrically aglow; the soup sat on an un-burning burner. I had put the pot on one burner and turned a different burner on.

Twenty-five years ago in college, I started to write a short story about two neighborhood teen-age boys who work up some mischief the night before their street's annual block party. The narrator is an older neighbor who has recently gone blind. For the first time since he went blind, he is alone; his wife has hesitantly gone away for the weekend, having been convinced by him that he'll be okay. In the course of his reveling in his newly re-gained independence, he "witnesses" what the boys do. As the evening begins he sets out to make some hot dogs for himself. After about twenty minutes or so, he realizes he has placed the pot of weiners on one burner, but turned on a different one. No big deal for a blind man.

However, though I am colorblind, and I've recently taken to wearing my first ever pair of eye glasses, I am not blind, so my gaffe is rather inexcusable. As of yet, twenty-five years and counting, I have not finished the short story. I know exactly how it ends, with the blind man chuckling to a neighbor, "Yep, with everything you've got." It's the middle of the story I'm still working on. Well, intermittently working on. Every few years or so I haul the story out, re-read what I have, still liking most of it, tinker with it, push it along a little more, but then end up putting it away again. Now I've written ten-page stories in one sitting. I've completed several stories with the same teenaged boys, using the street in all sorts of symbolic ways--I can start and finish a story in relatively short time--but this particular story remains in process. Each time I work on it, I feel like I am not quite ready to finish it, like it needs to germinate more, or maybe I need to mature more.

With my bumbling soup-making experience the other night, maybe I'm another click closer, but I don't know. In the story, when the man realizes his error, he laughs and takes the time to wax philosophic about whether it's better to rectify the situation by placing the pot of hot dogs on the already hot burner, or to turn off the one burner and light the correct one. My reaction wasn't quite so stoic. With burning eyes rather than a burning tongue, I howled and cursed my stupidity. Maybe because I had places to go and people to meet, but also maybe because I'm still me, I wasn't bemused but pissed. Maybe I'm still years from being able to honorably get inside that old blind man's thoughts and sensibilities.

Other questions linger, though.

Is there some kind of sudden onset culinary dyslexia disorder that prompts chefs to irrationally pinch confectioner's sugar into beef stew and dollop salt into souffles (or whatever an egregiously representative cooking faux pas would be), a psychological sort of kitchen counterpart to baseball's Steve Blass/Sax syndrome, where star players all of a sudden can't accurately throw a ball sixty feet anymore? With my limited cooking expertise I doubt I would qualify for such a diagnosis, but still.

Art imitates life all the time, and certainly life is capable of imitating art, but what about one particular person's life imitating his own putative art, especially twenty-five years after the initial creation of that putative art? Surely that must raise some beguiling questions, no? Are there subsconscious creatures at work in all of us, concocting odd scenarios for us, trying to make us see deeper meanings in our lives, or merely toying with us for their version of shits and giggles? Finish the story, learn to cook, get your head out of your ass, align your ying and yang, contemplate balance, call for pizza delivery?

Or was this all just a one-off goof, fodder for nothing more than blogging?

I don't know. I'll keep you posted if trends develop.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe-Strange Things Happening Every Day

What Would Any Sane Person Do?

It's mid-winter in Cleveland, Ohio. Faced with the choice of going to see some local college basketball with a great old friend one night and the next night watch the greatest basketball player on earth lead his team, which is playing the best basketball on the planet right now, or sit home and blog, I made the correct choices both nights.

Read some old posts while I bask in basketball heaven.

Ringo Starr-I'm The Greatest

Groundhog Night

"Actually," he begins, "for us, basically, Groundhog Night is much more important, scratch that, meaningful than Groundhog Day."

"He" is a guy I know, Yon (Thantos, from Indiana--stop that) and "us" is his group of Schmiccans, "an offshoot sect, basically, from the Wiccans." I nod. "We're basically more totemic in philosophy, more, well, technically, ascetically Druidic in practice, pagan monks, if you will." I won't, necessarily. "The hip nomenclature is 'ponk,' which I don't mind at all." He chortles.

"Basically, the ritual, which can be traced back as far as King Ethelrad's reign, but most Schmiccan elders believe it pre-dates that era by at least half a millennium, revolves around keeping vigil on this night and observing the nocturnal activities--which, actually hopefully are nil--of the latest descendent, presently Clearfield Caliph IX, of the ancient holy avatar groundhog Jesper. Basically, if the groundhog sleeps through the night, unstirred, Gaia will be good to us the following year: plentiful but not overabundant precipitation, adequate warmth for growing, but not excessive heat, basically a Mother Earth in harmony, or, if you will, one who's got her chakras together. If, on the other hand, the groundhog stirs, ambles about, and especially if it relieves itself, then, well, we're in for a tough year, I mean, storms, heat, cold, earthquakes, you name it. Like back in '96, Clearfield Caliph X, in what would be his last Groundhog night (he was killed in a tornado, naturally), he was basically doing cartwheels all night, in between relieving himself like, I mean, massively. We Schmiccans basically battened down the hatches that year. You remember the climate that year, don't you?" No. "You can look it up." I won't, obviously.

"Yeah, I won't be making the trek this year, but I'm going to stay up all night, nevertheless, actually, and watch the live feed. I'll call you if Caliph does anything weird." Don't, please. "I'd give you the password for the website, but then I'd have to summon you to a cleansing ceremony."

Just then the nice lady behind the counter at the Post Office asked if she could help me. "Don't get too crazy tonight, Yon."

"Actually, it's distilled moss night. YRRREEAAFGFGHHGEEEEEE!"

What it takes to mail a letter these days.

Doc Watson-Groundhog

Under The Weather

As opposed to being over it.

Or on top of it, bestride it, out in front of it, betwixt it, beneath it, immune to it, lagging behind it, on equal terms with it, side by side with it, hitching a ride on it, thumbing my nose at it, arm in arm with it, playing leapfrog with it, outrunning it, at war with it, surfing it, wrapping it around my finger, shunning it, reaching Detente with it, cursing it, rooming with it, catty-corner from it, pitching my tent with it, becoming one with it.

As if we in the Midwest aren't pinned under it like a hapless wrestler perpetually from December-February.

The term under the weather supposedly is a nautical one: when sailors were ill they were sent below decks, thus out of or more literally under the weather.

Don't cry for me, A.J. Colby, though. Tomorrow I should be back on deck swabbing away.

Mission Of Burma-Weatherbox