Michigan, land of thieves
I hadn’t been to my mother’s house in Michigan for a while. Part of it was probably due to the fact that I work with her, and end up talking to her several times each week. Part of it is because she’s at our house semi-regularly to visit with her grandkids or to attend family events. Part of it is simply that as you get older, you tend to visit a bit less often.
But mostly, we haven’t visited because Michigan is filled with weirdoes and thieves.
Last Friday, we went to visit my mom and stepdad in order to get rid of our children. This was the first time that my daughter, Sydney, would be staying overnight, so we decided to compromise on our usual drop-off-for-the-weekend. Instead of leaving them, we’d stay too, in a small guest house. (Don’t go thinking they’re loaded. While comfortable and technically a guest house, the cabin is closer to “Unabomber shack” than it is to “Butler’s quarters.”) That way if things got ugly, we’d be right there to pretend that we couldn’t hear my mother pounding on the door.
But we still got our alone time. So on Friday night, Robin and I went to the Olive Garden — just the two of us. It was very quiet and we immediately realized we had no idea what to do with ourselves.
“So what are we supposed to talk about?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Robin replied.
After an extended period of time, the waitress stumbled over, announced that she “needed more wine,” took our drink order, and then stared at us for a while. Then she left. After another extended period of time, she returned with our drinks. Then she stared at us again and left.
One of the people behind Robin was talking about her favorite TV shows.
“Do you watch House? It’s about this doctor who has like a limp and he solves mysteries but nobody likes him but he’s so good that it doesn’t matter and he has like polio or something. And Wife Swap? It’s about these families who trade the mothers and they’re all totally weird like this one lady who was possessed by the devil or something and like ate fire and then there was this kid? Have you seen Heroes?”
The waitress returned. “Can I get you something to drink?” she asked.
“We already have drinks.”
She stood in place and stared at us. So we decided to start ordering food in her general direction and hope that in some part of her mind, she would recognize our verbalizations as valid inquiries for food.
I decided to call my mother to see how Sydney was doing. I could hear her in the background, screaming.
“She’s playing,” my mom announced.
But really, all I cared about was that she wasn’t “playing” with us for a change. It was nice to have a meal without being interrupted. However, halfway through my plate, the waitress arrived with a to-go box and attempted to shovel my food into it.
“I’m still eating that,” I told her.
She stared at me, then left.
Later, while we were sitting at the local Borders book store and reading, a woman walked up to the endtable between our chairs, moved our coffees, picked up one of Robin’s magazines, appraised it briefly, and walked off with it.
You can’t blame Michigan, though. They live so close to those shifty Canadians that descent into lives of thievery was almost a given.
My mom works with a Canadian man named Greg. I once spent a weekend in a Canadian lake house with a group that included Greg and his wife. Greg did not like the lake house. He was bored and didn’t enjoy the beach. He didn’t care much for quiet, or tranquility. He was too busy complaining about the slow cellular internet service.
“There’s a way you can get satellite high-speed for free, you know,” he chided my mother. “It’s the same with DirecTV. You used to be able to get Dish Network TV here, and you could rig it so that it’s free, but then they changed the way it was broadcast and so we had to switch to stealing DirecTV instead.”
I was intrigued. ” ‘We?’ ”
“You know, Canadians.”
Greg tapped a key angrily, mumbling. “The setup I have at home is so fast that you can get full DVDs in no time at all,” he said.
“I can’t figure out how to burn them,” I told him.
“It’s complicated because sometimes they put copyright protection on them. You have to find the programs to break the protection. It can take a long time. There are times that I really want a DVD or CD and I have to search for hours to find it for free somewhere, and then I end up having to get through some copyright bullshit. It’s really annoying.” He tapped a key angrily again.
“Why don’t you just… I don’t know… buy the DVD?”
Greg shook his head. “I can’t. It’s part of being Canadian. We always want to get stuff for free.” He gestured out the window. “Hell, most of these houses have satellite dishes on them. But look around; most are for services we don’t have in Canada. They’re stealing American signals.”
You learn something new every day. Apparently Canadians steal. It’s like that Seinfeld episode where Jerry learns that all old people steal. I wonder what it’s like to be an old Canadian? Museums in Calgary and Toronto must have dozens of safeguards to hold back the onslaught of geriatric catburglars. Like maybe staircases, or low toilets.
The rest of my time in Canada, I walked around with my hands in my pockets.
Back in Michigan, I called my mom again. In the background I could hear the sound of my daughter screaming.
“She’s listening to Boppa play the guitar,” she told me.
I visited the Borders bathroom. When I returned, Robin told me that several people had tried to steal my clearly-marked seat. Later, she went to the bathroom and more people did the same for her seat. It was like they were circling, looking for weakness. I wondered if they could smell fear.
When we returned to my mother’s house, my mom announced that Sydney had cried so much that she had exhausted herself and collapsed into hypoxia. The house was quiet. Satisfied, we headed out to the cabin for our first night of uninterrupted sleep in approximately sixteen thousand years, and it was good.
When we awoke, we had another 36 hours ahead of us in Michigan. Near Detroit, just a stone’s throw from Canada. I decided it would be prudent to put my wallet in my sock and hang my food from a high branch. You never know, and better safe than sorry. Thieves and bears are everywhere.
Punk rock progeny
The other day I’m in the car with my four-year-old son Austin and he says, “Daddy, I want to listen to Uncle Matt’s music.”
“Uncle Matt’s music,” which as far as Austin is concerned is one conjoined phrase and a genre in itself, refers to Rube, the latest album from my brother-in-law Matt King. We both like Uncle Matt’s music. But, Austin’s fandom borders on obsession, to the point where I’m concerned that he may one day boil Matt’s rabbit.
I absolutely love that CD. But we listen to it all. The. Fucking. Time.
“I don’t want to listen to Uncle Matt’s music right now. If I listen too much to it, I’ll become totally desensitized to its awesomeness and will begin to resent it in the way I resent the green onions in the fridge, which have become a pile of decomposed, fetid stank.”
“Oh,” Austin replied. “Then I want to listen to punk rock.”
It’s moments like this that warm my heart. Kids are amazing because they’re like little create-your-own-minion kits. Even if nobody likes what you’re into, you can totally add new followers to the cause by brainwashing your children. I’ve explained to Austin the differences between pop, general rock, punk, ska, rockabilly, and Daddy’s favorite subgenre, Celtic punk. For those of you who are uncultured, that last contains Flogging Molly, Dropkick Murphys, and The Pogues. At my wedding, some of my friends and I did an impromptu jig in formalwear to The Pogues’ “Living in a World Without Her” and hence got odd stares for the rest of the night.
“Do you know The Goops?” I asked from the driver’s seat.
“No.”
“The Goops are way cool,” I told him, and started their self-titled album on my iPod.
Time passed. “You like this?”
“Yeah.”
“I love punk bands with girl singers,” I told him. “Girls should sing punk more. Do you know any other punk bands with girl singers?”
He nodded in the rear-view mirror. “Tilt.”
“Good boy.”
I had forgotten how cool The Goops were. They broke up, regrettably, back in the late 90s. I discovered The Goops when they opened for Samiam, and I discovered Samiam when they opened for Bad Religion. The Goops ended up doing a mini-tour with a rockabilly band called Buzzsaw and I went to see them in four cities. At the time, I liked to think I was working on some sort of punk documentary, so I kept trying to get them to let me interview them on my old gigantic VHS camcorder. They finally relented and I spent a few hours after a show hanging out with them until dawn in their motel room. Ah, The Goops.
“The Goops. The Goops. I like that name,” said Austin from the back seat.
“High five for The Goops,” I said, offering my hand. He hit it.
I was totally geeking out, so I made a mental note to listen to The Goops during my workout the next day. It would give me punk rock power, which means that although you may not set any records, you’re still really bad ass.
When I got home, I decided to look up The Goops, to see if they were still floating around cyberspace. Google revealed surprisingly little. Nada on Twitter. But on Facebook, I saw that there was an Eleanor Whitledge. Eleanor is super awesome. She threw up on Iggy Pop, then wrote a song about it.
Her avatar was of an inanimate object, like a UFO parked at a train station. So I messaged her: “You’re not by any chance the Eleanor who was in the band The Goops, are you?”
And the answer was, “Yes. I am she.”
So now, I think she’s totally bullshitting me because neglecting that I still haven’t gotten a response to my gushing response, that communique isn’t very punk rock at all. Such grammatically correct brevity. No cigarette burns on the email. No mention of huffing gas. I have my doubts that this is indeed the woman who sang, Passing dogs take pees on me / This really is the life for me.
Hell, it’s been ten years. My orange hair has grown out. The smoke smell has finally left my clothes. Maybe The Goops have gotten all civilized. Maybe they’re now tax assessors or chicken farmers. All respectable and possibly covered in white bird shit. With like, dental insurance.
I have no tattoos to make me regret the impetuosity of those younger days. Hair goes back to normal. My Pennywise tour shirt gets used to wax the car.
Okay, fine. The minivan.
I am a whore. But I am not Robert Goulet.
I want to make money.
There. I’ve said it. And don’t go pretending that you don’t want to make money, because if you do, I’ll open my stats package, correlate the time of your visit with the IP addresses active at that time, run an IP traceroute to find the locality serviced by that root IP, then drive there, hire a private investigator to match usernames with probable candidates based on psychological profiling, then determine where you live, show up at your door with a pie, and hit you in the face with it.
And motherfucker, that’s going to be really unpleasant unless you truly love pie and don’t care if you eat it off of your face, shirt, and floor.
So don’t tell me that you don’t want to make money. Don’t tell me that you do what you do for altruistic reasons. If you work with orphans, don’t tell me that you do it because it’s so rewarding. I totally know about the bribes and kickbacks in the orphan biz. And the golf memberships. And the private jet rides. Don’t get me started.
So what do you need if you’re going to make money off of a blog? You need traffic. And you need a plan.
Traffic is slowly building, thanks to some new friends of mine. Chuck Westbrook has mentioned and linked to me a few times, and that’s brought new readers. Havi Brooks and Selma have been strange champions on Twitter. (I don’t mean that they’re strange. I mean that it’s strange that they like my stuff so much and have been so helpful. Although they may also be strange personally; I don’t know them well enough to determine that. Stay tuned.)
So as I begin to see more traffic, I had to come up with a plan to capitalize on it. And here it is:
1. Become a whore
2. Stop being Robert Goulet
3. Collect underwear
4. ?
5. Profit.
Logical enough, right?
I began my quest to become a money-hungry whore with Google AdSense. You know those annoying ads you see all over the place? The ones that disgust you to the core of your being? Yeah, I was all over that. I put a few here and there on the site, and it’s already working. Don’t believe me? Well, check this out:
Yeah, that’s right.
But, I was careful not to get too excited by the early success of my ad campaign. I told myself to keep my eye on the ball. What’s the first thing you learn in law school about liability? When you start earning money, what’s the first thing you need to do in order to make sure you keep it?
That’s right: Safeguard all earnings from Robert Goulet.
Now, Bob Goulet himself is dead, but when that AdSense revenue you see above begins to double and triple, extended family Goulets may crawl out of the sewers like C.H.U.D.s and begin attempting to get their hands on my money because I’ve been using his image as my own. And what of the book I’m planning to offer soon? Whose photo do I use on the dust jacket? What if I create some great swag to sell? Whose picture do I use? If I continue to use Bob’s picture, the Goulets will be after me so vehemently that they may well break through all of the anti-Goulet countermeasures around my house.
So yeah, I love my Robert Goulet persona, but I can’t keep being Goulet. I have to move on. So allow me to introduce myself, as the real Johnny Truant. Just took this pic for y’all:
Stay tuned for more late-breaking update on my whoring and my transition away from Goulet. And in the meantime, keep your eye out for pies.
Fun with comic books
Click images to enlarge.
Unfortunately, pants
When people throw things at me and call me an uncultured shit — which happens frequently while shopping, hiking, and vomiting in public — it sometimes occurs to me that they’re wrong because I’m bilingual. Being bilingual is a rarity in today’s America, where most people don’t even speak one language, and instead manage to eke out a parody of communication through a series of grunts and gestures.
Today, I can sort of read a German magazine and can carry on a German conversation. I can sometimes follow German TV or radio. When I lived in Luxembourg in 1998, I even watched Alf in German. Get this: the German word for Alf is “Alf.”
It wasn’t always so rosy. I started learning German in high school, where I was taught how to tell people my name, how to ask where the disco was, and how to inquire as to whether or not Mrs. Schmidt was at home. At first, I didn’t understand everything. I didn’t get that when my teacher said “Pass auf,” she was requesting our attention rather than our unconsciousness. But it got easier, and I slugged through it. By the time I graduated high school, I was able to determine the whereabouts of the train to Berlin, what Wolfgang and Helga were doing after school, and at what time we would be invading Poland.
So, when I got to college, I was okay but not great. I figured I’d take my required two more quarters of German language, and then begin the arduous process of forgetting all of it.
College German required a lot of partner work, and my partner was a freshman named Jim. We were told to introduce ourselves to each other over and over and to tell each other our ages and to inquire whether or not the other liked sauerbraten. When we learned a new construction, we were told to create sentences using that construction. If we didn’t know how to say something, we were allowed to ask, but had to do it in German using the phrase ‘Wie sagt man…?” It all made me mentally tired — as if I was going to pass auf.
Once, deep in the midst of an assignment on relative pronoun phrases, we walked over to our T.A. to ask a question.
“Ja?” she said.
“Wie sagt man ‘pistol-whip’?”
She didn’t understand, so I pretended to beat Jim with the butt of an imaginary revolver before repeating the question.
” ‘Mit einer Pistole schlagen.’ “
Jim tried it out in German. ” ‘The man, who is wearing the blue hat, is pistol-whipping Tony Danza.’ ” He nodded. I thanked the T.A. and walked away.
More questions arose as we continued with the assignment. “Wie sagt man ‘flesh-eating bacteria’?” Jim asked later.
“Wie sagt man ‘break-dancing fiasco’?”
“Wie sagt man “David Bowie’s hairdo’?”
By the end of the session, we were turned around on the German language. We were further turned around when the T.A. brought in a popular German CD for our listening enjoyment. On the cover were four very white people in ostentatious studded sunglasses and various ridiculous hats — a hip-hop group by the name of “Die Fantastischen Vier,” or “The Fantastic Four.”
“Isn’t that a group of superheroes?” Jim asked.
The album turned out to be brilliant, and thanks to my increased skills, I was able to easily translate the lyrics (”The Smudo, the Smudo, I am the Smudo. I don’t know Karate and I don’t know Judo.”), which made me feel smart. I took the borrowed DFF album to the deli I worked at and played it loudly and proudly.
My boss, Ryan, was intrigued. He said that he only knew two German words. One was “dankeschön” (which he, like everyone else, mispronounced as “dunka-shane”) and the other was “lederhosen.”
“What does that mean, anyway?” he asked.
I knew that “hosen” meant pants, but the other half of the word had me mystified. So I pulled out my dictionary and looked it up.
“Here it is,” I told him, running my finger down the page. “It means ‘unfortunately.’ “
“So ‘lederhosen’ means ‘unfortunately, pants’?” he said.
“I guess.”
“As in, someone puts pants on their head instead of a hat and you point out their error by saying, ‘Excuse me, but unfortunately… pants.’ ”
I agreed that this was odd, so I asked my T.A. She was still afraid of me after the pistol-whipping incident but informed me that although “leider” did in fact mean “unfortunately,” “leder,” which was correct, meant “leather.”
“Dunker-shane.” I told her.
Her wariness of Jim and me did not improve with time. We were scheduled later in the day to perform a dialogue for the class about a campus issue. We had chosen the oft-lamented parking problem.
“There aren’t enough parking spots here,” I began, speaking in German.
“Yes. Yes there are not,” Jim agreed.
“There should be more.”
“Yes. Yes there should.”
“What if there was less parking?”
“That would be unfortunately,” Jim said, capitalizing on what we had learned about leiderhosen.
“But,” I pointed out, “that would mean more room for a…” I paused, then turned to the T.A. “Wie sagt man ‘Taco Bell’?”
” ‘Taco Bell,’” she answered.
“That would mean more room for a Taco Bell,” I told Jim.
“We should no parking places, and Taco Bell make,” Jim agreed.
“But what of the commuters?”
Jim rubbed his chin. “They need parking places?”
“They need.”
“We could kill all of the commuters,” he suggested, nodding.
“But what would we do with the bodies?”
“We could throw them in the river.”
“Ah,” I said, nodding back. “Yes. Let us eat tacos.”
We looked to the T.A. when we had finished. After a silent pause, she slowly offered one criticism. “When you talk about throwing the bodies into the river,” she explained, “you should say ‘in den Fluß,‘ not ‘in dem Fluß.’ Using dative case implies that you aren’t throwing bodies into the river, but are instead standing in the river and tossing them around.”
“That’s what we meant,” I said.
“Like a Frisbee,” Jim added, doing a pantomime for emphasis.
By the time I went to Luxembourg, I was set. I knew how to explain my tossing of bodies. I knew about Die Fantastischen Vier. And fortunately, I knew about my unfortunate pants. Which is pretty essential to getting the attention of Germans, as it turns out.