What We've Got Here is Failure ...

Things have changed in Uncool Land. If you haven't been paying attention, here or elsewhere, let me give you the 411 on what's been going these past several months:

Life Hands You Quarantine, Make Quaran-tini

Tomorrow, I find a restaurant with a huge outdoor patio and indulge in a fresh, hot burger and fries. And, definitely, a cold draft beer. At minimum, I’ll go get a haircut.

That’s how I plan to celebrate the end of my state imposed, 14-day self-quarantine for the high crime of vacationing in a COVID-19 hotspot even though while there I didn’t go out for a burger or a beer or anything vaguely vacationy beyond sitting on the spacious beach beyond our rental’s back deck for hours and hours. I won’t name the location to protect the many conspiracy theorists who permanently live there, but I’ll offer hints. It’s a state where:

• face masks only became required in public settings in late June,
• indoor dining is allowed at 50 percent capacity, and
• the riskiest behavior I undertook was showing my Blue State issued driver’s license to the Good Ol’ Boy behind the register at the ABC store.

The Mighty Have Fallen

I contributed to global warming more than usual recently, so: World, I’m sorry. But that tree had it coming.

A 2019 study published in the journal Science concluded the Earth has enough open space to plant more than a trillion trees. This, it noted, is enough to capture some 800 billion tons of carbon dioxide, or roughly the equivalent of a cable news pundit’s daily output of hot air. Actual experts said this could bring greenhouse gas levels down to a number not seen since the days before American women were allowed to vote. 

Yet I, avowed advocate of suffrage and not suffering death by polar ice cap sweat, gave the order to take out a four-story black oak that had shaded our back porch for decades. It was not an easy decision. Initially.

Pandemic Thrills in the Produce Aisle

Mere weeks before I first met my wife, she had survived a tandem skydive. That’s jumping out of an airplane with another person strapped to your back and only some polyester sheets to prevent the two of you from becoming a human short stack.

I, meanwhile, was still living with my parents. Living on the edge to me meant swigging their 1 percent straight out of the carton without first giving it a good, long sniff.

Nearly 30 years later, I am now the risk taker. The thrill seeker. The adrenaline junkie. The one who goes out for supplies during The Pandemic.

Strangers Among Us

The Woman in the Yellow Hat first appeared on a Saturday morning in the early days of The Great Sequester.

I spotted her from our dining room window, striding purposefully around the cul-de-sac. After lunch I ran some errands and drove by her, arms pumping briskly as she ascended a hill about a mile from our house. I passed her along a different street on my return an hour later. As the sun descended behind the tree tops, she appeared again cruising around the cul-de-sac without any apparent loss of stride.

I see The Woman in the Yellow Hat regularly now, though never as frequently on a single day. Usually she’s walking, once in a while jogging. At all times, she’s wearing that ballcap — a glowing lemon beacon -- and not a trace of the exhaustion I feel just thinking about her seemingly perpetual motion.

She’s part of the new cast of characters in my life. COVID-19 may be keeping people home and out of their cars but not in the house or off the roads off my neck of the burbs. Where in the past my dog and I, on our twice daily rambles, would only fleetingly see folks as they whizzed by at some rate well above the posted limit, now we are having to cross the street to safely and politely avoid the increase in casual strollers and side-street athletes.

This man's treasure is most likely trash

A rare collectible that pays for a mansion and a yacht may be waiting in a dusty corner of your parents’ basement. However, not in mine. What I found there barely covers the latest increase in my cable bill.

This tale of discovery, or rather lack thereof one, started in North Dakota. A man there recently learned that a Rolex watch he had tucked away for half a century was worth up to $700,000, according to a story I saw last week on the evening news. This made me wonder if I too might have hidden away somewhere a precious antique, a conclusion based mainly on the logic that I am so old I still watch the evening news.

What's so happy about a new year, anyway?

Every early January, as I watch the Christmas tree drop needles like a DJ on meth, I find myself wondering the same thing: Is anyone ever sad to see the old year go? Because, to me, the start of a new year is fairly depressing.

Those final days of December are regularly filled with a single sentiment from friends and strangers online and IRL: “Thank God that awfulness will soon be over! Don’t let the door hit you in your fat, ugly stern, old year. The new one has got to be better!” After weeks of jaunty carols relentlessly assaulting our ears to the point where German death metal becomes a welcome change, I can somewhat understand that sentiment.

As the fat burns ... through my bank account

Terror grips my every fiber whenever my wife opens a conservation with me using the phrase, “What do you know about …”

Her inquiry is almost never about something I:

a) actually do know something about, or
b) would like to discuss such as
     1) third-string catchers in New York Mets history, or
     2) what’s better for list making: letters or numbers?

But my pre-Google reputation for being a fount of useless knowledge, second only to my ability to tap a keg, was one of the charms she found irresistible in our initial courtship, so she keeps trying.

“What do you know,” she inquired shortly after New Year’s Day, “about PineappleHypothesis?”

Allergic to Middle Age

I’ve always thought myself to be fairly well prepared for and accepting of the inevitable breakdown of my body once I staggering into middle age a decade ago.

Thinning hair. Check.

Thickening middle. Double check.

Achy joints and muscles. I’m sore just thinking about them.

Green, Green Lawns of the Uncool Home

Is anything as inseparable as a dad and his lawn?

Maybe a dad and his grill.

Or a dad and his beer.

Definitively a dad and that pair of underwear from 15 years ago with the air-conditioned crotch that’s just too dang comfy to toss.

But let’s get back to lawns and #LawnGoals because that is what the good people at Cub Cadet are paying me to write about here.

She Had “A Face Like a Prostitute”

Now THAT’s a headline!

It’s in quotes but I didn’t say it. It was one of the “The Moms” from the WPIX Ch. 11 Morning News who I sat in with earlier this year on a segment about how old girls should be before they are allowed to wear makeup.

This is one of those rare “live” appearances by me in which:

1) There were no technical screw-ups. Although it was taped a week in advance, it was shot “live” in one take. I credit my three co-hosts who all know what they are doing. Note the sympathetic pat on the back one of them gives me.

2) I don’t seem totally panicked. I’m sure sitting in the green room for 40 minutes watching moronic dudes lose paternity tests on “Maury” made talking about Li’l Diva wearing eyeliner seem like a breeze.

Here it is:

What d’ya think? I have a face for radio and a voice for print, right?

She is Love: My Musical Oasis for Valentine’s Day

My talent knows many bounds, never more so when it comes to music. That’s why the idea of giving My Love a song as a Valentine’s Day present is so daunting.

Then I stumbled upon “She is Love” by Oasis.

The tune, written and sung by Noel Gallagher during a break from bashing brother Liam about the head, popped up on my iTunes radio the other day and refused to leave my brain. In a good way.

So I did some Googling.

Rejected Candy Hearts (#rejectedcandyhearts)

The annual Twitterfest of devising sayings no one would put on those chalky Necco candy hearts is always one of my favorites. (This year it is at #rejectedcandyhearts.)

To me, it’s a challenge to be funny in as few words as possible because, face it, no matter how hilarious a candy heart saying “Your real mother was a Vegas stripper named Juggs Aplentee” would be, that wouldn’t really fit on a heart. Even if you wrote on the edges.

So here are some that I came up with:

Ralph Kiner Never Met My Dog

Ralph Kiner never met the dog I named after him. It probably wasn’t a loss for either of them but it saddens me.

Twice in my life, I crossed paths with the baseball Hall of Famer, who died yesterday at the age of 91.

Zen and the Art of Snow Shoveling

I mocked the warning of the Woolly Bear caterpillars with narrow brown midsections. I laughed at the extra thick skins on the onions at the farmer's market. I never noticed the thinning crotch in my thermal undies.

Ignoring all the foreboding signs, I plowed ahead with my plan that this winter would be the one when we would remove all the snow off our driveway by hand.

Call me macho, call me masochistic or, like my mother did when leaving me the number of her plow guy, just call me stupid.

There’s a New ‘Dad About Town’

I have a new columnist gig writing “Dad About Town” for a local magazine. As you’ve guessed by the title, in it I wax poetically about nanotechnology and Italian cooking.

You can read my first column on the magazine’s website because I’m contractually unable to reprint it on this one.

However, I think it is perfectly fine for me to reprint the photo of me they used with the column because while they may have paid for my words, I am paying for that receding hairline and huge nose:

When I was told they wanted to take a photo of me for the column, I thought there would be some elaborate studio set up with 500-watt lights, Euro dance music blaring and at least one assistant to touch up my eyebrows.

Instead, I got a guy with an iPhone snapping me in front of our downstairs bathroom wall.

No joke. That’s where I’m standing in that shot. The photographer is literally three feet in front of me, with half a butt cheek on the sink counter.

Makes sense as the other photo of me that you most of you are familiar with is this one …

… which was taken by me with a cell phone camera in our master bathroom.

We have one bathroom left in the house that I have not been photographed in. I’m saving that one for my Pulitzer.

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The Thrill of Victimhood, The Agony of Dehydration

My Love had an air of curiosity in her tone when she said this over the weekend:

“The neighbors said they saw you out running this morning. They said you looked … ‘very intense.’”

“Yep, I saw them,” I said, digging through the mini-fridge for hoppy re-hydration. “And that’s how I look when I ‘m concentrating on not dying.”

I sensed her glare without turning around.

“OK. Concentrating on not dying more than usual,” I clarified. “No one wants to be found a victim while wearing Day-Glo green sneakers and sweaty jogging shorts without underwear.”

+ + +

I run on Sunday to put an end to Juvenile Myositis. I’m about $3,000 shy of my $15,000 goal.

Give online today at http://tinyurl.com/CureOurMegan or send a check to:

Cure JM Foundation
Attn: 2013 Chicago Fundraiser
836 Lynwood Drive
Encinitas, CA 92024

Don’t make me sweat and risk cardiac arrest in vain.

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$20 Worth of Stories in the Naked City

New Yorkers truly are honest, generous and unselfish. Even more so when you bribe them to be that way.

This lesson came after my day had started, hung over and early, at the train station where my wife dropped me off and I vowed never again to overindulge until the next time. As I stepped aboard Metro-North, the first raindrops splattered the platform like eggs hitting Ol' Man Crotchky's porch on Mischief Night.

We arrived with a leisurely 39 minutes and a mere five subway stops to go from my national syndicated talk show debut. Katie Couric, America's Perkiest Journalist, would soon be grilling me and a panel of other at-home dads about our being guests at our children's tea parties rather than captains of industry like, you know, our wives.

I walked unhurriedly through the over-caffeinated, under-deodorized crowd in Grand Central Terminal to join the queue for subway tickets.

Plenty-a' time, I heard my satisfied, suburban inner voice say.

Then Katie Couric Called Me “Hot”

Here it is. Me and Katie Couric.

Oh, and three other guys who wisely prevent me from talking most of the time.

I sit nervously, apparently on the verge of a seizure, until around the 3:10 mark (though just prior to that you can hear me holler “Bro code!” amid the rabble).

The best part? Unlike My Love or The Mother of All Uncoolness, Katie let’s me have the last word.

That’s among the many reasons she’s a permanent member of my list, people.

Next week, I’ll give you the whole backstage story on how I almost didn’t get to the show.

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Coaching the Untalented

The dismissal of Rutgers University basketball coach Mike Rice for using gay slurs and firing balls at his players, among other acts of stupidity, started me thinking about the coaches I had while growing up. None I can recall even remotely approached Rice’s level of old-school intimidation techniques though my teammates and I undoubtedly tempted a few of them with our mediocrity.

Take poor Mickey Lione Jr., for example. Lione, one of the most successful and respected coaches in Connecticut let alone his hometown of Stamford, had the misfortune of coaching me on two of his few exceptionally unexceptional high school baseball teams. Our two squads compiled losing records versus the other city high schools, in the county conference and, obviously, overall.

My contribution that first season was that I never played an inning. As the backup to our one bright spot, an all-county catcher named Tony Romeo, I spent the entire spring in the bullpen warming up our perpetually in-demand relief pitchers.