Category: Life in these United States

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Today’s Bible Lesson Brought to Us by…

Ecclesiastes 7: 15-18

7:15 All things have I seen in the days of my vanity: there is a just man that perisheth in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man that prolongeth his life in his wickedness.
7:16 Be not righteous over much, neither make thyself over wise; why should though destroy thyself?
7:17 Be not over much wicked, neither be thou foolish; why shouldest thou die before thy time?
7:18 It is good that thou shouldest take hold of this; yea also from this withdraw not thine hand: for he that feareth God shall come forth of them all.

Having grown up in church, I pride myself on having at least a working knowledge of the Bible. So imagine my intrigue when I read the above scriptures the other day that when paraphrased in the New Living Bible, basically said, “I’ve seen good people die young, and wicked people live to a ripe old age. So don’t be too good or too bad because if you love God, he’s going to take care of you either way.”

Wow! Now doesn’t that just fly in the face of “I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. So, because your are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” (Revelation 3:15-16 NRSV Bible)

This is what drives me nuts about the Bible, and about churches. They take one scripture and translate it literally, and then they take another and try to translate it into a metaphor that they live by. Either the Bible is literal or it isn’t.

At any rate, I’ve decided that this is how I live my life–not too good, and not too bad. If I were to put my life on a balance, I hope that I far outweigh to the Good side, but who knows?

However, lately I might be adding to my Bad balance because I’ve been sneaking out at night watering my yard and bushes even though there is a complete watering ban in my county during the week. I get it that we all share the water and if I take more than my share, others suffer, but Dangit! I just spent $2K on new bushes and such and I’ll be darned if I’m gonna let them die. Plus, if my grass dies, my home owner’s association says I have to immediately fix it. And then what? Put new grass down, water it with a 30-day permit, which might take me through middle-August, and then it dies again because I can’t water it but one day a week.

Ya know…just sue me…cuz I’m gonna water my yard. I just hope God doesn’t hold it against me.

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I’m sorry, I can’t understand what you’re saying with my hand in your mouth…

Consider the toothbrush.

Have you noticed how it has evolved in the last decade? It wasn’t too long ago that you had three choices, outside of the color, in your toothbrush selection: soft, medium and hard (bristles). Then, the most difficult decision was whether or not buying a purple toothbrush would be seen as a “gay” thing to do if you were a guy.

But today…well, today there are literally dozens of choices in toothbrushes. There’s ones with little rubber nubbies to clean your gums, there are some with the bristles in neat little circular patterns, presumably to appear more like an electric toothbrush. You have sonic toothbrushes that clean your mouth with sound and vibration–oooohhhh! Oh and let’s not forget that toothbrush innovation hasn’t stopped with the bristles. Nowadays, on the back side of the toothbrush you’ll find all kind of interesting little things that are designed to scour the inside of your cheeks as you brush.

Now, my personal favorite is the old Crest Reach toothbrush with a full-sized head made of medium bristles. You can’t find it today, but you can find similar models that contain its core details while eschewing newfangled additions such as swirlies.

I get that even toothbrushes must evolve, if only to support increasing the marketing budgets of the manufacturers. I mean, we simply can’t expect today’s youth to brush their teeth if we don’t provide them with “cool” tools. So I don’t really mind if the messaging around the new toothbrushes is a bit of a stretch. Do half as many swirly bristles really work as well as twice as many horizontal rows of bristles? I think not.

Therefore, I don’t mind being lied to by Johnson & Johnson, or whomever, but what I don’t get is why my dentist would lie to me…(it’s a logical jump folks…stick with me here….)

I recently had my teeth cleaned and as usual, “Your teeth are beautiful, blah blah blah.” In fact, they didn’t even take X-rays this time. So, imagine my surprise when a couple of days later as I’m shining a flashlight down my throat to count the number of puss-pockets on my tonsils from my sinus infection, that I find what appears to be the beginning of a very small cavity right smack on top of my back molar. Now, I’m no dentist but I think I can recognize a well-rounded hole in my tooth as a cavity. And I can’t for the life of me imagine that both my hygienist and the old feller (the dentist) would miss it when they poked their head in my head to look around.

The only thing I can think of is that it’s too small to do anything about right now, so they didn’t make a big deal of it. But isn’t that kinda like not telling someone they have an enlarged prostate? “Thanks for considering my mental health doc, but I’d really like to know if I’m prime for a colonoscopy.”

Perhaps I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, but since I haven’t had a cavity since I was 8, and the whole thing has become a bit of a source of pride for me, I’m only slightly less than devastated. Of course, in the grand scheme of things it’s a very minor thing for sure.

I guess between now and my next cleaning I’ll try out some of those newfangled toothbrush gizmos and see if they help me dig down into my molar crevasses (what a great pluralization!).


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Artistically speaking, where would we be without drugs?

As a family, you tend to gather pictures like old habits. One minute your walls are bare, the next you’re taking down one picture in order to move it to a new location so that you can arrange a multitude of pictures on the wall. With two boys now in our house, I’m forced to look at a series of pictures taken over the last few years and I gotta tell ya folks, it ain’t pretty.

At some point, I went from a trim runners body, to a stocky weighlifter’s body, complete with a small belly that threatens to grow wider than my shoulders. Oh, I could make excuses, such as less leisure time to hike and exercise. I could blame my back surgeries which have all but made running (the one thing that really burned off the fat) a thing of the past. I could make several excuses, but if I’m being honest, there are other, equally valid reasons for why I put on weight that have nothing to do with my lifestyle.

Plain and simple, I eat more junk than I used to. When I was single, and before there were kids, you wouldn’t find leftover pizza or cookies laying around. Dinner was cereal or stir fry, not hamburgers or some gourmet chicken with a fabulous wine sauce.

This isn’t really the direction I meant to take with this entry, but these things tend to have a mind of their own. What I meant to get to, was how things change as you age–and not just physically–but mentally too.

For instance, someone commented on my last post where I admitted I’d never smoked pot. I didn’t say it because it’s something I am all proud of and want to force on the rest of the world. As someone who has enjoyed the benefits of hydrocodone for nigh on three years as a way to enable me to sit in an office chair, pick up my kids without hitting the ground in pain, and walking without a limp, I’ll be the first to admit that drugs have their places. And drugs is one of those areas where I imagine I’m not the only one to have a change of heart.

As much as I like to make fun of them, public service announcements do have an affect. I didn’t do drugs, not because they weren’t available, but because I morally felt they were wrong. Now, as an adult, I’ve known some very intelligent people who regularly smoke pot and get by in life just fine. Do I agree that they should come to work baked, or use it prior to a long roadtrip as a way of staying alert? No, I can’t condone that, but I also don’t see a problem with a person using pot recreationally. I realize this opens a whole can of worms regarding public safety and work productivity etc., which is probably why, more than any other reason, pot isn’t legal in this country. If you legalized it, then you’d have to have a slew of follow up laws regulating where, when and how it could be used.

Legal nightmare, I get it.

But times change, we change–our bodies, our minds, our morals. Sometimes when I look in the mirror, I wonder if I should continue to cling to that image of myself in my youth in some vain hopes that I’ll be able to some day get back to it when life isn’t so demanding of my time. Other times I think that maybe this person in last month’s picture IS me. It’s the new me, or…the old me depending on how you want to look at it. There is no going back, there’s only going forward. That’s depressing, but I don’t suppose it isn’t anything billions of people ahead of me haven’t gone through.

I don’t know. I’m not yet ready to give up my youth, despite what my hair and my bones are telling me. But some things can and do change, like your opinion on things. Whether or not those changes are for the better, or simply “changes”…well, only time will tell.

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Dad Blogs Life in these United States

Post-PGA Postulates

As you know from my earlier blog, I snagged tickets to this past weekend’s AT&T Classic at nearby Sugarloaf Country Club in Duluth, GA. For many and various reasons, no really big names played this weekend. There were no Tiger’s, no Mickelsons. Arguably the biggest name there was recent Master’s winner Zach Johnson who went on to win. It’s a funny thing about these PGA events. I understand that the players schedule which ones they’ll play months in advance, and they must pay a fee to do so. Even still, many don’t show up to play. For instance, Phil Mickelson won last week, so he decided to skip this week. I can’t say I blame him, but what gets me, are how the other player’s respond.

Now me, if I’m really good at golf, but there are one or two people better than me, and one (or both) of those people are skipping an event, I’m damn-sure gonna show up and play. I mean, if I’m playing against a field of people that I can beat 3 out of 4 days in a week, you can bet it’s worth it to me. And the AT&T Classic winner was walking away with nearly $1 million, so it’s not like it was a low-paying gig either.

But anyway, my hats off to the organizers. We arrived around 11:30 and immediately got on a bus and was shuttled to a drop-off point near the 17th fairway. Crowds were manageble along the course due to the sheer length of the thing. I mean, with several thousands yards of golf course and a couple of thousand bench seats, crowd control was pretty easy.

We walked back and forth from the 15th-17th greens, and finally ended up at the 18th late in the afternoon where the real circus was going on. Between the corporate sponsors and their bar-b-que’s and open bars, and the under-18 entitlement crowd and their trust-fund parents living it up, there wasn’t much room to do much but sit and bask in the glow of all that money.

We watched about four group drive down the 18th fairway, most opting to lay it up short rather than pitch it across the water and risk a penalty shot. There were some good moments on the green, but most seemed just glad to be off the course so that they could go grab a beer to wash down their Vicodin. Most were gracious enough to sign some autographs for the kids and that always warms my heart.

All in all it was a good day. Got there late, left there early and still home in time to help with the fussy baby. Not a bad way to spend a Sunday.