Did you hear that?!

My God, this house is scary at night.  Although I’m fairly sure that the place isn’t actually haunted, it’s nonetheless quite possible that it could just up and collapse at any given moment throughout the night, which still isn’t exactly amongst the best possible scenarios when I’m already in my pajamas…

So here I am – it’s going on two o’clock in the morning, my wife is currently out of town, and I’m freaking out here, man! I mean, seriously – all of these creaks and scratches and insidious noises from just beyond the darkness … how come I never seem to hear them during the day?! Sure, mosey through my house in the middle of the afternoon and all seems calm and blissful, but as soon as the lights go down and I try to get some sleep, the whole place just seems to come alive – literally, figuratively, and seemingly just about anything and everything else in between, too!

It starts out innocently enough – a faint scrape against the wall or perhaps an unusually large bug flying into the window, and then slowly over the minutes and hours to come, the sounds gradually get worse.  The walls creak randomly, as if to sporadically remind me that they could cave in at any time they damn well please; the ceiling hosts the occasional pitter-patter, hinting that it could be filled with any number of vicious, wild animals, all the while knowing that yours truly wouldn’t dare set foot up that ladder to investigate myself!  In the distance, the hoot of a lone owl reverberates through the night as a subtle warning of the creepy dangers that may or may not lurk about.

What the hell – do owls even live in Florida???

As I try to distract my mind from haunts and other wild beasts, I begin to wonder instead if maybe it was a robber that I’ve been hearing … a robber looking to take advantage of an overweight 20-something who’s apparently afraid of his own house!  Hearing another non-descriptive, yet nonetheless frightening sound from the living room, I somehow manage to muster up the backbone to get out of bed and, in a surprising display of courage, I dash out into the other room, shouting and turning on every conceivable light as I go in a bewildering attempt to “scare” the alleged burglar away, or at the very least give him a good chuckle that could buy me enough time to make my own valiant escape.

But of course, there is no such burglar and instead I’m met only by our tropical fish, who proceed to give me the same curious look that they give pretty much anyone or anything that wanders past their tank, day or night.  I sheepishly return back to bed after sneaking a snack from the kitchen in a desperate attempt to calm my over-exaggerating nerves … besides, who can turn down Oreos and milk at 3:37am?  I’m only human!

So I suppose if we had to pick one, the moral of today’s story is … I’m a humongous wuss, but really, we already knew that long before this suburban version of Scooby Doo ever came to pass.  I mean, I can’t watch scary movies at night, or even listen to The Monster Mash, for that matter – I don’t care how much of a graveyard smash it was … all of those ghouls and ghosts slinking around just give me the heebie-jeebies!  But mock me all you will, there’s still something creepy about this place that I just can’t quite put my finger on – go ahead and sleep a mile in my bed if you don’t believe me.  Let’s see how funny it is when you wake up in the middle of the night, drenched in a combined of fear and sweat because there may very well be a robber / giant bug / scary monster just on the other side of your bedroom door…

In the meantime, honey, please make note that before you leave again, we may need to spring for a nightlight or something.  A very big nightlight, in fact – one for each and every room, closet, hallway, darkened corner, and crawl space in this haunted mansion of a domicile we call home … either that, or maybe I’ll just get a hotel room of my own while you’re away!  Of course, at that rate I might as well just go with you…

Strange hotel rooms in new cities are never creepy, right???

Let’s play a game, folks!  It’s just a little something I’ve cooked up in my spare time lately called Things You Never Want to Hear in Florida … in July, and it goes a little something like this: simply choose from the following what you think would be the worst possible thing to hear mid-summer here in the Sunshine State of Florida…

a)      ”The AC’s not working.”
b)      “We’re all out of rum.”
c)      “There’s an alligator at the front door and he looks pissed.”

If you answered A – “The AC’s not working,” you win the prize, which coincidentally is this nice box fan from Wal-Mart that sure would’ve been nice at my house a couple of days ago when tragedy struck our quaint, Floridian household here in the dead of summer!  As for those of you who opted for pina coladas or giant lizards as your answers … well, despite the stereotypes or your apparent alcoholism, let it be known that either one of those things on their own don’t even stack close to the idea of Florida living, au natural.

Maybe both of them put together might come a little closer because hey, when the Bacardi doth runneth dry, opening the door to see if the lizard on the other side came bearing fruity coconut and pineapple-flavored refills may very well sound entirely reasonable, but of course, that’s an entirely different column altogether…

But regardless, by far the worst is still having the air conditioning just mysteriously die without warning, and if it happens after business hours like mine so conveniently did recently, then all the better!  Really, there’s nothing quite like coming home at about eleven o’clock at night after a long and grueling day, only to find that it’s rapidly approaching 85 degrees inside your humble abode … and it’s still warmer outside than it is inside … and there’s no breeze outside whatsoever, even if opening up windows was a minute possibility.  If there was ever a time to call in a favor from that friendly, neighborhood repair guy whose fence you had recently helped paint, now would’ve been a wonderful time to call in said favor!

Unfortunately, though, I have no such recently painted neighbor, and even if I did, chances are *I* wouldn’t have been the first one out the door on a blisteringly hot Sunday afternoon to help him save a few bucks by painting it himself!  Remember, with the Florida heat and all?! So there I, my better half already sweaty and less than thrilled because she’d gotten home several hours prior and was clearly done with this whole no AC conundrum – the two of us destined to bear the brunt of this lack of proper household cooling for at least the next twelve hours or so, all depending – of course, on just how available the repair guy would be to come relieve us the next morning.

And the trouble is that really when you think about it, there’s not a whole lot you can do when such a disaster strikes and you find yourself sweating to the oldies, minus the spandex and a creepy Richard Simmons frolicking around on TV.  Sure, you could spend the night eating popsicles with the refrigerator door propped open, or maybe just make the best of it by falling asleep in the tub, but either is going to leave you in pretty rough shape the following morning … assuming you can actually get out of the bathtub after what I can only imagine would be one of the worst sleeping positions ever!  Nonetheless, my wife and I finally opted to endure the old-fashioned way – by opening all of the windows, turning the ceiling fan in our bedroom up to blow everything that isn’t bolted down around the room in a frenzy, and simply hope for the best.

A matter of hours later, as the sun came peeking up from behind the trees, with songbirds chirping all about, we awoke, knowing that the worst had passed.  Well, there were papers strewn in every corner of our bedroom, it was still scathingly hot, and at one point throughout the night I could’ve swore I heard a wild animal of some sort clawing at the window, but other than that, we were good to go!  Now thoroughly drenched in sweat, we waited for the repair guy to come and lend us his services, which would promptly return us to the land of the civilized.

Twelve hours, folks!  That’s how long I went without air conditioning one hot and sweaty night in July of the year 2009, and frankly, those were probably the twelve worst hours that I’ve had since I moved to Florida over five years ago.  The human body just isn’t designed to endure non-conditioned air, much less temperatures with the digits 8 and 9 in them!  It’s something that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies … well, maybe that one guy, but that’s what you get for cutting in front of me in line for It’s a Small World. No remorse!

So the moral of our story today, simply put, is this – if you live in Florida, don’t ever put yourself in a situation where you could possibly be without air conditioning for more than, oh say, four and a half minutes, max. Buy a second backup air conditioner, make a copy of your neighbor’s keys the next time they’re out of town, or even – dare I suggest it – actually help your friendly neighborhood repairman paint his fence one weekend, if for no other reason than so you can call him in the middle of the night should such an occasion as this arise in the future!  If he doesn’t have a fence, build one for him – trust me, three weeks of digging post holes and hammering boards will be time well spent if it might help you avoid spending seven or eight hours sleeping in a pool of your own sweat.  Whatever it takes, really…

Don’t let your household become just another sweaty, broken air conditioner-related statistic.

“Please grow, baby! Please grow!!!”

No, no – we’re not pregnant – and you should be ashamed of yourselves for even suggesting such a thought to a guy that isn’t even married yet! We’ll deal with that slippery slope soon enough, but today we’re here to talk about an entirely different baby of mine that most certainly has made it loud and clear that she needs a bit of tender love and care as of late…

My fiancée.

No, just kidding. Well, of course, she needs love and tenderness, too, but as far as I know, right now we seem to be doing a-ok in that department!

But you’d let me know if you heard anything otherwise…right?

Anywho, where were we?! Oh yes – my lawn! That’s what all of this fertilizing jargon is talking about, and while I’m most certainly quite happy to have transversed the domestic line between apartment-dwellers and those who are contained within four exterior walls that are exclusively their own, but at the same time I’m also learning that there’s a lot of extra work that comes from living in an actual house! A garage to sweep, gutters to clean, a perimeter to spray for bugs that will otherwise cause one’s previously-mentioned fiancée to wake you up by screaming at three o’clock in the morning when she finds one roughly the size of Nevada crawling across the bathroom tile floor, but from my own personal experience thus far, said gargantuan spiders still pale in comparison to the plights that I’m facing with regards to our less than green front lawn right now.

And you’ll notice that I’m very quick to mention merely the front lawn, as opposed to the entire thing from front to back surrounding our little domicile here in the middle of suburbia because, well, actually one of the first things that I learned about lawn care as we got ourselves settled was that it’s not entirely uncommon for people to put completely different kinds of grass in their front and back yards. Here, I would’ve thought that “grass is grass,” but apparently that goes to show just how next to absolutely nothing I seem to know about lawn care, eh?!

So the grass seemed to be doing ok for a while – we’d managed to rid our land of several massive colonies of evil fire ants last fall and glided through the winter months thinking that there really wasn’t all that much to this here “lawn care thingy.” Every once in a while we watered it (thank god for automatic sprinklers!), every once in a while we cut it (thank god for cool guys willing to brave the hot Florida sun to mow for a nominal fee!), and we certainly had ourselves a green Christmas, but now that it’s started getting warmer, our once-beautiful lawn has started taking a turn for its crispy, brown worse.

Well, the front yard has, anyways, which believe you me was even more confusing to watch our luscious backyard flourish while the front turned to absolute crap! We started watering more and even invited a fire ant or two to move back in, just in case its success was somehow influenced by those venomous, little devils, but still – nothing. I’ve considered just buying a few rolls of that green, prickly plastic carpet that you use outdoors that kind of looks like grass, but something tells me that our landlord might not take to kindly to such an “enhancement.”

Also, it would probably be a bitch to vacuum.

So instead, as you’ve probably deducted by now from the title of this column, we’re taking a different route and are now trying our hands at fertilizing the old girl back to her mid-20s, wild and sexy, yet still responsible enough to hold down a full-time job that doesn’t involve wearing a chicken suit-like self. The stuff that I bought was some spray by Miracle-Gro, which I figured was pretty fitting because at this point it feels like it might very well require a full-fledged miracle to get our lawn looking even minutely healthy again.

Errr, front yard. Sorry about that, backyard – didn’t mean to imply that you aren’t looking as ravishingly beautiful as ever!

Hmmph – lawns! You can’t live with ‘em, you can’t play a rousing game of croquet or host a backyard barbecue without ‘em…

Well, now that that’s over, let’s all just take a deep breath and try to move on!

I know that this particular holiday season was somewhat of a stressful one. It’s amazing how presents and food and decorations and family can all be welcome treats to your life one by one, and yet still somehow manage to cause copious amounts of stress when they’re all piled on top of each other like the ingredients of the new Quadruple-Decker Artery-Clogger from McRonalds. And don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas like a new pair of socks or a freshly baked batch of chocolate chip cookies, but still, after that much chaotic caroling, it’s also understandable for a bit of relief to be sighed when all is said and done…

So here we are, only a few days left in 2007, with 2008 right on our doorstep. Now is the time for life planning and resolution making and the generous knocking back of cocktails…at least on New Years Eve, anyways…for in only a few days we’re about to be given a fresh start. A new hand will be dealt, and it’s up to you whether to raise the stakes, go double down, or do some other poker term that I’m unaware of because I have better things to do than watch other people play poker on TV at three o’clock in the morning.

Nonetheless, 2008 is going to be a whole new ballgame and I think we’re going to see some pretty interesting happenings over the next twelve months. Just how interesting??? Well, funny you should ask…

Scott’s 2008 New Years Predictions…

• Santa Claus will find an extra bag of toys laying around that he mistakenly forgot to deliver earlier this week and head back out for another run in early January, thus fulfilling this child at heart’s Christmas List with the much-coveted Nintendo Wii.
• A mere three months into the new year, I will accomplish what no other man has by not only attaining all of my new years resolutions already, but also choosing new and even harder resolutions and meeting those goals as well. By March 31^st, I will be the wealthiest, most physically fit, hilarious guy on the planet, and I will owe it all to the magic of Oreo cookies.
• This upcoming $600 economic stimulus check from Uncle Sam will solve all of my financial problems.
• A potato chip or cookie company will woo me with their greatest culinary creations ever, then promptly break my heart into a thousand, million pieces six months later by pulling every last one of them from the shelves of my local grocer.
• Gasoline prices won’t really be much of a concern anymore because the big three automakers in Detroit will join forces to revolutionize American transportation with a complex system of monorails, hovercrafts, and teleportation units.
• Paramount will come to its senses and decide not to commit yet another tragedy of the silver screen by canceling the upcoming release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The rest of the film industry will learn from this bold gesture and begin hiring writers to create original scripts once again.
• My wedding planning will take a turn for the better when I’m informed that I’ll only need to work three extra jobs in order to pay it off before I die.
• FOX will churn out the most ridiculous reality show ever, this time involving Playboy playmates who challenge each other to rousing games of checkers, backgammon, and other nostalgic favorites. It will be FOX’s most successful reality show to date.
• The 2008 Summer Olympics will occur in Beijing. Other than costing me two weeks of TV time, I will not care.
• Google will dominate the election and become the first search engine to be elected President of the United States. YouTube will be its quirky, but lovable Vice President. Yahoo! will inquire about running Google Adsense on its site to try to raise a little beer and pizza money.
• In a last blunder of the season-like move, President Bush will pardon the annual turkey for Thanksgiving and then immediately deploy the bird to Iraq for Operation: Freedom Feast.
• After consuming unhealthy quantities of eggnog and gingerbread, yours truly will repurpose this idea next year in an effort to crank out an easy column so that I can get back to my annual Christmas holiday detox.

First and foremost, please accept my apologies here in advance for any whoopsical wordplay that may occur throughout the duration of today’s column.

Did you see that? Whoopsical?! That’s not even a real word! It’s kind of a goofy hybrid between whoops and whimsical, and it might be worth adding to the dictionary because it is kind of a fun word to say, but nonetheless in the meantime whoopsical is not a word! And frankly, that’s exactly the kind of thing that I’m talking about!

I’m not necessarily proud to admit it, but today’s humor column comes to you a bit loopy, a bit trippy, dare I say a bit high … which might be a lot more fun if it wasn’t for the horrendous mind-numbing, tear-invoking, humor-columnist-crippling pains that are currently cascading throughout my back. And I can’t even say that it was caused by a really cool reason like climbing mountains or wrestling grizzly bears, but apparently office chairs can be just as brutal as forest bears because according to my dear, old doc, just sitting around, doing what I do everyday is what did me in this time…or my back, rather…

Now the good news is that not only are my wounds healable, but even more importantly in the meantime the doctor was kind enough to hook me up with some really good painkillers! Hey, if I were him, I wouldn’t want to have to worry about me bugging him at three o’clock in the morning about how much it hurts, either. That’s what he gets for daring to have a last name, knowing that I have extensive access to yellowpages.com…

Of course, being all hopped up and happy as I write this, my big fear is that this column is going to become one of those things that you have to be all hopped up on painkillers yourself to enjoy. Actually, that’s a fear that I have even when I’m not under the influence while I’m dealing out the funny because let’s face it – the hopped up on painkillers demographic is an awfully small one to target, and even if you did bother, it’s not like they have any money anyways!

So with any luck, both for my own sake and from the looks of this column apparently yours as well, hopefully these little spasming back troubles of mine will be relatively short-lived and soon I’ll be able to return to the land of those who are only medicated on the weekends, and even then via cocktails instead of prescription painkillers. In the meantime, I think I’ll manage with a minimal amount of pain – these pills seem to tame the back hate to a level tolerable at least enough where I can surf the Internet and watch TV, which is pretty much what I’d be normally doing around here anyways! I probably won’t be out driving my forklift or kicking it around with the good, old wrecking ball anytime soon, but alas, these are the kinds of physical sacrifices one must make when they’re flying high in order to narrowly avoid severe and horrible pain!

Have a whoopsical day!!!

So it’s finally happened – after months upon months of deliberations, Martha Stewart has been sent up the river without so much as an ornately-designed, ancient Incan ceremonial paddle. Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not here to toss out any of the average, regularly-scheduled jokes because, well, frankly they had already been done to death long before there was ever even a conviction. No spring clean-up tips around the cell block, colorful centerpieces to spruce up the lunch room, or even easy and affordable accessories for the discriminating criminal – not in this column! I know, I know – it doesn’t sound like me at all. Normally I’d jump at the chance to go to comedic blows with the Queen of Potpourri, Doilies, and All That is Scented, but I simply can’t because just between you and me…I kinda feel sorry for her…

Sure, it sounds just absolutely horrible – kind of like not being able to buy booze at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning – but here me out for just a second: if Martha’s not safe anymore, then who’s next in the pecking order of public image?! Bob Vila? Big Bird?? Rosie O’Donnell??? Ok, bad example, but I think that the question itself still remains valid – if we’re willing to prosecute quite possibly the most wholesome, caring creature on this planet (aside from the wallaby, of course!), where exactly does the madness stop? Laugh at my speculations now, but we’ll just see who’s shouting “I told you so” and doing the associated “I was right” happy dance a couple of years down the road when Barbara Walters is brought up on indecency charges or the Pope is slapped with sexual harassment charges!

…again – bad example…

You see, I guess what I simply don’t understand about this one is…pretty much the entire thing! The original charge was itself was “Insider Trading” because basically the woman got word that things weren’t exactly looking good for the company and bailed, yet none of us could possibly admit that we wouldn’t do the same stinking thing! The concept of investing as a whole is based around doing what’s best for your money, so not jumping ship when it appears to be crashing down like the Hindenberg (or the Titanic – whichever metaphor you prefer) would make about as much sense as Vanilla Ice sponsoring a karaoke competition…am I right?! I know that technically you’re not supposed to because it’s unfair to the other investors, but the fun just doesn’t stop there…

Now change gears because 40 months later, dear old Martha actually gets arraigned for “The Obstruction of Justice” because of her wild love affair with Captain America…wait, no – it was because she refused to produce documentation that would support her decision to dump the stock – I always get those two confused! It was always my understanding, however, that you didn’t have to say or do anything in a court of law that would incriminate yourself, but then again, I probably couldn’t legalize my way out of a wet paper bag, so please keep the corrective e-mails to a minimum after reading this! It doesn’t make sense, that’s for sure, but then again, show me a legal precedent that does these days…Pee Wee Herman, anyone?!

So to summarize – what have we learned here today…if anything at all? Well for starters, we’ve learned that pleading ignorance just doesn’t work anymore, even for celebrities! We’ve learned that it might just be easier to simply take the fall and go down with the ship, despite the fact that your punishment will still be no more than a slap on the wrist when compared to similar cases that don’t involve, oh, being famous and all. We’ve even learned that the best solution of all may still be to hoard your money in a shoebox buried out in the backyard like this writer does…who is now going to have to find a better hiding place for it just as soon as he’s finished here today! And lastly, of course, Martha Stewart could never actually make it with Captain America in reality, anymore than I could ever actually make it with Martha Stewart!

In conclusion, Martha probably should’ve known better, but really – do you ask your financial planner for home decorating tips?! Yeah – some of you might, and it shows! Until our next legal interrogation…

Today’s legal counsel has been brought to you by the letters X and Q, the number 47, and this lovely arrangement of Daffodils, Tulips, and Baby’s Breath.

That’s right – it’s that time again, kids! Time to trade in those Frisbees and beach balls for text books and number two pencils, say goodbye to lazy afternoons on the beach and summer nights that seem to last forever, and most important of all, time to find a pair of pants – we’re going back to school!

I remember those days like they were yesterday – three-hour blocks of listening to foreign professors babble on about the trajectory of rabid giraffes, finding yourself barely able to lift a beer bottle after the writer’s cramps from frantically scribbling down hundreds and hundreds of pages of notes that you’ll absolutely never look at again, and getting completely hammered the night before the test at your buddies’ frat house, only to wake up fifteen minutes before the test and nearly miss it anyways – yes, those were the days! I can’t count the number of times that I stumbled home at nine o’clock in the morning, just in time to curse myself out for scheduling classes that early in the morning – who really gets up before noon, anyways?!

Ok, so I’ll just confess it before those of you who actually did go to college with me spread the word – I wasn’t that guy in college…but I did pass many of them on the streets on my way to work in the morning! Very few things can bring the spirit up quite like passing someone who’s barely sober enough to walk on their way to a three-hour long lecture about calculating the surface area of a dodecahedron or analyzing the sociological impact of women’s sexuality in the eighteenth century – somehow it makes that fifteen minute marketing spiel seem a little more bearable, doesn’t it? Now mind you, there’s a good chance that he had a bit more fun than the rest of us did the night before, slamming back tequila shots and groping his fellow classmates as we watched reruns of Seinfeld and Home Improvement on digital cable, but fun really is subjective…isn’t it?

A lot of people I know get somewhat bent out of shape when I stereotype college students to be raving, party maniacs who thrive on pizza, cheap beer, and living off their parents’ college fund as long as humanly possible, as if there are other aspects to the lifestyle as well! I suppose when it all comes down to it, they must be out there somewhere because I was one of them, spending most of my time studying because frankly, I couldn’t afford to give it a second try…but then again, of course we don’t hear much about the rest because police reports are very rarely filed for those who spend the majority of their nights knee-deep in biological classifications and anatomical terminologies. Not to mention the fact that I just paid way too much money for the furniture in my living room to go throwing the sofa out the front window!

In all fairness, there probably are a few groups of college students at various universities around the country that have managed to break this intoxicated mold that I’ve cast, mixing a combination of strong study habits with discipline and determination to successfully overcome the challenges of higher education and enter into the working world a step above all the rest. Of course, with all due respect, these people are also undoubtedly dorks who also spent Friday nights at home watching TV and still get jittery when members of the opposite sex are around – we certainly won’t be seeing an Animal House 2 based on these exciting chaps! So what exactly is my point? Well, now that I’ve managed to alienate just about anyone who’s ever gone to college, no matter what their extracurriculars may have been, I have just one more thing to profess…

It’s ok if you were a dork in college, just like it’s ok if you were a dork in high school – there’s a very good chance that you may turn out to be a dork for the rest of your life as well, but as long as you had a good time, whether it be doing body shots with a blonde whom you’ve never met or memorizing the lines to every episode of The Simpsons ever, who can complain?

Besides me, of course! I reserve the right to complain, while the rest of you…shouldn’t you all be in class or something?! Shake it off and get in there – I hear the teacher’s got fungi on the agenda for today!

I try to stay away from writing columns about food, mainly because it always makes me hungry and once I’ve gotten up to get a snack of any proportion, that column’s got about as much a chance of getting completed as Winona Ryder’s new blouse has of getting paid for. I should also note that as an aspiring humor columnist, I often find myself aspiring for other things as well, including both food and shelter, and not necessarily even in that order! There is a common myth floating around that artists such as myself, and yes – if you look really closely, it’s art of some sort or another, have been known to be able to sustain life on a healthy diet of macaroni and cheese, ramen noodles, and various other crap foods found in your grocer’s ten-cent bin, but I’m here to tell you today that there’s a new alternative, if you think you can handle it…

Remember back to those hot, sticky summer nights when Momma used to let you play outside until nine o’clock at night, before she would call you in for a bath and a quick bite to eat before bed? You’d frolick with the best of them, kicking the can and hide and seeking until you could hardly move, yet there was always one good reason to drag your dirt-encrusted carcass back to the house every evening, one sliver of purity to still look forward to before you had to turn in for the night, and that holy grail of your wonder years was:

THE GRILLED CHEESE SANDWICH

It was a simple manifestation, created in only a matter of minutes as you tried with little success to comb the rats out of your hair after your 45 second bath, but it gave you everything you needed to continue the fight another day. All of the major food groups were represented – the grains by two humble, yet mighty slices of bread; the vegetables by that silly pickle that somehow found its way onto your plate every night, even though it didn’t actually stand a chance of getting eaten; the dairy group even got two representatives, as both the very piece (or pieces if you were lucky!) of cheese which made up the heart and soul of the meal AND as the tall glass of milk which stood watch over the entire table, ready and waiting to spill itself onto any important documents which might fall in its path. I’m sure there were some more food groups around, too, but you can’t milk a dead cow, you know!

(…oh, there’s another one for dairy…)

So what I’m thinking is that if this almighty feast was enough to keep us strong and daring throughout our youth, what exactly happened as we got older to turn us off to the cheesy delight that is grilled cheese and bring us into the ramen-filled state which we live today? Sure, as we got older, the grilled cheese did begin to lose a bit of pizzazz and occasionally we needed to liven things up a bit…maybe with the addition of a slab of ham here or there, or in the poor, unfortunate man’s case, SPAM.

Hold on, I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to do that! Here I am, meeting some of you for the first time and I’m already insulting you by throwing the s-word around like that – how rude of me! Just calm the children down…I promise it won’t happen again…

So where was I? Oh yes – occasional the sandwich needed to be dressed up a bit by adding various condiments, and for a while there it almost got upgraded to a regular entrée for everyone, but then what happened? Just as the adults aren’t allowed to order the ham strips at Schelde’s, suddenly we’re excluded from enjoying a nice, warm grilled cheese sandwich, too! You won’t walk into any bar in these woods and find a group of merry old men shouting and having a gleeful old time, all the while clanging their beer steins together and wolfing down grilled cheese sandwiches as fast as ye old serving wench can cook them, now will you? No, instead they’re choking down porterhouse steaks and baby-back ribs, and believe me, they’re all miserable about it…

I don’t know where exactly we dropped the ball and I’m not one to focus on the past, anyways, so instead I say we look to the future. Any sane man knows that it can’t be done in one night, or one hundred nights, or even one million nights, but it needs to be done – for you and for me, for the good of mankind, and for America (especially Wisconsin – they’ve been kinda slipping a little lately…) – we need to get the grilled cheese sandwich off the endangered entrees list and back onto our menus! We need to stop instilling the idea into our people that grilled cheese is a child’s food because it’s not just for children anymore!

When I think about the future, I see a business man, a leather-clad biker and an eight-year-old child sitting at a bar together, eating the all-American meal of a grilled cheese sandwich and a nice, cold beer (or a tall glass of milk in the child’s case – he’s still underage…), and reminiscing about the good old days. I don’t know exactly what these good old days were, and frankly I don’t care because I’ve reached my word quota, but I’ve got a feeling that they were sweet.

Enough about the good old days, though – don’t you have a dinner you’ve been fixin’ to grill up for a long while now? Do it for me, do it for America, or at least do it for Wisconsin…at this point they can use all the help they can get…

Having just survived another Labor Day weekend without any major casualties, we’re finally seeing the summer vacation season come to a close. From a vacationer’s point of view, it’s time for us to get back into the swing of things and earn a little money for next year, and from that of the locals, we can finally make a simple trip to the grocery store without it being an all-day affair! I’ll admit that I’ve managed to play both roles this year, but for the purpose of this column, we’ll be concentrating on some out-of-town experiences from my yearbook.

The following are some points that, after venturing around the country over the summer, I’d like everyone else to just consider. Maybe I’m asking too much here, but who knows – possibly one or two of my fellow-travelers will agree with me here…

• Could you please try to work with me just a little at the concession stands? Although I understand that vacations are generally expensive, $4.00 for a cup of pop is considered rape back where I come from, especially when you’re buying for several people.
• We’ve all just enjoyed a fantastic event and now we’d all like to go home or back to our hotels, but let’s try to be civil during the process. Mass parking situations can turn simply getting out of the lot into an all-out brawl, but we can all make it a little easier by just working together. If you’re already in one of the outgoing lines, be a nice guy and let others in from the adjacent rows every so often, and if you’re in one of those rows, remember your roots when you finally make it in. None of us are rushing out to go perform open-heart surgery, so try and cooperate here…
• No one in their right mind gets up at seven o’clock in the morning on their vacation, so please stop asking if you can clean my hotel room that early. I make no guarantee of civility toward those who choose to violate this rule, no matter what language you might actually speak.
• If you live in a tourist-heavy area, don’t get upset by the constant barrage of camera-toting, misdirected families who simply came there to have a good time. Just be happy that you get to live there all year long and pray for the day when they go home.
• I’ll promise to stop stealing the hotel towels if you’d only get some that are a tad bit less comparable to sand paper. After a long day in the sun, these things are the final nails in the coffin for many of us…
• Contrary to the beliefs of every waiter and waitress I’ve encountered this summer, you’re not doing me a favor by bringing me my food and drinks – you’re doing your job. I have to work for a living, too, so lose the attitude or you can kiss your tip goodbye.
• As with many vacation-goers, I like to take lots of pictures, however I don’t want to take lots of pictures with you in them. When it’s obvious that I’m working on a shot, please either wait for me to finish or at least quicken your pace when crossing my path. Nevertheless, if you enjoy irritating complete strangers, walk directly up to my subject and just stare at it until I throw down my camera and strangle you.
• The lanes on the freeway are designated as follows: far left – passing lane, middle lanes – general traffic flow / speed limit, right lane – slow as hell troglodytes who shouldn’t even be on the road in the first place.
• On the other hand, don’t get ticked off at me when you have to slow down to 90 mph because the cars around me happen to be following the above rules. There’s a limit to how much you can break the speed laws before you’re just considered an idiot.
• I don’t know about how things work at your house, but in the unlikely event that somebody misses in the bathroom, we clean up after ourselves - this goes double when you’re out in public, such as at a theme park. I suppose it’s possibly that there was an earthquake or something while you were doing your thing, but do the rest of us a favor and wipe the rest off the seat (and the walls…) when you’re done…
• When you’re contemplating the next destination of your group of 20+ people, try to get everyone at least somewhat away from the dead-center of the walkway, sidewalk, etc… Your decision of whether to get pizza or burgers tonight should have no influence on how long it takes me to get to Space Mountain.
• Brief Warning: if you ask me how to get somewhere while I’m on vacation in a new city, chances are I’ll simply make something up because I have no idea where it is, either! My sense of humor can be sick like that sometimes…
• No matter how hungry the other members of my party are, we’re not eating at Denny’s.
• Traffic jams on the freeway suck, but for God’s sake, stay in your own vehicles! Nothing irritates me more than having to wait even longer after the line finally starts moving again because the elderly man ahead of me is taking pictures of his wife posing outside the car with the stopped traffic in the background.
• I don’t throw the ashes from my campfires in front of your car, so please figure out how to use the ash tray instead of throwing your cigarette butts out the window.
• Please share the hot tub at the hotel! Our day was just as exhausting as yours and as much as we’d like a chance to unwind, it’s just not polite to jump into a hot tub with a bunch of strangers. The sky’s the limit if you’re the only ones around, but if there’s already a line, let’s keep in down to a half an hour each, eh?
• Keep your vacation to yourself. If you want to get smashed at every restaurant and party all week, knock your socks off, but keep it within your own clique. Don’t bother me and I won’t bother you…or call the police.
• Staying with the theme of minimal outside interaction – just because I’m sitting next to you on the plane doesn’t mean that I actually want to talk to you and get to know you. I’m sure you’re a great person and live a fascinating life, but I’ve got one last deadline to meet before I’m allowed to go to Disney World, so please shut up and leave me alone!
• Parents, please do a little homework about the attractions before you visit them. Just because your older children loved the Jaws and King-Kong rides at Universal Studios doesn’t mean that your 2-year-old twins are going to have the same reaction…there’s something about mechanical sharks and giant, subway car-eating apes that just scares the shit out of infants…
• Yes, I was checking out your girlfriend. She’s hot and barely dressed – what did you expect?

Well, I finally made it home! My head is spinning, my eyes are blurry and I’ve got cramps throughout my entire body, but rather than go to bed like I really should, there’s a little something I need to get off my chest…

I just returned from a short vacation in sunny south Florida, which most of you can understand is just about the complete opposite of my home up in Northern Michigan. When I pulled out of my driveway last Friday afternoon, it was maybe forty degrees out in the sun…a day later the temperature was nearly double that, at eleven o’clock at night!!! Why I even came back is still a mystery to me, but I suppose the more important question would be ‘How did I make it back???’

For those in the audience that might be a bit slower than the rest of us, I’ll spell it out for you: I drove the entire length of the country – from Michigan to Florida – in my very own car. It only takes a quick look at any U.S. map to realize that these states are several inches apart, so saying that it was a pretty long road trip would be the understatement of the century! The exact mileage from Gaylord to Tampa is just short of 1500 miles, which typically translates to approximately twenty hours of driving time. Although I’m not saying that this is how long it should legally take for the trip, most of us understand the entire concept of keeping up with the flow of traffic and Sammy was right – sometimes 55 mph just doesn’t cut it! Besides, let’s also remember that I’m from Michigan, the home of Detroit – The Motor City, so it’s all good…

Under normal conditions, I would’ve been on the beach to enjoy the sunset the following evening, but that certainly wasn’t the case! Now I understand that our national freeway system requires constant attention to keep it operating at optimum levels, but I never knew that it would come down to this. It seems that somebody at the Department of Transportation had made the uncanny decision to place every single orange barrel available along I-75 to enhance my traveling experience…lucky me! In fact, I’m convinced that the DOT actually requisitioned barrels from various contractors around the nation specifically for this purpose because at this point, that’s the only explanation that makes any sense at all for the amounts of road construction that I encountered.

Don’t get me wrong – I’ve experienced more than my fair share of road construction already – I live in Michigan (official motto: Traffic fines are doubled in work zones). There’s so much work being done on our roads as it is that our children are beginning to believe that our state tree is the orange barrel (and I wish I could remember the name of the comedian who deserves credit for that one!). Of course, when you become as accustomed to these fluorescent obstructions as we have, one would think that we’d be used to our speeds dropping thirty or so mph under the speed limit frequently during our travels, but when you’re driving over a thousand miles, every second counts!

I sat in Tennessee for nearly an hour because they were polishing the reflectors on a bridge or something – not exactly a reasonable excuse to stop traffic on the biggest North-South artery in the country, if you ask me! I understand that this work needs to be done, but for God sakes, if you’re going to slow traffic down to a crawl, at least be doing some actual work when I drive by!!! Nothing rubs me the wrong way more than driving by a construction site at two miles per hour and looking up to see eighteen guys in orange vests, all getting paid out of my tax dollars, sitting around drinking coffee and laughing at the drivers having to go so slow. You’re getting paid $25 an hour – most people could only dream of those kinds of wages – so the least you can do is look busy!

The road construction business reminds me a lot of any local fast food restaurant, with the exception that the construction workers are making a hell of a lot more money. By this I mean that they really couldn’t care less about the services that they’re providing; they’re just there to collect a paycheck, which is a load of crap as far as I’m concerned. When was the last time you went out to get a burger and the cashier was actually courteous back to you? That’s what I thought…people have no sense of pride for their work anymore. I know that seasoning curly fries might not be the most prestigious job in the world, but for the time being, it’s yours, so do it right! No, some of us won’t notice, but I’ll tell you that I certainly don’t want to reach into my fries to find your used chewing gum because you hate your job, just as I don’t want to be driving down the highway dodging construction cones and barrels because the workers weren’t courteous enough to keep them in the lane in which the construction is being done…

Yeah, it sucks to work in the rain and snow, moving thousands of pounds of concrete and steel each and every day, but that’s why you’re making the big bucks, remember? If you’re really looking for a break from the grind, I’m sure your favorite fast food joint could always use another burger flipper and from what I hear, those burgers weigh next to nothing! Or if you’re willing to take an even bigger pay cut, just become a humor columnist, where the only things we have to worry about are paper cuts and nasty letters from our readers.

I’m already planning my next road trip so that I can get through the latest batch inspired by this one…