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Well another Super Bowl has come and gone. The game itself, this year, turned out to be a pretty good one. I was, quite literally, rooting for both teams. Whichever team had the ball, I was cheering. I couldn’t help it. I like Peyton Manning and the Colts, quite a bit, but the story of the Saints was just too good to pass up. I mean, the city and the hurricane, and the whole thing about the team being bad for so long, just hits you right in the heart. So, I was happy no matter who won and I am glad the Saints pulled off the upset.
The Super Bowl is an interesting thing. It is the one time where sports and entertainment collide head on, unabashedly. We all know, all season long, that football is really just TV entertainment. However, we all try (those of us who are fans) to say that it is the competition between two teams, the strategies and the sportsmanship are the real reasons we watch. Sure, because we just HATE seeing big huge men in padding and helmets smash into each other with the force of battering rams. In the Super Bowl, with its pageantry and commercials and half-time show, the two collide and we just give in.
The game itself turned out to be classic entertainment. It was something right of “Hoosiers” with the underdog team coming back and beating the big, bad team. But the rest of the show was rather interesting and, at times, sad.
I noticed, on Twitter, that a lot of older folks were raving about the half-time show. I saw a lot of people in their mid to late 40s and mid to late 50s raving about how “The Who” rocks. Folks, let me start off by saying that we did NOT see The Who playing. We saw this group that should just call themselves Townsend and Daltry. Unless the two dead members are resurrected and playing bass and drums, we cannot call half of the original group The Who. If we do that, then every time Ringo and Paul McCartney are together we can consider that the long-awaited and anticipated Beatles reunion. I believe the two of them even played on stage recently, so we got that Beatles reunion and we can shut up about it.
I thought that the half-time show had a great light show, but Daltry and Townsend sounded off-key and poorly rehearsed. The cut-offs for the Greatest Hits medley were strange for some of the songs. All in all, it was two old guys singing and playing…poorly.
As for the commercials, well, I was not overly impressed there either. Sadly, I missed the early commercials as I was traveling from one spot to the other and missed the very beginning of the game. I missed the Doritos commercial people were raving about and I missed the Betty White Snickers commercial, too. A lot of people seemed to like the Google commercial and I thought it was OK. Yes, I remember it probably more than others this morning, but I still don’t know if it worked. Maybe because I have had a few long distance relationships and they NEVER work out, so the whole concept had me rolling my eyes and going, “Phhh…yeah, RIGHT!”
It was another celebration of commerce mixed with sports. It had music and lights, lasers and colliding. Ultimately, New Orleans showed that the real entertainment was right there on the field as the underdog came back and overcame the big guys. Not a bad way to spend an evening.
Let me start off by saying that I am indeed male. I have all of the necessary equipment to be male. I do not feel like a woman trapped in a man’s body. I do not dress in women’s clothing and I do not find myself attracted to men. When I say I am missing some “guy parts” I mean some mental parts. There are just things about my brain that seem to be so vastly different from what normal guys’ brains have.
The first thing that comes to mind is cars. I have never found cars to be particularly interesting. Other guys would buy car magazines and cut out pictures of the sports cars they wanted. Even in high school, I knew guys who would have photos of cars they wanted taped on the inside of their locker. Me? I never had a sports car that I really wanted. I never had a desire to work on a car. I have no interest in how a car’s engine works.
I have friends who delighted in working on their cars. Their eyes would gleam when they pulled out their prized set of socket wrenches and then jack their car up on something to then crawl under it. I knew guys who loved installing this and that into their cars and spend hours and hours working lovingly on them. I have seem guys crawl right under the hood, balancing on the edge of the engine compartment, sweat dripping from their noses as they worked wrenches into impossible positions to reach some obscure engine component.
For me, the question always was, does the thing run? Will the car get me from point A to point B? If the answer was “yes” then I was fine with the car. I didn’t care if the damn thing had rich Corinthian leather or not.
This makes me very vulnerable when I visit a mechanic who always have some kind of sixth sense when they see someone they know knows nothing about engines. They can make up as many words as they want and know I will pay whatever they charge because I have no way of fixing the issue myself.
The second thing is related, in some ways. I have no love of tools. I have no dreams of a workshop stocked with drills and saws and things like that. Generally speaking, my experiments with power tools has usually resulted in some kind of injury either to myself, those around me, or the thing I was trying to build or fix. I lived in a townhome and tried exactly one (1) home improvement project and that was re-grouting a shower. By the time I was done my shower was more of a stucco shower than a nicely tiled and grouted one.
I do not long for home improvement projects. There are people who do love to do those things and you can pay them to do them for you. That is the way I prefer to go. I can better spend the time I would be using to damage myself or my home writing an article, short story or researching my latest true crime book.
So, I am not like most guys. I have no desire to even try and fix something on my own. I just reach for a phone and call the people paid to do the fixing for a living. They seem to like it, since they do it all day long. In short, maybe that makes guys like me better for the economy, really. I leave that up to you to decide.
I have always had pretty good teeth. Knocking on wood right now, I can say I have never had a cavity. However, I have had two root canals and, now, dental surgery involving slicing my gums open. Yes, I may go for cleanings and come out without any metal filling the middle of my teeth, but when my teeth decide to go bad, they go bad in a big way. No mere cavities are good enough for these choppers, no, these guys wait and then leave me in excruciating pain.
The first root canal was way back in sixth or seventh grade. I had cracked a tooth right in half while having a pillow fight with my cousins. Yes, a pillow fight. No, we were not having a pillow fight with pillow cases filled with rocks. I had simply been knocked to the ground and while I was trying to get back up, with my head down facing the floor, I got knocked on the head and my face smashed into the hardwood floor. Before long my mouth was in agony and I had root canal number one.
I then waited a couple of decades before having the second one. Suddenly I was getting agonizing pain from a tooth on my lower jaw. I went to the dentist who determined I had some kind of infection at the tip of the tooth and it had worn down into the tooth, damaging the nerve. I spent a week on Vicoprofen while taking antibiotics and had my second root canal.
Then, just recently, I started having pain again. This time the pain was coming from the same tooth that one of my cousins had helped break in half some three decades ago. It made no sense. Since that time the tooth had been capped. It was mostly fake. There was no nerve. What the hell could be hurting? Again, my teeth settle for no mere cavity.
This time, however, the surgery was so much different from that first root canal. I remember that being the first time I got a shot in my gums and it hurting the entire time the doctor had the needle in there. I whined and whimpered throughout the entire surgery. None of that happened this time.
Still, dental surgery is so much different from other kinds of surgery. You are usually awake, at least for most of it. I have yet to have so much surgery that they actually knock me unconscious or use something like nitrous on me. At least now they have topical anesthetics they put on your gums before they put that needle in. The needles in dentistry look like something out of Dante’s Inferno. They are big and metal and the needles look roughly sixty feet long when you see them coming straight for your face.
This was my first time having my gums cut open. The scalpel looks like a snow shovel coming at your face. The amazing thing is, you can feel and see that the doctor is cutting you open and not feel a thing. Imagine if you were awake when they removed your appendix. Imagine just looking down and seeing them slice you open and going, “I’ll be darned, would you look at that?”
I have discovered that I make a pretty sorry drug or drug-taking person. All narcotics do for me is make me want to sleep. If that is what these drugs do, I don’t get the appeal. Mostly I feel spacey and disconnected. Maybe that’s what people like.
However, all in all, my adventure could have been much worse. I got to keep my tooth. I felt really no pain. Right now, I look like I tried to have collagen put in my lips and the guy missed and filed my upper gums with it instead. All in all, though, it’s better than being in pain and much better than being toothless
Right now there are a lot of things that I should be writing about. I fancy myself a man who has opinions and comments on politics and pop culture. Lord knows, there are plenty of things going on in both arenas right now to make fun of and comment on. I am sure I will eventually have plenty to say, but right now I cannot stop thinking about the throbbing pain in my tooth right now.
Life is like that and people are like that, aren’t t hey? No matter what would happen right now, if a meteor were to strike the house right next door to the one I am in, I would be concerned, but mostly I would still be worried about the throbbing pain in my mouth. People, and by that I mean humans, just get blinded by whatever is happening to them that causes discomfort
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Nice guys really have earned their reputation. The funny thing is that most women, when you talk to them, tell us men who generally get qualified as “nice guys” that we are exactly what they are looking for. They tell us this as their current boyfriend, bedecked in tattoos, drunk, and probably punching a cat as he talks, walks up behind them to pinch them inappropriately on some naughty part of their body. Some part of them may crave a nice guy, but their lustful side wants the bad boy, the jerk, the ass who is going to unspeakable things to them behind closed doors.
What most women probably don’t know is that us nice guys are more than willing to do those things too. However, we feel that it is more appropriate to do them behind closed doors rather than out at the family reunion, say, or in the middle of a supermarket. We believe in this thing called politeness
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For some reason it always takes a disaster. We have seen that time and again throughout history. When the Great Chicago Fire happened, aid and rescue poured in from all over the world, and that was much harder to get from place to place back then. I wrote an entire book about disasters that have taken place in and around Chicago and, in nearly every case, the disaster brought help and comfort from around the world. We saw it again after 9/11. We saw it after the tsunami in 2004.
Whenever there are times of relative peace (yes, I realize I am suddenly ignoring two very real and very “hot” wars when I write that) the human race seems to settle back into some kind of strange selfish ease. I have told, time and again, that I do not believe that people are inherently good. No, I rather cynically and firmly believe that people are inherently selfish and only care about their own self-interest. It takes a slap in the face, and shocking pictures of children covered in blood, to knock people out of that bubble of selfishness
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What would actually surprise me would be if there were people who actually believed that Mark McGwire, the baseball player, was NOT using steroids during his pursuit of the home run record in 1998. I mean, it was the worst-kept secret in baseball. Anyone who could look at his freakish, Popeye forearms and NOT think he was juiced to the adenoids is someone who lives deep, deep, DEEP in the country of Denial. So deep that no amount of rescue effort could possibly bring them back to reality.
I think most of us suspected something even back in 1998. I had a rather unique year that year. I spent the first half of the year living in St. Louis where everyone was rooting for McGwire to get the record. It kind of seeped into me so that even I was rooting for the guy. Then, halfway through, I moved back to Chicago. Back here in the Windy City everyone was rooting for Sammy Sosa to win the thing. Not being a Cubs fan, ever, I was still pretty happy to keep rooting for the guy on the Cardinals
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I am going to be thirty-nine-years-old in 2010. It is hard for me to imagine this. I am older than my parents were when they had me. What amazes me, when I think back about it, is how I was so sure that my parents had all of the answers when I was a kid. I mean, I was so sure that mom and dad knew the answer to any question when I was in kindergarten. Of course, I think about that now and realize that my parents were in their early to mid-twenties during those years. I shake my head when I realize that. I think of how confused I really was, heck, still am, about the world and the way it works.
I have no children of my own as I write this. I have never felt the deep desire to be a father that my brother and some of my friends have felt. I love being an uncle. Uncles get to give out cool gifts, do cool things, but then they get to give the kids back to the parents and go home. Maybe someday I will have kids, but I don’t feel rushed about it
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Dear Chicago,
I look at you now and I still cannot believe the feelings I have for you. Sure, you’re frozen now, looking harder and colder than ever with your steel buildings and sidewalks and streets filled with snow and ice. A lot of people like to complain about you during this time of year. I don’t. I prefer to love you all the more during this time of year. It’s like you throw on make up or something with the covering of snow and manage to look cleaner and more beautiful than ever during this time of year
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It’s hard to separate the end of this year and the end of the decade from the things that happened in our world from the things that happened to me personally. I imagine that it is like that for most people. Our personal timelines are always interwoven with the events of the world. In the last decade, however, we have seen some amazing public events. Some of them should be celebrated, while others mourned. That’s true personally as well.
The decade started out great for me. I was working for a dot com and enjoying my job. I was also in love with this Canadian girl named Amanda. I thought I knew where life was going to take me. I would work for this company until she graduated from college and then I would move to Toronto and so would she. We would start our lives together
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