Author: Bill McCurry

In honor of Valentine’s Day, I must observe that my parents taught me how to break into cars. They taught me other useful stuff, like how play poker, when to over-tip, and to always buy the coolest presents I can afford. They taught me to frame walls, but for God’s sake to stay away from wallpapering. They taught me to break the rules I think are stupid, and to make it look like I was following those stupid rules all along.

However, my parents failed to teach me an important thing. They did not teach me how to get a girl. I have a great girl now, but I’m mystified about how I got her. It seems like luck. It’s as lucky as if lightning struck me 15 times, and it merely gave me a great tan and fixed my teeth.

Perplexed, I recently asked my parents how they became a couple. How did my dad get my mom? Maybe I did something right by chance, and it would be nice to know what it was. I guess my parents like me, because they told me their story.

My parents both grew up in the same town. That’s the town in which I grew up too, by the way. Their families had known each other for years. My future father was 5 years older than my future mother. His younger sister was my mom’s best friend, and my mom’s older brother was my dad’s best friend. When you’re a kid, someone 5 years older than you might as well be a thousand years older; my parents each were aware that the other existed, but they couldn’t possibly care.

At age 18 my dad joined the Marines and went to Korea. After three interesting years in Korea, he came home when he was 21. My mom was just 16 then, and he still barely noticed her. She didn’t pay much attention to his existence, either. Two more years passed in the way years tend to do. Now my dad was 23, and my mom was 18. My dad now noticed my mom and found he wanted her to be aware of his existence, and also to consider it a good thing. But my dad suffered from incredible shyness, and he couldn’t think of anything to do that would make this happen.

He asked his younger sister if she could help him, and she said, “You bet I can!” His sister asked my mom to go out Saturday night, as they often did, and my mom said sure. On Saturday my dad and his sister arrived at my mom’s house in his car. My mom thought it odd that my dad was there, but she shrugged and got in the car. Then my dad’s sister said, “Oh, I forgot I have something to do!” and she buggered off, leaving my dad and mom alone on what had just become a date.

They went to the local establishment where everyone in town gathered on Saturday nights. My mom knew everybody, and she laughed, and danced, and had a great time with her friends. My dad was slightly less outgoing. He sat in the corner all night drinking beer and saying nothing to anyone—including my mom.

The evening ended, and the time to go home arrived. In the parking lot my parents found that someone had parked their car behind my dad’s car, and he couldn’t get out. He solved this problem by picking up the back end of the offending car and dragging it out of the way so he could leave. My mom thought, “Huh.” That is exactly what she later told me she thought, word for word. During the ride back to my mom’s house, my dad still said nothing. He let her out at the curb and drove away. My mom went into the house and thought that this was the strangest thing that had ever happened to her.

On Sunday evening, with no planning or discussion, my dad pulled up in front of my mom’s house. As my mom looked out the window, she felt perplexed and unsure of what to do. She didn’t see many options, so she went outside and got in my dad’s car, and they drove away on their second date.

Six months later they were married.

I found that story to be charming, but not immediately helpful. I’m pretty sure I did speak to my wife at least once before we became a couple. I didn’t drink much beer, and I never picked up anything that weighed 10 times as much as me. Perhaps things were different in my parents’ time. Perhaps I’m different. Maybe it’s all just luck.

Then my mom mentioned that my dad did in fact speak during those six months. In fact, he and my mom both spoke quite a bit while driving around all night on a whole lot of occasions. So that was it! My dad demonstrated the ability to talk for six months without saying something fatally stupid. Now it all makes sense—I must have been lucky enough to do the same thing with my wife.

I find this all to be an enormous relief. I know how I got my girl, and I can put those doubts away. I didn’t blow it when the critical moment came. Because to be honest, I’ve never been able to drag a car out of my way, and part of me suspected that my parents taught me to break into cars so I’d be prepared when the moment arrived.

A palpable wave of hatred is surging over me as I sit on this Jamaican beach. My friends are hurling that wave at me from a thousand miles away while they look out their windows at snow. I may not be welcome in their homes when I return. They certainly will not allow me near their children. I might infect them with my contempt for the spirit of everyone suffering together.

As I sip my rum and coke I’ll attempt to explain myself. I’ve had a hard six months. Nobody likes a whiner, so let’s leave it at that. I decided to get out of town before I began rising in the dark of night to slaughter unsuspecting wayfarers. And before my wife had to impale me in my sleep to protect the innocent. A toasty resort seemed like just the thing. Some of my friends mocked me for choosing a resort for which you pay a huge, heaving chunk of money up front and then don’t pay for anything else while you’re there. My friends prefer to experience the genuine Jamaica—the Jamaica of the people. I prefer a vacation that requires me to make as few decisions as possible. I’ve been here three days, and the only decision I’ve made is whether or not I want ice in my drink.

That’s an exaggeration of course, but almost accurate. We have a refrigerator/mini-bar in our room, and I had to decide what beverages to ask for. We were limited to one mini-bar bottle of each type of liquor, which I thought a bit stingy, but what the hell. I ordered rum and forgot about it.

After breakfast yesterday we waddled like geese down to the beach. A red flag lies beside every beach chair, and when you lift the flag a nice gentleman hustles over to bring you whatever you want to drink. A ragged-voice fellow moved down the beach singing Bob Marley and Sam Cooke, and he staged himself with as much virtuosity as any Shakespearian actor I’ve ever seen. A friendly fellow wandered the beach selling jet-ski rides, parasailing, and marijuana.

I began to feel embarrassed to lie there like a veal calf, so I walked up to a shack that housed a fountain soda station, just so I could say that I foraged for myself at least once. Attached to the side of the shack was what I could only call a bubble gum machine of booze. Four liquor bottles hung upside down in a glass-front box—gin, vodka, whiskey, and of course rum. A spigot tapped each bottle so that any passerby could take all he wanted. Now I’m not much of a drinker. But at that point I realized that not drinking rum would be an insult to the people of Jamaica. By now the people of Jamaica should like me a lot.

The Bubble Gum Machine of Booze

By noon we were bored with swimming, drinking, and laying on the beach. So we spent the afternoon swimming, drinking, and laying by the pool, which is more of a change of pace than you might expect. We dragged back to our room and were greeted by an entire fifth of Appleton Jamaican rum. I realized that in Jamaica “mini-bar” means no more than half a dozen full bottles of liquor at a time.

We wandered to one of the restaurants and were told there’d be a short wait. They couldn’t say exactly how long. An hour later, still waiting at the bar, we laughed at the German couple next to us who’d given up and huffed away. We’d never wait an hour for dinner at home, but it seemed fine here even though we could have walked 90 seconds to another restaurant and be seated right away. We didn’t have anywhere else to be.

This morning we decided to do something different, so we signed up for a massage. I’ve never had a massage, so I found the menu of massage types a fascinating read. The ones involving bamboo and hot stones didn’t sound like too much fun. My wife let me decide, and I picked the basic massage. Then I saw there was a “deep tissue” option. I figured that if a massage is good, then deep tissue must be better. I sprang for the 90 minute version. Our masseuses, Diane and Doreen, directed us to our room, where we disrobed and flopped on the tables like halibut.

I knew that “deep tissue” had been a mistake when Diane placed her thumb under my shoulder blade and pressed it through my body into the table. From the whimpers and rapid, shallow breathing at the next table, I assumed my wife was coming to the same realization. I can best describe the event as two nice women dropping a fire hydrant on you in slow motion for an hour and a half. After pulling my spine out like a licorice whip, Diane moved south, eventually reaching my feet. She crushed my feet, and I now understand why that was such a popular medieval torture. I’m not sure what she did to the soles of my feet, but I think she may have brought in a rhino to gore me a few times.

But the most interesting part of the experience was Diane’s discretion. I lay under a sheet to protect my modesty, but during this procedure modesty was a fuzzy concept. While moving about to assault various parts of my body, Diane manipulated that sheet with the skill of a fan dancer. At one point she stopped and placed a cloth over my eyes, and I found that a bit ominous. But I then realized that it was another attempt at modesty as Diane went to work on areas uncomfortably close to very private places. The cloth over my eyes was apparently an appeal to the “ostrich effect”—if I couldn’t see Diane then I would assume that she couldn’t see me either.

Diane and Doreen at last relented and left us with polite words and smiles. My wife and I stared at one another for a while, as if we were spies amazed to have survived a KGB interrogation. We rolled off the tables and dressed. My wife was so crippled that she couldn’t lift her arms high enough to tie her bathing suit. We staggered back to our room, our plans for the beach now destroyed. My wife refused to talk to me, or even look at me.

That’s what I get for trying to make a decision. From now on, ice/no ice is the only question for me.

Fifty years will carve a people-sized Grand Canyon into a person’s body and mind. Sure, the Colorado River took millions of years to gouge the real Grand Canyon out of the Arizona rock, but we’re softer and get hit with harsher stuff than water and wind.

My friend The Bean pointed this out to me, although she may not have meant to. She’s young and feisty and pregnant. The Bean has enthusiasm oozing from all her pores, even before she became a vessel for new life and the metaphorical hope for the future of all humanity. She also cooks a tasty Beef with Scallion and Mushroom Sauce.

This week The Bean said that there’s something strangely comforting in hearing your doctor say “That looks awful.” When her doctor says that, she knows she’s not complaining for no good reason. Plus, she loves her doctor, and that makes her observation more palatable. But I guarantee that I, being a generation older, would not find, “That looks awful,” comforting in any way at all. In fact, I might be inclined to do something rude with a tongue depressor, or at least make a cutting remark.

Annoying medical experiences have eroded me far longer than they have The Bean, and bad statements from doctors can find no welcome in the canyons of my psyche. I’m not criticizing my friend. When I was her age, I was the same damn way.

Another generation of living will dig the canyons deeper, and the patience for stupid medical remarks pretty much disappears. When a person of 75 years like my mom is lying in the hospital full of morphine with a condition no one has been able to diagnose for two months, and when the doctor unwraps the dressing, the words “Oh my God!” plunge to the bottom of the canyon to crash with a bitter thud. When every nurse and aide says roughly the same thing, then comfort, patience, and acceptance evaporate. Even a smile from the doctor and the words, “That sure is spreading,” only create the urge to rip the doctor’s heart out through his nose.

Of course, our reaction depends a lot on our proximity to Death, that snappy-dressing clump of fungus and slime. When you’re in the hospital you know you’re in Death’s stomping grounds, sort of like his favorite bar. At my age, when I go to the doctor, Death hangs out in the waiting room, feet on the couch and reading Guns and Ammo.  He wants to get the news right away. For The Bean, Death just runs his errands at the mall and maybe goes to see The Phantom Menace in 3D, trusting that she’ll call later if they need to have lunch.

But I think that Death’s distance is less important than how time has changed our understanding of the word “awful.” I’ve seen how people a generation ahead of me understand difficulty and suffering in a way that I can’t. I feel sorry for them, and to be honest I feel sorrier for myself knowing that I’m coming up behind them. On the other hand, The Bean is still young enough to feel comfort and even laugh at bad news. And in the end I feel happy that her canyon is shallow, and she hasn’t yet been kicked in a tender place quite as much as us old folks.

I know it seems odd to scrutinize a matchmaking service ad while sitting next to your wife. It’s especially odd when she commonly leans over to look at whatever you’re reading, on the theory that if you didn’t want her to look at it you’d read it in a locked room somewhere in Latvia. But I couldn’t help it. The ad presented such a fascinating concept in such a compelling manner that I couldn’t look away.

This all happened in seats 28E and 28F of a Boeing 737 flying at 37,000 feet towards Washington. That’s the Washington with all the elected crybabies, not the Washington with enough rain to drown a hippo. My job required that I be there for a few days. I didn’t mind too much since I might have the chance to be mean to people. My wife’s work had lulled, so we burned some of my miles for her ticket. It’s a pretty good way to get to the Smithsonian for five bucks and the cost of all the food you would have eaten at home anyway.

Lots of couples meet on Internet dating services these days. It’s no longer the province of guys who read Mein Kampf on the toilet and who have only five concert t-shirts and an Army jacket in their wardrobe. I’ve met several nice couples who connected through online services that cater to young Christians, people over 50, Democrats, and people with IQs over 145. Narrowing the field is critical. If you’re a sci-fi fan, you needn’t waste time on potential mates who don’t speak Klingon and don’t know who said, “This is my boomstick!”

(As an aside, let me observe that my wife and I have gotten along nicely for two decades, even though we have almost nothing in common other than being vertebrates.)

The in-flight magazine ad that snatched my attention targeted business executives. Presumably it was geared towards successful executives, rather than bitter managers playing Angry Birds in their office all day while vindictive customers and crappy health insurance suck out their employees’ souls. The ad described this company’s executive recruitment matchmaking model, which I expect will make the ears of single, successful executives perk right up.

Businessmen everywhere rejoice. (photo by Ambro)

This process centers around an “executive love recruiter” that searches, filters, and performs due diligence on the love of your life. I know that I’d feel confident knowing that my recruiter was out there scouting, sourcing, recruiting, screening, weeding out the inappropriate and interviewing the must-meet individuals in-person on my behalf. In the meantime, I could be earning my Six Sigma black belt and jockeying for position at the staff meeting conference table.

The person who invented this service is a genius. As their customer, once my love recruiter extended an offer to my soul mate and she accepted, I’d know that she met my requirements for age, desirability, political views, humility, and willingness to put up with my shit. As a bonus, I’d have someone at all times to make copies and fix my lousy Powerpoint slides. This is something that our Captains of Industry have needed for so many years.

The cost of executive love recruitment can be vague. For men it’s just referred to as a premium fee. For women the cost is less vague. Women may take advantage of this service for no fee at all. Is it just me, or does no charge for ladies sound like happy hour at a cheap bar? On the other hand, what do I know about the loves and losses of those holding the throttle of the capitalist engine?

I spent at least five minutes pondering this advertisement. I’d been looking in the magazine to see whether I could get a teeny bottle of Jack Daniels, and instead I found my cultural horizons expanded. After soaking in the ad’s glory for a while, I leaned over to my wife, showed it to her, and said, “You can’t make this shit up. I know what I’m writing about tomorrow.”

Last week a smart woman told me to do something stupid. I said no, and she argued that even if the stupid thing didn’t help me, it wouldn’t hurt me either. I gave her reasons why I thought this thing she suggested was dumb. She huffed and said she’d been doing her job for 23 years, and she’d seen this thing work over and over. She didn’t come right out and scream at me to shut up and give in, but that may have been a matter of good breeding.

When she pulled out her 23 years experience, like Colt revolver at a gunfight, that’s when she lost me. I’d been teetering towards doing her dumb thing, but her vast experience meant nothing to me. Think about it. If I suggested that you start steering your car with your feet, would you fling off your sneakers and jump in the driver’s seat just because I’d seen it work for 23 years? If you would, please meet me at your bank with the keys to your house and a pair of fur-lined handcuffs.

Bobby Heinlein wrote, “There’s no virtue in being old, it just takes a long time.” Of course, he was an older fellow when he wrote it, but the sentiment still applies. The young may be wise and the old foolish, just as easily as the other way around. If I’ve done something for a generation, my head’s now so full of the things I know that there’s no room for the things I don’t know.

Today I found myself heaping gentle contempt on that well-meaning woman with 23 years of experience. Then I asked myself what my wife might say to me. My wife is always on my side in the ways that count. This means she is frequently not on my side when I’m behaving foolishly. Then she explains the other side, which is good for me in the end. In this case I’ll paraphrase her imaginary advice to me as, “You behave exactly the same way, dumbass.”

And of course, she is correct. She’s correct even when she’s only present in an imaginary sense, and I must say that’s a nice trick. But now that the mirror has been shoved in my face, I have to look at myself fairly hard. And that leads me to wonder about the ways in which a generation ago I was wise and today am foolish.

Buy cheap beer. My younger, wiser self ignored irrelevancies such as brand and flavor when buying beer. He only concerned himself with cost. If he could get a case of Milwaukee’s Best for $4.00, he bought a half dozen of them. Today I may pay $10.00 for a six-pack of fine, imported beer, but my young self knew that after the first three or four cans all beer tastes the same.

Don’t try to predict the future. I worry about the future these days. I think about investing for retirement, about the job market, and about home prices in my neighborhood. I even budget. If my younger self could see me, he’d snicker at the old guy wasting his time. He’d know that I can’t control any of these things, and that they’ll happen whether I worry about them or not. When they happen, that’s the time to deal with them. The young me understood this in the way that only those who drive a 15 year old Malibu that may throw a rod any day can understand it.

Don’t worry too much about having a job. My young self loved having a job, since having money let him buy cheap beer and pay rent and go out with his friends. But he didn’t fret about losing a job or finding another one. In fact, he was a lot more likely to keep his job when he didn’t act paranoid about losing it, and the job was less annoying too. My young self would be appalled to see me obsess over having a job, and young me would probably write older me off as a heart attack waiting to happen.

Buy stuff used. I admit that now I like to buy new things. There’s something about being the first person whose butt has embedded itself into that couch. But my young self knew that was nothing but conceit. Why buy a bed when you can buy your roommate’s brother’s futon for ten bucks? It’s just as good and is cheaper by two orders of magnitude. Young me would tell older me that used stuff is almost always better than new stuff, if I can just get past my big, fat ego.

Hang out with people you know, not people you look at. My young self spent a lot of time with his friends. They went to crappy bars, and to movies, and to play Frisbee golf, and to Shakespeare in the Park, and to dance clubs where the girls had fun torturing them. I can’t think of a single time that a friend called to say, “Hey, let’s go to that happy hour where the toquitos made us puke last time,” and young me replied, “Sorry, I’m watching TV tonight. Baywatch is on.” Young me knew that even puking with my friends makes a better memory than David Hasselhoff with no shirt on.

Don’t read editorials or reviews. Today I feel oppressed by the sense that there’s so much to know. Is Congress going insane, is Europe going down the toilet, will The Hobbit be any good, which news network is the biggest gang of lying bastards? It’s just too much. My young self simply assumed right out of the gate that every person older than him was lying to him about everything. If everyone says that interest rates will keep going up, just assume that rates will go down and move on. Go see whatever movies you want, even if all the reviewers say that “Caddyshack” sucks. My young self understood that there’s not too much to know. There’s just too much to worry about.

Tell people what you think. My young self rarely hid his thoughts. If he thought you were an overripe cluster of dangling camel scat, you probably knew it almost right away. People didn’t wonder what my young self thought. He sometimes earned trouble for himself, and a few people didn’t like him much, but he didn’t walk around trying to remember what not to say to dangling camel scat guy. When he said what he thought and people liked it, he knew he’d found a good place to be. He filtered the undesirable people and places out of his world by being a nasty jerk. It was a win-win.

Looking back now I see that young me was often wise, while older me has become foolish. Maybe this will help me empathize with my fellow foolish old guys, but I’m not sure I can recapture any of that youthful wisdom. I guess I can try. Come by this weekend—we’ll sit on my futon, do dumb stuff, and drink cheap beer.

The wisdom of youth. I'm the one praying for death.

I spent a good part of last night wondering why mice can’t use bazookas. Well, I say that I was wondering about this, but that may be a little misleading. My wife would probably say that was whining rather than wondering. Mouse-bazooka capability doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. If not bazookas, then something else that’s destructive on a similar scale. Napalm would be nice, or maybe they could topple a big church over onto something they don’t like.

For 20 chapters of the story I’m writing, my mice have lived in obliterating terror of their antagonist, and now it’s time to kill the bastard. Sixteen chapters ago I set up the ideal plot device to perform the coup de grâce. My problem is that when the coup comes, my readers will have seen it coming from 16 chapters away. That’s a lousy way to reward them for sticking with the story for 20 chapters. I need a Left Turn.

My understanding of the Left Turn springs from improvisational acting. In improv, when your partner says or does something, then you should say or do something in response. Hopefully you say something that makes sense. If you say something entertaining, that’s a bonus. Sometimes it’s neat to respond with something called a Left Turn, which is a response that no one expected, but that makes sense to everyone the moment you say it. It can’t just be some wild, random, turnips-doing-algebra-and-barking-like-dogs thing. That just confuses everyone and makes the audience hate you and all your seed unto the last generation. It has to make sense—unlike mice firing bazookas.

I’ve found that you can’t force a Left Turn to appear. That’s like forcing an ice cream truck to come down your block. But you can do things to encourage a Left Turn, just like you can hire pretty girls to stand at the curb waving dollars and crying out for Eskimo Pies. To cultivate a Left Turn in improv, when it’s your turn you can follow a chain of ideas until you get to an interesting response. Each idea builds on the one before it, so it gets further from the obvious response but still has a logical connection back to the beginning.

Here’s an improvised Left Turn in a scene:

Me: “That was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen! You killed 20 communist infiltrators all by yourself.”

My Partner: “Yes, but I’m terribly wounded.”

Me: “True, you’re about to die, but before you go I have one thing to say to you.”

My Partner: “What?”

[I start with the idea that this dude is about to die, and then I follow the chain of ideas.]

First idea in my head: “What do you want carved on your head stone?”
Second idea in my head: “Who should take care of your wife and children?”
Third idea in my head: “Do you think your wife likes me?”

Me: “Do you think your wife likes me?”

A Left Turn is born—logical, but not obvious.

So how the heck do my mice Left Turn their enemy into oblivion, alongside Carthage and The Captain and Tennille? I’ll start off with the basic assumption, which is something the mice might say. How about:

“This appalling creature is impaling and disemboweling us all over the place. We should do something.”

And here’s a chain of ideas about what they could do:

—Fall down and play dead.

—Run away to a safer town and forget this blemish of a place.

—Convince the creature it would be more fun to go impale and disembowel someone else, preferably someone far away who was once mean to us.

—Find someone who hates this creature worse than butt fungus and let him eradicate the creature.

—Find someone the creature loves and hold him/her/it hostage until the creature goes away.

—Eat poison and then let the creature eat us. Noble but stupid.

—Lead the creature to the town’s best hunter and taxidermist who conveniently happened to be passing by.

—Lure a giant predator bird down to kill the creature.

—Wait for a god to be lowered on wires and smite the creature with a thunderbolt.

I realize that my chain is pretty long now and that none of these ideas quite sparkle. Maybe I need to work a bit more on how the Left Turn can transition from improvisation to writing. Or maybe I started from the wrong basic assumption. I could instead begin with:

—Kill the creature with a bazooka.

—Kill the creature with a hyper-velocity acorn.

—Tie acorns to our foreheads so the creature chokes to death when it tries to eat a mouse.

I’ll keep working on it.

"A cat in an armored car? Good thing I brought my bazooka."

Photo by Noah7104 at www.roblox.com. (http://www.roblox.com/User.aspx?ID=1032679)

Last night I heard the most hilarious not-funny thing I’ve heard in years. After a long and mainly unsuccessful rehabilitation, my mom is back in her home. That is not the hilarious part, by the way. Unable to stand, my mom and her scooter and her permanently busted leg now wage war against the features of her home that she once loved. Her beloved Keurig coffee maker looms on the kitchen counter like Heartbreak Ridge, repulsing her when she wants to press the control buttons and insert the neat little single-serve coffee buckets. If I thought it would help her storm the thing, I’d buy her a flamethrower. When she wants to get into her nurturing recliner she must hurl herself trembling into its depths from the seat of her scooter. Getting back out of the recliner is like climbing K2. Her lovely bathtub is now a pit of horrors.

She ended up in this nasty little conflict partly because of the way she approached her rehabilitation. For 15 weeks she refused to eat nearly everything placed before her, despite her stated intention of walking out of the damned rehab facility with a healed leg. We almost immediately dismissed the hospital food, instead bringing her food from all across the vast spectrum of things humans can digest without dying. With this bounty brought before her, she occasionally ate a few grapes, part of a chicken strip, a few bites of a baked potato, and several spoonfuls of the broth from a bowl of Wendy’s chili. She had an appetite. Her doctor had prescribed appetite enhancers for her, so she was starving. But she typically reacted to food by making a please-stop-beating-me-with-that-stick face and moaning something like:

“That tastes just horrible.”

“This has too many spices.”

“It’s cold.”

“It isn’t spiced enough.”

“The toast is too thick.”

“I can’t stand to look at it.”

“My mouth just refuses to open.”

Fifteen weeks later and 30 pounds lighter, my mom sported a protein level rarely seen outside dusty third-world countries. It was low enough to kill a Kodiak bear, let alone a finicky 75 year old woman. When her surgeon saw that her leg had healed not at all, he told her to forget rehab and just go home. She and my father packed up her housecoats, her remote control lamp and her chap stick, and they initiated their vicious police action against the house they’ve owned for 51 years. They refuse any direct help from allies in this conflict, although they have accepted logistical support.   Just to be clear, none of that was the hilarious part either.

When I called my mom last night she told me that she’d been eating more. I interpreted that as eating eight grapes for breakfast instead of seven, but I merged into the traffic of her careening recitation of events and asked what “eating more” meant. She told me her breakfast consisted of two boiled eggs, two pieces of bacon and some toast, presumably not too thick. They were cooked how she liked them and tasted delicious, enabling her to eat them.

“My God!” I thought. I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “Great!” I suppose that was the right thing to say, since any act that might lead to her survival could be called “great.”

In the next breath she brought me up to date on my sister’s health. The flu had been pummeling my sister like an angry kangaroo, and she’d been sweating in misery on her couch for a week. My mom told me that my sister’s husband had cooked a hamburger and brought it to the couch where my sister lay, and she ate it. She hates meat and hardly ever eats any. In fact, she hasn’t eaten any meat for quite some time. My mom relayed that the hamburger cured my sister almost immediately and that her infirmity must have been caused by low protein. She stated this with all the authority of Charlie Sheen discussing hookers.

That wasn’t the hilarious part either.

Then my mom recounted, in detail, the sermon she had preached to my sister about the importance of proper eating. She emphasized the fact that my sister must eat meat, whether she wanted to or not, and that not liking something was no excuse for not eating it.

That was the hilarious part.

After this happy phone call ended, I found my wife in the kitchen. I told her that I’d just heard the most hilarious not-funny thing I’d heard in years, and I explained what had happened. I told her that I now felt some optimism, although my parents still refused any help, which was driving me crazy. I then said something that I thought clever. I said, “Maybe wisdom is taking what you see in others and applying it to yourself.”

My wife agreed that was a clever statement. Then she mentioned that since I wished my parents would accept some help, maybe I could try applying that to myself, as she’d been suggesting to me almost daily for the past two decades. At least I could let someone bring me a can of Diet Coke when I’m watching TV, or bring me some aspirin when I have the flu or hamburger deprivation. Just once in a while.

Well, that conversation didn’t go the way I’d anticipated. But my wife wasn’t wrong, so I smiled, nodded, and surrendered. I had failed to qualify for wise. I might or might not have a chance for clever. Whether I could identify hilarious was debatable. But having the effrontery to compare your mom to Charlie Sheen talking about hookers? Maybe that’s my defining characteristic.

My mom, before The War Against The House, and with both legs intact.

Like everybody else, I wonder why things happen. I mainly wonder why bad things happen. Thousands of years ago some guy saw lightning and thought it was cool. Let’s call him Chuck. Then lightning burned down Chuck’s hut and killed his cows. At that point he became really interested in lightning and why it happened to strike a certain place. He needed to understand what caused it, and he might not sleep well or enjoy his boiled rabbit until he understood.

Sadly, Chuck lived long before guys like Alessandro Volta figured out electricity, so he didn’t have much data to work with. By the way, I might have referenced Ben Franklin, but there’s a reason why we have 9-volt batteries and not 9-franklin batteries. But let’s return to Chuck, our fellow with no hut and a bunch of fried cows. He needed to understand why lightning had hurt him and not his neighbor, who everybody knew cheated on his wife, and who deserved to have his hut burned.

A lean, mean cow-cooking machine. Photo by National Geographic, courtesy of sky-wallpaper.com.

It couldn’t have happened by chance, could it? If it had happened by chance, what could Chuck do to keep it from happening again? Lightning must have singled him out for a reason, and if so maybe he could convince lightning to instead strike his jerk of a neighbor next time. So Chuck came to understand that someone was up there telling lightning where to strike. He realized that a thunder god resided in the sky, with a colorful name like “Teshub,” and maybe a fanciful costume covered in live lizards and chunks of smoking pine resin. And Chuck had better make Teshub happy if he didn’t want his next hut incinerated.

Not many of us believe in Teshub these days. We know that some smart guys have figured out how lightning works, although most of us can’t explain it any more accurately than Chuck could. We understand something called “causality.” When we drop a hammer, it will fall and land on our foot. When we eat an entire roll of cookie dough, we will gain more weight than we thought possible. When we listen to someone, they will walk away thinking that we cared what they had to say. By the way, that works better when we actually do care.

Causality was a pet project of a fellow named David Hume. He was smarter than Chuck, though a lot less fun at parties. Let me try to sum up Hume’s life’s work in one sentence. “We can say that rain causes mud when rain happens before mud, rain is in a position to affect mud, and you always see rain happen before mud happens.” Or put another way, “We can say that putting a mouse in your mother’s purse causes a you to get a spanking, because the mouse activity happens before the spanking, your mother owns the purse and also does the spanking, and you have been spanked each and every time you’ve done this.”

When I wonder why things happen, I am walking around in the land of causality. It’s a tricky place. Even Mr. Hume said that causality has more to do with what’s in our head than what may be happening in the world of mud and mice. For example, I didn’t see a limitless number of mouse/purse outcomes. For all I know, then next time I stuffed a poor mouse in that purse my mother might have given me ice cream. Or she might have thrown me off a cliff, perhaps justifiably. I can’t be sure. But despite the uncertainty, causality is what I have to work with.

As mammals with big frontal lobes, we are compelled to ask why things happen. It’s our nature, and it is one of the hallmarks of man. We ask why we hit every red light on the way to work. We ask why we suffer and die. We ask why we got the blue screen of death three times this morning. And as humans we are compelled to answer those questions and to understand—or else we won’t be able to enjoy our boiled rabbit.

When I’m asking myself why something bad happened, I sometimes hear a person say, “These things happen for a reason.” If he means that something caused these things, I agree with him. Something probably caused the bad thing to happen. The cause might be standing right there, like a dyspeptic Great Dane in an elevator. Or I may not be able to see cause, but I figure that the cause was indeed around there somewhere. I figure that because once we didn’t see what caused lightning but now we do, and that’s also true for thousands of other things we once scratched our heads about. So when that person talks about things happening for a reason, I nod my head and say, “Yep.”

However, sometimes people say that things happen for a reason, and they don’t just mean something caused those things. Instead they really mean a reason, like something made them happen on purpose. That’s when I get into trouble. Are they saying that my engine blew up not just because I didn’t check the oil, but also for some purposeful reason I can’t see? Did someone want my toe to be mashed off because that would make something else happen, or punish me, or make the doctor happy because he can afford new golf clubs? Is someone directing all this activity like Spielberg directing Indiana Jones through a trap-filled cave? Or like Teshub aiming lightning bolts at Chuck’s home? I personally have a hard time buying into this idea. I also advise not letting your toe get mashed off, because it hurts like a son of a bitch.

But just because I can’t buy the idea, that doesn’t mean it’s not a bargain. Lots of people believe that someone pulls all the strings according to a plan. If things seem to happen for no reason, that’s just because we can’t see the reason. Just like the rest of us, these folks need to understand why things happen. If their answers involve someone making things happen for sometimes-murky reasons, I can’t criticize them for it. Maybe they’re right. In any event, it doesn’t hurt me, and they can eat their boiled rabbit in peace.

My father told me once that nobody ever changed somebody else’s mind in an argument about religion. We already have plenty of people getting upset over how others answer the “why” question, and they don’t need me cluttering up their clubhouse.

In the end, for me the idea of an all-knowing, forward-planning string-puller doesn’t answer the “why” question any better than “because I said so” does. In fact, it is exactly like “because I said so,” except it’s about why a hurricane wiped out an island rather than why I can’t get an iguana tattooed on my forehead. I can’t accept it. And while I don’t criticize anyone else for accepting it, for me the answer to the “why” question ends with what causes what. Things do not happen for a reason. Things just happen.

My butt pines for my couch. I write this from what may be the nicest hotel room in which I’ve ever slept, watched HBO and flossed my teeth. Yet my butt and several other parts of my body feel morose. My butt and I have spent hundreds of nights in hotel rooms. We spent $3 to stay in the Rancho Motel, next to the railroad tracks outside Bakersfield. The room had no TV or private toilet, but it included amenities such as making your own bed with a woolen blanket from the Korean War. My butt and I have stayed about everywhere else, hanging out with roaches in a converted 11th floor tenement in San Francisco, stocking the room refrigerator with pie and Diet Coke at the DC Marriott, and wandering around the lobby of the Disney Wilderness Lodge under the protection of the 70-foot-tall totem pole. There’s something charming about a hotel room. At the same time, a hotel room differs from my living room in a way that makes my butt and me want to vandalize the place.

I think my butt and I can help the hotel industry. We can reduce the “this room is so unlike home that I want to carve stick figures into the wretched landscape print over the bed” factor. The key lies in amenities. Hotels have added some great amenities over the years, such as wireless internet and cable TV. They’ve replaced the surplus chairs once used by the KGB to interrogate spies. Hotels now have automatic check out, breakfast buffets with little individually-wrapped muffins, and containers of free water with orange slices floating in it. We don’t deny that hotels have accomplished a lot. But things could be better.

For example, refrigerators are a great addition. But come on, when you open your refrigerator at home, how often is it completely empty? Almost never. When you open a hotel refrigerator, you’re exposed to frigid desolation, like Antarctica without the penguins, who look cute but would happily bite you in the crotch if they could. If hotels really wanted you to feel at home, they would put something in the refrigerators, like Oreos and milk. To enhance the homey feel, they might include some bologna and a crusty bottle of ketchup.

Froot Loops. The ultimate amenity.

Another great amenity would be Valet Plus. When you check into the hotel, you’re probably driving a rental car that would embarrass a Guadalajara taxi driver. Maybe even a Toyota Yaris, which is the worst car I’ve ever driven, so bad that I kept looking on the back of it for the name “Hasbro.” With Valet Plus, the hotel valet would take away your rental car, and when you come back he would have replaced it with a car like the one you own at home. That way you’d know where all of the buttons and dials are, which side of the car the gas cap is on, and how to preset the radio. Or the hotel could provide the option of bringing you a far better car than the one you own, maybe a Mustang convertible or an Eclipse Spyder, which Hertz does rent by the way.

My butt and I don’t know about you, but we have pets at home. In fact, we have a lot of pets, and we miss them when we’re gone. Well, we miss having them lay next to us so we can pet them and hear them make happy grunting sounds. We don’t miss having to feed them and clean up after them, and we don’t miss it when they send a Christmas ornament we’ve had for 30 years shattering to the floor. What’s the solution? We suggest that every hotel have a petting zoo. That way you can pet some rabbits and goats and alpacas as much as you want, and then leave them in the lobby when you’re ready to return to your room and watch Big Bang Theory. You should have the option of bringing a pot bellied pig back to the room with you so it can sleep curled up against your head, if you like that sort of thing.

Hotels have added a number of handy, personal amenities such as coffee makers, blow dryers, and sewing kits. My butt and I have noticed one addition that puzzles us. When we open the closet door in a hotel room, we often find an ironing board hanging on the back of the door. We don’t want to demean unwrinkled clothing, but how often do you go to a hotel and really, really need to iron? Ironing boards just take up space that could be used for something more useful. Just imagine that you open that closet door to put away your jacket and instead find a complimentary ninja hanging from the back of the door. That is a useful amenity. We admit that we don’t have a ninja at home, and you may not either, but the complimentary ninja’s utility is undeniable. You can send him to business meetings to intimidate your customers and coworkers, leaving you free to go to the movies. He can infiltrate a nice restaurant and steal the most expensive meal for you, bringing it back so you can eat it in the peace of your room’s almost-comfortable armchair. And he can fade into the shadows outside your room at night to assassinate any unruly children shrieking down the hallway. We would go out of our way to make reservations at any hotel providing a complimentary ninja.

Finally, we’ll address the most annoying of all hotel room issues, since it strikes at the soul of what it means to have your own domicile. We refer to undocumented television channel arrangements. We have never stayed in a hotel room in which we could figure out how to switch the TV to a channel we wanted to watch. Many hotels provide no guidance on this at all. Others do provide a list of TV channels on a laminated card, or maybe in a fake leather hotel directory folder, but we have yet to find such a guide that was accurate. For Americans, nothing says “you’re not the master of your own existence” like the inability to find the channel you want to watch. Despite all of the hotel’s efforts to make you feel welcome, this is like a spiked collar they slap on you to remind you that you’re in their home, not yours.

To address this problem, we suggest the Television Caddy. The caddy would stand or crouch just over your right shoulder while you’re watching TV, providing you advice much like a golf caddy. You might say, “I want to watch ski jumping on ESPN2. This laminated piece of paper says that’s channel 41. What do you think?”

The caddy would squint at the TV, glance at the paper, and test the wind coming out of the cheap air conditioning unit under the window. “I think if you try a 41 then you may end up on the Oxygen Channel. Under these conditions I’d go with a 68.”

With the caddy’s help you’d safely hit ESPN2 on channel 68, which wouldn’t be showing ski jumping after all but would instead be covering the World Lumberjack Championship, which is about as good. Now you would feel that life is back under your control.

Do you hear us, hotel industry? You’ve done great work, but you have a long way to go to make us really happy. The first hotels to adopt these amenities, or others such as  a Best Buy on every floor and urchins in the courtyard at whom you can hurl pennies, will dominate the market. And now, my butt and I will head downstairs to the spa for our Swedish massage and our anointing with hot oils and myrrh.