The Odious Chinese Nachos Story

I’m not a picky eater. My father was a big advocate of “Eat what they set before you”, and my mother likes to try different recipes, mostly Southern Living Magazine’s fried salad/fried watermelon offerings. Good stuff.

When I cook, recipes are nothing but points of departure – a suggestion on how the other person once did it. If you’ve never run short on ingredients and hollowed out a Pop-Tart and used the crust in place of bread crumbs, you have no business calling yourself a cook.

But creativity has limits….

One of my China trips was supposed to last only 3 weeks (typically I’m gone for 5). Problems had erupted, solutions were rejected, and the bosses asked me to stay for another week. I failed in that week’s missions, so they asked me to stay yet another week.

After week four in the land of Mandarin Chinese, I was ready to speak some English. I can usually entertain myself with the contents of my head (one of the many, many advantages of an old-school Liberal Arts education) but I found myself bothering Texas co-workers on Skype more than necessary, and called home too many times at odd hours only to learn that the grass was still growing and that no dachshunds had died.

I started lurking in the lobby of the Xiamen Princess Hotel, hoping to catch other manufacturing exiles who could talk football, food, politics or even American Idol. After several nights of reading downstairs, advertising my availability like a Shanghai harbor whore, I saw someone going through the buffet line, a guy that looked like an American. He had on a John Deere Tractor T-shirt!

I ran over and introduced myself. (I may have offered to buy him a drink, given him my phone number, my room number, and told him how fit and manly he looked in his John Deer T-shirt.) He sensed my desperation level, and asked if I wanted to hang out with him and a buddy the next night. I’ve forgotten the guy’s name (Jason?), but he turned out to be from Memphis, Tennessee, and he and I had actually deer hunted on the same land in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. His family had a successful business manufacturing high-end dresses in a factory two hours from Xiamen.

One night later, I met Jason and his friend Jeremy (?) in the lobby. We were going to go to Xiamen, China’s first Mexican restaurant. Let me be clear: we were going to go to Xiamen, China’s first Mexican restaurant.

I’m an optimist. Having already experienced Cleveland, Mississippi’s first Chinese restaurant, Jackson, Mississippi’s first Thai restaurant, and Merigold, Mississippi’s first ever restaurant, I didn’t think things could go too wrong in Xiamen’s first Mexican restaurant.

Jeremy, who was somewhat fluent in Mandarin, explained the sign over the front door – “Xiamen’s House Of Mexico”. The place had a ragged tourist-trap sombrero hung on one wall, and a map of Texas and Mexico painted on another. (Chinese people generally don’t know the shape of Mexico, but everyone knows the shape of Texas, and perhaps the Lone Star State was included as a point of reference. You are about to eat food from the little country south of the nation of Texas. Canadian singer/songwriter Fred Eaglsmith likes to talk about how proud Texas is of its shape. We’ll put that shape on anything.) If not for the mariachi hat and the Texican wall map, the place could’ve been any other noodle shop.

Well, except for the menu….

Veteran China travelers often collect examples of bad “Chinglish”. The menus at this place were in Spanese. Or Chinish. Whatever you call it when you cross Manchu Wok with Taco Bell. After we ordered our beers, Jeremy determined that the menu item “Chips Beef Medley Layer Family” was probably nachos. You can’t go wrong with nachos.

Here’s how they went wrong with nachos:

These restauranteurs had never seen, smelled, tasted, eaten, chewed or shat Mexican food in their lives.

My theory was that everything on the menu was created from photographs, with no other guidance.

Let’s start at the bottom of the “Chips Beef Medley Layer Family”, shall we? Where god-fearing Mexicans would put some corn tortilla chips as a foundation, Xiamen’s House Of Mexico had a layer of rice chips. Not a problem. They don’t grow much corn in China. When in Rome, etc., etc., etc.

Most nachos continue upward with a layer of sliced and spiced chicken or beef. The Chips Beef Medley Layer Family nachos got by with a thin layer of shaved pork. I’ve never seen this stuff outside of Asia, but it’s pretty good. Take some pig meat and repeatedly run it across a cheese grater for a couple of years. It has a good taste with almost no texture. Dust it on the rice chips of your Chips Beef Medley Layer Family, shortly before adding your….cheese.

Asians (stereotype alert!) generally don’t like cheese or dairy. They think that cheese tastes and smells like baby vomit, which, when you come to think of it….it does. That’s why one cheese is as good as another to them. Take some leftover Limburger and Munster, or any combo that smells worse, throw them in your Crock Pot and melt it until it can be smelled throughout the Middle Kingdom, from Beijing to Hong Kong. Apply liberally to the pulverized pork, and you have the stinky middle child of your Medley Layer Family in place.

I know for a fact that the Master Chef at Xiamen’s House Of Mexico had never been exposed to salsa. Or Picante, Pico De Gallo, Ranchero, Guacamole, Chimichurri Sauce, Habaneros, or Chipotle. This guy had never even seen a bottle of Wal-Mart’s Old El Paso Picante Sauce from New Jersey. So he improvised. The upper stuff in his nacho photos was red. Tomatoes are red. He needed red stuff.  So he took a large can of Campbell’s Tomato Paste and put three thick slices of it on top of the Limburgermunster cheese. We could still see the ring marks from the Campbell’s can.

Remember my Chinese stereotype, the one where they don’t like cheese or dairy? The chef's photo of nachos probably showed a dollop of sour cream on top of the Chips Beef Medley Layer Family. Native Chinese can’t imagine eating sour cream.

What to do, what to do?

Instead of sour cream, they topped off the rice chips, the shaved pork, the Dr. Scholl’s Shoe Insert Cheese, and the slices of tomato paste with…. A big ol’ scoop of Kool Whip.

I’ve probably spent six months in China, and have had only four or five bad meals. Of the bad meals, this was the one I enjoyed the most. Jason, Jeremy and I didn’t act like The Ugly Americans. We were polite. We used the rice chips to dig out the shredded pork. We drank. We bonded. We drank some more. 

Having learned our lesson, we decided to stop experimenting with Asian/Mexican Fusion Food. We vowed to eat the next night where the Chinese eat, to experience what the locals were eating. The next night, we ate at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

The Tragic Story Of Albert's Fingers

I’ve written a lot on this website about the advantages of hiring ex-convicts. By overlooking their time spent as Involuntary Guests Of The State, you can sometimes hire brilliant people, hard workers no one else is willing to take a chance on, often for half the wages that their skill levels would otherwise demand. You must be willing to tolerate Parole Officers, Probation Specialists, Drug Testers and their ilk, all calling your employees away for useless bureaucratic “counseling” sessions at odd hours. Those wanting good workers at half price will find a way to deal with the inconvenience.

If that sounds like exploitation of the unfortunate, let’s see you walk into your boss’s office with a warped colony of Registered Sex Offenders and try to get ‘em hired. Let me know how it works out for you.

About 10 years ago, my employer cooperated with a church organization called Narrow Gate Ministries, a charity which gave ex-cons a 2nd chance at jobs, housing, and society. Some of Narrow Gate’s clients were outstanding people who just happened to get caught with a nosefull of Bolivian Marching Powder. Others had a drinking problem. Narrow Gate took in thieves, smugglers of Mexican illegals, forgers, sex offenders and addicts, and tried to straighten them out. We then hired almost all of them, whether they were straightened out or as warped as the Titanic’s shuffleboard court. Lordy, it got bizarre.

One the Narrow Gate clients was a guy named Albert. (Not his real name.) Albert was a talented pianist and singer who often performed for Narrow Gate events and at the dinners for the street people that my church sponsors. The man could do gospel songs like an angel. Like many recovering addicts, he was a deeply spiritual man, a nice guy, polite and respectful to everyone he worked with, and he loved cocaine more than he loved life itself. We put him to work in the plastics shop. “I love my job, I love this opportunity, and I love this second chance The Lord has given me here,” he would say to anyone who would listen. He should have added “But most of all, I love cocaine.”

By most accounts, Albert did a good job for about 3 months. Then he vanished for two weeks of narcotic bliss, inhaling white devil dandruff. The plastics manager fired him for job abandonment.

Because he had ingratiated himself with one of the company owners, we discovered that Albert couldn’t be fired. He could only be shifted. This benevolent company owner (a great guy, friend to all) unfired Albert and had him placed at our wood shop, three miles down the road.

“I love my job, I love this opportunity, and I love this second chance The Lord has given me here,” Albert said. Some employees corrected him, and claimed that Albert was up to at least chance number three. Seventeen or eighteen if you include the rehabs, the prison stints, and the other jobs that didn’t work out. But Albert had no yesterdays, only tomorrows.

Albert worked at the wood shop for about a month and then missed five shifts because he was riding the white rails at some friend’s house on the east side. (Insert a recording of Jackson Browne’s cover of “Cocaine, running all round my brain” here.) The wood shop manager doesn’t take that kind of crap, and he fired Albert for job abandonment.

Albert’s sponsor-owner-savior unfired him some more, gave him another stern talking-to, and then transferred him to work for me at the metal shop. I had already been warned about Albert. My fellow shop managers told me that Albert was deeply religious, deeply spiritual, deeply committed to doing a good job, and even more committed to cocaine. They also told me that I would get the best two weeks of Albert’s life out of him, and that I should fire him some more when he disappeared to go a-snorting through the Bolivian Poppy Patch.

I met with Albert, and welcomed him to the metal shop.

He said “I love my job, I love this opportunity, and I love this second chance The Lord has given me here.” He went on to explain what the apostle Paul REALLY meant in the book of Romans. I don’t remember the details.

At the time, I had about 100 employees working 3 shifts. In addition to my typical homegrown sprinkling of Brothers, Homies and Rednecks, I had Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Eritreans, Ethiopians, Cambodians, Vietnamese, Bosnians, Serbs, and Croatians. (I’m happiest when my crews represent multiple eras of failed U.S. Foreign Policy Adventures. When the boatloads of Iraqis, Afghans and Libyans arrive on our shores to escape the devastation we’ve made of their home places, I’ll be waiting for them with job applications.)

I had two drummers, three guitarists, and one Mexican who was pretty good on harmonica.

Our entire company (wood, metal, plastic and office) had 300 employees at the time, and only one decent piano player. Albert.

A couple of weeks after Albert joined us at the metal shop, I told Albert, the piano player, to operate the shear.

A shear is a giant pair of scissors activated with a foot pedal. Mash the pedal and the blade comes down, slicing whatever is being fed to it. If you’re cutting a lot of metal into small pieces, say, 1”x4” strips, you can get a nice rhythm going, feeding the metal into the blade while marking time with the foot pedal. Chunka chunka chunka chunka chunka chunka feed it in, hit the pedal feed it in hit the pedal feed it in. Get a new strip of metal and feed it in. Chunka chunka chunka chunka chunka chunka. Do it for several hours. Chunka chunka chunka chunka chunka chunka feed it in hit the pedal feed it in hit the pedal.

Oh, and one other thing.....Keep your hands out of the blades. 

We needed some scrap sheet metal cut into 1”x4” strips that would eventually be drilled and folded into a bracket.

And I told the Albert, the piano player, to operate the shear.

By the end of his shift that day, Albert was on autopilot. Zoning out. Chunka chunka chunka chunka chunka chunka feed it in hit the pedal feed it in hit the pedal feed it in.

You know that feeling when you’re getting out of your car and your brain tells you that the keys are still in the ignition, but your brain can’t multitask and tell your arm and hand not to slam the car door with the keys inside? Weeks later, that’s how Albert described what happened next. He knew his hand was under the blade when his foot hit the SLICE pedal. There was nothing he could do about it. Chunka chunka chunka chunka chunka chunka feed it in hit the pedal feed it in hit the pedal. But remember to get your hands out of the way before you hit the pedal, remember to get your hands out of the way before you hit the ped…..!!!

I’m not going to repeat Albert’s damn explanation in any damn detail, because I’m the one who told our only damn piano player to operate the damn shear.

I was in my upstairs office when my friend Mike ran in and out of the doorway saying “You gotta get Albert to the emergency room ! He just sliced all his fingers off in the shear !!” I followed Mike down the fire escape stairs three at a time and ran toward my truck – a red Ford Ranger. Panic was dripping across the parking lot as far as I could see. Battle-scarred welders and sheet metal specialists were gathering and ungathering in conversational knots of freak out. Brent, my co-manager, was helping Albert walk in a circle, his hand wrapped in our white emergency towels. Albert was slowly wading through the invisible panic, mumbling and praying.

After getting Albert into my Ranger, they told him that I was going to drive him to the Harris Hospital Emergency Room and that he was going to be fine. Easy for them to say, because they didn’t have to drive through all the blind freakin’ panic that was spreading from the door of the Fabrication Shop all the way to the hospital. Brent handed some stuff through the window and said something about extra towels if I needed them. I put the towels between Albert and me and stomped the accelerator. We were off.

It was 4:00 in the afternoon, the time when Interstate 30, Fort Worth’s shortest distance between the two points of Work and Hospital, moves with the starts and stops of a drunken caterpillar. It was infuriating. Didn’t these people know that I had a bleeding cokehead in my passenger seat? Albert was weaving back and forth, clutching his butchered hand and singing softly...

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,

That saved a wretch like me….

I can still see the bus that was moseying down the highway in front of me, doing a safe and prudent seven-point-three miles a freakin’ hour, blocking my path to the emergency room. Jesus H. Christ, what was wrong with these people?

I once was lost, but now I’m found,

Was blind but now I see.

Speaking of lost, I considered going off-interstate for a while, but that area had been under construction ever since LBJ was governor. Plus, when I get turned around I sometimes can’t find my way out of a sack.
I could imagine explaining why Albert had bled to death in my truck: “See, I thought I was still driving towards Harris Hospital, but when I finally saw a familiar landmark, I realized I was about three miles from the Branch Davidian compound in Waco….” So I stayed on the interstate, moving slightly faster than the crew who had laid the original asphalt. Albert kept singing:

“Through many dangers, toils and snares,

We have already come….

We’d gone less than half a mile from the shop, God help us. I was blowing my horn and cussing the traffic. What would happen if we both started screaming? What level of panic would I hit?

And then something magical happened, something I was privileged to experience. Albert, doubled over in pain, stopped in the middle of the verse. He looked at me and said “Sing it with me, Brother Allen. Sing it with me.”

There was no rage, there was no anger. There was only Albert’s acceptance of the situation as we edged down the interstate, and his invitation for me to join him.

T'was grace that brought us safe thus far,

And grace will lead us home.

All modesty aside, I can harmonize with a chainsaw. I threw a tenor part on top of his melody. Damn, we sounded good. It was getting surreal in the red Ford Ranger.

“When we’ve been there ten thousand years,

Bright shining as the sun…

Albert’s voice was that of someone who had tried his best and been defeated so many times that he saw life as something to endure rather than enjoy. Albert didn’t care if he got out of this alive. Some of us go through life with a bumpersticker that says “I Make Shit Happen”. For years and years, Albert’s bumpersticker had read “Shit Happens. To Me.” He’d carried the monkey on his back for so long, watching it grow from a cute little baby chimp - to be brought out for fun on weekends - into a full-grown hairy-assed gorilla that demanded attention and feeding and money, 24/7. Albert is the only person I’ve heard sing about heaven and sound like he looked forward to going there.

We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise,

Than when we’ve first begun.”

We hadn’t covered half the distance to the hospital, and the cloth on Albert’s hand was soaked red and dripping down the truck seat. Holy Jesus, holy Jesus, let me get to the hospital. Albert was almost my height but probably weighed the Opium Diet Optimum of 130. Could I possibly abandon the red Ford Ranger on the side of the road and carry Albert on my back to Harris?

Shall we gather at the river,

Where bright angel feet have trod?

With its crystal tide forever,

That flows by the throne of God?

I didn’t want to gather at the river, even if it flowed by the collective thrones of Princess Di, Princess Grace of Monaco, or the Demon Baron Of Hell (from Doom 2.0). I wanted to gather at the Henderson exit from I-30, and quickly. I sang anyway.

Yes we’ll gather at the river,

The beautiful, the beautiful river.

Gather with the saints at the river,

That flows by the throne of God.

At this time in my life, I was coming off a crisis of faith of sorts. But I had to admire Albert’s worldview. I had nothing to hang onto. Right or wrong, Albert had something that I’d lost. I was envious. Would I give up some fingers to have it again? I dunno. Albert was armed with a Defense Against The Dark Arts, and I had nothing. If I’d fed my fingers into a shear, I wouldn’t be singing about the peace in my soul.

I've got peace like a river

I've got peace like a river

I've got peace like a river in my soul

I could see the hospital in the distance, there by the river in my soul with the crystal tide forever on the far side of the toils and snares and saints and all that other crap gathered at the river where I was blind but now, thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus, I see. I could see the hospital.

Once I turned off the interstate we made better time. The hymn festival ceased. It was time to think, time to run stop signs and red lights, time to drive on the damn sidewalk if necessary. Albert started mumbling prayers through the red Ranger roof. How in the hell does he do this? I thought. If I cut my fingers off, I would be screaming and cussing.

Getting into the parking lot was a relief along the line of the bomb squad correctly snipping the red wire instead of the blue. Albert had sweat running down his face to a degree that, combined with the blood loss, made me worry that he would pass out and leave a pile of dust in my truck seat. I pulled into the emergency room overhang, threw the truck into park, and got out to help Albert inside. Attendants met me halfway with a wheelchair. I briefly explained the situation and they told me to park the truck and come back.

“You don’t understand,” I said. “This is Albert, and he plays the piano, and….”

“Sir, do us a favor,” the attendants said. “Go park your truck.” (I must not have looked like a normal human at this point.)

“But he plays the piano,” I said stupidly.

“Go….park….your….truck !” they snarled. This was obviously not their first rodeo. They’d obviously seen guilt-stricken metal shop managers who had chopped off their piano player’s fingers before.

I parked the truck and called our Human Resources manager. I explained that Albert was now in good hands, and that I would keep everyone updated.

I went into the emergency room and the desk guardians allowed me to go into the back room where they were working on Albert. Albert was staring at his ruined hand and telling every passing doctor and nurse “No morphine. No morphine. No morphine.” Can you imagine the willpower that took? Hell, if you’re a recovering addict and cut your fingers off, don’t you get a free pass for just one day and get a little shot of something to equalize all the bad karma?

I called Mike and Brent back at the metal shop, and told them that I’d made it to the hospital and that they were working on Albert’s hand.

“Are they going to be able to re-attach them?” Mike said.

“Re-attach what?” I said.

“His fingers.”

“How can they attach his fingers,” I said.

“Allen, they can do surgeries where they re-attach fingers.”

“What do you mean, re-attach his fingers? I said for the last time. Mike was obviously speaking an Ebonics dialect of Choctaw, while I could only speak in the informal Pig Latin variant of Sanskrit.

“We gave you his fingers, didn’t we?

“When in the shitting damn hell did you give me Albert’s shit damn hell fingers?”

“Dude, when we gave you all those towels, some of those had Albert’s fingers in them.”

There were three seconds of silence on the phone. Then the sheer (I typed that the first time as “shear”, as in the slicing machine. Freudian slip.) , the sheer godawfulness of the moment overwhelmed me. I hung up without saying a word.

I ran out of the E.R. and into the parking lot. Where did I park, where did I park???

Then I saw it, my beloved red Ford Ranger. It was sitting there, throbbing, with Albert’s fingers somewhere inside. You know those movie scenes where the camera zooms in and zooms out several times, just to increase tension? My truck wasn’t doing that at all. My truck just sat there, pregnant with fingers that I was going to have to deliver.

I unlocked the truck. I reached in for the remaining unused towels in the middle of the seat. The top one didn’t have any fingers in it. Nor did the second one.

The third one was full of fingers. Yep. The fingers were wrapped in towel number three.

I picked up the towel, which was warm and squishy, and trotted back into the emergency room with it. Marched right through there and into the treatment center. They’d given Albert something (not morphine-based) for the pain, and he was in a fingerless blissful state.

I found a doctor and handed him the towel full of fingers.

“Here. Y’all might need these.” I said, and got out of there.

*******************************************

The doctors weren’t able to re-attach Albert’s fingers. It turns out that he only sliced off the tips of some of them, less than a knuckle’s worth on any of them. The stuff that Brent and Mike had given me in the towels was just some mangled finger meat of a type that I never want to handle again.

Albert eventually collected a handsome Workers Comp check. He was still able to play the piano. We lost touch with him years ago.

I’ve thought a lot about that intense, horrible, wonderful ride down Interstate 30 towards the hospital, singing those old hymns and gospel songs with Albert. I thought a lot about how Albert seemed to have something that I’ve lost. He had something to get him through the bad times.

Whatever it was that Albert had, I’ll never own it again. I can’t go back there to that childlike faith.

You see, I’m the man who allowed Albert to slice off his fingers, and then lost the fingers.

What to do with 250 copies of "The Book Of Mormon"

A Southern Baptist Witch Doctor, Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Dallas, recently made some waves by stating that Christians shouldn't vote for Mitt Romney because he's a member of a cult.  (Romney is a member of the LDS church.  Also known as the Mormon church.) 
The Robert Jeffress publicity stunt reminded me of something that I did about 25 years ago.
 
This is an unlikely story, so I'm going to copy my friend Henry Farrish when I throw it on Facebook. 

Henry can't vouch for the buildup, but he can verify the aftermath.  And the aftermath was pure, undiluted greatness. 

Here goes:

I moved to Fort Worth, Texas, in January of 1984 to attend Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
The training didn’t take.

I dropped out of seminary because of a crisis of faith, because my heart wasn’t in it, because of The White Elephant Saloon in the Fort Worth Stockyards, and because of the discovery that God just might not have plans to torture Jews and Muslims for eternity for their lack of belief in things they’d never heard of.

I eventually went to work doing shipping and receiving for Taylors Books, a local retail chain. My last semester, the spring of ’85 (?), I skipped all of my classes except for a couple that I liked and spent most of my time working at Taylors and reading heretical literature in the seminary library.

If you ever want to know more about the Marcionite heresy, I’m your man.

While I was going through my dark night of the soul, a couple of Mormon missionaries were on a parallel track.  Customers and employees of Taylors Books could look out the store windows and see these two depressed Mormon lads on their bicycles, pedaling around the Camp Bowie Boulevard neighborhood in their black slacks, white IBM shirts and black ties, going through a lackluster routine of handing out pamphlets and hardback copies of The Book Of Mormon. I wish those boys had come in the store so we could compare notes.

The pic of a couple of random Mormon missionaries came from here. 

They reminded me of those kids who are paid minimum wage to put on a Hot Dog costume and pass out coupons for Big Dawgs House O’ Wieners. Any photo of these missionaries could’ve been captioned “So….it really has come to this”.

These boys decided that spreading the message of the late prophet Joseph Smith was a poor career choice. They eventually gave up on evangelism and quietly dumped two massive cases of “The Book Of Mormon” at the back door of Taylors Books and said “screw it”.  Maybe they would’ve felt too guilty about throwing the books into a dumpster, but figured that a bookstore might sell them.  We never saw them again, and as far as I know they took their bicycles to I-20 and pedaled back to Salt Lake City.

They left me with about 250 free copies of “The Book Of Mormon – Another Testimony Of Jesus Christ”.

What to do, what to do….

I’ve got to digress for a moment.  You won't miss much if you skip the next 7 paragraphs....

Here’s what was going on at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary at the time. They were having a Holy War.  There was a conservative faction in the Southern Baptist Convention that didn’t believe that women should be allowed to preach, or even teach men (I’m serious). They didn’t believe that women should be leaders in the church or in the home - a concept called the “subordination of women”. (This rule doesn’t apply at the national level, though, as some conservatives found enough wiggle room in their policies to support Sarah Palin, who was godless enough to run for Vice President despite owning a real live vagina.)

The conservatives claimed that every word of the arbitrary collection loosely called “Bible” is without error, they insisted on a literal 6 day creation, and that humans speak multiple languages because some people at Babel once built an offensive tower, and that gays and lesbians were sinners who chose homosexuality the way that you choose Coke instead of Pepsi.

Very few people stopped to wonder if God didn’t like Muslims, women, Jews, or homosexuals, why oh why did he keep making so many of them?

Up until that point, Southern Baptists had advocated a couple of concepts called “Autonomy Of The Local Church” and “Priesthood Of The Believer”.  I don’t have the time, space or inclination to go into those traditions here, since I no longer have a dog in that fight, but those concepts imply that individual churches and individual Christians are free to find their own way, for better or for worse.

Those old libertarian-ish traditions weren’t good enough for many of the grim young strivers of Southwestern Baptist Theological Semitary. Any system that leaves people alone, theologically or politically, is a blatant affront to those who just know what is best for everyone else. How can you pull of a successful Disney boycott or a big war if some churches and some people won’t participate in the hatin’ ??

The conservative faction was opposed by a “liberal Baptist” faction. (Yeah, roll that phrase around in your mouth for a while. There is such a thing!) The liberal Baptists were a smaller, less powerful group which has gone on to become Episcopalian.

Let’s just say that I wasn’t happy there. I couldn’t imagine spending the rest of my life enmeshed in those debates. I had already blown off half of my classes and was half-auditing the others just to learn more, with no intention of taking any final exams. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with the rest of my life and didn’t have an immediate goal.

But someone had given me 250 copies of The Book Of Mormon. I took that as a sign from God, or Jupiter, Zeus, Zool, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster (who had not yet been revealed unto us, Bless His Noodly Appendage), that those books should be put to use.

Early one Saturday morning, I put on a generic denim shirt, one that could’ve been issued to someone’s maintenance crew. I got my cases of Joseph Smith’s Epistle To The Polygamists, a couple of shopping bags, and drove to school.

Other than the professorial and administrative offices, Southwestern Semitary classrooms were as open and empty as the tomb of the slain Galilean. I decided to hit the school of Theology first. I went into a classroom and propped a copy of “The Book Of Mormon: Another Testimony Of Jesus Christ” on the chalkrail of the blackboard. Front and center. It felt good. It looked right. A Hustler centerfold of Hillary Clinton couldn’t have been more offensive in that environment. I took a few steps back to admire my work, “and saw that it was good.” (Genesis 1:10 )

I went from classroom to classroom, like a Utah Johnny Appleseed, spreading the Mormon Gospel of Sacred Undergarments, Celestial Marriage, Republican Governors, and large families. What were they going to do to me, throw me out of school? Plus, the only way I was going to get caught was if I kept breaking out in loud giggles.

I went to the Preaching Lab, a mini-church sanctuary with a pulpit, piano, and pews. I put a copy in the hymnal rack on the back of each pew, left one on the pulpit, and then propped open one on the piano.
Next, I entered to the chapel. Entering this room with those Joseph Smith’s books was like performing a Muslim ritual Hajj to Mecca, approaching the holy Kaaba, and then whipping out a Pizza Hut Deep Dish Pork Lover’s special (with extra bacon) just to see how it would go over with the other pilgrims. I decorated the chapel with my heretical books. Thus was The School Of Theology evangelized.

I had to go back to my truck and restock my supply several times. I worked over the School Of Education, the School Of Music, the fitness center, and the childcare facility. No Mormon has ever spread the LDS gospel to a hostile audience the way I spread it that morning, and if there really is a multi-tiered Mormon heaven with Celestial, Terrestrial, and Telestial kingdoms, I believe I’m going spend eternity looking down on a lot of other Baptists. I did my work better than Brigham Young, dammit.

(Here's a helpful Mormon chart showing where I shall take my rightful place in the highest circle, The Celestial Kingdom.  I'm going to get into the highest Mormon Heaven because of my good works for The Faith.)

Nobody noticed anything until Tuesday morning. (Southwestern Semitary doesn’t have classes on Mondays. This allows part-time preachers with churches in Oklahoma, Louisiana and West Texas to return to The Angel Factory on Monday instead of driving all Sunday night.)

Tuesday morning, there was a massive uproar all over campus. Outrage. Sturdy, strapping young Baptists discussed marching on Salt Lake City to plant copies of Herschell Hobbs’ landmark tract “The Baptist Faith And Message” in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir loft. Some professors declared it to be a harmless prank, while others began their classes with a prayer that all Mormons/LDS church members would listen for the Spirit’s voice, find the true path, repent of their errors, and blah blah blah freakin’ blah. (That was the approach taken by Dr. Boyd Hunt in Systematic Theology, by the way. I know because I was there for it.)

That night, I went to my job at Bassham Food Services. The Bassham’s night shift was 50% Seminary students working their way through school, and 50% bewildered stoners and neighborhood kids who were very, very tired of being evangelized by Seminary students.

The breakroom conversations were about the cropdusting of the Seminary with copies of “The Book Of Mormon”. Theories of Whodunnit were proposed. Nobody could come up with a satisfactory explanation.

I just sat there grinning, looking like the guy who knows Who Farted.

My friend, co-worker, and roommate Henry Farrish looked at me for a while. Henry and I have known each other since the 4th grade.

Henry whispered “Did you do that?????”

I winked.

Later on, we went into a corner of the warehouse and laughed and laughed and laughed. Wish you could’ve seen it.

And that is what you do with 250 copies of “The Book Of Mormon”.

Published !!!

Write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for. - Mark Twain

Mississippi Land And Lodges, an upscale hunting and fishing magazine, recently published this tale that I wrote about a year ago.  Hit the link if you have 10 minutes to kill. 
It's in the August/September/October issue, the one with the antler chandelier on the cover.
Check it out if you get a chance.  If you're a Mississippi hunter, you need this magazine on your coffee table, opened to page 20. 
They pay well, and I have a daughter at Texas A and M.  Let the editor know that you like my stuff.  That's all I'm saying.....

Fred The Dachshund's Excellent Adventure

I recently got a call from the Cleburne Texas Animal Control Facility. They were asking if they could remove Fred, my dachshund, from their “Most Wanted” list. There’s a story there, of course.

It began several months ago when my friend Tanya called, inviting me to “Dachshund Day” in Cleburne. She knew that my back yard was full of the little beasts, and she thought I would enjoy the dachshund races, the dachshund costumes, and all the other events ill-suited for that particular breed.

First, some background on Tanya. She is probably the worst person I’ve ever known. Within six months of my starting a website, she dreamed up a parody site complete with caption contests, ill-tempered rants, and all the other things that I was doing online at the time. She posted under the name “Fembuttx”, probably because the name “Demon Spawn From Hell” was already taken. She and her band of harpies commented beneath every post that I wrote, doing their best to shift any discussions to their own voracious, perverted appetites.

That’s what she did when she was sober. Whenever she was in her natural drunken state, she posted countless pictures of male butt cheeks.

Although we no longer work for the same company, she now stays in touch by sending me unspeakable insults on Facebook Chat.

Tanya is also a Methodist grandmother.

For Dachshund Day, I selected Fred from the pack of varmints in my back yard. Fred has a good disposition, doesn’t bark much, and is named after the great French Economist Frederic Bastiat. Fred was the dachshund most likely to enjoy Cleburne.

For reasons that now elude me, I also took The Aggie’s yellow Labrador, Kevin.

Now a few words about Kevin…. Kevin is the only reason that I don’t believe in Darwinian Evolution. I refuse to believe that the collection of fur, slobber, enthusiasm and urine collectively known as “Kevin” is the end result of millions of years of natural selection, survival of the fittest, or gradual improvement. I think God created Kevin as a joke.

Maybe I thought that Kevin and Tanya would be a nice match for each other.

Kevin, Fred and I got in the truck and headed to Tanya’s house, where we were supposed to meet briefly before going to Dachshund Day. When I got there I discovered that…. a) there was a box truck in Tanya’s driveway because she was in the process of moving to a new home, and b) most of the people there were already drunk. I had anticipated the drunkenness, but not the moving van, and immediately wrote off all hope of making it to anything other than Tanya’s driveway.

I put Kevin in Tanya’s back yard, where he amused himself by marking every vertical surface as his territory. Since Kevin can climb a standard chain link fence in about three seconds, I was lucky that Tanya’s back yard had a very high wood fence - probably so her family can throw her back there to recover from serious drinking bouts, a safe place where Tanya won’t hurt herself or anyone else. Near the back door there was a concrete slab with a water hose, perhaps so they can strip her down and hose her off before allowing her back in the house to sleep it off.

Kevin kept trying to get through the fence to join us under the carport. He eventually wedged his head between some of the planks and got it stuck there, looking exactly the way he’s gonna look after he dies and I have his head taxidermied on a wood plaque over the television.

I met Tanya’s boyfriend Shawn, a nice guy who could probably do better. I met Tanya’s oldest son Jeffery and his wife Ashley. Jeffery is a bassoon player. (More on that later.)

Tanya’s youngest son Trevor was fascinated with Fred, so I told him they could go for a walk. As you might expect from a dachshund named after a libertarian demigod, Fred can’t stand being on a leash and doesn’t like being restrained. Trevor and Fred went off on a long, long walk. (Trevor’s walk was going to be a lot longer than Fred’s. More on that later.)

Tanya spent the next thirty minutes insulting me (unjustified) and Kevin (totally justified) because he had his head stuck in the fence.

Eventually Trevor wandered back up to the carport. He was holding Fred’s leash and Fred’s collar, but not Fred.

“Fred didn’t like the leash and he slipped out of it,” Trevor said. “He’s somewhere out in THE FIELD.”

At this point, I had been trying to catch up to Tanya’s and her moving crew’s beer consumption for at least 30 minutes. Catching Fred seemed like an easy task, best delegated to the young. I told Little Trevor that Fred was scared and that if he watched carefully, Fred would come back out, assuring Little Trevor that the dachshund’s loss was not his fault, but that God and all the angels would be very angry if Fred wasn’t located soon. Little Trevor ran back to THE FIELD to wait on Fred to appear.

Thirty minutes later, Trevor reappeared in the driveway, Fredless. But he had a little girl named Alissa with him. I patiently explained to Little Trevor that Alissa looked nothing like Fred, and described what type of animal I needed him to be looking for.

“This is Alissa,” Trevor said, looking at me like I was unworthy of dachshund ownership. “She lives near THE FIELD and she’s going to help us find Fred.”

Since we had recently spent a large chunk of money getting Fred fixed, and since the rest of my family claim that they can distinguish one dachshund from another, I decided I’d better go help Trevor and Alissa find Fred. To prepare for the journey I filled two hands and two pockets with Bud Lights so Tanya wouldn’t waste them on her own selfish self. I thought Fred might come out of hiding to see Kevin, so I undwedged his idiot Labrador head from the fence and let him come with us on the Fred hunt.

We walked several blocks and then we got to THE FIELD. THE FIELD is an unlikely 8-acre piece of land in the middle of Cleburne, covered with briars, weeds, stickers, brambles, impenetrable vines, and enough sand burrs to fill up a grain bin. It's not that different from the rest of Cleburne, really. There was a tree line on the far side of the field, and I knew that if Fred made it to those trees we’d never see him again. We went stomping across the devastation, calling Fred. Kevin was overjoyed to be in an unmarked 8 acres, obsessively urinating on every weed. I started cussing Tanya, Fred, Fred’s collar, dachshunds, Cleburne, Kevin, and THE FIELD.

We searched the whole thing as best we could, and then started criss-crossing all of the residential streets between THE FIELD and Tanya’s Den Of Iniquity, calling for my little dog. No luck. No dachshund. And my socks collected every cocklebur and sticker that they touched.

Trevor, Alissa and I gave up and went back to Tanya’s. Tanya had reached the bottom of the beer bins, but thankfully everyone was still fully clothed. I explained that we still hadn’t found Fred. Trevor looked like he was about to cry. Alissa told us how she would be willing to look for Fred all night if necessary. Tanya made snarky comments about what kind of person can’t come to Cleburne without losing his dachshund, but she eventually agreed to start a new search party.

“Allen….” Tanya said, with an evil twinkle in her jaundiced eye, “I hate to ask this, but….where is Kevin?”
I looked around, mentally going through every old Anglo-Saxon curse ever hurled onto a small Texas town. I had no Kevin. How in the heck was I going to explain the loss of not just one, but two dissimilar dogs under different circumstances within an hour and a half?   Don’t get me wrong….when The Aggie first told me that she had acquired a yellow Lab puppy (because no Texas A and M dorm room is complete without one) and then when Kevin wore out his welcome at every residence in College Station, and then when Kevin had to come stay in Fort Worth and live in the bathroom because he can climb fences, well….I’ve survived the loss of better things than Kevin.

But how was I going to explain to The Aggie that Kevin had gone to live with Puumba? (Read the Puumba story when time permits. If you’ve made it this far, you probably won’t mind wasting more of your life on the Puumba story.)

I did the only thing possible under the circumstances. I started rummaging through the empty beer coolers, looking for something, anything, anything alcoholic at all to take the edge off of the day. Against all odds, Tanya’s house was suddenly under Shariah law, with not a drop of alcohol to be found. I would’ve done the 1930’s wino trick of straining a bottle of shoe polish through a couple of loaves of bread. I would’ve fermented some persimmons if drinking the stuff could take me out of that horrible place and that horrible moment.

Alissa saved me from sniffing some cans of paint thinner. “There’s Kevin !” she said proudly.

Yep. There he was across the street, frantically writing “Kevin was here !” on all of my truck tires.

Alissa involved, problem solved.

So Tanya the nemesis, Alissa the little girl, Jeffery the bassoonist, Ashley the bassoonist’s wife, Trevor the Tanya larvae, Kevin the Labrador and I went back out into THE FIELD looking for my dachshund. If memory serves, Shawn the boyfriend followed behind us in his pickup, like the guy who walks at the end of the circus parade, cleaning up behind the elephants. If he was walking with us, I doubt that he admits it. I can’t remember.

I can only imagine what the neighbors thought, with that crew walking down their streets screaming “Fred, Fred, FRED !!!!” at the tops of their lungs. Night Of The Living Dead, but with less graceful zombies. Tanya continued her insults about dachshund loss and Kevin’s danger of dehydration from over-urination. I tried to insult her back, but throwing vitriol at that woman is like throwing snowballs at Frosty. It only makes you tired, and your victim grows stronger.

I was incredibly frustrated. I needed to be somewhere else in a few hours, I couldn’t find my dachshund, and it was all beyond my control. I couldn’t take it out on Tanya, for the reasons stated above. I couldn’t pick at Trevor for losing my dog – he was already in a blind panic. So when the going gets tough….pick on the bassoon player. I dipped into my deep reservoir of musician jokes.

Hey, Jeffrey, do you know the difference between a bassoon and a clarinet? No? Well, bassoons burn longer.

We got to THE FIELD and fanned out, trying to cover as much ground as possible, stumbling through the wasteland calling Fred. Bear in mind that this patch of Cleburne real estate was covered with briars and weeds and stickers. To avoid ripping our shins to shreds we had to lift each step about twenty inches off the ground. Cleburne looked like it had been invaded by Monty Python’s Ministry Of Silly Walks.

Tanya made fun of my walking method. I responded like the Communists did, not by attacking my enemy, but by attacking the children.

Do y’all know the difference between a bassoon and a trampoline? People take off their shoes before they jump up and down on a trampoline.

Neighbors started showing up with 4-wheel drives and pickups, leading me to believe that the Fred Hunt might be the highlight of the Cleburne Social Season. Tanya would introduce me as her co-worker who couldn’t keep up with his damn dachshund. Lord have mercy, she is one tiresome woman.

Do you know what you call two bassoons playing in unison? A minor third.

Jeffery the bassoonist took it all in stride, but seemed to be wondering what sins he’d committed in a previous life to deserve that kind of abuse. Ashley looked at Jeffrey like she was expecting him to do the right thing and kick my ass all over THE FIELD.  Little did they know that “the sins of the Mothers are passed on to the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.” (Exodus 34:7) It was all Tanya’s fault.

What do you call a professional bassoon player who has broken up with his girlfriend? Homeless.

What’s the first thing a bassoon player says after he starts work? “Would you like fries with that?”

How do you make a bassoon player’s car more aerodynamic? Take the Domino’s Pizza sign off the roof.

How do you get a bassoon player off of your porch? Pay him for the pizza !

We walked THE FIELD a few more times over the next couple of hours. Kevin was joyfully urinating everywhere, claiming land like Columbus claiming the New World for Ferdinand and Isabella. Tanya never ran out of ways to enjoy my dilemma, or insult my dachshund containment skills.

How do you get two bassoonists to play in tune? Shoot one of them.

Define “perfect pitch”: The ability to throw a bassoon through a basketball goal without hitting the rim.

We got into nests of briars that could slow down Sherman tanks. Various Cleburnites criss-crossed THE FIELD in their SUV’s and pickups without luck. Because of them looking and sounding like a Mad Max dress rehearsal, and Frederic Bastiat’s legit fear of going back on a leash, I figured that Fred was putting as much distance between himself and that Methodist Scavenger Hunt as he possibly could.

It didn’t matter. Osama Bin Laden, a 6-foot, 7-inch diabetic Muslim in a turban, could’ve been sitting in the middle of all that Johnson County devastation, and we would’ve driven, hopped, stumbled and leg-lifted right past him.

We eventually abandoned THE FIELD in favor of canvassing the neighborhood some more. (If this had been an episode of “24”, we’d be at about the 2:30 mark.) I went up and down the residential streets hollering “Fred fred Fred fred! Fred!!!” with no luck.

And then I saw not one, but two dachshunds. Two of ‘em. One had a collar, and one didn’t. They were playing in a yard about three blocks down from Tanya’s house of ill fame. I sprinted down the block before they could run out of sight. One of them (the one with the collar) looked almost exactly like Fred, but on closer inspection, he wasn’t. Dang it.

But both of them were males! I could remove the collar from the brown one, Fred’s near-twin, put it on the blackish one, and take this brown one with me back to Fort Worth!!! I was sure that after a few days this beautiful new dachshund could be taught to answer to the name “Fred”.  If the real Fred were to turn up someplace in Cleburne, I was certain that he would eventually be taken to this lovely home since they would be the only people in Cleburne looking for a lost brown male dachshund. Fred would be joyfully accepted there. I almost got teary-eyed thinking of the possible ecstatic reunion this fine imaginary Christian family would possibly have with a dog that they had never seen before.

Hey, I don’t usually think that way, but at this point there was lots of beer involved.

That’s the plan that was going through my head when a pleasant elderly lady walked into the front yard of the dachshund house. The two of us shared an awkward moment, like when Cindy Lou-Who goes downstairs and catches The Grinch stealing all the Christmas presents. We discussed the merits and demerits of dachshunds for a few seconds before we got to the inevitable topic of why my shins and ankles were bleeding so badly. I gave her a capsule version of the Fred story, a shorter version I wish I could remember because it would’ve saved me from pounding most of the previous 2,715 words of this story (so far) into a laptop.

I limped back toward Tanya’s, totally defeated until some helpful soul told me of a rumor that Cleburne Animal Control had picked up a brown dachshund. This was great news. But until that moment, I had forgotten all about it being Dachshund Day in Cleburne, Texas. With my luck, there could be multiple lost Freds running around the Crystal Meth Capital Of North Texas, each with a Grinch-like owner more than willing to take Fred as his own.

I swapped numbers with The Dachshund Search Team, thanked them for their help, and Kevin and I drove to the Cleburne Animal Control Department. After a few minutes talking to the girl in charge, I understood that Cleburne Animal Control hadn’t picked up any lost dachshunds, despite it being Dachshund Day. No dachshunds. They had a ridiculous assortment of Rhodesian Ridgebacks and Great Danes. The rumor of Animal Control picking up dachshunds was obviously a clever ploy to get relief from searching THE FIELD, to get me out of Tanya’s driveway, and to make the bad bassoon jokes stop.

I imagined Tanya loitering around a replenished beer chest, bandaging bleeding shins and laughing at the thought of Kevin and me looking on the far side of town for a lost dachshund on Dachshund Day. After giving the Animal Control girl a description of Fred that was probably interchangeable with half the dogs in town, Kevin and I made the lonely trip back to Fort Worth. Fortunately, I was the only one home and didn’t have to explain my Fred deficit. I went to a party that night, totally distracted by thoughts of Frederic Bastiat lost and lonely in wilds of Cleburne.

Sunday morning, 7:00, Tanya left a message on my answering machine.

“Hey, douchebag ! Alissa found your damn dog. Call her. You won’t see my ass there because I’ll be at church.”

I called Alissa’s house and got her father. “Yessir, you wanting the dog that all the fuss was about yesterday?” he said. “She was up half the night trying to call him in. That’s a whole lot of work for not much dog. Yessir, Alissa’s got him for you.”

I thanked him at great length and told him that he had raised a fine daughter. Kevin and I got in the truck and drove back to Cleburne. Tanya’s house looked as empty and dark as her blackened soul, so we drove on to Alissa’s place. She ran out to meet me in her yard.

Alissa waited until I had thanked her multiple times before she let loose this bombshell: “I don’t exactly have Fred anymore. I caught him last night, but he didn’t like the collar I put on him and he got away again.”

How much of my weekend was going to be tied up in locating a dachshund? How many people were going to devote the rest of their lives to this project? It was amazing, simply amazing. My face probably betrayed my internal cussing, prompting Alissa to hurriedly add….

“But I know exactly where he is,” she said. “I’ve seen him twice this morning.”

“Wonderful. Thank you so very very very much. Where did you see him?”

Alissa glanced toward the undercarriages of all the vehicles in the yard, as if Fred might crawl out from doing an oil change. She gave a looked toward the house, an old pier and beam affair that might have a Fred-sized crawl space under the floor. She looked at a tree in the yard, as if Fred might pop out of the trunk like Minerva squeezing out of the mind of Zeus. Then Alissa proudly looked at me and said….

“THE FIELD !”

There comes a point in every difficult event in my life when I give up on accomplishing my goal, and concentrate on remembering all the details of the downward spiral so that they’ll make a good story. This was that moment.

Alissa, Kevin and I, the three remaining hardcore Fred hunters, went back into THE FIELD. All I wanted was my little dog. Keeping company with Kevin for 24 hours had confirmed Fred as my favorite. I knew that if Fred was nearby he could see me, even if I couldn’t see him. But he was afraid of the leash and wasn’t coming out. We spent another hour combing the Cleburne devastation, and then sat down on a fallen tree to take a breather.

That’s when I saw a brown spot bobbing up and down in the brambles off in the distance, 75 yards from the treeline. Could it be? I yelled for Alissa and Kevin to follow me and started running through the Johnson County wilderness toward the tantalizing little ball that was expanding and contracting over the tops of the vines and weeds. Every few feet, one of us would step off into a hidden stump hole or ditch and go tail over teacups into the vines and stickers. We didn’t care. It was Fred!!!

Do you remember the old cartoons of Snoopy jumping above top of the high grass, taking a quick look around, and then falling back to earth? That’s how Fred was negotiating the impenetrable vines and weeds. He was taking a running leap at each row of plant life, flinging himself over the top like a pole vaulter, snagging himself in the upper reaches of the vines and then falling to earth on the far side of the obstacles. He was getting closer and closer to the treeline, where he knew that his liberty-loving soul would be safe from the restraints of the Statist leash. We Three Amigos were at least 75 yards away.

I was stumbling every few steps and leaving Alissa behind, but didn’t care, closing the gap between The Quick Brown Dog Jumping Slower Than The Lazy Old Fox. Kevin was so excited that he kept up with me, which means he was leaving some tree stumps unmarked. But there was no way I could catch Fred in time. No way. I felt years, briars, and Bud Lights dragging me to earth. There was no way I could catch him.

We were 30 yards from Fred, but Fred was just 15 yards from the treeline and freedom, executing flawless weiner dog high hurdles. I was totally winded, thinking about giving up, and then….

In my mind, time slowed to a crawl. All I had to do was control the time/space continuum long enough to catch a dachshund. I could see individual gnats and mosquitoes hanging in the air, and if someone had fired a bullet in my direction, I could’ve reached out and grabbed it.  I was The Redneck Keanu Reaves in The Texas Matrix.  I saw Fred in slow motion, thrashing through the final row of briars, just a few feet from open territory in the Mythical Free State Of Cleburne. I went horizontal and launched myself at him with one final adrenalin-fueled effort, slowly floating above the stickers as they clawed holes in my shirt.

I reached for Fred’s back legs and caught them.

Time immediately shifted from “slow-motion fantasy” to “210-pound guy thumping to the ground” with his arms cradled around a dachshund. I pulled Fred to me and he gave me some obligatory licks on the face. He was covered with sand burrs and stickers, with a few vines were wrapped around his neck. The final indignity was a tiny wreath of vine “crawlers” perfectly wrapped around his little dachshund manhood.

I just deleted 4 consecutive bad puns about the wiener dog’s wiener. Be grateful.

By the time I carried him out of THE FIELD, Fred was asleep.

I thanked Alissa profusely, loaded my two mismatched dogs into the truck and headed back to Fort Worth. Unlike a lot of my favorite stories, this one doesn’t have a good punch line. I got my little dog back.

Well, there’s this. Flash forward about 6 months. One night Kevin and I had a running accident. Here’s what I posted on Facebook the next morning:

I took my daughter's idiot Labrador, Kevin, on my run last night. He saw another dog, tangled the leash in my legs and skidded me down the road about 5 yards. I've got road rash on both legs and I think I broke something in my left hand. Anybody want a dog?

This was Tanya’s immediate response:

At least when you don’t let go of Fred's leash, he just slips it and runs into briars. You have at least two stupid dogs. Was there a bassoon player?

I’m so sick of that woman. It’s too late now, but if I’d thought of it, I would’ve responded with the following:

Hey, Tanya !! Do you know why the Labrador and the Dachshund crossed the road?
To get away from the bassoon recital.

From last night's dinner conversation

Topics from last night's dinner table conversations....

First some background.  My two sisters, my brother, my mother, one of my aunts, my sister-in-law and mother-in-law have all been teachers.  So education issues (like the protests in Wisconsin) are a hot topic.

My sister-in-law teaches 2nd grade.  One of her 2nd grade kids recently got suspended for 3 days because he brought a set of brass knuckles to school.   
I somewhat sheepishly showed everyone the scar over my left eyebrow, a remnant of a college fight I got into that (ahem...) didn't go well for me.  The other team had brass knuckles and I didn't.
 
My mother-in-law graciously turned the topic away from my 1983 defeat to a proposal that's going through the Texas House Of Representatives:

AUSTIN — Texas is preparing to give college students and professors the right to carry guns on campus, adding momentum to a national campaign to open this part of society to firearms.

More than half the members of the Texas House have signed on as co-authors of a measure directing universities to allow concealed handguns. The Senate passed a similar bill in 2009 and is expected to do so again. Republican Gov. Rick Perry, who sometimes packs a pistol when he jogs, has said he's in favor of the idea.

Texas has become a prime battleground for the issue because of its gun culture and its size, with 38 public universities and more than 500,000 students. It would become the second state, following Utah, to pass such a broad-based law. Colorado gives colleges the option and several have allowed handguns.

Supporters of the legislation argue that gun violence on campuses, such as the mass shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007 and Northern Illinois in 2008, show that the best defense against a gunman is students who can shoot back.

I'm not a Rick Perry fan, but I like the idea of a governor carrying a pistol while working in a 5K before breakfast. 
I can only think of one thing that could guarantee that The Aggie would never, ever be the victim of a mass shooting.  And that's to authorize her to shoot back. 
I have a minority opinion on that, though. 

One of The Aggie's male friends recently gave her a rifle.  I've never met the guy, but I can tell you two things about him. 

1. He likes my daughter. 
2. He's not a psycho.  Psychos don't like armed victims. 

My mother-in-law then brought up a legit question.  What would've happened if I'd been armed in 1983?  What if my opponents (yeah, it took two of them) had been armed with more than brass knucks? 
I honestly don't know.  But either way, I don't think I would have a scar over my left eyebrow. 

That eventually got us around to politicians and the protests in Wisconsin.  My mother-in-law can say the words "Rick Perry" and make it sound like "malignant tumor".  Her hot-button is that Texas once paid 10 grand a month for a temporary governor's mansion, while cutting back on education. 
Yes, 10K for rent is too much.  As I've stated numerous times on these pages, electing a governor or a president should be no more important than selecting a lawn service.  If the decision really matters to you, then your government has gotten too big.  Once we start building Executive Mansions or Governor's Mansions, the Battle For The Minds Of The People has already been lost. 

Here's the comparison that I brought up....The U.S. pays about $11,000.00 per year per child for education.  My sister-in-law has 21 kids in her classroom.  At 11K per kid, she's making $231,000.00 per year !!!

Well, no, she isn't.  She's probably making a fourth of that.  So what is happening to the other 75% of that money?  The other $170,000.00 ??? 
It's being wasted, wasted in quantities that make Rick Perry's temporary governor's mansion rental look like a bargain along the lines of The Louisiana Purchase. 

Folks, for the amount we're pouring down the Department of Education rathole, we could start hiring freakin' Socrates to teach our kids.  You could turn the $11,000.00 per kid into, say, an $8,000 voucher.  Cut the spending per kid by 3K.  Then turn teachers loose.  My sister-in-law could rent a room.  Feed the kids via a catering service.  Select and purchase her own curriculum.  Hell, she's already having to supply pencils, crayons, and a ton of other supplies out of her own check, because even at $11,000 per kid, the school district doesn't have the money to do it !!!!!

What in the name of Thomas Tocco is going on there ???

One last thing, and this is something I didn't think of until I woke up this morning.  My sister-in-law used to teach kindergarten, but got moved to 2nd grade.  She's going to request a permanent spot in 2nd grade because one of her best friends in the kindergarten area is retiring, and kindergarten doesn't have the same appeal without this friend as a co-worker. 

Here's the catch.  The friend is something like 53 years old, and is going to retire with pay. 

According to Wikipedia, this friend will probably live to be 80 years old.  Can any organization fund 53-year-old retirees? 
Is anyone surprised that the retirement funds are now in trouble? We've made some extravagant promises to teachers that we aren't going to be able to keep. It's that simple. 

Here's Sonny Green, doing a forgotten classic "Don't Write A Check With Your Mouth (that yo' body can't cash.)" 

I'm not going to make a habit of transtribing dinner conversations. People would stop talking to me. I wish y'all could've been there. Last night was interesting. Good food for thought. And if I'd had a .357 magnum in 1983....

The almost tragic Arizona bacon story

I'm spending about a week and a half in Arizona, filling in for another guy at the Phoenix Jukt Micronics warehouse.  Most of our Texas transplants are staying at The Marriott TownePlace Suites since the rooms are more spacious, have kitchens, and are a little easier to live in for 6 months.  There are lots of good folks working there at the TownePlace Suites, and I owe them a lot. 
Here's why:

I've worked in manufacturing for so long that I have a hard time doing anything in small quantities.  If I buy laundry soap, I get a 3-month supply.  When I cut my food, I generally slice everything on my plate and THEN start eating.  It's called "batching your tasks".  You don't have to handle your tools so many times. 

So when I cook bacon, I throw an entire package in the skillet, stir it around for about 15 minutes and then put it in a ziplock bag.  I'm through cooking bacon for the week. 

The good people at the Marriott TownePlace Suites (Phoenix) provide each resident with a couple of small skillets, but those aren't big enough for a full production run of bacon. 

The other option would be to purchase microwaveable bacon, but that's against my general philosophy.  Bacon is meant to be fried. 

That left me with only one choice.  The dutch oven. 

The Dutch Oven provided by the Marriott TownePlace Suites (Phoenix) is not as sturdy as the one shown above, but it would do in a pinch.  I opened up the meat package, sorted out the slices of bacon into the pot, and then concentrated on scrambling eggs. 

So you can visualize the next few minutes of crisis, here's what a Marriott TownePlace Suites (Phoenix) kitchen looks like:

 

If you're cooking an entire package of bacon at once, some strips will get ready before others.  You just fish 'em out with a fork, throw them on a paper towel, and wait on the slackers to catch up.  By the time an entire package is done, there's at least an inch of boiling grease in the bottom of the skillet.  Even more if you're using a small Dutch Oven instead of the traditional wide skillet. 

I was almost through with the bacon.  Maybe 2 or 3 strips weren't done yet.  All of a sudden the grease started bubbling violently and dark smoke started coming out of the Dutch Oven.  I dredged out the last few pieces of bacon just in time to see the grease go up to the halfway mark inside the pot.  A black cloud started coming out of the Dutch Oven, a cloud so big that it  looked like Israelites should be following it through the wilderness for 40 years. 

All I could think of was "what if the fire sprinklers go off?" 

I moved the pot to an empty burner, but the grease didn't show any signs of settling down, and I was afraid it would spontaneously ignite. 

So I put the lid on it. 

The grease settled down within a few seconds.  Then I tried to remove the lid so I could dispose of the grease (the room was full of smoke, BTW). 

The lid wouldn't budge.  Putting the lid on top of all that heat had created a vacuum inside the Dutch Oven.  I got a fork and tried to pry it off, but got nowhere.  

Next I tried putting some Mississippi physics to work on the problem, reasoning that if heat had created the vacuum, cold might eliminate it.  I put the whole cluster o' metal and grease in the sink and slowly ran cold water over the lid.  

I heard creaking and groaning from the lid.  The pot then pulled the lid into itself about two inches, the metal going from convex to concave before my eyes.  With all the smoke and bubbling I almost expected a Linda Blair voice to come out of the Dutch Oven, saying "THE LID IS MINE, PRIEST ! ! !"   

When the going gets tough, the tough eat their breakfast.  I sat down in my smoke-filled room....

....and ate my scrambled eggs and hard-earned bacon. 
Before I left for work, I made a point of opening the windows and leaving the vent-a-hood and air conditioning turned up to "Geronimo".  I left the satanic Dutch Oven in the sink. 

Ten hours later which I got back to the room, the bed was made, the countertops were wiped down and everything seemed normal, except the place still smelled like someone had turned a pyromaniac loose in the Chicago Stockyards. 

I can't imagine what the housekeeping crew thought when they walked into that horrific room.  I have no idea how they pried the lid off the Dutch Oven, but there it was in the drawer with the other cookware, misshapen lid and all.  I owe them big-time. 

I might invite all of them over to eat tonight.  I'm cooking lasagna.   

Claude Marshall LaMastus - R.I.P.

One of my best friends ever was the late, great Stan Norwood of Drew, Mississippi. We met in kindergarten. Stan lived next door to a guy named Claude Marshall LaMastus, who was about 12 years older than we were.

This is the story of how, back in the early 1980's, Stan got Claude to the hospital after a uhmmm....hunting trip. But first, some background.

When we were about 14 or 15, Claude Marshall had a terrible car accident. He was coming home from Clarksdale, ran off the road, flipped his car, and was thrown through the sun roof. Claude was paralyzed from the waist down.

Claude hadn’t had much to do with Stan and me until the accident. But once Claude was confined to his wheelchair or crutches, we became his chauffeurs, running buddies, duck and dove retrievers and all-around gophers. I helped him with his physical therapy in the swimming pool a few times. In exchange, Claude let us hang out with him, let us make mix tapes from his record collection, etc etc etc. This was at the beginning of the “Outlaw Country” era, and Claude Marshall and Mike Ellis taught me to love that music. Stan and I were marching band and choir geeks; Claude was a semi-rich guy with some money. Remember, he was 12 years older. It seemed like a good deal at the time.

That’s all you need to know to appreciate this story. I’m going to tell it the way that Stan told it to me. I’m sure that I’m going to get some of the details wrong. If anyone in Drew Mississippi wants to correct or improve on this, please use the comment field.

One day in the middle of winter, Stan and Claude were going down the Sunflower River in a fishing boat, ambushing ducks. It was freezing cold. Claude was in the front of the boat with a shotgun and Stan was running the outboard motor. I don’t know the reason why, but Claude decided it was his turn to drive.

Imagine a paraplegic in full wintertime camouflage trying to get from the front of a metal fishing boat to the back. It was a doomed idea to begin with, and it was complicated by all the guns. Ever since the accident, Claude had become a little bit paranoid. Maybe he felt helpless without the full use of his legs. Most of the time he was armed with an amazing array of guns, ammo, and knives, and that was just for riding around town. I remember thinking that he looked like a cross between Franklin Roosevelt and Pancho Villa.

When Claude had scooted about halfway down the length of the fishing boat, one of his guns went off. The bullet entered one of his legs, and left a heck of an exit wound. The exit wound was nowhere near as bad as the entry wound the bullet made in the hull of the boat. Yes, Claude Marshall had shot himself AND the boat. Because of his paralysis and various pain medications, the gunshot wound didn’t bother Claude very much. Stan started freaking out because the boat was taking on water.

Once Claude got shot, they abandoned the plan to change drivers, turned the boat around, and headed toward the pickup and boat trailer which were about two miles away.

They were bailing as fast as they could but the boat was taking on more and more water. They started throwing out ballast. They threw out the ice chest. They got rid of the seat cushions. They got rid of some fishing poles and paddles and tackle boxes, and they threw out the extra gas tank. They were still taking on water.

When they were about halfway to the truck, Stan looked down at his remaining fuel tank, the one hooked to the motor. The needle was banging on empty, which was enough for Stan to imagine that the engine was starting to sputter. Various obscenities were shouted at the heavens. The motherhood of all gas tanks was questioned. Stan turned the boat around and went back to try to find the gas tank they’d just thrown overboard.

Fortunately, the tank had a half inch of air in the top and was bobbing in the current when they got back to it. Stan fished it out, swapped the tanks, and then made another effort to get back to the truck. In the meantime, they were both wet up to their thighs and were freezing.

Stan finally got them back to the truck. He backed the trailer into the water and started winching the boat (with Claude in it) onto the trailer. Once that was done, Stan had to figure out a way to get Claude into the pickup.

“Hell, don’t worry about me,” Claude said. “I can ride back here. Just get me to the hospital.”
Stan didn’t feel right about it, but he got in the truck, turned up the heat, and pulled the boat and Claude Marshall LaMastus up the riverbank. Once they got onto paved roads, Stan pulled over and suggested they stop at someone’s house, someone who might help get Claude into the cab.

Claude refused. So Stan got back in the truck and pulled Claude and the boat (in sub-freezing weather) all the way to the Ruleville hospital. Stan claimed there was ice in Claude’s beard by the time they got there. I can imagine the looks they got going down Highway 49, looking like a “Field & Stream” Christmas Parade Float.

When they got to the Emergency Room entrance, which had a loading dock, Stan removed the outboard motor from the boat, and backed the boat straight to the dock so they could unload Claude.

Stan said he hung around the Emergency Room for a little while, figuring they’d want to ask him some questions. Nobody ever did.

It was the Mississippi Delta. They’d seen it all before.

A few years after this happened, Stan Norwood was killed in an automobile accident between Drew and Memphis.
This afternoon I got word that Claude Marshall LaMastus was killed in a one car accident on the Drew/Merigold road.
Our world is now a much less interesting, much less colorful place. But if there’s a heaven, Stan and Claude are now shooting at low-flying angels from The Pearly Gates. They know they can't hurt anybody; they just want to keep things interesting.
My thoughts are with the LaMastus family tonight.
This is a song I first heard in Claude’s record archives. Here’s Waylon:

Quantum Of Solace and Casino Royale

Remember the scene in Fight Club where movie projectionist Tyler Durden splices frames from dirty movies into the reels of family films?
Last night I went to see "Quantum Of Solace", the new James Bond movie. Somewhere in all of that racing, fighting, exploding, and shooting, they may have spliced in a plot.
I'm not sure, since my eyes have a tendency to blink.

In the opening chase sequence (a Bond movie trademark), the editor only allows each scene to last for .09357 seconds. I had no idea what I was watching, which angle I was watching it from, or who things were happning to. But then, I'm old.....
Every now and then someone would pop in and mumble something about exploiting the workers to make T-shirts.
M's headquarters had a really cool screen that could almost do as much as CNN's Election Night map. Ever since Tom Cruise first used a similar screen in Minority Report, all government headquarters in movies are equipped with blue tinted glass walls where projected data can be manipulated with Leonard Bernstein-ish conductor gestures.
There was a lot of broken glass in this movie. Perhaps more than in all the other Bond films combined. Good subject for further research.
The bad guys had a hotel in the middle of the desert. Yes, a hotel in the middle of the desert, roughly modeled along the same lines as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. How does the hotel get power, you ask? From highly explosive hydrogen. (HINT: FORESHADOWING).

Remember the infamous scene in Goldfinger where the Bond girl is flea-dipped with so much gold that it doesn't allow her skin to breathe, and it kills her? Well in Quantum Of Solace, it happens with oil ! Motor oil ! Black Texas crude ! Get it? Get it? They're making a political statement ! OIL IS THE NEW GOLD !

It was nice, though, to see a Bond villain hiding behind a bunch of phony Green "Save The Planet" virtue. I don't know who that reminded me of.

But enough about Quantum Of Solace. I'd only give it a 4 on the 10 scale.
This is an email about what happened a couple of years ago when I went with my daughter to see "Casino Royale", the previous James Bond film. I've cleaned up some of the grammar and deleted a few names. Other than that, this is what really happened.....

1) Late Monday afternoon, I was in our main office talking to our company President and one of the owners. They mention that one of our factories is missing a box truck that was being used on an installation job in Mississippi. This is the factory that could lose The Concorde if it didn’t make a lot of noise, so I figure the box truck will turn up. I don’t worry about it, although it’s part of my job to worry about it. The factory in question is bi-polar, and has family of origin issues. (In case you're wondering, the factory mentioned here has been cleaned up, straightened out, and has new management. The manager who presided over this mess two years ago went on to be an Involuntary Guest Of The State. Huntsville Prison, I think.)

2) Later that night, my daugher, The Future Aggie, decides she’s willing to go see Casino Royale with me. This is a rarity, since she’s reached the age where she wants all her friends to think she was raised by wild dogs in the forest, or that she was conceived like Athena springing forth fully formed from the forehead of Zeus. I’m excited by the opportunity to go with her. She makes me put on different clothes and she also invites a friend, so as to inoculate herself against any un-coolness should she be seen by any of her other Paschal High School friends.

3) The opening credits - where the Bond silhouette is shooting the playing card people, and they bleed hearts and spades and clubs - that was impressive.

4) The flashbacks to his 1st two kills were well done. It apparently takes two kills to achieve Double-O status in the British Secret Service.

5) The chase scene through the snake/mongoose gambling pit, the aerobic workout in the construction site, and the fight in the embassy were all way cool. I can’t imagine Pierce Brosnan pulling that off.

6) Judi Dench starts chewing on James Bond for getting caught on film at the embassy. Then I get a call from the Yazoo City, Mississippi police department. (Of course, I had politely turned my phone on vibrate.) I leave for the lobby of the theatre. They want more info on the truck. They think they’ve seen it. We converse, and I tell them things they already know.

7) I come back into the theatre. Bond has apparently won a sportscar and the sportscar’s former owner’s wife. Bond works on bedding the wife, but gets a phone call and has to leave the wife. I get another phone call and have to leave the movie. It’s our Plastic Shop plant manager, who shouldn't have anything to do with this mess. He says the Hood County Sheriff’s Department has been trying to get in touch with me. I explain that I was on the phone with the Yazoo City police department, and Yazoo City thinks they’ve seen it. What the hell is Hood County doing in the picture? Isn’t Hood County what surrounds Granbury, Texas? I take the phone # and go back to the movie.

8) I get back into the theatre. Bond has moved onto another hottie, and this one is supposed to be an Accountant (sorta like the Bond move where Denise Richards was supposed to be a Nuclear Physicist…..snicker snicker.) They’re going to defeat terrorism by winning at Texas Hold’em, which makes about as much sense as defeating terrorism by invading Iraq, I guess.

9) The cell phone rings again. I’m mad enough at this point to achieve Double-O status in the British Secret Service. Two kills would be just the beginning. It’s the Hood County Sheriff’s department. They think they have our company’s truck. But the make and model don’t match. Then the lieutenant I’m talking to has to hang up to handle an emergency call. I leave the lobby for the theatre again. My child is pissed. She will no longer catch me up on what’s been happening in the movie. I turn my phone off, because the battery is dying.

10) James Bond loses 10 million righteous and holy dollars, apparently because he mis-reads a bleeding eye “tell”. The Future Aggie’s phone goes off about 8 times. The Future Aggie, unlike her father, doesn’t answer her phone during movies. The calls are coming from home. From her mother. Finally, her mother text-messages The Future Aggie something like TELL YOUR FATHER TO CALL ME NOW ! ! ! ! The hottie accountant won’t give James Bond 5 million more as a buy-in.

11) I go back to the lobby (by this point, I’m quite friendly with the mentally deficient guy that they’ve hired to tear the tickets) and I call Mrs. Whited Sepulchre. She has had conversations not with the Hood County Sheriff’s department, but with The Granbury Police department, and wants to tell me about these conversations in laborious detail. I start finishing all of her sentences for her, and tell her that I’ve got it covered. Mrs. Whited Sepulchre is pissed. She wants to fully experience the True Crime Moment.

12) I go back in the theatre. Something has happened with poison, a cell phone, and a glove compartment defibrillator. Bond has somehow gotten money to get back in the game. Everybody raises the pot to ridiculous amounts. The River, The Flop, and The Other Thing I Can’t Remember are aces and eights. The large African dictator puts down a full house, two aces and 3 eights. Someone else has the same thing, but with three aces. (I’m sure I’ve gotten this wrong, because I’ve already named 5 aces.) Then Bleeding Eye puts down 4 of a kind. I’ve forgotten to turn my phone onto vibrate, and it goes off louder than an A-rab funeral. It’s the Granbury Sheriff’s Department. They have our box truck. Positive I.D. this time. Instead of politely leaving for the lobby, I discuss all of this inside the theatre. Everyone around me is pissed. They want me to return to the Trailer Park from whence I came, since I obviously don’t know how to act in a movie. But I get to see James Bond fill an inside straight, which is impossible, and can’t be done.

13) I leave for the lobby, talking to Granbury cops all the way. Some guy left our box truck on private property near Granbury. The landowner thought he recognized the driver, but not the truck. The Landowner went to question the driver. The driver put a large padlock on the back door and ran away. Drugs are probably involved. I make mental arrangements to go to Granbury on Tuesday morning, not just to get our truck back, but to have the first pick of the drugs. I return to the theatre, where three rows of people hold me in total contempt. Bond is nekkid and Bleeding Eye is beating the daylights out of Bond’s privates with a knotted rope. I can sympathize and empathize. Nobody will sit with me.

14) I settle into my chair. The phone rings. Again. Loudly. A lady three rows down reaches levels of pissed off that I didn’t think were possible. I’ve once again forgotten to turn it back on vibrate. Nobody else comments, since no one else remains close enough to my violence-plagued seat to notice.

15) I go back into the lobby. It’s the manager who runs the factory that loses box trucks. He explains that the box truck was sent with an install group on a job to Mississippi, the install group stopped at the Casinos in Shreveport (not to be confused with the James Bond Stylish Casinos in Montenegro), and everyone did well and behaved themselves except the truck driver, who lost all of his per diem money gambling. He also had a hard time getting up the next morning (drunk), and was no good as a worker for the rest of the trip. He got sent home (to Texas) early. The idea was to get him home with the truck and then fire him. But he stopped in Vicksburg and charged a lot of stuff to his Company Credit Card at the Casinos there. Shoulda been home Friday in the truck. He and the truck weren’t missed until Monday. The driver was probably just depressed. I explain that I’ve got it covered, hang up, and go in the theatre. Bond is resigning his job via email, something I considered immediately.

16) The Hood County Sheriff’s department guy returns from his emergency call, and immediately calls me. I go back to the lobby. We discuss things. I ask about his family. The Hood County guy gets my whole story. He tells me that he has relatives in Yazoo City. I tell him that my mother is from Yazoo City, Mississippi, and I’ve also talked to people from there tonight. We make lots and lots and lots of small talk. Screw the movie. I hang up, and play video games in the lobby until the movie ends. The Future Aggie and her friend liked the movie a lot. I can’t wait to see it.

P.S. – I got the box truck back this morning. No drugs in the back, but LOTS of empty beer cans in the cab. Huge disappointment.

In case you're wondering, when I went to see Quantum Of Solace I left my cell phone in my truck.