Dad’s New Year Declaration
My Dad, who died 15 years ago, was not the guy who told jokes that featured an Irishman, an Englishman, and a Russian going into a bar. He never responded to the Reader’s Digest monthly offer to pay $300 for an amusing anecdote. Nor did he have a repertoire of homespun stories featuring his family and friends behaving in outrageously funny ways. I do not recall him once cracking wise, engaging in jocose repartee, proffering a pun, uttering a mot, or pulling a gag. He was not one to put others at risk for having their sides split, ribs tickled, or knees slapped.
Dad wasn’t grim or glum; he enjoyed clever stories his friends told, reacted appropriately to TV comedies of the Red Skelton Show sort, and laughed dutifully at whatever witticisms, selected from those au courant in our elementary school classes, my brother and I auditioned at the dinner table. He just didn’t do comedy himself.
He was, in fact, somewhat taciturn in general, especially compared to the stereotyped used car dealer.1
Nonetheless, Dad had one comic bit he performed reliably throughout my childhood and into my teens.
[Reading continues after the break]
- Of course, other than the fact that he undeniably bought and sold used cars, he had so little in common with the caricatured image of a fast-talking, sharkskin suit-wearing, fast-and-loose-dealing predator hustling suckers into buying wrecks at inflated prices that the comparison itself is misleading. My father preferred overalls, never slapped a back literally or figuratively, and had a reputation for honesty such that auctioneers at auctions limited to dealers would routinely note when he was the owner of the automobile on the block as a certification of the accuracy of the information they offered about the car, a tactic I never heard associated with another dealer in the eight years of car auctions I reluctantly attended. ~back~
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Ruby Wren: Still Awesome-O
As Great-Uncle, I’m privileged to present, on the occasion of her second day as a newborn and her third Heck Of A Guy post, Ms Ruby Wren.1
Under her stage name, Awesome-O, Ruby previously starred in Awesome-o Sends Greetings and the sequel, Awesome-O Returns.
In her latest role, Ruby took center stage at 6 lbs, 2.8 oz. in a live production on 29 December 2007 to the plaudits of her adoring public and joyfulness of her supporting cast.
Ruby’s Great-Aunt, Julie Wren, would have been very, very happy.
Footnotes:
- Yes, she has a last name; she has, in fact, two last names that are both dandy. They just aren’t necessary here. ~back~
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DrHGuy’s Solutions For New Year’s Resolutions
Protection From New Year Resolutions
You Say You Want A Resolution
Advice about managing New Year’s resolutions abounds. A Google search for the terms, “how to” AND “New Year resolutions,” turns up over 2,400,000 hits,1 most of which seem to be rewrites of the same recommendations: set specific and realistic goals, commit oneself to these realistic goals by informing friends and family of ones intentions, implement a comprehensive plan that breaks down the ultimate goals into incremental steps, each with its own deadline, reward oneself for success, and forgive oneself for lapses and setbacks.
If one also considers the specific resolutions suggested (e.g., follow a healthy diet, exercise daily, save more, invest wisely, advance professionally, spend more time with family and friends, organize ones life, and cease smoking, drinking, abusing drugs, etc.), it becomes evident that New Year Resolutions are clearly underappreciated — as a source of misery and psychological trauma.2 Inevitably, this syndrome will become formalized as an official psychiatric diagnosis (the smart money is behind “Post-Resolution Traumatic Disorder” with “Post-Resolution Traumatic Disorder, New Year Resolution Type” denoted as an especially virulent subcategory) with its own 12 step programs, victims self-help groups, and class action lawsuits.
DrHGuy, it may not surprise one to learn (especially if that one read the title to this post) has developed a strategy to deal with this problem.
Post-Resolution Traumatic Disorder Prevention
The obvious cure for Post-Resolution Traumatic Disorder is not making resolutions. Without a resolution, there is no risk of post-resolution trauma. But, while DrHGuy has himself reached this nirvana-like state, he recognizes that, especially in the case of the New Year Disorder subtype, this ideal is not a realistic standard for much of the populace. Consequently, this post introduces …
DrHGuy’s Management Protocol For Populations At High Risk For Post-Resolution Traumatic Disorder, New Year Resolution Type
1. Resolution Redirection
For those who are too habituated to the New Year Resolution custom to quit cold turkey, take a cue from those articles and columns of advice about making and keeping resolutions. Make long lists of especially ambitious commitments for the new year; just don’t make them for yourself. Take the burden off your friends and family by writing their New Year Resolutions for them.
Heck, while you’re at it, make resolutions for folks you don’t know personally. Think how pleased the President, the manager of the Cubs, that rude waitress at your local Applebee’s, the CEOs of the major oil companies, and all the others who would be enlightened by your efforts will be to receive your thoughtful list of resolutions for them.
You should, by the way, feel free (or even obligated) to develop resolutions that would have an especially beneficial impact on you (for example, you might provide your boss with a resolution to increase your wages and decrease your hours in 2007 or present your spouse with his or her commitment to satisfy your sexual needs in more extensive and more exotic ways in each of the next 365 days).
Remember,
Making New Year resolutions for yourself makes you miserable
2. Retrolution Substitution
Retrolutions are DrHGuy’s revision (or, some might say, correction) of the current tradition of making resolutions for the upcoming year, a custom that has its origins in the 153 B.C. reorganization of the calendar that placed the month named after Janus at the first of the calendar. Janus, you no doubt recall, had two faces, one to look on past events and one to look to the future. For obscure reasons, resolution creation was associated with the face gazing toward the upcoming twelve months. Obviously, however, the risk of disappointment and consequent self-loathing is reduced if one focuses on the preceding twelve months and creates retrolutions - commitments to complete tasks and reach goals that one has indeed already achieved in the past year.
At this time of year, for example, DrHGuy, had he not already developed sufficient self-discipline to just say no to resolutions, might be retroloving, with considerable confidence, to produce a blog, beginning the first week of March with daily entries (except during a pre-scheduled week of vacation in June), with content composed equally of wit, wisdom, weirdness, and wickedness that would be deservedly appreciated by an elite set of readers who will anticipate with spasms of delight the latest “Heck Of A Guy” post.3
DrHGuy must admit to feeling a certain shiver of giddy accomplishment as he completes even this mock retrolution. Imagine, then, the intense joyfulness one experiences upon completing genuine retrolutions, a response that, significantly, occurs immediately — without that frustrating delayed gratification thing.
It may be helpful to think of retrolution therapy this way: Retrolutions are to Resolutions as Methadone is to Heroin
Palliation For Incurable Cases
For those who are unresponsive to these protocols or other measures and thus unable to resist the lure of resolution-making, DrHGuy has palliative measures:
1. Choose Low-Risk Resolutions
The less difficult your resolution, the less likely you are to fail. Especially useful in this regard are non-negative resolutions; e.g., “I will not enter Chicago police headquarters shouting profane insults at the officers while brandishing a realistic but non-operative plastic replica of an assault rifle” is, for many of us, an acceptable risk.
2. Choose High Benefit Resolutions
Some individuals are convinced that choosing resolutions that are too easy is somehow equivalent to cheating. If you suffer from this delusional state, at least select goals that have a high payout. DrHGuy must confess, for example, that the year he spent pursuing his resolution to create the perfect margarita, while not completely successful, was not without certain gratifications.
The Universal Antidote
The key point, essential to any program, is the DrHGuy-centric Resolution. Highly recommended are the following:
- I will read every Heck Of A Guy post within six minutes of publication
- I will study to show myself approved unto DrHGuy, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth
- I will proclaim to at least one new person every day, “Damn, that Heck Of A Guy blog is good”
- I will send significant sums of cash, in small unmarked bills, to DrHGuy weekly
Footnotes:
- To avoid the e-mail from statistically savvy search sorts, DrHGuy herewith stipulates that (1) the number of hits on a Google search is, at best, a quick and dirty indicator of comparative interest in a subject, (2) Google lists of this sort typically contain duplicates, and (3) the number of hits in Google searches for anything other than the accepted names of people, places, and concepts are heavily dependent on the precise search terms entered. In this case, searching Google for “how to” AND “New Year’s resolutions” produces a list of titles such as How To Stick To New Year’s Resolutions, How To Make An Actual New Year’s Resolution, How To Achieve Your New Years Resolutions, How To Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions, How To Make A New Year’s Resolution, How To Stick To Your Resolution, How To Keep Up With Those New Year’s Resolutions, How To Make New Years Resolutions Last, and How To Make New Year’s Resolutions That You Can Keep. ~back~
- The only clear cut benefit from New Year Resolutions, in fact, is the upward blip in the economy resulting from the purchase of memberships in health clubs from resolution-motivated individuals who will use those exercise facilities an average of 1.3 times. ~back~
- Because the goal is illustration of a concept, this retrolution is vastly oversimplified; for maximum benefit, retrolutions are suffused with detail. The Heck Of A Guy blog retrolution might include, for instance, sub-retrolutions specifying the following content:
- Two recipes featuring dishwasher-cooking
- An extended description of a site that includes an operatic Hymn To Glaucoma
- A proffering of sexual perversity to and subsequent online flirtation with a gorgeous female singer who has put out an outstanding album and is Leonard Cohen’s lover
~back~
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Becky: A Short Story by Julie Showalter
Julie Showalter: Unpublished Writings1
Becky is the second in this short series of Julie’s unpublished pieces now available.
To view Becky by Julie Showalter in manuscript form, click on the first link below:
Becky — View
To download a PDF version of Becky by Julie Showalter, right-click on the next link, and choose “Save Link As … ” or “Save Target As …” from the context menu:
Becky– Download PDF
Footnotes
- Julie was my much-beloved, fiercely smart, extraordinarily sexy wife, who died in 1999 from cancer diagnosed the week of our wedding nearly 20 years earlier. She was also a prize-winning writer. This blog includes many other posts about her and the unlikely but true story of our romance (See Julie FAQ) as well as several of her short stories and other pieces. Most of Julie’s fully edited and buffed literary efforts are already available under the heading, Julie’s Writings, in “Categories.” Unpublished Julie is a group of pieces I’ve found on her computer or in her office that range from workshop exercises to story fragments to projects set aside to finish at a later day to work that appears, at least to me, to be fully as polished and effective as her published stories. ~back~
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Wall-To-Wall Coverage
Golden Walls
Da Boyz & I just returned from the Ozarks town of Golden, Missouri, where we were guests in my mother’s home, a residence featured in an earlier post, In My Mother’s House Are Many Tchotchkes, most of which focused on the proliferation of stuff she and my dad mounted on the walls of their home. During this Christmas pilgrimage to the parental homestead, I snapped a few photos to illustrate my earlier descriptions.
The shot selection was driven by impulse and whim so not all the items on all the walls are displayed. Moreover, I lacked the fortitude to explore the loft of the house, its closets, the garage, or the outbuilding that previously housed my parents’ RV, all of which now serve as repositories for still more miscellanea. Nonetheless, the gestalt of the place should be clear from the snapshots.
These photos can be viewed at:
Gallery Of My Mother’s Inventory
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DrHGuy’s Happy Newfie Year Celebration
DrHGuy has learned the hard way that off the shelf New Year’s Eve customs are a poor fit for his metaphysique.
An especially problematic issue has been the midnight hoopla welcoming the incoming year. While the occasional well-performed hoopla can induce a quite enjoyable mental state and can even cascade into delightful physical activities, a cost-benefit analysis of staying awake until midnight, well past DrHGuy’s bedtime, for no other reason than to raise a ruckus1 in acknowledgment that time has indeed progressed some infinitely small increment beyond the last instance of the year being completed discloses an unacceptably low return on investment.
DrHGuy is not, however, one to cavalierly dismiss or disregard altogether those cultural traditions that symbolically bind us together. Consequently, his goal is revision rather than renunciation of these customs.
Watching the televised Times Square New Year’s celebration offered the insight that time zones, while useful, are an arbitrary fabrication. That there are 24 time zones instead of 48 or 12 or 19 is itself arbitrary. Further, while time zones are conceptually constructed from wedges of the Earth bordered by meridians each 15° of longitude apart, each one hour different from its neighboring wedges, “political and geographical practicalities can result in irregularly-shaped zones that follow political boundaries or that change their time seasonally (as with daylight saving time), as well as being subject to occasional redefinition as political conditions change”2 – i.e., they are arbitrary.
And arbitrary standards offer one considerable slack for adaptation. The determination of the appropriate hour for the first libation of the day, for example, is rendered more flexible and thus less difficult when one realizes that, as the country-western song points out, “It’s five o’clock somewhere.”
Analogously, DrHGuy’s original revelation was that residing in the Midwest did not preclude his saluting the onset of the New Year along with the denizens of the Big Apple and the rest of the East Coast, which left ample post-hoopla time to tuck himself alongside, with luck, a female celebrant into bed before those locals chauvinistically attached to Central Standard Time bestirred themselves into applauding the inevitable passage of midnight.
Yet, even 11 PM (the CST correspondent of the East Coast’s midnight) became onerous,3 especially when the party was limited to DrHGuy and Da Boyz. And, New York’s loud, self-congratulatory style did grate a bit.
Salvation arrived when DrHGuy’s research revealed that Newfoundland, the Canadian province called – or so claim its governmental boosters — “the Far East of the Western World” – is, in one of those weird coincidences, covered by the Newfoundland Time Zone, which precedes the Central Time Zone by 2.5 (yep, it’s 2.5 hours rather than 2 hours or 3 hours – those wacky Canucks) and the Eastern Time Zone by 1.5 hours.
Because DrHGuy is fully confident that he can party hearty at 9:30 PM (local time) and still be in bed at a civilized 10:15, his household New Year’s ceremony will climax at that time. Besides, one can imagine what party beasts those Newfies can be.4
Thus it is that DrHGuy has now embraced his inner-Newfie and now gratefully adopts, for a few seconds every year, the Newfoundland Time Zone.
Reference Material
Footnotes
- DrHGuy does specifically endorse the celebratory tradition of kissing ones lover as one year finishes and another begins. Of course, DrHGuy endorses kissing ones (liberally defined) lover as part of any celebration – or in preparation for a celebration, after a celebration, between celebrations, … . Postponing a kiss until midnight, however, seems a poor bargain. ~back~
- Wikipedia ~back~
- DrHGuy is an “early to bed, early to rise” sort of fellow ~back~
- The folks in what is officially the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, have noted that their “unique time zone,” being 3.5 hours off Greenwich Mean Time, results in the New Year arriving on their shores before any other place in North America. It appears that the typical New Year’s Eve celebration in Newfoundland includes, beyond the ubiquitous fireworks and countdown to the New Year, midnight dogsled races and Celtic music concerts. ~back~
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An After-Christmas Gift From Julie
Julie Showalter: Unpublished Writings1
Most of Julie’s fully edited and buffed writings are already available on this site at Julie’s Writings. I have hesitated to include her other pieces I’ve found on her computer or in her office that range from workshop exercises to story fragments to projects set aside to finish at a later day to work that appears, at least to me, to be fully as polished and effective as her published stories.2
Beyond casual conversation (her mention, for example, over dinner of a conversation with an editor who planned to use one of her stories), I was not routinely privy to the status of her writing projects until they were accepted for publication so the extent to which Julie was or was not satisfied with most of these efforts is unknown to me.
In the past month or two, however, I have read and re-read these unpublished pieces and have found some moving and wonderful, and so, fully acknowledging that I am hardly an unbiased critic, I have decided to share a few.
Aunt Mona is the first of these offerings from the “Unpublished Julie” portfolio.
To view Aunt Mona by Julie Showalter in manuscript form, click on this link:
Aunt Mona by Julie Showalter– View
To download a PDF version of Aunt Mona by Julie Showalter, right-click on the next link, and choose “Save Target As …”
Download PDF of Aunt Mona by Julie Showalter
Footnotes
- Julie was my much-beloved, fiercely smart, extraordinarily sexy wife, who died in 1999 from cancer diagnosed the week of our wedding nearly 20 years earlier. She was also a prize-winning writer. This blog includes many other posts about her and the unlikely but true story of our romance (See Julie FAQ) as well as several of her short stories and other pieces. ~back~
- As might be expected, some of the documents in this section, especially those not subjected to proofreading or revisions, have more grammatical and spelling errors than Julie’s published work, and many are incompletely processed as literature. I chose to include each piece as it stood, warts and all, rather than subject it to my uneven editing. ~back~
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The Bestest Christmas
The Bestest Christmas
Last week, Lawanda & I were waxing nostalgic and happened onto the ambiguously defined topic of Bestest Christmas Memory. Lawanda’s story was touching, wonderful, uncomplicated, profound, gleeful, poignant, heartening, and, I realized, exactly the gift to offer others this Christmas Day.
The child of doting parents and the youngest sibling, by many years, of a horde of indulgent brothers and sisters, Lawanda was the unwitting star of a long-running series of theatrical productions featuring her as ingénue of an ensemble troupe with family members playing support roles, exquisitely and exhaustively stage-managing the shows, and serving as adoring audience.
A seasonal favorite, as one might guess, was the annual Christmas pageant, central to which was the assumption that Santa Claus was a dramatic, all-embracing, benevolent figure no less real for completing his seemingly impossible tasks out of sight of those whose lives he blessed – not unlike, say, the original Mayor Daley.
While the script varied somewhat from year to year, the recurrent motifs of “Lawanda’s Christmas” were the preparations for and accumulation of evidence of Santa’s visit. The latter category included sooty footprints beginning and ending beneath the chimney, partially eaten remnants of the snack left for Saint Nick and the chow left for his reindeer, and sound effects congruent with rooftop landings of flying sleighs. The cumulative effect was utterly convincing.
Lawanda’s self-assessed shining moment from the multitude of these Christmas performances took place in her ninth year as the juvenile lead of the ensemble troupe sometimes known as her family and featured an instance which crystallized and preserved for all time her dramaturgical talent for playing her role with absolute conviction.
Running a Christmas Eve errand with her father, perhaps her greatest fan, Lawanda glimpsed something in her peripheral vision. Although whatever had caught her eye has vanished within the fraction of a second required to shift her focus, she knew, whole-heartedly and unquestionably, that she had seen Santa Claus in his reindeer-powered sleigh flying across the sky on his delivery route.
The remaining plot is anti-climatic. Lawanda gleefully informed her father that she had just seen Santa Claus making his rounds, her father acknowledged her report without any suggestion of surprise, let alone doubt, and, on their return home, she found, indeed, that Santa had already delivered her usual bonanza of gifts.
Lawanda’s glance of a shared myth, however, distilled and condensed into that instance the innocence, security, delight, unalloyed joyfulness, enchantment, affection, and all that is special in a childhood that was imperfect, as all childhoods are, but nonetheless suffused with love, which is not true of all childhoods.
If the celebrations, customs, and costs of Christmas has accomplished nothing other than that moment during which that nine year old saw Santa flying through the sky, I would maintain that it’s been a worthwhile effort.
Merry Christmas, Lawanda.
And Merry Christmas to each of you.