How Dolly Parton Saved my Cousin's Life

In which your humble narrator explains, on the occasion of her 65th birthday, why Dolly is revered in his household.

My mother and her sister (my eldest aunt) are less than a year apart in age and have traditionally done lots of major life steps nearly synchronously. They married near the same time, had children at the same time and divorced at the same time. As such, sister-of-me and I spent lots of time with our similarly-aged cousins during the tandem dissolution of our respective parents' marriages.

This time together includes one particularly interesting vacation; two Moms, four kids go on the road for good times and adventure. Predictably the squabbling began almost as soon as we crossed the border from Ohio into Kentucky (about 20 minutes into the trip). Six people. One crew-cab pick-up truck. 3,675 lbs. of luggage (Mom and Auntie are not adherents of the "packing light" philosophy). We drove down. We stayed in a beach house for a week sniping at each other. At the end of the week we packed up and left for home.

By the end of the week, each of us was harboring murderous impulses toward my cousin (lets's call him Fusspot). Fusspot had spent the week complaining. About everything. All the time. He picked fights with his Mom, with his sister, with seagulls, with inanimate objects. In all fairness, it wasn't really his fault. There is a long standing rule in my family of origin that someone must ruin vacation. If the usual vacation ruiner cannot perform his or her duties, a replacement will be appointed and proceed to do everything in his or her power to provide an unpleasant experience. It has been this way since time immemorial, and so it shall be done until the end of vacations/time.

As we meandered northerly toward home, the air seethed with murderous intent. Fusspot continued to loudly air every grievance that entered his adolescent brain. At rest stops my sister and I debated whether it would be better to throw Fusspot off of a mountain top in rural North Carolina, or if we should simply make a break for it and start new lives as country western singers in Tennessee. The long knives were unsheathed.

And at about this time my aunt remembered that she had brought a book on tape. Perhaps that would help pass the time through the surprisingly heavy traffic. It was Dolly Parton's recently published audio autobiography, "Dolly: My Life and other Unfinished Business."

Her dulcet-toned delivery of the story of her hardscrabble* upbringing in Sevierville, Tennessee, her marriage to a recluse, her entertainment career, and her many reflections on her hairdos were the music that soothed the savage beast. Every single one of us was mesmerized by Dolly's harrowing tale of poverty and triumph. We were transfixed by her tendency to break into song while she told the story of her childhood. It was weird. Dolly is weird. Dolly's take on her experiences is blithely optimistic to the point of delusion, but sort of awesome?  But most importantly, Dolly did the talking. For a blessed four hours everyone shut the hell up, and we didn't commit murder. And that's how Dolly Parton saved my cousin's life.

*The use of the word "hardscrabble" is mandatory in any piece of writing concerning Ms. Parton.

Practical Jokery

In which your humble narrator discusses unimplemented plans for messing with his wife's head.

I actually almost never engage in practical jokery, which is sort of a shame since I'm really, really good at coming up with things that would completely annoy/surprise Wife-a-roo. It's a double pity because this is a woman who has gratifyingly large reactions to moderately startling circumstances. You can walk up to her, tell her that you now plan to hide behind a sofa and then jump out and yell "boo!" at her in exactly 43 seconds. She'll still jump when you do it. Here are some fun, unimplemented plans for messing with my wife's head.

1. Whenever I happen on the book that she's reading, I will flip one page forward. 
2. Reprogram Child #2's talking robot bear to say (and sing!) wife's name in that creepy robot bear voice it has. Then I shall put it on wife's pillow while she's mumbling about sleeping for "five more minutes*" and turn it on.
   
3. Pour regular cow milk into her rice milk cartons.
4. The next time I edit one of her papers on sexual health research, I will search for the term "sex" and replace it with the term "doin' it." "Sexual" will be replaced with "freak-nasty."
   

And last, even though I didn't do it, I should give an an honorable mention to Sister-of-me who changed Wife-a-roo's homepage to babyeinstein.com. Much flabbergasted sputtering ensued.


*Or, you know, 40 more minutes.

Watcha got cookin'?

In which your humble narrator talks about food, even though maybe he really shouldn't.

I cook. And for the most part, I cook because I enjoy it. It's the least odious component of housewifery as far as I'm concerned. I read books about food. I listen to radio programs about food. I have what's grown into an actual collection of cookbooks. I used to just own cookbooks, but then I started buying weird, non-utilitarian cookbooks with recipes for turkeys stuffed with weiners, tripe, 60's style canapes, et cetera. Once you go down the road of just buying cookbooks for the awful food photography or weird antiquated prose dedicated to the "noble onion," I'm pretty confident that it qualifies as a "collection." I nabbed this from flickr, but it does appear in one of my cookbooks from the 1960's-1970s "creative period" in American cookery.

What always shocks me is that someone spent time creating such a putrid dish. I sincerely doubt that it had been "a winner at the dinner table for generations" when this was published.

The only thing that Americans are more neurotic about than sex is food. Rather than food being an enjoyable component of the whole "staying alive" thing that we've all got going on, it's become yet another arena in which we get to broadcast our social and political viewpoints to the world. I fully cop to being snooty about food. I prefer organic stuff when I can afford it. We don't eat highly processed stuff. We generally avoid food with scary chemical ingredients. But mostly I've made those decisions because the snooty foods taste better and are generally better for us. Yet, I don't think that really confers any moral superiority on me. I think dinner should just be dinner most of the time. And that means not talking about the food and its pedigree while you're at the table. And at the same time, I realize that most people eat garbage. Yet somehow I don't think looking down my nose at people the shop for groceries at Wal-Mart is going to lead them to make better choices when it comes to food. Manufacturers of food-like products have spent a lot of time and money convincing us that we don't have the time to cook and then offering us "convenience foods" that taste yucky and aren't very convenient. The greatest success of American advertising has been to convince us all how busy* we are. But hey! Here's a miracle product that will solve that problem.

When we were kids, my sister and I would ask Dad what was for dinner:

Us: What's for dinner, Pop?
Dad: Food.
Us: What kind of food?
Dad: Good food.
Us: Yeah, but what is it old man? We're too short to see what you're doing on the counter there.
Dad: Good food that you will like.
Us: You are completely obnoxious.
Dad: Yes.

And the thing is... I do this to my wife all the time. She's a picky eater, so I don't like to tell her what's in dinner because then she'll spend twenty minutes trying to pick out the offending ingredient (usually a vegetable).

My Mom was asking what motivated this behavior the other day. "Why does everyone always ask and why does the cook never want to answer the question?" I told her it was like when you buy a gift for someone and do a fancy job wrapping it up and then you finally present it to her and she sits there with a fully wrapped present on her lap and asks, "What is it?" And you say, "What the hell is wrong with you? Just open the damn thing!"

Sit down and enjoy the meal.

*Here's a handy test of whether you are "busy": 

1. Do you watch Dancing with the Stars, America's Next Top Model, Project Runway or Oprah?
2. Do you have machines that wash and dry your clothes for you?
3. Do you have indoor plumbing?
   
4. Do you have time to take footnoted blog tests?

If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, you are not "busy" so please do not talk to me about it.

I married a sex researcher

In which your humble narrator comments on his Wife's profession and a book he recently managed to finish reading.

It's an absolute delight to tell people that you're married to a sex researcher. It's even better if you're telling local, born 'n' bred Minnesotans. Their little eyes get big and narrow quickly. Then they pronounce it "interesting," which is Minnesota-Speak for either "that is so boring that I will probably die right now" or "that is too horrifying to even contemplate; I have no choice but to go into a coma."

Wife wasn't a sex researcher when I married her, but that's what she does now. It's actually much, much, much more boring than you think it is. She mostly does fancy (and sexy) math and writes statistical program syntax and consults on research methodology for the faculty in her department.

If you know the history of sex research (or as I prefer: sexy research) you know that it all started with Alfred Kinsey, a voyeuristic, scientific, hedonistic, occasionally masochistic researcher at Indiana University who collected a lot of super-smutty data from a lot of perverted people. He was also one of two main characters in T.C. Boyle's The Inner Circle, a fictionalized account of Kinsey's sexy research as told by a fictional assistant, John Milk. Boyle's portrait of Kinsey isn't particularly flattering. He is presented largely as a somewhat cold, compulsive man whose control over those who surrounded him extended even into the bedroom. All in all, Liam Neeson seemed a lot nicer in the movie.

What was striking about this book was the listlessness of the novel. Boyle usually creates characters, that even if you don't particularly like, are at least interesting. In this volume he took a man who was arguably one of the more interesting scientists of the twentieth century and makes him into a stern, creepy controlling father figure for a bleating little weiner-man narrator.

Somehow I thought the book would be a lot more salacious. But then again I thought being married to a sex researcher would be too.

By Alphabet

In which your humble narrator describes a project designed solely to amuse himself in an inexpensive fashion and further comments on Edward Abbey, Reinaldo Arenas and Fidel Castro.

This summer, casting about for something to read, too poor to buy a book I wanted, too lazy to walk three blocks to the library, I picked up the first book from our alphabetized living room shelves. It happened to be Edward Abbey's "Hayduke Lives." I must have gotten it nearly free when I worked at the used bookstore. Boy was it a stinker. It turns out my complete disinterest in the American West that Abbey loved made it a pretty dull read. I have a low tolerance for the moral superiority that people who live in "beautiful" places show toward the rest of us. The literature of the West is streaked through with the assumption that the grandeur of the landscape somehow how reflects the character of its inhabitants. Horse pucky. Go eat at a Perkins in Wyoming and try to tell me about the noble character of the locals.

Thoroughly annoyed with myself for owning such a dull, pedantic book I started to wonder what other turd blossoms lurked on my shelves. So I kept reading, alphabetically any book that I'd never before read. I didn't stop reading other things (I usually have 4-5 books "going" at any given time). This brings me to last night. The Wife was using the computer preventing me from playing a dumb game on Facebook so I was forced to entertain  myself with reading a book. I grabbed the next alphabetical candidate from the shelf: Reinaldo Arena's "The Assault."

Wowee! If I were to describe this charming little tome in one word, I would choose: "scatological." And I'm pretty sure it was even filthier in the original Spanish. Arenas, who fled the Castro regime for Miami presents a horrible totalitarian/collectivist dystopia with a healthy dose of oedipal complex. Narrated by an agent of the regime, an inhuman, merciless man, the novel follows his travels through the countryside in search of his hated mother whom he suspects of being a "whisperer," or enemy of the state. Long story short: lots of traveling,  torture and executions, and then it finally turns out that his mother is the head of the regime so the narrator kills her with his penis. Fun, huh?

Frankly, it was pretty hysterical. I'm certainly not an apologist for Castro. I have no use for the certain type of comfortable, American liberal who idealizes the regime in Cuba. Castro has never been a benevolent dictator. That said, I'm not sure what use Arenas' over-the-top, exaggerated, dystopic horror film, in book form, really serves.