Mancation

A few years ago a buddy of mine and I decided to start a new tradition.  He and I have been friends since kindergarten.  Our lives have taken us in separate directions and as a result we have settled down and started families in different parts of the country.  Nevertheless we remain close pals.  During a visit, and after a few beers, we established an annual “Mancation”.  This is very similar to a vacation, with just a few exceptions.  The biggest exception is we leave our families at home.  We try to center the trip on activities we normally wouldn’t force the wife and kidd-o’s to go through.  In theory we would do tough guy stuff like running with the bulls, scaling Everest or K-2, or competing in the National Hot Dog Eating Contest.  In practice this turns out to be some rough camping that we are only semi-prepared for, fishing, drinking, scratching ourselves, and generally acting like we’re back in high school.  Basically being guys without parental/husband responsibilities of looking out for anyone but you.  Did I mention the scratching?  There’s a lot of that.

This year’s trip was a great example of the importance of proper reconnaissance.  It was my year to host the Mancation, so I tried to pick something on Texas’ Gulf Coast.  It was the perfect idea.  This part of Texas has fantastic fishing and a number of camp grounds to pick from.  Asking around I was told Matagorda Bay (on the Texas Gulf Coast) would be perfect for what I wanted.  I found just the place.  Goose Island had camp grounds right on the beach, a pier to fish from, and some interesting sights to see.  I booked a camp site and felt pretty good about myself.  This was going to be great!

Trouble started on the drive down.  As it turns out the trip from Houston is anything but a straight shot.  We took a left here, a right there, another left (I think), and wound up in a city called Victoria.  Yahoo! directions failed me again.  Can someone explain to me what a “slight” left is supposed to be?  Maybe we were only “slightly” lost.  But all was not lost.  As we drove aimlessly through the town of Victoria, 2007 population 62,246, we found the single best store promotion we have ever seen.  I immediately pulled the car over and went in to do a little spur-of-the-moment shopping.  (The sign reads:  Shop NAKED And Save)  Interesting side note, off to the right of the store is a dance studio.  Unbeknownst to us as we paraded around and took pictures in various stages of undress a busload of adolescent ballerinas-in-training was sitting just to our right.  We noticed their shocked little faces too late.  We left the parking lot to the sounds of shocked children and distant sirens.

Eventually we made it to Goose Island, but our luck didn’t change.  As we pulled up to the camp site we were pretty happy.  Sure enough we were right on the beach.  We had a fantastic view of the Gulf and could fish until the wee hours from our own front porch.  But as we got out of the car things went terribly wrong.  The first problem was the smell.  Ouch.  Turns out we are going to spend the next three days in a place called “Stinky Beach”.  They didn’t mention that on the website.  It didn’t take us long to discover that the smell could be overcome with booze.  After drinking the hard stuff the senses were dulled enough to make the smell tolerable. 

Our first order of business was to pitch the tent.  Now my buddy and I are not novice tent pitchers (hee, hee, I said “tent pitcher”).  We were both in the Boy Scouts and we both served in the Army.  We know how to play outdoors and enjoy it.  But today’s tent pitching held a few challenges.  First the tent was brand new.  And it’s big, way too big for two people.  Bass Pro had a sale and I bought it with the intention of using it with the kids in the future.  Neither of these would really be a problem if we hadn’t been working in tropical storm like conditions.  Seems one of the drawbacks to camping on the shore is the complete lack of protection from the wind.  And our luck had the wind blowing straight out to sea.  More than twice we had to perform heroic, cinematic, slow motion dives to rescue important tent pieces from Neptune’s clutches.  Just over an hour later we declared victory.  We proudly drank a beer and watched as our poorly constructed tent flapped, floundered, and clinged to its precarious perch on the beach.  We have about a 50/50 chance of finding this tent on its way to Cuba.  

Some of you may have noticed in the picture another big problem a little homework would have helped.  You see our “beach” was made of crushed oyster shells.  That’s right, it was basically rocks.  We were camping on rocks.  Fun.  These little critters only appear smooth and weather worn to the naked eye.  A close inspection, with say your back as you try to sleep, reveals them to be razor sharp instruments of relentless torture.  The marbled terrain poised a number of problems for us.  The most obvious was sleep.  Don’t get me wrong we used our self-medication methods to help with the problem, but it only dulled the pain.  There was not a soft spot anywhere in the 16-man tent; I spent every night searching for one.  But there were unforeseen problems with the mollusk shells.  They caught the bottom of the tent.  We ran a real risk of punching a hole in the bottom of the tent on its maiden voyage.  Luckily we had a tarp and it saved the tent floor.  Our second problem had no simple solution.  The tent came with plastic stakes.  Plastic.  Stakes.  Try anchoring a tent to the rocky ground with a piece of plastic.  It doesn’t work.  We broke all but one steak.  Our tent’s only anchorage depended on a handful of misshapen pieces of plastic.  (Now that I think about it, I’m surprised how often men trust our immediate and long-term future to flimsily pieces of plastic)  The chances of finding the tent in the ocean just jumped to 70/30. 

Now that we have the business portion of camping complete it's time to have some fun.  We went fishing; if there are fish out there two Cajun boys born and raised in Southern Louisiana can catch them.  All we really need is a sitck, some string, a few beers, and something fish beliebe is edible and we will have our limit in no time flat.  Give us real poles, a good line, a LOT of beer, and good bait and it hardly seems fair for our aquatic friends.  We reeled in some whopper!  I fought one of these bad boys for almost an hour, and my buddy pulled a muscle bringing one home. 

Goose Island wasn’t all nautical fun.  It seems it has another attraction that brings people from far and wide.  Goose Island is home to the “Big Tree”.  Yep, that’s what they call it.  I thought I thought trees had cool names like Evangeline in Louisiana, or Treaty Oak in Austin, or even LSU campus’ Pee-Tree.  But here it’s just Big Tree, good job, very creative.  But when you see it in person it sure is big.  We took a trip to the Big Tree.  We looked at the Big Tree.  We took some pictures of the Big Tree.  We read the plaque describing the Big Tree.  I had an epiphany there.  Things like the Big Tree take about five minutes to enjoy.  Don’t get me wrong I liked it, and I think I would have missed out if we were that close and didn’t get a chance to see it.  But once you’re there you see the tree, you say, “Yep, that sure is a big tree”, and that’s that.

Three days of fishing, camping, drinking, and lying to each other pretty much recharged the batteries.  It’s an astonishing thing to realize how little we need to refresh ourselves.  A moment without work, parental, or spousal duty is good to have every now and again.  It helps you appreciate what you come back to.

Pictures?

I’ve gotten some e-mails telling me that a good blog needs some pictures.  I’m told that plain text just doesn’t cut the mustard these days.  They say that today’s blog reader needs interesting visual references if they are going to stay interested.  This puts me in a tough spot.  Because not only do I need to write interesting prose I need to come up with some good pictures too.  That’s going to be difficult since I make most of this stuff up.  Maybe I can stage a few pictures and write around the narrative they create.  Or just copy some pictures from other blogs and pretend they are all about my crazy antics.  So don’t scoff if I look like a black fella with an afro in one post and a Swede in the next.  It’s just because I’m trying to keep up with the times.

Keeping Me Regular

The Misses tells me that it's no good having a blog if I don't regularly post anything.  "No one will ever read it," she says.  I didn't bother to point out that there would be nothing to read so of course no one would ever read it, kinda like trees succumbing to gravity in vacant wooded areas.  But that line of argument would only have gotten me in trouble for being obtuse, so I bit my tongue (but I didn't bite my typing fingers...hmmm...is it possible to get in trouble after the fact?  I bet I can.  I hope I'm wrong).

In order to improve readership, even though I have no way of knowing who reads this anyway, I will endeavor to post at least one blog a week.  Not enough interesting things happen to me to fill a once-a-week void, but I’m good at making things up.  So sometimes I’ll just pretend interesting things happened.  For instance, did I mention that I was recently elected the country’s first black President?  My parents are so proud…

A Blog About Nothing

I was thinking about nothing the other day.  For those of you who know me well, you probably believe this is not noteworthy, and certainly not blog-worthy.  Most of you believe I do nothing most of the time, so I should probably be thinking of nothing while I’m doing it (or is it more accurate to say “not doing it”)?  Anyway that’s not the “nothing” I’m talking about.  I’m talking about actual nothingness, not just the absence of thinking.

What started me on this line of thought was drinking a beer.  After I finished my brew, I took a look at the mug.  It was a good mug, and it lead me think about cups in general.  Cups, bowls, and empty vessels, they are pretty important things.  But the important part of a cup lies not in what the cup is, but what it is not.  Without the empty spot in the middle a cup the cup isn’t much use.  The bowl would be a plate, a platter, or a Frisbee, or something, all of those are a far cry from a bowl.  So I though about the nothing in my poor empty beer mug and decided I need a refill.  BARKEEP…

A few days later I came back to nothing and thought I’d write this blog about it.  Maybe it’s interesting, then again maybe it isn’t.  Either way something about nothing is what this blog is mostly about.

I never realized how important nothing is to our every day living.  First of all we need lots of empty things to get us through the day.  We fill things up all the time as we get on with our daily minutiae.   Empty backpacks get stuffed, empty chairs get sat in, empty brains get filled (in some cases), empty gas tanks get filled and drained, empty lots get houses, empty closets get packed to the brim with accumulated junk, the list goes on.    We use nothing all the time and never think twice.  And it’s not just us.

On a larger, cosmic scale, nothing dominates the universe.  Not getting deep here, I’ll probably never do that (Gnarls Barkley was talking about me in Who Cares? when he sang, “It’s deep how you can be so shallow.”).  I’m talking about the actual nothingness of space.  Most of the universe consists of nothing.  Big Empty Nothing, in capitol letters.  The nothing to something ratio heavily favors the nothing side of the equation.  This is probably a good thing for us sense it keeps Earth from bumping into inconvenient asteroids, and the Sun from rubbing metaphoric elbows with other stars and in general nothing keeps us safe from galactic turf battles that would create an apocalyptic bad hair day on a cosmic scale. 

But ok, I mean space is a big place so there’s lots of room for nothing, kinda makes sense.  On the complete opposite end of the scale we still find a lot of nothing.  The atomic universe is also filled with nothing.  The space between the nucleus and the orbiting electron(s) of an atom is vacuum, nothingness.  (Before I get an e-mail from you do-it-yourself quantum physicists, I do understand the wave function of the s-orbit of these electrons may be thought of as “filling” the whole space, and the area may also be filled with weak force exchanging bosons/photons between the electron and nucleus. But for the sake of this blog we’ll call that nothing, since it’s still vacuum.)  And outside the atom there’s still nothing; nothing between the atoms themselves.  Admittedly a little less nothing in my granite counter top compared to Number One Son’s inhaler, but still nothing inside everything we think of as something.  That’s a lot of nothing floating around out there not just in the bottom of my beer mug.

Not only is nothing important on a physical level, we need nothing on an emotional level.  How often do we look forward to doing nothing?  When the chance arrives people will set aside a weekend to do nothing.  It’s almost like scheduling an anti-vacation.  We set aside the time in advance, plan what we will not do, and look forward to the big, empty weekend.  Then we return to work on Monday and tell our coworkers about “wasting” two straight days.  The exploits attract envious stares that almost rival descriptions of fantastic Caribbean getaways (that feature doing nothing just in a more exotic location, with suntan lotion, and frozen drinks).  Doing nothing provides us a moment to recharge the batteries for the 90% of the time we are doing something.  If you have kids that percentage may be 110% of the time.

This Thanksgiving when you take your annual minute recite the list of things we’re supposed to appreciate every day (but still don’t) things that fall in some form of “health”, “wealth”, and “family” add “nothing” to this year’s list.  You may get a funny look for saying it out loud around the table, but who cares?  You may also get a funny look for accidently sloping pumpkin pie on your shirt, but it won’t stop you from eating it anyway.

Voting for Perks

The ability to vote in [mostly] free and fair elections is something we Americans have been [mostly] blessed since the day we declared independence and sent King George III’s men packing back to England.  (Skipping over the details of women’s sufferage and the whole 3/5 thing, don’t get bent out of shape, it’s just not the point of this blog.)

 

For the last couple of hundred years the perks of voting have remained the same.  Now they are good perks, don’t get me wrong.  We get to promote our best and brightest individuals to the highest office in the Free World.  They then work tirelessly for the betterment of every citizen and sometimes even manage to make lives better in far off countries that most of us cannot find on a map.  Places we’ve never heard of like Iraq or Tripoli or Viet Nam or somewhere.  That’s a pretty nice perk to voting.  Make our lives better and help the third-world children to boot, that’s a good deal.

 

Some perks are not quite as altruistic, but still nice.  Take for instance the entertainment value of Presidential Elections.  This must be a perk because it keeps expanding.  Ever since the Lincoln/Douglass debate sold out train stations across the US, Americans have been clamoring for Presidential Election theater.  Newspapers used the Adams/Jefferson election to hock fish wrap all the way back in 1796.  Every year the perk of election entertainment gets a little more expanded.  Modern times have seen televised debates and lavish conventions/pep-rallies.  This year a few examples of the theater perk include a 24-hour election radio channel (P.O.T.U.S. ’08 on XM radio), more televised debates than I can count, a primetime Pres-o-mercial, and daily fodder for 24-hour talk shows and news broadcasts.  We like Presidential theater so much we can’t even wait four years for it to start.  This year a few states helped out and moved the caucuses up a few months so we could extend the entertainment season to over a year of presidential intrigue. 

 

Another perk comes in the form of cold hard cash.  This must be a perk, I’m just not sure how it works.  I mean when you spend this much money on something someone, somewhere has to be cashing in.  This year the candidates spent over a BILLION bucks on the race.  This perk is a little trickier to understand then the last one, but someone, somewhere is making out like gangbusters every four years.  Maybe there’s something for me in here…I think I’ll spend the next four years figuring out the proper way to print signs and buttons and bumper–stickers and stuff.  That’s where the money is getting spent right…?

 

The last perk is entirely new.  How’s this grab ya, vote for someone and get free stuff.  You heard me right they’re giving away free stuff to voters.  “Oh, you voted today?  Good job, don’t worry about feeling good having exercized your civic duty and all that ethereal stuff, here have a taco.”  Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea, and I like encouraging people to vote.  It’s just that this seems awfully close to bribery.  Here are a few of the voting giveaways:

Starbucks – get a free coffee for voting.

Krispy Kreme – get a free doughnut for voting.

Ben & Jerry’s – get a free scoop of ice cream for voting.

California Taco – get a free taco for voting (and tacos aren’t even American Food!)

Various Bars – get a free beer for voting (you’ll have to find your own bar, I don’t want all of you crowding my haunts).

There are more, but I got tired of looking for them.  I think you get the picture.

 

Has anyone noticed the regression of perks?  They go from the original idea of making the world a better place to focusing on frivolous entertainment to virtual bribery.  I’ll think more about that as I stumble into the third Starbucks within a square mile of my house, licking sugar off of fingers trying to figure out how to work a cage-match into the primaries and worrying about how our next president will help the poor deprived people of Country-Not-Yet-Determined.

 

 

The Election

My limited research on blogs tells me that every single one of them is required to comment routinely on the political landscape.  I believe there is a memo somewhere that is sent to blog owners informing them of the rule.  I’m not sure what happens to those who disobey but I think it has something to do with an uncomfortable chair, a damp noodle, Chinese finger-cuffs, and a midget.  In my case The Misses has gotten involved.  She thinks I need to make my feelings on the election known to the world in order to do my part in adverting a tragic mistake on the part of the voting public.  Well, if the news is to be believed the election has already been decided and this blog can only be used as an, “I told you so” in four years time.

 

So what do I think about these two candidates?  They are both bad.  We have a “Republican” who will spend more money than Imelda Marcos at Payless, and a “Democrat” who thinks Lennin was a fiscal conservative.  Our choices are leftist or super-leftist. 

 

Obama scares me, and here are a few reasons why:

Healthcare.  He wants to nationalize it.  There are some interim steps in there but the end result is nationalization.  I think healthcare in this country is a mess, and I don’t have a good idea of how to fix it.  But I cannot think of one thing the government runs well.  If you can think of an example please forward it to me.  Government agencies are usually the butt of jokes, and the bigger they are the more useless they become.  When was the last time you thought the DMV was helpful?  When was the last time you looked forward to dealing with the Social Security office?  When was the last time you said to yourself, “Everything will be OK now, FEMA is here”?  Bigger government and more regulations are not the answer.  Specifically I don’t understand why any small business would offer healthcare under Obama’s plan.  Why should a small business owner incur the cost when employees can get their own coverage in the government plan?  When pressed about this in one of the debates Obama said small business owners would be give tax credits to help them “do the right thing”.  Do the right thing?  We should also hold hands and sing peace songs while we’re at it.

 

Taxes.  Obama has engaged in class warfare plain and simple.  Now I’m an opponent of the whole Income Tax idea in the first place.  It will be the subject of a blog one day I’m sure.  The idea of taxing the penalizing the rich to help the poor just doesn’t work.  Redistribution of wealth is a bad idea.  I say again, redistribution of wealth is a bad, bad idea.  It stifles growth, kills incentive, and demoralizes individuals.  There is a word for this taxation system, socialism, and it doesn’t work.  Originally the income tax was passed because Congress promised it would only be used to tax the rich.  Now just about everyone pays income tax.  Governments are greedy, it constantly takes more and more the feed the beast of bureaucracy.  The $250 thousand number hasn’t even lasted 12 months.  Already it’s slipping down to $200 (as stated in Obama’s primetime infomercial) or $150 as stated by Biden.  Just like the income tax it will continue to drop until everyone is affected.

 

Iraq.  I don’t know if I agree Obama here, it depends on which version he’s supporting this week.  If Obama settles on his promise to pull everyone out within a few months, I do not concur.  If he settles on the promise to listen to generals on the ground and follow their advice, then I agree.  I just don’t know which policy he will follow.  Obama claims that he’s gonna save a ton of money ($10 billion a month) by pulling troops out and this will help pay for some of his programs.  But he also says he needs to deploy those same troops to Afghanistan.  Did I miss something; did we get a discount from Afghanistan and deploying troops there?

 

Education.  I actually like most of Obama’s ideas here.  I don’t know how he will pay for it, but I like the ideas.  The only thing I disagree with him on is the vouchers.  Vouchers work, and I support them. But you can’t agree on everything, so overall I think this is the one area where Obama has a pretty good plan.

 

Personal associations.  Obama is a mess.  You know the names Rezko, Ayers, Jones Jr., Khalidi, and Rev. Wright.  One or two you could overlook as a bad idea, but put them together and it starts to make you wonder.  If this guy knew he was gonna run for president one day he should have distanced himself from them a long time ago.  I’m not running for any public office but I can tell you beyond the shadow of a doubt none of the people in my extended circle of friends are unrepentant terrorists, white supremacists, or embezzlers.  I can’t remember a politician who had this many questionable friends since Gary Heart took a ride on the “Love Boat”.

 

Voting record.  Present?  Present?  Seriously?  There’s a term for that it’s called chickensh*t.  If you have problems with legislation vote it down. 

 

After re-reading this blog I realized I could have probably save myself some time and cut and pasted it from Limbaugh or Hannity or one of those guys.  Those fellas are entertainers, not real people.  Here’s my opinion in a nutshell (and it took 940 words to get there) I’m worried Obama’s policies will send us into a deep recession.  Obama’s policies mirror those of President Hoover and that didn’t work out too well for the country.