Honea Express

Archive for the ‘Random Is As Random Does’ Category

There are two cats in the room. One is white. One is black. I’m told that some website with a cheeseburger fetish has a name for them, something about a basement, a ceiling, heaven and hell. It sounds fairly racist to me. The cats are sleeping on a green rug. I feel a sudden urge to play a game of Othello. I resist it. The cats are locked in a heated battle of who could care less. We are all winners.

Through the kitchen, down the steps and into the living room there are two boys turning on a carousel. One moment they tug at war, the next gives peace a chance. It’s up and down and round and round and the echo of their laughter blends with the screams that lead and follow.

The youngest has a cough. Every hack heightens my senses. Every bark burns in my chest. He ignores the symptoms. They are an inconvenience. I feel a tickle in my throat and prepare for the worst.

The oldest is talking about his namesake, the middle one. John Lennon turns 70 tomorrow, or would have, and I tell him to imagine it. To give peace a chance. He tells me that his school had a lockdown drill today and they had to place their faces on the floor and wait there quietly. I try to imagine it.

The other night my wife woke me up sometime after midnight. There were bears on our street, a mother and two cubs. I could see them in the neighbor’s trash. I shone a flashlight on them and we looked into each other but for the darkness around us. I found it unnerving. No doubt they found it annoying.

It is Friday, late afternoon, and my work is not done. There are talks of dinner and shows we recorded after school night bedtimes. There are deadlines unmet and a dog that desperately needs a bath. The lawn could use a good mowing. People I know are losing loved ones. Children in schools are being shot. I have scripts to read and meetings come Monday. It is Friday, late afternoon, and I am sitting here still while the world spins madly on.

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And this brought a tear to my eye.

Hello, and welcome to a new feature which I’ll most likely only do once, the Wednesday Review! The Wednesday Review is where I review some products that were sent to me for said reviewing. I have a whole policy on this, which you can find here, but mark me, I don’t review something unless I like it. If I don’t like it then I wrap the item in newspaper and pass it off as a gift to one of my backup friends on their respective birthday and/or religious holiday. Unless it really sucks, then I’ll tell you all about it, because that’s my obligation to you, the reader.

If you read the fine print on the side of the box you will also undoubtedly be aware that this first, and possibly only, edition of the Wednesday Review! also includes tidbits and news! Contents may have shifted, but probably not.

First the tidbits and the news. I’m not really sure how to tell them apart, so tidbits and news will be lumped together for your reading enjoyment:

• I got a new job! Actually, I got more than one, but only one is live and it’s a big deal (especially to my previously starving children). I’m now on staff over at BabyCenter as part of their FameBaby site. As a matter of fact, I just welcomed myself. In public.
• You may recall me talking about my friend Troy Olsen and his new single.  Well, he’s doing great. Since my post, but not because of my post, he has been featured on iTunes twice. He’s also been all over some country charts and his Summer Thing video is popular on CMT.
• The lovely Dan Hughes and his band of merry men and women are currently underway on their epic walk for a cause. The Hadrian’s Walk is an amazing undertaking and I’m truly sorry that my finances prevented me from being a part of it.  Yes, I know, we’re taking the family to Walt Disney World this summer, but a) the total cost of airfare, park tickets and accommodations for the four of us going to WDW is less than the airfare alone would have been for the two of us to fly to England, and b) holy crap, this vacation is biting me in the ass.
• Adventure Time With Finn and Jake is freaking killing me. It’s probably not good for kids, as they talk about death, kidnapping, farts and being sexy, but I let mine watch it anyway. They can’t hear anything over my laughter.
• I sell wine! Well, not me personally (although I used to sell wine personally at Cost Plus World Market many moons ago), but rather the Clever Girls Collective, of which I am a member — this despite my being neither clever or a girl, but I am collective and WINE!  There are deals and grapes and fancy descriptions and if you buy 3 bottles the shipping is FREE! Yes, free.

In closing (of this part), I have super, big and awesome things in the works that I can’t expand on at the moment because super, big awesome things didn’t fit in the title of this post, however, trust me, they are all that and more and I’ll be spilling as soon as possible, or as the kids say, ASAP.

This is turning out to be a really long post.

Okay, reviews! Reviews of stuff that I received for the sole purpose of reviewing! But only the things I like! Yes! You’ll see the crap I didn’t like on your birthday. Wrapped in newspaper.

Games from Hasbro: True story, until a few months ago we had a version of Chutes and Ladders that featured Dora the Explorer. The kids loved it and then subsequently broke it through a series of high kicks. We never had a version of Operation, but the neighbors did and the kids called it Surgery and it was good.

Enter the good people at Hasbro. They sent me two (2) games to review, a Toy Story 3 (and here’s my thought-provoking review of the film, free of charge) version of Chutes and Ladders and an Operation game that features Shrek. Needless to say, they’re a big hit.

The ladders go up, the chutes go down and everyone has a friend in me.  Also, Shrek has eaten things that would make the dog blush.

Please note, while I did not receive it there is also a Toy Story 3 edition of Connect 4, which can only mean one thing: sequel!

Okay, this is the part where you’re going to think I’m just angling for Hasbro to send me their entire Star Wars line (which would be awesome), but it’s the truth. Can you handle the truth? My kids freaking love these games, and here’s the weird part, we play them together as a family and we all have fun and there is NO TELEVISION REQUIRED, but sometimes we keep it on to watch the Daily Show.

Take that, video games and sexting!

And now for something completely different.

Man-bathing from Dove: No, they didn’t send me an actual man bathing, rather they inspired me to be one. Dove sent me a collection of their new (and first!) product line made exclusively for men: MEN+CARE.  To be clear, this is for men only, and if my wife is reading this she should consider herself warned. MEN+CARE has been known to grow hair on test animals. Of course those test animals were hairy men, but still, it could happen.

Perhaps you’re familiar with their “Wakey, Wakey” ad. Please note, there is no implication whatsoever that “wakey, wakey” should be followed by “hands off snaky.” You see, Dove is trying to market to men, not break them.

The items sent to me include the Active Clean shower tool, which is dual sided in case you’re entertaining, or even if you’re kind of boring. This isn’t your wife’s shower tool.  Insert crude joke here.

They also sent me Body and Face Wash as well as the Body and Face Bar. If you’re so dense as to have to ask the difference between the two, the wash has MICRO MOISTURE, duh. How the hell did you read this far? I swear.

The point is, the MEN+CARE line is made for men and it cleans deep and smells good. For the first time in years I can walk out of the shower not smelling like caramel butter and coconut mango. The guys in the locker room are ecstatic.

In fact, I just used it. Lean in and take a whiff. That’s man clean, baby.

And so, four hours into this post and I still have items left to discuss.  I think that I’ve guaranteed the return of the Wednesday Review! Or maybe not.  I like to keep you on your toes (and reaching for the stars).

Thanks for playing.

The fence is bent and unbreaking, but the gate isn’t locked.  The grass is uneven and showing wear, but it is equally green on the other side as it is on this one and I wonder if it’s because I’m a renter.

I own a home in another state where once we laughed and built treehouses in the yard, but now it sits empty with a sign in front and shells of echoes caught in dusty cobwebs.  We were happy there, but we weren’t.  This isn’t retrospect, this is a fact.  We knew we were happy and there were times that you may have mistaken the twinkle in our eyes for the stars that shone down upon them, and if you made such assumptions we would forgive you, because the only difference between those twinkles and the stars was distance and frankly, we were never that close.

Most of the time we listened to the wind howl and one of us would say something and the other one would nod and our blank stares through finger-smudged windows carried more weight than whatever it was we were talking about.

“If you look at that tree,” the boy said softly to no one, “with the green and red leaves in the sunlight, it looks like apples.

“We had an apple tree at the old house.”

And since he was talking to nobody nobody answered, except this time our gaze had focus and our silence had purpose and instead of pushing words down we were riding upon them and if there had been apples we would have picked one and shared it because one apple was enough between us. The green and red leaves on the tree in the sunlight bore no fruit and we weren’t that hungry as we’d just had breakfast, but when he walked away I did find that I was craving an apple and I turned my attentions to finding juice in the kitchen with varying degrees of success.

The day was long and covered in rays of gray.  The clouds and the sun fought and they twisted and there was much give and take, then finally they agreed to disagree and filled the sky with brilliantly lit buckets of rain and for the span of a shower I thought we might all get along and I stood on a field with a team of children and lost slick fly balls due to blindness and we found ourselves soaking wet and counting rainbows in the outfield.  There were nearly two more than I ever would have imagined.

“Probably won’t need any more fires this spring,” he said just moments before I walked in the door and built one.  What the hell did he know?  It was the last of the wood and the sky was still pouring pounds of prisms which were cold when they hit you and they hit me often because I am equal parts slow but mostly defiant. Standing before the open fire I dripped unwanted sprinkles like a man slowly melting. I left the puddle on the floor as something to remember me by and made a mental note to show the kids first thing in the morning, assuming I didn’t forget.

The boys went to bed after three gasps for air and the warmth of the fire filled the sudden stillness of the house. One of us grabbed a bottle of wine and the other played some songs on the stereo and from our seats we could watch the night as it came through the trees. and then it ran right past us. The glow from the flames flexed for a moment and then resigned itself to a more realistic pace once it realized we weren’t there to fight it.  There were things we could have said about the way that it danced or the bills left unpaid, but we’d said it all before and the room was better quiet.  The wine on her lips flirted fantastic.

The food court was alive. Tables were double-booked. It was a sea of trays and Gap bags.  There was a TV on without sound and music in the background that lacked any sort of soul.

I was a boy having lunch with his mother.  I was twelve. Give or take.

One man sat one table over.  He was in a suit that wore him cheaply. Even then I could see the frumpiness of it all.  He was wearing the required uniform and they did each other no favors.  He may have worked in the mall or perhaps the car lot across the street.  His lunch was in a brown paper sack as wrinkled as his jacket.  The shadows against it fell from the cloud looming above him.  His tension was cartoonish.

One man had a hampered gait and a fast smile.  He moved as quickly as his body would let him, darting between the busy tide of people to which he was all but invisible.  He took trays and wiped tables and he sang a little something to himself that echoed of happiness on repeat.  His manners were impeccable.

The crumpled man in the crumpled suit crumpled once more his once crumpled bag. He was careworn. He wore the ill-fitting suit like it had once been his father’s and the faded tweed was a weave of ghosts and disappointment pressed firmly across his back.  The cloud above him was dark and full of rain.  He rose from the table, put his hands in his pockets and walked away with far too much focus for a man of his nature.

The bag sat in the center of the table, a monument to his once was.  It sat there and slowly unraveled.  Time marched onward and the bag remained just one less thing that the man had to carry.

The man with the song on his breath circled the shrine.  Then again.  His eyes restless.  His mouth never stopping.  He searched the crowd for shades of tweed and finding none he took the brown bag and placed it in the trash.  He wiped the table until it glowed. And then his attentions were needed elsewhere.

I sat with my mother and ate my lunch.  Perhaps we chatted.  Perhaps my gaze returned to the quiet television.  Perhaps we were already done.

The man in the suit seemed taller when he returned.  His chin was firmer.  His face more red.  He stood at the glowing table and asked above the din as to the whereabouts of the bag he had left.

“The guy tossed it,” someone had said and suddenly the guy was standing there, no longer singing but looking sheepish and lost.  He tried to apologize but his tongue failed him.  He tried to apologize for doing his job.

The man in the suit proceeded to belittle, deprave and defame.  The man in the apron grew smaller and smaller.  The sparkle in his eyes turned soft and gray. His simple song fell muffled beyond silence.

The crowd marched onward. They cast glances and even looks of disgust, but they had trays in their hands and Gap bags on their wrists and there was something on the TV without sound that they could hide from their life in.  Theirs was a sound lacking any sort of soul.

“Stop it,” said a shaking voice from my shaking mouth. “He didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Mind your own business, kid,” replied the man, more or less, and his look was for my mother.

“You left the bag on the table,” I continued. “It was trash.”

And then he said other things that I can’t recall because I was overcome with anger and by that time someone much bigger than myself had decided that shouting at a child for defending a man with needs was even more than they could ignore. As the crowd grew bigger his cloud did too, and then the angry man went away for the second time without his bag and I think he looked at me but I wasn’t watching him.

I was watching a spark of doubt grow where happiness used to be.

Everybody falls from grace sometime. Athletes, politicians and actors tend to fall the farthest due to their pedestals being placed so high. And yet, fame bounces. The minute they hit bottom they start clawing their way back up.

Grace rains all around us. We know nothing but the space between dreams and the trampoline and the slight change of view that each direction brings.

Some find solace in having the grace to fall from. Some find hope in the promise of a net.

Some climb steps just to jump from the highest one. They dive deeper than where they started. We score them on their splash.

Some trip and slide over misplaced trust and misguided confidence. They are pulled down by others and some grasp for the ankles above them.

Most of us take two steps forward for every step back. More or less. We face each day and await our spin, not seeing the chutes for the ladders.

It isn’t the fall from grace that need define you but how you stick the landing. Remember to bend your knees.