Each Halloween, we are haunted by a familiar phantom.
He sits there on the front porch all night, barefoot in his pajamas, eating Reese's Puffs cereal, scaring the shit out of our hastily carved Jack O' Lantern.
He's cute -- in a creepy, "why do they always throw in these cracked out pre-schoolers in horror movies?" kind of way.
It'd be great if we could get him to hand out the candy while he's there, but somehow I think he's all about the cereal.
They say one thing they can never take away from you is your education.
Go to college, boy. Get that education. Nobody can take that from you.
Sounds like good advice.
I think sometimes about to what extent my life is owned by others. For the most part, I view that through the prism of whatever debt I might be in.
Not too bad, really.
I've got a mortgage and a car payment -- but at the end of it all, I could just give all that stuff back. You know, that whole "come follow me and I will make you a fisher of men" thing.
But there's one debt that I can't escape: my wife's student loan for the master's degree she earned seven years ago (thanks to an intense work ethic I could only hope to emulate the smallest sliver of).
My undergrad student loan was paid off a few years back. I'm done with that. Pell Grants helped make that possible. Finally, all that no-legitimate-head-of-the-household shit as a kid finally paid off for me.
But not my wife's student loan. No, sir. That's all us.
I realize -- as I wonder the many ways in which people could possibly lay claim to me and how I can win my freedom -- that an education is something they can never take from you.
But, damnit, you can't give it back, either.
They work on me.
The Miller Lite "Man Law" commercials.
I know, I know. Not one kegger in this great land of America can get through a night without a group of pink-polo-shirted frat boys yelling, "Oh shit, bro! I love that commercial! Dude, Kenny's dad totally knows somebody's dad who can get us on one of those commercials. Man Law!"
But hear me out ...
If I could have a super power, it would be the ability to eat whatever I want at any time during the day or night without fear of plumping out and becoming a flabby mass of dude. I love eating. I love carbohydrates. If I didn't get as much excercise as I do, I'd be a bit of a flab-ass.
I also love drinking beer. You can give me a regular Budweiser and I'm right with the world. I figure that somewhere else in the world a Budweiser is considered an import.
(As Ellerby from "The Departed" might say: "I'm gonna go have a beer right now. You want a beer? You don't drink beer, do ya, right? What are ya? One of those fitness freaks? Go fuck yourself").
But I don't get to drink a Budweiser. If I get to drink a Budweiser, I get to drink a Budweiser Select.
Allow me a moment to prove I'm secure in my own sexual orientation and say that again: If I drink a Budweiser, I drink a Budweiser Select.
Except, I don't drink a Budweiser Select. Not usually. At least not publicly.
Same for Michelob Ultra.
You could say those beers are gay. Or metrosexual.
I'm neither (but I'm cool with anybody who is, you know ... it's cool ... and ... like ... I don't mean it like ... whatever ... go fuck yourself).
But what I will drink is a Miller Lite. The carbohydrate count is just as low as these two other low-carb beers that bill themselves as such. Miller Lite doesn't go out of its way to make this point.
Of course, what's ironic is that they used to. Remember two years ago when Budweiser had those commercials that told consumers to decide by taste because all light beers had less carbs? They were in response to Miller Lite advertising that it had less carbs than a Bud Light (in fact, about half the carbohydrates).
The end result after all the advertising? The birth of Budweiser Select. Having proved its point, now Miller Lite -- which in the past has sponsored gay pride parades and advertised in gay magazines to penetrate the gay market-- is moving on to more ... macho ... endeavors.
So, what's the difference?
Certainly not that Miller Lite tastes any less like piss than a Michelob Ultra.
It's just that it's OK for a guy like me to drink it and be seen buying it.
Imagine for a moment a college football pre-game tailgate. Part of the fun is to see the raw, tribal rituals that take place in this fascinating social setting (which allows you to piss behind some kudzu on a Saturday where you'd get arrested for indecency on a Wednesday).
You've perfected the mechanics of the beer-drinking football guy that requires you to keep the beer steady in one hand as you throw and catch the football with the other.
You've parked your car. You've pulled out your cooler. You've grabbed your football.
You're ready. Now, just make sure that whatever you do you don't drop that Budweiser Select.
That doesn't work for you?
Try this one:
You enter the gas station at 10 p.m. You've had day that won't quit at work. You're still dressed in your tie, but, hey, you like to drink the 24 oz. beers if you're just looking for a fade to wind down for the rest of the night. If you do the math, you see that buying three 24 oz. beers costs less than buying a six pack.
These boys are big. They're gangsta. And for whatever reason, they make you look more like a drunk than a genius. Maybe it's because the clerk and all the people waiting behind you in line know that if you're opening one of them bad boys you're committing yourself to two beers right off the bat, and you've got two more waiting and only two hours until midnight.
So you head up to the counter, surrounded by a dozen eyes, looking like the interstate-commuting, worker drone guy you've decided to stomach being. And cradled ever so gently in your arms are three, sweating, 24 oz. ...
... Miller Fucking Lites.
I have to admit, I've gotten pretty confident that it's nearly impossible for me to be a sucker for obvious manipulation.
I pat myself on the back for what I see as an ability to see through the Matrix of advertising, to call bullshit on people underhandedly trying to secure my allegiances.
I even analyze the use of exclamation points. The more there are, the more suspicious you should be.
Risk Free!
Buy Two Get A Third For A Penny!!!
Going Out Of Bizness!!!!!!!!
But when it comes down to it, I'm an American. And that means I have been programmed by advertising since birth. Any aspiration to completely conquer the subconscious forces that lie beneath is wishful thinking.
So ...
I have a molar tooth that had its bonding come apart and caused quite a bit of pain. A month ago I had it reinforced. The dentist told me the pain that I had had whenever I chewed would go away after time. A month later, though, it still hurt.
I went to the dentist again the other day. The talkative hygenist lady tortured my gums into an inflamed but exceptionally clean flaming red mush. The dentist came in, looked at the X-ray of my nerves touching the new bond in the tooth and told me that it would take another month or two for it to all "settle down" and feel better.
He told me a good way to help the process along would be to brush with some Sensodyne toothpaste. Just for a few weeks. No more than a month.
I had only heard about this stuff on commercials, when I was a kid. Maybe when Bob Barker had some old lady on "The Price Is Right" trying to win a new dinette set: "Which costs more, Esther? The tube of Sensodyne or this fine pair of Jordache jeans?"
I decided to follow his advice. The dentist's, that is.
So, I went into the grocery store and looked for my sweet elixir of raging-tooth relief.
My eyes immediately keyed in on the "Fresh Mint" flavor "Maximum Strength" Sensodyne.
I thought, "'Maximum Strength?' Should I go with that? Or is that too much? He told me not to brush with it for more than a month or so. I wouldn't want to overdo it."
I moved on to the rest of the selection -- the "Tartar Control" and "Whitening" specials.
But then I noticed something.
They were all labeled "Maximum Strength."
I felt it wash over me. A kind of, let's say, QVC moment of suckerness. The kind I felt as a young adult emerging from a childhood of mass indoctrination and realizing that Isotoner gloves weren't really any more special just because my hero Dan Marino shilled them on TV.
There is no "Minimum Strength" or "Moderate Strength."
It's like "Green" on the terror alert scale: It exists, but only in a hypothetical world that will never materialize because the point is to give you a false frame of reference to start from. You'll never see cable TV news slap up a graphic that reads "Terror Alert: Low."
I don't know. I guess the toothpaste gives me comfort knowing that there is still room in my life for a pure and genuine gullibleness that I thought had left me long ago.
And there's comfort in knowing that my toothpaste isn't for wussies.
I've often thought of the conventional wisdom that describes what sets us apart from animals.
We can talk about God and self-awareness and our advanced understanding of the universe.
Those are all good and valid reasons. But sometimes we need convincing in ways that speak to only ourselves, because one of the many things that sets us apart from animals is that we want to be considered separate from them. By something or somebody.
What I often hear is that it is our capacity for good. Our ability to do great and wonderful things. That's a reasonable explanation, I guess.
But that doesn't resonate with me. Not really.
What is branded into the reality that I see is a comfort in knowing that we are set apart from the rest of the world not for our capacity for good, but our capacity for evil.
What do we do that is good? The stuff we all know about. The good stuff. The stuff we read about it in inspirational magazine articles and see on PBS.
But think, for instance, about cobras. Male cobras determine who gets the female by means of an age-old ritual of wrestling. They don't use their venom. They don't kill to prove themselves. They kill to eat. They do what is necessary and leave the rest to fulfilling nature's course and keeping balance.
Humans do for each other, too. It makes us feel good. And it helps our survival, as well.
What sets us apart, however, is our willingness to do things that are out of harmony with the world. To do what can best be described as evil.
We do things that are destructive to ourselves. We know greed and hate and fear of the things that we might never see and that we can't possibly control.
It's what makes us bad. And, in a strange way, what makes us good.
Because it's what makes us meaningful. It's the struggle to make goodness more than a means of survival. To make it a victory of transcendence over evil.
Meaningfulness is a symptom of choice. The power to look within ourselves, at what we're really capable of, both good and bad, and transcend our world to make it a better place.
More than just a place.
