"High" enough anyway

As I was driving home from a late day at work, racing to make it in time for the series finale of LOST (which was ab…so…lutely… AWESOME by the way), I was flipping through the channels on my Sirius radio and stopped by a station called “The Vault”. This is the station where they play “deeper classic rock.” Basically all the B-sides, lesser known and lesser played songs from classic rock artists. When I switched it on I heard a familiar and eerie sound of church bells. The text on the screen confirmed what my ears were telling me. It was the intro to the song “Fire On High” by Electric Light Orchestra.

I haven’t listened to this song in… maybe not years, but definitely a long time. And I really can’t remember the last time I heard it while driving in my car. I have the song on mp3 on my computer, but with no CD player in my car (and the fact that they rarely ever play this song on regular radio) the only place I really had the option to hear it was while sitting at my desk. Which is probably the reason I haven’t listened to it in so long, because this is and always has been one of the greatest driving songs ever. With no lyrics, incendiary and impossibly fast guitar riffs as well as crushing drum fills, it’s the perfect song for speeding down an empty Maine road, picking imaginary chords with your fingers and pounding out hardcore beats on the steering wheel.

Whenever I hear this song, my thoughts turn immediately to my college days. And anybody who was real close to me at Emerson at the time knows why. I used this song my sophomore year as the background for a marketing promo I edited for the Evvy Awards (which if you don’t know, is Emerson’s version of the Emmy’s). I had wanted to cut something to that song ever since I’d learned to edit a couple years earlier. The fast beats and guitar were perfect for quick cuts and movement. This ended up being the promo that first made people at Emerson think I was some kind of kickass editor. I’m not saying that conceitedly, in fact I kind of laugh when I think about it. I laugh because when I watch the promo now (well I haven’t actually watched it in… god, I don’t even know when, but I can remember exactly what it looked like), I think the editing was actually pretty… childish is the only word I can think of to describe it. I know I was only a sophomore in college, so I was still learning, but the whole promo is nothing but a series of lightning fast cuts. Cut,cut,cut,cutcutcutcutcutcutcut… Seriously, the only real talent it required was the ability to find a beat and the patience to tediously lay in each individual shot. That’s why I really think it was the song more so than the actual editing that made the promo be perceived as awesome. There’s just something about that song.

Tonight when I heard “Fire on High”, my thoughts didn’t go to my Emerson days… well maybe just for a second. Mostly this time, they returned to highschool, back when this song first came into my life. This was the song that they played when our soccer team ran out onto the field every game. I can think of no better song to get you pumped up for a game as much as this one. Alternating between majestic sounding verses full of strings and angelic voices, and the adrenaline-inducing chorus with its signature guitars and drums, that song made us feel like gods as we ran our warm-up laps around the field. I mean, you know, before the game started and we got our asses kicked six to nothing.

And like I said, as far as driving songs go, there simply was no better. But only when you were driving on the kind of empty two-lane cop-less roads we drove back home in Maine. Because inevitably, as you jammed on air guitar and pounded out steering wheel drums, your speed increased by at least ten miles an hour. It was seriously unavoidable. When that last round of badda-ba-ba-ba-bom… badda-da-daddadadada-dom-dom-dom… dadada-DOM ended, and your hands were numb from bashing against the steering wheel and your body was tingling in the now complete silence from how loud you’d had the radio cranked, you’d look down and realize you were doing almost eight and had drifted half-way across the center line.

As much as “Fire on High” took me back tonight, it just wasn’t the same. Driving down congested Street Road, one of the major thoroughfares through the Philly suburbs, it was impossible to truly give in to the music. With lights every thirty seconds, cars all around me, and a forty-five mile per hour speed limit on a street that’s loaded with cops, I couldn’t really concentrate on my guitar and drums too much. I was mostly using my thumbs as opposed to my whole hands on the drums. And the meat of my palms stayed planted on the wheel, rather than down near my side, as I picked out the notes on air guitar. For a second or two I tried to play the way I always remembered doing it back in Maine, but the second my car drifted and inch, I grabbed the wheel again and muted my performance a bit. Plus, whenever I stopped at a light, I had to ease it back for fear of the person in the next car looking at me.

But in spite of not being able to really cut loose, the song put me in such a great mood and got my adrenaline coursing through my veins the way it always had whenever I ran out onto that field, or whenever that marketing promo ended and one of my peers told me it had given them goosebumps. It was the most perfect appetizer for the most kickass episode of LOST ever. I only wish I had thought to lock the song into my radio’s memory on the off chance that it would come on again someday while I was out and about on one of the few two-lane roads in the area. Then I would be able to click over and experience “Fire on High” to its fullest. Oh well. With luck they’ll dust the song off and pull it out of The Vault again while I happen to be passing through and it’ll be just like the old times… you know, minus the getting creamed by our rival school afterward.

Now this time watch Daddy blow up the building

I really do have a blast playing with my daughter. She’s right at that fun age where she can run around and do things, she has good manual dexterity that allows her to maneuver blocks and other objects with her hands, she’s happy and energetic and full of life and laughs a lot, squeals with delight and jumps up and down clapping her hands at some new game that we just made up. But I swear I must be setting her up for some kind of violent streak in her future.

It’s not intentional. It never is. But somehow all our games end up turning violent. I mean, you know, violent in a cute, piggy-tailed, two-year-old girl kind of way, but violent nonetheless. I think it started around the time she finally figured out how to walk and then soon after, run. We started playing this game that we simply called “DING” where basically I would chase her around the apartment tickling her and yelling (you guessed it), “Ding!” every time I poked her. Well that quickly got boring for me and so I added an extra element to the game: a beach ball. Now instead of just chasing her around, I also chuck a beach ball at the back of her head and body in an attempt to knock her over. The beach ball in question is incredibly light and bounces off her with practically zero force. You could probably throw it at somebody with all your might and they’d barely feel it. I, of course, know this because I’ve thrown it off of Allison’s head with all my might and she only laughs harder. Really, the only time that thing knocks her over is if she happens to be rounding a corner and I catch her around the legs just right, causing her feet to get tangled in each other and down she goes.

We made up that game about a year ago and we still play it several times a week. And god forbid I should start chasing her empty handed. We’ll get about five seconds into it and she’ll stop, turn around and say, “Beach ball?”

When we play with blocks, we don’t try to build a tower as tall as we can so much as build a tower just tall enough so we can knock it over. Actually, now that I think about it, Allison is the one who started that one. Though again, it was probably my fault. A couple times she accidentally bumped the tower knocking it over and I exclaimed a big “Whoa!” which made her laugh, and so now the object of the game became to knock the tower as far across the room as possible.

A couple months ago we inherited a box of Matchbox cars and a box of plastic animals. We set the animals up on the coffee table and had about three minutes worth of fun making them walk around, drink water, eat food, climb Couch Pillow Mountain, etc. But then I got bored and honestly I could tell she did too. So it wasn’t long before we pulled out the Matchbox cars and started a new game called (I swear I’m not making this up), “Hit the Pig.” Basically we arrayed all the animals on the table with the pig figurine at the very end. The goal was to run the cars down the gauntlet and knock the pig off the other side. Each run begins with the war cry (again, you guessed it), “Hit the Pig!” Then I… WE send the cars charging down the track with the appropriate VROOM sound effects, and end the run with a resounding PAAAUUUGGHH as the car flies over the cliff and bursts into flames. Whenever we actually accomplish the goal of the game and “Hit the Pig,” we celebrate with a sadistic, “RREEEEEeeee….” as the pig plummets to his death.

Well now we’ve got new toys in the house again. Allison got a couple Little People playsets for her birthday last weekend: the Little People house and the Little People garage. I think I may have lasted a good twenty minutes this time around. I made the mommy push the baby around in the stroller, made the daddy sit at the computer and check his e-mail, put the older sister on the potty and had the little brother open and close the refrigerator a couple dozen times. In the garage I had the mechanic drive the car around to the gas pump and pretend to fill’er up. We made the cars go up the elevator and down the spiral ramp and drive into the oil change area a few times. But it wasn’t long before I had the mommy and daddy jumping off the roof, had the dog getting hit by the tow truck coming through the car wash, and had the baby stroller rolling off the table cliff. We pulled out the infamous Matchbox cars and had them make death defying jumps onto the top level off the garage, careen around the corner with appropriate tire squealing sound effects and then pile up with lots of smashing sounds at the bottom of the ramp.

I know Allison is entertained because she busts a big old gut every time we sit down (or run around) to play something. But man, am I setting her up for some sick fascination with violence where nothing is fun unless it involves mayhem and destruction? Honestly, I must admit I’m being more than a little melodramatic. While everything I have described is one hundred percent true without the least bit exaggeration, I truly don’t think I’m screwing her up in the least. If anything I think I’m giving her a harmless outlet for the violent impulses that, let’s face it, are present in every single one of us. I’ve always been a believer that kids need to play games that involve pretend killing people and breaking things. It allows obsolete evolutionary impulses to manifest themselves in a way where nobody actually gets hurt. As long as it’s tempered with a responsible adult making sure the kid understands the difference between make believe and real life then they should be just fine. My hope is that Allison will get out her aggressions on fake plastic people (and pigs) and not turn psycho on the real ones.

Of course that’s all assuming she even makes it to three years old without getting knocked down the stairs during a particularly intense round of DING.

Dress it down kiddo

I know we’re several months off for this, but I was thinking the other day about just how retarded Halloween is when you have a kid who is too young to go trick-or-treating. The last two years, people have asked me, “So what is Allison going as this year?”

For some reason, my response floors them, “Uh, nothing.”

What’s the point really? She isn’t at the age yet where she gets a kick out of, or really even notices, what she’s wearing. It’s hard enough to get her to wear a hat, nevermind a mask, a pair of angel wings, or a set of bunny ears. She hates it when we wash her face, so why would we aggravate the task by smearing on hard-to-remove makeup? She’s too young to get the concept of trick-or-treating, and to be honest, we’re trying to keep her away from candy for as long as possible anyway, so why would we bring her around the neighborhood filling a bag with it?

Let’s be honest, parents who dress their two-year-old up for Halloween are doing it for themselves way more than for their kid. They do it so they can take that one adorable little picture which they can show to all the other parents at Mommy and Me and share one of those phony my-kid-is-better-than-your-kid chuckles.

“Oh look how sweet. Broderick went as a Hobbit this year.”

Nevermind the fact that Broderick probably screamed for thirty minutes while mom tried to force him into that costume. Nevermind the fact that he got bored after the first two houses and fell asleep on Dad’s shoulder as he carried him from house to house. Nevermind the fact that if mister ((my parents used my name in a vain attempt to show everybody just how simultaneously creative and trendy they could be)) had actually ever SEEN Lord of the Rings at two years old, he would be waking up with night terrors until he was thirty-seven. I’m sure little “Broderick” would have been just as happy wearing a bowl on his head all night while dumping Cheerios into his plastic pumpkin. But that doesn’t make for good photography does it?

I’ve never really bought into the whole cliché dumbass parent thing of taking your kid somewhere and pretending it’ll be so much fun for them, when really, it’s all about rounding out that photo album that you bought at your last Pretentious Memories scrapbooking party. Do you think there’s a two-year-old on earth who really truly gives a crap about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny? At BEST they don’t care. More often they’re full fledged terrified because the giant flesh eating rabbit from their dreams has finally manifested itself. As far as I’m concerned, any activity where a parent finds themselves saying, “Honey stop screaming, Mommy’s trying to take your picture,” you might want to rethink your motivation for it.

Like taking your kids to Disney World. Oh we all have such a warm place in our heart for Disney World. And as soon as we become parents, we want nothing more than to fill that Daisy and Donald photo album that we found on sale at WalMart with pictures of our family vacation to the happiest place on earth. We build it up in our minds just how perfect it will be. The kids will get to see Mickey Mouse. They’ll squeal with glee on all the rides. They’ll giggle whenever their ice-cream cone accidentally bumps their nose and mom and dad have to kiss it off.

BULL… S---!

Disney World is a disaster waiting to happen for any family who brings in a kid under ten years old. After all, you’ve just shelled out enough money pay for a really high-class hooker and now you have to get your money’s worth. But of course your kid is too scared to go on ninety percent of the rides. So you wait an hour in line just to ride thirty seconds on the lame flying Dumbo’s only to spend the entire ride hovering along the ground because your kid freaks out every time you press the button to make the elephant go up. Finally, by the end of the ride you’re shouting at your five-year-old, “We waited in line for an hour because you wanted to ride the Dumbo and how we’re going up in the goddamn air! Stop screaming and wave to Mommy!”

It’s a hundred degrees out. Water costs five dollars per eight-ounce bottle. The line to see Mickey Mouse somehow corresponds exactly to the capacity of a young child’s bladder. And forget about kissing the ice-cream off your kid’s nose. If you’ve ever been to Disney World you’ve seen at least one crying toddler holding an empty waffle cone, standing next to a splattered chocolate scoop, and a red-faced parent screaming into their child’s face, “Look what you did! Didn’t I tell you to hang onto this?!? I did, didn’t I! Well that’s just great! Ten dollars right down the f---ing drain!” It’s truly a special moment when you see somebody inducing childhood neurosis over a chocolate dip.

For your money and relative aggravation you’d be better off shelling out sixty bucks a night at the Musty Fart Motel off Interstate 4 and spending the entire week using the in ground pool. It may have no diving board, no slide, no flotation devices and no pool toys, but you’ll never hear a five-year-old say, “I’m bored,” or “I want to go home.” He’ll spend five hours just jumping off the side into the shallow end over and over again, squealing, “Okay everybody watch!” before each jump. Get him a five-dollar pair of goggles and you’ve just bought him a bonus three hours of entertainment. He’ll put those things on and examine every square inch of that pool and never fuss for a moment. The only thing you have to do is act like you give a crap for six seconds when he wants to show you how long he can hold his breath. It really is the perfect vacation. Seriously, how can anybody get mad at the motel pool? The only tears that are ever shed happen when water goes up somebody’s nose. But thirty seconds later, they’ve already shaken it off and are begging you to watch their cannon ball again.

Allison is going to be two-and-a-half this Halloween and no, we will not be dressing her up. Maybe we’ll put a dress on her and say, “Look, you’re Maggie,” a girl at daycare who wears dresses every day. For Halloween, we’ll likely do what we do on any other day. Take her to the park, let her swing on the swings, climb the rock wall and slide down the slide, unencumbered by some ridiculously bulky costume that only frustrates her and gets in the way. We’ll go home, have dinner and let her have some chocolate milk before bed – which is as close to candy as I want her having right now.

...played it 'til my fingers bled... was the summer of '69...

I got a guitar for Christmas this year (This year? It was 2005, so technically that was last year, but is that confusing?). My parents, in cahoots with both my wife and father-in-law – a guitar player and enthusiast of several decades – bought me a Fender guitar as a combination Christmas/Birthday present. I was honestly floored. I’ve talked about learning to play the guitar now for at least seven years. Every New Years Eve I say that one year that will be my resolution. Well this year (last year?) Lauren decided to help me get going on that resolution. When my mother asked what I wanted for Christmas, she told her “a guitar.” My father-in-law did the research and sent my mom all the info and she gave them the credit card.

Lauren had led me to believe very strongly that my mother was getting me t-shirts for Christmas, which didn’t seem odd to me because that’s about the only thing I’d really asked for this year. So when she (Lauren, not my mom) pulled out this very large box from my parents to open on Christmas Eve, I was a little bit perplexed. It obviously was not t-shirts. But what would they have gotten me that big? Some kind of camping gear? That didn’t seem likely. I’ve asked my mother on more than one occasion to stick to gift cards in that arena for fear of her buying the wrong thing. I tore off the paper off the present slowly until I saw the word “Fender” printed on a cardboard box. I looked at Lauren with a face that said something like, “Are you shitting me?” I didn’t want to get too excited, because I figured maybe they had just wrapped the present inside a guitar box. Lauren’s dad buys a lot of guitars, so it wasn’t a ridiculous notion. But when I opened the box, I saw that it was, for real, a guitar.

I started giggling. I think I just kept giggling all night. It was just so funny. After talking about it for all these years, I finally had a guitar (one that was mine) in my hands, which I was going to learn to play.

As it turns out, the first time I actually picked the thing up to play it wasn’t until this past weekend. For multiple reasons really. My mom, trying so hard to do the right thing, remembered that I was left-handed and bought me the left-handed version of the Fender guitar. She apparently forgot all the times I said I only write with my left hand, while everything else is right-hand dominant. Hey, she meant well… and she footed the fairly expensive bill too, so who am I to complain? I returned the guitar for a right-hander, and with the credit leftover (because leftie guitars are so much more expensive) I was able to get a hard case for it as well. After that came a series of away jobs that kept me busy through February. After that I had no idea how to actually string the guitar and I kept waiting for a moment for when my father-in-law was over so he could help me and show me the process. Of course, every time he was over, we all got busy and forgot about that silly little guitar sitting around collecting dust.

Well finally this weekend, after Allison’s second birthday party, the two of us found a few minutes to sit down together with the guitar. He showed me how to string it, which is both trickier than I imagined, and yet exactly as awkward as I expected it to be. After that we did a cursory first lesson where he showed me a just a couple of chords and we noodled around for awhile practicing hand positions and finger placement and whatnot. Again, it was exactly as awkward as I’d always imagined it would be at first. I found it nearly impossible to keep my fingers pressed down hard enough on the strings so they would resonate the way you’d want them to, without accidentally touching the other strings around it, causing them to buzz when I played. The higher, thinner strings were the toughest. I felt as though they were slicing right through my pinky and ring fingers as I pressed down. And of course moving between two different chords with anything resembling manual dexterity was an exercise in tediousness. But hey, I knew that going into this. I knew, and still know, that it’s going to take a ton of practice to get halfway good at this. In fact, that’s probably the reason why I put off this resolution for as long as I did. What if I got bored with it? That’s a pretty expensive resolution to give up after only a couple months of sucking? And even now, struggling through chords that didn’t sound right and made my fingers feel blistery, I again wondered if I’d have the patience to stick with it.

But then my father-in-law showed me two chords that were easy to switch between. I honestly don’t remember what the names of the chords were. But switching between the two was as simple as moving my middle and fore finger up and down a single string.

((STRUM)) A low acoustic coffee house sound came humming from the guitar.

((strum)) A slightly higher coffee house sound that sounded really cool following the first.

((STRUM)) The alternating chords, combined with a simple strumming in time, was actually starting to sound like a song I might know.

((strum)) Wow, I was actually making music.

Okay, I realized instantly, I am going to LOVE learning to play this thing. Every new chord that I figure out, and every combination that sounds like actual music and not just the random plucking of strings is only going to make me love this more. I’ve never played a musical instrument. I played the drums in high school… badly. But musicians, people who can make music with an actual instrument, have always intrigued and captivated me. And when I hear a sound that could actually pass for music coming from an instrument that I’m playing, it’s going to give me a charge every time.

And tonight, when I pulled out the guitar again for a few minutes, that charge came back. It took me a couple minutes to remember exactly where each of my fingers needed to be, but I eventually found the starting chord.

((STRUM))

((strum))

Wow, I thought yet again, I’m making music. If I ever get really good at this, I hope that sense of wonder never goes away – that incredulous, disbelieving sense of wonder at the fact that I am the one actually making music. Sure, tonight I kept having to stop and recheck my fingering, and sure the strings were buzzing as much as they were resonating, and sure after a few minutes of the same two chords back and forth it was obvious I was going to eventually drive my conspiratorial wife nuts with repetition. But that was okay. This was only my second day playing and I was making music!

And then it happened. The thing that made me realize I could never ever stop. Not now. My daughter came over to watch me play. She had been playing with her new Little Peoples playhouse, fully engrossed in what she was doing, when she just stopped and turned around. She watched me from across the room for a minute or so as I struggled to keep my chords sounding right. But then she got up. She picked up her little chair and dragged it over in front of me and sat down. She watched my fingers strumming and listened to the music that accompanied the motion. She just watched me without talking, without getting bored, without getting up to do something else, and without asking if she could have a turn – just watching and listening to Dad play. And it was awesome.



My next step is to go pick up an introduction to the guitar book from the local library and start learning all the basics: notes, frets, chords, blah blah blah. I’d like to have at least a rudimentary handle on a few key concepts before I start paying for lessons. I’m psyched. I can’t remember the last time I got really psyched for something new like this. I mean it’s a muted psyche-“ment”. Kind of that disbelieving psyche-“ment” I had when I first saw the word “Fender” on my Christmas present. I can’t help but keep giggling. I’m actually going to learn to play the guitar. I would do it just to keep feeling that pleasant bewilderment of knowing I’m the one creating music. But to see that look on my daughter’s face again, watching her dad play… man, that’s just going to be the most awesome gravy I could ever think of.

Insanity, one bubble at a time

There's just something about bubble wrap isn't there? It's such a great stress reliever. I mean it's not as therapeutic as other things like sex, drugs or breaking stuff. On the other hand, as far as cost goes, it's way cheaper than most of the alternatives. If you work in an office that gets anything via UPS or FedEx more than once a week, it's pretty much a guarantee that there will be sheets and sheets of free stress relief kicking around somewhere in the vicinity of the mailroom.

And I'll admit, I partake in the 'wrap as much as the next guy. I find it's good for about thirty seconds of mindless entertainment, though I approach it differently than most people. I actually don't derive pleasure from the dull popping noise each individual bubble makes as you squeeze it. My enjoyment is a bit more subtle. I like to gently squeeze the bubble with the thumb and forefinger on each hand until a second bubble starts to form on it. You know what I'm talking about? It kind of grows off the main bubble like a pimple. The plastic starts stretching out until the slightly cloudy material becomes perfectly clear and THEN it pops. And that pop, my friend, is ten times more satisfying than if you'd just callously gone at the main bubble like a thirteen-year-old who's just seen his first breast. The sound is a little bit higher pitched, like the sound of a cap gun, and it signifies that you applied just the right amount of pressure. Too much pressure and the main bubble pops with is signature dull snap. Too little pressure and the clear pimple you've formed just kind of fizzles out anticlimacticly with no sound at all. But executed precisely, that pimple cracks open with a satisfying BIH-TZ.

But even a sound as gratifying as that will, again, only entertain me for about thirty seconds before I go off in search of hookers, dime bags and old computer monitors. Not like some other freaks I have met in my life. There are some people in this world who view bubble wrap as some kind of metaphysical Rubix Cube. They concentrate on these bumpy pieces of plastic so intently that you'd swear they were trying to discern the secrets of the universe from the broken capsules. And they truly would spend all day popping these things if you gave them the chance and a Staples giftcard.

There was a girl I worked with at a production company in New York a few years back who had just such a fascination. And one day she got the motherload. We got a huge shipment of tapes or something in the mail, and protecting this cargo was a ten-foot-long, three-foot-wide throw rug of bubble wrap. And this chick went... to... town on this thing, alternating between popping a series of individual bubbles to taking a large handful of the sheet in both hands and twisting, eliciting a fast series of firecracker snaps. And mind you, she was the receptionist in our office. In the waiting room where she was conducting this occupational therapy were producers, a casting director and multiple actors preparing for their audition. But she just kept popping, cheerfully oblivious of the entire room staring at her in pissed off amazement.

A couple months ago, I was working late and ordered deliverly from a sandwich shop down the road. When the delivery guy got there, he spotted a rather large sheet of bubble wrap sitting on the table. After handing me my food, he said, "Oh wow, bubble wrap!" then picked it up and started popping the bubbles. Okay, no problem. I went into the next room to get the petty cash to pay for my dinner, figuring he would get his therapy in, then leave after I paid him. Well as I handed him the money, he didn't even reach out his hand to accept it. He just kept right on popping.

And then he said (and I swear to you this is verbatim and not at all embellished), "You gotta give me a few minutes man. I love this stuff. I had a sheet of this at my house last week and I spent like two hours popping it." (emphasis mine)

I laughed and said, "Oh, there you go," which is what I always say when I either don't care about what somebody is saying or think they're a complete freak but don't want to say so. In this case, obviously both situations applied. So I went over to my dinner, unwrapped my meatball sub, took the straw out of its paper and stuck it in my soda, took a drink, took a bite, took another drink and finally said, "Dude, you can take that with you if you want."

You'd swear I'd just offered him one of the expensive computers I was busy prepping. His face lit up and he gushed, "Really? Oh wow thanks man, that's awesome." He grabbed his tip and walked back to his car, popping with the utmost concentration the entire way. I locked the door behind me then went looking for porn on the internet.

Huh, I'd like to pulse her tilla...

Homeopathy continues to amaze me. I just started learning about this whole practice last summer and as near as I have seen and experienced thus far, if used properly, homeopathy works just as well, if not better, than conventional drugs for treating just about anything that you would normally take a pill for. While the remedies are symptom specific, homeopathy doesn't treat symptoms (the way most drugs do). What it does is actually trigger your body to fight back against whatever happens to be plaguing it. It actually helps you heal faster, and heal naturally, with your body’s own defenses. A few of the remedies that we use in our house often are:

Arnica Montana – Great for bruises and sore muscles and has all but replaced Ibuprofen in our medicine cabinet.

Nux Vomica – Exactly like it sounds. It’s good for stomachaches, indigestion and all around ickiness due to overeating or overdrinking. If you let a few of these dissolve under your tongue after you’ve been out drinking all night it will usually save you not just the puking but also the hangover. I also took the Nux whenever my hernia started hurting or poking out and it was a good temporary fix until I got in for surgery.

Hepar Sulphuris Calcareum – This is an awesome remedy for dry congested coughs. It’ll cause the phlegm in your lungs to break up and allow you to get to sleep.

Chestal – This is the brand name of a homeopathic cough syrup made by Boiron and it’s good for wet, croupy coughs. What’s better, it tastes like honey. No I mean it REALLY tastes like honey. It’s not some false NyQuil promise, “Oh sure it tastes like grape,” but really still tastes like battery acid. We have no problems getting Allison to take this syrup. In fact she usually keeps asking for more.

Ambrosia Artemesia Folia – This was a godsend last September. Ragweed season always kills me, so last year, rather than suffer through another zombie-like month hopped up on Benadryl, I took Ambrosia which is literally ragweed. Taking in a little bit of ragweed several times a day made me right as rain all season with zero drowsiness. I’ve found that it also works when I’m having an allergic reaction to dust or other pollens as well.

Well the newest homeopathy to truly flip my lid and say, “Wow this stuff really does work doesn’t it,” is a remedy called Pulsatilla. I’ve heard Lauren mention this remedy before. At the birth center where she works they give it to women whose babies are presenting breech. Supposedly it helps the baby turn.

Okay, sure, it was always just one of those stories I heard about and said, “Oh that’s neat,” and didn’t think about further. Well then last Saturday Lauren got an email from her friend Lacey who was nine months pregnant. The mass email said that their baby was breech and the doctors didn’t want to do an ECV to try and turn it. They told her that unless the baby magically turned on its own, they would have to do a C-section on Tuesday.

Lauren immediately shot off an email to Lacey and told her to head to her closest natural food store and pick up some Pulsatilla. I honestly wasn’t expecting much. Even if Lacey got the message, she wouldn’t have had a whole lot of time to let the Pulsatilla do it’s work and would probably still be breech come Tuesday. My impression of most natural remedies is that they aren’t quick fixes. They generally need time to percolate in your system and do their work. I was again doubting homeopathy, which had shown me time and again to be the real deal.

Well apparently Lacey did get the message and went out on Sunday to pick up the remedy. And by Monday, the baby had turned! Her doctors were justifiably amazed and she went on to have a natural childbirth afterward. I’m not sure what the stats are on babies that turn after a certain point in the pregnancy and how those stats change for mothers who take Pulsatilla. Academically, I don’t know how well homeopathy stands up to conventional medicine. But it’s anecdotal cases like this that continue to make me a believer in this practice and make me want to learn more and more about it.

Yeah, but were there peanuts?

It's funny the way history has to be written so that it gives you no real perspective on the immediate and personal impact that certain events made on the world. Since most history is presented as simply a matter of dates, census figures and longitude and latitude coordinates, it's nearly impossible to truly understand why a particular battle, bill or discovery was important, not just to the world, but to the individuals living in that world. And you certainly can't get any kind of feel for the social, political and historical backdrop against which these events took place.

You only know that in such and such a year, Lincoln made his emancipation proclamation and then in such and such a year the war ended and then in such and such a year this bill was introduced giving blacks the right to vote. But you have no idea that Lincoln was one of the most hated men in the country and considered one of the worst and most divisive presidents ever. And that was by the people in the NORTH. I mean, the things they're saying about George Bush would probably seem tame compared to the things they were saying about Lincoln at the time. But history doesn't express that. They just give the stats that show it was Lincoln who freed the slaves. It makes you wonder how history will paint George Bush in the future once all the current and petty political squabblings have died away.

Another event that you don't get to fully appreciate in history class is the Wright Brother's historic first flight. We have dates and we have distances but the history books don't do much in the way of conveying what it must have been like that day at Kittyhawk. It's not until you actually visit the site of the first flight that you begin to understand what the feel of that day must have been. The Wright's needed a lot of wind for their experiment to work. Anybody who's ever spent time on North Carolina's Outerbanks has already begun to understand just why they chose this particular area. The wind never seems to stop around here. Even on a warm day it can make the temperature seem twenty degrees cooler. The Outerbanks wasn't the populated vacation spot, peppered with beach houses and crab shacks that it is today. In fact, it was a pretty remote, desolate location at the time, populated more by sand dunes than anything else. That was good for the Wright's who were secretive to the point of paranoia with their flyer that they didn't want to risk the press stopping on on their experiments.

The Wright's made their historic first flight on December 17, 1903. That's a long way from Ohio, their home, just over a week until Christmas. I remember coming down here for work as part of the TV crew covering the First Flight Centennial in December of 2003. I remember how much it sucked leaving home for just a week so close to Christmas. But neither of the Wright's were ever married, so they didn't have any familial ties keeping them from getting down here when the wind was at its best. Kind of makes you wonder if the Wright's just weren't able to find women who would put up with their all-consuming passion for flight - which undoubtedly would have kept them from their familial duties... or if the Wright's were just so into their passion that they never had the time to meet, much less court any women. Either way, it was probably because they didn't have the distractions of family that they were able to be the firsts in the history books.

We took a morning to check out the Wright Brother's National Memorial at Kittyhawk while we were on vacation in the Outerbanks. The park is fairly minimalist which I think serves it well. There are two visitor centers with artifacts and murals explaining the history surrounding the first flight. But other than that, most of the park's 430 acres is just wide open grassland which can kind of give you an idea of the isolation the Wright's experienced in their stay here.

The historical stats tell you that the Wrights conducted four flight tests on that historic day. The first three went anywhere from 120-200 feet and lasted less than 20 seconds. Orville is always credited with the first official flight, having won the famous coin toss between he and his brother. But it was Wilbur who truly flew that day, going over 800 feet in a flight that lasted nearly an entire minute. On paper, even at the Kitthawk visitor center itself, those numbers don't mean a whole lot. But then you go outside to that wide open field and stand in the very spot where the first flight took off and you begin to understand what it must have felt like that day. There are four concrete blocks marking the landing point of each flight. From the starting point, the first three markers seem almost embarrassingly close. The famous first flight went a mere 120 feet. From the point of liftoff, it really seems as thought the plane must have gone up and crashed right back down again. The next two flights look equally abrupt.

But then you look down the field, 800 feet away to the fourth marker and even in our modern world where everything is just supposed to work, and where we take airplanes for granted, you say "Wow, now THAT was a flight." I can only imagine Orville's reaction upon watching his brother go and go and go after three modest attempts. It probably went something like:

"Wow....... holy shit......... holy shit..... HO-LY SHIT!"

Orville may have been the one to go in the history books as "the first" but it was Wilbur who actually gave them something to write home about that day.

One other thing I found interesting being at Kitthawk is the photograph of the first flight. This is truly a unique picture. This picture was obviously taken before the days of digital cameras, before every schmuck with ten dollars could walk down to the CVS and buy a disposable point-and-shoot. The world didn't yet have the fanatical need to capture everything on film or tape that we have today. On the whole, important historical moments weren't photographed. Unless somebody in the press had a big heads up that something big was about to happen, nobody on the scene generally had a camera with them. But the Wright's did have the foresight. What's more they had the knowhow. The displays at Kitthawk say that Wilbur had a budding interest in photography and he meticulously documented their time at Kittyhawk. He likewise spent a lot of time taking artistic shots of the surrounding area and whatnot. He was exactly the kind of person you would have wanted around if you wanted a visual record of something as big as what they were about to attempt.

But when the moment came for the first flight, Wilbur couldn't be the one taking the picture. Even though Orville was the one actually flying, Wilbur had to run alongside the plane and steady the wing until it actually took off. He had to turn the camera over to somebody else. He had to trust somebody else to take perhaps the most important picture of his (Wilbur's) life. Other than the Wrights, there were only five other men present to witness the first flight. Local guys. None of them reporters. Wilbur had to turn control of his camera over to an amateur, a guy who likely had never even seen a camera, much less operated one. I'm sure Wilbur set the thing up on a tripod and took great pains to focus it exactly as it needed to be, but still, he had to express in no uncertain terms to this guy,

"Okay, now wait until the plane is off the ground before you press the button. As soon as you see it lift off, press the button. Now repeat back what I just said."

Can you imagine the pressure that guy must have felt - both Wilbur AND the photographer? It's hard enough to get a tourist at Disney World to take your picture without cutting your head off. Yet somehow he got the shot perfectly. The whole plane is visible. Orville and Wilbur are visible. It is the perfect shot to capture this historic event.



I thoroughly enjoyed Kittyhawk. It's not the kind of national park that you can spend more than a couple hours in, and honestly isn't one you go back to again and again. But it is definitely worth a single trip, if for no other reason than it's minimalist nature truly let's you experience history firsthand.