When I was 10, my father took me by the shoulder and said, “Son, we need to talk.” To this day, whenever someone (particularly my boss), tells me that we need to talk, it sends shivers down my spine. I had no idea it was going to be about the American dream. My mother was away doing whatever mothers do on a Saturday afternoon, so he knew he held me captive for at least an hour. He led me into the garage and told me to slide across the front seat of his car. Sitting in the front seat of my father’s Oldsmobile had become our own little cone of…
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Disneyland… The Happiest Summit on Earth Greetings and salutations from the highest peak in Anaheim, California
By the time the kids were let out for summer vacation, the climbing window for summiting Mt. Everest had already come and gone. I promised Shimmel that I would take him and his 8-year-old sister Toiba to the top of Mt. Everest to celebrate his circumcision, but none of the guide companies would have anything to do with a middle-aged, sedentary writer and his two irascible children. So, we shifted gears and made plans to climb The Happiest Peak on Earth – the Matterhorn. Not the legendary mountain in Zermatt, but the steel and cement behemoth located in the center of Disneyland. At 147 feet, the Matterhorn towers high over…
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Last Chance Underwear Skidmarks and the smell of kids... everything you ever wanted to know about rectal hygience
When I was a kid growing up in southern California, I’d try to escape the blistering summer heat by playing in the sprinklers on the front lawn or floating submerged in a public swimming pool until my fingers turned to prunes. I counted those hours under water as part of my daily hygienic practices. My mother didn’t. At that age I didn’t know that the reason they chlorinated the water so heavily was because my classmates were peeing or Hershey squirting in the water. It looked clean to me. The way I looked at it, as long as I spent every day under water, I could go the entire summer…
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Happy Birthday to Me Yummy surprises made from mashed sweet potatoes and eggs... happy birthday!
I just celebrated another birthday. Now, before you start applauding, you need to understand that at my age, birthdays aren’t something I relish with any level of enthusiasm. To me, birthdays merely mark the passage of time. The only thing I do to achieve another year on earth is continue breathing in and out and swing my feet out of bed each morning – which is becoming more difficult than it sounds. Things were simpler before the rise of Christianity. People didn’t know how to calculate the lunar calendar, so they couldn’t keep track of birthdays. Everyone just assumed they were getting older when they couldn’t see their toes any…
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My First Trip Over the Curb Why drive on the road, when you have all this empy curb?
During the 1950s, a driver’s license ranked way up there, along with circumcisions or Bar mitzvahs, signaling a young man had come of age. My father dreaded the day I’d be eligible for my learner’s permit. If it were up to him, he would have preferred celebrating my manhood with a bizarre tattoo or tying me down to an anthill. Nevertheless, it was time for me to get behind the wheel and there was nothing he could do about it. After spending the day in the Department of Motor Vehicles, I finally broke free waving my learner’s permit high above my head. I asked my mom if I could celebrate…