There is just barely, barely room in my heart for one Lady Gaga, and that’s only because I think it’s refreshing to see a 14 year-old boy make it in the world of Pop Divas dominated by modestly talented women. Besides, in our new green America, is it really economical to have two girls dressing up in three-foot monocles made of first-gen iPods?
I went to the doctor because my penis (that’s right I said penis. Penis, penis, penis. Grow up!) hurt. The good news is I don’t have syphilis.
Upon returning I walked into the house and was met by my mother. And she got all nosy like mother’s do. Get this: she asked me, ‘How are you?’ Geez, what’s with the 9th degree, Ma? What’s next?Are you going to ask me if my penis hurts?
Anyway, this is how it went:
Mom: How are you?
Lyle: Diabetic
And I wasn’t joking. The Doctor found ketones in my pee. This is how it went:
Me: Ketones!? So Tom Cruise isn’t full of crap!
Doctor: You’re thinking of ‘thetans,’ and yes Tom Cruise is full of crap. Have you seen ‘Top Gun,’ that movie’s lame by any standard. Even hipsters watching for a smug sake of irony cringe.
Me: So I won’t have to go to Venus for re-implantation?
Doctor: Ehh… no.
After the ketone discovery the doctor took my blood and found a lot of sugar in it. (Here I was thinking about making a ‘because I’m so sweet’ joke, but I’m going to need a couple more weeks to craft it.)
That’s right dear reader (I’m hoping to make that ‘readers’ plural any day now, so please tell your friends about my blog, Garrett), I am diabetic. And not fat, old guy diabetic; but nerdy kid at the slumber party diabetic. I feel like I’m too old to be diagnosed with Type I Diabetes, but then I’m also too old to be living with my parents, which leads me to another parallel: Neither me, nor my pancreas work.
So I get to shoot-up every day. Shoot up in the morning. Shoot up in the evening. Shoot up before every meal. And not the kind of shooting up that gets you record deals and biopics either. Doc says I have to start counting the Oreos I eat by cookie rather than by sleeves as well. In the past (like yesterday) I’d order my meal with Coke rather than Diet Coke because I’d rather have Diabetes than cancer. Those days are over and sadly realized. I’m an aspartame man now.
Quick. Think back to your childhood bookshelf. I have found The Land of Waldos and it is Portland, Oregon. Replace Waldo’s standard blue jeans with a pair a bit tighter; his red and white striped sweatshirt with a flannel or a cardigan; his cheerful grin with a scruffy young guy beard; his round, thin-framed glasses with square, thick-framed glasses; his hat with a smug sense of moral and cultural superiority; and his walking stick with a Toyota Prius (what kind of a monster doesn’t drive a Prius?*), and you have 85 percent of men aged 27-38 in the city of Portland.
They shop more conscientously than you, eat more educated than you, and vote more compassionately than you. Sure you may have an Apple laptop just like they do, but they bought theirs for superior reasons (give them an inch of moral high ground and they’ll take a mile), and not just to look better at their favorite cafe where they park their fixed-gear bike outside (if your bike has gears, get the HELL out of Portland) and sip coffee that you have never heard of and which they secretly hope you never do.
I don’t know how I’m not a millionaire yet. All I need to do is open a small market in some hip Portland neighborhood and listen patiently while my customers show me the new NPR apps on their iPhones. I’ll buy jars of natural peanut butter and replace the labels with ‘Bolivian Co-Op Mantequilla de Cacahuate.’ Portlanders will taste the difference in the identical peanut butter because it’s from Bolivia and housewives and Republicans have never heard of it. And I can mark it up 150 percent because… well, for the same reasons. Nothing is as delicious or thrifty as exclusivity.
With my millions I will buy the world’s largest SUV and drive around Portland until Prius drivers cast looks of scorn on me (it won’t take long or be infrequent) at which point I will throw hundreds of dollars of carbon credit vouchers at them with a bored look on my face.
I saw Nike’s Project: LeBron Reclamation commercial and I hated it because it sucked. LeBron kept asking ‘What should I do?’ in a patronizing manner suggesting that fans’ expectations weren’t and aren’t fair or reasonable. My only expectation for LeBron is to not be an a-hole if he wants to sell me shoes, hot dogs or underwear like the man whose expensive basketball and pitchman shoes were primed and ready to be filled by the ‘King.’ He failed to meet that expectation spectacularly with ESPN‘s: The Decision. Nike is now aiding that failure with this commercial.
Look, I’d love to move to Miami with my friends. Who wouldn’t? If he chooses to go play with his friends where he can prove nothing on the court–either he wins with the odds stacked in his favor and impresses no one; or he loses and is a failure–but be happy, that’s fine. Just don’t be an a-hole about it if you want to sell me things when ESPN has to take a break from slobbering all over you to air commercials.
With a new season, and a huge new ad campaign to begin redeeming himself, LeBron (and Nike) blew it (just like his move to Miami) like a real a-hole.
One of my local radio stations recently counted down the 20 greatest songs ever and TLC’s ‘Waterfalls’ didn’t even make the list. !. Willie Nelson, Shania Twain and Garth Brooks made the list, but somehow the undisputed greatest act ever, singing a song that reaches into the deepest depths of the heart and soul didn’t.
I guess Big Country Dave and Rusty just don’t understand metaphors. See, TLC isn’t actually singing about waterfalls and rivers and lakes. Now, I’ll allow that it was several years before someone pointed this use of symbolism out to me, and it was a few more yet before I really grasped it, but I think it should be quite clear–even to a couple jockeys who are introduced to the sounds of a steer groaning–that these bodies of water actually stand to represent important life stuff. Waterfalls are really some stuff that people chase; and rivers and lakes are some other stuff.
But that’s all lost on 98.3 The Spur, where ‘Real Music for Real Folks’ doesn’t seem to include a real song about real stuff.
So I thought I’d sort of let my hand linger on her thigh just above the knee to see how she would respond and get a gauge on things.
“What the hell are you doing?” is how she responded.
“Watch your language. There are children here,” I said.
“That’s another thing. It’s bad enough you brought me to McDonalds, but why are we sitting in the Play Place?”
“I wanted you to see how good I am with children.”
“You practically climbed up on your chair to get away from that little boy who walked over here.”
“That ball pit is swimming in urine. So, do you want to get dessert later?”
“Do you think this is some kind of date? I thought you said Kyle was going to be here.”
“Oh. Well… See, I may have been exaggerating about my relationship with Kyle.”
Anyway, it didn’t go well. I suppose it wasn’t the worst date I’ve had this year, but it was definitely the second.
Sometimes I find that the 80 episodes of ‘Friends’ available to me syndicated on local channels and basic cable each week isn’t nearly adequate. So recently I resorted to piracy; not the decreasingly-entertaining-each-chapter kind that Johnny Depp gave us, but rather, the digital ‘how dare you take food off Nicolas Cage’s table, he’ll have to resort to making crappy movies—see you in court’ kind. Besides, ‘The One Where Chandler Crosses the Line’ is well worth the hundreds of thousands of dollars that the RIAA/MPAA will seek for it (what’s your iPod worth?) if I am busted.
I wouldn’t have bothered taking that risk, however, had I known that the commercials had been edited out. See it isn’t just the laughing and laughing and laughing (and laughing) at the priceless back-and-forth between Phoebe and Joey that I want to experience, but also the commercials, which allow me to gauge myself as a human being. Without commercials, how can I know if the products I purchase make me a good, worthy, intelligent, conscientious, green, attractive, sexually desirable person, and not the pathetic opposite?
Look. If I wanted a cicada surgically implanted in my inner ear, I wouldn’t have so briskly walked away from that crazy homeless guy this one time downtown. The World Cup, however, offers a non-surgical, non-urine-scented option that yields the same sensation–and I hate it. I hate it a lot.
Everyone in the world has to use the same feet and the same inches for measure (or the metric equivalents I can’t wrap my American mind around), but short men get their own. So somehow, every time I meet a short man he can tell me that, just like me, he is five-foot-nine, and that I need to trim my nose hairs.
Look, I realize that modern gas prices have hit these gentlemen and their compensatory vehicles hard, but could you imagine being a contractor for one of these guys? It’s bad enough we all have to deal with short men’s shoulder chips, surly demeanors, constant fight picking (I’m not looking at anything, little guy) and lollipop guilds; some compliance to standard measurements doesn’t seem like too much to ask for.
PETA does some good, I suppose, but there are a lot of other animal charities out there raising a lot less than $25 million a year and doing things with that money more practical than organizing ‘Girl on Girl Make Out’ tours. Sure, other charities may lack the support of beautiful rich people, but they also lack the endless Holocaust comparisons, and they do not lack the full support of the Better Business Bureau.
The local Humane Society comes to mind. Sure, they don’t have full page ads of naked hot chicks in national magazines, but if you give them a bag of dog food they won’t respond by saying, ‘I can’t make a bikini out of this! And I need something to wear to tomorrow’s “Girl on Girl for Squirrels!”‘ Amazingly, the Humane Society somehow does good without resorting to the antics of a sociopath pining for a reality television show.
Volatile Lyle 
