Each year beginning around Thanksgiving, talk radio and cable television come alive with reports from the front lines of the “War on Christmas.”  This war has been going on for about 15 years and for those who haven’t followed it, involves stories about a school forbidding the mention of Santa Claus or ordering the immediate removal of colored tissue paper from the halls. 

Each time one of these stories comes up, some parents get so upset about the issue that they appear on TV with Bill O’Reilly and enter into a form of debate whereby each side attempts to see who can express more visible outrage at the fact that a sixth grader at Parker Elementary was given detention for referring to the Christmas tree as a “Christmas tree” instead of a “holiday tree”.  

I usually delight in these stories because they remind me that I grew up in the good old days when we used to give each other presents and make my mother a wreath out of red and green construction paper and my fifth grade picture where I had a bowl cut that is still in my parents’ bathroom; the good old days where I, as a drummer in Mr. Davidian’s clarinet-heavy school band, played an annual “Holiday” concert that included such favorites as “Good king Wenceslas” and an annual performance of “Hot cross buns” which was a chance for the 14,000 clarinetists to play the same wrong note in the “one a penny, two a penny” part.  

But it seems my belief about my town being part of Sarah Palin’s “real America” was based in a naïve assumption that our town was still as I remembered it and hadn’t yet been poisoned by hippy garbage and some ridiculous version of diversity that involves stifling a holiday celebrated in come form by nearly 90% of Americans because three vocal parents pretend their faith is somehow impaired by the use of garland. 

My mother, a retired educator, shared with me a story of her recent days in the infantry working as a substitute music teacher in the school I attended as a child.  Given the impending holidays my mother suggested “Rudolph the red nosed reindeer” to the children.  When she announced the song, two mousey little girls told her they would prefer she not sing the song in their presence and commanded her not to sing it at all.  When my mother inquired as to the basis of their objection the girls informed her that they did not discuss or celebrate Christmas, or Hanukah, or Kwanza, but rather celebrated  “winter solstice” and “vernal equinox” probably with a bunch of other Prius drivers who wear berets and hiking boots around town and make their kids gluten free birthday cake.

I just finished reading Ted Kennedy’s impressive memoir, True Compass, so nearly lost my lunch as my mother recounted her experience.  It’s not so much that Ted Kennedy would have disliked Winter Solstice, or thought stopping others from celebrating Christmas because you celebrate “Vernal Equinox” was the adult equivalent of the guys in my high school that frequently wore skirts to raise awareness of the fact that they didn’t care how much anyone picked on them for wearing skirts, but that I was reminded of the very real struggles that real people had to face a short while ago. Fights for real rights, and real diversity, and against real societal evils that had nothing to do with made-up allergies or anything you could learn about from your friends at the yoga studio, or the couple you met at the underwater birthing class.

My generation, and the one just ahead of mine, have never known any struggle and therefore, have the time and energy to waste complaining to public schools about the singing of songs about secular Christmas icons.  90% of people in my cohort wrote college and grad school essays about the way 9/11 changed their lives though basically none of them suffered any direct impact but 18 months of heightened patriotism as a result.  In a mere forty years we’ve gone from a time when people were fighting for voting equality and educational segregation to whining about trans fats in cafeteria food.

I suppose the one positive aspect of the aversion to celebrating Christmas is that today’s children have a chance to fully appreciate important holidays such as “100^th day of school day”.  In the 1980’s, we celebrated “100’s day”, but it usually involved counting to 100 in unison and kids bringing in collections of 100 things such as bread tags or marbles or goldfish crackers.  I can’t imagine that even today’s sissified parents could find fault with a holiday premised on an alleged excitement about the school year being somewhat more than halfway completed, especially when it falls so close to the Vernal Equinox.

I saw on the news today that Accenture Consulting was dropping Tiger Woods from its advertisements.  The news, of course, comes on the heels of the other news that Tiger has taken an “indefinite” leave from golf which was in response to other news, that Tiger had carried on affairs with most of the cocktail waitresses in the country, which came on the heels of other news that he smashed his car into a fire hydrant while his wife was "heroically" chasing him down the street with a golf club.  I have loved watching Tiger for years, and even though his phony father-son relationship made me want to puke, and I still can’t believe his favorite singer is Don Henley I resisted writing about his recent troubles because I was sad to see it happen.  But after hearing the news about Accenture’s decision I couldn’t resist taking a few swings of my own.

In distancing itself from Woods, Accenture issued a statement saying that after careful reflection, it had determined Woods was no longer the proper bearer of its message.  I assume that such reflection included a part about paying 8 million dollars a year to a guy whose idea of strategic thinking was dating women who make $8 an hour and then being surprised when they sold his pathetic groveling voice mail ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsrSgffTIAk to Us Weekly and then blaming the tabloid media for “hurtful” stories that everyone hoped were true about how his wife hit him with a golf club.

To me, the relationship between Woods and Accenture has never made any sense.  In fact, the only golfer/consulting firm relationship that made less sense was that of Phil Mickelson, who makes Woods’ mistresses sound clever, and Bearing Point.  The campaign mostly consisted of posters and commercials that show Tiger in various spots of bother such as standing with one foot in the water or against a tree, and then superimposed a “thought bubble” of the mathematical and strategic mental gymnastics Tiger was supposedly doing before deciding to proceed with a risky maneuver and getting away with it.  According to the campaign, Tiger, like Accenture’s clients, can’t avoid getting into problems, but he can, and does, have a level of intelligence that allows him to think everything through but then make perilous choices that always turn out to be successful. 

It’s tough to imagine a business equivalent to Tiger’s Accenture successes, but I assume it would be something like the CEO of GE carefully considering the financial impact of spinning off an under performing business unit and then abandoning all of his plans in favor of building tanning salons on the moon in hopes that everyone starts vacationing there.  Now that it’s clear that Tiger hits balls into the water on purpose, sends them text messages for years on end and then drives his car into trees in his own driveway before blaming the media for invading his privacy Accenture is wise to walk away.

Also this week I’ve been thrilled with the national television interviews granted by his various lovers.  Today’s was from Cori Rist, an unmarried mother of one who took to the national airwaves to rebut vicious rumors that she was a prostitute, and apparently, to make clear that she was instead, a naïve half wit.

Rist showed great class when she described cutting off the physical relationship with Tiger after six months because she saw pictures of his new baby and felt “really bad”.  So bad, in fact, that she reduced the relationship to a meaningful two-year friendship which consisted of Woods telling her not to call him when other people were around, not giving her any money or gifts, and occasionally inviting her to have sex with him on the road.

While nobody has handled this situation particularly well, I think Ms. Rist’s interview was the rough equivalent of opening your car door into someone else’s at a supermarket and then driving your car through the storefront just to show how sorry you are about it. 

Now that Tiger has admitted to unspecified “infidelity” the mainstream media is saying it’s time to respect his privacy.  I on the other hand follow the old Hebrew saying that “he who is world famous and a married father of two and dates between 12 and 15 cocktail waitresses named Cori, Jami, Jaimee ,Jaymee, and Kalika, and asks for privacy, better be kidding.” Moreover, it’s very hard to respect anyone who has a billion dollars and forces his wife to live in Orlando.

If Accenture is looking for a new spokesman, perhaps they should consider Elin Woods.  It's clear Tiger's head has been in the gutter all along and it’s obvious that Cori Rist has never thought carefully about anything, but a woman willing to swing a 3-Iron at the guy who suggests tanning beds on the moon is something our economy can use!

I first participated in Secret Santa when I was in kindergarten.  I was randomly assigned Greasy Haired Crystal.  Drawing Crystal was a big liability for two reasons, the first, was that getting a gift for a girl meant that everyone would pick on me for being in love with her, and the second was that she loved my mother and called her “Mrs. Isaac.”  I lost sleep over the decision of what to buy and ultimately selected a Disney’s Ducktales puzzle that my mother and I agreed was the perfect way to say “I spent as much as I was supposed to spend on this gift but I definitely don’t love you or want to marry you”.

I don’t know whether Crystal liked her puzzle but I think it’s safe to assume she did not. It’s safe to assume she did not because nobody really likes puzzles, except for my family. Some people say “I love puzzles” – but they say it in the same way other people say “I love raking leaves” which means they don’t really like them, but once had a good time building one during a power outage when they were 10 and there was literally nothing else to do. 

Some families start drinking when they unite for holidays as a way to mute the social friction that results from people having to hang around with their relatives.  In my family, there is no drinking, half because we all find one another tolerable for a couple of days, and because none of us really drinks, which is because my mother is a puritan and would be forced to turn herself in at the next witch trial if someone in our house had more than one beer, or a single mixed drink. 

In my family, our means of peaceful coexistence is the playing of games and the passively competitive building of puzzles which is all facilitated by my father, who holds the record for having suggested playing a game or doing a puzzle more times than anyone in history.  I regard the puzzle making as passively-competitive because it involves everyone else just building the puzzle normally but my father and my middle brother hiding a few pieces so that they can pretend some are missing so they can con the other one into believing the puzzle is in fact incomplete, and then being the last person to play a piece, which is fun for nobody except my father and middle brother.

In recent years my brothers have been having children, which makes us all very happy but has caused puzzle making to play even more prominently in our gatherings because my brothers are always a few minutes away from negotiating an equitable solution to arguing over certain toys that nobody cared about 15 minutes ago, or putting someone down for a nap, or trying to figure out if they should wake their children up from a nap so that they don’t have a hard time going to sleep, even though they always have a hard time going to sleep or staying asleep regardless of how few, or how many naps they have during the day.

My grandfather, who is 90 this year, is one of the greatest puzzle makers of his generation and consistently leads our family’s jig-sawed interests.  It’s true that since my grandfather is 90 he is technically one of the greatest of his generation at everything, but my admiration for his puzzle prowess is the same today as it would have been when he was 55, or 76. 

This year at Thanksgiving he committed 65% of his visit to putting together a puzzle he constructed for his parents during the New Deal which was essentially different shades of gray and green and featured several musicians wearing what looked like ascots but which my grandfather referred to as “waistcoats” 40,000 times.  The 350 or so piece puzzle was approximately impossible to put together because in addition to being handmade by a 14 year old 76 years ago, it was accompanied not by a photo, but by my grandfather’s memory of what he thought it looked like the two times he’d seen in completed which was mostly that there was a guy in a green or blue jacket smoking a pipe and sitting in a rocking chair somewhere in the picture.

I spent roughly one hour staring at the puzzle, put zero pieces into place, and succeeded only in knocking a piece off the table where it was immediately chewed unrecognizable by my dog Wallace, whose lack of appreciation for history is trumped only by his desire to eat things that might make him sick.  I think catching Wallace in the act helped me avoid my biggest ever puzzle related disaster – that is, if you don’t the time I got out of marrying Crystal.

If someone had told me last November that I’d be listening to Barack Obama justify a troop increase in Afghanistan by evoking 9/11 and boldly discussing an imminent threat to American security posed by cave-bound people with no shoes and the oppressive regime of the Taliban I would have laughed hysterically and then gone back to making fun of how John McCain says “Warshington”.

I was late to the Obama party because I felt like he was a bit of a showman and was running for president on his personal story more than his ability to lead. Slowly but surely, however, he convinced me, and loads of others, that he was the real deal.  I disagreed with some of his domestic priorities but voted for him and supported him feverishly on the basis that on matters of foreign policy, he would be a genuine liberal, and bring a totally different approach to the international stage.  Gone, I thought, were the days of chicken-hawk saber rattling and fear mongering.  

I argued with anyone who would listen about the wisdom of the Iraq war and continued presence in Afghanistan.  The thing that bothered me most about all of our forays was that I was debating the merits of a war aimed at bringing freedom to people 10,000 miles away with people whose hardest decision in life was deciding between going to Stanford or Harvard business school.  I am certain that none of my friends would spend five minutes in pursuit of a stabilized Iraq or take a bullet to ensure free and fair elections in Afghanistan but they are more than willing to puff of their chests and make the case about why other children should die in the name of America’s “security”. 

During the campaign, I cringed whenever Obama mentioned Afghanistan.  Part of his stump speech was about the importance of Afghanistan and how our resources had been drained from Iraq and have hence left dangerous unfinished business in Afghanistan.  I heard the words, but stupidly, assumed they were political cover for an effete liberal sissy who was still trying to win the hearts and minds of 50% of the country who thought he was a Muslim bent on burning down the White House.  Shame on me for thinking Obama was above donning a lapel and a red tie, adopting a dour tone, and telling us to be afraid.   

Last night, Obama The Cowboy, fed us the same line of romanticized military horseshit melodrama we heard from Baby Bush for more than six years.  Sure, it was couched in prettier language about multilateralism and The United Nations but it was the same crap, the same tired approach, and the same disastrous strategy of pretending there is a strategy that will fix Afghanistan and prevent bloodshed upon our departure. 
 

Since hyperbole is seldom productive I'll simply say that this week, Barack Obama officially drove his presidency off a cliff. Instead of focusing on his ambitious domestic agenda that is hanging on by a thread, and a health care bill that has roughly the strength of a Pat Buchanan presidential run, he’s off for another foreign boondoggle of death and waste.  What’s more, he officially endorsed Bush’s Money Pit and its costs in lives and dollars are officially on his hands.

I can see the future, and the future is immense political pressure to remove our troops from harm’s way in summer 2011 per last night’s promise.  The future is also a speech, just like we heard last night, a speech reminding us that we were attacked more than a decade ago, a speech creating a new reason to steal more young lives for a futile exercise.  I’d be shocked if that speech isn’t in our future, but if it’s not, the future is a Republican contender hammering Obama on jeopardizing our troops to fulfill his political promise, or leaving a festering threat in a far away land.

The good news is that Afghanistan is no threat to America security. What it is, is a mess with no clear ending, as are all similarly wrong-headed notions about the prospects of nation-building and civil-war meddling.  The sad news is that it’s a danger to the same people who have been in danger for the last decade, the same people who “volunteered” to run around in the dessert getting shot at by people who may or may not be on their team.

It used to be that we fought when we were threatened.  It used to be that we all took the burden on our backs and got behind the effort.  These days, all it takes is a speech about how our way of life might be in danger and it’s off to the races for other people’s children.  I wonder if Barack Obama will consider joining my law firm in 2012, because there's a significant chance he won’t be our president. 

 I have been struggling to find work for quite some time. At one point, things got so bad that I spent a brief period detailing boats. The job was one which literally anyone could do, but was physically exhausting and required frequent toe stubs and taking directions about how to apply wax from a chain-smoking non high school graduate.

I worked at a ship yard  30 miles North of Boston for a guy named Craig, who told me the first day I met him that he was “the king of the dipshits” and owned an independent service department that operated within the marina grounds.  Craig was your typical operator – the type of guy who didn’t go to college and wants everyone to know it.  I found him moderately likable but hated many things about him, mainly that he spoke ill of whichever worker was not in his sight and I knew that the minute I drove away he was mocking me, possibly about having gone to college.

Craig spoke often of his chops as a “master mechanic” but in the month or so I spent busting my back for him, his job consisted mostly of driving back and forth to the Home Depot and telling me how much money he made.

Craig’s business model was pretty smart.  Though I was never formally versed on its specifics, it appeared that boat owners paid for work and detailing by qualified and fully insured workers which was handed to a cadre of under-the -table drifters who no insurance company had ever heard of.  As long as nobody ever gets hurt, breaks a boat, or tries to buy a four wheeler by listing Craig as the employer, this business should be sustainable.

The foreman was a guy named Nate who was constantly taking days off to free up time for fighting with his live-in girlfriend who was running around on him, and whose eight cats were turning out to be a real downer. When he was on the job, he mostly walked around carrying extension cords and making things a bigger deal than they were.

One of my favorite colleagues was a guy named Bob who was 48 years old but because of a strange condition known as smoking 35,000 cigarettes, looked no younger than 60 and was the kind of guy who refers to a car as being "fully loaded" if it has electric windows.  Bob had been laid off from a machine shop and was using this job to bide time while waiting for his wife to get off of work at White Hen.  Bob believed he was worth top dollar on the open market and spent most of his time explaining that he had a music selection that would surprise me, and telling me the exact story of how he came to acquire every valuable possession in his life, including a motorcycle which he sold for a $300 profit after four years of ownership, and two corgis, which were the inspiration for the vanity plate, “Korgis.” 

If I ignored his frequent racist comments and laziness, I could tolerate working with Bob, mostly because he carried a photo album containing pictures of his freshly waxed vehicles, and because he hated Craig, and spent much of his time explaining to me how lucky Craig was to have someone of his skill working for so little money.  The true beauty of Bob was that in between delusional nonsense about his mastery of manual labor and telling me to slow down because the job “wasn’t a marathon”, he would correctly use words such as “spartan”.

On the day I determined I wouldn’t be coming back I intentionally did not tell Craig and ignored about 50 phone calls from him over the following days.  It’s not in my nature to screw over a boss, or leave someone hanging, but Craig was a special breed of prick who thinks he is smarter than the guys who do all of his work.  A few days before I left he told me that Nate was leaving to pursue fighting with his girlfriend full time and that he’d like me to take control as soon as possible.  I agreed I’d do it and waited patiently for a subsequent discussion, or at least a raise in pay. When nothing happened, I spoke to Bob and determined that Craig had told him the same thing, with nearly the exact wording.

I came to the job with a good attitude and strong back and hadn’t taken so much as a five minute break since starting.  I was offended that he thought lying about paying me more money was the best way to fool me into staying around for a few weeks until his season ended when I had no intention of leaving. Though I never trusted him, I will admit to being hurt by his slight - but I guess I was foolish to expect more from the King of Dipshits.

A few years ago I went to see the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” which was Al Gore’s life story told through a series of vignettes in which he was sitting with his feet in a river pretending to type feverishly about green house gas on an Apple iBook.  Some of it was about how his parents or his uncle raised cattle, and some of it was about how when he wasn’t inventing the internet, he was fighting tooth and nail to get other people from the South to worry about global warming, which they didn’t.

I went to see the movie with my parents in a theater in Vermont that serves yeast on its popcorn.  The only thing I found funny about the movie was that Al Gore spent much of it driving around rural Tennessee in the back seat of an 8 mpg Cadillac, iBook in hand, writing down his ideas about the need for shared sacrifices, such as, for example, buying more efficient cars. 

But the overall oddity of Gore’s movie was that he acted like now that he wasn’t holding the second-highest office in the world or running for President he finally had the bully pulpit of independent movie theaters necessary to bring about real change, which he was apparently planning to do by stimulating outrage among the kind of people who put wheat germ on their breakfast cereal.

Despite my skepticism at his oddly-timed attempt at revolution I was glad that people were starting to care about the environment. I was glad because even during my lifetime people have had a mixed relationship with the planet.  As an example of this mixed relationship I note that as recently as 1989 I was involved in a fund raiser that involved accepting $5 donations from my neighbors, writing the donors’ names on index cards, and then attaching the cards to hundreds of balloons and then releasing those balloons into the air so they could end up caught in trees or floating in lakes and rivers.  The primary purpose of this exercise was to raise about $400 for a field trip, but we later learned it had a second purpose which was to kill turtles who mistook balloons for jellyfish.

As it turns out, the 1990’s were a great time to be a jellyfish because it was also at this time that turtles started mistaking plastic 6-pack holders for jellyfish, which supposedly resulted in their having their beaks locked shut, which made it very hard for them to complain about the balloons.  Once the environmental movement started in earnest, I remember there was a huge push to cut through each of the six rings so that in the event that the 6-pack holder somehow got into the ocean from your trash can in Vermont, the turtles might still waste time and effort chasing plastic but wouldn’t die.

This tradition of balloon launches ended when I was in 6^th grade – perhaps because of the outcry about the turtles, or perhaps because it would have occurred to someone who didn’t know anything that asking your neighbors for money to help you buy trash to throw on someone else’s lawn was setting a bad example for children.

Even though most kids in the country were selling magazines or candy bars or running bake sales, the powers that were at my school were for some reason, very keen on the notion of fund raisers that involved releasing things.  So keen, in fact, that by the end of my time in elementary school instead of the balloon launch, I participated in the inaugural “Trouts away” event, which, aside from confusing children about how to pluralize trout, was a chance to gross out the girls by kissing the fish before putting them in the river.  Given the high price of hatchery trout I doubt if the launch was an actual fund raiser, but it did raise awareness of the fact that trout are slippery.

I seem either to have underestimated Gore’s timing, or the impact of his film, because these days the environment is the only thing anyone talks about.  Last week I went to a Senate debate which was exclusively about “climate change.” This debate included the term “ocean acidification,” and a spirited discussion of “cap & trade” even though none of the candidates had any idea what they were talking about.  To be honest, I'm not totally clear on it either, but I think it has something to do with American businesses paying people from other countries to reduce emissions so we don’t have to change anything.  I can't say I agree with the candidates that an easily-manipulated financial market of polluting privileges is the best solution to our problems, but I should probably cut them some slack since they were probably sponsoring balloon launches a short while ago.  

During my freshman year in college I applied for a position as a Senator on the school's Student Government Association. I did this largely because I didn't have any friends and because I had a jacket which was kind of formal that I really wanted to wear but couldn’t because I never had an excuse to wear dress clothes.

I didn't have to run for the office because several members had quit and left vacancies. These vacancies had created a lot of worry among the student body that without the full compliment of members, several people would be unable to put SGA on their resume.  Given the urgency of the matter, I was able to secure a post as a Senator with a single interview which consisted mostly of the interviewer telling me that my Resident Assistant, himself a Senator, told them I "totally rocked", which was weird.

I didn't know what to expect because my only experience with student government was playing a minor role in my friend Colin’s campaign for President of my high school.  Colin’s platform was mostly that he was more popular than whoever ran against him.  His central campaign strategy was to request that I and my soccer teammates join him on stage during the debate to take off our shirts and cheer for him as he "chugged" a large glass of milk.  This, we all agreed, was an awesome idea because it fit perfectly with his slogan "Colin - he does a STUDENT body good!" which we shouted in unison to a silent audience that had no idea what we were talking about.

Being part of SGA meant that one of my jobs was to receive an email from a guy named Greg who was the Senior Senator from my building which I was supposed to cut and paste in into an another email and then send it to all of my constituents.  To this message I was suppose to add a brief letter about current events, which was usually something about how the Chinese Marketing Majors Association was going to have a dance that was open to all students, even if they weren't Chinese, or a marketing major.

I also performed “constituent service” two hours a week in the SGA office where people could tell me about things that were bothering them.  In my year on the job I never had anyone stop by to complain but I did get lots of email, including one from a guy who thought the STD test at the health center was “more painful than it should be.”

The highlights of SGA were the weekly meetings where a student named Rob served as "parliamentarian", which meant he enforced Robert's Rules of Order.  Basically, his job was to force everyone to repeat whatever we just finished saying with a few silly words in front of it so that it was “binding”.  Rob usually got involved when someone said something such as “point of order, Shane is an idiot” to which Rob would say “you’re not allowed to do that. A point of order is only when you’re trying to enforce Robert’s Rules”, and then you say “point of order, Rob is an idiot” which made everyone laugh.

The president of SGA during my term was a guy named Raffi, who had been elected on a platform of promising to be drunk in public more than anyone else.  Six weeks into my term a big scandal involving the president threatened the stability of the entire SGA.  Raffi had been drunk in public and had, allegedly, said something to a female Senator which included the word “fat”.  This woman was friends with the conservative members of the organization who saw this as their chance to undermine Raffi.

At the next meeting, a guy named Rich made a motion to commence impeachment proceedings against Raffi.  The motion was seconded by a guy named Matt who had enormous hands, and then someone voted to suspend the rules temporarily so that we could just talk about what was going on instead of pretending anyone knew anything about Robert’s Rules.  Someone seconded the motion but Rob asked for time to make a “parliamentary inquiry” because he couldn’t look up the rules about impeachment fast enough to keep up with all of the yelling.

Raffi, not wanting to appear weak, continued as if nothing had happened, which meant asking for a whiney report from the commuter students’ representative about how they didn’t feel connected to the school, and then a report about the Black United Body dance which was apparently so-so, and ultimately, a report by me, about my constituent’s concerns about the STD test, which made everyone laugh.

Partisan bickering might have caused the 1999-2000 session of SGA to accomplish zero of its goals but since it didn't really have any goals, and since chips and sodas left over from catered lunches were occasionally available during our meetings, I still consider the hundred or so hours I spent on the effort, basically, worthwhile.

For more than three years I was a member of Angry Flannel, which, according to sources such as our website, was "Boston’s best early 90’s cover band". Our band was the brainchild of two MIT fraternity brothers who believed that playing in a 90’s cover band would attract more women than would living an apartment with several guys who were playing video games or starting software companies. The name was supposed to capture the spirit of our genre of music, which was Early 90's Grunge.  The name was Drew's idea and since he was the Band Leader, we let it slide, even though it was weird. Drew became Band Leader when he moved to an apartment that contained a basement large enough to set up a five piece band, as long as everyone didn't mind slouching and I didn't mind having the drum set behind the stairs completely out of view of the rest of the band.

Our lead guitarist was Rusty, a prematurely bald guy from Orlando who worked as a valet, and, apparently, played the guitar at all other times. Rusty was an amazing guitar player, which, at times was a burden as it drew attention to the play of other, less talented band members such as myself, Drew, Will and whoever happened to be singing at the time.

We had a hard time nailing down a singer and like lots of bands before us, we lost our share before landing a winner. The first singer we auditioned informed us that he was hoping to make “about $1,500 a month” from his participation in the band.  This fact alone was kind of a deal-breaker since the rest of the band had the intention of occasionally playing for free beer and mostly playing in Drew's basement, but he signed his official release when he informed us that he would prefer if we practiced one day a week without him so that he didn't have to waste his time watching us screw up the opening bars of “Plush” by Stone Temple Pilots where I was supposed to play ba, ba, brrra bup bup bup, and I frequently played ba, braaa, bup bup bup.  Also, he might have been a rapist.

For nearly two years we had a singer named Jeff, who was pretty fat but could really sing and who had some kind of a job selling things to teachers, possibly vacations.  On the eve of one of our biggest shows, Jeff gathered the band together to let us know that the show would be his last, he blamed his departure in small part on the fact that the band “wasn't going anywhere” and that it “felt like we are always playing the same handful of songs” and in large part, on having developed “vocal polyps”, which I assumed was just a different name for Isaac, Drew, Will and Rusty.

After Jeff left us, we were joined by a guy named Justin, who was always studying for exams and spent much of our rehearsal time telling us about his girlfriend had been on "The Fresh Price of Bel-Air" in some kind of a bit role and then acting annoyed by our reaction, even though we all said we believed him.

When Rusty returned to Orlando, we were joined by a guy named Andres, who had hair that looked like a buzz cut even though it was 4 inches long.  Andres was an o.k. guitar player, but he missed approximately every rehearsal because he was always moving, or installing a floor.  Andres was the kind of a guy whose demeanor never changed. He would have the same half-baked look if you kicked him in the shin, or told him the woman of his dreams was going to fall from the sky to help him install tile.  On the very few occasions when he was at rehearsal, he would always have to go upstairs to join a conference call about his job, which had something to do with trying to make sure every child in the Third World had a laptop.

Our bass player's name was Will and he was about as good at the bass as any person who had never heard of the bass could be if you showed them how to play a bass and gave them twenty minutes to practice. 

Amazingly, all of our personnel setbacks didn't stop Angry Flannel from being a success.  We played many shows at lots of venues, including Drew's living room (where my drums had to be set up in the dining room) an all-girls school on-campus bar, and an MIT graduate school dorm, where the residents mostly tried to walk through the lobby to go do their laundry without it looking like they were watching us play.  By the end of our run, we had established a fairly regular semi-monthly gig at a couple of bars in the area and had developed a following among our friends, and people Drew sort of knew from MIT.  Unfortunately, Drew got a real job and moved to San Francisco, making the use of his basement unlikely.  I like to think that if he hadn't, we'd still be rocking, polyps and all.

Every autumn my father made us drag his small sailboat all the way from the water to the back of our house to store it for the winter. The process of moving the boat was something we all dreaded for the entire year because it usually took about an hour and involved my father hurting his back and someone stubbing their toes.  One year, my brother Noah suggested that we balance the boat in the hatchback of the car and drive it slowly to the back of the house. This reduced the overall time to 45 minutes but did nothing to prevent bloody toes and slipped disks. 

When I was about 12 I mentioned that the fiberglass boat would probably survive the winter if we simply plopped it on the shore and flipped it on its side.  My father thought of several reasons why this wouldn’t work, most of them having to do with the fact that his uncle had once told him to put it behind the house but eventually he acknowledged that it “might work”.  While we’ll never get back the many hours of our lives we wasted dragging the boat to the house, I owe my father a great debt for teaching me an important lesson about paradigm paralysis, which is the term scientists give to people who refuse to move beyond their accepted notion about how something is supposed to work.

In addition to causing my family to drag 400 pounds of fiberglass for no reason, paradigm paralysis has other useful applications such as making my father believe he is allergic to bees because his mother told him he was 50 years ago and making much of the United States, except for Godforsaken Arizona, wake up in the dark or leave work in the dark for no apparent reason.  

If you ask most scholars about Daylight Savings, they will tell you they are scholars of something that doesn’t pertain to Daylight Savings time, but if you ask a special scholar whose research focuses on Daylight Savings, they will probably not work at a very good school and will tell you that it has something to do with America’s agrarian heritage, or children walking home from school in the dark, or both.

I have been asking people about this phenomenon for years and have never received a satisfactory answer so have arrived at my own answer using empirical scientific evidence.  According to scientists, the earth is really small, even though nobody has ever actually touched or gone near anything that is supposedly bigger without catching fire. The tiny little earth rotates around the sun, which for some reason, I think having to do with the ocean, in an circle which is not actually a circle.  

To make things more confusing, the earth also supposedly turns on an axis, which is an invisible stick that is stuck through the center of the earth on an angle.  This turning motion results in days, which vary in length depending upon where you live.  If you live in Vermont, and you are doing your paper route at, for example, 3:45pm after school in an attempt to earn $40 a month, you will be doing your paper route in the pitch dark, because your days contain approximately 6 hours of sunlight, which you won’t mind because it decreases the chances that any girls will see you doing your paper route.  Some places that are really high or really low on the globe, in addition to having a lot of seals, also have a lot of daylight, but because nobody lives there, paper routes are out of the question.

Even though everyone is well aware that the length of days fluctuates throughout the year and 99% of people think Daylight Savings is stupid, there are a few people who will tell you that it “makes a lot of sense” – these are the same people who laugh hysterically during live performances of “Hamlet.”

Media outlets are always very sure to remind people that the clocks don’t technically “fall back” or “spring forward” until 2am on the day in question.  I recognize that for a small subset of the population known as college students who are excited that a bar will stay open one hour longer, this is a very important detail, but for the rest of the population, including the people who laugh at Shakespeare, it would be fine to simply set one’s clock prior to falling asleep. 

According to several sources, Daylight Savings officially entered American life in 1918 and is one of approximately three things that Benjamin Franklin did not invent.  If you spent years reading the nonsense that’s available on this topic you might convince yourself that it’s stood the test of time because it’s an idea with merit.  If you’re like the rest of us, you know it’s just that nobody has suggested flipping it on its side.