Thanksgiving is Going to the Dogs

"Lou, you've known me ten years now, just a few months short of your whole life," I told my dog, "I'm probably not going to kill you with the vacuum cleaner." Lou hates it when I vacuum. He hates it when the washer begins its spin cycle. He hates it when the dishwasher door swings open. In fact, about the only thing he doesn't hate is when I accidentally leave the room with dirty dishes on the coffee table, but hates it once I re-enter the room, to find him with his little spotted snout all but impaling a plastic container, his tongue dislodging every last molecule of flavor from it. He cowers under the dining room table when Sophie digs her play broom and mop out of her toy box and pretends to clean house. And there's something especially frightening about living entities inhaling or exhaling or opening the mail anywhere within a four mile radius of him while he's drinking from his water dish.

But don't let Lou's fragility fool you. Woe is the well-meaning fundraiser who comes to the front door to sell candy bars or memberships to one environmental organization or another. You Girl Scouts and your cookies better look out. And all you deer out there who think you can just walk up to one of the trees and start munching without having your eardrums burst wide open from the most ferocious bark in three states can think again. Losers. And just after I adopted him TEN years ago, he was pretty sure that performing stealth attacks to my head while I slept was the very best possible way to spend an early Saturday morning. "If I were going to kill you, Lou," I ducked down under the table to explain, "it would have been then, and by the way, I wouldn't use a Swiffer to do it." It's also for this reason that I don't usually reprimand Sophie for her propensity to body tackle Lou once he's sound asleep in his chair.

We've included in our last three moves a big, old, and now very gross and beat-up stuffed chair, simply because it's Lou's Chair(TM), and I swear that if we ever buy land, I'm putting at least one sheep on it so that Lou finally has a proper way to unleash his desperate instincts to herd things. He's Lou, a forty pound cattle dog-mutt and the exact behavioral replica of Alex, only in dog form. He's the little guy I found in a poor, drug-addled town on the Colorado-New Mexico border, trembling and growling in equal measure at anyone who might harm him. And from the looks of it, pretty much everyone did.

I was not prepared to take a four month old puppy with substantial mental and physical difficulties home. I had already stuffed a dog--a big one--into my tiny townhome, and was working all the time. But there was something about Lou that was ornery and sweet in all the right places, and that convinced me to ply him with hot dogs until he allowed me to put him in my lap and give him the petting of his life. (What no one would have guessed about Lou is that he's one big tickle spot.) He fell asleep there, much to the wonderment of people who never got the memo about how holding down a puppy and docking his tail with an ax pretty much puts the kibosh on a dog/human relationship based on love and trust. So there's that.

I took Lou home, where I promptly paid my vet's student loan every month trying to figure out what was the deal with the daily torrent of bloody diarrhea. I spent the rest of my cash undoing what I came to call Lou's little home improvement projects: The trench he dug down the middle of the living room carpet had to have been my favorite. A few months later, I met Alex, who I think actually married me to get to Lou. They are high-strung, skittish males who are annoying and lovable at the same time, and live to run and play. They are intent on rolling in dead stuff, passing gas in close quarters, messing up the house on a constant basis, and can't be bothered with listening to anything I have to say. Whenever I take either one of them out, I use a short leash that I abandon the second I catch a glimpse of a certain sad face...and a whiff of something that can trigger a coroner's gag reflex.

A few years ago, we added "cancer survivor" to Lou's resume, an impressive record that also includes "porcupine survivor" and "prairie dog catcher." And come to think of it, Lou has outlasted and survived just about every thing that was in my life the day he walked into my house and promptly peed all over it. The job, most of the people, the house, the cars, the late, great, incredibly soft Bobo Reale. He's seen a chunk of my adulthood that made me want to cower under my dining room table, and I'm thankful to have had his little furry body next to me for it, the nervous, ungrateful bastard that he is. He's our dog, Lou, the only one of his kind. Lucky us.

Have a Merry Christmas...Somewhere Else

I ate lunch the other day with my friend Mickki. She's a doll who put up with my singing "Oh Micky you're so fine" three days a week at the job I had a million years ago right up until the day that she reminded me that I am four hundred and twenty seven years old, and she was something like 21 at the time. I think she said something like, "I've never heard the original version of that song, I've only heard other people sing it to me." But when we're not contemplating the fact that I'm over four hundred, we're just two kooky gals who both like eating lunch at Noodles.

"I can't believe they're playing Christmas music already," she said. And it was true, the sterile Musak version of Oh Come All Ye Faithful was oozing out of the overhead speaker onto me and my strogonoff, reminding me of one of my most genius ideas: Tiered Christmases.

One of the problems with Christmas, you see, is that everyone celebrates it at once. There's no escaping it. It's everywhere. So I, Jody Reale, propose the following: The US Regional Holiday Plan. Here's the idea:

For example, we could say, "Red states, your Christmas season happens in the summertime; blue states, your Christmas happens in the winter." That way, the white Christmas enthusiasts could travel to, say, Maine Massachusetts while they're celebrating their Christmas season, and Coloradoans like me would be psyched out of their damn minds that they didn't have to risk their lives driving to the mall in bad weather the day before the big gift exchange.

Or, maybe we could say that the Eastern Seaboard, the middle states, and the West Coast are all assigned different Christmas seasons. Or each state is given its own week of Christmas time, leaving the US with two full weeks out of every year during which Christmas is prohibited. Not personal enough for you? OK, your own Christmastime could be assigned to you based on the first three numbers of your social security number, or you could draw dates from a lottery.

Think of the possibilities; the lessening of airport mayhem and travel frustration. The steady flow of consumers to stores all year-round. The potential to make what can be an anxious time of year more palatable to those of us with seasonal affective disorder. Are you on board?

I'm sure Santa's going to fight this one with every fiber, but screw him. He's had a good run all these years working one day a year. He can start outsourcing like everyone else.

Grossing Out, Twice Removed

I wish I had a dime for every time Alex has asked me to drop whatever I’m doing so that he can show me some random dude’s film of some other dude skateboarding off his roof, or chugging a beer in record time and then burping the 1812 Overture. He watches them on the Internet of course, at a site that is the equivalent of YouTube’s younger brother; the littler one with chew stuck in his teeth. The stuff is, in general, a little ruder, harder, and delves right into the dark, so that after you watch the guy skateboard off his roof, you can also get a close up of his naked femur after he breaks his leg in half. Probably not coincidentally, the site’s name is Break.com. I have bowed only twice to watching a few choice offerings there, and both times, showered afterward.

I love mindless media, just ask the people at VH1 who are happy to deliver the Celebreality tripe I consistently clamor for in 55 gallon drums; it’s not that. It’s that Break is the Web site equivalent of the guy who drives a car with a “No fat chicks” bumper sticker on it, with his Jerky Boys tape turned up to 11. And I realize that, not only am I not hurting his feelings with these observations, I’m probably just encouraging him. So be it.

Despite my outward criticisms of such media, I don’t begrudge Alex his enjoyment of it, as long as I don’t have to drop whatever I’m doing to watch it myself, or hear about it over the phone while I’m trying to work. (I have to wonder what else he does at work.) For a few weeks running now, Alex explained to me, there’s been one video making the rounds more than any other, generating a buzz that was hard for Internet video-watching America to ignore. It was called, ominously, Two Girls, One Cup, a video that the vox populi touted as unwatchable. Not being one to ignore a gauntlet, no matter how juvenile, no matter how “betcha can’t” or “double dog dare,” Alex bucked up, gave it his all, and “was only able to make it eight seconds,” he told me, dialing up each of his friends to initiate a long-distance game of “betcha can’t” tag.

As I wondered how all of these men make incomes that are triple my own, one friend was only able to make it five seconds, with another, grittier guy just barely making it all the way through. Another friend had to stop watching it after ten seconds, and even after turning away from the picture, was unable to listen to it. “I don’t understand,” I said, unable to even guess at what would make these grown men—these ungross-outable men—so grossed out. “Is it snuff?” I asked, reaching for the most terrible genre I could think of.

“No, it’s poop,” I saw Alex wince. “And puke.”

A movie with poop in it that’s sweeping the nation. It’s these kinds of phenomena that make me wonder why I’m not a millionaire yet.

I won’t narrate the plot here; you can read about it yourself, literally ad nauseum, just by Googling the title. But the notes on the story line are these: Nude or nude-ish girl meets girl. Girl and girl meet all manners of the most rude and foul activities that one can perform with the body’s humors.

Right, so that’s all fine. I get it. I’m the girl who almost vomited during both Jackass I and II, not because of some of the more nauseating stunts, but because I laughed so hard during them. (I’m thinking specifically of one gag—no pun intended—in particular, entitled “Fart Mask.”) And I’m still not watching Two Girls, One Cup, all high-pressure tactics notwithstanding. I’m no sensor, no puritan. I’m not taking a stand, I’m making a choice, and it’s to think more about puppy dogs and Skittles than about two girls, one cup, and the interesting-but-not-that-interesting motives behind the camera. Maybe you’ll choose the same, or maybe you’ll let the curiosity get the better of you, pussy cat. No harm, no foul. Just count me in for hayrides and show tunes, and out for witnessing women take the Pepsi challenge with a cornucopia of each others’ body fluids.

Oh, and by the way, our friend Jeff has seen the whole thing five times now, the best part about that being that it’s so fun to watch him watching it that he threw an ad hoc viewing party in which he sat facing his computer monitor and his guests sat facing him. Who knew such a thing could be so entertaining? As it turns out: the Internet knew. They know everything.

Now, not only can you watch Two Girls, One Cup, (or not watch it, as the case may be) you can watch videos of people watching Two Girls, One Cup. A cottage industry!

So I told Alex that, as a consolation prize for my refusal to answer the call to jump off the bridge like everyone else, I would gladly appear on-camera, as a person watching a person watching Two Girls, One Cup. I’m such an innovator. Mom will be so proud.

Boxer Shorts and Black Socks: A Love Story

The other day our friend Jim came by to pick something up. It was as lazy of an afternoon as we’re capable of having, and Alex answered the door in his standard post-bike-ride best: A pair of striped boxers and the black dress socks that he’d put on for work at least forty eight hours before. Jim looked at him, scowling, shaking his head. “What are you doing?” Jim asked him, motioning with his hands to Alex’s exposed torso. Alex puffed up his chest, sucked in his belly, then let it all out and farted.

I can’t believe it myself, but this is the very thing that drew me to Alex all those years ago: An unashamed appreciation for life’s simplest, greatest pleasures. I literally fell in love the afternoon I witnessed Alex eating a sandwich over the sink, wearing nothing but his boxer briefs and the twenty dollar Timex Iron Man digital watch that he publicly considers his best purchase in twenty years. It looks like since then, he’s decided to keep his feet warm, too—thus the socks—making me wonder: Is there anything sexier than common sense?

“Tomorrow’s our anniversary,” I told Jim, which elicited a response that Jim’s famous for in our circle of friends. I heard it for the first time eight years ago, the night the three of us crowded into a ski town hotel room for the night; the night that I saw Alex perform for the first time what I guess was standard operating procedure—if you happen to be at summer camp: Reserving the bed he wanted by yanking down the comforter and his pants at the same time, and rubbing his bare bottom on the sheets. “Got dibs on this bed!” he cheered, pulling up his pants. Jim and I looked at each other, slack jawed, before Jim said, “I don’t know how you do it, Jody. I just don’t know.”

We met in the fall of ’98, at a party that he and his friends weren’t even invited to. Because it was the time in my life when I decided working ninety hours a week would be a good idea, it took us about two weeks to speak to each other again and agree to go on our first date. I pressed for lunch, he pressed for dinner and won. Since then, he’s taken me to live in three different cities in four different houses. He has sent me to Italy, and also in a separate turn of events, quite literally over the edge. I saw a therapist once, and as I was explaining why I was in her office sitting on her purple futon, this therapist, a person who is trained to look neutral and serene and blameless while you tell her things that are quite the opposite, smote herself on the head and said, “God! What was he thinking?”

Ever since we were married in Las Vegas of all places, here, during a four-day whirlwind nuptial extravaganza in the company of 90 of our closest friends and family, I’ve heard a lot of “I don’t know how you do it”-type sentiments, including:
You two don’t match
You really keep him grounded
Did he just do what I think he just did?
You’re a saint.

And yet, here we are: October 14, 2007. Alex and I are together for nine years, married for seven. A time when, for reasons that are unknown to me, and that I didn’t bother looking up, a couple’s destiny is ruled by an entity or phenomenon commonly known as the seven year itch.

I may be a lot of things on this day in history. Flaky, tired, overwhelmed, and in dire need of highlights and an all-day moisturizer specially formulated for acne-prone combination skin, but itchy isn’t one of them. It’s true that things have changed in seven years. For one, gray hairs. I’ve found a few in my own head of hair, but not Alex’s, that lucky dog, and have plucked them from my head, knowing that these things are like roaches; for every one you see, there are at least ten you don’t. And for another, I now have collected something like seven different doctors, one for each organ or gland, with a spare, free-range, after-hours-friendly one who is willing to call in a prescription on the fly for acute maladies that present themselves between the hours of midnight and three: Pink eye and ear infections and other delights fresh in from preschool, like SARS and Ebolla.

But Alex is no spring chick either.

In most recent years, he’s earned a secret nickname: Rapunzel, for his long, long locks of hair that also happen to also be his eyebrows. “What’s with the eyebrows?” I’ve been known to say, plucking a few of the more noticeable strays from the pack by twirling them around a doorknob a few times and then slamming the door. “Do you have to tuck your eyebrows behind your ears when they check your eyesight at the DMV?” I asked him once. And then I probably pushed the envelope a few inches too far the day I told him I was starting a grassroots organization called M.A.M.E.: Mothers Against Mammoth Eyebrows.

The difference between us is that he doesn’t know he’s any older. In fact, he’s still pretty sure he’s going to camp next summer, to learn some new tricks, like how to burp the alphabet, or make a bong out of a tennis racquet. He’s got big plans, and they involve first finding his old pair of parachute pants—“They’re around here somewhere”—and then restoring a ’71 GTO in the garage, despite the fact that he’s a man who loves great gas mileage more than Al Gore. More than Bono. I’ll let him figure out that one out on his own; the parachute pants I cannot abide, however, and if it were in the least environmentally safe, I would have burned them in the wood stove several winters ago. I will hide them someplace I know he will never look: With the cleaning supplies, or with the vacuum, a thing he hasn’t touched since the Carter administration, and only then was it a means to torturing his sister.

“How about taking me to dinner for our anniversary, so that I can have a martini for the first time in like twenty seven years?” I asked him after Jim had left the building, still shaking his head and muttering. “You can have a drink, too; don’t worry, your eyebrows said they would drive.”

We went to a nice place while Sophie was at a friend’s house, and laughed and teased each other at the bar, where we like to sit, even when there are perfectly nice tables available in the dining room. I pointed out that he speaks Spanish in a way that sounds like he’s recently sustained a head injury. He remarked that the suitcase I brought home from a trip a month ago is still sitting out in the living room, still fully packed, and he’s starting to tell our guests that it’s sculpture.

Parenthetically, on the compatibility side, we’re both extremely frugal, but for different reasons. His frugality originates with the belief that, no matter what job he has, he’s always ten minutes away from losing it, leaving us all out on the street with a sign that says, “Kidneys, cheap to a good home.” My frugal behavior is inextricably linked to laziness. Bringing another nice thing home means that there’s just one more thing to vacuum/dust/wash/keep the dogs and a sticky toddler away from. And entering a mall makes me want to spin my head around on its axis and throw the nearest clergyman down a flight of stairs.

That’s when we saw Nina, a woman from the tiny town we lived in, whom we know only by first name, which is an upgrade from what we called her for the first two years we knew her: Good Diction Woman. Apart from speaking with balls-on precision no matter what she’s doing, Nina is the real-life version of that sitcom character who works every job in whatever small, funky, fictional town the show’s set in. So in the morning, she’s taking your deposit at the bank, and then your lunch order at the diner, drives the kids home on the school bus that afternoon, and then looks up from her weeding in the community garden to wave at you as you’re driving home from work that night.

Nina, as we learned from our table in the bar, is a bit of a baseball nut, and with the Colorado Rockies going to the World Series, she was beside herself with joy and victorious anticipation. She looked to me to back her up on just what a boon this was to all living creatures in the great state of Colorado, to which I explained, shrugging, “I hate all professional sports, except for the World’s Strongest Man/Woman competitions.”

She looked at Alex like I had sprouted a second head and said the most profound and unprecedented thing anyone has ever said to us, “You’re a very patient and forgiving man. I don’t know how you do it.” Ladies and gentlemen, what a night!

So maybe we’ll chalk this one up to being lucky number seven, instead of the year of the itch. Maybe we won’t have to fight it this year, or maybe we’ll have to gulp down a boxcar full of Benadryl and slip into a Calamine bath. Who knows? Maybe we will complain about and to each other; I about how I envy him. He makes everything—everything—look so easy that it makes me nuts. And he that I have the memory of a whole herd of elephants and boy can I carry a grudge. Maybe we’ll just not even notice the slightest whisper of an itch, and this year will fall away like years do, leaving us at the door of number eight, wondering where the time went. And so on, until Alex is opening the door for Jim in his black socks and Depends.

***

Blogger’s note: A few weeks ago, the lovely and talented Susan Henderson at LitPark wrote about love. If you don’t know Susan, or the Park, please do yourself a favor by getting to know the two of them.

Now That We're BFFs, Let's KIT

Let's say that you're a guy or gal who likes to receive the very occasional email update from pithy writers and bloggists from around the globe. Can we say that? Good! Because the Jody Reale e-mailing list is here to serve you. To be sure, it's not your mother's email list, which means that you'll never--ever--receive emails from me forwarded from my mom's friend's daughter's sister-in-law's roommate from college about some terrible scam that was just--moments ago!--perpetrated against her boss's wife's cousin.

At the most, you'll find out exactly when there's a new addition to my Web site, or--or!--that I'm giving something away for free. So subscribe today at Yahoo Groups, where managing your subscription is a real snap, by sending a blank email to jodyreale-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

PS. Here's a fun link to a site dedicated to the game Cornhole...who knew there was a game called Cornhole?

I'm On a Tag Jag

I'm on a roll with the random fact jag I'm on as a result of yesterday's "tag" entry, and so here are a few more items of Jody Reale trivia, brought to you by Immodium PC, now available over the counter for sufferers of bloggorhea. Uh hem.

1. I married a man with two graduate degrees who insists--insists!--that the acronym TMJ stands for "totally massive jaw." I love him.

2. Despite having spent most of my adolescence smearing baby oil and/or Crisco on my skin every summer, all summer, instead of using, oh I don't know, SUNSCREEN, a dermatologist told me I'm hardly sun damaged at all.

3. I am, however, experiencing acne breakouts that make me wonder if I should just start auditioning for the part of the lonely loser girl in an ABC after school special.

4. After participating in a May pole dance at the wedding I attended today, I can tell you from experience that the picture I've always had in my head of merry folk dancing and skipping around with their flouncy skirts billowing behind them as they wove their ribbons was way off. First off, my ribbon was about two feet shorter than everyone else's, and after two passes around, I resigned myself to just ducking under every passerby's ribbon instead of going to all the trouble of alternating between the over and under positions. Sorry, Shawn.

5. I can't decide how I feel about the plot of Green Eggs and Ham. On the one hand, it's true that you might like something if you just try it, and you can't blame a guy clearly working on commission for trying to get you to just get over it and try the damn things; but on the other, did Sam I Am have to be such a freakin' stalker about it? OK, we get it, you want the guy in the crumpled top hat to try green eggs and ham because you believe in your product, but after the four hundredth objection, let it go, man, and get on with the rest of your sales calls.

Well It's About Damn Time: My first-ever tag

Without knowing whether it's an insult or a compliment, it's taken me eight years of blogging (even before it was called blogging) to get "tagged."

Tagging, if you don't know because you're 400 years old like me, is the practice of sending some other blogger an exercise to complete, and then send the exercise on to others. Kind of like a chain letter that refrains from threatening a case of flesh eating bacteria if the recipient refuses to comply. In this case, I'm required to report eight random facts about myself, making sure to post the following rules first:

"Each player starts with eight random facts/habits or embarrassing things about themselves. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read your blog."

Before I begin, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention I was tapped by the ever-brilliant writerJ. Chris Rock. If it hadn't been someone I admire so much, believe me, I would have included ten things about myself instead of eight, just to punish everyone.

And PS, these aren't random; you'll notice a theme. I'm sure I'll never be tagged in this town again.

8) When Styx came to Denver in 1983 on their Kilroy Was Here tour (the Mr. Roboto album), I saw Tommy Shaw jump off the stage and run through the audience just in time to jump down two rows of bleachers and pat him on the back.

7) When Def Leppard came to Denver on their Hysteria tour in 1987, a cameraman jumped in front of us for a one nanosecond shot. You can see part of my crispy bleached hair in the "Pour Some Sugar on Me" video.

6) After Quiet Riot opened for the Scorpions at Boulder's Balch Field House in 1984, guitarist Carlos Casavos threw what was left of his joint to me from the lighting catwalk where they watched the rest of the show.

5) I met Charo at the John Wayne Airport in 1977. She kissed me on the cheek and said, "Do ju want to come home with me, Yody?" My dad said, "I'll go with you Charo," to which my mom groaned, "Frank..."

4) When I asked Liberace for his autograph in a Denver restaurant in 1981, his "protege" waved his lace cuff in my face and hissed, "Not while he's eating!"

3) I sat in the Ceasar's Palace swim up bar with Rat Packer Joey Bishop in 1978. During the course of an hour I drank 47 Cokes and didn't pee once. OK, maybe once.

2) One of the Blue Man Group performers smudged my cheek with paint after a Vegas performance in 2001. He didn't use his finger, thus answering the question, "do you paint your whole body blue?"

1) When Bon Jovi came to Denver in 2003, a bouncer escorted my three friends and I to the stage, where we danced for three songs. I still have the backstage bracelet.

I'm tagging:
Pinckney Benedict
Laura Benedict
Paul Larosa
William L. Bryan
Nicole Del Sesto
Jen at Salt Publishing
Strong Pony
amy

Thank you,Denver! Goodnight!