Summer of Bean

I discussed the Summer of Bean with a friend last night.  She didnt know I’m a blogger, and it probably wasn’t really that relevant.  The point of the conversation was how despite all your plans, sometimes life can take you in new and wonderful directions.  That’s what’s happened to me in the last six weeks.  It’s been spectacular beyond my dreams.  As awesome as things are becoming though, I can’t help but get wistful for the Summer that could have been.  The one I’d planned so dilligently.  Or thought I had.

I’ve lived so much of my life thinking “if only”.  If only I won the $250 million lottery, everything would be alright.  Heck, if only I won the $1,000/week Win for Life, I’d be set.  If only I’d lose the weight, everything would be different.  I walked around DAILY with this attitude.  I kept waiting for some bolt of lightning to come in and change my life.  The thing is, it never does.  I mean there’s a reason they quote the odds of something happening against the odds of being struck by lightning (1 in 700,000, according to NOAA).

But because I started walking down this path in July, I feel like I’ve won every lottery on the planet.  I feel that fortunate.  If you would have told me on Day One of The Summer of Bean that I wouldn’t accomplish a single item on my list, but instead I’d be down 35 pounds (and still falling) and on my way to home ownership, I would have said you were nuts.  But given the choice between the two, I would have taken door #2 every day of the week.

Well, here I am.  Noticably thinner and on my way to owning my own place.  What a weird freaking world, no?

From the day I began this weight loss thing, I’ve targeted three co-workers in my office as my judges.  I’ll know I’m on the right path when one of them says something.  None of them has yet.  But you know what, that’s alright.  Betty with Sunglasses sees it.  Other friends too.  Good things are happening.  Hopefully I can keep it up.  For now though, I’m just doing it one day at a time.

As for the homeownership.  I got a collection call from one of my credit card companies back in December.  Those calls have been more or less a part of my life for several years now.  I finally decided to get that under control and start paying attention to the relationship between my paychecks and the calendar.  It didn’t hurt that my car was finally paid off and I had extra disposable income.  But by slowly accumulating several months in a row of good behavior, my credit score finally got to the point where I could qualify for a modest house.  Holy crap!  Now I have to figure out where to move.

So the Summer of Bean begins to wind down starting today.  I noticed the leaves are beginning to fall off a tree in the front yard.  This project hasn’t been what I’d hoped for back in May.  But that’s fine.  I’m so much more thankful for what I have.

I ran into an old coworker of mine at lunch yesterday. He’s enjoying semi-retirement with his wife.

After catching up for twenty minutes or so, I asked my favorite question of him.

“How many guns are within six feet of me right now?”

Keep in mind that my friend and his wife are both permitted to carry concealed, and both do. Always. It came as somewhat of a surprise then when the answer came back “only one.”

“Well, Bean,” my friend said, “I can’t wear my ankle holster while I’m wearing shorts now, can I?”

No, I suppose you can’t.

Mr. Costanza. ..your legs have sustained extensive trauma. Apparently your body was in the state of advanced atrophy, due to a period of extreme inactivity.
But with a lot of hard work and a little bit of luck, I think there’s a good chance you may, one day, walk again.

Ah, such high hopes for the summer. Read a book! Frolf! Spend some time getting to know Amanda Peet!   And what do I have to show for it? A big bucket of meh.  An advanced atrophy indeed.  While I’ve taken a huge step toward finally addressing my weight, with the help of a friend, I’ve done little in the way of visiting the gym.  I’ve gone once, in fact.  I got so dizzy, I fell off the treadmill.  Yowza!

On the plus-side, a project has crept up upon me in the last ten days or so which could make this truly a summer to remember.  Or at least one to look back upon and say “wow, that’s the summer this happened.”  It’s required rehearsals, rewrites, and talking to myself in the shower.  Now I talk to myself in the shower lots, but never aloud.  If I pull this off, I’ll be the happiest kid in town.  If I don’t, I’ll go down knowing I took my absolute best shot.  What is this project, you ask?  It will be revealed soon enough.

I have this bad habit of sitting and watching time run out without actually doing anything about it.  In my head, it’s already October.  But there’s still county fairs and a state fair to attend.  My freaking 20 year reunion is coming up too!  Why on earth would I want to sit around and wait for the sun to disappear and the leaves to begin falling?  The summer is too short for that.  So it’s back to it.  With renewed resolve.  By gosh, I’m gonna have a story to tell you before this is all over.  I promise.

There was a very interesting conversation over at Sullivan’s blog this last week over deception in dating.  It started out with this post and continued.

But consider a more common scenario: two people who meet in a bar, or on Match.com, both with their share of character flaws. Perhaps one of them is more interested than the other. It is pretty to think the right answer is that any deception or manipulation is wrong — but aren’t a lot of things that strike us as fair game actually deceptive and manipulative?Makeup is worn. Always messy living rooms are cleaned up before one’s date arrives. A favorite poem is gleaned from her Facebook profile, memorized, and strategically dropped into conversation. That last seems a more marginal case than the others. Why? Does it cross the line? Why or why not?

Is it deception if I put on a nice shirt and try and pick up the place a little before bringing a date over? Isn’t that all part of the game?  Several girls I’ve known would have been mortified had I not done those few things.  They would have run screaming.  Conversely, I’ve had one date recently that ended almost immediately upon visiting her apartment.  The place smelled as though a litter box had been placed inside her oven which had been left on all week.  An extreme example?  Probably.  Would things have proceeded that evening (and perhaps longer…) had she aired the place out a little before bringing me over?  I dunno.  Maybe.

Doesn’t the prospect of finding a good mate make you want to straighten up and fly a little straighter?  Kimberly talked about her own flight a day or two ago.

This man is passionate, honest, self-actualizing, caring and full of life – when I interact with him, my best attributes come out and when we part, I leave feeling full of energy and inspiration to be a better version of myself.It’s simply breathtaking.

And maybe that’s the point. Maybe it takes that other person for us to become better versions of ourselves.

So I’ll be getting up a little early tomorrow to iron my shirt and make sure I have enough time to shave.  You never know who you’re going to meet or where.

The economy was a topic of discussion last week as Jack and a friend of his got together for lunch.

Over lunch our friend asked — with an earnestness, almost a desperation, in his voice — what America is going to produce to lead itself out of the current recession. Given that we’re all turning a serious percentage of our disposable income over to thieves such as AT&T and Comcast, for communications and information that we did perfectly well without, or that used to come a lot cheaper, there’s no answer to that.

As I look at these stunning pictures of the Apollo 11 mission which launched forty-years ago this week, I can’t help but think of all the technological innovation which was required.  And it all started with a speech President Kennedy gave to Congress in May of 1961, about six weeks after the Soviets put a guy in space.  Imagine if George Bush had given a similar speech in 2001, where we could be today.  Instead he gave us a big heap of blah.

Ultimately the race to the moon was a competition with the Soviets over innovation.  Who could be the most creative?  Which got me to thinking.  What this country needs right now is a competitor to scare the crap out of us with technology.  What we need is the Chinese to put a man on the moon.  If that happens, I bet we come firing back in a hurry.  And when we do, Tom Friedman’s green utopia will follow closely behind.

No sooner did I get off the phone with my boss yesterday morning, than I got a call from Rick Emerson show producer Greg.  He apologized for waking me up, but he told me Rick had given him my number and told him to cajole me to come on the show.  While I swore I wouldn’t talk to any media about the Chappelle thing, I decided to make an exception for Rick.  He’s been a champion of my work going all the way back to the O-Live days, and I’ve always been loyal to him for that.  The rest of the media, and I did get emails, can go to hell.

Sidebar: I don’t care what the official police report says about what happened Tuesday night.  There were far more than 2,500 people in the Square.  Either that or attendance at rally ever held there has been grossly inflated.  The crowd was at least 10,000.  At least.  So I ask you:  10,000 people show up for something in downtown anywhere.  Do you think TV might be interested?  Maybe radio?  Someone?  Anyone?  But no.  There was NO ONE there.  I take that back.  I did see OPB.  And I know both the Merc and Willamette Week were there.  And Ben and Tim from O-Live were there too.  But TV was nowhere to be found.  This despite the fact that KGW has a studio IN THE SQUARE and KOIN is just up the street.  There was ample notice that something was going to go down.  There was plenty of time to get a reporter and a camera down there.  But they didn’t.

10,000 people showed up in Pioneer Square to see a comedian and they, for the most part, left as peacefully as they came and the only MSM video that exists was shot by OregonLive, a site everyone loves to hate on, yet one that consistently turns out fantastic local content.  But if someone had been shot down there,  you can bet all four stations would have had someone on the scene within minutes.  What a joke.  End sidebar rant.

Anyway, you can hear my semi-lucid thoughts on the Chappelle appearance here.  I start right at the three-minute mark.

I was there until about 12:30 when the risk/reward thing just became too much. From where I sat, I don’t think I would have been able to hear anyway. I wish there were a way to recreate what happened last night, but it would be impossible. What an incredible moment that almost was.

The light posting the last week or so has been due to my vacation schedule.  Every year I take July 6th through 9th off to help run the End of the Trail tournament down in Oregon City.  I’ve been doing this off and on now since high school.  Some people would go crazy sitting in a gymnasium for four days straight watching college coaches watch high school players get yelled at by AAU coaches, but for me there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.

This year I got a running start into my vacation by virtue of the fact July 3 was a company holiday.  So I haven’t worked now in over a week, and man do I feel good.  I did manage to accomplish a lot of Summer of Bean activities as well, so let’s do a rundown.

The Hangover:  The End of the Trail season actually begins in mid-June with a couple of high school and youth tournaments.  During this time, you’ll generally find me inside the tournament headquarters feverishly working on the programs for the two big tournaments.  We also find plenty of time to have fun as well.  A few years ago, we were all about sticking Mentos into Diet Coke bottles and watching the subsequent chemical physical reaction.  Other years we’ve created fantastic inside jokes.  This year was all about movies.  Well, one in particular.  My friend was all about Transformers 2.  ”Better than the first,” he continued to exclaim.  I had to go see it.

Right.  I pointed him to Rotten Tomatoes and also discussed some of the speculation that the thing had racist and anti-Semitic themes and explained that there was no way I was going to pay Michael Bay $10 to watch him abuse John Turturro like that.  I told him I’d check out The Hangover instead.

The Hangover has been the summer’s break-out hit to this point.  I say break-out because it came from sort of nowhere and steadily gained an audience through idiots like me on Twitter and their blogs.  The word of mouth was tremendous.  I caught it on Friday night down at the Eastport Plaza, my favorite theater in town.  I arrived just as the previews began expecting to find an empty theater.  It was packed.  After stepping on a couple of toes, I found a seat.

I won’t give anything away except to say the movie is wildly original and freaking hilarious.  There were times when I was the only person in the theater laughing, but that’s to be expected sometimes.  The writing and the acting were both solid.  Everyone’s been talking about Zach Galifianakis’ performance, which was damned good, but when I go back, and I will, I’ll be going back for Ken Jeong.  He absolutely kills his role and, on further review, makes a solid cameo in Knocked Up.  According to his IMDB page, we’ll be getting to see a lot of him in the next few years.  I hope so.  He’s good.

I Love You, Man:  I’m embarrassed to admit that I completely missed out on the first two three four(!) seasons of How I Met Your Mother on CBS.  It’s not like Anna and Jason haven’t been trying to tell me since day one.  They have.  It’s just that my remote control constantly forgets CBS is even on the air anymore.  Why that is, I couldn’t tell you.  I guess I’ve been trained since the 80s that the only funny and clever things worth watching on TV have been on NBC Thursday nights or Fox on Sundays.  That’s it.  Monday nights on CBS have been where NBC retreads have gone on to second acts.  Turns out I was completely wrong.  HIMYM is spectacularly funny and well written.  Now I have to go back and watch the first four seasons so I can know what I’m watching when Season Five rolls around in September.

Why am I telling you all this?  Because Jason Segal, the second lead in I Love You, Man also plays one of the main characters in HIMYM.  Aside from the thought of Rashida Jones in a bikini (if you’ve seen the movie, you know of what I speak), Segal is the film’s only redeeming quality.  Thinking back on it, I’m not sure if it’s more a product of his acting or the role.  Either way, he did his best to save the thing, but I just didn’t buy it.  I Love You, Man was sold as a guys answer to a chick flick.  It’s not.  It’s a chick flick that explores what makes men tick.  If chicks haven’t figured that answer out yet, I don’t think they ever will.

Basketball:  The End of the Tail is old home week for me.  Like I said, I’ve been doing this since high school and a lot of the faces I see every year have been coming just as long.  Generally we all sit and swap the same stories year after year, but every now and then a new one bubbles up.

One of the guys who helps run the thing is a retired NBA official.  He does a lot of college work these days but is still on a first-name basis with most everyone in the fraternity.  The subject of ejecting coaches came up, as it always does.  Coaches, he said, generally want to get thrown out of a game because they don’t want to get blamed for what’s happening on the floor.  When your team is getting drilled by 30, you don’t want to stick around.  So a few well-timed comments to the referee, and it’s over, right?

As the story goes, one night in the late-seventies down in Atlanta, the home team was down by double-digits early.  The coach saw his team wouldn’t be putting in an effort that night and he wanted to beat them to the locker room.  So he starts chipping at the officials.  They paid him no mind, figuring he was just letting off steam.

But he was serious.  And one time down the floor, he let fly with a few magic words that would get any coach run anytime.  The lead official walked over to the coach and said, “listen, if I have to be out here to watch this turd of a game, you do too.  Now sit down and take it like a man.”  At that point the coach called the official a motherfucker to which the official replied, “that may well be, but I ain’t throwing you out.”

The coach got the message, and went back to the bench.  He didn’t say a word the rest of the night.  Genius.

Smokin’ At The Ocean:  The tournament ended on Thursday which meant I still had another weekend to go before vacation was over.  I decided to take a leisurely Friday and mosey down to the coast for Smokin’ at The Ocean at the Chinook Winds Casino in Lincoln City.  Many of you know I took second in last year’s media rib eating contest.  While I was invited to participate again this year, I politely declined.  I think I’ve had my fill (if you’ll pardon the expression) of eating contests for a while.

Before I left Friday morning, I hit the Surftides website to see if there were any rooms available there.  As it happened there were.  They’re located right on the beach and their rooms all feature balconies with great ocean views.  I decided to go cheap this time around and get the $99 room.  From the description, it sounded like I’d be facing the parking lot which was fine.  I figured I was saving around $150 on the trip.  And did I really need the ocean view?  Answer?  No.

Boy was I shocked.  They gave me a room at the end of the building.  It was set maybe 30 feet back from the oceanfront side of the property, otherwise the view was the same.  The beautiful Pacific was right there.  Had my own balcony and everything.  What wasn’t to love?  Seriously.  If you’re ever in Lincoln City, Surftides is the only place to stay.  Thank me later.

I headed over to the casino after a few hours and sat down to play some blackjack.  I dig the casino at Chinook Winds.  Friendly dealers and great floor staff make it a good experience.  Plus they have single deck blackjack, which is tons of fun.  It takes some getting used to though.  It’s a much quicker game and doesn’t have the flow of the multi-deck shoes.  And weird freaking things happen in single deck that you wouldn’t see at a regular table.  For instance, after being dealt a 4 and a 2, I took a card which turned out to be a 5.  That gave me 11.  All I needed was a face card and I was home free, right?  Well the dealer gave me another 5.  The guy next to me starts grumbling that he needed one of my two 5s.  Tough darts.  So I’m sitting there with a 16 against a dealer face card.  I have no choice here but to take another card.  So I hit and wouldn’t you know it, another 5 comes up.  Three in a row!  I got my 21 and promptly shut up.  The guy next to me was incredulous.  Turns out he had the other 5.  He needed a 5 to make 20.  Instead the dealer gave him a 6 and HE shut up.  And so it went.  Single deck is a weird game.

Unfortunately the whole gambling experience didn’t turn out well for The Bean.  I lost a few hundred dollars and for a few hours wasn’t sure what was left in my bank account.  Turns out I was fine and could afford it, but it made for a sleepless night on Saturday.

The real reason I went down was to check out the barbecue competition which ended up being a real downer this year.  The last few years there have been over a dozen different competitors showcasing their wares, plus a bunch of other sauce vendors and such.  This year there were just two guys cooking and two guys hawking sauce.  That was it.  Very disappointing.  I’m sure the economy had something to do with it, but still.  Yikes.

Joey Chestnut was also there to defend his rib eating belt, which he did by eating almost nine pounds of ribs.  I love ribs and all, but yuck.  That’s just too much.  Unfortunately I didn’t stick around for the competition due to the previously noted sleepless Saturday.  Perhaps next year.

So now the Summer of Bean carries on.  Tonight I’ll be attending the AAA All-Star home run derby with a close advisor.  And Wednesday I have an appointment with a personal trainer.  We’re gonna kick the exercise thing up a notch.

For some reason I think it was when I was reading Little Big Man at Moss Jr High back in the early 80s that I was first exposed to the phrase “many moons”, as in “it’s been many moons since I last kissed a girl”.  I do know I picked up the phrase “it’s not a good day to die” from that book.

Anyway, it was while trying to figure out “blue moons” a few months back that I finally figured out the true lunar relation to our four seasons.  Turns out each season contains three full moons: early, mid, and late.  The “blue” moon comes in to play whenever there’s a fourth full moon in a season.  The third moon of a four-moon season is the “blue” moon.  See, I used to believe the blue moon was the second full moon of a calendar month.  The “true” definition is much cooler and more poetic.  The last one occured in May 2008, the next doesn’t come around until November 2010.  You bet that’s on my calendar.

So here it is tonight.  The first moon of summer.  Enjoy.

Pete and the Parkroses came to town this weekend from their compound outside Boise.  Pete has been among my best friends since we met at college nearly two decades ago.

Pete and his lovely bride were the first among my friends to start their family.  Erin was born in October of 1996.  I remember this because it was the same month my mom suffered the stroke which would cost her her life a month later.  For the first few weeks though, Mom was lucid.  She was 100% there mentally, she just couldn’t talk.  So it was nice to see her smile when I told her I was an uncle.  Her friends, though, were shocked.  I had to explain “uncle” was more of an honorary title.

It’s hard for me to think of Erin without also thinking of my mom.  It’s a circle-of-life thing.  One came in to my world as the other exited.  I’ve always wanted to tell Erin about this and maybe one day I will.  The thing is she doesn’t care.  Nor, I suspect, will she.

One of the most annoying things about growing up for me was tolerating the “I used to change your diapers” stories.  A variation is the “I remember when you were this tall.”  I didn’t care then, and frankly I still don’t.  These stories are generally told by people I don’t know.  They’re important people to my parents or family, but they have no importance at all to me.  I suspect I’m one of those people to Erin.  I may be a little more important than some, but not much.  So I leave her be.

The key to relating to kids, I’ve found, is to do it in the here-and-now.  That is to say, take an interest in what they’re interested in this week, not six months ago.  Are they in to Miley?  Or sports?  Or freaking Care Bears?  It doesn’t matter.  Talk about what they want to talk about and you have a friend for life.  And I can do that.

So we talked for a few minutes about sports and school.  She was polite and even laughed at my lame joke.  But I’m sure she forgot all about it five minutes later.  And that’s fine.  In the end, she knows she’s loved, and that’s all I can ask.