COLUMN: MDWAP

True story:  This is The Column That Never Printed.  The paper thought it was a little too taboo for a family paper.  It's the only time I've ever had something rejected outright.

I almost just wrecked my car.

On the way home earlier today, I was driving along, completely by myself, laughing SO uncontrollably hard that I suddenly became SUPER light-headed and thought I was about to pass out. I had to pull over to the side of road and put my head between my knees for a few seconds to regain composure.

I could have been seconds away from wrapping my car around a telephone pole, death by laughter. Instead of writing this column, I could be tended to by paramedics this very minute. But that's not the worst part. Had I passed out behind the wheel and required medical assistance, their first thought upon approaching my car probably wouldn't have been, "Hey, is that the dude from the newspaper?" It wouldn't have even been, "How did this guy end up crashing into a phone pole?"

No, had they come within earshot of my car, their first thought would have most definitely been, "Wait, was this guy driving around listening to PORNOGRAPHY?" This was almost my legacy.

I've been SO looking forward to this summer. Feeling the warmth of the sun. Seeing friends. Going to concerts and ballgames and being in crowds without worrying who's breathing on me. But the thing I've been looking forward to the most this summer is finally here: a new season of my favorite podcast, "My Dad Wrote A Porno."

Let's spell this disclaimer fully out: I am not endorsing this podcast. We are a family-friendly publication, and by its very nature, MDWAP is obviously NOT. If you're a wholesome and upstanding human being, don't give this podcast a second of your time. But if you can handle adult humor and you're POSITIVE there are no children anywhere within earshot, you can find MDWAP on most podcast streamers. Just don't blame me if you laugh so hard you wrap your car around a tree. You've been warned.   

In actuality, the podcast is NOT what it sounds like. But it's also EXACTLY what it sounds like. Host Jamie Morton is a British media producer who discovered his retired father had taken up a new hobby: self-publishing a series of ridiculously terrible erotic novels ("Belinda Blinked") he'd been secretly writing in the garden shed under the pen name Rocky Flintstone.

As a Christmas present to his friends, Morton took his dad's magnum opus of filth to a holiday luncheon and, through gales of laughter and embarassment, read it aloud to his best friends. One of those friends was Alice Levine, a BBC radio presenter, who immediately declared it should be a podcast. 

That was 2015. Today, "My Dad Wrote a Porno" is one of the most popular podcasts in the world. With over 250 million downloads, it's spawned a book, a world tour, and an HBO special. The sixth season debuted earlier this month, and it's as cringe-worthy and hysterical as ever. Each unscripted episode simply consists of Morton reading aloud a new chapter of his dad's work to Levine and their mutual friend James Cooper, while the three rip it to pieces mercilessly.  

Here's the thing: Rocky Flintstone has managed to create one of the least erotic attempts at erotica ever composed. It is legendarily bad. "Belinda Blinked" makes "50 Shades of Grey" seem like Shakespeare. The dialogue is stilted, the metaphors messy, and the tawdry bits are about as sexy as a stainless steel skillet.

The heroine of Rocky's tales is Belinda Blumenthal. She's the international sales director of Steele's Pots and Pans, because there's obviously no sexier industry than non-stick cookware. In each book, Belinda travels the globe selling pots and pans and, well, you know. But the plots make limited sense, even for this, umm, genre. To date, Belinda has traveled around Europe, visited the United States, taken the mainstage at the Millennium Dome, thwarted terrorists, briefly died and visited heaven, saved her friends from an avalanche, been kidnapped by villains in a hot air balloon, and was recently left for dead in the Australian outback. In the real world, all of this has taken six years to unfold; in the timeline of the book, it's all happened in roughly three months.

Over the six books, Rocky has described body parts as being "like pomegranates" and similar to "the bolts which held together the hull of the fateful Titanic." In certain risque scenes, characters appear to have grown third arms and accomplished feats that defy both common sense and the fundamental laws of physics. Some characters have entirely changed names over the course of a single chapter. Quality control is not a big concern to Rocky Flintstone.

On the podcast, Levine and Cooper constantly interrupt Morton to remind him that the filth he's reading was written by his DAD. I always thought my dad was a little weird because HIS favorite hobby is building replica Civil War cannons. I've never been more thankful of those cannons in my life. Dunno about you folks, but I'm perfectly 100% happy in my delusions that my parents sleep in separate beds Dick Van Dyke-style and I must have been some kind of immaculate conception. 

Oh, and speaking of Dick Van Dyke, in one famous bit of Rocky's novels, Belinda dies and goes to heaven, where she meets Dick Van Dyke. Jamie had to later tell his dad the unfortunate news that Dick Van Dyke is still very much alive. Oopsy. 

Again, if you're a virtuous and wholesome person with any sense of scruples, don't ever listen to this nonsense and feel free to pretend that I'm far too upstanding a person to listen to this hilarious filth. But if you're driving along and pull up next to a chubby guy barely in control of his vehicle because he's laughing like a lunatic, he might NOT be entirely deranged. He's probably just listening to porn.

COLUMN: Pickle Wrap

We live in turbulent times. This was made perfectly clear by the harrowing events of last weekend.

I spent Friday in my cubicle, blissfully unaware of the growing brouhaha outside. While I was returning e-mails, finalizing ad campaigns, and putting the finishing touches on a hard week's work, war was breaking out in our fragile community.

Only after I left the safety of the office did I discover life would never be the same. Great events in history come and go, but we shall always remember where we were and what we were doing when the Great Pickle Wrap War of 2021 broke out.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you (a) live under a rock, and (b) that rock is definitely NOT in the Quad Cities. But I'll recap one last time in case you were, I dunno, camping or something.

Late last week, a certain Bettendorf restaurant posted their daily special on Facebook: thick-cut dill pickle deliciousness surrounded by cream cheese and a dainty slice of deli meat. You know, those tasty concoctions that always make the menu at family reunions? You never know who made them. You never know where they came from. They just appear on the potluck table thanks to magical pickle pixies, or at least thanks to that one weird cousin whose name you can never remember. 

Well, this outraged the owner of another local deli. You see, she's been serving pickle wraps as a side dish for years, and she was a little irked to find another business copying her gimmick. But rather than take it on the chin and perhaps grumble about it to friends, she opted to air her grievance in a public post on Facebook while insinuating some kind of dibsies on the general concept of pickle wraps.

The post took approximately 32.6 seconds to go viral. By the time I got off work, EVERYONE was talking about pickle wraps. Memes were flying around social media, Lopiez was selling pickle-wrap pizza, bars were offering pickle shots, tattoo shops were etching pickle wraps onto ankles, and even the Moline Police Department tweeted out their diplomatic support of pickles in general. It was a viral celebration of dill, vinegar, and vitriol. Within two hours, a friend of mine from California was texting me asking why "Quad City pickle wraps" was trending across the country. 

Over the past week, I've now been stopped on the street by FIVE complete strangers, each saying they're looking forward to my take on the pickle wrap controversy. While I appreciate the support and love the assumption I'd be our paper's go-to authority on the much-coveted pickle beat, I may be about to disappoint you.

I have no horse in this race. I don't even really like pickle wraps. I won't NOT eat them should they be in front of me, but I've never sought them out. Call me steampunk if you must, but when it comes to vegetables floating in brine, I'm what you might call a pickle purist. I'd honestly much rather just chomp on pickles right out of the jar. They're perfect as is. I'm in full support of augmenting my ham with pickles, but I've never encountered a pickle that needed to be augmented by ham.

I have no hot-take on pickle wraps. Besides, I'm far too busy planning my lawsuit.

You see, the most outrageous thing happened to me. I went to a fast food restaurant for lunch the other day, and you'll never believe what happened. I ordered a cola, and this restaurant had the unmitigated audacity to serve my cola with little cubes of FROZEN WATER floating in it. 

But here's the thing. I've been putting frozen water cubes in my drinks at home for YEARS. "I was taught to make them as a kid and have made them ever since. Being a person that operates with integrity and 100% originality [except when I'm copying other people's angry Facebook posts verbatim,] I have zero respect for people who snatch ideas."

Clearly, it seems a bit of a stretch to claim ownership of the "idea" of a single item on a restaurant menu, especially one that's been around since those weird 1950's cookbooks that mostly featured umpteen intriguing ways to suspend things in Jell-O. If you think you're the owner of the "idea" of pickle wraps, I know a few dozen Mee-Maws and a limitless number of church basements that might beg to differ.  

If a restaurant could claim ownership to a food item, McDonalds could sue Burger King. Burger King could sue Wendy's. Chick-Fil-A could sue pretty much everyone. You'd have to drive to a mining town in central Mexico just to get a taco. You'd have to go to Frankfurt to get a hot dog or Hamburg for a Quarter Pounder, and God forbid you want to sauce it up without a voyage to Dijon or Worchestershire or wherever those Thousand Islands are. About the only thing we could eat with legal impunity in this neck of the woods would be Quad City style pizza -- and as much as I love it, an exclusive diet of fennel sausage probably isn't wise. 

The only way to claim "100% originality" in the restaurant game would be to sell something so weird and disgusting you can ensure it's never been invented before. If you opened a food truck that only sold pickle milkshakes with cream of opossum soup, you might not ever have a single customer, but you could at least wear the mantle of "100% originality" with pride.

Honestly, though, I truly couldn't care less. I like BOTH these restaurants and hope they both thrive. My only wish is that maybe this whole episode will translate into a Quad City pickle renaissance. I'm all in favor of increasing my overall pickle consumption. Maybe we should apply the best of our local 100% originality and create Quad City style pickle wraps. Take a pickle, cover it in a malted crust, top it with fennel sausage and Jim's rib sauce, and serve with a side of Boetje's.

Hmm. That actually sounds pretty good. Anyone have a food truck I could borrow?   

    

COLUMN: Instant Pot Cult

Welcome back to the continuing misadventures of Kitchen Shane: A Learning Experience.

As I've mentioned before, the only hobby I picked up in quarantine has been my ongoing quest to attempt to figure out how to use these strange devices that take up space in my kitchen. For decades, I had assumed that the sole purpose of the "refrigerator" device was to keep leftover pizza cold until you used the "oven" device to warm it back up. But, as it turns out, you can actually use these devices for tasks OTHER than cooling and/or warming pizzas.

My kitchen skills have always been slim to none, but I'm nothing if not someone with the time, fortitude, and committed laziness to waste entire evenings watching instructional videos on Youtube. With a little knowledge, a fair share of trials, and a whole lot of errors, it turns out I'm not entirely incompetent at mixing food with other food in order to make better food.

It started off fairly slowly by learning some simple bachelor-in-the-kitchen truths. For instance: Frozen vegetables are boring. Chicken is boring. But if you cover both with cream of mushroom soup and a positively unhealthy amount of cheese, you can pass it off as a casserole and suddenly you are a chef. If you add tater tots, it becomes a "hotdish" and you are now a master of regional cuisine.

My triumphs with casseroles slowly grew into more and more experimental territory. I'm not saying I've developed Julia Child skills or anything, but, people, the other day I braised short ribs. A year ago at this time, I didn't know what a short rib WAS. As for braising, I thought it was some fancy skateboarding move or something, i.e. "dude, you totally braised that rail!" Even more shocking? The end result was somewhat edible, and even worthy of a Facebook food photo. Yep, I've turned into THAT guy. Thanks, COVID.

But I think I've reach the zenith of my cooking skills. There's nothing more I need to know about braising, baking, or broiling. I'm done with simmering, stir-frying, and steaming. I have no need to knead. I can pass myself of as a master chef simply by knowing how to press ONE button. Thanks, Mom and Dad.

When I didn't give my parents a wish list for Christmas a couple years back, I ended up with two presents I never knew I needed: a breadmaker and an Instant Pot. 

Okay, let's be honest. The breadmaker was kind of a bust. I think I've used it three whole times, and each attempt has resulted in a dense, unpleasant, almost-edible loaf of something that could charitably be called "bread-ish" at best. 

I'm okay with that. Bread isn't easy. I know this because I've watched every single episode of the Great British Baking Show. I've seen some of Europe's best bakers absolutely botch a loaf of bread. One time a guy mistook salt for sugar. I haven't even done that, and I once started a kitchen fire trying to make a hot dog. If pro chefs can screw up bread, I don't feel so bad when I mess it up. Maybe one day I'll again be inspired to carefully measure ingredients and put them into an angry box that vomits out a tasteless rectangle of flour. For now, though, I'm focused on the other gift.

I think I wrote a column last year after playing around with my Instant Pot for a bit. At the time, I thought it was a neat novelty and something to fool around with once in a while. After lockdown, I'm now convinced it's the only appliance worth owning. Well, that and a dishwasher. And a clothes washer. And a vacuum. I'm not a heathen.

But for the past year, my oven has once again returned to its natural dormant state of hibernation. Every meal I've made has been in that magical pressure cooker, and I'm nowhere near satiated yet. At first, I thought, "Cool, a faster way to make chili and pot roasts. Sign me up." Then I discovered one of the most magical channels on all of Youtube: Pressure Luck Cooking. I divorced my oven soon after.

Pressure Luck is the brainchild of Jeffrey Eisner, an amateur home chef and self-proclaimed "nice Jewish boy from New York." Eisner was an early proponent of the Instant Pot, and when a video of his pressure-cooked mac & cheese went viral, he quit his day job and launched his Youtube channel. Since then, he's released two best-selling cookbooks and is a frequent guest of the Food Network, Good Morning America, and the fateful day I happened to catch him on the Rachael Ray Show.

On a whim, that next weekend I attempted to replicate the recipe he featured that day on TV. It didn't come out good. It came out GREAT. Like, the kind of great that I'd pay good money to eat in a restaurant. Except that I made it. Well, I guess technically the Instant Pot made it. But I put all the stuff INTO the Instant Pot and hit the "start" button, so that counts, right?

Does it officially mean I'm getting old when the day I look forward to the most is Sunday, because it's become my official Instant Pot Day? Every week, I keep trying different recipes from Pressure Luck and other Youtube channels, and I've yet to find a loser in the bunch. A couple weeks ago, Eisner was doing an online Q&A and I asked a question. I didn't get a response from him, but I DID get private messaged from another Instant Pot user who runs an invite-only group for Mexican Instant Pot recipes. Someone else invited me into a forum for people to share their Instant Pot secrets.

Everyone is super nice. Almost scary nice. I'm eating really well, but I also might now be in a cult. If you catch me actually worshipping my Instant Pot, please send deprogrammers. But they'd better have, like, a ton of pizza. 

COLUMN: E.T. Phone Home

Other journalists may hem and haw about with "fact checking" and "being professional" and "taking their job seriously, Shane," but is it safe for me to just come out and say it?

UFOs ARE REAL, PEOPLE. We should all probably run or something.

Scoff if you must, but it's a 100% actual honest fact that in the coming days, maybe even by the time you read this, the Pentagon is supposed to be releasing a report purported to confirm, in simple language, that UFOs exist.

Don't get me wrong, this isn't the government owning up to the existence of little green men. Even if the feds had a warehouse full of ETs somewhere, I doubt they'd ever invite us over for show-and-tell.

But this IS one of the few times the government has been willing to admit that sometimes, in our skies, there are unidentified flying objects. Most recently, a video from the Navy leaked showing high-speed objects with no visible means of propulsion out-manuvering and outflying some of our fanciest fighter jets. 

The video itself isn't much to look at -- just a grainy TicTac-shaped object in even grainier night vision. It isn't exactly the Death Star or anything. But it really IS captivating to see a flying breath mint run circles around fighter jets despite a lack of noticeable wings, rotors, or engines.

No one's saying it's aliens -- but no one's saying it's NOT aliens, either. Maybe there's a bunker somewhere in Who-knows-istan where scientists have invented some seriously next-level drone gadgetry. Maybe Elon Musk has more tricks up his sleeve than he's letting on. Maybe it's some crazy weather phenomenon we've never seen before.

One thing's for sure, though: it's weird. And I like weird.

I don't know if I'm a firm believer in alien visitors. But when you look up at the sky and realize there's a hundred thousand million stars in our galaxy, and then you realize that ours is but one of at least two trillion galaxies, it seems a little short-sighted to presume that ours is the only planet whose one-celled organisms had the wherewithal to grow legs and go for a stroll. I'm positive there's life out there.

I'm just not quite as positive that I ever want to meet it. Movie aliens are often portrayed as friendly, humanoid folks who visit Earth in order to share their wisdom of the universe. REAL aliens could be ravenous mosquito-monsters who visit Earth in order to share their wisdom of what condiments go best with people-meat (in which case, enjoy COVID, suckers.) There's a fine line between inviting us TO dinner and inviting us FOR dinner.  

Still, I'm fascinated by the idea that we're not alone in the universe. These are the times I like to go night driving and stargaze, but it's sadly cloudy out tonight, so I was left to peruse the newest UFO videos on Youtube to get my sci-fix in.

Most are super disappointing. One channel I found hyped a video entitled, "PROOF POSITIVE THAT ALIENS EXIST," and then proceeded to show a home movie of someone in their car filming a purported UFO. Except it wasn't a UFO. It was very obviously a dead bug on their windshield. If that's proof positive of alien life, the aliens are disappointingly small and REALLY easy to smoosh.

You could waste hours watching crackpot UFO conspiracy theory videos online. I should know because I just did. I'm now rife with important and crucial knowledge. In just one hour, I learned that:

- Aliens, working alongside the US government, have built 129 underground mile-deep bases throughout the US, and they're all interconnected by electromagnetic trains that whizz under our feet at the speed of sound. 

- "Nordic aliens" (??) are building large spaceships in conjunction with the Illuminati. Soon they'll tell us the Earth is dying and we need to board their spaceships to flee the planet. But don't believe them, it's a trap!

- COVID was genetically engineered by harvesting toxic alien, umm, droppings.

- The International Space Station exists in order to secretly forge alien metals that can only be smelted in zero gravity outer space.

- 64,000 secret black helicopters roam the skies nightly looking for aliens by spying on us all.

- The House of Windsor are descendents of shape-shifting, dragon-worshipping alien vampires intent on world domination. (I must've missed that episode of "The Crown.")

I'm glad the internet is here to bring us such clarity. If aliens ARE visiting us, they probably don't come here to study us or share their widsom of the universe. They're probably just here to laugh at us. Maybe Earth is just the universe's top-rated sitcom of all time. Or their trashiest reality show, I'm not sure which.

All I know is that, like Fox Mulder, I want to believe. But I'm not sure about the old X-Files tagline, "The Truth Is Out There." If it is, it's REALLY out there, and only after you hang a left past the royal shape-shifting vampires. 

The nerd in me will still read every sentence of the Pentagon report if and when it comes out. And I'll still gaze at the stars with the awe and wonder they deserve. But if I spent a year in isolation only to have aliens invade before I can make it to my first post-pandemic concert, I'll be seriously ticked off. Give us a breather, aliens. It's already been a rough year.

COLUMN: ASMR

My name's Shane, and I'm a media-holic.

God forbid I spend even a single moment alone with my own thoughts. I guess it's just comforting to know that the world continues to spin even when I'm in my own private Idaho. There's nary a second of the day that I'm not plugged into multiple media sources. 

You think I'm kidding? I often bring speakers into my bathroom so I can listen to podcasts while I'm in the shower. As I'm typing this now, I also have a second window pulled up on my laptop where I'm watching tornado chasers livestream from Kansas. Over my right shoulder, someone just missed the answer to Final Jeopardy. Over my left shoulder, Alexa awaits my every command. My police scanner is on. Downstairs, music is playing from a stereo no-one's listening to, while my bedroom TV is playing a looped film of some random guy's birdfeeder in case the cats need their own media fix. I may have a problem.

I'm even media-obsessed when I'm unconscious. Yep, I'm one of those weirdos who can't sleep unless there's a TV on in the background. The problem is, I can't find the right thing to watch -- or, more specifically, NOT watch and sleep through.

For years, I just tuned in overnight to one of the local networks with the sound nearly muted. After years of sleeping my way through Agribusiness Today, you'd think I'd be subconsciously well-versed on soybean futures by now. 

Lately, though, I've been experimenting with some new overnight options. The results have been decidedly mixed.

Do you guys know what ASMR is? It stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, although I'm pretty sure it really stands for Absolutely Stupid Mindboggling Ridiculousness. Its a new fad that's crept up from the oddest corners of the internet over the past few years, and it might be my favorite thing ever.

ASMR is a recognized form of paresthesia -- a tingling sensation that some people claim to experience when watching or listening to certain triggers. (I'm not one of them.) Most people who experience ASMR describe it a pleasant euphoric experience. I'm guessing it's sort of like fingers on a chalkboard, but in a GOOD way?

There are self-styled ASMR gurus online who claim their videos can can induce the phenomenon. Trust me, it's must-watch TV at its finest.

Traditional ASMR triggers are said to include: soft or whispering voices, repetitive noises, watching someone perform mundane tasks, tapping, clicking, breathing, and close-up hand movements. I've yet to have an ASMR video give me tingles, but they've definitely induced laughter.

If you've ever wanted to watch a 48-minute video of a guy leaning over a microphone making squirrel noises with his mouth, ASMR videos are for you. If you get euphoric tingles from watching a girl click two Lego pieces together for 17 minutes, ASMR videos are for you. If you want to watch a complete stranger brush their teeth for twenty-four straight minutes, ASMR videos are for you.

Personally, I don't care HOW good those tingles might feel, NOTHING is worth the uncomfortably close-up video I just watched of a guy's mouth as he slowly and loudly ate an entire bag of Doritos. 

Some people find ASMR videos incredibly relaxing, so I thought I'd try some as background noise while going to bed. I typed "ASMR" into Youtube and hit play on the first video that came up. Naturally, it was titled "100% ASMR Ear Licking." What followed were 29 of the least relaxing, least euphoric, and most hysterical minutes of my life, as I couldn't stop watching this asinine video of a girl licking a microphone for a half hour straight.

Even the cats looked at me like, "Have you gone weird, my man?" 

ASMR trigger videos do NOT help me sleep. They DO help me feel gross, awkward and especially worrisome about future generations -- and frankly, I'm already skilled at those feelings without the need to watch 29 minutes of faux ear-lickery. 

I tried some other relaxation videos instead. Norway's public television is famed for their all-day marathon shows of trains, sheep shearing, and people quilting for entire afternoons. There's oodles of rain sound effect videos. There's even videos labelled "sci-fi ambience" that are apparently supposed to emulate the feel of being aboard a spaceship, but in reality just kinda sound like muffled vacuum cleaners.

I also noticed most of those videos have now changed their titles to add "ASMR," as if now ANYTHING that's boring and long can now claim to be an ASMR trigger. I should just film myself typing this column and upload it as "ASMR Typing Trigger" and see how many views it gets. You might think all of this is weird (I sure do,) but in ONE month, "ASMR 100% Ear Licking" has been viewed 637,003 times. When your video's been viewed by more people than live in Wyoming, it gets tougher and tougher to argue that it's weird.

All I know is nothing made me tingly OR tired. I tried watching a 12-hour video of a guy driving cross-country and I found myself Googling road signs he was passing so I could map his course. I tried the app where celebrities read boring stories to put you to sleep and I ended up getting WAY into the stories. I think tonight I'll try this radical new sleep trigger I've been reading about online - it's called "silence."  I guess you turn off all your electronics and just, like, lay there in the dark. It sounds SO weird. 

COLUMN: Bad Week

Citians of Quad and Islanders of Rock, I have always championed you.

But some of you are seriously trying my patience this week.

I came to the Quad Cities by way of Augustana College. A good chunk of Augie's student body hails from the Chicagoland area, including many of my college friends. Some of my friends really liked the Quad Cities, but most of them treated our area like some sort of backwoods prison camp they were forced to endure in order to get a decent education.

I know, right? It seems impossible that ANYONE could happily exist in a metropolitan area with only THREE major shopping malls and few if any daily traffic jams, but somehow, we unfortunate backwoods country folk manage to survive.  

I always had a different take on the Quad Cities. Growing up in Galesburg, when the cool kids at my school talked about going to "the city" for the weekend, they didn't mean Chicago. They meant HERE. The QC is fancy big-city livin' compared to Galesburg. I remember the first day I ventured to Rock Island on my own, I turned the wrong way down the 7th Ave. one-way. About 72 people honked at me and I nearly wet my pants. I questioned whether I could ever hack life in such a big city.  

Growing up, my family seldom traveled to the Quad Cities, but I knew a lot about the area thanks to QC television channels. I came to college with a bucket list already in mind. I wanted to eat at the Choice Smorgasbord. I wanted to see Orby the Super Van Man. I wanted to visit the Showcase Cinemas in Milan, buy records at Co-Op, and rent videos from Time Travellers.

My friends may have thought life in the QC was tortuous, but I loved the place -- and I still do. After graduation, I planted roots. The Quad Cities was plenty big for me, and life here has treated me just fine. 

All this time, I've remained in Rock Island. Our town sometimes gets a bad rap, but I've always defended her. Rock Island's got amazing character. The hilltop area has great shops and eateries. The District has its highs and lows but will forever be my nightspot. Rozz Tox, Ragged, and Wake make the east end of downtown special. Broadway has some of the coolest homes in the Midwest. It's a town rich in culture and history. It's my home.

I love my neighborhood. My neighbor to the right barbecues every weekend and brings me ribs. My neighbor to the left doesn't speak a lick of English, but for years and without having ever been asked, he comes over in the middle of the night and rolls my trash to the curb. I like my neck of the woods.

But this week's been testing my allegiance to our town. A few days ago, I was playing with cats when my silent alarm system triggered. A quick glance at the cameras revealed someone trying to break into my garage in broad daylight. Based on the footage, I'm pretty sure it was the same kid who stole a package off my porch last week. This was deja vu, as last year someone tried a similar move and made off with my childhood bike. This time, I had a reinforced door, a spanky new security system, and a fast hand to 911.

My uninvited guest ran from the cops, but hopefully now realizes I'm not the easy mark he must've taken me for. Thanks to my security cams, we now have many stylish photos of him in action, so the cops have a good chance of tracking him down. But they may have bigger fish to fry.

It was three hours later when my world suddenly filled with sirens. A car chase in Davenport had made its way over the bridge and ended up careening through my neighborhood, as a speeding car followed by multiple cops barreled down my street at scary speeds. Thankfully, the cops cornered those idiots and caught most of them.

The next morning, it was a beautiful spring day that felt like a rebirth. Gentle rain on the sidewalk, birds chattering all around -- and, suddenly, rapid fire gunshots that had me heading for the basement. It was several blocks away, but still way too close for comfort. 

I just don't get it. I don't understand hating someone enough to draw guns at 9 a.m. on a Tuesday. I don't understand the thrill of stealing a car or breaking into someone's garage or ripping stuff off a stranger's porch without guilt or remorse. 

"We're living in a different world," a few people have told me, and sure, that may be true. Once upon a time, Elvis shaking his hips on TV was a global scandal. Today, Cardi B gives us graphic updates on the state of her nether-regions and we declare it an important moment of empowerment.

The world IS different. Change is inevitable, and if you don't think you should have to adapt, ask the Mayans or the Cahokia or any other stubborn lost civilization that refused to roll with the changes. But just because the world is different doesn't mean it has to be WORSE. I still believe most people are innately good. We've survived wars, depressions, derechos, divisive politics, and now a global pandemic. We're nothing if not resilient.

Is there an answer? Probably not an easy one, and I'm certainly no expert. But I'm not giving up on my community and neither should you. If you're a do-gooder, do a lot of it this week. If you're a do-badder, give it a rest. It's been a rough year, and we need to get back on track. I didn't just spend a lonely year indoors in order to NOW be too afraid to leave the house. Bad stuff's bound to happen now and again, but it shouldn't be the norm. We're better than this. The Quad Cities are better than this.

All I'm saying is give peace a chance. Be kind to your fellow man - or at the very least, leave their garages alone (FYI: it's EMPTY, people. Do I LOOK like the kind of guy who owns tools and sporting goods?) 

COLUMN: Porch Pirates

Stupidity, thy name is Shane.

Sometimes I can't help but marvel over my own idiocy. This was one of those weeks.

I work in media -- specifically, in this very company's advertising department. Over the years, I've had a front row seat to product pitches, exclusive offers, and countless ways to drive consumer interest. By now, I should be well and fully jaded when it comes to most marketing efforts. Surely I could never fall prey to a sales pitch, right?

Wrong. Advertising works, people.

As regular readers know, I'm a music junkie. When I'm online, I'm usually talking about some band, listening to some band, or listening to someone else talk about some band. Therefore, it's no surprise that when Facebook's marketing algorithms look at my user profile, they immediately go, "Fish on the line. Serve this guy as many ads about music stuff as possible."

Every time I hop on social media, I'm bombarded with products for music geeks. Just today, I've seen ads for a tape dispenser shaped like a DJ turntable, an area rug that looks like a vinyl record, and custom lighting that pulses in rhythm to any music you play. If I bought every nerdy item pitched to me on Facebook, my house would be a tacky pulsating discotheque, but with cats.

Good thing, then, that I only buy SOME of it.

It started innocently enough. A few months ago, I got served an ad for a t-shirt company that made me chuckle. In the small ad, the company offered glimpses of two music t-shirts they were selling: one for Metallica, and one for The Carpenters. This is not exactly the kind of mash-up one normally sees in an ad. If you are a fan of both The Carpenters AND Metallica, you are officially VERY strange and we should probably be friends.

I HAD to check this company out, so I clicked the link. Immediately I was taken to a sketchy website that looked like it was thrown together in a hustle. Nothing fancy, just dozens and dozens of music-related t-shirts and click-buttons that said "BUY!" It was pure musical chaos. ABBA t-shirts next to Marilyn Manson t-shirts next to Garth Brooks, Megadeth, and Cher. They even had t-shirts from some of MY favorite bands. You know, those snooty indie bands that no one but record store clerks and that one irritating guy at your school listened to? I was that one irritating guy.

I knew this website was less than legit. There's no way some fly-by-night t-shirt company owned the rights to all these images. When I buy band merch, I like to make sure it goes to the band, not some seedy company somewhere in Cyber-third-world-istan. BUT it's not every day you run into someplace selling My Bloody Valentine t-shirts, either. And they even had them in Fat Newspaper Columnist size. It was too much to resist.

I ordered ONE shirt on a whim. I expected to be out $25 and have a cautionary tale to tell. Instead, my shirt arrived two weeks later, exactly as promised. The package came from China and had the oh-so-legit return address of "Joe Doe," but the t-shirt was there nonetheless, and it was shockingly decent quality.

I ordered another and it showed up, too. That's when I threw caution to the wind and placed an order for 6 of the coolest shirts they offered. Soon I would be the king of music-nerd fashion, even if it meant being a 50-year-old strutting around in a t-shirt better suited for a 20-something, except 20-somethings wouldn't know any of these bands. 

The days ticked by. No shirts. "It's okay," I thought, "maybe there's a traffic jam in China somewhere. Have faith." As it turned out, I should have had more faith in the sketchy company and less faith in Rock Island.

A quick review of my security camera revealed that the package had, in fact, arrived. It lasted on my porch for approximately thirty minutes before some kid sauntered up and stole it. My pirated t-shirts got plundered by a porch pirate, and a stupid one at that.

The money I lost on the shirts was almost worth the comedy captured on my security cam, as the dude took almost six minutes attempting to look casual while failing repeatedly to do a sly reach-around, as if he were just learning the length of his own arms in real time. Eventually he just gave up and showed his face to the camera while running off with the package. I just REALLY wanna see the look on his face when he opened it up to find weird obscure t-shirts of bands no one's ever heard of before.

I almost felt embarassed filing a police report over such a ridiculous purchase, but I did -- and the thief's picture is now being distributed to officers around town. The only thing more embarassing than wasting money on a bootleg My Bloody Valentine t-shirt would be getting arrested for stealing one, so good luck, kid.

The officer suggested I write the company to see if they carried insurance and could possibly re-ship. I did -- and prmptly received the following response: "Thanks you for contacting we! Much of happy to service of your shirts. The mail will be order delivery of very important! Please you for my patronage." I clearly can't say enough about Joe Doe's customer service -- mostly because I can't speak Joe Doe's language.

So, lesson learned. My days of ordering sketchy stuff from sketchy websites is done. Now, this OTHER website I just found that sells plaid flannel shirts in color combinations that match your favorite album covers? Well, that's just about the nerdiest thing I've ever seen -- and of course the shipment arrives tomorrow.

NO, WAIT, IT DOESN'T. THERE IS NOTHING TO SEE ON MY PORCH. KEEP WALKING, FRIEND.

COLUMN: Shoegaze Revival

I think I was twelve years old when I discovered the Beatles.

There was a kid at my school who was the absolute coolest. He was tall, good-looking, and had the uncanny ability to grow facial hair in 7th grade. All the girls swooned over him and all the boys wanted to be him. 

He was too cool to listen to the radio. All he ever played on his boombox was vintage classic rock, and you couldn't catch him anywhere without his faded denim jacket covered in Beatles pins. Suddenly, it seemed like our whole school became Beatles fans overnight. I was no exception -- except I wasn't cool. I was obnoxious.

I quickly procured all the Beatles albums. I went to the library and checked out all the Beatles books. I wore a pair of round Lennon specs. Within a week, I fancied myself an expert on the Fab Four, and every day when my parents would pick me up from school, I'd spend the drive home explaining the Beatles to them as if they hadn't lived through it.

"Did you know Ringo's real name is Richard?  Did you know if you abbreviate 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,' it spells LSD? Did you know Paul is probably dead and they replaced him with a look-alike?" It's a wonder my parents didn't throw me out the car to be raised by raccoons (and raccoons that likely didn't care about George Harrison's middle name.) 

I just got a taste of what my parents had to endure.

Someone once said there's no music better than whatever you listened to in college, and that's absolute truth for me. But I'm honestly convinced that the best music of all time just happened to get released between 1988 and 1992.

My tastes in college were all over the board. I was learning to properly DJ, so I listened to a ton of dance music. But I also worked at the college radio station and developed an ear for esoteric, left-of-center indie rock -- especially the underappreciated bands that critics dubbed "shoegaze." It's still my favorite music to this day.

The dictionary defines shoegaze as "a subgenre of indie rock characterized by ethereal vocals, guitar distortion and effects, feedback, and overwhelming volume." Shoegaze originators like Ride, Slowdive, and My Bloody Valentine would famously spend months in the studio layering simple guitar chords with enough reverb and effects to punch holes through speakers. When I saw Slowdive play Chicago in '92, I remember having to grab the railing after every song, because when they'd stop playing, I'd be dizzy from the change in equilibrium. It's like if your favorite musician was, in fact, a jet engine.

It's definitely not the music for everyone. I don't know many people on the fence about shoegaze. You either really get it or you really DON'T. I read a review once that said shoegaze was like listening to a mermaid fall into a black hole. My mom told me it sounded like a vacuum cleaner. Even the term "shoegaze" was originally an insult hurled by a music critic, aghast that people were paying money to watch musicians stare stoically at a bank of effect pedals on the ground.

But shoegaze was MY music, and being a fan felt like membership into a secret club. You'd see the same people at shows. You'd nod respectfully at anyone you spotted wearing a Ride t-shirt. For once, I finally felt like the coolest kid in school, hip to something no one else understood.

That is, until this week -- when I saw an article on Vice entitled, "Gen Z are Resurrecting Shoegaze for their Bleak Post-COVID World." Unbeknownst to me, today's cool kids have rediscovered those esoteric little bands from my youth, and those hard-to-find albums are now in heavy rotation on Spotify.

I went to TikTok and it's eleventy times cringier than me trying to teach my parents about the Beatles. There's kids making viral dances to Slowdive songs. There's shoegaze make-up tutorials. Girls are posting videos where they burn incense and fondle crystals to "manifest a shoegaze boyfriend." There's blog articles entitled, "What your favorite shoegaze band says about you."

Worst of all, it seems like the overwhelming consensus among the new generation is that shoegaze is supposed to be the soundtrack to mopey depression, sadness, and pandemic isolation. I guess it's now supposed to be the music you listen to when you need a good cry. It was never that way for us back in the day. If anything, the layered guitar effects and sonic maelstrom of shoegaze made me feel happy, alive, and blissed out. Not once did I listen in order to mourn my own existence. That's why God invented goth music, you sillies. 

I'm not sure whether to be appalled by these new fans getting it all wrong, or if I should feel like a golden god for being a card-carrying member of the original shoegaze fanbase. Part of me wants to find these teenagers and lecture them on proper music appreciation. The other part wants them to think I'm a cool kid, too. 

Except I'm not a cool kid. I'm a 50-year-old dude who happens to like the same music as a bunch of pretentious trendy kids right now. Maybe some of them are telling their parents interesting facts about Slowdive as I speak. I think I'll just stay off TikTok and let the kids have their mopey shoegaze moment. Their misappreciation and misappropriation of my favorite music is appalling, but if it results in Slowdive going on another reunion tour, we all win (except the people who think they sound like a vacuum cleaner.)

I'll be the blissed-out 50-year-old sore thumb in the back row and I won't care one bit.

COLUMN: Livin' La Vida Awful

Well, this is a first.

I've been writing this column every week for 17 years now, and I can safely say this is the first one composed on a cellphone. But that's how desperate I am to escape my present situation. As I painfully type this one thumb at a time, I'm getting work done on my car, and I'm currently being tortured by the devil's Muzak while sitting in the waiting area / infinite purgatory of the dealership. 

I should be feeling good. This is maturity at work right here. I'm adulting like heck. I have a burned-out tail light, something I've known for weeks and relegated to the lower mid-section of the "to-do" list like an irresponsible idiot. But last week, I drove home to Galesburg and made the mistake of letting my dad notice. If I didn't sort this out post-haste, I guarantee it would be the lead topic of every phone call home. Plus I'd rather not get rear-ended OR a ticket, so it's time for action. Specifically, the action of sitting here indefinitely while time crawls to a halt.

In all honesty, it's a lovely waiting area and a great dealership. Everyone's super nice, it's clean as a whistle, there's unlimited beverages, and their COVID mitigations are top-notch. There's just one big problem.

The overhead radio is presently tuned to one of the many kazillion satellite stations out there. If I had to reckon a guess, I'd say we're listening to the Middle-Aged White People Party Jams channel, or perhaps a channel whose theme is simply Shane's Least Favorite Songs of All Time Ever. If it's insipid, over-played, inescapable, and terrible, it's on this playlist. I've been here for a half hour and I'm ready to pull my ears clean off.

I'm fully self-aware that I'm an elitist music snob. Listening to me prattle on about music is likely ten times more tiresome than this playlist could ever be. If there's a band you love, odds are good that I (a) sincerely hate them, (b) secretly love them but still insist I hate them, or (c) am about to tell you how they're derivative of some far superior Scottish indie band from 1982 that precisely 17 people on Earth have ever heard of. Sometimes it takes great patience to be my friend.

But I don't think you have to be a snobby elitist to hate this channel. We all come from different walks of life. We all have different tastes, passions, and stories. But if there's one thing that unifies us as a people, it's the shared truth that none of us EVER need to hear "Livin' La Vida Loca" ever again. Ricky Martin himself probably doesn't want to hear that song ever again.

That's the kind of schlock this channel's been pushing down my earholes for some forty minutes now without rhyme or reason. Well, I guess there's rhyme, if you count "loca" and "mocha." 

But worse than their song selections is the way they're assembled. It makes absolutely no sense. They just played that Cher autotune song -- "Do you beeeLIEEEEEEVE in life after love??" -- followed immediately by Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love." Is there anyone on Earth who's a hardcore fan of both Cher and Led Zep? If so, you're downright weird. And should probably be my friend.

Fifteen minutes have passed. I can now say with some certainty that I have no idea who let the dogs out and I frankly don't care. Nor do I care that you've been through the desert on a horse with no name. I cannot see paradise by the dashboard lights and I do not want to come sail away. It is quite unnecessary to celebrate good times, come on. These songs already live in the deepest, darkest earworm-riddled corners of our brains for all time, there's absolutely no reason to bring them out for a refresher. If "Mmm Bop" comes on, I swear I'm walking home.

WHOA. I just discovered what this channel is. It's the satellite channel "Road Trip Radio: Music To Drive To." If this was my required road trip soundtrack, I'd be a MUCH bigger homebody.

Now it's Icona Pop's "I Love It," which is actually a bop, but I'm trying to sort out why "Road Trip Radio" would feature a song whose main lyrics repeat, "I crashed my car into the bridge, I watched, I let it burn." This does NOT bode well for your roadtrip safety, people.

Perhaps this is all just a genius sales technique. I'm half-tempted to buy a new car just so I can get out of earshot. "Sure, give me the keys, I'll sign on the X, just don't make me listen to 'Love Shack,' I'm begging you." 

We have warped ahead 30 minutes. I'm home. Just as the gentle strains of "Eye of the Tiger" were kicking up, my car was done. All in all, a good experience -- as soon as I remembered I had my noise-cancelling earbuds in my pocket. I can definitely tell you what channel I did NOT listen to on the road trip home. If you were annoyed just now by the car zooming past with two shiny tail lights blaring some Scottish indie band from 1982 that only 17 people on Earth have ever heard of, my deepest apologies. And my work here is done, because you're now #18, congrats.  

COLUMN: Galesburg

They say "you can't go home again." I've clearly been proving them wrong.

I've spent a good chunk of this past week in my hometown of Galesburg. My mom took it upon herself to book an unexpected two-week stay at the fabulous bed & breakfast resort known as OSF St. Mary's Medical Center, so I've been doing a fair share of commutes lately.

Don't worry, she's home now and doing much better -- and it wasn't anything COVID-related -- but it definitely wasn't the most fun couple of weeks a person could have.

When I say Galesburg's my hometown, I'm kind of lying. Technically speaking, I don't have a hometown. I grew up in the country, about five miles northeast of the 'Burg. When I go home for a visit, I don't even need to go into town -- I usually just head straight into the sticks.

But between hospital visits and food runs, I've been spending quality time within the city limits of the town I used to run amok in -- and things ARE mighty different. 

Back in my day, the area around St. Mary's was truly the edge of town. The hospital was effectively in the country. But a few years back, they built a fancy new Wal-Mart in that corridor, which means the former edge of town is now bustling with fast-food joints and strip malls. Honestly, for once I'm a little jealous of my parent's locale -- they've got a Buffalo Wild Wings and a McAlister's and a Burger King and a Pizza Ranch all within five minutes of my once-isolated childhood home.

Of course, I'm not especially jealous of my mom right now, because the only haute cuisine she's been enjoying is water and Jello. When I asked what flavor it was, I was told "green." Seeing as how it's fairly impolite to sneak food into the hospital room of someone who can't eat, I was resorting to scarfing down burgers in the hospital parking lot, trying not make a spectacle of myself as the staff went about their shift changes.

It must have worked, because the first time I visited, I didn't even discover until later that I wasn't supposed to have made it through the door. I just walked in, nodded at the attendant, and went straight to the elevator up to my mom's room. I didn't even realize that COVID-19 protocols were still in play, and every patient was only allowed ONE support person (in this case, my dad.) They were supposed to have cross-checked me against a list of approved visitors. They were supposed to have checked my temperature and issued me hand sanitizer.

I didn't know any of this. I just strolled on in and nobody stopped me. Only later, when a surprised nurse walked in and gave me the third degree, did I realize I was in breach of protocol. Clearly this can only mean one thing: I must resemble a neurosurgeon. The attendant must have noticed my confidence, poise, and profound level of maturity and naturally assumed I was an important doctor here to do important doctorish things. I'm sure its nearly impossible to tell the difference between a cardiac surgeon and a chubby newspaper columnist wearing a t-shirt that says "your favorite band sucks."

I was summarily and justifiably booted from the premises. Given my hermitic ways, I'm pretty sure I was in more danger of catching COVID-19 from them than they were from me, but rules are rules and safety first. Thankfully, a couple days later they eased back the protocols. Mom was allowed two designated visitors and I made the list (sorry, Aunt Merry, you missed the cut.)

Once upon a time, a simple roadtrip home wasn't a big deal. I love any excuse to go for a drive. Once I left the house on a food run and ended up in northern Wisconsin. Roadtrips are my jam. But the older I get, the longer that stretch of highway gets. Instead of just hopping in the car, I'm running through checklists in my mind like a mature person (gross.) Do I have water? Check. Mask? Check. Advil? Check. Imodium? Can't be too cautious. Anything could happen on the mean streets of the Illinois interstate system.

Advil turned out to be a good idea. I fell on the ice two winters ago in a comically ridiculous way, and I'm pretty sure my butt's still broken. Get me in a car for longer than a half hour and there's a good chance my tailbone will start screaming. I should probably see somebody about that, lest I become a crochety old man whose butt predicts the weather ("Uh oh, my coccyx is flaring up. Hard rain's a-comin'!") 

Driving down Henderson Street in Galesburg always reminds me of high school weekends, when the required social activity was cruising the strip from the McDonalds on Henderson to the McDonalds on Main over and over again. Do teenagers even do that any more? Have I reached the age where I just sit around and start stories with, "Back in MY day..."? Apparently so, since I already started a sentence with those very words a few paragraphs above.

Change is inevitable. My mom liked to amuse me with stories about life before television. Our generation's children are equally blown away by our tales of life before cellphones. THEIR children will probably be saying things like "do you remember the olden days when cars used to roll around on WHEELS?" But whether we have to walk, drive, fly, or teleport, family will always be family, and I'm lucky to have one that will always welcome me.

It might not look the same, but you can DEFINITELY go home again.      

COLUMN: Second Shot

Well, it's official. I have been double-stabbinated and fully vaccinated. If all goes well, by this time next week, I will be 100% impervious to all disease and an immortal superhero with direct 5G access to Bill Gates and the Illuminati.

Or, just maybe, I'll be a normal human being who can interact with other human beings without a mask, Plexiglass, or six precious feet between us.

It's been a rough year. A microscopic (and, let's be honest, silly-looking) virus has taken the lives of an estimated 2.87 million people across the globe. The amount of tragedy, loss, and suffering caused by COVID-19 is horrific and incomprehensible, and that is the ONLY reason why I'm not spending the rest of this column whining about HOW MUCH MY ARM HURTS RIGHT NOW. Ow.

Honestly, though, I didn't experience any of the occasionally reported side effects from the vaccine. No nausea, brain fog, chills, or fever, and that's awesome. But I can't pretend my arm isn't sore right now. I'm literally typing this one-handed. But if a sore arm is the required price for concerts to happen again, I'm glad to pay the piper. For the love of rock & roll, go get stabbed. 

Where's the one place you'd want to be right now if you could travel anywhere? Most of you would probably want to be on a tropical beach or a majestic mountainside. Me? I wanna be at Codfish Hollow, the barn concert venue tucked into a little hidden valley just outside Maquoketa. If you haven't been, you're missing the greatest secret in the Midwest. Thanks to COVID, we've all been missing it for over a year now -- but word on the street is they're hoping to re-open later this summer, so fingers crossed and masks up, people.)

At this point, I'd go see ANYONE in concert. I'd pay money to watch Nickelback open for Milli Vanilli. I would sit through a polka band doing a twenty minute version of the Chicken Dance. I just want music and life and people and smiles. It's coming. I can feel it.

We need to be patient, though. Just because some of us are now fully vaccinated doesn't mean we're free to roam around mask-less, licking doorknobs with carefree abandon. Vaccinated people might not feel the effects of COVID-19, but they think we can still spread it to folks who are vulnerable, and that's no good. Herd immunity's on the horizon. For now, though, us vaccinated folk can get together in small groups and hug each other until it gets SUPER awkward, and that's a good start. 

Finally, I might be able to think realistically about post-pandemic life. COVID's changed the way we all live, though -- and for me, some of that will NOT be changing.

WHAT I'LL STOP DOING IN A WEEK: Disinfecting my groceries as they enter my house. The CDC already said it's probably overkill, but I got in the habit early on and have yet to stop. When I was at the store to get my second vaccine, I saw a little kid with his grubby little kid hands feeling up every can and box as he skipped maskless down an aisle, so I'm good with over-caution. Still, there are no seconds in a day longer than the ones where I'm wiping down groceries, especially the ridiculous times I've caught myself disinfecting cans of disinfectant. When you're wiping down Lysol bottles with Lysol, you may have a problem.

WHAT I WON'T STOP DOING IN A WEEK: Using a delivery service for groceries. I've grown to love it, pandemic or no. Sure, it's spending needless money on delivery fees, but I've done the math and I'm honestly SAVING money using a home delivery service. When someone else is hitting the grocery store on your behalf, you can't impulse shop. I'm spending less at the store because I'm not foolishly grabbing anything that looks tasty on a whim. 

WHAT I'LL STOP DOING IN A WEEK: Avoiding uncooked food. I realized the other day that I've spent the past year shying away from things like salads and sub sandwiches, and it's probably out of a subconscious fear that someone's coughed on them. I'm well aware how ridiculous this is. The odds of catching a virus from a ham sandwich are slim to none, but cooked food just seems safer and more comforting. That said, when I choose which restaurant I'll walk into next week for the first time in over a year, odds are pretty high it's going to rhyme with Bungry Bobo. 

WHAT I WON'T STOP DOING IN A WEEK: Cooking more at home. If nothing else, the pandemic's forced me to get pretty good at kitchen-y stuff, especially if it involves the Instant Pot, God's gift to single people who never learned how to cook. I got into a debate online last week with someone about caraway seeds. Never in my life did I expect to one day care about caraway seeds. A year ago, I didn't even know what a caraway seed was. But now, I'm SO insistent they're vital to Hungarian goulash that I picked a fight about with a stranger on the internet. WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO ME?

WHAT I'LL STOP DOING IN A WEEK: Being judgey towards people. You should never read a book by its cover, but on those rare occasions when I get out and about, I'm still catching myself looking at people and thinking, "Well, THAT dude looks super COVID-y." If you see me strutting by you briskly, I'm likely worried that you're toxic. There's even a chance that behind my mask, I'm holding my breath. Don't take it personally. I'm an idiot.

But soon, I'll be an idiot who doesn't have to live in a constant state of caution and pananoia. No longer will I have to spend my days sitting around alone wishing there was something to do, and I can finally get back to my normal hobby of CHOOSING to sit around alone wishing there was something to do. There's light at the end of the tunnel. With any luck, I'll be able to move my right arm by the time I reach it.

COLUMN: Coloring

As I've mentioned in previous columns, it was NOT a terrific winter for yours truly.

Some scary health symptoms combined with some ill-advised self-diagnostics on the internet led me to believe I was on the brink of death. Suddenly faced with mortality, I decided the best course of action would be to hole up in my house, stop answering the phone, and essentially suffer a fear-induced breakdown. In retrospect, I can't say this was an optimal way to spend the holiday season. It was NOT, as the song promises, the most wonderful time of the year.

My journey into self-isolation and panic wasn't without its upside, though. Had it not been for my temporary descent into madness, I wouldn't have discovered my newest hobby. And I'm proud to say, on the grand list of time-wasting hobbies out there, this one might very well be the stupidest.

I have acquired a fondness for online coloring apps.

Coloring books were never a big thing for me as a kid. I owned a few, sure, but it wasn't an activity I ever yearned for. I was always too worried about coloring outside the lines, using the incorrect color, or having an ugly finished product.

Online coloring apps take away all those worries. In fact, they take away any ounce of creativity whatsoever.

The app I downloaded, "Happy Color," works in a familiar manner to those old-school coloring books of yore. Each day, you can download a new array of black-and-white images full of tiny numbers. Each number corresponds to a color on the accompanying color palette. To complete each picture, you highlight one of the numbered colors, find its match in the image, and simply tap on that area of the image to have it magically colorize.

One image can easily have over 1000 of these numbered areas, so it can take hours to fully color in one image. There's no coloring outside the lines - the app won't let you. There's no using the wrong color - the app won't let you. You're just essentially matching the number from column A to the identical number in column B. It's just that column B happens to be a picture of a horse. Or a meadow. Or a horse in a meadow.

Essentially, Happy Color is little more than an excuse to waste hours furiously tapping on your phone for no real reason. It's ridiculous, it accomplishes nothing, and it's EXACTLY what I needed.

When you spend two months assuming you're moments from death, wasting hours furiously tapping on your phone for no real whatsoever is JUST what the doctor ordered. (Well, that and multiple colonoscopies.) But when I'm fooling with Happy Colors, for those few pleasant moments, I can switch my brain off and worry about nothing more than finding the right shade of blue. 

It's cathartic and calming and centering. And a bit crazy.

"Happy Color" prides itself on its wide variety of images, and they're not exaggerating. There must be thousands in all, and they add new images daily. Last time I opened the app, there was a pic of a cat. And a motorcycle. And a saxophone. Oh, and a picture of a wide-mouthed bald woman with razor-sharp teeth glaring psychotically at a terrified rat. Wait, what?

I'm all for variety, but this image could give ME nightmares, let alone some hapless little kid. Only later did I discover it's a still image from "The Witches," a recent film adaptation of the popular children's novel by Roald Dahl. This makes perfect sense, because Dahl is an author whose literary canon is full of Willy Wonkas and Giant Peaches and is basically a nightmare factory for children. This is, after all, the same man who once turned an innocent girl into a hideous blueberry monster, all for the unspeakable crime of... chewing gum? I know nothing about Roald Dahl's children, but I reckon they were terrified into some seriously good manners.

Yesterday, I opened "Happy Color" to find an image of... well, I'm not even really sure WHAT it's supposed to be. It's an elephant. Specifically, it's an elephant standing upright on an urban street corner. More specifically, the elephant appears to be having some kind of unspeakable romantic liaison with the side of a building. I know no other way to explain it. My friend thinks maybe the elephant is meant to be hiding and peering out from around the corner of the building. But I spent WAY too long coloring that image, and it sure looks more bawdy to me. No time is a good time for pachyderm pornography. I'm beginning to wonder if the artists of "Happy Color" get out of the house less than I do.

Oh, and if you think coloring these photos is a stress reliever, think again. The game won't let you complete an image until you've colored in every single space. And, invariably, as you reach the end, there will always be some teeny tiny uncolored sliver that can take FOREVER to find. So it's all quite charming and relaxing until you get to the end, when you have to play an agonizing round of "Where's Waldo" hunting for that last elusive uncolored piece.

Of course, the app offers hints to the location of the uncolored pieces, but to view the hints, you have to sit through a sixty second ad for some other time-wasting app. Frankly, I'd rather be turned into a hideous blueberry monster than suffer through one more ad for Crazy Birds. 

Honestly, though, I love this utterly stupid app, and I can't recommend it enough. It is the video game equivalent of "just take a second to breathe." If you're having a tough time making it through these (hopefully) last days of the pandemic, I feel your pain. Trust me, I've been there. But maybe things aren't as bad as you think. Maybe you just need a little color in your life.

    

COLUMN: Hope

Nothing makes me feel older than sitting around and letting my mind wander back to the good old days. And there's nothing like a pandemic to give you PLENTY of time for mind-wandering. When you're stuck on the same couch for the better part of a calendar year, suddenly good old days start feeling like GREAT old days.

Truth be told, I was fairly miserable for most of my youth, mostly of my own doing. I specialized in being the annoying nerdy kid, desperate to impress friends and fit in at all costs. I've grown up a heck of a lot since then, but I'm sure there's a part of me that still yearns for acceptance and hopes people think I'm cool.

Maybe we're all guilty of it. After all, is there any reason to post on Facebook other than to say, "Look at me, am I cool?" It makes me wonder. I'm a music geek through and through, but do I volunteer to DJ parties because I love music or because I love being in CONTROL of the music? This past weekend, I was wasting an afternoon practicing some DJ mixes, and I'll admit it: I cranked the music a little louder than necessary because I knew my window was open and the neighbor kids were playing outside. 

Am I that desperate for acceptance that I need 8-year-olds to think I'm cool? That's kinda sad. I haven't the slightest clue what impresses 8-year-olds these days, but I'm guessing it's NOT house music or the dorky neighbor playing it louder than he should've.

A friend asked an interesting question last week: Who was my first crush? And we're not talking celebrity crushes, because I prefer to overlook the salacious era of "the Debbie Gibson years." Celebrity crushes are silly and adolescent and that's why I definitely don't own every season of Dawson's Creek or find Katie Holmes to be a goddess (cough.)

I can barely recall all my celebrity crushes -- but I certainly know who my first real world crush was.

When I was growing up, my mom had one close friend. Whenever the two of them would get together, I'd usually be forced to tag along. This wasn't a huge sacrifice for me, because my mom's friend had a daughter my age, Maria. I probably SHOULD have had a crush on Maria, but she intimidated the heck out of me. She was smarter than me, more sarcastic than me, and she was even better at video games than me. My adolescent brain couldn't process anyone that cool. 

But one fateful day, our moms got together for an afternoon and I was along for the ride. But Maria had a friend from out of town visiting for the weekend. Her name was Hope. She was from Chicago. And after one afternoon together, I was positive she was my soulmate.

That afternoon was over 35 years ago, and honestly, I barely remember it. I can't recall Hope's face or a single thing we talked about. But I remember she smelled like strawberries, she laughed at my dumb jokes, and I went all wobbly when she touched my knee. And the best part? I wasn't trying to impress her. I wasn't desperate for her to think I was cool. The three of us just hung out all afternoon and had fun.

Afterwards, I asked Maria for Hope's address, and I wrote her an epic love letter, spilling the depths of my soul with romantic prose, passionate longing, and elegantly-crafted expressions of desire. Or, since I was in 7th grade, it probably consisted of "Do you like me? Check this box." She responded in kind with an equally romantic reply (she checked "YES,") so for a few fleeting days of pre-teenery, I had myself a girlfriend.

I took her letters to school, showed my friends, and spent every waking moment pining for her. Well, for about two weeks. In the short attention span of youth, our love was not meant to be and this stallion needed to roam free. But the simple question of "who was your first crush" brought fond fuzzy memories to mind, and I suddenly had an idea.

I haven't spoken to my friend Maria in over twenty years, but it didn't stop me from messaging her out of the blue to see if she was still in touch with Hope. She wasn't -- but she DID remember her last name and the suburb she lived in, which is more than I could recall about my soulmate of yore. That was good enough for a Google search. How great would it be to find her after all these years, see if she ever had fleeting thoughts of me, and find out how her life turned out? It could make a great column.

And it would have, except my Google search immediately pulled up an obituary for someone matching her name, age, and last known location. Ouch. That's a bummer. For what it's worth, Hope has/had a VERY common last name, and it might not even be her. I sure hope this Hope isn't MY Hope. I definitely didn't want a column about good memories turning into a wistful treatise on the fragility of life.

That was absolutely enough research for me. I'm content leaving her fate a mystery. I'm not telling Maria what I found, either. The only thing more awkward than "Hey, I know we haven't spoken in years, but remember your hot friend?" would be following it up with, "yeah, she might be dead." I'd rather just remember what I can about that perfect weekend and the magic of a hand accidentally brushing against my knee.

Take it from me, don't worry about fitting in or trying to look cool. Some days might seem long, but life is short. Don't waste it. I might never be the cool kid in the room, but after all these years, I'm kinda glad that I'm not. If you stop trying to fit in and start being yourself, you might just find your real passion. You might even find some Hope in this world.      

COLUMN: Rachael Ray

Exciting news, all: I have a new BFF.

Sorry, Bruce. You were the first to earn the title of Shane's Best Friend, and I couldn't imagine surviving high school alongside anyone but you. Sorry, Jason. You've been my closest confidant and other-mother brother since fate assigned us adjacent dorm rooms in college. And sorry, Dianna. I know there's one only one person who would come over at 7 a.m. just to help me change the battery in a smoke detector.

You're all amazing people that I couldn't imagine my life without. But you've all been replaced. I have a new bestie... and her name is Rachael Ray.

Some might say I've fallen into a pandemic routine lately. But when you're working from home like I've been for the past few months, there's no such thing as "routine," unless your idea of routine is having to leave a conference call because a cat just vomited in your lap -- which, to the fellow attendees of my Zoom meeting, appeared as if I suddenly and spontaneously glanced down at my crotch, screamed "Ewww!! Gross!!," and disconnected. It wasn't my best moment. 

But as much as I miss my co-workers and annoying them with Belgian house music quietly pumping from my cubicle at 9 a.m., I kinda enjoy working from home. If someone were to walk in here right now, they'd have little clue I'm working. It's me sprawled across the couch like a beached whale as usual. I just have a different laptop in front of me. At 5 p.m., I'm like, "Ahh, quitting time." And all I do is close my work laptop, set it aside, open my personal laptop, and remain in the exact same position. Welcome to my pandemic life.

The only real routine I have these days is waking up an hour before I have to log in. I use this time to saunter into the living room, imbibe caffeine, and catch a few minutes of the "Today" show while my brain boots up. When it's time to work, I simply grab the laptop and hit the mute button on the TV, which stays on throughout the day as my silent work buddy and comforting proof that I'm not the last person alive on Earth. 

But when the Today show ends, it's followed by the smiling Rachael Ray, whose delicious daily dishes are tough to ignore, even when she's muted. I often find myself catching glimpses of fabulous culinary creations, which is hard to take when my fridge contains little more than Lunchables and leftover pizza.

So for the past couple months, I've been taking my lunch hour with my new buddy Rachael. She's been teaching me how to cook, or at least trying her best. Rachael Ray has the amazing ability to make every recipe seem incredibly simple to pull off. At least once a week, she whips up something that makes me think, "I could do that."

As it turns out, sometimes I actually can. I made a decent soup the other day using one of her recipes. Last weekend, I successfully braised short ribs. I recently followed a Rachael Ray Show recipe for sausage & shells that turned out to be single tastiest thing that's ever come out of my kitchen. Am I becoming competent in the kitchen?

Of course, not all attempts are winners. A few weeks back, I attempted a recipe from her website called "Rach's Stupid Good, Silly Easy Sausage and Apple Tray Bake." I opted for a slight variation on the recipe, a creation I renamed "Shane's Stupid Bad Charred Husks of Blackened Things That May or May Not Have Once Been Sausages and Apples But I'm Honestly Not Sure." One minute, things looked fine in the oven. The next, it was culinary cremation.

I'm also starting to think my new bestie isn't entirely honest with her viewing audience. For one, bok choy isn't delicious, it's slimy and gross. And no, Rachael, I can't "add a dollop of Calabrian chili paste" because no one but you has Calabrian chili paste in their pantry.

Last week, Bobby Flay was on, sharing his recipe for Bucatini all'Amatriciana, which I believe is Italian for "spaghetti topped with a buttload of bacon." What's not to love, other than maybe your next cholesterol checkup? Just like Bobby, I carefully added my ingredients to a pot and set it to simmer. Just like Bobby, I checked on it after twenty minutes and added fresh oregano (or maybe oregano from a jar I'm pretty sure I've had since the 1990s, shh!)

But I definitely don't recall any part of Bobby Flay's video where a rogue drop of boiling sauce flies directly into his left eyeball, which was MY experience. And while I was cursing and trying to rinse my eye out with cold water, MORE drops of boiling sauce started flying everywhere around my kitchen. The end result tasted amazing, but it destroyed a perfectly good t-shirt and left behind a Dateline-worthy crime scene in my kitchen. 

Overall, though, Rachael Ray makes a pretty good pandemic pal. I usually can't stomach traditional cooking shows. Nothing makes my eyes roll faster than a studio audience gasping with appreciation at someone adding onion to a pan -- and no show is usually guiltier of fake audience reactions than Rachael Ray. But these are not usual times. Since the pandemic, Rachael and her hubby have been making the show on their own from their mountain home (actually, their GUEST home, but that's a whooole other story my bestie can tell you about.) The homemade DIY format so much better than a glossy studio full of people "ooh"-ing and "ahh"-ing chicken stock as it simmers.

So for the time being, I have a new best buddy, and it's just like most friendships. Sometimes she acts like she's better than me. Sometimes she tells me I need to cut back on my salt intake. We get along great, but sometimes we disagree. A couple weeks back, I said to myself, "Okay, this weekend I'm making whatever Rachael makes today." And then she said, "Welcome to the show! Today we're going to make Onion & Brussels Sprout Pasta," at which point I decided that maybe I needed a different best friend, so I changed the channel and met some exciting new people on CBS. I don't know much about them, but they seem quite young and restless. Wish me luck.     

COLUMN: Vaccinated

I may have been on this planet for some five decades now, but nothing seems more preposterous than the idea of some young person turning to ME for sagely wisdom about life. Frankly, I'm just not real good at this "existence" business. I will never pretend to be better than you, because I know I'm not. I don't even know HOW to get on a high horse.

But yesterday? For one brief second, I got to play the hero. I was brave, and I did a good thing: I got stabbed in the arm. If all goes well, in a matter of weeks, I will be an invincible superhero -- or at least able to shop for groceries within six feet of another human being, and that's close enough.

You should do it, too.

I'm not here to pick a fight with you anti-vaxxers. Nobody wins. Some people are afraid the vaccine isn't safe. Well, fine, I guess. Whatever. I'll put my faith in scienc-y people, because I sat next to some of them in high school and they seemed really smart. For me, it's a risk I was willing to take. "Could I suffer a side effect?" vs. "Do I ever want to attend a concert again?" Concerts won out.

Then there are people out there -- we all have that ONE uncle on Facebook -- who think the vaccine is part of a sinister plot to subjugate us all to the nefarious plans of, I dunno, I guess Dolly Parton and Dr. Fauci. Or the vaccine contains secret tracking chips so Bill Gates can spy on us.

I hate to break it to your over-inflated sense of self-importance, but Bill Gates most likely does NOT care about what you're having for dinner tonight. A similar rumor hits social media every year without fail. You know, the one that claims Facebook is going to claim ownership of all your social media content unless you post something that says, "No, Mark Zuckerberg! You may NOT have my photos!"

Mark Zuckerberg owns approximately eleventy kajillion dollars. He does not need the selfie of you in the red dress at the club. With just the spending money in his wallet, he could probably buy the club, the dress, and pay Kim Kardashian to wear it there. Honestly, if Mark Zuckerberg wants the 18 photos of my cats that adorn my Facebook page, he's welcome to them. 

Are there creepy violations of our privacy happening online? You bet. Do some websites track where we go online? Sure -- but they're mostly doing it in order to serve us ads based on our interests. Websites need to sell ads to make money. And if those sites are going to shove ads in my face, I'd rather they be for products I might actually care about. If Bill Gates really DID just put a tracking chip in my arm, he's welcome to spy on my exciting life ("My God, he's STILL on the couch. It's been ten hours. Do you think he's dead?")

The only fear I had to overcome when it came to getting the vaccine wasn't the vaccine. It was the "getting" part.

I'm terrified of needles. I remember the last time I got a vaccine. It was a booster shot I needed in grade school. I remember the nurse telling me "it's just like a little bee sting." I'm allergic to little bee stings. Little bee stings can kill me. I screamed so loud, I broke all the blood vessels in my face and walked around purple for a week.

But yesterday I did the unthinkable. Of my own free will, I went up to a nice lady and said, "Hello, I'm here for my injection, please." If you go out today, please be mindful -- the forecast calls for freezing hell and flying pigs. 

The down side? I may have caught COVID-19 from the dude next to me in the vaccine line. Mine took place at the grocery store, where there's a helpful smile in every aisle -- and a woman who stabs people with needles. Afterwards, they ask you to stick around for a few minutes, which is admittedly less than resassuring. "The vaccine is perfectly safe, but go wait here for fifteen minutes to make sure you don't die."

Worse yet, the guy ahead of me appeared to already have COVID-27 or 28. The entire time, he was coughing up a lung -- and with each cough, he thoughtfully reached up and pulled DOWN his mask to hack open-mouthed into the air. I was supposed to wait fifteen minutes, but I snuck out after five. I'd rather die of an allergic reaction on MY terms than catch grocery store cooties before the vaccine has a chance to do its trick.

It's trick, by the way, is to make your arm hurt so bad that you forget all about COVID. It's already much better now, but yesterday was unpleasant. I went to pick up a cat last night and about screamed. But it goes away. 

With any luck -- and a lot of needles -- so will COVID. 

COLUMN: Weekend From Hell, Pt. 2

Last week, I selfishly used this column as therapy. I just wanted to whine about my terrible, horrible, no good, very bad weekend. What started as an earnest attempt to organize my kitchen turned into an all-nighter of clutter and chaos. Then I was awakened the next morning after three hours sleep by a malfunctioning smoke detector. 

Little did I know, the fun was just getting started.

After convincing myself that the house was not, in fact, on fire, I spent Saturday organizing music files on my computer, because I am nothing if not a party animal.

But at 8 p.m., I got the chills. Remember the health problems I had earlier this winter? It all started with a kidney infection and me getting the chills. "Swell," I thought while grabbing a sweater and some cranberry juice. That's when my eye happened to catch the living room thermostat. It read 64 degrees. I had the chills, alright -- my heat was out.

I have no idea why, but I headed to the basement like I knew what I was doing. "Yep, that's a furnace," I said to myself, which is pretty much the extent of my HVAC knowledge. It wasn't on fire, so yay for that. I executed the only troubleshooting maneuver I was qualified to do: I turned it off and back on. No dice.

I called a couple 24-hour HVAC places, who were happy to come diagnose the problem for roughly 18% of my annual salary. I knew after-hours prices were steep, but man. If those poor Texans on the news could tough it out, I could, too. I bundled up and went to bed.

Sunday morning, I woke up to a 52 degree interior. Even the cats were looking at me like, "Ummm...?" Ergo, I did what you're NOT supposed to do -- I made a beeline for the kitchen, opened the (electric) oven, and set it to broil. In fact, as long as I was standing there monitoring it, I figured it'd be safe to turn on the stove burners, too.

I had made the beeline for the kitchen before making the morning pilgrimage to the bathroom, so I was standing in the kitchen doing a little jig that was half for warmth and half because I had to pee, so I hustled to the bathroom for a quick second.

The morning prior, I had indulged in a bowl of cereal. What I didn't know is that somewhere in the cereal-pouring process, a rogue Frosted Flake had absconded from my bowl and landed in the well of one of those stove burners. By the time I returned from the bathroom, the aforementioned Frosted Flake was on frosted fire. It was not "grrrrrreat." 

It burned out in seconds, but not before setting off EVERY smoke detector in the house, including the dreaded one in my bedroom. Whoever installed that smoke detector is a sadist. I have vaulted ceilings, and it's on the weeee tippy top. Shutting it off involves an aerial escapade on a telescoping ladder that requires teamwork and a degree in physics just to open, let alone climb. 

I only have one friend who I knew would be awake, and it's the same friend who helped with my kitchen not 24 hours earlier. If you know Dianna Saelens, give her a socially distant high-five and tell her how awesome she is. She arrived with space heaters, batteries, and the willingness to scale a two-story ladder without vomiting. I contributed the best way I knew how: bacon. I handled breakfast duty.

At one point, I noticed one of my poor cats scared out of her mind, heading behind the couch in a space she shouldn't be in. That's when the morning went from bad to worse to... indescribable.

I have three cats. Two are the geriatric sisters I've had for years. The third is the young feral I took in last year. It is NOT one big happy family. Bez, my grandma kitty with bad hips and bad kidneys, has long been the alpha of the house. She is NOT a fan of our young new tenant. But lately, things had been better. The new cat keeps to the basement, Bez patrols the main floor, and there's been less conflict.

When I pulled out the couch, I discovered why. I spend most of my time, especially this past year, camped out on the couch. Whether it's watching TV, working from home, or writing this column, it all happens here on this couch. Yet somehow, I've been sitting here completely oblivious that Granny Bez has been going behind the couch and using it as her own personal litterbox. For what appeared to be weeks.

I get paid to write, and I have no words. How it didn't make an unholy smell is beyond me. How my house wasn't declared a HAZMAT violation is beyond me. The noise I made upon discovering the hidden cache is beyond me. Why I'm even telling you all this is beyond me.  

Two days later, it's all hopefully ancient history. The smoke detector got reset. Space heaters got fired up. My carpet got cleaned. On Monday, I paid a man $260 to walk downstairs, open my furnace, and push a button. My house has heat again. Thankfully, he showed me how to push said button next time it happens, so I'm counting that as PERSONAL GROWTH, people. There is no longer a path to get behind the couch and there are ample litterboxes on every floor.

Who knows, maybe there's a moral in here somewhere. Cats are terrible, except when they're not? Smoke detectors are terrible, except when they're not? Never barbecue breakfast cereal? Or the REAL moral, which is "everyone needs a Dianna." Were it not for her, I might be writing this column from a hotel room.

If there's a better moral hiding in all this, I'll let you find it. I'm going to bed.