COLUMN: River Walks

When I first started in the newspaper biz some umpteen years ago, one of my first jobs was typing in personal ads. Nowadays, there's a kajillion different dating websites promising to find your soulmate, but back then, the best shot for the hopeless lovelorn was a simple ad in the personals. And once upon a time, those ads would come my way.

I remember one lady who would routinely place her ads in the form of epic oversized poems (because as we all know, if there's one thing us fellas like, it's a girl who can rhyme.) Some ads would be brief (aka the ones written by guys,) and others would be like reading a comprehensive biography and/or job application. But after typing in dozens of these things, a few trends began popping out.

For instance, it appears that single people LOVE to play darts and pool, because one or the other would be mentioned in almost every one of these ads. I'm not sure what "head games" even are exactly, but every girl out there is apparantly sick of them and needs to make sure that all potential suitors know this. Chubby guys like me are "chunky," while chubby girls are "full-figured." And maybe there'd be a lot fewer chunky full-figured bachelors and bachelorettes out there if they'd stop spending all their down time watching NASCAR and enjoying "quiet nights at home."

But one phrase would constantly pop up in these ads more than anything else:

"I LOVE TAKING LONG WALKS ALONG THE RIVER."

The number of times you would see this exact wording in an ad would boggle the mind. And the best part? Most of those people have to be lying.

If all the people who claimed to love taking long walks along the river actually loved taking long walks along the river, you would never be able to SEE the river through all the people taking long walks along it.

I, on the other hand, never fell victim to the alluring spell of long river walks. Why? Because the river's kind of, umm, well, ICKY. There, I said it. But let me qualify it so you don't hate me forever.

I love the river. The mighty Mississippi is the most important geographical element of our area. It shaped our hills, it shaped our valleys, and it shapes our lives. It is what makes our cities Quad, and as we all know, there's a feelin' in the air that you can't anywhere except the Quad Cities, right, KWQC? Many of us have jobs thanks to the river. Many of us love our community for the simple fact that it's situated on the biggest and most majestic river on this continent. The Mississippi is beautiful and forceful and bountiful and a sight to behold. I just kinda prefer to behold it from either a car or an air-conditioned vantage point.

There's two simple facts about the Mississippi (and pretty much all rivers) that bug me: (1) Rivers are dirty, and (2) rivers are smelly. And if I wanted to walk next to something dirty and smelly, I'd built a Habitrail around a landfill. I know a lot of you like to boat and fish the river, and hey, if I could swim, maybe I'd be one of you. But I also know a guy who went swimming in the river and got some of that majestic river water into a cut on his leg. Before he knew what hit him, his leg swelled up like a balloon, they ran tests and determined he had no fewer than 32 different strains of bacteria setting up shop in his thigh, and despite an inhuman load of antibiotics, the poor guy's been plagued with health problems ever since. Like I said: ICKY. And God bless him for all the work that he does, but there could be a million Chad Pregrackes running around cleaning up the river and I'd STILL be too scared to stick my foot in her.

But when I found myself last weekend in my girlfriend's car with her behind the wheel asking what I felt like doing, I had the uncommon stupidity to go, "Oh, I don't care. You pick." That's right, within minutes we were pulling into the Ben Butterworth Parkway and I was taking (gulp) a long walk along the river. And you know what? It was really entertaining.

We'd barely stepped out of the car when the entertainment began. A nice breeze was rolling in off the river and I was just starting to enjoy the tranquil awesomeness of the setting sun. It was really rather peacef--

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!

That's the sound of the least peaceful thing in the world: a jet-ski, which went careening by us way too fast for its own good. Onboard was a guy having the time of his life. But trailing that dude by a few hundred yards was his buddy, clinging on to an inner tube for dear life while hitting the river with a series of mighty FWAP's. Inner-tube guy looked like he was having considerably less fun than jet-ski guy, mostly because he was taking facefuls of river water with every FWAP.

As a non-swimmer, I'm fairly inexperienced with any facet of boating that doesn't involve pulling the handle of a slot machine and losing money. But boating in itself seems like a nice idea. Gentle waves, relaxing water, I get it. Jet-skiing, on the other hand, seems like a hobby for insane people. Let's just examine the word itself for a minute. Does putting a JET on SKIS even sound like a smart idea? I'm terrified enough of regular sporting activities, but any that involve compound or hyphenated words are extra bad: JET-SKIING, ROLLER-BLADING, BUNJEE-JUMPING, WIND-SURFING. (I've seen the Summer Olympics and now I'm even afraid of PING-PONG.) Let's just simplify it and call them all DEATH-DYING. It's as if a mad scientist thought to himself, "Hmm, how can I get across this river as violently, painfully, and noisely as possible? I know, let's put a JET on a SKI..."

Eventually, Jet-ski-guy dropped his buddy off and went back out on a solo run, most likely to impress the bikini-clad girl checking him out. Ergo, he decided the best course of action would be to take the river at a weird diagonal, gunning the engine and purposely cutting into the waves to hop out of the water as dangerously as possible and almost do a backflip.

"C'mon," my girlfriend whined. "Let's keep walking and get some exercise."

"Sure thing," I replied. "Just let me see this dude bite it real quick and we'll be off."

But darnit, he never did, and presumably lives to woo more bikini-clad girls at a later date. As for me, I got distracted by a lady distributing a loaf of bread to some lucky ducks... while standing directly in front of the sign that said, "Do not feed ducks." People rule.

All in all, though, it's not every day you get to see a guy nearly drown and a woman blatantly break the law. Plus the sunset was pretty, so hey. I'm Shane, I'm a little chunky, and I like darts and pool and NASCAR and long walks along the river.

COLUMN: Twilight

In today's hectic, breakneck, hustle-bustle, take-no-prisoners, do-or-die world of professional humor writing, stress breaks are clearly few and far between. So when the girlfriend recently brought up the idea of a night out at the Highway 61 Drive-In movie theatre up in Maquoketa, I was all for it.

After all, some of my most vivid memories as a kid hail from the old Galesburg drive-in. I may have only been a wee Shaneling, but I distinctly recall seeing three of my all-time favorites from the backseat of the family Accord: "The Blues Brothers," "Trading Places," and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." And if there's anything to feed the imagination of a six-year-old nerd, it's being able to watch "Close Encounters" and then looking up to a field of stars and just... hoping. It's a memory so perfect that it might not even be real.

I had always wanted to head up to Maquoketa and re-live the drive-in of my youth, plus the second movie on the bill was "Inception" which I was aching to see. Ergo, we threw caution to the wind and headed up Highway 61 for some outdoor movie party action.

They do things a little different in Maquoketa. For one, the lot isn't paved - it's grass. This was immediately a different vibe than I was expecting. "Hrrm," I said disapprovingly, like the closed-minded, change hating Grinch Who Stole Funtime that I often am.

"What's wrong?" my girlfriend asked.

"This is less like a drive-in and more like a bumpy pasture, albeit a bumpy pasture starring Leonardo Dicaprio."

"Shut up and have fun," she replied.

Ah well. At least I'd enjoy sidling up to one of those weird boxes and hooking up the tinny speaker to the car window. But wait, no poles? No boxes? No treble-heavy, sub-standard sound quality? No, instead you had to tune your radio to an FM frequency that broadcast the movie audio. What kind of new-fangled modern trickery was this?

At least some things hadn't changed. There was still the concession shack selling yummy treats at super-cheap prices. There was still the playground at the base of the screen (which, as we all know, serves one purpose and one purpose only: to give John Travolta something to look at wistfully while he sings "Ohhh Sannnnndy bayyy-beeee, sooome daaay, when hiiigh-iiii schoool is done!")

And, as I looked around, there were the prerequisite carloads of teenagers and 20-somethings. In fact, it started to dawn on me that maybe I was the oldest person here. This, I immediately determined, could be blamed on two simple facts:

(1) It was a Thursday night. My brain failed at the math of it all. Sunset + 2 movies + an hour drive home = one laaaate night, and I had to be at work at 9 a.m. the next day. Urgh. No other adults were this dumb. And no-one failed to tell me that "Inception," for as cool as it was, is roughly as long as "Ghandi." It finally got to the movie I wanted to see and I could barely stay awake for the thing.

(2) The first of the two movies was "Twilight: Eclipse."

My girlfriend did a good job at pretending that "Inception" was the movie she really wanted to see, but I know the truth. I've seen the Stephenie Meyer books creeping out of her purse. She, like every other female on the planet Earth, is a fan of the Twilight series. And I, out of sheer journalistic curiosity alone, have now partaken in the first three films.

Gentlemen, I'm speaking now to you, because I know that if you have estrogen in your system, you've already seen the movies. But to my brothers in arms, in case you were curious as to what this whole Twilight "saga" is about, I'm here to translate.

In "Twilight," a girl moves to the Pacific Northwest. She meets a vampire. Nothing happens.

In "New Moon," she meets a werewolf. Nothing continues to happen.

In "Eclipse," she hangs out with the vampire and the werewolf and the amount of nothing that's been happening takes a new and extreme turn towards egregious and unforgivable levels of nothing, which, as you may have guessed, continues to happen.

I take that back. One thing happens: a lot of pensive staring. See, the girl and the vampire want to bump uglies, but they can't, so instead they stare at each other pensively. Then the werewolf guy shows up with a disturbing inability to wear clothes above his groin, and he and the girl decide to stare at each pensively for awhile. Occasionally the girl gets up to go to the bathroom or make a sandwich, leaving the vampire and the werewolf to stare at each other pensively in their down time.

The real mystery of the Twilight saga is how this girl, who seems to ONLY know how to pensively stare at people, sulks around town and manages to woo pretty much everyone she meets despite having absolutely no charm or personality whatsoever. Never have I sat through a movie with so many supernatural baddies and such little spilled blood in my life.

We all know that vampires can't go out in the sun because they'll burn up in a horrifyingly awesome fireball, right? Not in Twilight. In these movies, vampires don't go into the sun because they get all sparkly and shiny. That's right - only in Twilight-land do vampires not go outside for fear of being CUTER. Sigh.

So I'm seriously annoyed by this movie. Because, of course, I can't figure out whether to sign up for Team Edward or Team Jacob. I mean, Edward really cares about Bella and you can tell, but Jacob's like, all shirtless and wolfy and he cares about her too! If only there were some way she could date both of them forever!

I say forget Edward AND Jacob. I'm officially Team Jasper. Jasper's one of the less-important vampires of the Twilight saga, but he's clearly my favorite. As a recent convert to the good-guy vampire clan, his character is supposed to be constantly struggling against his natural vampiric urges to chomp the necks of humans. But the guy who plays Jasper in the movies gives him this constant facial expression that's less "I want to bite people" and a lot more like "Gee, I could sure use some Ex-Lax right about now." And if there's one thing that could successfully put an end to all this pensive staring, a constipated vampire might just do the trick.

All in all, though, I had a blast. "Twilight" might not be for me, but it was still great to watch Twilight in the twilight of the Highway 61 Drive-In. Bumpy pasture or no, it brought back memories while making some great new ones. I kinda wanna live there now, at least provided I don't have to work at 9 a.m. the next day. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a girlfriend to go pensively stare at.

COLUMN: VW Key

I've said it many times before in this column, but never has it rung more true: I am NOT a morning person.

Each day, I rely on my alarm clock to pull me out of bed and set Zombie Shane on autopilot. Zombie Shane's purpose is singular: to get me showered, dressed, and en route to work while using the least amount of brainpower possible. How this is accomplished is beyond me, but based on the garbage lining the floor of my car, I'm going to say that it somehow involves coffee.

Truth be told, I have an intricate system of morning rituals that help me glide painlessly into consciousness. Get up, listen to the radio for a few minutes, visit the restroom, peruse the headlines on the internet, turn on the TV and allow Al Roker to insult my intelligence for five minutes, hop in the shower, throw on some clothes, and get out the door. All of this is timed in such a manner to allow me to get to work with exactly 4 minutes to spare, which is usually how long it takes to visit yonder caffeine merchant.

There's just one problem: I've moved. I'm in a new abode where everything is NEW and WEIRD and DIFFERENT and I'm still living out of boxes. Zombie Shane is NOT amused. My rituals have ground to a halt. I can't peruse the headlines on the internet because right now my computer is on the floor of my kitchen. I can't hear the radio from the living room and I can't see the TV from the bedroom. Things are so messed up right now that last week, I inadvertently arrived at work eighteen minutes early. EARLY! The horror!!!

But I've been at the new house for a couple of weeks, so things should be getting in a groove, right? Zombie Shane should be able to once again handle the mundane tasks of the morning, no? Ergo, I woke up today with brainpower firmly in the OFF position. Listened to the radio -- check. Restroom -- check. Morning headlines via my iPhone -- check. Al Roker -- check. Shave, shower, clothes -- check, check, and check. Just a last minute pocket inspection and we're clear to depart from Door #1: Phone... wallet... house keys... car key?

UH OH.

The car key was gone. Zombie Shane only knows one course of action in this event: Check the pocket again in hopes that magical key-finding pocket fairies returned it to its rightful place. No dice, and worse yet, no key. I know, I know... "If you put your key in one place when you came home every night, you'd never lose it." Thanks, mom. Well, if I was responsible enough to have a "key place," I'd probably be responsible enough not to have to rely on a "key place" to find my stupid keys because I wouldn't lose them in the first place. I looked all around the house -- that key was GONE.

There was only one place where it could be dwelling. When we moved the couch into the new house, we were pretty amazed at the collection of change and pocket possessions that had fallen through the cracks and into the dread underbowels of the Key-Eating Sofa. I started feeling under the couch. No keys, just a bunch of yuck and a freshly pinched finger. Ew. I pulled the little ripcord that opens the reclining end of the couch and felt under the footrest, but no key.

That was when I remembered the spare. I've always had a replacement key on-hand for just an occasion like this. It lurks in a junk drawer, but the remote lock stopped working the day I accidentally ran it through the washer/dryer. Still, I bet the key itself would work in the door lock, right? So I grab everything I need and go racing out to the car with plenty of time to spare. Put the key in the lock, watched as the lock disengaged, and opened my car door to the trumpeting call of victory.

It's funny, though, because I didn't remember the call of victory sounding like, "ENGH! ENGH! ENGH! ENGH! ENGH!"

Yes, my broken spare car key allowed me to quickly and efficiently set off my car alarm and NOT let me shut it off. So now it's 8:30 in the morning and I'm serenading all my new neighbors with my stupidity.

"GOSH!" I yelled out to my family friendly newspaper readers. Well, actually, maybe I chose a different word -- I can't quite remember, but I do recall it was four letters long. "Stupid goshgosh gosher-goshing key!" So yes, Rock Island, if you were serenaded with ENGH! ENGH! ENGH! last Monday, you can thank me later.

I ran back into the house to intensify the hunt. After checking to make sure the fairies didn't put the key under the recliner for the second time, I slammed the recliner shut and went to move on to the next hiding place. That's when the couch began screaming at me.

"ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWR! ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWR!"

I can't say that the morning wasn't educational. I learned something very important. I learned that if you're like me and you think, "Gee, there's no worse noise I could think of to hear at 8:30 in the morning than a car alarm blaring," TRY CLOSING YOUR RECLINER ON A CAT.

I immediately ran to the couch's ripcord and pulled it... right out of the couch and into my hand.

Let's recap. I'm now standing in my living room, drenched in sweat, FREAKING OUT, listening to my car alarm blare outside, while directly in front of me one of my cats is howling mercilessly because a couch just ate it -- and the release lever for the couch just snapped off in my hand. Or, if you need an audio translation, it was kinda like this:

ENGH! ENGH! gosh! gosh! ENGH! ROOOOOOWWWWWR! gosh! ENGH! ROOOOOOOWWWWR! gosh! gosh! ENGH!

I would have counted backwards from 10 to 1 like Jack from "Lost," but there was no time. I took one breath... then ran to the couch, popped open the recliner with a mighty heave, got hissed at in the face by a very ticked-off but thankfully uninjured cat, ran outside, jiggled the broken key until the car locked and the alarm stopped, then went inside and did the only manly, responsible thing I could think of: I called my girlfriend for help.

Happily, Amy raced over here, picked me up, took me to work, drove back to my house, promptly found the stupid missing key under the one section of couch I hadn't thoroughly checked, played with the poor cat to ensure it wouldn't be permanently maladjusted, then picked me up for lunch and brought me back to my car and my key.

Morning people suck -- in an "I-love-you-and-owe-you-one-bigtime" kinda way.

COLUMN: Zephyr

Lots of occasions pass me by in life wherein I think, "Well, if nothing else, this'll make for a good newspaper column." But it's rare luck indeed to encounter one of those perfect-storm moments where you KNOW you're sitting on a column-worthy goldmine. That's exactly what I thought last week when I received my first ever kidnap threat.

"Dear Shane," read the e-mail. "I have been following your world for quite some time now and I do think you are due for a mental recess. I am going to make you an offer you can't refuse, or suffer the consequences. I belong to MVR. We can take you on a long ride. I'm hoping you'll opt for the Zephyr. Are you intrigued? Of course you are. You will be surrounded Saturday, July 24. Details forthcoming. -CJB"

I spent the next hour at work totally sluffing off, I mean, CAREFULLY AND ANALYTICALLY PONDERING THIS IMPORTANT COMMUNIQUE. An offer I can't refuse? Suffer the consequences? Who is this CJB? And what exactly is "MVR"? Maliciously Violent Redheads? Mostly Vocal Rabbits? Mothers of Various Rodents? Wait a second -- a few weeks ago I took some unfair potshots at the overweight clientele of a Hannibal buffet restaurant. Maybe this was the Missourian Voices of the Rotund here to seek retribution.

I wrote back a one-word e-mail reply with the only thing going through my head: "Dear CJB, Gulp. -Shane," and then took a different route home from work that night.

It turns out I didn't have to be quite so scared. As the Saturday approached, a second e-mail showed up and everything was made clear. It turned out I got the Redhead part right, but she was neither malicious nor violent. "CJB" was, in fact, avid Argus reader and exemplary Quad Citizen Constance Bell. She and her husband Franklin are well-known in the area and active members of the MVR: The Mississippi Valley Region Antique Automobile Club of America.

Every month, members of the MVR get together and, weather willing, show off their rides. This month's outing was a leisurely caravan up Route 84 to the Mississippi Palisades State Park, and they wanted me to be their guest. And hey, who am I to say no to a friendly kidnapping? I was all for it.

Mostly, I was all for it because I've never understood the lure of the antique automobile. I know there's a whole lot of you folks out there who are proudly restoring some rustbucket out in your garage right now, so please don't be offended when I ask you all: WHY?

You can't go ten minutes these days without seeing some ad showcasing a team of scientists putting a new-fangled auto through wind tunnels and safety tests to prove it's The Ultimate Driving Machine Built Ram Tough To Move The Human Spirit And Grab Life By The Horns. Every new model of car claims to be the best model of car ever built, yet a huge number of people seem deeply concerned with preserving these old and thusly (if the ads are to be believed) inferior cars.

And from what I gather, the fewer miles you have on these classic cars, the better. So to recap: it's a hobby where you take old cars and spend countless hours getting them into pristine driving condition, yet you don't ever really want to drive them for fear of tacking on needless mileage. This seems like a LOT of work to preserve something that rarely sees the outside of your garage.

So yes, I was excited to go on the MVR-AACA's July drive, because I wanted to understand the lure. And I think maybe now I do.

We met in the corner of the Southpark Mall parking lot. Scores of classic cars had made their rare break for daylight, and it really was pretty impressive. There was a gorgeous Studebaker, a really sharp Triumph convertible, and even a car that Johnny Depp once rode in during the filming of "Public Enemies." And then there was our ride -- the Bell's fully restored 1937 Lincoln-Zephyr sedan.

And I've got to tell you, as cars that pre-date my parents go, this thing is a beauty. It wasn't made for aerodynamics or safety or fuel efficiency. It was made to be driven, and driven in luxury. The Bells have done a whale of a job on the remodel, even finding a company that still makes the mohair cloth upholstery. This car should serve one purpose and one purpose only: to allow ZZ Top and their team of supermodels to kidnap you and teach you the ways of love and rock-&-roll.

And there's some serious life left in the old girl, even if there was no radio or air conditioner ("Air conditioner?" Franklin said. "It's got 4 of them! Just take it over 40 mph and roll any of them down.") As we tore down the highway, I was amazed at the speed and smoothness, and the Bells were the most gracious hosts imaginable.

As we pulled into the Palisades, our caravan was faced with a wicked uphill drive to the lookout bluffs.

"The engine works too hard when you go this slow," explained Franklin as he downshifted into first gear.

"Then go faster!" said Constance playfully. "We've got twelve cylinders. Might as well use all of 'em."

High atop the bluffs of the Palisades State Park is a viewing platform that offers one of the most breathtaking scenes of the Mississippi you'll ever find. I almost got to see it, too, before our day suddenly turned into a weird re-run of "Lassie," complete with age-appropriate cars.

"The... dam... is... breaking...!" said the breathless woman running up to us.

Reports had come in that a dam along the Plum River was failing and we had precious time to get south of it if we didn't want to be stranded in a flood plain. I know very little about classic cars, but I do know that they're not exactly known for their flotation capabilities, and as much as I enjoyed my time with the Bells, I didn't fancy starting life anew with them in Savannah for the foreseeable future. Besides, you haven't seen anything until you've told a hundred antique car buffs that a flood's en route. Before that poor woman had caught her breath, everyone was in their cars hightailing it for high ground. As we drove south down Highway 84, the water was already encroaching the road. An hour later, 84 was flooded out, but we beat it. Score one for the mighty Lincoln-Zephyr.

We ended up at a country restaurant, eating a wicked buffet and talking shop. By the time we left, I felt like I understood the classic car enthusiast. It's not about wasting your time on a hunk of metal. It's about preserving the past, admiring the craftsmanship of the old days, and getting together with similar-minded people for fun and a shared passion -- some of which may have just rubbed off on me.

Thanks, Bell family, for a great day of education, fun, and hey, even a little danger. Who else wants to kidnap me?

COLUMN: I Write Like

I've always known that I was an Important Writer of Great Importance. Now I've finally got all the proof I need, without any of the bother of, you know, having to write important stuff.

A fella's got to have priorities in life, and I'm no different: (1) Fame. (2) Fortune. (3) Enough fame and fortune that I can eventually rule the world with an iron-hard fist while you, my epic fanbase of minions, do my (presumably) evil bidding. I'm not quite sure what kind of evil bidding will be on the future agenda, but that's a figure-it-out-as-you-go process, I reckon.

The only problem is convincing you, the editors, and the entire world of my great literative power. But thanks to the internet, I now have all the answers I need.

It's a website that's gaining hits by the tens of thousands every day: I Write Like (http://iwl.me). The concept is simple: You, the aspiring author/blogger/journalist, upload the column/story/manifesto of your choice, and the website immediately tells you what famous writer of yore that yore, errr, YOUR writing style most resembles. Could you be the next Sylvia Plath? Ernest Hemingway? Shane Brown? This site holds those answers.

It reaches its conclusion by examining your writing sample and putting it through a battery of tests, isolating your language, meter, and vocabulary choices via a sequential algorithm of synergy thusly maxified and redacted through the cosine of Pi squared and... and...

Okay, heck, I have no idea how it reaches its results. It could be science. It could be magic. It could be a little dude living inside the website who flips a coin. I honestly have no clue. But it's on the internet, so it MUST be a credible and accurate tool by which to judge your writing ability, no?

So tonight I'm going to have proof positive once and for all of my awesomeness. I'm going to enter a few of my most recent columns into the I Write Like site, and then I'll find out which cherished writer you'll be able to compare my future works to as I rise up and eclipse the competition.

My two most recent columns about moving into my new house remind the site of David Foster Wallace. This is kinda cool, as David Foster Wallace was a pretty brilliant guy and a great author. The problem, though, is that David Foster Wallace was also a bag of problems whose declining mental health amounted to a way-too-small handful of genius work before he sadly took his own life at 46. So that's a bum deal - I don't want fame and fortune if it comes with a tragic downward spiral, thanks. Let me try some other columns.

Hmm, here we go. It turns out that the columns I wrote recently about my trip to Missouri remind the site of none other than Beloved American Humorist Mark Twain -- possibly the best comparison that an aspiring humor columnist might want to attain, eh? Clearly, the complex logic of this website was able to see my wit and topical banter and compare it positively to that of a true national treasure. And the fact that those vacation columns repeatedly used the words "Missouri," "Huck Finn," and, yes, even "Mark Twain" -- well, that should be dismissed as pure coincidence.

Then there was the column I wrote a while back about mowing my yard, which the "I Write Like" site just informed me is comparable to the work of Chuck Palahniuk, the American master of transgressive fiction, which the Atlantic Monthly defines as "a literary genre that graphically explores such topics as incest and other aberrant sexual practices, mutilation, urban violence, drug use..." -- and, apparantly, lawn mowing. This proves that I'm so cool, I don't just mow my lawn -- I mow it TRANSGRESSIVELY. Heck yeah. Except that I really, really, really can't stand Palahniuk or his writing style or his annoying books.

This isn't working. I need a definitive answer as to who I Write Like. David Foster Wallace is too fragile, Mark Twain's too folksy, and Chuck Palahniuk is just plain annoying. So that's why I've just fed the last fifty columns that I've written into the website. I need an overall consensus as to the beloved author I best emulate. And I can now proudly proclaim to you all that you're bound to love me if you're a fan of...

CORY DOCTOROW.

Wait, who? I have NO idea who that is. Let me look him up... hmm. I might have just lost some nerd cool points. Cory Doctorow is apparantly a science fiction writer from Canada who contributes loads to nerd culture. He also looks a heck of a lot like the "I'm a PC" guy from those Mac ads. And of my last fifty columns, over half of them remind this dumb website of this guy.

Suddenly I feel not so Important after all. Where's Hemingway? Irving? Fitzgerald? Heck, I'll even settle for John Grisham. But nooooo. I get compared to some nerd savant guy. My dreams of global domination are fading. At best, maybe I could position myself as Ruler of the Nerds with an iron-hard pocket protector, while my epic fanbase of nerd minions do my evil nerd bidding, like destroying your credit rating or only giving my least favorite movies on Netflix one star.

But here's where it gets interesting. I wanted to find out how smart the brain of this website is, so I went online and I found a short story written by none other than Cory Doctorow called "The Things That Make Me Weak & Strange Get Engineered Away" (note to self: with a title like that, maybe I would actually enjoy Cory Doctorow.) But I just took THAT story and fed the entire thing into the I Write Like website. Guess what?

Cory Doctorow writes like... STEPHEN KING. And I write like Cory Doctorow. Ergo, I WRITE LIKE STEPHEN KING! And if there's one simple fact about Stephen King, it is that CLEARLY THE MAN HAS FAME AND FORTUNE.

So you heard it here first, Quad Cities. I am the next Stephen King -- just with a little David Foster Wallace, Mark Twain, Chuck Palahniuk, and Cory Doctorow thrown in for good measure. I think my first novel will be an ironic look at a tennis academy that spawns a kid who rafts down the Mississippi and starts a fight club for nerds... until a possessed car and a rabid St. Bernard kill everyone. The end.

Trust me, you will LOVE it.

Oh, and as for "I Write Like," I now KNOW the site's legit. I just fed it the lyrics from the modern treasure "Pimpin' Ain't EZ," by Snoop Dogg -- and it turns out that Snoop Dogg writes just like... William Shakespeare. I am SO headed for greatness.

COLUMN: Moving the Cats

It is official: I have moved. I'm not just a first-time homeowner, I'm now officially a first-time home liver-inner. All of my stuff is here, too, and appears to have made the journey relatively unscathed. Of course, 80% of it is still in boxes as I type, but hey, that's what the rest of my life is for, because Lord knows I'm NEVER going through this painful process again.

For all the chaos and hoopla that was my life leading up to moving day, the actual event was pretty anti-climatic. The movers I hired were careful and courteous and decent and efficient and I'd recommend them to anyone in a heartbeat, provided that Anyone was someone with lots and lots of money. Good work doesn't come cheap, and I'll be paying these guys off for a loooong time. Still, it was a fantastic decision.

But it made for a slightly awkward day. Their job was to pick up and lift all of my possessions from Apartment A to House B. My job in the affair was to stand there and play traffic cop, announcing "basement," "garage," "living room," etc. every time a bundle of boxes got heaved into the house. Even though I knew I was dishing out gobs and gobs of money for the courtesy, it was still pretty weird to not have to help or lift a thing.

However, there were two other residents of Casa Del Shane who were having a considerably more awkward time of things during the move.

I own two cats. Or maybe they own me. Let's just say we co-habitate together, occasionally willingly, through a mutually beneficial unspoken arrangement. I give them food and water and litter, and they allow me the privilege of occasionally scratching their heads. The problem was, though, I had foolishly made the decision to move without consulting my feline companions. I was hoping it would be a "fun surprise." Well, here's how it played out and you let me know whether it constitutes "fun" or not.

I suppose a good chunk of it was my fault. When the cats were wee kitties, I used to transport them together in the same pet carrier. Note to all: once your cats are fully grown, this is NOT an ideal scenario. My original plan was to take both the cats over to the new house and seal them up in the bathroom with some familiar blankets and toys. That way they'd get introduced to the new house quietly and with some smells of home in the air. Then, once the movers got everything else over, I'd open the bathroom door and the cats would jump out, eager to begin life in their awesome new abode.

So I woke up bright and early on moving day, got everything ready to go, and the minute that those cats heard me pull the pet carrier out of the closet, they were GONE. Cat wrangling is always super fun; imagine trying to do it in a maze of 100+ cardboard boxes. Eventually I managed to get one in the carrier, and she immediately started howling as though I were pulling her claws out one by one. I got ahold of the second one, but when I tried to put her in the carrier with the first, I heard a howl, felt a leap, and before I knew what had happened, both cats were gone and I was bleeding.

The movers were five minutes away, so I had to think on my feet. I decided to corral both cats into the apartment bathroom and then we'd worry about moving them later. I gave them a healthy supply of food, water, and litter, and managed to get them both into the bathroom. For this, I was rewarding with a duet of howls that lasted for the next six hours.

Now, I've had cats a few years, and I know their noises pretty well. Low-volume, high-pitch meow means "please pet me." High-volume, low-pitch meow means "please feed me." THIS noise I had never heard before, but its meaning was perfectly clear: "We are really, really, really less than amused to be in this bathroom, and if you don't let us out of here right this second, we WILL go all Discovery Channel on you, I swear to my cat god."

This non-stop howling went on the entire morning. Did you know that cats could get hoarse? I report it to you all now as fact. By the end of the day, my precious kitties both sounded like Brenda Vaccaro on a bender. It wasn't pretty. Once the apartment was cleared out, I opened the doors and let the cats out into the culture shock of a completely gutted, empty abode. Both of them immediately started hissing at the air, so I'm thinking that didn't go as smooth as possible.

After all my stuff was brought into the new house, the last step was to race over and transport the cats. Miraculously, I got them both into my oversized pet carrier without too much blood loss on my part. Then all I had to do was run the cats and their litterbox out to the car. I went with the litter first...

I had read somewhere that it's best to bring the current used litterbox to the new locale because it gives the cats yet another familiar smell to help them get accustomed to the new digs. I was halfway to the car when Epic Rainstorm o' Doom 2010 erupted over my head. By the time I could get to the car, the litterbox had turned into litter SOUP and things were flowing up and over my hands that I can't even stop typing to think about or else I'm gonna be sick AGAIN. At this point, I made an executive decision to stop on the way to the house and buy a new litterbox.

Which would have worked out fine had I not had a car full of two hissing, howling, hoarse kitties. And had the car not flooded out at the bottom of the first hill I encountered. And had I not been forced to leap out of my car and push it through foot-tall water to safety.

Eventually I got the car started again, but I was a drowned rat by this point. A lot of people that day saw me running into K-Mart, drenched from head to toe, buying cat litter like it was THE most important thing in the world, which at that point it was.

All's well that ends well, I guess. Well, kinda. The cats and I all made it over here safe and sound. They're still highly unamused but starting to get the hang of the place. We're 48 hours here and they're just now starting to explore. Sadly, they're mostly exploring how to hiss at each other and get territorial, but I'll take angry over hiding-under-the-bed-shaking-in-fear any day. Keep your fingers crossed.

COLUMN: The Great Fall

I've been learning one fun thing during my extended move into my first house: when you're the new guy on the block, you are the center of attention. I feel like P.T. Barnum in the center ring of my own socially-awkward nightmare. My new neighbors have been keeping an overly-watchful eye on the happenings at the International House of Shane.

The other night my girlfriend and I arrived at the house with an armful of supplies. After unpacking a couple of boxes and setting some stuff up in the kitchen, I stepped out on the front porch to get some air... and, just for a quick moment, had a flash of sympathy for Justin Bieber. As I glanced around the neighborhood, I realized that no fewer than 14 sets of eyes from houses near and far were trained on me. No one speaking, no one smiling, no one waving -- but everyone staring with curious eyes and blank faces. Was my fly down? I ALMOST did a quick check before realizing that a spontaneous crotch grab would probably NOT be the best way to make a first impression on the neighborhood.

I started thinking deviously. Clearly, as the new arrivals on the block, we had the full and undivided attention of all the neighbors -- so why waste the opportunity? Fame, especially for a reason as lackluster as being a new arrival, is fleeting -- so maybe we should do our best to use our fifteen minutes to really make a splash. As Bonnie Raitt said, let's give 'em something to talk about. My ideas:

(1) Deposit one lawn ornament smack in the middle of the front yard, the tackier the better. Then we step outside and kneel before it as though it were our god of choice. THIS is the kind of stuff good dinner conversations were made for.

(2) Amy and I could stage a verbal argument in the front yard -- speaking only in Klingon. Perhaps we could even hold a mock battle in Klingon garb and make-up, and approach passersby with a hearty, "NuqneH tera' jIl! ghIj qet jaghmeyjaj!" ("Greetings, human neighbor! May your enemies run from you with fear!")

(3) After sundown, obsessively flick the primary lights of the house on and off for 2-3 hours straight. What's happening inside that place? Short circuit? Rave party? Mad scientists attempting to create life? We're the only ones who know for sure!

(4) Live a perfectly normal life, coming and going as we please... but every time we walk INTO the house, we first stop and put a ski mask on. Always leave the house wearing a ski mask and remove it once you're two steps away from the door. That should be enough to leave the neighbors in a constant state of "What the...?" "Are they robbing themselves? Do they have some kind of skin disease? Is their house contaminated?"

Sadly, though, my favorite way of life is to exist silently under the radar and out of gossip circles, so I wouldn't have the guts to do any of that stuff. It's okay, though. Fate took care of it for us.

As I detailed in last week's column, we were leaving the house that night when our escape was thwarted by Boris the Death Spider, who descended on a thin web smack in the middle of the back doorway. Even after giving it a shower in Raid, he was hanging on by a thread, as if to say "Am I gonna stay here and bite you? Or am I gonna freefall right down the collar of your shirt where I will implant my vorpal spider incisors into your jugular? Guess you'll hafta find out!"

By this time, I had already made it outside, but poor Amy was trapped in front of the doorway and the spider. It was up to me to make an action plan. No silly spider was gonna stop me from taking a mature and adult command of the situation. I probably could have shooed it away with a flick of my hand or smooshed it with a shoe. But no. This situation required utmost intelligence and planning. I assessed carefully and intelligently, looked at Amy, and issued my command.

"Run for it!"

And run she did. But did I mention that it had been raining out? Not cool. Here's how it went down: RUN. RUN. SLIP. THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP. There are exactly five steps leading up to my back door, and Amy had just gone down all five butt-first in a magnificent pratfall that was over before I could even blink.

Right after college, Amy got a job teaching elementary students in Egypt, where she lived for two years. During her stay overseas, she and her friends took a holiday to go see the desert and the pyramids and the sphinx and all that, right? At some point, she and her friends decided to take a short tourist-y camel ride into the desert. And somehow during that ride, the camel bucked and she went flying. This is a pretty funny story, and she laughs about it now... except that on landing, she broke her back. Now imagine having to deal with paramedics and an ambulance and a lengthy hospital stay in a foreign country where only a handful of folk speak fluent English, and you can start to see how one could get a complex about falling. At least, I HOPE she had a complex...

Because a complex would be the ONLY acceptable answer for the noise that proceeded to come out of my sweet girlfriend's mouth. Imagine Lucille Ball going "Waaaaaah!" combined with your run-of-the-mill civil defense siren and you'll be close. With a sound like that, I immediately thought her back had SHATTERED.

"Omigod! Omigod! Are you okay?"
"WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-OF-COURSE-I'M-NOT-OKAY-I-JUST-FELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!!!"
"Is anything broken? Can you move?"
"LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!"
"Honey, shh. Shh. It's okay, baby, it's okay."
(I swear, at this point her head spun around like Linda Blair in "The Exorcist.")
"DON'T-TELL-ME-TO-BE-QUIET-I-JUST-FELL-AND-MY-BUTT-IS-WETTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT!!!"

She ended up with a seriously bruised tooshie, but was otherwise thankfully alright. And eventually I got the screaming down to a dull cry. This is a good thing, because it was, oh, 11 p.m. and a scream that clearly indicated, "Attention, the entire Longview neighborhood of Rock Island and perhaps even those of you drinking in the District, I am most likely being raped. Please send help immediately."

Happily, no one leapt out to her aid with a baseball bat or anything. Or maybe I'm not happy about all that - I've just learned that if I ever WAS mugged in the back of my house, screaming like a possessed banshee will get you absolutely nowhere. Still, mission accomplished: I think we officially made a splash with the neighbors. I'm now Shane, The Guy Who Makes Girls Shriek In Terror. Welcome to the neighborhood!

There were good bits, though. I'm happy that my girlfriend didn't break anything. I'm happy that Amy's banshee wail apparantly immolated the spider, because it promptly disappeared forever. And best yet, for the past week, I've had a perfectly wholesome reason to stare at my girlfriend's backside all the live-long day... out of concern for the well-being of her coccyx, of course.

COLUMN: Death Spider

Whew! Well, it took a lot of work and a lot of effort, but I'm finally all moved in to my new house.

At least that's what I'd say if I was Bizarro Shane who lived in a world where everything went according to plan. Tragically, I am Real Shane, who can't ever get anything done without a myriad of foibles, follies, and column fodder getting in the way.

Truth be told, I'm still very much un-moved, despite having taken last week off to get the deed done. It turned out, as I was frantically throwing my entire life into a sea of cardboard boxes, that about 80% of what I was packing was destined for the basement of the new house. The basement we plan on finishing. The basement that's currently home to a sea of Fiberglass and insulating foam and one very over-worked father, whose help on Project Basement has gone from "invaluable" to "indescribable" and "perhaps worthy of a commemorative statue."

Everyone on Earth should be as lucky as I to have a newly-retired father in possession of the home-improvement chromosome who was just itching for a new project. Every day, usually while I'm at work, the man has been driving up from Galesburg, slaving away by his lonesome in my new basement, and usually heading home before I'm even off work. I swear to you all in print, he called me at work the other day to ask my permission to eat a SALTINE out of my kitchen. Meanwhile, my job in this entire affair is to walk in to the house every night open-mouthed and go "whoooooa" when I see all the work he's done for me. Yes, it's a difficult life I lead. Trust me, though, I will see to it that the man never runs out of saltines in his life.

Still, the basement is nowhere near ready for habitation, let alone piles and piles of my smelly unsightly stuff. So rather than having to move and then move again and again while playing ring-around-the-remodel (fact: "stuff" is heavy,) I decided at the last minute to postpone the official relocation until we've at least got a floor and some drywall up in my future underground lair. This gives my dad room to work at the house and me room to live at the apartment.

So, even though the move is delayed a few weeks, it's finally starting to sink in: YOWZA, I OWN A HOME. Like a real person. Like a bona fide taxpaying member of society. And it's kind of giving me the willies.

Actually, it's been kinda cool, though it still sort of feels like I'm just playing house -- like it's a really complicated role-playing game that soon I'm gonna tire of and go order some pizza. The other night, my girlfriend and I went shopping for some toiletries and home decor type stuff. As we keyed into the house, arms full of all this normal-people-homeowner-y stuff, I think -- maybe for the first time in my weird little life -- that I felt like a real honest-to-gosh adult (and it only took me 39 years! Yay me!)

Good thing it only lasted for about seven minutes.

I had already made it out the back door and down the steps when I saw it. My girlfriend was trailing me a few paces so I had enough time to yell, "Blaaaa!" Happily, Amy knows by now that "Blaaaa!" is Shane for "hey-there's-something-really-creepy-out-here-and-you-should-probably-not-follow-me-at-this-time," so she stopped in her tracks.

This was a good thing, because her tracks would have led her face-to-face with the hairiest, gnarliest, most disturbing spider I've seen in some time. And at that moment, it had descended from Creepytown USA to hang out on its little web right in the middle of my back doorway, as if to say, "Umm, w'sup people? I don't seem to recall giving you express permission to move into my house."

I don't deny the fact that I'm a huge wuss when it comes to nature. Bees of any nature mortify me, beetles are pretty much disgusting, and don't get me started on snakes and, well, most of the reptile family in general. But I'm usually not a gigantic weenie when it comes to spiders. Some of them are actually pretty cool. This was NOT one of them.

This was, quite clearly, a demon spider sent from hell to cause pain and misery to all those around it. It was not a happy little "ooh-lookit-my-pretty-web" spider. No, this was a tiny-legged, hairy vampire with a HUGE abdomen presumably full of the innards of previous homeowners. It was the kind of spider where the only positive outcome MIGHT just be that you develop superpowers after it bites you with its vorpal snicker-snack. I was having NOTHING to do with this spider.

That was about the point where Amy shouted "Nyaaaaaaaaaaaah," which is Amy for "oh-I-see-it-too." Thus began a tense 30 seconds of silence, where each of us -- man, woman, and spider -- waited to see who would make the first move. It was Amy. "Don't just stand there, kill it!" she yelled to me.

"Ummm, no thanks much. I'm good. I think it's the spider's house now. We should just go." But then I had a brainstorm!

"Hey, there's a can of Raid in the kitchen! Douse that sucker!"

Amy went and got the stuff, which I believe was designed to kill ants and roaches but, hey, surely wouldn't be a picnic for spiders, right? So she comes out with the can and gives our arachnid friend a hosedown in liquid death. But rather than be a good little spider and dropping dead, it just sort of flailed about in a now-I'm-seriously-ticked-off sort of way. This was Rambo the Spider, and now he was looking at me like "You drew first blood!"

This is when Amy pulled her best move. A move that only girls can do. A move that out-wusses even me. I looked at her and she had tears in her eyes.

"Kill it! Quick! It's Charlotte and we just destroyed her web! She wasn't hurting anyone and now she's in pain! Kill it!"

I had a decision to make. Not Shane the fraidy wuss-boy. Shane the Home-Owning mature adult. As you can probably guess, the decision I made was fantastic.

And I'll tell you all about it next week.

COLUMN: Closing Table

The deed is done. I woke up today fully in charge of my life, my finances, my rent, and my world. Twelve hours later, I find myself fully in charge of $84,500 in newfound debt, a lawn I have no idea how to mow, appliances I have no idea how to repair, and what might very well be the onset symptoms of my very first ulcer.

The papers are signed. The keys are in my hand. I am a homeowner.

Moving day is next week, but I'm jumping the gun tonight. I sit here now, bathed in the warm glow of my laptop, typing cross-legged on the empty floor of the living room that is now mine. Hands have been shook, documents have been shuffled, hugs have been hugged -- and now I sit alone in the dark, surrounded on every side by the biggest impulse buy I have ever made and will ever make in my life. And man, it's quiet. Without the friendly, steadfast hum of my apartment's window air conditioner, I feel like I can hear my own thoughts. There's a window halfway across the living room and there's a bug outside recklessly flying into the pane of glass and I can hear it like it's inches away. This is weird.

Just a few hours ago I was sitting at the title company over what's affectionately known as "the closing table." This, for the uninitiated, is where all parties concerned with the buying and selling of a piece of property meet -- and stare at you silently and creepily while you sign a non-stop barrage of documents that, for all intents and purposes, are written in Martian. For all I know, I could have signed my girlfriend away to slave labor and not known it (in which case, umm, sorry, Amy.)

Putting the full weird on the event was a mid-afternoon Midwest monsoon, so every new person who came to the table was soaked with rain, like some kind of demented Buffy rerun where the Scooby Gang was faced with a clan of dripping water monsters intent on robbing an honest, hard-working newspaper columnist of his entire life savings. Well, not exactly -- because I took care of that for them. Let me explain.

The centerpiece of the paperwork barrage is the HUD form. This is the sheet that breaks down all of the buyer's expenses and credits and bottom-lines the necessary down-payment in order for the title company to hand you the keys. Included in the breakdown is the fun of property taxes. Now, buying a house smack in the middle of the year complicates things a bit, because half the taxes of the year have already come due.

Since the taxes owed in 2010 are, in fact, the taxes of 2009, it's not my responsibility to pony up the cash for them. It's the seller who lived there during the 2009 tax season who's stuck with the bill. The taxes are paid in 4 quarterly installments throughout the year, and in my case, they're automatically paid out of the funds in my loan's escrow account. But since the year is half done, the seller's already paid the city for 2 of those 4 quarters. For the remaining two quarters, the seller pays ME that money and then it's pulled from my escrow. Follow? (Don't worry, I only barely do myself.)

So I'm looking at this HUD form, and it shows what I owe, and then it shows my credits, and then it shows the bottom line figure I needed to have for the downpayment (in this case, a lump sum of around $1100.) But as I look at the credits, I notice something odd. There's a line that says "Credit for 2009 property tax" and it indicates a sum of $2700. Well, the property taxes for my house are $2700 for the whole year, but like I explained above, the seller's already paid for two of those four quarters, right?

Ergo, I say something.

"Let me take a look..." says the friendly title company rep.

"Hmm..." says my realtor.

"Hmm..." says the seller's realtor.

"Hmm..." says my loan officer.

"Hmm..." says the seller's attorney.

"YOU'RE RIGHT!" announces the title company rep. "This number IS wrong!"

Suddenly a wave of triumph sweeps over me. I found a math error. Me, who is pretty much legally math-tarded. Me, who scraped by Algebra II in high school with a D average and promptly took "Intro to Computers" for my remaining math credits. Me, who chose Augustana as my alma mater for the primary reason of no required math classes. Me, who still counts on my fingers when doing math in my head. I found a math error that escaped accountants and loan officers combined. "YOU ROCK!" said my brain to myself.

"Thank you SO much for noticing that," said the title company rep. I deserved a cookie.

"With that error cleared up, your credit is only $1350. So instead of owing us $1100 right now, we'll be needing $2500. Go get another cashier's check."

That's right, folks. I'm the only person on Earth bone-headed enough to discover an error saving me $1350 and promptly report it to the whole room. "Umm, excuse me, but I don't believe that I'm paying you enough. Please oh please charge me more."

Still, I've got mild warm fuzzies because I am now a documented do-gooder. And when I one day reach the pearly gates and St. Peter reminds me of the cassette single (or in 80's terms, "cassingle") that I stole when I was 12, I can at least come back with, "Oh, yeah? Well, I think I made up for it when I charged myself an extra $1350 for my house."

And my loan officer told me later that the error probably would have been found somewhere down the road and they would have made me come in and pay the difference at a later date. But still, part of me wonders if I just put the kibash on an accidental $1350 buyer bonus. Even though I felt kinda foolish pointing out a 1-line error that cost me $1350, I did the right thing, and I won't be losing sleep over it.

No, not when there's such a wide menu of OTHER things to lose sleep over. Now that there's no going back, reality's starting to creep in. Like, there's NO good place in my living room for both a wide-screen television AND my sectional. And simply due to the wall setup, there's no way to evenly hang surround sound speakers, so at best I will be enjoying my future cinema in 5.1 slightly-off-center-and-diagonal-sound. And don't get me started on the bad wiring job on the light switches - the living room overhead light appears to only work if the kitchen and living room switches are in the "OFF" position while the upstairs switch is "ON" - my house is like a bad game of Myst.

But the point is, it's MY house. Officially. Mine. I kinda like the sound of that...

(p.s. I'm taking next week off while I spend another fortune moving all of my possessions ten blocks to their new home. Say a prayer and I'll see you all soon.)

COLUMN: iPhone

I've never understood why, but the minute warm weather officially settles upon the Quad Cities, all I can think about doing is getting in a car and driving far, far away. Does this mean I hate the QC or something? Far from it. Even if I lived in the greatest place in the world -- a magical town called Shanetopia where the streets are lined with record stores and paved with chocolate -- I'd still want to hit the road the second the thermometer crests 65. (Come to think of it, it's probably not a bad idea to leave a chocolate-paved town in the summer months. "SUN RISES, HORROR RESUMES IN SHANETOPIA: SCORES DEAD AFTER YET ANOTHER TERRIFYING BUT TASTY CHOCOLATE FLOOD. FILM AT 11."

Ever since someone at the DMV foolishly handed me a license, my favorite hobby has been aimless driving. There is NOTHING better than filling the car up with gas, grabbing any available friends, and hitting the open -- and, occasionally, the closed -- road. No agenda, no destination, no rules. Nothing centers my psyche quite like being pleasantly lost on a gravel road in the middle of nowhere.

But this year seems different. When presented with some perfectly good aimless driving opportunities this spring, I've thus far responded with a resounding "feh." I'm not exactly sure why or how it happened, but a good old fashioned aimless drive seems to have lost its lustre a bit. I've been trying to figure out why the change in heart. Could it be...

• My age? Truth be told, the lure of the aimless drive clearly stemmed from parental independence and the ability to set our own rules and punchclock. My parents told me for years that anyone out in the middle of the night was clearly Up To No Good, and it was high time I learned what that was like. Suddenly mom and dad weren't calling the shots... and when the cat's away, occasionally the mice will take off on a back road and end up in central Wisconsin at 3 a.m. for no good reason whatsoever. These days, I sort of covet 8 hours of sleep and the comforting embrace of late night talk shows. I believe this makes me a fuddy-duddy.

• My car? As much as I love her, the Wonder Beetle is a bit past her prime. Its no fun getting lost in the middle of BFE with the serious risk that the car could break down at any millisecond. And with me currently buying a house and all, I'd like to eke out the last dying embers of Fahrvegnugen that the old girl's got in her. For the time being, I'm a trapped short-run city driver.

• My location? After 20-ish years of driving aimlessly around the area with Friend Jason and a countless cast of others, it takes an awful lot of effort these days to get us pleasantly lost on a gravel road in the middle of nowhere. We pretty much know every back road within a 50-mile radius of the Quad Cities by this point, which takes away some of the excitement off choosing the Roads Less Travelled By.

• Al Gore? As a proud left-leaner, I went to see ol' Al's shock-and-awe global warming disaster epic, "An Inconvenient Truth." But rather than leaving the theatre a satisfied Democrat, I left pretty much ashamed and guilty to be a living and consuming human being. Say what you want about global warming, but every time I stop at a gas station to fill up, I can't help but wince and think that I should be on a bike heading off to invent a car powered exclusively by lettuce and human tears.

But then I realized the truth. There's only one thing that's stopped me from enjoying aimless drives this year:

STEVE JOBS.

Him and his stupid technology have single-handedly killed my passion for aimless drives. It's easy to understand why. Getting lost in the country without an agenda is fun and relaxing... but it's not without a captivating spark or two of danger and excitement. I think back on all those college nights when we would go cruising and end up on some uncharted gravel bumpkin road at 1 a.m. If we'd have broken down, careened into a ditch, or smashed into Bambi, we would have been totally and completely HOSED. Even if we had cell phones, which we didn't, it would have been like:

"Help! My car broke down!"
"Sure! Where are you?"
"Ummmmmmm... by some trees. And corn."

And the knowledge that one wrong turn could end us left to our own devices amidst woodland creatures and the extras from "Deliverance" was kind of a rush. But thanks to Mr. Jobs and his magical iPhone, I now understand B.B. King: the thrill is gone.

Now that I've got an iPhone, it's a different world.

"Help! My car broke down!"
"Sure! Where are you?"
"N 41°30.435578951258293', W 90°30.788326263427734'. 3.42 miles from the Lamplighter Inn just past Lewis Fork. User 'CyberCooper' gives their cherry pie four out of five stars. The traffic is light. Radar shows mild cloud cover and a 30% chance of rain. Get a fix on my position with Loopt and I'll see you in an estimated 37.2 minutes."

How I managed to live for 30+ years without an iPhone is beyond me. While it indeed sucks the excitement out of an aimless drive, I can barely cope without it. One day last week I forgot my iPhone at home and it felt like I'd been cut off from all civilization. I barely made it through the day without my apps. My precious, precious apps!

With Maps, I'll never be lost again. With Shazam, I can identify any song that's playing on the radio. With Fandango, I can order movie tickets. With IMDB, I can learn about the movie. With Sporcle, I can take a quiz about the movie after I've seen it. With PocketFlicks, I can update my Netflix queue without moving those cumbersome ten feet from the couch to my computer. With Dragon Dictation, I can compose this entire column just by talking out loud. (Actually, Dragon just repeated that sentence as: "With dragon lactation, I suppose this is tire time just by talking to a cow." Which only makes it MORE interesting!)

And now, the iPhone just fixed my aimless driving doldrums. RoadsideAmerica.com has long been the bible of aimless driving, and they finally unveiled their app for the iPhone. Now, with the click of a button, no matter where I'm at, I can get info and directions to the nearest array of crazy weird stuff: giant plastic dinosaurs, haunted mansions, animatronic Ben Franklins, you name it. Now get out of my way -- I've got a World's Largest Ketchup Bottle to go see.

COLUMN: Junk

(Not really my apartment. This is a still from A&E's "Hoarders.")

Well, it turns out that moving into a new house is a far greater chore than I had ever expected.

For what seemed like hours, my girlfriend and I lugged box after box. By the time it was done, the two of us were a sweaty and exhausted mess. My foot hurt. My back hurt. My tailbone hurt. I couldn't catch my breath. The heat was unbearable. I was pushed to the breaking point of my physical and mental capabilities. The two of us simultaneously collapsed on the couch to bask in the after-pain of a job well done.

There was just one teeny problem: Did I mention the boxes we were lugging into my apartment were empty?

THIS is why, when it comes time to actually make the move in a couple of weeks, I'm hiring a professional moving company. I feel no shame when I tell you that we really DID get completely worn out by bringing in load after load of empty boxes that we'd scored off a recently-moved friend. Well, okay, maybe I feel a little bit of shame. But darn it, ANYTHING's heavy when you're carrying it in mass quantities, up to and including cardboard. A ton of feathers still weighs a ton, people.

The point is, I almost threw out my back lugging a stack of cardboard, so I couldn't possibly imagine doing it again when the cardboard's holding things far weightier. This is not a gig for a chubby nerd like me. This is a gig for a chubby nerd like me to pay a muscle-clad behemoth to do, and I'm pretty much okay with that.

At least, I was -- until I started getting estimates from movers. It turns out that there must be some seriously wealthy muscle-clad behemoths about town, because I had NO idea how much it actually costs to move your possessions. I'm about halfway through gathering estimates and thus far the lowest one has been $770 plus tax. That's a bit steep -- but I'll likely be paying it.

I've just got too much stinkin' stuff. The low-end quote of $770 was for a crew comprised of four movers for a time period of six hours. I find it amazing to think that, in my 39 short years of living, I've amassed enough material goods that it requires four dudes to spend six hours carrying. But as I look around this apartment, the 4 guy/6 hour thing seems pretty realistic.

Long have I been a connoisseur of junk. My apartment is packed to the gills with odds and ends and knicks and knacks and bits and baubles that, when viewed as a collective whole, offer a deep and spiritual glimpse into my inner, umm, Shane-ness. My girlfriend, on the other hand, feels that I am inching more and more precariously close to a starring role on A&E's "Hoarders."

Now, I've seen a few episodes of this "Hoarders" show. Every third friend, relative, and/or co-worker of mine is addicted to it. And I am here, ladies and gentlemen, to announce to you in all certainty that I am no hoarder. If you've been lucky enough to avoid the show, the premise is simple: Each week, a sad sack is profiled who -- through any combination of sloth, neglect, and/or mental illness -- has let their living environment turn into a sea of trash and feces. A typical "Hoarders" home usually has 2-3 feet of decomposing garbage strewn throughout the floors, tended to only by what usually ends up being an army of defecating and fornicating cats. I'd like to think that I'm slightly above this, as would my current landlord, I'm sure.

It's just that, given the size of my small apartment and the amount of junk contained within, occasionally one must get a little creative when it comes to storage. My girlfriend keeps bringing up certain aspects of my current living arrangement that are outside the norm. It's been a bit of a learning experience. For instance, I've learned that the average homeowner does NOT, strangely, have a kitchen cabinet devoted to the storage of a/v cables. My girlfriend gives me unlimited grief over what I call the "cord dungeon." I simply think it's the handiest place for spare cords and cables to go. I told her not to come crying to me the next time she was in the middle of a cookie recipe that calls for brown sugar to be mixed with a 1/4 cup of 30' shielded digital coaxial with dual balanced conductors. Like the Boy Scouts, I am always prepared, especially when it comes to audio/video experimentation in my kitchen.

It's true that she might look around my apartment and see loads of useless junk. I'm simply giving our survival a fighting chance. I've seen enough episodes of "MacGyver" to know that if we were ever trapped in here with an atomic bomb and a 1:00 detonator, that useless junk might just save our lives. Of couse, we'd have to be trapped in here with MacGyver himself because I don't know what to do with any of this useless junk, but still...

And nowhere does junk accumulate more than in the stereotypical household junk drawer... of which I have four. Weeding through these drawers is my current pre-move task, and I honestly just can't bring myself to throw any of this stuff away. There's priceless treasures in here! Among the things staring up at me from my junk drawer right now:

• A pair of work gloves with the HGTV logo on them. Correction: only the right glove. That's a keeper for those right-handed gardening moments for sure. Besides, if I throw it out, I'll find the left glove immediately and then be super sad.

• 3 Slinkys. For fun, they're wonderful toys.

• A lighter in the shape of a woman's bosom. Push one naughty bit, flames shoot out the other one. I'm nothing if not classy.

• A Posh Spice Fantasy Ball Gum Lollipop, unopened, also containing 1 of 24 collectible Spice Girls trading cards. That's going with me to the grave.

• Also unopened: a bottle of Gore/Lieberman drinking water from their Quad City campaign stop. The perfect companion to my bottle of Hillary Clinton hot sauce.

• A plastic baggie containing exactly 9 little plastic whatzits. I have no idea what they are. But they each have hooks and two small holes in them and look horribly important, which is clearly why I can't throw them away.

• "The Best of Foghat" on 8-track.

• A pin that proudly says "TALK HARD!" I believe it's a promo item from that Christian Slater movie, "Pump Up the Volume," which made every college kid believe that their campus radio show would end up changing the world. This one can come out of the junk drawer... and GO STRAIGHT ON MY JACKET! YES!

Everything in these drawers is in there because at one point in my life, I deemed it too important to throw away. So why question my past decision-making skills now? There's some great treasures in here... I just need to move the 342 Taco Bell sauce packets to get to them.

I'm not a hoarder. I'm a refined collector... of junk.

COLUMN: Lost Finale

My dad likes to build stuff. This is cool, especially since I've got a brand new basement in dire need of finishing. But this story begins with something my dad built for me six years ago -- a shelving unit to store my DVDs. And we're not talking your run-of-the-mill shelves. This was a majestic beast, all solid wood and heavy as a horse.

"Get at least five of your friends to help us get this thing inside," he warned me ahead of delivery.

Getting five friends was no problem at all, but each friend insisted on the same caveat: that we stopped whatever we were doing at 8 p.m.: LOST was on. I had slowly watched this show consume the lives and water-cooler discussions of my friends for the better part of a season, but I was having none of it. Some show about island castaways? Not for me, thanks. I imagined some evil hybrid between "Survivor," Tom Hanks, and a volleyball. I didn't need that in my life.

Still, I was grateful for their assistance, so I sat with my friends to suffer through my first episode of "Lost." After five minutes, I wasn't caring about the chip on my shoulder. After fifteen minutes, I was asking questions about EVERYTHING. After thirty minutes, I was on the internet trying to find the back episodes that I'd missed. By the time the hour was up, I was a Lostie. And now it's over.

If you're one of the, what, eighteen people on Earth who haven't come to the conclusion that "Lost" is the best show on Earth ever, you might want to stop reading. If you haven't seen the finale, DEFINITELY stop reading.

In retrospect, I think the most amazing thing about "Lost" is that it even made it to the air. Can you just imagine what that pitch meeting had to be like?

Stuffy ABC Executive: "Okay, Mr. Abrams. Mr. Lindelof. We really like your "Alias" show, but that's pretty much because Jennifer Garner's kind of a hottie. As for the show itself, it's bleeding viewers like crazy because the plotlines have gotten WAY too complicated and weird for anybody to figure out. We assume that your new show is a little more simplistic and grounded in reality, right? Tell us a little about it."

Abrams & Lindelof, two unabashed mega-nerds: "Oh, yes, yes, this one's completely simple to understand."

"A plane crashes on an uncharted island, right? And all the survivors are total screw-ups in life: you've got a doctor with daddy issues, a hot girl with mommy issues, a con man with mommy AND daddy issues, a fat guy who's funny, a bald guy who's not, a pregnant girl, an abusive Korean and his submissive wife, a junkie, an Iraqi torturer, and a deadbeat dad and his kid who may or may not have magic powers and grows approximately 2' each season he's on the air. Don't worry, the audience will grow to love them."

"So on the island, there's a monster made of smoke --"

"NOISY smoke."

"Yes, noisy smoke that kills people. And the survivors find a radio signal, but it's just some weird French Rambo chick. And then the bald guy finds a hatch."

"What's in the hatch? Oh, we're thinking a British guy who has to press a button on an Apple IIe every 108 minutes or the world's going to end. Why 108? Because that's what 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, & 42 add up to, duh. But then he leaves, so the bald guy has to push the button."

"And then there's other people on the island."

"What do you call these other people?"

"The, umm, Others. Their job is to tromp around the island in hobo make-up. At the same time, it turns out that the tail end of the plane crashed on the other side of the island, and it's loaded with survivors, too. They're all rich and complex characters rife with engaging histories and compelling storylines."

"Yes, which is why we'll be killing them off immediately."

"Then they'll find a guy who crashed in a hot air balloon. His name is Henry, but really his name is Ben, and he's the head Other. He's also the creepiest guy on the planet. Don't worry, the audience will grow to love him."

"The Others kidnap the survivors, feed them fish biscuits, and take them to New Otherton. And then we introduce a pair of jewel thieves but kill them off within 45 minutes. The bald guy stops pushing the button and the hatch implodes. The world doesn't end, but the British guy sees the future. He tells the junkie's he going to die, and he does. Then mercenaries show up and start killing people until the noisy smoke kills them. Henry/Ben spins a wheel and the island teleports to 1977. Except for some of the cast who escape the island but decide they'd rather be back, so they come back, plus a scientist who can time travel and another who can talk to dead people and another who's just kinda hot, so we'll be killing her off immediately. Back in 1977, given the choice of detonating an atom bomb or reliving the disco era, they opt for the atom bomb and all blow up. But really they just split into two parallel realities. In one, everyone's on the island while two superbeings battle for supremacy, and in the other, everyone's back at home just fine. Except that they're all dead. Eventually the doctor with daddy issues saves the world by turning on a light, gives the island to the fat guy, then dies and brings everyone together to a non-denominational church where they can hug and move on."

"Move on? To what exactly?"

"Either heaven or a Lost feature film, we haven't decided. Oh, and did we mention there's a guy with magic eyeliner?"

"You did say the chicks were HOT, right?"

"Smokin' hot. Plus the doctor can be played by one of those 'Party of Five' rejects if you want."

"Sirs, consider yourselves GREENLIGHTED!"

HOW did it happen? Who cares, it DID happen, and the result was six of the greatest years in television history. And now that it's done, how do I feel about the finale? I'm not quite sure. There's a surplus of unanswered questions, that's for sure -- but the theories left over will provide ample fodder for "Lost" nerds to debate on the net for years to come, and I'll probably be one of 'em.

Some folks think the finale was great. Others think it was terrible. I'm somewhere in the middle. It could have been a LOT worse. It could have all been a dream... or heaven... or they could have pulled the mask off the Smoke Monster to reveal Old Man Smithers who would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for those pesky kids. In the end, the creators were fair to the characters while being a tad bit unfair to the island that brought them together.

I say it was a fair trade, and a fitting end to a perfect piece of television. Soo, umm, now what do I watch?

COLUMN: Yard

Reality is starting to sink in.

In less than four weeks, barring any weird unforeseen termite-inspection-related catastrophes, I will be a home-owner. This fact is intimidating and terrifying enough on its own, but I'm starting to realize some of the repercussions of my actions.

It's just beginning to dawn on me that owning a home means that I also own the land my home sits on. I am about to possess my own little square of Rock Island. In a primitive way, this is pretty cool. Me have land. My land. Mine, not yours. "This land is yoooour land, this land is myyy land." No. That land might be your land, but this land is MY land so step off. It's empowering as heck. There's just one teeny problem -- I now have to care for that land.

I have lived 39 years very strategically. Some may argue that I've coasted my way through life to avoid any sort of mental or physical stresses. I would argue this point. While it's true that most of my life is spent either slouched at a desk or lying on a couch, it takes WORK to achieve a level of slothfulness such as mine. You can't just say, "I'm going to lay around all day and do nothing." In order to be really successful at inactivity, one must have an action plan.

For instance, I have made it thus far in life without ever having cut a single blade of grass. I honestly don't know how one mows a lawn -- but I've seen it in the movies and frankly, it looks unpleasant. How did I escape lawn-cutting chores as a child? By employing my strategic action plan of inactivity.

As you may know, I grew up on a farm. Wait, scratch that -- my parents did not "farm" and I think it may require the verb farm in order to justify the noun farm. My folks weren't farmers, but they just kinda liked the idea of living in the middle of nowhere. So my dad took a 50-acre parcel of land that's been passed down in our family and built our home smack in the middle of it. And when your yard is farm-sized, mowing the lawn becoems an all-day affair.

We didn't have a lawn mower. We didn't even have a lawn tractor. We had a TRACTOR tractor. A full-sized, gas-guzzling behemoth that my dad attached mower blades to. And every week, the family would go out on an all-day mowing binge. And by family, I mean my mom and dad. I'd be inside performing any necessary video-game-playing and/or MTV-watching chores.

One day, my folks decided it was time to pass the tractor-driving gauntlet my way. This was kinda cool in a way. I mean, what kid wouldn't want to be behind the wheel of a blade-spinning, exhaust-spitting monster? Still, learning to mow = having to mow and that's no good. So on my first lesson, I did what any uncoordinated nature-shy cybergeek would do: I got flustered and drove the tractor full throttle into the side of my dad's shed until both tractor and shed were mightily damaged. Shockingly, my folks never asked me to mow again.

Yet now here I am with my very own lawn and a now absolute and total lack of knowledge of how to mow it. Happily, my new lawn is infinitely smaller than that of my parent's house, but I still have no clue what I'm doing.

The thought of having to mow in the first place just irks me. What are we paying our nation's top scientists for if not to invent grass that stops growing at a given height? Come on. This is the 21st century. We're supposed to be technologically above all this. You never saw George Jetson mowing a lawn.

Look at corn. Agricultural geneticists have spent billions of dollars perfecting today's corn crops. You plant them and they grow. At some point, they stop growing, out pops the corn, and we reap the harvest. We don't have to mow the corn to prevent it from ascending to the heavens. Corn is smart. It knows when to stop growing.

Grass, on the other hand, is stupid. You cut it and it's like, "What the...? Guess I'll just have to grow some more!" You should be able to buy grass seed that sprouts, grows to exactly 1.5" out of the ground, and then stops to enjoy a leisurely life of photosynthesis and oxygen production.

No such luck, so I figure I've got a shortlist of options at this point. They are:

(1) Pave the entire lawn. Nothing says home-sweet-home like an expansive blacktop slab. Just ask a skateboarder. Wait, if I paved my entire yard it'd be like an open casting call for skater punks to loiter about, wouldn't it? And if one of those dudes fell down and broke his coccyx while doing an inverted backside 540 McTwist off my siding, I'd be sued seven ways to Sunday. Hmm...

(2) Build the world's biggest deck. One that wraps around the whole house and consumes most of the yard and hence the yard work. So if anyone wants to come and build me one of those for free, step right up. Note: I prefer the kind WITH a hot tub.

(3) Scour the neighborhood for Little Timmy. Every block has to have a Little Timmy, right? There must be an enterprising sucker (cough) I mean SWEET LITTLE KID who owns a push mower and needs extra change for the ice cream truck, no?

(4) Grass won't grow if I cover every square inch of my yard in lawn ornaments. If there's one thing I love, it's the pageantry and magic of a good ol' Civil War re-enactment. So why not simply replicate the entire Battle of Gettysburg on my front lawn with concrete gnomes? At Christmastime, we could dangle lights off 'em and -- presto -- they become Santa's elves. It's a win-win. Now to convince my girlfriend...

(5) Speaking of which, perhaps I should just remind her of a conversation the two of us had when I was wavering over such a huge decision. I believe it started with me going, "I dunno, if I buy a house, that means loads of yard work" and HER going, "I tell you what, if you buy this house, I WILL DO MOST OF THE YARD WORK FOR YOU." And now that sentence is in print in a major local publication, which is pretty much the same thing as a legally-binding contract, I'm fairly sure.

(6) Give up and look to the heavens for help, and that was clearly the best answer... because when I did that, I looked up and saw the state of my gutters and that made me forgot ALL about the lawn. Gulp. I need an action plan.

COLUMN: Offspring

Life has been evolving at a scary pace lately.

For pretty much the past decade, I've been living a life of complacency, safety, and let's face it, boredom. Over the past year, I've somehow managed to meet and date a girl that I'm in no real hurry to lose. And if that's not enough, if all goes well, in about a month or two I could be moving into my first house. How's that for shaking things up a bit?

Now, I realize that this column is doing nothing but feeding ammo to my annoying co-workers who serenade me through the halls on a near daily basis with a barrage of "So when's the wedding?" "When you popping the question?" "Do you have baby names picked out yet? I bet sheee does!" So let me just nip that in the bud right now with THIS statement: If it happens, it'll happen, and only when it's the right time. That time is not now, especially when I have to pull a down-payment out of thin air. But it could very well happen at some point in the future, and that's enough to make me gulp right now.

This sort of lifestyle upheaval is scary on a number of levels, but there's one that makes me extra super duper scared:

My girlfriend is a bit baby-crazy. And that's not to say that it's a bad thing, because it's not. And it's not to say that she's trying to rush me into something, because she's not. There's some people who reach a stage of life and their mind just starts going "BABY BABY BABY." That's not her, either. No, I'm pretty sure my girlfriend's been going "BABY BABY BABY" since she WAS a baby.

She just seriously digs kids. This is probably a good attribute to have when you're a full time elementary school teacher and part time babysitter. We can't go to a restaurant, mall, or any public place without her fawning over any assortment of little kids. I know she eventually wants kids, and I know she'd make an awesome mom. I seriously dig her, and I know that if I want to stay with her, there's a good chance that one day I'll be saying howdy to a pointy-eared Shaneling or two. Double gulp.

I've never been AROUND kids in my life. I grew up the only child in a small family out in the middle of the country. Amy grew up in an army-sized family that would invent their own holidays if that's what it took to have a potluck. None of my close friends have kids. ALL of her friends have kids.

I know NOTHING about babies -- well, except that you're not supposed to shake them or let them fall on the soft spots of their noggins. Ergo, I'll be in charge of keeping our future offspring docile, dormant, helmeted, and seat-belted in a prone position until junior high. Amy can handle the rest. All I'm sure about is the one thing I don't think I'll ever be able to handle: poo. With advances in modern technology, you would REALLY think that by now, we should be able to potty-train children in the womb. Even the newest of newborn kittens know how to drop deuce in a litterbox.

"But Shane," you all say, "It'll be different when it's your own child. You won't mind changing their diaper, trust me." I don't trust you.

Let's go back to the cat analogy. I love my two cats, right? They're the closest things to children I've ever had to deal with thus far in life. Well, the other day, I got home to find a big ol' pile of hairball puke in the center of the kitchen floor. And in order for me to clean THAT up, it took The Infinite Number of Paper Towels, a couple of rubber gloves, looking in the opposite direction, and I STILL started to retch in the two steps it took me to get that nightmare from floor to trashcan. I think the only way this will work is if Amy takes my progeny away until Shane Jr. has full control over his/her body orifices.

Occasionally I think that I need to spend time with kids to prep for what one day might be the real thing. This is where Amy's babysitting gig comes in handy. She frequently sits for two sisters, age 5 & 6, who I lovingly refer to as my "practice children." Don't worry, Amy's always close by so I can't warp these kids TOO bad. But hanging with them is starting to brace me for what fatherhood might one day entail.

The other day, I was sitting around a table at what's likely to become my new house, in near-convulsion levels of fear, signing the first of a thousand documents to make an offer on the place. That's when Amy walked in with the girls.

"YOU LIVE IN A PRINCESS HOUSE!" one exclaimed.

Great. That's the exact macho image I was going for with this life makeover.

After the deal was done and the papers were signed, we went to Village Inn to see if I could get my resting heartrate down to a manageable level. As Amy took one of the girls to the bathroom, I was left for a minute with the six-year-old, whose attention had already turned to a word search in the kid's activity book.

"How do you do this?" she asked me. Practice Dad to the rescue.

"Well, you see those words there, right?" I explained. "They're all hidden in the puzzle and you've got to find them. What's that first word? Spell it out for me."

"B-L-U-E-G-I-L-L."

"Now sound it out. What's that spell?"

"Bluegill?"

"Yep, that's a kind of fish. Now try to find it in the puzzle."

She nailed it in a second. I am totally awesome at this.

"Okay, spell out the next one. It's a kind of fish, too."

"C-A-R-P."

"See, you're GREAT at this! Now sound it out, what's that spell?"

Turns out that it's pretty easy to transpose an A and an R when you're six. And that's how the entire clientele and staff of Village Inn got to hear my practice child proudly yell out her first obscenity. So hey, at least I'm good at teaching little kids how to cuss (or, as I see it, perhaps I made a crucial early diagnosis of dyslexia.)

Still, I'm not giving up. One day I'll be comfortable around kids. Last weekend, I reviewed the Taylor Swift show at the iWi. Turns out I had an extra ticket, so I took Amy's little sister (a HUGE T-Swizzle fan.) Not only did we score great seats, I also lucked out and got her a pit pass so she could (gasp) TOUCH a guitarist and get loads of up-close pictures. I believe I am now THE COOLEST MY-SISTER'S-BOYFRIEND EVER. That's good enough for me for now.