I arrived home from work yesterday after an uneventful day at the restaurant. Nothing of interest had really happened during the day. Customers came and went. Some were nice and friendly and good tippers. Others were bastards. But in general it was just another day in another town in good ol’ USA.

When I arrived home, my wife was not there yet so I parked on the grass by the driveway. I could have parked on the driveway itself but that would have meant she would park behind me and if I needed to go out again, which I inevitably have to almost every evening, I would have to use her old Geo Prism instead of my brand new 2010 Corolla and that just wont do. A guy needs to have standards.

Anyway.

So I park on the grass and I turn off the car. I look out my window and there is a man standing on the yard of the house next to us. Decent looking fellow, maybe in his fifties and this is unusual in itself because the house next to us has been unoccupied for almost two years now. Evidently it is on the market for purchase or rent but no one will touch it with a ten foot pole. I’m not sure why… maybe it’s because of the lousy neighbors, who knows.

Back to the gentleman on the yard. Well I assumed, naturally that the man standing there was either the current owner or someone unfortunate enough to buy the property and I was going to leave it at that, until, I noticed the man was holding a rather large machete.

Well, now we have a strange man on the yard next to us, by a house that is all but abandoned and he’s holding a big machete. That is the kind of thing you want to pay attention to, if only for the sake of knowing which way to run.

I took a good look and he certainly didn’t look threatening, in fact he kind of looked like your average middle aged fella who serves as a CEO somewhere and plays golf with his old buddies on weekends. I waved at him and he waved back with the hand that was not holding a machete. A good sign. So, being that it didn’t look like he was going to come after me, I decided to go on my merry way and leave him to his own devices.

I was about to turn away in fact, when this man, this completely ordinary, smart looking middle aged gentleman, unexpectedly grabs his machete by the blade and casually throws it up in the air.

Well you better damn well bet I’m paying attention now.

The machete disappeared up into the branches but gravity being what it is, its came down equally fast a few feet in front of him. Undeterred, the guy walked over, picked it up, walked back to his original spot, and threw it up again.

Well, now I’m thinking I’m about to watch a very innovative and unique, if rather inefficient and probably gory form of suicide by machete. I’m imagining the first Japanese samurai that invented the hara kiri ritual suicide probably tried this method a few times before coming up with something better. At this point, as casually as I could I walked around to the other side of my car. I was almost certain death by machete would not cause too much blood splatter but hey, better safe than soaked.

By the fourth throw, however, I realized our suicidal fellow was talking to someone. This just kept getting better and better. He was killing himself by throwing a machete up in the air because voices were telling him to. Some voices will tell you the weirdest things.

I was trying to come up with the best way to describe this to the police officer who would question me but I was sure I was going to have a hard time with that one. But then, as fate would have it, I looked up took a closer look at the branches and realized he wasn’t talking to himself. He was in fact talking to another guy who was lying over a thick branch up on the tree.

Assisted suicide by machete! How clever is that! But it was soon apparent that the guy on the branch had a much more mundane mission than helping a poor friend exit this world in an original and gory way. Evidently, he wanted to trim off some branches from the tree; with a machete; which he didn’t have, because it was currently being held by this fellow standing under the tree.

Ah, now I am no longer watching an attempted assisted suicide by machete, I am in fact watching a Darwin Award in the making! Because everyone knows that if you want to transfer a machete from the ground up to a guy lying on a brand thirty feet off the ground, you simply hold your machete by the blade, throw it up as hard as you can, and hope that Isaac Newton was just bullshitting everyone about this law of gravity thing.

Well I sure as hell wasn’t going to stop watching now. This story was getting easier to tell by the minute. I was actually going to enjoy explaining this one to the police, after I wrote my full report to the Darwin Awards, of course.

“Why yes, officer, the guy up on the tree came very close to grabbing the machete that last time, unfortunately he missed by a few inches and I didn’t see very clearly what happened next but I haven’t heard that particular sound since I used to watch my grandpa split open coconuts on his backyard.”

Well, sadly after a dozen attempts or so, the guy up on the branch managed to defy the laws of physics, luck, common sense and even Murphy and actually caught the machete. Yes, I was forced to go home empty handed and dejected.

When I told my wife about the incident, she agreed with me, of course on the natural idiocy of the players involved and then she asked me why I had not offered my humble opinion that the activity on which they were engaged was not only marvelously stupid but also potentially fatal. My answer was as logical as her question.

“I am already going to write about this on my blog,” I replied, “but can you imagine how much better the story would have been if the machete had actually hit the guy standing on the ground? What makes you think I was going to interfere and ruin a potentially great story?”

She seems a little scared of me now… I can’t imagine why.

Originally Published 09/18/2009

Problems.

Everyone’s got them. Some more than others and in greater intensity but it is pretty safe to say no one in this world is completely free of problems. You know what bothers me about problems? They don’t seem to change a whole lot. It’s like life handed you a set and you own it and that’s all you get. Why?

I think of it as a wardrobe.

You open it up and sure, today you may choose to wear the late credit card payment and maybe tomorrow it’s your car with a flat tire and next week, just to shake things up, you’re going to wear a bad flu just when you’re out of sick days at work. But you know that next month, when you open your problem wardrobe, you’ll probably have to wear the late credit card payment again, because you had to spend that money to fix your flat and you missed two days at work because of the flu.

See, if you think about it, problems have this annoying tendency to recycle themselves like considerate cans of soda. For a guy living under a bridge and sleeping on a cardboard box, it’s a simple set: find food, get spare change, don’t freeze to death. I don’t necessarily want to try his set. But sure, perhaps you have a big wardrobe of problems with lots of variety and you may go months without wearing the same problem, but sooner or later, you’ll get back to it. It’s your set.

But wouldn’t you like to try a different set?

You know what problem I’ve never had? I’ve never eaten so much lobster that it made me sick. Never happened. I’m sure someone out there has had that problem. Not me. I’ve never lost two million dollars in the stock market. That would be one bitch of a problem. Never had it. I’ve never had someone break into my ten bedroom mansion and steal six hundred thousand dollars worth of jewelry. Someone out there must have gone through that. Not me.

And you know what? That pisses me off.

One of these days, just for kicks, I would like to try a different set of problems. I’m not saying that those problems are any better than mine, they’re just different problems. It would be like sneaking into your neighbor’s house and looking through their wardrobe. You might find that their clothes are not much better than yours, but dammit they are different and I’d like to wear them. I want to put them on and walk around in them for a bit.

At least that’s what I told the police officer as he handcuffed me, but that’s not important.

Is this so much to ask? Wouldn’t you like to wake up tomorrow morning and groan “Oh God, I hope I’m not harassed by those stupid paparazzi today.” Sure, if you’re Brad Pitt and that’s something you have to worry about every day… well, first of all, Hi Brad! I loved you on Fight Club. How the hell did you find my blog?

Second, it might not seem like so much fun to you because that’s your life, but maybe you’d like to try a whole other set of problems. Maybe for a celebrity, the neighbor’s wardrobe would be waking up and worrying that when they walk into a Starbucks, no one pays any attention to them. I know that’s one problem I have, but I’m guessing that’s not one of yours, Brad.

And maybe it will happen one of these days. It certainly happens. There is a guy out there for whom three months ago his biggest problem was whether he would pay the house mortgage or buy another bag of weed because he only had enough for one or the other. Then he buys the right number and suddenly his problem is that his family won’t talk to him because he did not buy them the house in Cancun they asked him for and two hundred different charities won’t stop calling him. But hey, at least he can buy weed.

The point is, everyone’s got problems and more often than not those problems are either caused by not enough money, or too much money. Well, I’ve had a good long taste of the “not enough money” problems so you know what? I’m ready for the second course. Bring it out waiter!

Also, if you’re still there, Brad… umm… Twelve Monkeys? What the hell was that all about?

Originally published 01/23/2012

Well, it is official. We are now walking out of the forest of another week. This is Thursday, the day placed here to tease us about the fact that it is not quite Friday. In fact, have you ever woken up on Thursday thinking it was Friday? Isn’t it crushing and disheartening once you realize you are still two days away from the weekend? What is that all about?

But hell, it’s better than Wednesday, a day whose only purpose is to obstruct a smooth transition to the end of your week. In the highway of your week, in fact, Wednesday is the old lady in the Cadillac driving seven and a half miles an hour on the fast lane. It doesn’t stop you from moving, but it slows you down enough to make you wish your kids weren’t in the car so you could give her the finger.

Well, we are past Wednesday already, so feel free to look back and give it the finger. Just be careful, cause as it often happens, right as you give the old lady the finger you realize she’s your Pastor’s elderly mother. I’m not sure how this applies to Wednesday, but watch yourself’s all I’m saying. I once flipped my High School English teacher by mistake. Hey, it happens. Plus she assured me the radical and highly suspicious drop in my grade was entirely unrelated.

OK. I suppose you expect a bit of motivation for today. Let’s see what we have for you…

In this life one has to be proactive and aggressive. Don’t be afraid to go after the things you want most cause sure as hell no one is gonna hand them to you… Unless you’re Paris Hilton, in which case… you are not reading this anyway. The important thing to remember is that rejections are simply opportunities for you to dust yourself off, fix your hair and increase the amount of the bribe.

Also, remember boys, when it comes to relationships, the word ‘no’ is often too abstract to be taken at face value. “No” could simply mean, “not now” or “I’m not sure” or “I’m not drunk enough” or “my 300 pound boyfriend is standing behind you with a machete” or “if you come any closer I will castrate you with my nail file and make a wind chime out of your…well, the point is, don’t give up so easy. Women like assertive men, and besides, you will always be able to recognize the true and final answer in the form of a Restraining Order or a bullet heading your way.

08/27/2009