ThatsMyWholeThing

Meet the New Master

greg@providencebiblefellowship.com (Greg Birdwell) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:54:00 +0000

Hey, folks. This is a post I wrote back in February, but have been too busy to upload. As you read, pretend it's February, there's a foot of snow on the ground, and it hasn't been six months since my last post.

I better not ever hear anyone question my love for my wife. I’m proving it in spades right now.

My wife and kids got a dog. 12 days and 10 hours ago we were at the pet store in the mall. Shelby wanted to get one of the dogs out of its cage to pet it with the kids. So they took the animal to one of the little petting pens and a full-blown love fest ensued.

Shelby was in love. The kids were in love. The little beast seemed to be in love, too. At that moment, I represented either the gateway or the barrier to their eternal happiness – it was my choice. To my everlasting shame, I said, “Let it be so.”

I could defend myself, but that would imply that I think I’m innocent. Trust me – for the next 12-15 years I’m not on speaking terms with me.

To appreciate the grand irony here, you might want to take a look at a post I wrote about dog people. I don’t hate dogs. I’ve wanted a German Shepherd since I was a little boy. My parents weren’t inclined to spend money on dogs, but they were kind enough to let me have a few free mutts. Four, to be exact. And not all at once - I had one a year for four consecutive years. I have no proof, but it seems a bit coincidental that my first dog ‘ran away’ within weeks of an Asian family moving in a couple doors down. I don’t want to judge anyone for their preferred cuisine, but it is wrong to steal a poor boy’s dog no matter how hungry you are. A shocking accusation, you say? I lost four dogs in four consecutive Novembers. I don’t think those folks were having turkey for Thanksgiving.

Anyway, the point is it’s not that I hate dogs. I don’t even hate this dog. I just hate having this dog. I once heard a guy say that a dog that can’t hunt duck isn’t worth feeding. I can sympathize with that sentiment – I think the only dog worth having is one that can kill people. Like a German Shepherd.

That’s not exactly what we picked up at the pet store on that horrible, horrible day almost two weeks ago.

Don’t let appearances deceive you. This animal is cunning and cold. It took about 10 minutes at home with the little devil to realize that having a new puppy is approximately 1.5 times more taxing than having a brand new baby human.

We’re busy people. The last thing we needed was another full time job. I spent the rest of that day vacillating between acute buyer’s remorse and abject despair. Our lives now consist of watching this animal around the clock so that when it relieves itself we can give it a tiny piece of cheese. The beast figured out the system and decided to pee in increments. It releases a few drops and then clamors for cheese. After receiving the reward, it goes and drips a couple more. More cheese.

Oh, and I forgot the pep rally. The potty training book says that every time the dog does this we’re supposed to act like it discovered a cure for pancreatic cancer. I mentioned this in the dog people post, but there is something so backward about this. My wife and kids and I are made in the image of God. And yet, this dog leads us around by the nose, making us, by its very existence, act like imbeciles – we cheer whenever this rat urinates or defecates.

In hindsight the copious cheese treats were not a good idea. What happens to you when you eat too much cheese? Right. We had some people over for dinner the evening after we bought the thing. Looking back now, I realize that the fact that the dog hadn’t moved its bowels since we brought it home wasn’t a good thing. At the time, I thought that was the silver lining of this whole nightmare. I thought we must have gotten the pick of the litter. I know now that all that cheese was acting like a cork. The poop dammed up by the cork liquefied over the course of the day and the dam broke as we were finishing dinner - the dog diarrhea-ed all over its cage. There is too much to tell. Let me just say that the rest of the story involves a doggie hemorrhoid the size of a golf ball, fresh liquid dog squeeze on the hands of one of our guests, and my wife feeling the same bitter regret I had felt over the previous 24 hours.

As a result, we amended the cheese program and now the animal only gets cheese for solid waste. I ask you, who has the power in this relationship? Pooping for cheese – that’s all this dog has to worry about. Nobody gives me cheese…

Sleeping arrangements have been over the top, as well. With a bowel the size of an electron, when this dog needs to go, it needs to go now. The experts tell us that if you let the beast relieve itself in its cage, it will become a “dirty dog” and will never learn to go where it’s supposed to. I think this is patently ridiculous. All dogs are dirty dogs. That’s why dogs should live outside. God gave them fur for a reason. My wife responds that our dog would freeze to death inside five minutes. I have no objection to that.

Anyway, Shelby has been sleeping in the living room so that she can hear the dog yelp in the night when it needs to go twoosies. She bolts off the couch and sprints to the back door, trying to catch the animal in time. The dog needs to go at least twice a night. So, we’ve been sleeping alone. I swear, I can hear that little rat cackling in the middle of the night.

The lack of sleep the first week was intensifying Shelby’s buyer’s remorse. I gently approached the subject of treating another family to a bargain-priced bundle of joy. She replied that she didn’t want to sell the dog for less than we paid for it. I said, “No one on earth is going to pay what we paid for that dog. The way I see it we have two options: 1) we can take a financial hit, keep the dog, and let this animal ruin our lives, or 2) we can take a financial hit and enjoy freedom beyond our wildest imaginations. The choice seems pretty clear to me.”

Some of her doggie owner friends encouraged her to stick it out. Thanks, ladies.

Fast forward to right now. She flew out to California to spend the weekend with her two best friends. I’m thrilled that she gets to do this from time to time. It’s usually not a big deal – I’ve finely tuned my survival skills so that a weekend alone with the kids is smooth sailing. It’s mostly fast-food, re-runs, and two naps a day for me and the baby.

This time it’s different. I’m here in Ohio under a winter storm warning with four needy little kids and a tiny dog who thinks I’m its mommy. One of the tiny details about this weekend that didn’t really hit me until my wife was at 30,000 ft was that it was going to fall to me to take Little Evil to the vet for inoculations. As I loaded a small pink dog carrier into my truck and headed out into blizzard conditions, I thought to myself, “I’m risking my life so that this mutt won’t get doggie AIDS or whatever it is that the doggie doctors and doggie drug companies have conspired to convince the general public will befall any and every doggie not given a series of several hundred injections of overpriced doggie snakeoil.” I realized, though, that a deadly doggie disease might be just what the doctor ordered. A natural death would give me my life back. All I had to do was skip the vet appointment and just drive around for a half hour before going home to relieve my in-laws, who were watching the kids for me. But I can’t lie to my wife. Blast it.

I got to the vet’s office and was disappointed to find that they hadn’t closed early to beat the bad weather. When I went in, the desk lady said, ‘What’s the name?’

“My name or the dog’s name?”

“The dog’s name.”

For the life of me I couldn’t remember. I stood there for a couple of awkward seconds before offering, “My last name is Birdwell – I don’t remember the dog’s name.”

The lady looked at her list of appointments and then said, “Is it Razzle?”

“That’s it.”

She instructed me to get the dog out of the cage. As I peered through the gate, I noticed a long, black object on the inside. “Of course.” The dog had squeezed one in the cage. How can such a tiny animal produce such large chunks of stool? I swear, it was the size of a hand grenade. After giving the dog to the shot person, I shared my grenade predicament with the desk lady. She offered me a blue paper towel. I said, “Okay, I’m gonna need like five of those.”

I finished dealing with that just in time to take the dog back from the shot person. The next blow was an expected one, but when it happened it was worse than I thought it would be.
The shot person referred to me as daddy. As in the dog’s daddy. I want to puke just typing this. In past posts, I’ve catalogued some of the reasons I have trouble thinking of myself as a grown man. Being a chihuahua’s daddy doesn’t help.

I told my friend Rick that the dog may not survive the weekend. One could accidentally leave the back door open all night right next to the dog’s cage. One could accidentally drop a handful of Hershey’s Kisses in the dog bowl. One could absent-mindedly leave the dog alone in the same room with my 3-year-old son. If you think of any others, please, please email.

God prepared me for this, though. Last week in chapel at school one of my professors preached from Job about God’s providence in affliction. So I know that God long ago set me apart for this pain. I just never thought it would take the form of a chihuahua.

President of the Christians

greg@providencebiblefellowship.com (Greg Birdwell) — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 10:34:00 +0000

Well, Bravo, Brother! You’ve done a great job of painting a picture of yourself as a physically pathetic individual who’s been given the short end of the stick. Today, your readers will know the truth. I emerge from your shadow to reveal that not only are you physically pleasing, but your life has been one award and achievement after another.

Fans and Family, let me introduce myself. My first name is “Aren’t you Greg’s little sister?” My middle name is, “He is such a great guy.” This is often abbreviated to “Godly.” My last name is, “Tell him we said, ‘Hi! – we’re praying for him.’” For short, you can call me Shelbi. Let me just say, it doesn’t escape me that I share the same name as his wife.

I’ll start from the beginning…the grand state of Texas. I coasted through life, enjoying a bumpless road until the 2nd grade. Greg and I are 3 years apart, so that would put Greg in the 5th grade. At this time, through a series of illnesses, it was discovered that Greg has 3 heart defects. Before any of you shed tears…please know that Beloved is fine. This diagnosis was the best thing to happen to the medical community and the worst thing to happen to me. Greg has been called a “medical marvel,” “a modern day miracle,” and “God’s most creative creation.” He was the buzz of our town and a permanent prayer request of our small church. Greg was deemed the holy child created for greatness. I overheard one lady tell a visitor of our church, “It’s as if the Lord is pumping Greg’s heart with his own two hands.” In the same breath she told the visitor as they both glanced at me, “She must be going through an early puberty!”

“Greg the great” did not disappoint! In the years to follow it was discovered that Greg had a singing voice that was “schooled by the angels.” He could write music that made old men think of better days and he could preach sermons that drew crowds like Billy Graham. The “medical miracle” was sixteen and it was said of him that he was gifted, talented, and called. It was said of me that maybe it wasn’t baby fat after all!

When we were teenagers, my dad got a job offer in Ohio. I was the only kid in our family that was excited. Finally, I was going to a place that knew nothing of Greg and his wimpy heart that was “created for Christ’s cause.” When the town found out, they were devastated to lose him. The closer the time came to our leaving, the more baked goods arrived for “Greg’s” trip to Ohio. I was given sugarless gum. I was packed and ready for the promise land…ready to leave this desert behind. The day before we were to leave, Greg’s wussy heart freaked out and he ended up in the ICU. Our small church did not take the news well. Tears were shed, knees were bent, and roses sent! Brother delayed my trip a whole week! When we finally did leave, there was a parade for Greg’s big send off. He was given the key to the town. The town is still waiting for the second coming of Greg…the trumpets are waiting to play.

I was an idiot to think that Greg’s reputation would be limited to our small community. Apparently, until we arrived Greg was just an urban myth amongst the northern youth ministers and church ladies. Whispers of his arrival spread through Ohio like Aslan’s return to Narnia.

Our new youth minister was smitten! He courted, flirted, and called Greg on a daily basis. He begged Greg to disciple him. Whenever Greg made a comment during a youth gathering the youth minister asked us to remove our shoes, “we were on holy ground.”

One night, our youth group got together to play a game of underground church. Our minister was explaining that there were two teams. One team was the secret police and the other team was the Christians. Each team needed a leader! One idiot shouted out over the crowd, “I say, Greg be President of the Christians!” It was unanimous! Greg was hoisted onto the shoulders of his followers. The cheers and applause delayed the game 30 minutes. I was the last one to be picked for a team. Apparently, weight is considered a handicap.

Youth choir…another light to make Greg shine. Our choir director cried for one full hour after hearing Greg sing. She kept mumbling stuff like “You pray for things, but you never dream of something this precious.” Greg was always on the front row. He sang every solo. We were always silenced during rehearsal, so Greg could demonstrate how the song should sound. I was often told to just be silent. One Sunday evening, our director said we were going to elect officers to represent the choir. The same idiot as above shouts out, “I say Greg be President of the Choir!” Once again, unanimous! We didn’t elect any other officers…ever! It was as if Greg was all the leadership we needed!

As we have gotten older, Greg’s shadow has only gotten bigger and darker. He has continued to chase after God’s heart, striving for a heart like His. In this continuous pursuit, Greg has memorized whole books of the Bible. I have continued to strive to escape the title of “Greg’s little sister.” In order to achieve this, I had to join a Bible study 30 minutes away from the town. My older sister joined and enjoyed with me this weekly escape from Brother’s reputation. One day we (the ladies in our Bible study) were discussing Jewish customs and all the Scripture they committed to memory. A lady my family doesn’t even know stood up and said, “I was convicted to memorize Scripture when I heard that “her brother memorized the whole book of Romans!” Who is “her”? “Her” is me. She was pointing to me, not my sister…she was point to me…only! This was the final straw! Before leaving the study forever I yelled, “He’s just a man!” True story!!

Please don’t get me wrong…I love the guy! He is talented, gifted, and called! But remember – just like all celebrities and movie stars, the “President of the Christians” is just a man!

Just Call Me Smee

greg@providencebiblefellowship.com (Greg Birdwell) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 14:21:00 +0000

Our youngest just turned 1 and I’m holding out hope that this one will stay enamored with me. At this point, she is the only one of the four who isn’t a professional feelings- hurter.

The other three, however, are lovers of the cold, hard truth. They don’t really have the ‘speaking the truth in love’ thing down. They aren’t malicious, they just like to say whatever is on their minds. I suppose I should be thankful for the truth-telling, but hopefully with time it will be tempered with a smidgeon of sensitivity.

From what I gather from my kids, I am fat and I am ugly. And I smell bad. I didn’t hear these kinds of things when I was a kid myself, the time of life when one expects to be ridiculed and beaten down. No, during my childhood I felt very well accepted by all. It is fatherhood that knocked me down a few notches. I brought these little sinners into the world and they thank me by making off-the-cuff derogatory remarks about my physique.

Wyatt is about to be four. His insults seem to be the most innocuous, mostly because they are simply an unpremeditated, stream-of-consciousness type of degradation. Recently, I went in to my bedroom to get ready for work. Wyatt walked in and inquired as to what I was doing. “I’m about to change clothes.” He responded, “Is it going to be scary?”

I understand I’m no Fabio, but I’d like to think that the prospect of my taking off my shirt doesn’t result in a general state of fear among my offspring. And yet, that seems to be the case. What kind of hellish nightmare must my wife have been enduring all these years?

Blake, our 6-year-old daughter, is the most troubled by my shirtlessness. When the baby was born, she and Blake were sharing a room. During those first few nights when the baby was up all hours, I would go in and get Blake to trade beds with me. She could sleep with her mom and I would sleep in her bed, so that they would be able to sleep well and I could take care of the baby. On the first of these nights, I went in shirtless and woke Blake up, telling her to go sleep in my bed.

Sleepily she asked, “Where are you going to sleep?”

“In your bed,” I replied.

Suddenly, she was wide awake, and the troubled look on her face turned to stark terror as she whimpered, “What are you going to wear?”

Is she afraid of the dark? Monsters in the closet? Chucky? Murderers? Corporal Punishment? No. The greatest fear in her young life is the idea of her half-naked father’s skin touching her Hello Kitty sheets.

Last summer we went to my wife’s family reunion. Her aunt and uncle have a pool so the kids were worked up for weeks ahead of time about going swimming for two whole days. I looked forward to it as well – I have fond memories of swimming with my dad. I had slow-motion daydreams about throwing my kids through the air and seeing their beautiful faces beaming as they squealed with delight, just like when my dad did it to me. Unfortunately, none of us foresaw my attire being an issue. When I got into the pool wearing nothing but swimming trunks, Blake reacted as if I were a 170-lbs. chunk of toilet food floating on the surface and coming to smother her. The boys were only slightly less disgusted and the only reason Wyatt let me touch him was because he can’t swim and he decided that I was a lesser evil than water-borne death. So as a general rule, my children are frightened of me with no shirt on.

They also think I could stand to shed a few pounds. One day, out of nowhere Blake referred to me as Mr. Smee. For those of you still boycotting Disney I’ve found a picture of him.

This is what my little girl thinks of when she hears the word “Daddy.”

Wyatt apparently feels the same way. While trying to get him to eat his vegetables, my wife asked him, “Do you know what’s going to happen to you if you eat nothing but junk food?” He said, “I’ll get fat like Daddy.”

I’ll get fat. Like Daddy. These things aren’t easy to hear.

It gets worse. My wife was on the internet reading the news when our dear little Wyatt pointed to a picture of Michael Moore on the computer and said, “Daddy.”

The only thing worse than agreeing with this man is looking like him.

A while back my wife was trying to get me to wear clothes that weren’t so baggy, so she bought me a long-sleeve tee that was a little more form fitting than I was used to.

And more form fitting than Blake was used to or could handle. She stared at me and said, “Is that mom’s shirt?”

On another occasion with similar attire, she commented, “That shirt looks weird. Why are you wearing that?”

So I’m fat and ugly. These in themselves are bad, but not crippling. Character is what matters, right? Well, Jackson, our oldest, dealt the heaviest blow by mixing the physical flaws and character flaws together. We went to the Columbus Zoo. We were having a good time.

Until we went to the gorilla exhibit. We were treated to the site of a huge silverback eating his own poop. In front of a large and diverse crowd, Jackson announced, “That lazy gorilla looks just like you, Dad.”

The large and diverse crowd howled.

I have to wonder if my first-born really thinks I eat my own poop. I mean, that’s the epitome of lazy, is it not? You don’t even get up to get new food, you just recycle what you had yesterday. You see, this particular insult, though devastating, has a beauty to it. It addresses so many issues. With one sentence, my son compared me to a lazy, hairy, smelly, poop-eating primate.

But the baby loves me. For now. How long will it last? 6-9 months based on previous experience.

Then it’ll be time to have another.

________________________

If you have second and need a laugh, check out humor-blogs.com.

I'll Believe Anything

greg@providencebiblefellowship.com (Greg Birdwell) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 21:11:00 +0000

This is a guest post from my wife, Shelby. (Not to be confused with my sister, Shelbi.) I'm afraid every word of it is true. Not that you'll trust me.

I love my husband more than anyone in the world. He makes me laugh out loud on a daily basis, and we have been blissfully married for over twelve years. He is the head of our home, a scholar, a gentleman, a comedian, a great dad, a wonderful husband, a gifted teacher and preacher, and a talented drummer, guitar player, and singer.

He is also an accomplished liar.

Well, “liar” may be too strong. “Storyteller” or “tale-spinner” is probably a more appropriate description. Or maybe “one who will say the most off-the-wall, ridiculous things, just to see if his wife will believe him.”

It started early in our marriage. He never told lies to try to get away with things—it wasn’t like that. He just thought that it was funny that I believed everything he said.

I worked in an office for a short time and dressed up for work each day. It was a Wednesday and we had choir/orchestra rehearsal at church and I wasn’t going to have time to go home first to change clothes. I called Greg and asked him if he would pack a few things that I would need and he agreed. I started to give him the list, and he told me to wait while he got a piece of paper.

Greg: Okay, I’m ready.

Me: Okay, I need my dark blue jeans.

Greg: Daaarrrk...bluuuue...jeeeeeans. Got it.

Me: White t-shirt.

Greg: Whiiiiite shirt.

Me: Socks.

Greg: Sooocks. Next?

Me: Long-sleeved shirt.

Greg: LSS. ‘K?

Me: Please don’t forget my brown boots.

Greg: Boots...Got it. Anything else?

Me: Um, yeah, go ahead and bring my toothbrush and some toothpaste, please.

Greg: Toothbrush. Toothpaste.

Me: Thank you.

Greg: You’re welcome. Did you really think that I was writing all of that down?

Not long after that we were with my family. My sister and I were discussing the breaking news story about how JFK, Jr. had died in a plane crash. Search teams were still combing the water for his body, so my sister and I were speculating over the possibility of recovery when Greg said, “Didn’t you hear? They found his body.”

“Oh, they did?” we asked.

“Yes. I can’t believe you didn’t hear this. It’s so weird. When they found him he was still sitting in the plane on the ocean floor, and he had a lit cigar in his mouth,” he replied.

I know this is so stupid, but we actually sort of believed him. “What?! That is so strange,” we said.

Greg just started laughing and shaking his head.

A couple of years after the JFK incident, we had moved to our second apartment in Nashville . Not too many weeks after we moved in we discovered that the area of town in which we were living had a bit of a cricket problem. I hate crickets. All bugs, actually, but I have a particular distaste for bugs that can jump up and try to kill me. Only these were not your everyday crickets. They were camel crickets. They were brown, they were huge, and they and all of their friends had a fondness for our unit.

One particular Sunday morning as we were preparing for church, I was standing in front of the open refrigerator trying to decide what to have for breakfast. In my peripheral vision I caught sight of a monster crawling out from under the fridge, right by my bare feet. I screamed like a banshee, slammed the fridge door, and ran into the living room, jumping up and standing on the couch. Greg had been sitting at the table in the kitchen and had witnessed the whole event, but I still was shaking and crying and begging him to kill it.

I heard him close the cabinet where our trash can was contained, and he calmly reassured me that it was okay, he had killed it.

It took several minutes for my nerves to settle down and the shaking to subside, but I was able to gingerly step back into the kitchen, my eyes darting about the room in search of any of the cricket’s wicked relatives. I was certain that the coast was clear and walked back over to the refrigerator to resume my hunt for breakfast. As I stood there, déjà vu of the worst kind took over, and I looked down to see yet another cricket emerging from beneath the fridge.

I’m assuming that my screams woke up every tenant in our building.

My vision blurred as I ran out of the room, crying like a baby. I waited for my knight-in-shining-armor to rescue me once again, when I heard him say the words that would forever stain our bond of marriage and cause me to never trust him again:

“It’s okay, Shelby . It was the same cricket.”

Every muscle in my body tensed up and I froze half-way to the couch. In slow-motion I turned toward him, and with a voice that I can only assume sounded like I was possessed by an evil spirit, I seethed through clenched teeth, “it...was...WHAT?!”

Greg shrugged and said, “It ran under the fridge and I couldn’t get to it. I didn’t think it would come back out.”

Needless to say, every single time in the last ten years that he has killed a bug for me I have made him file a report on the incident and show me the corpse.

Stop me if you can stomach no more, but on we go to lie number four. (Hey, that rhymes...)

We had gone to bed particularly late one night, and Greg needed to rise early the next day for work. We were talking about needing more sleep, and Greg said, “I’ll be okay as long as I wake up after 6:00.”

“Why 6:00?” I asked.

Greg replied, “Oh, I just read about this. It’s called the ‘Threshold of Rest.’ They say if you sleep until 6am you will have rested thoroughly, even if you didn’t go to sleep until, say, 3am. But if you wake up at, like, 10 ‘til 6:00, you haven’t reached the Threshold of Rest.”

I was intrigued. “Hmm. That’s interesting. I’ve not heard that before.”

“That’s because I just made it up.”

I’m sure that I could tell you stories all day, but I won’t. Let me conclude with this: as exasperating as the love of my life can be, I can tell you that every day is an adventure and no one on the face of the earth could ever take his place.

Believe me.

_____________________________

If you enjoyed this post, check out the other accomplished liars at Humor-Blogs.com.

The Rolodex

greg@providencebiblefellowship.com (Greg Birdwell) — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 19:45:00 +0000

Guest Blogger: Christi Harrison

Let me say from the very beginning that I am not as talented a writer as my brother. I will not be incorporating imagery into this blog entry and I am pretty certain that the word onomatopoeia will not be used either. Who uses that word except college English professors who read War and Peace for fun on the weekends and have pictures of Emily Bronte taped to the inside of their briefcases? But I digress.

My name is Christi Harrison. I am Greg’s older sister, although, many people have thought that he is the oldest. This tickles me. For those of you long-time readers, I am married to the West Virginian, who is the love and joy of my life! We have four beautiful, precocious little girls. Yes, all girls! My husband has told them that they can either go to college or have a wedding, we can not afford to do both. In addition to spending time trying to look younger than my brother, I also spend a great deal of energy trying to blend into the woodwork. So it is rather ironic that my claim to fame is that I have the most embarrassing moments on record-bar none!
We have all been there; the Sunday school social, the office or dinner party where someone stands up and says the dreaded word "ice breaker". Then he or she goes one step further and suggests that everyone tells their most embarrassing moment. Why is it socially acceptable to emotionally strip ourselves bare in order to make it easier for people to talk to us? Why not just get naked and complete the nightmare. But that isn’t the part that stresses me out, because while everyone else is trying to come up with one embarrassing moment, I am mentally pulling out my rolodex of embarrassing moments and trying to decide when the host was wanting said incident from. You have to be more specific. Do you want it from elementary school? A holiday? From September of ‘84? Or maybe you want a specific genre; dancing with a midget (actually happened), passing out naked, or peeing in front of an audience. You have to narrow the scope of your search people. So, for the interest of time, I have narrowed the field to my top four.

The first one occurred my freshman year of college. It was a Saturday night and I was going on a group date to the football game. The cute sophomore who sat beside me in my Western Civilizations class finally asked me out and I was so nervous. All of us girls who were going, lived in a high-rise dorm with a lobby that you had to walk down about five stairs to get to the couches and T.V. This was where we were meeting our dates and because it was football night the place was packed! When the guys got there we exchanged small talk and decided to head out. My date and I were the first ones to the stairs. On the very last step, I tripped. As if that were not bad enough, I had enough momentum going to fall and actually slide 10 feet and hit my head on the lobby desk. As you can probably imagine, I never saw that guy again.

The next one also took place in college, although it was a different school. This happened during my junior year at Cedarville College. It was finals week and I was stressed out trying to maintain my place on the Dean’s list. It was the only time I had even come close to being on a Dean’s list, thus, my stress. I admit that I had not been sleeping and eating properly, if at all, and it had started to get to me. The morning of a particularly hairy final, I woke after a minimal night’s sleep and went to the showers. In this dorm there was just one large community bathroom and shower area for roughly 25 girls and all of us were there that morning. Upon getting into the shower and starting the bathing process, I began to feel light-headed and the room started to spin. About the time I figured it might be a good idea to sit down, I went down like a tree in the forest! Once again, it was not enough to fall down. No, I fell out of the shower and onto the floor in front of 24 girls. Luckily, I came to about the time that they said the word "squad". The "squad" was composed of the male nursing and pre-med students there on campus. I was panicked! I managed with some help to make it to the side of the bathroom and cover up with a robe in time for Cedarville’s finest ( and most handsome) to come and check me out. Needless to say, I didn’t date much in college. One small blessing was that my future betrothed was also a nursing student, but luckily was not on the squad.

This next story is my sister’s favorite. So, Shelbi, this is for you. Fast forward a few years after college and I was working as an assistant-manager in the fragrance shop at Victoria’s Secret. It was the last Saturday before Christmas and the store was beyond packed! As my dad would say, we were stacked in there like cord wood! I was there dressed to the nines in my beautiful, black suit and perfectly coifed, when a very handsome man comes and asks for help finding a gift. I tell him I have the perfect item and as I am telling him to take a whiff of the scent I have just sprayed on the card, the loudest fart you have ever heard comes ripping out of me from nowhere. I can honestly tell you that you have never heard a room get so quite so fast! To this day I have no idea where it came from. You can ask anyone who knows me, I am not one to actively participate in this kind of behavior. My own husband has only heard me fart twice in the 12 years that he has known me. I was beyond embarrassed and managed a very meek, "I am so terribly sorry". What happened after that is a blur.

This final incident took place at the rehearsal dinner the night before my wedding. Whenever I bring this story up to my husband, he gets a very nervous look on his face and tells me I had to have dreamed this some night because it never happened. Unfortunately for him I have MULTIPLE eyewitnesses, most of whom are dear loved ones. My husband’s best friend was a ventriloquist. After telling said spouse that Nathan absolutely could not perform at the wedding reception, I decide to compromise and let Nathan perform at the rehearsal dinner. BIG MISTAKE!! Everything was going quite smoothly and Nathan was doing very well until he asks Aaron (my husband) and I to come up and stand with him. My sister says that what happened next was the most painful thing she has ever had to watch. Nathan tells Aaron and I that he is going to put his hand on our backs and we have to be his dummies! We have to move our mouths and arms in time to him. He then proceeds to sing , but I can’t tell you what the song was because I was trying to decide how to give Aaron the ring back. The West Virginians that were there look back and describe it as a delightful memory. My mother, on the other hand, still can’t talk about it.

Well, that is me in a nutshell, a shy, quiet wife and mother with a past that is anything but. Maybe sometime I can tell about the time I danced with the midget.

_________

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Intermission

greg@providencebiblefellowship.com (Greg Birdwell) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 18:06:00 +0000

I know its been over a week since I last posted. The Spring semester has begun and I'm pastoring a new church - I'm swamped. I will do my best to keep things up, but I'm afraid the frequency is going to decrease a bit. I intend to get some guest bloggers to put some content up. If you get sick of checking the site to see if a new post is up, you might consider subscribing to the blog by email or RSS feed (the links on the left side of the screen).

Those of you who are new to the blog, the archive has a few posts that you might enjoy.

Take it easy, everyone, and I'll talk to you soon.

Guest Blog: How I Destroyed the Emperor

greg@providencebiblefellowship.com (Greg Birdwell) — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 17:04:00 +0000

My wife and I are trying to instill a love of writing in our kids. So, we have a special treat today, a guest blogger, my 8-year-old son Jackson. When I asked him to pen something for the blog, I had no doubt that the theme would involve Star Wars. The saga has been a part of his identity since he was about 18 months old, when I first showed him Episode 1. He sat motionless in my lap for the entire movie. After that it was all over. Following his introduction to the original trilogy, all he wanted to think or talk about was “Dah Bader.”

When he was four I took him over to my parents’ house for a special presentation. I, too, had been a Star Wars junky as a child. Wisely, I kept every shred of merchandise I’d collected over the years. I brought him down to the basement and showed him a large box. He peered inside and looked as if he had found the Holy Grail. Millenium Falcon. X-wing. AT-AT. Cloud Car. Snowspeeder. A Darth Vader carrying case with approximately 50 action figures. Et cetera. For a brief moment, I came to mean more to him than Emperor Palpatine.

Every birthday and Christmas we add to the collection. He has a Darth Vader piggy bank with theme music, sound effects, and lightsaber action. He has blasters. He has five lightsabers. He has costumes. He has the movies in DVD and VHS (while he does enjoy the digital, he’s still a purist – sometimes he likes to go old-school and use the VHS). He has five Star Wars video games for Xbox. Books. Pajamas. Underwear. T-shirts. Notebooks. Posters. Magnets. Christmas tree ornaments. Lego sets. Shoes. You name it.

When he was five, we used to take a metallic balloon and pound the hooey out of it with lightsabers. It was his favorite game. He named it “Lightsaber-Smack-Balloon-Good”.

A couple of months ago, he and I almost got into a fist fight over who is more powerful, General Grievous or Darth Maul. I was trying to tell him that Grievous doesn’t even know the ways of the Force. Like a broken record, he kept replying, “Dooku trained him to use the Force – and he has four lightsabers instead of just the double-bladed that Maul has.” He’s completely delusional.
I’m not sure why, but from the very beginning, he had a soft spot for the Dark Side. Odd for such a sweet, affectionate kid. My wife, Shelby, was a bit troubled by it, thinking he might be headed down the wrong path. As much as we tried, we could not win him back to the Good Side. He’s convinced that the Dark Side is stronger. I suspect he’s right, but he doesn’t know that. Shelby and I still try to impress upon him that good always prevails over evil. He simply doesn’t see it that way. In his opinion, you can’t argue with Force lightning and the Force choke.

Probably nothing conveys a sense of Jackson’s dedication to the Dark Side more than a conversation my parents overheard between him and his cousin, Rylie, a few years back. They were arguing over a toy when Rylie reminded him, “Jackson, life isn’t all about you. Life is about other people.”

Jackson solemnly replied, “No, Rylie. Darth Vader. Life is about Darth Vader.”

So, he’s pretty serious. With that said, I’ll get out of the way and let you read his very first blog entry.

How I Destroyed the Emperor

One day I was playing lego star wars 2 [Xbox]. I was soon at the end of the levels in episode six. I was battling the emperor in that level. at the end the emperor’s last heart was beating. I was being darth vader at that point. I ran after the emperor. when I got to him I got my lightsaber and jumped once into the air and swung my lightsaber for the final blow. pow! then I saw vader kill the emperor. then I saw luke drag vader to the shuttle. then I saw vader die. then I saw luke push vader into the shuttle. then I saw luke pilot the shuttle into space and into endor. the level was completely over.

by Jackson

It comes so naturally to him. Did you notice the plot development towards the end? The onomatopoeia for dramatic effect? The sense of finality woven into the conclusion? The boy is brilliant.

But he’s not our only prodigy. My 6-year-old little girl, Blake, is working on a piece entitled “The Lion Who Ate the Exploding Hotdog”. She’s got a rough outline and I like where she’s going with it. Stay tuned.
____________

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The Lost Year

greg@providencebiblefellowship.com (Greg Birdwell) — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 19:08:00 +0000

As I drank my coffee creamer and choked down my Tums this morning, I felt the weight of how busy my life has become. Managing the family store, going to seminary, home-schooling the kids, writing 2 blogs, pastoring a new church, adoring my beautiful wife, and praying for the end of the Hollywood writers’ strike so I can have fresh episodes of The Office again. Not enough hours in the day. I found myself wishing I could get back The Lost Year.

The Lost Year. It started in May 2004 and lasted...a year. My wife’s business was requiring her to do some work online. Dial-up wasn’t cutting it. We needed high speed. So I called the local company and inquired. Whether by chance or by design, the representative I talked to was possessed by the devil and bent on my ultimate destruction. And as is customary among the demonic, this evil one was quite charming and persuasive and lovable and keen. I expected the price of high speed internet to be a significant increase over dial-up so I wasn’t surprised when the dark lord gave me the quote.

Then came that fateful moment, that instant of weakness, when Satan seized the opportunity, skillfully delivering the temptation and deceiving me into flushing away a year of my life. His medium on the other end of the phone line informed me that for only $10 more per month....I could have not only high-speed internet, but also digital cable. 200 channels. A digital video recorder. And pleasure beyond my wildest dreams.

All discernment and wisdom and love and perseverance and commitment and decency and patience and familial devotion and common sense disappeared like a sneeze in a tornado. I wanted that digital cable. I needed that digital cable. I deserved that digital cable. And it would be the height of poor stewardship to not take it for the unbelievably reasonable price of $10 per month.

You see, up until this point we didn’t have cable at all. All we had were three fuzzy stations, and those were only watchable on a perfectly clear night during a leap-year crescent moon. We were third-world being offered a slice of the American Dream. We were people on the brink of starvation being offered a veritable buffet of entertainment delight. We accepted.

And gorged.

In retrospect, it was quite disgusting. My wife is having a difficult time with my even writing about this. We are embarrassed. But we take comfort in the possibility of others learning from our past excesses.

After the cable was hooked up and the DVR was humming, we realized that the common maxim, “there’s never anything good on TV,” was a complete misconception. It’s not that there’s nothing good on, it’s just that there’s nothing good on when you only have three channels and can only watch in real time. True there’s nothing good on the Big 3 during primetime hours. But there are 197 other channels, each serving up 24 hours of all kinds of interesting stuff while normal people are sleeping, showering, eating, working, and loving their families. The digital video recorder bridges the time gap. You can record stuff all day and watch it at your own leisure. So, friends, there’s always something good on.

We put a billion miles on that DVR, setting it to record our favorite shows every time they were on, recording multiple shows at the same time, stashing cartoons for the kids, storing health shows, science shows, technology shows, military documentary shows, military history shows, military revisionist history shows, reality shows, fictional reality shows, washed-up celebrity reality shows, game shows, motorcycle-building shows, crime scene shows, and watching all these shows while recording other shows and simultaneously scrolling through the on-screen program guide looking for still more shows. My wife was working several nights a week at the time. She would get home around 9:30, change clothes, and come down to the basement so we could buckle-up for 2-3 hours of whatever was next. We believed we were being good stewards of our time because by skipping the commercials, we could watch four hours of TV in three. If cable was food, we would have been that huge side of beef down in Mexico who hasn’t seen his feet in 12 years.

We forgot how to read, care, and carry on intelligent conversation. We named the DVR, bought it Christmas presents, and prepared a place for it every night at the dinner table. We loved – nay – we cherished that DVR ...

...as Satan laughed in victorious contempt.

What I hadn’t consciously picked up during our conversation when he sold me on the whole deal was the vocal fine print informing me that the $10 per month thing was only for 3 months and that after that it would be nowhere near reasonable. But after 3 months, you’re hooked. Three hours, actually. It’s like audio-visual crack – it sucks you in and after a while what it costs is completely irrelevant. It rises to the level of toilet paper and food – you don’t question the necessity of it, you just pay the going rate.

Except this debauchery didn’t just cost dollars. That’s no big deal – we can earn more dollars. No, it required something far more valuable. It cost us life’s most precious resource, the one that can never be replaced.

Time.

One day by God’s grace we woke up and saw the wretches we had become. Our brains were mush, our hearts were black, and our muscles atrophied. So I made the call. The devil sent a warlock out to the house to pick up that infernal window into hell – the DVR.

Life returned to normal, we reconnected with loved ones, and resolved to find a way to atone for the time we wasted. But we soon realized it was too late. It was The Lost Year.

That hurts especially right now, since I’m so busy that whenever I need to go to the bathroom I have to pencil myself in. I can’t help but think about what all I could accomplish if I had that year back. 35 term papers. Or 52 sermons. Or 347 blog posts. Or 4 bowel movements. It’s tragic.

So, friends, learn from our mistake. Don’t give the devil a minute. He’ll take a year.

___________

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You Can Keep the Beach

greg@providencebiblefellowship.com (Greg Birdwell) — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 19:37:00 +0000

The snow is falling in Southwest Ohio and I’m thrilled to be here instead of with you poor folks who have the misfortune of being on a beach somewhere. Give me the frigid Midwest any day – I hate all things balmy. This stems from the few times I have been to the beach. My experiences there have been characterized mainly by two things: sand-chafing and near-fatal sunburns. I’ll save the sand-chafing for another time.

I was endowed by God with what some would call pasty-white skin. And actually, that phrase really fails to capture the severity of the situation. It is the total absence of color. We’re talking albino-baby-hiney white.

In the summer of ’97, my wife and I drove to Charleston, South Carolina with some friends for the 4th of July. For those of you educated in the West Virginia public school system, South Carolina is a land right next to the big water. Our friends, Jason and Renee, were actually from Charleston, so we stayed with Jason’s parents. No sooner had we arrived than Jason’s dad told us to rest up for a long day at the beach the next day. Oh, goodie.

The word “beach” automatically makes me feel self-conscious, so it was unnerving to see Jason’s mom staring at me with a concerned look on her face. “You’re gonna need sunscreen,” she announced, “Big-time.”

I’m not mentally crippled. I not only have a healthy respect for the sun, but also a realistic understanding of my skin’s propensity to burn. So I didn’t appreciate the obvious advice or that the attention of everyone in the house was drawn to the fact that my skin looked like I’d spent the whole of my days in a cold, damp cave. I had already stocked up on a sunscreen so thick that it came with a putty knife. “I think I’m set,” I replied.

Even though we arose at the crack of dawn to get to the beach as early as possible, every living soul in SC was already there waiting for us when we arrived.

I’d gone swimming in public before so I was accustomed to the usual responses to my whiteness. Some wince. Some point. Some cower. But not a soul misses my arrival. There are the mothers who nudge their small children and remind them it is impolite to stare. There are the buffed teenage boys who openly mock me. There is the 80-year-old man in need of a brassiere, who furrows his brow and proclaims in what he perceives to be a near-whisper, “Holy cow!” And as sure as the sun coming up there is always that one Mother Teresa-type who casts a compassionate, you-poor-thing gaze at me as if I was unrecognizable as a human being. But it’s okay. Everybody needs attention, right?

I applied and reapplied the sunscreen/paste at twenty-minute intervals for the entire day. This was not my choosing. I think I could have gotten away with forty-minute intervals, but Jason’s mother wouldn’t hear of it. I overheard some young men placing wagers about how long I would last until being flown to the burn unit. But to the surprise of everyone in Charleston, eight hours under the scorching sun had done nothing to mute my deathly pallor. It is a testament to the engineers at Johnson & Johnson.

I was feeling rather triumphant as I surveyed my still-pasty flesh before getting dressed to head back to the house. That is, until I glanced at my feet. For some reason that still escapes me, in applying the twenty-five-or-so coats of sunscreen over the course of the day, I had somehow overlooked the tops of my feet. From my ankles to the brown hair on the top of my head, I was as white as a ghost. From my ankles down, I was as red as perdition’s flames.

I looked like a giant, lit cigarette.

The next few days are a bit of a blur, but there is one scene that still plays vividly in my mind from time to time. I see myself sitting on the floor beside the bed the next morning whimpering like a frightened little girl as I try to wish my shoes onto my feet. It was at that moment that I swore to myself I would never again set foot on sand.

Give me a snowstorm any day. You can keep the beach.

________________
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The Sissification of the American Cartoon

greg@providencebiblefellowship.com (Greg Birdwell) — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 17:31:00 +0000

This is deeply disturbing. My kids were watching cartoons the other day while I was on the computer. After a while it struck me that I hadn’t had to threaten them at all to get them to leave me alone or pipe down. It was then that I looked up and saw that they were all sitting there staring half-comatose at the tube...not laughing. Nary a chuckle from any of them for the duration of the cartoon.

I hesitate to name names, but if you were guessing “Arthur” you were right. Have you seen this show? It is disgraceful. I have a number of problems with it, but first and foremost is that it’s all dialogue and no pain – that is, it ain’t funny. All it is is whining set within the context of nonviolent relationships. Just a bunch of sissies. Where on earth did that come from?

I’ll tell you. The sissification of our cartoons has resulted from the sissification of our culture. I trace it back to Woodstock – make love, not war. The hippies who were smoking dope out in the country back then are the hippies smoking dope in the boardrooms of entertainment corporations today. So, when it comes time to pitch a new cartoon, it doesn’t even occur to them that someone needs to get hurt in order for it to be funny. Their minds are so blown from dropping acid that everything is funny to them. Therefore, all the little unisex animal characters just talk out their differences, which simply comes across as wimpiness and whining. If we want our kids to learn how to whine, all we need to do is make them watch The View. If we want them to laugh, we should be able to turn on cartoons.

When I was a kid, cartoons were hilarious. I’ve seen ‘em all a hundred times and I still laugh at them. Those of us who had the privilege of growing up with Tom & Jerry, Yosemite Sam, and Wile E. Coyote understand that human children are hardwired to get a kick out of the physical pain of animated characters. It’s inborn. It’s human. It’s normal. And the only dialogue in those cartoons was Yosemite Sam threatening to kill Bugs Bunny and saying, “Aww hate that rrrabbut.”

The rationale behind the sissification of cartoons is that if we show children violent images, they will grow up to be violent adults. Let’s think about this for a second. As violence has decreased in our cartoons, has their been a proportional decrease in the violence of our society? No? It seems to me that there has been a negative correlation between the level of violence in cartoons relative to violence in the real world. For those of you educated in the West Virginia public school system, that means that as cartoon ouchies have got lesser, real ouchies have got morer.

The explanation of this mystery can be found in another sociological change I’ve witnessed. The aforementioned hippies are the very ones who have begun to brainwash our culture into believing that little boys need to be fixed by teaching them to be little girls. We all know some parent who doesn’t let their male offspring play with toy guns. They give them dolls instead. This, I surmise, is where the increase in actual violence comes from. If my parents raised me as a girl and deprived me of hilariously violent cartoons and toy guns, I might be prone to real life fisticuffs, too. But my parents did let me play with guns. They bought me toy guns and when I wasn’t satisfied with the quantity they encouraged me to make guns out of leftover PVC my dad had out in the garage.

I also watched many a violent cartoon in my youth, and yet I’ve never dropped an anvil or a grand piano off of a cliff in the desert in an effort to kill another person. I don’t know anyone who has. I’ve never shoved a pool cue down the throat of a cat so that it protruded out of the cat’s tail. (Although, I did fantasize about it yesterday when I found cat poo on my back doorstep. I don’t own a cat.) I’ve never loaded TNT into a rabbit hole to blow my lunch out of hiding. You see, as a child I realized that cartoons are pretend.

Related to the lack of violence in our cartoons is the lack of clear “ethnic” identities of the animals. Is there any question what kind of animal Daffy Duck is? But Arthur could be anything from a rat to a pigmy sasquatch. It’s creepy. As I write this, my son informs me that Arthur is an aardvark. That is pure insanity. He is an aardvark that looks nothing like an aardvark. See for yourself.

Now look at Daffy compared to a real duck.

See how far we’ve sunk? What are we so afraid of? That we’re going to offend aardvarks by playing on stereotypical aardvark characteristics? That our kids are going to treat aardvarks like aardvarks? It’s crazy.

Anyway, I have a proposal. Let’s scrap every cartoon made after 1960 and see what happens to crime. We’ll try it for a year. If I’m wrong, bring back the sissies. But I can tell you one thing, at my house there will be no more “sensitive” cartoons. They have been outlawed. There is only violence and laughter from now on.

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The Movies That Made The Man

greg@providencebiblefellowship.com (Greg Birdwell) — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 00:14:00 +0000

As ridiculous as the Hollywood crowd is to me, I have to admit that their work has had a profound impact on my life. What can capture the essence of the human experience, albeit entirely inaccurately, more than the universally-loved Big Screen? They make us hate. They make us love. They make us need to go to the bathroom so badly that we miss the climax of the film. America loves movies and so do I. So, in the interest of further transparency, I’ve decided to share with you some of the movies that have changed my life.

Deliverance. This I will never forget. I’ve mentioned before my mortal fear of prison. Deliverance extended this fear to the mountains of Eastern Tennessee. I was living in Nashville when I saw it, so it had double the impact. My friend Jed and I rented it one night and watched it after my wife went to bed. She wanted to watch it, but Jed, who had seen the movie before, said, “You don’t want to watch this movie.” Of course, that statement only got me more excited to see it.

That movie was creepy from frame one. It is truly a cinematic masterpiece. I feared for my life right away. Whoever came up with the inbred banjo player scene is a genius. It sets up the whole film. After watching that kid on the porch, you know these guys are in a very dangerous place.

Then came the scene. I don’t know of any other movie that has been so universally associated with one single scene. But if you bring that movie up to someone who has seen it, that is the only scene they remember – and they remember it vividly. I have one question: was Ned Beatty given a copy of the script? I can’t imagine being that desperate for work. He had to know that for the rest of his life people were going to associate him with...that. I think that scene was so terrifying because it was so realistic. I mean, if it’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen just like that.

I was a tad freaked out after the movie was over. Jed acted like we had just watched Mary Poppins. This is because no one on the planet would ever have the poor judgment to try to violate him. He’s Jed. But me – what sicko wouldn’t try to violate me? I’m a tiny white man with no hair on my face. I’m practically a 10-year-old girl.

Not long after I saw the movie, I waited on a family of people at J.Alexander’s whom I am sure are related to the inbred banjo player. They terrified me. I shared this with a friend who was also working that night and whenever I was near that table, he would whisper, “Squeal, piggy!”

So, how did this movie change my life? It changed forever the way I think about my body, I am now deathly afraid of hillbillies, and I’ll never eat pork again.

The Notebook. I’m embarrassed, if it makes you feel any better. But I have to admit that I loved this movie. I loved this movie. I couldn’t get it out of my head for days. [By the way, we are in the habit of skipping the naughty scenes.] The setting, the music, the dialogue, the switching back and forth from old Noah and Allie to young Noah and Allie, the music, Ryan Gosling’s awesome beard...the whole thing was just breathtaking.

I’m going to be accused of being a woman for saying this, but I’m sayin’ it: this movie makes you yearn. It makes you long. It makes you so happy to be married to my wife. And it makes you want to grow old and die together on a gurney in an old folks home. What else can be said?

How did it change my life? I developed a man-crush on Ryan Gosling, I want a kayak, and I accepted the fact that I am the only heterosexual male in North America to have embraced such an unabashed chick flick.

Se7en. This might be the most disturbing film I’ve seen. And I loved it. I saw it with my sister when we were in college. After the movie, we walked silently back to the car, drove silently back to campus, where I stopped silently in front of her dorm, and she silently exited the vehicle. After a few days, the shock wore off and I got the brilliant idea to take my fiancee (now my wife, Shelby) to see the movie.

Now, up until this event we loved to watch scary movies. Silence of the Lambs. The Shining. Cape Fear. Shelby was as into it as I was.

But something happened at Se7en. She was basically ruined on scary movies. As with my sister, we left the theatre silently, but the silence only lasted until we were about halfway to the car, when Shelby began to sob. I felt like the biggest cowpie in the universe. Way to protect the love of your life, moron.

So from that day forward, Shelby retired from scary movies. She has on occasion made the ill-fated decision to come out of retirement, after which she immediately goes back into retirement, swearing to never venture out again. Now all we watch are romantic comedies and Disney/Pixar.

Once, I made the mistake of thinking that a certain movie wasn’t scary enough to bother her, and I begged her to watch it with me. She agreed. It was The Village. It was scary enough to bother her. At the end of the credits, she slowly turned to me and said, “What is freaking wrong with you?”

So, how did Se7en change my life? My wife doesn’t fully trust me to look out for her best interests, I’ve seen more Barbara Streisand films than any male should, and if I want to see a scary movie, I have to ask my sisters to go.

Copycat. This is one for which Shelby came out of retirement. And re-retired. Demented movie. We rented it with some friends not long after we married. We had already seen it in the theatre, but that was pre-Se7en. I think Shelby thought that since we had already seen it and if we were all together, the being scared thing would be fun. It didn’t really work out that way. At one point during the movie, I looked up and all four of us were sitting on the couch hugging our knees.

Bedtime that night was interesting. We were both way freaked out, but she was the only one willing to admit it. She asked me if we could trade places so that she could sleep on my side of the bed. She figured that if someone broke in they would kill the person closest to the door – the side of the bed she usually slept on. If I had taken the time to process that I might have been a little offended, but in reality I was thinking that if someone broke in it would be through the window by the side of the bed I usually slept on – if we traded places, I would be safer. So, we traded, each one hoping that any potential killer would attack our mate first, giving each of us the chance to escape.

How was my life changed? I began to view Harry Connick as the most convincing actor of our time, I resolved to never sit down on a toilet at any institution of higher learning, and I realized that if any serial killer ever breaks into our home, its going to be every man for himself.

Hope Floats. This is one of my penance flicks for having scared the poo out of my wife by taking her to see Seven. The irony is that what Se7en was to Shelby, Hope Floats is to me. I am just flat out terrified of this movie. I’ll tell you why.

IT’S DEPRESSING. Whoever came up with the title should be forced to watch this movie on a continuous loop. The title is false advertising at its finest. “Hey, want to watch a feel-good? Well, here’s one for you! Picture this: A woman finds out on a nationally televised talk show that her husband has been having relations with her best friend. Just wait – that’s not even the feel-good part. She then moves back home to live with her mom, where everyone in town treats her like garbage, including her little girl. Hold on, hold on – it gets even better. Harry Connick, whom every woman in the world would love to love, loves her, but she is still stuck on the philanderer who devastated her on national television. Keep your pants on – that’s nothing. Her mother, the only source of strength in her life goes tango uniform about ¾ of the way through the movie. But that’s just window dressing, folks – the good part is still coming. Are you ready? When the adulterous husband comes to the funeral, the little girl packs a bag and starts to get into the husband’s car, presumably because she would rather live with her scumbag dad and his new whore than with her loving mother. The dad takes her bag out of the car, gets in the car, and drives off, leaving his little girl screaming and crying in the middle of the street, holding her suitcase and doll, begging him to let her come. Mmmm...makes you feel warm inside doesn’t it? And as a bonus, the whole thing is set in a wretched caricature of the Lone Star State.”

I single-handedly kept a suicide prevention hotline in business for a month after watching this movie. Every time I called I could hear the counselors doing Rock, Paper, Scissors. The loser would eventually take my call, after which the counselor would call the hotline his or herself...without even having seen the movie. See? It is devastating just hearing about it. They should have entitled the movie “All Hope Is Gone, Ya hear? It Don’t Float. All Hope is Gone.”

But my wife loves it. So we watch it. Well, she watches it. I just sit in the corner and cry.

So how did this movie change my life? I’m bitter toward Sandra Bullock, I no longer worship Harry Connick, and I’d like to fire-bomb all these daytime talk shows.

Titanic. Again, I know it’s womanish, but I loved this movie. (We always skip the naughty scene.) We saw the movie the first time in the theatre by ourselves. When the movie was over, Shelby made a scene sitting in her seat with a mound of soaking tissues in her lap, racked with sobs for a good ten minutes. I heard one man cussing under his breath at the spectacle. Okay, I cried, too, but only a little. For days – I mean, days – it’s all we thought about. We took a friend to see it a couple of weeks later. (His name might be Kirk and it might not.) After the movie, it was Kirk who was racked with sobs. And Shelby was, too. And yes, I cried, too, but only a little.

During that part at the end when old Rose is hobbling to the back of the ship, I was thinking, “Jump, Rose! Go to Jack! Go to him!” But when she chunked the diamond instead, I thought, “If I ever get my hands on old Rose, I’ll wring her neck.”

Anytime we’re around a freezing body of water, one of us inevitably comments, “Imagine how Jack and Rose must have felt.” We just naturally associate both liquid and chill with that movie.

That haunting penny whistle music, or whatever it’s called, and the lyricless ‘oohing’ of the same theme stabs us right in the heart every time we hear it. It’s that yearning thing again.

We own a copy of the movie, but we only watch it occasionally because it still affects us so much. Every once in a while, one of us will ask the other, “Are you ready to go back to Titanic?” Sometimes the pain is too fresh. And then sometimes, we need the pain.

So, how did this one change my life? I developed a man-crush on Leonardo, I’m obsessed with maritime history, and I flat refuse to have anything to do with the North Atlantic.

There are many more movies that have had a dramatic impact on me, but this post is getting pretty long.

Maybe I’ll do a sequel.

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Manhood and Black Coffee

greg@providencebiblefellowship.com (Greg Birdwell) — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 01:32:00 +0000

Given my beardlessness, short stature, tiny hands, lack of interest in professional sports, and heart condition which prevents me from lifting heavy objects, I was desperate for some way to prove that I am an adult male. I weighed a number of options – eating fire, walking on nails, hanging from the ceiling by strategically placed body piercings, etc. But all those things hurt too bad. So I decided on coffee.

In my opinion, nothing says ‘man’ like black coffee. My dad was drinking black coffee from a bottle when he was nine months old, just weeks shy of his first shave. Now he makes two pots of coffee a day. The first he pours directly into his drawers, the second he chugs piping hot straight from the carafe. When I was a kid, I used to ask if I could have a taste. He told me coffee would put hair on my chest and turn my elbows black. Half of that sounded like a good deal, but since I didn’t want black elbows, I decided to wait until I was an adult. (Now that I am an adult, I know that the chest hair part was right, but it also stunted the growth of my arms and my facial hair. Oh, well.)

My friend Jed, the toughest individual I personally know, also takes it straight. He is fond of saying that he likes his coffee like he likes his women – hot, black, and bitter. When offered cream or sugar, he takes it as an indictment of his manhood. People usually only offer it to him once.

I don’t want to get myself into trouble and I’m sure I’m going to be deluged with comments on this, but I’ve never known a woman who drinks coffee black. I’M NOT SAYING THERE AREN’T ANY, its just that every black coffee drinker I know is a man – a very tough man.

I will say that the most hard-core coffee drinker I know, even though she doesn't drink it black, is a woman - the mother-in-law. I recently asked her if she ever microwaves coffee hours after the pot has grown cold. She replied, "It depends on how desperate I am." I generally reserve the word desperate for life and death issues. In her mind, coffee truly is a life and death issue. She was once on an airplane that had been sitting idle on the tarmac for a good forty minutes. The captain came on the intercom and revealed that the hold up was due to a malfunction in the water lines that are used to make coffee. He said that they were delaying because they wanted to be able to serve it during the five hour flight. He announced that they would take a vote by show of hands how many people wanted to wait for the lines to be fixed before taking off and how many people just wanted to get going. "All in favor of waiting for the coffee?" A sole hand shot up out of approximately 200 passengers. That's the mother-in-law. She would rather miss a connection and cause scores of other humans to miss their connections than try to survive 5 hours without her Sanka. By the time the plane landed I'm sure her co-passengers were wishing they had waited for her coffee, too.

So obviously, there are some prolific female coffee drinkers out there, but as far as black coffee is concerned, its a man's world. And that really stinks because it tastes nasty. But I’m out of options.

I’ve always liked the smell of coffee. I vividly remember waking up at my grandparents’ house (and my other grandparents’ house) to the smell of ‘The Best Part of Wakin’ Up.’ So I always wanted to like coffee. But in my mind I imagined that it tasted like hot Coke, which has always been quite appealing. I don’t remember the first time I tasted coffee, but I do remember the resolve to never taste it again. How can anything that smells so good, taste so bad? It’s a huge paradox to me. It’s like a dirty diaper that smells like gingerbread. I realized that the caffeine was not what kept people awake, but it was the vile taste, vile aftertaste, and full-body heaving that it produced.

For me, it’s not just the taste, but also the temperature. I have a very sensitive tongue – it burns easily. Oh, that I had a nickel for every time a drink of hot chocolate has brought me to the verge of tears. I spend the rest of the week feeling like I have fur on my tongue. For this reason, I usually settle for warm chocolate. So you see, there were multiple barriers to my using coffee to prove my manhood.

Over the years I have wondered who on earth came up with the idea of coffee. “Hey, if straining water through leaves is good, imagine how much better it would be to strain it through dirt!” Yes, I know that coffee is not water strained through dirt, but it might as well be. I’m tempted to see if I can persuade people to drink water strained through tree bark or coal or toenails. Water run through ground up, burned beans just seems awfully arbitrary to me.

And yet, this is the acceptable beverage of manhood. So my quandary was finding some way to drink this sludge without vomiting or crying. Several attempts made it clear to me that black was out of the question. I would have to settle for half-manhood. A friend suggested the Frappucino. The cool sweetness definitely tempered the taste, and I thought I had found my in. However, I soon noticed the incredulous stares of the Starbucks faithful every time I ordered. “I’ll have a Venti Caramel Frappucino with no whipped cream.” Instantly, all Jazz music, coffee-making, and pithy conversation slammed to a halt and every soul on the premises turned their attention to me. They all looked at me as if I was wearing a brassiere on the outside of my clothes.

Most Starbucks customers fit into one of four categories. There are the young hippies in horn-rims, sweaters, and Army surplus knapsacks, with a general disdain for all of us morons over the age of 30 who, unlike them, haven’t figured out the world, yet. You have the self-important yuppie tech executive in business casual, shirt untucked, pretending to be chatting with Bill Gates on his Bluetooth. He pauses his conversation long enough to say, “The usual,” then glances around the room to make sure that everyone has noticed his tan. Then there are the young women, supposedly coming in fresh from the gym, where they failed to break a sweat. They can be heard ordering any one of a number of lowfat alternatives, as they, too, scan the room to ensure that they’ve been noticed. Finally, there are the middle-aged, independently wealthy, who have literally rolled out of bed and into their Beamers to get their morning joe. The balding, beer-bellied husband in sweats and loafers sips an espresso while reading the WSJ. The wife’s most noticeable feature is her curly bedhead, matted to her temple. She drinks a tiny latte while perusing a romance novel.

All of these ridiculous people had the gall to dash my dreams of half-manhood. Who needs them.

I eventually decided that it didn’t matter if other people accept me as a coffee drinking man, as long as I know in my heart that I am one. Now I only make it at home – mainly, because no one else stocks all the necessary peripherals I use to doctor it up. To be completely honest, I drink coffee creamer with a splash of coffee. But I use only the finest coffee money can buy – Folgers Gourmet (Vanilla Biscotti). This coffee combined with the Vanilla Coffee Mate liquid creamer is delish. I don’t even use caramel topping or chocolate syrup anymore.

It did occur to me that I could make my coffee and drink it from a travel mug so no one could see that it’s white. I knew that I would have to be careful to mind my cream mustache so as not to give the whole thing away. So I tried it.

And bingo. You’d be amazed how well I’m treated when drinking from a travel mug. I’m getting all kinds of respect. Women don’t open doors for me anymore. Teenage punks don’t question my sexual orientation. And men look me in the eye when they shake my hand. If I had known this whole time that the travel mug was all I needed I wouldn’t have wasted so much coffee.

On my way home today I’m going to pick up some Mountain Dew and a couple more travel mugs.

Awareness Awareness

greg@providencebiblefellowship.com (Greg Birdwell) — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 21:39:00 +0000

The more I look around, the more stickers, banners, window decals, and billboards I see clamoring for my Awareness, and it is almost always something of which I was already Aware. I have Awareness overload. Of course, the granddaddy of Awareness is AIDS Awareness. Is there a person on the planet over the age of eighteen months who is not Aware of AIDS? Or is it that the maker of the red lapel ribbon wants us to know more about AIDS? Honestly, there are a lot of things about AIDS that I wish I didn’t know, mainly related to its transmission. I understand that people get it through blood transfusions and birth, but I suspect the whole situation would be drastically improved if the people who are giving AIDS to others through blood transfusions and birth had a smidgeon of self-control. Maybe this one should be re-labeled Stop-Having-Relations-With-People-You’re-Not-Married-To Awareness.

I realize that many of you may think I have a callused soul for saying such things. You may be considering making Jerk Awareness your new cause. Go ahead – you can’t possibly be heard among all the Awareness noise.

I did some research and found a host of other Awarenessi out there. One of my favorites is Self-Injury Awareness. What? Self-Injury Awareness? Don’t those who have a problem with this already know it? It seems to me that people who burn, slash, bludgeon, or otherwise maim themselves are probably receiving within their own physiology signals that something is awry. Now, do the Self-Injury Awareness people just want me to be Aware of it so that I won’t fall prey to it? Tell you what, don’t worry about me. I’m good. I once accidentally burned off the eyelashes on my right eye – as an adult. Trust me, I don’t have a penchant for self-inflicted wounds.

There are hundreds of these out there. Stalking Awareness, Thyroid Awareness, Heartworm Awareness, Termite Awareness, Caffeine Awareness, Math Awareness, Goat Trauma Awareness, Accordion Awareness – I’m not making these up. What’s next? Hangnail Awareness? Caramel-Vanilla-Coffee-Creamer Awareness? Carpet-Tape Awareness? How about Life-Is-Hard Awareness? You know, there’s only so much attention to go around. At some point, something has to give.

Whatever happened to people just worrying about their own problems? I do have some things in my own life of which I am painfully Aware, and yet I don’t go out and publicize them. There’s Hemorrhoid Awareness. This one is genetic. My dad was a pioneer of the cause. He gave much blood, sweat, and tears for the movement – every movement, actually, until he had what he called a ‘butt-ectomy.’ And he “passed” a huge volume of this Awareness on to me. But when I personally received my first jolt of Hemorrhoid Awareness, my initial thought was not, “People need to know about this.” Rather, I was thinking, “Wow. That smarts. How am I going to keep a lid on this while walking like I have a raging diaper rash?” It never occurred to me to make it my personal mission to let the whole world know about my posterior suffering.

If you have read some of my past posts, you may also know about Beardlessness Awareness. I am only half a man. Although I do talk about it openly, I don’t try to make people cry about it or spend their free time pondering the plight of all those around the globe suffering from facial hairlessness.

I also have Elephantitis-Of-The-Nose Awareness. The kids at school pointed this one out to me when I was about twelve. Believe it or not, I did not have t-shirts made up that said, “Every year 5.3 people smother under the weight of their own noses – isn’t it time we do something?” I didn’t start a Nose Relief Fund and go shakedown total strangers for rhinoplasty. Maybe I’m unusual, but my parents taught me not to whine.

I think Webster should define Awareness as “please make my problem your problem by giving me money.” In other words, they aren’t as interested in my Awareness as they are in my money’s Awareness. What they don’t understand is that my money’s Awareness is quite over-extended as it is. There’s Self-Employment-Tax Awareness, also known as Uncle-Sam-Taking-Me-Out-Behind-The-Woodshed-For-Being-An-Entrepreneur Awareness. We have School-Loan Awareness, Mortgage Awareness, Four-Kids Awareness, Disposable-Underwear-So-My-Two-Youngest-Can-Poop-In-Their-Pants Awareness, and the greatest concern -- The-Most-Incompetent-School-District-In-The-State-Of-Ohio-Just-Passed-A-School-Levy-So-Even-Though-I-Homeschool-My-Kids-My-Mortgage-Payment-Is-Going-To-Go-Up-$50-Dollars-A-Month Awareness. Believe me, my money lays awake at night worrying because it is so Aware. It has no Awareness left to give.

So, I’ve decided to add one more Awareness to the fray, but if it catches on, it should go a long way to decreasing all the Awareness noise. It is Awareness Awareness. I want the world to know that there is way too much Awareness out there, and every human should do his or her part to end the suffering. If I can just enlist a few obnoxious, out-of-touch celebrities to make it their pet cause, it could be huge. Instead of wearing an Awareness ribbon, I’ll have them wear a chalk outline of a ribbon. But I also need your help – email this to everyone you know and let’s spread the word. If we work together, we can make a difference. We can eradicate Awareness in our lifetime.

Wal-mart - The Great Social Experiment

greg@providencebiblefellowship.com (Greg Birdwell) — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 03:51:00 +0000

I’m a student of culture and human behavior. I like to observe people in their own element and I’ve found that the best place to see individuals engaging in peculiar behavior is at that behemoth of the American marketplace, the Great Satan...Wal-mart.

I personally don’t think of it as the Great Satan. I like Wal-mart. Where else are you going to get a brand name coffee-maker for $3? We recently got a Super Wal-mart about five minutes from our house. I could live there. It’s unlike any other Wal-mart I’ve ever seen. It has a very upscale feel to it without compromising any of the distinctive clientele normally associated with Wal-mart. It’s far more spacious – you can traverse the store without any real danger of being smothered by the merchandise. Plus, they carry every item currently produced in the United States and China. There is no reason to go anywhere else to buy anything, ever. Except Sam’s.

And the most interesting thing is that since it’s a new fancy Wal-mart we have the people from the better parts of town coming here. It’s like a grand social experiment. These higher class folks in Springboro didn’t want the Super Wal-mart there because they didn’t want us Franklinites crossing under the highway into their safe haven. But now that the Super Wal-mart is in Franklin, they drive here to shop. Packing heat no doubt, but coming nonetheless. So it’s a miniature melting pot. You can see pickup trucks with tractor tires and vulgar logos parked right next to the Lexus SUV’s with the back-window decal shrine to the children athletes. It’s Hanes meets Versace. Old Sam Walton has proven that rock bottom prices can bring the world together.

In spite of the higher class element, our new Super Wal-mart has all the same theme nights you’ll find at the normal Wal-mart. You have Emaciated Chain-smoker Tuesdays. This is where you’ll see 65-pound old women buying beer and cigarettes for their still dependent grown sons who invariably sport high-top tennis shoes, jeans with holes in the knees, permed mullets, and tattered 10-year-old Brooks and Dunn t-shirts. Then there are Spandex-clad Morbid Obesity Thursdays. These can prove to be more than you bargained for depending on whether or not you’ve eaten. But no matter what, you can count on the envelope being pushed in the category of unabashed displays of immodesty by those least qualified to do so. And finally, you have Stomach-turning Public Displays of Affection Saturdays. I try to avoid Saturdays. As should you. For the Springboroans, I guess Wal-mart represents a bit of a catch-22. Going there makes them sick, and not going there and therefore paying double somewhere else makes them sick. I just enjoy knowing that I could see something truly memorable at any moment.

One of my professors in college told a story about one of his more memorable visits. He got in line behind a large woman in a pink moo-moo whose only objective was to get some change. Her grandson was tugging at her garment saying, “Granny, I gotta [PG-rated word for defecate].” Finally, the lady yelled, “Would you shut up – I’m tryin’ to bust a hunnerd!” The child took that as his cue to take necessary action right where he stood, after which he announced, “Granny, I don’t gotta [defecate] anymore.” The professor promptly changed checkout lines.

My wife recently came home from a late night trip to the Super Wal-mart and told me of an interesting conversation she had with a cashier. Upon arrival at the cash register, she asked the employee if she had had a good day. The cashier began her soliloquy with, “Working here just ain’t what people think it is.” Apparently, the glamour is a mere façade. The woman then proceeded to relay the day’s trying events.

My wife is very friendly and caring toward people and when she says “how are you?” to a total stranger, she means it. I used to. I don’t do it anymore. Well, I don’t do it at Wal-mart anymore. I’ve had a couple of bad experiences. I found that asking that question to a Wal-mart cashier can result in a perception of intimacy on the cashier’s part, making them feel completely comfortable doing one of two things, a) telling me intensely personal things about themselves, or b) asking me intensely personal questions about myself. And sometimes both.

I have to wonder what kind of training is involved in being a Wal-mart cashier. Is it simply the technical aspects of the job, such as pushing all the little buttons and working the microphone and credit card machine? Or do they attempt to instill any kind of people skills? I don’t mean any offense to anyone who works at Wal-mart or who loves someone who works at Wal-mart. I myself am a confessing social cripple, so I’m not judging anyone. I’m sure Wal-mart has some top notch people working for them, its just that I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting any of them.

Whatever training they receive, one thing is certain: the cashiers are taught that whenever a young adult male comes through the checkout with a pregnancy test, this particular item is an ideal conversation starter. They pounce every time.

I’m a sensitive, understanding husband. So when my wife asks me to pick up a pregnancy test, I have no problem with it. I guess this is partially because I’m so sensitive and understanding and partially because I’ve done it several hundred times. We’ve spent countless hours, dollars, and cc’s of urine on these things over the years. Ironically, it seems to be the one item that Sam’s doesn’t offer 50 for a dollar. Man, if ever there was something we needed in bulk. We always take several a day starting several days before there is any medical possibility of getting an accurate result. I say “we” because I am so sensitive and understanding.

However, I am not so sensitive and understanding that I want to talk to perfect strangers about it. And yet, I keep getting the opportunity to do so. At Wal-mart. The first time, as the cashier was ringing up my stuff, her eyes quickly locked onto the most personal item on the conveyor, prompting her to say, “Oh, do you think you might be pregnant?”

“Maybe.”

“Do you want to be pregnant or not?”

As this gal had some lungs, customers in both adjacent lanes glanced over to check out the Incredible Pregnant Man. I thought that if I answered under my breath with a short, clipped, one-syllable answer, she would get the picture and move on. So, I said quietly, “Want.”

Her hint receptor malfunctioned. “Have you been trying?”

“Just trying to get out of here.”

“Is this your first?”

I’m a Christian man. It’s against my faith and upbringing to be overtly rude to people. So I just decided to answer her questions, pay, and run out of the store. Half a dozen questions and nervous ticks later, the exchange was over and I was able to leave.

Of course, I went home and replayed the scene for my wife. She laughed so hard I thought she was going to need medical attention. When she could talk again, she apologized that I was forced to endure such an uncomfortable situation.

Unfortunately, that situation was straight-up Emily Post compared to the next. I went in to pick up yet another round of tests. I was also purchasing a bicycle for my son’s birthday, so I hoped that the larger, more expensive item would serve as a diversion and I would be able to get out of there without a foray into the most private area of my life. Circumstances would have none of it. I was right that the bicycle would get immediate attention. What I did not bargain for is that the bicycle would be missing a price tag, prompting the cashier to call for a price check, which provided her with five extra minutes to notice the tests and initiate the most awkward conversation of my life. My previous Wal-mart pregnancy test grilling had prepared me somewhat for the personal questions. She stayed with the script for a while, then started to ad lib.

Evidently trying to determine exactly when the test would begin to be effective for my wife and I, she began to inquire about...things. I’m doing my best to be discreet here. You know what I’m talking about. My blank stare gave her the perfect opening to transition from personal questions to personal stories about herself. She offered painfully detailed information about a new innovative pregnancy test that she had recently used, how the test is administered (which was unlike any other test of which I was aware), and finally, its time relation to the precipitating event. All of these details were delivered in the 1st person point of view.

As my father-in-law would say, I wanted to poke out my mind’s eye.

What seemed like hours later, the transaction was complete and I robotically drove home to wash my ears out with scalding water. After more prolonged hysterical laughter, my wife managed another apology. I now buy our pregnancy tests at Walgreens.

Anyway, I’ve got to go. My wife needs some Rubbermaid tubs...from Wal-mart.

Sensible Suggestions for Behavior Modification in the California Penal System

greg@providencebiblefellowship.com (Greg Birdwell) — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 04:04:00 +0000

I was watching a prison documentary on the History Channel the other day. I’m not quite sure what attracts me to these prison shows. Even though I’m petrified of prison, I can’t get enough of it on TV.

I was the same way when I was a kid. I loved the Incredible Hulk, but he scared the daylights out of me. I would watch the entire show from behind the couch, absolutely riveted. Ever since then I’ve had Hulk nightmares on a regular basis. I’m 32-years-old and still dream that I’m in my childhood home and I can see him walking in the yard toward the house. Of course, I freak out, run to my parents’ bedroom, and hide under the bed. He always knows precisely where I am. No rifling through drawers, no peeking into closets or behind the shower curtain. He just comes straight over to the bed and tosses it off of me. You’d think I’d have learned by now to try another hiding place. While he’s demolishing the bed, I run out into the garage, as always, and hide in the rear floorboard of my mom’s car. Each time, just as he is peeling back the roof of the car, I wake up, right on the tippy-toe edge of soiling myself.

The frequency of the dreams hasn’t decreased as I’ve gotten older; I’ve just added new dreams to the repertoire. Quite often he chases me along the tops of those huge shelves at Sam’s Club. It’s awesome that I can jump from shelf to shelf, but it doesn’t matter how fast I go, he’s right on my heels and eventually starts throwing pallets of baked beans at me. But the worst dream has only happened once – my parents rented a castle to throw me a birthday party. All my friends and family are there, but guess who my folks invited without telling me? Yes. And he has no interest in eating cake or opening presents, he just wants to chase me all over the castle.

And yet, I love him.

So, maybe I’m just wired to be intensely interested in that which terrifies me. But prison scares me far worse than the Hulk. I’m sure this is common knowledge, but slightly-built white males with no ability to grow facial hair, as a general rule, don’t fare very well in prison. I wouldn’t last five minutes. White boys are free game for any ethnic group. If you don’t know karate, your personal space is going to be violated. A lot. I’ve never been in anything resembling a physical altercation and I doubt my suitors would be willing to settle the matter with a friendly game of chess, so odds are that I would be a nice little toy for the whole inmate population.

For that reason, prison is a huge motivator for me. I will never break the law. If I was ever framed for something and sentenced to the pen, I would take that as a word from the Lord, “It’s time to come home.” Now, my friend Rick would be fine. Even though he may be a hair shorter than me, he loves to fight and is quite good at it. Apparently, if you can just mess somebody up on your first day, people won’t bother you after that (about which Rick would have mixed emotions.) Now that I think about it, I’d probably be fine in prison as long as I could talk whoever framed me into framing Rick, too. He could protect me and I could give him free toiletries.

But anyway, I’ve learned over the last few shows that California has a serious overpopulation problem in their prisons. They’ve got more people in prison than in college, or something crazy like that. Looks like the three-strikes thing is backfiring. Some of their cells are so packed they can’t even fit their entertainment centers in them anymore. It’s hell on earth. Even with all the racial unrest, all the prisoners are of one mind on one thing – the overcrowding problem is a problem.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t feel sorry for them. I’m just puzzled – how is it that anyone in California has more than one strike? Especially the little white guys. I’m telling you, if I had to go to prison and somehow survived, I’d be Ritchie Cunningham when I got out. I’d be doing community service just because. Bake sales, Habitat for Humanity, nursing drunks back to health, you name it. I’d be as straight as an arrow, friends.

But you wouldn’t believe how many interviews I’ve seen with people fresh out of prison talking about how it would be so much easier to be back on the inside. Help me understand this. I realize that leisure is addictive, but please, there are at least a few cons to being in the big house. No pun. How about being stabbed with a toothbrush out on the playground? (By the way, guess how they get the toothbrush out to the playground? It ain’t in an overnight bag.) How about thrice daily sexual assaults? How about trying to use the toilet with everybody in the cell block staring at you? Call me crazy, but given the choice, I’m fairly certain I would opt for freedom.

But they keep coming back. I saw this one guy who averaged less than twenty-four hours of freedom in between each of his incarcerations. This is getting out of hand. What kind of negative incentive do these people need in order to keep the law? No one seems to have any ideas.

So, I’ve got some proposals. First of all, these lifers who have been convicted of murder, rape, or child molestation by conclusive DNA evidence just need to be rubbed out. You choose the method. And don’t give me the ‘the death penalty doesn’t work as a deterrent’ speech. If the folks on the west coast don’t have the stomach to do it themselves, outsource to Texas. They specialize.

For violent offenders who don’t fit the criteria above, make them watch Oprah and Dr. Phil reruns 12 hours a day. They’ll either be so sissified that you couldn’t pay them to hurt somebody or they’ll be so nuts that the State of California will get a handsome return on all the belts and shoelaces provided to the prison system. Either way, there’ll be a little more elbow room out at Pelican Bay.

All non-violent offenders don’t even need to go to prison. Per se. There are over 550 Cracker Barrel Old Country Stores in the United States of America. I don’t know if it’s still the case, but at one time they had no qualms about hiring the sick and seedy. Just make these people wait tables there, double shifts seven days a week for the duration of their sentence – and don’t allow them to eat the food. Trust me, you have never seen reform like this program will bring.

Then all the prisons in California will be under-populated. Trump can turn them into luxury rehab centers for Hollywood, which will help to address the other great California overcrowding problem.

I may run for President.

We Don't Believe in Milk

greg@providencebiblefellowship.com (Greg Birdwell) — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 15:20:00 +0000

My parents came over to baby-sit last night so that my wife and I could get our Christmas shopping done. We had been gone about an hour when we got a phone call from my dad informing us that 50% of our kids were puking. Awesome. My favorite time for people to vomit is when I'm not there. So, not only was I out having a great time with my wife, but my kids were getting the barfing out of the way while I was gone. I love this time of year.

When we got home the kids were in bed, so we watched The Bourne Ultimatum while my wife wrapped presents. A grand evening. About five minutes before the climax, a figure appeared out of the darkness of our peripheral vision. We turned and saw our oldest standing there, as white as rice, with a thick ivory paste covering his pajama top. He calmly said, "I need to be cleaned up." My wife immediately jumped into action, taking him into the laundry room, removing his shirt and scrubbing off the debris in the utility sink. He was standing next to her getting in a few more violent heaves.

I stood there awkwardly, not knowing what to do with my hands. I was aware that there was another crime scene to be processed upstairs, but summoning the fortitude to volunteer for the job proved quite a hurdle. But after watching the two of them in the thick of it for a few moments, cold shame took over and I whispered, "Do you want me to take his sheets off the bed?" Unfortunately, she heard me and replied in the affirmative.

Here we go. I started up the stairs, careful to watch my step just in case he had left a trail. As I turned the corner into the boys' room, the odor hit me like a 200-pound cadaver. I don’t know if I can do this. Pressing on, I began to gingerly remove the sheets from the top bunk, taking great pains to not see or touch anything foreign, and making a conscious effort to breathe through my mouth. In order to pull the sheets off the back corner, I had to stand on the bottom bunk, at which point I let down my guard and caught sight of the vast landscape of half-digested macaroni and cheese.

Ooh-ho-ho mmmmommy dearest. When I came to, my wife was carrying the soiled bedding out the door and into the kitchen. She scrubbed that vile, biohazardous material off every square inch of every last blanket, sheet, and pillow case. No latex gloves, no haz-mat suit, and no Vicks VapoRub smeared on her upper lip to combat the smell. She simply washed her hands and said, "Let's go finish the movie." If this woman isn't the RoboCop of motherhood then I don't know anything.

So, we're probably going to have to take the kids to the doctor. That is, we get to go pay someone to treat us like imbeciles. Don't get me wrong - I like doctors. But our pediatric group for some reason always sticks us with a nurse practitioner. I feel like asking, "What? My co-pay's not good enough for a real doctor?" What a racket – get someone with half your education to do all of your job for a third of the salary while you burn down stogies out on the golf course. I don't remember the last time we saw a bona fide pediatrician. A couple of months ago, I took our oldest in and they didn't even give us our standard nurse practitioner - they sent in a trainee. I had to coach this poor person through the exam.

“Umm, I don’t think his sore throat is down there.”
“Yeah, he’s about to black out – you might not want to bear down so hard.”
“No, no, no - orally.”

It's getting to the point that I truly expect to one day see my kids being treated by someone with all the medical training of a pipefitter.

“Yes, I’m sorry, but we’re all out of medical professionals today. Instead, you’re pride and joy will be seeing Vern from JiffyLube in room 4. Oh, wait-- That’s right – I forgot, he had to go home early today – he injured himself with a tongue depressor. That leaves... Zokta, the witchdoctor... or Pepe, the recovering internet predator. Pepe could fit you in around noon. Shall I put you down?”

The educational downgrading of the personnel examining the kids makes the treatment we get even harder to take. At our son’s checkup after his second birthday, we had our first encounter with the nurse practitioner. Apparently, she had just gotten out of the nurse practitioner academy because she was spraying musk like a skunk in a lion’s den, peppering us with questions about his care, and reacting with varying intensities of disapproval with each answer.

My wife’s patience began to wane as the nurse started to ask our son questions. “Jackson? Jackson? Can you look at me?”

He just continued playing with the instruments on the wall, at which point she slowly turned around with eyes bulging, stared incredulously at my wife for several seconds, then asked with spitting contempt, “Does . . . he . . . understand . . . what . . . I’m . . . saying . . . to . . . him?”

“He understands – he just doesn’t like you.”

She asked a few more questions, tapped a few more body parts, and just generally acted as if we weren’t fit to care for a gold fish and our son had the motor skills and cognition of a brain-dead ape.

His checkup the following year was sweet vindication. He had blossomed and was quite intelligent. At that point, the n.p. had nothing to criticize about him, so she turned her disdain solely upon us.

Now each visit to the “doctor” ends up being a quest to quickly and cleanly bat away any condescending questions so that we can just get the medicine we need. We start out the appointment feeling quite cooperative, but by the end we’re Fort Knox – you ain’t getting anything out of us.

“Has he had a flu shot yet this year?”

“No, ma’am.”

“May I ask why?”

“I guess.”

“Okay, why?”

“The worst flu I ever got was right after getting a flu shot.”

“Well, you know a three-year-old’s body can’t handle the flu like yours can. But if you want to play Russian roulette with your son’s eternity, I can’t stop you.”

“Last winter none of us took anything but Flintstone vitamins and for the first time in our history there wasn’t so much as a sniffle in our house from November to May. Prior to that, if one or all of us got a flu shot, our home became a temporary satellite for the CDC. Now, those results may not pass peer review, but they’re good enough for morons like us.”

“Fine. Has he been drinking at least 16 ounces of milk per day?”

“We don’t believe in milk.”

“I’m sorry?”

“It’s a religious thing – we don’t like to talk about it. Any more questions?”

“Will he be getting his next round of vaccinations?”

“No.”

“May I ask why?”

“As I mentioned a moment ago, we’re morons. And we hate our children.”

There should be a small bit of grace granted to a parent who has successfully kept a child - or four – breathing until his third birthday. Somehow, in spite of our never having gone to nurse practitioner school, we’ve managed to keep the kids alive. We just put food in one end, get rid of what comes out the other, and give copious hugs.

I accept the fact that in this life we all have our burdens to bear. It just seems to me that the worst thing about my kids being sick should be the puke, not the doctor’s office.

Slap-fight on the World Stage

greg@providencebiblefellowship.com (Greg Birdwell) — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 21:53:00 +0000

I made an interesting connection the other day. I was watching one of the presidential debates, listening to them bicker, posture, and sulk, and I had a flashback to earlier in the day when my three oldest were fighting about who was going to get to use the squiggly straw for lunch. I was struck by the realization that the behavior I’m trying to eradicate in my children is the same thing I see in all the people who aspire to be the leader of the greatest nation in the world. Tattling. Lying. Boasting. Name-calling. Finger pointing. Whining. Pouting. Given such a consistent parallel, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that these candidates also poop in their pants and eat their boogers.

I have this picture in my mind of Giuliani crouching in the corner of my living room, red-faced, forcing out a grunt through clenched teeth. “Rudy – you’re supposed to do that in the potty, aren’t you? Someone’s not getting dessert tonight.”

“Obama, don’t eat that! Do not eat that!”

Really, the essential difference between the candidates and my three-year-old is their vocabulary – my son knows how to say please and thank you. Is it not amazing that we are poised to elect an overgrown brat to be the leader of the free world?

You know, if you think about it, running for President is inherently narcissistic. Essentially, what these folks are saying is, “Of all the people in the world, I’m the best and brightest.” Can anyone so quick to self-promote really be a self-less servant of the people? Is it logical to believe that people with a life-long history of cut-throat ladder-climbing have all at once adopted an ‘others first’ mentality?

Look at the way they campaign. As they say things like, “I just want to help people” and “no one should have to live a life without dreams,” they are simultaneously giving their opponents a knee-to-the-groin/foot-stomp combo. These debates have all the civility of a no-rules cockfight. Imagine if you or I behaved this way at work or in the neighborhood. We’d be ostracized.

- “Yeah, Doug’s lawn looks good, but what he’s not telling you is that he uses foreign fertilizer. I use only 100% union made American compost.”

- “While my co-worker is slinging mud here, I think the American people would like to know why he continues to park in my parking space.”

- “Okay, let’s think about this. Yesterday, he wanted a Dr. Pepper during his break. But today, he’s drinking a Coke. I ask you this: Can this company really afford another four years with this flip-flopper as my supervisor?”

It really all comes down to the fact that if you want to win, you’ve got to be the most effective slanderer and braggart, while at the same time convincing the most people that you are a bastion of virtue. They don’t even realize how ridiculous they look and sound.

“Don’t let my filthy riches fool you – I love poor people. I’ve always loved poor people. I probably know...oh, goodness...three or even four of them by name.”

“There is an appalling lack of principled leadership in the records of my opponents. As I was just saying to my third wife with whom I cheated on my second wife, 'It’s really sad to see the deficit of moral integrity exhibited by all these other leaders.'”

“The health care system is broken. You know, if there’s one thing I learned while making my millions fleecing the medical community in landmark malpractice suits, it’s that health care must be fixed.”

“Global warming! Global warming! Just think of all the energy that could have been saved if this President hadn’t turned a blind eye to the problem and forced me to use foreign oil to heat my 7.3million square foot Tahoe summer home.”

I want to hear someone shoot straight about why they want the job.

“Why do you want to be President?”

“Well, to be completely honest with you, I’m a self-important windbag, I love power, and I think you and everyone else are morons and I know better than you what is good for you. Can I count on your vote?”

Now that’s a candidate I could get behind – he may have the same character as all the rest of them, but at least he’s honest about it. They all have their own reason – they just pretend it’s above board.

Truthfully, I’d love to be the President, but not for the power and attention. I just think Air Force One is awesome – apparently, you automatically get your own bomber jacket. Plus, I would have my own theater in the White House. Dream come true. And I’ve always wanted to be best friends with a Secret Service Agent. I swear, I wouldn’t get anything done with those guys around. I have a good friend who’s a cop and I know I drive him crazy asking about his job. It would be ten times worse with the Secret Service:

“So, seriously? You’d take a bullet for me? What about a head shot? How do you guys train for that sort of thing?”

“What kind of gun do you carry? Does everybody carry the same kind or do you get to pick your own? Cool. Hey, do you think maybe I could carry one? – I swear, I wouldn’t say a word to anyone.”

“So, have you ever killed a counterfeiter? What’s the worst thing you ever did to a perp? You guys know karate?”

“Hey, let’s go down to my theater and watch In The Line of Fire.”

It may sound ridiculous, but you’d at least know where I stand. As it is, you have to diagram the real candidates’ sentences to nail down what they’re saying on any of the issues:

“You know, I’m glad to be asked this question yet again, which I think I’ve clearly answered a hundred times before. When it comes to gun control, do as I say, not holding me to what I’ve said you should do, while I’m doing something wholely other than what I’ve implied one might do when faced with a situation similar to yours or mine, should the previously mentioned contingencies prove to be applicable.”

“Mmm, yes, immigration. Well, Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after. So, I think we’ve got to keep that in mind.”

I want someone who is completely unashamed of his own views:

“What’s your platform?”

“The death penalty.”

“Could you elaborate?”

“I’d be happy to. The only thing I’m really passionate about is killing criminals. Executing murderers is a good first step, but there’s far more work to be done. Rapists, child molesters, kidnappers, and those teen punks who bashed my mailbox with a baseball bat - all need to be lit up.”

Of course, I know I’m asking for way too much honesty and humility from these people. All I know is that after listening to the Presidential debates, I’m toying with the idea of putting up my three-year-old as a write-in.

Now, That's More Like It

greg@providencebiblefellowship.com (Greg Birdwell) — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 17:17:00 +0000

I'm the one taking it easy. This is my in-your-face celebration of my yard's demise. I'm king for the next four months.

Ding-Dong, The Grass is Dead

greg@providencebiblefellowship.com (Greg Birdwell) — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 13:50:00 +0000

I woke up yesterday morning to my beautiful wife announcing the most glorious news of the year: Snow, Snow, Snow. This is the annual highlight I long for from that moment every Spring when I first crank up that infernal green slave-master in my backyard. Yes, friends, today is a wonderful day. The grass is dead.

As some of you know, I am an avid indoorsman, a lover of all activities coinciding with conditioned air. I trace it back to my upbringing in Texas. It's hot in Texas. Have you ever heard someone say, "Well, it's hot, but at least its a dry heat," implying that somehow the dryness makes it more tolerable? These poor fools must have never been to Texas, because if they had, they would never say such a silly thing. The heat in Texas is as dry as brimstone, but it will still make you wish you had never been born. Why do all the illegals choose Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada as their doorway to a better life? Because even Mexicans can't stand the heat in Texas.

I was younger than most when my dad shouldered me with the lawn mowing responsibilities. My grandfather had bought us this huge beast of a riding lawnmower. I'll never forget that machine. Dad explained that the right pedal was the "go," and the left one was the "mow." I had to stand on them simultaneously while pulling up on the steering wheel for leverage. It required a posture similar to water skiing. After a quick heads-up about rattlesnakes, dad fired 'er up and sent me on my way. The first time all the other men in the neighborhood saw this toddler making laps, and my dad drinking a sweating glass of iced tea on the porch swing, they all at once summoned their own sons to see if they, too, had been blessed with a mowing prodigy. When I was half-way done with the front yard my mom brought me a sippy cup of Gatorade and lay me down on the freshly cut grass to change my diaper.

Because of all the attention I was getting, Dad had to start making me mow at night until I was a little older. The child services people work a very strict 8 to 5. Dad figured as long as I waited until 7, we (he) were safe.

When I finally began to mow during the day on a regular basis, I must have been about 8 years old. That is when the seeds of hatred for the outdoors were sown in my heart. You see, I found that the discomfort of the Texas heat was compounded by a little problem I have - I'm a sweater. I don't mean that I am a winter garment, but someone who sweats often and profusely with or without a good reason. Two minutes into the mow I looked like I'd been given a swirly.

You know, I have to wonder if it was the Texas heat that made me a heavy sweater, rather than yet another of my dad's undesirable recessive traits. It may be that Texas is so hot that my sweat glands will be playing catch-up for the rest of my life. Either way, I now associate mowing with blistering heat and a socially-handicapping propensity to sweat.

That's why today I consider the grass in my yard to be my mortal enemy who for 8 months of the year owns me, forcing me out of my element into the harsh outer world. The agony of mowing is even worse now since I'm in far worse physical shape than I was back then. The neighbors still watch me mow but not for the same reason. They gather together across the street and place not-so-friendly wagers on how long it will take me to wither.

"I've got ten that says he makes it half an hour this time before he lays down in the garage."

"Are you nuts? It's 89 degrees and there's no wind. If he goes twenty it'll be on the news."

"Yeah, but look - he's starting on the big hill while he's fresh. Statistically, he always does better when he starts on that side."

"But not when he's wearing a black t-shirt."

"Oh, yeah."

"You gotta trust me - I'm up 600 bucks this year. Look - he hasn't even made one full pass and he's already heaving. Someone's taking a ride in an ambulance today."

I've already decided that when the kids are grown and gone, my wife and I are going to either purchase a modest condo in Antarctica or buy a dinghy and sail the seven seas for the rest of our days, far away from the man-made Hades that is the suburban lawn culture. I do not belong here.

If I could sow my property with salt I'd do it in a heartbeat. What a glorious thing a gravel pit or AstroTurf lawn would be. But the city and my wife insist on actual grass. All I know is that all the while I'm cutting the grass, God's words to Adam in Genesis 3 ring in my head like a death knell: "Cursed is the ground because of you." Indeed.

So, of course, winter is my time. It's the four months of the year when the rest of the population is almost as white as I am, and the only time I go outside is to get into my car. If you'll excuse me, my winter wonderland has arrived and I've got some living to do. Ding-Dong, the grass is dead.

Humility, Demonic Oppression, and My First Car

greg@providencebiblefellowship.com (Greg Birdwell) — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 18:30:00 +0000

"It wasn't supposed to be this way."

But I guess most things don't turn out the way you first expected. Still, this was way beyond anything I could have imagined.

It started five years earlier in 1994 as I was preparing to go away to college. I had saved $1,400 for a car and needed to find one quick. Those two components - very little money and very little time - gave me very little confidence that I was going to find a vehicle good for anything other than disposing of a body in the Ohio River.

So I prayed. I prayed that the Lord would bless me with a great deal on a vehicle that could get me from Nashville to Dayton and back - 700-miles round trip - every couple of weeks for the rest of my life. A tall order. But faith can move mountains, right?

In this case, faith moved a mountain of proverbial horse dung and buried me with it. But not all at once . . . it was one bowel movement at a time, slowly so that I didn't realize it was happening until finally the weight was cutting off my airway and the stench was a part of my essence.

In 1986, General Motors produced 138,000 units of the Buick Somerset. Many a night I have cursed the heads of that corporation for not stopping at 137,999. I had never heard of a Buick Somerset. That should have tipped me off, I guess, but I was young. A widow at my church was remarrying and her new husband - ironically, an engineer for GM - wanted to sell her Somerset and buy her a new vehicle. How much did they want for her old 1986 Buick Somerset?

$1,400.

The car was flawless. White paint without a hint of rust - no small feat after an eight year tenure in Ohio - new tires, and a removable stereo to prevent theft. And she drove like a dream. Remember the over-the-top power-steering on vehicles back in the eighties, where you could do figure 8's by only touching the steering wheel with the very tip of your pinkie? Yes. I loved it. The price was right and the car was in excellent shape - God had answered my prayer.

I actually do believe God answered my prayer. It's just that He wasn't interested in making me happy. He wanted to make me humble. Really, really humble.

So I bought the car, thanking the Lord all the way home. I slept like a baby that night. The next morning I got up and decided to take a joy ride in my very first car.

It wouldn't start. Hmm. That's strange. Oh, well. The car's eight years old. It's not gonna be perfect. It's probably the battery. A quick trip to Auto Zone confirmed that the battery was bad. No big deal. $40 dollars and I'm on my way.

One week later, on my first Sunday in college, I got up early to meet some family friends at their church. On the way, I noticed that the cassette tape I was listening to was slowing down. The voices of the singers went from tenor to bass in about 7 seconds and the car started to feel a bit sluggish. Another 7 seconds and I was straining to pull the car to the shoulder, every hint of that glorious power-steering seemingly gone forever, and praying desperately that inertia would carry me to the nearest gas station. The inertia came up about 1.5 miles short.

I was in a new city, had no life experience, knew nothing about cars, and had no earthly clue what to do. My parents were 330 miles away. Which didn't really matter since the only human in the universe with a cell phone was Captain Kirk. No pay phones in sight.

Then God's providential hand appeared and bailed me out. A car pulled over in front of me and a woman got out, walked back to my car, and asked if I needed a ride. I said yes and she asked where I was headed.

"To church."

"What church?"

"I don't know the name. I just know its on this road."

"Well, you can come to church with us."

Us? I couldn't see anyone else in her car. I got out and walked to the passenger side of her car and saw that there was a toddler in the back in a car seat. That's when I knew that God was looking out for me. What woman in her right mind gets out of her car and offers a ride to a total stranger when she has a baby in the back seat of her car?

We got to the church and I immediately ran into the friends I was supposed to meet. The Good Samaritan lady just happened to go to the same church as my friends.

Makes you feel warm inside, doesn't it? Happy ending, right? Not really. God really was at work here, but knowing what is coming, I can tell you that there is some grand irony in the mix. You see, God was just getting warmed up on the humility thing. He was still stretching. We're still on the front end of a five year lesson here. I'm convinced God's help that day was benevolent, but at the same time He was also keeping me in the game so that I could absorb a few more kidney punches to the ego.

As I write this, a large part of me wishes I had left that car on the side of the road and just taken the $1,400 haircut. I'm sure Greyhound offers service from Nashville to Dayton. The bus would have offered me reliable transportation and a little human interaction. Far less heartache, embarrassment, and physical injury. But I went back to the car. My friend Bobby determined it was the alternator, which I guess is somewhere under the hood. Another $80 and I'm on my way.

So far, just normal car trouble right? Well, buckle up. No pun. Things are about to get freaky.

Fast forward to that summer. I notice a foul stench coming from the back seat. I looked back there and found standing liquid in the rear driver side floorboard. I assumed one of my sisters had spilled a Coke and not had the decency to clean it up. The stifling summer heat and mildew had caused a seriously offensive aroma. All the cadaver dogs in the Midwest must have been freaking out. My dad, who himself has a bloodhound's sense of smell, felt a marked urgency to rectify the situation.

Of course, our first solution was simply to soak up the liquid, which turned out to not be Coke, but dirty water. The liquid returned. We soaked it up again. The liquid returned again. We absolutely could not detect where the water was coming from. After a few days of this, the wretched smell was preventing dad from sleeping at night and he suggested a more aggressive course of action: we tear out the rear driver side floorboard carpet and therefore remove the breeding ground for that hellish mildew. Even if water returned, at least there would be no mildew. I could just make it part of my routine to sop it up every day.

So that's what we did. I have to say, it was a tad embarrassing to have bare metal in the floorboard back there, but I accepted my lot, realizing that appearance isn't everything and that this situation was indeed preferable to the smell of death that precipitated it.

Here comes the freaky part. Water never again filled the rear driver side floorboard - it filled the rear passenger side floorboard. Are you following this? No moisture ever again on the driver side . . . a constant pool of water on the previously completely dry passenger side.

I have a flare for hyperbole. Mild embellishment can make a story far more enjoyable to the speaker as well as the listener. But I stand before God right here and now and tell you with a clear conscience that every word of this is true.

We went through the motions again - couldn't detect the source and couldn't keep it dry - and finally resorted to the same solution with the passenger's side: we tore out the carpet.

I then had no carpet in the back. It was noticeable. My attitude toward the vehicle was changing. At one time, I had been proud of this car. Not anymore. But I realized it was just a car and it got me where I needed to go. So I was humbled, but thankful.

The day after the second scalping, I went out to see if it had worked. I peered through the window into the back seat and felt a wave of relief as I found that there was no water in the floorboard. Hallelujah. I went around to get in and go to work, and as I sat down a shimmering light caught my eye - it was the sun's reflection dancing on the surface of a brand new pool of water in the front passenger side floorboard.

I audibly rebuked Satan. This was clearly supernatural. Again, no clue where it was coming from. Again, we were forced to tear out the carpet.

And again . . . the water found a new home.

Follow the pattern. Rear driver side floorboard. Rear passenger side floorboard. Front passenger side floorboard... Hmm. What's next? Where do we go from here? I'm afraid so. The circle was completed. I just went ahead and tore out the carpet underneath my feet since in the other three places the water had never come back once the carpet was gone. And that's where the demon juice broke with tradition.

From that day forward, there was standing water in the front driver side floorboard. I humbly accepted defeat and resigned myself to this character building element of my life. No big deal. I just had to learn to drive with my feet perched on the interior walls of the floorboard.

By the time I went back to school in the fall, all was routine. Then one day I went out to the car to go somewhere. I don't recall where I was headed - my destination is not what I remember about that day. What I do remember is the advent of the singularly most publicly humiliating quirk of this cursed machine. When I cranked the engine, it made a sound that initially had me completely convinced that someone was being stabbed to death with a railroad spike under the hood of my car. After the fight-or-flight response began to subside, I realized that the noise was far too loud to be a human in the throes of death. Far too loud.

Everyone within earshot - that is, every soul in the greater Nashville area - simultaneously turned their entire body in my direction in utter horror. At that point I had a full-blown episode. I needed world class mechanical and spiritual assistance ASAP. I didn't know whether to shut the car off and take the walk of shame back to my dorm, passing the glances of total rejection from all my peers, or floor it, get off campus, and pray that the car would warm up and taper off the ear-piercing screech.

To my relief, the noise did decrescendo after a few minutes. However, the next time I started the car, I learned that the screech, too, would become a hallmark right along with the perpetual swampland under the pedals. The mechanically-inclined could offer me no diagnosis or remedy.

That winter my illusions about a rust-free exterior were removed from me. Paint began chipping away like the skin of a leper in July, revealing a rust-ridden shell of a vehicle. After that, the careless entering and exiting of the automobile would require an immediate trip to UrgentCare for a tetanus shot.

For a while after that, it was just small things...small things that began to show a pattern. I noticed that of each of the features of the car that came in pairs, only one member of each pair was working. Two headlights - only one lighting up. Two windshield wipers - only one wiping. Two stereo speakers - only one hissing. Two rear shock absorbers - only one absorbing. It was as though the car had suffered a stroke and only the driver's side was still functioning. But at that point I had already decided, I'm not spending another dime on this beast, I'll drive it 'as is' until a government official declares it unfit for public travel.

I have a theory about what caused the next problem. I trace it back to the extended period of time with water in the floorboard. The constant moisture in the air caused the headliner to peel away from the roof so that it lay on my head like a terrycloth bedsheet, flattening my hair and rendering my rearview mirror completely irrelevant. A staple gun fixed the problem. For a time. But again the moisture had so weakened the fibers of the headliner that the staples eventually tore all the way through, returning my head-blanket and obscuring my rearview. Not to be beaten, I jabbed a coat hanger into the molding around the roof directly above my head, like a huge paper clip holding the blanket off of my head. I still couldn't see out the back window, but at least I wasn't dealing with constant static in my hair.

I was pretty calloused by that point. The screeching, the swamp, the giant do-rag, the stroke-induced paralysis - none of this affected me. I was numb to the pain. I had no memory of the blessed machine I had bought years before. There was only my master, the Hellcat.

We now come to the climax. One day during our last winter in Nashville, there was snow on the ground and ice on the streets, so I got ready a little early so I could defrost the Hellcat. I went out and cranked it up, once again breaking the noise ordinance via the ubiquitous cacophony that had become virtually inaudible to my desensitized ears. The ice was quite thick so I decided to assist the defrost by scraping the windows. My wife had our ice-scraper with her in our good car, so I went back into the apartment, retrieved a metal spatula, and started chipping away. Oddly, even when I was satisfied that there was no more ice on the windshield, I still could not see through the glass.

And then I knew. Condensation from the foot-bath in the floorboard had frozen on the inside of the windshield. Picture, if you will, this scene. I am sitting inside the loudest man-made object in Tennessee shrouded in a red canopy with my feet clinging to the sides of the floorboard as I scrape ice from the inside of the windshield.

When I could see through the glass, I buckled up and started off for work. Since I was running late by now, I had not taken the time to calculate the final implications of the internal ice scenario. Because the defrost was still on, melted ice was dripping down into the dashboard . . . the dashboard housing all my digital gauges. They didn't last long, but simply flickered three or four times and then expired for eternity. From then on, I had no idea how fast I was going, how much gas I had, or when to get my next oil change.

I then muttered quietly and to myself, "It wasn't supposed to be this way." It was the conclusion of a long, slow death of pride.

In the summer of '99, after disclosing all it's deficiencies, I sold the Hellcat to some desperate soul for $550 and laughed myself sore all the way to the bank.

Finally, I had gotten the great deal I prayed for.

Life Lessons Learned at the Barrel

greg@providencebiblefellowship.com (Greg Birdwell) — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 15:36:00 +0000

I had breakfast with a friend at the Cracker Barrel the other day. As usual, the second I walked in, all five of my senses simultaneously pulled a gun on my consciousness and forced it against its will to bring up a terrifying mosaic of sights and sounds from when I worked at the Cracker Barrel when I was in college. That I continue to patronize this place is a testament to their amazingly satisfying food.

It's been eleven years since I last removed that cursed brown apron embroidered with my name in yellow cursive and that single blasted star announcing to the world that I had graduated from a sub-human lifeform (no yellow star) to the dung on the bottom of the totem pole on which the management wiped their slip-resistant shoes on the way out the back door to suck down a non-filtered Camel (one yellow star). Ah, yes - those were the days.

My wife and I started working there 3 months after our wedding. We had somehow survived that first quarter with only the income from my minimum-wage part-time job at the school bookstore. As the Hamburger Helper began to dwindle we were faced with the cold realization that we were going to have to get real jobs. A friend from school told us she made good money at the Barrel. We believed her.

If you or anyone you know have information on the whereabouts of a Deana Armistice, email me ASAP. I have a package for her.

It's truly a sad thing that a four-month period of my life continues to haunt me all these years later. I don't believe in psycho-analysis, but it would be interesting to hear what a shrink would make of the recurring dream I have every two or three months in which I find myself at the Cracker Barrel, stressed to the limit and about to pour someone's coffee, when I realize that I'm missing several crucial articles of clothing. The patron of course declines the coffee and I stand there trying to decide what will put my job in the most jeopardy - failing to keep my tables turning or failing to cover up. I always come to the same conclusion and keep my tables turning and burning while neglecting my own personal dignity until I wake up sucking my thumb and my wife shaking me and saying, "Greg, you have clothes on. It's just a dream."

So, I've decided it's high time I found the silver lining on this ominous cloud of evil. To try to get the monkey off my back, I will brainstorm and share with you some of the important lessons I learned while working at the Barrel. My theory is that if I find something beneficial in that experience, I might be able to avoid having night terrors on the eve of my next breakfast appointment. Some of these lessons may seem obvious, but this is all I've got.

1. Never let a crack addict sleep on your couch. I learned this one vicariously. At the Cracker Barrel in Nashville, Tennessee, c.1996, at any one time there were 5-6 employees performing the daily task of finding a place to sleep "just for tonight." One day, a Good Samaritan single mother-of-one said, "yes." While against all odds she and her baby girl woke up the next morning unharmed, she did find that all her tips from the previous day's double shift had vanished, undoubtedly converted into an illegal substance coursing through the veins of her beneficiary, whom she would never see again.

2. In the restaurant business, if you are not addicted to nicotine you will forever be on the outside looking in. The first time I walked into the break room, I instinctively stopped, dropped, and rolled. No one was visible above the chest and yet they were all laughing and yucking it up as if they knew who else was in the room. When I asked if there was a break room for the nonsmokers, I was met with cold silence. I can only guess how many people were giving me the evil eye. Someone said, "This is the break room for the nonsmokers." From that day forward I was treated as a segregationist.

3. When working with illegal aliens, you will need to learn their language in order to get anything done. This was only a temporary setback since my wife took four years of Spanish in high school and taught me the necessary phrases. Only now does it strike me as ironic that I was living in America and learning Spanish so that I could work side-by-side with Hispanics.

4. Tears will get you nowhere in the blue collar world. How I learned this one is not important.

5. Never assume that a broad-shouldered, heavily-muscled individual with a military-short haircut and a name tag reading "Tommy" is a male. And not your boss. Kinda got off on the wrong foot with the general manager. Things went downhill from there. And I'll go ahead and admit she played a crucial role in my learning lesson #4.

6. The notion that a customary tip is 15% is a lie from the bowels of Sheol. A tip is a dollar. If you wait on one person and all that person orders is a sugar packet, a tip is a dollar. If you wait on a party of 20, they take up all your tables for the whole night, and every single one of them orders a t-bone, three 34oz. rootbeers, a chocolate cobbler, and a pound of fudge from the gift shop, a tip is a dollar.

Again, if you or anyone you know have information on the whereabouts of a Deana Armistice, email me ASAP. I have a package for her.

7. The health inspector in Nashville, Tennessee is a blind, deaf-mute sociopath with a nasty disdain for humble countryfolk. A lot of this I've blocked out because the food tastes so good. The World's Fattest Man still haunts me. All I'll say is I never order sweet tea, grits, sugar-cured ham, dumplins, stew, salad, or ketchup at the Barrel. And I never send my food back if the order is wrong. Oh, people, please - trust me, just eat whatever they put in front of you. Please.

My goal is to have ten lessons here, so give me a minute.

Okay.

8. There is no reason on earth to call a locksmith if you lock your keys in your car in the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel. The cooking and dishroom staff have all the tools and skills necessary to get you on your way, regardless of the year, make, and model or any security system you may have installed. This one saved me and my young bride about $50 late one Sunday night. Thanks again, Jesus Gonzalez and Tucker Brown.

9. I'm sorry. I can't think of any more.

There. I feel better. Of course, the real test will be next month when Dave and I meet again for breakfast.

Man vs. Wild (Wings)

greg@providencebiblefellowship.com (Greg Birdwell) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 01:55:00 +0000

I've just finished watching Bear Grylls survive in another extremely unforgiving environment. It occurs to me that he is surviving in ridiculous situations that almost no one will ever experience. I can survive anything he can - and with less energy. It's easy - I don't go to exotic places.

Anyway, I've decided to use my own expertise to try to prepare some of you for a situation you are much more likely to encounter. You see, I'm somewhat of an avid indoorsman. I've spent entire days in a movie theater. I've climbed to the top of a bunk bed and dozed for 14+ hours. And I've gone years without so much as a hint of color in my skin. And I'm going to show you what you need to do to survive an entire weekend vegging on the recliner. You can call me Bird Wells.

The key here is planning. If you fail to assemble the necessary equipment and supplies, you run the risk of finding yourself in a truly desperate situation. There are five pillars of survival in this kind of adventure: equipment, sustenance, elimination, shelter, and entertainment.

We start with equipment. Trust me, on an adventure like this one, you will live or die by your equipment. Of course, first of all we'll need a mini-fridge, at least a waist-high model. Those little knee-high jobs will never cut it. Even better, if you have the resources, a full-size fridge will give you the best odds of having a successful vegg. Also, placement will be key - it must be right next to the recliner so that you don't have to get up to retrieve food and drink. And make sure when it opens the door doesn't block the TV. Next, we'll need a microwave. The best place to put this is on top of the fridge. That way you have all your sustenance equipment right at your fingertips.

Now lets talk sustenance. First, a primary concern during this ordeal is to stay hydrated. It takes focus and determination to consistently replenish your fluids. It is so easy to underestimate how much liquid you're going to need for a whole weekend. Not long ago, there was a chap in Raleigh attempting a long weekend in the recliner. He failed to stock pile enough Kool-Aid and by the last day he found himself so thirsty, he had no choice but to get out of the recliner and go to the kitchen for some tapwater. I could tell story after story just like this one. Don't make the same mistake. Just pick your favorite drink or two and secure two gallons for each day of the vegg. I prefer Mountain Dew and coffee (I put the coffee maker on top of the microwave.)

Next, food. Really we want to think about what will maximize our enjoyment of the weekend. I think most of us immediately think of Buffalo Wild Wings. The protein will be crucial for the kind of endurance we're looking for. The varied intensities of the sauces will bolster our morale as our eyelids get heavy late in the evenings. Now I know some of you prefer the original wings on the bone, but we've got to be smart here. We must conserve energy any way we can. That means only boneless wings, so that we're not wasting valuable calories stripping the bones. I know something like that may seem silly, but take it from me, little details like this can mean the difference between leisure...and work.

Now, as far as the quantity of wings, only you really know what you will need per meal. You should keep in mind, though, that we have to walk a fine line between the hint of hunger on the one hand and the complication of our elimination game plan on the other. I personally can eat four boneless wings and 8-10 buffalo chips per meal. With any luck my digestive system will behave in a characteristic fashion and I won't be eliminating any solids the whole weekend. Some of you may not be so lucky. But don't worry - there are solutions. If your bowels are reasonably responsive to pharmaceutical suggestion, you may be able to get by with a double dose of Immodium every six hours. (Consult your physician.) For some, that may be all you need. For others, you may be forced to eliminate. My brother-in-law, The West Virginian, is a home healthcare nurse, and tells me there are a number of high quality portable thrones that you can place right next to your recliner. I realize that our objective is to not leave the recliner for the whole weekend, but worst case all you need to do is shift your weight a foot or so onto the stool, eliminate, and shift back into the recliner. In situations like this, you just have to reach deep inside yourself and do whatever is necessary to survive. Challenges like this can bring out the worst in us, but they can also bring out the best in us. You get to decide.

Okay, liquid elimination is, of course, far easier to deal with, especially for the blokes. As you work your way through the beverage jugs, you then simply use them as elimination receptacles. This is vegging survival 101 and shouldn't be a problem unless you have company.

Next, shelter. Actually, this just entails gathering blankets, a fan, and possibly a change or two of underwear. The key is that you don't want to be too cold or too hot at any time. Your blanket will keep you warm in case of an evening chill. The fan will cool you if the sun hits the nearest wall of the house during the heat of the day. Remember - you won't be able to adjust the thermostat from your recliner. Be prepared for the elements to challenge your determination.

Last, entertainment. This is huge. This is another facet that requires serious planning. All of the other preparations are completely for nought if you spend the weekend bored. I recommend a variety of forms to ensure that endurance doesn't become a factor. If at all possible, get satellite TV with a DVR. That way you can be taping things for several weeks before the adventure. For me, it's several hours of Ultimate Fighting, 6-10 Clint Eastwood movies, the Star Wars Saga (sans all the scenes in Episode 1 not involving Darth Maul), and Lassie. But you pick. Football? Baseball? Judge Judy? Whatever you find engaging. Also, I'd like to add that there is nothing in the world wrong with reading - many DVR's also offer the capability of surfing the internet right on the tube, offering you unlimited reading material.

There you have it. All the things you should have in order to beat the odds and survive this ordeal. One last word on safety, though. Every 3-4 hours, plan to roll onto one side for 30 minutes. After the next 3-4 hours roll onto the other side. This is crucial as bedsores could threaten your ability to cross the finish line. Also, keep a phone within arm's reach for emergencies. It's not uncommon on your first excursion into extended lounging to miscalculate a need or two and be forced to call a friend or relative to bring you food or drink. The last thing you want in a situation like that is to not have your phone right there. In fact, have your cell as a backup for the landline.

There are some of you who will fail. Not everyone has the fortitude to expend 72 hours of their life with absolutely nothing productive to show for it. Don't be ashamed. You're in the majority. But if you fancy yourself a thrill seeker, you will relish the opportunity to test yourself, pushing yourself to the limit as you burn 3 entire days eating, drinking, sleeping, and watching TV. Good luck.

More Soup, Anyone?

greg@providencebiblefellowship.com (Greg Birdwell) — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 21:59:00 +0000

My wife's friend has an acquaintance . The acquaintance recently had a baby. At the birth, the acquaintance made an unusual request of the hospital staff.

Brainstorm for a second. What could it be? What's the most off-the-wall thing any birthing woman could request?

Earphones for the TV? A mani/pedi while she pushes? A clean, drug-free, and painless delivery?

Wrong. The acquaintance requested the placenta to take home to use as the secret ingredient in a soup to be fed to the family.

My wife asked, "What? Are they cats?" (She has a very sensitive gag reflex. You wouldn't believe some of the things that have caused her to dry-heave. I know she can't help it, but sometimes it really hurts my feelings.)

Apparently, TomkatCruiseholmes decided to eat their placenta when Surly was born. But that's the kind of thing we expect from them. We hear Tom talking about playing golf with extra terrestrials and we accept it without pause. That's where Tom lives. It's his world. But here in the Midwest, it's a bit out of the ordinary to hear of people eating afterbirth.

I did some research on this and found that Southeast Asians find this quite appetizing. In fact, they're not even picky about whose placenta it is. They can it over there like Campbell's and sell it in stores. It's not even a delicacy to them. It's Placenta Helper. In some Chinese markets, you can find large fresh placentas for US$12. Now, define fresh - I mean, it's been floating inside a human abdomen for nine months. (My wife is gagging.)

I'm definitely going to think twice before I eat anymore Ramen Noodles. At least until I find out what Ramen means.

Have we crossed a line here? I know its supposed to be nutritious, but so is coleslaw. What's wrong with a multi-vitamin? I'm serious, I have to wonder about people so eager to reject social norms. Just play by the rules, for goodness sake. Eat some Kashi. Drink some V8. You'll feel great. But don't eat something that's been in your own body.

Who came up with this? I don't know why but I have this picture in my mind of the aftermath of such a birth with a big, burly custodian cleaning up the mess, licking his chops, looking up at the mother and saying, "Hey. You gonna eat that?" Surely, I'm not the only one balking at this.

I personally saw with my own eyes each of my four kids' respective placenti, and I'm telling you, it didn't give me the munchies. On the contrary, the arrival of a new child usually precipitates the loss of a few pounds.

Then my wife told me that some people I actually know kept their umbilical cord, boiled it, and drank the water like tea. Do they have no Tetley? That is repulsive. Still, the placentavores probably look down on these cord people as pansies. "What are you, a little girl? You only drink the water? Come on! Put that thing on Triscuits and throw down!"

This, like many other things, is a slippery slope. May I remind the world that decent folk at one time viewed the veggieburger as completely unnatural, the quintessential oxymoron. Now you can find otherwise moral people voluntarily ordering and enjoying this frankenstinian concoction at almost any dining establishment in the union. I'm afraid if we don't put a lid on this, your gonna have your neighbors firing up the grill and offering a choice of placentaburger or umbilicaldog.

As I write, my wife tells me of a girl in the news who just had a ten-pound ball of her own hair removed from inside her stomach.

I don’t have the energy for that one. Not today.

My Friend, Jed

greg@providencebiblefellowship.com (Greg Birdwell) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 05:26:00 +0000

My friend's name is Jed. Jed's a marine. He was a marine even before he was a marine. This post is dedicated to him.

Jed hit full-blown puberty at six months gestation and came into this world with a full beard, chest hair, and an adam's apple the size of a tennis ball. When his dad started handing out cigars at the hospital, Jed snagged one, fired it up, and inhaled. Sucked the whole thing down with one toke and then announced his own Apgar: "Ten, baby!"

He was a member of Mensa before he was five, played Division I football in the second grade, and once killed a Sasquatch for not honoring a bet. I met him when we waited tables together in college.

He'd been working there a while when I started and was one of the server trainers, a genius move on the part of the management. They used him to weed out the weak and wayward. My wife also worked there and had him as a trainer on her first day. She has no memory of it.

Jed used to carry five glasses in one hand just because he could. I don't mean shotglasses - I'm talkin' 20-ouncers! He could handle eight tables, keep the cooks stocked, haze the newbies, and still manage to pump out 15-20 one-armed push-ups in the dish room every time he bussed one of his tables.

He had marine written all over him. So I was thrilled when he called to say he had enlisted.

Basic training is supposed to be hellish. You're supposed to be overwhelmed by it. Wish you were dead. Jed was in heaven. He was having the time of his life. At last he was in a place where it was acceptable to make grown men cry. But the drill instructors had to ask him to go a little easier on the other recruits because their retention rate had plummeted.

Of course, he didn't stay an enlisted man very long. They made him an officer and immediately made good use of his reputation by utilizing him in psychological warfare.

Remember when we caught Saddam cowering in that rat-hole in Tikrit? Rumor has it that he had just heard that Jed was being deployed. They didn't show this on the news, but Saddam had soiled himself multiple times and was mindlessly muttering, "vill be good boy naw, vill be good boy naw."

And that Abu Ghraib thing? When I heard about that, I knew the military brass had nothing to do with it. I'm telling you, if they wanted some prisoners abused, there's one man they would have called and I know for a fact he was in Oklahoma at the time. Still, a lot of those pictures bore a striking resemblance to some of the things I saw while waiting tables at J.Alexander's.

He actually did deploy a couple of months ago. He likes it so much he's got his eye on a summer home in Fallujah. I don't know if you noticed the lack of bad news about the war in the media. Apparently, the "troop surge" is working. Just happened to coincide with Jed's arrival.

I've started a letter writing campaign to get Jed reassigned. It's high time we got our hands on Osama. With Jed on his trail, I guarantee Osammy wouldn't be holed-up in some cave - he'd be running like a scalded dog. Jed smells fear and cowardice as if it's bloated skunk roadkill, so it would take him about .5 seconds to zero in on him and introduce him to the toasty hereafter. It's a wonder to me they haven't already sent him in there after him. Of course, it may be that they want Osama alive.

I know you've never met him, but I can tell you with pride that I sleep better knowing that Jed and others like him are out there fighting for those who can't. If I were a terrorist over there right now, I'd be getting blond highlights and converting to Christianity in a New York minute. Evil is not safe around this man and I suspect things will be wrapping up before long.

Jed, if you're reading this, may the Lord bless you and your family. Please bring me a nuddy-butty.

And oh, yeah..."it puts the lotion on the skin."

The World's Fattest Man Lives in My Heart

greg@providencebiblefellowship.com (Greg Birdwell) — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 16:03:00 +0000

The time has come to reveal my 2007 New Years Resolution. (I've found that if I make my resolution within the last 6 weeks of the year, I'm much more likely to keep it until the new New Year.) This is a big one.

This Thanksgiving, I will not eat myself into a catatonic state.

A little history.

My two sisters and I have always shared a very special bond. It's hard to describe. It's like we always know what the other two are thinking. For example, at family get-togethers when someone outside our small circle stops eating even though they still have food on their plate, the three of us look at each other and immediately engage in single-elimination Paper-Rock-Scissors. Whenever we eat together we employ an intricate combination of technique and finely-tuned situational awareness to ensure that the plates and mouths stay full. If one of us runs out of something, without looking up we all sense it and communicate via non-verbal cues to quickly and seamlessly correct the situation. It's a ballet of sorts.

I'm not quite sure where we got this - our parents are normal. The only thing I can compare it to is the phenomenon known as "twinspeak," where twins speak a language to each other that no one else can understand. But with us, it's "eatspeak."

Obviously, Thanksgiving is our time. It's our World Series. We coach each other like someone spotting a powerlifter.
"Push it! Push it! Push it!"
"I can't - I just hit the wall."
"Don't think about it, just keep truckin'. Work through the pain."

We were a bit nervous when we became old enough to start marrying, not knowing how new people might disrupt our dynamic. Each potential mate was regarded with a combination of suspicion and latent resentment. Will this person be a compliment or a detriment to our way of life?

The woman who is now my wife was the first to enter the fold. To our surprise there were no waves. She could hold her own. The only thing now barring her from complete acceptance is her freak-of-nature metabolism.

Then came my brother-in-law, The West Virginian, my older sister's husband. Dude's got game. Fit in from day one. I think if we all were being honest, we would admit that we look up to him. I mean, we're good...but he's good. He brought with him a number of innovations that made us more efficient and increased our endurance. From pre-meal stretches to wind-pants with elastic waistbands, he revolutionized the way we think about eating.

The day my younger sister brought home a suitor to meet the family, is a day we remember well. These first-time encounters always take place on our turf, Mom and Dad's house. When we arrived, he and my sister were already there, which totally threw me off. I caught sight of this fellow just as The West Virginian nudged me and whispered, "Who's the bean pole?"

"Surely that's not the newbie."

Proper introductions confirmed that my little sister was actually going to try to pass this guy off as a contender.

He started entertaining the kids by walking on his hands. When he was upside down, his shirt fell, exposing his midriff. You've heard of six-pack abs? Try twelve. He had a whole case.

I said, "Alright, send this one back - there's no way he's gonna be able to throw down."

You don't get abs like that by eating. You get abs like that by not. The odds of this guy fitting in were infinitesimal. The West Virginian can inhale a twelve pound turkey without taking a drink of water. The newbie was way out of his league.

Then came mealtime. The newbie could eat. He was not intimidated.

"Where's he putting it?"

"More importantly, how is he keeping it there?"

He had a twenty-nine inch waist back then. He has a twenty-nine inch waist right now. He is our very own Kobayashi.

So, we successfully integrated the spouses. We all click. It's amazing. A couple of years ago the IFOCE (International Federation of Competitive Eating) approached us with a 6-figure contract to star in an instructional video for young talent. We were of one mind in our reply, "we don't do this for money - we do it for the love of the game."

Fast-forward to last summer. My wife and I were watching a show on The Learning Channel called, "The World's Fattest Man." It was about the world's fattest man. It's a guy in Mexico who at one point weighed something like 1,300 pounds. He looked like Jabba the Hut, but more carefree and with a smaller mouth. I remember being repulsed watching this man eat. And he could eat. I said to my wife, "That is just sinful. He doesn't need that much food."

I know. It hit me right then. If it is sinful for someone to eat more than they need, is it not also sinful for me to eat more than I need? He may have a bigger problem than me, but we have the same problem.

I realized that the World's Fattest Man lives in my heart.

Right about that time I heard about a book proposing the crazy idea of only eating when you are hungry, then stopping when you are full. Insanity.

But I was convicted about my gluttony, so I repented and started this ludicrous plan. This was huge. I was amazed at how little food I really needed. I was finding myself satisfied after 2/3 of a Happy Meal.

It has been several months now and I've lost about 20 pounds, mostly in my head. But I've known for sometime that Thanksgiving was coming - the real test.

With some reflection I now see how hypocritical it was for me to Give Thanks for all God's blessings, say amen, and then desecrate my body for the next hour by methodically shoving gibblets down my gullet until I am pressing right up against the threshold of my gag reflex. Is God honored by my spending the rest of Thanksgiving day with a sweat-soaked, furrowed brow; swollen beet-red lips; my pants undone; a barely-audible, perpetual moan; unable to think, move, or respond to verbal or visual stimuli? My children refusing to look at me, asking their mom, "Is Daddy gonna die?" Is The Lord blessed by my loss of my sense of smell for 2-4 weeks? I'm afraid not.

So. This Thanksgiving, I'm going to give thanks. Then I am going to eat the equivalent of a Happy Meal. Then I'm going to spend the rest of the day thanking the Lord that I can feel my legs.

And here's a hearty shout out to the World's Fattest Man.