Did anyone else notice the legal disclaimer for one of the Viagra type drugs being advertised on the Super Bowl? “If an erection lasts more than four hours see a doctor immediately.”
All posts by Bob Keller
I was listening to an interview of Roger Staubach sometime last week when he was credited with coining the term “Hail Mary Pass.” His last second pass to Drew Pearson that beat the Vikings and sent the Cowpies to the Super Bowl. It was 1975 and every Vikings fan old enough remembers the play. And we are all still pissed off. Obvious offensive pass interference. The worst call in the history of the NFL. The root of my eternal hatred of the Cowpies. But that’s not my point. In the sixties, Shocky Strand, the Moorhead Spud (that’s right, we were the Spuds) basketball coach referred to a forced shot as a “Hail Mary.” So on that particular play Roger not only stole the Super Bowl from the Vikings, he falsely is credited with coining a nugget of American colloquialism.
One of my pals dropped off his 2 year old boy this morning so Q could babysit while he was at a meeting. Oh, man is our house ever not childproof. It was a constant no, don’t touch, watch out. I’d forgotten what it’s like. Q is so patient and good with little kids. I wish she would extend that patience to her mom.
Tomorrow if you are watching the Superbowl and if you’re watching commercials think of me. one of those little bits of filmmaking caused a good deal of marital stress at our place last week. Beck doesn’t produce TV commercials anymore. She deals with talent and music and payments and the actors union and that stuff. But a week ago Friday she found out that there were revisions that needed to be made on the spot that her company was doing for the Super Bowl. And that the producer was going on vacation. And would she just take it over and see that everything got done. That put her as the liaison between production and client. Up one chain, down the other and you’d better not get far from your phone. Neither of us are what you would call workaholics, and we like to leave our jobs at the office, so working long hours and taking long phone calls at night at home makes us crabby. And I was cabby as only intestinal disruption can make one crabby. But we got through, I’m actually feeling a little better today and we had a nice long talk last night. When you’ve been married for 25 years, I guess you need to make sure you do an occasional “I still love you” check in. And we need to form a united front to defend ourselves from teenage girldom.
Not long ago we were sitting around the dinner table having one of our ever rarer family discussions. Q had just gotten back from a trip organized by a church group. She had been up to my hometown, Moorhead. “I saw the cutest nursing home. That’s were I want to put you guys when you get old. It’s so nice.”
L chimes in with her opinions about the aging. “I think they should all be euthenized. They’re not contributing anything and they have no quality of life. They’re just a burden to the economy.” It gave me a warm feeling inside to know I’ve given my children a good moral compass to navigate through life. And that if I ever get to the drooling stage, I’m going to have to watch my back.
I forgot to mention this last Sunday, but I think it’s worth the keystrokes. As I was driiving home from the Gopher’s embarrassing loss, just as I was crossing the Mississippi River at Hennepin Avenue, downtown Minneapolis, a bald eagle came flying up from under the bridge and landed in a tree about 20 yards away from me. I’ll bet that there aren’t many metro areas that can say they have bald eagles downtown.
I guess L doesn’t hate me. We were forced together in front of the fireplace because of the cold and I asked her why she was so mad at me and she said she wasn’t. We had a nice conversation about the Virginia Woolf book she’s reading for school.
I knew it.
I’m still home sick. It’s really cold. My daughter hates me.
This is the view from my computer. Actually it’s the view from the backdoor of my garage. The computer is 10 feet to the right but the screens on the windows make photos look wierd. I live in a second tier suburb, well inside the metro area. But my backyard butts up to the west end of a cemetery that isn’t even half full of graves. The Archdiocese has let the west end go wild so I live next to about nine city blocks of tall grass prairie and hardwood forest. Among the long list of critters I’ve seen out my back window is a wild turkey. Three years ago I was losing a battle with rabbits intent on eating my garden. I would get up in the morning and there would be eight of them grazing in my yard. Then, just before I bought the high powered air rifle, the foxes moved in. There are very few rabbits these days. I’ve identified 53 species of bird from my backyard. In May of ’93, I spotted 23 species in one day. When I die, the plan is to wrap me up and catapult me over the fence.
Princess L, knowing that I was home sick, brought one of the recent victims of her catch and release dating program home to watch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I’m going to have my revenge by going in the downstairs bathroom, right next to where they are and making really gross noises and a horrible gaseous cloud that has become my trademark.
Godspeed, friends.
At some point I Laid down a mental list of subjects I wasn’t going to touch in this blog. Health issues was one of them. But with readership down and me no longer taking prednisone, I’ve decided I can’t afford to not tap this goldmine of self-depricating neurotic humor.
This is dedicated to Quirk who’s having existential discomfort over turning thirty-seven. I think I dislocated my sachroiliac.. That’s the joint that connects your spine to your hips. I feel like I have some credence when it comes to diagnosing a dislocated sachroiliac because it’s happened to me at least twice before. The first time, or any of the pre going to the doctor with it times, I just rode it out, stretched and heated until it popped back in by itself. The first time I took it to the doctor was after a management conference at Lake Okoboji. (I’ve got the Iowan’s, Nebraskan’s, Minnesotan’s and South Dakotan’s attention now.) I was driving down to this North Central Iowa party center. I kissed Beck goodbye and leaned over to pick up my lightly packed duffle and POW, something snapped at the base of my spine, just right of center. I couldn’t stand up straight, I couldn’t walk without considerable pain. I immediately did Minnesota first aid, which is to say, “I’ll ignore it and see if it goes away.”
There’s nothing like a few hours in a car to really make a bad back into a really bad back. But I didn’t notice much after the Iowa border because I came screaming over a hill on a two lane country highway, 20 over to see a trooper with a car stopped. As I went by, I realized the miscreant was my boss, who I’d been teasing about driving too fast since I started working for her. Still chuckling to myself over that, I arrived at the resort to find it full of bikini clad high school cheerleaders. I was told that I couldn’t get into my cabin yet because the cheerleaders were leaving. The clerk saw the obvious disappointment on my face and said, “Don’t worry, there’s another group coming in tomorrow.” Picture this. Sitting in a room with thirty other people most of whom are hung over, taking turns reading from technical and process training manuals. The room has a great view of the swimming pool below. The swimming pool is crawling with semi naked teenage girls. It’s way too hot in the room. I am delirious with pain.
I made it home, still miserable. Went to work and decided to go to urgent care. I get assigned to a woman doctor who looked more like one of the volunteers from the local high school. It’s a real milestone in your life when all the doctors start looking like Doogie Howser. She was about 5’3” and couldn’t have weighed much more than a hundred pounds. First she examined my to see if there was any nerve problems. And then she started pulling on my legs. She looked up, gave me a big smile and said, “The bad news is that you’ve dislocated your sachroiliac, I can tell because your legs aren’t the same length, the good news is I can fix it. Hang on a second, I don’t think the other doc on this shift has ever seen this done. I’m going to go find him.”
She returned without her associate and said she was just going to do it. I’m trying to remember the wrestling hold she had me in. It involved me holding the opposite knee to my chest while she used my body for leverage and push pulled on my leg and torso. “I’m going to count to three and you push as hard as you can on that leg when I get to three. One, two three.” I had assumed she meant push off like I was going up for a rebound. She flew across the room and hit the wall. Bouncing off, she comes at me with this look of amused anger. “I meant a slow, steady push, I didn’t mean you should kick me!”
So getting our signals straight, we tried again. There was a pop. She said, “You should have some residual pain from the joint trauma, but you’re fine now. Just take some Tylenol. I stood up from the examination table and was immediately able to stand up straight and walk without pain. She gave me some exercises to do to help prevent it happening again. If I had gotten her associate, he probably would have given me some muscle relaxants and said to put some heat on it. It would have eventually popped back in by itself. In a week or two or three.
Did anyone get the license number of the truck that hit me? I got home from the game yesterday afternoon feeling a little tired so I took one of the catnaps I’m famous for. When I woke up I was still not feeling so good. Coffee didn’t help. I figured I’d just hang out until it got late enough to go to bed without too much embarassment. At about seven I was sitting in the family room trying to enjoy the heat from the gas fireplace, but I still felt cold. Pretty soon I was dressed in about six layers and I was uncontrollably shivering. I went to bed at 8:30, fully clothed and shaking like a leaf. I woke up several times duing the night soaked with sweat. I slept until almost noon today. Other than the fatigue and a headache I don’t have any other symptoms. No cough or flu symptoms. Wierd. Someday when I’m feeling more energetic, I’ll write about my experiences as a raging hypochondriac.
It’s lucky that I got the guitar, because I’m singing the blues! Sportsgoddess asks, “What on earth has happened to the Lady Gophers?” That my dears is one hell of a good question. I don’t get it. They lost by one to Michigan State at home, pretty much taking themselves out of contention for the Big 10 title. They lost because Michigan State wanted it more. They were nonchalant in their ball handling and passing in the last five minutes, no one other than Whalen seemed to want to shoot and again they got outhustled. I was a little upset about the fact that at the end of the Purdue game I saw smiling and laughing on the bench like they didn’t care that they were getting beat. Did they think they were done when they were 15-0. Did they think that the Big10 wasn’t going to be the toughest part of there schedule? Have they been hanging out with the Vikings?
So far no buyer’s remorse. I love my new axe. Either amped or not it sounds great, it’s relatively easy to play, even for my electric pampered fingers. I’m looking forward to improved playing from increased hand strength. I’m not sure why the call it Hawaiian, it’s not particularly set up for slack-key or slide playing. Maybe it’s just because it looks so different from a folk guitar. I think it’s a little smaller than a normal dreadnaught, but still has a deep body. The neck is narrow and the strings set up close. It looks like an old jazz guitar. Me and Django.
In 1970 my college roommate played the guitar. In those days I was listening to Cream and Butterfield and Taj, really great guitar driven blues. I wanted to play. Mike showed me the basics of the 12 bar blues progression, the Chuck Berry “spread” and what he called the blues scale, which is the minor pentonic scale. One Saturday morning I was in the music store in Northfield with a crushing hangover amplified by too much coffee. I forked over $65 for a Fender Mustang and a little Fender Champ amp. I still have them both today. I didn’t help the value of the guitar when I put decals on it, even though it already looked like it had been dragged behing a truck. So I took my new toy home and played that blues scale about a million times. BB will tell you that in our shack in Silverton, Idaho, I almost drove him and Configliaco insane. That being a pretty short drive in 1972. Mike had given me a gift. Because he didn’t sit down and show me any specific songs, just gave me the format and let me figure out how to find my way around in it, I learned how to improvise. It’s beyond a joke to compare myself to Stevie Ray, but I often go back to something he says at the beginning of one of his songs. “Roll it and I’ll just FEEL something.” I cannot begin to play Stairway to Heaven.
I just looked at the 10 day forcast. They are pedicting a high of -1 and a low of -2 for Friday. Ugh.