Recently in General Ramblings Category

After that big, painful, confessional bowel-movement of a preceding entry, I think we ought to have a little fun, don't you? Here's a meme that Jaquandor and SamuraiFrog both did earlier this month, which I've been trying to get to for a while. And for the record, I also swiped that animated GIF from SamuraiFrog, just because I thought it was moody and cool...

Just to bring you all up to date, I turned 43 a little over a month ago.

Friends and long-time readers know that I don't especially enjoy my birthdays. Not anymore. I used to. My old photo albums are full of pics of me holding up the latest cake designs for the camera and looking happy. I used to anticipate the landmark rite-of-passage-type birthdays as eagerly as any kid ever followed an advent-calendar countdown to Christmas: becoming a teenager at 13, getting my driver's license at 16, adulthood at 18, finally able to buy booze -- legally, that is -- at 21. For some reason, I recall 25 was kind of a big deal too... my silver anniversary, I guess. I had a quarter-century behind me and the main engines were still burning, all systems nominal.

Then something changed. I started having a problem with birthdays when I reached my thirties. And they got to be really difficult for me when I hit 40. Other people tell me they see birthdays a chance to celebrate life, or at least a good excuse to have a party. But for me they have become depressing reminders of time lost... no, time wasted... and dreams unfulfilled.

As I wrote on the occasion of last year's birthday, "there's just too much baggage now, too many disappointments and regrets. Too much understanding that a single lifetime isn't enough for all the things you want to do, and if you avoid making tough choices when you're young -- as I did -- you might not get the chance to do some of them." Since turning 40, I've also realized, as I further elaborated at the beginning of this year, "that while there may always be possibilities -- as Mr. Spock so frequently counseled us back in the days when Star Trek was relevant -- the probabilities of a great many things are shrinking for me." Pretty hard to party hearty with that sobering truth lingering in the back of your head, isn't it?

It probably doesn't help that my birthday falls around back-to-school time, with  all the bittersweet memories and melancholic feelings that stirs up, and the waning sensations of summer to amplify the sensation of time slipping away.

And yet, strangely enough given all the discontent and self-loathing that usually accompanies this annual observance of my failure to live up to my potential, this year's birthday... wasn't bad. Certainly it arrived with considerably less sense of utter defeat than in years past. Maybe I'm just becoming resigned to middle age, irrelevance, and mediocrity. But it's also entirely possible that my forty-third trip around the sun was so traumatic that the formal demarcation of its end might have come as more of a relief than a reckoning. Seriously, the past 12 months have been... well, they've been something, that's for sure.

About an hour's drive northeast of Salt Lake, high in the mountains above Ogden City, you'll find a sleepy little burg called Huntsville, Utah. The surrounding hillsides are dotted with summer homes and vacation cabins, and signs near Pineview Reservoir -- the pocket-sized lake that defines the town's western edge -- excitedly proclaim the coming of beachfront condos, leaving little doubt that this bucolic hamlet is going to end up as just another anonymous bedroom community before too many more years pass. But for now, at least, cows still graze contentedly at the roadside, and traffic along the main drag through town frequently bogs down behind slow-moving tractors and combines. It's a great place to escape to for an afternoon; The Girlfriend and I have been going up there at least once a summer for over a decade now.

We drive the old two-lane highways, enjoying fresh mountain air with the top down, and once we get there, we always enjoy lunch at a quirky little bar called the Shooting Star Saloon, which claims to be the oldest continuously operating tavern in the state. (I'll write more about that place some other time.) But before we go for Star Burgers and beer, we like to stop into the monastery nestled against the mountains on the other side of town.

Yes, believe it or not, there is a Catholic monastery in Mormon-dominated Utah. The Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity was founded in 1947 by Trappist monks, who set up housekeeping in several World War II-surplus Quonset huts with plans to build more permanent structures sometime in the future. It never happened. The whitewashed humps of the Quonsets are still there, shaded by trees that have grown tall and grand in the last 65 years. But the monks have made do, as their kind does, and their abbey, surrounded by a buffering ring of farmland, is a lovely green respite from the outside world.

I don't recall how or when I first heard about the abbey. It may have been back in college, when stories went around of a place where young men could go for a few days when they needed to clear their heads. Many a time, I considered taking one of those retreats myself, when the weight of everything I was going through with classes and girls and growing up got to be too much. But I always chickened out. Not being religious, let alone Catholic, it didn't seem like the best fit, no matter how alluring the idea of unplugging from the world and spending some time just thinking may have been. It felt like I would've been taking unfair advantage of someone's hospitality. At some point, though, I learned about the honey, produced by the monks themselves from hives they kept on the grounds and sold through a tiny gift shop they maintained near their chapel. And that was what finally convinced me to go for a visit.

It turned out you could buy a lot of goods made by the monks in that shop -- honey in various flavors and consistencies, bread, oatmeal -- as well as St. Christopher medals and holy water that would be blessed for you on the spot, and books and rosaries and candles and other goods of interest to Catholics. I never purchased any of those items, naturally, but I brought home lots of honey over the years, and I sampled the oatmeal, too -- simple, coarse stuff, very unlike machine-made Quaker Oats. Often times, I bought more than I needed, so much that it would take me a couple years to get through it all, but I liked the idea that I was supporting a unique local industry. And it really was good honey, which helped.

Anne and I somehow missed going to Huntsville last year. Not sure why; just busy I guess. A few weeks ago, we decided on the spur of the moment that we were long overdue and it was time to re-affirm our tradition. It was my birthday, as it happens, and it was a glorious day, the kind I love, when the sky is like a hard crystal dome arching impossibly high above you and the air is so clear it seems to sparkle a little. For the first time in several years, I was not crashingly depressed by the thought of making another orbit around the sun. I wasn't thinking much about the passage of time at all, in fact... until we stepped into the little gift shop by the chapel at the Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity and saw that there was no honey on display. No oatmeal or bread, either. In fact, the only food for sale was some caramels, made by nuns in a convent in another state. Puzzled, I turned to the monk sitting near the cash register and politely waited for him to set aside his reading.

"Do you not carry the honey anymore?" I asked.

The father looked at me through pale, watery eyes, and smiled ruefully. "No," he said, "I'm afraid we sold the last of it sometime last year. Brother So-and-So has gotten too old to care for the hives, you see, and he has no one to help."

"That's a shame," I said. It suddenly occurred to me that this man -- whom I'm certain I've encountered before on my annual visits, many times -- suddenly appeared to be much smaller and more frail than I remembered.

"Our average age now is 82," the monk continued. "There are only 18 of us left, and two of us are in a nursing home. So you understand we've had to make some changes."

I found myself apologizing to the monk, although I don't know what for. Skipping the prior year's visitation, perhaps, and feeling like I'd come too late. Or perhaps I felt sympathy for the man's advancing age and obvious physical deterioration. Maybe I was thinking of the articles I've read about the Catholic Church's inability to attract young men to the clergy anymore, signifying the decline of this gentle man's whole way of life. Maybe I was just sorry to realize that this unique gem of my home state probably doesn't have much longer before it gets subdivided, too. I bought a candle and some caramels for Anne, to soothe my own feelings as much as the monk's, and then we drove to the Shooting Star, where I drank a couple glasses of Coors Light and pondered the unfair cruelty of a world where men can work hard at building something for six and a half decades, only to find at the end of their lives that no one is interested in continuing their legacies after they've gone. That all their efforts ultimately amounted to nothing. I'm sure the monks wouldn't see their lives as exercises in futility; I'm not sure I could see my own in any other way, were I in their shoes.

For the record, I still have one cup of "Trappist Honey" left in my kitchen pantry. Brandy flavored. It's pretty old, but I don't think honey goes bad, does it? I intend to try it before too much longer, and to use it up if it hasn't gone rancid. And once it's gone, I'll clean out the cup -- or at least the lid -- and carefully store it in the Bennion Archives. Another souvenir of another thing that once mattered to me, and is -- or at least soon will be -- no more...

If you've been a fan of any of the sitcoms produced by Chuck Lorre over the past 15 years -- Dharma & Greg, Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory, or Mike & Molly -- you probably know about Lorre's "vanity card," i.e., the screen that comes up at the very end of the show's closing credits. Most vanity cards are just a logo of some kind for the show's production company, sometimes involving a little animation or brief film clip; think of MTM's cute little kitty, or JJ Abrams' Bad Robot, or "Sit, Ubu, Sit," that sort of thing. But at some point, Lorre started doing something different, using his card almost as a sort of blog on which he posts little essays, makes observations on life, cracks jokes, or, most famously (and stupidly, from a legal standpoint), shot off his mouth about the troubles Charlie Sheen was giving him during Sheen's infamous psychological disintegration. The cards aren't on-screen long enough to actually read them, but that's part of the fun. You have to record them (or watch the DVD) and freeze-frame them in order to catch the complete content. Back when Lorre first started doing this on Dharma & Greg in the late '90s, it felt like an almost-underground "cool kids only" kind of thing that not many people even knew about; nowadays, of course, it's a built-in part of Lorre's brand, an expected schtick, and all his "postings" are easily available online. The cards have gone mainstream, man, so of course they're not as cool anymore...

Anyhow, the Girlfriend and I have recently gotten hooked on The Big Bang Theory -- that's a development I probably ought to discuss in its own entry -- and we've been binging the last few weeks on the DVD sets for the first four seasons. And after each and every episode, we pause the playback and read the vanity card. Most of them are ephemeral, a momentary amusement that's forgotten within seconds as we forge ahead into the next episode. But there was one I spotted over the weekend that perfectly suited the mood I've been in lately, and some of the things I was getting in my previous entry on my semi-annual frustration. I thought I'd share it here, faithfully copied from Lorre's own archive so I get it right:

Mornings are the worst. The mind seems undefended, easy prey for both memories and imagination. What happened. What should've happened. What might happen someday. Your fault, my fault, no one's fault. The only way to relieve the torment is to get up, empty the bladder, drink the coffee, read the paper, run the treadmill, perform the animal sacrifice, paint the chicken blood on the groin and call upon the demonic spirits to bring you back.

Nights are bad too. Once again, exhaustion makes the mind vulnerable to obsessing over woulda, shoulda, coulda. The only thing to do is sit alone and eat the chicken which was senselessly murdered in the morning.

Mmm, murdered chicken. Pass the barbecue sauce, please...

Not that I'd blame you for assuming so, given the utter paucity of activity around here lately. Remember when this blog was a happening place and jasonbennion.com was on the verge of exploding into a world-dominating brand that would be spoken of in the farthest corners of the InterWebs for years to come? No? Me neither. Even so, I deeply regret that I'm no longer able to find the time or energy to blog regularly. It's been long enough since my last entry, for example, that there are probably virtual tumbleweeds blowing down the main street of downtown Simple Tricks, or at least there would be if we experienced cyberspace as an actual environment with "buildings" and such, the way William Gibson first imagined it way back in the '80s. Not to put too melodramatic a spin on the situation, but with the slow diminishing of my output here, I honestly feel like the last vestige of my self-identity as a writer -- a notion I've carried around since the eighth grade, more or less -- is finally slipping through my fingers. But then I've been thinking lately that a lot of things I used to take for granted are slipping away...

Eh, don't mind me. I've just entered another one of those periodic phases when it feels like somebody's cranked the treadmill up to 11 and my limbs are flopping around like the Wizard of Oz's Scarecrow doing a jig, and I'm about three steps away from losing my footing and going flat on my face. If you've been paying attention, you've probably noticed this happens every year around this time. The production cycle at my dayjob always picks up toward the end of summer, leading to days (and occasional late nights) of constant, urgent activity that leave me utterly drained. It's just dumb, bad luck that this uptick coincides with my annual melancholy over my birthday and the changing of the season; the slightly frantic feeling I get as I try to cram in a last few summertime activities while the weather holds; the nagging disappointment in myself for things I should've done when I was young and now fear I never will; and of course that weird, rootless sensation I still experience, even after all two and a half decades away from it, because it's time to be heading back to school and I'm not going. You stir all this together and you end up with a big old bowl of frustration and sadness.

Maybe I wouldn't have such a hard time with all this stuff if it didn't seem like so many of my friends and coworkers are privy to some secret that's apparently been denied me. They all have jobs and commutes and obligations, too, and yet somehow they also manage to keep their houses clean and cook fabulous meals and host parties and exercise and enjoy hobbies and participate in causes. They find the time to go back to school and garden and make things, and some of them -- many of them -- create art or play a musical instrument or become highly skilled in some craft. Sometimes all of the above. They're interesting people who appear to be living good lives. Oh, and some of them are even raising kids. And still they manage to pull it all together. Compared to them, I'm a tremendous failure at this life thing.

Hell, I can't even keep the kitchen sink free of dirty dishes, let alone accomplish anything really worthwhile. I haven't written fiction in longer than I care to admit. I haven't yet sorted or posted the photographs from my Hawaiian cruise clear back in February... or any of my other trips for the last several years. The Girlfriend has been living with me for eight months and we still haven't gotten all of her stuff out of the storage unit we rented in January. I have a list of half-finished projects as long as my forearm, some of them dating back to the mid-90s. Oh, and that movie I mentioned in the last entry, Son of Kong? That was the first feature-length DVD I've managed to get through in a single sitting in months. And it's only 70 minutes long! So much for my hobby as the great film buff.

When I think about all these things, then consider how many of my days consist only of commuting to my dayjob, working my dayjob, traveling home from my dayjob, eating dinner, and collapsing for the night without managing to get a damn thing done for myself... well, I just can't believe it's like this for everyone. I'm doing something wrong, but I'm damned if I can figure out what it is. Sometimes I wonder if I'm not just plain damned.

So, yeah, not dead yet... but I'm not sure you can really call this living, either...

"Oh every night, and every day
A little piece of you is falling away
But lift your face, the western way, baby
Build your muscles as your body decays."

A verse from one my all-time favorite songs, "Hammer to Fall" by the inimitable, indispensable Queen. Just a little something that's been running through my mind tonight as I contemplate my approaching birthday, my various medical misadventures of the past year -- long story, but don't worry, I'm okay -- and of course my impending appointment tomorrow with an oral surgeon to get all four of my wisdom teeth yanked, only about 25 years after I probably should have had it done. What can I say, I tend to put things off. As you can probably imagine, I'm really not looking forward to a week of living on Jello and Lortabs. But that's tomorrow, isn't it? For tonight, let's lose ourselves in the rock and roll, shall we? Which, oddly enough, is the general theme of "Hammer to Fall":

For a Utah native, no summer is complete without a visit to Lagoon, our local amusement park. Located a few miles north of Salt Lake City, Lagoon is an ancient part of Utah history; it got its start on the shores of the Great Salt Lake in 1886 before moving to its present, inland location ten years later, in 1896. Much of the original park still remains today, although it's been added onto and upgraded over the years, so the old and quaint attractions mingle side-by-side with the latest in high-tech, computer-controlled thrill rides. I like plenty of the modern rides just fine, but I'm sure my Loyal Readers won't be at all surprised to learn that my favorite parts of Lagoon are the oldest ones... and my very favorite ride of all is the 1921 roller coaster that has no official name. Locals just call it the White Roller Coaster, due to the coating of white paint that was originally used to preserve the wooden structure. (Lagoon management recently made what I consider a boneheaded decision to stop painting the WRC, so with weathering and the occasional replacement of aging timbers, it's gradually turning a rather unremarkable shade of grayish-brown. Supposedly, this is to make it easier for the inspection crews to see problems in the elderly structure, but I'm willing to bet it was a cost-benefit thing; somebody figured out they could save a few bucks if they stopped painting it every spring.)

The old roller coaster isn't sexy, and it certainly isn't a gentle lover. Compared to the smooth ride of the modern steel coasters that surround it, the WRC is actually something of a bare-knuckled bastard. Every turn, every warped board, every connecting bolt translates as a rattle, a thump, or a jolt. The whole structure seems to shift and flex underneath you as your car passes over it. It makes many people nervous. For me, though, that's just part of the fun. The coaster feels like an organic, living thing that never delivers quite the same ride twice. Some of my earliest Lagoon memories are of riding it.

Unfortunately, The Girlfriend and I haven't been able to enjoy the white coaster together in a very long time. To be perfectly frank, we'd both grown too fat in recent years to comfortably sit in the narrow, old-fashioned cars. The last time we rode together several years ago, Anne was forced to sit with her hips turned sort of sideways -- uncomfortable to start with, downright painful once the pounding began. After a very unpleasant run that left her bruised and humiliated, she declared she was done with the WRC, and I accepted this without argument. I've since ridden it alone a few times, feeling sad and guilty that she couldn't be with me, and also pretty cramped myself in those unforgiving seats that were designed for kids and people from, ahem, a time when foodstuffs were less plentiful. Last year, I didn't go on my favorite roller coaster at all. It didn't seem worth the trouble anymore. It was just one more thing I'd resigned myself to having to give up now that I was a middle-aged man, one more childish pleasure that I no longer had room for in my grown-up present. At least that's what I told myself. I didn't really believe it, and I felt like shit about it. But the situation was what it was...

I'm incredibly happy to report that the situation is different this year. Like I said a few weeks back when I first wrote about that 5K that Anne participated in, she and I have both made a lot of changes since the start of 2012. I've lost in the neighborhood of 40 pounds (I haven't been keeping close track, so I don't know an exact figure, but I know it's somewhere around there -- possibly even a little higher) and Anne, who's taken the extra step of hiring a trainer and has been working so very hard, has dropped 60 and is still losing. We're feeling a lot better about ourselves, both physically and emotionally, and there's no question that we're smaller people than we used to be. And today, during our annual outing to Lagoon with her family, we proved it -- and earned ourselves a major sense of triumph -- when we successfully rode that rickety old wooden roller coaster again, together, sitting in the very front seats. I was perfectly at ease, right in the middle of the seat with room to spare on either side, and Anne, while still feeling pretty cozy, was not at all compressed, crowded, mashed, or packed in. We just got on, closed the lap bars, and had a fun ride, same as anybody else. Although the day was a bit frustrating in several respects, that one moment made everything else worthwhile. It made all of the struggles we've both endured -- but especially Anne, because quite honestly she's worked harder at it than I've had to -- over the last eight months worthwhile. The joy in her face as she sat down, her exuberant "I did it!" at the end of the ride... well, just think of the end of the original Star Wars, the scene in the hanger on Yavin IV after Luke has obliterated the Death Star and everyone is hugging and slapping each other on the back, and you might have some notion of how that moment felt for us.

I'm so very proud of her -- of both of us, but especially of her. And I've got my White (soon-to-be brown) Roller Coaster back!

Do you remember me mentioning a while back that my buddy Mike Gillilan is a contributor to a car-news blog called The Daily Derbi? Well, a couple months ago, Anne and I were out for an afternoon cruise in my beloved old Ford Galaxie and, on the spur of the moment, we stopped to see Mike and his girlfriend. He took a few photos of my car while we were there, and then, a few days later, asked if I would mind him turning those shots into one of his Weekly Wallpapers for the Derbi site. Of course not, I told him; I'm proud of that old girl, and always happy to show her off. Then he asked if I would like to contribute some copy to go along with the image. Sure, I said, no problem. I did a little research on the history of the Galaxie line, mixed it with some personal observations on my particular car, and banged out a couple paragraphs for him. The end result turned out very well, if I say so myself. (I'm sure Mike would agree.)

His image and my words drew quite a few accolades, as well as a little boost in traffic for the site, so, to at last get to the point of this entry, I've been asked to join The Daily Derbi myself. Mike and the site's founder, Chad Waite, both think my perspective as a lover of classic Detroit steel will add an interesting new flavor to the proceedings over there. I'll be honest, I'm a little dubious of how well I'll fit in -- I've been doing my own thing here for nearly a decade, with no editorial oversight whatsoever, free to write whatever, whenever, and however I wish -- but I'm game to give it a try. And I think writing about different subject matter in a different location may help break through some of the malaise I've been feeling about blogging lately. We'll see how it goes.

My first solo post for the Derbi went up a couple days ago; it's about an exhibition of vintage racing machines currently on display at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. Give it a read here, and then have a look around the rest of the site. Feel free to let me know what you think...