Guest Blog: How I Destroyed the Emperor

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

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

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

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

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

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.