crdahlberg

Totally Fried

Ha! It’s county fair time again! Time to discover who won this year’s gooseberry jelly first prize! And we’re awestruck by the winner of the formal dining table decor competition: a country music-themed homage featuring a look-alike Brad Paisley hat for the centerpiece, Roy Rogers-inspired silver bullet salt and pepper shakers, and decorative accents honoring Dolly Parton.

We eagerly launch ourselves into the fair’s enormous display halls, searching out our favorite gadgets, hawked by gung-ho purveyors demanding to know how we survive without their trinkets, which, by the way, are seriously discounted–today only–at a Special Fair Price Reduction. How could we fail to take home the orange sponge thing that, with one magic swipe, can absorb a baby elephant’s entire trunkful of water? Or maybe we will choose to purchase one of the countless competing sets of hi-tech cookware, compellingly presented by the non-stick humor and extravagant propaganda of the frying pan merchants—these futuristic copper-cored titanium-clad industrial-strength pots and skillets will present a lifetime of culinary treasures!

Another prime reason for a trip to the fair is the excuse to dump our allegiances to healthy fruits and veggies, long-extinct in this environment. Onward, to sample the fair’s gastronomical fares! We unceremoniously discard restraint, loosen our belts by several notches to accommodate the impending added girth, and the maniacal self-indulgent search for serious fair nosh begins.

The grub is easy to come by. A mound of barbecued tri-tip is squeezed between oversized buns and lathered in sauce. The ensuing energetic consumption sends warm brown goo splashing noses, dripping down chins and sloshing in pools on shirts and shorts. The gigantic Texas Turkey Legs appear large enough to have belonged to a variety of miniature dinosaurs. Oversize hot dogs are smothered in cheese, lathered with chili and accompanied by a combo order of cheese fries and onion rings. The setting is rife for virtual—or actual—heart attacks.

How to choose what to eat? Each would be a perfect choice!

Then our eyes fall onto the Totally Fried vendor’s cart. Totally Fried! What a delight! Our salivary glands cramp at the notion of Totally Fried Chicken Sandwiches accompanied by Totally Fried Krispy Kreme doughnuts, Totally Fried Klondike ice cream bars, Totally Fried Kool-Aid, Totally Fried frog legs, Totally Fried avocados, Totally Fried caramel apples, Totally Fried FryBQ ribs, and Totally Fried Twinkies. How to choose among such treats?

Still, I was mildly troubled by the Totally Fried offerings. Where was the Totally Fried butter I had anticipating sliding down my gullet? Imagine–a butter stick, perfectly fried in, what else—butter—then rolled in cinnamon to create that perfect treat, comprised of 100% saturated fat—what a delight!

There’s time to think over our choices, as the distinct smell of an ill-maintained barnyard drifts our way, demanding our attention. And we’re off! Who could miss the Fairview Farms domestic animal display area, to view the endless milking of bovines, and the eternally cud-chomping goats with staring and unfocused geometrically-challenged pupils.

Where else is there the opportunity to see—and smell—those gargantuan hogs, rubbery snouts buried and rooting in mud, eagerly gorging themselves on anything that will fit into their gaping mouths! As an added bonus, it’s hard to believe our good fortune—last year’s blue ribbon winning hog, “Mighty Mickey,” makes a return showing, this year appearing as the pure-pork pepperoni featured atop Luigi’s Flying Pizza! We hurry over to sample him, to see if he serves up this year on the plate as proudly as he paraded last year on the hoof. Thumbs up. He tastes better than he ever smelled.

After eventually exiting the fair, our waddle to the car in bloated, cholesterol-charged, sweat-drenched bodies reminds us of one obvious fact.

We ourselves are now, unmistakably, Totally Fried. But at least we have a whole year to purge the lard from our bodies and repent from our recalcitrant ways before we try it all again.

Praying Mantis

Six years ago, I spotted an oddly-shaped green leaf on my sidewalk. It was a skinny leaf, as though torn from a larger piece. Scrunching down on my knees for a closer look, I realized it was no ordinary leaf. Instead, I stared into the rotating, alien-looking eyeballs of a praying mantis. His weird eyes really did rotate like the bulging eyes of a chameleon. I could track the tiny black pupils staring back at mine.

He stood directly between me and the door of my house. I wanted him to hop or jump or fly or whatever it is that he does, directly away from me.

Instead, he dared me to squish him. He wasn’t a bit afraid. Every move I made, he followed with his stare. He became a Godzilla-like monster to me. Would my wife arrive home and find me, hours from now, still locked in a sidewalk staring duel with this fearsome-looking creature?

I imagined his brain had me figured out. His calculating calmness meant to weaken me, his intentions to do me harm once I gave in to the madness of the ever-creeping fear.

Seizing upon a solution to the impasse, I grabbed a twig, and, holding it bravely at arm’s length, I poked him. Godzilla stood his ground on the sidewalk, eyes rotating toward mine, defying my efforts, as if to say, “Is that all you’ve got?”

I poked again. This time, his large front legs, the ones he seemed to be praying with, flexed open, then slowly closed. Maybe he really was in prayer–in prayer for this giant oaf of a being who was interrupting meditations that I could not perceive.

In time, he unlocked his rotating-eyeball stare. Perhaps his prayers had concluded. Perhaps he spied a tasty-looking beetle in the weeds. Perhaps he felt sorry for me and decided to let me go. Legs still held in reverence, ever so slowly and proudly, he strolled forward to the edge of the sidewalk and dropped over its edge to once again enter the bug kingdom.

I may be the only human he ever makes contact with. I wonder what impression I left behind?

Postlude

Two weeks ago, I was crossing a parking lot, when I spotted an oddly-shaped brownish-tan leaf. It was a skinny leaf, as though torn from a larger piece.

This time when I scrunched down, I recognized that I was staring into the rotating eyes of another praying mantis.

By now, I knew that a praying mantis changes color from green, in a wet environment, to brown, when it is dry.

By now, I knew that a praying mantis possesses ultrasonic hearing, much like a bat; this one had heard me coming.

By now, I knew that a praying mantis has exceptional eyesight and can see movement up to 60 feet away; her rotating eyes could see me better than I could see her.

By now, I hoped that somehow this praying mantis had placed herself in a parking lot to help me recall her long-deceased green relative, and to remind me that the seemingly most insignificant of life’s encounters should not pass unnoticed and without gratitude.

U.S. Husband Production Suffers Steep Decline

The statistics following the 2010 U.S. Census are truly alarming. There is a sharp decline in the U.S. production of Prospective Husbands.

News of the decline in the current crop of Prospective Husbands caused the greatest trauma among single women. Upon hearing this dramatic news, the advocate group “Wimmin Who Ain’t Grinnin’” vowed to get to the bottom of the dilemma, launching an exacting study of the meager Prospective Husband crop. The following findings are the results of their exhaustive investigations:

A significant number of Prospective Husbands have been discovered—weak, emaciated and nearly comatose–endlessly circling cities in mass-transit buses and subways while playing video games on portable electronic devices, zombie-like and apparently unaware of both passing time and of their surroundings.
Entomologists hypothesize the viral popularity of young Justin Bieber may have spawned a widespread hormone imbalance such that Prospective Husbands are stuck in a larval state between childhood and manhood.
Earth’s rising average temperature has reduced the willingness of Prospective Husbands to exercise, causing their already overextended waistlines to explode the elastic bands in their shorts and causing their once-comfortable belts to produce painful welts upon expanding bellies, driving Prospective Husbands into closets, far from potential physical contact with potential mates.

Therapists have suggested various treatments to combat this phenomenon, which scientists now call Husband Crop Decline. The most effective remedy appears to be widespread distribution of the most recent edition of the Peterson Field Guide to Humans, in which the social needs of the adult human female are described in detail.

A quick remedy for this dilemma is urgent. Sensing the decline of the Prospective Husband population, there have been multiple sightings of increasingly aggressive giant blue Smurfs, shopping for acceptable extra-large fashionable clothing to help them attract comely but lonely, disenfranchised human females.

Cockeyed: turned or twisted toward one side

When I arrived home from vacation, I discovered two tiny frogs that had glued themselves to the two-step stair I had loaded into the camper, providing them free rides all the way from the campground. They now reside somewhere in my un-mowed grass.

The frogs had stowed away just outside of my normal, non-froggy field of vision, or I would never have given them this free ride, considering the possible hazards to their health.

How much else lies just outside the field of my usual vision? If I tilt my vision by just a hair, sort of cockeyed, there’s no telling everything that I would see.

It’s all a matter the angle of our sight – the tilt of our vision. The gift of Vision is the ability to see cockeyed.

A cockeyed restaurateur with a zany business plan drew my attention. A store had fallen victim to the stressed economy. In its place, a restaurant emerged. Where goods once stood on display in the curved front display windows, patrons of the store-turned-coffee shop now sipped mochas, lounging within their wrap-around glassed-in dining area with a prime view of the street-side happenings.

The cockeyed entrepreneur wasn’t done yet. Tables for two take up a lot of real estate on an outside patio; instead, why not use long, narrow ironing boards with stools? So he did. Folks drifting in to dawdle over coffee need something to read. So he furnished them shelf-fuls of hardcover books tucked in each wall of the shop; there’s always something new to fuel customer imaginations.

A growling stomach demands that a decision be made. Whether to have the “Thoreau” sandwich, featuring hummus, pepper jack cheese and cucumber? Or to indulge with the “Albert Camus” seared tuna, hardboiled egg and new potatoes? It’s a much more refined and cockeyed approach than saying, “I’ll have your Number Three, please.”

Serving lattés in wrap-around display windows and noticing hitchhiking frogs were both outside of my view. Time to tilt the head and enjoy the Cockeyed Vision.

Three Circles at the Koi Pond

The first circle is in the upper left corner–the faint circle of human adults in conversation. Humans may exist in adult form for sixty years or more after they pass through the adolescent stage. Though they appear small in the picture, they actually play a very large role because adults are the ones who are in control. Adulthood is marked by several distinct and progressive stages of control: 1.) wishing to be in control, 2.) being in control, 3.) wishing not to be in control, and finally, 4.) wondering what should have been better controlled so things would have turned out differently.

The second circle is that of children chasing one another. This is a sort of larval stage for humans, a proving ground for what they will become as adults. It can be a beautiful stage of human development because there is room for much hope of what they will become. For the meantime, they’ll remain kids, innocent and running around the pond. Gradually, blemishes in their character may become obvious as those on their faces. But still, we will hope because that’s what childhood and adolescence demands of us. This will last until nearly 20 years goes by and adolescence has run its course, and they themselves will morph into adulthood.

The third circle is the pond in the center. Carefully-bred, brightly-colored, and highly-valued koi fish, a kind of carp, are circling just beneath the water’s surface. They’re hard to see except at feeding time, when they churn the waters as they recognize the person who feeds them–yes, koi are capable of recognizing their caretaker feeder–though otherwise they likely have very few thoughts that either the upper left adults or the fountain-chasing children would recognize. Inexplicably, koi enjoy lives that are far longer than our own. One famous scarlet koi named “Hanako” lived a documented, incredibly long lifetime that spanned from 1751 to July 7, 1977. Yet during the two and a quarter centuries of its lifetime, its brain recorded little other than the bubble, bubble of the water, the suck, suck of the water through its gills, and the plop, plop of the food above its head.

And it remembered the image of its caretaker feeders, having watched these humans grow from adolescents to adults-in-control, for generation, after generation, after generation…

Squirrel Feeds Man

It’s a sign of the times.

We are told that one day the lion will lie down with the lamb.

War shall be no more.

The squirrel shall feed a man.

Wait a minute! That’s nuts!

Yes, as this picture clearly documents, a literal protein feast of nuts was passed from this squirrel to this eager man. Partially chewed and ready for digestion, the squirrel donated its “nut mix” downward to the grateful man.

In these dismal economic times, the human was doubtless without a job and nearing the end of his extended unemployment benefits. The generous squirrel became his benefactor in the man’s time of need.

The word on the street, however, is that the man actually “double dipped,” manipulating the animal for a free meal while also smuggling bananas from the local zoo’s ape house–and pocketing his unemployment check for financial profit and personal gain. In addition to sharing the squirrel’s nuts, our investigation also discovered alarming behavior previous exhibited by the man in question:

He twice violated a free-range alpaca’s fur-trading rights by taking a Norelco razor to her underbelly, shearing off her most prized belly fur, creating collector-quality toupees, and selling them on the black market.

He systematically used an opossum for a coin bank, depositing small change in her pouch while snitching coins from malfunctioning parking meters.

He taught parrots questionable words from “The Big Book of Slang” dictionary and then released the birds into a flock of homing pigeons aimed for the poolside lounge area of Arnold “The Governator” Schwarzenegger’s California residence.

Since this troubling story emerged, the federal government has issued a full-scale alert to monitor the behavior of the 13.9 million unemployed Americans, searching for stockpiled partially-digested nuts, ziplock bags containing home-spun alpaca wool wiggery, drawers filled with suspicious opossum-skinned coin purses, and mini-flocks of parrots spouting ignoble epithets from their brightly-hued, yet baleful beaks.

Un-Leadership

I’ve always wanted to be a leader. I mow the lawn and take out the trash. I pay the bills. I’ve fed the dog and picked up the poop, just like a good leader should.

But I’m no leader.

I know this because I’ve been reading blogs about the subject. I’m finding out that true leaders can write and master multi-step action plans that make them superhumanly productive. They select and nourish positive, reinforcing team members around themselves. They demonstrate unequalled zest for adventure in their personal lives. Their professional success generates surplus income sufficient to spawn multiple non-profit organizations.

Does that describe me? Nope. I’m an un-leader. Here are some blog-harvested leadership skills I haven’t quite mastered:

How to be a responsive person
How to train my brain
How to become a better communicator
How to say “no”
How to promote myself
How to become a champion
How to build my own “platform”

…oh…and this one…

How to not feel overwhelmed

See?

I’m an un-leader because I can’t shrink my to-do lists; instead, they keep growing.

I’m an un-leader because realists are less popular than idealists; they don’t draw much more of a following than flies.

Bzzzzzzz.

If I Wrote a Song Today

If I wrote a song today, there would be a verse about birds because this week I witnessed two of them, on two separate occasions, helpless and injured on the sidewalk in front of me. One young bird fell out of the nest above my head just as I walked by. I might write a second verse that would ask what else I could have done besides simply walk by.

There would be a very long verse with too many words about my family, how much they mean to me, and how much I hope I mean to them.

There would be a verse about my great friend, who this week suffered a major heart attack and who is now in the hospital following surgery. I would tell of his long and loyal relationship over many decades, how he has enriched my life and how much better I have become by knowing him.

There would be a very short verse that would ponder whether or not my job is significant.

There would be a verse about people who ride the train, legs splayed, bags on cushions meant for passengers, their bodies blocking access to the seat next to them.

There would be a verse about seeing the reflection of my face, noticing no change day by day except for the deepening creases that somehow migrated there since a picture taken a decade ago.

In between each verse would be a majestic, joyful refrain—a sort of counterpoint—expressing gratitude to God for birds, for family, for friends, for jobs, for trains and for health.

What’s in the Backyard

Just beyond the prim, tidy front yard intended for view by the general public, lies a more restricted, wilder place, a vestige of nearly-forgotten cops and robbers chases, water balloon fights and a blow-up swimming pool with a three-week lifespan before the leaks would arrive.

Backyards hold private mysteries that go undiscovered even by others within the same household. Here, a mother recalls a hedgehog that tore up the lovingly-weeded annuals. There, children observed a feral cat bear her kittens, creating the myth of fierce cat-creatures that toy soldiers would hunt for several summers. Dreams of future baseball and soccer triumphs would eventually crowd out fights between plastic soldiers clutching plastic guns.

Gradually, the forgotten green soldiers buried themselves within misplaced Lego brick fortress walls, long since concealed beneath the roots of a giant oleander bush. There, they guarded the small menagerie of plastic farm animals. A tiny replica of Trigger peered into the dirt, searching for Roy Rogers, unaware of his presence six inches deep in the dirt just beyond the fading pink fragment of hula hoop.

Another world lay buried just below this community of plastic. It consisted primarily of rusting creations: toy cranes, a windup monkey frozen by time, and a piggy bank containing 16 coins, all bearing dates prior to 1930.

And so the sediment treasures continue downward, each layer less familiar and more mysterious than the one before. Who can know what lies beneath the ancient Indian relics and buckles of explorers, and what creatures conquered and then perished in a deepening layer of sediment before human witnesses existed.

It will be our turn to lay a layer down. As the gigabytes of discarded data settle into the next layer of strata, I’m hoping for more than irretrievable bits and bytes, more than fading plastic and more than rusted scrap metal.

I’m hoping for a layer that will last: for faith well-founded, for promises well-kept, for trust well-earned, for love well-invested, for encouragement well-placed.

There’s still time to build a better backyard.

Dividing the Light

As I walk past artist James Turrell’s architectural installation, the color of the light emitted from the art constantly changes against the evolving hues of the sky. The light-splashed square opening in the artwork frames the sky above, so the interplay of light is never the same from moment to moment, from sunrise to sundown. The combinations are unpredictable.

If our lives are the sculpture, the light we generate interacts against the backdrop of the ever-changing light of the world we live in. No wonder life can be perplexing. Sometimes we can manage a chameleon-like blend with our surroundings. Other times we feel an uncomfortable clash with our environment.

Or…huh…maybe it’s just a cool piece of art.