CALL ME SNAKE

The other day, in response to a post about sleep deprivation that I'm still hazy about, Gatemouth had this to say:

Don't worry, Snake. Scientists have already identified the major cause of sleep deprivation: kids. The breakdown in kid-related sleep interruptions is as follows:

Midnight feedings - 13%

Diaper change - 6%

Bug in the room - 22%

Weird noise - 17%

Bad dreams - 26%

Out late w/friends and car - 16%

Luckily, the cure is pretty simple. You just ship the kids off to college.

CELEBRITY GUEST REBUTTAL (from an anonymous friend in Nashville [why does that burg keep coming up???] that we'll call "Fletch"): Gatemouth has it right on the sleep thing.  To us, Snake, it seemed right about the time they were "self-sufficient" in terms of bathing themselves, having you read or tell them a bedtime story, tucking them in, etc. - about the time you begin to look forward to peaceful evenings of a couple of hours/minutes in the evening with your spouse before drifting off to sleep - is when they suddenly develop the ability to stay up later than you.  Then they want you to drive them places on Fri. and Sat. nights (and pick them up). Then come the cars.  It's a conspiracy and yes, college is the antidote. 

SNAKE REPLIES: I'm still a bit dazed, I must confess, from the lack of sleep due to various causes (weird noise, bug in room, bad dreams, etc.), and thus did not follow these arguments as closely as I (AND YOU) might have liked. But at first glance it seems that everyone agrees that somehow, somewhere, the answer has something to do with college. This, I'm sure, is an important finding that deserves all the attention I've bestowed on it.

I subscribe to a ton of magazines, way more than I can keep up with, and they tend to pile up, just like those sudoku puzzles I clip from two newspapers every day. Last night, I forced myself to stay awake to work my way through the daunting pile of periodical literature. The last thing I read, struggling to keep my eyes open, was an article entitled: "Sleep Loss Affects More than the Brain." It detailed a long litany of things that sleep deprivation can do to you: cognitive deficits, cardivascular risk, a weakened immune system, and so on and so forth. After awhile, with my eyelids growing heavier by the second, I couldn't take it any more. "Who needs it?" I finally said. "I'm staying up to read this?"

We have a giant tree in our backyard (our side yard, actually, if you want to be a nitpicker). It's a silver maple, by far the biggest tree in the neighborhood. Why am I telling you this? For no apparent reason, though it does relate to the story at hand. (And when I say "at hand," I mean "at hand," as we shall see...) The trees roots are extensive and voracious and our constantly finding their way into our drainpipe, which is why each fall, I'm visited by the friendly Rooter Man, who clears are drain--a messy job made especially messy due to our filthy, dirt-floor basement. The Rooter Man is indeed friendly, as I mentioned above, and a nice guy to boot. When he's done snaking our drain and gathers his equipment and collects a check from me, he always holds his hand out to shake. The thing is, I know where that hand has just been. And Larry David--at least in his show--would have second thoughts, or third thoughts, about shaking that hand. I now give it some thought too, but never refuse the extended palm, despite the fact of where it's been during the preceding half hour--a place I'd rather not dwell on. Or dwell in...

Years ago, decades ago in fact, long before there were blogs or I ever dreamed of becoming a blogger, a friend I knew from volleyball--let's call him "H"--started calling me "Snake." It was a nickname that stuck. With him, at least. No one else really used it. But when H. calls occasionally and I hear the familiar one-syllable greeting, "Snake," I immediately know who it is. We've been out of touch for awhile, but we spoke over the phone last week (about volleyball, marriage, and kids, in that order), and I realized that, for what it's worth, I owe the name of this blog to him. About 20 years ago, a friend of H's (Phil) addressed me in casual conversation as Snake. I set him straight right off: "Listen friend," I said, "no one calls me that. No one. Except H."

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was wrong to have called our president, George W. Bush, "the devil." Not only was that statement slanderous, it was unfair, misleading, and inaccurate. At this point, the only decent thing for Chavez to do would be to retract and disavow that characterization. At best, Bush may be the devil's henchman, or front man, but he is definitely not the devil.

In more ways than one, this truly is the land of television. The typical U.S. home has more TV sets than people--2.73 versus 2.5. The average television in this country is turned on more than eight hours a day, more hours, in fact, than the average person sleeps. More than half the households in American have three or more TV sets. How do I know all these facts? I saw it on TV.

After Deval Patrick won last Tuesday's primary, I felt, for the first time in a long while, the stirrings of something special--finally some excitement about a new face on the political scene, akin to the feeling I had when Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992. So far, Patrick seems to offer everything you'd want in a politician: He's smart, thoughtful, charismatic, and nondoctrinaire. I think he'll be able to dispose of his Republican opponent, Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey, with little difficulty (a contest that a Globe columnist characterized as one of "hope vs. tax cuts"). Healy is offering the standard Republican formula, trying to cast Patrick as a “tax-and-spend” liberal, and I expect that by now that stratagem has worn thin. Healy also suffers from the taint of Romney--a governor whose slogan appears to be “Anywhere But Massachusetts.” Assuming Patrick does prevail over our Lieutenant Governor, he’ll then face an even bigger challenge, attempting to do what his former boss Clinton did not--measuring up to his great promise.

Earlier today, I heard Frank Rich, the New York Times columnist, on one of those NPR talk shows I have a hard time keeping straight. Rich was hawking his new book, "The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina," and he had an interesting tale to tell about how we got into the war in Iraq. None of it, exactly, was stuff I hadn't heard of before, or thought about myself, but for some reason today it really hit home. In 2002, Karl Rove convinced Bush to wage war on Iraq in order to help the Republicans in the mid-term elections. At the time, Bush didn't have much going on anyway. He didn't have much of an agenda and had even fewer ideas. But with a war going on, Rove argued, the country would rally behind the Republicans, the "war party."

And here we are, three-and-a-half years after "shock and awe," with thousands of American soldiers dead and a far greater (though unknown) number of dead Iraqis, locked in a pointless, though bloody, conflict, with no end in sight. All because Rove reasoned, and Bush and Cheney heartily agreed, that a war would serve Republican interests well. When you think about it, the whole thing is sickening. If that's not a war crime, I don't know what is.

Here's another irony to consider: Clinton was pilloried, and almost hounded from office, for being less than forthcoming about a minor sexual dalliance; meanwhile these cold-blooded criminals, who started a senseless war for political gain, run free.

I got a disconcerting phone message the other day from my mother who was in Nashville with her brother and his family. She was with my cousin at the time and was laughing so hard she could scarcely talk. My cousin was laughing too. I could barely make out a word she said, but the bottom line was clear: She was having a "GREAT time," and my cousin was an incredible host/tour guide and all-around good sport.

On one level, I was happy for her. You SHOULD have a good time when you travel these days since the getting there, with airports being what they are, can be a real pain. But maybe not THAT good a time. She never laughs like that when she's around me. She never has that much fun. Which led to a sobering realization: I'm not that much fun. In fact, I'm a bit of a dullard when you get right down to it. So when it comes to rollicking good times, sidesplitting belly laughs, and all that, I can't really compete with my younger, funnier, better-looking younger cousin. And I'd better not try. My only hope is to wait a long time before seeing my parents again so that the comparison won't be so fresh in their minds. Maybe they'll forget how good it was in Nashville and just go with the status quo.

Some friends of mine--let's call them Henry & Catherine--are often taking so-called "urban adventures," hopping on buses to different parts of the Boston area and then getting out and exploring. Yesterday, my family had some urban adventures of our own. And even though they were rather modest, as adventures go, when they happen, unexpectedly, in your own backyard, that makes them even more special. First we took a hike in the nearby Middlesex Fells because of its proximity and the fact that we dawdled for much of the morning and well into the afternoon and didn't leave time to travel farther. But even though we'd been there many times before, this time we found a trail we hadn't seen that afforded great views of the city and great rocks for climbing and scrambling. Off the beaten path as we were, we saw snakes, toad, and frogs. For the last stretch mile, we wandered around off the marked trails, bushwhacking through the wilds, and the kids loved it.

On the way home, we stopped off at a new playground in East Cambridge I'd just heard about the day before that had challenging--and almost entirely new--play structures for kids. Having spent thousands of hours in playgrounds over the past several years (and that's no exaggeration), it was nice for me, and especially for the kids, to find everything new, as if they'd reinvented the wheel at this park. The formula, I'm sure, we'll be repeated in the next generation of parks, but for now it's still fresh.

So that's it for the week's "urban adventure." For those of you expecting my usual cynicism and sarcasm, I apologize. But don't worry, tomorrow is another day. And I can already feel the negativity and rancor starting to bubble up within.