Juggling Monkeys

Imagine this scene. Two wild monkeys are struggling to balance themselves atop their unicycles while juggling machetes and chainsaws. As the camera draws back we see that the monkeys are performing this death defying stunt while perched on the top of a giant beach ball being held in the air by the trunk of a white elephant, himself reared up on his back legs attempting to surf a pipe wave in Ehukai Beach Park in Hawaii.

This is what has been going on inside my wife’s head for the past seven days. When I wrote my blog a week ago entitled “The Next 97 Days”, I couldn’t add the part about her planning and executing a 50^th birthday party for her sister because it was a surprise. Even though it was absolutely, positively the last thing she needed on her plate, the thought of someone else throwing the party without her was too much for her to bear. It was like waving a red blanket at a raging bull. No, if a party was going to be planned it would be Pam at the helm or nobody at the helm.

Of course, being Pam, it had to involve color coordinated decorations, properly arranged with a consistent theme… and cupcakes. She would insist on not one, or even two, but three different varieties of these delicious but labor intensive confections.

So, the morning of the big event I hear her down stairs in the kitchen rattling pots and pans, precariously close to meltdown status def-com 5, but what to do? The extent of my baking skills is limited to the consumption phase of the process. As a general rule, I have always held to the belief that injecting myself into the midst of a chaotic kitchen is one of the worst rookie mistakes of marriage, and is to be avoided at all cost. But, I could tell that the pressure and fatigue were catching up with her. So, I go downstairs and peek around the corner. She is franticly whipping up something with her high tech mixer, flour and confectionary sugar all over the place. Then it hit me. I am one hell of a dishwasher.

“Honey, how about I just wash up the pots and pans between courses here? Would that help?”

One of my better ideas.

Two and a half hours later she was done, the kitchen was spotless and I had even managed to help her put the filling in some of the cupcakes, a collaborative triumph of brains and brawn.

She then headed over to the venue to set everything up. I followed later with a chicken nugget tray from Chick-Fil-A, the only store bought item on the menu. When I arrived all hell was breaking loose, as people were showing up early and no one had showed up to help yet. I was plugged into this gaping manpower hole with barked commands from both my wife AND mother-in-law. (def-com 6.) Twenty minutes later this is what the place looked like:

Yep. My wife is amazing.

The Flying Squirrels

Tonight Pam and Kaitlin are taking me to a Flying Squirrels game for my birthday. We have seats on the lower level, first base side right behind the dugout. It looks like it’s going to be a beautiful night, in the 70’s. Can’t wait!

We will sample the unique cuisine of baseball. There will be ballpark hotdogs, giant soft pretzels, popcorn that comes in that familiar striped red box, and of course cotton candy. This year, Flying Squirrel fans will get to try a new locally brewed beer that we all got a chance to name…chin music. Then there’s dippin dots, that strange, otherworldly ice cream imitation that sounds and looks horrible but somehow works only at the ballpark. There will be those wonderful carnival barker guys who walk up and down the aisles hawking everything from peanuts to cold beer. There’s just about no place on earth I would rather be on a Friday night.

Minor league baseball may be the best entertainment value in America. First of all, at least on the Double-A level, the players are young and quite good. They hustle as if they have something to prove on every play, which they actually do. These guys don’t have the entitled swagger of their big league brethren. There’s not a lot of batting glove adjustments and long walks out of the batter’s box after every pitch. They are mostly 21 year olds with a dream and they play with a sort of unbridled energy, eager to impress. Because these games aren’t televised, the games are played at a must faster pace which is something MLB could learn from. These guys don’t take a lot of pitches. See ball, hit ball.

Then there’s the marketing department of the Flying Squirrels, a sort of Barnum & Bailey meets WWE. Every half inning features some zany madcap game featuring kids playing horse shoes with toilet seats or some such thing. Once every game a bunch of grounds crew guys run out in dresses and blond wigs to sweep the infield and advertise Molly Maids. It’s non-stop tom-foolery until the final out.

Five years ago when the Flying Squirrels replaced our beloved Braves, the name Flying Squirrels was something of an embarrassment and source of great derision. Of all the things to name a team from Richmond, Virginia, which hadn’t had an actual flying squirrel sighting maybe EVER. If I was going to name a team from Richmond I would have gone with something that its citizens could understand and appreciate..like the Monuments, or the Rebels, the Virginians, or even the Insufferable Old-Money Bluebloods. But the Flying Squirrels?? Well, this just proves how little I know about marketing. Somehow it caught on in a huge way and is now one of the most popular Minor League mascots in the business. “Nutsy” is the man, although if he ever showed up in my back yard he would feel the wrath of my BB gun.

There are a lot of things wrong in America at the moment, but thank God, minor league baseball isn’t one of them.

Generational Whining

Hang around enough people in their mid-twenties and you will hear them lament their severely diminished prospects post graduation from college. You will hear all of the statistics about obscene levels of college debt, and reduced employment opportunities caused by corporations concerned more with “profits than people.” The American Dream is dead for them, they say, replaced by a future of permanently stifled expectations. Since most kids fresh out of college are dependably liberal politically, they normally blame some sort of conservative Republican, big business, Koch brothers, anti-union, cabal for their troubles. Although the Occupy movement has fizzled out, I expect it will make a comeback as more and more French Poetry majors graduate and discover fewer and fewer jobs available or suitable for their skill sets.

On some level, I have sympathy for kids about to enter the job market right now. My generation, the famously narcissistic Baby Boomers have been an abject failure in government. The decisions we have made have indeed screwed up the country in ways great and small, and this fact isn’t the fault of our kids. They are just the ones who will be forced to live with our failures. However, before I have to read any more sad-sack, woe is me hand wringing from the twenty-somethings, a little perspective is in order.

When my father came of age in the 1940’s, his prospects included an economy still reeling from the Great Depression, and his government requesting his assistance fighting a two front war for our nation’s very existence, not exactly the fast track to fame and fortune. Yet, somehow he managed to get married, start a family and thrive. My brother, who is ten years older than me, became an adult about the time when his college contemporaries were getting gunned down at Kent State and either burning their draft cards, or being shipped off to Vietnam, a future just slightly less murky and troublesome than our Dad’s. Then there’s me.

When I graduated from the University of Richmond in 1981, I did so with close to $25,000 of college debt, a terrifying sum of money back then, adjusted for inflation. When I got married a couple of years later, as part of her dowry, I inherited my wife's college debt of nearly $12,000. Again, adjusted for inflation, it compares favorably to the “mountains of debt” I keep hearing about these days so, cry me a river. Speaking of inflation, when Pam and I started having kids and needed something bigger than a two bedroom apartment; our first house came with a 12.75% interest rate mortgage. The Jeep Cherokee I bought to carry around the two car seats cost me 16% to finance. Oh, and incidentally, there was no such thing as “no money down” financing. But, somehow I managed to pay back my student loans, although it took over ten years, and we ate beans and franks for dinner many a night to make ends meet, but meet they did. We had no choice, if we wanted to build a life.

The point I am trying to make here is that every generation that has ever lived has faced daunting challenges. There is nothing new under the sun. Kids entering the work place today face challenges as well, but there is nothing uniquely debilitating about their lot that comes close to justifying such doomed expectations. Cheer up, guys. Face life with excitement and great expectations. You have cell phones in your hands that bring the wisdom of the world to your fingertips. This is an advantage that no generation in the world has enjoyed. Make use of it.

I, unlike most of you, expect tremendous things from you guys. In fact, I’m counting on it!  

My Favorite Day of the Year

Every year about this time, the people over at the Tax Foundation publish their numbers calculating “Tax Freedom Day” in America. That’s the day when the nation has made enough money collectively to pay its total tax burden for the year, including not only Federal taxes but state and local taxes as well.  This year it will be three days later than last year, arriving on April 21.

There are a few quibbles I have with the process, for instance, people who live in low tax states like Tennessee and Mississippi reach their Tax Freedom Day a heck of a lot sooner than the good people in New York and California. Not only that, but low income people reach their Tax Freedom Day very early in the year compared with some Wall Street bond trader in New York city. We’re talking the “average American here, and who wants to admit that they’re average?

So, seeing as I am in possession of my 2013 tax return hot off the presses, I did the math myself. I added up all my income, then totaled up all of my tax payments to Uncle Sam, FICA, the State of Virginia, and Henrico County. Then I did the division on my $3.99 calculator. It turns out that my Tax Freedom Day arrived on April 16.

The Tax Foundation folks claim that the average American spends more money paying taxes than they do on food, clothing and shelter…combined. I ran the numbers and found out that they were right on that one too, by a long shot.

Big government types always hate it when Tax Freedom Day is announced, calling it “flawed, and devious anti-government propaganda.” I happen to think it serves as a decent measuring stick as to how we are doing economically as a nation, and on that score, it turns out, not too badly!

For example, in the year 2000, we weren’t free of our tax bills until May 1, and back then our tax burden represented over 33% of our income. Of course back in 1900, we were done forking over money to all branches of government by Jan. 22. In 1940 after the Great Depression and right before World War II, it was still earlier…March 7.

However, if we think we have it bad, we should walk a mile in the European’s shoes. Our buddies in the United Kingdom slave away until May 30 until they get to keep any of their money. For the Germans it’s July 8, for the French it’s July 16, and pity the poor Belgians who pay a whopping 58.5% of their income to the government, which takes them all the way until August 3 to get into the black. Just think about that for a minute. Those countries have that kind of tax rate and they don’t have to worry about fielding a military capable of defending themselves!

Of course all of these statistics are meaningless unless they are attached to what sort of value we are getting for all of this money. If our government provided excellent service, tremendous schools, and efficiency and accountability, a tax rate of 30% would be considered a bargain. Conversely, when we get the DMV, the United States Postal Service, career politicians with lifelong pensions, and a National Security Agency that listens to all of our calls, 30% seems unfair and confiscatory. Eye of the beholder, I suppose.

But, cheer up. At least we don’t live in Afghanistan, where the top tax rate is only 3%, but nobody survives long enough to pay!