The Inner Bean

don’t drink much. Mostly because I come from long lines of alcoholism on both sides of my the family and the first time I felt out of control, I realized I didn’t want to give up the social aspect of drinking by giving into the demons.

When I was twenty-one I got a job working in a bar. My friend at the time and I had begun frequenting the place on our occasional night away from the kids and husbands. While chatting with one of my future bosses, we jokingly asked him what we had to do to get a job working in such a cool place. It was called the Classic Rock Cafe, and while in retrospect I can’t for life of me figure out what we thought was so cool about it, it was as if I’d walked into the place my very firstt ime and known a part of my future would be dedicated to that world.

Half-drunk, I met my real future boss and had an interview with him. He thought we were hilarious because we had been drinking. He asked why he should give me a job and I said, “Because I’m one of the most awesome people you will ever have the pleasure of meeting.” That must have been enough because the next afternoon the kitchen manager called me and asked when I could start working. She was the real reason I was sent there by the universe, as she would become one of my bestest friends in the whole world. Her name was Rita and she was like iron, but the two of us hit it off right away. We soon became an unstoppable force in the establishment, and many a late night after work was spent on the other side of the bar nursing our sorrows away.

I can’t say that those weren’t some of the most incredibly hilarious days of my life. At the time I was thinner than I am now, and I had a host of guys who came in there to flirt with me whenever I’d tend bar. After about a year there was a group of us that had grown so close we gathered weekly and poisoned ourself after work in a corner booth. We’d down our flaming doctor pepper shots, slam down Alabama Slammers and kamakazis, but nothing could get started until Rita and I had our nightly shot of Bailey’s Irish Cream on the rocks. After that, the serious drinking started, and fortunately we were lucky enough to have a designated driver to cart us all home at the end of the night. Rita’s husband Rob, who worked the door as a bouncer, rarely had more than a beer just so the rest of us could slosh ourselves.

It’s been a few years now since the whole bar was shut down, and many of us lost a place that still manages to haunt our dreams. About 8% of my nightly wanderings take me back to that place, and those days. Out of all of the people I once knew there, the only one I still speak to is Rita, but neither of us has much desire to drink like we used to. It was that out of control feeling that did me in. That wake up with your tongue stuck to the carpeted roof of your mouth with your skull cracking opened feeling was not something I wanted to spend an eternity nursing away. I actually have an incredibly low tolerance for alcohol, and a few drinks are enough to poison my blood.

However, tonight, as I nurse the last few shots in a bottle of Bailey’s Irish Creme before bed, I can’t help but remember the laughter we shared with fondness. Sure, we still laugh, and most of it is done without the aid of tequila and Jack. I don’t mind that we don’t drink, but I do miss the camaraderie we shared.

Does everyone reach that stage in life, when fear factors into every decision you make? And I don’t mean just the major decisions, like “Should I tell my job to stuff their pretentious we’ll pay you whenever we fracking feel like policy up their ass…” but even the minor ones, like “Should I leave the house today?”   No don’t get me wrong.  I’m no agoraphobic, despite my daughter’s curiosity on whether or not I ever leave the house… lo, though I do digress.

I keep bringing up to Jason how much I think we need to take more risks.  Risks are scary.  My biggest joke has been that I’m going to become a badass Harley bitch because since I was about eleven I’ve had an irrational fear of driving, especially motorcycles and quads.  I was twenty-one before I even tested for my driver’s license and started to drive myself around because the idea of driving a car around so many careless morons made me want to throw up.

Most of these fears came from my youth.  I grew up with two younger brothers, all of us close enough in age to be party to each other’s likes and dislikes.  Growing up we had a dirtbike at one point, the neighbors had four wheelers, my dad had a moped.  When I was about eleven, my eight year old brother (who taught himself how to ride a two wheel bike without training wheels when he was four years old,) convinced me to take the dirtbike for a spin.  So I did, despite my reservations of imminent death and doom.  I get on, he showed me where the gas was, but not he brakes. I set off into the woods behind the house and panicked when I started to feel like I was going too fast.  Not being familiar with the brake system, I gunned the gas and went flying into a literal tangle of weeds so thick that I didn’t need brakes anymore.  I did need poison sumac and ivy treatment for about a month.

About two years later a girl I grew up with (who was really more like one of the guys than that 1980’s movie about the high school reporter who pretends to be a guy to get the inside scoop, so I will cal her a guyrl,) invited a friend over on his four wheeler.  Everyone took a turn, but when it was my turn, I said no thanks. They laughed and poked me with sticks, finally convincing me there was nothing to be afraid of. Easier said than realized. I started off down the driveway, again having that similar anxiety over the brakes, and when I couldn’t stop I literally flintstoned it, holding the four wheeler against my own leg strength until the guy came down and helped me. I was lucky not o break my legs!!  Needless to say, my guyrl friend and I took a spin down the road and back about half and hour later, with me riding on the back.  She turned to look over her shoulder and saw a car coming, and when she turned she jerked the steering, flipping the four wheeler into our neighbors mailbox.  I landed first, she landed on top of me and the four wheeler landed on top of her.  To this day, I cry when I look at the lawn tractor and wonder what I would do if my wonderful husband wasn’t here to mow the lawn.

The horror story continues… at he time I was around sixteen and all of my friends were getting their license to drive, my dad started to encourage me to drive.  The thing is, encouragement and my dad are not on familiar terms with one another. In fact, they are mortal enemies, I think.   One day while I was backing down the driveway, I stopped at the end.  There was a car coming from the end of the road, but a normal driver could have pulled out in time and not even come near the other car. I start to back out when my dad freaks.  He screamed and started to open the door, hollaring, “What the fuck is wrong with you. I don’t want o fucking die!  Why are you trying to kill me? Fuck fuck fuck!”   Anyone who knows my dad can testify that he really used to talk like that, though meeting him today you might not believe it.

So… I latched onto some friends who had drivers’ licenses after that, and refused to learn how to drive myself until I was twenty-one.

Now, as an adult I look at my life quite often from the perspective of that frightened teenager doing donuts in the middle of the road while her dad screams like a sea captain.  I approach change with extreme caution, and often if it gets too hairy or scary, I back away. When I first went to college in 2002 I was HORRIFIED!  I literally broke out in hives during orientation, and felt completely unsure of myself.  What if they laughed because I was older, what if all those guidance counselors who didn’t believe I could ever go to college were right?  I had always deemed myself fairly intelligent, but what if I was wrong?  What if Math was right and I was stupid?

The moral of that story was that I found out all along that I was right. That I could do it, and it turned out to be an awesome experience.  It even became comfortable to the point where once I was on the verge of graduation I cried because I didn’t want to leave.  Now, despite that experience I feel like I’m right back where I started in a lot of ways. Fear keeps me from stepping outside my comfort zone when I know I need to push the limits and really live. No amount of self-help reading or psychological advice has the power to change that, only I can and I know it.

It’s just fear. Why do we let it factor into so many of our decisions? Why do I let govern my happiness, when I know if I just kicked it to the curb I’d probably be a lot happier with myself and my choices.

Now, before you get all excited, this blog has nothing to do with music, though it will briefly discuss the 1980’s.

I have always been fascinated by language. As a child I even had a friend that I made up a secret language with so that only we would know what our communications meant. In school I excelled in English, grammar, spelling and literature because words and communication made me feel warm and tingly.

While this may sound harsh, I couldn’t stand it when people couldn’t communicate effectively, and often fought with my own father, who developed a learning disability as a small boy thanks to an undetected hearing problem. He had never learned how to pronounce certain words or spell them properly, and while most teenagers were arguing with their dad about why they should be allowed to have the car keys, I was arguing with mine over how to pronounce battery or spell spaghetti. Fortunately, I’ve overcome some of that ridiculous snobbishness in my old age, however there is a part of me that feels as though it’s dying inside every time I realize that the Valley Girl of the 80’s has come back to bite us in our collective asses.

Yes, as a teen, I too mocked the Valley Girl. “Gross me out” and “Gag me with a spoon” were two of my favorite sayings, and I was very good at that whole “ending every statement in a question” accent. In college I even wrote a Valley Girl interpretation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Prioress” from The Canterbury Tales to amuse my favorite faculty members.

It was there, in college, that I realized just how far the English language had sunk into a sea of “like totallys” and “OMG Whatevers.” While taking a British Literature survey I sat next to a young woman we’ll call Emma. Emma was in her senior semester, about ready to begin student teaching. She was going to be teaching English to high school students after graduation. As we began to discuss William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience” I was horror stricken when this future teacher began to analyze “The Little Boy Lost.”

WARNING: The following is not a joke. It is a horrid and bleak portrait of the “Like Whatever Generation” and the influence they will pass on to our children:

Dr. M: Emma, what do you think the speaker in “Little Boy Lost” is saying?

Emma: Well, like Blake, right, I think that like he was trying to say that like man had gotten lost a little. Like now man is in the dark and stuff, wandering around all like confused and messed up. Like he calls out to God, but like God doesn’t answer, so like he realizes that he’s like all alone, and he like starts to cry.

At he time, a classmate of mine who was also over twenty-five, turned to me and held his hands up and mouthed the word “TEN.” In that short passage she manged to use the word “like” ten times. Like, why? And to make matters even more bizarre, she seemed to have no conviction in her explantion because every inflection ended with a question. “Blake, right? He like meant this? right?”

WRONG!

And this girl graduated. She went on to get a job teaching at a nearby high school, spreading her like influence to like as many teens as she like could.

Language evolves to meet man’s needs, I realize this. It just blows my mind how far backward it seems to have fallen at this time. As a writer I worry that one day I will walk into my local borders and pick up a book. I’ll open the pages and the first sentence will read:

LOLZ, it wuz drk and strmy @ nite, but like no1 wuz skaret. Vampirez rulez, like LOLZ.

Here is an example of the days when being stupid was funny:

See, that was funny… but it isn’t so funny when I go to the grocery store and ask Jeff Spicoli where I can find the cream of tartar. “Like what? Dude, no way. Cream of tartar…whatever.”Can we save the English language, or must we sit back and watch it wither into dust.

I’m sure that sounds incredibly pretentious, and maybe it is, but even the books have gotten worse. It seems like all they publish now is garbage geared to appeal to people who can’t sit still for more than four minutes. Maybe that’s what it is, but I miss the good old days, when children were taught proper grammar but thwarted it just for fun.

I had never thought about this before, but in instances of immaculate conception, what if the subject was hermaphroditic?  While some may find this notion offensive, this would be nature perfecting itself, and making for humankind to reproduce without mating.

Now before anyone jumps and says it isn’t possible, I just spent the last hour reading articles that suggest that about 99% of hermaphrodites do not develop both gender organs fully enough for them to function, but what if that other 1 percent was perfect?

It might explain an “immaculate conception,” though again, before anyone throws a brick at me because I’m not a Christian, and you think I’m poking fun, I don’t think that would make immaculate conception any less miraculous. Hermaphroditic self-impregnation in the animal kingdom is rare, but it has happened, so why not among humans?

I’m no big bad scientist, but it is an interesting thought.  Food for your brain to chew on.

So having a teenager in the house means finding myself often exposed to things I wouldn’t normally expose myself to. For example, that stupid Parent/Child dating show on MTV and the increasing number of “celebrity smash shows.”  That is what I will call them.  You may call them something else. They are shows in which a group of F-list nobodies, ranging from celebrity hair-stylists to “Nicole Kidman look-alike” experts, sit around watching clips of things like the Oscars and Grammy’s and the celebrities who appear at them. Then they sit and poking fun at them with dripping sarcasm. Rehab and drugs are serious things, not to be shone amusingly in the spotlight while the guys from washed up glam bands stroke their beards and talk about bubble butts and Brittany’s overdose.

Now most of these people like to pretend they are smarter than Brittany Spears or Paris Hilton, but in the end they sound equally repulsive, petty and stupid.  They watch celebrities do stupid things, and to try and make a name for themselves they make stupid, self-absorbed commentaries about celebrities, and still wind up being no one.

Does anyone over thirteen in the world really watch Talk Soup on E?  Entertainment Tonight?  Any of the numerous nutty shows that now consume VH1 (didn’t VH1 used to be a video music channel for pete’s sake?) like Cutest Celebrity Baby and Top Fashion Faux Pas of the Red Carpet Week 9876.

I mean don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with having a sense of humor, and being sarcastic is one of my fortes, but  you couldn’t pay me enough to sit on a VH1 stage and poke fun at Adrian Zmed’s hair in Grease 2.   They also can’t pay me to watch the crap either.

It’s just another chapter in the reality TV hype that is burning me out on TV completely.   I wish more people would tune out so they’d get the hint and stop promoting that kind of garbage.

Coming soon: When did we start turning every sentence into a question?  Are we really that unsure of what we’re saying?

So, it’s that time of year when the 80’s movie film craze sneaks in on me and I start to catch myself planning out how I can hook up with Judd Nelson in the Breakfast Club. While I was listening to an amalgamation of 80’s movie soundtrack songs, the Ferris Bueller song came on and I started to think about Ferris. Not Matthew Broderick, but Ferris and Cameron, and how awkward that whole movie was. It was honestly never one of my favorites, and I could never quite put my finger on why.

The thing that bothered me even as a teen was why on EARTH was the principal so worried about Ferris Bueller? He wasn’t even that badass. Okay, so he did sing in the street, and he manged to convince everyone he was practically dead on ONE day from school, but haven’t we all done that?

I just can’t wrap my head around it. He was a total nerd. Cameron was way more pathetic and even a little cooler than Ferris. I got the impression that Cameron missed way more school. So why was everyone so obsessed with Ferris?

I guess the movie is a classic, but it’s almost like John Hughes just wanted squeeze out as many hits as he could before he got to 1990 and his movies started to smell bad, but seriously. Ferris Beuller? If you thought he was all the rage, I want to know why. Honestly, I thought Farmer Ted from Sixteen Candles was way cooler, or even Ducky from Pretty in Pink… but Bueller… I don’t know. Maybe there was always the potential for Anthony Michael Hall to become a hot psychic.. but whatever happened to Matthew Broderick and who cares?

I don’t know when it started, the Wednesday night tradition of watching ABC television’s reality show “Wife Swap.” If I knew, I would go back in time and look away before the train wreck, or even better position myself as far from the TV as possible. How the show has manged to maintain itself these last few years is beyond me, but season after season foolish families agree to swap wives with another family for two weeks to experience another lifestyle (and hopefully TEACH the other family how wrong their style of life is).

I have managed to learn two things from the show:

1. If you’re going to swap lives with another woman from another family, you better believe that they are going to find a family who is completely opposite of yours in beliefs, practices, customs and values.

2. I hate reality TV more and more each time I watch it.

The unfortunate thing is that it really is like a train wreck. Gruesome, hideous and powerful enough to scar your mind, but if you pass it by while scanning channels you will stop.

Beware this evil mind trap. Not only is it one of the most awful reflections of a closed-minded society, they seem to gather some of the most evil women on the face of the planet. You will hate them.