Recently it has come to my attention that one of Big River’s fellow tenants called us “circus people.” Granted, this comment was heard by one of our “circus” people while sitting in a restroom stall playing games on an iPhone, but that is usually where the truth comes out. Circus people. Really?

To be honest, our office does not look like a regular business; I will give them that concession. We have a surplus of glass and steel and concrete and rough-hewn timber and chairs made of leather and bark and giant stumps for table bases and a big boat hanging from the ceiling and more food than a Montana survival cult. There is probably beer in an ice chest over in the corner and several VCU Brand Center students hanging out and a few motorcycle parts greasing up the floor. Those Star Wars Light Sabers and all those left-wing-counter-culture-square-pegs-in-the-round-holes Apple devices do not help our misfit notoriety, to be sure, especially if you are a Microsoft drone who spends all day whacking your Dell. Nor does the open door policy to anyone looking to think differently or strangely or not at all debunk our circus train stature.

Fred is on the couch sometimes in the main conference room (we circus people call it “The Lodge”) with his shoes off, possibly sleeping, possibly solving a problem, possibly watching a basketball game. So what? Scott plays his guitar when the mood hits him. It is not like he is swinging on a trapeze from the ductwork. My wall does sort of look like the closet of a serial killer, and there is Noel’s homemade, cardboard periscope and Geoff’s huge fruit fly genus poster and Marcel’s severed Spock ear and Jimmy’s Phish paraphernalia and Dee’s bourbon-of-the-month stash and Kim’s Playboy magazines (those are for a client, I swear) and Margaret wearing sunglasses all day. Jeff has been known to remotely control people’s computers and Jan, while small, is not circus small by any means. We talk loudly sometimes. Okay, it could be considered screaming if you were out in the hall near our front door, but still, circus? I saw Water For Elephants. We’re not even close.

I walked down and looked at their offices the other day, the offices of the people who called us circus people. Standard equipment. Compared to their space and the untrained eye, perhaps ours looks a little like the circus, especially to a person sitting in a cube farm crunching numbers.

To give the devil his due, it could be the way we dress that has given us this P.T. Barnum-ish moniker. I don’t know about you, but I get up every morning, stand in my closet gazing at the stacks of sweatshirts and denim and wonder, “What would Bozo do?”

Seriously, I have never seen anyone at Big River wear giant polka dots. Well, there was that one time, but who am I to question what women wear when they leave home in a hurry? Normally we wear jeans, t-shirts, athletic shoes and, okay, maybe my checked bedroom slippers are a bit circusy, but there are a lot of clowns in business wearing suits too. Then there is Noel’s hat up there in that pic. I cannot defend that.

I think our circus rep probably happened in the elevator. We have done some strange things in there, all of them legal, however. We did not leave that big wad of gum in there no matter how many times we were accused.

The aforementioned restroom may have also sullied our honor, although the guys from the other company could compete with any pack of elephants or chimps in there. One guy left a half-eaten banana next to a toilet. One dumped his drink in the stall and tossed a few squares of paper into the massive puddle and ran. One laid his Subway sandwich on the sink while he was otherwise occupied. I found a spreadsheet in there on the floor next to a cookie with one bite taken out of it. These are just a few of the printable observations. Let us just say that in the restroom, the circus is losing this game 100-17. Yeah, I admit we scored 17. We have adhered some interesting verbiage to the walls in there. But usually it is just mildly offensive or insulting or juvenile. Look, we do ideas for a living. No company would ever want us to balance their books.

American business talks about innovation constantly – until it runs into creative people in a restroom or elevator. Then it scares them. If you go to any of those tech startups we all read about in the Wall Street Journal or Wired or Mashable or in the New York Times, you will see people wearing shorts and sandals and sleeping on the couch next to their dog. I used to bring my dog, Rudy, to work. Then one day he pooped right in the middle of the front door. I guess his business manners fall on the circus side of the corporate divide.

Sounds like Rudy may be visiting the office soon.

I have strange dreams around holidays. The one about Santa and a family of elf zombies kept me freaked for days. The pumpkins and nuns dream still bothers me on Halloween. My most recent dream fits today’s holiday if you live in certain parts of the country where Thanksgiving parades are not sponsored by Macy’s, but do involve flatbed trucks decorated with paper mache and waving girls in some stage of winning a beauty pageant. I say this not to make fun of any regional group, mind you, but to prove that I have, indeed, decorated such a float and dated such a waving girl, and I figured this experience gives me a small amount of credibility on the subject.

In my dream I was on one of these floats wearing a camo’d pilgrim hat, a big belt buckle and – here’s the weird part, just in case you thought I had gotten to it already – I was deep-frying a cowpigdeerturducken while waving to people who looked at me as if I had either given a large contribution to the First Baptist Church or stolen that very same thing. Strange, not going to lie.

The dream sort of hung around for my morning Coke and Pop Tart and I almost told my wife, but thought better of it since she was busy with our own bird and already wonders what I dream about that makes me grunt and yodel now and then. It has bothered me all morning, to the point that I Googled “Cowpigdeerturducken” just now.

No such animal combo on the Internet. Zip. That is how dreams work. They mess with you at night with un-invented things even Google cannot find just so you will spend some of your day trying to understand a way to justify their unconscious stupidity.

Then again, in a Bass-Pro-Shopped world of Cajun marinade injectors and ten-gallon deep fryers, why has no Bubba ever tried to create the ultimate redneck feasty beast? A Cowpigdeerturducken would be a whole episode of Extreme Chef.

Finding a deep fryer big enough to do the job on a cow stuffed with a pig stuffed with a deer stuffed with a turkey stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken would really be a 50-gallon drum perched over a bonfire, and even that might not do it. In my dream it was kind of like that. The whole float was a little greasy and slippery. That much boiling oil would be a dangerous job even for Paula Deen in a fireproof NASCAR uniform, although imagining Paula Deen in that uniform is not a dream I would admit to having.

None of this really matters, though. It was just a dream brought on by a biscuit I ate too late last night. No such thing as a cowpigdeerturducken, nope, just a weird dream. Besides, Gander Mountain and Bass Pro Shops sell everything from camo’d long johns to camo’d couches, but there are no camo’d pilgrim hats in either place. I checked their websites. And not one item big enough to help a man cook a cowpigdeerturducken. Part of me says thank God and the other part wonders why no one has done it yet.

As you watch the parade this Thanksgiving morning, imagine yourself on one of those floats dressed like Larry the Cable-Pilgrim, riding beside a sloshing drum of boiling oil frying a cowpigdeerturducken puckering into a crispy critter while you wave. And my wife wonders why I grunt and yodel in my sleep.

(NOTE: Even though I could not find a cowpigderturducken or a camo’d pilgrim hat on the Internet, I found that pic up there. That is the best I could do)

Being a Dudeist Priest, with an official license recognized in some states, means I can now perform marriages and funerals and such, not that I have an extreme urge to do either, but if someone is in need of a cleric, I can pinch-hit for a preacher. The good news about Dudeism is, however, there are no preachers, just Dudes. I’ll explain.

Oliver Benjamin, a journalist, started the Church Of The Latter-Day Dude in 2005 as the “slowest growing religion in the world.” It is legit, so the website says (dudeism.com), just like Baptists or Catholics. I hope this means I get a special tax deduction or something, but I doubt it. No matter, I’m pretty stoked about my newfound religion.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2PPgcNjols

Keep in mind, Dudeism exists with other religions perfectly. It makes no judgements about others, no hell-fire and damnation or passing the plate (unless you go to the Dudeism Store), and no “I’m going to heaven and you’re going to hell” pronouncements. The goal is do what the Dude would do; the Dude being Jeffery “The Dude” Lebowski from the Coen Brother’s movie “The Big Lebowski.” Jeff Bridges knows him all too well. You don’t even have to bowl or drink White Russians to follow this faith. It’s cool. Just hang loose and watch it roll, baby.

Now before some of you organized religious folks get all Jesus’d up on me, remember, Jesus was the original-dude. Just because he drank wine and ate fishes and loaves and Fig Newtons (according to a Forum post I read from a dude named Lazy Dude) doesn’t mean your organized religion can’t mix with an unorganized religion such as Dudeism. Jesus talked about loving those who hate you and helping the sick and poor (all things few Americans like to do these days). In fact, Jesus is listed as one of the Great Dudes In History along with Lao Tzu (creator of Taoism), Hereclitus (stop it), Snoopy (yeah, Charlie Brown’s dog), Quincy Jones (urban Dude), Sarah Silverman (in our world, we don’t stereotype genders, so girls are Dudes too, even girl comics), The Buddah (meditating Indian Dude), David Grayson (alter ego of writer Dude Ray Stannard Baker), Jerry Garcia (duh), Joni Mitchell (troubador Dude), Gandhi (peace-loving Dude), Walt Whitman (hobo Dude poet), Julia Child (cuisine Dude), Jeff Spicoli (surfer Dude, AKA Sean Penn from Fast Times At Ridgemont High), and uber Dude, Kurt Vonnegut. Just for the record – and I have messed this one up before – there are no Dudettes, just Dudes, no matter if you are male, female, animal, vegetable or mineral. A unisex approach simplifies things.

Please don’t get Dudeism mixed up with Wiccans, or Satan worshippers or vampires or werewolves or atheists or any other group you may see on True Blood or the Twilight series of movies. We’re easy on the theology, dude. Chill. Sit back. Take life as it comes. Forget the past and the future. You can’t change either one. Right now is what we have. This minute. That’s it. Make the most of it, dude. If that sounds like some freakish mantra, perhaps you need to go to iTunes and purchase some better tuneage.

Being one of only 130,000 Dudeist priests in the world comes with some pretty special privileges besides the aforementioned license to wed and bury people and dispense Dudeish advice. I have an official certificate (shown above), I get the Dudespaper and I am somewhat well versed in the Dudeist Bible, known to lay people as “The Abide Guide.” This handsome volume contains the tenets of the Dudeist religion. By the way, that thing in my cheek is my tongue. Even my dog, Rudy, is a practicing Dudeist Priest:

If you go to Dudeism.com, you’ll see that Dudeism is a mellow, laid back faith described thusly: “Down through the ages, this “rebel shrug” has fortified many successful creeds – Buddhism, Christianity, Sufism, John Lennonism and Fo’-Shizzle-my-Nizzlism. The idea is this: Life is short and complicated and nobody knows what to do about it. So don’t do anything about it. Just take it easy, man. Stop worrying so much whether you’ll make it into the finals. Kick back with some friends and some oat soda and whether you roll strikes or gutters, do your best to be true to yourself and others – that is to say, abide.” And say it like Sam Elliot.

The four books of Duderonomy lays down some simple ways to live, like “Whenever possible, try to get paid in cash in order to avoid getting bumped up into a higher tax bracket.” And “Respect everyone’s point of view. It’s just, like, their opinion, man.” Of course there are several obvious ones as well: “Unless you’re a high-ranking member of society, don’t expect too much from the police.” And the ever-true “When confronted by unfortunate circumstances, forget about it. You can’t be worrying about that shit. Life goes on.”

How do you know if you might be a candidate for Dudeism? Do you like to listen to Creedence? Have you seen all of the Coen Brothers movies? Did you download the Big Lebowski app for your iPhone? Are you tolerant of differing opinions? Have you had enough of the hatred practiced by other religions? Do you prefer not to shave? Do you like really comfortable shoes? Then you may have found a church home.

Dudes, I will say this, though: the whole Abide thing is not for everyone. Some people like their religion unleavened, no salt, straight from the can, no balance, no levity, no shit. But if you believe in loving your fellow man and think Jesus was cooler than the people out there using his name right now, perhaps you should think about Dudeism, but don’t think about it too hard, man. You don’t want to hurt yourself.

Okay, let’s all stand, turn to hymn number 342 and do a little Abiding and takin’er easy.

Over the next several posts, I will tell a few tales from a trip Susan and I recently took across Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Tennessee – most of the South as I know it. We also came within 20 miles of Kentucky and Mississippi on this 2,500 mile run to revisit our roots. We did not visit either of the Café Risque’s we saw on our journey, however. I only mention that because I know several people who have and who asked me about it several times during my trip. No nekked lunch for us.

Thirty-four years ago, my wife and I spent our honeymoon and every dime we had – all $400 of it – to go to a fairly new amusement park in Orlando, Florida called Disney World. That’s sort of how this recent trip began, as an ode to that part of our past. We went back to the Magic Kingdom and barely remembered any of it except Space Mountain – which I had to ride with the help of half a Vicodin due to my persistent back ailment. Getting old is a bitch.

The adventure grew to a drive down Highway 30A along the Florida Panhandle (a ride worth taking for anyone with a love of condos built just before the real estate meltdown). From there we took care of a little family business in Alabama and then on to a visit to our Crimson Tide Alma Mater in Tuscaloosa, walking one of the most beautiful campuses in the country and crying at the devastation of the most horrific tornado to ever hit Alabama. My words are too weak to tell what we saw in Alberta City.

Along the way, we roamed what was once called The Redneck Rivera in Panama City Beach, Florida, we dropped by boiled peanut shacks in Georgia and peach stands in Chilton County, Alabama. We ate barbecue every chance we got (as the first post following this one will attest). We saw fire and torrential rain, alligators, floods, cats, dogs, chickens, deer, armadillos and hundreds of what my father called “the National Bird of the South,” buzzards. From sugar-white sand to red clay to buggy swamps, wind-bent trailers and leaning loblollies, my Southern history passed before my aging eyes. Sometimes memory lane has a few potholes. But between spicy bites of Gulf shrimp in Destin to plums in Clanton and homegrown tomatoes in Andalusia, our stomachs relived a few memories as well. People down there eat better than people up here. Sorry. That is just the Southern Baptist truth.

By the way, if you have never stopped by South of the Border on the aforementioned side of the North Carolina/South Carolina state lines on I-95, you have missed one of the strangest things ever to sit beside an American interstate (unless you count that straddling-the-road McDonald’s in Oklahoma). The pic of it up there hardly does it justice. Yet people still get married there.

With a cold drink between us, let the trip begin.

I spent last week reading World Book Encyclopedia’s Year Books from 1965 – 1976. Perhaps you are old enough to remember these dusty annuals. It is fascinating to read about events that happened 40-something years ago in language that makes it seem like the news happened just this year.

Astronauts were heroes. Russians were bad. New music from Sonny and Cher, a group called Black Sabbath, and a hard rock band going by the odd-spelled moniker, Led Zeppelin confounded the writers of these old books. The description of Woodstock in dryly-academic terms from a man clearly in his 50’s comes across like a Martian telling about his first day on earth.

“Bonnie and Clyde represents a violent new trend in film” and young directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese baffle the stodgy editors pounding the keys of old manual typewriters in offices where people could still smoke three packs a day at their desks.

“Easy Rider” comes across as political culture gone awry. “Laugh In” and “All In The Family” are pushing the boundaries of television. On one page a bikini is introduced. On another, an unlikely torchbearer for the JFK legacy named LBJ changed us all with the Civil Rights Bill, his Great Society and the War on Poverty before losing a wounded war in Vietnam. Watergate was happening in raw, unprecedented audacity on page after page of smelly old texts. Reading about Archie Bunker and Fred Sanford in the present tense brought back memories of my father laughing in our old Naugahyde recliner.

All of this information is easily available now in a single click through Google, Bing, Wikipedia and YouTube. But back when I was a kid, World Book Year Books were state of the art information, organized and summarized neatly into quick articles tucked around black and white images that once felt immediate and now feel ancient. Reading these old words took on deeper meaning for me since I had short but personal interactions with figures like Martin Luther King, George Wallace, John Connolly, Ronald Regan, Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant and Joe Willie Namath, to name a few. Racially charged photographs of the historic March from Selma to Montgomery happened in full color ten feet in front of me on the Mobile Highway.

In many ways, 1965-1976 created the DNA of today’s culture, good bad and ugly. Yet from book to book we seemed more willing to face our failings, hypocrisy and hope with more honesty than today. Chet Huntley and David Brinkley told the truth, without opinion, punditry or bullshit. The news was the news, not hype and spin. When Cronkite said, “And that’s the way it is,” it was.

Growing up, with Vietnam and Watergate, rock and roll and hippies, free love and protests, demonstrations and even the infamous phrase, “never trust anyone over thirty,” young people still talked with older people all the time. Even the Beatles. You do not see much of that anymore. Many young people today have adopted a confidence so extreme, they can only converse with people their own age or younger. That, however, is another post with its own set of newly minted research.

“How can it be that with smartphones and social media filling our lives, we don’t have a real conversation anymore?” said a talking head on one of the 500 channels pouring through my TV. “Everything happens on Crackberries and iPhones and Droids.”

We do still talk with each other, of course, but few of us are listening to what is really being said.

The dirt track hugs wooden bleachers angling up about 25 feet into the damp Shenandoah wind. A man in a camo gimme cap with a belly big enough to have swallowed a small child chugs by wearing a painted-on-tight t-shirt, confederate tats embroidering his hairy forearms. Gasoline fumes laced with cigarette smoke and the aroma of deep-fried grease float in the muddy breeze between the trucks parked in the grass lot. A pretty woman walks by with a Bible verse on her shirt while another woman, less pretty, curses at a man on her cell phone. Two-toned blondes in skin-tight jeans snuggle wiry thin boys next to a concession stand that is big enough for a decent wrestling match. I could tell this was going to be fun from county fair smell and the sound of rubber churning mud on the far side of the weathered grandstands.

Walking into the crowd, I look around at Jim, my doctor and friend long before that. “I’ll give you $20 to yell, ‘I love Barack Obama?’”

“I’m not taking that bet. Besides, I don’t have my medical kit with me,” he says with a straight face. He is not kidding.

Rain pounds the red clay track into a reflective ooze slicker than owl manure squishing under the tires of warped, colorful cars built by hand from pipes and fiberglass and a desire to win some spending money.

Nothing says Saturday night like wet bleachers plastering your ass to the seat of your pants while people around you yell at flimsy, dirt-plastered cars barreling around a slippery oval. The rain stops. Racecars rumble onto the slush single file. Everyone secretly waits for the wreck that eventually comes.

It takes 15 minutes. A Navy blue Mustang switches ends, grinding and sandwiching between two other Mustangs. It seems that every car on the track is a Mustang. I grin. Jim grins. The first wreck, albeit small, has occurred. Everyone feels like they got some of what they came for.

Above us, frantic bugs boil in hypnotic patterns around the lights causing Jim and me to divert our gaze from the speckled brown racing.

“Try to follow one,” says Jim, watching the bugs arc and loop in big, goofy circles.

I do for a while, before looking over at a grizzly gentleman spitting a slurry of Red Man and corn chips over the rail. It barely misses a pregnant woman eating a hotdog. You cannot purchase this kind of entertainment in New York City or Los Angeles. But it happens every Saturday night in small towns across the South.

“That guy looks just like…” A crunching sound to our left pinches off my sentence. What I see pushes the spitter from importance.

People stand and scream and point left. A bulbous man burps and yells, “Brrlook!” all in one raucous motion. Up in the tight curve of slanting earth a purple and white car collides with a lime green car spilling curled sheets of what was once purple and lime green cars onto the track. A red and blue racer swerves to miss the chunks and hits the guardrail like a paper airplane unfolding, sending wobbly slices of thin fuselage across the ground in a manner resembling tossed potato chips. The orange light glows from the tower, pissed-off drivers get out of their wrecks, and a hurried cleanup commences. The surviving cars roam and jerk back and forth around the track, anxious for the green light.

I inhale a haze of rusty air thrown up by spinning tires. Puffs from a cigarette brush my face, burning my eyes. Beside me, smoke plumes between the puckered lips of a woman chomping a mound of chili cheese nachos loaded with raw onions. Uncorking my earplugs, I look over at Jim. He looks like a man visiting either a zoo or a strip joint for the first time.

“I’m liking this,” he says.

“It’s the most fun I’ve had since I was a kid in Montgomery, Alabama,” I say. “Wish my dad was here to see this.” He loved to watch cars drive in circles.

Jim and I stand frozen between city and country, lost in a time warp that feels like 1966. For me, the aroma of blue collar summer nights mix with fading memories of Red Farmer trading paint with one of the Allison’s while two men beat each other with cowboy boots not 5 feet away. This was my youth revisiting for just a moment. I cannot speak of what Jim’s thoughts held. But he looked hypnotized by the proceedings.

“Worth every one of those ten dollars,” says Jim. He turns, looks up at the crowd and leans in nervously. “Let’s get the hell out of here before these boys get all raced up out there in the parking lot.”

We walk away and into the misty night, our ears ringing, our noses filled with wet dirt, our inner rednecks smiling. Well, at least mine.

(to be continued somewhere down the road)

It took less than fifteen minutes to realize I had found a place that fit a part of me that I have kept prisoner under the guise of corporate bullshit for 30 years. I was still in the cab when it hit me. I see why Harry “Give ‘Em Hell” Truman loved to come here. Key West is so far from DC – or his native Missouri – as to seem foreign. I know. I’ve lived in both. People in Key West have their own opinions about life, love, law and liquor. Independence flourishes. Eccentricity rules. Best to bring you’re a-game in that department.

Conch’s – what Key Westerners choose to be called – don’t care what you think about them or politics, religion, work ethic, prejudice or government. Just to prove it, Key West has left the United States officially several times (I lose track), forming the Conch Republic and still flying the blue Conch flag every chance they get from New Town to Old Town. According to the pilot, the sign on the airport building: “Welcome To The Conch Republic” is longer than the runway. The motto “One Human Family” is displayed at businesses and homes across the 4×2 mile stretch of very flat and independent land. People are happy, behaved and respect each other, even when they do not get along. It is another world down at the southernmost tip of the U.S. So leave yours behind when you come here; changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes and all that.

Leathery fishermen work docks; leathery tourists roam hundreds of bars; leathery Conch is served in balls of spicy cornbread. Dogs are everywhere. Some are dressed like pirates. Chickens dip and peck across streets and under tables. It seldom rains in Key West. The sky is so blue and the trees so red that people run into each other looking up at both. Of course, looking down you will likely see a plastic cup of rum or beer or “greenish booze from the blender.” Music pours from almost every open door on Duval, cool air rushing the sidewalk, luring sweating people inside. Word is there are well over 300 bars in 8 square miles. Most are packed. Some are disguised as restaurants. When the cruise ships dock, the crowd swells, the patrons get older and hundreds of Hawaiian shirts snug the bars.

The smell of salt breeze, fish, coconut, alcohol and cigars waft down Duval Street, a place much like Mardi Gras without the police. I saw two cops in 6 days while walking at least 10 miles a day. Then again, I was not in the thick of it at 3 A.M. I heard more laughter than a lifetime of jokes and more lies than a lifetime of politics. Except the lies are told knowingly as humorous stories meant to entertain.

“Life is just too damned hard and too damned short to spend it listening to lies told by assholes who think we believe them to begin with,” said a man who tossed his former job, life and wife and runs a fishing charter boat catering to “short-termers.” That’s what he calls people like me who only come down for a few days. “We understand our lies here. They are told with flair and honesty. Honest lying. That’s storytelling.”

“The tales are tall under the palms,” said a woman driving a tour bus passing us near the first headquarters of Pan Am. “If you want a beer, there’s Kelly’s in the old Pan Am house.”

No shortage of beer in Key West. They sell it in four-foot wide alleys “just big enough to wedge two drunks into,” according to the guy sipping a cool one in front of the “smallest bar in the world.” Open containers are no problemo on Duval. The Anheuser-Busch distributor must be a happy guy.

Over by the Hog’s Breath Saloon sign a man laughed with passersby. Friendly and wanting nothing from anyone, I think his name was Bart or Ben. Could have been Louie or Frank or Gerald. Hell, it doesn’t matter. No one has a name down here.

“You will be lied to at least 30 times a day at work, I bet,” he said. “That’s not the bad part. The bad part is, they don’t even know how to lie in a good way. They are pathetic liars. They’re just deceit wrapped in fake concern. There are two kinds of liars. Only one of them you want to hang out with. The rest of them can go to hell. And will.”

“I’m in advertising,” I said, smiling.

He nodded, holding up one hand like an evangelist on TV. “Preaching to the choir, brother.” He walked over and rubbed his dog’s head and turned to me and squinted. “I hope your lies are the good kind. Not bullshitting some poor bastard about what happens in a meeting. You getting me here?”

“I know exactly what you’re talking about,” I said. “If you’re going to lie, make it a good story about something that…” He cut me off.

“Look, sorry to cut you off, but Hemingway lived up on that hill over there.” He pointed up Whitehead Street to what was likely a one-foot-above-sea-level rise in the landscape, not exactly a hill to most people, but easily a hill here in Key West.

“I was there earlier today,” I said. “Lots of cats. Some six-toed. The guide said a few things I know to be suspect.”

“So?” he said sharply. “Did you go there for the guide or for Hemingway?”

“We both know the answer to that question,” I said.

“Hemingway knew how to tell a good lie, didn’t he? Wrote them in an attic behind his house. A Farewell to Arms, Death In the Afternoon, Winner Take Nothing, Green Hills of Africa, For Whom the Bell Tolls – all his best lies were written down right up there. Tennessee Williams wrote the first draft of A Street Car Named Desire over at the La Concha Hotel. There are a lot more too. I’m just too drunk to remember them all.”

He seemed more sober than most people I know.

“I wouldn’t call what Hemingway wrote lies, necessarily,” I said. “I’d call them great stories.”

“But were they true?” he said, pausing for effect. I grinned. “Same thing!” He burped silently, his eyes remembering lunch. Obviously a red onion was involved.

“Hemingway didn’t lie about what some shit at work. He told lies about fishermen and wars and struggles with being human,” he said. “Great stories, his lies.”

I turned to leave, but he caught me. He was not finished.

“Jimmy Buffet records his lies in a concrete building near the harbor,” he continued. “Michael McCloud sings his over at the Schooner Wharf Bar. Some famous country stars steal songs from Michael, you know. Sometimes we inspire other people to lie. You get YouTube?”

“Some of Mr. Buffet’s and Mr. McCloud’s lies sound pretty true to me,” I said.

A group of loud people came by. One woman was loudly telling her friends about an adventure she most likely had not been on. She waved her arms in circles for effect. Everyone listened drunkenly.

“Proof right there,” he said tilting his head towards them. “I’m telling you, this is an island of damned good liars. And a few Nashville Pirates.”

VIDEO CREDIT: YouTube, Michael McCloud singing Tourist Town Bar at the Schooner Wharf Bar, Key West. As he has done for over 20 years.

SATURDAY BEFORE EASTER:

We had already made a boiling error before we even started dying the Easter eggs. Most smart people know that an egg pulled from a cold fridge will, when dropped into boiling water, fracture and disgorge its contents like the one you see above. We colored it anyway, as you can see. It looks like Shrek barfing.

We cracked three of the orbs before figuring out the temperature problem. So we went back and re-did the process with the rest of our eggs, putting them into a pot of cool water and bringing that water to a boil. It is amazing what happens when you understand what you are doing – almost. The correctly boiled eggs appeared to be perfect. After they cooled, we colored each one from the classic Paas box with the twelve holes (for drying evenly). The instruction, I noticed later were on the box exactly where we had already punched the holes. So I blame Paas. Right?

I must reluctantly mention that my wife was out-of-town when this all happened or the process would have been quite different. As it was, my oldest son, his fiancé and my daughter were the culprits. Of course, I was the head chef of this misguided culinary catastrophe. I swear I thought I knew how to do this. After all, I have been involved with Easter eggs from back in the 1960’s. You would think I’d have it down by now.

The goal was to hide the eggs for Rudy, our Jack Russell. It turned cold, however, and began to rain and Rudy did not understand the egg-hunting concept to begin with, so we just put them in the fridge and drove to a café in Richmond, where I ate oysters that were amazing.

About now I should also mention that I have a little reaction to shellfish from time to time. Not the restaurant’s fault. It just happens. I will leave the details at that. It was just an omen of things to come.

EASTER MORNING:

We got up, I felt much better and we decided to eat the boiled eggs – first the orange one. The yoke was not cooked. We all looked at each other. Not a good start to Easter. We broke open another one. It was not cooked either. While my son began to systematically crack each one, looking inside to see the ugly results, I decided to do something that in hindsight was pretty stupid.

I figured an egg might explode if put into a microwave. I think I read that somewhere in an instruction book, but what about a boiled egg, or an almost boiled one? I cracked the shell a little and exposed the white. It was cooked like the others. So just the yolks were the problem. I placed it in the center of the rotating plate in the microwave oven. All seemed to go well until the timer reached 48 seconds. I am still cleaning up what happened next.

You have seen old war movies, right? You know the scenes where grenades explode in a spray of shrapnel? Imagine that grenade being purple and in your microwave. The sound was percussive, especially for a small egg. Badoof! It kind of sounded like that. The damned thing just blew up into a million yellow, white and purple fragments, coating the inside of our shiny microwave. The amount of destruction was impressive for a single egg. The glass door window was plastered opaque.

Remember, my wife was not home, and my first thought, beyond the shock of what had happened, was relief that she had not seen this disaster. My kids were on the floor pouring tears in laughter. Rudy’s first reaction was to run. When I opened the door of the oven, he raced back into the kitchen and began to sniff the smell of exploded egg as if he were a four-legged Dyson.

The egg was a normal sized Kroger egg, dyed purple and boiled none too well. The remains coating all four sides of the microwave would indicate a full-grown rooster carrying a pipe bomb. The egg went from boiled to scrambled in one tick of the timer. The vapor of almost-bird still hangs in the air as I type this. Sort of like an egg sandwich that was shot with a 12-gauge at close range. And to top it off, my wife comes home tomorrow.

So, ah, what happens if you microwave a can of air freshener?

South Alabama, between Mobile and Dothan and north of Pensacola, is a rural place filled with deer, rabbits, alligators, foxes, squirrels, bobcats, panthers and even an off-course bear or two. There are no reindeer. Not officially. This fact never stopped my uncle from hunting them.

“This year I’m gonna get me one of them reindeers,” he would say.

My cousins and I would cry. We only saw reindeer as cute characters with weird names hooked up to Santa’s sleigh. It never occurred to us that anyone would hunt one. But when the weather turned cold, my uncle would start in with boasts of “baggin ol’ Rudolph.” I knew he would not stop there. He’d take out Dasher, Dancer, Donder, Blitzen – the whole song-full. It scared the hell out of us.

Every time he would go off at 3 A.M., toting that 12-gauge, we just knew he would come back dragging one of our beloved reindeer. He never did.

Years later, I realized that he was just messing with us kids. He never intended to kill Rudolph or any other reindeer. But he got a twisted kick out of our worrying about it.

When he was an old man, invalid and dying, he pulled me aside and whispered, “You know there ain’t no reindeers down here, don’t you?”

I nodded that I did know.

“They’re all out in Los Angeles,” he said. “makin’ TV shows.” Through the pain of cancer, he grudged a smile.

On his dying day, he was still messing with us kids.

Merry Christmas

Saturday shoppers strut through Tyson’s Corner mall. Christmas is in two weeks. You can see the building stress in their faces. The line for Santa is long and coughing and features a juggling elf amid a gauntlet of snotty sleeves and yawning parents. On Santa’s knee, a full-grown man and woman straddle the jolly old codger as he pretends they don’t weight 230 pounds each. His cheeks are rosy more from hypertension than joy.

At the food court, across from the Cinnabon, sushi rides a conveyor belt beside people who can’t use chopsticks. Sushi and cinnamon rolls probably should not be for sale this close, but that’s just me.

Playing cards spin in the air between the magic hands of a guy who not only can spin a dime in mid air, he can throw down some spin that almost makes me want to buy the $50 magic trick in the cool box. Then I remember that I don’t really like magic all that much.

About 3 P.M., I am tired and thirsty and buy a strawberry lemonade chiller from a fast food joint across from a row of massage chairs. “$1 for 3 minutes.” That’s a cheap massage. I inspect the chair. Seems legit, very sturdy, nice leather, solid construction. I go with it. Besides, I could use 3 minutes of even cheap rubbing after walking for three hours, so I settle in and feed my buck through the slot. The chair comes to life, rollers gouging and prodding my aching back and shoulders. Pressure pads constrict around my calves. Just when I am caught in the chair’s full grasp, another movement starts up, and not in a place I want massaged while sitting in the middle of thousands of people as Taylor Swift’s “Santa Baby” echoes past L’Occitane en Provence, Build-A-Bear Workshop and Godiva.

At this point, let me say that I have sat in my share of massage chairs (mostly at Sharper Image and Brookstone). I have had several serious massages over the years by experts, some using their feet. So I have the massage thing down. I get it. This is not it.

As the rollers drop down into a relaxing lumbar motion, what feels like a pool ball attached to the end of a broom handle begins to ascend from the middle of the seat. It is a bit weird at first. When it does not stop rising, I get concerned. When it gets to full-on prostate exam mode, I panic. My strawberry lemonade ends up on the floor. But my legs are trapped. The pool ball digs in like Hell Boy is head-butting me in the ass.

Is this a joke? Is there a camera videoing this for MTV? I am on my elbows, up off the seat trying to wiggle out of the thing’s way. Finally it eases off and drops back into the seat and I jump up. What the hell? I look around and another guy is sitting down in the chair beside me. He shakes his head and feed in $10 for 30 minutes.

“Man, I could use this,” he grunts to no one in particular.

I back away from him and the chair, un-tucking my massage wedgie. If a dollar gets you 3 minutes of the pool-ball-in-the-back-pocket treatment, what will $10 get you for 30 minutes? I refuse to imagine it. Walking through the crowd I glance back. The man is gone. It hasn’t been two minutes. The chair is rocking and rolling like the sick machine George Clooney constructed in the movie “Burn After Reading.”

And I always thought the Christmas goose was served on a plate.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETSWLFWPhqQ