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Forgive the joke. It was almost a typo but then I couldn’t let it go.

Anyway, I was surprised at the instant feeling of sadness when I heard he died today. More so than Michael Jackson. I had recently watched Point Break so his larger than life personality was fresh in my mind.

The guy had an energy that you don’t see very often. I suppose he was acting to some extent, but you didn’t have to be James Lipton to realize the guy had an intensity and presence on screen that isn’t taught in acting school.

He was one of the “role model” 80’s movie actors that figured into my adolescence. The peak of his career occurred simultaneously with my coming of age. I’m not sure exactly in what way he guided us gawky teens trying to figure ourselves out, but he was what you wanted to be like when you figured it out. You’d spend your days

wondering how to just stand there but still look cool, how to look tough in a “Don’t worry, I can take care of myself” way while not looking tough in a “Hey dork, meet me in the parking lot after school” way and of course, how to have rad hair but act like you don’t really care how rad your hair is.

He was who you wanted to be, and knowing that wasn’t really going to happen, he was who you were in your head. Other people saw a goofy kid with a mono-brow standing there but you knew it was really Jack Dalton standing there and if anyone got out of line, you would take out the trash (in a totally even tempered but unforgiving way). Even if he was a criminal or just a bad-ass tearing out people’s thoraxes, he did it in a way that made you believe that if you ever ended up in either of those situations, you would want to be that kind of criminal or that kind of deadly but focused and respectful bad-ass.

In Road House he was cooler than cool. Most actors given this challenge leave us rolling our eyes and making pfft noises. As outrageous as the character is, Swazye is no less genuine in the role than he would be in any movie. It’s a class in “How to be an action star in an 80’s movie without looking like an idiot 20 years later.”

Although Dirty Dancing and Ghost were not the movies rented from the wire racks at the gas station over and over again by me and my brother, they are a testament to his sexiness. As I said, he was everything you wanted to be and even if it might have been hard to admit to at the age of  15, you desperately wanted to be as sexy as Patrick Swayze.

• Extra awesome: he is singing the song too.
• Extra, Extra awesome: he wrote it for his wife!

Speaking of wife. He has been married to the same woman he met when he was 18. Before, during and after he was famous for a total of 35 years. We all know that isn’t the story for most of our Hollywood heroes. Check them out dancing together. They probably can’t wait to show off at wedding receptions. “Honey, want to dance? Oh, sure.. why not.”

His crowning achievement is, of course, Point Break. Many teens unhappy with their guidance counselor’s list of possible careers seriously thought about becoming a bank robber for a while. Not just any old thief though, a cool, friendly bank robber that only used the money to pursue enlightenment by means of surfing the planet. It’s clear in the movie that Patrick is Bodhi. He is there in his mind, body and spirit and that lets you be there too. It’s his charisma in this character that makes you want to drop everything in your life at the moment you’re watching the movie and just Be.  Bodhi: “This was never about the money, this was about us against the system. That system that kills the human spirit. We stand for something. We are here to show those guys that are inching their way on the freeways in their metal coffins that the human spirit is still alive.”

• Extra awesome: He wanted to do the skydive scene for real but the producers wouldn’t let him. They said that after the movie was a wrap, he could do it although he wouldn’t be covered by the movie’s insurance policy anymore. He did, and you see many scenes of him free falling in the movie. Tell me you don’t see pure exhilaration on his face both while he’s skydiving and while he’s surfing. Bodhi: “If you want the ultimate, you’ve got to be willing to pay the ultimate price. It’s not tragic to die doing what you love.”

Reality check…

I’m not 15 anymore. Patrick Swayze has served a purpose in my life and I am grateful to him for that, but alas, like the fictional worlds his characters lived in and kicked ass in, he was no more the perfect guy than I was. In a way we both may have been pretending to be Patrick Swayze in 1991. Jack Dalton taking out the trash for an hour and a half isn’t enough to inspire me anymore. I need to know the whole picture. Finding a good role model when your thirtysomething isn’t so easy. Turns out Captain Cool almost crashed a plane in a residential area during the time he was an alcoholic. “According to the police report, witnesses said that Swayze appeared to be extremely intoxicated and asked for help to remove evidence (including an open bottle of wine and a 30-pack of beer) from the crash site.” Bodhi: “100% pure adrenaline!” or maybe, “Six seconds. We’re going to be meat waffles.”

• Not awesome: He dabbled in Scientology.

I mourn his passing and will still enjoy watching his enthusiasm while playing my fictional childhood alter egos on screen whenever I get the chance. But age along with the ability to quickly do research on the internet has clouded my ability to see him only for what he once was. Although this might leave him a little tarnished aren’t we all are by some point in our lives? I wouldn’t say he’s this, but he might be getting a little closer to this.

I learned on NPR today that Ray Kurzweil believes our brains will achieve singularity with our technology in the middle part of this century. Normally, it doesn’t really matter what crazy people may say but if what the crazy person says usually comes true, then maybe he’s not so crazy after all.

The estimate actually doesn’t seem crazy at all if you think about it even for one minute. Computers were the size of rooms, then desks, then diaries and now split peas. It only makes sense that they will soon be the size of blood cells and once they are that size, what better place to put them than in our blood? In fact, it would take a crazy person to insist that in 40 years computers won’t be any smaller than they are today.

Krazy man Kurzweil believes that this singularity will blend our reality reality (his word) with our virtual reality until they are no longer distinguishable by our brains. This will be what we want mind you, not some side effect. The nano computers will decide which realities our neurons are perceiving at the moment (based on our “preferences” of course) but our brains won’t know the difference. A virtual rose will smell as good as a real rose if not sweeter. Email, texting and Facebook will be accessible by thoughts alone. I guess Logitech will be out of the keyboard business.

But really, do we want to blend these now separate realities? I suppose we do. We spend so much time on the internet it seems that reality reality just wasn’t cutting it. A few people scoff at cell phones and email but most are scrambling over each other to be the one with more “friends,” “views,” “hits” and “status updates.” It’s all about social connection. The internet makes us feel connected to other people and that feels good.

What motivated me to post this was the question of how our connection to others inspires us to feel alive. Not just the presence of connection though, but the lack of it.

If one were to go without human connection for decades they would become… well, sort of Krazy. At least we universally accept that is the case when we talk about putting prisoners in solitary confinement and watch Tom Hanks discuss how to build his raft with Wilson the volleyball. To have an excessive amount, or what seems to be an excessive amount (given Twitter, iPhone etc.), of human contact makes us feel hyper-alive. It is a rush to have five chat windows open, be watching a movie, talking on the phone and writing a post on your blog at the same time. Even driving while texting. Is there any reason to have to do this other than it’s a way to connect were there previously was none?

Why is it then that it is just as much of a rush to stand alone on top of a mountain? Canoe alone down a river without any people for miles? Stand alone on the plains with nothing but grass and clouds to accompany you?

Nobody (who’s done this) would argue that these situations make you feel more alive than you’ve ever felt. But one of the key factors in the experience is the aloneness of it. If there were 200,000 people standing with you on top of the mountain and you were surrounded by webcams and status updates, it still might be kinda cool, but it’s not going to blow your mind.

It seems we need connections to feel alive, but one of the things that makes us feel most alive is having no connection at all for a moment.

Having no connections indefinitely makes us less than human, but never having the chance to stand on the mountain with no connections makes us unaware of what it is to be human.

I wake up and log on to the computer. Often before I eat. I want to say I wouldn’t embrace Kurzweil’s future, but the fact of the matter is that I already have. If I have a computer in my head am I going to be able to shut it off when I go canoeing down the lonely river?

I want to believe that when the brain-puters are handed out, I will say, “No thank you. I’m going to keep my desktop computer” even though it’s one million times bigger, one billion times slower and a zillion times less efficient when it comes to connecting me with others.

This presumes that we will want to be able to turn IT off whatever IT becomes. The only reason things like Twitter exist today is because nobody wants to turn it off. Everyone wants it more and everyone wants it all the time. By the time the singularity occurs, there will be a preference where you can set your status to “alone” and you will be standing on the virtual mountain and it will blow your mind much more than standing on Mt. Reality.

Look at technology 50 years ago. We had the phone down pretty good and just figured out the TV. Now take a look at today. Is any one really Krazy enough to think that to be alive and to be on will be that different in 50 years?

I wonder if anyone else thought to write a blog entry on Barack Obama’s election?

What I’m really wondering is what my daughter’s America will be like. If all things go as planned, she’ll be eight when The Obama Express chugs down the tracks taking  him back to Chicago.

I remember voting for Ronald Reagan in 1980. The Weekly Reader had a little voting thing for kids on the back and I remember checking the Reagan box. Why? I think he was kind of a celebrity at the time or something. I was four and I remember Ronald Reagan. I remember very little of being four so the fact that I remember Ronald Reagan means he must have been popular.

Ironically, Obama is a star for the exact opposite reason. While people were glad Reagan was going to give the country back to the people (read: hard working citizens and businessmen), people are now glad Obama is going to take the country away from the people (read: greedy citizens and corrupt businessmen).

Is Obama really going to socialize America?

Is there really a place anymore for Ben Franklin’s America?

People think Obama is destroying the republic that the forefathers set out to create. It’s true, socializing things may not be what they had in mind. But they didn’t have everything in mind so let’s stop basing  modern America entirely on what people were shooting for almost 250 years ago. Were they thinking about how Facebook would change the social structure of the country? Hell, were they even thinking about how the car would change the social structure of the country? Of course not.

Their America was so new that inequality was only skin deep. Literally.  Taking the fruits of one man’s labor and giving them to another who wasn’t working as hard was unfair. But applying that same reasoning to a society a quarter millennium later doesn’t make sense.

People think that just because the founding fathers said so over 200 years ago, a child born into a poor family in South Central LA has the same opportunity at success as a kid born into a rich family in well, let’s say Midland, TX. It’s one thing to be academic and understand how the country was founded, but one must also be realistic and understand what the country has become. Notice the people making this argument weren’t kids born in South Central.

Where the old, brown, curled paper and good penmanship America breaks down is at the fact that everyone isn’t just arriving anymore. It is no longer a level playing field. People can say it’s the fault of the family of that kid for not being more successful, but the fact remains that nobody chooses to be born American. One doesn’t choose to be born a rich American with plenty of opportunities, and one doesn’t choose to be born a poor American with no opportunity due to education, income and circumstance.

It is nothing more than a lottery. If you came into this world a rich American then it was by pure luck. You certainly didn’t plan it. The founding fathers didn’t give it to you. So what gives you the right to hold that position as if you deserve it?  Maybe your family worked hard for their success but you as a separate individual no more deserve to benefit from that than a poor baby deserves to be put in a garbage can because it’s parents are failures.

Understanding the difference between what one has and what one deserves is problem with the current America. Some worked hard for what they have and they deserve it. Some have gotten more than they deserve from the very beginning, and some deserve more than they will ever get in this life. Are the trajectories of haves and have-nots set to continue infinitely? Maybe, maybe not.

If you’re already successful, do you not want to help others who didn’t have the same opportunities as you? If you’re living off of hand-outs wouldn’t you rather be the one with enough to hand out? There is still room for nobility in America. A reason to push for success that also brings equality. As much as some people might find it hard to believe, America is, in essence, a large commune as all countries are. We share roads, parks and rivers. Our children love and marry one another. You are not America by yourself.

I really wonder where would the forefathers stand on this election? Besides the fact that most owned slaves. They seemed to have the interests of the people in mind above all. Maybe they’d be communists.

In 2012 my daughter will be four and hopefully will remember the election. She may have a check box on an iPhone app instead of the Weekly Reader, but I wonder who she’ll choose?  I wonder if four year-olds loved Washington at the time? I wonder who Washinton loved when he was four?

We’re looking into different neighborhoods around Milwaukee. Why? Because of the economy stupid! Honestly though, some places are more friendly to the income challenged. We checked out a great house the other day that seems like a great deal. Is it some governmental stimulus deal to get us a new house without endangering the worldwide economy by offering us a mortgage loan we can’t afford? No, of course not. It’s just a nice place in a quaint little neighborhood with among other things, really high crime.

Crime sucks. Luckily, our high-rent digs here in Shorewood come with an ever present police force. Want to go for a walk at 1 a.m? No problem, you can probably be followed by your own private squad car. We’re wrestling with the idea of what it’s worth to always feel safe in your neighborhood. It’s worth a lot for sure, but how do you run the numbers exactly?

For the time being we remain, as does the bubble boy, in our little sphere of safety. Tonight the skies were filled with amazing lightning. Scary too. Not scary like crime though. It was a perfect opportunity to take advantage of living near the lake and living in such a safe neighborhood. We walked over to the park to watch the storm pass over to Michigan.

A crowd was gathered on the bluff. The scene was incredible. I had my camera ready and began to take pictures. Within minutes Shorewood’s finest came in two cars to let us know the park was closed. Not closed as in: Take your time and enjoy the incredible view of the storm over the lake from the safety of Shorewood, but closed as in: Yeah that’s really amazing but get the hell out of the park.

What trouble they were thinking we could have gotten into while standing there looking at a lake I don’t know. I suppose the whole problem is that they weren’t really thinking at all. The ordinance said the park was closed so the park was closed. I pleaded for more time.

“This is kind of a unique situation though don’t you think? It’s a rare opportunity to witness something like this.”

“The ordinance doesn’t say anything about unique situations.”

“Well, can we hang out for a few more minutes?”

“No, I’ve got better things to be doing right now.”

Hmm.. how much better I wonder. The fact that they came with two cars makes me think the one thing they don’t have is anything better to do. But alas, this is the price we pay for our safe neighborhood. It’s a nice feeling to know you can safely go for walks at any time of the day. It’s almost as nice as watching a thunderstorm blow across Lake Michigan.

Prior to the mid 1980’s George Lucas was the greatest movie genius ever. He basically created the trilogy as we know it. the fantasy adventure movie series that you can watch over and over and over and then play dress up and watch again. But that all ended in 1989 after The Last Crusade, or arguably, in 1981 after Raiders of the Lost Arc. Let’s face it, Return of the Jedi, Temple of Doom and Last Crusade weren’t great movies. Each one was an unsuccessful attempt at recapturing a prior movie. That means he really only wrote great stories for three movies ever. Then he wrote three mediocre stories (ROTJ, Temple and Crusade) that we’ll give a pass because we love the idea of the trilogy and they were made close enough to the others that it at least looked the same story and had the same people in it. Then he made three shit movies in the form of Star Wars prequels. Clearly, too much time had passed, too much money had been made and he had lost all perspective on what was cool about the cool movies he had made. Now he has made Kingdom of the Crystal Suck. We’ll get to that later. He is listed as having writing credits on over 40 projects since Raiders. Every single one but three of them are some spin off of Star Wars or Indiana Jones.

1. Captain EO. A weirdo movie starring Michael Jackson as Captain EO (really? yes really!)
2. Willow. Not bad. Probably the best thing to happen to midgets since R2D2.
3. Radioland Murders. A storyline I actually think is better than all the prequels combined.

So basically, he’s exclusively been beating this horse since 1977 when he wrote Star Wars. Before that, he had vision. He did American Graffiti, a social commentary that won academy awards. He did THX1138 a true scil-fi movie that investigates the what-if future that is heavily borrowed from by movies like The Matrix. My point is that he used to have a variety of ideas. And not just any ideas, he had a variety of good ideas. Star Wars was supposed to be just one of the ideas he had. A space movie that was more like old cowboy serial novels than it was like Buck Rogers or other sci-fi of the time. The problem being that it was so successful that he never got back to his pre-Star Wars self. After that movie, his life became a single track where the goal was to churn out as many Star Wars related ideas as possible. The Indiana Jones thing is actually a smaller version of the Star Wars thing contained within the Star Wars thing. It’s his one truly good idea since Star Wars and it just became another successful idea becomes bad idea factory story. So, 31 years go by, 46 stories are imagined and 43 of them are about Star Wars or Indiana Jones.

I don’t think he ever wanted it to be this way either. He wanted to be an art house film maker. He wanted to make movies with clever ideas that said something we could all relate to. Like any good art student, he wanted to make a statement about the world and money be damned. One possible explanation for The Crystal Skull is that he is getting back at us. We made these movies this popular and in turn it made him so successful he was unable to make it back to his real film maker self. He had to keep meeting our obsessed, fanatical demand for more Star Wars and Indiana Jones. It didn’t matter if it was a good idea, we needed our fix. The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a punishment bestowed upon all of us for making George Lucas what he is: A fat, rich, chin-less Star Wars/Inidiana Jones factory that can only churn out a rehashed 30 year old idea over and over and over and over.

“Look at what you’ve done to me! Now sit there for two hours and suffer the horror that is this movie! You like your precious little Indy do you? Well here he his talking to an alien. Take that. You can make fun of me all you want, but I am still the god of your geeky worlds and i can crush you like a bug with scenes of animated gophers and flying nuked refrigerators! it may be a lame, played out world but it is my lame, played out world and you are just tourists. Maybe you shouldn’t have been so obsessed with the good ideas when I had them. Maybe you shouldn’t have painted your car like a land speeder. Maybe you shouldn’t have pretended your prom date was Slave Leia. Maybe you shouldn’t have spent months building a Bobba Fett costume when you’re 35 years old. But you did, and now you are my slave.”

George Lucas has basically become Darth Vader. He was supposed to be something better. He had greatness in his blood, but then he got mutilated by fame and the power of holding your own merchandising rights and became the dark lord of his own empire. Bitter that he is not loved for being an artist, he travels the galaxy destroying audiences with his Death Star crappy movie ray.

“No! They’re a peaceful audience… they have no weapons!”

“Initiate preview sequence. Begin movie.”

“Nooooooooooooo!”

My only hope is that we can all be there next to him at the end with ILM and Lucasfilm crumbling around us. We shave off his beard that’s supposed to make him look like he has a chin but isn’t fooling anyone and see him for the genius he once was. He tells us thank you and to try and save ourselves, but we insist on saving him too. We take him home and burn him on a giant pyre and there is no party that follows. There are no muppet bears playing the congas. We don’t go out and run into the girl we broke up with a long time ago and marry her. There is definitely no hint that in a decade or two we will meet young George Lucas and learn about how he became old George Lucas. It is over. It’s the end.

Come fellow traveler and travel though the portals of time. Come with me back to a time when the world was a simple place. A time of answering machines, MC Hammer and CD walkmen. Come my friends to the early 90’s, to the time of… (insert dramatic orchestra swell and echo effect) No Internet!

I know it’s hard to believe that one could even survive such a trip, but trust me, I’ve been there and back and lived to tell the tale. The first morning I awoke in this bizzare past I found one house mate reading a book and the other playing the piano. It seemed as though we had traveled back an entire century in just one night. Would we be playing parlor games this evening I wondered?

The installation date wasn’t for a week so I began to wonder what we could accomplish in this time free of the burdens of email and YouTube featured videos. Maybe we could learn to ride a unicycle, speak with a perfect New Zeland accent or drive a car on two wheels like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Twins. All worthy endeavors that could be accomplished easily without the nuisance of the attention demanding internet.

Alas, it was not to be. For a life without the internet is but a half life. A life spent in coffee shops for hours using someone else’s internet. It’s like sleeping in someone else’s bed. It’s better than no bed at all, but it still smells like someone else. It’s a life spent desperately trying to find other technology to fill the void. A whole night spent trying to see if T9 input is really better than multi-tap.

Another night spent trying to have a “conversation.” Just minutes into each attempt, I would find myself referring to a YouTube video. With no ability to show said video, the conversation would just become a description of that video. I realized 99% of everything I currently think about revolves around a YouTube video. The night degraded into some perverse group therapy where each member would bring up a classic YouTube that everyone knew, while the rest of the group would laugh and agree how funny that video was.

What did I do most of the time in 1993? I remember being there surely. Was it something involving the outdoors? I suppose I spent most of my time in school being educated in all sorts of subjects that are entirely unrelated to YouTube.

There are few people without the internet nowadays. Almost any village on the globe, even ones with using wooden plows to eke their living out of the Earth are online. The current young generation will not know life without the internet. I can only hope for their sake that when they have to change internet accounts, Time Warner has a faster turn around time than a week.

I awoke this morning anticipating the arrival of the van with the ladder on top. It was kinda like Christmas morning. I now sit happily with my internet looking out the window at the beautiful spring day. It’s inspiring. It’s inspiring me to look up some good spring weather videos on YouTube.

What will make tonight a little different for my wife will be the fact that she will go to sleep with a younger man and wake up with him having left her. In his place will have appeared an old man. Well, not old really, just old-er. Same age as her in fact so maybe she won’t feel weird at all. The old man will feel old though.

How old is old you ask? How many teeth does the average person have in their mouth I respond? Too difficult for you? Well how about this: It’s the smallest number n with exactly 7 solutions to the equation φ(x) = n. It is also the sum of the totient function for the first ten integers.

I thought this was a no-big-deal age to turn, but thanks to The Internet, it’s feeling much more significant. It all depends on how you look at it I guess. It’s pretty epic to turn this age in binary. The ripe old age of 1000000… sounds pretty old though, I prefer to think of it in hexadecimal, a refreshing, wide-eyed 20.

You gotta take the good with the bad. That’s what getting older is all about.

Good: The number of completed piano sonatas written by Beethoven. Bad: the country code to direct-dial Belgium.

Good: The bit size of a databus commonly used in computers. Bad: Jesus’ age when he was crucified.

Good: The year of this century when John Spartan (the Demolition Man) will be removed from cryo-stasis to help deal with Simon Phoenix. Bad: The very same year will be the assassination of John Connor by a T-850 series Terminator. (One possible future.)

As I go to bed a young man, the age of which there are Baskin Robins flavors, the only thing I hope for is that tomorrow there will be less ice to chip off the driveway. Ironically, I will wake up the age of which water freezes in degrees Fahrenheit.

Anyone who wanted to be a politican in Greece would study the art of speaking from a master orator. This was absolutly necessary before you tried to convince the people to follow you to a better future. I suppose first you had to have a good idea of how to make the future better, but people wouldn’t follow you unless, through the art of speaking, you could organize and relay your idea.

In the 19th century presidential candidates would travel across America on a train giving speeches off the back of the caboose. They would sell them self and their idea to the people through the power of their speech (and possibly the height their stove pipe hat).

What happened?
Now you need to buy a lot of TV commercials. You also need… no wait, you just need a lot of TV commercials. You can have difficulty forming complete sentences let alone eloquent ones and still sit in The White House for eight years. W clearly never rode across America to dazzle us with his oration skills. In fact, I don’t think he’s even seen conjunction junction what’s your function?

Say what you like about any of the presidential candidates, but you have to give Barack Obama props for his old skool oration skillz. It’s a simple rule that hasn’t changed since the Greeks. You don’t really need a tall hat, or even a $500 hair cut. If you want to inspire people, master public speaking and deliver some stirring speeches.

They do say pictures speak louder than words though. Here are some pictures of Barack at his latest rally in Milwaukee.

Someone contacted me recently to see if i was still alive. It had been so long since a post to davauer.com that she thought I might have died or something. I feel flattered that someone must have logged on to the blog more than once in a six month period, but burdened by the idea that i must post to keep myself alive.

I know blogging looks like the most glamorous thing in the world right now with all the press it gets from confused adults above 50 but it ain’t like being a movie star or anything. Will Smith may be the most liked man on Earth in both movies and music, but hey, he doesn’t have a blog. “That’s because he’s the most liked man on Earth and doesn’t need to desperately write to no one in particular to get attention” you say, well… yeah, so? Anyway, I understand the burden under which I’ve placed myself and I plan to rise to the occasion. How am I going to quit my job and live on Google ad click-through revenue with only four posts a year?

It’s Orion’s first birthday today. I had planned many posts about the singular hysteria of the first year of first-time parents. The year seems empty now. No crazy diaper stories. A lot of nights with plenty of sleep. Seems weird to think my one year old son would be babbling incoherently while I write this.

A year from now though, I will be posting for three. In fact, starting in September I should have plenty of stories that revolve around the complex topic of doo doo.

(No worries, from day one the baby and the pee-stick of destiny have been under the protection of the fearless and noble Sir Gawain)

I’m sitting with my niece in the hospital writing this post. To be more accurate, I’m sitting with my sister in whom my niece sits. I figure I’ll try to write something before I become a part-time babysitter and have even less time to do things like write vague essays to no one in particular. My niece is being coaxed out into our cold world by none other than the Iron Chef himself. He seems in quite a hurry to get his dish done by the deadline. We all watch anxiously, empathizing with his efforts. My sister also has something that needs to get done and the deadline is now. The oven is off and the bun is done. It’s just a few short hours before I’ll have one more loyal, related reader.

It won’t be long before the baby realizes she has mad cooking skillz. I’m already looking forward to Thanksgiving twenty odd years from now. That’s going to be good eatin’. So many of our best qualities are are inherited like a chicken breast inherits the flavor of the bay leaf. We stew in our families while young taking on all kinds of flavors. The final dish can be so subtle you don’t know why you do what you do and like what you like, but you know it has something to do with those years in the family crock pot.

The snow came down hard this week. It wasn’t so much the each-one-is-a-unique-individual type as it was the clump-together-and-git-r-done type. It was beautiful nonetheless. Huge globs covered our landing strip of a driveway. No less than eight cars share the tarmac between our house and our neighbor’s. My friends to the south think, “That must have been beautiful. All that snow piled up… just like a painting.” My stout and sturdy colleagues up north think, “You have a snowblower right?”

No, I don’t have a snowblower, but I do have my mitts. Like recognizing a flavor in the Iron Chef’s Porcini Crusted Beef Tenderloin with Red Wine Reduction Sauce, I recognize my grandpa in me while shoveling. It wasn’t so much that he taught me how to work hard when work needed to be done. It was more like I just existed around him and pretty soon it soaked in. He always worked harder than anyone I knew while complaining about working less than anyone I knew. The work wasn’t easy work either. It was backbreaking crack-o-dawn work.

As many people as there are running around the city doing things that make them money to pay the bills, there just isn’t that much hard work being done. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of people doing things that are hard and putting in long hours but it’s still not life on the farm. Sometimes, like when the snow piles up on the driveway, I can go back to the farm and life becomes clear for a while. It becomes a simple equation: Hard work/Time=Job Well Done. It’s a chance for me to see my grandpa again. I see him when I come back in and my back is killing me but I know it doesn’t matter. I see him when I wake up and there’s twice as much snow as the day before and I think, “Well, looks like that driveway needs shovelin’ again.” For the next couple hours, I know exactly what life holds.

My niece will be a whole new spin on the family recipe. I’m seeing an intelligent, well traveled, multi-lingual chef with a great smile. Hopefully I can get her out to shovel with me a couple times.

“She’s got some sugar on top and some really nice carmelization” That she does Iron Chef, that she does.