Yes, it is true. The rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated. I realize that it has been well over a month since I last boarded the Maru for a voyage. My sincerest apologies. I could tell you that my life has been dreary and dull and un-blog-worthy. But neither of us believe that, do we? So I could tell you that I have been so very busy as to not have time to breath much less blog. But, alas, this also is not really believable. Besides, with the writers strike it wasn’t even like there was anything good on TV, nothing at all. (I remember the first American Gladiators being SO COOL. What happened!?
Anyway, I really don’t have an excuse. Life kept going and I did not keep up. I am bad. I must go iron my hands.
Okay, I am back. thought this is taking much longer to type now - I guess that is the nature of penance though. So let’s see. In the last month or so…I had a birthday. Go me. I am now officially a year older. One step closer to retirement…like I am one stroke closer to swimming around the world. Both are nice goals to have.
One interesting thing happened since we last set sail together. My mother read my blog. Seriously, I could not make that up. She read it. Pretty much the whole thing in one sitting I think. For whatever reason, my step dad gave her my blog. Yes. I said gave her my blog. Not “opened up a browser and allowed her scroll through posts at her leisure.” Not, “emailed her a hyperlink to the Maru so she could find it in the great blue sea of cyberspace.” Not even, “wrote down the IP address for her to type into her browser when she was sitting in front of the computer with nothing else to do.” He gave her my blog…as in printed off most, if not all, of the posts to date.
Yes people, let us have a moment of silence for that huge swath of trees that have been sacrificed on the altar of printer paper. On the other hand, if you are a logger, feel free to send my folks a personalized thank you note and one of those cool t-shirts
So the point is that she read my blog. Actually the more amazing point is that she did it in like one sitting. I am no sure if she was being punished or what. That could be a form of punishment. Like when I was in high school and evidently all of us were bad and were forced to read anything by any of the Bronte sisters. Looking back, I don’t know exactly what we did to deserve that, but I spent most of the rest of my youth terrified to do anything wrong lest Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Emily’s Wuthering Heights or Anne’s Agnes Grey be forced upon me again. In fact I am certain that there is a library in hell that is well stocked with similar ilk. But I digress. My mother punched a ticket on the Maru and set sail for a long journey. I have often been told that when blogging, one should never expect their mother to read it, but should write it as if they might. Obviously, I paid much heed to the first part of that, but might have let the second portion of that wisdom fly off my proverbial windshield like a flier for a new adult book shop in town. So, as now in retrospect I might should have been expecting for a while, one day my cell phone rang and when I looked at the caller ID it said “MiMi’s House”. I was at once thrilled and elated as this is not that common an occurrence. (easy now mom… I don’t mean to imply that you don’t call or that you have abandoned your youngest child here in the frozen north. Just that with long distance charges being what they are, it doesn’t happen every day.) I answered the phone with an upbeat and excited, “HI MOM!” Like a football player who scores a touch down and then looks into the camera with a big smile and mouths the words “hi mom” except I am not a football player, I have not scored a touchdown in like 15 years, there was no camera and mine was audible - otherwise it was exactly the same. Well, and unlike most of those football players I am not just saying it because I don’t know who my dad was, but am positive who my momma is. Other than that, it was just like that.
The other end of the line was not like anything you have seen on a Sunday afternoon on NBC. Believe you me. The response I expected was a “Hi baby!” But what I got was, “I raised you better than that.”
Now understand, I was raised to believe a certain number of things that were non-negotiable and unwaivering as a child:
- God exists
- Mom brought me into this world and has a legal right to take me out of it without written warning and at her sole discretion
- Mom has eyes in the back of her head
- Mom has a network of spies that would make J. Edgar Hoover sexually aroused
- Mom knows… (really that was it. she just knows - whatever it is)
- Spare the rod, spoil the
funchild - One cannot misbehave in front of Mom, but one must be even better in front of others so as not to embarrass Mom or family
- Mom will do whatever it takes to ensure that I am the best person I can be, even if that means killing me with her bare hands
- Mom loves me (just to note - these are not in any particular order and I do not mean to imply that being loved by Mom was lesser in importance than two separate references to her ending my life - I am just stream of consciousness here)
- Mom loves me more than Marvin. (Hey, these are my memories. His might be slightly different - or not.)
So knowing these things as reference points, I was suddenly stricken with a cold sweat trying to remember everything I did wrong in the last 37 years that hadn’t come up in casual conversation with her yet. Quickly three things went through my mind: WHAT could she have possibly found out…HOW did she find out…WHAT were the chances of me losing cell service in the next 3 seconds?? I did not, by the way, lose cell service - THANKS A LOT ROGERS!! (If I had a Telus plan, this all could have turned out different…) Anyway, once that all went through my head I remembered a couple of important facts: 1) I am an adult man with a wife and child. 2) I live like 3000 miles away from this woman now 3) I am an grown man! (I had to remind myself in this instance - so sue me) So keeping those things in the forefront of my mind, I replied with confidence a forethought, “yes ma’am you did and I am so sorry…what did i do”
Then my mother tells me that she has read my blog. Again, I whip open the steel trap that is my mind and flip though the mental files of what is on the Maru’s most recent posts… magic kisses, Muppet pinching her finger, Muppet apologizing…Christmas with the in-laws - all fairly innocuous stuff really. So I am really confused now, which is never a good thing. It’s like being in the boxing ring blindfolded on a pay-per-view event from Madison Square Garden and wondering if there is someway so sneak under the ropes and back into the locker room cause you don’t even understand the rules, but you just know that you are about to get the beating of your life. So, meekly I try a different approach - patronizing. “Gosh mom…you read my writing. I am thrilled that you took the time to read my stuff.” (I knew enough not to ask her what she thought about it - that would have been rhetorical, not to mention it would have swung wide the gates to a conversation that I was pretty sure I was trying to avoid.) But she tossed that tactic aside like a midget wrestler and says, “Yes. I read it…” AND JUST LEAVES THAT HANGING THERE. It was one of those horrific moments. I know that the best thing to do is keep my mouth shut and not be afraid of silence, but I can’t just stay quiet CAUSE IT’S MY MOM DUDE. So, with much trepidation, I ask…”And?”
It is amazing how a conjunction can so easily be turned into the world’s most dangerous question. Just by putting a little lilt into the end of it. But there. I had done it. That was like a moral victory in an underground bunker right before a daisy cutter gets dropped on you.
You can’t even congratulate yourself on your moral victory because all the words are being drowned out by the incessant whistling from the cluster bomb screaming through the air locked onto your position. Anyway, moral victory aside, the bomb finally drops “I DID NOT TEACH YOU TO TALK THAT WAY. YOUR FATHER DID NOT TALK THAT WAY. I DID NOT TALK THAT WAY. I RAISED YOU BETTER!!!!”
All at once, I was like, “whew…it’s the curse words that occasionally salt my postings that have her upset. Sweet mother of God, I thought she had found out about”…WAIT A MINUTE, I am not doing that - she reads this thing now!!! (I kid mother, I kid)
Actually I thought she might have been offended by the t-shirt reference and my brother
But, to be fair (to me) I thought, “gawrsh, I don’t cuss all through my postings.” Then I thought, “yeah, but you don’t read them all in a row…at one time…in one sitting…in printed form…for the first time ever…” And then I thought…”ok, I can see where she’s coming from on this. Sure Dad did actually do his fair share of cussing, but not til later in his life and by they weren’t together, so she might not have heard him as often as I did. And I have never heard my sainted mother utter so much as the beginnings of a swear word. And my brother is a youth pastor so he probably never sins, cause full-time church staff have morality clauses in their employment contracts and at the end of the day they work for God, so you can’t really get one past your boss there. SO yeah, in that context, I am the bad seed who moved away from family, shunned my mother country and became a writer (on the internet where there is all that porn anyway, so it makes me look even worse that I chose this as a medium, what does that say about me too) and started cursing like I was raised poorly. People read this and immediately think that my mother did a bad job of bringing me up. I have spent years now making my mother look bad to millions…hundreds of thousands…dozens…a handful of friends (and some star trek junkies who google this by accident and are so mad they have to grab their puffer when they find out that I have horked the venerable Kobayashi Maru for something that has absolutely nothing to do with the Star Trek universe or Saint Roddenberry).
And for this I am truly sorry. Momma, you raised me right. I have only dad’s half of my DNA to blame…and that woman, she gave me the apple and made me move to Canada. She seduced me with her feminine allures and sexual wiles and her bottled pheromones and fur lined handcuffs…oops, I am digressing. I am so sorry Momma. I want everyone to know that Mama Tried
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