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February 27, 2005
Yes, Virginia, They Are Canceling "Hee-Haw"
Out to dinner with relatives.
There is something strange about my uncle. Everywhere we go for dinner, he knows someone. It's always a male with a Michigan sweatshirt on. They clasp hands. They talk in a certain tone. They use language that I do not understand. I think sometimes that this is a "Y" chromosome bull-shit language in which the fluttering of various peacock feathers happens with every nuance. Yet I know many, many males that do not behave like they have something to prove when running into an acquaintance with hot sauce on their shirt.
Or perhaps he was just being social. This, I know nothing of.
A 7-year-old is not a pleasant dining companion. Neither is a sixteen-year-old. The only pleasant dining companions are over age twenty-one. They can imbibe; they don't ask in high-pitch voices when we are going to leave. We are not going to leave while people are still enjoyably sipping coffee. We are not going to leave because you are bored. Maybe if you had more witty repartee, we would respond to your conversations more often.
My cousin's surgery (scintillating to all the kids in China) will take five hours. They aren't going to cut. Then how the hell is it surgery? Am I so behind the times? I was having visions of saws and Frankenstein stitches. He also will have to sleep in an E-Z boy for five months. To sleep in an E-Z boy for five months is the sport's fan's bar mitzvah. He will become a man. I find all this very exciting and wonder if a briefcase full of fake Rolexes would be an appropriate present for him.
Missing New York Item #5435- All of this "Hockeytown" hooey. Exciting game, yes. Appreciate the violence, yes. Canceling the hockey season, however, is not like canceling "Hee-Haw." Check that, it is exactly like canceling "Hee-Haw." Note that there are two people of color at any one of those games. This is why it has not caught on in New York, unlike baseball, basketball or group urination.
So boy/man cousin with the busted shoulder will be missing out on his Hee-Haw lovin' this year. Both on the ice and off. I am not at all sorry for him. He is fourteen and can bounce back easily. Develop other interests. Read a book. Perhaps by the time his shoulder heals, he won't be interested in hockey at all, but will have dyed his hair black, donned a striped shirt and discussed modes of alienation with his new friends at the coffee shop.
My hopes for today's youth.
1) They will learn the value of the comma, the semicolon and Burt Bacharach.
2) They will learn that the true road to happiness is not money, fame or wealth, but drugs, Proust and space heaters.
3) They will toss off the shackles of our insipid commercialism and replace their want of the latest jeans or crap music CD with a want for a hooker.
I am not too optimistic.
Posted by emily at February 27, 2005 12:59 AM