Being good with technology is like being the guy who owns a pickup truck; everybody wants to be your best friend when there’s heavy lifting to be done. Face it, the question "Can you help me move?" is substantially the same as "Can you get my internet working?" The only real difference is that when you help somebody move, they're more likely to provide pizza and pop at some point during the experience.

As the tech-guy, I've been called upon to rebuild computers, hook-up satellite television systems, and program VCR clocks so they stop flashing twelve. Once word of my mad skillz gets out in the neighborhood, it's open season on my free time. If I lived next door to CERN, I would have been asked to help debug the Large Hadron Collider.

After all these years of being drafted to solve other people's problems, it feels good to finally speak the truth and say ... I don't mind.

Really.

As far as my cars are concerned, my primary function is to take them in for maintenance as often as possible. My mechanic shares their viewpoint, except he also sees me as the guy who pays for that maintenance. If I could figure out some way to extract myself from the middle of this arrangement, we'd all be a lot happier.

Except then I'd have no cars to drive, the cars wouldn't have anyone to take them to the mechanic and the mechanic wouldn't have all of my money. Actually, giving up those last two wouldn't be bad. It's the transportation thing that I can't get past. Like most people in challenging relationships, I've decided to take the bad with the good.

My relationships with new cars are always full of hope and promise.

Maybe it's a bad case of nostalgia; or maybe it's the fact that my kids are getting older; or maybe it's because I can’t afford the gas to drive to the edge of town. Whatever the reason, I've been thinking a lot about road trips lately.

A road trip is an express ticket out of your rut. Back home you may be bored with the routine. You know every local McDonald's and Walmart and Radio Shack inside and out. A trip to a new town will expose you to new and exciting venues. Like early Presidential Primary Season, a road trip is positively stuffed with promises. Of course, when you arrive, you'll find the new McDonald's is pretty much like the old one; a "nice" Walmart is still a Walmart; and the inside of one Radio Shack is much like another.

A road trip isn't about the destination, it's about the journey.

Really....

In case you missed it, the world didn't end when they turned on the Large Hadron Collider on September 10, 2008. It would be understandable if you missed this. The so-called major news outlets barely gave it a mention. They also routinely fail to report that the sun has risen or that no asteroids have hit the Earth today. They're too busy reporting on trivial things like the the latest Hollywood gossip, the weather, and who won the Presidential Election.

Of course, as my correspondent called Mainframe points out, all of the news stories about the world's biggest science fair project ignored the real question; is it a collider designed to work with large hadrons or is it a large collider designed to work with hadrons. This is the kind of ambiguity that makes the public suspicious of scientists. After all, if they can't tell us what they're actually building, why should we trust them?...

I'd like to take a few minutes to talk about the serious issue of the fiscal crisis in the United States. I'd like to, but I'm easily distracted so before I really got going I'd probably wind up talking about something entirely ... hey! Do I smell pizza?

You see what I mean?

Years of excessive mental stimulation have left my attention span so withered it can't hold any one idea for more than fifteen seconds. Even if I suffered from the illusion that I was qualified to write about the fiscal crisis, I'd have to start by doing research which would probably mean using the internet which would mean in about twenty-minutes you'd find me watching YouTube and singing along with the video of 99 Red Balloons...

Scientists tell us that the make-believe games of small children are vital for normal psychological development. When children pretend to be something they're not, it prepares them to be grown-ups who pretend to be something they’re not; like the guy who has a chrome-plated skull-and-cross-bones and airbrushed flames on his scooter.

Does he really believe that a biker gang will take him seriously on a 250cc Vespa? No matter how many times he watches Easy Rider on DVD the chrome on his scooter won’t make him a biker any more than a pair of scrubs makes someone a doctor. The chrome is just a grown-up version of playing pretend.

He’s like the rest of us; we all think we can fool most of the people most of the time.

Once you realize that everybody is playing make-believe all the time, it’s easy to spot the pretenders..

My sons are both skilled sleepers and I envy them. When they snooze -- which is often -- they throw themselves into the embrace of slumber with the same abandon that Billy Bob Thornton throws himself into marriage. Except they tend to sleep longer than Billy Bob stays married.

They are the only people I know that sleep intensely. Their enthusiasm for unconsciousness makes them easy marks for sleep, which is happy to reach out and drag them down.

For me, sleep is a timid little critter which must be enticed and snared and which is likely to turn and run at the slightest provocation.

Really.......

The pioneers had a hard life. They had to deal with floods, fires, famines, and even the occasional wild animal. On the other hand, they didn't have to worry about "Modern Conveniences."

I spend about three hours a day dealing with the problems created by my convenient, high-tech appliances. It starts the minute I get up and put breakfast in the microwave. In the good old, pre-microwave days, I wouldn't have even dared attempt a hot breakfast. I can only make eggs two ways--black or blacker. (Black is my favorite, it matches my toast.)

The microwave seduces me, though. It says, "I know you can cook in me. Any idiot can cook with a microwave. Just open the freezer and take out a package of 'Bright and Chipper' low-cholesterol, imitation eggs with strips of real-meat bacon. Two minutes and you're done."

Even though I know better, I'm convinced that this time I'll get it right. I peel off the plastic wrap, put the cardboard tray in the microwave, press the buttons and read the headlines while I wait. The microwave beeps politely to tell me it's done. I take out the tray and discover that my food has become one with the tray. In fact, except for a couple of vaguely bacon-shaped lumps, the tray looks completely empty......

The subject of today's essay is ... ummm ... bear with me ... I have some notes here somewhere ... just let me ... no, not there ... maybe over here? Nope, that's a recipe for Haggis; must remember to try that someday. I need to add sheep's stomach to my shopping list which is right here under this library book ... I wonder what the fine comes to after two decades?

I'm not disorganized. That would imply that at some point I was organized and things had just gotten away from me. You know, like when a politician or celebrity appears tearfully on television to explain that their latest DUI/affair/physical-assault-on-a-press-photographer was completely out of character and came as the result of stress.

No. I'm completely, chaotically, consistently organizationally challenged. When I'm installing new software and the computer has a blank for "Organization" I enter "Who, me?".....

We certainly have it better than our ancestors of just two or three millenia ago.

Really.

They lived under governments which were poorly organized and given to inconsistent policies and illogical action. We have ... wait a minute. Let me start again.

They lived at the mercy of the elements, risking disaster and death as a result of uncaring nature. We ... um ... let me try this one more time.

When they were ill and needed a cure, they had to consult with an oracle. We have have doctors. You see, I was right. Things really are better.....

The U.S government has announced the date for doomsday. It's February 17, 2009. That's the day that your old TV -- bringer of entertainment and enlightenment -- switches from planned programming to endless static. No more talk shows where the on-stage guests have IQs resembling shoe sizes; no more shows with three-letter acronyms like CSI, SVU, PSI, or QVC; no more product commercials in which people discuss their disgusting personal problems over lunch with friends; no more political commercials in which candidates discuss their opponent’s disgusting personal problems over a microphone with America; no more ... well, anything. Just static.

Which, might not be so bad. Except that the point of this essay is that it will be bad, so let me return to my point....

People don't like to change. They don't want to change their religion, political party, or (in the case of adolescent males) their T-shirts. They'll cling to their beliefs (or their ratty, stained eighties-vintage T-shirts) until their dying day.

Much of human history is really about the struggle to get people to change; whether it was the Conquistadors trying to get the natives of the Americas to change from being gold hoarders to being dead people, the American Revolutionaries trying to get the British to change from being soldiers to being dead people, or the owners of the Titanic trying to get people to change from being passengers to being dead people. With survival at stake so often, it's no surprise people resist change.

Which is why I reacted so strongly when I had to pick a new breakfast cereal....

Pop quiz, hotshot. Gas costs a little more than four dollars a gallon. Kevin's rattletrap minivan gets a little less than twenty miles to the gallon. The drive to work is exactly nine-point-nine miles each way. What do you do?

That’s the question I've been wrestling with. I pay four dollars a day for the round-trip to my place of semi-involuntary-servitude. The most tempting response is to quit work, but my wife has a violent emotional reaction every time I broach the subject of an income-free lifestyle. The less tempting responses include public transit or bicycling.

I'm in favor of public transit in theory, but opposed to it in practice. Like most people, I believe that public transit is a good idea for the public which is a term applied to anyone who isn't me.

No car? No bus? That leaves bicycling.........

I wish I were an evil genius. My wife says I don't qualify ... on either count. Which is exactly the kind of snippy comment I wouldn’t have to tolerate if I were an evil genius.

Take a look at a really good, top-level evil genius like Goldfinger or Dr. Drakken or that guy who invented the shrink-wrap on CDs. With their success in the art of evil, they have entire staffs of thugs and minions and henchmen to keep their various other thugs, minions and henchmen in line. As a middle-manager I'm not allowed to have a single minion, let alone a henchman or thug. (It turns out that HR has all of these fussy rules against job descriptions which include the words "kill", "maim" or "at the whim of your supervisor".)

Still, it's kind of fun to daydream what it would be like to be the head of an evil organization........

If there’s a better way to spend a Saturday morning than hiking halfway up a mountain and crawling into a hole in the ground, I don’t know what it is.

Honestly.

Don’t you think if I’d have had a better idea I would have been doing it? Instead, one recent Saturday found me standing halfway between heaven and earth getting ready to crawl into...well, into a really dark place.

The dark place in question is a popular Utah tourist destination called Timpanogos Cave. It is conveniently located a dozen or so miles up a winding canyon road. Tourists who are brave enough to drive to the Visitor’s Center are rewarded with the opportunity for a mile-and-a-half hike up the mountainside to the cave entrance. You would think that a tourist destination would have been better planned; like Stonehenge which the druids thoughtfully constructed right beside a major highway.......

Last week I realized that I can spend an entire day on the telephone and never have to speak to an actual human being.

Really.

After I'd returned a half-dozen voice-mail messages with tag-you’re-it-style replies, I tried calling to check on an order I'd placed and got to play Phone Menu Cryptography. It's the game where the computer on the telephone gives you a menu of mysterious and useless choices and you have to puzzle out which one will get you closer to your goal of talking to an actual human being. Indiana Jones, Robert Langdon and Benjamin Franklin Gates combined couldn't have worked their way through the process in anything less than a week. I gave up in a mere four hours reasoning that I'd feel foolish if I was still waiting on the phone when the package arrived.

This whole phenomenon of replacing unsatisfactory person-to-person interactions with unsatisfactory person-to-machine interactions started with the phone company. They used to have real people to talk to you. They were sometimes rude and insensitive, but at least they were real people......

It's gotten so that I'm afraid to turn on the TV. Every time I do, they're waiting for me; enticing me with promises of new and interesting relationships, exotic locations, and complicated plots. I'm speaking, of course, of the new Fall TV line-up and I just can't get involved in another series right now.

When I was younger, television was just for fun. I could pick up a new show mid-season, have a good time with it for an episode or two, and then drop it in favor of a new show.

Comedies – shows like All in the Family, Three's Company or C-SPAN – always had the same basic plot even though the cast changed over time except for cartoon characters like Fred Flinstone and Tip O’Neil. You could count on TV to be as solid and stable as the dollar.....

When a couple makes the sad decision to get divorced, a nice judge helps them divide up their property. If they choose to stay married, they get no such help and have to settle ownership on their own.

You would think that dividing up property with your significant other would be simple; stack all of your worldly possessions out on the lawn and take turns claiming them the way you chose-up sides in kickball.

"I choose ... DVD player!"

Of course, your beloved couldn't let a choice like that go unanswered and would immediately say, "I choose fifty-two inch plasma TV with HDMI, 1080p, 1040EZ, and EIEIO for enhanced color..." Before you could protest, she'd add, "...and all of the cables."

Sure, after that you'd get to claim your video-game console, but it just wouldn't be the same without the big screen to play it on. Maybe the answer is a pre-nuptial agreement which specifies how the property will be divided during the marriage....

When I realized I was indisputably sick, I recognized the perfect opportunity to gain sympathy points from my wife.

"It hurts," I said. "A lot. I think it’s pretty serious." "It’s an ear ache," she said.

With the sympathy meter reading dangerously close to empty, I sought the advice of a qualified medical professional. She confirmed that it was "just" an ear ache and that I was a good candidate for a full recovery.

"Are you sure?" I asked.

"Yeah. It’s just a mild case of otitis externa."

Otitis externa? Wasn’t that the "ear curse" in Harry Potter and the Maintenance of Health Organization?...

Big brother is watching you. And so is big sister. Uncle Henry's in on the act, too. It's getting hard to go anywhere without running into a nut with a video camera of some sort.

A typical daycare music recital looks more like a press conference than a kid’s program. The presidential candidates would give up half of their remaining brain cells for the kind of video coverage those toddlers get. Maybe the Constitution should be changed to limit nominees to candidates who can belt out I'm A Little Teapot off key.

Most of the camcorders are run by men. This goes back to the traditional male role which was established in the distant past when human beings lived in caves instead of suburbs. Prehistoric women stayed at the cave and cared for the children while their mates wandered the plains tracking and video taping animals...

When I got a note in the mail saying I needed to renew my driver's license, I wasn't worried. After all, I've been driving since I was sixteen. All I had to do was take a quick written exam, get a bad picture taken, and I'd be done. Right?

When I got to the DMV, my immediate thought was, "WOW! Lookit all the people...they must be giving away thousand dollar bills inside."

I was wrong. Inside, I found twenty-two service windows, two employees and a line which appeared to contain the entire population of Ogallala, Nebraska. I took my place at the end.

Grimly, like Soviets waiting five hours for the chance to buy half a roll of industrial-grade toilet paper, we stood in line. Unlike the Russians, we weren't relieved when we got to the front of the queue.......

For the first time in twenty-five years I have a new hairstyle. For a quarter century I've been faithful to a basic short-bangs, parted-on-the-right, square-backed haircut. It was a simple look; a serious look; a look that said, "I’m clueless about fashion."

If they had named my hairstyle, it would have been called The Republican.

Some masculine hairstyles are named for the people who made them popular like The Caesar or The Donald. (One is a famous tyrant and the other was a Roman Emperor.) My new do with it’s short-back-and-sides and gelled bangs that stick out should be called The Richie Rich after the famous comic-book character.

When I got that first good look at myself in the mirror in the salon, all I could think was, "What have I done?" and "Will my wife like it?"......

It's June and I think we all know what that means ... endless summer reruns of cop shows we didn’t watch, comedies we didn’t watch, and (or course) the interminable political debates that we’re still not watching.

Fortunately, the annual glut of June weddings gives an amusing diversion from the relentless, wall-to-wall election coverage. Like all newlyweds these poor folks are probably getting that that most common of wedding gifts; unsolicited advice.

I, myself, was given at least two metric tons worth of advice that I didn’t ask for. The trouble with advice is that -- unlike an extra Salad Shooter or spare blender -- you can’t exchange it for something more useful. You just have to take it or toss it aside. (Hint: People who give you advice really want to see you use it. So, when you toss it aside, do so quietly and in a dark alley where they won’t be able to see you.)......

At this very moment a hidden crisis is raging out of control across the United States. It is a shortage of gigantic proportions; an epidemic that touches millions of lives. The problem? A complete, and devastating lack of clues.

In cities ranging from Albany to Barstow and all of the letters in-between, men, women, and children are getting up without a clue; going about their daily lives without a clue; and finally falling into bed at night without a clue. In short, they are all clueless.

Here at the CummingsCo Research Laboratories, we are committed to the fight against cluelessness. Teams of dedicated scientists and engineers have pledged their efforts to develop cutting-edge technology to stem the tide of cluelessness; technology which will improve the lives of Mr. and Mrs. America; technology which we will sell direct to you at reasonable prices......

Eight years ago my wife and I took leave of our senses and began to shovel great piles of money directly into the trash. Actually, we bought a boat, but saying that just makes us sound stupid.

Our reasons for joining the ranks of amateur sailors were simple and logical. My wife grew up in a family that sailed recreationally; a family that could turn a weather-eye to the clouds and chart the best course to avoid a coming storm; a family that felt utterly at home on the water. For my part, I thought sailing looked really cool.

The boat was our fifteenth anniversary gift to one another. In my wife’s family, it was tradition for the grateful husband to gift his long-suffering spouse with a one-carat diamond ring on the occasion of fifteen years of wedded bliss. My wife teasingly reminded me of this every three days starting just after our fourteenth wedding anniversary. Like most guys facing a costly obligation, I responded by changing the subject.

Until the day she said, 'I don’t want a diamond, I want a boat.'

Did I marry well or what?.....

Last week an acquaintance of mine had to endure two days of medically necessary bed rest. The official diagnosis was a badly-strained back. However, given that the injury occurred when he jumped out of a perfectly functional airplane to celebrate his forty-fifth birthday, I think a more accurate diagnosis would have been 'Testosterone poisoning'.

For those of you who didn't enjoy the benefit of taking Mr. Tovey's eleventh-grade biology class, let me explain Testosterone. Testosterone is a 'hormone' which is a type of chemical that acts in the body the same way a bicycle messenger acts on the streets of Manhattan. Hormones race around with great urgency delivering messages that generally cause chaos and confusion. Testosterone is the king of causing confusion. It is the chemical antidote to intelligence......

If I held a press conference right now, it would sound like this.

Thank-you all for coming. I will keep my remarks brief and I will not be taking questions. I'd like to being by apologizing to my wife for any pain my actions may have caused. It was never my intention to hurt or embarrass her in any way. I admit it was all my fault. I was the one who signed us up for the Ballroom Dancing class.

I should have known better. My gift for dancing is on a par with Britney Spears' talent for parenting. When I attended high school dances, people who saw me in action rushed to help me in the mistaken belief that I was suffering a massive seizure. The wild way I flailed my arms reinforced their belief, but also kept them from getting close enough to render any actual aid.

Once I was safely past the age of compulsory public dancing, I hung up my shoes and settled in for more sedentary pursuits like unsynchronized channel surfing and free form snacking. These were areas in which I could demonstrate some measure of competence, areas where I could hold my own, areas which wouldn't make me look like an electrician trying to jerk a screwdriver out of a live electrical socket.

Yet, not long ago, I myself enrolled us in a Ballroom Dance class.....

From the moment the alarm clock interrupts my inadequate night’s sleep to the moment I drift off in front of the TV while the frowny-faced anchorperson tries to scare me to death with actual news, I am at the mercy of the clock. My high-tech computer-based day planner assigns different colors to different appointments. It looks like someone gave a toddler a paint ball gun and pointed him at my screen. The occasional, tiny sliver of white shows a few precious, unbooked moments.

And it’s not just work.

My 'free time' -- which is only free in the sense that I don’t get paid for what I do during those hours -- is filled with engagements and obligations and errands ... all of which absorb my life the way the blob absorbed most of Steve McQueen’s hometown.

The only way to keep up is to do everything with the feverish intensity of an espresso-fueled chipmunk....

My house rings with the rockin’ sound-track of Guitar Hero III ... except when I’m playing. Then it sort of grinds along like a snail on a cheese grater.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Guitar Hero video game franchise -- both of you -- let me fill you in. Guitar Hero is a game in which you can rock out just like Eddie Van Halen, Jimi Hendrix or Peter Tork ... if any of them had played a plastic guitar with brightly-colored buttons and no strings. Clever players are rewarded with simulated applause from the simulated crowd in the simulated rock club. Bad players...well, until I played, my family didn’t know that the simulated crowd could boo you off-stage in a very real way.

My performance was so bad the game refused to let me finish. I had to hand the little plastic guitar to another (better) player.

I found this a little odd because in High School I was an absolutely awesome air guitar player. At the drop of a hat, I could crank out a rendition of the Immigrant Song that would bring tears to people’s eyes...

According to the excessively capitalized and exclamation-point-laden e-mail I received last week, I! CAN EARN A DEGREE! RIGHT NOW! FOR WORK EXPERIENCE I'VE! ALREADY! HAD! Unlike your traditional university which requires students to waste time studying and learning, the people who sent me the e-mail recognize the value of my forced participation in the School of Hard Knocks. Over the years I've messed up assignments, missed deadlines, made bad decisions and (on occasion) backed the wrong horse, candidate, political party, or fashion choice. I'd always assumed those were moments of shame, but now I can see them for what they really were...learning experiences; experiences that entitle me to a Ph.D. in Individual Life Management. All I have to do is submit a one-time processing fee of three-hundred fifty dollars.

I'm a little skeptical. I'm not sure I've had a doctoral-degree's-worth of life experiences. What if they decide not to give me the degree after I send them the check?

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that my wife -- and, in fact, all moms -- qualify easily. In the eighteen-plus years she's been a mom my wife has had extensive, on-the-job training in arts, psychology, chemistry, mathematics, literature, English, emergency medicine, small animal veterinary care, fashion design, and counseling...

Americans have a lot to worry about right now.

There's the mortgage industry which must have switched to an all alcohol diet and decided that it made perfect sense to loan people more money than they would actually earn in their lifetimes. Foreclosure is now the only growth industry in the financial sector and the fastest selling homes feature the words 'Kenmore', 'Whirlpool', and 'Refrigerator' prominently on their cardboard sides.

There's the price of gas which is rising so quickly the entire Theoretical Mathematics Department at Harvard has been hired for the sole task of keeping track of oil company profits. One more increase in the cost of sweet crude and it will be cheaper to power our cars with Chanel Number Five.

Combined, these problems are giving rise to a recession which will stop the U.S. economy the way a concrete barrier stops a speeding car.

There is one bright spot, though. America leads the world in caffeine delivery technology as measured by the total amount of square footage devoted to Starbucks stores. If all of the stores were put right next to each other – I mean even more than they are now – they would cover an area approximately the size of Dallas, only with a faint coffee odor and a Norah Jones soundtrack....

I pity the Presidential candidates. It's not easy being them.

For starters, they live on the road twenty-four-seven. A life of travel sounds exciting until you realize that most of the time they are ending up in desolate, barely civilized places like East Armpit, New Jersey, Rattlesnake Acres, Nevada, and Kansas City. (Special note to readers in Kansas City: Not your Kansas City ... the other one.)

When they arrive they have to pretend to enjoy the local cuisine. Again, sounds interesting until you find out the local cuisine includes Auntie May's special rutabaga bouillabaisse, pig snout sandwiches or haggis. (Special note to readers in Scotland: Not your haggis ... the other kind.)

No matter where they go, the candidates have to pose for photo ops wearing fixed smiles so rigidly indestructible that they can only be removed by specially trained teams of plastic surgeons. The other folks in these photos are always minor local celebrities like the Kumquat Queen, City Mayor or the Vice President of the United States. (Special note to readers who are Dick Cheney: Not you ... the other Vice President of the United States.)...

The Olympic Games represent the best in human endeavor. The spirit of friendly competition, the years of training, and the satisfaction of seeing our athletes overcome competitors who live in countries where indoor plumbing is a luxury item. It's a time of special pride for Americans and I'm sure you share my sentiment when I say, "Just how many commercials can they put in one hour?"

Every company in America (and a few from beyond our shores) is planning to cash in on the games. There's an official car, an official swim suit, an official shoe, and an official soft-drink. I'll bet there's even an official nasal spray and an official liquid drain cleaner.

Of course that's not what the Olympics is about. The Olympics is about competition. That means yet another "Dream Team." As Americans it is our duty to watch the U.S.A. basketball team play. It doesn't matter that the results sound more like blood-pressure readings than basketball scores. ("122 over 36--Your systolic is good, but your diastolic is a little low.") It doesn't matter that it's like watching the L.A. Lakers play the Richard M. Nixon Middle School team. What matters is that you get to watch a team whose total annual income is larger than the gross national product of most of the countries they play...

I help my wife with the grocery shopping approximately every eight or nine months. That's about how long it takes her to forget what happened the last time I helped her.

When it comes to the weekly run to the Giganto-Mart, we have very different approaches. My wife likes to make a menu, prepare a list, and then stick to it. I, on the other hand, like to make a menu, prepare a list, and then buy whatever catches my eye.

Her approach has the benefit of letting her feel virtuous; she's planning and shopping methodically. My approach has the benefit of letting me feel virtuous (I'm planning methodically) and spontaneous (I'm buying whatever I want!) Sadly, there's no easy way to reconcile our two different approaches. The best my wife can do is hope to contain me.

She usually does this by sending me off in search of a specific item – canned beans, vinegar, boiled snipe – whatever she thinks will keep me occupied for the longest amount of time. The more intense the quest, the less likely I am to be distracted by ... oooh! Look at the new flavors of soda!...

There was a time when I didn't fear food. I ate with gusto and abandon (and occasionally a knife, fork, and napkin) without worrying about the consequences. That was before I understood calories.

Like many of the unpleasant facts of modern living – nuclear weapons, greenhouse gases, reality television, etc. – calories were discovered by scientists who meddled in things man was not meant to know. Or, at least, things this man didn't want to know.

Indulging in a fast-food burger and fries became a lot less fun when I realized I was consuming two day's worth of calories and a week's worth of fat and salt.

If the universe was fair, the size of food items would have some correlation to the number of calories they contained; carrot sticks would be toothpick-sized, baked-potatoes would resemble small beach balls, and burgers would have to be borne about on litters carried by six strong men. When you dared to order one of the frothy, creamy, sugary drinks at your local coffee house it would be delivered in a convenient fifty-five gallon drum.

If the universe was fair...

I have it on good authority that the furnace repairman will be at my house sometime between the hours of five a.m. and midnight today.

Whether you're dealing with a willful teen or a reluctant machine, the approach is the same – repeatedly flick the reset switch. Except that teens don't have reset switches and the ones on machines appear to be mostly decorative.

Having exhausted my entire repertoire of furnace repair techniques, I broke down and decided I had to call the furnace repairman...

My children and I live in different time zones. They live in Teenage Standard Time and I live in the real world.

In the real world, deadlines have mass and momentum and cannot be ignored. Whenever I get a new deadline it starts making a sound like the music from the documentary film Jaws in which unsuspecting swimmers were viciously attacked by a great white cello player.

Take the annual United States Tax Day deadline. Every year on April fifteenth, I'm required to file a an extensive set of documents and a distressingly large check with the Internal Revenue Service. (Historical aside: The Titanic sank on April 15, 1912 and I think it's fitting that America commemorates this tragic event by soaking the rich...)

I'm worried about my wife's memory. Just last week she forgot a key ingredient for dinner.

I found her standing in the kitchen, staring into the pantry with a look of intense concentration; the kind of look you associate with a sage pondering the nature of the universe or someone trying to figure out how best to ask a favor.

"Bother," she muttered.

Seeing no reasonable escape, I took the bait asked what was wrong.

"I thought we had some spaghetti sauce," she said.

You see what I mean about her memory? Taking pity, I offered to go to the store.

"So long as you're going anyway..." she said. "Could you pick up a French Loaf and some of those ... whatdyacallits for salad ... crunchy-bready things."

"Croutons?"

"Yeah. Here I'll write you a list."

I refused. It's her memory that's a problem, not mine...

Next week I have to take a personality test at work and I'm a little worried. What if it comes up negative?

Will I be summoned to the HR office where I will be forcibly enrolled in some flashy, pricey character-building exercise like a Dale Carnegie seminar, a ropes course, or graduate school? I kind of like the personality I have, it's everyone else who needs to change.

Especially the machines around me.

Really.

The gee-whiz-won't-the-world-of-tomorrow-be-great crowd can't wait for machines that have human-like personalities all their own. From what I can see, my machines already have too much personality.

Take my cars, for example. I drive a a piece of Detroit iron, American-made with a personality to match. It's loud, abrasive, and completely in-your-face. If I leave the headlights on, it rewards me with a sharp, sustained buzzzzzz; the automotive equivalent of "Hey mac, what do you think you're doing?"...

This past Christmas my wife gave me a supremely "guy" toy. She did this because, after twenty-two years of marriage, she's given up any hope of ever curing me of my essential guyness.

Early in our relationship she thought she had an outside chance of knocking the rough edges off me. She thought this because I wasn't exactly a fan of organized sports; football had more rules than any one game needed, baseball was less interesting than its scandals, and basketball and soccer seemed like too much work.

Despite my lack of the sports-appreciation gene, my wife found she couldn't really civilize me.

Her one attempt to help me get in touch with my feminine side resulted in a restraining order which requires me to stay at least fifty yards away from my feminine side at all times.

So I'm a guy and to honor that fact my wife gave me a guy toy for Christmas; a self-taught course in miniature helicopter repair.

There comes a time in every dad's life when he realizes he's no longer the competitor he used to be. Somewhere along the line he's lost the skills and reflexes of his youth and his kids can beat him. It's the day when he passes the video game crown to the next generation.

I grew up in the late seventies and early eighties; the golden age of arcades. No ghost was safe from me in Pac Man. If Ms. Pac Man had been willing to trade round and yellow for skinny and adolescent, I'd have gone out with her. Figuring out how to get that last Space Invader seemed far more important to me than the national debt, the state of Soviet/U.S. relations, or personal hygiene.

If you squinted a lot and used your imagination, the graphics vaguely resembled real figures the way Jackson Pollock's paintings vaguely resemble actual art. The in-game sound consisted of annoyingly simplistic bouncy music (long before boy-bands made such tunes popular). The games were eight-bit, darn it, and I loved them.

If I'm the master of my household pets, why was I the one standing in line at the pet supply superstore shepherding two carts through the check-out line? The answer is simple; I'm a pawn of the pet-tech-industrial complex.

In case you missed it, pet supplies have become big business in this country. The mom-and-pop pet shop of yesteryear is gone, crushed under the weight of warehouse-sized megastores which, if they weren't full of pet supplies, could be used to store a spare fleet of 747s, the Astrodome, or one month's worth of redundant and contradictory government memos.

These stores require this much space because they must contain the thousands of mutant varieties of pet food available now. This is food which has been carefully produced in controlled laboratory conditions to appeal to even the most finicky pet owner.

The real problem with television isn’t violence, or inappropriate content, or news stories which appear to have been invented just before the cameras rolled. The real problem is that kids are imitating the stuff they see between the commercials.

Kids grow up watching ER (now airing its fifty-first “episode that changes everything�) and they’re just dying to become nurses and doctors. By the time they discover the practice of medicine isn’t all trauma and drama, they’re so buried in education loans they’ll be healthcare wage-slaves for the rest of their lives. The only steamy romance they’ll see is if they get off shift in time to catch the newest ER (which will be the two-hundred-and-twenty-third “episode that changes everything.�)

Sometimes I feel like my life is really a movie; you know the kind where there's some kind of cipher and everyone else is in on the secret but me ... The DUH-Vinci Code. It'd probably be a lot easier if people stopped trying to communicate and just talked.

Part of the problem is that words aren't generally reliable in the picking-a-meaning-and-sticking-to-it department. Take the good-old standby “love�. This little tramp of a word never met a meaning it didn't like. You'll find it promiscuously applied to everything from the intertwining of two lives (“I love my new puppy�) to devotion to a favored sports team (“I love the Jazz when they win�) to favored foods (“I love a good mutton sandwich, especially when the crusts are trimmed off�.) Next thing you know it'll be snuggled up against a government policy description -- “Ooh! I love the penalty-free deferment of survivor benefits for capital gains in designated enterprise zones.� How can you trust a word like that?

In my experience, the difference between "Oh look it's snowing" and "Oh no it's snowing" is about thirty-six inches or three days; whichever comes first. Individual flakes are harmless; in small groups they're adorable; in large quantities they are dangerous and uncontrollable ... sort of like toddlers.

Except you never have to use a special shovel to clear the toddlers off your driveway.

Much of human history is concerned with the way that people get from one place to another. Our earliest ancestors traveled on foot, braving the elements, avoiding attack by wild animals and suffering really nasty blisters. Some forgotten genius came up with the idea of riding on animals and things improved. Somebody else (the Phoenicians, I think, but I sorta slept through history class) invented carts and things improved again. Carts gave way to trains and cars and trucks and things improved again. Then human beings invented air travel and things ... fell apart.

Really.

Airplane trips generally begin early in the morning with a drive to the airport through rush hour traffic. Sitting gridlocked on the freeway is actually a good thing because it gives you a chance to prepare for the lines you'll be waiting in the rest of the day.

On the great feedlot of life, I'm just another barbecue-on-the-hoof, passing time mooing and waiting for the day they award me a gold watch and shoo me into the stunning pen. In terms of domestication, I'm at a ninety-two on a ten-point scale.

I realized the full extent of my tractability at the local Super-Ultra-Mega-Mart last week. I urgently had to purchase a few things including bread, Bandaids, Bactine and a new toaster. At the checkout, I swiped my credit card and scrawled something on the electronic pad that might have been my signature or a quick sketch of two worms wrestling.

The computer beeped and flashed a message. “Signature exceeds space available.�

I squinted. Sure enough. I'd drawn outside the lines. “Sorry,� I said and signed again, more carefully this time.

It didn't strike me until I was out of the store. I'd just apologized to a computer. A MACHINE! A hunk of junk hardware no smarter than a fifth-grader had called me out and I just stood there and took it.

My life is a blur these days.

Really.

I've traded my reliable (but stodgy) glasses for less reliable (but far more exciting) contacts. Like a lot of guys who try to trade up, I think I may have simply swapped one set of problems for another.

I slipped solidly into geekdom at the age of ten when I was fitted with a pair of black-rimmed glasses that had all of the aesthetic appeal and elegance of a spork at formal dinner party. Years passed and my eyes stabilized until I landed on the big square labeled '40' and I couldn't read any more. The nice eye doctor wrote me a prescription for progressives.

Through a miracle of modern manufacturing, progressives have two different kinds of lenses forcibly melded into one ineffectual whole; sort of like a compass with a whistle in it, a tent trailer, or low-fat, sugar-free ice-cream.

When it comes to mathematical ability, nine out of ten experts agree that Americans can easily outperform most single-celled organisms from other cultures. When it comes to competing with actual human beings -- or trained chimps or even well-bred horses -- Americans don't do nearly as well. In fact, they lose six out of seven times which equates to a mere forty-eight percent win/loss ratio.

Like all problems in America, our collective lack of mathematical skills can be blamed on the educational system. This may or may not be true, but it's easy to blame the educational system. In the coming election, look for Presidential candidates to blame schools for poor public health, the sub-prime mortgage crisis, hurricanes, tidal waves, South American deforestation, and the popularity of Brittany Spears. Politicians like to blame the schools because ninety-eight percent of the public (three voters in twelve) will buy it without question.

In the case of Math skills, the problem can be traced back to the one thing everyone hated in Math class – the teacher, Mrs. MacGruder. Not really. What everyone hated was story problems.

For over a century, the Nobel Prize committee has been giving an award for literature. The Pulitzer Prize committee has been recognizing outstanding journalistic writing for ninety years. The Christopher Award is a mere slip of a thing at half that age. Other writing awards include the Hugo, the Nebula, the Newbery, the Booker Prize, the Blooker Prize, and the National Book Award.

Yet not a one of those prize committees has ever recognized someone for writing an outstanding Holiday Letter.

This is probably because in the entire history of literature no one has ever written a Holiday Letter worthy of an award.

Summing up the last twelve months of your life in a few dozen words is no easy trick. You've got to hit the high points and give just enough detail to make your friends and relations insanely jealous of how well you're doing. Except, your relations probably know enough of the truth to see through your tissue of lies and if your friends don't, just how close are they really?

Psychologists have long known about holiday meltdown. Among the probable causes they cite unrealistically high expectations (maybe Santa will bring me that pony this year), pressure to be perfect (maybe my in-laws will compliment my cranberry-garlic loaf this year), and sheer, simple stress (maybe I'll crack and finally have that breakdown this year). They don't talk about the rash of psychoses that come from the anguish of people who are faced with giving and receiving gifts.

Most of these syndromes don't even have names. In the interest of advancing science, I'd like to suggest a few new diagnoses.

If you lived through the eighties, you probably remember the highly instructive Mad Max film series in which Mel Gibson played an enigmatic loner who traveled a post-apocalyptic wasteland trying to find a parking space. Just kidding. He was traveling the post-apocalyptic wasteland looking for gas so he could drive his car long enough to find a place to park.

Even at the end of the world, parking spaces will be in short supply.

Which is why I'm deeply disappointed that my son's state-approved driver's education course didn't spend more time on parking. They pretty much stopped at “park between the lines�. Comparatively, this is about as useful as stopping sky-diving lessons after Step One, Jump out of the airplane. There's got to be more to it if you intend to arrive safely.