So gas prices are approaching the cost of college tuition. It’s now cheaper to fly first class to France than it is to drive that SUV down to the convenience mart and pick up a quart of milk. And soon, mark my word, you’ll be caught in a dark alley and hear from the shadows a low voice mutter, “OK, buddy, give me all your gas.” That’s the fuel-dependant world we live in. But I feel pretty unique because I don’t live more than a half mile from work. In other words, I haven’t needed to take out a loan yet to cover my gas card bill. Sometimes my wife and I drive to work, and other times we walk. To mix it up, sometimes I drive, forget the car is there, and then walk home. This makes it interesting when my wife looks out the window and screams, “Where’s the car?” It prompts me to scream, “Oh no, those blammin’ jimmy-ammies stole it again!” A moment or two later sanity taps me on the shoulder and I turn to my wife to admit that this isn’t nearly as bad as the time I put my underwear on over my pants. But think of all that gas I’m saving. We’re extremely lucky. We’re not adding rubbing alcohol to the tank to make it last longer, or having to lose weight to make road trips more economical. People tell me how they’re spending ungodly sums of money each week, and I […]

It occurred to me this morning as I awoke, desperate for a column idea and the deadline-clock ticking away, that all these thousands of people moving to Florida everyday have no idea what wonderful bugs we have. That Florida could easily be the bug capital of the world. We breed ‘em big, we grow ‘em ugly, and we make sure there are plenty to go around. “Twenty bugs for every man, woman and child,” goes the state motto, “and double on Sunday.” This “occurred” to me as I walked into the kitchen to put the kettle on the stove. I was greeted by a silverfish the size of an engorged tuna. He emerged from the shadows and asked if I could spare any cottage cheese. I hate silverfish — I don’t think they’re fish at all — and I put a lickin’ on him. For a third generation Floridian, it’s a typical morning: Throw a bagel in the toaster, start the coffee and do battle with the arthropods. It’s a way of life, and many a song have chronicled these great crusades. I’ve never lived in any other states, but I don’t think there’s anywhere else where bugs are as par for the course. So accepted, not fashionably, but just as something we have to put up with. There’s your Uncle Eddy, and the cockroach. You invite both to Christmas, and you endure the bad jokes and how they creep up on you in the middle of the night when […]

It was just sitting there in my brother’s backyard, rotting, decaying — no longer so much a vehicle as a potting bench. It was like some rusted and forgotten object of war, discarded in a jungle somewhere. Once a clunker, now an overgrown heap. If I’m not mistaken, it was a 1964 Volvo, with its rounded pug-nose and long hatchback. I say “was” because it had long left this earth. Leaves covered up the sides and hood, rust had threatened to detach the body from the frame and a tire was not only flat, but off the rim. When Ernie, our buddy, and a former roommate of my brother’s, packed up to leave for New Zealand, he parked the Volvo in my brother’s backyard. None of us, including Ernie, thought he would stay so long. But he’s since been named prime minister, and looks to be there until the New Zealanders come to their senses and ask him to go explore another country. That said, my brother Scott decided to take action. Part of that was due to his girlfriend, Holly, who told him that few gardens she admired ever had Volvos in the middle of them. Scott can be a lot of things, but dumb is not one of them. Besides, he was starting to feel the same way. Too long he had tried to tell people the partially buried car was an Indian burial mound. But it’s no easy task moving a petrified Volvo that had sunk roots […]

And so the end is near. I can see it, just over there on the horizon — the end of the semester. When you work at a college, years are no longer years. They’re semesters. And semesters fly by like someone’s yanking them away with string. They start out slow, gain speed and roar out of sight before you can say, “What the heck’s a semester?” And when they end, they take a whole new crop of kids with them, headed for the real world to claim jobs, make families and wonder for the rest of their lives how they could have run up $20,000 in pizza debt. This semester I’m losing a bunch of them. My kids. I’ve been with Flagler College almost two years now, and my office runs the student newspaper. So I’ve got a chance to get to know a bunch of them, and it’s getting me a little misty thinking about them going away. What will I do with my time? Work? All day they pop into my office, dropping their bodies in a chair like you dump clean laundry on the bed. Sometimes they sigh or stare. Rarely do they have anything important to say, and usually I’m in the middle of some panic attack or crisis involving mass quantities of money I shouldn’t have spent. I speak fast like my calf is brushing up against an exposed electrical wire. “What’sup?how’sitgoing?Youdoingalright.Goodgoodgood.Nowwhattheheckdoyouwantanditbetterbeimportantbecauseifitisn’tI’mcallingsecurity … again.” They don’t have anything important to say because they’re college kids […]

Is nothing sacred anymore? Apparently not. Now, I’m not naïve. I understand the world is run by money, marketing and the consumption of Cheese Doodles. But I want it to be about something more meaningful. Not people selling the rights to their names on eBay. eBay, that part circus, part flea market where people sell everything from Aunt Nelly’s gnome collection to body parts. Now the new fad seems to be people auctioning off names, as Matthew Jean Rouse is doing. Matthew Jean, a 31-year-old father of two, doesn’t like his middle name. According to The Associated Press, he wants to let someone in the general public give him a new one, and he’s asking big bucks for it. As of press time, someone who doesn’t understand the value of money has bid $2,175. “If he wants to walk around with ‘Fool’ as his middle name, that’s his problem,” Rouse’s wife told AP. “If someone changes his name to ‘Poophead,’ he may decide it’s a little more important than he thought.” I hope someone does name him “Poophead.” I hope someone names him “chicken legs” or “stinky behind.” I hope someone names him “slap me.” There comes a point where you go too far, and Matthew Lugnut Rouse has reached it. Terry Iligan, a 33-year-old mother of five from Knoxville (a place that I would now recommend not drinking the water), sold her entire name on eBay for $15,199. You can officially call her “GoldenPalace.com,” after the online casino. GoldenPalace.com, […]

If I am the cause, I apologize. If it is me who has ruined the environment, poisoned the drinking supply, caused a tear in the ozone layer like a run in stockings, and dried up the schools of tuna who used to swim the oceans free, then to future generations I say I’m sorry. I’m a bad man who doesn’t follow directions. It’s spring, so I’m out fighting bugs, fungus, grubs, clover, root rot, jumping circus beetles, a clan of armed, horse-riding Turks and strange crop circles in my grass that read: “Land the mother ship here!” Actually, it’s mainly just clover, and I’ve waged war on it with some clover killer I wrangled up down at the hardware store. Not that I know what I’m doing, and certainly the packaging is no help. Look, there’s only so much of these directions and warnings you can read on a bottle of pesticide or weed killer before you throw up your hands and shout, “Mama mia, that’s a lot of meatballs!” I look for big warnings — warnings I can relate to: “Has been known to cause cancer in laboratory rats AS WELL AS extra limbs growing from their rumps, talking like Michael Jackson and giving money to the IRS.” Oh, man. Better wear gloves! Not that I pay attention much. I mix these things into such strange concoctions using highly questionable containers and sprayers that just the week before held other high-threat toxins. And I wonder why blue puffs of […]

It struck me in the car, on the way to get a pizza, just how far technology has come, and how much a part of our lives these days it is. I was listening to a CD, one I had just bought online. I had purchased it with the click of a finger, and downloaded it to my computer where I burned it to a disc and minutes later had it spinning on my automobile CD player. Was it always like this? So quick? So convenient? So easy to spend money that you never held in your hand? So impersonal? So digital? Am I a part of the technology revolution or what? (Forget that I still get lost on a fairly regular basis, or that I have a receipt sitting on my dresser that I can’t for the life of me figure out what it’s for.) What a technologically amazing world we live in. I wake up early Saturday to watch English soccer on my digital cable. I have high speed access that allows me to spend even more time in front of the computer at home than I already do at work. (Wait a minute, benefit where?) And I carry computer files home on a little portable memory device no larger than a peapod, but capable of storing more information than the computers of yesteryear which were large as houses. But there are always downsides. Why is it the more advanced we become, the harder it is to tape […]

So it’s a competition, eh? My parents, divorced since the invention of rocks, can’t stand to let the other one win. Competitive parents. And not competitive in anything that matters. What’s the game? Who can have the worst road trip to St. Augustine. In the left corner, weighing in at two sacks of flour, my mother, who won the heavyweight champion of the world title a couple months back when she got speeding tickets both to and from Tampa. It cost her a whopping $380 to J.Q. Law, and landed her in Internet traffic school. In the right corner, weighing slightly more, my father, who took a stab at dethroning her this past weekend, and landed a couple of good upper cuts that might just put him over the top. Ding, ding, ding. My father, whose favorite driving move is to back into those yellow pipe bumpers that gas stations use to keep people from running over fuel pumps, came from Tampa late Friday night. He decided to take the route through the Ocala National Forest because, like my mother, there is too little that can go wrong when you get on an interstate, set the cruise control and kick back for the ride. It was this haunted forest that became his undoing. Not long into it he heard a sound coming from the passenger seat where one of his two dogs was sitting. It was a sound you could identify through jet engines and a heavy metal concert — […]

There’s something about the way she says my name. “Bri-annnnn,” and the “n” trails off into infinity like a chain saw, or a motorcycle racing into the distance. It was my mother, of course. It was time for her to make her 13 phone calls to me in the span of 11 minutes. There must be equipment at the phone company that burns out on a regular basis because of her quick-on-the-button redials. I’m also sure there is a man whose sole job is to figure out why it’s happening. “We’ve tracked it to a short woman in Tampa who always remembers something she forgot to ask her sons, and calls back 1,500 times. We also suspect she caused a blackout in China.” I was waiting for the calls, expecting the calls like you expect high tide or bills. I knew they were coming because I knew she was coming. Up to visit for the weekend, the weekend between my brother’s and my birthday. (I’ll be 32 by the time you read this.) As we get closer to one of her voyages, it begins with messages at home, a fleet of them, and then calls to work. The closer we get, the more frantic. The more pressing. The more critical to the fate of the universe. So the phone rang one night. “Bri-annnnn,” she said. “Your brother won’t speak to me anymore so I’m calling you. He’s threatening to change his number and not list it.” No “hello.” No “how […]