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 […]

A week-old letter to my wife on the pinkest holiday of them all. Dear Sweet Pea, Happy Valentine’s Day. I know you are a big observer of this holiday, and you’re shackled to a man who likens it to being pitched off a cliff into a field of sandspurs, or worse, having his toenails clipped by a badger. But, learning to recognize fights I can’t win after 7 years of marriage, I give in and send you Valentine’s Day wishes. All the best. God’s speed. May the wind be at your back and the sun never set. All the typical loving and romantic things Valentine’s cards usually wish. This isn’t to say I understand the holiday. Oh, to the contrary. I still find it horribly irresponsible, and that’s saying a lot coming from a guy like me. But how, as a society, can we possibly condone giving a bow and arrow to a little baby named Cupid? My brother and I each had a bow and arrow when we were kids, and family members quickly realized how foolish a decision that was when their car tires went flat and we almost pierced a neighbor’s ear by accident one day. And even worse, we actually allow this little baby archer to run around and shoot people? Uh, hello! Maybe rob from the rich and give to the poor, but don’t be shooting people. Alas, I won’t discount a holiday because its symbols are a bit violent. But a little explanation: My […]

Super hype. Super hoopla. Super shindigs. Super headaches. Whoo! Thank goodness it’s over. The Super Bowl blows in and out like a hurricane, folks, and the good thing is there are no tree branches left to pick up. Has it already come and gone? All these years of preparation, and it’s over like that? Little left to show for it but stale beer cups and pins that didn’t sell. For me it was not successful. My attempts to rent a room at the last minute to some needy celebrity pretty much went down in flames. Amenities! It all comes down to amenities. And when all you have to offer these people are overdone poached eggs, a bowl of Special K, slightly worn slippers, whatever beer’s in the fridge and the promise that you will be woken up in the morning by a dog sitting on your face, it’s a tough sell. Real tough. And my asking price — $100,000 or a part in their next movie — was a little steep. Alas, my room went vacant. There weren’t many celebrities that I could tell. No shortage of sightings. Everybody had a sighting. Vin Diesel spotted at the drive-thru at Chick-Fil-A; Brad Pitt shopping for art; Celine Dion staying at a B&B downtown and breaking glass with her singing. A few you may not have heard: • Hugh Heffner and a couple of the Playboy Bunnies enjoyed a bag of pork rinds at a Jiffy Mart before heading for the airport. […]

A Good Newsroom … It doesn’t matter if it’s the New York Times, The St. Augustine Record or the Flagler College Gargoyle. As far as I’m concerned, a newsroom is a newsroom is a newsroom. I’m thinking this because I spent the past week working with the “kids” of the Flagler paper. They listen to alien music and talk in a strange free-flowing language I can’t seem to understand. I’ll say it: I think I’m getting old. But it was a blast (even if they did call me Old Man Magoo.) Sure, no police scanner, AP feeds or people yelling, “I brought pruning sheers if that page isn’t down by six,” but it was the same old thrill. I always loved newsrooms because you never knew what was going to come your way. And you never knew what was going to be thrown your way. I’ll tell this little story since I don’t work at the Record anymore, making it a little harder to fire me. One day someone threw a ball in my direction (I swear I was not participating) and it ricocheted off my computer. Now, a ball has 20 million places it can ricochet to, but this one decided to pick a full glass of water. It toppled in a giant flood, and despite the 20 million places it could have spilled to, it drowned my keyboard instead. I stared in shock expecting sparks to fly. When they didn’t, I turned the keyboard over to drain it […]

My wife called her cousin in Long Island, New York, just to see if they were OK. It was the blizzard, you know? Twelve inches of snow had fallen — an inch an hour. The roads were impassable. The front yard now stretched for snowy miles. The cold was pounding on the front door, demanding to come in. The insulation in heavy jackets had called a strike, tired of all the overtime and demands to keep people warm in steadily declining conditions. The salt had frozen. The wolves were out asking people for spare change. The snow was marauding through town, drunk and kicking over street signs. And if the federal government didn’t start dropping-in hot chocolate, people were surely going to die. Well, these are things I figured happened in a blizzard. I’ve never witnessed one firsthand, and never want to. Check that: Most of me doesn’t — the part that gets so cold that my internal organs tie-up into Christmas bows and makes my toes want to drop off and crawl to warmer climates. I’m third generation from Tampa, and before that, two-thirds of me came from places where you’re lucky if ice will last in your drink. My DNA is coded to withstand heat, like Teflon, and has several warning labels about letting the temperature get below 50. “Caution: In freezing temperatures, skeleton may eject from body. Look for it in Key West.” I don’t know blizzards, but some strange part of me — the part I’ve […]

I think it’s time we do something about warning labels on products, and especially tools. Oh, and if you think I’m going to advocate removing them all, you’ve got another thing coming. I want them to be more effective — even interesting — and I think I’ve found a way. First, let’s remember that the real purpose of labels stuck on power saws, ladders, toasters and toothbrushes is not safety, but preventing lawsuits. When a guy named Drunk Bob accidentally plugs his un-electric toothbrush into a wall socket, that tends to, uh, spark legal filings. But not if Drunk Bob’s toothbrush had a 13-page manual that clearly warned of this, right after it told him, “Don’t stick in ear while lit with kerosene” and “Do not use as a weapon during a bar fight.” Only they’re so ridiculous, no one pays attention to them. Warnings should be heeded, not something you try on a boring weekend — “I wonder what WOULD happen if I dropped a running hair dryer into a bath tub full of water.” So I’ve struck upon something, and hear me out: Instead of warning labels, lets use the X-rays of people who have misused these products and wounded themselves. I’m serious. A recent and perfect example: A man was using a nail gun. It misfired and a nail several inches long shot into the roof of his mouth and poked about four inches into his brain. Miraculously, he survived. Even more miraculously, he didn’t realize he […]

I got my wife a lot of nice things for Christmas. I always do. I’m a nice guy. I buy nice things. I got her a spa package, and a calendar with very bizarre chickens in it, and a book the size of a garbage dumpster with every cartoon that has ever been published in The New Yorker. They were nice gifts. I spent a lot of time thinking about them. But I don’t think anything she got this year came close to something her mother got her — a year’s pass to the St. Augustine Alligator Farm. Her eyes lit up like a little kid and she blurted out, “YES! Just what I wanted.” “Eh?” was my reaction. I had never been to the alligator farm in all the years I’ve lived in St. Augustine. And neither had my wife. She has been talking about it since about the day we met, but I had never taken her. A strike against me, but it didn’t seem like the kind of place you take a girl on a date — “And over here is another reptile who can rip off your limbs before drowning you. Feel like making out during the animal show?” So when her sister came to town, she went without me, and now she’s a regular Crocodile Hunter. She wants the newsletter. She wants to work there. She wants to raise alligators and teach them how to be civilized and knit. She wants to give them all […]

So here it is Jan. 7 and we already have a contender for the most bizarre story of the year. Maybe you saw it the other morning. It was headlined “Large African Gambian rats have Keys officials worried.” This should be one heck of a new year if we’re starting it like this. It was really the subhead that caught my attention: “Rats that can grow as big as a raccoon could threaten other species …” What? Big as raccoons? Now that’s what I call a rat. The African Gambian pouch rat. And officials down there are worried the needle-nose critters could decimate local wildlife and run off tourists. Tourists will swim with barracuda, but mention a rat and they’re off to the other coast. What a great story. When I was a reporter it was the kind of piece I literally begged for. Something that is filled with color and total absurdity — that draws all kinds of great imagery in a reader’s head. Like how it mentioned pouch rats are so big they don’t have any natural predators. Cats won’t go near them. It cites a woman who went outside one night to investigate a loud shrieking noise only two find two pouch rats fighting, maybe over a girl named Judy or some pizza crust. Then, and here’s the kicker, what’s watching the whole thing but two cats. In my mind I hear one cat lean over to the other and whisper, “Jeez, the neighborhood’s really going downhill […]