I had the most vivid dream last night.

Maybe it was the beer.

Or the leftover Hamburger Helper I warmed up too late and then forgot about and left sitting in the microwave where it cooled down so much that I had to nuke it again. How many times can you reheat Hamburger Helper, I wonder, before it becomes just a rock of something unrecognizable and then sits in your gut all night while you try and get some sleep.

I’ll blame the Hamburger Helper.

I had taken a job at a child care center shaped like one of those A frame houses with the loft at the top where the toddlers have plenty of room but we had to duck to keep from banging our heads.

We were playing some game with little plastic blocks that were all the colors of the rainbow and shaped like squares and circles and rectangles and stars. There seemed to be no rules but little Johnny won every time and the other kids were getting pissed off and screaming at him and trying to hit him with the blocks and crying when we told them it was just a game and to not take life so seriously but they weren’t having it and so they started to run around the room and kick stuff and throw Cheerios.

And so I decided to take them all outside into the fenced in backyard for some fresh air. The sun shone brightly and there was no breeze to speak of and so things went well for a minute or two. Then overhead a mass of clouds formed and out of them dipped the most perfectly cylindrical tornado I had ever seen, like God took a straw and stuck it through the sky and just started sucking.

And the kids started screaming again and trying to run away even though I told them it was no big deal, that this sort of thing happens all the time and is actually kind of cool to witness. But they ran toward the fence, which was an electric fence for some reason, and they all stuck to the fence and stopped screaming and began writhing and a few caught on fire.

It was like that scene in The Green Mile when that asshole Percy Wetmore tricked everyone and didn’t get the sponge wet and so Eduard Delacroix caught on fire and the flames from his eyes burned right through the sack over his head and all that was left was a charbroiled Cajun who had once gone so far as to love a magical mouse. It was like that, and so it wasn’t really frightening or all that gross to watch.

But Johnny hadn’t run. He had stood there in the middle of the backyard and stared at the perfect tornado even as it ripped apart the fence and the kids that were on fire and sucked them up. Even as it came right up to him, sucked him up, and then just like that swooped right back up into the clouds and then the clouds vanished and there was sunshine again.

And there were no kids left to care for and so I went home for the rest of the day. And that’s when I woke up.

The real test of friendship is: Can you literally do nothing with the other person? Can you enjoy together those moments of life that are utterly simple? They are the moments that people look back on at the end of life and number as their most sacred experiences.

~ Eugene Kennedy

We went to the usual spot, the Athenian Restaurant on Coliseum, because he likes to flirt with the waitress. It’s sort of embarrassing. But I was spared that particular show on this sunny but brisk Veterans Day morning; much to his dismay, she wasn’t scheduled to come in until noon.

His name is Joe. I met him back during my days as a southern gospel music director at a local AM station. A long-haul semi-truck driver who liked to swing by when he was home and chat up the announcers, he once played a part in organizing an event in our parking lot featuring the local truck stop’s chapel-on-wheels, the kind Bill Maher visits toward the beginning of Religulous. He’s a lot like those guys – outspoken about his Christian faith and willing to lay hands upon and send prayers heavenward on behalf on anyone in need of a spiritual touch.

When we changed formats, dumping the four-part harmony of the Cathedrals in favor of the more saccharine and advertiser-friendly Matt Redman, he cut his unkempt hair off, ditched the cowboy hat, grew a goatee, and hung around. And even after I dumped most of what I thought was faith at the time and moved on to other notions of God that conflicted with his own, he didn’t abandon me.

He helps me change my brakes when they start squealing. Recently, looking for more of a challenge, we went all out and tore my 2001 Pontiac Montana apart and changed the head gaskets. I mostly fetched sockets, paced around the garage, smoked lots of cigarettes, and lost shit. But he is a patient soul and never once during the two week ordeal complained that I was getting on his nerves, although I’m sure I did. He just kept humming along to the oldies he piped in on XM and ratcheting away. He’s retired now so we get together more and eat out a lot.

He’s also a veteran. I knew this, of course. I’ve spent many mornings sitting at his side at the VA hospital, driving him home after some invasive procedure. I’ve heard bits and pieces of stories and seen a picture or two from his days in the service, but I never held a cohesive, panoramic image of his years in the military in my head. Until this morning. Over omelets, biscuits and gravy, cup after cup of coffee, and eggs sunny side up – just the way he likes them – he told me everything. Well, as much as a former spy can reveal . . .

At the ripe old age of 19, on the advice of a recruiter who promised him the moon, Joe left a job manufacturing rear axles for trucks at International Harvester and enlisted in the USAF. He had been told there were opportunities to work on jet engines, but when, in 1959, he reported for basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, they told him he had two options: slinging hash or spying. Although he was (and still is) a fine cook, he chose instead to become a Morse Intercept Operator with the United States Air Force Security Service. After further training in Morse code at Keesler AFB in Biloxi, Mississippi, he hopped a plane headed to Karamürsel Air Station in Turkey, where, as a member of TUSLOG Detachment 3, he eavesdropped on the Russians and heard firsthand the reports of the downing of Gary Powers’ U-2 aircraft. He also developed a love for bowling, playing in base and local tournaments and amassing numerous trophies. He once rolled fourteen strikes in a row, spanning two games, and recorded a personal best score of 299, one pin shy of perfect. He had only planned on staying in the military long enough to complete a tour and then return home, but he soon found himself hooked, enjoying the opportunity to travel and see parts of the world he’d only read about.

After eighteen months in Turkey, he was transferred to the 6987^th Security Squadron at the Shu Lin Kou Air Station in Taipei, Taiwan, where he first heard of the assassination of President John Kennedy from a G.I. who operated the local American radio station and had been monitoring news reports for rebroadcast. Joe claims he knows who shot Kennedy, but he won’t tell me. Says he’d have to kill me. I can live with that. One of his more interesting duties during this stint of his service was monitoring the monthly flights of C-47 Gooney Bird aircraft, under the command of Chaing Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, over communist China. These flights were a violation of controlled air space, something done “just to piss off the Commies,” and the chatter provided loads of entertainment.

With more advanced methods of communications available and becoming frequently utilized by countries the U.S. military were monitoring during the Cold War, Joe acquired further training credentials as a Non Morse Intercept Operator at Goodfellow AFB in San Angelo, Texas, and in October of 1964, deployed as part of the 6913^th R.S.M. stationed in Bremerhaven, Germany. He continued to achieve success in myriad bowling competitions, played flag football, and served as assistant coach for the softball team, traveling all over Europe for tournaments. It was while in Germany that the travel bug hit hard. He and his friends took boat excursions up and down the Rhine River, stopping to look at castles along the way. He visited Copenhagen and Hamburg and started a love affair with German ale. Then, in March of 1967, after a number of older cars has been driven to death, restored in his spare time, and then sold, Joe forked over $3500 for a 1967 Mercedes Benz 200D, and the fun really started. He traveled to Amsterdam during tulip season, taking a few thousand photos he later developed into slides, ran at windmills with an aplomb rivaling that of Don Quixote, attended wine festivals, and ate Wimpy-style hamburgers, washing them down with cases of beer. By the time he left Germany, late in 1967, for his next assignment with the 6931^st Security Group operating out of the Iraklion Air Station on the island of Crete, his Mercedes had rolled over 25,000 miles worth of European roadways. It was while in Crete that he fell hard for tsipouro, a Greek cousin of Turkish raki, and an especially strong drink served best with freshly-shelled almonds dipped in honey.

As 1969 wound down, he found himself back at Goodfellow as an instructor. But he missed being overseas, so after another training stint, this time at Fort Mead where he specialized in decoding burst transmissions, he made his way to “where the heel meets the boot,” Brindisi, Italy, and the San Vito dei Normanni Air Station, where he tinkered in the “elephant cage,” the AN/FLR-9 antenna array that took Cold War eavesdropping to an entirely new, 360-degree level of sophistication. Despite all the geekiness such tinkering entailed, he found time to blend with the locals, enjoying the occasional afternoon siesta and more than one man’s share of Italian night life.

Joe eventually returned stateside in December of 1974 and spent the rest of his military career as an instructor, both at Goodfellow and at the Naval Technical Training Center Corry Station near Pensacola, Florida, where he fed his new love for NASCAR racing by spending his spare time at the Five Flags Speedway. Joe retired in 1979 having achieved the rank of E-6 Technical Sergeant.

You may be wondering how Joe managed to miss a tour in Vietnam. He tells me he tried. He begged them to just let him fly over so he could earn the points necessary for promotion. But it was a no-go; the equipment he worked with was never used in Vietnam. Too cumbersome. And his training never made a combat deployment practical. So he traveled. Soaked up the societies in which he found himself. He never had any illicit romantic entanglements. Never got in a fight. Despite all the alcohol he consumed during his free time, while on duty he was the model of contentment, consistency and performance. He listened, and listened well.

As did I while he shared his story of military service. A tale of interesting work and wild recreation and mysterious locales I will never see firsthand. But I share his memories as he shares them with me.

In a recent post, I bemoaned the fact that so much of what social media offers is generally lacking in substance. How what happens on Facebook or Twitter just doesn’t compare to the connection felt between honest-to-God, face-to-face friends. My friendship with Joe is of the sort that has raised the bar of comparison. In him I have found a friend with whom I can simply do nothing. We can sit and talk for hours and accomplish absolutely nothing, a nothing which is everything. And, on this Veterans Day, I am grateful for all that he means to me . . .

All the ingredients, the mix and eggs and oil and sugary blue and green frosting, were fashioned with love and care by the baker at our local supermarket into the perfect cake. A rectangle of show-stopping perfection.

My wife picked it up and we hauled it to my mom and dad’s place. My mom had prepared the bestest of birthday dinners. Beef and noodles, deviled eggs, French-style green beans, heat-and-serve rolls, and her world-famous, to-die-for hash brown potato casserole with golden brown corn flakes on top. These are the delicacies that have padded my ribs for forty one years now, and they’ve never tasted better.

To top it all off was that gorgeous cake, which my eight year old insisted say “Happy Birthday Daddy.” And so it did.

Early yesterday morning, a friend of mine from Chicago sent me a note on Facebook telling me she couldn’t write on my wall so she was sending a message instead, wishing me a happy day. I changed my settings to make things easier for others, and more birthday wishes began rolling in. Some from relatives, others from older friends, and one in particular from someone I’d never met. She lives in my town and is married to another friend, a guy I used to do a lot of miniature skirmishes with at the Friendly Local Gaming Store. She’s a blogger and if memory serves we’d hooked up through that medium initially. So she left wrote on my wall and told me to save her some cake. This is not uncommon; I’ve written this myself on other walls in jest, knowing that the possibility of actually getting any cake, even via the wonders of expedited shipping, were nil.

That was her mistake, for as-of-late I am a man of action. I wrote back that we should hook up later in the afternoon at the aforementioned FLGS. She was game, figuring her husband and I could spend some time talking gaming shop, and she could eat cake. So after dinner, we packed up the three remaining pieces of cake and headed out.

The look on her face was priceless, a mixture of unhinged reticence and bafflement. And she ate her some cake, by golly. Another piece went to my old GM Steve, who also sent me a note on Facebook, and we let the gamers in the back room roll d100s for the last piece, a corner monstrosity the size of a brick. The nice thing about cake is it doesn’t leave a stain on your character sheet.

Cake with friends, old and new. That’s my kind of birthday . . .

[photo credit]

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Before I created The Cheek and began cranking out non-fiction stuff about my life, I loved to write short stories. I didn’t write many of them, but the few I took the time to sweat over and shape into cheesy little morsels of literary Camembert are to me tiny glimpses into my soul. I love to dip into the nether regions of my hard drive on occasion and give them another read. I tweak them every so often in an attempt to polish and shape them into tales worthy of my respect, worth passing on to others. The problem is that the average short story in my archives takes about ten minutes to read. Ten minutes for someone to fly through what took me sometimes months to bring to fruition.

And that hardly seems fair.

So this month, like about a zillion other people, I decided to tighten my writing belt and peck out a novel. Yes, as you can tell by the picture in this post and the little badge at the top of my sidebar, I am a participant in 2009’s NaNoWriMo competition. In case you are clueless and unaware of what NaNo is all about, here’s a blurb from their website:

Founded in 1999, this fiction-writing extravaganza encourages everyone in the world to spend November bashing out a 50,000-word novel. Not for fame or fortune. But because it’s monkey-barrels of fun.

Monkey-barrels may be just a tad hyperbolic, but it’s close. I’m having a blast. And I’m almost caught up: your favorite chronic procrastinator didn’t start until November 3^rd.

The cool thing about all this is that my two oldest kids are on board as well. Each signed up on to take part in the Youth Writers Program and made a commitment to write 20,000-word novels of their own. Nothing beats nibbling around the edges of a huge literary cookie with your kids, knowing we’re going to devour that monstrosity and ache a bit when we’re done but will have eaten the whole damn thing. Maybe when it’s over, I’ll print us out a certificate of completion like I did back when I tackled and handily defeated The Ultimate Colossal Burger at Ruby Tuesday.

So I thought I would post a little excerpt for your reading enjoyment. Ignore any typos and all the bad grammar; this month is about getting it out of my head and into the laptop. This section is inspired by my blogging buddy Pat who issued this challenge a while back. After a couple months of, well, procrastination, I finally found a place to take her up on her offer. So this is for you, Pat. And if you, Dear Tweaker, choose to skip reading my excerpt, please know that I’m cool with that. Not everyone has ten minutes to spare. And feel free to share your thoughts about NaNoWriMo or my excerpt in the comments. Are you writing a novel this month? Have you done this in the past? Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Should I give up writing and get a real job? And after you comment, please, have a safe and happy weekend . . .

I drove through a car wash the other day. And for the first time it wasn’t one of those automated jobs where you delicately attempt to slide smoothed-out dollar bills into the seldom-functioning slot or swipe your debit card. I went to the new one out on Highway 10. Dave’s or something like that. Where someone actually greets you when you drive up and smiles when they ask you if you’d like to try the Dave’s Deluxe with the undercarriage wash and tire shine. “Sure,” I said and handed over a ten to the young lady with the retainer and pigtails held tight with strips of towel that matched the trim around the neon sign advertising Dave’s Deal cards – SIX DELUXE WASHES ONLY $50. I rolled up my window and then drove into the wash bay, inching over the front lip of the metal doohickey buried in the floor and then into the center where the pressure makes the light panel switch from green to bright red and you’d better damn well be stopped or there could be damage to your car, which Dave’s was in no way shape or form responsible for. I thought this is what it must be like to be invited over for dinner by someone who wants to get to know you a bit better and they smile when they invite you and tell you they can’t wait for you to come and then you get there and you have to do all these things like take off your shoes at the door and let them hang up your coat which you’d rather keep within arm’s reach and then eat off the fine china which they seem to keep worrying about every time you use the knife to cut your steak and then they fret when you almost forget to use a coaster when you’re sitting in the living room on the couch with the fabric that seems to change colors when you run your hand over it. Welcome, but mind your P’s and Q’s or you’re outta here. But I stop on time and there’s no new damage inflicted upon my car as I sit inside a coccoon of spinning brushes and flying soap and steamy jets of water that come so fast that they lift the windshield wipers out of their little notched holders when your window gets rinsed. And then I get to drive again but this time, unlike at the automated place, there is no blower the size of a Honda blasting my own Honda with hot air fired from cannons that do that automated twitch from side to side like eyes watching you warily as you drive through really slow in order to eke out every last puff of air that you paid ten bucks for. I wonder for a second how Dave expects me to drive safely out of this narrow hallway lined with bright red concrete with rivers of water with soap residue streaming down my windshield trammeling my vision. And my savior is a kid with a bright red baseball cap turned backwards guiding me a little to the left and then a little to the right and then waving me forward like a traffic cop at an intersection holding back the tide for a passing funeral procession. He’s not smiling quite as brightly as the young lady at the starting line but I guess I wouldn’t be smiling either is I had to concentrate so much. I pull forward until he puts his hands up suddenly, palms out, and then with an aw-shucks sauter comes alongside my door and grabs the towel draped over his shoulder. He stares at me for a half a second too long. I start to turn away from his gaze but don’t do it instead. I stare back. Our eyes locked in some sort of mutual assessment. Maybe he’s a bit self-conscious about the hat and that’s why he wears it backwards. Possessor of a rebellious streak, this one, I think. My cheeks rise, bringing my lips along in a sort of half-hearted attempt at a smile, but he doesn’t snap out of it. What began as a moment of lingering contemplation has turned into a daydream. He’s not really staring at me anymore but toward me and perhaps through me at whatever he sees that isn’t me but beyond me. Outside of me. Not even here in the car with me but trapped in his head as he just stares. I take out my cellphone and roll the ball to the camera icon and then hold it up to face the glass and think maybe he’ll come back to earth if I attempt to make contact. I press the ball and the camera makes its little faux click noise and I see him now both on my phone, frozen in pixels, and right there outside my window. I think of Hume and how he would say that I have a perception in my mind that is based on an impression, an outward sentiment if you will, of a kid standing outside my window staring at me. And how later, if he ever gets to wiping my car down with his bright red towel and I don’t have to see him staring at me anymore, I’ll have an idea in my mind of the kid standing outside my window and staring at me, because he’s not actually doing it at the time that I’m thinking about it. Right now, for instance. I remember his standing there, with his hat turned backwards and his blank stare that seemed to last longer than the director’s cut of Dances With Wolves, and it is an idea I’m entertaining based on a previous impression. But then I can take my phone out and look at his picture and experience him again just as I had when he was actually there, for I’m entertaining and outward sentiment of him, albiet on my phone. And I think about all the stuff that we think about and how much of it is just an idea based on some shitty perception through a window streaked with soapy water. And how I really butchered Hume and would have embarrassed old Professor Moore with such nonsense. Like when I’d ask him questions about God and he would hem and haw and listen to me try and elucidate what I really wanted to say but ended up on some tangent that sidetracked the class so that he had to rein it back in while giving me that look that said, “Save it for later, will ya?” but later never came because he had a meeting or a conference or needed to go and get a beer with a collegue and I wasn’t invited. But I found God without Dr. Moore. And I’m not ready to write about that yet.

This book is either really good or really bad. You decide . . .