My Final Thoughts When I Thought The Plane Was Crashing

This is not turbulence. Something is wrong. Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. This can't be happening. I'm too young to die.

Okay, maybe not young, but I'm not old, either. Thirty-nine isn't old, it's just...

Oh Jesus Christ, I'm thirty-nine years old! How the fuck did that happen? Did I just stop paying attention? I swear to any divine entity that's listening, if this plane doesn't crash, I'm making some big changes. First thing, I'm getting rid of the solitaire on my computer. And then no more afternoon drinking. I don't crack a bottle until 5pm... no, 6pm... no, no, 8... 9.... okay, no drinking at all until the weekend. No more wasted potential. It's time to get serious with my life!

KEEP ON READIN'! C'MON, BE A PAL!

Why am I the only one panicking? We're all going to die, people! Stop talking calmly amongst yourselves and start screaming your heads off. Look at that fucking guy over there, thumbing through his goddamn People Magazine like he doesn't have a care in the world. What are you smiling at, fuckhead? Too busy reading about how celebrities are just like us to ponder the random cruelty of death? It must be great to be so oblivious to your own mortality. Well, here's a Hollywood fun-fact for you. You know how celebrities are not like us? They're not currently plummeting towards the earth in a man-made projectile of doom! George Clooney is not faced with the certainty of burning metal and melting flesh! Yeah, that's right, point out the pretty pictures to your lady friend. That way she won't know the end is coming until it's too late. "Tell me about the rabbits again, George. Tell me about..."

Waaaaaait a minute. Is that my ex-girlfriend? Holy shit, I think People Magazine-reading douchebag is holding hands with Katie! At least I'm pretty sure that's Katie. Did she always have bangs? I can't remember anymore. Come on, lean forward again. Tilt your head a little to the right so I can get a good look at you. Wow, that could totally be her. But it's been, what, ten years since I saw her? A lot can change in a decade. Didn't she have a tattoo? A mouse or something? Yeah, yeah, that was it. She had a Mickey Mouse on her upper thigh. Well, that's easy enough to check. I'll just walk up to her and say, "So listen, you look like somebody I used to sleep with back in the early 90s. Would you mind hiking up your dress a little so I can see if you have the same tat?" No way that's gonna lead to me getting slapped.



Y'know, the more I think about it, the more ironic this chance encounter seems. The last time I saw her, I'm almost positive we were at an airport. I was flying out to LA and she was staying in Chicago, and she made me promise to haunt her if the plane crashed. She wanted us to agree on a specific code word, something I could say to the psychic she'd hire after my death. This way, she'd know it was really me and not just some random apparition trying to cop a feel. We decided on "mustachioed", because it's a word that always makes me laugh, and facial hair on spectral beings is a subject that's unlikely to come up organically in conversation, especially with a psychic.

"But what if I crash in New Mexico?" I asked her.

"So what if you do?" She said, crinkling her nose.

"I'm not walking all the way back to Chicago on foot. That's, like, a thousand miles. Even for a ghost, that'd take at least a few weeks. Why wouldn't I just stay close to the crash-site and haunt somebody in Santa Fe or Albuquerque?"

"You’re so unromantic," she said, rejecting my attempts at a goodbye hug.

And that was the last time I ever set eyes on her. Not because my plane crashed, but because I was a heartless bastard who didn't see the upside of making a cross-country trip to Chicago to watch her have sex with an endless deluge of argyle-sweater-wearing (and likely mustachioed) frat boys for the rest of eternity.

Hey, why weren't there any ghosts in New York after 9/11? That seems really weird. After the Towers went down, you'd think there would've been tons of ghosts haunting Lower Manhattan. You're telling me that of all three-thousand people who died on that day, everybody went towards the light? See, if it was me, I would've stuck around, just to find out what the hell happened. And then, y'know, I'd watch a few of the benefit concerts, and maybe see a Broadway show for free, and spy on a few ex-girlfriends in the shower, that sorta thing. I would've expected Ground Zero to be brimming with ghosts - just hundreds and hundreds of disgruntled spirits, elbowing each other for position. But how are you going to work out who gets to stay and haunt the memorial site? Seniority, maybe? A lottery system? What if you were just some temp who got hired to work at the Towers a week before the attacks? You can't really expect to haunt the place over the guy who'd been working on the 90th floor of Tower Two since the late 70s. Come on, don't be a dick!

I never thought I was going to die in a plane. Actually, I've tried to avoid thinking about death at all. The last time I seriously pondered my own demise was... well, I guess it was my pseudo-heart attack last summer. But that was just because I took that awful ghostwriting job. I still don't know what the hell I was thinking. The Ron Jeremy autobiography was one thing, but did I honestly think I could write a book about pregnancy and not have a mental breakdown? I've made my living in comedy, and you know what's really not all that funny? Cervical dysplasia and uterine rupture. It didn't help matters that the guy who hired me kept saying things like "I want this book to be in your face." I didn't understand what that meant. How can a non-sarcastic book about pregnancy be "in your face?" That just didn't make any sense.

Every phone conversation I had with him was the same. "I like what you've done here," he'd tell me, "but it's not edgy enough. I want to get up in the reader's grill. You know what I'm talking about? Every sentence needs to be right up in their face."

I was tempted to take him literally. In my more desperate hours, I wrote what I thought he expected from me. "Yo, listen up, bitch. I'm here to school you on preeclampsia, unless you got other ideas. What's that? I'm sorry, I didn't hear you so good. You don't think you're a candidate for a hypertensive disorder that typically occurs after the first 20 weeks of gestation? Well, get ready to be schooled, punk. Unless you want to take this outside."

Just a few weeks into writing the book, I woke up with heart palpitations. My heart was pounding like a thousand judgmental gnomes were marching across my chest, in a funeral procession for my artistic integrity. The Dame tried to calm me down, assuring me that it was just a panic attack. But I knew better. The universe was punishing me for being a hack. And it didn't help matters that my father died of a massive heart attack, so I've always been "heart attack ready," if you will. I expect the Big One to come at any moment. I have more phantom chest pains in a typical week than Redd Foxx.

The Dame took me to the emergency room, and I sat in the waiting room for almost three hours, breathing with the exaggerated huffs of a child in time-out pretending to cry. The bald kid sitting next to me - whose braggity parents just had to announce was battling lymphoma (put it on a bumper sticker and leave me alone) - looked over at me with so much sincere compassion that I almost felt guilty for not really having a heart attack.

"Are you okay, mister?" He asked.

"I'm pretty sure I'm dying," I told him, though even I didn't believe my own hysteria anymore.

"How did that happen?" He asked.

"It's my heart," I said. "It's given up on me."

"Why?" He asked.

I surprised myself with how easily I came up with an answer. "Because I sold out everything I believe in."

Oh Jesus, did you feel that? Why is this fucking plane shaking so much? I feel like I'm sitting on a washing machine during the spin cycle. Did the pilot know we were heading into this? I'm sorry, that's just irresponsible. They should've delayed the flight, or cancelled it. Didn't we learn anything from John-John? Okay, okay, okay, it's cool. Just think happy thoughts. Don't pay attention to the obvious signs that you're going to die at any moment. Just clear your mind and think happy thoughts... happy thoughts... happy thoughts...

I would totally fuck Katie in the bathroom right now.

Whoa! Where did that come from? That is weird. What is it about imminent death that makes me so horny? Is it because sex and death are inexplicably intertwined? Or do I just want to get one more off before I'm snuffed out? This is like my dad's funeral all over again. I should've been inside the church at his memorial service, holding hands with my mother and letting strangers comfort me with embellished memories of my father's kindness and having a good old fashioned emotional collapse. But instead, I was out in the parking lot, getting a handjob in the back seat of a rental car from some woman I barely knew.

Who was she, anyway? Oh god, I don't even remember her name anymore. I'm pretty sure that her hair was curly, or at least it was curly when we started dating. I'm almost positive that her hair had something to do with why we broke up. When she decided to straighten it, I didn't like it at all. It looked so severe, like the bangs of a flapper from the 20s. It was all hard angles and sharp edges. I was afraid to touch it. I thought it'd feel like roof shingles. I tried to tell her that she looked better with curly hair, but she never believed me. I even insinuated that there was something implicitly racist about straightening her hair.

"Your head is a cultural stereotype," I told her. "If you want to stick it to the Man, you should be rockin' the fro."

I knew I was full of shit. Hair can't be racist. Well, unless the hair is attached to somebody who lives in the suburbs. God, remember that? Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago was like getting a tutorial in remedial racism. Were they just pissed off because all the black people lived in the city and had access to culture and the best drugs money could buy, and they were stuck with mediocrity and strip malls and whippets?

I remember when I first got my driver's license and I wanted to drive down to the city by myself, and my best friend's mother told me that I was crazy. The city was teeming with dark-skinned criminals, she warned me, just waiting for their chance to lure some innocent white kid into an alley. She told me elaborate stories about black gangs - always the Bloods or the Crips, though I think she was just repeating names she's heard on 60 Minutes - who would initiate new members by forcing them to fillet their victims. Not just murder them, but fillet them. Like a fish. I could imagine the horror of being shot or stabbed. But skinned alive? It was just too bizarre and gruesome.

"It's true," my friend's mother lectured us. "It's all that African voodoo they're teaching at those inner-city schools. I ain't no racist or nothin', but you just can't trust a nigger with a knife."



I love racists. They're so easy to make fun of. You never listen to a racist rant and think, "Well, he makes some good points." It's always, "What in the hell?! Are you seriously saying that out loud? You're like one IQ point away from being a ward of the state." There's just never a good argument for racism.

Well, except for Todd, but that's just because his wife left him for Ziggy Marley. So, you know, he had his reasons. Your wife bangs a Melody Maker, you can get away with a little blatant xenophobia.

I knew it was a mistake when Todd bought the Harbor Bar, that much-beloved tavern in the middle of nowhere, somewhere in the little finger of northern Michigan. He had the savvy to run a successful business, but I still don't understand what he was thinking when he hired Ziggy Marley. I mean seriously, a town with a population of less than 300 doesn't need live music from the spawn of reggae royalty. And if you're going to pay a dude named Ziggy to entertain drunk rednecks at your saloon, get some college kids to work the bar so you can keep tabs on your wife and make sure she isn't giving head to a dreadlocked guitarist in the pool room. That, to me, is just common sense.

I wonder what happened to Todd? I really do feel badly for the guy. For at least a month after the Ziggy incident, he wouldn't even go into the bar at all. He'd just sit alone in his car, parked in the dirt lot outside, staring at the streetlights and eating cold fried chicken out of a brown paper bag. If that's not a sign of a deep depression, I don't know what is.

I talked to him not long after he sold the Harbor Bar, and he told me how surreal it was to go through a divorce. There was just so much hostility between him and his ex, and he didn't know how to deal with it. So he found ways to block it out. When it got so bad that he thought his head might implode, he'd just pretend he was an extra in a movie, muttering gibberish in the background, like an actor waiting for somebody with authority to yell cut.

"You just smile and say, 'Peas and carrots'," he told me, "'Peas and carrots, peas and carrots, peas and carrots'."

That reminds me, when was the last time I listened to Ziggy Marley? I don't think I could name even one of his songs. "Something-something People"? I forget. Hey, where's my iPod? If I'm gonna die, I should at least go out with a memorable soundtrack. Aw hell, I didn't bother to make a death playlist, did I? Stupid, stupid, stupid. Never get on a plane without making a death playlist. How hard is that? The last time this happened, I even made a mental checklist of songs to include. Nothing so obvious as James Taylor's "Fire & Rain". I want songs with a sense of impending doom, with an ominous subtext and lots of gritty baritone. So, there's Johnny Cash, obviously. And then maybe a little Uncle Tupelo, and some Violent Femmes from when Gordon Gano found religion and got creepy. Yeeeeah, that's the stuff. Nothing takes the sting out of a premature death than ironic religious conversion.

Oh, and I've got to put some Wilco on there. Can't expect a guy to be erased in a mushroom cloud of burning gasoline without first getting a goodbye serenade from Jeff Tweedy.



Okay, so what do we have...? Summerteeth? No, too poppy. A selection from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot? Yeah, that'll do the trick. What's that song I like so much? "You know that I would die if I could come back new." Is that from Ashes of American Flags? Yeah, that's the stuff. That song just kills me. It's so bleak and fatalistic, and yet so unreasonably hopeful. I don't know why it hits such a nerve with me. I haven't listened to it in years. It still reminds me of Los Angeles, but I'm not sure why. It's not even-

Holy crap! I just got it! It's Katie! I didn't see her for the last time in Chicago. It was Los Angeles! She came out to see me, and it was awkward and uncomfortable, and we listened to that Wilco album incessantly, probably just to fill the empty spaces. I don't know why, but we always ended up in Chinatown. Our last few months together were just a series of treks to Chinatown. It was always something: a party or a book reading or some mutual friends who wanted to take us out to dinner. I think I ate nothing but dim sum for an entire summer. I don't even like dim sum that much. But our friends insisted. "Oh come on," they goaded us. "It'll be an adventure." So we painted on fake smiles and filled another night with the white noise of polite conversation and feasted on mystery meats wrapped in bamboo leaves and downed endless frosty glasses of Tsing Tao. And nobody ever mentioned the sad-looking elephant in the room.

When a relationship is dying, everybody wants to plug the holes with a dumpling.

Jesus Christ, she's getting up. Katie has left her seat and she's walking towards the bathroom. She's going to walk right past me, and she's going to see me and there's going to be that moment of recognition, and oh my god, this is happening, this is totally happening. What's she going to say? Well, what else can she say? "You're the one who got away. I've never been able to forget you. The memory of you haunts me. On most nights, after I've finished slapping away the groping hands of the People Magazine-loving mongoloid I married, I lay awake and fantasize about you. I think about what could have been, and how unfathomably blissful our lives would be if I just hadn't been so stubborn. I know it's too late for us, not just because you're involved with somebody else now - The Dame seems like a pretty rockin' chick, by the way - but because, y'know, our plane is crashing. So all I ask is this: Please, if you have any sense of decency, let me put your penis in my mouth. Just until we hit the ground and are obliterated into dust. I want to die knowing that I've given you, the man of my dreams, at least a modicum of pleasure before we leave this mortal coil. And if you'll-"

Holy shit!

....

Okay, so that's definitely not Katie. Wow. I don't... wow. He totally did not look like a dude from behind. I don't think I've ever been more disturbed by a goatee in my life. Wow. That is just... that is just wrong. Did Katie always vaguely resemble Johnny Winter? Aw man, I am so weirded out right now. The blonde guy in 14C needs to cut his hair, and maybe gain 80 pounds. That's gross negligence and false advertising. I may have to...

Oh come on! What the hell is that? Is the plane upside down now? Are we burrowing into the center of the earth? We should not be shaking this much. This is just not normal. This is not right. Can we please just crash now or be done with it? My nerves are frayed. And now I'm not even going to die getting a blowjob from an ex-girlfriend. What's the point? Okay, okay, just close your eyes and forget any of this is happening.

Everything is fine. Nothing is wrong. Peas and carrots, peas and carrots, peas and carrots, peas and carrots, peas and carrots, peas and carrots...

Two Seemingly Unrelated Stories About Fathers (Not My Own), Which Actually Have Nothing At All To Do With Fatherhood

My grandfather was a doctor. And for at least a few hours, he was convinced that I would follow in his footsteps.

I was seventeen years old, and aside from a brief flirtation with veterinary medicine, utterly uninterested in any career that involved scalpels and touching guts. I had discovered the joys of writing snarky op-ed pieces for the high school newspaper, performing in Woody Allen plays for the drama department, and smoking clove cigarettes with my girlfriend in her bedroom as we listened to Smiths' records and complained about how much the suburbs "sucked balls." To think realistically about becoming a doctor would require paying attention in my remedial biology class, and actually taking notes when my teacher explained the difference between mitral and tricuspid valves in the human heart, and worst of all, applying to at least a few colleges with a reputation for academia and not just schools where I was likely to meet girls who wanted to smoke clove cigarettes and listen to Smiths' albums.

I might've been left alone to choose my own uninspired destiny, had I just managed to keep my big mouth shut. I'm telling you, the next time somebody announces to me that they have blood in their stool, I'm not saying a word.

KEEP ON READIN'! IT'LL BE OUR LITTLE SECRET.

My grandfather may have been many things, but he wasn't an alarmist. He loved telling stories about the Great Depression and how he survived it. On the infamous "Black Tuesday" of 1929, one of the partners in his medical firm lost everything, and he committed suicide by throwing himself from the top story of their building in Manhattan. My grandfather delighted in describing every horrifying detail; how he just happened to glance out the window of his office at that precise moment and watched his partner's body float past, like a marionette whose wires had been snipped by a sadistic puppeteer.

My grandfather, now alone in his medical practice and presumably penniless, did not join the national panic. He didn't do anything. He just ignored his dwindling stocks and saving accounts and waited. “No good can come from expecting the worst,” he told his wife. "We're just going to wait and see." In the end, it paid off. It took two decades and one world war, but the stock market finally righted itself and he became a rich man (for the second time). At least amongst his immediate family, it appeared that he was a financial genius. His philosophy became our philosophy: Don’t make any hasty decisions, we told ourselves during any crisis, monetary or otherwise. Don't draw too much attention to yourself. Just wait and see what happens.

From the outside, it might've seemed like we were being rational and patient. But as somebody who has been in the middle of it, let me assure you, it wasn't nearly as cunning as it looked. We were just drawing on our innate animal instinct for predator evasion. We believed that if we remained perfectly still, bad things couldn't find us. It's something that most people unlearn when they're five or six, or at least old enough to understand that hiding under a blanket won't protect you from monsters.

To be fair, a little caution now and then can be a smart move. There must be something to it, because my grandfather died a much richer man than I'll ever be. But there were times when his "wait and see" philosophy clearly wasn't the best course of action. Like, for instance, when he realized there was blood in his stool.

"Grandpa is pooping blood?" I asked. It probably wasn't the most appropriate thing to discuss during dinner, especially when my grandparents were sitting right across the table from me, but I wasn't the one who brought it up in the first place.

"He's not pooping blood," my father corrected. "There's just some blood in his stool."

I didn't understand the difference. To me, anything coming out of my anus that belonged in my veins was cause for alarm. "Shouldn't he go to the hospital?" I asked. "It could be serious."

Nobody said a word. My mother and my father and my brother just stared at their plates. They didn't want to come out and tell me I was wrong. But, well, the person with the supposed malady had several medical degrees in New York State, and I was a kid who still regularly masturbated into all the fresh linens in the guest bathroom. It was painfully obvious who had the intellectual high ground.

I just shrugged, refusing to feel like the fool. "Whatever," I said, making defiant eye contact with my grandfather. "If I had blood in my turds, I'd be getting my poop-chute x-rayed right now rather than packing my large intestines with pork chops. But you do what you want, gramps."

The next day, he checked himself into the nearest hospital. And not unsurprisingly, it was something serious. Well, not life-threatening serious. Just a few polyps on his colon. It was nothing that'd kill him, but if left untreated, the polyps could've become cancerous.

He told the nurses that his grandson was the one who successfully diagnosed him, and they all agreed that I had the deductive skills of a future medical practitioner.

"That kid has intuitive smarts," he told everyone who would listen. "He knew there was something wrong with me before anyone else picked up on it. If it was up to them, they would've waited until I was passed out in a pool of my own viscous fluid."

When it became clear that my grandfather wasn't going to die just yet, my family turned their attention to me. They huddled around me, whispering encouraging words about my inevitable future as a medicine man. "Your grandfather thinks you're meant for great things," they said. "You have the soul of a surgeon. You read his symptoms like an art critic studying Monet. You can see things that the rest of us can't."

And for a moment, I almost believed them. I laid awake at night and imagined myself a modern day Doctor Zhivago, but without the Russian accent or addiction to bad poetry. I could save the world with a syringe, and become one of those guys who women aren't ashamed to introduce to their mothers. "He's a doctor" sounds a lot better than "he's a struggling writer who doesn't make enough money to pay his own electric bill, but he sure can be charming if he thinks he's going to get a free meal out of it."

It took days before the spell wore off and I realized that I hadn't made quite such a spectacular prognosis. I'd told a man in his 80s to go to the hospital after discovering blood in his stool. This is not something that a child prodigy in the medical arts would say. This is something that a person not suffering from mental retardation would say. To call my recommendation obvious would be an insult to the definition of "obvious".

"But your grandpa is a doctor," various members of my family would tell me. "He didn't recognize the symptoms and you did. That has to tell you something."

It does tell me something, I'd admit. It tells me that my grandfather is a lousy doctor. Which, to anybody who'd been paying attention, wasn't major news. This was a man who had once advised my grandmother, his wife, against having surgery to remove the cancer in her gallbladder. On what grounds? On the grounds of "I don't want to talk about it!!" I'm sure he was just afraid of losing her and thought that even acknowledging the cancer's existence would mean admitting she could die. While that's an achingly romantic gesture in a partner, it might be considered a character flaw in your personal physician. You don't want your doctor to be huddled in the corner, cradling his legs and rocking himself and silently muttering, "Don'tleavemedon'tleavemedon'tleavemeohgodohgodohgodohgod."

I was never one of my grandfather's patients, which may have saved my life. I've never had a medical scare, but I can only imagine how he would've broken the news to me. "You see that spot on your x-ray? Yeah, I don't like the looks of that at all. So why don't we just stop looking at it and focus on happy thoughts."

In the weeks after he left the hospital, he continued to insist that I was put on this earth to become a doctor. And I continued to insist that I'd be the type of doctor who accidentally invents a stronger strain of drug-resistant tuberculosis. I'd be the Dr. Kevorkian who didn't intend to kill all those people. My bedside manner would be somewhere between "Whoops, my bad" and "You can't prove anything!" If I saved anybody, it would be solely because of my ability to recognize the obvious. A typical checkup with one of my patients would likely go something like this:

PATIENT: My genitals are emitting an electrical charge. And I have a lump in my armpit the size of a conjoined twin.

DR. SPITZNAGEL: Really? That's weird. You should probably have that looked at.

PATIENT: Wow, that never occurred to me. Thank you, Doctor Spitznagel. You saved my life.

Two years later, my grandfather died of a stroke. And I never predicted it. I was as surprised as anyone. Of course, I had already left home, and was safely nestled in a college dorm room in southern Wisconsin, enjoying the anonymity (and skunk weed) that comes with a liberal arts education. But even if my grandfather had managed to track me down, I'm not sure what I would've told him.

"You're feeling numbness in your left side and you've suddenly lost the ability to speak? Well gee, gramps, I don't know, that could be anything. Actually, just thinking about it has given me psychosomatic pains. Could we stop talking about it and maybe watch some TV? I'm sure it'll go away."

My prognosis would've killed him, but I still think he would've been proud of my hesitation. Just like I'm sure he was proud of the family's stoic poise at his funeral. We tried (though we didn't always succeed) to mourn him as he wished, by mourning nothing, smiling at the anxious crowd (so quick to panic, those mindless idiots), muttering to each other, "Let's not jump to any conclusions. Yes, he does appear to be dead, but we don't know anything for certain yet. Let's just wait a little longer and see what happens. Just calm down, people. Calm down... calm down... calm down..."

* * *

"Don't you think she looks like Kira?" My brother said, motioning towards his wife.

"I'm sorry?" I asked. "Kira who?"

"You know, Kira," he repeated, as if overstating the obvious. "The hot blonde Gelfling from The Dark Crystal."



I know that my brother meant this as a compliment. But it still took me a few minutes to digest this information.

I assume you're all familiar with The Dark Crystal, and you already know about Jen and Kira, the Gelfling couple of Jim Henson's sci-fi fantasy epic from the early 80s. I have vague memories of seeing the film in theaters, but apparently it left a lasting impression on my brother. He loved it so much that when our family moved to the Chicago suburbs, my brother, just eleven years old, took a bus into the city - an hour-and-a-half journey - to see The Dark Crystal for a second time. And even most disturbingly, he also took a bus, sans parental guidance, to see a second screening of Gandhi.

Yes, that's right. My younger brother left the house, probably telling our mother that he was off to meet some friends in the park, and then got on a bus bound for downtown Chicago, with the sole intent of seeing a three-plus hour biopic about the leader of a nonviolent resistance movement in India. I don't know if that's ever going to make sense to me. I had a lot of unusual interests as a prepubescent, but pee-drinking pacifism wasn't one of them. I'm not going to be the one to say that he was a very confused child, but this is a guy whose music collection as a teenager consisted almost solely of John Williams' soundtracks and Peter Cetera albums. So... you know... I think you can arrive at your own conclusions, right?

"I do not look like a fucking muppet," my sister-in-law wailed in protest, glaring at the photos on my brother's computer screen.

"What is so wrong with that?" He asked. "Kira is hot."

I had to agree with my brother on that point. Kira was smokin' hot, or at least as hot as muppets go. Which - coming from a child of the Sesame Street generation - is really saying something. I wouldn't come out and admit that Bert and Ernie made me doubt my own heterosexuality, or that Janice, the lead guitarist in the Electric Mayhem, inspired my very first erection. Those are all true statements, of course, but they're not something a sane person confesses to complete strangers.

But come on, even if you aren't a red-blooded, non-gay male who came of age on or around 1982, you have to admit that Kira, fictional or not, is kinda desirable. She's the kind of woman you look at and say, "Don't take this the wrong way, but you remind me of something that Frank Oz would've constructed out of reticulated polyfoam. I'd totally like to dreamfast with you and protect you from the Skeksis." How is that not sexy? Are you made of stone? C'mon!!

"Will you stop talking about this?" My sister-in-law howled.

"What's wrong?" My brother asked, seemingly perplexed. "I mean it as a compliment."

I honestly believe that's true. I've never known a man who loved a woman as much as my brother loves his wife. But sometimes true love doesn't always translate in ways that makes sense to the rest of us. Love isn't always about trite and predictable romantic cliches. In a weird, assbackwards kinda way, when a guy says to a woman, "You remind me of Kira from Dark Crystal," what he's really saying is, "I love you so much, I'm even turned on by the creepy muppet version of you." I ask you, what's so bad about that?

My sister-in-law stormed out of the room. And my brother and I, with little else to do with our evening, went 'Net-crawling for Gelfling porn.

As it turns out, Gelflings are in the minority of bizarro porn niches. There's an abundance of Hobbit porn and even Smurf porn (I'll never understand that), but erotica involving the elf-like beings from the fictional planet of Thra? There's not much out there. There's not even a respectable showing of fan fiction, which is embarrassing on a lot of different fronts. Are my brother and I really the only teenage males in the western hemisphere who repeatedly had "private time" with our Beta copies of Dark Crystal while their parents were at work?

The only thing we found that could even pass for Gelfling smut were a few videos on YouTube, but they were more surreal than sexy. Our favorite (for all the wrong reasons) was a montage of Dark Crystal footage with a puzzling soundtrack. If watching amorous Gelflings while listening to Belinda Carlisle's "Circle in the Sand" doesn't leave you feeling sexually confused, I don't think we have much in common.

The more time you spend on Google, the more you're going to discover just how deviant your sexual deviances really are. I don't know if I needed to learn that the brunette Gelfling in Dark Crystal was a guy. I could've easily gone my entire life without knowing that. Should I have reason to cross paths with Jim Henson in the afterlife, I don't think I'll be able to suppress my hostility.

"Seriously, you had to name him Jen?" I'd yell at him. "A lithe pixie with long hair, and he's a fucking dude? Couldn't you have at least made him and Kira a really hot lesbian couple? That's all we want from our science fiction - a little muppet girl-on-girl action."

My brother and I stared at the computer, wondering how we had allowed ourselves to be so misled. "I feel dirty," he said, his voice devoid of any emotion.



It was 3am by the time we finally gave up, and though I probably never would have admitted it to him, I was kinda relieved. I'd never noticed it until my brother pointed it out, but he's right, his wife does look eerily like a Gelfling. Maybe it's just her Finnish genes. Do all Fins have large ears and button noses and yarn-like hair? I don't know. But I do know that if my brother and I had happened upon some genuine Gelfling porn, it would've been like watching my sister-in-law perform in a very unsettling fetish porn video. And that's not something you can come back from. That's something that's going to ruin every family dinner for the rest of your life.

I have no problem looking at my sister-in-law and seeing a muppet. But if it's all the same, I'd prefer if she kept the robe on.

True Tales of Fleeting Literary Celebrity

PROLOGUE

It's easy to feel invisible when it's 3:30 in the morning and you're alone in your apartment and you've just polished off a bottle and a half of discount Australian wine.

The self-confidence of solitude is one of the many pitfalls of being a writer. If you're any good at your job, you don't leave the house all that often. The best writers can go weeks without feeling sunlight on their face. You forget that the outside world operates under a very different set of rules. When you're alone with your computer, you can close your eyes and almost believe that you're Oscar Wilde, sipping absinthe and exchanging bon mots with foppish socialites in fin-de-siècle Paris.

But when you finally leave the comforts of home, you'll discover just how untrue that home-office mirage really is. The people who get up every morning and get dressed and go to work aren't easily charmed by your sleep-till-noon eccentricities. They don't think it's cute or funny when you wear a "Bukkake Ruined My Carpet" t-shirt, or that you haven't bathed in so long that your skin smells like brisket. You may think you can win them over with your delightfulness, but human beings aren't nearly as forgiving as computers, and somehow the brilliant one-liners barreling down the superhighway of your brain always miss the intersection to your mouth.

MAKE MY MOTHER (SEMI-)PROUD AND KEEP ON READIN'!

But one tends to forget these irrefutable truths when, as I mentioned, you're alone and tipsy and it's 3:30 in the morning. Too drunk to write, you end up watching a repeat of The Daily Show, and Jon Stewart is interviewing some author you've never heard of. You think to yourself, "That lucky bastard. I could do that, if somebody just gave me a chance. How hard can it be? This douchebag's not even funny. Put me on TV and I'll show you how entertaining an author can be. I'll sell so many goddamn books, you'd think I'd written a novel about Mary Magdalene's affair with a college professor dying of ALS while shedding pounds with the Atkins-approved Black Swan diet."



Getting on a bestseller list isn't the only reason writers dream of guest spots on talk shows. We crave it for much the same reason anybody wants to be on television. Because we think an ex-lover will see us, remember how attractive and/or witty we are, and immediately call us with offers of unconditional love and oral sex.

So you lie on your bed, not noticing that it's almost 4 a.m., chugging the last of your Australian wine straight from the bottle, brushing away the crumbs of whatever it was you had for dinner from your chest hair, and think, "Yeah, that needs to happen. I need to get me on the talking picture box. That would totally rock the casbah."

You're going to make some bad decisions in the morning. But sometimes, like a child touching a stove or a liberal arts college student being gay for the weekend, that's the only way you're going to learn.

ACT ONE

My anti-authority streak has made me do some stupid things, but nothing quite as personally embarrassing as plotting a coup d’état of Vanna White's dressing room.

"I think she's in there," I whispered to Brendan, my writing partner. I could hear movement across the hall, and the hairs on my forearm bristled with excitement.

Brendan just shrugged. "So what?" He muttered. He had far more pressing concerns, like trying to decide between an assortment of colorful neckties.

"We should bum-rush her dressing room," I said. "Just kick down the door and introduce ourselves. Maybe fill our pockets with some of her complimentary buffet. C'mon, we're both guests on the same show. It'd be impolite not to say hello."

Brendan glanced at me with an expression somewhere between pity and fear. "Since when do you care about Vanna White?" He asked.

He made a good point. I didn't care. But my feelings of self-worth had been challenged. This was my first appearance on a major TV talk show. Granted, it was just a morning talk show, something called The View which, in my egocentric universe, I'd never bothered to watch before today. And the only reason Brendan and I got the gig at all was because one of the producers owed a favor to our publicist. But I still felt like this was a crossroads for my career. This was my opportunity to prove myself, to show the unwashed masses just how infectious my personality could be. I was David Sedaris without the expatriatism, Lenny Bruce without the swears, Bill Cosby without the speech impediment, Ira Glass without a dependable source of income.

I wasn't asking for much. I just wanted America to fall in love with me.

That's a tall order for a morning talk show in which your segment is scheduled for the final 5-to-7 minutes, when most of the audience is either taking a piss or have long since turned off their TVs to become productive members of society.

It didn't help matters that we got second billing to Vanna White. That was like slathering insult frosting on an injury cake. I knew we weren't exactly a ratings magnet, but c'mon, Vanna White? The Wheel of Fortune chickapoo who managed to become a trophy wife to her own gams? If you really want to chip away at a writer's ego, tell him that he's valued just below somebody whose sole job is identifying vowels.



I glared at the closed door of her dressing room, cooking up conspiracy theories on how she was being pampered. I imagined a full spread of fruits and exotic dips and hummus sculptures in the shape of The Pieta and veal cutlets wrapped in pork chops and stuffed with bacon. I glanced over at our snack table, which contained a sad bowl of carrots and bottled water so tiny it wouldn't quench a midget's thirst. I was ready to make a scene, to charge the gates of Vanna's heavily-guarded sanctuary of entitlement and snatch a measly loaf of bread from her greedy clutches, like a modern-day Jean Valjean - albeit a Jean Valjean who'd make sure to mention as he's fleeing the building that he has a new book coming out from Doubleday next week and he'd sure appreciate it if you picked up a copy, and hey, if come down to the Barnes and Noble on Broadway and 82nd next Tuesday, he'll sign a copy just for you, "Viva la Proletariat!"

But I never got the chance. A team of six or so interns and production assistants stormed our small dressing room, surrounding us like they thought we intended to escape. They were all women, all somewhere between the ages of 22-and-26, and all breathtakingly beautiful. I never had a sister, but I assumed this is what it felt like to be the youngest male living with a gaggle of female siblings. They combed my hair with their fingers, roughly tucked in my shirt, frisked me for unfastened buttons, plucked stray hairs from my back, tightened my tie until I choked in protest, patted me down like they were searching for needles or weapons - generally just primping and preening me like I was a porcelain doll preparing for a tea party.

One of them eventually noticed what I was wearing, and she fixed on me with a disapproving frown. "You're not really going to wear that, are you?" She asked.

I gave myself a quick self-exam. Everything looked fine to me.

The other women realized what their associate had spotted, and they responded by clucking their tongues and violently shaking their heads in protest. "No no no no no no no," they repeated like a Greek chorus. "That won't do at all."

I had no idea what they were referring to. Did I forget to zip up? Had my nipples inexplicably started lactating, ruining my freshly ironed shirt? What exactly did they find so offensive about my appearance?

"You can't wear shorts," one of them finally told me.

"I can't?" I asked, honestly perplexed. "Why not?"

I looked at my naked legs. They didn't strike me as particularly offensive. Actually, all humbleness aside, my calves are delicious. They're like two grapefruits balanced on a pair of stilts. It's the only part of my body with noticeable muscles, at least enough to flex and not make onlookers point and laugh. I'm so proud of my legs that I rarely, if ever, consent to wear trousers (my least favorite word in the English language, second only to slacks. Try saying it without sounding like the Penguin from Batman Returns. "Slacks. Slaaaaaaaaaacks.") Unless I'm being audited by the IRS or attending the funeral of a parent, I just don't see why I wouldn't want to show off my best feature - or more importantly, distract from my less bewitching physical traits, such as the belly that makes strangers want to tickle me until I giggle like an albino anthropoid shilling pancake mix.



The women were circling me, dressing me with their eyes. I let a hand drift across my crotch, just to make sure a testicle hasn't slipped out. Surely they couldn't be so worked up over a few exposed kneecaps.

"You do what you want," the head production assistant said, shaking her head in disbelief. "But I'm warning you, if you walk out on The View set in shorts, Star Jones is gonna make fun of you."

I probably shouldn't have laughed quite so hard. I'm a coward by nature, and my German roots have conditioned me to be subservient to any and all authority figures. But there are few things in this world that terrify me as little as the sentence "Star Jones is gonna make fun of you."

Really? That's your threat? My people had to deal with the Schutzstaffel, and you think I'm going to be intimidated by a woman whose wedding was sponsored by Continental Airlines?

The six or so interns and production assistants were not as amused. They folded their arms and flared their nostrils, glowering at me with such apparent animosity that I thought they were trying to melt my brain with their eyes. I turned to Brendan for support, but he busied himself with picking lint from his pantleg. (Et tu, Brute?)

"Well," I announced to them with a big, shit-eating grin. "I guess that's just a chance I'm gonna have to take."

Intermission I (smoke 'em if you got 'em)

Wait, wait, I've left out a lot, haven't I? Let's back up.

Back in 1997, my writing partner and I wrote a book. Well, it was our second book, but the less said about the first one, the better. We considered this our official debut as humorists. It was a tongue-in-cheek dating tome for men called A Guy's Guide To Dating. Not the best title, I know. Our original idea was much edgier and memorable. We wanted to call it Men Are From Mars, Women Are Out Of Their Fucking Minds. But our editor at Doubleday nixed it on the grounds that readers might find it too hostile. We fought for that title until the end, believe it or not. Brendan and I were both still in our "you're not the boss of me" mid-twenties, and determined to write the kind of scathing satire that might've appeared in National Lampoon. But even Doug Kenny wasn't stupid enough to try and slip "fuck" into a book title.

We didn't expect much in the way of publicity. Snarky humor books written by unknown authors aren't exactly ground-breaking. We assumed Doubleday would treat us like any major publisher treats its no-name writers; with pleasant indifference. We thought they'd ship a few thousand copies to bookstores and wait for readers to find it. If they didn't, well, our advance wasn't gonna break the company's bank.

During the first few weeks, our numbers weren't impressive, but they weren't humiliating, either. Some readers liked the book, some didn't. Judging from our Amazon reviews, most of our fans were foreigners with a shaky grasp of irony and the English language. (My hands-down favorite review: "This is one of the successful books a guy can have to know and succeed his dating." Indeed!)



But we weren't content to just sit back and wait for our book to end up on remainder tables. We wanted to promote the damn thing, with or without Doubleday's help. Our motto became "Divide and Conquer." Or at least it became that when, just weeks after the book was published, Brendan moved out of our shared digs in Chicago and found his own pad in Brooklyn. Apparently sooooomebody (I'm not gonna name any names) thought that humor books don't sell and it made more financial sense to go to New York, because that's where all the real writing work is, or more specifically, where the hot TV producer lived whom he'd slept with a few months earlier, who'd made vague promises of a staff writing gig on a soap opera, which paid a handsome salary that might make him temporarily content, as long as he could ignore the nagging feeling that every word he wrote was disposable, and he'd die forgotten and unappreciated, having contributed nothing of any real value to the culture, and perhaps even made it worse, eating away at what was good and right and true, like a cancer or an American Pie sequel.

I'm sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself. We'll get to that fun little dilemma soon enough.

So Brendan was in New York and I was in Chicago. And in keeping with the repressed homoerotic nature of any writing relationship, we pretended it was no big deal, and maybe even a blessing. "Divide and conquer," we said. Brendan would be our media representative on the East Coast, and I would hustle for press coverage in the Heartland. For a few months, it actually worked. Brendan hosted a bookstore reading in the Village and did the guest bit on a smattering of radio shows. I ended up doing a lot of TV in Chicago, although much of it was public access, and at least one anchor accused me (on a live broadcast, mind you) of condoning rape. I'm still not entirely sure why. It had something to do with a chapter called "Everything I Really Needed To Know About Seduction I Learned From Submarine Warfare."

My biggest TV appearance, by far, was Talking with Aaron Freeman. If you're not from Chicago, the name Aaron Freeman probably means nothing. But anybody with a 312 or 773 area code hears about Aaron Freeman just slightly less often than they hear about Mayor Richard Daley. I was thrilled to be on the show, especially after learning that I would be part of a roundtable discussion with the guy who created Defending the Caveman and the Alderman of the 46th Ward. (How do you go wrong with that kind of comedy competition?)

During the hour-long taping, I was in rare form. I delivered zingers like my writing career depended on it. I even saved myself from what could've been an awkward and embarrassing moment of dead air.

The show was taped in March of 1998, just a few months after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. I'd heard about it in passing, but hadn't bothered to read a newspaper. I was too preoccupied with my own busy life. I had a book out, I was suddenly in need of a roommate, and I'd spent most of my advance from A Guy's Guide on dope and buying drinks for any woman in Chicago who might be impressed with a line like, "Yeah, I just published a book with Doubleday. But enough about me, can I smell your hair?" I had more important things to think about than whether the President was getting head from chubby interns.

"So," Freeman asked me, "you wrote a book about dating. Do you have any advice for Clinton?"

I hesitated. I didn't want to admit that I knew almost nothing about Billy's misdeeds, at least not enough to say anything intelligent about it. Maybe if I just coughed up an oral sex joke, I thought, something vague enough to get me off the hook, they'll move on to another topic. 'Think, Spitznagel, think!' A voice echoed through my head. 'A guy gets blown in the Oval Office, what's the obvious punchline?'

"W-well," I stuttered. "I guess I'd tell him to always keep a few moist towelettes near his desk."

The other guests burst into laughter. Aaron gave me an approving nod. "Niiiiice," he said, flashing me his immaculate smile.

It wasn't until much later that I learned about the dress stained with Mista Kotta's DNA. I was amazed at my improvisational prowess. Did I have some kind of subconscious connection with the comedy cosmos, or a verbal agreement with the universe to get immediate access to satire-ready material on a "need-to-know" basis? If I could pull a Clinton joke out of my ass, maybe I was a pop culture reference machine, able to spit out timely thigh-slappers on every conceivable topic.

I was riding the crest of my PBS-affiliate victory when I got the call about The View. Our publicist had booked us on a national talk show. This was it, I thought. This was my moment to shine.

I rubbed my palms together like a Bond villain. "This will be too easy," I laughed.

ACT TWO

I put on pants. You know the kind I mean. Pants that go down to your feet. Slacks. Slaaaaaaaaaaaaaaacks. (Cue uncontrollable shuddering.)

I don't want to get into the messy details about what happened. Okay, fine, I caved. Have you ever tried to say no to six or so interns and production assistants for a morning talk show on a major TV network? They don't back down easily. You're a tiny fishing boat and they're the tidal wave in The Perfect Storm.

Okay, okay, that's not entirely true either. They didn't bully me into putting on pants. I actually enjoyed making them squirm. I even told them I was considering wearing a vest and no shirt. If Star Jones was gonna go to the trouble of mocking me on national TV, we might as well do it right. I wanted to give her some comedy fodder that she could really sink her pre-gastric bypass fangs into. I would be the guy who dressed like a Cirque de Soleil understudy and didn't understand why everybody was staring at him. Maybe I'd even play the flute and ask her if she believed in fairies. She could have a field day with me.

"I knew you'd back down," my writing partner laughed.

I didn't respond. I was still a little hurt that he didn't defend me. But I was mostly annoyed that he knew exactly why I'd so easily abandoned my principles.

I wish my reasons were more original. But sadly, sometimes I'm just a dude. And like all dudes, I get flustered when an attractive woman smiles at me, and brushes her fingers across my forearm, and laughs at my jokes a little too hard, and tells me repeatedly just how brilliant and funny and talented and easy on the eyes I am, and "Oh my god, I can't believe I just said that out loud, that is so unprofessional of me, (giggle, giggle, giggle.)"

I'm helpless when just one attractive woman fawns over me, but when it's six or so attractive women - who (let's not forget) are paid to shamelessly flirt with schmucks like me - I am a spineless toad. I'll do anything they want me to do, because like all dudes, the moment an attractive woman shows any interest at all, I'm convinced that there's a very real possibility, however remote, that she wants to have sex with me in the nearest unoccupied bathroom stall.

I was an idiot. An idiot in slacks.

(TO BE CONTINUED... oh, I don't know. Let's say "eventually." Is that vague enough for you?)

Falling Out of the Family Tree (part two)

(To read Part One, kindly go here.)

Here's a suggestion: The next time you anticipate spending a holiday with your family, plan some distractions well in advance. A few months before your mother flies out, casually mention to her that you've developed an interest in genealogy. If she's anything like the Spitznagel matriarch, she'll do the homework for you, and show up for Thanksgiving with a massive scrapbook of photos, documenting every person who ever claimed to share your bloodline. And then, instead of taking part in awkward conversations rife with thinly-veiled hostility - which inevitably lead to comments like "Well, looks like you ruined dinner, just like you ruined my childhood" - you can defuse some of that tension by making snide comments about family members who died several hundred years ago and are unable to defend themselves.

YOU'VE COME THIS FAR, DON'T GIVE UP NOW! KEEP ON READIN'!

Take this picture, which includes a gaggle of Spitznagel descendants so utterly forgettable that nobody bothered to write down their names:



My brother and I spent most of Thanksgiving studying this photo and trying to work out the intricate family dynamics. We decided that mere moments after it was taken, the mütter grabbed the nearest blunt object - a belt, perhaps, but more likely a shovel - and beat the living strudel out of her kids, muttering in a thick German accent, "You are zuch naughty, dirty, awful, disobedient children!"

The beating was probably especially unpleasant for the chubby monkey in the lower right corner. My heart goes out to that kid, it really does. It's bad enough that his mother forced him to wear a pseudo-sailor suit, but did she really have to encourage him to stuff his fat little face with so many berliners that he started to resemble a bad Godfather impression? Seriously, have you ever seen a fat kid that made you want to invent a time machine just so you could go back to 1851 and punch him squarely in his gelatinous belly?

But there's so much more than just portly comic fodder to be found in this photo. Little did I realize that a Spitznagel ancestor was the inspiration for Uter, the German foreign exchange student from The Simpsons.



"Don't make me run, I'm full of chocolate!" You're welcome, America.

Though the photos made for some much-needed frivolity in what could've been a disastrous holiday, it wasn't entirely a joke to me. Sure, I didn't come right out and ask my mother to collect photographic evidence that more Spitznagels had walked the earth than just the people I see at weddings and funerals. But I hadn't discouraged her from doing so. I just... hinted at my curiosity. I didn't hide my thirst for knowledge, and occasionally I gently mocked her preconceived notions of familial relations. Specifically, a certain Danish knight that everybody in the family seemed determined to claim as a genetic elder.

To her credit, my mom responded to my taunting by doing her research, and collecting every conceivable record of the Spitznagel family tree. This included photos, birth certificates, personal histories, diary excerpts, and indecipherable notes written in what I can only assume was intoxication. When she handed me the bulging notebook, which had the girth of a Tolstoy novel but without any of the self-effacing charm, I was initially enthusiastic. But as I flipped through its yellowing pages, it became apparent that everything had been arranged in no particular order. There was no sense of chronology. One page might contain a photo collage of my grandparents' wedding, followed by a detailed chart of every Spitznagel that remained in Göteborg, Sweden during the Great Exodus of 1781, and then - the obvious thematic thruline - a recipe for vegan chocolate-chip cookies by my brother's college roommate, minus the hashish.

It had the haphazard aesthetic of a smash-and-grab job. If I didn't know better, I would've guessed that my mother had broken into a government building and snatched every file she could find on the Spitznagel family. The pages were arranged with the hurried panic of somebody who believed the authorities might be kicking down the door at any minute.

My mom was especially pleased with her documentation of the so-called Danish knight, which she believed proved his existence beyond a shadow of a doubt. I didn't want to be a party pooper, but just because you have a lineage chart that's written in courier 12-point type on paper so old it has the consistency of bark, and the first name on the list is DANISH KNIGHT, well, that don't make it so.

Not that I don't want to be related to a knight. Who wouldn't want that kind of street cred in the family? It's not like our pedigree began with UNDERACHIEVING SERF WITH SCABIES. And even more than his job title, I was particularly impressed by said knight's ability to procreate. He spilled his seed with the same frequency that most people shake hands. "So nice to meet you. Aaaaaaaaaand you're pregnant." With so many kids to contend with, he took the easy way out and named everybody Warren or Edwards - or if they were girls, Isabel or Joan. I wish I was exaggerating, but it's entirely true. I'm related to almost 300 people named Warren. Either there was a name shortage in the 15th century, or my forefathering Danish knight was as unoriginal as he was non-Danish.

I like to think he was populating his own army. Granted, it'd be a very confused army, a little unclear on who they should be fighting or what flag they were supposed to be carrying. Every march into battle would be ruined when somebody invariably asked, "We're from Denmark, right? Then what the hell are we doing in Sweden? Or is this Germany? I have no clue. Damn you, vague genealogical parchment!"

As I continued to flip through the Spitznagel Book of Ancestors - my brother and I were endlessly amused by this title, especially when we said it with a creepy Dark Shadows baritone - I discovered a plethora of fun facts about my family's history that had nothing to do with ambiguous nationalism or medieval military braggery. Here are some of the highlights:

1. My mother's side reproduced like rabbits. From the moment it was legal to have sex - which, in the mid-1800s, was the moment you wandered alone into a barn - her family was plopping out babies like they thought yellow fever might wipe out the bloodline. Here's a sentence my mother's great-great-great-grandmother never heard her husband say to her: "I'm gonna pull out this time."

Meanwhile, on my father's side, it wasn't uncommon for parents to settle for just one child. I'm not sure why this was. Maybe they just didn't like children, or maybe all of the Spitznagel women had really, really small vaginas. If that's true, it must've made for great sex (at least for the men) and unbearable childbirth. I imagine them slapping away the groping hands of their husbands, scowling at them like a bartender at last call. "You don't have to go home but you can't stay here, this vagina is clooooosed."

2. The Spitznagels have a proud tradition of not smiling for portraits.



I can't say I'm surprised by this. Nobody in my family - at least nobody I've met - has a sense of humor. They take everything they encounter in life literally. There is no room for sarcasm. If my family had a motto, it would be this: "We are mentally preparing for famine and disease, so kindly shut up already with the jokes." In keeping with this world-view, my relatives have always looked severe in photographs. They don't smile for the camera so much as sneer at it, as if they suspect the photographer is secretly mocking them and they just haven't figured out how yet. Look more closely at their expressions and you'll know exactly what they're thinking. "Go ahead and laugh, but at least I'll be ready when the doctor tells me I have inoperable cancer."

3. The Spitznagel men have been consistently shitty to women.

I could cite several examples, but here are just a few of my favorites.

Richard Warren of Kent, England landed at Plymouth Rock after a heroic journey across the Atlantic on the Mayflower in 1620 (at least according to another random parchment discovered by my mom, which has roughly the same legality as a Las Vegas marriage certificate). He was a brave man - brave enough to say to his wife and five daughters, "So listen, I'm gonna take a sail with some of my buddies. Be back... well, I'm not sure. Don't wait up, love you, bye."

Did you know that the pilgrims were deadbeat dads? I sure didn't. I knew that they'd brought smallpox and slavery to the New World, and their habit of chopping off the hands of Native Americans was never appreciated as an obvious hazing prank. But I didn't realize they'd used the "I'm just going out to get some cigarettes" line on their wives, and then jumped the first ship to the ends of the earth. How nifty that I'm related to one of those douchebags.

(Coincidently, Richard's wife and five kids eventually found him - five years later. I like to think the reunion had a goofy sitcom aesthetic. "Oh, it's... it's you. Wow, this is... awkward. So listen, funny story, um... have you met my new wife yet?" And then both women took turns beating him senseless as the Bonnie Raitt song "Let's Give Them Something To Talk About" played on mandolin in the background.)

And then there's William Larkin, my grandfather on my mother's side. He contributed to the family tree, in typical narcissistic form, by writing a lengthy account of his own life, which he titled IMPORTANT DATES IN THE LIFE OF WILLIAM LARKIN. The resulting essay reads like a resume, listing every job he ever had, from summer camp counselor to ranch hand to, my personal favorite, "stacking tin cans for the American Can Company." Strangely, he failed to mention his wedding day or the birth of any of his four children. Apparently none of these qualify as "IMPORTANT DATES". Stacking cans for some greedy tin-can tycoon, who likely paid him a shiny new nickel every month? A priceless memory. But falling in love and having children to carry on his can-stacking legacy? Eh, whatever.

4.

My family is obsessed with how our relatives died.

Maybe I'm just not that morbid, but I don't want details about my great-great-great-grandfather's long battle with diphtheria. I'm not interested in how a distant aunt succumbed to scurvy, or whether a third-cousin was driven to an early grave by severe hypertension, an acute intracranial infection, or any number of diseases of the eyes, nose, throat, teeth, ears and cervical vertebrae. Okay fine, I did enjoy reading about a great-uncle named Thomas Larkin, who once fell into a drainage canal and "SUFFERED GREAT SHOCK" (emphasis not mine). Really, great shock? Well I should fucking hope so. I've never fallen into a canal, drainage or otherwise, but I imagine the experience would be at least a little stressful.

Here's where I differ from the rest of my immediate family. When I hear that I had relatives who worked on a pig farm in Brienz, Switzerland, my first questions are, "What were their lives like? What made them happy? What made them sad?" Not "did they suffer from irritable bowel syndrome?"



But that's mostly what was recorded by countless generations of Spitznagels. You want to read about my family's rich history of colon blockage? You got it, buster! You won't find more disgusting and depressing reading material this side of the Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy. But what about the personalities of my ancestry? Who were these people? What did they think and feel and love and hate and believe?

Aside from a few can-stacking tales, there isn't much to go on. Believe me, I've checked. The only relative given any kind of backstory that doesn't read like a postmortem is George Comings, who depending on who you believe, is related to either my mother or my father (and possibly both, which may explain why I have so much difficulty with math). The written account of his life is sometimes fascinating, but usually lacking in any narrative depth. It's less a Hero's Journey and more a random collection of unrelated bullet points listed in no particular order.

"The Great Chicago Fire wiped out his sewing machine business." So sad. And yet for the rest of us who might've one day been guilt-tripped into taking over the family business, so fortunate. Thank you, Mrs. O'Leary's Cow.

"He was responsible for the first bottled milk to be sold in the city of Eau Claire, Wisconsin." Not sure why that's something worth remembering, but sure, thanks for sharing.

"He had a passion for the southern negro." I'm sorry, what? That's a little vague, don't you think? What kind of passion are we talking about, exactly? Like a Thomas Jefferson kinda passion? Is that why I tan so easily?

It's times like this that I wish I'd asked my grandparents more questions. Surely they'd have a few stories about my family, something to put it all into context. Only one is still alive - my mother's mother - and she's started to go senile. Which isn't a bad thing. If you reach her age and you aren't defecating in a bag and babbling incoherently about Eisenhower, you probably weren't the "fun one" at parties. I adore her, I really do, but the last meaningful conversation I had with her was about how there's just too many different types of cheeses these days. "Gouda, brie, havarti, provolone, who can keep track anymore?"

Even if I could go back and do it all over, I'm not sure what insights I'd uncover. In those rare moments in my youth when a grandparent discussed their past, it was never with nostalgia or the worldly hindsight of age. It was always tinged with anger and bitterness. It was less "Back in my day, you could go to the talking picture show for a nickel" and more "Have you seen the goddamn movies these days? Absolute garbage. If they want more than a nickel from me, they're kidding themselves."

For them, it was never that the past was perfect, but that the present is awful.

After Thanksgiving, I returned home with the Spitznagel Book of Ancestors (cue Dark Shadows lightning). I assumed that'd be the end of it, but what started as a mildly amusing holiday diversion soon evolved into a fixation. I stayed up all night, huddled under the covers with a flashlight, studying all of those unfamiliar faces like I was searching for clues. I wanted to feel some kind of connection with them. This was my family, after all. But it was like looking at the nameless models in stock photos for the frames sold at Target. They meant nothing to me. I could stare and stare and stare at them until my eyes bled, but they would always be strangers.

The mind does funny things when it's 4am and you're exhausted and yet determined to have an intimate connection with somebody who died hundreds of years before you were born. You start making up life stories...

Joseph Larkin



Joseph - or as his friends called him, "Ol' Dead Eyes" - was not an exceptionally bright kid, or even talented in any discernable way. But he was easily the most somber and annoyingly despondent child in Leipzig, Germany - and if you've ever been to Leipzig, you know that's really saying something. His mirthless moods inspired him to write some of the worst poetry in all of late 19th Century Germany - which, again, is like saying he was voted "most fascist" at his German grade school.

Joseph's magnum opus was a 1200-page epic poem called "Broken Hearts, Melancholy Massacre and The Lament Of a Lonely Girl", which very few people read and even his parents described as "kinda faggy."

Sadly, he died 126 years too soon to enjoy the limited success of his inevitable emo band.

Gottlob and Emilie Bareis



As Shakespeare once wrote, "Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind." You couldn't find a more perfect sentiment to sum up the marriage of Gottlob and Emilie, who celebrated 68 wonderful years of not noticing each other. From the moment their respective families made their wedding plans, they were involved in a whirlwind romance somewhere between strangers on an elevator and a funeral greeting line.

For their 50th anniversary, the happy couple renewed their vows with a ceremony that almost everybody involved described as "uncomfortable and weird." Who can forget when they gazed deeply into each other's eyes, as if they were peering into the other person's soul, and asked the question that trickled from their lips like sweet music: "I'm sorry, who are you again?"

Alice Comings



Whether it was her irresistible "life is a bowl of sunshine" smile or her always impeccable fashion sense - she never failed to wear the trendiest rags of the Depression Era (as long as they showed off her yummy ankles) - Alice put the "hot" back in "impoverished hottie." She was easily the most desirable vagrant in New York's German ghetto.

But much to the disappointment of eligible soup kitchen bachelors everyone, she never married. Instead, she remained fiercely independent and self-sufficient, and eventually went on to modest fame as a supporting character in a string of William Faulkner novels.

* * *

I did this for almost an entire weekend. And by the end, I had fabricated a long and complex history for my family. None of it was actually true, but whatever. Maybe that's the best anybody can hope for. They say that history is written by the winners. But I'm starting to think that history is actually written by anybody who bothers to write it down at all. I may not have my facts straight, but I have enough free time to obsess over such things. And that's really all it takes to become your family's personal historian.

Someday, when I tell my grandkids about our ancestors - assuming I can get them to take off their goddamn jetpacks for one goddamn minute - I'll have some great stories for them. "Gather 'round, children," I'll say in my harumphy old guy voice. "I'm gonna tell you about the time your great-great-grandfather saved Manhattan from Hitler's Stormtroopers by stacking tin cans along the New York Harbor and creating an impenetrable Wall of Resistance."

Horseshit, sure. But who are you gonna believe?