Big Mike: Growing Older — And I Do Mean Growing

A personal message to Milo: Thank you, thank you, thank, you. I feel as though a weight has been lifted off my shoulders.

Yesterday, if any of the seven of you recall, Milo confessed that the mug who greets him from the mirror each morning isn’t the same king of beasts who grinned at him a couple of decades ago. And all this time I thought I was the only one who was turning into the subject of an Ivan Albright painting.

Good Morning!

It’s embarrassing, I tell you, this business of getting old. Swear to god, I used to fantasize that firm young females would be peeking in on me as I showered. I’d pose for my pretend audience. Just look at those bulging biceps. That flat abdomen. Those springy legs. I’d lather up as if I were the star of a soap commercial. Better, I was the lead actor in my own soft-core porn movie.

Me, Then

Now, though, I try to shower with the lights off and my eyes closed. The less I — or any imaginary audience — sees, the better. I hate to start the day weeping.

It’s a goddamned shame. See, now I have the confidence of a middle-aged, graying veteran of the love wars.  I’m not afraid to talk to any woman. I don’t get tongue tied around pretty dames like Rat in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Rat

Maybe it’s because the object of the game isn’t to convince them to watch me lather up sensually and languorously in the shower anymore. I’d rather have them laugh at my bons mots now, not my ballooning belly and my saggy glutes.

When I was first dating The Loved One, we’d go out to dinner and I’d eat like a sparrow. I wouldn’t even finish my entree. Heaven forbid she’d think I was a glutton. Now, though, I can swiftly dump a couple of heaping plates of baked rigatoni down my gullet and then tell her I could go for some bread and butter.

Then the next morning I force myself to look in the mirror and wonder why I’m turning into a sphere. If, as they say, I am what I eat, then I must be one colossal meatball.

Me, Now

Amazingly, The Loved One tells me I’m alluring to her no matter what I look like, the silly fool.

To look at her, you’d hardly believe she’s now middle-aged. She’s still quite a dish. When people see pix of her, they often make the winking comment that I’d robbed the cradle. I wonder what her friends tell her — that she’s taken a hostage from the nursing home?

And what about Benny Jay? The son of a bitch runs every day, for pity’s sake! He’s more fit and trim now than when I first met him in the early ’80s. It’s not fair.

My brother Joey is in his sixties now, yet he’s thinner than he was when he had a bushy white-boy ‘fro. Damn him.

My pal Danny, who turned half a century old in November, has a magnificent head of salt and pepper hair. Richard Gere or Michael Douglas could play him in the story of his life. He’s distinguished looking. Women still occasionally follow him with their eyes as he walks through a restaurant. I’m beginning to despise him.

Richard Gere As My Pal Danny

The Loved One could doll herself up, don a short skirt, and still turn heads down at the wine bar. Benny Jay, Joey, and Danny could go out tonight and sweep the tomatoes off their feet.

Me? All I’ve got is tomato sauce stains on my shirt.

But I’m not alone. I’ve got a friend in Milo.

Oliver Platt As Big Mike & Lauren Graham As The Loved One In The New Movie “When Do We Eat?”

Big Mike: How Do You Take Your Coffee?

So today is National Coffee Party Day. Woo-hoo. It’s supposedly the liberals’ answer to the wingnut right’s Tea Parties.

They Prefer Tea

And that’s the problem with liberals and Democrats and all the rest of this holy land’s softies including abortionists and jackbooted homosexuals. Always a day late, always answering the right — as if the right is some authority to which one has to answer. Well, let me say…, wait, um, oops. On second thought, that is the right.

Anyway, I ought to be right in the middle of Coffee Party festivities. I sit here in my home away from home, Soma coffeehouse in good old Bloomington, Indiana. If Annabel Park and her gang of klatschers are really on to something, this place will be packed with citizens expounding on the evils of corporate America, the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, and the fact that Glenn Beck is allowed to roam the streets without a straightjacket.

Annabel Park (photo by Eric Sueyoshi)

So, I look around and see…, a fairly empty coffeehouse. You see, yesterday was the last day of classes before spring break so Bloomington, much to the delight of townies, will be pretty much student-less for a week. Oh sure, the usual suspects are here. There’s the couple Sally and Harry — she works for Indiana University’s financial aid office and he’s in the Southeast Asian Studies department. Oh, and there’s the streetwise former Chicagoan, Pat, who’s the boss of the city’s water department, holding court at his customary table. We all usually talk about the issues of the day and pretty much agree that Bushey Boy was a lunkhead and Obama’s a hell of a lot better, but that isn’t really saying much.

I paid my respects to parties at both tables and not once did we talk about our visions for the future of this great republic, as Park might hope. The chief barista, Abbey, didn’t even have NPR on the radio, as it normally is on Saturday mornings. Instead, she’s playing that Feist disc, the one we’ve all heard so many times we just tune it out now, like music in an elevator.

The difference between the left and the right in America is the right has a clearly defined villain around whom they all can gather and lob verbal stones as well as the occasional real one. That would be one Barack Hussein Obama, as they like to refer to him — that is, when they’re not calling him Obama bin Laden or Adolf Owe-bama. The left, on the other hand, has a cast of thousands to demonize. My personal fave is Lloyd Blankfein. Others prefer Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly. Then there’s Dick Cheney. Sarah Palin. Mitch McConnell. John Boehner. Oil company CEOs. Fundamentalists. The Texas board of education. Birthers. The Micheles: Malkin and Bachmann. They all have their little hissing sections within the left.

How can you get people to stand up as one — as Annabel Park hopes Coffee Party Day will do — when they’re all splintered into little diverse subsets? One of the cardinal rules of organizing is to get people to identify a single threat they can all agree on. And, man, Obama fits that bill perfectly for the right. They don’t even need a secret handshake. They can simply spout “Obama’s a socialist” (code for I’ll never accept the fact that a brown man is the president) and their confreres will jump out of the woodwork. The more radical among them might simply say “Obama’s destroying this country” (another code, this one meaning Now all our sisters/wives/daughters will be going black before you know it.) That gang is stocking up on canned goods and ammo.

He Knows What’s Wrong And What To Do About It

We dedicated liberals, progressives, mild radicals, social capitalists, and the like need a straw man like that. As I indicated earlier, my vote would go to the CEO of Goldman Sachs. But Lloyd Blankfein lacks the cachet, the aura, the celebrity. Half the people on my side of the political spectrum probably don’t even know who he is. We need someone with pizzazz. Someone who looks great on TV. Someone whose very being threatens the ideals we hold dear.

John McCain wasn’t that person. Nor would Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney be. Frankly, not even Glenn Beck fills the bill. Trying to demonize him would be like picking on a wimpy fat kid in the fifth grade. Only toward the end of his term did the public  catch on that George W. Bush was the personification of all that was wrong with the right. Before that, we had to pretend to support him as commander in chief after 9/11.

We need, in short, Sarah Palin. Then we can have a real National Coffee Party Day.

The Look Of Love

Big Mike: Am I Blue?

Things have been going awfully swimmingly the last few months. The Loved One and I are thrilled with each other. Work’s going well for us. Our home is in fairly good shape. The car’s still running. Our doctors aren’t warning us to wrap up our financial affairs just yet. And — hoo-rah! — spring seems to be here (although Constance, the big potato over at The Book Case, keeps saying You watch, it’s gonna snow again, the scrooge.)

It’s times like these — rare though they are — that make me wonder why I still keep taking Zoloft. I’ve been on it since 2002. Before that I did imipramine and desipramine, a couple of early anti-depressants that today seem laughably primitive. I also swallowed a lot of Xanax back in the 1980s and 90s.

In fact, I wouldn’t leave the house without at least a half dozen Xanax in my pocket. Not that I was going to take all six of them. But merely having them clacking around in the plastic pill case gave me just enough spine to go out into the world and face down agoraphobia, panic attacks, and — horrors — people. So I’d take one or two on a good day, four on a bad day.

Not only that, I had my head shrunk by psychiatrists, psychologists, and licensed clinical social workers. I tried prayer, meditation, chanting, booze, and good old positive thinking. No matter what I tried, my terrors of going outdoors, high places, confined spaces, and the rest of the cornucopia of neuroses I entertained made me a shuddering wreck.

I’m thinking about all this because I just finished reading a piece in The New Yorker about depression. The author, Louis Menand, seems to think all the rage for diagnosing depression in people is a load of crap. He implies that this mania is nudged along by drug manufacturers who want to peddle more and more anti-depressants.

He’s not the only one who thinks that way. He writes of a hot new book out called Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease. Its author, Gary Greenberg, also sees a lot of business opportunism in telling people they’re pathologically blue.

Gary Greenberg

None of this is new. My old pal Danny long ago told me his daddy-o felt psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists and the like loved to tell you your head was fucked up “so they could get you hooked.” It’s unclear whether Danny’s poppa-rino meant hooked on medications or hooked on weekly visits — probably both. The latest stats seem to bear his fears out. The National Institute of Mental Health reports that 26.2 percent of Americans can be diagnosed with a mental disorder (primarily depression) in any given year.

Sheesh! That means if you’re car-pooling this morning with three other people, you’d better hope today’s driver isn’t the NIMH’s one-in-four, especially when the car nears that concrete support column up ahead.

“Please, Please, Please Don’t Be One Of The Four!”

Then again, as Menand and Greenberg argue, the driver merely might be experiencing some normal everyday sadness — the loss of a loved one, say, or a pressing financial concern. She or he feels down about it all, happens to catch an ad for Cymbalta on TV, makes an appointment and says Hey doc, lemme have some of those skull jockey pills.

Menand even cites the case of Paxil. Its manufacturer discovered in the 90s that the drug seemed to make people less shy. So it went about the business of positioning shyness as a mental disorder so that shrinks could prescribe barrels-ful of Paxil.

No doubt all of this is true. Trivializing clinical depression just to make a buck is so craven you’d think a Wall Street banker came up with the idea. The only problem is when I read this stuff I start thinking that maybe — just maybe — I’d fallen victim to all the hype back when I was that shuddering wreck.

I don’t shudder so much anymore. I have no idea why. Was it the Zoloft? Or was it a combination of meditation, therapy, and booze? Or — worse — was I just imagining it all?

Someone very close to me once scoffed at my collection of loose screws. I won’t identify him because I don’t want to embarrass him (although I should.) Let’s call him Thomas. One day Thomas had as much as he could take of my little madnesses. “You know what your problem is?” he said. “It’s all in your head.”

Uh, yeah.

Even though I’m pretty certain Thomas was full of shit, there’s still that tiny little part of me that fears he was right. Then when I read the indictments put forth by guys like Menand and Greenberg, I start obsessing: I wasn’t really depressed; There was nothing wrong with me; It must have been all in my head.

Every once in a while, though, some crystal clear memory of the existential terror I felt being trapped in an el car some forty feet above the pavement hits me. I think of my racing, pounding heart. I recall hyperventilating. I can almost feel the sweat pouring out of me again. I get twitchy thinking about how I’d struggle to resist the urge in every cell of my being to tear the doors open and jump out. And that was only one of my little madnesses.

Then I realize that Thomas was right. It was all in my head. He just didn’t know how right he was.

All In My Head

Big Mike: The Half Of Life I Love

I turned 54 big ones this week. March 4th. The only date that’s a command.

March forth.

As in the years, which are now flipping by like calendar pages in an old movie. Eek.

The Days Seem Like Minutes

I can’t stop my paunch from growing, my lower legs from turning more mottled, the area just below what used to be my finely chiseled jaw from turning wobbly, and other signs that I’m nearer the soil than the womb.

Scary? You bet. Then again when my sis, Good Old Franny, died in January 2007 I sat in her bedroom alone with her. It was our goodbye. Cancer had torn through her bowels, her liver, and then pretty much all the rest of her internal organs until she was almost a skeleton. She only had a few days left on this mad Earth, maybe only a few hours. Everyone knew it. We’d all taken vacation and sick days to gather around her and usher her out. Each of us — her sibs, her kids, her grandkids, her old pals — took ten or fifteen minutes to commune with her, alone. I almost envied her. That’s the way to go, I thought, with people waiting in line to tell you how much they love you.

Ma, of course, was part of the bon voyage party. She took an hour or so with Franny, naturally. And, just as naturally, they fought. They’d been fighting all their lives. Why should they stop just because one of them was on her deathbed?

Anyway, it came to my turn. I’m not a sugar-coater and Franny wasn’t either. It would have been an insult to her to pretend I was there for anything other than to bid her adieu. So I said, “Well, this is it. Tell me, did you love this life?

Franny nodded, then after a pause during which I suppose she was gathering her strength to speak, she said, “Yes I did.” She paused again, eying me in a way that made me squirm, as if she was on the verge of knowing something that the rest of us couldn’t even begin to imagine. That coming knowledge liberated her from niceties and any possible hesitancy — no matter how slight it might have been in her case — to tell a painful truth. She said, “You don’t, do you?”

How could I lie to my dying sister?

“Not so much,” I said. “I’d say about fifty percent of the time I love life. The other fifty percent you can have.”

She nodded again as if she knew precisely what my answer was going to be. She’d only wanted me to tell her the truth.

So let me tell you about a part of that fifty percent I love. The Loved One asked me a couple of weeks what I wanted to do for my birthday. The first thing I said was, “Don’t get me anything; I got enough crap.”

“Okay, what do you want to do?”

“I dunno.”

You know, at fifty-four you really don’t want to get a James Bond 007 attache case. I got one when I was eight. Good god, that thing was so cool — I would have had an orgasm upon unwrapping it had I been capable of having one at that tender age. That’s one of the drawbacks of my age — there’s no longer any gift that can excite me that much.

An Eight-Year-Old’s Dream

And at fifty-four you really don’t want to go to the circus, which I was dying to do when I was seven. I pestered Ma and Dad to take me to the circus for my birthday that year. Both of them looked at me as if I were daft. As if they’d rehearsed beforehand, each said, in turn, “Whaddya wanna do that for?”

I had no answer. I was trying to buy into their outlook on life so I pretended that I knew the circus was nothing more than a bunch of lions and tigers and clowns and acrobats. A silly expense. How would going to the circus help pay the mortgage, tuitions, doctor bills, and keep the family’s credit rating pristine? So I shrugged. Of course, one of the advantages of the passage of time is the ability to think of a good riposte. Now I know that when they asked why I wanted to go to the circus, I should have said, “Uh, because I’m seven?”

A Seven-Year-Old’s Priority

So what did I want to do on my 54th birthday? It hit me. Tell Me A Story, Part Three at the Muddy Boots Cafe in Nashville, about fifteen miles east on us on State Road 46.

That’s what we did last night. It was, as the name suggests, the third installment of an open mike storytelling event sponsored by radio station WFHB (for which I’m a newswriter, by the way). Just plain old folk get up and tell some true tale.

Best thing we could have ever done. The Loved One had a chai and a slice of cornbread. I had a blueberry smoothie. And we listened to the most motley collection of storytellers rural Indiana could produce.

The Muddy Boots Cafe

There was a young woman who told of a car trip she’d taken with her family when she was a girl to the mountains of Virginia. All the way, squished into the backseat with her sibs, she listened to her older brother tell her spooky tales about vampires and Jesus. She recalled laying up all night long in her sleeping bag when they finally reached their campsite, her eyes wide, listening for the tell-tale sounds of vampires or a bloody Jesus come to scare the poo out of her. To this day, she admitted, she still can’t really distinguish between vampires and Jesus.

Another guy told a story he swore was true of his high school reunion where the most athletic, noblest and most popular guy in class finally decked the biggest bully and everyone cheered. But his telling of the old chestnut was so heartfelt and entertaining that none of us cared that everyone who’s ever attended a high school reunion tells the same damned story.

There was a grandma who began by mentioning that her completely gray hair was caused by her daughter Heather. It seems the family once had a pet ferret that constantly humped everything in sight. One day when she was about four, Heather stuffed the ferret into a pillowcase and swung it wildly over her head just to see how it would feel. She stopped only when she inadvertently clunked the ferret-bag on the dining room chair. “Mama,” she called out, “the ferret’s not moving!” It turned she’d paralyzed the ferret from the waist down. The incident, the grandma said, had instilled in Heather a lifelong desire to care for animals. As for the ferret, she said, it went on to live longer than most of its species-mates, only the family never again had to witness it humping anything.

A farm woman told a story about her ex-husband. He had a horse whom she loathed. The husband, she claimed, only kept the horse around to torture her. One day he was out putting fenceposts in the ground. He came in midway through his chore and grabbed a beer out of the fridge. He went back out and resumed his work. A few minutes later, he dashed back in and demanded of the woman, “Why did you drink my beer?”

“I never touched your beer,” she said. And, like many married couples, they went back and forth for long minutes. Finally, he ordered her to bring him out another beer.

A few minutes later, he burst back in the house and yelled, “You did it again! You drank my beer!”

“I did not,” she huffed and another back and forth ensued. Again he ordered her to bring him out another beer.

This time, the woman decided to hang around, hoping to see what was going on. A moment after her husband laid his beer and the ground and began to concentrate on his fence posts, the horse peeked around the barn, extended his neck, picked up the can with his lips, raised his head and drained it.

“Look, look,” the woman shouted. “Look what your damned horse is doing!”

The next day, the woman concluded, her soon-to-be ex-husband nailed a sign up on one of his new fenceposts reading, “Horse for sale. Cheap.”

The last storyteller of the night was a big, round guy with a long, thick, gray beard and equally gray hair hanging down to his shoulders. He was about 65 or so and looked like a cross between an overgrown gnome and a department-store Santa Claus. He wore suspenders and baggy jeans and carried a six-foot walking stick. His was less a tale than a prose-poem about how telling stories makes us human.

The Loved One and I drove back home on hilly, curvy State Road 46 in utter darkness. “I’ll bet we could see a million stars,” she said. Upon hearing that, I pulled off on a gravel road leading into a secluded forest. We came to an opening and I put the Prius in park. When I turned the lights off we couldn’t even see each other for the first few moments.

“It’s too cold,” The Loved One said.

“Let’s just look for a minute,” I said.

We got out of the car and turned our heads skyward. There were so many stars it was hard to make out the constellations. We saw the Winter Triangle easily, though, with brilliant Sirius, the brightest star in the sky other than the Sun forming its bottom point, the red supergiant Betelgeuse forming its top point and white Procyon the triangle’s third point. We saw the blue Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, riding on Taurus the Bull’s massive shoulder. The Loved One broke the silence when she exclaimed, “Look at that! A shooting star!”

She then kissed me as if I were no longer a 54-year-old goat but a someone who had a finely chiseled jaw and no paunch. Those calendar pages suddenly stopped flipping, if only for a moment, in the dark under a million stars.

It was better than the all the circuses and all the James Bond 007 attache cases in the world.

Procyon (upper left), Betelgeuse (upper right) and Sirius (bottom)

Big Mike: Vajazzling

You want proof that human beings are sick and stupid? Here it is: the hottest new thing is vajazzling.

For the uninitiated, vajazzlers decorate their their female genitalia with jewels. The leading proponent of this craze is Jennifer Love Hewitt, who long, long, long ago starred in I Know What You Did Last Summer and since then has been so deservedly ignored that she was forced to, well, encrust her nether-asset in diamonds in order to get the attention she believes she so richly merits.

And you thought women having half-cantaloupes surgically attached to their pectoral muscles was a sure sign of the coming end of the world.

The End Is Near!

Maybe vajazzling is the last gasp manifestation of the Age of Reagan — you know, the fabulous three decades that gave us Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, real-life Gordon Geckos, McMansions, the Hummer H2, gazillion-inch flat screen TVs, Enron, Bernie Madoff and Lloyd Blankfein. I thought the Great Recession had cooled off this holy land’s fascination with greed and hyper-materialism. Maybe Jennifer Love Hewitt and her ovine followers are simply behind the curve.

Trendsetters

We can only hope.

Then again, as good old H.L. Mencken once wrote, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

Jennifer Love Hewitt may be too dense to understand that her glittery hoo-hoo is old hat. She’s certainly not smart enough to grasp the simple fact that having gems mashed into her honey pot makes her, de facto, a dope.

Of course, it could be that vajazzling is merely another benchmark in women’s long struggle for equality. Sexual expression is an historically recognized statement, a revolutionary demonstration even, in the liberation of the oppressed. Jennifer Love Hewitt et al may be announcing to the world that their vaginas are their own property, and they may do with them as they please. In that case, women have now achieved parity with the opposite sex — they are just as stupid as men.

My old pal Aaron Freeman passed on this video of the vajazzling process, via Gawker. The beauty of the whole clip is the woman who actually does the vajazzling (is she the vajazzler or is the woman who gets it done to her the vajazzler?) is embarrassed to say the word vagina!

Nice to know that the certified, professional woman to whom you’re entrusting your girl-junk has the sexual attitude of a kindergartener.

Don’t think I’m coming down hard on these people just because they’re women. I guarantee that if Lloyd Blankfein wasn’t too busy doing god’s work of raping the world economy, he’d be having his phallus gilded this very minute.

Maybe the creationists are right and Darwin and his gang are wrong. We aren’t the progeny of apes. Evolution suggests species improve upon their forebears. Jennifer Love Hewitt and her vajazzling subspecies can’t possibly be an improvement. Have you ever seen a chimp or an orang with jewels on her vagina?

Smarter Than Jennifer Love Hewitt

Big Mike: The Game Behind The Games (Redux)

(We inadvertently posted this piece yesterday. Monday is Milo’s day. Just as he was preparing to hit Publish for his masterpiece, he noticed this piece was already up. Immediately he was on the phone, threatening to take his literary pearls elsewhere. It took no less than a half-hour’s-worth of groveling, a case of Jack Daniel’s, and the arrangement for a midnight visit to his office of a trio of high-priced call girls to calm him down. Oh, and the presentation to him of a solid gold plaque bearing the inscription, “Gary, Indiana’s Greatest Writer.” Our ordeal of prostration took so much out of us, we were too exhausted to include images and links in this re-post. Go to the original post if you want to see them. — The Eds.)

The Winter Olympics are finished, thank goodness. Now it’ll be two good years before I’ll be bombarded with information about athletes I don’t care about and sports that are so pointless as to be parodies of themselves.

Didn’t I warn you a couple of weeks ago when all this year’s Olympics fuckery began that it would be chock full of emotional pornography? Sure enough, as Benny Jay wrote Sunday, some skater performed despite losing her mother. There are six-plus billion of us on this crazy planet. People drop like flies every second of the day. When someone I know cashes it in, I’ll weep. If a friend or a colleague loses a loved one, I’ll be johnny-on-the-spot at the wake or to help them sit shiva. But I won’t salivate like Pavlov’s dogs every time some NBC sportscaster rings the death knell.

This year’s Olympiad may be best remembered not for the poor guy who was killed when he flew off his sled or even for the skater but for the inexplicable interest it has generated in curling. Yup. Curling.

It’s the hottest thing right now. In a Washington Post story the other day one of the Canadian curlers claimed there are a million of her fellow citizens who engage in the sport…, er, thing. That means one of every 34 Canadians enjoys watching a giant paperweight with a handle on top sliding down the ice while a couple of goofs furiously sweep the surface ahead of it. They’re nuts.

A few years ago poker became the hottest thing in the world. It seemed as though every network and cable channel began carrying poker tournaments. Think of it! A game where people sit there, motionless, doing all they can to mask their emotions was being aired a dozen times a day. Watching paint dry would have been far more compelling — at least there’s a color involved.

But I swear to you, poker is a cavalcade of laughs compared to curling.

Yet people all over this lunkheaded land are getting giddy over it. “Fans far and wide were drawn to Canada’s No. 2 sport,” the WashPo story asserted. “… Many fans took time to try to understand the strategy and idiosyncracies. New curling clubs already are being formed in warmer places like Florida and North Carolina.”

Are people that bored in those two states?

Chicago came thisclose to getting the 2016 Olympics. Poor Benny Jay almost had a baby worrying that the International Olympic Committee would tab our town for the “honor.” Public parks would be paved over for one-off concrete arenas, Richie Daley’s cousins and campaign contributors would become (even more) enriched by sweetheart construction and concessions contracts, and embarrassingly poor neighborhood folk would be shipped off to the equivalent of Siberia (Ford Heights?) so they wouldn’t be seen on network TV. All in the name of bringing the city some mythical “world class” cachet.

We really dodged a bullet there, folks. The Vancouver Sun estimated a year ago that various arms of Canadian government — local, provincial and national — had by that time already ponied up $6 billion to make the quadrennial sports/advertising orgy go on. Six years from now, the even bigger summer games would cost us several times that amount. Like we’ve got it to spare.

Who knows what pyramid schemes Richie Daley would have concocted to pay for the 2016 bash? He’d probably begin by slashing expenses — schoolkids don’t really need textbooks, do they? And he might have sold more of the city’s assets — the sidewalks, say — to private operators.

All this talk about money, games, poker, and pyramid schemes reminds me of the one and only time I’ve ever played poker with a bunch of guys.

We played at the Arlington Heights home of a guy named Lester. He was the captain of my 12-inch softball team back in the ’90s. He was geekily earnest — he’d solemnly shake hands with every player as soon as each showed up for practice or the game.

We all arrived at Lester’s house that Friday night, opened our bottles of bourbon, lighted up our five-dollar cigars and looked expectantly at our host. “Deal ‘em up,” one guy said. Instead, Lester lugged out a bunch of charts on easels and a whiteboard. “I just wanna show you guys something before we play,” he said. We all glanced at each other.

Lester proceeded to extol the virtues and wonders of Amway. Oy. “You may ask why I’m so committed to Amway,” he said, which we hadn’t but he told us anyway.

He’d survived a near-death experience a few years before, he said. He was gassing up his car late at night when a guy came up, stuck a pistol in the small of his back and demanded his wallet. He smartly turned it over but, for the hell of it, the gunman pulled the trigger. Lester went down like a sack of flour. Fortunately — maybe miraculously — the bullet lodged in his spine and didn’t do much more damage than to give him a cranky back for the rest of his life.

Anyway, as he recovered, Lester decided not to waste another moment of his life. He’d devote all his energies to making a fabulous living for himself and his family. In fact, he was going to let us all in on the secret of his success.

He drew flow charts showing how scads of money would pass from our countless potential clients to us. The charts described perfect pyramids. Amway makes Bernie Madoff look like a three-card monte player on the el.

None of us exhibited the slightest interest in enrolling. The night wasn’t a total loss for Lester, though. He cleaned each and every one of us out by the time the game broke up.

Richie Daley, the International Olympic Committee and NBC would have been proud.

Big Mike: The Game Behind The Games

The Winter Olympics are finished, thank goodness. Now it’ll be two good years before I’ll be bombarded again with information about athletes I don’t care about and sports that are so pointless as to be parodies of themselves.

Didn’t I warn you a couple of weeks ago when all this year’s Olympics fuckery began that it would be chock full of emotional pornography? Sure enough, as Benny Jay wrote Sunday, some skater performed despite losing her mother a couple of days before. I know it’s tough to lose a parent. I’ve gone through it. My old man and I weren’t exactly peas in a pod but I still cried like a baby when he bought his ticket in 1995.

At the risk of sounding heartless, though, I really don’t care that the woman lost her mother. There are six-plus billion of us on this crazy planet. People drop like flies every second of the day. When someone I know cashes it in, I’ll weep. If a friend or colleague loses a loved one, I’ll be johnny-on-the-spot at the wake or to help them sit shiva. But I won’t salivate like Pavlov’s dog every time some NBC sportscaster rings the death knell.

NBC Got What It Wanted

This year’s Olympiad may be best remembered not for the poor guy who was killed when he flew off his sled or even for that skater but for the inexplicable interest it has generated in curling. Yup. Curling.

It’s the hottest thing right now. In a Washington Post story the other day one of the Canadian curlers claimed there are a million of her fellow citizens who engage in the sport…, er, thing. There are about 34 million Canadians so that mean one of every 34 of them enjoys watching a giant paperweight with a handle on top skidding down the ice while a couple of goofs furiously sweep the surface ahead of it. They’re nuts.

That Sound You Hear Is Me Snoring

A few years ago poker became the hottest thing in the world. It seemed like every network and cable channel began carrying poker tournaments. Think of it! A game where people sit there, motionless, doing all they can to mask their emotions was being aired a dozen times a day. Watching paint dry would have been far more compelling — at least there’s a color involved.

But I swear to you, poker is a cavalcade of laughs compared to curling.

Yet people all over this lunkheaded land are getting giddy over it. “Fans far and wide were drawn to Canada’s No. 2 sport,” the WashPo story asserted. “… Many fans took time to try to understand the strategy and idiosyncrasies. New curling clubs already are being formed in warmer places like Florida and North Carolina.”

Are people that bored in those two states?

Chicago came thisclose to getting the 2016 Olympics. Poor Benny Jay almost had a baby worrying that the International Olympic Committee would tab our town for the “honor.” Public parks would be paved over for one-off concrete arenas, Richie Daley’s cousins and campaign contributors would become (even more) enriched by sweatheart construction and concession contracts, and embarrassingly poor neighborhood folk would be shipped off to the equivalent of Siberia (Ford Heights?) so they wouldn’t be seen on network TV. All in the name of bringing the city some mythical “world class” cachet.

We really dodged a bullet there, folks. The Vancouver Sun estimated a year ago that various arms of Canadian government — local, provincial and national — had by that time already ponied up $6 billion to make the quadrennial sports/advertising orgy go on. Six years from now, the even bigger summer games would cost us several times that amount. Like we’ve got it to spare.

Who knows what pyramid schemes Richie Daley would have concocted to pay for the 2016 bash?  He’d probably begin by slashing expenses — schoolkids don’t really need textbooks, do they? And he might have sold more of the city’s assets — the sidewalks, for instance — to private operators.

“Dear Diary: I’d Happily Give Up All My Textbooks So The City Can Build A Curling Palace!”

All this talk about money, games, poker and pyramid schemes reminds me of the one and only time I’ve ever played poker with a bunch of guys.

We played at the Arlington Heights home of a guy named Lester. He was the captain of my 12-inch softball team back in the ’90s. He was a geekily earnest fellow — he’d solemnly shake hands with every player as soon as each arrived for practice or the game.

We all arrived at Lester’s house that Friday night, opened our bottles of bourbon, lighted up our five-dollar cigars and looked expectantly at our host. “Deal ‘em up,” one guy said. Instead, Lester lugged out a bunch of charts on easels and a whiteboard. “I just wanna show you guys something before we play,” he said. We all glanced at each other.

Lester proceeded to extol the virtues and wonders of Amway. Oy. “You may ask why I’m so committed to Amway,” he said, which we hadn’t but he told us anyway.

He’d survived a near death experience a few years before, he said. He was gassing up his car late at night when guy came up, put a pistol in the small of his back and demanded his wallet. He smartly turned it over but, for the hell of it, the gunman pulled the trigger. Naturally, Lester went down like a sack of flour. Fortunately — almost miraculously so — the bullet lodged in his spine and didn’t do much more damage than to give him a cranky back for the rest of his life.

Anyway, as he was recuperating, Lester decided not to waste another moment of his life. He’d devote all his energies to making a fabulous living for himself and his family. In fact, he was going to let us all on the secret of his success.

He drew flow charts showing how scads of money would pass from our countless potential clients to us. The charts described perfect pyramids. Amway makes Bernie Madoff look like a three-card monte player on the el.

None of us showed the slightest interest in enrolling. The night wasn’t a total loss for Lester, though. He cleaned each and every one of us out by the time the game was over.

Richie Daley, the International Olympic Committee and NBC would have been proud.