The Schwann's Man: A Tale of Heartbreak

There are a lot of things that really bother me in life, but I hold a special hatred for a chosen few punk ass irritating things like Hornets, Dog the Bounty Hunter, Roundabouts, Jimmy Fallon's monologue, muumuus, crocs, not being able to see your own butt without a house of mirrors, you know stuff like that.

I also reserve a special hatred for the Schwann's guy. Now most of my hatred I've come up with on my own, but the Schwan's owns a special place, for this is an inherited hatred, one I picked up from my Dad, and low and behold, I've found that this animosity is well deserved.

Let me take you back to 1986, when I was a fresh faced youngster, happily naive, with no trace yet of any of the sarcasm and cynicism I would later develop keenly. The Schwans man would come by and although we didn't have a lot of money, sometimes my parents would indulge me with some little circular pizzas, or dreamsicles or something. It was a happy time.

The Schwan's man's name was Brian too, and although it was likely that he was a recovering crackhead with an eye for young boy butts, because we were both Brian's, we had a bond.

Everything changed one dark and stormy night. Brian came over, and was being sort of insistant that we buy some goods from him. We had just gone shopping and we didn't need anything. Come back another time right? Nope, instead Brian fired off this query which altered the course of history.

"Whatsa matter Mr Jensen, can't afford a few treats? Having job problems?"

The nerve of this idiot to pry into other people's personal business. We just didn't want your food. My dad told him, in no uncertain terms, to leave, and I never saw Brian again. I would assume that he drifted into a life of rampant drug use and gay prostitution, but who knows; he could have become a clergyman.

Fast forward to 2005. I am now a grown man (in age, not in maturity) with a wifey, a house, a dog, and a baby girl. The American dream right, except that I don't drive around in a big van solving mysteries. I guess you can't have everything. Anyway, the Schwann's man reappeared into my life. I was a little apprehensive after how badly I'd been burned 19 years earlier, but decided to give it another shot. I was happy. I had my little circular pizzas that always burn the roof of your mouth no matter what again.

But, as it always is with the Schwann's man, the relationship went south faster than a preppy white kid who kills his wife. First he just stopped showing up. This was odd. After about 3 months of no-shows, he finally appears again, like nothing had happened. This is akin to a relationship where a dude disappears on his girlfriend and goes and humps everybody for a while and then comes back and tries to pretend she's the only one for him because he needs money.

I am not fooled. I tell him I'm not interested in his little pizzas anymore. Unbelievably, I get nearly the same response as my Dad had gotten 19 years earlier.

"Whatsa matter Mister Jensen, little short on funds this month?"

What the fuck is up with these people? Is this like, a strategy they teach at the Schwann's Institute?

Rule #1: If a customer refuses to pay you 7 bucks, tease him about his financial situation. It may also be helpful to insinuate that you've seen him at the welfare station

Rule #2: Have sex with his pets when he goes to the bathroom.

Seriously, to all the Schwanns people reading this, the whole issue is customer service. I can buy pizza and popsicles at Cub Foods. If you can't be conciliatory when I turn you down over 7 dollars worth of groceries, then please don't approach me in the first place. Walk back to your freezer with wheels, and go peddle your wares elsewhere. Thanks.

P.S. Don't have sex with my pets either!

I get myself in trouble in the bathroom

Here's something I bet some people have done before. The other day I was in the bathroom at Target, in the stall, just minding my own business, and trying to ensure that nobody accidentally walked in on me or tried to Larry Craig me, when I started thinking about this morbidly obese man I had recently seen. He had a red sweatshirt, red sweatpants, and was wearing a red stocking cap. He looked a lot like the big Kool-Aid mascot guy, the one that used to crash through the wall in commercials.

The more I thought about Kool-Aid man, the funnier it became to me, so eventually I started chortling and eventually laughing out loud, alone, in the stalls of Target.

Now of course there's like 3 people milling about outside the stall at this time, peeing or washing their hands, or doing drugs or whatever, and all the while there's some weirdo in the stall giggling.

When I think of it in those terms, I immediately stop laughing. I am overcome with a completely rational concern. My concern is that the people outside the stall will hear me laughing and think that I am laughing at my own poop. I don't want people to think this, so I start to cough to try and convince all the random people that the laughter they heard was actually just a weird form of coughing. I don't think they are convinced. Now I am embarrassed so I remain perfectly still and I pick my feet up so nobody can see me. I will do this until everybody leaves. But they don't leave quickly enough because some other guy comes into the stall next to me and it sounds like an army is marching out of his butt.

I am faced with a serious dilemma. Do I stay in the stall and listen to the butt symphony going on next to me, or do I leave and risk the people who think I laugh at my own turds seeing my face. I decide to leave. I stand up and realize that one of the people in the bathroom is the really fat Kool-Aid man who I was laughing at in the first place. I decide this is a good omen. Just for the record though, I don't think my poop is all that funny. Maybe mildly amusing, but only if it's an odd color.

My Son is Just Like Me.

Sometimes I wonder how much my kids are going to be influenced by the fact that their father is a semi-insane, ultra competive weirdo with a giant head. At times I think, blissfully, probably not too much, after all, they have their mother who is grounded, maddeningly reasonable, and has a normal sized head.

Other times, however, I can see a lot of me in them, especially my son. To wit, he is 4 years old, yet completely happy with watching an entire football or baseball game with me, all the while peppering me like a caesar salad with questions ranging from totally inane and pointless ("Dad, does the brown football team have 2 shoes?") to concise and well thought out, ("Dad, what happens if the pitcher throws a ball and the guy hits it and it bounces over the fence?")

His favorite question however, is always, "Dad, who are the bad guys?" He's determined to know who the bad guys are in any situation, so he can figure out who to cheer for, and against. This doesn't just apply to regular sporting events either. The other day we were watching an airplane race from Greece or someplace like that and he wanted to know.

Him: Dad, who are the bad guys?
Me: Ummmm, I don't know dude, this is an airplane race. I don't think there are bad guys.
Him: The red?
Me: Seriously, I don't know.
Him: The blue?
Me: Sure, the blue.
Him: No, the red.
Me: Ummm....

He also wants to know the bad guys when we are watching SportsCenter.

Him: Dad, who are the bad guys?
Me: Buddy, this is just a bunch of people talking about football. There aren't any bad guys.
Him: The guy in black?
Me: Miles???

So once he determines who the bad guys are in any situation (Football, Basketball, the VMA's) he begins vociferously rooting against them. This can be pretty funny when we are alone, but in a setting with others, it's a little embarrassing. We were at Farmington High's Homecoming football game, and near the end we were sitting with my wife's parents on the visitor side, because the home side was too packed to find seats. So then the visiting parents and fans got to enjoy a 4 year old obnoxiously, and loudly rooting for the other team.

Him (Really loudly): GO TIGERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That was OK, a little gamesmanship never hurt anybody. But then one of the players on the other team suffered what appeared to be a pretty severe knee injury. Things got a little out of hand after that.

Him (Very loudly again): THE BAD GUY GOT AN OWWIE!!! YAY!!!!!
Us (In hushed tones): Miles, you can't cheer when somebody gets an owwie.
Him: Why not, he's the bad guy. GOOOOO TIGERS!!!!!

People turned around to frown at whoever was cheering a high school kid's injury, and saw my beautiful little boy. He frowned back at all of them, very defiantly. I figure that might be partially my doing. Oops.

Then there's the issue of strategy for winning, which he appears to be coming up with all on his own. I'm not necessarily opposed to this, but it's the type of strategy he's employing that has me a little concerned. I coached his and my daughter's soccer team this fall, and what I noticed was that in between coming up to me and making sure that his team had more goals than the "bad guys" i.e. a bunch of 4 and 5 year olds every 3 minutes or so, that he was also crashing into the other team's players and knocking them over an inordinate amount of times, enough so that it was raising eyebrows with the fans. After the game I said to him,

Me: You were really crashing into the other team a lot. What's the deal?
Him: I was bumping the bad guys so that our team would get the ball and win.
Me: Ummmm....

See, strategy. He was the wrecking ball, opening lanes for his teammates. I applaud the thought he put into that, he's only 4 after all, but I was a little concerned it might be, I don't know, blatant cheating.

Finally, there's this thing he does, around our house we refer to it as a "Gigantic Temper Tantrum", whenever it seems as though he's going to lose at something. I can't help but accept that this is my fault, you're looking at the guy who got kicked out of SS Billiards in Hopkins at the ripe old age of 5 for beating up the "Baby Pac-Man" machine because I thought the joystick wasn't functioning properly. Again, oops. Yesterday we were playing the Wii version of some really lame mini-golf game. My son lost to my daughter. What followed was an epic tantrum, which should really only be reserved for things like the End of the World, that lasted well into dinner, and including loud screaming, and trying to maim his sibling, and the dogs.

I'm not really lamenting about this, he's probably going to be a wonderful athlete, but it's just weird to see the traits your little ones pick up on. I'm resolving to kick garbage cans less this year during baseball season for this reason. Awww, who am I kidding?

Lost & Found

Did you ever stop and think about how much stuff you've lost in your lifetime, and then think in terms of monetary value how much all that stuff would be worth if you had it back? I think about that a lot, and it makes me really mad at myself. How could I have possibly been so careless as to lose all this stuff? Maybe some of it got stolen, but mostly I probably just left the stuff lying somewhere because I'm a careless idiot. Let's break down the list.

-99% of all pens I've ever owned
-60% of all CD's I've ever owned
-1 IPod
-20 pairs of sunglasses
-1 pair of shoes (Side note: When I was 12 and on vacation in San Francisco, my shoes mysteriously vanished, and to this day I have no idea what happened to them. I had only brought one pair also, so I had to wear bread bags on my feet to the airport. I felt like an orphan.)
-A plastic bag containing over 1000 dollars. (Side Note: I found this while floating down a river in Mexico, and I was so geeked about finding it that I forgot to put it in a safe place and it floated right out of my pocket)
-3 cement dildos
-The cassette tape that I drunkenly rapped at Funkytown Studios on
- 2 Wallets
-A trapeze
- A $25 Mystic Lake Casino Chip
-40 Pairs of underpants (Boxers and briefs, but not my snakeskin ballhuggers, thank goodness!!)
- 342 homework assignments (Grades 7-12)
-4 Turtles
-A Sword of Damocles
-404 Wiffle Balls
-2 Girlfriends
-1 cage to keep girlfriends in.
-1 cell phone
-1 baseball uniform (J Botten)
-A really rare Playboy with a nude pictorial featuring Martina Navratilova frenching Ellen DeGeneres.
-74 VHS videos, including 3 Caddyshacks.
-41 DVD's, including 3 Caddyshacks.
- A pair of Jeans that I really liked.
-My "Bad Ass" t-shirt that I made myself and wore to the bar once
-A Charleston Chew that Goose gave me
-A large vat of Meth
-Horse Testicles that I won at the Dakota County Fair
-A Rocket Ship
-The infamous "Will Watson Alaska Anchorage Basketball"
-The 1958 Cleveland Browns
-The Soundtrack to "Peter and the Wolf" hummed loudly by Elton John
-4 million buttons
- A bag of cat poop that we had planned on putting on an old lady's doorstep and then setting it on fire and then ringing the doorbell and when she ran out to stomp on the bag we would run in and lock the door, essentially stealing a house. A foolproof plan conjured up by 11 year olds, foiled because the cat poop bag went missing.
-4 gas caps
-A machine that could turn a normal person into an angry transvestite.
-A large hole in the earth (That's right, I lost a hole. Deal with it.)
-A foam rubber phallus, very handy for smashing people on the head with.
-One of those big foam hands, formed in the shape of "The Shocker"
-A fish hook that actively tried to hook itself into your fingers
and
-All of my baby teeth

That's a pretty long list of very valuable things. But while I was getting all angry, and pouting and swearing, and contemplating going gang raping alone, I realized that I have an equally large pile of things that I have no idea where they came from. I may have inherited them from the earth, like Johnny Appleseed, but more likely it's just mostly stuff my people left behind, and I was too lousy of a friend to ever tell them. This list includes

-74 Tapes and CD's
-42 shirts
- One fleece that did not fit, but I wore it anyway to justify having it.
- One of those bowling glove/carpal tunnel syndrome fixer hand things
-A beach towel previously owned by a professional hockey player
- A statue of Marge Schott
-Some strange medicine from China that makes you poop, pee, and hallucinate about large kittens all at the same time.
-One Moose
-A bunch of hamburger patties that wound up in my freezer.
-Skim cat milk.
-A false Declaration of Independence
-A rogue Tylenol PM that lived on my dorm room floor for months. We even vacuumed around it.
-A bunch of pubes (In a textbook I had in 9th grade)
-2 folding chairs
-A broken camera
-2 pairs of rusty nipple clamps
-A Garden Weasel
-Noseplugs
-A half used tube of Diaper Rash Ointment
-Kevin McHale
-Penis tweezers
-A bunch of useless self help books (Example: How to be Clinically Depressed and Still get the Morning Paper)
-3 different cement dildos
-22,000 rubber bands
-Everybody Poops on Audio book
-A Fernando Valenzuela rookie card, not autographed by me in a blatant attempt to fleece a childhood friend out of money
-Doyle Brunson's front teeth
-A large vial of Crack (or shaved peanuts)
-A small vial of liquid mercury
-The Zapruder Film
-A term paper that proves conclusively the amount of wood a woodchuck would chuck had he been willing and able to chuck the aforementioned wood.
-A zipper
-A bottle of Salmon flavored Whiskey
-A deck of naked lady playing cards that is all jokers and instruction cards
and
-A bottle of sunshine.

I figure I came out about even in this whole thing, so that made me feel a lot better.

Brian is Eco-Friendly Sort-Of

You know what I can't figure out? How come there's all these shoes on the highway? Why is it that people seem compelled to huck their shoes out the window? And why are the shoes never in pairs? Is there a roving gang of newly peg-legged pirates roaming the countryside littering their now obsolete peg leg shoes? I find this suspicious

I swear, just drive along any thoroughfare for 10 minutes, and you'll see at least one shoe. See, I reserve my special "highway garbage" passes for large things, like urine soaked couches and the large cage I kept that 11 year old in for five years once. Shoes just go in the garbage, people.

Here's another thing I bet only I wish I could do. I would really like to comb the highway for random items, trace them back to the people who they belonged to, and return them. Not because I'm "green" or really all that environmentally conscious, just because it would probably make them unconfortable. The weirder the item, the better too:

Me: Are you Darwin K. Morris?

Guy: Uh yeah.

Me: We traced these 50 bottles of urine back to you. We found them along highways all over the place.

Guy: Um... these aren't..

Me: Sir, let me implore you to be cautious with your bottled urine. Apparently these little buggers have a mind of their own when they're on the road.

How about this for fun. Turn the tables on these litterbugs. Stand on the side of the highway and throw garbage at cars driving by. Fun! The bigger the item the better. Extra credit if it's alive and has pointy talons or a poisonous bite. Then crap in an orange safety cone (the small end) and run off giggling.

I'd just like to mention that I plan on doing all these things before 2010, so look out South Metro near 169....

Kid Cartoon Reviews

Recently the kids have been home with the H1N1, or some derivative of it, so we've spent a lot of time laying around watching kid stuff on TV. What follows is a review of some of our current favorites:

Scooby Doo-First off, the plot is the exact same every time. A monster pops out and cackles. Then the gang is driving around aimlessly, apparently looking for mysteries. They find a mystery to solve. They split up to look for clues. Shaggy and Scooby get scared and also eat things. Fred and Daphne go in the corner and hump. Velma's glasses fall off. They accidentally catch the monster and reveal that he is Mr Carruthers, the janitor. They unravel the flimsy evil plan for the benefit of the police. There is usually dry ice involved. Scooby and Shaggy eat more things. The end.

In newer episodes, however, the ghosts have become real, instead of Mr Carruthers, the janitor, which sort of ruins the "everything can be explained by a greedy jerk" thesis the old show had going for it. Heck, I even saw a 20 foot tall glowing red Chupacabra, when in actuality they are supposed to look like a hairless coyote. Then we watched "A pup named Scooby Doo" where the plot was totally implausable, even for a cartoon, which is saying a lot. An example: Burglars were chasing the gang, who are all kids now for some reason, so they jerry-rigged a Home Alone type device to foil the burglars. So a burglar ran in and a tennis racket hit him in the face. Normally, you'd go "Ow" and maybe have a bloody nose. In this case however, the burglar flew backwards, out the door, over the trees, and into a whole other country where he landed on the beach and made a giant hole, which he then climbed out of, stole a rowboat, rowed back to the correct country, and ran back to the house, all in a span of 5 seconds or so. Even the kids were skeptical of this scenario.

The Jetsons- Possibly the most sexist cartoon ever. I guess it was made in the 60's, so that was acceptable then, but I found myself almost being offended, and I'm me. Women drivers are feared, Jane spends all day shopping (How do you spend all day shopping, every day?). Mr Spacely is a jerky midget, George's job consists of pushing one button and then sleeping, and this bank robber named Knuckles Nuclear seems to appear in every episode. Also, your food is all in pill form, which sucks.

MVP-Most Valuable Primate- Almost as implausable as the plots from "A pup named Scooby Doo". A monkey, who lives at a college with an old man and a retarded dude and is really smart, runs away when the old man dies because the jerkface dean is going to sell him to a research lab. The retarded guy puts him on a train and tells him to get off at "Simian Village" or something like that. Here's where it really gets tough to believe. He's leaving from LA. The stops on the train are San Francisco, Simian Village, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, and Bumblefuck, BC. Let's see, 4 giant metropolises, a monkey village, and a frozen noplace. Right. The monkey, of course, winds up in Bumblefuck, BC, where he is befriended by a deaf girl and becomes the star of the hockey team. What strikes me is that somebody actually had to look at this plot and say, "Yes, I think this will serve our viewers well. Go with the 'Runaway Monkey Hockey Star' movie". Funniest part of the movie bar none: The deaf girl is talking like deaf people talk. Bella says to me, "This girl talks worse than Miles." She is 5. He is 3. I am dying laughing.

Higglytown Heroes- Obviously thought up by someone on meth. Everyone in the show are Russian Nesting Dolls, and when the smaller ones get frightened, they hop inside the bigger ones, regardless if the bigger ones like it or not. This could, theoretically, lead to a situation, like the Apocalypse, where the biggest person in the world could be hopped into by the rest of the 6.791 billion people, which would surely cause some gastrointestinal discomfort. Also, the squirrel is voiced by the secretary from Ferris Bueller's Day Off with a weird Fargo accent. Just makes the show more bizarre.

Handy Manny- Wilmer Valderrama's attempt to become the most sensible kids show since Mr Rogers, which it is, but even with the anthropomorphic tools, it's really boring. The antithesis to the "A Pup Named Scooby Doo" plots, these center around Handy Manny being hard working and resourceful, while his tools bicker about stuff. Remember when your mom used to put Mr Rogers on to make you settle down, because it took him 10 minutes to change shoes and put on a gay sweater? This is Handy Manny.

Mickey Mouse Clubhouse- Finally, a show that would make Walt Disney mad enough to break out of the cryogenic chamber he's stored in along with Ted Williams' head, John Henry Williams' testicles, and Austin Powers' mojo. Mickey and friends are all CG now (take that Steamboat Willie) and are focusing on problem solving, instead of general hijinks. Pete, from the Beagle Boys, has been reduced to an oppotunistic antagonist, and Donald Duck thinks things out, instead of having the giant spazzes he's known for.

Guess it shows me that I'm getting old, because I'm finding fault in cartoons, but screw you, ours were better...