Dear Mr. President:

You won’t remember me, unless you have a hard time with names but never forget pushy rural humorists in Hawaiian shirts.  There we were in the fall of 2007 at a campaign stop in Littleton, NH, sharing two common bonds: a handshake and a smoking addiction.

Now two years later, I’ve long-since stopped smoking, but I’ll still press the flesh with any politician who takes the time to stump this far north.  We upper and outlying region Granite Staters prefer our smokescreens up close and personal.  Just don’t ask us to speak for those kooky Nashuans (an inside New Hampshire joke).

Please note that I did say smoking “addiction,” not habit.  Here’s the Live Smoke-Free Or Die inside scoop on that oft-confused distinction: 

Let’s suppose that when dressing yourself, you've always first put on a sock and a sock and a shoe and a shoe, versus a sock and a shoe and a sock and a shoe.  We’ll call this your habit, your elective quirk, and one that is largely inconsequential.  Even after an adult lifetime of donning sock-sock shoe-shoe, if you suddenly had to change this habit to sock-shoe sock-shoe, you could do it without feeling like you were unilaterally disarming your feet. 

But, mere footplay pales against the nail-biting, weight-gaining, burning-down-the-lilacs real and imagined angst and agony and withdrawal pains one suffers when quitting a smoking addiction. 

Here, like any good pol worth his weight in segues, we arrive at your problem: the one where you still call yourself “ninety-five percent cured.”  Excuse me, Mr. President, but you’re saying that you only smoke five percent of the time.  Now we’re at the heart of your own double bind. 

You’ve confessed that you still “mess up” and “fall off the wagon.”  Those mea culpas might be noble first steps in vetoing a craving, but I think if Patrick Henry had said “Give me liberty or give me a rationalization!” he might not have risen to American Revolutionary status. 

Let’s stop quibbling and instead embrace your signature word:  “CHANGE”.  It’s the only way to forever rid yourself of these smoking relapses.  You can’t quit them.  I know, because when it comes to quitting, even quitting doesn’t work.  You must change the way you think. 

There is only one way to live smoke-free, but there is a filibuster of ways to get there: 

At the risk of alienating the quit-smoking lobbyists, you must eschew any applications of hypnotic triggers, skin patches, acupunctures, e-puff cigarettes, herbal tobacco, chewing gums, sublingual homeopathic sprays, extended filter perforators, aversion therapies, flavored tablets, behavior modification videos, no-smoking seminar audios, reformer testimonials, nicotine substitute inhalers, lozenges, oils, powders and salves. 

And, don’t even think about "Snuffdogs," the company that provides an on-site, specially-trained, quit-smoking Portuguese water attack dog, (a companion for Bo) complete with its own handler and non-choking accessories for achieving private home cold turkeys. 

Okay, I made that last one up, but let’s be honest: as a self-admitted hardcore five-percenting butt fiend, you were sucked in there for a minute, because it sounded like the solution that finally just might work for you, right? 

When all else fails, (and it will) here’s THE surefire method:  Remember that you promised your wife you'd quit.  And, when that fails, remember that you promised your wife you'd quit.  Oh, and if you get to where you can't stand it another second, remember that you promised your wife you'd quit. 

When that method is successful (and it will be) you'll be a cinch for a non-smoking do-over on Oprah's couch trip, and that's no drag.  Ever again. 

You once said, in prepping for your Presidential bid:  “I figure there’s nowhere to go from here but down.  So tonight, I’m announcing my retirement from the United States Senate.” 

Spoken in the reverse logic of a true New Hampshirite – one who knows that when it comes to an addiction, you can stop smoking some cigarettes five percent of the time; you can stop smoking all cigarettes ninety-five percent of the time, but if you truly want to be smoke-free, you have to start not smoking any cigarettes a hundred percent of the time. 

YES (if I can do it) YOU CAN get there from here. 

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Syndicated humor columnist writes from the New Hampshire north country, but still maintains a smoking section here. Copyright 2009 B. Elwin Sherman. All rights reserved. Used here with permission. This column is protected by intellectual property laws, including U.S. copyright laws. Electronic or print reproduction, adaptation, or distribution without permission is prohibited. Ordinary internet links to this column at Humorist-On-Loan may be distributed without written permission.

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    It was written long ago that we were given dominion over the animals. We know better. It’s impossible to control something by the tail that has ahold of you by the heart.

            "Wryder" was a throwback: a crossbred, ten-dollar dog plucked from a discarded litter of puppies. No papers, no championship lineage, no canine credentials other than he and his siblings, rescued from a cardboard box someone had found abandoned on the roadside and mercifully delivered to the Humane Society.

            He was a pure mutt, arriving with half-mast ears, the head & tail markings of half a dozen pedigrees, and an in-your-face, puppylick charm that could’ve softened the heart of an arctic gravedigger.

            "Wryder."

            So-dubbed and spelled after he emptied his stomach contents into the back seat on the ride home. We’re Harley Touring bikers, and the idea of saying, “Easy, Wryder!” was irresistible.

            It was also that wry smile.

            Pet owners know this. Animals DO smile. Now, I’ve never personally seen a grinning fish, but if you write to me and swear that your pet guppy Gilligan smirks at you whenever you drop the fish flakes in the aquarium, I’ll believe it.

            Wryder was not a “Come, Sit, Stay” kind of dog. A leash didn’t work, and was ultimately abandoned. It was like trying to walk a square yo-yo. He’d wind up all wound up in the chain, gasping and tantrumming and flat on his belly. It was right about there, as the supposed masters of an animal kindred spirit, that we began humanizing the negotiations:

            “Wryder! If you don’t come in here right now, you won’t get your treat, and you’ll just have to go scratch behind your own ears. Are you listening? Okay, if you take another step, I hope you can use those teeth for a can opener, because that’s the only way you’re getting Alpo tonight!”

            Once you begin talking to your pet like this, there’s no going back to simple commands.

            He was a leader, scout, explorer and guardian. Nature-walks in our country setting with Wryder were the height of reconnaissance and reportage. Always going up ahead of us, he’d run his five miles for every one of ours, always returning to tell us all the details of the flushed-out chipmunks, new fallen trees, undiscovered rock formations, and the hollowed-out hiding places we could expect if we followed his trail.

            He talked to US, too, and we understood every whimper, growl and arf, but he was not above doing those base duties one expects of a country dog:

            He’d drag home and then roll around in stinky dead things. This behavior was tolerated, though discouraged. We took it as his sovereign message to any wild animal kingdom intruders to tend their own castles. 

            On the other hand, he ate Charlie, our pet cockatiel. Charlie had somehow pushed open his cage door on a day Wryder was home alone. When we returned, we followed a trail of shredded feathers leading to the kitchen, where the aviaricide had taken place.

            Wryder was duly repentant, attempting to retreat under the refrigerator. When we demanded an explanation, he begged for mercy: “Oh, please, it wasn’t my fault ... he ... he landed on my nose when I was half-asleep! ... I ... I thought it was a rabid bat! ... I had to defend myself! ... I don’t know what came over me! …  Okay, okay, I know, no Milk-Bone tonight .... ”

            He was so smart he fetched rocks underwater, nudged us awake five minutes before the alarm clock sounded, and always jumped off the toboggan before the puckerbrush impact.

            He was so dumb he thought the stuffed bear in the bedroom was alive, and never passed by it without a “Just try it, buddy,” glance and grrr.

            Toward the end, we were dumb enough to think he’d find some comfort in having the television left on whenever he was alone in the house, but smart enough to set it to the Animal Channel. 

            He was devoted to us, and best pal to anyone he met. He was the kind of dog that prompted a friend or neighbor to say: “Hi!  How’s Wryder?” before they’d ask about us.

            Twice in his life he rode lying down in the car: on his first woozy trip home with us thirteen years ago, and today, when his legs could no longer take the strain -- his last ride to the animal hospital.

            Eyesight failing, bones riddled with cancer, unable to assume his unfailing role as sentry, companion and keeper of the bedroom bear, this time he went up ahead and did not return, leaving us to discover the rest of the walk for ourselves.

            But, he’s left his markers along the trail of our lives, and when we come to them, we’ll know where to look.

            Servant to our hearth and master of our hearts. Good-bye, old friend.

            Go easy, Wryder, and keep smiling.

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Syndicated humor columnist B. Elwin Sherman writes from Bethlehem, NH. Copyright 2009 by B. Elwin Sherman. All rights reserved. Used here with permission.

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I’m determined to keep this simple. There I was, working at the computer:

I’d just installed the “upgrade” to a software program I’d been using for years. Great! Now my life would be simpler, easier, faster (would the advertisement lie?). I hadn’t been feeling particularly complicated, difficult or slow, but I’m not one to stand in the way of progress, except when it’s one smaller step for Man, and one teensy nudge for Mankind.

You don’t need to know why, when I’m doing my home budget spreadsheets, that I use green and yellow background colors to separate my accounts receivables from accounts payables (an ever-widening gap that has become so far apart of late, I’m thinking of merging with myself). My version of line-item accountancy resembles what happens when you combine a calculator and a pinball machine.

I’ve even thought of cutting my own bonuses this year, even though I know I’m the most valuable asset sitting in this chair. Honestly, even with my poor handling of the money passing through this house, how can I expect me to stick around if I don’t give myself some handsome incentives? Get real. If I want quality incompetence, I’ve got to pay for it.

There I was, armed with my snazzy new software, when I noticed that my green & yellow background highlights looked funny. Something wasn’t right. Instead of the bright, primary colors I’d long been accustomed to, the defaults on the screen were dull and flat.

Where were my radiant visual cues telling me at a glance how little I had versus how much I could expect? These were now to be my lush-lawn green invoices? My brilliant canary yellow overdrafts? I clicked on the fill-selector tab and saw why:

The makers of this “simpler, easier, faster” version of my beloved cyber-bookkeeper decided that its mere green and yellow primary colors just won’t do. Now, in order to simplify, smooth out and speed up my life, I apparently must have half a dozen shades each, of both. Separately.  They’ve turned my simple, beautiful, vibrant backgrounds into the same ho-hum spectrum as our faded and fading fleet of American cars.

Green? HA! Yes, there’s still a plain old original “green” selection but it now looks like a bad Granny Smith (you’ll just have to sort that out for yourselves). Trouble is, not only are there six additional defined variations of “green,” I’m also free to invent my own. No!

I can now drag my “green” palette brush cursor-thingie into an encroaching red zone, or tip it into a blurry blue tidal graph and come up with … with … well, a green color that we in the rural regions would say: “looks like a blue mailbox painted brown.”

Now, hold it. Before the variety-is-the-spice-of-life people all send me the same e-mail, please don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of nuance. I love variety. I love spices. I love a variety of spices. But, does EVERYTHING we do and have in this life lately need to be androgynized, anesthetized, overanalyzed, re-, up-, down-, over-, and/or under-super-sized?

I understand: there may not be much of anything left these days well-enough to leave alone, but we should try. Change is not art, and should never be done just for its own sake. When American businessman Bert Lance launched “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” into the lexicon, he forgot, “and if you’re a bored, color-blind, overpaid software designer, keep your metaphorical greenish chocolate out of B. Elwin Sherman’s green peanut butter.”

Please, no more bleach in my finances, a dozen brands of flavored bottled water, 150 different kinds of the same cereal, or three grades of gasoline from the same tank (there’s your real conspiracy, my dear readers).

And, I don’t want or need my simply simple coffeepot to walk the dog or receive satellite radio. Right here I’d like to thank the company who made my current brewmaster. It’s been on duty in this house for years: Directions? Put in the coffee. Put in the water. Turn the ON/OFF switch to ON. Wait. Pour. Drink. Turn the ON/OFF switch to OFF. Thank you. Good morning.

I’m dreading the day the thing breaks. Will I be able to call the appliance repair guy? Sure. His shop is right there next to ye olde stagecoach wheelwright shoppe, across the street from the spittoon polisher.

How about if I try fixing it myself? Absolutely, if I don’t mind firemen running through the house.

What, then? I’d better check and see if the same company today makes the same coffeemaker. Be right back.

Hooray! It’s still there … almost. Today’s bottom-of-the-line model has an added “programmable brew timer, because an active lifestyle like yours can’t have coffee delays!” Yes, as I spend my days redefining the color of money, I mustn’t waste any of that time waiting for coffee.

What’s the good news in all these complicated simplifications? My simpler, easier, faster coffeemaker is offered in two colors: black or white.

Personally, I’d prefer a different shade of greenish yellow.

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Syndicated humor columnist B. Elwin Sherman writes simply in color from upstate NH. Copyright 2009 B. Elwin Sherman. All rights reserved. Used here with permission. This column is protected by intellectual property laws, including U.S. copyright laws. Electronic or print reproduction, adaptation, or distribution without permission is prohibited. Ordinary internet links to this column may be distributed without permssion.

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THE BUMBLING BEE BAILOUT

By B. Elwin Sherman

Right about here, you might ask what having a live, angry bee in your ear has to do with anything that might help us out of this mess we’re in, and you might be right. Probably, you could’ve made it through your day, and in fact the rest of your life without knowing the following, but I personally like to always be armed with unusual trivia. Here’s yours:

There I was with Judy my riding partner, cruising alongside the Connecticut River on the Harley.

Ah … the sun glistening on the lazy water, the soft leans into the winding landscape, the warm breeze of the open ride, the rumbling cadence beneath us … and WHAP! A bumblebee flew into my ear.

 Now, there are three thoughts that go through one’s mind at the instant a bumblebee unexpectedly begins burrowing into one’s head at 50 mph on a motorcycle:

 1. Whatever you do, DON’T do what every instinct in your body tells you to do, i.e. leap off and/or drive your bike into the river, freeing the bee but killing you and your passenger. As usual, the next day’s headlines would blame the victims and exonerate the culprit:

 INNOCENT PASSERBY BUMBLEBEE SURVIVES BIKER ASSAULT IN WILD RIVER PLUNGE.

 2. In the next millisecond, DON’T wonder why God so-chose to punish you right then for all your unnamed but certain transgressions by inserting you and your sweetie in such an inextricable dilemma.

 Yes, such a thought does only take a millisecond, with even a few microseconds to spare, but resist it if you can.

 Pondering it at that exact moment won’t help either of you. You need to save such contemplation for the next rest stop when your head (and your ear canal) is clear. But, somewhere in those ensuing microseconds, you do make this deal with God, if only He’ll let you survive this, as you also promise to make amends for the aforementioned transgressions.

 3. Lastly, DO pull over and resist the raging urge to jam a probing, killing finger into your own head. Reassure your passenger, (who has assumed in now mere nanoseconds that you’re either having a heart attack or finally going loco) by calmly screaming in her direction: “THERE’S A (expletive deleted) BUG IN MY EAR!”

 As she learns the now reasonable reason for your abrupt change in navigation and temperament, she will naturally do the normal thing to try and assist you, by attempting to extract the intruder from your head with her sunglasses.

 This will, of course -- combined with your own efforts to knock the invader out of your left ear by repeatedly slapping your right ear -- have no effect whatsoever, other than to drive what now must be the world’s most disoriented bumblebee deeper into your aural hive.

 Meanwhile, inside your head, it sounds like someone is taxiing a Cessna deep down on your brain’s runway, while outside, passing motorists are no-doubt wondering why a frantic woman is jabbing at a man on a motorcycle who is beating himself up.

 Right about here, I want this whole image to be a giant metaphor for how and why we’ve all come to find ourselves in such hard economic times:

 I want the result of wearing a half-helmet instead of a full one to symbolize spending more than we could afford.

 I want a bumblebee buzzing along in its own lane on its way to work, flying responsibly and doing what bumblebees do, to signify what happens when you’re not prepared for the impact of an obstacle you didn’t see coming but should’ve known could happen along.

 I want the fruitless practice of applying the wrong fixes in the wrong directions with the wrong pressures to represent government’s under- and overcompensation and corporate ineptitude.

 I want a lot from my metaphors.

 And, right about here, trivia or not, you’ll need to know the real outcome of what I’ll now call The Bumbling Bee Bailout. Did our hero and heroine survive the attack unstung? How? What intervention was applied that removed the offender, increased production, restored stability, and reaffirmed the fine tradition of the best American ride?

Before I answer that, and here’s the best part of your new trivia: it IS possible for a bumblebee (yes, the big fat stripe-y kind) to completely disappear into an ear canal (Judy looked in there and saw nothing) then later simply emerge on its own, stunned but intact, and fly away.

Yes, it was a painful, thunderous bombilation to a shaky recovery, but here’s the answer:

Hold your head at the right angle, give it time, and it will turn around on its own and find its way out.

Long live the metaphor, the art of the horrible pun, and if we all just bee all we can bee, in the end we’ll bee alright.

Meanwhile, I have a few transgressions to buzz over.

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Syndicated humor columnist writes from the New Hampshire north country. Copyright 2009 B. Elwin Sherman. All rights reserved. Used here with permission. This column is protected by intellectual property laws, including U.S. copyright laws. Electronic or print reproduction, adaptation, or distribution without permission is prohibited. Ordinary internet links to this column at Humorist-On-Loan may be distributed without written permission.

REAL MEN IN TUBS

by B. Elwin Sherman

Not enough hasn’t been written about the subject of men in tubs, but I can’t ignore it any longer. Today I’m taking a bubble bath, and now is the time for all good men to rise up and sit down together with one voice on this issue.

Yes, my dear dedicated he-men, you CAN be a MAN and still revel in the sweet retreat of airy soap globule immersion. I mention this only because women have long known about and withdrawn to the rejuvenating properties of this submersive activity, but men have suffered a fearful loathing of the bubbly sanctuary ever since Charlotte Corday prepared the bath for Jean Paul Marat.

Thus, this week, here’s a little heart, head and handbook for my bubble-hearted brethren:

Gentlemen, the array and supply of bubble bath soaps, oils, foams, gels, salts and even teas, are endless. You may thank me for doing the “cleansing infusion of urban technology and trends” research for you. Now you won’t have to wander the supermarket soap sections and spend half your day opting for whichever concoction seems your optimum apothecary blend of handcrafted and home-fomented foaming spices. Forget all that. Just dump in the Mr. Bubble (I prefer Bubbleberry with Aloe) and begin.

My research reveals that the FDA has received only one male consumer complaint on the above product, and it claimed an “unspecified injury.” I suspect this had more to do with the complainant’s ingress or egress from the tub, but I didn’t investigate further.

Prepare your bath & brain equally. The ensuing soothing qualities and playful boyhood regressions you’ll encounter in your nostalgic, effervescing abandon will serve for naught, if you haven’t first rinsed out the tub wall cat hairs or the Oxi-Clean residue left behind after your Sweetie used the tub to bleach the lace curtains. (Gentlemen, let’s not be the first male consumer who files an FDA complaint citing a very specified injury.)

As for your mental prep work, you must recapture the innocent child’s mindset you once had when you could still shared a bath with your splashy siblings. Long before tubs were instruments of hygiene, they were childhood romping pools.

For this, you can either step into a 1950’s time machine ... or lock the bathroom door.

Tub toys are optional, but encouraged. Plastic or rubber, animated or static, plain or elaborate, let your imagination fill in the blanks. I personally prefer floatables that will serve as quasi-jellyfish, mermaids, sea mines and enemy submarines. Extra points if you can assemble anything resembling a pirate flotilla or a mysterious and forbidden archipelago.

Thanks to a chronic case of excessive manhood, if you can’t find the reversions necessary to produce the requisite self-playfulness, might I suggest an extended game of “Up Periscope Off Rocky Point.” Or, “Damn The Torpedoes, I’m Neptune!” 

Or, to the more adventurous among us, a spirited game of “Barney’s Bubble Rubble” will do nicely to ease off the machismo, embrace a long-gone boy’s imaginings, and soften your heart. An extended dousing in your steaming vessel will also produce those fingertip hydro-sucking wrinkles that will, in turn, generate a grand finale of the notorious “Loch Ness Monster Versus The Skin Beast Battle For The Goo-Boy Championship Of Bubble Bay!”

Careful, don’t go too far. I hope I don’t have to forewarn you about attempting a universal plugging/rescue maneuver, when you imagine that all cosmic evil has conspired to drip from your tub faucet and you are the sole aquatic superhero with the only form-fitting big toe that can stop the leak and save the world.

Don’t do it. Unless you want to be the most infamous domestic extraction ever performed by your local firemen, don’t even think about it. 

Lastly, don’t forget to shape up a few shampoo horns, pompadour sculptures, beard shadows, Elephant Man mutations. Add those spitty tongue motor noises you splurt when reconnoitering your battlewagons. And, no self-respecting revisitation to simpler times would be complete without at least one attack of flatulent, depth charge countermeasures. We’ll just leave it there, hanging in the air, where the surfacing “death mist” once wiped out your little brother’s entire armada of battleships.

If you’ve performed your sudsplay with the proper spirit, the whole event should unclog the Ever-Ever-Land of grown-up congestion, at least until you pull the plug. Even then, as the tub drains, don’t miss the departing contest of wills when you fight off “The Psycho Whirlpool Avenger!”

Today, good sirs, take a hot bath break, be the buoys in the bubbles, have a grand look back, and I’ll meet you on the high sees.

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Syndicated humor columnist writes from the New Hampshire north country. Copyright 2009 B. Elwin Sherman. All rights reserved. Used here with permission. This column is protected by intellectual property laws, including U.S. copyright laws. Electronic or print reproduction, adaptation, or distribution without permission is prohibited. Ordinary internet links to this column at Humorist-On-Loan may be distributed without written permission.