Punxsutawney Phil, you over-hyped weather rat. You let us down. You dampened our spirits. You … ahhh, why do we care whether an over-sized groundhog sees his shadow any way? I shouldn’t blame poor Phillip. We’re smart people. We know better than to put our good faith in the hands of over-fed marmots. You know, I’ve heard groundhogs are also referred to as land-beavers or whistle-pigs, and you should never trust anything called a whistle-pig.

But we want to believe. We want to think that the groundhog might just be able to dispose of this gloomy time of year. That time when even we bright and cheery Floridians — normally drenched in a cocktail of sun — start to doubt whether the shiny stuff will ever re-emerge. We wonder why we’ve been forsaken and yell out at the heavens: “We’re lookin’ like cave fish down here, oh Lord. Bring us back our rays!”

When the clouds don’t break and worse, torture us with a tinkling of monotonous drizzle that has plagued us the past week, we turn to critters who look like they should lay off the carbs.

Why? Because we want hope — to make a clean break with winter and get jiggy with spring. Remember spring? That time of year when wilted and frost-burned vegetation sparks back to life and drowns us in heaps of lung-choking pollen?

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Terror. Absolute terror. That’s the only way to describe it.

I was sitting at my desk, waiting in pained anticipation for the moment when my voice would come across the radio, and I was dreading it.

Nobody likes to hear the sound of their voice. You know, their “true” voice. Not the one we hear everyday in our own heads — the one that sounds like “us” to us. I’m talking about our REAL voice — the one everyone else hears. The one that makes us recoil and cringe in pain if it’s ever played to us on a recording. It always sounds so strange, so alien, so unusual and, well, like we should be wearing pocket protectors and saying things like, “the square roots of integers are always irrational, unless of course they’re perfect squares.”

Not to mention I’m nasally. Oh sure, you say, we all are, but I sound like I’ve got a bushel of cotton stuffed up the old nasal passageways. And it’s possible I do.

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“Jack, what happened?” asked his mom. He was clutching his hand and on the verge of tears. We were at the Jacksonville Zoo and he was grimacing terribly, as if an elephant had sat on his hand or one of the leopards had snipped off a fingertip. Little chunks of skin flapped in the breeze and I was wondering how long before tiny trickles of blood would bubble to the surface.

“Uh, he fell in a cactus,” I told her.

“He fell in a cactus?” she said.

“Yep, fell in a cactus. He was trying to karate chop me, but with ninja-like reflexes I jumped out of the way and he … um … fell in the cactus. Just … splat! … right in there.”

Yes, I did feel a bit guilty. There is the fact that he’s 5 years old and I’ll be 37 next month — a minor age difference, if you ask me. And there is also the fact that he WAS trying to karate chop me. What was I supposed to do, just take it? And how could I know he would fall in a cactus. I mean, it’s 2010 … who does that anymore?
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Save the Floridians. We’re freezing!

“You liar!” I barked at the sleek digital thermometer, which sat comfy and cozy inside my kitchen. It didn’t even have to brave the weather outside to tell how cold it was. A little rat tail with a temperature probe poked out the window doing the dirty work for it. How lazy!

I stared at it — shocked, but unconvinced. “You drunken monkey,” I scolded it. “You must have your numbers backwards.”

Thirty eight it read … in the middle of the day. THIRTY EIGHT! That was the high! That’s just a few notches above freezing, and small consolation for my poor plants outside which looked like they had all spontaneously combusted in this unprecedented Florida cold snap.

Let me remind you what we already know: We live in Florida. The Sunshine State. Where flip-flops are the state shoe, and possibly their own religion. Most households here only have a single sweater to wear between them, and usually it has a clump of fake plastic holly on the front — a gift from a cold-weather aunt up north.
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“Trust Janet,” he said. “Janet won’t steer us wrong. Janet knows what she’s doing. Janet knows the way.”

“Harumph,” I mumbled, arms crossed as I threw myself back into the seat. “Janet’s going to drive us to Kansas … through a lake.”

Janet is the GPS navigation system that sits on the dash of my wife’s cousin’s husband’s SUV. I don’t know if Janet is her real name or just the name they gave her, but she speaks in a very soft, sophisticated and (frankly) uppity voice as she politely dishes out directions to here and there.

“You are approaching the intersection. Turn right.”
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I read the other day about how this decade never really had a name — not something that rolled quickly off the tongue like the 80s, captured the decade in a catchy phrase like the Roaring 20s, or put things into perspective, like how the 70s are best known as “the great polyester infection.” (Or at least they are in my mind.)

But this decade, monumental, historic and tragic as it was, has gone without a name, which seems like we’re short-changing it. It deserves an epithet — something that sums it up. Me? I will always refer to it as the “OH-ohs” — similar to “uh-oh,” but grunted more and forlorn. The first “OH” excited and upbeat; the second like, “oh crap!”

Think about it: This was the decade we all thought we were rich — OH! — before learning the Chinese were foreclosing upon us — oh!

This was supposed to be the decade of interstellar space travel, robots with artificial intelligence, cars that flew, and us all wearing futuristic, super-hot body suits, no matter what our body type. But those childhood dreams never quite came true — my computer can barely get the printer to work, and for most Americans, body suits should be deemed illegal.
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Well, I never thought radio commentator would be on my resume, but once a month I’m now going to be reading a piece on WJCT — the NPR station in Jacksonville, Florida. The first one — an abbreviated version of “The Tale of the Christmas Kahlua” — ran Dec. 14, 2009, and can be heard by clicking the play button below:

It’s part of their local news show, “First Coast Connect,” and here’s a link to the whole show — you’ll need to fast forward through about 3/4s of the show until you hear the nasally-sounding guy — http://www.wjct.org/mp3/weekly/fccm.mp3

WJCT is planning on airing one of my commentaries every third Thursday of the month. So tune in.

That Kahlua piece, by the way, was one of three columns that recently won a Florida Press Club award for commentary.

It began as the slightest tingling. Hardly noticeable. Nothing memorable. But it grew, and spread, from my chest down into my arms and legs. My toes trembled and tapped. My hair stood at attention and I felt hot as the blood raced quickly through my veins.

Most of all, I could feel it in my eyes. They danced and darted about like googly eyes, latching onto this or that in a wild frenzy.

I felt strange urges — primal urges — like I should hunt and gather or scream things like, “Woo-hoo! The Promised Land!”

“Damn it, man,” I told myself. “Compose yourself. You’re drooling and children are starting to stare. That woman thinks you’re rabid and is probably going to hit you with her umbrella.”

But I couldn’t help it. I JUST couldn’t help it!

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It’s officially the holidays at my house and that can mean only one thing: a super nova explosion of Christmas craft projects. Epic. Extraordinary. The paint flies in such a frenzy that it tickles the ceiling. The glue gun is begging for mercy — “No, not another piece of construction paper!”

The colored markers have run as dry as a Texas desert and the glitter is falling like snow. (Question: Why in the world would you ever give glitter to a 3-1/2-year-old who has questionable motor skills and a penchant for saying things like, “Is this candy?”)

The biggest of the projects so far was the one we did on Thanksgiving. My wife devised it in order to amuse, entertain, and mostly preoccupy the time of the grandparents and my aunt.

She was concerned that a stocked liquor cabinet and my family’s genuine love of fighting like rabid badgers could negatively affect the holiday. So in order to head off the fireworks she saw coming, she put them all to work. Why not? Big kids are like little kids: Want to keep ‘em out of trouble? Give them something to do. It was either that or resort to muzzles and shock collars.
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