“I found her diary underneath the tree
And started reading about me
The words she’d written took me by surprise
You’d never read them in her eyes
They said that she had found
The love she’d waited for
Wouldn’t you know it.
She wouldn’t show it.”

When I was in 8th grade I had a monumental crush on a girl named Kelly. It was a typical junior high school crush where I thought the world revolved around her, and she wasn’t even aware that I was one of its inhabitants. I was just a faceless loser that passed her in the hallway hoping that she’d accidentally run into me and instantly recognize me as her soul mate. The only thing standing between fantasy and reality was John. John was Kelly’s boyfriend.

Why is it all the hot babes of the world go for guys that are so repulsive they have to shave in the dark? I see pictures of models and actresses hanging all over these guys that look like they belong in the clearance bin at UglyMart. Most of us guys have the following self-esteem issue: “I’m not good looking enough for her.” When in reality, we should be thinking: “I don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting her because my face isn’t the mirror image of my butt.”

In John’s case, he looked like someone assembled his face without using the easy-to-follow face-assembly instructions. He also had a thriving zit garden on his face that flourished due to the fact that he had been absent during hygiene week in 8th grade health. If zit gardens were horticultural, John would have walked away with the blue ribbon at any county fair. Yet he already had a blue ribbon. Her name was Kelly.

Then fate presented itself with an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. A junior high school dance.

I would go and I would ask Kelly to dance. Sure, it was risky. Sure, there was a high risk of rejection due to the fact that my face did not cause instantaneous and uncontrollable vomiting. But there’s always that rare exception when the power of love is so strong it overcomes even the most formidable of obstacles. Love stories that give us all hope. Love stories that stand the test of time. Love stories that end up on the silver screen. I even thought of a title for “our” movie. “Kelly flushes John for Dustin.”

Back in my school dance days, there were two types of dancing. Fast dancing and slow dancing.

Fast dancing was when you stood several feet from your dance partner and allowed your body to make a bunch of random voluntary body movements very similar to involuntary movements some people take medication to control.

I despised fast dancing. It was like exercising-which I did every day. It was called P.E. There was also the coordination factor. Like most kids in junior high, my large motor skills were still in their rudimentary stages of development. My body could feel the beat of the music; it just didn’t know what to do with it. The difference between me and so many other guys my age was that I knew it and they didn’t.

I knew that the moment I set foot on the dance floor, I would embarrass myself until the moment I set foot off the dance floor. I could strut my stuff like the rest of them, but deep down I knew my stuff was strutless.

I am thankful I faced this reality head on when I was younger. Some guys never faced it. They’re the guys you see at wedding receptions strutting around the dance floor like a rooster-who got into a sack of bad seed.

Slow dancing was when you tried to eliminate any measurable space between your dance partner’s skin and yours. When it came to slow dancing, the goal for most junior high guys was to dance with the girls who were early developers. If you were going to press your body against a girl, you wanted her to have something that would press back. This rated much higher in importance than beauty, since all you were going to see was the side of her head anyway.

The other great thing about slow dancing was that it was easy for guys to do. All we had to do was go in circles. We learned how to do that when we were little kids. Going in circles was one of the fundamental moves of the potty dance. Of course, so was tugging on your wee-wee, but most guys stop doing that in public as they get older-unless they become rock stars.

My goal was to slow dance with Kelly. I decided to increase my chance of success by splashing on an extra palm puddle of Skin Bracer After Shave-which in my case was technically called Skin Bracer 3 Years Before Shave. If real life results were as successful as the television commercial results, Kelly would take one whiff of me and pencil my name across her entire dance card.

Unfortunately, the dance turned out quite different than I had envisioned it would.

Yes, Kelly was there. John was a no-show. As soon as I entered the school gym, I navigated through waves of pubescent humanity until I found her. I immediately approached her and asked for a dance. She told me she had already said yes to someone, but to ask her after the next song. Even in the loosest of interpretations that would not be considered a rejection. Just a delayed acceptance.

So I waited until the next song was over. And I asked her again. She said she’d already been asked, but to ask her again after the next song. And believe it or not, she used the same line on me the entire night. And believe it or not, I fell for it the entire night. I spent the entire night watching Kelly dance with one repugnant guy after another. I even passed up several opportunities to slow dance with Becky the Boob.

It didn’t hit me until I got home that night what had happened. I considered for a second that perhaps she was just too kind of a person to come right out and reject my request, but that wasn’t it. Her friends and her would giggle every time they saw me approach. I was their source of entertainment for the night. After that, I never walked close enough to Kelly in the hallway for her to accidentally run into me. We would never be soul mates.

It’s been over 30 years since that dance, and it still hurts when I think about it. I’m not talking about a deep “I need therapy” pain. Just a little memory discomfort that haunts me whenever I hear a familiar song. And it makes me wonder-does she ever think about that same night all those years ago when she danced all over some faceless loser’s heart?

“I found her diary underneath the tree
And started reading about me.

The words began to stick,

then tears to fall.

Her meaning now was clear to see.

The love she’d waited for

Was someone else, not me.

Wouldn’t you know it.

She wouldn’t show it.”

-David Gates, Bread

***

Check out L. Dustin Twede’s website at . He can be reached at ddtwede@yahoo.com.

I went for a walk in the woods today-or more accurately, I went for a hike in the woods. 

I enjoy walks. They allow me to exercise without me even being aware of the fact that I’m exercising.
One rule that I’m very committed to following when I walk is the “no incline” rule. If I feel the slightest hint of an incline on the surface I’m walking on, the muscles in my legs immediately file the following protest with the head office: “According to Chapter 17, paragraph 6.2 of the WALK Agreement, any surface with an incline greater than 0% is considered a hill, and therefore not allowable under the Terms and Conditions spelled out in Chapter 22, paragraph 8.2.c.ii through 8.2.c.iv. Any violation of this agreement may result in an immediate muscle cramp.”
But today I went for a hike, which meant that any incline ranging from 1% to 135% was fair game. Hiking any incline steeper than that would be considered repelling-in every sense of the word.
Since I was able to write this column, it’s quite obvious that I survived the ordeal. But I am now dealing with a very disgruntled body. In an attempt to re-establish total body-mind unity, I requested my body to help me describe the difference between a walk and a hike. Here was my body’s immediate (and unedited) response.
The difference between a walk and a hike is like the difference between getting a full body massage from a licensed masseuse on a comfortable massage table and getting a full body massage from a licensed semi-truck on uncomfortable pavement.
One of the phenomenal perks of living in the Great Northwest is easy access to thousands of miles of hiking trails. Ten minutes after backing my car out of the driveway, I was standing at the trailhead attempting to stretch the muscles in my body. I allowed them to officially file their protest, and then we disappeared into the vast wilderness.
As several hikers passed me, it didn’t take long to realize that I was not wearing the latest in designer hiking apparel. And after several snubbings from my fellow hikers, I began to feel inferior, and my hiking fun-o-meter dropped dangerously close to the red zone.
Just as I was about to turn around and slink back towards my car, I realized that nature didn’t have the same discriminators. It didn’t care what I was wearing. In fact, it didn’t even care if I was wearing. And that was all the reassurance I needed to forge ahead.
The other thing that didn’t take long for me to realize was that I was monumentally out of shape. The average person’s lungs hold about five liters of air, whereas I appeared to have the same lung capacity of a small rodent, which holds about one milliliter of air. I was so completely out of breath that I couldn’t find it, let alone catch it.
I had heard about this phenomenon during exercising called the “burn.” The burn apparently occurs early in a person’s workout routine, when every muscle in their body feels like it’s on fire. The good news is that the burn is only temporary, and it’s immediately followed by a burst of increased energy and drive. The bad news is that when my body reached the burn stage it just kept burning.
In my younger days, I was a very competitive person. I lettered in three sports. I did not like to lose at anything, whether it was running a race or determining which one of my two brothers and me could hold our breath the longest. I always managed to find enough reserve in my tank to finish strong in whatever event I competed in.
So as I was hiking, I would occasionally hear someone approaching from behind me and my competitive nature, rusty from dormancy, instinctively tried to kick in. Unfortunately, when I hit the accelerator, it was obvious that there was nothing left in my tank but cobwebs.
The first to humiliate me was a pack of cub scouts trying to earn their plant and wildlife badges by identifying various species of flora and fauna. “There’s an indigenous Mossback Bipedal.” A scout the size of a sapling was pointing his right twig in my direction. The other small trees erupted in full-lung laughter as each passed by me. It was too much to hope for an American Black Bear to suddenly appear on the trail in front of them. I’d like to see which snot-nosed sapling would be able to earn his wildlife badge by pointing to the snarling fauna while shrieking, “There’s an Ursus Americanus” without wetting himself uncontrollably.
Later, as I was traversing a series of perilous switchbacks, I heard this high-pitched raspy voice directly behind me: “On your left.” Before I was able to figure out what “On your left” meant, this frail, spindly, grey-haired lady blew past me. I don’t know how old she was, but I would bet she was probably hiking these hills when the old-growth trees were considered new growth.
Now I have nothing against old ladies. I am married to a beautiful lady who some day will turn into a beautiful old lady. I am very respectful of the elderly-as long as their behavior is age appropriate. This lady was certainly not acting hers. I can just imagine the discussion later that evening at the local retirement center’s bingo night.
Eunice: “So, Harriet, what did you do this afternoon?”
Bingo Caller: “G43.”
Harriet: “I sat in my rocker listening to Perry Como while crocheting a pair of baby socks for my great-granddaughter. What about you, Mildred?”
Bingo Caller: “D13.”
Mildred: “I watched my soaps. That Doctor Filbert is a handsome dish. If he were my doctor, I’d become a hypochondriac. What did you do, Eunice?”
Bingo Caller: “I27.”
Eunice: “I hiked up the side of a mountain using my new handheld GPS navigation system while listening to my MP3 player.”
Bingo Caller: “E32.”
Harriet: “Did you pass anyone?”
Bingo Caller: “M29.”
Eunice: “Pack of scouts and a man who looked like Welton Carp did just before he stroked out. BINGO!”
I have found that communing with nature by oneself is extremely rewarding. You get to enjoy the relaxing sounds of nature. You get to set your own pace. And you have no witnesses who will ridicule you in front of family and friends that you got passed “on your left” by a granny.
I’m going to take a breather from writing this column and address a pet peeve of mine. Until I went for my hike, I did not even consider this a peeve, let alone a pet peeve.
When I was at the trailhead today, there was this plastic bag dispenser. If you are hiking with a canine companion, you are supposed to carry a plastic bag with you in case he/she decides to squat in the middle of the trail and drop a gomer. It’s not fair for some unsuspecting hiker to step in your dog’s gomer. A commercial pressure washer that produces 5,000 PSI can instantaneously peel eight layers of paint off the side of a house. But once you get dog gomer packed deep into the complex tread patterns of your multi-grip rugged-terrain hiking boots, it is not leaving.
So for all you hikers with dogs, I’ve modified a very famous quote uttered by every wannabe environmentalist: “Take only memories (and plastic bags with your dog’s gomers), so others can leave only non-gomer footprints.”
Back to my column.
When I finished the hike and returned to the trailhead, I was both exhausted and elated. There is something both peaceful and therapeutic about communing with nature. Henry David Thoreau wrote: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
Since I’m about 150 years too late to have a chat with Mr. Thoreau, I’ll have to draw my own conclusion to this famous quote from his book, Walden. After all, he lived in the woods for several years, whereas I lived in the woods for several hours.
A visit to nature is cleansing. We walk into the woods carrying a forty-pound backpack stuffed with stress, problems, worries, and burdens. Every aspect of our lives is complicated and complex. There are no easy answers or simple solutions. Life weighs heavy on us. And although we each have our own unique ways of dealing with this reality, the objective is universal: to protect what is internally meaningful against all that is externally meaningless.

***

Check out L. Dustin Twede’s website at www.ldustintwede.com. He can be reached at ddtwede@yahoo.com.

The other day I was flipping through television channels with the anticipation of something catching my attention. My attention is not picky, and can usually be caught as easily as a trout at a sportsman exhibition fishpond.
But as luck would have it, not one of the 13 channels had anything worth biting. And yes, you read that correctly, only 13 channels. No cable. No dish. I only spend 30 seconds of my life finding out there is nothing on television, whereas those of you with platinum cable or satellite subscriptions lose 30 minutes of your life flipping through 2,137 channels before you arrive at the same conclusion. Read the rest of this article »

THE NEW MILITARY

Military experts say that future wars will be fought completely different than any war we’ve ever been involved with in the past. Fighter jets will be unmanned. Cameras will be attached to the jets and people will fly them from the safety of a control station hundreds if not thousands of miles away from the actual battlefield. The “pilot” will navigate their sophisticated planes to the target area, and drop their lethal arsenal with one hand while the other hand is buried in a bag of microwave popcorn.
National defense will be protected the same way. Incoming missiles or aircraft will be blasted out of the sky from someone sitting in an ergonomically approved office chair with his hand on a laser controller that looks very similar to a video game controller. For all he knows, it is a video game. Perhaps the incentive for destroying incoming nuclear missiles is not the satisfaction of saving thousands of lives, but the fact that the “pilot” gets 10,000 bonus points and extra laser power.
Each day I walk into my living room and stare in disbelief at the red-eyed zombie renting out space in my son’s body, playing video games instead of doing his chores, or doing his homework. I used to think, “What a lazy, red-eyed zombie.” Now I look at him with patriotic pride and think, “Keep up the training son. Our country needs you.”

* * *
CHICK MAGNET DAD

A few days ago, my son and I were walking along a street lined with quaint shops and cute girls. I could not believe the looks these girls were giving me as they passed. Some would shoot me a quick glance and smile. Others would perform the equivalent of a full-body MRI on me. Their flirtatious expressions and comments confirmed that they liked what they saw.
And why shouldn’t they? Twenty years ago, their mothers would have given me the same appreciative stares. If their mothers had good taste, it stands to reason that they passed those good-taste genes on to their daughters. Sure, some of them were young enough to be my daughter, but who am I to deprive them of appreciating timeless good looks?
Once we reached the end of the shops, my 19-year-old son leaned over to me and said, “Have you seen the way these girls have been checking me out?” I almost busted my gut laughing, but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Not wanting to ground his soaring self-esteem, I decided to let him think these babes were looking him over instead of his middle-aged, balding, slightly overweight, out-of-style chick magnet of a father.
The sacrifices we make for our kids.

When I was a boy, I was also a scout. I don’t have a plethora of scout memories, but I do remember Pinewood Derbies.
For those of you who don’t have a clue what I’m referring to, a Pinewood Derby is a car race. The cars are approximately 8 inches in length and are made out of…you guessed it. Pinewood. The race is run on a straight track, and several cars compete at the same time.
Several weeks prior to the race, each scout is handed a bag with the following contents:
1 rectangle block of pinewood
4 plastic wheels
4 nails (wheel axels)
½ sheet of instructions
Each scout would take his trusty pocket knife (in those days, we called them pocket knives because we were actually allowed to carry knives in our pockets), and start whittling away at the block of pinewood.
There are probably thousands of rules and regulations you have to comply with if you want to enter a car in a NASCAR race. In a Pinewood Derby, there are only two rules and regulations you have to meet in order to race.
Rule #1: The racecar has to meet a specific weight limit.
Rule #2: This is a scout project—not a father-of-a-scout project.
By the time each scout removed all of the non-racecar pinewood from the racecar pinewood, there was always a few bloodstains in the wood where the pocketknife accidentally shaved off some non-racecar scout skin.
After the whittling came the sanding. The trick was to remove any obvious chips, nicks, and blemishes that could act as air pockets, that could act as speed inhibitors, that could act as excuses for coming in last place, that could act as reasons for all of the other scouts to ridicule you.
Like most other scouts, before putting blade to wood (and scout skin), I put pencil to paper. I would design the shape, style, color, and paint scheme of my pinewood racecar.
And like most scouts, the actual shape, style, color, and paint scheme of my pinewood racecar turned out slightly different than how it looked on paper; okay, significantly different. But that was okay. There was always a sense of scout pride to do something from start to finish by myself. And while my racecar would never end up in the Boy Scout Pinewood Derby Hall of Fame, I was still confident that it would take less time to travel the length of the racetrack than anyone else’s racecar. Each year, I would reserve a piece of bedroom shelf real estate to display the winning trophy.
The night of the big event would arrive and the first thing most scouts noticed were the scouts/scout fathers who violated Rule #2. It was easy to tell. No blood stains. Some scouts never got to whittle away a single splinter of non-racecar pinewood. Their dad’s would design the shape, style, color, and paint scheme. And if the scout dad was an engineer, he’d take the racecar to work with him and test it in a wind tunnel chamber. Over the years, my pinewood racecars competed against some very aerodynamic racecars with spectacular paint schemes.
At the end of the night there was always one winner and a whole bunch of non-winners. Nobody likes to lose. Even scouts. Scouts are Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, and Cheerful. Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Reverent. But nowhere in the scout oath does it say anything about being a good sport.
Then one year something incredible happened. I won. It was not my best design. It was not my best whittling job. It was not my best sanding job. It was not even my best paint job. It was obvious to everyone participating that the winning scout’s dad played no active, or even consultant’s role in the development and construction of the winning racecar. It was definitely a scout-only effort. I don’t know who was more surprised when I took home the trophy—my bedroom shelf or me.
So here’s the deal about Pinewood Derbies. They’re as much about life as they are about racing.
* I am a block of pinewood. I am responsible for whittling away the “non-me” part of the pinewood, and leaving only the “me” part.
* Occasionally each of us wins a race, but most of the time we don’t. Sometimes we start strong. Sometimes we finish weak. Sometimes we don’t even make it out of the starting gate. Some people win even though they don’t even try. Some people finish last, even though they try very hard. Not winning can either motivate or debilitate. Our choice.
* A trophy will tarnish over time, unless it is won unfairly. Then it starts out tarnished, and remains that way forever.
* The only true losers are those who choose to stay in their bag—unwhittled, unsanded, and unpainted.
***
Check out L. Dustin Twede’s website at www.ldustintwede.com. He can be reached at ddtwede@yahoo.com.

I have decided to stop watching television sitcoms. There seems to be a common theme running through each of them that just doesn’t sit well with me. The writers of these sitcoms must all drink the same brand of creative formula, because whenever they spit something up, it pretty much all looks and smells the same. I can envision the initial brainstorming session by a typical writing team trying to come up with the basic premise for a new sitcom.

Writer #1: “Okay, here’s what I’ve got so far. It’s a family. 90% of the show will take place in their living room. And the father of the family is a chowder-head.”
Read the rest of this article »

Lady Debby and I recently walked into a phone store because she needed a new cell phone. What was wrong with her current cell phone? It was old. Two years old, to be precise. In technological years, that’s the equivalent of a paleontologist unearthing a three-billion-year-old plereioiocdusaurus jawbone.

The first thing I noticed when I began looking at the various phone options is all of the features built into them that have absolutely nothing to do with making phone calls. Call me a purist, but if you need a phone, buy a phone. If you need a camera, buy a camera. If you need a nose hair trimmer, buy a nose hair trimmer…(it’s only a matter of time). Read the rest of this article »

Arnold places the worn dollar bill up to his lips, exchanges a short but intimate liplock with the founder of our country, and then tosses the dollar bill into the wind never to be seen or heard from again. Now many of us would say that Arnold is a total and complete spudhead? Nobody with the sense of tree sap would just throw money away. Read the rest of this article »

I just watched a car commercial on television. One of the selling points of the car was a feature that notified you in the event of a car accident. What a great idea. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve pulled into my driveway, gotten out of my car, and the guy next door said, “Howdy, neighbor, looks like you totaled your car on the way home from work. Is that your face imprint on the what’s left of the windshield? You may want to have a doctor reattach that missing appendage once you find it.” Read the rest of this article »

Recently, I decided to go on a diet.Over the years, I have relied heavily upon my stomach for making the food consumption decisions for the rest of my body. This seemed like affective body management delegation, since no other part of my body sends signals to the home office complaining of hunger.

It’s becoming painfully evident that when it comes to job performance, my stomach has been “overachieving.” In a typical business environment, you usually don’t want to stifle overachievers because they compensate for the underachievers, commonly known as the general workforce. Read the rest of this article »

This morning I was driving along the freeway listening to the radio when a commercial about hair transplants took control of the radio airwaves. The commercial was basically equating a man losing his hair to a man losing his ability to do…man things.A few months ago I wouldn’t have been offended by this bold-faced attack on the fragile balding male ego. I would have laughed it off, for it was an attack on a fraternity of men that I didn’t belong to. The Phi Beta Balding fraternity. But lately I’m beginning to see more of my hair in places where it’s not supposed to be (shower drain, hairbrush, cereal bowl), and less of my hair where it’s supposed to be-imbedded in my scalp. Read the rest of this article »

One of the extra perks we receive as parents of school-aged children is school music concerts. This special bonus is similar to your dentist telling you, “On top of your regular cleaning today, we’re going to throw in a free root canal.” Only with a dentist at least you get to suffer in a reclining position. For school music concerts you get to sit on bleachers, where halfway through the concert your butt cheeks fall asleep, which irritates the rest of your body, which is forced to stay awake. Read the rest of this article »