While everyone else is out there spending time with their dads, I’m in here alone, trying not to get too lost in my own sadness. It’s just that, Father’s Day is always pretty dark around my house, because my dad was lost at sea when I was a very young boy.
No, that’s not true at all, my dad never went out to sea, I don’t know why I said that. Sorry dad. I was just trying to beef up your backstory a little bit, make everything a touch more heroic. But the truth is unfortunately pretty mundane. One night my dad went out for a pack of cigarettes, and he never came home.
Again, that’s a lie. My dad didn’t leave us. And he never smoked. I guess I was just trying to make him seem a little cooler, but when I wrote it out and read it back to myself, it’s not cool at all. And if you’re reading this, and your dad actually did the whole, “I’m going out for some smokes” bit and never returned, I’m sorry, I hope I didn’t bring up too many weird memories, I’m sure your dad had his reasons.
And I guess I should apologize for the first part too, if your dad was lost at sea, I wasn’t trying to trivialize your loss, or make fun of what I’m sure had to be a really long and vague process of waiting for answers, coming to terms with the fact that, even though they couldn’t find any wreckage, even though it’s theoretically possible that your dad could have somehow survived, maybe taken refuge on a deserted island somewhere, like in Castaway, you eventually had to force yourself to move on, to let go of that stubborn hope that maybe someday dad would walk through the front door.
I was also going to write this story about how my dad was actually a really famous hockey player from the 1980s, and while he was on a road game thirty years ago, he got my mom pregnant but then disappeared, and so eventually the league had to get involved and they forced my dad to financially take care of us, but only on the condition that we all had to keep his identity a secret.
But imagine if that really happened to you, what would it be like to read some random guy on the Internet making fun of your story? I wouldn’t want that. Even though it’s really unlikely. Is it? Maybe it’s not that unlikely. That’s basically the whole first part of that movie The Place Beyond the Pines. Right? Except instead of hockey it was carnival motorcycle riding.
No, I should just keep it simple. And sincere. Dad, Happy Father’s Day. I still miss you. I can’t believe it’s been over three years since you were taken away from us. If only you’d known about that heart condition, maybe you could have sought treatment, maybe you wouldn’t have died while driving that Jeep Wrangler with your second wife.
At least I have all of your old interviews and championship matches to watch on the Internet whenever I get too sad thinking about how you’re not here with us anymore. I used to get really mad with the fact that I had to share you with the whole world, but it’s just another way that I get to keep your spirit alive. Besides, while the whole world knew you as Macho Man Randy Savage, how many people actually got to call you dad? That’s something nobody can ever take away from me. I love you dad. Happy Father’s Day.
I just love Flag Day, but I always get so bummed out that it’s not a bigger holiday. I mean, I’ve already said, “Happy Flag Day!” to at least half a dozen random people, and nobody really gets it, most people just kind of look at me like I’m nuts, maybe if I’m lucky I’ll get an awkward smile in return. Nobody’s ever like, “Happy Flag Day to you too!” Which sucks, because Flag Day’s a real day, and it’s awesome.
My family was big into Flag Day when I was a kid. My mom would wake us up really early and she’d make a special Flag Day pancake breakfast. I don’t know how she did it, but each pancake came out exactly like the American flag. And I’m not talking just a plain rectangle, no, they were the shape of a proud flag that’s bravely blowing in the wind. Then she’d put out blueberry and strawberry jellies, so we could decorate the stars and stripes ourselves. It was awesome.
I went to the diner this morning, and, whatever, I always get a little sad on festive holidays as an adult, for whatever reason, I can never seem to recapture that Flag Day magic of my youth. I asked the waiter if he could somehow get the chef to at least try to make my Flag Day pancakes. He kept saying, “What?” every time I explained to him what I was looking for. “Pancakes shaped like an American flag blowing in the wind with a side of blueberry and strawberry jam,” and each time, “What?” Finally he just said, “OK boss, you got it,” and he came back ten minutes later with the most regular looking regular pancakes I’ve ever seen in my life.
That’s OK I guess, that’s not an official Flag Day tradition, it was just something my family always did to really amp up the spirit of the grand old flag. Kind of like our annual flag hunt. After breakfast, my dad would lead us outside, where he’d spent all night painstakingly hiding little American flags all over the backyard. “First one to fifty flags in the winner!” he’d shout out as he pulled the trigger on his Flag Day starter pistol. It was cool because when he fired, a little flag popped out and unrolled itself, just like you’d see on a cartoon.
We all had American flag t-shirts and shorts, we’d play outside on the Slip-N-Slide and dry off with these American flag towels that we only used on Flag Day. My parents got really into it. I remember one year my mom bought this America Flag doormat, and we all thought it was a really cool addition to all of the Flag Day paraphernalia. But later in the day my grandfather came over. He was a World War II vet, and he got really upset about the idea of someone stepping on the flag.
And yeah, everybody got really quiet after that, the realization that we’d all been stepping on the flag, all day, on Flag Day. My little brother was only like four or five years old, and he started crying, wailing. He was totally inconsolable. My mom tried to reassure him, “It’s OK, it wasn’t on purpose, look, I took it off the floor and I’ll clean it off, it’s going to be fine.” But my grandfather was getting even angrier, “No!” he shouted, “Let the boy cry! You should all be crying!”
After like fifteen minutes or so, the scene was only escalating, and my father, who had so far been reluctant to oppose my veteran grandfather, finally made a move to try to diffuse the situation. Unfortunately, it was at that moment that the sprinkler system went off. My dad had rigged the whole setup so that miniature American flags popped up from underground.
“What is this? You think the flag is some sort of a joke?” That was my grandfather again. His face was beet red at this point. And he was wearing a blue and white shirt, so it was actually kind of funny, I think we all thought it, how he sort of resembled a really angry American flag. But nobody dared say anything. We all just stood there and tried to act contrite until my grandfather left in a huff, screaming stuff about, “double-ya double-ya two,” as he backed his truck out of our driveway.
Flag Day was never the same after that, the next year’s celebration was markedly subdued in comparison. And like I’ve said, Flag Day today is nothing like the Flag Days of my youth. Still, my iPhone’s calendar app had Flag Day preinstalled as an event on today’s date. So that was cool. And I found a deck of American flag playing cards at a store a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been saving them for today, so hopefully my wife agrees to play a few hands of spit or gin rummy. We’ll see. We actually don’t play cards that much. Because yeah, it’s kind of boring, and there are so many more interesting things to do.
People think I’m being a little crazy, everyone’s telling me that it’s all in my head, that my house isn’t haunted. They’re only partially right. It’s not all haunted. But certain spots are really haunted. Here are the five most haunted spots in my house:
Yeah, I guess everybody’s basement stairs are haunted to some extent. But you know that feeling you get when you’re at the bottom and you turn the lights off and you have to sprint upstairs all while you can just feel the otherworldly spirits reaching out to pull you back down? I’ve experienced that everywhere, my childhood home growing up, my grandparent’s place. And for real, it’s significantly more pronounced in my basement.
Even worse, my basement staircase is its own separate room. There’s a door on the first floor dividing it from the living room, and another door at the bottom that closes off the actual basement. I’m pretty sure that the architects who designed the house recognized the evil inherent in that narrow corridor, and so they did their best to localize the darkness by sealing it in from both sides. Which is fine if I’m in the basement with the door closed or upstairs in the living room with the door closed. But as soon as either one of those doors is opened up even a crack, it’s like you can feel the ominous presence start to encroach upon your soul. If I was the kind of guy who lit candles, I’m almost positive they’d all get blown out in unison.
2. The haunted crawlspace off the basement stairs
I’m still on the basement stairs here. Once you get to the bottom, there’s that door to the left that goes to the basement. But there’s also another door straight ahead that leads into this weird dungeon area. That’s where you’d go if you wanted to do work on the pipes that connect to the street and everything, and so when you’re in there, you look up and it’s all subterranean, pools of moisture that don’t have any specific source, or random cracks in the concrete that would make really comfortable habitats for rats or possums, that is, if that architectural abscess were capable of sustaining biological life.
And the door won’t close all the way. There’s a doorknob, which should close in theory, but for whatever reason, it doesn’t click shut. So the previous owner nailed this tiny little latch to keep the void from constantly gaping out to the rest of the house. Only, even with the latch, the door is still just a little bit open, just a crack. And it’s like, that’s all it needs, just that inch, so that every time I go downstairs, not only do I have to ignore the spirits that occupy the stairway, I have to simultaneously keep out of my head whatever it is that lurks behind that creepy second door. And I can feel it, calling out to me, creepy looking ghost fingers trying to paw through from the other side. When I’m away, do the voices in the two rooms whisper to each other, make plans on how they’re going to lure me deeper inside?
3. Underneath my kitchen sink.
This is a subtler haunted spot, because it’s so small. When I first moved in, I had naturally assumed that the entire kitchen was haunted. But upon further examination, I was able to pinpoint the origin of any spooky activity to directly under the kitchen sink. The first obvious sign was the total disappearance of sponges. There are never any sponges. And I’m constantly buying them, the five-packs, the high quality yellow-bottomed-green-topped good sponges. When I get home, I put them with the other kitchen cleaning supplies, right underneath the sink. So where are they? There’s just no way I could be going through that many sponges. It’s like whatever lives in there is consuming them by the multi-pack.
Also, did I leave it open? The cabinet door? I don’t think so. Stuff like this happens all the time. And if I’m ever guaranteed to be surprised by a cockroach or a silverfish, it’s almost always coming from that two-by-two cupboard of horror. There’s no food under there, and it’s relatively free of clutter. The only possible explanation is ghosts. Lots of very small ghosts.
4. My guest bedroom
Totally haunted. Which, I mean, if I have to have ghosts hanging out in the house, I guess I’d rather them hang out in the guest bedroom than in my bedroom. It gives me the sense that they’re respecting boundaries, that they realized they’re merely guests in my house. Or I could just be projecting too much of my own hopes and fears into the situation. Maybe the guest bedroom is haunted because that’s where something crazy went down. Like a murder. Or a possession. Or a murderous series of possession, all eventually culminating in right now, me living in this house, the ghosts just waiting for my wife and I to get into a big enough fight where one of us storms out of the master bedroom to sleep in the guest bedroom for the night.
And that’s when it’s going to happen, because the guy is always the one that storms out, pillow and guest blanket in hand, full of anger, ripe for murderous possession. Or maybe it’s the guest bed. Maybe the wood that the bedframe is made out of came from a tree, a cursed tree, maybe some crazy violent possessed lunatic hung himself on that tree, and then when they found his body and cut it down, they accidentally cut his neck, and all of his possessed evil blood spilled onto the ground, into the soil, through the roots, making the tree even more evil, and now it’s in my guest bed, it is my guest bed. Whatever it is, it’s haunted, it’s the most haunted guest bedroom ever.
5. My printer
I didn’t use to believe that printers could be haunted, but that’s because I’ve never owned a haunted printer before. Now that I own one, I want to get the word out there: printers can definitely be haunted. It started out innocently enough, I’d click print, I’d get random messages popping up on my computer like, “There’s no printer connected,” or, “There’s no ink,” even though I just bought ink, there’s no way that I could be out of ink already.
But then pages started printing randomly, without any prompting from me, pages of characters and incomprehensible text. That was my first hunch that something dark might be living inside the printer. But it was only after I had my next ink cartridge blessed by a priest that I came to conclusively believe that what lurked inside was pure evil. It spazzed out and sputtered around, for a while only printing out documents in blood red tones. Finally the strange activity subsided somewhat, but I still think that it’s haunted, that it’s just waiting there for the malevolent printer company to remotely send it an evil firmware update. And I’d get rid of it, I really would, but printers are so expensive, and it’s last on a long list of haunted repairs and maintenance that I need taken care of here. Like, do you know how much it costs to replace just the kitchen sink cabinets?
There are so many more haunted hot spots in my house, like our haunted Oster twelve-speed blender, or my left hiking boot, but the haunting are more obscure and hard to articulate, and in terms of conclusive proof, well, it’s conclusive to me, I mean, I can feel it, but … you think I’m crazy, right? Why does everyone think I’m nuts? Did you just hear that? No, you’re reading this from your house, how would you hear that? Unless your shower curtain rod is haunted like mine is, and maybe they can send each other haunted messages. No, that’s nuts. Is it?
I went to the movies last week, someone gave me a bunch of free movie passes, these were physical tickets, pieces of paper that I had to redeem at the movie theater box office. And so I couldn’t buy my tickets in advance on the phone, I wasn’t even able to use one of those self-service kiosks by the entrance. I actually had to wait on line and interact with a human being.
Which is fine, I guess, it should be fine. All I could think of though was how much easier this could have been had I been able to just walk in and not have to wait on this line. There were all of these other people in front of me, and only one employee actually taking money and printing out tickets. I was curious as to what other people were doing on the line, and so I paid close attention.
They asked for the tickets, handed a credit card, waited while the ticket booth clerk gave it a swipe, and handed them their tickets. I really had to restrain myself from acting out on the urge to get involved. I’d be like, “Guys, why did you wait on this line? There are like eight empty kiosks over there. All you have to do is select your movie and swipe your card. You really feel it necessary to wait on this dumb line? You’re not even going to bother trying to figure out how to do it yourself?”
But you can’t say stuff like that to random strangers. That’s how you get punched in the face. And what am I going to say to the security guard as they escort both of us off premises? “You don’t understand, I was just asking a question, and this doofus punched me!” No, nobody’s interested, now neither one of us gets to see the movie.
But for real, why do you think they only have one person behind that window? Because they’re discouraging you from standing on line. Just use the kiosk. There’s only one person standing there because there are really only a very limited number of reasons as to why you might actually need someone to help process your movie theater transaction. Like my case with the gift tickets. Unfortunately, there’s no option on the touch-screen to scan my passes in.
Do you know how I know that? Because I tried. I at least gave the kiosk a shot. It’s not my fault that I had to wait in line, but I did, and so here I was. What’s everybody else’s excuse? There is no excuse.
And then I finally got up to the window, I got my ticket, and the cashier said to me, “Do you want to donate a dollar for kids with cancer?” and I was just like, “No.” Because I know this game, OK, they do it at the drug store, sometimes they do it at McDonald’s. Let’s guilt you into donating some money. Come on, it’s just a dollar. And it’s for kids with cancer. Pay up.
Don’t think I’m cruel, or that I’m against charity. It’s just that, these movies cost like twenty bucks. Everything about going to the movies is a rip-off. I still enjoy going, and so I’m stuck in the position where I have to pay. But come on, don’t ask me another dollar. Why don’t you give a dollar? Why don’t you donate to charity and leave the fundraising to someone who’s not charging me twelve dollars for a small soda?
It was the same at the concession stand. I bought a small popcorn, that small soda that I was talking about earlier. “Do you want to donate a dollar for kids with cancer?” It’s like, one, how do you know that I didn’t already donate at the ticket booth? I didn’t, but you don’t know that. And two, again, how about you donate a dollar?
And that’s where I had to resist another urge to start a fight with another random stranger. “No,” I said. And the concession lady just looked at me and said, “Really?” Which, I don’t know why she said that, I’m sure I’m not the only person that’s declined to donate before. Maybe it was the blunt way in which I delivered my answer, unashamed, maybe a little annoyed.
But come on, I’m here to watch a movie, not to have some faceless mega-corporation force it’s minimum-wage paid employees to solicit an extra dollar from its customers along every step of the way. I wanted to ask the popcorn girl, “Hey, you, can you give me one dollar? I want to use it to donate a dollar to kids with cancer.” I didn’t, remember that whole me-trying-to-not-get-kicked-out-of-the-theater thing. But I ran through the scenario in my head, I guarantee you I wouldn’t have been given a dollar. And then what, could I have done that whole, “Really?” thing to her? Like, I can’t believe you’re not donating. Don’t you care about kids? Kid with cancer? Come on. Jeez.
The problem with the New York Rangers is a fundamental and a simple one: they lack heart. You need heart if you want to win big. Without heart, sure, you might win a few playoff series, you might even get all the way to the finals, but unless you really have what it takes deep down inside, that intangible quality that I’m talking about here, heart, the one that the blueshirts unfortunately seem to be lacking, most seasons, of course, but this season even more than ever, you’re never going to rise to the occasion, you’re never going to win the Stanley Cup.
And I guess I should put it out there, for the sake of objectivity, I’m not a Rangers fan. But I pride myself on being able to keep an open mind. Although I can’t really picture any way the Rangers would be able to win me over, sure, in the infinite possibilities contained in the universe, there has to exist at least one way in which I’d jump on the Rangers bandwagon. But I can’t think of what that situation would look like.
Maybe if they had a little more heart. Well, I probably wouldn’t be a Rangers fan, but maybe I’d start to at least respect them just a little. It’s just that, you can only go so far in pro hockey without heart. I think this year’s playoffs have shown us that you can go pretty far. All the way to the end even. But without heart, it looks like second best is as good as it’s going to get.
Who knows? Maybe something will happen. Maybe the Rangers will find heart sometime between now and game four. I can’t really see it happening, seeing as how they’ve been playing without any heart for years now. It’s just who they are, it’s not their fault necessarily. They get out there on the ice, they think they can skate a good game without even taking a second to consider what role heart plays in the larger NHL equation. And yeah, they’ve done pretty well for themselves.
But just look at where they’re at now. It’s totally deflating. And like I said, I’m not even a Rangers fan. But as a human being fan, I’ve got to say that the Rangers’ performance for the past three games has actually shaken my faith in the very definition of heart. I always thought that, even if you were generally devoid of heart, that there always existed a little bit of heart, even just a sliver, somewhere deep down, that heart had to exist in all of us universally.
But I don’t know, I see these guys getting manhandled and I’m thinking, this is what the void looks like. Here exists proof that life can exist without any heart whatsoever. And it’s just depressing, you know, I don’t want the Rangers to win, but I didn’t want to see them get completely annihilated either. Where’s the fun in that? I would have much rather watched the series go to game seven, maybe a triple or a quadruple overtime, and then maybe Nash or St. Louis or even some fourth liner could have accidentally scored on their own net by mistake. That would have been awesome.
But this. What else can I say? You need heart to win. But I said that already.
At least New York won’t have to endure the total absence of heart for much longer. After this next season, the New York Islanders will be officially moving to Brooklyn, once and for all giving New York City hockey fans a reason to get excited again. Sure, the Islanders came off a disappointing 2013-14, but the future looks bright for the Isles, arguably one of the best teams in professional sports history.
And if the Rangers have any hope at all of actually finding some heart and making a play for game four, they better look to their future cross-river rivals. The Islanders are one of four teams in sports history to have come back from a three to nothing playoff deficit. They did it in 1975 against the Penguins. Unfortunately for the Rangers, one of the other four teams happens to be the 2014 Los Angeles Kings, when they came back from three zip to beat the Sharks.
Oh well, sorry Rangers, sorry Rangers fans, just remember, it’s not about the goal, sometimes it’s more important to focus on the journey. What a ride. You made a pretty good run. But, and I’ll say it one more time here, just to really drive the point home, without heart, you’ll never be able to go all the way. There’s no chance. And this year’s Stanley Cup finals are proof.
