Happy New Year. Oh, there will be a fee for that.

Verizon’s ethically questionable payment fee was on the horizon, but fortunately the curtain rang down on it before it became just another corporate attempt to extort money from already cash-strapped working blokes. With added fees everywhere you look, from checked baggage fees to ATM fees, nothing costs what it costs. Makes you wonder what’s in store for 2012.  Here are some ideas that we could very well see.

Pew fees (an across-the-denomination fee). Why stop at the collection plate? Why not charge the faithful for sitting down to be lulled to sleep by an enthralling sermon?

Sin tax (for Catholics only). Provide Catholics with a Sin card they have to swipe before they can be absolved from their sins. Sort of a new spin on the old indulgence payola of pre-Vatican II.

Holy Water dispensers (again for Catholics only):  Upgrade regular blessed water to Holy Perrier and plunk in two quarters and you’ll get a holy squirt.

Pay toilets on airplanes: Why not?

Cushion fee: Why should airline passengers think they should have a cushion on their seat.  In 2012 I predict a $5 cushion fee.  The airlines will rake in millions.

Cone fee: In 2012 they won’t raise the price of ice cream, but expect to pay a $1 if you want it in a cone.

Sunny day fee: Why should nice weather be free?  In 2012 we’ll be billed for sunny days with an extra fee for a blue sky.

Plate Fee: With the cost of food going up, many people are not eating out as much as they used to, so why not keep the menu prices the same as 2011, but introduce a plate fee…and if that works, add a utensil fee.

Politician Fee: With 2012 an election year, why not create an honesty fee.  Any politician who says or does anything dishonest will have to pay a hefty fee. A subsequent fee will be a charge for running a dirty campaign. Could be the end of politics as we know it.)

Imagination Fee:  Not a big money maker for I fear imagination is a thing of the past. But if there were an imagination fee, I would be willing to pay it.

Christmas Wish List from Oz

Dorothy

A pair of ruby Nikes
A new galvanized bucket filled with gin
A (short) leash/choke collar for Toto
A GPS (No more “recalculating for me!)

Toto

A (short) leash/choke collar for Dorothy
A dreidel chew toy. (Bet you didn’t know I was Jewish!)

Scarecrow

To be re-stuffed with hypo-allergenic, hay made from recyclable material
No brain, please. (Brains are highly over-rated and appear to have no value.)

Tin Man

A case of 10W/40 synthetic oil
A light-weight ax

No heart, please. (Why risk having it broken by some a** h***)

Lion

A high-priced spa package
A de-lousing treatment
No courage, please. (I plan on running for public office and courage will get in the way)

The Wizard

Some pepper spray to ward off annoying dogs
Anything that’s not green for God’s sake

The Wicked Witch

A high-tech, waterproof rain coat
A Dyson vacuum to replace that out-of-date broom

Glinda

Voice lessons
A new dress…I’m tired of being mistaken for Lady GaGa. I’m Lady GlinGlin!)

Uncle Henry

A subscription to Playboy
A divorce from Em

Aunt Em

A subscription to Playgirl
A divorce from that dolt, Henry

 

The end of the line, not the end of the lion, on the YBR.

Twice upon a time there was Max the village’s only shepherd. Max was the thirteenth of his mother and father’s twelve children. Max was born with a silver spoon in his mouth which figuratively isn’t a bad thing, but in Max’s case it was literal, making it very awkward when his mother attempted to breast feed him.

Max’s pasture was on the border of Wales and Scotland. (Don’t go look it up on a map, because this is my story and I can write anything I want.) Max was the shepherd of a very unusual flock of sheep. Unlike normal sheep that have to be sheared first before their wool can be made into sweaters, Max’s sheep didn’t have wool. They had sweaters. Some were cardigans, some pullovers, and the black sheep of the flock was a turtle neck, which caused a number of eyes to be raised because the only turtle in the vicinity was a loose living reptile that had this sheepish grin.

Max was bored. His life had turned grey and there was the problem with his teacher, Miss Gulch who didn’t appreciate the fact that Max’s sheep followed him to school one day. And then there was the bullying. Max’s wardrobe was less than boyish. It’s true that he wore the typical shepherd’s tunic, but Max’s footwear was far from traditional. He wore ruby slippers because red was his favorite color. People wondered about Max.

On impulse Max sold his entire flock of sweaters, with the exception of Turtle Neck, to Ye Olde Abercrombie and Fitch and took his small fortune and sought to find his dream at the spiritual center of the nearest city of Oz. Unlike other cities that boasted magnificent cathedrals, the citizens of Oz had toiled for years building a casino.

Max entered the casino at Oz with Turtle Neck at his side and went straight to the roulette table. He removed the leather purse containing his sweater money and poured the contents out on the table. He yelled, “all of it one red!”

The rouletteer spun the wheel and as it slowed down the little white ball jumped back and forth. And when it stopped a “hush” fell over the crowd, which wasn’t a good thing because in my story a hush is a speeding object from outer space.

The “hush” crashed through the glass ceiling of the casino in the ballroom where it landed squarely on Betty White who was appearing in Dancing with the Stars with her partner Derek Hough. Judge Len Goodman held up his paddle and said “Fore!” which he should have yelled sooner because it might have given poor Betty White a chance to dodge the “hush.”

But back in the game room the wind began to switch – the casino to pitch and suddenly the hinges started to unhitch. And oh, what happened then was rich. The casino began to pitch…and you know how the  rest of it goes.

Max and Turtle Neck were transported over the rainbow to Kansas.

And with that “along the yellow brick road” comes to a close. And while the blog will stay up, Dorothy and her traveling companions will go their separate ways.

Since its inception in January 2010, the YBR has had 10,000 views…averaging 15 views a day, from a one-day high of 154 to a low of 0.  (For some reason, two blogs, “Beginning to see God Again for the First Time on the YBR,” and “My Three Fathers. A Father’s Day Reflection on the YBR” earned a combined total of 5,600 views, with both of them scoring views every day. Go figure.)

The end of the YBR does not necessarily mean the end of my blogging, but at the moment I want to focus my attention on a book I’ve been hired to write and another project I’ve been contracted to complete by the end of January.

Although I would like to conclude the YBR by answering the question Glinda asked Dorothy before she clicked her heels, “And what did you learn?” I believe I would like to save that answer for a book I want to write about the meaning of Oz.

There’s still facebook and twitter. My facebook goals are to come up with some really pithy and relevant quotes or some awesome lyrics I can post to the amazement of my facebook friends. And when I really learn how to tweet, I’ll tweet my ass off.

A Picture is Worth at least a Thousand Words on the YBR

In going through some old, but not-so-old photographs that they’ve turned sepia toned, I came across two that jogged my memory. (At my age my memory doesn’t jog as much as it saunters.) If my father thought that paying more than $2.50 for a Christmas tree was an extravagance, you can begin to imagine how that translated into buying a car. It was basic all the way for him. No plush anything. And if he could have managed with three tires, he would have done so.

He bought his first car the same year I was born. I don’t know which came first. Me or the car. All I know is that when my parents got the call to pick me up at the Foundling Home they didn’t go by car. I came home the NYC way. By subway.

But that’s the subject of another story. This is about the Begley family car. A dark almost black blue 1948 Chevy that I believe was made from a WWII German U-boat.

And you wonder why my modeling career didn't take off. Pictured here with Arlene (RIP) and Virginia (RIP) Renz, Lincoln Street, Seaford.

The exterior of our 48 Chevy was the opposite of sleek. It had more curves than the fat lady at the circus. It was built to withstand an earthquake measuring 62 on the Richter scale. But it is the inside I remember most. The seats were covered in what I can only describe as “hide.” Perhaps it was made from the skin of an old donkey. Sitting on it for any length of time left marks all over your body that didn’t fade until I was 10.

The rear seat was low and the back of the front seat was high as were the sides. And because all my height was in my legs, meaning I sat low in the back seat, all I ever saw while driving in the car was donkey hide all around me.  Even when I tried to sit up high I couldn’t see out any of the car windows.  It was like taking a drive inside a box. I’d get in the car in our driveway and an hour or two later I’d get out in  some other driveway.

Thank God I could listen to the music coming from the car radio. Oh, did I say listen to music? Well, it had to be music playing inside my head because our car didn’t have a radio. But it did have a heater…if you were lucky enough to be in the front seat. And in the summer I would lose on average of three pounds of water that poured out of every pore in my body.

I compensated for all our 48 Chevy didn’t have by sleeping. I’d be out cold before my father pulled out of the driveway and would have to be pried out of the car when we eventually arrived at our destination…which was usually Brooklyn.

I believe the car is now a taxi in Tijuana.

In 1959 my father was ready to buy a new car. He had his eye set on the bottom model of the 59 Chevy line. It was a Biscayne. It had no details other than paint. The Impala, on the other hand, had all the trimmings. (Too extravagant for my father.)  But…it did have a radio set to station that only gave traffic reports.

1959 was a big year for me. I was receiving the sacrament of confirmation and as a special privilege I got to pick out the color of our new car. It was a no brainer for me. I wanted fire engine red.

My father came home in a sapphire blue 59 Chevy.  (But in my mind it was always red.)

The big spender, my mother, my sister (Patti) and me outside a cabin in upstate New York in front of our (red) 59 Chevy.

The grey interior was a cross between plastic and linoleum.  In the winter the surface temperature of the seats was about 16 degrees below zero and in the summer you could cook a steak on it.

I had grown enough to be able to see out of the windows and couldn’t stop yelling out things like” “Look at that, a building!” or “Do you see all the other cars?”

I learned how to drive in our 59 Chevy. A car that was standard with the shift on the column,  a car that had no power steering and had no power brakes. It was literally like driving a tank.  Parallel parking was an Olympic event, and trying to start on a hill was friggin’ scary!

In 1965 my father bought his third Chevy. It was shaped like a box.

Open the vents on the YBR because I’m going to vent…whether you like it or not.

Warning: This blog is not intended for the faint of heart, those weak in the knees, hypocrites, old nun, old farts, and people who have a pole up their butt.

You know how astrologers are all into planets and stars aligning? Well, lately my planets have been crashing into my stars, so I do not apologize for anything I blog in this blog. I own the content and take full responsibility for the views expressed herein.

In my opinion, and since this is MY blog, that’s the only opinion I really care about, the greatest moment in The Wizard of Oz was when Dorothy deliberately and with malice in her heart picked up the bucket of water and gleefully threw it on the witch. (Unfortunately the gutless producers of the movie filmed the sequence to look like Dorothy’s action was unintentional and the resulting witch-melting was a regrettable outcome.)

Okay, where am I going with this blog.  Some background might help.

Look up the word “good” in the dictionary and you’ll see my picture:

good

And by “good” I don’t mean noble or virtuous. I mean good as in “well-behaved.”  I was good from day one. And if nice people finish last, good people don’t finish at all. Not that I’m against goodness. There is a place for it, but that place isn’t in the real world.

At this point in my life I have seen enough to know that there are two types of people in the world. On the one hand there are the egocentric…and egocentrics are like powerful magnets. They attract other excentrics…and in the end you have this powerful (m)ass of egocentrics who basically rule the world. And one of the characteristics of an egocentrics is this overpowering urge to kiss ass…as long as someone returns the favor.

And because magnets have two poles, eccentrics tend to repel those who are not egocentrics.

Now, you can find egocentrics in all walks of life and you’ll find they come in different sizes. Egocentrics can be anyone…but what makes them so abhorrent (to me) is that they abuse power. They tend not to use their power when they are in the presence of future egocentrics, but when they are in the presence of “good” i.e. well-behaved and well-mannered people they are in their element.

As a result, good people (perhaps you can call them powerless people) can be beaten down.  Now, I’m not an African-American and I’ve never been a slave, but I can certainly empathize with those souls who were slaves.  In order to survive they had to do the shuffle and say “yes master” and “no master.” And even though Lincoln freed the slave, it took over a century and a half for the descendants of slaves to throw off the psychological chains that had kept them in a constant state of bondage.  And to anyone with any understanding of what it means to be in bondage, you will certainly understand why there were so many decades of violence in Black communities.

If I had to do it over again I would not be good. Not that I would have wanted to be an egocentric asshole, but I certainly would have tossed a bucket or two over some real assholes.

I think we, as parents, go to great lengths to raise “good” kids. But are we doing them a favor or a disservice?  I sometimes think we are doing them a disservice. When we teach our children how to talk, one of the words (or phrase) we need to teach them is: FU! and then tell them to use the expression judiciously.

I’ll never forget when my son Nicholas came home from high school with a quiz marked by Dr. Cohen.  She marked a few questions wrong that were actually right. The good doctor told Nick that it didn’t matter how the dictionary defined the words, she had her own definitions.

Nick would have been right to have told her to F herself.

I went up to talk to Dr. C and all I can tell you was she acted like a total asshole.  Had I not been a good person, I would..and should have told her to shove her doctorate up her ass.

The problem in the world today isn’t so much a recession as it is an abundance of egocentric assholes.

I say go out and find a bucket and start tossing water on the assholes in your life. You’ll feel “good” when you do it.