Good Parenting

Good parenting is often 90% parenting and only 10% good.

--Mitchell Hegman

Afraid of Ghosts?

I think I saw the ghost of a mouse just outside the door of my house yesterday morning…and, as I write this, I really wish that I was kidding.  There out of nowhere.  Very fast.  Vanishing into thin air.

Is that possible?

--Mitchell Hegman

Mr. X and His Driving Trick

Finding success as either a stand-up comedian or as any form of obnoxious ass requires very nearly the same dedication to detail and timing.  A while back, I wrote about a certain Mr. X.   Mr. X had invented a rather unhandy electrical trick in which he purposely shorted live household electrical circuits to make sparks fly just as people were looking over his shoulder to either snoop or make a suggestion to him.  Today, I will tell you about Mr. X and his infamous driving trick.  And, no, this trick did not make him a successful comedian; this one landed him far on the opposite end of the scale.

To perform his driving trick, Mr. X required the following elements: long lines of traffic backed up on each side of a train crossing, a shop truck with the name of our employer in bold graphics on the doors and perfect timing.

Timing often turned out to be the undoing of the driving trick.

As luck might have it, though, Mr. X regularly had a chance to practice his driving trick because the electrical shop that employed us happened to be located very near a railway crossing that often saw trains blocking a busy street.  On many occasions, I was in the passenger seat to experience both the successful execution and the not-so-successful attempts at the driving trick.

This trick required Mr. X to watch the train at the crossing and estimate how long it might take for him to escape from his place in the long line of stopped automobiles, blast down the empty left-hand lane for traffic going the opposite direction (passing all of the other stopped cars ahead of him) and arrive at the rail crossing just as the barrier arms lifted.  If Mr. X arrived at the proper time, he could drift at angle across the railroad tracks (at or slightly above the speed limit) and end up in the proper lane on the far side, sailing by the string of stopped cars waiting for the first car in their line to move.

As I said earlier, timing often proved problematic.  If we ended up with more than a twenty cars ahead of us, our arrival time at the crossing might fall into question.   Often, more than one car in the mix had to give way so Mr. X could maintain forward momentum.  On occasion, we ended up more-or-less parked at the crossing in the wrong lane.  More regularly, a Doppler chorus of automobile horns accompanied our rocketing escape from the traffic stoppage.  All of the attempts were usually followed by incensed phone calls to our shop, the irate drivers having captured the number off the side of the truck as we raced by.

Nice trick, Mr. X.

--Mitchell Hegman

The Guitar Store

Here is another video that will speak (sing) for itself.

--Mitchell Hegman

Please click on this link if the video here fails to launch:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSocO8zF1ho

Tweet and Shout

We have entered a brave new world of full exposure—more like full self-exposure.  Social media has presented all of us with the opportunity for (maybe the illusion of) fame.  If not given the full fifteen minutes of fame Andy Worhol predicted we would all get, most of us can achieve at least few seconds of notoriety.  If by design we don’t desire our lurid-selves to last, we can Snapchat a fleeting image that flares but for ten seconds and vanishes like a shooting star.

So here we are, Andy.  Here we are Marshall McLuhan.  Here we are Marshall Mathers.  We post thoughts on Facebook, quip on Twitter, share photographs on flickr, present blogs on Blogspot and likely share in a dozen more openly public ways.

We have become a spectacle in ourselves.

We cell our selfies and send them off in seven directions.

We tweet our clever this-and-that’s.

We twerk and flash mob in the glow of light—hoping someone notices.

We text and sext and hook-up and link-in and maybe it is not all bad, but at the end of the day  we sometimes end up more lonely than when we started.  We have, as we turn off the lights, only our thoughts and our electronic devices nearby—all of the devices charging-up at half-glow and awaiting the press of a button so they might burst with a new color or discharge a word or two in upper case letters.

And by the simple fact that two or more of us have reached this exact spot of reading in separation… my point is made.

--Mitchell Hegman

Street Sounds (Incredible Guitar)

Not the best quality of sound, but truly astounding guitar work!

If the video here does not launch, please click on this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GF2-TKfQOsk

--Mitchell Hegman

Not That Kind of Waterfall

I have had many people tell me that I have a lot to learn about sex, but I figured out on my own that attempting the Waterfall position from the Kama Sutra while drinking a cup of hot coffee is a pretty bad idea for at least one of the partners involved.

--Mitchell Hegman