Miami Bound Machine - Part 3

My experience at the beach can pretty much be summed up by an experience from my college years.

I was home on Long Island, back from my first year at ASU. One weekend my buddy Mike, his friend Jen, and I all went to the beach. We parked the car, grabbed our stuff, and headed out to the sand.

After finding a spot and dropping our things Jen and Mike stripped down to their bathing suits and jogged merrily down to the water.

I on the other hand, took off my shirt and immediately got a nosebleed.

It wasn’t like a little one either; it was like what happens when one catches a football with their face.

I started to panic. I’m not sure if you’ve ever tried to track down a tissue at the beach, but trust me, they are in short supply.

The awkward thing about getting a nosebleed at the beach is there is just nothing to stop it. What are you going to use… sand?

Mike: Hey Rich why are you laying face down in the sand?

Rich: Oh nothing, just a nose bleed, I think this is how they stop oil spills. I’ll be fine.

No, you can’t do that. And of course there is nobody around, I am bleeding all over my hand and the only thing I have to stop the bleeding is the shirt I just took off.

It was either use my shirt or just go bleed in the ocean. So naturally I chose to use the shirt.

Imagine my friends’ confusion when they came back from the ocean to find me with a tank top in my nose and blood on my hands.

It doesn’t get more embarrassing than that. I mean I hadn’t even been there 10 minutes! And I had JUST gotten my shirt off, which is quite the event itself. My body being so pale and reflective it requires sunglasses just to witness.

Much later on, Mike told me about a conversation he had with his friend Jen and my name came up.

Mike: Do you remember my friend Richy?

Jen: Is that the kid who almost died when we went to the beach.

Pretty much. I mean I might as well title my memoir that

The Kid Who Almost Died When We Went to the Beach: The Rich Boehmcke Story.

And even though I sometimes spontaneously bleed there, I do love the beach. But for many reasons, the beach doesn’t so much love me. Typically a lot of awful things aside from nosebleeds have happened to me at the beach. Granted this is because I have done a fair bit of travelling by myself. So I am usually at the beach on my own with nobody to look out for me.

Going in the water by yourself is a stressful situation. I remember my time in Australia when I finally got up the courage to leave my stuff on the beach and just go swimming by myself, only to see this sign when I emerged from the ocean:

Awesome.

My body was built for many things: sitting on a couch, reaching for high up objects, making really dramatic awkward movements, but the beach? No, this vessel I have is not necessarily beach ready.

Those of you who have seen me in person (and once again, my apologies) know that my skin is not really a durable looking kind of skin. I am pale. While my mother is of Italian decent, my father’s Irish German lineage beat out my mother’s genes when it came to whose skin I would get.

While “lily white” is a beautiful color, it isn’t exactly a good color for skin. And it certainly isn’t a sun proof kind of color. It is the main reason that from the ages of 6 up until recently I always wore SPF 45 when I went to the beach. And not just SPF 45, a very specific brand called Water Babies.

It is a fine product that works well but you just get to a certain age and you just look to avoid using products that have pictures of half naked children on them.

So if I am going to go to the beach I need to make sure I have plenty of sun block on hand. I reapply many times, and make sure to hit all exposed areas.

Though if I am by myself, the issue usually arises about what to do about my back. If I apply it to myself, I usually miss a rather large spot in the middle of my back, which I don’t know about until somebody points it out to me later on.

This became very obvious to me in Chile last year.

It would be beneficial if somebody could invent some sort of back scratcher/sun tan lotion applier. This way I could go to the beach alone and actually enjoy myself. Half the time I am just standing 2 feet into the ocean praying I don’t get burnt and staring at my blanket hoping somebody doesn’t steal my stuff.

But Miami should be different because I will be there with friends.

Well, not really friends, more like 100 strangers I have JUST met, but hey, same thing.

This fancy hotel I am staying at will perhaps have some sort of sun block applier. I sure hope so anyway because my goal to show up tan has failed.

In fact at this point I have really lowered my hopes for all the things I wanted to be before I showed up in Miami. I realize I won’t be buff. There is a good chance I will be ostracized for my clothes. And as for tan? Like I said, I’ve given up any hope of that.

Now my goal for when I show up to the beach is just not to look like Gollum.

Stranger: Hey Rich why is your nose bleeding?

Rich: THE PRECIOUS!

But that all remains to be seen when I finally put my feet in that Miami sand, which hopefully, I will not need to use as clotting material.

The End.  (Kind of, I’m sure there will be a recap.)

Miami Bound Machine - Part 2

So after settling on a collection of (questionably) stylish pieces to wear to Miami I am faced with another decision to make.

Do I want to get in shape before I go?

Now I wouldn’t say I’m in bad shape but the words used by other to describe me (lanky, gangly) don’t exactly bring to mind the image of an Adonis. And this is Miami! Nobody looks crappy in Miami.

Now that I think of it that could be the catch phrase for Miami. Ya know,

Virginia is for Lovers

Georgia on My Mind

Nobody Looks Crappy in Miami.

Some of you may know that I had an unfortunate falling out with my gym last spring. I haven’t gone back to that, or any gym, since..

This is not to say I haven’t been working out. No sir, I work out, like a healthy champion. I have gone through several iterations of a workout plan with varying levels of success.

First I started working out in the park near my apartment. This was going well for a decent part of last summer. I would get home from work, change clothes, and then go do whatever routine I had cobbled together for myself. Sometimes doing pull ups on the monkey bars or step ups in the playhouse.

But then I worked out on a Saturday, and the park was full of kids and their families. I didn’t think much of it until I realized jumping around sleeveless and sweaty with a bunch of 8 year olds is a great way to live your life if you are a camp counselor.

Otherwise, it’s just a great way to end up on the news.

So I quickly put an end to my park workouts.

I decided I could just rollerblade instead. But there is a funny thing about rollerblading that you don’t notice until you are actually doing it.

And that fact is, NOBODY ROLLERBLADES.

I mean practically nobody. Apparently the year that rollerblading started getting cool was the same year it stopped being cool. And I certainly don’t look cool doing it. (Remember, gangly and lanky)

While I am blessed with a certain degree of athletic faculty, if I hit a bump while I am skating, my limbs spring out from my body like 3 different Jack in the Boxes. Which wouldn’t be so bad if there weren’t so many people around to see it happen.

Add into the equation that dogs don’t like rollerbladers. I mean if they don’t like a biker, that biker can just ride away no problems, no worries.

But on Rollerblades, a getaway is not as easy.

Dogs don’t instantly bark, they just stare intently at you as you approach. You can see them thinking…

Herehecomes herehecomes herehecomes “WOOF WOOF WOOF WOOF!”

As they launch forward yanking their leash and owners arm nearly out of the socket. I usually try and laugh it off but I really can’t hear or focus on anything anyway because the adrenaline influx I just experienced is enough to bring a Mastodon back from the dead.

Plus there is a rather large hill on the way to the park. And while it is a bitch to get up, it is practically a suicide attempt to go down. I mean I am OK at stopping but there really is no OK at stopping when you are on Rollerblades. You can either stop, or you can’t.

And the hill ends at a rather busy intersection where I have to make a sharp right turn to get to the park. So I would either have to jump OVER the traffic like I’m Evil Kinevil, or just smack straight into it like… well, Evil Kinevil.

The last time I attempted this hill I was going down the hill so fast I had to jump off the side walk and jog onto the grass (in my rollerblades) to stop.

This near death experience quickly changed my view on using Rollerblading as my primary workout activity. Seeing as one of my requirements for my workout regimen is that I live through it. And as much as I’d like to be in good shape, I do not consider “dead” to be good shape.

So I’ve started working out in my apartment. I even bought one of those pull-up bars that you attach to your door frame. I bought it in Bed Bath and Beyond if you can believe it.

It seemed like an awesome way to do pull ups without ending up on To Catch a Predator.

I opened it and there were a lot of pieces. I have to admit I was a bit skeptical that the whole apparatus could be put together using the exact same tool I used to put my erector sets together when I was a kid.

But it worked and I have been using quite frequently. Granted it has been more out of guilt than anything else. Like this weekend where I eat 2 cupcakes at midnight, have a bacon omelet for breakfast and then do 20 pull ups like that is going to negate that refuse my body is now trying to process.

I tried doing pushups in my living room but every time I do pushups, the following morning my wrist gets sore and a bone starts to protrude out of it like I’m a crappy fetal Wolverine.

Again, a description I try to avoid at all costs.

I thought about joining a gym just for a month until I left for Miami but then I remembered the conversation I had with Neil, one of the prized idiot salesmen I met when I first joined my gym back home.

I was there with my buddy and the salesman says to me,

“Hey so here’s the deal, you guys like hot girls? Cuz we got a ton of them here.”

Wow Neil, nice. Very profound. In fact you could probably write slogans. How bout this one.

Miami: If you like hot girls, we got a ton of them here.

But seeing as there are now less than 2 weeks left to go before Miami and I have made nearly 0 noticeable progress, I have pretty much resigned myself to the fact that my body will remain more or less in the non Adonis phase as opposed to, well, you get the picture.

I have even convinced myself that taking the stairs up to my apartment can wipe out eating three chocolate croissants a day.

Desperate people come up with interesting theories.

But I have something else even more serious to concentrate on. On this trip there will be beach time involved and that means going shirtless, and that is something Miami is really not ready for.

To Be Concluded…

Miami Bound Machine - Part 1

I mentioned recently that my Cold-EEZE video won the contest it was in. And my prize for that was a mystery vacation. The details of my vaycay were recently revealed to me. I will be going on an all expenses paid trip to MIAMI!

Awooohooo!

The itinerary for the trip was posted on the website.

It is going to be epic. I am beyond excited. I knew it was going to be someplace warm and awesome and Miami is both of those things.

But then I started thinking.

This is Miami. This is where, at least according to Will Smith, there is a party in the city and the heat is on.

Miami is like the Las Vegas of the East Coast without all the hookers and the gambling (I’m guessing).  Nobody ever comes back from Miami with a story like

“Yea it was OK, I mean, it was kind of quiet, real low key, we just kind of hung around and ate chips.”

No, every time I talk to anybody who has come back from Miami it’s always like:

“Oh my god the beaches were so hot and everyone looked amazing and buff and then we went to the craziest club at night, and danced in an upside down anti gravity chamber of awesome. And then we drank champagne out of David Caruso’s wallet!”

Miami is the city of players, and playas, and la playa, and probably papaya. This is a city of bespoke linen suits, and bottle service, and the sexiest humans on the planet.

Well, in 3 weeks it will be home to the sexiest humans on the planet and this guy;

This just will not do. I can’t roll up to Miami looking all hokey and foolish... ya know, like myself. There will be about 100 very cool people getting on this plane to go down there for this party. And I just keep having visions of myself walking onto the plane and hearing:

GO HOME DORK

As a tiny empty vodka bottle and a honey roasted peanut hit me in the side of the face.

No, I have to get my act together. The way I see it there are 3 parts of my life I need to get in order before I make my way down on a plane full of trendy, sexy, party animals. And the first part of it is my wardrobe.

Even though I think I look OK when I go out in New York, it is always different when you go to another city. Like last year when I shot down to D.C. for the 4^th of July and my friends and I went out at night. I thought I would look good in my New York staple black. Imagine my surprise when I showed up at a bar full of people who looked like they were on an Easter egg hunt.

I realize now that certain cities require certain style.

Now I have had some interesting outfit choices over the course of my life. In fact it wasn’t until a couple years ago that I actually started understanding how to buy and wear clothes.

Up until then it was a lot of hit and miss with many more misses than hits.

Like back in 8^th grade when I so badly wanted to dress cool and look like the other cool people. At this time there was a popular accessory in my school. It was a belt made out of a seat belt.

I didn’t have such an accessory, and I really wanted one. And this feeling hit me about an hour before the 8^th grade dance when I was visited by the pants muse. And suddenly I fancied myself a designer, a pant closure genius if you will.

So I tried to invent my own belt. I went into my father’s closet and got out one of his old leather belts and cut off the metal clasp. Then I poked a hole in both ends. And then I took, get ready for this, a combination lock, and hooked it through the hole on one end, and then the other and then I CLOSED THE LOCK.

I walked over and took a look in the mirror. Sweet! I looked awesome. This would totally make other people think I was cool.

Have you seen Rich’s awesome combination lock belt?

Man, Rich has the coolest belt ever!

It’s a belt, it’s a lock, it’s both!

Satisfied with my invention I went to open it and realized a crucial fault in my design. It was still a combination lock. And now I had to put in the combination, on an upside down lock, which was secured tightly to my pelvis.

And that’s when I started to panic. I was having trouble opening it and starting to sweat. And then I realized I had to go to the bathroom. I was like a crappy Houdini. Except I didn’t have any magical abilities and I wasn’t trying to do a magic trick, I just had to pee!

Since then I have avoided the trends. I have stuck with basics, things that worked, and things that did not require the training and expertise of a locksmith. I imagine most people would say I have a pretty clear style, nothing too crazy or outlandish.

But this is Miami! This is the place where ya know… stuff happens.

(I would be more specific here but I have never been to Miami and therefore have no idea what actually goes on)

I want to make a statement so that when we all go out to the clurb to get our drink on and dance on, people will say, hey who is THAT guy?! And not just because I managed to get Pina Colada in my hair, but because I look good!

This thought process led me to an investment reserved for a certain class of people, those either playing shuffleboard in Boca Raton or those people named Ricky Martin. This led me to an investment I never thought I’d make.

I bought white pants.

Now the actual ramifications of this decision remain to be seen. I am not sure when or where I will display these pants. But they are coming with me. I am going to rock them. I am going to show the world my confidence… or lack thereof.

But most importantly, when the time comes to go to the bathroom… I will be able to do so.

To Be Continued…

Pore Decision

The funny thing about a bad idea is it doesn’t always immediately seem like a bad idea. On the contrary, it is not until you are in the middle of implementing that idea that you realize… this is an awful idea.

I started a new job this week. It’s a whole new position in a completely different industry. I was looking to feel refreshed and rejuvenated so I didn’t roll into my first day of work looking like this:

Yikes.

I didn’t have time for a vacation or a getaway. So I thought if I couldn’t actually feel refreshed and renewed, I might as well appear so. I will get a facial!

And yes I am aware this can be added to the least manly things I have done in my life. But hey, celebrities get facials and I am planning to be really ridiculously successful so this is basically just planning ahead.

Way ahead.

I heard it might be a little rough and there might be some discomfort but I could handle it. After all I had been to the dentist earlier that morning. I had dealt with my pain threshold for the day.

The place I chose was bustling with many eastern European women with dazzling skin, escorting (mostly but not all) female clients in and out of tiny rooms in a large labyrinth of facial care.

I checked in and was escorted by one blonde eastern European woman to a tiny room 6 feet wide and 12 feet long with an accordion door. She looked at me and said:

Is this your first time here?

Yes

Top off, robe on, and make yourself comfortable.

And she slid the door closed and left.

The confusion immediately set in. Robe? What robe? I looked around the room and noticed a full massage table and what appeared to be a dry cleaning steamer.

Why did I need to take my top off? What were they going to do to me? Did every man’s facial come with a complementary chest wax? I did not want a complementary chest wax… I did not want ANY chest wax. I tried to ignore this thought as I spotted a large green silky robe hanging on the wall and traded my shirt for it.

Fact: Dressing like a Hogwarts Professor is not my idea of “getting comfortable.” I was reminded of my time at the dermatologist, but comforted by the fact that this time I got to keep my pants on.

I sat down on the bed, and then decided to lie down and fold my hands over my chest to try to appear as nonchalant as possible. (Read: Not very nonchalant at all) Eventually a tall eastern European woman with dark hair and large dark spectacles entered the room. In her thick accent she introduced herself.

My name is Madonna and I will be your aesthetician.

But what she SHOULD have said, was,

My name is Madonna and I am about to squeeze the shit out of your face.

I asked her how my skin looked thinking I did a good job of face maintenance.

It’s a little dry and a little clogged.

Dry and clogged? So the face that I was proud of had the exact same qualities as a dorm toilet. Awesome.

I’m not sure why my skin was clogged. Perhaps I had spent 1 too many nights pretending I was a dirty pirate.

Who knows? As she was getting herself setup she also said to me:

We put on hat gloves.

Hat gloves? I tried to imagine what a hat glove looked like? Was she going to put a winter hat on each of my hands? Or was I going to have to put my hands inside of a hat on my head (which she had already wrapped in some sort of shower cap/ turban combo).

She must have seen the look of confusion on my face because she repeated.

We put on hot gloves.

Ohhh hot gloves ok, sure. I’m not sure what this has to do with a facial, but sure.

She then coated my hands in a lotion, covered them in tissues and slipped them into a pair of plastic/aluminum oven mitts that were plugged into the wall.

I was a bit concerned about being PLUGGED INTO A WALL like a toaster. This is something I try to avoid. She said:

If they are too hot, just take them off.

I had no idea how that would be possible, considering I was bound and plugged into the wall like some kind of electric mental patient. But luckily I was quickly distracted by something else.

She began rubbing lotion on my face and covered my eyes with a wet towel. I then felt the sensation of a dry cleaning steamer on my face. I started to feel claustrophobic. I think she noticed because she pulled it back before she left me me lying on the table to... steam?

After about 10 minutes she came back in.

How was that?

Good, very relaxing.

This part won't be. (Small laugh) Now I clean out your pores. Let me know if it is too hard.

I thought this was just a courtesy, a way of making me feel comfortable.

No, she was serious.

Madonna went to town. I'm not sure if she was using her nails, or actual carpentry nails, but I think she was mad at my face. Like, really mad. So mad that she was trying to ruin it. I was not prepared for this amount of pain. I was wincing and wondering why I didn’t hear screams coming from the other rooms? If other people were experiencing this much pain shouldn’t I be hearing swear words and blood curdling screaming? Because I tell you, that was my inclination. Was I just a wuss?

I must be bleeding I thought. There is no way I am not bleeding. SURELY she can see the blood coming out of my face right? Why does she continue to squeeze if I have a bloody face? Just because her name was Madonna didn’t mean she had to turn this into the Passion of My Face.

She finally finished and it was all I could do to not actually scream out praise for the actual mother of God.

Then she said,

Do you see the light?

And I really panicked. Oh shit I am dead. I died. I knew it! The mother Madonna is here to escort me into heaven after squeezing my face into an early grave.

As it turns out, what she actually said was

Are you alright?

I mumbled yes as she took the towel off my eyes.

And that is when I felt the tears spill out and roll down the sides of my face. The pain had been so great that I hadn’t noticed my eyes welling up.

She had finally managed to unclog my face, and I managed to moisturize it myself.

She did give me a bit of advice as well.

Next time, shave.

Ha! Like there’s gonna be a next time.

My Obsession

I have a problem; I am addicted to video contests.

Like most of the things wrong with me, I blame my mother.

It all started last spring when my mom sent me a gChat (yes my mom gChats, isn’t she hip?) that said “This is the perfect job for you” and enclosed a link to a contest website.

She was right; it was the perfect job for me.

Well, kind of. It was an amazing job. Six months living on a vineyard in Northern California getting paid 10 grand a month to keep a written and video blog of wine tastings and picnic spots. Sweet!

How could one acquire such a job? Well the first round was determined by a video submission entry. This was my video:

There were nearly 2,000 videos entered and mine was selected to be part of the top 50. And then there was a phone interview to narrow it down even more. I did the interview and my heart was beating so fast I couldn’t even pay attention to what I was saying. I may or may not have done the whole interview in German. Who knows?

Needless to say I didn’t make it to the next round.

I did get a sweet wine opener and a set of Liar’s Dice though.

I didn’t do a contest for the rest of the year, though I did write a couple of plays.

But I didn’t do any kind of video project. I hadn’t even really thought about one until a couple months ago when I got an email. It was some commercial email and in it was an advertisement for the Cold-Eeze video contest. I told everybody and their mother about it. In case you are a Fraggle, here is that video:

And do you know what happened with that contest? I WON IT! I know right? And do you know what I won? A mystery vacation! I have no idea where or when. But I do know that I am going with like 100 strangers. The best, right?

But even before I had one that contest, the process itself had me hooked like a drug addiction. That set off a seemingly ceaseless creation process that had me and my friends enter 7 different video contests in 8 weeks.

Yea I know, I get kind of obsessive.

In this process I coerced 6 different friends to play roles in these ridiculous videos that dealt with everything from a commercial for going green:

To a commercial for Bar-B-Q sauce:

WHICH I DIDN’T WIN even though the other commercials didn’t make any sense and the narrative structure of the videos didn’t equally relate to the…. Deep breath.

Sorry, sometimes I get indignant when I don’t win enough free meat to feed a Roman army.

Anyway, I realized something. I was doing better in contests where the public didn’t vote. So I said to myself, “Self, No more public votes. We are only doing panel judging from now on.”

And immediately after I came to that conclusion something else happened. I came across a contest where the winner would get 2 business class tickets to anywhere Air Pacific flies. So essentially… Fiji.

And then I had a really good idea for it.

But I had already sworn off public voting videos. What was I to do?

Seeing as I have an iron clad will and fortitude unmatched throughout the land I did what I always do… I caved.

I shot the video.

And I uploaded it hoping that the gods of the contest world would choose it as a finalist…

And they did!

So here it is. I am one of the top 3. The voting only goes until Monday the 10^th. There is no registering. Just click the button for “Video 1” and click “Vote.” There is no personal information, no pets’ names, and no nonsense. It is easy peasy! And please, forward this to as many people as you can. I really want to win this one.

And I promise this will be the last one…

http://www.fijiwater.com/blog/2010/05/vote-two-tickets-paradise-air-pacific-video-contest/

For a while anyway.

Gel Hath No Fury

Hello, my name is Richard Boehmcke and I used to be addicted to hair gel.

Wow, that was tough.

It wasn’t always this way.

I mean, I was addicted to hair spray first. And hair spray will always be my first love. But when it comes to Gel, no addiction in my life was harder for me to kick.

My hair is kind of like a classroom of ADD 8 year olds on top of my head. It is confusing, nobody follows directions, and everybody is looking in a different direction.

But up until 5^th grade I wasn’t aware that my hair was capable of such epic ridiculousity. My beautiful ignorance was still firmly in place courtesy of my mother. Always wanting her son to appear handsome, she combed my hair for the early part of my life, and she did it the same way my father did his; parted on the side.

But unlike my father who only used a couple of spritzes of hairspray to hold his hair in place, my hair required quite a few more something like 25 sprays of hair spray to get the hair to behave.

Looking back now I realize that between my mother, father, and sister we were probably responsible for most of the hairspray purchased in New York between 1987 and 1995.

It was around 6^th grade that I branched out and started learning how to do my own hair, truly a momentous occasion in my life. This was also around the time of puberty where my face looked like a battlefield; my voice sounded like a broken cello, and when I walked it kind of looked like I was trying to roller-skate… on ice.

So with my life seemingly out of control my subconscious quickly latched on to the idea that if I couldn’t control what I sounded like, or what people thought of me, or how popular I was, I was going to do my damndest to make my hair look perfect.

This meant the end of hair spray and a rather unfortunate reinvention and subsequent love affair with hair gel. Seeing as I grew up on Long Island this was pretty much my birthright.

It is challenging to grow up in a place (Long Island) where hair gel is revered as though it had come straight from the hands of Jesus himself. Like in his most famous of stories Jesus hadn’t turned water into wine, but rather hair gel. So that none of his disciples would have to suffer from dry, lifeless hair, which was rumored to affect all of the apostles except Judas ironically.

I familiarized myself with all the myriad types of Dep. This fantastic manufacturer of hair product measured its different kinds of hair gel on a scale from 1 to 5. The first level I guess meaning “I don’t really care how I look,” to level 5 meaning, “I need to stand in a wind tunnel for my job.”

Later on Dep created levels 5 through 10. Now for the life of me I have not been able to distinguish sufficient differences between levels 1 and 10 but you can bet there IS a population using level 10. Those are my brethren from Long Island, those individuals who are fans of the hairstyle known as “The Blowout.”

The Blowout, for those of you unfamiliar, and I really don’t know how you could be, is a haircut where the owner appears to have exploded a large quantity of dynamite in the morning and then decided to leave the house without touching the hair.

I don’t know how this started, but I pray to god that it will one day stop. I don’t know how the first person that walked into the barbershop described this haircut.

“Hey yo, Barber man, you check this out. I want like, a haircut, but don’t like, don’t cut too much offs, ya know, and then take like, all the hair gels you got and make it look like I’m being sucked into the sky by like, a spaceship or some shit. Word?”

But while I never engaged in any hair gelling that made my noggin look like the wrong end of a turnip, I did use more than my share of hair gel.

In fact my love of hair gel was so profound that one year for Easter my mother bought me a VAT of hair gel. I’m not sure what the corollary was between Jesus rising from the dead and a “strong hold and lustrous shine” but I will gladly admit that having that much gel was completely unnecessary.

It was no less than 64 houses of bright yellow goo. It was the kind of jar you might have reached for had you been looking for some industrial coolant.

There was no spout, no nozzle, just a lid, which unscrewed allowing me to put my entire hand into and scoop out as much yellow confidence builder as I needed.

Never one for moderation, this made this activity the equivalent applying a glob of axle grease to lube up a jet turbine.

And my head may resemble many things, but “jet turbine” is one I have readily tried to avoid.

I think my mother and I can agree that was a mistake on both of our parts.

But can you really blame me?

I mean how else was I supposed to make people like me? A good personality? Kindness? Please, everyone knows those things don’t work in your teen years.

But alas these days I keep the amount of hair product I use to a minimum. And I anticipate it staying like that. Unless of course I come across a Bible with a new take on Easter. Something like:

"On the third day Jesus rose from the dead… and his hair looked FABULOUS!"