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A few weekends ago, Sis and I traveled to Arizona for the Tucson Festival of Books. Between shipping rates and storage, and the fact that we’d had things damaged or lost in shipping before, we decided that the easiest thing was to drive. Yes, from Nashville to Tucson. (As you can tell from previous Smart Chickens entries as far back as “BEA or bust” and “Smells like Oklahoma”, we are drivers.)

We learned several important lessons right off the bat. One – GPS systems can vary quite a bit in not only how much time they tell you a trip will take, but in which route is best. We still can’t figure out why Sis’s GPS wanted us to travel I-40 both ways. Two – check the weather all along your route, not just the beginning and end points. It was 65 degrees in Tennessee when we left for a 75 degree weekend in Tucson. Along the way we hit flash flooding, severe thunderstorms and snow – none of which were we prepared for.

And we saw a bunch of signs that tried to point us in the right direction.

The first was a standard “Road may be icy” sign. It had hinges to fold it up in the off season and – as it was 65 according to the car – someone had clearly forgotten to put the sign away. Seeing the sign kicked off a monologue in my head: “Stupid sign. Sure, the roads are a bit wet, but in order to be ICY, there would have had to have been several feet of snow lingering here for days . . . weeks even. There’s nothing here—“

At that exact moment I took a turn and encountered approximately three feet of snow. Everywhere.

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Recently I saw a picture on my Facebook page that attempted to explain all the various social media. It went something like this:

Twitter: I need to pee.
Facebook: I peed.
Foursquare: This is where I pee.
Quora: Why am I peeing?
YouTube: Look at this pee!
LinkedIn: I’m good at peeing.

A lot of people found the mock-post actually useful for explaining the various websites, but personally, I thought something was missing. Where was Pinterest? There are so many options for this . . .

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I sat down to watch TV the other night and realized what was bugging me. Okay, I mean aside from the fact that there are pop-up ads that take up approximately one-fifth of my screen and now move around in case I had successfully learned to ignore them. No, I’ve come to accept that I get advertised to as punishment for opening my eyes in the morning. What’s bugging me now is the TV rating system.

One thing about the system is that shows display the rating in the upper left corner of the screen . . . and though this has been going on for years, TV directors and producers have not yet figured out that this is a bad place to position your lead character’s head. I cannot tell you how many times I have watched a dramatic scene in which the main character gets very emotional, but instead of his face all I see is a black square proclaiming TV-M. Thanks, I got that during the opening scene where a man fell from the window and died atop a car below. Personally, I was far more disturbed by the director, who after five-plus years of this ratings system still thinks this area is prime real-estate.

A second thing about the rating system is that it now earns its own ad space before the show. And in the middle of the show. And once again near the end. I’m pretty sure that this cuts out of program time (rather than commercial time). FX goes all the way, it doesn’t just make ad space, it makes ads – different ones for each show, usually featuring the big X that’s part of the FX logo. These ads are serious: Ultimate Fighter has a cage that transforms into the X. ‘Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s X matches the show’s signature yellow. ‘Archer’ features his mother in her animated pissiness explaining the show rating. There has clearly been a lot of effort put into this but ironically, we don’t need the rating. Let’s be honest: you know what you’re getting just because you tuned in to FX. (Need I put in some listings? Nip/Tuck, the Sheild, Sons of Anarchy, Justified, Unsupervised, American Horror Story and the aforementioned Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Archer – just to name a few.)

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The problem of deodorant came to our attention in the early ninties with Nirvana’s song “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. For those of you who don’t know, the song that no one could understand was named after a deodorant for teenage girls. In fact, the song is far better known now than the deodorant.
But ‘Teen Spirit’ deodorant highlighted a huge American problem, that persists even today. This is a problem that has no real recognition, no support organizations, and is largely brushed under the rug of society. You may have unwittingly added to it without realizing it. The problem no one wants to deal with is this: What should we name deodorant fragrances?
What does “Teen Spirit” smell like? Would you want to smell like it? Even if you were a teenaged girl?
While the term ‘Teen Spirit’ conveys nothing, today deodorants have moved into the realm of the unreal. The Old Spice guy brought the idea of antiperspirant and sex and humor all to one boiling point. But this still failed to address that he’s selling a scent called “Denali”. The Denali is in Alaska. It’s a national park. Thus, it smells like pine trees and bear poop. Your call, gentlemen.
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Where’s my flying car?
Okay, in the absence of that, how about a hover skateboard? Moon colonies?

No, what we have achieved in this day and age is:
1) Hybrid cars that run on innovative new technology. Most of which top out somewhere around 10 miles per gallon less than the best gas cars. Go figure.
2) Cell phones that no longer qualify as cell phones. These are phone/PDA/handheld wireless connections/and constant companion cameras. How many people do you know who no longer wear a watch because they always have their cell phone with them?
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Now, I’m all in favor of personalizing your things. Put stickers on your notebooks in high school? Fine by me. Paint your house you favorite color? Go for it! There’s even a house about three miles from me with a Rolling Stones ‘tongue’ logo on the side of their house. I’m in. Bumper stickers on your car? Sure! Even if they say “Rush is Right.” I think . . . we’ll, I think you have the right to free speech.
I never could figure out the car that had only these two bumper stickers: the first said “Daddy, tell me about trees again” and the second said “Save the Spotted Owl. They taste just like chicken.” I saw that about ten years ago and to this day I have no good explanation for how those two disparate ideas would wind up on the same car.
Yet, after ten years of muddling, it still doesn’t get me as much as this one does: Trucks with balls.
If you aren’t familiar with these – and for your sake I hope you aren’t – these are . . . well, balls. They are a cast of hard plastic (I’ve only seen one model, so I’m guessing there’s only one company making them right now). And they look like a real scrotum . . . except for their seven inch width and three pound weight. People suspend them from the trailer hitch of their trucks. This may be just a Southern thing, but I doubt it.
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Hi everyone! This is Utukku (the creature from the cover of God’s Eye). I’ve been travelling quite a bit lately and have recently landed in Nashville. What a great city!

Let me know where you’d like me to visit next and I’ll try to get there. Can’t wait to see all of you!

Yes, I’m a loser. When I tell people this, friends and acquaintances are quick to offer soothing words of “No, you’re not! You’re successful and everyone loves you.”

But they’ve missed the point. I AM a loser – I LOSE things. All kinds of things.

I’ve gotten much better about it the older I’ve become, but just this last summer there was an incidence with leaving my ATM card at a Taco Bell in Hope, Arkansas. You would think I would learn, but no. I left the replacement at a B & B just outside Gatlinburg, TN a month ago.

I’ve misplaced my car and house keys so often, that I joked about getting a pair of very powerful magnets. I’d put one on my keys and one just inside my front door. This way, every time I walked into the house, the keys would be ripped from my hand and fly to the appropriate spot. (Though I actually know where to get such magnets, I had to nix the idea. I’m afraid I would forget to let go of the keys one day and find my whole hand flying to the magnet and getting crushed there. My father actually put one of these magnets on his fridge and we couldn’t move it. Finally, with a pair of pliers, we were able to slide it off – but it took the paint with it!)

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Everyone had those childhood rebellions. No matter how small or how silly those rebellions were, they were attempts to assert ourselves as right. Me, I refused to eat mushrooms and onions. I hated them and balked at the ‘you’ll enjoy them when you grow up’. Aside from the obvious ‘Well, I sure don’t enjoy them now’ retort, I stuck to part of my rebellion. Though I now love mushrooms, onions are still on my top ten watch list.

In junior high, I put forth another rebellion. It typing class we were told that we needed to learn to touch type. 1) it would help us tremendously in the future. 2) there was no way we could ever get fast enough to pass if we were looking at the keys. Well, I showed them! I quickly read the paragraph, memorized the whole thing and watched the keyboard the whole time I typed. Though I was nowhere near the fastest in the class, I did pass. So ha!

But I hate it when people are right. I couldn’t touch type. As a writer, this was a huge problem. It’s really hard to untrain yourself from looking or to learn to do consciously what you can do if you just don’t think about it. Chew on that – I typed so much that if I could get out of my head, I COULD sit back and touch type, but the second I thought about it, I had to look at the keys.

Later during a course book writing project I started developing the early warning signs of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and also made my left arm numb to the elbow. In researching how to fix what I’d done and prevent further damage, I bought wrist braces, got gelfoam wrist supports to put in front of my keyboard and tilted the keyboard away from me rather than toward. And then I came across the Dvorak keyboard.

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Recently we celebrated Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday. Facebook and Twitter lit up with MLK Jr quotes and bold statements about acceptance. Though I have never heard this quoted anywhere else, I have always thought that MLK Jr had the following principle at heart: if you wish to be accepted by society, you must first show society that you can be a useful part of the culture. King suggested that his people be peaceful protestors who advocated their own worth, and even today this continues to be a valuable idea.

There’s value to the other side, too. You don’t have to conform to what’s already in a society to prove you can have value in it. “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” has its own merits. And every year I lived in Los Angeles, you can bet I wasn’t going to miss the West Hollywood Gay Pride Parade on Halloween. I have never seen better costumes anywhere than what I saw there every year, everywhere I turned. One year, the string quartet from “Titanic” played as they walked, complete with old-time life vests and icicles hanging from their faces and sleeves. Another year, a human Oscar and an Emmy stood on raised daises at one end of the walk. Parade goers could grasp them by the calves and get their picture taken as if accepting a life-sized award. But wearing your purple, thigh-high shazam boots with only a green over-the-shoulder thong isn’t really the way to convince society that you belong.

But the issue of one group trying to get a legitimate foothold in society doesn’t end there: anti-weight discrimination groups are in the mix now. (“We’re here, we’re spheres, get used to it”). But a new group has a dog in the fight, too: the medical marijuana contingent.

Let’s start with a breakdown:
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