The Rake Magazine

I absolutely loves me some Facebook. And I know what you’re thinking: What the hell is Todd Smith, the Spazz Dad, doing on Facebook? Isn’t he the guy with the Vagina Eye (Chop It Off) and the overactive colon? You are totally right. I have about as much right of being on the hip social networking website as I do in joining the Harlem Globetrotters. But so be it. I’m logged on and Facebookin’ the hell out of things.

I was invited to join the website by an 18 year old coworker, a hyper college student named Joshlynn. She excitedly told me that “Oh, My, God, Everyone’s Doing It” and that it would be a super awesome way to keep in touch with my friends, since I’m like…old and stuff. Joshlynn said that me and my buddies could send each other pictures and notes back and forth… on our computers! We could even trade virtual gifts.

I was extremely hesitant at first. Joshlynn didn’t fully understand that my friends are different then her friends. While her friends have raging indie-alternative college lives that are filled with gallery shows and Arcade Fire concerts, my friends are all middle aged and sweaty and have shitty jobs and even shittier kids and live on Cultasacks in Eden Prairie. I really didn’t need to see the progression of my friend Peter’s rapidly receding hairline every time I turned on my computer.


Plus, it was a little awkward explaining the whole deal to my wife. She already puts up with enough of my shenanigans. And now I was about to take all my blarney and put it online for the whole world to see. Not a good idea. The conversation went something like this:

“Hey, honey. Yeah, so …I’m going to join this social networking website, where I will be emailing and sending pictures to college age girls and boys.”

Sarah cupped her hands around her mouth and mockingly booed me.

“That’s really funny,” Sarah said, nearly out of breath with wheezing laughter. “You are trying soooo hard to stay cool.”

She had a good point. The kids at my work do actually think I’m cool. What they don’t realize, of course, is that besides my seemingly limitless knowledge of Dave Chappell skits and pop culture in general, I’m really just an uncool 35 year old dad who before work douses his crotch with Gold Bond Medicated Powder and takes Metamucil on a daily basis.

Undeterred, I joined up. Soon I had to choose a profile picture that the whole world would see every time I was using the website. Selecting my profile picture had all the drama of my senior year high school portrait. What do I wear? Do I look fat in this picture? Can they see my goiter in this one? As I deliberated the choices, my sneaky wife went ahead and downloaded an awful looking fake portrait I had done a few years back (which was titled “The Dirty Sanchez”) where I had a bad comb over, opened shirt to showcase chest hair, a greasy mustache, and looked exactly like the type of guy that would actually apply a Dirty Sanchez. Needless to say, it wasn’t my first choice.

Shortly after my icky porno portrait hit the World Wide Web, I was immediately befriended online in my Facebook by the gaggle of twenty something hipsters at my work. It was like Junior High in a box! They posted comments on my wall (a message board like thingy on my main profile page), sent me growing gifts such as donut trees and cherry blossoms, and cute little pictures of cans of whoop ass and shamrocks. We played online games where I was attacked by werewolves and zombies and fought street gangs. They sent me bumper stickers that said catchy things like “My Balls Aren’t Gonna Lick Themselves” and “Stop Snitching”. My college age friends formed groups such as “I Got through Puberty Listening to Loveline” and “I Have a Suspicion that my Teacher Smokes Pot…and that makes me Happy”. One of my coworkers asked me to join her group that was titled “Enough with the Unicycling Already!” I joined immediately because who doesn’t hate fuckers who show off on their fancy one wheeled bikes?

Over time, my network blossomed. And Joshlynn was totally right: everyone is doing Facebook. My friend list now includes a gun toting Marine, smooching hippies, NYC fashionistas, various Minneapolis Public high school rats, a M.I.T. Grad School nerd, and one dental hygienist. It is a daily occurrence that I will get a Friendship request from someone I went to grade school, high school, or college with. It’s so weird to see the names and faces of my past pop up on my computer. As I add them to my network, the memories come roaring back: I went to High School with that guy and he had testicles the size of tennis ball; Oh, my, that girl used to look like Jennifer Aniston but now she looks like Carol Channing; When I was in college, I think I took a shit in that guy’s mail box.

The greatest feature of Facebook is one that no one talks about: Cyber Stalking. As a member of the website, you have access to millions of people, and can stalk all of your friends and family with great ease. You get to know who is in their network and what they are up to. We can peek through a virtual peep hole into their lives without causing suspicion. And before you know it, all the networks are intertwined, and internet snooping comes with your morning coffee.

But the down side of all the cyber stalking is that you can get found by people you have tried to forget. A few weeks ago, the most wickedly popular girl from my childhood found me on Facebook. Megan was not only the cutest girl in the school but also the type of girl who would purposely break your crayons, throw them at you, and shriek with laughter. She had huge boobies in fifth grade, had grown into a full blown woman by seventh grade, and was dating buff high school dudes by eighth grade. She single handedly crushed my soul and then pissed on it. I had heard rumors that Megan had grown up and was now actually quite nice and started a family. Apparently, she was no longer smoking cigarettes behind the junior high, lurking in the shadows, ready to kick me in the gonads for smiling at her. But now there she was, in front of me on my computer, an entire lifetime later, requesting (I like to think she was begging) to be my friend.

In 2004, when Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook in his Harvard dorm room, his goal was simple: to form an online community solely for Harvard and other Ivy League students to communicate. He had no idea four short years later, his networking website that was to be used strictly for Ivy Leaguers would become a giant popularity contest for bored housebound adults all over the world. As I sat there pondering whether to accept Megan’s request, I moved my cursor back and forth over the yes /no options. Facebook had finally leveled the playing field. For the first time in my life, I felt golden.
I checked yes.

On a recent sunny afternoon in Minneapolis, four fabulous looking ladies put some serious sass into the usually bland game of golf. As the young fasionistas shimmied across the grounds of the Walker Museum’s new Artist Designed Mini Golf Course, the women combined ample cleavage and golf putters to make the fantasy of millions of American males finally come true. Astroturf never looked sexier.

 

The gorgeous golf girls, who were all in their twenties and in ridiculous high heels, casually flitted around the unique sculptures/golf holes that were on display, even occasionally trying to hit a ball. On Hole Two, where numerous empty glass bottles hung from ropes over the putting green, the group giggled lightly as one of the women jokingly did a sexy come hither burlesque walk through the bottles. Ten feet away, a male golfer in a classic visor and Dockers nearly swallowed his tongue.

Immediately following the four sultry women, my son and I stepped onto the golf course and the whole sex vibe instantly died. I’m a stocky Barney Rubble look alike and my son is Bam Bam dressed in Gap Kid clothes. There is no greater buzzkill in the world than a four year old boy wielding a golf club. With his index finger rammed up his nostril, constant barrage of mind numbing questions, and possible hot pile of poop in his pants, my son is two legged anti-Viagra.

When the four hotties sauntered off to Hole Three, we moved onto the platform to the Hole Two bottle fun. Without a single word of instruction from me (I’m about as good at golf as I am at speaking Mandarin), Murphy drew the club back behind his ear and violently slap shot his golf ball all the way across the frame and out onto the lawn. The sex kittens playfully giggled as my son tore off into the bottle maze to find his ball. Within seconds, he couldn’t navigate the bottles dangling from above and soon looked like a drunk staggering around in a house of mirrors. I reached in and lead him out. After he retrieved his ball, he promptly slam dunked the thing into the cup and raced to the next hole.

The course was at times difficult and at others just plain odd. With the sports aspect taking a back seat to wenches and weird metal roosters, at times I felt like it was something Andy Warhol probably came up with in gym class while all the dick hard jocks were tagging him with dodge balls. But each hole was inspiring and unique and the entire local artist congregation designed environmentally sound and challenging pieces.

There were holes with water towers, giant carpeted waves, Paul Bunyan, and even one where we shot our balls into Teddy Roosevelt’s mouth. And amazingly, they were all made from recycled or reused materials like crushed glass and rubber tires. We spent a solid ten minutes at a hole where we had to peddle a stationary bike backwards to shoot our ball into a giant pinball machine, then use the hand brakes to move the flippers, and finally had to putt our balls through a labyrinth of slots.

We finished golfing and took a nice leisurely stroll through the Sculpture Garden across the street. With the heat slowly fading away and the blue sky just beginning to fill with stars, we walked hand and hand under an awesome summer sky that was filled with both day and night. We playfully chased each other into a grove of trees where our innocent Father and Son moment was punctured by the sight of two young people dry humping the bejesus out of each other on a secluded bench.

After I saw my son’s worried expression, I told him, “Those people are just wrestling.”

“Like those two bears at the zoo?” he innocently asked.

“Ugh, yep.”

(I chuckled because every time we see two living creatures engaged in foreplay or intercourse, whether it is two horny twenty-somethings fresh from two-for-one drinks at Liquor Lyles or mating grizzlies at the Minnesota Zoo, I always tell him that they are just wrestling. And I don’t know why I do this. Maybe it’s because I went to Catholic school for thirteen years and was told that God would send a plague of locusts after me if I had premarital sex. The whole wrestling excuse seems to cover all the logistics of the situation. But I can’t help but think that when my son has his first sexual intercourse experience [when he’s married of course!] he will greet his partner with a flying forearm shiver as he leaps off the bedpost.)

We quickly left the happy humpers and returned to the golf course to eat a small snack from the golf shack which featured food from Wolfgang Puck’s Gallery 8 Cafe. Darkness was just beginning to cover the grounds and the downtown city lights twinkled in the distance. The course was now bustling with a whole legion of people on dates. There were straight couples and gay dudes, all noodling each other as they swung golf clubs around. As we walked to the car, you could feel waves of summer loving wafting off the golf course.

Who knew that a sport normally reserved for rich white guys could be such an aphrodisiac?

At the end of July, I will be trekking to Montana to write a story about a man who lives on top of a mountain in the most remote corner of Glacier National Park.

Since this dude literally lives on top of a mountain, I have to hike up hill for six straight miles (with an elevation gain of 3,000 feet) through grizzly bear infested wilderness just to talk to him. I’ve hired a professional Twin Cities photographer named John McCambridge to shoot the story.

As our journey draws closer, I recently fretted to McCambridge about how in fact are two bumbling idiots like us going to make it up a god damn mountain? "The only thing I’m carrying up there is a camera and my will to live,” McCambridge jokingly replied. Easy for him to say. He’s built like one of those wild Scotsmen from the movie “Braveheart.”

Me on the other hand, well, I just kind of…suck. In an attempt to not die on the mountain, I started exercising to get ready for the journey. I thought I’d start with a bike ride around the Chain of Lakes in Minneapolis. The last time I rode a bike in earnest was when I looked like Duane Allman and played hacky sack in the oval of the University of Montana. This is to say it was a lifetime ago. I hooked up the kid carriage on the back of my bike, loaded up my son and his cousin Elliot, and off we went.

Within two blocks of my house, the wind was so violent it was as if I were pedaling in soup. Then the two kids started chirping. “Where are we going? Do you like elephants? Who's Darth Maul? Can we have treats at wherever you are taking us? Why are you going so slowly? Why is your skin purple?” It felt like I was carrying those two old crumudginey bastards from the Muppet Show on my back. The biking was a bad call. Hated the bike.

So I started jogging. The next day, I put my son in the stroller and we headed down to Lake Harriet. I began the jog with a little trot. But after only a few feet, I realized that pushing a forty pound kid and trying to run really, really blows. In a miracle from God, I made it to the concession stand where I quickly bought my son a box of the famous Lake Harriet popcorn (which is basically buttered flavored crack rock) to shut him up. As I started jogging again, several packs of beautiful people sprinted past me. These little clicks of runners --all dressed in their fancy sweat wicking shirts and flowing shorts-- were so annoying I wanted to hockey fight them right in the path. They passed me at full speed and gobbled up miles like Pac-Man eating up dots. The worst part was that they were casually talking the entire time they ran. I, on the other hand, looked like Chris Farley choking on a pork chop.

Near the beach, I ran into my dad. Big Smitty was doing the half running/half walking thing where the person moves with an odd tightness, not quite sure if they should run slower or walk faster. In my dad’s case, he just looked like a man trying to hold a poop in. When he saw me jogging towards him, a look of bewilderment came across his face.

“What the hell are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m jogging. Trying to get in shape for my Montana trip,” I said.

“You gonna need more than that,” he said. The iPod that I bought him two weeks ago dangled off his pocket. I preloaded the thing with 200 of his favorite songs so that he could rock out as he exercised. It was nice to see him using it. He fiddled with the iPod and said, “Hey, how do I get this thingy to play a different song. All it plays is Mustang Sally.”

I took a look at the iPod and realized that somehow my dad had screwed the menu up so badly that he’d been listening to Otis Redding’s “Mustang Sally” on repeat for two straight weeks. I clicked a few options on the menu and got it working. He trotted off, his butt turtling a poo, singing some sunny Beach Boys song. The whole scene made me chuckle and it got me through the last grueling mile. I guarantee that Big Smitty, at least once, had gotten so frustrated by his new iPod and its lame ability to only play one song that he turned the thing upside down and smacked it like Fonzi trying to fix something.

I asked some twenty year olds at my work to make me some music mixes to run to. On one mix it was all whiny British guys and the other featured growling white chicks. I was really grooving to this one mix (titled “Two Forty Gordy,” a sly reference to fat people) when all of a sudden the up tempo rock music went off and there were five straight songs of slow folk music. This would be fine if you were sitting in a coffee shop, but I was sweating my ass off trying to make it up the Newton Avenue hill. I asked the kid who made it why on earth would he slow down the music on an exercise mix?

“It was for your cool down period, bro,” he told me. “Like the circuit training at Lifetime Fitness.” Cool down? What the hell is a cool down? I was going old school on this exercise shit. I simply was going to run until I fell over. I don’t think Rocky was listening to the soft melodies of “Teghan and Sarah” when he was in Russia carrying logs in the deep snow.

After a few weeks, I was feeling good. Although my frantic Alaskan sled dog running style led many of my neighbors to believe that I was being chased by something, things started to pick up. I could jog for longer stretches without feeling like my lungs were going to explode.

On a recent afternoon jog, I ran past the Milo’s sandwich shop in Linden Hills and saw McCambridge the photographer completely going to town on a sub the size of a muffler. His cheeks were stuffed full and he could hardly talk. Then I realized something: I don’t have to be in shape at all for our journey up the mountain. I will just let the big guy go first up the hill and let him be the pace car, nice and steady. And if we do see a grizzly bear, all I have to do is be faster than McCambridge.

I think I’m going to make it up that mountain after all. Just maybe not in one piece.