Thoughts from the Bottom on Earth Day

First appeared on April 22, 2015
in The Lebanon Reporter

Anniversaries have a way of creeping up on us like a Russian sniper or unexpected gas. And so you sit, surrounded by the soft clinking of silverware on porcelain, candlelight shimmering off a glass of Merlot as the misses considers her plate of Linguini Alfredo. You toast before turning your attention to a delicious plate of Pickled Herring when a man in an army jacket, Woody Allen glasses and pair of hush puppies made of hemp, stops at your table with the warning that your precious dinner grew up ingesting micro-particles of plastic in the Pacific Ocean.

It may seem overly simplistic to believe the Earth’s problems could stem from something as simple as throwing a Little Debbie wrapper out the window because you can’t risk smudging your well pressed pants on the way to work. After all, your bosses boss is in town and even though you made him enough dough last year to buy a vacation home in Cabo for his second wife, a really nice bungalow just down the street from the one his first wife now owns, everybody still has to look like they just walked off a GQ photo shoot or heads will roll.

So Little Debbie zips out the window and out of sight and a small part of you aches for knowing its wrong, but you find balance in the fact you’re not texting and driving. Besides you don’t have time to think about carbon footprints or the death of future generations, you drew the short straw and have to tell Crazy Bob in accounting he’ll have to put the Hawaiian shirts away for a week since the Big Kahuna is flying in. And normally this would be no big deal except in this case “crazy” isn’t a term of affection.

So Little Debbie flutters away in the morning breeze before falling to rest gently on the double yellow line you just left behind. And as a single solitary ant inches his way towards a surefire glucose induced coma, an eighteen wheeler thunders past sending the wrapper swirling into the air. Debbie tumbles helplessly over the Queen Anne’s Lace and Purple Aster twisting and turning like a Monarch butterfly until falling to the bottom of the ditch where she finds herself in a stream of muddy water snaking from the interstate.

Slowly she winds downstream before plunging into a larger river. On a rippling current wide and deep, Little Debbie swirls through a city where the water grows congested with displaced gasoline residue, a gift from overflowing storm sewers, and various unwanted bi-products generated during the assembly of that 55 inch flat screen your wife surprised you with on Father’s Day. The one you first watched An Inconvenient Truth on.

So she twists and turns and bobs along, crossing state lines and dodging old car tires, and the occasional set of rusted bed springs, until the river grows wider still upon reaching the delta where it gives all it has to the sea. On the ocean your wrapper joins the tide as dolphins chitter with curiosity at Debbie’s faded smile and the occasional sea turtle nibbles at her curly locks.

And after a month or two, Little Debbie finds herself joining a garbage patch wider than 50 football fields, locked in a South Pacific gyre, circling for perpetuity. And there she stays, riding the waves and floating in the sun for years and years and years. An artifact from a busy morning and a relic that will tell future archaeologists what made us tick, the little Debbie wrapper from the N and Out, the one with your fingerprints on it.

Wednesday is Earth Day. Take a moment to do your part by checking out 50 things everyone can do to save the Earth at: http://www.50waystohelp.com/


© 2015 Eric Walker Williams

A Smashing Start to "Next Year"

First appeared on April 11th, 2015
in The Lebanon Reporter

I don’t ask for much. I’d like a good hot dog and at least one of my children to follow directions the first time. I’d also like flushing toilets in Wrigley and the sports world to stop heckling her like she’s the subject of a Comedy Central roast.

I’m not in construction. The only thing I build are sentences and that’s done on a part time basis and somewhat pedestrian level. But I am a sports fan and I know enough to realize when Opening Day rolls around its best to have your ducks in a row. It’s not like the boys in Chicago had a short off-season after all.

So you pack yourself into a car and point it north for a little slice of heaven the outside world knows as Wrigley Field. You do this knowing full well the baseball gods will shine on you even though it is April and April in Chicago can sometimes require great bravery, or at the very least polar survival gear.

But Ernest Shackleton you are not, you are a Cubs fan and you don’t ask for much. You want a cold beer and a warm dog, a spot out of the wind and a toilet that works. The radio is alive with stories of civil wars fought in countries devoid of natural resources and any qualitative reasons for living there. And while you depart with the full understanding your journey is likely to end in heartbreak and misery, you harbor strong faith in the front office, despite their inability to hire a qualified plumber, and besides, this is ‘next year’ and you want to be able to tell your grandchildren you were there.

But an unexplained postponement leaves you flustered because, not unlike Washington, you are left choosing between a woman who hid her emails from the public and a man so elitist he believes everyone in the U.S. should be above accepting a helping hand. Talk about limited options indeed.

The Action 2 News broadcasts shots of construction crews delivering plastic outhouses to Wrigley, which only brings more inspiration to those jeering her. The jokes keep coming faster than Republican presidential candidates and while she may be undeniably stunning and the closest thing the sports world has to historical perfection, she remains incredibly fragile and self-conscious in the face of her multimillion-dollar renovation.

The Action 2 guy says something about the postponement being linked to a malfunction in the bathrooms on Opening Day before making a joke about a goat and you wonder if his hair is real and try imagining Shackleton’s crew using plastic toilets while crossing the Antarctic. Why can’t they just open the doors? You drove two hours and would be happy to just sit and watch the grass grow under the lights; after all games at Wrigley have always been more of an unavoidable distraction anyway.

So ‘Next Year’ is off to a smashing start as you take a twenty dollar cab back to the parking garage you had to move some stocks around and mortgage your house just to use for a couple hours. And as you limp out of town with your NXTYR vanity plate and Ernie Banks bobble head wobbling on the dashboard, you do so realizing ‘pottygate’ has made the Cubs the laughing stock of baseball. And while it’s not an entirely unfamiliar position, it is one they don’t normally assume until the first or second week of June.

© 2015 Eric Walker Williams

The End of the World as Hoosier Fans Know It

First appeared on March 31, 2015
in The Lebanon Reporter

According to Prepper Shows USA, the essentials for surviving the end of the world are shelter, water, food and communication. Apparently they don’t know its March, or basketball would have made their list as well. I don’t know about you, but I don’t spend a lot of time prepping for the end of the world. When I was a kid, the end of the world meant nuclear annihilation at the hands of the Soviet Union, but I suppose today the thought of Kentucky going 40-0 carries about the same meaning.

If you’re like me, you’re wondering at what point politicians forgot they work for an electorate, why there’s a Preppers Shows USA to begin with and how in the world Notre Dame lost to Kentucky Saturday night. Notre Dame did everything they needed to do to win. They played together. They played fearlessly for forty minutes. They got scoring from all five positions.

There was also no shortage of examples where smaller players defied the laws of nature. Riding the wings of pure heart and guts far up into the stratosphere, to the point where the outsized Irish found themselves looking down from the roof of the world. A perch that allowed Notre Dame to snatch many a timely rebound. Rebounds that were hovering just beyond the outstretched arms of Kentucky’s freakishly large front line.

In short, Notre Dame did everything they needed to do to win, everything but score once in the last 3 possessions. And then an Aaron Harrison three pointer from twenty-five feet sent the Irish down to a knee, grasping the rope as the judge began his count. But Irish coach Mike Brey called time out, rallied his troops and opened the door for his senior stand out Jerian Grant to bury a shot from South Bend to put his team back up by 2. And just as every person on Earth living outside ‘Big Blue Nation’ seemed ready to celebrate an Irish victory with a poorly executed jig, Notre Dame lost.

So now the Big Blue Train chugs on. On towards the end of the world. Next stop Indianapolis, land of the free and home of the intolerant. A place where lawmakers would have you believe friendly farmhands will stop slopping hogs long enough to greet you with a smile and save you a seat, provided you share the exact same values and religious beliefs as them that is.

And now derailing the Big Blue Train and saving the world from the aforementioned annihilation falls to Bo Ryan. And if there’s one thing to be said for Ryan it’s that he won’t shy away. He won’t back down. He will stand on the tracks as the Big Blue Train bears down on him and chuckle at the thought of his group being overmatched.

But in the end will it be enough? Will Ryan’s fiery glares and eternal scowl, his old school no-nonsense approach to playing the game, share the ball, stop the ball, protect the ball, be enough to counter Kentucky’s athleticism and historic length? Does a team built mostly of in-state kids tackling a traveling team of AAU All Stars stand a chance? Ryan would say yes.

To beat Kentucky you have to protect the ball and make shots and its hard to argue anybody does this better than Wisconsin. And now, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance, Kentucky and Wisconsin will meet Saturday night. And as the young Badgers race out to defend all that is good and proper in college basketball, let the rest of the world lock arms and sing, “On Wisconsin! Fight! Fellows fight, fight, fight! We’ll win this game!”

© 2015 Eric Walker Williams