"We Didn't Use a Potato-Launcher, I Swear."

We never use the hallway light so the tealeaf walls are steeped in dusk though it is the middle of the afternoon, and the sangria carpet just looks like mudpie. I rap on the faded but still glossy Benny Beaver’s bucktooth, and his door coughs a series of short, hollow, muted notes. A grunt is issued from the other side and I open the door.

His room reeks of boy – there’s no term more apt for that unique pungency. It makes the air thick and heavy and I postpone gulping it in as long as I can, which isn’t long. I offer to buy him lunch (or breakfast since he’s been conscious less than an hour) as a means of changing venue, but he declines. He’s “too lazy” to get dressed, which would explain his 3 pm getup of flannel pajama bottoms and a bleached wifebeater were I not already aware that this is also his 10 pm getup and his 7 am getup and every getup in between.

His walls are Pabst Blue Ribbon blue, and the single drop curtain is the color of deep ocean from space. The dresser, the shelves, the floorspace not occupied by furniture, and the half of the bed he’s not currently inhabiting are all mounded over with clothes that are in need of laundering whether or not they’ve been worn recently. The television screen lights the room and sports commentators buzz to make their voices hoarse until he mutes them.

“Sec.” He lopes his six-foot-three-inch, well-muscled frame past me to the kitchen and returns with a small mixing bowl, a spoon, and an already working jaw; even on my feet, it’s only after he’s seated that I can see over the rim to the cereal. “Aight, go.”

Straight and to the point, he mumbles unornamented responses between mouthfuls of Fruit Loops and 2%. “Bout 2:30.” “Bulls Celtics.” “Meat, mostly.” “The gym.”

Sharing a womb lets you skip formalities. Unfortunately, it doesn’t mandate intimacy, and since monosyllables don’t sell, I prod. To no avail.

Tell me about your friends. “Uh, Jamo… Zack… Craig.” Uh, tell me about them. “Iunno, they’re chill.” What do you do together? “Baseball.” Positions? “Drinking game, not with the bat.”

It’s not that he’s withholding; he is a man of few words. Still, if he had a wall clock, its marking of seconds would deafen and arrive hours apart.

He burps, no, belches. The creak of the metal bed frame as he stretches to place the bowl on the television stand. Long, satisfied sigh. He chortles softly, offhandedly launches into a gut-buster involving the sliding door of a green minivan, a five pound bag of Russets, and a field full of Holsteins. Paints the scene: the boonies way out off State Street, once you get to the gravel and dirt roads, the driver slowing to forty, you leaning out of the gaping hole in the side of the van and chucking spuds straight at the longhorn’s domesticated cousin.

My eyeballs explode in their sockets. He doesn’t notice.

He admits it was not an isolated incident. He vehemently denies potato-launcher involvement. “That’s cheap fun right there. And it’s not like it’s going to hurt the cows, man we were just feeding them.” So cows eat potatoes? A shrug of the shoulders. “Yeah, why not.”

Apparently that’s true. Cows love potatoes.

What They Don't Tell You About Laughter.

The average adult laughs seventeen times daily, which is roughly equivalent to two minutes and thirty seconds on an exercise bike. Laugh it up for twenty straight seconds and you may have done the equivalent of rowing for three minutes. Vigorously. Yes, exercise is good for you.

But maybe the gym is safer… for all involved.

What they don’t tell you about laughter is that the brain thinks it’s dying.

Fifteen facial muscles contract. The epiglottis half-chokes the larynx, leaving the comically afflicted subject gasping for air. The tear ducts sometimes activate (science has yet to definitively determine why), whence comes the tragicomic combination of laughter and tears.

As a response, the brain sends out serotonin, which helps to regulate mood (it’s the reason Prozac works), and endorphins, which act in the body as painkillers, just like morphine. The chemicals produced by the simple act of laughing increase immune function: B cells and T cells (special kinds of disease-fighting white blood cells) and gamma interferon (that thing House prescribes nearly every episode).

Alright, so laughing actually heals you, whether it’s due to incongruity, relief, or schadenfreude.


That is, if it’s you doing the laughing.

Mack Lobell

While Silke Horneer was swimming her way to a world record in the hundred meter breaststroke, Mack Lobell was cantering over the finish line of the mile-long trot for a first-place finish and a world record of his own. Yes, on the day of my first worldly breaths, two world records were shattered and formed anew.

If I had to relate to one of those victors, it would be Mack. While I’ve never competed in a harness race for trotters, I can’t swim either. It’s not that Mack is so close to my age (he was three when he set the world record). Yes, Silke and I both have two of the same chromosome. We also have the same number of chromosomes, while Mack has nine pairs more. But genetics has nothing to do with our stories. It’s the rest of Mack’s story that echoes mine. It’s because my life and Mack’s are both the same kind of Love Song…



The Triple Crown of Harness Racing for Trotters consists of the Yonkers Trot, the Hambletonian, and the Kentucky Futurity. In 1987, Mack had won the late-June Yonkers and the early-August Hambletonian with ease. The Futurity, held at The Red Mile in Lexington, was his only remaining obstacle to achieving what no horse had done since Super Bowl swept the races in 1972. And he liked The Red Mile. Going into the final leg of the triad, he was undefeated that year, and still held the previous year’s title of Trotter of the Year (which he would receive for ’87, too). His world-record-breaking trot came less than two weeks after his win at the Hambletonian, and was followed by a month’s rest and training. He was heavily favored to take the Crown.

And in the crisp morning air of October 2, 1987, Napoletano, sired by Super Bowl and Mack’s nearest competitor at the Hambletonian (finishing six and a quarter lengths behind), ascended from second in a final-quarter coup, overtaking Mack Lobell and ending his dream of attaining the Crown.



Mack’s owner sold him to a Swede, who let him win a few more purses in Europe before he put him to stud.



I don’t know enough about horses to know if Mack could have felt the gravitational pressure to perform, or resentment towards his trainers and their demands, or even disappointment at his loss, but I can’t imagine he didn’t. He must have. He must have been inconsolable.



It’s the only thing that makes sense, experientially.