All chairs are certainly not made equal.

I just spent the night in a motel in eastern North Carolina. It was actually a very nice spacious room. The motel was only about 14 months old and that makes an incredible difference in the quality of your stay. New motels have not had enough time to get stinky from smoke or disinfectant or whatever stinks up a good motel room.

One thing I personally look for in a good room is a nice chair to sit in while working at my laptop or reading or watching the TV if that is what I end up doing while I’m there. The television is rather a last resort for me unless I can find a good baseball game or a specific show I enjoy. I hate to find myself trolling with the remote. Once I start that bullshit, it can go on forever before someone comes along and slaps me on the side of the head in order to get me to snap out of it. TV is a bit like ice cream for me. I find it all too easy to start and somewhat difficult to stop. That’s why I usually sit and talk to the set when it’s on. It helps me keep the whole thing in perspective if I can point out the lies and deceptions that are going on while I watch. Unfortunately it makes me no friends with my family if they are trying to watch something while this little game is going on.

I don’t like to use the stuffed comfy chairs that are located in most hotel rooms. Most of them are way too soft for my liking and while it is easy to get into them, a person of my substantial body frame finds them rather difficult to leave. When I first eye a chair in any given new situation, whether it is a motel room or a friend’s home, I usually size up the furniture with the dismount in mind. In other words, how much effort is it going to be to get out of the damned thing?

That’s why I usually avoid soft chairs or sofas. The best bet for me is usually a straight back dining room chair or even a solid folding chair. They are easier on my back and they provide the support I crave for long spells of TV or computer time.

The chair that was pushed up against the desk in the motel room I was in made me wary from the start.

First of all, it did not look very substantial at all. It was an office type chair with wheels to roll around on (something that is usually quite pleasant for me) but there was this weird kind of pattern of holes in the back that looked faintly old-fashioned and somewhat macabre in nature. It looked almost evil. The kind of chair that invites you in when you know you should stay away and then somehow or other traps you. A black widow chair, if you will.

“Come, sit down relax…Hahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!!

I may let my imagination run wild sometimes but I had to sit somewhere and when I get all of my stuff in a motel room the first thing I want to do is get my laptop set up and check my email. I guess I’m just that kind of 21^st Century (check my math Randolph) kind of guy. So I sat in this suspicious chair and proceeded to boot up said computer.

If there is anywhere in this or my previous posts where I indicated that I was a really sharp, intelligent sort of person I must have been drinking when I wrote it, because it just is not so. Upon placing myself in the arms of this new chair and sitting at the desk with my laptop I was disturbed by the height of the chair. I felt like an orphan at the community table waiting for my portion of porridge. The height of the table came up to the top of my stomach just below my chest and I thought all of the blood would drain out of my arms before the afternoon was over.

I’m embarrassed to say how often a minor difficulty will cause me to adjust my actions and sometimes my thinking rather than serve as the impetus to make me fix or correct a problem. If my windshield wipers stop working I tend to do things like stick my arm out of the window in the rain and wipe away the water rather than go to a service station and get the proper repair done. I could name way too many other examples of such backward thinking but I think you get my drift.

It was only on my second trip to the computer, and therefore the chair, that I realized there was a lever on the side of it that an intelligent person could use to raise and lower the height of this sitting apparatus. Duh! OK. I can still learn things. At the proper height I came to have a new respect for this marvelous and intriguing piece of furniture.

My wife is a bit more supple and flexible, in many respects, than I am. She can use the laptop that she is normally connected too (meaning most waking hours) while sitting on the motel bed. When I felt as though I was caught up with the world of CNN, Major League Baseball, my email and twitter, I turned to her and we began to chat about our day and the things we had to do tomorrow. Lucky is the man who can talk with his wife. Not that we never disagree, but I still find her conversation truly interesting.

While I sat in the chair, I leaned back and stretched my feet out in front of me. I discovered my own personal angle of repose and laced my hands together behind my head. After a few minutes I rose to perform some task. I really don’t remember what, but the point is I got up from the chair and walked around the room. Maybe I was pulling down the covers and looking for a mint that may or may not have been placed on my pillow. (It was not there, this was not THAT good of a motel). Later when I returned to the chair I noticed that I had inadvertently rolled the arm of the chair under the handle of the drawer in the center of the table where my laptop was. When I stood up the chair rose beneath me and the arm caught on the handle and lifted the table up in the air like a jack had been placed under it. I thought that was kind of funny. This chair was still baffling me.

My experiences with this chair had already taught me many things but it was not over yet.

It was not until the next morning that I discovered another unique characteristic of this fine piece of office furniture.

Since I have a large frame, (No laughs here please), I look for more than substance or support when choosing a chair. I also have to be vigilant about the arms. In an ideal world most of the chairs I encounter would not have arms at all. After all, I am capable of resting them on a table either in front of me or to my side and if worse comes to worse I can fold them across my stomach. It’s true, I really can.

In a restaurant I usually try to be seated at a table rather than a booth but unless the chair has no arms or is fairly wide, it can be a problem sitting in it comfortably. Usually, if the chair does not fit this description, I will find myself perching on the front of it. It makes it easier to leave and I feel safer. One never knows when the place may catch fire and you will have to depart quickly.

The devil chair, or as I was beginning to feel about it, the darned good chair had arms and while that were not spaced any too far apart, they did not seem to present a real problem. But as I stated earlier, on the next day I discovered a rather cool characteristic of the chair that I had not known about earlier. The arms moved. Tadaaah!

Yes, you could push the arms and they swiveled on some sort of hinge on the back of them that caused you to be able to swing them out for more comfort. At least more comfort for us more traditionally built men. You know, the men who built this country; the real men. Oh well, be that as it may, I guess I should feel lucky that I can be entertained and educated by such a simple piece of work. Where would we be without comfortable chairs?

The Chair in Question

I remember an old episode of the Andy Griffith Show where Andy and Barney are singing this old sold that my parents sang when I was a kid. The title of the song was The Vacant Chair.

The lyrics went something like this

“We will meet, but we will miss him, there will be one vacant chair”

I looked it up on Google, you know, where we find out everything we want to know. If you’d like to read the lyrics and hear what the melody sounds like check out this link.

http://www.contemplator.com/america/vchair.html

One of my children (very funny kids have I) one time changed the words to fit the more appropriate situation in the event of my passing.

“We will meet, but we will miss him, there will be one vacant love-seat”

Funny children I raised. Yes, I am a lucky guy.

Ralph's Barbeque

I live in North Carolina now. Some of you who know me are aware of the fact that I prefer living on the west coast. It’s not that I don’t like North Carolina or the east coast it’s just that given my druthers, I would prefer to live on the west coast. It’s a totally different vibe there. People are more casual in dress and manner and that is a big part of Bob.

The truth is that there are good and bad things about every place. There are good and bad things about almost everything in life and I think one of the big things that separates sane people from the majority of us is the ability to discern those differences and not let them drive you nuts. Life is full of good and bad things and you have to learn to deal with it or lose your mind.

One of the truly great things about North Carolina is the barbeque. You know I love that eastern style pulled or chopped pork. I’ve raved about it here, many a time.

My First Helping

As I write this I am sitting in a Starbucks in Roanoke Rapids, NC with a full belly and a happy heart. My wife and I are visiting this fair city today. Roanoke Rapids is about half way between Raleigh, NC and Richmond, VA, right next to Interstate 95. On the other side of I-95 is the small community of Weldon, NC and that is the home of Ralph’s Barbeque. I just had the luncheon buffet and I could not be more pleased with my meal. I have had barbeque in many places and cooked in many styles but today was my first buffet. I am very pleased.

I'll have just a little bit more, please.

Let’s talk about what they had on this all-you-can-eat, $7.99 including drink, barbeque lunch buffet.

First of all, they had the eastern style vinegar based pork I love both chopped and pulled. They also had the tomato based sweet sauce pork as well, but I avoided it. It may be fine for some people (like my wife) but it is really not for me.

Pigs relaxing before the barbeque

A virtual cornucopia of side dishes was included in the lunch. They had sweet potatoes, succotash, macaroni and cheese, beef stew with potatoes, cooked cabbage, collard greens, stewed tomatoes, barbecued chicken and much more.

One good old southern side they had was green beans. Now you may have eaten green beans in many different styles during your life but they have a very special way of cooking them in the south. In the south they like to cook them to death. I enjoy green beans when they are just a little under done with a touch of crispness to them but in the south most people prefer that they just plain melt in your mouth and cooking them to death achieves this goal. I once heard a fine southern gentleman state that you should not have to chew green beans if they are cooked properly. They should be like eating gravy. They should just melt in your mouth. These were true southern style cooked green beans and they were delicious.

They had other beans on the buffet as well and if you are a regular reader you are aware of my feelings about side dishes and beans in general. I am a bit particular about my beans.

Recently I had occasion to make a crock pot of my own beans and I was quite proud of them. My recipe is really very simple. I buy several cans of a variety of beans including navy beans, pintos, black-eyed peas, kidney beans and whatever else I see and think would taste good. I drain them and add them all to a crock pot. Then I fry up some chopped bacon with a couple of cloves of garlic and a chopped onion. All of this goes into the pot with a can of drained, diced tomatoes and some salt and pepper. Cook them on high for 5 or 6 hours and they are about ready to eat.

The beans at Ralph’s were not done the way I make them but I have no complaints. I really liked them very much. They were a simple cooked bean dish of just white beans. I don’t know for sure what kind of beans they were but they looked like small navy beans and they tasted wonderful.

Everything was outstanding. The pulled pork was perfect, the collards were outstanding and when I had only the smallest amount of space left in my gut I got some banana pudding. Exquisite. I am back in the south and there are wonderful reasons to be happy about that.

The Great Waitresses of Ralph's Barbeque

There is one more thing I need to mention about this dining experience. The waitresses were extremely helpful and polite. I love to see a waitress smile and they had great smiles and courteous attitudes. Hospitality can often carry a restaurant but at Ralph’ it is just the icing on the cake. If you are traveling I-95 you should make it a point of stopping at exit 173 for lunch or dinner. This is what eastern North Carolina is all about.

Look for this sign and smile.

In closing let me say that there is only one thing I regret about the whole experience. I wish I could have seen the place at night. There are little neon, pig shaped lights that run across the top of the building and on the big sign out by the road and I bet they look great lit up after dark. As I stated earlier, you just have to learn to take the bad with the good. Being there in the daytime meant that the only things that were lit up were my eyes and my stomach.

Yum Yum.

Good Pig.

Pile O' Rocks

Contrary to what my wife might tell you, I am not really a downer. I have a generally positive outlook on life and I wish my fellow humans the best even if I tend to think that the majority of them are really not all that bright.

OK. I said it, but let me be clear here, I believe in a God that loves ALL of us and notwithstanding my overall opinion of the general intelligence of humankind, I love people.

But even a cheerful dude, like myself, needs to have a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

What I mean to say is that if you look too long at the news or worse yet, television, you can very easily get the impression that the whole world is going to hell. There is a lot of bad news out there and even though that is what our news sources deem the most important information for us to have, I still think the good outnumbers the bad. If I didn’t believe this, I would probably pull the covers over my head and refuse to rise. My family or friends would have to drag me out kicking and screaming all the way.

I find joy in life. I love good writing, good movies, good music and of course good food and drink. I believe all these things to be gifts from God and I believe our fellow human beings are gifts as well.

Last week on our trip across America I experienced several fine examples of the inherent good in humankind.

We do need to keep abreast of what is happening in the world. I do anyway and I don’t think we can ignore every bad thing that is going on in the world or America. There is much to be concerned about and we need to be informed if we are to make intelligent choices when we elect the people who are charged with guiding our future. But with the growth of the internet we have reached a point where the television is practically useless. Ninety percent of my news comes from the internet and twitter.

Like many of the major technological innovations that were introduced during the last one hundred years, the television was hailed as a miracle. It was to be an educational tool that would raise the intelligence and standard of living for all of us. All I can say is that the folks who predicted that did not envision The Gong Show or Court TV. My real beef with the idiot box is that we seem to have reached a point where there is nothing new that can be done with it. A few years ago we were presented with Reality television, a name that has no basis in reality whatsoever. After the initial success of such shows as Survivor and Big Brother (very appropriately named in my opinion) we have seen an avalanche of copy cat shows. Each one has been more outrageous then the last one and not really different in any way from its predecessors. Just like Hollywood with its endless sequels and prequels and Rocky VIIs and Rocky VIIIs, the so called creative minds in power seem to have dried up and we can only hope they will soon blow away.

I do watch some television. I enjoy the nerd shows like Jeopardy and I am a fan of The Office. But I would not say that they are the good shows and that everything you watch is bad. I just think that the whole concept is outdated. If you want to control your television at all you should use the DVR buttons and prerecord what you want to watch in order to view it on your time. It also allows you to skip the asinine commercials that are the real purpose of the whole thing anyway.

My question is this, why do we have to pay for cable as well as watch the stupid commercials. Commercials were used in early TV to pay for this whole mess. Reception was so poor that cable was introduced in order to get those commercials to us in an easier to view format. But we had to pay for that too. It sounds kind of like the petting zoo concept. You charge people to come pet animals and then you charge them for food to feed the animals that you charged them access to. What a concept. It’s win-win for the petting zoo owners and of course it’s win-win for the TV executives.

Alright. I’ve probably gone too far already. Perhaps the wife is right. Maybe I am a grouchy old man.

I love to read. As snobby as I know it makes me, I love a good book. I have often said that a well written book on cleaning toilets would be enjoyable to me. Just give me good writing. I aspire to it myself, but more than that, I just love to read it.

A large portion of the stories, phrases and titles of the books we’ve come to think of as classics have come from two sources in the English language. I am referring to Shakespeare and the King James Version of the Bible.

In my humble opinion, The Bible is the king of the books. I think the KJV, while technically not as accurate a translation as some, is the greatest piece of literature in the English language and I read it a lot and am always finding new things in it. It is in truth, a book of books and contains everything from poetry to history. There are stories that have captivated readers for hundreds of years as well as philosophical truths and moral examples in this library of books. In short, The Bible contains an endless supply of entertainment and education.

That being said, I must also point out that it is probably the most dangerous book ever written.

Human beings throughout history have used it to further practically any cause they care to champion. It was used to support slavery and to go to war. It is still used to support as well as to oppose capital punishment and it will probably be used in the future for even stranger notions that we have not had the time to even imagine. I strongly endorse reading it, but I caution the reader to read it carefully and for God’s, as well as Man’s sake please do not try to take it too literally. Remember Jesus, according to his own words, taught in parables.

I would also like to point out that while I read The Bible regularly, I try to maintain a healthy respect for those who don’t as well as those who read other Holy writings for guidance in their lives.

WE MUST RESPECT EACH OTHERS BELIEFS.

We will not survive as a planet if we do not figure out some way to get along. That involves giving up the deadly notion that what we believe is right and what anyone else believes is wrong. I feel strongly about this.

When my wife and I finished our trip across the country we did some grocery shopping to fill up the pantries of our children. They are young and still struggling to reach the level of comfort that we old folks have found and I think you should help your children as much as you can. While shopping I discovered that I was missing a bank card. I must admit that it put me in a minor panic. I headed to my computer and started checking my bank account to see if there were any unusual or inaccurate charges on the card. I was glad to see none but as soon as my bank opened, on the West coast, I called them and explained the situation.

They told me the card had been turned off.

I was very confused about that since I was sure I had used it the day before but they insisted that it had been turned off three days before the time I thought I used it last. Now I was really puzzled. How could that be? I used it only yesterday.

I spent the day watching my account rather closely and waiting for some of the charges I knew were on that card to clear. Sometimes it takes a couple of days for things to go through. The next day I checked again and not only were there no unusual charges on the card, but the stuff I knew I had put on it a few days earlier had not cleared. I could not figure out what was wrong. Then I looked at a different card for another bank account and saw the charges I was looking for coming through on it.

Can you see the light bulb coming on over my head? I’m not the smartest guy but it finally dawned on me that I must have been using the other card for several days and did not even realize it. All of the charges I was waiting to see on the one account came through on the other. Fortunately that was not a problem but it meant that I lost the first card several days before I realized it and guess what?

Someone turned it off.

Someone called the bank and had the card turned off.

What I’m saying is that I must have lost the card, while pumping gas or buying something; someone found it and then called the bank to tell them. The bank then canceled the card.

Who did it? I will never know. Just some person of undetermined ethnicity, religious perspective, political party, gender or sexual orientation who found a card on the ground and said to themselves “what would I have wanted done” if this was my card and another human found it. In other words, they did the right thing just because it was the right thing.

In our house we have an expression we use when a good thing happens in our life.

When something like that happens we say, “Thank you Jesus”.

It is our way of expressing our appreciation for the teachings of Jesus being acted out by normal, whatever that means, human beings. We are not concerned with any intricate implications and rules or theological speculations associated with those who choose to call themselves Christians. We are not detailed in our interpretations of what constitutes “real” Christianity or what rules are practiced or not practiced by others. We don’t decide who lives up to the rules and who does not. We accept the fact that we really do not know what all of the rules are supposed to be. We just feel that we should be treating each other decently. Keep it simple.

I love to read good books. I am crazy about great music as well as food and drink. I love humanity with all of its warts and I am constantly learning more about all of these things because not only do I not know it all, but I never will. It’s the journey that counts and that is why I am able to drag my large frame out of bed every day. I hope you have your reasons. I will try to respect them and will be appreciative if you respect mine.