So she'll frequently give me a lot of very complicated directions in long-form expository prose. Many times, I am in another room, and she is speaking to me, a very nearly deaf man, in a volume more appropriate to a cartoon duckling.

You see, I think I've got great stories. I take any opportunity I can to spin them. So much so that my family and the majority of my friends have heard them all five times - once with genuine appreciation and four times with mounting irritation.

When I was a child, people always told me to savor it because these are the best years of your life. Again and again, hideous old relatives would stoop over, push their ponderously swollen grown-up heads into my childhood airspace, and assure me that this was the best it was ever going to get.

I've grilled chickens that were either pink and new as an infant mole rat, or burned into some sort of dinosaur fossil, but I've never, ever made a nice, juicy thigh or breast. Ever. And steaks? Don't get me started. Usually, they just end up looking like gnarled curlicues of road rubber.

And if they are coming, then you know where they're coming. The same place as all the rest of the tourists: Montana. Which means we finally have to face some paradigm-altering ideas, such as, Is there anyone in the universe that could possibly be worse than Californians?

One summer’s day after church, when I was in first or second grade, one of the big-hatted, blue-haired ladies of the St. Leo’s congregation asked me, within earshot of my father, what I wanted to be when I grew up. I answered, without a moment’s doubt, “I want to be a hobo!”

I vaguely remember having been assigned something to read and talk about in front of the class. What was it?

Dr. Pisberg is our family doctor, and sometimes I wonder about him. Mostly, I wonder if he can account for his whereabouts from 1933-1945 or so. Like any true sadist, he also knows that words can hurt much worse than sticks and stones or reflex hammers and tongue depressors.

How many of you are fortunate enough to have a younger brother? I have endured that good fortune for most of my life, and though I will readily admit that as a grown man he has some redeeming traits.

This is probably the highest praise I can afford the Impossible Burger: if eaten quickly, while hot, with one eye closed, it's like beef. More like beef than, say, a pencil eraser. More like beef than, just for one random example, a kitchen sponge. Definitely. 

I went to the cow then, for a friendly visit, only to discover she was in a fit of bovine rage. This, too was not a good sign. As a fat old man, I figure it was about even odds in a fair fight, but I refused to die without another cup of coffee, so I started to trudge back to the house when I noticed it: a wretched little bundle of white, barely visible amidst the snow.

"What's the matter with you, son?" If only I could have told him. If it were only that easy, and I could have just said "overbearing mother," or "raised Catholic," or "unrealistic expectations from a lifetime of television watching," and have that serve as an explanation for how I got this way...

I’m old enough to remember the golden age of TV Westerns, when shows like The Rifleman, Have Gun, Will Travel, and Gunsmoke filled the few channels we did get. Hell, I’m old enough to remember getting our first television, an enormous humming Philco...