Best App Ever, Man.

Who am I to give advice to Apple?

I mean, with their cutsey, for-girls-only white laptops and their touchy-touch-touch phones that play music and bring you to cross-continental orgasm-- they seem to be doing alright without my help.

I mean, Steve Jobs doesn't seem to be doing very well, but he may need hemodialysis more than he needs my suggestions about product enhancement.

Then again, whether my help or wisdom is needed or not, this is my soapbox, my "column," my blog, and so, when I have something to say, it's at least going to be welcomed here.

Last night, I thought of the greatest App in the world. Unrivaled in functionality, unparalleled in brilliance and unmatched in immediate worldly necessity-- this is no App that helps folk singers at open mic nights tune their guitars or helps recently graduated theatre-majors find 3-star sushi in the Village.

No, this is an App designed to help all of us: you and me.

Ladies and gentlemen, behold:

The Shut-the-Fuck-Up App.

Yes, it's all the app'age you could ever hope for, and more: The Shut-the-Fuck-Up App. You need it, the world needs it. In an age where so many annoying, obnoxious people are filling the airwaves, and taking up your airspace with inanity, banality, puffery, stuffery, insidious and mindless chatter and clatter, when the world is a cacophany of pernicious gossip and irritating Starbucks drink orders, what you need is the Shut-the-Fuck-Up App.

Best of all, if Jobs and the rest of Apple Nation jumped on my idea now, it would be ready for public consumption by Christmas. And what better answer could there be to strip-malls playing rampant and unending holiday music through their loudspeakers? The Shut-the-Fuck-Up App!

Here's a small list of people who would definitely be receiving the Shut-the-Fuck-Up App this holiday season from me, wrapped with a red bow:

Tareq and Michaele Salahi

Tiger Woods

The Tiger Woods Inseminated Debutante Society, Ltd.

Meredith Vieira

The People Screaming Outside "The Today Show" During the Weather Report

Sarah Palin

Nicholas Cage

The Cast & Writers of the Last 15 Years of SNL

My Alcoholic Aunt

Brad Pitt

The Woman on my Street Who Congratulates Me for Picking Up My Dog's Shit

Oprah (& her associated Frankensteinian creations)

The View

Howie Long & Those Awful, Smug Chevy Commercials ("It's Self-Propelled!")

People Who Talk Shit About NPR & Have Never Listened to It

Santa Claus

Your Goddamn Zhu-Zhu Pet

The People Whose Starbucks Drink Orders Take Longer to Recite than Most Tests of the Emergency Broadcast System

Mumia Abu-Jamal (& Friends)

People Who Take Pleasure in Relating Mother-in-Law & Old-Ball-n-Chain Jokes

Sarah Palin

(Yes, I know she's on there twice. Wouldn't you like to give it to her twice?)

Facebook

and last but definitely not least,

Your Mom.

Happy Holidays from My Masonic Apron, and get your Shut-the-Fuck-Up App today!

Oh, Earth, You are Too Wonderful

There is an old saying-- actually, I don't really know if it's old or not but, if it's not, one day it will be-- that goes something like, "Half of life is just showing up."

If that's true, then there's an awful lot of people out there who aren't very good at life.

Actually, maybe that's not true. Lots of people show up for things-- usually late-- but, even when they do show up, far fewer of them are actually present. In the moment. You can attend a play or a class or a meeting without actually attending.

And that's sad.

What's sadder is that I recently attended a small children's play, and there were the children's parents in the audience, glued to their iPhones, thumbing the little wheels on their Blackberries, totally tuned out to what their children were doing in earnest before them, having worked for weeks on this little performance.

And that's sadder.

I pined for a long time for a smartphone, and I have one (actually, I've had several-- purchased used through Ebay. I think I finally learned my lesson and bought one from the evil orangey retail store) but if you asked me today why I needed one so badly, I wouldn't be able to tell you.

At work, I sit at a computer all day long, and have my personal email on one screen, and my work email on another screen-- so it's not like I'm "unplugged" from the interwebula. At home, the computer is on 24 hours a day, like the domicile of Mr. & Mrs. Apron is some sort of NASA substation or emergency dispatch center. I am not a first-responder (not an active one, at any rate) nor am I a high-powered CEO with a receding hairline and custom-tailored Brooks Brothers shirts. Who am I that I need to receive e-mails while I'm shaking off the last droplet of pee-pee or eviscerating a grilled Reuben?

And yet, with a cheery little "blong!" I am instantly alerted whenever my eldest sister feels compelled to send me the latest Consumer Reports washing machine crash-test results or the local county's update on prevalence of rectal cancer in the area's white-tailed deer population. Why? I don't know.

After the little children's show, I overheard one of the balding parents pontificating to one of the saddle-bag mothers about the ever-growing importance of being "plugged in." He recited some story about someone he knew who received an email at 5:45 on a Friday asking him to come in "stat" for a job interview first thing on Monday morning.

"Well, if he didn't have his Blackberry, and he went away for the weekend-- he'd have screwed himself out of a job-- which he got, by the way. This is the world we live in now. You know what I mean?"

Yeah. I know what you mean. Dog eat dog. Early bird gets the worm. Snooze, you lose. I've got it. It's just that, in this world we live in now, when you smile, your bluetooth looks a little crooked to me.

I wanted my smartphone, but I was scared of getting it, because I thought it would ruin my relationships with people. I saw what it did to my former best friend the last couple of times I visited him in New York. We were sitting at a diner in Chelsea and, every five minutes or so, he would grimace a tad, and I knew he was getting a text or an email from his girlfriend. Yes, he made a "sorry about this" face, but, if he was really sorry, he wouldn't have pulled out the device and pecked out a reply. He might have even done the unthinkable and *gasp* shut it off, to be with his friend who he only saw three times a year.

You know, before he decided to stop seeing me altogether.

Sometimes, my wife and I will be sitting together on the couch, watching television or reading, as we married folk do, and my phone will "blip" or "blong" on the coffee table in front of us, and I will keep reading, or keep watching Sally Field endorse Boniva and play with her fake grandchildren, and my wife will give me an affectionate hug as a thank-you for ignoring the insistent little piece of plastic in front of me. She likes when I don't jump to see who it is, or what it's all about this time. Sometimes being a good husband is less about the things we do and more about the things we don't do.

I hope I'm a good husband. I hope at least I'm a better husband than I am a smartphone user.

I know I'll at least be a better father than those schmucks tapping and scrolling their way through life, while their children perform for, well, nobody really-- because, what's a performance if nobody's watching? There's a beautiful passage in the play "Our Town--" if you've ever seen the play or read it, you already know where I'm going with this. Act III. Emily, dead in her lovely white dress, asks the Stage Manager to go back to Grover's Corners, just one more time. He reluctantly agrees to take her back to a long ago birthday, and she is able to see her parents, puttering around the house, doing parenty things, and she calls out to them, but they cannot hear or see her. Emily tries to tear herself away from their young and smooth faces, from her memories of what was and will never be again, but she cannot. She cries out in anguish:

"Mama, just for a moment we're happy. Let's really look at one another!...I can't. I can't go on.It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back -- up the hill -- to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-bye , Good-bye world. Good-bye, Grover's Corners....Mama and Papa. Good-bye to clocks ticking....and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths....and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth,you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every,every minute?"

If only Thornton Wilder had known about the smartphone. I guess he predicted it.

Blind Mr. Apron

You know how, once someone you know gets an iPhone, suddenly everyone you know is sending you emails that end with the unctuous phrase,

"Sent from my iPhone"

That's how life goes, I guess. In 1948, the first year the Volkswagen Beetle was imported to America, they sold 2.

Two, people. Two.

The next year, it was over a thousand. After that? Forget about it. Everyone had one, or everyone knew someone who had one. It was like an infestation, if you'll pardon the pun.

Nicknames are kind of the same, but kind of different. One somebody has one, it sounds cool, and everybody wants one. The best thing about nicknames is that they don't cost anything, and the next best thing is that a nickname is only something that someone else can give to you.

You can't come up with your own nickname. You just can't.

Ball players love nicknames. Like Whitey Ford. And... well, I can't actually think of any more.

Another group of individuals who love their nicknames are musicians. I'm not talking about P. Diddles or whatever the fuck his name is now, I'm talking about real musicians. Like Mississippi John Hurt and T-Bone Burnett and Ramblin' Jack Elliott. Like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf.

If you look through the history of American musicians, you'll no doubt observe that there are a good deal of musicians who referred to themselves, or were referred to by other people as "Blind" Somethingorother.

Take Blind Snooks Eaglin, who passed away in February of this year. Snooks went blind in early childhood from glaucoma. It's been said in literature that his voice was very reminiscent of Ray Charles, which I think is pretty coincidental considering that, well, you know. After Snooks went blind, at age 5, his father gave him a guitar.

Now, I don't know about you, but, if I had a son who was blind, the first thought that would go through my mind would not be, "Here, have a guitar."

But I guess that's why I'm never going to have a kid who's going to be a musical prodigy, be referred to as "The Little Ray Charles" or "The Human Jukebox" both of which Snooks was.

There's Blind Boy Fuller,
Blind John Davis,
Blind Roosevelt Graves,
Blind Mississippi Morris,
Blind Tom Wiggins,
Blind Alfred Reed,
Blind Joe Reynolds,
Blind Lemon Jefferson,
Blind Willie Johnson,
Blind Blake

and, of course, the bands The Blind Boys of Alabama and The Five Blind Boys of Mississippi.

There's also, according to Wikipedia, 124 more blind musicians who don't use the word "Blind" in their titles and/or names.

So, I'm left to wonder a couple of things here...

1.) Why the hell are there so many blind musicians?

2.) Where are all the deaf painters?

3.) Did I ever take the Ektorp cover out of the washing machine?

4.) How exactly does a blind musician decide whether or not to call himself "Blind" Whatever?

Question four is the one this is occupying most of my thoughts today. Like, take Ray Charles. Why didn't he call himself Blind Ray Charles? Or Ray Blind Charles? Or Ray Charles (Blind)? Charles was getting noteriety in just the right time period to be publicizing his disability in his name-- I don't think anybody would have noticed, or cared, in the early 1960s. Stevie Wonder I have more trouble picturing as Blind Stevie Wonder. Maybe just "Blind Wonder" would have been enough. It sounds not vaguely superhero-ish, but I think it works. You picture him flying through the air in front of a levitating keyboard... slamming into telephone poles.

I have even more trouble picturing Andrea Bocelli calling himself "Blind Andrea Bocelli." Though I think it would be pretty awesome.

I guess it has something to do with marketing and your clientele-- how you want people to see you.

Me? I don't know if I'd want to be referred to as "Jew Mr. Apron." Or "Scoliosis Mr. Apron." Or "Left Leg 3/8-of-an-inch Shorter than the Right" Mr. Apron. Or "Asthmatic Mr. Apron."

But that's just me.