Best Experienced With: Social Distortion; Don’t Take Me For Granted
(please right click on the link below to cue up the suggested background music for this evening’s treatise)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdZb2inh4YM
Rambling Intro
Like most of us, at twenty I could do eight minutes of cardio each day, lift for twelve minutes and maintain a fighting weight of a buck ninety while eating at least a dozen pizzas for breakfast. Some days I would smother several of the pizzas with a thick coating of Crisco and top them off with pork rinds and back fat. Because I could. Back then.
These days, I need to average eight hours of cardio (morning and night) to eat two slices a week. This leaves very little discretionary time each day for robbing gas stations, drinking Foster’s in the shade and general mayhem.
My friend Jim and I joined one of the first nationally syndicated gyms, a Nautilus gym, in Westlake, Ohio back in 1979. We were thirteen and our parents took turns driving us to the plaza on Center Ridge Road three times a week. I owe my lifelong love of staying relatively mesomorphic to Jim. Jim was one of my best friends and Jim was one in three billion.
This is eight. Eight it not a prime number, yet eight fits this evening. This is eight.
The Perfect Dinner Party of 8
You may choose seven people, alive or dead (Christian or heathen) to be your ideal seven dinner partners at a dinner party. Who would you choose? Here are mine.
Please imagine a round, eight-top table with Travis Bickel at the twelve o’clock spot and each subsequent person sitting equidistant from the other in chairs like these.
The centerpiece is royal purple anthurium. Seating is boy, girl, boy, girl, boy, etc with Natalie Imbruglia sitting to my left. My chair and Natalie’s chair are somewhat closer together than the other chairs at the table, but not that much closer together because I’d be a bit nervous around Natalie. The dinner is black tie. Over to the left is a champagne and chocolate fountain as well as a pastry table chock full of Hostess snack cakes. On the right is a bar where Checkoslovakian Pilsner flows as freely as liberal insults at a TEA Party convention.
Here’s the crew at Mind of Mully’s dinner party.
Travis Bickel (at the end of Taxi Driver, not the beginning of Taxi Driver)
Farah Pahlavi
Me
Natalie Imbruglia
Heinrich Harrer
Princess Grace
Menachem Begin
Sylvia Plath
Jen B’s Eight Questions
Jen B. was my cheerleading partner at Miami University and one of Boston Scientific’s first surgical sales representatives in 1988. In 1989, Jen made $150,000: this is roughly $2,453,800,000 in 2010 equivalent income. Jen was disciplined, focused, hard working and one of the best surgical sales representatives any of us has ever met. She was also one of perhaps eight women surgical sales representatives in the entire universe back in 1989. Jen dragged me kicking and screaming into the world of hips, knees, cervical implants, Roux-n-Y’s, ad infinitum back in 1989. My aquarium is all the better for it.
If you think surgical sales is a testosterone fest today, you should have seen it in the late 1980’s. Jen was methodical in her question asking and her process for qualifying customers was remarkable. Most of the questions I teach surgical sales representatives to this day are Jen’s questions. Jen was one of my best friends and Jen was one in three billion.
These are Jen’s questions:
- Who are all the people that that will make this decision and what are their titles?
- What is each person’s role in the decision making process?
- Can you please introduce me to them?
- What exact date have you, as a group, decided to issue the purchase order?
- Should you choose my offering the week before that, what is the exact paper trail that the purchase requisition follows?
- How long does it take at each place and have you ever walked one through in a day or two?
- Does a board or committee have to give final approval
- What is the first step and when would you like to start that step?
Who Was Your Crush on Eight is Enough
Who was your crush on the hit television show Eight is Enough? The doctor sister, Mary? Me too. While the blonde sister, Nancy was indeed fine, pretty is easy. Genetics simply………. are. Great choice
Rambling Conclusion
One of the Mind of Mully Singles Awareness Day gift suggestions was Rick Bragg’s All Over but the Shoutin’. The introduction has a fantastic line: “…because dreaming backwards can carry a man through some dark rooms where the walls seem lined with razor blades”. All hail Rick Bragg and his prose.
Facebook is an interesting and entertaining beast. You can choose to take memories, pickle them to keep the flavor in, and seal them in airtight mason jars. You can then wrap those mason jars in bubble wrap, carefully pack the mason jars in cardboard boxes and wrap the boxes in kryptonite laden twine…then carefully place them in a Morgan vault. Doesn’t matter. Some days, Facebook can snatch those memories out of the neatly stacked boxes and toss you into Mr. Bragg’s dark rooms.
Jim passed away in 1998 from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, leaving behind a wife and young son. She is remarried and raising a beautiful family with her husband on the right coast. Jen passed away in 2008 from a brain aneurism. She left behind a loving husband and three beautiful children. Jen passed away about twenty miles from where Jim passed away. That’s quite random. To the best of my knowledge, they never met.
I miss Jim and Jen. Thanks for pulling out those boxes, Facebook.
The Mind of Mully
I’m the blood
on your guitar
I’m that wave you caught
back in 1975
Mind of Mully Biz Haus Shoppe 