The Onion is right on target, as usual.

My grandfather has had a very eventful and wonderful life. He is the only member in his generation of his family to go through college. My grandfather also served in the military for two years and started his own business, which has been in operation for the last thirty-six years. His life has been very rewarding to not only himself but also to all of those who were influenced by him. My grandfather is a wonderful and caring person who leaves a distinct impression on whoever he meets. I have told his story here, as best I can perceive it from two interviews. I know that if he was the one writing it, however, this story would be very different. I have highlighted the main events in his life as best I know them. Of course, I cannot get into his innermost thoughts and cannot show key incidents in great detail, since I was not actually there, but I know that from reading this paper you will understand a part of my grandpa.

I was born in a small town in the suburbs of New York. My parents had emigrated here from Poland with my two older sisters long before I was born. We lived in Queens in an area called Ozone Park, which is today near Kennedy Airport. Our section of town consisted mainly of emigrants from Sicily, who were Italian. My mother died when I was only nine, and my brothers and sisters raised me from my youth. My father worked at a nearby cap factory, where team logo caps were produced. I enjoyed my days playing baseball and football in addition to going to school.

We lived during the Great Depression. We did not have much money, but we had lots of food since we had a large garden. To help out during the hard times, I enlisted in the army in 1943. At that same time my brothers and sisters sold our house for a smaller one, since there were now only five people living there instead of eight. This was because my mother was eleven years dead and my father had died two years earlier.

After I left the army I started working for a bakery supply company. Very soon after that I went to college. I paid for college by getting a job at a resort hotel being a waiter and a busboy. When I finally received my degree four years later, I went to work for Buckingham Wax, which was a janitorial supply company much like my company, Maintex, is today. I stayed at Buckingham Wax for thirteen years.

Backtracking a bit, I was married to Marilyn Mandel in ‘48, right after college. We were set up one night and things just worked out. We bought our first house for $14,000. In 1960 Marilyn, myself, and our two children, Linda and Stuart, moved from New York to Monrovia, California where I started Maintex. At the time of the move, Linda was in first grade and Stu was in third.

In that day automobiles were very expensive. I bought a new one for $700. Linda and Stuart had to ride the Subway or a bus for five cents a trip. I have lived in California since our move in 1960 and currently reside in my home in Dana Point, where I spend my days playing golf, reading, watching sports, listening to music, and walking around the neighborhood, in addition to going on frequent trips with my wonderful wife Marilyn and going to Maintex to oversee operations.

One of my greatest achievements since I have retired was when I started playing the piano. So far, I have had off-and-on lessons with three different teachers and after five years I can now play three songs!

Is this what it has come to? Nightmares about big banks ruining my life? You know what I blame this on the downfall of? Society!

Half an hour on the frisbee field this afternoon kicked my butt. I haven’t played Ultimate in a while now, and after thirty minutes in the heat I was wiped out. I’m trying to decide whether this should be discouraging — I’m woefully out of shape and don’t know where I’ll find the time to do the sort of work necessary to become competitive; or encouraging — I can work to build up my speed and stamina and go back to playing a game I really enjoy.

With summer almost over, though, I’m leaning towards the first option. Especially since a lot of the people playing seem to have naturally a level of fitness I can never hope to achieve by effort.

I sure hope so anyway…I’ve already bought a couple useless cases and stands along the way.

The television was almost never on. There were no radios. There were many iPods, all set to shuffle. I kept up with the news of the world and my various internet feeds via my iPad. None of it seemed particularily important, none of it moved me. The only thing I felt the need to check in on daily was the comics.

There wasn’t much of a plan, aside from go to the beach now or go to the beach later. We sailed in the sound. A kayak ended up in a swimming pool. Lacking a volleyball, we used an enormous beach ball as a surprisingly effective substitute. I played RISK for the first time. I won at RISK for the first time. We made tacos, and the kids were enthralled. Near the end of the week, the jellyfish invaded.

I’ve generally been of the opinion that one should spend one’s — that is, my — limited vacation time exploring new places or doing new things. I’m not rushing to do everything, moving to fast to take anything in; at the same time, I don’t want to waste time doing nothing. This vacation was an interesting combination: North Carolina’s Outer Banks are new to me, but the beach is very familiar. There was no set schedule, but there were some clear goals.

It was surprisingly pleasant, and over much sooner than it felt possible. Which is a sign of success, I guess. I didn’t spend too much time thinking about the specifics of work on this vacation. But I did find lots of time to ponder and reflect, and I came out of it with my mind made up about a few things.

Duck itself is an interesting town, in that it seems to have more vacation rental properties than residents (about 500 at last count), but I’m sure there are other similar towns, I just haven’t seen them yet. And the Outer Banks are interesting in that they are barrier islands, which are incredibly transient in geological time, and it is shocking that so much development and investment would take place on a landmass that is likely to be dramatically different or even completely wiped out in 100 years, or 50, or even sooner. This, again, isn’t specific to the Outer Banks, it just happens to be the first barrier island chain I’ve seen. And as far as I can tell, the Outer Banks have been far less shaped by human hands than other barrier islands (does the Army Corps of Engineers ever get anything right?).

Duck has a great city park with extensive wood promenade over the wetlands, a wonderful vantage, in the quiet evening and morning hours, to observe the local fauna. Up in Corolla there is another great park with museums, more boardwalk, shops, and a lighthouse. They’ve also got feral horses roaming the beaches, but I didn’t get a chance to see them.

The vacation felt very American, very pleasant, very family-oriented, safe, comfortable. The Reillys have been doing this same vacation to this same spot in this same rental house for five years running, and are already putting down the deposit for year six. I loved it, and loved that it was about the company more that the destination. But I wonder for how many years in a row I would love it. Would it still be as nice and relaxing the fifth time around? Or am I the sort of person who would go stir crazy after year two? Hard to tell.

Is this what happens when you have kids? You stay away from the exciting, the difficult, the random, and settle for the familiar, the simple, the pleasant? It is settling, or is it what you end up needing? I guess one day I’ll find out for myself.

My gaming has mostly been limited to Starcraft and Halo, and wishing to expand my horizons a bit, I embarked upon the single player campaign for Modern Warfare 2, a game recommended by friends and critics alike. My thoughts on it are decidedly mixed, with a general feeling of ambivalence and discomfort towards the game as a whole.

First off, I found the game’s setup confusing: the player starts out as one character, then after that character dies jumps to another character, then a third, then back to the second, etc. In different “missions,” characters that you were previously playing as show up as your non-controllable companions, with dialogue and everything. It took me a while to understand this and get used to it, it feels very strange, but apparently it is common to the previous Call of Duty games.

The first main mission of the game is a raid on a Taliban stronghold in a village in Afghanistan. The game is hyper-realistic and incredibly graphic, and this mission struck too close to home for me — real people are really dying in situations just like this. The game is not bloodless like Halo or set in some distant past or far future, it is set in the here and now. I’m not normally prudish or over-sensitive, but I found it hard to enjoy this mission, even when trying to look at it as a way of gaining more insight into the real Afghanistan conflict.

If that wasn’t enough, I was next dumped into a ridiculous CIA “deep cover” operation with a terrorist group killing hundreds of innocent bystanders at a Russian airport. The mission objective was only to “follow” the terrorist leader, so I did, shooting in the air so they wouldn’t suspect me but purposefully missing the civilians. Still, it was a painful mission to get through, slow and bloody and disgusting, and when I accidentally shot a crumpled but still alive civilian in the head, I felt nauseous.

At the end of the mission the terrorist leader revealed that he knew all along I was a spy, and shot me in the head. Was it because I didn’t kill civilians like the rest of them? No, apparently this is the end result regardless of how you behave. Which isn’t really very logical — wouldn’t the terrorist leader be worried about having a CIA operative shadowing him with an automatic weapon? But in the end it all turns out to be the work of a crazed Army general, so I guess it makes sense?

I had to take a break from the game after the airport level, and also had to take breaks after the combat that took place on US soil. This, however, really was awe-inspiring. “Walking” through a Virginia overrun with Russians and all the accouterments and materiel of war was an experience that I do not feel can be matched in written or movie form. I felt like I really was in an America transformed, a vision of the Cold War turned hot, or a future conflict at home rather than abroad. It was painful, and troublesome, but remarkable in its scope.

Questions inevitably formed: is this what it feels like to be invaded? Is this what war does to other countries? Could America’s actions abroad ever bring the war home to us? Would we be the least bit prepared? And if war is really like this, how is peace between invader and invadee ever achieved?

But before these questions can be fully fleshed out, we are in the Russian mountains on snowmobile, or breaching an oil platform holding hostages, or somewhere else in the world, seemingly at random, chasing ridiculous clues.

Modern Warfare 2 tells a story with the illusion of choice, but everything is planned and triggered, like most other games. The environments are open so you can explore, but, for example, I ended up getting stuck in a back alley in one level, hidden from enemy gunfire, and the fighting around me went on indefinitely. When I was finally able to get myself out and reach a checkpoint, the story instantly jumped forward, the hostage was captured, and we evacuated by helicopter. But none of that could happen as long as I sat in my alley, even if I had stayed there for hours.

The second-to-last scene in the game is one where I have only one course of action — to throw a knife. As long as I get it going in the general vicinity of the intended victim, the cinematic kicks in that shows me piercing his face and him falling over, dead. It is a powerful image — awful and sickening and without a point. And then the helicopter comes and the game ends, leaving me with this image of death as I go to sleep.

I guess I’m supposed to feel good about getting personal revenge on the man behind the destruction of the eastern seaboard and the deaths of hundreds of thousands or more. But why would I feel good about that? No one got their justice. Those people are not alive again, the destruction not reversed. What a sad, silly, unfulfilling note on which to end the game.

Ninety-six percent positive rating on Metacritic? Really? The technology is amazing, but that is par for the course these days. The story is — compelling? No. Gripping, I guess. The message? I don’t think there is one. I understand that “shooters” are a major genre in gaming. I understand that many people would like a game like this. But if 96% of game reviewers find this sort of thing appealing, I’m frankly happy to not call myself a gamer.

— Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning. Well worth a read. At a recent pool party I was keeping an eye on the kids in the pool, but I wonder if I would have actually spotted a drowning incident in time.

This timely post by Dave Pell is an excellent explanation of why I don’t publish my birthday in my Facebook profile.