The Adorable Train

My Arkansas buddy Kiser came into town last night from Jersey, where he's been living for two weeks doing training for a new pharm-sales job. He worked for another drug company for a decade; they recently downsized not just him, but his entire territory, which is now being covered by a younger, poorer-paid guy out of Tulsa. His new employer's put the trainees up in company campus dorms, complete with roommates. Kiser's is a mustachioed blue-toother with sleep apnea who's brother-in-law to an original Redskins Hog; their neighbor is an Oklahoma Republican who home-schools five kids.

Kiser is too old for this shit. During a doctor/salesman role-playing exercise, a trainee threw a fit at receiving subpar (but still passing) marks. Kiser laughed off the exercise -- it bore no resemblance to real-world scenarios, since the real world isn't a scenario. Still, who cares, get the thing done, don't bitch. In front of everyone, Kiser just about tore the girl a new one for wasting his time. Another classmate held him back, told him that by blowing up he too would be getting "off the train" -- "the train" being the smooth completion of some necessary bullshit. The woman then performed a grinning, shuffling train dance. This is the kind of thing that gets you by when you're too old for this shit, stuck in a class with people who aren't.

Thanks to the watermelon-sized heart of his wife, Kiser's Fayetteville home serves as ground zero for Bourbon 2000, an annual bash that in 2000 Proper involved drinking absolutely nothing except Makers Mark. The Makers-only rule quietly died -- some say as early as B2K-'01 -- but as of '09, guys were still drinking more bourbon than was good for them. Kiser himself only drinks Red Bull vodkas. Phebe's, where we were watching first-round Tourney games, does not serve Red Bull, only Monster. Kiser grumbled about Monster either having or not having “the sugar”, but got on the train anyway.

During Kiser's absence, his parents took his two-year-old son, Owen, to a JC Penney photo-shoot. After some hands-in-pocket-laughing shots, the photographer asked Owen if he could be a little more “pensive”. Neither the photographer nor the grandparents expected Owen to know the word, but without further explanation, he struck the above pose, causing three jaws to drop. Is this normal? Didn't precociousness used to onset at five-years-old?

Not too long ago, Kiser's own grandfather passed away after a long bout with dementia. As far as anyone knew, the man had never drank or cussed in his life, and was the sort of person who'd tell friends of his grandson, “I love you, because Aaron loves you”. During his downslide, the dam broke. In front of everybody, he told his wife, “Imogene, you have been a great sex partner, but you don't have the good sense to piss in a boot”. He told his son that to prevent his running around with women, he'd once considered “cutting off your pecker”. This is the kind of thing that gets you by when you're too old for this shit, that shit, and the other shit -- pretty much all shit. But given how extraordinarily sweet the guy'd acted for most of the past century, it's nice to think that at the end, in his own way, he was also being a little precocious.