D’oh! A Deer!

June has been a bit of blur.

For my wife and me, the month began with a 1:00 AM phone call where we learned that our son had bagged his first deer—with a 4-door Honda.

We were relieved that neither he or his friend were injured. However, we had to say goodbye to our venerable Civic.

A picture of a brown Honda Civic that has been damaged in an accident. There is extensive damage to right front of car, right fender and lights are crusted exposing wires and, hood is crumpled, radiator is pushed way back

Oh Deer Me

A few days later, I finished up the school year.

Then a couple of days after that we left for vacation–as they say in Michigan, we went “Up North” for a week of hiking, dining out, visiting charming Lakeshore towns, and a healthy amount of loafing in our rental’s screened-in porch with a scenic forest overlook.

We returned to Grand Rapids and began car shopping. When our son had moved out a while ago, his plan was to borrow the Civic and he would eventually buy a car of his own.

Though Lori and I had been getting by with sharing one car for several months we decided to provide our insurance settlement money to him. He got a small loan from his credit union and bought his first vehicle. We didn’t even have to co-sign anything! The kid is pretty good at “adulting.”

For the first time this millennium, I live in a one-car household. I’m not all that into cars, so I’m good with that. I had a meeting last week and walked two miles (sorry not barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways) to get there.

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Teen Idol

On a long-ago summer Saturday, I visited a collectibles store near Wrigley Field. I was thumbing through a bin of photographs and magazine covers, and was startled by a celebrity image that was eerily familiar.

I reached for my wallet and beelined to the register and brought the picture home. I called my younger brother to see if he or our father had my middle school pictures.

I described the photo I was looking for and I received it in the mail a few days later. I mounted it on a presentation board next to the celebrity photo I’d purchased and showed them to a senior art director co-worker.

Bobby Sherman and Me

We examined the photos as if we were forensic detectives. After a few moments, he pulled out a ruler and measured the shirt collars in both photos and said: “They are an exact match. Bobby Sherman is indeed your father!”

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Weed

It’s puzzling that in a year with more than 70 major elections around the world (many in weed-legal states) that nobody  endeavored to create a line of cannabis-infused choice cuts of beef, under the brand name of: “The Steaks Have Never Been Higher.”

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Knock That Shit In The Creek

(The earliest draft of this never-published piece was written several years, ago, but most of 2025, I’ve pondered what I with pent-up energy that  grows with each encounter with a news headline, )

I’ve noticed that nearly all promotional, motivational  and political content, that is based  on sports metaphors, is….offensive. 

That is, they refer to things like home runs, touchdowns, knockout punches, or other terms that are about scoring points.

Rarely do you hear defense-oriented phrases about catching a fly ball at the outfield wall before it leaves the park, stopping a running back  short of  the goal line, or dodging a haymaker in the boxing ring. 

However, sports teams, businesses and constituents  are reliant on defense as well as offense. You play more defense in your work and life  than you probably realize.

Why haven’t defensive sports metaphors permeated the vocabulary of business and political  clichés? 

A few of my college friends have been using one for decades. We frequently played pickup  basketball a few blocks from our  apartment building. On the court’s  western edge, the concrete was bordered by a 6-ft fence. In the wooded area behind that there was a small trickle of flowing water.

A picture of a basketball court, with concrete surfaces. There is an iron-bar fence in front of the backboard in the fore ground, in the background is the the other backboard, and there is a dense treelike

Depot Avenue Courts, Gainesville, Florida

Whenever a player attempted a shot, somebody on defense  would issue this call to action:

“Knock that shit in the creek.”

During a game, if a player blocked a shot with authority, their teammates would shout, “He knocked that shit in the creek!”

If a player dribbled toward the basket, a defender would yell, “C’mon, bring it this way and I’ll knock that shit in the creek!”


In the years since my friends and I have constantly used variation of that phrase to describe our responses to (depending on our professions): a business challenge, a news interview, or a dissertation defense…

As you write a response to a request-for-proposal, or field challenging question from an audience, or draft a letter to your US Representative or Senator, you are not in a position for a metaphorical slam dunk, though visualize knocking that shit in the creek.

 

 

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