Flying Starfish of Death: A Beach Slapped Humor Collection (2008)

By Barton Grover Howe

One flying starfish of death and life on the beach has never been the same; Barton Grover Howe can prove it. The beginning of his weekly need to leave Americans “Beach Slapped,” in his newspaper column, he’s got all the stories of life in the Pacific Northwest that matter. His wife’s crazed driving habits (“She’s from New Jersey, where cussing out the guy next to you isn’t so much rude as it is a preemptive strike.”); tips for getting through airport screening during the busy holiday season (“Nothing says you’re not an Islamic Fundamentalist terrorist like carrying a 12-pound honey-glazed pile of pig meat onto the plane.”); and questioning the methods of sanctimonious supermarket environmentalists (“Where do they take their cloth bags from the store? Their cars. If they were serious they’d be going home on a llama.”).

So join Amazon.com best-selling author Barton Grover Howe as he tells the real-life story of the world’s first homicidal starfish ... and just gets funnier from there.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barton Grover Howe
• Release date: Nov 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465725530

Barton Grover Howe

Barton Grover Howe is a high school teacher and humor columnist who has spent most of the last 10 years teaching, being a mascot and generally not being near as funny as he thinks he is. A former newspaper reporter, hotel manager, aquarium diver, stand-up comedian, forcibly retired Disney On Ice performer and professional mascot, Barton Grover Howe has combined his experiences and skills from all of those environments to create writing with a voice like no other. Living proof that you don’t need hurricanes blowing the palm trees sideways to get beach slapped time and again. He currently resides in the only small town on the Oregon coast that has seven miles of coastline and not one boat dock. He is married to the most patient woman on earth and is father to the cutest daughter in the universe, who got all of her looks from her mother.

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Introduction

When I discovered Dave Barry sometime in the summer before my senior year of high school, I was in love. More than a date with the gorgeous cheerleader across the room, more than Tom Cruise’s six-pack abs, more even than the bright red Firebird in the parking lot, I wanted to have a gift for writing humor like Dave Barry. Alas — and this was the one thing they all had in common — I wasn’t anywhere close to having any of them.

My first attempts at humor writing were truly dreadful, as I did the one thing that no one who wants to be considered humorous should ever do: Tell other people about funny things. Funny things retold are never funny. I don’t know why this is true; it just is. And if you doubt that, just recall the last time someone told you something you just have to hear, because it was so unbelievably funny.

It wasn’t.

And neither was I.

As I ran off to journalism school and other professional endeavors in my life, I continued to read Dave Barry and other humor columnists, lamenting all the while I would never be that funny. As a professional aspiration, however, I pretty much forgot about it; journalism schools and newspapers are for serious writers who write serious things. To my credit, I was pretty good at it, winning awards every now and again as well as the occasional nice note from a reader.

In the fall of 2005, however, I was out reporting something eminently forgettable that required that I walk on the jetty in Newport, Oregon. Careful to not get too close to the water, I was watching my footing when a giant wave tossed a starfish out of the water and straight into my knee. Knocking me off balance, I went tumbling — right into my first humor column. And it was there I understood: Funny isn’t funny, pain is — as well as misery, trials and travails and all the other things that we bitch about on a daily basis.

So, that’s what I write about. For one thing, it makes me happy. There’s tremendous solace in knowing that now matter how miserable you might be, a good column will come out of it. For another thing: It seems to make other people happy. I get more feedback from writing about my underwear and my wife — occasionally in the same sentence — than anything I ever wrote for the mainstream newspaper.

We all have underwear, I guess.

More than that, however, I’d like to think people see a bit of themselves in what I write. This is a mixed blessing, of course; some people’s lives are really lame. More often, however, I take it as a compliment, especially when someone tells me they think I’m as funny as Dave Barry. Some loves never die.

For the record, I do not think I am as funny as Dave Barry. If I were, I’d be rich and could live off my catalog like he does. I appreciate the observation, though, especially when they bring donuts. And know you’re welcome to do the same.

The observations or the donuts, although both are better.

Barton Grover Howe

Lincoln City, Oregon

[e-mail]

Attack of the Flying Starfish of Death

November 2005

When I first moved to the Oregon coast, I immediately became aware of some of the dangers that lurk in that large blue thing to the west.

First I saw billboards warning me about beach logs. Then I heard about shark warnings for surfers. I even saw that other Newport sea lions had sunk a boat.

But no one told me about the starfish.

This story does not begin as these stories often do: with a bottle of Tequila and a case full of Jimmy Buffet songs. No, this story begins with my editor telling me I should go out and about the area and shoot some scenic pictures for the paper. I presume if she had known I was headed for the Yaquina Bay jetty she would have warned me about the starfish.

Then again, it’s hard to say with editors.

I should also in all fairness note anything related to the ocean seems to hate me of late. My fiancée and I are trying to wedding, and between our upcoming wedding and honeymoon we’d made plans for Cancun, Cozumel and New Orleans. Until the very waters of the ocean rose up and smote them from the earth, that is.

So to be honest I probably shouldn’t have been going near the ocean, but it’s pretty hard to take scenic pictures around Lincoln County if you leave that out. (Yes, I know, Toledo is pretty, but you’re missing the point.) So, mission in hand, I headed out onto the north jetty to get some pictures of seagulls, waves and sunsets.

The waves were hitting pretty hard, so I stayed in the middle of the jetty, which is where I was when the wave hit. I knew I was far enough from the water, but nonetheless, I wrapped my camera up tight in my arms.

And that’s when it attacked.

Flying out of the wave, a starfish slammed right into my calf knocking my feet out from under me on the wet rocks. Unable to use my arms — heck, unwilling; at least my body’s insured — I crashed to the rocks, drawing blood from both knees and legs.

I looked like Sylvester Stallone at the end of a Rocky movie, assuming he’d been boxing an elf. I hadn’t been this badly beaten up since I was hit by a bus. (Don’t ask.) Maybe I should have brought that bottle of Tequila.

The first thing I did was call my fiancée, who took the time to tell me to get some disinfectant on it before she broke down in hysterics with her co-workers. She even called me later just to tell me she and her co-workers decided I had been attacked by a shooting starfish. (Did I mention they’re all editors?)

Needless to say, I’ll probably skip the worker’s comp claim, to save myself the humiliation of explaining how I was attacked by a starfish. This from someone who has been clocked in the head by a 97-mile per hour fastball while at work and once got a concussion on the job after being hit by an anorexic woman dressed as an octopus. (There’s the ocean thing again.)

This is not that bad, in so far that I’m not having hourly dizzy spells. (No more than usual, anyway.) But I will say I pretty much hate starfish now. That story about how if you throw a starfish back in the ocean it’s a start on making the world a better place? Hogwash. The only place I’m throwing a starfish I find on the beach is in a chowder bowl.

In fact, pithy moralistic stories aside, I find it rather wonderful that when you find a starfish on the beach it does no good to throw them back because it’s already dead. Ha! I’ll even go so far as to admit the logical part of me knows the starfish that flew out of the sea at me was likely already dead.

Too bad that’s smaller than the bitter part of me which knows it attacked me on purpose. Estrellas De Mar Del Vuelo De La Muerte I call it. And if you do a little research you’ll find the Flying Starfish of Death is responsible for hundreds of ankle and knee injuries every year, as well as the sinking of the Andrea Doria.

OK, perhaps that’s a little much. I’ll admit I talked to dozens of people at the Oregon Coast Aquarium and they all think it was a freak occurrence. (Or a freak on the jetty.) One guy even suggested the starfish might have been dropped by a passing seagull that picked up more than it could carry.

Maybe. But that would mean the creatures of the ocean AND air are out to get me, and I just don’t think I could handle that.

(And the rest, as they say, is history. Including the starfish — which is still in my freezer.)

Coffee: Proudly, gladly addicted

Feb. 6, 2008

Today marks exactly two-and-a-half years since I moved to Oregon, an experience that has changed me in profound and meaningful ways.

I pee a lot more.

Part of it is the rain, of course. When I lived in Colorado, the sheer act of existing tended to turn one into a prune. The buffalo, the Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep, John Denver before plastic surgery — it’s where all the wrinkly mammals come from.

Beyond just massive involuntary hydration, however, since moving to the murk of coastal Oregon I have started drinking massive amounts of coffee. Indeed, the first place I ever went in Lincoln City upon moving here was Clipper Ship coffee. (They have very nice bathrooms.)

This is not to say I didn’t have coffee at all in Colorado. Countless were the afternoons spent with a warm cup of cappuccino poured down my pants to stay warm.

But as survey after survey shows, the people of the Pacific Northwest are the most caffeine-sodden, latte-laden, Frappuccino-fraught people on earth. And while some people may call it horrifying that the average American adult now consumes 26.7 gallons of coffee a year, I call it pathetic.

Because while that sounds like a lot, it’s really not even 10 ounces a day. In the Folger’s family, babies can get more than that breast-feeding. I’m lucky if I don’t spill 10 ounces a day on my pants.

Truly, I figure I knock back about 40 ounces a day. There are probably health concerns with that, and if I could stop shaking long enough I’m sure I’d read them. But if I’m going to carpe diem on a daily basis, I need to seize a steaming mug while I do it.

Besides, living in Lincoln County it’s useless to try and fight it. This place is to coffee addicts what Las Vegas is to gambling addicts (and alcohol addicts, and sex addicts, and …) What’s the use of a 12-step program when Starbucks and Java Depot are 10 steps apart?

We get started early with our coffee culture here in Lincoln City. The Culinary Program at Taft High School 7-12 actually teaches students how to make coffee drinks, which they give to their teachers to sample and evaluate. Almost daily, the students run a coffee stand right outside my room, and although none of the baristas are still-suckling infants, with a day-care program right down the hall, I figure it’s only a matter of time.

Some people would argue coffee in school is a bad thing. They clearly have never greeted 32 teenagers at 8:20 in the morning. More than that, however, coffee is educational. Really.

Ordering multiple-shot caffeine drinks is based on Latin prefixes. Triple comes from the Latin tri, meaning three; quad means four, and so on. And while that might seem pretty basic, I think as people’s addictions intensify, we’ll be able to learn more even prefixes: the Dodeca-shot, for a latte with a dozen hits, and the Google-shot, the highest amount of espresso before infinity.

And understanding Latin is important; everyone should know a dead and nearly useless language. Ah, high school, where many a young maiden would greet me with it: Cur etiam hic es. (Why are you still here?)

It’s also useful, of course, if you want to work in a coffee shop. When I was a barista for an enormous, world-dominating coffee chain that will remain nameless, one of the great highlights of my life was calling for a sex-shot. The first time I had someone order six shots in a drink, I called it across the store with glee. To my knowledge, this is the only place outside of the adult film industry you can actually use this term.

Actually, turns out the latter is the only place. Apparently, you’re not ever allowed to yell the word sex while people are drinking hot beverages that close to their nose. They even cover it in training, I’m told.

Must have been in the bathroom.

Love kills, just the way nature intended

Feb. 13, 2008

Valentine’s Day arrives tomorrow, and although I am a married person, I always greet it with a bit of dread. Flashbacks, I suppose, to my bitter teens, (and 20s AND 30s) when the day was a perpetual reminder that I was completely clueless about love and that no one was sending me cards or flowers.

My Mom doesn’t count.

Every Feb. 1 it began the same: a lonely lament that built over the next two weeks as society, the mass media, any song by Michael Bolton, let me know that I was a loser. Silently stewing, I would stare across the room at my peers who were always better looking, cooler and driving the hottest car around. I hated them, though not as much as I hated Michael Bolton. (Let’s be reasonable.)

Yes, I knew that someday none of that would matter. That someday I would be loved and I would value all the more that which had been so difficult to find. But I still hoped and prayed that on Valentine’s Day at least, something could mar their perfect world, like having all their body hair ripped out by a combine.

That never happened to any of them, of course, although it would explain Michael Jackson in the 90s. For my part, I got married and happily embraced my new role: staring at single guys in bars and thinking, ‘Yeah, dude, she’s with me. And you should SEE my car.’

And all those people I was jealous of? Some of them are married, some divorced, never knowing who sent them bottles of Nair in the mail.

That doesn’t mean I’m any less clueless about love. Despite being what I consider to be the greatest husband ever — even in emergencies I never wear my underwear over my pants — I am constantly screwing up in the love department.

Even though love supposedly means never having to say you’re sorry, I always do. Indeed, you would think doing it a dozen times a day would mean a lot of extra love, but apparently not. Even when I apologize EVERY DAY for the same thing, it doesn’t seem to help in the lovin’ department.

I blame the world.

As near as I can tell, there’s not a single thing out there that serves as a good role model in understanding love. Take the plant kingdom, which has dozens of ways of confusing the issue.

At its most blatant, there’s poison oak, which when you’ve been backpacking with your girlfriend for several days looks like an acceptable recommendation for a toilet paper substitute. (This happened to my buddy at summer camp in New York. They broke up.)

Even in the city it’s not any easier. Every year, millions of people kiss underneath the mistletoe — a parasitic plant that smothers then eventually kills everything it gloms onto. Oh yeah, definitely love.

Then there’s the animal kingdom. In the Disney version, spiders and bugs of all kinds meet, fall in love and eventually end up as a theme park ride. In the real world, the Black Widow spider makes love and stings her mate to death. Which is nice compared to the praying mantis, where she consummates conception by tearing off her mate’s head and eating him. Metaphorically, they’re all Elizabeth Taylor.

Humans aren’t much better, even if you don’t include Britney Spears. When teenagers ask how they’ll know when they’re in love, we tell them, Oh, you’ll just know. Imagine parents teaching driver’s ed this way: Here’s the keys to the Hummer! Those bright red lights? Don’t worry about it, you’ll just know. (I think some do teach it this way.)

Even getting older doesn’t make it better, and from what I see on TV, I think it’s now actually worse. Younger people are allowed to be romantic anywhere: a movie, the couch, the backseat of a big car, the back seat of a small car, a moped. (Stupid gas prices.)

But for older people, things have gotten so bad, drug companies have had to invent an arousal pill that lasts 36 hours. Because it’s not