Ray Manzarek lives in an Omaha suburb working part-time as the organ player at the Skate World roller rink.  Manzarek, of course, is old school and is trying to come to grips with the in-line skaters who dominate the rink. 

“Whatever happened to the 4-wheel roller skates, man?” he asks no one in particular, stubbing out another cigarette, announcing a reverse skate into the microphone and starts playing, I’ve got a Brand New Pair of Roller Skates (You’ve Got a Brand New Key).

A kid, maybe 7 or 8 years of age, skates over and tells Ray, “You suck, mister.”

Frantically, Ray slams the keys of his organ like he did at the Fillmore East in 1969, stops suddenly and says to the kid, “I was with The Doors. I don’t suck.” 

The Manager, overhearing the last bit of the exchange says, “Ray, knock it off, will you?” 

Ray knocks it off.  This would never be happening had Jim lived longer.  Jim Morrison promised revolution, but delivered only an early death. 

“The kids don’t get it.  None of them get it.  Our society has bred two successive generations of complete ignorance.  The Doors are timeless.  We wrote Moonlight Drive and People Are Strange and The End, for Christ sake…those compositions are timeless, like the philosophy of Nietzsche and the poetry of Rimbaud. We changed the world.  We were, and this is truth not ego, we were Gods.”

Manzarek landed this job after various attempts at Doors revivals proved commercially unsuccessful.  With little more than a continuing desire to fuel his organ art, Manzarek traveled the country looking for gigs, finally ending up at this suburban Omaha rink. 

“I still have trouble with authority, man.  Nobody will alter or change or dissuade my art, man.  Nobody can move me away from my raison d’ etre.  Now it’s all about Britney Spears and 50 Cent and Clay Aiken and people like that.  But, I told management when I started here there are a lot of Doors fans out there, even 10-year olds love us once they understand us.  I play a lot of Doors, a lot of Big Brother and the Holding Company and Jefferson Airplane in my sets. Jim said, ‘Once you make peace with authority, you become authority.’ I’ll never accept total authority, man. Not now, not ever, you know. At first when I got here and started this gig, man, The Man hassled me, but like all true artists they’re coming to accept my genius.” 

Assistant Manager, Chuck Tracy, said Ray was on the verge of being let go by management until he noticed the owner’s daughter choking on a chicken bone in the rink’s eating area.  Ray - a devout follower of Zen Buddhism, the Maharashi, and Shamanism, also has his life-saving badge and first-aid certification earned at a Los Angeles YMCA - saved the owner’s daughter with the Heimlich Maneuver.

“The owner is always saying, like, ‘My daughter is the apple of my eye’…more like the apple pie with a double scoop of ice-cream with a chocolate shake of his eye. She’s big, dude. Are you going to print my name? Ray was gone until he saved her life.  The kids are sick of hearing Doors songs.  It’s really bad.  I mean it’s no different than making the kids study for and take a test about the Pilgrims.  This is supposed to be fun.” 

Ray views his current job as a test of his resolve and as suffering for his art, 30 years removed from his success with The Doors.

“What I really want is to find someone to replace Jim as a lead vocalist, man, that is my ultimate goal. I’m applying with various NHL and NBA and MLB teams to play the organ at their games.  I could be good with the Sabres, or the Suns, or the Dodgers or any of those teams. The Lakers, man, that would be ideal. I’d be back in the city where it all began for Jim and me. Kobe Bryant, I’m sure he gets it. Can you imagine?  What a more fitting tune than Light My Fire, to get a team fired up. People are always saying that The Doors were done after Jim died, but that’s not true, man. All of us, me, Robbie and John…we’re all out there perfecting our art.”

After two more songs – Break on Through and LA Woman (which Ray also sings) – it will be time for him to clean the urinals. 

The car is a 1988 Volvo and my wife recently went from suggesting I sell it to demanding I do so.

My neighbor, an eccentric and eclectic man, who raises pigeons in his backyard and yet hunts pheasants and dove and quail and turkeys and other assorted birds, does not disagree with my wife. 

“You think I should sell it?”  I asked him one afternoon as he was spray-painting his truck’s gun rack in his driveway.

“Yes,” he said. “You should sell it.”

He has a bumper sticker on his truck reading:  “Fear the government that fears guns.”

I asked my wife once, after reading the bumper sticker, “Does that mean we should fear a government that doesn’t have an army or weapons or something like that?

“Are you serious with that question?”  She asked me.

“I guess I was at first, but probably not now.”

“C’mon, now, please. You got to be joking on that.” 

The Volvo is heading towards 200,000 miles and was once burgundy-red in color.  The exterior is aging badly and rusting at an awkward, confused pace making it look like a Jackson Pollack painting.

In a twist of ironic weirdness as far as car sale mythology goes, the only person who answered the newspaper ad was a 55-year old minister who needed a reliable car to get him to and from church on Sundays.

“Is it reliable enough to get me to and from church every week?” The minister asked, not looking at me.

The car had taken me to Alaska, Canada, Mexico, Florida, Arizona, California, Nebraska, Iowa, Utah, Washington, New York City and hundreds of places in between. It had been ticketed for drag-racing and had been to repair shops after being damaged four-wheeling.  It tried to chase down the limousine carrying Red Auerbach and his cigar after an NBA All-Star game when he refused to acknowledge my, “Hey, Red, how’s it going, bra?”  The Volvo drove me to Joe Montana’s retirement party at San Francisco’s Embarcadero Square and to a basketball tournament at Rucker Park in Harlem, but never once had it taken me to a church anywhere.

“I really have no idea,” I answered the minister. 

The day before the minister arrived I cleaned the car out and found a ticket from the 1995 Colorado-Oklahoma football game.  My friend Deke and I drove to Norman for the game and watched Colorado beat Oklahoma. The Sooner Schooner tipped over right before halftime and Deke was slugged in the back of the head before the game by Oklahoma quarterback Cale Gundy’s aunt for loudly questioning Gundy’s gender while in the pocket.  It was an eye-watering punch that brought him to a knee. He recovered, got to his feet, apologized to her and bought her a cold drink.  That’s the way to do it down there.

Unable to get tickets together, we used walkie-talkies as a communication device throughout the game.  Deke purchased a yellow windbreaker and a blue baseball hat the day before at a sporting goods store and managed to get down on the Colorado sideline pretending to be game security. He radioed me, told me where he was, which was directly behind coach Bill McCartney, and waved to me at the same time the real security was escorting him away from the sidelines and off to jail.

While waiting for Deke to be processed and released later that evening, I sat on a barstool next to Barry Switzer drinking Coors.  Switzer was fired a couple of years earlier for running an outlaw program.  He was anything but an outlaw that evening, talking to me for several hours about the best fishing spots in the Southeast.  I have never been fishing, but am an avid reader of fishing magazines and had a few things to say back to Barry, like, “fish flop around for awhile on the shore after you catch them before they die for good.”  I consider him a friend after that night, even though he wouldn’t remember me if we passed on the street.  

A couple of years earlier, Deke and I drove the Volvo to Miami for the Orange Bowl.  We didn’t have enough money for immediate accommodations having run our credit cards to the limit making t-shirts for the Orange Bowl game and had just enough cash to get us back to Colorado.

“We’ll make enough off t-shirt sales to live at a South Beach hotel for months,” I told Deke.

“I want to drink multi-#### drinks out of big glasses with stir-sticks, too,” Deke said, always the Zen optimist.

Deke is generous with his wisdom.  He has told me important things like, “Don’t throw the bottle out of the window in front of the cops.” And, “Don’t be in a hurry unless you need to get somewhere really fast.”  And, “Don’t climb big fences to get something that isn’t yours. If the wire doesn’t get you, the dogs will.” And, “Don’t take a lot of hits of LSD on Fat Tuesday.” 

Four hours into our Miami stay and about 32 minutes into selling our t-shirts, we were busted by an Orange Bowl representative claiming the shirts were not properly licensed by the universities or the Orange Bowl.  We plead ignorance, because we were ignorant about the recent t-shirt legislation.

After the shirts were confiscated, we had $267 in cash and no credit.  We slept in the car for three nights and hung out in Miami during the days.  The Orange Bowl is a game you don’t miss when you’re in Miami on January 1^st and have tickets. We were unshowered and gamey for the game, but this was humid Miami. Everyone has their game face on and their gamey bodies on. 

A newspaper columnist made the mistake of critiquing our hero, John Elway, too often. We found out where he lived and drove by his house to do something to make him understand our position, and saw him laying sod down at his new house.  Later, eight of us crammed into the Volvo, and in the middle of the night, quiet and effective like mute landscape laborers; we rolled the sod up and put it back on the pallets. 

The Volvo took me and three buddies to Tempe for an Arizona State-Nebraska football game.  On the way down we purchased 3 cases of beer and put them in the trunk of the car.  Driving through the desert in 100 degree heat without air conditioning, we started hearing popping sounds coming from the car trunk. 

At first we thought they were gunshots, but when we pulled over we found the desert heat was causing the beer cans to explode.  Not wanting to lose our investment, we began drinking as many beers as fast as we could.  Being more than a few sheets to the wind, probably a mid-sized laundry to a gale, we took off and a few miles down the road, drinking, weaving, and listening to a Guns & Roses CD, Deke, with his arm hanging out of the window slammed it into a mile-marker. 

We found a chain-smoking rural doctor who set the broken arm and asked us, “So let me get this straight. You were arm-wrestling to see who drove the next leg of the trip?” 

“Something like that,” I answered for Deke, knowing that it is always better to lie and maybe get away with it, then it is to tell the truth and face an immediate consequence.

After the Arizona trip, we solved the exploding beer can problem by drilling a hole into the back seat of the Volvo to the trunk so we could carry a keg in the trunk and run the tap through the hole and into the back seat. 

There was a night driving down a highway from Colorado Springs to Denver with my buddies in a blizzard after watching a friend play goalie for the Colorado College hockey team. We were drinking beer from the trunk-keg when the Volvo was stopped by a cop. 

“How fast do you think you were going?”  He asked me, the designated driver at 1:55 AM with a .18 BAC.

“I don’t know…70, 75.” 

“14” 

He made each of us get out of the car and stood facing us jingling coins in his pocket.  He then threw the coins from his pocket and into the snow.

“Whoever can come closest to telling me how much change I threw out is driving.”

This same goalie, after his first year at Colorado College, asked me to keep his goalie pads in the trunk while he spent some time with his new girlfriend. They had a lot of catching up to do, because I didn’t see him the entire summer.

That August, at a drive-in movie theater, his pads combusted and caught on fire.  When the police arrived after the pads were extinguished, the investigating officer told me, “I have a couple of questions for you.” 

“Will you be expecting good answers?” I asked. 

There was the time on my way back to Colorado after my grandma’s funeral I stopped in the town of Alta, Iowa, population 1,865. Curious as to why 1,865 people would live there, I exited the highway and lost the alternator belt on the main street. I pulled into a gas station and asked the owner when he could fix the Volvo.

“Tomorrow.  Tonight is the sectional basketball finals. Alta and Aurelia. They’re big, but we’re better. Get in the truck.”

I think every town member was at the game, and for these people, it was like Game 7 of the NBA Finals. I locked away my cynicism and witnessed a good game of basketball played at Iowa’s lowest high school classification.

Afterward, I ate pot-luck dinner with the fans and the players and the coaches. I never knew you could use Jell-O to make so many different dishes.

I looked at the minister as these thoughts ran through my head and then I looked at the car that had brought so much life to my life.

“You’re really going to take this car to church and back every Sunday?”
“Yeah, and maybe do some church-related errands.”

I thought about the time me and Deke drove the Volvo to Mexico to see a bullfight. We committed felonies, probably, and compromised an international treaty or two, maybe.  All I really remember is we never found the bullfight and the car smelled like a reggae concert for three months afterward.

“I’m sorry.  This isn’t the car for you.”

I made the decision without talking to my wife. I know communication is the key to a successful relationship, but there is a clause in the vows about for better or for worse. I don’t think keeping the car qualifies as a for worse. At least not just yet.

EMBRYO, EMBROYO! WHEREFORE ART THOU EMBRYO?

Imagine a world where Yale, Harvard, Colgate, Brown, MIT and Oberlin are regular BCS participants. 

Imagine a world where the Final Four consists of Yale, Harvard, Colgate and Brown.

Imagine a world where the Duke Lacrosse team wins a national championship each year and the gene for aggressive behavior towards exotic dancers has been removed, or at a minimum, a gene making them more believable to law enforcement is inserted.

Genetic engineering has progressed from the imagination of science-fiction writers to becoming scientific reality.  

Steroids, prior to becoming a reality, was first imagined by both chemists and cartoonists. The thought of a drug’s ability to create supermen has moved from fake heroes created on comic-book pages, to chemists making and selling the drug to create fake comic sports heroes.

Steroids may soon become the jealous ancestor of technology developed to create “designer babies” by enhancing genetic makeup before birth.

The idea of creating “designer babies” is no longer a pencil-sketch; it is published science, and these “designer babies” may be coming to schoolyards and ball fields and basketball courts very soon.

The Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, which oversees tests involving human embryos in Britain, ruled last week that fertility clinics may screen out human embryos carrying genes that raise the risk of certain adulthood cancers.  Those in favor of the move view it as a needed step in preventing human suffering, while critics view it as the first step in the age of handpicking babies.

The British Medical Association embraced the decision "to extend the criteria for embryo selection." The Association’s chief of ethics and science, Vivienne Nathanson, calmed critics by stating:

"We do not see that today's decision is moving towards 'designer babies.'  There is a world of difference between a parent not wanting their child to develop breast cancer and someone wanting a child with blue eyes and blond hair."

Nathanson provided the Aryan physical description without an irony addendum.

The Authority stopped short at selecting embryos with genetic markers for eczema and asthma - because they are treatable- and for schizophrenia, a condition without a single gene of causation.

In a foreseeable future, a society of breast healthy, cancer-free, wheezing, scratching people debating politics with imaginary friends is a distinct possibility. In a future a little fuzzier, once genes for various items such as height, obesity, personality, IQ, physical makeup and others are identified and found to be adjustable in a lab, parents will be ordering up offspring as if in a Chinese restaurant:

“I’ll take blonde hair, blue eyes, no cancer, no mental illness, no teenage rebellion, a height gene, a big-bone gene, the speed gene, the vertical leap gene, the strength gene, add 75 IQ points, an outgoing comedy gene, and throw in some personal responsibility as well.”

Altering a human being prior to birth would be cost prohibitive for the masses, but an elite few - an elite few who want to cheer a son scoring 15 goals at a peewee soccer game and then change to a suit and tie in the car to win the national spelling bee, and then later that evening play cello for the Boston Pops Orchestra – will be able to afford a procedure or set of procedures to make this a reality. 

There is an absolute truth about the human being and science is finding the proof.

Nature is an absolute, a fact, and with each scientific discovery concerning genetics, personal experience and environment as dominant factors in human achievement is nothing more than anecdotal dialogue.

Studies indicate two different children can be raised identically in the same household and become vastly different people; and, two nearly identical people can be raised in vastly different households and become almost identical people.

For example, a two-parent family can raise children adhering strictly to the teachings of Dr. Spock and one of the kids may grow up to be a responsible, well-adjusted kid, while the other may dress up like Spock from Star Trek and abuse stray animals in the neighborhood.  Identical twins, separated at birth, and raised in different environs, tend to be indistinguishable people as adults with the same interests, personalities and talents.

Genetics as final destiny is a fallacy, but genetics as a road map is undeniable. Environment can merely prescribe road choice, it cannot determine the pace or make of the vehicle or the distance it will cover.  Our society fears science revealing biological factors over environmental factors, because it removes us as our own ultimate path maker.

Behaviorists point to various studies to improve the argument we can be anything we want to be if we just stick to it and work hard.  John Watson, an American Psychologist, believed he could take any healthy child in his controlled environment and make the child into anything he wanted to make him be regardless of talent, intelligence, tendencies and abilities.  His theory, when viewed through the eyes of modern science, is laughably improbable.  But maybe, had he lived long enough, Watson could have trained, for instance, the hyper-aggressive Charles Manson to be the featherweight champion of the world instead of a serial killer, or trained a Palestinian child seasoned in rock throwing at Israeli tanks to be a major league baseball pitcher. 

B.F. Skinner believed the human could be conditioned to do anything.  He pointed to studies where he taught pigeons how to dance and play tennis.  That’s an interesting experiment as circus sideshow, but he never studied or explained differences in ability levels amongst his tennis playing and dancing pigeons.  Any human being can learn how to dance or play tennis or play basketball or baseball or football.  The gist is that certain people do things much better than others, and not that they simply can do them at all.    

Denying genetic truths for environmental dominant theories is understandable.  It is the way we control our lives and the lives of our children. We want to believe we can do and be anything we want to be. Our society is founded on this belief.  Our system of law, politics and education is founded on this belief, and western religion is wholly dependant on this belief. 

This belief - held by millions of parents - at its tamest, is simply egotistical; and, at worst is a reckless ambition aimed at their children causing lifelong trauma for both child and parent.  This belief has led to athletic performance and enhancement centers for children beginning as early as two years of age.  These centers can make the slow and weak a tad faster and a tad stronger; the average guy a little above average; the above average very good; the very good great; the great elite. But, parents are shoving their kids into these enhancement programs with a false dream their kid will be a professional athlete, when they are better suited for CPAing, or constructing homes, or as career counselors.  

Talent and genius is not manufactured, it is born, and is merely nudged by environment.

We think we can be a John Elway if we put in the time and the effort. 

We think we can be a Michael Jordan if we put in the time and the effort.

We think we can be an Alex Rodriguez if we put in the time and the effort.

We tell ourselves these things as kids, and when we fail, we owe the failings to disadvantageous training, to bad coaching, to the wrong school district, to uncomfortable shoes, to bad teammates, and many other excuses.  Some of these environmental excuses may apply, but science is telling us through continuing genetic advances that our failings in athletics happen well before we even step on a field a diamond or a court.

But science may be coming to the rescue of the athletically challenged very soon, if the critics of the British Medical Association are also prophets.

Imagine an all Ivy League Final Four.

Imagine a BCS where the players are also responsible for creating the computer analysis determining the teams.

Imagine professional leagues comprised solely of the genetically enhanced.

Imagine this could never happen?

Imagine it already has.