Bloggin' Umholtz

The Arlo Guthrie Syndrome

The Arlo Guhrie Syndrome
or
The Alice’s Restaurant Defense.


(with full orchestration and five part harmony)

Admittedly, I’m not the brightest bulb in the pack. Sometimes it takes me quite a while to learn something and sometimes I can’t see the forest for the trees. My wife says it comes from being over analytical. She hates watching a mystery show on TV with me because usually within the first fifteen minutes or so I can tell her how it ends. My foot could be on fire while I’m trying to figure it out...and I’d never notice that.

So it should come as no surprise that it just finally dawned on me that my son has fallen victim to the Arlo Guthrie Syndrome. Well more accurately, he is the perpetuator of the syndrome and I, poor I, his unsuspecting victim.

I guess I should shoulder some of the blame. After all, during his formative years, I did introduce him to Alice’s Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie (with full orchestration and five part harmony). Yes, I do have the album. You remember records, don’t you?

One of the last things I do before going to bed is wash the dishes that are in the sink. In the morning, before I leave for work, I do the same thing. As I am usually first up and since I emptied the sink the night before, the only dishes I expect to do are my breakfast ones. This is never the case. They seem to multiply throughout the night. Prolific little buggers if you ask me. I also began to notice that if I left a dish or two in the sink at lunch, by dinner there would be a veritable mound. I began to suspect foul play.

What was actually happening, never occurred to me, until a few weekends ago when I was sitting at the table eating breakfast. My son comes down from his room, dishes precariously balanced in one hand and laundry tucked under his other arm. He walks to the sink, studies the several dishes in the sink and then summarily adds his to them. Turning towards the washer he does the same with his laundry, adding it to the pile my wife had placed there.

My son is 26. When I asked him if he ever thought about actually washing the dishes or doing the laundry, he adopted a puzzled look and after what I can only assume as being several long moments of brain strain, answered, “No.”

Something about the whole process struck me as vaguely familiar and that’s when I remembered Arlo Guthrie’s song, Alice’s Restaurant (with full orchestration and five part harmony). For those of you unfamiliar with the song, it revolves around Arlo’s attempt to help a friend, Alice, (Alice’s restaurant is not the name of the restaurant, it’s just the name of the song and that’s why the song came to be called Alice’s Restaurant), by getting rid of her garbage (after a Thanksgiving meal that just couldn’t be beat) and how after getting arrested for littering he was deemed not fit to serve in the Army. I’ll not divulge any more than that in case you want to track it down and listen for yourself.

But what we’re dealing with here isn’t Alice’s restaurant, and it isn’t the armed forces draft. What we’re dealing with is the novel approach Arlo used to get rid of the garbage, and no one could say it better than Arlo. We pick up where Arlo arrives at the town dump.

“Well we got there and there was a big sign and a chain across across the dump saying, "Closed on Thanksgiving." And we had never heard of a dump closed on Thanksgiving before, and with tears in our eyes we drove off into the sunset looking for another place to put the garbage.

We didn't find one. Until we came to a side road, and off the side of the side road there was another fifteen foot cliff and at the bottom of the cliff there was another pile of garbage. And we decided that one big pile is better than two little piles, and rather than bring that one up we decided to throw our's down.”

And there you have it – The Arlo Guthrie Syndrome, straight from his lips. Rather than wash the dishes in the sink or do a load of laundry, my son simply added to the piles already there.

In closing I leave you with this thought:

“You can get anything you want at Alice’s restaurant.
Excepting Alice”

My apologies to Arlo.