Alpha Male: G

Grocery Stores: I love grocery stores. Not shopping, per se, but just wandering around the aisles marveling at the quantity and variety of foodstuffs can entertain me for an hour or so. The cereal aisle alone is good for 15 or 20 minutes.

My dad was in the grocery business, 40 years with IGA mostly. At one time, he owned three small grocery markets in our county, plus two dry goods stores and a restaurant. He thrived in these endeavors, and strongly discouraged his son from ever becoming a grocer. Such was the dichotomy of my father's pride in his profession and his love for me: he loved the grocery business but knew my feet were on a different path.

So I come by my affection for grocery stores naturally, almost genetically, and although I generally prefer to shop in small neighborhood markets like the one in which I practically grew up, I share my dad's fascination with the trappings of the modern supermarket: the massive butcher department and meat cases, the produce section with automatic water spritzers, the wine and spirits section as large as my first apartment, the latest in automatic price scanners and cash registers.

As a child when our family went on vacation, my dad treated regional variations on these themes as destinations as exciting as Sea World or Yosemite. Many is the hour we passed in strange cities, oooh-ing and ahhh-ing appreciatively at the manifold variety of Von's, Ralph's, Kroger, Piggly-Wiggly.

Dad's IGA store in my hometown was tiny: three aisles of canned goods and bread delivered twice a week, plus one check lane where shoppers' orders were rung up on a hulking, brass-encased register with thin metallic numbers that popped up and displayed the total when you turned a crank. There was a stockroom in back that seemed cavernous to a five-year-old and a tiny office where my father fretted over inventory and ran a successful business without once balancing his checkbook in four decades.

Near the end of his life, even ten years or more after he "retired" and sold the store, dad thrilled when he and mom came to visit me in St. Louis and I took him to the newest and ever more elaborate incarnations of Schnucks or Dierbergs. He regarded Sam Walton as a genius businessman and, at the same time, recognized that Sam's success was going to be the death of small stores like his own. He got out on his own terms, before it came to that, and truly enjoyed visiting our area's first Super Wal-Mart, prowling the soulless aisles of produce and packaged dinners, awed at the efficiency and inevitability of it all.

We used to joke that at one time or another, everyone living in our tiny little town had either worked for, stolen from or traded in my father's IGA store, and that was damn close to the truth. I know I did all three myself. I love grocery stores because they remind me of my dad.

Alpha Male: F

Falling: I am afraid of falling. From great heights, I mean, not stumbling and landing on my butt. And I am not afraid of heights. I can visit the very top of tall buildings or mountains, so long as there is not the possibility that I will actually plummet from them.

For example, I can come to a party at your penthouse apartment in the Empire State Building but do not expect me to saunter out onto the balcony and gaze placidly over the edge. Do not, under any circumstance, expect me to walk over a high bridge, particularly one that carries vehicular traffic, thereby increasing the possibility that a car will nudge me over the side. After just a few floors, glass-walled elevators make me woozy and I will insist on standing right by the doors because if I am near or -- God forbid -- leaning against the glass wall, it will pop out and the last thing I will hear in my life is a loud splat, I just know it.

In Spring Green, Wisconsin, there is an amazing museum called the House on the Rock. It's this odd, former private residence of a man who created amazing sculpture and retained some of the most exhaustive collections -- dolls, carousel horses, antiques of every sort -- you'd ever expect to see. I've been there many, many times.

The last time I visited, in 1993 or 1994, there was a new attraction called The Infinity Room. Essentially, the Infinity Room is a corridor constructed of over 3,000 glass panels (top, bottom and both sides) that juts out 200 feet over a seemingly bottomless wooded valley. You can walk all the way to the end of the room and back, marveling at the 360 degree view.

You probably could. I couldn't. I walked out, and made the mistake of looking down. As nearly as I could tell, the only thing preventing me from a sudden and sharp plunge to the unseeable forest floor was a thin layer of glass. I panicked. I could not make myself turn around and walk back to the room's entrance. I could only look straight ahead and will myself to breathe.

After what seemed like an hour and a half but was probably only a couple of minutes, another brave visitor wandered out. Seeing what must have been a pale, stricken look on my face, he asked if I was okay. "I. Am. Afraid. Of. Falling." I said this to him, as evenly as I could.

"Well, if you weren't when you started out," he said, almost jovially, "you would be by the time you got here. I'm feeling a little queasy myself. What say you and I go back?" And with that, he took me by the arm and, keeping up a pleasant conversation about where I was from and what brought me to the area and oh-my-wasn't-the-carousel-wonderful?, guided me back to terra firma.

Alpha Male: E

Elevators: I have this attraction/repulsion thing going on with elevators. As a child, I loved elevators, everything about them. I loved pressing the button to call for them and begged my mother to let me do it every time we approached one, even if she had to put down her parcels and hold me up so I could reach it. I loved riding on elevators and I was especially fascinated by the glass-enclosed sort that run outside a shaft and ascend in an office or hotel lobby so you can see and be seen while you ride. In high school, I did an entire history project on the Otis Elevator Company and learned more than most people probably care to know about the technology behind the elevator: how the cabling works, the sophisticated electronics in modern elevator traffic systems, how a relatively crude but effective safety mechanism keeps the car from plummeting to the bottom of the shaft (most of the time) in the unlikely event the cable from which it is suspended snaps.

But, oddly enough, armed with all of the knowledge, my most frequent recurring dream is of being in an elevator car when it begins to descend unchecked and at a high rate of speed. I always awake before the car reaches the squishy-splat-sub-basement, but the next time I approach a lift after one of those dreams, I seriously consider steering away and taking the stairs. It is not a full-fledged phobia; I never wuss out entirely. And -- thank St. Otis -- I have never been trapped in an elevator, felt as though I were in danger while riding in one, even so much as had a car in which I was a passenger arrive slightly out of plumb with the floor and had to step up or down while disembarking.

I accept elevators as a fact of modern life, venerate them as a remarkable invention that enabled majestic mountains of steel and glass to soar ever skyward. But I guess, on some subconcious level, I don't entirely trust them.

Alpha Male: C

Caffeine: My personal slogan should probably be, "Mountain Dew: It's not just for breakfast anymore." When I started my job at The Rep, one of the first campaigns I undertook was to replace Pepsi with Mountain Dew in the vending machine so I wouldn't have to continue shlepping cases of it to the office and stocking the limited fridge space.

I drink a lot of soda. Tea, too. Coffee sometimes, and frankly the opening of a Starbucks near my office has done a lot to aggravate that habit. My lifestyle depends on never permitting too much blood in my caffeinestream.

A few years ago, I was driving to Washington DC and, passing through Ohio late at night, I spotted a billboard for a new product being test-marketed in the area: Caffeine-Free Mountain Dew. I nearly veered off the road. Why?! What possible appeal could such a product have to a mass audience? It's not as though I drink that stuff for the taste, although, as lemon-flavored sodas go, it's the least offensive of the breed. Since I have not seen it on my local grocer's shelves, I can only assume the test-marketing was a failure. Rightfully so.

Alpha Male: B

Boots: I don't spend a lot of money on clothing. I just don't. I've never been a label-hound, and it irks me to pay more than $40 for damn near anything: jeans, dress trousers, shirts, sweaters. But I will eat egg noodles for a month and pay hundreds of dollars for a nice pair of boots. That said, it's not as though I'm the Imelda Marcos of the cowboy set. Right now, I own only four pair: some solid brown leather shit-kickers I bought in Nashville almost a decade ago, some slick Tony Lama snakeskins, a pair of dressy black leathers and the practically-mandatory Timberland hikers.

Alpha Male: A

Today begins a new semi-regular feature here at The Daily Brad, something I like to call Alpha Male. Twenty-six letters, twenty-six days, only five minutes allowed, no editing, to write about something from my life that starts with the letter du jour. Hey, I'm part of the Sesame Street generation! You expected Proust, maybe? So, let's start at the very beginning...

Anheuser-Busch: I make a concerted effort to support the home team with my purchases: I fly TWA, I rent cars from Enterprise, and I drink Bud Light. It's not the best beer in the world, but it's brewed in my backyard and I feel a sense of loyalty to one of the few remaining major companies headquartered in my hometown. I often joke that I drink A-B beer out of fear, since I live practically in the shadow of the brewery and I'm afraid they'll load up a trebuchet and hurl a Clydesdale at me if I don't.

This fealty to Anheuser-Busch follows me out of town; I'm usually reluctant to try to local liquor, with a few notable exceptions. Kansas City has Boulevard, a nice collection of boutique brews and, of course, there's Shiner Bock whenever I'm in Texas. It's not that I don't like other beers or that I don't appreciate something more robust (in other words, I don't fear Fosters). It's simply convenient and safe, and my beer consumption is probably one of the few areas of my life where those are the watchwords of my creed. I've proudly ordered A-B beers from Los Angeles to London, and I've never been disappointed.

But I won't drink Tequiza, and I don't care if a thousand horses rain down upon me for saying so. That Lemon Pledge-flavored piss is just nasty.