Thursday's 13 Things That New Scout Merit Badges Should Cover

1. Family Guy Trivia Merit Badge


2. Talk Like Cartman Merit Badge


3. Cut Your Finger While Carving Boobs into the Picnic Table Merit Badge


4. Cry Like a Girl Because You're Scared of a Daddy Long Legs Merit Badge


5. "This Lake has Awesome Graphics," Merit Badge


6. "Does Our Tent Have WiFi?" Merit Badge


7. Sink Your Canoe on Purpose Merit Badge


8. Kick Your Senior Patrol Leader in the Balls Merit Badge


9. Drink a 32 Oz. Chocolate/Watermelon/Mocha Shake Then Puke All Night Merit Badge


10. Hold Your Poop Seven Days Merit Badge


11. Texas Hold 'Em Merit Badge


12. Secret Backwoods Private Club Start-Up Merit Badge


13. Saying "Camp Sucks," So Much It Is Statistically Improbable Championship High Score Merit Badge

Homework Tornado Strikes Chicago Living Room. Dog Scared.

y daughter turns fifteen in a few days and I am compelled to make a few observations. I am finally getting to the point where her boobs don't scare me, where her astonishing compilation of sexual inuendi doesn't surprise me; and where her frank independence no longer challenges my authority and I am damn proud of myself.

But there is a trait that seems to have grown deep roots in the fecund habituae my daughter possesses and that trait is abject, terrifying, horrible absence of kempt. The girl's a slob. She exudes disarray, disorder, and disarrangement. She isn't, how do you say, sheveled.

She comes by it honestly--I am a reverse neatfreak. I'm obsessive-repulsive, I throw stuff everywhere. Well, ok, that's not entirely true. I love order. I relish organization. I get a contact high at the container store. If a house is organized and perfectly arranged I'm capable of pretty much keeping it that way. It's the putting it that way that I'm not up to and never have been. There's so much unfinished laundry in my basement that it's more like excavation than housework. I can pull it apart and read the history of our family as easily as a paleontologist reading lithics: the German Porn Bin-olithic era, the Pink and Purple pajama pant-o-zenic stage, the Osh Kosh B'Gosh-a-zoic. One day I'll break through the onesie-stratum and reach the floor.

But the girl child has taken it to a new height. Her habits aren't human, they're gull-like. She doesn't have a room. She lives in an impenetrable nest of unmatched bikini tops, iPod earbud wires, pantyhose, Pirates of the Caribbean pajamas, and yarn. Lots of yarn. I reached down to yank a lose strand of yarn out of the way yesterday and slung a hamster corpse across the room. This wattle is adorned like a crow's nest with spent Vitamin Water bottles, old glasses of orange juice, chip bags and Popsicle sticks.

This isn't so bad. I venture into her room trembling with fear, wary of boobytraps and micro-carnivores, stuff her underwear into her drawer and back out carefully. I keep the door closed. And just like the mom in Poltergeist, I will occasionally open it for curious strangers who will stare in wonder and fear then marvel at my indifference (not recognizing it as abject terror). As long as it's contained, I feel safe.

But last night, the unclean-teen's poltergeic puerility escaped and wreaked havoc on my living room.

As I have mentioned (bragged) in the past (five minutes) my daughter (monkey) attends Superhero High School, oft mentioned in a national magazine I'm too humble to name (Time) several (5) times. Her workload is college level and she often has homework questions I can't answer. Thank God her mom (rumored to be My Attorney [true]) is a superkillerfreakyEinstein genius with dominate genes or she'd be eating paste every day. Instead she's writing essays about Buddhism and Teen Pregnancy (that was a fun trip to the Library) and working calculus. This last weekend she crammed for her very first final exams ever. Her focus was like a powerful searchlight. You could see her thinking. It was like watching Jackie Chan outtakes, only for math. She studied for 17 hours straight and aced her exams. She earned a perfect score.

However, proud as I am, some reject teacher assigned a scrapbook project on the Greek Gods--all of them--showing the God, the origin of their name, and a well known product or object named after them. Two days before finals. That #@%@!

So I go to sleep and she's perched on the edge of the couch with scrapbook materials and her laptop, prim as a pea. I woke up to this:

Chick Magnet Jr.--Day One

Being hippies, we pretty much let our kids run their own life while we tye-dye our underwear and grow pot in the kitchen and so when the Roon up and said he didn't want to go to school at the Catholic School he'd been attending since kindergarten, we roused ourselves from our purple haze and said, "Cool, man, do your own thing!"

However, we were prepared for him to attend the nearby public school where our genius daughter went. In fact, he'd planned for a whole year to go there and I was overjoyed because he can ride his bike to that school and it meant I could laze out until the screen door slammed and the Hey Dad bird started in on the daily questioning. Now I have to fire up the gyro copter and fly over a golf course to get him.

But it's worth it for two reasons:

• He looks so damn handsome in the much more formal uniform of the new school which employs a white oxford button down shirt, a blue tie, and a dark blue sweater-vest. Kid looks vegas. I mean, it's Catholic Vegas, so no gambling or hookers, but still. Vegas.
• Chicks dig him.

This came as a real surprise to me. I mean, ok, not a total surprise. He'd always had a couple of girls that clearly liked him but it's always been in the "Dad, she's a girl who is my FRIEND not a GIRLfriend, JEEZ!" end of the scale. I mean, he never thought about it.

Well, that's apparently changed. The uniforms for boys and girls at the original Catholic school were the same for boys and girls: dark blue polo, dark blue pants. At the new Catholic school, the boys are all prep and the girls are in a YELLOW sweater vest, a green and crimson plaid skirt, and a matching cravat. Or something like a cravat. It's cravaty. Apparently this minor change in the uniform makes a difference. Maybe it's the different colors--now he can actually tell which ones are girls from a distance. I'm not sure he's consciously noticing girls, but things are moving in that direction. Ie:

He went to the store the other day and got some new clothes which he picked out himself. He spent a lot of time doing this and ended up with the kind of acid streaked jeans, t-shirt and matching over-shirt ensemble you'd normally expect in a GQ ad. He looked hip. Cool. Well put together. And he knew it too. He borrowed my nappy horrible old "G" cap and checked the crook in the mirror for 5 minutes before we took off for sign-ups.

As we're walking out of sign-ups, two yellow-sweater clad girls are talking. As Connor walks past, one of them blurts out to Connor--"Oh my god, WHAT GRADE ARE YOU IN?"

Now I happen to speak 5th grade. (took it in College) and I know what that means. That's 11 for "God, you're hot!" And it means Connor has been noticed, not merely by one girl but, as they share a hive mind, he's been noticed by ALL girls.

As we rounded the lot to go home, the girls never took their eyes off him.

Connor Garlington--Chick Magnet.

Freemasonry, X-Box, Burnout 2, and the New Man

I was doing laundry today when I looked around and realized that this housewife thing ain’t exactly brain surgery.
It can get hard. It can be overwhelming. And, yes, I do have a maid service every two weeks and that seriously helps. For you poor folk out there who don’t live the upscale two-car garage lifestyle I’m becoming accustomed to . . . uh, I use my dead dad’s meager melothemioma suit-winnings to pay for the maids. Otherwise I’d be hip deep in wet towels and dirty dishes. But with the help of my three Slavic cleaners, I get by.

I had been worried I’d never get the laundry completely done, that I’d never scale the Everest of skid marked skivvies that had grown in my basement laundry room, my own private Smatterhorn.

I hate laundry because it’s so ridiculously inefficient. Why do we undress on the third floor but wash our clothes in the basement? That’s like taking a bath but keeping the towels in the kitchen. I want my dresser to have a wash drawer. I throw in what I wore today, open it in the morning—Dockers dried and folded, s’il vous plais.

Sometime in the next two years, we’re redoing our second floor and I’m having an over/under machine put in up there. Screw the basement. The basement is where I grow pot.

Or. Maybe I’m looking at it the wrong way. Maybe the Smatterhorn is a good thing. Maybe the basement is my new office. IT would beat the hell out of my old office, which was in, the . . . on the . . . actually I don’t have an office.

But in the basement, I have Xbox, Playstation 2, Gamecube, three TVs, a stereo, a bar, wireless, a phone, two couches, my golf clubs and the bookcases. My god, my basement is like a Dot Com dream office! I’ve been spending all my time sitting in the living room walking up and down stairs when I could’ve been kicked back with a cold one shooting Nazis with my wireless controller, surfing the net, doing some actual work—and getting the laundry done. I think I feel a new Euphemism coming on. Dude, wanna come over and do a couple loads?

I was doing some stats the other day and found out that there are over 2 million men staying home in the role traditionally reserved for women. 2 million.

X-box is marketing to the wrong people. For that matter, so are the dying fraternities that once funded all the parades—the Rotary, the Lions Club, and the Freemasons.

When they aren’t busy taking over the world and hiding the Holy Grail, the Freemasons spend a lot of time talking about Freemasonry. A website devoted to the fraternity recently posted an article saying that this breeding ground fro Shriners, Illuminati, and Alien Death Ray mechanics has watched its membership dwindle from a strong 4 million around the mid 50s to only about 2.5 million today. The reason for the drop in numbers has a lot to with the disconnect in the 60s, but really, more so with the fact that those 4 million guys in the mid 50s are all dead or dying now and the Masons and all those other clubs where you grandfather used to go practice secret handshakes and wear a fez, well they don’t exactly advertise. In fact, they do the exact opposite. You have to go to them. That’s kind of like having a sports store in an unmarked building. But that’s their way. I think they ought to quietly take a long look into the new crop of daddy-bloggers. Because I don’t want all these old clubs to disappear. We need guys to wear funny hats and drive miniature Caddilacs in parades. We need secret handshakes.

And imagine the boon to these clubs when they get 2 million members who all have no real job? The Christmas party committee is gonna rock! We’ll never miss a meeting (unless there’s a little-league game, basketball, chess club, band, football, theatre, AP classes, or a special episode of Lost. Otherwise we’ll be there.

I’m putting a call out to the Daddy Bloggers out there: join a fraternity today. Get your funny hat. Get your secret handshake. Drive that tiny car. You deserve it!

The Wind Proofed Burnt Leg Polyester Rocket Powered Matchbox Car Disaster!

hildhood, for me, was an adventure involving snakes, setting things on fire, theft, smoking cigars, and innovative homemade toys of nefarious--and potentially lethal--design.

Every day, particularly in the summer, my friends and I were hustled out of our houses and left to our own devices. Given that we weren't anesthetized by cable, and we could read, and were sub-genius bored 11 year olds, we tended to find ways to amuse ourselves that should've involved rope harnesses, fire-proof suits, and an emergency unit on stand by.

Take the rocket powered car.

We learned about rockets pretty quick and Tim McDonald's dad would happily drive us to the hobby shop to buy us rocketry equipment assuming it was keeping us out of street gangs and prison. Our chosen launchpad, our cape Canaveral, was the swamp just west of the cemetery.

We built all kinds of rockets, launched them, and lost them. We'd launch during ceremonies, at night, during school. We didn't care. We just wanted to get as much stuff into the sky as possible.

Eventually, the intensive labor of building a rocket lost its appeal. The launch was the thing. The fire--that's all that mattered. We realized that there were plenty of rocket shaped things lying around and immediately discarded our plans to build bigger and more aerodynamic rockets in favor of launching whatever was close by.

We launched barbie dolls, GI Joes, picnic ketchup bottles, OWL brand metal cigar tubes--anything we could stick an engine into went up. Or around. Often directly back at us.

One day my buddy Mark English and I were forming a sideral rocket launching cabal over a bowl of fruit loops and lack of cartoons. I had two C rocket engines but didn't have the launch rig. Mark had a nearly palpable, hyperinsane need to be entertained, a book of matches, and not much else. We rooted around through the debris in his room and discovered a Matchbox car. Mark held it up with an evil glint in his eye.

We weren't scouts (yet) so be prepared wasn't part of our motto. Our motto was Festina, prae mater videt!¹ We raced out into the cul de sac, carved all the dry rocket fuel from the engine with a pocket knife, and piled it up on the ground. Mark rubber-banded the other engine to the car and pointed it down the street. We both assumed the positions of two pre-teen scientists, testing the wind direction with a wet finger, looking around for adults or cops, hesitating for reasons that were entirely subconscious (our subconscious minds, mute with fear and indignation, couldn't actually tell us we were about to blow ourselves up, only make us pause meaningfully which we took as some kind of noble gesture).

Mark knelt with a lit cigar to ignite the saltpeter and black powder pile and I did what came naturally back then, I listened to what the esteemed writer, Neal Stephenson, refers to as the imp of the perverse: I stood directly behind the engine, the car pointed away from me, and stated, nobly, assured, full of purpose and aplomb:

"You light it, I'll block the wind."

Mark set flame to powder. There was an enormous, powerful flash, the car leapt into the air, bounced off Mark's skull, slammed into the asphalt, then spun around for a minute or two before the chute charge blew. Then it just laid there, smoking.

Much. Like. My. Left. Leg.

I didn't feel any pain. I was wearing the usual assortment of 1975 clothing made entirely from petroleum, uncomfortable as a burlap sack, emblazoned with a motocross closeup. I was a flammable boy. My pants--long pants--were deep blue polyester with a smoking hole in the middle of the shin.

I pulled up my pants leg, and stared in horror as blackened skin peeled off my leg with them. There was a black oval about the size of a train-flattened nickel in the middle of my shin. The skin around it was bright red and there were pieces of melted polyester fused with charred Christopher and things were curling up away from my skin like I'D BEEN HORRIBLY BURNED BY A ROCKET ENGINE!

We both screamed and ran away in different directions. I was literally hopping up and down while I ran. I was completely terrified as somehow this burn has morphed into an all consuming holy fire and I was about to go poof.

Tim McDonald's sister heard us and somehow collared Mark, found me limping home crying copiously, holding my charred polyester pant leg. She rushed us back to her bathroom (she was older than us, listened to David Bowie, and smoked. She was the epitome of wisdom) slapped some Vaseline on my burn and smacked us both in the head for being  "such [DELETED] idiots!"

You might think we learned a lesson about improvising chemical fun but I assure you we did not. We went on to ever more colorful ways of injuring ourselves, all predicated on the simple principal that a boy's untethered imagination, unlimited access to power tools, and depraved ingenuity add up to great stories told by people in slings, the worst case involving molten lead, a coke bottle, and screaming. Coming soon.
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¹ Hurry, before Mom finds out!

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My kids are TRYING to be the death of me!