I'm talking to you, Mr. "Border Collie Licks My Toes." I don't know what perverted sociopath t-boned your childhood like an off-white van t-bones a brand new porche, and I don't care. Stop. Stop now. As much as I like the traffic stats on my Google analytic page, I really REALLY don't want your kind attentions.
Even though I am deeply reassured by the scarce 1.42 seconds you spent on my blog before you realized it wasn't dog porn, I am equally deeply dismayed that you found your way here at all.
And the rest of you. Seriously, move to Singapore or something. I can't stand the "key word results page" stats any more. I'm supposed to find out people are searching for "highly articulate hilarious parenting humor" not "gay dog".
So, in the immortal paean of every Irish cop in every family movie car crash scene ever, (ahem) "Alright, move along, nothing to see here."
Monday, May 25, 2009
My Indian Name is 'Dances With Squirrels'
Every day my kids and I burst out the front door so I can take them to school. We do this at almost exactly the same time, and when I say burst, I mean something like explode.
Since we live in Chicago near a golf course and a forest preserve, we often see rabbits, chipmunks—even deer—grazing in the yard. We always see squirrels. Squirrels rule the street. They’re so tame they don’t even scatter when we race down the sidewalk to the car, they just sit their on their fat little haunches gnawing acorns or pine cones or crabapples and give us the hairy eyeball, as if every single squirrel immigrated from the Bronx.
Until the other day, when a squirrel and I bonded.
I always assume the squirrels don’t pay much attention to us enormous. explosive bipeds. I figure they figure us for ‘big crazy squirrels’ and ignore the screaming, the papers flying everywhere, the hip-check duels for determining who gets shotgun. But the other day, I threw the door open, raced down the steps, and skidded to a stop: One of them was staring at me.
I don’t mean staring the way a rabbit will glance at you to see if it should run, I mean a big fat tawny squirrel with an acorn in it’s grip was giving me the hairy eyeball. Like he recognized me.
I sensed a weird resonance with this tiny mammal: we were roughly the same shape, we both had a sardonic glare plastered on our mugs, we were both exquisitely browed. I was carrying a stack of books in my hands, close to my chest, worried they’d slip, just like he was carrying a giant acorn in his little fingers. I don’t know why I did this but I hunched down, like I was ducking—and the squirrel did the same thing. My son said the most remarkable, eloquent thing, practically an oration, he said “Dude.” I was inspired.
I double hunched and the squirrel double hunched. I turned my head to the right and the squirrel turned his. I ducked my head. He ducked his head. It was an interspecies tango. I said “Oh my God, my new Indian name is ‘dancing with squirrels’. My kids cracked up. My dance partner ran away.
The next day we hit the steps and pulled up short. There he was, same time, same place. My daughter immediately started in with a ‘bown-chicka-wow-wow’ and me and the squirrel ducked and bobbed until my son, though deeply impressed with the cross genus gyrations, informed us we were already late for the first bell by groaning, “Dude?” and we pulled into the car. As I checked the rearview to pull out, I saw my squirrel still staring at us, like the song was still playing but we’d jilted him and went to the bar for a drink. He looked surprised.
The next day he didn’t show. Instead of blowing the door open, we eased out onto the steps-- but no squirrel. I tried to get a rabbit to bump and grind but he just wiggled his nose, kind of a ‘you got to be kidding me,’ wiggle. The other squirrels just raced around the tree trunk and ignored me. I mean they completely ignored me, like they were saying ‘that bastard just left Franky standing there.’
As we sped through the neighborhood, suicide squirrels darted into the road, dodging my tires and leaping out of the way with hair trigger timing and steely bravado. I usually ignore this but after dancing with a squirrel for two days in a row, I had a new view. These were not simply confused rodents. They were warriors. They were testing their mettle by arcing across the path of oncoming hummers and hybrids. I imagined bristly squirrel girls hidden in the boxwoods and peonies switching their carefully groomed tails and saying ‘OMG, did you see that?!’ while their boy squirrels strut back to them across the grass having risked everything to give the tiny finger to chrome plated roaring death by squishilation.
This fantasy spun completely out of control so that every wild animal I saw seemed to have cartoon talk bubbles suspended in mid-air over their heads, filled with snappy dialogue and withering quips. The deer all talked like Frasier, rabbits were all frat boys’ the squirrels all talked like DeNiro in taxi, smoking unfiltered cigarettes and asking me ‘what, you gotta problem?’
Friday, May 22, 2009
The Family Braap
I didn't marry my wife because she can burp the alphabet but it was right up there with "hot" and "wicked smart". However, when my kids asked me why I married her (with a little too much of a 'what the hell were you thinking' in their voice . . .) I gave them the alphaburp spiel.
She can do it, too. My wife's ability to brap alphabetically is impressive and worthy of video (we have not--yet) but lately she won't do it. She won't pony up. My son will get down on his knees but she won't crack. She's a lawyer now and that kind of behavior won't hunt.
But the two or three times she broke it out for the kids forever changed their idea of burping. For most kids, a good fricative FRAAAP will do. But not ours. Our kids have goals.
The princess gave up early. It doesn't please the court. She gets to about J then loses focus. But the kid, he's committed.
My wife taught him how to fake burp in order to get through all 26 letters. She neglected to explain the physics involved: when you sallow a lot of air, it kind of makes you a human balloon and the air, it needs to come out.
So one day Connor is working it. He's horfing air like a Hoover and pumping out magnificently phlegmatic ligatures but he can't get past M without cracking up. So he's working on his game face when he fades. Just peters out. He wanders into the bathroom and sits down on the edge of the tub.
I'm on the phone (I don't recall the conversation but given the sheer idiotic guyness of coaching my son to better burping, more than likely there were a lot of "dudes" and air-fives) when I notice Connor is gripping the edge of the sink and staring at the floor with a look that either meant 'I'm giving birth' or 'this happened in Alien'. Then he screams.
My son is scared of spiders and there's one chick on his basketball team that railroads him to the hoop like a freaking bulldozer and he just stands there blinking so I'm not saying he's tough. But when it comes to puking, diarrhea, and any other ungainly expectorations, he's a pro. No prob. If he has to puke, he pauses the DVR, says 'Pardon, methinks I must hurl, forthwith’, hits the can, cleans up, and returns to Spongebob like nothing happened.
If you didn't read it in my previous, I don't freak out. I don't call 911. I don't scare easily. So when homme started wailing and wouldn't stop, when his screaming started getting louder, harder, more urgent, I grabbed the phone.
I've never felt so useless and stupid. Staring at Connor, patting him on the back, the arms, not knowing what the hell is going on, thinking his stomach is knotted, or his heart is decavitating, or his spleen's exploding, and he's looking at me like I'm supposed to know what's going on. I ask him what’s wrong and he nails me, his face contorted with horror and surprise: ‘Don’t you know?’ The paramedics burst through the door and the street fills up with sirens and red lights and they hit the hallway, all radios, faceplates and gear, and Connor looks up, astonished, revelation dawning, and he burps.
For 38 seconds.
It is a luxurious, arresting, and august irruption. It is a venting of such sepulchural weirdness it seems to disrupt the natural order: birds fall from the sky, wolves howl, republicans forgive someone, time stops yet the burp just keeps coming, just keeps unraveling like a magic act and even Connor, in the middle of it, starts to laugh while he's belching. I'm laughing. The paramedics sitting at my kitchen table are cracking up. Connor, giggling, continues to erupt: short echoing bursts of FRAAAP and CRARRRG and BLAAAAGH--like Batman for blind people.
The paramedics advise us to administer a folk remedy: coke. Burp boy keeps up his vaporous ellipses. The bleats get further apart and stop catching him by surprise and before the paramedics leave, he manages one last massive BLAAAAP!
He uses it to say thank you.
Monday is Manday!
I'm still reliving my Friday spent sitting in a leather wingback smoking a Macanudo and talking to an Arabian math teacher about the underlying similarities across various root languages and beers with Dave, fully manned-out, 3-day beard and leather brim cabelas cap representing.
Dave and I turned in our book last week and we definitely deserved a smoke. I enjoyed a Hoya de Monterrey vacuum stored aged Partaga first a couple of hours before the Macanudo event, the boys in the council circle of old retired guys laid out a table full of grilled custom butchered bratwurst and other stuff I didn't recognize. Unfortunately, I'd just loaded up on crab cakes, spiced fries, and Newcastlesat Village Inn.
I spent the day talking to Dave about how to market the book and wishing I had snoot full of scotch. Then the Arabian math teacher showed up and we got into a long lively discussion about imprecision in the English language and how there are similarities in grammar at the root of most similar languages, you know, guy talk. Then a local songwriter stopped by and played me one of her songs on her iPhone while she knocked back an Olivia Serie G and talked guitars with Big Lee.
I finally had to pry myself out of the wingback and finish off the very tail end of my last Macanudo and looked around that the animal heads on the wall, the thousand dollar humidors, the Mont Blanc displays and the dual 50 inch wide TVs dedicated to news and sports and wondered why the hell I didn't live there.
Dave and I turned in our book last week and we definitely deserved a smoke. I enjoyed a Hoya de Monterrey vacuum stored aged Partaga first a couple of hours before the Macanudo event, the boys in the council circle of old retired guys laid out a table full of grilled custom butchered bratwurst and other stuff I didn't recognize. Unfortunately, I'd just loaded up on crab cakes, spiced fries, and Newcastlesat Village Inn.
I spent the day talking to Dave about how to market the book and wishing I had snoot full of scotch. Then the Arabian math teacher showed up and we got into a long lively discussion about imprecision in the English language and how there are similarities in grammar at the root of most similar languages, you know, guy talk. Then a local songwriter stopped by and played me one of her songs on her iPhone while she knocked back an Olivia Serie G and talked guitars with Big Lee.
I finally had to pry myself out of the wingback and finish off the very tail end of my last Macanudo and looked around that the animal heads on the wall, the thousand dollar humidors, the Mont Blanc displays and the dual 50 inch wide TVs dedicated to news and sports and wondered why the hell I didn't live there.
113 degrees
You just have no idea how hot it is here in Alabama where I am visiting my clan (that's clan with a C). We've cancelled everything. No golf. No great big barbeque. We're just sitting under the fan in the AC watching movies and hoping the entire state doesn't just burst into flame.
Also, my stepfather gave me one of his cowhorn peppers. In case you ever visit Alabama and some local offers you a cowhorn pepper, just punch him in the face.
Also, my stepfather gave me one of his cowhorn peppers. In case you ever visit Alabama and some local offers you a cowhorn pepper, just punch him in the face.
My Son's Awesome Balls
Another Man Moment slides into oblivion as I ponder my son's recently acquired balls.
We were at the Sox-Yankees game at Comisky Park just south of Chinatown here in Chicago sitting in seats good enough for God. My son had brought his glove, a ball, and a sharpie. We were 20 rows up from the Sox dugout, looking down the first baseline from home plate. Roon and I grabbed the sharpie and the gear and loped down the steps to the dugout where Jenks signed our stuff. It was sunny and nippy and the guy selling hot dogs was saying it like it was some kind of verdant truth. He didn't call out HOOOOOT DOOOOOGSS! Like they usually do. He glared into the crowd, banged on his box, and stated, perfunctly: Hot Dogsh. Like he was saying "It ain't hot pretzels, idiot."
So Connor is sitting there burning in the sun and he has his little black glove and his Sox hat and his Sox shirt and Morkoviak slices one to 8 o'clock and guess who gets it? Oh yeah. The guy RIGHT BEHIND MY SON. Connor had his hand in the air and it tipped his glove and shot into the open hands of the baseball marketing director sitting behind us.
This has happened before. We were at a Bulls game and one of those impossibly curvaceous t-shirt girls slingshot a bulls shirt into the air over our head. Its parachute opened and it drifted down like some kind of modified Chinese water torture specialty, like a Fellinni take, like for seven and a half years it floated down directly over my son's head. There's no one around us for like fourteen seats and he's screaming. I mean BELLOWING "I GOT IT I GOT IT" and just as it's almost in his hands the wind (wind?) blows it one seat back to a guy in a suit (AT A FRIKKING BALL GAME). I just turned around and stared down into his brain stem for a second and he smiled and handed the shirt to Connor who proceeded to scream until his throat blew out.
But it was different at the Sox game. The guy had class. He didn't even hesitate. He shoved it into Roon's glove, said "Nice catch, kid! GO SOX!" and patted him on the back. Connor was practically weightless. He held the thing up and whooped with the kind of unadulterated glee that made my inner Southern boy proud.
After the game (Sox pasted the Yankees) we walked out and Connor carried the ball in front of him and kept saying to me "It sure is cool that I caught this foul ball, huh?" "Yep, caught a foul ball, right here. Yep this one. Nice one dad, huh? This foul ball? This ball? That I caught?" All the way down six levels until we were in the car. Then he rolled the window down. "I sure like this ball. This ball is super cool, This foul ball. That I caught."
Ahh. Baseball.
----
We were at the Sox-Yankees game at Comisky Park just south of Chinatown here in Chicago sitting in seats good enough for God. My son had brought his glove, a ball, and a sharpie. We were 20 rows up from the Sox dugout, looking down the first baseline from home plate. Roon and I grabbed the sharpie and the gear and loped down the steps to the dugout where Jenks signed our stuff. It was sunny and nippy and the guy selling hot dogs was saying it like it was some kind of verdant truth. He didn't call out HOOOOOT DOOOOOGSS! Like they usually do. He glared into the crowd, banged on his box, and stated, perfunctly: Hot Dogsh. Like he was saying "It ain't hot pretzels, idiot."
So Connor is sitting there burning in the sun and he has his little black glove and his Sox hat and his Sox shirt and Morkoviak slices one to 8 o'clock and guess who gets it? Oh yeah. The guy RIGHT BEHIND MY SON. Connor had his hand in the air and it tipped his glove and shot into the open hands of the baseball marketing director sitting behind us.
This has happened before. We were at a Bulls game and one of those impossibly curvaceous t-shirt girls slingshot a bulls shirt into the air over our head. Its parachute opened and it drifted down like some kind of modified Chinese water torture specialty, like a Fellinni take, like for seven and a half years it floated down directly over my son's head. There's no one around us for like fourteen seats and he's screaming. I mean BELLOWING "I GOT IT I GOT IT" and just as it's almost in his hands the wind (wind?) blows it one seat back to a guy in a suit (AT A FRIKKING BALL GAME). I just turned around and stared down into his brain stem for a second and he smiled and handed the shirt to Connor who proceeded to scream until his throat blew out.
But it was different at the Sox game. The guy had class. He didn't even hesitate. He shoved it into Roon's glove, said "Nice catch, kid! GO SOX!" and patted him on the back. Connor was practically weightless. He held the thing up and whooped with the kind of unadulterated glee that made my inner Southern boy proud.
After the game (Sox pasted the Yankees) we walked out and Connor carried the ball in front of him and kept saying to me "It sure is cool that I caught this foul ball, huh?" "Yep, caught a foul ball, right here. Yep this one. Nice one dad, huh? This foul ball? This ball? That I caught?" All the way down six levels until we were in the car. Then he rolled the window down. "I sure like this ball. This ball is super cool, This foul ball. That I caught."
Ahh. Baseball.
----
Radio: We Are T-Minus Something or Other
The Dave & Chris show on WBBJ 1530 AM is a go. We just have to finish up a few things and learn how to speak English. We've decided to host our inaugural show at the Cigar King. They don't know this yet. Maybe we should tell them . . .
Jenny Craig, I think I Love You
ot many people know that I have been, most of my adult life, secretly obese. I hide it well with baggy clothes and by never leaving the house, but, truth be told, I'm fat as all get out.
By average standards, I have been, at my greatest rotundity, 100 pounds over the standard mark. Just because the standard is set according to the average size of fanatical fasting Fakirs in Darfur doesn't mean it isn't right. I'm supposed to be only one person and, according to the measure, I'm two.
My gorgeous attorney has also battled with thinnitism and decided recently to join Jenny Craig. As a measure of support, I vowed to stand by her, diet spackle bar to diet spackle bar, steamed zucchini to steamed zucchini, in her quest to reduce her size by one thin secretary.
So here we are, 7 weeks into the program and we're down 20 pounds each. 20 pounds. I never thought I'd freakin lose twenty pounds. You know how much twenty pounds is? Grab four bags of sugar. Wear them. For thirty years.
However, no one's noticed yet. My pants are hanging off my ass like I'm some kind of white rapper wanna be. I went bowling and nothing worked because I'm used to heaving twenty more pounds up to the line and I'm just . ... off. I look in the mirror and I look different to myself and I see me every day. I see my attorney every day and we LOOK DIFFERENT! WE'RE SKINNIER! AND NO ONE NOTICES IT!
I think it has to do with fear of fat. When my attorney complained that no one had noticed that she'd lost weight, I told her that until she's dramatically thinner, no one is going to say anything because they can't be sure they're right. If they say "Wow, you've lost weight!" and you say, "Uh, no," look at them for a minute then finish with "I'm still fat," well, it's an awkward moment.
It's the opposite of the irrevocable comment: "When's it due?" to which the robustly bellied recipient of this folly replies, with frigid malice, "I'm. Not. Pregnant."
If you are on the upside of ample, as Mrs. Death and I were, please accept my assurance that you can lose it. You really can. And it's easy.
I've been losing two pounds or more every week for eight weeks. I eat more than I used to, the food is good, and I haven't exercised. At all. I'm not advocating that by the way so all you nitpickerels can just stand down now. I hate exercising and I doubt I'll really do it until I have to. If I was exercising---I'd have lost probably 25 pounds by now.
Jenny Craig food is expensive and it doesn't always live up to the picture on the box. The pesto pizza is terrible. The cheese tortellini is torpid and wan. But the Fish and Chips is alright and the pot-stickers and cashew chicken dinners are pretty tasty.
The important thing we've found is to load up the fridge with diet Jello and really good vegetables. We eat a salad every lunch and a huge bowl of steamed veggies every night. I have yogurt and dry cereal for breakfast every morning with a fruit, a cup of coffee and a lot of water. I eat a snack two hours later: yogurt and a snack bar with fruit. I eat a JC lunch with a womping salad at lunch, take a vitamin, have a snack two hours later, cottage cheese, a fruit, and diet chips. Then dinner. Then desert. I'm eating more food than Oprah on a binge and I'm losing weight.
I know some of my readers are, as I have so delicately described, on the upside of ample. Maybe it's you. Maybe this sounds like preaching but I'm pretty excited about losing weight. It can be done. You can do it. If I can do it ... you can.
Thirteen Things That Make You Go Huh?
- Blobpositioning
- Impossible to describe.
- Proof that internet is the new CB radio and oddities museum combined.
- I just . . . I don't know what to say. People are weird. Thank god.
- don't.
- Tobacco Warning
- Important things to know if you are a writer.
- Praise God for Maple Bacon Lollypops.
- How I Get Ready for Work Every Day.
- I used to run one of these in my old job . . .
- I can't tell you how many times I've had to say this VERY SAME THING to my kids ...
- I refer to this site DAILY...
- Why Adobe is the God of Design. (Caution: high speed only!)
Monday is Manday for Beer!
I had a rough weekend. I did. I was swamped with children, I saw Sweeney Todd and sympathized far too much with that poor misunderstood psycho killer, and I got a sinus headache that still hasn't gone away. Plus I had to do a lot of wifey stuff, laundry and cleaning and yadda yadda yadda. I'm hip deep in laundry RIGHT NOW. And just when it looks like the horizon is just a long, dirty dishtowel stretched into infinity, my bud, the inestimable mathrock genius drummer, Dan Brill, of Acumen Nation (buy their CD now!) invites me to his birthday party. And where does a self respecting hard core heavy metal drummer with mind melting power drumming skills have a party? Where the beer is heavy and the women are too! Brau Haus. Ah, there is no antidote to housework more clear and manly than weird German beer!
13 Things I found randomly on the Internet
- This peanut looks like a duck.
- Turkey vultures virtually vibrate vivacity and vim .
- Which 70s album cover do you most resemble?
- Random. I'm talking random here, people.
- How life ought to be all the time.
- I am a zombie filled with love.
- Why do Brits always play villains when their commercials are sooooo good?
- This would be a plopsicle.
- Great music video!
- Paranormal writing test.
- This lady's baby is so stoned.
- Will Smith plays the Cramer of Superheroes this summer.
- Second Best Blog on the Internet.
Sperm Wail
Today I walked out onto the Mother Theresa tarmac to retrieve Boy and saw him from all the way across the lot, beaming at me, loaded with promise. What a moment. I mean, he's like a little Kennedy doll and he's picked me out, made eye-contact, from like 50 yards and I know he's just bursting with pride. It's like he's barely containing a nuclear bomb of pride and I'm so glad. I could use it.
I had a bad day. My mac deep-sixed at THE VERY MOMENT I WAS UPLOADING A CLIENT'S FINISHED WEBSITE. I mean like as my finger hovered over the return key, as the space between the fingerprints and the Baleek china surface of the mac grew increasingly smaller until I could practically feel the nano indentation of the word "enter," the screen froze and my mac died it's third and least noble death.
Also, I absorbed the brunt of the snot gargling this week and received my dubious infection like a church wafer, spending most of yesterday lying in bed watching Top Chef re-reruns and wondering if I had the temerity to stand erect in the shower long enough to shave (I didn't). I actually went to the store in my "cold clothes"--cut-off -jersey-raggy-old-shorts that look like I cleaned a crime scene in them with a matching t-shirt complete with an espresso-tinged ellipses running down my front like some weird t-shirt semaphore, a semiotic self-referential version of "I'm with stupid," the kind of high-end hyper-intelligent garb Umberto Eco would wear to a micro-brew ten-pin bowling alley old-school martini joint.
And my guitar was out of tune.
And my headlight went out.
And did I mention my Mac had crashed? I mean, I had just spent something like 8 hours crunching through a Flash site from scratch, turning it into a beeeautiful work of art that screamed through transitions and just looked gorgeous--for free. And can't. Show. It to any. Body.
And I got bad customer service from the Mac store. This is what kills me. The MAC store, my place of worship, Middle Managemented me. I know the face, I've worked retail. I know when I've hit the customer service terminal wall.
So walking across the hot sticky tar (90 degrees in Sept!) and seeing my son broadcasting a radiant ear-to-ear and knowing that he's at this top-shelf school and knowing that he's finally working at the level he deserves, I'm thinking he's going to say something like:
Because your kid, smiling, smart, achieving, can blow the bad day away. That genuine enthusiasm, the kind of all-in yeah-baby crash-the-car bravado that only kids can provide, can clear it all out like a firehose. Reset. Do over.
And that's what I wanted. And just like any good Wuthering Heights remake, I loped in slomo across the blacktop to my prideful, beside-himself with accomplishment, scion of 5th grade intelligentsia, fruit of my loins, heir to my . . . fortune; mini me, my boy who drops in beside me and says:
Dude, today we totally talked about sperm!"
I had a bad day. My mac deep-sixed at THE VERY MOMENT I WAS UPLOADING A CLIENT'S FINISHED WEBSITE. I mean like as my finger hovered over the return key, as the space between the fingerprints and the Baleek china surface of the mac grew increasingly smaller until I could practically feel the nano indentation of the word "enter," the screen froze and my mac died it's third and least noble death.
Also, I absorbed the brunt of the snot gargling this week and received my dubious infection like a church wafer, spending most of yesterday lying in bed watching Top Chef re-reruns and wondering if I had the temerity to stand erect in the shower long enough to shave (I didn't). I actually went to the store in my "cold clothes"--cut-off -jersey-raggy-old-shorts that look like I cleaned a crime scene in them with a matching t-shirt complete with an espresso-tinged ellipses running down my front like some weird t-shirt semaphore, a semiotic self-referential version of "I'm with stupid," the kind of high-end hyper-intelligent garb Umberto Eco would wear to a micro-brew ten-pin bowling alley old-school martini joint.
And my guitar was out of tune.
And my headlight went out.
And did I mention my Mac had crashed? I mean, I had just spent something like 8 hours crunching through a Flash site from scratch, turning it into a beeeautiful work of art that screamed through transitions and just looked gorgeous--for free. And can't. Show. It to any. Body.
And I got bad customer service from the Mac store. This is what kills me. The MAC store, my place of worship, Middle Managemented me. I know the face, I've worked retail. I know when I've hit the customer service terminal wall.
So walking across the hot sticky tar (90 degrees in Sept!) and seeing my son broadcasting a radiant ear-to-ear and knowing that he's at this top-shelf school and knowing that he's finally working at the level he deserves, I'm thinking he's going to say something like:
- Father, dear, you were right! The Brothers Karamozov really is incredible!
- Wow; the similarities between Latin and English are stunning. Did you know . . .
or even - I owned pre-calc today!
Because your kid, smiling, smart, achieving, can blow the bad day away. That genuine enthusiasm, the kind of all-in yeah-baby crash-the-car bravado that only kids can provide, can clear it all out like a firehose. Reset. Do over.
And that's what I wanted. And just like any good Wuthering Heights remake, I loped in slomo across the blacktop to my prideful, beside-himself with accomplishment, scion of 5th grade intelligentsia, fruit of my loins, heir to my . . . fortune; mini me, my boy who drops in beside me and says:
Dude, today we totally talked about sperm!"
I Am a Fearless Cub Scout Leader!
As usual, the scouts and I performed a valuable community service by walking through the forest preserve and pouting to the point where a helicopter could land on our upper lips.
I enjoy scouting. I like sleeping on the cold hard ground during a rainstorm then driving home for three hours smelling like a dead weasel slow roasted over a tire fire. I like eating hot dogs cooked to a delicious full bodied carbon. I like gnats. Under my eyelids.
And I truly appreciate the civic lesson embodied in the Scout credo. There really isn't another organization for kids that actually rewards them for selflessly assisting the community. Bravo. But whoever said scouts is a youth organization was misguided and high on bug juice. Scouts is a brilliant method for ensnaring the skills and resources of local adults through the apparent involvement of their children. Scouts is a ball and chain. You get your kid involved in scouts because YOU were a scout and by god if you had to hike three miles through a muddy ravine to camp in a slough full of badger vomit your kid's gonna do it too.
Take today. We assembled the scouts to walk through the local forest preserve to clean up litter. This is selfless and noble and I felt like a titanic citizen, like I was cast in bronze. I could barely walk straight cause I had my chest stuck out so far. For like eight seconds. Then I looked around and realized the scouts were all throwing empty Pabst cans into the river. They spent the entire hike endeavoring to fall off the steep muddy sides of the DesPlaines, cut themselves on broken glass no doubt previously dipped in the festering open wounds of homeless CDC escapees, and stab each other with the pointy ends of sticks pulled out of cold fires that looked suspiciously sacrificial. As the scouts rocketed down the leafy deer trails in the woods, leaping nimbly over the discarded cigar tubes and McDonald's wrappers, they passed by countless scenes as wild and rare as anything on the nature channel: Enormous hardwood fungi big as dinner plates; wild asparagus shooting up out of the ground like, um, asparagus; deer nibbling at the remains of a Taco Belle Grande. Real nature.
I saw these things because unlike the feral howler monkeys we were leading on this selfless act of delittering the forest, I was actually picking up garbage. Me and all the adults. The parents. And it occurred to me that the people who convince the scouts to do this kind of thing are brilliant social engineers. They ask how big the troop is, multiply by two, and get a solid number of adult volunteers. If the kids actually do anything, it's a bonus.
The kids only real brush with condensed littering occurred when we stumbled on a hobo camp. No hobos, alas, cause we'd dearly love to have interviewed them and shared their homely dinner of hot beans and chicken wings with a nice steaming cup of black coffee, all cooked over a small fire in a paint bucket. Ah, to listen to them regal us with stories of riding the rails and then teach us the secret hobo signs and maybe part with a song backed up by a cigar box banjo. But they weren't there. Which is good. Because the meth addled freaks who had made this camp had consumed something like eight cases of Ice Blue and had tied something to a tree with an old lamp cord and some wall wiring. Oh and we found a cat skull. Maybe not hobos so much as psychos.
As we shuffled through the underbrush we came on another encampment, a circular fence of fallen limbs all wrangled together around an old fire. We found a lot of pills and a lot of hair dye so this must've been a travelling goth encampment. After we circled around through the forest, we passed by it again (after we'd removed the dope) and it was already filling up with a bunch of youth meddling with a keg. Ah. Nature. Walden would be proud.
It occurred to me as were were leading these pink cheeked elven kids through the dark forest that the dark forest of Chicago was not a whole lot different from the dark forests of any medieval locale. Ours is filled with drunken louts, lost youth, and secret gypsy encampments of people that probably don't exactly hold to the Scout motto much. This idea was driven home by the man we ran into up on a grassy plateau. He had an enormous welt on his head and we thought maybe he had passed on to that great summer camp in the sky when he heaved a deep snotty snorp and we realized that he'd merely passed out there in his little house BUILT ENTIRLEY OUT OF EMPTY BEER CASES. Two of our scouts, wanting to share their nascent sheer with this colorful local, began to jump up and down at the edge of the clearing singing merrily: HOBO! HOBO! Until he woke up and lumbered their way.
We eventually finished up, stowed our bags of trash, old tents, rotted lawn chairs and assortment of empty beer cans--a job well done. I for one biked home satisfied and relieved that we hadn't had to explain any caches of needles nor a single spent condom.
I enjoy scouting. I like sleeping on the cold hard ground during a rainstorm then driving home for three hours smelling like a dead weasel slow roasted over a tire fire. I like eating hot dogs cooked to a delicious full bodied carbon. I like gnats. Under my eyelids.
And I truly appreciate the civic lesson embodied in the Scout credo. There really isn't another organization for kids that actually rewards them for selflessly assisting the community. Bravo. But whoever said scouts is a youth organization was misguided and high on bug juice. Scouts is a brilliant method for ensnaring the skills and resources of local adults through the apparent involvement of their children. Scouts is a ball and chain. You get your kid involved in scouts because YOU were a scout and by god if you had to hike three miles through a muddy ravine to camp in a slough full of badger vomit your kid's gonna do it too.
Take today. We assembled the scouts to walk through the local forest preserve to clean up litter. This is selfless and noble and I felt like a titanic citizen, like I was cast in bronze. I could barely walk straight cause I had my chest stuck out so far. For like eight seconds. Then I looked around and realized the scouts were all throwing empty Pabst cans into the river. They spent the entire hike endeavoring to fall off the steep muddy sides of the DesPlaines, cut themselves on broken glass no doubt previously dipped in the festering open wounds of homeless CDC escapees, and stab each other with the pointy ends of sticks pulled out of cold fires that looked suspiciously sacrificial. As the scouts rocketed down the leafy deer trails in the woods, leaping nimbly over the discarded cigar tubes and McDonald's wrappers, they passed by countless scenes as wild and rare as anything on the nature channel: Enormous hardwood fungi big as dinner plates; wild asparagus shooting up out of the ground like, um, asparagus; deer nibbling at the remains of a Taco Belle Grande. Real nature.
I saw these things because unlike the feral howler monkeys we were leading on this selfless act of delittering the forest, I was actually picking up garbage. Me and all the adults. The parents. And it occurred to me that the people who convince the scouts to do this kind of thing are brilliant social engineers. They ask how big the troop is, multiply by two, and get a solid number of adult volunteers. If the kids actually do anything, it's a bonus.
The kids only real brush with condensed littering occurred when we stumbled on a hobo camp. No hobos, alas, cause we'd dearly love to have interviewed them and shared their homely dinner of hot beans and chicken wings with a nice steaming cup of black coffee, all cooked over a small fire in a paint bucket. Ah, to listen to them regal us with stories of riding the rails and then teach us the secret hobo signs and maybe part with a song backed up by a cigar box banjo. But they weren't there. Which is good. Because the meth addled freaks who had made this camp had consumed something like eight cases of Ice Blue and had tied something to a tree with an old lamp cord and some wall wiring. Oh and we found a cat skull. Maybe not hobos so much as psychos.
As we shuffled through the underbrush we came on another encampment, a circular fence of fallen limbs all wrangled together around an old fire. We found a lot of pills and a lot of hair dye so this must've been a travelling goth encampment. After we circled around through the forest, we passed by it again (after we'd removed the dope) and it was already filling up with a bunch of youth meddling with a keg. Ah. Nature. Walden would be proud.
It occurred to me as were were leading these pink cheeked elven kids through the dark forest that the dark forest of Chicago was not a whole lot different from the dark forests of any medieval locale. Ours is filled with drunken louts, lost youth, and secret gypsy encampments of people that probably don't exactly hold to the Scout motto much. This idea was driven home by the man we ran into up on a grassy plateau. He had an enormous welt on his head and we thought maybe he had passed on to that great summer camp in the sky when he heaved a deep snotty snorp and we realized that he'd merely passed out there in his little house BUILT ENTIRLEY OUT OF EMPTY BEER CASES. Two of our scouts, wanting to share their nascent sheer with this colorful local, began to jump up and down at the edge of the clearing singing merrily: HOBO! HOBO! Until he woke up and lumbered their way.
We eventually finished up, stowed our bags of trash, old tents, rotted lawn chairs and assortment of empty beer cans--a job well done. I for one biked home satisfied and relieved that we hadn't had to explain any caches of needles nor a single spent condom.
Frosting Cupcakes on Demand
Every other week I go to lodge and hang out with a bunch of like minded men. Pillars of the community, doctors, lawyers, builders, politicians, ordinary salary men, engineers, barbers, butchers, salesmen, and more, we sit down to a delicious dinner and discuss Family Guy trivia. It's an exclusive, elite club and I'm proud to be part of it. During our meetings, we have a very strict NO CELL PHONES policy. I put mine on vibrate and hope the kids don't implode while I'm semiincommunicado. I tell the kids: DO NOT CALL ME UNLESS YOU ARE ON FIRE!
In the two years I've been able to do this, the kids have NEVER called me. Ever. They have some weird respect for me when I put on the Vegas suit (meetings are a black tie thing). I've never had to rush out of a meeting. Until this last Wednesday night.
Now you have to understand: the daughter is afflicted. Along with her gifted status and the extra brain cells she got from [My attorney]'s DNA, the stuff that helps her explain polygon tessellations and get an A in Arabic language studies (she can sass me in two languages now), Rah received (from my DNADHD) a glitch. We're not sure what it means, but, when we're both away--the mom working, the dad smoking fine cigars--Rah tends to start baking.
This is highly alarming because the genius DNA means she can measure the ingredients perfectly but the DUH-NA means she forgets the oven is on, takes a shower, tries to write a novel, then falls asleep.
Once [My Attorney] and I were on a date. The kids were under strict orders to not call unless
Even then I'd better hear sirens in the background or they were grounded. Yet, between the appetizer and the main course, we got this call:
Dad?
Are you on fire?
I smell gas.
Your brother farted.
No, I'm baking.
It's 10:30 at night!?
It's my 11 monthiversary tomorrow!
Jesus Haploid Christ.
What should I do?
Give the phone to your brother.
...
Dude!
Are you in the kitchen?
Dude.
Do you smell gas?
Dude?
Turn on a burner.
(pffff)
Still there?
Dude.
So the next day I explain to my daughter that baking is to occur during daylight hours only, when I am there, and with the local fire department alerted.
Just before my meeting starts last Wednesday, I'm having fellowship (Stewie impersonations) during dinner (pizza) when the phone rings.
Dad?
Yeah.
Is the top of the oven supposed to get really, really hot?
[insert tirade here]
I explain that she is to turn off the oven as soon as the CAKE she is baking at 8PM AT NIGHT is DONE. Twenty minutes later I call her.
Is the oven off?
(totally dejected) Yeah.
Don't call me again unless you've lost a limb.
(still remorseful) OK.
So I'm in my secret meeting, vibrate mode, in the middle of a lecture when the phone vibrates with such tintinnabulated seismic alarm it rips a hole in my pants and skips across the floor. I excuse myself under a cloud of raised eyebrows and glares, walk outside and answer the phone.
I'm thinking "Holy crap, the place is on fire." I get this.
Dad?
Yeah.
On your way home can you pick up frosting?
As a father, you develop certain skills, certain ninja-like qualities, that can't readily be explained to the unspawned. The dadface is a father's principle skill, along with all it's declinations, like the uttering of the word 'boy' with barely constrained menace; like the whistle your son can hear down in his bones even though he's six miles away with his Xbox headset clamped across his ears in the middle of a tactical assault yet still reacts with robotic efficiency and primal urgency; like the face that answers questions like 'can I watch Naruto?' asked rhetorically as they reach out to swipe the remote from your easy-chair lair, then glance over and freeze in place as their soul is melted by your Medusa-like perfunctory glare. These are important tools of a parent and to them I have added a new skill, a modern age technique for cell phone use: the silent glare. After about forty seconds of lethal silence, Rah says: Oh, were you in your meeting? I'm sorry! White frosting, ok?
Apparently it doesn't work on girls.
I get to the store rack up a basket stand in line realize I forgot my wallet when I changed into the Vegas suit drive home walk into the house and she's asleep.
Snoring.
The kitchen's been cake-bombed. The counter top is a foot deep in mixing bowls, measuring cups, flour sacks, cook books, wooden spoons, spent diet coke cans, food coloring, cupcake wrappers, cupcake pans, cake pans, cake mix boxes, and, inexplicably, a ball of yarn with two knitting needles stuck into it like a rabbit ear antennae.
In the center of it all is my enormous clear glass mixing bowl filled to the rim with a broken strawberry cake. It looks like it was raped by a squirrel.
This explains the tons of dejection and remorse I heard in my last call to her. I remember now why she's baking: it's her boyfriend's birthday the next day and she wants to celebrate at lunch and was going to bring him a cake. A cake that is now shredded and useless.
Then, tucked behind the huge glass bowl, I see three perfect cupcakes. They are naked and unfrosted.
Here's where awesome dad proves he rules with a velvet gauntlet.
I make icing from scratch, from a secret Amish recipe--frosting so white and light and delicious, angels appear halfway through mixing it, and at 12:22 am, while she's snoring in the other room, amid the debris of exploded pastry, I frost my daughter's cupcakes.
In the two years I've been able to do this, the kids have NEVER called me. Ever. They have some weird respect for me when I put on the Vegas suit (meetings are a black tie thing). I've never had to rush out of a meeting. Until this last Wednesday night.
Now you have to understand: the daughter is afflicted. Along with her gifted status and the extra brain cells she got from [My attorney]'s DNA, the stuff that helps her explain polygon tessellations and get an A in Arabic language studies (she can sass me in two languages now), Rah received (from my DNADHD) a glitch. We're not sure what it means, but, when we're both away--the mom working, the dad smoking fine cigars--Rah tends to start baking.
This is highly alarming because the genius DNA means she can measure the ingredients perfectly but the DUH-NA means she forgets the oven is on, takes a shower, tries to write a novel, then falls asleep.
Once [My Attorney] and I were on a date. The kids were under strict orders to not call unless
- something was poking out of them, and
- there was a lot of blood
Even then I'd better hear sirens in the background or they were grounded. Yet, between the appetizer and the main course, we got this call:
Dad?
Are you on fire?
I smell gas.
Your brother farted.
No, I'm baking.
It's 10:30 at night!?
It's my 11 monthiversary tomorrow!
Jesus Haploid Christ.
What should I do?
Give the phone to your brother.
...
Dude!
Are you in the kitchen?
Dude.
Do you smell gas?
Dude?
Turn on a burner.
(pffff)
Still there?
Dude.
So the next day I explain to my daughter that baking is to occur during daylight hours only, when I am there, and with the local fire department alerted.
Just before my meeting starts last Wednesday, I'm having fellowship (Stewie impersonations) during dinner (pizza) when the phone rings.
Dad?
Yeah.
Is the top of the oven supposed to get really, really hot?
[insert tirade here]
I explain that she is to turn off the oven as soon as the CAKE she is baking at 8PM AT NIGHT is DONE. Twenty minutes later I call her.
Is the oven off?
(totally dejected) Yeah.
Don't call me again unless you've lost a limb.
(still remorseful) OK.
So I'm in my secret meeting, vibrate mode, in the middle of a lecture when the phone vibrates with such tintinnabulated seismic alarm it rips a hole in my pants and skips across the floor. I excuse myself under a cloud of raised eyebrows and glares, walk outside and answer the phone.
I'm thinking "Holy crap, the place is on fire." I get this.
Dad?
Yeah.
On your way home can you pick up frosting?
As a father, you develop certain skills, certain ninja-like qualities, that can't readily be explained to the unspawned. The dadface is a father's principle skill, along with all it's declinations, like the uttering of the word 'boy' with barely constrained menace; like the whistle your son can hear down in his bones even though he's six miles away with his Xbox headset clamped across his ears in the middle of a tactical assault yet still reacts with robotic efficiency and primal urgency; like the face that answers questions like 'can I watch Naruto?' asked rhetorically as they reach out to swipe the remote from your easy-chair lair, then glance over and freeze in place as their soul is melted by your Medusa-like perfunctory glare. These are important tools of a parent and to them I have added a new skill, a modern age technique for cell phone use: the silent glare. After about forty seconds of lethal silence, Rah says: Oh, were you in your meeting? I'm sorry! White frosting, ok?
Apparently it doesn't work on girls.
I get to the store rack up a basket stand in line realize I forgot my wallet when I changed into the Vegas suit drive home walk into the house and she's asleep.
Snoring.
The kitchen's been cake-bombed. The counter top is a foot deep in mixing bowls, measuring cups, flour sacks, cook books, wooden spoons, spent diet coke cans, food coloring, cupcake wrappers, cupcake pans, cake pans, cake mix boxes, and, inexplicably, a ball of yarn with two knitting needles stuck into it like a rabbit ear antennae.
In the center of it all is my enormous clear glass mixing bowl filled to the rim with a broken strawberry cake. It looks like it was raped by a squirrel.
This explains the tons of dejection and remorse I heard in my last call to her. I remember now why she's baking: it's her boyfriend's birthday the next day and she wants to celebrate at lunch and was going to bring him a cake. A cake that is now shredded and useless.
Then, tucked behind the huge glass bowl, I see three perfect cupcakes. They are naked and unfrosted.
Here's where awesome dad proves he rules with a velvet gauntlet.
I make icing from scratch, from a secret Amish recipe--frosting so white and light and delicious, angels appear halfway through mixing it, and at 12:22 am, while she's snoring in the other room, amid the debris of exploded pastry, I frost my daughter's cupcakes.
Cussin' Up a Storm
We're a cuss friendly family, here at the house of Death. My kids cuss with abandon, [My Attorney] and I cuss like sailors--even the dog cusses.
But I'm wondering if this is a bad thing. My kids are careful editors outside casa de caca--no complaints from the school. But once they get inside the door? Like sailors.
I'm not saying it's fbomb central. They're colorful, not ugly. They say the D word and the S word and the GD word and a few composites handed down from past generations. X-box live has added some new words to the list, since the Boy plays Gears of War with some articulate potheads from New Zealand. But overall, they're cursing is actually sub-naval.
I think I'm highly liberal and I think this is unusual but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe, behind closed doors, all families are cuss positive.
What's it like in your family? Do youi let your kids cuss at home? In the car? In texts?
But I'm wondering if this is a bad thing. My kids are careful editors outside casa de caca--no complaints from the school. But once they get inside the door? Like sailors.
I'm not saying it's fbomb central. They're colorful, not ugly. They say the D word and the S word and the GD word and a few composites handed down from past generations. X-box live has added some new words to the list, since the Boy plays Gears of War with some articulate potheads from New Zealand. But overall, they're cursing is actually sub-naval.
I think I'm highly liberal and I think this is unusual but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe, behind closed doors, all families are cuss positive.
What's it like in your family? Do youi let your kids cuss at home? In the car? In texts?
Flickr Resume
I've been using Flickr a long time and stumbled onto a Flickr meme game where you answer twelve questions and use Big Huge Lab's mosaic maker to illustrate your list. The rule is you answer the questions, then search your answers on Flickr. You have to use an image from the first results page. Here's mine.
1. What is your nickname? G
2. What is your favorite food? Oysters
3. What high school did you go to? West Orange High School
4. What is your favorite color? white
5. Who is your celebrity crush? Scarlett Johanson
6. Favorite drink? Chimay Beer
7. Dream vacation? Veranasi
8. Favorite dessert? Flan
9. What you want to be when you grow up? Finished
10. What do you love most in life? Learning
11. One Word to describe you. Curious
12. Your flickr name. chris garlington
1. What is your nickname? G
2. What is your favorite food? Oysters
3. What high school did you go to? West Orange High School
4. What is your favorite color? white
5. Who is your celebrity crush? Scarlett Johanson
6. Favorite drink? Chimay Beer
7. Dream vacation? Veranasi
8. Favorite dessert? Flan
9. What you want to be when you grow up? Finished
10. What do you love most in life? Learning
11. One Word to describe you. Curious
12. Your flickr name. chris garlington
Freelace Writers Don't Get Sick Days.
s you know, I work at home. When I came up with a career change I thought to myself, ok, brilliant, I'll work at home, write, become famous, make a bajillion dollars, and live like a rock star. I envisioned myself draped over my leather chair with a laptop and a cappuccino interviewing Obama for Rolling Stone.
I knew that was a fantasy, I knew I'd be writing stock entries for digital camera retail sites and B2B literature instead of the great American novel and I was and still am ok with that. My principle complaint is that in each of the myriad fantasies I entertained about the glamour of the telecommuter life, I was always BY MYSELF, not embedded with the groaning, moaning, hacking, wheezing, snot sluiced rheumy eyed boredomites I am bivouacked with currently.
Tuesday at 3:48am (AY EM!) my daughter woke up screaming. [My Attorney] was propelled from the bed, leaving a body shaped smoking hole in the floor as she manifested by her screaming daughter's side, then remanifested by my side to tell me I had to take the girl to the emergency room because her ears were exploding.
By 4:25 I was standing in the ER with the screamer who had swallowed two hulking horse pill sized [brand name aspirin who won't play ball with me that rhymes with "stylenol"] expecting to still be standing there four hours later explaining to them how I am not actually an indigent, but a possessor of gold plated POP insurance benefits that allow me to handpick new organs and pays in cash. However, I didn't have that experience. I was processed with such alarming efficiency that I am compelled to believe they were tracking me by satellite and knew I was coming and why. The girl and I found ourselves in a room post haste and before the blue curtain unswished itself, a doctor came breezing in, looked in my daughter's ear and proclaimed, with grave authority: there's nothing wrong. We were home by five.
I know I'm supposed to wax joyously about such efficiency in our health care. I mean, people complain all the time about lag time at hospitals and doctors' offices, myself first and foremost. I hate it. I hate that I have to answer the same questions three times in the same visit; I complain that I have to fill out the same form every time I show up even though I haven't changed my name or grown a new arm; I complain that when I tell the nurse the girl had no fever the attendant then asks if she had a fever and then the Doctor asks if she had a fever and then they take her temperature. I dread the ER like I dread the draft and so when it works they way I've always shouted that it should I shouldn't bitch but here's the deal, if it works, then what am I going to write about?
And the kids are sick. The girl really does have a hideous and disgusting ear infection, the kind of thing that spews whale vomit from the side of her head like a punctured jugular. The boy and [My Attorney] may have strep; at least they're acting like they do when they have strep. The boy has a horrible stomachache and [My Attorney] sounds like a third level Star Wars alien bar-scene voice-over. She usually sounds a little like Demi Moore when she's sick, but not this time. She's on a trial and so tired and sick her eyes actually fell out of her head this morning and she just left them there on the carpet in the wadded up tissue and spent diet coke cans like two quail's eggs in a crow's nest. She turned to me and said "Hrrrgh frogsnot didjkse ughtra clambake?" As she passed into delirium, I crept out of the room.
And, worse, as [My Attorney] waivers in and out of consciousness, she's losing track of time like some kind of Alzheimer patient in the last throws of losing their mind, and keeps nagging me out of sequence, like I'll hang up her jacket and she'll say thank you then 'did you take my jacket to the dry cleaner?' and 'is the baby ok?' and my favorite 'he'll never know; is a hundred enough?' which I hope is about a birthday present.
And it all started with dog puke. Ty blew cack on the boy's bed three times in a row, which meant three huge laundry cycles on an already strained system that is trying to finish all the laundry that was soaked during the basement flood. He cacked on the new porch. Cacked in the kitchen. I took him to the vet and he cacked all over my car. The vet breezes in and gravely proclaims: there's nothing wrong.
God help them if they get me sick. I will retaliate, I swear. I will puke on the dog. I will puke on [My Attorney's] jacket. I will puke on their homework and their book bags. They will rue the day RUE THE DAY if I {haaaorf} get {wheeeze} even {hack!} the slightest bit {flaarrrrgh!} . . . crap.
13 Things on Thursday That I Already Miss from our Trip to Fat City!
One: Lump crab and alligator cheescake from Jaques Imo's. Holy. Mother. Of. God. This was by far the most bizarre and delicious thing I've ever eaten. Ever. ever.Two: Sweetbread Appetizer at Bayona's. I saw God. God said You think this is something? Try Jaque's Imos!
Three: Pravda. The hip-ass literati lounge decorated in prewar commy art, and Absinthe curia. They played the Cocteau Twins and served us Absinthe with no prattle or disdain. Arty yet homey. Loved it. And they made the best dirty martini in the quarter. This was a martini so dirty it was served with a pair of panties and a call from your wife. Absinthe, by the way, is . . . drifty.
Four: Koops. If you're a waitress or a bartender and your joint is closed and you just want some good food, a beer, and no bullshizzy, go to Koops. Two of the bartenders who'd served us at other places walked in while we we there after the quarter had shut down. It was cool. And rabbit and oyster gumbo? God.
Five: The infinite jukebox. I'm hanging with my girl arguing tequila with a dishwasher from the Marriot listening to Filipino Box Spring Hog, then Cake, then Waterboys, then . . . the Darth Vader theme from Star Wars? It's like a giant iPod that plays any song you want but also tries to get you to play video poker.
Six: Soul Rebels. They pointed their trombones at my wife and sang Getcha Booty Down Low. For that alone, I adore them. They are a HIGH ENERGY BAND. They could make baptists dance.
Seven: Rebirth Brass band. I've wanted to see this band for so long I almost cried when they got on stage. The ultimate New Orleans band (with Soul Rebels on their heels). They own the Maple Leaf, they shake the roofbeams, THEY MAKE STUFFY WHITE PEOPLE DANCE LIKE JAMES BROWN! You got to understand how to see Rebirth. At 10:30 at night they were just getting the barbeque going in front of the club. Around 11:30 they finally got started and just blew the roof off the place. By 11:35 the little hall where they play had gone from maybe thirty people evenly dispersed like a checker board and enjoying the odd cool breeze to A FRIKKIN VIBRATING DRUNKEN MOB 300 STRONG, SWEATING, MAKIN' OUT, GETTING IT ON. It was divine.
Eight: Pat O'Brien's. I know it's a cheesy tourist thing and is pretty much the Space Mountain of New Orleans but damn is it fun. I'm such a music snob that when Phil Collin's comes on the car radio I'll kick it out of the dash board. You couldn't PAY me to play a Billy Joel song. But three minutes and four Margaritas into Pat O'Brien's and I'm scream-singing Piano Man and throwing money. But beware: They will keep serving you booze until you die. NOBODY GETS THROWN OUT OF Pat O'Brien's! I got so drunk I started requesting Gilligan's Island Incidental Music, Mutant Ninja Turtle Fight Song, and Mendelssohn's Concerto in G Minor which did not make the real-estate-saleswoman-cum-lounge-singer laugh.
Nine: Alvin, the professional drink tray soloist. Look. It's impossible to explain. Pat O'Brien's has two great big copper clad dueling pianos between which a man stands with a drink tray covered in quarters. He has huge thimbles on all his fingers and at some point the piano players say Take it away Alvin! and he DOES A SOLO on a DRINK TRAY. It's just stupid and insipid and clearly a gimmick for generating tips. Here's how you tip him: You roll up a dollar (I saw a guy throw a 20) then get his attention then throw the dollar-ball which he catches on the tray and the room goes crazy. It's just. . .stupid. I know it's silly as all get out but I had the most fun tossing money at this guy and just digging on the fact that somewhere in the world there's a guy making a living playing a drink tray. And, here's the weird part, HE'S NOT THE FIRST ONE! THIS GUY did it first (We saw him in 2003).
Ten: The Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwiches every night at 10pm at LaPavillon where we stayed, dripping in splendor. The place is ornate, gilded, and flush with Louis 14th antiques. They treat you like landed gentry, turn your bed down at night, wear those safari hats and open the door for you and it's just rock star luxurious. But every night at ten oclock they have a tiny buffet table with cold milk, hot chocolate, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Old men in sear sucker suits and little old ladies in chiffon dresses and trust-fund leveling diamond necklaces were elbowing me out of the way to stack these free sandwiches in their arms and go back to their room. But, after a night of professional Margaritavilling, those sandwiches hit the spot.
Eleven: Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville. Another silly tourist trap. Whatever. They make KILLER margs and Brint Trenor plays there twice a week and he frikking smokes a slide guitar.
Twelve: All the naked chicks. I can't say enough about the importance of high quality public nudity as a means to boosting tourism.
Thirteen: Drunks touring Bourbon street at two in the morning--with their kids. Here I am smoking a cigar and drinking a MaiTai on the street at 2 in the morning giggling uncontrollably at the collection of nearly nekkid wimmin hanging out the door of a strippers club and I'm looking at the pictures on the facade of the place which are lurid and pornographic and I hear 'Daddy, I'm tired' and I turn to my right and there's a guy AND HIS WIFE AND KIDS looking at the very same damn porn I am. And people question MY parenting skills!
My Son Has an Outstanding Online Kill Ratio
I was at a little league game one time and my spawn was playing right field, the place where they put blind kids and quadriplegics, and the first base superstar, a kid with reflexes slightly higher than a coked out ninja astronaut, misses a grounder. It bounces out through the grass into the glove of the spawn of my loins
who was probably about to scoop up an interesting rock. He stood up in total shock, threw the ball to second base and got a guy out. After spending most of the season saying, well baseball isn't that important, and you should see the kid golf, I screamed so loud I spit my left lung into the dugout.
I don't pay much attention to sports. I just can't get into it. Guys will start talking to me about sports and I just blank out. Sounds like gibberish to me. Like cheerleaders talking about purses. Like old ladies talking about the neighbors. So the poor kid, he doesn't have much of a sports dad to teach him the ropes. That might not matter much since he is to sports what a fish is to the hot desert sands. He plays golf and volley balls. Excels in one, keeps up in the other. That's just fine with me and definitely fine with him because he's not a playa. He's a killer.
I never got to scream that's my boy after a three run RBI but I am proud to say he's an unsympathetic, merciless, unstoppable, death machine when he's playing Halo 3 on Xbox live.
Yesterday, he was playing some guy from Australia who was a Brigadier level player (which means he hasn't slept in eight weeks) who had the temerity to kill my son who was on his own team, a move the game announces by saying you were betrayed. Connor's inner sense of justice was so fouled, he followed the guy through the rest of the game and punked him at every opportunity. Scored the highest kills in the game, left a pile of bodies behind a Warthog. The guy couldn't even get in the game. At one point, his virtual highly armored self actually shrugged its virtual shoulders and virtually stood there, virtually crying. I was so proud.
who was probably about to scoop up an interesting rock. He stood up in total shock, threw the ball to second base and got a guy out. After spending most of the season saying, well baseball isn't that important, and you should see the kid golf, I screamed so loud I spit my left lung into the dugout.
I don't pay much attention to sports. I just can't get into it. Guys will start talking to me about sports and I just blank out. Sounds like gibberish to me. Like cheerleaders talking about purses. Like old ladies talking about the neighbors. So the poor kid, he doesn't have much of a sports dad to teach him the ropes. That might not matter much since he is to sports what a fish is to the hot desert sands. He plays golf and volley balls. Excels in one, keeps up in the other. That's just fine with me and definitely fine with him because he's not a playa. He's a killer.
I never got to scream that's my boy after a three run RBI but I am proud to say he's an unsympathetic, merciless, unstoppable, death machine when he's playing Halo 3 on Xbox live.
Yesterday, he was playing some guy from Australia who was a Brigadier level player (which means he hasn't slept in eight weeks) who had the temerity to kill my son who was on his own team, a move the game announces by saying you were betrayed. Connor's inner sense of justice was so fouled, he followed the guy through the rest of the game and punked him at every opportunity. Scored the highest kills in the game, left a pile of bodies behind a Warthog. The guy couldn't even get in the game. At one point, his virtual highly armored self actually shrugged its virtual shoulders and virtually stood there, virtually crying. I was so proud.
Damn, that's a sweet dragon.
I found these posters while looking for some graphic art prompts. Absolutely fantastic. I would go see every one of these guys . . . except the Floyds.The biggest difference between graphic art of the Victorian era and today is not merely the brilliant advent of photoshop, it's the mistakes. The old stuff had gorgeous mistakes which do not happen in computer controlled artistic rendering. Look at the way the letters are not base aligned and how they're all weighted differently. Not because the artist wanted them to be, but because the artist was eyeballing the whole thing and didn't have an intel processor equipped Mac that could kern ligatures to the nanometer.
And look at that frikking dragon. Damn, that's a sweet dragon.
You can see the rest of the collection here.
Haute Cuisine Macaroni and Cheese is GO!
I looked up Macaroni in Cheese on the internet to get the best recipe. Seven hours later, I gave up and just tried to find the common trends in the 3,410,987 recipes I read before I gave up.
Here's the deal. My wife and I love cheese. Maybe it's because we live within spittin' distance of Wisconsin or maybe it's because we're nouveau snobs and love to talk about how we had some delicious manchego with our 12 year old tawny port. Or we're dweebs. We even shop at a cheese shop, The Cheese Stands Alone, down on Western. So we often have a couple of heels of expensive cheese sulking in the fridge and I like to give 'em a new home shredded up along side some hardcore New York cheddar with so much attitude it smokes cigarettes and still listens to the Stones and bake it into comfort food heaven.
Recipe:
DO NOT MEASURE ANYTHING
So my Mac&Cheese has: Manchego, Piave, Iberico, Romano, and frikkin' Chedda. I take four egg yolks, a spoonful of Dijon, some cream, and a little Cayenne pepper. Oh. Macaroni.
You shred all the cheese into a pile. You get a bowl, toss in the egg yolks, mustard, cream and cayenne and mix 'em together. Toss in the macaroni (cooked--duh). Mix it up. Now add most of the shredded cheese, mix it up. Pour it into the baking thing. Finish with the rest of the cheese, toss it into an oven that's almost on fire until the cheese on top is brown and bubbling.
My son ate it like he'd been starved to death.
Serve it. Ought to look like this:
Here's the deal. My wife and I love cheese. Maybe it's because we live within spittin' distance of Wisconsin or maybe it's because we're nouveau snobs and love to talk about how we had some delicious manchego with our 12 year old tawny port. Or we're dweebs. We even shop at a cheese shop, The Cheese Stands Alone, down on Western. So we often have a couple of heels of expensive cheese sulking in the fridge and I like to give 'em a new home shredded up along side some hardcore New York cheddar with so much attitude it smokes cigarettes and still listens to the Stones and bake it into comfort food heaven.
Recipe:
DO NOT MEASURE ANYTHING
So my Mac&Cheese has: Manchego, Piave, Iberico, Romano, and frikkin' Chedda. I take four egg yolks, a spoonful of Dijon, some cream, and a little Cayenne pepper. Oh. Macaroni.
You shred all the cheese into a pile. You get a bowl, toss in the egg yolks, mustard, cream and cayenne and mix 'em together. Toss in the macaroni (cooked--duh). Mix it up. Now add most of the shredded cheese, mix it up. Pour it into the baking thing. Finish with the rest of the cheese, toss it into an oven that's almost on fire until the cheese on top is brown and bubbling.
My son ate it like he'd been starved to death.
Serve it. Ought to look like this:
What's in a Name
y daughter’s budding freshman romance is either sickening, if you are a crusty old curmudgeon like myself, or the sweetest thing you’ve ever seen if you’re retarded.I suppose I’m a little jealous in a weird and admittedly stupid way, that she’s dating someone in 9th grade. I didn’t have a date until the end of 10th grade and it didn’t go too well. I didn’t have a girlfriend . . . until . . . um . . . So, anyway, like I said, this thing is saccharine to the point of causing instant diabetes if you stand too close to her and it got even worse this week when she celebrated her monthiversery.
This auspicious date fell on the day one of best friends, Scott T. Pants, and his beautiful Italian wife brought a gorgeous girl into the world and made the exact same mistake as me and my Attorney by giving their daughter a name that is both elegant and portentous. They named their daughter Sophia. We named ours Sarah. Both names lie side-by-side in the baby name books under the rubric of “wisdom” but the baby name books are written by childless zombie robot hacks and they never go any deeper in their research or experience to figure out what a name really means because clearly the names Sophia and Sarah, if you look them up in the original Sanskrit, mean not “wise one,” but, instead, “too smart for her own good—and yours”. It’s right there on the pyramids.
I feel for Pants and his lovely Italian wife and I fear for him too because, like me, he has spawned a force of nature not unlike a hurricane for, like me, Pants married a beautiful genius, and, therefore, like Rah, his Sophia will be the center of his universe. Whether he likes it or not.
Having a beautiful genius daughter is a little like reverting back to your first girlfriend because they know they hold your heart in their hands and will happily smash it to pieces should you have the temerity to disagree with them about even the slightest thing. Say, for instance, coming home from a date via the blue line through Chicago after dark.
Where the normal, caring, wise father would offer the humble opinion that, should one decide to seek one’s puppy-love romance at one’s boyfriend’s parlour, one should plan this event, in the father’s, again, humble opinion, so that one leaves and returns at reasonable times and informs one’s parents in a reasonable fashion prior to the event of all the details surrounding the event out of respect for all the parties involved.
However, a girl named Wisdom knows, innately and without the arduous necessity of actual consideration, that world bends to her will and humble opinions be damned, she will inflict her noble presence on the CTA at her leisure or her father shall never have the pleasure of her company again.
So I feel like I ought to say something right here and now and provide a sign post, a guiding tract, a word, to new fathers everywhere, and particularly to my friend, Pants: choose your daughter’s name carefully and don’t pick something so auspicious as Sarah. Pick Hope or Faith or Joy—something malleable and sweet, a name that bespeaks verdant pastures and song. Something wholesome and Swedish, like Helga.
Punch Buggy Pugilism and the Black Parade
Maybe it's part of getting old, but I can't seem to spot Volkswagen beetles until it's too late. By too late, I mean my son has drilled me in the bicep with a Chuck Norris knuckle punch and I'm howling with pain and barely able to drive us through insane Chicago traffic to the next Volkswagen beetle, which I will not see. Again.
In case you are just now walking out of a life in a cave, punch buggy is the emerging Olympic sport of sighting Volkswagen beetles and then, upon said visual identification of said beetle of Voklswagenistic orgin, promptly beating the crap out of whomever you're sitting next to. This game is played in the car, while driving, so if that person is the driver, then they better be able to maneuver sans left hand because the moment the person riding shotgun sees a buggy--WHAM--dead left arm.
Roon is addicted to this stupid game, a game surely invented by 10 year old brothers back in 1835 when they didn't have the internet or cars or decent health care and, on more than one occasion, I am certain, some poor Swedish immigrant buried an extra son after a buggy punch incident went horribly wrong. I can see him now, Amish beard wagging in the afternoon sun, leaning against a hand-made shovel in his white shirt and stovepipe pants, wide brimmed hat held grimly at his side, "Vell, he vas a goot bouy, and he is viff Gott now--punch buggy! (slam!) ooh!--gott to digg another hole, yah"
The game and my son's violent enthusiasm for it, are underscored by his new obsession with My Chemical Romance, a group that wears almost as much makeup as KISS and has almost the same weird marshall influence on its ravenous, zombiefied 10 year old fan base. I have to admit, I think they're a good group and I can hear the guitar player pretty obviously ripping off Queen and I doff my hat (well, do-rag) to his ingenious and talented thievery. But the group revels in some kind of grave obsession with the color black and death imagery and are trying, I think, to single-handedly create a new genre combinging emo, which is like a curse word for 10 year olds, and goth, which is a level of cool ten year olds peer hopefully toward and whisper about and pretend to disregard almost as much as they pretend not to notice girls, a genre I think might be called Gothmo, or Emoth.
I remember when I was young I wanted to be in the KISS army. We all wore Army fatigues and KISS t-shirts and threw our horns-of-Satan salutes in the air and prayed for the coming revolt to be a violent, sustained, bloodbath of biblical scope during which our heroes would descend from a lightning streaked thunderhead and join us as we decapitated disco dancing yuppies with our razor-edged flying-v electric guitars.
My Chemical Romance inspires a similar, though wussed-out, semi military response in it's fans although they're all vegetarians and pacifists so instead of the KISS army they're more like the Salvation Army, dancing, sort of. So I get the music thing but I never, ever, hit my dad. Evidence to this fact is that I can type with both hands.
Together, along with the inch and a quarter he gained since January and the ability to wear my shoes, punch buggy pugilism and the enthusiasm for the Black Parade are turning my son into that thing that's older than a kid but not quite a tween yet and I can see the hairy gawky teen poking out of him like he's wearing some kind of costume. Just the other day he was sitting on the couch and suddenly sniffed and said to the room "God, my pits reek."
And it's not the gleefully vicious thrill he gets spotting one of those stupid cars and punching me in the arm to the glumjoy cascade of electric guitar from My Chemical Romance that's driving home the fact that I'm getting older and so is the mini-me. It's not even the fact that I miss the same antibiotic-chalk-yellow buggy that's parked in the same spot every damn day and take a hit for it because I'm getting older and so is it. It's this: when he hits me, it's not like a kid is hitting me, it's like some dude is hitting me. It kind of hurts and after two or three buggies, I got to tell him to lay off and I pretend its because I think it's boring but the truth is, my arm hurts.
In case you are just now walking out of a life in a cave, punch buggy is the emerging Olympic sport of sighting Volkswagen beetles and then, upon said visual identification of said beetle of Voklswagenistic orgin, promptly beating the crap out of whomever you're sitting next to. This game is played in the car, while driving, so if that person is the driver, then they better be able to maneuver sans left hand because the moment the person riding shotgun sees a buggy--WHAM--dead left arm.
Roon is addicted to this stupid game, a game surely invented by 10 year old brothers back in 1835 when they didn't have the internet or cars or decent health care and, on more than one occasion, I am certain, some poor Swedish immigrant buried an extra son after a buggy punch incident went horribly wrong. I can see him now, Amish beard wagging in the afternoon sun, leaning against a hand-made shovel in his white shirt and stovepipe pants, wide brimmed hat held grimly at his side, "Vell, he vas a goot bouy, and he is viff Gott now--punch buggy! (slam!) ooh!--gott to digg another hole, yah"
The game and my son's violent enthusiasm for it, are underscored by his new obsession with My Chemical Romance, a group that wears almost as much makeup as KISS and has almost the same weird marshall influence on its ravenous, zombiefied 10 year old fan base. I have to admit, I think they're a good group and I can hear the guitar player pretty obviously ripping off Queen and I doff my hat (well, do-rag) to his ingenious and talented thievery. But the group revels in some kind of grave obsession with the color black and death imagery and are trying, I think, to single-handedly create a new genre combinging emo, which is like a curse word for 10 year olds, and goth, which is a level of cool ten year olds peer hopefully toward and whisper about and pretend to disregard almost as much as they pretend not to notice girls, a genre I think might be called Gothmo, or Emoth.
I remember when I was young I wanted to be in the KISS army. We all wore Army fatigues and KISS t-shirts and threw our horns-of-Satan salutes in the air and prayed for the coming revolt to be a violent, sustained, bloodbath of biblical scope during which our heroes would descend from a lightning streaked thunderhead and join us as we decapitated disco dancing yuppies with our razor-edged flying-v electric guitars.
My Chemical Romance inspires a similar, though wussed-out, semi military response in it's fans although they're all vegetarians and pacifists so instead of the KISS army they're more like the Salvation Army, dancing, sort of. So I get the music thing but I never, ever, hit my dad. Evidence to this fact is that I can type with both hands.
Together, along with the inch and a quarter he gained since January and the ability to wear my shoes, punch buggy pugilism and the enthusiasm for the Black Parade are turning my son into that thing that's older than a kid but not quite a tween yet and I can see the hairy gawky teen poking out of him like he's wearing some kind of costume. Just the other day he was sitting on the couch and suddenly sniffed and said to the room "God, my pits reek."
And it's not the gleefully vicious thrill he gets spotting one of those stupid cars and punching me in the arm to the glumjoy cascade of electric guitar from My Chemical Romance that's driving home the fact that I'm getting older and so is the mini-me. It's not even the fact that I miss the same antibiotic-chalk-yellow buggy that's parked in the same spot every damn day and take a hit for it because I'm getting older and so is it. It's this: when he hits me, it's not like a kid is hitting me, it's like some dude is hitting me. It kind of hurts and after two or three buggies, I got to tell him to lay off and I pretend its because I think it's boring but the truth is, my arm hurts.
My Friend Started a Blog.
My friend in Florida, Pat Greene, just started a blog. He roams all over Florida writing news stories for regional mags. He has the weirdest most serendipitous luck anyone could ask for. No writer could ask for better luck. I mean, seriously, who gets lost in Tarpon Springs and finds a casket in a dumpster. Please read his new blog and congradulate him on his excellent spelling. His blog: I Still Don't Want to Talk About It. 
Dear Google
I monitor the efficacy of your adwords program with the obsessive-compulsive attention to detail usually employed by internet celebrity stalkers or fantasy football nerds. I am concerned about how your "relevant text-based ads" are stacking up against my writing.
To whit: what the hell is it in death by children that generates an ad for BAGPIPES for the love of Christ? BAGPIPES!
Also: BAGPIPES!
It's just frikking stupid to align an article blatantly begging people to jack me into the memeoshpere like some kind of rocket propelled Amway freak with ads for a totally idiotic Scottish toture device. I mean cat mangler. I mean car wreckophone. I mean instrument.
This is an AD CAMPAIGN! I'm expecting, literally, THOUSANDS of visitors looking for more articles about teen boob distress and my gay dog and you, YOU, multi-bajillion-dollar-a-minute-Bill-Gates-Can-kiss-my-processors size mega company stacked to the eaves with qudra-degreed MIT Philberts think all these people are going to go: " . . . "I can't believe you want me to restrain my womanhoo--HEY LOOK, THEY'RE SELLING BAGPIPES! RED HOT BAGPIPES! JUST LIKE MAMMA USED TO . . .
I don't know. Blow?
Hey Google. It's a parenting blog. It's a humor blog. I'm a distraught manwife writing jokes about tampons and peeing out fires! Not haggas, ya bloody fuel!
To whit: what the hell is it in death by children that generates an ad for BAGPIPES for the love of Christ? BAGPIPES!
Also: BAGPIPES!
It's just frikking stupid to align an article blatantly begging people to jack me into the memeoshpere like some kind of rocket propelled Amway freak with ads for a totally idiotic Scottish toture device. I mean cat mangler. I mean car wreckophone. I mean instrument.
This is an AD CAMPAIGN! I'm expecting, literally, THOUSANDS of visitors looking for more articles about teen boob distress and my gay dog and you, YOU, multi-bajillion-dollar-a-minute-Bill-Gates-Can-kiss-my-processors size mega company stacked to the eaves with qudra-degreed MIT Philberts think all these people are going to go: " . . . "I can't believe you want me to restrain my womanhoo--HEY LOOK, THEY'RE SELLING BAGPIPES! RED HOT BAGPIPES! JUST LIKE MAMMA USED TO . . .
I don't know. Blow?
Hey Google. It's a parenting blog. It's a humor blog. I'm a distraught manwife writing jokes about tampons and peeing out fires! Not haggas, ya bloody fuel!
I am Heroic. Period.
My daughter’s friends were over the other day. My daughter’s friends are all hyper intelligent and busy as hell just like my daughter but, unlike her, they all have hero-quality dads who bend steel bars with their bare hands for a living and rescue babies from vats of molten lead and who, most of all, go away during the day to return haggard and stoic and dead tired sometime after 5pm.
I, on the other hand, wrestle laundry to the basement and immerse myself in the minutiae of dishwasher load planning and the use of “bluing” to make my whites whiter. I also make twisted knock knock jokes1 and have a tendency to sing where I ought to mumble and I have, somehow, become their hero.
I didn’t mean to and I say somehow but I’m being unnecessarily (and uncharacteristically) modest--I know exactly how I became their hero: I told them I chart my daughter’s . . . um . . . I keep a record of, uh . . . I mark the calendar for. . .
I’m steadfastly abreast of her punctuation.
This is not the lowest depth my steady emasculation, by the way. That’s surely marked by me sitting through a stuttering presentation of a Hugh Grant movie so insipidly British even Hugh Grant was rolling his eyes--IN THE MOVIE HE WAS STARRING IN! It was a chick flick so flicking chicked I think I grew breasts while I was watching. But, such is marriage. I made my attorney sit through Spawn once so I owe her forever.
It is, however, a most unmasculine thing to do, to chart the, er, grammatical manifestation of your little princess. In fact, if you are a man, just Stumble elsewhere. I’m embarrassed, ok? Chicks, keep reading.
It all started because [My Attorney] is pretty much too frikkin busy to pay attention to her own [red swarm]. One day she was working hard, staying up late after a 14 hour day deciphering antennae displacement graphs or something equally insanely technical. She was sleep deprived and focused with such unwavering intensity that she actually burned a hole through a deposition with her very eyes.
She said “God I feel like crap. I feel bloated and woggly and irritable and—“
“You’re getting your [red tide]”
“I just had my [monsoon wedding]!”
“Yeah, 27 days ago.”
She’d been working so hard she’d actually lost her sense of time. I think if she didn’t have a calendar on her blackberry, she wouldn’t know what day it was. So her [mighty mighty bosstone] snuck up on her and smacked her across the head. I felt sorry for my little legal Lolita and decided to add her [insane in the membrane] to my automatic calendar and I’ve been charting ever since. To the minute.
Being that busy, she never really explained to the teen that this is a regular occurrence, that it can be expected, that JEANS DAY on the calendar is not referring too a dress code.
So, in for a dollar if you’re in for a dime. The next time my daughter screamed “PAD!” from the bathroom, I tossed a couple in (like grenades) and put her on my calendar too.
So there she is, hanging with her friends—ok . . . hanging is way too energetic to describe what they do. They flop. They flop over the chair. They flop down in front of the TV. They flop down the steps, flop into the car, and flop out. They’re virtually boneless. They're all draped across the furniture expending less energy than most dead field mice when I casually mention to Rah that I’d stocked the bathroom with [ammunition] and she might want to remember that since she was due for her [screaming orc horde].
Her friends howled with approval and the Polish one screamed out YOU ARE MY HERO!
So there you go. My ability to suppress my natural male tendency to fish and work on trucks in favor of ticking off the days until the women in my life are assaulted by their respective [mammy tsunamis] has elevated me to the level of hero. I should have a statue.
I can see myself now, standing tall, cast in bronze, a metallic cape forever blown behind me in chunky statuesque bravery, my brow pointed ever eastward, my countenance ever grim, ever focused—-a fistful of tampons at my side.
---------------------------
(1) KK/WT?/Dyslexic interrupting cow./Dyslexic--/Ooooom!
---------------------------
I, on the other hand, wrestle laundry to the basement and immerse myself in the minutiae of dishwasher load planning and the use of “bluing” to make my whites whiter. I also make twisted knock knock jokes1 and have a tendency to sing where I ought to mumble and I have, somehow, become their hero.
I didn’t mean to and I say somehow but I’m being unnecessarily (and uncharacteristically) modest--I know exactly how I became their hero: I told them I chart my daughter’s . . . um . . . I keep a record of, uh . . . I mark the calendar for. . .
I’m steadfastly abreast of her punctuation.
This is not the lowest depth my steady emasculation, by the way. That’s surely marked by me sitting through a stuttering presentation of a Hugh Grant movie so insipidly British even Hugh Grant was rolling his eyes--IN THE MOVIE HE WAS STARRING IN! It was a chick flick so flicking chicked I think I grew breasts while I was watching. But, such is marriage. I made my attorney sit through Spawn once so I owe her forever.
It is, however, a most unmasculine thing to do, to chart the, er, grammatical manifestation of your little princess. In fact, if you are a man, just Stumble elsewhere. I’m embarrassed, ok? Chicks, keep reading.
It all started because [My Attorney] is pretty much too frikkin busy to pay attention to her own [red swarm]. One day she was working hard, staying up late after a 14 hour day deciphering antennae displacement graphs or something equally insanely technical. She was sleep deprived and focused with such unwavering intensity that she actually burned a hole through a deposition with her very eyes.
She said “God I feel like crap. I feel bloated and woggly and irritable and—“
“You’re getting your [red tide]”
“I just had my [monsoon wedding]!”
“Yeah, 27 days ago.”
She’d been working so hard she’d actually lost her sense of time. I think if she didn’t have a calendar on her blackberry, she wouldn’t know what day it was. So her [mighty mighty bosstone] snuck up on her and smacked her across the head. I felt sorry for my little legal Lolita and decided to add her [insane in the membrane] to my automatic calendar and I’ve been charting ever since. To the minute.
Being that busy, she never really explained to the teen that this is a regular occurrence, that it can be expected, that JEANS DAY on the calendar is not referring too a dress code.
So, in for a dollar if you’re in for a dime. The next time my daughter screamed “PAD!” from the bathroom, I tossed a couple in (like grenades) and put her on my calendar too.
So there she is, hanging with her friends—ok . . . hanging is way too energetic to describe what they do. They flop. They flop over the chair. They flop down in front of the TV. They flop down the steps, flop into the car, and flop out. They’re virtually boneless. They're all draped across the furniture expending less energy than most dead field mice when I casually mention to Rah that I’d stocked the bathroom with [ammunition] and she might want to remember that since she was due for her [screaming orc horde].
Her friends howled with approval and the Polish one screamed out YOU ARE MY HERO!
So there you go. My ability to suppress my natural male tendency to fish and work on trucks in favor of ticking off the days until the women in my life are assaulted by their respective [mammy tsunamis] has elevated me to the level of hero. I should have a statue.
I can see myself now, standing tall, cast in bronze, a metallic cape forever blown behind me in chunky statuesque bravery, my brow pointed ever eastward, my countenance ever grim, ever focused—-a fistful of tampons at my side.
---------------------------
(1) KK/WT?/Dyslexic interrupting cow./Dyslexic--/Ooooom!
---------------------------
Happy Pulaski Day! A Day in the life of a nearly 10 year old boy
[My Attorney] went to Delaware this week for a patent trial in which a lot of people grumble and kvetch about who owns the intellectual rights to the number 7. So I’m left at home with the monkeys.
Girl monkey tells me she doesn’t have school Monday. I ask why. She declares: It’s Pulaski day!
Boy Monkey chimes in “Oh yeah, we don’t have school either--happy Pulaski Day!”
My kids go to different schools. Monkeyboy goes to a Catholic school and girlmonkey goes to a public school. They’re both geniuses and their state-manded ISAT scores pretty much lend measurable evidence to the idea that they’re smarter than me. This is a concept they exploit mercilessly and they’ve come to accept it as fact. So they assume any idea they have for putting one over on me is a perfect idea since by context it will exceed my stated level of understanding. I firmly believe that they sometimes think that when they talk in my presence I think they’re speaking a different language. Their arrogance is unfathomable.
And dead on. When Monkeyboy said he had Pulaski day off, I didn’t even blink I just thought 'great, I can sleep in'.
His school wakes me up at 8:45.
“We’re just calling about Connor’s absence.”
“That little bastard.”
“Pardon me?”
“He told me it was Pulaski day.”
“That’s not a Catholic Holiday.”
“I’m going to kill him.”
“So he won’t be coming in?”
“Oh, he’ll be there.” [evil music rises . . .]
When I want to, I have a voice like a cannon. I reserve this voice for unsolicited calls from mortgage resellers and republicans. I used vox artilleria to wake up Connor by loudly wishing him HAPPY PULASKI DAY! He leaped straight out of the covers and landed feet first in an excuse.
“I said I thought we had Pulaski Day Off!”
I hadn’t done laundry—Pulaski day, right?—so the only gym pants he had were a pair discarded by his sister. They were too big and sagged around his ankles like he was wearing swanky potato sacks. I almost made him walk but I honestly believe it’s so cold outside his brain might explode like an ice-decavitated Pepsi can.
Later: at school, he and his friend-who-just-happens-to-be-a-girl whom shall never be referred to as a girlfriend, __ __ __ __ ___ __ __, have a knock down drag out over which dog is most popular, Border Collies (ours) or bulldogs, (hers). Pretty soon they have the room divided and at each other's throats like one of those weird psyche experiments from the 60s and he and __ __ __ __ ___ __ __, his friend-who-just-happens-to-be-a-girl, aren’t speaking. Which is ok because, ‘dude, she’s a girl.’
Later: To fulfill a promise, I take them to dinner at Gino’s East where you can write on the walls. I heard they serve pizza but scribbling on the bench is the principle attraction. I stop by Walgreen’s and bone up with sharpies and gel pens and we get a booth and start drawing on everything in sight. The simians disappear into the Gothic depths and I busy myself with some intricate graffiti. The male child comes back with the satisfied swagger of a dictionary-loving preteen who’s managed to write a word on the wall so vulgar and satanic a nun would drop dead after one syllable. He also sports a dumbass badge of truly classic stature: he’s used the brown sharpie to draw a mustache on himself.
A. Sharp. Eee.
I crack up and he tries to shrug it off but I catch him trying to read the fine print on the marker later on.
“Dude, are you aware you have a mustache?”
“Yeah!”
“Are you aware that a sharpie is a permanent marker?”
“Yeah, uh, what?”
“You’re going to have that mustache for three weeks.”
“I can get it off.”
"How?"
"Spit."
“Jesus Hapolid Christ. Why’d you draw a mustache on yourself.”
“I didn’t—Sarah did.”
“Well—why—what--how" the kids know when I’m about to 'splode. He cuts me off.
“Dude, I let her.”
“Why?!”
“Because she bet me I wouldn’t do it! Duh!”
Later: we get home and the Roon is declaring himself bored and I’m writing and I keep hearing this clickity clickity sound.
Let me admit here and now that I have an affliction. I can’t handle little clicky sounds when I’m trying to work. I fully understand that this makes me a whacked out freak hell-bent on one day driving a car with little plastic airplanes superglued all over the top. I understand that. But. The. Clicking. Has. To. Stop.
After the fourth snarling imprecation for him to CEASE! I turn around and give him the hairy eyeball. I hold out my hand and tersely demand that he give up whatever he’s picking his teeth with. I’m expecting a toothpick or a crayon or something marginally believable but instead he hands me a tooth. A fnarcking tooth! He lost it yesterday and I had him put it in a little bowl in the china cabinet and here he is sitting on the sofa driving me crazy by PICKING HIS TEETH WITH A TOOTH!
Little freak.
Lice, Lice, Lice Baby!
othing makes a parent feel more like a degenerate knuckle-sucking bat-shit crazy shut-in than finding lice on their kid's head.
When I was a child progeny, I lived in rural Alabama. Took the bus to school. I lived in a decent part of the county, good people, lots of churches, good soil. But there were pockets of insanity that can only happen when people are deeply isolated from public transportation and cable. The trailer kids, for instance.
My bus would stop at the trailer kids' place which was a dirt white single-wide set about a football field back off the main highway at the end of a weed choked puddle pocked red dirt driveway. It was never quite level and the door was gone. In the two years I rode the bus to school, that trailer never had a door. The kids would be standing at the side of the highway in perfectly starched shirts, perfectly pressed pants, lunchboxes in hand, their faces poking out through a pale circle of clean. It was incongruous and weird and to this day the open door of that trailer is like the drooling maul of Hell in my head.
When I found a fully adult louse crawling through my son's head my whole house morphed into that crooked doorless tornado target. I was disgusted. I wanted to move.
You read the lice notices from school and you secretly smirk and think, God which aborigines' kids are these? And wallow in the self satisfied luxury of knowing it ain't yours. Until it is.
I'd hunted for lice before. I'd held a promising dandruff flake under the magnifying glass with my wife leaning over my shoulder, laptop open to a googled image of a bug zoomed to Cthulian proportion. But we'd never found one. We just spent a lot of time tsking at the parents of children without lice black-tie ball and fund raiser, champagne glass to our lips, asking in a nervous whisper, You think it was the Greenburg's kids?
But no. It was my kids wearing a lice wig. And I had to make the call to the school and I realized that even if every other parent in the school didn't get a note saying BEWARE THE FAMILY G FOR THEY ARE BESOT WITH VERMIN, the frikkin receptionist knows. Might as well wear a sandwich board.
So I buy enough chemicals to qualify as a superfund site, and dunk Roon's head into a bucket of foul smelling gunk and carefully pull the NIT COMB through his hair and inspect it under the glass after every pull. My wife, who used to be an industrial hygienist has gone into hazmat mode. She's full-on FEMA. She announces we have to wash all the sheets and blankets.
All. Of. Them.
Everyone takes their special bath and does the monkey grooming daisy chain and we stay up till 3 am washing bed linens until we're reasonably certain the lice are dead. We wait three days and do it again because the eggs you missed might've hatched. We refuse all phone calls and don't go anywhere. We might as well be quarantined with a great big crimson L stitched on our chests.
So I send the kid to school with a note explaining our multifaceted assault on the infestation. They call me to take him home. He still has lice.
I stick him under a lamp and get the glass and there, behind his ear--eggs. Worse as I'm looking at the eggs, an adult louse wiggles out from behind a hair. Let me tell you, these things are not hard to see. It was like a rhinoceros. I actually smacked it and Roon yelped. So we do another day of treatment. I send him to school. They send him back.
I buy another truckload of chemicals. I spray the mattresses, the couch, the love seat, wash ALL of his clothes, spray his drawers, spray the dog, throw away his baseball hats, tooks, combs. I throw away all our brushes, buy more at the dollar store, get another bottle of VILE FOUL LICE KILLING PASTE and slather all our heads like I'm laying brick. Me and Darth Mom seriously consider shaving our heads and having the house fumigated. Another mom happens to call us to see if Roon has chicken pox because if he does, she wants her kids to get it and get the whole chicken pox thing over with and I admit the dark truth. She cracks up: Yeah, us too. She says her kids had it but they killed 'em with mayonnaise.
Mayon--naise?
Mayonnaise. Hellman's to be precise because when you bring out the Hellmans, you bring out the best. We put a chair in the middle of the kitchen and got some shower caps and to prove it wasn't entirely bizarre, I went first and let the kids dope my head an inch deep. I smelled like a hoagie for an hour but I have to say, after shampooing it something like 30 times, my hair felt luxuriously thick and manageable.
So we send the kid to school the nest day and he sticks. We do the sandwich head trick three days later much to everyone's hilarity, and we've been lice free ever since.
Entreaty
I was talking to my dentist today, the best Dentist in Chicago (this is not hyperbole), and he mentioned that one of the things that he really likes about the blog is all the comments. He really likes reading the comments. Some other people have said the same thing.
I want to take a moment to thank everyone for their input. People like Sween, Miss Celliana, Oh The Joys, Drama, The Cleaning Lady, Miss Bliss, Jadegirl, Blogdog, everyone else but especially Anonymous because you're, well, anonymous and it kind of weirds me out that you compliment me and I don't know who you are.
I pray to god you're an editor at a filthy rich publishing house and you're considering giving me a 1.5 million dollar upfront deal but I am resigned to the more likely reality that you're making license plates in a windowless facility in Tampa where you were incarcerated for repeatedly emailing the President the Hurley numbers from Lost. Nice one.
In any case, you guys all rock and I am very VERY grateful for the way you're going to email a link to this blog to everyone you know and everyone you ever met and everyone in those address heavy emails about lost children and angels because you know how vital and important it is to the health of the very planet that everyone alive read my posts about my daughter's boobs.
I want to take a moment to thank everyone for their input. People like Sween, Miss Celliana, Oh The Joys, Drama, The Cleaning Lady, Miss Bliss, Jadegirl, Blogdog, everyone else but especially Anonymous because you're, well, anonymous and it kind of weirds me out that you compliment me and I don't know who you are.
I pray to god you're an editor at a filthy rich publishing house and you're considering giving me a 1.5 million dollar upfront deal but I am resigned to the more likely reality that you're making license plates in a windowless facility in Tampa where you were incarcerated for repeatedly emailing the President the Hurley numbers from Lost. Nice one.
In any case, you guys all rock and I am very VERY grateful for the way you're going to email a link to this blog to everyone you know and everyone you ever met and everyone in those address heavy emails about lost children and angels because you know how vital and important it is to the health of the very planet that everyone alive read my posts about my daughter's boobs.
I'm in a Co Dependent Relationship with my Gay Dog
My dog is gay and he thinks we’re married.
I’m serious. I’ve written about my retarded dog previously but just to refresh: my dog is a tardhound and he ain’t getting any better.
I noticed it when we first got him from a Border Collie rescue mission way out in Idaho. They picked him up on the side of the road and clearly he was busted from square one because his foster masters raised him with cats. When we got him he was house trained and the first time he went out to poop, I noticed that he immediately covered it up. I asked the nice lady who voluntarily drove my dog all the way to Chicago and wouldn’t even accept a tip: “Was he . . . raised by cats?”
“Oh, a lot of puppies do that. He’ll grow out of it.”
He didn't. But that doesn’t make him gay or retarded, just poop finicky.
The retarded part is easily proven by the long list of highly expensive, cherished, or necessary household items he has eaten. Here’s a brief excerpt:
But I can live with (or without) all those things. I got a new cell phone and my daughter’s teeth are fine. What’s bugging me is how the dog is turning into my gay wife.
Maybe it’s because my actual wife, Darth Garlington, isn’t home that much. Maybe Ty sees an opportunity. Maybe he’s just trying to be helpful. I don’t know, but the little bastard’s nagging me all the time and it’s getting on my nerves.
Dog owners, explain this behavior.
He pre-follows me everywhere. He doesn’t walk behind me like a real dog, no. He scampers ahead no matter where I’m going, backwards, staring at me.
I thought at first it might be tracking behavior, maybe a little bloodhound work. But no. The only thing he’s tracking is our relationship.
He putters ahead of me, his eyes all arched and pleading: “Are you going this way? This way? How about over here? See how much we have in common—I know which way you’re going. It's like we're soul mates.”
He comes into whatever room I’m in and instead of lying at my feet with my slippers in his mouth, he stands across the room and stares at me, inching closer and closer, staring: "Is now a good time for petting? How about you pet me now? Now? What about now?"
When I sit down to work, he stands in the middle of the room and glares at me. If I look at him, he’ll take a step toward me then back up, sit down, and obviously look away like he wants me to know he knows I don’t have any time for him but he’s not going to let me know he knows that, no, he wants me to know he’s just perfectly fine. All by himself. Right here. Like three feet from me. Just licking himself, hanging out, don’t mind him. Ladida.
He licks my toes. A lot. I don’t ask him to do this and it just weirds me out. I mean the first time it was cute but now it’s like all the time and he does it while he’s STARING AT ME. I tell him to stop and he steps away then glances back at me like I’ve hurt his feelings. Like he’s saying “You don’t think I'm hot anymore!” It’s just twisted.
And don’t even get me started about his preference for 4th grade boys.
I know a lot of you see a pattern here and you’re thinking a) he needs to pee, or b) he’s lonely and just wants some attention. Well, you’re wrong. That dog spends more time in my lap than I do. And when he jumps up into my lap, he rolls over on his back, completely heels-to-Jesus, shoves his stupid head up under my chin and moans. Tell me that’s not gay!
I had another border collie, Chelsea (R.I.P.), and she did the same kind of things but I chalked it up to her being a bitch and her being 15 years old. Guy dogs aren’t supposed to do that kind of thing, particularly untrained idiotic guy dogs. They’re supposed to lay around and lick dirt. They’re supposed to crap and sleep and when you call them, they walk over and let you pet them on the head for a minute then go back to sleep.
You let a regular dog out into the yard and he’ll walk right past a burglar, a cat, a rabid barking squirrel, and seven pounds of raw steak, just to crap on the sidewalk then lay down in the shade and start snoring. That’s a dog.
My dog leaps into the backyard bark first, his ears all up, prancing—PRANCING!—with his tail in the air like some British office queen shouting “Now just see here, SEE HERE, you scoundrels! Ruffians! I will NOT tolerate your behavior!”
Other dogs walking by are clearly unimpressed, barely managing a canine ‘whatever’ bark. Then he’ll run back over to stare at me. I swear his eyebrows are raised. I swear he’s all middle-management. My dog could work retail. “Can you—did you—Good Lord, the nerve of that mixed breed terrier to just urinate on the fence like it belonged to him.” Stare. Stare. “Well, are you going to call the cops?”
Damn gay dog.
---------------------------
I’m serious. I’ve written about my retarded dog previously but just to refresh: my dog is a tardhound and he ain’t getting any better.
I noticed it when we first got him from a Border Collie rescue mission way out in Idaho. They picked him up on the side of the road and clearly he was busted from square one because his foster masters raised him with cats. When we got him he was house trained and the first time he went out to poop, I noticed that he immediately covered it up. I asked the nice lady who voluntarily drove my dog all the way to Chicago and wouldn’t even accept a tip: “Was he . . . raised by cats?”
“Oh, a lot of puppies do that. He’ll grow out of it.”
He didn't. But that doesn’t make him gay or retarded, just poop finicky.
The retarded part is easily proven by the long list of highly expensive, cherished, or necessary household items he has eaten. Here’s a brief excerpt:
• My cell phone. $125.00
• My daughter’s retainer. $300.00
• My daughter’s replacement retainer. $300.00
• A hand crafted dragon puppet. $120.00
• Half a bag of whiskey-filled smuggled German chocolate truffles: $15.00
• A hand carved hunting horn with my great, great, great uncle Lorenzo Ezekiel Garlington’s initials carved into it that’s been in my family for generations. Priceless.
• An Etch a Sketch
But I can live with (or without) all those things. I got a new cell phone and my daughter’s teeth are fine. What’s bugging me is how the dog is turning into my gay wife.
Maybe it’s because my actual wife, Darth Garlington, isn’t home that much. Maybe Ty sees an opportunity. Maybe he’s just trying to be helpful. I don’t know, but the little bastard’s nagging me all the time and it’s getting on my nerves.
Dog owners, explain this behavior.
He pre-follows me everywhere. He doesn’t walk behind me like a real dog, no. He scampers ahead no matter where I’m going, backwards, staring at me.
I thought at first it might be tracking behavior, maybe a little bloodhound work. But no. The only thing he’s tracking is our relationship.
He putters ahead of me, his eyes all arched and pleading: “Are you going this way? This way? How about over here? See how much we have in common—I know which way you’re going. It's like we're soul mates.”
He comes into whatever room I’m in and instead of lying at my feet with my slippers in his mouth, he stands across the room and stares at me, inching closer and closer, staring: "Is now a good time for petting? How about you pet me now? Now? What about now?"
When I sit down to work, he stands in the middle of the room and glares at me. If I look at him, he’ll take a step toward me then back up, sit down, and obviously look away like he wants me to know he knows I don’t have any time for him but he’s not going to let me know he knows that, no, he wants me to know he’s just perfectly fine. All by himself. Right here. Like three feet from me. Just licking himself, hanging out, don’t mind him. Ladida.
He licks my toes. A lot. I don’t ask him to do this and it just weirds me out. I mean the first time it was cute but now it’s like all the time and he does it while he’s STARING AT ME. I tell him to stop and he steps away then glances back at me like I’ve hurt his feelings. Like he’s saying “You don’t think I'm hot anymore!” It’s just twisted.
And don’t even get me started about his preference for 4th grade boys.
I know a lot of you see a pattern here and you’re thinking a) he needs to pee, or b) he’s lonely and just wants some attention. Well, you’re wrong. That dog spends more time in my lap than I do. And when he jumps up into my lap, he rolls over on his back, completely heels-to-Jesus, shoves his stupid head up under my chin and moans. Tell me that’s not gay!
I had another border collie, Chelsea (R.I.P.), and she did the same kind of things but I chalked it up to her being a bitch and her being 15 years old. Guy dogs aren’t supposed to do that kind of thing, particularly untrained idiotic guy dogs. They’re supposed to lay around and lick dirt. They’re supposed to crap and sleep and when you call them, they walk over and let you pet them on the head for a minute then go back to sleep.
You let a regular dog out into the yard and he’ll walk right past a burglar, a cat, a rabid barking squirrel, and seven pounds of raw steak, just to crap on the sidewalk then lay down in the shade and start snoring. That’s a dog.
My dog leaps into the backyard bark first, his ears all up, prancing—PRANCING!—with his tail in the air like some British office queen shouting “Now just see here, SEE HERE, you scoundrels! Ruffians! I will NOT tolerate your behavior!”
Other dogs walking by are clearly unimpressed, barely managing a canine ‘whatever’ bark. Then he’ll run back over to stare at me. I swear his eyebrows are raised. I swear he’s all middle-management. My dog could work retail. “Can you—did you—Good Lord, the nerve of that mixed breed terrier to just urinate on the fence like it belonged to him.” Stare. Stare. “Well, are you going to call the cops?”
Damn gay dog.
---------------------------
My Name is [NAME]; I'll Be Your Lunchroom Mom Today
Today was my first day as lunchroom mom for my son's 6th grade class. I am proud to say that I managed to secretly flip him off seven times without detection and he got me twice.
I was up past the witching hour last night writing so I was groggy as all get out this morning and showed up late with Monkey Boy's half-assed bag lunch, wearing a Cabela's hat, and one day's beard which on lesser men looks a lot like a nine day beard.
I was all about the irony of being a lunchroom mom and swore I'd wear a t-shirt with the sleeves cut off and "LUNCH ROOM MOM" written across the back with a sharpie but I manned out and forgot. I wasn't even funny. I didn't speak. I stood near the door like a disgruntled janitor waiting for some kick to cack on the floor. I'm sure some kid asked Monkey, "Dude, is your dad retarded?"
By the time the end of lunch had rolled around, they were stacking desks and had one kid duct taped to the ceiling. The class geek was using the teacher's laptop to hack into the grading queue. Some other kid was making prank phone calls to the class next door. Someone was hung out the window by their ankles. Mayhem. Depravity. I think. Maybe. I don't know. I know that I wasn't counting all the kids leaving for the head and when the teacher showed up I finally shook off my fugue, looked up, and realized half the class was missing.
"Where's my class?"
"Bathroom?"
"All of them?"
"Uh . . . . maybe I should count next time?"
At the sound of her voice the building tipped sideways and the bathrooms spilled children into the hallways, all of which walked past me as if I were some kind of exhibit.
I believe I have mentioned the malicious nature of children. You can't give them an inch, not a millimeter. Today one of the girls walked up to me carrying a bag of skittles and asked if she could go to another class to give it to someone. Dazed, barely awake, I looked at her for a split second then, mustering all the wisdom 8 minutes of sleep can provide, I asked her: "Are you allowed?" then watched the subtle contraction of her irises as she calculated, rechecked, and filed away the precise level of gullibility I had just exhibited and responded "Yes. Yes I am." then disappeared. Unable to properly focus my narcotic gaze as she left my field of vision, I noticed the girl in the desk in front of me, blocked by the Calculatora's head just a moment prior, was staring at me with hr mouth open.
I will never recover. I know how it works. If my daughter's school is Super Hero High, the Monkey's school is Hogwarts for The Holy and every kid in there is a certified genetic malaprop destined to be aggressively wealthy IP lawyers and moguls of various species and already, in sixth grade, I have shown weakness in front of them. They've got my number. I am doomed.
I can see already my lunchroom mom excursions will become increasingly militant as a cold war simmers between me and the students, with them imagining ever more complex and improbable permissions and goading each other to ask me if they can engage them. I'm tempted to just say "No," to every request. But, as I type this, I can feel the ropey sluice of my morning coffee finally jolting my brainpan and I realize that the best tactic for me is not to deny them anything at all, but to allow everything they request. These are honor students we're dealing with here. If I say "Are you normally allowed to superglue the bunsen burner on?" and they say yes, it's them that's gonna git the divil, not I.
Holiday Horse Latitudes
Every year, we've been working on building a new tradition for our Christmas Holidays and I think we finally got something we like. Some time between Christmas and New Years while the whole family is on vacation we go on a Movie Crawl.
A Movie Crawl starts when we wake up. I make a stupid, ginormous breakfast and we pop in some movie we've all been waiting to see on DVD. After it's done, about 12:00, we go to our favorite thee a tah and hit the first showing--and watch every movie they show for the whole day.
Well, not every movie. I'm not about to watch Alvin and the Chipmunks unless the fate of the world hangs in the balance. What you do is map the whole thing out, buy your tickets online so that you walk out of one movie and into the next.
We're lucky because we go see movies at Muvico, a brand new megaplex high definition digital screen 3D monstrosity with a 5 star restaurant, valet parking, and seats designed with the 21st century American ass in mind. A kid could lay down in these seats. They're huge.
Yesterday we tried to get our crawl on but life and Xbox 360 intervened so we only saw two movies. I'm pretty disappointed and I'm almost ready to tell my family they have to try again. Still, they were good movies.
I Am Legend the director had definitely learned the lesson about keeping the tension high. I thought I was going to have a coronary halfway through the movie. And when Will Smith talks to the mannekin (you'll know what I mean when you see it) I totaly bought it. I was practically in tears. In a ZOMBIE movie for the love of Christ. That's good.
Then we saw Charlie Wilson's War and were completely blown away and pleasantly surprised during the credits to find out it was written by Aaron Sorkin, who wrote West Wing.
So I'm preaching it: go out after Xmas and spend a day in the unreality of cinema. It's awesome.
A Movie Crawl starts when we wake up. I make a stupid, ginormous breakfast and we pop in some movie we've all been waiting to see on DVD. After it's done, about 12:00, we go to our favorite thee a tah and hit the first showing--and watch every movie they show for the whole day.
Well, not every movie. I'm not about to watch Alvin and the Chipmunks unless the fate of the world hangs in the balance. What you do is map the whole thing out, buy your tickets online so that you walk out of one movie and into the next.
We're lucky because we go see movies at Muvico, a brand new megaplex high definition digital screen 3D monstrosity with a 5 star restaurant, valet parking, and seats designed with the 21st century American ass in mind. A kid could lay down in these seats. They're huge.
Yesterday we tried to get our crawl on but life and Xbox 360 intervened so we only saw two movies. I'm pretty disappointed and I'm almost ready to tell my family they have to try again. Still, they were good movies.
I Am Legend the director had definitely learned the lesson about keeping the tension high. I thought I was going to have a coronary halfway through the movie. And when Will Smith talks to the mannekin (you'll know what I mean when you see it) I totaly bought it. I was practically in tears. In a ZOMBIE movie for the love of Christ. That's good.
Then we saw Charlie Wilson's War and were completely blown away and pleasantly surprised during the credits to find out it was written by Aaron Sorkin, who wrote West Wing.
So I'm preaching it: go out after Xmas and spend a day in the unreality of cinema. It's awesome.
A Baby Waitress's Dream Table
e’re getting our kitchen remodeled and it’s a custom job because our house is weird and we’re hifalutin’ and things tend to go awry and we were stressed and George Foreman grill be damned, we’re eating out. So we loaded the kids, the niece, the aunt, and headed to Olive Garden.
Apparently, word got out since everyone in Chicago decided to go to the same Olive Garden. When we arrived it was bedlam. People were sharking with obvious malice in their hearts. Some contractor had parked his rusted hulk of a truck ON the sidewalk next to the restaurant, creating a bottleneck of America’s Funniest Videos proportions. There was menace in the air.
As we had to take two cars my aunt elected to meet us there and since she wasn’t stopping by Walgreen’s and didn’t have Queen-of-all-fourteen-year-old-pre-Goth-anime-superstars driving her crazy, she got there first by 32 minutes and was rewarded with the joy of standing in the middle of what amounts to Denny’s Italiana surrounded by people who treat parking spaces like big game kills.
Now usually, we are the difficult table. Older, more experienced, waiters can spot us at the door and will elect to faint onto the knife table and suffer internal injuries before of serving us. Most waiters start crying halfway through the initial drink order and My Attorney can turn the question of ‘soup or salad’ into a legal inquisition that would make for a good Boston Legal script.
When you're buying supplies like baby bottles for your new child keep in mind that cloth diapers aren't old-fashioned in today's world, with environmental issues on our minds. Besides organic diapers you can also find lines of organic baby clothes to buy for those interested in organic clothes for their children.
We started our abuse with the ritual changing of the tables: as soon as we’re seated and the drink order is in, we decide to switch tables because of a) draft, b) cigarette smoke (real or imagined), or c) republicans (real or imagined). Last night was no different except that for once we switched tables exclusively because they cleaned off a gorgeous round six-top in the corner behind us. So I informed the maitre de (some guy in a vest) and eloped.
Our waitress arrived with the drinks, managed to delicately lay them before their respected orderers, and smile. She looked like a Polish version of Kirsten Dunst and it was clearly her first night.
It had taken me twenty minutes and two fist fights to park after I dropped everyone off and I was ready for a total meltdown walking into the resturant—a table switching, drink-order-control-freakin what-are-you-getting-what-am-I-getting psycho screamfest. Instead, my wife greets me with a kiss and here we were ten minutes into sitting down and no one had complained yet. We hadn’t even sent anything back.
Things got weirder. After switching tables, we all ordered our food with zero hassle. We received our salad and it was replete with olives and onions, our bread sticks were hot—there were no problems. Our table neighbors didn’t pick their noses, didn’t curse wildly, didn’t smell. We all talked gently to each other and had a very pleasant time. I mean, seriously, it was pleasant.
Then Kirsten Dunstski blew it. She didn’t put our order in. We didn’t know this. We only knew that she came back to our table and rechecked our order then our order never came and we sat there and watched my son turn into raving, insane, drooling maniac. We watched the table next to us finish their meals. We had our drinks refilled twice.
I don’t know what it is about Roon, but he goes into self-inflicted laughing jags of titanic proportions. Last night, he morphed into some kind of Jack Nicholson/PacMan blend, laughing so hard it looked like his head was split in half. And once again he proved that he is boneless, provided, apparently, with a geleton instead of bones.
I was in the poker seat and could look out into the maelstrom of customers and waitstaff and saw Duntski walk into a small throng of unsympathetic waiters and put her head in her hands, nerved out of her mind, and I knew she’d messed up our order and didn’t know what to do. Worst, the waiters were schooling her on how she’d have to comp a six top. I could see her primed for a core dump.
But she lucked out. Normally, we’ll climb the management ladder until we’re on the phone with corporate setting up a lifetime free-meal plan replete with private jets and a celebrity masseuse. But some kind of weird grace descended on us last night. I think the stress of remodeling, the constant pounding, dust, arguments, strange architecture revealed by demolition, and constant pounding--along with the pounding--had tenderized us. We were stressed into some kind of gentle frisson, like a runner’s high. We’d worked through the pain. Everything was luminal and joyous. Waiting 45 minutes for crappy faux Italian? Blissful. Wondrous.
I think we somehow all realized that we didn’t really have anywhere to go any way and we never complained and we enjoyed our meal without incident (except for the Hyena). My Attorney did gently suggest they comp part of our bill and the waitress was quick to comply—then My Attorney tipped her 25% of the original bill.
T W E N T Y F I V E P E R C E N T.
I hope Kirsten Dunstki made it through that night and I hope that she makes it though the gauntlet of busboys and grabass soccer dads and the self righteous bill hagglers that can rape a tip jar with a single malicious word. I hope that when she’s knee deep in jackasses, when the management flips and the new guy is a hardass, when she’s too sick to work and there’s no one to cover so she has to work through a fog of Benedryl to placate a six-top of real estate management managers who want to impress each other by sending back a bottle of house Chianti and faking a birthday just for the stupid handclapping parade, I hope she remembers the table of smiling Irish who tipped big and believes that her next table might be half that easy.
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