Boys Will be Frikkin Boys

Roon was born in March so, naturally, we had his birthday party June 25th. We rented the pool with the coolest slides, ordered pizza, and invited 346 ten year old boys. Who all spent the night in my basement attempting to balance themselves on the brink of death until three in the morning.

Now I am a sincerely cool parent and while I may not plan parties on time, I do ensure that the boys have a good time. I use my most advanced and preferred tool: my attorney. This time my attorney ensured a good time by filling a large bag with silly string cans and handing them out in the front yard.

I thought this was cool. I was really looking forward to this part because silly string rocks almost as much as cool Nerf guns and I had enough silly string that I'd made it onto the Fed's list of arms dealers. I lined the monkeys up, armed them, and let them shoot. We coated the yard and each other with a chiaroscuro of spaghetti threads. Each kid had three cans and they just kept spraying, screaming, and screaming, and spraying. It was awesome.

For like eight seconds.

Then one of the boys, and I won't say who because all their parents read my blog (if only to check it for porn links) but one of them ran up to me, screaming, and deftly sprayed his silly string INTO HIS OWN EAR. I chase him into the house, make him sluice his ear with water until I'm comfortable that a) he's ok, and b) he'll never, ever do something so frikking dumb again. We run back outside and he's barely off the last step, like midair even, when some other screaming kid sprays him in the face.

SIMULTANEOUSLY one of the parents who lives nearby was passing and skidded to a stop in front of what must have looked like some kind of hippy hazing ritual. In three and a half seconds her van was tatooed with purple snotwads and she was staring, mouth quite literally agape, as I screamed at my wife to take the kid into the house and WASH HIS EYES!

She called her son over to her van and had a long hushed talk with him. She called again later and stopped by once to bring him some shoes and he didn't stay the night. I can't blame her.

The rest of the night they spent playing Halo and Spongebob games. At one point my son raced upstairs, his chest bursting with pride, his face flush yelling for me. He'd managed to lock his friend in an elevator in Halo and his friend kept respawning in it and he kept killing him and the elevator was piling up with bodies. He was so proud.

They also spent the night peppering their opinions with "gay" as in "those Doritos are gay" or "your shoes are so gay" and "after being told his backpack was gay "that's gay." At one point, two of the boys had put their t-shirts on upside down and had stuck two of the styrofoam balls that had once filled the gut of the beanbag chair on their nipples and were prancing--PRANCING--around the basement chirping GAY GAY GAY.

My initial response was that I should sit them down and explain that GAY is not the same as, say, BLUE or CHINESE and shouldn't be used in such a cavalier fashion but I honestly couldn't do it because they all have such a finely honed sense of humor that one of them would've waited patiently until I was finished and then said: that's so gay.

We managed to get through the night without me saying the F word or appearing nude so I'm failry certain all the same boys will arrive for the party next year though I'm mot entirely convinced the one who's mom showed up--three times--will RSVP next time. I should reassure them: next time, no silly string.

Next time: paint ball.

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Death By Children Rescues a Man from the Brink of Certain Demise!

I received this email this morning and it really brought home to me the importance of being an accident prone articulate smartass:

bloodyowl has left a new comment on your post "The Water Pik Netti Pot Listerine Don't Try This A... ":

AHH! I reached this mess by Googling "netti pot listerine" to see if I could! I saw Water Pik, and said in my congested head, "Yessss, I totally have one of those!"So, thankfully, my ADD held off long enough for me to read the outcome of your fiasco... otherwise, I would have whitewashed the oldest and deepest parts of my brain with straight Listerine.Thank you for saving my life, and doing it hilariously.But I'm curious: are you still stuffed up?

IS IT WRONG?

To teach your housekeeper that "you semi conscious incontinent jackass" is a formal greeting whenever one meets politicians?

WTF Department

My daughter asks me the following:

Dad, if you were one of those cool gay guys, would you be a serious cool gay guy or one of those "out there" gay dudes with feathers?

I think the answer is obvious.

Kid Quotes

"You mean to tell me, dad, that if you were rich you wouldn't buy a monkey?"

The Scout Vote

It was a close call, but apparently I'm still in. After a shouting match, an impromptu "Stayin'Alive" pose off, and sining the signature phrase from "Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting," the new Scouts chose the patrol name of FUNKY NINJAS and their cheer is a stylized Karate yell.

My Kids Will be Proud

I don't know if it's proximity to Republicans or just the thrill of being on the radio and really having to talk faster than I think or what but in our second show yesterday I threw my hands in the air in exasperation of having to explain for the jillionth time to a republican freak dog that the best way to stop people from streaming illegally into our bright sparkly nation is to make their nation just as bright and just as sparkly as ours and for the love of God I just couldn't take it so I declared war.

On Mexico.

It's not that I really give a crap about illegal immigrants. I'm just sick and tired of explaining the whole thing to people who think in the slow lane. I explained it to my kids and received a resounding "duh." Why can't the Repubs get it?

I know, this isn't my political blog (christophergarlington.blogspot.com) but you need to know what's happening in radioville.

The way I see it, these poor border crossing desperate folks are risking their lives because their conditions blow chunks like a frat boy on Friday night. It's not their fault they have to run away to make enough money to keep their kids alive. And the GOP has done everything short of nuking Texas to stop the problem. It's not their fault we own the world. (Actually, it is). So who's fault it is that our borders are like Christmas at the Mall? It's the Mexican government's fault. And they don't care. They just sit around smoking cigars and looking for gold in the Sierra Madre without no steenking batches and letting their country go to hell in a handbasket (except for Curacas, Porta Villarta, laPlaya, Acapulco, and all those other killer destination beaches which might as well be in California) and allowing so many people to be dirt poor and scared and actually distributing flyers that teach people how to cross the border, allowing "role playing" tourist businesses which "re-enact" a border crossing never realizing all the tourists are from Oaxaca.

During the Halloween season when you think costumes you'll probably first think of kids costumes. In the weeks and months after Halloween the Santa suit is probably more important, as Santa costumes are not only useful for family photos but a Santa Claus suit can be useful for some kinds of Christmas parties.

So we go to war with them. Not for the sake of the people, though it would be nice if the average Jose in Mexico could afford his own home and a car and send his kids to a nice school. That would be a cool effect. No we go to war so the freaking republican hand-wringers will SHUT THE HALE UP and I can get back to having a nice conversation about tequila and Dominican Oscuros without getting into a fistfight with a right-winging nimrod who's had one too many MGDs.

The Secret Life of Fathers and Daughters Finally Revealed in All Its Evil Splendor

[My Attorney] works at home sometimes. Her MO is to sit down on our slouch, pull the piano bench in front of her, open up the latest American Idol and start working. That's about the time her blackberry vibrates off the bench and scurries across the carpet, its contents a volatile email with attached documents demanding that she solve the legal equivalent of Fermat's Last Theorum within the hour. Suddenly Randy is frozen mid "dawg" and My Attorney's hands go up like shields and the household is admonished to SHUSSSH!

Now, because we respect the sheer magnitude and complexity of what it is (whatever it is) [My Attorney] does, me and the kids generally respect her wishes, drop everything, and start disco dancing. We'll keep it up, pumping and thrusting like our life depends on it, until she screams and grabs her head and cries out in anguish "YOU PEOPLE ARE SO WEIRD!"

This morning, her Blackberry throbbed like a quarter-fed hotel bed, shot off the table, and stabbed [My Attorney] in the forehead whereupon she ripped a leg off the table and threatened the 14-year-old-95th-percentile-ISAT-tester-Anime-Superfan and me with bodily injury if we so much as breathed deep while she gnawed her arm off to get out of some bear-trap-legal-document deadline crisis.

Rah and I were eating Captain Crunch. Our eyes were unfixed and wobbling in our heads--she because she's a teen and me because I broke my coffee maker--when [My Attorney's] urgent outburst snapped us out of attention. We looked at each other and, reading each others minds, started tapping our spoons against the edges of our bowls.

It started out as just a mildly snarky jab but as we gazed into each others eyes, our inherent malice leaked out like burning tar and our light tapping morphed from synchronized cereal consumption normalcy, directly through 'let's raise our glass for a toast' wine glass clanging, all the way to a Nibelung anvil hammering cacophony of seismic proportions.

Gleefully evil.

Maybe I shouldn't be proud of how my girl-spawn so easily slides into maliciousness but I am deeply pleased that we have that silent Vulcan mind-meld and I am even more deeply pleased, my joy, in fact, is boundless, at the knowledge that this psychic connection is rooted in mutual sarcasm.

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