Laundry Mountain Finally has a Soundtrack

I'm typing this on an old chair in my basement. At my feet lies a low range of unfolded denim mountains and sloping terry cloth hills running all the way into the laundry room. I hope one day to scale those hills, to raze them into a perfect unadulterated plane of nothingness. But for now they mock me. They are in fact laughing at me because not only am I incapable of reducing these mountains into molehills and less, I am currently reduced to sitting on this hideous old chair and listening to a YouTube video of the Amazon jungle while my daughter does virtual laps on the treadmill for her class project, the 'transcendental challenge'.

I would love to be upstairs where the boychild is finally playing his brand new version of metal death worship, Call of Duty: World at War which I see as a training video for future corporate sponsored slaughter. It's kind of like Ender's Game playing out in real life. But I digress.

Both of my kids are somewhat terrified of our basement. They used to be perfectly fine until their cousin lived with us for a while in a room in the basement which she swears was haunted because late at night she could hear someone playing guitar. I think if you've got a haunt going on, and it plays guitar instead of asking you for your soul or clanking chains, that's a pretty good ghost. That's like some kind of double bonus, like if you found Bigfoot and he says "Hey, want to see something really weird?" and introduces you to his gay twin brother.

So they're scared of the basement and will only go down there in the daytime or with the dog or with an adult sporting loaded .45 automatics and a grenade.

So I figured since I'm down here, I'd give you a live moment by moment account of my life here: I'm in the basement staring into the foothills of mount domestica; the kid is finally getting into his newest slaughterfest, [My Attorney] is working on some kind of tangled legality at such a level of minutiae and detail you would need the Large Hadron Collider to surpass it; my daughter is listening to bird calls and monkeys while running a treadmill and writing down her thoughts about it every 20 minutes; and my gay dog is licking my toes. Again.

In my fantasy world as a noble literary giant, I am not embedded in the bedding in the basement, but sitting on a panel discussion at a convention of lexicographers who are impressed by my new word constructions and are about to give me an award, the Golden Dictionary, and a bottle of Balvenye and a box of cigars. Or I'm stepping onto the steppe in Veranasi and some kid offers me a glass of fresh chai and I'm wearing a white linen suit and my hand-made leather writer's bag and a stingy brim trilby and Johnny Depp walks up to me and asks me to sign his dog-eared copy of my best selling novel and says "Nice hat, man."

Or I'm sitting in my basement and the laundry . . . is . . . done.

Ghost Story

June. It's like 3 in the morning. It's ink dark in the house. I'm knocked out of a deep sleep by a scream.

This isn't the normal screaming I'm used to. This isn't "oh dear, I've stabbed myself with this kitchen implement!," Nor was it "Good Lord, that fecal expurgation was distressingly large and I fear that I may have torn something loose down there!" It was real fear. It was "I just saw a freaking ghost."

I ran downstairs, my mind blank with concern, and found Connor standing in the dining room, all the lights on, wailing. I grabbed him, asking what was wrong, checking him for blood, automatically adding up his extremities. He was perfectly fine--and white as a sheet. I asked him what happened.

"I saw a ghost."

Now my kids hate my inflexible stance on the paranormal, a stance immovable and fixed: it's one rung below noodling and NASCAR on the rung to true redneck Gothic stupidity and I don't buy it. I don't believe in:

• Psychics
• Bigfoot
• The Bermuda Triangle
• No Money Down Refi claims
• or ghosts

It just doesn't happen. As much as I enjoy reading about it, and as thrilling as it may seem, I think it's a big bucket of self agrandizement and delusion and the precipice off which one can gape into the wide, wiggly valley of bonkerville.

That isn't to say I won't tell a good ghost story. I've turned entire ranks of Cubscouts into wild-eyed, wigged-out believers. I made them cry and beg me not to tell another story. I've had parents tell me maybe I ought to tell some jokes instead. I can lay into it.

And I've met men who've spent their lives in the pursuit of dignity and providence, men who are not easily shaken, men who would stare down the barrel of a gun. They were the kind of guys you vote for. Pillars of character. And they told me they'd seen a ghost. Yet I don't buy it. I just don't.

But I'm closer now than I ever have been. If I shield my eyes and squint, I can barely see the idea of ghosts being real--like trying to make out the opposite shore of a long lake. I'm closer not because of Connor's recent scare. I'm closer because of my dog.

Connor didn't want to talk about what happened that night. He came upstairs and slept fitfully between me and my attorney. The next day Connor explained that he'd looked out his bedroom door and seen a face looking around the door jamb, then jerk back out of sight. He said he saw it then he screamed. I told him it was probably just part of a dream that got mixed up with some night time noise and not to worry about it and he bought it. Or seemed to.

But several months later. Yesterday, actually, out of nowhere, he told me what happened. We're driving back from downtown, just the two of us, and he tells me this version.

He says he woke up because Ty (the dog) was whining. He sat up in bed and Ty was standing next to the bed looking out the door, stock still. Connor looked up and saw a person dressed in nice clothes with white hair pulled back. He said they looked into his room and seemed amused. Connor said the dog backed up.

Connor said it took him a long time to scream. He said he had to make it happen. Then he said he screamed for a long time before I got there. (Of course, the sister never woke up.)

I've told you before our dog is gay and I mean that in a good way. Our gay friends know how to nurture--and Ty is no exception. When Connor gets hurt, Ty is all over him, tail wagging like crazy, licking and nudging, as if he's saying "It's all right, you'll be ok, don't worry, look I'm licking you. Everything is good. Lick lick lick"

But when I raced downstairs to deal with the screaming, when I skidded into the dining room and found Connor too afraid to come upstairs or go back in his room, the thing I forgot until yesterday is this: Ty's tail was dragging the floor and he was standing with his furry ass backed-up to the window and he was not happy. He was as far away from the hallway bathroom and he could get, still as a statue--looking over my shoulder.

Now perhaps Connor enjoyed a delusional moment of heightened and sudden neuroses. Maybe a moth flew into his room. Maybe nothing happened and he just had a dream. But the dog? Ty does nothing but wag his tail, lick people, and run around trying to figure out where we're going to walk next. He never stands still. Ever. Even when he's in STAY he's twitching and sweeping the floor with his tail, and smiling and panting and drooling all over himself. But this time--nothing. Backed up against the wall, afraid of the bathroom.

Give your effluence some affluence . . . or bowl bling.

I've been told many times that I act like my fecal matter manifests a pleasant bouquet unlike that of the fecal matter of my fellow man. Well, now I can at least make it sparkle:

If you've got so much money that you're just looking for new ways to waste it, Tobias Wong and Ju$t Another Rich Kid created the Gold Pill for you. It's a pill dipped in gold and filled with 24-karat gold leaf. You're supposed to eat it "to increase your self-worth." That would be funny if it didn't cost $425 for the joke. Supposedly an added benefit is that it will make your poop sparkle, but no one seems to have proven that part yet (and if you do, please don't send us the pictures). This is either genius social commentary or a brilliant way to bilk rich people out of their money. If Wong's name sounds familiar, it's probably because he also created the $2,000 ccPhone.

Things I Didn't Want to Hear

Connor: You know how, how farts smell, like out?

Who Ordered a Sleep Disorder?

A couple of months ago, my daughter started falling asleep in class. We noticed her grades were slipping. Her mornings got weird, with her nearly impossible to wake up. She slept in the car on the way to school, in class, in the car on the way back, on the couch before supper, in her chair at supper, on the couch after supper, in the shower . . . she was sleeping anywhere from 12 to 16 hours a day.

She started missing school. First she missed morning classes. Soon, she missed entire days. Finally, she missed three days in a row. Asleep.

Besides sleeping all day, she was gaining weight. A lot of weight. She was depressed. She was irritable. And sometimes, she was out of her mind. Her mother woke her one morning and she started screaming. She flailed around then stopped, for an instant, and stared at us like we'd just appeared out of thin air and cried out What is going on?! Then she wept. We realized that she wasn't actually awake until that instant before she asked what was going on.

We took her to an endocrinologist who did a full mark-up and found nothing. No reason for her to gain weight, no anomalies that might point to excessive sleeping. We took her to a psychologist who said she was depressed but offered no cure. We took her to her psychiatrist who, finally, a woman of excessive intelligence, suggested a sleep specialist.

The sleep doctor gave us a couple of tools to measure her sleep patterns. The result was insane. Sarah had a 'free running sleep delay'. Her natural onset of sleep was being delayed two hours every night. This resulted in her natural sleep schedule of 7 hours a night to occasionally bump up against itself and double up. It seemed random but it wasn't. On a chart, it looked like a spiral.

This disorder screws up a kid's circadian rhythm, the natural alignment of the body clock with daytime hours. Her body literally didn't know what time it was. It was running blind.

She also has sleep apnea from some kind of obstructive aspect of her throat. Though she is unconscious, she is not actually sleeping. In the lab, they said she woke up 17 times every hour and was getting less than 2 hours of real sleep every night.

This two problems combined to throw a bunch of her body-clock dependent processes off schedule or shut them down. She was irritable because she wasn't getting any sleep. She occasionally woke up crazy because she wasn't actually waking up. She was gaining weight because her body couldn't get all of it's maintenance done while she was unconscious but not asleep. She was depressed because she rarely saw daylight.

As of this article, Sarah has withdrawn from the Super Hero High School she was attending, one of the top 5 high schools in the nation and is working via correspondence. She is trying to use a CPAP machine but keeps ripping the mask off in the middle of the night. We haven't been able to realign her circadian schedule and as I type at 5pm on a Sunday, she's been 'asleep' since last night at 9:30.

I know most of my posts are supposed to be funny, but this blog is about parenting first and poop jokes second. Being a good parent is incredibly difficult and recognizing then fixing the myriad problems teenagers can face is hard. When a problem seems to originate from the eldritch imagination of a horror writer, it can be terrifying.

This article is the first in a series following our efforts to cure Sarah of this sleep disorder and get her back into school and in shape and sane by September. It also will serve as a means to educate other parents and commiserate with them about this wild card teen issue. I know, I know, regular readers are all throwing their hands in the air and wondering: yo, Chris, where are the fart jokes? They're here, they're in the other parts of the website. And know this, throughout this ordeal, Sarah is performing splendidly, accepting this issue philosophically, and most important, the most telling indication of what a remarkable and rare person she is: with a sense of humor.

Monday is Man Day: Pork and Blood

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="386" caption="My new girlfriend."][/caption]

Oh pork, you're so bacon. I don't know what to say. I'm speechless. I'm saturated. I'm enporkenated. I'm in heaven.

I visited the Butcher & Larder and had their Pig's Head Hot Sandwich and fell in love. I am now dating their slicer.

Imagine eating a delicious, freshly butchered pork sandwich while standing at the counter watching them fill sausages and slice bacon to order.

If only they served beer.

Poison Control Poster Child Training Unit 1

Nine-year-old boys are doomed by their curiosity. I know a lot of nine-year-old boys and they're all lucky to be alive. I thank god every day for their obsession with video games because it turns them into mindless, sedentary zombies--and it keeps them off the street and away from the power tools.

But sometimes it gets away from them and their curiosity makes them do something so irreversibly stupid that they lose an arm or worse. This kind of behavior is usually preceded by a question, either to themselves or a friend who is egging them on, something along the lines of "What does this thing do?" and thwack: meet Stumpy.

So I'm at the kitchen table writing, which involves, believe it or not, an ungodly and tedious amount of staring into space, when I notice my son is examining a mint. It's one of those highly technical mints where a hard, chalky candy is welded seamlessly to a translucent gel mint. It has a demarcation which Connor has discovered and he's decided to find out what's inside the thing by prying the two halves asunder and what he finds is that the gel, cinnamon flavored, is pressurized and the oil of cinnamon has exploded from inside the gel and taken up residence in his eye socket which has, as I look up, welded itself shut.

But I didn't see any of that happen. Though it occurred directly across the table from me, I was writing and, so , oblivious to anything other than the fine and specialized fiction which I labor to produce. All I saw was my son calmly holding his hands to his eyes. So I ask him, calmly, what's the matter?

Now, I don't get upset. I get annpyed. If a kid saws him arm off, though he may do irreversible damage to himself, the real problem is that he's ruined my day. Now I gotta do first aid, clean up the blood, do something with the arm, call 911. It's an inglorious pain in the ass and just pisses me off. And, really, most accidents and traumatic events are way overblown. Most things are on the splinter-in-the-finger varietal and should not intrude on the well deserved quiet afternoon of an adult. So I don't go looking for problems. I don't jump up from the chair when something crashes; I don't put down my magazine right away when a kid comes in with a nosebleed; and I never, ever, ask "what's wrong?" I don't want to know. So when my wife sees me rising gently from my chair, she explodes.

I see Connor hunch a little harder and a wail unwinds from somewhere deep in his knees. It comes out of his mouth shoots through the ceiling like a missile and explodes over our house, shaking the roof beams, and curling the floorboards up and Connor, suddenly lost in a plume of hurt, screams:

"My eyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyes!"

Colleen hits the dining room in full charge. She swoops Connor up, throws me the phone, and yells: POISON CONTROL! The way someone might yell "GRENADE!" and pushes her son into shower turns his face into a full stream of ice cold water and Clockwork Oranges his eyes wide open while he screams.

Poison Control tells me we're doing the right thing, that cinnamon oil is unlikely to cause any real damage and ought to stop hurting in about 15 minutes and maybe I ought to try a piece of bread. So I take a piece of bread into the shower with my son still bawling and Col tries to stick it on his eye to sponge up the oil but it dissolves.

Connor is sobbing and yelling that he's blinded himself, asking Colleen if he'll ever see again and Colleen of course runs all the scenarios through her mental actuarial tables, her ephemeris of disaster, and yells at me to ask poison control about it and the woman from poison control is trying to reassure me and says that really, such a small amount of the material won't cause permanent damage and I can call her back in an hour and let her know how things went.

So everything gets better all of a sudden. Connor stops crying. He and Colleen emerge in a heap of damp towels, fully clothed, wild haired and red eyed and slightly addled like they just washed up from a shipwreck.

The Overnight Camp Sagas: Day Three

I get this text to wake me up: "Dad, I'm almost out of clothes."

Well, no kidding. It's Wednesday. He's worn two and a half days worth of clothes so far. Roon has a tendency to wear undershirts. But he uses his other shirts as his undershirts so it looks like he's wearing two t-shirts. Well, he IS wearing two t-shirts. But I only packed on t-shirt per day so perhaps he's run through his stupid rock-n-roll t-shirt batch.

I've already been out there once to sneak him his laptop and enough snacks to last him a week which adds up to a metric ton of beef jerky and chips. However, I'm the world's worst dad and the power chord that was WRAPPED AROUND HIS LAPTOP in his room was NOT HIS POWER CHORD. Hommes was, shall we say, non-plussed.

I expected to be upbraided for my slackard ways. But instead his morning text emergency is that he might be running out of clothes.
I'm raising a fashion maven.