Laundry as a Form of Self Discovery

Laundry sucks. In the two years I've been on house arrest, I've just now started to get the tiniest little purchase on Mt. Dirtyclothes and that's just towels. I can keep up with towels. Everything else is chance.

Being the knight-like, selfless, humble servant I am to my family, I often reserve my own clothing to be washed last which means, if I'm lucky, I'll get to it before Kehjouteck shows up. However, I manage to get a shirt or a pair of pants cleaned enough to not run naked through WalMart. Sometimes, I don't. recently, I found myself wearing a t-shirt that had been on me so long it was taking phone calls and ordering lunch. I had to meet someone, pick up something at an office, and I figured I ought not look like I'd been abducted and dragged through a hayfield. So I put on my vegas suit.

You know the suit. I'm sure you have one too. For a guy, it's a bad ass black suit with killer cufflinks, shoes like small italian lapdogs laquered to a fine black veneer; a white linen shirt with a thread count approaching infinite, and a tie that can only be compared with the "girl in the red dress" in The Matrix. Even my socks are cool. Fully Sinatra. The Vegas suit.

I drive to the appointment listening to, no kidding, Sinatra, and feeling pretty swank. I swagger into the office and the girl behind the desk smiles at me. She grins actgually, a full on ear to ear and I just assume she's digging the Vegas suit. So I stand there, hands in my pockets, swinging my tie, being cool. I'm Joey Bishop. I'm Dean Martin.

The girl is still grinning. She picks up her receiver and whispers something into it and I scan the room and decide whether I'll pick up the USAToday or gaze cooly out the window when the grinning receptionist buzzes a friend through, another woman, who breezes into the room, takes in the Vegas suit, and lays a smile on me that makes me hear music. For a married man, this is a good day.

Another office worker walks through from the opposite door and grins at me and shares a look with the receptionist and I start to get a feeling, a kind of gnawing question, the idea that maybe it ain't my suit they're digging. That maybe a middle aged portly married man in a 400 dollar suit is still not much different from Capt. Kangaroo in black. I snap back into reality. Nobody over 22 smiles at middle aged portly men no matter how much they work out unless they actually drop wads of money in their path like crumbs--and that's not even a smile. Its a precursor of rictus. Nobody over 22--unless their pants are unzipped.

I spin around and do the "I-think-I-forgot-something-in-my-pocket--no-no-the-other pocket--shit!" check which delivers a positive YES YOUR ZIPPER IS DOWN YOU REGARDLESS JACKASS report.

See, I recently started wearing suspenders. This is NOT proof that I am an ancient old dork but finally cool enough to take off my jacket and roll up my sleeves, which I do on the rare occasion, like a really distressingly hard game of boggle. I just figired it was time. I needed that 1940s detective sobriety in my appearance. It's part of growing up. Besides, my damn stomach kept rolling over my belt letting my pants slip down and I looked a little too bubbalistic. What I didn't think about is how we are creatures of habit. Whenever I buckled by belt, I zipped. It was like punctuation. My suspenders suspended that habit leaving me frozen in the middle of an office with my hatch open below decks.

If I had only kept the laundry up. I'd've been standing there in a belted pair of shorts with a Hawaiin shirt and my zipper welded tight.

However, I manned up. In full view I casually closed the barn doors and picked up that USAToday I'd been considering and went about my business, horrified by the idea that I'd worn this suit six times already since I got the suspenders and people smile at me all the time. How many fundraisers had I unwittingly been the main attraction? I'd given a very popular lecture recently in this very suit with these very suspenders. Very popular. Lots of applause.

I'm Giving My Son Eyes in the Back of His Ass

I'm taking Roon to the plastic surgeon and get him eyes in the back of his ass.

The kid will sit on anything. He sits on the remote, on game controllers, on entire stacks of folded laundry, on my laptop--if it's on the ottoman even for a second there's a near certainty it will end up as a permanent imprint on his dimpled butt. Like a rebus of uh-oh.

I'm particularly upset about him sitting on the phone since they all look alike and I'm running low on Lysol.

Thinking about this makes me wonder what other specializations might be worthy of parental plastic surgery fantasies . . .

A nose in back. Faster fart detection.

Extra wide nostrils. Better booger access.

Night vision. So they can sleep with the lights off.

Prehensile probyscis. So they can hoarf their food and play video games simultaneously.

Eyes in the back of their ass. So they can see things before they sit on them.

The Reward for Most Boring Post Ever Award Goes To ...

Ok, I agree. The most recent post was weird, out of character, and didn't belong here. But it's a great example of what writers do when they're stuck. I wanted to write something for my blog and, truth be told., my kids aren't very interesting lately. The boy hasn't blown himself up and seems to be leaning away from such dangerous proclivities , and the girl is being entirely well behaved. The future of this blog is in serious question if they don't start going crazy again soon.

So I'm siting there realizing I have to my Manday post, knowing I don't really care that baseball season just started (though I'm excited about upcoming grill sales . . . ), I had nothing Manly to talk about so I tried to tie together the beginning of movies, the dictionary, and the dust bowl.

In the hands of a capable speculative essayist this might've turned out either a) spectacular or b) hilarious but in the hands of a desperate bloggist, it turned to be a) what the hell? ad b) huh?

So I swear to you, my capable readers, I'll stick to the subject in the future.

Quickie: My Doppleganger in Deustchland

BERLIN (Reuters) - A 43-year-old German man was taken to hospital in critical condition after he fell off a second storey balcony during a spitting contest with his 12-year-old son, police said Friday.

A spokesman for the police in the eastern town of Cottbus said the man in Forst had apparently lost his balance after thrusting too far forward in his attempt to outspit his son.

He tumbled over the ledge and landed on a balcony of the ground floor apartment, police said. He was taken to hospital in a rescue helicopter.

We're Getting Bigger! So Sign Up to Be Part of the Change!

Subscribe to our mailing list

Insomnia et futilitia! es cafe, cafe, el simplifico!

As I type these words it is a quarter to six in the morning and I haven't been to bed yet. Well, I've been to bed but I didn't sleep. I don't have insomnia, per se, I have futile sleeplessness. It's involuntary sleep deprivation based solely on the fact that I had a nagging feeling I'd forgotten something.

All night.

I tried to go to sleep. I dutifully got under the covers, I turned out the lamp, ad I laid there. Part of the problem is that a woman's work is never done. I spent the day cleaning and washing and feeding and running errands ad I discovered, around 4 am, that there is a routine, a proclivity, a jones that underscores my day: caffeine.

It starts off immediately upon being terrified out of bed by my egregiously explosive alarm clock which employs a frequency that can double as a sonic rust remover for aircraft carriers. It can move planets out of their orbit. I leap out of bed, race downstairs, and start the joe.

The recommended level is one lumpy tabledspoon of ground coffee per 6 oz. of water. I exceed this recommendation by an order of magnitude, using the recommended grounds ground for a crowd on the grounds that touching the ground slows me down, I'd rather bound around---See that? The shameless and blunt repetition and rhyming? Signs of a hallucinatory state.

I drop the kid off at the Church then head over to the dry cleaners which is located next to the Starbucks they built inside our neighborhood Starbucks. A doppio and a quick run through the Sun Times then race back home to take the medicine I take for a wee lil' problemo I developed, medicine that is essentially Doctor prescribed speed, make a new pot of coffee, and get crackin on the rigorous and erudite refutation of the latest swiftoboatian screes against Obama or Hilary stuffed into my email box overnight by rage-crazed GOP black-op clerks--SEE THAT!? That's unfounded paranoia [no it isn't--Agent K], the 'they're out to get us-ism [seriously, we're not--Agent K] symptomatic of a mind unhinged by stress or S L E E P D E P R I V A T I O N.

But tonight I don't think it was the industrial levels of caffeine or the medicine, tonight it was something at the back of my mind, one of those furtive, irritating hmmmms, like 'hmmmm--did I leave the stove on?' or 'hmmmmm--just how DO you load a self-firing bazooka?' or 'hmmmm--I wonder what THIS does?'

I clean, I prep for school, I have an early breakfast of diet yogurt and what looks like dried contact lenses. Anther cup of coffee. . .just brush the masticated contact lens off my t-shirt and--THAT'S IT: LAUNDRY! I left the kid's uniform in the wash.

But I can't find it. It's not in the washer like I thought. I remember at the last second that I was following a load of bleached whites with a load of NOT EVEN ON THE SAME CONTINENT AS BLEACH black business clothes for my Attorney, dove into the washing machine, and heaved them out over the side. I race down the stairs into the basement and land on--and sink into--an ice cold mound of wet clothes.

There's plenty of time to get them washed and dried. But now that I've discovered what it was that keeping me up, I can barely type. I can barely even sk'cj[s[n ]z. ............ ...... ...............

I'm Ready for my Close Up

During Halloween I was stuck in the back of Party City waiting for my daughter to try on her "Shame Daddy" costume. They make room for all the costumes by shoving everything unhalloweenic into the back aisle which is how I discovered my newest parenting tool: the air horn.

This is a father's dream toy and I don't know how I've gone so long without one.

Having trouble waking your little princess? FRONK!

Everybody talking at once during Robot Chicken? FRONK!

Skimpy shirt violation by girlteen? FRONK!

[My Attorney] may shoot me any day now as she does not see the intrinsic humor in quietly opening the bathroom door and FRONKING! her shower.

Still, all the FRONKING! in the world won't make my daughter move out of mosey mode. She could shuffle down hill. On skates. So we found ourselves stuck in the Chicago rush hour traffic we usually just barely miss. She has her make up kit in her hand and she's clicking it like a nervous Lehman Brothers loan officer. I keep suggesting she go ahead and put on her make-up but she declines with a mumble, staring out the window like a thorazine test dummy.

I'm scanning through FM looking for music that doesn't make me want to stab myself in the eyes from exhausted hope for good radio in Chicago. Every station is playing suck: bad ardent 80s synth pop, bad 80s repetitive Irish pop, easy listening, polka. Each three seconds of sampled music makes my daughter roll her eyes so hard I think she's going to affect the rotation of the earth itself. Finally something with the correct alchemy of beat and lyrics pops out of the speakers and it's like awakenings, she snaps out of it and starts putting on her makeup and I realize, she was just waiting for her theme music.

And I want to FRONK! so bad because I think this is a violation of her path to total cooldom. I think it should go the other way around and she should apply her makeup according to whatever music is playing, not wait for her current sonic obsession. So if country comes up, she should lay it on thick and blue with ruby red nautical level red hull plaster on her lips. Or if it's classical then just some burnt sienna and no sun for a week. Or if its goth, then bury your head in a vat of chalk.

While she's applying her lip lacquer, "No One Knows," by Queens of the Stone Age, comes on and together we lunge for the volume knob to crank it to a level you can use to mine cadmium, and I realize we share a musical helix of considerable worth. We rocket down North Ave hair rocking to Queens with all the gleeful pomp and indignity of Garth and Wayne. Then "Take Me to Funky Town," comes on and the ironic perfection of it's just too much for us and we go robot disco at the stop light in full view of beautiful people in Escalades on their cellphones. We don't care. It's "Funky Town," for the love of Christ: ironic retro disco fealty must be paid.

I realize that we share distressingly similar sick limits. We both laugh--hysterically--at that robot chicken promo when the gummy bear gets its foot stuck in a bear trap. I mean, H Y S T E R I C A L L Y.  And that's great. I know that for the rest of our life, our intrinsic taste in psychotic twisted humor and heavy metal will keep us from going nuts all at the same time. In the long run, it'll be cheaper.

DIY: Repairing an Antique Doorknob in Five Easy Steps!

Death By Children is about more than the nefarious and deadly machinations of our spawn or their efforts to render us twitching and pale from their ongoing appropriation of internet porn slang. It's about a lifestyle, a way of going about your day with a kind of Zen focus, a way of being ever more self sufficient and capable. To that end, we present our ongoing series of Do It Yourself projects.

DIY #014: The Doorknob.

Materials:
Doorknob.
Door.
Toolbox.
The Internet.
CNN.
Cognac, Cointreau, fresh lemon juice, ice.
73 years

Installation

1. Buy a cute Tudor style Chicago bungalow built in 1937.


2. Give that killer first floor bedroom with the double windows that would make a most enviable office to your son, the ingrate.


3. Make sure the kid develops into a sasquatchian freak of nature who can palm a watermelon at 13 and turns his doorknob with the same delicate grace with which the Titanic rammed that cheeky berg.


4. React with thinly veiled debilitating laughter when Sasquatch calls repeatedly "Dad? Dad? DAAAAAAAD? I'M LOCKED IN MY ROOM!"


5. Don't worry that answering "What? What was that? I can't hear you, open the door!" is not as funny to him as it is to you.


6. Let him out.


7. Using a screwdriver and jeweler's hammer, repair doorknob by tightening the 73 year old brass screw  holding it together by stripping the threads as if they were cast from old play dough.


8. Wait four hours then repeat.


9. Wait six hours then repeat.


10. Wait nine hours then repeat.


11. Using a carpenter's pencil and a torn envelope, write the following excuse for your son's tardiness:



To whom it may concern;
Please excuse Connor's tardiness for [date] as he was locked in his room due to a faulty doorknob and my inability to find the pair of pinking shears I've been using for the last three weeks to open his door and let him out.



12. Using the internet, look up ANTIQUE DOORKNOBS


13. Email a link to this alarming porn site to all your bros and, accidentally, your mom.


14. Get caught up in the rescue of those Chilean miners.


15. Over the span of three days, try to write a really good joke using "chili" "mine shaft" and "mistress"


16. Using a meat thermometer and a shoe, rattle the locking mechanism for your son's bedroom door as he yells "I'M GOING TO BE LATE AGAIN!" over and over.


17. Repeat #11 and #12.


18. Using Duct tape, seal the locking mechanism on your son's bedroom door.


19. Watch CNN for six hours.


20. Scream at your son to turn down the music or shut the &^%$#@! door!


21. Accept his impeccable logic when he screams back, "I WOULD IF YOU'D FIX IT!"


22. Using the ingredients listed above, make an absolutely killer Sidecar. Drink.


23. Write article about repairing the doorknob.


24. Don't repair the doorknob.