Empty Nest Envy Syndrome

Wait, wasn't I supposed to be sipping a demitasse at a Paris cafe this morning?

I checked my schedule and, indeed, my children were supposed to be gone already. Well, one of them. The other one is never here anyway so it doesn't matter. But the 20 year old? She's still sleeping in her room which, in French, is pronounced My Office.

But she has a job and she's going to go to school. I think. She said she was. I'm not sure which school she's going to. Maybe she's going to the school of sleep-all-day-go-out-all night and wear that one dress that makes me want to drape a blanket over her.

I willingly gave up my hip years to raise kids. I could've been a slightly bearded wordsman waiting tables in a boutique pork shop while spending all night smoking Gitanes, drinking coffee, writing 700 page oubliettes while never using the letter e.  But no, I was hip deep in dirty laundry, spent Pampers, and old pizza boxes. Instead of chilling out to jazz in Prague, I was learning all the words to the Sponge Bob theme song.

Which is all fine, because of the unspoken contract between I and my progeny in which, pursuant to page 89, paragraph 16, sub section MN, which states: "you will leapt from the premises as you turn 18 with a job in one hand and apartment keys in the other, forsooth."

Hasn't happened yet.

My friend's nest is empty as a Church on Saturday. He's renovated his daughter's room into a den and turned the other kid's room into a mancave. His empty nest is like a lair. He's currently teaching his dog how to open a beer.

 

My Dog Ate My Homework--Then Threw Up!

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

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

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

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

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

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

As I have mentioned (bragged) in the past (five minutes) my daughter (monkey) attends Superhero High School, oft mentioned in a national magazine I'm too humble to name (Time) several (5) times. Her workload is college level and she often has homework questions I can't answer. Thank God her mom (rumored to be My Attorney [true]) is a superkillerfreakyEinstein genius with dominate genes or she'd be eating paste every day. Instead she's writng essays about Buddhism and Teen Pregnancy (that was a fun trip to the Library) and working calculus. This last weekend she crammed for her very first final exams ever. Her focus was like a powerful searchlight. You could see her thinking. It was like watching Jackie Chan outtakes, only for math. She studied for 17 hours straight and aced her exams. She earned a perfect score.
However, proud as I am, some reject teacher assigned a scrapbook project on the Greek Gods--all of them--showing the God, the origin of their name, and a well known product or object named after them. Two days before finals. That #@%@!

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

The Great America Swine Flu Roller Coaster Heat Stroke Calamity, or, What I Did on My Summer Vacation!

The kids have had a busy summer. First I took them to Alabama for their ritual Summer sunburning and to taunt them with the richness and normality of family life in the rural South; then I throw the girl on a plane to a University level full immersion Arabic language course;

[caption id="attachment_1676" align="alignleft" width="240"] Six Flags. No, seriously.[/caption]

then I go to school for two weeks and leave the boy to starve to death while watching an endless loop of McDonald's commercials; then I pack his lazy ass off to a two week long computer camp at Lake Forest college where he stays over night in a killer dorm after spending the day with other geeks who understand AllCap, the geek Ur language, which sounds something like WTFD? STFU! NK! Beast headshot, dude, beast!; then he got swine flu and had to miss the second week AND lose 2400 bucks in the bargain and THEN after a week plus of ultra-laze video-game and dope induced bliss and recovery I send him to Great America on the hottest day in the Midwest in a year so he can ride roller coasters all day, blister his feet into some kind of cephalopodic skin graft gone wrong, get heat stroke, come home and fall down the stairs.

There are certain precautions most parents take when delivering their prepubescent children alone into the roaring maul of an amusement park. For instance, the parent will send the child with the following items:

1. Cell phone. Charged. Ringer on "taze"


2. Cash.


3. Water bottle. Do not confuse with Vodka Bottle, which is what adults bring.


4. The right clothes: sandals, light t shirt, hat, a bag with extra in case of drenching.


5. Hat.


6. Sun screen.


7. ID card pinned inside their shorts so if they fall off the ride, the authorities know where to send the body.

I sent my son to Great America on a day that would've made native Floridians shake their head with wonder as the humidity and the oppressive heat slaked their skin off their bones, in the following:

1. white socks


2. heavy tennis shoes


3. heavy shorts


4. a black t-shirt


5. no hat.

He had plenty of cash and was instructed to spend it mostly on water and Gatorade, instructions given by a parent who has forgotten that water in a theme park costs the gross GDP of Belarus.

He was instructed to call us at least three times and finally a few minutes before he leaves so we could swing by and pry his hyper excited carcass off the lot.

Call  1:

"I! just! rode! the! Eagle! in! the! front! car! I! rode! the! Raging! Bull! seven! times!!!! This!!! is!!! awesome!!!! OMG!!!!!!! AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! [garble, garble]!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!   !   [ click].

Call 2:

[garble, garble; screaming] hands up but at the end!! I [garble, garble, garble, garble; music] huge wave hit me!!! [garble; click.]

Call 3:

You know the park closes in an hour, right? You have to leave now to come get us.

Call 4—29:

You heard what I said about coming to get us, right? Where are you? Should we run out to the highway? Can you see us? Can you see a McDonald's? Can you see McDonald's!

We get to the gate. Pull right up to the big WELCOME sign and the kid staggers out like a chunky prepubescent Frankenstein. He's holding his hands out from his sides and walking like he rode a sandpaper saddle all day. He's flushed and moist and squinting. I realize he looks exactly like I did when I was his age and did a six mile hike in Scouts along an open road in Florida in JULY and I realize the kid's in real pain.

We feed. We water. On the way home he tells us at one point during the day, he was dizzy, his heart was racing, and his mouth was dry. He starts to complain. He has a headache. His thighs hurt. His feet hurt. We get to his friend's house, drop the kid off, and my son starts to cry. He's moaning. We check him out, poke, prod. His head is hot and his hands are cold. We administer aspirin and Gatorade. He finally falls asleep in the back seat. We get home and he doesn't even want to go to his room. I make him a bed on the couch. We go upstairs.

An hour later, I hear a crash. Now crashes are not uncommon in our house and I always wait until the screaming starts before I react. 99 percent of the time, there's no screaming, so, no emergency and I can continue my Psych and Burn Notice marathon uninterrupted. Tonight, there were no screams, but a little while after the crash I heard whimpering. [My Attorney] and I leaped out of bed and found the kid slumped at the bottom of the stairs.

The poor kid, he was so exhausted, he kind of sleep walked and was going upstairs, god knows why, and laid his hand on my usual stack of magazines and books permanently perched on the third step and the whole thing tipped and he slid down. Didn't fall down the stairs; didn't flip over, hit his head, and paralyze himself down the stairs. But let me tell you, coming around the corner and seeing him puddled on the hardwood stopped my heart cold.

And it's all my fault. The kid had an absolutely fantastic day, except for the effects of bad parenting. To whit:

• I neglected to impart to my son the miraculously soothing quality of corn starch when applied to one's [insert preferred euphemism for one's "junk" here]. By the end of the day, you could've driven a clown car between his knees. He was walking like a retired cowboy.

• I dressed him like a retiree with bad circulation. I mean, seriously, the heavy lined shorts, socks, and a black t-shirt? We're lucky he didn't burst into flames.

It took him a while to get back to sleep. [My Attorney] performed her famous HIGH ENERGY LED FLASHLIGHT IN THE EYE CONCUSSION TEST wherein she uses a high intensity beam of pure radiation to cauterize the retina. I made him drink nearly a liter of Gatorade. He's fine.

I might not sleep all night, but he's fine.

This is how the world ends

If the world were ending on, say, Saturday, around 3:21 pm or so, would there be some kind of catastrophic leading indicators? And if so, would we be smart enough to notice? I'm only asking because, as your resident brainiac, I have to tell you, I'm seeing some pretty disturbing stuff out on the rough seas of the internet. In fact, I think I'm starting to see things, anomalies, virtual ghosts, bandwidth banshees. I'm seeing the kind of things you read about after the disaster happens and someones just happens to mention that all the dogs and cats ran away just before the volcano blew or 300 surfers mysteriously showed up the day before the tidal wave struck. Stuff like that.

The clearest leading indicator of our Apocalypse is the proliferation of Brit Lit. No, I don't mean all those Percy Bysh Shelley blogs. I mean literature regarding the imminent decline of Our Lady of Trailer Trash, Britney Spears.

This brief article will be the most attention I've ever given Spears during my adult life. She don't register. My mind is trained to edit my reality with excruciating prejudice. In th course of a day there are countless boneheaded micro-catastrophes it just blithely deletes. I never know they're there. It's like my inner child grew up to be a curmudgeonly aesthete and barely has the time of day for me much less the sheer billions of jaggoffs that walk among us, her calamitousness being one of them, being in fact, their queen. It's a gift from God.

But deep in the bowels of Death By Children's secret underground complex, the internet churns and wails and occasionally I have to go down and poke it with a fork and today when I poked it, it said "The end is near--Chart Britney's period."

We all know Spears went crazy when she married Kevin Federline. It's simple math: trailer trash + trailer trash = "Cops". And we're all guilty of paying attention to her mostly because we know she's bound to set herself on fire any day now and we want to be the first person in our Five to make the emergency conference "Dude" call and put the YouTube immolation video on our blog. Same reason we go to NASCAR. It's not the race that's exciting, it's the crash.

The thing is, Britney's crash is so inevitable that I can't see how it's interesting to anyone. In fact, I think her crash is long over but she's milking it. Or worse, it's all orchestrated by her Svengalian manager to drum up sympathy and support for a massive comeback to coincide with a new album and hit song. I don't know if it's better that I'm right about that or wrong. And I don't care that much. I'm just saying that she's one of the leading indicators of impending planetary destruction. She's THE indicator. In a bazillion years, they'll be referring to her and Nostradamus in the same breath.

How do I know? This is how I know. Celebrity gossip hounds have sunken pretty much as far as they can in finding Britnephalia to coat the empty insides of their blogs. It's not enough that she's just %$#@!ing crazy. That's not simple enough. And it's not enough that she's bipolar, or suffering from post-partum depression, or exhausted, or any of the ten thousand other afflictions that might explain the source of her ludicrous behavior (she makes Ludicris look like a Lutheran). NO, for the leading indicator of global deletion, Britney must suffer from something both noble and mundane, both ridiculous and rare, something divine yet disturbing.

She's on the rag.

But when Britney is visited by her leel frin it's she can't just be a little crabby. Her orc horde switches on her bipolarity, her post-partumality, and her panty-less-shopping-ism. Because she isn't human. She's a leading indicator and she dances on the upturned faces of her worshipful bloggists, people who watch her every move and would, could they afford the air fare, gleefully root through her garbage like feral pigs stumbling out of the forest into the grease trap at Arby's. People like this guy, who actually CHART HER PERIOD TO SEE WHEN SHE' GOING TO FREAK OUT NEXT! Gaze, as the planet teeters on the brink of disaster, on the wonder that i the menstrual cycle of Our Lady of Holy Sh--


(Red indicates . . . uh . . . that her "Cousin Red's" in town t help her with her "Grammar" . . . )

Dinner and a Booby

We run a tight ship around here at Casa de Death. No cussin. No runnin' with scissors. No mixing metaphors. Also, we're dead set against public nudity. This is not true of everyone in our neighborhood.

There's a fantastic Mexican/Guatemalan restaurant a couple of blocks away. We love it. Eat there all the time. In fact, we don't even call it by its actual name (because we'd get sued). We call it by the name of the exuberant owner. We call it Juan's. Some families order Chinese. We say, let's eat at Juan's. And so there we were the other night, peacefully crunching through some lomo de Res con nopalitos, chicken flautas, and steak quesadillas when I casually glance across the street and notice a light come on in a second story window. Oh, how nice, I think. I didn't know anyone lived over those nondescript businesses. Someone lives there. That's where they live. There.


I'm bringing a forkful of lomo and nopalitas (steak and baby cactus) to my mouth when the person who lives there steps into view and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt they not only live there, they also poop there.

Most bathroom windows are made from frosted or pebbled glass. Not this one. This one was carved from pure gas plasma high definition glass. As I stared, agog, through the remarkably clear possibly magnifying unfrosted pane, an elderly woman removed her robe and sat on what I could only assume was a pissoir and opened what I could only assume was a magazine (Exhibitionist Monthly?) I watched in horror, steak and baby cactus dangling before my gaping mouth, as she thrust out her chin the tiniest little bit and, I assume, strained, ever so slightly.

[My Attorney]: What?
Me: Man, these tacos are scrumptious.
[My Attorney]: (not fooled for a minute) What.
My son: Dad? Why do you look scared?
Me: How's your chicken oh my god!

The horror show across the street has gotten measurably worse. I will never be able to wipe it from my memory. As hard as I try now to wipe it from my mind, I cannot. I can't wipe that image clear. It remains there where I can't wipe it. Wipe. Wipe. Wipe.

Following my stricken countenance, [My Attoryney] and innocent child glance behind them and spit their flautas across the table. A flurry of Oh My Gods are whispered through fingers as we clamp our hands across our faces to wipe the horror from our horror wiped faces. Wipe.

Now we're trying to finish our meal without calling attention to the free show happening across the street. [My Attorney] is facing mostly away and the boy child, so innocent, so pure, has his back to the window. Well, his chair has its back to the window. My kid is practicing yoga so he can eat while accidentally glancing out the window into the window.

Our waiter stops by, follows our glance across the street into the red light district, and pours cold water all over the guacamole. He tries to clean up but he keeps staring at our new friend who is now standing and putting on a shower cap. She does some sort of . . . examination? We're not sure. All we know is the waiter poured water in the guac, the flautas, our empty margarita glasses, and onto the floor.

We figured she'd have to finish her ablutions and turn off the light but she did not. She continued to disappear and reappear, nekkid as all get out, as we finished our desert, politely refused to have our empty salsa cups refilled with coffee, and paid our check. She was doing some kind of pit maintenance as we drove away.

Two weeks later, we're at a neighborhood party and mention this, purely out of an altruistic effort to perhaps communicate to this woman that her glass, she is not frosted. We mention it because a person at the party works in the building beneath the glaze de l'boudoir and we felt we had to tell her. Turns out the woman is not entirely shy and may not give a rats ass if people can see her flaunting her flab over their flautas.

I guess we'll have to start requesting a table that faces the wall or perhaps only eat there in the daytime.

Alternate titles for this post:

"Rear Window"
"Room with a View"

The Joy of Shopping!

I took the boy child shopping today at the urging of [My Attorney] who saw there was a sale at Kohl's and insisted we go buy snow boots.

I don't hate shopping but I manshop which means I go in alone, unaided, unprotected, a solitary soldier with an objective and a deadline. I learned long ago that I have no real style so I stick with the classics and never deviate: white shirts, black or khaki pants, no prints, no visible branding, no logos. I know my size and I know where to go and I shop during the day when the pros are at work.

[My Attorney] can close her eyes and visualize any shirt as it would appear on the kids. It's her super power. If she were on Heroes she's defeat Silar by fitting him for winterwear for three hours until he caved and begged for mercy. She can buy a suit off the rack and it will fit me like it was tailored in Shanghai. She's like the terminator--only for clothes.

I am not. I had the actual boy with me today who actually tried on the clothes and stood in front of me wearing the actual shirt and we looked at each other and couldn't figure out if it fit or not.

"Is it too big?"

"I don't know."

"Is it too small?"

"Um, uh"

"Is it a small or a medium?"

"What?"

And the boy isn't exactly in it to win it. Here we are willing to drop a deuce on duds and he steps off the escalator, surveys the second floor and says "Everything here is gay."

Being that I end up in the stores with the moms most of the time, I have learned by carefully concealed observation how to find the stuff that appears to not be in stock. I've learned there is no such thing as sold out, that with enough arms-crossed-lethal-glare ground holding, one can make a befuddled stocking clerk hang by his nails in the rafters to look on top of the office roof and find a discarded pair of Totes Snowcaps size 8 that somehow got left there last winter and are now 80% off. I can do this.

Take today: Your average dad would take a quick look at the boxes stacked underneath the boots we wanted, see that they are all 9s and 11s and walk away satisfied that they don't stock 8s. I, however, am married to SHOPZILLA and, like a Spartan, I either come back with my sale item or draped across it, dead from multiple stab wounds. So I removed the entire wall of 9s and 11s, re-stacked them along the aisle, and lo, there in the back, were 8s and 14s. As soon as I had the pair I wanted, a herd of mothers spontaneously assembled behind me and bought everything I'd uncovered.

Using her super ninja shopzilla armor piercing sale-radar, [My Attorney] realized I had the boots in hand but was walking out before looking at shirts and pants so she called me and ordered me to drag the boy child through the shirts until something stuck.

We walked around the corner and he reminded me that 'everything here is gay' and I reminded him that people who say everything is gay are gay and he said I was working off some kind of repression and I mentally threw him down the up escalator. Physically, I made him try on mauve colored sweater vests until he realized I was just messing with him. Still, not one t-shirt made the bill excepting the "Chuck Norris" shirt which was too small. Everything else? Gay. He walked out with a belt buckle and a belt and a knit hat and a dapper gray button up.

In the parking lot, it was already snowing. The boy had elected not to put on his jacket because it was simply too much work. Now a mom would've busted his chops and made him suit up. But a dad is born with a sink-or-swim mentality that won't let us do that. I asked him once, he said no, I said fine. On the way in, it was still light out and he managed to just make it into the store before he shivered. But when we left? Black as night, falling snow, slight breeze and I had the keys. I made that trip across the parking lot in baby steps, talked on the phone, dropped my keys, asked him if he left his coat in the store. By the time I squelched the doors, he was blue and shivering.

"You cold?"

"Nope."

"People who say nope are gay."

"Shut up, dad."

"People who are cold are gay."

"SHUT UP!"

"People who say shut up are gay."

"Shut Up!"

"See."

Neal Patrick Harris is My Lord & Savior

It started in "Harold & Kumar Go To Whitecastle," when NPH played himself. I thought, wow, that guy is a total dilligaf. He's funny as all get out and dosn't take himself seriously. But his acting there was just him playing against type and being snarky.

In Dr. Horrible's Sing A Long Blog, he reaches some kind of Zenith of cool, with the help of Josh Whedon and some really great sidemen. When are the Coen brothers finally going to get it and cast Harris? This little movie is so good, so smart, and so funny. And watch NPH's nuances as the Mad Scientist/Blogger who's too shy to talk to his true love, Penny. Good lord this is the best thing on the web.

Dr. Horrible

Please save me: my children are trying to kill me.

How to Not Get Hired: Part 1

I posted my resume on an online job board because another freelancer convinced me you can get work that way. I haven't gotten a single contract from it but boy if I wanted to go into door-to-door knife sales or insurance franchising, I'm in the money. I don't know if these people can't read or if the job board just doesn't check who's looking at our resumes. So I figured the only thing to do is do what I do best and write back at them. Here's the first one...

Their letter to me:

On Dec 31, 2010, at 2:00 PM, Jennifer Butler wrote:

Dear Christopher,

I’d love to speak with you about your resume.

Despite recent economic conditions, a few industries have experienced success - one of them being the franchise industry.  I have been hired to (hand select) and invite qualified individuals with managerial/leadership backgrounds (to explore franchise opportunities).  Based on your credentials, I feel you may be a good fit.

I work with an enormous network of consultants that represent hundreds of major franchise businesses.  I place qualified individuals in various franchises that fit within the realms of their previous work history and acquired talents ultimately training (and equipping) born entrepreneurs with the necessary tools to take the leap towards owning a business and taking control of their futures.

This is a unique opportunity that would allow you to apply your experience towards a business of your own, increasing your earning potential and allowing you some much deserved flexibility in your career.

Please visit our website at:  www.explorefranchise.com and just take a look around.  Once there, fill out the "Get Started Today" form.  When I receive your information, I’ll give you a call within 48 hours to discuss the next steps.

Best regards,

Jennifer Butler

Franchising Coordinator

jennifer@explorefranchise.com

www.explorefranchise.com

26035 Acero Suite 200

Mission Viejo, California 92691

http://app.streamsend.com/private/PKHj/UYK/dL0tU8T/unsubscribe/13169603

My Response:

Dear Jennifer;

What a fantastic idea. I am totally on board. What I'm most interested in is a franchise involving importation. I think that's a great bet considering the economy and how it looks going forward into the second term of the current GOP.

Specifically, I'm looking at a franchise importing the rare New Guinean Tufted  Ocelot. These are beautiful, naturally miniature versions of the common ocelot we all know and love. They'll fit in the palm of your hand when they're still six months old so importation through standard customs will be no trouble.

My method of importation is highly advanced, yards ahed of that guy from Brazil who stuffed endangered bearded tiger monkeys down his pants and expected to make it through Miami Nat. Classic, right? No, my method involves a certain amount of salesmanship and believe me, I am the right guy for the job.

First, my friend Fiornio who is a "Doctor" in Ecuador, admits me to his specialty oncology lab in Quito. There I am fitted with a full body stasis wrap under which the Ocelots, drugged of course, are packed pretty tight. Fiornio then slaps a couple contagion stickers on a flatbed rig and hooks me up to a fake IV and we get on a direct flight to Homassasa Springs.

Understand I won't have bathed or brushed my teeth for at least three weeks so I'm not what you'd call pleasant. Also, this covers up the natural musk of the Ocelots. The Ocelots themselves will be hibernating due to the massive doses of neambutol administered by Fiornio. If anyone asks, Fiornio will tell them they're tumeritic bulbues and we're on our way to a lab where they'll laser them off for study. If one moves, so much the better. I'm betting no one's going to come close to us.

In Homassassa, we unload with medical priority directly into a waiting ambulance and bingo bango bongo, we're in business. I meet with a couple of dealers I know and unload the product that's still alive (we're working on percentages here--neambutol is pretty strong stuff).

I'm so happy you picked my resume out of the pile you must certainly receive regularly and even happier you saw through my disguise as a"creative writer" right. Whatever.

So, when can we get this shindig started? Soledad's got about 20 cats ready to pop so we're looking at a cool 380 grand here. Can you front the airfare and costume fees as "start up"? I love the franchise cover, by the way. Classic.

Yours;

CG

The Clash

At the movie theater:

"Why is that guy singing, rock the cat box?"

The Wet Willy Way: NINJA!

Death by Children is committed to supporting only the highest standards in parenting techniques. We are especially devoted to methods of parenting that embody joy, love, and laughter, as well as promoting the idea to every parent that their children are not a burden, but a gift. We also tell fart jokes.

WWW Technique #002: The Ninja

This technique is designed to teach the parent how to reconnect to their children through absurdity and laughter.

Method:

Wait until your kids is sitting quietly, lost in thought, then grab their forearm and loudly scream NINJA!

Why it works

It's funnier than hell. Seriously, nothing's funnier than surprising the crap out of your kids.

It's inclusive: your kids get to ninja you back.

It's ridiculous: it erodes tension and severity with absurdity.

It levels the playing field: Everyone gets really silly and competitive and tries so hard to find that perfect moment when everyone's forgotten about NINJA then yell NINJA!

Try it.

See. It works.

Open Letter from the Dogs

Dear Bipeds;

We are concerned. As practicing members of the canine subculture, we dogs face a constant problem of dehydration. It is vital to us that we are provided with adequate water at all times.

By adequate, we mean, of course, clean. To that point, we need to address certain habits of the uprights that have come to our attention.

Firstly, allow me to say, and I'm speaking for myself and the short one who tries to hump me all the time, we have deep and abiding respect for you and all the two-legs in the house. As you know, we are in the habit of licking you on a fairly regular basis. This is our way of showing you our respect and affection (albeit, we're also checking for pizza crumbs). We are, in the humblest manner, as they say in the street, your dogs (yo).

Secondly, we feel compelled to bring to your attention your usage of the water bowl located in the bathroom. Although you do a remarkable job keeping this bowl full of fresh, clean water, free of debris, and available to us quadrapeds, you also seem to enjoy urinating in it. Regularly.

Suffice it to say, we're displeased. We drink out of that bowl, good sir. We dip our unprotected snouts in that water several times each day and we do so with a certain mindlessness that comes from habitual behavior (I assume you've read Pavlov and Skinner; you know how this works); i.e., we don't check first. We just start lapping and to do so and suddenly realize one of the vertical kind has marked the bowl again is, well, surprising would be diplomatic.

We're not asking for much and we know this is a cultural difference that needs to be addressed with care, but could you possibly start urinating outdoors like a good dog? Peeing in our water bowl is just rude and leads to aggressive behavior (I don't want to sound threatening but have you looked in your shoes today?).

In closing, if you could please find it in your heart to reform this unacceptable habit, we'll stop peeing on the couch.

With warmest regards;

The Dogs.

Or maybe not . . .

[My Attorney] told me in no uncertain terms that Death by Children shall not be terminated. Also, it looks like an independent publisher is very interested in turning it into a book in 2012. So, that whole Aztec end of the world thing was actually all about me.

Here's what will happen: The current stories will disappear and be shuttled off to North Korea where a warehouse full of kidney donors will type paginate them prior to publication.

I will continue to write stories and, according to [My Attorney], I will write even more.

All this despite having a book out on the shelves now that I'm co-marketing with my co-author, co-Dave Haynes; AND despite having just started a new intensive project mentioned earlier (which is already going well).

So don't expect much. I will probably write total crap, first draft level, show gazing crap. But it'll be funny.

Children’s Books for Precocious Youth

I was working on future book projects and came up with these fetching kid's books.

1. Alphabet Cassulet:
   A is for acidophilus
   B is for brachinacea
   C is for contrapuntal
   D is for dipsomaniac
   E is for existentialism


2. My Pet Giant African Land Snail


3. Everybody Poops: Academic Review of Fecal Humor in Early Childhood Educational Literature.


4. Goodnight Bassoon


5. Where the Wild Things Are: Statistical Analysis For Establishing Social Boundaries


6. Why Are You My Mommy?


7. Where the Sidewalk Ends: Jungian Archetypes and the Loss of Urban Micro Social Cultures


8. Spurious George


9. Schrödinger's Cat in the Hat


10. Green Eggs & Ham: Sustainable Agriculture and Carbon Footprint Reduction in Breakfast Food Production Techniques


11. My Two Mommies: An Argument for Human Egg Cloning

Penn and Teller

Guest Post by Kevin Bender

 

One of the best shows to ever been seen on satellite TV from directstartv.com is Penn and Teller's show entitled Bullshit. The title may seem a little profane and some people may not watch it based purely on this, of course that is the intention as typically only open minded people are into this particular program.

Penn and Teller are famous magicians that preform in Las Vegas regularly, but very little magic is in the show. They seek out issues that controversial and seek to prove whether or not something is in fact Bullshit. The aforementioned profane word is used to avoid charges of slander, but really helps to set the mood.

Some of their episodes have gone so far as to prove a deserve array of things such as disproving Fung Suei, which is the art of arranging furniture to increase a room's positive energy. This was easily disproved by hiring three so called experts and having them arrange the same room for optimal positive energy. Seeing each expert arrange the room in stark contrast to one another and provide their own reasoning for it, goes so far as to prove beyond a doubt that this not a legitimate thing.

They have had a variety of different topics on the show and seemingly nothing is off limits. This is why so many people are looking forward to new episodes to come.

 

First Snow

The sky finally gave it up and covered our yard with a velvety blanket of snow last night. It's still coming down and I know I don't usually write Hallmarky bull hockey like this but it's really nice.

I think what I like the most baout snow is that my yard finally has a consistent, beautiful appearance--one unbesmirched stretch of alabaster instead of a hodge podge of green grass, brown dead grass, old leaves, dead plants, McDonald's litter, and rusted bikes.

My mom is visiting and I got up to make waffles and bacon and coffee and she got up and had her coffee and decided to take a moment at our big windows and take in the snow. She parts the drapes to gaze out at our beautiful snow white landscape and nearl spit her coffee through her nose because staring back at her was a gossamer draped skeleton and a grinning horrid skull glaring back at her through the falling snow.

I left my halloween decorations piled in a corner of the backyard. I'm thinking of finally putting them away but then, it does make for a unique snowman . . .

Second First Day of School Epic Fail

I woke up (from my night of wondering if I'd ever fall asleep) to the sound of my iPhone sawing through my desk. I heard the front door slam, looked out the window, and saw the boy child getting into his mom's car.

That seemed like a perfect thing. He gets to school on time and I get to go back to sleep. Which I did.

I wake up a few hours later to the sound of my iPhone trying to bury itself in my desk to hide from [My Attorney] who is reaching through the phone and beating me to death. I get up. I drive all the way downtown to pick up the papers I needed yesterday to register the girl. I drive all the way home. I make six calls on the way down there and two on the way back all in the vein of: take a frikkin shower so you're all dressed and ready when I get there. All of these answered with SHUT UP DAD I CAN HANDLE THIS ALRIGHT?!

I walk in the door and she's in her room.

"Hey, you ready?"

"No."

"What? Listen, we've got to get our carcass to that school and get you in."

"I don't have any pants."

I just . . I can't . . . I . . .

How does she not have any pants? She had pants yesterday. She wore them for less than an hour. Where are they now? Did they return to their pant overlords and report on the activities of teen humans?

(Pants: SIR WE TRIED TO OBSERVE THE HU-MAN TEENS BUT THEY NEVER GOT OFF THE COUCH SO THERE'S NOT MUCH TO REPORT UNLESS YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENED ON 'ADVENTURE TIME' FOR THE LAST SIX WEEKS.)

I fix this problem. I get her loaded into the car. I get there despite spending all seven minutes fighting for control of the radio. We leap out of the car, race across the field to the office where they tell us they stop registering at 11am, which we missed by an hour and five minutes.

Derp.

I'm so mad. I needed my day of peace and I haven't gotten yet. All the other dads-who-"work"-at-home have called me up trying to explain around the end of their cigar how good their beer tastes while I'm washing bras.

So I threaten her that I'm going to prance across the tennis courts just to embarrass her and she tells me I couldn't prance my way out of a light mist and I swear I can score higher than her on Prance Prance Revolution and we stop there in the middle of the tennis courts at the school she will go to every day but, apparently, never attend, and we shout OH MY GOD THAT WOULD BE AN AWESOME GAME!

I am a 17 year old girl.

Do You Feel Lucky, Punk? Huh, Do You?

’m anti gun. Not for you—-for me. I don’t care who else owns a gun. I assume all the retards, rejects, and reprobates already have one. I assume I’m walking among the armed.

But I put myself on the DO NOT EMPISTOLATE list years ago. I’m too likely be looking for a hammer and settle for a .357 magnum. I still get a kick out of guns, no doubt. With adult supervision, I can shoot.

This summer I helped my father-in-law site a scope. We chugged up the mountain to his private hunting reserve, laid a gorgeous 30-06 across the sighting table and started peeling off high velocity brass jacketed hell-yeahs one after the other.

Meanwhile, a gunfight was brewing in my sister’s basement. She was throwing a party for my nephew and though I knew my son was attending, I didn’t know it was a gun-centric occasion.

The guns in question were a kind of sub-paintball-weapon maximized for safety by firing a soft, resilient pellet that is best described as ‘nerfish’. Shoot somebody from more than a couple feet away and they barely feel a pinch. Closer up and it’s just a wicked sting. Point blank? We’ll get to that.

So we’re all at part a) of the soirée. We’re playing laser tag (did I mention I’m from Alabama? We’d stir our grits with a gun if it didn't rust) and on the way home, my sister—with a van filled to the eaves with 11 year old boys bristling to shoot something and chattering non-stop about barrels and ammo and calibers and my son, my cute little geek son, is practically drooling—she stops at a regional sports store (ammunition dump) so some of the kids can get more nerf-pellets and her son gets a new gun and my son, wiping the drool off his face, knowing full well my position about firearms, he gives me the sad kitten appeal and just pleeeeeads with me. He is relentless. Ardent. Driven. Finally he hits me with the heavy artillery. He says “You were out shooting guns today!” Crap.

I pride myself on parenting with logic and clarity (and threats of maiming and punitive deletion of cherished electronics) so when he points out the obvious I know he’s got me. I buy him the gun.

On one condition.

I get to shoot him.

“But dad! That will HURT!”

“You’re right. It’s dangerous.” I start to put it back on the shelf. The rest of the assassins are watching carefully because if Roon gets a gun that means he gets to play and THAT means he’s a target and they know he's a little slow on his feet. Roon considers his options and agrees.

So we get back to Dodge City Basement and I line the boys up gauntlet style. Roon runs upstairs and puts on three thick t-shirts. I get my older nephew to play a military dirge-march on the drums, pin Connor to the wall and ceremoniously walk back to my place, point, aim, ask him if he has any last words, then shoot the little bastard in the solar plexus.

He didn’t even feel it.

So later. Two of the gunfighters come upstairs and ask that Connor be ejected from the OK corral. Seems he can’t really tell the difference between STOP SHOOTING, PLEASE STOP SHOOTING, OW OW OW DAMMIT STOP! and OK, START SHOOTING AGAIN and the rest of the boys are about to take away his gun by pulling it through his ass. So I go downstairs and, as I’m standing there, Connor puts his finger over the open barrel and pulls the trigger. There is a distinct, surprisingly loud SNAP and Connor looks at me with a big shit-eating grin on his face. For like one second.

Did you ever see the Grinch That Stole Christmas? Remember when his sourpuss morphs slowly into a beatific smile? Imagine that in reverse. Connor’s grin slides backwards into a howl of pain and he THROWS HIS GUN down and runs upstairs.

He was ok later, even laughed about it. But the gun? Well, let’s just say he’s on the same list I am and the gun is safely out of reach.

Radio Free Winnebagoes!

The bra discussion continued on the air:

Why Men Should Watch Sex and the City

So we're on our way back from New Orleans when [My Attorney] whips out her laptop and asks me if I want to watch Sex in the City.

For a little vacation lagniappe, we used some of our miles to bump into first class thinking it could be a great way to top off the trip. A little bubbly. A little movie. Comfort. First class is statussymbolville, rock star level, pole dancer stewardessing luxury. I wanted the optional foot massage and nude kabuki theater. Instead, I got a crabby stewardess who yelled at everyone. The champagne was crap. My seat was broken. There was GRAFITTI on the seatback.

There was no movie. There were no peanuts.

So when my attorney offered to play a rental on her laptop, I jumped at it. So what if it's Sex and the City? None of my friends were there. The seatbacks (covered in gang tags) were pretty high. So I did it.

I know, you guys are throwing your hands in the air asking How Could You, Man!? I was bored. I needed something. So she hits play and the credits come up and I find myself intrigued. The credits are pretty good and I'm surprised that the lead is actually much hotter than I used to think back in the day when SATC was the rage. And I got to give credit where credit is due--the directors really use a lot of slo-mo hair flips which are nothing more than extended gratuitous boob shots. Yay.

So the show starts and I'm all prepped to crack on the crappy writing but instead I'm asking questions and saying dude, (I often refer to My Attorney as Dude--it's unisexual, I swear), that dude's a loser and what's up her crack? And I'm into it, the story is pretty good, pretty well written, and the jokes are funny as hell. I'm realizing that basically this is just a recurring chick flick, like Roman Holiday on endless repeat, and Mr. Big is Cary Grant and all the other chicks are the quintessential American women: the hot slut, the hot professional, the hot girl next door, and the hot brainy lit chick. They're all perfect and exquisite and they have interesting conversations. About sex. For an hour. Now that's pretty cool and tolerable and yes, you will learn something about the mindset of women and yes that will help you understand your [attorney] better.

But that's not why men should watch Sex and the City.

Dude, you should watch Sex and the City because, dude: you get to watch hot naked women have sex--with your [attorney].

I saw more skin in three episodes of SATC than I ever did watching Serena Williams play tennis. It's like the Sopranos only instead of a really satisfying lurid payback assassination, you get one of the women topless. WITH YOUR [ATTORNEY].

So get comfy and plop yourself down on the couch and make occasional comments like yeah, that guy's a turd, or wow, she changed her hair. And every time they have one of the xtra-hot main characters revealing their most bankable options, say Oh that's gratuitous. Say it like you mean it.

13 Bad Headlines for NASA's Admission to Sex Training For Mars Mission

A NASA adviser recently battled the president of Virgin Atlantic for the title of "most purposefully misquoted official" after they discussed how co-ed Mars Mission astronauts---stuck together in tight quarters for three years--- might, um, think about, um . . . probing. Read the whole story here.

1. Astronauts Train For Bumpy Ride!
2. The Eagle Has Landed! (um, that's not my Eagle . . .)
3. NASA Talks to VIRGIN About SEX!
4. Asked to Extend Boom, Astronauts Giggle Uncontrollably.
5. Virgin Atlantic Adds "NOT!" to Logo!
6. Probes No Longer Limited to Aliens!
7. Uranus Begs for Name Change!
8. Cigar Shaped Object Not Cigar!
9. Howard Stern Heads New Apollo Mission!
10. Mile High Club Extended by 100 Miles.
11. Cape Canaveral Worker Fired for T-Shirt: "I Got Yer Right Stuff Hangin!"
    
12. NASA Relocates to Miami Beach, Opens Club.
    
13. New Space Suits Designed by Trojan.
    

13 Things About Swine Flu that (hack-cough-wheeze) Suck!

You try to save. You scrimp. You deprive yourself. You go a day or two without high end sushi. You order a 2004 Chateau Neuf des Papes instead of the Rothschild 1998. You suffer.

Finally, you save up just enough loose change and hedgefund windfall to send your son to computer camp at Lake Forest College, a place that makes Hogwarts look drab, a place where he will hone his burgeoning skills as a World of Warcraft modder to the point where some ten year old kids treat him like a God, a camp that costs more than the GDP of Lichtenstein, and the little snotty fartknocker goes and gets Swine Flu.

And now we're all confined indoors like we've got the consumption. Our neighbors have painted PIG in big red letters on our front door (I'm pretty sure that's related) and guys in forced-air Hazmat suits are staking a perimeter with red tape and bio-hazard signs.

So there's only one thing to do—well, 13 Things! (About Swine Flu That Suck)


1. Having it.
2. The really cool kids all have Bird Flu.
3. Too sick to play Wii, not sick enough to puke on your sister.
4. Sudden aversion to Bacon.
5. There's no medicine so you actually have to stay sick for a week which in modern times is like having your leg amputated with a hack saw.
6. After a few days, Gatorade looks the same going in as it does coming out.
7. Worrying that #4 might last forever.
8. Can't taste your Bacon Double Cheese Burger (without bacon).
9. Snot.
10. Leaving your Xbox at camp because you can't go back to get it until you don't have the flu so you're stuck at home without your game system.
11. Ditto for your Ozzie CD.
12. Friends keep texting you "Oink" and "Bacon".
13. Your dad thinks it's funny so he blogs about it. That ^%$#@!!

I Might Have Been Mentioned Somewhere . . .

Like in ChicGalleria.com, an online magazine unafraid to run my picture. Their bravery is singular and you should visit their site IMMEDIATELY!



Here's some sample comments, in case you're busy or you're just too moved for words. Just cut & paste:

1. My GOD that's a good looking man!


2. The writing in this book is so  eloquent and smooth, like he's not even, it's like -- words fail me.


3. Is this a how-to book?


4. Are there recipes?


5. Isn't this a woman's magazine?


6. That guy called his dog gay. HE CALLED HIS DOG GAY! His dog isn't gay, it's just a Border Collie. They can't help it. They're prancy!

My Daughter: Pukezilla

My wife’s first job involved testing water. It often found her flung to the furthest fields of Florida horse country, which is how I ended up in a hotel room with my infant daughter watching Kung Fu movies and bitching.

Since she got per diem and a hotel room, we’d turn her jobs into mini-vacations. Occasionally a job would land her in Miami or Fort Ladida which were always luxurious and ended with us staggering back to our hotel room at 3 am exuberantly inebriated. (Therefore: children.) But most jobs had her working an abandoned gas station where walking the baby involved diesel fumes and broken glass.

So there I am, watching A-team reruns while Sarah is rolling around on the bed. She can’t even sit up yet. She’s new and fragile, like highly animated pudding. I have no idea what to do with her. I make faces, cute noises. All I get is disdain and dirty diapers.

Around the time Mr. T is welding giant teeth on a golf cart, Ra starts grousing. The grouse turns into a kind of rarefied staccato, like someone trying to jump start a Dr. Seuss car, then escalates into full blown screaming horror. Her little face is crimson. She’s squirming to beat hell. And I’m deeply panicked. It's the kind of stupid fear confusion that makes a guy put on one shoe, a hat, and no pants before running out into the parking lot to jump up and down, scream-crying “somebody call 911”. Not me—I didn’t do that. Hell, I’d write about it if I did.

So I’m in this hotel room (not in the parking lot, pantless, jumping up, and down scream-crying) with le enfant hole shite when suddenly she stops. She stops and she stares at me and her eyes start to widen.

Now imagine this part in slomo.

I pick her up, my hands under her arms, and I get real close because I think that since she stopped screaming that things have gotten even worse, that something inside her, something internal, has gone horribly wrong. Before I can blink, she opens her mouth and horfs in my face.

When I say horf, I want you to understand we’re not talking a little tartar sauce on the shoulder. We’re talking serious fluid dispersion. Hurrlcane Katrina.

You ever see those nature shows where they’re filming the seashore and the ocean, like the entire ocean, pounds itself through a tiny hole in a rock and spews foam thirty feet in the air and knocks live birds out of the sky and sinks ships? It was like that, only chunky.

Sure, I saw it coming; but I was holding her—-what could I do?! I managed to wang my head sideways to avoid the initial sluice but Sarah had morphed into Pukezilla and there was no avoiding it. Against the known laws of physics, she had a limitless supply of fetid, lactatious, effluvium and—-again, we’re in slomo here—-was trying to see it as it came out of her. She’d never hurled so she was checking it out, or trying to, but as she’d cock her head to dig the unending jet cascading out of her mouth it would whip around like a psychotic cobra. She’s squirming, craning her neck, trying to take it all in as she gets it all out. She was an Exorcist-level 360 degree panoramic vomit volcano.

I can’t put her down because I think she might choke and I can’t turn her away because I’ve been slimed and I can barely hold on-—I’m afraid I’ll drop her-—so I just take it. Head to toe.

I’m not such a wimp anymore. If this happened now, after dropping both my kids more than once, after seeing them drive their foreheads, temples, jaws, eyeballs, and nearly every other soft part of them into various corners, mortises, baseball bats, pocket knives, handlebars, terrazzo floors, and each other, and still get As in math, I’m a little less likely to give a crap if they fall down. Now if Sarah yells “I hurt myself!” from the basement my first response is “Are you bleeding yet?” If Pukezilla attacked now, I’d toss her slimy ass on the bed and take a shower.

So she finally finishes. The bed is a foamy lake of alabaster chum. There’s a trail of it across the floor, across the TV, and splattering the lampshade. I look like someone dumped a barrel of cottage cheese over my head.

I look down at my Pukezilla, who’s squirming again and I expect another gusher, I resign myself to a life covered in goo, I set my jaw and steel my demeanor.

She’s laughing.

Not giggling. Not chuckling. She’s shaking with unalloyed, from the toes, ‘look at you, you horf covered dick’ guffaws.

Thirteen years later, she still thinks it’s funny.

------------------------

Please save me: my children are trying to kill me.

Showering with zzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Somebody's son, I'm not saying who, but somebody's gigantic, sasquatchian teen, fell asleep on the toilet today and revealed some unusual ablution habits.

He runs the shower while he's pinching a loaf. When he fell asleep, he ran out of hot water. So he turned off the hot water, but continued to run the cold water because "it makes the hot water heat up faster."

This kid gets good grades in science. He reads a lot. He . . . look, I don't know what to say. Kids get weird ideas. Maybe it's because he's a vegetarian. I don't know. But I'm knocking every ten seconds to make sure he's awake . . .

My other job goes on TV

13 Reasons Why Real Men Clean Better

1. Real Men sweep with a leaf blower.


2. Real Men don't mop: Real Men hose.


3. Real Men understand the toilet cleaning power of the Water Pik.


4. Real Men know the best music for cleaning house is porno.


5. Real Men know the best way to clean the fridge is to eat your way to the back.


6. Real Men know Vodka cleans anything.


7. Real mens KnOw VDkoa cleams anythings.


8. Real Men dust with a Hoover.


9. When Real Men wash reds with whites, they don't apologize. They just say "pink makes you look ten years younger."


10. Real men consider phone sales an act of war.

Pukezilla Attacks!

My wife’s first job involved testing water. It often found her flung to the furthest fields of Florida horse country, which is how I ended up in a hotel room with my infant daughter watching Kung Fu movies and bitching.

Since she got per diem and a hotel room, we’d turn her jobs into mini-vacations. Occasionally a job would land her in Miami or Fort Ladida which were always luxurious and ended with us staggering back to our hotel room at 3 am exuberantly inebriated. (Therefore: children.) But most jobs had her working an abandoned gas station where walking the baby involved diesel fumes and broken glass.

So there I am, watching A-team reruns while Sarah is rolling around on the bed. She can’t even sit up yet. She’s new and fragile, like highly animated pudding. I have no idea what to do with her. I make faces, cute noises. All I get is disdain and dirty diapers.

Around the time Mr. T is welding giant teeth on a golf cart, Ra starts grousing. The grouse turns into a kind of rarefied staccato, like someone trying to jump start a Dr. Seuss car, then escalates into full blown screaming horror. Her little face is crimson. She’s squirming to beat hell. And I’m deeply panicked. It's the kind of stupid fear confusion that makes a guy put on one shoe, a hat, and no pants before running out into the parking lot to jump up and down, scream-crying “somebody call 911”. Not me—I didn’t do that. Hell, I’d write about it if I did.

So I’m in this hotel room (not in the parking lot, pantless, jumping up, and down scream-crying) with le enfant hole shite when suddenly she stops. She stops and she stares at me and her eyes start to widen.

Now imagine this part in slomo.

I pick her up, my hands under her arms, and I get real close because I think that since she stopped screaming that things have gotten even worse, that something inside her, something internal, has gone horribly wrong. Before I can blink, she opens her mouth and horfs in my face.

When I say horf, I want you to understand we’re not talking a little tartar sauce on the shoulder. We’re talking serious fluid dispersion. Hurrlcane Katrina.

You ever see those nature shows where they’re filming the seashore and the ocean, like the entire ocean, pounds itself through a tiny hole in a rock and spews foam thirty feet in the air and knocks live birds out of the sky and sinks ships? It was like that, only chunky.

Sure, I saw it coming; but I was holding her—-what could I do?! I managed to wang my head sideways to avoid the initial sluice but Sarah had morphed into Pukezilla and there was no avoiding it. Against the known laws of physics, she had a limitless supply of fetid, lactatious, effluvium and—-again, we’re in slomo here—-was trying to see it as it came out of her. She’d never hurled so she was checking it out, or trying to, but as she’d cock her head to dig the unending jet cascading out of her mouth it would whip around like a psychotic cobra. She’s squirming, craning her neck, trying to take it all in as she gets it all out. She was an Exorcist-level 360 degree panoramic vomit volcano.

I can’t put her down because I think she might choke and I can’t turn her away because I’ve been slimed and I can barely hold on-—I’m afraid I’ll drop her-—so I just take it. Head to toe.

I’m not such a wimp anymore. If this happened now, after dropping both my kids more than once, after seeing them drive their foreheads, temples, jaws, eyeballs, and nearly every other soft part of them into various corners, mortises, baseball bats, pocket knives, handlebars, terrazzo floors, and each other, and still get As in math, I’m a little less likely to give a crap if they fall down. Now if Sarah yells “I hurt myself!” from the basement my first response is “Are you bleeding yet?” If Pukezilla attacked now, I’d toss her slimy ass on the bed and take a shower.

So she finally finishes. The bed is a foamy lake of alabaster chum. There’s a trail of it across the floor, across the TV, and splattering the lampshade. I look like someone dumped a barrel of cottage cheese over my head.

I look down at my Pukezilla, who’s squirming again and I expect another gusher, I resign myself to a life covered in goo, I set my jaw and steel my demeanor.

She’s laughing.

Not giggling. Not chuckling. She’s shaking with unalloyed, from the toes, ‘look at you, you horf covered dick’ guffaws.

Thirteen years later, she still thinks it’s funny.

True Love Ate My Homework

Well it happened. The girl-child finally got a boyfriend. This is big news and a mountain-sized moment since she’s been coveting the status of “boyfriend” since birth.

I knew that a high school filled with drama queens and ultra geeks would be the place for her to find her soul mate and that’s why I sent her there. Other kids saw this high school, which might as well be called “Super Hero High” as an academic mecca, a math-and-science Matterhorn, and face each day with the necessary resolve to fight their way through the high-concept classes (literary research?) to the goal of good grades.

But not the girl. When we were leaving orientation, starry-eyed and blown away by the sheer Hogwartian quality of the place, my daughter was floating on air for an entirely different reason. We saw a level of academia you rarely see in goof colleges, much less in a high school. But Sarah crunched her packet to her chest and sighed “Did you see all the cute boys in there? Oh my GOD!”

There were a couple of false starts, a Ziggy-Marleyan young man who was far too forgiving of my daughters various insanities, telescoping his base hopes a little too clearly; and some French kid—I think—who apparently didn’t like her misuse of post-participle noun-events but thought she had pretty eyes. She waved them both off, saw right through them, left them floundering in the wasteland of IM “ignore” commands and a flurry of whatevers. The new kid had a quality they didn’t have in that he’s very honest and very natural and when she was acting like a hyper-active stage-hungry little nutcase he called her on it and I think that mattered to her.

Then he kissed her.

So they’re a couple. And by couple, I mean they disgust me. Last night the girl child gasped and flopped herself down on the end of the couch with such ridiculous force I thought she’d popped a rib—I paused the TV and asked her what happened. She sighed and said “[undisclosed] sat here.” I suppressed the sudden urge to vomit and was about to tell her she was being hyper dramatic but the Artist, who was leaning against the wall sipping tea, snorted and said “Yeah, maybe some of his butt particles are still there,” which you would think would snap the girl-child out of her love induced reverie but, no, she merely sighed again and said “butt particles” and the rest of us rolled our eyes so hard the earth shifted in its orbit.

I had to drop her off at Hogwarts yesterday since my Attorney was in D.C. taking a dep (I love it, I feel like I’m on some cool lawyer show). On the way we listened to the new eagles song and dug it and then Beverly Hills came on so we were rocking it in traffic and she remembered she’d forgotten some homework and begged me to let her miss first period. I pulled over and let her out and told her to tell them her homework was a casualty of love.

I’ve dreaded this day as long as she’s been aching for it, but I have to say it was anti-climactic. It didn’t even bother me when I caught them entangled on the couch. I just told them to disentangle themselves and that was that. When she floated home the first day in love, I hugged her and said “good for you.” I didn’t admonish her for snogging in the hallways. I didn’t tell her to watch his hands. It never occurred to me. I was just happy for her.

Of course I put a tracking device in the kid’s backpack while he wasn’t looking, but that’s just typical dad stuff. Right?

I Totally Cheated on My Wife

n response to former Governor Spitzer and sitting Governor Blindguy's recent admission of infidelity, I feel compelled to admit that I have totally cheated on my wife.

More, I have to admit, to expose that it was totally hot and sticky and I spent most of the time moaning and saying 'oh Go, oh God' and I'll probably do it again.


Since going on this damn diet, I have successfully dropped some serious tonnage. My pants are starting to hang off my back end by accident and not design. My old shirts are starting to actually fit me. Even my shoes feel different.

And for the most part, I haven't had the horrible cravings you would think I'd have by giving up dirty martinis and Manchego. I've been just fine. Until yesterday. Yesterday she arrived, waltzed in to our house steamy and hot, and said 'come on, baby, I'm all yours'.

And I caved. I did. I only had a little, just a piece, but it still counts. My poor Attorney was at work, slaving away, and there I was at home, my hands full of the voluptuous, delicious, totally hot Cheese Pizza.

I had a corner, a tragic baked-out postage-stamp-sized sliver with just a spoonful of hot melted cheese and a wad of Italian sausage slumped under it but it was delicious. Made Jenny Craig taste like wheat paste, I swear.

I just ... I had to say something. I wanted there to be full disclosure, just like Spitzer and Blindguy, because I am a man of honor.

Except when faced with cheese pizza.

Huh #115

Son: Dad, I think the dog ate make up.

Dad: What makes you say that?

Son: He smells like lipstick.

[Dad keeps working on the laptop for like 17 seconds then looks up.]

Dad: How do you know what lipstick smells like?

100th Post

Well, here we are--100 moments into the life of a 21st century Dad. Since this blog began I've been hired to write part of a book, started a radio show with a republican, had my kitchen remodeled, and lost 5 pounds. All in all, not a bad start.

My Son has grown 1.4 inches in these 100 posts and now keeps setting off my instinctual alarm bells because I catch a glimpse of him in the corner of my eye and think some dude's walked into the house.

My daughter has joined Superhero High School and gained a laconic boyfriend who is exceedingly polite and apparently plays guitar better than I do.

My niece has moved in to the room we built for her in the basement and added organic flax seed and some kind of soft drink that is actually alive to our repertoire of victuals.

My attorney has entered into her third year and is undergoing the kind of unrelenting thankless grind you hear about sometimes in the same news story that ends with " . . . still don't know where she got the gun."

Only my gay dog hasn't changed. He still waits, poised on the edge of the couch, for someone to go scrounging around under the furniture for the remote, at which point he will strike without warning--and hump them into oblivion, tongue lolling out the side of his snout, big stupid frat boy grin on his face.

December will bring you four great Christmas posts, timeless classics of American family values that will leave you contemplating out-dopting your children or perhaps having yourself neutered. I promise.

Thanks for reading, for a writer, knowing people are digging your work can mean the difference between a single and a triple martini lunch. I genuflect honorably in your general direction.

My New Favorite Website

I predict great things for this upstart, um, anti-social networking site: rottenneighbor.com.

To play, you register, log in, then write about your neighbors. I assume you could write something good but given the title of the business, I think they discourage it. I've seen reports from Chicago titled: "Looney Daughter" (not mine), "Disgusting People" (not us), and "Hates Cats and Women" (Not me). I'm tempted to write completely wacky things about everyone I know, so if you're one of my neighbors, look for these upcoming titles:

"Recently Abducted--Probed"
"Weird Disney Christmas Creche"
"Dog poops in my yard"
"Drives a 1974 Toyota Diesel"
"Sculpts yard waste--political"
"Parking Pirate"
"Hangs lights for every holiday--even St. Patrick's Day. Weirdo."
"Sexy wife and/or housekeeper"
"Walks dog in bikini. Back fat. Fake tan."

When the kid becomes a doctor

My son wants to be a doctor. I'm still shocked about this. He's not talking about a fake video game doctor, but an actual stick your hands elbow deep in blood sawbones. I'm so proud.

I'm happy, too, because I know that when I'm old, he'll be able to give me drugs and somehow stave off the onset of early Alzheimers which I'm pretty sure hasn't happened yet.

I'm happy, too, because I know that when I'm old, he'll be able to give me drugs and somehow stave off the onset of early Alzheimers which I'm pretty sure hasn't happened yet.

When he does become a doctor, I hope he'll wear some decent Scrubs. If you've been to a doctor recently you know that fashion is definitely low on their priority list. Why isn't Nike or Old Navy jumping on this bandwagon? I don't know, but these guys, http://www.blueskyscrubs.com/categories/Scrubs/, might be game changers in the world of men's scrubs design and sales.

Knowing my kid, however, I'm sure he'll show up in baggy pants and a Bob Marley t-shirt.

TV on the Radio on the Audio Book on Good God Please Kill Me

It's Sunday. I am couch-ridden from some kind of teen delivered horror-cold that's making me all woggly and irritable. [My Attorney] is similarly afflicted and like all decent adults, when sick, we turn to the age old comfort of television.

Only, I turn to awesome television like Burn Notice and Game of Thrones and she turns to psychotic worse-than-a-grade-school-play British television in the form of Dr. Who.

From 1954.

And not just the horribly lit, badly acted, ridiculously written, STOOOPID black & white schlock available on the 985 DVDs she'd pulled down off of eBay. No, she's watching an episode for which there is no video available. So we're looking at a still photograph from the original and listening to the scene chewing, harrumphing of long dead British ACTors.

We are LISTENING to Dr. Who.

The All In Kid Strikes Again

I was reeling from the funk of old tennis shoes and [OH MY GOD] recently, in my tiny car, driving the boy and his stinkmates home from a movie when my mind tried to alleviate my distress by playing old home movies in my head from back in the day. Particularly, of when I taught the boy poker.

I know what you're saying: "Jesus, Garlington, first you become the designated porn hub of your street, then you let him drink beer, and now you're teaching him how to gamble? We're calling the cops!" But it's not like I handed him a credit card and pointed him to Poker Sites U.S.A.

No, I just decided it was a healthy way to teach him math and cunning. What I didn't realize is the sheer insane glee with which he gambles. It's like he's Richy Rich's dark twin let loose in Vegas or plopped down in front of Online Casinos for USA Players with a bag of digital greenbacks (which is one of the Best US Poker Sites I've ever lost a hundred bucks on . . .)

I showed him the basics and we ran through a couple of games. He was mildly interested. Mostly because I'd shut down the cable feed. After I figured he had a grip on your basic five card game, I introduced him to betting and watched in horror as he morphed from a cute kid playing poker to a full grown man in a double breasted leopard print sharkskin suit throwing money at me, screaming HERE'S FIVE BUCKS, BUY YOURSELF SOMETHING NICE!

It took a couple of rounds before he really understood we were playing for real money.

Roon: Wait, you mean if I win this hand I get to keep the money?

Dad: Yep.

Roon: And you won't say anything? I mean, I don't have to mow the lawn for this, right?

Dad: Shit.

Three hands later, the kid's rainmanned me out of ten bucks. I get a hand that makes my knees weak, a flush of such staggering rarity I kick myself for not being at the "fishcamp" poker cabin. I go all in.

Roon: What the hell is that?

Dad: I'm betting everything I have on my hand. You match my bet.

Roon: What if I can't match it?

Dad: You have to bet everything you have.

He matches my bet and loses gracefully. I drag the pot over and deal another hand. He looks at his cards and on his bet he says "All in." The next three hands he goes all in. Every hand after that, he goes all in. Every bet, every time, he's all in.  By the end of the afternoon, he's smoking a cheroot and I'm drinking straight Rye whisky from the bottle.

You know those signs for casinos that have a tagline at the bottom in print so small amoebas go blind trying to read it, saying If you or someone you know has a gambling problem, call 800-blah-blah-blah? I called them.

 

800: Do you have a gambling problem?

Me: My son just took me for everything I had.

800: Has your son's gambling affected his job or friendships?

Me: Well, I don't like him anymore.

800: Has he asked you for money in the last 30 days?

Me: Every day.

800: Oh dear. And how old is your son?

Me: Ten.

800: . . .

Me: And a half. Here's the thing, I can't seem to explain to him that "all in" is a rare gambit.

800: We're here to help gambling problems—

Me: It is a problem. How's this kid gonna play two games in a row if he's all in every hand.

800: Every hand?

Me: Every bet.

800: And . . .

Me: Cleaned me out.

800: I can't believe it works.

Me: Wanna bet?

800: [click].

Hello, I'll be your lunch mom today.

Wednesdays are lunch mom days.  I stand scowling in front of 21 highly articulate, devious, well-heeled know-it-alls and try to prevent them from destroying their classroom in the 19 minutes we dedicate to peanut butter and jelly mayhem.

I debated how to play these half hour displays of volunteerism. I thought maybe I'd be the cool dad who only steps in when the flames are creeping toward the fetal pig storage bins; I thought maybe I'd be the funny dad who tells hilarious stories and knock-knock jokes hat are just on the verge of inappropriate, just enough to make them think you think they're thinking; I thought maybe I'd be the wise, erudite elder, sitting buddha like at the front of the class dispensing brilliant bon mots, changing lives. But I'm not any of those.

I'm exactly the same guy  I am at home when the boy's asked me for the mac like the four hundred and sixty-seventh time and I lose my self control and embed it in his forehead like a crushed keg tossed off by Andre the Giant.  I'm . . . cranky.

This bothers me a little as I wonder where it comes from. I have, in the past, been the child dazzler. I was famous among four year olds in my previous career as a middle manager at a cavernous bookstore where I did the Friday night storytime. Seriously--it was standing room only. And I have had to swerve off the side of the road while carting scouts home from camp because I made them laugh so hard they were about to ruin my upholstery. I can make kids laugh. I can entertain. I could be the Chris Rock of lunchroom moms. But I'm not.

I'm the guy in the picture up there. Why? I think it's Wednesdays. I'm the Wednesday lunch mom. Wednesdays are hump day from way back and by 11:30 on Wednesdays I've had just enough time after dropping off Dr. Whines N. Ces'antly at school, to grab a shower, finish my coffee and get into a project just enough to develp a little wind which I then have to let out of my sails so I can go play sheep herder for the sixth grade.

When I get back, I have to start all over. I have to get the coffee, re-open the project, and worse, somehow wrestle my original train of thought back into submission so I can get it down on paper and get paid.

So being a lunchmom, precious and altruistic as it is, wrecks my day. I don't know how people with real jobs do it. I saw one mom furiously texting on her blackberry because she's in the middle of a big real estate deal (probably the only person in the United States who is in the middle of a real estate deal) and had to break off the meeting to come utter such prestigious chestnuts as "Do NOT chase the ball into the street!" and "Please do not throw candy through the open window of the first grade, McCorski!" Tell me a 1.9 million dollar contract can compete with that.

Monday is Manday

My friend Dave and I were sunk into a couple of wingbacks smoking some illegal cigars and drinking 21 year old Bushmill's when someone mentioned a local restaurant that makes great meatloaf. They make it in muffin tins and call their result a meatmuffin (which is the nick name of my third girlfriend). There was a long pause wherein Dave and I stared off into the thick smoke while we absorbed the genius of a meatmuffin and allowed the image to rattle around in our craniums and we suddenly realized we could improve this thing by lining the muffin tins with bacon.

You're welcome.

Death By Chronic Weepy Girly Man Syndrome

I cry at movies.

I’ve been struggling with this for a long time because I’ve never been able to truly understand it. I still don’t. But I’ve decided it’s some kind of weird benefit, a decision that came from the reaction of my children, those mongrel dogs, when they caught me wiping tears out of my eyes at Ice Age 2.

Never mind that I cried in Ice Age one, as if that’s not bad enough. No. I was cranking out the juice in the sequel. I am a sad, sad little man and I’ll never be cool. I’ll never be Indiana Jones.

The list of guys who are cooler than me is long enough that it fades off into the distance like some desert highway. Everyone is cooler than me. Everybody’s Steve McQueen.

Take the guy remodeling my house. He can build stuff that doesn’t fall down, he scuba dives in the Caribbean, he goes off to Galena on the weekends to work on his boat, and he beat up three guys last year who were trying to steal his tools. Oh, and he was a Navy rescue swimmer.

Take my buddy Pat Greene (not the gay country singer). Last year he moved to New York for the hell of it, worked for three months as a superluminary in a play in Ashville where they put him up in a luxury apartment, and now he’s going to travel the world in the ground crew for a blimp. He gets a cool flight suit.
Me? Here’s a list of movies and commercials that have reduced me to a blubbering girl man:

• Ice Age
• Ice Age 2
• Over the Hedge
• American Idol when Gina G got voted off and had to sing Smile as her goodbye song and pulled it off with supernatural grace and aplomb.
• The Sylvan Learning center one with the kid with the skateboard? Every time.
• Chicken Little
• Spiderman I and II
• Shrek
• Lord of the Rings I, II, and III
• The hallmark commercial where that kid gives that girl that card.
• Finding Nemo
• Click (This claim is contested as RahRah is admant that I was tearstruck, where Roon is equally adamant that this is the only movie where I didn’t cry. Personally, I have a hard time crying in Adam Sandler movies. . .)
• Stranger than Fiction (like a busted dike)

Just now while compiling this list, I asked my daughter, Queen-of-All-14-Year-Old-Heartless-Daughters-and-Anime-Superfan, what movies I’ve cried in and she gleefully rattled off more than I could bear then cut herself off and said “basically, any movie where it’s not manly to cry.”
Hallmark commercials? What the hell is wrong with me?

Ok, I cried at my daughter’s play where she had the lead in Annie and did such a FREAKING AMAZING JOB and got several standing ohs and who wouldn’t cry, right? That’s cool. That’s manly. But I didn’t cry when the cat died and my kids were decavitating and flooding the room up to my knees with tears. Me? Dry as a piece of sandpaper.
If it had been a movie, I’d have been soaking my shirt sleeves. But in real life I’m bone dry.

Well, not always. About three months after I retired for a life of leisure, I had some kind of bizarre housewife crying jag which freaked me AND my wife out. I just walked into the kitchen and started weeping. My wife crept into the kitchen like I'd sprouted wings and asked me what was wrong and I remember looking at her with total bafflement and saying “I have no idea!” It was like having a seizure. Apparently this happens a lot—TO WOMEN who retire from the workforce and stay home. My sister told me it had a lot to do with missing the people I’d befriended at my job, like they’d disappeared off the face of the earth—oh and that I was a wussy little girl.

I get those. They make sense. But I opened one of those glurge mails the other day, you know the kind, about some act of angelic kindness that is so hokey and saccharine you actually get diabetes at the end of the letter, that kind of glurge, and I weeped up.

It’s an affliction. My daughter says I have CCB—chronic cry baby syndrome.

But it’s a part of me and I gotta get right with it because believe me, it ain’t going anywhere. And I’m thinking it teaches something to my kids. I don’t know what, but they love it. They can barely pay attention to a movie for all their neck craning to check me for tears. Whatever chemical deficiency causes me to leak so often also causes me to display a kind of genuine tenderness in front of my kids. I mean, it’s funny, they don’t let me forget that, but it’s also real.

So I’ve decided to take it as a kind reverse badge of manliness. I weep openly now. I cry with abandon. Hell, I’m crying right now—you got a problem with that, bub? Huh? Do ya?

Pantsed in the Dells

We went to the dells. Growing up in Florida, we had a lot of cool natural stuff to enjoy--rivers, lakes, Disney--and we had beaches. A lot of them. No matter where you are in Florida, you're never more than an hour and a half from the beach. So in my childhood memory box are sweaty trips down the Bee-line (that's a highway, not a train) to New Smyrna and Daytona beach.

But in all my years there, I never learned to surf. Believe it or not, people in Florida surf. You don't get the same kind of waves they get in Cali or Hawaii for the love of God, but you can catch a wave and stand up and do some tricks before you run over the pale people of Michigan standing in the shallows looking for sharks.

I did learn to body surf which is a remarkable skill for a fat guy. I can jump in the face of a wave and ride it in and let me tell you, it's a very cool feeling and I can only assume it's twice as cool on a surfboard.

And being a teen in the land of lakes and Daytona, I can tell you stories of women losing their tops i the waves or behind a ski-boat, it's happened millions of times. How many people do we know who've dived into a pool only to leave their shorts on the surface with their pride. But it's never happened to me.

Until the Dells.

Our son, the Finagler, finagled his way into the vacation plans of some close friends who were visiting a Ukrainian Youth Camp in Baraboo, WI. A Ukrainian Youth Camp is a clapboard motel refurbished only enough so that live snakes and bears can't actually reach through the walls to eat you. It is not the height of luxury. My son went there and we met them a few days later, booked a room 20 miles north in the Dells, picked him up and took off.

In the days preceding that, my son had gone to a place called Noah's Ark which is water-park heaven, and lost his water park cherry, and grown fierce and brave and determined to find a slide, somewhere, that was actually vertical and hopefully deposited riders into the open air a half mile over a shark infested vat of radioactive yak vomit. That would be perfect for him.

We booked a hotel that included the world's largest indoor water park and when we gazed upon it's polycarbonate glory, my son punched me in the arm and demanded that I ride every slide with him to which I acquiesced then vomited into a garbage can.

The first slide we go on is called the Man-Eating-Blade-Choked-Maw-of-Death-Python and like most of the slides is an enclosed tube modeled somewhat on the lower intestines in which you are voluntarily flushed into a small pool whereupon you crack you skull on the cement berm at the far side. The tube has something like 75 turns and 131 drops and it lies somewhere between 88 and 90 degrees of vertical so at some points you're not sliding so much as falling feet first in total darkness with nothing but the sound of your own scream--but it's ok because it only lasts about 45 minutes.

To get to the beginning of these slides, you walk up 44 flights of stairs, the elbows of the slides resting just inches away so that everytime a body slams into the turn, you can feel the concussion, like a piano dropped off the back porch. So it's great, after throwing yourself down "The Well" which is an unlighted vertical pit with rocks and dead bodies in the bottom and getting your heart rate up to 300 beats per minute, you then have to carry a 3-tone raft back up all 631 flights of stairs. I fnally threw myself off the top to commit touristocide but landed in some guy's commemorative Mai Tai.

Once we'd exhausted the terrifying out door slides we went to the indoor park for the terrifying indoor slides and as we walked in noticed theri was a surf ride, a standing wave. You stood at the top and simply dropped in. It was far too cool to pass up AND had the benefit of only being about 10 feet tall and SLOPED so not only were there no dark turns, I could slip down the thing and survive. We stood in line and watched the Wisconsin lifeguard/superjock/surf nazis do their little hot dog routines to impress the girls. They flipped, spun, rolled and finally fell down the front of the way rolling headfirst into a flip out which they simply walked up to the nearest blushing girl-will-go-wild like they'd just stepped out of their dorm. I fugured if a perfectly buff 19 year old hot shot farm boy can do it, so can I.

So my son's turn came and he was surprisingly adroit, staying up on his "board" and having a blast before he fell off and was blasted back up to the landing area. Then my turn came.

I know from my writing you probably think I'm some George Clooney/Matt Damon double and
thanks for the compliments, and the flowers, really. But truth is, I'm sligtly overweight. And hairy. And by slightly overweight, I mean it looks like I might give birth to a fully grown wildabeest at any moment and by hairy I mean I can braid the hair on my back. And I don't tan well. Furthermore, Id like to say that I'm bringing sexy back. Mostly because it looks like a minitaure orange speedo on me.

So I drop in from the top, half expecting the thing to shut down and management come out and have a talk with me but, amazingly, I glide down the face of this wave with real grace and panache and then I kind of hang there in the middle, just like you're supposed to, surfing. My inner nine-year old retarded sociopath takes the controls and convinces me to try to skim from side to side like the surf jockies were doing so I lift the edge of my raft and it throws me off into the three hundred mile and hour wave and eats my pants.

Now, in a lake, if you lose you shorts, you can stand there and try to get the attention of your friends and hope to god they'll help you out. Even in a pool you can stand in the deep end and beg someone to throw you a towel. But the standing wave water that shoots out of the wave machine at a fierce three hundred miles an hour is only six inches deep. There's nowhere to hide.

In slow motion, I feel my pants ripped down to my knees any my own personaly indoor water park is exposed to the horror and permanent scarring of all the prepubescent teens (now all in queue to become monks) lined up to surf.

Let my just report that I kept my cool, knowing there is nothing NOTHING you can do in this situation except try to make it as brief as possible. As I rolled up the wave to be deposited onto the "bank" at the top, I managed to yank my suit back up to the frugal position it originally occupied while rolling in such a manner that the poor afflicted youth were merely mooned and not faced with the full Monty. And let it be further known that I was man enough to make a joke about it and walk calmly down the stone steps back out into the water park.

Then I went right to my hotel room and locked myself in the closet.

Mission Accomplished

The father and son fishing trip is perhaps one of the classic moments of fatherdom. The Roon and I were fortunate enough to b invited to one by my friend and political antithesis, Dave Haynes, Republican Committee Chairman, CPD Sergeant, and talk radio superstar. Dave's family rents all the cabins at Sunset Bluff Resort every May and has a fishing weekend.

Fishing is more than a sport, fishing is a kind of religion. Its rituals are ancient and the man who pays them due regard is participating in an ancient and honorable ceremony of petitioning the earth for sustenance. Should he pronounce the sacred words correctly, should he furnish himself with the proper instruments of his office, should he perform the illustrious dance with the proper form then he will be rewarded and the earth shall give up her bounty, the robust and filling, mysterious small-mouth bass; and the man shall hold it against the palm of his hand and appeal to the gods of the water in the time honored fashion and with the following proper oration: Jesus Snot Barking Christ in a Hat Basket, I didn't drive five hours and pay $900.00 to catch more bait! And then ceremoniously throw his Shakespeare rod and reel into the weed choked briny depths of Lake Hamlin, Michigan.

Fun on a father-and-son fish camp vacation is hampered by several obstacles, not the least of which is the bizarre and unexpected skill possessed by one's son in knotting his fishing line, mid cast, in the wind, into a perfect model of an Amazonian jungle spider's massive web, large enough to catch a man (which we proved). How Roon managed this on nearly every cast is completely outside the scope of science. But, like in a cartoon, I'd set up his hook, his bait, the bobber, turn around a gently place my Rapala with the grace and precision of a man comfortable with his place in the world, turn back to the kid to find him entrapped in a monofilament cocoon.

There s an etiquette and a collection of best practices associated with fishing that can easily be translated for the man who, like me, hasn’t fished in a long time and who, like me, is about to embark on a weekend excursion among a group of uncles and brothers and sons and nephews who’ve been fishing this lake since Sinatra was on the radio and the first lesson is this: watch where they fish.

One of the draws of Sunset Bluff is that the cabin cost includes a boat, a nice open topped Boston Whaler aluminum john boat with a 9 horsepower outboard motor hanging off the back. We woke the first morning, fled our cabin to the dock where ten or twelve guys are all standing on the docks and the banks fishing worms. There were a couple of guys in their boats but they weren’t going anywhere. Their boats were still tied up, fishing off the back of their boat three of four inches from the pier. Me and Roon jump in our boat and take off across the lake.

Aaah, the open water! Spray in our face, wind at our backs, lures lodged firmy and irretrievably in the carpet of weeds that lie thick and mocking in every direction on Lake Hamlin just three inches below the surface of the water, the ping of your son’s lure catching on the keel of the johnboat, where it will dangle like an inverse trophy hood ornament, a badge of your lack of paternal instruction, throughout the trip.

About six minutes into the weekend, Roon and every other 11 year old child, threw their arms into the air from sheer exhaustion. They were bored and they needed guns so while we were getting our fishing licenses at Wal Mart, I talked Dave into letting the kids get air soft guns.

When I was a kid, I remember the Titanic task of begging my mom to let me have a BB gun. My mom would say “You could put an eye out with those things,” and I’d shrug, staring of at the rack of high powered pellet guns, shiny black and lethal as hell, and say “Yeah--barely.”

And air soft is a wimpy version of a BBgun, molded out of high impact plastic to look exactly like an AK 47 or a Glock, the pistol most favored by drug dealers and Gary Busey. The producers finally started making them out of clear plastic so the neighborhood watch people would stop calling in their kids as gangbangers. They fire little plastic pellets that can hardly hurt you and probably would merely give you permanent diminished sight, not total blindness, not like a BB gun.

Not sixteen seconds after opening the passage, homeboy had already had his gun confiscated for pointing it at one of the grown men in the cabin—all cops—who wholeheartedly disapproved of the toys, especially their propensity for filling the damn things by, apparently, tossing all 15,000 bright green plastic BBs into the air, hoping a few might make it into the ammo slot. By 11:30 one of them had shot the other in the leg and both guns were on top of the fridge and they were sulking around the property. Bored.

But some rights of passage are vital and must be endured. Most vital, on a father and son fishing trip, is the entirely unnecessary profitless run. This is a trip by boat at a time when even comatose fishermen know that no fish in their right mind would get off their warm lake-bottom bed to eat a lifeless worm dangling from a rig transmitting our every word like a loudspeaker into the black water beneath the boat.

It is vital that this trip be undertaken under threat of rain, when it is far too cold to even creep slowly past an open kiln, much less fly across the open water of a deep water lake in the Upper Penninsula of Michigan. (Not many people know that Lake Hamlin, in Mikasoukee, means “dress in layers”).

But we did that right of passage. Four of us, Dave, Connor, Nate, and myself, in a tiny rowboat with an 8-horsepower engine (and by horse we mean dead horse and by dead horse we mean a three legged, diseased, malnourished ancient asthmatic dead horse) cutting a deep wake across the very center of the lake. Boats flew past us, barely touching the water, their keels just slicing through the very tips of the whitecaps, their Ray Bans following us in silence as they skimmed by, the look on their face the same look you give to someone limping to a four way stop in a purple 1973 Gremlin.

We got to the furthest edge of the lake, dropped anchor, and began fervently casting in all directions, the water cool and perfectly clear, calm as glass in the little cutaway glade we found, the bottom riddled with shallow pans of fish beds. We were silent, studious, our lures and bait in the water for all of, I don’t know, three maybe four seconds before Roon start reeling furiously.

“They’re not biting, let’s move.”

After getting his lure snagged on the anchor rope, and after getting mine snagged under the boat and onto Nate’s line and after a beaver swam up to stare at us with that same Ray Ban glaze the pros were using out on the open water, that there but for the grace of God go I stare FROM A BEAVER Dave and I chucked it all and raced (I’m exaggerating) across the lake to a waterside restaurant and order fish baskets and beer. We’re all puttering along toward the docks under a gray sky and the waves are low mounds, the reflection of the clouds like silver jewelry on the surface of the water and just as I’m thinking that, Roon notices it too and he says “Dude, this lake has excellent graphics!”

Later, after docking the boat, we saw that nearly everyone who had elected to stay at the docks had caught enough fish to feed Bolivia. We all took positions on the ends of the docks and dropped our bait in the water. I watched as mine drifted all the way back from the middle of the slough to just in front of me, a shaft of setting sunlight gilding the worm just a few feet below the surface and by some miracle, two fish, a bass and a northern, spun their slow motion front fins and idled up to my bait and I swear to you I SWEAR they looke
d at the worm, looked at each other, and shrugged.

About that time, Roon got a bite and reeled in a gorgeous 2 pound bass and his inner cave man perked up and said hey, wait, that’s kind of cool, and Roon got bit by the fishing bug and we stayed there until it was so dark he couldn’t see his bobber anymore.

The next morning when the insane bird that kept flying into my window every morning had finally committed birdicide and I finally crawled out from under the blankets, Roon was gone. I found him down on the bank with his rod, my rod, and someone else’s rod, working all three, eyes on the bobbers like a bird of prey. He caught a couple of bluegill and we took the boat our one last time for the hell of it. Roon road silently in the boat for like ten whole minutes before he finally spoke and I braced myself for the inevitable, for him to say I’m bored, or this is better on x-box, or fishing is gay, but instead he just says “This was pretty cool, dad.”