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?