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

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.

My other job goes on TV

I'm Not Crazy—I'm Listening to Louis C.K.

Roon's school is a quick walk from our house to his home room. Of course, he sleeps until the last minute each day so he can't make it there if he walks so I have to drive him to school which means I have to make it through the Gauntlet of Stupidity each morning without cursing into cardiac arrest.

For the first couple of weeks I did what all the other parents did. I hung my shaggy dome out the window and screamed phrases banned from use in the British Navy. And prisons. Some mornings I found myself dangerously close to leaping out of my car and eating the living crap out of some petit, double cell phone wrangling soccer mom and her impossible inability to use a blinker. I mean, I don't—I wouldn't. Those bitches are armed.

But man, the cranky is deep. You know the news footage where someone is trapped on top of their car while muddy water and ugly sofas swirl around their mini hummer? Imagine that but it's not water, it's pure unadulterated anger.

And everyone hates everyone else. They're all beady eyeing each other through the windshield and waiting to pounce on the tiniest infraction of morning drop off traffic jam etiquette and unload all the pent up anger left over from yesterday when they did EXACTLY THE SAME THING.

Bear in mind, this school is located at a three way intersection that entertains nearly 20,000 cars on each artery every day. Most of them are trying to drop off their kids.

Here're examples of the pure stupid:

• Just stopping in front of the school to wait


• Parking in the right hand lane for whatever reason


• Switching drivers in traffic


• Parking in front of the entrance to switch drivers, unload eight slow children, replace their engine


• Parking on the train tracks


• Causing me to park on the train tracks


• Blocking the intersection


• Re-blocking the same intersection


• Turning left from the right hand lane into the other right hand lane

And these are all the same car.

After a stint in anger management, I realized I merely needed to accept that I drive among the retarded—and that by changing my environment, I can change how I react to them. I wasn't sure what to do. Until Pandora added comedy to their stream.

Now I turn on my Louis C.K. channel and laugh my way through the tard fest. While everyone else's face is clenched into a fist of pure rage, mine is loose and relaxed, scrunched up into an insane grin or split ear-to-ear from full on guffawing.

However, I caught someone's eye today (we all try to avoid this) and realized that while inside my car, I'm simply being super entertained, jolly, and relaxed, from the outside, I look like a terrorist. My hair is attempting to escape. My face is a post-pillow, drool crusted wedge, my eyes are wide, and I'm laughing hysterically. They don't know I'm listening to Louis C.K. They think I'm stewing in angry silence just like them. Only I'm laughing.

Chestnut from the Nut Chest

Getting into the Holiday Spirit, I offer you a gift, this handsomely wrapped BEST OF post from last year. I swear it's worth your time. Don't believe me? Check out this handy quote . . .

But I don't blog for myself--I do it for you, dear readers, and to give up merely because there were risks, discomforts, or potential blindness would be cowardly. I pressed on. I pressed the blunted pik into my left nostril, tilted my head 45 degrees to the right, flipped the switch, and blew the top of my skull off.

The Water Pik Netti Pot Listerine Don't Try This At Home Sinus Irrigation Disaster

Sex, exercise, and getting the kids out of the house.

I'm trying this out. Here's part of my latest article, this on in Sacramento parent, and it's about sex. So, sure, you'll read it.

My kids have ruined my sex life.

Not for the reasons you might think. My wife and I aren’t too tired. I still think she’s sexy after having kids. Hell, you could roll my wife in axle grease, give her a 1977 perm, and add 30 pounds and it wouldn’t deter me from my husbandly “duties.” We’re not too busy.

It’s them: les petits saboteurs. They walk around on little ninja-rabbit feet. They are silent, sexy-time killers. We never know when they’re just going to pop their head over the edge of the Serta and ask for water. It got so bad that we couldn’t do the wangdango at all.

“Oh baby, I love how—did you hear something?”

“Everything’s fine, sweetheart, let me just—“

“I think he’s coming up the stairs! Get Dressed!"

Read the rest. . . .

 

In My Defense, I Did Conquer Tzichlitan With my Ninja Tanks. . .

A lot of people think video games are the latest agent of our progeny's demise and I am one of them. I can't think of a more ridiculous and possibly sinister leading indicator of imminent doom than kids who won't clean their room or feed their dog but never forget to flush the toilet or feed their goldfish on Sims. It scares the bejesus out of me and I strive to threaten my children with uninterrupted painful flogging if they spend more than 18 minutes a day playing video games.

I've also made some disparaging comments about some of the retired people I know who spend hours and hours playing video games. Bingo and solitary have been usurped by Zelda and online solitary.

To all of this I have thrown up my hands and shaken a sage and surly finger at all involved, saying they are squandering the precious few moments they have here on this little ball of dirt. Which makes me a pathetic a sad old hypocrite.

At about 1:30 in the afternoon this Saturday, I started playing a game. I just wanted to see what it was like. I'd seen the Roon slackjawed and dazed, playing this game for three hours at a stretch, which is pretty good even for him, and I wondered what was so compelling.

The game is called Civilizations/Revolution. The graphics are average. The length of gameplay is only a couple of hours. There are no car incendiary crashes or crimson head-shots. In the game, you choose to start a civilization, say the Roman Empire, from scratch and endeavor to take them from caveman to Cosmonaut ahead of all the other empires in the game. It. Is. Awesome.

I started just after lunch and a few minutes later, [My Attorney] called and asked what I fed the boys.

"Hot dogs."
"For dinner?"
"Dinner? No I just gave them hot dogs just now."
"Do you have any idea what time it is?"
"What? Uh, three?"
"It's eleven o'clock."

I had been playing this game for ten hours. TEN HOURS. I don't do anything for ten hours. I don't even sleep for ten hours. I looked around at my house, empty and dark, the dog crouched by the door with his legs crossed, the boys passed out on the couch under a protective blanket of spent Cheetos bags. I realized I was dehydrated, I was starving, and I'd been holding it for something like three hours straight because, dude, I needed to get the people of Pima to build one more Galleon so I could make a fleet and sink the new ships from Bismark, my enemy to the north.

I have never been so into a game in my life. Again, you have to understand, the graphics are sub par. But the manipulation of a tiny universe is brilliant! And it affects your world view. We started watching a movie which showed the 18th century workers of a dying factory and I instantly realised that if only there were more of them, that country could upgrade to the industrial era so, hey, it teaches history.

Late the next day the family wanted again to watch a movie and I was playing the game, my world dominating Egyptian empire having just discovered the Internet and on the brink of colonizing Alpha Centauri when the family G politely asked me to turn. Off. The. Game. I reacted ungraciously (I'm being diplomatic here) and my son started laughing. "Geeze, dad, you're acting just like me. You're addicted, dude!"

I'm so scared. I have two simultaneous deadlines, a huge complictaed ceremony, Bad Movie Night, and god knows what else due in the next two weeks but I am terrified that what's gonna happen is [My Attorney] is going to come home and find the kids emaciated and me surrounded by a nest of laundry and cold pizza looking like Uncle Fester and mumbling to myself: "I gotta research steam power. I got to build more legions. I got to get a submarine . . ."

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My Indian Name is 'Dances With Squirrels'

Every day my kids and I burst out the front door so I can take them to school. We do this at almost exactly the same time, and when I say burst, I mean something like explode.

Since we live in Chicago near a golf course and a forest preserve, we often see rabbits, chipmunks—even deer—grazing in the yard. We always see squirrels. Squirrels rule the street. They’re so tame they don’t even scatter when we race down the sidewalk to the car, they just sit their on their fat little haunches gnawing acorns or pine cones or crabapples and give us the hairy eyeball, as if every single squirrel immigrated from the Bronx.

Until the other day, when a squirrel and I bonded.

I always assume the squirrels don’t pay much attention to us enormous. explosive bipeds. I figure they figure us for ‘big crazy squirrels’ and ignore the screaming, the papers flying everywhere, the hip-check duels for determining who gets shotgun. But the other day, I threw the door open, raced down the steps, and skidded to a stop: One of them was staring at me.

I don’t mean staring the way a rabbit will glance at you to see if it should run, I mean a big fat tawny squirrel with an acorn in it’s grip was giving me the hairy eyeball. Like he recognized me.

I sensed a weird resonance with this tiny mammal: we were roughly the same shape, we both had a sardonic glare plastered on our mugs, we were both exquisitely browed. I was carrying a stack of books in my hands, close to my chest, worried they’d slip, just like he was carrying a giant acorn in his little fingers. I don’t know why I did this but I hunched down, like I was ducking—and the squirrel did the same thing. My son said the most remarkable, eloquent thing, practically an oration, he said “Dude.” I was inspired.

I double hunched and the squirrel double hunched. I turned my head to the right and the squirrel turned his. I ducked my head. He ducked his head. It was an interspecies tango. I said “Oh my God, my new Indian name is ‘dancing with squirrels’. My kids cracked up. My dance partner ran away.

The next day we hit the steps and pulled up short. There he was, same time, same place. My daughter immediately started in with a ‘bown-chicka-wow-wow’ and me and the squirrel ducked and bobbed until my son, though deeply impressed with the cross genus gyrations, informed us we were already late for the first bell by groaning, “Dude?” and we pulled into the car. As I checked the rearview to pull out, I saw my squirrel still staring at us, like the song was still playing but we’d jilted him and went to the bar for a drink. He looked surprised.

The next day he didn’t show. Instead of blowing the door open, we eased out onto the steps-- but no squirrel. I tried to get a rabbit to bump and grind but he just wiggled his nose, kind of a ‘you got to be kidding me,’ wiggle. The other squirrels just raced around the tree trunk and ignored me. I mean they completely ignored me, like they were saying ‘that bastard just left Franky standing there.’

As we sped through the neighborhood, suicide squirrels darted into the road, dodging my tires and leaping out of the way with hair trigger timing and steely bravado. I usually ignore this but after dancing with a squirrel for two days in a row, I had a new view. These were not simply confused rodents. They were warriors. They were testing their mettle by arcing across the path of oncoming hummers and hybrids. I imagined bristly squirrel girls hidden in the boxwoods and peonies switching their carefully groomed tails and saying ‘OMG, did you see that?!’ while their boy squirrels strut back to them across the grass having risked everything to give the tiny finger to chrome plated roaring death by squishilation.

This fantasy spun completely out of control so that every wild animal I saw seemed to have cartoon talk bubbles suspended in mid-air over their heads, filled with snappy dialogue and withering quips. The deer all talked like Frasier, rabbits were all frat boys’ the squirrels all talked like DeNiro in taxi, smoking unfiltered cigarettes and asking me ‘what, you gotta problem?’

Freelace Writers Don't Get Sick Days.

s you know, I work at home. When I came up with a career change I thought to myself, ok, brilliant, I'll work at home, write, become famous, make a bajillion dollars, and live like a rock star. I envisioned myself draped over my leather chair with a laptop and a cappuccino interviewing Obama for Rolling Stone.

I knew that was a fantasy, I knew I'd be writing stock entries for digital camera retail sites and B2B literature instead of the great American novel and I was and still am ok with that.  My principle complaint is that in each of the myriad fantasies I entertained about the glamour of the telecommuter life, I was always BY MYSELF, not embedded with the groaning, moaning, hacking, wheezing, snot sluiced rheumy eyed boredomites I am bivouacked with currently.

Tuesday at 3:48am (AY EM!) my daughter woke up screaming. [My Attorney] was propelled from the bed, leaving a body shaped smoking hole in the floor as she manifested by her screaming daughter's side, then remanifested by my side to tell me I had to take the girl to the emergency room because her ears were exploding.

By 4:25 I was standing in the ER with the screamer who had swallowed two hulking horse pill sized [brand name aspirin who won't play ball with me that rhymes with "stylenol"] expecting to still be standing there four hours later explaining to them how I am not actually an indigent, but a possessor of gold plated POP insurance benefits that allow me to handpick new organs and pays in cash. However, I didn't have that experience. I was processed with such alarming efficiency that I am compelled to believe they were tracking me by satellite and knew I was coming and why. The girl and I found ourselves in a room post haste and before the blue curtain unswished itself, a doctor came breezing in, looked in my daughter's ear and proclaimed, with grave authority: there's nothing wrong. We were home by five.

I know I'm supposed to wax joyously about such efficiency in our health care. I mean, people complain all the time about lag time at hospitals and doctors' offices, myself first and foremost. I hate it. I hate that I have to answer the same questions three times in the same visit; I complain that I have to fill out the same form every time I show up even though I haven't changed my name or grown a new arm; I complain that when I tell the nurse the girl had no fever the attendant then asks if she had a fever and then the Doctor asks if she had a fever and then they take her temperature. I dread the ER like I dread the draft and so when it works they way I've always shouted that it should I shouldn't bitch but here's the deal, if it works, then what am I going to write about?

And the kids are sick. The girl really does have a hideous and disgusting ear infection, the kind of thing that spews whale vomit from the side of her head like a punctured jugular. The boy and [My Attorney] may have strep; at least they're acting like they do when they have strep. The boy has a horrible stomachache and [My Attorney] sounds like a third level Star Wars alien bar-scene voice-over. She usually sounds a little like Demi Moore when she's sick, but not this time. She's on a trial and so tired and sick her eyes actually fell out of her head this morning and she just left them there on the carpet in the wadded up tissue and spent diet coke cans like two quail's eggs in a crow's nest. She turned to me and said "Hrrrgh frogsnot didjkse ughtra clambake?" As she passed into delirium, I crept out of the room.

And, worse, as [My Attorney] waivers in and out of consciousness, she's losing track of time like some kind of Alzheimer patient in the last throws of losing their mind, and keeps nagging me out of sequence, like I'll hang up her jacket and she'll say thank you then 'did you take my jacket to the dry cleaner?' and 'is the baby ok?' and my favorite 'he'll never know; is a hundred enough?' which I hope is about a birthday present.

And it all started with dog puke. Ty blew cack on the boy's bed three times in a row, which meant three huge laundry cycles on an already strained system that is trying to finish all the laundry that was soaked during the basement flood. He cacked on the new porch. Cacked in the kitchen. I took him to the vet and he cacked all over my car. The vet breezes in and gravely proclaims: there's nothing wrong.

God help them if they get me sick. I will retaliate, I swear. I will puke on the dog. I will puke on [My Attorney's] jacket. I will puke on their homework and their book bags. They will rue the day RUE THE DAY if I  {haaaorf} get {wheeeze} even {hack!} the slightest bit {flaarrrrgh!} . . .  crap.

Happy Pulaski Day! A Day in the life of a nearly 10 year old boy

[My Attorney] went to Delaware this week for a patent trial in which a lot of people grumble and kvetch about who owns the intellectual rights to the number 7. So I’m left at home with the monkeys.

Girl monkey tells me she doesn’t have school Monday. I ask why. She declares: It’s Pulaski day!

Boy Monkey chimes in “Oh yeah, we don’t have school either--happy Pulaski Day!”

My kids go to different schools. Monkeyboy goes to a Catholic school and girlmonkey goes to a public school. They’re both geniuses and their state-manded ISAT scores pretty much lend measurable evidence to the idea that they’re smarter than me. This is a concept they exploit mercilessly and they’ve come to accept it as fact. So they assume any idea they have for putting one over on me is a perfect idea since by context it will exceed my stated level of understanding. I firmly believe that they sometimes think that when they talk in my presence I think they’re speaking a different language. Their arrogance is unfathomable.

And dead on. When Monkeyboy said he had Pulaski day off, I didn’t even blink I just thought 'great, I can sleep in'.

His school wakes me up at 8:45.

“We’re just calling about Connor’s absence.”

“That little bastard.”

“Pardon me?”

“He told me it was Pulaski day.”

“That’s not a Catholic Holiday.”

“I’m going to kill him.”

“So he won’t be coming in?”

“Oh, he’ll be there.” [evil music rises . . .]

When I want to, I have a voice like a cannon. I reserve this voice for unsolicited calls from mortgage resellers and republicans. I used vox artilleria to wake up Connor by loudly wishing him HAPPY PULASKI DAY! He leaped straight out of the covers and landed feet first in an excuse.

“I said I thought we had Pulaski Day Off!”

I hadn’t done laundry—Pulaski day, right?—so the only gym pants he had were a pair discarded by his sister. They were too big and sagged around his ankles like he was wearing swanky potato sacks. I almost made him walk but I honestly believe it’s so cold outside his brain might explode like an ice-decavitated Pepsi can.

Later: at school, he and his friend-who-just-happens-to-be-a-girl whom shall never be referred to as a girlfriend, __ __ __ __ ___ __ __, have a knock down drag out over which dog is most popular, Border Collies (ours) or bulldogs, (hers). Pretty soon they have the room divided and at each other's throats like one of those weird psyche experiments from the 60s and he and __ __ __ __ ___ __ __, his friend-who-just-happens-to-be-a-girl, aren’t speaking. Which is ok because, ‘dude, she’s a girl.’

Later: To fulfill a promise, I take them to dinner at Gino’s East where you can write on the walls. I heard they serve pizza but scribbling on the bench is the principle attraction. I stop by Walgreen’s and bone up with sharpies and gel pens and we get a booth and start drawing on everything in sight. The simians disappear into the Gothic depths and I busy myself with some intricate graffiti. The male child comes back with the satisfied swagger of a dictionary-loving preteen who’s managed to write a word on the wall so vulgar and satanic a nun would drop dead after one syllable. He also sports a dumbass badge of truly classic stature: he’s used the brown sharpie to draw a mustache on himself.

A. Sharp. Eee.

I crack up and he tries to shrug it off but I catch him trying to read the fine print on the marker later on.

“Dude, are you aware you have a mustache?”

“Yeah!”

“Are you aware that a sharpie is a permanent marker?”

“Yeah, uh, what?”

“You’re going to have that mustache for three weeks.”

“I can get it off.”

"How?"

"Spit."

“Jesus Hapolid Christ. Why’d you draw a mustache on yourself.”

“I didn’t—Sarah did.”

“Well—why—what--how" the kids know when I’m about to 'splode. He cuts me off.

“Dude, I let her.”

“Why?!”

“Because she bet me I wouldn’t do it! Duh!”

Later: we get home and the Roon is declaring himself bored and I’m writing and I keep hearing this clickity clickity sound.

Let me admit here and now that I have an affliction. I can’t handle little clicky sounds when I’m trying to work. I fully understand that this makes me a whacked out freak hell-bent on one day driving a car with little plastic airplanes superglued all over the top. I understand that. But. The. Clicking. Has. To. Stop.

After the fourth snarling imprecation for him to CEASE! I turn around and give him the hairy eyeball. I hold out my hand and tersely demand that he give up whatever he’s picking his teeth with. I’m expecting a toothpick or a crayon or something marginally believable but instead he hands me a tooth. A fnarcking tooth! He lost it yesterday and I had him put it in a little bowl in the china cabinet and here he is sitting on the sofa driving me crazy by PICKING HIS TEETH WITH A TOOTH!

Little freak.

Birdwatching

I am 44 years old. Fourty four. It's an incredible thing to say, to have reached this level of maturity, this sanguine, sage, and wise perch on the dim side of middle age, and I truly wish I had some nugget of wisdom to reveal to you, my gentle, inebriated readers, but all I can say is that being 44 just means I've been 11 four times.

It's not my birthday. I just that I'm coming to the realization that I will never completely grow up.

I tell my kids all the time that people don't all grow up in a straight line. I tell them that being adult is not the same as being mature. I tell them that most grown-ups are just nine-year olds with jobs. They believe it, because they've known me their whole lives.

I was thinking about this today and my son and I engaged in a little surreptitious bird watching.

A lot of people think birdwatching is for hopeless geeks or the British. But their thinking of the popular sport of spotting actual living feathered bipeds. I'm not talking about those birds, I'm talking about the finger variety.

I don't know what the hell drives me to do it. I mean, seriously, go on Facebook and look at my iRead bookshelf. I read about linguistic theory, guillouche construction, and history. I'm no idiot. I don't think I'm an idiot. Maybe I'm an idiot.

Is it possible for your inner child to be precocious?

So me and the Roon are in the eye doctor's office today and she's got her back to me and says "Ok, now look at your father," and while she gazes into his eyeball I start flipping the bird.

Where does it come from? What prompts this? I'm in the room with a dignified professional, someone to whom I'm paying a hefty bucket of coin, yet as soon as her back is turned I go tween, flipping the bird, and making my son laugh.

The doctor half jokingly asks, "Am I that funny?"

Now a normal adult would take this as a cue to drop the shenanigans. But I just amp it up so that she has to give the kid a second to cool out before she finishes the next eye.

If she had turned to look at me, it would have been one of those questioning looks often shot wordlessly between knowing adults as a kind of verification that they both consider the kid they're considering to be home schooled by drug-addled baboons. She would have seen a middle aged man with a grim, serious, no-bull-dooky look on his face. The kind of face that keeps me from getting mugged. The kind of face that scares pre-schoolers and dogs.

Unless she checks the security cameras, she'll never know that this seemingly grumpy father was practically mooning his son while her back was turned. She'll never see me mock vomiting, or pretending to eat my boogers with the melodramatic trance-like gustatorial delight of a Rip Taylor gourmand. She will always think my son was laughing at her.

And that's part of the joke, this secret stand-up routine that goes on forever between me my spawn; that it's just between us, a sacred covenant of comedy, a language of fart jokes, family guy references, and guerrilla wet willies that only we can partake of or comprehend.

And I'm OK with it. People make assumptions about me. I wear a nice suit, comb my hair, know my way around a three course dinner, and can list the differences between a Malbec and a Pinotage until everyone's eyes glaze over. But if my kids are in sight, somewhere in the conversation I'm having with the adults, I'll recognize a moment when no one is looking at me and I'll catch my kids' eye and I'll use my middle finger to push up my glasses. Or I'll say something like 'there's only one thing I can  say about . . . ' and use my middle finger to count. Or I'll tap the top of a glass with my middle finger while I'm looking at them and they'll howl in the back ground, absolutely entertained by the sheer purposeful bravado of my depraved immaturity.

Is it professional adult behavior? Is it even worthy and admirable? Is it the kind of behavior you should manifest for your progeny? Blowhard says what?

Hell if I know. No parent truly knows what works. For me, it's a combination of calculated neglect, abject clarity, and unmitigated honesty. I try not to ever pretend to them, to ever act as if I have all the answers or even the final say. And I haven't told them this part: that half the time I'm flying by the seat of my pants, figuring it out as I go and, most terrifying, I just as often base my parenting on what I learn from them. That's not a Hallmark platitude, either: my kids are frikkin smart. Most of all I'm not restrained around them. I allow my inner retard to go wild, to let my monkey brain take over, and to flip the bird in secret as often as I can. I think it teaches them that growing up doesn't mean you abandon childishness. It means you celebrate it. I think that works.

That and fart jokes.

How to Pack for Disney

Listen, going to Walt Disney World is like voluntarily attending the Batan Death march. Pack light and prepare for blisters with sisters. Your feet will feel like they'd been hacked off and run over by a truck. Twice.

The average visitor to Disney walks 5 to 7 miles a day. The average visitor stands in line for about three years per ride (less popular rides only take about six months of standing). So figure that an average day at Disney is like hiking uphill barefoot over broken Coke bottles and hot melted plastic carrying your entire family and their respective souvenir lead figurines and signature bricks while a British guy keeps saying "Oy! Mate!" into his cell phone which you can barely hear over his skin as it audibly blisters--for eight years.

There was a point where I just wanted to saw off my legs and turn them in.

I realized that I really needed a handy guide, a quick, bulleted list that I could have used to help me navigate the horizontal Everest that is a day at Walt Disney World.

The Most Important Pre Disney Visit Preparation List In the World!

Pack The Following Indispensable Items:

1. A gas mask: Look, there's usually 17 million people walking around that place, people that spend most of their life eating cheese and beans and carbonated beverages while watching TV or surfing midget-wrestler porn. Suddenly they're walking the length and breadth of WDW in the hot sun and all the occulted gaseous deposits they've been storing up like secret Turkmenistanian nukes is getting dislodged and launched aft, directly across your bow and under your nose. Walking through Disney is like being haunted by an invisible  nose level stratus of ass fog. Every other breath I was punched in the mouth by farts from all over the world. It was EPCOT for ipicac.


2. Corn Starch: If your family is super athletic and skinny you may not need this. But if your family is like everyone else's and at least one or more of you have thighs like hickory trunks, then pack the damn starch. After just a mile or two of trudging up and down the horizontal mountain that is WDW, your average fat kid's inner thighs are gonna look like bright red boxing gloves and they will be walking with the wide open swagger of a gay cowboy. And crying. Keep it in a film canister. Apply liberally throughout the day.


3. Chewing gum: I have kids and they never shut up. At home, I just erupt once an hour and scare the living shit out of them and they simmer down. But I don't want to ruin a Disney trip. Shut them up by gluing their lips together with a big wad of gum. Disney doesn't sell gum because they don't want it getting on people's feet. Bring your own, shut their holes, and prevent yourself from going crazy.


4. Custom Translations: Because Disney is an international hot spot, you'll have the rare opportunity to get pissed off at people from all over the globe. Be a more effective communicator and translate your favorite FU lines into French, Norwegian, and Tajikistan. Here's mine:
   "Excuse me, you cretinous buffoon, but I actually require the tiny space in front of me for breathing so I was wondering if you could remove your unsoaped self from it post haste. Thank you."
   Excusez-moi, vous cretinous bouffon, mais j'ai vraiment besoin de le petit espace en face de moi pour respirer tellement je me demandais si vous pouviez supprimer l'autonomie de votre sans savon il vite. Merci.
   "No, that's actually MY foot. You're supposed to use YOUR feet for walking."
   Hindi, na talagang AKING paa. Ikaw ay para gamitin IYONG paa para sa paglakad.
   "For the last time, I don't work here, I just like to dress like a Pirate some times!"
   Pela última vez, eu não trabalho aqui, eu só quero vestido como um pirata algumas vezes!
   
   
   
   


5. The McCauly Culkin: You're going to get into one of those crowd clogs and wish you had a people plunger to flush everyone through the bathroom passage between Adventureland and Frontierland. Nothing works like McCauly Culkin! Just point over everyone's head, slap your hands to your face a'la that kid from that one movie, and scream OH MY GOD, IT'S MICHAEL JACKSON! Suddenly you'll be standing all by yourself. You must be careful to employ the McCauly Culkin with great skill or you'll be trampled to death.


6. Corn Chowder: Sometimes you just need your space and at Dismal World, you're not going to get any. People are wedged into that place like refugees on a raft. So pack a tiny can of corn chowder. If things get weird, if you find yourself sardined by smelly Norwegians and flotillas of twin baby buggies, just take a swig of chowder and let fly. Really spray it everywhere. Throw some theatrics into it. It's like a bomb--suddenly you have a 50 foot circle of privacy. If they don't get the message, reach down, grab a kernel off your shoe or something and eat it.


7. A White Cane: People all wink and grin and claim if you rent a wheelchair you can get ahead in lines. But wheelchairs are expensive and clunky and in order to sell it, somebody has to push. The truly savvy carry a foldable cane. You'll already have sunglasses so half your disguise is done! The cast at Disney is hip to the wheelchair trick and you most often end up waiting a long time while they let a few hundred people ahead of you to test your patience. They NEVER mess with the blind.  They'll even put a blind guy in front of the wheelchair people. Just remember the rides all have people watching on night-vision video cameras so be sure to Ray Charles yourself a little and point in random directions. At the end, wave at the wall.


8. Food: Disney food sucks. Imagine the least palatable cafeteria gloop you've ever eaten and degrade it enough so it could be used as a torture device at Gitmo and you almost have something disgusting enough for Disney cuisine. If you're bringing kids, then you've got built in pack mules. Clean out their school bags, pack one with food, one with ice and beer, and one with all your extra socks and gel insoles.


9. Extra feet: because you will finally collapse in front of the hat shop across from the Jungle Cruise and begin sawing off your own feet. Everyone does it. You think Disney made that cement brick red? That's dried blood, pilgrim.


10. A taser: sometimes you'll get stuck behind someone who just doesn't understand the urgency you feel in getting through the secret back way from Fantasyland to Tomorrowland and they're creeping along, two twin strollers side by side with grandma in the motorized scooter and nineteen kids walking in a line behind dad who is glued to his blackberry and no matter how hard you try, that narrow gap through their sedentary glurgefest it keeps closing up on you and you're about to 'splode. A deft application of 30,000 volts will usually stop them in their tracks and you can squeeze past them while they try to ressussitate grandma.

Proper Potty Training for People with Penises

For sending parents into drooling catatonia, nothing compares to potty training. It's first of the classic thresholds of child development and the first time you and your spawn have a shared weird experience. Trust me, there will be more.

All parents will have to teach their kids this simple skill. Every "What to expect when you're Expectorating" book out there has a chapter devoted to the minutiae of merde and most of them try to convince you that potty training is an intricate, delicate, and difficult period, requiring endless couch-time for the parents and their progeny. Most guides imply that improper potty training can lead to lifelong neuroses and Emo music.

My kids were so easy it was almost spontaneous. I sat the boy down on his little chair at exactly the right moment and the resulting efficacy of exporting his effluence sans diaper made an instant impression on him.

My great neglect at that moment was a lack of follow-through. I should have explained immediately that the chamber of reflection has a dual purpose, that one can use it for sitting or for standing. I figured it would come up in the very near future and shelved the whole idea and went back to doing laundry.

[My Attorney] was on deck for the next Number 1 and wasted no time in teaching the boy proper penis procedure: sit, release, wipe.

She told me she was teaching the boy how to pee in the bowl and I didn't think twice about it. I just crossed it off my to-do list. Only later did I wonder about the obvious mechanics and thought to myself, how does she know what to do?

"You taught him to shake, right?"

"What?"

"You know--shake."

"Shake what?"

"His thing."

"Why!?"

"Guys shake."

"Before or after?"

"What did you teach him to do when he's done?"

"Use a tissue, duh."

"Oh my god. Babe, how exactly did you teach my son to pee?"

"I don't know, like everyone pees: you sit down---"

"@#!^%$ ^$##@!"

I want all the new moms and moms to be to please listen up and listen up good: leave proper penile procedural to the papas.

When it comes to penis training, the dad has the upper hand because the dad, presumably, is furnished with the same equipment as the son. He has, in fact, been training his entire life in peni practicalia, and, again, presumably, knows things that, as a mom, you don't know.

Specifically, and this is paramount penis procedure, are two habits unique to the water closet ways of woman-kind: tissues and sitting.

Pay very close attention: men don't sit down to pee. Pay even more attention: when we're done, we S H A K E. We don't W I P E.

I realized [My Attorney] had been teaching the toddler to touch up his tallywacker with a tissue for two weeks before I found out. Then I realize that it is too late--TOO LATE--to change. He's been trained.

Then it really hit me: my son pees like a girl!

His life as a man was finished. Now when other boys make jokes about writing their name in the snow, the Roon will have to ask them what they're talking about. I had a vision of him walking into the urinal bay at school and wondering out loud,  "Dude, where are the wipes?"

He would be an urinary outcast; a pee pariah.

I acted fast. I called him over.

You know you're supposed to pee standing up.

Gross!

And you don't wipe.

What? Well . . .  well . . .what do you do?

You shake.

Shake what?

What do you think?

Oh my god! Dad, that's gross! Gross! It'll go everywhere!

I was too late.

I went out to the garage. I dipped my hands into a bucket of crude oil, lit a cigar, and thought about guns. I had to protect my manhood and for some reason I thought it was at stake. I thought maybe the boy's manhood was at stake too. I remembered great pee moments from my childhood:

• Peeing into the wind off the back of a moving pick-up truck;


• Peeing onto an electric fence;


• Writing my name in the sand at the beach then drinking three whole cokes because my name is 22 letters long and I was trying to write in cursive and I ran out at christopher pa--


• Peeing off the side of a boat


• Peeing off the top of a building under construction


• Peeing into the campfire


• Peeing into the bait-well in our boat


• Peeing on a cow


• Starting a forest fire . . .

Those are cherished memories, the very building blocks of a boy's life. How was my son supposed to ---

Hey dad, you're right. It totally works. I can pee standing up.

Awesome. You made it into the toilet?

Toilet?

Possible Books for Precocious Children

I'm always trying to come up with new things to procrastinate over. Today, my writer's bug got to me and I decided I needed to write some children's books for the precocious set. Here's a list of potential titles:

Alphabet Cassulet:

A is for acidophilus
B is for bactracious
C is for contrapuntal
D is for dipsomaniac
E is for existentialism

•    My Pet Giant African Land Snail
•    Everybody Poops: Academic Review of Fecal Humor in Early Educational Literature.
•    Goodnight Bassoon
•    Where the Wild Things Are: Statistical Analysis For Establishing Social Boundaries
•    Why Are You My Mommy?
•    Where the Sidewalk Ends: Jungian Archetypes and the Loss of Urban Micro Social Cultures
•    Spurious George
•    Schrödinger’s Cat in the Hat
•    Green Eggs & Ham: Sustainable Agriculture and Carbon Footprint Reduction in Breakfast Food Production Techniques
•    My Two Mommies: An Argument for Human Egg Cloning