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.

Did You Say Penis? I Thought You Said Penis! Penis!

I wish I'd never studied psychology. I wish I didn't know about Freudian slips or marker locution, or any of that psycholinguistic, semiotic mumbo jumbo because if I didn't, then I wouldn't know my daughter's got procreation on the mind 24/7. I used to live in a disabused state of blissful ignorance. Now, I get this.

Dad: Hey, can somebody get this bag of dog food off the table?
Sarah: What!? Dad, did you say penis?!

Dad: You want a glass of orange juice?
Sarah: OMG! Dad said penis!

or

Dad: . . . so you have to divide the quadratic dividend into the coefficient of fourteen to get zero for a.
Sarah: Did you say penis?

I know I'm supposed to realize she's grown up, that she'sa woman now. I know I'm supposed to realize her hormones are raging through her like the Niagra filling a teacup. I know. But I don't want to know. I want to remain the blissful inebriate king I was when she thought she was Pochahantas, when she said she was going to grow up and marry a cartoon.

By definition I am a Dad because I am the sole male progenitor of my own spawn. But by habit, I'm fairly certain I am a mom as I spend most of my day doing laundry and cleaning floors. I am the limo. I am the grocer. And I am he who obtains pads. I've learned to deal with a lot of womanstuff and I think I do it with all the aplomb such trans-traditional-parenting requires. Once you find yourself standing in the HYGIENE aisle on your cell asking your daughter if she needs heavy or regular flow kotex, your manhood's pretty much a wash.

But the sex line is one I will approach fully Gandalphed. I'll wag my beard, staff stabbed into stone, and thunderously proclaim YOU SHALL NOT PASS! And my daughter will poke her head around the kitchen door and ask: "Did you say penis?"

As a boy, I had sex on the brain with the same drooly retardation as any other kid. I just didn't know girls did that too. I really didn't. Like my father before me, I found it hard to believe girls even pooped, much less thought about peen. But having replicated into the opposite gender, I have had all my girl illusions shattered like porcelain princess dolls run over by a van full of girls-gone-wild videos. When I was a kid, I didn't know:

• Girls fart.


• Girls name their boobs.


• Girls think about sex.


• All the time.


• God help me.

This illusion, I think, serves some evolutionary purpose. I don't know if it's Darwinian or Lemarkian evolution, but it came out of a desire for fathers to ensure their girls marry someone who is as smitten and retarded about them as their father, because that narcoleptic effect allows the girls to remain in control for years, giving them time to establish their man as something just above the level of pack mule.

I like the illusion. I like being ignorant. I like it enough that I'm inches away from stabbing my eardrums with an ice-pik so I can remain deaf and stupid and not hear my daughter say the word penis. I don't care if she grows up to be a fluid dynamics scientist and wins a Nobel prize for her invention of a urinary canal replacement device, I don't want to hear the P word come out of her mouth ever again.

As I've remarked before, my girl was born deep into the aftermath of the sexual revolution. She has the exact plans for herself as any Victorian railroad tycoon's first born son: that she will receive an alarmingly expensive quality education at a college built during the age of steam; that she will walk out of that college into a job in science or law, promptly receiving a salary slightly smaller than a wrongful death payoff; that she will rock a sweet convertible from day one, vacation in luxurious leisure villas on exclusive island mountain resorts; that she will marry a man just as smart and witty as she is who will immediately give birth to and raise her nine children.

I said as much recently as the family frequented the best new sushi joint in Chicago, Makisu, which is actually in Skokie. We were all sitting around the table sinking our teeth into a plate of White Dragon maki when the wine and the joise d' vive washed over me and I said I was so happy, that my kids seemed destined to do well, that I was really proud of my daughter's acceptance into a summer Arabic language program.

Dad: I'm so proud of you.
Daughter: [snorting Rame cola through her nose] Did you say penis?

Father! Please Refrain From Feeling the Family Jewels!

It’s a man thing. It’s unavoidable. We can’t help it: God designed us so that our hands fall in our lap and, well, since they’re there, we figure we ought to use them for something cause we’re all about practicality and getting her done and, so, sphericum ergo, we scratch.

Sometimes we don’t even itch. In fact, I’d have to say in this day and age of soap and instant hot showers and excellent laundry services and all the other things that separate us from the Amish and the 18th century, we rarely have any real reason to claw the baubles save one: it reasserts our manhood.

My daughter doesn’t buy it, however. In fact, if I scratch myself in front of her one more time she might stab me with her iPod.

It’s not like I plan this. I don’t have an Outlook reminder that says “8:47am Scratch Balls.” It’s unconscious. It’s a tic. But tell that to my daughter. This morning I walked out into the living room where she’s waiting for the limo to take her to school and it’s picture day so she’s dressed like a rock star. I mean she looks stunning: black silk dress, choker, diamond earrings, and an unnaturally prominent display of boobage.

I’m wearing a modified wife-beater T-shirt, Jack Daniels jams, and my head looks like it’s being humped by a drug-addled squirrel. Then I hustle the boys.

“Daaaaaaaaaaaad! God! GOD! What’s your PROBLEM! Do you have to do that in front of me EVERY TIME?!”

“IT’S A REFLEX!”

“I don’t care! Stop it!”

“Ok,” scritch scritch.

“DAD!”

“Doh!”

“Don’t be such a man!”

“Sorry.”

“Now get me my black strapless bra.”

I swear this is verbatim.

My kids are TRYING to be the death of me.

Gay is the New Dude

An unscientific poll of grade school boys in northwest Chicago shows a disturbing trend toward a new epithet that is entirely inappropriate: instead of 'stupid', they say 'gay'.

For instance: when my father would play me, say, a Roger Miller song when I was ten, I'd say "Dad, that song is stupid." Today, when I play, say, King Crimson, Roon says "Dad, that song is gay."

Where the hell do they get this language? Who says stuff like that? I mean using an entire subculture's sexual proclivity as an epithet is totally gay.

Oh.

Ok, so they get it from, um, us.  Surely they didn't make up the word and surely they didn't decide to use it as an interlocutory substitute for "unacceptable" without a little modeling. (And by modeling I mean behavioral modeling, not runways.) I know you think I'm talking about parents but I'm not. I'm talking about comedians.

Every single comedian doing a gay impersonation drops the prancing fey bomb and impersonates the very same gay guy from 1987 who idolized Kate Bush and wore his button down shirts like halter tops. We all know that guy didn't rep the gay community even then, but today it's so far off the mark it's like thinking Amos & Andy are hip.

Today's gay is indistinguishable from today's not so gay. They have earned their place in the status quo by becoming so typical and every-day that there's not even any drama in coming out anymore. I expect parents will be throwing coming out parties with the same indifference as sweet sixteens. And as much as I'd like to follow my comedic instincts and make a Cotillion joke, I just can't. Not because it's not politically correct, but because it's just not funny. Why? Because gay is boring. Big yawn.

But the poofy queen has become such a stock character in sitcoms and stand-up that comedians just can't give it up. They keep swishing across the stage in a parody of a person that hardly exists anymore and truthfully, I wonder if the slang logic of ten year-olds is picking up on this.

When they say 'gay' they actually mean 'boring' or 'stupid' and so in that respect, they're dead on. Maybe this isn't indicative of intolerance but of sophisticated linguistic theory at work. Maybe they're all micro Chomskyites and we're really behind the language curve here, like finding out phat means awesome, a linguistic shift that has a perfectly intact logic but didn't trickle down to the elders until it was already passe.

I distrust political correctness, but I insist on linguistic integrity and I'm leaning toward an appreciation for the 'gay' epithet coming from these tiny Stevie Pinkers. The big swishy gay is as dead as E. Aaron Presley and impersonating either of them is as lame as the current GOP. It is, in a word, stupid. Kids know this instinctively and they're language reflects it. To think otherwise is to promote a belief that children are not sophisticated users of language, and that's, in a word, gay.

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 . . ."

The Times We Live In.

So I'm making supper and I glance out the window and I can see this guy at the corner of our lot. He's got a red wagon with extended cardboard sides and he's kind of staring down the sidewalk past the side of our house kind of blankly.

"Crazy alert," I say over my shoulder into the kitchen. My son elbows me out of the way and stares at the guy over the sink.
"What's he doing?"
"I don't know. What's with the wagon?"
"Why's he just standing there?"
"I'm sure he's just waiting on someone."
"Dude," my son uses my given name. "A grown man with a wagon?"
The girl reports from the front room: "There's a blanket and newspapers in the wagon! I think he's homeless!"
"He's not homeless. Look at his shoes."
"Crazy. Definitely crazy."
The guy turns like he's following something invisible. He moves the wagon like he doesn't know what he's doing. It rolls off the sidewalk into the snow. He rocks it back and forth kind of gently. He looks up. Looks around.
"He's not going anywhere."
"Why us?"
"Dad, can my friend walk home with a crazy guy in the neighborhood?"
"Uh," rapid lawsuit calculations. "No. Tell him to wait."
[pullquote]"How do you know he's crazy?" The friend asks.
"Dude: grown man. Wagon. Blanket. Newspapers."[/pullquote]
"DUDE YOU CAN"T GO HOME BECAUSE SOME CRAZY GUY IS IN OUR YARD!"
"WHAT? OMG!" Rush to the window. The dogs follow the friend. Now two tweens, a teen, me, and two dogs are all staring out the window at the corner sidewalk intersection.
"How do you know he's crazy?" The friend asks.
"Dude: grown man. Wagon. Blanket. Newspapers."
"Right."
The guy looks up, starts pulling the wagon around the corner to our front sidewalk, toward our walk.
"Oh shit! He's coming!"
"Come on, guys, he's not . . . I mean. . ."
"Dad, should we call 911!?"
"No. Just go to your room."
"I'm in the middle of an assault anyway."
They leave. The girl resumes manic T.V. consumption. I go back to washing dishes. I look up through the window and the guy is kind of rocking back on his heals, waving his arms vaguely, like he's talking to himself.
Maybe I should call Dave. He's a cop. He'll know what to do[1. Dave would laugh].
Then a kid walks into the scene from the front of my house.  A poor innocent kid! I drop my towel and I'm thinking I have to warn that kid! I've got to do something!
The guy reaches for the kid with one great maniacal gloved hand . . . and tousles his hair. The kid throws a couple of newspapers into the wagon. The man takes the kid's hand and they walk away, down the block, father and son, delivering the local paper.

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?’

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.

My Son Loves to Read

This is so important to me. I think mostly because I'm a writer and it's kind of nice to see him learn this important art that's so important to my art. He's staying up late reading and twice TWICE I've caught him killing the video game and kicking back with a book. There might be a God . . .

All in all, there is a change-a-comin' for the kid. I can see it in the way he pays attention to the world, the way he's picking up on the power and grace of good rock and roll, and the way he is disappearing into books.

I can't remember when I started reading. I think I was annotating Tolstoy in the womb. I have always been reading. In fact, it is safe to say I have been reading every day since I learned how. I should get paid for it.

I'm one of those crazy (gifted) readers who needs several titles at once. Librarians either love me or hate me. The really cool ones get this look in their eyes when I walk up to the counter with 14 books. Others see me coming with an 85 pound backpack full of books and they go on break.

Worse, I have multiple libraries. The upstairs loo usually has a stack on the sink; there's always a Harpers and a book in the car; the kitchen counter usually has a cookbook on the counter; there's a stack on my bedstand; a row on my desk; a literal library along the upstairs hall; then there's the stack on the end table by my chair in the living room. I don't know if my collection of rare books in PDF form on my hard drive counts, but they're there too.

Reading is an acti of magic as powerful as writing any day of the week. More importantly, reading is seperate from writing. They are intimately related but not the same. Both are creative acts (hence, magic). A person who is reading a book is working as hard as the writer to create a world and that world is distinct from the one laid down on those pages by the author.

The art of disappearing into a book is one developed over time though the trick of it can be learned in the blink of an eye, in the turn of a phrase. It's that moment in a story when you forget that your're reading a book and become part of the story, the invisible observer, the ghost in the room. That's what we are as readers, ghosts in the stories we love.

Maybe that's a great Halloween concept, something to scare you and make you worry a little. Think about the powerful sense that these characters in your favorite stories are alive. When you're reading it, you don't question it at all. They breathe, they love, they kill, they worry, weep, and waylay. And it doesn't end when you put the book down. You can return it to the library and forget about the thing, the sheaf of leaves you were studying so long, you can pretend it wasn't a talisman that evoked these characters into your head where they now live. You can believe they are all just a trick. But they're still there in your head.

What if the book doesn't evoke the characters out of the page, like a zip file, but instead invokes you into their world? What if we're the book?

Happy halloween.

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?