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?

Rapping Rhapsodic on Bohemian Rhapsody with my Bonne Homme

Roon switched schools this week, moving from a parochial school to public, thereby losing his uniform, meaning I had to buy him new clothes.

I thought it was telling that when we went to the store, he didn't care about what pants we bought as long as they were jeans. But he took a long time to pick out three t-shirts. See if you can detect a theme here. The shirts displayed the following pop memes: The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd. He topped them off with an AC/DC cap.

I have to say he's starting off well in his musical snobbery. Those are all good bands and he really does listen to them. He recently started paying attention to my iTunes and put together a playlist labeled "Good Music" (to distinguish it from the baffling crap I usually listen to). I pulled some songs off of it to make him a morning mix tape. Check it out:

1. "Mr. Blue Sky," by Electric Light Orchestra


2. "Park & Beans," by Weezer


3. "Bohemian Rhapsody," by Queen


4. "Dracula from Houston," by the Butthole Surfers


5. "Storm in a Teacup," by the Red Hot Chili Peppers


6. "Science Fiction Double Feature," punked out by Me First and the Gimme Gimmes


7. "Death of a Martian," by Red Hot Chili Peppers


8. "Black Times Bad Times," by Led Zeppelin


9. "More Than a Feeling," by Boston

At first I thought this was a further extension of his newfound rock snobbery but I realized it wasn't really about the music so much as it was about self definition. Roon wanted to define himself to his new school as a rocker, and he wanted to establish his musical taste right off the bat not to lord his 1970s playlist cred over anyone else, but to let them know where his head is at.

This may seem like over intellectualizing t-shirts but it's a completely valid effort on his part to adopt a new uniform: the cobbled-together non-uniform of the Boheme. I don't know how much of that need to define himself played into his decision to switch schools, but it mattered a lot that on his first day in the cradle of public knowledge he was representing Pink Floyd, a band he equates with stellar musicianship, individuality, and intellectualism.

Pink Floyd is his second choice, however, after Queen. If he'd had a Queen shirt, he'd probably never take it off, hoping that their operatic falsetto rock cred would somehow seep into his skin along with dirt, taco sauce, and diet coke stains.

His transition to public school marks a loss for me in one regard--quality time.

I get to spend a lot of time with my spawn because I work at home. But driving them to school has always been important to me because for the eight minutes we had together in the car, remarkable conversations would occur.

The other day we rocked to school under the auspicious and noble refrains of Bohemian Rhapsody, singing at top volume, until Roon killed the song to ask questions about it, to talk about complex rock & roll, Freddy Mercury, gay rock stars, and the song itself.

It's easy to think that the tent-pole conversations are what matters--the sex talk, the dope talk, the Bischon Frieze talk. But I don't buy it. I think it's the sum total of all these little seemingly inconsequential talks--the argument about what 'scaramouch' actually means--that ultimately make up a longer, broader, and permanent body of discussion in the mind of our children that transmits the concepts we truly believe. It teaches them our real philosophy and assists them in building their own.

Now that my daughter is gone so much, I hardly ever get to talk to her except to ask her to please stop singing in the shower at midnight. We quip in passing and she's obviously witty as hell and, like her mom, [My Attorney], a brain on legs. But I don't get much conversation time.

Now that Roon will be walking to school I'm losing face time with him as well. Of course, he'll be walking in the door every day at 3:30 demanding food. It's not like I won't see him. But there's something about the drive time. All you have is driving and talking. At home there's laundry, living room, lunch, dishes, dog walking, laundry, homework, house cleaning, laundry and sometimes laundry. I won't have that brief break where I have nothing to do but drive, that time when we talk about those things that matter. Like gay rock stars.

Laundry Mountain Finally has a Soundtrack

I'm typing this on an old chair in my basement. At my feet lies a low range of unfolded denim mountains and sloping terry cloth hills running all the way into the laundry room. I hope one day to scale those hills, to raze them into a perfect unadulterated plane of nothingness. But for now they mock me. They are in fact laughing at me because not only am I incapable of reducing these mountains into molehills and less, I am currently reduced to sitting on this hideous old chair and listening to a YouTube video of the Amazon jungle while my daughter does virtual laps on the treadmill for her class project, the 'transcendental challenge'.

I would love to be upstairs where the boychild is finally playing his brand new version of metal death worship, Call of Duty: World at War which I see as a training video for future corporate sponsored slaughter. It's kind of like Ender's Game playing out in real life. But I digress.

Both of my kids are somewhat terrified of our basement. They used to be perfectly fine until their cousin lived with us for a while in a room in the basement which she swears was haunted because late at night she could hear someone playing guitar. I think if you've got a haunt going on, and it plays guitar instead of asking you for your soul or clanking chains, that's a pretty good ghost. That's like some kind of double bonus, like if you found Bigfoot and he says "Hey, want to see something really weird?" and introduces you to his gay twin brother.

So they're scared of the basement and will only go down there in the daytime or with the dog or with an adult sporting loaded .45 automatics and a grenade.

So I figured since I'm down here, I'd give you a live moment by moment account of my life here: I'm in the basement staring into the foothills of mount domestica; the kid is finally getting into his newest slaughterfest, [My Attorney] is working on some kind of tangled legality at such a level of minutiae and detail you would need the Large Hadron Collider to surpass it; my daughter is listening to bird calls and monkeys while running a treadmill and writing down her thoughts about it every 20 minutes; and my gay dog is licking my toes. Again.

In my fantasy world as a noble literary giant, I am not embedded in the bedding in the basement, but sitting on a panel discussion at a convention of lexicographers who are impressed by my new word constructions and are about to give me an award, the Golden Dictionary, and a bottle of Balvenye and a box of cigars. Or I'm stepping onto the steppe in Veranasi and some kid offers me a glass of fresh chai and I'm wearing a white linen suit and my hand-made leather writer's bag and a stingy brim trilby and Johnny Depp walks up to me and asks me to sign his dog-eared copy of my best selling novel and says "Nice hat, man."

Or I'm sitting in my basement and the laundry . . . is . . . done.

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.

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.