Laid-Off Dad

The muse strikes in the strangest places

Last week, amid the white noise of Christmas party patter, I very clearly heard a man’s voice say, “I lost my pen in a river of poop.” At first I thought I had imagined it, or perhaps I was projecting my own efflucentric lifestyle on some oblivious partygoer. But on the way home, my wife confirmed that she heard it, too. She had been closer to the conversation; apparently, the man works as a nurse and was regaling a not-so-rapt audience with one of those revolting tales that nurses find commonplace and amusing and non-nurses would really rather not hear about, thankyouverymuch.

The sentence stuck with me for a while, because of its wonderfully lyric quality. This is a sentence, I thought, that cries out to be the first line of a poem. So now, it is.

I lost my pen in a river of poop
Thinner than oatmeal, thicker than soup
It would have offended C. Everett Koop
To see the streets pulsing with feculent goop.

I lost my pen in a river of poop
It circled a camp in a large, viscous loop
And swallowed an unwitting Boy Scout troop
It took me just over a month to regroup.

I lost my pen in a river of poop
That slithered on by my apartment’s front stoop
I tried to give chase in my single-mast sloop
But the mainsail got snared in a basketball hoop.

I lost my pen in a river of poop
Too runny to mold, too solid to scoop
And though it was part of a very rare group
That pen is a loss I hope not to recoup.

Happy ’05, everyone. May your revelry be merry—and free of poop-related anecdotes.

Let something me dismay

If I have one talent that will remain finely tuned until the day I croak, it is the ability to appall myself. Sure, blog entries are specific to particular brain-dump at a particular moment, captured like mummified whores in a Pompeii brothel. Naturally, they are subject to a little revisionism. But complaining about putting a little work into a family holiday makes me feel like an overprivileged douchebag.

Yes, I hauled ass all over town on Christmas Eve in order to secure Robert’s new hog (on which he sits constantly, like an expectant mother bird). Yes, I am destined to impale a toe on one of the myriad small parts from some of Robert’s new toys, which came from very generous relatives. But dammit already. I thought being laid off for 15 months would imbue me with some sense of perspective.

Failing that, I only need contemplate that Mother Nature can snuff out a generation with a split-second shift of her knickers, and that thousands of parents are currently waiting for their children’s corpses to wash ashore.

Christmas was lovely, and the three of us were very fortunate to be a part of it. Thank you all for the food, the booze, and the presents (like the deep-fat fryer, in which Robert likes to store his new Lincoln Logs). And a special shout-out to Grandma and Grandpa, from whom we received a large box of gifts yesterday. You’ll be happy to know that Robert’s favorite gift was the box itself, in which he offered to mail himself to you.

“It’s the least objectionable time of the year!”

There was a time when a blissfully unfettered bachelor would head home on Christmas Eve, drive to the mall to buy all of his presents, sit down with the family to a pot of cheese fondue (the traditional Night Before meal), sing “Silent Night” in a candlelit church, take the long way home past all the notoriously tasteless holiday decorations, and crash out in his boyhood bedroom. He slept like a log and ate like a pig, and his only concern was whether he could lug all his booty back to the city in one trip.

And now, his old bedroom is Granddad’s study. The fondue pot is a rusted hulk somewhere in the basement. The gaudy decorators have moved. (Or, more likely, died.) And saving everything until the last minute is positively laughable. (Did I say laughable? I meant LAUGHABLE.)

I always sort of knew that, once I became a parent, Christmas was bound to turn from a 36-hour dine-and-dash into a months-long odyssey of planning and girded loins, to be endured with clenched teeth, as one might a colonoscopy or a tax audit.

But now I get it. I have seen the light. I now have a first-person sense of how the year’s end becomes a frenetic endurance test, and how important it is to bask in the joy of the quiet moments, between swats from the Giant Yuletide Spanking Machine.

More later. Right now, I have too much new crap to assimilate.

At least he didn’t ask for a tourniquet

Here’s something you don’t want to hear from your two-year-old as he scampers in from another room:

 “Daddy? I need a damp rag!”

Because the holidays are a special time for compulsory gift exchange

When I was younger and singler and stupider, I was afflicted with a bizarre hubris that made me think I could find the perfect gift for anybody. This was especially true when buying wedding and baby gifts. Why stick to the registry like a prosaic halfwit when you can surprise your friends with that singular something that will always remind them of terrific, wonderful you?

I was abruptly cured of this disease when I got married, and several of our single friends ignored our registry (and nimbly avoided getting us something we might actually want) in favor of useless gewgaws we have yet to unpack. Like picture frames. And decorative bowls. And homemade things that defy the basic tenets of logic and taste.

And vases. My god, the vases. I’m as much of a flower lover as anyone, but dammit, people. We have enough floral display vessels to open a funeral parlor, and all we wanted was a few small appliances and some nice plates. (Granted, these also remain unpacked. But that’s beside the point.) Our vase surplus is more of a nuisance now that Mr. Grabby has mastered his new foldable stepstool. Anything remotely fragile must now be stored at least six feet off the ground, and there’s only so much surface area atop the fridge.

All this, to make a short story long, is prologue to this year’s Secret Santa nonsense. I was assigned a 24-year-old woman I barely know, and I got her an iTunes gift certificate. Conversely, my Secret Santa—a sweet, single woman who meant well—got me another goddamn vase.

 What do I want for Christmas next year? A backyard and a pellet gun.

Deck the balls

The family Christmas tree is finally up and fully decorated, and our son, as is typical, insisted on hanging most of the ornaments himself. So if you stop by, you'll understand why the majority of the doodads are clustered in the tree's groin region.

You'll also understand why some of the ornaments aren't really ornaments, since Robert got the idea that anything you can hang from a string or stab with a hook—such as a toy car, a small puppet, or one of his sneakers—is fair game.

Coffee talk

The Sunday version of Bagels With Butter^TM has morphed into a trip to our local diner, mainly because: 1) Daddy wants eggs and bottomless coffee; 2) those slackers at the coffee place don’t open until 8 on Sunday mornings; and 3) the diner offers a far more interesting view of disheveled dog-walkers and vehicles running red lights.

On the way to our table, we passed a dad ministering to a one-year-old girl in a high chair while a four-year-old girl vigorously sawed at a waffle. Since lately I’ve been envisioning the next few years of my life as that of a beleaguered shuttlecock in my children’s insouciant game of badminton, I saw the chance to squeeze a little reassurance from a kindred spirit. I’d confess my nervousness, he’d tell me it’s not so bad, and we’d laugh heartily, merge our tables, and order a side of bacon for everyone in the restaurant.

I began with the tried-and-true parental icebreaker:

Me: “How old are your girls?”
Him: “These are my sister’s kids. She and my wife are upstairs sleeping off hangovers. So I’m sorta stuck with them.”

Ah. OK. The conversation just went code blue, but it’s still got strong vitals. At least he’s wearing a Sox cap.

Me: “It’s good to see more Red Sox caps around town since the World Series.”
Him: “I have no idea what this hat means. My brother gave it to me before he moved to Australia.”
Me: “Do you follow baseball at all?”
Him: “Not really. I just moved here from Zambia.”

Now we’re on life support. Time to whip out the defibrillator paddles.

Me: “How do you like the city so far?”
Him [smiling wanly]: “I miss my home.”

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep. Time of death, 7.48am.

Later, after they had left, I caught myself gazing at Robert while he gnawed on his breakfast. This will be his first real Christmas, I thought, and I wondered what he must be thinking of all the lights and Bing Crosby music and the five-foot evergreen by the TV. As if reading my mind, he looked round at all the diner’s holiday decorations—Santa and his reindeer over the lunch counter, icicle lights and other baubles hanging from every horizontal seam in the ceiling—and exclaimed, “Wow! Look at all this crap!”

Kiddie Konjecture I

In honor of these, the Thoughtful Yet Terribly Underinformed Years, I've decided to launch a new running feature: The Kiddie Konjecture. Robert's full of ideas about how life works, and it's amazing how defensible yet wrong they all are.

Case in point: As he finished a pee the other day, Robert flushed it down and said, "There it goes! The pee is flushing down the toilet and running down into somebody else's toilet."

Feigning interest

Most people dismiss financial institutions as pathologically self-serving monoliths dedicated to wrenching profits from their clientele through usurious fees and backbreaking interest payments. Others agree. Sure, ragging on banks is easier than shooting slugs in a bucket, but one particular bank has recently made its way onto my shit list, and not for reasons you might imagine.

It’s not Huge Monster A, which urges us to “live richly” by skipping along the road of life and not getting hung up about money. This bothers the hell out of me. Is this hippie vibe supposed to tell us that you don’t care whether my money earns any interest? If so, why should I give it to you? Or instead, are you goading us into dreaming our dreamy dreams so we’ll turn a blind eye to the billions you’ve paid in fines for predatory lending, illegal bond trading, and biased stock research?

It’s also not Huge Monster B, which has a brand-new slogan that proudly touts something called “maximum-strength checking.” This would be fine, I guess, if these wondrous new perks weren’t commonplace a few years ago. No minimum balance! No ATM fees! Overdraft protection! These are the exact services that were discontinued after one of its mergers. (“Maximum strength checking! Now, no more compulsory enemas!” Whoop-dee-doo.)

The bank in question is a relative upstart that has turned the banking game on its venal, pointy head by opening seven days a week and cooking up myriad stunts to woo customers. One of these is a huge talking machine that counts your loose change. Before you dump that two-quart  beer stein full of pennies into the slot, it lets you guess how much your coins are worth. If your prediction is within $1.99 of the total, you win a prize.

As fate would have it, I was off by about 60 cents. I took my receipt to the teller, who shrieked, “We have a winner!” And all the employees thinly masked their depression over having to work on a Sunday and applauded. I took my cash and stood there, basking in triumph and awaiting my award, which turned out to be [drumroll] ...  a pile of useless corporate swag.

This why de-crapment is such serious business. The forces of re-crapment are always baying at the door.

I got your Homeland Security right here

WASHINGTON, DC (AP) -- Fresh off his nomination to succeed Tom Ridge as Secretary of Homeland Security, former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik announced his plan to upgrade the color-coded terror alert  system developed in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“We needed a change,” said Mr. Kerik, who can kick your ass, your dad’s ass, and all of your friends’ asses in alphabetical order. Despite his laughable claims that voting for John Kerry was tantamount to inviting more terrorism on American soil, New Yorkers are optimistic that Mr. Kerik, who witnessed 9/11 and its aftermath first-hand, might see the wisdom of allotting a few more per-capita security dollars to New York City than to, say, Boise Fuckin’ Idaho.