Laid-Off Dad

Why there isn't as much of me around

I know, it's been a week since I posted. And though I would have you believe that this was intentional, that my enduring post could proclaim my enduring love for my endearing wife, that's not entirely the case. In truth, I've gotten myself completely hooked on the gym-rat lifestyle. I've been there five times this week, running for an hour at a time and then enjoying the sweet, stifling solitude of the steamroom, where errant thoughts bubble about my brainpan before oozing out my pores and down the drainpan.

I got involved with this contest at work, whereby eight guys put up $25 each to see who could lose the most weight in two months. Weigh-in is tomorrow, and it's down to me and this other guy, who is fiercely competitive and sort of nuts. Nuts enough to wrap himself in cling film and eat nothing but sawdust all weekend so that he can drop some emergency poundage and nip me at the wire. I can't tell you how much I've lost exactly; I only know it's around 20 pounds. The scale read 220 when I started this thing, but as far as the gym's farkakte scale is concerned, I'm too light for the 200+0 setting and too heavy for 150+50. So I have little idea how tomorrow morning will play out.

The other thing I've been doing is reading, and since I have a lot more energy now I can actually make it through three paragraphs without dozing off. You may have noticed that I've added my current book to the left-hand margin, because 1) I greatly enjoy perusing other people's reading lists, and 2) if several weeks go by and I'm still reading the same book, I want you folks to bust my chops and tell me to get the hell on with it, already.

I'm off for a business trip in the morning, after weigh-in, and I don't know how much time I'll have to post over the next three days. So I'll leave you with this: Yesterday morning, I convinced my wife to prop TwoBert in his high chair with some apple wedges, prop Robert in front of The Electric Company, and prop herself on top of me. (I also convinced her to let me blog about it.) I recommend this practice wholeheartedly. It really starts the weekend off with a bang to an auspicious start.

Even sweeter

Seven years ago today, my wife and I walked down the aisle of a tiny church in rural Michigan, spouted a few lines of Lutheran liturgy, and legally bound ourselves to one another.

Happy anniversary, sweetie. You'll always be the biggest, blackest jellybean in the bag.

Sweet

Every Easter I manage at least one complaint about how I can no longer buy the jellybeans of my youth. Everyone's busy making little gourmet jellyballs that taste like popcorn or peanut butter or puke, but the basic Brach's assortment--eight no-nonsense flavors, beans as big as your thumb--is never anywhere to be found.

Determined to put this annual rant to rest, my wife shopped around and came home with a bag of  "Brach's Classic Jelly Bird Eggs." And oh, the joy. Everything tasted exactly as I remembered. The citruses were bold and unmistakable. The cherry and grape were gloriously artificial, like children's medicine. The white and pink flavors were still marvelous and inscrutable. And the blacks. Dear god, I could live on black licorice jellybeans. I used to pile them in my mouth and chew with ecstasy until rivers ran down my chin and my teeth turned as gray as a flannel scarf. And so I did again, ripping through the bag in about 20 minutes and savoring that waxy buildup on my teeth long after the goo-orgy was over.

Fast-forward to today, Greek Orthodox Easter, when the church across the street has finally stopped with the all-night chanting. This is a good thing, because Easter brings all the C-and-E Christians out of the woodwork, and the church is too small to hold them all. So every syllable is blasted out into the street on a P/A system, and dozens of the marginally devout stand on the sidewalk and listen. I'm sure it's a lovely and moving ceremony for the faithful, but to the neighbors it sounds a lot like the atonal groaning during the sex-cult scene in EYES WIDE SHUT.

Orthodox Easter also means that un-Orthodox candy is priced to move. I stopped into a big-chain drugstore and there it was--the forlorn discount rack that had been mostly picked clean, except for a pile of pink bags. (This is one good thing about being older than the key consumer demographic; the stuff you like is no longer popular and thus dirt cheap, making possible the absolute scandal of finding XTC albums in the discount bin.)

So I grabbed two bags and headed to the counter, expecting to pay a couple bucks apiece. But when she scanned the bounteous bean booty the price came up as 62 cents. For a 19.5-ounce bag of pure gold. This was an atrocious market imbalance I'd be crazy not to exploit, so I begged a moment and headed back to the shelf. I rummaged around for five more bags, and then found the holy. fucking. grail: a bag of All Blacks.

I bought seven pounds of jellybeans for $4. I feel like I got in on Google's IPO.

On Thursday I have a dental appointment to repair a broken filling. Unless my wife can hide my bean stash, my dentist will probably have to cancel the rest of the day's appointments.

Shin mange, part II: the missing link explained

People josh about shin mange. Josh all you will (and you will), but it could very well be a major evolutionary imperative of the humanoid species. Call it "follicular Darwinism."

Mankind, as it evolves, is becoming less hirsute. This is clearly because hairier men are less inclined to procreate, lest they suffer the pain of forcible depilation by probing, year-old fists. Hairless men, on the contrary, can procreate with impunity. Thus, the smooth-skinned male lives to pass on his glabrous genes, while the man-yaks are slowly, inexorably outnumbered.

I demand this be taught in high schools across the country immediately. Especially in Kansas, which seems extra willing to embrace new ideas.

Shin mange

Here's another thing those "new father" books never tell you:

When you come home from work, and your little 11-month-old expert cruiser who is this close to walking greets you by pulling himself up by your pant legs into a standing position so you can get a better look at his wide, gap-toothed smile, your chest heaves with waves of pride and affection.

The experience is diametrically unpleasant when it's the weekend, and you're wearing shorts.

That's why I'll always stay around

A night at the theater reminds us, briefly, that dads who walk out on the family create long-term wounds that might never heal. And that becoming a dad means trading in your carefree bravado for a lifetime of weeping wussitude.

Happy motoring!

Two of my wife's best friends are about to have their first babies, and last weekend we went to DC for the baby shower of one and brunch with the other. Both events were lovely and jovial, but the houses, like the people, were just too perfectly appointed. No one in DC is distinguishable from the waist down, because everyone is the same size and wears beige pants and loafers. And the couple who threw the shower has two kids, yet not a stitch was out of place in the whole structure. They had even swept out the fireplaces and set up a series of fat beige candles on the andirons. (Ritual sacrifice, anyone?) Somewhere between that Stepford Sterility and the cluttered hive that is the Laid-Off Lair lies a happy medium worth striving for.

We stayed in the Omni Shoreham Hotel, a beautiful landmark that you know is a big deal because all of its signs are lettered in fusty script. It recently celebrated 75 years of luminary guests and presidential galas, and this weekend it proudly hosted a convention of Outback Steakhouse managers, several of whom sat in the room next door and rent the night with their high-pitched giggling. Said my wife as she held a pillow over her head, "Laugh now, you drunken reprobates. Wait till the kids get up at 6:30 tomorrow. Payback's a bitch."

Eight hours in the car with two kids is a crapshoot at best, but our trip came off pretty well, despite TwoBert's habitual crankiness. There were several highlights, but my favorite came when we were surfing among the unfamiliar radio stations and stumbled upon an All Eighties Weekend. Soon, we started singing along to the old favorites and conjuring alternate lyrics, many of which involved farts. At one point Styx's "The Best of Times" came on, and Robert replaced the chorus ("these are the best ... of tiiiimes!") with "we'll fart until ... we stop!" I heard that and almost ran off the Turnpike.

And nothing puts a spring in your step like the feeling when you've hauled ass up the I-95 corridor, sped through the city like Ms. Pac-Man on crank, dropped of the family, unpacked all the crap, filled the gas tank, skidded to a halt outside the rental place, and handed over your rental agreement--the one with NO GRACE PERIOD scrawled ominously across the front--with five minutes to spare. Makes you want to strut all the way home like a badass. Which I did. Until I stopped.

A goddamned object pronoun

"There's this woman I know who only says 'Bless' after you sneeze. Instead of 'Bless you.'"

"I'm sure the 'you' is implied."

"How can you be sure? Getting into Heaven is probably very competitive. You don't think the Heaven Committee is looking for technicalities like that so they can ding you? Isn't it possible they're just waiting to laugh in the face of some dink who says 'the you is implied'?"

"I don't think that's how it works."

"Why wouldn't it work like that? If humans are cast in God's image, and we're all a bunch of bureaucratic backbiters, why wouldn't the cherabim be as well?"

"Wouldn't the 'Bless' be an all-inclusive "Bless,' applying to everyone within earshot?"

"Possibly, but why not spend the extra syllable and direct the blessing where it's most needed--at the poor slob who just blew his soul out of his nostrils?"

"Perhaps she felt it more polite not to single that poor slob out among the crowd."

"All I'm saying is, there'd be a lot less left to chance if she'd bother to expend the energy for a goddamned object pronoun."

"You're a very strange person."

"I'm sure the 'I love you' is implied."

Upside the head

It was a quiet week on Lake Laid-Off, my home town, out on the urban antheap. Not inert by any means, but wonderfully less complicated. I took some time away from the blog, reveling in Robert's precious little epigrams (about cows in space, and riding his bike to the jungle, and who invented bark). TwoBert is cruising like mad, and he's mastered hand signals for "milk" and "more." It's a matter of time before he waddles down the street and flips off his first bike messenger.

There was time for books, for dates with my wife, for a little culture. There's also been time at the gym--and the steam room, which is great for thinking but lousy for taking notes. As I type I'm desperately trying to re-create some really good phrasing that came to me during my last shvitz.

Relaxation is a wonderful thing, but when it's time to go back to work one must ready oneself for the return to the grind. I can only imagine that this is what my wife had in mind Sunday morning when she woke me up with a diaperful of TwoBert's garlic poop and said, "You have got to smell this."

Thus began the aptly initialed Sensory Overload Sunday, when my central nervous system took a day-long ride in the paddywhack machine.

We started with a birthday party at a LES pizza joint. It sounded benign enough until we found that 1) the place was about as big as my living room and 2) 23 kids showed up. Each kid got a helium balloon and an over-frosted cupcake, so they all ran around like agitated CO₂ bubbles, threatening to strangle each other with the balloon ribbons, until the gathering mercifully ended and we all spewed onto Clinton Street.

For normal people, this would be enough for one day. But not us. We chose instead to fight our way through the crowds on Delancey Street, ride the squalid F train to Herald Square (which on weekends is virtually impassable with human clots), and walk to MSG to attend the circus.

I'm not much of a circus person, since circus performers are basically carnies with a bigger bankroll. But my friend scored some free tickets, and we pretty much got what we paid for. There were some fun stunts, like the Motorbikes in the Metal Mesh Ball, but the only animals bigger than a bread box were the elephants. No lions, tigers, or bears. The clowns over-pandered, the music was ear-splitting, and the popcorn cost $7/box. The only real selling point was the completely hott Mistress of Ceremonies, who kept urging us to Use Our Imagination! (Trust me. I did.) When the lights finally came up, Robert's first words were, "Can we get outta here now?"

For the next several hours I was kind of numb. We went home in a shell-shocked trance and collapsed on the couch. (At least I think it was the couch. For all I could sense, it could have been the bathtub.) When I woke up I was grumpy, groggy, and fidgety.

The transition back to work was remarkably seamless.

Daddy = Dummy

Have you seen this man? If so, please feel free to smoke him inside with a high heater.