Laid-Off Dad

Piloting my dinghy on a vast, feminine sea

BlogHer is over, and I'm very glad I went. I arrived in San Jose with some hesitation, mainly because of nagging thoughts that I was an interloper. But the women I met were lovely and accepting and did not throw me into the pool, especially after I acquitted myself so well amid myriad discussions of menstruation and handbags.

Thank you all for a special weekend--especially to those who fed me, transported me, housed and fed and transported me, bathed me, and overall made me feel so comfortable as a rooster in the blogospheric henhouse.

So let the word go forth, etc.: Dudes are welcome at this thing. It's moving east next year, so for many of us it will be easier to get to. You will meet talented people and learn a lot about where blogging is headed. And there will be no line for the men's room.

The call of the Apple

If there is a palliative for living in New York City, it's an extended absence. I've just started my fourth week of exile, and I'm starting to get itchy all over. Just now I GoogleMapped my apartment building, just to look at my roof and see if I might be up there, sunning myself on Tar Beach. I feel like an especially creepy Internet stalker, with the added complication that I seem to be stalking myself.

Flitting among small farming towns was lovely and peaceful, but the peace soon became deafening. Those towns were quiet, as in sensory-deprivation quiet. The kind of towns where you place your toddler in the only diaper swing at the playground, and it squeaks so gratingly from disuse that locals at the Gas-and-Sip six blocks away prick up their ears and say, "Sounds like someone's swingin' on ol' Bessie!"

There were other cities, but they just weren't the same. Chicagoland is too sprawling, square-mileage-wise, and there are too many streets that are not named after numbers. Minneapolis is smaller and more manageable, but when you follow a certain cross street or other you can't be sure it will extend as far as you want because you will very likely run into a lake. That left the Happy Medium college towns, like South Bend (too manicured) and Madison (too cheese-centric).

I am comforted by the chill of San Francisco, while the rest of the country bakes. (The Junipers have been tremendous hosts, having picked me up at the airport and plied me with with a gorgeous stout microbrew sludgy enough to apply with a trowel.) But I still miss New York. I know I'll be back there in two weeks, coping with soot and strife and Schwetty balls. But I will be home, dammit.

The clubhouse turn

Three weeks and some 1,700 miles into the LODyssey, and our intrepid four-door (which by now contains more crumbs than a few dozen restaurant toasters) has turned around and headed east. We've lived, we've loved, we've laughed--and we have eaten. Sweet Lordy Moses, we've been putting it away. Between the meals, and the mid-meals, and the mid-mid-meal snacks, my wife finally introduced me to Culver's and their delicious frozen custard. At this point I'll probably waddle into BlogHer, assuming the plane can hold me.

I'll miss Great Grandma's, as I always do, but leaving was harder this year because of two other important discoveries. First, there was the coffee joint that shares space with the Lutheran Education Center. Lutherans aren't often associated with the dark, viscous brew I so seldom find when I'm out here, but this place serves a cup you can bounce a quarter on. So Robert and I liked to go there in the morning and play "chess" (which, although it used chess pieces, didn't bear much resemblance to the game we know). According to Robert, you can bust your pieces out of jail because the knights carry welder's torches, and it's possible to attach a pipe to the queen's head and suck out all her power. One pawn must be kept on the corner of the table, to stand guard. Also, one rook can balance on the other rook's head and form a Super-Rook that makes the king unhappy because he is no longer the tallest piece on the board.

The other new spectacle is the municipal pool, the most amazing city facility I've ever seen. It has a wading pool with two big umbrella sprinklers, racing lanes, diving boards, a waterslide, and a huge sandpit with playground equipment and two fountains. Yesterday Robert and about 10 other boys spent hours creating a series of locks and canals that would make the Tennessee Valley Authority proud. Lifeguards stopped by and gawked--especially the ones tasked with smoothing it all out before closing.

This might be my last web access for a while, at least until I get to San Jose. If you're going to BlogHer next weekend, I look forward to meeting you. I'll be the tubby guy jonesing for a cold cup of concrete.

Surprisingly

Surprisingly, Great Grandma's house has wireless access, courtesy of the new next-door neighbors. Great Grandma is 90 and thus something of a Luddite; most of her belongings predate Roosevelt. [Teddy Roosevelt. Senior.]

Surprisingly, the temperature has been in the triple-digits for three days straight, the most intense heat wave to hit the area in 11 years. I get uneasy when it's hotter outside my body than inside. The horseflies might want to fly in my mouth just to cool off.

Surprisingly, the excessive heat found me on the end of a rope swing, flinging my creaky bones into the Mississippi River.

Not surprisingly, this is one of those instances when a man suddenly feels half his age and is destined to feel twice his age in the morning. Ever since that rope swing I've been mainlining ibuprofen, and the only way I can type is to fling my forearms onto the keyboard.

Dregvertising

Yes, this sounds disingenuous coming from someone who just asked you to participate in an advertising survey. Advertising is intrusive, but I can tolerate it within certain limits. For an example of something that oversteps those limits, I would suggest something like this.

As a responsible person, I absolutely cannot recommend that anyone head to CBS headquarters and pelt the place with these things until the windows are opaque. No sir, not me.

Live long and pester

I know what you're thinking: "LOD was so nice to do that interview, where he revealed his near-death experience and showed us a picture of his kind-yet-smoldering eyes. I'd love to tell him more about me. But how? "

Friend, this is your lucky day. As you may have noticed, I am a now officially a federated medium. A nice federation asked me to join up, and they gave me a smart-looking tunic and a phaser and everything, and we roam the galaxy looking for adventure and dodging papier-mâché meteors.

I would be very grateful if you would take a moment to complete this survey. It would mean a lot to my new federation friends, many of whom were dropped on their heads as children and thus derive great personal fulfillment from crunching other people's data points. It will also confirm my view that this readership comprises the most urbane, intelligent, and tech-savvy humanoids in explored space.

Thanks.

Wobegon-athon (and on ... )

You would think that, on a prolonged odyssey through the Minnesota woods (where the mosquitoes are so big they wear license plates), you would not find a tony interior design studio complete with an espresso bar and free wireless access. And you would be wrong. I have about ten minutes here while the boys are burning off a little pent-up energy and running laps around the car; after a week of drinking dishwater, I have a cup of Ethiopian dark roast and access to e-mail. The world is starting to make sense again.

There's a lot to say about our lake-hopping extravapalooza, too much to go into much detail now. The main story his TwoBert, whose fevers started to spike higher and who greeted a recent morning with a glassy-eyed stupor. We took him to a local hospital, where a very nice and seemingly capable doctor who nonetheless looked a lot like Mortimer Snerd diagnosed a "red-hot" ear infection. TwoBert has been on Zithro for a week and is back to his normal diet of 1) Anything I'm Eating and 2) the crayons provided by all the kid-friendly cafes we've been patronizing. He hasn't had a BM for three days, so we're getting ready for him to crap a wax rainbow.

We are immersed in Lake Culture, and its discussions of frontage and curly-leaf pondweed and Eurasian milfoil. We're also immersed in ourselves, trapped together in our Ford Fusion for hours at a time. This might be having an adverse effect on our relationship as a family. The other day we took a wrong turn and temporarily lost track of wherever the hell we were, and Robert piped up with "Great, Daddy. We're lost ... with you."

And now I must go. I've just been told that the wax rainbow is upon us.

My bulb laid bare

They say a blogger is like an onion: round, pungent, and sensitive to light. A blogger also can be mysterious, revealing through prose only parts of his or her true self like so many concentric layers of skin.

LeahPeah is unsatisfied with this characterization. She likes to peel away those layers, fan-slice and batter-fry them, and serve them up with a spicy goop-sauce. I've been enjoying her interviews for a while now, so when she decided to come after me with her interrogative paring knife I was honored.

This is the result. In case you're wondering, the glasses I'm wearing in the photo are somewhere in the Atlantic; the surf whipped them off my face while TwoBert and I were wave-hopping at the Jersey shore.

I would drive 1,000 miles and I would drive 1,000 more

Four days in, 1,000 miles on the odometer, and I'm getting a little surly. This is not how man was meant to live. I am from the East Coast, where points of interest are far more concentrated. When we drove seven hours, we were done driving for a while. We stayed. For weeks. Here, a seven-hour trek is just one leg of a journey, as commonplace as sauntering down the block for a scoop of seven-layer Jell-O.

As an added bit of excitement, TwoBert has spent his last three nights by spiking fevers and bursting into tears every 45 minutes. We're narrowing down the reasons, and the first three that come to mind are: 1) he has a summer cold and is having trouble breathing through his nose; 2) he's reacting adversely to sleeping in a new, strange bed every night; and 3) he's getting a molar. It's a trifecta for misery on all accounts -- except for Robert, who sleeps through everything and bounds out of bed every morning pulsing with Kiddie Kilowatts.

If you're driving on I-94 and you pass a green four-door driven by a four-year-old, please give us a wave. We'll certainly wave back, if we're conscious.

The great divide

Now that we've become born-again car culturists for the next few weeks, we've started to notice bumper stickers. Like this one:

BIPARTISANSHIP:
I'll hug your elephant if you'll kiss my ass.