Laid-Off Dad

This post brought to you by the Dumbass Marketing Board

How d'you like that? I'm such a dumbass that when I mentioned I was a dumbass in my last post ("iMadumbass", ibid), I forgot to mention why I'm a dumbass. What a dumb, ass-like thing to do.

It all began last month, when my neighbor, he of the flat stomach and designer vodkas, moved out. When he left, he took his wireless Internet hookup -- and Moxie's and my ability to blog simultaneously -- with him. Therefore, whenever we're both burning to write something, I take my work laptop to a nearby cafe. It has good food, delicious coffee, excellent free wireless, and a cheerful, accommodating staff, all of whom just happen to have incredibly thick Russian accents. ("Vaht vill you heff?") This is just a coincidence and in no way suggests that the place is a front for the Russian mafia. No, sir. Absolutely nyet.

When I go there I bring my flash drive, which has all my reams of scribblings and screams of ribblings on it. And one night last week, for the first time, I also brought the new iPod. Because, hey: Wouldn't I do some really great work if I were inspired by my favorite music?

That'd be "No."

Instead, I spent most of the night concentrating on lyrics and further concentrating on not making raspy, guttural noises that were meant to simulate guitar chords. And as I packed up I apparently wasn't concentrating on making sure I had everything with me, because when I got home the flash drive was missing. I've asked back at the cafe, and re-traced my steps a dozen times, and turned the Laid-Off Lair inside-out, but it's gone. Hence, my dumbassitude.

Perhaps it was a caged deathmatch between two USB-based storage units. (Two gadgets enter; one leaves.) Or maybe the flash drive was jealous. We'd been together for three good years, and then this new thing sashays into my life, flashing its full-color utility and swinging its supple earbuds. It may have been too much to take.

The weird thing is, I don't remember anything between deciding to go home and arriving home, because my little hamster brain, which can only engage one thing at a time, was bopping along to Oranges and Lemons. This same little hamster brain, addled by the DVR, wants to rewind my life and find out just what the hell happened. But it turns out you can't do that. Yet.

For a while there, I had a fun little fantasy that the cafe manager had found the flash drive and pocketed it, just to see if it held any sensitive information that could be used for large-scale cyber-theft. Once he realized it was just a bunch of harmless Word documents, and not a database of anonymous brokerage accounts and their PINs, he'd say he found it in the dishwasher or something, and we'd have a good laugh.

Didn't happen. The guy very helpfully spent about 10 minutes helping me look around, but nothing turned up. This of course doesn't mean he doesn't spend his off-hours translating my fiction into Cyrillic and rubbing his hands maniacally. But it does tend to temper the plausibility.

So, will I ever find my plagiarized work in a bookshop in Little Odessa? Possibly. Will I go after the bastard and sue? Hell, no. I'm a dumbass, but I'm no fool.

iBlop, iPod, iMadumbass

Hello again. It's been a while since I've sat and written, and my story is that I'm conserving my energy for a month of Blopping. But tonight the kids are asleep, the wife is off at her book club, and I've had three beers. Time to release the hounds!

I have to tell you there's another reason I haven't written in a while, and it's especially pernicious. My birthday was a month ago tonight, and after that sweet, sweet birthday cash finished rolling in I cobbled some together and bought an iPod. I chose a Nano because it looks pretty slick, and I can stick it just about anywhere. (They could just as easily have called it the "iPlug.") Besides, everyone knows you're nobody until you've got those telltale white plug-wires leaking out of your ears. How great it feels to finally belong.

I can't say purchasing it was all that pleasant. I took TwoBert with me to the Apple store in SoHo, and if you've ever visited SoHo you know that on gorgeous fall Saturdays its streets are packed with the Gawking Fabulous. Making headway is hard enough on your own, but with a stroller it feels like you're flailing against a tapioca riptide. And each little tapiocum has yellow-tinted glasses and starched jeans.

Owning an iPod has brought to life a harsh truth: my taste in music is just awful. As I considered which CDs to load onto the iPlug I realized that almost everything I own got massive airplay about 20 years ago and is now a staple on VH1. It's mostly just high-voltage heavy-pop, combined with the Southern rock I grew to love as a teenager when I spent my summers as a beach rat in Virginia. Basically, my iTunes directory is stuffed with crap most males listen to before their hair migrates south for the winter.

Furthermore, whenever those beats are pounding in my ears, it takes a lot of willpower not to start Beavis-ing right there on the subway. (I hear that's a problem.)

But mostly, the iPod has taken away something I never thought I treasured so much: my thinking time. Since I'm almost never alone, my time on the 6 is about the only chance I get to take a breath and sort things through, and I'm wasting it with Meat Puppets blasting in my ears.

(Ahem. Please rephrase that last bit on your own.)

Somebody please suggest to me some new and interesting music I can buy from iTunes. Or I'll have to auction the iPlug off on eBay, and some unwitting sap will get stuck with the complete works of mOlly hAtchet.

Stink, stank, stunk

I watched that disaster of a baseball game last night, and I was so keyed up that I didn't get to bed until around 2. I was staggering around this morning on 4 hours of fitful sleep when Robert asked me if I was okay.

Me: "See, the thing about being a sports fan is that when your team loses, it really stinks."
Robert: "I know. I stinked so much last night that I needed a bath."

We both wanted to write about this, but I yelled "BLOG IT!" first

This year Robert has a new classmate, Sean, who knows an awful lot about football. He throws and catches. He runs and tackles. He kicks. He knows that when the defense stacks the box on third and short, you can line up heavy left, call a play-action fullback dive, and throw a quick out to your right slotback. He and Robert were recently part of a makeshift game of three-on-three, and Robert wasn't much of an asset. He kind of ran sideways a lot, and bumped into other kids, and yelled "TOUCHDOWN" without much knowledge of how one actually comes into being.

I like football. Not in the strip-down, paint-your-gut, freeze-your-nipples-off sort of way, but my pulse does tend to quicken on Sunday afternoons. Robert and I have watched a few games, and we've had a few catches, but he's never really taken to it. He throws OK, but balls tend to clang off his head and chest. So after a few tosses he usually gets bored and runs off to dig a hole in something.

I know I shouldn't care whether Robert is much of a football fan. But part of me wants him at least to be aware, just because boys who know about football have an easier time than those who don't. And besides, what father hasn't at least contemplated the idea of leaping to his feet after his son makes a great play and yelling "That's my BOY!" ?

As always, there is solace in candy.

Earlier this week, Robert proudly possessed two Tootsie Rolls (one for him, one for TwoBert) when Moxie took the boys to the bathroom at a Large Book Retailer. After they washed up, Robert decided to unwrap his Tootsie Roll, but with predictable zeal he ripped too quickly, and it fell to the floor. This being a public, urban bathroom (where the five-second rule works in reverse and food is rendered inedible five seconds before it hits the ground), the candy was a goner before it left his hand.

Moxie told him to throw it away and turned to see to TwoBert, who was probably putting his hands in something nasty. She heard Robert grunting behind her and turned to find him trying to break the other Tootsie Roll in half. Moxie suggested that he bite it, and after he did he gave the bigger piece to his little brother.

Robert's depth perception might be crappy and he might not know a wingback from a wideout, but he's growing into a real mensch.

That's my boy.

A legacy of dorkitude

I went to the Whitney on Friday to check out its new exhibit on Picasso's influence on American art. The walls were covered with lots of Big-Name Art Dudes (or "B-NADs," as insiders call them) like Pollock, Johns, de Kooning, Warhol, Man Ray, and Lichtenstein. They may have been blown away by synthetic cubism, or they might have just decided that the best way to become a rock-star art celebrity is to copy a rock-star art celebrity. Either way it's worth a visit, not least so you can see all the surreal depictions of guys with feet in their mouths and women with boobs growing out of their ears. Then you can go home and determine his influence on you.

As I browsed and learned about who knew whom, and where and when who said what, I got to thinking about an exhibit about bloggers and their influence on each other. Let's face it: There are a lot of museums in the world, and some insomniac pothead with rectangular glasses and a soul patch is bound to pitch the idea to a curator sooner or later.

The idea gets better the further into the future it occurs. Picture researchers 80 years from now poking through billions of posts and e-mails, trying to piece together the Intra-Blogger Relationships of the Early 21st Century. Picture the holographic displays of jpegs rescued and restored from long-dead Flickr accounts. Picture some ancient, wheezy voice in your headset saying something like, "We are reasonably certain that throughout their friendship Maggie greatly admired Heather's use of poop as leitmotif."

From there, it's not hard to envision a Blogger's Museum, full of permanent displays like the Hall of Emphasis. Who popularized the overuse of ALL CAPS? Who was the first to create the Three. Period. Sentence? When did the first <shriek>code geekery</shriek> surface? Who was the first hysteric to <gasp>COMBINE! ALL! THREE!</gasp>?

These are the juicy factoids that future generations will clamor to learn. (Probably.) Thus, we must all be aware of our place in history, as our words are quite likely to survive us. Perhaps, if you're like me, you greet this chance with open arms, if only to prove to your great-grandchildren what a complete dork you were.

If so, you might want to beef up your oeuvre and try to keep up with Eden's National Blog Writing Month (helpfully abbreviated to "NaBloWriMo"), during which participants will post something every day in November. It's an intriguing idea, because I don't think I have the slightest chance of pulling it off. But I'm going to give it a shot, just to see how badly I can gum up the Interwebs with unfiltered blather. Besides, anything that's a month long and has the word "blow" in it can't be all bad. *

* Another stellar insight for the grandkids to treasure! O!M!G!

[UPDATE: Mrs. K has changed the name to NaBloPoMo, which officially ruins the "blow" joke. But hey, a month of BloP might be interesting, too.]

You gonna eat that?

I cooked dinner last night. I liked cooking a lot before the kids arrived -- despite the fact that my kitchen also serves as my vestibule and contains a whopping 24 inches of counter space -- because there's something satisfying about making someone a really good meal. I used to think I was pretty good, but it's clear now that five years as the family garbage disposal have widened my spectrum of things that I consider palatable. This makes me a bad choice to cook for the family because 1) my wife spent six months cultivating her palate at culinary school, and 2) my children, if left to their own devices, will eat nothing but raisins and jalapeño corn pufflings.

I was proud of the meal I made until I discovered that much of it had stuck to our non-stick skillet. Moxie came into the kitchen as I was scraping the pan (and launching new invective with every thrust), and the following conversation sums up the extent to which my skills have atrophied:

Me: "This so-called 'non-stick' pan can suck my left nut."
She: "Sweetie, that's not a non-stick pan."
Me: "Oh. Well then, I rescind the offer."

Plucking on life's ukulele

String theorists believe that all matter is just a bunch of subatomic strings that tense and slack and give off vibrations that are the source of everything humans can perceive. Unfortunately, our primitive brains can't see length in nanobillionths or in 11 spacetime dimensions, so we see separate-ness between all living things. The theory goes, though, that everything is actually one hunk of  vibrating matter, that events are somehow aligned. That we are all connected.

The beauty of this theory is that it is completely untestable, so debate is moot. Either you believe it, or you don't. I'm more in the camp that life is chaotic and random, but every so often life throws me some wacky synchronicity that makes me reconsider. Like Saturday, when I was watching the end of Game 4 between the Yankees and the team they were supposed to bulldoze, the Tiggers. Just as the game and the Yankee season were ending, three unpremeditated things happened:

1. I was typing "Yankees" in an e-mail, but my crappy typing skillz made me type "Tankees" instead;
2. I ran over my son's Yankee hat (don't ask) with the wheels on my desk chair; and
3. The iPod, which was shuffling songs, came up with Annie Lennox's "Money Can't Buy It."

I'm a Red Sox fan, so watching the Yankees collapse in the playoffs always makes my heart go pit-a-pat. This one was particularly helpful, because it ended a really grumpy week that began when my wife took the boys out of town for a long weekend.

Living alone had its perks. I never came home to find socks in the toilet or raisins mashed into the rug. I read when I wanted to, in places other than the bathroom. I saw movies, killed a few brain cells, slept late. And it was fine, but it was empty. And quiet.

I am a father. I've only been one for 4+ years, but Moxie always says I was a father when she met me, only the kids hadn't arrived yet. Having little halflings around to wrestle with, and give upside-down hugs to, and scrub the dirt off of, and do other things that end in prepositions is part of my make-up. It's what makes sense. When I'm alone, I revert to the pre-married self that veered and lurched through life like a dwarf planet without any gravitional pull. It's fun to re-live that existence for a day or two, but after that I get creeped out.

The family came home last Monday, but I still didn't see the kids much because they slept late (they were still on Central time) and I worked a lot later than usual. I got about an hour tops with the kids per night, if I made it home in time at all.

Finally, the weekend came, and while Moxie slept Saturday morning began as all Saturdays should: with Bagels With Butter^TM. Robert babbled on about all the construction sites he was going to build in our bathroom, and TwoBert took every opportunity to wipe his nose on my shirt. A few hours later, the Tankees pissed away another postseason.

The other strings are home again. My life is back in tune.

Don't read this over a meal

I know what you're thinking: "He hasn't posted for almost a week because he got sucked into that Godforsaken Funny Farm game. Even now, he's stooped filthily over his keyboard, pawing at his chapped lips, and searching for the link between New York and fast food. Poor bastard."

Silly you. Thoughtful reader "mpat" left me a link to the finished puzzle, so whenever I felt stumped (that is, whenever I went 15 nanoseconds without finding a word), I consulted it. And it's a good thing, too, because that link turned out to be fries (?), and the five-letter words I tried -- mouse, roach, thumb, blood, vomit, feces, and semen, all prevalent ingredients in NYC's fast-food gumbo -- were way off. 

No, I'll tell you what's been taking up my time, and I'm not proud of it. It's TV. Specifically, it's rewindable TV, now that we've plunked for the DVR service that let's you bend the temporal universe. If you're watching a show, and your child, say, scampers into the room flinging a poopy diaper that he just yanked from his waist, you can pause the show and come back later, after you've scrubbed down the walls. If a character says a key piece of dialogue right when a Cranker rides by, you can 1) rewind it or 2) pause it and run to the fridge for an egg. You can also record all sorts of dreck (that you'd normally miss in blissful ignorance) and watch it later, ad-free.

The downside is that I now have lost all temporal sense. I see my life through the lens of a pause button -- a shapeless void where time is meaningless. And I wonder: If a show is a rerun, and it comes on late (because a game ran long, maybe), and enough people pause it at the same time, can you crack the Earth's spissitude? And is "spissitude" just some word that a Wikipedia geek made up? If Einstein were alive to see this, he'd hop around on all fours like a Great Dane that needs walkies.

Hey, that reminds me. I could have tried urine.