Laid-Off Dad

I can see my house from here!

Here we are, at the snow-capped summit of NaBloPoMountain. Exhilirating, isn't it? Can you feel the giddy? I feel the giddy. Although it might just be the thin air up here. And all that pure oxygen.

Yes, I changed the metaphor from a marathon to a mountain climb. But it's appropriate, don't you think?

• For one, we all climbed Everest because it was there, and now it's time to strip off the crampons, tip your sherpa, and savor the view.
• For two, climbing Everest isn't even that big a deal anymore. In the mere 53 years since Hillary first reached its peak, Everest has become so crowded with climbers and litter and frozen poo balls that it is now considered the "world's highest junkyard." Awesome, mankind! A majestic peak, millions of years in the making, and in no time flat we turn it into a toilet.
• For three, this blopathon has been transformative, and I have an entirely new approach to and appreciation for what leaps from my fingertips each night.

So much has happened this month. So many changes ahead, so many new mountains to climb. So much more wireless to poach, now that our new neighbor has finally gotten her act in gear. (W00t!) And so many new readers, who sent my daily traffic up by about a third. Thank you all for enduring this with me. And special thanks to Eden, the mother of this precious brainchild.

So what happens now? Do we all heave a collective sigh and power down for the weekend? What if no one blogged tomorrow? Would our computer screens buckle inward from the content vacuum? Would hundreds of thousands of lurkers suddenly have nothing to do but ... be productive?

It's a monstrous thought.

Beware the cups.

This. This is the day when you can start the Christmas Countdown: When the tree at Rockefeller Center goes up. Not before Thanksgiving, and certainly not before Halloween. And yet, at the end of October, I was in the laundromat waiting for the dryer cycle to finish when I started counting the number of times the word "Christmas" was crooned at me on the light-fm station. I got 85 in 20 minutes.

The holiday season is doing it's darnedest to subsume the entire calendar, and some people like to call this Christmas Creep. It seems unfair, though, to connect the birth of Jesus with the mobs of knuckleheads clamoring into a Best Buy at 5am. Instead, I prefer Red Cup Creep.

You know what I'm talking about. They're synonymous with mass retailing, and that coffee company trots them out earlier every year. This year, the official start date was November 1, probably the absolute earliest time they could pick without starting a formal outcry from people who don't want to see Christmas images before they've bought their tubs of fun-sized Snickers. The cups stay long after the new year as well, meaning that the holiday season is now, officially, more than 1/6 of the year! (In a related story, I now have 7 birthdays.)

There is one silver lining to all this. Now, at least, winter has a nice set of book-ends: Red Cups at the beginning, and Brown Shorts at the end -- and thanks to global warming, those come out earlier every year, too.

Blopper's high

After four full weeks of wordspew, the finish line for this marathon is suddenly in sight. We've left the Verrazzano, crossed the Queensboro, ducked in and out of the Bronx, and turned the corner into Central Park. I have to tell you, at this point I fully expected to have fallen by the side of the road, moaning and gasping and retching into the chickweed. But the reverse it true: I'm feeling strangely energized.

I've searched for reasons, but I can't find them. All I know is that, for the last few weeks, I've taken the same approach to work-related writing as I have to my blog posts, and the result is an amazing increase in efficiency. Stuff I used to hem and haw about now just flows forth, like drool from a teething 18-month-old. And I don't even hate it, nor do I feel that noisome compulsion to futz with the verbiage. It's eerie.

Once more, this new dynamism is starting to infect my bloodstream. Today I left work, took a wrong turn down Park Avenue, and before I knew it I had walked all the way home, 58 blocks. Later, I had enough energy to clean the dishes, read from the excellent Pizza the Size of the Sun, and have Robert cream me at Great States Junior. I had no chance; he rolled three stars, and he reeled off six states that start with "M" as effortlessly as a concert pianist plays a C scale.

(I feel we are doing Robert a great service by playing this game so much. It will surely incubate a love of arcane American trivia that will help him win a ton of bar bets. And make him a huge hit with the ladies.)

Time to sprint for the finish, everyone. If you're starting to falter, hop on my back and let's roll. You see that Kenyan guy up ahead? We can totally take him.

Full-frontal fronting

I joined my gym because it stays open until 11 on weekdays, so I can get in a run and a steam after the boys fall asleep. It was a nice, simple, calisthenic arrangement -- until the new night guy arrived. New Night Guy has an agenda. Places to go, people to clean up after. The steam room doesn't close until 10:45pm, but New Night Guy likes to think he can close it whenever he wants, hose it down, scoop up the towels, and leave as soon after closing as possible. Sometimes, he even leaves before closing, which ticks me off to no end.

I need that steam. I want that steam. I am owed that steam. I've talked to him about it before, talked to the supervisor, and there's no problem ... for a while, until the Cycle of Malingering continues anew.

The other night I got down to the showers at 10:15, and there he was, hosing away. And I was so PO'ed about it that I got in his face. What are you doing? How many times do we have to go through this? Et cetera!

Mixing it up with strangers is not a good thing. Doing it when you're naked is worse. Yet there I was, up in his grill, swinging away, demanding my God- and club-given right to a good schvitz. I can't say I recommend it.

Déjà vuBert

When I started this blog, Robert and I were really big into walkabouts. (Here and here are some musty-old posts about it.) He had been on his feet for only a couple of months, and we used to spend hours at a time discovering the neighborhood -- in all its sticky, feculent glory -- from his teetering, two-foot-tall perspective. He was the Mayor of Everything, smiling and gladhanding and making sure not to wander within 100 feet of polling sites.

One of my favorite things to watch him do was position himself behind Siamese water valves and play the two heads like a pair of bongos. There's one such pipe that faces Union Square, and we couldn't walk past it without Robert favoring the crowd with his pint-sized version of Babalù.

I haven't had much of a chance to go on walkabouts with TwoBert, because he is a horribly neglected second child. But today we got the chance, and we made the most of it. We motored around for a good 90 minutes, waving at strangers and leaping out of the way of little people walking enormous dogs. Then we passed that same water valve, and damned if TwoBert didn't start whaling away on those skins, just as his brother had three years ago.

Is it nature? Is it nurture? Is is a universal love for the up-tempo stylings of Cuban immigrants? Theories welcome.

Protection

On this, the last weekend of Blopping, I'd like to state for the record that weekend posts are for the birds. Everyone knows blogs are meant to be created and enjoyed on your employer's dime -- especially when you spend your Saturday mornings watching your little boys run around in circles and summoning the strength to take them for yet another extended WrestleMania in the park.

The Berts' love of committing acts of violence on their father conjures the image of Yahoo's new SpamGuard defense, trumpeted on its sexy new mail interface. The text promises to "put the hurt" on spammers and offer award-winning "protection" against viruses, and the logo looks like a shiny, golden nutshell.

Since I value my man-frame and my mainframe almost equally, the imagery is apt.

Train in pain

I spent the night at my parents' house last night, and while I waited for the train into the city this morning I was struck with a vivid memory that still haunts me every once in a while. That's because I was standing in about the same spot where, about 20 years ago, I saw a guy get hit by a train.

I was working my first job out of college, living at home, and commuting downtown via the World Trade Center. My mornings were a marvel of consistency, because it seemed that each day I ended up 1) running for the train just as it pulled into the station and 2) spending my trip fermenting in sweat.

One morning as I reached the station, another guy about 50 feet ahead of me was sprinting for the train, which was about to pull out. I ran down the steps in time to see the guy leap for the train, and when he grabbed the little handle he was instantly pulled parallel to the ground. Naturally this caught him by surprise, so he let go -- and he fell between the train and the platform. I stood there for a few seconds, agape, unsure of how to process what I had just seen. When the train was gone he lay there on the tracks, but he was largely unharmed. He had gotten a few bad scrapes from the undercarriage, but he had miraculously avoided anything serious, like an amputation, because his whole body had rolled between the rails.

It was the closest thing to a miracle that I've ever seen, and since then I've been just a little bit more awed by how random life is, and just a little more thankful for having made it this far.

Thanks for everything, everyone.

Vox clamantis in deserto

Yes, it's Thanksgiving and yes, I'm posting. Because I take my Blopping seriously, which means posting each day, no banking or back-dating. In for a penny, in for a pound, and so forth.

How can you be sure this is being written today? Well, the Knicks got blown out last night. (OK, bad example.)

If you're reading this, I hope you're not alone today. I hope you're among a gaggle of extended kith and kin, and perhaps you've sneaked down to the basement with your glass of box wine and fired up your brother-in-law's ancient Toshiba laptop, which somehow still works and is connected to a dormant Mindspring account with an old phone line that he never bothered to disconnect and that lets Inter-data dribble across the screen at about 4 kB/min.

If you're feeling a little anti-social, you can kill a little time by writing a haiku.

When you're done, go back upstairs and refill your glass. And then hug somebody.

You can call me Daddy, or you can "call me Daddy"

Today is Travel Day in America, when more people expend more energy to get to more places and see more people (and drink more booze) than any other day of the year. I am celebrating by staying put, perhaps venturing out to see a movie three blocks away. 'Cause I'm all contrary like that.

On NPR this morning, a psychotherapist flogging this book talked about the delicate antithesis of sex and parenting. Raising kids relies on consistency and familiarity with each other, but erotica thrives on intrigue. I appreciated her insights, especially since she is not American and therefore able to size up American culture, and the couples within it, from a distance. Americans are famous for the Puritanical paradox that "sex is dirty, so I'll save it for the one I love." Add to that the notion that Americans are a lot like the world's big brother, obsessed with finding solutions to things, whereas balancing domesticity and intimacy is "a paradox to manage, rather than a problem to solve."

Soon afterward, in the course of daily surfing, I came across Hipster Haiku, written by a woman whose first name is incredibly sexy and whose last name is ... also relevant to today's topic. Therefore, in the spirit of synergy, I offer this:

The way you clean stains
Off of everything we own
Makes me very hot

The knife knonsense, Day 2

Another day, and my diastolic is back in double digits. If you could pick a time for your son's friend to find a cache of knives and Go Zorro on the furniture, the weekend before Thanksgiving would be a very good choice. Normal weekly rituals have shut down for the holiday, so maintaining radio silence seems perfectly understandable.

I doubt this is the end of the friendship, although I can't be sure. Moxie and I have had far more contact with the mom, who is a terrific person; the dad's a bit of a nutball who works crazy hours, so we don't see him as much. This is bound to change, however, because he recently decided he hated his job and flat-out quit, with no prospects of a new gig on the horizon. This is the sort of thing you can do when 1) you've got savings and 2) your spacious, two-bedroom duplex in the West Village is already paid for. (You might think this is reason enough to hate them. And you would be right.)

I'm pretty sure we'll smoothe it over soon, even if all future playdates are in neutral territory. Raising kids in the city without piles of cash lying around can be challenge, and friends are a valuable resource not to be taken lightly. And I'm encouraged by a case precedent. After my mom read yesterday's post, she helpfully reminded me that when I was 7 she left me with the neighbors two doors down, and when she came back their two daughters were chasing me with a hatchet. But everything worked out OK; the adults stayed friends (and cut-throat, trash-talking bridge partners) for years, and I learned early how to lust after warrior princesses.