Laid-Off Dad

When they say there's a buzz surrounding it, they mean it literally

Once again, I pause at the the end of the blopathon to savor the view.  I can't say this feeling is quite as exhilarating as last year, when, to a much younger blogger, all things seemed possible. As I examine my psyche now, I can't help but feel a little bruised, mostly because of the chaff I thrust forth into the world over the past month. Lots of posts start with seemingly good ideas that are later exposed as sucktastic, and these posts are rightly shunted off into some alternate limbo-cache, retrievable by only the most adept techsmiths. But when you're blopping, you can't afford to discern. You type it, out it goes, and it either soars off with the rest of the flock or you scrape it off the road. Que sera sera.

I do, however, again feel tempered by the accomplishment. After all, I lived to see the end of NaBloPoMo 2.0, but Evel Knievel did not. If I can survive something that one of the world's most indestructible sumbitches can't, that must say something for my ruggedry, right?

[Rest in peace, Mr. K. Enjoy your rightful place at the head table in the Pantheon of Crazy.]

Fittingly, I'm preparing to celebrate my surging machismo as most of us he-men types do: with an evening of wine tasting and musical theater. My friend Michael is an expert on one and a fan of the other, so he wrote a piece that will have a limited run on the Upper West Side. We have also been promised six wines to sample during the performance, which means we'll at least all be 1) drunk or 2) spitting in unison. Either way, it should be memorable.

A grudging endorsal

You may have detected in that last post a reference to a "daypack," which I was wearing as I floundered down and up, respectively, the two steepest outdoor staircases along the Connecticut shoreline. Look it up!

(Don't look it up.)

You might be skeptical, thinking I sound more like a shoulderbag man. And until last week, you'd have been right. It's true that I've segued to the backpack lifestyle, and I'm struggling with it. I was raised to think that personal crapsacs were the business of one shoulder, and anyone who wore a pack over both shoulders was a gearhead doofus, or president of the AV Club. Cool people slung their belongings just so, as if to say sure, I've got homework. But when I get in the door, I will slough off my burden with a casual shrug. Tilt my shoulders 2 degrees downward, and BAM. I am unfettered. The whole one-shoulder backpack look? I invented that. It's trademarked. Look it up!

(Don't look that up, either.)

Look, the point is I was very comfortable with the messenger bag look. I got it from my local NPR station as a prize during a pledge drive, so it made me look cool and socially conscious. But then the pains started, the ones that set up base camp in my lower back and began to dig tunnels for their new transit system. I began slinging my bag over my head, so it hung straight back. I looked like a bike messenger, albeit with very unchiseled calves. But the pains wouldn't leave, and it became apparent that I had to adjust my portage strategy, lest I doom myself to walking the rest of my life on a tilt, lunging side to side like the confused oldsters who barge ahead of you in the deli line and then stare into space for 20 minutes.

I wanted to try out the Backpack Way, so I'm using an old babypack thing I bought at Babies R Us a few years back. It has about 2 billion compartments, many of which are of sealable, odorproof plastic. But it's also large and rather boxy, which is why we never really used it in the first place. Because of this, the transitioning is not going well, mainly because I can't sidle. Sidling is crucial for New Yorkers, who spent the lion's share of their commutes working their way through narrow spaces and around the Slow People--the texters, the tourists, the clueless, the change diggers, the guy with his nose buried in "MILF Hunters' Weekly." A few times I've tried to get past such people, still unaware of the two-cubic-foot ham strapped to my back, and I've collided with two support poles, a bulletin board, a mailbox, and three dumpsters. And those are only the inanimates. I keep thinking one of these days I'll make a sharp turn on the subway platform and send some poor soul face-first onto the tracks. I don't think I'm insured for that.

In sum, my back is happy, but my teenage self is mortified. And anyone else who sees me coming has a good chance of being killed. Just another of life's tedious compromises, I guess.

In case you're wondering, it's Algonquian for "high rock"

It's just like the saying goes: "Sooner or later, you'll wake up in Connecticut."

You live your life scorning old yarns like this, convinced It Will Never Happen To You. But then you:

1. stay up all night, reading and playing Scrabulous with people in other time zones;
2. stagger to work the next morning for an early meeting, cursing the inconsiderate dolt who refused to go to bed the night before;
3. get a late-afternoon train to Westchester to meet some business partners;
4. plug into your eponymous mp3 player; and
5. proceed to saw serious logs.

Before you know it, you're rustled awake by the dude behind you coughing his spleen into his Wall Street Journal. You blink quizzically at the unearthly name on the station stop, process the fact that you're SOL, gather your shit and scamper off the train just as the doors threaten to chop off your good hand. The one that works the remote.

The bracing night air jolts you into cognizance, and you understand that you must find your way to the southbound platform. You look for an over- or an underpass, but neither seems about. You're closer to the south end of the station, so you pace all the way down to the end to find nothing but razor wire and what you'll later learn is Route 95. You turn and break into a northerly trot, scanning the ground for a secret tunnel to freedom. You start gazing up at the tracks, anxiously. You know there's an egress around here somewhere, goddammit, but that train could come at any moment while I'm sitting here like a semi-conscious asshat. Don't be an idiot, you chastise yourself. Why must you always be an idiot like this? Why the constant idiotude? For heaven's sake, can't you for once just--

Say, is that a light up there?

Sure enough, the southbound train is careening toward the station, mockingly. Just listen to that engine: mocka-mocka, mocka-mocka. You perform a little elimination logic and sprint northward, squinting into the poorly lit parking lot.

Squint and sprint. Mocka-mocka.

Your head is on a perpetual swivel, searching for the slightest hint of a downward slope. But there is nothing. And you start hashing out plans for a silver lining. OK, you think. So I'll miss this train and wait an hour for the next one. Big deal. You consider texting Google to see if there's a good brothel nearby.

You are becoming resigned to your fate. Until. There, at the absolute most northerly part of the lot, way over there by the drooping birch trees. Is that a bannister?

Mocka-mocka. Mocka-mocka.

You bolt like a motherfucker, singing the praises of the great lordamighty, until you see there are what you'll later learn to be 42 steps heading down steeply to a road below the tracks. You bound downward by twos, ruing the unshakable logic that every two steps down equals two steps up on the other side. You're galloping now like thoroughbred, albeit a thoroughbred with J&M captoes and a 30-pound daypack.

You hear the ties above you, rumbling and groaning under the coming weight. You reach the bottom, bolt left. The upstairs is 50 feet ahead.

Mocka-mocka. Mocka-mocka. MOCKA-MOCKA.

Up you go, three steps at a time, gasping like a scuba diver with a faulty pressure gauge. The train pulls in. You reach the top, flail yourself frontward, and hurl yourself inward, just as the doors close.

You find a seat, heaving sighs of gratitude to anyone, corporeal or otherwise, who might be listening. Your evening is saved. You place a call, explain the delay. It's no problem, they say. How funny, they say. If I had a nickel, they say. We'll save you a seat at the restaurant. God's in his heaven, all's right with the world.

Then you reach into your wallet and find no cash.

Your mind races. It's only three stops. Maybe the conductor won't reach you in time. Maybe if you hid in the john for five minutes, you might get through this unscathed, albeit reeking of a potent blend of 1) human stink and 2) industrial stink hider. You resolve to do what must be done, slip into the can, lock the door. You breathe through your mouth--your gasping, wheezing mouth--and crane your ears for the announcement of your stop. You stand for about three minutes, fretting about the consequences of detection. Another fare-jumper stowing away in the crapper. If I had a nickel.

Then, through the stink and the fretting, your station is announced. Or maybe it was, you can't be sure. It sounded like it, though. And you know what, fuck it. If it isn't the right stop, it's close fucking enough because it stinks like corpse's fart in here. You feel the train stop, throw open the door, walk as nonchalantly as you can down the aisle, out the door and down the platform. You read the station sign and are hit with another wave of relief. You've made it. You're a little giddy now, feeling a bit like Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton after that flying cow scene in "Twister." You think maybe you should blog about this.

Seriously, though. "Cos Cob" is lovely this time of year. You should go.

Stoking the oven

It's Tuesday, which means I've just come from my therapist. Which means I really shouldn't be blogging, because after an hour of shoveling out all the ash in my brainpain I feel very introspective and questioning and altogether insufferably boring. How dare she stir up the embers that smolder all week, fan them with pure oxygen, and send me out to fend for myself with flames shooting out my ears?

I like my therapist because she reminds me of Jane Alexander's character on "Tell Me You Love Me," which I watched with varying interest during its run. The stories that the three couples were living grabbed my interest intermittently, so I made a point of never watching it in real time. DVR viewing helped me pass over the Hipster Lustbuckets, who lost me after episode 2, so I could concentrate on the Barren Yuppies and the Domestic Celibates. Regardless of the exogenous lifecrap that each patient was navigating, the sessions with May were always fascinating, because the  characters reacted quite believably, in my view, to whatever revelations they were either discovering or willfully ignoring. And the whole idea of two people building a love/partnership that survives the test of time is an especially intriguing concept, because on paper it seems so laughably illogical.

I've only had one therapist, and I've only been seeing her for a few months, so I can't say I'm anything close to an expert on all this. But I know I like meeting her each week, in her little, windowless pillbox of a room, because she seems to know just the right thing to say to keep me on edge, questioning the subtext, and nursing my metaphorical shoulder burns.

See? Boring. Sorry about that.

The price of indulgence

Sunday morning, the time of the Lumberjack Breakfast. The Big Boy bursts into the bedroom calling for Daddy to rescue the Little Boy, who is hungry and crib-bound. Daddy arrives at cribside to find that the Little Boy is actually a cat, mewling and rolling around in the sheets. The boy/cat then starts licking its hand/paw and grooming behind its ears. Then it motions for Daddy to scratch its belly so it can make little sounds that Daddy guesses are supposed to be purrs.

Finally, a motion to be hoisted up and out of the crib. The boy/cat is gleeful and appreciative, and Daddy makes plans to get Big Boy and Little Cat dressed and out the door. Miraculously, the boy/cat suddenly develops the gift of speech:

Boy/Cat: Daddy, are we going for breakfast right now?
Daddy: Yes, little cat. We are going to the diner, where your brother will have boy food and you will have cat food.
BC: I can have cat food?
D: Absolutely. What kind of food would you like?
BC: Catcakes.
D: With cat syrup?
BC: Yes with cat syrup!
D: And cat toast and cat juice?
BC: Cat juice!
D: OK, but first we have to get your cat clothes on.
BC: Cat clothes?
D: Yes. You need to be dressed to go outside.
BC: I don't wanna cat clothes.
D: Why not?
BC: No clothes on a cat. That would be dumb!

From high atop Cee Pee Dub

As I mentioned before, I took a few photos of our sixth-floor vantage point of this year's Thanksgiving Day parade. I'd never been to it before, and now I can cross this off my "Do Before I Die" List. (Admittedly, it's pretty far down the priority chain, between "Get My Back Waxed" and "Hail A Cab Naked.")

The boys were entranced for about 10 minutes, but they spent most of the morning hip-deep in their host's grotesque action figures.

Life takes Visa, Visa takes you

In a related note to yesterday's post, I'd like to use this forum to rant my nads off about the new Visa ads urging people to buybuybuy with their swipe cards rather than cash. The premise: A retail space hums along like a Swiss watch, cashiers and consumers engaged in a synchronous ballet of commerce. Rhythmic music plays as happy, groovy shoppers sashay up to the counter, swipe their cards, and boogie off triumphantly. Sashay-swipe-boogie, sashay-swipe-boogie. Then the arrhythmic square reaches into his wallet, daring to pay for something with money he has, and the whole scene grinds to a halt. Not only is it irresponsible, apparently, to spend within your means, it's downright irritating to everyone else in the world, who couldn't care less about mundane stuff like predatory lending and 29% APR.

Even if it's just a check card, or a debit card, or some other "tap-n-go" swipething that draws from existing funds, the point is to desensitize us from spending our money, to make the process so effortless as to make us barely aware that it even happened. Just spend, baby, and pay it off in time. And in the meantime we'll keep inundating you with preapprovals that you better shred already, because we don't care who sends 'em back--even if you tear them to pieces.

So, there it is. Credit cards are a sore spot with me, because our culture keeps convincing itself to buy crap it doesn't need with money it doesn't have. And each time I see one of those reprehensible Visa ads, I keep hoping the poor slob who pays with specie pops the scornful cashier in the face with a roll of quarters.

Investments in vestments

Anyone with small children knows that seasonal transitions are a huge pain in the taint. It's finally gotten colder, and the kids' bureaus are sadly finite, so you have to switch out all the too-small and too-thin for the long-sleeved and full-legged. And you also have to find those pesky winter coats, because making your kid walk to school in five layers and a windbreaker against the 40° chill can get onerous after a while.

[We later found those coats in the last place we thought of looking ... the hall closet. With the rest of the coats.]

My wife and I knew that, at some point, we had put away piles of 3T winter clothes for TwoBert to inherit. We also knew that if we didn't find them soon we'd have to -- shudder -- buy new ones. This would have bothered me on a billion levels, mainly because we had the clothes. We had them. We slaughtered an afternoon stocking our little anthill while the grasshoppers grass-hopped gaily about, and now it's winter, and we're starving. Oh, the indignity of it.

Cut to this afternoon, when my wife was moving Robert's platform bed in her personal quest to re-paint the Bert Sanctuary. And lo, there it was, behind the drawers: the mother lode of hand-me-downs and hand-me-ups and hand-me-overs for TwoBert to snuggle in for many months ahead! Add that to the pile of 6/7 jeans and button-downs Robert gratefully inherited from his cousin, and you've got two greatly enhanced and frost-appropriate wardrobes for the low, low price of ... bupkis. And once again, Black Friday gets the reaction it deserves.

Feeling strangely fine

A year ago, I invited those of you who were spending Thanksgiving looking at blogs to write a haiku about it. So I'm going to start this Second Annual Thanksgiving BlopPost with an invite to do the same, even though I'm posting this a lot later this year than last. I'll start with one of my own:

Massive crowds moving
here to there, and for a change
I was among them

In the past, I would look upon the prospect of a day like today with a dread that could macrame my intestines. Traveling to not one, but two of the most humanity-clogged places in the city, then making the train trip to my sister's for a holiday gathering? Preposterous. I was a dyed-in-the-wool city boy who used his years of experience to pilot my little boat away from the tsunami, not into it. Yet for this Thanksgiving, we made the decision to attend my friend's parade party on Central Park West and then, given our rapacious appetite for mammalian gridlock, head to Penn Station right after the parade was over, along with hundreds of thousands of our closest friends.

Before we went, I made a pact with myself. Normally I'm happiest when everything adheres to a schedule. If we fall behind, or miss the train we're aiming for, I pace and scowl like a caged cougar. But today, I had no schedule. We would get there when we got there, period. The going would be slow, and arduous in spots, but so effing what. We'll get there when we get there.

We got to the party at around 9:30, thanks to a very helpful building manager who sneaked us in the service entrance, and the boys had a ball watching the balloons from six floors up. I'm not much of a parade person, but I admit I liked it, too. The child safety bars kept us from seeing what was coming, so we hung your cameras out the window and took pictures up the road. I'm out of pocket now, but when I get back I'll post a bunch of them, many of which feature 1) lovely fall foliage and 2) a balloon's ass. The boys were especially enthusiastic about this second point, making sure to announce it was Shrek's butt! or Kermit's butt! or Dora's butt! as it wafted past.

Then came Phase Two, the trip back down the 1 train. And yes, I was surrounded by the deranged and aimless. And yes, the line for train tickets stretched well into the main corridor and into the bakery next door. But since I hadn't imposed any parameters on myself, there was nothing to stress about. I was with my family, after all, whom I love, even if every other word out of one of their mouths is about Pokemon.

I'm here now, in the quiet quiet sticks, inert at last and feeling like I've run a marathon. But I feel really good. And after I wake up tomorrow I'll feel even better, because I always sleep well without a Monster Garbage Truck rally outside my window.

Believe it or not, today I learned to relax. And I am very thankful for that.

De la soul

I enjoy Time Out New York, especially because it likes to seem edgy, as if it is written by dirt-poor, adventure-seeking poets with eccentric facial hair. Naturally, a cover headline called "Has Manhattan Lost Its Soul?" seemed right up its alley. Granted, Manhattan has entered into a gilded age that is slowly but inexorably corporatizing just about everything. There is a microcosmic block not too far from me that used to have all sorts of eclectic shops along it, but the lineup is now: Starbucks, spa, chain store, dry cleaner, chain store, wireless store, Subway. And to add insult to insult, all the awnings are homogenized, in the same font and color scheme.

New slogan: Welcome to New York! Just Like A Strip Mall, Except Without the Parking!

Manhattan has lost lots of iconic landmarks lately, and to see what's replacing them can reduce you to hot, sour tears. But I remember my neighborhood when I first moved in, and it was full of the filth and degradation TONY's editors are supposedly pining for. Drug addicts used to tuck their methadone hits from the clinic into their cheeks and sell them for crack in the park, which you'd never traverse at night. My car was broken into several times, twice by a homeless person who probably slept there and put his coals out on my dashboard. Kids from the nearby high school were routinely arrested for weapons and drug possession. And if you had told me then that one day I'd be raising my two young sons in this hellhole, I'd have strangled myself with my sideburns.

Now, of course, all of that stuff is long gone. And today, as the Berts and I walked hand-in-hand to school, there were dozens of other kids, hand in hand with their moms and dads, laughing and running in circles, low-slung backpacks flying off of shoulders. Then TwoBert and I stopped into my coffee place, where Stacy served up my usual and gave TwoBert a free scone. We window-shopped and walked about, waving at the deli guy and the dry cleaner guy and the diner guys, I wondered whether you can consider something lost if you don't really want it back.