Laid-Off Dad

Staycation: All I ever wanted

On this, the second day of my staycation, I had great plans. I girded my loins for a trip to the DMV to finally register my car in New York. Currently it has Jersey plates on it--and not even the most recent style, which looks like a pool of dissipating urine. It's an older style that was designed by a very morose person to be only a little less ugly than the beige-and-black atrocities I grew up with. All legalities aside, there's a very important aesthetic imperative at stake.

Also, my car looks like 1) it's not from the neighborhood and 2) is taking up space that could be for someone who is from the neighborhood, which could lead to 3) god-knows-what on my windshield. People take this crap seriously up here.

As usual, though, the best laid plans went kerflooey. So I figured I'd take this little time before I go pick up the boys from school and assure what's left of my readership that I'm not dead. I admit, though, that it's been a challenge to sit down and write about myself lately. It just hasn't seemed natural, because of all the truly juicy stuff that's going on in my life right now. Like [MATERIAL REDACTED] and [CAN'T TALK ABOUT THAT, EITHER] and [DRAMA! ALWAYS WITH THE EFFING DRAMA!]. Sometimes, when your life accelerates into a turgid spume, you get the idea that maybe it'll all go away if you refuse to write about it.

But hey, it's springtime in Manhattan. The weather is warming, and people we haven't seen for months are emerging from their little Habitrails and embracing the outdoors once again. Today I'll take the boys to our favorite cloistered playground, where we've been going for years, and take part in the annual rite of marveling at how large and obnoxious all the other kids have become. It's the simple pleasures that feed your soul.

Comfort

Welcome to Shit-Together Sunday, a day devoted to shoveling through piles of work in preparation for the piles of work to come this week. After that, I get to pack the shovel away and spend a few weeks tap-dancing on the sidewalk. Which is an unnecessarily contorted way of saying I'm in for an easy March.

This Shit-Together Sunday is brought to you by the delicious bowl of Trix in front of me. Work gives me breakfast every morning, and a few weeks ago I saw a vision of bright-colored sugar balls in the cereal dispenser. Ever since I've been reminded that Cereal Milk is one of the tastiest things ever--the more artificially colored, the better. It's one of the many comfort staples I've surrounded myself with over the last few months.

You know what the latest is? I got Netflix to send me the last season of "The West Wing." I never saw it, because I, like most of America, sort of lost interest in presidential palace intrigue when Bush won his second term. Apart from the emotional manipulation, which I actually sort of liked, it feels good to hear Sorkin's signature-style dialogue (which partially inspired this), and to think, even naively, that smart, capable people are running the country again.

There's much more to write about, like how great the Adirondacks were, how my 25 Things About Me is coming along, and how Robert and I attended a beekeeping seminar yesterday and have already signed up for the Spring Hive Inspection. After I get my Shit Together, I have to comb the web for mini bee suits.

Mmm. Honeycomb. Gotta get me a box of that.

25TAM #6: Eating in the food court with the old and the bored

"Never Is Enough," Barenaked Ladies

OK, I'm out of steam. I've only written five of these 25TAM things, and as I stare down the barrel of another 20 I'm officially yelling Uncle. I thought it might be an interesting idea to involve song lyrics, but I've since discovered that most of them depress the crap out of me when the melody is stripped away. Then there's all the old, wonderfully inscrutable R.E.M. songs, with lyrics like "postcard stowaway within, pristine indigo without." What do you do with that?

I'm bored with this. For now anyway. I'll still write a list as it was originally conjured, though, because I have to admit I like the idea. I've learned a lot about the people I'm linked to, even at the outermost periphery, and I've already used a bunch of these lists to help me flesh out characters and envision dialogue. So if you ever read my novel and recognize yourself, you have my gratitude. (Unless you're going to sue or something, in which case you're out of your tiny, narcissistic mind.)

I'm looking forward to this long weekend, because the boys and I are headed upstate and off the grid. We'll be enjoying the cold, snowy peace and communing with the conifers, and I'll get to spend Valentine's Day throwing my arms around the people I will always love the most--as we hurtle downhill on inner tubes.

25TAM #5: I don't know my right from left, or my right from wrong

"Two Hearts Beat As One," U2

When I was a freshman in high school, I figured out that I'm ambidextrous. I grew up writing with my left hand, but in the Era of Erasable Pens I routinely came home with blue residue all over my hand. After essay tests, it ran halfway up my arm. I looked like I'd just bloodied a Smurf.

The pivotal moment came when I sprained my left wrist at basketball practice three days before my huge essay test on Greek society. My writing hand was wrapped up tight (like a toiger) and useless, so I had to write the whole damn thing with my right hand. My teacher was sympathetic, so he gave me as much time as I needed to finish it. It took almost two hours, and by the time I was done my handwriting was looking a lot better than when it started. Plus, no blue crap!

Since then I've learned to do cool stuff, like switch-hit and throw a 30-mph fastball with my weak hand. But what's really got me fascinated is the whole left-brain, right-brain conundrum. I still draw with my left hand, for example, and feel very creative; when I do my taxes, I use my right hand and feel like a complete numberwonk.

Then there's the issue of seeing both sides of both sides of every issue. I usually have a devil of a time making a decision. I like to dither and muse and basically put stuff off. Lucky for me, I can't decide if that's a problem.

25TAM #4: We roar onto the stage, and too soon we're dead center

"We're All Light," XTC

The summer before 7th grade, we moved to a bigger house in a smaller town. I was ambivalent about leaving, because even though I got the third floor to myself (Hello, Greg Brady!), I had to start all over amassing charisma points at a new school. So after the usual New Kid hazing crap, I decided the best way to announce myself to my new community was to go out for the school play.

It was a musical re-imagining of Robin Hood, and I got the role of the Sheriff of Nottingham. But before your head fills with the debonair villainry, you should know the story was also re-shaped as a broad farce, and the Sheriff as a blithering idiot. I had two long monologues, and both were litanies of iconic film dialogue, like this:

SHERIFF

You dirty rat! You killed my brother! Villains! Tear up the planks! It's the beating of his hideous heart! I am the champ! Stella! Here's looking at you, kid. I'll get you my pretty! And your little dog, too!

Also: I wore a full-length purple vest-robe and about two dozen water pistols on strings.

The show was a hit, and I bonded with the writer/director, a non-faculty ringer who made extra cash herding cats high school thespians. He was very supportive as I tried to pull off this broad character while working with a bunch of kids that were still virtual strangers, always urging me to trust my instincts (and when in doubt, "go bigger"). I got the bug big time, and I resolved that the next year, in eighth grade, I'd try for the lead.

But we didn't have a play the next year. The ringer got a better gig at a bigger school, and they couldn't find anyone to replace him.

25TAM #3: The skin on his face like a well-worn saddle

"Melody Motel," Squeeze

I was wondering how long it would take for a Squeeze song to pop up, since the Diffbrook oeuvre occupies about a tenth of my music library. There's also a helluva lot of XTC, R.E.M., U2, Beatles, and Billy Joel. I'll have to decide whether to allow duplicate artists.

Anyway, this song is about a guy who stops by a brothel for rough sex with a young prostitute on his way home to his wife and baby. Parallels to my life didn't really suggest themselves right away. But then I remembered that the most purely thrilling experience I've had was at full canter on the back of a horse. I hadn't ridden since I was a kid, and that didn't really count because someone shuffled along next to me with his hand on the reins. But that ride in the woods was the sort of powerful, terrifying, adrenaline-spewing, experience that made me want to scream "Holy crap, I'm ALIVE!" over Lake Michigan. Except I couldn't, because I was with my girlfriend and felt the laughably adolescent need to keep my shit together. So even though I clenched myself silly trying to look cool and collected while this enormous animal and I hurtled through drooping foliage, on the inside I was crapping myself. Metaphorically.

25TAM #2: You need a little room for your big head, don'tcha? Don'tcha?

"A Little Time," The Beautiful South

I have a size 7-3/4 head, which means I can't just wear any old hat. When Robert went out for Little League last spring, for example, all the volunteer dads were given hats. They fit all the other dads just fine, but when I crammed mine onto my ubernoggin, it looked someone had tried to stretch a condom over a cantaloupe.

When I was a kid I had a teacher who had about as much hair as I have now. He always used to say he never saw himself as bald, only that his head had outgrown his hair. At the time, I thought this was about the lamest thing anyone could say about anything. And yet, I said the exact thing to Robert yesterday when he was making my Wii avatar.

Apropos of something, Robert named that avatar "Dork."

25TAM #1: My heart's beatin' louder than a big bass drum

"Bitch," the Rolling Stones

I learned I had high blood pressure about six months after I got married, when my friend and work colleague Sean was hit by a car. He was riding in the back of a cab with two friends when a Town car with TLC plates ran a red light and broadsided them, and he suffered most of the impact. When I got to work the morning after it happened, word spread that he was in stable but critical condition and had lost a lot of blood. So a bunch of us took a trip to Bellevue Hospital to give him some.

When I rolled up my sleeve and the nurse first took my blood pressure, she kept pumping and pumping long after I expected her to stop. Then she looked at her gauge and made a face that made me think my systolic was in the quadruple digits. She tried three more times, pumping that sleeve tighter each time, before saying, "I'm sorry, sir. You can't donate today. If we were to puncture your artery, blood would spray out of you like a Power Painter. So if you don't mind, we'd like you to leave before you re-enact the elevator scene from The Shining."

I'd never had a problem before, so I hoped it was contextual, based on seeing my friend lying in a broken heap next to his wife and infant daughter. But it's never left, and I now know I have essential hypertension, just like my father. Interestingly, however, I had a physical last summer, about a month after I moved out, and my doctor mentioned that my pressure was as low as he'd ever seen it. He asked me if I thought the drugs were working, and I admitted I'd run out about three weeks prior and hadn't taken anything since.

Because Facebook could use a good sweeping

Have you seen that "25 Things About Me" meme that has been sweeping Facebook? I've enjoyed reading the little bits of self that my friends have chosen to reveal about themselves, if for no other reason than it makes my "Friends" feel more like friends. And less like that guy you got wasted with in that bar that one time who has the hook-up for some killer stereo speakers.

I thought about writing a list, but Iwanted to make it more of a writing exercise, with a side order of improv. And besides, since my son has decided to write an autobiographical screenplay (working title: "Robert: The Movie"), I've decided to join in on the raging narcissism and take this a bit further:

• Each morning, I'll set my ePonymous Music Gadget on "music shuffle."
• I'll choose a lyric from the first song that pops up and use it as the title of a post.
• Then, while idling on my megacommute, I'll shape a post about me based on that lyric.

I figure, this string of posts will have a twofold purpose: You'll learn whether I'm really all that interesting, and I'll learn whether I'm all that interesting. It's entirely possible that I am not, in which case we'll all just admit this has been a wonderful, 6-year waste of time and call it a blog.

I might also try to do it every day, blop-style, although I don't like my chances. What with my new book club, and own book approaching its 40,000th word, and the upcoming Presidents' Day weekend, when my boys and I will have a little Thoreau-down and head to the woods for a few days of exploring, s'mores, and beating things with large sticks. I've also been tasked with combining two things the boys love--s'mores and fried eggs--into something gustatorially palatable. We'll soon see if the world is ready for S'moremelets.

I fling the body electric

Here's a word to the wise: It can't be a good idea to cover your body with a sofa cushion and let your hyperactive monkeyboys jump on you for half an hour straight. I can't be sure because I'm not in the vanguard when it comes to internal anatomy, but my spleen feels like it's been smashed flat as a spleencake.

It started out simply and innocently enough. The boys were using the cushions to build a "stronghold," which is one of the hot-button words that dominate his vocabulary. (So far, we've been mercifully spared a barrage of "sphincters" and "rectums," although I'm told they're usually in the second-grade lexicon.) And if Robert says it, then TwoBert has to say it, too. This often places TwoBert in the awkward position of speaking authoritatively of things he knows absolutely nothing about:

T: Daddy! We built a stronghold and now we're going to live in the stronghold!
Me: What's a stronghold?
T: [pauses, then points] That thing!

I was to be the marauder whose marauding advances were to be thwarted by this loose jumble of pliant rectangular prisms. And soon after I had begun marauding, one of largest ones fell on top of me, forming a bridge between the two couches. So I evolved into the Troll Under the Bridge, who would let you pass only if you could answer his riddle:

Q: "What has four wheels and flies?"
A: "Lightning McQueen!" (The judges gave it to him.)

From there, is was a matter of time before I became their personal Dad-oline (tramp0dad?), and with each successive jump I felt closer to either 1) God or 2) a gurney.

We'll take a break from the dadmashing this weekend, because the wonder-couch is still on order. Instead, we plan to hit the sledslopes, which at last look were solid ice. Add the dusting of snow we got this afternoon, and you've got the makings of some real hurtling. With the emphasis on "hurt."