BRING ME DEATH... OR A SANDWICH

One Whole Page!

2013-08-18T21:58:00.003+01:00

It was the Best of Times, it was the Blurst of Times

I’ve written the first page of my novel. I’ll be the first to admit, it’s not spectacular, but rather than hit select all > delete, I just keep telling myself “first draft, first draft, it's just the first draft”. I will probably be too lazy to do a second draft, if I ever actually do complete a first draft. But telling myself that makes me feel better. I will at least go through it and cut out all the shitty run-on sentences, and over punctuation, and spelling mistakes. I’m not that lazy. Not quite.

It went better than I expected though. I wasn’t too sure how to start it. But I persevered. You’ll be riveted to know, in the first page alone, there have been a bunch of swear words (come on, it’s me – what did you expect?), sex, drugs, a hangover, vomiting and potentially a murder. Also some domestic abuse, which I’m not proud of, but was necessary for the drama. Stop looking at me like that. It’s fiction. Really, I’m very much against it. Someone just got murdered ferchrissakes, can we focus on that? Actually, after reading American Psycho, I’m convinced Bret Easton Ellis is a sociopath. You can’t think that shit up without being a little disturbed. It’s still a great book, and he’s still one of my favorite authors, but if you are at all squeamish, don’t read it… says the guy who has sex, drugs, domestic abuse and murder on the first page of his (wannabe) novel.

Anyway, you can’t read it. Yet. I’m way too self-conscious,for that right now, but maybe as I get deeper into it, I’ll send you lovely people some tidbits from it. If you ask really nicely. But it genuinely was nice to get behind the keyboard and let my imagination go. I haven’t done that in a very long time, and I realized how much I miss it. So I’ll keep on trucking, and hopefully someday, you’ll see my name on amazon and download it onto your kindle for, I dunno, probably 25 cents, or free, or I might even offer people money just to read it. So I can tell people I “sold” 15 whole copies of my novel.

The Writer Who Wouldn't Write

2013-08-14T19:17:00.000+01:00

We've All Felt This Way, Right?

I’m starting to believe that my creativity has died. That it has vanished into the ether, like my youth and my disposable income. When I was 23 I had the imagination to write whatever I wanted. I wasn’t as good a writer as I am now, in the technical sense – I was full of the energetic impatience of youth. I was cocky, using unnecessarily big words and glib cliches. I’m a better writer now, but bereft; back then, I was full of ideas. They fell of my fingers and onto the screen like the alcohol and drugs that got splashed and swallowed and snorted into my young body. Now it’s difficult for me to even come up with an idea for this fucking blog. I try to find funny, interesting stories about my domestic life to write about – and I know they’re there, because my kids are fucking mental – but there’s only so many blog posts I can write about not getting enough sleep, or trying to be a good parent while depressed. And outside of my domestic life, I have no life. Save work, which I don’t write about much, because I would like to remain unfired.

When I was twenty-three, I didn’t have the time to write. I was a burgeoning alcoholic. My weekends were spent on booze-fueled quest for trashy chicks in trashier nightclubs. My weekdays were spent fueling my weekends. I was young, drunk and full of spunk. My passion for writing was pushed aside as I lived the life of a typical twentysomething with more balls than brains. I guess I assumed my writing would be waiting for me. That it would marinate, and I would come back to it. But that's not quite how it works. As I grew older I became frustrated by my lack of forward momentum. I wrote bit-parts of novels and essays with little or no passion or direction. The people – family and friends – who encouraged and lauded me, stopped asking me about my writing "career", some asked when I would get a real one. It became an embarrassment, a noose around my neck. David the writer, became David who can't find his direction. So I quit.

Slowly my depression grew. I'm not going to tell you that the loss of my dream and the acceleration of my mental illness were in any way analogous, but they certainly complemented one another. Eventually the party started to wind down. When the music stopped and everybody left, I sat at the bar drinking bottom shelf liquor and bemoaning the gaping hole in my life.

I met my wife around the time I decided to wind down the partying lifestyle. I kept drinking; I just did a lot more of it alone. You can strip away the friends, and the music and the flashy lights, but as long as you have the booze, as long as you get the buzz, none of that matters. I hadn't yet realized I was an alcoholic, because I hadn't tried to stop. That's when you know she has you in her clutches: when you try to leave her, but you keep on coming back.

It seemed the more I drank, the less I wrote. The less I wrote, the less I felt like a writer. Until I stopped completely. Of course life moved on, as it always does. My wife and I got married and had kids; we eventually faced my addiction, and I failed and failed and failed at conquering it. I had some dry spells, but I'd gradually ease back into casual drinking, and then one night I'd get fucked up and vomit in the bath tub, and I'd start again on the long path to sobriety.

One day, three or four May's ago, the air tingling with the onset of summer and my wife's trust returning, I asked her could I spend some time alone writing. Our son was 6 months old and we lived in a small apartment where space was an issue. So every Monday morning, for a few months, I took myself down to the public library and wrote for a few hours on end. This was perfect, because I was doing a lot of reading: and discovered some wonderful novels in this time. Anyway, I had the idea of writing a thriller/revenge novel. The idea wasn't blistering, but it was okay, and I figured if I could write it well, it would be unique and interesting. After four weeks, I read over it, and it was shit. Absolute garbage. The pacing was all wrong; it read more like a synopsis than a script. It was cheesy and without of any kind of originality or ingenuity. I was gutted. I sat in shock for about twenty minutes, then I got up returned my books to the lady at the counter, and quit writing. Then I went for a beer.

And that leads me to this blog. Which I started sometime in January. Some two and a half years later. I wasn't writing for popularity, or for traffic, or to promote anything; I was just writing for the sake of it: For myself. Although I have to admit I am absolutely thrilled that I have a small few regular readers who seem to love what I write. I'm grateful for their support. So what's this post all about then? Why do I feel my creativity has left me? The answer is: I don't know.

I'm not quitting writing again, or anything rash like that. I need to return to fiction. I need to start reading again, and writing down the ideas that come to me. I need to work those mental muscles so I can produce ideas I'm proud of, not staring at the screen wondering if I should buy a puppy just so I can write a blog post about him shitting on the floor. So maybe this blog will take a back seat a little. Maybe it'll be the stepping stone back into serious writing – which is what I intended it to be in the first place.

So if I occasionally disappear for a little while, don't panic; I'm not gone anywhere. I've just got some other stuff going on. And maybe I'll even send you all a signed copy of my first novel. After all, guy can dream.

Oedipus, Simple!

2013-08-09T13:36:00.001+01:00

Lock Up Your... Cats

My son sleeps with my wife. I sleep in the next room -- his! It’s an arrangement that would make Oedipus himself puce with jealousy. There’s a simple enough explanation for this, and no it doesn’t rhyme with divschmorce. The reason: my son is a fucking bully.

My wife and I have obviously discussed the situation. It used to be my job, but now she’s taken the reins of putting him to bed every night. She claims he won’t go to sleep in his own bed. “Mommy’s bed; Mommy’s bed!!!” he demands, when she takes him up. Mommy doesn’t say no, so the kid winds up passing out on my side of the bed.

In the beginning, I’d simply carry him back in. This was about as effective as eating soup with a fork. Within minutes, the child would be straight back in. Lodging himself between me and my wife. I should point out my wife sleeps with about fifty pillows under her head. No joke, she’s practically sitting up. It’s kinda creepy. But it means me and the kid effectively share half a bed, because he’d need a fucking Sherpa to climb up onto her side. One time, after I returned him to bed for the tenth time that night, I went to use the bathroom. An when I got back to bed... there he was, IN MY BED! It was like a fucking cartoon: you know Pepe Le Pew – the skunk who rapes cats... for the amusement of children – when he’s chasing down his lady, and she keeps running away from him, but there he is wherever she hides? It was like that.

So one night I just climbed into his bed, and had the best sleep I’d had in weeks. I know this, because when he came running in shouting “Daddy, daddy”, at 7am, I actually felt capable of functioning like a regular human being, without mainlining a gallon of coffee. Of course, I had a gallon of coffee anyway. I like coffee.

The only person who wasn’t pleased with this new arrangement was my wife. She missed her husband? I kept her warm at night? She liked to occasionally watch me sleep, serene and vulnerable, but still somehow oh so masculine? None of the above. She had nobody to share baby-feeding duties with (and by share I mean get-him-to-do-all-of-them). Conveniently, she soon discovered that whenever our 5 month old awoke, wailing for a bottle and a new diaper, she had to use the bathroom. Every fucking time! “Baby, would you mind getting Eva? I have to use the bathroom”. And I would trudge down the hall to my (old) bedroom like a zombie – an old-fashioned zombie, not one of those terrifying modern, ultra-fast zombies – and feed my daughter at the foot of the bed, while my son and my wife slept soundly.

At least I like coffee.

It's All About The Money

2013-08-07T11:06:00.000+01:00

Under That Jacket, This Guy is RIPPED!

I’m writing this from the sanctuary of the bathroom today. My family keep assaulting me with hugs and love, and demands of my attention. Can’t a guy get some peace. My wife is on a crusade to find all our legal documents. We’re trying to extract as much money from the government as possible. Today’s mission: to claim “Child Allowance”. For the uninitiated, child allowance is essentially free money from the government for having kids. Yup, that’s one of the few perks of living in commie, left-wing Europe. If you cut us, we bleed, eh... red. It’s not insignificant either: I get 260 Euro for my two kids. That’s about $350. A month. That buys a lot of diapers and crayons.

We’re also trying to get registered as a married couple, which will lower my tax rate, because here in commie, left-wing Europe we pay insanely high taxes. It’s so that we can pay everybody “Child Allowance”. I know; I’m from here and I don’t get it. Trying to understand the reasoning of some of our laws would push you to the limits of your sanity, and beyond. I just do what I do whenever I’m faced with something I don’t understand — I just smile and nod. I seem do that a lot. I think it’s weirding people out.

I don’t look at my bank statements much; if I want to read a horror story, I’ll pick up a Stephen King book. But I needed to log in to get some details for my wife. Anyway, I noticed a charge of 67 Euro for something called “Ripped Muscle”. I don’t have ripped muscles, so I’m feeling a little short changed by that. I think I remember signing up for a free sample of some kind of supplement though. I must have given them my debit card number. Why? I hear you ask? Well, isn’t it obvious? I’m fucking retarded, clearly.

I also saw a charge of $167 from Hertz Rent-a-car. I called customer service, and they have no idea what the charge is for. They said they’d call me back. I feel like maybe karma has bitten me in the ass on this one, but we’ll see. I’m sure they’ll find a reason for the charge. Either that or they’ll give me a coupon for $167 worth of car rental, that I’ll never need to use. Either way, I won’t hold my breath for a refund.

Well, I gotta go now, my son is knocking on the door looking for “love” and “affection”. Can’t I get a damn moment to myself?

Giant Cock

2013-08-05T23:31:00.003+01:00

Caption Not Necessary

So my place of employment is blocking my blog. Or at least, they’re blocking my most recent post. I’m not sure why. I used the word “fuck”, as I do in pretty much every post paragraph sentence I write, but this time I used it in its literal sense. I also mentioned a vagina, and had sex in the title. But mostly I just discussed my beard. Obviously, there’s some kind of filter on the word sex, which is fucking hilarious when you think about it. And by degrees depressing when you think about it some more.

Last I checked, pretty much everyone I work with is an adult. Which historically has meant that we are capable of making our own decisions in life. Now, those choices could include looking at pornography, in a public setting, in the offices of a major, Fortune 500 corporation. Decisions like that, however, make you a fucking idiot. Nobody is going to do it (and even if they did... so fucking what? It’s just fucking fucking. Where’s the crime?). Putting a filter to block out certain words, so that grown men and women don’t see some skin on their break is a ridiculous display of censorship.

But the kicker, for me, is I didn’t even use the word porn, or pornography, or blowjob, or cumshot, or leather-clad midgets, which are the terms we actually use when we want to get intimate with our laptops. Who the hell types “sex” when they want to see hardcore porn? I haven’t typed that into a searchbar since 1995. The word “sex” has a vast myriad of uses other than people fucking. Hell, the word is on my 5 month-old daughter’s birth certificate. Or maybe it says “gender”... I need to research more. But that just further proves my point. Maybe the internet has corrupted us all a little, maybe it has dragged our minds gutter-wards, but by filtering out a simple little grown-up word like “sex”, ISP’s and businesses, and all the other censors out there are merely compounding the adolescent, chuckling association with it.

Anyway, I figured I'd name this one something entirely different. It’s not entirely accurate. Despite what it says in the narrative of my last post (if you could read it), it’s not that big (that was what we in the business call “creative license.”) So tell me... is this better?

Sex Or The Beard

2013-08-05T00:32:00.000+01:00

The Holy Grail of Fat Guys with Beards

“You really need to do something about that… that thing on your face,” was the delightful greeting from my wife this morning. “It’s not even a proper beard; you need to trim it, groom it. It looks like a 1970’s vagina.” I’ve never been a beard guy. I know beards are manly, but what’s more manly than drawing a razor sharp blade across your face every morning? That’s fucking hardcore if you ask me. But I guess every guy, at some point in their life should grow a beard, right? I mean it’s one of the defining qualities of being a guy – our ability to grow a big fuck-off beard. So this is my time.

I had never actually intended on growing one. It just happened when I stopped shaving. It’s a depression beard. When you just about manage to bathe and clothe yourself, shaving is decorative folly. But as the fog lifted, I found the beard to be quite fetching. “It really brings out my lips.” I told my wife. “It makes you look fat.” She countered, unfairly in my opinion. “Actually, you’ll find it’s my fat that makes me look fat; my beard just makes me look awesome.” “I’m not having sex with you ‘til you shave that thing off.” “You know withholding sex only actually works with people who actually have sex with each other.” This statement thus began a huge argument about me not understanding her needs, and never listening to her, etc. (at least I think that’s what she said). But that's ok; it takes the heat off my precious beard.

My kids like my beard too. My three year old keeps asking what it is. “It’s a beard,” I tell him. He seems satisfied. And my 5 month old daughter keeps trying to grab it. I assume that’s an endorsement. Of course, I’ll shave it off eventually. I’m not a beard guy. And anyway, that sharpened steel is calling for my face.

Then my wife can go back to her regular list of reasons not to have sex with me. My morning breath, my bad moods, my inability to communicate with her, my lack of understanding about her illness, my intimidatingly large penis, and a hundred other character flaws that don’t make me Prince fucking Charming. Of course, all I hear is “It’s because you’re fat.”

Of course we have sex sometimes. We have kids, dammit. Kids that look like me. Sometimes we go through spells where the sex is flowing like cheap beer at a frat house. And then, zip… nada. The rain stops falling and the ground becomes arid and desert-like. Right now I’m somewhere in the Sahara. I think I just saw a camel.

I know it’s not going to be like the old days, we have two young kids who give us literally minutes of time to ourselves daily. My wife suffers from a chronic illness, and I’m a depressive, recovering alcoholic. But it’s just sex. Can’t we just fuck in the bathroom at 4 a.m.? I’d be game for that. Either way, until I get some sex, the beard is here to stay!

From beneath....

2013-08-04T01:09:00.002+01:00

Well this is awkward. I kinda feel like the family member who borrows a bunch of money, and then disappears for a few years, before showing up at a funeral or some shit. I’m not good with awkward conversation and platitudes, so we’ll gracefully move on and perhaps you’ll listen while I fill you in on the past 3 months of my life.

So on May 6th of this year, my family and I were sent kicking and screaming back to Ireland, by my work. I had tomporarily relocated to Oregon in January 2012 and we had hoped to stay a bit longer there. Somewhere in the region of forever. Alas, it wasn’t to be, and we were sent back to the old country. My wife who is American, didn’t seem to mind a whole lot, despite the loss of our not insignificant expense account. Like I said, she’s American, and I think she is still waiting to see a leprechaun or some shit. Me, I’ve lived here all my life. People tell me all the time how great a place Ireland is to visit, or if they’ve never been, how much they would love to visit. The key word here is “visit”. That is: fly in, kiss the Blarney Stone, drink lots of Guinness and get the fuck out of dodge. When you deal with the high taxes, and shitty infrastructure, and abysmal healthcare, and shitty weather on a daily basis, it becomes akin to a kind of large insane asylum with bad food.

Ok, ok, I’m being harsh. Truth is, our move didn’t go too smoothly, and I’m perhaps a little bitter. Plus there’s fuck all to do when the national past-time is drinking, and you’re an alcoholic. We arrived with nowhere to live and no car. We were staying in my Mom’s and driving a rental, so there was pressure to buy a car and get somewhere to live. After a week I bought a used BMW from the archetypal greasy used car salesman. And as you would expect, within a week, the engine fucking exploded (not literally, it was the exhaust manifold, but I spent a month waiting on the guy to get it fixed). After about three weeks, we found somewhere to live: a slightly overpriced -- but the only place in our search that felt like it could be home -- house in a quiet little neighborhood near work. Unfortunately, this was about two and a half weeks after living with my Mom had become un-fucking-bearable. We hadn’t seen the woman in 18 months, and within days she made it clear our welcome was eroding on pace with my sanity. Disclaimer: I love my mom, and she’s been wonderfully kind to us. It just was way too crowded for us all, and the feeling that we had invaded her privacy swarmed the air like a siren call.

I also realised that I hate my fucking job. The perks, and the cameraderie that I had with the guys in Oregon was not there when I got back to the Irish office. So all I was left with was work itself, which I have little interest or passion for. We’d also eaten into our savings a lot more than we’d anticipated, and then I remembered that alcohol existed. So I started drinking again. Because that’s what total fucking idiots like me do.

So the blog -- this blog -- just kind of died. There was no place for it in my life with two small kids, and settling into a new home, and trying to get your car fixed from a sheister who kept trying to get me to go halves on the cost of repairs (yeah right, pal), and drinking, and guilt, and drinking some more, and a job I hated, and hangovers. Eventually, about two weeks ago, I put the bottle back down. I was deriving little pleasure from it; just numbness. Which is kind of when you know you are an alcoholic. If it’s not social, it’s poison. And my wife and I talked things through. We got some long-standing issues out of the way, and things were better... much better. And I thought about maybe writing again. But it just didn’t happen.

You see, all that other stuff is only half of the story. Because during it all, and maybe because of it all, I fell into a pretty hardcore depression. Not gloominess, or sadness, but a bitter unyielding malaise. Those that suffer from depression can maybe Identify. I’ve been suffering from it for a long time -- it comes and goes with me -- and I’ve been on antidepressants for about 3 and a half years. Those that don’t suffer... it’s almost unexplainable. For me, it’s just an unbearable hollowness -- like somebody just scooped out my insides, everything important about me, and now I’m just left wandering around like Heathcliff’s Cathy, banging on windows and shit, looking for all the important stuff I’ve lost in my life. And that relentless emptiness just wears away at you, until it’s raw and agonising. It’s like heartbreak and profound apathy rolled into one horrific psychologically scarred ball. And to just play with my kids, or shower, or hug my wife, is a grappling, struggle, like swimming through honey. So yeah, “fuck this blog” was kinda where I was at.

But another part of me missed it deeply. I was aware that I was treading water, that I was barely going through the motions of living a life, and that there were a lot of holes that needed filling, and part of me was desperate to fill them. But when everything is so painful, it’s hard to even know where to start. And in all honesty, there has never really been a time in my life when there haven’t been holes to fill.

I guess I’m out of the deepest part of this depression. I hadn’t seen her face in years, and had almost forgotten her touch, but when you’re gobbling Cymbalta and valium like they’re movie theater popcorn, it’s easier to avoid. It still lingers though. I almost cried tonight, leaving my son for the night shift (crying’s good though -- it’s the numbness, the void, that’s so hateful; crying is a fucking vacation from that). But I’ll keep pushing on. I’ve upped my dosage of meds, and will try to find a good therapist nearby. I might even start meditation again. And as cliche as it sounds, I need to start liking myself. I’ve been through a lot of pain in my life, and most of that was self-imposed. There’s an anchor of guilt and shame hanging around my neck. I’ve hurt people: ex-girlfriends, discarded friends, family... my closest family. Christ! It’s hard knowing there are folk out there who actively despise you, even years after our last countenance. I haven’t just burned bridges; I’ve scorched the earth behind me. Those closest to me have forgiven me, but I’m just not sure if I have.

So I’m back. I can return to describing the zany machinations of my everyday life, while we guffaw in unison at my mild misfortune and embarrassment., m’kay? So just forget you read all this, and we’ll talk soon.

Old Man

2013-04-22T08:21:00.000+01:00

Get me off the damn Interweb!

I’m dealing with getting older well. At least I think I am. No longer do I pass frivolous nights in garish bars, trying hard to drown in a well of booze, trying hard to entice women who maybe pass for a seven (when drunk) back to my place for coffee – coffee and sex, trying hard to fit as many pills or powder into my stupid young head, trying hard to balance a lifestyle of excessive vapidity and vapid excess with my sanity. I spent most of my twenties (and some of my teens) living for the weekend, a weekend entailing the above, but with hangovers – I never mentioned the hangovers. Of course, I don’t miss it. It sounds hideous to me; ok I’ve just written it to sound hideous, but looking back it was a truly grotesque way of life. And yeah I’m dealing with the absence of that in my life really well.

Don’t get me wrong, the hardest part of being a teetotal dad of two younglings and husband of a wife, who’s been unwell of late, is the boredom. The incessant, merciless torrent of boredom. You might think your Saturday nights have dried up a little recently: a bottle of wine and some friends around for a DVD, perhaps; maybe some take out and an early night with your significant other, and a cuddle before the lights go out, wink wink; fuck it, maybe you’re in prison or homeless or a ten year old. Doesn’t matter. You’re still having more fun than me. Last Saturday night, I had the pleasure of watching the movie “Hop” three times in a row before being puked on by both my kids. Meanwhile my wife was upstairs, herself puking – I alone was the only non-puker in my family, and still I would have killed to swap places with her. So later I had to change my daughter’s shitty diaper, which was a fucking delight, because she wasn’t yet finished, so I got to watch that. It went from green to a mustard-yellow color (it looked a bit like mint and butterscotch frozen yogurt, but it did not, repeat: NOT smell like mint and butterscotch frozen yogurt). My wife then felt better just long enough to hold my baby girl (Eva the Diva, as we like to call her, does not like not being held. Ever. I mean EVER… ha ha ha, it’s enough to drive one crazy. Weird huh?) just long enough for me to put my son to bed. Upon his insistence, I told him Goldilocks and the Three Bears about twenty times before he finally settled long enough to sleep. At Ten. Fucking. O. Clock! Finally, I got some alone time with my wife, which lasted about nine seconds before we both crashed into Slumberville.

So yeah, I’m dealing with that aspect of getting older real well. But as I approach my mid thirties (34 is NOT yet mid-thirties; it’s late, early thirties), I’m starting to notice a few …changes. I have bona fide white hairs now. There aren’t many, only one or two, but they’re there, and they weren’t there before. I’m getting aches and pains: I have this tightness inside my shoulder blade that I can never seem to stretch out; and my back… my back is like a game of fucking Jenga. And I can’t get away with eating crap, and not working out anymore. My metabolism is like a steel mill in the rust belt in the 80’s – grinding to a fucking halt. I have zero baldness yet, but I’m getting back-pubes to match my chest-pubes. It’s gross, and I’m too lazy/cheap to get it waxed. Seriously, if the hair doesn’t stop, I’m gonna look like I'm wearing a sweater... under my shirt.

I’m turning into an old grouch too. I don’t like modern music; I don’t understand modern clothes – skinny jeans on girls are great; on guys, not so much. I complain a lot – Exhibit A: This blog. I yell at slow drivers; I yell at fast drivers; I yell at pedestrians; I hit people on bikes. If I had a walking stick I’d shake it at people. A lot. The weather is a fairly prevalent recipient of my wrath; I’m an Irishman living in Oregon, go figure. I’m a pre-middle aged fogey, and guess what? I love it. If I didn’t have anything to complain about, I’d complain about that too. It’s the best thing about growing old, and the older I get, the more cantankerous I get to be.

Now where the hell did I leave my damn pipe and slippers?

More Less Of Me... And A Kitten

2013-04-20T19:54:00.001+01:00

I have have zero time at a PC or a laptop for days now. My life this week has been a mixture of screaming, demanding kids, lack of sleep, poor life choices, and a sick wife. The poor life choices were mine and involved alcohol (as 99% of shitty choices are), reminding me why I've abstained for the last few months. It's self-control, people, or lack thereof. I don't have it. If you watch me drink, or spend money, or "snack" before bedtime, it will become apparent why I'm poor and slightly pudgy around the edges. Or at least it becomes less of a surprise.

Anyway, as a consequence, very little action has occurred on my blog for almost a week. To make up for this, I promise I'll spend more time tending to my grubby little corner of the internet, and all you have to do is read the thing. That's a fair deal? Right?

Ok, I've got to go feed and bathe my kids, clean the house, then pick up my poor, sick wife from the hospital. All in all a pretty rock star way to spend a Saturday afternoon. Woohooo!!!

And because you guys loved the hamsters so much, here's a kitten being super-cute ('cos he thinks he's a people):

and some alternatives, for the less cutesy minded:

Surprised Kitty - Darth Vader

Surprised Kitty - Toast

Surprised Kitty - Lego

Some Hamsters Being Hilarious.

2013-04-16T15:28:00.000+01:00

I'm exhausted this morning. I was up late with her, I was woken during the night to feed her, and I was up early with her. She has a Mother too, apparently. We should try to find that lady.

Anyway, for those of you in need of a good laugh, and because I have two kids to look after and am, at this moment, unmedicated, and therefore not going to write anything, I bring you: some hamsters being hilarious:

Have a great day :)

Video Killed The Dad Blogger

2013-04-15T14:53:00.000+01:00

Why can't the TV eat my Kids?

Last week, I had to leave work early a couple of times and even take a day off. My wife has been unwell, and seeing as how caring for our two kids would drive a perfectly healthy person into the realm of madness, it’s been a bit too much for her while sick, so naturally I’ve had to miss some time to help out. Truth be told, I wasn’t too pleased about this. Understand something: I fucking hate my job; it’s tedious, boring and perfunctory, except on those occasions when it’s hectic, stressful and perfunctory. I suppose in many ways, you get what you put in, but I have no passion for it. It pays the bills, so I swap my time, and some labor for cash. Yes, I’m a whore. And yet, I wanted nothing more than to stay there until quitting time today. Because my house is fucking nuts.

Today, my wife and I have been working on a system of segregation, which has worked reasonably well: she’s been upstairs, napping with the baby in a mellow Lennon-Ono style love-in, whilst downstairs I have gradually been losing the will to live trying to keep my son happy. And by happy, I mean not yelling and screaming and hopping up and down making the floorboards shake (his latest trick). The changeovers have been the worst; he’s up with her now, trying to sleep, while she’s currently vegging on my lap, in that glorious, post-bottle stoner haze. Unfortunately, for the child trade to take place, they had to be in the same room as one another for two minutes. And so my wife and I were treated to a fucking world-class mini person scream-off. Two tiny kids screaming in some kind of perverted, fucked-up harmony, perfectly keyed to drive my wife and I out of our minds. Dante, if you’re reading this from somewhere beyond the grave… there was a tenth fucking circle.

Anyway, most of the day was spent hanging out with the little dude, watching DVDs. And if you don’t have kids, you probably just read through that line like it was nothing… right? But if you do have kids, you’ll know the pain involved in sitting down to watch a movie with your child. My favorite movies range from comedy, to action, to drama. Films such as Star Wars; E.T.; The Shawshank Redemption; Planes, Trains & Automobiles; Goodfellas. The list is not perfect, but there are two notable things about it: 1, the target market of these movies is above the age of six; 2, I’ve only seen these movies a few times each (I’ve seen Star Wars maybe 5 times). My son’s favorite movies, however, include the groundbreaking “Alvin & The Chipmunks: The Squeakquel”, the award winning “Smurfs”, and the timeless classic “Stuart Little 2”. And guess what? I’ve seen each of these movies, and more – many, many more – about five hundred-fucking-thousand times each.

Watching movies with your kid is a strange sort of torture. At first, you’re not even aware of it: you sit down with your little boy or girl and watch Shrek, or Wallace and Gromit, or one of the many wonderful Pixar movies, and you enjoy it. “This is awesome,” you think, “I don’t see what’s wrong with this.” And you laugh at the jokes aimed at adults, and you even laugh at some of the ones aimed at kids, and your child curls into your lap, and you both laugh together… and all of these things only lend to the nightmarish qualities of the eventual horror in store for you.

So the movie ends, and you wonder what you’ll do next. You could do painting, go to the park, maybe read a story… then a little voice pipes up: “Pwess pway, daddy.” Hmm! Not too sure you’re in the mood to watch it again, you acquiesce as your child’s impatience steadily grows. So you watch it again, and this time you might smile knowingly at the adult jokes, maybe laugh at one you missed on the previous viewing, meanwhile your child cackles manically at the jokes aimed at kids, he or she curls up into your lap, but you nudge them away so you can play with your phone. And then the video ends. “Pwess pway,” your crazy little spawn demands again. What? No! Not again, let’s watch another one… anythi-- “PWESS PWAY!!!” Ok, ok. And gradually your descent into madness begins its inexorable crawl “Do it to Mommy!” you scream, “Do it to Mommy.” While the monster you bore laughs on.

Try it. Put your favorite movie on and watch it two or three times, day after day, after day. If you can handle that shit, you are stronger than me. If it doesn’t forever destroy that movie for you, you are inhuman. Fucking Soviet Russia could’ve learned a thing from this. The Nazi’s, the Japanese, you name it. Unit 731? Dr. Mengele? They have nothing on my three year-old and his DVD collection.

My wife and I are up to speed with all the DVD release dates, just to inject something fresh into the mix, to allow our minds 80 minutes of relief. We obsess over them “Oh My God, look – Wreck-It-Ralph is out next week, honey.” And a round of high fives ensues. As an act of rebellion, I’ve started quoting long stretches of dialogue from the movies. For some reason, my son abhors this. He begs me to stop. But I don’t. It’s all I have left.

Of course, now my daughter is just a few months old, so roughly when my son grows out of this current batch of kids’ movies, she’ll be there ready to take his place, forcing me to sit through them all over again. I think I’m going to need a hobby, or a drug habit, or something to get through this. Anyway, I gotta go… my son is asking (demanding) to watch “The Smurfs” for the eight billionth time.

The Reach Zone

2013-04-12T06:26:00.002+01:00

Imma get that shit!

There is an imaginary line in every room, every shopping mall, every street… everywhere. This imaginary line is about four foot high, and anything left below this line will be cause, or consequence, of the most hostile of abuse. For most folk, this line is invisible – non-existent – but for the parent of a toddler, this line is the first fucking thing you see when you enter a room. For you see, this line isn’t imaginary at all; it is the boundary between life and death; between sanity and insanity. We call it ‘The Reach Zone’.

You will always know when you’re standing in the home of a small child – there is nothing… nothing beneath this line that isn’t made by Fisher Price or Mattel. And when you see the parent’s of one of these little sprouts enter the room of a regular person (a “normal”, we call them), you will see the palpable expression of panic appear on said parent’s face. “Holy shit, they keep stuff on the coffee table?”, “What the hell is that? It looks expensive!” and always “Oh Jesus, is that a fucking candle? Save us!!!”

My Dad used to remind us, my brother and I, of the time we shattered my Uncle’s expensive guitar while they sat in the next room chatting. I have no recollection of this, and thus only minor guilt, which I think pisses my Uncle off almost as much as the incident itself. But seriously, who doesn’t hear two toddlers obliterate a fucking acoustic guitar in the next room?

You become so accustomed to keeping stuff out of your kid’s reach, that it becomes automatic. Nothing gets left out. Everything of danger to a toddler (and that’s everything) is kept hidden, not just from arms reach, but from sight too. And everything that is in danger from a child gets the same treatment (that too is pretty much everything). You are a fucking ninja at keeping your house as safe and damage free as possible. The only danger you face is complacency. That, or arrogance, will be your undoing. Because it might take a while, but eventually you will fuck up.

Today, my three year old boy got a hold of the Desitin. Do I need to continue? I could end this post now, and it wouldn’t matter: because already you have a picture of the unmitigated carnage that befell our household today. Thankfully I was at work when this happened, for two reasons: firstly, I’d have been blamed, and second, I’d have had to assist in cleaning it up. Actually, my wife would have diligently rolled up her sleeves and got to work, while I sweated, panicking; dabbing here and there at large mounds of thick, white, glutinous paste (or what the missus calls a Saturday night – kidding, kidding). All the while my wife would clean up 99% of the mess. Which is exactly what happened, except I got to remain relatively sweat free from the confines of work.

My Son: If he becomes a clown, I disown him.

Suffice it to say, the Desitin has been placed far beyond the reach of tiny fingers, where it shall remain. And probably three or four years from now, when my son is old enough to know better, and my daughter is patrolling the lower reaches of our home, we’ll find jars of hot pink nail polish dumped across the beige carpets of our bedroom floor. Because it might take a while, but eventually you will fuck up.

Picture Perfect

2013-04-06T21:18:00.000+01:00

That good-looking guy in my profile picture, right there at the bottom of my sidebar. That guy in black and white, with the cheesy smile and the scruffy-chic hair? Yeah, he's a lie. He doesn't exist. The guy writing this is an older, fatter version. Don't get me wrong, that's definitely me, it's just me four or five years ago, before I had kids, before I got married, and before I quit the gym and stopped kidding myself that protein shakes were an adequate substitution for cheeseburgers.

"How could you deceive us like this?" I hear you cry. "We thought you were a moderately good-looking youngish man, and now we find you are an average looking, average aged man! The lies!!!! The lies!!!" Well I'm sorry, but there are a number of reasons for my betrayal. Firstly, it's what my mother would call a "white lie", it's technically not entirely a mistruth, and who is it really hurting (aside from the lustful young ladies whose dreams and hopes have been shattered)? I could look like that again, if I liked. Aside from the extra twenty...ish pounds I've added, I'm aging quite well. No crow’s feet, no grey hairs. I could hit the gym, and purge myself of fast food and soda. And chocolate. And ice cream and cake. And... well, and pretty much everything I eat. I could start buying my clothes at A&F again (with da popped colla!), and go back to fancy expensive hair salons (yes, I was one of those guys). I could use moisturizer and exfoliate. And I would look at least as good as that guy. Probably better (truth be told, I was already beginning to tank when this was taken – I'd, by now, hooked my wife into a long term relationship). So really, that guy still exists: I just ate him.

Another reason I don't have a more recent picture is because there are literally no good photos of me in existence since the turn of the decade. I don't just mean because I've let myself go. I still have the same face, and while I'm no George Clooney, I'm certainly not Quasimodo's twin brother either. I just don't have any pictures where I'm sober, or smiling, or without a wan paper-thin smile draped over thick layers of anxiety and depression. Most of the portraits I've taken recently have been with my newborn daughter. Or with my son. In most of those I look exactly like the dad of two small kids: like I haven't shaved in days, like I'm about six weeks overdue on a haircut, like I look as if I maybe had a quick shower -- we're talking "Apply, Lather, Rinse". No fucking "Repeat" for me. Not on my son's watch.

There's more to it than that though (and this is where the sad, dramatic, violin-ey music comes in). Look at me. Look at how fucking relaxed I am. We're not talking stiff-drink-and-a-valium-relaxed either. Which was my go-to source of relaxation for most of my adult life. We're talking the kind of relaxation that comes with being in love, without a care in the world, free of all responsibility, with a healthy disposable income, and a penchant for having fun. I’m on vacation, having cocktails and cheesecake Goddammit! This photograph fell within a three month window when I felt completely free. And it shows in that photo. And in all the other photos since, I haven't fucking felt that way. And that shows too. I'm happy, and I'm deeply in love – with my wife and my kids. I'm financially dependent, and I'm healthy, but that's maybe one of two times in my adult life when I've felt like I had the universe by the balls. The other was when I was 20, which doesn't really count. And I probably won't feel this way again until I'm an old man... and that's ok.

After you have kids, nothing is ever the same again. You start to see the world differently; everything becomes a "what if", or a "but maybe" or a "oh shit". You know when you're a teenager and you steal your dad's Ferrari and drive it all around Chicago, and you're worried about your cocky best friend scratching it, well multiply that by a fucking million when you have kids. When the weight of every poor parenting decision, every strange looking rash, every heart-ending moment when you lose sight of your kid for a millisecond at the mall or the playground, stays with you day and night, you know then that you'll never quite relive your carefree twenties. But I wouldn't swap a second with my two little Ferraris for one more photograph like that. Being a parent is the hardest, most taxing, most willfully, endlessly stressful thing you'll ever endure, and yet it's worth every second of it.

Clowning Around

2013-03-30T15:47:00.000+00:00

Joining a Circus with Dental Insurance was top of his wishlist

Pennywise the clown. That fucker haunted my dreams for years. He lurked in the shadows of my bedroom, hid between the cracked alleyways that dotted my hometown. He was everywhere I feared and many places I didn’t. I should never have watched that fucking movie: Stephen King’s “It”. I begged my Mother to let me rent it. I promised her it wasn’t that scary. “It’s about a clown, Mom,” I urged, “how scary can it be?” “It’s about an evil clown.” She countered. “A rogue clown, Mom. A clown who’s been chewed up and spat out by society. A misunderstood clown who’s made some wrong turns in life, and is trying to find some semblance of normalcy in his baggy-panted, white-faced, red-nosed existence.” Twelve year-old me probably didn’t say that, but either way she bought it. In reality, it was about an evil clown – one who feasted on the dreams and also the flesh (an important detail) of children.

Being a child myself, and knowing first-hand that clowns existed, and that any adult man, who painted his face and traveled around with a circus under the guise of entertaining kids, was almost certainly pure evil, I found this movie somewhat unsettling. Or put more succinctly: I didn’t sleep for almost a year.

Let’s cut to the fucking chase: clowns are weird. Anyone who aspires to be a clown is fucking weird, and anyone who has made enough poor decisions in life that they find themselves employed as a clown, is fucking weird. At face value, the concept of a clown is to entertain children. But let’s look a little closer at this supposition: The modern clown began as vaudevillian characters in French theater. You had the whiteface or ‘blanc’ clown, who would essentially abuse the lower class, or ‘auguste’ clowns. They did this with their faces plastered in colored face-paint, because, y’know, that’s hilarious and all. Later, common to North America, came the ‘hobo’ clowns, these are the guys who look like they’ve just murdered and raped some kids, and smell of piss. They’re usually sullen and grumpy and derive much pleasure from the physical (and one would imagine mental) abuse of their peers. Obviously anyone who can’t see the hilarity in that is lacking in the very basic tenets of a sense of humor.

Somewhere along the lines, people realized that these guys weren’t so much funny, as freaky-looking fuckers, and that rather than tickle the funny bone, they instead stomped all over their fear receptors. Horror writers, such as the aforementioned Stephen King, began to write clowns as the horrible, monstrous beings they are. Over the past twenty years there has been a flurry of terrifying clown movies. Clowns, as a source of joy, entertainment and gaiety, have virtually been wiped off the map (which is a good thing). Of course, many of these clowns have freaky-ass evil faces, as you can see on thiswebsite. But this isn’t even necessary. If, like me, you have a true fear of clowns, you’ll agree it’s the regular old middle-aged men with sad expressions and painted on grimacing smiles that are the most sinister. Except for Pennywise – the granddaddy of them all – who flips with consummate ease between creepy regular clown guy, and soul-petrifying monster, whenever those meddling kids piss him off.

His owner not willing to take a chance, poor Gizmo starved to death.

Of course, it wasn’t just clowns I was afraid of: Gremlins scared every shade of shit out of me. And a question: WHEN THE FUCK DOES “AFTER MIDNIGHT” END? 6am? 9am? Fucking when can I feed my pet, without him attempting to murder me and everyone I love? And I accidentally saw “Aliens” when I was eleven. I vomited that night, and every day for about six months I went to bed with anxiety that I had an Alien hitch-hiking in my chest. In fact, as a kid I was afraid of fucking everything: vampires, aliens, banshees scared the living bejeesus out of me (If you see one you die? How fucking unfair is that? Gimme at least a chance of escape, for fuck sake). On top of all these grotesque creatures of the night, I also possessed a vague fear of just your random, garden variety, amorphous type of monster; the ones that you never did see, but you knew looked all kind of monstery – a bit like the ones you see in “Monsters INC.” but less cute and more terrifying.

And then it stopped. All of it. I realized that the really frightening things in life were real. There were no Bogeymen hiding under my bed. There were actual real-life terrors waiting to strike at any moment. When my Dad was diagnosed with Cancer, just after my eighteenth birthday, I realized that adult life was a hell of a lot fucking scarier, than my childhood imaginings. Fears didn’t hide in the shadows; they jumped out and face-raped you in broad daylight. By the time my dad died, and I dropped out of college, got myself in debt, had my heart broken a couple of times, and been diagnosed with depression, I was no longer frightened of things that go bump in the night. I’d lie in bed at night willing them to come take me away.

Nowadays, things are much better for me: I have a beautiful wife; two amazing kids; a good job; depression still rears its head sometimes, but never for long; debt … debt still sucks, but I can handle it. I’m still afraid, of what the future holds for my kids, of how they’ll navigate school and the lure of sex and drugs in their teens, of their job prospects twenty years from now. I sometimes worry about my wife’s health, about my health – was my Dad’s illness genetic, or just bad fucking luck? But these fears don’t paralyze me; I still wake up in the morning and go to work, or make my son breakfast and watch cartoons with him. And I’ll be there for both of my kids when they get scared that there may or may not be an evil child-murdering clown in their closet. I might even check it out for them. Either that or run screaming for the door.

The real cost...

2013-03-25T05:33:00.001+00:00

More expensive than it looks...

As if to let me know who is boss between myself and Karma, I broke my cell phone last night. Or more pertinently, a combination of gravity and the ground broke my cell phone last night. I wasn’t too concerned, however, because I had it insured. For six dollars a month, I was covered for theft, loss or damage. Sounds like a good deal, right? That is, until I discovered my deductible is 99 bucks. Doesn’t that suck? Over the past 16 months I’ve essentially been paying for the privilege of buying my phone back for the same price I bought it the first time. Insurance in this country – and I mean all kinds of insurance, particularly health insurance – seems to just be a way of fucking you over. But crazier still is that you get screwed even harder if you’re not insured. Insurance, in a nutshell, is a protection racket. “Pay us this much every month and you’ll avoid bankruptcy. You’ll still have to scrape every penny to keep your head above water, but hey, we won’t take your house.”

With minimal digging through previous posts, you’ll see the two biggest things to happen my in recent weeks, are the birth of my daughter, and the disintegration of my spine. Having a baby is expensive, it would seem. Because my doctor seemed reticent to send me for an MRI, as she didn’t want me to reach my limit, and have to pay a deductible. At least I think that’s what she said, because I don’t have a fucking clue about insurance over here. Back in Ireland, you go into a hospital, they do their thing, and Insurance pays it. If you aren’t insured, then the government pays for it. Simple huh? Of course, you’re probably thinking “why get insurance at all then”, but let’s just say, the difference in care is vast. But still… free fucking healthcare. Sharing a ward with 5 other people, with no TV, and food that appears to be leftovers from the local homeless shelter might not be ideal, but it sure beats bleeding on the sidewalk.

Anyway, as it turns out I won’t be getting an MRI; just Physical Therapy, which if I’m honest, suits me just fine: I have the posture of someone a couple of places to the left on the human evolution chart, so it’ll be nice to work some of the kinks out. Literally. In general, I feel I’m ready to get back in shape. I no longer drink alcohol; haven’t done so in months, which is the longest I’ve been dry since my teens. And as soon as my back starts to strengthen, I’m ready to renew my gym membership.

My diet has improved drastically. I eat way smaller portions for dinner and lunch, and my breakfast consists of a large bowl of porridge, which is Irish for oatmeal, and is made from water and oats, and a dash of salt, and nothing else. For snacks, I eat baby carrots. I’ve actually become obsessed with the things. It’s hard for me to comprehend that something so fucking delicious and gaudy in color can be healthy, and contain about as many calories as it takes to chew the fucking things. The only downside is they're making me look slightly orange. I'm starting to look like a chubby version of The Situation.

Weirdly, for me, none of these changes seem to take any effort. It’s as though I got sick of loading my gut with chips, and ice cream and cheeseburgers. Perhaps it’s my kids. My Dad, who was a helluva lot more clean living than I (seriously, I’ve had weekends of excess that would kill a tribe of South American indians), died of Cancer when I was nineteen. It wasn’t really justified; as I said, he was a healthy man, who exercised, ate well, drank in moderation, and, well… if he had a crack habit, he hid it well.

My son gets upset when I go to check the mail. The prospect of leaving him on a permanent basis fills me with an aching, glassy-eyed terror. And my daughter? Well she won’t miss me: she’s four weeks old, and won’t ever have known me. She’ll just spend her life without.

Of course I need to learn to chill out. Between me and you, it was probably stress that took my Dad. And I’m not the most mellow of souls, truth be told. I’m thinking maybe a change of employer in the near to mid future. Life’s too fucking short to spend half my waking life in a place that will happily fire me for the most innocent of mistakes, or let me go because profits are down a couple of billion bucks. I’m not built for that shit. I’m intelligent enough to have a higher standing in life, if that’s the kind of life I wanted. But it’s not. I work to live, not live to work. And while I need to pay the rent and feed my kids, I’m not willing to do work a job that makes me miserable just to keep my head above water. Not anymore, anyway.

Life’s whizzing by, and it’s not stopping to wait until you finish that report, or get that promotion, or clear your mortgage. You’re kids won’t look back and remember the PS3 you bought them, or the shiniest bike in the store. They’ll remember all the times you spent with them. The times you laughed with them, cried with them, sang them to sleep. And guess what? You don’t need to make $100k a year to do any of that.

Perc'd Up

2013-03-24T19:49:00.000+00:00

Playing with kids will fuck you up

In the way that slightly overweight dad’s who’ve let themselves go do, wearing ill fitting jeans and a t-shirt of their favorite sports team (an irony that only becomes apparent when standing near an actual athlete, with abs that look like they could be used to crash test Jeeps, and Pecs you could take shelter under), I’ve fucked my back up. The set up was quite an obvious one: I was wheeling my three year-old around our street on his Mickey Mouse bike, when we came to a slight incline of maybe two or three degrees. It was at this point my spine said “Fuck it, I quit” and I spent the next ten minutes on my hands and knees in front of all our neighbors, whimpering like a freshly neutered puppy. To be fair, the bike was about 18 inches off the ground, and I hadn’t bent over this far since my last medical. It also involved running, so in many ways I’m lucky to be alive.

I could try to explain the moment my back imploded, but all I remember is seeing white and falling on the ground. I also remember my son laughing at his goofy dad lying on the street making strange chimp-like noises. We were about 15 foot from my front door, but it might as well have been on the other side of the Mojave for all the fucking hope I had of making it home. I considered crawling back, but between me and you, I’ve left enough dignity on the sidewalk over the years to consider that. I managed to convince my son to wheel himself over to the garage, and then I began the long trek home. Think Bambi on ice, after downing a fifth of Whiskey.

The drive to the hospital was a whole new world of pain for me. I kid you not. Maybe that says more about my sheltered existence than my injury, but I spent the entire journey unsure whether to pass out or vomit: every bump and pothole treated me with a level of hatred hitherto reserved only by ex-girlfriends. Whenever my wife hit the brakes, my back spasmed like my spinal cord was connected to the power grid.

We finally reached the hospital, and then… Percocet. And everything felt better. Everything. My pain slipped away into the ether, along with all the other little day-to-day worries that turn an anxious depressive such as me, into a twitching, paranoid mess. It was like God himself was my personal assistant. All I could do was smile 'til drool spilt from my lips. I cuddled my kids so much even my three year old began to feel embarrassed. I told my wife I wanted to marry her. Trust me, you haven’t ever really experienced strong painkillers until you’ve told your mother in law that you love her. Repeatedly. I’ve taken a bunch of different, ahem… “recreational” drugs in my younger days, and with the possible exception of ecstasy (that shit is dope), nothing comes close.

As luck would have it, I was given a prescription for a bunch more of the dime-sized magical little discs. Plus a note for a week off work. All in all a very nice outcome for a man who may or may not have begged for death at one point.

Scoli-fucking-what-sis?

Except… as a precaution, my primary care physician suggested maybe I should get an X-ray done, just to get to the bottom of the occasional back-aches I’ve suffered over the last few years. “Sure, why not,” I said, willing to acquiesce to any demand she made for that delicious prescription of sweet, sweet candy she’d promised me. I wasn’t concerned. I’d pulled muscles in my back before; usually at the gym, sometimes playing sports. I figured it was all a part life when you have a nice round belly like mine, and the flexibility of Venus de Milo.

But there are a number of things you don’t want to hear from the mouth of a medical professional, when you’re the subject. “That’s unusual” is high up on that list. “Eh… what’s unusual?” I replied, relying heavily on the drugs not to go into full-on panic mode. “Have you ever been diagnosed with scoliosis before?” she queried. “Eh no,” I offered in response, “No I have fucking not.” “Well it could be just a spasm, but your spine looks slightly bent. Let me show you.” And there it was, the X-ray of my back that looked like a game of Jenga… played by a bunch of four year olds. Usually when I look at things like Ultrasounds, and X-rays, I can’t make head or tail of it. To me they look like someone spilt their dinner on the floor then took a black and white photograph of it. But there was no mistaking this: my spinal column looked like someone had taken a hammer to it.

The nurse told me she’d seen worse, and that physical therapy would probably fix it, but that the doctor would assess it and contact me next week. But I see an MRI on the horizon, and if that’s bad news, then surgery. Of course, usually this would have me hyperventilating in a state of extreme panic. Not today though… now where did I put those damn Percocet?

Return of the Living Dead

2013-03-20T04:37:00.000+00:00

This man knows pain only a parent can...

You may have noticed, if you’ve been paying really close attention, that I haven’t been around for a while. There’s a reason for that. I am now the proud father of two small children. Three weeks ago my wife gave birth to my daughter, who now, along with my three year old son, is the recipient of all my time and energy. Writing a blog, you say? Yeah, that’s kind of down the pecking order of my priorities right now. Don’t get me wrong, I’m elated: every day is a gift and all that shit, but it doesn’t mean it’s easy.

Last night I managed to get four hours sleep, which was awesome. Most nights it’s two or three. My daughter, in her brief time with us, has decided that she likes being held. Constantly. This means that either myself or her mother must be awake at some point through the night holding her, so that she can sleep. Unless of course she decides it’s time to be fed, in which case she’ll charm us with her attention for a diaper and a bottle, then it’s back off to Slumberville. It’s impressive really; that’s the kind of high maintenance her mom would be proud of. Were she not so fucking tired all the time.

We could manage this, just, were it not for a rather loud and boisterous three year old we share a home with. With him night time is not a problem – it’s the bit in between we have trouble with: he’ll sleep like the dead from 9pm ‘til about 8am. But then … then the screaming begins. And does not fucking end. Running away won’t help; like Daniel Day-Lewis in Last of the Mohicans… he will fucking find you. I’ve taken to hiding out in the bathroom. I’ve got a bunch of books in there, along with my wife’s iPad. All I need is a mini refrigerator and I never have to leave. At this point I’m shitting more than a puppy on your brand new beige carpet. But still, my son hunts me down, banging on the door and squealing with a fury only a three year old can realize.

Then, as the sun sets, and bed time nears, my daughter decides this would be an awesome time to raise her fuzzy little head from whomever’s chest she’s lying on, and grace us with her presence until about 2 am. And thus the dual source of mine and my wife’s exhaustion completes its daily cycle. I’m convinced the two of them are working in tandem, like some kind of cherubic, pink-skinned, chubby-cheeked tag-team sent from above to purge us of our sins. Through sleep-deprivation.

And have you ever held a sleeping baby? It’s like taking fifty Valium and climbing into a bed made from angel’s feathers and fucking clouds, while Morgan Freeman recites nursery rhymes. Now try it on a day when you can measure how much sleep you got the night before in minutes, not hours. If you can stay awake through that shit, you have my eternal respect. Right now, my wife has taken my son to the store (I can still hear him scream from here though), so our daughter is asleep on my chest. It feels like my eyelids are made from plutonium, and actually, as you can probably tell from the quality of writing, most of this post was written by my face falling repeatedly onto the keyboard.

In fact, and I’m a little ashamed to admit this, a few nights ago, while lying near the edge of the bed, I fell asleep holding her and almost dropped her. And by ‘almost dropped her’ I mean ‘definitely did drop her, but caught her’. And by ‘caught her’ I mean ‘broke her fall’. Oh put the phone down… the floor was carpeted, and she only fell about 6 inches – like I said, I broke her fall right before she hit the ground with a light thud. But seriously, what sort of fucked up survival instinct is that? What the hell was Mother Nature thinking? “I know; I’ll make these defenseless, vulnerable, utterly dependent baby humans so loud and demanding, that they cause the very people they rely on to keep them alive, in a state of exhaustion that risks all of their lives. What can go wrong with that?” Survival of the fittest? Fuck you too, Darwin!

Anyway, my son is home and my daughter is awake, which means it’s time to eat and poop ... I think I’ll poop first.

Sleeping like a Dad

2013-02-24T06:53:00.002+00:00

Our own Dad-like Hell!

I’ll keep this one brief because the past few days, my spare time is like my sex life: It doesn’t exist. And when it does, it consists of me panting for breath, wiping the sweat from my brow, and weeping silently. You see, my wife has been put on permanent bed rest until the baby is born, which essentially means I have to take care of her, my 3 year old son, as well as cook, clean, do laundry, and make daily visits to her doctor’s office. I don’t need to tell you that I’m failing miserably. Already, the laundry is beginning to pile into a giant amorphous beast. I think it has developed sentience. We need to keep the door locked to prevent it from absorbing my son. And I’m pretty sure it raided the fridge last night.

My Wife has it pretty bad too. I have to admit that. Her body is serving up the eviction papers as we speak. My daughter will have to vacate, because my wife has had enough: Back spasms, high blood pressure, nausea, discomfort, pain, and about eighty more symptoms that she likes to remind me of every… 2 minutes or so. I told her that’s how I feel when I go to the gym. Now she has a sore fist to add to that list.

So there’s a high likelihood that I’ll have a daughter the next time I post – that could be when she goes to college, at this rate. Maybe I’ll get her to guest post. Hopefully she’ll settle down quickly, and her and my son will keep each other entertained, and perhaps they’ll tire one another out and sleep 16 hours a day, and my wife and I will have all the time in the world to rekindle our pre-baby magic. I know this is just fantasy, and I’ll spend most of the next three years in a sleepless fog of screaming kids and shitty diapers. But a man can hope. After all, “once you choose hope, anything’s possible.” Christopher Reeve said that… before he died… from severe complications from his quadriplegia. Hmm…

I do want to point something out. I would happily murder the person who coined the phrase “sleeps like a baby!” Babies don’t fucking sleep. A baby’s sole, single solitary goal in life is to deprive his/her parents of as much sleep as possible, while still managing to survive. It’s like a game of Russian roulette for the wrinkly little Benjamin Buttons`. “Let’s try to drive our parents to the point of insanity, without them abandoning us by jumping in front of the nearest passing train!”

The problem is, it doesn’t end with the newborns. Tonight, my son (whom I’ve spent every waking hour with over the past five days) decided I’d misjudged his bedtime tonight. “Hey Dad,” I imagined him say, “it’s Saturday night. Let’s stay up for two more hours.” Well, son… believe it or not, I had a game on the DVR I wanted to watch. Maybe you should just go to sleep and climb in to our bed around midnight, like you do… Every… Fucking… Night! Nope. It’s 10.30 now and the little Beelzebub has literally just fallen asleep 10 minutes ago (To note: I began writing this post 12 hours ago).

So yeah… the uncle, or aunt (‘cause it wasn’t a Mommy, or Daddy), who coined the phrase “sleeping like a baby” is more than welcome to spend the evening putting my son to bed. Sleep like a baby? Yeah right! Should be ”sleep like the parent’s of a baby… any fucking chance they get!!!”

Hey Roomie!

2013-02-18T15:34:00.000+00:00

Hey Marv... tonight we eat!!!!

My mother-in-law will be arriving in a week. That’s pretty much the last thing we’re waiting on – aside from the actual baby. When she arrives, we’re pretty much ready to go. I’m pretty excited about this (the baby arriving more so than my MIL). My wife, understandably, is not so much. She’s more… how would one put it – in a constant state of blind, unrelenting terror. Basically she’s got an operation to look forward to; an operation whereby they’ll cut through layers of her abdomen, until they reach her womb. Then they’ll keep cutting until they find a baby. While she’s awake! Let that sink in for a moment. When they performed a C-section on her to spelunk for my son, she remarked that although numb, she could feel them tugging and pulling at her insides. It was a fucked up sensation for the eyes too. Like one of those magic tricks where they put the body in a box, saw through it, and separate the feet end from the head end: where my wife’s torso should have been, were two surgeons rummaging away at the table like two bums in a trash can. A very bloody trash can.

I made the unfortunate comment, a few weeks ago, that I was nervous about being in the room with her while they cut her in two. There little point in me telling you it didn’t go down well. I do feel genuinely bad for her though: where I’m beginning to get excited – up at 4 am excited – she’s essentially paralyzed with nerves.

But the thing that gets her through it, the thing that gives her a beacon of joy at the end of her painful, mentally draining ordeal, is the knowledge that for the four or five days she’s going to be recuperating, I’m going to be housemates with her Mom.

Now, I have nothing against her Mom. My MIL and I get on just fine. We interact when we have to. We make polite conversation, we both enjoy willfully corny jokes, and she stays out of my business the exact right amount a Mom-in-law should – which is totally. She can be a little passive-aggressive at times, but show me a lady in late middle age that isn’t. We get on perfectly, which is to say we keep each other at just the right distance to never have to argue or, I dunno… hug and stuff. But now… now we have to decide what to have for dinner together, we have to coordinate getting ready in the morning, which may involve me knocking on her bedroom door and maybe seeing things I never wanted to see. We’ve got to watch TV in the evenings together, and go grocery shopping together. And we have to do these things together. We can’t just ignore each other for nearly a week; then the charade is blown. There’s no going back from that. Ultimately, it’s akin to saying “I’ve got nothing against you; I just don’t like you.” So we have to do all these things together. And I have this irrational fear of us walking through Wal-Mart together hand in hand.

Of course my son is the delicious filling in this crusty tasteless sandwich. He’ll fill all the awkward silences. He’ll be an unending topic of conversation when the only sound is the clock ticking in the background. And that moment when we’re watching a movie and the sex scene comes on and me and my MIL are silently dying on the inside, well, that’s bedtime.

And then when my wife and newborn child return home, myself and the MIL will go back to being polite strangers, casually avoiding any genuine commitment to a shared relationship. But every once in a while, we’ll catch each other’s eye, and share a knowing moment… that we’ve been to hell and back, but that we shared it together.

On a totally unrelated note (because right now my options are: keep writing, watch reality TV with my wife, or tidy up), my wife and I have been getting up super early lately, and I have no idea why. The past two mornings I’ve been up before 4.30am, and my wife usually follows me down the stairs an hour or two later. My son meanwhile, stays sleeping until after eight. It’s like bizarre world. When I was a small child, I can’t think of one incident when my parents were up before me.

In part I suspect it’s because my son climbs into our bed in the early hours. He doesn’t do this sometimes; no, he does this EVERY. FUCKING. NIGHT. And he fidgets. It’s like having a three foot tall, somnolent break-dancer under the covers.

But it’s more than just that. He’s been disturbing our sleep since he was born, and the effect has, hitherto, been me draining every last second of time until my alarm clock goes off. So it can't be just that. As I mentioned above, it could be excitement, but to be quite frank, I’m not very excitable in the mornings. It usually takes a not-insignificant amount of caffeine before I’m able to raise a smile.

It could be the fact that I’ve been falling asleep while putting my son to bed, the last few nights. Why am I falling asleep while putting him to bed, I hear you ask? Well, aside from the fact that I’m waking at four fucking am, my son has started to take sometimes more than an hour to fall asleep. We think it’s a phase he’s going through – I believe the phase known as “being a little shit” and it lasts until he’s about 18. He stays awake by playing little games with himself. We make sure to remove all toys from the area, we turn out all lights, we don’t engage him at all; it’s full-on like sensory deprivation for the little guy. But like some middle-eastern political prisoner, the kid bears his solitary confinement out, by keeping his mind active: he’ll wiggle his toes and feet for ten minutes. Then he’ll play with the corner of his pillow for a while, flicking it back and forth, back and forth. Then he might make little shapes with his fingers. How he gleans entertainment from this is beyond me, but it’s the kind of thing that could have me punching myself in the eyeballs with frustration, if I hadn’t learned a coping mechanism of my own: it’s called sleep. Yup, I just clear my schedule for the evening, and lay there in the darkness until I get drowsy. He probably caves around 1am, I have no way of knowing, other than I stumble back to my own bed around 2, and he follows me not long after. Then squirms and kicks until I’m awake again, downing cup after cup of tea and coffee, waiting for the sun to come up. Ad infinitum.

As you can see above, I’m super-fancy now and have my own domain name. No more “.blogspot” for this go-getter. I’m on my way to the top. Unfortunately, this had two nasty side-effects. One, I think I may have an ulcer from the fucking frustration of trying to redirect my domain through my blogger domain name. Seriously, I’m fucking gray now. And two, it erased my blogroll (why did it do that, you might wonder? My money is on spite. It makes no other sense to me than Google wrote code to erase my blogroll out of spite, for removing the “.blogspot” from my address). The upshot is: I need the names of anyone who may have been on my blogroll, and now isn’t, and wants to be again. Or if you were never on it, and want to be anyway… we can do that too. I’m desperate. As long as you’re not trying to sell penis enlargements, or some shit like that.

H.E.R.O.

2013-02-17T14:47:00.001+00:00

Nondescript Super Hero Type Character

If you haven’t picked up on it from some of my other blog posts, I’ll spell it out: I’ve been feeling a little depressed lately. That’s nothing too unusual for me; I suffer from depression and anxiety. My doctor told me. Depression, for the uninitiated, isn’t a simple case of feeling a bit blue, a bit glum; depression is a way of life. You might punk your hair up and listen to death metal on the weekend, then show up for work on Monday in a suit and tie, but we’re the guys with tattoos on our faces and gauges in our nostrils. We’re living it 24/7. We don’t have bad days, or a bad weekend; we have bad fucking years. My depression usually lasts for about three months at a time, maybe longer, maybe shorter. And I don’t just feel sad or wistful: I get headaches, I can’t eat, I succumb to alcohol, I keep the blinds closed until my wife can bear it, I wear pajamas 90% of the time I’m home, I miss work, I go into short bursts of panic when the phone rings or there’s a knock on the door, I don’t cry at sad things – I cry at happy things, but worst of all, I walk around with this emptiness, this emotional black hole that sits in my chest with the weight of a collapsed star, and eats… just eats away at me, at my humanity. So yeah, I’ve had that going for me for the last few months.

But here’s the good news: I can feel it start to lift. A lot of this is just timing; it’s the gradual and natural healing process. Some of it is experience; I’ve come to terms with having this illness and have learned when, and how, to say “fuck off depression” and kind of force myself to get over it. But there are some awesome changes going on in my life right now, and I surprise myself by how excited and happy I feel lately (seriously, having a happy disposition is a depressive’s Holy Grail). In two weeks (maybe sooner), I’m going to have a daughter – the absolute mind-fuck of awesomeness this brings is starting to sink in. We’re cutting her out, so already that’s one decision we’ve taken out of her hands – the first of a lifetime full of them. I guess therapy has helped too. My therapist played a key role in getting me to write again, and that sure has helped. The outcome of that is this blog, and I’ve had a lot of positive feedback about it, from people who don’t know me, and thus don’t have reason to offer false platitudes just to protect my gentle ego. But most of all, I’ve had the unconditional support of my family: My son and my wife.

When I was about 15, I had every inch of wall covered with pictures of Rock Stars and Sporting heroes. I had a poster of every member of the Manchester United ’94 double-winning team. Individually. I had about 50 posters of Eric Cantona. And while my hero worship for these guys never faded, the pictures eventually came down (there comes a point in time of every man’s life, when he either starts taking pictures of fully-grown, athletic men in awkward positions off his walls, or else starts putting them up; they’re a different kind of picture). Nowadays, although I’m still a fan of sports – to the point of obsession – I don’t really look up to the guys on the field anymore. They’re not my heroes. Sure, I can admire them, and I can appreciate the action and drama they create in my life. For a start, they’re all younger than me now. It’d just be weird to worship a 22 year old because he can throw a ball real good. Ditto with music: I can be moved by a piece of music, inspired by lyrical genius, but I wouldn’t cry if Robert Smith died tomorrow, like fifteen year old me did over Kurt Cobain. Nor do I try to find deep, hidden meanings in their lyrics, as if God’s signature was hidden somewhere in the second verse.

Le King

My heroes are a lot closer to home now. More tangible. They’re my heroes because I love and admire the sacrifices they’ve made in their ordinary, everyday lives, not for fame or fortune, but because it was right, or because they had to just to get one foot in front of the other. Because of pure, old-fashioned integrity.

My Dad is my hero: he faced his death with a stoicism and strength that’s still unfathomable to me as a mature (no really…) adult, and a father. Even in his dying moments, he tried to protect us all from the worst of his pain. But more than that, he was a man of incredible integrity, who didn’t take bullshit off anybody, who believed in himself at all costs; he a man with razor-sharp intelligence – he studied math for fun – but most of all, he was a kind man, and an awesome dad, who never failed to make my Brother and Me laugh. And even though I haven’t seen him in 15 years, he’ll always be a hero to me.

But I have another hero in my life. Right here and now, the one person who continues to stand side by side with me, through my darkest days, through all the shit I’ve created in her life, is my beautiful wife. My wife suffers from a long-term chronic illness, which sometimes is a complete drag and the rest of the time makes the simple act of existing painful. It’s the kind of illness that would have destroyed me years ago, but every day she gets out of bed, eats breakfast – sometimes through a thick mist of nausea – gets in the shower, puts her make-up on, makes her hair all pretty, and says “Fuck you Ulcerative Colitis” like a fucking boss!

She cares for our son while I’m at work, with no family for support, despite the fact that she’s 37 weeks pregnant, and often enduring the kind of suffering most of us can only guess at. And she’s awesome with him. She does little art projects with him, and teaches him his colors, and numbers, and letters. She’s even thought him to read a bunch of words. And she’s sweet and loving and patient with him to an extent that seems almost impossible on reflection.

And she’s sweet and loving and patient with me too. She didn’t sign up for an alcoholic with depression who’s let himself go a little, but she sure as hell is sticking by him. My wife is the main reason why I’m starting to feel better. Without her support and love, I’d be drunk in a studio apartment somewhere, weeping silently while I furiously masturbate to some kind of strange foreign pornography. But she’s protected me from that life – Goddammit, she’s swooped in superman style, and saved me from that life. A life of bad pornography and tears. Her problems are hers, and my problems are hers, and though that might not be fair, she gives zero fucks because she’s my wife and she loves me. And I love her. Immensely. She’s my hero for all that, and more.

Plus… she’s super fucking hot!!!

Freudian Tip

2013-02-13T07:17:00.000+00:00

Freud: They see me rollin'... they hatin'...

I seem to have started a therapist turf war. I’m in demand. I’m seeing a Therapist about a half an hour away in downtown Portland, but the local Therapist ain’t having that. Downtown Therapist has stepped on suburban Therapist’s patch, and it’s going to end only one way: in a violent and bloody shoot-out.

Or at least it would, if either of them knew the other existed. See, for a few weeks last month I was seeing two Therapists. This wasn’t planned – I’m not that messed up that I need a team of Therapists to fight my inner demons, like a nerdy croc-wearing version of Fathers Merrin andKarras. I just kind of got stuck with two Therapists. I was going to explain how this happened, but it’s quite a boring story involving the kind of clumsy, disjointed social awkwardness you only see from people with deep-set, OCD veterans, such as yours truly.

A cinematic representation of my treatment. My Brain is the levitating 12 year old girl: apt as a motherfucker.

Long story short, I ditched local, suburban Therapist because, while he was professional, and clinical, and understanding, I didn’t really connect with him like I did with downtown Therapist. I think he actually blushed when I mentioned sex, which then made me blush. One awkward silence and a change of subject later, I decided he probably wasn’t my guy. By the time we finally made eye contact again, I was certain.

The first guy, my current Therapist, is a pretty cool guy. He talks a lot about acting, and truth be told, he nudged me to begin writing again. The outcome is my blog. So you can blame him for that. Personally, if I had to make a guess, I’d say he’s an ex corporate drone, who cut loose, moved to Portland (he’s from out of Town, just like everyone else from here, it seems; about 90% of people I’ve met in this town are from elsewhere), and began living his dream as a Therapist. At least I like to think so; I have no way of knowing this, because despite being privy to the very darkest moments of my life, I know little more than the dude’s name. Weird isn’t it, how you can strike that sort of relationship with someone because you’re paying them? He’s like a stress ball with legs, and a mouth and brain, nudging my verbose meanderings into some kind of revelation. It’s a very underrated and overlooked skill.

But one thing I have noticed, in my search for Therapists (plural) is that there are fucking millions of them. The market is flooded with them. That kind of competition must get vicious at times, right? You probably have inner city Therapists capping each other like 90’s rap stars. It’s like personal trainers. It’s like every fifth person is a fucking personal trainer. Where’s the demand? It’s getting to the point where PT’s and Therapists are going to be hustling on street corners, promising to fix your body and your brain “for fie dolla!!!”

Take Suburban Therapist, for instance, who went to great lengths to “squeeze me in next Wednesday at 11”. And every time we scheduled a new appointment, he would go to great pains to make it seem like he was struggling to find a slot for me. “Hmm, how does ten o’clock on Tuesday suit you?” No, I can’t do Tuesday. “Ok, well… hmm … hmm.” Pause. ”Hmm…" Long pause. "How about ten on Wednesday?” But then, two hours later, after I realize mine clashes with my Wife’s appointment – sorry Doctor, can we make it Wednesday afternoon? A flash of irritation, overridden almost instantly by desperation (We’re losing him!!! we’re losing him!!!) “Hmm…. How does Wednesday at four suit you?” Sure. “Thank fu… I mean, uh, see you then.”

I can afford it, fortunately. My co-pay is five dollars. I feel almost rude handing it over. “I can buy lunch today,” I imagine him wonder, as he snatches it Gollum-style from my hand. But I forget it doesn’t work like that here. In Ireland you either pay or you don’t. Insurance covers everything but a deductible, which essentially means you pay full price for a lot of stuff (medications, primary care visits, etc.). But when they carted me out here, my company gave me really good insurance. I’m not sure why; part of me thinks it’s because they are so awesome, but another, more cynical part of me thinks it’s so I didn’t run screaming for the nearest airport after the first brief flu season. Either way, it’s really good insurance. The problem with this, however, is that when I walk into a doctor’s office, I can feel them eyeing me up; I can hear them wiping the drool from their chin. I feel like a big roast chicken to their Sylvester the Cat.

To be honest, I’m not complaining. They can poke, prod, slice, crack, bend, and straighten all they want if it’ll make me feel any better. Five dollars? Just keep the Vicodin coming, Senior Doctor.

Fade to Black.

Beards n Bellies

2013-02-12T04:00:00.001+00:00

Zach Galfinanaiakinaniakis

My wife seems to think I’ve let myself go, over the last few years. She says I don’t take care of myself like I used to. I’ve let my gym membership expire. Twice. And I invest neither my time, nor my money, in grooming myself like I did when we first met. My answer to that is: be careful of what you wish for.

It’s true, I sometimes cut my own hair, and go unshaven for days on end (but hey, facial hair is nothing to run from right? Beards are cool now. And I live just outside of Portland, Oregon. Beard capital of the world. Even some of the chicks have beards. Maybe). And yeah, I might have packed on a bit of weight around my gut and jowls, but she’s a damn good cook. And to be honest, food is one of the few pleasures I haven’t yet sacrificed for one reason or another. When you don’t drink alcohol, and you haven’t had sex since the summer, and your idea of a Saturday night is watching Stuart Little 2 on loop, with a whiny three year old, come back and tell me you’re going vegan. And I’ve essentially replaced booze with soda. Sell your shares in Anheuser-Busch and buy Coca-cola, I’m mainlining that shit.

But what my wife fails to remember is that I spent a lot of time, money and effort on my appearance for the very purpose of snagging hot, blonde chicks that otherwise would be out of my league. Aka: her. My motives have changed, and that’s a good thing. I’m a dad and husband now, and $50 haircuts and expensive clothes are the domain of younger, singler men in search of their prize (“you sir have just won, two kids, a wife and all the responsibility and burden your broad shoulders can carry – and then a little bit more).

Ultimately – and this is what’s sometimes hard to admit – I agree with her. I have let myself go a little bit. If I told you I wake up and feel a healthy sense of self-worth and just, well… just the fucking energy to lift some weights, shave, style my hair and floss, then I’d be lying to you. I have spurts. I have times when I’m ready to take on the world, but they’re little islands of an archipelago surrounded by an ocean of languor (I robbed that line from The Dice Man, then changed it to make it look original. It’s a little trick us mediocre writers like to call “blatant plagiarism”).

The sad part, is I’m not sure why. A part of me knows that well-groomed David was a fake. That the guy who made the effort did so with the ultimate goal of someday not having to. That isn’t fair on my wife though. She didn’t sign up for the guy in his pajamas, eating cold Pizza at four in the afternoon, watching the game. Ok, she married a guy, so she kind of did sign up for that, but not every fucking day. But a bigger part of me knows that it’s more than that. I’ve allowed myself to put walls up, to hide away from the outside world. I suffer from anxiety and depression, and I have had sleepless nights about the responsibilities I’ve taken on (I’m a delicate soul – don’t judge). I’ve used alcohol to cope, and all I got out of that was pain, a label, and a copy of the big book. And now I have to figure how to cope with all the tricky, nasty parts of life. And really I don’t want to. That’s why I go to therapy, I guess. To figure it all out.

So I guess it is that I’m allowing my exterior to reflect my interior. “I’ve let myself go,” is really another way of saying, I’ve parted, or hidden from myself. Which is kinda what I’ve done inside. I just hide from all the debris and complications I’ve gathered in my 34 years on earth (most of which I’ve been privy to their creation; some of which just blind-sided me like birdshit on a new jacket).

There is no real moral to this post, by the way. Just maybe that I look like shit because I feel like shit. And that I’m really trying to figure it all. So maybe I’ll see if I can start from the outside: clean up the diet, bring my gym gear to work (we have a gym, awesome huh?), maybe hit a nice barbershop, and trim the ol’ nose hair.

And the soda? From my cold dead hand…

Death Breath and the Expensive Couch Cushion

2013-02-06T17:52:00.001+00:00

My three year old lodged something up his nose. We’re not sure what exactly, because despite shoving a pair of tongs about 6 inches up there, the doctor couldn’t find said hidden treasure. She said that it was more than likely a decomposing piece of food which had started an infection. This made sense because of the smell. That smell. Two foot away and he was the cutest kid on earth, a step closer and it smelled like the apocalypse had begun; Satan was releasing his dark angels on every exhale. To kiss the kid goodnight required the resolve of a Benedictine monk, and afterwards the Missus and I would sit silently for hours, with the thousand yard stare of an old man who’d seen too much war and was waiting to die.

Then there was the nose-whistle. The kid was like a slide whistle on legs. Every time he ran, he sounded like Mickey Mouse in SteamboatWillie. We’d be in Target and Wal-Mart getting strange looks. “He was born without a tongue,” we’d tell them as their smiled cracked, “we’re teaching him to communicate through song.” Then the smell would hit and they’d flee to the nearest Catholic Church.

The antibiotics seem to be working though. The neighbor’s dog has stopped howling. And my wife and I can take the breathing apparatus off to shower and eat now. Also, the brown-green slime that masqueraded as his boogers have all but dried up. We’re feeling good about his chances of re-assimilating into normal society.

What I want.

In other news, I think the Missus wants a cat: she keeps dropping hints, and watching TV shows about kittens, telling me how cute she thinks they are, etc. Plus, she said “we’re getting a fucking cat”. So, the subtle hints are there. I’m quite perceptive when I want to be.

What I'll get.

Of course, I’ve no problem getting a kitten. I love Kittens. I’d sleep in a bed made from kittens, and wear kitten-made pants. They’re cute and cuddly and the only issue I have with them is that they eventually turn into cats. I have little passion for cats. I just don’t get them. We – humans – domesticated cats, so I suppose the least we could do is give them a home and food. What I don’t understand is why? What do cats do? What was Caveman David thinking when he decided to do this? “I need something for my dog to chase”? Ok, so they catch rodents. Well, here’s an idea… domesticate the fucking rodents. Like I said, I’ve nothing against cats per se; I just think some new couch cushions might serve the same purpose. And I won’t have to feed them and empty out their shit every day.

Our Last Dance Together...

2013-02-05T06:33:00.002+00:00

I’ve started listening to The Cure again, and I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I first started properly listening to The Cure after my first ever session of therapy. I had been experiencing emotional pain that I hadn’t known possible. It scared the shit out of me, to be honest. When you think of physical pain, you have a map of it in your head. You may never have had your hand chopped off, but you can kinda, maybe take your mind to that place; to how horrible that might feel. But emotionally, I was in uncharted waters. Until then.

I rode the bus there – I think I had intended to drink heavily afterwards, or before… during if I could swing it – but because the session with my therapist went so well, and because I vomited all this congealing, rotting bile of emotion onto her office floor, and because afterwards I felt a glimmer of hope, and maybe because it was a crisp October afternoon, I decided to just walk home. Past the bars, past the liquor stores: just home. I had bought Disintegration a few days before. My ex and I had liked some of their more upbeat tunes. The poppiness of Just Like Heaven, and Friday I’m In Love along with a bunch of other favorites bands from our past had added a flavor of blitheness to the previous summer. I guess I’d never been a huge fan of theirs before that but I picked up a copy of the album few weeks before our split. Though I hadn’t yet listened to it. Couldn’t, if I’m honest.

I put it in my Discman (I’m not gonna lie – I’m old) and listened to it on the walk home. And I didn’t stop listening for the rest of my twenties. Robert Smith’s lyrics and music were simply who I was – and, more importantly, the part of me I couldn’t figure out – converted from brain chemistry to sound. They fucking echoed through every cell in my body. And for the next five years every friend, girlfriend, family member, colleague, shop-teller, fucking passer-by were bombarded by my obsession with this band.

The break-up with the ex had destroyed me. I sometimes wonder how I survived it. That kind of trauma can’t be compared to a physical suffering, because if it had been physical I wouldn’t have survived (there were many physical side-effects: I lost a shit-ton of weight, and essentially became an alcoholic around then, for example, but the white-hot core of agony was purely emotional). Still, to try to give it some context, I liken it to a car crash. A sickening smash from which I emerged forever changed – scarred and disfigured.

And then the pain kind of reached a breaking point, whereby for no other reason than it simply could not get any worse, it had to start getting better. Like when you’re travelling so far away from home, you eventually reach a point where you’re returning. That’s what happened that day, the day I bawled my eyes out in my therapist’s office, and listened to Disintegration in full for the first time. And there I found something just like me; with exactly as much shadow as light, and exactly as much hope as despair.

Eventually I started to recover. I fell in love again. I matured. I got married and had kids. I bought an iPod and put fucking Britney Spears on it – gym music. I started listening to Just Like Heaven and Friday I’m In Love again. Eighties rock became my soundtrack. In a way (Oh God, this is corny as fuck) I felt like I was cured (barf!). The scars have faded; like little silver ribbons, they remain a part of me. I’m better for them, but I wish they weren’t there. And I still miss the ex from time to time; in ways that it shouldn’t, my heart sinks when I remember her. But it never lasts long.

I have therapy tomorrow. It’s my second visit. And no, I haven’t cried yet. Shit happens: I sometimes find it hard to cope with stuff. I can feel blue too easily. I suffer from fucking depression and alcoholism – it’s clearly not a bunch of flowers. But I’ve a good job, a great wife, an amazing son, and a daughter on the way. I’m just listening to The Cure again, well… because they’re awesome!

0,-1,-2... Dammit

2013-02-04T06:45:00.001+00:00

Nokia 3210. My First True Love. I'm OK, it's just a bit... dusty in here, is all!

There was once a very brief but glorious period of time in the history of humankind. I like to call it the 'Golden Age of Human Interaction'. It was perhaps a circumstance of my age, my social circle, and my locale. But the best we ever had it, was when text messages were limited to 160 characters. Do you remember that?

I refer to my age, and location, because I was earning way too little money to actually waste time with dialogue, and pay-as-you-go credit was by far the cheapest way to afford to use a phone in 00's Ireland. So we – my friends and I – were limited to having exchanges of verbal communication using 160 characters or less. "Coming out tonight?", "Can't. Sorry.", "Why not?", "Exam in the morning.", "Cool. What about the weekend?", "Sounds good." That was it: Conversation over. Back to dial-up internet porn before the page had even loaded her boobs.

Of course, like Icarus and his obscenely strong arms, ever reaching toward the sun with those waxy wings that somehow melted in cooler air, we didn't realize how good we had it. There were those conversations (usually with girlfriends) when you needed to squeeze those extra digits into 160 measly little spots. Some among us, like the little Orwellian prophecies that we were, figured ways around this: we used numbers as words, and letters became syllables. Ever straining at the leash of technological boundary we began to revert back to a primal state. Utterances such as "Cn u cum out l8r", became commonplace. Something had to be done. And eventually, phone companies caved, and allowed long, gaudy paragraphs of deep, tortuous insight, and fumbling explanations that trailed on and on about why "It was a joke. Everybody knows sarcasm doesn't come across on texts. I didn't really mean you're a fucking loser." to come in to being. We had eaten the forbidden fruit, and were banished from our Eden of brief, concise and above all only-when-fucking-necessary communication.

It's maybe why I like Twitter so much. I'm not particularly active on Twitter, but that's simply because I've no fucking friends (I probably lost them all when texts got longer, and they discovered I was a jerk). And because my kids aren't old enough to embarrass yet. But I love how the focus is strictly on getting the information across, and not the means of doing it. If you want to get into get into a debate about sports with @bobsadick, then you better damn well have your facts at hand. It's the one true pulpit of social media with which to get your words out. Sure, you can scream and shout about religion, and post shitty pictures of your dinner, just as you can on hovels such as Facebook and the thankfully dead and buried MySpace. But it's all garbage there; nothing else. At least on twitter, there's a chance, an outside shot you can discuss with a respected journalist, or scientist, or -- fuck it -- celebrity something you give a shit about.

And then, of course, it's the greatest filter of intellectual vapidity known to man. As my super-awesomeblogger buddy proves, when you're truly thick as shit, you can't hide behind waffle and bullshit to deflect from the true absence of character or ethos within you (I'm looking in your direction, Kim K). When you truly have nothing to say, say it on twitter, and give us all a good ol' knee-slapping chuckle. It's the least you can do for suffocating us with your bullshit lives on every magazine stand and TV station.