I have changed my own definition of popularity.

In my younger days I viewed the whole concept the same way a lot of people look at an all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant. If one’s plate represents one’s circle of friends, the goal is to load up with as much food as possible. For some, one particular item on the buffet line—say, chicken fried rice—is so appealing that it stands alone on the plate, and I would equate this arrangement to the various cliques one finds in high school: the stoners, the jocks, and so forth. Conversely, there are those who love the all-you-can-eat buffet because of the pure, gluttonous variety it offers, from salad to buffalo wings, from California rolls to that nasty ambrosia salad stuff. The opportunity to overload one’s plate with such a diverse assortment of foods reminds me of the people in high school who had friends across the spectrum of cliques and groups on campus. If you were popular in high school, you had a plate piled high with food.

But the buffet disgusts me now. The food, like the high school friendships in most cases, is of poor quality, poor taste, poor consistency, and it generally leaves me feeling nauseous. Today, for me, popularity means quality, not quantity. It means sitting down at a restaurant, eating a properly portioned plate of good food. It means savoring the food, not devouring it like a pig being plumped so it can ultimately end up as the piece de resistance in some Midwestern family’s Christmas dinner. It means actually considering what I eat: what its made of, where it comes from, where its flavors come from.

I may not have a lot of food in front of me nowadays, but I have enough, and I know for fact that it’s delicious.

Although she has had four children, Jen is an avid runner (quick digression: I use the word “avid” way too much. I consider it a major shortcoming in my writing, especially given how many bitchen synonyms there are for it. Like “ardent.” Or “enthusiastic.” I suppose I could also use “eager,” but those of you who have read RAGE will understand my disdain for that word.). In fact, many of Jen’s running buddies are at the party with us. She introduces each of them to us, and vice versa, like so:

“Skinny bitch, this is my friend [Hot Wife]. We were in the crib together.”

In the MTV generation, I think the second sentence might connote something other than what Jen intends to communicate, but taken literally, it’s true. Jen thinks its hilarious to say this to her friends, and she pointedly asks me to blog about it. (Hi, Jen.)

“Dude,” I say to Hot Wife, “nobody here has any body fat.”

She scans the area to confirm my diagnosis. To our left is a woman in a risqué nurse costume. To our right is another. Behind us is a woman in a cheerleader costume. And none of them—not one!—has ever eaten a carb.

“You’re right,” she says.

(I think that’s the first time my wife has ever said that to me.)

We don’t really know anyone at this party, so we spend a lot of time standing around, eating taquitos, alternately eavesdropping on the conversations between the beautiful, lean people of Newport Beach and looking at their enormous calves (the body part, not the livestock). I feel the strong twinge of calf envy, primarily because the lower half of my legs look like the shaft of a five-iron.

(If you’re not laughing at the use of the word “shaft”, get off of my website right now.)

Throughout the evening, Jen returns to me time and again and demands, “You totally have to blog that.” I normally don’t take requests, but it’s hard to say no to a pirate with no body fat who was in the crib with my wife.

It should be noted here that Hot Wife and I were not in costume for this party, and that is because we are died-in-the-wool party poopers who take our lives too seriously and believe dressing up as pirates or sexy nurses or the fucking devil would undermine our very important lives and credibility.

Also because we like Pop-Tarts.

2) Stop playing with your burrito.

3) Your vagina is your business.

4) Dessert?! You barely touched your dinner.

5) Take your finger out of your nose.

6) Why do you always have to go right when the waiter brings our dinner?

7) Don’t just sit there and stare at it. Clean it up!

8) I thought I told you to keep your hands to yourself.

9) Don’t forget to flush it.

10) You still have shampoo in your hair.

11) Well mommy’s not here right now, is she?

12) Are you a baby? Then why are you talking like one?

13) Take your shoes off of the couch.

14) That’s it! Go to bed!

“Hey,” I said, “do you want to know what Mrs. Robinson said about you at our parent-teacher conference today?”

“Did she say I’m awesome?”

“Basically, yeah. She said you’re a pleasure to have in class.”

He pumped his fist victoriously. “What else?”

“She said you’re a fantastic reader, a good writer, and that you’re doing well in math and science. Lots of good things.”

“Did she say anything bad?”

“What do you think?”

“Talking.”

“Exactly,” I said. “She said you need to work harder on talking at the appropriate times because you’re a leader and when you start chatting during class, the other kids do the same thing and it creates a big problem for Mrs. Robinson. Can you work on that please?”

He shakes his head yes.

“One other problem,” I said.

“What?”

“She said you have terrible gas and you need to stop farting in class.”

“Nuh-UH!”

“Yep. She said you pooter all the time and a few times she’s even had to evacuate the classroom because your stinky butt makes it hard for your classmates to breathe.”

“Dad! You’re making that up!”

“Am I? Really, bud? Because I live with you and I’ve smelled you toots and honestly? I believe her.”

“OK, first of all, YOU’RE the one with the stinky farts, daddy!”

“[Gasp] How dare you!”

“And second of all, there’s no WAY my teacher would say that to you. She’d get fired.”

“For telling the truth?”

“Dad! I do not fart in class!”

“So you’re calling Mrs. Robinson a liar?”

“No, I’m calling YOU a liar.”

“[Gasp] How dare you!”

Suddenly, his face freezes. Five seconds pass.

“Hey, dad.”

“What?”

Fbrrrrrraaaappp!

“I rest my case, stinkybutt.”

I hope you appreciate this, Kristen.

Other book news:

1) I received my advanced copy of RULES FOR MY UNBORN SON by Walker Lamond and have thoroughly enjoyed it.

2) Jen Lancaster recommended I check out I AM A GENIUS OF UNSPEAKABLE EVIL AND I WANT TO BE YOUR CLASS PRESIDENT by Josh Lieb, an Emmy-winning executive producer on The Daily Show. As the title pretty strongly suggests, its hilarious.

3) I've started on a proposal for what I hope will become my follow-up to RAGE AGAINST THE MESHUGENAH.

Getting in touch with what’s really going on in my heart and head requires that I withdraw into my own head. I feel like a miner with a bright lamp on my head, looking around in the dark, rubbing my hands along the walls, trying to find something precious and valuable hidden in the deep recesses.

While this process is important and virtually mandatory, it is never quick—and the longer I stay isolated in my emotional mine, the more problematic that isolation becomes. I do not live a life of solitude. I have built my life around people, and those people have made me a part of their lives. When I take myself away from them—even if the cause of my isolation is a fundamental part of my creative process—they are left to wonder if my allegiance to them is fraying.

I eventually come out of the mine, but I can’t predict when. And that’s the hardest part.

On the popularity hierarchy, identifying oneself as a member of the speech and debate team ranked one somewhere between being the kid who crapped his pants on a field trip and the kid who took his mom to the winter formal. It may as well have been called The Nerd Club. But it was a sanctuary from popularity. None of us was popular and we knew it, so we didn’t even bother trying to put on airs or impress each other or, in some cases, bother with basic personal hygiene. It was understood that if you were in that room, your existence was essentially devoid of social graces, popularity, and athletic prowess.

Though we were all part of the same team, we were cast into two distinct groups: the debaters and the speakers. The debate team was comprised of the smarter nerds. They competed against other local high school teams in what was called Lincoln-Douglass debate. I didn’t know what that was. Still don’t. But they won a lot of trophies.

I was a part of the other group: the speakers. I think I chose that rout because debate implies conflict, whereas public speaking was just me up there talking. There was a great variety of speaking categories from which to choose. The kids who elected to do Humorous Interpretation (HI) or Dramatic Interpretation (DI) selected a previously published literary work and crafted an 8-10 minute speech out of it. (My buddy Andy, who’s now a bad-ass glass artist, performed a DI that included the speech President Ronald Reagan gave after the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded. Our friend Mike Moon, a champion in the HI, won an Emmy in 2005 for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation for his work on “Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends.”) Extemporaneous speakers were given, with very short notice, a series of three questions related to current events and required to prepare a speech that answered one of them.

And then there was my event: Original Prose or Poetry (OPP). I was so down with OPP (“Yeah, you know me.”). OPP was quite similar to HI, the notable difference being that the “literary” work being interpreted was written by the speaker himself.

My speech was called, “Spin The Wheel And Guess The Word For Big Bucks.” It was the humorous yet harrowing tale of a high school senior who appears on a game show in hopes of winning enough money to take a girl to the senior prom. The name of the speech is the name of this imaginary game show, which was obviously a complete rip-off of Wheel of Fortune. I remember very little about the speech, but I remember the day I won the league tournament and was handed a big trophy topped with a well-dressed man standing next to a lectern. The engraved gold plate on the bottom of the trophy read, “1988 Marmonte League Champion. Original Prose and Poetry.”

At the time, that was the highlight of my life.

My league championship qualified me to enter the high school state championship tournament at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) in San Luis Obispo, a quaint college town along the Central California coast, due east of Bakersfield. I was eliminated in the first round of the tournament because one of the judges ruled that casting my arms out in front of my body and drawing them sideways across my body to look like I was spinning the big wheel went to far astray from “interpreting” and into the no-no realm of “acting.”

Although our “coach,” the inimitable Mrs. Reese, did her best to console me, I simply couldn’t accept her sympathy. Our fearless leader was known among the team for two things: her enormous eyeglasses and her propensity to leave her various coffee mugs on her desk so long that they began to breed plainly visible bacteria inside. Sometimes it was green, sometimes it was brown, sometimes it seemed to be breathing.

One might be inclined—as I was—to believe such a high concentration socially inept nerds would make the speech and debate environment a sex-free zone. But this is high school. Hormones don’t rage any differently in the geek teenager than they do in the jock or the stoner or the student council president. This naturally created an intense conundrum for me because although I was horny as hell, I lacked the knowledge of how to actually take that out on anything other than my sock drawer.

Still, at a glance, we weren’t all that different from other extracurricular clubs. While the jocks shared tubes of Ben-Gay and the cheerleaders borrowed one another’s tall purple cans of AquaNet, members of the speech and debate team were happy to help a teammate by loaning him or her a few Clearasil wipes or piece of the white wax we wore on our braces to keep them from slashing the insides of our lips. And while other groups may have prepared for battle with a collective yawp of WIN! or FIGHT! or PIONEERS!, we gathered in a circle, put our hands together in the middle and simultaneously shouted SPEAK! Ironically, every dog in the surrounding residential neighborhoods started barking when we did that.

It should be noted that Paul Dinius, he of the angry scowl, is now the commander of a nuclear submarine and Josh Rubin was the drummer in an awesome punk band called Sicko. 

He had to be at practice Tuesday night, which I originally interpreted as bad news because it coincided with a televised hockey game featuring our favorite team, the Anaheim Ducks. I could have set the DVR to record it, but there’s something about watching a sporting event as it’s happening that makes it more interesting to me. Anyway, I was about to start negotiating a deal with Hot Wife whereby she would take our son to hockey practice and in exchange I would do something for her. Like shower. Or flush.

But then I realized that practice was at a hockey rink, and there are about five big-ass TVs in the lobby of the rink, and if there’s one thing you can count on seeing on TV at a hockey rink, it’s hockey.

When we got the rink, my son put on all of his gear and raced off, leaving me in the lobby. And guess what was on the TV there.

Baseball.

Not just baseball, but some stupid game between Minnesota and Detroit, neither of which anyone in California gives half a crap about.

“Hey, man, do you think you can put the Ducks game on one of these TVs?” I ask the feverishly texting high school kid at the snack bar.

“Actually, um, you need to ask that guy over there.” He points to a chubby redhead sitting at a computer on the opposite side of the room. He looks about 20 years old. “He has the remote.”

“Cool. Thanks."

I walk over the Big Red and he, too, is texting.

“I hear you’re the man with the remote control,” I say. “Any chance you can get the Ducks game on one of these big screens?”

“Uh, sure,” he says, still looking down at his little cell phone. He appears to be struggling with the fact that the keys on his phone are tiny and his fingers are the size of kielbasas. Every time he types one letter, his fingers inadvertently hit the four keys around that letter as well. Lots of deleting going on. “Gimme one sec."

I step out for about 10 minutes, watch my son struggle with his puck-handling for a few minutes, then return to the lobby to watch the game.

Still baseball.

“Dude,” I say. “Ducks?”

“Yeah,” another hockey dad says. “I was hoping to see that too."

Big Red doesn’t look up, doesn’t acknowledge us in any way. It’s as though he didn’t hear us, although I know he can. Unless an errant piece of Slim Jim is stuck in his ears, which is entirely possible.

“Hey! Big fella! Can you hear me?”

He looks up, irritated. “I said one sec, man.”

“You said ‘one sec’ 10 minutes ago,” I say. “How hard is it to pick up a remote control, aim it at a TV, and push a couple of buttons?"

“I’m waiting until this game is over,” he says.

“You’re not even watching it! You’re texting with Little Debbie or something! Besides, this is a hockey rink, not a baseball field."

“God! Fine!” In a huff he opens a drawer, grabs a remote, and puts the hockey game on.

Just in time for the first intermission.

This is my daughter’s fault.

Having a son first gave me a false sense of control and made me believe parenting is no harder than installing a car seat. Gave him a couple of Matchbox cars, set him down on the floor, and he could keep himself occupied for 30 minutes. Changing his diaper was simple—wipe the balls, wipe the butt, strap him in and let him go. Even as he’s grown into the big-shot nine-year-old he is now, most conflicts can be diffused with a joke, a vanilla shake, or simply by me laying down on the ground and letting him punch me in the nuts a couple of times. He’s a boy. He’s a breeze.

But if I compare my experience to an airplane flight, where my son was a smooth ride at a comfy cruising altitude with an exit row seat for extra legroom and a friendly flight attendant who gives me free booze, my daughter’s arrival and first six years of life are like a sudden, horrendous pocket of turbulence that sends laptops and Kindles and honey roasted peanuts flying through the fuselage. People are screaming and praying. The oxygen masks drop from the overhead compartments and people start to remove their seat cushions to prepare for the very likely event of a water landing.

Where did this little attitude come from? How is it possible for a human being to shift from sweet little angel to fire-breathing harbinger of death and back again within the amount of time it takes to eat a Pop Tart?

I should have seen this coming. Even when she was a baby, in stark contrast to the ease of changing her brother’s diaper, changing hers required a practical, working knowledge of physics and kinesiology and spelunking. Wipe this way, not that way. Up. No, down. Oh God, it got in there! Get a Q-Tip. Sorry, but that’s not normal. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not normal.

And as she has matured, ugh, the ATTITUDE! Have you seen the video Will Ferrell made with his daughter Pearl? The one where she’s the evil landlord and he’s the frightened tenant?

Yeah, well that’s not such a stretch.

“Honey, can you carry your plate to the sink please?”

“YOU carry it! You work for ME, bitch!”

“I really don’t like the way you’re talking to me right now."

“Who cares? Fuck off.”

And do you want to know the worst part? Whenever I try to talk to people about this, the reply is universally the same: “Just wait until she gets older, dude. It’s only just begun.”

To which I say, “Noooooooooo!”

The Edge’s analogy closely mirrors the way I feel about marriage and parenthood. It’s haphazard and random almost all of the time. There’s no rhythm, no clarity, time to pause for a breath. And suddenly, as if out of nowhere, each of your kids goes to play at a friend’s house and you find yourself alone, with your wife, with nothing standing in the way of you and a full afternoon of high-flying, acrobatic, Cirque Du Soleil baboon sex

But it’s never that easy, is it? Course not

It so happens that I was made aware of our afternoon of freedom while standing around bullshitting with our friends, Marty the Cheese Whisperer and his wife Julie, for whom no nickname would be sufficient but if I gave her one it would probably have something to do with being a cheese widow.

This is roughly how the conversation went:

Marty: “…and I got this really stinky blue cheese at Trader Joe’s."

Hot Wife: “Oh, hi guys. Guess what, Danny. Both of our kids are gone for the afternoon."

Me (to myself): “Well what are we doing here? Let’s go home and engage in SEXUAL CONGRESS!"

Hot Wife (to Marty and Julie): “So, do you guys want to go to lunch or something?”

Me (to myself again): “Double-U Tee Eff?!”

I mean, is she new here? Is it not written somewhere that when the kids are away, the parents will...you know...do the Malachi Crunch?

Remember that old Schoolhouse Rocks song about the sad little bill trying to get all the way to congress so he could become a law?

That was me Sunday afternoon. I was the bill. I was trying to get to the (sexual) “congress,” but all of the other stupid bills wanted to go out for Mexican food.

Alas, Rage is front-page news here in the birthplace of Richard Nixon, Gwen Stefani, and the Real Housewives. Is that sad? It could be. It must be. Because in addition to my happy tale, these were the stories on the front page this morning: a killer tsunami, some bad news for senior citizens in Huntington Beach, and a tease about how nuts can make cookies “even better.” EVEN! BETTER! Bet you won’t get that in YOUR morning paper, New York.

(Lest you think I’m joking, consider the coordination it took to pair that nutty cookies piece with the feature about RAGE, which details, “why it takes balls to go…NUTS!” Booyah!)

CLICK HERE if you haven’t heard enough about me already.

I’m seated at a wooden table long enough for three chairs on each side. I’m at the end, next to the window. There is a high school across the street and through the chain link fence I can see the gangly freshman running laps around the track.

An elderly woman with a gray metal walker with tennis balls on the nubs ambles up to the other side of the table and waves her hand at me. I presume she wants to say something so I pull the earbud out of my right ear so I can hear her.

“Is this seat taken?”

“No, ma’am,” I say. “It’s all yours.”

She smiles and thanks me. She seems frail. As she sits, I return the earbud and pick up the beat from the new Pearl Jam song. I can smell her perfume. It smells like flowers. And formaldehyde.

A Matisyahu song comes on. I write a Tweet.

An elderly man approaches the table. He’s holding a cup of coffee in each hand and a book in his armpit. He sets the coffee down next to the elderly woman and then reaches up to his armpit, grabs his book and sets it on the table.

Chicken Soup for the Older and Wiser.

They’re a cute couple. He wears a white baseball cap with a blue bill. His shirt is ugly as sin, but he is forgiven because of the way he dotes on his wife. He’s very concerned with her comfort, with the temperature of her coffee. It’s endearing. I start to think about what my wife and I will look like in 40 years. I wonder if I’ll wear ugly shirts.

With a smile in my heart, I return to my writing. Coldplay now: “Be my mirror, my sword and shield.” For the first time in a week, I feel that groove every writer seeks. The words are flowing. I’m focused.

And then the old man starts reading out loud to his wife.

I have my headphones on, but I can still hear him. Does he not see me? Has he considered how distracting he is to me?

I crank the volume on the iPod. Now I’m deaf. The elderly couple isn’t endearing anymore. They’re a major nuisance. But they’re cute. And clearly fragile. And I really don’t want to shush them.

Genesis. “I’ve got a name! And I’ve got a number. I’ve got a line on you.”

And then she starts laughing. It’s an old lady laugh—the kind that makes you concerned that she’s going to hork up a big chunk of lung cheese if she doesn’t calm down. I don’t mind hearing her laugh, but the idea that she’s gotten that hearty a guffaw from one of those damn Chicken Soup books really sets me off.  I disagree with it on principle, in the same way I disagree with faith-healing and crotch-rot and the infield fly rule.

I remove the earbud again.

I’m about to say something, but what? How does one confront the elderly? I could just ask them to be quieter, but the very nature of their purpose here makes that impossible. Plus, maybe they’re so loud because they’re hard of hearing. I play the conversation through in my mind:

“Can you guys please keep it down? I’m working.”

“What?"

“I SAID I’M TRYING TO WORK AND YOU’RE BEING VERY LOUD. CAN YOU PLEASE READ MORE QUIETLY?"

The man would turn to his wife. “What did he say? I can’t hear him.”

“He said he doesn’t like old people and we should just go outside and die.”

“I SAID NO SUCH THING!”

“He just called you an asshole,” the woman would say.

“Fuck you,” the man would say to me.

I return the earbud to my ear.

The Jonas Brothers? How did THAT get on here?

In my mind I start to hear music from Jaws, and in an instant I rewrite the most famous line from that movie to suit my own unchecked anxiety:

“We’re gonna need a bigger butt."

Dr. Manhands sits down on his wheeled stool and asks me why I’m there and I try with all my might to answer his very detailed, probing (ooh, wrong choice of words there) questions about my urinary challenges without laughing.

“Any pain?” he asks.

“No, no pain.”

“Any blood in your urine?"

“No. Ew.”

“Do you have to, like, scratch your ass a little bit in order to get the flow started.”

“Yes!” I exclaim (as you can see from the exclamation point). “All the time! Do you do that, too?”

“I do indeed,” he says.

And for a second I thought seriously about giving him a fist bump, but I reconsidered because I didn’t want the idea or image or even a scintilla of thought about a fist to enter his mind for at least the next 10 minutes.

He sits back, thinks for a moment, then begins to hypothesize about all of the conditions that could be causing my Morse code. Could be an infection. Could be cancer. Could be that I’m a hypochondriac.

“So why don’t you stand up and drop your pants,” he says nonchalantly, as if he were a bartender asking to see my ID.

I stand up and pull my shorts and underwear (sorry, ladies) all the way to the tops of my shoes like a five-year-old getting ready to pee. And out of the corner of my eye I can see Dr. Manhands open a metal drawer to retrieve a pair of rubber gloves and a tube of personal lubricant so monstrous that I expected the words “Orgy-Sized” to be stamped on the packaging.

I can hear him preparing his finger. It was almost as loud as the sound of my butthole puckering.

He’s ready.

“OK,” he says, “you might feel a little pressure.”

“OK,” I say, “and you might feel the carne asada burrito I ate for dinner last night."

I don’t think he thought that was funny because he stuck his finger in my butt right after I said it. And it wasn’t like a quick in-and-out type of invasion either. He was in there for a while and his finger was crooked and moving all around. I half expected him to take it out and say, “Look! Found a quarter!”

Finally, its over. He snaps his glove off, tosses it in the trash, and my anus returns to its full and airtight position. But I soon realize that Dr. Manhands has left behind a major skidmark of KY, and because this is the second time in my life a doctor has done this to me, I’m beginning to take it personally. Is there something about my caboose that just screams out for such mistreatment? Seriously, medical community! Is this some sort of weird hazing ritual you all practice?

“Everything feels pretty normal,” Dr. Manhands says.

“Easy for you to say.”