Dad: What makes you say that?

Son: He smells like lipstick.

[Dad keeps working on the laptop for like 17 seconds then looks up.]

Dad: How do you know what lipstick smells like?

Even though I am deeply reassured by the scarce 1.42 seconds you spent on my blog before you realized it wasn’t dog porn, I am equally deeply dismayed that you found your way here at all.

And the rest of you. Seriously, move to Singapore or something. I can’t stand the “key word results page” stats any more. I’m supposed to find out people are searching for “highly articulate hilarious parenting humor” not “gay dog”.

So, in the immortal paean of every Irish cop in every family movie car crash scene ever, (ahem) “Alright, move along, nothing to see here.”

We were at the Sox-Yankees game at Comisky Park just south of Chinatown here in Chicago sitting in seats good enough for God. My son had brought his glove, a ball, and a sharpie. We were 20 rows up from the Sox dugout, looking down the first baseline from home plate. Roon and I grabbed the sharpie and the gear and loped down the steps to the dugout where Jenks signed our stuff. It was sunny and nippy and the guy selling hot dogs was saying it like it was some kind of verdant truth. He didn’t call out HOOOOOT DOOOOOGSS! Like they usually do. He glared into the crowd, banged on his box, and stated, perfunctly: Hot Dogsh. Like he was saying “It ain’t hot pretzels, idiot.”

So Connor is sitting there burning in the sun and he has his little black glove and his Sox hat and his Sox shirt and Morkoviak slices one to 8 o’clock and guess who gets it? Oh yeah. The guy RIGHT BEHIND MY SON. Connor had his hand in the air and it tipped his glove and shot into the open hands of the baseball marketing director sitting behind us.

This has happened before. We were at a Bulls game and one of those impossibly curvaceous t-shirt girls slingshot a bulls shirt into the air over our head. Its parachute opened and it drifted down like some kind of modified Chinese water torture specialty, like a Fellinni take, like for seven and a half years it floated down directly over my son’s head. There’s no one around us for like fourteen seats and he’s screaming. I mean BELLOWING “I GOT IT I GOT IT” and just as it’s almost in his hands the wind (wind?) blows it one seat back to a guy in a suit (AT A FRIKKING BALL GAME). I just turned around and stared down into his brain stem for a second and he smiled and handed the shirt to Connor who proceeded to scream until his throat blew out.

But it was different at the Sox game. The guy had class. He didn’t even hesitate. He shoved it into Roon’s glove, said “Nice catch, kid! GO SOX!” and patted him on the back. Connor was practically weightless. He held the thing up and whooped with the kind of unadulterated glee that made my inner Southern boy proud.

After the game (Sox pasted the Yankees) we walked out and Connor carried the ball in front of him and kept saying to me “It sure is cool that I caught this foul ball, huh?” “Yep, caught a foul ball, right here. Yep this one. Nice one dad, huh? This foul ball? This ball? That I caught?” All the way down six levels until we were in the car. Then he rolled the window down. “I sure like this ball. This ball is super cool, This foul ball. That I caught.”

Ahh. Baseball.

—-

Originally posted 2007-06-02 19:18:00. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Originally posted 2007-04-19 18:57:00. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Originally posted 2007-12-05 09:25:00. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Also, my stepfather gave me one of his cowhorn peppers. In case you ever visit Alabama and some local offers you a cowhorn pepper, just punch him in the face.

Originally posted 2007-08-09 16:29:00. Republished by Old Post Promoter

I stumbled onto this site, which offers a test of text to determine the gender of the author.

The categories are fiction, non-fiction, and blog entry.

I entered an entire blog entry (Dances with Squirrels), an excerpt, and a few sentences randomly generated from my own head. My kids shouted things to type in and even [My Attorney] played.

Our results? Ok, first of all this test is surely flawed. Despite the rigorous science behind its generation, it’s just wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrongity wrong wrong.

[My Attorney] — Female.

The Girl — Female.

The Boy — Male.

Me. The Dad. Your bloggist. A manly man type man of a man. — Female.

Originally posted 2008-11-22 00:18:09. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Originally posted 2007-04-18 14:05:00. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Nine: You are made out of money. It doesn’t matter that you bought the kid an xbox three sixty. You also have to buy him the wifi connection, xbox live account, Gears of War, Rock Band, and a spare guitar so his friend can play bass with him for fourteen seconds before they toss the whole rack on the floor and go out to glue scrap cardboard to their bike-forks so their spokes will rattle, thereby playing with garbage for an hour after you dropped nearly 7 bills on a video game system that could pilot the space shuttle.

Ten: You will experience the urge to kill. (Refer to number nine).

Eleven: You will face the dilemma of birth control pills with candor and resolve. Even when they are prescribed by your daughter’s ob/gyn who swears your daughter doesn’t need them for actual birth control but to control the random and overwhelming effects of her orc horde. You will repeat this respectable raison d’ acclaim to yourself like a holy mantra as you drink fistfulls of martinis in an effort to erase the barely perceptible evil grin your daughter was trying desperately to suppress as you were thusly schooled.

Twelve: You will learn not to post stuff like that on the internet because as much as you’re Googling her dates before they go out with her, they’re Googling her which means they’re Googling you, which means your stupid tell-all blog is their number one stalker’s reference page. Dumbass.

Thirteen: You will learn patience. Not by some kind of hallmark afternoon special hands folded treacly bull caca. You will learn by the daily practice of forward thinking. Every time your kid trips over their brand new bass guitar, their Ps3, their fortress of Anime, or their library card while succumbing to the mind-numbing effects of tween/teen sudden-loss-of-constant stimulation, while nearly fainting from it while muttering their hive-mind/Borg mantra ‘I’m so booooored’. While that happens you will not erupt with WHEN I WAS YOUR AGE ; nor will you throw a book at them; nor will you tell them they’d be less bored if they’d try to clean their lair for three minutes; nor will you sigh dejectedly, throw your hands in the air and surrender your wallet.

No.

You will do the following Tantric exercise, recommended by the ceaseless research conducted at the Death By Children Institute for Parental Sanity: close your eyes; envision yourself standing on the sidewalk as your youngest child packs his very last bag into a rusty clunker on his way to college three or perhaps ten thousand miles away from you. Smile warmly, appear happy/sad, crinkle your crows feet as much as possible. Now, envision yourself reaching back and patting your back pocket wherein lie two round trip tickets to an all inclusive trip to Vegas.

Originally posted 2008-06-05 14:03:00. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Roon switched schools this week, moving from a parochial school to public, thereby losing his uniform, meaning I had to buy him new clothes.

I thought it was telling that when we went to the store, he didn’t care about what pants we bought as long as they were jeans. But he took a long time to pick out three t-shirts. See if you can detect a theme here. The shirts displayed the following pop memes: The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd. He topped them off with an AC/DC cap.

I have to say he’s starting off well in his musical snobbery. Those are all good bands and he really does listen to them. He recently started paying attention to my iTunes and put together a playlist labeled “Good Music” (to distinguish it from the baffling crap I usually listen to). I pulled some songs off of it to make him a morning mix tape. Check it out:

1. “Mr. Blue Sky,” by Electric Light Orchestra
2. “Park & Beans,” by Weezer
3. “Bohemian Rhapsody,” by Queen
4. “Dracula from Houston,” by the Butthole Surfers
5. “Storm in a Teacup,” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers
6. “Science Fiction Double Feature,” punked out by Me First and the Gimme Gimmes
7. “Death of a Martian,” by Red Hot Chili Peppers
8. “Black Times Bad Times,” by Led Zeppelin
9. “More Than a Feeling,” by Boston

At first I thought this was a further extension of his newfound rock snobbery but I realized it wasn’t really about the music so much as it was about self definition. Roon wanted to define himself to his new school as a rocker, and he wanted to establish his musical taste right off the bat not to lord his 1970s playlist cred over anyone else, but to let them know where his head is at.

This may seem like over intellectualizing t-shirts but it’s a completely valid effort on his part to adopt a new uniform: the cobbled-together non-uniform of the Boheme. I don’t know how much of that need to define himself played into his decision to switch schools, but it mattered a lot that on his first day in the cradle of public knowledge he was representing Pink Floyd, a band he equates with stellar musicianship, individuality, and intellectualism.

Pink Floyd is his second choice, however, after Queen. If he’d had a Queen shirt, he’d probably never take it off, hoping that their operatic falsetto rock cred would somehow seep into his skin along with dirt, taco sauce, and diet coke stains.

His transition to public school marks a loss for me in one regard–quality time.

I get to spend a lot of time with my spawn because I work at home. But driving them to school has always been important to me because for the eight minutes we had together in the car, remarkable conversations would occur.

The other day we rocked to school under the auspicious and noble refrains of Bohemian Rhapsody, singing at top volume, until Roon killed the song to ask questions about it, to talk about complex rock & roll, Freddy Mercury, gay rock stars, and the song itself.

It’s easy to think that the tent-pole conversations are what matters–the sex talk, the dope talk, the Bischon Frieze talk. But I don’t buy it. I think it’s the sum total of all these little seemingly inconsequential talks–the argument about what ’scaramouch’ actually means–that ultimately make up a longer, broader, and permanent body of discussion in the mind of our children that transmits the concepts we truly believe. It teaches them our real philosophy and assists them in building their own.

Now that my daughter is gone so much, I hardly ever get to talk to her except to ask her to please stop singing in the shower at midnight. We quip in passing and she’s obviously witty as hell and, like her mom, [My Attorney], a brain on legs. But I don’t get much conversation time.

Now that Roon will be walking to school I’m losing face time with him as well. Of course, he’ll be walking in the door every day at 3:30 demanding food. It’s not like I won’t see him. But there’s something about the drive time. All you have is driving and talking. At home there’s laundry, living room, lunch, dishes, dog walking, laundry, homework, house cleaning, laundry and sometimes laundry. I won’t have that brief break where I have nothing to do but drive, that time when we talk about those things that matter. Like gay rock stars.

Originally posted 2008-10-29 16:03:28. Republished by Old Post Promoter