The Twenty

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I was doing some light math recently (always dangerous when I start tinkering with subtraction) and I realized that I’m closing in on my 20th high school reunion. It’s a mere two years away. I had to double check my math because, well, because I’m so damned young, it simply can’t be right. But…carry the one…pie…yep. My twenty is just two years away. Which means I can’t be as young as I think I am. I must be well into my 30s.

Bummer.

Now, an argument could me made that high school reunions aren’t relevant anymore. What, with Facebook and self-indulgent blogs (I’m talking about your blog, not mine. My blog is art), you could say some of us have never actually left high school. Not only do I know what that weird kid who sat in the back of my Spanish class is doing for a living these days (his Linkedin profile says accountant, but really he’s a cashier at Golden Corral), I know what he had for breakfast this morning, and that he’s “psyched to see how this season of Secret Circle turns out.”

And yet, I feel the gravitational pull of the high school reunion. I skipped the 10 year, got stupid drunk at the five year and rode a mechanical bull so I may as well have skipped it, but the 20 year has a certain amount of weight to it. Twenty years is a significant amount of time–plenty of time for my classmates to have grown into interesting human beings.

Which means I have exactly two years to grow into an interesting human being myself. I have a lot of work to do.

There are about eight foreign countries I need to travel to before the reunion. I’m not sure about the specific countries, but I feel like eight is a good, “well traveled,” number to shoot for. What country is hot right now with the ex-patriot crowd? Pakistan? Something with a “stan”? I’ll start with Pakistan, then maybe hit Canada.

I have to find my abs. I can’t remember where I left them (in a bar, probably) but I know it’s been a long time since I’ve seen them.

I have to write a novel. Better yet, I need to write a screenplay, because, frankly, I went to a Georgia public school, so none of us class of ’94 Hoyas can read too good (Go Hoyas!)

I should buy one of those hip hybrid sports cars. The one that Clooney drives. Can you fit two car seats in there?

And any self respecting man should be onto his second marriage by the 20-year reunion. That’s trophy wife territory. Luckily, my wife is trophy hot, so I’m good there. I’ll just buy her a slutty dress and refer to her as Nadia all night long.

That’s a big to-do list to knock off between now and 2014. Fortunately, my high school performance was so underwhelming in every category from sports to grades, that I’ve set the expectations very low. If I show up without a house arrest bracelet on my ankle, people will probably be pleasantly surprised.

The Van Life

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We’re toying with the notion of buying a mini-van, a move that, according to absolutely everyone we consult, will eliminate any remaining vestige of hipness from our lives. Luckily, we’ve never been hip, so there isn’t much to lose. That’s not to say that when I was a young lad daydreaming about what my life as an adult would be like, I pictured cruising around in a white Toyota Sienna. A vintage Woody with surf boards hanging out the back is more what I had in mind for my future. I would catch killer tube by day, and sleep in the car parked at the nearest Circle K by night. To feed myself, I would bed a series of artistic, but gullible college girls, mooching off their unlimited meal cards at the university cafeteria. Dudes, raise your hand if you had a similar dream. Now, keep that hand up if you’re actually living that dream.

Yeah, me neither.

I have my beautiful wife to blame…er…thank for that. If it wasn’t for her, I’d truly be living in a van down by the river (how awesome would that be!?). And if it wasn’t for her, I’d drive my 1998 diesel Jetta until the wheels fall off, which by the looks of things, could be tomorrow.

So, the mini van enters into the equation. Even though I’m not clinging to any delusions that I am young or hip (cool, rad, boss…what do kids say these days?) I’m still not gung-ho about buying a mini van. My wife says we need the space, but I see families of nine pile in and out of 1999 Honda Civics all the time. She says we need something more reliable than our 12 year old cars, but really, with the glaring oversights in manufacturing practices these days, what does the word “reliable” mean anymore?

In order to test out the world of mini vanning (yes, it’s a verb too), we’ve rented one for a week. My wife is hoping it will convince me that a mini van will make our lives so much easier. What she doesn’t realize is that there’s only one reason a man buys a van: the potential for mobile sex. That’s the long and short of it, period, the end. If you see a guy driving a van, be it a mini or full size, you can be certain he’s on the prowl. At the very least, there’s an inflatable mattress stowed in the back and a disco ball ready to descend from the ceiling given the right opportunity. That’s not a sunroof on the ceiling, that’s a mirror, baby!

But I digress.

I will admit there’s more room in the mini. It has more square footage than our house, which could come in handy. Since my daughter has developed a serious dress fetish, we’ve quickly run out of closet space. I could easily use the spacious trunk as my closet. Would it be weird if I wandered out there every morning wearing a robe and drinking coffee to get dressed? What if I wasn’t wearing the robe?

Just driving the MV around town for a day, I’ve noticed one undeniable truth: Blasting Jay Z from a mini van makes you look like a jackass. Cranking George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex,” on the other hand, is perfectly appropriate.

With all this talk about mini vans, I think we’ve overlooked the obvious solution to our problem. We need a solid family car–what about a golf cart. Before you scoff, I’d like to point out three things.

  1. Golf carts are awesome. You can’t deny that. The only thing more awesome than commuting to work in a golf cart, would be commuting to work in a dune buggy.
  2. Gas prices continue to rise and America is experiencing an oil crisis. Golf carts can literally travel for several miles on a single charge. Don’t you love the earth?
  3. Golf carts may lack standard safety features like seat belts and a windshield, but picture the kids riding to school, the wind blowing in their hair, their tiny legs securely strapped to the seat with a healthy amount of duct tape.

Imagine you’re in stand still traffic and all you have to do is drive up slowly to the car in front of you and ask, “mind if I play through?”

It doesn’t get much more practical than that.

Safety Dance

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This is how I know it’s Spring now that I’m kind of an adult: I’m craving increasingly lighter beers with citrus in them. I know, I’m a girl. Leave it alone.

This is how I knew it was Spring when I was a kid: The smell of smoke from all of the accidental forest fires around town, all of which were set by kids in my neighborhood. And by “kids in my neighborhood,” I mean my two older brothers. It’s not as sinister as it sounds. Every Spring, caterpillars would set up cozy little cocoons in the trees surrounding our house, and every Spring, my brothers, armed with Bic lighters and cans of WD-40, would hunt down the cotton-candy-like cocoons. For those of you who weren’t raised in a house with two cars up on blocks in the front yard: The great thing about WD-40 and a Bic lighter is the blow-torch effect you get when you combine the two. Don’t judge us too harshly: We didn’t have cable, so we came up with our own entertainment. Imagine two middle-school kids in whitewash jeans and RATT tank tops all jacked up on Rambo fantasies heading into the woods with redneck blowtorches, and you’ll get a good image of what I’m talking about here.

The truly disturbing part of this story isn’t the satisfaction that my brothers got from scorching sleeping caterpillars. It’s that my parents were perfectly fine with two children wandering around the neighborhood with homemade bombs.

Can you imagine parents letting their 11-year-old kid loose in the woods with a blowtorch in 2012? Hell no. I don’t even think I’ll let my kids walk to school alone when they’re 11.

But my brothers and I were lucky to be raised during the ‘80s, when kids spent their free time playing elaborate games of “war” armed with air-pump BB guns and Roman Candles.

Safety was a different issue back then. A non-issue, really. Seat belts were for pussies. Bicycle helmet? What bicycle helmet? Quality time with my dad was when he sat me on his lap while he was driving and let me steer the station wagon down the interstate at 80mph. MTV wasn’t allowed in our house, but driving a car at 7? Sure.

Today, there’s a five-point safety checklist I go through before I’ll even start the damned car with my kids in it. If I forget to lather my kids with sun screen for a 30 minute session in the park, I feel like calling DSS on myself. They wear Water Wings for their tubbies and have never even walked outside without hard plastic on their heads. I make the dad in Finding Nemo look laid back.

On the one hand, I feel sorry for my kids and their peers, as they’re being raised during the “Golden Age of Irrational Fears,” where everything is padded, locked, and kid proofed. They will probably never know the joy of playing Bow and Arrow Chicken (two people stand together, one shoots an arrow straight into the air. Last one to move wins. Awesome). If I could figure out a way to wrap my kids in bubble wrap before they played soccer, I’d do it. Life was just more carefree when RATT’s “Round and Round,” was getting heavy radio play. Each morning, kids were simply let loose into the neighborhood with their throwing stars, fireworks, and stolen Hustler magazines, free to reenact scenes from Lord of the Flies as they saw fit.

I couldn’t imagine being raised any other way.

On the other hand, I can’t believe we didn’t blow ourselves up. With all the flammable hairspray bottles lying around our house and almost complete lack of adult supervision, it’s a damned miracle any of us made it out alive.

So while I appreciate the laissez faire approach to parenting that seemed to be the federal mandate in 1983, I’m going to stick with my overprotective micro-management approach. Now, can anyone help me build a prototype of that bubble-wrap suit I keep dreaming about?

Children of Former Decades: What’s the craziest thing your parents let you do? Steering the family car on a road trip is up there for me. Encouraging me to strip antique furniture with industrial grade acids might also make the list.

The Princess Diaries: Volume One

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So, here’s something a little strange. My daughter sneaks out of her bed at 2am to “shop” for dresses in her closet. She has lots of dresses. Purple mostly, some pink. She pulls them out, looks them over, tries some on. Sometimes, she falls back asleep in the closet, pulling those dresses over her for warmth.

Cute? Disturbing? I can’t decide.

Ask her what she wants to be when she grows up, and she’ll tell you: “I want to be a princess.” Ask her what a princess does at work, and she’ll tell you: “twirl.”

She spends a lot of time twirling. And changing clothes.

The other day, within the same conversation, she said to me, “I just want to wear a little black dress.” WTF? Then she followed up that gem with, “just give me some space, daddy.”

I’m not really sure when it happened. She’s three going on 13.

Meanwhile, Cooper’s hell bent on “shooting” any moving object (with pretend lasers) and “fixing” any stationary object (by bludgeoning it with a plastic hammer). He’s such a stereotypical dude: He likes sticks and hitting things with sticks and occasionally peeing on things.

What’s amazing to me is how easily they’ve both fallen into these classic gender roles. You might think the kids are just imitating what they see from their parents, but you couldn’t be more wrong. Cooper’s never seen me pick up a hammer or fix anything and Addie rarely sees her mom in anything other than hospital scrubs. I do the cooking, my wife mows the lawn. I drive a tiny Jetta, my wife drives a four-wheel drive SUV. And yet my daughter will spend an entire afternoon spinning around in front of a mirror while saying, “I’m so pretty,” and my son is obsessed with monster trucks. Specifically, monster trucks that smash smaller trucks.

That’s not to say Addie is strictly a princess. She’s hell on a climbing wall, sending all kinds of routes with grace. She’s a fast little trail runner, too. And I’ve occasionally caught her smashing shit with a plastic hammer. She also loves chicken wings. I think that’s pretty cool.

Cooper has a soft side too, which I’m doing my best to nurture. Like his sister, he’ll occasionally strap on a skirt and twirl like a princess–a fact that drives certain grandparents crazy, I’m sure. I know some dads might take issue with their son wearing pink skirts and pretending to be a Snow White, but I like to think I’m more open-minded than that. I’m evolved: I’ll love my son if he grows up to wear pretty dresses…as long as he’s still the starting center fielder for the Atlanta Braves. That’s non-negotiable.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Toots and the McGoots

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There’s no way to say it, but to just say it: The kids and I have started a band. Scratch that. We’ve started a kick-ass band. To say we rock is an understatement. The kids typically share the drum set, while I wail on the electric guitar. Occasionally, my daughter will kick the piano keys. My son only says one phrase during each jam session: “Louder, Daddy. Louder.”

Our influences? Beastie Boys, Nirvana, and Justin Bieber (his edgier stuff before he sold out).

Obviously, since we’re dealing with two toddlers and an A.D.D. dad, the band name changes quite a bit. First, we were the Yogurt Explosion, but we decided that was too sophomoric. We do a pretty good job keeping our yogurt in its container these days. So right now, we’re calling ourselves Toots and the McGoots. I’m not sure who’s Toots and who’s the McGoots.

We share bylines on all of our original songs, but to be honest, I do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to the lyrics. Mainly because the kids can’t write yet. Every time I give them crayons and paper to work on a chorus, they just draw circles, which they then tell me are whales. They’re not whales. They’re circles, but I’m supportive.

Even though we’re still looking for a label, we’ve got a full album worth of songs. We’ve titled the record,  Don’t Call the DSS. It’s a concept album in the vein of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. If you start our album half way through Apocalypse Now, the music synchs up perfectly with the action on the film. When Martin Sheen meets Colonel Kurtz and “Yep, That’s Poop” kicks in, I get chills.

The record kicks off with Honey, We’re Out of Wipes, which is the single we’re we’re hoping will get a lot of radio play. It’s really melodic. Then things get a bit Ska with Is That Poop? We sample the Clash’s “London Calling” for this one. Then it gets heavy with three punk songs in a row: 3am Puke Fest, Fuck Sleep, and Yep, That’s Poop. Then we slow things down a bit with Don’t Worry, It’s Just Yogurt, a sweet love song that sets the listener up for Petrified Turkey Sandwich in the Glove Box and the finale, A Sixer Fits Nicely in this Diaper Bag, a classic country ballad that was also the inspiration for the album title, Don’t Call the DSS.

The toughest aspect of playing in a predominantly toddler band? Trying to get a three-year-old drummer to follow my chord changes. Booking gigs has been tough too because of bed time constraints. But every band has to start somewhere. Toots and the McGoots may only be playing my basement right now, but with the massive loopholes in child labor laws, the sky’s the limit.

Here’s a short clip of the drum solo in the middle of 3am Puke Fest. Enjoy.

Viva La HouseBoy!

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I became a little teary eyed during a commercial for a combination steamer/vacuum this morning. It was just so beautiful. Not only does this product vacuum up all the crap your kids leave behind, it “sanitizes the floor with steam” at the same time. The woman using it said so. And she looked so happy.

My emotional response to this commercial means that the transition from dude to house wife is almost complete. The next time you see me in public, I’ll probably be wearing Jeggings and a little tipsy from too much afternoon Chardonnay.

I thought about trying to fight the transformation by doing some pushups or hitting a strip club, but who has the energy anymore? And let’s face it: I’m more comfortable discussing the latest episode of Fashion Star with the other moms at the park than I am talking football with my dude friends. So I’ve decided to embrace it. I can’t wait until the kids are a little older and I can spend my days reading vampire/werewolf books written for teenage girls.

Now, a quick reading of this blog might lead you to believe that I’m saying all housewives are poorly dressed, slightly drunk devotees of crappy vampire lit and reality TV. That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m saying the most fun housewives are poorly dressed, slightly drunk devotees of crappy vampire lit and reality TV. Ladies, you know who you are. Keep it real. Never change.

Wait, can I even use the term “housewife” anymore? Probably not. I bet it was retired along with “stewardess” and “secretary.”

Personally, I like the sound of “houseman.” It’s a little bit degrading, but a little bit naughty, too. Sure, your houseman cleans your gutters, but he also cleans your gutters, if you know what I mean. (Wink, wink)

Several of my friends were “houseboys” for sororities in college. They cooked, did a little cleaning of the massive Southern mansions the girls lived in, and had a lot of sex with the residents. None of them seemed to complain about the “houseboy” title.

Viva la “houseboy”!

 


An Odyssey of Meat

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I know what you’re thinking. “An Odyssey of Meat”: Great gay-porn title. Sadly, no, that’s not what this is about.

It’s not easy for me to leave the kids, even for a couple of days, but sometimes an assignment pops up that I simply can’t refuse. Like this one: Find the best burger in the state of North Carolina. Sounds like a dream, right? But here’s the catch. Because of familial obligations (somebody has to feed the kids and make sure the TV is on for them all day) I only have 72 hours to do the sampling. My list of burgers to try has reached 25 and continues to grow. I’m not good at math, but that’s like an average of seven burgers a day. I know. I’ve got uptown problems.

Beef. It’s what’s for dinner. And lunch. And breakfast. And snacks.

I’m in day two of this Meat Odyssey. Let me describe how it’s gone so far. Wake early, hit the treadmill, drive two hours to a diner in the middle of nowhere, eat a burger with cheese, chili, slaw, get back in the car to drive two hours to an uber-hip gourmet burger place where they put things I can’t even spell on top of their burgers, then run across the street to an old school bar that’s been doing burgers a certain way for 20 years, then back in the car for a two hour drive…

Today, I’ve had five burgers in as many hours. Or is it seven? I don’t know. I’m meat drunk. Dizzy and sluggish and confused. My fingertips are humming and my ears are hot. Is that the sign of a stroke? Am I having a meat stroke?

Much like Odysseus in The Odyssey, I too am learning some things about myself and the world during my journey through North Carolina’s finest cows.

Thing 1) The Black Keys offer the best soundtrack for eating burgers. Burgers are dirty (in a good way). The Black Keys are dirty (in a good way).

Thing 2) I sleep really well in hotel rooms. It could be the fact that I don’t have two three-year-olds waking me up at 2:30 in the a.m. because they want to watch Yogi Bear. But I’m going to say it’s the pillows.

Thing 3) Eating roughly 16 pounds of beef in 72 hours is just as difficult as it sounds. Here’s a metaphor for you: The burger odyssey is a lot like sex. If it goes on for too long, it starts to hurt.

Thing 4) While dining solo is calm and peaceful, sampling seven burgers a day in some of the state’s most unique restaurants and bars isn’t nearly as much fun without my wife and two kids, who would be emptying the salt shaker down their pants at each establishment. The kids do that, not my wife. In other words, I miss my family.

The real question throughout this journey is this: Was Socrates right? Is the key to happiness really moderation? Even eating burgers? I know that burgers are good, therefore a lot of burgers should be a lot of good. But I’m nervous. My belly has this hard, knotty consistency to it and I’ve been slightly nauseous since Burger #2. Will this journey have long-term health implications? Am I entering the Spirit World?

Oh, and my apologies to any Hindu readers of this blog. I’d suggest skipping this week’s entry, which you’ll find incredibly insensitive. My bad