this is what today's big barham fire looked like from the drive-thru at the toluca lake mcdonald's when i stopped to get a medium fries and diet coke for the drive home after skipping lunch.
i'm a regular jimmy olsen with man-teats.
2. this evening, i heard a co-worker describe a cat that had been brought to our office for a segment on some cockamamie televised pageant as "fluffy, adorable, well-groomed...a real guy's cat."
not to sound exclusionary or too dog-centric, but the only guy's cat out there i can think of is a puma.
and he's probably eating a rabbit or sheep at this very moment, not thinking about how his next blow-out will impress the judges.
should i be called Home as i sleep tonight, my family can take great comfort knowing that my final waking minutes on earth were spent enjoying a taste of target's low rent but sublime choxie artisan truffle tiles and dialing in my very first american idol vote.
put me down at least 75 times for sanjaya.
at first, mrs b thought i was being funny. then the beep of the phone as i worked the redial button started to get to her, followed shortly by the realization that i really was going to vote for this guy as often as i could before i went to sleep.
cue furious wife and cackling husband.
in my defense, i couldn't help myself. everyone knows i'm an all day sucker for a po' hawk. always have been, always will be.
which of the following meant-as-a-compliments is actually more insulting?
1) telling a musician that you used his album to put your children to sleep when they were babies because whenever they listened to it, it was like they were being gassed?
or
2) telling an author that you enjoyed his book so much that it became your go-to toilet reading and will forever have a place behind your bowl?
the answer shall be decided by you in the comments. hopefully using the the kind of terrific "i read The Metz" insight with which i know you all roll.
my ipod made me feel very old today - thanks to this song:
"my philosophy" by boogie down productions
featuring the immortal closing line:
"fresh! for '88...you suckers!"
listening to the song in my car on my way home from work, i immediately flashed back to when i first heard it: on an 11th grade model u.n. field trip to yale - a trip on which, despite being a baby-faced 5' 2" 16 year old, i confidently ordered, and was served, a gin and tonic at a new haven chinese restaurant.
ostensibly, my friends and i went on this trip to represent our high school by pretending we were delegates from the great nation of zaire at a gathering of like-minded students pretending to be the un general assembly. instead, we used the yalies who were volunteering as pages to pass notes to girls. at night, we had a few cocktails, went to a party and danced with these same girls to the strains of tone loc.
life was good.
yes, 19 years ago i was fresh for '88, you suckers.
now i have backfat, a mortgage, three kids, and could probably find a little more time in my life to listen to bdp.
the good news is that i can still do whatever the fake-turntable version of lip-synching is to all the scratching on the song.
don't sleep. The Kid can still get nice with his hands.
over the last few weeks, i've had a couple of people email me and ask why i haven't been writing more big long emotional/funny/interesting posts about the new arrival.
well, if i'm going to answer honestly, it's because the emotion has kind of worn off. he's here. i'm used to it. plus, he hasn't done anything remotely funny or interesting. ever. unless you call sleeping, crying and lying on a jiminy staring at the lights like he's high funny or interesting.
i mean, yeah, he's fun to look at - but for the time being, at the very least until he can hold his own head up, we're still dealing with life in its most elemental form here. feed it. shelter it. listen to it over the monitor all night as it tries with surprising intensity to squeeze out little baby farts.
bottom line, over the past 5 weeks, i have come to the realization that having a kid is like riding a rollercoaster. it's thrilling and amazing and takes your breath away and sometimes there's vomit involved. it's just that the second time you do it, you already know where the drops are and how to handle the speed - and, unfortunately, that adds at least the tiniest bit of "meh" factor to the whole thing.
and just so you don't think that i'm a total tool, you should know full well that my heart dances every single time he tilts his head and stares into my eyes like he's looking for an answer only i can give him. and i smile like a mental patient on nitrous whenever i hear him sound off with a nice, juicy burp after tapping on his back for so long my wrist starts to click.
and when i look at his beautiful face as he's sleeping...
...goddamn it, would you look at that? all of a sudden i've got tears on my cheeks as i type this.
no joke.
(you little bastard.)
you know what?
on second thought, forget all the grumpy smart ass stuff i said up there.
because at the end of the day, like his brothers, this little boy has done more to make my life worth living by doing absolutely nothing than i could ever express by saying something.
long before i became a homeowner, i kind of had an idealized vision of what having your own backyard was like. there was the grill part of the fantasy - which i fulfilled before the ink was dry on my mortgage - and the tossing a baseball with the sons part - which we're working on slowly but surely these days.
and then there was this odd image i always had of me, ass-in-chair, with a string of small white light bulbs lit over my head, as i sat and contemplated life while smoking a fine cigar.
which is kind of funny because i've never really been a cigar smoker. sure, i dabbled with cheap swisher sweets/guinea stinkers when i was back in high school and wanted to look like an iconoclast at open house parties. and i splurged on a cuban while pounding big, gay mugs of a drink called 'nanny of the maroons' with a couple of friends when we were on vacation with our embarrassed wives in jamaica. but just sitting down, smoking some fine hand-rolled tobacco, absorbed in thought, and then suddenly using my cigar to animate a cogent point about politics or music or something while lit perfectly? never.
last night, i had an opportunity to live the dream.
my buddy tom, a man who actually does enjoy a cigar now and again on his well scrubbed and herb-gardened porch, came by the house to peep the baby, watch the boys play wii boxing - which is something more hilarious than i could ever describe here without accidentally insulting epileptics - and light up a few prime stubs of honduras' finest exports in honor of the newest berg.
for 20 minutes, i felt like my dream had come true. there i was, in my green yard, under my lights, sitting and having a rambling conversation about life and goals while puffing away like fidel himself. life was grand.
sure, it smelled absolutely disgusting, but it was grand nonetheless.
and then, 10 minutes after i had stubbed out my smoke and tom headed home, life began to truly suck shit.
it was somewhere between my house and the cvs to which i was driving on a last minute errand, when my body finally demonstrated what happens when a guy who never works the nicotine gets a full kong sized dose out of the blue. my mouth got dry, my head started to spin, and the sushi dinner liquifying my stomach started doing something between a lurch and a slow boil. it is only with the grace of god and my open car window that i was able to prevent a stomachful of raw fish from reappearing all over my car.
i aborted my drug store mission and headed home to chew gum, hit the shower and then brush my teeth like i was trying to get my dentist to blow me.
no dice.
long story slightly shorter... when i woke up this morning, my mouth still tasted like george burns' dentures. and it stayed that way long after my coffee and bagel. and lunch. and drunken nap at my desk.
i have learned my lesson. next time, we smoke meth or we smoke nothing.
this afternoon, the boys got their first taste of professional basketball, courtesy of my buddy at the nba who laced me with terrific seats to see the los angeles clippers get manhandled by the detroit pistons.
for me, the highlight was watching their faces when the lights went down, the crowd warmed up, the strobes started kickin' and the pa announcer went into his "yourrrrrr losssss angeles cliiiiiiiiiiiiiiipers!!" routine. it was a perfect mix. 90% amazement, 10% fear.
for ab, i'd wager the highlight was the heap of chicken fingers he plowed through before tipoff, followed by the mcdonalds french fries and the foam "clippers #1" finger i bought him on the way out.
jb was partial to the "de-fense" chant. even though he has no idea what defense is, it was influential enough to follow him home and cause him to lapse into a "clap/clap! stomp/stomp!" routine every so often for the rest of the day.
in the end though, the thing that made the biggest impression on the crew was probably the panda express beef and broccoli the woman in front of us was eating, which jb said "smelled like bb's doody". what can i say? the kid's got a hell of a nose on him.
bottom line, they enjoyed themselves and drank it all in happily until the long side of halftime. next up, dodger stadium sometime this spring.
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when we got home from the game, ab immediately entered his john nash-ishlego zone - the one where he sits, focused on the little pieces and his instruction book for an hour or two - feverishly crafting some piece of hardware i'd have an aneurysm if i attempted.
today's project was a 100 something piece/30 step hydrofoil - complete with rotating wheels on the bottom to make it look like it's floating.
and rather than fucking it up with any lame description i could think of, i'll just let him explain how he did it.
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in closing...as we start another week 'round these parts, let's hand out a quick weekend mvp to my man b "captain hungry" b - who seems to have had his light click on over the past couple of days. as in someone's finally home in there. 36 hours ago he was a wailing, soulless animal, - more beast than human - living only for his formula and a snug swaddling. today, he's beginning to follow faces and voices, and can actually be calmed during his rare grumpy spells by looking into his eyes and speaking to him all babylike. plus, his eyelashes are finally growing in. if he keeps it up, i will feel confident enough to throw out the receipt.
on the other side of the coin, before we go, let's send out a big fat gas face to the 5 year old on the encino rookie league mets who, when i tried to coax a high five/good game out of him after his team ran roughshod over jb and ab's marlins, paused, looked me in the eyes and sneered "you're a tiny man."
usually, kids don't learn how to really sneer properly until they hit about 13. this kid was way ahead of his time. his parents must be very proud.
