Human Writes

Human Writes Has Moved

2005-02-23T18:29:00.000-08:00

Greetings, Human Writes readers,

After a spirited run and nearly 50,000 hits, Human Writes has moved on to greener, more user-friendly pastures. You can now read the slanderous commentary and nonsensical rantings of Daniel Evans at:

www.DadGoneMad.com

Worry not. The same silliness about poop, farts and efforts to kill Barney can be found at the new location.

Thank you for your continued support and encouragement.

Danny

P.S. -- Please update your links and bookmarks accordingly.

The Dad Gone Mad 500

2005-02-22T13:31:00.000-08:00

I watched roughly 10 minutes of the Daytona 500 this weekend. Ten minutes is my threshold for auto racing unless there’s a five-car crash where someone’s head goes rolling down pit road or the announcer with the hard, barely intelligible Southern drawl squeals, “They’re running three abreast down the straight-away, y’all! Weeeeeeehooooo! I tell you hwut, dad-gummit, I ain’t never seen a race like this’n right here!”

Three abreast. Love that imagery.

One of my favorite things about watching race cars on TV is that they have little cameras mounted inside the cars to spy on the drivers and microphones that capture the fever-pitched chatter between the driver and his pit crew. I like to imagine what the camera would see if it was instead mounted on the dashboard of my car, spying on me as I swerve through rush hour traffic on my way to work.

7:25 a.m. -- Camera sees me kerplunk into the driver’s seat of my black Honda CR-V. I start the engine, rub the sleep from my eyes and read the sports page while the car heats up. Then, as I pull out of the Evans World Headquarters driveway, I go fishing for boogers.

7:35 a.m. – I stop at Starbucks. They’re out of cinnamon twists. I have a k’nipshin.

7:45 a.m. – I spill coffee in my crotch. I scream “Fuck!” at the top of my tired lungs. The announcer says something about me needing to maintain composure. I make a mental note to stab him in the eye with my straw next time I see him.

7:50 a.m. – I’m on the freeway and the traffic is bumper to bumper. I turn on the radio and pick my nose again.

7:52 a.m. – I have extracted a booger the size of a ferret from deep inside my right nostril. I roll down the window and try to flick it off of my finger but it won’t let go of me. It merely adheres itself to one finger after another. I pull my hand back inside and wipe the booger under my seat. The announcer says I’m a disgusting animal. He has no idea.

7:54 a.m. – Some assclown in a pick-up truck cuts me off. I flip him off. He flips me off. I mouth the words “Suck my dick, you fucking asshole” at him. His mouth moves but I have no idea what he’s saying. I imagine that he is accepting my invitation.

7:57 a.m. – The assclown in the pick-up is next to me now. He rolls down his window and invites me to pull over and settle our dispute “like men.” I thank him for the invitation but tell him I’m late for my job as an assassin and will have to kick his long-haired pansy ass another time. I pick my nose.

8:01 a.m. – That new Green Day song comes on. I cranked the volume on the radio, roll down the window, sing as loud as I can. I pretend that my index fingers are drumsticks and my steering wheel is a cherry-ass drum kit, a la Neil Peart from Rush.

8:03 a.m. – A middle-aged woman wearing too much make-up pulls up in a Cadillac next to me at the bottom of the offramp. She throws me a look of disdain, the kind she gives to her cleaning people when there is too much Pledge build-up on her solid oak dining room table. I look at her for a moment and then scream, “Don’t wanna be an American Idiot! The subliminal mindfuck America!” (major emphasis on “fuck”). She shakes her head in disbelief. I am happy that she thinks I’m representative of what’s wrong with society today, so I pick my nose in celebration. Though there is nothing left to extract, I withdraw my finger and pretend to flip a booger at the Cadillac.

8:07 a.m. – I park the Honda in the Employee of the Month parking space near the front of my building. As I open the door, the assclown in the pick-up parks in the stall next to me. I clinch my fists and prepare to tenderize his ass like a skirt steak. He opens his palms in a gesture of peace, tells me he’s starting a new job today. As it turns out, he reports to me. I get him in a headlock and give him noogies just to let him know who’s boss. “Me! That’s who! Me! You got that, asshole?”

8:10 a.m. – My ass hits the chair at my desk and I’m still pissed about the cinnamon twists.

The Monday Enema

2005-02-21T07:49:00.000-08:00

Dear Dad Gone Mad,

Here's the scenario: Get to work. Everything's going great. Go over to new, and very excited about, girlfriend's cubicle. Start talking about our fun drinking escapades last night. Fart. Isn't loud. Smells like a rotten trash barge on the last day of August. Run away as fast as possible. The end.

HOW do I approach her after such a disastrous event? She was most definitely aware of the smell and there was no one else around to blame it on.

Any advice would be great. I've only been friends with her for a short time and would hate to have a fart come between us!

Sincerely, Stinky

Dear Stinky,

In the friendly confines of my marriage to Hot Wife, I like to think of a good fart as a gift to her, like a bouquet of roses or a case of Yoohoo. When one of us cuts loose a butt-cheek-flapping window-rattler or a pooter that smells especially heinous, it’s cause for a good, hearty laugh. It might behoove you to take a similar posture with your ladyfriend. Make it fun. Make it an ice-breaker, an entrée through which you can take your relationship to a higher, more pungent level. After all, is a union where bodily functions like burping and farting are suppressed the kind of relationship you want to be tangled up in?

I think it would be silly to retroactively apologize or beg forgiveness for a butt bomb you unleashed several days ago. “Hi, um remember that fucking nasty rat I cracked in your cubicle about five or six days ago? Yeah, well, I had a pretty gross quesadilla for lunch that day and, um, what I guess I’m trying to say is, um, I’m sorry. I hope this doesn’t make you think twice about going down on me tonight.” No. Absolutely not.

Look at this as a positive. You’ve already crossed an imaginary threshold – the fart barrier -- that most people in relationships sweat over. My suggestion is to do it again. Next time you feel a hardcore goober putting pressure on your sphincter, turn it loose. If she laughs, you’ve got yourself a winner. If she freaks out (which is highly unlikely given that she has already been subjected to one of your weapons of ass destruction), she’s probably as prissy little control freak who you should kick to the curb.

Dear Dad Gone Mad,

My boyfriend is a web designer...for porn sites. Yeah. We've only been going out for seven months, after three months we moved in with each other. He told me he did web design, but left out the porn of it. So we moved in with each other and crap and then he told me, so I was like "uh...OK" and then he went on a trip and I was looking through his closet for an AIR CD (I swear!) and I found a massive collection of porn DVDs. Not just a little bit of porn...A MASSIVE COLLECTION OF PORN.

The man is 23 for Christ’s sake! And he works on porn!! And has…MORE PORN! Um yeah, so my question is...is he worthy of keeping around? Or is he some sort of weird retard porn freak man thing? Oh yeah yeah yeah and he talks to some of the girls that he advertises sites for (filthy whores). On the phone.

Since I found the stash and all I asked him about it, and he said he's stopped talking to the girls and buying porn. Is he to be trusted? Or will he always just be a wanker?

Thanks.

sincerely yours,
girl who got a vibrator for valentines day from this man

Dear Girl Who Got a Vibrator for Valentine’s Day From This Man,

There are two issues here. One is the porn. The other is the personal interaction with the alleged porn starlets.

1. Porn
Unless the work your boyfriend does or the videos he possesses depict salacious acts with livestock or circus clowns or anyone from the cast of Barney’s Alphabet Zoo, he’s not hurting anyone. Shit, the guy is 23 years old. When I was 23, I was punching the munchkin five times a day and the issue of Playboy with a Vanna White pictorial was my bible. At 23, the kid’s hormones are buzzing around like an infant after a triple espresso. In fact, if he has a bearskin rug in his apartment, I suggest you wear shoes when walking on it.

As for his work, I’m told that porn on the web is an exceptionally lucrative pursuit. If you want the guy to buy you nice things and live in a neighborhood where you don’t have to keep mace in your purse when you go to visit him, let him follow his chosen career path. I don’t think it makes him “some sort of weird retard porn freak.”

My neighbor has season tickets for the Angels next to a guy who produces porn. When I ask the guy about the shit he sees at work (strictly for research purposes, of course), his descriptions make it seem as though he has become desensitized to the vision of women sticking 15-inch purple rubber penises into themselves. Your boyfriend may become similarly numb. Although I can’t understand how.

But if you’re really uncomfortable with his collection of porn, box it up and send it to my attention.

2. Talking With Filthy Whores On The Phone
This, obviously, is over the line. If he wants to chat with dirty sluts on the phone, he should have to pay $4.99 per minute like the rest of us.

If he says he’s stopped calling them, good. Now get over to Radio Shack, buy some bugging equipment and spy on his perverted ass to make sure he’s not cavorting with Roxanne Gravel, the chick who can shove a two-liter Pepsi bottle where the sun don’t shine, while you’re not looking.

Speaking of whores, I have a question for YOU: what were you doing move in with this cat after three months?

--------

Submit your questions for next week’s Monday Enema to themondayenema@dadgonemad.com

New Feature: The Monday Enema

2005-02-18T12:02:00.000-08:00

I’m both proud and horrified to disclose that this site gets between 600 and 1,000 hits a day. While only about 2% of you have the balls to leave comments, I have to assume that 100% of you are deeply troubled human beings. Why else would you return day after day to read about poop and boogers and the ways in which I have conspired to kill my daughter’s favorite TV character?

In part because I want to know the depths of your psychoses, I am prepared to offer my bad advice, twisted insight, faux empathy, handy tips, and hollow independent confirmation of your lunacy through a new regular feature called THE MONDAY ENEMA.

It’s important to begin each week anew, free of the burdensome problems and confusion that gather in our minds during each weekend’s Zima-fueled introspection and self-loathing. To assist you in regaining that freedom, I will be responding each week to your questions, queries and pleas for mercy.

The act of venting your problems and having them validated by a fellow looney-ass motherfucker will serve as a mental enema for you, helping to cleanse the little colon in your brain and starting you off right for a week of peace and harmony.

(Plus, we all want to see how fucked up you are.)

If you’re contemplating taking a new relationship to “the next level” by audibly farting in front of your boyfriend, we’ll talk you through it.

If you don’t know what to do when your boss says he’ll only promote you if you give him a humdiggity under his desk, ask us.

If you are seeking just the right way to tell your parents that you’re into sex acts that involve temporarily halting your breathing, we can help.

Send your questions and conundrums to themondayenema@dadgonemad.com.

In honor of George and Abe, the first Monday Enema will start draining this Monday.

(For those of you playing at home, that e-mail address should give you some insight into some changes afoot. More news on that next week, too.)

Back Off Before I Tazer Your Ass, Sasquatch

2005-02-17T10:41:00.000-08:00

The Starbucks nearest Evans World Headquarters has a drive-thru window, which is ideal for mornings like today, when my son was up at the buttcrack of dawn, climbing into our bed and wanting to cuddle and chat and bond. Because I am the model parent, I acquiesced despite the fact that my son had roused me from a dream where I was flying naked over Nazi Germany, taunting all of Hitler’s pointy-helmeted goons and telling them to suck my schmeckel. “Screw Adolph,” I yelled. Heil this, motherfuckers!”

Awake and grounded, I buckled my son into his car seat and steered our pimped-out Mazda minivan (the one with the CD player that doesn’t work because my daughter shoved about four bucks in loose change into it) over to the Starbucks drive-thru. A friendly female voice welcomed me through the speaker and took our usual order: an iced venti soy latte, a chocolate milk and two cinnamon twists. And then we “pulled around.”

Here’s where the story gets a little hairy.

I hold out a $10 bill to pay for our very healthy breakfast and out of the window comes the right front paw of a yeti.

I scream. “Aaaaah!”

My son shrieks. “Eeeeeh!”

The yeti groans. “Grrronnng!”

My first instinct is to fish around in the glove compartment for my wife’s pepper spray. I’ll douse the beast, render it powerless, hog-tie it and drag it down to the police station in exchange for a handsome reward of canned welfare turkey and supermarket scrip.

But as I leaf through the maps and pens and tampons in the glove compartment, the yeti speaks to me. In English.

“Sir,” it says, “here’s your coffee.”

I snap my head in Sasquatch’s direction. IT’S A WOMAN! A HUMAN WOMAN! RUN, WOMAN, RUN! RUN BEFORE THE YETI EATS YOUR GUTS!

I look at her outstretched hand -- the hand holding the coffee that I need to survive -- and I notice that the yeti’s arm is attached to the woman’s body. I inspect further and I’ll be damned if that wasn’t a yeti paw at all. It was a woman’s arm --- an arm covered with more human hair than the heads of Crystal Gayle, Cher, Rapunzel and that weirdo lead singer from Creed combined.

I’m mortified. How do you apologize to someone for thinking they were Big Foot and being so petrified by their mutant limbs that you were three seconds away from pepper spraying them like you would a belligerent, piss-soaked drunkard who takes a swing at a cop? I try to summon the right words but my thought process is interrupted by the kid in the choo-choo train pajamas in the back seat.

“Daddy,” he says, “why does that woman have arms like a bear?”

“Not a bear, buddy. A yeti.”

“What’s a yeti?”

“A yeti is a big, hairy, human-like animal that lives in the Himalayas and eats little children who don’t flush after they go potty.”

“Oh. We don’t like yetis do we, daddy?”

“No, buddy. We don’t. And that’s why you have to remember to flush.”

When we return home from Starbucks, Hot Wife is awake. She confronts me in the bathroom. Seeing yet another cup of coffee, she wonders if perhaps I’m spending a little too much money at Starbucks. I tell her that with a few more visits during the yeti’s shift, our son just might be scared into painting the house, cooking us dinner every night and rotating the tires on the minivan.

The Tribe Has Spoken, Bitches

2005-02-16T15:41:00.000-08:00

I get a kick out of people who stick their noses in the air and say, “Oh, we don’t have a television.”

I’m all, “Why?”

And they’re all, “We’d rather talk or read.”

And I’m all, “Talk? Read? Are you fucking nuts? Where’s the fun in that?”

I lump people like this into the same category as the people who will haul ass to an Omaha donut shop to see an apple fritter that looks like the Virgin Mary or the people who perpetually send me emails about not flashing your brights at cars who don’t have their lights on at night because it’s all part of a gang initiation ritual and they’ll totally pop a cap in your punk ass. Word.

This just in, folks: TV makes the world go ‘round. It’s right up there with water and oxygen and Yoohoo. And when you say you’d rather talk than watch TV, I have to guffaw because what else is there to talk about besides the way women on The Swan look like Secretariat after their teeth get capped and how the incessant tension between Simon and Paula on American Idol is because they’re schtupping and Paula won’t let him poke her in the pooper? If you’re not hip to the happenings on the boob tube, I have to assume that you just sit and stare at each other and listen to the chirp-chirp-chirp of the crickets.

My sister-in-law, Karona, is the decaffeinated version of one of these people. She freely admits to owning a television, but she claims to be too busy to indulge in the nonsensical drivel on the air. Hah! Double hah! I wonder what she’ll say after I tell the whole god-damned Internet that whenever she comes over to visit the kids, she can’t take her eyes off of Survivor or The Apprentice or The Surreal Life long enough to notice that the kids are asleep, Weak-Bladdered Dog (whom she HATES!) has eaten her curry couscous (which makes sense because the healthy, preservative-free “food” she eats tastes like Alpo to begin with) and she has a big puddle of drool at her feet because she was so enthralled with the show that she forgot to swallow.

We also know some people who are hardcore bible-thumpers. These fine folks imply that they don’t own a TV because it’s the devil’s entertainment. I have never had the gonads to challenge them on it, but I presume this also means that they don’t listen to Slayer (the devil’s music), drink Mocha Mix (the devil’s non-dairy creamer), vote Democratic (the devil’s party), root for the Yankees (the devil’s ballclub), eat Hot Tamales candy (the devil’s confection) or engage in sexual relations intended for purposes other than procreation.

Actually, that’s a pretty good analogy because you’re about as inclined to believe that people don’t watch TV as you are to believe that they only screw when it’s time to have another baby. These are the same people who read Playboy for the articles and never pick their noses and smoked pot once but didn’t inhale. In other words, BULLSHIT!

I think there’s nothing wrong with watching shitloads of TV. It’s the American way. Hot Wife is always pleading with me that we should have some “quiet time” with the kids --- that we should have the TV off between the time they get out of the bathtub and when they go to bed. I ask if by “quiet time” she means we should have the Laker game on mute. She says nothing, just gives me a look like, “You just bought yourself another date with Rosie Palms, mister.” This from the woman who is still so stuck in the tar pits of the dark ages that she won’t agree to let us have a TV in our bedroom. I know: horrifying.

Quiet time, my ass. That’s right. You heard me. Quiet time, my pimply white ass. I want the TV on. I want my kids to know that if they can’t sing the theme song to The Apprentice (“moneymoneymoneymoney…MAH-NAY…”) by the time they go to kindergarten, they’re losers in my eyes. Yes, my son can say the alphabet and count to 10 in three different languages (and no, one of them isn’t Pig Latin) and sing the National Anthems of two different countries, but if he doesn’t know that SportsCenter comes on at 8 and 11 p.m., what good is he?

I swear, if either of my kids grows up to be one of those assclowns who doesn’t believe in watching television, they can kiss their inheritance goodbye.

I Have Seen The Depths Of Hell And They Look Like The Inside Of A Bean And Cheese Burrito

2005-02-15T10:40:00.000-08:00

I have a daughter.

Her name is Barney’s Biggest Fan.

She’ll be two next month.

She is sweet and cute and when she wants to know what I’m doing she walks up to me, puts her teeny little hand on my leg and says, “Danny. Dooween?”

Until last weekend, she was allergic to peanuts, dairy products and eggs. The doctor called this weekend and said her blood test revealed that her allergies have essentially vanished.

Last night, for the first time, she drank a sippy cup full of milk.

This morning she came to visit me in the bathroom and her ass smelled like a vat of spoiled cottage cheese on a 100-degree afternoon in Death Valley. She needed a diaper change and quick, before the paint on the walls started to bubble and peel.

[I want to digress here for a moment to tell you about the most disgusting thing I had ever seen before this morning. When I was in college, I took an environmental science course that mandated a visit to the nearby waste water treatment facility. In the middle of the tour, we were led up a concrete staircase to a viewing platform overlooking a 300-yard-long, 20-feet-deep lake of shit, piss, used condoms, discarded tampons, dead goldfish, soiled toilet paper, foam, vomit, Q-Tips and countless other unmentionables. According to our docent, when residents of this particular city flush something down the toilet, it comes here, to the Great Shit Lake. The aptly named “waste water” is then treated and recycled and the detritus is presumably packaged and shipped to McDonalds, where it is ground up with underperforming drive-thru associates and shaped into little McSausage patties and chicken nuggets.]

I carried Barney’s Biggest Fan from the bathroom to her bedroom with my hands outstretched as far from my body as possible. When I unzipped her lavender footie pajamas, a wave of hot toddler stench nearly knocked me backwards. As I steadied myself, I imagined that first few gulps of milk as it churned through my little baby girl’s guts, festering and souring, producing a foul chemical reaction in her belly and the rank fumes I was breathing.

But I am an experienced parent. I have changed literally hundreds of dirty diapers. And I know that any crap that smells this bad has the power to incapacitate those within a two-mile radius when the velcro straps on the diaper are undone. I girded myself, tried to breathe through my mouth and prepared to witness a new level of excretory hell.

When I peeled back her Minnie Mouse Huggies, Barney’s Biggest Fan laughed. I don’t know if she was laughing because she was proud of herself or if she was reacting to the “Grungnf” sound I made when I saw what she’d spawned. The entire inner surface of the diaper was smeared with a pungent, inch-thick wad of runny, brown nastiness that reminded me of the filling in those rank 7-11 bean and cheese burritos. Steam rose from the diaper, and embedded within the smear were three whole cranberries, the only survivors of the accident.

Evidently, dairy products are to my daughter’s digestive system what Mork From Ork was to the cast of Happy Days --- an unwelcome irritant that spreads havoc and destruction through the whole area. And we haven’t even introduced eggs or peanuts yet. I imagine that when we do, Barney’s Biggest Fan will sprout horns on her head and shoot fire from her cute little ass and demand a personal audience with Barney for her second birthday party. And then I’ll be forced to tell her the sad truth, which is that Barney lives deep in the Great Shit Lake and eats little girls for breakfast, especially those who haven’t yet learned to deposit their disgusting, milk-fueled devil shits in the toilet like normal people.

Danny’s Guide To Personal Grooming and Fashion

2005-02-14T16:33:00.000-08:00

I was walking out of the supermarket near my office this morning when I passed a woman who had committed the mortal sin of leaving for work without drying her shoulder-length hair. Her head was covered in a matted mop of wet, curly blackness that bore striking resemblance to the pubic hair of a late 1970s porn king after an especially squishy romp on a leopard-skin loveseat with a top-heavy, coked-out starlet.

Now, don’t get all upset and accuse me of being the possessor of a wandering eye. I am not in the habit of closely examining the personal grooming habits of strange women, but this pube-headed goober’s Monday morning faux pas was thrust in my face. How can you NOT notice something like that? It’s like being kicked in the nards with a steel-toed cowboy boot. There are just certain things that should and should not be done when it comes to personal grooming.

1. If you are going to wear open-toed shoes, kindly sand back your toenails so they don’t protrude past the front rim of your flip-flops, pumps or Birkenstocks. Nobody wants to see your Gail-Devers-ass toenail daggers or see the sparks that fly backward every time you drag one of your Neanderthalic, two-inch-thick paws across the concrete when you walk (even if they’re painted Sassy Ass pink and decorated with little white flowers --- which, by the way, makes your feet look like a piece of wallpaper from the China Palace bathroom).

2. Perfume is nice when it’s a squirt or two on your neck, but those of you who douse yourselves with so much potpourri-scented pisswater that you make yourselves smell like the linen closet of an octogenarian are doing serious damage to both the ozone layer and the septums of the men you try to seduce. Christ, some of you smell like my parents’ Maltese does when it comes back from the dog groomers.

3. What’s the deal with mascara that leaves big old globules of black soot on your lashes? Some of you look like you have aphids crawling up your face. Do you have any idea how distracting it is to ask a female coworker about when she might have the TPS reports done only to see her stop mid-sentence in her reply to fish a piece of hardened mascara the size of a peach pit out of her left eye?

4. This just in: we can see the cavernous crevices under your caked-up on makeup. We know you had a big zit on your chin because you ate half a pint of Chunky Monkey and in a fit of rage and fear, you picked at it until it popped a wad of white zit goo all down your face. Big whup. It happens to us, too. Save yourself the money and the trouble of smearing that ashen slop all over your face and just tell us about the sound it made – “Squirtsch!” – when you popped it. It’s a great conversation starter.

5. If you want to wear a g-string, fine. If you want to let it peak out from the waistline of your pants, have at it. But please don’t let it hike so far up your back that men are forced to imagine that the underwear is so far up your ass that if you yawn, we might be able to see it wrapped around your uvula.

6. If you want to ask us about the kind of car seat we purchased for our children, please remove the Crest White Strips from your Cheerios-box-yellow grill first.

7. If you’re going to wear a mini-skirt, please also remember to shave the back of your legs, where your hamstrings are. Nothing like walking behind a woman who looks like a runway model in the front and The Bride of Sasquatch in the back.

8. If you can fit a two-liter bottle of Pepsi between your tits, please wear a bra with that shirt. Nobody wants to see your droopy, disgusting primate tits two inches from your waistline, cavewoman. And we certainly don’t want to see your hairy, dinner-plate-sized nipples peaking through the weathered “Porn Star” shirt you’ve tragically elected to wear to work on Dress-Down Friday.

9. Whatever the reason may be that you choose to break the air-tight seal between your dentures and your top gums and force the fake choppers outward with your tongue, please make sure that your mouth-breathing doesn’t produce a high-pitched whistle that distracts your coworkers.

10. Got a hickey? Wear a turtleneck. Nobody wants to have to imagine what you and your crack-showing, donut-eating IT boyfriend do in your own time, especially if it means that he sucks the Cheetos crumbs off of your neck with such ferocity that it leaves a bruised welt in the sh

All Up In Walt’s Ass

2005-02-13T13:04:00.000-08:00

One of the great, underrated joys of living in Southern California is the semi-regular opportunity it presents to interact with disciples of The Church of Disney, a cult-like congregation of “cast members” past and present who are likely to disembowel and consume the remains of any non-believer sinful enough to believe that “The Little Mermaid 6: Ariel Makes That Little Lobster Her Deep Sea Sex Slave” went straight to video because mainstream theatres would rather show a Wilford Brimley film festival than that animated swill. There is no gray when you’re a Disneyophile --- anything associated with the mouse or the theme park or the cable channel is mind-blowing, off-the-charts genius.

I know a handful of people who have worked for Disney --- one who worked in the corporate environs and one who was employed at Disneyland, presumably mopping up the snow-cone-colored vomit of park patrons who evicted their $8 corn dogs all over Main Street after a particularly bumpy trek through Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. In both cases, despite the fact that their respective tenures with Disney ended over a decade ago, there are incessant references made to Disney as the model by which all other brands and animation studios and employers should be judged. It’s as if anyone who ever signed a W-2 there has a fresh shot of Disney Kool-Aid waiting on his front porch each morning, right there next to the Orange County Register, the mud-covered Welcome matt and the stinky, corroded flip flops that don’t dare enter the home, lest they shower their toe-jammy stench all over the Goofy-and-Donald-playing-Pinochle throw rug in the entryway.

When I worked in advertising, I remember hearing one particular Disney cult member describe in glowing terms the Disneyland strategy of posting signs at various rides that overstate the amount of time visitors would have to wait. If the sign outside Space Mountain said “30 minutes from this point” and the wait was only 15, Disney had made a miracle happen by making people actually feel good about waiting 15 minutes. Funny, he never said anything about how that goodwill came crashing back to earth when the same patron had to pay $173 for two plates of cold, congealed fried chicken, leaden mashed potatoes, two Cokes and a piece of ass-cheese-flavored cheesecake at The Mad Hatter’s Hideaway in Tomorrowland. Fuckers.

I was shopping at the mall with Left-Handed, Power-Hitting Son this weekend when he predictably wandered into The Disney Store, a satellite supplier of Disney propaganda, overpriced merchandise and little plastic tchotchkes bearing the likenesses of Rollie Pollie Olie and Buzz Lightyear and the aforementioned undersea mermaid with the loose morals. I obliged the boy and sure enough he found a pair of underpants baring the likeness of the little blonde kid from The Incredibles (and let’s not even discuss how I feel about my son having pictures of a boy on his skivvies), and he absolutely HAD to have them. To avoid a scene, I obliged him and we trotted to the register with his new Dash butthuggers (and I have set the over-under on this garment being smeared with unwiped poop from his ass at four days).

Behind the register stood a sloth who embodies all things Disney: early 40s, overweight, pocked with acne and random, thick-gauge hairs in places where women don’t normally have hair (see: moustache, beard, ear bush), and enough Disney-themed pins and buttons on her suspenders to add a good 40 pounds to her already hefty upper body.

“Hi, welcome to The Disney Shtore,” she says, her speech slurred by a heavy lateral lisp and a build-up of thick white mouth smegma in the corners of her lips.. “Will thish be all for you today?”

“Yes, that’s it.”

“Would you like to shign up for our Disney Shavers Club and resheive an addition 15% off your purchash?”

“No. No thank you.”

“Are you sure? You’ll also get dishcounts off of cool Disney shpecialsh like admission to Disneyland and membersh-only merchandishe.”

“I’m sure. Just the underwear, ma’am.”

“Are these for you, little Mousheketeer?” she asks my son, folding the undies in that nice little trifold that only retail clothing experts can reproduce. My son says nothing. He merely hugs my right leg, partially hiding behind it. He is petrified.

She continues.

“I love The Incredibles, don’t you? I think it’sh some of the besht animation we’ve done since The Jungle Book 14: Mogley Getsh Busted For Shtealing Cigarettesh.” My favorite schene is the one where Mr. Ice hash to go help The Incredibles and he shaysh, ‘Honey, where is my shupershuit?’ Washn’t that hilarioush?”

“Yeah. Hilarious.”

A line is forming behind us and I pray to God and Walt Disney and all of those kinds of guys that no one I know is in the queue. They may think that I have said something to indulge this behemoth weirdo, and perhaps that I too am a disciple of The Church of Disney. I am not. I am merely a man who wants to get these underpants purchased so my son can get them home and poop in them.

“Oh! That remindsh me,” she says, “would you like to preorder your copy of The Incredibles on DVD?”

“No.”

“Are you shure?”

“Honey, here’s what I’m sure of. I’m sure that you are scaring the shit out of my son. I’m sure that there is so much of that white build-up in the corners of your mouth that if you were a shih-tzu they’d test you for rabies and distemper and probably euthanize you. And I’m sure that of all of the tweaked, pathetic Disney low-lifes I have ever met, none of them has had a better Tom Selleck porn star moustache than you. I am also sure that if you don’t swipe my Visa card right now so I can conclude this purchase, my son and I are going to strip naked, light our hair on fire and run screaming from this store.

[Deep breath.]

“Furthermore, I don’t want to be in your little Disney Rewards club and I don’t want to preorder any stupid DVDs and I don’t want to hear your lame-ass Samuel L. Jackson impression --- which, by the way, sounds more like Carol Channing than Mr. Ice. Simply hand me my son’s underpants and let’s get this over with, shishter.”

The Disney sloth didn’t miss a beat. She leaned over and asked my son, “Is your daddy always this grumpy?”

“No,” my son said. “Are you always this ugly?”

And a little tear ran down my face. My little boy is becoming a man.

Show Me A Batshit Asshat And I'll Show You A Shit-Eating Cockmaster

2005-02-11T10:00:00.000-08:00

I once read that psychologists believe people swear out of a need to feel empowered and in control, but I think that’s bullshit. I swear because it feels good. It’s fun. I’m good at it. And sometimes calling a person rude or narcissistic or misguided doesn’t do justice to his shortcomings the way calling him a shit-eating cockmaster does. It’s a matter of accuracy, not empowerment.

The first cursing I ever remember hearing came from the mouth of my father. It was, as so much cursing is, inspired by a traffic altercation. We were pulling into the parking lot of the Simi 4 Deli when some ditsy bimbo in a wood-paneled yellow station wagon cut in front of us and nearly wrecked our shit brown Ford Granada. My dad, a man you don’t want to piss off, rolled down his window and lit that bitch up, rattling off a prolific string of expletives that forced my mother to cover her ears and my sister and me to giggle uncontrollably in the back seat. That experience was an awakening for me that I put on par with the first time I saw bare breasts.

And so began my life in profanity.

From time to time I call my sister and try out new curse words on her. We’ll talk about the usual gossip and family news and then I’ll say, “OK, I think I have to go now, you fuck-knocker.” If she laughs, that new word goes into everyday rotation. If not, the word goes down the drain the way “shit monkey” and “dickmunch” and “assclown” did.

Certain words are bona fide staples in my profane vocabulary --- words like “batshit” and “asshat” and the reliable “cocksucker.” It’s important to use these words in the proper application. Some are nouns, some are adjectives. You don’t want to call someone a batshit because that’s an adjective and calling them that would be like calling them a moist or a magenta. Therein lies the slippery slope of swearing: use the word correctly or you might sound like an assclown.

Some of the people who read Human Writes have told me they recommend the site to their friends only after warning them that the content is “a little raw.” I take offense to that. It’s not raw. This is how people talk, especially when they’re mad or oppressed or under the influence of near-fatal doses of drive-thru chow. And people always ask me if I talk like this in front of my children. The answer, of course, is yes. “For the fourth time, get in the motherfucking bathtub, shit-for-brains.” “No, dear, you may not watch Barney again because he is a cocksucking purple dipshit.” And so on.

I by no means believe I am alone in my adherence to this strict moral code of cursing. To prove my point, I would like you all to answer the following questions when you leave a comment this weekend:

1. What is your favorite curse word?
2. Please use your answer to No. 1 in a sentence.
3. Invent a new curse word right now and put it here.
4. Without naming names, say something profane about someone you don’t like.
5. Describe a time when you cursed when you shouldn’t have (e.g., in front of your children or your parents).
6. Describe yourself in a sentence using at least one dirty word.

Turns Out You Don’t Have To Butcher The Word “Nuclear” To Succeed in Politics

2005-02-10T11:45:00.000-08:00

I’m not generally the type who likes to get involved in political or civic causes, but last night I found myself standing before the city traffic commission, turning my sweaty palms to the sky and pleading with the five elderly men on the dais to install a four-way stop at the intersection leading into and out of Evans World Headquarters before our minivan gets t-boned by an oncoming F-150 and I am forced to eat my next birthday cake through a straw and shit it out into a bag attached to the back of my motorized wheelchair, a la that really smart science guy, something-or-other Hawking.

Whatever I said worked because the old guys were all yeah I think that intersection really needs a four-way stop so do I hear a motion to accept the resolution and I go yeah I’ve got your motion right here and the chairman of the commission was all no sir someone on the commission needs to make the motion, which they did, and then it was seconded and just like that I get to eat my cake with a fork. Phew.

Speaking of a piece of cake, that’s what politics is. I never had to say the word “noo-kee-lur” or stick a Cohiba into an intern’s coochie or have myself burned in effigy by angry foreigners chanting “Danny, Boom-Bah-Yeh! Danny, Boom-Bah-Yeh!” (Whatever that means.) All I had to do was show up. Given the ease with which I got this stop sign put in, I’ve started to pen a list of the causes I will be tackling next in my mission to adjust the world to suit my own preferences and comfort zone.

1) I would like someone to find a cure for lactose intolerance. I love ice cream but every time I eat it my insides turn to water, my gas smells like the rotting carcass of a wooly mammoth, my face breaks out like the kids from Hanson, my belly cramps and I have to wear running shoes with my Dockers (which looks totally lame) because I may have to sprint to the bathroom with my hand over my ass at a moment’s notice.

2) I would like to make it a federal regulation that all men’s bathroom stalls be stocked with a sports page, the current issues of Playboy, Hustler, Swank, Oui, Juggs and Leg Show, a PlayStation, a container of lotion, a small fridge stocked with beer and a television with a cable hook-up. Anyone who thinks we go in there just to defecate is kidding herself.

3) I would like to make it a crime for a woman to walk around the office with her shoes off unless she also removes her blouse.

4) The government seems to be big on launching this big cultural awareness campaigns, propagating messages about the dangers of smoking and drug use and hating people based on their ethnicity. I would like to support the launch of a campaign geared toward changing the nation’s reaction to nose picking. My independent survey indicates that virtually everyone does it, so why is it ridiculed? I want the country to jump on board with me and rally behind our new slogan: It’s Hip To Pick.

My Daughter Thinks I’m Gay (Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That)

2005-02-09T10:50:00.000-08:00

There are two disturbing trends in my otherwise-perfect daughter’s speech development:

1) She has some kind of mental block that prevents her from calling me “daddy.” She calls me “Danny” instead. I am aware of the fact that that is my name, but I don’t expect that kind of formal reference until she’s entered college and learned how much fun it is to subvert authority wherever possible.

2) She has not yet learned to pronounce the “L” sound. When she wants to say a word with that sound embedded within it, it is her common practice to drop the “L” altogether. For example, she says the word “butterfly” like this: “Fuhfy.” Interestingly, that’s also how she asks for french fries --- “fuhfies, Danny” --- but if Hot Wife knew I fed our child McPoison like that she’d kill me, so let us never speak of this again.

The other day while we were driving to the gym, the convergence of these two speech irregularities bore catastrophic consequences. My daughter saw a large American flag flying from a pole in front of a large bank building. She said this:

“Danny! Fag! Fag, Danny!”

“Honey,” I say, forcing calm, “daddy is not a fag. And we don’t call people names. It’s not nice.”

“Fag, Danny! Fag!”

“What did I just say, baby? Name-calling is not nice and even though daddy is not gay, there’s nothing wrong with being homosexual. Do you understand?”

“Sorry, Danny.”

“Thank you, sweetheart.”

[A pause.]

“Danny?”

“Yes?”

“Fag! Pretty!”

I roll my eyes, conceding defeat.

“Thank you, honey. I think you’re pretty, too.”

Penis, The Home Version

2005-02-08T20:17:00.000-08:00

When I was in my early teens, I was introduced at summer camp to a game called “Penis.”

The game is simple. A group of people stands in a circle. Whoever elects to go first says the word “penis” as softly as he or she can. The next person says it a little bit louder. And so on. The first person to laugh loses and must step out of the circle. After that, the game begins again. The last person standing wins. (When I grew older, I learned a drinking game variation on “Penis” --- the first person who laughs must take a shot.)

The great thing about “Penis” is the sight of someone yelling “peeeeeeennniiiiiissss!” at the top of his or her lungs (and when you’re 14, hearing a girl even say that word is enough to turn your Jordache jeans into floods) (if you know what I mean) (and by that I mean it gives you a huge boner) (or as huge as a boner can be when you’re 14) (which in my case was about the size of a AA battery) (but still) (and can we just stop here for a sec to appreciate the splendor and phonetic beauty of the word “boner”) (just try to say that word without smiling) (and by that logic, I guess the game “Penis” could also be the game “Boner” or the game “Vagina” or the game “Labia Majora”).

As I became more adept at stifling my amusement at the word “penis,” I became a bit of a showboat during our regular games. I’d mix in adjectives and verbs and occasionally hand gestures. For example:

• Big fucking penis
• Purple-headed hairy penis
• Huge erect penis and a furry ballsack to match
• Massive vein-covered penis with a hairy wart on the bottom of it

Yep, I was the Michael Jordan of “Penis” (and by that I don’t mean that I have a penis like Michael’s (which I wouldn’t know because I’ve never seen Michael’s unit, although I assume it was, you know, nice) but that I was the greatest to ever play the game and everyone knew it).

I Don’t Want To Eat Anything Other Than What I’ve Been Trying To Eat Lately

2005-02-07T17:55:00.000-08:00

My daughter, Barney’s Biggest Fan, has lived the first 23 months of her life with allergies to peanuts, dairy products, eggs and soy. For those of you playing at home, that means she has never experienced the tender kiss of crunchy peanut butter or Ben & Jerry’s ice cream or Ovaltine or any of the other staples to which no less a document than the Constitution of the United Fucking States of America declares to be the inalienable rights of every almost two year old girl in the country, even the ones who care more about some former cheerleader in a purple dinosaur costume than, say, walking around the house with boogers crusted to her face.

At her most recent trip to her allergist, it appeared to the doctor that my daughter had outgrown her food allergies. Unfortunately, the only way to know for sure is to subject the child to a blood test, so Hot Wife called me and begged me to take two hours out of my very, very, very important and insanely busy blog-writing schedule to join her at the lab for the blood test, the first my daughter has ever been treated to.

We entered the slaughterhouse this morning and my wife said to the women, “Um, just so you know, she has this thing where sometimes she cries so hard that she passes out. So if that happens don’t worry because she starts breathing again right after she passes out. M’kay?”

The phlebotomist’s face turned ashen. “Um, OK…” she said. [Note to Hot Wife: the next time one of our children is going to go under the needle, let me do the talking. Love you, honey.]

The nurse started fishing around for a vein, poking my precious little girl with her Lee Press-On Nails and saying hurtful, insensitive things like, “My, she does have small veins, doesn’t she?” Newsflash, you smarmy bitch: she’s not even two. It’ll be 40 years and 16 cases of Twinkies before she has the big, cholesterol-smeared garden hoses you have running through your scaley arms. Now can we please just get this over with so I can get back to my office and write to the whole Internet about how fucking mean you are?

Naturally, my daughter had no idea what was happening. All she knew is that she was sitting on my lap with a piece of surgical tubing tied around her arm, a woman was rubbing the inside of her elbow with a stinky alcohol swab, her mommy was distracting her with stickers and Care Bear dolls, her father was promising that everything was OK (liar!), and then --- whamo! --- the crazy bitch with the blue scrubs on was thrusting the business end of a bayonet into her arm.

To stem her crying, I tried to explain to my daughter that the red stuff pouring out her was going to tell us whether she could eat peanut butter and ice cream. [Note to me: don’t try to reason with little kids when they’re giving blood. They don’t give a shit. Let Hot Wife do the talking.] Then I started singing Barney songs to her, which worked for, oh, three-quarters of a second, at which time she looked down and saw herself melting into a blood vile and started wailing again. It was like she was telling us she’d rather drink rice milk for the rest of her life than be subjected to this torture.

When it was over, the evil nurse put a cotton ball and a Bugs Bunny Band-Aid on my little baby’s arm…but no toy. I saw red.

“Wait a second, honey,” I said to the Twinkie vein lady. “My kid just gave you her blood and you don’t even have a little Barney sticker or a Mr. Tooth coloring book for her? What kind of joint are you running here?”

She tried to sling some stupid comeback about this not being Chuck E. Cheese, but I wasn’t having any of it. In six months, after my daughter has started eating ice cream only to discover that she is lactose intolerant like her daddy, we’re going to take one of her lactose-induced diarrhea diapers to that lab, set it on the doorstep, light it on fire and run like the wind. As we sprint back to the minivan and haul ass away from the burning pile, I’ll explain to my daughter that she should never let anyone fuck with her.

Dipping

2005-02-07T10:26:00.000-08:00

I went to college in Fresno, the raisin capitol of the world. Fresno rises up from the flat, agricultural badlands of Central California in a miasma of eyeglass-fogging cow shit, throat-searing Pabst Blue Ribbon burps and anus-torching welfare cheese farts. The city is enveloped by the pungent aroma of fresh animal dung steaming under the San Joaquin Valley sun, fostering a dire, depressed environment where the Klan still somehow feels welcome to prance around town in their long white dresses and dunce caps, denouncing Jews and African-Americans and homosexuals and Asian-Americans as second-class citizens. (Trust me, you haven’t lived until you’ve seen grown, ignorant men hopped up on crystal meth, walking down the street dressed as ghosts, claiming to be the leaders of God’s chosen race. If God were an unemployed forklift driver who sat around the trailer drinking generic-label tequila, watching NASCAR on pirated cable TV and wearing a snot-stained undershirt, these people might be right about that chosen people bullshit.)

Living in Fresno is an exercise in amateur anesthesiology. To pass the time until graduation, my buddies and I imbibed quite an array of foreign substances to make ourselves forget where we were. We ate pork rinds. We smoked clove cigarettes and, occasionally, pot. We chose from a selection of beers that the liquor store across Shaw Avenue from the dorms sold for $4.99-a-12-pack --- Natural Light, Meister Brau, Old Milwaukee and the inimitable Pabst. After your fifth or sixth can, you no longer cared that the stuff tasted like monkey piss.

Put the one indulgence I remember most fondly from my college days was chewing tobacco. Every Wednesday night was “Family Night” in Graves Hall, a mid-week celebration whereupon we drank beer, ate Domino’s pizza, watched porn and chomped on what we called the Graves Hall Combo: a big fistful of Beech Nut chewing tobacco wrapped around a wad of Big League Chew bubble gum. The first time I tried it, I nearly puked. The second time, I copped a healthy buzz. And from there, it was smooth sailing. I enjoyed it immensely, but I never had the courage to bring the tradition home with me to Southern California. Civilized people don’t do things like that and, as the saying goes, what happens in Fresno stays in Fresno.

I left Fresno 12 years ago this spring and have never been back. During that span, chewing tobacco has never touched my gums again. But yesterday, while watching the Super Bowl with my neighbors, Jeff The Yankee Fan pulled a tin of cherry flavored Skoal from his pocket and put a huge pinch in the left side of his mouth. Jeff is a Little League baseball coach. He has a big, bush goatee and ends each sentence with the word “brother,” a la Hulk Hogan, the wrestler.

“Hey, Jeff,” I said.

“Yeah, brother?”

“Lemme see that Skoal.”

“Right on, brother.”

He hands me the tin. I open it and take a big whiff. It doesn’t smell good at all --- imagine a combination of cherry flavored cough medicine and a pile of wet leaves --- but I’m curious. I take a small pinch and tuck it into the front of my mouth, between my cheek and my teeth.

The first thing I remember is the spit. When we used to “dip” in Fresno, we’d spit into an empty Diet Coke can (because if you swallow the saliva chewing tobacco produces, you’ll puke your guts out). Once, my dorm buddy, Bill, who used to brag to the girls that he shaved his pubes, mistook his spit can for a half-full can of soda and drank it. I’ve never laughed that hard again.

Jeff The Yankee Fan and I stood outside our neighbor’s garage, talking, spitting, watching the game, spitting, throwing a football, spitting. It was paradise.

In the second half of the game, Hot Wife walked over to where we were watching the game to say hello. We were talking and for some reason I simply cannot explain, I peeled back my bottom lip to reveal the moist, black blob of Cherry Skoal to her. The looked that washed over her face was a mixture of shock, horror, disgust and disappointment. She winced. Her mouth dropped open. And she said, “Is that chewing tobacco? Guh-ross!”

Jeff The Yankee Fan saw her expression and said, “Ohhp! You’re in trouble now, brother.”

And there ended my trip down memory lane.

Intersection 2: The Sequel. You’d Be Crazy Not To Read This.

2005-02-04T13:08:00.000-08:00

One of the great things about recovering from a mental illness is the semi-regular opportunity one has to sit in the psychiatrist’s waiting room and try to deduce whether the other patients are more or less batshit than you are.

It’s fun because it’s simply not the kind of game people with other illnesses and ailments play. Would a man waiting to see his cardiologist scan the waiting room, wondering if perhaps the old guy across the room reading the four-month-old issue of Auto Upholstery Weekly has a more life-threatening aortal blockage than his? Do women waiting for their electrolysis appointment try to see if the other ladies in the room have fuller moustaches? Of course not. It’s just not done. But when you’re a looney, it’s somehow a comfort to know (or at least believe) that there are others in the room who are worse off that you (sort of the opposite of penis envy).

The first time I ever walked into to a psychiatrist’s office, I expected to find people banging their heads against the drywall or drooling all over the pages of Highlights For Children or quoting Jack Nicholson to the receptionist: “PUT YOUR HAND IN THE AIR, CHIEF! DON’T YOU WANT TO WATCH THE GAME, CHIEF?” But it wasn’t like that at all, and part of me was disappointed. In fact, the only real crazy person I saw that day was the psychiatrist himself --- a balding, sweater-wearing old man with a thousand-mile stare who talked in barely audible whispers and appeared to be simultaneously under the influence of a valium, Milk of Magnesia and Grey Goose. Needless to say, I found a new psychiatrist.

The new guy is of Middle Eastern descent and his receptionist has huge breasts. She speaks to me very nicely, in a practiced, polished, professional tone that seems to say, “If you’re severely disturbed and homicidal, I hope that my sexy voice and this up-close view of my enormous cans will convince you to walk away and kill someone besides me.” The waiting room is bright and spacious and loaded with pamphlets about antidepressants that contain happy, supportive phrases like “not feeling yourself lately” and “get back to being you.” This doctor, whom we’ll call Dr. Pakistan, seems to attract a more affluent mix of crazies and in the half-dozen times I’ve been there over the years, I always have a good time deconstructing the white-collar psychos and projecting various ailments and lifestyles onto them. It makes me feel better about myself to imagine that they are, in fact, certifiably wacko.

There’s a woman sitting next to the magazine rack. See her? She’s here seeking treatment for a unique kind of behavioral disorder --- the kind where anytime someone says the word “chicken,” she stands up, tucks her hands under her armpits like wings and begins to cluck. “Buh-kawk! Buk-buk-buh-kawk!” Such a sad, misunderstood woman. Dr. Pakistan’s Prescription: 95,000 mg. of Wellbutrin before bedtime (may be taken with or without food) and for God’s sake, stay away from all Kentucky Fried Chicken locations.

Oh, and see that man over there by the window? He’s here because he has trouble with childhood memories of his father, the kind of man most would describe as an overzealous Little League dad. He was pushed so relentlessly by his father to excel at baseball that he came to believe this was the only way he could earn his dad’s love. The man is in his late 40s now. His father died over a decade ago, but the man still walks around wearing a batting helmet. He had thick black lines tattooed under his eyes. And whenever he gets nervous, he begins to chant “Hey, batter, batter, batter. Hey, batter, batter, batter. Swing!” over and over again. Naturally, these issues have had decidedly negative affect on the man’s love life and his work as a librarian. Dr. Pakistan’s Prescription: 600 mg. of Zoloft eight times a day and start rooting for the Chicago Cubs (which would break just about any baseball fan’s enthusiasm for the game in no time flat).

And then there’s the man who is in with Dr. Pakistan right now, a man who likes to curse and make funny noises so much that he pretends to have Tourette’s Syndrome just so he has an excuse. Before he went in to see the doctor, he was sitting here looking for nudity in the January issue of Cosmopolitan, going, “Woop! Fuck it! Click. Click. You’re an asshole. ASSHOLE! Wooooooop! Fuck it!” It’s a nice show, but it gets a little old after 15 minutes. So now he’s in there with the doctor and I can hear his antics through the door. Dr. Pakistan’s Prescription: For starters, SHUT THE FUCK UP!

See? I’m not so crazy after all.

Are You Sitting Down?

2005-02-02T18:03:00.000-08:00

OK, whoa. Hold the phone. What the fuck was that all about? You turn around for one second and I get all maudlin on your asses, talking about craziness and psychotropic meds and cute little babies sleeping in their mommy’s arms. You don’t come here for that. You come here for frank, honest, death-defyingly graphic discussion of projectile bodily fluids. So sorry. I now return you to your regularly scheduled hijinx and obscenity.

As a token of my genuine remorse for sidetracking us from the matter at hand (namely, colorful stories about gastrointestinal distress), I am prepared to reveal one of my most closely held secrets:

Sometimes I pee sitting down.

I know this is standard operating procedure for you fine ladies out there, but for men it is the excretory equivalent of putting your pants on over your head --- it’s just not the way we do things. God gave us these little hangie-down parts in the front of our bodies so that we could urinate while standing. We have the luxury of being able to scratch our ass and pee simultaneously. So why would someone purposely turn a cold shoulder to that capability?

In my case, it is usually related to a common condition known as “morning dick.” When a man has spent his dozing hours dreaming of his wife, a tarpaulin and an industrial-sized container of Cool Whip, it serves to figure that he will wake up with a kickstand. Generally speaking, he is not at full attention, but his hog is sufficiently alert and unpliable so as to make the simple act of urinating an exercise in futility. Any man who has ever tried to pee standing up with morning dick is in a position to describe one or more of the following scenarios:

1) He peed in his own eye.
2) He peed on his feet.
3) He peed at a sharp 90-degree angle, soaking the toilet paper roll hanging on the wall.
4) His pee shot over the toilet seat, over the tank and on to the framed, black-and-white photo of Paris in the springtime, redefining the French term “Eau de Toilette.”
5) He failed to muster the strength to pee at all (since peeing with even a partial a boner is like trying to shove a jar of Miracle Whip into your asshole).

Therefore, lest he spend his morning sponging his own urine from the walls of his bathroom, sometimes a man’s only recourse is to swallow his pride, sit his freshly rustled ass on the toilet seat (making sure to tuck his Johnson under the seat and aim the business end due south) and pee like a woman.

It is my own contention that the unwillingness of most men to follow this simple strategy is why the floors of most of the men’s rooms in bars and nightclubs are soaked with Coors Light piss. Guys are out there dancing, drinking, rubbing up against pretty women and getting all horny. Then they go in to take a leak, drunk and in ensconced in the male version of estrus, and there pee-pee make a sharp left turn at the urinal and ends up filling in the honeycombed-shaped holes in the rubber mat at their feet.

And why do you think the guys on Happy Days were always telling each other to “sit on it?” Could have been that Potsie and the Fonz were too horny and self-absorbed to take their business into a stall, preferring instead to shower the Arnold’s men’s room in their piss? One has his suspicions.

Intersection

2005-02-01T22:02:00.000-08:00

Tonight I saw a man wandering aimlessly through a busy intersection. He was wearing filthy gray sweatpants and a weathered t-shirt, no shoes, and the thousand-mile stare of someone in severe psychological and emotional peril. He had nowhere to go, no idea where he was going and presumably no one to go to.

There was a time not long ago when I would have scowled at such a pathetic character, sneering him off as a nuisance impeding the flow of traffic and getting in the way of my very, very important life. I had no time for compassion; I would have forgotten him by the time I reached the next intersection and never thought of him again. But that is not the case any longer.

Almost six years ago, the advertising agency for which I worked succumbed to the dot-bomb. I had an infant son, a mortgage and a suddenly very fragile belief in myself. I spent the better part of 2000 trying to find gainful employment again, but to no avail. Eventually, the stress and pressure swallowed me up and I was diagnosed with clinical depression. There is no greater blow to one’s ego, no faster ride to the bottom than the moment someone tells you you have a mental health problem and hands you a prescription for Zoloft.

I remember the fear. I had no idea what depression meant. I assumed I was a pussy, that I was somehow deficient or unprepared. I was mortified, and I held my diagnosis close to the vest. I didn’t need the judgmental people I knew holding this against me, believing (as I did) that depression was merely a window into a deeper, more compromising imperfection in my brain or my character or my ability to function any longer in the real world. Would the pitfalls and disappointments of everyday life present challenges I was no longer fit to confront? Would I freak out? Could people see it on my face? It was uncharted territory for all of us and none of us had any answers.

There were times during my depression when I genuinely feared that I would spend the rest of my days in a psych ward (although I have never seen the inside of one and according to virtually every analysis I heard, my case was mild). I feared that I wouldn’t be able to watch my child grow up. I feared that my wife would be relegated to raising our child by herself. And I feared that I would end up like the man I saw hobbling through the intersection tonight --- alone, adrift, oblivious. Those feelings and nightmares were worse than any physical symptom.

But I was fortunate. I had health insurance. I had a home. I had money to pay for the drugs I needed. I had a child who gave me reason to persevere through the sadness and lethargy and the lowest lows I have ever known. I had a wife who gracefully juggled the very ominous trifecta of raising an infant son, bringing in money to pay the bills and nursing me back to good health. I don’t know how she did it and I have never found the words to adequately articulate my gratitude to her for that. I don’t know that I ever will.

I ultimately found my way back to normal (whatever that means), got a job and started rebuilding myself brick by brick. Then at about this time last year, it happened again. And again I found the same motivations to chug through the exhausting task of recovery --- my wife and my children and, to a certain extent, the weak-bladdered dog who inspires me to go to work each day so I can afford to replace the shag carpet she stains with her caustic urine.

Tonight, not two hours after I saw the man in the intersection, I saw my wife holding our baby daughter in her arms, singing her a lullaby. I watched my daughter’s eyes grow heavy as she fought sleep. It was the kind of moment that affirms one’s decision to persevere through the hard times. It was the kind of moment that erases from memory the dirty diapers and the vomit that looks and smells like blueberry yogurt and watching the same Barney video so many times that you find yourself humming “Sun, Sun, Mr. Golden Sun, Please Shine Down On Me” to yourself in the shower.

Still, I believe there is not such a drastic difference between the man in the intersection and the man at this keyboard. A lucky break here and there perhaps.

In Through The Out Door

2005-02-01T13:49:00.000-08:00

My mother is a nurse, and for most of my youth her specialty was something called gastroenterology. In what was then quite a trailblazing medical field, her work involved sticking long, bendable probes --- most fitted with a tiny camera on the tip --- down people’s throats or up their assholes. These procedures gave doctors the power to see into the stomach, esophagus, colon, rectum and god-knows-what-else of the poor sons of bitches who had to endure the indignity of having their guts examined and the nightmarish possibility that someone mistakenly stuck the ass probe into their throat. Sometimes the doctors saw malignant polyps. Sometimes they saw esophageal erosion. And sometimes, presumably, they saw the as-yet-undigested remains of someone’s Denver omelet.

When the hospital where my mother worked expanded, we were invited to attend an open house, complete with syrupy red fruit punch and cookies plastered with colored sprinkles. My mother proudly gave us a tour of the unit in which she worked, and at some point I noticed a series of clear plastic jars sitting on a ledge near the window. I asked what they were and my mother told me matter-of-factly that they were foreign objects “rescued” from the bodies of patients over the years. The objects included:

• A yellow toothbrush
• A political campaign button
• A salami
• A quarter
• Enough produce to make a healthy salad (and with the aforementioned salami, we’d have the makings of an Anal Antipasti)
• A snow globe from the Swiss Alps
• A midget named Carl

Given that there would be children present, I assume the hospital brass made the wise decision to hide what I’m certain was an impressive stash of dildos, vibrators, butt plugs and sundry beaded accessories yanked from the poopers of sexual deviants who had waddled into the ER asking to speak to a nonjudgmental doctor. Still, I learned a valuable lesson that day and I’m moderately proud to report that I have never engaged in any manner of sexual hijinx that even remotely threatened to land me on a hospital gurney answering the question, “So, Mr. Evans, how exactly did the Louisville Slugger become lodged in your rectum?”

That said, there was one occasion when a foreign object did become stuck in my person. I was about six. I was playing in our front yard, by myself, and I found this really cool rock. It was tan, flecked with black dots and about the size of an unshelled almond. I remember inspecting it, admiring it. And then, for some reason I can’t explain, I was compelled to slide the stone into my right nostril. Don’t ask me why.

What followed were 15 of the most horrifying minutes of my life. As soon as the rock went in, I tried to get it out. I plugged my left nostril and exhaled forcefully, trying in vain to propel the rock from my nose. I put my finger on the top of my nose and ran it down the side of my right nostril, trying to slide the rock from the hole. I shook my head violently from side to side. But the rock wouldn’t budge.

I became panic-stricken, certain that the only way to dislodge the rock would be to slice my nose open. Furthermore, if my sister came out and saw me like this, she’d laugh harder than I did when our mom puked in her face. In my young life, there had never been a more horrifying moment than this.

I honestly don’t remember how I did it, but I finally extracted the rock from my nose. When I did, I exhaled a sigh of great relief and then chucked that little rock down the street as far as I could (lest it end up on display somewhere like a toothbrush or a shit-stained carrot). Then I ran inside and watched Bullwinkle.

Markie and Dickless

2005-01-31T16:02:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid I had two close buddies. On particularly giddy afternoons when we were all hopped up on Butterfingers and Jolt Cola, we’d call ourselves The Three Musketeers. We were:

• Mark, an overweight redhead, lived four houses down from me. Everyone in the neighborhood knew Mark (my sister called him “Markie”) was a bad kid, but he was the only guy on the block my age. His dad was a gruff man, a cop, and he was always working on his gold-flecked 1968 Camaro in the garage (I swear he worked on that car every night for 15 years and I never once saw him drive it). Despite the fact that Markie used to sit on me until I cried, I played with him everyday, mostly because he had Atari and I wanted to be invited over to play Missile Command and eat pork products.

• Doug, a short, mop-topped spark plug, lived two blocks away. Doug was small, but he was mean. He’d do shit he knew would get under my skin just to see if I would cry or fight back or call him “Dickless” (instead of “Douglas”) and run for my life. The backyard of Doug’s house abutted what we called “the wash” – a large, cement-walled storm sewer that led all the way down to the railroad tracks that ran parallel to Los Angeles Avenue. On hot summer days, we’d sit under the tracks, drink soda pop and try to hear our own prepubescent screams above the screeching thunder of the Santa Fe cargo trains that chugged over our heads.

• Me, a tall, 90-pound thyroid case with big feet and a strong aversion to conflict. Unless we were hanging out with Rodney, a mildly retarded black kid from our class who always had milk residue welled up in the corners of his mouth, I was the default subject of Mark and Doug’s relentless teasing – and it was hard to blame them. I was such an easy target. I was skinny. I had a big nose. I wasn’t good at sports. And I was Jewish, which meant every Saturday when all of the other kids were riding their bikes, I had to go to the synagogue with my dad and wear one of those funny beanies on my head. God, the ribbing I took after they first saw me wearing a yarmulke was relentless. “Nice yar-mool-key, fag! What are you, a rabbi or somethin’?”

I don’t believe my parents were particularly fond of Markie and Dickless. I think they would have preferred that I associate with other Jewish boys or at the very least boys who didn’t send me home a blubbering mass of tears, snot, blood, dirt, bruises and hurt feelings every afternoon. But I didn’t care. I was a glutton for punishment, I guess.

We would often chill in the ratty wooden fort in Doug’s backyard, leafing through Doug’s dad’s Playboys and debating whether or not Fritos were better than Doritos. But one day when we were in junior high school, we were in the fort when Doug produced an industrial squirt bottle full of a pale brown liquid. He said it was Jack Daniels, swiped from his dad’s liquor cabinet. I believed him.

Doug and Mark knew my reputation. They knew I was, in the parlance of the day, a puss. I didn’t drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes, even cloves. I just didn’t experiment, not because I wasn’t curious but because I knew there would be hell to pay at home if there was any evidence of straying from the path of straight and narrow.

As the afternoon wore on, Doug and Mark squirted the brown liquid into their mouths repeatedly. They were timid at first --- just one squirt at a time. But then they became emboldened, challenging one another to two squirts, then five, then 10 at a time. They kept asking me to try, I kept declining and they kept calling me names.

As the sun began to set, Doug turned the squirt bottle toward me and threatened to squirt me. I pleaded with him not to. He fired a warning shot over my right shoulder, hitting Miss September in the left breast. I told him to knock it off. He laughed at my meager indignance and fired another shot over my left shoulder, hitting Miss February right between the eyes. I stood up and dusted myself off.

“Fuck you guys,” I said, marching off toward home.

“Ooooooh. Big words, Jewboy,” one of them said as I stomped off. I heard the sound of the trigger on the squirtbottle being squeezed repeatedly as I left the yard.

We were never close again after that. I saw them at school from time to time, but we never walked down to the train tracks or rode our bikes to get ice cream again. Last I heard, Mark had gone off to fight in Desert Storm and Doug had married and become a father.

My son has begun to carve out a group of regular friends from his preschool --- nice kids with great parents. I watch them play with their Rescue Heroes figures and pretend to be Superman and become downright giddy when they see each other. It’s quite a sight for a parent to behold --- his child in a moment of unbridled joy and youthful exuberance. But I suppose my subconscious litmus test for my son’s friends will always be whether or not I can picture any of them 10 or 12 years from now sporting a mild bourbon buzz and perusing stolen porno mags.

If I Could You Know I Would. If I Could I Would Let It Go.

2005-01-30T15:02:00.000-08:00

It is Sunday morning at Evans World Headquarters. Hot Wife is out of town. The children are watching Care Bears in the other room. And I am encountering a moment of severe physical and psychological peril.

I have consumed two-thirds of a venti iced soy latte, a beverage that generally sends my colon into a spastic fit that would shame even an epileptic breakdancer with Parkinson’s Disease in the middle of an earthquake. Under normal circumstances I’d grab the sports page and head for the throne. But it is 9:58 am and I must be online at 10:00 sharp, the precise moment at which tickets go on sale for the U2 concert. I clinch my brown eye together with all of my might, punch up the Ticketmaster website and pray. Pray for good seats. Pray for speedy service. Pray that if I do soil myself, the children are far enough away from the blast zone that they don’t drown.

I enter the date and location of the concert I want to see and my computer screen spits back a spiraling gray and white bar indicating that it is searching for the two best seats available for the show. It spins and spins and spins. It’s mocking me. I break into a two-step known internationally as the I-have-to-take-a-dump-really-bad dance --- side to side, butt moving forward and back, a wince on my face, my brow furrowed.

The bar continues to spin. It’s still thinking, and so am I. I’m thinking that I will never drink coffee again. It’s just as well, I tell myself, because the drink I like has tons of soy milk in it and I keep hearing that men who drink too much soy grow breasts and labia and an affinity for something called a pagmina. Still spinning. God? Please, God. Please let the bar stop spinning. Please, your immensehood. Please tell my colon to chill. God?

A voice comes waddling down the hall. It’s her.

“Daddy? Barney, daddy. Barney.”

“OK, honey. Daddy will put Barney on in a minute, OK?”

“NO, DADDY! BARNEY! BARNEY!”

“I’ll be out there in a minute, sweetheart. If you can give me just a few more minutes, I’ll give you a cookie when I get out there, OK?”

“OK. Bye, daddy.”

I look back at the computer. Still spinning. Ohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodohgod. The dance becomes a little more seizurelike now. I start to hum and I place my left hand flat against my bum (as if that alone will stop the flash flood of poop and soy milk that’s poised to pour out of my ass like a thoroughbred at the starting gate the minute I unclench my ass muscles). Still spinning.

Another voice. It’s him.

“Daddy?”

“What! What is it?”

“Can I have some milk?”

“Listen, buddy. I need your help. Can you just give me like three more minutes? Please? Then I swear I’ll come out there and get you milk and put on Barney for your sister and buy each of you a pony. I promise. OK? Just three minutes.”

“I don’t want a pony, daddy.”

“Well, what do you want?”

“I want a dinosaur. A tyrannosaurus.”

“OK. You got it. Give me three minutes and I’ll buy you a T-Rex.”

“Daddy?”

“What.”

“Why are you dancing like that?”

“Because I have to go potty but I can’t.”

“Oh. OK. Bye, dad.”

Still fucking spinning. OhgodohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodOHMYMOTHERFUCKINGGOD! I was just about to throw my hands up and start hating U2 when the spinning finally stopped. The computer smiled, telling me in its own special way that there are two seats in section 472, row f, with my name on them. I’ll take them. I punch in my credit card number and address and --- click! --- they’re mine. Hallelujah!

I race to the bathroom, yank down my underwear and feel my cheeks slap the toilet seat just in time for --- well, remember that dude who interrupted Bob Dylan’s set at the Grammy’s that year with the words SOY BOMB painted on his chest? Well, that guy had no idea what a soy bomb was. I do know. While it would be difficult to articulate it, I’ll say this much: it sounded like there was a 747 landing underneath my ass and the sensation was something like spawning a palm tree.

I exited the bathroom exhausted and emaciated. I thought I should look online to see exactly where section 472, row f is before I went out to explain why we couldn’t actually get a pony or a tyrannosaurus rex. Lo and behold, Hot Wife and I will be watching Bono and The Edge preen around from behind the stage, about two rows in front of the ozone layer.

Just Who The Hell Do You Think You Are?

2005-01-28T14:23:00.000-08:00

I will be cavorting with my children this weekend and sadly will not have time to update the status of my bowel movements, my mucous production or the results of my cremaster exercises (although I will tell you that I’m doing the latter as I write this and if you find a man with a stronger cremaster than me, you tell him Danny Evans wants to challenge him to a duel).

It occurs to me, however, that you all know so much about me --- too much, by the standards of common decency --- and I know jack squat about you. To remedy the lopsidedness of our relationship, I’d like everyone who visits the site to answer the following questionnaire in the comments section (Note: some of the questions are me-centric, but this is my fucking site and if you don’t like it I’ll FedEx you my ass and you can kiss it).

1) Name/URL
2) Do I know you? If so, how?
3) What celebrity do you most closely resemble?
4) What Sesame Street character do you associate with most?
5) How many times do you defecate each day?
6) Be honest: do you pick your nose?
7) What is your favorite Human Writes entry? (This information will be used to assemble a Human Writes starter kit for newbies to the site.)
8) What do you drink at Starbucks?
9) Say something nice about the person who posted before you.
10) Say something nice about me (because this is my site and without me you’d be nothing. Do you hear me? NOTHING!).

Doctor, My Cremaster

2005-01-27T14:21:00.000-08:00

My brother-in-law, Ben, was a fencer at Princeton. You might think that automatically puts him into the category of “pussy intellectual,” but it doesn’t. He’s a doctor who cures kids with cancer. He plays the guitar. He’s the father of my niece and nephew (and if you say anything mean about them I swear to God I’ll cut you).

Plus, how intellectual could he be if he married my sister, a woman who to this day swears vehemently that Vida Blue pitched for the Dodgers despite the absence of any supporting evidence. Somehow the juxtaposition of the last name “Blue” and the blue accents in the Dodgers’ uniforms has my sister so completely convinced that she’s right about this that reason and proof are about as welcome in her mind as a Honeybaked ham is in a kosher butchershop.

Furthermore, I know that Dr. Ben The Fencer is not a pussy because a pussy would not have imparted these two precious nuggets of data:

1) Medical students are trained not to use the word “oops” in surgery. Instead, they say “there.” I plan to access this knowledge during my vasectomy. If the doctor says “there” at any point during that procedure, I’ll know enough to look up and make sure he hasn’t removed and discarded my penis, thereby relegating me to a future as a headliner in those crazy Thai sex shows you’re always reading about.

2) There is an organ in the male reproductive system called the cremaster.

I don’t know whose job it was to name body parts back when they were being discovered, but I’d like to toss back a few Bud Lights with who ever named the cremaster. That is just some funny, funny shit.

“Gentlemen, it is my scientific finding that this muscle, which covers the testes, raises and lowers the scrotum in order to modulate the temperature of the testes. This is, in simplest terms, what makes the goo warm. We shall henceforth call this muscle the ‘cremaster.’ It is a compound word --- ‘crème’ being Latin for ‘man yogurt’ and ‘master,’ of course, referring to the episode of Seinfeld in which Jerry and Elaine talk about being the ‘master of your domain.’”

I’m not the type to speak in hyperbole, but I’ll say this much: “cremaster” is the finest word in the English language. Has there ever been a more appropriately named organ? Plus, I submit to you that the function of the cremaster supports human life itself. If your goo gets cold, your little spermies die and life on earth comes to an end. I don’t think I’m overstating it by saying that would be bad.

I’ve been searching for the right way to commemorate the cremaster’s greatness. I contemplated having mine pierced, but Hot Wife wasn’t really into that. I thought about having mine removed, bronzed and mounted, but that would leave me with cold goo and that’s really not good for anybody.

So I’ve settled on this: in the middle of the night, I’m going to sneak into Vida Blue’s house, remove his cremaster with a Swiss Army knife, dye it blue, attach it to the end of a gold chain and give it to my sister. On the bottom, I’m going to engrave the slogan for my cremaster awareness campaign: “Go Blue For Warm Goo.”

BY REQUEST: My First Sexual Experience

2005-01-26T11:17:00.000-08:00

The following is a transcript from my first and only call to a phone sex line. I was 15. As evidenced by what I said to the woman, I had no idea what I was doing.

[Ed. Note: to protect my family from even greater humiliation than I have already caused them in this space, salacious and lascivious terms herein will be replaced with the names of Sesame Street characters.]

Ring-ring. Ring-ring.

“Hi. This is Wanda. Who’s this?”

“Um, hi. My name is, um, Charlie.”

“How you doin’ tonight, Charlie?”

“I’m fine.”

“Good. Good. What would you like to talk about tonight?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never done this before.”

“Oh, really? A virgin, huh? Well, why don’t we start by talking about my big, round Cookie Monsters?”

“OK. That sounds nice.”

“Mmmmm. I’ve got them right here. I’m squeezing them. It feels soooo good.”

“Wow. That’s awesome. [A giggle.]”

“I wish I had your Big Bird right now, Charlie.”

“You do?”

“I do. Tell me about your Big Bird. How big is it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe about 13 or 14 inches.”

“THIRTEEN OR 14 INCHES?! WHO ARE GONNA SNUFFALUFFAGUS WITH A 13-INCH BIG BIRD?! THERE ISN’T AN OSCAR THE GROUCH ON GOD’S GREEN EARTH THAT CAN TAKE A 13-INCH BIG BIRD!”

“Can we not talk about God please, Wanda?”

“SHUT YOUR MOUTH, KID! HOW OLD ARE YOU ANYWAY?”

“I’m 21.”

“TWENTY-ONE, MY ELMO!”

“Besides, what do you care how old I am? As long as I’m paying your $4.99 a minute…”

“I DON’T DO PHONE SEX WITH CHILDREN, CHARLIE. WHY DON’T YOU TAKE YOUR 13-INCH BIG BIRD AND GO PLAY WITH YOUR LEGOS!”

“I’m not a child, Wanda, you Elmohole! I’m 21! And your Oscar The Grouch probably couldn’t handle my Big Bird anyway!”

Click.

I cried myself to sleep that night. And to this day, if I see Big Bird and Oscar The Grouch on the TV screen at the same time, I have to leave the room.

Behind Every Good Man Is A Woman Who Would Totally Kick The Next Door Neighbor’s Ass If She Pulls That Shit Again

2005-01-25T13:54:00.000-08:00

Although I would like to take full credit for the man I am today, I can’t. I have the luxury and good fortune of being surrounded by a small army of strong, nurturing and occasionally very scary women, each of whom has played a vital role in shaping me into the demented, obscene, potty-mouthed n’er-do-well you see before you. In celebration of these women – and at the risk of forfeiting any spoils they have bestowed to me in their respective wills and trusts – here is a short story about each of them.

My Mother, Who Has Asked Me Not To Write About Her Because She “Still Has To Live In This Town,” But May Change Her Mind If I Tell A Story That Reflects Positively On Her Motherly Instincts.
When we were young, my sister and I used to sit on the cinder block wall that separated our yard from that of our next-door neighbors, the Zinks. We would play with my Hot Wheels cars and Star Wars figurines, pretending my little die-cast Datsun hatchback could hit R2-D2 so hard that it turned him into a hand mixer. From time to time, Mrs. Zink would come out and yell at us to get off of her wall.

One day my sister and I were on the wall again and Mrs. Zink snapped. She came out of her house, turned her garden hose on full blast and doused my sister and me, sending us inside in sopping wet hysterics. When my mother heard what Mrs. Zink had done, she bolted outside and confronted the hag. You should have seen it. These two women stood on opposite sides of a knee-high block wall, yelling at each other, pointing fingers at each other, accusing one another of dastardly, evil things. All of the neighborhood kids heard the ruckus and came running to root my mother on. “Go, Mrs. Evans! Kick her ass! We hate that skanky bitch!”

I don’t recall specifically what was said – perhaps something about my mother’s size seven Easy Sprit shoes and Mrs. Zink’s big, fat, haggard, cottage cheese ass – but whatever it was hit the mark. My parents still live in that house, but the Zinks, well, we’ve never heard from them again. In my twisted imagination, they moved to Idaho and joined up with a band of white supremacists who spread grammatically incorrect, hate-filled literature, rampant with dangling participles and misspelled words like this: “Jooz and Kweers Are Derty Sunza Biches.”

My Sister, Who Thinks She’s All Bad-Ass Because She Can Throw A Bagel Like 90 Miles An Hour, But Let’s See How Cool She Thinks She Is After I Tell The Whole Internet That Our Mom Puked In Her Face.
Prior to meeting my wife, the greatest day of my life was a hot summer day in the early 1980s. We were on our way to a nice family outing at a museum, cruising down the road with the windows on my dad’s Dodge Omni rolled down. My sister and I were playing some silly game in the back seat and, unbeknownst to us, my mother was in the midst of a rather severe case of food poisoning or rot gut or stomach flu up front.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, something beige and warm and steamy came flying into my sister’s window and splattered all over her face. She was stunned. Was it bird shit? Was it alfredo sauce? Was it spackle?

No. It was my mother’s breakfast.

She vomited out the window and, thanks to the laws of physics and aerodynamics, her scrambled eggs, toast, orange juice, coffee, two tablespoons of Metamucil and a multivitamin were pushed right back into the car and all over my big sister.

We never made it to the museum, but I didn’t care. I laughed all the way home.

My Mother-In-Law, Who Likes To Refer To My Children Using The Yiddish Words For Various Farm Animals And Once Tried To Poison My Baby Boy With A Steak Fry.
When my son was born, my mother-in-law referred to him once as “kotchke.” There was some debate at the time as to whether a kotchke is a duck or a goose, but I suppose that’s irrelevant now. At least she didn’t call him a mule or a pig or a jackass. And for some reason, we still refer to the kids as “The Goose.”

When Left-Handed, Power-Hitting Son was very young, we all went to dinner at Red Robin, a burger place. To my horror, my mother-in-law gave him a french fry --- and not just any little fry, but a STEAK FRY! I chastised her.

“What are you doing?! I don’t want him eating that!”

“Why not?” she asked, perplexed.

“Because he’s just a little kid! He doesn’t need to be eating fried foods. It might hurt his teeny little belly. Shit, why don’t you let him chew on some rusty nails, for Pete’s sake?”

She said nothing. She just pulled the fry away from my son and wore a look that seemed to say, “Whatever, dumbfuck.”

Now, four years later, the kid eats Snickers for breakfast and can polish off a large order of fries in one bite. My mother-in-law was right, as usual: I’m a dumbfuck.”

My Sister-In-Law, Diga, Who Once Got Really Mad At Me For Telling Her She Had Hair Like Lyle Lovett.
I was once on the phone with Diga and the subject of parents who curse came up. I bet her she couldn’t get her mother to say “fucking asshole,” and she took the bait. We called her with the three-way feature on my phone.

[Ring. Ring.]

“Hello.”

“Hi, mom.”

“Hi, darling.”

“Danny’s here, too.”

“Oh. Hi, Danny.”

“Hi.”

“Mom?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Will you do me a favor?”

“What?”

“Will you say ‘fucking asshole?’”

“What?”

“Say ‘fucking asshole.’”

“You want me to say ‘fucking asshole?’”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Just because.”

“OK. Fucking asshole.”

[Laughter ensues.]

My Other Sister-In-Law, Karona, Who Believes Contorting Her Body Like A Pretzel On Acid Will Make The Ball Go Into The Hole
I love to laugh, and I can count on one hand and two webbed toes the number of times I have laughed so hard that I had to sit down and squeeze my crotch so as not to urinate on myself. One of them was the first time I played miniature golf with Karona.

She put the little pink ball on the rubber mat, lined up her putt and whacked it super hard with the short rubber putter. The ball bounced off of the concrete barrier and began to roll toward the cup. The closer the ball came to the hole, the more Karona screamed. The more she screamed, the more she contorted her body. The more she contorted her body, the scarier it got.

For the next two hours, Karona cavorted through the miniature golf course, inventing on the fly a game that combines golf, yoga, pilates, opera and re-enactments of some of the more gory and unwatchable scenes from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. She would arch her back, twist her torso, bend her left leg like a flamingo, jut out her bottom jaw and scream like a five-year-old who sees the ice cream man coming around the corner --- all, presumably, in hopes of making the little ball go into the hole.

Golf is supposed to be a serene game. Golfers need silence and concentration. But with Karona around, the only thing people can concentrate on is the funny lady who looks like she’s having a grand mal on the eighth hole.

My Daughter, Who Eats Chepup
My baby girl is learning new words every day. This week, she has learned the word for that the red stuff you put on hot dogs and french fries. She calls it “chepup.”

My Wife, Who Has The Funniest Throw-Up Sound Ever (Sorry, Honey, But You Do. You Know You Do.).
When Hot Wife was pregnant with each of our children, she fought the evils of morning sickness rather frequently. While it was distressing to see her in such misery, I will admit to you candidly that hearing her puke sometimes made me laugh hysterically.

See, Hot Wife was blessed with some proprietary combination of vocal chord alignment that causes her to make the world’s perfect vomit sound. It sounds a little bit like she screaming at an imaginary hose-wielding neighbor who is sequestered in the bottom of the toilet bowl. Wehhhhhhhhk! Wehhhhhhhhhkk!

For yours truly, someone who has repeatedly confessed to being what I call a piggy-back puker --- someone so repulsed by other peoples’ vomit that it causes me to vomit shortly thereafter --- my wife’s “gift” creates the ultimate conflict. Do I laugh? Do I puke? And is it biologically feasible to do both at once? Sadly, my fight-or-flight response kicked in when she started to heave and “flight” won that battle by a landslide. I was never around to attempt the laugh/puke combination. But I have a sense that after Hot Wife reads this, an opportunity to attempt the dreaded laugh/get kicked in the nuts maneuver will present itself.

Block Party Weekend

2005-01-24T14:51:00.000-08:00

The depths of my writer’s block were so bleak this weekend that I came dangerously close to buying one of those “Unleash Your Creativity and Get Published Today” magazines. Can you imagine?! (For the uninitiated, these are monthly publications aimed at porky, varicose-veined housewives from South Dakota who seek to break up the day-to-day monotony of Andy Griffith reruns, Little Debbie snack cakes and supermarket tabloids by learning to write their own Harlequin romance novels. Each magazine comes with a series of writing prompts like “When and where were you happiest?” or “Describe what it would be like to be a Little Debbie snack cake for a day.”)

Writer block is the scribe’s version of a huge hemorrhoid. You believe with all of your heart that there’s something good and worthy inside you and you’d do just about anything to let it out and share it with the world, but something is preventing it from coming out. And while there are lots of salves and ointments and things you can use to dress it up and deaden the pain, the only real cure is to wait it out.

Well, that’s what I have, everyone: a big purple hemorrhoid on my creativity. So in lieu of having anything interesting to put in this space today, I will insert my huge ego and invite your requests. I will whore myself out to the internet.

Tell me. What do you want me to write about?

Things They Don’t Tell You About In Childbirth Classes Because You’d Puke

2005-01-20T18:14:00.000-08:00

It has occurred to me lately that the classes most hospitals offer to expectant parents about childbirth and childrearing are woefully devoid of information about the most disturbing elements of parenthood. I remember walking out of those sessions saying, “OK. I know how to change a diaper, how to burp a baby and that the birth of my child has something to do with a vagina. I’m all set. Bring on the offspring!” I was such a dipshit.

Bringing a child into the world is disgusting and gory and unsanitary, and raising them isn’t much cleaner. As a service to my brother-in-law Robert (a new father), Old Buddy Andy (an expectant father) and Craig The Mouse Killer (newly engaged), I will now list a few of the key discoveries I’ve made during my four-plus years of fatherhood --- items not discussed in childbirth or childrearing classes because they don’t want to make becoming a dad seem as much like an episode of Fear Factor as it really is:

Childbirth
1. When your wife is in the late stages of delivering your child, the doctor while ask her to push, whereupon she will bear down on midsection with the force of 10,000 atomic bombs. The goal, naturally, is to have something come out of her crotch. Unfortunately, there are two holes in her crotch and it’s best that you know now that something is going to come out of both holes. Hole number one will produce a baby. Hole number two will produce, well, number two. You’ll try to look away and you’ll try to maintain your focus on what’s coming out of hole number one, but you won’t be able to. And you’ll never be able to look at a Play-Doh Fun Factory again.

2. After your child is born and has been taken across the delivery room to be weighed and measured and wiped clean of yuck, you’ll notice that the doctor is still staring into hole number one. Do not attempt to accost the doctor; he’s not getting his jollies. He’s actually “delivering” the most rancid, foul, nightmare-inducing substance known to man: the placenta. If your doctor is a sicko like ours, he’ll hold it up and show it to you when it comes out. Be prepared. The placenta looks like someone has taken the layer of melted cheese from the top of a pizza and is holding it sauce-side up. They’ll try to convince you that it’s beautiful and a miracle and shit like that, but when you’ve been up all night stressing about your baby being born with his nose on his ass or your wife dying during childbirth, there’s nothing beautiful or miraculous about a big skin bag covered of blood, is there?

3. The first few shits your newborn takes are made of the same substance NASA uses to adhere those special tiles to the outside of the Space Shuttle to protect it from the unfathomable heat it encounters upon re-entry to earth’s atmosphere. It is black and sticky and infused with the smell of the vomit one produces after a night of partying with a quart of tequila and a bag of chili-cheese Fritos. By all means, make the nurses in the hospital change the first few diapers. They love that shit. And if you get it on your hands, there isn’t a space-age polymer on the planet that will get it off of you.

Childrearing
1. There are more varieties of fluids in a child than there are under the hood of your average import sedan, and all of them are bound to come out flying out of the child at different velocities from time to time. For example, last night there was a wad of snot the size of a nectarine that had dried and sealed shut the left nostril of my daughter. I was able to pry it loose with a chamois, a putty knife and a stick of Juicy Fruit, but my point is that you have to be prepared for anything. They puke when they’re mad. They have diarrhea when they’re asleep. And they shoot piss at you when they’re having their diaper changed. Fathers of Planet Earth, I have but one word for you: duck.

2. Imagine your wife at her PMS worst. Picture her raging at you, spewing hate in your direction for no good reason, slamming doors in your face and threatening to dismember you with her eyelash curler. Now imagine that same behavior from someone who is two feet tall and cannot color a picture without sticking his tongue out. This, basically, is the kind of irrational behavior you can expect from your child when you deny him Halloween candy for breakfast or tell him that he may not, under any circumstances, throw dogshit at his baby sister. Kids are fucking crazy sometimes and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s best to just let them wail and go back to watching SportsCenter until they calm down.

3. If you do not already know how, you should learn to complete the following tasks immediately (reason in parenthesis): strip and remake a bed in the dark (your kid will wet the bed at 2 a.m.), breathe threw your mouth for long periods of time (your kid will get sick and will simultaneously cry, vomit, shit his clothes, also at 2 a.m.), resist torture (your kid will want to watch Barney’s Adventure Bus for the 1,192nd time right about the time your favorite team is taking the opening kickoff back for a touchdown in the Super Bowl), make pasta with butter (that’s the only thing your kid will eat until he’s 14), take a kick or a punch in the balls (no matter how hard you try to avoid it, your kid will hit you there --- either accidentally or on purpose --- once a day for the foreseeable future).

4. You’ll never sleep through the night again. That’s just the way it is. But I’ll be up, too, so call me.

Nice Night For An Exorcism

2005-01-19T14:22:00.000-08:00

I walked in from the gym last night to find my son in the throes of a moderately severe tantrum --- and by “moderately severe” I mean his head was doing 360s and blood was shooting out of his eyes and he had written the word “murder” on the wall with his own feces (which is really impressive because he’s had trouble making a lower-case d lately).

He was saying something about dessert, and the way he was raging and screaming left no doubt in my mind that he had either been attacked by a fruit roll-up or accosted by some chocolate pudding or denied the opportunity to consume large quantities of high fructose corn syrup by the evil warlord “mommy.” Whatever the cause, the boy was going completely batshit. I could see the strain on Hot Wife’s face, so I dropped my gym bag and intervened.

“Buddy, you need to slow down a little bit,” I said, rubbing big, slow circles on his back with the palm of my hand. “Take a deep breath. Relax.”

“NO! I DON’T WANT TO RELAX. I WANT MY DESSERT!”

“Well, you behavior is telling me that you’re tired, maybe too tired to eat dessert. But if you can calm down, we can talk about it.”

“I DON’T WANT TO CALM DOWN! I WANT MY FUCKING DESSERT! AND IF YOU TELL ME TO RELAX ONE MORE TIME I SWEAR I’M GOING TO RIP YOUR HEAD OFF AND SHIT DOWN YOUR NECK!”

At this point, it became reflex. I remembered the repetitive line from the priest from The Exorcist --- “The power of Christ compels you! The power of Christ compels you!” --- and I began to holler it at my son, if only to eliminate the possibility that he had been possessed by the devil. Yes, we’re Jewish and the whole Christ thing usually doesn’t enter into the equation for us, but you never know --- that’s my point.

The boy’s breathing was shallow and fast. He was laying face-down on the dining room floor, pounding the tile with his clenched fists and screaming the scream of a woman giving birth to a full-grown teenager without the aid of an epidural.

Suddenly my son’s eyes opened wide. A look of terror washed over his face and a tiny bit of mucousy throw-up shot out of his mouth. It landed on the floor, next to his puddle tears, and it took every ounce of intestinal strength I possess not to follow his lead. I’ll change dirty, shit-plastered Huggies with whole, undigested raisins and corn in them any day of the week, but seeing another person throw up --- even my own son --- makes my toes curl backwards and my stomach feel all heavy and syrupy and puts me on the precipice serious emotional collapse.

Wait a second. What’s that sound? Is it…could it be…silence? Yes, that’s it. That’s definitely it. The boy has stopped wailing. It seems my son was so horrified and fascinated by his own vomit that he became distracted and forgot about his dessert rage.

He shortly thereafter became exhausted and actually requested to go to sleep. I changed him into his dinosaur pajamas, tucked him in and kissed him gently on the forehead. As I switched off the light in his bedroom and began to pull the door closed, he called out to me.

“Dad?” he said, almost whimpering through his cute, four-year-old fatigue.

“Yeah, buddy?”

“DID YOU THINK I FORGOT? BRING ME MY MOTHERFUCKING DESSERT!”

The New Underpants

2005-01-17T21:10:00.000-08:00

There are five 12-year-old boys in my neighborhood and these boys serve as my own personal style council. They roam the playgrounds and cafeterias of the local middle school and report back to me on what music, television shows, video games and sundry pop culture phenomena I’ll need to check out in order to maintain my classification as “cool.” In return, I take them to Dairy Queen and load them up on Blizzards just in time to spoil their dinner and incur the wrath of their parents.

I convened the council yesterday and immediately noticed that each of the boys was wearing at least one brightly colored plastic bracelet. I recognized the canary colored LIVE STRONG number as the kind I purchased from the Lance Armstrong Foundation a few months ago --- a purchase that at once articulated my solidarity with cancer survivors and trumpeted my continued allegiance to all things hip and pimped out. But as I surveyed the wrists of my peeps yesterday, I noticed some colors I had not yet seen. Further investigation revealed the awareness represented with bracelets in the following colors and textures:

• Red: Abstinence from drugs
• Purple: Varicose veins
• Brown: Incontinence
• Yellowish Green: Sinus infections
• Green and Sticky: Legalization of Marijuana
• Two Flesh-Colored Bracelets Stuck Together: Webbed Toes
• Bright Red and Hard: Priapism
• Black, Engraved With the Words “Woot! Fuckit! Click!”: Tourette’s Syndrome

As the boys went down the list, it became clear to me that these colored bracelets are the new generation’s version of underpants. You could leave home without wearing them, but it isn’t recommended. What if you have an accident? How will the paramedics know that you’re allergic to penicillin if you’re not wearing your mold-covered bracelet?

I have to admit that I was initially concerned for the safety of my style council. These bracelets compare somewhat favorably to the red and blue bandanas kids wore back in the day to show which gang they were from. But the last time I saw a gang-banger wearing a bracelet, it was made by Med-Alert and meant to tell his homeboys that he was allergic to peanuts --- so I think the kids are safe.

My second thought, naturally, was that I should piggyback on this bracelet craze and get rich. As such, it is my pleasure to announce the creation of a Human Writes bracelet. It is designed to raise awareness for the plight of indigenous peoples who have nasty-smelling poops and suffer the slings and arrows of an unappreciative public as a result.

This handsome bracelet is made of high-grade, two-ply toilet paper and is engraved with the letters SMAMWNSCAISYAVPWESAHAHNKAGTIHM. These letters are, of course, an acronym for the term “Show Me A Man With Nice-Smelling Craps And I’ll Show You A Vegan Pussy Who Eats Sprouts And Hominy And Has Never Kissed A Girl That Isn’t His Mother."

Is There Second Place In The Lottery?

2005-01-14T17:57:00.000-08:00

Some asshole strolled into the 7-11 up the street from Evans World Headquarters this week and bought a lottery ticket that won him $81 million. I have no idea who this person is, but I hate him. I hate him very, very much. Like a boil on my ass, I hate him.

People who shop at 7-11 eat heat-lamped jalapeño dogs. They drink 128 ounces of Mr. Pibb every day. They chew spearmint-flavored tobacco and laugh at the comics that come in Bazooka gum and don’t start catching a buzz until they’ve consumed their ninth can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. I ask you, America: is this the kind of person upon whom we want to bestow unfathomable wealth? Isn’t that like leaving a toddler home alone with a loaded handgun, 30 lines of blow and the director’s cut of Scarface?

My initial fear was that my neighbor John had won the money. John throws like a little girl and doesn’t like to play poker with the rest of us because he thinks we’re all pussies. He buys lottery tickets (and corn nuts) at that 7-11 all the time, so when I heard that the winning ticket had been purchased there, I called John (which is a lesson in self-sacrifice because John’s one of those dim bulbs who thinks that in order to be heard he needs to yell into the cell phone so loudly that it makes your ears bleed). He said no, he had purchased his ticket at Sav-On this week and, much to my chagrin, would not be moving out of the neighborhood. Fuck.

So in the event that this asshat doesn’t show up to claim his booty, I hereby nominate myself to take it in his stead. I submit to you that the $81 million is perfectly suited to someone like me – a man of incomprehensible integrity, dashing good lucks, top-notch credentials, a healthy libido, love for all creatures (except that bitch Barbara Streisand) and no desire whatsoever to eat a jalapeño dog. Oh, and my wife is totally hot.

Of course, whenever talk turns to winning the lottery, we let our fantasies carry us away. (No, not the fantasy about the Olsen twins and a bottle of baby oil, silly. The other one, about what you’d do if you won the lottery.) I won’t bore you with a long list of the things I’d do or buy or see or consume with my money, but I can tell you this:

There will be porn. Oh, yes. There will be porn.

The Industrial Revolution Meets The Intestinal Revolution

2005-01-13T17:42:00.000-08:00

The company for which I work has installed in the men’s room a device that automatically sprays a mist of scented air freshener at timed intervals of about two minutes. My narcissistic belief that the odors emanating from my bum have in some way created the need for this machine have my emotions alternating between self-disgust and self-pride. I am in no way prepared to take full credit for the foul men’s room stench, but I am aware that my semi-regular trips to Starbucks and McDonald’s sometimes result in the spawning of some rather malodorous buttfish. As they say, “Garbage in, garbage out.” (Except now my “garbage out” will smell like a spring meadow.)

The company has recently enacted drastic budget cuts, and yet it still found enough spare nickels to justify the expense for an automatic air freshener squirter --- as opposed to, say, sticking a can of Lysol in the crapper. Rest assured, though: if I don’t get a bonus this year because the company spent my money on the Destinkifyer 2000 (or whatever it’s called), there will be a rebellion. I’ll go to the all-you-can-eat Indian food buffet down the street, load up on curries and asparagus and stinky cauliflower dishes, then I’ll lay the mother of all cable in that bathroom, disconnect the automatic squirter and run like a motherfucker, screaming “Eat it, bastards! Taste the pain!” all the way home.

I presume the installation of this device is partially the result of an ultimatum by Julio, the building maintenance man assigned to our floor. I can’t count how many times I have emerged from a stall to find Julio changing the paper towels or restocking the ass gaskets in an adjoining stall. We look at each other. He knows I am the reason he is having to breathe through his mouth. And then what do you say? How do you apologize to someone whose job requires him to smell your shits?

“Hey, Julio,” I say.

“Hey, Mr. Danny,” he says. “Another Filet O’Fish for lunch today?”

“Wow. You can tell that just by smelling my poo? That’s awesome.”

“Awesome for you maybe. Very, very bad for me.”

“Oh, come on. It’s not that bad.”

“Si, in the janitor’s lounge you are the man we call ‘Señor Crap.’ Only reason I work on this floor is because I drew the shortest straw.”

“You guys call me ‘Señor Crap?’ Seriously?”

“Seriously. Your shit smells like rotten tamales. You need to eat more fruits and vegetables.”

“Fuck you, Julio. What are you, my mother?”

“No, I’m the guy who has to smell your shits everyday. And fuck you, too, Señor Crap.”

What Part of “Keep Your Penis Out Of Other Peoples’ Faces” Didn’t You Understand?

2005-01-12T20:25:00.000-08:00

The ongoing saga of Left-Handed, Power-Hitting Son’s self-discovery has taken a rather disturbing turn in the direction of all-inclusiveness. When you’re four, your penis is the fleshy, pliable equivalent of a new bike, and you therefore want everyone to see it up close – except instead of showing them a Schwinn, you’re sticking your little Johnson in the faces of friends, family members and, on one particularly embarrassing occasion, the guy who works in the small home electronics section of Target.

Hot Wife and I have tried strenuously to make our son understand that his penis is “just for him,” but he hasn’t yet been able to comprehend the socially unacceptable nature of his auto-manipulation. To him, it might as well be a watch or a toy fire truck or a cool seashell. To everyone else, the sight of a young boy with a tiny peter that has been flicked and contorted into a state of bright redness is at once pathetically cute, entirely harmless and disturbing on a par with images of humping dogs. We haven’t yet had people threaten to call Child Protective Services, but can it possibly be far behind?

Ground Zero for our son’s devotion to sharing his penis with the world at large is his nightly bath --- the same bath he takes with his little sister, who is even more ignorant of the issue of penis etiquette than he is, if that’s even possible. For the past several nights, my son has escalated the intolerability of his behavior by attempting to engage his sister in celebrating the wonder and splendor of his tiny pecker. He stands like a superhero, with his hands on his hips, his little unit swinging to and fro, and his face seeming to say, “Behold, young lass! Behold my man parts!”

Her natural curiosity then motivates her to reach out and mimic the way she sees her brother manipulating his penis --- flicking, punching, pinching, balancing bath toys on it, etc. It’s a horrible sight that Hot Wife and I react to with unambiguous rage and admonitions that the children keep their hands and their genitals to themselves. We repeatedly tell Left-Handed, Power-Hitting Son that other people may not touch him where his bathing suit goes, but the look he wears when we’re telling him this is the one you might expect a four-year-old to make if you were describing to him how a company prepares for its IPO.

Yeah, I know --- it’s completely normal. That’s what everyone says. “Oh, my boys humped empty paper towel rollers until they were old enough to drive.” People tell me this kind of thing all the time and my response is uniformly that seeing if your wiener will fit into openings of various sizes may be normal but contorting it into the shape of the Greek letter Omega certainly can’t be considered acceptable behavior by even the most earthy child psychologists.

That’s why Hot Wife and I have taken the drastic step of fitting our son with stainless steel underpants that are held closed with a padlock. The “wonderpants” are removed only when the child has to tinkle, defecate and bathe --- all of which are done in the presence of a parent and/or a security camera.

Drastic? Perhaps.

Effective? Your damn skippy.

There is no way the kid is going to be able to stick his penis into someone’s face unless he learns how to weld. And everyone knows the Jews don’t weld.

It’s None Of Your Fucking Business Why I Want To Cancel My Subscription

2005-01-10T19:54:00.000-08:00

At what point did it become acceptable for customer service representatives to attempt to pry private, personal information from people? Like I’m really going to tell some dipshit in a New Delhi call center why I want to cancel my subscription to satellite radio or internet access or that raunchy porn magazine, which was bought for me as a prank by my buddy and somehow found its way into the hands of my children, who now believe every woman has her pubes shaved into the shape of a butterfly.

“Hi, my name is Bindhu,” the woman on the phone says. “How can I be of most excellent and golden service to you today?”

“Hi, Bindhu. I want to cancel my subscription.”

“Oh, well that is a tragedy sent directly from the heavens, sir. Please tell me why you wish to stifle the precious gift of our service. Have we done something to bring harm to your family name?”

“I’d rather not get into this. Can you please just push whatever buttons you have to push so my Visa doesn’t get dinged again next month?”

“Certainly, sir. No need to get upset. I am a woman of peace and tranquility. Please, what is your name?”

“My name is Daniel. Daniel Evans.”

I hear the sound of Bindhu’s fingernails clicking against a computer keyboard. In the background I can hear the voices of her call center brothers and sisters. It sounds like a real fun place to work.

“OK, Mr. Daniel Evans,” Bindhu says. “I have your information in front of me. Just a few questions. What is your mother’s maiden name?”

“Bartenfinkle.”

“Do you have any distinguishing marks or deformities?”

“Yes, I have two webbed toes on my left foot.”

“I see. At what age were you when you lost your virginity?”

“I beg your pardon.”

“How old were you when you first experienced the loving caress of a woman?”

“Bindhu, what does that have to do with my subscription?”

“Please try not to yell, Mr. Daniel Evans. Our company uses this information to serve our subscribers better. Now please, what was your age when your dipstick first became useful in the way God himself intended?”

“I was 18.”

“Eighteen. My, Mr. Daniel Evans, that certainly is late, isn’t it? Was there something wrong with you? Were you flaccid?”

“No, Bindhu. Not flaccid. Just waiting for the right girl, you know.”

“Did it have something to do with your webbed toes, sir? Perhaps the girls were scared that they might become pregnant with a duck.”

“I’ve had enough of this. Can I speak to your manager please?”

“I’m sorry, but our manager doesn’t speak to deformed people with bird feet. Besides, I’m nearly finished, sir. Just one more question.”

“What? What is it, Bindhu? Do you want to know how big my penis is?”

“No, sir. That won’t be necessary. I was just wondering if you could please take a picture of your webbed toes and e-mail it to me. I think the ladies in the lunchroom would get a good laugh out of it.”

“Go to hell, Bindhu.”

This Little Piggie Isn’t Such A Little Piggie After All

2005-01-09T21:10:00.000-08:00

Let’s not make a big deal out of this, OK? Let’s not point and laugh and stare and giggle at the freak. And let’s not throw pity at the poor dude with the webbed toes, for fuck’s sake, because I don’t need people feeling sorry for me. Let’s not do any of that, OK? Let’s just not.

Yes, that’s what you read: I have two webbed toes. The second and third toes of my left foot are about 50% webbed, meaning the skin between the two has grow together to form what I like to call a “supertoe.” When you look at them from the top, you might not even be able to tell that I have such a physical deformity. But if I have my shoes off and my legs crossed, you might get a look at my supertoe from the bottom and then, well, there’s no question at all. Once I took my shoe off at the beach and this middle-aged redhead caught a glimpse of my supertoe and face-planted right into the sand.

You’re thinking of a joke right now, aren’t you? You were about to say something about me being a great swimmer or greeting passersby with a “quack” instead of a “hello” or about my favorite hockey team being the Mighty Ducks. Spare me. Please. I’ve heard them all before. Real fucking funny.

Sometimes when I’m looking at it, I think of how easy it would be to just grab a box-cutter or a pair of nail clippers and separate my supertoe into two distinct digits, the way normal peoples’ feet are. But then I contemplate the pain such self surgery might inflict --- pain so raw and deep that it makes my teeth clinch and my butt pucker just thinking of it --- and I talk myself out of it. Plus the risk of a serious infection and gangrene would obliterate my goal of playing professional basketball.

So I go through life as a deformed man.

I endure the jokes about the Special Olympics and flying south for the winter. I acquiesce when, at parties, people offer to buy me beers in exchange for a quick glance at my supertoe. What am I, a freak? Some kind of leper or social outcast? No, I’m none of those things. I’m just a man --- a man with eight regular toes and two that just couldn’t bear to be apart from each other (kind of like podiatry’s version of Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen).

Let’s not make a huge deal about it, OK? Let’s just not.

The Happiest Place On Earth (Even For People With Severed Fingers and Huge Space Ranger Asses)

2005-01-07T17:40:00.000-08:00

Finger Sandwiches
I never met Walt Disney and I therefore can’t tell you how he intended to have his vision for Disneyland live on after he was gone. But if old Walt truly believed that having people with severed fingers sell $7 turkey sandwiches was the right way to visually represent the splendor of the Magic Kingdom, he was one sick motherfucker.

We got to Disneyland around 11:30 and all I’d eaten by then was a Starbucks cinnamon twist and a venti latte. I was famished and when I saw the little snack shop out of the corner of my eye, I bolted for it like Snow White in hot pursuit of one of her midget friends. In the cooler was a small arrangement of sandwiches, and I zeroed-in on the turkey immediately.

“Can I help you?” the middle-aged Hispanic woman behind the counter asked.

“Yeah. I’ll take a turkey sandwich.”

“OK. Can I get you any chips or Snapple with that?” (They’re always trying to up-sell you at Disneyland, as if paying SEVENTY-FIVE DOLLARS to get in isn’t enough of a shock to your system and the savings you had put aside to buy porn.)

“No, thanks. Just the sandwich.”

The woman fetches my breakfast from the cooler, punches some keys on the register and tells me my total comes to $7.34. I hand her a five and three ones. She sets my money on the register and begins to withdraw my change from the drawer. As she does so, I notice that the first two knuckles on her left index finger --- the very finger she’s using to slide the quarters and dimes out of their respective compartments --- are totally and completely gone.

“Jesus H. Fucking Christ on a stick!” I say. “What the hell is that?”

“It’s my finger.”

“If that’s a finger, I’m Buzz Lightyear and this wristwatch is my secret link to Star Command. That is NOT a finger, missy.”

“It’s not, sir?!” she says, waving her emaciated little stump in my face. “If it’s not a finger, what is it?”

“You tell me, sister. What is it? Is this some kind of twisted little Disney inside joke? Do all of the cast members with severed digits get oral from the Mad Hatter or a free funnel cake or something? Or is this your personal homage to Captain Hook?”

“None of the above, dipshit,” she says. “This is the finger I’m going to use to put mayo and mustard on your sandwich.”

With that she squirts a long dollop of Miracle Whip directly onto her wannabe finger and runs it across the top layer of turkey. My stomach begins to feel warm and queasy. If she doesn’t remove her little piggy from my overpriced late breakfast this instant, someone with nine and a half fingers is going to be mopping up vomit.

Time To Locate The Star Command Salad Bar, Space Ranger Starla
We made it to the 3:15 Buzz Lightyear show in Tomorrowland. We’ve seen the show before, but much like the collection of Barney videos we have at Evans World Headquarters, Barney’s Biggest Fan and Left-Handed, Power-Hitting Son have no problem watching it again and again and again, until they’ve memorized the dialogue and dance steps and can recite the whole skit in their sleep.

The show was somewhat different this time, however, because the cast member dressed in a green Space Ranger outfit had a huge ass. Taking a calculated risk, I asked Hot Wife to confirm my assessment of the junk in Starla’s trunk.

“Honey, is it me or does Starla have a really big butt?”

“What are you talking about?” she said. “Put your dinagling back in your pants and watch the show, idiot.”

“I’m trying to watch the show, but Starla’s big old ass keeps blocking my view of Zurg.”

Hot Wife just rolled her eyes. I saw then that it was incumbent on me to speak up. I stood up, put both hands high in the sky and said, “HOLD IT! HOLD IT! STOP THE SHOW! HOLD ON FOR A SECOND!”

The music stopped. Buzz and Zurg and Starla stopped dancing. All eyes were on me.

“I’m sorry, but Starla’s big fat ass keeps blocking my view of the show. Mr. Lightyear, is there a gym at Star Command?”

“Yes, we have a small fitness center,” Buzz said. “A few elliptical trainers and treadmills – that sort of thing. And a juice bar.”

“Good,” I said. “I mean tell me if I’m wrong, but don’t you think Starla could afford to drop about 20 pounds of ass? Look at that thing, sir. Talk about ‘To infinity and beyond.’”

“He does have a point, Starla,” Buzz says, turning his attention to the owner of the outer-galaxy’s version of Shirley Hemphill. “Perhaps you might be of better service in the fight against Zurg if you cut down on the Pop Tarts and Cheetos and increase your cardio.”

“Yeah, Starla,” I said. “I spent two months’ salary getting into this park and if I had known my hard-earned money was going to get me a front-row seat to look directly into your oversized caboose, I would never have gotten off of the Monorail. Now drop and give me 20!”

You know the rest. Starla runs from the stage in tears. Security escorts me from the park. We make it home in time for SportsCenter. And I go to bed happy.

If It’s Such A Small World After All, Why Do I Have To Pay $50 To Get In?

2005-01-05T18:29:00.000-08:00

I don’t want to just come right out and say where we are taking the kids tomorrow because you just never know. My four-year-old son is pretty web savvy and there’s no guarantee that he’s not reading this right now (and if you are, dude, please don’t ask mommy to tell you what “fuck” and “shit” mean --- I’ll tell you later).

To maintain the veil of secrecy (so as not to have to answer a litany of questions between now and the moment we get to this secret, ridiculously expensive place), I’ll describe it for you:

1. It is in Anaheim, CA

2. It has been called, “The Happiest Place On Earth” (and no, it’s not that titty bar near Angels Stadium, although that place is quite happy if you bring enough one-dollar bills and pay this really ugly chick with a discolored prosthetic leg and a mouthful of gold teeth $20 to give your neighbor a lap dance and admonish her to “make it dirty.”) (And son, if you’re still reading this, a lap dance is what mommies and daddies do after little boys and girls go to sleep and there’s nothing good on TV.)

3. There are large, happy-faced rodents and dogs and princesses there who pose for pictures with visitors and scare the bejesus out of little boys and girls who think the animals are going to eat them or drag them back to Toon Town and make them their bitch.

4. You get to wait two hours in line to go on a rickety old ride that lasts 90 seconds and renders you either soaking wet, scared shitless, bitter for having waited so long for such a stupid ride or, in the case of one park visitor who went on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad last year, dead and shredded into tiny little pieces like bad carnitas.

5. When it gets dark, you get to watch the Main Street Electrical Parade, where everyone else is looking at the brightly colored floats and you start ogling all of the aforementioned princesses as they ride by, fantasizing what kind of deep sea trouble you could get into if you could just get 10 minutes alone with The Little Mermaid (Son, if you’re still reading this, I’m talking about playing Chutes and Ladders with her. That’s all. Just good, clean fun. Now turn the computer off and go to bed.).

6. Every time you get on a new ride, some uppity female voice says, “Remain Seated Please. Permanecer Sentado Por Favor.” By the time you’ve ridden Space Mountain for the eighth time, you’re like, “OK, shut up already! What are you, my mother?”

7. As you stand in line for Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, you can make wild bets with your friends about specifically what drugs Walt Disney was taking when he developed the concept for the ride and specifically what mental disorders he was suffering. According to my well-placed sources in the psychology world, the answers are high-grade LSD, Miller High Life, a Filet O’ Fish with extra tartar sauce, paranoid schizophrenia and a belief that he was being chased by a cricket wearing a top hat and carrying an umbrella (there is no name for the latter in the DSM-IV, but we have deemed it “Jiminiphobia”). (And son, if you’re still reading this, “LSD” is another way to say Mormon. Didn’t I tell you to go to bed?).

The House at Poop Corner

2005-01-03T20:28:00.000-08:00

There is a knock at the door.

“Who is it?”

“Honey, it’s me. Are you OK?”

“I’m fine.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m taking a dump.”

“You’ve been in there for a long time. Is everything alright?”

“Everything’s fine dear. Can you just give me a few minutes please?”

“OK. Bye.”

A moment later, there is another knock at the door.

“Who is it?”

“It’s me, daddy.”

“What do you need, bud?”

“Well, I just want to know if you wanted to play with me.”

“Yeah, I do. I really do. Can you just give me a couple of minutes?”

“Why can’t you play now?”

“Because I’m going poo-poo, buddy.”

“OK. Come and find me when you’re done, OK?”

“OK. Bye.”

A few moments later, another knock.

“Who is it?”

“Daddy!”

“What do you need, peanut?”

“Daddy! Barney!”

“Honey, I’ll put Barney on for you in a minute, OK?”

“Noooo! Barney, daddy! Barney!”

“Sweetheart, daddy’s going poo-poo. Can you go ask mommy to help you with the Barney tape?”

“Nooooo! Daddy do it! Barney!”

“Barney’s dead, honey. Daddy killed him with a chainsaw.”

“Waaaaaaaaaaah!”

A minute later, another knock.

“WHO THE FUCK IS IT?!”

“Daniel, did you just tell our daughter that you killed Barney?”

“YES! GO AWAY!”

“Why? Why would you do that to her?”

“BECAUSE, WOMAN! I’M TRYING TO TAKE A SHIT!”

“Lovely. I guess your bowel movement is important enough to scar our daughter for life.”

“IT IS! NOW GO AWAY AND TELL EVERYONE TO STOP BOTHERING ME!”

A minute later, I glance over and find that there is no toilet paper. I holler out for assistance, but no one will come. They don’t want me to yell at them. They’re smart.

A minute later, I realize that I’m going to have to wipe my butt with my underpants.

I’m All, “Yeah, You’re A Total Shitwad”

2005-01-03T17:53:00.000-08:00

I know this woman who is both a licensed clinical social worker and a complete dumbfuck weirdo. I find that to be a bit of a disturbing combination because when you talk to someone who is trained to deliver mental health care, you like to think that what they say is coming from a place of cognitive and emotional understanding. Yet this person, this dumbfuck weirdo, seems unable to comprehend even the basic tenets of interpersonal communication, let alone how to effectively read minds.

Today she was asking me to help her with something meaningless. She prefaced her request with a bit of a background story, and as the telling of this story droned on and on, I apparently began to wear the look of someone who couldn’t give two shits about what she was saying (I do that sometimes when I’m forced to listen to nonessential gibberish and self-congratulatory jibjab).

HER: “…and so what he asked me to do was have us work up just a simple description of how Tab X goes into Slot Y and forms this unbreakable bond, kind of like that old commercial where the guy Super Glues his hard hat to a metal beam and then hangs on for dear life. Remember that? Oh my God, that was so funny.”

ME: [Silence.]

HER: “You’re like, ‘Yeah, whatever.’”

ME: “No, I’m not like ‘Yeah, whatever.’” I was thinking. And don’t tell me what I’m ‘like.’ You don’t know me. Just shut your fucking mouth for a second.”

I have never known anyone who was so uncomfortable with silence, as if the flapping of her gums created the oxygen for all of planet earth and if she were to stop merely long enough to take a breath or pick that big piece of broccoli out of her teeth, life on earth would perish instantaneously and then she would never be able to buy that Kate Spade bag she’s been eyeing. The bitch.

[I will pause here to apologize profusely to those of you who are offended by profanity. It has recently come to my attention that my parents and some of my friends’ parents read this blog on a regular basis and I shudder to think that your image of poor, sweet, innocent little Danny Evans has been replaced by the image of a raging, potty-mouthed lunatic who shaves his eyebrows and can't keep his finger out of his nose and recently initiated a very public divorce with one of his toiletries. But, shit, I gotta be me.]

After I told her to shut up for a second so I could think, I asked her a few clarifying questions so that the bullshit hogwash she wanted me to write would be spot-on (I didn’t want there to be a rewrite, which would have necessitated another conversation with this shitwad and another 15 minutes during which I would be unable to take my eyes off of the offending broccoli).

She answered my questions with, “Oh, good questions. You’re all, ‘God, why can’t this idiot just tell me the whole story the first time around?’”

“No!” I holler. “I’m not all ‘God, why can’t this idiot just tell me the whole story the first time around?’ Will you please stop telling me what I’m ‘all!’ Don’t get me wrong – you ARE an idiot. But when I want you to know what I’m ‘all,’ I’ll tell you. I’ll say, ‘You know, fucknugget, I’m tired of your mouth. Zip it!’ And you know what else? You have a piece of broccoli the size of Des Moines in your teeth and I feel really sorry for that piece of broccoli because no poor vegetable should be subjected to your mouth for that long.”

An Open Letter To My Hair Gel

2005-01-01T10:39:00.000-08:00

Dear Dep Maximum Hold,

You know you’ve always been my favorite toiletry. There’s just no way to tell you how much all that we have been through together means to me. But sometimes people and their toiletries grow apart.

What I guess I’m trying to say is this: I think it’s time we both see other products.

Try not to cry, Hair Gel. We’ll always have our happy memories. You’ve ridden shotgun during virtually all of the watershed moments of my life. I applied you liberally the night of my senior prom, although you and I both knew the chances of reaching even first base with Wendy “The Maddog” Maduff that night were negligible at best. You stood by me all throughout the 1980s, supporting me when I alternately tried to style my hair like all of the members of Duran Duran, and that one time when I tried to mimic the radical hairdo of that fancypants singer from Flock of Seagulls. You never laughed. You never judged. You just…I don’t know…held.

And the night I married Hot Wife, you were right there under the stars with me, holding my yarmulke in place like a champ. I’ll never forget that. You weren't my Best Man, but you were definitely my Best Personal Grooming Article.

It feels funny to say this, Gelly, but I’ve found someone else. It’s a pomade. It understands that I’m in my mid-30s now and as my hairline recedes I’m going to need to do more creative things with my hair than just rubbing you through it and walking out the door. I need body. I need spirit. I need people to know that I don’t believe the wet look is still in vogue and that I don’t still harbor some twisted desire to look like Billy Idol.

Of all the breakups I've ever had with toiletries --- spray-on deodorant (not good for the environment), tooth-whitening strips (didn't work), Listerine (tasted like stale pig piss) --- this is by far the hardest on me, Gelly. You've done nothing wrong. We've just grown apart. We're different people now (well, you're not a person, you're an inanimate tube of chemicals and dye, but you know what I mean).

It's me. It's not you. Know that.

I wish you nothing but the best, Hair Gel. Good luck, and thanks for everything.

Love,
Danny

My First TV Script

2004-12-30T13:32:00.000-08:00

HUMAN WRITES
“The Arm Fart”

CAST
DR. JOHNNY FEVER..............Daniel Evans
HOT WIFE............................Hot Wife
WEAK-BLADDERED DOG......Weak-Bladdered Dog

ACT ONE

SCENE ONE

INT. BATHROOM - DAY
[SCENE: DR. JOHNNY FEVER IS IN THE SHOWER. HOT WIFE IS BRUSHING HER TEETH NEARBY AT THE SINK. WEAK-BLADDERED DOG IS SITTING AT HOT WIFE’S FEET, WAITING FOR HER TO DROP SOME TOOTHPASTE ON THE FLOOR SO SHE CAN LAP IT UP.]

DR. JOHNNY FEVER: [shouting slightly to be heard over Hot Wife’s Sonicare toothbrush] How about this one? [puts his hand under his arm and does a chunky-sounding arm fart]

HOT WIFE: [stops brushing for a moment] Nah... too conservative. [resumes brushing]

DR. JOHNNY FEVER: OK, how about this one? [puts hand under arm again, omits a slightly longer and much louder arm fart]

HOT WIFE: [stops brushing for a moment] Better, but not quite perfect. [resumes brushing]

DR. JOHNNY FEVER: Alright, check this one out... [rattles the shower door with a calamitous arm fart long and loud enough to set off car alarms in the street outside]

HOT WIFE: [drops toothbrush] Fuckin’ A, Dr. Fever! Now THAT’S what I’m talkin’ about!

DR. JOHNNY FEVER: Great. There’s just one problem, honey.

HOT WIFE: What?

DR. JOHNNY FEVER: That one wasn’t my arm. It was my ass.

WEAK-BLADDERED DOG: Arf!

END

Happy New Year. Let's Watch Some Porn.

2004-12-29T15:00:00.000-08:00

A new year is drawing nigh and you know what that means --- it’s time to create a list of lies to tell ourselves about how much cleaner and more excitingly we’ll live our lives in 2005.

It is generally not my practice to make New Year’s resolutions because, well, I’m practically perfect in every way. But for the sake of fun (and make no mistake, brothers and sisters, this is going to be a fucking HOOT AND A HALF), here is a list of things I am going to try strenuously to do, see, consume, avoid, learn, enjoy, quit, improve and understand in The Year Of Our Lord, Two Thousand Five:

Ahem.

1. I will try to carefully and neatly fold my toilet paper rather than crumpling it into a big wad before applying it to my bum. It has occurred to me this year that crumpling is just such a hurried and unattractive technique, more appropriate perhaps for a down-and-dirty construction site port-a-potty dump than my normal, leisurely Sunday afternoon bowel evacuation, whereupon I gather my sports page and my coffee and my industrial-sized can of lemon-zest-scented Lysol and I don’t stand up until my legs have fallen asleep or my sphincter has been rendered weak and exhausted and powerless --- whichever comes first.

2. I will seek out and obliterate those who post comments on this site anonymously. People, if I can share the most intimate details of my personal hygiene and my children’s television habits and sordid personal history with you, the least you can do is tell me your name so I know who to talk about in my therapy sessions.

3. I will endeavor to drink the recommended eight glasses of water each day. As it stands now, I drink approximately .6 glasses of water each day, which is derived from the melted ice in my 64-ounce Diet Coke. It is my sincere hope that increased consumption of water will change the color of my pee-pee from dark amber (think cream soda) to a hue more closely resembling very weak lemonade.

4. I will find the IT hack who prevented me from viewing a number of really good blogs at work --- INCLUDING MY OWN! --- and fart in his cubicle.

5. I will gain 10 pounds. Of muscle. In stark and sometimes shocking contrast to the national obesity epidemic, my own body weight closely resembles that of a health five-year-old girl. In fact, were it not for my prominent Jew nose and my impressive nether bits, I would practically be invisible when I turn sideways. And in much the same way that heavy folks try every ridiculous diet to shed pounds, my own efforts to bulk up have inspired everything from rapid-fire McGriddle eating to two-gallon protein shakes made with chalky, indigestible powders made from the dried and ground gizzards of South African tzi-tzi flies. By this time next year I intend to have doubled my maximum bench press (which would get me to about 45 pounds, including the bar) and to be able to look in the mirror and see a chest that sticks out farther than my Adam’s apple.

6. I will write at least one television script. In what has become a regular infringement on my own pattern of self-deprecation and my strongly-held belief that I was put on this earth to write brochure copy, I have been told by more than one person on more than one occasion that if I don’t pursue a career path that leads through a television studio sometime in the near future, my life will have been an utter waste. To satisfy those busy-bodies and put an end to their threats, I will at least investigate the possibility of transferring my immense and considerable gift of humor, the likes of which have never been seen before, to the small screen. “Tonight on a very special Desperate Housewives, that one blonde chick with the huge fake tits learns how to blow a snot rocket and accidentally kills the gardener she’s been schtuping on the side. Meanwhile, the emaciated red-head who used to be on Beverly Hills 90210 eats her first McGriddle and has an orgasmic experience that sends the whole neighborhood into anaphylactic shock. That’s tonight on Desperate Housewives, at 9, 8 Central, right here on ABC.”

7. I will supplement my income by making bets with the other T-ball dads that my son can hit the ball farther than their sons. See, Left-Handed Power-Hitting Son has a gift when it comes to T-ball. He doesn’t look like much when he steps up to the plate, but you should hear the parents ooh and aah when my boy hits the ball over the heads of the kids picking their noses in centerfield and all the way out to the drinking fountain, which is next the parking lot, which is a good 500 feet from home plate. I’ve heard grumblings that some parents think the kid is on steroids because he hits it so far, which is a ludicrous claim because my son won’t even drink cough medicine when he’s hacking like a sick duck in estrus, so taking a needle full of some anabolic cocktail in the right buttcheek would be totally out of the question. A new batch of rookie dads will trot their little droolers out to the T-ball field this summer, so I’ll just mosey over to the father of the biggest one and go, “Hey, Phil, $200 says my kid hits it farther than little Butch there.” He’ll laugh, make the bet and then cry when my kid hits it twice as far as his pride and joy. Happens all the time. The way I see it, I should be driving a new Benz by the all-star break and living in a 30,000-square-foot bungalow at the beach by season’s end.

8. I will kill Barney. I will kill him and eat his stupid-ass purple liver with some fava beans and a nice key-ann-tee. And then I will kill him again.

9. I will take control of my own destiny. Like when my boss comes over to my desk and tells me he wants me to rewrite that brochure copy, I will pretend that my appendix is bursting. And when Hot Wife asks me to do the dishes, I will pretend that I wear the pants in the family and say no, honey, you’re the woman and it’s the woman’s job to wash dishes and it’s my job to sit here and watch this football game until you bring me a chicken pot pie, so hurry up and get on those dishes, chop chop.

10. I will learn to be a more patient and courteous driver. I will keep my hands at the 10:00 and 2:00 positions on the steering wheel at all times, unless I’m flipping off the bastard in the lowered El Camino for cutting me off or using the index, ring or pinky finger on my right hand to extricate a stubborn and very crispy booger. I will keep my eyes on the road at all times, unless I’m trying to find a good song on the radio or trying to read the chicken scratch on the cardboard signs the homeless guys by my office are holding or looking at the girl in the Jetta next to me who is driving and talking on the phone and putting on mascara at the same time. And I will allow one car length in front of me for each 10 miles an hour I am driving, unless I’m in a hurry to get somewhere, like the supermarket or Taco Bell or that place over there, in which case I will revert to my old familiar tactic of allowing barely enough space for an ATM card between me and the car in front of me.

11. I will change my underwear every day, unless I’m going commando.

12. I will watch more porn. God, I love porn. I just wish there was a better name for it because “porn” sounds a lot to me like “corn” and there’s nothing sexy about corn, is there? No, there isn’t. Corn is for eating at summer picnics with watermelon and barbecued chicken and porn is for watching and contorting your face and hiding before your sister walks in and has the image of you contorting your face like that burned in her memory forever.

12a. I will come up with a better word for “porn.”

12b. I will make a sign to hang on the door that says, “I’m busy watching porn. Please come back later.”

Michael Jordan Is My Homeboy

2004-12-29T11:23:00.000-08:00

When I was a senior in high school, I began writing for the newspaper in my hometown. I covered mostly small potatoes – high school and community college sports. The work was by no means glamorous, but for a budding reporter with no experience whatsoever, it was the perfect start. I took it seriously and believed sincerely at the time that my writing was as good as it was ever going to be – although when I look back at some of my old clips, I can barely get through the first paragraph without cringing at the klutzy, amateurish prose.

The paper couldn’t pay me for the work I did but on occasion offered to score me a press pass so I could cover professional sporting events in Los Angeles. Naturally, I was thrilled with that arrangement. My good fortune enabled me to come in close contact with many of the city’s larger-than-life sports heroes of the late 1980s – Bo Jackson, Marcus Allen, Orel Hershiser, Tommy Lasorda, Wayne Gretzky. Each time I got near one of these athletes, I became hopelessly paralyzed by their star power. I could almost never muster the gonads to ask even a single question because I was so star-struck and in awe. I merely stuck my little tape recorder out and waited for the athletes to answer the other reporters’ questions.

In 1989, I begged my editor to let me cover a Los Angeles Clippers game against the Chicago Bulls, an opportunity that would give me a chance to talk to my hero, Michael Jordan. He agreed and on a rainy night in February I drove my shit brown Ford Granada to the Los Angeles Sports Arena. The Bulls won the game handily, with Jordan torching the Clippers all night long. But a Clippers player named Ron Harper came up with a strong effort in defeat, scoring 36 points. In the Clippers locker room after the game, Harper was predictably asked if his big night was somehow motivated by playing against the likes of Jordan. He coyly paid homage to Jordan’s greatness but said he plays hard every night. I saw my lead in his answer. I was going to ask Jordan if he got excited to play against Ron Harper.

As I walked through the underground tunnel that led from the Clippers locker room to the visiting team’s locker room, I chastised myself. If I had an opportunity to speak to Michael Jordan and blew it, I would never be able to live with myself. This was the seminal moment of my life – as a reporter, as a man. I had to come through for myself.

A throng of 15 reporters stood waiting at Jordan’s locker. He emerged fully dressed – a stark contrast from the habit of most professional athletes, who walk around butt naked, scratching their balls and flicking their teammates in the bare ass with their towels. When Jordan appeared, my palms began to sweat. My heart raced. I became light-headed and feared for a moment that I was about to shit my clothes in the presence of the greatest athlete in the history of sport.

The beat writers from LA and Chicago began to question Jordan about the game and his play as if he was just another schmendrick off the street. Did they not know who they were speaking to? I didn’t even hear his answers. I was fighting nerves and paralysis and the overwhelming urge to ask him to autograph my forehead in permanent ink.

Finally there was an uncomfortable silence – a common occurrence when reporters have asked an athlete every possible question about every fathomable element of a game – and it appeared that the opportunity was about to vanish. I pounced.

“Um, Michael,” I said, my voice quivering, “Ron Harper said he tends to get a little more, you know, pumped up when he plays against you. Do you get pumped up to play against him, too?”

Silence. The heads of the seasoned reporters from the LA Times and Chicago Tribune swiveled in my direction, perhaps wondering who let the towel boy in here to do interviews? My eyes stayed on Jordan’s, praying to God and Ronald McDonald and John Wooden and Buddha and whoever else would listen that Jordan wouldn’t laugh me out of the building. He sat there, clearly seeing that he held my life in his hands, and then he answered:

“Well, Ron and I have played against each other many times and I don’t think my game changes that much,” Michael Jordan said. To me!

I smiled.

He answered! I did it! I spoke to No. 23! And he spoke back! In your face, bitches!

When I returned to the newspaper office the next day, my editor sat me down. Seems someone read my name off my press pass and complained that my questions were too sophomoric. I wasn’t allowed to cover anymore Clippers game after that, which was fine with me because the Clippers SUCK! and a serious journalist like me, who had interviewed MICHAEL MOTHERFUCKING JORDAN!, was more interested in the Lakers anyway.

Everything's Coming Up Barney

2004-12-28T16:34:00.000-08:00

This one time when I was a kid, my Barney got stuck in a Barney and I couldn’t get it out for, like, an entire Barney. I mean it was completely and totally Barney. Talk about embarrassing.

This is the world I live in. This is the gibberish that spews from my daughter’s precious lips. When she can think of nothing to say or no appropriate answer to a question, the default response is “Barney.”

“Honey, what do you want for lunch today?”

“Barney.”

Given the very visceral negative reaction I have to the seven-foot psychotically happy dinosaur with the yellow toenails and the totally pussified prepubescent voice, I am not at all fond that this is the word my child has chosen to fill in the blanks in her speech development. But my efforts to correct the problem have been futile at best.

“Sweetheart, can you please stop playing with your tushie when I’m trying to change your diaper?”

“Barney.”

Some may say my daughter’s tendency to summon the name of her beloved in this way is merely a harmless youthful game, a pattern she’ll soon grow out of. To those people I say this: mind your own fucking business. As the example at the beginning of this entry illustrates with resounding clarity, her failure to correct this shortcoming quicklike will no doubt affect her ability to communicate, which will inhibit her chances of finding a rich doctor to marry, which will compromise my chances of retiring early, which will doom me to a lifetime writing brochure copy. See, this is about me, folks. Me! That’s who!

“Has anyone seen the very sharp, dangerous implement that was just sitting here?”

“Barney.”

I have no choice but to follow through on my plan to kill the bastard, as described here:

http://humanwrites.blogspot.com/2004/10/purple-haze.html

How To Dismantle A Jewish Newborn’s Penis

2004-12-27T10:28:00.000-08:00

I’m going to become an uncle again tomorrow. Hot Wife’s sister, Diga, is going to have a C-section at around noon on Tuesday and there will soon be a new baby boy chillin’ at our family functions. We’re all very excited about his arrival, although my giddiness was tempered somewhat this weekend when Hot Wife told me I’d need to take a day off next week so we could all drive down to San Diego for the baby’s bris (which is Hebrew for “Come on, everyone, let’s all watch the scary, demented rabbi take a rusty old Ginsu knife to the poor little baby’s wiener.”).

I have no idea where the gory, twisted, morbid, inhumane ritual came from, but it is custom for Jews to gather ‘round the crotch of a Jewish baby boy on the eighth day of his life and watch as his tiny little newborn penis is ceremoniously pulled, clamped and mutilated. The last bris I attended was that of my own son a little more than four years ago and I swore on that day that I would never attend another without first consuming three tumblers full of a potent grain alcohol. Here’s why:

When Left-Handed, Power-Hitting Son was eight days old, all of our friends and family gathered in the home of my in-laws for his bris. While the others milled about downstairs, presumably talking about what a perfect day it was to mutilate a helpless baby’s genitals, Hot Wife, our son, the mohel (pronounced “moyel,” it means a rabbi who is trained to cut penises for $350 a pop) and I gathered in an upstairs bedroom for the undercard. The mohel unvelcroed my son’s diaper and began to inspect the poor kid’s penis.

“How’s it look, doc?” I asked. “Pretty stacked, huh? Just like the old man.”

The mohel then unzipped his doctor bag and withdrew a syringe with a needle long and shiny enough to make even the most hardened heroin addict run like a bat out of hell for the nearest methadone clinic. He then began to stick the needle into various areas of my son’s foreskin, injecting it with an anesthetic and causing my toes to curl and my butthole to pucker. I don’t suppose I ever really knew my own threshold for psychological torture, but when that motherfucker was repeatedly needling my new baby boy’s schmuck, causing the child to cry and wail like a baby seal being struck by the business end of a square-point shovel, I would have done anything to make him stop. I would have eaten maggots and drunken a gallon of pig piss and worked as a lifeguard at the nudist colony for Morbidly Obese Octogenarians for Christ for the rest of my life to spare my son the pain of having his penis punctured by that mean, mean man and his Syringe of Death.

When my son’s money maker was properly anesthetized, we carried him downstairs for the main event. A microphone was lowered down from the ceiling and a man in a tuxedo began to speak into it.

“Ladieeeeees and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to this afternoon’s main even,” he said as a ring card girl in a sequined bikini walked behind him holding a sign that said Round 1. “In the blue corner, weighing in at eight pounds, two ounces…The Master of Meconium…The Baron of Breastmilk…Little…Baby….Evansssssssss!”

[Applause. Whistling.]

“And in the red corner, weighing in at one hundred and ninety two pounds, with a record of 48 successful penis mutilations and no knockouts…The Sultan of Slice…The Weenie Whacker himself…Rabbi…Shmooly…Schwartzenfinklesteinbergowitz!”

[Boos. Hisses. Projectile tomatoes.]

My son and the mohel meet in the center of the ring. The announcer tells them something about wanting a good, clean bris. He asks my son not to pee on anyone and then tells them to return to their corners and wait for the bell.

Ding ding!

The bris starts benignly, with lots of praying and chanting in Hebrew. My son is stoic, laying there cooing and staring at the ceiling. Then the mohel goes on the offensive, undiapering the boy and applying a series of stainless steel clamps to the poor kid’s anesthetized foreskin. While he clamps, he prays – fucking showoff.

My son responds with a combination – kicking his wee legs and screaming at the top of his lungs – but the mohel isn’t fazed. He applies a funny little contraption to the clamped-off section of dick skin and then produces the instrument that will deliver the knockout blow – a scalpel.

The crowd gasps. The child wails. The mohel moves in for the kill.

Slice! Off goes the foreskin! The child is officially a Jew! Mazel Tov!

The mohel isn’t finished yet though, folks. He wraps the decapitated section of the child’s unit in a piece of white gauze. He walks over and places it into the hand of the father.

“Bury this,” he says.

And with that, the father’s legs turn to jelly. He’s down! The father is down! He’s passed out, ladies and gentlemen! What a spectacular turn of events!

The referee gets down on one knee over the father and begins to count: 1…2…3…4…5…6…He’s not getting up, folks!...7…8…9…10! 10! [Ding ding!] It’s over! The bris is over! The winner and still champion…The Father of Foreskin…Rabbi… Shmooly…Schwartenfinklestein!

When I awoke, there was a cold compress on the back of my neck and a pool of vomit at my feet.

Wanting to be a model Jew, I followed the rabbi’s orders. I went home and buried my son’s foreskin under a red rose bush in the backyard of Evans World Headquarters. And it’s weirdest thing: when you rub the rose bush, it gets bigger.

Gimme Some Tongue

2004-12-25T14:14:00.000-08:00

When we bought our tickets to The Living Desert, the zoo in Palm Desert, the ticket chick told us they’d be feeding the giraffes at 10:00 and we’d be able to help if we got there in time. I looked at my kick-ass new Nike watch and it told me with the utmost coolness and style that the time was 9:52. We could make it if we hustled. I kicked the double jogging stroller into high gear and Hot Wife and I ran faster than any Jews have run since tickets went on sale for the last Barbara Streisand concert.

We got to the giraffe exhibit --- a concrete perch high above a large, open desert pit --- at 10:00 on the button. There were roughly 50 people there, including two zookeepers, but no giraffes in sight. Finally, after the zookeepers had repeatedly rung a large cowbell, a lone giraffe came lurching into view. It walked right up to the perch, putting its head close enough that several patrons reached out and petted its head.

One zookeeper then produced a Tupperwear container full of brown pellets about the width and length as a bazooka shell --- Giraffe Chow. He asked for volunteers to help feed the animal and despite the fact that I was holding my son, I walked over to give it a shot. I grabbed a pellet and held it about eight inches from the giraffe’s head.

I will never recover from what happened next. The animal opened its mouth only slightly and out shot a bruise-colored tongue longer than any human leg I have ever seen and shaped like a penis longer than even the most contaminated Chernobyl survivor could ever hope to shove into a pair of Fruit of The Looms.

“Holy shit!” I yelled. “What the hell is that thing?!” And my son shrieked the kind of shriek one might emit at the sight of man having his head removed with a chainsaw.

The giraffe’s foot-long protuberance began to fish around in the air for the food it sensed was near. It curled at the tip and big dollops of giraffe slobber sprayed out in every direction, raining down on the zoo patrons like stale caramels from a freshly punctured Pinata. I’ve seen some nasty things in my life --- illegal porn, my father eating borscht and sardines for lunch, Clippers games --- but that giraffe’s freakishly long, penis-shaped purple tongue reached me in horrible emotional places I would rather leave unoccupied. (Note to self: remember to Google the words “giraffe porn.”)

I dropped the pellet onto the giraffe’s tongue and it swallowed it in one gulp. No “thank you.” No “Merry Christmas.” No acknowledgement of any kind. The rude animal simply moved down the line to drench the other volunteer feeders in its rank, syrupy spit.

Greedy ass giraffe. Learn some fucking manners.

Postcards From The Edge

2004-12-24T07:30:00.000-08:00

Scenes from the first 24 hours of the Evans Family vacation in Palm Springs:

1) On my list of places to have a DEFCON 5 diarrhea attack, the Vons supermarket on the corner of Bob Hope Drive and Highway 111 isn’t even in the top 50. Yet there I was yesterday, standing near the soymilk, feeling that familiar cramping and realizing I had to find a bathroom within the next two minutes or face the prospect of terrifying the old ladies shopping for Christmas hams with an ugly display of “what brown can do for me.”

“Where’s your men’s room, dude?” I asked the Vons stockboy, interrupting his deft replenishing of the Cool Ranch Doritos.

“Down aisle six, through the double doors, up the stairs on your right,” he said.

“Bless you, skippy,” I shouted back as I ran down the aisle, my hand over my butthole.

I raced down aisle six in record time, burst through the flimsy brown double doors. There was a sign that said “Authorized Personnel Only.” I thought for a second that maybe I shouldn’t proceed, but then I realized that people who are about to redecorate the produce section with a spray of chunky brown holiday poop nog are clearly “authorized,” so I continued. I jetted up the stairs praying to God and Hari Krishna and Mohammed and all those dudes that stretching my legs wide enough to cover two stairs at once wouldn’t open my sphincter and unleash Armegeddon. When I got to the top of the stairs, I found myself standing in the middle of the Vons employee lounge.

Just in time for the employee Christmas party.

There was a table with homemade cakes, cold cuts, casseroles, a crock pot full of something brown and four two-liter bottles of Coke and Diet Coke. I stood at the top of the stairs, sweating, panting, doing a little “I have to poop” dance, and all eyes turned toward me.

“Hi,” a woman in a brown Vons apron said.

“Hi,” I said back sheepishly.

“Can I help you?”

“Men’s room?”

She said nothing, just pointed to a door to her immediate left.

“Ah,” I said, kind of skipping in that direction. “Thanks.”

As I waddled past the partiers, their eyes followed me, anticipating perhaps that I was about to kill them all with an axe or do a striptease. I guess I looked that crazy.

Finally, I bounded through the men’s room door. As it swung closed behind me, I shouted back, “Merry Christmas. Save me some cake.”

2) To accommodate all of the elderly people who live here, they have adapted all of the crosswalk meters with a countdown clock. When the big red hand appears, a counter appears in red next to it telling you how many seconds must elapse before the meter will change to the little white walking guy.

I was driving to Starbucks this morning, about to turn left on Fred Waring Drive from Monterey Street. I had a green light and there was a dude standing at the corner. The meter told him he had 12 seconds to wait before crossing, but just as I hit the gas on the minivan and started to make the turn, he stepped out into the crosswalk and began to cross.

Were I one of Palm Springs’ typical drivers – picture a 90-year-old man in an olive green Ford Granada, wearing Coke-bottle glasses and barely able to see over the steering wheel – the dude would have been toast. I would have hit him, run over him and skidded out on his writhing carcass without even knowing it. But since I am still moderately fleet of foot and lucid, I slammed on the brakes and spared the kid’s life. Barely.

“Are you fucking crazy, you dumb-ass?” I yelled to him.

He barked something back at me in Spanish – something about Carnitas I think – and made some kind of strange finger gesture that looked like the itsy bitsy spider climbing up the water spout.

If I wasn’t consumed with holiday cheer, I swear to God I would have turned the minivan around and flattened that motherfucker. He’s so incredibly lucky that I’m a righteous Jew and that I was jonesing for my Starbucks fix. Coffee saved that dude’s life. For reals.

3) All of the streets here are named after dead celebrities. Bob Hope Drive. Frank Sinatra Drive. Dinah Shore Drive. Hot Wife and I have therefore initiated a game where we try to guess which blue-haired geezer will die next and have a street in Palm Desert or Rancho Mirage named after him or her.

I took George Burns. Hot Wife has Dean Martin.

4) It’s been a while since our daughter, Barney’s Biggest Fan, has had a developmental breakthrough to get excited about, but last night on the way home from Tony Roma’s she unleashed a doozie.

She sat in her car seat and started talking. She pointed to herself and said, “Me.” Then she pointed at me and said, “Daddy.” Then she pointed at Hot Wife and said, “Mommy.” I was floored.

“Did you hear that, honey?!” I said to Hot Wife. “She pointed to me before she pointed to you!”

What can I say? The child is a genius.

What Color is My Parachute?

2004-12-22T09:59:00.000-08:00

My kids are both big fans of this annoying group called The Wiggles, a band of four Australian goobers who sing songs about making fruit salad and dance around with a giant octopus named Henry. For the uninitiated, imagine The Monkees having an orgy with the cast of H.R. Puffinstuff where everybody’s on acid.

To make sure that The Wiggles weren’t subliminally recruiting my children into The Church of Scientology or some goofy Aussie death cult where they believe shitting the bed will inspire the second coming of Elvis Presley, I did some reading on The Wiggles and here’s what I found: These four guys – Jeff, Greg, Anthony and Murray – were college students in Sydney, all training to be teachers. As part of their education, they put together a video where they danced and sang and preened around like retards on a sugar high. The video fell into the hands of parents, whose kids loved it. Supply, meet demand. More videos were made and The Wiggles enterprise grew so large that the foursome now appears daily on The Disney Channel and no self-respecting parent can conceivably make it through the day without a half-dozen Wiggles videotapes or DVDs.

Naturally, the accidental success of The Wiggles has me all kinds of pissed off. I’ve done a hell of a lot more creative things than make a stupid video, and yet none of them has begotten wealth or fame or opportunities to drink expensive scotch with Michael Eisner. In fact, the only riches my creativity have ever won are a trip to the principal’s office and a few magazine clips, which I parlayed into a stead job as a copywriter for a health care company – which is the professional equivalent of root canal without anesthesia.

It’s time for me to do something drastic to change my fortunes. It’s time for me to shout from the rooftops that I am a creative dynamo and that I can change the world for the low, low price of $50 million (act now – operators are standing by)!

What color is my parachute, internet? What job will bring me riches and fulfillment? What children’s video or Rubik’s Cube or bagless vacuum cleaner can I invent that will redefine some industry and infuse my checking account with enough money that I can guarantee that my kids will never have to worry about their Starbucks cards running out or whether they can afford HBO? In the words of Forrest, Forrest Gump, “What’s my destiny, mama?”

I’ve started my journey of discovery by making a list of the things I’m really good at:

1) Cursing
2) Saying mean things about people
3) Farting
4) Blowing snot rockets in the shower
5) Rewinding videos
6) Flipping people off
7) Eating Pop-Tarts
8) Cycling between ESPN and ESPN2 on the remote control
9) Telling my kids “no”
10) Going to the movies
11) Ordering McGriddles
12) Drinking Diet Coke

That’s a pretty robust list. Surely there is something profitable in there. Perhaps snot rocket lessons?

The Tall, Thin Man and His Stupid Metal Stick

2004-12-20T19:37:00.000-08:00

The following events may or may not have occurred on a golf course in Southern California today. If they did, they probably involved me. If they didn’t, that would be really, really weird because I was playing golf today and this is what I saw.

There is a ball. There is a metal stick. There is a hole in the ground, about six inches deep. There is a tall, thin man.

The ball is nine feet from the hole in the ground. The tall, thin man is holding the metal stick. The tall thin man is trying to hit the ball with the metal stick just hard enough that it rolls right into the hole in the ground.

The tall, thin man hits the ball with the metal stick. The ball rolls along the grass. It looks like it is rolling too fast. Yes, it is definitely rolling too fast. Slow down, ball. Slow the fuck down.

The ball rolls right past the hole in the ground. When the ball finally stops, it is farther from the hole in the ground than it was when the tall, thin man hit it with the metal stick.

The tall, thin man is not happy. This same scenario has occurred repeatedly all day long. It is clearly the medal stick’s fault. Stupid stick. Bad, bad stick.

The tall, thin man throws the metal stick as far as he can.

The tall, thin man storms off in a huff. He stops in an area of thick brush. He unzips his pants. He pees, right there in front of God and Neighbor Jimbo and everyone.

As he pees, the tall, thin man wonders how he will finish his round without his metal stick.

Get Out of My House

2004-12-19T09:19:00.000-08:00

It is generally not our practice to welcome dirty, bedraggled, scab-covered trolls into the dining room of Evans World Headquarters. We’re not running a fucking soup kitchen here. But for some reason, when just such a pathetic character claims to represent a house painting business, well, come right in, ma’am. Let me take your smock. Would you like a cup of chamomile tea? Or perhaps a shower?

What can I say? We’re idiots.

It costs $20,000 to have a house texture-coated (“You’ll never have to paint this house again, sir, and that’s my solemn promise.”) and to have five new windows installed (“They could drop a nuclear bomb outside your door and you wouldn’t hear a thing.”). For that astronomical fee, you’d think the company would send a representative who, you know, bathes or something. But that was not the case. Let me describe the woman who sat at our dining room table yesterday and tried to pry 20 grand from us:

• She was approximately 50 years old.
• She took her shoes off in our house and her feet smelled like a ball of mozerella that had been left in the sun for three days.
• One of her eyes looked at me and the other at her shoes. At the same time. Think Sammy Davis Jr. tweaking really hard.
• The tips of her fingers were crusted black with filth. She looked like a chimney sweep.
• She had scabs on her forehead, nose and hands.
• Her hair had the dulled glow of something that had not felt the tender kiss of shampoo since the Carter administration.
• She had a hacking cough that sounded like tuberculosis and two packs a day of Benson and Hedges got married and bore the mother of all lung cheeses.

I was not going to convict her of anything untoward based solely on appearance. Truth be told, I am currently sitting unshowered and unshaved in a Starbucks wearing the same underwear I wore yesterday.

She kept saying, “I’m not a salesman.” She claimed to be the director of marketing for this company, in town because she has been tasked with securing texture-coating contracts for six homes so she could taker before-and-after photos to use for local marketing efforts. I smelled bullshit immediately.

If she was, in fact, the marketing director, where were her marketing materials? All she had was two bent placards with paint colors on them.

And if she was, in fact, the director of marketing, she would have been responsible for the “face” of the company to its customers. Clearly that face should be acquainted with the concepts of cleansing, exfoliating, moisturizing and (FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!) make-up.

She slung a pretty polished line of bullshit for not being a salesman. If she was to be believed at her word, the texture coating and windows her company would install for “next to nothing” would single-handedly increase the value of Evans World Headquarters by $50,000, enable it to withstand a nuclear winter, rid it of pests, keep solicitors and religious freaks at bay, make it sprout a second story and automatically change Barney tapes in the VCR every hour, on the hour.

She measured the circumference of our house, then came back to the table, exhaled a long sigh (the kind you hear at the auto dealer when he’s trying to convince you that the price he’s about to offer you will rob him blind and prevent his kids from going to college, even though it’s still WAY over the price you’re looking for and you know his whole line is bullshit), and then told us she was going to give us texture-coating and five new windows for $20,000 -– and she was throwing in rain gutters for free. Then she said something about writing up the contract right then and there so she could “get us in on the next work cycle.”

We’ve only been homeowners for about six years and I will therefore allow that I don’t have a ton of experience interacting with “vendors” like this one. But I do know that I’m a man. And I have a lot of faith in my B.S. detector. And I know that I don’t like dirty, smelly, scabby, lazy-eyed marketing directors sitting at my dining room table talking nonsense about free rain gutters and nuclear bombs. My blood was boiling. I was thinking that all of these alleged savings she keeps telling us about aren’t going to amount to JACK SQUAT because we still have to pay to have the house fumigated and sterilized from the fact that she polluted it with her filthy presence.

She was somewhere in the middle of her spiel about vinyl window frames when I stood up, pointed to the door and said, “Out! Out! Get out of my house, stinky! We don’t buy texture coating from people who smell like porridge and we don’t write checks for 20 grand to people who can't look us in the eye WITH BOTH EYES! Now leave, Pigpen!”

A tear ran down her face –- the side with the good eye –- and she said, “OK. OK. Nineteen five, but that’s my final offer.”

Tubular

2004-12-16T13:05:00.000-08:00

I have aspirations like everyone else, but when it comes right down to it, all I really want to do is watch TV. I really like watching TV. I’m good at it.

Hot Wife e-mailed me this morning and asked how I felt about taking the kids down to watch the boat parade – an annual event whereupon the rich snotholes from one of Southern California’s wealthiest enclaves entangle their yachts in Christmas lights, get good and blasted on egg nog and Johnnie Walker Black, and putter around the waterway, slurring carols and waving to lowlifes like the Evans family who inexplicably show up year after year to watch from the shore.

Now don’t get me wrong: I like watching drunk rich folks drown in two feet of water as much as the next guy. But the finale of The Apprentice is on tonight. What’s a family man to do?

I have to pretend that this is a serious quandary for me because I don’t want Hot Wife to know that given the choice between:

a) getting sand in my shoes, trying to keep my son from eating kelp, and wishing I was wealthy enough to get plowed on good liquor and tool around the coast on my boat, The Constipator, singing “Oh, Dreidle, Dreidle, Dreidle”; or
b) watching television,

I’m taking “b” every single time. To me, it’s like choosing between having a vasectomy or eating a hot fudge sundae. I really like watching TV. I’m good at it.

I think the reason my television-centric lifestyle is so disconcerting to my beloved Hot Wife is that she sees our children drifting over to The Dark Side with me. If Barney’s Biggest Fan isn’t watching Barney or Dora The Explorer or The Wiggles, she’s not happy, and that means nobody’s happy. If Left-Handed Power-Hitting Son isn’t watching Jimmy Neutron and picking his nose and flicking at his penis, he’s not content either. Hot Wife sees her precious dream of an active, motivated, thrill-seeking family morphing into the nightmare of living with three people consumed by a 27-inch Panasonic and a subscription to The Dish Network. We really like watching TV. We’re good at it.

She’s getting good and creative at distracting us. I’m on vacation next week and Hot Wife arranged for us to take a family trip to Palm Springs. She arranged for a place to stay and things to do – she’s got the whole vacation planned out in her head. This morning I queried her on the particulars of our living arrangements for the trip.

“So what’s this place like?” I asked.

“I’m glad you asked,” she said, believing perhaps that I actually wanted to go. “The brochure says it’s got a big living room with a balcony and a fireplace…”

“Uh-huh.”

“…and there are lots of little stores and restaurants within walking distance…”

“Uh-huh.”

“…and there’s a pool and a Jacuzzi if we feel like taking a dip…”

“Honey?”

“What?”

“Do they have cable?”

“Daniel! We are not going on vacation so that you can watch television! If all you want to do is watch TV, we can just stay home!”

“Perfect! Thanks, honey. Love ya.”

And then I turned on the TV. I really like watching TV. I’m good at it.

Sometimes You Feel Like A Nut, Sometimes You Don't Because Your Nut Is Disabled

2004-12-15T11:46:00.000-08:00

Hot Wife and I are engaged in ongoing negotiations about whether or not conceiving a third child would compromise our marriage, our sanity, our desire never to see another dirty diaper, and our ability to clothe and feed the children we already have. While there has not yet been a definitive decision made, I think it’s a moderately safe bet that The Evans Children Factory is closed.

And do you know what that means? It means my poor little giblets are about to be surgically decaffeinated.

My desire to avoid the white hot agony of a vasectomy is almost enough to make me argue in favor of having a third child. Hell, I’d almost rather keep having children on regular nine-month intervals than have some goofy urologist with Coke bottle glasses slash open my scrotum with an Exacto blade and switch me from “high octane” to “unleaded” with a pair of garden shears and a blow torch. Sadly, I don’t think the same course of reproductive action is amenable to Hot Wife. She keeps saying something about me not knowing what pain is until I’ve pushed an eight-pound mammal through an opening the size of a quarter. My response, of course, is that I actually DO know that pain because I have been really, really constipated and an eight-pounder is a runt compared to some of the doozies I’ve spawned.

I have friends who have been vasectomized and they tell me it’s really no big deal. I choose to believe the doctor convinced them to say that or face the prospect of walking around for the rest of their days with a limp, a wince and a card that lets them avoid metal detectors at airports. You can feasibly describe testicle surgery in a lot of ways, but “no big deal” isn’t one of them unless you mean “no big deal” in the same way that detonating a nuclear warhead at the Super Bowl would be “no big deal?”

I remember talking to my neighbor John the day he had his vasectomy. He answered the door holding an ice pack to his crotch, wearing an expression on his face that seemed to suggest the world’s entire supply of Bud Light and Cheetos had just been kidnapped by warlords in Argentina. That look told me everything I needed to know. Not that John is some big, hulking he-man, but we men have a certain unspoken language when it comes to relaying testicular discomfort. It’s exactly the same reason why we respond the way we do when we see a guy getting kicked in the sack by a mule on America’s Funniest Home Videos.

When I was nine years old, I had a hernia operation. Even then I was worried that the hot nurses were laughing at the size of my wee little commando while it was exposed for all in the operating room to see. I may be 25 years older now, but the same insecurity persists. If anyone laughs at my unit while the vasectomy mutilation is being performed, asses will be kicked. Trust me.

I also have trouble with the word “vasectomy” itself. I believe any word ending in “-ectomy” implies that something is being removed and presumably discarded like old Esmeralda’s gall bladder or little Billy’s tonsils. I find that disturbing. Wasteful. My vas deferens are in perfectly workable order. I’m using them. If it ain’t broke, don’t cut it out and burn it. Isn’t there some kind of pill I can take instead – something that will make me stop producing sperm without the use of sharp implements and cauterizing? Because you just know that I’m going to go through with this and then I’m going to come home walking like I have a big dump in my pants and then my kids are going to want to play and I’m going to be kicked and punched and bitten in the crotch and I’m going to bleed and people are going to see the blood on my pants and they’re going to think I have my period and then it’s going to be all over the tabloids that I had a sex change operation instead of a vasectomy and I’m going to be the laughing stock of the whole fucking planet.

I don’t think I’m being irrational about this. Shit, people, we’re talking about MY BALLS, for Pete’s sake! They are meant to be coddled and protected and covered with hard plastic when playing baseball. They are not meant to be scissored and sliced like a Christmas ham.

I have to stop writing now. I’m about to cry.

Evaluate This

2004-12-14T13:30:00.000-08:00

My annual performance review has been scheduled for tomorrow afternoon and that means I am spending today completing my self-evaluation. Here’s what I have so far:

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS – List your key accomplishments during the review year and the business impact.

1) The inordinate amount of time I have spent perusing the internet on company time has served to streamline the efforts of my internal constituents because they have been spared the duty of correcting, approving, editing or requesting complete rewrites on work I would have done were I not reviewing sports site, blogs and forums and Googling the names of hot celebrities I want to see naked. Business impact: I estimate that eliminating the need for my colleagues to collaborate with me on actual work has saved the company $422,000.

2) I have purchased one can of Diet Coke from the vending machine each business day for the past nine months, at a cost of 60 cents per can. Sixty cents times five days a week times four weeks a month times nine months equals $108. Business impact: $108. Duh.

3) On a Tuesday in early July, despite my efforts to the contrary, I actually did spend almost one full hour working. Then I took a three-hour lunch because I was all kinds of burned out from working so hard. Business impact: $98,000.

4) I sat through the entire Sales & Marketing meeting without falling asleep. Business impact: I was so tired from having endured that nonsense with eyes wide open that I couldn’t even surf the web the next day. That increased the company’s available bandwidth, which I estimate precipitated a savings of approximately $737,000.

5) I wrote the shit out of an e-mail telling my coworkers that I was going to be out of the office on my birthday and that they should call this other chick if they needed anything that I might normally deliver, which isn’t much – probably just fart jokes and disgusting stories about what goes on in the men’s room. Business impact: Since my e-mail eliminated the possibility of rampant confusion and workplace chaos, I’ll say I saved the company about $3.2 million, give or take.

CHALLENGES OR AREAS FOR IMPROVEMENT – List your biggest challenges or areas where outcomes could have been better during the review year.

1) When I’m sitting at my cubicle picking my nose, I should probably try to remember to flick the boogers into the trash can rather than discarding them on the floor or wiping them under my desk.

2) I could definitely improve the response time of my mouse finger when I hear footsteps coming down the hall toward my cubicle. If I don’t speed it up, I might get caught with naked chicks on my computer screen and I think I read something in the employee handbook about that being bad.

3) I need to improve my ability to react professionally when an undesirable assignment is handed down to me. I have been advised that “Fuck that! Why can’t Phil do it?” is not an acceptable response.

4) One word. Flush.

5) Some of the newer phones in the office have a screen that tells the answerer who’s calling them, so I need to find a more creative way to crank call my coworkers so they don’t catch me. Like the time put a paper towel over the phone, called Lucy and said, “Hey, baby, you got any Jew in ya? Want some?” I think she might have suspected that was me so next time I’ll call from the phone in the conference room.

6) When I try to pull the old “dine and dash” in the company cafeteria, I have to remember to check that my shoes are tied before the “dash” part.

SUMMARY – How would you categorize your overall performance? Check one of the following:

___ Exceeds Expectations
___ Meets Expectations
___ Some Improvement Needed
___ Does Not Meet Expectations

Hmm. That depends. Whose expectations are we talking about? I think I’m kicking serious booty, but I’m not sure my boss will feel that same way.

Can I Get An Amen?

2004-12-13T13:53:00.000-08:00

My son and I were at Starbucks this Saturday morning when a man with a tattoo on his neck walked past us.

It said “Seek God.”

And what better method of proselytization is there than to evangelize in leaking permanent ink on top of one’s carotid?

Faith makes people do funny things:

• It makes them believe that faith-healers like Benny Hinn can genuinely cure old ladies of incontinence or leukemia or yeast infections just by touching them on the forehead and pushing them into the arms of a stagehand.
• It makes them tool around town on a 10-speed, wearing a short-sleeved white dress shirt and a black clip-on tie, asking folks if they’d like something to discuss The Word of Joseph Smith.
• It makes them strap explosives to their waists and blow themselves up in Jerusalem pizza parlors and on buses taking innocent people to work in Tel Aviv.
• It makes them send large sums of cash to televangelists who prance around on TV wearing fake eyelashes as long as Slurpee straws and enough AquaNet to punch a hole the size of Poughkeepsie in the ozone layer.
• It makes them invite family and friends to witness the ritual mutilation of their son’s penis, after which a buffet of lox and bagels and tuna fish is served.

What ever happened to the day when religious wackos just wore big crosses around their necks and those little God-inspired fish on their cars? Whatever happened to people walking through the supermarker singing “I don’t care if it rains or freezes as long as I’ve got my plastic Jesus riding on the dashboard of my car?”

Perhaps it’s my perception that has changed over the last decade. Maybe these weirdos have been in my midst all along and I have only recently become aware of the twisted shit that they do in the name of The Lord. Either way, I’m seeing an inordinate amount of religious fanaticism lately. And it scares me.

My son has entered a phase in his development where he wants to understand the reasons why people to things. Each new experience and observation begets an interrogation of Hot Wife and me. Why do people shoot guns? Why is bird poop white and black when people poop is just brown? Why do old people smell like fish? Why can’t he have a Snickers before bed? So when the inevitable question of why the man had a tattoo on his neck surfaced, I struggled mightily with an answer that was both accurate and consumable for a four-year-old.

“Well, bud,” I said, “you know how much you love ice cream? Well, some people love God as much as you love ice cream.”

“Yeah, daddy,” he said, “but does that mean I have to have ‘ice cream’ tattooed on my neck?”

“No. Definitely not. Your mother would kill me.”

“Well, then why does that man have God on his neck?”

“Because he’s crazy, son. He’s certifiably batshit. His elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top. He’s two fries short of a Happy Meal. See what I’m saying?”

“Yeah. Got it. Can I have some more chocolate milk?”

“No, bud.”

“Why not?”

“Because God says you’ve had enough.”

Tricky Dick

2004-12-11T10:53:00.000-08:00

I hold no delusions that my son is the only four-year-old boy in history who has played with his penis on a regular basis, but I will say this: if there has ever been a boy who could acrobatically contort and manipulate his unit at the same horrifying level that my kid does, I’d be shocked.

As the parent of a child thusly gifted, I am at once overcome with pride and horror. Boys will be boys, yes, and that clearly means they will play with their ding-a-lings whenever the urge to do so hits, regardless of the presence of horrified onlookers, frigid temperatures, physical limitations, social mores, cultural sensitivities, and, in this morning’s case, cracker crumbs.

We were watching Blue’s Clues and as he is wont to do, Left-Handed Power-Hitting Son was sitting naked on the couch, spread eagle, exposing his miniature undercarriage to his sister and his father and his dog and the little blue puppy on the TV and anyone else who dared turn an ill-fated gaze toward our living room.

As the episode wore on, the child began to twist and flick and contort and squeeze and pinch and serenade and punch and cup and generally abuse his bat and balls with unwavering concentration. One often hears athletes describe being “in the zone,” whereupon the basket they shoot at looks as big as a Cadillac and an incoming baseball looks the size of a beachball. I believe my son found that zone this morning. His wiener was suddenly made of Play-Doh and the Fun Factory was open for business.

I’m not a doctor, but I don’t believe the male organ is intended to be twisted into the shape of a Chinese throwing star. I don’t believe it’s supposed to be treated like some kind of animal balloon being squeaked into the shape of a Schnauzer by Chuckles the Clown at little Sally’s birthday party. It’s flesh and blood and God-willing the engine behind the creation of my future grandchildren.

Please, son. Go easy on the poor little guy before you break it off.

I Can't Hear A Thing

2004-12-09T11:51:00.000-08:00

What? Did you say something? WHAT?! Sorry, you'll have to speak up a bit.

Must every toy be bastardized with the installation of a siren or the sound of an airplane taking off or the high-pitched voice of a cartoon character or some other cacophony-producing subwoofer that causes those in neighboring homes to duck for cover, believing perhaps that we’re being invaded by Canada or Mars or the cast of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy? I mean what the fuck?

What ever happened to quiet toys, like coloring books and matches and unopened bottles of Bicardi? I long for the days of yore, when toys made no sounds and we were inspired to produce them ourselves. I remember playing with my little Star Wars figurines and trying to approximate the voices of Yoda and Darth Vader. I remember fondly playing outside with a magnifying glass, lording over a colony of red ants on a sunny day and promising to fry those little bastards if they came anywhere near me.

Those days are long gone, friends. Nowadays my kids want nothing to do with a toy if it doesn’t rattle their eardrums or produce a vibration that causes Hot Wife and eye to bleed from our eyes and lose control of our bowels.

My in-laws came over last night for Hanukkah dinner and presented Left-Handed Power-Hitting Son with a replica airport – complete with toothless fat women working at the metal detector and a secret room near the employee lounge where innocent vacationers from the Middle East are forcibly disrobed and subjected to a full body cavity search by a 300-pound FBI agent named Bruno. The airport came with a series of vehicles, including a bus, a tow truck, a police car and, of course, a big ol’ jet airliner. I noticed a compartment on the bottom of the plane where batteries were to be installed, so I plugged in two double-A Duracells and was subsequently serenaded by a weeyoo-weeyoo-weeyoo-weeyoo-weeyoo alarm siren at a volume so tragically loud that one of my fillings shook loose.

My son has also become a fan of the Rescue Heroes, a troop of firemen, policemen and other stereotypically macho characters who market a series of toys that make sounds one normally associates with being in a crisis situation but which now serve as entertainment for four-year-old boys. There is a helicopter that has a rope line that can be lowered with a crank – a crank that sounds like a jackhammer when turned. There is a military jet that sounds like the beeping ping-ping-ping of a hospital heart monitor. And there is of course a fire engine that emits the requisite beeping, pinging, sirening noise one associates with real fire engines. It’s just that those sounds don’t normally come from the living room.

I’m at a loss. One of the great struggles in my life is finding three minutes of peace every day, and as each day of Hanukkah passes, my son unwraps another toy that stacks the odds of my finding those three minutes higher and higher against me. I can’t hear myself singing in the shower anymore. I have to scream at the top of my lungs to apologize to Hot Wife for whatever wrong I’ve committed during the day. And even when I have an electric toothbrush vibrating in my mouth, the orchestra of beeps and talking Barney dolls and crashing race car crunches is loud enough to drown out the buzz of a Sonicare that is only an inch from my ear drum.

I’m Sick About This. Sick, I Tell You. Sick!

2004-12-08T13:06:00.000-08:00

I don’t tend to get sick very often, but when I do it’s usually something really dramatic. Like the time back in April when my wife and kids were out of town and what seemed like a run-of-the-mill cold deteriorated to the point that I found myself lying in bed and unable to move for four hours. Seeing as how it was the weekend and my doctor was out playing golf or screwing his secretary or something, I decided the only legitimate course of action was to drag my ass to the emergency room.

The ER is a very disturbing, very unsavory place to be, especially when you feel like dogshit. The one they show on NBC doesn’t even tell half of the story because they never show frail old ladies on death’s doorstep who smell like piss or stupid people getting 88 stitches in the next room because they nearly severed their own fingers opening a can of cling peaches in their own juice or doctors who are more concerned with giving some flunky candy-striper their Burger King order than with ACTUALLY DELIVERING HEALTH CARE TO THE SICK DUDE IN ER BED 4! And trust me, I was feeling all kinds of fucked up that day.

After a two hour wait, the ER doctor finished her Whopper with cheese and came to see if I was still alive. I was. Barely. She took a throat culture (which is kind of like trying to swallow a golf club), ran some tests, ruled out a case of mono, wrote me a prescription for antibiotics and sent me home to convalesce so she could go back and finish her fries.

Fast forward to late last week when my mailbox frowned on me with an envelope from the hospital. I opened the envelope to find a bill for $609.17, which they claim is my portion of the bill for the services rendered that day.

I don’t understand this. I turned the bill over to look at the itemized charges:

$362.34 for “clinical lab.” What’s that?
$51.87 for something called “lab call back.” If that’s as meaningless as it sounds – and it sounds like someone picked up the Batphone to the lab and said, “Hey, Phil, any word on the Evans kid’s syphilis test yet?” – I’m going to shit a brick.
$42.99 for “pharmacy oral solid,” which I don’t believe is related in any way to the anal solid I spawned when I saw this bill.
And so on.

Believe you me, I’m about to get on the horn with my insurance company – which also happens to be my employer – and cruse up a blue streak about how I’m being unjustly billed here and they’d better get this ship turned around stat before I call my contact over there at the KCAL Evening News (“Live! Local! Late Breaking!”) and tell them they don’t like Jews at a certain hospital or at a certain insurance company.

I can see it now: a picket line of rabbis and yentas and orthodox Jews out in front of the hospital, carrying signs that say, “I’ve got your pharmacy oral solid right here, you Jew-hating bastards!” Then Barbara Streisand will get up on the stage and scream into the microphone: “We will not rest until Daniel Evans’ bill is expunged and the old lady piss is cleaned up and this hospital starts treating Jews with respect!”

Oh yes, my friends. A reckoning is coming.

Do As I Say, Not As I Pick

2004-12-07T10:45:00.000-08:00

I told my son to stop picking his nose this morning and the irony of the admonition struck me immediately. He’s only engaging in the behaviors his old man has modeled for him. We can only hope that McGriddle addiction and perpetual flatulence don’t follow.

In my own defense, I believe there is a significant difference between my nose picking and my son’s. Mine serves a specific purpose: the extraction of crusted obstructions that threaten to interfere with my breathing, my comfort and my ability to carry out a conversation with my boss without him becoming completely distracted by the whistling of my nose. Also, as noted a few days ago, boogers are an excellent weapon against n’er-do-well teenage girls on the highways and byways of America.

Conversely, my son’s nose picking seems less about a specific goal than about a pastime. To him, having the first two knuckles of his index finger in his nose is comfort, like sucking a thumb or rocking back and forth or copping a touch-buzz from a favorite blanket. It’s not as though he’s paying conscious attention to what he’s doing. His focus is solely on the television screen or the book we’re reading, and I believe strongly that he has no idea that he is tickling the inside of his nose and on occasion removing the finger, rolling something between his thumb and index finger and flicking it in the general direction of his little sister. He’s in some kind of weird nose-picking trance, kind of like a cobra under the spell of a snake charmer.

I would like to believe that this is standard four-year-old behavior, but I’m not that dim. I know that my son sees me digging for gold on my own nose on a regular basis – especially if we’re driving somewhere – and he has come to believe that this is what men do. We watch sports, we say “dude” before or after each sentence, we drink large quantities of soft drinks, and we pick our noses. We’re men, and this is what men do.

I believe it is now incumbent upon me to right this wrong, to model more appropriate mucous-related behaviors for my son, lest he eliminate the possibility of ever finding true love because no woman will ever want to go to the prom with a boy who picks his nose during fifth period chemistry class. So today I will go to the supermarket and, horror of all horrors, I will buy a package of Kleenex, take it home, and show my son how to blow his nose like a gentleman.

Twenty bucks says the kid eventually teaches himself to wrap a Kleenex around his index finger and pick his nose with it.

Careful, Sweetheart. You’re Sitting on Santa’s Testicles

2004-12-06T11:05:00.000-08:00

If you were a child in the San Fernando Valley during the early 1990s, there’s a good chance you sat on my lap.

I was Santa Claus. Yes, me: the six-foot-three, 160-pound Jewish kid who wouldn’t know yuletide cheer from All-Temperature Cheer. I sat in the big, red throne in the middle of the Northridge Mall, right next to Orange Julius, and posed with you for a $5 Polaroid.

You asked me for an Easy-Bake Oven or a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figure or a Betsy Wetsy doll, and I said yes to it all because I had gotten stoned to the bejesus in the parking lot before I put on the puffy red costume and, if we’re being honest, I would have said yes to anything that got you off of my lap before my right testicle burst under the combined weight of you and your crabby little brother.

Sometimes you cried hysterically. Sometimes your mother practically had to do jumping jacks to get you to smile for the picture. Sometimes you peed your pants or smelled like your diaper hadn’t been changed since St. Patrick’s Day. Sometimes you played with my itchy white beard or my velvety red coat. But you never seemed to notice that my big, honking Jew schnoz was the antithesis of Santa’s jolly, red nose. And you never seemed to care that the candy cane my little elf friends gave you was stale because it was from the same batch we’d been handing out for three years.

I never really paid that much attention to what you wanted or whether you had been naughty or nice. What did I care? I was Jewish and Jewish kids are never queried as to their behavior during the previous year. They get their Hanukkah presents either way, which essentially gives them carte blanche to act like dipshits year-round. Plus, my focus was almost exclusively on my coworkers in Santa’s Workshop, the perky little female elves, who were dressed in little green elf skirts and tight green elf stockings. Sorry, kids, but Santa has needs, too.

I never did understand the masses of parents who turned out each December to let their precious children sit on the lap of a complete stranger. But there you were, dressed in your Sunday best, posing for a photo and asking for a remote control monster truck or a princess dress or a little puppy. And I said yes to all of you because, look, what do I care? You could have asked me for a machete or a sawed-off shotgun or a package of C-4 explosives and I would have said yes to that, too. And then if your parents ended up buying you argyle socks or My First Book About Coin Collecting instead, they were the ones who would have to explain to you that that is what children get when they don’t clean their rooms or when they hit their sister or when they tell their third grade teacher that she smells like rotten eggs.

Santa knows who’s been naughty or nice, kids, even though he smells like marijuana and has a hooked Jew nose.

Pimp My Sinus Infection

2004-12-04T15:09:00.000-08:00

Now that the hardcore throes of my own private sinus infection hell have abated, I am enjoying what I believe to be the colossally underrated afterglow of nose and throat ailments – chasing the hardened remnant boogers around the inside of my nose with my fingers, keys, pen, nail clippers and car radio antenna.

I was reminded this afternoon just how fun this stage of sickness can be. I was driving to the mall on a busy street near Evans World Headquarters, just kind of lost on a safari into my right nostril. I don’t know how long I was hunting or how many fingers I had used, but I looked to my right and saw a bright yellow Xterra full of teenaged girls looking at me, laughing, pantomiming the action of picking their noses. One girl also crossed her eyes. Another wiped an imaginary booger on the window in front of her. Then the light turned green and they drove off, probably thinking I’m some sicko. What, like they never pick their noses when they’re alone in the car? Right. And I’m the prime minister of the United Arab Emirates.

I happen to be very good at picking my nose. But today I seemed to be having a little trouble with the crusty little bastard in my right nostril. Every time I thought I had it, it squirted out of my grasp and up into the little cavity where fingers don’t dare tread – the area that separates your brains from your nose. Whenever the little guy retreated back to that cavity, I’d pinch closed the opposite nostril and blow a little air through my nose. That did the trick every time.

Finally, as I pulled into the mall parking lot, I extracted the offending mucous. I hurt a little, but that’s because I pulled a few nose hairs out in my fervent attempts to trap the booger. Lo and behold, as I exited the Honda CR-V I noticed that the yellow Xterra that ferried the teenaged girls who were laughing at me was parked just three spots down the same aisle. I knew it was the same car because there was a streaked fingerprint on the left rear window where that one smarmy bitch wiped her imaginary snot.

I got out of my car with my freshly yanked booger still attached to my index finger. Then I walked over and wiped that bad boy right on the front windshield of the Xterra.

As I walked away from the crime scene, I thought to myself, “Ha! Take that, bitches! You got served!”

Adventures in the Men's Room

2004-12-03T14:13:00.000-08:00

I was purging my bladder of Diet Coke this afternoon when a coworker I didn’t recognize emerged from one of the stalls, waddled over to the sink, washed his hands, checked his nose for boogers, yanked some paper towels from the dispenser, dried his hands and then inexplicably ran the paper towels across the top of his head, front to back.

“Dude, what the hell are you doing?” I asked, horrified.

“I’m fixing my hair,” he said matter-of-factly. “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m the guy who has never seen anyone use the same paper towel he used to wipe poo from his hands to make sure his hair spikes were all in order,” I said. “Who are you?”

“I’m the guy who’s about to beat your ass if you don’t mind your own business,” he said.

“Ooooooh, scary,” I said, “but I think a better name for you would be ‘Shithead,’ seeing as how that is both literally and figuratively accurate,” I said.

He shook his head and left. I presume the five-syllable word was more than his head could handle.

Reveling in my victory, I moseyed over to the sink to wash my hands. As I did so, I smiled at the handsome devil in the mirror and what smiled back was a horrifying creature straight out of the oral hygiene video they show at the pediatric dentist.

See, there’s this restaurant near my office that serves nothing but buffalo wings. Kung Pao wings, teriyaki wings, honey barbecue wings, and a category guaranteed to be so spicy that it makes your butt shoot sparks when you fart. I went to this restaurant for lunch and clearly managed to lodge more chicken meat between my teeth than I did in my belly. When I smiled at myself in the mirror, I saw so much detritus jammed in between my choppers that it roughly approximated the grill of an 18-wheeler hauling ass through a swarm of fruit flies.

I needed more than floss. I needed a hammer and a chisel. Since none of them was readily available, I resorted to the strategy of my dear father-in-law: I retrieved a business card from my wallet and began to saw between my teeth with it. Chicken pieces came flicking out of my mouth and splattering on the bathroom mirror in front of me. One left a small hairline crack.

Just then my old pal Shithead returned, presumably to wipe more excrement into his hair. He saw me and a look of anger washed over his chubby face.

“You and I have unfinished business,” he said.

“You’re right,” I said.

And with that I stuck the business card between my two front teeth and fired a grape-sized piece of buffalo wing at him. It was a direct hit, right into his left eye.

Shithead fell to the floor hollering something or other about his vision. I walked toward the exit, stepped over his writhing body and pushed open the door. This battle was won.

Before the door could close completely, I shouted back to Shithead: “Don’t start a fight you can’t win, son. And don’t let me catch you putting poo in your hair again.”

TODAY’S READER QUESTION

Q: What are you getting Hot Wife for Hanukkah?
- Joe in Vegas

A: Living with me is enough of a gift in itself, sir. And I’ll thank you to mind your own beeswax.

All I Want For Hanukkah

2004-12-02T13:26:00.000-08:00

I have finally decided what I want for Hanukkah this year. Sex. Lots and lots of sex. Sweaty, groping, face-contorting sex.

Not gonna happen. It’s not that Hot Wife doesn’t like that kind of thing. It’s just that we have two whiney children and a weak-bladdered dog who farts and cable television, so by the time any notion of conjugal relations may arise (for lack of a better term), we’re either too tired or too enthralled by The Apprentice to act upon it. Were I to ask Hot Wife for the gift of ess ee ex, she’s likely to hand me a bottle of Jergen’s lotion and a wash cloth, pat me on the butt and say, “Go get ‘em, Tiger.”

So now I am beginning to drift uncontrollably into panic mode. Hanukkah is less than a week away and I have not yet been able to zero in on what I want Hot Wife to buy me as a symbol of her love, respect, appreciation, worship, obedience, lust, admiration, attraction and pride for me (all of which are completely justified, naturally). I have to be very specific with my wife – item, brand, price range, store of preference, product number, UPC code – or I am likely to get a three-pack of Gold Toe socks from Marshall’s and a Neil Sedaka CD from the cut-out bin at Wal-Mart.

I thought for a few days that I might want a new pair of Oakley sunglasses. I have a pair of bitchen blue ones that make me look cooler than The Fonz and Vin Deisel put together, but the left earpiece broke in half while I was holding a certain squirmy one-year-old girl on my lap during her brother’s Thanksgiving play at school. Sadly, a new pair of Oakley sunglasses costs roughly the same as it would cost to feed the entire nation of Uganda a McGriddle every day for the next three years, so I opted to have the old glasses repaired, which Oakley did for free. If you know anyone from Uganda, tell them to call me.

Now what? With sex and sunglasses eliminated from consideration, what can I possibly request that will quench the thirst of my inner materialist? I looked at some of those funny shaped Nike watches yesterday, but I’m afraid I would look like an absolute poseur wearing one. I thought about clothes or music or video games, but I simply don’t trust my wife to buy any of those things for me. Picture a 34-year-old man rolling down the street in a Honda CR-V wearing a brown argyle sweater and powder blue corduroy pants, listening to Dionne Warwick’s Greatest Hits, on his way home to play a bass fishing game with his horrified son and daughter. “Mommy, why does daddy dress like Alex P. Keaton and listen to that silly music?”

Perhaps I should just tell her I want a gift certificate.

TODAY’S READER QUESTION

Q: Danny, is it true that Jewish people don’t have Christmas trees?
-- Eunice, Winnipeg, ONT

A: Yes, Eunice, that’s true. We also churn our own butter, pee sitting down and draw pictures of Moses and Abraham on the eastern-facing walls of our homes with the blood of cute little bunny rabbits and chipmunks.

(If you would like to submit a question to Human Writes, you may do so via e-mail at daniel at daniel evans dot net.) (By the way, don’t you think it’s so cool that I spelled out my e-mail address like that instead of using the boring old @ and .?) (I do.) (Screw you if you don’t think I’m cool.) (Who asked you anyway?) (Bitches.)

She Don’t Lie. She Don’t Lie. She Don’t Lie. Caffeine.

2004-12-01T15:49:00.000-08:00

I don’t recall what I was thinking when I made the decision to stop drinking caffeine, but I’d say the chances that I was hopped up on at least a six-pack of artificially sweetened carbonated heaven are pretty good. Perhaps that was it. Perhaps I saw how beholden I was to caffeine and that was why I decided to give it up. Or maybe I was drunk. Who knows?

I have reason to believe that my parents put Pepsi in my baby bottles – a reason based largely on the fact that I simply cannot think of a day in my life when I was not under the influence of a wicked caffeine buzz. All of the pinnacle moments of my life – my wedding, the birth of my kids, the first time I tasted Frosted Mini-Wheats – have been viewed through pupils dilated by Diet Coke. It’s not just some chemical that I imbibe. I give it more respect than to merely call it an ingredient.

Caffeine is who I am. Drink me.

One day I just decided it was time to eliminate it from my diet, and what followed was a week pocked with headaches, blurred vision, irritability, lethargy and general physical malaise that could only be approximated by taking a large prehistoric creature – think Godzilla – who is both addicted to heroin and enduring severe premenstrual cramping and throw that bitch into detox for a week without even so much as one Advil. There were wild mood swings, tantrums, broken glass, hurt feelings, weight loss, incessantly furrowed brows and a perplexing desire to disembowel anyone who asked me if something was wrong. “Of course something is wrong, you dirty whore! I haven’t been to Starbucks in a week! Now back off before I feed you my shoe!”

And that was just the family dog.

My mood eventually equalized and staying away from caffeine became less and less difficult. I started drinking Caffeine-Free Diet Coke, Caffeine-Free Diet Dr. Pepper, Caffeine-Free Root Beer, Caffeine-Free Squirt, decaffeinated coffee and – horror of horrors – water, which can not be robbed of its caffeine because the shit never had caffeine to begin with, which in my book puts in on the same plain as crystal meth, Hitler and the way my pee smells after I’ve eaten asparagus.

In spite of all of these tribulations, I maintained my caffeine-free diet for six months. I was cleansed. The devil was cast out. My pupils returned to their default dilation, my pulse slowed, my energy dipped from the level of a hyperactive five-year-old to that of a normal human being.

But like so many others, one slip led me back into temptation. I was in a meeting at a hotel and someone was mumbling on and on about sales or something and there was one of those little bottles of Diet Coke just sitting there asking me to drink it and I was weak. I drank it. I felt the bubbley goodness slide down my gullet. I felt my limbs tingle and jerk when the caffeine hit my nervous system. And then out of nowhere the caffeine grabbed hold of me like a puppet on a string. I ripped off my shirt, buttons flying everywhere, jumped up onto the table in the middle of the hotel ballroom, put my hands under my armpits in the shape of birdie wings and shouted, “I’m cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs! Braaaack! Braaaack! I’m cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs!”

Did you know that they don’t serve Starbucks in the psych ward? What a rip-off.

When Bad Things Happen To Good Shirts

2004-11-30T13:54:00.000-08:00

I have been feeling for about 10 days as though an overweight, dust-covered shi-tzu has taken up residence in my sinus cavity, so this morning I finally summoned the intelligence to make an appointment with my doctor. Based on past experience, I figured my malady was a pretty cut-and-tried sinus infection – shouldn’t take but two minutes for the doctor to look into my ears, write me an illegible prescription for a Z-Pack and send me on my way.

I arrived at the doctor’s office 15 minutes early. After reading two issues of Entertainment Weekly, my gaunt, balding, children’s-charity-tie-wearing doctor burst through the door and into examination room two.

“How’s it going, Daniel?” he asked. I was under no impression that he actually knew my name. He saw it in my chart.

“I’m OK. How are you doing?”

“Better than you from what I can tell,” he said.

I said nothing. I just waited for him to start pushing down on my sinuses and perhaps dangle a rawhide chew toy up my nose to lure out the offending shi-tzu. But before he could begin, you know, doctoring, he looked up at me and gave me a once-over – the kind you might expect if you walked into a Mercedes-Benz dealer wearing nothing but a winning smile and a cock ring.

“Wow,” he said. “That is a really nice shirt.”

(What? What the fuck did he just say to me?)

“Thanks,” I said. “Eddie Bauer.”

“Eddie Bauer, huh?” he said. “Wow. I mean that is a really, really nice shirt.”

And with that my doctor walked over and began to feel my clothing – WHILE I WAS WEARING IT! He ran his index finger across the seam stitching on my shoulder. He grabbed a piece of the fabric on my sleeve between his thumb and forefinger and rolled it back and forth like a thumb-sucking kid copping a touch-buzz from the ear of his teddy bear as he falls asleep. He ran the back of his hand along the wooden buttons.

(If he kisses me, I am so fucking out of here.)

At this point, I was completely freaked out. But the little four-year-old inside of me thought if I didn’t sit still I would have to get a shot and I really didn’t want a shot. So just sat there, staring straight ahead, letting the doctor get his jollies from my starched white Eddie Bauer button-down shirt, which I will never wear again.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a shirt quite like this one,” he said with kind of a glassed-over look on his face, the same look you see on the face of a porn star just after the money shot. “It’s so strong and firm. Very well-constructed, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Strong. Firm.”

(Kind of like the bottom of the Timberland hiking boot on my right foot, which is going straight up your ass if you don’t BACK UP right now, you sick, sick freak.)

I needed to change the subject immediately or face the very genuine possibility that my doctor was going to ask me to remove my underpants so he could begin his examination of my sinuses with a closer look at my butthole. I recalled – in a moment of absolute heterosexual, woman-loving terror – that he and I are both hockey players.

“So,” I said, “have you, um, scored any goals lately?”

With that, the glaze vanished from his eyes and he was a human being again. He snapped out of his cotton-fetish-driven haze and, lo and behold, began to examine my sinuses. Never did get an answer to the hockey question, but I didn’t really need one. I just wanted to get my prescription and run like the wind.

Didn’t I ask you to remind me to find a female doctor?

Thank You. Please Drive Around.

2004-11-29T14:39:00.000-08:00

My son’s birthday was two and a half months ago but it wasn’t until this weekend that we finally got around to assembling one of his gifts – a city with roads and buildings and traffic signals for his toy cars to cruise. It took Hot Wife and I a total of two man hours to put the city together, what with all of the stickers and moving parts and pieces of gray plastic that snapped together only with the application of brute force and, one occasion, the blunt end of a ball-peen hammer.

One of the buildings on the outskirts this little plastic city is a replica of a McDonalds, complete with a dangerous little playground out front and a flunky high school kid with catastrophic, puss-spewing acne standing at the drive-thru window. It occurred to me as I snapped the little golden arches onto the top of the red plastic roof that if the makers of the toy were going for absolute realism, they fell painfully short. Note the following shortcomings:

1) If there is going to be a little plastic McDonalds, shouldn’t a little plastic liposuction clinic also be part of this fantasy city? After all, who is going to suction the fat from the necks, backs and spare tires of the Big-Mac-devouring, Shamrock-shake-guzzling, French-fry-inhaling, McSalad-shaker-shaking people of this town when they wake up at age 35 and discover that they can no longer fit into their die-cast Ford Mustangs without first lathering their hips with Crisco?

2) Where does the god damned therapist live? Unless Dr. Feelgood has an office in the car wash (highly doubtful), there is no place in town for our overweight population to turn when the aforementioned awakening comes to pass and the troubled masses of Fat Ass Land are forced to confront that they have spent too many years anesthetizing their horror over living in a plastic city by engaging in torrid affairs with The Hamburglar (“rubble-rubble-rubble”) and shoveling down Filet O’ Fishes like tartar sauce was heroin and they were Rick James.

3) Perhaps it’s just a simple oversight on the part of the toy’s designers, but there is no airport in this God-forsaken city, which means none of its people will be flying on Southwest Airlines, which means none of them will be able to read my article on the legendary old burger joints of Los Angeles in the December issue of Southwest Airlines Spirit Magazine. That’s just criminal.

4) Hello? Starbucks?

5) There’s no supermarket and I happen to know from recent experience that eating a steady diet of McGriddles necessitates the acquisition of a variety of common grocery items, including laxatives, analgesics and the occasional item of adult incontinence couture. If these people don’t have access to such basic gastrointestinal crutches, there is likely to be a river of little plastic people shit cascading down 1 McDonalds Road, overwhelming the poor fire engine with the chipped red paint and submerging the black Trans Am, T-top and all.

I trust that the next iteration of this toy will be more accurate. In the meantime, I’ll have a Big Mac combo with a Diet Coke. And Super Size it, please.

Free to a Good Home: The Germ That Has Burrowed Into My Sinuses and Made My Life Hell for A Week

2004-11-29T11:50:00.000-08:00

As a service to my loyal readers (most of whom live in Canada, which I just don’t get), I am offering free to a good home the insidious bug that has taken up residence in behind my forehead.

The Evans Head Bug comes in its own handy carrying case – your head – and is the perfect way to show your loved ones you wish them the very best this holiday season.

[Visual: Deathly ill middle-aged man hugging his wife under the tree on Christmas morning. “Oh, hodey,” he says. “It’s just what I wadted. (Hack. Hack. Sniff.) My very owd Evads Head Cold. Ah-choo!”]

If your child has asked for dizziness, headaches, congestion and coughing this Christmas, The Evans Head Bug can wipe out your shopping in one fell swoop. And if your honey’s wants sleepless nights, sneezing, a sore throat and a raspy voice for Hanukkah, well, Mazel Tov. Here it is: the perfect gift.

What’s more, there’s no need to make a mess with wrapping paper or hard-to-handle holiday ribbons this year. The Evans Head Bug can be delivered merely by carrying out one’s daily life. I’ll arrange to visit your location and sneeze on a doorknob or spray a snot rocket on your loved one’s pillow case. The rest is up to his immune system. It really is that simple!

[Visual: Young girl lying in bed with a thermometer in her mouth. “Mommy, daddy, thank you for my Evans Head Bug. (Barfs into a bedside bucket. Wipes excess from her mouth with sleeve of pajamas) This is the best Hanukkah ever! (Belches)]

But wait! There’s more!

Act now and you’ll also receive three empty containers of Thera-Flu cold medicine used by Daniel Evans ABSOLUTELY FREE!

Act now. Operators are standing by (although they may step away from time to time to blow their noses and try to clear the thick mucous from their vocal chords).

Void where prohibited. Restrictions may apply.

Little Debbie and Her Flying Bagels of Death

2004-11-29T11:46:00.000-08:00

I have a big sister named Debbie. She lives in San Francisco with her genius pediatric cancer specialist husband who plays the guitar and her four-year-old son whose giggle absolutely cracks me up and her one-year-old daughter who is so cute and cuddly and perfect that I just want to pick her up and put her in my pocket and nibble on her cheeks for breakfast.

I don’t get to see my big sister and her family very often, but I saw her twice during the past week. We went to Starbucks on Saturday and while the barista was making decaf soy gingerbread lattes for our whole family, I told Debbie what a Dirty Sanchez is. Then we went to Trader Joe’s and she bought something called pumpkin butter, which falls just after llama shit and just before pig piss on the list of things I would want in my mouth.

Once, when we were teenagers, Debbie and I were having a typical brother-sister argument (I think I was ragging her about what a shitty flute player she was) and I said something especially mean and she chucked a frozen, stale bagel at me. It hit me in the eye, and I now believe you never really know how good a pitcher’s fastball is until it beans you in the melon. I was pissed, but I got Debbie back several years later when I recounted that story in my toast at her wedding and told her new husband that if there was one piece of advice I could give him about Debbie it’s that he should duck.

Category 5 Adulthood

2004-11-28T09:46:00.000-08:00

When I was a scrawny, gangly kid (as opposed to the scrawny, gangly grown-up I am today), my family and I took a trip to Lake Tahoe, along the northern border between California and Nevada. During this trip my folks decided to take my sister and I on a rafting trip down the nearby Truckee River. This represented a significant departure for us, a family generally disinclined to participate in any activity more physically demanding than a game of Boggle.

The rafting adventure began harmlessly enough, which is to say we all got into the raft without drowning. We slowly drifted down the river, occasionally steering the raft with an oar and comforting one another as the fear of drowing washed over us. We craned our necks back in forth in the orange life vests, staring at the scenery and noshing on tuna sandwiches as we coasted. Then suddenly, to the surprise and disapproval of everyone in the raft, the Truckee River turned into a Category 5 rapid and the Evans family was immersed in a struggle for its collective life.

The river became choppy and rough. I looked at my dad, who looked at my mom, who looked at my sister and me with a face that seemed to say, “Well, it’s been fun, kids. We’re all going to die now.” A family in a raft near ours overturned in the splashing nightmare of the rapids. My folks struggled mightily to keep our raft right-side-up and away from the jagged rocks that would most certainly have been the instruments of our death. I imagined the headline in the paper the next day would read, "Oy Vey! Physically Retarded Jewish Family Drowns in Truckee River Disaster; Should Have Stuck To Boggle."

Ultimately, through some stroke of luck I will never be able to explain (perhaps it was our Lord and Savior, Barbara Streisand, having mercy on our souls), we made it through the rapids and escaped with our lives. Then we all rushed back to the hotel to change our underpants. We spent the rest of the trip watching The Jazz Singer on Spectravision and never went on another vacation again.

As time goes by, I see that being an adult is a lot like that rafting trip. Everything started out so smoothly and serenely. I got a job. I met a wonderful woman. We got married. We went to Europe. We took walks on the beach. The world was paradise – smooth and serene and beautiful.

And then, without warning, experiences like last night turn that serenity into a hellstorm.

At 4:26 a.m., Left-Handed Power-Hitting Son called out to my wife that he had wet the bed. Hot Wife dutifully threw the covers off of herself and dragged her tired body into his room to strip the pee-soaked sheets, hose the child down and tuck him into a freshly made bed.

I won’t lie. I was thrilled to remain in the warm, cozy confines of our flannel sheets while Hot Wife went about her business. But my joy was completely crushed when she returned a moment later.

“Danny,” she said, “the dog took a dump on the carpet.”

That would be the new carpet. The carpet we just had installed a month ago. The carpet I mortgage my right testicle to afford. The carpet that replaced the carpet so stained and soiled with dog piss and shit stains that it looked like it had lined the floor of a kennel instead of a modest single family dwelling.

My first thought: I’m going to kill that dog. Right now. Where’s my Louisville Slugger?

My second thought: Shit! I’d better clean that poop before it stains the carpet and I have to mortgage the other nard to replace this carpet, too.

The second thought won out. So there I was at 4:31 in the morning, picking up dog shit with a wad of paper towels while my wife was in the next room pulling pee-stained sheets from our son’s bed.

And suddenly I was in the category 5 rapids of the Truckee River again.

Check This Out

2004-11-26T08:55:00.000-08:00

The market nearest Evans World Headquarters recently installed a self-checkout station, presumably to make the process of purchasing adult diapers or douche bags more anonymous for those who choose not to discuss the proper application of such items with their fellow shoppers. The concept of the station is remarkably simple – you scan your items, you bag them, you pay and you leave.

I needed four items: kitchen garbage bags, bananas, chips and dip. I gathered my goods and schlepped my basket to the self-checkout station. After a thorough once-over of the unit, I felt sufficiently familiar with it and pushed the button that said “Begin Checkout.” A very pleasant electronic female voice squirted out of the machine.

“Please scan your first item,” she said.

I grabbed the garbage bags from the basket, spun the box around four or five times until I located the little bar code, and then let it hover over the airspace of the scanner. I swiped it back and forth across the scanner a few times, waiting for the beep.

“Please scan your first item,” she said again.

“I’m trying!” I said, marginally panicked.

After another pass or two over the scanner, I finally heard the beep.

“Four dollars and ninety-nine cents,” she said. “Please scan your next item.”

I put the trash bags into a plastic grocery bag, then grabbed the Ruffles from my shopping basket and ran it across the scanner. Once. Twice, Three times. Four times. No beep.

“Please scan your next item,” she said.

“Shut up, bitch. I’m trying,” I said.

Growing increasingly agitated and feeling as though my dreams of a career in supermarket checking were atrophying in front of me, I continued trying to scan then chips. Still no beep.

“Please scan your next item,” she said.

“I heard you!” I said. “Zip it!”

I put the chips down, hoping that perhaps there was a problem with the bar code instead of the more likely problem: user error. I grabbed the dip and tried scanning it, but the same dismal failure ensued. I scanned and scanned and scanned, and nothing happened. At this point, my blood was boiling. A line of Thanksgiving shoppers was forming behind me, waiting to be similarly embarrassed by this stupid fucking machine of death.

“Please scan your next item,” she said again.

“OK, you chatty hag,” I said, throwing the dip back into the basket. “Here comes my next item right now.”

With that I unbuttoned my jeans, pulled them down to my ankles and put my bare ass right on the scanner. I shook it back and forth to make sure the evil woman inside the machine got a good look at my caboose.

“Here!” I said, riding the scanner and screaming at the top of my lungs. “Here’s the next item! Right here! Is it on sale? Huh? Huh? Huh?”

Beep.

“One dollar and forty-nine cents,” she said. “Please scan your next item.”

Burn, Barney, Burn

2004-11-24T15:49:00.000-08:00

We explained the concept of fire to Barney’s Biggest Fan last night. She may never forgive us.

The Southern California temperature had dipped to an intolerably frigid 60 degrees and I thought it was a good time to clear the cobwebs from the fireplace and spark up a Duraflame log, lest my family and I be reduced to putting on long sleeves. Not 30 seconds after I set the log alight, Barney’s Biggest Fan ambled over to the brick fireplace in our living room and gazed into the flames.

You know what came next: she moved purposefully toward the flames, clearly wanting to touch them like Peter Gabriel told her to (“I wanna touch the light, the heat I see in your eyes.”).

The situation was completely under control. I was going to let her get close enough to the fire to feel the heat and then tell her that the feeling is called “hot” and that’s why we don’t get too close to fire. But when Hot Wife entered the room and saw our daughter close enough to the fire to be cast in an orangey glow (but not close enough to, say, make a s’more), she freaked.

“Honey! No! Hot!” Hot Wife said. She then threw me a disdainful look that told me unequivocally that any hope I may have had for holiday nookie was as dead as William Howard Taft.

So we went with The China Palace Approach – yelling monosyllabic words at the child as if she were deaf, just like my father-in-law yells “Sweet and Sour Chicken!” at the waiter at China Palace, believing that the man will better understand English if it is hollered at the top of an American man’s lungs.

We asked her if she understood.

“Yes,” she said. “Hot. Hot.”

She then turned and marched straight toward the fireplace again.

“Noooooooo,” I said. “Hot. That’s fire. Hot. No touching.”

“Hot,” she parroted back. “No. Hot.”

She then turned and marched straight toward the fireplace again.

At this point, given my extensive parenting experience, college education and spectacular command of the obvious, I could see that The China Palace Approach wasn’t getting through to the child (I do provide parenting consultations on the side. Call me.). It was time to provide a more visual lesson.

I marched over to the toy box, fished for the stuffed Barney doll – my daugher’s holy grail – and returned with the little dinosaur. Without a word, I held Barney up to my daughter’s face and then tossed the little fucker into the fireplace. The asbestos-stuffed dinosaur burst into flames and vanished faster than a pack of clove cigarettes at a senior prom. I then turned to my daughter.

“See?” I asked. “Hot. Fire. No touching.”

Go On With Your Bad Self, White Boy!

2004-11-23T11:57:00.000-08:00

Rappin’ Davey W e-mailed me this morning (all the way from Maui!) and asked me why I haven’t yet written a blog entry about our brief stint as rap stars in the late 1980s. The answer, of course, is that I am a very serious scribe who chooses very important subject matter (like how to tackle raging constipation with low-grade explosives). Besides that, I don’t take requests like some cheesie Bar Mitzvah band where the lead singer plays “Sunrise, Sunset” on the accordion during the candle-lighting ceremony.

But since Dave sent me money (all the way from Maui!) to buy lottery tickets and I spent most of it on McGriddles and stool softeners, I guess I owe it to him to tell the story. So, Dave, this long distance dedication is going out to you (all the way to Maui!):

When Dave, his brother Kevin and I were counselors at a summer camp called Camp Alonim (which I believe is Hebrew for “We’re out of toilet paper so you’ll have to use a leaf”), there was a regular Saturday night talent show attended by the whole camp. Kids and counselors alike would cowboy up to perform various acts each week – acts like playing Havah Negila on the cello or belching the entire Hebrew alphabet.

Dave, Kevin and I decided to write and perform a rap about our summer camp experience, modeling our act after our favorite MCs of the day: the Beastie Boys, the Fat Boys, Slick Rick, Public Enemy and the late rapper who chose to refer to himself as Easy Motherfuckin’ E. Dave and Kevin wrote the words to our rap and I practiced what was a prerequisite element of any listenable rap song in those days: the beat box. For those with a low hip-hop IQ, a beat box is performed by putting one’s mouth right up against the microphone and making a series of noises that sounds conspicuously like a dying transmission.

Psss-pihuh-pssstpsst-prffff-pssst, uhprrrrf-pahpur-psssst.

And so on.

As showtime drew near, we were as giddy as 10-year-old girls at a Debbie Gibson concert. What we lacked in street cred and simple musical inclination was compensated by absolute glee and complete ignorance of our tone-deafness. We huddled backstage. Dave and Kevin whispered through the lyrics once more. I just sat there listening, wondering if this was going to turn out like that scene in The Jazz Singer when a big shot record producer hears Neil Diamond perform and offers him a record deal on the spot.

When the curtain rose, all we could see was the glare of the bright auditorium lights shining down on us. The crowed was completely hushed (the predictable after-effect of the act before us, which featured seven-year-old boys from Bunk 2 doing arm farts to the tune of the Israeli National Anthem).

I took a deep breath, grabbed the mic and started grunting out a funky beat box, like so:

Psss-pihuh-pssstpsst-prffff-pssst, uhprrrrf-pahpur-psssst.

And so on.

Then came Dave and Kevin with the lyrics, like so:

Well, I’m Rappin’ Davey W. from Alonim
I’m the best darn rapper that you’ve ever seen.

And so on. (Solid gold, isn’t it?).

The rest is just one long orgasmic blur. The tune went on with rhyming about the chicken served in the camp dining hall and our perceived domination of all comers on the camp basketball court.

When the song ended, the crowd went completely batshit. There were whistles and cheering and yarmulkes flying everywhere. People came running up to the stage to get our autographs or to touch our shoes or to put their palms on top of our heads and recite the traditional Hebrew blessing over kick-ass rappers (something like, “Baruch attach adonai blah blah blah word up!”).

When Dave, Kevin and I reconvened backstage, we decided the our success couldn’t possibly get any better than what we had just experienced and we therefore decided to disband the group.

Later that summer, I made Kevin laugh while his mouth was full of Cheerios and one of them came shooting out of his nose, whole. If that’s not street cred, I don’t know what is.

What Not To Wear To a Testicle Examination

2004-11-22T10:11:00.000-08:00

About five years ago I felt a small irregularity on my right testicle. Hot Wife was pregnant with Left-Handed Power-Hitting Son at the time and she encouraged me to have my Happy Bag checked by a physician. I acquiesced out of obligation to my manhood and my budding family, not out of a desire to have a man in scrubs put his face in my crotch and handle my balls like a pair of dice at the craps table, which is how I knew the examination would unfold.

After squeezing and juggling and examining my nards for a few minutes, my doctor said he had an almost surefire test for testicular cancer. He pulled a little penlight out of his shirt pocket and told me has was going to shine it against the nodule on my testicle. If something black appeared in the glow of the light, well, that would be bad. Gleefully, no such blackness appeared and I figured that meant I was free to zip up and go about my manly ways in good health.

Sadly, no. The doctor told me he wanted me to have an ultrasound on the groin ornament in question, just to be sure nothing untoward was happening down there. Then he reached out and shook my hand, which was the first time I had ever had a man shake both my money maker and my hand in the span of two minutes.

(Remind me to find a female physician.)

As it turns out, Hot Wife’s godfather is the head of radiology at the hospital where our kids were born. I called him, described my situation and asked if I could come down to his office for a quick ultrasound. No problem, he said.

The next day I arrived at The Godfather’s office dressed in shorts, flip-flops and the loudest Hawaiian shirt I could find. I didn’t know the proper attire for a testicle exam, but I figured it wasn’t too much different from the preferred attire at whorehouses and titty bars and glory holes worldwide. I even stuffed my pocket with one dollar bills, just in case.

This is where the story gets a little twisted.

I have no idea to this day whether the arrangement was the doing of The Godfather, but I was greeted in the waiting room by a very attractive blonde ultrasound technician. She escorted me back to a row of dressing rooms and asked me to change into one of those flattering, open-backed hospital gowns. I did so, but I left the Hawaiian shirt on. Chicks dig that. She then brought me into the ultrasound room, told me she was going to leave the room and would return in five minutes. When she returned, she said, the blankets should be arranged so that only my testicles were exposed (I know: if I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard that…).

When I had properly covered my, ahem, “self” and was ready for Nurse Ratchet to return, I felt the spirit of David Lee Roth wash over me.

I hollered out, “I’ve got my pencil! Gimme something to write on, man!”

The nurse returned, smiling. She snapped on a pair of rubber gloves, grabbed a white squirt bottle filled with a warm, clear goo and squirted it all over my package. She then picked up a large ultrasound wand that looked a little like a personal massager and began to move it back and forth across the freshly gooed area. It was paradise.

What does one say to a nurse while she’s, you know, doing that to you down there?

“So,” I said, trying to act all cool in a decidedly uncool situation, “do you always get this frisky on the first date?”

She laughed, which made her arm shake, which made the little wand shake, which felt kind of alright, which made me think I should crack some more jokes.

“It’s funny,” I said, “but this always seems to happen when I wear this shirt. It’s irresistible, isn’t it?”

“That’s not the word I would have used,” she said, smirking.

“What word would you have used then, pray tell,” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Ugly. Unfortunate. Loud. Any of those would work.”

God. Talk about ruining a moment.

As it turned out, the little doohickey on my doohickey was a calcium deposit. Totally harmless. The same, however, cannot be said of my Hawaiian shirt.

Little Tom and His Short Temper

2004-11-19T14:06:00.000-08:00

I was ordering my iced venti decaf soy latte this morning when I heard the distinctive sounds of smooching and kanoodling behind me. I turned around to see the source of the PDA (public display of affection) and what I saw will be seared into my memory for all eternity: a tall redhead with a nose ring embraced in a lip-locked death match with a leathered-out biker dude who was – no joke – a good eight inches shorter than she. Picture Nicole Kidman making out with Gary Coleman and you’re in the right ballpark.

I have lived in Southern California for my whole life and that means I have had to see a lot of really weird shit and a lot of really strange people. I once saw a kid pull his glass eye out of his head, put it in his mouth to clean it off and then pop it back into his eye socket. I was once browsing in a sex shop (for the articles, of course) when a 400-pound woman with a purple Mohawk and a tongue stud, an employee of the establishment, walked over and asked me if I had any questions about the merchandise. I played pool in a bar one time against a guy who had iron cross tattoos on his face. On his fucking face!

Yet in spite of the daily parade of freaks and weirdos and outcasts that has passed in front of me, I have never before seen a guy who was so completely dwarfed by his girlfriend. His head was looking straight up at her and hers was straight down at him. And they were kissing and holding hands and crushing on each other like minxes.

You know what came next, of course: suppressed laughter. It was as if someone had farted in church.

The barista who was taking my money saw the look on my face and we both looked away from one another immediately. Eye contact would have unleashed a torrent of laughter neither of us could have stopped. We didn’t want to make a scene.

So I got my receipt and stepped aside while they made my coffee and you know what came next, of course: that little bastard order chocolate milk. Chocolate fucking milk!

Well, at this point I just lost it. And the barista lost it. And the guy who was reading the Wall Street Journal in the big, cushy brown chair lost it. And the three teenagers immersed in their before-school bible study lost it. And the little chocolate milk guy looked around, wondering what everyone was laughing about.

Through the cacophony of laughter and tears and snot and people mouthing the words “chocolate milk” to each other in silence, the barista asked Little Chocolate Milk Guy what his name was so she could write it on his cup.

And he said his name was Tom. Tom! As in “Tom Thumb!”

And you know what came next: Little Tom The Chocolate Milk Guy got pissed. He discovered that we were laughing at his little ass and his little boy drink and the pathetic way he looked up at his girlfriend and he just went batshit. Straws and napkins and holiday knick-knacks started flying everywhere. I got drilled in the ear by a biscotti. A piece of jellied orange from the top of the holiday gingerbread went flying through the front page of the guy’s Wall Street Journal. Yep, Little Tom was having a little tantrum.

After a few minutes, Little Tom’s big girlfriend picked him up by a belt loop and got him to calm the fuck down and find his happy place. She leaned down and kissed him on the top of his little over-Moussed head and convinced him to just finish ordering and leave. He agreed, in part because she was way bigger than him and he didn’t have much choice.

And you know what came next, of course: the barista got down real low, looked Little Tom right in the face and said, “So did you want that chocolate milk in a sippy cup, little guy?”

What Would Neil Diamond Do (WWND)?

2004-11-18T11:53:00.000-08:00

The five weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas have always been to Jews what the time between the sinking of the Titanic and the arrival of the rescue boats was for survivors of that wreck. We all just kind of float out here at the mercy of the non-Jewish world, hoping that the 26th of December comes before we drown under the annual red and white tsunami of animatronic elves, Bing Crosby and Perry Como songs and disbelieving paramedics coming to rescue neighbors who try to hang their Christmas lights after imbibing a little too much eggnog and end up nailing their thumbs to the rain gutters.

Yeah, being Jewish is a pretty pathetic sentence in December. But have you noticed that the evil warlords of commerce are turning the screw a little tighter by starting the whole Noel Baby Jesus Candy Cane Saint Nick Freak-Out a little earlier each year? Starbucks busted out the white wreaths with the little red berries on them just before Halloween. Go to the movies and you’ll see a half-dozen previews for upcoming flicks about someone who goes home for the holidays and gets involved in some kind of hijinx about snow or sledding or reindeer. And the big mall near our house is already letting parents drag their crying, snot-crusted kids kicking and screaming onto Santa’s lap for a blurry Polaroid.

The small talk around the holidays changes rather drastically, too. I was riding up in the elevator at work the other day with a somewhat big-boned woman with a hairy mole on her earlobe – a woman I barely know but have passed in the hallway a few times. The conversation went like this:

Her: “So, have you gotten all of your Christmas shopping done?”

Me: “Oh, no. Barely started. You?”

Her: “Getting there. You gonna have a big tree this year?”

Me: “Well, actually no. I’m Jewish.”

Her. “Oh. Weird. So you guys don’t have a Christmas tree?”

Me: “Nope. No tree. No lights either. We just gather up all of the Christian children in the neighborhood and burn their souls in the backyard as a sign to God that we love him. Say, do you have any kids?”

Her: “[Gasp!] Damn you! Damn you and all of the evil Jewish sinners. You and Neil Diamond and Ben Stiller and that bitch Barbara Streisand. All of you will burn in hell!”

I know that kind of characterization of our holiday rituals doesn’t do much to, say, advance the hopes for peace in the Middle East, but it sure as shit extracts me from the tired duty of having to explain why we don’t have a tree, why we don’t have a big Christmas pig and why we don’t own any Jimmy Stewart movies on DVD.

Conversely, here are some of the things Jews do enjoy during the holidays:

1) Shouting obscenities out the window at Christmas carolers and pelting them with the fried potato pancakes (called “Latkes”) we eat during Hanukkah.

2) Drinking ourselves into a Maneshevitz-wine-fueled stupor, swirving over to the mall in the Honda CRV and telling Santa that all we want for Christmas is a quick peek at Mrs. Claus’ underpants and a dime bag of the chronic, and we’re not leaving until we get it.

3) Making a batch of holiday fudge for all of our neighbors and hand-delivering them on Christmas Eve. Then we sit by the window and wait until the Ex-Lax we mixed in with the fudge kicks in. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen the big guy across the street sprint from the front yard to the bathroom with his hand over his ass, like that’s going to prevent him from (to borrow a phrase from UPS) “seeing what brown can do for him” right there in his silk candy cane boxer shorts.

4) Teaching Left-Handed Power-Hitting Son how to use a power screwdriver so that when all of the neighborhood kids come out Christmas morning with their new bikes, he can deftly move in and loosen the spokes and the handlebars when they’re not looking. The next time those little shits try to stop they end up flying ass over teakettle and wind up with a bitchen case of holiday road rash.

I could go on, but I don’t want to give away all of our secrets. I need something to look forward to on Christmas morning, too, you know.

If You Were Me

2004-11-17T17:39:00.000-08:00

Say there’s this kid who lives with you.

Say he’s cute and clever and really good at t-ball but not so good about acting rationally when you tell him he can’t have candy for breakfast and he can’t play with his penis in front of company and he can’t bash his little sister in the head with his Rescue Heroes action figures.

And say when you try to establish these boundaries with him he falls to the ground like a rag doll, starts to cry hysterically and won’t stop even if you pretend to have your finger stuck in your nose, then his nose, then your nose AND his nose, and then the dog’s.

And say he won’t stop crying until you offer him a piece of Halloween candy – the very candy that he wants for breakfast and can’t have.

And say you don’t want to bribe him out of hysterics with candy anymore because it’s bad for his teeth and it’s bad for his belly and it’s bad for you when you want him to go to bed before Letterman comes on.

So say you decide that the next time he has one of his freakouts you’re just going to let him cry because all of the experts say you shouldn’t acknowledge that kind of behavior, you shouldn’t reward insubordination and you shouldn’t encourage him to do it again because he will and you’ll eventually run out of Halloween candy and then you’ll be totally fucked.

So say you tell the child that the street lights have come on and it’s time to come inside, he cries and cries and cries and begins to melt down and you decide this is the one, this is the time you’re going to take a stand and not give in to his bullshit, which is all well and good and nice until the fit starts to drag into its third fucking hour and you really want him to shut his piehole so you can watch the Laker game in peace.

Then what? What do you do?

Do you give in and give the boy his Almond Joy and congratulate him for his persistence?

Or do you say screw the Lakers because your son has a gift and you want to see if he can break the world record with a six-hour temper tantrum, which would most likely get his pictures in all of the papers and put you in the slammer for child neglect which would be fine because you’d have a kid in the Guinness Book of World Records and spending a few weeks sharing a 12 x 6 cell with Willie the Drunk Midget Flasher is a small price to pay to have a kid who’s good – I mean really fucking John Coltrane awesome – at something he loves to do, which is freak out?

Or do you just grab your car keys and peel the Honda CRV out of the driveway and go to see a movie by yourself because you just can’t stand the sound of the kid wailing anymore and even the tastes of torched popcorn and flat Sprite are better than listening to that dude for one more second and you hope he’s done when you get home so you don’t have to sell him to the scrap yard for parts?

Yeah, that’s what I did, too.

Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho, It's Off To The Asylum I Go

2004-11-16T17:20:00.000-08:00

This is where I work:

• The office building was constructed in such a way that in order to get from one side to the other, one must either walk through the kitchen (where there are enough unwashed, bacteria-smeared coffee mugs in the sink to start a penicillin factory) or the room that houses printers, copiers and office supplies (which I have named “The Drop Zone” because it’s quite odorously apparent that that’s where everyone on the second floor goes to fart). Since the men’s room is on the wing of the building opposite the one on which I sit, I have a choice to make each time I have to “make water”: tour our budding biology laboratory or inhale the wafting odor of the Nachos Bell Grande that Steve from accounting ate for lunch.

• The woman in the cubicle to my right has set her cell phone ringer to play the song on the Irish Spring commercials at the loudest possible volume. Since she is often away from her desk without the offending phone, I must type away to a soundtrack that’s fresh and – whe-whoo! – clean as a whistle.

• The blonde who sits in the cubicle directly in front of mine didn’t get the memo that open-toed flippy floppy shoes are not to be warn after Labor Day. As she flutters around the office, I hear the incessant slap of sweat-soaked leather against the soles of her stinky feet: slap-slop, slap-slop, slap-slop. And so forth.

• The marketing guru who wants everyone to know how important and powerful he is walks around the office talking into the hands-free device on his cell phone. Since one simply cannot talk into one of those things without yelling, the whole office gets treated to the cacophonous stylings of a balding, middle-aged stress case as he negotiates low-grade “chip clip” buys with a tchotchke vendor in Poughkeepsie.

• I keep a bag of M&Ms at my desk because I’m a sugar addict and the candy keeps me from mainlining Mountain Dew when the 3:00 blues hit. Everyone in the office knows about my sugar stash and they pay regular visits to my cubicle to pilfer my candy and chit-chat about the latest office gossip. “So,” says one particular offender, “how’s it going over here? Write any good copy lately?” People, if you’re reading this, spare me the small talk. Just reach the grubby little mitt you just picked your nose with into the bag, spread your germs and leave me alone before I tie you to rafter beam in The Drop Zone and blueflame my McGriddle gas until your eyebrows melt.

• The building maintenance crew has somehow set the hinges on the men’s room door so that it closes very, very slowly. As a result, the door is still roughly halfway open when many guys have begun their evacuatory exercises and/or when their asses begin to emit sounds most commonly associated with a 1967 Gremlin that’s running out of gas: putt-chacha-putt-chacha-pahhhhhh… Thank you, maintenance crew, for allowing everyone in the sales and marketing department to know the status of my colorectal health (or lack thereof).

• There is an elderly, cataract-ridden security guard named Vibart who sits at the desk in the building lobby. Vibart has an insanely strong Caribbean accent and when he’s not sleeping at the desk or losing people’s packages, he’s chatting me up about what he perceives to be the hot current events of the day. “OK, Danny, did you watch the debayut last night, mon?” he says. “I think President Bush is gonna win, mon, you know? He just seems to be the smarter of the two, mon, don’t you think?” They breed ‘em sharp as marbles down there in the Caribbean, don’t they?

When I was freelancing for a living, I used to long for the interactivity and camaraderie of a full-time office gig. What was I thinking?

Don't Hold Your Breath

2004-11-16T11:38:00.000-08:00

I was reminded this weekend why I so passionately wanted to procreate. It’s because childless people couldn’t possibly have the kind of near-death, soul-crushing experiences that parents encounter on a daily basis.

Sure, being single and/or sans offspring has its own attractive selling points. But while it’s one thing to pass out from a whiskey bender and find when you awaken that your buddies have Sharpied a big, blue penis onto your right butt cheek (for example – not saying that has ever happened to me or anything), it’s quite another to watch a youngster made from your own goo display the folly and fallibility of mankind anew each day.

This weekend my daughter cried so hard that she literally passed out. Second time she’s done that. Hot Wife was putting Barney’s Biggest Fan in her high chair before breakfast on Saturday morning and the child was apparently not interested in eating. She began to cry with such force and conviction that she was impotent to stop it. She stopped making noise. She turned blue. Her head fell back. And we fucking freaked out.

I was about to start administering CPR on her when Barney’s Biggest Fan came to. She opened her eyes, looked me right in the face and said, “Barney.” When my heart started again, I put Barney on for her. I have not been shy about voicing my distaste for Barney, but if it keeps my daughter breathing, that bastard can spoon me in my bed and help himself to my porno mags if he wants to.

Later that day, my son punched me in the face. We were wrestling on the floor, I was pretending to deliver a series of rib-shattering body blows and he decided it was time to up the ante. He clenched his four-year-old fist and clocked me in the right cheek. Twice. Boom-boom.

I was stunned. I knew he hadn’t done it on purpose and I wasn’t sure if I should scold him for even thinking that was OK or trot him out and pit him against some of the other boys in the neighborhood to see exactly how badass he is. I knew the latter would probably draw the ire of Hot Wife, so I settled for telling Left-Handed Power Hitting Son that blows to the head are strictly forbidden by the Torah and if he does it again God will send down a lightning bolt and kill Elmo.

Yesterday, fully recovered from her little cardiovascular vacation, Barney’s Biggest Fan let me know that all biological systems were operating at optimal levels by depositing something in her diaper that should not have been approached without a hazmat suit and a set of barbecue tongs. How can a precious, wide-eyed child who weighs barely 20 pounds evacuate a turd that so closely resembles the excrement of creatures that haven’t walked the earth in 200 million years?

If you want to get gross about it (and if you’re here reading this, you do), here’s what I found embedded in the diaper of Barney’s Biggest Fan: nine undigested raisins, three whole black beans, a cell phone, the next door neighbor’s lost cat, 58 cents in change, a license plate, my wife’s Costco card, a copy of The Watchtower, the 22-pound turkey Hot Wife was going to make for Thanksgiving, and a man who says his name is Carl and wanted to know how to get back to the San Diego Freeway.

Let this be a lesson to you. If you’re planning to come by Evans World Headquarters in the near future, you’ll need to be trained in CPR, self defense and the proper handling of hazardous materials.

Shock and Awe

2004-11-15T13:10:00.000-08:00

Why is it that we can shoot incoming nuclear missiles out of mid-air with frickin’ laser beams but we can’t develop a shopping cart that doesn’t have to be muscled out of its fervent desire to veer left into the bok choi?

I am able to allow my mind to wander off on tangential thinking like this because I have cleansed myself of the evil warlord Constipation. Ding dong, the shit is dead. I killed it, and in my desire to show solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Iraq, I mimicked many of their physical and spiritual strategies, starting with giving the enemy a name: Osama. Rather appropriate, no?

Here’s what else I did:

1) Before I swallowed my first dose of stool softener, I took out a little ball point pen and wrote the following message on the pill: “You’re in deep shit now, Osama.” If the American military can writes messages on bombs, I think it shows great support and unity when I write messages on my poo medicine. After all, we’re both trying to blow away a little shit.

2) I called the local newspaper and invited them to send over a correspondent who would be “embedded” with my troops to cover the battle. They declined, although they did send a representative to hand-deliver an official correspondence. What’s a “Cease and Desist” order?

3) I swore in Left-Handed Power-Hitting Son as my Minister of Propaganda. He sat with me in the bathroom as the battle raged, emerging from time to time to deliver updates and the official coalition position on the offensive. For example, “Oh, nasty! Mommy, daddy’s going poo-poo and it smells like that baloney sandwich I left in the garage for a few weeks last summer. I think I’m gonna hurl!”

4) Every time I swallowed one of the little stool softener pills, I shouted “Fire in the hole!” at the top of my lungs.

5) Just like the American military command, I ordered my Minister of Propaganda to drastically overestimate the enemy casualties. “Mom, daddy says he just broke his second plunger of the day and he needs you to go to Home Depot and get a new one. And he needs another 24-pack of TP, stat!” I also prohibited the broadcast or publication of any photo showing my own dead and wounded, just like the US government does. This means you’re not going to be able to see pictures of my swollen, red bunghole. Sorry.

Exit Strategy

2004-11-12T14:08:00.000-08:00

I am preparing to wage The Mother of All Assaults on my constipation. I am broadcasting this because based on the conduct of the American military command, who told everyone and their balls that the U.S. was going to attack Fallujah, I now believe it is the proper protocol to give my enemy (my intestinal track and my rectum) fair warning that the fury of hell is headed their way. Smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em, boys.

I will soften the command and control center of my constipation with the special forces of dietary overhaul. I had fish tacos with lots of black beans at lunch today, and I have drunk enough water today to create a man-made lake right there at Evans World Headquarters.

Once those initial targets are neutralized, I’ll call in the cavalry to finish the job. The cavalry in this case is the ammo I bought this afternoon: stool softeners, laxatives, milk of magnesia, high fiber cereals, Metamucil, a plunger, a 100-yard garden hose, a weed whacker, four fence posts, a large blue plastic tarp, a box of steel wool, a mule, a GPS tracking device, three rolls of duct tape and two day laborers I picked up in front of The Home Depot. How do you say “Get down! She’s gonna blow!” in Spanish?

This offensive is being launched now because the enemy is growing too strong, too resolute, too absolutely rank to let it fester any longer. Constipation means hard stools, which means gas, which means public scorn. Were this problem given any more life, I would be banished to the backyard with Weak-Bladdered Dog, where I would drink from a stainless steel bowl and scratch at the back door when I was ready to come in for the night.

Of course, war is not waged without casualties. There will be no McGriddles for a while, and probably no Starbucks banana loaf cake either. The day laborers may not be seen again and their families may be left to wonder what became of them. I hope they are able to take solace in the fact that their loved ones perished fighting for a noble cause. That cause: my ability to evacuate my bowels like a normal human being, without the pity of the man in the stall next to me, without the desperate squeezing of noses by the people next to me at the fish taco place, and without Hot Wife’s ongoing requirement that I take my stinky ass out of the bed and go sleep on the couch.

As we prepare for battle, we recall the rally cry of the American armed forces: "Ours is not to question why. Ours is just to do or die. Or smell really bad."

(I added that last part myself.)

To the special forces and the cavalry, I wish you Godspeed. And to the enemy, I admonish you to get out of my ass so I can flush you like the shit that you are.

Crazydar

2004-11-11T13:57:00.000-08:00

I work in the mental health industry and I have encountered my own fair share of mental health issues, so now I am convinced that I have developed “crazydar,” which is like “gaydar” except that it allows me to sniff out and identify crazy people instead of gay people. What can I say? It’s a gift.

It’s not the kind of superpower that would make for a Hollywood summer blockbuster (although they tried with The Sixth Sense) or a cartoon series on Nickelodeon, but it certainly does make a run-of-the-mill trip to Costco or McDonald’s a lot more entertaining.

Like sometimes Hot Wife and I will be out having Mexican food and I’ll see a guy in line at the cashier and I’ll say, “Hey, honey, see that guy over there? He’s depressed.”

“How can you possibly tell that?” she asks.

“Because he keeps pulling his underwear out of his ass,” I say. “A lot of those antidepressant meds make you constipated. He’s obviously got a rough case of swamp ass and I’ll bet you anything it’s because he’s on Zoloft on he hasn’t shit in four days.”

She rolls her eyes and looks at me like I just told her I want her refer to me as “O Captain, My Captain” from now on, but I’m sure I’m right about the guy at the register. Normal people don’t pick at their asses like that. Not in public anyway.

My crazydar has also afforded me countless opportunities to meet and share war stories with other crazies like me. Like sometimes I’ll be at lunch and I’ll catch a heavy bipolar vibe from the dude who sits down next to me.

“So,” I say to the guy, having never met him before, “that Klonopin is some good shit, isn’t it?” And then we’ll spend the rest of our respective lunch hours discussing therapy and meds and sexual side effects and how completely whacked-out most psychiatrists are (which explains why they became psychiatrists in the first place).

I won’t lie. My crazydar has misfired on a few occasions, each an unfortunate turn of events that has put me into a rather compromising and confrontational situation. I once asked this heavily pierced tattoo freak in a biker bar if I could bum a Paxil from him and he hit me in the balls with Coors Light bottle. Another time I asked a woman in the airport if Prozac made her breasts tender and she pepper sprayed my ass right there at gate 9A. You probably read about that one. It was in all of the papers.

Bongwater Porkfat Zaboomafoo

2004-11-10T16:59:00.000-08:00

They stop selling McGriddles at 10:30 so I decided to try this Vietnamese place near the office at lunch today. I have developed a raging fetish for pho, which is basically beef broth with long, white rice noodles and pieces of rare beef in it. I eat pho at least once a week, in part I think because anything about Vietnam reminds me of that scene in Apocalypse Now where Robert Duval says, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like…victory.”

I took my new book into the Saigon Noodle House, found a quiet little corner table and ordered the No. 3 with a Diet Coke. Then I settle in for a nice, mellow hour of slurping piping hot soup and reading about this dude who picks up women at sexual addiction support group meetings.

My plan worked to perfection for about 10 minutes, at which point an Asian woman (whom we’ll call Phong) and her friend sat down at the table next to me. From the minute her ass hit the wicker-backed chair, Phong began speaking a language I didn’t recognize (which basically means it wasn’t English) at the top of her lungs. She wasn’t yelling, but her volume was barely one click below a primal scream.

It sounded something like this:

“Maay! Bongwater porkfat zaboomafoo! Boomshakalakah bokchoi choppedliver metallica pingpong doohickey chakakahn!”

This was not simple ethnic or cultural unfamiliarity on my part. I know this because every other head in the restaurant turned in the direction of Phong’s voice, partly squinting as one might do if someone sounded an airhorn six inches from one’s ear. Phong was shouting and she didn’t care who heard the sordid details of her bongwater porkfat zaboomafoo.

“Excuse me,” I said, leaning over and talking directly to Phong. “Do you think you could keep it down just a little bit? I’m trying to read.”

Silence. Phong turned her head toward me and gave me a look I might have expected if I pissed in her pho. Her eyes filled with rage.

“Chipwich!” she screamed at me, now standing and looking straight down at me. “Loch Ness Chewbacca ginseng! Cantankerous jicama John Kerry tchochke tu-tu!”

Now I’m fucking pissed. You can say whatever you want about my chipwich, but bringing politics into it crosses the line where I have to get all angry on your ass. I stand, throw my chopsticks onto the table and put the tip of my nose right up against hers.

“What did you just say about John Kerry?” I bark. “Did you just call him a tchochke tu-tu? I’ve got your tchochke tu-tu right here, you Republican hag! Don’t let your mouth write checks your ass can’t cash!”

We go back and forth a few more times like this. She calls me a phosphate jericurl colostomy and I tell her that her breath smells like she just drank a maggot milkshake with a cherry on top (which the owner of the restaurant didn’t seem to like, but that’s neither here nor there).

Finally, the other patrons in the restaurant come over and separate us. Phong and her friend leave, which is fine by me, and I sit down and go back to my pho and my book.

I love the smell of pho in the afternoon after a shouting match with an angry Republican Vietnamese immigrant. It smells like victory.

Right Here

2004-11-10T09:24:00.000-08:00

I don’t even know where this came from but lately when I feel indignant and bitter and perhaps a little melancholy I respond to people with a “right here!” For me, it’s the new “shut up.”

I had the TV on this morning and there was a car commercial on. The announcer said something about asking my dealer* about the sport-tuned touring suspension package. To no one in particular I said, “Yeah, I’ve got your suspension package right here, buddy.”

I ordered my iced venti decaf soy latte at Starbucks this morning and the barista is all, “Do you want whip?”** And I go, “I’ve got your whip right here, lady.”

I was so pissed about my barista’s lack of familiarity with my order that I decided to drown my sorrows in a McGriddle.*** So I go to the drive-thru and order breakfast combo number nine and the hair-netted trailer trash asks me through the speaker if I want to super size my order. I was just about to tell her that I had her super sized combo right here, but I realized that such words might be interpreted as either sexual harassment or a welcome sexual proposition, so I just shut my mouth and drive forward to the next window like I was told.

*Um, I don’t have a dealer, and if I did it wouldn’t be for cars. It would be for crack or poker hands or McGriddles something fun like that.

**Honey, I have been coming to this Starbucks everyday for almost seven years. If you don’t know me and the way I like my drink by now, you should be demoted to restocking the Equal packets and plunging the toilets.

***Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know I swore off of these things yesterday in the Barnes & Noble bathroom, but I’m only human.

The House at Poop Corner (or Purging the McGriddles)

2004-11-09T14:07:00.000-08:00

I was at the bookstore when it hit. I suppose that’s the good news – I had lots to read while my spleen, gall bladder and larynx were passing through me.

I warned myself that my recent gluttony would ultimately end badly, and today it did. I was standing there getting my jollies with the sketches in The Joy of Sex when my gut began to rumble and groan like a submarine sinking to the bottom of the Pacific. A minute later, there was a cramping feeling in my poopchute that told me I needed to find the men’s room immediately or face the prospect of waddling out of Barnes & Noble with squishy socks.

I found the bathroom, closed and latched the stall door and looked up to see a larger-than-life graffiti drawing of a penis going into an anatomically impossible vagina on the back of the door. The penis, which was three feet tall, was ornamented by two huge testicles and some funny gang words that I couldn’t decipher. I presume the message being sent was that the Barnes & Nobles Bloods have really big balls (and what better place to advertise that then here, alongside Dostoyevsky and Faulkner and Judy Blume). Their can be no pride that compares to a mother’s pride for her son’s huge gang member balls.

While my mind wandered through further analysis of the stall décor, the opposite end of my body was in a fight for its life. Each successive rectal heave softened my allegiance to McGriddle and mint chip ice cream and those damned bite-sized Milky Ways I’ve been eating every hour on the hour since the week before Halloween. My gut was telling me to chill the fuck out in no uncertain terms, and I had no choice but to listen – and stare at the Sharpied diagram of gang-ridden, elephantitus-ravaged testicles on the door in front of me. If there is a hell, it’s got to look something like this, perhaps with Robert Goulet pumping out of the overhead speakers and an empty roll in the toilet paper dispenser.

As the hours rolled on, I wondered how long Shiticus, the God of Dung, would make me suffer. I peered between my legs to inspect my own handiwork and I swear to God I saw one of my kidneys sitting there in the crapper. I contemplated fishing it out, but this was a public toilet used by gang members and I wasn’t about to put my hand in there, kidney or no kidney. My mama didn’t raise no stoopnagle.

The horror finally ended when my intestinal tract had nothing else to purge. As I washed my hands and exited the bathroom, I realized that I would have to honor the promises I made to Shiticus during my hour of peril (as in, “Please make it stop. I’ll do anything. Just make the poo-poo stop.”).

I promised never to ever eat another McGriddle, and I will honor that (but I won’t be happy about it).

I promised to throw away any and all candy in my domain, and I will honor that (but I might have another half-dozen Milky Way minis before I do).

I promised never to consume another dairy product as long as I live (or until such time as a cure for lactose intolerance is discovered), and I’m still thinking about honoring that one. Fifty-fifty chance.

McGriddles Anonymous

2004-11-09T10:09:00.000-08:00

Craig The Mouse Killer called me this morning to inquire about the low-grade online intervention on this site in the wake of my admission about a McGriddle addiction relapse. Several of you have voiced concern over the fact that I am consuming them again and Craig The Mouse Killer thinks it’s time for me to come clean.

Well he can fuck the fuck off.

I don’t have a problem. I don’t. I admit that sometimes I drive-thru for a McGriddle or two, but I can stop whenever I want to. I only do it when I’ve had a really stressful morning or when I know I’ll have to talk to people and I need some kind of social lubricant. And, yeah, there have been a few occasions when I’ve had to call in sick because of a McGriddle bender, but everyone does that now and then, don’t they?

It’s not like I’m drinking Costco-sized jugs of Dewar’s for breakfast or snorting lines of blow off the naked belly of a hooker. According to the McDonald’s website, all I’m doing is indulging in 550 scrumptious calories (300 from fat), 21 mouth-watering grams of fat and 1270 delectable milligrams of sodium. Big deal. Like that’s any different from a steaming bowl of lard and a glass of Ovaltine. It’s all part of a nutritious breakfast, people. I do not. Have. A problem.

I’ll tell you who has a problem:

The guy I saw this morning who was had his long-sleeved shirt tucked under his gaudy gold watch has a problem.

The people who live in the red states have a problem.

The plastic surgeon who did this to Tara Reid’s boobies has a problem.

What do I have? I have a ravenous appetite, a mouse-murdering friend and a small army of controlling readers who have their panties in a bunch over my diet. My McBreakfast is my fucking McBusiness, ladies and gentlemen.

Now if you’ll excuse me, my hash browns are getting cold.

Don't Put Your Hands Near Its Mouth

2004-11-08T13:52:00.000-08:00

I cannot stop eating. Since I stopped drinking beer about a month ago, my need to replace those calories by any carnivorous means necessary has become a public safety hazard. I see a dalmatian walking down the street and think to myself, “Damn, I bet that would be good with some chili-cheese fries and a root beer.”

I have been skinny my entire life and that is not a good thing when you have a Jewish mother. My failure to possess an appetite worthy of my heritage’s penchant for solving virtually any imaginable crisis with food has caused her unspeakable trauma (“Only nine matzo balls, Danny? Is something bothering you?”). But I am a grown man. I know when I’m full. And I won’t be guilt-tripped into eating more food than my 170-pound frame can tolerate (unless there's money involved, whereupon I will eat until I puke).

But lately my metabolism has been significantly more Jew-like. Yesterday, for example, I ate a McDonald’s sausage McGriddle with egg, hash browns, a large Diet Coke, a piece of banana bread, an iced venti decaf soy latte, a can of Chef Boyardee beef raviolis, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, some pretzels, another Diet Coke, some trail mix, a chicken breast, some broccoli, some Ben & Jerry’s Karmel Sutra ice cream and another Diet Coke. I mean could you just fucking barf?

I have not yet seen the physical manifestation of my superhuman appetite, but I have no doubt that one day soon I will look into the mirror and see Reuben Studdard staring back at me. I mean, one simply cannot ingest as much grease-soaked, lard-laden, deep-fried shit as I have without developing either a spare tire that can fit a monster truck or The Hemorrhoid That Ate Cleveland. And if you’re looking for a renewable energy source, Mr. President, grab a jar and stand behind me.

In what should come as no surprise, I went to an all-you-can-eat salad bar for lunch today and was baited into an altercation with the cashier over my gluttony. I strolled through the line adding scoop upon scoop of food, so much that it swelled over the edge of my plate and out onto the plaid green tray. I got to the register and the bitch was all, “Sir, that’s way too much food.”

So I’m all, “What the fuck are you talking about? It says ‘All You Can Eat.’”

And she’s all, “Well, yes, sir, it does say that. But what you have on that tray goes above and beyond the spirit of that promise. You have taken enough food there to feed yourself and everyone on Guam two or three times over. Come on. Why don’t you just put some of the jicama back?”

So I’m all, “Look, this jicama isn’t going anywhere and I’m really starting to feel an anti-semetic vibe from you. I suggest you take my $6.49 and let me eat my lunch or I’m going to call my rabbi and tell them they don’t allow Jews up in this motherfucker. You choose, peanut. Is it ‘All You Can Eat’ or ‘All You Can Eat Unless You Have a Circumcised Penis and a Job in The Entertainment Industry?’”

She wisely chose what was behind door number one: my money and the continued support of The Chosen People.

This Just In

2004-11-08T10:36:00.000-08:00

This morning on my way to work I heard some asshat news anchor named Rick ask a CNN correspondent in Iraq why the newest offensive in Fallujah was initiated at night.

“Because, Rick,” she said, “it’s dark at night, which makes it harder for the bad guys to see us coming. And so you know, I’m not standing our here on two hours sleep in a flack jacket and a puke green army helmet so I can answer dipshit questions like that. If you’re going to waste my time asking me what color the sky is and what the capital of North Dakota is, you’re going to have to kiss my lily white ass first. I’m a war correspondent, not a kindergarten teacher, OK? Back to you, fuckface.”

High Degree of Difficulty

2004-11-06T19:01:00.000-08:00

After more than four years of parenthood I have finally reached a point where I can enjoy the pure theatrical brilliance of my children’s tantrums.

At first these semi-regular meltdowns – which may be precipitated by catalysts as diverse as improperly microwaved macaroni and cheese or the completely absurd request that a child not wipe his freshly extracted boogers on the new carpet – caused me immense frustration. My blood boiled, in part because I thought my job as a parent was to not make the kids cry. Crying = bad. The more frequently the kids cry, the worse a parent I become.

I’ve grown out of that belief. I now believe that the more my children cry, the smaller my entertainment budget becomes. Why pay $9 to sit in a movie theatre when I can sit on my own couch and watch two supremely talented children cry and scream and pound the ground in performances that warrant Oscar consideration.

We had a good one this afternoon. When the sun set and the temperature dropped and the mud caked to Left-Handed Power-Hitting Son’s knees after a long day of outside play was starting to affect his ability to walk, I told him it was time to come inside. And so it began.

I liken these tantrums to a gymnastics routine. There are a series of compulsory characteristics – criteria that must be met to categorize the display as a tantrum. The rest is up to the children’s creativity, and this is where they soar.

We began today with the mount, which is a simple jelly-kneed collapse to the floor. A simple compulsory maneuver. From there he graduated to another fundamental step, the oh-my-god-my-life-is-ending wail, whereupon long periods of time elapse with no sound. When the silence ends, there is a long, forceful, throat-searing scream. And then more silence. If there were an Olympic gold medal awarded in this category, my son would be a national hero. He’s that good.

Trying to save ourselves from public humiliation, Hot Wife and I escorted our son to his bedroom and invited him to come out when he could calm down. When the door closed, Left-Handed Power-Hitting Son’s creativity began to take over. In a panicked, Rainmanesque litany of words, he tried his own twist on the tried and true “I have to go potty so let me out of here before I piss myself” routine. It went like this:

Waaaaaaaaahmommypeepeepeepeedaddypottypottypottywaaaaaahpeepee…[deep inhale]…aaaaaaahpeepeemommypoopoodaddyihavetogopeepee…

At this point, Hot Wife buckled. She re-entered his room and tried valiantly to keep the boy from hyperventilating, or worse, pissing himself. I listened from the next room and could hear the poor woman floundering. I intervened.

Here comes the dismount.

“Hey, buddy,” I said to him. “Do you think we should go have a piece of your Halloween candy?”

Silence.

He lifted his head from his hands, a web of tears and snot left pooled in his cupped paws, and he smiled at me through his tears. He was happy again. Tantrum over.

The Austrian judge wept as he held up a placard that read 9.95. The Swedish, Dutch and Canadian judges also gave high marks. The scowling French bitch only gave him a 9.275, but we all got a good laugh from the hair in her armpits when she held up her score.

The Weighting Is The Hardest Part

2004-11-05T10:29:00.000-08:00

I belong to a gym, but I don't belong in a gym. Big difference. Still, there are infrequent occasions when I muster the courage to show my scrawny frame in the weight room.

I can't tell you what the roided-out muscleheads are thinking when they see my tall, wire-thin, pencil-necked skeleton plop down at the weight bench next to them, but I won't rule out that they believe I'm a pale version of those malnourished African kids who pathetically cavort with Sally Struthers on television.

Seeing my rib cage poking through my skin, they might say, "Hey, Ndugu, you need a spot?"

"No, mon," I'll say, "but could you keep the flies away from my rice while I finish this set?"

Despite the overwhelming likelihood of embarrassing myself, I cowboyed up and visited that perilous corner of this gym two nights ago. In the past, I have ventured into the weight room only at off hours and lifted the two-pound pink dumbbells in relative peace and anonymity. But the other day, trying my best not to look like a complete poseur in front of a packed gym, I racked on a little extra weight.

Bad idea.

After a workout that included bench presses, bicep curls, the pec deck and a triceps exercise that nearly caused me to blow out an O-ring (again), my upper body is so sore and tender that even a moderate breeze sends me writhing to the floor in a quivering mass of tears and snot. And my condition is causing myriad problems in my day-to-day existence:

•A new employee was paraded around the office yesterday and when I reached my hand out to shake hers, I couldn’t life my arm above my waist, thereby forcing me to greet the newbie with a headbutt. She and I now sport matching red welts on our foreheads.

• In the shower this morning, trying to lift my hands high enough to wash my hair was a futile exercise. Combing it was equally as difficult, so as I sit here writing, my head is a matted mess of unkempt, unclean, uncombed fur. But, hey, it’s Casual Friday in the office anyway.

• I paid for lunch with a credit card yesterday and when I was asked to sign the receipt, I had to put the pen in my nose and scribble my name by moving my entire head in the shape of my autograph. That was hard enough, but imagine trying to remove a writing implement from your nose without using your hands. I tried shaking my head back and forth, but that didn’t work. I had to resort to the Snot Rocket routine, a strategy that succeeded in dislodging the pen, but not without a robust accompaniment that reminded everyone within a 20-foot radius that the cold and flu season is upon us.

Why do I do this to myself? The ridicule and the pain and the paralysis and the projectile boogers are not worth the minimal gains I get from my sporadic workouts. But if I'm going to live in a house with an aerobics instructor, I suppose it's incumbent upon me to uphold my end of the Hotness Factor in our house. Why couldn't Hot Wife have taken up a vocation more suited to my skill set, like politics or child care or acting?

Brake Dancing

2004-11-04T15:10:00.000-08:00

I drove away from Evans World Headquarters this morning in a car that sounded like a hyena in estrus. There was a high-pitched, metal-on-metal grinding noise coming from the front wheel wells and we all know what that means: an expensive brake job.

Driving a sick car makes me feel scummy. I can hear the Sanford & Son theme song playing in my head (“buh-buh-bahdad, buh-buh-bahdah-bahdah-bah…”) and I feel like every other vehicle on the road is looking at my car, hearing the sound of my gravely ill brake pads and wondering if I’ll be late for my job shoveling shit or applying ointment to hemmorhoid-laden bungholes in some sick clinical study.

Ken, the tattooed chain-smoker mechanic, heard me coming. He walked over to where I parked with a half-roasted Marlboro dangling from his bottom lip, his eyes squinting at my car through a cloud of tobacco smoke and his own stench.

“Sounds like the brakes,” he grunted. Ya think, Huckleberry?

He said he could fit me in right away, told me to go fill out some paperwork inside and leave my key with Nicole. Funny, when he spoke her name (which also happens to be the middle name of my daughter), I expected to find someone with, oh, I don’t know, a full set of teeth. That wasn’t the case.

Nicole is five-foot-two. Her hair is jet black and greasy and her eyes are surrounded with an inch wide stripe of black eye make-up (or were they bruises?). She is wearing acid wash jeans, circa 1983. Behind her desk is a NASCAR calendar, surprisingly flipped to the right month. In the box that denotes November 8, the following words have been scribbled in purple, ballpoint ink: “Nicole needs off. Court date.” One can only imagine.

“Hi,” I say. “I’m here to drop of my car.”

She looks up, smiles, revealing that she is missing two teeth from her top rack. Might this have something to do with the court date?

She asks me some questions about my car – year, model, license plate number, why a hot, macho guy like me would drive such a pussy of a car – then hands me a pen and asks me to sign the form that waives the shop from any liability if I drive away and hit a water buffalo on the way home. I sign, but not before I notice that Nicole’s fingernails are long and dirty and ringed with what I presume is auto grease. Please, God, let it be auto grease. We shared a pen.

I walk across the parking lot to a restaurant and enjoy a breakfast of cold, runny eggs, gristled sausage patties and a mass of mushy beige paste described in the menu as “hash browns.” The man in the next booth is a clergyman, his companion a parishioner. He is loud and domineering and really tied to this whole idea that God is the way and the light. He voted for Bush because the Lord told him to, and I presume the Lord also told him not to order the hash browns.

As I eat, I try to imagine the scenario that necessitated Nicole’s court date. I’ve narrowed it down to public urination, driving under the influence of Skoal or brandishing that heinous, toothless grin at a police officer.

An hour or so later, I returned to the mechanic and find that Ken has removed all four of my tires and is trying to wedge the rotor from my left rear wheel with a crow bar and a hammer. And he has another Marlboro in his mouth. He and Nicole make a lovely couple.

Four hours and $261 later, my car is ready. As I drive away and watch Nicole growing smaller and smaller in my rearview mirror, I can’t help but think Ken left one of his cigarette embers in my brakes and that my car will explode if I try to stop.

Parental Sleep Deprivation

2004-11-03T11:03:00.000-08:00

When Hot Wife and I were relative newlyweds and in the throes of contemplating procreation, my brother-in-law, David, warned me that I should be prepared not to sleep through the night until our last child is five years old. David is exceptionally cool and funny and filthy rich and I once ate escargots because he challenged me to. It’s not my usual practice to doubt him, except on the snails. But in this case, perhaps out of self-preservation, I assumed he was exaggerating.

He wasn’t.

I’ve been thinking a lot about David’s prophetic insight over the last week, usually at around 4 a.m., when Left-Handed Power-Hitting Son crawls over my head, kicks me in the left ball and wiggles his way into bed between Hot Wife and me.

Trust me, you haven’t lived until you’ve been woken up in the middle of the night by a boy one-third your size who requests that you march out to the kitchen and get him some Frosted Mini-Wheats and a sippy cup full of milk. The request on its own merit seems innocuous enough. Your first instinct is to tell the child to go back to sleep or the boogeyman will eat him. But then you recall that the child has a penchant for wailing at the top of his lungs like a seal taking a beating with a Louisville Slugger, a whiney howl so loud and pathetic that it sends a posse of pajama-clad neighbors running to your front door with machetes and frying pans cocked and ready to disembowel the purported abuser inside. So you dutifully drag your sleepy ass to the kitchen and get the boy his fucking cereal.

I have tried passionately to dissuade the child from waking me in this manner. We made a chart with 14 boxes on it. Every time the child went out to the living room to watch Zaboomafoo instead of going to his parents’ bedroom to re-enact the baby seal routine, he would receive a sticker in another box. When all 14 boxes were decorated, the child and his father went together to the driving range and dinner, without the girls. We called it “Boys Night” (which starkly contrasts the "Boys Night" I enjoyed in college, whereupon my dorm buddies and I drank Coors Light, ate pizza and watched porn until the wee hours of the Fresno morning -- ah, the glory of youth).

All was well for a while after the sticker strategy was implemented, but now the early morning interruptions have resumed. I’m not about to do the sticker thing again because I’m not looking for a band-aid solution. I want the child to feel my pain. If daddy can’t sleep, the child can’t sleep either. That’s why I bought the air horn. Around midnight tonight, I’m going to sneak into the child’s room and sound a long, calamitous horn blast, presumably motivating the child to involuntarily move his bowels.

When the child is resuscitated, I will explain to him that I shocked him awake and permanently damaged the hearing in his right ear out of love. I will also tell him that I didn’t want to have to resort to more extreme measures, like taking away his Matchbox cars or revoking his right to live in our home rent-free.

And then I will go back to bed.

Dora The Screaming Pedopheliac, Shoe-Fetishist Explorer

2004-11-02T11:35:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite television shows as a kid was H.R. Puffinstuff. I watched it every Saturday morning, right after Sigmond and the Sea Monsters. Given my passionate allegiance to the show, it should come as no shock that I was crushed when Old Buddy Andy, who works as a set dresser on a TV show you definitely watch, advised me that H.R. Puffinstuff was one big veiled drug reference. His evidence:

• H.R. stood for “hand-rolled.” Hand-Rolled Puffinstuff.
• Whenever things got sad and ugly in the land where the characters lived, they blew on their little flute (see: doobie) and everything got happy again.
• The theme song, which contained the unforgettable line, “He can’t do a little and he can’t do enough.”

I have lived with the painful scars of this revelation for almost 15 years. I have sought therapy for it. It saddens me to know that I was living a lie throughout my youth. I am horrified that my fragile, impressionable little brain was so catastrophically tainted by a few stoners with a video camera, some silly costumers and an eighth of the chronic. Look at me! I’m a wreck!

As a result of my ordeal, I have made a concerted effort to ensure that my children are spared from any such mindgames hidden within the new generation of programming.

You already know my stance on Barney, but I have found another problem.

Adorable Daughter With Poopie Diapers and Left-Handed Power-Hitting Son have taken quite a shine to a cartoon character named Dora The Explorer. To the untrained eye, the show looks innocent enough: a little girl and her monkey friend, Boots, travel the world, speaking sporadic Spanish and helping friends they meet along the way. Basic cartoon fare, no?

Sadly, no.

I have studied Dora. I know what makes her tick. And I am here to report that Dora The Explorer is a hopeless hussy. A tramp. A sick, Mary Kay LaTourneau wannabe who prays on young primates and camouflages her promiscuity, bestiality and pedophilia under an animated veil of multicultural glee.

Exhibit A: The Song
No matter what task they undertake during an episode, Dora, Boots and their newly enveloped friends end with the same song:

We did it!
We did it!
We did it!
Hooray!

See? Filth! What the kids buy as a song about accomplishing a task is really a joyous musical celebration of their sexual escapades. These three monosyllabic words – “We did it” – are the words every horny teenager longs to say to his buddies after a date with the prom queen, are they not?

That Dora and her disgusting friends frolic post-coitally like whores is reason enough to yank the show from the air, but there’s more.

Exhibit B: The Boots
Who ever heard of a monkey wearing boots? The kids don’t question it, but it’s apparent to me that this is some kind of fetish. Perhaps they chose this particular deviant sexual behavior because a monkey wearing leather chaps or a strap-on is too hard to animate. And kids can’t pronounce “Xaveria, The Monkey Dominatrix” without spitting Cheerios all over their Garanamals.

Exhibit C: The Yelling
Dora is always shouting at the top of her lungs, kind of like a woman whose brains are being effed out.

Exhibit D: The Backpack
Dora carries with her a magical backpack. It talks. And whenever they need something – a map, a book, a compass – it’s in the backpack. Where there's smoke, there's fire. In other words, there’s no telling what kind of foul sexual toys skanky ass Dora keeps in there. I can't be sure, but I think I saw a quick snipet of some Root Beer flavored edible lube fall out of the backpack in one episode.

I could go on, but the point is made. Dora is this generation’s H.R. Puffinstuff and she should be pulled from the air immediately.

Kids, pass daddy the remote. We’re watching SportsCenter tonight.

America The Pitiful

2004-11-02T08:36:00.000-08:00

I got to McPherson Magnet Middle School at 6:55 this morning and found a line of about 40 people. I spotted Neighbor Tom, a cinematographer and ardent Kerry supporter, in the middle of the line. Tom and I chatted for a minute about the big shit sandwich we’d all have to eat if Bush wins, and then I decided to retreat to the back of the line, lest a riot start over my taking cuts and I end up talking to Sheppard Smith on Fox News Channel tonight instead of putting ointment on my swollen bunghole.

Shortly after I retreated to the end of the line, a blue-haired old woman with super flabby skin on her triceps came out of the cafeteria and announced that there was a problem. The voter log from a city 20 miles away had been delivered to our polling place in error. We would have to wait until the proper log was delivered.

“I want a refund!” I hollered.

Half of those waiting to vote mumbled dirty words to themselves and left, presumably because living in a country where our leader elects to bomb the shit out of people for no good reason is not as bad as being 10 minutes late for work.

Fifteen minutes later, I found myself in the cafeteria, where 20 cardboard polling booths were arranged. As I waited for my turn to cast a ballot, the old man behind me was trying to read the cafeteria menu board to his wife. I will remember a lot about this campaign season, but my favorite moment – by a mile – was the gift of listening to this man try to pronounce the word “entrée.”

“Look up there, hun,” he said, pointing his wrinkled old finger at the menu. “It says there that today’s entry is chicken nuggets. Shoot, when I was a boy, the old entray we ever got was bread and mashed taters. Now they little’ns get all kinds of different entries.”

Clearly a Bush man.

Butt Seriously

2004-11-01T14:07:00.000-08:00

I have an uninvited guest and this morning I went to the supermarket to get some ointment that will make it go away. I’ll spare you the details about my nasty little intruder, but suffice it to say that it’s large and it’s purple and it’s making it hard for me to sit down.

There are certain items one cannot buy at a supermarket without feeling like an ass (ooh, another reference to my intruder). Those items include condoms, non-alcoholic beer, adult diapers, anti-hemorrhoid creams, KY jelly, gallon-sized bottles of vodka, stool softeners, Efferdent, douche bags and Beano.

I bought one of those items today – not saying which one – and the experience was a little like being caught with a Hustler magazine and a family-sized bottle of lotion. I could not escape the conspicuously disapproving gaze of the check-out whore, the red-faced attempt by the bag boy to contain his laughter and the prying eyes of the fat woman behind me (another clue to my ailment) in line. Neither of these people said a word to me, but I felt compelled to enter a plea nonetheless.

“It’s for my kid,” I said, snickering a bit. “He got some Halloween candy stuck up there and it left a nasty wound.”

I don’t know if they bought it.

I prayed that this torture would end quickly so I could get home and anoint myself. No such luck. The cashier ran my little yellow box of relief over the scanner, but it didn’t ding. She scanned it again. Still no ding.

I started to pray. “Please, God. I know I’m voting for John Kerry, but please make the scanner ding. Please don’t make her call for a price check. I promise not to step on anymore snails ‘accidentally on purpose’ just to hear their shells crunch if you grant me this one wish.”

God was apparently at a Bush rally because Marlene, the cashier from hell, grabbed her intercom phone and told everyone in Ralph’s that she needed a price check on baboon ass cream for the customer at aisle nine who walks funny and keeps scratching his bum.

A moment later, the intercom speaker shouted back, “The anal invader cream is four thirty-nine, Marlene.”

Marlene punched in the total and then had the nerve to ask me if I had my Ralph’s Club Card on me.

“No, Marlene, you hag,” I thought to myself. “I don’t have my Club Card. Will you please just let me pay so I can get out of here and slash my wrists?”

Marlene said nothing. She took my money, gave me my change and threw me a smile that seemed to say, “I hope your sphincter feels better soon. Please come again.”

The Control Freak and The Missing Clicker

2004-11-01T09:30:00.000-08:00

After we returned from Trick-or-Treating last night, Hot Wife and I got Spiderman and Little Red Riding Hood to bed and I settled down in front of the tube to enjoy my Milky Way-induced sugar buzz. And so began the worst night of my life.

See, I have this control issue, and the primary instrument of my domination and tyranny is the remote control to the television in our living room. It has become an extension of my right hand. It’s who I am. If the TV is on and I am not in possession of “the clicker,” I simply cannot be in the room. Hot Wife has very few shortcomings, but two of them are that she does not change channels quick enough and she watches far too much Food TV.

Last night, the clicker went AWOL.

I looked everywhere for it: under the couch cushions, on top of the TV, in the trash cans, in the kids’ rooms, in the fridge, in the bathroom, under the beds, in my ass crack and that of every member of my family (including Weak-Bladdered Dog, whose right rear paw was pumping feverishly in circles as I performed said cavity search).

I felt my pulse quicken. My control! Where is it?

“Honey, have you seen the remote?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s gone. It’s gone! Help me find it, for Christ’s sake!”

Sensing an imminent meltdown, Hot Wife withdrew her hand from Left-Handed Power-Hitting Son’s bag of candy and assisted me in the search. She took the bedrooms and bathrooms, I took the living room, kitchen, garage and dining room. My anxiety was elevating to a full-blown panic attack. My palms were sweating profusely. I was hyperventilating.

Thirty minutes later, we reconvened in the living room. Both of us had come up empty.

“Fuck!” I belted. “This fucking sucks! How am I supposed to watch SportsCenter, Extreme Home Make-Over, The Real World and election spin-doctoring on three different cable news stations at the same time now?”

I contemplated a return to the antiquated practice of walking all the way over to the TV to change channels, but the very thought of it made me feel small and pathetic. This isn’t China and I don’t have to live like a fucking caveman. So I just sat there and pouted. Arms crossed. Brow furrowed. Head down.

Hot Wife tried to calm my nerves, suggesting that perhaps I should call my EAP. But I was in no mood to talk to a therapist. All I wanted was my goddamned clicker and there’s nothing that some granola-eating, Birkenstock-wearing head-shrinker could say to me to make it any better. Besides, people who wear Birkenstocks have stinky feet.

After another half hour, I grew tired of pouting. I stood up, walked over to the kids’ Halloween candy and ate Chewy Sweet Tarts and Jujy Fruits until I grew sleepy and lapsed into a candy coma.

Playing Taps

2004-10-30T10:27:00.000-07:00

Left-Handed Power-Hitting Son and I were up before the sun this morning, preparing for our Saturday morning ritual: a trip to Starbucks, where we scarf banana loaf cake and chocolate milk, and we read the sports page together. I’m raising my son to be a man, and this is what men do. We talk about football and get all hopped-up on sugar first thing in the morning.

Before we left the house, we were in Left-Handed Power-Hitting Son’s room getting him dressed. I was sitting on his bed and after I had wrestled his squirmy feet into his socks, I asked him to go to the closet and pick out some shoes.

He returned with two shiny black tap shoes.

“Who’s are those?” I asked.

“They’re mine,” he said. “I’m going to be a tap dancer.”

Blink.

Blink. Blink.

My first impulse was to lock him in a closet with a stack of Playboys and monster truck magazines and not let him out until his 18th birthday. But then I remembered a story my mother told me about my youth. Seems I used to carry my Hot Wheels cars around the neighborhood in a pink vinyl purse. And I turned out voraciously hetero nonetheless.

“Really, bud?” I asked. “Where did you get those shoes?”

He didn’t hear the question. He was on the floor, grunting, trying to squeeze his size five feet into a girls’ size three tap shoe. He was growing frustrated because only three of his toes could be wedged in. I intervened before his frustration elevated into a full-blown tantrum.

“How about this, pal: we’ll put on some other shoes for now and work on the tap shoes when we get home from Starbucks. OK?”

“OK, I guess,” he said.

He then retreated to his closet and began to dig around. A part of me was petrified that he would return with a pair of stiletto heels or ballet slippers. But he reappeared holding his new Power Ranger sneakers – the ones with little red lights on the side that light up each time he takes a step. Thank Christ.

In the car on the way to Starbucks, I queried Left-Handed Power-Hitting Son about his interest in tap. I wasn’t trying to discourage him just because it wasn’t the interest I would have chosen for him, but – well, I take that back. Yes. Yes I was.

He detailed for me that all of the little girls in the neighborhood take tap and he wanted to be with them. And it struck me that my little boy wasn’t a sissy at all. He was trying to impress the girls. Because we’re men, and that’s what men do.

Shall I Compare Thee to an Erectile Dysfunction Pharmaceutical Ad?

2004-10-29T09:46:00.000-07:00

The best commercials on the air right now are those promoting Cialis, Viagra and the other erectile dysfunction drugs. The first 20 seconds of the spots describe how, through the miracle of chemistry, floppy-dicked men can regain virility and peace of mind by popping one of these miracle pills. Then, over the backdrop of a man throwing a football through a tire (subtle analogy), a voice-over warns that side effects may include spontaneous combustion, development of voluptuous man boobs and a raging, painful boner that lasts four weeks and can type 120 words a minute.

It occurs to me that each American presidential candidate favorably resembles one of these drugs. They blabber on about how wonderful things would be under their respective administrations – world peace, affordable health care and the public execution of Paris Hilton. And then, just like in the erectile dysfunction commercials, we get to the fine print. Candidate X likes to wear crotchless lace panties and read Harlequin Romance novels. Candidate Y has Irritable Bowel Syndrome and drinks Dewar’s like it’s Aquafina. Candidate Z received an honorable discharge from the Coast Guard because he can't swim and he demanded to wear floaties on his arms while on duty.

Marketing makes the world go ‘round. Nothing is as it seems.

Yes, the E.D. drugs can help your friend “Woody” reappear, but beware: you won’t able to sleep on your stomach for a month.

Yes, you know where George Bush stands, but beware: re-elect him and we may launch a pre-emptive attack on Hawaii during his next term.

Yes, John Kerry might present a “fresh start” for America, but beware: his election might beget a stiff national ketchup tax.

Me? I’m inclined to vote for Kerry because thanks to his stirring convention speech, every time I walk into the bathroom, I look into the mirror, salute myself and say, “I’m Danny Evans and I’m reporting for doodie.”

Buried Treasurer

2004-10-28T11:47:00.000-07:00

The fever pitch of the last week of another presidential campaign takes me back to my own foray into high-pressure politics – the year I ran for Treasurer of Sycamore Elementary School.

Treasurer was the office I felt most confident about winning, primarily because my only opponent was Sarita Aggarwal, whose ass I had recently smoked in the sixth grade spelling bee. I wasn’t popular enough to run for President (besides, what does the President of an elementary school really do? Rule on whether or not “bubble-ups” are legal on the handball court?), but I believed there was something perfect about a Jewish kid as Treasurer. I was sure that all of my goyish friends would feel likewise.

I didn’t have a platform per se, but I did make a rather bold campaign promise:

“Vote for Danny or He’ll Kick You in the Fanny.”

(See, even in elementary school I was a master of the English language?)

In lieu of professionally printed campaign placards and buttons (which I would have ordered if they hadn’t given the appearance of fiscal irresponsibility, a trait unbecoming of a treasurer), my mom took me to the craft store and bought me a huge piece of white butcher paper. I busted my Crayolas out of the Fat Albert lunchbox I kept them in and created a visual representation of my campaign promise: a little tushie in blue jeans with a Nike hightop sneaker swinging toward it. To the right of the image, I wrote in huge Burnt Sienna letters, “Vote for Danny or He’ll Kick You in the Fanny. Danny Evans for Treasurer.”

When I’d finished coloring, I stood back and admired my creation, fantasizing that this was how Picasso felt when he’d completed one of those pictures of people with their head on their right shoulder and their legs coming out of their navel. It was my masterpiece. The next day, I toted it to school and hung it up on a painted cinderblock wall facing the quad. It dwarfed Sarita’s sign and I knew this meant sure victory.

Later that day I was counting the pieces of gum stuck under my desk when the phone in my classroom rang. My teacher, Mr. Layton, answered it, said something to the caller and hung up. He then walked over to my desk.

“Danny, the principal would like to see you,” he said. “Do you know how to get to his office?”

Of course I knew. The principal’s office was near the nurse’s office, which is where I’d been the week before when I ate too many Fruit Roll-Ups and threw up on the monkey bars. My first thought was that the principal wanted to congratulate me on my artistic excellence, perhaps offer to frame it so that it didn’t get ruined by Sarita’s jealous friends.

I marched through the hallway swollen with self-appreciation. This was the greatest moment of my life, better even than the time I shot a rock out of my nose like a spaceship. I was already writing my acceptance speech. I was already thinking that I should wear a thick jacket to school on election day so that all of the pats on the back I was sure to get wouldn’t raise a blister. “I. Am. King!”

I practically floated to the principal’s office. When I got there, he invited me in and asked me to take a seat. He closed the door, sat down in the big leather chair behind his desk and let out a long, frustrated sigh.

“Danny,” he said, “I brought you in here because I need to talk to you about the sign you hung in the quad today.”

“Thanks, sir,” I said. “I’m really proud of it. The Nike swoosh came out great, didn’t it?”

“Well, there’s no doubt about your artistic talent. But I’m afraid I’m going to need you to take the sign down.”

“I totally understand,” I said. “I was thinking that a nice walnut or cherrywood frame would look great. But do you think the framers can have it back before election day?”

He cocked his head to the side like a dog that had just heard the distant ringing of the dinner bell. He was flummoxed.

“No, Danny,” he said. “I don’t think you understand what I’m asking you. I need you to remove the sign from school property. I’m afraid the slogan you’ve chosen isn’t appropriate for Sycamore Elementary. We don’t advocate violence here.”

I had no words. I felt a wave of sadness wash over me, and then a wave of anger, and then a wave of pure rage. I stood up to leave, my head hung low, but my bitterness over his censorship and disapproval quickly overcame me and I was forced to go all Howard Dean on his ass.

I climbed up onto his desk, grabbed him by the lapels and screamed into his face.

“Why are you trying to crush my political aspirations, you asshole? What have I done to deserve this? Do you know how long I worked on that sign? It took me an hour to wash all of the Periwinkle off of my hands after I colored that goddamn thing and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let a thin-haired, spare-tire-wearing douchebag like you deprive me of my right to free expression and fair elections.”

I then reached down and pinched both of his nipples as hard as I could and twisted.

“Now whistle, you maggot! Whistle or I’ll twist them harder! WHISTLE!”

That’s all I remember. But when I woke up in juvee, the warden told me Sarita had won the election.

Morning Breath

2004-10-27T14:15:00.000-07:00

Hot Wife took me out for a great Italian dinner last night to celebrate our anniversary. I had a bowtie pasta dish with garlic, pesto, garlic, chicken, garlic, sun-dried tomatoes and more garlic. Before that, we shared a spinach salad with kalamata olives and really strong red onions. The meal was almost as delicious as the company, but Hot Wife and I each voiced concern that the strong flavors and smells of the meal might make kissing goodnight a rather unattractive experience. But we brushed our teeth and the strong, minty smell of Crest camouflaged the other smells long enough for a kiss to occur.

But while I slept, the various pungent aromas from the foods I ate partied in my gut. They danced around in the warm pit of my belly and joined together to create a smell to which no human being should be exposed.

I smelled it first. The alarm went off, I opened my eyes and I immediately thought there had been a DEFCON 5 raw sewage spill under my pillow. But when I slid my hand along the sheet and felt nothing, the stark realization that my breath could be causing that heinous smell washed over me.

I panicked. I cupped my hand in front of my face and did that thing where you try to breathe into your hand and try to inhale the scent before it dissipates into the air. I did that once and smelled nothing. I did it again and passed out.

I don’t know how long I was out, but I awoke to Hot Wife shaking my arm.

“Danny! Danny! What the hell is that smell? Do you smell that? Did you shit the bed?”

“No, honey. It’s my breath.”

Before I could finish the sentence, Hot Wife fell back and passed out. She’d smelled it. Damn! I knew the responsible thing to do then was to get up and scrub the hazardous, caustic pollutant from my mouth. I looked around for some steel wool or a pressure washer, but all I could find was my toothbrush. That would have to do. I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed my tongue until it was shriveled and wilted like a slice of pastrami.

I then went back into the bedroom and tried to stir Hot Wife from her slumber/coma. I kissed her gently on the forehead. Her eyes opened slowly at first. Then, when they were wide enough to see that it was me, they opened completely. And by “completely” I mean the way a woman’s eyes open when she’s starring in a horror movie and she sees a man in a hockey goalie mask coming at her with a chainsaw. Hot Wife screamed, threw the covers off of herself and bolted from the room. She yelled back to me as she ran.

“Stay back, Yuckmouth! Stay back or I’ll call the authorities!”

“But, honey!” I yelled back. “I brushed! And besides, you were the one who picked the restaurant!”

Home Sweet Trailer

2004-10-26T14:59:00.000-07:00

It has recently come to my attention that I am white trash. I have tried extremely hard to compartmentalize the various actions that have led me to this self assessment and explain each away, but the preponderance of the evidence – taken both individually and in summary – leave room for no other finding. You be the judge:

1)I have a television in my garage. On most Sundays, my neighbors and I can be found sitting on patio furniture there, watching football and drinking beer. Yes, I use the garage for more conventional purposes, like storage of old boxes and ladders and a minivan. But I also use it as an entertainment center. I have hung an old dartboard and some sports posters and a basketball jersey from my alma mater, The Fresno State University. It’s at once a thrilling oasis and a source of catastrophic embarrassment for my family. The only things that could make it a more euphoric white trash haven are a nudie girl calendar and a bug zapper.

2) I have trash on the side of my house. Two weeks ago, Hot Wife got a wild hair and decided it was time for us to clean out the storage shed. Everything she decreed to be trash – and it should come as no surprise that most of it was my old stuff – was set aside for me to discard. There were too many boxes to fit in our trash can, so I set some aside to be cut down at a later date. That date, unfortunately, has not yet come. So the boxes sit there collecting rain water and making my sideyard look like the set of Sanford & Son. Maybe that’s why Hot Wife has been referring to me lately as “ya big dummy.”

3) Most of the sprinkler heads in my yard are broken, thereby rendering my lawn a brown mass of parched weeds and earth. I was not born with the handiness gene, as evidenced by the fact that I didn’t know what a crescent wrench was until my son got one in his toy tool chest. Given the facts that a) I don’t know jack squat about home improvement and b) Schneider from One Day At A Time doesn’t live in my house, a lot of the maintenance chores go undone. I pay a gardener to come and mow my lawn/dirt patch every Thursday and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that he will fix the sprinkler heads he dismembers with his mower. But he’s clearly too busy flicking Marlboro butts into the gutter to worry about insignificant little things like a gusher that floods my neighborhood. Remind me to fire his punk ass.

4) I sometimes let my daughter run around wearing just a diaper. I know this to be the cardinal sin of middle-class parenthood because more than one of my neighbors has called Child Protective Services on me. They see my cute little girl bopping down the street with one of the Velcro straps on her Huggies unfastened and they automatically assume I’m spending her wardrobe allowance on Schlitz and Twinkies. What is it with people? Can’t the child show some independence? Anyone who has ever tried to put one-piece pajamas on an infant knows it’s like trying to stuff a squirming, pissed-off anaconda into a Zip-Lock sandwich bag. By letting her run around in a diaper, I’m saving my own sanity and helping her to get a nice base tan for next summer.

5) We own two cars and both of them are missing external parts. Thanks to a minor fender-bender for which I was completely at fault, my Honda CR-V is currently sans its front license plate and the Honda “H” ornament that once sat proudly on the front of the grill. And our minivan is missing the plastic “Mazda” from its hatchback door because of a run-in Hot Wife had with our garage door opener. Normal people have these kinds of cosmetic issues corrected, either with some good glue or a trip to the dealership. White Trash people do not. I rest my case.

I could go on, but I won’t. Besides, I hurt my finger falling out of the trailer this morning and typing makes it hurt.

My Heart Going Boom-Boom-Boom...

2004-10-26T06:18:00.000-07:00

I woke up eight years ago today with two grown men in my bed and a howling wind blowing outside my window. The men were two of my six groomsmen, all of whom slept at our apartment that night. Of the two who demanded to share the bed, one snored like a drunken hobo and the other created a rather putrid wind of his own all night long.

Neither wind was welcome. The wedding was supposed to be an outdoor ceremony and if there wasn’t a significant change in the weather during the day, it was going to be ruined.

I spent the day with my groomsmen, all of whom tried their best to settle my anxiety in their own inimitable ways. Best Man Dave went so far as to drink orange juice straight from the IHOP carafe, big streams of the stuff flowing over the rim and down the front of his shirt. I mustered a chuckle but my thoughts were with Hot Fiancé, who was no doubt fretting over the wind, as well. I worried that she’d be crushed if we had to move our ceremony indoors. She’d planned it all out so perfectly that to have her vision dashed by Mother Nature would certainly be a buzzkill.

Ultimately, the weather did indeed require us to take our outdoor plans and decorations and move them into a squished hotel ballroom with a low ceiling and a loud, humming AC unit. I was disappointed, but I took solace in the fact that we’d soon be married and I tried hard to keep a stiff upper lip for Hot Fiancé.

After I had changed into my tux and pounded down a Kamikaze shot Best Man Dave bought to calm my nerves, I decided to take a moment to myself. I took the elevator downstairs to see how the room set-up was going.

I can remember it as though it happened yesterday: I was walking down a dimly lit stucco hallway. As I approached the corner, where I was to make a left turn into the ballroom, she appeared. She was dressed in her wedding gown, her hair Aqua Netted into place, her make-up applied perfectly, her spectacular blue eyes sparkling. She looked up, saw me and wore an expression that bordered shock and relief. I felt the same way. I wasn’t supposed to see her until she walked down the aisle, but I was never happier to see her than that moment.

After that, it didn’t matter. It could have been subzero and sleeting outside and it wouldn’t have mattered. But to our great excitement, the wind died down in just enough time that the ceremony could again be moved outdoors. Yes, it was a little windy. Yes, some of our guests won’t speak to us anymore because we made them sit out in the cold to watch us get married. But those people were only invited because we were determined to get everything from Crate & Barrel that we registered for. And by the way, thanks for the wooden salad tongs, you-know-who.

Today, Hot Wife and I celebrate our eighth anniversary. In the eight years since that day, we have brought two beautiful children into our world. We have acquired a golden retriever who eats rocks and showers everything in her path with urine. We have purchased a home, a minivan, two hand mixers, 200 gallons of paint, 500 boxes of Frosted Mini Wheats and new carpet. We have eaten paella in Spain, pickles in New York City, hot dogs at Fenway Park, pizza in Chicago, whipped cream in Monterey, gnocchi in Seattle, sushi in Maui, fish tacos in Irvine and pasta in Cambria.

She has stood over my shoulder and monitored my spending at a blackjack table in Las Vegas. She let me cut short an anniversary dinner in Santa Barbara two years ago so I could watch the Angels in the World Series. She has nurtured me through two episodes of depression and I have rubbed her back during two pregnancies worth of morning sickness vomiting. She has taken back every item of clothing I have ever purchased for her. She has introduced me to a doctor of Chinese medicine who made me eat spoonsful of mixed herbs that taste like old dirt. I have introduced her to Newcastle and buffalo wings.

She reads this blog everyday and checks back often to make sure people say nice things about me. We recently paid a visit to the house she grew up in and, although she doesn’t know this, it made me well up a bit. Our kids have no idea how lucky they are to have her as their mommy, but I know how lucky I am to have her as my wife. She has a degree in nutrition and a fervent passion for fitness, but put a Slurpee or a carton of Ben & Jerry’s in front of her and she wilts like a normal person. When I have an unattractively long hair on my arm or my shoulder, she grabs it with her bare fingers and yanks on it until it comes out, roots and all. As I wince in pain, she tells me, “See? That didn’t hurt at all.”

I don’t know for certain what I did to deserve a wife as sweet and short and fit and beautiful and loving and floss-happy and supportive as mine, but I hope that I have the strength within me to keep doing it.

I love you, Hot Wife. Happy Anniversary.

The Breast of Times

2004-10-25T13:48:00.000-07:00

Lunch hour found me today at Souplantation, the all-you-can-eat salad bar where a six-foot-three man must bend his knees, tilt his waist and maneuver his elbow into a painful, Twister-like contortion to access the cherry tomatoes and pasta salad under the spit shield. I paid for my food and was handed an empty plastic cup, which I was free to refill with Diet Coke as frequently as I wished (a dangerous and catastrophically profit-draining proposition for the restaurant, I can assure you).

After I loaded my tray with salad and soup and a few blueberry muffins, I set it down at a table near the window, grabbed my cup and marched off toward the fountain for my first Diet Coke. As I approached the fountain, I saw something one normally doesn’t expect to see at a salad bar: an exposed breast. The woman sitting at the booth directly next to the drink station was wearing a navy blue sweatsuit and the zipper on the jacket was pulled almost all the way down to her navel, completely exposing her left boobie.

As someone married to a hot wife with perfect teeth and a license to teach aerobics, I don’t often feel the need to go out looking for other peoples’ titties. But when one seeks me out, I have no choice but to look. I am, after all, a man. My gaze is magnetically drawn to bare breasts in the way a child’s is to candy and a woman’s is to a shoe sale. As such, I had no recourse but to stare at Sweatsuit Woman’s fun bags while I filled my cup and she devoured her Cajun Chicken Surprise.

As I stared, I began to feel a cool, wet, popping sensation on my hand, whereupon I noticed that my cup was overflowing and Diet Coke was oozing down my arm. I snapped myself back to reality, napkined my arm clean and walked back to my table. I began to eat and tried to read my newspaper, but let’s be honest here: who can concentrate on swing states and insurgency when there are naked tits in the room? I wondered if I had actually seen what I thought I’d seen or was there something in the clam chowder making me hallucinate? I felt I owed to myself and other patrons who might try said chowder to investigate further.

I guzzled my Diet Coke like a frat boy would chug a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon, let out a moderately sized belch and returned to the fountain for a refill. Sure enough, there they were. And by the looks of things, Sweatsuit Woman was getting a little chilly. I continued to overfill my cup until a thundering voice distracted my attention.

“Hey!” the voice said. “Eyes front!”

As it turned out, the voice was coming from a rather robust and muscular man sitting across the table from Sweatsuit Woman. He had a skull and crossbones tattooed on his left deltoid and he appeared to have chosen a shirt three sizes too small so as to accentuate his steroid-assisted goonhood. He had the kind of physique that made me believe he could broken my neck with his thumb and forefinger while buttering his cornbread with his other hand.

It’s so hard to find the right thing to say when a guy confronts you for staring at his wife’s chest, so I said nothing. I merely refocused my attention on my beverage and returned to my seat, happy to have my neck still intact.

When I got back to my table, I noticed a flier advertising the specials available at Souplantaion in the coming week. And I’ll be darned if grilled chicken breasts weren’t on the top of the list.