Happily married man survives night alone unscathed

Tonight my shoes are in the middle of the living room floor. My right and left sock are hanging willy nilly from the bedroom doorknob and bookshelf respectfully. My clothes never left the bathroom once I got out of the tub that incidentally is covered in grungy man film and my own body hair. Were I to invite you on a scavenger hunt in my home right now, I'd challenge to find a half-eaten sandwich, a three-day weekend's worth of junk mail, empty CD cases and cans of diet soft drink that are only half empty. Or are they half full? In the VCR is a videocassette that dates back to my bachelor days (if you catch my drift) and at the top of my lungs I'm singing along to my downloaded 80s-era mp3's by Falco, Taco, Devo and Barry Manilow. When those are done I plan to move on to 70s mellow gold. Yes, I'm devolving not just musically but also developmentally. My wife has taken the baby out of town to visit the grandparents. Tonight I'm batching it.

As I write I'm sitting in my throne. For some men the throne is a reclining La-Z-Boy-style chair with cup holders and convenient pockets for the TV Guide and remote control(s). Mine's a bit more streamlined. I bought it a decade ago when it came from Rooms To Go with an identical couch, a coffee table and two end tables complete with generic lamps. The couch, tables and lamps have long since gone the way of garage sales or the trash, but this chair remains. My wife affectionately refers to it as "the plaid chair", but I know it' as the throne. Along with an old Bullwinkle t-shirt, this chair's the only thing of mine in the home that predates my marriage. Well, OK, there's that VHS collection I mentioned, but I generally keep that hidden away. Ahh, if this chair could talk! Well sure, most of what it would say would be about being covered in stale french fries and spilled box wine but it'd also talk about sexual escapades involving me and . . . that VHS collection I mentioned earlier.

Right now I want to shout, shout, let it all out. These are the things I can do without: emissions testing; overdue sperm bank bills; middle management; the lawn that still needs to be mowed; alarms set to go off at 7:28AM; and jobs that need to be reported to at 8:00AM at which point I'll get into my car where I can lock all my doors. Wait, where was I? Here in my thrown I fell asleep and dreamed that I ran. I ran so far away. Tracy Lordes, hold me now. Warm my heart. Stay with me. We can dance if we want to. 'Cause your friends don't blog and if they don't blog then they're no friends of mine. It's a safety dance.

How embarrassing!

You'll have to forgive me.


You see, I suffer from My Own E-Hollywood Story Disorder. The visions always start with the same image. I'm wearing a Boone's Farm-stained Bullwinkle t-shirt and I'm sitting in a tasteless plaid Rooms-to-Go-esque chair. Tina Turner walks in and she's my private dancer. Sometimes the music playing is 80s glam but any old music will do nicely, thank you. She does what I want her to do which is take on me and take me on. For a brief moment part of me wonders if I can escape my responsibilities into a world of music video animation where it's better to be safe than sorry. I start to shed tears, but they're only tears for fears, and then I think Hey now. Hey now. Iko iko I, eh?

If a picture paints a thousand words, then why can't I paint you? Screw Tracy Lordes. I'm ready for my wife to get home. I may be climbing on rainbows, but Lainey here goes. Dreams, they're for those who sleep. Life is for us to keep. Elaine, if you're wondering what this blog is leading to . . .

I wanna make it with you.

I really think that we could me it, Girl.

Six days of daddyhood

As sleepless nights have blurred into restless days for this past week, I have little concept of time. Looking at the calendar, I can tell that only seven days ago my wife and I were downing ginger pork and coconut chicken soup at our favorite Thai place, our last decent meal before heading to the hospital for induction. I was jittery and somewhat irritable. I couldn't finish my dish. I always enjoy a glass of plum wine with Asian food but this time I came close to asking if I could order it by the bottle.

Our first night in the hospital was spent in our labor and delivery suite, which by hospital standards was rather spacious. There was dim lighting and faux hardwood flooring. To my wife's delight, there was cable television, something we normally manage to do without, and to my delight the hospital provided free wireless internet serivce. To my chagrin however there was the saddest excuse for a pullout sleeper you could ever imagine. It was barely comfortable to sit on, much less lay on. Rather than leather or fabric it was covered in coarse plastic like you find on the seat of a school bus. It also wasn't a pullout couch; it was a pullout chair that after great efforts on the part of the soon-to-be victim extended out into a cot about the size of a massage table. This thing was so uncomfortable that I seriously considered spreading my hospital-provided bed linens out on the faux hardwood and sleeping on the floor. On top of all that, my wife and I both were kept awake most of the night by our neighboring patient's delivery which by the sound of her wailing was done à naturelle.

The early part of the next day consisted of a barrage of people parading in and out of my wife's room to take her blood pressure, take her temperature, shove things up in her down there place, take things out of her down there place and bring her a feast of chicken broth and ice chips. Clearly my role in the whole thing was minimal. One nurse actually asked me my name which made me swoon, but come to think of it her reason for asking may have been just for billing pourposes. After all, I did help myself to the popsicles and cranberry juices which were supposedly reserved for delivering preggers.

Around ten that morning after much poking, prodding and examining, my wife's doctor suggested she go ahead and get the epidural. They had her sit on the edge of the bed with her knees in between mine. I don't know what purpose this really serves other than maybe indulge me to think I play a vital role in all of this. More likely it's so that as an anesthesiologist works a needle up through her spinal cord the woman can give the evil eye to whatever guy got her into this mess to begin with. I did just fine for the inital alcohol swabbing. When the doctor said he was inserting the needle, I was fine for that too. It wasn't until he threw that intravenous tube up over her shoulder that I nervously looked up at the nurse and asked if she could take my place. While some people have a problem with needles, my problem is with things going in a vein. Finger pricks I can handle and even dental needles I can live through, but when something's going inside a vein, I need the cold compresses and my feet propped up. The day my daughter was to be born was no exception.

"I need some crackers and peanut butter in here for my dad, please," the nurse shouted into the intercom. Meanwhile I staggered back to that God-forsaken prison-cot-slash-chair like a rookie player heading back to the bench. Queasiness was something I had feared would happen. Oh well. The crackers were pretty good.

At around 2:45PM that afternoon I was on the phone with my mom trying to give her an idea on when we might be delivering a baby. Elaine and I had taken bets. I said 10:30PM while she had guessed 8:30PM. It turns out we were both wrong. When the nurse came in to check on Elaine she announced that we were at ten centimeters. Even a pregnancy illiterate like me knows that being dialated ten centimeters in delivery is like being at the top of the ninth in baseball. As nurses were stammering around quickly trying to assemble the various baby birthing tools and summon the doctor, I hung up with my mom with the promise to call her back once we had more news. I got up to look at the down there place. There was what looked like the top of a head with hair. I asked the nurse to confirm my suspicions. Indeed, the baby was crowning.

Originally I had planned to be what they refer to in the obstetric field as a "north daddy" where the equator is an imaginary line running from one of your wife's hips to the other. In the heat of the moment however, I decided "south daddies" are where it's at. I wasn't going to come this far without seeing the grand finale. Elaine's first push happened around 2:55. A few minutes after that she pushed again, thus expelling the baby's head. The third push which happened at 3:05 in the afternoon was a grand slam. As Elaine's delivering obstetrician so eloquently put it, "You could drive a truck through her pelvis." Meryl Elizabeth came out crying loud and proud. The daughter I had been waiting months to meet finally had arrived. She was strong. She was invincible. She was mine.

Since we began dating my wife and I have celebrated May 5 as Email Day. It was that day in 1997 that I first emailed her after having acted in community theater together. For weeks we exchanged friendly emails and later our exchanges became more intimate. It was a private holiday that just she and I shared. Now we share a daughter and her birthday is May 5, 2006. How fitting that Meryl's birthday is on Cinco de Mayo when our trip to Mexico, which occurred two weeks into her gestation, was my daughter's first foreign travel experience. At the time, we had no idea. In utero, Meryl had sangria, she ate the salsa and she even drank the water.

Had she been a boy, we were thinking Montezuma.

Baby pictures

On May 5, 2006 at 3:05 in the afternoon my whole world changed.

Please don't wear sweatpants out of the house

Remember that old adage about not leaving home without wearing clean underwear? The fear was that if you got into a car crash and the paramedics, whose job apparently was to immediately pull down the pants of the wounded, were to notice you're tightie whities weren't so tidy you would then receive substandard emergency aid. Dirty underwear isn't something I've had to worry about for some time because . . . well I'll save it for Six More Weird Slash Interesting Things about Me . . . but I did recently commit a social faux pas that was equally if not far more heinous.

I was on the way to Subway and the grocery store to pick up some sandwiches and Reese's miniatures. I know this doesn't sound all that nurtritious but I'm on the Fatkins diet, what can I say? After locating the new 44-ounce bag (yes, just over two pounds) of chocolatey quasi-peanut buttery goodness, I headed to the registers to check out. Alas, at the register with the shortest line I spotted one of my wife's coworkers and her husband. She's more than a coworker really. We've had the pleasure of puppysitting their Beagle, Lucy. Under normal circumstances I would have no qualms about sharing a cashier with Lucy's parents and saying hello, but I wasn't dressed my best. Come to think of it, I wasn't dressed anywhere close to my best. I did have on a banded collared shirt complete with sweater vest and dress shoes, but moments before leaving the house my wife made me take off the dress slacks I had on so she could wash them. I replaced them with -- get out the smelling salts --- sweatpants.

For those who think it's just fine to wear sweatpants out of the house, let me take a moment to admonish you. You should feel ashamed just as I felt ashamed. Not even the finest cover model looks good in sweats. Face it, when you see someone publicly donning sweatpants, you want to look the other way. They really should be reserved for cleaning around the house and late-night tv parties spent on the couch with a pint of Haagen Dazs and no one else around.

There, now that that's out of the way, let's return to our regularly scheduled blog entry.

After opting not to make small talk with the librarian and her beau, I made my way to the next register where a woman was unloading her groceries onto the conveyor. Then I realized it wasn't just any woman in the checkout line, it was an exgirlfriend in the checkout line. And I don't mean someone with whom I parted ways after one night of cheap cinema, chain restaurant food and no kiss. I mean someone with whom I parted ways after almost four years of spit swapping, concert going, family function escorting, loving, caring, arguing, makeup loving and all the hooha that goes along with all of those things. This woman had seen me naked. Come to think of it, she had even seen me in sweatpants.

But not today, I thought.

So I wandered down to the last register and rang up my 44-ounces of future root canal via the self checkout. That really is where people in sweatpants should pay for their groceries anyway, don't you think? I promptly paid the Spanish-English bilingual cyber-cashier who reminded me to take my change and my receipt and then headed for the car, ashamed for having worn sweatpants out of the house and forlorn for not having said hello to an old flame.

As I was climbing into my car I remembered that through the years of dating said flame, my then mode of transportation and the condition in which I kept it was a constant source of frustration and debate for us. I drove an '83 beat up handed down Camaro which still bore the unslightly scars of an auto accident I managed to get myself into years earlier. People who knew me then would tell you that the ugliness of the outside of the car paled in comparison to the ugliness inside. The floorboards alone were littered with fast food bags, Diet Coke cans, empty fry containers, half-empty fry containers, cigarette packs and college papers from several quarters ago. I suffered from both an addiction to nicotine and an aversion to cleaning out my ashtray which as a result was piled high with old, stale extinguished cigarette butts. My brother once referred to it as cigarette art. My father warned that if I were ever pulled over, I would be cited for operating a fire hazard. And as for the old flame who I might add was the daughter of a General Motors employee and she always judged people not by the content of their character (except in my case of course) but by the make and model of their car, I don't know what bothered her more, the condition I kept my car in or the fact that it didn't bother me. I would promptly point out to her that on my side of the floorboard where I needed unhindered access to the gas and brake pedal there was no such garbage and what she did with her side of the car and the condition she kept it in was her own business. Can you imagine why she would have stayed with me as long as she did?

I can, but I'll save it for another Six Weird Slash Interesting Things about Me.

I now drive a late model eight-cylinder SUV that boasts luxury car status. Yes, I know it only gets forty miles to the tank and I have to take out a second mortgage just to get the oil changed on it, but it's a Mercedes. I wanted her to see me in it. Is that shallow? I decided to circle the Kroger one time and see if by chance and intelligent design I could accidentally on purpose bump into her in the parking lot.

Mission accomplished.

She was loading groceries into her trunk and had a little tyke watching from the seat of the grocery cart. Oddly enough, she parked two spaces down from Lucy's mom and dad. I pulled up beside the ex's car, rolled down my window and asked, "Excuse me, Ma'am, don't I know you?" Cheesy intro, I know, but she played along.

"Yeh, I think so. How've you been?" She had a great smile and by the looks of her she had lost a pound for every one I had gained. Her daugher, one of two I soon learned, had her mother's eyes and hair color. At four years of age, she was just the cutest kid and looking at her made me wish my yet-to-be-born daughter would hurry up and get to that stage. I complimented her daughter on her snazzy outfit. The kid, after spotting the bag of candy in the front seat, asked her mom if she could sit in my car which I thought was flattering. The ex and I chatted about people from our shared past, jobs, kids, birthing and making baby food. I asked her to check to make sure I put the car seat in correctly and she gave me the thumbs up.

It was somewhat strange, not that she had lost weight or even that she now had kids, but that somehow she seemed so . . . maternal. With her daughter she was nurturing and caring. I never would have pictured her that way when we were dating. And yet there was something oddly comforting in seeing that quality in her. In recent years she had reached one of the pinnacle of womanhood. Motherhood. It made me realize that soon I'm going to look at my own wife in that same way. And I relish that.

The next day my wife called me from work to say that when she explained to her coworker why I had seen her at Kroger but didn't say hello, her coworker asked if I was the creepy guy in the red SUV who pulled up next to that woman with her kid and asked if I knew them. Lucy's parents, who apparently didn't recognize the face of the man who welcomed their Beagle into his home, mistook me for some ne'er-do-well with evil intentions. They suspected I was a kidnapper, the kind of stranger who masquerades as the friend of a gullible kid's parents and then uses the promise of candy to lure the kid into the backseat! Can you believe that? Librarians are a strange breed, believe you me.

Anyhow, don't wear sweats out of the house. I'm just saying.

In memorium of a dead pet rodent

My wife's sister was kind enough to email me this picture of her late pet's backyard memorial. Touching though this may be, the deceased's grave marker is somewhat misleading as it depicts a little mouse much like the creatures that befriend Cinderella and mend her gown for the ball or like the two cousins, one from the city and one from the country, who go and visit each other. Mice after all are adorable woodland creatures that gobble up Swiss cheese and outsmart their feline foe. They're cute, right? Well this perished pet's name was Randy and Randy was not cute (See photo and poll below to voice your opinion). In fact, he wasn't even a mouse at all. Randy was a rat.

Far be it for me to begrudge my beloved sister-in-law her rightful mourning period. Anyone who's had a pet knows that they do become part of your life and when they finally do meet their reward, whether that be a plot in the backyard or a one-way tour through the bathroom plumbing, there is a part of the family history that goes with them. But a rat? That's not quite the same as my loving cat who fetches and returns catnip-filled feather balls or my dog who, envious of the cat, then races for and destroys catnip-filled feather balls, is it? Can a rat really capture the affection of a loving family?

On the one occasion that I had the pleasure of meeting Randy the Rat he sat in the corner of his cage, refusing to move or even make a peep. A rat of few words, that Randy. He was also quite rotund and he suffered from male patterned baldness. Sure, he had the opportunity to explore his rodent wheel and occasional cardboard toilet paper tube, but he turned his long pointy nose up at these and instead preferred to bask in his antisocial solitude and silent cognizance. In his beady black eyes there was a look of shiftiness as though in the back of his mind he was plotting world domination and the downfall of bipeds everywhere.

Or is this observation just a reflection of my aversion to all things rodentary?

I wouldn't call myself a suriphobe per se because I have lived peacefully in a home where gerbils were accepted as pets. My brother owned them and then passed his penchant on to his two daughters, who went on to own hamsters. If I fell asleep my nieces would enjoy watching my expression as I woke up to a hamster sitting on my chest. My reaction was never one of horror or abnormal fear but I'll admit to a slight degree of disfavor. It's not that I have a problem with rodents. I just think when it comes to them my best stance is one of noninterference. They have their world, and I have mine. Kinda like the Amish.

When Caroline and her husband, Matt, first purchased Randy, they also got him a leash and collar to wear(Randy, that is -- not Matt). The theory was that Randy would accompany Caroline as she pushed her daughter around the neighborhood in a stroller. I don't know enough about rats to know what kind of pace they keep with those tiny little legs. Do they chase after cars or like my dog, unexpectedly stop dead in their tracks in full view of the neighbor's living room window to hunker down and pop a squat in someone else's yard? If so, is the owner required to pick it up? Turns out, it's all a moot issue really. As I understand it, the concept of rat walking never came to fruition. Randy either lacked the ability or desire or both.

Caroline tells me that when their daughter is old enough they'll try another rat, and that said rat will prove himself so worthy of petdom that my daughter too wil clamor for one. I'll talk it over with my wife when the time comes, but somehow I don't see us adding a rat to the fray. I'm sure rats are warm creatures that provide all the affection a rat owner would come to expect, but I can't shake that whole bubonic plague image. I'm judgemental that way.

As for Randy's untimely demise, if you're thinking about sending my family flowers, hold off. While the date in the photo reveals that the picture of his grave marker was taken just this week, I actually got the email announcing Randy's death nine months ago. Caroline must have just been snapping photos in the backyard.

I guess everyone grieves in their own way

My Ballot Box Is Randy cute? Yes No View Results

Expelling Harry Potter from Gwinnett County schools does not help children

This morning I awoke to a news story that just about made me want to upchuck yesterday's lunch in a way that only Linda Blair could envy. I'm talking about this stupid-ass agenda to get Harry Potter thrown out of the schools. According to WSB radio, local mom Laura Mallory thinks the Harry Potter series is "too dark and anti-Christian." What the article means by too dark I'm not quite certain. Are the characters so angst-ridden that even Nietzsche would put down the book crying? And anti-Christian? You'd think little Harry and his buddies were burning televangelists at the stake.

The most disgusting aspect of the news story to me was that they threw up some young girl at the mic who professed that after reading the Harry Potter books she and other friends became fascinated with witchcraft, conducted a seance in PE class and later became suicidal. I won't write the kid's name because I think she's really nothing more than an innocent pawn in a game of here-we-go-'round-the-book-burning-bush, but you can find out here. It's her parents that disgust me. Listen carefully people. If this child truly wants to kill herself and her parents blame this on access to books, not only will that child likely not live to see her next birthday but her blood will be on her parents hands. They and they alone will be to blame. This is like parents who blame McDonald's because their child is fat.

There is not a book on this planet that can cause a child to do something that that child's parents have instilled in him is wrong. Conversely nor is there a book on this planet that can cause a child to do something that that child's parents have instilled in him is right. The book itself has no power whatsoever. A book is an inanimate object. It cannot make you fat, immoral, or evil. It cannot make you exercise. It cannot make you accept me as your Lord and Savior. It cannot make you want to kill yourself. If the written word had as much power as some people give it credit, this blog would be one big solicitation for donations to my checking account.

Now, I'll preface by stating I don't become a parenting expert for another four weeks or so, but I can speak as a former elementary school teacher. Many people when discovering I taught young un's will ask my views on public, private and home schooling. They really are very simple. No teacher, regardless of how evil her intentions, can corrupt your child unless you allow her to. Same goes for other kids in the class. That goes for a public school class or a private school class. Kids do not have the power. Negative peer pressure is a scapegoat for lack of parenting. Home schooling is a topic for another post, but I always want to ask proud home schoolers if they also perform home dentistry or home tonsilectomies. Checking out videos from the local library so your child can spend hours at a time being home schooled while you polish off the last of the White Zin box wine does not protect your child from the evils of this world. It just keeps them from knowing how to respond when they encounter them.

Consider for a moment the spiritual development of a child who has always been kept from whatever his parents deem as contrary to their values. Now consider the spiritual development of the child who has grown up not being sheltered from such devilry but instead has been taught to resist it. Surely the child who eschews that which is forbidden shows greater moral buildup. Temporarily hiding the apple doesn't keep us from biting it once we find it; it just makes it all the more tempting.

Poor white kid suffers from M.P.M.D. (Ms. Pac Man Disorder)

Today I treated myself to lunch, which as I rapidly approach fatherhood and therefore become gradually poorer, is a rarity. At any rate, as I sat there uvula-deep in a plate of Ledo's Buffalo wings watching obscure sports on ESPN with the sound turned down, I heard an old familiar tune that brought back memories from times long ago. I don't know quite how to describe it in words, but it was an increasingly rapid pulsating sound that I immediately recognized as vintage electronica that I had first heard in the arcades of yesteryear. Ah yes, it was the sound of a gobbled power pellet, the mere swallowing of which turned all the othewise unpallatable ghosts blue and therefore edible on a circa-1983 Ms. PacMan game.

I tried my hand at most of the popular video games growing up: PacMan, Frogger, Donkey Kong, etc. This was back in the early days before realistic space ship graphics and sexy heroines like that Tomb Raider chick. This was when a pixelated triangle represented a space invader and, as far as I know, no teenage boys fantasized about the maiden in Donkey Kong. Arcade games were more prominent then than they are now. Sure, you'd see them at the arcade and the skating rink, but there would also be at least one in the grocery store, the children's dentist's office, and some restaurants. Pizza Hut always had a two-player table Pac Man game where players could sit down and square off against each other. Looking back, it took forever for them to bring that pizza out to your table, and it was probably because they wanted you to keep throwing quarters into the Pac Man and the jukebox.

One particular machine I remember was the one in the Lawrenceville Food Giant grocery store on the corner of Scenic Highway and Gwinnett Drive. After the Food Giant closed up shop, Quality Foods took over. The same facility has been host to a Goodwill for years now and neighboring stores include a pawn shop and a cambianos cheques, but originally it was a Food Giant, complete with handwritten signs in the produce section and a Brach's candy display that called out to sweet-toothed cleptomaniacs of all ages. Near the front entrance where customers could return their glass bottles for credit was a Ms. Pac Man machine.

There was one guy who usually played it. He was a tall skinny white kid with greasy almost-but-not-quite-shoulder-length hair that looked like it was always in need of being cut. He was a few years older than me and I recognized him as the brother of a kid in my fourth-grade class. My classmate's name was Jerry, and Jerry looked like a smaller version of his older brother whose name I don't quite remember but something tells me it might have been Terry. Jerry had his older brother's unkempt hair, his stale cigarette smell, and I imagine most of his clothes once the older brother grew out of them. In the days when teachers segregated kids into reading group according to skill level, Jerry was never in the Blue Birds; he was always in the Buzzards. Once when I wasn't doing my homework my teacher took me aside and whispered, "Do you want to end up like Jerry?" I think the politically correct term is low-income Ivory Recycling.

Anyway, this guy -- the brother; not Jerry -- would ask to straighten store shelves or mop the floor for a period of time just so he could earn quarters to put into that Ms. Pac Man machine. He could play forever on a single quarter. He was just that good. Sometimes I would stand behind him along with other kids and watch while my mother was grocery shopping. He liked being watched and would give a play-by-play of what his next move was. He had learned tricks that most people didn't know like where to pause so the ghosts wouldn't find you or how to jostle the joystick so you could pass through a ghost unscathed. He would successfully play level after level until he used up all his extra turns. Then he would always curse and hit the side of the machine.

One day I asked my mother who got to keep the quarters people put into the Ms. Pac Man machine and she told me that the money probably went to the grocery store manager. Even as a kid I realized that Jerry's older brother was basically being exploited for his labors in exchange for a few short-lived moments of recreation. Sadder still is that he chose exploitation. Come to think of it, I don't remember seeing Jerry or his older brother in middle school or high school in the succeeding years. I'd bet money they each dropped out. Furthermore, something tells me they're still no strangers to that same store now that it's a Goodwill.