Exploding Unicorn

Uninvited Guests

2009-10-01T23:55:00.004-04:00

I don’t consider myself to be an unsanitary person. I generally smell better than the nearest road kill, and I vacuum the house of my own free will at least once every presidency. A win for the incumbent means our resident dust bunnies remain unmolested for another four years. These illusions of cleanliness were shattered recently when we discovered our dogs, Niko and Spencer, have fleas. To understand the magnitude of that statement, you must first understand that each of our 10-pound dogs is comprised of nine pounds of fur and one pound of poop they have yet to deposit on some well-traveled section of our carpet. These insects could survive for years in our dogs’ thick, tangled coats, completely untouched by sunlight or chemical attacks. Niko and Spencer are basically walking parasite bomb shelters, which consequently is the only function either of them has ever served that is actually useful to another living creature. I’d count the time Niko ate a dead bug I was too lazy to pick up, but if you add up the number of things they’ve removed from the floor and the number of things they’ve deposited there, you’d discover both dogs are still running a tremendous deficit.

I’m not sure of Niko’s exact lineage, but I’m pretty sure it involved a sheep, a Wookiee, and a bottle of tequila.

Realizing that eliminating the fleas would take considerable time and energy, I tried unsuccessfully to convince Lola that we should spend our weekend tackling an easier project, like eliminating poverty in Africa. She also rejected my suggestions that we use flea bombs, lasers, and a highly skilled exorcist. Instead, Lola gave the dogs a bath and I applied a flea-killing gel I bought at the grocery store. I like shopping at places where poisons and chip dip are sold in the same aisle just in case I ever need to kill someone using only a platter of nachos. I’m still waiting for Osama Bin Laden to call and invite me to a potluck. Like the terrorist leader and his highly selective guest list, Niko and Spencer’s fleas refused to politely curl up and die. The flea gel is supposed to make a dog’s skin toxic to parasites after only a few days, but to these fleas the substance apparently worked less like arsenic and more like mustard. I guess the over-the-counter stuff makes your dogs so delicious the fleas eat until they die from high cholesterol or diabetes.

I know it’s time to bathe the dogs when I remember Spencer doesn’t actually have any brown spots.

Basking in the warm glow of recent failure, Lola and I tried a new approach. Perhaps the death-through-fatness approach was working, we theorized, but the morbidly obese fleas on the dogs were just being replaced by slim fleas from elsewhere in the house. Since the dogs had free run of our home in the days before we noticed their newfound insectoid fan club, we figured the fleas were thoroughly entrenched in forward operating bases throughout our humble abode. Realizing the tactical strength of our cunning foe, I offered Lola two reasonable options: Give in and finally flea bomb the whole house, or burn the structure down and move somewhere else. Deeming my suggestions “unhealthy” and “insane” respectively, Lola instead insisted that we clean the house thoroughly to rid ourselves of the pests. This answer was predictable since women instinctively resort to house cleaning in times of distress. It was the same answer she gave me when I asked her what we should do about the mortgage crisis and global warming. The financial system still hasn’t recovered, but my attic is now spotless.

Lola and I spent most of Saturday washing and steam-cleaning every soft surface in the house. All blankets and towels ended up in the washing machine, and all four-legged animals ended up in the back yard. Before we banished Niko and Spencer yet again, I gave them a bath with a special shampoo that promised to be to fleas what a tornado is to trailer parks. We also scheduled an appointment with a groomer who offered to clear-cut our dogs, rendering their barren surfaces utterly incapable of supporting life. That appointment, which was Tuesday morning, went about like you would expect. Niko and Spencer officially became the first animals in the history of the world to flunk getting a haircut. Even in the best of circumstances, Niko is about as stationary as a very agitated trout. Apparently trashing about wildly isn’t conducive to proper to grooming, a reality that became evident when Niko’s impromptu dance routine earned him a noticeable cut to the thigh. After a strange man with a noisy slicing machine tries to cut off one of your legs, I guess you develop some trust issues. The situation quickly spiraled out of control, with the end result being that Lola got a call to come pick up our highly retarded but only slightly lacerated dogs.

Back when the dogs were puppies, grooming them took much less time. That’s because Lola didn’t know I used the lawn mower.

The groomer didn’t charge us – probably because most dog hairdressers don’t carry malpractice insurance – but he also didn’t cut any hair. He did, however, give each dog an anti-flea pill, or at least that’s what he said. A full day after the pill was supposed to take effect, we were finally unable to find any fleas on the dogs. We let Niko and Spencer back into the house, and they let the fleas back onto our furniture. Apparently their parasitic partners lay in hiding just long enough to regain access to our climate-controlled environment. I’m not sure why our dogs still have fleas after one regular bath, one gel treatment, one flea bath, and one pill treatment, but I guessing it’s because the groomer didn’t so much give our dogs anti-flea medicine as he did roll them in the eggs of significantly more cunning fleas. Lola is still adamantly against using flea bombs, which are useless anyway as long as our flea-infested dogs keep redistributing their guests in any areas we clear out. On Saturday, Lola and I are going to try to cut the dogs’ hair ourselves and give them an additional flea bath. If that doesn’t work, I’m sure my wife will finally acquiesce and let me burn down the house.

Close Call

2009-09-08T23:45:00.001-04:00

I’m twenty-four years old. I have a wife, a house, and a college degree. Two days ago, I almost pooped my pants. I say this not with shame, but with triumph. The mere fact that I can say “almost” instead of “actually did” is a testament to the superhuman strength of my sphincter. That’s the kind of accomplishment you bring up at your high school reunion: “I’m not doing a whole lot career-wise, but let me tell you a little story about bowel control.” My résumé and obituary will be updated accordingly.

This is the point where I should warn you that if you not interested in reading 1,000 words about the nuances of my large intestine, you should probably slink off to some other corner of the Internet. I don’t know why you would, though. This is the kind of tale they put in the Bible: “And then Moses almost shat his pants, but he did not. And Pharaoh was so filled with awe and disgust he finally granted the Hebrews freedom and adult diapers by the dozen.”

This poop story, like all good poop stories, begins at Chilies. Lola and I were on our way back from an ill-fated trip to Cincinnati. We drove an hour from Lola’s sister-in-law’s house to get there, but we never actually got out of our car. Parking was $10, and a random selection of unfamiliar streets was about to be shut down for a fireworks show not scheduled to start until much later that evening. Rather than paying a modest parking fee to spend several hours trapped downtown with Lola’s family, we made the split-second decision to turn our car around and start the two-hour trek back home.

If there’s one thing that makes me hungry, it’s blowing off Lola’s family members. The wife and I soon found ourselves and the previously named roadside restaurant. Said eatery was offering one of those $20-meal-deals where you get a three course meal for the price of two parking spaces in downtown Cincinnati. I didn’t go into this meal asking for trouble, but I also didn’t specifically request digestive tranquility, so I guess you could chalk that up as mistake number one. The menu didn’t even offer anything that raised serious questions in my mind, like Nuclear Bean Mystery Bowl or Anal Assault Sampler Platter. If it had, I would have ordered both just to reward the restaurant for its honesty. Instead, I settled for a mushroom cheeseburger along with nachos with some kind of cheese and beef dip for an appetizer and what can only be described as a mound of cake for desert. By the time we left the restaurant, I had at least thirty-five pounds of somewhat processed food matter in my stomach, which is made it a pretty typical restaurant visit for me.

I felt fine when we got in the car. I was still in okay when the engine started and we were on our way back toward the Interstate. In fact, I felt absolutely perfect until we had pulled just far enough onto the Interstate that we couldn’t turn around. At that exact moment, I realized I was going to die. It’s difficult for me to describe the ferocity with which my abdominal region was suddenly stricken with pain. Imagine that you’re walking along, minding your own business, when suddenly you’re attacked by a bear. Only instead of fur the bear is covered in razor blades and electric eels, and instead of growling the bear sings songs by the Jonas Brothers. My level of discomfort was exactly like that, only twice as bad and half as cool. Seriously, it would be an honor to be mauled by a singing killer super bear.

Back in reality, something big and angry was on its way out. Maybe it was food I’d consumed earlier in the day. Maybe it was one of those aliens that burst from people’s chests in Ridley Scott movies. Either way, I desperately needed some moist towelettes and possibly a flame thrower. Conveniently, I had neither. Thanks federally-mandated three-day waiting period.

Lola quickly noticed I was in a state of distress. It helped that my eyes were filled with blood and I was speaking in tongues. She asked if I was okay, and I calmly informed her that the Dark Prince decided to launch Armageddon from the comfort of my anal cavity. I looked forward to the next Interstate exit like it was Christmas, my twenty-first birthday, and the start of football season all rolled into one. But as we neared the exit, it became readily apparent that there were no lights or buildings in either direction. As far as I could tell, the next closest bathroom was on the International Space Station.

Lola squeezed my hand and offered some encouraging words, but every time she spoke her voice hit my abdomen like a sledgehammer. This was either because her efforts to help only drew more attention to the problem or because the only thing that hurts me more than life-threatening diarrhea is the compassion of another human being. I did my best to ignore Lola and focus on practical solutions, like shifting in my seat and praying for death. Nothing I did appeased the butt demons. As the pain built, my standards quickly began to drop. I didn’t need a building with a working toilet. I’d settle for a ditch or an open car window. I would have tried for the latter had it not been for Lola’s swift use of her car’s built-in child window locks.

Just when all hope appeared to be lost, the pain suddenly and inexplicably went away. It was like the singing killer super bear got bored with mauling me and decided to go race go carts instead (When you take a few months off from writing, the metaphors are the first thing to go). We were rapidly approaching a second exit, but I bravely waved it off. Don’t worry about pulling over, I assured Lola. I can make it home.

Seconds after we passed my second chance at salvation, my hubris was rewarded with a crushing pain in my midsection. It was like the super bear suddenly realized go carts are lame compared to the veritable amusement park that is my digestive system. Clearly, I was facing a cunning foe. I maintained consciousness for the next several miles solely out of fear of what would happen to me if I ruined the upholstery in Lola’s car.

Finally, after what seemed like six weeks but was probably only five and a half, we came to an Interstate exit that led to a gas station. Lola foolishly tried to park the car, but I jumped out while it was still moving and rushed for the gas station door. By “rushed,” I mean “somewhat swiftly waddled” because by this point I was literally doubled over from the pain in my abdomen. The clerk in the gas station laughed at the panic in my voice when I attempted to ascertain the location of the building’s restroom facilities. I have a feeling she would have been considerably less amused if she knew just how close she came to a very, very unpleasant cleanup in aisle three. The clerk informed me the bathroom was on the side of the building, so I made a mad, waddling dash out the front door and toward deliverance.

The finish was so close you’d need one of those touch boards they used to time Michael Phelps to figure out if I made it in time. The gas station bathroom was as disgusting as you would expect, but at that moment it was the happiest place on earth. If I had listened closely, I’m sure I could have heard choirs of angels. As it was, the fecal symphony I unleashed in that confined space left me partially deaf in both ears. Having survived what I think I can reasonably classify as a near death experience, I hobbled back to the car and quietly rode home.

In hindsight, I realize I overestimated the importance of that story be several orders of magnitude. I could have saved four minutes of your life if I had just said, “I really had to go to the bathroom on Sunday, and so we stopped at a gas station.” But more importantly, going back and writing a new, non-terrible post would take way more time and effort than I’m willing to commit. For now, you’ll just have to settle for this anticlimactic but nonetheless epic digestive narrative story. Just be happy I didn’t include pictures with this time.

Olivia

2009-08-11T21:28:00.000-04:00

I’ve been putting off this post for nearly two months, but I have to deliver this message eventually. We lost the baby June 12. The umbilical cord got tangled around the baby’s neck about three months before her due date. It was a freak accident. Because there was nothing genetically wrong with our daughter, Lola and I shouldn’t have any trouble conceiving again.

At some point I plan to write a fitting tribute for our daughter, but this is neither the time nor the place. In the next week or two, I plan to start writing new blog entries. Lola and I are doing fine, and we still look forward to starting a family. Thanks for your patience. This website will return to happier maters very soon.

Working Out Isn't Working Out

2009-05-18T22:34:00.001-04:00

Medical science tells us fat people are doomed to die before their skinny brethren, cut down by diabetes, heart disease, and old floors not built to accommodate a man who weighs as much as a herd of wild horses. The portly should be wary of entering structure that predates the invention of the Big Mac. Health experts suggest being larger than life is synonymous with being on the verge of death, but it’s actually the skinny who risk extinction. “Love handles” got their name because there was a time in human history when they gave you a better chance to hang on through another season. Coincidently, ancient women were more willing to love a man and let him sire their offspring if he looked like he was going to live through the winter. I might not have abs fit for the cover of a magazine, but I’d be one stud of a caveman. Despite my newfound belief that I would have been sexy 10,000 years ago, I must admit I was perturbed when I found unexplained pockets of fat on my body near the end of college. I felt betrayed by my metabolism, which previously allowed me to consume entire farm animals in a single sitting without consequence. Ever since my body started following basic laws of physics, my weight has fluctuated wildly. I’ve alternated between exercising and sitting around while gravy is intravenously injected into my body, and after experiencing both ends of the spectrum I have to say I’d rather be filled with coagulated meat juices than self-respect. Physical fitness, like honesty and literacy, is for chumps.

I didn’t always have the physique of a diabetic walrus. By my sophomore year in high school I had reached my current height of a hair shy of 6’2”, but I weighed in at an impressive 140 lbs. To this day I have no idea how that was possible. The math only comes out right if my bones had negative weight. During this period I often ate half a tray of brownies for breakfast, two-day’s worth of sandwich matter for lunch, and the children of my enemies for diner. I loved diner. My body’s seemingly magical ability to destroy food was hardly unique. If all teenage males were exiled from the planet world hunger would end in an afternoon, assuming of course that 13 to 18-year-old boys are solely to blame for the unstable governments and inefficient agricultural practices present in sub-Saharan Africa. Evidently, the only use my body had for food was as ammunition to blast out my colon. Some of the bathrooms I encountered during that time period are to this day still considered to be major disaster areas by my parents, local clergy, and FEMA.

It is important to remember that during this time I was a distance runner, and there is no more useless shape than distance running shape. You’re not strong enough to fight off an attacker, but you’re also not fast enough to outrun one unless said assailant is willing to pursue you at a slow and steady pace for many, many miles. There is no practical application for having thin, wiry leg muscles and an atrophied upper body, unless your life depends on squeezing between some prison bars and then playing an impromptu game of soccer. This knowledge didn’t make me train any less because it wouldn’t have made a difference; I thought I was already the worst runner I could be. Then I discovered weight lifting. Trying to get better at running by lifting weights is kind of like trying to get better at flying a plane by shaving cats. Coaches have never quite grasped this concept, however, and most remain solidly positive about lifting weights and ambivalent about shaving cats.

I entered college weighing 160 lbs. and managed to add about twenty-five pounds to that total by my junior year. All that muscle – and all of it was muscle, save for the twenty-four pounds that instantly went to my head as fat – would have been useful if I didn’t run like a T-Rex: I feebly clutch my arms to my chest as I gracelessly amble forward, occasionally devouring goats and SUVs full of tourists as I progress. The stronger I became, the more sluggish I got, which is how I discovered the only way to go slower than being stationary is to move backwards. The extra muscle didn’t help me with the ladies, either. Lola started dating me back when I still regularly lost arm wrestling matches with twelve-year-old girls with polio. What muscle I did eventually acquire was mostly hidden anyway. I wear baggy clothes and move with an awkward slouching lope that should be an impossible form of locomotion for an upright primate. The only muscle that was visible through this elaborate façade was in my shoulders, and even then you could really only get a good look at it while I was lifting weights. At some point working out for the sake of looking good while working out seemed counterproductive. I stopped exercising, my metabolism shut down, and my body instantly started converting muscle into fat and fat into armored shell. I have a theory that turtles are actually just lizards that got really fat.

It seems the only time my muscles are noticeable is in retrospect. Lola, who never once commented on my weightlifting while we were in college, occasionally brings up how I used to have big shoulders and six-pack abs. Evidently all the exercise in the world can’t compare to the body-shaping power of a faulty memory. My fellow cross country runners and I usually ran with our shirts off, so I have literally dozens of witnesses who can attest to the fact that not during one day of the four years I spent at an institute of higher learning was the outline of my abdominal muscles visible. Rather than working out now, I should just wait for Lola’s recognizance to get worse. Eventually she’ll wistfully look back to a time when I had a cape and a handlebar mustache. Rather than relying on Lola’s rapidly progressing dementia, I could actually grow new muscle and facial hair, but that sounds like an incredibly bad idea. If you really think about it, there is no activity quite as pointless as exercising. Studies suggest it can extend your life, but even the most ardent exercise proponent wouldn’t argue that an hour of exercise will give you an hour of extra life. But even if we take this absurdly optimistic estimate of a 1:1 ratio of life extension as truth, it doesn’t make sense to waste time doing crunches and squat thrusts when you’re young just to have a few extra days sitting around doing nothing when you’re old. I’d prefer to use my precious hours to sit around doing nothing right now.

Did I Make That?

2009-04-19T23:23:00.007-04:00

I’m not a vain man. I don’t expect my unborn child to be beautiful, but I also don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to hope our baby will look like something other than the spawn of Satan. Clearly I’m asking for too much. According to a recent ultrasound, my wife is just four and a half months away from giving birth to a demonic clown:

The woman doing the ultrasound assured us the baby will look more normal once he or she builds up fat stores by feasting on milk and the souls of the damned.

As the alleged father, I know I’m supposed to love my offspring no matter what they look like, but seriously that kid’s face will haunt your dreams. I’d like to claim that’s not my handiwork, but everyone knows the demonic clown gene is carried on the Y chromosome. That doesn’t mean I’ll soon be the dad of a healthy but evil baby boy. If I recall high school biology correctly, demonic clowns aren’t confined to specific human genders. For all I know, this thing could have two X’s, one Y, and half a Z. Even at this early stage the family resemblance is striking. Our demon baby has my vacant eyes and Lola’s bright orange skin. I guess the pigmentation doesn’t matter much since he or she will always be wearing creepy face paint. At least we’ll have something in common. Heaven knows I’ve done my share of unholy circus work.

Should the ultrasound be wrong – and it looks pretty conclusive to me – Lola and I have decided we don’t want to know what we’re having. This deliberate ignorance only applies to the baby’s gender. If my wife is going to pop out a stegosaurus or something I’d appreciate a heads up. Even a father’s love has its limits, and mine stops at the armored spines of a prehistoric beast. I have two friends who managed to knock up their female companions, and both of them are having boys. I can’t publicly say I want a boy more than I want a girl or a girl more than I want a demonic clown, but I can say it better be illegal for whatever I produce to procreate with whatever my friends produce. Other than that, I’ll be happy with whatever my wife and I get just as long as whatever that is doesn’t ride out of my wife’s uterus on the back of a dinosaur.

The demonic clown pictures in our possession are the result of 4D imaging technology. The fourth “D” of course refers to the serious dough expectant parents hemorrhage to admire that view. Most of the images we saw at our ultrasound appointment were of the traditional grainy black-and-white that-could-be-your-baby-or-the-Lock-Ness-Monster variety. That didn’t stop my wife from proudly taking them to work. The hospital could have given us pictures of someone else’s unborn kid and we wouldn’t have known the difference. If I were an ultrasound technician, I’d take proper ultrasound images exactly once and then hand out those same pictures to every other set of parents for the rest of my career. The ultrasound technician at our visit spent forty-five minutes pointing how this dark area was the heart and that dark area was a liver, but we couldn’t see any of it. She may has well have just poked my wife in the stomach, said she was pretty sure there was a baby in there, and then sent us on our way.

This video shows a healthy baby. Too bad it probably belongs to somebody else.

The biggest advantage to not knowing the gender of our baby is that it slows down Lola’s spending somewhat. Decorating for babies is a simple but expensive process: blue for boys, pink for girls, and green for dinosaurs. Demonic clowns don’t have a color, but they do come with their own scary theme music. Most people find out the sex of their offspring as early as they can, meaning they don’t have to shop for androgynous clothing for nine months. Unsurprisingly, the available selection of non-gender specific baby clothing is somewhat limited. For our baby’s wardrobe, Lola has settled on clothing displaying ducks and frogs as not being too masculine or feminine, but that doesn’t seem quite right. I’ve seen some pretty vicious ducks in my day, and frog DNA is what led to a very manly catastrophe in Jurassic Park. The only truly non-gender specific outfit you can buy for a baby is one of those white onesies that are basically the equivalent of a wife-beater for a baby. I think we own at least sixteen of those so far. If you’re going to raise a white trash baby, you might as well do it right.

Appropriate accessories for this outfit include NASCAR tattoos and Baby Miller Light.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned up to this point in the pregnancy, it’s that growing a baby takes forever. Boys, girls, and demonic clowns all have gestation periods lasting about forty weeks. Dinosaurs, however, don’t have live births, so I’m pretty sure if we were having a stegosaurus Lola would have laid an egg by now. I’ll be happy with whatever we get four of five months from now as long as it’s small enough to be confined by the picket fence we just finished building around our backyard. Then again if our child is able jump a five foot barrier as an infant I suppose we’ll make due. We’ll just have to make sure to call a talent agent – or an exorcist who doesn’t fear balloon animals.

Good Fences Make Bad Marriages

2009-03-30T00:05:00.004-04:00

It took millions of men hundreds of years to build the Great Wall of China. If they made it out of wooden pickets instead, it would have taken them twice that long. This weekend I drafted various friends and family members to help me build a backyard fence. It won’t keep out any Mongolian raiders, but it might just let our dogs poop at will outside – a much loftier goal. I have yet to see a Mongolian take a dump on my carpet, but I guess I’m not here all day. Lola made food for the work crew but didn’t help with construction, much to everyone’s relief. While I would never suggest my wife has succumbed to hormone-induced insanity, I happen to know another pregnant woman – let’s call her Mola – who earlier this week nearly murdered her husband over a box of Cheese-Its. There’s a reason the Surgeon General recommends pregnant women stay away from power tools and it has nothing to do with the health of the baby.

Lola originally insisted on a white picket fence, and as far as she knows she’s still getting one. It’s a well known fact that pregnant women can’t see colors.

With Lola confined to the house, there were about seven of us left to build two hundred and forty feet of fence, a Herculean task even if all of our tools had been adequate. Instead of renting a gas-powered post hole digger, I should have just bought some dynamite or maybe some kind of space-based laser. The post hole digger’s only useful feature was that it was loud enough to drown out our swearing. The large screw it used to bore into the earth was evidently designed to cut through a surface about as hard as pudding. Whenever it encountered something tougher, like a slightly thicker pudding, it would kick back, slamming me in the legs and knocking Rocco over backwards. Rocco would then stab the ground with a screw driver until he figured out what object was impeding our downward progress. These searches quickly proved unnecessary. The only thing we didn’t find while digging in my yard was actual dirt; there wasn’t any room for it between the tree roots, rocks, and discarded bricks lurking below the thin veneer of grass covering my property.

Filling the spaces between these posts with pickets is one way to keep out intruders. Using these posts to mount the skulls of my enemies is another. The method I go with will depend entirely on which permit is cheaper.

Wherever possible, my brother Harry would use a wooden post hole digger to finish the holes we started to make room for the 4x4s, which my dad, Lola’s dad, and Lola’s little brother put in place. My dad is a former farmer who is used to building fences in northern Iowa, where the temperature is often twenty degrees below zero in the middle of June. Fence posts there had to be planted at least three feet in the ground to get below the frost line; otherwise they’d never be strong enough to withstand months-long snowstorms and frequent yeti attacks. Conditions aren’t quite as harsh where I live now. This fence only has to hold back a few hard freezes a year and maybe an occasional Mongol, but we opted to follow with my dad’s Antarctic building codes just to be safe. At least that was the plan before we realized my yard is basically a brick road with a little vegetation on top. We made progress where we could and some where we couldn’t, resulting in post holes without any semblance of uniform depth. Some made it about as deep as my dad wanted, while others appeared to actually increase in elevation by the time we were done digging. The posts, however, are all exactly eight feet long, meaning some of them stick out of the ground almost seven feet. The goal originally was to cut them off at about the same height above the ground, but leaving them uneven might help keep away the neighbors. You’re less likely to stop by for a visit if you think a poorly grounded piece of timber is going to fall over and crush you to death.

If our dogs learn to dig the entire fence will be useless. Then again, if our dogs learn anything Hell will freeze over. Hopefully that will keep the ground hard enough to keep our dogs from getting through.

We managed to get all of the posts set by early afternoon, leaving only the small task of putting up about six hundred pickets. My mom came out to help for that part, and she and Harry made it around the first bend in the fence before we all gave up for the day. In the process we discovered our yard is about as flat as Dolly Parton’s chest. Discussions about how to deal with those changes in elevation resulted in shouting matches but no injuries because none of the possible solutions involved Mola or a box of Cheese-Its. Putting up the pickets would have been faster if we used a nail gun, but on my dad’s advice I opted to use screws instead. The fence is ridiculously overbuilt for this part of the country, but I feel safer that way. If a yeti ever does venture this far south, it’s not getting onto my property without a screwdriver. Of course if it has the motor skills necessary to use a hand tool I suppose it could just open the gate. By that point the dogs will be outside, though, and the minute or so the yeti spends eating them should give me more than enough time to escape.

I need to install the remaining five hundred pickets between now and next Saturday, when my dad is returning to build these yeti-compatible gates. That’s about one hundred pickets a day, which means in reality I’ll put up about a dozen on the first day and none for the rest of the week. In all honestly this project will still probably be unfinished when our yet-to-be born child is old enough to finish it for me, which won’t really be that far away since I plan to put him to work by age four. We’re building this partially for him anyway, although I don’t know how much he’ll want to use it since we’re basically converting the entire backyard into one big doggy bathroom.

Dishonesty is the Best Policy

2009-02-24T23:03:00.002-05:00

Lying is profitable. I know this on an intellectual level, but I’ve always had trouble transforming mistruths into monetary gains. My boss has yet to accept an impromptu dance competition as a valid excuse for being late, and almost none of my neighbors donated to my Stop Same Sex Marriages Among Werewolves Fund. I probably would’ve been more successful raising money to encourage same sex werewolf marriages because it seems like that would cut down on werewolf procreation, but in reality all it would do is lead to a drastic increase in the number of lycanthrope couples adopting werewolf offspring from China. Sure, it’s a sham cause, but in all fairness the marital customs of fictional monsters are exactly as much of a threat to the world as global warming. The lesson I’ve learned through all this misguided philanthropy is I’m bad at lying but great at being lied to. In the past few weeks there have been more attempts than usual to swindle me out of my money, scams I survived not because I’m particularly cunning but because I’m incredibly cheap. After surviving one of these close calls I even had enough left over to donate a few dollars to my new Stop Gay Werewolves from Adopting Baby Chinese Werewolves Fund.

It’s hard to be swindled if you never leave home, but unfortunately Lola and I need supplies from time to time. Shopping combines my two least favorite activities: spending money and interacting with other human beings. To me, the acquisition of manufactured goods is about as fun as letting a pack of feral cats viciously attack my reproductive organs, but that’s a poor analogy since it suggests I find shopping to be moderately enjoyable. Regardless of my stance of feline-on-genital interactions, Lola and I needed a couch. If I was a real man, I would have just whittled a new couch out of a tree and maybe some sheep, but we don’t have a big enough tree and sheep-whittling is now illegal in this and every other state. Recognizing my limitations, Lola and I went to a furniture store about six weeks ago to find something long enough for me to lie down on. We have two loveseats in our living room right now, which are perfectly comfortable as long as you’re some kind of gnome. Lola, being at least eighty-five percent gnome, has no problem with this arrangement. You could probably lay three Lolas end-to-end across the loveseat cushions and still not run out of room. I, however, have to curl up in the fetal position if I want to lie down anywhere other than the dining room floor. I probably would’ve been content to stay on the floor since it saved me money, but then the dogs decided my napping area and their pooping area should be in the same spot. Being thus driven from the dining room carpet, Lola and I set out to have our monetary chastity violated by an unscrupulous furniture salesman.

We went to three or four stores on our first expedition, and shockingly each and every one of them was running a sale for ten percent off. Just don’t suggest a perpetual ten-percent sale means the regular price is actually ten percent below whatever price is listed on the sticker. Such heresy could result in unexpected charges and a savings of a mere nine percent. At one store we found a sectional couch we liked, and – after factoring in our remarkably good fortune for having walked into this particular store when everything was ten percent off – the saleswoman said the item could be ours for $1711. It was a high price, but my hatred for spending money was counterbalanced by my love of lying down in places where our dogs don’t poop. Lola and I went home to ponder our options, which is a polite way of saying we had to leave quickly because the thought of spending more than one hundred dollars at one time gives me violent diarrhea.

We returned to the same store six weeks later armed with a checkbook and preemptively emptied bowels. We hoped to take advantage of a nationally advertised President’s Day weekend sale, but little did we know that to Lazy-Boy employees “sale” and “drastic price increase” are pretty much synonymous. This time a different saleswoman excitedly told us that after factoring in a ten percent discount for paying cash and a thirty percent discount on behalf of Abraham Lincoln’s love of sectional furniture the couch in question could be ours for a mere $2048. I’ve built my life around hurling one inappropriately timed snide comment after another, but this particular attempt at financial rape was so brazen I was actually stunned to silence. When Lola and I finally managed to mutter that saving negative $337 didn’t really sound like a good deal, the three saleswomen – they gradually closed in on us like hyenas surrounding a gimpy water buffalo – refused to admit they had some latitude on pricing. We all understood they were operating under a commission-based system, meaning the final price is based entirely on how much they think they can gouge a customer. We all also understood that I look incredibly gougable. If the employees would have simply cut their losses and acknowledge this basic truth, I probably would have bought two couches as a reward for their honesty. Or maybe I just wouldn’t have gone home and written a 1,000-word rant about trying to buy a couch.

Instead of attempting something as devious as the truth, the saleswomen looked nervously at each other for five or six seconds before one of them made a frantic grab for a random pamphlet on a nearby table. She insisted this particular couch now had a higher price tag because it was recently upgraded with the space-age foam filling shown in the brochure. It was capable, she assured us, of supporting the weight of a rhinoceros dropped from a height of forty feet. Never mind that the model number of the couch hadn’t changed; never mind that the two different prices were pulled from the exact same pricing book, which definitely had not been reprinted in between our visits; and never mind that Lola and I only drop our rhinoceroses from an altitude of eighty feet, making space-age foam certified for only forty feet completely inadequate for our rhinoceros-dropping needs. Unwilling to accept defeat, I made a counter offer – I’d pay the new price if the store somehow used the profits to somehow disenfranchise gay werewolves – but the saleswomen heartlessly declined my very reasonable offer.

I like to make fun of Lola for telling stories like a woman, but I just spent five long, rambling paragraphs weaving a yarn that could be accurately summarized by saying “someone lied to us so we didn’t buy a couch.” In the future I’ll post an abstract at the top of every blog post so you can save time if you’re not concerned about how I’m doing at fulfilling my day-to-day furniture needs. For those of you who do care, Lola and I ended up ordering another couch at a different store. I’m sure we were still gouged to an incredible degree, but at least the amount we were going to get gouged stayed the same in between visits.Hurray for consistency.

Paging Dr. Gilbert

2009-02-08T21:49:00.005-05:00

Last week I briefly toyed with the idea of going to medical school and becoming a doctor, but now I’m aspiring to be a slumlord instead. It turns out you don’t need seven years of college to oppress the poor. In terms of career aspirations, I’ve kind of been adrift ever since I abandoned the sinking ship of journalism. In order to complete the analogy, though, you have to imagine the vessel is also on fire and full of heavily irradiated cobras. There are still people on board, too, but they’re the kind of people who don’t realize that drowning, third-degree burns, and snake-induced radiation poisoning aren’t conducive to a fulfilling lifestyle. I don’t necessarily wish these people ill, but I’m also not actively rooting against the cobras. In the months following my departure from the newspaper, my former coworkers have endured wage-freezes, layoffs, furloughs, and the obvious feelings of depression and despair that consume anyone who realizes I’m not around anymore. Coincidentally, those same feelings consumed my new coworkers when they realized I could be around for quite a while. As my former career was simultaneously submerging, melting, and experiencing a reptilian form of China Syndrome, I wasn’t exactly picky about my next career move. I was open to anything that offered more stock options and less imminent death.

I was lucky enough to end up in one of those generic white-collar jobs where pay is decent and no one is sure of what I’m supposed to be doing during my eight hours of company time each day. I think it has something to do with finances, the Internet, and erotic vampire love triangles, but I may be confusing my job description and my Netflix queue again. I’m not exactly eager to jump out of bed and head to work each morning, but my two years in the real world have taught me that trying to find a job I can do without growing to hate it is like trying to find a body of water I can swim in without getting wet. That line of thought recently led me to an epiphany. Like all great moments worth remembering, this one occurred while sitting with my beautiful wife and watching my even more beautiful HDTV. A proctologist from New York was on the Home and Garden Channel searching for his fourth vacation home in the Caribbean when it occurred to me that if all jobs are equally unenjoyable, then the only thing separating them is the amount of money you make while actively despising your daily contribution to human society. In that instant, I realized I’m young enough and trainable enough to be just as professionally unsatisfied as I am now but at a much higher pay grade. We don’t really need the money and I absolutely loathe the idea of going back to school, but that didn’t stop me from swearing I would somehow acquire an obscene amount of wealth of my own before my newfound televised proctologist rival had a chance to acquire tropical vacation home number five.

Before I continue, I want to clarify one point: I don’t want to be a doctor. I just want to get paid like one. I wasn’t sure how to express this train of thought to Lola, though, so I simply asked her if I could go to medical school. It was one of those ridiculous suggestions I sometimes throw out there to make my follow-up ideas seem much more reasonable by comparison. For example, asking if I can jump out of a third story window and land on my wife’s car would garner an instant negative response, but then my follow-up suggestion that I merely leap from a second story window and land on a pile of assorted beanbag chairs and stale marsh mellows would be much more likely to be approved. In this case, I was hoping she’d veto the doctor idea so I could be something more practical, like a well-paid ninja. I hear it only takes two semesters of night classes at a community college to get an associate’s degree in stealth assassinations. Somehow seeing through my clever ruse, Lola nixed my martial arts career plan but approved my health care aspirations assuming I find a way to retroactively switch my college majors from English and history to biology and pre-med. For whatever reason, the elitists at John Hopkins University don’t think an excellent understanding of proper conjugation and the Battle of Hastings qualify me for a career in neurosurgery. They may be right, but at least I’d be able to exhibit my impressive grammar at all of the malpractice hearings I’d get to attend before I was permanently barred from the profession.

With college and any willingness I had to learn new things two full years behind me and a baby looming in my immediate future, becoming a doctor or a lawyer isn’t a realistic option at this point in my life. I survived higher education by sabotaging those around me, though, so I can’t help but feel that I’ve failed every time one of my peers succeeds in one of those fields. At least I feel insecure about people who make it in professions that are actually desirable. When I was a reporter, I felt threatened around janitors, secretaries, and the homeless, all of whom enjoyed considerably better compensation than I did. It was hard to get excited about going to work when I knew improving my sweeping skills would result in a twenty-five percent raise.

Sadly, I know at least one person who isn’t qualified to empty trash cans but who is somehow in medical school studying to be a pediatrician. My assessment of her intelligence is based not on my own subjective – although invariably correct – opinion, but on the cold, empirical data that can be gained only by watching the movie Snakes on a Plane. This girl, who was dating one of my roommates at the time, watched with us as a large snake slowly slithered into a hatch on the aircraft. Moments later, someone opened the hatch and the snake jumped out. Somehow caught off guard by this bit of cinematic brilliance, the future pediatrician jumped and shrieked. Maybe she thought the screenwriters would opt to improve the storyline by randomly replacing the snake with piñatas and colorful streamers. To this day I’m baffled and frightened by her thought process, but during college I struggled to understand it by bringing it up with her every time I was drunk. This happened quite often since her presence in our apartment and my alcoholism had a definite cause-and-effect relationship. Until the MCAT screens out applicants by asking questions about anacondas popping out of hatches, I refuse to have faith in any doctor who passed that test. If any of my future children ever get sick, I might as well put them down because it’s certainly not going to do any good to take them to see her or any similarly qualified medical professional.

Maybe I’m being too hard on anaconda-girl. If I were a doctor, I’m certain my general apathy toward anything I get paid to do would kill far more of my patients than her complete and inexplicable surprise at easily predicted events. I don’t need a respectable education or a valued career to feel better about myself. Rather than comparing myself to doctors and lawyers, I should bring myself into more regular contact with the poor and disadvantaged – a demographic that is as abundant as it is easily oppressed. Based on our one-third of an hour visit with Lola’s obstetrician last month, doctors make about fifty-one dollars a minute. I could achieve the same income as a slum lord if I rented out hundreds of cheap residences to people who have grown accustomed to absolutely horrible living conditions. Buying and renting out actual houses would take too much startup capital, so I’m thinking of hollowing out a few old refrigerators and slapping street addresses on them. Due to their inability to afford to meet their daily nutritional needs, the poor are predisposed to be small, making it likely that I can fit three to four impoverished renters in each fridge. If I make fifteen dollars per tenant per hollowed-out appliance, I’ll only need ten thousand refrigerator tenants plus my regular fulltime job and Lola’s fulltime job to equal the income of that proctologist I saw on TV. Using my reasonable-by-comparison theory of persuasion, I’ll convince Lola to go along with my broken appliance ghetto by suggesting we rent out old washing machines as homes instead. My refrigerator apartments will seem lavishly spacious by comparison. If you’re interested in renting one, reserve your space soon. Their certain to fill up fast.

There She Blows

2009-01-19T12:42:00.004-05:00

Lola is dying – or pregnant. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. She spends most of her waking hours, of which there must be three or four a day, eating and puking. I list them separately, but really those two items are part of one fluid action, with the emphasis on word “fluid.” She’s managed to lose an impressive five pounds since becoming pregnant. I naturally assumed we have an anorexic baby, but the doctor suggested otherwise at the ultrasound appointment today. The kid had a little stub that the doctor claimed to be the start of arms, but it looked more like a dorsal fin to me. Clearly, Lola is carrying a dolphin. How exactly it got into her uterus remains a mystery, but now that we know what’s in there Lola would be well advised to eat less oatmeal and more raw fish. A school of dolphins is capable of headbutting a whale to death. Lola’s womb seems to be filled with only one of the aquatic monsters, but I think she should buy shielding for her internal organs just in case. The last thing she needs right now is an enraged bottlenose fetus attacking her pancreas.

This horrible scan of an already blurry ultrasound image clearly shows a dolphin located somewhere in or near Lola. That’s the last time I let her go to SeaWorld without me.

As Lola fills up with dolphin, her body has less room for other things, like tact. On consecutive days I was told upon my return home from work that I’m fat and smell like poop. She didn’t phrase the former quite like that. All she said was “Better brace the floor boards; Chumba Wumba’s coming through!” The comment itself wasn’t entirely insulting, but I could have done without her jiggling my stomach fat for the next eight minutes. So now I’m on a diet, which kind of happened on its own anyway since Lola stopped cooking and I’m incapable of providing for myself. The mere smell of food is enough to make her vomit, but which odors will cause this violent reaction varies on a minute-by-minute basis. One day she had a potato for dinner. She stuck it in the microwave, pulled it out, and swallowed it whole. It’s a little known fact that snakes and pregnant women are the only two animals that can voluntarily dislocate their lower jaws. After she finished inhaling the vegetable, she informed me that I was free to eat any food I wanted just as long as that food was also a potato. If I chose to eat anything else I had to do so on a different floor of the house or, if possible, in another house entirely. The next day, the mere thought of potato wedges so sickened her that I had to remove them from the fridge when she stood outside and closed her eyes. Apparently potato matter is okay, but angular shapes displease her dolphin.

Much of the food in our fridge is now off-limits to Lola. Apparently pregnant women aren’t supposed to have caffeine, aspartame, or heroin.

At least our house should be less crowded by the time our marine mammal arrives. Sensing that we won’t have enough resources to support both them and the new offspring, the dogs have started aggressively attacking every power cord they can find in an attempt to courteously remove themselves from the household. They tore the cord for our Rock Band microphone into about sixteen pieces, but the Xbox360 wasn’t on at the time. As I was typing this they chewed all the way through the cord for the lights on our Christmas tree. If the cord had been plugged in at the time, I’d be guaranteed at least one warm meal for a change. It is said that pets imitate their owners, and while they have yet to emulate my excellent habit of not chewing on power cords, they’re quite fond turning partially digested food into a projectile weapon just like Lola. It’s not uncommon to have her and at least one of the dogs puking in the same evening. Half of the rooms in the house are now blocked off by baby gates to limit the areas in which the dogs can chew and spew, so I guess we’re already set up for a baby. Too bad we’re having a dolphin instead.

Natural selection has to be plugged in to work.

Our friends, Phoebe and Rocco, have had an entirely different pregnancy experience. She’s had no morning sickness. To be fair, Lola only has about fifty percent morning sickness. The rest of it happens in the afternoon. We don’t have it all bad, though. Phoebe’s been experiencing violent mood swings, although if you bring that up with her she’ll politely disagree by ripping your face off. Lola, however, has experienced only two emotions up to this point in her pregnancy: hunger and unconsciousness. She exhibits both traits most of the time, which I guess makes her stable. Just don’t touch her when she’s sleeping or she’ll eat your hand. You’ll get it back thirty seconds later, though.

Phoebe and Rocco also differ from us in that they’ve already confirmed that their pending offspring is a boy. For some reason they rejected my helpful suggestion that maybe the kid is just giving them the finger from the womb. Lola and I plan to be surprised by the gender of our kid if only because I don’t want Lola to get discouraged by just how big the dorsal fin gets on male dolphins. There’s really no good way to get one of those through the birth canal. In one of the rare moments when Lola was both awake and not throwing up, she and I accompanied Phoebe and Rocco to a baby store nearby so they could stock up on tiny blue clothes. With Lola gaining negative weight, I felt like all the waddling women in that store were silently accusing us of being frauds. I was kind of surprised there wasn’t a bouncer at the door with a sign stating, “You must be this pregnant to enter the store.” She might not have the belly, but she has enough morning sickness for a whole herd of pregnant women. It’s hard to get too excited about this whole child-bearing thing when you realize it’s pretty much identical to the flu.

Maybe I’m looking at this wrong. Perhaps I could market a Lola-style pregnancy as a great new diet fad. It’s technically not bulimia if you have to do it because of an estrogen overdose. Either way, this while problem should go away by September 3, which we learned today is Lola’s due date. On her current diet plan, Lola should weigh about fourteen pounds by then.

My New 50" TV and Other, Less Important Happenings

2008-12-29T18:35:00.004-05:00

I wanted to write about my new 50” plasma TV today, but my wife said I should write about the baby instead. Lola, like all women, has confused priorities, but I’ll oblige her just this once because I’m tired of sleeping on the porch. Before I get any further, I want to make one thing clear: We’re not pregnant; only Lola is. Seriously, I took a pregnancy test this morning and it came back negative. I didn’t really mean to take the test. I just pee on a lot of stuff. Lola, however, distributes her urine more sparingly. The two pregnancy tests she took are only 99 percent accurate, so I guess it’s possible that they were positive for some reason other than a baby. Maybe her uterus is actually full of cobras. I don’t know. I’m not a doctor – although you wouldn’t know that given my incredible understanding of the female reproductive system. My understanding of the pregnancy test is that it shows an equal sign if you’re full of babies. The box doesn’t show the rest of the mathematical formula, but it must be something like “two people of opposite genders + too much free time = offspring.” I seldom do anything intentionally, but Lola and I were trying to have a baby, which I think means we both just won. It’s hard to be sure. Pregnancy is one of the few cases where intent defines the thin line between “congratulations” and “better luck next time.”

Judging by the clearness of the line, Lola got less pregnant between the two tests. My guess is that the cobras ate half the baby.

As Lola and I do with most of our important decisions, we made this one based mostly on peer pressure. Our friends Rocco and Phoebe just announced their own progress toward family-building, and there’s an unspoken agreement that Lola and I have to do everything they do, only better. Rocco and Phoebe bought a house, so we acquired a bigger one. Rocco got a Chinese character tattoo, so I sought out a more foreign one. People sometimes ask me why my back is covered in a life-like image of Ché Guevara wrestling a giraffe. I’m still not sure, but I think it has something to do with the conflicting values of capitalism and the Dewy Decimal system. Phoebe is three months along and doing fine, so Lola and I figured we’d be okay with childbearing, too. Unfortunately, Phoebe is so early in her pregnancy that making that kind of a judgment at this stage is kind of like saying, “See, he’s alright,” after a man jumps off a cliff but before he hits the bottom. It’s a stupid analogy, unless Rocco and Phoebe jump off a cliff, in which case Lola and I will be right behind them.

At the very least, this pregnancy should make my parents happy. My mom has been looking forward to grandchildren ever since I first brought home a girl. At the time, my argument against immediate procreation was that I still had the whole fourth grade ahead of me. Who am I kidding? I didn’t even look at a girl until college, and even now Lola and I communicate mostly by postcard. Residing in separate zip codes made conception tricky, but as with most baby-making operations it involved love, compassion, and those vacuum tubes they have in the drive through at the bank. I’m Catholic, and my Protestant wife is a non-denominational godless heathen. Birth control was a touchy subject for us at first, but like most religious couples we settled on the only obvious baby-preventing compromise: multiple open-hand palm strikes to the face. You have no idea how hard it is to stay interested in the conception-related procedures when even a passing request for conjugal relations inevitable results in a concussion. To conceive a child, Lola and I simply upped the cuddling and toned down the blunt force trauma. Forget the pill or natural family planning; the growth of real families is most effectively controlled through ninja-like blows to the cranium.

I wish “no” just meant “no” instead of “a broken nose and three hours in the emergency room.”

I suppose this is the point where I should start cleaning up my act. Assuming that the Internet and the civilization that supports it aren’t wiped out by SARS or the bird flu or Beatlemania, my future child could come to this site someday and read all the snide things I wrote about his or her conception. To that child, remember this: There was no paternity test. It’s important for me to maintain plausible deniability in case you turn out to be something horrible, like a war criminal or a vegetarian. Also, I don’t know what name you will end up with given your mother’s horrible taste, but I always intended to name my first three children Wario, Stumpy, and MacGyver. As of this date, I have no names picked out for if you’re a boy. Also, I claim credit for only the following genetic traits: gangly, ape-like arms; overactive sweat glands; and an awkward but distinctive lope that makes its bearer immediately identifiable to observers standing up to four hundred yards away. These characteristics were intended for a being standing more than six feet tall, so if you inherit any of these traits along with your mother’s gnome-like frame, just remember it could be worse. My fourth choice name was The Fartster.

Lola is about a month along, so the kid should arrive here sometime next September. We were originally going to wait until Lola saw a doctor, but the physicians she talked to didn’t want to see her until she was eight or nine weeks along. So keep and mind that all of this is based on our own attempts at conception, a missed period, and two home pregnancy tests. There’s always the possibility that Lola is going through menopause at the age of 23 and that only the cobras in her uterus are pregnant. Baring that contingency, Lola and I managed to succeed at this whole making-a-child-thing on our first try. Apparently knocking up women is one of my many previously undiscovered talents. I hope I also have an undiscovered talent for totally ignoring children while my spouse raises them, a technique my own father has nearly perfected. He had little recourse, though, given that the last headcount of his children had to be rounded to the nearest dozen. Lola also wanted me to put in a reference to her parents, so Mr. and Mrs. Lola’s Parents, I just did horrible things to your daughter. See you on Memorial Day.

Now that you’ve suffered through all the boring stuff, here’s what you really care about: my new best friend and our child’s future babysitter.

Man Cave

2008-12-07T22:40:00.004-05:00

Every man needs a cave. It’s an urge that can be traced directly to ancient homo sapiens, who desperately needed shelter from pterodactyls and telemarketers. They don’t seem very scary now, but you have to remember that everything was a lot bigger back then. Prehistoric men were naturally drawn to caves, which were move-in ready and usually located in neighborhoods with good school districts. But ancient women didn’t like the caves because they were damp and hard to decorate. Ancient men initially ignored these complaints because they wisely understood that women don’t like anything. In fact, cultural anthropologists have proven human speech was developed entirely by women as a tool for whining in a more specific fashion. It was sometimes hard to get a message across with the old method of whining, which consisted entirely of grunts and eye-jabbing. And so it was that after many generations of nagging and female-induced blindness, men left the caves and moved into trendy condos. It was an upgrade, men were told, but deep inside the male species would always yearn for a less civilized place where it was okay to draw crude pictures on the wall or poop in a corner just because it sounded like a good idea at the time. As a proud male descendent of this less than proud lineage, I’ve decided that it’s time for me to take a stand and create a man cave of my own – with my wife’s permission, of course.

I didn’t need a man cave until we got a DVR. Lola uses it to record approximately ninety-percent of all televised content available in the western world. Watching all that content keeps Lola firmly in control of our living room TV most days, preventing me from using my Xbox360. Sure, I could hook it up to another TV, but the one in the living room is a fifty inch HDTV. The one upstairs in only thirty-two inches measured diagonally, and the one in my office is about thirteen. It’s not a real TV if it can’t be seen from low orbit. Hooking up a gaming device to one of our auxiliary TVs would be about as functional as attaching it to a microwave oven. Having been effectively driven off the main floor of the house, Lola saw it fit to allow me to purchase a second HDTV for use in the room of my choosing. Operation Man Den was finally a real possibility. Sure, I could have claimed a far flung corner of our house as my own months ago, but there wouldn’t have been much point. A man den isn’t a man den without something shiny to stare at in the middle of it. Cavemen didn’t have HDTVs, but they did have fire. The flames didn’t have great graphics, but they provided hours of entertainment in the form of games like “Poke the Fire with a Stick,” “Push Jim into the Fire,” and “Poke Jim with a Stick While He’s on Fire.” Consequently, people named Jim seldom had family lines that survived into the modern era.

Lola hoards everything important in the house in her lair, the living room. Pictured: My big TV, my Rock Band accessories, and the comfortable furniture. Not pictured: My dignity.

Besides featuring a violent form of entertainment, the only other requirement of a man cave is that it exists on a floor other than the one on which the woman of the house primarily resides. In our house, Lola has established her lair in the living room, leaving the second floor, attic, and basement as possible man cave locations. Basements are preferable in most situations since there are usually fewer valuable items in them that can be destroyed by the chance release of beer, blood, or urine, but ours won’t work for that purpose. It’s unfinished, it lacks adequate outlets, and it’s full of all the stuff that should go in our non-existent garage. Our basement warranted temporary consideration for man den status only because it very closely resembles an actual cave. If I looked hard enough, I wouldn’t be surprised if we found ancient hunting spears and the bones of giant telemarketers down there.

If you can measure your love for something by the number of times you photograph it, then I love my grill approximately sixteen times more than I love my wife.

The attic was ruled out as a possible man cave location for similar reasons. Sure, it’s a great place to hide from wayward pterodactyls, but it has no insulation and has a less-than stellar record with open flames. Our house has a new roof only because a neighboring building burned two years ago, taking the top of our house with it. The last time I went up there, Lola screamed at me for three days about tracking soot into the lower floors. I could put my man den up there, but if I did I’d have to make sure I never entered the main part of the house again. If there were a fridge and a toilet in the attic, I’d go for it, but I’ll have to put that plan on hold for now since pooping out a third-story window is against city regulations.

That leaves only two unoccupied rooms on the second floor as potential sites for my man cave. The one with blue walls, which the former owner used to store his child, will probably be used for the same purpose by us eventually. I’m positive that the second I set up shop in that room Lola will have triplets out of spite. I plan to stay out of that room because karma is the most effective form of birth control. That leaves the carpeted bedroom as my future man cave location. The room is at least ten degrees cooler than the rest of the house at all times, which means it’s ready to be warmed by the hot-air output of an unreasonable number of electronic devices. I’m still trying to explain to Lola that buying a sixty-five inch TV for the room is a smart, economical move since it can double as a space heater. Besides a pitifully undersized thirty-two inch TV, a futon, and a few book shelves, the room is empty. My understanding of the situation is that Lola plans to use her end-of-the-year bonus to buy new furniture for the living room. The living room furniture would then be relegated upstairs to the man cave, assuming we can build a pulley system or futuristic matter teleporter to get it up there. Most of the current living room furniture ranges in value from “free because someone gave it to us” to “free because we dug it out of the garbage,” so it should be a perfect fit for my new living space. It’s nonexistent worth should limit the complaints from Lola when one of the loveseats really does end up covered in beer, blood, and urine. I have to practice juggling my chainsaws somewhere.

To properly envision the potential of the man cave, you have to imagine that all of this stuff has been replaced by a bigger TV, more ample seating, and some kind of a ramp so I can do barrel rolls on a motorcycle.

Operation Man Den will supposedly go into effect some time after Christmas, but that may just be one of those lies Lola comes up with to distract me while she tries to take away my matches. I tend to be rather melodramatic when access to my Xbox360 is limited by her presence in the living room. However, all is not good in the world of man den planning. Lola has recently floated multiple threats that the new TV we buy has to be fifty inches or smaller, which is kind of like telling your sixteen-year-old he can buy a cool new ride just as long his new car is actually a goat. Sure, he’ll get plenty of milk, but his date will be less than thrilled when he tries to drive her to the winter formal. I’m not sure where I was going with that analogy, but it probably had something to do with headbutting Lola until she gives in. I knew there was a reason I own a bike helmet.

Mr. Nagel Doesn't Go To Washington

2008-11-24T23:56:00.002-05:00

The election could have gone better for State Senator Rick Nagel, I-Montana. Of the 125,488,292 ballots cast November 4, Mr. Nagel received exactly zero votes. Factoring in random chance and voting irregularities – at least one voting machine overheated and burned its way two miles into the earth’s crust – Mr. Nagel’s perfect no-vote record is as statistically improbable as winning the lottery twice while being devoured by a giraffe in heat. There’s a reason no one’s ever witnessed the giraffe mating cycle and lived to talk about it. Predictably, Mr. Nagel has stayed out of the media spotlight for the past few weeks. Some media outlets speculated that he committed suicide or took a fatal interest in giraffe reproduction. Mr. Nagel put an end to those rumors this morning when he agreed to an exclusive interview with this website. The following transcript from that interview has been edited only to remove the State Senator’s prolific swearing, which reduced the overall number of words in the interview by about two-thirds. To read Mr. Nagel’s previous interview, click here.

Where have you been for the last three weeks?

When I found out that no one voted for me, I drank sixty-five cans of Natty Light in two hours. I didn’t regain consciousness until this morning. You should have seen my first post-coma trip to the bathroom. I peed fire, and that’s not a metaphor. I also learned an important lesson: Porcelain melts at like 1400 degrees Fahrenheit. My wife was not pleased.

How did you get zero votes? Didn’t you vote for yourself?

I don’t believe in voting. My wife didn’t vote for me, either. Let’s just say this isn’t the first time I’ve melted a toilet. My name didn’t make it on the ballot in most states. The only place I was actually listed was American Samoa, and apparently they can’t even vote for president. It’s just as well that they didn’t give me their support because I totally would have screwed them over. The best people to harass are the ones who can’t vote you out of office. That’s why my entire presidential platform revolved around giving foreigners the shaft. Madagascar would not have fared well under the Nagel administration.

In states where you didn’t make it on the ballot did you try to appeal to voters as a write in candidate?

No, and in hindsight I guess that was a mistake. “Elvis Presley” had over two hundred votes. “Hairy Balls” had six. I’m not bitter, though. If given the chance, I probably would have voted for “Hairy Balls,” too.

Did you actually campaign?

It depends on what you mean by “campaign.” If you mean hired and staff and tried to persuade constituents to vote for me, then no. If you mean got in an argument with my neighbor and hit him with a shovel, then yes. Although I guess we weren’t even fighting about politics, so I’m not sure that one counts. But I’ll tell you this much: That guy will never put out his Christmas lights at the start of November again.

How are you even a state senator?

There are only three sources of entertainment in Montana: Drinking, shooting, and running for elected office. Paradoxically, you can’t run for office if you’ve ever been convicted of an alcohol or gun-related offense. That basically disqualified everyone but me. My only opponent was a serial rapist. He was allowed to run because that’s only a misdemeanor in these parts.

What are you going to do now?

I’m still a member of the Montana State Senate, but there’s not a whole lot to legislate around here. Seriously, there’s like 28 people in the whole state. At least that’s how many people our census guy counted before he decided it was in his best interest to move to a better state. We state senators spend most of our days shooting paintballs at the zebras in the Helena State Zoo, although we do spend some time writing poetry, too. Most of that poetry centers on shooting paintballs at the zebras in the Helena State Zoo.

What’s your opinion of Barack Obama?

To be honest with you, I don’t watch much news. And by not much, I mean none. Instead of sizing up the competition, I was kind of hoping that everyone else would just forget to run. I figured if the country was distracted by the Iraq War or Dancing with the Stars, the election might slip everyone’s mind, allowing me to slide into office with just a few votes. Of course since I didn’t vote, even if my plan had worked I still would have been locked in a zero-zero tie with the other candidates. I’m no constitutional scholar, but it’s my understanding that in that scenario the candidates play in a round-robin Yahtzee tournament until a new president is crowned.

If it were up to you, would you bail out the Big Three auto manufacturers?

No, I’d submerge them further. I assume they have flood insurance. After the way the federal government botched the Katrina cleanup, no one would even raise an eyebrow is some government agency “accidentally” emptied one of the great lakes into Detroit.

Now that the campaign is over, are you glad to finally be out of the media spotlight?

The only time I made it on TV this year was when I was arrested for riding a moped without any pants on. But even in that one incident I could feel the obvious media bias. The KTRA Channel 9 news crew totally ignored my argument that jeans would have created too much wind resistance for my heroic attempt to jump a pen of paint-saturated zebras at the Helena State Zoo. When you’re trying to hit a ramp on a 30 horsepower vehicle running on a nine-volt battery, every little bit counts.

Will you ever run for President again?

If I do, I’ll make sure to change my name to “Hairy Balls” first. People seem to really love that guy.

Home Defense

2008-11-03T00:05:00.000-05:00

As a man, I’m supposed to provide for and protect my home. I’ve already failed at the providing part, but only because my employer pays me in day-old donuts and left-handed compliments. I had to choose between that and stock options when I got hired. Given the state of the economy, I’d say I made the right call. I don’t provide much for my family, but I’m contractually obliged to make at least a nominal effort to protect it anyway. You’d think it’d be an easy job since I only have to look out for myself and my wife. If disaster strikes, I can leave here behind and still save fifty percent of the household. It’d take a lot of time and effort to coerce another woman into marrying me, though, so it’s probably a better use of my resources to protect the one I have now. There aren’t many situations where this whole protection thing even comes into play. Lola’s decision-making skills are better than mine, so anything that can’t be solved with blunt-force trauma is best left to her. That means my role as a protector applies only in the event of a middle-of-the-night burglary or impromptu game of whack-a-mole. As a large but inefficiently designed hominid who has exercised about three times this year, I’ll be useful only if the intruder is small, unarmed, and mildly dyslexic. That way I can slow him down with clever word games while Lola and I devise a better plan.

If the attacker possesses none of those qualities, my methods of defense may have to be somewhat unconventional – as long as “unconventional” is a synonym for “confused and desperate.” We don’t have a landline in this house, and we keep our cell phones on the first floor at night. If someone were to break in, we have no way to call for help unless I can somehow capture and train a pigeon to carry a message before the intruder climbs our stairs. Considering the only thing I’ve managed to train our dogs to do is look perplexed when I yell at them for defiling yet another carpeted room, I’d put my chances of success at this particular plan at about twenty percent. We live in an old house with tall ceilings, so our second-story bedroom is approximately ninety-five feet above ground level. Jumping out and running for help isn’t an option. The only other way to call for help is smoke signals, but lighting a fire inside the house in an effort to protect our belongings seems counterproductive. As is the case with most business disagreements and all standardized tests, violence is once again the only answer.

I’ve made it a point not to keep objects Lola could use to kill me on a whim, so I don’t have anything in the house sharper than my elbow. That’s also why I don’t own any guns, chainsaws, or poison-coated ninjas – although availability was also a limiting factor on the latter. Martial arts experts covered in deadly chemicals aren’t exactly in stock at most retail outlets. If someone breaks into our house, my arsenal for fighting back isn’t exactly extensive. I started this article with the intention of listing how I’d use each item in our bedroom as a weapon, but I just realized everything small enough for me to wield is either made of or filled with cotton. Unless the burglar is a sexy coed, initiating a pillow fight probably isn’t a wise move. Lola and I live in a relatively small town, so whoever comes crashing through our window will likely be high on meth and paint thinner. Rather than attacking him with a pillow, I think I’ll just hand it to him and hope he takes a nap.

There are more effective defensive strategies than hoping potential intruders have narcolepsy, but what that plan lacks in practicality it makes up for in economy. A slightly more expensive approach is purchasing an actual weapon. My friend Rocco, who became a homeowner a few months before Lola and I did, has a massive knife he uses for home defense. That’s not an option for me since Lola would eventually respond to my witty sarcasm with a thorough stabbing. Also, a knife would require me to get uncomfortably close to the hypothetical intruder. I think I’d rather invest in a really long stick that I could use to lightly prod said home invader until he becomes annoyed enough to leave. If I need something more assertive, the obvious choice is a baseball bat. That way I’ll be ready if the intruder is a drugged-up felon or a slow-pitch softball team. In all honesty I wouldn’t rush toward a confrontation in either scenario. I’ll just clutch the bat for reassurance as I cower in a corner. When the intruder sees how assuredly I cower, he’ll most likely lose heart and leave. If that doesn’t work, maybe Lola can drive him away. Even the most powerful mind-altering drugs won’t shield the burglar from her passive-aggressive nagging about vacuuming the dining room. That’s usually enough to make me leave the house.

This whole exercise is probably a waste since I’m such a heavy sleeper. I’m not quite as bad as my brother, Mitchell, who could sleep through someone filling his pants with live salmon. I only know this because we’ve done it twice. I’m not quite that hard to wake, but I’ve learned to sleep through Lola’s alarm clock and her ensuing forty-five minute morning routine, which for some reason involves the use of most of our power tools. Someone could probably smash in a window and steal everything on our first story without rousing me. It’s only when climbing the stairs that the intruder would run into trouble. Our squeaky stairs are quieter than a fog horn, but not by much. Even though we don’t have a phone on the second floor to call for help, the sound of someone going up those stairs in the middle of the night will probably be enough to alert everyone in a six block radius that trouble is afoot at the old Gilbert house. Then all I’ll have to do is bravely cower in the corner for a few minutes until help arrives.

Of Puppies and Men

2008-10-22T23:17:00.016-04:00

It’s hard to fail at being a dog. Success requires only that you eat, sleep, and poop someplace that isn’t my dining room. Small animals have small brains. I don’t expect our dogs to do calculus. Quite frankly, I’d be satisfied with basic algebra. But so far Niko and Spencer have proven to be considerably less trainable than potted plants. At least our fern has mastered the “stay” command. Lola and I aren’t experienced animal handlers by any means, but we offer treats and kind words when the dogs do something good and witty criticisms and beatings with golf-clubs when they fall short. We’ve tried other techniques as well. When Spencer peed on the carpet, I put him in his carrier as a sort of puppy timeout. When Niko pooped on our carpet, I pooped on him. Nothing worked. At this point, their potty habits can alternately be described as frustratingly inconsistent and maliciously brilliant. Sometimes they’ll hit the newspaper or pee outside with stunning accuracy for a period of hours or even days, only to douse all of our carpeted surfaces with a thick layer of urine and spite the second Lola and I look away. I’ve passed from denial (surely they can’t be that stupid) to anger (I’ll beat the stupid out of them) to bargaining (I’ll beat the stupid out of them for a reduced fee). I even flirted with depression (The vacuum in your little heads reduces the overall air pressure in the house) before arriving at the final stage grief: doggy diapers.

They voided their bowels. We voided their dignity. The arms race between dog and man continues unabated.

They don’t wear real diapers, of course, because those cost money. Instead we stick a Maxi Pad to a piece of cloth and wrap it around their abdomens. They can still poop at will – a freedom they exercise at every available opportunity – but at least now they soak in their own liquid expulsions when they get the urge to ruin my floor coverings. My mom devised this system for her yorkie, which we were convinced was the dumbest animal alive at the time. She made him wear it until she installed a doggie door, at which point the animal magically learned to pee outside. Our dogs spent a weekend with the same doggie door earlier this month. They learned to go outside at will, but they always made sure to come back inside and find a nice rug when it was time to do their business. Actions like that make me suspect that beneath their clueless façade lurks pure evil. For the last three months, we’ve been putting Niko and Spencer in our backyard for an hour or two every day when we get home from work. I stand in the same spot to hook and unhook them from their leashes, and I managed to go eighty-seven consecutive days without a single encounter of the fecal kind. Then we made our pets wear doggie diapers. Since that day, I have yet to return from the yard with my shoes one hundred percent poop-free.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then menstruation is its ugly step-sister.

This is the part where people chime in and blame the owners. If only we were more patient and consistent, they speculate, our dogs would spend less time ruining our house and more time performing cute tricks or solving equations in theoretically physics. There are a lot of things in this world that are my fault, but the fact that my dogs have the intelligence of retarded chipmunks isn’t one of them. Seriously, I took them to the vet earlier this week, and the tests back me up: I am not their father. Sure, they share some of my DNA, but no more than they have in common with any other land mammal. These dogs were not bred to save children from wells. They might go near that well, but only to poop in a spot where they think a rescuer will step. Don’t get me wrong: These are the most cheerful and well-natured puppies you’ll ever encounter, but there’s a difference between being happy because the situation warrants it and being happy because you’re too stupid to hate. In every elementary school classroom there’s that kid who sits in the corner eating glue. You secretly hope that he’s actually a dysfunctional genius who will one day unravel the mysteries of space and time, but 999,999 times out of one million the best he’ll ever do is give up that white liquid in favor of the stick variety. Our dogs definitely fit in with the majority on this one. Bring on the Dog Whisperer and animal rights activists everyone else who is convinced of the brilliance of animals and the stupidity of man. I promise you that after the third day of stepping on a well-hidden turd in the middle of the living room, even PETA will recognize the merits of using canines as a source of protein.

If it fits in your hand, you can eat it.

The only alternative to this theory, which is known in most scientific circles as the Too-Stupid-To-Be-Alive Hypothesis, is to assume that our pets are actually evil masterminds. There is no physiological reason why they should drink as much water as they do. They weigh five pounds apiece yet somehow manage to guzzle as much water every day as small herd of camels. They’re only awake four hours in any given twenty-four hour period, and they spend at least half of this time thinking very seriously about taking a nap. What do they need all that water for? A very small percentage – perhaps a gallon, maybe a little less – goes into our grass for the purpose of earning treats. The rest of their liquid payload used to be reserved for our dining room carpet, with an occasional dribble saved for the second floor carpeting if either dog was motivated enough to climb the stairs. Their favorite tactic quickly became taking a token pee outside just to earn a treat while holding back the rest of their urine stockpile for strategic deployment immediately upon their return to the house. The doggie diapers slowed down this trick, but they didn’t stop it altogether. Anyone who’s ever seen a Maxi Pad commercial knows that each pad can hold as much water as an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Our dogs have oversaturated these pads twice. I’m guessing that they intend to repeat this feat because their water consumption levels recently increased enough to be roughly on par with that of a nuclear power plant. It’d be nice if they generated electricity, too, but so far they’ve only mastered the harmful admissions part.

The camera flash made their eyes appear yellow, disguising their normal healthy red glow.

I’m still not sure if our dogs are dumb or malevolent, but the mere existence of that question makes me take them a bit more seriously. Niko and Spencer always whine when we put them in their pen for the night. At first I thought this was dog speak for “Please let me play a little longer,” but now I’m pretty sure it means “Let me out our I will kill you and everyone you love.” Then again, Niko managed to chew off all of the hair on the back of his knee caps. It’s hard to fear an animal that looks like we tried to give his hindquarters a poodle cut with a samurai sword, but then again maybe that’s all part of his plan. Some good citizen will turn us in for animal cruelty, and the dogs will have the whole house to themselves. If that’s the case, then those animals possess too much vindictiveness for any Maxi Pad to contain.

Tough Choices

2008-10-09T23:11:00.001-04:00

You may never see me again, and this time it has nothing to do with all the hours I’ve spent praying that you’ll all go blind. I don’t have time for stuff like that anymore. I have cable. My job, my family, and my religion all had to be shoved aside to make room for the unfathomable number o f channels now at my disposal. Someone put in a lot of time and effort to create those shows. It’d be impolite not to watch them. If maintaining that politeness demands that I occasionally have to miss a few days of work or keep my wife locked outside for a weekend, so be it. Lola stopped trying to get back inside the house sometime late Sunday night, which means she either conceded defeat or froze to death. There’s a reason that since the 1950s the national divorce rate and the number of available channels have increase at a ratio of 1:1.

I find spending money to be about as enjoyable as bathing in army ants, so I didn’t jump into expanded cable on a whim. I didn’t take that bath on a whim, either, but I was on plenty of other stuff at the time. After months of vacillating between working out and begging Lola for bigger pants, I decided it was time to choose once and for all between health and happiness. For thirty-five dollars a month, I could buy a gym membership or an expanded cable package. One would make me use my legs for the first time since my cross country days, and the other would transform all of my movement-related appendages into vestigial organs. I’ve long suspected that locomotion was a misstep in the evolutionary process.

This debate continued for as long as it did only because I entertained the false premise that physical activity would be good for me. An afternoon of exercise taught me the error of my ways. My friend Rocco is now both stupid and married, which I guess is redundant. As part of his bachelor party he invited me to play a game of tackle football with his hometown friends, which is kind of like offering a diabetic a trip to the ice cream and pixie stick factory. I knew it wouldn’t be good for me, but at the very least I thought I would enjoy it. I spent the next week walking like I’d been raped by a school bus. I’m not sure how a vehicle without reproductive organs could commit that particular act, but I suppose new school buses have to come from somewhere. Far from being an elixir to good health and a longer life, exercise is a dangerous drug that uses promises of endorphins and smaller man boobs to mask the vile poison within. The next time I feel the need to be active, I’ll skip the sports and just chug some antifreeze.

The main lesson I learned during that football game was that while standing up sometimes leaves me winded for half an hour, I was no more or less out of shape than anyone else. Those who did perform above average were looked upon with derision for trying. In high school and college, effort and athletic ability were admirable qualities, but time in the workforce changes all of that. The most impressive thing I’ve done all year is take a forty-five minute dump on company time. I’m still waiting for my trophy for that one. At this stage in life, men are expected to spend one day a year playing sports and the rest watching them on TV. I can finally fulfill that basic requirement of my manhood now that I have more channels than the pope, which is impressive since he started accepting cable subscriptions as tithes shortly after Vatican II.

Before last week, I paid an extra five dollars a month on my internet bill to pick up about twenty-two channels. I haven’t bothered to count my current channel wealth, but about a third of what I have is in high-def. That’s not necessarily a good thing. After watching nature programs on the Discovery Channel for two hours, I taped garbage bags over all of my windows since the low-def reality looked terrible by comparison. More important than the number of channels I have is the magic little box that came with them. Someday mankind will find a way to toast bread with lasers from space, but until that happens DVR will stand as the greatest invention in the history of mankind. I don’t know what that acronym stands for, but a DVR is what you'd get if a VCR and R2D2 had a baby. It takes two or three clicks of the remote to set the DVR to automatically record every episode of a series on every channel you have access to. I use this mostly to catch up on South Park and Family Guy. The pope might not approve, but then again he only uses his DVR to keep up with the Girls Gone Wild videos.

Going from a handful of local stations to full-blown high-def digital cable is like handing an Amish kid the keys to the Death Star. I now have to hit nine different buttons to turn the TV on but only one to blow up Alderaan. Everything runs through DVR and its accompanying remote, but my brain is too filled with useless Star Wars references to learn how to use new technology. I usually just complain until Lola changes the channel. It’s not very efficient, but I think my whining counts toward my daily conversation quota with her. I’m bound by our prenuptial agreement to aim at least twenty-nine words a day in her general direction, and only half of them can be profanity. This complex channel surfing process has occupied most of my time in the previous few weeks, but I do plan to get back to updating this website somewhat regularly in the future. In the coming weeks I might even tell you about the new scheme I've devised, but it's really only relevant to those of you who aren't susceptible to divine intervention-induced blindness.

Stock Tips for the Apocalypse

2008-09-21T23:14:00.009-04:00

Lately there’s been a mad scramble to find someone to blame for the state of the economy, but I’m proud to announce the search is over. The culprit is me. I radiate such powerful beams of failure that I managed to drag down the entire stock market just by opening a 401(k) account. I’m a follower, albeit a slow one. In the animal kingdom, I’d be that gimpy, diseased water buffalo way behind the rest of the herd. If you see me coming, you’d better run since the lions and hyenas can’t be far behind. Other investors did exactly that when I started saving for retirement. There have been minor fluctuations since the day I opened my account, but if you were to graph the overall performance of the market after that point the resulting line would very closely match the path of a jet liner flying with one wing and no pilot. If I had taken one tenth of the money I put into that fund and spent it on cocaine and prostitutes, I still would have beaten my 401(k) performance by four percent. In honor of the realization, here are some other investments that will have better returns than default employer 401(k) plans in the current market.

Miller Manufacturing

People who have to work an extra ten years because of recent 401(k) loses are going to have a lot of aggression to work out. That’s why it’s a good idea to buy stock in the company that makes the most popular brand of electric cattle prod. I expect Miller Manufacturing to revolutionize the workplace by giving employees with too little patience too much voltage. Petty office politics will become considerably less pleasant, especially since the jolts produced by some cattle prods are powerful enough to stop a human heart. On a positive note, if you lose a cattle prod duel it won’t matter that your retirement fund has been wiped out.

Canada

I’m not sure if you can invest in a country as a whole, but it’d be a good idea to find out before the banks fail and the dollar collapses. The U.S. no longer has the gold standard, but every Canadian dollar is still backed by pine cones and bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon. The latter is a bit perplexing since it’s made by an American company, but the beer features a bear in its commercials and I guess that’s Canadian enough for the Canucks. Keep in mind that investing in Canada is a nice hedge against inflation. Six bottles of Blue Ribbon have been equal to exactly eight Canadian dollars since 1972.

Toilet Paper

If you must invest in a commodity, skip oil and go for the bathroom tissue. If prices get too high, people can carpool or take the bus, but wherever they go and however they get there, they’ll still need to poop. Everyone needs toilet paper – except for the ancient Romans. They wiped their butts with a sponge on a stick. Then their empire collapsed. Coincidence? I think not.

Heroin

Now that the federal government is spending billions to prop up failing companies it will have much less money available to prop up failing countries. Expect Afghanistan to have another record poppy harvest this year. That’s bad news if you want to win the war on drugs but good news if you find a way to tie the success of your 401(k) to the availability of heroin. Expect to see the Taliban listed at the New York Stock Exchange sometime in the near future.

McDonald’s

A ninety-nine cent double cheeseburger has enough calories to feed an entire African village for three weeks. With the retirement savings of Baby Boomers rapidly disappearing, millions of people will soon be eating one and a third burgers a month as their only source of sustenance. There is a real debate, however, over which will kill you faster: starvation or the cholesterol from an all-burger diet. While scientists sort that one out, invest in this fast food giant and wait for the impending stock surge to change your lifestyle. If you take my advice, you might even be able to afford two whole double cheeseburgers per month after the McDonald’s poverty diet becomes popular.

Any Company that Makes Caskets Big Enough for Horses

All of those loyal McDonald’s customers have to be buried somewhere. When diversifying your 401(k) fund, never bet against obesity.

Any Company You Don’t Work For

You can usual gauge the financial future of a company by the soundness of its management decisions. Your employer evidently dropped the ball in that department when it decided to hire you. If you’re like 99.9 percent of all white collar workers, you excel at creating the illusion of productivity and nothing else. The key to a good investment is finding that company where the other 0.1 percent works. You might not know where that place is, but at least now you know one place it’s not. Using the process of elimination, that leaves you with only about 23 million other businesses to sort through before you find one with stock worth owning.

Robot Alligators Inc.

This company doesn’t exist, but if it ever does mortgage your house and sell your children into slavery to raise the capital necessary to buy its stock. There are only three things in this world that are certain: death, taxes, and consumer demand for ancient carnivorous reptiles that are also robots. Invest accordingly.

What's in a Name?

2008-09-04T00:33:00.005-04:00

My youngest brother, Frodo, was born in the last months of my senior year in college. We’ve never lived under the same roof at the same time, so it’s understandable that he doesn’t quite grasp how much more important I am then all of our other family members. I accepted his naivety at first, but the extent of his ignorance is becoming insulting. This seventeen-month-old humanoid still can’t say my name. He can say “mom,” but she had an unfair advantage. If Frodo didn’t express at least nominal loyalty to her he’d starve, so I’ll give him a pass on that one. He can also say “dad,” the moniker of the man whose greatest contribution to Frodo’s upbringing is not stepping on him that often. The last piggyback ride Dad gave Frodo ended with a baby-on-light-fixture collision, so maybe Frodo learned to say “dad” as a sort of distress call in the hope of eliciting the assistance of a more competent parental figure. Frodo can even say the names of my six dozen other siblings, all of whom interact with the toddler only in the sense that they compete with him for the same supply of food. As an outsider, I draw of the resources of that fridge only once every three or four weeks, so I should be his favorite brother by virtue of threatening him with malnutrition the least.

It’s not like Frodo has a lot to do besides work on learning my name. So far his only other hobbies are soiling himself and drawing on the dog.

The situation didn’t really bother me until I visited my ancestral home in Dashville this weekend. Lola sees Frodo exactly as often as I do, so we should be equally neglected in the child’s eyes. I spent an entire day with the kid and he still has no idea who I am, but Lola passed him in the hall and he can now perfectly annunciate her name. He can also name one of our dogs. We brought them with us this weekend, and they did nothing but surround Frodo’s swing set with poop. I guess if I want him to learn my identity I’ll have to mark my territory in a similarly direct fashion. I’m sure my parents won’t appreciate that, but their flowers probably will. It’s not like my name is hard to say, either. It’s one syllable long – giving it exactly half as many syllables as the dog’s – and it rolls of the tongue so naturally that it could easily be a swear word. I’m sure it will be used that way if I ever carry out my “marking my territory” plan in my parent’s backyard.

The most frustrating part of this identity crisis is that Frodo looks exactly like I did at his age. If he’d just pay attention to me, I could clue him in to the genetic misfortunes that await him in the future. I, too, once had blond hair and blue eyes, but then time passed and I succumbed to the hereditary condition known as debilitating ugliness. I’m now twenty-three, but I still have a grandmother who tells me on an annual basis that I was the cutest two-year-old she’d ever seen. I’m still not sure if she does this because she enjoys flaunting retroactive favoritism in the faces of my siblings or because she wants to draw attention to the fact that in the subsequent twenty-one years I haven’t done so well in the beauty department. My perfection as a toddler was only skin deep, making it the only kind of perfection that matters. My ultimate undoing was that I was ascetically pleasing but structurally unsound. I somehow managed to learn to walk before I learned to crawl, so when I fell I didn’t know how to catch myself. I bore the brunt of most of those impacts directly on my face, which I suppose is good since it protected my soft, girly hands for the life of white collar work that lay before me. In the process of sustaining regular cranial trauma, my hair and eyes somehow changed color, permanently revoking my status as a poster child of the Aryan race. I cried for days when I found out I couldn’t participate in the photo shoot for the neo-Nazi kid’s calendar.

I was disappointed when the Nazis turned me down for the photo shoot since they had previously promised to get a picture of me either sitting on a beach or invading the Sudentenland.

Frodo doesn’t fall as much as I did, but he still manages to slam his massive head into absolutely everything. His face naturally collides with the hardest surface in any given room, a behavior pattern that I can only assume offers some kind of evolutionary advantage. Perhaps in our ancient past saber tooth tigers preferred pretty children, so the good-looking kids either got ugly or got eaten. My other siblings displayed admirable consistency by beginning life ugly and staying that way for the duration, but Frodo and I weren’t so fortunate. I can only assume that Frodo’s steadfast refusal to say my name derives from a subconscious desire to avoid drawing unwanted predatory attention to a former beautiful person. He’s right to be cautious. Just as Frodo and I inherited from our ancestors the survival instinct to embrace ugliness, our carnivorous enemies passed down the desire to consume ascetically pleasing pray. I learned this weekend that when I was a baby my parents had to give away a cat that constantly tried to sleep on my while I was in my crib. Evolution took away that feline’s ability to swallow me whole, but the animal still tried to smother me because cat’s evidently replaced their massive jaws with ability to hold grudges for a really long time.

Frodo ponders just how hard he’ll have to swing his head to get it stuck between these second-story railings. Luckily for him, the answer was “not very.”

Frodo may never learn my name and I may never be happy about that, but at least now I can refocus my anger by scapegoating a common household pet. When I was younger I was even allergic to cats, another sure sign that natural selection instilled me with the instinct to avoid my true enemy. If I could just get Frodo watch me defeat a few feline adversaries, perhaps he’d finally feel safe enough to vocalize my name. I guess animal cruelty really is the most effective form of speech therapy, although I don’t expect that technique to work its way into special education classes anytime soon.

Misery: A Retrospective

2008-08-28T01:00:00.004-04:00

As of Monday of Lola and I have officially been married for a year, which is just long enough for the details of my wedding to be made hazy by the passage of time. Chicken was served at the rehearsal dinner. The marriage ceremony took place in the afternoon. Sometime during the wedding reception I killed a dinosaur with a shotgun. I’m not sure why I was carrying a gun or for that matter why an extinct prehistoric animal was on the guest list, but my memories must be accurate because they were fortified by alcohol, which is a proven mind-enhancing elixir. Sobriety wasn’t an option that day because I had to deal with numerous unpleasant people, only one of whom was Lola. Typically at large, formal functions, I grab as much food as I can and then slink to a back table where I systematically mangle decorative centerpieces until someone lets me go home. This process is expedited by the presence of booze and fire. If a formal function features both an open bar and candles, I usually get sent home shortly before my tie finishes burning all the way through. Lola made it clear before our own wedding, however, that I would have to participate in all of the day’s festivities, no matter how drunk or severely burned I became. She stood by those words, or at least that’s what my memory of all those dead dinosaurs would seem to indicate.

Attendance at our wedding dropped severally when I asked the ushers to start screening for dinosaurs at the door.

The ceremony itself was uneventful, except for the part where I was abandoned at the altar. Everyone in the wedding had to come down the aisle except for me since walking in a straight line for that long was deemed to be well beyond my capabilities, even while sober. My only job was to move from the priest’s dressing room to the side of the altar and stand there while everyone else came down to meet me. Moments before the ceremony was scheduled to begin, the priest sent me out to my assigned spot. Everything went according to plan assuming the plan included me standing in front of the congregation by myself for nine hours while the wedding failed to start. No music played, and nobody came down the aisle. I figured I was free to leave if Lola jilted me, but unfortunately I could see her and the rest of the wedding party standing in the back of church. To this day I’m not really sure what they were doing back there – if I had to guess, I’d say there were holding an impromptu checker’s tournament – but in the meantime it was up to me to put on a show for the crowd to prevent a riot. I should have just let the place erupt in violence to decide once and for whose side of the family is better at street fighting, but I wasn’t thinking clearly at the time. Instead I did my best to placate the crowd with such amusing antics as laughing nervously and rocking back and forth on my feet. At one point I may have done both at the same time. My thrilling show came to an end six days later when someone finally decided to start the wedding music and let the rest of the wedding party join me at the front of the church. Things went downhill from there, though, since everyone knows I do my best work alone.

For Catholics, the wedding ceremony is a meaningless formality. The actual marriage takes place at the reception since total commitment can only be achieved in the loving embrace of total inebriation. Being a naturally social and outgoing person, Lola took to the dance floor completely sober. I joined her only after consuming enough alcohol to kill a horse. A few summers ago I tried to quantify exactly how much booze that expression suggests, but I gave up when I found out thoroughbreds will only drink Guinness if it’s mixed in a bucket with blended burritos. None of the horses ever consumed a fatal dosage of the bean and lager soup, but I quickly discovered the substance traveled at a considerably faster velocity on the way out than on the way in. If you can imagine a drunken horse frantically expelling the full contents of its large intestine, you’ll have a pretty good image of how graceful I was on the dance floor. Lola put up with me for the first slow song and then spent the rest of the evening pretending that she married someone else.

If I had straightened my legs, I undoubtedly would have toppled over and crushed Lola to death. She hiked up her dress just in case she needed to do a barrel roll to escape my impending collapse.

Overall, I was rather well-behaved, at least within the context of my own family. Lola’s kin were a different story. I’m not sure why her father frowns upon mirth-making, but I strongly suspect that fun somehow raped his childhood. Lola parents and siblings spent much of the evening glaring at the dance floor, reminding themselves that their unforgiving protestant deity considers swaying to music and sodomizing children to be morally equivalent. Their opinions did not change as more and more revelers became drunk enough to finally take to the dance floor. The tipping point came when the keg ran out. About fifteen of my college-age friends had been sitting on the sidelines up to that point, proudly demonstrating the only skills they developed while away at their respective institutions of learning. When their liquid entertainment ran out, they had no choice but to demonstrate in mass their newfound ability to flail wildly in presence of loud music. We ended the reception an hour early so Lola’s family would have time to perform exorcisms on themselves before they went to bed. It’s too bad they opted to go with protestant exorcisms, which everyone knows don’t really work. When people confront demon-possessed girls in movies, they don’t run to the Baptists for help, especially if those possessed girls are wearing dancing shoes.

My mom danced the entire night with the baby in that position. He eventually fell asleep or suffered a concussion depending on where one defines the threshold for shaken baby syndrome.

In retrospect I suppose the wedding could be considered a success since only people who I’m not related to were offended. Lola and I are still married, or at least we were when I checked a few days ago. After a year of marriage we’ve both realized the key to a happy a relationship is seeing each other as little as possible. Lola is somewhere in the house, or at least I assume she is since her car is still parked outside. Things are going so well that to celebrate our second anniversary we might even hold a conversation.

Condolences

2008-08-19T00:19:00.006-04:00

Dear Sir / Madam / Androgynous Robot with the Ability to Own Property,

We regret to inform you that your puppies have exploded. Our entire veterinary staff agrees with this diagnosis based upon the evidence you presented, namely the piles of singed dog hair and puppy-sized craters now present in your backyard. When you took possession of the two puppies, you signed a document promising to provide them with food, shelter, and basic medical care. While this contract did not specifically require you to safeguard them against canine combustion, we at the Kennel Club of America cannot help but feel that you somehow violated the spirit of the agreement. Consequently, we disagree with your assertion that “susceptibility to explosions” should qualify as a preexisting medical condition covered by our warranty. Even if it was, there is no known vaccination against unplanned puppy detonations. Enclosed is the visual evidence you supplied to us. Please never contact us again.

Sincerely,

The Kennel Club of America

Puppy explosions are always traumatic, but at least we have enough fur left over to construct two or three additional dogs.

This Sunday Lola and I gave our puppies a haircut. When we found Spencer and Niko on the internet, they were described by the seller as “large piles of fur that may or may not contain actual dogs.” This puppy fluff was adorable, but more importantly it was deadly. First, it created a level of cuteness so densely concentrated that it could cause cancer. Scientists have proven that everything causes cancer, however, so these carcinogenic properties weren’t remarkable. Second, the fur attracted filth like fat kids attract cougars. During the day we keep Niko and Spencer caged on rubber mats that are supposed to protect our wood floors. Anything they expel from their tiny bodies – they look like gerbils but poop like horses – stays on the surface of those mats, giving them ample time to run through it over and over again. It’s not much different from soaking a sponge in a toilet for eight hours and then letting it jump on your lap and lick you in the face. At this point that sounds like an attractive alternative to pet ownership, but I just checked eBay and sentient sponges are surprisingly expensive.

Over the course of my life I’ve spent exactly three dollars to have someone cut my hair: It was a few weeks before my wedding, and I had a nine dollar coupon. With that kind of hygiene history, I figured Lola and I were perfectly capable of cutting the dogs’ fur ourselves. I bought a pair of electric clippers with the intention of sheering the dogs like sheep, but the device terrified their walnut-sized brains. Instead, we had to trim them by hands with scissors, an approach that was infinitely more dangerous. I still hold a record at my former preschool as the only student to sever an artery with a pair of safety scissors. While that was a solo accomplishment, Lola and I made our attempt to cut the puppies’ hair a joint effort. I pinned the first dog and Lola assaulted him with sharp metal objects. We couldn’t have been too scary because Spencer actually fell asleep, allowing us to destroy his dignity at a significantly faster rate.

Niko cowers halfway through his transformation from puffy sheep to streamlined sewer rat.

The process was going so smoothly that Lola suggested I start on the other dog. Whereas Lola incapacitated her dog and then systematically cut his hair by a predetermined amount, I started cutting while my dog was still moving. Measuring was impractical given the mobile nature of my target, so I randomly sliced chunks from his coat whenever he paused to change directions. I wasn’t too worried about the results because I figured if Niko’s haircut turned out too badly we could always shoot him. Given the way my work turned out, I probably could have done a more accurate job if I had used a weed whacker. Niko is lucky he escaped with his tail and other protrusions still intact. If the result had been the opposite, I would have just called it an amateur neutering attempt. These before-and-after pictures show which dog parts we did cut off:

The timing of their next haircut will depend on whether or not I want them to survive the winter.

The animals are much more sanitary now, but their new haircuts had at least one unintended side effect. Without all that fur the puppies take up about a third of the space they did before, making them much harder to catch. They’re getting faster by the day, and they now know how to go up and down stairs. I only know where they are when one of them yelps because he’s been stepped on. Consequently, it’s much harder for me to figure out what they’ve been up to, causing me to be perpetually suspicious. Our dining room carpet looks darker in spots if the fibers have been pushed in a certain direction. I now find myself playing a game where I walk through that part of the house every ten minutes and step on suspicious areas until I find the one that’s actually dog pee. I’d say it’s the only game in the world that always ends with the winner covered in urine, but I still remember high school basketball.

Screw You, Missouri

2008-08-11T00:18:00.005-04:00

Missouri is known as the “Show Me State,” a motto it derives from its inexplicable urge to show visitors just how much worse it is than every other state. It’s allowed to be part of the union only to boost the egos of states with low self-esteem. If Missouri didn’t exist, Vermont would have killed itself a long time ago – which would be a national tragedy only in the sense that Americans would have slightly fewer options when shopping for overpriced cheeses. Two Saturdays ago my wife and I drove from Indianapolis to Kansas City and back again, a 1,000-mile round trip to pick up our puppies that should have taken roughly sixteen hours. That estimate was based on the naïve assumption that Missouri had paved roads and traffic laws created sometime after the invention of the wheel. Had we known that most cargo in Missouri is still pulled on sleds drawn by bison or very hairy women – it’s hard to tell the difference when you get that far south – we might have just stayed home. In hindsight, I should have paid attention to the omens that were readily apparent before we even left home. When I asked Google Maps for the best way to cross Missouri, the search engine returned only one result: “Don’t.”

We don’t like to play favorites, but it’s no accident that one puppy sleeps in a padded bed and the other uses a brick for a pillow.

Disregarding the advice of our search engine overlord, Lola and I set out at 4 a.m. two weeks ago for Kansas City. The trip was going well enough until we came to a spot in Missouri where two lanes of a four-lane highway were under construction. In most places sophisticated enough to have mastered basic math, the remaining two lanes would be split evenly between eastbound and westbound traffic. In Missouri, equal lane distribution is considered a form of communism. Rather than inconveniencing both directions of traffic equally, eastbound traffic was patriotically given two lanes while westbound traffic was given zero. Missouri’s highway department didn’t even bother to post a detour, presumably because signs are useless in a state with a four percent literacy rate. Instead of erecting those big, orange markers that guide motorists around construction areas, the state of Missouri paid a worker to stand at the roadblock all day. His job was to offer advice to drivers whose routes had been disrupted, but the helpfulness of his guidance was debatable. The following is an exact transcript of our conversation with him:

Him: “Where are you folks headed?”

Me: “Kansas City.”

Him: “Well, you could drive an hour straight south. There’s a paved road down there, or at least that’s the rumor. We haven’t updated our maps since 1984.”

Me: “Is there a faster way?”

Him: “Yes, assuming you’ve got a canoe or a hot air balloon. Just don’t drift too close to Hunnewell. Folks there think flying is a sign of the Antichrist.”

I intended to take pictures in Missouri, but the construction worker warned me that flash photography would scare the locals. Here’s another picture of a dog on a couch instead.

As luck would have it, Lola and I left our hot air balloon at home that day, forcing us to take the hour-long detour. Twenty miles into it I realized that estimate assumed the roads the state worker sent us to were open, which of course they were not. That’s right: There was a detour on the detour. Missouri one-upped itself this time. Instead of closing one direction of traffic, the state closed both directions and had no signs or people around to suggest an alternate route. If I was wise, I would have cut my loses and headed home, but I soldiered on in the mistaken belief that most roads run along cardinal directions in a grid-like pattern. I figured there had to be a shortcut that would take us around the second road closure. The first side road we tried started out heading north, but then it twisted east and led back toward Indianapolis. We kept looking for another road to turn onto so we could head west, but we drove for five miles without seeing an outlet. Back roads in Missouri are essentially log flumes that take you in the opposite direction of wherever you really want to go. Driving in a state where all of the roads curve and lead back the way you came doesn’t seem like a carnival ride, but you have to realize that the prize is leaving Missouri sooner than expected.

Dogs don’t know what a log flume is, but I’d like to believe they come close to understanding the concept every time I throw them down the stairs. The person who sold them to us described the puppies as being about the size of footballs, which is probably why I’m able to put such a good spiral on them.

Missouri hasn’t bothered to document its roads this century, but Rand McNally has. I had an atlas with me, but those books are only useful for pointing out major roads. By the time we hit the detour on our detour, we were forced onto the paths that the atlas depicted in gray. In most cases, those aren’t even real thoroughfares. They’re just there as decoration so the atlas pages don’t feature too much blank space. After the first side road we took led us halfway back to Indianapolis, we turned off the gray roads and onto gravel roads that – according to Rand McNally – don’t exist in this or any other dimension. As we traveled further from civilization, gas stations became less frequent sites and roadside cemeteries became increasingly abundant. Rather than engaging in meaningful interstate commerce, Missouri figures it’s easier to let visitors get lost and die so that their credit cards can be billed for overpriced burial plots.

We eventually made it to Kansas City and retrieved our precious cargo of miniature poop factories, but that only marked the halfway point of our journey. We took a completely different route on the way back, and it proved to be much quicker. We forgot our hot air balloon, but we definitely remembered our canoe. It got considerably better gas mileage than my wife’s car, but what we saved on gas we spent on energy bars and largemouth bass. I thought we could use them to pull our boat like huskies pull sleds, but our harnessing system ultimately proved to be problematic. We spent about $150 on fuel for the entire trip, but we saved $600 by picking up the dogs rather than having them flown to us. For whatever reason, the only way to ship these animals was to have them sent in an airplane with a vet on standby. There has to be a cheaper delivery system, like shooting them out of a cannon. Surely some of dogs would survive being sent to their new homes via a puppy artillery barrage. The monetary savings would be more than enough to make up for the occasional splattered fur ball. Even if the canon delivery system wasn’t cheaper, I’d still rather have my house covered in high-velocity puppy guts than attempt to drive through Missouri again.

When Puppies Happen to Good People

2008-07-29T00:07:00.003-04:00

Puppies don’t grow on trees. I was disappointed to discover this, especially since I’ve spent countless hours burying other people’s puppy’s in my back yard. In my heart I always knew a puppy grove was unrealistic, but I figured nature owed me at least a puppy shrub. I was once known as the greatest human enemy of man’s best friend, so my transition from dog hater to dog owner was filled with just enough hypocrisy to make me an excellent candidate for president. Much like original sin and the invention of table coasters, my new status as a pet owner can be blamed entirely on a woman. My wife and I were in a frighteningly rundown furniture store two weeks ago looking for a dining room table when Lola wandered out of my line of sight. Moments later, she called out my name. I assumed she’ d found something relatively harmless, like rapist or a cobra with AIDS, so I took my time making my way to her position. When I finally reached her, I was horrified to discover the one thing guaranteed to ruin our way of life: a pile of baby wiener dogs. Cuteness, like earthquakes and hurricanes, can be measure on an empirical scale according to its strength. That mound of two-week-old dachshunds registered a 9.2, which is powerful enough to burn through steel. There’s a reason diamond-tipped saws are being phased out in favor of pictures of kittens in most heavy industries. That mound of miniature canines hit Lola with a flamethrower of adorableness, burning down any hope I had of living a dog-free existence. It was impossible to talk Lola out of her puppy lust, and it was too late to hit her with an AIDS-infected cobra. One way or another, we were going to get a dog. I grudgingly accepted my fate and began researching which breeds of dogs have the shortest life span.

Dachshunds are considerably less cute as adults.

The dachshunds were free and poorly engineered, making them an excellent pet by my Machiavellian criteria, but Lola thought zero dollars was too much to pay for an animal that wouldn’t survive more than three minutes in our house. The breed’s elongated spine bends unnaturally when it goes up stairs, creating a very real risk that the animals can snap in half. Our house is comprised of nothing but stairs, save for the occasional hallway that leads to yet more stairs, and I had no intention of spending my days caring for a pack of paralyzed wiener dogs. Dachshunds were officially ruled out as a viable pet candidate, hilarious though their paraplegic presence in our house might have been.

Having been thus thwarted in our first attempt at dog acquisition, Lola and I began researching dog breeds on the internet. My criteria were simply: I wanted something lazy that didn’t shed and could be trained to use a litter box. Essentially I wanted a slow-moving pillow that pooped. I wasn’t crazy about the pooping part either, but I figured I had to make some compromises since the surgery to sew shut a canine anus is very expensive. The only breed that met our criteria was the Miki, an animal created by a breeder who failed to take any genealogical notes. There is no universal definition of what a Miki should be, so breeders who claim to be selling that particular type of animal could actually be offering anything from a discolored poodle to a small horse. The only characteristic Mikis have in common is their price; they can’t be purchased with anything less than a home equity loan or a winning lottery ticket. As usual, I decided to save money by buying non-name brand. We found a woman who breeds something practically identical to Mikis, only with a different muzzle and known parentage. It would take me days to describe exactly what breeding goes into them, but suffice it to say that if there was an orgy attended by every small, yappy dog on the planet, our puppies would be the result.

Sometimes selective breeding creates a beautiful animal. Other times it results in a dog with a second head on its butt. I don't know which option is better, but I certainly know which one is cheaper.

I’ve never been a huge fan of dogs, but it still made sense for Lola and I to buy two puppies rather than one. That way there’s not as much pressure to feed them; if I forget to fill their bowl, one dog can just eat the other. It also made sense from a sociological perspective to buy multiple puppies. Dogs, like children, can raise each other if trapped in the same cage for a long enough period of time. This would be the perfect strategy if our dogs didn’t whine at a pitch somewhere between chirping birds and prehistoric animals. If you’ve heard the noise those small , carnivorous dinosaurs make in Jurassic Park II, then you’ve already vicariously experienced one of the joys of owning my dogs. I’m not against whining in general because it’s the main way I communicate with my wife. My main problem with the dogs whining is that the only thing they want is for me to pay attention to them, which is unfortunate because I wanted a non-shedding, litter box-trained dog specifically so I could ignore it from the moment we bought it until the moment I used it to plant a new puppy shrub in our backyard. The dogs don’t want me to play with them, either. I tried chasing them earlier today and I think I caused one of them to have a mild stroke. The dogs simply want me to be in the same room as them, indicating that they’ve formed a bond with me after being in our house for less than forty-eight hours. This was expected since a dog is essentially a friend you can buy, but these dogs are even less discerning than most in how they allocate their affection. The woman we bought them from warned us that they’re very easy to steal since they’ll gladly hop in a stranger’s car and ride away with them. In essence, that’s what they did when they piled into a vehicle with Lola and I for our trip halfway across the Midwest. The dogs might be vulnerable to thieves, but at least I know that if necessary I can always steal two of their kind more to replace them.

Puppies have two modes: pooping and searching for another place to poop. It only took our dogs two days to figure out how to use the lines on the dining room carpet to play bingo with their own droppings.

Although they are highly replaceable, I’ve grown rather attached to these puppies – who we named Spencer and Niko – but that attachment lasts only as long as one or both of them isn’t pooping on my floor. On a good day, that means I can only like them in thirty-second bursts. Spencer uses a litter box when he’s in his cage, but he’s made it readily apparent that he much prefers my hardwood floors as his fecal dumping ground. Niko, who is the alpha dog, shuns all pretenses and simply holds it until I let him out of his cage. The fact that he only expels waste when it can somehow damage my house is a testament to his incredible bladder control. Lola is in Washington, D.C., this week on a work-related trip, so right now it’s just me and the two puppies in the house. I’m not worried about the responsibility since there’s virtually no way I can lose. If the dogs stay alive it will prove that they’re impossible to kill, so I’ll never have to bother caring for them again. If the opposite proves to be the case, I’ll have yet another chance to establish that illusive puppy grove in my backyard.

Mr. Nagel Goes to Washington

2008-07-18T00:48:00.002-04:00

There are many great men who want to be the next president of the United States. Rick Nagel, I-Montana, is not one of them. The congressman graciously sat down with me earlier this week to discuss his aspirations for the highest office in the land.

Q: Why do you want to be president?

A: I wouldn’t say that I love America, but I like it enough to feel guilty if I fool around with some foreign country on the weekend. In addition to my lukewarm patriotism, I’m also bored and filled with spite. I plan to use my presidential powers mostly for good, but I’d be lying if I said most of my former high school classmates won’t mysteriously die from weapons-grade smallpox.

Q: What’s your response to critics who accuse you of being just another Washington insider?

A: I couldn’t find Washington, D.C., on a map. Seriously, I almost had to skip my first term in Congress because I didn’t know how to get to the damn place. Then I realized that my map was actually a cartoon drawing on one of those Pizza Hut placemats. The whole east coast was covered by a giant pepperoni with arms and legs. That’s why during my administration all personified pizza toppings will be executed.

Q: What’s your solution to the situation in Iraq?

A: The mistake we made was invading a country full of angry people with guns. As commander-in-chief, I promise to only attack places where the gun-wielding inhabitants have pleasant dispositions. That’s why an assault on Iran is out but a preemptive strike against Nebraska could very well be in.

Q: Do you seriously intend to invade Nebraska?

A: There’s no reason to invade, but there’s also no reason not to invade. When you do something without an apparent motivation, people by default assume you’re driven by altruism. I could use the political capital generated by attacking Nebraska to pursue healthcare reform or even to survive my first few media-generated scandals. For whatever reason, TV news networks think it’s a big deal when a man wants to enjoy an occasional drug-fueled zoo animal orgy in the comfort of the Oval Office.

Q: Are you prolife or prochoice?

A: I believe in compromise. All fetuses should be cloned so that every pregnant mother carries two children. One should be murdered immediately after being expelled from the uterus, and the other should be forced to live forever through the use of every life support system in existence. Most Americans will find this plan so controversial that they’ll just stop having sex, making abortion a non-issue for the first time in thirty years.

Q: If elected, what will you do about America’s current economic state?

A: The cost of gas climbs ever higher as the value of the dollar continues to fall. My solution is to make gasoline the national currency. That way American’s can enjoy the benefits of crippling deflation right up until the moment that the last drop of oil is used up.

Q: But what will Americans use to power their cars?

A: Thanks to global warming, people should be able to walk to work year-round in most parts of the country. This should also solve America’s obesity epidemic. Those who commute great distances will die in transit, making thousands of jobs available to recent college graduates with young, fresh legs. The elderly will be the first to die off under the new system, thereby making Social Security solvent again.

Q: How will you balance the nation’s security and civil liberty needs?

A: I’ve already found the perfect balance. On the one hand I won’t tap anyone’s phone lines, but on the other I will bind everyone to the land. Liberals and conservatives are too close-minded to admit it, but the only true way to ensure the survival of democracy is to give feudalism a chance.

Q: How will you uphold family values?

A: For the past few years the value of a four-member family has held steady at about $120,000, assuming that the children have nimble enough fingers to operate the sewing machines effectively. Some people buy gold to survive a bear market, but the surest way to stabilize your 401(k) during a recession is to invest in human slavery.

Q: What measures will you pursue to protect children from pedophiles?

A: I plan to combat sexual predators by releasing wave after wave of natural predators, like cougars and man-eating bison. They should devour the pedophiles – or maybe they’ll just eat the children. I don’t know; I’m not a biologist. But we’ll all learn the answer to that question after we shoot the animals full of steroids and then sit back to let nature take its course.

Q: Do you have any policies that won’t result in the deaths of a sizable portion of this country’s population?

A: I plan to declare October 10 to be National Ham Sandwich Day. That shouldn’t kill anyone, except for maybe the Muslims and the Jews. There will be plenty of grant money available for any scientist that can link pig meat and spontaneous human combustion.

The Importance of Tubing

2008-07-11T00:55:00.003-04:00

There are many signs that a new venture will be successful. Stumbling across a dead body isn’t one of them – unless your venture happens to be corpse looting. I was equipped for boating, not pilfering the dead, that lazy summer afternoon, but that’s the kind of naivety that only years of experience can correct. My friend – this was back in junior high, so I did still have occasional contact with other human beings – had invited me to join him for an afternoon on Dashville’s scenic lake. By “boating,” I mean being towed behind a boat on a glorified inner tube, and by “scenic” I mean filled with dead bodies. That’s an exaggeration. One cadaver can’t fill a lake – unless the body belonged to a giant or the lake was actually a very large puddle. My memory of that afternoon is hazy, but I don’t think either condition applied in this case. My friend was out on the water when my dad and I arrived at the lake, so we made our way to the edge of the water to wait for him to return to shore. We stood there, basking in the awkward silence only an unexpected wait shared by a father and son can create, when a boat filled with conservation officers pulled up to a nearby dock. Their cargo was a guy whose agenda for that day included getting hit in the face by a speedboat. For whatever reason a boat-related fatality within minutes of our arrival failed to impress upon my dad the true safety of water sports. I didn’t get to go tubing that day, which also happened to be the first time either my dad or I had ever been to the lake, but at least I never again forgot to keep a corpse looting kit somewhere on my person.

The setting sun is often used as a metaphor for death, which makes sense given that stellar body’s link to skin cancer, global warming, and second hand smoke.

I’ve been tubing many times since that day, but the only thing that’s died on those trips is my self-esteem. I’m used to failing at physical tasks, but during most of those activities failure isn’t rewarded with a catastrophic wipe out at thirty miles per hour. Saying that tubing doesn’t always hurt is like saying that humping another man isn’t always gay. Maybe the guy had a bomb lodged in his colon and there was only one way to deactivate it. I won’t judge you, but all of your family members who saw the YouTube video likely will. The point is that while being swung around on an inner tube doesn’t technically have to result in physical agony, the conditions necessary for a painless ride are highly improbable and have strongly homosexual overtones. Much like a batter and a pitcher (but not a pitcher and a catcher – even I have my limits for innuendo), a natural rivalry exits between the guy driving the boat and guy sitting on the tube. It’s kind of like letting your best friend control the carnival ride you’re on after said friend just found out you murdered his entire family. It’s a great idea as long as you consider barfing up your internal organs to be a rewarding pastime.

The tubes begin accelerating for our second outing of the day. Not pictured: my appendix, gallbladder, and left kidney.

Through the combined forces of velocity, inertia, and general douche baggery, a skilled boat driver will eventually dislodge any tube rider. If this happens when the boat is traveling in a straight line at a reasonable speed, the tuber will land in the water like a swan. If the opposite is the case, the guy on the rubber donut will land more like the Challenger. There’s a certain speed at which the water loses its cushioning properties and feels more like an asphalt parking lot where a broken glass and barbed wire festival just got underway. I have yet to go tubing when a boat was traveling below that speed. That fact should keep tubers so motivated that they never fall off their inflatable ally, but if human willpower alone could overcome the laws of physics the status of the entire space shuttle fleet would currently be “unexploded.” Terrified fingers inevitably fail in their desperate effort to cling to the tube, and the tuber ultimately wipes out in a frightening jumble of spacecraft and parking lot metaphors.

Women usually fail at tubing because nagging is only a useful defense against one of the Newton’s three laws of motion. Inertia always has been whipped.

While painful and not particularly fun, tubing as an absolutely necessary component of the human experience. Without tubing and other pain-inflicting sports, we’d have no way to compare our own stupidity to that of our fellow man. Thanks to the existence of pride and testosterone, life is a competition in which the winner usually dies. That’s why on average women live much longer than men. That’s also why bang-your-head-against-the-wall-as-hard-as-you-can is still a popular game at my family reunions. I don’t have many talents, but one of them is excelling at a game in which brain damage is a sign of success.

Given my short memory and inability to focus on anything that happened less recently than right now, you’ve probably already surmised that my wife and I went tubing this weekend. We joined our friends Phoebe and Rocco on an expedition to the frigid north, and the experience wasn’t entirely unenjoyable. Food and beer were ample, and most major firework mishaps happened at dwellings other than our own. I had fun tubing only because it gave me a chance to compete with Rocco, who is a horrible, horrible human being according to his parents, the Bible, and all sentient life. That competition nearly resulted in my death, which I guess means I almost won. Predictably, Rocco beat me. His funeral will be next Thursday.

The Lack of Wisdom of Year Twenty-Three

2008-06-27T00:58:00.001-04:00

As of today I’ve managed to stay alive for twenty-three nearly-consecutive years, a streak interrupted only by a few bouts of zombism. Doctors sometimes mistake the disorder for teen pregnancy, but there are subtle differences: With one you want to devour the brains of the living, but with the other you just want to expel a small child from your uterus. Surviving for more than two decades hasn’t been easy, but the government offered just enough age-based incentives to keep me going. It’s legal to drive at sixteen, vote at eighteen, and drink at twenty-one. Technically there aren’t any new privileges to be gained at age twenty-three, but unofficially it’s finally OK to drink, drive, and vote at the same time. Later today I plan to get plastered and ram my car into a polling place, but only because I believe so strongly in my slate of write-in candidates. It consists entirely of Care Bears and historical figures, but it’s hard to think of anyone more qualified to be county assessor than Giggles, Sunshine, or John Wilkes Booth. Sure, all three might be fictional, traitorous, or dead, but I think most Americans are ready to forgive Sunshine Bear for his involvement in the Kennedy assassination.

When I turned twenty-one I wrote a post explaining all of the wisdom I’d acquired over the course of my lifetime. It was only three sentences long, two which contained various arrangements of the phrases “third-degree burns” and “elongated scrotum.” I guess all I’d really learned up to that point was that college antics are the most effective form of birth control. Since then, I’ve been the victim of considerably fewer trouser fires, but I haven’t done much learning, either. That trend started years ago when I figured out I could pass senior-level English classes without reading the material. Literature is all about interpretation, so if I think James Joyce’s “Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man” was about the human desire to use a harpoon gun to hunt pandas, it’s literally impossible for me to be wrong. If it came down to it, I was prepared to write a brilliant term paper on how Joyce’s relationship with his mother somehow symbolized the slaying of large, bamboo-eating land mammals, but the professor never called my bluff. In such an environment, I learned that it didn’t matter if I had the reading level of a third-grader as long as I could lie like Beethoven. It’s a little know fact that the famous composer wasn’t really deaf, but he acted like he was so he didn’t have to listen to his mother’s warning not to use a harpoon gun to hunt pandas. The only changes I’ve undergone in the past two years entailed become dumber and more dishonest, two truly useful traits that should take me far in the working world.

I used those skills to escape journalism, but it frightens me now to look back and realize that two years ago today I was still looking forward to a promising career in that field. Even then I knew all that profession really promised was long hours, poverty, and an early death, but I figured none of that would matter if I married for money and supplemented my income by selling panda pelts. That optimism lasted for nearly a month, but to be fair I spent most of that time browsing Google maps trying to find the quickest way to commute to the bamboo forests of China. I now understand that I’m a naturally unhappy person who will despise whatever career path I choose, a realization that allowed me to transform into an unhappy person who works much less but gets paid much more than before. The American dream is really about doing as little as possible to get by, a philosophy that I have truly come to exemplify. I show up to work only because it’s easier than faking an injury and applying for welfare. Two years from now, that sentiment might seem as foolish as my one-time journalistic ambitions, but it’s impossible to predict exactly how I’ll view the world after I’ve had another 730 more days to hone my more appealing sloth-like qualities.

It’s possible that by the time I turn twenty-four I’ll have some actual wisdom to dispense, but it’s equally possible that I failed to progress as a human being because I’ve already learned everything there is to know. Self-improvement works like the odometer on a car. If I’m already perfect and then I improve on that state, the dial roles over and I’m back to being a salamander or clock radio or whatever it is we evolved from. I have no intention of risking devolution, so I think I’ll spend my time huddled in a corner until my next birthday rolls around.

Toilet Troubles

2008-06-19T00:45:00.005-04:00

There are very few worthwhile activities I complete in any given day, but nearly all of them take place in the bathroom. That’s why I was disappointed to discover that one of the toilets in our house had the flushing power of a wooden bucket and the other was ergonomically correct only for dwarves, elves, and other mythical creatures about the same height as my wife. I had two options as far as our bathroom situation was concerned: I could attempt to replace the toilets myself, or I could hold in my bodily wastes every day until I got to work. I must admit that there is no nobler pursuit than getting paid to spend twenty minutes defiling the company bathroom, but I ultimately decided to replace our bathroom fixtures because I wasn’t sure if my bowels would survive three-day weekends.

Since I planned to buy toilets exactly once in my lifetime, I splurged for models that were allegedly top-of-the-line. I wanted something with enough flushing power to tear my arm off – and not just when I’m reaching into the commode. I wanted to be at serious risk of shoulder dislocation even when sitting in the living room. Such powerful toilets weren’t cheap, but I offset the cost by telling Lola that the fixtures counted as her birthday and Christmas presents. She won’t use them as much as I will, but she’ll benefit from not having to use the plunger after I finish some of my more memorable works. I’m not employed in the lumber industry, but you wouldn’t know that based on the number of log jams I cause.

I expected installing the toilets to be difficult, but I had a hard time even buying them. Lola and I live in a city of about 13,000 people, and I assume that most of those people poop at some point in their lives. Logically, one would think there would be a local market for devices to transport that fecal payload from people’s homes to the corresponding sewer system. That’s where you’d be wrong. The closest place to buy a toilet is thirty miles away, at least on the weekend. There are hardware stores in my town, but they wisely lock their doors on Saturday and Sunday – the two days when no absolutely no homeowners need hardware-related items for home improvement projects. Not counting the initial trip for our toilet purchases, I drove at least one hundred miles to distant big-box retailers to exchange parts that were the wrong size. Measuring is for cowards, but I still could have skipped those trips if I had a cinderblock to throw through the window of the hardware store that is literally two blocks from my house. That didn’t happen, though, since said hardware store is the only place in town that sells cinderblocks. I had to drive thirty miles to get the necessary breaking-and-entering tools, so I decided to just buy the parts I needed for the toilets while I was there.

Even on weekdays the local hardware store closes before most people get off work, ensuring that only professional contractors will be able to shop there. I’m surprised this brilliant business model hasn’t spread to other industries. I look forward to the day when amusement parks shut down on nights and weekends because the only customers they really want are the three people who ride roller coasters for a living. If it wasn’t for big-box retailers in neighboring cities, I still wouldn’t have working plumbing in my house. The next time I hear someone bemoan the demise of mom-and-pop businesses like the hardware store down the street, I plan to beat them with a miss sized toiled gasket.

Predictably, obtaining the right parts for the toilets I wanted to install wasn’t enough to appease the waste removal gods. When the former homeowner had the plumbing redone upstairs, the plumber evidently put the pipe for the toilet too close to the wall. It was such a close fit that that former homeowner had to tear down wallpaper to squeeze in the smallest midget-compatible toilet he could find. I learned this fact moments after damaging the old toilet just enough that I couldn’t put it back. When choosing the tools for this job, I should have gone with the hacksaw instead of the dynamite. After some carefully applied brute force and much swearing, I managed to almost make the new, normal-sized toilet fit in the midget toilet’s old space. The only problem was the lid, which jutted out about an inch further than the rest of the tank. The sensible thing to do would have been to give up and buy a toilet that would actually fit, but the convenient thing to do was find a hammer. After obtaining enough consent from Lola to absolve me from total blame in the event that the wall collapsed and killed us both, I wildly bludgeoned the sheetrock behind the toilet’s tank. The resulting hole was about an inch deep and fourteen inches long – just big enough for us to squeeze on the tank’s lid and pretend that it never happened. Now when I go into that bathroom I don’t even notice the hole as long as I remember to pee with my eyes closed.

If even screwing a toilet to the floor requires me to put large holes in our walls, there isn’t much hope for when it comes time for me to hang pictures.

Problem: The crack is still visible even in the dimmest light. Solution: Remove all light bulbs.

The second toilet, which went in the downstairs bathroom, was significantly harder to install than the first. Although I remain relatively calm when dealing with other humans, I now realize that I have rage issues when it comes to computers, plumbing fixtures, and other inanimate objects that are capable of outsmarting me. In that spirit, the plumbing downstairs seems to have sabotaged itself in anticipation of my arrival. There was a major crack in the flange, or the plastic part at the end of the sewer pipe to which you’re supposed to connect the toilet. We looked up how to fix it, and the instructions looked something like this: 1) Call a plumber. 2) Pray. We didn’t know any plumbers or deities who could help us in that situation, so we instead achieved what I can only assume will be a permanent solution by filling the crack with small bits of cardboard. Toilets don’t have that many parts, but we somehow managed to have a minor crises for every single one of them before the installation was complete. At the end of the process, we discovered that the toilet wobbled when weight was applied to it. It turns out that our bathroom floor is uneven. Lola suggested that we buy some plastic shims. I suggested that we buy a new house.

This plunger is largely pointless now that I’ve installed super-flush toilets. Anything big enough to clog them can’t be cleared out by anything smaller than a shotgun.

Toilets are supposed to last fifty years, so with any luck I’ll be dead before we have to replace the ones we just put in. After a dangerously timed flush near the end of the installation process, I was both disappointed and relieved to find out they don’t have enough flushing power to rip off a man’s arm. I haven’t been able to lure Lola close enough to them to find out what they can do to a woman. Besides that, the toilets seem to perform their basic functions better than the old ones, or at least it sounds that way. I have yet to confirm that with my own eyes since I’m afraid to open them when using our bathrooms.