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No idea if I’ll get to finish this one before Santa shows up, but if not I wanted to at least post something along with a wish that you all have a wonderful Holiday Season!
See you in 2012!
My father and I get along great. Growing up he was a loving and giving dad, and we had lots of great times together. In my adulthood, we continue to chat often.
All this being said, my Father is also a guy who doesn’t always have his priorities in check. The day I announced that my wife and I were expecting our first child was a great example.
As a bit of backstory, you should know that, due to some medical complications, we had no luck getting pregnant “the old fashioned way.” So when that didn’t work we tried sex. Still no luck, but we kept at it… for 9 years. We had also been married a total of 12 years. So it had been a long period of no grandkids for my father. When I got my current job, I was fortunate enough to get some medical assistance with in vitro fertilization (IVF), and it was a crazy process.
My portion of it was easy, as I simply had to give a sample of my swimmers, but my wife had to be subjected to a minimum of 3 shots a day, in both her belly and her hip.
During this process, I kept in constant contact with family members, including my father, and provided updates on where we were in the process.
So just to sum up: 9 years of trying, followed by countless needles jammed into my wife, and an insane amount of stress, but in the end it worked! We were expecting our first child. It was an amazing moment, and I couldn’t wait to share it with everyone, including my dad.
I called him on the phone, and the conversation went EXACTLY like this:
“Hey, Dad!”
“Hi, bud. How are you?”
“Good! I’ve got some great news!”
“What’s that?”
“Tessa and I are expecting! The IVF worked and she’s pregnant!”
“Alright! That’s great news. Say, did you hear that Ron from across the street has to turn his pick-up in on the Lemon Law?”
“Dad, I feel like you sort of blew right past the news about us expecting.”
“Nah… that’s great news, Davey, but Ron has only had that pick-up for a month and it’s been in the shop 3 times already.”
I knew my Dad was excited in his own way, even if he happened to be just a bit more excited about the news of Ron from across the street turning in his month-old Nissan on the Lemon Law.
My son is now a couple of weeks away from turning 4, and my dad couldn’t be happier to be a grandfather. Not only that, but Ron from across the street hasn’t had any problems with his replacement pickup and is still driving it to this day.
I know this because my dad updates me on it every time I take my son to his house for a visit.
When it came time for me and my wife to pick out names for our unborn children, we toiled over each one as any good parent should. My rules were simply that the name couldn’t rhyme with something derogatory (Icky Ricky, Smelly Kelly, Flaccid… uh… Hermaccid, etc.), couldn’t also describe a body part (Dick, Peter, Vulva, etc.), and above all else couldn’t join with my phallic last name to create some type of uber locker-stuffing combination (Harry Johnson, Tanner Johnson, Sandy Johnson, etc.).
I almost let one slip past me as we had decided on the name Sawyer for my Son (yes, “Lost” was big at the time), and right at the last minute, I realized that this would make my Son “Saw Yer Johnson.” Crisis narrowly averted.
I went to school in a very small town, and I saw what hell a poorly named child could be subjected to. Don Keys was a laughing stock, Rusty Steele an outcast, and Dollar Bill Smith (we called him “Buck” for short) was often found huddled in a ball on the floor of the bathroom, letting his tears run down the floor drain.
(I only wish those names were fictitious, as do the kids involved.)
So instead we went with Sebastian for my Son, and a few years later we went with Lily for my Daughter. Yes, “Silly Lily” is a possibility, but frankly I hope my Daughter is a little on the silly side, just like her old man.
Whipped this out over the weekend for my side freelance gig.
You can never go wrong with an angry monkey.
Take care!
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“I’m doing alright, but I’m a little bitchy.”
Those were the words I heard uttered by the woman behind the counter at my local mini-mart this morning. I fuel up at this same mini-mart at least once a week, and I do this not for the charming woman behind the counter, but instead because my next door neighbor happens to own it, is a good man, and I like to support him when I can.
The 300lb, heavily-tattooed, bleach-blonde woman behind the counter just happens to be the icing on the cake for me, because I love angry people, and I love trying to “turn them.” If I work with a perpetual rain cloud, I take great pride at being the guy who chips away their hard shell of rage and finds the sweet candy middle. In fact, I sort of make it a mission at times. At a previous company I worked for, the woman in accounts payable was a real pitbull, and everyone called her things that you shouldn’t call women unless they just cut you off in traffic, and you haven’t had caffeine yet, and you didn’t get much sleep because your 4-year-old has a cold, and you… WHY DON’T YOU TRY USING A SIGNAL, YOU STUPID…
Wait… where was I?
Oh right. So this woman was not well-liked in the office, but each day I’d chip away at her. “Hello, Linda. You look nice today.” “Well good morning, Linda! I see you have your attack face on. Haha… go get em’!” “Linda, I actually don’t think she can breathe. You’d better get off of her.” It took months, but eventually I wore her down to the point where she dropped her tough exterior and wound up being nice to me and only me. She even started to let me in on her secrets like, “Now watch as I really turn on the rage to Carl. His account hasn’t paid in 6 weeks, and he’ll wilt like a flower.” I got some kind of strange pleasure out of it, as I’d watch this woman then pounce on poor Carl like some kind of rabies-infested tree squirrel.
So the woman at the mini-mart is no exception. She is angry, bitter, loud, crass, and I desperately want her to accept me. So I’ve spent the last 6 months working on her each time I fill up for my daily commute to work, and I’ve made serious progress. So much so that after she looked at the stunned patron across the counter, who had no idea that casually asking, “How are you doing today?” would warrant a response such as, “I’m doing alright, but I’m a little bitchy,” she then turned and winked at me.
“Why are you a little bitchy, Carol?” I asked in as monotone a way as possible. With someone like this, you never want to display any signs of fear.
“Well, I was supposed to leave for Hawaii tomorrow, but then my husband went and got a stupid job,” she replied with a snort as she bit the head off of a bottle of beer and drank the contents. Now don’t be alarmed that she was drinking beer at 8:00am in the morning, as I should mention that it was probably only her 7th or 8th, and nothing terribly out of control.
“That son of a bitch,” I responded.
She laughed and said, “I know! He’s been laid off for 18 years, and gets a job two weeks before we’re supposed to leave for Hawaii. Probably for the best though, since they drug test at his new job, so we wouldn’t have been able to have a good time anyway.”
I probably wouldn’t have been able to hide my reaction to the fact that her husband had been laid off for the past 18 years, had it not been for the fact that I could not stop my stupid brain from immediately conjuring up images of this woman in a bikini on a beach in Hawaii. To give you an idea of what this would look like; picture 70s all-pro Linebacker, Dick Butkus, in his prime, in a bikini, lounging on a beach, only with slightly more facial hair.
So there lies the double-edged sword of trying to be a friend to Oscar the Grouch: Sometimes you get to live vicariously through them as they pounce on helpless prey…
Other times you just get to picture Dick Butkus in a bikini.
I’ve had the same freelance gig for around 8 years now, and I love working on these. The company makes chip games that get played in bars, and the concepts are always super-fun to draw. Plus they want fast turnaround, don’t mind if the art isn’t perfect, and have yet to reject a single thing I’ve ever sent them. In other words… it’s a cake job!
The only request they ever make is that the colors need to be super saturated so that they “pop” even in low-light bars and taverns. Outside of that, they usually just give me a title and maybe a rough premise, and then let me run wild.
“Lucky Lucy” is the latest example, and the 6 images at the bottom make up the chips for the game.
There was this old house around 40 feet from the chain-link fence that surrounded my elementary school. In retrospect, it was just another crappy, run-down house in my crappy, run-down hometown. However to the kids in the 5th grade, it had taken on a life of its own, and had become… HAUNTED.
There were many stories around this house like that kids had died there, skeletons hung in the closets on coat hangers, blood stains could be seen on the windows, and countless other yarns that children find quite troubling yet feed on in some sadistic way.
By the time it was my 5th grade class’s turn to have the legend passed to us, it had morphed into something quite simple: If you looked into the upstairs window at the worn out dresser, and you stared hard enough and long enough, you’d see the drawers move on their own!
Looking back on things, I think what was really being handed down from class to class was a punishment in the same way hazing works, in that the older kids did it to the younger simply because it had been done to them. Sometime towards the end of the year, when a kid had spent an entire year staring at the house, and hadn’t seen a single bloody handprint or dead kid waving from the basement, they would realize they had been duped. To make up for this, they would then construct a story of their own to waste a year’s worth of recesses for the following class.
So we got the drawers. Those damn drawers. It was really just one drawer, and it was probably some hard working, blue collar father’s underpants drawer who probably would have been more than a little creeped out himself to know that an entire classroom of kids was staring at the drawer that housed his… well… drawers.
Yet there we were, every day, staring into that stupid window at that stupid drawer. The weak kids peeled off one by one, turning their attention to the swings or the slide, but not me. Oh no, I was going to see that stinking drawer move if it took every second of every recess of the entire school year.
Well I’ve built this up enough, so the big reveal is that I never saw the dumb thing move. Not even an inch. I have no idea what I would have done if I had seen it move, but I was sure pissed off when it didn’t. I realized that I too had been tricked. The blood-stained torch had been passed, and I fell for it rusty hook in the door, line and sinker.
So I dedicated the entire summer to shaping the legend I would hand down to the upcoming class. I wound up telling a kid that a daughter of the family that lived in the house had been buried alive in the front yard, and if you watched long enough in one spot, you’d see the ground move.
Then I spent the entire year taking great pride in seeing him and all of his little 5th Grade buddies hanging out at the fence and staring at that spot of ground.
What a bunch of rubes.
I let my wife read a recent post of mine that centered around writing a book about Honey Buckets (Port-o-potties) of the world.
I could tell she spent most of her time attempting to stifle at least a few snickers, a possible chortle, and most certainly at least one guffaw. Then, instead of giving me the laughter I so richly deserved, she simply turned and said, “All you ever write about is poop.”
How dare her.
In fact, how dare her times two.
I’ve held back some of my very best poop stories. Poop stories that would rattle the poop blogging infrastructure to its very core. She’s insane if she thinks all I write about is poop.
I could have easily told of the time my friend, Steve, was squatting near his fishing pole at Denmark Pond when I told a zinger that made him laugh so hard he pooped a little. We even had to bury his underpants behind the cattails and send my cousin to fetch Steve’s Dad to bring us home. Can’t ride back down the canal bank on a bike after a fiasco such as that one!
Or what about the little doozy of a number involving my friend, Joel? In Junior High, he got his fingers slammed in a car door resulting in him pooping his pants, but you didn’t see me writing about that little number.
Finally, I could have most certainly told of the time that I threw my back out so badly that I couldn’t move from the kitchen floor or call for help. As I sobbed on the floor, crippled in pain, my 16-year-old Daschund did what any loyal companion of 16 years would do… he walked up next to me and took a dump within a foot of my head.
And there are more. Believe you me, I’ve got lots of poop stories. I’m ripe with poop stories. I’ve got poop stories coming out of my… well… you get the idea. I just choose to write about other things rather than being just a one-poop-pony.
So do me a favor, would you? The next time you see my wife on the street, please mention that I write about many things besides poop.
Only write about poop… HA… where does she get off?
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I live in the state of Washington, and the town I grew up in is almost smack dab in the center of the state. I’ve long since relocated to the Seattle area, because I felt that my hometown lacked the number of beard-wearing, coffee-drinking, better-than-me-because-they-drive-a-Suburu people that I needed to really feel like I was living.
The result of this is that there is now roughly a 3-hour gap between where I live and my Mom lives. So anytime I start feeling like the bad son for not allowing her to see her grandkids more often, we pack up the Family Truckster and head that way.
Today on our return trip, we decided to take “the long way home,” through the beautiful Cascade mountains, and one of our favorite towns in the world, Leavenworth. If you’ve never been, think of Leavenworth as a Bavarian town, nestled in the Cascades of Washington, but just a stone’s throw from a bunch of beard-wearing, coffee-drinking, better-than-you-because-they-drive-a-Suburu people.
It’s an outstanding drive, especially given that we got some pretty decent weather for October, but the tradeoff is that our Son, who is a couple of months from turning 4, had to take a couple of potty breaks on our 4.5 hour drive. One of these breaks needed to happen almost instantly as he suddenly yelled from the back seat that which all parents on a major highway fear hearing, “I NEED TO POOP!”
I jerked the car down the nearest forest road and we were all set to let him get out and fall his own tree when I spotted the following items on the ground, just off the road:
I asked my wife under my breath (as not to alarm my son), “Are you seeing this?” She didn’t reply, but her eyes, and the fact that she was drawing blood from my forearm with her nails screamed, “Honey, let’s find another abandoned forest road to get murdered on.”
So we drove. And we drove.
And we drove.
What seemed like hours was probably 10-15 minutes, but when you’re constant glances to your backseat are met with a 3-year-old returning a stare to you that mixes fear, determination to keep things in place, and pain, time slows to a crawl.
And then… out of the blue, like a shiny, green, pillar of hope… we spotted it.
The Honey Bucket.
Known to some as The Porta Potty, or as my Father lovingly referred to it, “The Sh*t Shed,” this modern marvel is nothing more than a thin plastic shell, a toilet seat, and the worst mixture of chemicals and human to ever be placed inside a thin plastic shell.
I pulled up in front of it, shut the vehicle off and turned to my son as I pointed.
“You’re going to go potty in there.”
“Cool!” was the reply, which I was actually almost disappointed by. I think part of me was hoping for a, “No… I can wait until the end of time if I need to. Please don’t make me go in there.” Instead, he was actually thrilled with the idea of going potty in what he later coined, “A poop pod.”
So we entered the Honey Bucket together. Father and Son, ready for the worst and hoping for the best. Frankly I half expected the owner of the mattress, case of beer and leaf blower to be sitting inside when we flung the door open. He’d just laugh and say, “I’ve been expecting you,” and my wife would watch in horror as the door slammed and locked behind us.
Instead we got the typical stinky honey bucket, complete with what looked like 25 years worth of other 3-year-old droppings floating in the nuclear-blue sludge. My kid was sitting there, talking about how cool all the blue poop was and doing his thing, when I got hit with a moment of inspiration:
A Honey Bucket Coffee Table Book!
I’m thinking of calling it, “Honey Buckets Around the World: Blue and Brown in Any Language.”
Now before all of you Internet Jockeys run around sending me Amazon links to the thousands of Honey Bucket books that already exist, let me explain that mine will be different. Mine will be nothing more than the following:
I’m not trying to be gross with that last picture, but I just think it would be cool to see how blue poop compares around the world. After all, you’ve seen one Honey Bucket, you’ve sort of seen them all. It’s that blue poop that really is the finger print of the honey bucket.
By this point, I was snapped out of my book writing haze by my Son’s laughter. he was now standing knee-deep in the blue sludge in our honey bucket and laughing wildly as his Mom pounded on the outside of the plastic shell yelling, “You better not be letting him play inside that thing!” He was a mess, but it was no big deal, as I have a luggage rack, and as mentioned, it was unseasonably warm.
Better yet, I had a damn fine book idea.
Just a quick one today as I toy around with a few facial expressions.
My Son asked for, “A dinosaur bird with big teeth and a seat for me to ride on.”