Happy Mothers Day: A Tribute to Tolerance

I don't have giardia. I'm disappointed by that. I thought the lab would fish from my stool a praying mantis-sized giardia and after some medicinal napalm everything would be better. So for now I'm staying gluten-free (although I don't even like to mention it out of self-loathing) and concocting up other issues in my head. The giardia, however, was at one point very real. I got lost in the mountains and became so dehydrated that I had to drink out of a river. What really makes me mad is that we walked forever to find a pristine spot in the water, something that was moving really fast and kicking up rapids. We found this little waterfall and chugged and chugged. It wasn't until we were safe at home when i realized something was wrong. I was getting ready to go to work when I heard a gurgling sound. It was so loud and unfamiliar that I looked around the house in Ninja mode wondering what in the hell awful creature I was going to find, before realizing it was me. At about the same time a little clock popped in my head. It was actually a countdown timer and it said I had about five seconds to get somewhere other than where I was.

The result was so alarming and so throttling that it took me a long time to be able stand up. Part of it was shame, and part of it was actual physical exhaustion. It was like I'd just had ten babies that didn't live. I would, however, continue to find reasons to go on, mostly to find bathrooms, where I'd burst in like the Kool Aid Man and tear at my pants like a frightened raccoon.

It wasn't only happening to me. Chad, a co-worker and high school friend, also got it. We had actually gotten lost together wandering around the Never Summer mountain range. Colorado's taxpayers were paying us to do trail maintenance to Kelly Lake, when while camping we ended up getting really, really drunk. We drank everything. I mean everything. We ate everything too, and then to add to our regret, vomited much of it. So we were hungry and tired and hot and lost. And eventually we'd be, as my smirking boss would say, "shitting through a screen door at thirty paces."

Chad went to the doctor and got on an antibiotic regiment that made him better. I never did. That was in 1992, so when I went to the doctor last week she was excited to see the guy who thought he had giardia for twenty years. Christ, twenty years.

But I don't. Right now my stomach is going ape shit and I don't even have my imaginary bugs to blame. Of course there were a couple trips to Mexico; that could be a whole different test.

There's not much of a point to telling you that story, other than it reminds me of why we read books and watch movies: to comfort us that we're not alone. It actually wasn't a book, but an article in a health magazine  about a woman who discovered she couldn't eat pizza because she had parasites. I love pizza and would love to stop eating the cheese and leaving the entire crust as evidence of how ugly Americans are. I'm sorry America. And Somalia. So when my wife shared that story of the giardia girl, I felt normal. Or at least more so.

And tonight there was solace again as Sarah and I watched a movie called Submarine. Very good. It's a sweet little love story of a kid trying to save his parent's marriage while kindling some passion with his own girlfriend. It's foreign (Welsh) and has that sweet indie flick feel that is good when it's real and downright awful when Hollywood tries to fake it. Well this movie is so real--or I should say the story is--that I felt comforted by the narrator saying he spends his spare time thinking of how people will react when he dies. For him there's lots of sadness, tributes and a constant local news presence following the story of his forlorn family and friends. For me there's not much sadness, but a lot of embarrassing inspiration. In my latest death montage, I'm in ashes at the front of my high school gymnasium when colorful Native American dancers burst through the double doors and do some amazing, synchronized leaping. Here all my country-white high school friends are settling in for a few quick Psalms (please god no) and a goodbye when colored people of color come charging in, shrieking and going above and beyond Indian tradition by throwing in some cool Cirque du Soleil stuff. The Tribal outreach coordinator for whom I worked with the 2010 Census will calmly walk through the flinging homage to explain my efforts to help count tribal nations. He'll also mention that he served four tours of duty in Vietnam as a Navy Seal. Everyone will be blown away by my associations.

That's one of the latest, and it's completely harmless, if you don't count all the time I think about dying. It's something I've done forever, and it's not even in the top 5 of the things I'm thinking about when Sarah asks me what I'm thinking about. Top contenders include: 1) Nazi-like invaders and our escape 2) A giant, I mean moon-like huge ball rolling across the plains and at our neighborhood and I must get my family out of the way and 3) I'm about to die so get back on the radio which leads to a re-energized comedy career that ends right before I'm dead with a performance at Carnegie Hall.

That last one actually translates to life, as it's helped me see "what I really want to do" in the vein of professions. Not sure about the Carnegie Hall thing though. I think that was poached from the Andy Kaufman story.

Before I sound like a depressed teen, let me qualify this...a little. And I should say it's going to get worse before it gets better.

Anyway, because I'm not in radio or doing comedy or even writing much right now, I tend to get a little sad. Oh, and I need to exercise.

In this sadness I was compelled to tell Sarah (my wife and mother of our awesome children) my plans to kill myself while making it look like an accident so she still gets insurance money. Now I told her this on an unusually down day, and I clearly wasn't thinking about what it all really means. For god sakes am I writing this? Anyway, as I was sharing this scheme, and the little me in my head was banging on the glass and yelling at me to stop, I realized that this is one of those things (ironically) that you take with you to the grave. You DON'T tell your wife and mother of your amazing children your plan to die. And this is the thing, it's not a plan to die, but a little daydream thing that pops into my head when I'm really hungry and haven't produced anything of merit. So a lot lately, but it's really just porn--a fake scenario that flickers against the wall while I wait out the storm.

When I finished talking--Sarah took it in stride, way too much in stride--I found myself changing the subject to the kids and their day at school. Because to the male mind I'd just violated one of the top penal codes in the maniverse: if you've got anything, it's that you can be reliable. Be reliable.

What I'd just poured out like a Judy Blume character was that I was not at all reliable. I was thinking about leaving. Permanently. So invoking some more penal code, I didn't talk about it for twenty-four hours and would bring it up at the most awkward time. We'd be wrestling through a family outing at Beau Jos Pizza. The kids were whining and spilling milk and demanding their mother and I just shot this soft diatribe across the table about how I realized I wasn't reliable and it was really dumb to say the things I said. With Otto trying to climb into her lap Sarah multi-tasked an answer that A) agreed with my dumbness and B) highlighted the difference between my brain and her brain. Instead of reliability, she turned the whole damn thing into an exercise in her extraordinary selflessness. If this were a game I'd be getting trounced.

She never looked more badass than when she calmly calmed our youngest child, and between lifting a slice of cheese and pepper pizza and biting it said, "It just says you're unhappy with your life."

I've always thought that if there's a hell, it's that final realization the second you die that stretches out for an eternity. "Oh my god I'm an asssssssshoooooooolllllllleeeeeeeternity."
If you're heaven bound you go out eternally as "I'm the goddamn (wo)maaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnirvana."

Try saying "that's not it at all" to the woman with whom you're married and have had two of the best children in the world and you've recently shared a plan to end your life.

And don't get all soft on me. I'm not going to die now. I'm pretty sure it'll be my colon attacking me. Can you die of a colon attack? But I can see it and it won't be for a while. Although tonight I had to Kook Aid Man it to the bathroom like three times. So who knows.

Or, it could be my wife who kills me. She's reading this and calling bullshit, or at least half bullshit. She needs to see proof that I'm not just whimpering away from the edge. No, I screwed up. And now if I do die, no matter how genuine or heroic, she'll be like, "that motherfucker."

My point is that I don't want to die; I'm just obsessed with death. All it takes is a few dead bodies in your life and your putting your ear over your sleeping wife's mouth hoping there's hot air. I have images in my head and they go like this: 1) My dead mom who was so cold and so heavy 2) That one Holocaust documentary I watched as a kid and 3) my high school friend Scott who was all fixed up to almost look like himself in his coffin. All I remember when I saw him was not knowing what to do, and not liking what I saw. My finger twitched, and that was all that was left of my impulse to drag that fucker out of the box and try to make him walk.

Yah, so I'm scared. In twenty minutes I'll sprint up the stairs because ever since I was a kid I've been certain something is going to materialize in the dark and come after me. I'll hover over the boys and tuck stuffed animals into the cracks of their beds. And I'll look really closely at Sarah who, when I'm lucky, is actually awake and asks how I'm doing. I'll also feel if the dog is alive. So what. A little death thing. If I were to want to die it would be so I don't ever have to deal with anyone else ever dying again.

Still I'm pretty practical about it all. We're here, we go and the best we can do after that is feed a tree. I know mortality. I've seen the shortness of life and not too long ago I had to dig through my own feces with a tiny spoon. So in between now and then we have to rock this fucking place like it is Carnegie Hall...wherever that may be.

Trip 2012: Day 1 Denver to Grand Junction

I didn't want to be daunted by the fact that it was Friday the 13th. As humans we've evolved and should let go of silly superstitions. But after a few hours in traffic, I would have sacrificed a pile of cats to get to Silverthorne. It took us three and a half hours to go sixty miles. All I can hope is that the gleaming white of tiny buttocks brought joy to others who may have seen our boys peeing on the side of Interstate 70.

We rolled into the Best Western Grand Junction at about midnight, just four hours shy of our target time. Other Friday the 13th mischief may have included our loss of free lodging. We were going to stay at a friend's house but she pinged us to say she was sick. It might have been my texts from traffic about "stabbing every living thing." It worked out though. The Best Western has some pretty comfy beds, and despite Quin dealing with some rather intense personal issues, our getting-the-kids-to-sleep mayhem was relatively quiet. If someone happens to find my phone or taps into my Internet history, I just want you to know that there's a very good reason why I was searching "4 year old itchy penis."

We're off to Vegas.

Otto I'm Getting to you bud...

Writing about this guy takes discipline. He's a palette of subtelties, and just when you think you've got him nailed, he takes to a spatula as his favorite toy.

They have to sleep sometime.

If there was a solar flare this weekend, or something that looked like a bright flash that disrupted cell phones and soap operas, then I apologize. It came from our house. It's the collective energy of our two young boys bursting out of their bodies and rocking the Earth slightly off its axis. I won't bore you with the details of their business, something that parents are wont to do, "And we ate ice cream and went swimming and then went swimming again, and I was sure he was going to take a nap but then we went swimming..." Swimming is one of the most surefire ways (isn't surefire the most of anything already?) to wear out a child, or so goes the adage. But  it's also the best way to wear out a parent. The very parent who's looking through itchy, squinting, chlorine-poisoned eyes at two little naked men jumping up and down on the bed where said parent thought he could nap.

But occasionally, the system breaks down. The molten core of the earth, which is connected to the energy center of all children, freezes over. They sap it of all its geothermal goodness and it is that this point when the child withers. And I'm sorry, but when Quin or Otto throw a tired tantrum, I seal my destiny to hotter places with outbursts of laughter. I can't help but delight at someone so passionate over a piece of Trident. So he lies there squealing and throwing haymakers. And it's here, with blood-curdling screeching making the dog nervous, where you can't help but smile because they're as emotionally wrought as a bus full of hungry drama students and it's all melting down right in front of you. It's an honor, to be honest. Here's this immaculate piece of evolutionary machinery losing several billion years of collective shit on your kitchen floor. For the child, this is everything. The sun just fell into a hole and the planets have broken apart. All that's left is thirty pounds of insanity and an evil father floating through an infinite nothingness. Because nothing else matters but .05 ounces of Green Apple Fusion, and with that denied, what's the point of anything?

Sometime after this Supernova, with the last of his fuel from a partially eaten banana now gone, he settles for some quiet time with Mommy's iPhone.

Looks like he could be watching his favorite cartoon: The Avengers superhero series.

Because who could sleep like this? Especially when they're not tired?

Wait...no! Could it be...

Yes! He's down! Hurry...somebody make love or mop.

And he would actually wake up to say he dreamt about Ironman.

Who would no doubt be impressed by this feat.

How to be the Most Powerful Person in the World

I look at kids and am happy they don't yet know I'm not really all that cool. I was walking with Quin last night--well he was on his bike--and since he's always the line leader, I had a chance to gaze at his larger-than-normal head and smile an uncontrollable smile about how awesome he is. It was about then, as it always is, that I freak out about the countdown to teenage assholedom, which these days seems to be getting winnowed to about the age of seven. And it's not so much that children grow into pubescent pricks, but that I've got an even shorter timetable until they realize they're smarter than me. I must stand up here and gaze down in grinning glory while I can.

This morning we lay in bed and listened to Quin cough. He runs amok all day, no coughing, not even a wheeze, but then when we lay him down to rest--for all of us to rest--and he coughs like an 80-year-old smoker. And then, after nearly launching a lung, I hear him up and playing with his brother. When he trots into the room I ask, "How are you feeling?"

"Good," he replies, like it was a pretty dumb question.

I have no idea how he's functioning. He's been coughing for two nights, the little tubes of cough suppressant pebbles (yah, they're like medicinal pop rocks) don't seem to do anything. If that were me I'd be nuts. Aside from being from a family that wants people to know when they're consternated, I'm the kind of guy that will throw down a company if their product doesn't work (Mucinex can suck it). Quin doesn't seem to mind that we startled him out of his sleep to force down tiny pills, or that it didn't seem to help. Thing is, he didn't even mind that he was coughing. I was the one pissed about it, on his behalf, and did my best to keep Sarah awake with my sighs of disapproval. Meanwhile, Quin's entire body is convulsing to a constant cough, and somehow he's docile as a dead armadillo.

This should be your head.

There's something in there that we haven't gotten to. And I'm happy about that. He seems to not realize that your body making loud gyrations throughout the night should be a bad thing. He's living at the apex of human enjoyment, a place where one has yet to hang all the negative shit around their mental kitchen. He's thriving in the cinnamon rolls and cheese sandwiches of constant satisfaction. There's no garbage smell or outdated meat somewhere in the back. He's so pure he can sit across the couch from me and not at all be bothered by my overhwelming desire to have him be the least bit annoyed. I'm reeking of skepticism and he just rubs his eyes, looks up and asks, "Dad, can I have a waffle for breakfast?"

And damn if I'm not leaping around making sure he gets bread doused in butter and syrup, because in a moment it's the least I can do to maintain what could be the most perfect thing I've ever seen: a human creating its own condition. This is what we all try to get back to. We spend millions on books and trips to see the Dalai Lama just to find out how to remind our brain to like us again. This little dude with bedhead and pajamas dwarfing his tiny butt, who's mouthing the alphabet along with a cartoon pig on PBS, does not care that he's the most powerful being on the planet.

The other night we rolled his "emotional" dice he made in school. The ones with the little faces of different expression glued to each side. "Angry" rolled to the top and we followed the assignment by asking, "So, Quin, what makes you angry? Do you know what makes you angry?"

He's not sure so we enthusiastically tell him when and why to be angry.

He repeats back some of our suggestions but with tredipation and question marks: "So, I'm angry when someone takes a toy?"

Yah, that's it. Now you know. And I'm half tempted to say he should be crazy angry for coughing all night, but he's into that waffle, and now his brother is up too, and he yells, "Otto" at the TV when the cartoon pig asks him his name. Sarah and I smile. It's so cute.

After all, a cartoon pig did ask. We grown ups stare at the TV all the time, and are rarely satisfied with the one-way conversation.

Quin finishes his waffle and I get to work getting his clothes. "What do you think you'll do at school today," I ask as I button jeans around a ten-inch waist.

"I don't know," he replies. "Probably play."

All hail the mighty wonders.

In the truck with the boys and The Big Lebowski

Little Urban Achievers.

Su-ba-ru

We were driving home and I noticed the Subaru Forester had cracked 300 miles on one tank. I cheered the car for the milestone, but Sarah said "uh oh." I was celebrating the efficency and Sarah was realizing that the car had to be about out of gas. It's who she is. It's who I am. And when the boys asked why were laughing so hard, it was easy to explain: we're different.

I've written it at least ten times--and those brilliant assholes who scribe the show Modern Family expressed it brilliantly in the episode Punkin Chunkin'--that I'm the kite and Sarah is the tether. Sometimes I lift her up, but when shit gets a little too hairy, she reels me back to the ground. It works. Sometimes it bugs the shit out of me, but I can't imagine how Sarah felt when about a year ago today I woke up and said, "I'm going to do 100 comedy shows in 10 days!" The kite broke loose for a while, but every night it ran out of wind and came crashing down to home.

We don't know what we've done to our boys. At least genetically they could end up with a host of issues, or as my mother in law says, things they've "come by honestly." Other than crazy love for our kids, Sarah and I have three things in common:

1. Stubborn. Dumb stubborn. Our stubbornnesses are different. Sarah, for example, won't budge on--Christ I don't know. But she's got this clinging to weird traditional shit when you least expect it. Mine is the kind of thing that YouTube videos are made of. Before YouTube it would have been Rescue 911, in that I don't care what odds are against me, I'm going to leap off a bridge/drive fast on an icy road/carry this couch by myself (in order of age-advancing risk) no matter what awfulness could befall me.
2. Our sarcasm. I'm worse, but Sarah's got a nuclear sneak attack that will have you scrambling for shelter.
3. Our loathing of bullshit. Corporate bullshit. Televised bullshit (local news). Personal-level smiling-and-saying-nothing-while-talking bullshit.

I'd also add a #4, in that we're both extremely self conscious. You might look at that and ask, "What in the fuck have you done to your progeny?" And we'd sarcastically respond, "Oh, just riddle them with a lifetime of skepticism in the oncoming specter of richer-than-fuck kids loaded on legal speed and Ivy League enemas."

Goddamn, it's tough raising little ones wondering about all the things you only recently realized are wrong with you. Euthanization is only a facetious joke, but you do feel very sorry for the young you've trotted into the world with the attitude of a donkey and Michael Moore. There's something brilliant out there for them, except we may be the first people to hire a nanny for their kids after college. We're just too damn cynical to encourage anybody after 16 tornadoes just tore up 11 states. It seems more like a world for Mad Max shop class enthusiasm rather than a life in a cubicle. (If you can find it after the storm--see?)

So the kite and the tether cried tears of laughter with their sperm/egg combos shouting questions about what was wrong with their mom and dad. I said, "I'd wonder the same thing too," to the inquiring boys. And to tell them the truth, we were having a cathartic moment after months of new jobs, shit salaries and sometimes seemingly insurmountable life obstacles.

There's a two-edged sword to being who we are. We can create. Goddamn we can create, and to bring that to an earthly level, I mean Sarah can work magic with an Excel spreadsheet. She has coworkers backing away in silent reverence at the new girl's ability to spin some serious mojo on Microsoft Suite. The other side of the sword? We could give two shits about for whom we're creating. That is to say, "We're nearly developmentally disabled on our own, so we still need you, corporate narcissist, to cut us a bi-weekly check for our efforts."

It's OK. It's OK in that someone is still paying us, and that every day we chip away at the granite between us and ourselves. Yah, whatever. But we're in there, and we're tapping away at the self doubt.

The Subaru did get nearly 21 miles to the gallon city driving, which for Sarah and me isn't enough (and bothers the shit out of us how many NPR listeners drive them around like they're doing something good). But what was impressive was the sperm/egg combo. No kites. No wind...or winds of skeptical subversion. Just two kids interrogating us from the backseat of an inefficient used car.

Yah, we made them.