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Fresno? FresYES!
When I was an undergrad at Fresno State in the early 90s, there was a liquor store across the street that claimed to have the world’s largest Coors Light display. There stacks and stacks of silver 12-pack boxes, complete with a “river” running through the middle and little rubber duckies floating in the “pond” at the end closest to the front door. Although I was operating on a college student’s budget, which meant that Coors Light was out of my price range (you could get a 12-pack of Natural Light for $4.99 at Bulldog Liquor on the other end of campus), I still liked to stroll over and marvel at the duckies from time to time...
Published June 26, 2008 PermaLinkAll Dad Gone Mad Posts on /Parenting:
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June 25, 2008
Eight Weird Things That Happen When You’re Writing a Book
1. Sometimes you’ll be sitting with your family at the dinner table, listening to the kids talk about their day at summer camp, and you suddenly zone out. You’ll still be looking at the kids, but you’re mind will drift back to that one section you wrote the day before yesterday, and in that moment you’ll finally figure out what the hell you were trying to convey with that story about that whore in Vegas with the third nipple. Then suddenly – boom! – you’re back at the dinner table in time to hear your child explain the concept of a “swim buddy.” ...
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June 23, 2008
I burned the turkey burgers.
“You have to watch them, Danny!”
“I was watching them,” I said.
That was a half-truth at best. I was clearly cognizant of the fact that the BBQ was on, and I obviously remembered placing the mostly frozen patties on the grill. But in terms of my attentiveness to them thereafter, “watching” may be a tad aggressive...
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June 12, 2008
A reporter from the St. Paul Pioneer Press called me earlier this week. She’s writing a feature on “daddy bloggers” for Father’s Day, and our conversation predictably meandered its way to the topic of personal privacy. What will I reveal on the site? What will I keep to myself? Where is the boundary? ...
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June 10, 2008
I can’t tell you why people feel compelled to tell me this, but I’ve heard it so many times that the words are practically emblazoned across my brain like a tramp stamp on a Midwestern stripper: “It’s better to be presumed ignorant than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”
With your permission, I’d like to propose a slight modification to this sage morsel of wisdom. “It’s better to people believe you’re athletic because you’re tall than to pick up a baseball bat and prove without equivocation that you don’t have the athletic ability God gave the Southeast-Asian, Blue-Haired Nocturnal Sh*tmonkey.” ...
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June 09, 2008
As much as I want to think of myself as a mover and shaker, the simple fact is I’m little more than a sporadic twitcher. I don’t hire or fire people. My decisions have no effect on the stock market or the GNP. The last time anything moved or shook in my own damn house was the other night when Hot Wife tried to badger me into demonstrating the Cabbage Patch for her...
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June 05, 2008
The only excuse I can offer is that I was 14 years old, an adolescent embroiled in a struggle against my own hormones, and therefore at the mercy of my tear ducts. Also, I was a nerd without a whole lot going on socially, meaning this event was pretty much the center of my entire universe.
I cried. The Celtics beat the Lakers in the NBA Finals and I cried. Big elephant tears and snot leakage that I wiped from my face with the sleeve of my Garanimals...
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June 03, 2008
Jewish mothers never take a day off. I can offer almost four decades worth of circumstantial evidence and thousands of dollars worth of therapy costs to support that claim, but no single tale articulates the relentlessness of my mother’s relentlessness better than what happened yesterday...
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May 28, 2008
Bea Arthur Is Coming To Get Us
A few years ago I bought one of those bitchen-ass clock radios that automatically sets itself to the local time when it’s plugged in. From a macro point of view, the thing is an unmitigated lemon (I’m dubious of the suggestion that Los Angeles and Helsinki share the same local time), but the radio works reasonably well and I’m a simple man with simple needs...
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May 22, 2008
My body operates on its own biological clock, and after 38 years of observation I can predict with absolute certainty how I will feel and behave at given points of the day. I know, for example, that I’m a morning person and that my eyes will open at about 5:30 a.m. (give or take a few minutes based on whether or not I’m having a dream about Norah O’Donnell and an industrial-sized tub of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter)...
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May 20, 2008
I’ve been unemployed for more than two weeks now and there is no need to mince words about it – I love it.
By my count, I’ve spent all but one of the past 14 years in a cubicle. Five days a week, eight hours a day, wallowing away in a box while I work primarily for the benefit of others. The days bleed into one another, each a minuscule variation of the one before it. I’d wait and hope for something I could not articulate. One little spark. One little boost. One little victory. But it never materialized. It existed only because I wanted it to. Because I needed it to...
