Big Daddy Paul

I went biking again today. Between the holidays and all the rain in the past few weeks, I haven’t been able to head out for a while. Determined to not the mistakes I have made in the past, I set out for some fun in the sun. My plans were almost shanghaied when my bike had two flat tires and I couldn’t find the tire pump. I knew it was in the garage but our garage looks like the inside of my colon, except with more spiderwebs. After poking around for 45 minutes, I found the pump, pumped up the tires, and decided that cleaning our garage was way overdue. (I remain blissfully ignorant about the ramifications of my colon being in its current shape.)

I started in a bit of a deficit when I noticed that I had grabbed Amy’s biking gloves for my outing. Since they are only partially frilly, I didn’t care all that much. I did feel just a tad extra pretty knowing that I was wearing ladies accessories. When I finally got out there, I had a great time!

An otherwise nice day

My Ipod expertly selected my favorite songs  (which sadly include selections from Twisted Sister, 2 Live Crew, and Erasure) while I nimbly navigated between the hordes of walkers that were enjoying the nice morning. I got a great workout, and knew so because I, for some reason, feel like I need to spit when working hard, and I spit many times during the ride. I also didn’t have to get off the bike and walk up any hills, so the outing was almost a complete success.

Almost is a pretty big word though for me, and I had another one of my moments. Blazing away around a turn singing (out loud) Weird Al’s opus to Star Wars, I encountered two women walking in the path. I announced my intention to pass on the left, but for some reason one of the women hopped right in front of me. Being a bit rusty, I jammed on the front brake. This had the foreseeable consequence of causing me to do a reverse wheelie and ended up ejecting me over the handle bars. I landed with the soft thud a pork shoulder makes when thrown onto the scale at the butcher, but managed to avoid any serious injury. Anxious to prove that I wasn’t hurt, I hopped right back up, looking at my legs to see if there was any residual damage. At precisely this moment, I realized that my fly was down (as it oft is) and immediately took corrective action. I also noticed the numerous trails of spit that had been collecting on my shoulder. I looked at them, they looked at me, and one of them asked if I was alright. I quickly hopped back on my bike, apologized for some reason, and then sped off. I was a tad irked afterwards, but smiled when I considered the story the two women would be relating to their friends:

A chubby cross dresser came barreling around a corner singing about Queen Amidala, screamed, “ON YOUR LEFT!” and then jumped over his handlebars. Then, he stood up looking like a confused monkey, zipped his fly, wiped his mouth on his shirt, grunted, “I’m sorry” and sped away. It was honestly the first time it had ever happened to me.

I think I am going to choose a new path next time I ride. Or maybe I’ll just find something to do that is less embarrassing.

Don’t worry, there isn’t anything weird in this post, I just thought I would relate the somewhat comical night that Amy and I had the other night. One night last week, I got home late and found Amy asleep already. Our sheets evidently never made it out of the laundry that day, so Amy was sound asleep atop the comforter with the guest bedroom comforter on top acting as her blanket. Amy took the good spare, so I was left to fend for myself. I ended up using a thin, cheap blanket the quality of which you’d find in a crappy motel. It wasn’t much better than a beach towel, but it was late and I really wanted to go to sleep.

After crawling into bed, Amy said hello to me and then announced that her body was a rope and that she could feel the connections all up and down her body. ”Oh,” I said. “That’s nice,” not really knowing how to respond to such an announcement. This was not the first strange conversation Amy and I have had in the middle of the night, as Amy has bountiful history of sleep talking. Once, she screamed at the cat, “What do you think you are, some kinda chicken?” and after poking me in the ribs at 3am once and asking whether I was asleep, she smiled at me and just said, “Ha!”

While soaking up the connections in my wife that would lead her to believe that she was a rope, I noticed the smell of jasmine. Some might be comforted by such a smell, but to me it served as a reminder that I am a lazy homeowner. Over the summer, we left our bedroom windows open all the time. While open, our neighbor’s night blooming jasmine plant started growing towards our bedroom. When we finally tried closing the window, the plant got stuck. The plant is now trapped on the inside of the window, sealed between the window and the screen. It has become part of our bedroom. It wouldn’t be so bad, except that since the plant blooms at night when the weather is warm, it has mistaken our warm bedroom for a nice summer night and floods the room with its jasmine scent. Nice smell for some, but I can’t get it out of my head that we have plants overgrowing our room. I am also somewhat afraid that it is going to try and kill us while we sleep.

I was quickly snapped from killer vine fantasy by Amy starting up another conversation. “Nurse Nancy needs nets,” she exclaimed to my surprise. My mom, Nancy, is a nurse, and I found it odd that Amy would be alliterating about her in the middle of the night. I looked at her quizzically, and she continued. “Nurse Nancy needles noses. Naps. Necks. Nights.” I started giggling and Amy turned over and promptly returned to a peaceful slumber. I didn’t get much sleep that night, and it is not hard to see why. I was freezing, the room was overrun with potentially homicidal weeds, and I couldn’t figure out what the fuck my wife was dreaming about.

So, there you have it. Nothing weird about this post eh?

We adopted a family this year, and this means I have been out shopping for them this week.  I say this, not to brag about what a great person I am, but to explain what I was doing in the little girls bra and panties section in Target, in case any of you saw me there. Armed with a wish list, a credit card that was declined not once, but twice due to the flurry of activity and holiday good cheer, I set out to make someone’s Christmas just a wee bit better.

Shopping is challenging for me because I am alone.  While it is nice to have fellow holiday shoppers out there with me, they tend to smell of beef log and don’t seem to care all that much about my fantasy football team, both of which make them undesirable to talk to (or even stand next to in line.)  To mitigate my feelings of loneliness, I found myself having an internal dialogue with the people I was out shopping for.  The conversations were interesting because I have never met them and know little of them except for their wish list.  Of course, since they weren’t actually present for the conversation, I felt free to be as mean and condescending as I possible.  Here are a few excerpts:

“Wow, the only sweatshirt they have in XXL, Michael, is black.  It’s too bad, because the other [smaller] sweatshirts are way cooler.  Maybe if you didn’t eat at McDonald’s so much you wouldn’t be so fat and you could look cooler.”

“Chris Brown, Esmerelda. Really?  He beat up his girlfriend!  Why not listen to someone a little more wholesome?  Paul Simon.  There you go, I think he is battery-free! Oh, this is going to a very special Christmas indeed!”

“Darryl, you asked for a XBox 360?  I don’t even have one!  Next year set your sights on something more realistic.  This year, to punish you, I buying you a My Little Pony.”

“Sorry, Daniel, I just can’t buy underpants for another man.  I don’t want you thinking of me every time you put them on.  Please enjoy this modest gift card.”

“You’re a 5T at one year old?  God I hope your mom filled out the form wrong, because if not, you are the be the biggest baby in the whole wide world.  Somebody call the Today Show!”

And so it went, me walking around the store shopping for toys for boys and girls, tool sets for dad, and trying to find clothes for the infant version of King Kong Bundy.  It was a long day, but enjoyable nonetheless.  I even brought Malcolm along for 3 hours of shopping to teach him the true meaning of the holidays. To his credit, he learned to not give people what they want, but rather what you think the should want.  He learned to accept people for who they are, but criticize them endlessly when they are not around.  Perhaps the most important lesson of all, he learned to avoid people who smell like beef log.  And that, my friends, is what the holidays are all about.

It was a simple task, really.  For each child at Malcolm’s preschool’s birthday, the child’s parents are supposed to put together a collage of photos to tell a story about how the child has spent the past year.  I did the collage last year, and while it wasn’t necessarily a thing of beauty, it got the job done.  This year, like so many other things that I have set my mind to recently, it was a bit of a disaster.  Here is what Malcolm’s friends at school got to see: 

I think Malcolm may be on the lookout for a brand new daddy for his birthday.

The first problem with the collage o’ crap was that the pictures were terrible, in almost every way.  I realized last night that our printer was out of ink, so I had to rush out this morning to the office store to buy new cartridges.  Why I chose this occasion to purchase cheap ink made by Office Max and not Canon for the first time, I do not know, but I certainly regretted the decision as soon as I started printing out the pictures.  The pictures were the wrong color and had stripes in them.  Malcolm’s skin and hair are really not carrot colored, but you wouldn’t know that looking at the collage. They ended up turning out looking like they were taken by a surveillance camera and printed out on slides from the 1970’s.  The colors on each side of the pictures are also different, which forced me to crop the pictures using our kitchen shears (evidently the only scissors we own now.)  I don’t know how to cut straight, so it looks like Malcolm did the chopping himself, after a night of drinking whiskey.  To cap it all off, I didn’t even want to use most of these pictures, but most of the pictures we have taken this year are on a flash memory card which is now hiding somewhere in the house where I cannot find them. Maybe the scissors and the memory card are silently laughing at me somewhere underneath the couch, but rest assured I am blaming them for the poor picture quality in the collage.

The second thing wrong with the collage is that it has my writing on them.  My handwriting normally looks as if it were done by an irate chicken dipping its talons in ink.  When I have left myself a grand total of 15 minutes to get the whole collage done, it looks as if the chicken is irate, a little bit typsy herself, and an old doctor.  Taking a closer look, you’ll see that my handiwork is done in two different inks, the result of me deciding that I wasn’t able to space the words well with a black Sharpie, and switching to the only pen I could find in our house (a blue one.) The other pens that we own must be really having a good time with the scissors and the memory card.  I was really crushing it while wrapping up the “project” so you will notice the many mistakes I made while writing and the almost total lack of punctuation.  Having satisfied myself that the kids aren’t able to read yet anyways, I flew off to school, where I arrived late, and had to endure the scowls of the teachers who were filling time waiting for me.  When I arrived, they looked at me as if to say, “This is it? This is how you are honoring your son?”  I didn’t have the heart to tell them that Malcolm was going to have four or five other birthday celebrations this year and that I didn’t really care about this one.

As I skulked off into the corner, I decided to check out the other collages that parents had put together for the November birthdays at Malcolm’s school.  It was precisely then that I realized my third mistake.  My job was not to chronicle what Malcolm had done during his third year, but rather detail the milestones that he had reached on each of his birthdays.  I basically needed to present a photo growth chart of Malcolm, and I, in my ultimate wisdom decided to present them with striped pictures in odd hues of Malcolm eating smores and riding in a tractor. I was supposed to stick around and watch the circle time presentation forMalcolm’s birthday, but I was so humiliated by my own ineptitude that I just bolted for the door without saying goodbye.  Honestly, I think I would have been better off if I would have just wiped a bunch of cat shit on a piece of paper and then typed the words, “This is my life” underneath.  Sorry Malcolm, you’re stuck with a pretty bad dad.