Big Daddy Paul

I hate doing stuff around the house. Perhaps this is the reason that our house looks like a clutter bomb just went off and has more spiders in it than humans. Alas, I knew that my housework hiatus was finished when I found a mushroom growing in our bathroom. I’ve had mushrooms in pizza and mushrooms in soup, and I even had mushrooms on prom night, but mushrooms in the bathtub? Yikes!!! Somewhere, deep down inside me, the beer drinking slacker died, replaced by a mighty Bob Villa-inspired phoenix springing forth out of the ashes.

Daddy, that thing I just ate made me feel a little ... fuzzy.

I hadn’t really figured out how I was going to go about getting Malcolm to agree to go to Home Depot with me to begin the process of unfungaling and re-grouting our shower. Luckily, fate was on my side this day, as Malcolm threw a ball into his ceiling fan, causing the light  to shatter and sending shards of glass cascading everywhere in his room. I saw the opening and I drove straight through it: “Malcolm, now we are going to have to go to the hardware store and figure out how to fix the light. This is really bad thing that you have done.” Inside, I was beaming! Score one for the home team! Sure, this meant that I was going to either have to replace the light fixture on Malcolm’s fan (or worse, replace the whole thing!) but this paled in comparison to having a whining brat running all around the store, throwing merchandise everywhere and proudly informing anyone who would listen how much he hates my guts.

Malcolm was more than a bit puzzled as to why we spent most of the time at the store in the cleaning solution and caulking aisles. “Daddy, I thought we needed a new ceiling fan?” he asked, at one point. I assured him that we were almost ready to head over to the ceiling fans and constantly chastised him for why we were there, “Remember, you did a really bad thing.” Much to my amazement, this actually worked, and he was pretty well behaved while I read instructions on the back of anti-fungal cleaners. Sadly, Home Depot does not appear to sell replacement globes to the ceiling fans they sell, so I ended up having to buy a whole new fan. Even worse, the replacement ceiling fan we bought is awesome: the light is a mini-earth, and there are stars and moons all over the blades. I am sure Malcolm has taken away this from the experience: destroy something large in the house and it will be replaced by something way better. I’m pissed.

We got home and Malcolm got to watch me scrape all the infected grout out the cracks in the shower. To his credit, he did not ever say, “You missed a spot!” I offered him the chance to help, but he graciously declined, muttering something under his breath about not wanting to inhale potentially poisonous spores. Soon, I had the caulk gun out and was spreading sealer around like it was icing on a cake. Both of us were extremely happy as nothing makes boys giggle with glee as much as the words “caulk” and “gun.” Having assured myself that I had rid our bathroom of any further pizza ingredients, we piled back downstairs, started up a game of Life, and picked a date next year when we planned on replacing his ceiling fan. Remember that beer guy? He’s back!

I hate Glacier National Park. I know I shouldn’t hate something as sweet and innocent  as a national park, but I do. (It’s like hating a puppy!) I hate Glacier Park more than I hate cilantro. I hate I hate Glacier Park like your in-laws hate it when you get to drunk and take off your pants. I hate Glacier Park, and sadly the feeling is mutual.

It wasn’t always this way. I madly pursued Glacier for a while. The first two times I went to Montana, our attempts to make it to Glacier Park were thwarted by snow. Both visits took place in June. Let’s recap. Snow. June. Obviously, some sort of conspiracy was taking place to keep me from the park. Fear not, I was assured, for if we visited just a little later in the season the weather would be fantastic and our trip to the park would be spectacular.

This year would have no excuses, as we were in Montana in August and my sources here told me snow in August was about as likely as coming upon a hairless moose playing an organ. On Monday, seventeen of us made our way to Glacier park, anxious to take in one of the most beautiful spots on earth. Our trek got off to a difficult start when we decided to all take a shuttle up the mountain together, but had to wait 50 minutes for a shuttle with enough space to accommodate us all. Undeterred, we slowly made our way up to the top of the park. During the ride, we began to sniff out some clues that the weather was not going to cooperate with us. One of the waterfalls (which, I was told, usually flows downhill) was actually shooting water uphill, owing mainly to epically strong winds blowing the stream 20 feet into the air. We also noticed that mountains behind us kept disappearing into a thick, dark storm.

At 4:30, we finally reached the top, at which time the shuttle driver informed us that a weather advisory had been issued for a storm that would soon blow through. Not really sure what to do, we quickly ran into the visitors center. Once inside, the skies really opened up, drenching everything in a cold, windy monsoon. Then the thunder and lightening started, followed shortly by a hail storm. It would have been really sad, except for being able to witness the steady current of underdressed hikers return to the visitor center drenched and freezing. Can anyone say, “Wet tee shirt contest?” I did, many times, although my fondest memory is not seeing the mother of two boys in a see-through tank top, but, rather, hearing her kids (while sobbing and shivering uncontrollably) shout, “WWWWWWhy ddddiiiiiddddd  yyyyyyyou mmmmmakkkke usssssssss gggggggo onnnnnnn a sssssssstuppppid hhhhhhhike? WWWWWWWWWWWWWeeeeeee hhhhhhhhate yyyyyyyou!!!!!”

Thanks for bringing me to Glacier Park, daddy.

After huddling in the visitor center for about an hour with the other thousand or so tourists trapped by the storm, we figured we were going to need to stand back in line to catch the shuttle back down the mountain. When we got in line there were 20 or so people in front of us. When the last remaining members of our group made it into line, there were about 75 people in the line. When the first shuttle came, it picked up a grand total of seven people. I did the math and at that rate, (with shuttles coming every half hour) we were going to be on a shuttle in 90 minutes, while the rest of the group would get back sometime around Thanksgiving. Luckily, the park figured out that they needed to get everyone off the mountain and sent every shuttle they had to pick up passengers. Eventually, we piled into a shuttle and the trip down the mountain was wet and cold, sad and quiet.

We finally got home without seeing anything. People still tell me that Glacier is a beautiful place to visit, but they are clearly full of shit. Glacier is an awful place that no one should ever visit, and I hate its guts. The next time we head up here and Amy’s family suggest we go up there again, I’ll tell them that prefer to do something a little more enjoyable, like a colonoscopy or maybe have a mountain goat chew off one of my fingers. Glacier, for all intents and purposes, is dead to me.

Our lives are pretty good.  We live in a nice little neighborhood, with our nice little boy.  We drive around in our nice little cars, and have nice phones.  We are surrounded by nice things, but they rarely seem to stay nice.  Why is it, you ask?  Because Amy and I fuck shit up.  All the time.  We are the ying to nice thing yang.  We’re the bull in the glass shop, just waiting for the time to be right, when we can bring the whole house down.  I am not sure why we do this, but, after countless episodes of us ruining perfectly good things in our life, I have given up feeling bad when it happens. Here are a few of the more significant fuck ups.

Most recently, I got into a fender bender.  On the way home from my stay at home dad’s playgroup, the car in front of me locked up its brakes and hit the car in front of it.  I was unable to stop in time, and hit the car in front of me. The car behind me hit me, shoving me farther into the car in front.  I thought that it was a bit of cosmetic damage, but an $8,000 repair job later finally restored our car to its original front bumper lustre.  Except that Amy, decided to one up me by hitting a column in a parking garage one week after we got the car back from the shop.  So much for that brand new bumper!  She, in fact, one upped herself as she ripped off the rear view mirror of the car while backing out of our driveway two whole days after we bought the thing.  Our car, not so nice.

Our brand new home has also taken a beating. We remodeled our house not four years ago, and it already shows like a run down piece of crap.  You can’t read the clock on the oven, because I made nachos once and they caught on fire while under the broiler.  I opened the oven door and flames jumped out and licked the console, thus blurring the clock.  After putting out the fire, I made another plate of nachos, and bam, those caught on fire too, burning the instrumentation even worse. The only thing worse than having to extinguish a plate of flaming nachos by throwing them into the sink is having to do it twice in succession. I could go on and explain why the ceiling of our kitchen is stained with wine, or why I choose not to fix the leak on the rear door, but it really doesn’t matter.  Our house, not so nice.

All this has me worried about how Malcolm is going to turn out.  For the most part, we have ruined every nice thing we have ever had.  Think I am lying?  Ask Amy where her wedding ring is.  When you do, she will probably inform you that I have lost three, count them three, wedding rings, and that yours truly doesn’t even wear one anymore because I can’t seem to hang on to the darn things.  As for Malcolm, here is already showing signs of wear.  (He threw my Iphone in the tiolet!)  I can only hope that as he gets older, the teachers in his life will set him off on the right path and that we won’t fuck him up as much as we do the cars and clocks and doors and ceilings in our life.