The Sorta Great Wall

This is a repost from June, 2008.



Here's why I'm increasingly down on science: I've heard over and over that most of what we think of as "matter," which laypeople call "stuff," is actually made up of empty space.


Well, that's a lot of, as my dad used to say, "bull-lar."

I don't know what "bull-lar" was, but my dad said that a lot of things were "bull-lar." He'd say what we did, as kids, was "bull-lar." He'd be yelling at us for something, and say something parental, old-school parental, like "You think you can just take a car and race it along and jump it 100 feet off the road? Well you can't! That's a lot of bull-lar!" (It was not 100 feet, though. It was 110, at least.)

Between the frequent use of the phrase "bull-lar" and my dad's habit of holding my younger sister, who was only about two, while he yelled at us, very little 'punishment' actually soaked in because we spent half the time wondering what "bull-lar" was and half the time watching our sister mimic dad as he yelled.

I suppose "bull-lar" was one of those things that parents learn to say when their kids are young because they don't want to swear around their kids and are trying to be good role models. I try to do that, too, which was why a while back when I slipped while installing the stove hood and banged my head hard enough to draw blood, I didn't swear or cuss or yell. I didn't do anything for about 10 minutes except try not to explode, and I did it. I didn't swear at all. I just bled. So I'm a good role model, except that while I try not to swear and I never drink, I also regularly let the Babies! watch, on Youtube while they eat breakfast, a clip of Butters from "South Park" singing What What In The Butt, which I think is hilarious and the Babies think is hilarious, too, and it really helps us get through breakfast a lot easier.

I know, I know. I can hear you now: How can you possibly do that? How can you, of all people, possibly expose your not-even-two-year-old boys to copyright infringement? I feel bad about, it, too. But listen to my side: A family is an economic partnership. Everyone has to pitch in. So some people make sure that the Babies! get fed and some people make sure the Babies! get bathed and some people make sure that the Babies! don't fall out of windows. Those people, in our family, are Sweetie. Other people (me) have them watch South Park clips on Youtube and determine what occupations they will have in the future to make sure they make enough money that Other People (me) don't have to work after they're fifty. (Currently, Plan A is them having a Disney show, since if you are a kid and you appear on Disney TV you are instantly worth a billion dollars, and also, I like "Bunnytown.")

Plus, consider this: if someone in the family is going to take a fall for the rest of us, shouldn't it be the infants? Let's face it; someone has to pirate the South Park clips and illegally download music and make fun of Tom Cruise. If, when the hammer comes down, the Babies! take the fall, then they will receive shorter jail terms and lighter sentences because, well, they're cute. Cuteness is still a defense to most criminal charges, isn't it? I should probably know that.

But I don't know that. I don't know a lot of things because all my memory is taken up with everything "science" has filled my head with, like hokey stories about how everything is mostly empty space, how we are all made of "atoms" and that these are very small and are made up of mostly smaller things like "electrons" and "quarks" and "my paycheck" and that as a result of all this small-osity, things that we think of as solid matter, things that seem good and thick to us -- the table, the old shed, Kris Kristofferson-- are in fact mostly empty space.

Well, I'm not buying it. I'm not buying it because nothing is mostly empty space.

I'm not mostly empty space. I've tried, unsuccessfully, fitting into some of my more favorite t-shirts lately, and I've tried going jogging, and I can assure you that I am far from being made up of mostly empty space. Empty space would have a far far easier time lugging it's empty-space-belly up the hill at the end of empty space's running route, and empty space would not fill up a t-shirt quite so snugly. My own scientific analysis has led me to conclude, at this point, that I am mostly made up of Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch, which also is not mostly empty space.

Another thing that is not at all empty space was our old shed, which is finally down, and which somehow warped time and space in that the shed, torn down, managed to contain more actual material than it had when it was still standing. I can remember when it was standing, and it was four walls and a roof and some old household furniture inside. I would go inside, sort of. I would actually stand just outside the shed and look in, to see if there was a place to put more junk, in between the older junk and the raccoons, and the shed was full of lots of seemingly empty space, because it wasn't full of stuff and according to "science," things that aren't full of stuff are mostly empty space. I wish "science" had been here to help with the work. But, as usual, "science" never shows up until the work's done and the pizza's being served, when "science" tries to prove that it knows something after all by having your pizza remain superhot for longer than it should so that you burn your mouth even though you waited a really, really long time before eating the pizza.

Tearing down the shed was like battling the hydra; every board we tore out created three more. Every wall that came down left two more. It just kept multiplying and multiplying and we just kept hauling it to the second of two dumpsters using our specialized shed-tearing-down-tools of "old winter gloves" and "a garbage can with wheels."


Using that highly technical equipment, we threw away the entire shed which, when torn down created a pile of rubble that took up two dumpsters. Two. When they redid our roof last year, they only used one. So there was more stuff in that shed than there was in our entire roof on our house.

Of course, the roof of our house did not contain, as I found out the shed did, five live raccoons and one very very dead raccoon. At least I hope it didn't, because if there is that much wildlife in our roof, I'm moving.

There is nothing quite like pulling up an old board and seeing most of a raccoon skull sitting there in front of you, not quite attached to most of a raccoon skeleton. The only thing I could think was where's the rest of it? Is it on me? I still kind of feel that way. That's my most common reaction to nature, as I sit here and think of it: Is it on me? I'm not the outdoorsy type. Put me outdoors for any length of time, and I'll begin to think that the outdoors is on me, and not shake that feeling or the way it makes my skin crawl, until I get back inside, take a shower, and watch Newhart on DVD.
But it's done! The shed is down, and where there used to be a sagging, possibly haunted shed there now stands what looks like empty space but isn't. What it is, is a bare dirt area covered with leaves and bits of grass and the smaller debris that I decided to leave there. Trust me, it's an improvement, even if technically part of that dirt area is still made up of shed parts.

There's still shed parts there because I took The Boy's advice, something I only am ready to do when I've been working in the hot sun all day and am covered with raccoon flakes. We were hauling and hauling and I was trying not to think of what the pieces of animal would do to my lungs and, and we got down to the last two items of stuff to haul: the world's largest collection of cement cinder blocks, and a pile of stuff that included shingles but was, in my imagination, made up mostly of dead animal skin, animal skin that was getting on me.


We looked at that, me and The Boy and The Boy's Friend, who I'll call "Q," and The Boy said the smartest thing he's ever said. He said "Let's just let erosion do its thing." Who says kids don't learn anything these days?

I brushed some raccoon parts off my head and decided we'd do just that. We spread the pile back out and hoped for erosion to work more quickly than most so-called "science."

That left the cement bricks, which as it turned out made up a lot of what appeared to be the empty space under the shed. (They may also make up a lot of the empty space in me, if the doctor's scale is to be believed.) There were more cement bricks under that shed than I could have imagined. If cement bricks were money, we'd be rich. But they're not, so we're just tired.

We decided to not haul the cement bricks, and instead to turn them into The Sorta Great Wall. I began stacking them into a line of bricks along the lot line between our house and Q's house next door. I got permission to do this by asking Q "Do you think your parents would want us to stack those bricks there?" He shrugged and said he'd ask them, and then I began stacking them there before he could do that, because people can only tell you "no" if you give them a chance.

The Sorta Great Wall now extends about fifteen feet along the lot line, and about two feet tall, and will hopefully one day be very scenic. Until then, I'm hoping that Robert Frost was a little wrong. "Good fences," Robert Frost probably said, "make good neighbors." I'm hoping that "Crummy fences made up of things you are too lazy to haul to the dumpster" make good neighbors, too. Or least make neighbors not call the zoning committee on you.


That's what I've spent the first three days of my vacation doing: Tearing apart the last of the shed, beginning construction of The Great Wall, and pondering just why science is never right. Because I know now: matter is not made up of 'empty space.' It's made up of cement blocks and raccoon skins, and it's on me.

Throwback Thursday: Somehow I managed to allow pizza toppings to be given credit for THE SPACE PROGRAM.

The topic of pizza, and specifically what is a pizza, or when is a pizza really a pizza, is suddenly all over the news this week -- from Antonin Scalia's death making people recall that he once proclaimed deep dish pizza to not be real pizza  to yesterday's Dinosaur Comics:

Anyway, like most things, I've thought of this stuff first, and the rest of the world is only just now getting around to catching up to where my head was at years ago.  7 years ago, more or less, when I posted The Best Pizza Topping.  I've reprinted it below; as usual with posts like these, my comments as I re-read it are in red.
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Yesterday, I had a lot of time to think. And this topic is one of the things I thought about. Specifically, here's what happened: I was driving home from Milwaukee, about a 1 1/2 hour drive, and I put on the song "This Guy's In Love With You" performed by Herb Alpert & His Tijuana Brass. You know the song, right?

And as I listened to that song, this thought suddenly occurred to me:

When does a thing stop being that thing and start being something else?

Which doesn't immediately, I know, make sense, but it will, if you bear with me as I do a little thought experiment.

Picture a ray. You remember "rays" from math class in high school, right? A line extending from a point in space off into infinity, represented by an arrow with a dot at one end.
Yeah, the middle one. Picture that ray, and assume that point "C" represents "pizza" the way "pizza" originally was intended to be represented, like, say, this:
Maybe that's not your idea of a pizza. Maybe your idea of a pizza is something thinner crusted or square or with anchovies or whatever, but that's not the point. Or it is the point but I'm not yet at the point where I'm ready to make my point, so whatever your idea of a pizza is, of the quintessential pizza, get that picture in your mind, and picture your own Quintessential Pizza as the point at which the ray begins.

Got that? Now, picture, in your mind, making more and more changes to the Quintessential Pizza, each change moving you a little further along that ray, each change not a big deal, in and of itself, not so far removed from what came before, but each a change nonetheless. As that happens, as you keep making little changes here and there to your Q.P., this mathematically- and scientifically-accurate diagram gives an idea what happens:




As you can see from that Scientific chart, at some point, you, the Q.P. creator, have moved so far away from your starting point that we, as human beings/scientific observers, have to ask, in the interest of philosophical, intellectual inquiry, this question:

Is what you've got really a pizza anymore?

Which begs this question: 

What is the essence of a pizza?

Which begs this question:

What is the essence of ANYTHING?

Which is how you can get from Herb Alpert to questioning the very foundations of human existence via pepperoni.

But this is a serious question, albeit a serious question I am choosing to answer via the method of "pizza-as-demonstrative-example." (I was about to say "Pizza-as-allegory," because that sounded good, but the pizza isn't really allegorical in this article, it's demonstrative.)

Which begs this question:

Which sounds better, "Quintessential Pizza" or "Allegorical Pizza?"

I think the answer is "Allegorical Pizza." But anyway, the pizza in this article is not allegorical, it is demonstrative of the question of when a thing stops being that thing, a question that actually was on my mind because I read the "novella" Disquiet on Saturday. Disquiet, by Julia Leigh, is a very, very good story. After I read it, though, I questioned whether it is a novel or novella or a long short story, and then I wondered whether that matters.

I decided that it is a very long short story, and that yes, it does matter.

Here's how I decided it's a very long short story: the transformations that the characters go through are ambiguous and not clearly explained, and much of the plot occurs offscreen or is left untold. That's the criteria I apply to a short story, as opposed to a novel. A novel is not only longer, but has more development, more wrap-up, more explanation.

In a short story, a character might (as one of mine did, once) get in her car and try to drive away from her house with her young daughter, only to rethink her actions as a thunderstorm starts to set in, and go back. And the reader might (as my readers were) be left to wonder or fill in the blanks as to why the woman is leaving, why the thunderstorm makes her change her mind. The short story shows an episode in the woman's life with some explanation but with little change in her and with little beyond that episode explicated.

If that story were a novel, though, we would expect more detail, more plot, more description, more backstory, more of everything. The short story is a snapshot; the novel is a photo album.

That's not to say one is better than the other; it's to say that each label carries with it a set of expectations and rules that guide the writer, and the reader, and determine how they should interact with each other through the medium being used. A short story cannot be said to be better or worse than a novel any more than a sculpture could be said to be better or worse than a painting.

The problem, if there is one, arises when we use the wrong terminology to describe something. If I told you to come to my house to see a sculpture, and showed you "Red Yellow Blue,"



you might be mystified. That's a painting, you might say, and while you might like "Red Yellow Blue," you may find yourself befuddled because you were expecting a three dimensional sculpture only to be presented with a two dimensional painting.

Or maybe you think you did see a sculpture, because "Red Yellow Blue" is three canvases separated from each other so that it is more than a two-dimensional splattering of paint on a canvas, it takes into account the space between the canvases and can be rearranged and in that way fully inhabits or more fully inhabits a three-dimensional world than a "painting," but is it a sculpture? When I say sculpture, do you think of "Red, Yellow, Blue," or do you think of this:



And if you do think of that, why didn't you think of this

when I said "sculpture?" Aren't they both sculptures? Of course they are: but one is more sculpture-y than the other. One is more a quintessential sculpture.

Which is my point again, here. At some point, a sculpture stops being a sculpture. As it gets bigger, and more made of metal, and more standing-in-a-harbor-in-New York, it stops being a "sculpture" and starts being a "statue" or "monument." And as it gets flatter and more primary-color-ish and on canvas, it stops being a "sculpture" and starts being a painting.

So as Disquiet failed to tie up all of its storylines, it stopped being a novel and became more of a short story. Which was not a bad thing. It wasn't what I expected, because I was told it's a novel, and so I expected more wrap up, but given the nature of the story and the general feel of the story, being left hanging somewhat at the end despite expecting more resolution wasn't a bad thing itself, either -- it made the story more of a meta-story, instilling in me one last time the exact feeling (of disquiet) that the author was going for.

So maybe messing with one's expectations can work, in some instances. But in pizza? That's where we began, after all, to consider whether a thing can ever stop being a thing, and as this discussion is important, it will help to keep it rooted in the things of reality: Herb Alpert and pizza.

So when is a pizza no longer a pizza? Is a breakfast pizza a pizza? I had a sample of breakfast pizza at the store two weeks ago -- miraculously, given that pizza samples are amazingly rare in the real world, and I had to wonder is this pizza? It was round -- like a pizza, except that sometimes when I make pizza at home I run out of pans and have to resort to making some of them square or rectangle. It had a pizza crust on it, which is like a pizza. But it had eggs and cheese, and while pizzas have cheese they don't have breakfast-y kind of cheese on them, they have pizza-y kinds of cheese on them: mozzarella, which I think is chosen for the way it can hold everything on the pizza while not having much actual flavor, which is why I usually substitute in some other kind of cheese on my homemade pizzas: I like the stronger flavor.

The breakfast pizza was toasted in a toaster oven, but aren't pizzas supposed to be cooked in pizza ovens? I sometimes grill mine, too, making them using the broiler setting.

All of which leads to much confusion: was this breakfast pizza sample a pizza at all? And if it was a pizza, why is it a pizza?

What about the "mashed potato pizza" that I sometimes make using an idea I stole from a pizzeria -- making a pizza crust and then putting mashed potatoes into it and then topping it with pizza toppings and baking it? Is that a pizza?

And if it is, what about the "fruit pizza" my mother-in-law makes -- that's a sugar cookie with fruit and frosting on it. Is that a pizza?

If that's a pizza, then isn't everything a pizza? If all that's required of a pizza is that it be round, more or less, and be called a pizza, then isn't this:



a pizza if I call it a pizza?

I come down on both sides of that issue. I understand the allure of saying that things have to be what we call them, that everything has to have a category, that a pizza must have some definable quality or qualities that makes it a pizza and that if something doesn't have all or most or enough of those qualities, then it's not a pizza, because then everything makes more sense and expectations are not dashed and we all know what we mean when we invite each other over for pizza -- nobody will be invited over for pizza and be served eggs on a crust, or fruit on a cookie.

But on the other hand, I see, too, the side that says anything can be a pizza if we want it to be, for two reasons.

First, the practical: I want to be aligned with the anything can be a pizza crowd because my pick for The Best Pizza Topping is mashed potatoes. Ever since coming across the potato pizza as an appetizer in that restaurant, I've loved the potato pizza. Done right, it is (as the pigeon might say of the hot dog) a taste sensation. It combines the mushy-but-crisp-edged creaminess of a twice-baked potato with the gluey cheese and savory tomato sauce and spicy sausage and fruity pineapple and zing of the onions that I like on my non-potato-pizzas, and does so in a way that creates a new feeling, a new thing that is both pizza and not pizza at the same time.

There is the impractical, esoteric reason why I see the appeal of the anything can be a pizza argument: the ability to grow and change and become something new. If we rigidly define life's categories, if we say a statue is a statue, and a pizza is a pizza, and things that aren't quite statues or pizzas aren't statues or pizzas at all, then we are limiting ourselves and our thoughts. We'll be saying to our imaginations: no, you can't put that on a pizza, or no, you can't sculpt that or no, Herb Alpert, you can't have the Tijuana Brass play with you (it'd been a while since I'd mentioned Herb) and we'll say that because pizzas don't have that, whatever that is, on them -- so pizzas will never have that on them, and limiting ourselves like that raises the prospect that we'll stop innovating at all.

After all, it's easier to take tiny steps than giant leaps. It's easier to decide to move a city away than a continent away. It's easier to move from painting to sculpting if a painting can kind of be a sculpture. It's easier to try to mix something into your pizza than to create an entirely new dish... but doing all those little steps leads you into a direction that you might not have tried, had you had to do it whole hog right off the bat. How tough was it, do you suppose, for Columbus to get on his ship and sail towards the edge of the world? Pretty tough, I imagine. What if, instead, Columbus had known of five, six, seven island chains all stringing off into the west, and had decided he was just going to follow them and see if there was an eighth and instead of finding the Eighth Islands, he found America?


What if the space program, instead of trying first to get to the moon, had set off for the nearest star outside our solar system, Proxima Centauri? That's only 4.2 light years away. Voyager, our fastest spaceship, moves at 17.4 km/second. At that rate, it would have reached Proxima Centauri in 7 million years. Why would we have even tried to go into space if we wouldn't see results for 7 million years?

Tiny steps, incremental changes, minor modifications, shifting standards, can lead to big things. Not pigeonholing things into one category lets people experiment with tiny steps and incremental changes. And, not pigeonholing things into one category allows the mind to wander. It allows people to expand their mental horizons, to picture more than one thing when just one word is used, to play with the shifting sands of our imagination and in doing so, create something new, something wondrous, something that challenges our expectations and makes us think, at the end of our novel, or as we bite into a pizza, or look at a painting: "Hmm. Well, that was interesting. That wasn't what I expected at all."

In the end, that's one of the best things about Mashed Potatoes being The Best Pizza Topping: allowing mashed potatoes to be pizza opens the door for a world where one can move from pondering Herb Alpert to questioning the very basis of reality -- and that kind of world is the kind of world I want to live in, the kind of a world where a thing never stops being that thing but can be that thing and something else, entirely, all at once.


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When I first wrote that, I had never heard of the Ship of Theseus philosophical conundrum, and had not heard of the Platonic ideal of things. The Ship of Theseus argument actually fascinates me the most -- and I'd touched on it that essay, well before I ever learned that such a question had long been pondered by the brightest minds of previous civilizations.

I guess what I'm trying to say is: Since pizza got the space program started, I am obviously 2016's Aristotle.

Throwback Thursday: Catbugs, Revisited

Back in 2010 I used to post weekly about the Saturday Adventures, outings for me and the twins and Sweetie.  Here's the one I posted on October 22, 2010.  Any comments in red are ones I added today.

Catbugs

Somebody needs to invent a new kind of pants. We've got sweatpants, dress pants, and blue jeans, and none of them is good for doing things like "walking around outside on a borderline-temperature fall day."

"Borderline temperature days" are those days when it's just a little bit too cold for shorts, and a little bit too warm for pants-- so that no matter what you do you're going to be a little uncomfortable. That's what happened to me last week, on the Saturday Adventure, when Sweetie and I took Mr F and Mr Bunches on

The Catbug Trail Nature Walk!

On this particular day, I opted to wear blue jeans, because I'm not going to walk around in slacks,

Nobody born after 1952 should ever use the word "slacks." It's like calling a couch a davenport, like my Grandma used to. She also had a fold-out bed davenport, which she called the "Dabble Bed." 

for Pete's sake, on a nature trail, but I didn't want to be too cold, either. That was a mistake, as you'll see. But before I knew it was a mistake, we set out optimistically, bringing along the soon-to-be-obsolete double stroller because it's about a 1 and 1/2 mile walk to our destination, the highest point in Middleton, Wisconsin. You can see it in the exact center of this picture:

And, no, I don't know it's officially the highest point in Middleton, Wisconsin, but I don't not know that, either, and is it really worth debating?

That hill in the middle of the picture is the "Mountain" that led to "Little Park On The Mountain" being called "Little Park On The Mountain." But, weirdly, this mountain is not the mountain Little Park is on. I know, I know. Nothing I say makes sense. You know, if you've got like a JILLION years and want to read another long post you could read "The Naked Boy And The Mountain That Isn't." 

To get to the point where we took that picture, though, we first had to walk up the giant hill that leads away from our house. To get to or from our house, you have to go uphill. I know that sounds like the kind of story your grandfather

who wore slacks

 told you, but it's true: If we walk anywhere, the walk begins and ends with a strenuous uphill walk, because our house sits off to the side of the top of a tall hill, so you have to drive or walk up that hill, turn onto our road, and then go back down a hill to get to us.

Which means I was already tired and a little hot in my jeans when I took that first picture, and we still had over a mile to go. Luckily, I had a chance to rest and deperspirate (that's a word I invented for when you stand really still until the perspiration on your legs evaporates and your jeans don't stick to you anymore) when we passed a playground on the way; the nature trail goes along the edge of a park for a portion of it, and Mr Bunches wanted to take a moment to go down the slides. So we let him do that, while I rested, before heading on to the rest of the nature trail, where we came across what could be described as a thundering herd of these:


... if caterpillars thundered when they herded around. The trail was full of caterpillars -- all of them trying to head east across the gravelly, sandy trail. It made me wonder what was coming from the west. Was there something they knew that we didn't? A caterpillarocalypse?

It could have been. The actual term for a group of caterpillars is "army." An Army Of Caterpillars.

I picked up one of them to show Mr F and Mr Bunches. Mr F wanted to hold it but I wouldn't let him -- he's kind of rough and I didn't want him to hurt it. Mr Bunches looked and said: "Bug."

I said "Caterpillar."

He said "Catbug."

So that's what they are now.

We were closer to our goal, but it didn't seem that way. Here was where we had to park the stroller to go up the part of the hill where strollers aren't allowed:


Sweetie said "Is it safe to leave it here?" We were in the middle of a nature reserve, with nobody around. "Who's going to steal a stroller?" I asked, forgetting my upbringing, when I learned that everyone in the world is a thief (which is why I was carrying my wallet in my front pocket even on the nature trail.)

(I don't know why I brought my wallet.)

It didn't really matter is someone did steal the stroller.

I miss that stroller so much. Not only was it great for getting through crowds, but it was far easier to go somewhere with the boys before Mr F was a 120-pound linebacker who frequently changes direction, or trys to, without any warning, leaving the person in charge of him with a separated shoulder. 

 The Babies! are 4 years old now, and getting a little big for it; it serves mainly as a way for them to rest if we go somewhere like a nature walk, and it's usually more trouble than it's worth, especially since Mr Bunches, who sits in front, can put his feet down and touch the ground and if he does it hard enough he'll stop the stroller dead in its tracks.

Mr F:
enjoyed the walk up the hill, but that's because he's supermuscular. He likes to jump on Sweetie's exercise trampoline for hours, and as a result has legs that would be the envy of an Olympic high-jumper.

This is still true. We are about 2 weeks away from Mr F being stronger than me. He still jumps, plus he has one of those exercise balls that you sit on only he bounces on it, too. His core is a thing of wonder. He is the most solid, stable kid I know. He's like a block of iron suddenly developed muscles and a strong urge to go that way right now.

The walk up the hill posed no problem for him.

It nearly destroyed me, as the temperature continued to hover around "You won't be able to make up your mind what to wear" degrees, and I got sweatier and sweatier in my jeans.

Things got a little worse when, near the top of the hill (which is about a 1/2 mile uphill climb) Mr F and Mr Bunches both got tired and I had to carry each of them about 200 yards uphill to get to the top.

I used to be able to do that! I once walked a mile carrying both of them, to avoid a fox that was stalking us through a back road. That's a true story, every bit of it. These days, when I try to do yoga only to have an asthma attack so severe that I have to go to the doctor, I think back to those days and tell myself:  I WAS ONCE A SUPERHERO.

But we made it there -- sweaty jeans legs and all -- and were rewarded with this view:




That watertower in the upper left side is where I took the first picture from, just to give you a sense of perspective.

We hung around a few minutes up there, but there's really nothing to do once you've looked out at the scenery and said "Wow, what a view" and "Boy, that's a long walk" and "My legs are sweaty," so we headed back home. I paused to take this picture just before we left:


Because I've always liked the pattern of stark branches against a blue sky.

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So there wasn't much to that adventure, I suppose, but, there you go. That's what I was doing five years ago today.

Do That Woo Hoo That You Do So Well. (Throwback... Whatever. I Do What I Want.)

Did you know that they had Xmas back in 2008? Seriously, that was a thing we did back then, too.  Here's a post from 12/7/08 that vaguely references some holiday-ish ideas. My comments from today are in red.

Do You Want To Woo Hoo?

Always carry the pooping toddler behind you, not in front of you.

That way, when the pooping toddler poops, it will not fall directly into your path, causing you to step in it, which in turn will cause you to think oh my god this is possibly the grossest but most hilarious emergency I've ever been a part of, and which will then also cause you to stop, take that sock off, and only after that continue on your way to the potty chair, which you have left upstairs, and upstairs is an awful long ways away when you are carrying a naked, pooping, and now upset, toddler at arm's length.

That's what I learned last night, as I was helping to clean up the kitchen after a dinner of tacos and smoothies made in the new blender using the high-end "Whole Foods" fruit we had, both of which (the blenders and the fruit) we had because Sweetie got them for St. Nick's Day.

I'm not sure why "St. Nick's Day" exists, or even if it does exist outside of my family. I always wondered if it existed outside of my family when I was a kid, too.  St. Nick's Day was (and still is) this day in the beginning of December when we as kids (and now we as adults, and our kids too) get candy in our stockings. Never presents or anything, just candy, and candy which always included one of those giant, straight-up-and-down candy canes.  You've probably seen those candy cans, about an inch in diameter and eight inches tall and solid like a billy club, but neverthelss they would splinter when you bit them, so that if you sat on the brown couch eating them and watching channel 18 -- channel 18 was the only channel worth watching most of the time back then, because it was the only non-network channel, so it showed reruns of shows and cartoons in the afternoon, as opposed to showing "Phil Donahue," a show that by my memories was on at least 17 hours a day on all three networks in the late 70s and early 80s-- if you sat on the brown couch eating your candy cane and watching Channel 18, you would have parts splinter off and fall on your chest and thereafter the shards of cane would be covered with sweater-fuzz, making them inedible. You would also get little tiny peppermint shards sprinkled down your chest and stomach, giving you a minty smell and a crackly feel the rest of the day.

That paragraph is a very confusing and circuitous story that seems to make no sense.  That is how my mind actually works.  Reading that paragraph is exactly like watching me think.  Now you know what Sweetie has to live with.

No other kids ever seemed to get stuff for St. Nick's Day, which was why I thought maybe it only existed in our family, but, then again, I was the kind of kid who never really knew what was going on, either, so maybe everyone was getting St. Nick's presents, and I just didn't know it because I spent most of my time in fourth grade reading the "Emil" books and playing one-on-one football on recesses with Kevin Donnerbauer, the kid with only one thumb, and what time I didn't spend doing that I spent drawing "vipers" from Battlestar Galactica and getting beat up by Dean Larsen. None of which really lead one to conversations about whether or not the other kid celebrates "St. Nick's Day."


When I married Sweetie, I learned that she, too, celebrated St. Nick's Day, and that she celebrated it not with candy but with presents, which seems odd, since Sweetie is always telling me how poor she was growing up, stories about poverty that make me feel even more guilty than I do most of the time about my relatively-privileged background. I, as a kid, generally got presents like the Millennium Falcon with Actual Cargo Bays for hiding Han Solo, or my "official" Dallas Cowboys helmet, or the Lego set that let me build an actual Lunar Landing Module (which I still remember was called the "LEM," even though I don't remember why it was called the "LEM") or any of the the 1000 other toys and junk my parents got us for Christmas, and that still wasn't enough, as most years there were plenty of junky things we didn't get. Realizing that, that I was so spoiled and privileged and didn't appreciate it, serves the valuable purpose today of making me feel guilty, guilt that I channel into areas that society desperately needs, like "working hard" and "giving to charity" and "telling my own kids how lucky they are that they have so much stuff, compared to how little stuff I had," which is only true comparatively speaking, because I had a lot of stuff, but my kids have more stuff, and they, too, do not think they have enough. Yes, The Boy has a great big TV in his room and a DVD player and a Playstation 3, but he still pines away for an Internet connection that would let him play Playstation online against other players, even though the other player he would mostly play against is his friend, who lives next door, and who would probably come over to play anyway, bringing his own TV and Playstation 3, so that they could harness the awesome power of the Internet to play a game against each other sitting two feet apart.

Whereas I harness the awesome power of the internet to write paragraphs that make me dizzy re-reading them, and to stream all of Parks & Recreation while I am supposed to be working.

So the guilt I carry around is enough that I have some to spare to put on The Boy and his sisters for having so much stuff, something that I do to relieve my own guilt and also to make sure that they have guilt when they grow up, so that they will work hard and give to charity and be good people and guilt-trip their own kids, and the Circle of Guilt will continue.

I don't guilt-trip the Babies! yet, because they're too little to feel guilty about anything, and also because they don't really want anything. We have not yet bought them that many toys -- all of their toys except the slide and their car fit into a laundry basket -- but we have bought them toys, and they generally ignore those toys and play with anything else.

BOY HAS THAT CHANGED.  Now, Mr Bunches wants everything, including toys they do not make anymore.  He watches videos on Youtube that consist of commercials for toys that were made 20 years ago and asks if he can get them, and when I try to explain that they don't make that toy anymore, he gets sad.  He doesn't understand why he can't have that toy. Now, if I tell him we can't get a toy -- for whatever reason -- he says "Is it bad?" like there's something wrong with the toy, or with him for wanting it.  I can't have that on my conscience. I cannot make an 8-year-old boy think that he's a terrible person for wanting a terrible toy.  I have actually gone to eBay to look to see if I could buy some of these 'vintage' toys he wants.  I have not yet bought him a vintage toy off eBay because (a) all 'vintage' toys on eBay cost $2,300 and I won't pay that for a toy, and (b) having been raised by my parents, I know that anything you buy from a stranger probably has the AIDS on it.

But really what would be nice would be if toy manufacturers would just never stop making anything no matter how unpopular or outmoded it became, just on the offchance that Mr Bunches sees an old ad for the toy and gets obsessed with it. I don't feel that's too much to ask.

Mr Bunches, for example, carries around a small red practice golf ball that Middle gave him. It's made of foam rubber and he has it with him at all times. I've never known anyone to have a "Security Golf Ball" but he does, and he gets upset if he can't find it. He got so upset the last time it was lost (we found it behind the Only Surviving Plant in the house)

That plant is long gone. Now we have no plants growing in our house and it makes me feel like a degenerate.  Productive members of society have plants in their house. To make up for it, I have two cactuses, a plant Sweetie gave me on our anniversary once, and a banana plant she bought me for Valentine's Day last year all at my office.

 that Sweetie took precautions and found a second one, a Spare Emergency Golf Ball that is kept carefully hidden in the Babies!'s room. We all also make sure, at all times, that we are aware of the Red Ball: "Where's his red ball?" we ask each other, when moving Mr Bunches from one room or level of the house to the next.

He can't be switched, either -- give him a different color practice golf ball and he'll throw it aside. Give him a different kind of red ball and he'll squeeze it to test it out, and if it doesn't give a little like The Red Ball, he'll toss that aside, too.

Losing his Red Ball is one of the few things that upsets Mr Bunches. He's pretty easygoing. The only other things I've seen upset him are when someone leaves the room he's in, or him being whisked away to poop on the potty chair rather than on the living room floor, where he thought it was okay to poop because, after all, he was naked.

Mr Bunches was only naked because I felt sorry for him and also because I needed both hands free to clean up the smoothie mess that I'd created making smoothies on the blender I'd given Sweetie for St. Nick's Day, a blender that was big and expensive and more big and expensive than a St. Nick's Day present should be, but I tend to give Sweetie big and expensive presents because, like I said, I feel guilty about my privileged background and Sweetie manages to dredge up more guilt by telling me stories about her own unprivileged background.

I might tell a story, for example, of how I had all these Star Wars action figures and I used to set them up in elaborate scenarios in my room in which the dresser with its four shelves was the Death Star, because the books on the bottom shelf could be the trash compactor, and then I might say that I wished I'd kept those Star Wars figures because maybe they'd be worth money, and then Sweetie will say something like this, a story she actually told us:

"I didn't have action figures or dolls when I was a little girl. We couldn't afford them. I had marbles, though, that my grandma gave me. I used to pretend the marbles were people and play with them and make them go shopping."

Imagine hearing that on the heels of your story about having an actual Boba Fett that shot missiles. Then imagine yourself standing in the department store thinking "Should I get her that blender she asked for even though it's very expensive?" and as you think that, you remember that Sweetie, as a kid, had to have her marbles have adventures, things she couldn't even dress up or fix the hair of or whatever it is that girls do with their dolls and toys.

And then imagine standing in that department store, pushing your Babies! in their stroller, and feeling terribly guilty about having been so privileged, and deciding that yes, you will buy her the blender, and you'll also get her some other stuff because she deserves it, but then you get distracted and think How would a marble be a person? And did they have names? Were they, like "Judy The Marble?" Did she make them walk, or just roll them to the Marble Shopping Mall? And then before you can get the blender or answer those questions, Mr F leans over and starts trying to knock over the pile of Christmas dinner plates you're stopped in front of.

Mr F got to try to knock over a lot of things last week, as we finished up the shopping for Sweetie's St. Nick's Day present. Her entire present was that blender that she asked for, and a bunch of high-quality fruit from Whole Foods, and a Whole Foods $10 gift card (which I threw in to top it off, but which is useless because $10 at Whole Foods will get you one grape) and a book of smoothie recipes that had lots of recipes for smoothies made without yogurt, because Sweetie likes smoothies but hates yogurt. Or I should say, Sweetie wants to like smoothies, something she tells us all the time:

"I want to like smoothies," she'll say, "But I just don't like that yogurt."

When I ask why it's so important that she like smoothies, she answers: "Because they're cool."

Smoothies aren't really a thing anymore.  Back in 2008, they were everywhere.  But it's been years since anyone even used the word "smoothie" in my presence. I wonder what happened to them? How is it that iced coffee -- which is just cold coffee for God's sake you are paying someone to drink coffee that's gone bad -- has outlasted the "smoothie?"

Finding the blender was the easy part -- the department store had blenders, lots of them, some of them as high-priced as $159. I did not get guilt-tripped into buying that. Marble People or not, I don't buy $159 kitchen appliances.

I firmly believe that if you do buy $159 kitchen appliances you probably are going to Hell.  

I settled on a tough-looking red blender that had an "Ice Crusher" feature. That sounded good (if not very romantic or Christmas-y) to me. Getting the fruit was also easy. It was the book that was tough, because I had Mr Bunches and Mr F with me in their stroller, and I had to go to three different bookstores to find just the right book of smoothie recipes, which meant three different nights of pushing the Babies! through bookstores, bookstores with shelves that were very close together and packed with books that were ripe for the plucking, so that as we walked down the aisles Mr F and Mr Bunches would reach out and grab books and toss them on the floor, and I would quickly scoop the books up and put them back more or less in the region they came from, hopefully also getting all of the "Teddy Graham" crumbs and smudges off of them. So if you are shopping for a book at any of those stores, the odds are that the book you want is about five feet further down the aisle, and you'll want to wipe it off a little before buying it.

I also could not stop the stroller, because they'd get really antsy then, and start arching their backs or taking off their socks and shoes and throwing them, and if there's anything that gets you judged to be a bad parent, it's having barefoot kids out in a store in December in Wisconsin. Plus, people don't think it's so cute the third time a shoe gets flung at them.

Most of the shopping, then, was done with me handing them "Teddy Grahams" and trying to calm them down and distract them by talking to them and singing Mr F's favorite song ("All I Want Is You" from the "Juno" Soundtrack) quietly as we walked through the aisles, and when that didn't work, I'd try to quickly scan the books as we walked by. When I'd see a book I thought would be good, I'd scoop it up and keep pushing the stroller, checking out the book with one hand and pushing the stroller with the other hand, eventually looping back to drop the book off more or less where I'd gotten it (I could tell by the trail of "Teddy Grahams.")

I had to do that because in public, I'll do anything to keep the Babies! happy, and also because I'm a pushover. I think I'm a tough dad, but I'm not, and I just give in to the Babies! demands no matter what the cost to me personally is. I will let them, for example, out of the cart while we're at the drugstore picking up cold medicine, even though I know that it will be physically impossible for me to hold both of their hands and get out my wallet to pay. I let them out of the cart and hold their hands and then, when it comes time to pull out my wallet, I let go of Mr Bunches' hand for just one second I hope and pull out the $20 Sweetie gave me, but it's no use: Mr Bunches has taken off towards the back of the store, laughing, and I have to scoop up Mr F and tell the lady behind the counter "put the change in the bag" and then I carry Mr F with me while I chase Mr Bunches around the rack of cold medicines in the back of the store, twice, before grabbing him and going up front carrying both boys to grab the bag, which hopefully has my change in it, and head outside.

Even then, I'm such a pushover that I feel bad for Mr F, who didn't get to run around the pharmacy, and I wonder if I should give him a chance, too. But Mr F gets his own special treatment, like when I keep playing The Tackle Game with him even though I'm afraid that he's given me a concussion.

The Tackle Game is Mr F's favorite. He invented it, and as you'd expect of a game invented by a two-year-old, it's pretty simple and also violent. In The Tackle Game, I sit cross-legged on the floor, and Mr F goes into the other room and then comes running at me while I say "No no no no no" in a scared voice (note: I'm not acting) and he then plows into me and we fall over backwards and I tell him he's very strong and how'd he get so strong? Then we do it all again, for about an hour. And I keep playing The Tackle Game under the most adverse conditions, like when Mr F the other night caught me just behind the temple with his forehead, causing him to momentarily cry until I calmed him down by tossing him in the air a few times. He was fine. I, though, was seeing stars and had a splitting headache, one that instantly set in and spread down to my jaw and my neck, and one that I still kind of have, two days later. But I kept playing The Tackle Game, and didn't let on to Mr F that I thought maybe I had a concussion.

Another time, I had sat on the floor to talk to Sweetie and Mr F had thought I was playing "The Tackle Game" with him.  I didn't know I was playing the game until he cracked right into my right eye socket, nearly knocking me out and giving me a shiner that lasted for three days.  Those three days were the first three days of a five-day jury trial I was starting the next day.  

That pushoveriness is how Mr F and Mr Bunches ended up running around buck naked on St. Nick's Eve, or the night of St. Nick's Day, or whatever. We'd eaten dinner, which was tacos and chips and non-yogurt-containing smoothies that I'd made using Sweetie's new St. Nick's blender, and I was helping clean up before taking the Babies! upstairs for their bath, and Mr F started getting into the wedding cabinet, which is the only thing in our house anymore that both contains glass and is in arm's reach. It's a curio cabinet with glass doors that's filled with wedding mementos and champagne glasses and pictures from our wedding and things like that, and we'd move it, but it's really heavy and it wouldn't be right to put it in the garage, anyway, so we guard the wedding cabinet using the high-tech method of taking the piano bench and the round table and laying them down in front of it, a giant barricade that completely fails to slow down Mr F, who likes to open and close doors, hard, to hear the bang! they make. Mr F frequently gets into the wedding cabinet doors, which make a satisfying glassy sound. He hasn't yet noticed that every single thing inside that cabinet is breakable, but it's only a matter of time.

While I was cleaning up last night, Mr F got into the wedding cabinet, and I got him out and tried to distract him from that by dropping him on the couch. That's "The Treatment," a game he and Mr Bunches like. In "The Treatment," I hold them and swing them back and forth and say "1... 2... Treatment!" and then drop them on the couch.

And, yes, "The Treatment" is a lot like "Cloverfield," but there are subtle differences that experts will note. Differences like: In "Cloverfield," I'm a monster, who walks around roaring Cloverfield! and then picking them up and dropping them on the couch, while in The Treatment, I am just Daddy, or sometimes Dr Slider, and I do not roar, but I do count. Cloverfield The Monster would never count. He's a monster.

I realize that paragraph, too, makes very little sense but in this case it's because another blog post actually explained what "Cloverfield" and "Dr Slider" were.  Basically, they were all the same game: I would chase the boys around and grab them and tickle them/make them go down the slide/flop them onto the couch.  I was a lot more active back then.  Not more creative. Just more active.  Although Dr. Slider was pretty badass.  He had an EVIL SLIDE.

"The Treatment" did not work on Mr F, who headed back to the wedding cabinet, so I took the next most logical step, which was to strip him down to his diaper. You would have to live in our house for a while to understand why that was the next most logical step, but it was. And it worked: soon, Mr F was down to his diaper and we were hollering, as he ran by, "Woo-hoo!" which is what we do when nearly-naked two-year-olds run around our house. (We even call it "Woo-hooing." "Do you want to woo-hoo?" we'll ask the Babies!, who will answer with "guck.")

Then, Mr Bunches wanted in on the Woo-Hooing, so he came over to me and I stripped him down to his diaper, too, but that wasn't enough: he wanted the diaper off.

So I put my foot down. As he pulled at his diaper and looked up at me and made pleading noises that were kind of like words but not really, I said: "No. You've got to leave the diaper on."

He pulled at it more and pulled at my leg.

"No," I said, firmly. "The diaper stays on."

He whined a little, looked sad, and pulled at his diaper, forlornly. So I caved in and said "Fine," and stripped the diaper off, which Sweetie might have objected to but it was my day to be in charge, so she didn't say anything other than that I sure am a pushover, and I then stripped off Mr F's diaper, too, letting them run around naked while we continued cleaning. I figured, they'll get some naked woo-hooing in before their bath, and I can get this place cleaned up so that we can just relax," and I went back to cleaning the blender, but within about two minutes, I heard Sweetie yelling that Mr Bunches was pooping, and I rushed out there to see Mr Bunches by the Only Surviving Plant, with Sweetie holding a magazine under his butt.

I picked up Mr Bunches, who looked surprised, and held him at arm's length as we went through the kitchen, where he dropped part of the load and I stepped in it, forcing me to stop and hold Mr Bunches in one arm while I took off the now-needed-to-be-burned sock, at which point Mr Bunches got terribly upset and started crying, so I got the sock off, and got him upstairs into his room and sitting on the potty chair.

By then, Mr Bunches was thoroughly upset and was bawling, and I didn't want him to form some kind of permanent negative pooping attitude -- what if he ended up always being constipated because he was worried that if he pooped he'd get scooped up and whisked around? What if he went crazy because he was so scared of pooping? How would that affect my plans to have him and Mr F star in their own show on Disney so that I can retire? -- so to fix that, I told him it was okay, and then when that didn't work, I cheered.

"Yay!" I said, and started clapping. He looked surprised, but stopped crying and looked at me. "Yay!" I said again, and cheered some more. "What a good boy! Yay! Hooray! Good job!" and I kept clapping while he sniffled and then cheered up and then he gave me a hug.

We cleaned him up and then, still naked, I took him back downstairs to clean up the mess. I forewarned Sweetie and Middle to cheer for him, too, so Mr Bunches walked, naked, into the kitchen, to a standing ovation of Mommy and his sister clapping and cheering, while Mr F looked a little jealous, like he was wondering if he should poop, too.

With a lot of bleach, we got the floor clean, and we got the Babies! up to their bath and got them dressed, and spent the rest of St. Nick's Night playing The Tackle Game and watching their new movies they'd gotten for St. Nick's Day, and I had learned a valuable lesson, which was this:

Next time, put more ice cream into the smoothie.

That was possibly the least Xmas-y essay ever.

Throwback THANKSGIVING!

Time to re-run an old Thanksgiving post of mine. HOPE I DON'T BREAK THE INTERNET.  This originally was posted back in 2008, just after our Thanksgiving that year. My comments from today, as always, are in red.

If you want a unique take on Thanksgiving in the form of wildly creative short stories not a single one of which actually involves a family sitting down to eat Thanksgiving dinner, check out my "Some Thanksgiving Stories" which is available for free on Amazon through Black Friday. You'll meet my newest favorite character, "the regular mouse." And there may or may not be a savage horde of beets with swords.  CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD IT NOW FREE.

And now on with your old post for you to leave a generically bland comment about because you only read about 1/3 of the way through, said "How the #*#$%;$ long is this thing?" and then went to read "Beetle Bailey" instead. That Sarge! Beetle makes him SO ANGRY.

Hark! The Thumping Potatoes... Make Change For A $20.


The sounds of the holidays, in our house, include things that you would not hear elsewhere, sounds like the soothing tones of Foghat blasting out Christmas music accompanied by the pounding beat of potatoes being thrown across the room. Also, there was a Thanksgiving pageant in which Sweetie played two parts.

Pageants have always played a big role in my holidays, so it was nice to welcome them back this year. When I was younger, we regularly put on Christmas pageants not just at the Catholic school we attended for a while, but also at home for all the aunts and uncles who would come over and subtly mock us while we put on the Christmas pageants. My memories of those pageants, both official and un-, are somewhat hazy. But I know that for one, I was the Christmas star: a fat kid with crooked glasses holding up a giant star covered in tinfoil and ringed with garland reciting a poem for the whole Church and for the whole family Christmas gathering.

"Christmas Star" was one of my few starring roles -- pun intended -- as a kid. The other starring role was "narrator" at a choir concert in fourth or fifth grade, during which the whole school sang while I stood uncomfortably in front of them and in between songs gave little introductions for the songs. I was, even at an early age, marked as "not leading man material," except for that year that I was the Christmas Star, and even that wasn't really a "leading man" type of role. You can't see Brad Pitt or Harrison Ford playing "Christmas Star" in a major motion picture, can you? Although that would be excellent: " Christmas Star," the story of a Hollywood celebrity whose ego gets too big, so, to teach him a lesson, an angel makes him into the ACTUAL Christmas star, where he witnesses the birth of Jesus and learns a valuable lesson about what's REALLY important. Starring Brad Pitt as "The Star," and featuring Dame Judi Dench in a double role, as the head of "Herod Productions" and as Queen Herod at the Nativity.

I am aware that I am not quite accurate on who was at the Nativity. I'm also aware that so far this really isn't a Thanksgiving post at all.  

The leading man role in the Christmas pageants my mom put on when we were kids was played usually by my younger brother, Matt, who was recognized as leading man material early on, despite having really no acting ability whatsoever. Matt starred not just as Joseph in the family Christmas pageants, but also as whatever leading role there happened to be in the middle school musicals that were put on every year in the spring. So while I muddled through my own middle school years in roles such as "Lord Growlie" in "The Wizard of Oz," and "Innkeeper" in Annie, Get Your Gun, (and as a Munchkin who was part of the Lollipop Guild, making me the biggest, fattest, glasses-wearing-est Munckin in the history of theater), Matt became "Narrator" in The Fantasticks, a role that he played tongue-in-cheek-- quite literally, as whenever he wasn't talking, Matt would stick his tongue in his cheek, something that you could see easily when the stage was the gym floor and the audience sat in bleachers around it.

Of course, I may just be jealous because Matt got all the girls. Girls always want to date the leading man. The Christmas Star gets very few groupies.

None, actually. Gets none.

For the home pageants the stage was our living room, or at least that portion of the living room between the Christmas tree and the dining room, next to the yellow chairs and in front of the glass coffee table.

It occurred to me as I read this that in the 19 years I lived at home, my parents never rearranged the furniture.  Never.  I can still remember the exact layout of furniture in our house and it didn't move an iota during my entire childhood.  I change my house around all the time.  I've lived in our current house for 11 years and I bet I've had 10 different living room setups in that time. The latest includes a hammock, but technically that is there to replace the swing that we couldn't have any longer.  I think it's weird to never rearrange your furniture. My parents were weird.

 As Christmas Star, I stood in between the tree and the yellow chairs and made my speech, and then Matt and my cousin Shannon would enter as Mary and Joseph, and my cousin Jason had a role, too, and some years also I would double as a wise man with my cousin Joey and my brother Bill, three wise men wearing bathrobes

Why are bathrobes a thing? People wear them over pajamas, right? Why do that? I suppose if your pajamas are scandalous or something you want to wear a robe over them but if the pajamas are just ordinary pajamas do you still wear a robe over them? When we were kids we had bathrobes that we wore over pajamas that were pants-and-shirts combos. That's like wearing an overcoat around the house, but one made of terrycloth. Nowadays I mostly wear pajamas (no robe!) around the house if it's too cold for shorts. I don't want to lounge around in jeans anymore.  Jeans are uncomfortable.  It's all pajamas for me from here on out. That's one of the great things about being 45, almost 46. You can just wear pajamas and not worry about whether anyone thinks you're a dork, because everyone thinks you're a dork already, whether or not you wear pajamas.

 over their Christmas pants and shirts, entering from near the front door to take the gifts of the magi to the Baby Jesus, represented by a bundle of something held by Shannon, while Joseph looked bored and stuck his tongue into his cheek. Then we would all get out of costume and prepare to play the holiday songs that we had diligently practiced on our various instruments: I played piano, Bill played acoustic guitar, and Joey played saxophone. Not all together -- we weren't a jazz combo. Instead, one at a time we'd haltingly pick our way through a couple of songs, the family would clap, and then we'd be free to go off and talk about how we hoped we got an Atari 2600 that year.

PS I am fairly sure eventually this gets around to Thanksgiving.

Holidays for me now are a much more relaxed affair, so relaxed that this was the first time I've ever had the kids put on a pageant. They didn't perform for the family, though; they performed to teach them a Valuable Lesson, something I tried because it came up on the Wheel of Parenting, which is the mental image that I get when I consider the various parenting techniques I try to prepare the kids to take on the world successfully:  a giant wheel just like the "Wheel of Fortune," only it has, instead of dollar amounts, parenting methods: Kind-But-Firm. Yelling. Take Away Privileges. The Dad on "Leave It To Beaver."

Interestingly, on my Wheel of Parenting, there is still Lose A Turn. And Bankrupt.

So yesterday, when a fight erupted while I was cooking Alternate Thanksgiving

Told you! There it is, only 14,000 words in: Thanksgiving!

dinner, I moved on from the earlier parenting method I'd spun up (Sarcastic Comments Hollered from the Kitchen) and instead landed on Overly Dramatic Teaching Method.

I'd used up Sarcastic Comments Hollered From The Kitchen while peeling potatoes, something I did accompanied by the sounds of Foghat. I was listening to Foghat because I was playing Christmas music in the background. I'd have dialed up some Thanksgiving music, but the only "Thanksgiving music" I know of is the song "Alice's Restaurant," and I really wasn't in the mood for that. I was in the mood for Foghat, and specifically for Foghat Christmas music.

You know, what with it being Thanksgiving and all.

10 pounds of potatoes wasn't even daunting to me. 10 pounds of potatoes, for me, is a walk in the park. This is because I was prepared as a kid by my parents for such things as peeling potatoes.  My parents prepared me for all kinds of things as a kid: peeling potatoes, someday having a job and responsibilities of my own, and, of course, how to deal with the fact that every person in the world is just waiting to steal your wallet, rape you, and murder you and your entire family.  (Step one: put your wallet in your front pocket when you go into the big city. That stops them cold: they can't move on to rape and murder if they can't get your wallet first.)

I'm never sure that even with the Wheel of Parenting Method I'm actually preparing the kids for life, because instead of the things that my parents did, I do things like let them sleep in a little while I started preparing Alternate Thanksgiving dinner, something I allowed them to do this day until Mr Bunches intervened and forced me to get them up.

I didn't let them sleep in because I'm nice or was being kind; those two slots rarely come up on the Wheel of Parenting. No, I let them sleep in because I wanted to hear my music while I cooked dinner-that-was-actually-lunch because we were eating at 11:30, and I let them sleep in because the holidays tend to increase the friction between The Boy and Middle, resulting in the kind of dumb fights that they would, in fact, have later on thatday, and I didn't want that. I wanted to stay in a good mood and peel potatoes and jam out to Foghat,

I'm so cool.

both of which got harder when Mr Bunches discovered what I was doing, and discovered that potatoes made a good, solid, thumping sound when you throw them.

I was sitting in the kitchen by the garbage can, peeling the potatoes and whipping right through them, something I could do because, as I said, my parents prepared us for adulthood, prepared us better than we could suspect, given that my adulthood actually does include peeling 10 pounds of potatoes on a Saturday morning. I couldn't have expected as a kid that potato peeling skills would be necessary as an adult. Somehow, though, Mom and Dad seemed to understand that kind of thing was in my future, because we peeled potatoes constantly when I was a kid. At least, that's what it seems like, looking back. Every day, it feels like, there I'd be: peeling potatoes at the kitchen sink and looking out the window wistfully at the backyard, where I could be playing if I didn't have to peel potatoes. We probably didn't even eat potatoes every day; Mom probably just had us peel the potatoes to build character or teach us to be self-sufficient, or as a cost-saving mechanism that we would inevitably misunderstand, the way I misunderstood when she hollered at us about crushing up the milk cartons before we threw them away.

"You have crush them up and put them in the garbage," she'd said, stomping it down viciously and then putting it into the garbage can. "Otherwise, they take up too much space in the can."

From that lecture, I took this: We are too poor to afford to buy garbage bags! I did try to crush the milk cartons after that, but not because Mom and Dad said to do it. I crushed them to avoid us having to live on the streets, because I knew that would be embarrassing.

That's why, by the way, I don't worry too much about my parenting methods and/or changing my parenting methods randomly. I know that whatever method I choose, the kids will inevitably entirely misunderstand or misinterpret the message, the way they misinterpret my telling them about the time I nearly failed Chemistry in college, a story I tell them to show them the importance of studying: Study, I tell them, because if you don't, you might be like me and have an "F" in Chemistry before your final exam, so you will have to stay up all night reading 17 chapters of the textbook you were SUPPOSED to be reading all along, because you will need to get an "A" on the final just to pass the class.

"Did you pass the class?" they ask me.

"Yes," I say. "I got that A on the exam, but I wish I'd studied harder and didn't have to risk it."

"What grade did you get for the class?" they ask me.

"A D," I say. "See?" I add. "That's why you've got to study."

The point of the story from my perspective is "learn from my mistakes: study so you don't have to cram just to barely pass a test, and instead actually get some value out of your education and make your life easier."  But what the kids take from it is first, you got a D so I can't be expected to do any better and second plus it's possible to pass a class by half-assing the studying part and cramming at the end. 

It doesn't matter how hard you parent. It's not going to work.  Even kids raised by wolves will misinterpret what the wolves teach them and eventually stop trying to kill sheep and go off to be chiropractors.

Mom and Dad would never have let us sleep in while they peeled the potatoes, no matter how hard Foghat was rockin'. That's just one of the many things I do differently from them and from other parents. Other things I do differently include letting Mr F and Mr Bunches walk around the kitchen while I'm preparing a dinner/lunch that includes the two turkeys that were not fully thawed out before I had to start cooking them. I hadn't even remembered to start thawing them until the night before at about 7 p.m., and I'd had to start cooking them at 7:30 a.m. the next day. They were still partially frozen when I stuck them in the oven, each in their own little disposable tinfoil pan. They barely fit into the oven together, which caused me some concern, too, because there was no time to cook two turkeys one after the other, so it's a lucky thing I was able to cram them in, bending the foil pans only a little. Well, a lot. But they fit in. That's the important thing.

I don't remember why I was cooking two turkeys. It might have been because by the time we went to buy our turkey, only smaller ones were available. I might also have been unsure of how big a turkey might fit in our oven and bought small. I am not very good at Thanksgiving.

Later, as I was desperately trying to finish up the rest of the meal while the guests -- Dad and Grandma and Grandpa and Sweetie's sister and kids -- milled around drinking coffee and eating the Chex Mix I had grudgingly put out for them, Oldest and The Boy commented that I had messed up because I was cooking the meal that morning. They told Sweetie that if it were them, they would have cooked the entire dinner the night before.


I added that to the mental list I keep of Reasons I Will Never Eat Dinner at the Kids' Houses and kept going with the dual turkeys, etc.

I'd had to wake the kids up while peeling potatoes because Mr F and Mr Bunches were roaming around the kitchen and dining room while I cooked and were starting to be too interfere-y. I was able to live with Mr F throwing the chairs to the ground. He can not stand to see a chair standing upright. We have five kitchen chairs and if Mr F is in the dining room, all five must be laying on their backs or sides. He doesn't even care that this makes it more difficult for him to get around. He comes in, throws the chairs down, and then roams around looking for other things to throw, stepping and stumbling over the chairs.

Throwing things down is his hobby, and he's getting better at it. He used to just take things and drop them to hear the sound they made -- soft like a pillow, clanking like the little drain piece from the bathtub.Now, he hurls them, and he's fast, like he was Friday night when he walked into the kitchen and whipped an arm out and knocked my can of soda onto the ground. I stopped baking pies to clean that up, putting the remainder of the can of soda on the other counter, only to finish mopping the spill up at the same time as Mr F threw the remainder of the can down on the other side of the kitchen. Then, while I began cleaning that up, he grabbed the bowl of cat food off the counter and whipped that down, which had to be a nirvana-like experience for him, as it resulted in a giant clang from the bowl, thousands of tiny little clicks from the cat food, and a howl of despair from me.

Saturday morning, he was content with throwing the kids' trophies off the bookshelf and knocking over chairs. Mr Bunches was bored and came into the kitchen where I was peeling potatoes, and began throwing those, enjoying the thump! thump! thump! they made. But he was slowing me down and interfering with my hearing Foghat, so I began calling for Middle, who had been sleeping in but who now had to get up to do her jobs, which were (a) supervise the twins and (b) clean the bathroom.
It went like this:

Thump! And I'd holler: "Time to get up and get the babies!"

Thump! Me: "Time to get up and get the babies away from the potatoes!"

Thump! Me: "I better hear the sound of people getting out of bed and getting the babies!"

Thump! Me: "Let's get moving before I decide to reassign the potato peeling!"

Thump! Me: "For every potato he throws I'm charging a dollar." ("Make a profit off punishment" had come up on the Wheel Of Parenting.)

Thump! Me: "Mr Bunches, come on! Go throw something somewhere else!"

Finally, Middle had come down and taken the Babies! downstairs so I was able to check on the slowly-thawing turkeys and get The Boy going on his job, which was "deep-frying onion and apple rings/complaining about random things," (the latter one not assigned; he opted to take that on willingly) but the stress of the holidays and of doing a chore must have gotten to both of them, because shortly before guests arrived, the fight broke out and I was forced to do some Real Parenting to assist Sweetie, who was running out of patience with them.

The fight broke out, from what I can tell, about no issue; I say that because no matter what I asked about why either The Boy or Middle was mad I got a different answer -- a new answer cropping up every time I solved the first one. During this all, Sweetie tried to resolve things, too, while Oldest, who had arrived, did her best to keep it from being resolved by throwing in little, nonhelpful comments like "I get it; I don't know why she doesn't," which served only to fuel the fire.

The starting point -- not the cause, but where it began-- for the fight was the division of twenty dollars the kids' Grandma had given to Middle when they'd gone to visit her. Middle and The Boy had driven up on Real Thanksgiving to see their Grandma and eat spaghetti (because, why not?) and bring home what looked to me, when I found it jamming open the freezer later that night, like a bag of blood (only it was spaghetti sauce). They'd agreed/been ordered to split the gas by each paying $7 of the $14 cost of the trip.

As of Saturday morning, The Boy had not given Middle his $7 yet, but Middle had been given $20 by Grandma to cover the cost of gas. So Middle asked Sweetie to break a $20 for her and explained how it all came about and also apparently said that The Boy had not yet given her the $7. (I'm a little unclear on the details of the fight's inception, because I was upstairs collecting potatoes.)

Sweetie had then allowed Middle to keep $17 of the $20, and given $3 to The Boy, doing the math quickly and coming up with the correct result -- The Boy was entitled, she said, to 1/2 the $20, less the $7 he should contribute for gas.

That caused Middle to begin complaining, loudly, about things in this order: (1) The Boy never had to pay for anything (2) as usual, she was paying for everything, (3) The Boy is spoiled, and (4) How come The Boy can yell at Mom all he wants while every time SHE yells at Mom she's in trouble.

That last one was a newcomer brought about when I got into the action and told her not to yell at her Mom.

While Middle was having her Complain-A-Thon, Oldest was throwing in little comments here and there and The Boy was getting mad, too. I'm not sure what The Boy was getting mad about; I think he was mad about not really having anything to get mad about. His complaints were, in order (1) Why is everybody mad at him, and (2) What did he do and (3) He gets in trouble more than Middle, so shut up.

Even though the problem really wasn't the division of the $20, we thought it was because Middle kept alternating between "I'm getting ripped off" and "Why can't I yell at Mom?" so I set up my first ever Thanksgiving Pageant, which we can call "The Gift of the Grandma." It starred The Boy as The Boy, Middle as Middle, Oldest as Grandma-With-$20, and Sweetie as "Gas Station Attendant Who Middle Pays $14 for Gas." This pageant told the Magical Thanksgiving Story of "Why The Boy Should Not Have to Pay $7 and Should Get $3 from the $20 Grandma Gave."

As they acted it out, we were supposed to show Middle how it worked that The Boy would get $3 and not pay her, but we ran into snags because Oldest wasn't sure where she should come in, the Babies! wanted to throw things at the Pageant, and Sweetie didn't have the proper cash to actually make change, resulting in us having to pretend that $7 was, at times, $10, $7, $20, and, for all I know, the Christmas Star. But in the end, the Pageant was performed, chairs were uprighted, turkeys were cooked to a point where they were safe to eat, and Middle learned, as we all did, a valuable lesson, which she summed up at this:

I still don't see why The Boy can yell at Mom anytime he wants and I get in trouble just for yelling at her once.

Words we can all live by in this holiday season.