Staying Home #2

“Cover the mirror, look to the sky”

Right now I’m sitting at my desk because I told myself I would, that I’d sit down and write even if I didn’t have anything to say.

“Saturn is orbiting nothing” is the phrase that usually starts to rattle around my brain around this time, that is when my wife has been out of town for a few days.  It’s a mostly-nonsense phrase from an REM song, the natural habitat of many mostly-nonsense phrases.  I’m not sure what the metaphor is supposed to represent in the song but in my own mind it’s me, the way my I spin off into darkness when I’m alone with my kids without her.

There is a concept in physics called entanglement, when two photons come into contact and become part of the same system.  It’s tedious to try to explain why (and there really is no coherent arm-waving argument that can describe it anyway) but the entanglement of those two particles is the building block of what we call “time.”

Time does not exist until two entangled particles are observed separately by another observer.  Until that happens, the system is static, unchanging.  Once the observer becomes entangled with one of the particles, time begins.

This is all nonsense, of course.  It is the hanging of a human philosophical concept like “time” onto things that are in reality nothing but numbers and measurements and equations.  Nonetheless, it appears to be accurate, and has recently been experimentally confirmed.  Go figure.

There is a picture on my wall that my wife’s mother drew, many many years ago.  It is a picture of a man draped over the shrouded body of another person, a loved one.  We cannot see his face but his posture tells us he is distraught, devastated.

The man is wearing a watch on his left wrist.  His watch has always struck me as the point of the piece - his relationship with time has been changed forever.  He no longer has the luxury that I have, to wait for his love in scattered anticipation, wondering what will be left of her when she returns.

Voice #1

I bought this book.  I'll let you know.

Wake up to your alarm.  It is pitch dark and a voice is telling you "Don't get up; it's not even dawn."
DO NOT LISTEN TO THAT VOICE

Get up, get dressed, go downstairs, make coffee.  A voice is telling you "It's too much trouble to make breakfast; have some Honey Nut Cheerios."
DO NOT LISTEN TO THAT VOICE

Cook breakfast, eat breakfast, clear up breakfast, get the kids to school.  When you get home a voice is telling you "You don't need to run today; your legs hurt, you didn't get enough sleep, you can run tomorrow."
DO NOT LISTEN TO THAT VOICE

Start to run.  A voice is telling you "This sucks, let's just go by the coffee shop and get a pastry."
DO NOT LISTEN TO THAT VOICE

Halfway through the run you feel fantastic and a voice is telling you "You are invincible!  Run faster!  Run Longer!  This feeling will last forever and there will be no comeuppance!  You hear me?  No comeuppance!"
DO NOT LISTEN TO THAT VOICE

Run home.  Sit down to write.  A voice is telling you "This is a waste of time.  You never finish anything.  You're only pretending to be a writer to get out of getting a real job. Might as well just fuck around on Facebook."
DO NOT LISTEN TO THAT VOICE

As you move the pen across the page, you wait for inspiration that never comes.  No rising action.  No spark.  A voice is telling you "Look, you've wasted another hour writing something that's not worth reading.  Bravo."
DO NOT LISTEN TO THAT VOICE

As the evening winds down, your wife is going to bed.  A voice is telling you "Stay up, have a glass of wine, watch a Tarrantino movie.  You deserve it!"
DO NOT LISTEN TO THAT VOICE

Go to bed with your wife.  Read a book.  Fall asleep.

Wake up to your alarm.  Somewhere in your house there is a paper containing what you wrote yesterday.  Find that paper.  Read it.  On that paper is your voice, telling you, as best it can, who you are, what your condition is, and what may happen to you as a result.
LISTEN TO THAT VOICE

Death #1

A photo, downloaded from Facebook, of a piece of landscape art by Peter C. Allen of Bend, Oregon.




A few weeks ago an old friend of mine died in a house fire. I hadn't seen him in many years, but as I often discover when someone I once knew dies, his friendship had a great impact on me. In the days since his death I've thought a lot about the duty we all have to carry something of him forward into the rest of our lives. He was a brazen man, proud of his own quirky, self-destructive, passionate approach to life, and I know that it would have pained him to know how much I hide parts of me from the world because I feel ashamed of them.

In his honor here is something I want to get off my chest: I have a deep, unironic love for Facebook.

I hate being available to people. I hate phone calls, I hate emails, I hate text messages. I hate my electronic calendar with its constant reminders about things I've named so lazily and sloppily that when the reminders pop up I know how long until I'm late but not where the fuck I'm supposed to go. I'm terrible at all types of correspondence and look at "keeping in touch" as the most crushing of Sisyphian tasks. Yet for some reason I love Facebook. I think I love it for all the reasons that, objectively, I know it must be terrible. I think it facilitates the haunting loneliness that defines modern life by giving us a simulacrum of communication and togetherness and community that keeps us inside when we should be out building the real thing. I think it creates a disturbing temptation for middle-aged people to leer at young people, and that a byproduct of that temptation is a constant stream of guilt-tripping of the young by the middle aged for being too damn young and sexy for their own good. I think it makes it too easy to stay up late and reach out to your storybook lover instead of going upstairs and going to bed with the real thing.

 I think I like all of that. Facebook is the dead skin and dust bunnies of human interaction, assembled in the middle of a big common room for everyone to see. The aspects of human culture that we would most like to pretend don't exist are all too apparent on Facebook - our narcissism, our greed for attention, our pettiness, our sanctimoniousness, our frustrated passive-aggression. There are plenty of wars on Facebook, but I think what we see most days is the process of our worst selves making peace with one another. And that, ugly as it is, is a beautiful thing.

Vimeo of the Week #1

Blue Season from Katrina Christensen on Vimeo.

Woke up feeling like I never wanted to do anything ever again except maybe snap at my loved ones and sit on the couch watching Breaking Bad with the commentary on.

Fortunately on my birthday a prominent Richmond writing, theatre and film family provided me a gift of a $30 contribution in my name to Starbuck's Campaign of World Domination , so I was able to trick myself into going for a run to redeem my Victory Coffee rations.

I felt much better when I got back so I'm trying to capitalize by doing some laundry.  In lieu of today's lesson, here's the Vimeo of the Week, Blue Season, which is a short documentary about the Vegas hip hop scene by Las Vegas independent filmmaker Katrina Christensen.

Cleaning Day #1

Today is cleaning day, not in the sense that I clean but in the sense that I am one of the great shamefaced multitude of stay-at-home parents who pays other people to clean my house for me.

If you're unfamiliar with this phenomenon, here's how it works - you do a crappy job cleaning your house for some significant period of time, until you come to a decision as a family that it would be best for everyone if someone actually cleaned the damn house every once in a while, and so you hire four members of some marginalized socioeconomic group to clean up after your privileged suburban ass.

Which sounds great until you realize that the reason you never clean anything is that every surface in the house has a two-foot layer of debris settled on top of it, made up of, say, clothes that may or may not be clean, pieces of construction paper with a cat's face drawn in marker the same color as the paper, half a jigsaw puzzle spilling out of a box that can't hold a jigsaw puzzle because some hairy neanderthal stepped on it, not even really by accident but more out of depraved indifference to the fate of the box, that sort of thing.

So obviously when your house is in that kind of condition no one can clean it, not even very dedicated, hardworking poor people.  So before the cleaners get there you have to clean up all the shit that is the whole reason you never clean (the cleaning part is actually rather pleasant once you get down to it, in my experience), and it takes hours and will show you exactly how out of control your entire living situation has gotten when you try to put away the fabric markers and you find that there are four separate bags of markers, each containing some part of three different sets of fabric markers, and also those bags contain things like pencils and hair ties and small bits of plastic that don't seem to do anything at all but are definitely an important part of some thing or other that little Daisy definitely needs in order to realize her potential as an artist or fashion designer or whatever the fuck.

So you get the picture, I would think.  It's a hard day.  A day of reckoning.  A tiring day.  And yet I care about you, Dear Reader.  So I stay up after putting the kids to bed to bring you this blog post.  And also to watch a bit of football.

If you're not a football fan, as I think many of the readers of this fine blog in fact are not, you may not even be aware of Thursday night football, which is only a few years old.  There is a game on Thursday nights that's not on TV and features two teams that just played four days ago, so they're all injured and sloppy and the game sucks.

You can watch the game if you either have NFL Network (which most people don't) or if you go to NFL.com and watch it online.  Except instead of actually showing you the horrible game online they just show you random bits and pieces of the horrible game and the rest of the time it's two guys just talking about the game in a cheap, tiny studio, or ads for stoner food like pizza and taco bell (that may just be my ads.)

So anyhow, I'm going to go watch that now, because I have no taste.  Enjoy your evening.  Your assignment is to not watch this awful football game.  I mean, what are you doing with your life, Dear Reader?

Birthday Boys

Today I went for a long walk instead of a run to rest my knee and give myself a treat for my birthday. I very much enjoy long walks as they give me a chance to think things through without distractions intruding on what I’m thinking about. Distraction is a terrible problem for a stay-at-home parent because there are always little emergencies happening everywhere all around you. Then if you get done with the emergencies for a moment there are a dozen little maintenance/drudgery items to take care of, many of which are things you’d rather not do. So you look for something to do that seems a bit more stimulating than scraping cheerios off a bowl with a fork, and you remember you need to pick a restaurant for your birthday dinner and follow up with the babysitter, so you sit down at your computer and suddenly it’s 2:30 p.m. and you’ve wasted the entire day having important cultural discourse about whether or not Hannah Montana should be allowed to go on television and pretend to fuck a giant foam “We’re #1” Finger. Obviously this is a problem for everyone, whether they work at home or in an office or at the fire department or wherever it is. But when you’re a stay at home parent those things you were supposed to do are going to be staring at you for the rest of the day, and your wife is going to come home and see them, and your kids are going to complain about them, and your friends are going to see it when they come over and you’ll be embarrassed, etc. etc. It’s a very visible form of failure when you get distracted and get behind on your work. This affects your self-image, obviously. One way to counteract this is to have a group of male friends you can go out with, who won’t care if you didn’t do the dishes and forgot to call the plumber and can’t even remember where you left the vacuum cleaner it’s been so long since you plugged the damn thing in. Stay-at-home moms might be gasping a bit at this. I get the feeling a lot of them wouldn’t think of going out with friends when the dishes are piled up in the sink and there are legos everywhere and there is a load of sour laundry mildewing. That’s probably a healthy way to be and I applaud that, but I’m not that way. It can be easy to sort of forget to have male friends as a stay at home dad, but you need them. Most of all you need people you can be honest with about important emotional matters that are hard to talk to your wife about, like which of the other moms at your kids’ preschool has the best ass. Notice I say “other moms.” A lot of what I’m going to say on here presupposes something very important which is that you find your wife insanely attractive, miles more attractive than just about any other woman you’ve ever come into contact with. If you married someone who is not a “10” on your personal sexual chemistry scale, you’ve wandered into a difficult place and I don’t envy you. I certainly do not recommend becoming a stay at home dad. It will not end well. So your lesson for the day - as you make your mom friends, reach out and make dad friends too wherever you can. Your friendships that will work the best are the ones where all the adults in both families are close and can talk to each other openly. If you don’t have that, problems can become very big before everyone who’s affected by them is aware of them, which is a recipe for resentment, mistrust, and worse. Your assignment is to have dessert, call your buddies to set up a boys' night, and remember to look at your wife and say "damn that is one fine woman."

Staying Home #1

(Even if you weigh 300 pounds and have a face like Jerry Quarry, when women see you taking care of your kids they see this fellow right here.)

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The other day at the pumpkin patch my friend Leigh (all names fictionalized) asked me if I had a blog, and when I said “not really” she said if I had one, she would read it.  

I guess I should have asked her what sort of thing I was writing about on my imaginary fantasy blog, but it didn’t occur to me, so now I’m here with no real prompt.  

I glance over at my friend Hunter’s blog to see what kind of things he writes about.  He’s another stay at home dad/Browns fan/writer/longhaired deadbeat type like myself.  He has three boys - one of them recently got his hair cut, it seems, but that’s no help to me.  I’m not really into that sort of thing, as a writer.  Also my wife takes the kids to get their hair cut and takes the lead on most hair-related matters.  

I find the nuts and bolts of parenting, and life in general I suppose, to be pretty boring.  I like writing about sex and pain and death and revenge and things like that.  It would be a strange beat, the sex/pain/death/revenge/stay-at-home-parenting beat.  I’m not sure what quarterly I’d submit my work to.  

Sex is a natural fit, I guess.  I could be the stay at home dad who just writes about sex all the time.  Sex, sex, sex.  Sex in the morning, sex in the night, sex every single moment of your godforsaken life.  

I might be able to get away with it because I’m not that guy who has sex all the time.  That annoying fucker, the one who’s like “you’ve got to keep the magic alive with little touches like roses and massages and get her some nice bath lotion” or whatever the fuck.  Eat a dick, asshole.  

Or worse, his wife, some successful novelist whose work the New York Review of Books says “simmers with the savory broth of greatness” or some gushing poppycock, who writes an Op/Ed in the Times about how to be happily married and make time for your man and keep the spark alive and blah blah blah.  Fuck you, too, bitch.  

This isn’t going well, I feel.  I don’t think this is what Leigh wants to read.  I imagine she was thinking I’d be writing about how to listen to your children and respect them as people and put your family first or some crap like that.  I’m falling asleep just thinking about it.  Let’s get back to the sex stuff.

Sex is the key thing that makes stay-at-home fatherhood hard.  The rest of it is really very easy.  Not easy in the sense of, easy as falling off a log.  I mean, it takes work.  There are butts to be wiped (h/t - Hunter) and dishes to be washed and endless, endless laundry that never stops because kids like to wear four different outfits every day and shit their pants regularly and aren’t even embarrassed about it.  

It’s easy, though, in the sense that for cultural reasons there is a very low standard of success for stay-at-home dads.  Where stay-at-home moms have this ceaseless passive-aggressive competition that’s constantly hanging over every aspect of their lives every waking minute of every day, stay-at-home dads are exempt.  The shame that Kate Winslet feels having forgotten her kid’s snack for the 47th time at the playground in “Little Children” is not really present for a stay-at-home dad, at least it needn’t be.  No one expects you to remember to bring a snack, or sunblock, or a change of clothes.  The moms fall all over themselves trying to help you out, and trying sincerely to make sure you know that these things happen to everyone, and we’re all in this together, right?

A stay-at-home dad can walk out of the house, two kids in tow, with a diaper crammed into his back pocket and figure everything will pretty much work out ok.  In fact not only will it be OK, he’ll be such a hero other dads start to hate his guts because their wives won’t shut the fuck up about what a great dad he is.  And what did he do that makes him so great?  Nothing.  He talked his kid through some stupid tantrum about what color sippy cup he brought, and how whatever was in it wasn’t exactly what the kid expected.  For this (something all stay-at-home moms do every day) women will build you a nine-foot marble statue and put it on the capitol steps if you let them.  Which you shouldn’t because you won’t get invited to poker games.  

So now, once you’ve settled in and gotten used to this treatment and made your first real stay-at-home-mom friend, you’re going to realize the situation you’re in, which is that you’re spending a lot of time with a woman who has an unaccountably high opinion of you during the day while her husband is at work.  You’re developing nice wholesome relationships with her kids, which by the way if you’re ever trying to seduce young mothers is the beginning, middle and end of the playbook, and she’s opening up to you about the problems in her marriage and how she’s not sure it’s working out.

I slipped that last one in on you.  DO NOT LET WOMEN DO THIS.  There is nothing to be gained by listening to a woman complain about her husband.  The way you do not want the conversation to go is as follows:

WOMAN

My husband leaves his dirty dishes all over the house.

YOU

Yes, my wife does that too.  It makes me feel so unappreciated.

WOMAN

YES!  It’s so nice that there is a man who understands.

This is DEFCON-1 level seriously bad shit right here, my friend.  This woman is starting a fight with her husband about this TONIGHT.  Take it to the bank.  And even if your name doesn’t come up, it’ll be hanging in the air like a stale fart.  

Let’s try this again, but with a slightly different response from our hero, the SAHD.

WOMAN

My husband leaves his dirty dishes all over the house.

YOU

Yeah, I still throw my dirty socks at the hamper like a goddamn chimpanzee.  Drives my wife crazy, makes her feel so unappreciated.

WOMAN

Wow, I guess all men just fucking suck.

YOU

I’ll drink to that, sister!

See what you’ve done there?  If your excuse for the previous exchange was that you just wanted to be there for your friend, validating her feelings, well, here’s your chance, Romeo.  Validate her in a way that 1) reaffirms how much you appreciate your wife, even though you don't always show it and 2) closes down any stray thoughts she might have about how maybe you’d be a better husband than the one she’s already got.  

Well, my writing time for the day is up.  Your assignment for the day is to Google “Hot Dad-on-mom sex” (in quotes like that) and look at what comes up.  Yep.  This page (once the spidering is done) and one other page that says “It turns out that there wasn't much enthusiasm in the room for hot Dad-on-Mom sex either.  Go figure.”  

Go figure indeed.  Til next time, Dear Reader.