Big Ugly Man Doll

You check CNN in the morning to plan your work day.
Your friends have press secretaries.
You look at the World News / Current Events section of the paper – to plan your weekend.
You can plan your upcoming work week by looking at the press releases at Whitehouse.gov.
You walk around with more badges than keys.
You color coordinate your badge chain with your clothes.
You never ask what a three-letter acronym stands for. If you haven’t heard of it, you either look it up later or assume they can’t tell you.
When someone mentions a secretary, you don’t ask “whose secretary,” you ask “secretary of what?”
Your hot dog vendor knows more about politics than your high school civics teacher did.
You can’t remember the last time you heard less than three languages on the Metro/Bus/Train ride home.
You refer to all the memorials by their last names: The Lincoln, the Jefferson, the Einstein…
Someone mentions the end of the year and you assume they mean fiscal.
“Start of term” has nothing to do with school, or with loans.
You’re more likely to take a page out of someone’s office than someone’s book.
You measure success with how busy you are, not how much free time you have!

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The other day my wife decided that I needed a new pillow. I tend to sweat on pillows, which may be why I needed a new one, and so she bought me a pillow from “Natura.” This is a wonderful new advance in pillow technology, in which the all wool pillow actually wicks moisture away while you’re sleeping.

What I want to know is, just where does it store all that moisture that it’s wicking away? I have this image of a big pillow with a bladder inside, storing sweat and drool up until the pressure builds up and it bursts forth one night in an unwholesome engorgement of tepid bodily fluids. I’m starting to have dreams of sloshing, and I’m not sure I like it.

We’re also looking at a new bed, and here’s another example of a technological advance that I just don’t understand. The “Memory Foam” mattress, for a mere gazillion dollars, will remember the contoures of your body and mold itself to your form.

You have to pay extra for that? Every mattress I’ve ever had was able to do that, usually before I’d finished paying for it. What would *really* be a valuable technology improvement would be a “Fuhgeddaboudit Foam” mattress, that was able to forget the shape of my ass when I get up each morning without my having to flip the damn thing and turn it twice a week. Now that would be a sleep-aid advance that my behind could get behind!

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So there I was, having an innocent discussion with an old friend, when what should come up but a question concerning the sin of Onan. Funny old thing, life. The question came down to this: was the sin in simply giving myself a good round of applause, as it were, or was the sin in having someone else give me a hand? Was Onan’s sin in wasting the seed of life (Monty Python reminds us that every sperm is sacred, you’ll remember), or was it in the ritual of self-abuse, the failure to remain master of his domain?

Now, since I was taught as a Catholic, albeit now somewhat laissez-faire, I thought I knew this sort of thing; but since there seemed to be some question, I decided to take matters into my own hands and do some research.

Turns out, the events leading up to the sin that our guy Onan committed were as follows: God, I guess in a fit of divine peak, smote Onan’s older brother – smote him dead. His name was Er, but that’s not important now. Er was married, though, and that’s where the fun starts. Turns out back then, there was a custom called Levirate marriage – if your brother died (or was, you know, smote dead), and his now widowed wife was childless, you (or one of your brothers) were expected to step up to that plate and continue the line of the dead husband.

I’m pretty sure that the whole concept of Levirate marriage explains why there are so many members of the Kennedy family.

Anyway, Onan’s father tapped Onan to tap the widow, Tamar, so that (under the terms of Levirate marriage) her kids would be legally Er’s kids. Onan decided that since the kids would really be his, but legally they’d be his dead brother’s, he just wasn’t down with that. So, when he, ahem, the scripture says that when he went into her, he ensured that there would be no children from the union by pulling out and “spilling his seed upon the ground.”

Seems to me Onan’s real sin was in trying to have his cake and eat it too – he didn’t want kids, but he wasn’t going to turn down a nice piece of tail like Tamar, either. So she feels used, tells the Lord, and the Lord God Almighty done smote Onan too. Must have been in quite a mood. So much for maintaining the bloodline.

(It seems worth noting that I’m pretty sure I saw this whole scenario played out on General Hospital back in the ’80s – Bobby and Jack and Anna and I forget who all else, with dead brothers and sex with the in-laws and babies raised by the natural father who was really the uncle… Did they lift that straight from Genesis? Does God hold copyright on that stuff?)

So it turns out the Scripture is open to debate. Was Onan killed by God because he dissed Tamar instead of standing to stud as a surrogate for his dead brother, or was he killed because of the way in which he dissed her – coitis interruptus, wasting his seed upon the ground. (More likely upon the sheets.) The answer is, scholars have pondered and continue to debate this issue today – right now, master debaters are handling this issue – and there’s evidence to support both sides.

The most interesting article I found – and you can find some very interesting things Googling words like “masturbation” and “church” in the same search – was a very well written, thoughtful, and detailed explanation of how to go about giving your boyfriend a blowjob in the church in which you were baptized and received first confession and first communion. It was so detailed and, well, explicit that I promptly committed the sin of Onan.

And yet God has not said a word!

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I’m always loath to call her Number Two Daughter. First, she might take it awry. Second, Number One Daughter already lords it over her siblings on being eldest. And Third, well, she might take it awry – and I’m a little scared of her. She’s fierce. (For those who might not know, it is in fact her toothless grin that currently graces the cover of this here big ugly man blog. Would *you* mess with her?)

I’ve considered calling her “last daughter”, but while technically accurate it lacks that je ne se qua, that sense of effervescent bouncing pinkness that is her. Like I said, she’s fierce.

And now, she fierce and she’s Five! It is her Birthday today, celebrated with love on the day of her birth, which is sure to become a major holiday in the near future. And so, a toast – Happy Birthday Weechin!

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Every day, I am grateful to the people who help me deepen my understanding of important words, such as ‘idiot’ and ‘asshole.’ The past two days have included such singular, outstanding examples of both that it’s necessary to give a holla, as it were.

In a 10 am staff meeting, I was asked by my client to attend a 3 pm meeting later that day. “Of course, I’ll be happy to leave this building, get back to my office, then travel back here for another meeting this afternoon,” I didn’t say. It’s not really that far, and I didn’t really mind. So, 3 pm found me back at the client’s location, where I was thanked very much for coming back, we really appreciate it, and now please sit in this chair here in the hallway and we’ll call you in when we’re ready for you.

Right. I’ll be happy to sit in this chair, it looks delightful. I particularly like the dilapidated ones, how did you know?

(Ticking clock theme plays here, ticking away 35 very billable minutes.)

The door opens, rousing me from happy thoughts of deep-vein thrombosis, and the meeting breaks up. “Ah, sorry about that, we had to break up and we didn’t get to you! Well, let me bring you over to so-and-so, you can help her with something and it won’t have been a wasted trip!”

“Ah, Meester Client, I call no trip wasted that includes the honor of seeing you.” The hardest thing to fake is sincerity, and I do it well. I talk to so-and-so for almost 15 seconds while she thanks me for helping but she’s late for another meeting, sorry, and I use the “call no trip wasted” line again, which I actually carry off pretty well.

The down button, the elevator, and I steam through the exit of the building realizing that if I go straight back to my office, I’m likely to tear someone’s head off. I notice that the shoe shine lady in front of the Metrorail is unencumbered by customers, and remember that I’ve been meaning to have my shoes shined for nearly 2 years. This seems a good way to stare into space for 8 minutes, calm down a bit.

For $5, this woman is sitting below me, level with my feet, shining my shoes. Even as the BigUglyManDoll, I can’t help but feel exploitive – the classic imagery of the White Man keepin’ ya down. As I’m distracting myself with these lingering thoughts of subliminal racial guilt, glancing down the shirt of this attractive East European woman with limited English and a flair for waxing shoes, another potential customer walks up. He’s carrying a portable DVD player, on which he is watching a movie while he walks through the Metro station. He stops to blatantly check out the shoe shine woman, then asks her about his shoes, her hours, and how long it will take. Glancing back and forth between her answers and his movie, he decides to come back later, and disappears down the escalator into the Metro station with his movie. As he was talking to the shoe shinestress, I caught a glimpse of what was keeping him so riveted to the screen.

“Boom shaka-laka-laka / Chicka-bow chicka bow-bow…” Yep, good old fashioned porn. With this here new portable DVD player, I can ride the subway from Riverside to Beachmont to Glenmont to Suitland and never miss a stroke, baby! Yeah, none of that artistic softcore namby pamby, give me the good old tongue-in-groove hardcore chicka-bow-bow, baby.

Wow. All the folks upstairs did was leave me cooling my heels in the hallway – this guy is an asshole. I tipped the cute shoe shinestress an extra $5, just for having to put up with people who need to get their freak on ALL THE TIME.

This morning, just to help me refine my understanding of what it means to be an idiot, I boarded the subway and watch the doors close. As I watched, they opened again, as they sometimes do. As they closed again, a woman pushing a stroller, complete with small child, jumped to the doors and wedged them open by means of inserting the stroller between the doors. The stroller was pinched by the Metro doors (which were not opening), unable to move forward or backward, and now in some danger of being carried willy-nilly down the tracks, like a toddler’s trainjacking gone awry.

The woman was yelling at the driver of the train, who was so far down the other side of the platform as to be in the next station, and anyway out of shouting range. Being the BigUglyManDoll, I was obligated to put down my book and force the doors open, letting the woman and child all the way onto the train and getting my hands and shirt filthy in the process. The woman had the grace to thank me and actually looked quite pleased with herself, having not only leveraged her small child into and out of danger, but gotten on the train as well. The driver managed to get all the doors to close at the same time, and then to stay closed, and we moved to the next station. They cheerfully got off there, navigating the stroller and the now-open doors without further incident. The total distance she’d fought so hard to travel was less than 3 blocks.

And so today, I have a deeper appreciation for what it really means to be an idiot, and to be an asshole. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go get my freak on.

Chicka bow!

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