Big Ugly Man Doll

I’m all in favor of things that make people say, “Huh?” Everyone should have some inexplicable weirdness inserted into their otherwise dull, everyday lives. Usually, that inexplicable weirdness is me. I’m good at it – I’m a professional, after a fashion, and so I’m not easily made to tilt my own head and say, “Huh?”

Number One Son, however, seems to have not only inherited this trait from me, but to have concentrated and refined it. This morning, for example, he was playing a video game. In and of itself, not a surprise. He was also singing, which is again not a surprising activity for him. (The fact that he can carry a tune is surprising, on a macro level, as he’s the first male of my bloodline to be able to do so for more generations than I know of. That’s another story.) The surprise was the combination of the two.

The video game, which he received a few days ago on the occasion of his Kindergarten graduation, has to do with the Bionicles, some hellish toy creation for which we can thank the fine folks at Lego. This is basically a robot-based first person shooter game set in some robot netherworld, where pits of lava explode into flaming deathmasks. (It’s simple, you see: the Mask of Life has been seized by the evil Barraki, and to recover the Mask of Life, the six powerful Toa will have to wage the war of their lives.) Why is he playing this? I do not ask.

So, as I glance over and see the laser eye beams and hand-held Gatling phaser weapons, with the sound turned nearly off since folks are still sleeping, I notice that he’s singing as he’s shooting, “Day by day / Day by day / Oh Dear Lord / Three things I pray / To see thee more clearly / Love thee more dearly (“Got ‘em!”) / Follow thee more nearly / Day by day…”

Huh? OK, he wins.

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It’s Saturday morning, and morning comes early in the house of the BUMD, because we have children with allergies. Specifically, Number One Son is allergic to sleeping past, say, 6 am. So we’re up, and since it’s Saturday morning, I’m cooking. In case you’re hungry, I’ll tell you what I’m cooking, which is to the right, scrapple, and to the left, pancakes. The pancakes are on the big cast-iron griddle, next to the can of bacon fat, which is being spooned cake by cake onto the griddle (and then an extra dab onto the top of each pancake before I flip them).

I have long since yanked the battery out of the hallway cooking detector, which leads a double life as a smoke alarm by night and a pain in my ass by day. I have not, at this point in our story, had enough coffee to consider turning on the fan above the stove. By the time the scrapple is done – which is not a source of smoke, I’ll have you know – the pancakes are nearly ready, and the kitchen is so filed with smoke from the bacon fat that it penetrates my caffeine-deficient brain that I should turn on the fan and open the window. I accomplish these minor feats and set the table.

We sit to eat, nearly everyone in the house being awake or at least ambulatory by this point, and everything ready but the coffee. Scrapple is yummy. Pancakes are yummy, even the slightly burnt ones. The coffeepot beeps to let me know that it’s ready when I am. Number One Son has eaten most of a small pancake, which constitutes 80 percent of his caloric intake for the day, and has removed himself to the kitchen. The sunlight has finally broken over the treetops to grace our smoke-filled kitchen, and my son is marveling at the grand spectacle of the streaming rays of morning blazing their discrete paths through the haze.

“Daddy, it’s a miracle! The sunlight has decided to visit our kitchen, and it’s shining right through the window to light up OUR kitchen! The sunlight is a miracle this morning!”

I couldn’t help but agree with him. The simple action of the sun coming up in the East every morning continually strikes me as a miracle in and of itself. The rays of light streaming through the window were indeed beautiful. “Big Man, you’re right, it sure is a miracle.” I moved past him to get to the coffee, into the light.

“Daaaddy,” said Number One Son, with the exasperation for ignorant adults that only a 6-yr-old can voice, “you’re STEPPING in the miracle.” The tone was that of, ewww, you’ve stepped in that turd. I actually found myself looking to see if any of it had stuck to me before I fell over laughing. I couldn’t shake the smell of that miracle on the bottom of my shoe all day.

So, if you’re standing next to someone today and you detect a faint odor that you just can’t place, remember – they just might have stepped in a miracle that morning.

But it’s probably a turd.

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“Run for your lives!” shouted the Barbie…

As I’m putting Annalise to bed, she tells me she wants me to tell her a story. I start in with the “Once upon a time there was a little girl who went to bed…” and she interrupts me.

“Not that story, Daddy! I want a story about a little girl and a sheep.”

Now, there must be three hundred places to take that, and I’m not going to any of them with my 4-yr-old, particularly as I notice her cuddling up with a small stuffed sheep under the mountain of pink fluff she uses for a bed. So I tried this.

“Once upon a time there was a little girl who had a cute little sheep. She was a little bit cold, so they cut off all the sheep’s wool, and made everyone nice warm wool coats. Then everyone was warm, except the sheep. And the sheep said, ‘But what about me?’ And they said not to worry, your wool will grow back! And do you know what? They were right! The sheep’s wool grew back, and everybody had nice warm wool coats, even the sheep. The end!”

Annalise, who had snuggled into what looked like an uncomfortable position with the stuffed sheep, promptly sat up and yelled at me as I tried to make my escape. “Not that story, Daddy! I want a story about a little girl and a sheep!”

Right.

Do you ever have those days when you forget who you are, and try to be who you think you should try to be? What you’re forgetting is that most of the time, what folks want is who you are when you’re not trying. So I tried this.

“Once upon a time there was a little girl who had a cute little sheep. She brought her cute little sheep to show to her father, who said ‘That’s great! I was getting pretty hungry.’ So he cut off all the sheep’s wool, chopped the sheep into good-sized roasts, and threw him in the oven! When the sheep was done cooking, he hacked it to collops and everybody ate it with a delicious garlic butter sauce! And everybody went to bed happy and full. Except the sheep. The end!”

“Yaay! Goodnight, Daddy!”

Some days I wonder. Then I remember to stop thinking. Just do it.

-dpl

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I need a good name.

So, what do we call these stupid little big houses going up all over the place? We have the “McMansion” moniker, for those monsters in the upper-middle of the housing market. Now we’re seeing an influx of insipid McMansion wannabes, where the buyer takes a nice little bungalow, knocks it down, and builds a three-fourths acre house on a quarter-acre lot. Increasingly, we’re also surrounded with new not-condos being developed by companies with core condo competencies – like some developer found three acres of grass in a row and told a builder, “Hey, I’ll have an 8-piece Mansion McNuggets, for here, hold the fries.”

Sad, really.

Because I like fries.

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Somehow it’s less exciting when it’s my own journal. It’s like getting all worked up about being the first to write in the new diary, and then remembering that you live by yourself, in a tower, with only the howling wind to read your deathless prose. Not entirely unlike the sense of serenity and satisfaction you got from watching your digital wristwatch flip to the new year at midnight. (You knew that you could reset the time to watch it do that whenever you wanted, and that it was usually off by 2-3 minutes anyway, but it didn’t matter, did it? We were crazy then.)

So, welcome. You’re probably in the wrong place. I am the Big Ugly Man Doll. Stick around and I’ll tell you why.

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