Big Ugly Man Doll

So there I was last night, up at Pee O’clock in the morning, only to find SOBUMD awake at my desk.  We talked for a while, then I went upstairs to play one of my favorite games:  Guess Who Turned Their Lights Off.  Usually, I have to turn off at least 1 or 2 and sometimes all 3 lights, sometimes removing books from sleeping fingers in the process.

Last night was a full win – every one of them had turned their own light out before crashing.  Score! 

The days of insisting their lights were out before I went downstairs went away when they learned to read.  Nothing teaches personal responsibility like falling asleep in class because you’ve stayed up too late reading a book, and the sooner they learn this – and the Human Tape Recorder gets it already – the better. 

Sleeping With Harry

The Reigning Queen of Pink, above, is on her way to learning it, I think. The flash on the camera didn’t even wake her that morning, and the sound of a camera to the RQoP usually has the same effect that the crack of ice had on Joe Lewis.  She was beat.

Number One Son, on the other hand, sometimes requires more extreme measures.  Yeah, I know, go figure.

He came downstairs one morning a few weeks ago and mentioned that his light was broken.  I told him I’d look at it – oh look, it’s working now!  The next morning he told me it broke again.  By the third night, he noticed that his light broke at 10:30 every evening, and asked me about that.  I told him there must be a problem with the breaker – probably couldn’t be fixed. 

He didn’t actually notice the timer SOBUMD had plugged into his lamp for a week, by which time he’d gotten a little closer to back on schedule and was getting to sleep before midnight.  He wasn’t even mad, which I took for a good sign. 

The first time I caught the Human Tape Recorder sitting under her blanket reading a book with a flashlight, I told her that she had to stop that Right Now.  She was all of 6 years old, and I have no idea anymore what she was reading, but she looked up at me very obviously trying to gauge my mood – she could tell I wasn’t’ really angry, but the *words* were angry, and this threw her for a moment.  I was trying to decide just what the hell the right response was.  Yell at her for disobeying?  Yell at her for falling into a cliché?  Congratulate her on her reading skills?  What behavior was I trying to reinforce here, anyhow?

I decided, all in an instant, to take this lesson from my own childhood, which was (of course) also spent with flashlights and books under sheets.  I had done the same thing.  My parents had made the standard desultory efforts to curb this behavior.  It never worked, and by the time I was maybe 10, they decided the hell with it – as long as I was quiet, they were going to bed. 

So, I figure all my kids are genetically pre-programmed to read in bed.  But there was a critical difference between me and my daughter.  I still don’t wear glasses.  She’s had glasses since she was 2 years old.

“OK kid.  Turn your damn lights on if you’re reading, your eyes are bad enough already.  Don’t stay up too late, and don’t make any noise.  Daddy needs plausible deniability, OK?”

“OK Daddy!”

And we just don’t talk about why all my kids could define “plausible deniability” before they could write their names…

And now, just to check before I post this here at 11:30 at night, let’s play again – shall we?  Be right back.

Still a win – two lights out, one light on, and all three sound asleep!  I’ll take it.  And so, good night.

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It has been pointed out to me – and thousands of others on Facebook – that today is National Coming Out Day.  I’ve seen dozens of status updates stating that people I know are “coming out for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality because it’s 2010 and only five states plus DC recognize that love, not gender, is what matters in a marriage” or things much to that effect.

I’m always conflicted about things like this.  I would love to be able to post something on the order of “I empathize with this group because I know how they feel” – but of course, I don’t.  Let’s be honest – if for no better reason than because I’m known for absolute objectivity – I am a Big, Ugly, Heterosexual, Middle-Class, White Man Doll living in Middle Class America.  I don’t think I’ve experienced negative discrimination of any sort in my life.  Doors open at my knock, and it’s not all because of the hat. 

So saying that I understand the feeling of being a minority feels disingenuous.  I can, however, empathize with feelings that I do understand, namely anxiety.  (That I am not always a calm person may not come as a shock to long-time readers…) 

Let me tell you a story.

A long time ago, I worked with a pretty girl 10 years my senior who used to tell me about her boyfriend, John.  After we’d been working together for several months, she asked if I could come over to her condo one morning and help her move some furniture to her truck, in exchange for which help I was promised breakfast.  Never being one to turn down free food, I cheerfully agreed.  I arrived in the pouring rain, and we determined that truck and futon were not destined to meet that morning.  She made breakfast nonetheless, something yummy plus a grapefruit, and we made small talk for a while.  After a moment’s pause in the conversation, she asked, “So, do you like to be shocked before breakfast or after?”

Mouth full of grapefruit, I explained that during breakfast was fine.  She then said, eyes looking anywhere but at me, that everything she’d told me about her boyfriend John was true, except for the minor detail of his name.  It wasn’t John.  It was Marie. 

“OK,” I remember saying, “when do we get to the shocking part?  You’re going to have to try a lot harder to shock me.”  She thought it was the books on her shelf that had given her away, and I told her that actually it was the Patrick Nagel prints on the walls that were a bigger clue.  Then I remember her wrapping her arms around my neck and saying, “I’m so glad you’re one of the cool ones.”

And it dawned on me that she had not been sure of my reaction.  This competent, self-possessed, smart, funny, beautiful woman had been anxious and worried about what reaction she would get from me at this “revelation.”

And that sucks.

That she had not been comfortable “coming out” at work was her business, and since her lifestyle had nothing to do with her job, it made perfect sense – straight people shouldn’t talk about their sexual preferences in the office either, unless they work in the porn industry.  It’s not relevant in a professional setting. 

But realizing that she was nervous about telling me she was gay made me think about how many times that conversation might have gone badly, for her and anyone else having that conversation with a friend.  Since then, I’ve tried to make sure I wear my liberal tendencies a little more loudly on my sleeve – to let gay friends, who haven’t yet decided to tell me, know in advance how I’ll react.  Life’s hard enough.  Having to be anxious about telling a friend something important?  That sucks.  And to this day I’m glad she told me – she’s become a life-long friend.

So that’s why I’m joining the ranks of “straight allies” and posting this.  As I’ve mentioned before, I’m about 93 percent attracted to women, 5 percent attracted to men, 2 percent attracted to goats and sheep, and 100 percent attracted to SOBUMD.  There was only one time I’ve been disappointed to learn a friend was a lesbian, and the only reason I was disappointed was because it dramatically reduced my chances of sleeping with her.  (Because, as we know, it’s all about the Hey Hey.) 

But the rest?  The questions of who’s having Hey Hey with whom?  Doesn’t matter. 

In the workplace, there are two kinds of people:  professionals and non- professionals.  I know professionals who clean floors in my office, and I know non- professionals in high-power white-collar jobs.  Gender and sexual preference are no more important than religion and skin color in getting the job done.   Easy for me to say, of course, but that’s how I work with people and that’s how I hire. 

Outside the workplace, there are still two kinds of people:  happy and not.  As long as people are working toward happy, gender sexuality religion race money weight nothing else matters.   Teaching this lesson to our kids is one of the most important challenges SOBUMD and I face – not only to let them know that it’s OK to be whoever they grow up to be, but to make damn sure they know that it’s OK for other people to grow up to be who they are. 

After all, life’s hard enough.

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Do you know, I spend hours, sometimes days, talking about funny stuff my kids say, the funny things they do, and explaining the foibles of the malodorous gender for the ManFAQ.  I’ve told you about my experiences in coffeeshops, at birthday parties, at back-to-school functions.   Isn’t it time I wrote about me?   

Why have I held out on you?  Why haven’t you seen the good stuff?   Mind you, it’s a lot to deal with – I’m a big guy.  Some people say they don’t get me.   I tell them “Nobody gets me, baby – I’m the wind.”   And that’s true, but it’s not the whole truth.  So sit back, get yourself a nice drink, and take your ginkgo balboa.  

Because you’re going to want to remember this.

The Hat

Most hats just keep the sun and the rain off your head.  My hats actually encourage the sun and rain to go bother someone else.  At night, my hats play stud poker with real money.  (I don’t know where they get it.)   The magic of the hat has been reasonably well documented, but some folks have speculated about why I wear them, and I thought I’d put some of the more outlandish theories to rest.  I do not have a skin condition that requires the constant rubbing of the tops of my ears, nor do I keep a GPS unit under the hat so I don’t get lost.  (Obviously.)   The hats are, in fact, all bound on the inside with a highly specialize substance that contains my ego.  Without this, my unchecked ego would never make it through most doors.  It has its own passport, required for travelling through some of the smaller European countries – my ego is the size of Long Island.  Unfettered, my ego frightens small children and makes dogs howl for no apparent reason.  Some women have been known to faint.  

Now you know – I wear hats as a public service, keeping my massive ego from invading other people’s personal space and reading their diaries.  Also, I look damn good in them.

The Poems

Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.  I, on the other hand, rock those words like something very hard falling on top of something else, also very hard.  I’m so good, I once had my ass kicked by Charles Bukowski hisownself, just before he told me his view on sex.  (“Interesting, but not as important as shitting.  A man can go seventy years without a piece of ass, but he can die in a week without a bowel movement.”)   Eddie Poe consulted me on The Raven, before I was born, and he didn’t even take my advice.  (He’d’a gotten more money for it if he had.)  Also, I was Coleridge’s laudanum supplier.   Even my throwaway doggerel can bring tears.  I’ve made up poems on the spot, just to chastise errant waitresses:

Don’t pour me a beer in a wineglass, lass,
Or I’ll send you on off to the beer-pourin’ class!
And the beer-pourin’ class is no place for the ass
Of a stout-hearted lass who’s learnin’ it’s crass
To be makin’ a pass at a wine-drinkin’ glass
With my beer!

For the record, she promptly comped all our drinks, quit her job, and got into the adult film industry where she’s making quite a name for herself; she still sends me X-rated postcards on the Holidays.  

The Awesome

False modesty is unbecoming, and I’ve invested so much time becoming who I am that I don’t have time to unbecome.  Let’s face it, I’m pretty awesome.  All the kids say so:

Friend@Work:  “You rock, I just wish all our people were like you.”
BUMD:  “Oh, you wouldn’t want them all like me – we’d just sit around admiring how awesome we all were, and we’d never get anything done.”

I saw a mirror the other day and thought to myself, gosh, what a good-looking mirror. Then I realized it was just an average mirror being dramatically improved by reflecting me.  It broke as I moved *out* of the frame, because it knew it would never look that good again.  Somehow, it just knew.

The police retain me for special projects when they need to gain access to a house; I broke in and the pit bull looked me dead in the eye, then lead me to the stash of drugs the cops were looking for.  Even the goldfish swam up to the top of the tank so I could rub his belly.  Mind you, he stayed that way when I left…   I came home last week, there were 3 deer in my front yard, planting new Hostas.  One of them had baked cookies as well.  The note said, “Sorry, we hadn’t realized it was your yard.”

So yeah, I’m pretty awesome.  I try to keep it bottled up along with my ego, just so I don’t trip the Terror Alert Level sensors and accidentally move the nation to DefCon Mauve, but sometimes, I need to air it out, and flood the world with awesome. 

That’s why I’m going to be asking for your support as I become Good Morning America’s next Advice Guru.  America needs an infusion of awesome pretty badly and, like the man said, I’m just the Big Ugly Man Doll to give it to them.   Together, we’ll take the Friday ManFAQ national.   I’ll keep you posted as I move through the application process.  Come on, America, let’s wake up to the Big Ugly Man Doll!  

After all, what could go wrong?

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Operation Wedding:  1200 Miles in 5 Days
My cousin’s getting married in Chicago.  Game on.

So there I was, Crackberry on and no way to charge it.  I fired off one note to a well-placed, well-trusted peep and hoped for the best.  No calls for you today, Grommit!

We found the best, about four doors down from the hotel, and we began the end of our road trip the way we started the beginning – that’s right, there’s a Waffle House.  It was laid out in signature Waffle House style, which is to say that it looked exactly like the one in Frederick, MD.  The similarities, however, stopped there.  Our waitress was a dusky-eyed, tattooed beauty named Carol, and she clearly owned the place.  Perhaps not literally, but she knew everyone on both sides of the counter, all the orders, all the drinks, and every word to every song I played on the jukebox.  I’m not sure what a girl has to do to look “dusky-eyed” at 0730 in the morning, but she did it.  In between taking our orders, keeping Number One Son’s undivided attention, and delivering enough coffee and calories to feed a small third-world village get us through the trip, she managed to shout hellos to every person that walked in the door that Monday morning. 

Mind you, so did many other people.  “Norm!”  Dear god, may I never become so established in my ways that all my friends know me when I walk into the Waffle House.  On the other hand, I’m sure the grease keeps them regular, and that’s healthy – right?  Anyway, if you’re passing through Bowling Green for breakfast, go see Carol at the Waffle House.  She rocks. 

Piles of Clouds

Do you remember the clouds that looked like tanks in western Ohio?  As we approached Pennsylvania, the clouds looked like hemorrhoids piled up on the ass of the sky – I felt like we were driving into a scene from the Grapes of Wrath.  So to speak.  Once again, we were going to end the trip the way it started, raining sideways and pissing down the road.    

Driving Into Hell

My good friends Billy Joel and Billie Joe Armstrong got us through the worst of it, a musical Preparation H to ease our passage down the Highway of Darkness. 

Once we were back on the road again, SOBUMD rang up the hotel in Twinsburg to see if they had my charger.  They connected her with housekeeping, please leave a message and we’ll get back to you.  And they did – about 100 miles past the exit, but still.  They found it, and shipped it to the house, and it’s plugged in now, safe and grounded.  (I know you were worried.)  Thank you, Hilton Garden Inn!

Rain or no, the America you can see from a car window looks considerably different than the one you see from the window of an airplane.  SOBUMD said this with her camera more eloquently than my humble words ever could. 

Farming in the Heartland

Industry in the Heartland

As if by miracle, we got home in time for the 5pm call with the office that I didn’t expect to make.  My aforementioned peep heard me join the call just as it started and said, mostly to remind our boss, “Hey, you’re supposed to be on vacation!”  It’s good to have friends! 

And this trip proved that simple fact, several times over – it’s not just good, it’s great to have friends.  Without all of you, we’d never have gotten past the front door. 

Congratulations to Sean and Katie, and thank you all for helping us get there and back again!

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 Operation Wedding:  1200 Miles in 5 Days
My cousin’s getting married in Chicago.  Game on.

We left the hotel before most of the revelers were awake – Number One Son being inclined to rise at 0630, time zones notwithstanding.  “Hey, Dad, come look at the sunrise!”  Oh god.  Right.  Sunrise.  OK.  So, packed and out in short order.  We saw some more cousins on the way out – also very early risers, which is another term for “parents of young children.”  

Speaking of young children, the imperative in the morning is to get food into Number One Son, so that he can have his medicine, which has been proven to dramatically increase the lifespan of children with his conditions, especially when driving long distances with them in the car.  So, we turned on SOBUMD’s magic iPhone, now with the God App divinely installed, fired up Bitchin’ Betty, and found us some grub.  There being no handy Waffle House, we turned to a local version – Elly’s Pancake House, in Arlington Heights.  Here’s a pic of part of the menu:  

Elly's Pancake House. It's THAT good.

Oh my god.  This place is everything Dan’s Family Restaurant wants to be when it grows up.  They had coffee on the table within 30 seconds of seating us – and I was NOT wearing a visible sidearm, I might add.  The food was incredible and enormous and reasonably priced.  Elly’s Pancake House.  There are three of them, and if the others are as good as this one, I’ll have to try them all.  Yum!

Once fed and medicated, we pressed on toward Bowling Green, Ohio.  Explaining why we were headed to Bowling Green requires some history.

Where to begin?  In the early ‘70s, DARPA and ARPA became the internet, small “i”, and then in the ‘80s Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML, which spawned the World Wide Web on the Internet, big “I”, and then we got to the crazy Dot-Com days of 1999, where some crazy people thought that they could make money by creating a message/chat board for women who were all going to have babies in any given month talk to each other about how it was going.  They couldn’t really make any money that way, but that wouldn’t become apparent for several years.  The point is that there were a bunch of women who were, in fact, interested in such a board, and the upshot of this is that there are I think 80 or so women who are still talking about how it’s going.   Just as PBS and Sesame Street were the great promise of television in the ‘60s, this kind of community building – crossing boundaries of race, income, location, education, orientation, everything – is the great promise of the Internet, and it’s been fascinating to me to watch this community of interest become self-sustaining. 

When the original hosting company realized this was not a money-making venture after all, these women packed up en masse and bootlegged the board onto their own systems until they found something else to work with.  It is now its own self-sustaining, self-policing community, and I’ve been delighted to be privileged to meet some of the members – pretty much the only things they all have in common are English and babies.  The original babies are around 10 years old now – most were born in June or July of 2000; in our case, Number One Son.  (Number One Son has 100 mommies, and I only get to sleep with one of them.  Hardly seems fair.)  He doesn’t really know that he has a hundred mommies, but I do – I’m convinced that The Board, as we call it, is responsible for saving his life at least once.  Possibly mine also.  Many of the ladies of The Board have also contributed questions to the Friday ManFAQ, for which they have my undying gratitude – and the thanks of a grateful nation. 

So, short story long, one of the Board ladies lives in Bowling Green, and another lives within 90 minutes drive of there, and we were heading to Bowling Green to meet them for dinner.  (It says something about the Board that one of them was willing to drive her whole family an hour and a half up and another hour and a half back, to meet us at Bob Evans.  That’s love, baby.)

Driving there had its moments.  Just before we crossed the state line, there was a great billboard:  “Indiana Coffee and Chocolate Company – To Dull the Pain of Ohio.”  Only in the Great Plains do the actual states gang up and insult each other.  You won’t hear Virginia messing with North Carolina, believe me.  On the other hand, the clouds through most of Ohio looked like tanks, all the same shape and lined up for battle.  Maybe they take that kind of thing seriously. 

The other great part of that drive was explaining to Number One Son (and his sisters) who we were going meet and exhorting him to behave.  We had explained the bribe before we left home:  behave very well this whole trip and you’ll get the Iron Man 2 DVD you want when we get home.  Driving to Bowling Green, he asks “Maybe some other time we could come to Chicago under, you know, better circumstances?”

“Better circumst – What?  What could be better than a wedding?”

“You know, when I don’t have a movie riding on it.” 

Responsibility.  Ain’t it a bitch.

We met two of the wonderful ladies of the Board, Shelli and Kirsty, and their families at the Bob Evans, taking pictures and finding out what we’re all like in real life, and what happens When Blogs Collide!  

Kirsty tried on the magical fedora, and rocked it.

For the most part, the kids ate at their own tables, and Number One Son ordered himself a plate of corn for dinner.  Following a good hearty meal, we sloped off down the street for what was billed as the oldest Dairy Queen in Ohio – where Number One Son made up for the light dinner fare by ordering a banana split.  It’s all about managing expectations.

Speaking of managing expectations, the Dairy Queen in Bowling Green may indeed be the oldest Dairy Queen in Ohio – if you told me it was older than Ohio, I might believe you.  It’s old.  It’s damn old.  My arteries hardened just a little as I walked in the door, just from the smell of the centuries of hot oil.  They had a coin-operated cigarette machine in the front; I haven’t seen one of those outside of eBay in years.

We See Board People! Kirsty, Julie (SOBUMD), and Shelli

 
We piled all the kids into a corner for a sugared-up photo op.  It was always going to be a success, photos notwithstanding. 

Board Kids R Not Bored!

We said our fond farewells and retired to our homes, cars, and hotels.  Tomorrow being Monday, I plugged in the Blackberry just in case I needed…  OK, do you remember the McGuffin from Thursday night?  I plugged in the Blackberry charger in Twinsburg, OH.  To the surprise of no one at all, it’s still there.

Next up:  Miles 821 – 1200.  Destination:  Washington, DC.

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