little kids masturbate.

my sister in law, who is an elementary teacher, calls kids who masturbate in class honkers. she calls the act of masturbating in class, honking. i fear my kids may be future honkers. while i don't recall specifically, odds are more than good that i may have been a honker myself. my new theory is that without intervention, all kids have the honker gene in them. i r...

a guy and i were talking at work about what it would be like to go to jail, like for-real jail. this guy is a pretty normal looking dude. normal height, normal weight, has to shave everyday, beginning to lose his hair. you know normal dude. additionally, he doesn't have a feminine thread in him. given all of this, i had to set the boy straight. now oddly enough, after defending my standing as the more appealing prison bitch, i swear this guy didn't look at me the same the rest of the day. is there such a thing as a corporate cube bitch? if so, i'm afraid i may already be spoken for.

speaking of baby having, i just learned that the woman across the street had her second kid in a wheelchair at the entrance of the hospital. below are random snippets from our conversation.

me: so you didn't make it to the room. were you in the lobby, the parking lot or what?
her: yes. i was sitting in a wheelchair but could reach out and touch the door of our car.

me: was anyone around?
her: it was noon at the main entrance of a large city hospital on a workday. yes, there were people around.

me: did anyone just kind of stop to watch?
her: twenty people applauded when the kid fell out of me.

me: what was the first thing you said afterward?
her: can i please have a robe.

me: after having a kid on the front steps of a hospital would you give an ounce of shit about a totally silent tampon wrapper?
her: a what?
me: yeah, that's what i thought.

at a social gathering last weekend, unbeknownst to me, one corner of the room spent several minutes of their life trying to figure out why i looked different.

one person said i looked thinner. another explained that was not because i lost weight but because i seemed to have not gotten my hair cut for a month and because of this it only appeared as though i was wearing a batter's helmet and therefore skinnier through the body.

another guessed that it was the clothes i was wearing and that the best they could tell i was attempting to pay some sort of homage to bill bixby from the hulk given my tattered, tight jean shorts, super baggy, mostly unbuttoned shirt and drifter necklace (bomber's words).

upon hearing of this discussion i asked one of the participants if my ensemble smacked of bixby before he became the hulk or ferigino as the hulk or bixby, post hulk after waking up in a landfill. bomber said i was definitely sportin' the post hulked out look. this was not a promising opinion in that i certainly wasn't trying to look like a person who had recently turned into a wild, green, oversized mutant and tore to shreds every last thing on his body.

i'm thinking we may need invest in one of those mirrors that hang on the back of the door.

ok. so we have two of those already. maybe i just need to have my wife ok my outfits before leaving the house.

i'm not happy that it's come to this.

if someone were attempting to create the party environment i would be least comfortable in, they would have to design a halloween/karaoke combo party. two things to know: i don't dress up and i sure as hell don't sing in public.

upon entering the threshold of this debacle, the very first thing i see would be a six foot sock monkey singing elvis' blue christmas and dancing in circles in the living room like one of those hopping toy penises used in Pump Up the Volume.

do you know how scary a six foot sock monkey is? do you know that sock monkeys have a horizontal anus that looks like a set of lips? do you know that this sideways nether region is disproportionately large in regard to the rest of the creature? in fact, it is a whopping thirteen inches in length on the six foot rendition of this cotton-tubed primate.

but why is it sideways? if it were oriented the way one would expect, it would only be slightly unnerving, but tip the damn thing on it's side like that and were talking about a vision that consumes the last thoughts to enter your mind's eye before slumber for four straight nights.

on the positive side, at the least i had something to mull over while sitting in the corner while the non-introverted types did their thing.

thursday morning i woke up, took my shower and then went downstairs to the kitchen wearing a towel around my waist as i'm like to do. bella was already down there sitting at the counter eating her breakfast.

b: good morning daddy.
d: good morning sweetheart.
b: there's another daddy in the basement.
d: oh is there? that's nice.

one quickly adjusts to the rocketing imagination of a young child and learns to nod and 'uhm-hum' with great frequency. so i got my breakfast together and sat next to bella at the counter eating. then the 'other daddy' emerged from the basement appearing in the kitchen doorway.

o: good morning.
d: oh, good morning.
b: there's the other daddy, daddy.
d: yes, i see the other daddy.

turns out the other daddy in the basement was the exterminator marty had let in while i was showering. marty entered the kitchen and started rapping with the guy. i decided to quickly finish my breakfast and head back upstairs to get ready for work. but, the conversation he and marty were having proved interesting enough to draw me in. it's not often that i stand in front of strange men in nothing but a towel and jaw for 20 or so minutes but (1) i didn't know he was here and (2) it is my house and this is what i do. one may ask what can be learned in such a short span between a man holding a can of bug spray and another wearing a plush green towel. here's a sample of what i now know about this other daddy.

our exterminator ...

1. was one of eight children. four boys. four girls.
2. had a nun ram a pencil into the palm of his hand when he was in first grade. the lead tip is still there.
3. is a book-writing, painter.
4. grew up on a farmhouse built where a lake used to be. in addition to several feet of water they would routinely find salamanders swimming around their flooded basement.
5. went through a horrible divorce where he sold his bar in attempt to get his two sons. he lost the petition and was instructed to give them up and pay child support. when he and his wife exited the courtroom, she pushed the two boys to him and said you take them, but i still want the checks.
6. cried when he dropped his oldest boy off at college. he almost made it out of there but as he was driving away his son looked back and waved. it was here he lost it.
7. almost died from internal bleeding after having colon cancer surgury.
8. wished he had learned to play the piano in his youth, but feared for his safety given his three brothers.
9. tried to domesticate a flying squirrel, mole and just about anything else he could catch in the woods.
10. knows a guy who looks a lot like me.

i had no choice. i told the guy i had to go to work but he would absolutely have to come over for dinner in the very near future. once at work i had the following conversation:

g: hey troy. so what's up?
t: not much. although, i just met the most interesting guy this morning.
g: who was it?
t: my exterminator.

this modest piece of banter culminated with the following life-lessons being passed down to me by a half-circle of the hunting, scratching, full-time-uber-males i work with ...

1. the man of the house should always know, and i mean always know, when another man is in his home.
2. men do not walk around their home in a towel.
3. men do not talk to strangers while in nothing but a towel.
4. men do not invite perfect strangers to their home for dinner.
5. men do not wear boxers. (one guy)
6. men do not wear briefs. (another guy)
7. men switch between boxers and briefs. (and yet another guy)
8. men shower before going to bed and not in the morning.
9. men do not run outside in their underwear to grab the paper.
10. sleeping naked is left to hippies and perverts.

i fear these guys are three minutes away from dragging me to the bathroom to prove to them that i'm actually a member of their gender club.

there was a college kid in my neighborhood who had the best trained dog i've seen since spuds mckenzie. they had this deal they'd do where the guy would drive along the street and his canine would run on the sidewalk even with the car. if the car stopped, the dog stopped. the dog would always sit down anxiously waiting for his owner\'s car to begin again. i will admit i mildly enjoyed watching thi...

if you wandered into the what i'm hearing section, you may have noticed it has a new look. in spending the last few days hacking on that, i devoted many cycles on listening to music, thinking about music, organizing my music and even laying hands on some new music. in fact, this month's offering comes from bookguy. now this unemployed bloke jet sets all over the planet and the one dirge he returns with has a total of nine unique words in it, and they're not even in english. sheesh. and, of what little spanish i know, these scant words don't even seem right. i asked bookguy about this and he replied: what can i say, bookguy's smart. bookguy also doesn't question native speakers on matters of their own tongue. like i said, smart. once satisfied with its grammatical correctness i listened to this nine-word, four-minute song on repeat for one hour. i'm smart too.

well, anyway, back to these random thoughts on music. one thing i recalled dealt with how my mother never knocked before coming into my room. any women reading this, please just accept that you should not walk straight into teenage boys rooms without some sort of fanfare or ceremony announcing the visit. you'll will hear things going on behind the door before it opens. this is good. you want this to be happening. ultimately i'm just trying to save you the embarrassment my mother suffered when she burst into my room and found me standing in front of a full length mirror singing and dancing to the Grease soundtrack. i was all over every move from the Greased Lightning bit, using my bed as the car. regrettably, i had the music up so loud i didn't hear her enter and continued the mini-production until her laughter overwhelmed my Optimus speaker 'system'. and, yes i had the whole arm pointing and hip bucking thing all worked out too. i don't play when i'm getting my greased lightning going.

amazingly given this trauma, somehow, years later, i was able to overcome the shame of my mother's invasion enough to ask a girl to move around funny with me on the dance floor at a junior high, all-stag affair. jenna something conceded (astoundingly) and we weaved our way through the crowd to the beginnings of hipsway's honeythief. we settled on a spot and marked it as ours by stopping, facing one another and then moving about in a seizing manner. my mother wasn't around so my body was quick to do what it does. falling into the zone, i drifted somewhere else, my head rolling back looking upwards at the tile ceiling and the random streamers coming down as my body fought an invisible enemy. i was really starting to let go, opening it up some might say, but who couldn't, this is hipsway we're talking about. but again, regrettably, my introduction to dance with other humans was cut short when my thrusting hand accidentally struck my partner in the ribcage leaving her slightly bent, holding her side and breathing irregularly. as people stopped to look and a smallish circle formed i could tell that some people may have been embarrassed by this development but those people would not have spent a moment of their life standing in their underwear, soaked with sweat, a musical playing behind them and shouting at their mother to stop laughing, get out of their room and to try knocking next time.