i have a friend who once or twice a year sends me a surprise in the mail. these parcels always come neatly wrapped in brown shipping paper, the address written in his typewriter perfect handwriting. bella would sooner guess what her reward for pooping in the toilet was before i would come even ball-park close to the contents of one of these never-announced deliveries. and, for sure, no two have ever been remotely similar.

yesterday i received such a parcel. i can't tell you how this renovates looking through the mail. it's very exciting. i momentarily held the box in my hands, surprised by its heft, before setting it to the side to save it for last. i shot through the other mail occasionally letting my eyes drift to the magic box. as i said, i know i will never guess what's in it, but the childlike stir created in me is as pleasing as caffeine. after parsing the other mail i slide the box in front of me and begin opening it with the same care as used when it was sealed. once exposed i see the box inside is shiny silver with the year 1831 written in big fancy white script. i open this gilded box and find a handwritten note placed on top of the contents. it reads:

from the briefcase of every successful mormon. in case you ever want to read the inspiring text that fuels your newest hobby ...

inside the box was my very own book of mormon! this used to be his very own book of mormon because this friend, you see, is an ex-mormon which makes him a jack-mormon. most don't know that this descriptor for a fallen latter day saint is my most coveted title. jack-mormon. sounds rough. sound randy. sounds like a fella who would help you get your car out of a snowbank.

hello. i'm troy dearmitt. jack-mormon extraordinaire! it's so nice to make your acquaintance.

sounds cool doesn't it? while i'm on secret wishes, let me share one of my friend who sends the great baubles through the mail. he wishes privately that he was a minority. i don't think he has a specific one in mind. just any ole minority. i haven't really delved too deep into this ambition. i think i'm afraid of opening a wound that may stop my surprises in the mail and there are few things i enjoy more than those so i think i'll let him keep his secret all to himself (as well as anyone reading this).

thank you for the latest brown-paper man. i appreciate you and it.

i spent last weekend in north carolina visiting friends. the night before i was to return home, my office contacted me to tell me a colleague, and friend, had passed away. joe was a young guy, younger than me. to describe joe to someone who didn't know him i'd tell them he had an easy affability you could liken to alan alda's character on MASH, hawkey pierce, and also that his most noticeable and endearing feature was his youthful and mischievous grin which he flashed often.

joe lived life with a vigor seen in few people. one of his greatest passions was music. a year ago, joe asked if i would help him with the lyrics of an album he was planning. i was flattered and intrigued by his invitation. we would lunch or meet at his house to discuss all sorts of topics. it's the closest i've been to those infinitely awesome dorm-room philosophy sessions which without fail spun into the morning hours. life on other planets. the meaning of existence. what makes a good song. an endearing story. the power of language. the mood of sound. basically, these were conversations that would have been endless in subject and enjoyment.

i don't have a lot of experience with death. and by a lot i mean any. joe is the first person i've known who has died. while i'm fortunate to have been spared all of these years, i feel entirely ill-prepared for the emotions i'm experiencing. the only absolute i know is i will miss seeing joe sitting across from me flashing the smile i came to know him by.

on wednesday i had lunch with some people i just recently met. one of the girls at the table was complaining about the state of her dating life. i gave her the typical 'just got to keep swinging' propoganda speech, you know the one that ends with a hearty, yet assuring, clap on the back.

she responded to my spirited pep talk by sharing a moment from her last outing where her date left her sitting alone at a table while he stepped out to engage in some medieval combat using a weapon made from pvc tubing.

on the good side, at least his mom was letting him stay out late, and this in addition to borrowing the car for the night.

afterthought : if i had to guess where the traditional clap on the back business comes from, i'd attribute it to homophobes who were unable to give hugs to their other phobe friends. if this is true, giving a clap on the back is almost like throwing hail hitler salutes around the workplace. no more claps on the back from me. you are either getting a full-body contact hug or you'll have to lick your wounds all on your own.

smart john once told me that a leading theory about yawning is that we yawn when our bodies aren't getting enough oxygen. you do this a lot when you're tired because your body is getting lazy and not drawing in enough oxygen.

smart john went on to say that yawning is contagious autonomically; a biological survival deal. if you see the guy sitting next to you yawning, your body vibes that there isn't enough oxygen in the room/cave/space and thinks it also needs to yawn so you can get a big ole mouthful of air as well.

i have no idea if this is true but i liked it when i heard it. it's become a rubik's cube of sorts sitting on the coffee table in my brain. a curiosity picked up a few times a year and spun aimlessly, knowing i have no prayer of making sense of the riddle but oddly compelled to study it for a few yawn-free moments every now and again.

the new guy's wife

(this definitely qualifies as a string of words i never expected to be said to me in conversation. it also qualifies as one of the most amazing string of words ever said to me in conversation.)

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.

i am starting a business. i'm going to be a Nula. to answer your next question, a Nula is a naked doula. and, if you don't know what a doula is, it is someone who helps a woman have a baby.

why does the doula have to be naked? well, simply because the woman having the baby is naked, or should be naked at least. and why should this naked woman have to be surrounded by a bunch of folks who are dressed. i strongly believe everyone in a delivery room should be naked and this is my contribution to this missive. i will show up at anyone's delivery, undress in the bathroom, walk out and say "now let's have us a baby" while rubbing my hands together excitedly. this is the service i will provide.

and lucky for me i have two friends days from having a baby. guess that do-it-yourself brazilian waxing kit isn't going to go to waste after all. only question is will jenn or tracy get to see the goods first.

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.

i'm not sure how i came to have these snapshots [below]. it's almost certain that i asked for them in some way. but, this is a guy i used to work with and these shots are from when he was in the army years earlier. he was one of those crazy-eager and overly bright fellas who was a great catch for any organization, although companies rarely seem to notice when they get an young individual with such pluck.

the thing i'll most remember about jon is his smile. he could crack a grin that was so authentic and true that it would just turn you in a better direction, without fail. well that's what it did for guys, i'm pretty sure it unglued girls at the seams.

and i just thought of another thing. he grew up on a farm and once had to reach up the business end of a pregnant cow to pull its calf out. and he was like 13 or 14 when this happened. his dad was out of town and the cow started having this baby and it was breach or something so he had to help the process along and how you help is you reach up and work the little dude free. he said he'd seen his father do it but wasn't formally instructed on the process. i guess part of the technique involved pulling the calf mostly out, but leaving its torso in. this is so one of the mother's contractions would squeeze all of the uterine goo out of the calf's lungs freeing it to breath. he didn't know this or forgot this and just kinda yanked it out (i'm pretty sure i wouldn't have done that, wanting to prolong such a singular experience and all). well the calf hits the ground and can't breath and he's realizes what's happened and has to somehow get all that muck out of the lungs. i wish i could recall what he said happened next but i had long since drove my lunch fork straight into my eye as to divert further attention away from the thought of having a cow's undulating vagina massaging the full length of my arm. but i have a really vague notion that his mouth may have been involved. i'm admittedly real foggy on that though. i'm telling ya, i was reeling.

let's now call me confident on not knowing much else about jf.

bella spent last weekend at the betty ford clinic, the grandparents house for any newcomers. with only one kid in our care this meant marty and i were free to light it up, get it on, tear it apart. if you're wondering what such an unbridled weekend looks like for such an unbridled guy, let me give you a glimpse into my full-throttle life:

friday night after work i ...
watched the italian job
and then walked up to the local cine to take in monster

saturday i ...
watched episodes 1-6 of curb your enthusiasm
helped to host a marty dinner party
watched episodes 1-3 of the west wing

and sunday i ...
watched episodes 4-8 of the west wing
read 20 pages of my 600 page book

i know, i know. crazy. and had i not had to participate in the previously scheduled dinner party i certainly would have gotten the star wars trilogy in, had i not watched it the weekend before which means i could have and would have watched the godfather trilogy.

without the dinner party i may also have read 30 pages of my book instead of 20.

and did you know that they are finally releasing freaks and geeks on dvd? as if it's not bad enough they had to cancel the show in the first place, they have to torture us with this embarrassingly latent release.

just as my campaign against circumcision was ebbing, i learned that i had my first admitted/documented conversion. and by this i mean when these new parents were having the discussion about to chop or to not chop my name came up, and in a positive way, a convincing way.

now some of you may be thinking that for all the raving i do, it is amazing that this is my first conversion. i know that's what i thought when my jehovah's witness friend told me that after knocking on doors every week for ten years he had yet to convert someone. i thought what conviction, what perseverance, what a lunatic. in fact, his dedication proved sturdier than mine because i was ready to give up the foreskin fight after just three years of rejection. but, the most disheartening fact about it all was not the futility but the near-believers. the people who nodded in agreement. the people who saw the logic before them. the people who could see the flaws in the process and still decided, in the end, to take the knife to their infant boys.

for those who want the converts' names, whether your intention be congratulatory or inflammatory (for rekindling my faith) forget about it. all of my client information is kept in the strictest of confidence, especially the clients i like.

five or six years ago i walked into a j crew store. during the visit, a certain sweater caught my eye and i tried it on. it was super soft lambs wool and had a thick, heavy feel. being a little pricey i only picked up two, a dark blue and a hunter green. at the time i didn't realize the relationship about to be forged between me and these two wintertime garments. you see, since that day, these would be the only two articles of clothing i would wear whenever the temperature dipped below 45 degrees, except for the occasional college sweatshirt i may don on less formal situations. one day i would wear the green, the next the blue, then the green, then back to blue, green, blue, green. it was a whole thing. tragically though, another thing i didn't know the day i purchased these two items is that i would never again see them on a j crew shelf.

somewhere between years four and five my bony arm joint punched through one of the elbows. shortly thereafter another, and then another until only one of the four elbows was still in tact. what was i to do? i checked back with the crew religiously only to find tube-sockish, wafer-thin or fuzzy wannabe sweaters lining their walls. marty told me my alpha wear was out of style, has been for years, she'd add hesitantly. but, my hands were tied. i had no other contenders and therefore no other options so i continued to wear them, gaping holes in the back of the sleeves and all.

a day could not pass where i wouldn't be stopped by someone tapping me on the shoulder and saying "it appears your elbow gave away" or "i think your sweater has about had it". i would convincingly reply "oh suck, that must have just happened, well i guess this one goes to the back of the closet". but in my mind i spat on them in disgust for their petty pickiness about the completeness of garments and their irrational need for structurally sound apparel. every new day would renew this dance between the public at large and myself with no end in sight.

and then she entered. a heavenly spirit who did not look at my injured lambswool with abjectness but instead pity. her eyes sympathetic to its hurt, her hand gently touching the wound. i can fix this she said. it is here i don't feel capable of putting my inner thoughts out there to be read. they are too singsongy, too personal. suffice it to say the maimed fellows were delivered to her in the spring and returned to me before the next season's first frost. mended and healed with gray (for blue) and black (for green) gauze (elbow patches), ready to drape my awkward frame again. she has delivered me from despair and for this i'm forever thankful.

sadly, i've discovered a whole new world of patch haters living among us.

fricken wretches.

marty and i know a young man. i find him to be quite spectacular because he is unlike most people his age. perhaps my affinity to him comes from sharing a proclivity for never fitting into the peg we're told we're supposed to fit in, by the society around us at least. but he ... he is one of the most introspective and beautiful people i know from and because of it. below is an excerpt from an email he sent to marty. and, for once, i am posting it with his permission, albeit anonymously.

at last friday night's bachelor party (congrats mikey d) one of our stops included a video arcade place. for the most part i hate the modern day video house, what with all these newfangled hi-fi games. like many i'm a classic vids man. today's fare is nothing more than a bunch of space ace's lining the wall. big frills, no skills.

and as a purist in an unappreciative world i was relegated to the back corner of the room, as too often happens, where they had a stand up game capable of playing all the lost jewels from yesteryear; galaga, joust, robotron. sadly there was no excite bike. or marble madness now that i think about it. but i did get to momentarily return to my adolescent years as well as smugly inform some square 40-something how missile command was truly supposed to be played. tourist.

one of my earliest friends was a boy named chris andrews. chris was an incredibly quiet kid. on a true and non-artificial level, so was i and hence our early bond. kids weren't necessarily cruel to chris, they just weren't anything to him. my memories of him are, like the boy, quiet. but, i succinctly remember being drawn to his silent charisma. his most fetching talent was an ability to draw. even in elementary his skill at this was savant-like. as the years passed and chris became more unique compared to his peers we drifted but i always held a private admiration of him.

a few years back i saw him at my high school reunion. the two things most striking about him were his distinct presence and a palpable confidence. but just like when we were kids, it was a silent bravado. no speaking, no posturing just calm ease. this was especially drastic given all the loud and drunken showboating happening between the other ex-classmates in the crowd.

i spoke to him very much hoping his soft manner wasn't preventing him from making a way in the adult world. a few minutes in he recounted how he had just returned from a science expedition to borneo where he charted some previously unexplored caves in attempt to save it from ruin by the local government. six months later i see my man in national geographic.

the other day i sent him an email about the everyman thinking that a well-traveled fellow like himself might have a candidate or two. true to my recollection of him, his voluntary description of one of his photos was leagues better than the actual photo, and the photo is quite good. and, while it may be in poor taste for me to post, the guts of his email are simply too rousing to not share. he admittedly wished he could send more but he was off the next day on a desert trip to new mexico for a cave survey.

it has come to my attention that the most particular of my friends is struggling through a dilemma.

it would seem his wife dropped her shiny new clie palm pilot in a public toilet. he and i thought the same thing, 'oh suck, now i've got to buy another pda'. she thought something entirely different though, something along the lines of 'how am i ever going to dry off my pda now that i just fished it out of the toilet'.

i leave you with a message i know to be fact; all things are disposable given the proper conditions.

it started with a comment i made to marty a few months ago:

"it's just weird that 90% of the people in this neighborhood are doing the exact same thing right now (making dinner) and most of them hate it."

it was next passed onto a neighbor by marty at a picnic:

"i mean how hard would it be to double your recipe and walk half of it down to your neighbors so they wouldn't have to cook for an evening."

and, it culminated with an authentic indian dinner being hand delivered to our door one week later.

if things go right, there should be more on this later. but in the meantime, crazy mad props go to Anu.

and i also need throw a shout out to neighbor anne who brought to our kitchen a farm fresh chicken dinner the week before.

while down deep i know people don't mostly suck, it's nice to experience an occassional reminder illustrating this.

and i promise to stop saying things like 'mad props' and 'shout out' anymore. my temporary excuse; i'm high on people.

i don't make bets very often. the few times i do, i'm certain i will win (exept where e-love is concerned). yesterday i was presented with such an opportunity. the bet: if you put a dime on the floor beneath the urinal in the men's bathroom, would it still be there an hour later. the wager: lunch. my position: yes, it would absolutely still be there one hour later, one day later, one lifetime later (barring the janitorial process).

all men should know where i'm coming from but women may not so allow me take just a moment to explain this rationale. i'm sure you ladies have possible notions of how a male attends to his liquid business but there is minutia involved that most wouldn't be privy to. now i know those that are married or co-habitating have a semblance of understanding because there are drops and smatterings of your partner around your own lavatory. you may on occasion marvel at the quantity or the distance it traveled from the commode but assuming you're only living with one guy at a time, these thoughts are still wildly deficient. now what i need you to do is imagine the mayhem created by 100 men sharing one urinal over a span of 9 hours. furthermore, consider a man's attention to such matters in their own home and then project how their nature may change in a public forum where they are not solely responsible or held accountable for the cumulative effect.

for instance, in the morning when the bathroom is pristine from the night's cleaning, men just step up and do their deed. as early as ten am you may have to move anywhere from 6-12 inches back as to not stand in the shiny pool beginning to form under the urinal as brought about by the hapless shakes and miscalculations of previous patrons. by 3pm you may find yourself a full two feet away with legs apart as not to be standing in this accumulated swill.

so given this you can imagine my certainty when someone said they were going to set a dime in the epicenter of this mayhem at 2:30pm and that it would still be there come 3:30. i know, sheer madness. but this fella was confident as was i, so the dime was dropped at the appointed hour. for obvious reasons we could not stand watch over the urinal so i cannot say if the silver lucre lasted 10 or 55 minutes, all i can report is that it did not last the full 60. i repeat, it did not last the full 60.

shocked and staggered and now uncertain of the far-reaching ramifications of this study, i will buy this lunch but i will buy it with paper currency. and i will accept only paper currency in return, as my change in that from this day forward coin will never again touch the hand of troy lane dearmitt. never!

and oh yeah, everyman submissions are due tonight by midnight.

in case you haven't noticed, i've been out to lunch. i've also been out for brunch, tea and a late night snack. actually i believe someone secretly exercised some technology-aversion conditioning on me because during my holiday sabbatical, every time i walked into my study i would look at my desk, turn around and walk out.

instead, i slept. i had bella ask what that was on my chin. it was a zit. i made two homemade pies. i observed that more people that come to my house prefer pumpkin over apple pie. i burned a cord of wood in the fireplace. i ran the side of my thumb through a cheese grater, twice, while talking to the intentionally-disshevled guy. i finished one book about someone who wanted to have more sex and started another about someone who wanted to have less sex (can you guess which one is fiction). i did some other stuff but suddenly find myself sidetracked trying to gauge where i fall on the sex issue.

i'd like to say that my mind was ready to heave and vomit two weeks worth of quality thoughts but in reviewing my notes, and if the above serves as any indication, it appears the best i'm able to divine would be a wispy, odorless fart. you know the saying "i know people who can shit better stuff than that"? well, do you know people who can let a wispy, odorless fart better than that? you can now check yes to that box. so it may take a little bit for me to get my sea legs back but back they will get. and meantime, i can hopefully spend the next few days collecting and organizing all of your everyman photos which are certain to begin pouring in given the deadline is this friday @ midnight.

friday.

midnight.

be there or be the sex-hungry guy in my previous book and not the sex-laden guy in my current book. yes, the everyman equals sex and loads of it. maybe not for you and maybe not for me, but if i recall my younger years with any kind of vividness, maybe was all it took to get any still-breathing man off the couch and in the car.

well, if you consider the four prime tickets to the david sedaris reading this april that are tacked to the wall of wonder, i'd say i am. so we've established that i'm your buddy, but the more pressing matter is are you mine? do you deem yourself worthy of one of these golden tickets to what is sure to be a night of hilarious bliss.

it's time to separate the alphas from the betas and see who really, really, viscerally, wants to be the one, or three, on my arm come showtime.

now i know many of you would consider marty to be a logical candidate. i'd advise you to consider again because after somewhere between 11 and 15 years of comments like "what's your website address again" and "no, a little to the left, a lot really, just start going left and i'll tell you when to stop" or the daily ritual of getting struck about the head and told that i'm going to be late for work again if i don't get my odor-ridden ass moving, i assure you, her ticket is up for grabs, way up.

yesterday was a good day. i won't boast the degree by iterating through the various boons, just accept that it was exceptional. even getting gigged put a smile on my face, that's how good of a day it was.

for those sending money and thoughts in the name of the tv-cart family (08.07.02), here's a follow-up. not tell me about the particulars of his marriage? perhaps not in an email and maybe not even today but unless he intends on severing all personal ties to me and never looking me in the eye again, this is a story that will be told.

we keep our microwave in the basement. have for years. and the years before that, we didn't have one. when company is over and they want to heat up their coffee or warm a plate of food, we take their morsel, disappear into the basement and return with a piping hot rendition of said item. you might think we would have to explain this a lot, but most of the people we hang out with surpass this paltry idiosyncrasy tenfold and don't think anything of it: "oh the nuke-box is in the basement, sure, where else would it be?"

allow me to proffer the following as evidence. some couple friends of ours tv lives on one of those black, wheeled audio visual carts in the garage ... a disconnected garage in at a home located in the country. as a rule they don't watch tv. as a helper to this rule, that can't keep the tube in the house, lest they may break this mandate. but when company stays with them, in comes the cart with the shiny picture box. here is where you get to envision my grown and portly friend pushing an a.v. cart across a grassy and bumpy backyard into the home so said visitors don't think them foolish or a tad on the eccentric side.

a situational side-effect of this routine comes from the effort required to return the cart to it's spiderwebby home all the way on the other side of the lawn. in getting it in, there is incentive, company and all. in getting it out all there is effort, and work and a hundred pound pain in the ass on wheels. given this, sometimes the tv cart out-endures the company. this is bad. this is very bad. because as you can imagine, there's a good reason the cart lives next to the family automobile.

i received the following email in regard to a sign left by my friend's wife, taped to the tv during its latest tour in their home: given my friends unwillingness to even check the actual writing on the sign for the above email, i'm thinking they will be watching the next super bowl wherever the tv now rests.

i sent an email to a buddy, Intentionally Disheveled Guy, the other day thanking him for a favor he did for me. in part of my letter, i wrote:

thanks again and i owe you a solid.

his, unexpected, response read:

ugh. What's that? It doesn't sound too good.

the really sad and scary thing is, he?s right. sorry Disheveled Guy. i will keep my solids to myself.

Everywhere I have lived, I have this thing I do where I find spots in the house/apartment on the floor in corners or under things and sit or lie down there and read a book or just think on something for awhile. I don't remember how this exactly started, but I remember sitting somewhere weird for some reason or another and looking up and realizing how different it all looked from that vantage point...