i was brought out of my sunday morning slumber by getting pushed on the shoulder by bella and told: i guess we've left the everyone-can-be-naked part of our life. or perhaps we've just left the dad-can-be-naked part of our life. i see a plush terry cloth robe in my near future.

i've previously commented on the totally schizophrenic nature of children but have never really exposed the same trait in the keepers of those children. the below three shots represent a sub-sixty second block of time during last week's spiritual outing. i like this series because it does much to illuminate the dramatic shifts possible in one's state when little humans are constantly in your grill.

additionally, twenty minutes before these snaps, i was asleep in the ultra-bed. when i stirred naturally from my slumber and opened my eyes, i found bella's round face inches from my own, studying me intently. her expression changed slightly when my eyes opened. we silently looked at one another for a few seconds before she raised her arm, patted me on the head and brightly said "your hair is crunchy dad". she then rolled out of bed and marched off. i share this incident because i feel understanding how my day began may help to explain my impressively alert and welcoming glances below.

as you may have noticed from my unintentionally, unannounced absence last week, i pulled the car off the highway (the car being my mind and the highway being my life ... cliff note for my closer friends). and not only did i pull the car onto an onramp, i actually removed the key from the ignition, tossing the small ring onto the dashboard where it sat all week, with one notable exception.

the hiatus was medicinal. and i'm not talking about your three-aspirin variety but a count backwards from ten caliber of narcotic. the topper ... i slept outside all week. have you ever slept outside? and i don't mean tent-outside. i mean outside-outside. my naked feet poked between the slats and over the edge of our beach house's second-story deck, the ocean winds massaging my triple-E soles. only one night did i sleep alone. all other nights, i had bella or alex or both nestled in an armpit or sprawled across my chest (marty and sassafras slept indoors, enjoying the bountiful real estate their bed offered).

one night after reading books on the porch-bed alex was drawing on a piece of paper with a bic pen. he set the page down and the wind lifted it off the deck sweeping it away. he immediately pointed at the lost parchment and sent me packing.

ALEX
daddy, my paper.

TROY
yeah, your paper blew away alex. you should have held onto it better.

ALEX
you get it.

TROY
no, me not get it. i'm in bed and it's probably a mile away by now.

ALEX
get my paper daddy.

TROY
alex it's gone. i can't get it. here, finish your picture on my hand.

he looked at the the back of the hand i set in his lap, shrugged indifferently and resumed his artwork. thirty minutes later my hand, arm, chest and stomach looked like a drunk tattoo artist was pissed at me. i mostly didn't mind serving as little man's canvass but alex became obsessed with fully covering my nipples with the blue ink of the pen. do you know how hard you have to press a ball point pen against a flaccid male-nipple to actually color it? allow me to answer; hard enough to make the full-grown owner of that male-nipple wince ... repeatedly.

we went camping again last weekend. this makes twice in one month. quite unprecedented. i think part of the reason for this landmark can be explained through marty's last birthday present; an 8-person tent.

i know, i know. there's only four of us in our family, and two of them are tiny. what you're not accounting for in the equation though is what i call the marty-factor. the marty-factor stipulates that when evaluating your space requirements (1 + 1 + .5 + .5) you take the total number of full grown, or equivalent-sized humans, double it and then add one. this is the only way you can guarantee that the matriarch of our family will get a full and good night's rest. when sassafras shows up, we may need to upgrade. so any family, mormon or otherwise, needing space for eight, look for us on ebay come next spring.

and, much to marty's distaste, i always contend that insomniacs are simply victims of too much sleep to begin with.

not long ago i did some research into best practices for sleep. one point all the researchers agreed upon was that alarm clocks are the devil's work. your body knows when it's sufficiently rested and will wake you naturally. i've been doing this for over a year now and will say there is a great amount of truth to that finding.

but to clarify, by waking naturally i mean (1) after having gotten the requisite amount of sleep my body wakes, without any kind of assistance or (2) getting pushed in the shoulder and being told by a hands-on-hip four year old, "father, i said you need to change my pull-up, so get up!"

sorry i've been away so long. i've been camping. i'm sure some of you are wondering what it takes for a man-purse carrying fellow such as myself to survive in the wild. well, first i need my man-purse and second i need a support staff of about twenty.

it was a great outing. one of the best we've had. the only bump under the tent came when a bed came available in the one air-conditioned RV in our party. the bed was secretly offered to marty. after learning of the opportunity, i said she should take it. she acted disinterested, albeit unconvincingly. i insisted.

on the surface, it appears to be a stand-up gesture on my part. under the surface it is the choice of a man who knows his wife well enough to know that if a raccoon drops ass within 50 yards of the tent, the girl is going to wake up. so for good measure throw in (a) two twisty, kicky, sweaty kids, (b) a 100 degree day, (c) one husband who is trying to go four days without showering (for reasons not well-defined) and (d) four people in a three-man dome tent and what you have is a proverbial no-brainer. for obvious reasons, i sent her off and for even more obvious reasons, she went off.

when it came time to for her to retire to the camper she paused on the way out of the tent and asked for the pillow i was using. this common house pillow was without doubt the only luxury item in the tent the kids and i were sharing. i uncertainly raised my head and started handing it to her when i asked what i was supposed to use. she tossed me a cloth object that i could have fit into the front pocket of my daisy dukes and told me to use that.

what the hell is this?

it's your pillow.

this is not a pillow.

it's a camping pillow.

what, for a ken doll?

well, did you pack a pillow?

well, did you pack an air-conditioned camper?

fine, keep the pillow. (throws it at me)

yes. how very generous of you. i think i will.

---

and this was how pissy she was before not getting a full night's sleep. i imagine my choices are looking much more sage at this point.

a detail i forgot to include in this month's gallery essay is that the day after getting the software, marty mocked me because i had stayed up all night working on my computer and was exhausted the next day. i told her to be nice to me and my new software because Apple's Tiger saved her marriage. she, like the gas-station clerk, indifferently shrugged her shoulders before turning away.

perhaps it's just that everyone but me knows that my seductress was really a prostitute trying to salvage a slow night.

i'm laying face-down in bed being woken, prematurely, from a strong sleep by a relentless alarm clock.

through the stupor i realize the object on my back is my sleeping two-year old, himself unmoved by the grate of the alarm clock.

it was at this exact moment that my mind experienced its most lucid thought ever.

the sensation lasted less than a second but in this blip, ...

these were the first words said to me after waking up yesterday morning ...

my high school was doing a production of the little mermaid. i was the mermaid but was replaced when i became too difficult to work with.

and, here is the second thing said to me after waking up yesterday morning ...

ivana from the apprentice was there but i couldn't remember her name so i kept calling her maggie.

and, this was my first thought yesterday morning ...

i would pay some serious jack to have marty and ivana in the same room getting haughty with one another.

you just don't know how a day that begins with such beautiful randomness is going to turn out. life excites me.

TROY
so i think i may have hit the wall yesterday.

MARTY
what? you? you mean you call falling asleep in the middle of a party with 10 people in the room and the super bowl blaring on the tv, hitting the wall? no, that's totally normal behavior.

to say i have a few things on my plate this month would be like saying my high school chum big dog was just kinda mean to people he dealt with at drive-through windows.

if you don't know big dog you'll just have to take my word for it when i tell you he has, without question, consumed more human dna through fast food products than any other person ever has or ever will. while the thought of this may horrify you, it should not. what should wake you in the night though is the comfort-level he had in knowing he was consuming just about anything the 16 year-old working that night could eject, pull or scrape from his body and then conceal within big dog's order. forever stamped in my brain is a vision of big dog in the driver's seat of a car working on a too-large bite of burger while shrugging his shoulders at me.

but, back to me. in october, i'm trying to build two complete web sites AS WELL AS preparing for the everyman unveiling. now this is not to say i won't post, it's just to say what i do post my be less coherent than usual. and for the dozen or so people who don't think my writing is understandable to begin with, sadly, you're just extra-screwed this month.

but before giving up on me completely, let me share an odd detail about myself. did you ever see the episode of WKRP in Cincinnati where dr fever and venus had to drink ridiculous amounts of alcohol for a state trooper? the police official was attempting to demonstrate the ill effects liquor had on the human mind and more importantly, human response time. in the show, the more johnny fever drank, the quicker he'd become, leaving the trooper quite dour. this is how i am with sleep. the less i get the better i perform which leaves my wife quite dour because she is very much not like this. although i guess my deal is the opposite of the johnny fever example because the more he had the better he got so it's kind of backwards because for me it's the less i get the better i become, but you get the meaning.

ok. i just reread this post and i may be wrong about this whole improving while fatigued thing.

but, as i always tell my children, lucidity is overrated.