everyone is chasing something. everyone that gets out of bed in the morning at least. what people pursue in life varies, but for most it probably falls into one of the obvious categories: money, status, fame, belonging, love, acceptance, comfort. it seems that when you reach a certain mature age, say forty or thereabouts, you look around and if you're still with the pack and feeling nourished, all is good and well and you bear down keeping your eye on the person in front of you and your ears tuned to the person behind. if you find yourself trailing too many in the group, or in the wrong race altogether, you pull up, winded. what a defeated contestant in this state does next is wildly unpredictable but most call the collective actions of these folks a mid-life crisis.

given where i'm at in this race i'm seeing runners throw in the towel in alarming numbers. the disintegration of an adult's life with decades of momentum behind them is a bewildering thing to behold. and when children are involved, a tragedy, for sure.

excerpt from american pastoral by philip roth

can i do your belt and tie dad?

that's how it starts. and it goes that way just about every work morning. alex asking if he can help put on my belt and tie. this has been a ritual for over a year now. i don't recall how it started, it just did. and it's always the same. the belt goes first, every time. he asks if we're doing the black side or the red (cordovan) side this day. it's usually a red day and he studies the reversible belt to make sure it's set up right and then he feeds it into the first loop. after he pulls the belt through he quietly says "turn". he says this after each belt loop and does so with an air of concentration and seriousness in his voice. to this instruction i spin in place one belt-loop worth at a time. when i've come full circle he grabs up the other end, feeds the belt through the buckle in his practiced way. if i reach to help him in any way he quickly waves me off saying he can do it. and he does. sometimes when he cinches it tight i make an exaggerated gasp to which his face darts up looking to see if he hurt me. when he sees i'm ok he many times will caution me to "be for real dad" which is kind of like when i'm clowning around reading books and he frustratedly tells me he doesn't want any of my funniness right now.

after the belt comes the tie. i usually pick it out and throw it around my neck. i'll then sit on a bed and call alex asking him if he's doing my tie today. he always is. here he climbs up on the bed behind me, pulls my collar up straight, exposing the inside corridor. he then feeds the fat end of the tie through the left button hole and pulls it straight. he then feeds the skinny side of the tie through the other side. after both are pulled through he lowers the raised collar and smoothes it out with his small hands leaning around both sides making sure it is properly flat all around.

then i stand up and begin pulling the tie back and forth getting it properly centered to be tied. here alex, with great excitement and anticipation in his voice, says "do that funny thing again". the funny thing i do is tell a story when i tie my tie. the story involves two characters. sometimes it is a bunny and a bear. sometimes a squirrel and a lion. and sometimes alex and i. but always one big and one small. to start, with each hand i grab a side of the tie. i hold the little one up and say this is alex. then i hold the bigger side forward and in a deep voice and say this one is dad. then, alex and dad were at lewis park when dad saw alex and said i smell biscuits so alex ran under the slide thinking his dad couldn't get there but his dad could and chased him under there. then alex ran up to the top and and said his dad was too big and fat to get up there but i did. then alex jumped down the slide and said his dad was too smelly and scared to go down the slide but i wasn't and i jumped down the slide too.

as i'm talking i'm flinging the tie around in the usual manner to manage the knot. sometimes when i finish the tie is wrong. too long, too short, sloppy knot, and i have to do it again. alex learned that if i mess up he gets to hear the story a second time and even though the second-telling of the story is always much faster and less animated, alex is always rooting to hear me say "doggonit! stupid tie!. ok here we go again. this here's alex. and this is dad ..."

and so our mornings go.

a new developer in my office is about to roll out his first project with our group. we delivered a preview to the core clients last week and it went very well. next his app goes into user testing and then into the wild world of production. yesterday i attempted to give him a pep talk to make sure he stays focused and diligent in these final hours of the project. this is what i said: my closer friends will easily recognize the move of me starting out talking about someone else but finding a way to swing the attention back on me. i'm old and savvy enough to know this about myself and if it could work for travolta in pulp no reason it can't work for me in my small world.

i believe the first half of your life should be spent learning stuff and the second half of your life should be spent teaching the stuff you learned to others. if you get any years beyond that, they're yours to do with as you wish.

as for when the halfway point is, forty seems like a nice round number to me. so pull up a chair and get ready to get your learn on.

the passing of marty's father represents the closest person to our children to have died since they've been old enough to absorb things. fact of the matter, ken is the closest person to me that i have known to die. for this reason there was a lot of processing going on in our house over the last few days.

minutes after breaking the news, i sent marty to be with her mother and siblings as this unexpected event fell on their family. this for the most part made me a single, stay at home dad. in between the gatherings and ceremonies i've talked to both bella and alex about what is happening and their thoughts on it all. alex asked about how we would see grandpa again. he asked if grandpa was in heaven. he asked if grandpa was sad. he asked why people were crying. essentially, he asked a bunch of normal and legitimate questions, many of which we talked through together because i didn't know the answers any better than he did.

as for bella, she didn't ask a thing. to a direct question asking her about her questions, she said she had none. while at the wake i asked her if she wanted to go up and say goodbye to grandpa. she said she didn't. when marty later asked her about it, bella said she already did say goodbye. i wasn't really sure how to interpret bella's reticence to talk about it but i gave her space because she didn't seem upset or withdrawn and just kept telling her that if she had questions she could come talk to me. she said she knew this but never asked a single one. the morning of the burial, bella drew this picture while eating breakfast.



after looking at it, i asked her about the third item in the legend. she said that she would have used that mark next to grandpa if he had been murdered but since he wasn't she didn't have to. still curious, i stood for a moment studying the picture in my hand feeling there was a follow-up question i was missing. my eyes focused on her perception of grandpa's face and i saw that he was smiling. i thanked bella for making the picture, told her i thought it was special and walked away. how bella portrayed her grandfather in her drawing tells me she has, like her mother, a healthy understanding of what transpired in this last week. in fact, i think she reached this point far sooner than i had. i would typically say i'm pretty good at not over-thinking a problem but perhaps i'm not as good at it as i like to think i am.

it was alex who woke me up. i had spent the night in his bunk bed. he had slept in my spot next to marty.

he told me it was saturday. he told me it was time to get up. finally relenting and beginning to move he told me that when i got out of bed he would be able to see my underwear. i agreed adding that the only reason he would see underwear at all is because i slept in his bed and not my own (i'm not devoid of respect). so the first thing i did on this particular saturday was awkwardly climb down a miniature wooden ladder while being taunted with a chant of 'i can see your underwear. i can see your underwear.'

what little energy i possessed at the moment was spent safely navigating the indiana-jones like ladder. once down the chant followed me as i groggily ambled to the bathroom. at some point i decided to see how long it would take for the taunting to die on it's own, naturally.

i thought using the restroom might put me over the hump but all that achieved was having alex pause to lean around to watch me pee. then the lambasting changed from 'i can see your underwear' to 'i can see your penis'. my penis was surprised by this early-morning audience. it certainly hasn't happened enough in its meager opinion. the cry continued until my penis went back into its quiet house on its even quieter cul de sac. back to the underwear chant.

things surely got to the point of intervention. i wanted to. needed to. three minutes in the morning are like two hours after seven pm. but i gritted my teeth. then i brushed them. and before my electric toothbrush pulsed marking the end of my brushing time, the chant was magically done too.

i was off to a good dad day.

the advice i give to young technologists who work with me.

i began my first day of forty sick. i'm not in tune enough with my body to know if it was rebelling against leaving my thirties or being pissy about entering my forties. either way, the coughing and hacking kept me home. i wasn't about to go in public on my first day in a new decade sounding like a feeble old man.

marty spent much of her day out and about giving me an unusually quite house to recuperate in. i puttered about trying to catch up on my chores which piled up given my on-the-couch state the day before. intermittently i sat down at the piano. i'm learning to play jingle bells so i can support alex while he sings 'jingle bells, batman smells' on christmas day.

my folks were coming down for dinner. when they arrived marty and the children were still out. we sat and caught up for a bit. when marty and kids did arrive my dad told bella that it was thirty-nine years a some months ago that they went to the pound to get me. i added it was good they were ok with taking home a mutt. bella gave the two of us a practiced eye roll.

we went to my favorite eatery at the moment. it's a persian place on south grand called kabob international and their food is ridiculous. the maternal owner seems smitten with our children and dotes on us like we were kin. anthony was drawn to a ramp connecting two rooms that had beads hanging in the doorway. he kept animatedly running through them with his arms waving until he lost his balance and face-planted into the bar. also eating there was a neighbor with his two sons (a week earlier i saw his wife eating there as well). we exchanged pleasantries and our adoration for the food. when i said i was here for my birthday he said he was here a month earlier (nov 7th) when he turned forty. crazy little world.

for dessert we went to ted drewes. drewes sells custard year round and custard and christmas trees during the holidays. the place is a scene straight out of christmas story with old-school traditionalist on the hunt for that perfect christmas tree. they have everything but the barrel-fire to keep the workers warm. no matter how cold or late it is our kids always fight to eat their various concrete mixtures in the parking lot, lazing about on the car. this night we went home.

when we walked in the door the house was richly decorated with helium balloons. there were scores of them throughout each room. they weren't there when we left. marty and the kids had spent much of their day down the street at a friend's house. they were drawing my cards and readying these balloons which the mom agreed to decorate our house with while we were at dinner. these are the touches in life that let you know you are part of something.

after eating dessert and sending grandparents home and getting children to bed, i called my friend snake in colorado. he had sent me an email earlier in the day and i was months overdue in returning a call to him. we caught up and compared our thoughts on the boons and bites of aging. i ended the call by saying "see ya dave" which is probably the first time i haven't called him by his snake moniker since our friendship began some thirty years ago. this could be one of the bites of forty.

marty and i then sat in front of the fire, each looking minutes from bed. instead we held our comfy spots and talked for over two hours about when we were young and re-visiting how we met and the nuances and fortunate twists that surrounded our coming together. this more than any other component of my life makes being forty not only ok but actually better than being thirty-something or twenty-something. i think i'm going to be ok with this leg of the marathon.

i'm a voyeur. but of a very innocent and pedestrian type. that is, i like to see the parts of life no one else feels is interesting. i like hearing about people's hobbies, their proclivities, their favorite toys when young, what they do when they get home from work, odd surgeries they may have had. essentially i like learning about things that do not deal with education, profession or relationshi...

one of the few downsides of loving your family, work, home and life is that it is extra-hard to do things you don't like doing on the rare occasions such things sneak into your world.

last week i had my second annual review at work. it was favorable. and it came with a raise. just as my first review at the new job did. some folks may consider a raise mandatory but my last job taught me that this is just not so. while at the bank, one of the largest in the country, i went several years without a wage increase. this trend came after the bank i worked for was purchased. the new co...

i didn't post yesterday because i was fast asleep by 8:30pm sunday night and didn't wake until 7:45am the next morning. i slept stupendously. i was finally stirred by the only guy in the house who got more sleep than me, anthony. he was three minutes into his day and already on fire, walking around pushing things over, opening dresser drawers and flinging delicate objects against the wall. he came at me with a toothy smile thirsting for a tickle fight. and you know what i did? i smiled back. i smiled before my morning shower, tinkle, coffee or bran muffin. it was at this grinning moment i saw the secret to his blissful existence ... sleep. well, that and not taking any shit or voluntarily doing anything he doesn't want to. and well, there's also his screaming like a wild man when he is hungry and the food item of his choosing is not immediately before him. but aside from those few sticking points he's quite a happy chap.

in fact he's so happy, he doesn't even care if he's got a marbled ball of feces tumbling around his diaper pushing and contorting against his miniscule butt cheeks. if you can have that mess going on and still crack a smile, i think it's clear you've got your world figured out.

i stopped taking vicodan on saturday. i'd been on them for a week an a half and they certainly handled their business. after leaving the hospital, i never experienced discomfort except once when i got lazy about my pill schedule. reason i had to quit them is they were clouding my thoughts and to my great pleasure i have a job that requires unclouded thought. what i didn't account for was the lingering effects of the narcotic.

when i arrived to work on monday i was still a touch foggy. in my addled and unproductive state, i somehow stumbled upon this guy randy pausch. mid last year randy, a college professor, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given 3-6 months to live. he has three kids, his oldest being one year younger than bella. the stir about him stems from how he has shouldered this tragic development. how everyone found about him was through his Last Lecture. last lectures are a university-ritual and occur when a long-standing prof finally steps down and delivers their final official lecture. randy's last talk, titled Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, focuses not on his field of study, virtual reality, but instead on his life experience. my favorite bit in there was something a female colleague told him about dating: the hour long talk was worth those twenty-seven words alone. intrigued i dug a little deeper and found another, subsequent talk randy gave at another university on time management (he does get to claim a bit of authority on the topic after all). also very informational and inspiring. and if you're still jonsin' for more randy, as was i, there's a diane sawyer interview that is not great, but ok.

his experience is surely adding some perspective to my current state which in comparison would barely rate as a head cold, or maybe even a festering whitehead.

marty woke up 20 minutes late. i woke up 30 minutes late. what we were waking up late for was sunday brunch. guests were arriving in less than an hour and we were still bleary, un-showered and food-less.

marty made it to the kitchen first but was slowed down because alex wanted to help her make the custard french toast and bran muffins. after getting the fire going, i was soon hobbled by anthony nipping at my heels while working on the bacon. bella was yelling something indecipherable down the stairwell. the phone rang. it was marty's mother calling from florida. marty left her food station to gab ... for twenty minutes .. while i juggled food and humans. bella appeared in front of me seemingly out of thin air. she stretched her hand out forcing on me a full-size sheet of paper. once in hand, she turned on a heel and marched back upstairs. i read enough of the page to see it was a set of demands. i tossed it to the side and continued my circus act. marty hung up the phone minutes before our guests arrived and when she walked them into the kitchen made some crack to the room about how i should be cooking the bacon differently. our new audience was about to get a marital show-down, and i said as much, but comically announcing the point brought enough levity to pull us out of the spousal nose-dive and we went on to have a wonderfully homey and smiley day with friends.

after stomachs were full and the general fervor ebbed, i noticed bella's note on the counter. she was now beyond her funk and running about the house with her visiting playmates. i took the moment to read her text in full.


translated:
i decided that my webkinz is being cramped in their bed so until i can play webkinz again i'm staying in my bed and i will only come out when a movie is in or to play on the computer.

p.s. if you want me to come out you'll have to let me play webkinz again.

i'm hungry.

BREAKFAST ORDER:
oatmeal
mcdonalds
waffles
toast
pancakes
daddy cereal

for mom and troy
from bella

the true source of her angst is apparent given her use of "mom and troy" in the closing. bella lost her computer privileges a few weeks back and has been fretting for the webkin horse she received for christmas. for the uninitiated (read spared), you care for your webkin pet in this online environment, routinely giving it love and food and toys. after meting out the restriction i had a premonition that when bella did again log onto the website, she'd be met by a decaying, fly-covered horse carcass with cartoony fumes coming out of its sunken abdomen. another parent told me this is not possible in that the site is quite liberal with children's oversights and the worst she'd find is a pouty and tearful version of her horse. i think this is just another example of how our society is coddling our children to unhealthy degrees and years from now when bella finds some neglected real-life-pet molding in the bottom of an aquarium she will surely express surprise if not complete shock. and when her crest-fallen face turns to me for answers i'm going to be the one that finally delivers her the truth, "you should have stuck with those bullshit webkinz."

lately marty has been sending anthony in to wake me in the morning. reason is he is better at it than anyone else in the house. in trying to get me to play with him he hits me about the face, perches himself on top of my head hoping i'll try to make him fall and/or buries my face with books, toys and clothes. yesterday he woke me by trying to force a plastic car into my mouth. very effective that. i groggily sat up, patted him on the head and moved to the bathroom.

i mindlessly turned the shower on and walked to my office giving the hot water a chance to start its day. anthony waddled behind me at each stop hoping i'd toss him in the air or read him the book he held in his hand. as i leaned over my desk typing my password i felt something on my foot and looked down to see an arc of pee coming from beneath his unbuttoned onesie and landing on the top of my foot. he looked up at me proud and smiling. from my up-high view i didn't notice that he was diaper-less. my mind tried to remember if before cramming the matchbox in my mouth if he had sat on top of my head that morning. i couldn't be sure. while still watching the stream i let go a throaty "AAAAAAHHHHHHGGGGG!" hearing my exclamation marty innocently called from downstairs, "is anthony peeing?"

on the good side, i couldn't have been in a better place in my day to get pissed on. i was already naked and the running shower should have reached a steamy state by now. when i finished washing my foot five times (and my head twice just in case), i pulled the curtain back to find alex standing in the bathroom. his pants were around his knees and he was fumbling with the front of his underwear.

hey dad! look at this?

what am i looking at alex?

i can pull my penis out of this hole in my underwear.

well yes you can. and it's only 8:12 in the morning.

do you want to try to pull my penis out of my underwear?

not today pal. i gotta get ready for work.

standing in the kitchen, i quickly ate a bran muffin, got dressed and headed down to take the kids to school. as i descended the stairs alex was standing in the foyer with his pants, again, at his knees and showing his new trick to the rest of the family.

look mom. look della. i can take my penis out of my underwear through this hole.

(the girls bend and crouch to see the action)

i see that alex. now can you put your coat on for me.

no. wait. one minute mom. do you want to do it?

no. i don't need to do it alex.

della? do you want to do it?

yes!

no. bella doesn't need to do it either. please put your coat on alex. you're going to be late.

i wish i had a penis. (bella said in her saddest voice)

while not as noteworthy, this day held like surprises for me throughout. but i absorbed them all with a broad grin thinking at least these humans weren't smilingly dousing me in fresh urine, nor were they offering to let me bend and contort their penis through a too-small and not-straight-enough passage in their jockey briefs. you can't keep a man with this outlook down. it just can't be done.

it was on a thursday, August 23 to be precise, 5:42pm to be even more precise, that i carried our home's only television from the tv room to the basement. this was the first thing i did after arriving home from work. i did this namely because when i walked in the door and dropped my bag marty appeared before me and said, "i want you to put the tv in the basement" to which i said, "now?" to which s...

excerpt from hyrum smith's ten natural laws of successful time and life management ... a book i've read this time of year for seven years now.

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. old

excerpt from Phillip Roth's The Human Stain

marty took the kids on a play date a while back. when she came home she was morose. i asked what was wrong. she said she felt like she just walked off the set of 90210 and that all of her clothes were ugly, and out of style, and didn't fit her right and all these other moms not only managed to keep up with the latest trends but their clothes were also ironed and free of kool-aid and/or vomit stains. i studied marty momentarily, gauging if she was working towards a punch-line, because this is pretty unlike the girl i'm married to. there was no punch-line.

her observations about the moms at our kids' preschool are right though. they are stylish, not quite high-fashion but certainly trendily-appointed. think camouflage capris. they also somehow seem to always be freshly showered too. these are not the sorts of things the dearmitt-walter home can claim with any sort of daily regularity.

seeing my partner injured so, i jumped in as it seems men are wont to do. i said to her, 'marty, you're a parent. you know this. you accept this. they don't. they dress like teenage girls in a sophomoric attempt to transport themselves back to when they were the popular kid in school and lived at the mall because for them it is a way to escape the reality of their faltering adulthood."

my words did not hit the mark. later that day, marty called one of her three sisters. the sister said ... "marty, while you're looking at them wishing you looked nicer, they are probably looking at you wishing they had the self-esteem to not try so hard." yeah, i guess that's sorta ok advice. ok enough to mend marty's mood more than my own words at least. what do you say we call it a girl thing and leave it at that.

admittedly, after hearing the sisters take on things, i thought more about it. while we'll gladly take the self-esteem card, i don't know that it would work for everyone. for instance some of these grown, near-forty women wear thongs and frilly bras (i know this because so many of these items conspicuously peek out of their other teenager wear). the hottest piece of lingerie in our home is a 1987, threadbare, psychedelic furs concert tee marty sometimes wears to bed. unfortunately when she puts this wisp of a garment on she's not always attempting to ignite our relationship. i know this because when she looks at me looking at her in it, she sometimes sighs and says:

MARTY
don't even think it. i'm tired and i'm going to bed.

TROY
but you got THE shirt on.

MARTY
the only reason i got THE shirt on is because you forgot to wash whites again.

TROY
it could be fate talking to us.

MARTY
well, you or fate need to do a load of laundry before i'm taking any messages.

conversely, if she did ever come to bed in a bedazzled or satiny thong, we'd spend twenty minutes studying it, talking about how comfortable it was (or wasn't) and examining the physics of how it worked. marty would probably convince me to try it on and then we'd laugh hysterically at the outcome and i'd eventually do zany dances on the bed. after tiring of the sport i'd ask her to put the furs shirt on and she would and we'd return to our life in our home, which is quite a ways away from the 90210 zip code. and for us, gladly so.

it was twenty years ago today that i left colorado. i had just graduated high school and was headed to saint louis to attend college. it was not my choice. i had forfeited my option to stay in the state by not taking control of a situation earlier. this was one of my first severe lessons in life. as i pulled off I-25 and onto I-70 east i recall repeatedly looking into the rear-view mirror, watching the mountains dissipate in the distance. i couldn't cry outright because my home-town pal snake was cheerily riding shotgun next to me. his jovial spirit was certainly a by-product of his golden two-way ticket.

time has shown, leaving fort collins and colorado was one of the best doses of medicine i ever ingested. staying there would have stunted my emotional growth more than a pack a day habit would have stymied my physical maturity. leaving the serene shelter of fort collins granted me not one but two re-inventions of myself (the first of which lacked some of the potential i thought possible). it allowed me to shake off my adolescent conditioning and live a life governed by natural instincts rather than societal expectations. i'm unable to quantify how this change in approach improved my life and ultimate fulfillment other than to say it was immense.

another unanticipated boon of the change was oddly enough my theatre-going. before moving away, i had never gone to movies alone. after the move, i went solo quite frequently (having no one to go with) and found it to be wonderfully liberating. i've actually tested this theory against real-life folks and find it to be mostly predictable. that is, people who live in their hometown seldom or never go to movies alone and those who have had some major change in geography will sit alone without compunction if not by preference. i know it's sad to to insert this sophomoric discovery in with such a heartfelt reveal but i'm disproportionately proud of this observation.

i do have great adoration and warmth towards colorado and love saying i am from the state. a pre-boom, pre-california colorado where kids rode bikes into the mountains without helmets, routinely ice-skated on wild lakes and always knew on which horizon the sun would set. i may return one day but will do so as a different person and with different expectations. and thanks to in-town family i love and a job i greatly enjoy in saint louis, i will patiently do so many, many years from now.

thursday began wonderfully. the night before i launched the new and improved everyman making it to bed at a respectable 2:30am. in the morning, i woke up after marty's first nudge, showered and ate breakfast before anyone else had risen. i got bella awake with a negligible amount of effort, dressed her and had her sitting at the breakfast bar with time to spare. while she ate corn-pops and my vietnamese coffees brewed, i serenaded her with my very own version of tori amos' cornflake girl which began "bella was a corn-pop girl" to which she immediately stopped me and told me not to call her 'girl'. i improvised with "bella was a corn-pop kid." this was also shot down. as was child, lady, woman and scamp. i then ushered her to school came back grabbed my bag and after receiving a hearty push out the door from alex was on my way.

when i stepped off the curb into the alley behind my house i twisted my ankle. and by twisted i mean horrifically buckled it so far that the little bump on the outside of my ankle touched the cement. i might have said a couple of swears, like a really long and creative collection of them. there was an older chinese couple walking by when it happened and the guy laughed, like a for real belly-chortle. i gave him the benefit and assumed he was admiring my robust use of language. the pain was excruciating. i collected myself and tested the foot. even though my walking commute is under a half a mile i didn't think i'd make it. i hobbled back inside and collapsed on the foyer bench. marty came down to check on me. i felt like one of the kids sitting atop the bathroom radiator waiting for a spiderman bandaid. being the receiver of such tender focus was a nice change. in the end marty put a compression wrap on the foot and i was back out the door.

work went well. upon returning home i found marty in the kitchen. i asked how her day went. she stopped, leaned a hip on the counter and succinctly described it as 'pretty terrible'. she slipped coming down the stairs and jacked up her ankle (i know, kinda funny in a coincidental way). anthony was sick. bella had to be picked up early from school because of allergies. and alex was testing her at every bend and currently serving a really long time-out. i kissed her on the back of the neck and said i was sorry her day was not better and that i'd go wrangle children so she could have some time.

i went upstairs. the first child i found was alex in the bathroom. he was using the sink and when i looked around the corner saw that he was rotating a bar of soap between his lathered hands. i stepped behind him and told him he had enough soap. he put the bar down and i grabbed one of his hands between mine and started washing it. something about it felt wrong but i couldn't make it out. i lifted my hands to look at them. they were shiny. as i studied them he stepped back to face me holding his arms up towards me. coating his hands, his arms, some of his face and much of his shirt was a generous layer of Vaseline. i looked at my hands again. he had infected me too.

Vaseline has been my nemesis since childhood. you might know it as petroleum jelly which is possibly the worst name for anything meant for non-prescription use. bella for many years pronounced it as scasolene. i'm also pretty sure it is the goo they put on thermometers before sticking them into people's rectums in the hospital, which is also pretty much all i need to know about a product. i immediately turn the water on and the second my hand gripped the faucet i felt the murky grease bleed through my clenched fingers. double-duped. there was enough bottom-grease on that handle for 68 thermometers, so much in fact the silver knob had completely lost its shape. i pulled my hand back and stared at it again. i then looked at the source of this mess and he innocently held his arms straighter and with a shrug of his bony shoulders said, 'it won't come off'. at the conclusion of this matter-of-fact statement, i heard a thumb kill a running stopwatch in my head. marty's parental calvary made it exactly 89 seconds before being cast onto the heap of fallen care-givers.

i really need a sure wind to come and blow this dark cloud away from my home.

04.30am		put my computer to sleep after working on a site design for 7 straight hours
04.35am		get undressed in the dark and fall into bed only to learn alex is sleeping in my spot. i yank my pillow from under his head and drag it behind me to his bed.
04.40am		listen to bella grind her teeth for five minutes and do some unqualified projections on what orthodontic expenses will look like in ten years.
04.45am		fall asleep
06.18am		roll over and smash my face into a metal thomas the tank engine toy. attempt to throw it across the room but send it into the wall next to the bed. fall back asleep.
07.30am		get pushed in the head by alex's foot and told to get out of his bed. i push him away telling him to go ask mom.
07.34am		get shoved again by alex, this time with a hand, and told more emphatically to remove myself from his bed. i repeat the instruction to take it up with his mother. he leaves.
07.50am		pushed in the back by marty and told to get up for work.
07.53am		bowl of grapes spilled on my head and chest as alex roughly climbs over me for the thomas train that accosted my cheek and nose earlier.
08.00am		pushed harder in the back by marty and told she's not telling me again to get up.
08.06am		tickled by bella and excitedly told 'first one to the tv room gets to pick first show'. i tell her i hate the formulaic brainwashing that happens on modern broadcasting and am fifteen hours into a boycott. moments later i hear her shout her first-show victory through the house.
08.10am		again shoved in the back by marty and told i am ruining her morning.
08.32am		i wake, naturally, and stumble to the bathroom feeling surprisingly refreshed and have a notion it is going to be a good day.
08.35am		i find my electric toothbrush lying behind the toilet. it seems the good day hunch was a tad premature.