a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. once upon a time

comment made on the radio about obama's selection for chief of staff, rahm emanuel.

interesting and seemingly pertinent fact: rahm's brother ari emanuel is a talent agent in la who inspired the ari gold character in entourage.

if you hear bella or alex say the words - "anthony come here, i have a really great idea" - eight times in ten anthony will be crying inside of ninety seconds.

marty showed stress before the new week even began. sensing this i offered to take the kids to my folks on saturday giving the house to marty from one in the afternoon to eight in the evening. hours after penning the deal she remembered a meeting she had to attend from 9am to noon that same day.

having gone to bed early friday night in preparation of my day, i woke up at 4am. anthony fol...

when i put anthony to bed it is obviously without the numma-numma's he gets from his mother. i understand his thirst because i share his adoration of numma-numma time with his mother. but sporting a lactation-free body, putting anthony down requires me to get creative, because as soon as anthony realizes i'm there to end his day, he balks. in protest he wriggles, contorts and folds awkwardly in my arms. if i try to put him down before he's ready, his body acts like an opposing magnet to the crib.

one night, testing reason, i pulled the shade of his window back. i pointed to the darkness outside and said the sun had gone to bed and so must he. he looked out the window, blinked a few times and uttered a soft and convinced 'oh'. seconds later, he voluntarily leaned towards his crib. i lowered him in positioning his body in the only corner of the crib he's ever slept in. he slid one of his legs under the mattress sheet (one of his nightly rituals), and pulled his blankets into his chest like they were a teddy bear or future spouse. the battle was done and won.

little humans are odd folk. what makes them odd is they have no powers of logic. logic is what separates little humans from full grown ones. and how much logic they are able to acquire in youth separates the odd grown ones from the not so odd grown ones. so work hard early. it's a temporary gig and pays the best dividends you'll ever see.

i work on a university campus. it's an old one and has tree lined sidewalks flanked by classic, gothic-stone architecture. it's on the edge of the city border and is fully land-locked by its urban surroundings. yesterday morning while walking to work i saw something quite unexpected. on the school's main quadrangle, amidst fast-walking backpacked students was a young, delicate female deer. the sight stopped my feet.

i watched this deer hesitantly try to pick a path through these unusual environs. it cautiously edged along grassy patches until encountering a walkway. here it would pause looking each way for students and stepping back sheepishly when some would pass. when a break in the traffic would come she would quickly step over the walkway to another large swath of grass on the other side moving to the next walkway.

now the oddest part about this moment for me was that i was the only one to stop and gawk at this deer. others walked briskly by not giving it as much as a glance of acknowledgment. that no one else looked at it, i thought i was hallucinating. when it continued, i thought i may have died in my sleep and this was what the other side of things looked like. regular world just with unexpected shit all around. kind of like a dali painting. after about sixty seconds (and about ten seconds before i screamed, "doesn't anyone else see the deer!") one girl glanced up, did a double take and then effortlessly pulled her phone from her bag, snapped a photo and then kept on walking. after this trend-setter, more students did the same.

i was just glad i wasn't dead.



photo was taken later in the day by a colleague.

for the first time in the history of marty and troy, marty ran out of her monthly allowance before me. and not by just a little bit. the girl is bone dry and i have over half my money left. in fact, i have so much left that after learning of her plight on errand day and after fanning my face with a handful of bills i plucked a twenty from the stack pushed it into the palm of her hand, clapped her on the butt and told her to go get herself something nice today, just because.

fortunately for me her jaw was still resting solidly on the ground at seeing my late in the month financial state because any other time such ribald placement of my hand to her ass would have resulted with her knuckles on my jawbone. it is funny what money can do to a woman.

after the 2000 and 2004 elections i wanted to cry. after this election, while standing in an upscale loft surrounded by cheering and hooting followers as our new leader addressed the nation, i did cry.

friday was halloween. anthony was a clown. alex was spiderman. and bella wore a self-made costume announcing herself as a star princess. our neighborhood is one of the lucky ones where halloween is still alive. we on average get about a hundred kids. this year marty stayed to dish out candy and i ushered our cadre onto the busy nighttime sidewalks.

in saint louis, the custom states that you must either do a trick or tell a joke before obtaining candy. these days enforcement of the rule varies from house to house but it is best to have something ready should the human with the candy bowl challenge your preparedness. not yet verbal enough, anthony did a trick. it was jumping up and down. sometimes he'd give people one big jump and sometimes he'd give them a flurry of quick bounces. either way it went the little blonde boy in a clown costume hopping for candy proved to be a crowd pleaser. one thing we didn't account for while practicing anthony's trick in the living room is that he'd often be doing his antic while on the top step of a short flight of cement or brick stairs. we had no catastrophes but it did raise the thrill-factor considerably. alex told a joke. his joke was, 'what did the baseball glove say to the baseball?' after people would say i don't know what the baseball glove said to the baseball alex would animatedly give the punch-line, 'catcha later!'. when giving the answer he had this great verbal peak on the backend which always won smiles. a couple of times he forgot the answer. on these doorsteps everyone would stand waiting and alex would be looking at the ground thinking hard. if somebody went to say something he'd hold up his hand and say, 'don't tell me, i know it' which also was grin-inducing. in addition to making her costume, bella also made up all of her jokes. some i can remember ... how do you compliment a cat? you tell her she's purrrfect. or, how do you compliment a cow? you tell him he's utterly awesome. bella left the boys and i in the dust about three houses in to run ahead with some of the neighbor girls so i'm not sure how well it went over but given the size of her haul, she didn't get turned away from too many doors.

the one oddity of the evening was a full-grown man dressed in a spot-on michael myers costume, mechanics jumpsuit and all. (clarification: this is the halloween movie guy and not the comedic austin powers guy). this lumbering, man wandered the neighborhood and was obviously alone. he did not go up to any doors, nor did he talk to anyone, nor did he carry a candy bag. he just roamed the sidewalks and would occasionally stand motionlessly staring at people from a distance. more than once i found him staring at me. i held his gaze from across the dark street until he'd become engulfed by kids and parents racing by or my own kids would beckon me to the next house. when i'd turn to look back he'd be gone. then i would see him several houses later again looking at me or at seemingly nothing. i overheard more than one mom say that someone should possibly call the police about him given his seeming lack of purpose or belonging. i didn't chime in but will say i wish one of them took the initiative. that guy was freaking my chili out.