blogclubformen.com

I’m standing in a nail salon with my son and his buddy, Ben. This is not a place for little boys, which is fine because we’re not staying. We’ll be back, but we’re not staying.

The salon is called Happy Nails—perfect for the seven seven-year-old girls we have just ferried to this spot. Each of them is now standing on a chair, scouring a spice rack loaded with bottles of nail polish, looking for just the right color to express whatever it is seven-year-old girls need to express. Something about the Jonas Brothers probably. Or dolls.

The boys are curious about all of this nail stuff. They ask the girls what color they like, what kinds of stickers they’re going to get on their nails. One by one, the girls sit down in the oversized chairs, soak their toes in the water, giggle at the individual attention being paid to them by the women we’ve paid to pamper them. These are my daughter’s best friends, and seeing them so giggly and silly and gloriously uncomfortable with this is pure joy. Is anything this pure?

Happy birthday, sweetheart. But how are you seven? You were JUST born. Stop growing so fast.

“Guys, let’s get out of here,” I say. “Unless you want to stay…”

They blush.

We go down to Starbucks for Frappacinos, extra whipped cream. They talk about video games and silly cards that sound like Dungeons & Dragons for the modern boy. I think of how lucky I am to have a son with an imagination, with friends who have imaginations. And extra whipped cream.

Buzzed on sugar, we return to the nail salon to find the girls walking around with freshly painted toes. Some them walk with their fingers fanned out, demonstrating what they want their toes to do so as not to smear the fresh paint. The women who work here are overwhelmed by the cuteness, as they should be. This is pure. This is adorable. This is a group of precious girls being treated like their mommies—pampered, mature. This is how they should always be remembered. Where’s my camera?

As we begin to file into the minvans so we can return home for cake, the girls are again careful not to smear the paint or dislodge the stickers. I hear the flippity-flop of their shoes, carefully chosen for both style and utility. Pretty clever for seven.

At the stoplight in front of the gas station, I stop and wonder how I got here. How did I get to be the guy with the daughter and the son and the wife and the nail salon and the giggling and the Frappacinos and the minivan full of little girls blowing on their little fingers and toes. I don’t have an answer. But I guess I don’t really need one.

That would just ruin it.

Making silly lists is all the rage right now. Celebrities I Would Dry Hump! Things I Can Sculpt Out Of Earwax! Things I Like To Think About While I’m Eating Lunchables! It’s like you’re not cool if you don’t have some sort of list on your blog, and you know how desperate I am to be cool.

I thought about writing my bucket list but what I ended up with is basically my fuckit list: Things I Want NOT To Do or See Before I Die. See if any of these match your fuckit list:

• Star in a reality show about people with deep-seeded character flaws, like the folks who come up with all of the different foods that get battered and deep fried at county fairs. “Hey! I know! GUM! Deep fried gum! Maw, go get the oil."

• Have any part of my body pierced. I once saw a porno with a guy who had his shaft pierced and I thought to myself, “Why?!” I mean if you really want to experience that kind of pain in your peen, why not just go catch a venereal disease from Lindsay Lohan like everyone else?

• Have any sort of elective surgery. I once gave serious thought to getting calf implants but I stopped when I realized having big calves would only draw further attention to my arms, which look like Olive Oyl’s after she spent 30 days of starvation in an internment camp for cartoon characters that don’t put out.
  

• Catch a venereal disease from Lindsay Lohan.

• Win a prize or acknowledgement for something I’m not proud of. If they gave out Olympics medals for people who can pick their nose with all five fingers or people who can clear out a room just by eating a piece of cheese and waiting for the lactose intolerance to kick in, I’d make Michael Phelps look like a three-year-old wearing floaties in the kiddie pool.
  

• Watch the Duggars go for number 20.

• Download an iPhone app that lets anyone nearby know my insecurities. “Dingding! The man next to you in the elevator is smiling at you but you should know that he is genuinely jealous of your calves. If you want to see something cool, flex your calves by standing on your tippy toes and he will begin to weep.”

That’s as far as I’ve gone so far. I'll probably have to add something about Sarah Palin soon.

I’ve been spinning for the last couple of days on a new book proposal, and last night I found myself in one of those pockets of self-discovery that makes writing therapeutic for me. But like real therapy, it’s sometimes an intense and difficult and stretch of clarity—one that shows me things I never knew about myself—and oftentimes what I see in that emotional looking glass horrifies me. Is that really the person I’ve been?

As she did in RAGE, my wife will play a prominent role in the new book. In fact, one of the primary drivers of this one is my awareness that she dropped everything to take care of me and our kids and all of the household responsibilities when I was depressed. She effectively put her own life on hold and I can’t say I’ve adequately articulated (with deeds) my gratitude to her. Kissing and hugging and saying “I love you” is nice, but I believe what my wife needs to see in order to understand my love is a permanent change in my posture toward my familial, household, and marital commitment. That’s what I mean when I say the book is about becoming a better man.

I’ve hammered out a few thousand words so far—enough that I’m already unable to see the forest for the trees—so last night I sent what I’ve written to an old friend of mine. Here’s what she said about it:

“..we could have a long conversation about men and their fear and avoidance of growing up. I really think that's why some men get married.”

The second line of that reply caught me square on the jaw. Is that true of me? Did I get married because I wanted someone to take care of me? To do for me without reciprocation? To be, in essence, my second mother? These are heavy duty questions, and I think in years past I would have laughed them off and accused the asker of trying to assassinate my character and my marriage (or both). But my mind is open a little wider nowadays, and I’ve taken the question to heart.

I don’t have an easy, bite-sized answer. Sharon and I have been together for the better part of two decades and I have never once thought of her as my maid or my assistant, but I can recall times when my behavior and attitude may have demonstrated otherwise. How many piles of unfolded laundry have I ignored because I assumed she’d do it? How many sinks full of dirty dishes, how many unbathed children, how many household repairs have I conveniently “forgotten” to address because, well, I was tired or distracted or focused on myself again?

She deserves better.

She deserves the man I promised to be—the one who loves and honors in word and deed. After what she did for me when I was ill, she deserves to see my gratitude, not just hear about it. And she deserves to know that we didn’t get married because I wanted a caretaker or a babysitter. Little shards of her knight in shining armor peek through my skin now and again, but now is the time for me to grow up and be that man again.

She deserves it.

Since I started working at Oakley two months ago, my watchful eye for great advertising has reopened. And last week I stumbled upon a campaign that I personally believe to be one of the best I've ever seen.

The video embedded below, entitled The Human Chain, captures perfectly the tone of the world right now. It takes a universal theme--perseverance--and humanizes it so deftly and in such an emotionally articulate way that I flatly cannot stop watching it.

I see so much of my own life in this ad. I think about bouncing back from a mental illness. I think about the process of writing a book. I think about trying to be a better man for my family, of building a meaningful career, and even of the experience of trying to come up with an ad campaign as strong as (or stronger than) this one. I wonder what each of you sees of yourself in this spot. (Pay special attention to the lyrics, too.)  

If you're interested, the song in the video is called "Ali In The Jungle" by The Hours.

I was trying to find myself in 1992. I was a senior at Fresno State University, sort of a loner, not at all certain of the look I wanted to rock as I moved beyond college.

That was almost twenty years ago and I have fortunately been able to forget that stylistic aimlessness. But yesterday an old friend of mine was kind enough to remind me what an absolute car wreck I was in my early twenties.

The "friend" is the woman behind me. Wonder why she's cracking up.

Notice the sweet gold chain around my neck, the overabundance of product in my hair, and the caterpillar riding shotgun on my top lip.

My knuckles are bleeding.

It’s two thirty in the afternoon, the official end to my first day of high school, and my older sister Debbie is waiting for me in the parking lot. She’s a senior now and she’s going to drive us both to and from school everyday in the shit brown Ford Granada our mom used to drive. I’m supposed to meet her at the car at two thirty-five but I’m going to be late to the parking lot because my knuckles are bleeding and I can’t get my pants on.

I can explain.

My predicament here is the result of a perfect storm of physical and situational missteps that began the moment I was conceived. Something in that magnificent collision of genetic goo regrettably determined that while I would eventually inherit my father’s tall, lean body-type, I would do so a little later than preferred. In short, I’m a late bloomer. I’m 15 years old and my crotch is as bald as Kojak. I have no muscle tone to speak of, my posture (or lack thereof) makes me look like a question mark, and my braces have not yet begun to correct the Elephant-Man-like overbite I cultivated by sucking my thumb until I was ten years old. A thing of beauty I am not.

The second wave of the aforementioned perfect storm was initiated last night when, while picking out my clothes for my first day at Simi Valley High School, I elected to wear my high-top sneakers. I chose them not because I was going to play basketball but because it was my first day and I wanted people to think I could play basketball if I wanted to, and short of a jump shot and hands big enough to palm a basketball, the best way to communicate that fact is to wear high-tops. By my logic, my shoes are an incontrovertible distraction from the simple fact that I couldn’t make a basket even if that hot, blonde Cybil Shepherd from Moonlighting promised to deflower me right afterward.

Finally, I have just finished my final class of the day: physical education. Per school policy, I had to change into a hideous gray P.E. outfit, which include a very tight fit across the groin area so that everyone around can see whether or not you’re Jewish. I happen to know that there’s about a five-minute gap between the time we’re supposed to shower and change into our school clothes and the time when the football team comes in to get dressed for practice. I have elected not to shower because I’m a scrawny puss with bald balls and I don’t want anyone to see me naked. As a matter of fact, I am so motivated to get out of this locker room that I stripped out of my P.E. grays without even taking off my high-tops. But when I also attempted to put my jeans back on without first removing my massive, size 11, Nike high-tops, they got stuck. I have spent the last seven minutes trying to muscle the leg opening of my jeans around the rim of my shoes—grasping and yanking with such ferocity that my knuckles have started to bleed from rubbing against both denim and rubber—but to no avail. Everyone else has left the locker room, and the only sounds bouncing off the acoustically tragic white tile walls are my grunts and growls and utterances of profanity, which have grown increasingly more frequent with each passing minute.

I hear a ruckus. Shit. Football players.

Some fat kid walks by, looks down the aisle at me, and does that thing with his neck that cool guys do. It’s sort of a brief, upward flick of the head. If ever there is any speech associated with it, it’s usually “sup?” (Short for “what’s up?”) I do the head flick back to him but he’s already moved on to the football team’s lockers, three rows away from the ass-kicking my pants and shoes are laying on me. Maybe he saw my bloody knuckles, assumed I got them from beating somebody up (meaning I’m deceptively pugilistic and much stronger than my 90-pound frame suggests), and didi-mao’d before I got pissed at him for eyeballing me. After all, what could be more intimidating than a flyweight, pre-pubescent freshman getting the shit beat out of him by his goddamned 501s?

I know I’ve dodged a bullet with this kid, but soon there will be others and my desperation to wrest my shoes free reaches DEFCON 1. I decide to try standing up, and as I attempt to do so I lose my balance and slam my right shoulder into the row of prison gray lockers. I’m of slight build but the force of the collision rattles the padlocks on the lockers and a cacophony of metallic thumps fills the air, outdone only by the eyeglass-fogging, throat-searing odor of ballsweat-soaked athletic supporters. Undeterred, I right myself. With my right cheek pressed against the lockers (it’s the only way I can stay upright), I reach down, grab the cuffs of my pant legs, and pull with all my might (which isn’t much). My knuckles ache as they rub against the rough denim of my pants legs and the rubber soles of my high-tops, but this is a seminal moment in my life—the moment where I right myself before the entire Simi Valley High School varsity football team sees me squirming like a trout on the end of a line. Leveraging one foot against the other, I give one more strenuous pull and thump! The heel of my shoe lunges out of my pant leg like gunshot and slams into the metal lockers. I’m free!

Bleeding and shaking, but free.

I stepped back, took a deep breath, and tried to clear my mind of bias and emotional attachment. I invested so much time and energy into it and gotten so close to it that I lost perspective. I lost the ability to look at it honestly. And last week, when I finally did, I realized I had to let it go. It was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made, but it had to be done.

I was on the phone Thursday afternoon with Karen. I called because I was lost. I’d been working on a new book based on an idea I had several months ago—and idea that a lot of people thought was strong. I was 20,000 words into it when suddenly I just hit a wall. I couldn’t move forward. So I threw my hands up, sent what I’d written to Karen, and begged her to show me the way.

We talked for two hours, each of us trying to find the soul of the book, and every time one of us tried to articulate it, it sounded hollow and forced. It was a difficult conversation, and in the end it just came down to what I felt—this isn’t the right book right now. And just like that, six months of work—writing and interviews and soul-searching—was scuttled.

I’ve never had to do that before. In fact I think in my past life I would never have had the consideration to alter my course; I’d just put my head down and fake engagement because all I really wanted was to publish a book. But that’s not me anymore. I guess on the heels of Rage Against The Meshugenah, I’m too fucking tired to keep looking back on my past and picking apart every last hurt, every twisted self-perception, every crisis of confidence. If I’m lucky enough to publish another book, I want it to be about building myself up, not analyzing the wreckage behind me and trying to make some sense of it again.

And that, basically, is the book I’m working on now. Building myself up. Becoming a better man. Doing for others. That’s the book I need to write right now. That’s the journey I need to take.

My wife asked me this weekend if I was mad that all the work I’d done went for naught, and yes, there’s part of me that wants to finish what I started. And maybe someday I will. But for now, I’m not mad. This is the natural course of things. These are the hard decisions we have to make sometimes so we can stay true to ourselves.

As I’ve said before, I thought this would be easier the second time around. But it’s not. It’s not supposed to be. It’s supposed to feel like you’re running your brain through a pasta maker. And every so often, it’s supposed to make you feel giddy because you’ve unveiled some deep, hidden part of your spirit you never knew you had. That’s what I’m looking for. And that’s what I’m determined to find.

Killing an old lady was easier than I expected. I mean I had never actually hunkered down with a legal pad and calculated exactly how difficult it would be, but 17-year-old kids walk around with certain expectations of how things in life (and death) work, and I guess I always assumed it would take a lot of moxie and malice and other cool things I didn’t have to knock off a blue-hair. But I learned thirty seconds ago that even a nerd can pull it off, even if I didn’t do it on purpose.

I really don’t even remember how I did it. One second I’m driving home from school on a plain old weekday and the next I’m sitting here in my mangled Celica, squinting through the smoke rising from under the accordioned hood to see the back of the dead woman’s head in the driver’s seat of the Dodge Dart in front of me. I’m stricken by the color of the Dart—a muddy shade of green that was probably the shit when the car was built in the late 1960s, but looks like rotten cabbage here in the late 80s. Only an old person could drive a car like that.

Anyway, she’s dead. I know it. She hasn’t moved and inch since I plowed into the back of her car a minute ago. She’s just sitting there. Being dead.

I suppose I should get out of the car and go feel her neck for a pulse like they do on CHiPs. I open the heavy, beige door of my car and step out into the eastbound lane of Cochran Street. People are looking at me. I wonder if anyone has called the police. I wonder if I’m going to spend the rest of my life in jail. Part of me wants to run across the street to Taco Bell and scarf on a bean and cheese burrito because chances are I’ll be living on bread and water in juvie for a while. Oh, Jesus. My car is fucked. The Dart must be built like a Sherman tank because the front bumper of my car has wrapped itself around it like a little girl hugging her daddy’s leg, and I can see no damage on the Dart. I feel my chest filling up. I want to cry.

I continue walking until I reach the driver’s side window of the Dart. I see the deceased. She looks like a sweet old lady. Probably had grandkids, for whom she knitted itchy sweaters. She’s looking straight ahead, her dead, open eyes staring straight ahead, right at the Kids-N-Things preschool I went to. I don’t know what to do. What do I do? I tap on the glass with the first knuckle of my right index finger. She turns her head and looks at me. I cry.

I open her door.

“Are you OK?” I ask through my budding hysteria.

“Oh, yes, dear,” she says sweetly. “How are you?”

“I’m fine. I’m so sorry. Are you OK?”

She places her pale, wrinkled hand on mine and uses the leverage to turn her body toward the door. Her touch drives me deeper.

I escort her from the car to the sidewalk and hold her hand in the crook of my elbow. She didn’t die. I didn’t either. But I crashed my car and I’m scared and I don’t know what to do. I’m weeping as hard as I ever have, standing on the side of the road, watching the cars swerve around the wreckage I’ve created.

“LOOK AT THE FUCKING CRYBABY!”

“WAAAAAAH!”

A lowered black truck full of high school kids passes by, pointing at me, teasing my tears. I’m still young enough and naïve enough to pray for the tow trucks to get here before anymore of my schoolmates see me like this. Alas, no. School is out and a parade of teenagers slows as it passes by, each one looking first at the cars, then up at my tear-stained mug, then at their friends. Many just laugh. Some point. A few shout teases and mock me. “Look at the skinny nerd crying! Look at him! What a pussy!” I know this is going to knock me even farther down on the social totem pole at school, if that’s even possible for a guy with as few friends as me.

And yet I can’t stop crying.

I’m at the hockey game with my son the other night—not just any game, mind you, but the LA cross-town rivalry between the Ducks and Kings—when the boy taps me on the left elbow and says, “Dad, I gotta go poo.”

I’m fortunate. I know this. I have a great kid—the kind of boy I wanted to be when I was nine—and I treasure every moment I have with him. You’d love him. Everyone does. But god-dammit does that boy need clip a yam at the worst possible moments:

We spend twenty minutes lumbering through the chow line at the all-you-can-eat salad bar place, and when we finally set our trays down on the table and can practically taste the crisp cucumber slices—“Dad, I gotta poo.”

We go to the movies and just before the blue alien dude is about to “make the connection” with the blue alien hottie – “Dad, I gotta go poo.”

So we’re at the hockey game.

“Can you wait until the intermission?”

He shakes his head no, and though I would love to make an impassioned plea that he just cross his legs or stick a churro in his ass until the end of the period, I’m wise enough to know that when he tells me he has to go, that means the shit is crowning at his pooper and touchdown is imminent. So I grab his hand and we shuffle down the aisle—“Scuse us…pardon me…scuse me…son’s gotta spawn a buttfish…scuse me…”—and we high-tail it (pun intended) to the men’s room.

My kid locks himself into the big, handicapped stall because when Evans men go, we go in style. And lo and behold, just as he begins to really get into his work, three drunk-ass Kings fans stumble into the bathroom. They see me wearing my Ducks jersey and start in immediately.

“Nice jersey,” one guys says. “You get that of a crap heap?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Can’t believe what great shape it was in. You should have seen the way these white stripes reflected off the Stanley Cup.”

If this was a hockey fight, that would have been a straight forearm to the schnozz.

“That’s old news,” his buddy says. “Three years ago. Move on.”

“Oh, we have, dude. Have you seen the scoreboard out there? We’re kicking your asses right now.”

“Who cares?” the first guy slurs. “We’re going to the playoffs this year and you’ll just be sitting at home crying about how your little duckie-fucks didn’t make it.”

Suddenly my son hollers out from the handicapped stall.

“Dad?”

“Yeah, bud?”

“What’s a duckie-fuck?”

“Not quite sure of that myself. Apparently it’s what drunk, belligerent Kings fans like to call the Ducks. Maybe it distracts them from the sad truth that we’ve won a Cup and they haven’t.”

Drunk dude number two is seriously lost.

“Who’s in there?” he asks.

“Your mom. Duh.”

And with that my son opens the door to the stall and walks out while still buttoning his pants. So maybe his timing isn’t so awful after all.

The kids and I are flipping through the channels on a lazy Saturday afternoon at Evans World Headquarters, looking for something—anything—that might captivate our attention. My daughter doesn’t want to watch hockey. My son doesn’t want to watch cartoons. And I most certainly don’t want to watch yet another episode of Full House.

So we flip. Flip, flip, flip. And then:

“Ooooooh,” my son says, “Toddlers and Tiaras!”

“Yeah!” his sister says.

My knowledge of this show is minimal. I know only that it’s a reality show about kids who dress up for beauty pageants. I’m intrigued, so we keep the show on and watch for twenty minutes or so, at which point I am utterly disgusted and I demand we watch something more…I don’t know…sane.

It occurs to me more and more that the popularity of reality television is born of the fact that we like to watch mental illness on display. Perhaps it makes us feel better about ourselves to see others flail and embarrass themselves so resoundingly. Maybe our own imperfections seem insignificant in the light of mothers who dress their five-year-old daughters like sluts and people whose homes become overrun with trash and troubled young people who try out for singing competitions and are put on the air only because they are so completely out of touch with reality that they don’t know how badly they are embarrassing themselves in the process.

In so many cases—Hoarders, Intervention, Toddlers and Tiaras, The Real Housewives, and so on—so-called reality TV is merely a glitzed-up showcase through which we can watch people suffer through and struggle with genuine mental shortcomings. Is that entertainment? What if the diseases were more “conventional” and visible, like cancer or ALS? Wouldn’t we be collectively appalled if someone turned that kind of illness into a reality TV show? Naturally. So is our willingness to watch and be entertained mental illness a product of our ignorance of the subject? Or is it our need to feel smarter and more “whole” than our peers?

At least with Intervention and Hoarders, the premise of the shows is to intervene on the illness and try to help the subject get treatment. There’s some humanity there. But with this Toddlers and Tiaras nightmare, there seems to be a more callous intention. “Look at this crazy motherfucker! Look at her! Thank god WE’RE not that crazy.”

In truth, maybe we ARE that crazy. We're just not proving it on TV.