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Tonight my son and I sat in the minivan, which is parked in the garage, watching a baseball game on TV---a TV in our garage because that's where men go to watch TV when women want to watch So You Think You Can Dance.

He wants to be a catcher, so we watched the catchers on TV, dissecting their moves, the way they protect their signs to the pitcher, the way they block a ball in the dirt, the way they commit to sacrificing their body in order to make a play for the team.

I am proud of many things, but I have never felt the pride I feel when I look at my son, Noah. The heart he has. The way he (usually) treats his little sister (despite her badgering of him). His enthusiasm for life, for baseball, for me, for ice cream, for sleeping when he's tired, for cuddling with his mom, for being able to explore life with the wide eyes of a nine-year-old boy. I have wished I was him. I have wished for his innocence. I have wished for the ability to look upon the world as a mountain to be conquered rather than a cross to be borne.

I'm not the best dad ever. I fail. I yell when I should be sensitive. I set bad examples. I'm unavailable and distant and often my parenting skills are a disaster on par with a reality show on The Discovery Channel. But I love him. I love him like I've never loved anything. I love him more than I love anything. I'm not a religious person or a person who believes in fate or destiny or any of that crap, but I believe I was put here to love this boy. And I do.

Entirely.

 

I’m naked, but don’t be scared. I’m always naked when I shower.

To my immediate left is a porcelain shelf, and on that shelf sits a mammoth, purple, plastic bottle with a pump top. This is the shampoo my wife and I share. The label on the bottle says the shampoo comes from Australia. It also says it’s “mega” and “moist.” I completely get the “moist” part because my hair is wet (see also: moist) when I wash it, but I’ve never quite figured out what’s so “mega” about my Aussie shampoo. Perhaps the marketers knew I’d be naked when I used their shampoo and the “mega” is in reference to my…well…my… Never mind.  

I turn to my left, place my left hand under the pump and push the plunger down with my right hand.

“Pffft!” the bottle says, spitting at me. No shampoo comes out. I push it again and the same thing happens. So I pick it up, shake it, determine the bottle is empty, and throw it into the trash can.

From another part of the house, my wife hears the thud of the bottle hitting the can and comes into the bathroom to find the source of the sound. She looks around and sees the gigantic bottle in the trash.

“What are you doing?” she exclaims.

“I’m practicing my kegels,” I say facetiously. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

“Why did you throw this away?” she asks, now holding the shampoo bottle.

“Because it’s empty, you goober.”

“It is not.”

I know this dance. After fourteen years of marriage, two kids, and dozens of disagreements on the same line as this make clear that Hot Wife and I have starkly different interpretations of the word “empty.” In my view, when a shampoo bottle stops delivering its contents in the manner for which it was designed, it’s empty. To my beautiful bride, that same bottle isn’t empty until it has been squeezed, crushed, rolled up, stomped on, yelled at, and pressed in a vice for so long that not even an atom of its contents remains inside.

“Are we really going to do this again, honey?” I ask.

“I don’t know about you,” she says, “but I am.”

Although I purchased a new mammoth purple bottle of the same Aussie shampoo earlier in the week, my wife does not intend to start a new bottle until the current bottle has been pillaged entirely. So how do you get shampoo from a pump that is no longer pumping shampoo? According to Sharon, you untwist the cap, remove the clear plastic straw that’s attached to the pump, and wipe the adhering shampoo dregs into the palm of your other hand. Then reattached the cap and proceed as normal.

“That’s so much more trouble than it’s worth,” I plead. “Come on, honey. Take a walk on the wild side with me. Throw that bottle away and put your hands on the new and improved ‘mega.’”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Danny,” she says. “It’s not that big a deal.”

See, but I’m naked. And I’m not sure if she’s talking about the shampoo bottle or my…well…my… Never mind.

I hate you, writing. I mean I love you and I need you and I’m not entirely sure what or where I’d be without you. But some days, like today, I hate you and I want you to die.

I have chosen to live my life with you, everyday, but in moments of clarity I understand that the choice was never really mine. It was a hostile takeover. A coup d’etat. You barged in and said, “I’m calling the shots here, motherfucker.” And though you have given me more than I could have had without you, there are some days, like today, when I want nothing more than to wipe you out.

I have something to say. I have a story I want to tell. I want to stick a giant shovel into my soul, unearth the pain and power and promise within myself, and put it all on paper so that I can learn about myself and possibly help others identify those same feelings within themselves. But you won’t let me. You’ve decided you don’t want to get out of my way today. You’ve thrown up smoke screens and roadblocks and other indescribable obstacles that have left me here wallowing in frustration, impotent even to know where I can begin.

We’ve had great moments together, writing. Remember the days when you would pull me to your breast and comfort me? Remember that? I could sit and write for hours. Thousands of words. I felt whole on those days. I felt you lifting me up and carrying me to the places I needed to go—to the corners of my mind where I could discover who I am, what drove me, where I’d been hurt. I got clarity. I got resolution. I got a sense of who I might become.

But today, and on many recent days, you’re a stubborn little ass. Why are you making this so hard for me?  Are we not yet beyond this tough love shit? Can you not just be here when I need you and take your leave when I don’t? I want to punch you in your smug face. I want you to know the pain I feel in your absence. But then what? Then you’d be dead and you’d never come back and I’d be less. Less happy. Less fulfilled. Less everything.

I’m your fucking slave. You’re a drug I can’t quit. The highs are so high, but the lows are unbearable. So do me a favor, writing. Meet me here tomorrow. Meet me on the blank page and prove to me that I still have you. Or don’t. Your call. I’ll wait for you.

I’m having my makeup done and from my point of view, it’s not going well.

It’s nine a.m. on Sunday morning. I’m seated in a chair in someone’s living room in a neighborhood near LA International Airport. In a few moments I’ll be on camera, talking about my book on a show described to me as a Web-based version of The Daily Show. The target audience is stay-at-home dads and the production team is comprised of (mostly) men who worked together for many years on Dateline NBC.

Linda, the makeup artist, turns her back to me momentarily, squirts a dollop of babyshit green goo into her hands and begins to apply it to my ears. Aside from the time I let my daughter put her Skittles-scented lipstick and cheek stuff on me, this is the first time I have ever worn makeup and I’ll be honest: I don’t know why anyone would need babyshit green goo on his ears.

“Whatcha got there, Linda?”

“Your ears are really red,” she says. “When you wear sunscreen, don’t forget to put it on your ears.”

So there you have it. Wear sunscreen or wear baby shit.

She wipes the green goo from her hands and turns to examine my face again. This is an uncomfortable predicament for me. There are two parts of my body that I don’t really like to have scrutinized, and one of them is my face. But here I am, and there she is, and wow is it warm in here or is that just my self-respect going down in flames?

Had she stopped right here, right now, I may have been able to escape with at least a limp wisp of myself intact. But she didn’t. She put a black drop cloth around me and tucked napkins inside the collar, against my neck.

Then she broke out the airbrush. The fucking airbrush.

There is a small metal well on top of the airbrush and Linda fills the well with a soup of various shades of tan and beige. Then she tells me to close my eyes and begins to spray back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. I can feel the spritz landing on my face and it occurs to me that this is how a giant barn door must feel when it’s being hosed down with bright red paint.

A minute passes. Then two. Then five. Still spraying.

I take this as a bad sign.

“Wow,” I say. “That bad, huh?”

No response. Question answered.

I wonder what comes after the airbrush. A belt sander? A nail gun? Explosives?

Finally, I am saved. The director busts in and firmly says, “Linda, we have to go right now. Finish up and let’s get Danny to the set.”

She sighs a little, as if to say “OK, but there’s still a LOT of work to do on this one.”

And then I sat down and started talking about men with depression, which was actually quite perfect because I was wearing a three-inch-thick blanket of paint on my face and baby shit on my red ears and where’s the god-damned happiness news in that?

Some friends of mine showed me this video this afternoon and there's no doubt about this: the sounds this woman makes after she falls are the funniest noises I have ever heard. Enjoy.

I called Dr. Laura once.

“Bruce, welcome to the program.”

(I told the screener my name was Bruce because if anyone at school happened to hear me on the air, whining about my parents, I would have been toast.)

“Hi, Dr. Laura.”

I’m home alone for some reason, and as I speak I am nervously pacing around our entire house. I’m the kind of person who has to move when he’s nervous, and I was so nervous at that moment that I practically wore a path into the wall-to-wall carpeting. The family dog, Daisy, followed me around and the two of us must have looked like a pathetic, in-home parade.

“Hi, Bruce. What can I help you with today?”

“Hi. Um. I’m seventeen,” I stutter, my voice and my hands quivering with concern that she’ll yell at me like she did with the previous caller, who had gotten pregnant out of wedlock. “I have a job and my grades are OK, but I just can’t seem to get my parents to treat me like an adult, you know? I mean, they won’t let me go out or go to parties or do the things all of the other kids my age get to do.”

(I neglected to mention that I had never been invited to a high school party or that the things I wanted to do with my friends included going to the drive-in movie theater, ogling Glenn Close’s lady bits in Fatal Attraction, and smoking pot out of a crushed Cactus Cooler can in the back of my friend Chuck’s pick-up truck.)

“OK, so what’s your question?”

“Well, I guess my question is. ‘How do I get them to stop treating me like a child?’”

“You don’t,” she said.

“Huh?”

“You are a child. You’re seventeen.”

“I disagree. I feel like—“

“And that’s exactly the point, Bruce,” she interrupted. “It doesn’t matter how you feel. What matters are the facts, and the fact is that as long as you’re living under your parents’ roof and as long as they are still your legal guardian—which they are until you’re eighteen—they get to call the shots.”

I was stupefied. I thought I had a legitimate gripe when I called her, but after thirty seconds on the air I was reduced to a sniveling little brat with too many feelings. (If you ask some people, I’m still that way.) And then they went to a commercial.

If you’ve ever listened to Dr. Laura’s show, you know you can truly read how she and her staff felt about you by what song they play as a bumper when they come back from the commercial. Well, I didn’t recognize the song I got, but I think the lyrics went, “Grow up, you childish little pussy.”

Or something like that.

I can remember playing catch with my dad on the sidewalk in front of our house. I had a first baseman’s mitt—the kind with the clamshell-shaped pocket—and I pretended with every catch that I was Steve Garvey, who was then the first baseman for my beloved Los Angeles Dodgers. There was a big tree down near the curb, and this tree was notorious for dropping pea-sized round seedpods. Once in a while, just for a laugh, my dad would throw me a seedpod instead of the baseball and I would whack it with the back of my glove and pretend I’d just hit a home run. We didn’t do it often, but the glee I felt when we did is still fresh in my mind.

My dad was not terribly athletic, nor was he much of a sports fan, and sometimes I wonder if the fact that I am is some twisted form of rebellion. Nevertheless, the fact that he found the motivation to play catch with me from time to time has no doubt contributed to me belief that baseball is a language fathers can use to communicate to their sons some of life’s most important lessons. That shared bond, the give and take of a throw and a catch, the rudimentary form interplay between a boy and his role model is beyond precious. It was to me, and I hope it is to my son, too.

Last night, during the final moments of sunlight, we were playing catch in our backyard. We have this little game we like to play wherein one of us throws the ball and tries to get it to dive or curve or knuckle, and then the other person tries to guess what kind of pitch it was. The funny thing is that neither of us knows the first thing about pitching. Any movement on the ball is purely unintentional.

“What was that?” he asks as my pitch snaps into his glove.

“Four-seamer,” I say.

He throws it back.

“What was that?” I ask.

“Splitter.”

Our throwing sessions usually devolve into him wanting to show me how awesome he thinks he is, but he has nothing to prove to me. He’ll never have a bigger fan. But I acquiesce, throwing pop flies over his head so he can jump up and pretend to rob someone of a home run.

And sometimes, just for laughs, I’ll throw him a Whiffle ball instead of a baseball. Sometimes he hits it with the back of his glove.

My inbox smiled at me Friday afternoon with an announcement that the iPad I ordered three weeks ago has finally shipped. The entire family is obviously quite excited about the arrival of our new toy, and we gathered round the computer several times this weekend to track the iPad’s journey via the FedEx web site.

“Looks like it’s still in Hong Kong,” I said Saturday.

“Where was it before that, daddy?” my daughter asked.

“It was made in China,” I said, pointing the first line in the tracking log.

“Everything’s made in China,” my son said.

“Yep,” I agreed. “Even you guys.”

My daughter’s brow furrowed. “I wasn’t made in China,” she said matter-of-factly. “I was made in mommy’s tummy.”

I feigned a look of confusion and disbelief. “Who told you that?”

“You did!”

“I must have been joking when I said that, honey, because the truth is all little babies are made in a factory in China and shipped to their mommies and daddies in America, just like my iPad.”

“Nuh-uh!” she protests, getting frustrated now.

“Yuh-huh!”

At that moment, Hot Wife walked into the room to see what all of the ruckus was about.

“Mommy, was I made in China?”

Hot Wife says nothing. She just looks at me.”

“Daddy said little babies are made in China like iPads. He’s lying, isn’t he, mommy? I came from your tummy.”

There are two morals to this story.

One: Seven-year-olds aren’t as gullible as I thought they were.

Two: My wife doesn’t get my humor.

 

 

Not long after I started working at The Company With The Tank Out Front, a colleague articulated the company’s brand with the following words: “We make cool shit. Fuck you.” Although it’s my job to create the words that define this company and the products it designs and sells, I have been unable to distill our offerings down into a more concise or accurate phrase than that.

We make cool shit. Fuck you.

That posture toward the rest of the world is an accurate reflection of the company culture, too. We don’t play nice, particularly when it comes to our competition, particularly the competitor that owns a dominant share of the market. Perhaps you know of this competitor. It’s named after a Greek god and was made ultra-famous by a now retired basketball player. Yeah, them.

Well it just so happens that today I’m wearing shoes and a shirt with that company’s rather well known logo, which around here is kind of like walking into a formal, black tie affair at the White House wearing nothing but a cock ring and a ball gag. I have no excuse for dressing this way other than the fact that these clothes were on the top of the clean pile at home. Nevertheless, I wore them, and on my way down to the cafeteria for some runny eggs and Diet Coke, I was accosted.

Walking down the stairs, I passed three men having a conversation about something. Shoes, I think. Or maybe the oil spill. As I trekked down the stairs, their conversation came to an abrupt halt.

“Wow,” said the shorter of the three men, who I have a feeling is kind of a big shot here, “that’s a lot of [Company Named After Greek God] gear for a [Company With The Tank Out Front] man.”

“Yeah,” I said, turning to face him. “I know. But I have [Company With The Tank Out Front] in my soul.”

There are three possible reasons for the humorless, stone-faced glare he fired at me immediately thereafter: 1) he was rendered emotionless by my sophisticated humor, 2) he didn’t understand me, 3) he was making a mental note to call HR and have my ass fired.

If you axe me, it was No. 1.

But I’m boxing up my belongings, just in case.

I have a hatred in my heart. It runs deep. As deep as my hatred for beets and Brussels sprouts and the god-damned Red Wings.

I hate Little League umpires. I hate ‘em bad. If you axe me, they all deserve a meal of beets and Brussel’s sprouts.

My son’s baseball team, the Yankees, found itself immersed in a very important game Wednesday night. They advanced to second round of the tournament that pits every team in the entire city against one another, and every game in the tournament is do or die—lose and you’re out. For such high stakes, you might think the city could contract with some better-trained umpires. But no. These games are called by zit-faced, fourteen-year-old kids who wouldn’t know a strike zone from a pimple on their mama’s ass.

Worse yet, we, the parents—the parents whose kids are suffering from the garbage calls being made by these little shits—are not permitted to heckle. Explain that one. They’re old enough to be entrusted with my kid’s future career as a Major League badass but not old enough for me to tell them through the chain-link backstop that that pitch in the dirt was as close to a strike as he is to having sex with anything but his hand in the next decade.

Last night when my son was at bat, this blind little fucker called a strike on a pitch the catcher had to slide to his left to catch. And that’s when I kind of lost it.

“A strike?! That was three feet outside, you moron!”

There was an audible gasp from the other parents there, each of them keenly aware of the don’t-harass-the-shitty-umps rule.

 The umpire turned and looked at me.

“Yeah, I’m the one who said it, Bieber boy,” I barked. “And that stud at the plate is my son, so I’d appreciate if you’d bend over and use your good eye.”

He motioned at me with his hands to calm down. So I did. And when the next pitch nearly hit my kid in the elbow, he called that a strike too.

“Oh my god,” I said, softly at first. “OH MY GOD! ARE YOU ON DRUGS? YOU’RE ON DRUGS! YOU’RE ABOUT AS USEFUL AS A FOOTBALL BAT!”

At this point some tall men with big muscles came over, applied the Vulcan death grip to my biceps (or at least the part of my arms where biceps are supposed to be), and began to escort me to the parking lot. But not before I got one more in.

“Hey, your ass called! It wants your head out by tomorrow morning!”

My son’s team won the game.