Let’s Babble On Cold Meds!

Ok, day two of feeling like a fucking cementhead is coming to an end, and the cumulative effect of so many cold meds is starting to get to me. I use DayQuil to cure my cold and wake me up, and NyQuil to cure my cold and knock me out. It’s getting to be that the only reliable way for me to tell what time of day it is is to look at the color of what I’m drinking. Maybe I’ll just start mixing them together and let them fucking duke it out. If I fall asleep, NyQuil wins. If I sprint laps around the house trailing used Kleenex behind me, DayQuil is the winner. And if my liver fails because I’m the kind of idiot that fucks around with over the counter medicine for giggles, well then the funeral industry wins, I guess.

Although I will NOT have a standard funeral. I’ve been asked before what I would like done with my alcohol-soaked corpse when I die. With one exception, my response has always been the same: Burn me up, put my ashes in a giant fucking fireworks shell and shoot it directly into Rosanne Barr’s face. (The one exception was the time I thought it would be funny to put a knife in my back and fling me into OJ’s living room, the theory being that if he got away with a murder he actually committed, maybe he’d get convicted for a murder he didn’t commit. Then he had to go and get jailed for something else, ruining my plans. Fucking inconsiderate, murdering bastard.)

Where was I? Oh yeah, I wanted to recap an actual conversation I had with my two sons yesterday. Let this serve as a cautionary example of how kids can fucking ruin your brain:

4 Year Old: Boh-Yoh!

6 Year Old: No, no, it’s Boh-Yow!

4 Year Old: Boh-Yoo?

6 Year Old: No, Boh-Yow!

4 Year Old: Boo-Yow?

6 Year Old: BOH-YOW!

4 Year Old: BOH-YOW?

6 Year Old: Yes! BOH-YOW!

Me: What are you guys talking about?

6 Year Old: We don’t know.

I had to fight the urge to pull over to the side of the road and slam my head against the steering wheel until shit like that made sense. A couple of years ago (I posted this once, I think, but I’m too lazy to look it up [here it is]), I had this brain-melting talk with my son at a playground.

Son: Daddy, who is that boy?

Me: I don’t know, why don’t you go over and ask him?

Son: Hi, what’s your name?

Kid: Steven.

Son: (running back to me) He says his name is Uncle Doyd.

Me: Have you been huffing glue or something?

Jesus, kid, you broke my fucking brain…

We still laugh at that one over dinner sometimes. That and shit my daughter did when she was two and a total character. One time we were all going grocery shopping, and I needed to do something at the service desk. I glanced down and discovered that my daughter wasn’t standing by my side (which I expected, but shouldn’t have because she was fucking two). I looked up and saw her standing in front of the entrance. She was greeting people at the door by saying, “Hi!” in a bright, cheery voice, and then turning around and mooning them. She did this to three consecutive people before I could get to her.

This, of course, has all the elements of a cherished family memory if you happen to be one of my two boys, because stories involving butts are motherfucking GOLD. The only way that story could have been any better in their eyes is if it involved poop somehow.

Getting back to my boys and their ramblings, I was actually kind of excited when I heard that gibberish because I was holding out hope that maybe they’d developed their own language, like twins do. Have you ever heard of twinspeak? It’s when twins (or multiples in general) develop their own language, sometimes retaining it and using it later on in life so they can say things such as, “Holy fucking shit, look at the knockers on her!” in public without getting kicked in a very personal place.

Very personal.

Twinspeak makes sense, if you think about it. You’ve got two babies in a room, and the parents aren’t there because they are off crying somewhere, and so the babies start cooking up words so they can agree that what they really need most right now is a bottle, or possibly diapers with a less toxic payload in them. The parents are off crying, of course, because having one baby is scary enough. When you find out you’ve got more than one on the way, well then you are fucked flatter than hammered shit, my friend. Your life is over.

I have a friend who knocked his wife up with triplets about ten years back, and then when they got the rugrats home she came down with a frightening (but luckily short term) disease that left her paralyzed and bedridden. Triplets, and a paralyzed wife at home: That has got to suck. Of course, if you decide to go out for a few dozen drinks to help deal with the stress, at least you know where everyone’s gonna be when you get home. It’s not like they’re going anywhere.

I had another friend who was VERY TRAUMATIZED by having children, and let everyone know about it. While she was pregnant, she was like the character Glum on Gulliver’s Travels (a cartoon I’m sure no one remembers):

Doom and gloom. And reluctantly, with prodding from her husband (heh) she decided to maybe try having another kid and consequently got knocked up with a couple, and the world went black for the next 9+ months because of all of the gloom spreading from her house. Big, thick plumes of black dread. (Not that I blame her, it didn’t look like a whole lot of fun.)

Not too long before the twins were born, I remember going to Pottery Barn to exchange something someone had bought for the baby shower because she discovered it was not the correct size, and I volunteered to go swap it out because if I didn’t, someone was going to fucking die. Her husband was totally clueless, and while everyone else was trying to placate the snarling Preggo-Beast, he was making the situation worse by saying things from Common Sense Land such as, “So it’s the wrong size. Big deal.” He weighed all of 150 pounds, and she would have snapped him like a fucking twig, so I hauled ass to Pottery Barn.

I am ranging rather far afield, aren’t I?

On to a completely different topic, this is the time of year when youngsters graduate from high school (and then go grope each other after hastily consuming three cans of expired Four Loko), and I’ve always kind of wanted to be the guest speaker that totally wastes his wisdom on these 18 year old blobs of hormones and oxycontin. I didn’t listen to whatever steakhead talked at my graduation, and unless you were very lucky and had someone cool, memorable, and yet still willing to speak at a fucking high school graduation, neither do you.

“Dude, who the fuck is that up there?”

“I dunno. The program says Kurt Loder, whoever the fuck that is.”

“Why is he like… So old?”

“Who cares? You have any more Xanax bars?”

Anyway, I’ve always kind of wanted to be that guy because you can get up there and say whatever the fuck you want, and no one is going to care. The kids aren’t listening, and the entire audience has been cooking out in the sun for three hours. As long as you keep it short and to the point, no one cares.

“Hello, my name is Greg, and to the class of 2013, I say this: Walk forward into your future with hope in your eyes, and a spring in your step, totally ignoring the fact that sooner or later, life is gonna put a dick in your ass.”

(At this point I’d drunkenly wave a bottle of scotch at my audience. I don’t even really like scotch, but a public meltdown like this just seems like it requires scotch, doesn’t it?)

“You see, life has a way of fucking you over. One minute you’re on your way to college and a bright, fulfilling future as an underpaid dental hygienist, and the next minute you are servicing Taiwanese businessmen in a port-o-potty. Life is capricious and unfair, and no matter how many fucking pills you pop, that ain’t gonna change you fucking freaks. So go get shitfaced for a few years because after that, you’re likely to be working in an ass tasting factory.”

The benefits sound good at first, but… Yeah. Ass tasting factory no es bueno.

Wouldn’t you enjoy listening to that commencement speech? I know I would. I would fucking look forward to my kids graduating if I knew something that fucking crazy was in store. Instead you have to listen to the head of the local Jaycees ramble on about civic responsibility and then listen to the 18 year old valedictorian act like a fucking know-it-all. Oh, my God, when I hear an 18 year old kid get up there and start telling everyone how life is going to be, I want to run down there and slap the fucking pimples off of his fucking face.

“As we march forward into our bright future…”

WHACK!

“Hey! What was that for?”

“You don’t know shit, motherfucker!”

This is why I’m no longer allowed within 1000 yards of a graduation. But if one of your loved ones is graduating and you’d like to hear me ramble bloviate speak, go ahead and tell your school that I would very much be interested in doing so, as long as they provide the NyQuil and scotch.