My 7 year old son has always been oddly interested in college, specifically about where he is going to live when he attends. “I can still live with you, right?”, he asks, with a hint of panic in his voice. I try to explain to him that by the time he turns 18, he will be absolutely dying to move out on his own but he’s not buying it. “Who will make me waffles?” Continue reading

I was putting some gas in my Jeep this afternoon, when a man at the next pump approached and asked me for directions to a well known road in the area. We then proceeded to get into an argument after I provided him with simple, easy to understand directions and he insisted that I was wrong. I even pulled up the directions on my iPhone, and he still insisted that I was wrong. “You’re no help at all,” he said as he turned away. “Thanks a lot.” Continue reading

I just got done with my 7 year old son’s back-to-school shopping, which I did without him. He goes to a school that requires uniforms as well as standard school supplies, such as red folders, green folders, a white binder, etc. This is to avoid all the knife fights that erupt when kids start arguing over whether or not a LEGO folder is cooler than a Minecraft folder, and… Wait a minute. Do you have a Justin Bieber folder? You do, don’t you? GET HIM! Continue reading

You know how, from time to time you get that disoriented feeling upon waking? I used to get that a lot when I was younger, and for good reason: My love for spontaneous, drunken road trips made the questions, “Where am I?”, “Whose couch is this?”, “What state am I in?”, and, “Do I still have both of my kidneys?” logical and important questions to ask. Of course, as I got older and became the mature and responsible person I am today, early morning bafflement receded, rarely to be seen and usually only after traditional drinking holidays such as New Year’s Eve, St. Patrick’s Day, or Friday. Continue reading

I grew up on the banks of the Fox River in Illinois. I’ll mention that in passing, occasionally, and often it elicits a semi-awestruck comment, such as, “Wow! That must be nice, growing up on a river!” as if I spent all of my days lazily rafting downstream with runaway slaves, à la Tom Sawyer. Although it was an idyllic scene in many respects, it wasn’t really like that, unless you replace rafts with drunk men driving speedboats, and then, yes, it was pretty much exactly like that. Continue reading

The neighborhood I live in has a community pool. Nothing special, just a kidney shaped hole in the ground. There are no life guards, no slides, and with a maximum depth of five feet, no diving board. It’s basically a place where you can go when it’s 118° outside and you want to experience for yourself just how hot water can get when it sits in a scorching hot concrete tub all day. So on the weekends, I like to take the kids to the municipal pool, which is much cooler, has slides and other water-related things to play with, and is a beach-style pool, meaning that I have to keep a death-grip on my four year old most of the time instead of all of it. Continue reading

My seven year old son came home the other day with a book: The Hardy Boys – Trouble at the Arcade. I laughed at the title because it was obviously an attempt to breathe new life into an old franchise by making it “modern”, when in fact, arcades are virtually extinct, and by now the Hardy Boys are dead and rotting in the ground alongside that simpering twat, Nancy Drew. And good riddance, too, because they put a lot of pressure on kids, didn’t they? They solved so many fucking mysteries that you felt inadequate by comparison. The only mystery I knew of as a kid was why my art teacher’s office smelled like the bus driver’s Black Sabbath jacket, and it took me until high school before I figured that one out. One mystery solved in ten years. That paled in comparison to the fucking Hardy Boys, who probably solved a mystery or two before they got around to dealing with their morning wood. Thanks for the low self-esteem, assholes! Continue reading

I used to teach computer classes back in the mid-90’s. At the time, computers were just starting to become an indispensable tool in the business world, and thanks to the global pornography network known as the internet being made public, it was starting to become an indispensable tool at home as well, if only because guys needed something different to jerk it to (the lingerie section of the Sears Roebuck catalog only came out twice a year, after all. Not that I would know.) “This is a great investment, honey!” guys would say. “We can use it to balance our checkbook!” How this was accomplished by dumping man-juice all over the keyboard was left unexplained. Continue reading

The summer after I graduated high school, I held down a job working in the radiation exposure monitoring division of a large company. That sounds like the sort of cool, sci-fi job that would entail frequent visits from Iron Man, but it was quite the opposite. You know how when you get x-rays your dentist puts a lead apron over your goodies and then runs out of the room to turn on the Cancer-Tron 5000? When he does that, he’s wearing a badge that measures radiation exposure which he would mail in to us at the end of the month. We’d process it, then either tell him that he was in the clear or that his kids were going to be born with flippers. We were like a Fotomat booth for the medical industry. Continue reading

I’ve got an iPad at home. I absolutely had to have an iPad when they first came out, but the steep price kept me from buying one for quite a while. Finally, I was unable to hold out any longer and I justified its purchase by mentally running down all the things I could do with it: Take effective notes at the office; be able to multi-task at my desk; ummm… I could use it to watch Netflix when the kids are watching Netflix on the TV; uhhh… If my Kindle ever died, I could use the Kindle app to still be able to read on the go… I had all these weak arguments and more, but truth be told, they were all bullshit. If there was an app called iCoaster that allowed you to put your drink down on the iPad with the label always facing North, I would’ve used it as justification. Continue reading