When you’re a parent, you learn to ready yourself for those inevitable panicky moments. You see your child take an awkward fall off of a swingset, you get a call from your kid’s school out of the blue, or you find a pound and a half of heroin in your daughter’s closet. (Luckily, it turned out she was just holding it for a friend. Whew!) You catch your breath, your heart skips a beat, and that familiar sinking feeling in your stomach sets in. It’s a terrible, sickening feeling, but luckily it goes away by the time your child turns thirty. Continue reading

I fixed a toilet today. And when I say “fixed” I don’t mean I jiggled the handle or any of that pussy toilet-fixing shit. I disassembled the toilet into individual toilet molecules and put it back together again because I am a man, and that is what a man does: Fixes toilets and celebrates with seventeen beers. For my next trick, I”m going to show off my knowledge of sports by discussing inscrutable statistics, ogle a passing woman’s breasts, and if there’s any time left over I may scratch my ass and belch. Continue reading

Why don’t blind people go skydiving? Because it scares the shit out of the dogs. Hahaha, isn’t that a laff riot? Well, not according to the blind guy I told it to last week. What a baby. Just kidding, actually. I’d never say something like that to a blind person. They can hear really fucking well. I might make some silly faces, maybe throw a couple of punches that land short just to see if they’re faking it, but I’d never go so far as to actually say that to a blind person because I’ve got class. That and I’m a richly deserving social pariah who is no longer allowed out in public. Continue reading

One of the advantages of having a web site that’s been up and running for over a year is the fact that you start getting a steady stream of random emails from people who want something from you. Some of them want you to place their links on your site, some of them want money, and others want those photos you took of them getting romantic with a washing machine. I love these people. They allow me to get my freak on. Observe: Continue reading

For a guy who likes to talk about the various chemicals and solvents I used to put in my body in prodigious quantities, I’m actually pretty healthy. I hiked over twelve miles in the Superstition Wilderness today, spending about seven hours grinding my knees into pulp. I used to play soccer at a very competitive level, and let me tell you something: When a knee, or anything else, acts up when you’re in your teens or early twenties, the full weight of medical science is brought to bear on the problem: CT-Scans, MRI’s, orthopedic surgeons, and micro-fracture surgeries are involved. And when they are, the goal is to get you back to the way you were before the injury, which is to say maximum kick-ass mode because when you’re that young, you are at your fucking peak. Fast-forward twenty years, however, and a complaint regarding knee pain is met with a brief “Meh”, and the suggestion that you stop doing whatever caused you pain in the first place. This is why I never pay medical bills. Continue reading

My wife and I took our kids to some shitty pumpkin patch today. It’s in the middle of a major metropolitan area, and it is billed as a “farm”, although from what I could tell the only thing that it farms is money: Admission for adults is $3.00. Kids will run you $10.00. This is a pricing strategy known in the business as price-gouging bullshit. Here’s what you got for your admission: A hay-ride (a tractor pulling a trailer), a small pumpkin (kids only), access to a bouncy castle (again, kids only, which is a bunch of crap), and for a dollar you could buy a bag of carrots which you could then feed to goats. “Why are we paying to feed their animals?” my wife asked. The answer, of course, is that we’re parents. Continue reading

I often take a walk around the building at work after lunch. I’m one of those types of people that likes to walk while I think even though it’s the kind of thing that evolution is sure to stamp out pretty soon. One minute you’re deep in thought and think you’ve finally figured out the cure for ass cancer, the next minute you’re plastered to the grill of a Cadillac driven by an eighty year old who is late for bingo. Mental acuity and cardiovascular fitness don’t mean shit if you’re too stupid to watch where you’re going. Continue reading

While driving my daughter to an appointment this week, she informed me that someone in her school had been suspended. “What happened was she went into the office for something, and they smelled something on her and opened up her backpack. They found a bag of marijuana and a pipe.” My daughter is twelve. Jesus. At least my wife and I have some experience in this area (ahem), and know what to look for. As I mentioned earlier this week, my parents were totally clueless when it came to drugs. My father was born in 1928 in rural Ontario, and my mom was schooled in a Roman Catholic convent: Drugs were simply not a feature of their environment growing up. To them, drugs were something hippies and gang members abused, not something their long haired, tie-dyed son sitting in the next room, laughing his ass off to Monty Python would be involved with. Continue reading

Let’s talk about guns. Firearm ownership is, I know, a very polarizing subject. There are many among us who wish that guns were banned outright. Others believe that gun ownership is central to our identity as Americans and still serves as protection against an increasingly overbearing government. Then there are people who just want to marry a bitch and shoot themselves some goddamn guns. Continue reading

As those of you who live in the United States know, September 3rd was Labor Day which, according to Wikipedia, is a holiday that “celebrates the economic and social contributions of workers”. We celebrate this by doing no labor whatsoever, which is kind of weird given the name of the holiday. They really should change the name to “Sleep In Because You Drank Way Too Much The Entire Weekend Day”. And Wikipedia could update the purpose of the holiday by adding a few words top say that it “celebrates the economic and social contributions of workers by getting shithouse wasted and waking up on the front lawn.” Continue reading