Tag: memories (page 6 of 6)

It’s Valentine’s Day.

It is, depending on your perspective, some combination of day where you go above and beyond the call of duty to celebrate your love, or a day where you get on the Internet and bitch about how Valentine’s Day is a crass holiday created by the greeting card companies and how you should be nice to your loved ones every day so blah blah blah now you’re the Grinch That Had Venereal Disease And Stole Valentine’s Day. Because, c’mon, Santa was invented by Coca-Cola. The Easter Bunny was invented by, I dunno, Cadbury. Jesus was invented by Toyota. It’s all just marketing and advertising.

Listen, I get it, you think Valentine’s Day is a stinky pink blossom of consumerist hate juice. I don’t really care. Just shush about it and keep your head down while the rest of us love our respective others, yeah?

With that in mind, let me just announce it:

I love my wife.

I love my wife unmercifully, beyond the periphery of reason and sanity.

I met her online. Match-dot-com, actually. When I “online-dated,” I met a small percentage of very cool and lovely ladies, and I also met a small battalion of total farking moonbats. I went on dates that concluded with me going home, locking all the doors, and corking the silverware. When I met my wife, however, we went out to a Chinese restaurant. And we stayed there for four hours. We closed the joint out. They were throwing fortune cookies at our heads to get us to leave.

It was then and there that I knew I would marry my wife.

Why do I love my wife so completely, so deeply, so dearly?

First: she’s hot.

See? Hot.

Second: she is not an alcoholic, despite the inordinate number of photos I take of her where she is imbibing said alcohol. Which, for the record, seems to be most of the photos I take of her.

That’s really just the tip of the iceberg. In my photos, she drinks a lot. In real life, not so much. Still, right now she deserves major kudos because, as a pregnant human being, she cannot consume her most favoritest drink in the world, the Dirty Vodka Martini. Me, I just tell her to drink it. Frankly, the baby’s going to need booze to put up with us as parents. Even still, she perseveres.

My wife also puts up with my shit. Which is a really big deal, because I am a man who gives a lot of shit with up which that one would need to put. Or something. See? I can’t even write a reasonable sentence. The fact that she has not yet snapped and taken a rifle up to a clocktower is a really good sign. A number of my ex-ladyfriends are now locked away in those white metal-free rooms like where they imprisoned Magneto. If you want to see my wife in the middle of putting up with my shit, here is an image. You can see it on her face how she is very kindly tolerating my nonsense:

That is her “Tolerate Husband” face. I know it well. Here is another:

One day, she’ll probably stab me in the temple with a chopstick. And I’ll totally let it happen. I won’t even be mad. She’ll be like, “Do you remember how you were acting?” And I’ll be like, “Okay, yeah. Yeah. Yes.”

My wife is funny. And, mysteriously, she thinks I’m funny. She also has the foulest mouth of any woman I know, which for me is a total win. The fact that she can occasionally out-profane my infernal tongue does not merely earn a check-mark in the box but rather a check-plus-plus. Seriously. You cut her off in traffic, she will tell you to eat a dick and die. She will curse you in ways that will wilt your heart like warm spinach.

She’s kind-hearted. She’s tolerant. She believes in me.

But even her negative traits are ones to love:

Her impatience matches my own, as does her raging river of snark.

Plus, if cajoled, she will kiss a tiki, which is not a metaphor for anything sexual but rather a literal truth:

Tiki Loving 101, kids.

She’s got beautiful eyes and long gorgeous hair and legs that won’t quit. Seriously, her legs — her getaway sticks, her lady-longs, her gams — are long. We’re the same height but I go to drive her car and I have to spend two minutes and 37 seconds readjusting the seat to compensate for her long legs and my stumpy little clod-hoppers. By the way, I totally just made up “lady-longs,” but you can have it for a dollar.

She is one half of the Husband And Wife Video-Game Super-Team.

She is beautiful even when she’s picking something out of her eye:

She lets me thrust her into dubious Photoshop situations:

And she is beloved by all the creatures of the earth, as evidenced by unrequited looks of love and lust born by this… I dunno, amphibious Deep One frog dude.

Let’s be very clear, here. The fact that this person —

Married me —

Is an indicator that she is both charitable and loving.

She is going to be a wonderful mother, but really, who cares? What I care about is that she’s a beautiful, awesome, kick-ass wife. The kid’s just going to have to take the back-seat on this one. Sorry, Upcoming Wee One. This hot chick is all mine.

I love you, wife of my life.

You make my world awesome.

It would turn gray and then black and then die without your presence.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

It has come to my attention that a lot of you crazy people are reading this blog. Which, for the record, is awesome, though it does lead me to suspect that my words have some kind of narcotic effect, or that perhaps my blog exudes some kind of nicotine haze. I certainly don’t know why you keep coming back. Or why you follow me on Twitter. I’m an ass.

I don’t have the good sense God gave to a brain-damaged trilobite.

(For those of you with alternate religious beliefs, replace “God” with: Zeus, Buddha, Ahura Mazda, the Devil, genetics, Papa Legba, Shiva, Wash from Firefly, Godzilla, or John Quincy Adams.)

Regardless, here you are.

Which I totally appreciate.

As such, I figure it’s a good time to get to know one another. Here, then, is a random slapdash written-in-no-sensible-order list of things you may not know about me. It bears no rhyme, no reason. It doesn’t even strive to be all that interesting, really — it’s more or less a conglomeration of meaningless facts about yours truly. With that in mind? Let us begin.

…

I only recently learned how to belch. Or burp — whatever term you prefer. Now I go around burping because I can, and because it is wonderful. This is not good news for my wife because I am like a kid with a new toy. What’s interesting, and this may be entirely coincidental, is that once I learned how to burp, I no longer get heartburn. True story.

Mice ate my buttplug. To clarify, I did not have a buttplug for my own buttplug pleasures but rather, because a friend gave sex toys as gag gifts one year for the holidays. (Though I am not knocking said “buttplug pleasures.” I think that in this world you do whatever you like to enjoy yourself — I make no judgments on your sexual peccadilloes.) I ended up with a buttplug which went into a drawer where I forgot about it. At the time I was living in a double-wide trailer (“the carriage house”), and I had mice. The mice, I discovered, had eaten into many objects of mine (including books, the little fuckers). I opened a drawer at one point to find that mice had eaten the buttplug package and the buttplug itself, and then made a nest out of the rubbery buttplug materials. Which makes them the weirdest mice in the history of mice, living in a nest made of a buttplug. Be advised: “Mice Ate My Buttplug” is a great name for a band. Be advised also: the mice shit on my silverware. Since I am not a fan of hantavirus salad, that earned the mice a death sentence.

Speaking of death sentence, it is Squirrel War up in this bitch. For the squeamish, you have my apologies, but so far two squirrels have… lost their lives in this war. The same principle is at work: they are shitting on our front porch. They leave a line of little squirrel turdlets along the railing. That is the lesson for all animals out there: if you shit on my things uninvited, you have written your own ticket. Actually, that’s probably true for humans, too. If some dude wanders onto my driveway and takes a dump on my car, I’m going to shoot him. And I think that would be excused in a court of law.

I wrote a short story called “Squirrel Skin.” It was about squirrels who steal the flesh of humans and wear dudes like suits. That story is in this anthology — Vermin — which is apparently out. I’ve seen no payment for this. I don’t even think I realized it was out. It was a woefully mismanaged, long-delayed anthology. It’s part of why getting short stories published is a pain in the ass. Worth the trouble sometimes, but not always.

Have you read “Hell’s Bells“…? A short story about Coyote (like, the mythic character) in Hell. It features sandwiches. And the Devil. And Dybbuk. Is it any good? Eh. Funny, maybe. Wrote it five, six years ago.

I believe in ghosts and grew up in a haunted house and believe I have proof that ghosts exist. My earliest ghostly encounter was when I was about five years old as I emerged from the bathroom. I had not yet put my “boy parts” back in my pants when I saw footprints appear in the carpet in front of me. I ran. Correction: I ran without having put my “boy parts” back in my pants.

When I was a kid, I did not fear the supernatural or monsters or any of that. I feared two things very distinctly: serial killers and nuclear war. I shouldn’t have been afraid of those things so early — frankly, I shouldn’t have even been aware of them at that point. So it goes. Now I write fucked up horror stories.

The first horror book I read was Stephen King’s The Shining, but I didn’t really “get it.” I was, I dunno. Ten? Eleven? After that, I didn’t read any more King novels until high school — but I did read one helluva lot of Dean Koontz and Robert McCammon. Stinger, Swan Song, Watchers, Strangers.

I do not like eggplant. I used to not like tomatoes, fish, mushrooms, Brussel sprouts. I now pretty much like everything I didn’t used to like. With one exception: eggplant. Because, really, fuck eggplant.

I used to run a BBS when I was in high school. It went by many names: Shadowlands, BizarroWorld, Unreality. There may have been a fourth name? I used to call BBSes, too. One time I ran up a $500 phone bill because I didn’t realize calling Philadelphia was a “long distance call.” To this day, I am genuinely surprised my father did not attack my computer with a hammer. The threat was made.

I once had a hedgehog, name of Poppy. She was not a happy animal. You see some hedgehogs being all cute and shit, but not her. Angry, xenophobic little lady. Cute, though, even still.

The first short story I had published was “Bourbon Street Lullaby,” a kind of Poppy Z. Brite-esque ghost story about these dead twins and their older, still-living brother. It was a good early lesson on the value of editors and so-called “gatekeepers.” Editor (John Benson) saw something good about it, but wanted changes — I made those changes gladly, resubmitted, and boom, my first publishing credit. That was, what, 16 years ago? And the pay rates for short stories haven’t gotten better. They’ve gotten worse. But it did teach me that you can get paid for this crazy gig. And, more importantly, you should get paid.

I’m probably going to die of cancer one day.

I used to think I was going to be a cartoonist. I drew a comic called Odds N’ Ends. Starring hedgehogs. One was a surfer. I had a copyright on it. Still do, I guess. Turns out, I wasn’t very good at it. Or, maybe more importantly, I didn’t want to become better. Writing, though — that’s what eventually drew me.

Not sure why, but I used to be fascinated by surfing. And surfers. This despite the fact that I was somewhat hydrophobic. Hell, maybe because of it. Maybe because surfers conquered the ocean, and the ocean is basically one big scary hungry watery mouth. And there they are, astride the churning hell-waves. Or maybe it was because there were a lot of bad-ass surfer chicks in tight suits. Who can say?

I was once stung by a lot of bees. Ran into a nest of bumblebees. I was more afraid of bees before that. Not sure why, but getting stung by a fuckton of bees (and being coated head to toe in pink Calamine lotion) cured me of my “bee fear.” You don’t hear that very often. “I was afraid of being trampled by wild boar and then stabbed in the face by natives. But when it actually happened, I was like, hey, this isn’t so bad.”

My Dad used to give me a .22 revolver as a kid, and we’d put .22 CCI shotshells in the cylinder, and I’d shoot carpenter bees who were trying to eat our barn. I still have that .22.

Someone bought our property a couple years back and tore it down and build a shitty-looking house. Our house was old. But, it’s gone. And the dickwipe also tore down the barn. A red barn. If you live in this area, you know that red barns are kind of “a thing.” Jacks the value of your house to have an original red barn and this guy kicks it to splinters. It’d be like buying a house with a Jacuzzi tub and then filling it with cement and then taking a crap on the cement. Nice job. Asshole.

I love bacon but I suspect it’s becoming overrated. I think sausage is the next big thing.

That’s not a dick joke.

That’s it for now, folks. I think I’ve bored you enough.

Your turn, if you so desire.

Flit down the comments, and drop into them one thing about you that I probably don’t know.

Went to the Obi-Gyn Kenobi’s office yesterday to learn which particular brand of bait-and-tackle our upcoming child would possess. Boy parts? Girl unit? Some squirming squid-like mish-mash, some Cthulhu’s beard of uncertainty lined with stinging nematocysts?

Of course, to discern this secret truth it was necessary to get busy with the ultrasound wand. If you’re one of those people with kids older than… shit, I dunno, 10?… then I guess they can see a lot more these days with ultrasounds. You tell my mother about the ultrasound and basically it sounds like they had to rip her open and shove a submarine full of tiny doctors in there to report back on the health of my unformed heart.

Our first ultrasound showed an adorable poppet with cartoon cloud fists who persisted in punching invisible ghosts. Our second ultrasound revealed a child sucking its thumb — or, it did until you looked at the 3-D ultrasound, which actually revealed some kind of greasy unformed polecat curled around a boulder.

So, this ultrasound, we didn’t know what to expect.

Mostly, the kid looked like some kind of… specter? Wraith? At one point the tech lady pushed in with the ultrasound and the child’s face peeled away, illustrating some sort of… howling monkey skull, some wrothful rage-filled incubus. I honestly wish she had snapped that shot as one of our take-home Polaroid print-0uts so I could show it to our spawn years later.

“You’re 13 now,” I’ll say. “It’s time to show you the truth. See this picture? That’s you in there. In your mother’s womb. No, no, I know. You’re right. That is so not the picture of a human being. That’s an image of an undead baboon, its flesh flensed away by the keening winds of the underworld, scoured free of the bones by sand born of the Devil’s dandruff. You’re not our child. You’re some kind of hell-imp. Which explains your nascent teenage behavior. P.S., stop stealing Daddy’s liquor.”

It was truly horrifying. Then she pulled back and sure enough, there’s the kid again, sucking its thumb in the womb. Did you know they did that? Suck their thumb in the womb? I didn’t know that either. They can do all kinds of shit in there. They suck their thumbs, they cry, they do robot dances, they put up shelves. They’re busy. No wonder they scream coming out. I wouldn’t want to leave my kickin’ pad either.

She continued noodling around in there like some kind of ultrasound ninja, doing all these clicky-clickies and boop-boops. She showed us some crazy stuff — like, the four chambers of the heart, lub-dubbing away. Then we got to hear the heartbeat, which really just sounds like some news guy broadcasting from inside a hurricane while construction work goes on in the background. I was pretty sure I heard some construction worker catcall in the background. He used the word “gams.” Do people say “gams” anymore? They really should. Maybe there’s a time traveler inside our baby? Yeah. That’d be cool.

Sometimes the ultrasound tech lady would get so close to the baby it was like a Magic Eye painting. I’d sit there wondering, “Is that a dolphin? Mating with a tugboat? Is that Lady Gaga?”

One point she zoomed in good and close and I was like, “Oh, hey, there’s the child’s little face!”

And then she was like, “These are the kidneys.”

“Are the kidneys part of the face?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Very.”

Whatever, lady. You’re just a glorified joystick monkey.

At another point she asked, “When’s the due date?” And we told her, June 1st. I had no idea that I’d come home and find out that June 1st now meant our child was going to belong to the 17th Zodiac sign of Herpecin the Syphilitic Brine-Carrier. I mean, what the hell, people? I go to the hospital for a couple hours and I return back to find you’ve totally dicked up the Zodiac. Ophioucus? Ophicus? Ophiucus? Ohfuckus? Odie, from Garfield? C’mon, somebody’s just making that up. They’re just fucking with us. The astrologers figure we’ve had it too good for too long and now they’re just flicking nuggets of bullshit into our eyes. I’m onto you, astrologers. Your shit’s already not real, you can’t make it less real. What, are we going to add new Chinese Zodiac, too? “This is the Year of the Sugar Glider. Next year will be the Year of the Two-Cocked Coelacanth!” Are my Tarot cards broken now? Why does my divining rod only divine Diet Doctor Pepper? Someone went and broke all the mystic hoodoo!

Hrm. I feel like I’ve gotten on a tangent.

What I’m saying is, I gave the poor ultrasound tech lady a hard time, but she was actually quite nice. Right from the get-go she asked, “Do you want to know the gender?”

And we said, “Yes, yes we would.” We never bought into that, “But then it won’t be a surprise!” business. Really? Because it’s a surprise whenever I learn it. Whether I learn it at 20 weeks or when the baby karate kicks his way out of my wife’s baby compartment, it’s still news I did not know before. And knowing it at 20 weeks means we don’t get a shit-ton of “gender neutral” baby stuff. And “gender neutral” pretty much means “brown” and “yellow,” which are (perhaps not coincidentally) colors that are going to be coming out of the child at regular intervals.

Upon confirming that yes, we’d like to know if our child is going to want a ninja sword or a pink pony for Christmas, she instantly zoomed in real close and said:

“This is the turtle shot.”

And then she drew a circle around, well, what looked frankly like a turtle.

“Here’s the shell,” she said, pointing. “And here’s the head poking out.”

Then, just in case we were brain-diseased, she typed onto the screen, “BOY!!!!”

Which is, of course, what we’re having.

I knew it all along. See, during the first ultrasound, what was playing over the Obi-Gyn radio? Don Henley. “Boys of Summer.” And the first stuffed animal we bought for the tyke was in Hawaii — drum roll please, a sea turtle. Which is apparently a metaphor for “baby penis.”

I’m excited. At first I wanted a little girl, but now, I’m onboard with the whole “boy” thing. Frankly, I’m just happy he’s healthy. And that’s he’s not some kind of angry goblin hermaphrodite.

Oh, my wife wanted to ask all you people:

Advice!

Need baby books. But not crazy-person baby books, okay? But we need to catch up on some baby-reading. Anything you have, shoot it my way in the comments below.

Our baby thanks you. Gratitude, after all, is a trait of the 17th Zodiac sign of Herpecin the Brine-Carrier.