byrneunit

A late entry to the pictoral account of our Stigler visit: One (1) tiny, tiny frog, catching sun in the wading pool.

Normalcy is the last thing I’ll claim is happening to me, people, but two days in Stigler has at least reminded me of the finer things in life. Those are, in no particular order:

• explosives
• homemade beer
• potato cannons
• smoked meat
• beans
• board games
• tiny dogs
• naps
• relatives who mostly look after your three-year-old
• tiny grandmothers who take shit from no one
• thunderstorms that hit miles away, but that bring with them incredibly nice cool fronts

Vacations bring with them a feeling of simplicity that often unfairly imposes that idea on the people whose lives take place where you’re vacationing. I suppose it’s only really unfair if your delusion of simplicity imposes on their day-to-day workings, like if you keep them out drinking and shooting guns until 4 a.m. on a work night. (We did not do this, or have not yet this vacaction, though the week, it should be said, is young.) That’s the real value of vacation time, though: When you’re able able to successfully delude yourself for a few days into a sort of fugue state in which life is simple and mostly enjoyable.

Rental cars can help achieve this effect, though they don’t always, necessarily. For example, our rental for the week is whatever peesashit knockoff Chevy came up with to try and draw sales away from the PT Cruiser, Chrysler’s peesashit. You get in the rental, the worries about your ten-year-old car suddenly developing a sudden and debilitating ailment miles from nowhere just evaporate, leaving only worries about your peesashit GM doing the same, interspersed with worries about whether or not you’ve given your concussion by knocking your skull into the doorjamb while entering the car (probably not yet) and worries about whether or not the light you’re sitting at is green yet, since you’re completely unable to see said light when sitting straight up (probably yes). Note to tall persons considering the purchase of a Chevy HHR: Really, don’t.

Coming into the tail end of the experience, though, I do hereby and unsurprisingly recommend, to those of you who have small children and who are planning visits home in the near future, that you ship them back a little early and let them make the rounds in advance; this will leave you free to spend your time in a more leisurely capacity, and not hauling your small person around to the homes of various relatives.

All this insight, and we’re only on day three! Tune in tomorrow, when I’ll awake with a solution to the world’s hardest math problem and a delicious recipe for banana pudding casserole.

We have Oklahoma, ladies and gentlemen. The flight was brief and we started earlier than we needed to. I didn’t get coffee until too late, which led to me typing the following.

The phrase “Cognitive Dissonance” doesn’t get used as often as it should when describing the baffling array of stimuli many of us face on a given day. I think if more people were familiar with the idea, more people might at least be comforted by the knowledge that they’re not alone in being overwhelmed.

Or at least I would have been this morning. We were up by 6:30 to be at O’Hare by 8:00 for a 10:25 flight. The check-in process at American Airlines has been retooled to the brink of utter chaos; rather than a line, there’s about 300 feet of kiosks that sit amid clots, rather than lines, of travelers. There appears to be one guy taking checked bags for the entire system. We hand him our bag; he takes it.

That the idea of removing one’s shoes, disgorging the contents of one’s pockets, sending all of it through an X-ray machine and stepping barefoot through a doorway that may or may not sound an alarm has become routine to most of us is a healthy indicator we’ve lost sight of normalcy. And the trip ends with a sit-down breakfast at Macaroni Grill, a restaurant I’ve only seen elsewhere by the gigantic mall on the South side of Tulsa, where we’re presented with ten-dollar breakfast plates we eat with plastic silverware presented on linen napkins, all the while serenaded with an aria from 16th-Century Italy.

Please don’t give me any of this shit about the New Normal. I’m not saying the New Normal doesn’t exist, or hasn’t existed since the first time things seemed abnormal after the word was invented. I’m saying this New Normal, and the several iterations before it, are quite probably driving us insane, and that we may be ignorant of the fact.

Something like 15 percent of Americans are currently taking, or have taken in the past, psychotropic drugs for depression. (I am included in this number, you will likely not be surprised to learn.) What’s so goddamn depressing, one might ask? “A blend of mini pretzels, honey roasted sesame sticks and cheddar corn bites.”

“Ingredients: Mini Pretzel Twists (Enriched Flour [Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine, Mononitrate, Riboflavin and Folic Acid]. Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Salt, Corn Syrup, Yeast, and Baking Soda), Cheese Corn Stick (Corn Masa, Soybean Oil, Seasoning [Dehydrated Cheese Flavor (Cheddar Cheese [Pasteurized Milk, Cheese Cultures, Salt, Enzymes]. Whey, Salt, Disodium Phosphate, Yellow 5, Yellow 6), Dried Whey, Salt, Buttermilk Powder, Dextrose Monohydrate, Natural and Artificial Flavoring (Containing Maltodextrin, Food Starch Modified, Soybean/Cotton Seed Oil), Onion and Garlic Powder, Extractives of Turmeric and Paprika, Citric Acid, Yellow 6 Lake, Lactic Acid]), Honey Roasted Sesame Stick (Unbleached Wheat Flour [Contains Malted Barley Flour as a Natural Enzyme Additive]. Soybean Oil, Sesame Seeds, Honey Coating [Sucrose, Wheat Starch, Honey]. Bulgur Wheat, Tack Blend [Maltodextrin, Xanthan Gum]. Salt), Beet Powder, Turmeric.

“Produced in a facility that processes peanuts and other nuts.”

Clearly the peanuts are what we need to be looking out for.

Tomorrow we shoot guns at the strip pits.

It occurs to me that we’ve got all these damn photograph-type-things lying around and we’re not doing a thing with them. So! Here’s a picture of Trucky with a frog on him. Enjoy.

UPDATE:

This one here, the cute one? With the fuzz and the whatnot? This morning at 2:45 he decided the other two cats had suddenly become The Enemy, and would NOT STOP YOWLING AND GROWLING AT THEM FOR LIKE AN HOUR until I made the executive decision to put him in the bathroom and shut the goddamn door, thus isolating him from the (apparently perceived) threat of Gus and Smudge.

At 7:00 when I got up, I went to, how you say, “pee.” The bathroom door was locked. At first I thought it was stuck, but it was sure acting locked. The thing is, it’s just got a deadbolt in there — the house is 90 years old, and it’s the original door. Removing the doorknob was A) impossible, and B) wouldn’t have helped, probably. Thank the Earl of Gloucestershire that Erin was able to discover a glaring security problem with our bathroom window, climb inside, and beat the shit out of Trucky; I was thinking we’d have to call the fire department to do it for us.

She climbed out after that and shut the window. We know how to get in now, in case we ever need to beat the shit out of him again.

TURDS. ALL OF THEM. TURDS.

So. Things I have learned during our two weeks and counting without our precious boy in the house:

1. The sense of purposelessness quickly dissipates.
2. It dissipates into a sense of overwhelming, vacationlike calm.
3. The awesome thing about feeling like you’re on vacation in the big awesome city where you live? You can do all the vacationlike stuff you usually want to do but don’t, only you can do it with your friends, who already live there.
4. Turns out the vacationlike stuff we want to do mainly involves drinking and going out to restaurants after work.
5. Sleeping in fucking rules.

We’ve done so little, and yet I feel we could do so much less for so much longer. Yesterday we went to breakfast (at NOON, thank you!) and then went to read magazines at Borders, and I was reminded of how we used to do that like, every single week back before we were with child, and how I’d completely forgotten that fact. It wasn’t just that I’d misplaced the knowledge, like usual; the fact had been completely obliterated, crumpled up and tossed down the memory hole in the Ministry of Truth, and replaced by one of the only truths I’ve bothered to keep up with since 2005, which is that there’s a small cute person whose butt I need to wipe with some frequency.

In short, it’s been a joy, an absolute goddamn joy, and as much as I’m starting to miss our tot, I’m comforted by the fact that from all accounts, he’s having a terrific time with both sets of grandparents. Oh hey, you know what’s fun? What’s fun is when you get to switch sides of the table with said grandparents, and call them up and chuckle bemusedly as they tear around the house after your toddler, keeping him both amused and uninjured. And then you say your pleasantries and turn in for a nap, often your second of the day. Experiencing this, I completely understand why everybody talks about how goddamn great it is to have grandkids. We are, for all practical purposes, retirees this week, and it is sweeeeeeeeeeet.

We’re on day two of the Great Child-Free Odyssey of ‘08, and I have not got the faintest goddamned idea what to do with myself. Tonight we ate kebabs and half-watched “Spider-Man 3.” Then I purchased three seperate versions of “Autumn Leaves” (did you know this is maybe one of my three favorite songs ever recorded? Because I think I’d forgotten until just now) from the Amazon MP3 store. Then I finished Erin’s beer when she went to bed. This handful of activity covers roughly four and a half hours. I’d say things have slowed down considerably here, except that on nights when Henry’s here with us, some variation on that incredibly mundane bit happens in pretty much exactly the same way, only over maybe two and a half hours.

I guess when you’re as much a creature of habit as I’ve always been, and thus as deeply steeped in routine, it’s more than just the usual kick in the parietal lobe when your routine suddenly has a chunk taken out of it. I kind of feel like I don’t know what I am anymore. Which sounds more melodramatic than it is, but is also kind of not a complete exaggeration. Factor in the fact that I’m prone to sitting and staring for long stretches, and presto! Now I’m wondering what I was before what I was became a guy who takes care of his kid, runs up credit card bills, drinks too much beer, and plays XBox 360.

I’m pretty sure it was all that other stuff, but without the kid. Or the Xbox. Since those weren’t around until sort of recently.

Soooo, yeah, back to drinking.

Seven years of marriage and counting! Sarahbrown scanned in some delightful photographs from that fateful day lo those many years ago! This time in 2001 we were … let me see here … drunk, yes. Definitely drunk.

The more things change. Happy anniversary, toots.

Oh, persons. It’s a bit of a slog here these days. The thick black tar of truly deep depression remains at bay due to the miracle of modern overpriced pharmaceuticals, but said looming specter is doing a truly half-assed job of hiding itself. Picture it hiding behind, say, a two-year-old sapling, and you’ll have a fine indicator of the line I’m walking here.

Hope springs eternal, though. Wait, that’s not hope. That’s gas. But Erin’s mom is coming here Monday, and she’s lots of fun, so that’s something. Add to that the fact that when she heads back to scenic Oklahoma City next Wednesday, Grandma S. will have with her a certain 2.9-year-old who’ll be going on his VERY FIRST EXTENDED TRIP OMG SERIOUSLY HE IS SO MATURE AND SHIT, leaving his mother and me to putter about the house and (in my case) confirm my mounting suspicion that my life has become increasingly meaningless without the boy to give me some semblance of purpose.

Ha! Just some mild humor there. Sort of. But! I am pleased to report that a combination of my mounting sense of purposelessness and the thudding approach of Bloomsday (this coming Monday, if you’re keeping track, also known as our 7th anniversary) has prompted me to commit to reading Ulysses for the first time ever, with the help of my bosom chums Natrone and Sarahbrown, both of whom are also Actual English Literature Majors who have never read what was, I believe, voted the greatest literary work of the entire goddamn 20th Century. We’ve had tentative collective plans to do this for about the last five years now, to the point where I actually bought a physical copy of this book in ‘02 or so, but I’ll be damned if this man’s search for meaning wasn’t enough to push him hurtling over the literary cliffs this year, taking two of his best peeps with him. Exciting times!

I must say, as of page 22, I’m really excited about the book. Perhaps it’s because I haven’t read much of anything for the past several months, but that trademark dense Joyceian prose is getting me pretty riled. In a good way, even! I don’t even think it was entirely the hooch talking, though I did find myself reading passages aloud to myself in what seemed to me at the time to be a one hundred percent plausible Irish accent, in a way that perhaps the completely sober do not.

But whatever. I’m clearly going to need a new bottle of Tullamore Dew for this one.

Brian told me today that he got an email from Blogher asking if we were ok. Yes, we’re ok. I can’t speak for Brian, but I’ve been a touch withdrawn lo, these last few months. With the help of Brian, my steadfast dude, I am inching my way out of the ass groove of, what HGB calls, my Thinking Chair. It’s really more like my Sulking Chair.

However, the recent addition of my own tiny toy TARDIS had improved my mood greatly. HGB now understands that, while he may hold mommy’s TARDIS, he may neither take it from the Sulking Chair or chew on its adorable dome light.

I carried it in my pocket — much like the TARDIS, my pocket it bigger on the inside — to a job interview last week. The TARDIS remained in my purse during the actual interview. Had I kept it on my person, there was an excellent chance that I would have clutched it in my lap, stroking it in a way that could easily be misconstrued. Nevertheless, the constant handling of my tiny toy TARDIS is causing it to have a realistically aged patina. Either that, or it’s going to become silky from constant exposure to my body’s natural oils. Like pearls, which I also wore to the interview.

When I’m not wondering why the actual TARDIS hasn’t come and picked me up yet, I snap at my child and read Torchwood/Doctor Who fan fiction. Since the first two on that list aren’t fun for anyone but me, reading Torchwood fan fiction has lasting appeal for all ages. That aside, there are certain literary motifs that I feel should be retired. Since I really can discuss these themes with the precision of a 5th level mage Chaucer scholar, I’ll just leave you with a list:

* ghosting hands
* steely blue orbs
* the freedom of anything from its tight cotton prison
* stories about two dudes who take candle light bubble baths together and drizzle one another with fondue while espousing their love for one another
* prostates
* pregnant dudes
* dudes who are duty-bound to adopt precious alien babies and raise them as their own
*use of prophylactics when one or more parties is immortal, though not undead. Not that prophylactics are needed when making tender man love to the undead.
* talk of civil partnership
* “The Welshman”

Thank you.

Tonight I glanced at one of a great many empty Old Style 30-packs that patiently wait in the back of our kitchen as I fail to discard them time and again.

What the box said: “Pure Genuine.”

What I saw for a split second: “Pure Genius.”

Anyone familiar with the fine work of the Heilmann family can attest to the fact that the latter description is just as apt, if not more so, than the former.