The Drug Test from HELL!

Today, I had to shove off my contract job for the afternoon to go to Edina and take a drug test.

Yeah. That's what I thought too.

I knew this was coming. The agency I'm contracted with told me two weeks ago, but they didn't get around to sending my forms until today. Which is funny, because last week I think I might have wanted to subconsciously fail it as I had poppyseed bagels for lunch every day. But alas the drug test was today.

Now, I haven't taken a drug test for a job in like 20 years. I mean I was employed at my last job for the prior 14 years, so it's been a while. At lunch, I made sure I drank two large glasses of unsweetened ice-tea, then I topped that off with an iced vanilla latte grande from Caribou.

Coffee makes me piss like a racehorse, as my dad puts it. Though, to this day I have never put the logic together about why racehorses in particular, pee more than regular horses. But I like the colloquialism.

Okay. Now the freakishly embarrassing revelation. So I had two large ice teas and one grande iced coffee and I'm standing in that bathroom at the drug testing place and can't get a damn drop out.

Yes. I CANNOT pee on command.

And I definitely CANNOT pee in a room where directly outside it a sixty-some year old lady waits, tapping her pencil...loudly, asking me every so often if I am finished or not.

OF COURSE I'M NOT FINISHED!!! DON'T YOU THINK I WOULD HAVE COME OUT IF I HAD FINISHED?!!

Okay, so it was a bit of hyperbole. I managed to fill the cup to the specified line.

Whew!

So I zip up and bring my cup outside, where the old lady poured it into a small plastic beaker and then held it up and looked at it as if she were at a wine tasting.

“This just won't do,” she said. “It has to be past the line.”

“Past the line?” I ask. “I thought you said to the line?”

“Past the line,” she says and promptly dumped my hard work into the toilet and flushed it away. “You'll have to try again.”

WHAT?! ARE YOU F!@#ING KIDDING ME?!!

Panic. Embarassment. Humiliation. All of it swirled around me as I looked at the clock. I had 40 minutes to get back home to pick up the kids from school, so that gave me 10 minutes to man up and fill a cup.

So I sat in the lobby and downed four cups of water and paced. I jumped in place. I sat down and stood up over and over again. Sat down. Tried those lemaze breathing techniques. Stared at a watercolor painting. Visualized a full cup. Waterfalls. Raindrops. Babbling brooks. Rushing rivers. Monsoons. Hurricanes. Deluges.

BINGO! I NEED A CUP HERE!!! PRONTO!

Thirty seconds later, I obliterated the line. I had excess and had to let it go to waste in the toilet. I felt like yelling to the old lady outside the door, “Hey, you have any empty 5 gallon buckets you need filled?! Barrels? Brewery vats?”

Relieved, I quickly finished the necessary paperwork and walked out of the office. I was standing at the elevators, when I first felt it. The second iced tea was dropping. So before entering the elevator I head around the corner to the bathroom.

When I don't need it, now it flows like the Ganges.

I ride the elevator down and get in the car. The wife has waited longer than she anticipated (Thank you). On the way home, we're joking about my urination inadequacies. Now, the trip from Edina to Chaska is what 15-20 miles tops. So about the time we're getting off the crosstown and onto 212. The iced grande vanilla latte drops.

No problem. It's another 10 miles or so. I got this in the bag.

It was about at Eden Prairie when the four large cups of water I drank in the doctor's office dropped.

I actually heard the rush of liquid into my bladder like an old coffee pot.

For seven excruciating miles, mind you during rush hour traffic now, I bit my lip, gripped the arm rest and stared longingly at the sweet, sweet empty Vitamin Water bottle at my feet. Oh, heavenly bottle, I need you - NOW. But we were at the stoplight at the top of the Chestnut Street exit, completely surrounded by cars.

In the driver's seat, my dear wife held back explosive laughter, the kind that is so violently hilarious that it takes all her will power to hold it in.

I get it. I'd do the same thing. At least she's not saying, “Waterfalls, raindrops, deluges.” DAMMIT. I just said it to myself.

I closed my eyes and tried not to imagine my downstairs parts actually exploding from the pressure, leaving cartoonish, blackened explosion burns where my genitalia used to be.

I had my seat belt off and my hand on the door handle 25 yards from the driveway, and before the wife put the car in park, I was downstairs in the bathroom at the beginning of literal 2 minute torrent.

HALLELUJAH! HALLELUJAH-HALLELUJAH! HA-LLE-LU-JAH!

Oh and later, after a bike ride with the girls. We got in a water fight with the hose. What fun!

A Bike Ride, Playing Baseball with Football Helmets and Human Hamster Balls

This morning, I had a momentary leap of fear. This wasn't one of those mortality day dreams, this one centered around my job situation. Sure things at the 6-month contract job are going just swell - I surprised my new, temporary boss by having something he needed done finished before he asked for it.

Yeah, I'm that good.

But the last few days in the office, I've heard people talking around me and on the phone about the man I'm temporary replacing. They love the guy to death and miss him – I have no issue with that. I know it's a temporary thing and I'm even going out of my way to not make myself so neato, or change things up too much there. I want to respect what this guy had built and done while he was here and when my time is up, I'll just disappear like Keyser Soce without all the hooplah.

But every time they talk about him coming back, it reminds me that my future is still not set, that the career is in a timeout, and thus, so is my family. I know I shouldn't let it affect me too much. I know I'll find something. But it's been 4 months now. Had a lot of promising interviews and no luck. I'm generally a free-wheeling guy, but sometimes I get panicky about all this and each breath gets shallower, tighter and I have to shake my head to get back to reality.

Everyone says change is good and I can kind of see it. I can earn a healthy wage by contracting out my services. I've been surprisingly adept at picking up contract work since the layoff, so shit, I should just go merc. Believe me, there's a big part of me that likes the lone wolf, mercenary approach to things – it's cool in a Pulp Fiction sort of way. But I still have that side that gets scared, wondering about the fate of things. I think I need to take hold of this freedom and try and run with it, maybe look for more contract work. I can't let the fear get to me.

Speaking of fear, I was on my nightly bike ride and stopped by a little league park to rest and take in a few pitches of little league baseball. Little league baseball was always a stark memory of mine from childhood, but not how you think. See, I sucked...royally! Especially hitting. Again, fear gripped me. The ball coming in fast, thrown by a twelve year old as hard he could. A twelve year-old! Even at a young age, I couldn't fathom why adults chose to put their children in front of a young boy with ZERO accuracy and tell that boy throw it at that other boy as fast as you can. I still remember the plunker I took in the thigh. The bruise spread from my hip to my knee and stayed purple for a month. But you know what. I stuck in there. I got beaned quite a bit. Learned to pitch pretty well. But I stuck in there, even though it scared the bejesus out of me

Having my dad throw knuckleballs at us for batting practice didn't help either. Dad has one mean, mo-fo of a knuckleball.

Anyway, this little league game I saw. Half the kids were wearing full-on football helmets.

Yeah.

On Friday at the Brownie Picnic, the adults were talking about activities to schedule for the troop. Camping. Nope. You need to hire and bring a certified First Aid instructor. Swimming. No you need to hire and bring a certified lifeguard. Horseback riding. Nope. You need a certified horse whisperer. McDonald's Playland. Nope. You need a registered cardiologist.

When I was a kid. We didn't wear helmets when we rode our bike. We wore regular baseball helmets for baseball. We road in the back of a truck for 4 hours on the way to the cabin. We had B-B guns. We had pocket knives. And we're still here. Hell my brother and I just about burned down a house - AND WE'RE STILL HERE!!!

But you can't have any of that today. If you thought I had fear issues, look at America. In five years, helmets will be mandatory for walking. Furniture will require bubble wrap covering. Baseball will be outlawed. Football too. Kids will need to be placed in poofy plastic airballs for car rides. And bicycles will be replaced by large hamster balls for kids, because you can't fall over in a hamster ball.

Worse yet, the world will be deemed too dangerous for human consumption. All work will be telecommuted through computers. Air conditioner and heater sales will skyrocket. Doors and windows will no longer exist. Humans will be created, birthed and raised straight in the home. No need to go outside into the dangerous world, where birds fly above you, casting their dreaded shadows on you and a wind might tousle your hair. Hell there might even be a storm.

OH MY GOD! WHAT WERE WE THINKING!!! RUN BACK TO THE HOUSE! RUN!!!

Centuries ago, the great explorers of Earth never fretted the jaws of death in their quest to find the undiscovered. Exploration parties were virtually decimated by the elements, disease and wildlife. Maybe there isn't anything to discover on Earth anymore. Maybe that's why we play it safe all the time. But I don't think that's true. I think America has grown complacent. We don't have the drive to change the world anymore. We're only interested in the next paycheck, the next DVD, the next car, the next bonus, the next step in the consumerism ladder leading to nowhere. I don't mean to be pessimistic. I just want more. America went to the moon. It was exciting and new. Then we stopped venturing into the unknown. WTF? Let's get back on the horse and ride it to Mars.

Epic Bike Fail – In Front of the Kids

I must make a retraction. Yesterday I may have alluded to my dear wife running over Julia's bike. She did not. There is no evidence to prove that she did. There. Done.

Well, let's get started. Remember, yesterday I told you about my new bike? Yep. Today I did some modifications as the model had a few assembly flaws. Listen to me. I have a new bike and on the second day, I'm a mechanical bike whiz. So, I adjusted the rear-brake positions, realigned the back tire. Minor stuff.

So after bike shop class, the girls and I headed out on our first bike ride, all three of us together. Things went surprisingly well – the girls listened, they were safe, no one cried. Good times. Christa is getting better and better on her training wheels – I could hardly hear them behind me rattling on the ground, which is good. That means she's keeping the main tires pretty well balanced. Good for her.

So we just shot through a trail tunnel leading to hill. Julia, like the little biker she is, shot ahead of me and Christa, screaming all the way down the hill. I told Christa to go ahead of me so I could keep an eye on her. She pedaled forward and seemed to be on her way, so I looked down to set my feet and began pedaling too. When I look up, BAM she had stopped and I couldn't help but plow into the poor little twinkie.

Relax. She's fine. Just a few tears. But I messed up my bike a bit in my spill, so we have to take the short road home, me hauling my bike home by hand and it was like the Nicaraguan bush out there today. Friggin' hot!

So today I was reminded of that awesome childhood reality of bicycle crashes. Everyone has had one or more in their history. I've performed and witnessed some of the best:

THE TWISTED SHOESTRING – This was the most common crash I performed, largely due to my own laziness. This crash happens when your untied shoelace gets caught in the pedals, gears or chain, applying painful pressure to your foot as the shoelace gets tighter and tighter. Inevitably, your attention is drawn to your foot that is about to get drawn into what your mind envisions as a wood chipper, thus you lose track where you are going and hit any number of obstacles.

THE HARVEY WALLBANGER – Ironically, this crash has nothing to do with alcoholic beverages, but it could I suppose. I just never saw any performed under the influence. This crash involves the rider, going faster than they intended, getting suddenly worried about their sister or a friend who also crashed and riding right up through the lawn and smacking into the side of a house. This particular crash needs a really distracted or poor bicycle driver to achieve as houses are generally built 15-30 feet from any street. I have never performed a Harvey Wallbanger...yet. But I've seen others do it.

THE HEAD-OVER-TEAKETTLES – I only saw this crash live once and I'd never wish it on anyone. My brother performed this one on a black Huffy banana seat bike. When he performed it, we were riding down this steep gravel path. Near the bottom, a small ravine had cut across the path leaving about a foot and half that you had to jump over on your way down. Well, me and our friends jumped the ravine just fine. My brother, however, mistimed his jump, landing his front wheel in the ravine and causing his momentum to flip him and his bike head-over-teakettles and into the brush.

THE CROTCHBUSTER – Now this isn't technically a crash, but males will agree with me that the immediate cross bar on the “male” bicycles is painfully inconvenient, should you stop short or slip off your seat. Too many times has this design flaw accounted for swollen testicles.

Today, I did not split the crossbar, didn't go head-over-teakettles or bang into a wall, but I was reminded that you never forget how to ride a bike, but you certainly forget the years of expertise you had as kid and that you have to relearn all the intricacies again. I'm sure I'll get the hang of it again and look forward to more bike trips with the girls.

A New Bicycle and an Homage to Ken Wahl's The Gladiator

Today started with a trip to Erik's “The Bike Man” Bike Shop, to get a replacement rim for Julia's bike. See mysteriously, the rim got bent and no one in this house who drives a car besides me remembers running over a bike. So I went there thinking you buy a wheel – rim, tire, tube, etc all put together. I get there and they ask me a few questions which I answer and the man comes out with just a rim.

So I asked if he has any with all the other tire stuff on it and he said, “Do you need a tire and inner tube too?”

“Um, sure,” I said back, knowing full well Jules' tire and inner tube at home are just fine.

Yeah, I guess sometimes I'm just plain slow.

So I waited until he almost has a new tire and inner tube picked out before I came to my senses and said, “You know. I think the tire and inner tube are still good.”

This entire exchange at the bike shop is a true testament to my stupidity. After he explained how you actually replace a tire (it's obvious he picked up on how lame I am), he tried talking me into buying some tool to help get the tire and inner tube off. To which I said, “Couldn't a screwdriver do that?”

Ha! Now the tables were turned. His only reply was, “I suppose that could work, but the tool is really slick.”

We walked out without the tool and back at home, a task I thought I'd screw up worse than fix, ended up being rather quick and easy. I felt young again to have a bike flipped over, propped up by its handlebars and seat and me above it, fixing things, hand-pedaling the bike to make sure the wheel works.

So that brings me to the next order of business. Okay. So I am unemployed, but have contract work. My future and my family's future is kind of fluid and not entirely gelled yet, so maybe it wasn't the best of fiscal decisions, but I bought a bicycle today.

Yeah, I know. Fat guys on bicycles sounds like a great theme for America's Funniest Home Videos. But I promised my girls when they learned to ride, I'd get a bike and we'd go for bike rides. Plus my normal mode of exercise for the summer, tennis, is logistically I night mare now, since I work in the city. So biking will allow me to get the exercise I SORELY need.

I'm rationalizing the purchase now aren't I?

Well, the tires did not explode when I got on it. So right away I get to start with a positive. Now I didn't go out and buy the $7,000 bike at Erik's Bike Shop. Yeah. Not kidding $7,000. I paid $9,000 for my car! I got mine on a Target special for $70 duckets.

Julia couldn't wait to go biking, so we went on a jaunt through the neighborhood trails. I noticed one thing about Jules that I had to correct her on numerous times – PAYING ATTENTION. On a downward slope heading into a tight right turn, I noticed she was late on braking. So I had to warn her. Crossing a road, she only looked one way and jutted out. I hollered and she stepped back. Luckily that car stopped to let us cross. The next car may not be so nice.

But afterward, our legs were tired from pedaling up hills and our chests heaved from taking our bikes to the highest speeds we could. The last time I felt like that, was like 1984, when we were almost run down one night on our bikes by a demon car.

Yeah, I said demon car.

Remember that made-for-tv movie The Gladiator about a brother who loses his younger brother to some killer in a suped up car who runs people off the road? Yeah, the older brother vows to get him, so he supes up his truck and goes out to get revenge. Well, that same year my brother and I were biking down a darkened street, when a parked car threw its headlights on, fired up its engine and actually chased us.

No shit.

Well we pedaled our asses off for four blocks, once even taking a wrong turn in a cul-de-sac, which made the car squeal Its tires as it spun around to continue the chase. Once we got to our home street, we bailed off into our neighbors back yard, tired, winded and scared shitless.

When we got home, we told our parents, every single detail – in horrifying fashion.

That's when mom said, “Yeah, right.”

At the time, we were shocked. We were almost killed for Christ's sake! There was a demon car trying to run down kids out there! Just like on tv. It took me 24 years to realize, had anyone lied, stole and cheated as much as my brother and I did when we were younger, non one would have believed us either.

But I swear to god it really happened. Really!

FREE Pizza, Sunfish and John Williams the Famous Movie Soundtrack Composer

Whoops! I totally forgot to blogerize last night! Boy was I tired. Full day at the contract job yesterday.

Time out.

I don't know if anyone knows what I do. I'm a writer of course, but in the professional world, I specialize in proposal writing. Simply put, when a company wants a vendor or service organization to do a contract job for them, they put out a Request for Proposal (RFP) for a whole panel of organizations to bid on the contract. A proposal writer takes that RFP and writes the response for the service organization to try and win that contract.

Now as you can imagine, as with all corporate documents, RFPs/busines proposals are fricking HUGE. They also test your persuasive and argumentative writing styles, because if you can't convince this audience to give you the contract, then the company you work for doesn't make a lot of money.

My frustration with some organizations and how they manage this process is that rather than having a central repository for ALL standard copy and materials for preparing these proposals, they continually perform the hunt and peck method. That is they look back through their entire past proposal history to find one piece of copy they want to use.

This process blows.

Rather than finding this copy in the aforementioned central repository within five minutes, you have to sift through fifty some 200pp documents and do a keyword search numerous times to find what you need which roughly takes 2-3 hours if you're lucky. Logic says – MAKE THE GODDAMN CENTRAL DATABASE!

Whew!

Now to the fun stuff. Christa had a picnic for her Brownie Troop last night in downtown Chaska at the Fireman's Park. Now, those that know me, know this is not generally a SCOTT-like production, but it got me out of the house and offered FREE pizza.

At the park, we were kind of early. Only a few families had arrived. But I was immediately drawn to two things: a tree about ten feet from the pond that was being chewed down by a beaver (not actually being chewed on that very minute and it seemed quite odd knowing that a beaver lives in downtown Chaska) and a dock stretching out into the pond. The girls want to go on the dock first, so we ran there. It was one of those docks built on flotation pontoons.

Immediately my mind sang, “FAT GUY ON A FLOATING DOCK!”

The dock didn't sink, you smart-asses. I'm not that big....yet.

The girls were all a flutter. “Look at the fish, Daddy!” so I peered over the edge of the railing and ssaw hundreds of sunfish, bluegills and pumpkinseeds gathering at the dock. Since it was a large pond in a park, I immediately made the connection the primary food source for these fish were breadcrumbs thrown from the dock. So these weren't fish in the wild fish sense, but sunfish that hd been coied – they only miss the infamous orange coi color patterns. They all wanted something but I didn't have anything to give, so I did what any kid would have done without a handful of breadcrumbs – I spit into the school of sunfish – who went absolutely piranha berserk over it. Yeah, eww. But I was still boyishly amazed at a school of sunfish that large.

My fascination started as kid, obviously, but intensified the summer of 1987...88, or was it 90? Couldn't have been. Well it was a summer in the late eighties around there. My father, brother and I went fishing sunfish on Spider Lake up in Marcel, MN. The sunfish on this lake were HUGE – some came in at over a pound. Well, it was a hot June day on our weeklong vacation and we selected this bay on the lake notorious for panfish...and muskies.

Somewhere around and below our boat was an awesome school of sunnies. Catching them was no problem – it was fun, feeling their tug on the line, the way they wavered in the water like you're reeling in a airplane wing. We caught a mess of them. It was scorching hot on a reflective lake, so I took off my shoes and socks and sat at the back of the boat, wading my feet in the cool, bright water.

Yeah, I did say muskies earlier. They don't bite feet, though on that lake we had seen them tail walleyes as we reeled them to the boat, so that shows how big some of them were in that lake.

So I was wading my feet in the cool water, reeling in sunnies like a fish pond at the county fair, when I hooked a bright pumpkinseed (a species of sunny with immaculate and colorful patterns in its scales). I know this because the fish did an uncharacteristic flip out of the water as I reeled it in.

I reeled it to the boat and could see it about a foot from my wading feet. Cute little thing.

That's when the water around my feet exploded in Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom-like thrashing and I saw the long black form of a muskie lunging at my pumpkinseed.

Now all this happened in the span of one maybe two seconds, so bear with me. My first reaction was not to save my feet. Instead, I feared for the muskie stealing my prize pumpkinseed, so I jerked upwards on my fishing pole, yanking the fish out of the water and sending me crashing back into the boat. Back in the deep recesses of my brain, John Williams played those infamous short, fearful staccato notes on the cello.

As I lied on the floor of the boat, my dad and brother eyed the water, saying things like “Jesus,” and “Did you see that?”

Uh, yeah. I was in it.

So I stood up in the boat and saw I had saved the pumpkinseed - cute, colorful and probably grateful to be on the hook. But he was getting eaten regardless. Circle of life, fish. Get over it.

“Throw it back in!” my dad said.

I turned and saw him holding the landing net. “Cast it out there and reel him in slowly, I'll try and net that bastard!”

I imagine if that pumpkinseed understood any English whatsoever, he would have shat himself all over my shirt. Circle of life, man.

So I sat in the back of the boat and cast the fish back to the water there and reeled him in slowly. Sure enough, as the fish got close to the boat, SPLASH and another attack from the muskie. Dad swung the net and missed but managed to hit the fish with the aluminum piping of the net (Keep in mind my pops is really great at hitting things with objects - see a later story involving him hitting a softball a country mile).

“Again,” Dad said.

So I cast the fish out again. Same thing, but dad missed. Again. Another miss. Again. Another miss.

Netting a fish in full on attack mode when he is not constrained to a fishing line is A LOT harder than it seems.

Eventually we quit trying, but that afternoon was one of the most stark afternoons in my life, seeing a massive fish attacking a wee-bitty pumpkinseed.

Being laid off and having the future kind of unclear is a lot like being that pumpkinseed, swimming along, keeping your eyes peeled for the muskie in the shadows and doing whatever you can to avoid the snapping jaws. It's awfully tiring and a lot of work. No doubt that pumpkinseed survived as long as it did because he was smart and strong. Yet, he ended up in our basket and eventually coated in flour, salt and pepper and fried.

Circle of life, man.

Try and try and try and the big muskie or fisherman still takes you. It can almost feel defeating to think like that, so I try not too. I'm doing my best with what the lake has given me. I'm still swimming. But no one can live in that kind of fear. That's not living. That's why doing this blog is cathartic in a way. It allows me to keep swimming sanely and to approach life in a more realistic manner (even though I use a lot of hyperbole and metaphor). After all it's not easy to stay afloat with John Williams following you around still playing those infamous short, fearful staccato notes on the cello.

Duh-dum.

Duh-dum.

Duh-duh, duh-duh, Duh-dum, duh-duh, duh-duh, Duh-dum.

Helicopter Seedpods, Skipping and the Amazing Sam Rockwell

Okay, no talk of Matrices, or Cathy's books today. Sorry, Cathy.

But I must get one thing off my chest quick. Sam Rockwell is a freaking genius actor. From his rollicking turn as crazed fan and former cast member in Galaxy Quest to his recent foil as Tony Stark's business nemesis, Sam Rockwell just amazes me. This afternoon I watched a smaller film called Moon. It's about a man that runs a space station on the moon all by his onesie. Kevin Spacey actually plays his robot friend...in a a great voice over role (watchout HAL!).

This film knocked it out of the park. I haven't seen a performance like this in a long time. I mean Jeff Bridges was good in Crazy Heart last year, but come on, another alcoholic overcoming his demons. Been there. We're talking about a man dealing with the isolation of living on the moon away from his wife and child for three years. It's like The Shining – ON THE MOON!!! Yeah, there is a touch of creepiness and craziness and a twist that will rock your preconceptions about your own existence.

Moon.

Netflix it and watch it now. Also queue up Galaxy Quest for a really zany, fun film which kind of announced Rockwell's jump onto the scene. Finally, go see him in Iron Man 2. His banter and interaction with RDJ is absolutely fabulous and worth the ticket price alone (as is Scarlet Johannson's Black Widow – yowzers).

Okay. So today, I did a few things that made me feel like a kid today. Remember in school, when class got boring and you spent most of your time doodling on your Trapper Keeper as the teachers drone on and on? Yeah, I did something like that except I wrote a story. I'll leave it at that.

I think I wanted to do a bunch of kid stuff today, because I didn't stop at the above incident. After work, I took Christa to the park and on our way, she started skipping. Well, now I'm a portly dude in khaki shorts and blue shirt – imagine Homer Simpson except a lot less yellow and much more hair on the skull. So I followed her, skipping along. Now, it's weird. I haven't skipped in ages. And I must say, it's an adjustment when you're bigger and taller. Mainly, you have to make sure of your rhythm is on, because tripping and falling now is a lot farther up than when I was six.

So I skipped like there was no tomorrow.

I bet the neighbors thought that was pretty weird. But it felt fun. Skipping is like walking hiccups, without the diaphragm spasms.

But I wasn't done there, nosiree! After skipping to the park, Christa and I saw that the tree next to the jungle gym had littered thousands of those whirlybird seedpods – you know the ones that spin like helicopters when you throw them in the air.

Yeah, you know where I'm going.

You can't see those things without picking up a whole handful of them and throwing them in the air, watching the miniature apaches flutter down.

Now, I'm not a big God guy. I mean I believe that some all-seeing force started all this, but whether or not it's one of the twenty or so gods that are worshipped on this planet is yet to be seen. But one thing I will say is the god that created whirly-bird seedpods, had to have designed them for the sheer fun of watching them flutter down. It had nothing to do with evolving the seedpod to spread farther away from the tree to spread the genetics. No. I see god (dress him/her up however you want) creating the pod, adding the single fin on the pod and then watching it spin down. At the first giggle of enjoyment, god stopped. His work was done. And on the tenth day he/she created whirly-bird helicopter seedpods.

And the world rejoiced.

Lime JELL-O and Yet Another Reference to the Matrix (WTF?)

So after yesterday and my dandelion foofing escapades, I fear that today's entry may lack a little luster. Literally nothing happened today that was remotely epiphanorial or whatever. I suppose everyday can't result in some kind of newfound awareness.

Though my go moment today happened at my new job, where I flexed my dormant Photoshop and Visio muscles – how EXCITING! Can't you just feel the buzz in the air. I know. No biggie, right? Well, for me it was. The one part about this job I was a wee bit skeptical about was the Photoshop skills. After today I'm tempted to bump up the Photoshop skill on my resume from Beginner to Intermediate.

WOW! It's almost like the calm before the storm. And may I add, I'm surprisingly adept at Visio too, for someone who just opened the software today.

Enough about nerdy computer skills.

So on the bus ride over and back home today, I continued reading Cathy Day's, Comeback Season, and I'm really enjoying it. Today somewhere around the 4^th game of the Colts regular season, I pick up on Cathy's idea about how we all grow up envisioning our own “story” a little too romantically, with visions and dreams fed to us by movies, books and commercialism.

I literally stopped reading and looked out the window in thought. Now, what Cathy wrote about is something we all know about, but not consciously. I mean I read that paragraph and I agreed with it and recognized that everyone does it. But my epiphany happened when I realized, I knew, but I never acknowledged it or did anything about it. Like everyone else, I go day-by-day in an ignorant bliss thinking I am Tony Stark, I am Luke Skywalker, I am Captain Jack Sparrow.

But I'm not.

We're all plugged in to the American Dream Matrix, where we all own houses we probably don't need and definitely can't afford, where we think we need to purchase things, objects and services to survive, when we do not, and everything we want to do is completely out of our monetary means, yet we continue to do it.

I have two words: Tyler Durden.

Yeah, he blew up the major credit and financial headquarters in Delaware, but he had a bold vision. An America without possessions.

Maybe that's what we need a de-evolution.

To cap off this American Dream Matrix vibe, I had a little tub of JELL-O this afternoon. I loved JELL-O as a kid – especially the lime flavored JELL-O. So I sit down after mowing the lawn to enjoy some nice cool, lime JELL-O. God, I'm salivating just thinking about the burst of sweet lime in my mouth.

I love it when the spoon makes that JELL-Oey SPLORK sound when you scoop it out.

When it hits my tongue, I taste the lime, but the sweet is gone. Not like I remembered. So I flip over the little foil tab from the container.

Sugar-FREE.

Great.

Stupid Matrix.

The Dandelion Poof of Eternal Youth

Boy. What a day. Turned in my first draft of my bull-riding, middle grade book titled Cowboy Up this morning...one month ahead of schedule. Can you say brownie points?

Christa got an abscessed tooth pulled. Too much soda kiddo. And welcome to dad's Listerane therapy, kid. When it burns – it means it's workin'!

Finished Cathy Day's The Circus in Winter on the bus ride into work this morning. On the bus ride back started her book Comeback Season. One of my biggest regrets EVER was not taking one of her classes when she taught at MSUM. Cathy has a voice very few writers have – storyteller's voice, a way with words that hypnotizes people and keeps them turning pages, convinced those characters will step off the page and shake your hand. Brilliant.

Besides all that, I learned an important lesson too. Never take a long walk to the park directly after a big dinner of penne with meat sauce and garlic bread. Sure, I got some much needed exercise, but at the expense of near vomiting three times – maybe I shouldn't have given Christa a piggy-back ride on the way home.

This near-vomit is sponsored by TUMS.

Despite almost vomiting, I did find a way to do something that made me feel like a kid again. During our walk, I was striding ahead of the girls, when I heard the petite voice of Christa say, “Daddy? Here's what you can do for your blog today?”

When I turned around, I saw Christa, abscessed-molar free, holding a the tallest, poofiest dandelion poof I had ever seen.

Now you have to understand something. I haven't blown the fuzz off a dandelion in at least 25 years and in that span, I have studied the evil weed and learned to absolutely abhor it. Every single little fluff on that glorious poof lands in the lawn and sprouts another despicable, vile dandelion. I have spent over 2,000 hours of my life combating these little buggers with sprays, preventative herbicide and spades and I have yet to win the battle.

Surely, I couldn't just blow on that magnificent poof I held in my hand and purposely spread hundreds of seeds to the unsuspecting lawns of Chaska? What tormented soul would project that kind of torture on his fellow neighbors?

FOOF!

Now, remember, I haven't foofed a dandelion poof in at least 25 years. There's a lot about dandelion foofing that you can forget in that time span:

#1: It's like fireworks. Seriously. It was like being in the Matrix only with a lot less Carrie-Anne Moss. Those seeds just explode in a cloud of ambient physics...and I remember a Matrix-like pause – I call it Dandelion Time – where all the seeds froze in mid-air for a brief second, then dispersed like tiny parachutes. And that whole time, I saw each individual seed floating away like tiny parasol skeletons. Awesome.

#2: Sometimes you have to perform the double-foof, when all the seeds do not eject upon the original foof and you need an additional one to get the job done.

#3: Kids love to do this. Julia and Christa picked handfuls of these things on our way to the park and twirled like tap dancers, creating a veritable whirlwind of seed.

#4: The post-foofing dandelion stem almost makes you cry.

Tonight I thought about that bare stem, it's bald, seedless head pouting, depressed. I didn't see a spent weed, I saw me. An adult, driven to work and frustration with life. Burned out. Claustrophobic. Penned in. Days, weeks, months and years stuck in ruts. Eyes off the clock and thinking there is plenty of time yet – one more hour of American Idol, one more day wasted to mundane busiwork. Things will turn around, you just wait and see.

Then I remembered waiting for the bus tonight, watching all the other seedless dandelion heads standing next to me, passing by with their ears tied to cell phones, carrying briefcases full of pointless paperwork and meticulous forms, wearing ridiculously khaki pants and stupid patent leather shoes.

My bus came in. I watched empty dandelion head after empty dandelion head enter the bus. I was reading Comeback Season. Twenty dandelion heads got in and I told myself, “That's my bus.”

I looked up at the bus schedule.

I looked at Cathy's book.

The bus left without me as I kept reading in the skyscraper canyons of Minneapolis. People. Buses. Always in a hurry to herd off to the next slot on their appointment books. They don't even look up - the sky crisp with feather cirrus today.

Back on the path to the park, I hold the seedless dandelion stem in my hands and decide to drop it.

I pick another.

FOOF!

Another.

FOOF!

Taking Chances, Fat Albert and Moment of Dread on the Bus

Today I was a bad boy. I didn't do anything remotely kid-like. Unless you call barely staying awake at your new job kid-like. I didn't even get a few moments to take the guitar out and strum a few chords. And I should. Last week I learned Highway to Hell by AC/DC and you can't NOT play that when you know it. Even people who don't know what a guitar is want to play Highway to Hell.

I did plan on going for a walk with the girls – they wanted to revisit their bridge overpass again. I just want to break a new trail, go in a different direction. Quite frankly, I have been thinking about that concept a lot lately.

Supporting Evidence #1: This weekend. A traffic filled trip to the cabin. If I went along all my former paths, I knew they would only lead to traffic, chaos, anger and frustration. So I chose the unknown path. You see, I think our human instincts detect the unknown and immediately develop solutions using the known to get around it. Maybe it's fear of change. Or just plain fear. So if the known course only leads to frustration and the unknown course leads to fear, what do you have to lose? I took the unknown course and the experience was not fear or frustration – it was excellent.

Supporting Evidence #2: Okay. I don't really have anything for #2. Though, I will say I am almost finished with Cathy Day's Circus in Winter and on the bus this afternoon I was reading the chapter on the death of Ollie Hofstader and I had one of those death moments. You know those moments in time where you glimpse your own mortality and for a few brief seconds you succumb to such a sense of dread you have to shake yourself out of it. I had one of those. And amidst all this joblessness, financial turmoil and the face of the unknown, I had to remind myself all that is nothing compared to the grand exit, the final bow. So why not break a new trail, do the opposite or take a chance. It's very liberating.

Wait...

I remember something kid-like. It wasn't today but yesterday. The kids downloaded the first full-season of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids.

Hey, Hey, Hey!

From the canned Hannah-Barbara laugh track to Cosby's many voices and the Junkyard Band, I again found myself transported back to my childhood.

Back then I never saw it as a black/white thing. It made me laugh and it had cool music and Dum-Dum with his hat pulled down over his face. And Bill Cosby was svelte back then. They were all groovy cats. What's not to like. When I watched it again, I had perspective. It amazed me how ground-breaking that show was for its time. In a way, I feel guilty for not admiring the barriers they were breaking at the time. But I'm still mystified with that magical age where things like race and cultural backgrounds have absolutely zero foothold in a young child's mind.

I'm thankful my mind never got past age eight, because Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids are just as cool today as they were back in the 70's.

A Gas-Station Fiasco, a 5am Awakening and an Epiphany at the Hands of a Backlashed Slingshot

WRITTEN SATURDAY, POSTED SUNDAY

Okay. No blog on Friday – busy day: work, pack, mow lawn, drive to cabin, argue with family in the car, eat three stale junior cheeseburgers from Wendy's. Still feeling those.

So it's Saturday night and I sit on a spacious cedar deck looking out across Lake Mille Lacs. It's interesting sitting in front of a laptop computer with those picturesque nature screensavers, only to look up and see a calm night on the lake, waves cackling against the shore, the sun setting in the water and all around the hums the drone of fishing boats motoring out to their honey holes.

So, you may be asking, why am I not out with the others, fishing, hauling in Big Luke the Lunker? The answer simple – commercialism.

See, very unlike me, I did not purchase my fishing license prior to the season for a variety of reasons – I don't know if you are aware, but I am unemployed, looking for FT work and juggling job searches, interviews and contract jobs all at once. But I have the time to write a blog, though, right? Touche. Nice countermove.

Anyway, I went in to a local establishment up at the lake here to buy my fishing license, handed the gal my driver's license and my debit card and was greeted with: “We can't sell licenses on cards, ONLY cash.”

Really?! Can't purchase a fishing license with a debit card? I've done it for the last seven years and it wasn't a problem.

“Oh, but we have an ATM in the back that you can withdraw cash from. There's a $4 surcharge.”

Ah. That's the game.

So instead of using my card to buy a fishing license, like every other place does, I have to pay $4 for the right to withdraw my own money and buy the license. And this is a standard rule right? So standard it requires a B&W, dot-matrix paper printout scotch-taped to the front door to advertise for it? Yeah. It doesn't look like a temporary “We can stick it to the fishermen on opening weekend when they come up here to buy their licenses” scam. It doesn't feel like that at all. I mean you went to all that trouble to print out that B&W, dot-matrix paper printout. So you were pretty damn serious about it.

While you're at it, here's a red-hot fire poker. Why don't you stick that in my ass too while you're at it.

I can wait and buy my license this week, where I know I won't have to pay a surcharge to get access to my own money.

Okay. What did I do to feel like a kid again?

Last night, driving up to Mille Lacs, we went a completely different route we had ever gone before and I didn't care if we got lost or took twice as long to get there. And you know what? It was the best commute to the lake ever. There was no traffic. And it was fishing opener weekend. There's ALWAYS traffic on that weekend. Hell my cul-de-sac in Chaska is full of cars that weekend. But last night it was a breeze. We drove through four new towns we had never seen before – Dalbo, St. Francis, Ogilive, Nowthen and town called Day 2, which made us wonder where Day 1 went.

On Saturday, I had to find time to actually be an adult after I spent all day running with the dog, climbing on rocks on the shore, playing kickball with the girls using a stability ball (It's a lot harder than it sounds!) and playing board games. Well, I did two adult things – I replaced the license plates on my car (Kind of on a license bender here and guess how many times I misspelled it when writing this? At least a dozen times and I only used the word eight times) and did the dishes. But I'll make up for that tonight – campfire cherry pies. YUM!

I woke up at 5am this morning because my dog was whining. It's 7pm as I write this and my eyelids feel like caked-on mudflaps, heavy and thick. Earlier, I was shooting a slingshot at some birds. The slingshots up here get used quite a bit, so we've replaced the rubber hoses that have broke over the years. So I was lining up a good shot and stretched that hose as far as she could go and SNAP. My hand and pocketed rock flung back and hit me in the nose. I was caught unaware and it stung, but I had to laugh about it.

Lately I've learned to laugh at a lot of things, especially the unexpected bad things. You may wonder why? I'm thinking that I must still have it pretty damn good to have the powers that be worried enough to try and tear it down all the time.

How's that for positive thinking?

Teaching the Kids About Graffiti Tags Under the Bridge

It's almost been a week now on the new job. I have email, computer access and an actual project to work on. I'm getting used to the concept of riding a bus, taking the opportunity to read Cathy Day's Circus in Winter (fantastic by the way) – and yes I know I should have read that years ago. Since when have I done anything the right way.

This morning as I sat down in my seat, I thought back to my school days and riding the bus, remembering the bus seat game. Now to different species of high school, middle school and elementary school student, the seat game takes on different parameters. For my example, we'll use the fat, sweaty nerd perspective.

Now on a bus, the fat, sweaty nerd always gets to sit in a seat by himself. It's a double edged sword, because, hey, you get a whole seat to lounge, but at the same time, the fat, sweaty nerd is also sitting there hoping they aren't so physically, acumenically and theoretically repulsive that someone – anyone – would actually entertain the idea of sitting by them should all the seats already have one occupant. Mostly a girl – any girl.

So this morning, my bus picked up thirty or so adult individuals and I must say even I play the game. Find the next available seat with no one in it and sit down. But my stop is generally the first stop, so as we pick up more riders, I watched the faces of the new entrants, seeing those profiling thoughts race across their faces, counting the open seats, scanning the riders that make for a more attractive bus pair like Noah's Ark and the most futile bus thought of all – I have no choice, I have to sit by the fat, sweaty nerd.

I mention this, because today on the way home, someone sat by the fat, sweaty nerd and she had plenty of other options.

Made my day. Because I was the sweaty, nerd. Boy that was hard to figure out.

So tonight, I actually got home and had an hour between the rain, which I unfortunately made the decision to NOT mow my lawn and take a walk with my kids and dog. That lawn will get back at me – especially since we're leaving for the weekend. I imagine genetically cloned Tyranosaurs and Brachiosaurs moving into the lush jungle of my yard over the weekend. Great. Once they move in, it's hard as hell to shoo them out.

So anyway, you know yesterday's blog I kind of hit that vein of fatherhood cheese, well, today, the cheese turned. And the dog wasn't helping either – three poops – WTH? Are they feeding you prunes? So we're walking this gravel path through the woods, past a pond and under a highway overpass. Now the rainclouds were gathering up steam, so instead of running home, I told the kids to climb the grassy hill by the bridge supports and sit under the bridge.

Of course the kids were all over that. Going off the beaten path and under a bridge! That's totally wicked!!

And it was! The girls ran up and down the cement embankment under the bridge. The dog learned to run on in a slanted environment. I taught them about graffiti tags, marking your territory and how to hold a bottle of malt liquor. I squatted there and looked at the walking path far below us and I felt like a kid again, hell I kind of wished I had a can of spray paint so I could sign off my portion of the bridge support.

So then on the way home the wheels fell off the bus. Not one, but both girls threw tantrums – mind you these are 10 and 8 year olds, tantrums should be long gone by now. It started with Jules. She wanted to stay under the bridge so she did, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the path under the bridge. So I worked out of that inning.

In the mean time, Christa responded to Julia's tantrum by calling her a hurtful name. So I gave her a stern lecture about name calling, with full-on Welvaert pointer finger waggling. Julia returns and Christa took her place, sitting down in the middle of the path, refusing to come home.

Now even the best closers in baseball have trouble going for a second inning, so I did what I do best. I picked Christa up like a sack of potatoes and hauled her off. After a while, she apologized and I gave her a piggy-back ride home.

I remember when my brother, or was it me, shit I don't remember, but one of us got mad and told Mom, “I'm outta here. I'm leaving!” And we slammed the front door as we left. At that point, Mom packed a suitcase for one of us and brought out to the curb for us. “There you go,” she said. “Have at it.”

Well, you can imagine what happened after that. Lots of blubbering and trip back in the house. When my kids pulled this tonight, I told them that if they wanted to stay, they could, but that I knew what would happen, because I pulled the same garbage when I was their age. So I told them that story about mom packing a suitcase up for me or my brother.

When I was a kid, I often thought I was WAY smarter than my folks and could outfox them at every move, but in reality the parents always have the edge because they've been there before and have done the exact same things. I often try and tell my kids this, but after 10 years of being a parent, I still don't think they believe me.

In twenty years, maybe they'll be reading this blog with their kids and finally get it.

Kids.