Quote of the morning.

“I am SO good at lying in bed.”
- Maggie

Room for improvement.

Oh, man. Yesterday was NOT my finest day of fatherhood, husbandhood (is that a word), or general human being-ness. I was irritable, prone to saying angry things, and generally miserable. And I helped everyone else be that way, too.

Admittedly, I’ve been stressed. It was pouring here in Montauk, we were stuck in a small studio, my main person at work has taken ill (possibly for the long term), and I was trying to get work done here under non-work conditions. (I won’t even mention my visiting father-in-law insisting we walk to a restaurant for breakfast in the rain. That made for happy kids, I can tell you.)

Shit.

We DID try to come up with some fun things to do. We went to the Riverhead Aquarium, which was okay. It tooks us two hours to get there, though. Hamptons’ traffic. We played lots of games. But my fuse was about a micron long.

I called a friend of mine, and he gave me this advice, in re: speaking in anger. He said to ask myself:

1) Does it need to be said?
2) Does it need to be said now?
3) Doe it need to be said by me?

Smart people, my friends.

Love to all. Even you, older lady with the monogrammed towel.

Checkmate.

My five-year-old-daughter just put me in checkmate in four moves.

Greetings from, um, Vacationland.

Must… fight… despair. I’m sitting in a small studio co-op in Montauk, NY. It’s pouring. The place is a little small for five people. Well, actually, it’s REALLY small for five people. My two oldest have been up since 5:15am. Maggie is conked out. My youngest is still sleeping... but it appears he wet the bed. Whee! (Or is that wee?)

The cool thing is that I’m posting this with my PowerBook via my Verizon 710 bluetooth phone. Yay, technology! The other cool thing is that I’m wearing boxer briefs, and look fairly fetching.

It’s supposed to rain today and tomorrow. Possibly more, if Katrina’s remnants come this way. I’m not sure what the point is of staying here, if it’s raining. I’ve got to find something fun for us to do today, or we’re going to kill each other.

I know, I know, I’m lucky to have the chance to take a vacation. Screw you.

Love to all. Even you, the lady who probably should buy a slightly fuller suit.

Manhattan Half-Marathon, August 28, 2005.

I just got back from my third half-marathon of the year... and my sixth New York Road Runner's race, also of 2005. Only three more races before new year's, and I automatically qualify for the 2006 NYC marathon. Rock ON.

I ran this race at a slower pace, which was planned. Between the various stressors of my life, the halt in training from Ehrlichiosis, and the fact that it was drizzling and 91% humidity today, I decided to just go easy. I did 8:39 minute miles for 13.1 miles. Good enough for me today.

You know what's fantastic? I don't NEED to set personal records every single race I run. Hell, I'm someone who used to get fired up about things for a day or two... and then forget them completely. I've been running consistently for 2 years, now. I've run a total of 123.1 miles of races, which clearly doesn't include training. That kicks ASS.

Although for the Staten Island half-marathon in October... I actually WILL be going for a personal record. So, um, I'm a hypocrite.

Love to all. Even you, the lady who blew a snot rocket on my foot today.

Editing SUCKS.

This is one of those moments where I wished that the six or seven people who know that I'm the author of this blog didn't know it. There's shit going on that I'd love to write about, but I can't. FUCK. Change is afoot in my life, I think. We'll see what goes down.

Love to all. Even you, the nameless dude behind Door Number Three.

Intelligent Design vs. What, exactly?

One of my online friends was writing, somewhat negatively, about the idea of Intelligent Design. You know: the idea that biological- and physics-based systems are so complex that they HAVE to have been created by God, and that this idea should be taught in schools either alongside or in place of evolution. This is NOT a response to her… just a comment on the whole thing.

There are two separate issues, here. Let’s handle the easy one first:

Keep God out of the public schools. If you want to teach God-based education, either leave the country or go to private school. It’s constitutionally mandated to be this way, so drop the argument. Nobody has any right to use public funds to teach children about any group’s view on any form of God’s involvement in their lives. We have church for that. Or parents. Remember parents?

The land was made for you AND me. And THEM. You know? Even if if God snapped his fingers and created it all, teach what happened in the aftermath. There’s a lot of ground to cover, there.

Second: Why are God and Science are so incompatible, anyway? Maybe God started the ball rolling, and then things developed. I dunno. I just don't think they're so different. Unless you’re a biblical literalist.

And shit, yo: How long is a day in God's mind, anyway? 7 days could be 4 billion years, for all we know. Hubris, hubris, to think we know otherwise.

Love to all. Even you, the dude with the argyle blanket, sleeping on 31st and Lexington in NYC.

Pat Robertson: Holy SHIT.

What's worse?

1) Pat Robertson calling for the murder of another person?
2) Pat Robertson lying and saying he never use the word "assassinate?"

I'd say they go in order. Or maybe not.

Sheesh.

Love to all, even misguided "Holy Men" who clearly have forgotten the Word.

Suddenly, the Age Thing kicks in.

WARNING: This post makes reference to pubic hair.

But not yet.

My eyes have been bugging me. I've always been proud of my vision... I've always been able to see things that other people couldn't, and from some pretty great distances, too. But over the last six months, I've had a harder time focusing on things both near and far. So today, I got my eyes examined. Glasses! I'm getting glasses! Apparently, I've got a mild astigmatism.

Now, I have to be honest: I was sort of HOPING to need glasses. But only for reading/computer stuff. I mean, I think glasses are so cool. But now it turns out I'm getting glasses to wear ALL THE TIME. Be care what you wish for, indeed.

Add to this my slowly thinning hair (Admittedly, this is relative.. I just used to have LOTS of hair. HUGE hair. Long, curly, crazy-ass hair. Now I have regular hair. Short. Boringly normal.), my suddenly shot-through-with-gray beard, and my first GRAY pubic hair... and I'm feeling a little like walking, talking ONSET. Did I mention the hearing damage from my drumming-in-dirtbag-bars days? What? Could you speak up?

But then again: I'm running another half-marathon this weekend. I've lost 15 pounds (I'm now 5 pounds from the weight I was when I got married 10 years ago), and I've been going to the gym in earnest... Add to that that I quit smoking in 2000, and quit drinking in 2003... and I'm probably in the best shape of my life.

Ah, fuck it. I've spawned three times over. I'm rightfully being replaced by the younger, superior, next generation.

Love to all. Even you, the kid who plays too much CounterStrike.

Yay, Blogger! Word Verification and Comments for All!

Phew! I mean... I love you, Blogger... but I don't want to limit comments to Blogger-registered folks. And as the super-helpful commenter pointed out, Blogger now has word verification for posts. This is brand new: announced August 21, 2005.

Yay! Back to our regular schedule of religion, politics, and parenting. Phew!

Love to all. Even you, the woman who forgot to set her alarm.

Anonymous Comment Spam. AAAAAAH!

Oh. My. God.

I had to turn off anonymous comments, because I was getting SuperSpammed. I'll turn 'em back in on a day or so. I've deleted all the spam, so all that's left are the wry and wonderful comments of you, the reading public. As well as the angry and offended comments of you, the reading public. Not to mention the neutral comments of, yes, the reading public.

Love to all. Even you, the guy who forgot to shave.

Random event number 8,361.

My four year old just had one of those brain freeze moments. He walked into the kitchen, flipped up the garbage can lid, and peed in the garbage can.

It was truly hilarious.

Love to all. Even you, the guy who doesn't know that his feet are a tad stinky.

Saturday, Part II: Block Party!

After being here in tony, tony Westchester for 5 years, we finally decided: screw this, man. We're having a block party.

So, in 1 hour and 43 minutes, about 70 people will be converging on our cul-de-sac. My neighbor and I did the music, and I've set up a PowerBook attached to Bose Speakers. Way cool We've got beer and wine for the drinkers, lots of soda for the non-drinkers (which I think is, um, me), and, almost best of all...

WE RENTED WARMING TROUGHS... WITH STERNO!

And even better:

WE HAVE A PORT-O-POTTY!

Love to all. Even you, the lady who dropped a glass.

Saturday, Part I: Concrete meaning.

One side affect of having been raised by a borderline is this: it's hard to believe in concrete meaning. Words liks "I love you" or "I hate you" or "Nice job" or "You're completely incompetent" all start to blend together, since they can be substituted for each other at any moment. It's one of the reasons why I have relatively few strong attachments to people.

The great challenge of my life, and one at which I've made significant progress, is to:

1) Realize that some things DO have concrete meaning, and
2) To act on those meanings every day.

That's all.

Love to all. Even you, the dude with the cracked molar.

When the old dog's gotta go...

...he's gotta go.

Every night, Carter wakes me up so I can let him out. Last night, I was up from 2:30 to 4:30.

Yikes!

Pardon the depression.

What a fucking day. Two things, here.

One:

If you send an email to a relative with Borderline Personality Disorder, even if you haven't spoken to that person in two and a half years, be prepared for the worst. Even if that email was meant for (and sent to, but with "reply-all" hit instead of "reply") someone else. And even if all that email said was "Hey, congratulations on moving! You deserve a spa day!" If I told you what the response I got was, I don't think you'd even believe me. Unless you've dealt with someone who has BPD, you just can't understand the pure fucking fury. Scary shit.

Two:

D, our fresh air fund kid was taken home a day early: he got in a fistfight with my oldest. Really, they were both to blame. And my oldest freely admits it. But once things escalated to the point of them actually punching the crap out of each other (they had verbally argued quite a few times prior), that was it. Visit over.

The sad thing was, well, how sad D was. For someone who was quite aloof about letting us know he was having fun, he was really upset about going home. Ugh. And truthfully, he was getting along SO much better with my oldest that Maggie and I were like, "Oh, this is turning out great!" But again, physical violence is one line that can't be crossed in this house.

So, we're back to being a house of 5 again (9, if you include the dogs and cats). And I'm feeling really, really sad.

I miss my crazy-ass relatives, in spite of the fact that, their asses are, indeed, crazy. And I'm sad that things didn't turn out better with D. I think we gave him a great trip, overall: we got him swim lessons (and he learned to swim!), we got him tennis lessons, we took him to Rye Playland... and more importantly, we hung out. He's a bright and friendly kid, for the most part.

So that's all from me. I'll be more interesting tomorrow. I hope.

Love to all. Even you, the lady with the worn-down pastels.

Agnosticism is for losers.

Platform agnosticism, that is. Windows vs. Mac.

I spent the day removing spyware from a client's PC today. (This is my second job... not my main gig.) It was maddening. I had to use a combination of four different software tools to finally get everything to a state of near-normalcy. It was unbelievably tedious and frustrating.

There are variants of spyware that reinstall themselves immediately upon removal. How rude.

Now, I've often dabbled in platform agnosticism: trying to be neither Mac nor PC biased. But you know what? Microsoft Windows (up to and including XP SP2) is a badly coded, insecure, bloated piece of utter shit. When people are THROWING AWAY their computers instead of cleaning out the spyware, you know something is wrong.

But then again, I appreciate the work. Thanks, Bill! You rock!

Love to all. Even you, the dude with the Alienware Gaming PC.

Maggie lays down the law.

I love my wife. She's so freakin' SOLID.

So, D. (the fresh air fund kid) was complaining a lot. He didn't like anything we did, didn't want to do anything other than what he wanted to do, and kept saying he wanted to go home. Maggie called the folks at Fresh Air for advice. After speaking with a completely unhelpful "hotline" operator who kept putting her on hold to go ask her supervisor what she should say, she finally got in touch with the regional coordinator, who was absolutely terrific.

So, Maggie took D. aside and said "Look. If you want to go home, that's fine. I can bring you right now. But we really like having you here, and are really looking forward to having you hear for six more days. But it's your choice. The thing is, there are four children here, and we can't change everything around so we can do only what you want, whenever you want to do it. So it's up to you: if you want to have fun, you can. If you want to go home, you can. But it's YOUR choice to have a good time or not."

He was kind of silent after that, then his attitude changed completely, and has remained so today.

Rock on. Love to you all. Even you, the dude in the clashing blues.

My doctor, my exasperation.

So, I’m at the doctor this morning for a follow-up on the Ehrlichiosis, and I told him: “Dude, remember when you told me that my chest pains, etc., are just part of getting older? Well, yoga fixed it.” He said “Well, that makes sense, if it’s muscular-skeletal.” I said “DUDE, WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME TO TRY YOGA? Or stretching.” He laughed, and said that traditional Western medicine doesn’t really approach things like that… that I am welcome to try alternative methods, but that he can’t really guarantee anything.

I said: “Listen: I will sign a release for you which absolves you for any responsibility for the efficacy of any alternative medicine you suggest. Just SUGGEST it. Okay?”

He said: “Okay.” Then he told me that malaria has come to Westchester, NY.

Ugh.

Monsignor Eugene Clark: Hypocrite, but for a different reason.

So, the Rector of St. Patrick's in New York City just resigned because he had an affair with a married woman. I love St. Patrick's. I go there from time to time when my day is getting super-stressful, or I want to sit, think, and pray for a little while.

Clearly, carrying on an affair with a married woman was a bad thing to do. And it's kind of sad that he preached so strongly on the subject of marital fidelity... in fact, preached on the identical circumstances he was in... only to do exactly what he was preaching against. But then again... he was probably talking about his own internal troubles, so this actually makes sense.

But what REALLY pisses me off as that:

1) The man isn't admitting that he did anything. In fact, the woman involved says they rented a hotel room for five hours so SHE COULD NAP and he could do PAPERWORK. Umm... Of course, they told her husband they were going to somewhere ENTIRELY different, as opposed to Montauk. (One of my top 5 places in the country, by the way.)

2) The man BLAMED GAYS for the problems the Church is having. "Homosexual recruitment" is the cause of the Church's problems. Allowing gays to "slip into seminaries." AAAAAG! It just makes me fucking NUTS. Homosexuality and pedophilia are two ENTIRELY SEPARATE THINGS. They have NO relation to each other whatsoever. GRRRRRRR.

Here's what I propose for the Catholic Church:

1) Ordain women as priests. It makes sense to me. Hell, Mary Magdalene was the closest to Jesus of ANYONE.
2) Allow priests to marry.
3) Embrace gays as children of God. NORMAL children of God.
4) Promote birth control. <--- off topic, but this is a big one for me.

That's all from my layperson's persepctive. I just got back from the doctor, and have to catch a 10:30 train to the city.

Love you all. Even you, the pissed-off person with the Dell laptop. Yeah, you.

Bright tears, elaborate pratfalls.

My oldest has been bickering with our visitor from the Fresh Air Fund (heretofore, D.), and vice-versa. I think there's a bit of jealousy there, in both directions.

D has been of mixed emotions: he's a bit afraid of being in an environment where he can't excel fairly quickly. He loves to shoot hoops, but doesn't want to go to the skate park. He's happy to go swimming in the community pool, (even though he can't swim that well, the pool is quite shallow over a large area... we've gotten him lessons, which he likes). Tennis is out. Overall, he's a sweet and engaging kid.

All of our animals just ADORE hiim. My two other children also think he's aces.

I took my oldest out for dinner tonight. Solo. I felt it was important for us to have some alone time.,I'll be going out solo witih D on Monday evening. While we were out, we stopped at the bookstore and my oldest, knowing how much D likes the NBA, bought him a book of Basketball Top 10 lists. It was very well received.

D spoke to his Mom tonight. It was really interesting to hear him describe our house and family. When I put him to bed, he wasn't talking. I said "Are you sad?" He nodded. I said "Do you miss your Mom?" He nodded again, and single, bright tear snuck out of the corner of his eye, and crept down his cheek.

"D," I said. "Here's the deal. We've only got you for six more days, and you'll be back with your Mom. And MAN, are we glad to have you in our house. Six days, and you're home. So I'm gonna make sure I enjoy having you around, since it's such a short period of time."

After that, I can't exactly tell you what I did: only that it invovled a spontaneous dance, a fake seizure, and an elaborate pratfall that left my oldest and d. smiling widely and clearly thinking: "What a strange yet entertaining man."

4 kids is a LOT.

I don’t know what I was expecting.

Part of me expected disaster. Part of me expected 100% bliss. Clearly, what we’re getting here is something well in-between. Adding another child to the house does some interesting things to the chemistry. Even if the boy is only here for 10 days.

He’s a good kid. Seeks approval. Likes to show off, but isn’t overly haughty.
He’s never seen a dishwasher.
He’s never seen a tennis court.
He likes PlayStation 2, which we don’t have.He can sink three-pointers from unbelievable distances.
He doesn’t know his Dad.

My oldest got mad at him over something, and it just ruined his afternoon. Maggie did a fantastic job of talking them back to being friends again.

Maggie is really sick, which is a drag. I’ve got client visits all day, so I can’t go help her until later this afternoon. More later.

Hello, young man.

Dominique, our visitor from the Fresh Air Fund, is here. What a great first iimpression he made! He's polite, handsome, and HUGE!!!! He's SO tall!

Five thoughts.

1) Carter didn't finish his special hamburger dinner for the first time ever. That doesn't bode well for him. Gorgeous old dog.

2) Why is it that many "very religious" people don't seem to be able to counter arguments based on scripture?

3) Right now, Maggie is in the woods behind a neighbor's house, looking for Stewball, the missing kitty.

4) We've got five kids tonight... three of mine and two/thirds of a set of triplets visiting my oldest.

5) On Monday, we've got a Fresh-Air Fund kid arriving. I'm a little nervous.

De-cranked.

I went to sleep at 7pm last night. Woke up 18 minutes ago.

I was turning into such a crankball after two nights of no sleep. I feel like a new man.

ROCK ON.

Enough of this religious shit: Life update.

A cat is missing. Stewball vanished 72 hours ago, almost to the day of the two-year anniversry of our losing Courageous Kitty. This is his official kitten picture from the vet. He's about 4 years old, now. We're worried that he was taken by, in order of likelihood, a great-horned owl, a fox, or a coyote. It's really sad. Stewball is/was a solid dude. We distributed fliers today, hoping that maybe he just got lost.

Carter, on the other hand, is still with us. Fully three months after the outside envlope of his predicted demise. I love that dog, and every day he's here is just awesome.

My foot's been itching for two days, and it turns out I had this enormous blister between my third and fourth toes. I don't understand how I didn't notice. Bleah.

New York City has been really hot. I had to dress up three days this week for client visits.

My company is on track to do about a million dollars in sales this year. How about that?

Love you all. Especially YOU. Right there. With the computer.

Excerpt from a discussion with a pleasant pro-lifer.

I don't believe that questions like "Does God make children by mistake?" or "Can God make a mistake?" are actually valid. Is God fallible? Maybe. I know that in the Torah, God was persuaded to change his mind by Moses at least three different times. See Exodus 32:34- 33:23 for just one example. Was God merely "pretending" to change his mind? A little bit of trickery from the Almighty?

When Jesus died, he LEFT. At least according to John.

"But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you. - John 14:26"

What he left behind was the Advocate. The Holy Spirit. Which is an entirely different presence than the direct intervention of God. God may or may not make mistakes, but God isn't directly involved in day to day decisions, so it doesn't matter.

I hear similar things in AA. (I'm an alcoholic. But I don't drink, so it's cool.) People always say "nothing happens by mistake. There are no coincidences." Etc. Speaking strongly, here: I consider this the height of arrogance. God didn't shatter someone's prized teacup on purpose, then go and starve a million Nigerian children, or kill a child via some drunk driver. God isn't part of the day-to-day situation.

God doesn't influence the Super Bowl.

On the other hand, I believe in the Spirit. The flow of good on the planet. And I can work to be spiritually aligned with that, or not. I think it's a tangible, internally provable thing. And it's why I have that big-ass tattoo on my right shoulder (see my blogger profile pic). It's a dove, and it represents the moment Jesus was imbued with the Holy Spirit, after being baptized by John.

Some thoughts on the train to NYC from Westchester. Rock on.