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advice column

The Ice Of Wrath

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Dear You...Wish You Were Here!

Premise of column…the abridged version: The theory behind this column is that, unlike most advice columns, I will not be dispensing advice. I have more issues than a magazine stand, so I feel that it would be rather disingenuous (as well as mildly dangerous) for me to offer anyone advice. So what I am doing is offering up my problems to you, the constant reader, so that you may share with me, and the world at large, your sage advice and wisdom. Who knows? You may even actually help me with one of my problems or even become the next Dr. Phil, which would entail an outpatient surgical procedure to have you welded to the megalomaniacal monster that is Oprah Winfrey’s ego.

Well, my debut column kind of went astray rather quickly. I began it with all good intentions, but that damned dog was just preying on my mind, so there wasn’t too much in the way of advice that anyone could offer beside “train it,” “give it away” or “play fetch with it on the roof of Kettering Tower.” This column, I assure you, will give you an opportunity to not so much give advice, but lecture me about what kind of horrible person I am.

There is nothing like a good ice storm to bring things into perspective. As evening draws night and I see the steel grey daylight fade from the vines hanging off my office’s window (the vines I meant to remove this past summer before they manage to pull the window out of it’s frame). I ponder the imponderables, such as what color does a Smurf turn if you choke him, how does the guy that runs the snow plow get to work and, while watching back to back reruns of Full House, how did two bug eyed girls, who resembled my vision of what trolls must look like, turn into two skanky globe trotting trollops in such a short time? I never seek the answers to these questions as then they would cease being imponderable and I would have nothing to do while sitting in my house, snowed in.

From Innocent Gremlins To International Slut-Butts

Another thought flits through my head as I sit here with three kids annoying the living crap out of me, the youngest talking while I am trying to write, the middle one going through all the drawers in my office, borrowing whatever his little adolescent fingers fall on…without asking, of course. The third kid isn’t even mine, but one of my older son’s friends. He just stands there laughing like a mook, knowing that his mere presence makes me yearn for a time when adults were allowed to clout a kid upside the head for irritating them. The thought that careens through my cranium is, “How many people who espouse the wonders and sanctity of family have actually been forced into close quarters with them?” I don’t think they ever have. They are too busy making speeches across the country, dictating their familial beliefs to others, then going back to a Holiday Inn, getting room service and then settling down for an evening of in-room porn.

Careful With That Axe Eugene

I believe that most people who are trapped with their family all day turn into Jack Nicolson’s character from the Shining before Oprah even airs in the afternoon. There are only so many times that your better half can pop awake from their almost continuous catnap to berate you for not spending enough time with them (and then dropping back into a blessed catatonia) before your thoughts cast themselves towards the garage, wondering where you put the axe this past fall and was it sharp enough?

I love my family. My kids are the absolute beginning and end for me and I would do anything for them…except watch four hours of mind melting Japanimation cartoons while my eleven year old does color commentary. It’s not that I don’t like spending time with them…but dear God, small doses please! My kids and I have a great time when we are out and about, but that is when I am safe in the knowledge that sometime soon, they will go back to school, allowing me to sit in my office, lulled by the sounds of silence as I look up at pictures of them…pictures that don’t ask questions like, “Can a Jedi lightsaber cut through Superman?”

Do you have a spouse that begs you to stop working and sit down with her to watch some television…and then proceeds to flip back and forth between RuPaul’s Drag Race and Bizarre Foods until you get confused and start wondering which thing fluttering by on the screen would be worse to have in your mouth? She single handedly will turn your television into a RGB colored strobe light if you give her the controller. Either that or you’ll be locked onto the TLC or the Oxygen network watching some graphic retelling of some “based on a true story” made for TV movie that makes you consider how lucky Hellen Keller was.

Perhaps the problem lies with me. I have always been somewhat of a loner and not really able to relate to people, so maybe I should be able to open myself up to the experience of domesticated living. I should embrace the Snuggie and kick back in the Laz-E-Boy, quaffing down a six pack of beer while watching and laughing through the American Idol audition shows…

Who Could Be A Meaner To A Face Like That?

…see? I can’t write more than a sentence on certain subjects without seeming to be a mean spirited, smarmy a-hole. It’s not that I dislike my family. It’s just that I believe there should be a separation, like there is between Creationism and logic. For example, in the short time that I have been writing this, my kids have interrupted me innumerable times and my wife has been in here three times. Once to use my lighter, even though her lighter was concealed in her other hand. The second time was to…I’m not making this up…talk to me about our relationship because she feels that I need to spend more time with her. The third time was so she could have me look up how to make hand made soap which, while an admirable aspiration and hobby, she only seems interested in because I am on the computer. This has been interspersed with random yelling matches between the kids and her and her and the kids, peppered with random observations yelled out to no one in particular.

Now that the ice is melting away, everyone is breathing easier, knowing that, if worse comes to worse, they can run screaming from the house if the youngest child wants to play charades for the millionth time (a game which, after having the instructions told to him a billion times, he still cannot truly grasp) or if their mom wants to go into one of her long winded stories about her youth, stories which a.) have no end or meaning and b.) grow in breadth and depth exponentially with each telling. As I sit here at the computer as my wife begins a tirade about missing hair ties, I wonder if it’s the forced confinement that creates these feelings or if society has played up the importance of “family time” so much so that you feel guilty if all you want to do is have a moment of silence and eschew yet another discussion with your children about how is it possible for a squirrel to live in Bikini Bottom with Spongebob…a discussion that invariably ends with me screaming, “Because it’s f#$%ing cartoon!” and my son throwing something at me and calling me a meaner.

So, I guess what the question is, buried within this convoluted rant, is how do you balance family time and personal time? What is the basis for time spent with the family/children/spouses? Is it based on the factor of quality or quantity?

Dear You – Preamble, Procrastination And A Puppy

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Dear You...Wish You Were Here!

The premise of this column is rather simple: while most advice columns have readers submit their most convoluted personal tragedies, some of which I find to be nothing more than the apocryphal rants of desperate attention-mongers, and then the advice columnist gushes with humanity and proceeds to tell this perfect stranger how to live their life. This column, however, takes a rather dynamic approach to meting out advice which is, simply put, that I don’t. I have more problems before 8:00 am than the average person has in a whole lifetime, so I feel that a.) I am not in the position to give anyone advice, what with the precariously poised position my life teeters on at any given moment and b.) if anyone in this dynamic needs advice, it is me. Ask anyone that has dealt with me for more than five minutes and they will wholeheartedly agree with me…and then I will hate them forever for passing such crass judgments against my character. I mean, who the hell are they to be so judgmental? I’ve only known them for a little more than five minutes!

So, the way this works is, I will write about whatever problem I happen to be dealing with at that moment and you, the reader, will submit their well intentioned, sage like counsel, which I will, in turn, probably argue against, picking apart their suggestion point by point in the next column. While this may seem rather mean spirited and, at the end of the day, rather a huge waste of time for all involved if I am not even going to entertain taking the advice of perfect strangers, but it is the process and not the proffered guidance that helps people. You can read Freud, Nietzsche or Chicken Soup for the Soul until the tattered pages decay into dust and you won’t actually apply any of the answers that you may find there because you have not gone through the process of dealing with the problem. Slapping a bumper sticker philosophy across a problem and repeating it’s poetic phrases like some monosyllabic mantra will only mask the problem, lulling you into a false sense of security. You may feel as if you have conquered a world of pain by singing, Don’t Worry, Be Happy, thinking that it will sink into your subconscious, healing all your wounds, when all it will really do is allow your problem to ferment and foment in the shadows of evasion…and make you want to hitchhike to Hollywood and choke Bobby McFerrin with a bag of Lifesavers. In a nutshell, I guess what I am saying is that, regardless of whether or not I take the advice given, it opens up the process of realization and, by agreeing or arguing a point down, it allows each side to actually examine an issue and not just throw fortune cookie philosophies at it.

Well, I guess with all of the unnecessary preambles and attacks on modern psychobabble out of the way, let’s journey forward together, shall we?

I wondered which of the many issues that act as a roadblock on my synaptic superhighway I should tackle first. Well, since I actually sat down to write this yesterday, my epic weakness for succumbing to procrastination jumped right to the top of the list. Yesterday, I had thought about starting this column as I dropped my children off to school, trying to mold a frame together which later I would hang words and phrases off of. I had an adequate number of cigarettes on hand and a chilled two liter of Mountain Dew at the ready. As I turned on the computer, I remembered that I needed to do laundry, so I got up and grabbed my basket full of dirty clothes and headed for the basement. After almost careening headfirst down the steps because one of my little lethargic offspring had thrown a large, wet beach towel onto the steps. I went back upstairs fuming, entering the guilty child’s room to pee on his pillowcase so that he would reflect on the danger that his slothful deed could have caused. I learned that trick from my cat, who trained me not to accidently lock her in the garage with just two short sessions of this method. After getting the laundry started, I went back upstairs, only to find that my baby-mama’s Pomeranian had pulled out some of the stuffing from one of the couch cushions.

This could actually be a whole separate story in of itself, but since it has reared its furry little head into this story, it must be discussed. I didn’t want a dog in the first place. Dogs, in my opinion, are too needy. You have to work your whole schedule around a dog, making sure that you get home in time before your living room becomes a waste management way station. You have to adjust your leisure time activities to include the dog, which means that you get to watch others have a leisure time activity while you get your shoulder yanked out of socket trying to keep said dog from running in front of an ice cream truck.

This dog…this dog is nothing but a ball of fuzzy destruction. Anything that comes near its sharp toothed Alpo-hole is devoured instantly. It ate my middle son’s Blue Tooth, threw it up, then fought me as I tried to clean it up and he tried to re-eat it. It ate a whole can of my youngest son’s Play-Doh, which, while annoying, at least added a festive décor to the front yard when he pooped out merry little red dog logs just in time for Christmas. It ate a whole four foot length of hemp twine and then whined and cried while we had to pull the rest out of him because it only pooped out a foot and a half. We had brand new carpet laid in the living room just before Christmas and the dog chewed a hole through it. People have told me, ‘You have to train the poor little puppy!’ and then they turn to walk away and trip in the hole that the malevolent little creature dug…through the sidewalk! It dug a hole through a two inch thick brick paver!

It occurs to me in the wee hours of the morning as I hear him gnawing through his water bowl or dry-humping his little bed, that this could possibly be a terrorist tactic, aimed at dismantling the nuclear family, one torn pant leg and chewed shoe at a time. It makes perfect sense that there could be an Al Qaeda AKC splinter cell that is training dogs to masticate the American way of life. When I talk this way, people look at me as if I’m crazy and they look at the dog, which cocks its cute little head like Nipper, the RCA dog. I tell them that if he’s so cute and harmless, they should take him home, but they must subconsciously sense his insufferable evil rolling off his fur and decline in a flurry of excuses. One time at the drive through of the bank, and then I’m the bad guy because I suggested that I could send him through the vacuum tube to her. He’s small! He would have fit!

I’m the one being cruel? I have to be on guard constantly, ever vigilant for the muted chomping sounds coming from under the couch. He got in the habit of spending several hours under the bed, which I thought was fine because I knew where he was and he couldn’t get into too much trouble under there. This was what I thought, until one night at about three or four in the morning, I rolled over and the bed collapsed. The little bastard had chewed straight through the center board supporting the box springs! Our living room looks as if we can’t afford decorations and such because we had to strip it bare so that he couldn’t eat anything. He ate through three electrical cords and somehow did not get electrocuted. He ate through the cable wire. He ate through the X-Box controllers. He has eaten through five collars while I have had him chained up front and then run away…but I’ll be damned if he doesn’t show right back up!

I know I sound exceptionally cruel, but let me assure you that I have never mistreated an animal. I grew up with twenty-one cats, a flock of ducks, a beehive, two dogs and a snapping turtle named Herbie. All of my cats have been strays that I have rescued and they have all lived long, happy lives. I worked with my mom volunteering for several animal rescue groups and humanitarian networks…then the Devil’s dog comes along to test my humanitarian record.

Well, I started this column with all good intentions. I wanted to talk about my rampant ADHD and propensity for procrastination and that damned dog got in the way again! It’s like it’s chewing a hole through my brain, just like the carpet. I guess I’ll write the article about procrastination once I take care of the puppy problem. Maybe I’ll do it tomorrow…or maybe the next day…