Your guide to fatherhood, Truant style
I’m sorry to report that still, after all of this time and effort, I have not yet been on Oprah. Apparently none of my readers know Oprah, or they are unwilling to introduce me, which is really uncool when you think about it because I would totally introduce any of you to this drunken Irish midget I used to see panhandling outside of where I worked during college.
But yeah, I haven’t been on Oprah yet and I’m not a millionaire yet, and all of this really bothers me because I promised my son that when I got my ten million dollars (which is supposed to happen this year, by the way), I’d give him ten dollars. He keeps asking me about it and nobody wants to disappoint a child by not earning ten million dollars. So I’m writing another book.
Unlike my first book, May Contain Nuts, this one will be a practical guidebook filled with tips that, if you don’t follow them, will almost certainly mean that you’ll eventually be crushed from above by a falling thousand-pound iron gun safe.
It’s called Feed It, Clothe It, & Don’t Drop It: A Parenting Guide for Regular Dudes. If this book were a Samurai, it would duel to the death with traditional fatherhood books that are filled with such lies as “you have to bathe a baby every day” and “baby clothing with Ted Nugent’s face on it is not appropriate.” This is going to be one for the rest of us — normal people who aren’t perfect. It’s so annoying when a perfect person writes a book with the goal of making everyone else feel inadequate.
It’ll be a while before it sees publication, because I’m just finishing the proposal now and will need to send it around to agents. So if any of you know good agents (no shitbags, please), tell them how awesome I am.
Just figured I’d give you a heads-up because I’m sure to talk about the process as time goes by.
So I’ll leave you with an excerpt. And then it’s time to listen to Howard Stern, so I don’t want to be disturbed. Here ya go:
Let’s face it: a lot of these “baby musts” aren’t really “musts” at all. There are a lot of things that you could do, same as how you could bathe every day on vacation. But are they all necessary? Nope. Let’s be guys here. Let’s keep it simple. Could the baby sleep in one of those big plastic Tupperware storage containers? Yeah, assuming you remember to leave the lid off.
It’s helpful to separate your baby-prep tasks into “must have” and “nice to have.” Food? Must have. Baby monitor? Nice to have. Clothes? Must have. Clothes fancier than a snugly-wrapped 1991 Winger tour T-shirt? Nice to have. By keeping in mind your “musts” – food, warmth, unobstructed breathing, Playstation 2 – you can lessen your anxiety level and consider things like diapers a “bonus.”
This just-the-basics mentality really kept me sane during our first pregnancy. I developed it out of necessity after we took a trip to Babies R’ Us for our shopping trip. Now, notice how I wrote that: “our shopping trip.” As in, I thought we were going to get everything we needed and then be done with it. That’s not exactly how it worked out.
When you go into Babies R’ Us with a pregnant woman, the clerks will crap their pants with excitement and run over to hand you a flier detailing exactly what you must have if your baby is going to remain alive and non-Bigfoot. Then they point around randomly and tell you to go nuts, and then say, “Good luck finding it all, ha-ha, fucker.”
And then the hilarity continues from there. If you could pre-order, I’d absolutely encourage you to. But you can’t. Instead, I WILL reluctantly allow you to send me money for no reason. Well, not for no reason. It would be in exchange for all of this awesome free entertainment I give you. I’m just that cool.
I'm fat, I'm fat, ch'mon
DISCLAIMER: Okay, so I’m not actually fat. Let’s just get that out of the way so that I don’t piss off those of you who are actually fat, causing you to send me hate mail and come running after me as far and as fast as your fatness will allow, jiggling hypnotically and clutching Ho-Hos in your pudgy fists, causing small tremors and making children in your wake flee in terror until you collapse in exhaustion. It’s more that I feel gross and generally like hell even though I’m still a sexy motherfucker and got these new weightlifting shoes the other day that are really boss.
So, yeah, every winter I undertake a little contest with myself to see how poorly I can interpret proper nutrition. I really do it up right, eating everything that robs me of energy and makes me feel like throwing up and/or passing out. It’s like I recognize that my mind takes a hit when it’s cold and dark out, and feel compelled to punish my body so that everything is on equal footing.
This winter in particular, I’ve been shoving everything into my mouth that I could think of (except for squirrels), so I’m really looking forward to a return to normality when Spring returns. Because with Spring comes moderation, and a strange compulsion to eat fruit and go outside more.
Now, I don’t want to go off onto an estrogen-filled rant about how fat I’ve gotten, because it hasn’t even been a week since I admitted to doing gymnastics. Whatever manly credibility I ever had has taken a serious hit.
(Of course, if I had no credibility to begin with, then this is all aces. And really that’s where we stand, with me just being a big douchebag and the rest of you throwing tomatoes, or perhaps FedExing tomatoes for me to throw at myself, or perhaps creating and mailing ingenious spring-loaded FedEx envelopes that throw tomatoes out of the flap when someone opens them. I mean, when you think about it, you could probably rig one of the standard boxes with a giant spring and put a tomato on some sort of flinging lever. The only real problem would be getting the tomato to stay in place, because if the FedEx arrived and the tomato had fallen off, you’ve basically just sent me a giant rat trap and a tomato, and I’m going to open it up and gleefully shout, “I CAN USE BOTH OF THESE THINGS!” and then I’ll set the spring/trap thing in the barn with cheese on it and cut up the tomato, and then I’ll send you a thank-you note. And let’s face it, that’s just going to piss you off.)
But yeah, it’s March now, and my birthday is in March, and Spring training for baseball starts in March, and the beginning of Spring is in March, and the return of daylight savings time is in March. So I like March, even though right now it’s being a real whore outside and still doesn’t feel very Springy. (Except out in the barn where I put your tomato trap. That thing is springy as a motherfucker.) And I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, which is way cool.
I don’t like winter. So I keep doing what my dad suggests to make myself feel better, which is to find “small indulgences.” I don’t really drink and don’t do drugs and have very limited access to my harem of young nubiles, so the way in which I choose to destroy myself is junk food.
Filet-o-Fish. Mmmmm. Fries. Mmmmmmmmmmm.
I’m particularly a sucker for chocolate. I’ve gotten in the habit of buying this giant bag chocolate chips from Sam’s Club, and then sitting down on the couch with a cupful of them. I then take a butter knife, dip it into a jar of peanut butter, and dip that into the chips. Eat. Repeat.
Sometimes I do it with M&Ms, which I also buy at Sam’s Club. However, I do this for altruistic reasons because the M&Ms are pink, which means a portion of the proceeds go to fight breast cancer.
Our Sam’s Club trips go something like this:
Robin: “Are you really going to get that giant bag of M&Ms? After getting the giant bag of chocolate chips?”
Me: “But they raise money to fight breast cancer. It’s the perfect cause, combining my hate of cancer with my love of breasts.”
Robin: “Weren’t you trying to start eating better?”
Me: “Do you want breast cancer to win? What if breast cancer wins and we didn’t buy these M&Ms. Then how will you feel?”
Robin: “Don’t you do gymnastics?”
So yeah, I’m gross and fat and probably will start growing my own boobs soon. But that would actually be really neat because then I could combine my love of eating junk with my love of boobs, and when Robin was away, I’d still be set. And just imagine the joys that could come from combining those two indulgences.
Cheer up, everyone. Spring is coming, and boobs are in the air.
Good night, sweet fly-ass prince
I’m all messed up because I lost Vanilla Ice this morning. He’s been a faithful companion to me for more than ten years, but now he can’t hold liquids without me risking severe burns to my chest and groin.
I’ll try to tell this tale because it deserves to be told. But… it’s going to be hard.
(Sigh.)
Hang on… I can do this.
When I was in college, I spent a few months in Europe and just kind of traveled around a lot. This was before 9/11 but just after some idiotic move in some country in the middle east and I remember pretending to be Canadian so that the Pakistani shopkeepers wouldn’t punch me in the face when I went into their stores. And honestly, I was big on going into stores. Mainly to buy cheese. I found out a few interesting things about cheese while I was there, too, like the fact that there is very little orange cheese in Europe, and that refrigerating cheese is for pussies. It will keep fine in a backpack for a week.
When I was in Amsterdam, this guy I was with bought weed because he wanted to hang out with the German border patrol on the way back. A few others contemplated ways to bring back hookers. I’ve never been into weed or hookers, so I brought back a Vanilla Ice coffee cup.
Let me explain how that happened:
I saw this cup in a train station and totally geeked out because not only do you never expect to see Ice on a cup; you never expect to see him in Amsterdam. I looked over at Jim, this guy I was traveling with, and was like, “I may have to buy that” and he was like, “I really don’t think you have a choice” and so I gave the Pakistani shopkeeper this coin that was like a big coin orbiting a smaller coin and he was like, “Enjoy your cup back in Canada” and I was like, “This cup is so fly that it makes me want to punch Americans in the face!” and then we high-fived over this picture of Clinton that had an anarchy symbol scrawled on it in red paint and rocked out while flashing the devil’s horns sign for like a solid two minutes.
Once I was home in Manitoba (but definitely not in the U.S.), Ice and I hung out a lot. He was the first cup I used out of each wash cycle. It was cool because I’d drink coffee and he was right there with me, all like, “Yo, this coffee is phat!” and we’d work together in the mornings and it was way awesome, him being fabulous and me admiring his fabulousness, him flashing his V symbol and pursing his lips and me lamenting, “Ice, this client sucks!” and he’d be like, “Don’t hate the player, hate the game” and then I’d flash him the symbol back and we’d laugh, except that he wouldn’t laugh because he was way too cool to show emotion. And then I’d put on his CD and start rapping out and he’d be like, “Word.”
Then, one fateful day, it all changed.
It was cold. Ice and I went out to load firewood into the wagon. I bumped into him and he fell onto the ground and his handle broke in four places. I was all worried and freaked out, but he was totally fly and just kept pursing his lips and flashing his V symbol. I was like, “Oh, no, Ice! Your handle!” and he was like, “Can’t hurt a playa, bitch.” Then my wife fixed him up, giving him badass grey scars all up and down his handle, and making him extraordinarily dangerous to use.
We hung out for a few more years and it was all good. He didn’t even scald me, despite his many injuries. But then the worst happened.
This morning, one of his scars gave out. I dropped a bunch of coffee, and then I realized it was time to give it up. To let go, for the sake of everyone involved.
I told Ice he had to retire and hang out on my shelf. He was all pissed off, but wouldn’t show it because he’s cool like that. And then before I knew it, he was flashing his symbol again and pursing his lips and was all like “Word” and I flashed the symbol back and rapped him a few bars of “Ice Ice Baby.” But, it’s just not the same.
So yeah, that’s my story. I’m without my companion today.
And it’s sad.