O, to be 34 again – to be young and dumb and virile and not altogether positive that most people who walk with a limp are doing so because they have to go to the bathroom real bad.

When you get to be my age, you’ve learned a thing or two about how the world works. On the occasion of my birthday, I want to give YOU a gift: the gift of my brilliance and earth-rotating insight. Here, in nor particular order, are the most important lessons I learned during my first 34 years on this big round ball we call home.

1. Software and vibrators cannot be returned once they are opened.

2. Your children watch and mimic every single thing you do. If you come into the house cursing wildly because you stepped in dog doo with your new New Balances on, don’t be surprised when your young’n does the same after the toilet paper slips out of his hand and he mistakenly wipes his ass with his forearm.

3. Don’t blog about your mother. If you do, she’ll call you on the phone and in that you’re-going-to-bed-without-dinner voice say, “Can you please take that entry down? I still have to live in this town, you know.”

4. Dogs don’t like grapes.

5. Sometimes little babies just have to cry, and that’s OK. Contrary to what many new parents believe, your job is not to prevent the child from crying. Your job is to prevent the child from microwaving Hot Wheels cars.

6. Everybody compares everything good to crack, but people who read blog really don’t know what crack feels like. Also, everyone who blogs nowadays emphasizes really good things by using one-word sentences. Just. Like. This.

7. Even though it feels that way some days, your value as a human being is not determined by how many people leave comments on your blog. It’s just that some people don’t know how to articulate just how much your ninety-seventh consecutive post about poop made them laugh.

8. You can get a meal comped at certain restaurants if you pretend to choke on their cole slaw.

9. The password is “Falcon.”

10. Once you have thrown up from too much tequila, you can never drink it again. (The tequila, not the throw up)

11. Your boss will sometimes schedule your office birthday celebration for late in the day just so you won’t try to leave early – but if you leave and come back, he won’t know.

12. In marriage, pick your battles wisely. It makes no sense to argue about folding laundry when you are about to tell your wife that you just spent 20 large on a plasma screen and some really good weed.

13. Breasts and football make the world go ‘round.

14. When you find out that certain bloggers that you totally worship read your blog, you will do a funny little happy dance that looks little like a Chihuahua on acid trying to dislodge a live, angry lobster from its ass. Don’t let anyone see you do that dance.

15. When you invite a sophomore cheerleader to be your date to the senior prom, make sure she doesn’t have to be home by 9:00 so you don’t end up sitting at Denny’s with your other loser friends wondering if you’ll ever get laid.

16. When making a list, don’t go past No. 16.

Tomorrow is my thirty-fifth birthday, a monumental event that has moved the United States Postal Service to issue a commemorative stamp featuring my Ray Bolgeresque grill right next to a steaming pile of doo. I wouldn’t agree to appear on the stamp until the USPS agreed to make it the old lickable kind instead of the new-fangled self-adhering stamp, just because I think it will be so bitchen to say that I have been licked by over 20 billion American tongues.

(By the way, today’s entry is brought to you by the term “God Complex.”)

This is also an occasion that has inspired me to look back. So without further ado (or adon’t), Dad Gone Mad proudly presents…”Great Birthday Moments In Danny Evans History.”

April 29, 1970 – A star is born in Van Nuys, CA – the porn capitol of the world. Coincidence? You’ll have to ask my doctor and delivery nurse, Fire Crotch and Bust Lightyear, stars of great cinematic achievements like “Poke-A-Hot-Ass” (a takeoff on Disney’s Pocahontas) and “Balls To The Wall 7: No One Pulls Out Alive.”

April 29, 1977 – My seventh birthday party is at Straw Hat Pizza. There is a large metal racehorse that bucks back and forth when you put a quarter in the pay slot. My rambunctious friends and I ride that thing all afternoon long, many of us climbing onto it’s head and holding its tail. In a moment of unbridled glee, one of my friends blurts out, “Look! We’re humping it!”

On the way home from the party, I tell my mother that my favorite part of the party was when we were humping the horse. My mom slams on the brakes, bringing to the shit brown Ford Granada to a screeching halt. She looks at me and says, “Danny, do you know what the word ‘hump’ means?” And so begins my first lecture about sex.

April 29, 1990 – On my way to Hollywood to visit a girlfriend, I am pulled over on the 101 freeway for speeding. The California Highway Patrolman takes my license and registration and walks back to his car for what seems like an eternity. In his absence, I fantasize that he is searching deep inside his soul, challenging himself about whether or not to give a ticket to an upstanding citizen -- with no priors – on his twentieth birthday.

I hear footsteps. I look into my side mirror and see Officer Poncharello returning with my shit. He hands me my license, registration and a speeding ticket.

“Happy birthday, Mr. Evans,” he says. “Please watch your speed.”

April 29, 1991 – I’m legal. And even though I have a remedial English class final exam early the next morning, my buddy Andy and I cruise in his dark blue Celica down to a titty bar call The Candy Cat. I order a Budweiser and take a seat up at the stage, where a woman who looks like Weezie Jefferson takes off her sequined bra and reveals what appear to be breasts weathered by the birthing and breastfeeding of 11 children into their late teens. She shakes them near my face and she wears an expression that implies that she thinks she’s sexy. She smells like Kools and Right Guard.

Andy hollers to me over the loud Quiet Riot song Weezie’s dancing to, “Pretty hot, huh?”

“Not really!” I shout back. “She looks like one of those National Geographic chicks!”

“Quit being such a pussy!” he yells. “Besides, could you drink that beer any slower? Do you want me to get a nipple to put on top of the bottle, you big baby?”

“Can we please not talk about nipples right now, dude? I’m trying to get the image of Weezie’s Frisbee nips out of my mind.”

April 29, 1992 – The LA riots.

April 29, 1994 – My first birthday with Hot Wife (known then as Hot Girlfriend). Among other things, she makes me a mix tape with “These Are Days” by 10,000 Maniacs on it. Then she steals it back from me so she can listen to it herself.

April 29, 2001 – My first birthday as a parent. I get a framed Sears Portrait Studio special of Left-Handed Power-Hitting Son. And my mother sends me the first of many gifts she will purchase from QVC – a monogrammed terry cloth robe with matching slippers.

“It’s lovely, mom,” I say when she calls to wish me a happy birthday. “And how did you know that lavender is my favorite color?”

Mad props to The Red Head (who hails from the bastion of Judaism: Salt Lake City) for deducing once and for all who I look like:

That's Ray Bolger, who played the scarecrow in The Wizard Of Oz.

This is me:

Like the scarecrow, I have a huge Jew schnoz, devilish good looks and no brain. (See, Jen In Door County? I can make fun of lots of people -- myself included!)

Unlike him, I have never taken a walk on any yellow road that wasn't made yellow by my own weak-ass bladder.

Yeah, I went to Starbucks this morning. So what? You didn’t hear me criticizing you when you were trying to quit mainlining heroin or sniffing paste or watching Days Of Our Lives. I’ll have you know that I went three days without coffee, but last night I took a third of a Unisom to help me sleep and I woke up groggy and I have a meeting with a VP today and if I didn’t have some coffee in my system aysap this morning I would have fallen asleep and started drooling in said meeting, thereby getting fired and going broke and having to send my children off to be raised by sherpas in the Himalayas. So yeah. I did it for the kids. I went to Starbucks so my kids can eat. So shut up.

Anyhooo…

There’s this new guy working at Starbucks and MY GOD is he disgusting. He’s gotta be close to four spins on the bathroom scale, but his weight is not what makes my skin crawl. He wears the same black t-shirt everyday under his standard issue green Starbucks apron, and the collar of that shirt has been so stretched out by his fatness and sweat and the absolute vacuum of hygiene in which he lives that you can see down to his sternum. His chest is covered in hair and psoriasis rash and acne.

In my mind I call him Jabba The Barista.

He ambled up to the register and spoke in a guttural, phlegm-bubbled monotone. “Welcome to Starbucks, sir. What can I do for you this morning?”

I wanted to say, “How about taking a shower and putting on a clean shirt for starters, you sick fuck. Your chest looks like a goddamn science fair project.” But I didn’t say that because I don’t like to confront large people who are covered in bacteria unless there is a hazmat team nearby.

I know what you’re thinking, you readers who are so free-flowing with advice and direction. You’re thinking that maybe Jabba The Barista is enough to keep me away from Starbucks, lest one of his thick-gauge chest hairs or one of the filth-fueled, whiteheaded chest zits finds its way into my iced venti soy latte. You would think that, wouldn’t you?

Nope. Wrong. My kids need me, and that means I have to go to Starbucks.

Today, on a very special Monday Enema, Dad Gone Mad is overjoyed to learn that there are people on the internet far more disturbed than he.

Oh Wise One.

Recently, I was in a social situation - a formal party with many workpeople - in which the peristaltic purge became overwhelming and I knew I was in dire need of laying down one of my trademark Illinois-bred Land of Lincoln logs.

No big shit. Actually, it was. A monstrosity of fecal lumber that surprised even me when I stood up to admire my work.

As I flushed and bid a tearful farewell to my recently departed, something happened. I had a clogger. To make it worse, there was no plunger or even a fucking toilet brush that I could have tried to use to force this colossal colon consummation down the shit chute.

I was faced with either the humility of asking the host for a plunger, nonchalantly walking off as if I was not the doer of such an assturdly deed, or to take matters into my own hands.

I chose the latter, rolled up my shirt sleeves, and reached deep into the bowel bowl and undid the clog myself.

My question to you - in hindsight, other than the manual mud manipulation, can you think of any other method by which I could have solved this problem while still maintaining my status as an upstanding member of the community?

If used - feel free to rewrite or edit this piece of shit as needed.

Macek

Dear Macek,

You know what’s funny? My mother reads this blog. My mother! The one who raised me to be respectable and proud and honorable. The one who tells all of her Mah Jong friends that they absolutely must look at her son’s blog (“Blog? What’s a blog?”) and read the witty and charming things he writes. What must she be thinking when she opens this site on her browser and finds that I’m fielding questions about assclowns trying to shove turds down the chute with their bare hands?

[Hi, mom.]

Actually, Macek, the scenario you detail here reminds me a little bit of the old board game called Clue. If you’re guilty of clogging the bowl at a party again in the future (assuming you’ll ever again be invited into the homes of other people, which is by no means a done deal) I suggest you leave your offspring in the crapper and walk away. When it is discovered, the whole gathering can engage in a little Clue-like game of who-dumped-it. “It was Mr. Macek, in the downstairs guest bathroom, with a bowl of Fiber One.”

(But, dude. Seriously. Between me and you. Don’t touch your own poo. And if you must touch it, don’t “manipulate” it. That’s just gross.)

Dear Dad Gone Mad,

1) Who the heck are the people in your avatar?  For a while I thought it was you and Hot Wife, then you posted pics of your very Caucasian self (has anyone told you that you bear a passing resemblance to Michael Richards when you wear that ballcap?).

2) What's up with women who wear sleep attire in public?  I'm talking about the chicks scuffing around the Wal-Mart in the middle of the day in their faded Winnie-the-Pooh cotton sleep pants and FUZZY SLIPPERS.

Yo, what's up bitch? You had enough time to put on lipstick and snag your $200 cell-phone on the way out the door but you couldn't put on SHOES?  And do you not own a mirror?  'Cause, honey, you need to get a quick glimpse of your ass.  The rest of us are petrified by the sight of your hips jiggling above the waistband that's ridden down to your butt-crack.

I won't even address the belly fat welling out between the pants and the babydoll camisole in the front

And don't talk to me about how you're pregnant and your feet hurt, either.  I'm twice your age, 8 months along with my 4th, and wrangling the other three (2 toddlers and a baby) and I'm dressed so as not to frighten passers-by.  Talk to the hand.  This is NOT your house.

whew*  I feel better.  Thanks DGM!  Cheap therapy, lol

Sincerely,

Cool Shade Farm 

Dear CSF,

I have absolutely no idea who the people in the picture to your left are, but Hot Wife and I have shared many a chortle over the visitors to Dad Gone Mad who think that’s us. Also? Not sure how happy I am about being compared to Kramer. I have at various times been told that I look like Joe DiMaggio, Bob Saget, Anthony Michael Hall (from the Sixteen Candles days) and RuPaul sans makeup. None of those really work for me. I was hoping that seeing my photo would conjure images of more -- oh, I don’t know – “attractive” people. But whatever. Hot Wife thinks I’m the cat’s ass and that’s all that matters.

As for your second query, I hardly feel qualified to talk because every Saturday morning when Left-Handed Power-Hitting Son and I go to Starbucks, it’s hats and flip-flops for both of us. We look destitute actually. Then again, this is a forum for tearing dummies a new one, so let us proceed as though we DIDN’T live in a glass house.   

Yeah. Dumbshits. What gives with wearing your PJs to the mall? This isn’t a fucking slumber party, OK, Peaches? And if you absolutely must go out in public with all of the Popeyes-chicken-and-biscuits-powered fat squeezing out of every seam, please, in the name of all that is holy and good, do not wear spandex hot pants. This isn’t some Kirstie Alley program or a new episode of The Biggest Loser. Cover your rolls and save the rest of us the torture of having to imagine what all of that jiggle sounds like when your 400-pound “baby daddy” is on top of you, giving you the business and picking the Sour Cream and Onion Pringles crumbs out from between your skin folds.

Dear Dad Gone Mad,

I would be very keen to hear your opinion on this.  Although raising teenagers is still coming to a theater near you, perhaps you can shed some light on this phenomenon.

If ANYONE outside of our house asks our teenage son to do something that resembles a chore, like raking leaves, clean out the garage, etc., he will spring to it like he stands to win a gold medal.  If a similar request is made at home, we go from 0 to DEFCON OFF THE RADAR in 0.13 seconds.  Chances of it getting done with an obliging and willing smile like a friend's aunt, father, grandmother or distant relative might enjoy are NIL at home.

Thanks.

Dawn

Dear Dawn,

I don’t think teenagers are altogether different from my kids. A little taller maybe. And that whole puberty thing. But otherwise they’re just kids in bigger, hairier, more acne-covered bodies. As such, I suggest you borrow some of the punitive techniques implemented at Evans World headquarters.

1) There is a little corner in the foyer (see: hall closet) that we have renamed “The Penalty Box.” When a child does something egregiously wrong – like throwing urine-filled water balloons at the neighbors and taking daddy’s Honda CR-V for a joyride down to the liquor store for a jug of Southern Comfort and the new issue of Penthouse Forum – the child is banished to The Penalty Box for a time not less than one minute for each year of his life. At your kids’ ages, that could mean one whole episode of MTV Cribs.

2) There is a small glass jar and a bag of marbles. Every time the child does something good – like cleaning his room or peeling all of the Dora The Explorer stickers off of the front windshield of mommy’s minivan – they get one marble in the jar. When they get 20 marbles, they get a reward, such as a trip to Dairy Queen for a Blizzard or removal from solitary confinement.

--

Submit your questions for the next Monday Enema to themondayenema@dadgonemad.com.

I went to the sporting goods store on my lunch hour today to shop for all of the following items:

1)    New basketball shoes, because I’m not playing well in the shoes I have now and new shoes will most certainly elevate my game to the point that the other guys at the gym won’t call me Mayor McAirball and ask me to fetch them bottles of Gatorade from the gym’s juice bar.

2)    New athletic underwear, because part of the reason my shooting is off so drastically is because my junk keeps slamming into my inner thighs as I run down the court.

3)    A Hit-Away for my son, because I want him to be drafted in the first round of the 2018 Major League Baseball Draft by the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim so he can make tons of money with which to repay me for all of the times I’ve had to wipe his ass.

As I was browsing through the athletic undies department of the store, I felt an itch in the most private of places. It wasn’t just a garden variety butthole itch, but a festering, almost painful itch that sprung from deep, deep inside the Cornhole Gone Mad, up there where it’s pink.

As you know, I have no shame. So I reached around with my right hand and began to furiously attack the itch, scratching it and rubbing it and dousing it through my jeans. I was not shy about what I was doing and there could be no mistake that I was, in plain fact, scratching an itch in my pooper.

“Are you finding everything OK, sir?” The voice came from an employee of the store, a lovely young woman with a red store vest on over her sweatsuit. Her name tag said her name was Jen.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I barked back, assuming she was making some kind of a crack about my, um, crack.

“It’s supposed to mean I’m hear to help you find something if you can’t find it yourself.” She said. “That’s all.”

“Oh, very funny, Jen,” I said, squinting my eyes like people do when they can’t take a joke. “For your information, sweetheart, it’s Passover and matzah balls make me constipated and constipation makes my asshole itch, OK? So just back off before I tell your manager that I was disenfranchised by that snarky sales associate Jen and that he’ll be hearing from my lawyer, who is also Jewish by the way.”

“I think you misunderstood me, sir,” Jen said. “I was just trying to be helpful.”

“You wanna be helpful, sweetheart? Pay my mortgage – that’s helpful to me. Click my Google ads – that’s helpful, too. But catching me with half my arm up my ass and then asking if I need help finding anything is not – I repeat: NOT! – helpful. It’s rude and mean.”

“So sorry, sir.”

“You should be.”

Jen turns and begins to walk away dejectedly. Just before she turns into the golf club section, I holler out to her.

“Jen!”

“Yes, sir!”

“Where’s your men’s room? I need to wash my hand!”

When my son has to take a dump, he waits for no one. Not even God.

We went last night to the Jewish synagogue for their monthly kids service – a completely uninspiring 45-minute part-English, part-Hebrew Smackdown that features rabbi puppets, guitar music and bored children running around the congregation like a Sasquatch with his pubes on fire. This service is a horrible idea, in part because every kid in the building knows there will be chocolate chip cookies afterward and anything that stands in the way of the kids and their cookies – be it prayers or songs or parents admonishing them to shut their holes and listen to the rabbi – is viewed in the same way as an addict would view his drug dealer if the dealers said, “Sorry, pal, I’m out of crack. But how ‘bout some Rice Chex?” 

Ten minutes into the service last night Left-Handed Power-Hitting Son tugged on my shirt and said, “Daddy, I have to go poo-poo.”

I sighed the sigh of a frustrated man, but in truth I was relieved to have an out from the services. We marched back to the men’s room and my son bolts into the first stall. He pulls his pants down, has a seat and begins to grunt and push and pant in a way that worries me he may be trying to pass a whole watermelon.

Minutes pass. A pungent aroma begins to waft through the bathroom, causing my eyes to water and my stamina to wane. My son is working hard and it suddenly occurs to me that he is executing this dump in a house of worship. There has to be something wrong with that.

I open the stall door to make sure the boy hasn’t had a thrombo or something and I unfortunately decide, out of sheer morbid curiosity, to see what he’s laying down. Without getting to graphic here, there is a lot of it. And there is a lot of corn.

I close the door in horror and anxiety takes hold. I’m not a terribly religious person, but I know enough to know that God’s not gonna be cool with this. God’s not gonna be cool with my kid using His house as an Andy Gump. So I do what comes naturally to a Godless, borderline agnostic: I pray.

“God? Hi, God. Look, I’m really sorry about what my son is doing right now. I had no idea it was going to be so gruesome. And oh my God, God, it definitely IS gruesome, isn’t it? It’s just that when he has to go, it’s not a good idea to ask him to wait until we get home. Might have had an ugly incident in the sanctuary and had to wipe his put with the pages from a prayer book – and I imagine that’s a sure-fire ticket to aych-ee-double-hockey-sticks, huh? But he really is a good boy. You should see the way he hits the shit out of a baseball, God. I mean, if you could just give him a pass on this stinky indiscretion…”

“Dad?”

“Yeah, bud?”

“Who are you talking to?”

“Nobody, honey.”

“Yuh-huh. I heard you talking. Who were you talking to?”

“I was talking to God.”

“Why?”

“I was just telling him I’m sorry that we had to leave services to come in here and we would finish as soon as we could.”

A beat.

“Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m done. Can you come in and help me wipe my butt?”

I am attempting to wean myself from my daily fix from the disposable-income-sucking, evil corporate monolith known as Starbucks, to once and for all remove the hypodermic from the crook of my elbow and tell those motherfuckers to stick – no, SHOVE! – their iced venti soy lattes into a deep, dank, fleshy crevice where Ray Charles CDs and little yellow Splenda packets dare not go.

Yes, I’m taking the power back, people. Starbucks doesn’t own me anymore. I’m not their puppet. They can’t manipulate me and woo me with visions of their caffeinated liquid crack being sucked through a long green straw, pulsing through my veins and turning me from some average, nondescript dingleberry on the street to The Danimal! I won’t buy what they’re slinging anymore. I won’t. Just…no.

But I’m only human. Like any other two-bit addict, I need something to fill-in the nervous energy and anxiety and spare dollars left in the wake of my Starbucks abstinence. I don’t smoke. I was a complete failure at chewing tobacco. And alcohol and porn are, for me, more like staples than actual replacement addictions, so fuck that.

I’m going with sunflower seeds.

I have been chewing David sunflower seeds since I was a little kid, but never with the ferocity and audible glee I have exhibited this week. I have been crunching and spitting my way through this week with such reckless abandon that my coworkers have just given up on telling me that I have seeds in my teeth and when I take my clothes off at night (easy, ladies), there are seeds in my socks, underwear, shirt pocket and, on one particularly painful occasion, my butthole.

I learned long ago to chew seeds like the Major League ballplayers do; fuck that one at a time shit. I pour a handful of David Bar-B-Q-flavored seeds into my left hand and dump the whole pile into my mouth. Using my tongue, I push the whole wad into the left side of my bottom jaw, between my cheek and teeth. Then I deftly move one seed at a time to my right jaw, crack it, swallow the seed and – Choooooik. Thoop! – spit out the shell. If there was a professional seed-spitting league, I’d be its Michael Jordan.

My son has tried to mimic my technique when we’re playing baseball outside, but he does it catastrophically wrong. I mean, like, Hindenburg wrong. He takes a big wad of seed, dumps it into his mouth, chews up the whole wad at once and then spits out the whole wad five seconds later. It comes out in a deluge of black seed casings, partially chewed seeds, spit and mucous. Then he wipes his mouth on his sleeve, picks up the bat and says, “OK, dad. I’m ready.” Rest assured, that kid won’t be signed up for t-ball until he learns to chew seeds like a real man.

My seed-chewing is not going over well at work. I usually write with my iPod on, which means all I can hear is Rush or Green Day or annoyingly catchy Kelly Clarkson songs. The redundant cacophony of “crunch…snap…thoop…crack…” is completed drowned out by my music, but any coworker within 50 yards can hear it loud and clear. The following is the text from an actual e-mail I received Tuesday afternoon:

“Dude, seriously, can you chew those things a little quieter. You sound like a fucking cow chewing its cud. Thanx.”

I wrote back:

“Dude, seriously, quit being a fucking enabler. You want me to go back to drinking coffee, don’t you? Are you a spy from Starbucks or something? Seriously? Are you? Because if you are you can stick those stupid lattes right up your pooper. Thanx.”

They say giving up caffeine makes you paranoid, but I think that’s hogwash.

P.S. – Tomorrow is Wondersis’ birthday. Happy Birthday, you shit-eating cockmaster. Hope you get an E-Z Bake Oven or something.

P.P.S. – That reminds me of something funny. They were passing around a birthday card for everyone to sign at the office yesterday and somebody wrote this: “Happy Birthday…and don’t forget to dance in the sunshine.” Uch! Doesn’t that just give you the runs?

Passover starts this weekend. I hate Passover. In fact, on “Danny’s List Of Reasons It’s Cool To Be Jewish,” Passover ranks second to last, just behind that weird gelatinous goo in which they pack gefilte fish and just ahead of having the tip of your schmeckel chopped off for no good reason when you’re eight days old.

For the uninitiated, Passover is an eight-day stretch of gastrointestinal hell where Jews don’t eat bread or Pop Tarts or McGriddles (I know: I might as well be in fucking San Quentin!). During this time, we eat matzah, which is an oversized, unleavened cracker that tastes like mildewed drywall and is fortified with an ancient chemical compound that causes your intestines to seize up and prevents you from moving your bowels for the duration of the holiday. You walk around during this, the Hebrew Hell Week, with the sensation that someone has double-parked a Buick just behind your belly button.

If we’re The Chosen People, why do we have to eat this bullshit for eight days? Couldn’t we just order out?

Passover takes on another interesting dynamic in my family because there is a civil war raging just beneath the surface of our gatherings. There is something called a matzah ball. During the big Passover meal, called a seder (pronounced say-der, it means “order” in Hebrew, which is a total crock of shit because while there are lots of things going on during that meal – farting, drunken carousing, badly mannered Evans children climbing under the table and tickling peoples’ feet – order is not one of them), one of the standard dishes is a bowl of chicken soup with a large, doughy ball in the middle of it. This, in a stroke of standard issue Jewish originality and creative chutzpah, is called “matzah ball soup.”

But there are two kinds of matzah balls: sinkers and floaters.

I grew up in a floater family. My mom actually used to put 7-Up in her matzah balls to make them fluffy and easy to eat. You know, like actual food?

Hot Wife grew up in a sinker family. She and her siblings aren’t satisfied unless their matzah balls weigh more than the youngest Seder attendee and can be eaten wonly with the aid of power tools and, on one memorable Passover several years ago, three day laborers from out in front of Home Depot.

We’ll be doing our Seder at my mother-in-law’s house this week, which means there will be sinkers. There will be a dish near the front door where guests are asked to deposit their false teeth and orthodontia so as not to break them on the matzah balls.

Also? My parents will be there. You know how sometimes there that unspoken tension between in-laws? Imagine how uncomfortable it will be when my mom, the Queen of Floaters, tries to take a bite of a sinker. Add to that the fact that my dad is like hardcore Jewish and he takes the religious significance of these Seders very seriously. Wait til he gets a load of the Seders my in-laws throw, what with the interpretive dance of the 10 plagues and the male stripper who comes to the door pretending to be Elijah.

Ever since Drakkar Noir became a scent worn only by men with crooked toops and sadly misguided views of what attracts women, I have struggled mightily with choosing the right manly scent to drive Hot Wife wild. In high school and college, things were so easy. I’d squirt some Drakkar or Polo on my pencil-neck and march out of the house feeling confident that even after the inevitable cold shoulders and harshly-worded rejections from the women at whom I’d fling my irresistible pick-up lines (“I lost my phone number. Can I have yours?”), I’d still come home at the end of the night smelling like a man. No idea what the ladies were thinking because I definitely would have fucked me.

But that was long ago. I now have only one woman for whom I need to smell manly and irresistible, although I do like to squirt on a spritz or two before I go to work lest my colleagues become dizzied and nauseated by the odor of my sweaty pits, McNugget breath and antibiotic-fueled swamp-ass.

I bought a canister of Axe bodyspray about three months ago. I applied some to my torso and bare ass the day I bought it and immediately thought I smelled exactly the way my parents’ Maltese smells when she returns from the groomers. “Freshly shorn lapdog” is not the scent I was going for. I’m trying to drive Hot Wife wild, not awaken some subliminal fear in her mind that I might lift my leg and pee on her. So I hid the offending Axe in the back of the medicine cabinet and forgot about it.

I’ve tried any number of scents since then, none of which has made Hot Wife sweat and swoon and feel instantaneously compelled to stick her tongue in my ear like the women on the commercials do. Something by Dior. Something by Gillette. A clear bottle of lime-scented Old Spice (circa 1982) that my dad gave me when I was 12. Three cloves of raw garlic. Belvedere vodka. And while I am happy to report that none of the above has melted the skin from my neck or rendered me incontinent, they haven’t gotten Hot Wife to ask me to rush home for a lunchtime quickie either.

So I was a little grumpy yesterday on accounta the cold I got from the fleabag-kiddies-gum-popping extravaganza last weekend. I awoke this morning with an inkling to adorn myself with a scent that would drive Hot Wife nuts, to thank her for understanding my grumpiness and to tell her that I am healthy enough to resume, you know, “relations.”  After I got out of the shower, I dug into the back of the medicine cabinet and produced the Axe canister.

I applied it liberally to virtually every inch of my body, except my Johnson and my eyeballs. (Yes, I even put some there!) Smelling the way I did, I had to stifle the urge to scratch my chest with my right foot and lick my own privates, hoping against hope that Hot Wife would think I smelled more like a delicious man waiting to be humped than a Chihuahua with hyperactive saliva glands and a fresh 'do. I got dressed and marched out to the kitchen, where Hot Wife was trying to get the kids to eat something besides Pop Tarts and Ovaltine.

“Hi!” I shouted, thrusting my chest out toward her and putting my fists on my hips all Superman-like and shit.

“Hi back,” she said, confused and convinced that she had married the world’s strangest man.

“Hi!” I repeated, louder than necessary. “Smell anything DIFFERENT about me?”

Sniff. Sniff-sniff.

“No,” she said. “Should I?”

“Are you sure you don’t want to, like, rip my clothes off and mount me right now?” [Chest, such as it is, still puffed out like a woman trying to overcompensate for her small breasts.]

“Uh, yeah, I’m sure, weirdo,” she said. “Plus, your children are here…”

“Hi, daddy,” Barney’s Biggest Fan says, cute as can be.

“Good morning, sweetheart,” I say.

Then Barney’s Biggest Fan turns to Hot Wife, waves her hand back and forth in front of her wrinkled-up nose and says, “Mommy, daddy stinky. Stinky poo-poo.”

Then I went and took another shower.