Lately I’ve been tracking this strange meme traipsing through the blogosphere – “10 Things You Don’t Know About Me.” I find these entries interesting to read, but the idea of actually writing one here strikes me as unnecessarily narcissistic and self-congratulatory. “Oooooh. Look at meeeee! I’m so different and edgy and special. Do you want to touch the hem of my garment?”

Aw, phooey!

But then again, I don’t really give a shit.

Let’s do this.

10 THINGS YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT ME (AND ARE PROBABLY BETTER OFF NOT KNOWING BUT WHATEVER. DEAL WITH IT. AND QUIT YOUR BITCHING.):

1. I was born with an undescended testicle. For the first nine years of my life, I thought it was normal to be a “uniball.” But when I was nine I had a hernia operation and when I woke up there were two little playmates in my satchel. I remember that to keep it from retreating back into its hiding place, they attached a piece of that cylindrical dental gauze to it.

2. I didn’t kiss a girl until I was 20 (unless you count a poster of Farrah Fawcett as “a girl,” in which case I was a fucking PIMP! by my twelfth birthday).

3. When I was a sportswriter, I got to interview some of my sports heroes. Michael Jordan. Tiger Woods. Steve Yzerman. David Robinson. Bo Jackson. Marcus Allen. Oscar de la Hoya. Sergei Fedorov. But now I see those people less as superstar untouchables and more as simply as flawed, normal human beings. I don’t get too excited about famous athletes anymore, but when I see them through my son’s eyes, I do feel a little bit tingly.

4. One of my childhood buddies was the cousin of Adam Rich, who played that little twerp Nicholas on Eight Is Enough. We were once at a party together right about the time Adam was slipping into the drug-induced nightmare that virtually every childhood star of that era experienced. Although I was star-struck, it was the first time I had ever seen someone actually doing drugs. It freaked me out. But not enough to keeping from smoking sticky green buds all through college.

5. I met Hot Wife in the summer of 1993, right after I graduated from college. We were counselors at a summer camp together. Toward the end of that summer, I was sitting outside writing in a journal. I remember writing about my strong feelings for her and wondering if she might be “the one.” Just as I was writing a sentence about finally finding someone with whom I could share my life, two giant watermelon-sized seeds fell simultaneously out of a tree right in my line of site. Perhaps it was just serendipity or coincidence, but I chose to look at the event as a sign. Two big things falling out of a tree at the same time just when I was thinking about the two of us? To me, that was evidence that the world wanted us to be together. And we have been ever since.

6. I have this funky little cyst on the skin over my left collarbone. It’s completely benign and harmless, but I’ve had it for many years. I’m thinking about drinking a whole bunch of whiskey and pulling it out with an Exacto knife and some needle-nosed pliers.

7. I am stunned everyday by what this blog has given me. The thousands of people who read it. The number of people who bought t-shirts and requested more when they ran out. The people who have taken a shine to my wife and my kids and my sister. The insane amounts of positive feedback I get for doing what I love. Last week someone sent me an e-mail asking if I was at such-and-such restaurant on such-and-such night because she could have sworn it was me. I wrote back and said why yes, it was me and why the hell didn’t you come over and say hi and let me buy you a beer. She said I was too famous and she didn’t want to disturb me. What? WHAT?! (Note: if you ever see me out in the world, I demand that you say hello. I’m not famous. I’m a guy who picks his nose and flicks the booger out the window just like everyone else.) And let me just say once and for all how much I appreciate the people who support what I write here. I feel very lucky.

8. I have a very large nose, an overbite and no chin. I have been told that I look like Bob Saget (dork), Ichabod Crane (ugly), Joe DiMaggio (talented enough to have his ghastly appearance overlooked) and Brad Pitt. (That last one was from Hot Wife.)

9. My neighbors all read this site now and you can’t fathom the amount of shit I take from them over it. “Hey, when are you gonna write about your pills again, Danny?” “I don’t read your blog for your shit. I read it because of that blonde chick on the t-shirt page.” “What interesting gibberish did you write today, Danny Boy? Is it an entry about your exciting navel lint or something?” But I love it. And besides, they’re all dickheads anyway so what do I care?

10. I have considered deleting this entry about 50 times since I started writing it.

SPECIAL BONUS EMBARRASSMENT!
(I was just having a conversation with someone and it reminded me of this. Lucky you.)

11. When I was in my early 20s, I submitted a commissioned story to this podunk little piece of shit newspaper. The editor was a complete hag -- nothing nice to say to anyone. When I submitted my story, she called me and said, "I simply cannot accept this rubbish. This is not journalism." And she said "cannot" the way all those snooty rich bitches on TV say it, with the emphasis on the first syllable. I was so completely crushed. I thought I was a dismal failure as a journalist and that writing was just something I wasn't good at. I don't believe that anymore. I'm not friggin' Gore Vidal or anything, but I can occassionally put together a complete sentence -- subject, verb, the whole bit -- without any profanities in it. I just think prose is a whole lot better when you add a fuck or a shit or a cocksucker.

When Kate Winslet appeared on the Oscar telecast Sunday night, I turned to Hot Wife and said, “If I ever leave you, it’ll be for her.”

“But I thought you were in love with Jessica Biel,” she said.

“Well, yeah. I am. But she’s got the kind of stunning beauty that could feasibly be intimidating to a guy with very little game. Not that that has anything to do with me because I’ve got mad game, as you know. Anyway, Kate’s more normal. She’s beautiful like you’re beautiful.”

“Kate?” she said. “You and she are on a first name basis?”

“Shit, honey, I’ve seen her boobies in like 20 different movies,” I said. “And I think she even showed the beaver in a movie once. I guess that practically makes us an item, and items call each other by their first names, do they not? She’s got really huge areolas though. Huge. Like Frisbees. Salad plates. That could be a potential deal-breaker for me. Big nipples scare me.”

“I see,” she said.

(Hot Wife is having trouble determining which celebrity she’d leave me for. It used to be Paul Newman exclusively, but liver spots and crotchety old man behavior have sullied him in my wife’s eyes.)

I wondered aloud if any of these celebrities looked as perfect in person as they do on TV. I heard some guys on the radio talking about Penelope Cruz’s badonka-donk and whether or not she’d had ass implants. That’s the kind of thing men discuss amongst ourselves because it’s absolutely essential information. The bedrock of any man’s intellectual existence is knowing who leads the league in home runs, who has the remote, who drank the last can of Bud Light and whose celebrity boobs are fake.

This discussion dovetailed with my absolute disgust for celebrity interviewers, especially the asshats who stand next to the red carpet and lob softball after softball at the stars. “Who are you wearing?” “Is this your mother?” “Who would you like to see win tonight?” So as we watched the stars arriving, I found myself playing Armchair Seacrest.

“Hey Forest! What's up with your eye, dude?”

“Gayle from the Oprah show? You suck! What qualifications do you have to be here aside from the fact that the richest woman in the world calls you her 'best friend', which we all know is code for 'we're gay together.'”

“Oh, so you’re up for best animated short film? Perhaps you can answer a question for me then. Who cares? Seriously. Who gives half a shit about that category? No one ever knows anything about any of the nominees, we never see them and it really does seem like a tremendous waste of time. Couldn’t you do this at Denny’s or something and save us all the agony?”

So yes: I was bitter. The whole show is just a parade of nitwits and plastic surgery nightmares and people who are more popular than talented.

But toward the end of the show I saw something very peculiar. When Steven Spielberg was on stage presenting the best director award, the camera cut away to a shot of his wife, Kate Something. In the seat next to her, where her husband had been sitting, there was some unknown goober in a rented tux sitting up straight with his hands in his lap. He clearly didn’t belong.

I remember hearing once that these big-time awards shows hire people to serve as “seat-fillers.” To make it look like every seat is occupied, as if no one ever has to take a potty break or sneak into the cloakroom to snort some blow, they fill the seats with nobodies.

Next year, I’m going to be one of the nobodies.

I am resolving right now to find a way to be a seat-filler at next year’s Oscars. There is likely to be some sort of attractiveness clause that I can’t possibly fulfill, but the Academy will most certainly overlook that when they see how many other criteria I can meet:

1. I’m Jewish. I hear that’s a huge advantage in Hollywood.
2. I have considered writing a screenplay.
3. I know more about film than Joan and Melissa River combined.
4. I own a tuxedo.
5. I know how to look falsely happy for no good reason.
6. I live in Southern California.
7. I am willing to pay to play. If they vote me in, I will reward them all with a free Hot Wife t-shirt (even the men) (which isn’t terribly outrageous in Hollywood) (snap, snap).
8. I’ve been around famous people before and I only lost control of my bowels once, and that was in front of Michael Jordan, who isn’t even an actor so…

I kid, but I’m totally and completely serious about going for this. Because how else will I ever have the opportunity to sit next to Kate Winslet? How else will I ever be able to ask her if she’d like to go out for a milkshake after the ceremony? And how else will I ever get a beautiful, famous, lovely woman who loves to take her clothes off on camera to tell me to go fuck myself with a perfect British accent.

Don't mean to alarm anyone, but the Hot Wife t-shirts have arrived.

Reprints of the Dad Gone Mad shirts are in too, including XL and XXL by popular demand.

To see more and order, CLICK HERE.

*** UPDATE***
The first shirt has been delivered! Check out Becca, who writes Girl's Gone Child and contributes at Babble:

***MONDAY MORNING UPDATE***
MY RABBI JUST BOUGHT A HOT WIFE T-SHIRT! It's not bad enough that I objectify the female readers of this site, so now I have to sully the reputation of my spiritual advisor. Coming soon: "Hot Rabbi" shirts.

Until yesterday, my son’s foray into kindergarten had been standard public school faire. He’s learned to count to 100 and color within the lines. He can perform simple addition and read rudimentary words like cat and apple. And he now understands the concept of doing what must be done in order to collect a reward – a lesson that will surely serve him well when he journeys into Corporate America and is asked by some middle management hack to sell his soul for a bump in pay that will barely cover the cost of the therapy he’ll need.

We learned yesterday that the next step in our son’s educational development is honing the cognitive skills to match complete sentences with graphic representations of the same message. More specifically, if the sentence says “Mary likes to wake and bake,” my son must circle the picture of Mary taking a bong hit while sitting on the edge of her bed in her pajamas. And so on.

Here is the work he brought home last night:

Let’s zoom in on the premise:

Oh, I see. This is like an urban remake of Cinderella, except without all that pesky logic. What the fuck are these people teaching my son?

When was the last time a princess did her own grocery shopping? Whenever that was, did the princess not bring along the royal servants to carry her fucking Pop-Tarts to the limo? And what dipshit king is going to allow his daughter to marry some sycophant from the Piggly Wiggly parking lot? Somehow Carl from AAA Carpet Cleaners doesn’t seem like the ideal heir to the throne. And why is he wearing a tie?

Naturally, Hot Wife and I had a blast with this assignment. We spent most of the afternoon trying to fill-in the back-story.

“He probably nailed her in the frozen foods section, knocked her up and then had to marry her before the king threw him under the royal guillotine.”

“Yeah, and what’s the deal with the donkey? Were they into that sex with animals thing? Disgusting.”

“Look at her mouth in the wedding picture? Is that her “O” face? Cool your jets, princess. You can blow him after the wedding.”

And so on.

Last night we were laying in bed, lights off. Suddenly, Hot Wife sat up and tapped me on the shoulder.

“Danny?”

“What? What is it?”

“I want you to promise me something.”

“Sure. Anything. What?”

“I want you to promise me that if you ever meet a princess in a parking lot and decide to marry her, you won’t let her wear that tacky heart necklace during the wedding. Buy her a solitaire or something, but no hearts. Promise?”

“Promise, as long as you can guarantee that if you’re ever fall in love with a man in a supermarket parking lot, it will be a supermarket that sells more than bananas, citrus fruits and little bundles of white dildos. Deal?”

“Deal. G’night, dear.”

“G’night, princess.”

Hot Wife was out last night, which left me home alone with the kids. By 7:00, I had already let them skip their bath, forgotten to have them brush their teeth and made them each chocolate milk. The freedom from the dietary and grooming restrictions placed upon them by The Evil Warlord Mommy filled their hearts with glee, not unlike the heart-swelling liberation that overcomes them when I take them to McDonald’s. You should have seen their faces. They think I’m God.

By 7:30, we were all seated on the couch, guffawing over Tivo’d episodes of America’s Funniest Home Videos and eating Apple Jacks straight from the box.

“Daddy, what are these?’ my daughter asked, pointing the tiny red specks that dot the outside of the cereal.

“I think that’s the fake cinnamon,” I said.

“No. I think it’s candy.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right. Candy’s awesome, huh?”

“I love you, daddy,” she said.

If there has ever been a reason to feed one’s children sugar-laden cereal that rots their teeth and causes them to freak-out like a monkey in the psyche ward, there it is right there.

When the kids were babies, I always believed that my job as their father was not to make them cry; if they cried, I had failed. But now that they’re older, my job is to get away with as much as I can with them without their mother finding out (which would result in my immediate death). For every time I’ve scolded the kids about doing stupid, dickish things like getting gum stuck in the dog’s hair or sneezing all over the lasagna, there is also a time when I have let them get away with murder, like the time I let them throw rocks at the neighbor’s cat just for fun.

Truth is I enjoy it as much as they do. When one has been married for 10 years and a parent for six, there is a need to adjust one’s behavior accordingly. I don’t fart in people’s faces anymore, and I don’t prance around the house naked and sometimes I even floss, if only to set a good example. But there are times when I’m with the kids that my buttoned-up, authoritative parent persona disintegrates and I become nine years old again. I become their buddy, not their daddy. They NEED the latter, but they are entitled to the former from time to time, too.

So we’re snarfing Apple Jacks and watching AFV last night when The Funniest Clip Of All Time comes on. It shows a brand new baby, no more than a few days old, lying in his crib. As the baby unleashes a long yawn, the father has dubbed-in the sound of a deep, loud, guttural belch. It lasts about 12 seconds. This sets my kids off completely. Then, after the belch ends, the baby does one of the fussy little face squints babies do when they’re about to cry. It’s short, but over that span of a second or two the father has dubbed-in the sound of a powerful fart.

To review: a newborn burping and farting like a frat boy.

All three of us absolutely lose it. My son has tears running down his cheeks. My daughter is doing that long, silent laugh thing and rolling back on the floor in hysterics. We rewound and watched the clip a dozen times, maybe more.

To me, this is what fatherhood has to look like sometimes. Shirked responsibilities. Covert snacking. And the kind of genuine, side-splitting laughter that sends you scurrying for the bathroom with your hands over your privates because you think you’re going to piss your pants.

Last night at baseball practice one of the six-year-olds on my team requested that I henceforth refer to him as Han Solo. Last week he wanted to be Pikachu. When I said goodbye to him last night, I mistakenly called him Hankachu.

I knew this job was dangerous when I took it, but it has now become comically ugly.

There are 11 boys on the team. Three of them sit in the outfield filling their caps with picked grass during catching drills. Two of them incessantly throw their gloves at each other’s heads – and miss! And I think one of them believes this is a tennis team. Or possibly a juvenile detention camp.

They’re so cute at six. And by cute I mean PAY ATTENTION, GOOBERS! PAY ATTENTION OR ALL OF THE POKEMONS WILL DIE! I WILL PERSONALLY TURN MYSELF INTO A CARTOON AND KILL EVERY ONE OF THEM WITH MY CARTOON CX47 DEATH RAY! AND THEN WHAT WILL YOU WATCH ON TV WHILE YOU’RE PICKING YOUR NOSES AND WIPING IT ON THE COUCH? TWO WORDS, BOYS: OPE. RAH.

This is not to say that the situation is dire. There are several kids on the team who can hit and throw and catch at a level that gives me some hope that we will not be humiliated on a weekly basis. But even those kids seem the be a little…I don’t know…”off.”

Take my son. In my completely biased opinion, he’s one of the top two or three kids on the team (in terms of talent). But he cries like a sissy. Last night we were practicing the art of fielding a ground ball and throwing it to first base. On his first attempt, my son bobbled the ball a bit while transferring it from his glove to his throwing hand, and the runner beat his throw. By a mile.

And so began the waterworks.

“WAAAAAAAAAAAH! WAAAAAAAAAH!”

“What’s wrong, bud? Are you hurt?”

“No!” he said furiously. “I didn’t get that guy out! WAAAAAAAAAH! WAAAAAAAAH!”

“Dude. Chill. You’ll get him next time. It’s not the end of the world.”

“WAAAAAAAAAAAAA-HA-HAAAAAAAA!”

And so forth.

What a mess. It is not merely unbecoming for the coach’s son to completely lose his shit over nothing, it is really quite impossible to maintain one’s control and composure as a coach for 10 other kids when he is busy telling his own child not to be such a whimpering girlie-boy.

With my back to the other boys, I told my son that if he was going to continue to be such a fucking baby about this maybe we should bring a purse to practice next time and he could catch the ball in that. Then he laughed. Crisis diffused.

Opening day is in two weeks. While I cannot guarantee that we will score any runs or get anybody out, I feel supremely confident that our team will dominate all comers in the categories of swings that look like a lumberjack, tripping over first base, tears shed, coaches mortified, throws that go 90 degrees left of the target, and slides for no reason other than to get our pants dirty.

Boys, if you’re reading this, remember what I said at practice last night. We are MEN! And men don’t play with their wieners during baseball practice.

We installed a new garage door opener at Evans World Headquarters a few weeks ago and lemme tell ya: she’s a beauty! As someone who is barely handy enough to open a can of soup, tools and appliances others might find mundane impress the hell out of me. I still can’t get over the whole idea of a slotted spaghetti spoon. I mean the power to gather up all of those noodles without scooping all that nasty pasta water, too? Phenomenal!

I want to come clean about one thing: I did not personally install the new garage door opener. That handiwork was actually performed by my brother-in-law, David. He’s a self-taught handyman and he has a garage full of cool tools that measure electricity and cut holes in the ceiling, and he totally knows the difference between a pipe wrench and a hammer. I know: genius. But to make me feel a little less like an ass, David let me help him install our new opener. Every so often he delegated a very important task to me, like fetching him a Diet Coke or getting the fuck out of the way. So I really felt like we performed the installation together, with a 50-50 split of achievement.

Trouble is, I did a much better job with my duties that day than David did. I know this because for the past couple of weeks the garage door opener has not been working properly. And since I didn’t even touch it, I know it’s not my fault. Basically, David hosed us. I have removed his name from our will.

The specific problem is that the garage door opens and closes whenever the hell it wants to. A few mornings ago, I walked into the garage butt naked to get some underwear out of the dryer and the door was wide open. “Oh, hi neighbor…What’s that?...NO I MOST CERTAINLY AM NOT A EUNUCH! HOW DARE YOU!” And yesterday when we were sitting outside watching the kids hit each other in the neck with hockey sticks, the garage door decided to close itself and lock us out of the house.

I suspected for a moment that our house might be haunted because this seems like exactly the kind of asshole thing a ghost might do, especially if it was a ghost who didn’t like Jewish people. But we called the Ghostbusters and Bill Murray said it probably wasn’t a ghost because ghosts have more important things to worry about, like resting up for Halloween and posing for the cover photo for Frankenberry and Count Chocula boxes. He also said there’s no such thing as an anti-Semitic ghosts and, to the contrary, there are some ghosts who never mix meat with dairy products and refuse to work on the Sabbath.

So based on what I learned from watching Schneider prance around in “One Day At A Time” when I was a wee lad, I can only assume that there is someone else in the neighborhood who has a garage door opener on the same frequency as ours, thereby inadvertently opening our door when he opens his. Either that or God’s fucking with us.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some pasta to scoop --- WITHOUT THE WATER!

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1. New snark is up at Snarkywood.
2. My buddy Kirk has a new video up at Atom Films. Check it out and give him five stars.

I have felt a strong inferiority complex lately because I don't take fancy pictures of rusty tin cans or brown leaves or my own cleavage like everyone else in the blogosphere. So I offer the next best thing: stolen videos. Here's what I've been watching on YouTube lately:

This is the most spectacular commercial of all time.

This is one of my favorite Borat episodes because I too am big like a can of Pepsi.

Classic, hilarious Will Ferrell bloopers from SNL

This very closely resembles my days in the dorms at The Fresno State University

I worked in a magic shop when I was a teenager so here's some magic.

I am the kind of man who would buy Moulin Rouge on DVD because it’s absolutely fabulous and Ewan McGregor is SUCH a doll. Mwah!

I am a homebound, hopelessly bored housewife whose sole joy in life is being part of Oprah’s book club.

I am an elderly stroke victim who walks like he has a big dump in his pants. Help me up, dear.

I am a pimple-pocked, hormone-drunk, adolescent masturbation fiend who would gladly pay $20 extra a month to stare at Maria Sharapova’s ass all day, everyday. Dude, I would so totally hit that shit.

OK wait. I’m not REALLY any of these people. But it’s my job to imagine that I am. That’s the great thing about working in advertising: with each new client that hires us, my professional schizophrenia swells a little more and I get to become someone different. By doing so, the copy I write at work is written to my own imaginary selves, and it therefore (usually) works for the real audience. Sooner or later, I’m going to be you, too. Bank on it.

But yesterday I was confronted with a project that requires that I pretend to be something that couldn’t possibly be further from the “real” me: a nine-year old girl.

I have to be very careful with what I say here because I have signed a very firm and intimidating non-disclosure agreement and if I spill too many beans, the headline of my next post will be “Danny Sleeps With The Fishes.” So I’ll just say this: one of our clients is somehow involved in games and they are somehow associated with a theoretical game that may or may not exist yet and if it does exist it might have something loosely to do with…KITTENS!

Do I seem like the kind of person who likes or even knows anything about kittens? Truth be told – and this is going to offend many of you – I hate cats. They scratch people and their piss stinks and they simply can’t hold a candle to a dog. Shit, they can’t hold a candle AT ALL!

But I knew the job was dangerous when I took it, and since I like to think of myself as something of a copywriting daredevil, I persevered. I have for the last 24 hours tried as hard as I can to imagine myself as a screaming, nine-year-old, gum-smacking, Roxy-wearing girl. My name is Danielle. I wear bubble-gum-flavored lipgloss and I have like 45 MySpace friends and ohmygah’id Troy Bolton from High School Musical is sooooo adorable. I want to marry him sooooo bayawd.

So I’m like sitting here and I’m all “Ohmygod WHAT am I going to say about these little kitties?” And I was all “Danielle, just start writing or something and like see what comes out.” So I did and it was totally bizarre. OH. MY. GAW’ID, YOU GUYS!!!! All these weird words started to come out of my fingertips and they were towwwwwtully the kind of things a nine-year-old would say if she were talking about kitties that may or may not even exist.

I was all “this is frisky!” and “that looks super yummy!” and “aww, he’s so cuddly and cute!” If I weren’t such an annoying and blindly cheerful nine-year-old, I totally would have puked alllllll over the place. If I were, like, this 36-year-old blogger guy, I totally would have made this copy all dirty and misogynistic. I would have used the word “pussy” with unacceptable frequency. Fer sher, you guys. And then when it was the end and I had to like tell the reader what to do next or whatever, I prolly would have said, “Go snatch yourself a cuddly pussy.” Or something like that. Ohmygah’id. Guys are so guh-ROSSE!

OK, wuhl the streetlights are turning on right now and I should towwwwwtully go home and set the table. I think we’re having lasagna tonight. Well. Later, taters. Text me!

Last night all four of us huddled under the covers and read a children’s book about some bratty little kid named Timothy who wouldn’t change his socks for a whole month. As the days turned to weeks, Timothy started to smell like shit. His friends left him. His parents kicked him out of the house. And even his little dog, his most loyal supporter, began to suggest that Timothy smells like ass and should really consider a footwear change. But Timothy persevered.

Every children’s book has a message about being a good person, and the message of this one was “Finish what you start even if it means ignoring your parents and alienating everyone you know, because you, young man, are stubborn, defiant, rebellious little douchebag and everyone knows that’s way better than being a good listener or adhering to even the most basic grooming decorum. Keep it real, boys and girls, just like Timothy.”

When we mercifully finished the last page of the book, it was bedtime for the kids. Hot Wife tells the kids to go potty before they climb into bed. The Champ does so without a peep. But our daughter, The Artist Formerly Known As Barney’s Biggest Fan, chooses to remain in our bed. Her arms are crossed in defiance.

“Honey,” I say, “you heard what mommy said. You need to go potty.”

“No,” she says.

“Yes. Come on. Let’s go potty right now.”

“No.”

Well. This is a new one. She often likes to push the boundaries and whine when she is asked to do something she doesn’t like, but she has never been quite this firm or curt. This is clearly Timothy’s fault.

So now we start to go down the checklist of Responsible Ways A Parent Can Get His Daughter To Go To The Fucking Bathroom Already.

IDIOT METHOD 1: GIVE THE CHILD CHOICES
“OK, you have two choices,” Hot Wife says. “You can either cooperate with us and go to the bathroom or you can go sit in the penalty box for four minutes. Which do you choose?”

Nothing. Total silence. Just a defiant staredown.

Swing and a miss.

IDIOT METHOD 2: BE FIRM
I lean in, put my face three inches from hers, furrow my brow and say, “I want you to get up right now and go to the bathroom. Now. Now!”

Nothing.

There must be millions of other Idiot Methods, but I’m frustrated and there is a Tivo’d hockey game waiting for me in the living room and FUCK! THIS!

POSSIBLY HEAVY-HANDED AND MEAN BUT TOTALLY EFFECTIVE METHOD 1: STRONGARM THE BRAT
I reach over and adhere The Vulcan Grip of Death to my daughter’s left bicep. She begins to cry, but she is moving. She scoots herself down from the bed and follows my lead into the bathroom. I lift her and set her down on the potty, and she begins to cry harder. But as she cries, she pees.

Good guys win, 1-0.

Suffice it to say we have obliterated any possibility that our daughter will follow Timothy’s hard-headed penchant for subverting the dominant paradigm and generally being a smelly motherfucker.

But she’ll also need to learn that people don’t cry when they pee unless they have a venereal disease, a kidney stone, the fear of an unwanted positive on a pregnancy test, or a bladder infection. Then and only then can she cry, especially on the first and third options, because each of those will result in her immediate excommunication from the family and a lifetime of sleeping in a van down by the river near smelly people like Timothy.

The kids sat in the bathtub for 45 minutes last night.

Would you like to know why they soaked so long?

Because my son had gas, which he was releasing in the bathtub, which repeatedly caused great big bubbles of stinky air to float to the surface, which made his sister laugh hysterically, which in turn made him laugh, which made me laugh, which made Hot Wife sit on the couch with her head in her hands and rue the day flatulence was ever invented.

I have had many discussions with various people lately about the degradation of decency in our society – a sorry state for which someone recently blamed me. When you can Google the name of any celebrity and find a picture of her naked crotch (if not a full blown sex tape) in milliseconds, one has no choice but to wonder if maybe we’ve gone too far.

And yes, I have crossed that line myself. I have been indecent. I have been raunchy. I have used gratuitous profanity and innuendo and convinced myself that I did so for the sake of humor. I recently lost an opportunity to write something quite prominent because the editorial leadership of this outlet read this site and thought publishing my words despite my online obscenities would be akin to supporting a politician despite his previous conviction for attempted murder.

That’s fine. In the days before I started blogging, I would have given anything to have a consistent voice in my writing and to be able to speak to others with it. Now I’ve found that voice, and for some reason it’s not at all like my speaking voice. I’m harsh. I’m dirty. I write things I would never think of saying to or about someone face-to-face, mostly because I get to hide behind this keyboard and don’t have to pay any immediate personal consequence. I write things that completely contradict my faux rage about the absence of decency. I don’t know how to justify that. I can’t. I’m a hypocrite.

In fact, sometimes I think Dad Gone Mad reads a little like this:

Yet this blog continues to grow in popularity. So maybe I’m totally full of shit about the decency thing. Or maybe I’m locked inside one of those corny existential crises that Hollywood likes to turn into movies – the kind with soundtracks full of songs from the 80s by Brian Ferry and The Violent Femmes, and maybe a remake of I’ll Tumble 4 Ya by Korn.

Where am I going with this? Not sure really, except to say that farting in the tub is hilarious.

Every day at lunchtime, I take a pill. It’s about the size of an Altoid and its color closely resembles the teeth of someone who has smoked unfiltered Camels for 50 years. I don’t usually let anyone see me take this pill unless they are my wife or someone dumb enough to believe me when I say the pill is a vitamin or a Skittle (from which they can infer that I’m “normal” and not, in fact, completely batshit).

This pill keeps me from ripping my clothes off, lighting my hair on fire and running down the street screaming the preamble to the Constitution over and over again. It is the pill that keeps me from becoming a blubbering mass of tears and snot at the mere sight of anything even moderately emotional, like a stop sign. Or yogurt. And it is the pill I must take at lunchtime everyday, lest I forget a dose and start clucking and shitting all over the office like a six-foot, big-nosed chicken in Dockers by 2:30.

I went to lunch with four coworkers Friday afternoon at a burger joint decorated with fake birds and plastic palm fronds and Tiki shit. There were rips in the upholstery, carvings in the tabletop and the kind of sticky yuckiness on the floor that generates a tearing sound every time one lifts his foot to take a step.

After we ordered, I reached into my pocket to grab the aforementioned pill, which I intended to deftly sneak into my mouth and wash down with a sip of Diet Coke. But in my attempt to quickly and stealthily jam the pill into my grill, I lost my grip, fumbled, and watched as it dropped to the nasty, disgusting, filthy floor and began to roll around under our table like a marble in a funnel. It made two full revolutions around the table’s support pole and ultimately came to rest at the feet of a coworker.

“Fuck!”

I slid down in my seat and tried to reach my foot out far enough to drag the pill back to me, but I couldn’t reach. There was no other way to get to it other than asking for help from the other side of the table.

“Um, hey, um, Kirk?”

“Yeah, dude?”

“I dropped my pill on the floor. It’s right by your foot. Can you reach down and grab it for me?”

Without a word, he bends down, puts his head all the way under the table and tries to reach out for my crazy meds. It’s just beyond his reach. As he rearranges his body and positions himself to grab it, someone asks The Question.

“What kind of pill is that, Danny?”

“It’s this, like, um… an antibiotic.”

“What are you taking it for?”

“I have a… um… a yeast infection.”

It was the first thing I could think of, but as soon as the words leave my lips, I realize I am completely hosed.

I sit there, waiting, looking at the eyes of each coworker to see if they will deduce the fact that yeast infections occur within an orifice that people like me aren’t supposed to have. But as I wait, I remember that only one other person at the table is married, meaning three of them are without steady poontang and would therefore not know a yeast infection from athlete’s foot. Thank you, lucky stars.

Kirk finally rescues my pill and slides it over to me. I swallow it without even washing it off first because I really, really, really want this moment to end so we can change subjects and go back to debating who has the biggest boobs in the office.

“Wait a sec,” The Only Other Married Guy says. “I thought only chicks get yeast infections.”

“Pffft!” I spit. “Where did you read that horseshit? Guys get ‘em all the time.”

“Are you sure, dude?”

“Positive. Think about it. Yeast is used to make bread and bagels and shit, right? So when a bagel gets old and gross, the yeast gets all tweaked and shit. If you eat anything with tweaked yeast, you get a yeast infection. It’s basic medicine, dude. Look it up on WebMD.”

“OK, OK. I believe you,” he says. “Relax.”

“I AM relaxed,” I say. “Pass the ketchup, unless you think that’s something only women can do, too.”

My children have no game. They know nothing about strategic siblinghood or what it takes to dominate one’s brother or sister. I’m embarrassed for them, truly.

Hot Wife started a new class at the local college last night and we thought it would be fun to tag along and walk her to class. After we dropped her off and told her not to blow her lunch money on strippers and blow, I loaded the kids into the minivan and began the 10-minute drive home. For the entire trip, the kids argued about who was going to pick the television show they would watch when we got home. My son, who presumes he can dominate his sister simply because he is older and taller than she, wanted to see The Suite Life of Zack and Cody. But my daughter was vehement in her disagreement and quite squeaky in her demand to watch Maisy. They pled their cases and belittled one another a bit, but nothing was ever settled.

When we got home, I turned them loose to work it out for themselves. But after about eight minutes of silence, I walked into the living room and found them both asleep on the couch. After all of the arguing and name-calling and homicidal threats, neither had the stamina even to stay awake long enough to follow through. A whole lot of gum flapping for naught (which is strikingly similar to my own behavior on the basketball court lately).

With such weak resolve and biteless barking, neither child would have lasted 10 minutes in my childhood home. When Wondersis and I fought, there was no tolerance for empty threats and useless chest pounding; we were serious about what we said we’d do to one another. When Wondersis threatened to drill me in the head with a frozen bagel if I didn’t shut the hell up about the heinous odor she’d left in our bathroom, she was totally and completely serious. And she stuck to her word.

But our relationship went beyond harsh words and projectiles. I’ve never mentioned this to anyone, not even our parents, but my sister dug a hole under our house and built a fully operational torture chamber, very much like the one in Syriana where the bad guys ripped George Clooney’s fingernails from his hands.

Wondersis’ Chamber of Doom had four concrete walls, a metal chair with arm and leg straps, and a single light bulb swinging back and forth overhead. Every once in a while, she’d drag me down there, tie me to the chair, shoot me up with sodium pentathol and try to get important information from me. “I’m getting angry, Danny, and you won’t like me when I’m angry. So this is the last time I’m going to ask you. DID YOU (slap to the face) EAT (slap) THE LAST (slap) POP-TART (slap)!?”

That’s what being a sibling means. It means doing whatever you must to gain a competitive advantage over your brother or sister. It means getting what you want and not letting some little piss-ant blood relative stand in your way. It means inflicting pain.

It saddened me to see my kids quit on themselves last night. As they lay there with drool running down their faces, I almost let myself become endeared by their innocence. I almost succumbed to their sweetness. But then I remembered that emotion is for pussies. My kids aren’t pussies. They’re warriors. They’re gladiators. Dammit, they’re EVANSES! Evanses live through death. We show no fear. And we most certainly do NOT fall asleep before the battle even starts.

We’ll have to work on that.

My friends and I were at a Super Bowl party in Las Vegas Sunday afternoon. Five feet behind us sat a retired, very-well-known Major League Baseball manager. In addition to being an inductee of the baseball Hall of Fame, this man kicked me out of his team’s locker room when I was 19 years old.

At some point during the game, my buddy Tom stood up from his seat, disappeared for a few seconds, and then returned to the couch with a big, shit-eating grin on his face.

“What? What did you do, Tommy?”

“I just crop-dusted the Skipper,” Tom said.

(“Skipper” is baseball-speak for “manager.”)

(“Crop-dusting” is a term flatulent men use to describe the act of standing close to someone, farting, and then walking away as the toxic aroma wafts over the unsuspecting victim.)

As had been the case all weekend, uproarious laughter ensued. I can’t remember laughing more than I did these past three days. I laughed when John spilled a full Corona across the middle of the blackjack table and sent the pit boss into a frenzy about wet cards and irresponsible dealers. I laughed when Murph unloaded a caustic, beer-fueled, cabbage-scented fart in the minivan that practically suffocated the rest of us and melted the reflective coating on the rearview mirror. I laughed when John incessantly whined about being “slow rolled” by some asshole in the poker room.

The laughter was medicine. It was the ideal prescription for our friend and neighbor, Jimbo.

Jimbo hasn’t been feeling well lately. His cancer has spread from his liver to other parts of his body, and he has become reliant on a steady diet of hardcore pain meds. Watching a good friend struggle and fight death the way Jimbo has had to for the last few months has been one of the most gut-wrenching experiences of my life. I’ve never known cancer, never seen the way it can breakdown a strong, proud, confident man. I’m frightened. I’m frightened for my friend. I’m frightened for his son. I’m frightened for myself.

The weekend Vegas trip was intended to cheer him (and us) up – to change the subject from his health woes to something a little more pleasant, like relentlessly heckling a slight, Asian blackjack dealer named “Chiling” for tossing him shitty cards on six consecutive hands.

Sunday night after the Super Bowl ended, we piled into the minivan and headed back to our hotel room in Primm, at the Nevada/California border. The 40-mile stretch of land between those two oases is dark and desolate – an unspectacular patch of desert nothingness. Aside from Jimbo, who was designated to drive, the rest of us fell asleep in the van, trying to catch a respite before one more night of $5 blackjack and Coors Light.

I just sat there thinking, looking out the window, trying to convince myself that this would NOT be the last time we all would be together. It was a heavy, meaningful moment for me because I knew it was on Jimbo’s mind, too.

As we rolled through the vacant Nevada desert that night, a song came on the radio. It’s a song I know and like, but I hadn’t heard it in a while:

For the one’s who had a notion
A notion deep inside
That it ain’t no sin
To be glad you’re alive

The words hit me hard because I think the Springsteen’s sentiment perfectly articulated the purpose of our trip. No one is ready to declare definitively what the future holds for Jimbo, but the uninformed speculations and armchair diagnoses we conjure for ourselves are sometimes too difficult to bear. But today, right now, he’s here and he’s still Jimbo. He’s still the gruff, ornery, white-haired man we love and cling to, and we want to believe in our hearts that he’s still glad to be alive.

This morning, Jimbo and I were walking to our cars at the same time. We shouted to each other from across the street:

“Jimbo!”

“Danny Boy!”

We met in the middle of the street and Jimbo handed me a bright yellow “Live Strong” bracelet, just like the one he’s been wearing since his diagnosis. I’m wearing it now, too.

Live strong, Jimbo. Live strong.

I have lately been consumed with the issue of financial stability. I know it’s exceptionally taboo to tell or talk to others about one’s financial status. It’s fine to write about buttholes and poo and such, but when you talk about money you open the front door of hell. People feel competitive and class-conscious because we all want to keep up with (if not surpass) the Joneses. But I’m a little irritated with the Jonseses right now because I frankly think they’re full of shit.

Thanks to a suggestion by Lena, I recently started reading a book called The Total Money Makeover. Historically, I have not been disciplined when it comes to savings and investments and whatnot. It has been my practice to hand my paycheck to Hot Wife and let her handle it from there. But lately I have awoken to the stark, cold, unavoidable reality that it’s time to start looking beyond the next paycheck. There is college to think about. And retirement. We have little IRAs and money markets and things here and there, but it would be a stretch to call our financial picture organized.

The book stirred something. It motivated action. From me. It seemed rather intuitive and simple, so I gathered up all of our finances and really, for the first time, took stock of where we stand and where we want to be. And that’s when my myopic outlook on our financial posture began to sharpen. And I’m wiggin’ out, people. I’m like Emeril Legasse after four lines of blow and a six-pack of Red Bull.

The Total Money Makeover suggests that the first responsible thing to do (after one has paid off all debt) is to build an “emergency fund” that holds enough cash to cover six months worth of normal household expenses. The money is not to be used for anything short of a bona fide financial emergency, like covering the family in the event a layoff. It is not for Pop-Tarts. The book also declares that 15% of one’s income should be saved for retirement.

To review: save for emergencies and save for retirement. “Save.” Any idea what that means? Me neither.

Naturally, the money for savings appears when one tightens his belt with respect to frivolous, unnecessary expenses. Take a hike, Starbucks. See you later, satellite radio. And Hot Wife’s $150 haircuts? Buh-bye now. We’re lean, mean saving machines!

Last night I sat down to do something I’ve never done before. I wrote out a budget for the month. As suggested by the book, I calculated our household income for the period and accounted for the expenditure of every dollar we’ll have this month. And do you know what I found? After whittling the list of expenses down to only the most critical and basic necessities – health insurance, mortgage payments, electricity – we are still living beyond our respectable, hard-earned means. Beyond simply obliterating the notion of saving anything, we need to find a few hundred additional bucks a month just to cover what we must spend to survive. WHAT THE FUCK?!

I’m flabbergasted. I make a healthy salary and bring in a few extra bucks here and there. Hot Wife works part-time, too. We bought a modest house in a modest neighborhood at a time when it didn’t cost $3 million and your first-born child to become a homeowner in Southern California. Our son goes to public school. Both of our cars are paid-off. We have no debt. We have the same furniture and television we bought when we got married 10 years ago. Our “nut” is quite small. But still we find ourselves up against some impenetrable wall, some dickhead economical threshold that taunts us. “Security? You? Not a chance. Fuck off.”

How does middle class America do it? How do normal people buy HDTVs and tricky new cell phones and expensive bottles of Pinot Noir without putting themselves in serious financial jeopardy? Is it all a myth? Are the Joneses poseurs who merely give the appearance of stability and wealth but ultimately return home to a house of cards?

It simply can’t believe that my household is alone in this predicament. As I said, I know this subject matter is sensitive and volatile to many of us because we are conditioned to believe that our financial status reflects something in our personalities – a flaw or a weakness or, in the other direction, a feeling of superiority and entitlement. But let’s just discard all of that for now. I need to know if this craziness is the new American burden or if I’m just a peasant with clean slacks and an inflated self-image.

If you need me I’ll be home with my family, eating Top Ramen in the dark and conserving our energy to go dumpster diving for aluminum cans.

You poor, poor souls,

Run.

Gather your children and run and run and run until you hit water or ice or an electrified border fence.

(I’m kidding.)

(Kind of.)

It is not generally my practice to preemptively contact people and warn them that I am in their path, but the circumstances that befell some of the parents from last year’s team compel me to forewarn you before we even conduct our first practice. It’s best that you know this now.

At about this time last year, I joined ranks with countless dumbass idiots worldwide by subjecting myself to a vasectomy. I wrote about the experience extensively on this site, exposing myself (literally and figuratively) as someone who doesn’t particularly care for having his precious, sub-penile coin purse penetrated by cold, sharp metal instruments.

A couple months later, I became coach of a t-ball team. When I called the parents to introduce myself, I gave them my name. And like any wise parent who wishes to protect his child from weirdos and n’er-do-wells, they Googled me (which is how I’m guessing you’ve found your way here, too). I was unaware of this. I assumed my profane, depraved, inappropriate rantings were safely tucked away in this dark corner of the Internet and that my online persona would never be seen by the parents of the children I was teaching to stop sticking blades of grass up their noses and focus on the fucking game.

When the season ended, a gathering of those parents approached me and told me they’d been reading about my nuts on the web. They also said that they strongly considered pulling their children from the team and having their husbands kick my ass all the way to Huntington Beach.

Fortunately, no asses were kicked. In fact, I’m back at the Little League field to work with YOUR children. Surprise!

Here are a few things you’ll want to remember as we hold hands and skip through another season of misplayed grounders, erroneous throws and outfield pee-pee dances:

1. The league has determined that our sons are now old enough to hit a pitched ball. I presume this also means they’re old enough not to cry when I tell them the snack bar is out of M&Ms.

2. Our team name is the Phillies, a fact from which you may infer that I got the last choice of names.

3. In reference to the aforementioned pitched ball: I will be the one pitching to them. I will be down on one knee just a few feet from home plate, trying to aim for the zone where each child likes it, which I know from experience to be anywhere between the dirt and four feet over their heads. In the highly likely event that one of your children hits a comebacker that catches me square in the teeth, I do intend to sue you for gross negligence with intent to harm the coach because he assessed your child’s skill and determined that he could best help the team by sitting in the dugout eating Hot Tamales.

4. The field on which we will play this season is the farthest field from the bathrooms. I suggest you restrict the child from drinking anything starting 48 hours before each game.

5. I reserve the right to inflict bodily harm to any parent who says, “There’s no _____ing in baseball.” Because you know what? That really annoys me. And everyone knows there’s no being a douche in baseball.