My daughter is in love with a boy named Jacob. And a boy named Eli. And a boy named Troy. But especially Jacob. Oh, and Ben. She loves her some Ben.

She’s only four and I’m not altogether thrilled with her loving any boy yet, but you have to admire her enthusiasm. Each of the boys knows how hard she crushes on them (on a rotating basis), and so do their parents. You should see the way the boys react when she gets near them and switches-on her giggly charm and says, “Hiiiiiiiiii, Jacob...” The boys blush and smile sheepishly and it becomes quite clear that they’d be more comfortable eating ketchup-covered earthworms than talking to a bouncy little girl who professes her love to them on a minute-to-minute basis.

In the car yesterday, The Artist Formerly Known As Barney’s Biggest Fan put her open palms over her chest and said, “Mommy, Jacob is part of my heart.”

I’ve been thinking about that story all morning.

The bullshit on this site can get pretty thick. I like to portray myself alternately as a victim and as a hard-ass oblivious to the fact that he doesn’t have the nuggets to back up his gum-flapping, but the simple fact is that I’m not really either of those characters. I’m just a guy. I have a cubicle job that I complain about incessantly. I drive an eight-year-old car. I have a dog. Just a guy.

But somehow when I walk through the door at night I become something more. I become a king. I have two kids who come running to the door when they hear my keys jiggling outside, and the moment they see me they ram their little heads into my crotch, hug my legs, tell me they love me and ask me how my day was. I have a wife who, after almost 11 years, still takes my breath away. I get to have this life. I get to be this daddy, this husband, this person everyone is excited to see. And like my daughter said, they’re part of my heart, too. The biggest part.

We live in a scary, fucked-up time. We’re killing our planet, we’re killing innocent people, we’re killing simple human decency. We walk around in that world every day and there are some days when we can’t help but wonder what tragedy will befall us next, what catastrophe waits around the next corner. We are afraid. But somehow walking through that door every evening and seeing those three faces makes the hell outside vanish. In my view, there could be no greater gift. To love and be loved.

I felt like saying this today because my daughter reminded me of it. I felt like taking the DGM mask off and just being Danny for second. Maybe it’s time we all hit the brakes, if only for a minute, to remember that underneath all of the nastiness and hate we wade through everyday lays a pristine layer of love. Sometimes we have to dig for it, but it’s there.

It’s there.

I gave Hot Wife some serious attitude Saturday morning. I can’t remember why I snapped at her or what she said to unleash my wrath, but I think it had something to do with the fact that I couldn’t figure out why the sprinklers weren’t going on in our backyard. Guys are weird that way; when we’re pissed off about a problem we can’t solve, even the mere suggestion that we need help is tantamount being called a sissy and it must be repelled with profanity and anger and embittered claims that the offending Samaritan wouldn’t know a sprinkler head from a colostomy bag.

When one of my misguided insults finally sunk Hot Wife’s battleship, she walked over to where I was working and spoke the words every husband dreads: “Can I have a word with you in private?”

Busted! In many houses across this land, an angry wife is no scarier than an empty toilet paper roll. But at Evans World Headquarters, it’s why we keep a small stash of adult diapers in the linen closet. My wife works out and eats well and you can see serious definition in her abs. If she wanted to, she could kill me and make a nutritious salad at the same time. I live in fear. Not just of the salad but also the looming threat of dismemberment and death.

It was obvious that I deserved whatever tongue-lashing was imminent. But Hot Wife had to momentarily restrain her vitriol because both kids were standing right next to me, and it wouldn’t very well comply with parental mores for her to just stand their and call me a cocksucker in front of two adorable and impressionable minds.

The nearest door led directly into the garage. Hot Wife stomped in that direction and I dutifully followed, if only to mitigate the looming damage to my psyche and, in the worst case scenario, the arrangement of my face. She shut the door behind me, crossed her arms and began to lecture me about assholes and sprinkler valves and the difference between knowing what you’re doing and making mistakes that flood the house and necessitate the construction of an ark.

Just as she was about to ask me for reasons why she should NOT beat me until the white meat showed, two little heads poked through the doggie door.

“What are you guys doing?” the wee one asked.

“Nothing,” Hot Wife said. “We’re just talking.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Mommy wants to kill me,” I said to her. “Go in the house and call the police.”

She laughed. She thought I was joking. I wasn’t.

Because she needed more time to understand why I’m such an shithead, Hot Wife stepped over to the doggie door, pushed the kids’ heads out of the way and slid the gray, plastic doggie door blocker thing into the slot. Then she locked the door, essentially imprisoning me in the garage. I assumed I was about to die, right there next to the minivan and the big, 36-can palette of Diet Coke from Costco.

My spectacularly beautiful and compassionate wife continued her diatribe. She asked, rhetorically, why on earth I would snap at her when she’d offered her help on a project we both knew I was going to fuck up anyway. (Answer: “Pfft.”) She asked, rhetorically, when the hell I thought I’d transformed myself from Mr. I Can’t Unclog A Backed-Up Toilet to Mr. I Can Make Water Flow From The Sprinklers Like Urine Flows From An Incontinent Octogenarian? (Answer: “Just now.”) She asked, rhetorically, who the hell I thought I was. (Answer: “I’ll be whoever you want me to be, honey. Just don’t kill me.”)

Suddenly, a voice.

“Mommy?”

It’s him. He’s poked his head through the door between the house and the garage.

“WHAT?!” she says.

“Can I have some Apple Jacks?”

“NO!”

“Aww. How about some M&Ms?”

“NO! IT’S 10:00 IN THE MORNING! NO CANDY UNTIL 10:30!”

“OK, then can I watch that one really violent cartoon until you’re done yelling at daddy?”

“I’m not yelling at daddy. We’re just talking.”

I interrupt. “No, you’re right, bud. She’s yelling at me. Call the police.”

“Oh, stop it,” Hot Wife says to me. “You’re scaring him.”

“I’m scaring HIM?!” I say, flabbergasted. “YOU’RE scaring ME!”

“Just give us one more sec, okay?” she said to our son. He agreed and closed the door.

Ultimately, we kissed and made up. I apologized for being a dick. She apologized for endangering my life. And then I took the kids to McDonald’s to thank them for saving my life.

I fell through the ceiling.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m about as handy as a wet noodle. In the nine years since Evans World Headquarters was established I have tried and failed miserably in home maintenance and improvement projects ranging from installing crown molding to planting vegetables. I am the living, breathing embodiment of the old journalistic adage, “Those who can, do. And those who can’t, write about those who can.” But I’m stubborn. Despite my ghastly track record, I continue to engage projects that imperil my home, my life and the tattered, paper-thin wisp of self-respect to which I cling.

This weekend I decided to replace a ceiling fan. The existing fixture had slowly deteriorated to the point that if it had been a horse, we would have long ago destroyed it shipped it off to the dog food factory. Because of its woeful condition, dismantling it was no trouble at all. There was one somewhat inconsequential issue, however: one of the electrical wires that led from the house to the fixture became disconnected from the electrical box – which is in the attic.

To be completely accurate, most Southern California homes don’t have “attics.” We have “crawl spaces,” so named because they are so incredibly small and tight. Most are about two feet high – just the space between the ceiling and the roof. It’s dark and practically without ventilation. And there is no floor – one must carefully step from wooden beam to wooden beam, careful not to step between the beams and directly onto the drywall that comprises the house’s ceiling.

There is a small square entry to the crawl space at the east end of Evans World Headquarters. Naturally, the junction box I needed to access was at the west end of the house, which meant I needed to crowd my six-foot-three frame into the space and crawl the entire width of the ceiling.

The first thing I noticed was the intense heat up there. It has been in the mid-80s here lately and that heat was trapped and stagnant in the crawl space, and I estimated the temperature to be about 125 degrees – certainly hotter than the hottest day I’ve ever experienced. In fact, by the time I had traversed the beams and insulation material to the box I needed to work with, big drops of sweat were dropping from my forehead onto the wooden planks below me. But I had all of the proper tools tucked into the waistband of my shorts and in a matter of five minutes, the proper connections were made and I was ready to head back.

I knew where I had to go because I could hear the kids screaming up to me from the open hatch – “Daddy, are you coming back?” “Daddy, is it dark up there?” “Daddy, are you still alive?” I was more than three-quarters of the way back when my brain started doing some strange, heat-induced somersaults. Between the incessant howling of the kids, the intolerable heat, the pain in my hips and back from having to crawl over wooden beams and the slippery sweat dripping from my body, I just had to get the fuck out of there. Immediately!

I sped my crawl speed a bit, now crouching to step from beam to beam instead of crawling. I was two steps from the hatch when the unexpected occurred. My right foot slipped off of a wooden beam and right onto the drywall ceiling – and suddenly I was falling. I was able to stop my descent with my arms, but not until my entire right leg had pierced the drywall and dangled from the ceiling, right in front of my son’s bedroom.

I fell through the ceiling.

Everyone came running from all corners of the house to see what had caused the calamitous crash, and when they got to the spot where my leg had come through, they all said in unison, “Ohhhhhh my gaaaaawwwwwd.”

I was stunned, but still dying to get the hell out of the crawl space. I lifted myself, traversed the final two beams and step onto the ladder. When I finally reached the floor, I saw it: a two-foot puncture wound in the ceiling. The scene was decorated with tufts of pink insulation and dust and white drywall shrapnel. And somewhere under all of that schmutz was the last shred of my dignity.

As I surveyed the carnage, I looked down and noticed that my leg was bleeding in two different places. As the day wore on, I started to develop more aches and pains – but none of them hurt as bad as my pride. What kind of dipshit falls through the ceiling? That only happens in Steve Martin movies or reruns of Home Improvement.

Today I hurt everywhere. My leg, my hands, my back, my hips, my ass – all of it. My whole life hurts. And my wallet is going to hurt when the drywall repair dudes come out to inspect the fruits of my clumsiness and mark the price up a little higher under the line item “dumbshit tax.”

But the ceiling fan works. So I’ve got THAT going for me, which is nice.

They never mention it in childbirth classes or parenting books but I’m here to tell you it’s true: when you become a father, you can never have anything that’s exclusively your own. Any of the material and intangible “things” you used to have “all to yourself” – starting with your wife – are claimed as community property in a hostile takeover by your greedy-ass children. I’ve known this to be a fact for many years now and have learned to live with it. But this week I was reminded just how insidious and rapacious my own flesh and blood can be.

When they were babies, the signs that nothing was mine were of a gruesome nature. If I had a favorite shirt or tie, the kids commandeered it with a perfectly times gush of curdled white spit-up – the kind that smells like a gallon of buttermilk after a long, hot summer in the Mojave desert. If I had any semblance of innocence or hope in my heart, they stole that the first time I opened a dirty diaper and saw pieces of food I could identify (corn, beans, small rodents, etc.). In fact, the only possessions I was still able to control independently were a couple of cigars, my collection of porn DVDs, and a bright orange Black and Decker power drill they couldn’t use because their hands were too small and weak to the drill and pull the trigger simultaneously.

Last week, I finally took a stand. The behemoth Sony TV we’d had since before Hot Wife and I were married (almost 11 years ago) had become a true embarrassment in our home. Friends and neighbors would come into the house, see the antiquated TV and throw us a disgusted snarl – probably the same kind you’d see if you showed-up at a pool party wearing sandals with brown socks and one of those clips people use to keep water out of their noses.

So I took the plunge: a 32-inch, flat-screen HDTV. I don’t know how to articulate my unbridled giddiness about my new toy except to say that if the rumors about Jesus returning to earth are true, he’ll probably come over to my place to watch SportsCenter before getting down to the business of forgiving and whatnot.

In fact, the brilliance of my new TV can be rivaled by only one thing, and that of course is my children’s belief that they are entitled to anything their greedy little eyes can see. I have clearly been too generous with them, and it's plain to me now that I should have spent less time praising/rewarding them and more time beating them into submission.

My daughter woke up at 6:45 this morning. She shuffled her way out to the living room where I was sitting on the couch with my laptop, reading blogs. She smiled her tired smile at me and crawled up to rest her sleepy little head on my shoulder. I closed the laptop and held her.

“Daddy?”

“What, baby?”

“Can I watch TV?”

Shit! Fuck! I can tell immediately that this conversation is going to end in tears, although I’m not altogether sure which of us will be shedding them. I want to be generous with my new TV, but generosity has limits.

“What do you want to watch?” I ask her.

(You know what’s coming next, don’t you?)

“Ummmm…BARNEY!”

“No,” I say. “Absolutely not. No way.”

“But whyyyyyy, daddddeeeeeee?”

“Honey, that TV right there is the most important and special thing I’ve ever bought – even better than the items in The Drawer of Sex and Violence. I certainly will not have My Precious soiled by an effeminate, purple fuckhead.”

“What’s a fuckhead?”

“It’s bad, honey. Very, very bad. Worse than that woman in the Camry who daddy flipped-off on the freeway last weekend. I betcha Barney would change lanes in front of us without signaling, too.”

That’s a lot of vitriol for a four-year-old who has just woken up. She sits there silently trying to get her bearings. Then she turns and looks at me.

“Pweease, daddy? Pweease can I pweease watch Barney?”

“No, honey,” I say. “I’m sorry but the day Barney’s face appears on that beautiful screen is the day I light my hair on fire and run naked down Main Street screaming, “I DON’T love him and he sure as shit DOESN’T love ME!”

Her eyes well up and a giant crocodile tear dives down her right cheek. She puts her head in her hands and begins to sob.

Just then, her brother opens his bedroom door and walks out to the living room. He too is rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

“Morning, daddy,” he says.

My daughter picks her tear-stained face up out of her hands, looks at him and says, “Morning, fuckhead.”

O.J. Simpson is an inspiration to all of us. Poor guy. First he loses his wife, then he has to go on trial for the crime, and since his acquittal he has spent 12 years desperately scouring every golf course in America in search of the elusive twat who killed his dear, departed soulmate. His heroic persistence is already legendary, but now, in attempt to help authorities identify and apprehend the brutal killer, he has written a book detailing how, if he were the killer, which he is not, he would have gone about nearly decapitating his beloved and the horny piece of ass accompanying her.

I find his creative sleuthing quite intriguing, if not altogether a breakthrough in creative nonfiction. And since imitation is flattery’s bitch, I’ve decided to mimic his tactic and apply it to a preposterous fable about me – the one where I (allegedly) got kicked out of a Major League Baseball locker room by a Hall of Fame manager wearing nothing but underpants, knee-high tube socks and a scowl on his face.

If this incident had in fact transpired, which it most certainly did now, it probably would have happened when I was 18. I would probably have been a stringer (newspaper industry term for “scrub”) for a community newspaper called The Enterprise. Since the newspaper would have worked me like a slave and paid me absolutely nothing, they probably made one of my greatest dreams come true by handing me a small, credit-card-sized press credential for big league team that played in or around Los Angeles, probably close to something called Dodger Stadium.

Again, this experience never actually occurred, but if it had I probably would have swallowed my Chiclets when I walked into the press box and saw the stadium at which I’d grown up from the best vantage point in the place. And I probably would have pretended to be an actual journalist despite the fact that I was just a kid whose previous manifestos for the newspaper were so small as to not even warrant a byline.

When the game was over and the alleged team from LA had beaten an alleged team from San Francisco, it’s feasible that I may have urinated down my leg when I showed the security guard my press pass, slid it into my shirt pocket and walked into the first Major League locker room I’d ever seen. I was probably in awe, trying with my limited intellectual power to commit every sight, every sound, every bare Major League ass to memory so I could someday write about it on a blog that’s supposed to be about fatherhood but usually isn’t.

After I’d walked through the locker room and seen irrefutable visual proof that a player on the team who I thought was Jewish was clearly not, I probably would have followed the rest of the local press corps into the office of the manager. His name may or may not have started with a T, as in Tommy Lasorda. There’s a chance that I would have followed the flock of reporters by sticking my little tape recorder thing as close to the manager’s mouth as I could without taking a throat culture so I could record his voice and play it back later for my asshole friends who thought I was lying about the following experience.

After the man who could have been named Tommy finished his comments, the flock of newspapermen and talking heads probably dispersed back into the locker room to interview players who played a key role in the game. After doing the same for a while, I might have decided to take advantage of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity before me and gone walkabout around the clubhouse. I might have walked down the tunnel and into the dugout, my top-siders crunching on sunflower seed shells and slipping on discarded chewing tobacco that covered the concrete floor. And as I walked back down the tunnel toward the locker room, a security guard may have stopped me.

“Can I see your press pass please?” he might have asked.

I probably answered, “Sure,” and reached into my shirt pocket where’d put it.

And it probably wasn’t there. Which may have caused me to lose all control of my sphinctorial orifice.

It’s possible that I then began to blubber and fumble my words and try to explain to the guard dude that I swear to Sandy fucking Koufax that I was there legitimately on a credential from The Enterprise and perhaps you read my article last week about the local high school’s water polo team and its streak of near-drownings.

If this had happened, the security guard might have put the Vulcan death grip on my left bicep (or at least the part where a normal person would have a bicep) (whereas all I had was a humerus bone and some pasty-ass white skin) and began to firmly escort me out of the clubhouse, but not before he dragged me through the locker room so that every player and media member in the room could see my face and remember to stick a Louisville Slugger somewhere on me if I ever showed my face there again.

Having heard the ruckus, the aforementioned manager may have stirred from his three-cheese lasagna lunch and run down the long concrete hallway to see what was happening. He may not have been wearing much. And the site may have been like seeing one’s great-grandmother feverishly running at you in her granny panties and a “Liquor Up Front, Poker In The Rear” t-shirt.

“Hey!” he may have shouted. “What the fuck’s going on down here?!”

At this point the security guard may have informed the manager, who is now an inductee in the Hall of Fame, that this skinny little twerp snuck into the clubhouse and could not produce a press pass despite his claims of legitimacy.

The manager, whose ass I could totally have kicked, may have looked me up and down, snarled at me and said, “Get the fuck out of my clubhouse, you lowlife piece of shit!”

The security guard may then have escorted me the rest of the way down the dark hallway while the manager went back to his lasagna. As we neared the exit, the security guard may have confided in me that there had been a rash of thefts from the clubhouse recently and that had made the manager especially sensitive to trespassers. He then may have opened the door for me and said, “Have a nice evening,” which no security guard would say unless he knew you were totally fucking innocent, none of which really mattered because you were still entangled in the post-traumatic stress into which people fall when they see a 65-year-old man running at you with his frumpy old wanker swinging to and from in his size XXL underwear.

But none of this really happened.

I watched a movie called “Children of Men” last night. It’s set 20 years into the future and rather strikingly presents a world gone to shit. Anarchy. Chaos. Death and destruction. Near the end of the movie it hit me that the world flickering on the TV screen was a pretty true-to-life representation of life on the freeways of Southern California.

Traffic congestion is a simple fact of life in almost any big city. I’ve been to New York and Chicago and Boston and have seen first-hand the virtual impossibility of getting anywhere. But despite my obvious bias I must say I’ve never seen anything quite like the every-Saab-for-himself, may-God-have-mercy-on-your-transmission warfare one must attempt to survive around here. And just like the small band of freaks in the movie last night, there are those who try to resist the dominant paradigm amid the madness around us but in the end it’s clear that resistance is futile. Comply or die.

The warfare about which I speak is most evident in the way SoCal drivers vigorously defend their imaginary turf on the road. It seems we all believe there is an invisible bubble around our car and any attempt by another driver to invade that space by (gasp!) changing lanes must be repelled with extreme malice.

Here’s what I mean. Imagine yourself having just driven onto the freeway. The on-ramp you’ve traversed becomes an “exit only” lane for the next off-ramp, meaning you need to move one lane to the left within a span of about a quarter-mile. You put on your turn signal and check your blindspot. There is a car about half a car-length behind you and you expect that your blinker is a “signal” to him that he should slow down a smidge so you can merge.

That’s not the way it works in SoCal, Holmes. Your flashing red taillight is a signal to the other driver that it’s time to protect his territory – because your decision to change RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIM is a threat not just to his spatial rights but to his human rights. In these parts, changing lanes in front of someone is tantamount to calling him an asshole and kicking him in the nuts. So what does he do? He speeds up and blocks you – and then he throws you an angry, disdainful glare that seems to say, “How DARE you! I should kill you just for THINKING about coming into my lane!”

This scenario repeats itself several times per second on the many slithering freeways and busy surface streets in this region, and when you combine it with the simple fact that there are way too many cars on the road (Public transportation? Here? Pfft.) and highways built decades ago to accommodate a fraction of the current volume, you have what I saw in Children of Men last night. A world gone to shit. Anarchy. Chaos. Death and destruction.

And I’m one of the lucky ones. My commute is only 45 minutes (12 fucking miles!). But it’s not uncommon to hear tales to three-hour drives or six-hour drives or near-death experiences with road-raging freaks. The main north-south point of transit in California is I-5, “The Golden State Freeway.” It’s always jammed, in part because in most places it constricts the traffic into a three-lane clusterfuck of shitty drivers trying to squeeze their way into downtown L.A. or Disneyland or the Mexican border. It seems appropriate to quote a line from one of my favorite movies: “It’s a big shit sandwich and we’re all gonna have to take a bite.”

I’ll close with a question for you: what is traffic like in your city? Is it bad enough to impact your “quality of life”?

When I awoke this morning, The Great Big Man In Red was in full effect. It’s like that on a lot of mornings, which is very painful because when I try to roll over on my belly it sort of squishes back into itself and I end up having to Move Like An Emu for the next several hours. I can’t speak for everyone, but I think most guys handle these situations by taking Jimmy The Elf into the bathroom and Ring-A-Ding-A-Ding Dong! But this time, since it was Friday and I’d been Racing to the Rainbow all week long, I decided a little Zing Zang Wing Wang Wong might be nice.

I scooted over to the other side of the bed and said, “Hey There, Partner.”

She opened her eyes, looked at me and said, “Ooh, It's Captain Feathersword.”

“Hey,” I said. “Cocky Want A Cracker. Can I interest you in a Morningtown Ride?”

She furrowed her brow and looked at me as though I was a moron. “Wake Up Jeff!” she said. “We can’t do the Romp Bomp A Stomp when the kids are awake. What if they see us?”

“Big deal,” I said. “First of all, even if they did see us they wouldn’t know we were doing the Willaby Wallaby Woo. And if they walk in we can tell them We're Playing A Trick On The Captain or something. Come on. Let’s do the Monkey Dance.”

She smiled coyly and said, “Lights, Camera, Action, Wiggles!”

“Now THAT’S what I’M talking about,” I said. “Here Come The Wiggles.”

“Go Captain Feathersword, Ahoy!” she said.

But before we could begin the Shaky Shaky, in walked the Top Of The Tots.

“Hey There, Wally” I said.

“Hi Dad,” he said. “Can you please make me some Crunchy Munchy Honey Cakes?”

Ugh! The horror! Fatherhood can be a serious inconvenience when you’re horny.

“I’ll tell you what, bud. I Can Do So Many Things, but I think I need a little more sleep first. Can you give me about 15 minutes? After that I’ll come out there and we can have a Magical Adventure.”

He drops his shoulders and cops that frustrated, disappointed little boy attitude.

“Waiting for you is boring. I don’t even know what to do while you finish sleeping.”

“Oh come on, dude,” I said. “You can Play Your Guitar With Murray. You could take your little army men on a Wiggly Safari. And if you’re really hungry there’s some Fruit Salad on the bottom shelf of the fridge. OK? Now go. Go Shake Your Sillies Out.”

He turns and drags his bag of bones out of the room. Finally! Now we can get back to the Hoop Dee Doo.

But wait. There’s a problem with Captain’s Magic Buttons. While I was trying to rescue our coitus from our son, it seems Captain Feathersword Fell Asleep On His Pirate Ship (if you catch my drift). “Blow Me Down!” I exclaimed in frustration.

Hot Wife sees my disappointment and tries to remedy the situation in her own special way.

“What's This Button For?” she says, and then she answers the question herself. After a few wonderful seconds, This Little Baby Is Born Again. Now we can get back to The Barrel Polka.

I re-engaged and was oh-so-close to starting to Splish Splash Big Red Boat, but the bedroom door opened again. It was our beautiful daughter, Mitten the Kitten. She was holding a picture book of animals. She climbed up onto the bed, showed me a picture of a polar bear and said, “Daddy, You Might Like A Pet.”

My attempts to scoot her out of the room failed miserably. I look at Hot Wife, she looks at me, and our eyes agree that we’ll have to bid Farewell To The Wiggly Trail.

It’s a total drag because, as I said, Wags Loves To Shake Shake. So after Hot Wife took our Balla Balla Bambina out to Run Around Run Run, I slipped into Anthony’s Workshop to Dance The Ooby-Doo.

Shortly thereafter, someone knocked on the bathroom door. Scared the crap out of me (but I guess the bathroom is a good place to be in the event of having the crap scared out of you). I immediately stopped playing Where Is Thumbkin, pulled my pants up and apparently created quite a ruckus in the process.

“Daddy?” my son called-out from the other side of the door. “What are you doing in there?”

I caught my breath and calmly tried to think of something clever to say.

“Ahem,” I said. “Wah Hoo Hey, I'm Combing My Hair Today.”

He miraculously believed me and walked away without investigating further. But I certainly learned my lesson. It just goes to show you: Snakes: You Can Look But You Better Not Touch.

There are certain things men shouldn’t do. It’s not chauvinism or sexism or chest-pounding to say so either; I’m just keeping it real. In fact, I think it would be a mighty steep challenge to find someone who truly believes in his/her heart that it’s OK for a guy to, say, wear anything made of pink leather. Or to cry over a broken fingernail. Or to refer to anything about his life as his “monthly visitor.”

Now before you accuse me of being out of touch or phobic in some way, remember this: I have admitted on this site that I occasionally find it nice to sit down when I pee. I once used a loofa. And I made it public knowledge that I downloaded a Kelly Clarkson song (on purpose). So don’t even think for a second that my existence is all about beef jerky and bicep curls and crushing empty beer cans on my forehead. I have never been accused of being a macho he-man. (I know: huge shock there.)

But I must confess that today I stepped over the line. I acted in a way that puts my status as “male” in serious jeopardy. In fact, when you combine what I did this afternoon with the fact that I have had a vasectomy, which eviscerated my virility like a water balloon in sixty-fourth level of hell, I may actually be just two implants and a Brazilian wax away from becoming Dad Gone Mom. Here’s why I say that:

I bought a book from Oprah’s book club.

(Listen. Do you hear that? It’s the sound of browser windows closing all over the U.S.)

I’ll have you know that this is all my wife’s fault. She’s the one who Tivoes that damn show everyday and watches them back when the kids go to sleep. And she’s the one who had it playing in the background while I was doing manly things like tracking sports scores and scratching my nuts and trying to burp and yell at the same time. And she’s the one who left the show on when I turned my attention to the interview she was doing with the author of this book. I’m completely innocent.

I also find some solace in the recollection that the first thing I did with the book when I got to my car was remove the big, round, two-tone yellow sticker on the front cover that shouted to anyone within a two block radius: “OPRAH’S MOTHERFUCKING BOOK CLUB, BITCHES! THAT’S ‘OPRAH.’ O-P-R-A-H. AS IN ‘THIS WUSSYBOY IN THIS HERE WUSSYBOY HONDA JUST BOUGHT A BOOK FROM MY CLUB, YO! AND HE PEES SITTING DOWN, TOO!”

I was so humiliated by my own emasculating behavior that I went back into the bookstore and bought a Playboy.

For the articles, of course.

 

***LAST DAYS FOR FREE SHIPPING***
If you're planning to snag a Dad Gone Mad t-shirt for someone you love this Father's Day, Thursday is the last day they'll be available without shipping and handling charges tacked on (and probably the last day to order if you want to have it by Sunday). And don't forget: Hot Wife shirts in sizes L, XL and XXL are available now, too. ***

The family into which I married is well known for two pervasive characteristics.

The first is that they’re all criers. I’ve never seen anything like it. Even at happy occasions like the one we celebrated together this weekend, not one of them can observe the joy without welling-up like a little girl whose favorite doll was decapitated by a weed-whacker.

The second inescapable similarity is that they’re all cartoonishly short. They may claim that my outlook on this issue is skewed by the fact that I’m six-foot-two and therefore EVERYONE looks short to me, but that’s bollocks. Adding my seed to the family gene pool has probably increased the average overall height of future descendants by six inches, if not more.

But don’t infer from these revelations that I consider myself in any way superior to the members of my family-in-law. Quite the contrary. I have to call Hot Wife’s brother for every god-damned fix-it project that arises at Evans World Headquarters. Without him I’m certain we’d be living in the dark, peeing in the backyard and eating cold hot dogs for dinner every night.

And then there’s the issue of Hot Wife’s oldest sister, The Evil Scrabble Assassin. To give you a true flavor of what she’s all about I need only to tell you why we were all together Sunday morning. Next year The Evil Scrabble Assassin of Death will turn 50 – and she hasn’t even broken her hip yet. But because she is such a frustratingly intelligent asshat and the kind of person who would know about a surprise birthday party long before she should, her mother threw her a surprise 49th birthday party, several weeks in advance of her actual birth date.

My mother-in-law asked me to stand up at the party and say something nice about The Evil Scrabble Assassin of Death(presumably because I’m the only in the family tall enough to be seen in the back of the room when I stand). So Sunday, in front of 65 or so friends, one whom is the President of a current client of the agency where I work, my mother-in-law clinked her water glass to draw everyone’s attention and introduced me by saying I have the wonderful blob. And then she gave everyone the URL and told them they "must" go and read it. I can only presume that the aforementioned client went home, looked up this site, saw that disgusting MySpace link in the last entry and gave the principals of my agency an ultimatum: “Either the sick fuck blobber goes or I go. Your call.”

The resulting panic of that issue notwithstanding, I stood up and tried to say some nice stuff about my sister-in-law. I figured at first that I’d be nice and talk about her big heart and all of the people she’s inspired with her generosity and blah blah blah blah blah. The faces in the crowd expressed boredom and dwindling attention. No one wants to here the platitudes and pleasantries. They want DIRT! They want…THE SCRABBLE STORIES! And oh was I happy to oblige.

The story I told harkened back almost 15 years – to the days when I was first getting to know Hot Wife’s family and they were trying to come to grips with the idea that their sweet little girl was dating an incorrigible jackass. On the second or third time we were all together, this particular sister-in-law suggested we all play Scrabble, which I thought was a fine idea. I happened to be a professional sportswriter back then and there was no doubt in my mind that I would kick this chick’s ass in a stupid little word game – and perhaps doing so might give me some street cred with my girlfriend’s family. Finally! My chance to shine had arrived.

Had she been even the smallest bit in my corner, Hot Wife would have warned me that her beloved big sister eats Scrabble pussies like me for breakfast. This fact became excruciatingly clear when The Evil Scrabble Assassin of Death put down a string of nine consecutive consonants – a row that looked more like hieroglyphics than English. Better yet, she got three triple word scores.

“What the fuck is THAT!” I exclaimed. “That’s not a word.”

“Oh it definitely IS a word,” she said. “A clxsvthz is a small, herbivorous, purple-bellied newt indigenous to the Southeastern rainforests of Tijuana.”

“I’m calling bullshit,” I said. “There ARE no rainforests in Mexico and the only purple-bellied newt I can even imagine would be indigenous to Chernobyl.”

And then The Evil Scrabble Assassin of Death got this arrogant little smirk on her face – the kind that says, “Don’t test me, you little bitch. My sister may think you’re something special but in my eyes you’re just another empty chamber in my Scrabble pistol.”

She stood up, said nothing, walked away. Twenty seconds later she returned with a fat, dog-eared dictionary opened to the CLX-CMA page. And there it was: “Clxsvthz: a purple-bellied newt from the Mexican rainforest.”

I tried not to let my humiliation show in either my demeanor or my game-play. I just sat stoically, put the word “eats” down on some distant, lonely corner of the Scrabble board, and said, “Eats. Four points.”

In the 15 years since, I have tried and failed repeatedly to beat The Evil Scrabble Assassin of Deathof Death in Scrabble.

But I’m still taller than her.

***Several weeks ago a nice woman named Angela wrote to me and asked if I'd consider writing a short essay about fatherhood for her site, MusingMama.com, in advance of Father's Day. I said yes. It's live today if you're interested. CLICK HERE.

Someone recently asked me why I haven't hopped on the MySpace bandwagon.

This is why. http://www.myspace.com/dadgonemad

For the record, that's not me.

Beware! The link above is not suitable for work, children, homophobes, pets, people on heart medication, Republicans, PETA members, vodka drinkers and anyone who might take offense to a butt-naked man having sex in the missionary position with a six-foot, floozy scorpion.

There is a purple plastic bowl on the table: a modest helping of shell-shaped pasta with a bit of pasta sauce. This is her dinner.

She’s playing a Wonder Pets video game on her mother’s computer, staring intently into the monitor as though a flash flood of puppies and Skittles and pink-clad babydolls will cascade out of the screen at any moment. This is roughly the same concentrated stare you’d see on the face of a 14-year-old boy when his buxom algebra teacher walks into class wearing a loose-fitting blouse with no bra underneath.

I walk over to her and wave my hand up and down in front of her face. She blinks twice, then turns her head toward me and flashes that smile of hers – the one that melts my heart and weakens me knees and makes 10,000 white doves fly out of my chest.

“Hi daddy,” she says.

“Hi baby,” I say, leaning over to kiss her on the forehead. “Listen, I’m going to set the timer for three minutes. When you hear it beep, that will mean it’s time to turn off the computer and eat your dinner. OK?”

“OK, daddy.”

Three minutes later: Beeeeeep.

I’m in the living room but I hear some shuffling, the sound of a chair being scooted away from the table, a fork being dropped.

In a flash she’s standing in front of me. She’s holding the bowl.

“Daddy, I don’t like this pasta. I want spaghetti instead.”

“Honey, spaghetti and shells are the same thing,” I say. “All pasta is alike. Only the shape is different.”

“I know, daddy, but I want spaghetti. I don’t like the shells.”

I shrug my shoulders at her and say, “Sorry, but I’m not going to cook another kind of pasta for you when you’ve got some right in front of you. That’s what we’re having for dinner tonight. You don’t have to eat it but I’m not making anything else.”

Her eyes well up and her bottom lip droops and for a moment I am the meanest motherfucker on the planet. When she looks at me this way it takes every ounce of self-restraint I can muster to stand firm and not give her whatever she wants, which would ease her heartbreak – and mine by association. She walks away with her head down, defeated, sullen.

A few minutes pass before she returns. Her reappearance comes with a bashful smile. She climbs into my lap and snuggles her head into that little pocket between my chin and neck. It sends my heart soaring. I interpret her cuddles as a non-verbal apology for making such a ridiculous food request.

I am mistaken.

“Daddy?” she says softly. “Can I have some ice cream?”

This just in from our “the punishment doesn’t fit the crime” department: I have to go to traffic school because I ran over a fucking speed bump.

I spent two months trying to render the fortitude it would take to fight my ticket. But I couldn’t seem to get past the fact that I am guilty of the charges against me. Here’s how the conversation went in my head:

Judge: “Why are you here today?”

Me: “I’m here today, sir, to fight against a terrible injustice.”

Judge: “And what injustice is that, Mr. Big Shot?”

Me: “Sir, I was on my way to my son’s baseball game and stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. I was attempting to maneuver my car into the left-turn lane when my left rear tire inadvertently clipped the end of a large reflector bump. An officer pulled me over and gave me a ticket for that. As a taxpayer and a law-abiding citizen I am appalled by the decision to punish such a trivial offense. Public safety was never endangered. It’s a victimless crime, sir.”

Judge: “I see. Let me ask you one question, Mr. Evans. Did you or did you not run over the bump?”

Me: “I did.”

Judge: “That’s all I needed to know. The court finds you guilty and sentences you to stop being such a petty asshole. Upon completion of traffic school the violation will be expunged from your record.”

Me: [muttering under my breath as I gather my papers] “Guilty my ass.”

Judge: “What did you just say, Mr. Evans?”

Me: “Let’s be real here, your honor, sir. In the neighborhood where this so-called violation occurred there are unspeakable crimes on a minute-to-minute basis – guys stealing cars and people giving handjobs for a hit of meth and heavyset women wearing metallic pink hotpants in public. It’s rampant. But in spite of all of it, I’M the criminal? I’M the dangerous one? Because I ran over a fucking speed bump!? Which we can find in the penal code right next to killing a mosquito with a newspaper and digging into the coin return of a pay phone for spare change that doesn’t belong to you.”

Judge: “Sir, you are out of order.”

Me: “No! YOU’RE out of order! YOU’RE out of order, sir! You should be ashamed of yourself!”

At this point I feel a sharp pinch in my right side. I fall to the ground in pain and the bailiff keeps his trigger finger on the tazer gun for a few extra seconds, just long enough for my bladder and bowels and voice box to go about there merry way on the courtroom floor. And as I lay there, swimming in my own juices and howling like a chimp with a railroad spike in his eyeball, the judge upholds his ruling and sends me to jail for contempt, where I will share a cell with an axe murderer with Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

That’s where my daydream ends.

I think the decision to pay the stupid $202 fine and endure a long, boring Saturday watching Red Asphalt five times is very clearly the right one, don’t you?

I find this deleted scene from the new movie "Knocked Up" at once hilarious and refreshing. If only all doctors would give it to us this straight.

Don't forget, moms, you still have time to get the dad in your life a Dad Gone Mad t-shirt for Father's Day.