My daughter is sick. That’s what she says, anyway. You can never be certain.

Pardon my cynicism, but I happen to have been the master of Mom Can I Please Please Stay Home From School Because I’m Super Duper Sick And Cough Cough Hack I Think There’s A Good Chance I’ll Die From Pneumonia Or Typhus Or Possibly Clogged Fallopian Tubes If I Have To Go To That That That Place Today.

So please, child. Don’t waste my time.

The very softest and squishiest part of my heart is reserved for my daughter. If you could see it, you’d see sloppily pasted pieces of dry macaroni all over it. And stickers. And, if we must, glitter. I absolutely adore this child in the same way presidential candidates adore the word “change”. She’s who I am.

But my mama didn’t raise no stoopnagel.

I credit my own superior “I’m sick” success to the fact that she (my mom) was a nurse – someone who is trained to recognize symptoms. You have to work long and hard to get a nurse to let you stay home from school, and I did. To give you an idea of my mastery, one morning I doused my mouth, chin and chest with ketchup (or blood, as I wanted her to believe) and walked out for breakfast coughing. “Mom?” I moaned. “I don’t feel so good.”

(Dude, if they handed out trophies for this shit, I would have had to add-on to my room in order to house them all.)

(Unfortunately, I overshot my wad a little bit with the ketchup and ended up in the ER with a tube down my throat.) (Which sucked.)

This is all a roundabout way of saying I know when a child, however cute, is playing pathetic. I’ve watched a lot of television in my life and I know shitty acting when I see it (read: Nicholas Cage). So, child, don’t come out here with your head down and your voice raspy and…

Oh.

Never mind.

Bless me, internet, for I have sinned. It has been five days since my last nonsensical, profanity-laden diatribe.

I was genuinely enjoying the drive down Pacific Coast Highway until that asshole in the powder blue Lamborghini nearly killed us.

It was Sunday, around noon, and the sunlight was jumping off the waves like popcorn kernels exploding in hot oil. It was a quintessential Southern California moment – an oceanside highway, dark sunglasses, a sea breeze carrying the inimitable scent of decaying seaweed in through the window. The only spoiler was the vehicle. Seems to me PCH should be cruised in a convertible red Mustang or an old VW bus, not a grey minivan with a child’s car seat in the back and Cheerios wedged between the seats. Alas, these are the elements of cool we sacrifice when we become parents.

Somewhere near the intersection with Malibu Canyon Road a loud rumble began to overpower the sounds of waves crashing and seagulls screaming overhead. If you could hear an earthquake coming before it started, it would sound this way.

“What the hell?” I said.

“Danny!” Hot Wife said, motioning to the back seat with a nod of her neck.

“I mean ‘heck!’ What the heck!”

I saw them in the rearview mirror: a convoy of Lamborghinis, each painted in a different shade of “Look at me! I have a wee little pecker and a terrible habit of sabotaging my personal relationships, but maybe this loud car that costs more than your entire life will make you think I’m like bad-ass or something!”

Although it is very well known and heavily traveled, PCH is just two lanes in each direction. That makes for frequent traffic jams and frustrations. Knowing that Lamborghinis are born to drive fast, I meandered over into the “slow” lane to let the convoy pass without incident.

Zzzzzzzzoom! Zzzzzzzoomzoomzoomzzzooom! Zzzzzzzzoom! It sounded like fucking Le Mans out there.

There must have been at least 30 of them, maybe more. The kids stared out the window, mouths agape.

“Look at that one!” my son said, pointing. “It’s orange!”

After a minute or two, they were gone.

“Very nice,” I said.

And then…

ZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzoooom! Errrrrrrrrt!

A straggler driving a powder blue Lamborghini sped up, chilled for a second because I was next to him and there was another car in front of him and about half a car length ahead of our minivan. Half a car length!

Then it was as though he said to himself, “You know what? Fuck it. I’m going for it.”

And he went for it.

He sped up and cut right in front us. I had to hit the brakes to avoid clipping his back tire and sending him into a death spiral right there in front of David Schwimmer’s house.

In an instant I engaged myself in an almost existential debate.

The younger me – the one without kids and a wife and a vasectomy scar – would have chased that Lamborghini to the next stoplight, gotten out of the minivan, open the driver’s side door of the other car and beaten Tom Thumb until his hairplugs cried for mercy. I was a man, and that’s what men do: we pound on people who are weaker than us.

“Hold on a second there, bucko,” the older me interjected. “You’ve got kids in the car. Suppose Tom Thumb has a gun or a knife or a mechanical pencil in that Lamborghini. Do you want them to see you die?”

“I’m not gonna die,” the younger me said. “Don’t be such a puss. I don’t want them to see me die, but I also don’t want them to see me be disrespected without sticking up for myself.”

“Because?”

“Because…because…because I don’t want them to think being disrespected is OK!”

“Oh, I see. So the lesson here is that every time someone does something rude to them, they should beat that person up?”

A pause.

The old me continued, “Come on, Danny. Keep it together.”

Ugh. I hate when the old me wins.

A few moments later, the powder blue Lamborghini was stopped on a red arrow, presumably turning left to follow the other Lamborghinis to the 2008 Pretentious Asshole Convention somewhere up in the canyon. Since we were going to continue south, we had a bright green light.

As we passed him, I rolled down my window, stuck my head out into the breeze and shouted, “I’m gonna blog your ass, motherfucker!”

“Danny!” Hot Wife said, flabbergasted by my profanity in front of the children.

“Oh!” I said, mortified. “Sorry, kids. What I should have said is ‘I’m gonna blog your butt, motherfucker.’ Your butt.”

Once every two weeks or so I wake up my kids by shouting at them with made-up words. These impromptu diatribes are an amalgamation of English and German that at once wrests them from sleep and makes them laugh because, as they like to say, “daddy sounds super duper silly.”

“IT IS TIME TO VAKINZE OOPENSTRUDEL! MIEN KINDER MOOST GETINZE TUSHIES AUT OF DER BED, BROOSHINZE TEETH AND TINKLE FROM DER WINERSCHNITZEL! YOU VEEL DO ZIS OR ZER FAZZER VEEL SPANKEN ZER LEETL BOOTS!”

People say French is the language of love, which may be true, but in my opinion German is the language of humor. I think my passion for the language was born during my early days of Hebrew school, about the time when the teachers showed us old propaganda films feature a certain German dictator with a ridiculous half-moustache and a God complex. I had no idea what he was saying to his people during these speeches (although the teachers said he was “a very, very bad man”), but I loved to imagine he was trying to convince the masses that men with small dicks and mommy issues are the greatest leaders of all.

“MIEN WINERSCHNITZEL ISS OON OONDER-SIZEN PECKER OONT EIN HAHVEN JOOST VUN TESTICLE! OH, AND ALSO? FUCK DER JUDEN!”

It so happens that my kids got a German wake-up call just this morning. Then I got to work and had a business meeting with a real live German guy. According to his business card, his title is “Praktikant Marketing – Kommunikation” and he is from Stuttgart, which I believe is pronounced SHTOOTGART.

God, how I wish I was from somewhere with a cool name like SHTOOTGART.

“Where are you from?”

“SHTOOTGART!” I would say proudly. “You?”

“Oh, just the Valley.”

“Well I am obviously better than you. Because I am from SHTOOTGART!”

And guess what? Turns out the Germans are very nice people.

They don’t talk like that mono ball, dictator guy. They don’t have shitty moustaches. Shit, this guy even had a cool PowerPoint presentation, complete with those cool slide transitions.

What a quandary this presents! How can I continue to speak to my children in angry, false German when I know first-hand that Germans are neither angry nor mean? I can’t. I have to keep it real with my children, if only because I want them to grow up believe Germans are cool (as opposed to the propaganda of Germans I heard growing up, which said they are terrible people who want to steal our gold filings and perform crazy experiments on our testicles).

But I have found a solution that spares the German people their reputations while also perpetuating my ability to make the kids laugh.

Little League baseball season is about to start up again. When I tell my son to put on his uniform, I will no longer remind him to wear his cup.

I will remind him not to forget his SHTOOTGART!

Although my entertainment preferences slant dramatically toward heathenism and aggression, I’m not above experiencing a little culture here and there. In fact, when my in-laws invited Hot Wife and me to join them for a play last night, I felt a wee bit giddy about the idea. I attribute this sensation to the realization that I’ve made such a habit of acting like an asshat in front of others that the opportunity to watch someone else do so was as exciting and life-affirming as opening a new tube of KY.

We arrived at the theater about 10 minutes before the show and the first thing I noticed was the stark demographic reversal. Two nights ago I was at a professional hockey game, seated amongst 15,000 boisterous, bloodthirsty pottymouths, including the guy in the front row who shouted I HAD SEX WITH YOUR MOTHER! at the poor, dumb schmuck in the visitors’ penalty box. The very next night, at the play, I found myself shuffling past a row of bluehairs, trying not to step on their arthritically gnarled toes on the way to my seat – seat 119.

Not long after we sat down, a tall, thin woman with glasses on the tip of her nose appeared at the end of our row. She looked down at her ticket, then up at me. Ticket, me. Ticket, me. I made eye contact with her and she said, “I think you’re in my seat.”

This happens all the time at hockey games. Some drunk twatsicle comes ambling down the aisle and mumbles, “Yo, bro, you’re in my seat, dude.” Again, we’re talking about an entirely different demographic, and at the arena you can halt this sort of confusion by telling the drunkard to suck your dick and/or go cry to the usher and try not to trip on his skirt on his way back down the aisle.

The theater hardly seemed like the place to take that vitriolic posture. If only to remind myself that I can behave in a civilized manner, I took the high road with the woman at the end of the row. I pulled my ticket stub from my pocket and looked at it.

“Row C, seat 119,” I said. “Is that what yours says, too?”

“Indeed it does.”

My mother-in-law came to my defense. “We’ve had these same seats for 20 years,” she said. “I’m positive we’re in the right place.”

That comment seemed to summarily sink the woman’s battleship. “I think I’ll go ask an usher,” she said.

Wow. That was easy.

Three minutes later the woman returned, this time with an usher in tow.

“Can I see your ticket stub please, sir,” she asked.

I rolled my eyes and passed the stub down the aisle. Again.

The usher held my ticket in one hand and the other woman’s ticket in the other. Left hand, right hand. Left, right. Left, right.

“Hmm...” she said. “Did you trade tickets with someone else?”

“No,” I said, a little pissed that she was taking the other woman’s side. “I did not trade tickets with anyone. I’m am a guest of someone who has reserved these same seats since you still had your real teeth.”

Oops. My inner hockey fan was showing. Hot Wife pinched my leg to remind me to be civil.

The usher seemed not to have heard my insult. She simply looked back at the tickets – left, right – and said to the woman, “Looks like we need to go have a talk with the ticket office. Follow me.”

As they turned to go, the woman scowled at me and said, “Thanks for nothing.”

In the parlance of theater patronage, this is the equivalent of saying, “Fuck you.”

“OH YEAH?” I said, now standing and yelling in full hockey fan mode. “I HAD SEX WITH YOUR MOTHER!”

Nerds live in a universe dominated by fact. Truth. Absolute certainty. This equation renders this answer and there will never be deviation from it. Two plus two equals four. It will always equal four. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a fool. This is a safe and comfortable outlook on the world because there’s no need for sticky, frivolous accoutrements like interpretation or (gasp!) feelings. It’s better this way for a nerd because thinking about the variables inherent in other, non-scientific pursuits – love, for example – takes away the control and safety of factual reliability.

When my son was two, I discovered the polar opposite of a facts-centric existence – the equivalent of kryptonite for a geek. The parenting books refer to it as a tantrum, but anyone who has seen one in person will agree that the act is so chaotic and illogical that a quaint two-syllable can hardly do it justice. Tantrum sounds like an analgesic for premenstrual cramps or a high-fiber cereal. These violent spasms our children throw need something edgier, sharper, more terrorizing. That led Sharon and me to the rather obvious analogy that tantrums are like natural disasters:

* Hurricanes, which can be seen before they manifest, giving the parent-slash-storm-chaser time to run like hell before the tantrum unleashes its wrath.

* Earthquakes, which cannot be forecast and may range in severity from a weak little whimper to a get-under-the-desk-and-hold-on soul-rattler, complete with flying tears, primal screams and the occasionally the need to remove the kid from the restaurant before you’ve even finished your Minestrone.

Something I’ve always found interesting about hurricane season is the inevitable TV news story about the dopes who elect to hunker-down in their homes and wait the storm out. It’s fascinating because it defies logic, which is also a close personal friend of nerds everywhere. I’ve found myself yelling at the TV. “Get out, dipshit! You’re gonna die!” But becoming a parent has changed my assessment of these stubborn Southerners. I still think they’re dopes, but I empathize with the notion that disaster can be fun if you don’t take it so seriously.

Parenthood does that to you.

This morning at breakfast my daughter wanted to sit in certain one of the six chairs around our dining room table. Unfortunately, the chair she wanted was the one in which her brother was sitting.

A normal person would have cut her losses and accepted the deal I proposed, which was that she could sit in that chair for dinner that night.

(My first mistake was presuming she was normal. I should know better.)

Not sure which natural weather phenomenon I can ascribe to this scenario -- perhaps an especially windy day, if only because she was unrelenting in her defiance. She seemed to believe that by repeatedly saying "But I want to sit in THAT chair" she could convince me that I should comply. We went round and round on this track for about five minutes -- until I finally said this:

"OK, you have two choices. You can either sit down in another chair and eat your waffle or you can sit in the penalty box. Which of those options do you choose?"

A pause. She's thinking.

"But daddy?"

"What?"

"I want to sit in THAT chair."

"OK, so that's your choice? You're telling me you want to sit in the penalty box?"

"No."

"I'm going to walk away for a minute to put on my shoes. When I get back, I want you to tell me what you've chosen. OK?"

"OK."

I walk away, tie my shoes, and walk back. And lo and behold, she was sitting down in a chair across the table from her brother. And she was SMILING!

Sometimes you want your children to smile. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes you don't want them to smile because I smile reflects mischief and guilt, as opposed to happiness. This was one of those times.

With extreme trepidation, I walked in for a closer look.

There was half a gallon of maple syrup on her plate. Somewhere under the surface was a waffle, but I couldn't see it.

Sometimes you don't want them to smile.

I freely admit that I harbor overblown, vicarious fantasies about my son becoming the next great American baseball player. These delusions are no doubt retreads of my own childhood dreams – imaginings that lived and ultimately died in my head because I was too busy with Hebrew school to devote any time, hope or energy on grooming myself to bat clean-up for the Dodgers.

I want my son to love the game, and I consider myself fortunate that he does. While I am careful to avoid becoming the stereotypically hard-assed Little League dad, I do let him know how much I love watching him play. I love the excitement on his face. I love the pride he displays when he knows he’s done well. And even a tiny smidgeon of me doesn’t mind when he gets bummed after a bad play. It shows me the game means something to him.

The league in which he plays held its annual tryout last Saturday, which in my mind is pretty damn silly considering the boys are seven years old, too young even to keep score of their games. I had every intention of keeping him home, but when he caught wind of the tryouts, he said he wanted to go. So we went.

[Cue: delusions of grandeur]

The first part of the tryout was a defensive assessment. The boys were lined up at the second base position. Their instructions were simple: scoop up a ground ball and throw it to first base. They’d do it four consecutive times before moving on to the next drill.

My son: four perfect throws.

The next drill was to catch pop-ups at the shortstop position.

My son: four perfect catches.

I don’t intend to cast a light of negativity on the other boys in attendance, but I have to be honest. My boy was the best player out there. He was consistent. He looked comfortable. And he was smiling the whole time.

Before he even had a chance to pick up a bat and show off his hitting chops, four different coaches approached me and said they’d be trying to draft my son. If that doesn’t make a father’s heart burst out of his chest, nothing will. I can’t tell you how hard it was for me to fight back a goofy grin and a primal scream.

“Why are so happy, dad?”

“No reason,” I said, lying my ass off. “Just happy to be back at the ballpark.”

“OK,” he said. “But you’re weird.”

“YOU’RE the weird one,” I said, mussing his hair with my hand. “Go hit the ball.”

Although he showed no nerves whatsoever, I was a bit tentative about the hitting drill. This year he’s playing in the division that hits pitches hurled by a machine at 35 miles per hour. This was the first time he’d ever seen such a contraption. Would it spook him? Would the pitches come at him too fast? Was he about to squander his first-round draft pick status?

He sauntered up to the plate, put his bat up in the ready position and began to swivel his hips back and forth like he was Mickey Fucking Mantle.

There was a coach standing behind the machine. He held up a baseball and shouted to my son: “Ready?”

My kid just nodded his head. Didn’t speak a word.

The coach dropped the ball into the machine. I couldn’t look. But I couldn’t look away.

Zzzzzzzzzzzip…PING!

(I love the sound of an aluminum bat making solid contact with a baseball. Sounds like…victory.)

Zzzzzzzzzzzip…PING!

Zzzzzzzzzzzip…PING!

Zzzzzzzzzzzip…PING!

Four pitches, four solid hits, two very hard nipples (mine, not his).

Better get his autograph now. That’s all I’m saying.

Two thirds of the respondents to yesterday's poll said they thought a DGM message board would be cool. And who am I to keep the people from coolness?

DGMTALK.COM

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my first decade of fatherhood, it’s this: the guys who talk about it like it’s a charming, noble, life-affirming pursuit are twatsicles of the highest order. The real truth is that being a dad is sometimes an imposition of pain far worse than any up-the-peen catheter could ever dream to deliver.

We walk through our wife’s pregnancy in some dim-witted stupor, having convinced ourselves that if we’re savvy enough to unclog a sink or change the spark plugs on a Camry, raising a child is like shooting fish in a barrel.

Then comes the day our child is born.

We stare into our wife’s crotch expecting to see the kid’s head but instead we see an enormous human arm jet out and grab us firmly by the throat. The tattoo on the bicep reads “FATHERHOOD.” While it chokes us, it whips our body around the delivery room, smashing us against instrument trays and stirrups and bassinets.

It speaks.

“You think you can take me, punk? You think you’re stronger than me? Well I got news for ya. I’m about to put you in a world of hurt! For the next 18 years I won’t let you sleep, I won’t give you a moment of privacy and I won’t even let you bang your wife without interrupting the festivities to tell you your kid shit the bed and you need to clean it up. And you know what? You’re gonna like it.”

Then the fist releases its grip and slithers home to your wife’s uterus.

***HUMOR ME***

By some stroke of good fortune, three different girls saw fit to kiss me by the time I graduated college. One even referred to me as her boyfriend. But as each of these poor, misguided girls could attest, I had no idea how to kiss a girl. Where do you put your tongue? What do you do with all of the slobber? How do you know when it’s OK to start touching things? In true nerd fashion, I figured there must be some sort of textbook on the subject, some literary guide to navigating romantic awkwardness, but I never found one. Through trial and error (mostly error) I managed to find my way around a woman without being slapped, pepper-sprayed or incarcerated.

In the summer of 1993, I had a freshly minted bachelor’s degree and no clue what to do with it, so I agreed to return to the summer camp I’d attended as a kid to work as a counselor. I met Sharon the day I arrived. I liked her immediately, in part because she was the first “cool” chick who’d ever seen fit to talk to me. She laughed at my jokes, told a few of her own (bad ones) and I can recall being overwhelmed by her beautifully white, perfectly straight, incomprehensibly flossed teeth. I knew Sharon was out of my league because she was the first female friend I’d ever had who seemed incapable of eating an apple through a chain link fence.

I had no idea what love was, but Sharon made me feel as though I was outgrowing my lifelong nerd persona. I wanted to kiss her, although I was paralyzed by the idea that she might not welcome such an attempt and therefore stop talking to me. But late one night while we were talking on the porch in front of her cabin, I summoned the courage to say this:

“I really like you, Sharon, but I’m not sure what to do about it.”

She giggled a little, partly amused by my catastrophic social retardation and partly because she felt the same way about me.

“Hmmm,” she said sarcastically. “That sounds like a pretty serious problem.”

She walked over, put her hands on my cheeks and kissed me. On the mouth. Hollywood is famous for its clichéd recreations of scenes like this, replete with fireworks bursting in the background and little pink hearts floating into the air when the actors’ love is finally sealed with a kiss. I used to think that was gross and off-putting. But once you feel it for yourself, it doesn’t seem so outlandish.

We grew closer as the summer wore on, but there was a roadblock to circumvent: the camp administrators strongly discouraged romance between staff members. They claimed it distracted the counselors’ attention from the campers and was therefore grounds for dismissal from the staff. But neither Sharon nor I had any intention of adhering to that rule. We were in love, so we developed a plan to camouflage our budding relationship, sneaking out of sight during the night to talk and kiss and cuddle under the cover of darkness, and during the day we’d try to act inconspicuously. But in the event that we wanted to say “I love you” while the sun was up, we agreed on a gesture, a simple rub of the nose, to say it for us. Each morning at summer camp began with the children and counselors encircling a flagpole to say the Pledge of Allegiance, and each morning my eyes met Sharon’s from across the circle. We rubbed our noses at one another with such ferocity and frequency that the other counselors began to think we’d each developed a raging cocaine habit.

We were married three years later.

One morning in ninth grade, Eugene Ellerbe stabbed me in the gut with a mechanical pencil. Pretty hardcore pugnacity for a meek, toe-headed little nerd like Eugene, whose fiercest act of aggression theretofore had been wiping a booger on Mike DeMattia’s backpack after Mike broke Eugene’s high score on Donkey Kong. That’s how we used to settle things in the geek squad: boogers and loogies and wet willies. I suppose that’s what made Eugene’s attack so spectacular. Notwithstanding the simple fact that his Crown pencil pierced the skin on my abdomen and left behind a half-inch souvenir of busted lead, the real shock was the uncharacteristic bloodlust and hostility displayed by a kid who couldn’t move a muscle without first taking a hit from his asthma inhaler.

We had a substitute teacher in computer science class that day, which typically portended bad things for the nerds. Back then we learned how to write computer programs on monolithic black terminals called TRS-80s (everyone called them Trash 80s). There were two dozen of them in the computer lab – a small, poorly ventilated, portable building planted next to the teachers’ parking lot – and everyone who used the “Trashers” knew about their logic-defying design flaw: a small square button on the top right corner of the keyboard. The kill switch. If pressed, the button shut down the computer and whatever data hadn’t been saved was lost forever. There were very few cool kids in computer class but those who were enrolled developed a fun little game called “Let’s Piss Off The Nerds And Laugh At Their Impotent Rage,” during which they would sneak up behind us and push the kill switch in the middle of our projects. Because they knew none of us had the muscle mass or intestinal fortitude to stand up to them, the sight of a substitute teacher was like Christmas morning for the jocks, stoners and cheerleaders.

Eugene was the chosen mark that morning because he was the geek most intently concentrating on his work. The ideal target for a sneak attack. One after another, for almost the entire hour, they crept up behind Eugene, heartlessly killed his machine and scooted back to their seats before the substitute teacher awoke from her gin-induced slumber. The rest of us dweebs were so overjoyed to have escaped this wrath that we began to laugh as hard at Eugene’s misfortune as the other kids. There’s nothing funnier than an angry geek.

“Hey! Evans!”

It was Butch Hankins, the boy rumored to have touched the boob of Tina James, the cheerleader every nerd in school would have given our most prized Dungeons and Dragons dice just to talk to. Butch had never spoken to me (I didn’t even know he knew my name) so I perked up immediately to claim my validation.

“Yeah, Butch?”

“Go kill Elerbe’s computer or I’ll kick your ass.”

My heart sank. Eugene was my friend. We’d gotten our braces at about the same time and we’d both suffered the ultimate indignity of having to wear our headgear to school. We had a running lunchtime agreement that I would trade him my Del Monte fruit cup for his Cheetos. But what choice did I have here? In my panic, I calculated that I stood a better chance of Eugene forgiving me than I did of surviving a beating by Butch.

“OK, Butch. I’ll do it.”

I stood from my chair and began to sneak toward Eugene’s computer, looking back with each step to make sure Butch and his boys were still watching. I was wearing my light blue corduroy pants that day and I remember worrying that the vit-vit sound of the rubbing ridges would alert Eugene to my presence. But when I got to within just a step or two, I was still confident that I hadn’t been noticed. I paused for a moment swiveled my glance back to Butch, hoping against all hope that he’d call the attack off. Maybe he was just testing me to see if I was man enough to get out of the chair, and since I demonstrated at least a modicum of balls I was free to come over to his house for lasagna and to feel-up Tina James for dessert. But there was no such cease-fire. He mouthed the words “do it, nerd” and flicked the back of his hand a couple of times – the universal sign for “scoot.”

I turned around, took a breath and lunged toward Eugene’s kill switch. At that very instant Eugene grabbed his pencil, wheeled around in his chair and drove the lead into my right side, perfectly placed in the hollow between two ribs. The room erupted in oohs and aahs, and in an instant Eugene became a cult hero on campus (not unlike the tragically untalented guy laughed off of the TV singing competition only to become a celebrity). Butch never talked to me again after that and I never got to lay a single quivering finger on Tina.

But I did get to leave school early that day.

To get a tetanus shot.

You never recover from something like that. Nerds start out with a severe street cred deficit as it is, but I learned that year that it’s possible to retreat even further from coolness. Even the other members of the geek squad chose not to associate with me, and trust me: you haven’t known sorrow until kids with dandruff, pocket protectors and a tendency to snort when they laugh think you’re beneath them. When ninth grade finally drew to an end and the school yearbook came out, I was voted “Most Likely To Die Without Ever Having Kissed A Girl That Wasn’t His Mom.”

After they bathed and brushed last night, the kids crawled into our bed, pulled the flannel sheets up to their chins and demanded that I read Dora’s Book of Manners to them. Given the frequency with which I read this book to them, you’d think some of the manners would have rubbed off on them by now.

Alas, no.

They’re still the same untamed banshees they’ve always been, and I suppose Hot Wife and I should consider ourselves fortunate that we haven’t yet found them hanging upside-down from the rafters and eating bananas with their feet.

“Who do we ask for help when we don’t know which way to go?” I read.

“Map!” she said.

“Nuh-uh,” her brother blurted. “Spap!”

I had no idea how funny Spap is to a four-year-old. The way she reacted was as though she’d heard Chris Farley’s “I live in a van down by the river” speech and Bill Murray’s Dalai Lama speech for the first time. Simultaneously. I tried to play along – to pretend that Spap really was funny – but I frankly expect a higher grade of humor from my children. I continued reading.

“Right,” I read. “We ask the map. Mr. Map, can you tell us how to return all of the friendship bracelets?”

“…friendship facelets,” he said.

She laughs. He laughs. I laugh because they’re laughing at something so stupid. It’s like they’ve never even bothered to read my blog and discover what real humor looks like. Losers.

Then, in my best Map voice, I say, “To return the friendship bracelets to all of the little boys and girls, you have to go across Sneezing Snake Lake…over Dragon Mountain…and through the Tunnel of Turkey Poops.”

(I added that last part myself, if only to fuel the fire and get them good and hyper before bedtime.)

“It doesn’t say that, daddy,” my daughter said matter-of-factly.

“You made that up,” her brother said.

I put the book down and glared at them.

“Wait a sec. You guys make up silly words like facelets and spap, thinking they’re the funniest words you’ve ever heard. But when I make up something truly funny and clever – the Tunnel of Turkey Poops, you guys! – you get mad at me because it’s not in the book? Whose children are you?”

Silence. Blank stares.

My son nudges his sister. “Hey, Goose…SPAP!”

“Bwaah-ha-ha-ha-haaaaaaaaaaa!”

Before I found it in myself to protect the scant little microbe of dignity I still possess, I blogged about poop a lot. I’m not proud of it, nor is my wife, but every blogger does it sooner or later and since my life is virtually an open book, I guess it’s an open butt, too.

Wait. That came out wrong. So to speak.

Anyway, one of the many foul revelations I shared back in the poop days was that I have a bit of a lactose issue (and by “issue” I mean “don’t stand behind me if I’ve eaten ice cream in the previous 24 hours because you might die”). It has generally been my practice to eat dairy products only sparingly, if at all, because enduring my intestinal Jekyll and Hyde routine isn’t worth the reward.

I forgot about that need for restraint yesterday when, while watching football at a sports bar, I ordered a piece of mud pie: a four-inch-tall, pie-slice-shaped slab of ice cream that did to my gut what a two-ton nuclear warhead would do to my living room. I’ll spare us all the specific details of what ensued, but suffice it say it wasn’t pleasant. Every time I walked by Hot Wife, she fanned the air away from her with a magazine.

But in this situation, as in virtually all others related to unfortunate biological functions, I have found away to distract myself from the painful rejection and shame with humor.

In writing classes, professors are fond of giving students a “prompt” – a prefabricated scenario from which the students should write their next essay or chapter. For example:

“What if you had six nipples?”

“What was your worst babysitting nightmare?”

“January 7 is National Kick Someone in the Balls Day. Who would you like to kick in the balls and why?”

I have applied the same context to my own farts. They are not merely malicious and aggressive expulsions of foul air from the tushie; they are creativity prompts.

These are some of the things I say after particularly loud farts:

Can someone get the phone?

Top of the morning, Guv’nuh.

Come in!

I’ll get it!

Rusty! Guh-ross! (Rusty is our dog.)

May I ask who’s calling?

Say it to my face, asshole.

Did somebody step on a duck? (Props to Rodney Dangerfield for that one.)

We are experiencing a sudden loss of cabin pressure. Remain calm.

That wasn’t me. It was a California Barking Spider. They’re indigenous to these parts.

I’m sitting here this morning wondering when our senses of compassion and respect deteriorated to this point.

When did we become so callous and heartless that we started to view a young mother struggling with a mental illness as entertainment?

When did we stop trying to empathize?

When did we find ourselves so miserable with our own existences that we started to distract ourselves by watching someone else fall apart live on TMZ?

I hear the feeble attempts at logic.

When she decided to become an entertainer, she gave up her right to privacy.

Oh, I see. So because she's makes her living in a spotlight, she can never leave it. Even when that light irrefutably reveals that she's unwell, that she needs help, that the decent and humane thing to do would be to turn the light off and leave her alone, we refuse.

And let's not stop at simply broadcasting her breakdown; let's taunt her on her way down. Let's call her "Unfitney" and repost pictures of her crotch and act as though we have been personally effected by someone else's breakdown.

If it bleeds, it leads.

Better her than me.

I’m sitting here this morning wondering if anyone else sees more than one tragedy here.

Twelve years ago, on New Year’s Eve 1996, I was facedown on a friend’s bathroom floor, wearing a dress and vomiting kamikaze shots until my eyes turned bloodshot.

Two days ago, on New Year’s Eve 2008, I was watching High School Musical 2 and drinking Caffeine-Free Diet Coke until my eyelids grew heavy. I was in bed at 10:30.

I’m going to be 38 this year, and I distinctly recall a time in my life when I thought 38 was, like, really old. My “roommate”, who wishes to remain nameless and would prefer that I not advertise this fact, will be 40 this year. I feel far too young to be marr--, er, “cohabitating” with a 40-year-old. But if you cut me in half and count the rings (please don’t), I only have two rings fewer than she. Final analysis: we’re old.

Part of me wanted to throw on the old dress and wig again this year and drink to the point of dementia, if only to remind myself that I still had it in me to behave like a younger man. But that part of me was overruled by this other annoying part of me – the crotchety old fart who didn’t want his kids to see him in that condition, who didn’t want to wake up with a hangover because he knew his son would wake him at 5:45 in the morning and inquire as to whether or not he was ready to take the boy to Starbucks.

I’ve searched my soul for a scintilla of youthfulness, for some signal that my path I still guided by arm farts and dick tricks and smoking bad weed out of a crushed Pepsi can. I found no such things. I found a guy who wakes up every morning with a sore back, who clips his fingernails while sitting in traffic, whose hair (even down there) is beginning to gray, who takes fish oil and flaxseed supplements, and whose foremost celebrity sex fantasy nowadays involves Diane Sawyer and a pumice stone.

Resolutions have never been terribly appealing to me. When I promised myself that I would get a book deal in 2008, it was more of a reworded complaint than a determined pep talk to myself. But since I imagine there must be some sort of time delay or statute of limitations on New Year’s resolutions, I hereby resolve to act and feel younger in 2008 – to pretend that I’m not going to be 38 this year, even if it looks pathetic and desperate to others.

I’m going to eat more Pop-Tarts and fewer high-fiber cereals.

I’m going to chew with my mouth open and tuck my napkin into my shirt collar.

I’m going to watch more porn and less news.

I’m going to, with renewed gusto and commitment, arm fart, belch, butt fart, and do that thing where you push your junk way down and close your legs tightly so it looks like you have a vagina.

I’m going to leave a pile of dirty clothes on the floor. (Wait. I already do that.)

I’m going to buy toothpaste that tastes like candy, gummi snacks shaped like cartoon characters and carbonated sugar bombs that tell my body it’s time to run around like banshee with ADD and an assfull of burning butt hair.

I’m going to call into work pretending to be myself and say I can’t make it in today because I’m very, very sick. And then I’ll spend the day playing Wii tennis like I’m Bjorn Fucking Borg.

And wherever I go, whomever I see, I’m going to incorporate our official new curse word: twatsicle.

Yep. Gonna start all of that just as soon as I take my nap and swallow my fiber pills.

-----HOUSEKEEPING ITEMS-----

1) I want you all to go and see The Diving Bell and The Butterfly. I mean this sincerely: best movie I have ever seen. Incredible piece of film-making from every perspective: acting performances, script, cinematography, etc. Can't recall ever being so moved by a film. Please, please, please check it out. Here is the NY Times review.

2) News comes this morning that Dad Gone Mad is the 80th most popular blog on the Amazon.com Kindle Store. We're not quite as popular as Bill Simmons from ESPN, but we're a full 10 spots more kick-ass than the BYU sports blog. This may have something to do with he the absolute blow job of a review posted by BG this weekend. Stalker much, twatsicle boy?