Month: February 2018

A couple months ago, my dog started to limp.  And no, that is not a euphemism for some kind of sexual dysfunction.  I mean it literally.  I have a German Shepard named Sky, and she started to hobble on her left front foot.

When we noticed her limping, my wife and I took Sky to the veterinarian to have her foot examined.  Unfortunately, as soon as the vet saw my dog, she started saying things like, “Wow, I’ve read about this before, but I’ve never actually seen it,” and “I’m going to have to call my friend at UC Davis to figure out how to treat it.”

I felt like I was talking to a car a mechanic running up the price of the repairs.  “I don’t know what you did to this car, but it’s going to take a while to fix it.  And I don’t have the right parts in the shop, so I’ll have to special order them.”

Long story short: I knew this was going to be expensive.  Sky has a congenital defect that caused calcium deposits to form in the pad of her foot, and it was going to be about $1000 to open up her foot and remove them.

The vet gave us an estimate on the surgery, then sent us home to discuss it.  At home, I suggested to my wife that it would much cheaper to simply shoot Sky and go find a new puppy that looked exactly like her.  Bullets are cheap, and I had a couple extras lying around in the closet.  We could even name the new dog Sky to make the transition more seamless.

My wife didn’t talk to me again for three days.

When the subject of Sky’s surgery came up again a week later, I advised my wife that maybe amputation would be a better way to go.  I have a brand new circular saw in the garage that I am dying to try out, and I have seen several three-legged dogs that seem perfectly happy hopping around with a missing appendage.  I think my wife took this suggestion a little better than my first one, because I only got the silent treatment for two days this time.

Finally, reluctantly, rather than going on vacation, buying a really nice new television set, or paying the monthly mortgage on the house, we decided to take Sky in for surgery.

The surgery went well (for a thousand bucks, I should hope so), and we brought her home with a brand-new plastic cone around her head, and a bright pink bandage on her foot.  The bandage was pink because Sky is a girl and the veterinarian is, apparently, a bit of a sexist.  She just assumed that a girl dog wanted a pink wrap regardless of the dog’s actual preferences.  Maybe Sky wanted a blue bandage, but we will never know because the doctor didn’t ask.

Also, dogs can’t talk.

When Sky got home, she promptly began to bang her plastic cone into every damn thing in the house.  My wife said she was crashing into things because she couldn’t see where she was going.  I, however, think she was doing it on purpose.  I know if I had a plastic cone around my neck, I might throw a bit of a tantrum and break some stuff.  Especially if someone had wrapped my foot in a ridiculous pink bandage.

Sky isn’t supposed to move around too much until her stitches come out in a few days.  Too much activity might cause her to tear out some of the stitches and cause the injury to bleed.  This means that she is stuck indoors most of the time, and when she goes outside she must be kept on a leash so she doesn’t try to run on her bad foot.  She doesn’t seem to enjoy this very much.  Sky spends her day lying on her doggy bed in the living room glaring at me because her foot hurts, she’s bored, and she blames me for all her problems.  And I glare back at her because she’s the reason I’m completely broke.

My wife is upset because her dog is injured and her husband is acting like a child.  Basically, everyone is unhappy.  In fact, the only one in the entire house that seems to be enjoying this situation is the cat.

She had better not gloat too much, though.

I’m still looking for an excuse to try out the circular saw.

My father passed away in 2004.  I miss him, and lately I’ve been feeling rather nostalgic about him.  I’ve been thinking a lot about my childhood, and the time I was able to spend with him while he was still alive.

The thing I remember the most about my father, besides his two pack of cigarettes per day habit, and him hiding booze bottles around the house because he thought we didn’t know he had a drinking problem, was a conversation we had a few months before I turned eighteen.  I had just told him that I was thinking about taking a year off after high school and not going to college right away.

My dad took a long drag on his cigarette, paused the video game he was playing, and set the hand controller down on the coffee table.  He looked up at me for a long moment, then said, “Okay.  Where are you going to live?”

I was puzzled by his response and answered him with a carefully considered, “Huh?”

He told me that he had saved some money and he was planning to use it to help me pay for college.  He said if I decided to not go to college, he would write me a check for half of the total amount that he had put aside for my education, then he would help me pack so I could move out on my eighteenth birthday.

I asked him if he was kidding or being serious about making me move out.  He just picked up the game controller and turned back to his game.

I started college in September that year.

I know what you are all thinking.  “Who the heck writes checks?”  But you have to remember this was in the 1980’s, so give the old guy a break.

I used to think that he told me that story because he felt strongly about me going to college and wanted to scare me into going.  Now that I have two children of college age myself, I am not so sure that was his only motivation.  I think he just wanted me to get the hell out of his house.

As I think about it, there were other signs that my dad wanted me to leave.  There was the time I was fifteen years-old and he suggested I should run away from home.  I asked him why he was being so mean to me and he said, “I’m not mean.  If you run away, I would be happy to fix you a sandwich for the trip.  In fact, if you leave right now I’ll even throw in a cookie.”

While the cookie was tempting, I had school the next day and I needed someone to drive me there, so I declined the offer.

To be fair to my father, I was the youngest of three boys and my oldest brother is thirteen years older than I am.  My dad had been dealing with kids of various ages in his house for over thirty years, and he was tired of having us around.  And I don’t blame him.

I know I can’t wait until my kids have moved out and I can have my life back.  No more sporting events and recitals to go to.  No more school fund raisers I have to participate in.  Just an occasional long-distance phone call to say, “Hi, dad.  I need money.”  The rest of the time would once more belong to me.

I used to wonder why birds abandoned their nests and built new ones every year.  Now, I know.  It’s because the kids know where it is, and you can’t change the locks on a nest.

My dad wanted me to leave the nest.  Either with a goal in my mind, or a footprint on my ass, he just wanted me to go.

As I write this blog and I sit here thinking about my father, I wish I could build a time machine and go back to talk to my teenage self.  There are three very important things I would like to tell me.

One: hug your parents more often.  You are going to miss them one day.

Two: when the chemistry teacher is talking, you should pay more attention.  Eyebrows take several weeks to grow back.

And three: when your dad makes you angry, instead of yelling and fighting with him, just tell him you are going to convert the garage into an apartment and live with him forever.  I guarantee you’ll win every argument.

Over the past couple weeks, I have been driving my daughter around to various musical auditions.  She is a senior in high school this year and, like most seniors, she has been submitting applications to various colleges.  Because she has decided that she wants to major in music while in college, she is required to do two things most college applicants never have to go through.  First, she has to listen to everyone she knows telling her that she will never make any money with a music degree.  And, second, she must physically go to each of the colleges she applied to and audition with her saxophone before they will decide whether or not to accept her.

And because she has to go to auditions, I have to go to auditions.  Part of the reason I go is, of course, to be a supportive dad.  But the main reason I go with her is because, simply put, she does not yet have her driver’s license.  Yes, you read that correctly.  My daughter will be eighteen years-old this year and still doesn’t have her driver’s license.

Why doesn’t she have it?  Because she does not want to drive.  I am still trying to wrap my head around this one.  The day I turned sixteen, I was first in line at the DMV to take my behind-the-wheel test.  I couldn’t wait to be driving on my own.  Although, I had to come back later for a re-test because …  well … this isn’t about me.  Let’s get back to the subject at hand.

My daughter told me that she will take the test when she turns eighteen.  She wants to wait because when she is eighteen she will not need to do the required driver’s training before she tries for her license.  For some reason, in California, if you are under the age of eighteen, you must complete a certain number of hours of practice driving with a certified instructor before you can test for your license.  If you are eighteen or older, this requirement goes away.

I must admit, I think this is a moronic rule.  Age should never replace actual study and practice.  For example, how would you like to go in for surgery and hear the doctor say, “I didn’t go to medical school.  I just waited until I was thirty-five, so now I can cut you open and it’s okay.”

Anyway, with no license, and places she needs to be, my daughter requires a chauffeur.  Lucky me, I drew the short straw.  I get to drive for hours all over the state so she can play her saxophone for ten minutes, and a small group of bored professors can decide if she is good enough to let me and my wife give them all our money.

The auditions might not be so bad if they would let me sit in the room and listen to her play.  But, no.  That might be a “distraction.”  As if they suspect I might be standing in the back of the room with an air horn and a banner that says, “That’s my girl!”  Okay, I might, but the point is they never gave me the chance.

During the most recent audition, I got to sit in a small room with a dozen other parents, all of us not talking to each other.  (They represent the competition after all, so why should I be nice to them?)  We all just sat in uncomfortable folding chairs and stared at the “hospitality table,” where someone had put out a twenty-gallon coffee pot and a paper plate full of stale cookies.

That isn’t speculation, by the way.  Those cookies were as stale as bleached cardboard.  I know because I ate one.  After the first bite, I was too polite to just throw it away, so I went ahead and finished it.  I have no explanation as to why I went back and got another one.  But, again, this isn’t about me.

When my daughter came back from the audition room, I asked her how it went.  I got about as much from her as most parents get from their teenage children.  She told me, “It was okay.”

I asked her what she meant by, okay.  Okay, as in they rushed the stage and begged you to come to their school?  Or, okay, as in you crapped your pants and they had to open a window to air out the room?

She said, “I dunno.  It was just okay.”

That’s it.  That’s all I got out of her.  Now, I can only sit back and wait to see if any of the schools are going to let her in.  Hopefully, at least one of them says, yes.

But if not, maybe when she turns thirty-five she can become a surgeon.

I do not fall asleep easily.  That is not a recent development, however; I have been like this from a young age.  I never have been able to fall asleep quickly.  I find I have too much garbage circulating in my head as I lay in bed and it usually takes some time to process it all enough to let me fall asleep.  I greatly envy those that can crawl into bed, turn the light off, and be asleep before the pillow starts to get warm.  Envy them, and perhaps hate them a little.

The late-night insomnia is only made worse when I have to be up early the next morning.  Thinking about what time I have to get up makes it harder to fall asleep, and this usually means that I will most likely manage a few hours of sleep at best before the alarm clock demands that I get up.  I will stagger through my day, thinking about nothing except how much I want to go home and go back to bed.  Yet, when I finally do get to crawl back under the covers, I will be wide awake again.  And the more often it happens, the worse it gets.  I have discovered that sleep deprivation can at times make even simple coherent thought difficult.  Fortunately, yellow never delivered too many bees.

I have attempted methods of falling asleep more quickly.  I have discovered that if I drink copious amounts of alcohol during the evening, I often fall asleep quite easily.  The subsequent hangover the next morning, and trying to remember where the hell I am, often negate any benefit I might have derived from sleeping longer, so I have ruled this tactic out as a long-term solution.

For me, finding sleep is a process; a long, grueling process.  First, I have to go over everything I did during the day, usually focusing on the things that pissed me off or that I somehow screwed up.  I think about what I could have said or done differently that would have created a better outcome than the one I am actually stuck with.  It is a very depressing game of “if only” that can last anywhere from a few minutes to an hour.  It never accomplishes anything or actually helps me feel better in any way, but it is an unavoidable part of falling asleep.

Next, is the to do list for the following day.  This list includes: where I have to go, who I need to talk to, and (of course) what I’m going to be having for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  These are pivotal events each day and must be carefully planned out.  They are not to be left to chance, lest I find myself poking carrot sticks into a peanut butter jar while driving to Jack in the Box.

After, and only after, the essential planning has been completed, then begins the fun stuff.  If anything about insomnia can be referred to as “fun stuff,” that is.  This is when the esoteric crap starts to flow through my head.  This is when I start to wonder about things like death, and what happens to a person after they die.  Is there an afterlife, or is it just eternal darkness?  And then I start to panic a little bit because I’m afraid of the dark, and eternal dark would really suck.  I wonder if maybe this is going to be the night that I fall asleep and don’t wake up in the morning.  And I wonder if my wife will ever be convicted of the murder.

When I finally work my way through the depressing blackness of my own soul, this is typically when I begin to doze off.  The ideas in my head begin to break apart and focus on less important things like: Why aren’t there any animals with just one eye?  How do you describe what chicken tastes like?  Why do they call it celery root?  It is neither celery, nor a root.  And, do dogs ever accidentally step in their own poop?

This is also the time when flawed logical concepts start to make sense.  For example: if I drive 80 miles per hour for 45 minutes, then stop for 15 minutes for gas and maybe a snack, I only averaged 60 miles per hour.  So, is it really speeding?  Think about this factoid some night when you are only half awake and see if it doesn’t make sense to you as well.

Each night, sleep does at last arrive.  Unfortunately, it generally doesn’t last.  I am a very light sleeper, and I find myself waking up several times during the night for no apparent reason.  As I grow older, bodily imperatives such as a desperate need to pee every night have added to the number of times I wake.  I find this terribly inconvenient, however I have to admit there is an upside to the situation.

I have discovered that frequently, when I wake up in the middle of the night, it is right in the middle of a dream.  As a writer, these ephemeral events in my head have been the basis for several short stories and have even triggered ideas for a novel or two.  To take full advantage of these moments, I have begun to keep a notebook beside my bed, so I can write down whatever it is that I’m thinking about when I wake up.  This way I don’t just forget about the idea later.

Recently, I was flipping through my bedside notebook and came across entries for spinach-flavored bubble gum, and a giraffe with three teeth.  Not exactly useful stuff.  I realize that not every idea can be a winner.

Maybe I just need more sleep.