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Recently, we took a road trip from Sacramento, California, down to Los Angeles.  By “we,” I mean me, my wife, and our two daughters.  By “road trip,” I mean a scenic tour of each of Dante’s nine circles of Hell.  The plan was to drive for six hours, saving ourselves the cost of four plane tickets, then spend an amazing week of family fun in the happiest place on Earth.  That was the plan.  The reality, unfortunately was something quite a bit different.

Our vacation began to derail right about the time I placed our suitcases into the car.  As I closed the trunk, my youngest daughter stepped up to the rear passenger side door and opened it.  My oldest immediately pushed it shut.

“What are you doing?” she asked her younger sister.  “This is my side of the car.  I always sit on this side.”

“You’ve been gone,” the younger one responded, referring to the fact that her sister had been away at college for the past few months.  “I sit on this side now.”

My youngest pulled the car door open again.  Her sister slammed it.

I stood in the garage for the next fifteen minutes, listening to a chorus of, “Go to the other side.”  “No, you go to the other side.”  “No, you go.”  Each sentence was punctuated by the banging of the car door as it was repeatedly pulled open and pushed shut.  Before the hinge broke and the poor abused door fell off onto the garage floor, I finally had to intervene.

I told the girls that one them could have the passenger side on the way to Los Angeles, then they would switch on our way home.  It was a simple elegant solution, and I was actually a little proud of myself for thinking of it.  The girls agreed to the proposal.

My youngest opened the car door and said, “I’ll be on this side first.”  The oldest pushed it shut.  “No, I will.”

I went into the house to find some aspirin and to tell my wife that she needed to go to the garage and get her children under control.

When I returned, the argument had apparently been settled.  The oldest had gotten her choice of seats for the first part of our trip, and the youngest was listening to music on headphones, ignoring the rest of us and pretending she didn’t really care about where she was sitting.  I started the car and backed out of the garage.

I don’t think I moved more than six feet before the car door popped open and the older kid jumped out and ran for the house, shouting, “I forgot something.”  As soon as she was out of the car, her sister unbuckled her seatbelt and casually, but very deliberately, slid over to the other side of the car and pulled the door shut.  I watched it happen.  I should have done something to stop it, but I just sat and stared as she glided across the seat with the slow inevitability of a glacier swallowing a continent.

I’m human.  And, like most humans, there is a tiny part of my brain that, when it senses a train wreck about to happen, it doesn’t want to help; it just wants to sit back and watch shit explode.

In my defense, my wife did not say anything, either.  I don’t know if she didn’t notice what the little monster was doing, or if she was having her own moment of inner struggle, but the final outcome was the same.  The music from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly played in my head, and I waited for Wyatt Earp to arrive at the OK Corral.  Okay, I know I’m mixing up my movies, but the point is I was now just an uninvolved spectator waiting for the shootout to occur.

The older girl returned with – of course – nothing in her hands.  I still do not know what it is that she “forgot.”  As she stepped up to the car, I heard a chunk as the door locks engaged.  I discovered in that moment, that my younger kid is even more evil than I had previously realized.  She didn’t even look up as her sister pounded on the window.

She just twirled her finger in the air and said, “go to the other side.”

(How does this standoff end?  Check in next week for part 2.)

 

I have always been fascinated by the concept of lying.  Specifically, it is amazing to me how often we lie, and how little reason we need to do it.  I’m not talking about the culturally approved lies that everybody tells their children; about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy.  I’m not even talking about those little white lies that we tell out of self-defense.  I get that there is no safe answer to questions like: “Do these pants make me look fat?”  “Do you think she is prettier than me?”  Or, “What do you think about this haircut?”

I’m referring to lies that are just part of our daily lives, stories that we tell other people without even thinking about them.  If someone asks what I did this weekend, I might tell them, “nothing.”  The truth is, I didn’t do nothing.  I didn’t just lie down on the floor and go catatonic for two days.  Probably, what actually happened was too boring or embarrassing, so I lie and say that I did absolutely nothing rather than admit that I twisted my ankle while standing on a rock trying to see the neighbor sunbathing topless in her backyard.  Even if that would actually make a better story, it makes me sound stupid and creepy and I’m better off saving it to tell later when I’m drunk and trading stories with strangers.

Other lies are more direct.  To impress a girl, I once said that I could bench press three hundred pounds.  It wasn’t exactly a lie, it just would have been more correct to say that I could bench press fifty pounds, six times.  It’s all about perspective.

But what I’m really getting at today, is the lies that everyone tells themselves at the beginning of each new year.  Yes, I’m talking about the New Year’s Resolution.  Every December 31^st, we tell ourselves that we are going to eat better, work out more, lose some weight, etc.  But does it ever really happen?  I’m doubtful.  Maybe, on occasion, someone actually sticks to a resolution, but people also get killed by meteors.  I’m not taking odds on that bet either.

Over the past few years, I resolved to go to the gym and work out.  Typically, in January, I go to the gym and end up driving around the parking lot for half an hour, looking for a parking space that doesn’t exist because everybody else has decided to the exact same thing at the exact same time.  My resolution generally ends with me never getting out of the car, swearing profusely at a lot of people I have never met (and now never will since they are all inside the gym working out), then stopping at Jack in the Box on my way home.

If I make it as far as January 15^th before giving up, I consider it to have been a pretty good run.

And I guarantee I am not the only person still making these resolutions with the full knowledge that I will never follow through on any of them.

For example, every December my wife decides that she is going to do whatever it takes to be a happier person.  She is going to remove the things in her life that are toxic or make her miserable, and not let negative people get her down.

And … I’m still here.

Why do we lie to ourselves?  I honestly don’t know.  Maybe we need them to feel better about ourselves.  It would be a rather depressing start to every January 1st if I resolved that this year my life will be just as crappy, and I will suck just as hard as I did last year.  Or if I told myself, this year I will get older, gain some more weight, and work a little harder on giving myself terminal liver failure.  They might be easier to stick to, but resolutions like that might just convince someone to try playing a solo game of Russian roulette with a fully loaded revolver.  Not a desirable outcome.

So, maybe these lies are actually necessary.  After all, it is little white lies that hold the fabric of civil society together.  It is sometimes more polite to lie to a stranger than to tell someone a truth that is painful.  Perhaps lying to ourselves is just as important to holding together our own personal fabric.  If that is the case, then for 2018 I resolve to be a better father and husband, and to be kinder to my family.

(Damn, I almost got through typing that entire sentence with a straight face.  Maybe I should just resolve to be a better liar.)

In closing, despite the prevalence of lies in the world around us, I just want to let the readers of Deep Dark Thoughts know that when you read these pages, you can always trust what I tell you will be the absolute truth.  I will never lie to you.

And now I’m off to the gym to bench press three hundred pounds.

Happy New Year.

Christmas is right on top of us.  The tree is decorated, presents are (mostly) wrapped, and family is gathering.  In just a few more days the jolly fat man will be up on the roof stuffing presents down the chimney.  But enough about Uncle Mike.

The part of Christmas that I love the most is that my family is now together again.  The rest of the year we are constantly pulled apart by school and work.  But now, for a few short weeks, we are all together with no other responsibilities and nowhere else we need to go.  Last night is the perfect example of what I am talking about.  I was sitting on the couch watching television.  My wife was sitting next to me checking e-mail and playing games on her computer.  My youngest daughter was upstairs facetiming her boyfriend, and my oldest was in her room watching a movie on her cell phone.

Ahhh … family time.  Nothing better.

Now, if you think I’m being facetious, nothing could be further from the truth.  The situation I just described is the best possible outcome of all four of us being home at the same time.  On the rare occasions when we are all in the same room for more than fifteen minutes, my life generally devolves into a living hell.  The girls begin to argue about whatever it is that girls fight about, (Hair ribbon?  Face cream?  I don’t know.  I try to stay out of their nonsense.) and my wife will suddenly decide she wants to talk to me about her day.  It makes it very difficult to hear the TV.

When this happens, turning the volume up on the TV is no solution either.  The television only goes up to 100, while my daughters can exceed this setting by several decibels.

Meals are slightly better.  It is more difficult to yell at your sibling when your mouth is full of food.  Don’t get me wrong.  They still manage it.  The argument is just a bit more muffled.  I try to serve thick, starchy items like potatoes or pasta because they tend to cram more into their mouths and it gives me slightly longer periods of calm.  In a hurricane, seconds count.

For the most part, I have grown accustomed to this kind of chaotic occurrence in my home.  I have learned to tune it out and simply enjoy the peace and quiet I have cultivated in my own head.  I call it selective hearing.  My wife calls it senility.

But this year, against my better judgement, we are endeavoring on a slightly more precarious holiday gathering.  Rather than staying home, we are undertaking a road trip and a five day stay in a hotel in Southern California.  I would tell you where we are going, but I am not altogether certain of the copyright laws regarding using their name.  So, let’s just say it rhymes with Lisneydand.

Eight hours in a car, then six nights in a space smaller than our living room.  Bring on the joy!

I suggested driving two cars and splitting up the family to make the trip a little more bearable.  For some reason, my wife thought that I meant that each of us would have one kid in our car.  That was not at all what I was thinking.  I explained my view on the division of the family, then my wife explained her thoughts on dividing the family.  Her ideas involved a lawyer.  So, one car it is.

As for the hotel room, at least we will be able to roam free and wild during the days.  The girls can take off on their own and argue with each other far away from me.  My wife and I can grab a corndog and hang out on a bench; me playing games on my phone, her looking pissed off at being ignored.  Good times.

The nights will be a little more claustrophobic as we all pack into that tiny hotel room and try to pretend the others don’t exist.  But it is only for one week.  We can do that.  We have tolerated each other for over seventeen years, we can do five more days.

When it is done, we will all pile back into our tiny clown car and be home in plenty of time for Christmas.   On Christmas Eve, we will be in our own comfortable beds once more, fast asleep and waiting for the man in the red suit to sneak into our house to steal milk and cookies.

But enough about Uncle Mike.

My youngest child will be turning 18 years old next year and she will be headed off to college in the fall.  I decided that, although she will be living in the dormitory where food is provided, she should still learn to cook a few simple meals so she is able to feed herself when she is living on her own.  I did not want to make the same mistake I made with her older sister.  That one is already off to college and starving to death.  Her apartment has a full kitchen and she insists that she is fixing meals for herself, but when she comes home she never stops eating.  The last time she visited, I couldn’t pry her out of the pantry with a crowbar.

But, let’s focus on the younger one that might still be salvaged.

I broached the topic a few nights ago with the leech … excuse me … child still living at home.  I told her that I thought it would be a good idea if she started fixing dinner for the family one night each week.  It would give her a chance to learn some simple recipes and learn a few basic cooking skills.  I expected some resistance from her, but to my utter shock, she was excited by the idea.  She told me, “Now I can cook some things from my cook book!”

I was initially confused by the statement, since I had no idea what she meant by “my cookbook.”  I asked her, and she replied that she was referring to the cookbook she got for her birthday.  She immediately ran into her bedroom and returned with a dog-eared children’s book that she had received when she was seven years old.  I had seen the book on her bookshelf many times in her room, assuming it was just another picture book she had held onto from her childhood, but, lucky me, the thing was actually a cookbook.  On the cover was the caption “Meals You Can Cook Today.”  What it didn’t say, and I believe should have added was, “But Really Shouldn’t.”

My daughter began to flip through the book, musing out loud about what she could fix for dinner for the family.  As I looked over her shoulder, I saw such gustatory delights as: fruit in a cup, carrot and celery sticks, and, my personal favorite, jelly sandwiches cut into triangles.  Yes, there is a recipe for jelly sandwiches.  I have seen it with my own eyes.  Somebody took time out of their life and got paid to write it down and publish it in a book.

I am left to wonder if that person is proud of their accomplishment, or if they sit at home alone at night questioning their life decisions.  And I can’t help but imagine what that might look like on a resume.

Interviewer: “It says here you published a recipe for jelly sandwiches.”

Author: “Yes, sir.  I’m quite proud of that one.  Unfortunately, I ran out of room on my resume or I would have added that I also published a recipe for peanut butter roll-ups with white bread.”

Interviewer: “Next!”

My daughter was so excited as she read through her cookbook (insert eyeroll and air quotes here), I almost didn’t have the heart to tell her that there was no way I was going to eat any of that crap.  Almost.  I want to encourage my children in their endeavors, but not to the degree that it might impact me in any way.  That’s what makes me such a good dad.  I am teaching them the importance of boundaries, and not doing stupid stuff that requires me to participate.

They will thank me for it later.

On a side note, as I write this blog I am reminded of a question one of my readers asked me.  They wanted to know how my family felt about being mentioned in my blogs each week.  Were they upset at the things I said about them?  Was I concerned that they might be mad at me?

Well, to answer that question, let me tell you about a conversation I had with my oldest daughter very recently.  I took her out to a local sandwich joint that day to feed her because, as I discussed earlier, she is absolutely helpless in a kitchen.  Out of curiosity, I asked her if she had read my latest blog.  She set her turkey sandwich down between unhinged snake-jawed bites, and she looked at me as if I had asked her how she liked the second head I was growing.

She swallowed and said, “You have a blog?  Since when?”

So, am I concerned?  Not really.

That time of year has come once again, the time when we must all trim our trees.  And no, unfortunately, I do not mean the festive Christmas trees.  Fall is over and the trees in the yard have all dropped their leaves, preparing themselves for the cold Winter ahead.  It is time for me to give them a helping hand.

I have twelve fruit trees growing in my backyard, everything from apricots and cherries to plums and peaches, and every self-help book I have ever read on fruit trees says the branches must be trimmed back after the tree has lost its leaves.  Apparently, trimming back the branches leads to larger, healthier fruit the next spring.  I suppose this does make some sense.  If someone hacked off a few of my fingers and threatened to remove more next year, I would certainly try a little harder to procreate before they came back to finish me off.

The problem with these self-help books is that none of them actually give any instruction on exactly how to trim a tree.  That would have been more useful.  But nobody bothers to write “when standing on a ladder, if a tree branch is out of reach, move the ladder.  Do not lean farther out while holding branch cutters.”  How hard would that have been?  Another helpful item would be, “don’t stand directly underneath the branch you are cutting.”  I have been assured that my hair will cover the scar, but it still would have been good information to have sooner.

These same books also recommend spraying your trees with fungicides and pesticides while they are dormant.  This helps keep the new leaves and blooms healthy when they emerge in the warmer months.  Again, while the authors are quick to tell what you should be doing, there is no help with how.  One book I read advised spraying peach trees with a copper-based fungicide and stressed very clearly that the entire tree mush be completely covered.  Complete coverage, for anyone fuzzy on the definition of complete, requires moving around the tree 360 degrees and spraying from all sides, which guarantees at some point you will be pointing your sprayer into the wind.  I suppose the good news is that in the spring, I can safely assume that my face will not be developing leaf curl.

And as if the trees are not bad enough, December is also the month that all gardeners insist you must trim the nasty, thorny weeds that my wife has the nerve to call rose bushes.  She has planted these barbed wire nuisances all over our front and back yards.  She thinks they are pretty.  But that is only because she is not the one hacking through them every year like the prince trying to make his way to Sleeping Beauty.  It isn’t her clothing getting tossed in the rag bucket because it is so shredded even Goodwill won’t take it.  Yet, whenever I suggest removing the briar patch completely, my wife acts as if I just said I wanted to shoot the dog.  (Which I have suggested before, but that will have to be covered in another blog.)

Since moving out to the country six years ago, I have learned a little more each year about how to take care of a large yard.  I have the battle scars to prove it.  However, each year I also get a little closer to losing my mind trying to keep everything looking nice.  I fear there may come a time, in the near future, that the neighbors will find me wandering the yard in my underwear, waving around hedge cutters and raving about crown rot.

But I bet the roses will look spectacular.

Thanksgiving is over.  The fall decorations have been wrapped, boxed, and returned to the garage amidst the other mostly forgotten clutter.  Let the Christmas season begin.

The week following Thanksgiving is the week that my wife loses her mind and decides that the Christmas decorations need to be put out immediately or else she has failed as a wife, a mother, and as a human being.  This is the time of year that I must listen to non-stop Christmas carols in the living room, and intermittent cries for help from the garage.  I simply adore the winter classics, such as, “I can’t reach that, can you get it down for me?”  “Clean that out before you bring it in the house, there might be spiders.”  And my personal favorite, “This is too heavy, I need you to carry it into the family room.”

The kickoff to this annual parade is, of course, the trimming of the Christmas tree.  We have a nine-foot, plastic monstrosity that is absolutely covered in pre-strung lights.  Most of them even work.  It weighs about the same as our sofa, and it cost more than we pay on our monthly mortgage.  Eleven months out of the year, it sits on a shelf in the garage wrapped in a garbage bag and providing shelter for everything that scurries, flies, or crawls outdoors.  It is my job at the end of November to peel off the plastic covering, shake out the dirt and new inhabitants (trying to keep the screaming to a minimum so as not to disturb the neighbors) and drag the green plastic behemoth to its place of honor in the living room.

Once in the house, my wife takes over.  And by take over, I mean she tells me where to put it and how she wants it displayed.  This year was a personal best for me.  I only had to assemble the tree twice, and relocate it four times.  While this process was going on, my two daughters were sitting on the couch five feet away, playing with their cell phones and watching SpongeBob on the television set.  This would not bother me so much if they were five years old.  But the youngest is seventeen, and the oldest is twenty.  At this stage of their lives, I expected more from them than the occasional complaints that the tree looks crooked, or that plastic trees are stupid and we should have gotten a real one this year.  However, any suggestions I made regarding them actually moving off of the couch to assist me were all met with confused stares.  Perhaps I should have used smaller words.  Or spoken more slowly.  Or used less profanity.

But I digress.  Back to the tree.

When the tree is finally assembled and upright, with absolutely no help from my useless children, my wife begins the process of decorating it.  This process of course included me returning to the garage to locate a ladder and three large plastic bins full of Christmas tree ornaments.  After the requisite delousing ritual, I drag the aforementioned items into the house and place them around the tree wherever I happen to be told to place them.  I find it curious that this is the point in the day that I am no longer permitted to help.  I do not get to handle the ornaments once they are out of the boxes.  It is as if she is afraid I will start grabbing ornaments and throwing them at the tree from across the room, like a chimp in the zoo tossing its own feces.

Now, I am only permitted to step back and observe while she climbs the ladder and begins to place shiny baubles on the branches just so.  Sometimes, my wife will let me take a picture so she can post it on social media and tell all her friends about how she put the tree up today (refer to photo above).  Otherwise, I am merely a spectator, forced to watch while she teeters precariously four feet off the ground.  Her efforts are usually punctuated by pleasant observations like, “I can’t quite reach that.  Maybe if I lean over a little more.”  And, “Oops, that was close.  I would have landed on the table.”  I have suggested to her that standing at the top of a ladder may not be in her best interests.  Three surgeries on her feet in the past five years may not have actually improved her balance and climbing abilities.  She insists she is fine and politely asks me to mind my own f—ing business.

911 is on speed dial and our insurance is paid up, so I just walk away.  I hide in my den and wonder if, when I come back out, I will find decorations covering the tree, or blood covering the walls.  And I know that, either way, it will be my job to clean it all up by January second.