Got Mashed Potatoes

Saturday

It was more timing and luck than anything else. The boy had taken an interest in the bathroom, so the wife bought him a little throne to sit on. It plays a song when he does his business (one or two). He only recently turned two, so I thought this was all a bit premature. But then, after dinner Saturday night, there he was, sitting on the stump with his pants around his ankles, reading a book. Then he peed. The wife got it on tape. Her smile glowed.

That was before he stood up, turned around, put his hand down into the bowl, and put his hand into his mouth.

And, no, we aren't sending anything in to America's Funniest Home Videos. She turned the camera off right as he stood up. No $10,000 for us. We've got a setup without a punchline.

Sunday

My wife has had her mind set on getting an ottoman for the couch for a while. I don't know why; seems to me if we add any more furniture to the home, no one will be able to walk anymore around here. But when she mentioned that she wanted to go to some "going out of business" furniture sale, I didn't really have the energy to argue.

Plus, I like going to furniture stores. I like sitting in the chairs. Deciding what a certain piece is ghetto or not. Checking to see if a bookcase has just a cheap cardboard backing or whether they use plywood. Seeing if the drawers are dove-tailed. It's good, nitpicking fun.

When we had seen all the ottomans this place had and found none my wife liked, we decided we'd make a circle of the points of the store we missed to catch any potential deals before leaving. This is kind of our standard operating procedure when it comes to browsing at a store we both don't mind being in.

I found a nice office set we probably couldn't afford. It had drawer-pulls on the front just for decoration -- I didn't like that. Otherwise, it was nice, and as the wife and boy walked ahead of me, I took a look at some accessory pieces. It was then that I heard the crash.

Coming to the scene of the crime, I saw a salesman trying to fit a clock back into a decorative shell. Surely the results of my son, I thought. But I couldn't stop to ask how it had happened -- there was another crash. A very loud, shattering crash. I rounded the corner to witness a four-foot tall vase being saved by my wife and a second salesman from certain destruction. My son was cackling. Beside him, on the floor, lay the shards of the other vase. I guess it had been a twin set.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the fastest way to spend $524 without having to drive around back to the loading dock.

"I want to thank you for sticking around here, sir. A lot of people would have ditched out of here," the manager told me.

"I guess we're not going to Florida in March," I told my wife.

"We have the devil for a son," my wife said.

There is an art to corporate speech. People are not laid off. There are adjustments made. Leverages taken advantage of.

I used to have this job in which a woman sat kitty-corner from me. And it was only a couple days into her time with us that I knew for sure: she wasn't going to make it. It was unavoidable. She maintained a blissful ignorance of any performance standards or professionalism.

And yet . . . . years later, there is much I remember about this woman.

• She had to be well over 300 lbs, and she loved it. Loved it.
• She always had great food at her desk, and huge quantities of it: she could take down an entire large pizza, cheese bread, chicken wings and tub of custard in one shift. It was a treasure to watch such love for eating. Plus, she shared.
• She once told me: "I loooooove black women. I do. I just love black women. You see, I think it's because we keep everyone else going. We have this burden, whether anyone wants to admit it or not. We have to be the grown-ups and caretakers. I love that. I embrace it."
• She went crazy for the maintenance man's strong aftershave.
• She told me all about how she kicked her man out of the house "for good" because he didn't want to hear her talk about how her day went. I tried to ask why this was such a sticking point for her, and she was unapologetic: "You have to contribute to be with me, and if you can't even listen, I be DONE with you." He crawled back two days later, and - yes - she told me about the makeup sex.
• I listened to her slurp down shakes and french fries while on the phone with clients . . . . at the same time as she read a magazine and browsed on the Internet.
• She often told me: "I can really see myself here for a long time. I just want to succeed here so bad."
• One night, she told me how she caught a ride home with a third-shift worker who openly, graphically came on to her in his car outside her house. Eventually her boyfriend chased him off, and she didn't seem to hear me when I told her she should report the worker to management.
• Once, when the neighborhood pizza place made a mistake with her order, she declared that she would never order from them again, and said to me, "And that's a good chunk of their business!" I didn't disagree with her. A week later, I couldn't get her to explain to me why she was again ordering from them. "Oh, Will -- that was so long ago!. That's all over with now."
• Workers there were judged on statistics, and hers were awful. I sat down with her a couple times to explain to her what she needed to do to pull them up. She told me that I should be a manager because none of them ever sat down with her.
• One day I overheard her talking to her tub of custard; she said: "Oh THERE you are! I MISSED you!"
  
• She talked about how it was important to her that her kids behaved well in restaurants. She made it a point that she wanted people to respect her family in public.

When they fired her, she was so upset that she wouldn't leave the women's restroom for nearly an hour. I still remember the management team pacing and slumping outside the restroom doors, wondering how to deal with this woman they didn't know, who was so crushed by what they had done.

After a certain age, you can never please people. At some point, people will wonder why you don't have a girlfriend. And then when you get one, they'll wonder when you'll get married. And then when you do, they'll wonder when you'll have kids. And then when you do, they'll wonder when you'll have more.

I get that all the time now. "So, are you two gonna have another baaaaaaby? When are ya gonna have another baaaaaaby?"

And then what happens after that, fine reader? You already know. We'll have one and then they'll ask: "When is the next one coming?"

No more. Got it? The line is drawn in the sand. And I'm not going to be nice about it anymore, either. I'm calling it as I see it: "Do you think the wife and I are stupid? Because stupid people don't learn effect from cause. And we're not stupid."

We know that 1+1=2 little monsters, tearing apart our house all the time and demanding attention. One boy is enough. Actually, he is like six boys in one. He is. I'm not boasting or complaining. Well, a little. But I've seen other boys. This is some kind of reptile we've got.

"But you can't just have ooooooone. He can't be an ooooooonly child. What about a buddy for him?" People say this as if they think they can guilt me and the wife into having another child. Again -- do you think I am an idiot? Some sort of happy sadist? Another one? Listen, I know my limitations once I've reached them, and I've reached them. I'm a good father, but I'm not a fool. The boy will be fine. We'll get him dogs.

I love the gremlin, but I'm not getting him wet. End of story.

The reason -- to this careful observer -- why women will always finish ahead of men, is found at the nearest bathroom urinal. Regular readers will know that I often bemoan the fact that -- claims of "glass ceilings" or not -- women comprehensively run the culture. I attest -- and let me also point out that I'm really not trying to be funny here -- that the answer, the reason for this great chasm in ability between the sexes, has to do with a dirty little secret men encounter nearly every time we take a leak in a public urinal.

For the women who don't know what I'm talking about, I will explain. It is my wild guess that eight of ten times a man relieves himself in a public urinal, he encounters -- just inches in front of his face -- another man's snot. Yes, there is a large (I want to call it a 'subset', but it's really more like a...) faction of men who unload their nostrils right on the wall in front of them while taking a leak.

I'm not going to go into the action itself. I don't really have an issue with that. It's a restroom -- that's probably the best place for making some space in the sniffer. It's (obviously) the placement of this deposit that irks me. And one finds it everywhere.

It could be a brand new bathroom in a four-star hotel. It could be a noxious port-o-let. It doesn't matter: the age, upkeep, size, and makeup of the bathroom can neither prevent or encourage this behavior.

This leads me to the following conclusions, not to mention a deep embarrassment and shame for my own pathetic kind:
1.) It's gross. This is a given. More importantly...
2.) This is a mind-bogglingly lazy act. OK. You're gonna clean some house in the shnozz. Fine. THEN JUST FLICK THE FUCKING MUCOUS IN THE URINAL IN FRONT OF YOU, YOU SAP! Why smear it on the wall? It's like a dog pissing on every tree to mark land.
3.) Given the percentage of snot per urinal, a great number of us are utterly lazy and disgusting people.

The great assumption here is that women do not encounter such childish laziness on such a regular basis. Maybe I'm wrong -- I hope I am. But my level of instinctively built-in esteem for the other sex leads me to believe this is a fair assumption.

How can we compete, when we remain at a 9-year-old's maturity level when it comes to life's simplest function? They are getting law degrees, curing cancer, and running for congress. We're smearing snot on the tile above the urinal. It's no surprise that we're headed for what? -- careers in low-level "service" jobs. Where we'll probably have to clean the restrooms.

My running for '06:

1843 miles
140 abs of steel workouts
315 days

I think about 15 of the missed days were to injury, another 15 to scheduling/weather problems, and the other 20 to a lack in planning.

***

On an altogether different note, the new Modest Mouse song is really, really good.

***

I left work tonight, wondering how many double-chili cheese dogs this gigantic, fucking ogre I'm forced to work with could eat. Eight? No, far more. Fifteen -- could he take down 15 double-chili cheese dogs in a sitting? I think so. That sounds about right. I never enjoyed that Nickelodeon television show . . . . I think it was called "You Can't Do that on Television". Just wasn't my kind of humor. But I think that if we dumped a large bucket of green slime over the ogre that he would continue mowing down double-chili cheese dogs. You might be thinking there's something noble to that, but you haven't seen the mush of chili, cheese and grease trickle down his gullet as he rips into another one.

***

I think that's enough for one evening.

Clementine oranges don't count. The skin practically falls off of them. I mean real oranges, basic oranges.