Go To H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks

My sons have developed a fascination with swearing. I don’t swear around them and neither does their mother. That lack of exposure has led them to be curious about the social constraints regarding swearing.

They don't actually swear, but they like to point it out when they see a bumper sticker with a curse word on it or when they see an ad promoting "Kick-Ass 2." Sometimes that can be amusing, such as when I heard them arguing about whether shit was the ‘S word’ or the ‘SH word.’

The other day, and not for any other reason than sometimes I say things like this, I said, “What the H-E-double-hockey-sticks was that?”

Casey looked at me quizzically and said, “What does that mean?”

“That I don’t understand why that person just pulled in front of me,” I explained.

“No,” he said. “What does H-E-double-hockey-sticks mean?”

Suddenly, I was in a parking lot trying to explain to an 8-year-old kid that hockey sticks kind of look like L’s…even if it’s just barely...so I was kind of spelling hell instead of just saying hell. As my sons are wont to do, he immediately told his mother about his newly found knowledge at the earliest opportunity.

The troubling part is that I inadvertently added spelling as an option for swearing. I’m sure that it’s only a matter of time before I hear, “Why don’t you go f-u-c-k yourself?” coming out of his mouth.

Casey has already amped up his use of substitute words like ‘heck’ and ‘fricking.’ I thought about trying to get him to switch to ‘frack’ instead…you know, to at least give him some geek cred…but then I would’ve had to borrow a season of “Battlestar Gallactica” from a friend and then try to explain the socio-political undertones to him.

Grown-ups didn’t swear around me when I was a kid, at least for the most part. I learned about profanity the old fashioned way…from comedians.

While the generations prior had learned various naughty words from listening to Red Foxx albums when the adults weren't paying attention, I was at the forefront of using bad stuff from cable television.

My older sister was the first person I knew who had cable in the mid-1970’s. She tapped into the new medium early enough that HBO wasn’t even in existence when she first had it. When the premium channel was first added to her lineup, the now titan of the entertainment industry wasn’t even broadcasting full-time yet.

Thanks to HBO, I was able to learn George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” routine around the time that I was Casey’s age now…making me, I believe, one of the first of a new generation that heard Carlin’s routine for the first time while watching him say those words on television.

I didn’t even know what two of the words meant (hint: one rhymes with hunt and the other had something to do with a rooster lollipop). When you’re watching Carlin on the sneak, you can’t just go off asking people what the words that he used mean.

 While that earned me an unending appreciation of Carlin – when I saw him live for the last time before his death, he was still closing some shows talking about words that you’re not supposed to say – there was another comedian had a stronger influence on my thinking regarding profanity.

Freddie Prinze – not the Sarah Michelle Gellar/”Scooby-Doo”/”I Know What You Did Last Summer” one, but his father – was an actor who I liked on his sitcom “Chico & the Man.” Then I saw his stand-up routine. Suddenly, the sweet and safe generically Hispanic guy from the sitcom was a cocksure New Yorker who hung out in comedy clubs. Instead of the pat lines produced by necessity by network sitcom writers, Prinze on cable seemed inclined to say whatever he felt like saying.

When you’re eight, having the realization that you can be two different people if you want – one in polite society and another if the setting is more relaxed – can be pretty liberating.

 

However, I’m finding it hard to teach that to my own children. It’s probably just one of those things that they have to learn on their own…but I’m impatient and would just as soon help them figure it out quicker. Of course, there’s a possibility now that I might need to rethink my lessons on patience.

If you can’t teach your kids the “Seven Words That You Can Never Say on Television” – most of which now get said even on network broadcasts with regularity – you might as well find something else to teach them.

Not to be overly sappy, but I still remember where I was when a newscaster announced that Freddie Prinze had shot himself (he died the following day). There’s a scene in the movie “Fame” where the high school student that wants to be a comedian talks about Prinze’s influence on him...that scene almost made me cry when I first saw it as a kid.

 

It’s not every role model in your life who teaches you about freedom, death AND the skillful use of profanity.

Here’s a clip of Prinze’s HBO special from when I was a kid:

(Disclaimer: One, yes, I realize that he doesn’t actually swear all that much in his routine, but I was eight when I saw it. Saying hell a few times would’ve qualified to me. Two, I also realize that the routine would now not be considered politically correct. It was 1976. There was no such thing as politically correct. I apologize for not being able to go back in time and adjust the social mores of 40 years ago.)

For those wondering about the debate from the opening paragraph, the floor eventually resolved that since they couldn’t figure out another ‘S word’ that the more streamlined designation would be used instead of ‘SH word.’ It’s so nice when profanity can be used as a civics lesson.

Swearing Addendum

There was a story from my youth that came up in the writing of the post about profanity that subsequently didn’t really fit in. However, never one to edit myself down, I decided to just include it separately.

When I moved to rural Michigan as a youngster, it was because my mother married a jackass who was originally from there. Now, you might be thinking that you’re not supposed to say anything if you don’t have something nice to say about a person. While I normally appreciate that line of thinking, the fact of the matter is that the guy my mother married was a jackass…empirically.

I did not swear in front of my family when I was young. I don’t really swear in front of my family now. In an Irish household growing up, using the Lord’s name in vain (“Jesus!”) was infinitely better than telling someone to fuck off.

One evening when I was around 14, I was sitting on the floor watching television while my mother and her jackass husband were behind me. For reasons that I have no recollection of, her husband began flicking me in the back of the head. Perhaps I had done something that annoyed him, or more likely he was just doing it because he was a jackass.

He seemed to have it in his head that he was going to get his shots in on me while I was still skinny as a rail and before I grew to the stature of my brothers…who are 6-foot-4 and 6-foot-8, respectively.

That’s the kind of person that he was; only pick on someone when you clearly have the upper hand.

I started out casually saying, “Quit it.” When that didn’t work, I
upped the volume of my “Quit it!” as the anger built.

Finally, I reared around and yelled, “Keep your fucking hands off of me, old man!”

As soon as I realized what I just said, I took a look at my mother
whose back had stiffened at the offensive language. For a brief
second, it looked as though she was going to explode at me.

Then our eyes met. I’m not sure what expression I had on my face, but I watched as my mother became less sure of what she wanted to say, eventually deciding not to say anything and then finally moving her gaze away from mine.

I went back to watching television and her husband kept his hands to himself for the rest of the time that I was sitting there.

That didn’t last, of course. Being a jackass there were plenty of
other occasions where he tried to pick fights with me, but I learned quickly that it got me nowhere to take the bait and figured out how to control myself.

That actually led to one of my favorite stories about him, even if it
doesn’t cast me in the best light. One time, I thought that the
fighting between he and my mother was progressively escalating into something that might become physical. So, I waited until a point when it was just the two of us – he and I – and said, “You better make sure that you keep your hands off of my mother.”

He sneered and said, “Really? What are you going to do about it if I don’t?”

Quite calmly I looked at him and said something along the lines of,
“I’m not going to do anything by myself. The first phone call I’m
going to make will be to my brother-in-law explaining the situation and asking him to arrange for things. Then I’m going to have him fly out here with my 6-foot-8 brother – you know, the crazy one – and I’m going to tell him that you hit our mother. We’re then going to lock the two of you in a room for a little while and let him do whatever he wants to you. Once he’s done, we’re going to bring in my other brother – you know, the 6-foot-4 one with all of the military training – and let him finish the job. He’ll then tell us how to clean up and dispose of you so that no one ever knows what happened. Then we’ll all go back to our normal lives and forget that you ever existed. That’s what I’ll do.”

By the time that I was finished, he wasn’t sneering anymore.

Funny thing…he also didn’t act like he was going to hit my mother any more after that.

Robin Thicke Has a What?

Let me first start with this...while this is normally a family friendly -- mostly -- blog, this post is a little bit less so. So, what I'm trying to say is that my own sons should stop reading now.

One of the dangers of being single and unemployed is that you can also become a little bit out of touch. And, sure, being a dad seems to automatically veer you towards the clueless.

When a friend asked yesterday if I had seen the video for Robin Thicke's song "Blurred Lines," I had to admit that I had not. Heck, I hadn't even really paid that much attention to the song the couple of times that I had heard it. I vaguely remembered reading in Entertainment Weekly about the controversy over the lyrics and Thicke's comment about "what a pleasure it is to degrade women."

Since it's Robin Thicke, son of Alan and from a lineage that produced the theme to "The Facts of Life," I didn't worry too much about it.

It wasn't until later that I learned about the copyright controvesy, with Thicke suing the estate of Marvin Gaye and Funkadelic/George Clinton in order to prove that they didn't steal from Gaye's "Got To Give It Up" and Clinton's "Sexy Ways."

That isn't what this post is about, but just to give my two cents, "Blurred Lines" does sound like "Got To Give It Up." However, it wasn't so obvious that I immediately thought of it. And, if you're going to steal, stealing from Marvin Gaye and George Clinton at least shows that you have taste.

No, the only reason that I bring any of this up is because of the video. My first thought in watching the video -- well, right after "those are certainly nice boobs" and who's the other guy besides Thicke and Pharrell Williams (so sue me...I couldn't remember T.I. right off the bat) -- was, "Is this video an homage to Robert Palmer or George Michael or both?"

For comparison's sake, here's Thicke's "Blurred Lines" video:

 

 

(If you want the full on nudie version instead of the cleaned up version above then feel free to click here.)

 

Here's the video for Palmer's "Simply Irrestible":

 

 

 

Finally, here's Michael's "Freedom 90":

 

 

 



Let's see...we've got Thicke, Pharrel and T.I. in evening attire while models wear vapid expressions. That points to a tribute to Palmer's iconic mid-80's videos...including his breakthrough hit "Addicted To Love."

Depending on the version, the models are either pretty naked or really naked. While there aren't out and out nipples in George Michael's video, there are some really famous super models (Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, etc.) that aren't wearing much...or in the case of Cindy Crawford are enticingly nude, although strategically filmed.

By the way, if you forgot about what we all thought about Ms. Crawford back in the day, watch the video and I'm sure the memories will come flooding back.

In Thicke's video, the models show that even really beautiful women can look kind of goofy dancing naked. In Palmer's videos, the models also move in a uniform, automoton way...making them look kind of goofy.

Palmer's videos and "Blurred Lines" are both set against fairly generic backgrounds.

Double points to Palmer.

George Michael doesn't even appear in the video for "Freedom 90," let alone hashtag his own name as Thicke does nor did he use inflatable letters to brag about the size of his appendage.

Then again, maybe neither Robert Palmer or George Michael felt like they had to brag about their manhood.

So, while others will debate whether Thicke and Pharrell plagarized "Got To Give It Up," I will continue watching the video for more clues about who they were ripping off with that.

Purely scientific. Nothing at all to do with the boobs.

While it seems unlikely that there might be someone reading this that doesn't actually know Marvin Gaye's "Got To Give It Up"...well, one you probably do and just don't know that's the title. It gets played on every Lunchtime 70's radio show in the country and was in both "Boogie Nights" and "Menace II Society." If that doesn't help you, then here's a clip of Gaye performing the song on "Soul Train":

New Life

If you’ll take a look at the post history of this blog you’ll notice that there is a significant gap between the previous post and this one. What was I doing, you might ask?

Well, even if you didn’t ask I’m going to tell you because this is, after all, my blog. The primary reason for the break in a blog about the joys of my domestic life is that I got a divorce. Since the point of the blog was that my life as a husband and father frequently resembled the sitcoms that myself and many of my friends either write for, wrote for or tried to write for, suddenly not having a wife presented a problem.

Turns out that I didn’t think much of anything was funny about the divorce.

Having had about a year to digest it all…well, I still don’t think the divorce part was funny. I’m pretty sure that there aren’t too many worse things that you can have happen to you than to believe yourself to be happily married only to find out that only one of you feels that way.

With time, though, you start to find more things funny. Little by little, I’ve started to find the humor in life again. Like when my cousin seemingly forgot how to talk after an afternoon of drinking beer in the sun. Of course, first we had to verify that he wasn’t having a stroke but once we were sure that it was just the demon booze it quickly became funny. The paramedics might not have thought so but I did.

Just as things had seemingly settled down from the whole divorce brouhaha and kids were settled into a routine of going back and forth between parents, I subsequently lost my job. Unlike the divorce, that one I kind of find funny.

I didn’t particularly like my job. I was an empty suit in middle management not really doing much of anything of use to most people. It’s hard to feel bad when you loose something like that. The only problem is that I’m an adult with responsibilities…I have to pay child support now for God’s sake. I might have hated the job, but the fact of the matter is that I wasn’t just working as a drone for the fun of it. They paid me real money for kind of, sort of doing some things.

When I was younger and was a struggling writer in Los Angeles, not working a real job had a certain amount of cache. You were working on your material. You were available for meetings any time that your agent or a producer might want to see you. The fact that no one ever wanted to see you was irrelevant. Plus, it’s easier to go see movies by yourself in the afternoon…and you probably won’t be alone for long once you spot three or four of your “struggling artists” writer friends taking their own mental break to see a matinee.

Being single and unemployed as a 45-year-old dude in the Midwest is a lot less fun. I can try to call myself a struggling artist around here, but the more official term used by the local citizenry is “bum.” I can’t even ride the rails and upgrade to “hobo” since I still have to care for two children.

However, if being Irish has taught me anything it is this: When life hands you lemons, go trade them for some beer and get pissed.

I’m going to go back to looking at the bright side of life, as Monty Python famously taught me as a youngster.

You, gentle reader, are invited back to partake of my ramblings and amusing stories about my life, many of them tied to the darndest things that my sons continue to utter. And, if you happen to know of anyone hiring empty suit, middle management types that are also failed writers...well, I'm easy enough to find and less picky than a chess club geek on the eve of prom.

Easter

As I sit here annoying my family with my Easter tradition of watching "Jesus Christ Superstar," I'm reminded of the difference in the Easter experience that my children have and the ones that I had as a child.

For starters, most of my childhood Easter's involved at least some church service...at a Catholic church decked out in purple. We became non-practicing Catholics sometime early in Marty's life, so the religious part of the holiday is mostly represented in my viewing of the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice rock opera.

Otherwise, my kids have it pretty good. They get their Easter baskets filled with candy. They usually get a book or toy in their basket and they get an Easter egg hunt. Then they get to go to their grandparents house and get more candy.

I will say that as a kid, I do remember getting the candy in abundance, if for no other reason the older members of my family would buy it so that they could eat it.

However, there's one Easter that stands out above all others. While my parents were never divorced, they did frequently separate during the seven years of my life before my dad died. There was no real pattern to when I would be with my father if he wasn't living with my mother...since he didn't work, I just seemed to have been with him whenever.

One year, they were separated heading up to Easter and I was out on weekend with my father, who took me someplace to see the Easter Bunny. After that, we stopped at the pet store in the shopping center so that I could look at the puppies and kitties. Like a lot of pet store's, they also had a bunch of baby chicks for sale for Easter. Considering that we were in an East Coast suburb, you wouldn't think that there would be a lot of call for chicks.

Well, as any 6-year-old kid would, I wanted to take a chick home. So, my father let me. In fact, he let me get three of them so that they wouldn't be lonely.

When he took me back to the apartment that he and my mother sometimes shared, he walked me as far as the door. Then he rang the doorbell.

And, then he ran.

You can imagine how pleased my mother -- who at this point was mostly laid up in bed after a bad car accident had led to several malpractice inducing botched back surgeries -- when she found her first grader had acquired three baby chicks.

As I had done with the three goldfish that I had previously gotten thanks to my dad, I happily named the chicks after my three favorite people -- Moe, Larry and Curly.

It was assumed that the chicks would perish, of course. We lived in an apartment after all and didn't really have anything to feed them. My mom finally settled on giving them oatmeal loaded down with sugar. Why? Who the heck knows, but turns out that chickens like that.

Instead of dying, the chicks actually did quite well. They spent the entire summer growing in a cardboard box.

By the time Christmas rolled around, Moe, Larry and Curly were still alive...and could now fly a little bit. Kept flying right into the Christmas tree. They weren't three French hens...but it was still as close as I've ever come to experiencing a live action "Twelve Days of Christmas."

Around the time that they were knocking the ornaments all over the place, it was decided that they were probably too big to keep in the apartment. You'd have thought that would've been obvious a few months prior to that, but don't look at me...I had just turned seven.

One of my uncles had a brother that owned a farm in Western Maryland, and Moe, Larry and Curly were shipped off to him. For obvious reasons, their fate past that wasn't really relayed to me. My understanding after I got a little older is that at least two of them had turned out to be egg layers, and had stuck around for a while...before eventually becoming someone's dinner. Considering that I doubt that most pet store chicks even make it much past May of the year they're sold, I like to think that my little Stooges actually did pretty well.

Despite the fact that we live in a house with a yard, and in a town that is surrounded by working farms, I've already been told that I'm not allowed to try to recreate that childhood experience for Marty and Casey.

Of course, I wasn't told that I can't get a pair of turtledoves or a partridge, so there's hope yet.

NCAA Tournament

As I get older, I find that my memory is not what it used to be. This irritates me, because once upon a time I had a very good memory. I say "very good," because over the years, I've realized that I only remembered things that I care about. If I didn't care about it, I probably didn't remember it. I've never cared about numbers and I have always had trouble remembering phone numbers. The only way that I've ever remembered a birthday or anniversary is by fighting my natural inclination to not care about them (and ever since they were invented, setting Outlook reminders).

However, every year when the NCAA men's basketball tournament starts, all of a sudden I realize that I can remember all sorts of college basketball things from years and years ago.

Starting lineup of the 1985 St. John's Redmen, my second favorite team ever? Check. (Mark Jackson, Willie Glass, Chris Mullin, Walter Berry, Bill Wennington...coached by Lou Carneseca.)

Starting lineup of the 1983 Houston Cougars, aka Phi Slamma Jamma, my favorite team ever? Check. (Reid Gettys, Alvin Franklin, Larry Micheaux, Clyde Drexler, Akeem Olajuwan...Michael Young off the bench...coached by Guy Lewis.)

Favorite name of a player? Memphis State's Baskerville Holmes, who played in the early 1980's with Keith Lee and Andre Turner.

Names of Rick Barry's sons? Sure...Scooter (Kansas), Jon (Georgia Tech), Brent (Oregon State) and Drew (Georgia Tech).

I can go on like this for awhile...but I usually don't because unless I'm around other people that know some of the same minutiae that I do, I've found that most people find it obnoxious. (Especially when I do stuff like insisting on spelling Hakeem Olajuwan's name the way that it was in '83 or referring to the University of Memphis by its former name.)

Most people point to the 1979 NCAA championship game that featured Magic Johnson and Larry Bird as the point that most people really began to pay attention to college basketball. I come from a basketball family, so I remember that, but in all honesty, it didn't stand out to me any more than famed Catholic Al McGuire and Marquette winning the title in 1977. We were, after all, an Irish-Catholic basketball family.

No, my defining moment with the tournament was the 1983 one...known famously to most people as the Jim Valvano year. That was because Valvano's North Carolina State team upset my beloved Houston Cougars -- who had just won the most entertaining basketball game ever by defeating Louisville in the semifinals -- and the coach ran all over the court trying to find someone to hug. It was already a big deal just because of the last second nature of the shot that won the game...but its taken on epic proportions since Valvano's untimely death from cancer.

To this day, I remember staying up on a Friday night early in that tournament and watching NC State come from behind and beat Jim Harrick's Pepperdine team. The game didn't get over until after midnight Eastern time and I didn't sleep for a while after that because I was annoyed at the outcome. From that point on, I watched every game of that tournament that was televised...which, let's face it, wasn't anywhere near what it would become years later.

So, there it is...not only do I watch the NCAA Tournament every year, I watch replays of old games on random cable channels.

This is the stuff that I can remember...but I have to set a reminder on my phone for my wedding anniversary and I start most conversations with business associates with, "Hey, how's it going?" so that I can buy time to remember their name.

God willing, I suppose, I'll be in the home someday babbling on about why Louisville's Rodney and Scooter McCray were a better sibling teammate tandem than Stanford's Robin and Brook Lopez...all the while calling everyone on the staff, "Hey you!"

St. Patrick's Day

If you're Irish like me, St. Patrick's Day is supposed to be a big deal. Not because its a venerable Holy Day, honoring the saint that legendarily banished snakes from the Emerald Isle (sure, if you talk to natural historians, there never were snakes in Ireland, but what Irishman would let some scientific malarkey stand in the way of a good story), but because we Irish-Americans have decided that it's "our" day.

Perhaps because I was named after a different Irish saint, I've never been as enamored of the day as others. Or, maybe its because the modern meaning of St. Patrick's Day involves the words "pub crawl" which isn't overly enticing to someone that doesn't drink very much. The one pub crawl I've been on in my life ended early when I decided it was better to go home than to start punching drunken idiots.

But, that's just me. Most of my Irish-Catholic brethren do not seem to share my apathy towards the day. In fact, every year recently, I'll get a text from my family on the East Coast from a bar...usually followed later by pictures as one group of my relatives runs into another group of my relatives.

I am actually proud of my heritage...at least most of it. Of course, that doesn't mean that I'm very effective when it comes to verbalizing that. Yesterday, as Marty and Casey were going to school to participate in their classes with the Irish-themed festivities -- which can get confusing around here thanks to freakin' Notre Dame -- I pointed out that they needed to represent since they are, themselves, Irish. They both looked at me quizzically and said, "We are?"

Last year, Marty came up with this game for St. Patrick's Day called, "Find The Leprechaun." He organized Casey and I to help him leave clues around the house to lead Amy to the spot where the Leprechaun was. On one of the clues, I put down something about Dublin. "What's that?," they both asked.

I could feel my father and my Uncle Jimmy both rolling over in their graves. When I was just a tyke, my father would send me over to my Uncle Jimmy to ask him if I were Irish. "As Irish as Paddy's pig!" he would reply.

The fact that this typically took place in a bar and that I still don't really know what that expression mean is irrelevant. I knew where I came from...something I've apparently failed thus far to impart on my offspring.

When I was growing up on the East Coast, it was a lot easier. Everyone knew their ethnicity, because no one was that far removed from a time when you lived with your own in the same neighborhood. To this day, you can tell what the population of a neighborhood used to be by what saint the local Catholic church is named after.

Where my sons are growing up, being Irish means that you are a fan of the team that plays beneath the Golden Dome. Much like my lack of affinity for St. Patrick and drinking, I've never understood why so many Irish-Catholics like Notre Dame. It's not like it's the only Catholic university in the country. There are dozens. The fact that they call their sports teams the Fighting Irish and have a brawling Leprechaun as a mascot has never been anything that I thought should make me like them better. If I were just going to pick a Catholic university to root for without having any sort of actual attachment to them, I would've gone with Gonzaga...if only because it's fun to say.

So, I have to come up with some anti-Notre Dame way of teaching my children about their Irish heritage. You'd think it would be easier, since Casey already has displayed an overabundance of the gift of blarney.

I suppose I add it to my ancestors to get them proud of whence they came. Or, at least get them to acknowledge it. I don't need them to go nuts and try to learn Gaelic or anything. Maybe just get it to the point that they can actually point to the land of my forefathers on a map.

Probably my responsibility as a father or something...you know so that they don't have to repay the sins of the father or that kind of stuff. After all, "an nì chì na big, ‘s e nì na big." (What the little ones see, the little ones do.)

Friends

Marty and Casey were having a conversation that is painful for a parent to hear...especially one with a kid with Asperger's.

It started off as a simple argument. Marty, who believes in just about anything, holds out the possibility that there are unicorns. While that might sound like an odd thing for a 9-year-old boy to even mention, in his defense, the topic was related to an Annoying Orange YouTube video.

Casey, who is creative in his own right, but without the whimsy of his brother, feels that this is ridiculous.

While this discussion was going on, Marty tried to get Casey to give him a toy that he was holding. The younger brother refused.

Marty tried to point out to him that sharing is very important, and that it helps you win friends. Casey, in his interminably Irish way, said, "I don't need to share to have people be friends with me."

The arguing continued along this line, with Marty pointing out that he had become friends with someone by going out of his way to talk to the person. Casey, never one to switch a defense tactic if it's working, said, "I don't need to talk to someone to make friends."

Shortly thereafter, Marty became upset, feeling as though his little brother doesn't care about him. It was that point that I stepped in and stopped them. It could be argued -- probably rightfully -- that I should have stopped it before that, but my philosophy is that they're brothers and sometimes they just need to try to work through things themselves.

There's a whole team of people assigned to Marty to help him learn how to function socially. He goes to social interaction classes. They have meetings on his progress and discuss other ways to help him recognize social cues and try to fit in with his peers. They've even had talks with some of the children that are most friendly with Marty to try to help them understand better why he behaves the way that he does sometimes.

And, his little brother takes about 15 minutes to wipe all of that out.

Casey does mostly understand the challenges that Marty faces, but he's also one of the people that has to live with it...and he's the one that feels as though attention is diverted from him while everyone deals with his brother. I don't know that jealousy is the right word, but Casey makes it clear that he doesn't have the patience for Marty's quirks that most others do.

The fact is that Casey is just naturally adept at being social. He's made friends easily since before he could even talk. More than any blood relative of mine that I can think of, he has a personality that people gravitate to. If anything, he's more in line with his godparents -- both of whom have rarely been in situations where they aren't well liked -- than with anyone in my family.

Meanwhile, Marty lives in his own world that sometimes intersects with reality and sometimes doesn't. He's always been comfortable playing on his own...usually more so than with another person and definitely more so than with a group of people. For years now, he's desperately wanted a best friend and has no idea how that's supposed to work.

As a father, the whole thing is a killer to try and watch and understand. I keep trying to relate it back to when I was a kid, but in my memory anyway, it seems like I was kind of in between them...and all that really does is paralyze me when it comes time to try to give advice.

One the one hand, from the time that I was 4-years-old on, I always had at least one really close friend...and that person changed depending on circumstances. In the apartment complex I lived when I was really young, I had my friend Jeff. At the Catholic grade school, that I went to I had my friend Billy. And, when I moved to a different neighborhood and different school for junior high, I had my friend Mark. In high school, I had a circle of friends that has continued on for the rest of my life, even with everyone going to different colleges and me moving all over the country. Heck, I'm still at least in touch with both Mark and Billy, despite being geographically nowhere near them, and have tried for years to figure out where Jeff is now.

All that said, outside of those friends, most people don't remember me. If they do, the word that they'll use to describe me is "quiet." I was never popular...my friends were. What I had was I was always funny in my odd, usually sarcastic way. I always had just enough fans of my brand of humor to keep anyone from bothering me too much...or more accurately, to make it worth the people that didn't like me to have to deal with the people that did.

However, in watching my sons, it's become apparent that what works for one person doesn't work for someone else. As much as I might like Marty to be able to use the coping mechanisms that I did when I was a child, in actuality, he can't. He has to figure out his own way of doing it...and the more he struggles, the more I have to try to stop myself from using his little brother as an example. Or from trying to tell him what to do.

I've told Amy that I always come away feeling as though our job is to just try to get Marty through his teens. If we can get him safely to college, then the creative urges that takes over his day-to-day life on a regular basis can stop being a hindrance and instead become an asset. Hopefully by then he'll have learned how to focus and move his projects from start to finish, while working with others.

Hopefully. As long as he gets to a certain point, the world will start working for him instead of against him.

But, as his father, getting him from point A to point B -- while simultaneously not braining his brother for just being himself -- is a bit more of a challenge than I would have ever have thought.

I'm pretty sure that Marty is up for the challenge. I just wish I was more sure about myself.

Dance Fights and Other Things

The other day, I was watching the film version of "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers." While they were eating lunch, Marty and Casey joined in watching the movie.

With that opening, I'm 99-percent certain that I'm describing a situation that was only happening in my household at that moment -- a father and two sons watching "Seven Brides" -- any place in the country...if not the world.

It becomes 100-percent when you add on the part of the father -- me -- providing commentary on the fact that you usually don't see the guy that plays Benjamin (Jeff Richards) dancing is because he was really a former baseball player that is only in the movie because he was under contract to MGM. Or, that similarly, while Howard Keel was a tremendous singer, he wasn't a dancer. Or, that while a number of the other brothers came from a ballet background, Russ Tamblyn's background was really in gymnastics. Or, that the barn raising scenes involve some of the most difficult dancing ever committed to film.

The boys didn't watch the entire movie, but the fact that the hung out watching a significant chunk of it says something about the household in which they are being raised.

It's not quite to the level of what I was exposed to. When I was a kid, CBS's annual showing of "West Side Story" was treated as a holiday in my family. I knew the Romeo and Juliet plot and cried for the first time over the demise of Tony before I could even form full sentences. My father and sister took me to a showing of "The Sound of Music" when I was about 4-years-old...and the movie is over 2 1/2 hours long. I saw "Jesus Christ Superstar" on stage for the first time when I was six. I honestly don't remember a time when there wasn't a movie soundtrack or Broadway cast recording not played on a regular basis in my childhood home. When I lived in Los Angeles, if I had occasion to meet an actor from one of those musicals (Dick Van Dyke, Buddy Hackett, Shirley Jones, etc.), there was always a certain charge that I got, like being a kid again...and I made it a point to go to every showing of those films that American Cinematheque put on, as well as things like the sing-a-long "Sound of Music" at the Hollywood Bowl.

To this day, I do things like watch "Superstar" around Easter every year (yes, the Norman Jewison film version of Rotten Tomatoes/Golden Turkeys fame). I watch "1776" on Fourth of July weekend and "White Christmas" multiple times over the Christmas season. I have two different versions of "West Side Story" on DVD...as well as copies of pretty much every major musical dating back to the 1950's. I have both the Todd-AO and Cinemascope versions of "Oklahoma." What I'm saying is that this has been my way of life.

While I'm sure that there are other households where stuff like this happens, I'm not sure how many of them are in the Midwest and have no daughters living in them.

My kids aren't as schooled in this stuff as I was, but they still are growing up to not think twice about people breaking out into song. With the "High School Musical" trend in tween entertainment -- something that seems to still continue as far as I can tell with the shows that the boys sometimes watch -- they're able to tie back to the origin of some of what they're seeing. When a recent Nickelodeon show (Big Time Rush) included a number of references to The Beatles, it didn't take them much to get it.

So, when they do things like try to ape Donald O'Connor's "Make 'Em Laugh" moves from "Singin' In the Rain" or when Casey sat through three performances of "Godspell" last summer, I always feel a pang of pride that a family tradition is being carried on.

It might make things easier if either of them could sing or dance, but that's the problem with real life...no Marnie Nixon track to overdub you.

The Village

There's been a couple of things that have come up recently that have caused me to remember that perhaps my youth wasn't quite the same as many people. Not in a bad way -- and not really even in an overly interesting way --but maybe just a touch different. Of course, a lot of that probably just had to do with the fact that I might have been just a little bit odd...or maybe the right word is geeky. Or, at least geekier than the son of a bookie is probably supposed to be.

During the course of a conversation with Amy, it came up that when I was a teenager, I subscribed to Ellery Queen Magazine...which publishes detective/mystery short stories. Had I been a teenager in the 1940's through the middle of the 1960's, there probably wouldn't have been anything unusual about this. However, this was in the mid-80's and let's just say that it wasn't what most of my peers were doing. Of course, one of my best friends -- Marty and Casey's godmother -- was getting Architectural Digest at the time. Then again, we both did fun things like went to academic summer camps and bandied about ideas for future novels. We met similar contemporaries in college, but we were living in the middle of nowhere at the time that all of this started. Back then, I used to frequently read three newspapers a day and would specifically take a route that would allow me to stop at the appropriate stores to get them since they weren't all available in one place.

Of course, Amy, the one that raised an eyebrow at my magazine subscription, used to read her local newspaper, pointing out every grammatical error along the way.

The other part about my younger days is that I'm actually a pretty good example of the "it takes a village to raise a child" thing. I'm at least enough of an example that you would think that Hillary Clinton would want to meet me, instead of slapping me with a restraining order.

When Amy was filling out a form for the kids' upcoming visit to the eye doctor and had to ask me when I first started wearing eye glasses. In actually, I started wearing glasses because my friend's mother made me. Marie, the AD reading friend from above, is about six months younger than me so initially I was a frequent chauffeur for her. She mentioned to her mother that I was having trouble reading street signs. Her mother -- who along with many of my other friend's mothers -- was one of the main reasons that I ate a regular dinner in high school. She was also a little overprotective of her daughter. Let's just say that I am still fairly well versed in what the proper procedures are in emergency situations because of her. She never made me take a CPR class, but that's only because she didn't think of it.

At the point that it was known that I was having trouble seeing, it immediately became an unacceptable situation. Marie's mother made the eye doctor appointment for me and then came to school to pick me to ensure that I went to it.

Having read plenty of Sports Illustrated stories, I know that this kind of thing isn't unusual. However, as I hinted at, her mother was only one of a group of people that would've done that for me. When I was younger, there was always at least one family of a friend that would keep tabs on me and try to make sure that I was staying on a straight path. I still remember in junior high when my English teacher told me with a touch of surprise that he had been someplace and when it came up where he taught at, one of my friend's mothers had started quizzing him on me.

When I was in high school, in a completely different part of the country, that number wasn't just one or two...it was at least five families. I ate dinner so often at friend's houses so often that usually the people that lived there stopped even noticing if I was there. Everyone made sure that I was taken care of. I was told by others that weren't part of those families that they were fiercely protective of me out in the small community in which we lived. By the time that my mother officially moved back to the East Coast and I moved in with the family that Marty and Casey consider their family, most people thought that I already did live there. Here's the thing though, when it became known that my mother had told me that she was not returning from her "visit" the group of families that watched over me all let me know that I was not in danger of having nowhere to go.

So, while there are undoubtedly things from my childhood that were not ideal -- I come from a crazy Irish family and that kind of goes with the territory -- there were other ways where my youth was unique in a positive way. I learned firsthand that there are good people in the world that will go out of their way to help someone. I don't know that you can underestimate how important a lesson that is to learn when you're a kid.

Knowing that people care about you no matter what when you're a kid gives you the freedom to be yourself...even if that just gives you the opportunity to be a geek.

How are you remembered?

This morning as I was pouring myself a cup of coffee I looked down at my mug. For years now -- at least 12 -- I've drank my coffee at home in a mug with the face of a classic Warner Bros. cartoon character on it. Most of the time it's the Tasmanian Devil, but sometimes it's Sylvester the cat. There's more than one mug, so I just kind of rotate them.

As I was looking at the mug, I was struck by the thought that perhaps this is something that Marty and Casey are going to remember about me. Then again, maybe they've never once noticed that I always use the same mugs every morning.

That's the thing about how you remember people...you don't really know how people will remember you and its hard to tell how you'll remember someone else. I'm not sure that most people care about it, but its one of those things I've been conscious of for probably too long.

When my father died when I was seven, I tried hard to keep whatever memories that I could of him. I don't remember anyone telling me that I should try to do that, but maybe someone did. However, most of my memories are just of small things...like remembering being in a car with him or random moments at the racetrack. I remember him looking at Playboy or listening to the soundtrack of "The Sound of Music" (or, in memories that probably lead to some behaviors in me that cause a lot of confusion for Amy, doing both of those at the same time). Oddly, I remember him being upset when people like Jim Croce, Bruce Lee and Moe Howard died -- Lee, in particular, because he had a young son named Brandon, which seemed to be the part that had caught my father's attention. To this day, I sit quietly in a movie theater because that's what he ordered me to do as a tot. And, ever since that final goodbye, the smell of too many flowers is something that I can't stand because it brings back a memory that I really don't like.

But, were something to happen to me, I don't really know how my children would remember me. I'd like to think that there's been enough things that would allow them to have good things that they could latch onto...however, it's the kind of thing that actually concerns me. Conversely, it's also not the kind of thing that you can do very much about.

Around the holidays, I went to an Indianapolis Colts game when we were staying at Amy's sister's house. My brother-in-law and their 11-year-old daughter went with me when I ended up with a couple of extra tickets (I had the tickets initially because of work). It was a nice time...the game was good and the weather was nice. As we were walking back to the car after the game, I just happened to catch a glimpse of my niece beaming up at her father in the winter sunlight. It was a week before Christmas and all I could think was, "She's making a memory of her father...she's picking this moment to try to hold onto."

Hopefully, even now, Marty and Casey have at least a couple of those moments to keep with them...but I'll keep trying to give them the opportunity to make the ones that they want.

Saturday Mornings

I recently acquired one of those compilation DVDs of cartoons from the 1970s, and Marty and Casey have been watching them. This morning, it was hard not to be a little confused as "Funky Phantom" was on our television... I was simultaneously having flashbacks to being a 4-year-old and having to fight the urge to put on polyester clothing and light a Kool while enjoying a glass of Tang. I suppose the urges were just a byproduct of the memories. As I closed my eyes, I could very nearly smell the mix of menthol smoke and orange powder.

Its nice to have kids that are willing to watch older cartoons. Thanks to Boomerang, I realize that a lot of kids have continued to be exposed to everything from The Flintstones to Yogi Bear to Jabberjaw. My kids, particularly Marty, don't have a problem taking it a step further. He'll watch animation from the '30s and '40s... which, thanks to me, he has access to. They will also go on YouTube and watch obscure stuff.

So, its funny when they start talking about stuff that I would've talked about when I was 10, like figuring out the relationships between the different Hanna-Barbera characters on "Laff-Olympics."

See, it turns out -- and I was reminded of this earlier in the week with the passing of The Monkees' Davy Jones -- I watched a lot of television when I was a kid. I remember doing a lot of other stuff, but I don't know where I found the time considering the amount of things that I remember from TV shows from the 1960s and '70s. Last week, I was watching an ESPN Classic replay of a "Battle of the Network Stars" from somewhere in the neighborhood of 1980. Amy found it troubling that I was able to match-up the actors with their respective shows before either Howard Cosell or the chyron display did. I found it disturbing that there was a show that I didn't remember. (It was a NBC show called "Games People Play"...which was the launching pad for Mr. T, a story that I remember but the show itself escapes me.)

Back when I was a kid, all three networks (that's right... three) used to run a prime time special to introduce that season's Saturday morning cartoon lineup. I was the target audience for those shows and watched them religiously. I would probably be better off if I could forget some of that useless knowledge -- it's probably not critical that I be able to identify all of the characters on "Yogi's Gang" by sight for my sons -- but so far, I'm stuck with it.

I'm the annoying person that corrects someone with a "No, that wasn't 'Bewitched,' that was 'I Dream of Jeanie'" during conversations that I'm not even involved in. Or, calls up radio stations to point out that it was Stephen Stills that was originally considered for "The Monkees," not David Crosby.

It makes me wonder what I'm imparting to the kids... what kind of obscure references they'll confuse people with in 20 years. Some fathers pass along a trade to their children...I offer them knowledge that will be helpful with the retro release of Trivial Pursuit's 50th anniversary.

Hey, at least it's something.

Weird

The other day, Marty asked me, "Is our family too weird?"
How do you respond to that? I pointed out that since I'm a writer and a former member of the Hollywood establishment, that we're allowed to be a little bit weird.
Amy said that I should've just said that all families are weird and let it go at that. It turns out that Marty's concern was really that he felt that he had gotten the kids in his class to accept him and he was worried that the weirdness of the rest of his family might blow that for him. Considering that Marty's Asperger's related peculiarities are known by a decent amount of peers, beyond just his class -- and really the population of the town we live in as a whole -- it was kind of endearing to have him worrying about the strangeness of the rest of us.
It also seems that his query was driven by the interactions of his little brother Casey and myself. Marty believes that when Casey and I are intentionally being obnoxious, making statements to each other that we know aren't true or singing badly at the top of our lungs, that its weird. Most people use the word "stupid" along with the obvious "obnoxious" designation. Of course, our behavior is also fairly consistent with adolescent boys. According to Amy, that's fine for Casey but less ok for his 4o-ish father.
So, what I suppose it boils down to is that I'm weird and that's a concern for Marty. I find it amusing that some of the normal behaviors of boys his age are what he finds weird. I'm sure that opinion is not without merit, but I don't that its members of the class itself that typically express it.
Lost in all of this is Amy, who doesn't believe that Marty's concerns are in any way directed to her. She might be right, but all I know is that for years she used to flip her shoes in her hands, like a juggler, before putting them on her feet. I don't believe that repressing your idiosyncrasies keeps them from being picked up on by your children.
I doubt that our family really is any weirder than others -- although I did wonder the time that Marty and Casey began arguing over who is more "creative." We might do a little less to hide it than some others, but that just keeps us honest.
Notice that I said "family"...there's a decent chance that I'm a complete lunatic, but why should that drag all the others down with me. For safety's sake, though, I might lock myself in my room until Marty's out of high school.

All Hallow's Eve

I'm not really a big Halloween person. It really seems like I should be...it's got candy, which I like, and there's the whole theatrical nature of the holiday, which you would think would be up my alley.

It's not that I dislike it, really. I've just never gotten that into it. When I was a kid, my older sister (by 16 years) was a Halloween person. She liked making costumes and going to costume parties and all of that. Her and her husband would make these really elaborate costumes, many of which stayed in their basement for years. I was never clear on where these costume parties were, but my brothers seemed to go to them too during one stretch. Still remember my oldest brother, who spent a number of years as a military police officer, dressed as a nurse, and my other brother, who's 6-foot-8, dressed as a sheik. Outside of Christmas, I don't actually remember that many people in my family having a good time at once on a holiday.

Yet, while I love Christmas -- possibly a little too much so -- I'm pretty indifferent about Halloween. I went out to a costume event at a bar exactly once. Then I remembered that I don't really drink that much. It didn't take long before I almost got into a fight with a drunk jackass about 8-inches shorter than me, and decided that I should probably just go home.

I don't remember having any traumatic experiences when I was a kid. There was one time that I was sick and laid in bed watching a rerun of "The Carol Burnett Show," but I don't think that particularly scarred me. And, when I was a little bit older, one of my cousins was amongst the neighborhood bullies. All I had to do was give him a handful of candy and keep my mouth shut, and me and my friends got to go about our business (sadly, we fared much better than the non-relatives).

My concern is that I'm passing my indifference on to my children. They should really be free to decide if they want to be into the holiday or not.

This is only the second year that the boys have actually gone trick-or-treating...and the second year that I went to Casey's classroom for their party.

This year, one of his classmates was kind enough to say, "Who's this, you're grandpa?" While, with the history of teenage pregnancies in this area, it might be entirely possible that there are grandparents around here my age, I'm happily not one of them. But, it did make me realize that I need to shave my head more often to get rid of the stupid gray hair.

Last year, the town that we live in inexplicably decided to have trick-or-treating on Friday night, and I had to cover a high school football game. So, this year, I got to be the parent that takes the kids walking around. Where I come from on the East Coast, this usually involved a group of guys walking around each holding a six-pack, but I don't really have any guy friends here and there were cops all over the place.

I did not know that people apparently now stand outside of their houses to give out the candy, thereby eliminating the whole knocking on the door thing that I had to do as a child. I guess all of that knocking must have been annoying.

While we were walking around Marty kept stopping every so often and staring blankly. I had to keep pushing him to catch up. "I keep hearing something," he said. After a few more times, he said, "I think someone's saying my name." As we started to walk away, I stopped. "Wait," I said. "I heard that one too."

Finally, we noticed the girl that had been apparently trying to get Marty's attention for quite some time running up to us. Turns out it was one of his classmates, and it took a couple of more minutes to realize that she had apparently abandoned her sister to get to where we were. No wonder she wanted to talk to Marty...that's the kind of thing that both of kids would do.

We didn't really stay out very long...much more and we would've almost been forced to go to one of the various church based functions around town. I don't have anything against those, but I always get heartburn from the hot dogs that they give out.

Instead, we went back to our house where Marty and I started passing out candy while also studying for a social studies test (his, smart guy). After a couple of visitors, Marty decided that he wanted to be the one handing out the candy. Towards the end of that, a kid came up that knew him, leading to one of those classic, "Hey..." "Hey" moments that 9-year-old boys share. When Marty came back to me, he shared conspiratorially, "I gave him two, since he's my friend."

That's at least part of the Halloween spirit that I'm glad that he's gotten down.

9 Years

Today is my son Marty's ninth birthday. If it was hard to wrap my head around being married for 10-years, its even harder to fathom that.

As he's quick to point out, Marty was born in Los Angeles at Cedars Sinai Hospital. Trust me when I tell you that you don't want to know what that cost my insurance company.

They actually tried to induce labor...for two days. It started innocently enough. I took the day off to go with Amy to what was supposed to be her final ultrasound. Since they were making us do it at a location down the street from the hospital, we decided to hang out in Beverly Hills for a while. We had breakfast sitting next to Judge Judy and her husband, and went to the BH library to vote in the Arnold Schwarzenegger gubernatorial election.

Finally, we went to the ultrasound place to wait. When the technician did the scan, they pointed out that Marty had very little amniotic fluid and left to go call the obstetrician's office. After a while, they came back into the room and said that they were going to send us over to the hospital to be admitted, and then left again.

So, we waited. And waited. And waited. A couple of times I left the room to try to find someone, but never did. We became suspicious, however, when the lights started going out. I yelled, "Hello?" and one of the nurses popped her head around the corner and said, "What are you still doing here? I thought you went over to the hospital?"

Turns out they just assumed that we when they told us that they were going to send us to the hospital, we were just supposed to leave. We, on the other hand, assumed the "going to" part of the sentence meant that there was still something else that we were to wait for.

When we got to the hospital, they did take us right back and get us through admissions, but then because Amy wasn't in labor they took us into a triage room and there we stayed.

They started trying to induce right away of course, telling us that it would probably be a few hours. The next morning, we were still there in the little triage room waiting.

The cool thing about Cedars Sinai is that the late George Burns and Gracie Allen were major donors to the hospital. So, on a closed circuit TV station, they show stuff like "The Burns & Allen Show" and "The Bill Dana Show." OK, so I thought it was far cooler than Amy did, who would've preferred that I just go down the street to the Museum of Television and Radio to satisfy my old sitcom fetish.

Sometime during that second day, I took a walk over to the Beverly Center to try to get some things to kill time. Got an Etch-A-Sketch, a book about Christmas songs, some puzzle books and a couple of other things. Meanwhile, Amy remained hooked up to a bunch of monitors and really wasn't allowed to do anything except lay there.

They would try every so often to induce labor again, but it did not seem to be working the way that they thought it would.

At the close of the second day, Amy was pretty angry...so much so that I didn't even bother complaining about having to sleep on some chair thing again.

The next day, we were still there in our little triage room and had at that point become a cause celeb for the nurses, who really did feel bad for us being stuck there.

As the day dragged on, they were finally taking increased steps to move the labor along, and finally began bringing up the option of a C-section.

Late in the afternoon, the nurses finally seemed happy since labor was actually jump started at last. After having been stuck in our closet for so long, the nurse on duty actually held us there a little longer. They had decided that in reward for our travails, they were going to get us the best birthing room that they could (short of the $10,000 a day birthing suites).

The room that they put us in had a view of the Hollywood Hills and the Hollywood sign. We put our preordained "birth" music in the stereo and...we went back to waiting.

On the plus side, there was more room and a nice view...which it turns out you shouldn't say to a woman that's been strapped to a bed for more than 48 hours.

After another few hours the obstetrician showed up and things actually got into gear. However, the newest delay threw off my son's godmother, who arrived planning on going down to the nursery and looking at a baby through the glass. Instead, she was directed to the room where the action was still going on and popped her head in, not quite prepared for the scene that she saw.

As she stammered, the doctor apparently took that as a cue that she wanted to help. The baby doc instructed me to grab one of Amy's legs and for the godmother to grab the other. Our friend, let's call her Marie, does not have any children and really didn't want the front row view...but coming from a small town in Michigan, she did what the doctor told her to.

Things were going ok, but then Marty's head got stuck. Suddenly, they were pushing and pulling...and then they got this suction cup thing. They attached it to his head, and started yanking. Were this a book, I would describe the horrified look that Marie and I shared, but it would take a couple of paragraphs to do it justice.

When they finally got him out, they put Marty on Amy's stomach and all I remember is hearing her say, "Come on, baby, breath."

Next thing I knew, a SWAT team came rushing into the room and grabbed Marty. They took him across the room to a little station with a heat lamp and they began intubating him. I looked back at Amy who looked weak and was being stitched up and then I looked back at Marty being given what looked like CPR.

I was in the middle of the room kind of spinning around in a terrified daze. All I could think was that this was supposed to be the best day of my life, and it was looking like it was dangerously close to being the worst possible day that I could imagine.

I didn't hear the exchange, but apparently Amy encouraged Marie to go try to get me from my spinning. Marie, who's known me since we were kids and we were now in our 30's, came up next to me, awkwardly put her hand on my arm and said something along the lines of, "I'm sure it'll probably be fine."

Oddly, that helped since that was pretty much the way that I would expect Marie to handle that situation. If she had done something differently, I might have freaked out.

While I still wasn't sure that Amy was ok, the doctors dealing with Marty forced me to come over with them. The crisis was averted, Marty was breathing normally, and they had figured out that I wasn't necessarily doing good. They had me come touch Marty so that I could feel him breathing and forced me to cut the umbilical cord. And, I mean forced. I tried to beg off and they put the scissors in my hand and moved it to where they wanted me to cut.

After that, I got shuffled down to the nursery with Marty. Since he had struggled to breath, they were still watching him closely and I needed to go with him.

When we were down in the nursery, I just more or less stood there not knowing what to do. The nurse came over and told me that I needed to touch and talk to Marty. So, I stood there holding his little hand and saying stupid things like, "Hello, Marty...um, that was kind of exciting, huh?"

Once they were sure that he was ok, they told me that I could go back to where Amy was and they would meet me with Marty at the normal room. I'm sure there's some other name for it, but that's what it was after the triage room and the birthing room.

When I got back to the birthing room, I arrived just in time to find the nurse and Marie picking Amy up off the floor. She had passed out. They make the mother get up and walk to show that she's ok -- and I think go to the bathroom -- but instead she took a step and dropped. So, they made her stay in the birthing room even longer as they worked to make sure that she was stabalized.

Around 11 p.m., they let us go to the other room. As we arrived there, Marie -- who had expected to be at the hospital for about an hour...five hours ago -- took her leave with a simple, "Yeah, I gotta go."

They offered to have Marty hang out in the nursery, but we kept him in the room instead...if for no other reason than that it had taken him so long to actually arrive.

Since we were on the West Coast, had he been born a few hours later, it would've been Halloween in the East...which is really when our families found out about the birth. I stood outside the hospital at about 7:30 a.m. making all of the necessary calls. I also tried to send out a group e-mail...which AOL flagged as spam. At the time, I was working for the short-lived AOL Time Warner. I was standing in the hallways of Cedars Sinai on the phone with a sister company of my own employer, trying to convince them that I was jsut trying to send out a birth announcement and not a link to porn.

On Halloween night, after three days of hospital food -- which, don't get me wrong, if someone is going to force you to eat food from a hospital, pick Cedars -- I wanted to have something else. I had spent the day staring at a Jerry's Famous Deli across the street from the hospital and decided that a nice ham and swiss on rye would do the trick.

As I left the hospital to cross the street, I looked around and noticed all of the people in costumes. In my sleep deprived state, it took a minute for me to put together what day it actually was.

The fact that all of that was nine years ago seems unreal. The fact that the little red-headed baby that I stood in a nursery with is now a red-headed third grader makes me feel a little old.

The fact of the matter though is that ever since those handful of minutes that I stood watching a team of doctors working on him seconds after his birth, there isn't a day that goes by that I don't realize how lucky I am to have Marty.

I'm guessing that I'll never stop feeling that way.

Hands of Stone

It is quite possibe that I am the least handy person in the world. We're talking when I try to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity, not only do they tell me that I'm not needed, they hire extra security to make sure that I don't wander onto the construction site.

All of my male friends -- gay or otherwise -- are more handy than me, able to assemble things and fix lawn equipment and all of that. All of my female friends are more handy than me. My wife is more handy than me.

The biggest problem is that outside of comedy and sexual orientation, I have trouble doing anything straight. I can't saw straight, can't hammer a nail straight, can't screw straight (all right, get your mind out of the gutter).

The oddest thing, to me anyway, is that I've actually done quite a few things that, given my affliction, I probably shouldn't have. Back when you used to be able to do such things on cars more readily, I changed a variety of starters and alternators on a variety of rust buckets. With assistance, I've changed out both an engine and a transmission. I used to be proficient at taking apart and putting together office cubicles back when I worked at companies that liked to make departments move offices once a year. I've switched out electrical fixtures, installed ceiling fans and earthquake proofed an apartment.

You would think that at some point, something useful would've rubbed off on me. But, no, nothing. If anything I've gotten worse the older I've gotten, because now I'm not a prideful young man anymore. Now, I just admit from the start that I'm not good at things and find someone else to do it.

Sure, I guess that I could try to learn some of the things that I don't know...or try to learn how to do the things that I don't know how to do. Let's face it though, I'm not going to. At this point, its really only something to inspire me to be more successful.

That way, I can just hire the people to do stuff instead of trying to find people to do it for free.

Fit of Anger

In a fit of rage, Marty approached me, angry that I said that he couldn't watch television. Even though he's only eight, his anger can manifest itself in different ways, including sometimes, him trying to hurt himself. So, I was on alert for what was about to happen.

He came up to me as I was sitting down and screamed a frustrated, "Aaaarrrggghhhh!"

Then he grabbed my leg and started pulling on my shoe. Confused, since this wasn't exactly what I was expecting, I asked, "What are you doing?"

He ignored the question and went right on tugging on my shoe. Finally, he gave up trying to just pull it off without untying it and took a moment to loosen the laces, before yanking it off. He then hurled it to the floor.

Still angry, he grabbed my foot again and took off my sock, and hurled that to the floor.

And...that was it.

Oh, he was still mad. He went and grabbed some small free weights that we have around the house and started lifting those, announcing that he was going to exercise. Then he peeled off his shirt and went running around our yard for a few minutes. After that, he seemed to be fine.

But, back to the shoe. I don't understand that one. I watched to see what he was going to do, because I honestly didn't know. I was half expecting to see him start pounding on the table with it, ala Krushchev.

I know that there's something about shoes in Middle Eastern culture...I seem to remember people throwing shoes at the fallen statue of Saddam Hussein, to the confusion of most Western viewers. But, I'm pretty sure that Marty hasn't gotten up to Middle Eastern culture in his social studies/history class. Last I knew, they were learning about the Great Lakes.

And, did the sock have some significance? Was it that not only didn't I deserve a shoe, but no sock either?

I've got a pretty good idea that I will never know what was going through his head in that moment, but I guess of all of the ways that he could've dealt with his anger, taking off my shoe and then exercising probably isn't all that bad.

LA, Day Three

Holy cow, has Disneyland gotten expensive! I mean, it was always expensive, but I'm pretty sure that their prices have gone up faster than inflation. And, that's just the tickets for one park...not one of those Park Hopper deals where you can go back and forth with California Adventure.

But, with the number of classmates of Marty and Casey that vacation every winter in Florida at Disney World, there really wasn't a choice about whether or not we were going.

Sticker shock aside, I've been to Disneyland plenty of times with a variety of people but the only times I've been there with my own child was when Marty was essentially a baby. This time the kids knew what was going on.

Oddly, I was expecting them to be a little more excited when we first got there, but maybe you go into a kind of shock that you're actually at someplace like that the first time. I had picked a Tuesday, because I thought it might be less crowded...but it was still plenty of people.

I forced my family into doing my traditional circle, meaning that you start with Adventureland and then you make your way around from there. The main flaw in my plan was that even though the park had only been open for a half-hour when we got there, Indiana Jones was already down. I've gone on Indiana Jones as the first ride, I'm pretty sure ever since it opened, but fate's fickle finger pushed me over to the Jungle Cruise instead. (Indy did reopen, and we did get to use our Fast Pass for it, so I guess all's well that ends well.)

Marty and Casey both really liked two of the rides that I didn't know how they would take -- Pirates of the Carribean and the Haunted Mansion. They're not really fans of the Pirates movies...and we won't even talk about the Eddie Murphy HM film. Maybe it was just the cruising around looking at animatrons, but they thought both of them were cool.

Less shocking was how much they enjoyed Splash Mountain. It is August after all.

And, also in grand Disneyland tradition, Amy, Marty and Casey got stuck on a ride in Mickey's Toon Town. They finally got to walk out after about 15 minutes of sitting in Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin.

Also in keeping with tradition, Casey was a little freaked out about meeting Mickey Mouse. You have to wait in line, and he kept trying to convince me that we should leave and go do something else (Marty was busy watching the cartoons they were showing). Someday, I'm sure that he'll be happy that I made him meet the mouse...and, luckily, he didn't have the same reaction to Goofy.

In all the times that I've been to Disneyland, I've never stayed in Anaheim...in large part because that would've been silly. However, since we were doing it this time, we decided to go over to the hotel for part of the afternoon to rest. Turns out that's a really good idea.

I went to get fast food for us -- which cost about 1/10th what it would've been in the park -- and had a guy notice my USFL Michigan Panthers T-shirt. He struck up a conversation, mentioning that he used to go to the LA Express's games. I didn't really ask, but I'm pretty sure the guy was from the front office of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim since it was game day and we were about a half-block from the park.

We had to get back to the park in time for our Fast Pass to Space Mountain. Man, do I still love me some Space Mountain. I'm not really a "ride" guy, but I love that one. I wasn't sure how the boys would take it...I have to remind myself that they are still kind of young...but they both got it. Roller coaster in the dark...coolness.

Everyone else would've been happy to leave not long after that, but with what those freakin' tickets cost I insisted that we stay for the fireworks. We also watched the Fantasmic! water show, which I had never actually stopped to watch before. Just like a parade, though, the boys had trouble seeing, so there was a lot of jostling around to try to get them into position to see the action. That's when everyone's best instincts come out as every parent tries to shove their kid someplace with a decent view. It always reminds me of that scene at the end of "Animal House" at the homecoming parade where the father asks one of the Deltas if his son can stand in front of them, and the the Delta says simply, "No."

Yet again, by the time the boys got to the hotel room they were already out cold. If I could figure out a way to get them to walk 5-10 miles during a school day, apparently bed time during the rest of the year wouldn't be such an issue.

LA, Day Two

Marty found out today that we're not actually going to the beach until Wednesday, a situation that he finds unacceptable. Trying to convince him that there are plenty of other cool things to do in Los Angeles did not alter his conviction that the Pacific Ocean ranked above all of them.

As tour guide, we were trying to find something low-key to do since the plan calls for us to go to Disneyland tomorrow. So, we went over the hills into Hollywood.

When Marty was asked in the spring what U.S. landmark he most wanted to see, his answer was "The Hollywood Sign." Even though technically he's seen it previously -- he used to toddle around Hollywood and Highland trying to get young actress types to pick him up -- he doesn't remember it. Well, now he has.

Casey spent the first hour that we were out complaining about the sun and his lack of sunglasses, until he was finally allowed to purchase an overpriced pair from one of the souvenir places.

We took them to Grauman's Chinese Theater, but then realized that their only frame of reference to it was exterior shots. They haven't really ever been able to see anything where the concrete hands bit is featured (they've never seen the John Wayne episode of "I Love Lucy," and while I saw "Blazing Saddles" for the first time when I was around Marty's age, I've been barred from repeating that parenting mistake). Not surprisingly, the indentations that they found most interesting were the "Star Wars" ones.

We set out to go a star on the Walk of Fame that Marty is named after. I've been to the spot before, but I used to be around Hollywood Blvd. a lot, since I've had friends live not far away.
What I forgot is that the star isn't really on the touristy part of the street. It's more in the stripper outfit retail section.

As we were walking, I could see Amy looking at the stores unhappily. Finally, Marty looked at a mannequin dressed in what amounted to pasties and dental floss and exclaimed, "She's hot!"

"Hurry up," I heard Amy hiss.

We found it and took the pictures and all of that, but that also put us close to a store that I had told Marty and Casey that we would go to: Hollywood Toys & Costume. I once ran into Kristen Dunst there...literally. Security guard got all bent out of shape about it, but I didn't actually knock her down. From my standpoint, she walked into me. Hey, I'm 6-foot-2 and she's like 5-foot-nothing...she's not the only actress I've ever had trouble seeing because I was looking over top of them. The boys did enjoy it, although they got quite a bit bent out of shape when they weren't allowed to get a woopee cushion. I don't know where that came from, but they were both protesting that they've always wanted one.

For dinner, we ended up going to another of my favorite places in LA, The House of Pies. Its this diner that sits in the Los Feliz area, which has long been a hip and trendy location. The movie "Swingers" basically takes place there...The Dresden is just down the street a little bit and The Derby, before it closed, was just up from there. There's basically a whole bunch of other places in the area that you can spot a variety of celebrities hanging out at.

The House of Pies is not one of those places. Its more the type of place that some actors go to for a late breakfast wearing dark glasses because they're really hungover and need to actually eat.

Shockingly, one of the high points of going to The House of Pies is getting to eat some pie. The diner food is fine...burgers, Monte Criscos, etc. But the pie is why I love it. They don't just have banana cream...they have chocolate banana cream, with whole bananas. It'll kill a diet quicker than you can blink, but oh my God is it good.

I was going to take the boys up to Griffith Observatory before realizing that its closed on Mondays, so instead we went into the park for a little while and the boys played on a playground that was outfitted to accomodate kids with disabilities.

I don't know that Amy was thrilled with me since the place -- named Shane's Inspiration -- was built by a foundation started by parents of a child that died after two weeks because of severe disabilities. Or, at least, she wasn't thrilled that I convinced her to read the placard with the story. It might be sad, but the idea is a cool one. They're called boundless playgrounds because children in wheelchairs are meant to be able to access most of the features. Also cool is the fact that the organization (ShanesInspiration.org), helps other places build similar playgrounds.

So, the kids got Hollywood sleaze and social responsibility all in one day. That kind of sums up my parenting style, to be honest.