Come on In

When you're a kid, having weird obsessions is usually charming. When you're an adult, it sometimes lands you in a psych hospital.

My childhood obsessions were as follows:

* Airplane crashes
* News anchors
* Classical music
* Cars from the 1970s
* Multi-line rotary office telephones
* Hypochondria
* Three-piece suits
* CB radios
* Doorknobs

(If you ever get bored and want to write to my parents to ask them why I was not engaged in intensive psychotherapy beginning at age 7, PM me for their mailing address. I think they'd like to hear from you.)

If you're not quite sure how a young boy gets obsessed with doorknobs, well, ladies (and gents?), you've once again come to the right blog. Go, you.

When I was a child, I grew up watching "Fawlty Towers," a brilliant BBC comedy series written by John Cleese and his then-soon-to-be-ex-wife Connie Booth. The show was written and produced in the mid-1970s, and only twelve episodes exist-- almost each and every one is comedic gold. The show takes place in a hotel in Torquay in a hotel that bears the same name as the show. As a child of maybe ten, I knew each line of episode by heart, and my eldest sister used to take great joy in lying in bed while I would recite entire sections of dialogue from "The Germans" or "Basil the Rat" episodes from memory, altering my voice to seamlessly change from one character to the next, and back again.

If you think kids don't notice details, you're crazy. The set of Fawlty Towers was very meticulously designed, and, even though it's supposed to be a not-so-hot hotel, (the front sign with movable letters frequently changed from anything to "Watery Farts" to "Fawlty Twats"), it was still formal, and uptight, and decidedly English. And what's more English than an S-shaped, serpentine door handle.


One day, I announced to my father that we needed to go to the hardware store. Back then, it was called "Channel."

"Why?"

"Because my door needs a new handle," I said confidently. Funny, they say teenagers think they're invincible-- but I was always afraid of approaching my father with some bizarre request as a teenager. However, when I was ten, I thought nothing of it whatsoever.

"What the fuck are you talking about?" he asked, his brow furrowed.

"Just take me to Channel," I said, "and I'll show you."

So my father and I went to Channel, and I pointed to a gold-colored s-shaped door handle, elegant and sweeping to a small curlie-q at the end. It was $27.00.

"Mummy, I love you, but you've got to be fuckin' kidding me. $27.00 for a fucking door handle? No. Don't you want to go to college some day?"

"No," I answered. Little did I realize then that I would be able to publish a book, produce my own plays, and get laid in this magical place. I pouted as my eyes searched hungrily for an acceptable compromise.

"What about this one?" I asked, prepping the puppy eyes. "It's only $13.00."

"Jesus Christ," my father muttered, grabbing the plastic casing encapsulating my new door handle, "let's get the fuck out of here already."

Not too long ago, my wife and my eldest sister and I were sitting together upstairs in my parents' house. This house has been home to generations of my family, beginning with my grandparents, my great-aunt, my mother and her brothers when they were little children, my father, me and my sisters, and now, most of the time, my nephew. The day-to-day residents of the house are my parents and my eldest sister, though she says she's moving out again. Some day. Affectionately disordered folks with my blood have played musical rooms in that house since 1957.

"Did you ever live in this room?" my wife asked me that night when we were all talking in the room now inhabited by my eldest sister.

"Of course he did," my sister said, "look at that fucking door handle."

And there, barely still attached to a chewed-up, run-down, beat up, bare-assed, hollow-core wooden door is a gold-colored swirly, elegant, shining door handle, the clear enigmatic emblem of a house that has had its details ignored, its moldings carelessly painted over, its chimney practically collapsing onto itself, and the same floor in the dining room and kitchen since 1957.

"That handle looks really funny on that door," my wife commented, gazing at it in a haze of humor and disbelief.

"Looks good to me," I said.

Subverting Darwin

In the olden days, they would have taken me out back and shot me.

That's what I thought one day last week when I was getting dressed to greet another soul-free day of non-profit strife and I happened to catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror before I put on my trousers.

My hips, I observed, were lopsided. My left leg was turned completely inwards at an absurdly acute angle while the right leg, though toothpick-like in girth at least stayed ramrod straight. My feet, desperately flat and practically caving in, resembled two dead fish encased in a pair of argyle socks.

I won't even get started on my shoulders and my pigeon chest, covered in sporadic tufts of hair resembling broccoli that's gone past its prime.

As I regarded my grotesque form in the mirror, I thought to myself, "Damn, there's a body that has subverted Darwin."

If Darwin had his way, I never would have lost my virginity or found a forever-mate, and, really, if it weren't for lemur-like leaps in fiberoptic technology, I probably wouldn't have accomplished the latter. For the former, I have only college to thank and, really, almost everybody gets laid in college. On those glossy, full-color brochures, they should dispense with the lush photo of the auburn-haired co-ed reading a book underneath an autumnal oak tree and replace it with a picture of a twin-sized bed with the sheets askew, blotted with tell-tale stains, perhaps with some wadded-up tissues scattered around the cheap Ikea rug for good measure.

Getting back, though, to Darwin, that bearded bastard could not possibly conceive of a world where somebody like me doing anything other than dry-humping the sofa was a good idea. What could somebody like me possibly have to contribute to the idea of strengthening the gene pool? My outlandish bone structure? How about my elephantine-proportioned proboscis? No, it's the annoyingly Jewish propensity to possess post-nasal drip, allergies, asthma and the incongruous inability to enjoy eating sandwiches made with mayonnaise.

If Darwin were in charge of the Mating Game, he would give me a big FAIL. And, really, in the golden olden days, I would have failed. I would have been relegated to some depressing "seashore house" for "invalids," my flat feet confining me to a wheelchair, my asthma confining me to an iron lung, my dry wit confining me to a lifetime of exchanging pornographic letters with Oscar Wilde. And, really, that's all there would have been of me.

Enter: The Internet.

That's right, Darwin, you hairy, funny fuckhead. You didn't count on the internet, did you? It's how I get to be a writer. It's how I got to be a husband, too.

And, God willing, it's how I'm going to be a father.

No-- we're not buying a Chinese baby-- I just mean, like, it started the series of events that will hopefully culminate in me being a father. You know, because I met my wife online. And, like, we do it sometimes, and, I mean, hopefully, one of those times will result in my squiggle-wiggles attacking her ovumesque thing and then blorpie-doo baby time.

What?

There's lots of people out there who probably shouldn't be having kids. I mean, look at Max Headroom. I doubt Darwin would have been into that particular arrangement. But we're all imperfect beings in one way or another. Sure, my skeleton is probably dangerously close to a medical oddity, and, after I die, my wife will probably sell it to the University of Pennsylvania Medical School so she can fund her undying lust for clothes from Anthropologie, but that's okay. I don't mind. My osteoquirks help make me special. I remember going to the podiatrist once when I was eighteen to get fitted for my first pair of orthotics. I took off my shoes and socks and stood there in front of him and he wrinkled up his brow and said,

"Jesus Christ-- I don't even understand how you're able to stand up!"

I mean, the fact that I'm able to do that obviously means that I'm pretty fucking cool, right? I mean, if I weren't married-- you'd totally be into that, right? I'm like a walking, talking miracle. The fact that I live, breathe, am mobile and on a mission to procreate and make awkward babies is just a total face-fuck to Darwin, every day that I'm alive.

Take that, Motherfucker. In your beard.