Stay The Fuck Away From Me, World

As my wife and I walked hand-in-hand up the path to the front door of my parents’ house, we spied an unfamiliar sticker affixed to the screen door.

If my mother could be summed up in a sticker, it would be this one.

Fearful, paranoid, constantly warding off the evil eye or evil bacteria or evildoers in general, she is a 5’2” hundred-odd-pound bundle of anxiety with stylish short hair and librarian glasses.

And, we love her. And not just because yesterday was Mother’s Day either.

Being greeted as we were by this new sticker last night made me smile, because nothing says “my mother” quite like a “stay the fuck away from me, world” sticker on the front door that’s approximately a full foot tall. If she could enclose the property in razor-wire without it looking institutional, she would do it. Because, really—why take a chance?

We do not take chances in my family. In fact, when my wife texted me while I was at work Saturday to let me know that she had an idea percolating about something special to do next weekend to celebrate my birthday, this was my reply:

“As long as it doesn’t involve me performing and/or socializing too much, or potentially risking my life or our lives outside of the normal risks, you should be okay. I love you.”

Ah, good old genetics. Thanks for those hand-me-down worry-warts, Mom.

Not only are my parents proudly displaying this boldly-hued burglar warning on their screen-door, they had two more of them, they had two more of them, in case my sister and I wanted one for either or both of our houses.

I politely declined. The previous owners of our house, also apparently scared straight by the wicked world, had already placed an older version of this sticker on our front door years ago. My sister declined because she’s an asshole.

The previous owners of our house also have metal grates on the basement windows, three locks on the basement door, and auxiliary locks on all the windows in the house, operated by small keys. I think we must be distantly related.

I love my mom and her paranoia and her fears, many of which I have inherited. While I don’t wake up covered in sweat after having nightmares about thousands of half-naked Koreans storming the beach like she does, I am, basically, afraid of everything. Seeing that sticker on the front door of their house reminded me of the day when I was in fifth grade and I stayed home from school sick. And I called the police because some scruffy-looking guy was crawling through our bushes in front of our house. Three radio cars with emergency lights ablaze responded in under three minutes. When he didn’t comply with their directions fast enough, he was taken down.

It was the guy from the water company trying to read our meter.

I was worried that, when my mother got home from work and found out what I'd done, that I'd gotten a menial public servant thrown to the ground because I was a tightly-wound, neurotic child who watched far too much "Rescue, 911" for his own good, that I would get in trouble, that she would be disappointed in me, ashamed of me, mad at me, bewildered and confused by me. But she wasn't any of those things. She held me close and said,

"I'm very proud of you-- I'd have done exactly the same thing."

Of course she would have.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. I love your crazy, I love your sticker, and I love you.

Such a Rake

On Tuesday, my day off, I was determined to be both productive and leisurely. On Monday evening, after returning from a Target Run with the Mrs., I turned to her and said,

"I'm going to take care of all these fucking leaves tomorrow, it's getting ridiculous. I'll probably need a bulldozer. The neighbors are getting restless, I think."

"Meh," my wife said, failing to notice that every lawn on our street is distinctly devoid of fallen autumn leaves, and that our section of the street was littered with rather substantive leafy mountains.

My lovely wife, I suspect, has a similar lack of social awareness that her lovely parents possess. Oftentimes, they are mystified as to why they don't fit in with their affluent neighbors in Providence, R. I. My mother-in-law and father-in-law look great, on paper. They're Jewish, and she's an attorney and he's a psychiatrist, probably just like lots of power-couples in their neighborhood. Of course, there are cracks in the plaster. She's an attorney who wears pink jumpers emblazoned with cartoon pigs, frilly socks, and a handbag shaped like a watering can. He's a psychiatrist, who, even when attired in a sport coat, collared shirt, dress pants and a tie, looks like he just rolled out of bed on a good day, or a dumpster on a not so good day. Their lawn is unkempt, there are often cast-off cars in their driveway, their mentally disorganized dogs haphazardly pull them down the neighborhood streets and bark at unseemly hours of the day and night, sometimes resulting in law enforcement contact.

While my wife and her family are afflicted with the curse of unawareness, I am struck by hyper-awareness. Or maybe it's paranoia. I'm not really sure, but, since I'm as yet undiagnosed, let's stick with the colloquial. I constantly feel the searing stares of others upon me when I do something, or, worse, don't do something. When our lawn is an unfortunate state, I know I am silently being judged by those around us-- older, wiser, more competent, more experienced, more... with it. As I've said before, lawn care doesn't interest me in the slightest, as I suspect it doesn't interest many other people my age who happen to have the good fortune to have a house to maintain. But I know that I'm supposed to give a shit about mowing and raking and trimming, so I do it. As Pooh-Bah says in The Mikado, "it revolts me, but I do it."

And, Tuesday morning, I did it. With a snow shovel.

Now, as I was "raking" my autumn leaves with a tool definitely manufactured for a different purpose and a different season, neighbors passed me by, jogging, walking their children to the elementary school that I attended as a boy, getting into their cars to start their daily commutes, and I couldn't help but think to myself, "Was what they were thinking and saying about me before they saw me cleaning up the street with a snow shovel worse or better than what they're thinking and saying about me now, watching me shovel gargantuan piles of red, brown, orange, yellow, and purple leaves with a snow shovel?"

And I suppose what it all comes down to (my friend) is that I'll never know, just as those around me will never know the vitriolic, frustrated, judgmental sentiments I have about lots of them (especially that bald jerkoff with the black Passat wagon) and what does it all really matter anyway? A lot of the time, I wish that I could operate more like my wife and her family, wandering around unaware of the vast, great distance that separates us from The Joneses.

Or maybe there's a happy medium somewhere in there. But, for a guy who cleans up leaves with a snow shovel, I sort of doubt it.

Maybe It's Yours

The knock on our door was one of those ones that instantly scares the shit out of you, even if you aren't one of those people who automatically assumes tragedy or violence is about to occur at the sound of every telephone ring, bump in the night, or doorstep visitor.

It was a pounding, in rapid succession, a closed, large fist, rapping five times on our front door, on a Sunday afternoon following a 2-foot snowfall. My wife and I were upstairs reading, she a piece of F.F.F. (Fucking Female Fiction) and me my mammoth John Irving book. At the sound of the dramatic knocking, she and I both instantly jerked our heads up from our respective literary lands, far different from the others, and looked at each other in real fear.

"Who is that?" she asked me, I suppose rhetorically. How the fuck should I know who it is?

"How the fuck should I know who it is?" I answered, though in question, also rhetorically.

"Maybe it's Girl Scouts?" she suggested half-heartedly as I shakily inserted my book-mark in between pages 421 and 422. Prostitutes in Amsterdam were having sex and there was cum and metaphors everywhere.

"Bullshit," I said, closing the book, "Girl Scouts don't knock like that. Not unless they're Russian Girl Scouts and you owe them money."

I got up from my chair and walked down the stairs in my slipper socks with more than moderate trepidation thinking, "I'm about to be shot dead. In slipper socks."

The trouble with our front door is that there is really no way to see who is on the other side until you are close enough to it that the person on the other side can see you. My wife learned this lesson just last week when I went out to pick up Chinese and arrived home to find my wife, in her pajamas and slipper-socks talking to a clean water activist wearing green cargo pants and carrying a petition form on a clipboard. My wife, of course, is too short to see who is on the other side of the glass, the result of which is that my wife now supports Clean Water Action and we have now been demarcated on the Clean Water Action spreadsheet with an asterisk meaning "sucker."

Yooo-hooo!

This is a very ineffective design. There's a peep-hole, but it's been painted over, so you have to resort to sticking your face up against the semi-transluscent curtains that cover the glass panes in the door and, of course, if you can see the person on the other side, they can see you. And make you put your name down on petitions. And shoot you through the glass.

Every time my doorbell rings, or somebody knocks on the door-- especially like that-- I am convinced that I am but moments away from a most disagreeable death. People do not "drop in" on us, the way nobody "drops in" on my parents. Visits must not only be announced, but heavily scheduled. My mother keeps the burglar alarm on not only when she is away, and when she is asleep, but when she is simply inside the house, alone, during the day, say, during her lunch hour. While she sits at the kitchen table, drinking her half-glass of V-8 and eating lean, thin-cut turkey slices out of the wax paper, she can watch her "stories" knowing that she is protected by the ADT community/force-field.

If we had an alarm, I'd do the same thing.

But we don't, and so the only force-field protecting my wife, my dog and little old me is the force-field that emanates from my own vast supply of paranoia. Once, when I was fourteen years old and home sick from school, I was sipping orange juice on the couch and noticed, through the window, a man with a ponytail lurking around in our bushes outside. I leapt up, ran to the kitchen, and dialed the police (an unwieldy seven-digit number back in those days). Within three minutes, four police cars came racing down, lights ablaze from all different directions, converging on my parents' lawn. Officers jumped out and one tackled the suspect-- who turned out to be the new meter-reader, hacking his way through our bushes because he didn't know where our meter was. At least I'm slightly more sane than my oldest sister who, when she was home alone in the early 1970s, called the police on the vacuum cleaner.

I thought fleetingly about that as I turned the doorknob of our door, with its painted over peep-hole. I thought about lying in a pool of blood on our doormat, sprawled out there for the police and medics to see, that they would be joking around with each other, waiting for the coroner, making fun of my slipper-socks. Fuck them, I thought, as I opened the door.

It wasn't a burglar or a hired assassin or a meter-reader or even a Russian Girl-Scout, angrily clutching a tire-iron in her hairy, veiny fist. It was the old guy from across the street, who, two hours earlier, had come out of his house, in true suburban fashion, guilted into cleaning out his own car because we were cleaning the massive amounts of snow off ours. Even though I had just seen him two hours ago, I blinked several times upon looking at him, because, when I opened the door he said nothing to me, and it took me a moment to realize who he was. As is the case with all of my neighbors, we don't talk much.

"Look-a-that!" he finally said to me, stepping back and to the side so I could behold... what was it exactly I was beholding again?

"What?" I asked.

"Look! Look at how I cleaned my car!" he exclaimed, beaming.

I looked. His car was indeed clear of snow, just as ours was. But it was his wife's car. The car that he had originally started cleaning when we were outside wasn't there anymore.

"That's the wife's car, see, I already cleaned off my car-- it's in the back alley-- moved it, ya see."

I saw.

"I see," I said.

"Beeyooteeful job, yeah?" he asked, rhetorically, I presume. Both Italian and Jewish old people from this area say "beeyooteeful." I don't know why. This guy's Italian.

"My son-in-law-- well, my future son in law, he lives way out, waaay out, see-- he gave me this. Best thing in the world for clearing snow offa cars. Here, look!" he said, giving me no alternative as he shoved this weird orange thing on a stick two inches away from my face.

"That's very nice!" I said with my best mock-enthusiasm.

"Touch it," he bade me. "Go on, touch it!"

Even though this was getting weird, I obeyed and ran my fingers along the orange rectangle. It was foamy to the touch.

"Yeah? Yeah?!" he said, his eyes getting wide and his eyebrows going up and down. "You like that? I get another one, maybe it's yours."

Hmm. "Maybe it's yours," I thought to myself. Gee, thanks. Maybe.

"You gotta name, fella?" he asked me. No, I wanted to say, they call me "The Situation." I told him my name. He told me his. It was something Italian. And then he turned around and walked back to his house. I shut the door, double-locked it, and walked upstairs, thoroughly bewildered.

"Who the hell was that?" my wife asked.

"The guy from across the street, who was cleaning off his car with us."

"What did he want."

I thought about that.

"I guess he wanted to brag," I replied. "Maybe."

Stall Worthy

Tell me, what do you think of when you see this image?




If you're honest with me, and with yourself, no doubt some seriously disturbing thoughts and scenarios flash before your eyes. Looks to me like the Zombies that used to entertain all of us on Facebook before Farmville and Happy Aquarium were invented have risen, and they want pure, unfettered brains.

Warning: Defenseless Babies Will Be Eaten.

Now, fine, this is just a picture of an emblem for a baby-changing station that I took with my cameraphone in the bathroom of a Borders in the Poconos, but, seriously, if I hadn't cropped out the words "Diaper Depot," you'd have thought the polygon people had seriously gone ape and were out to eviscerate all babies who are left lying on their backs on flat surfaces.

This image, and indeed the fact of well-dressed gentlemen using cameraphones in public lavatories simply underscores the inherent yuckiness that we all must face in bathrooms that are not our own.

I don't have to tell you that I'm a paranoid person. This is like telling you that you should be watering the ferns instead of reading this asscandy. But I heart and respect you and, therefore, I'll allow you to make your own (dubious) choices, especially if they're ones that fluff my ego.

Anyway, I'm a paranoid freak, though I used to be a lot worse.

I think.

I'm especially paranoid when it comes to a public bathroom. I'm more at home skipping barefoot through a needle-strewn alley or a refereeing a Jamaican pud-wrestling championship. I wasn't always this way, but, like lots of people who go off the deep end, the watershed event in my life was something relatively innocuous.

I was urinating in the school bathroom one afternoon when Jacky, one of the retarded boys who was inexplicably and constantly attired in striped shirts and knee pads entered the bathroom and took up residence at the stall next to me. My stream immediately ceased. Then, just as I had convinced myself that I was being stupid and I started to let it flow a little bit, I heard Jacky clear his throat and say,

"I like your watch!"

And that was that.

In high school, I would only use the bathroom before or after normal school hours. That's right, from 7:15am-2:25pm, Mondays-Fridays, from September-June, I didn't poop or pee. For four years.

When fresh-faced, lithe little Apron went off to college, he obviously didn't have a choice in the matter, seeing as his freshman dorm room was, well, a freshman dorm room. One day on the second week of classes, I walked into the bathroom and found that it stunk to high heaven of shit. The existence of the odor didn't surprise me, but the fact that its milky, copious source was located in the sink.

I tried to train myself to contain my bodily functions to the bathrooms contained within the academic buildings, hoping that these facilities would be more, well, academic. And they were. At least, I never found shit rivers resembling Nestle Quick in the sinks of the theatre or the science building.

Unfortunately, while taking a most philosophical shit while my philosophy class was in session, my proclivity for lavs in academic buildings took a wrong turn when the toilet upon which I was s(h)itting exploded on me.

In a cruel instant, I at once felt like I was porpoise at Sea World and a Saran-wrapped prostitute on a date with R. Kelly.

But that was college. I was crazy back then-- I even dated a Catholic girl. Now, I'm much better. I settled down, married a nice Jewish girl (my dead allergist would have been thrilled) and I can go into virtually any rest stop bathroom on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

However...

I still think that, while standing at the urinal, my face two inches away from the cold tile wall, that some crazy bastard is going to walk up behind me and donkey-punch me, slamming my face into the wall. Either that or he'll shoot me in the back of the head, spraying the admittedly shallow and perverse contents of my cranium all over the place for the toothless, mop-manning Manolo to squeegee.

God. I should never have seen "American Beauty." Every time I pee at a rest-stop, I picture Kevin Spacey getting his head blown off in his lily-white kitchen. And, every time I see a fucking plastic bag blowing in the wind, I make that joke. And every time I take a shower...

No, just kidding. Not every time....

Oh, I'm also afraid I'm going to see somebody's penis at a rest stop which, if you can believe it, has never happened to me yet. It's pretty surprising, considering most dudes are already fidgeting with their widgets as they're rounding the corner by Sbarros. Like seeing some poor bastard's slop-sausage should be my biggest problem in life.

Obviously, you who read my blog every day know that it's most definitely not.

However, after hitting the bathroom in the Bartonsville Borders, baby-attacking zombie mommies, though, are up there on the list.

Check Check It One Two

There was a great piece on "60 Minutes" that I still remember from maybe 10 years ago. I know it must have been that long ago because I can remember watching it at my parents house, with them, in the living room. The house I grew up in had only a living room. I didn't know what a "family room" was until I saw one at a friend's house. I still kind of don't know what it is. It looks just like a living room, except it's called a "family room." I also don't understand "dens." I thought dens were things boy scouts huddled in and in which they received merit badges for repressing homosexuality. Some houses have living rooms, dens and family rooms. That to me just seems like too many sectionals-- and anybody with good taste can tell you that one sectional is one sectional too many.

Anyway, so this "60 Minutes" piece was a Morley Safer jobbie. Morley was profiling, I think, some psychiatrist who was employing rather unorthodox ways of assisting his patients with their fears/compulsions. The one segment of this piece I remember very well was the part with the woman with OCD. There are different manifestations of OCD, for those of you who learned about the disorder from Tony Shaloub. Some people are neat freaks. Others are tappers, pickers, washers, thinkers and checkers.

This woman was a checker.

She would get into her car in the morning for her ten or twelve minute commute to work, and would routinely arrive for work an hour or so late. How is this possible, you might ask? Well, it's not a complicated mathematican conundrum. This woman was so consumed by the fear that, during the first minute or two of her drive, she had hit a pedestrian that she would double back and check. Then she would triple back. And quadruple back. And quintuple back-- just to make sure. Then, she'd do it several dozen more times, you know, until she was really sure she didn't commit vehicular homicide (not to mention fleeing the scene of an accident and failing to render aid).

She was obviously in danger of losing her job, amongst a lot of other things, if she could not get this inescapable compulsion under control. See, whether or not the fear is irrational is basically immaterial. As long as it is interfering with a person's ability to function in the world, the fear might as well be real, because it's real to the nutjob. I mean person.

So, eventually, this woman sought help from this psychiatrist, and that's where Morley and the camera crew come in. The shrink asked the woman if she'd ever actually hit a pedestrian.

"Well, I don't know," she said, not wanting to commit 100%, in case the police were watching. "I don't think I have."

"Do you know what it would feel like to hit a person with your car?" the psychiatrist asked.

"Well, I don't know," she answered honestly.

No, honey, of course you don't know, because you've never done it. Can you see where Dr. Shrinky-Dink is going here?

With small cameras rigged all over this woman's car, she set out for work one morning like she always does. Meanwhile, Dr. Wackadoo is hiding behind a large bush about 3/4ths of a mile away from her house with a life-sized, true-weighted dummy, dressed in a t-shirt and jogging shorts for optimum realism. He gets the signal that numbnuts is approaching the bush and, when the timing's just right, he lobs the dummy right in front of her car with all the might he can muster.

"AAAAAAAAAUUGGHH!!" screams Fruitcake McGee as she slams right into the fucking short-shorts-wearing sack of potatoes. Fortunately, she didn't drive off a cliff or into another vehicle. Or have a fucking aneurysm.

"There," said the soon-to-be-defrocked psychiatrist to his breathless, virtually catatonic patient, "that is what it feels like to hit a person."

--------------------

I'm a checker, too, though not to this degree. If I had great insurance and/or lots of money, I might actually look this goofball up, but I'm a little trepidatious about seeing how he'll make me confront my fear of being in an airline disaster.

My checking is rooted in personal insecurity, and an immense fear of being "found out." See, in my professional life, I'm wise-cracking and sarcastic-- but it's relatively clean. I know how to function and survive in the professional world, I know boundaries of good taste and I adhere to them because I know that there are grave consequences if I don't. Who I am around my family and close friends, and the blogosphere, well, that's different. It's not like I'm "pretending" in one life or the other, they're just different facets of the same personality that, unfortunately, due to societal constraints, are not allowed to function at the same time.

Fuck you, society.

Because of these two parts of myself, I'm always scared that the obscene part is going to some how come out in the professional part. When I write work emails, my tired eyes scan and scan and scan the text for any scrap of profanity that might have wedged itself into the text or a spreadsheet-- because you never know, right? I mean, I'm capable of writing some pretty awful things, aren't I? What if, just what if, something dirty got on one of my tittylicking spreadsheets?

I'd be done for.

So I check.

And then I check again.

My eyes go left to right left to right left to right left to right left to right.

Then I hit send.

And then, invariably, I go into my Sent Mail folder and open it up, petrified that NOW I'm going to find the "fuck" or the "cunt" in my business letter. It's never there. But I always check, because I'm a checker, and that's how we mothafuckas roll.

Since I write emails to my wife from work a lot, and typically sign them "Love," and then I immediately move on to write to a colleague, I'm always paranoid that I'll have signed an email to a co-worker or Board Member "Love." Because it's so automatic when writing to Mrs. Apron, I can't conceive that it's possible that the automatic way I sign my work emails, usually "Thanks" or "--" won't engage, well, automatically. I guess I could always just go, "Ooops, sorry-- I thought I was writing to my wife" but I would inevitably be regarded as a fuckup basketcase who can't even be trusted to compose a simple piece of e-correspondence. And then it's the breadlines!

Another thing I am always questioning myself on is, "Did you put on deodorant today?" It's not that I smell bad, I don't (if I did, then it would be pretty easy to discern whether or not I put on deodorant), it's just that certain of these lavatory tasks are done so quickly, so routinely, so unceremoniously that it's really difficult to remember if they're actually done at all. So, logically, I sometimes make a ceremony out of putting on deodorant. Sometimes I undo the cap, stare at it and go, "I'm putting on deodorant now, I'm putting on deodorant now, I'm putting on deodorant now." Other times, I hold it up to my mouth like a microphone and sing a song,

"Deeee-odorant! Makes me glint! Slap you under my arms! It's slick and cool feeling! Makes me all gooey under my haaaaaaaaaaairs!"

That way, it's easier to remember doing it. "Oh, yeah, I sang that gay-ass while the dog was staring at me and my wife was cracking up in the next room. I remember that."

You'd think I would be able to feel the gross, goopy sensation under my arms but, an hour or two into my day, when I start to doubt myself, I trick myself into believing that the glooby, wet feeling under there is sweat-- you know-- having formed after I forgot to apply deodorant.

I know what that psychiatrist would do with me.

After a week of ordering me to go to work without applying deodorant, he'll look at me and say,

"THAT'S what forgetting to wear deodorant smells like."

After sending expletive-riddled, pornographic emails replete with close-up pictures of gaping assholes and video clips of overweight Bavarian porno starlettes shitting on each other to all of my coworkers and elderly family members, he'll look at me and say,

"THAT'S what fucking up at work looks like."

Sometimes I'm glad my insurance doesn't cover mental health.