Pardon Me, But There's a Condom on Your Antenna

For all the declamations and declarations about the crassness and crudeness of modern society (maybe some people are actually reading this blog after all...), I think we're still pretty civilized and polite, as a general rule. Sure, when we're online, hidden behind our clever screennames and our cutesy avatars, we let our collective hair down perhaps a wee bit too much, but, when we've got to face each other one-on-one, I think we're basically all over our P's & Q's, because, when you get down to it, most of us who have lived this long were raised by good mommies and daddies.

And it shows, you little punim, you.

Now, those of you who know me in real life know that this whole Mr. Apron thing is a a pretty shrewd facade. Well, of course, there are some facets of Mr. Apron that I share-- the petulent love of a good obscenity, especially a trusty old pornographic portmanteau-- like "vomcock," the shameless self-deprecations, the, um, limestone-solid vocabulary. The, uh... big...... nose.

You can see it from there, can't you? Don't lie. I don't care.

However, while my mouth may be as big as a toiletbowl on this toilet bowl brush of a blog, in real life it is about as pert and petite as a Lego lady's purse. It takes months of knowing you before I can crack a joke, it takes me a long time to warm up, getting comfortable is very difficult for me, and speaking my mind is almost an impossibility because I am far too busy predicting and inventing and obsessing over all of the ways you are going to judge me.

I'm, you know.... shy.

Guys feel silly calling themselves shy. Shy is for girls. It's for gays. It's for, I don't know... ponies? Puppies? "Oh, she's shy," a middle-aged woman says to a 5-year-old girl after a white poodle shrinks from her proffered hand. 30-year-old men aren't shy. Unless they're really poodles.

But, here I am: shy. As my mother and I are fond of saying: it is what it is.

I started a new job at the end of August, and I've moved from children to psychiatric patients in one fell swoop, which admittedly was a big transition, but I think perhaps an even bigger transition was going from having one coworker, who was also my boss, to having forty-or-so coworkers in a given shift-- and at least four of them at any given time, are my boss(es)/supervisor(s). So, the first month of my employment, I was constantly introducing/being forced to introduce myself to people, sometimes more than once, you know, because nobody remembers a shy poodle the first time they meet her. Introductions for me are painful, because I can smell people sizing me up, and I can smell their judgments. And they can, I'm sure, smell my fear, emanating from my impossibly large pores. I am petrified of saying the wrong thing, or getting tongue-tied, or looking at someone's breasts, or having a booger dangling or an eye twitch or sneezing in someone's face or saying something inappropriate, or racist, or patently inaccurate, like, "Hey, did you know that the world is flat-- just like Pam Anderson's chest?"

For the first little bit of time that I know you, I am painfully, awkwardly, incomparably shy, and careful not to offend, or single myself out, or draw attention to myself with some sort of bizarre comment or statement-- unlike the ones I make here, um, every day. So, imagine my consternation when, in the employee parking lot on Friday, I observed a condom, filled with I don't know what, attached to the antenna of Bob, the maintenance man's, Chevrolet Equinox.

"Oh my God," I said, looking around for, you know, somebody else to see it so they would have to go tell Bob that there was a moog-filled condom tied to his car antenna. Only, there wasn't anybody else around which, of course, meant that I was going to have to go do it myself.

Now, Bob is an older man, maybe in his mid-sixties. He wears hearing aids. Immediately, I started obsessing.

"What am I going to say? He's going to think I'm nuts. Worse-- he's going to think I put it there as some kind of sick practical joke. What if he doesn't hear me right? What if he hears, 'Bob, I've got a condom for your Aunt Fanny.' and he punches me in the face?"

Well, I found Bob cleaning up the activity room on the Acute Unit. I took a deep breath and walked up to him, as calmly as I could. He was mopping the floor, and I tapped him on the shoulder. He turned to face me and I wrinkled up my brow and scrunched up my eyebrows as if I was about to give him news of a freshly deceased kin.

"Um, Bob-- you drive a Chevy Equinox, right?"

"Yes," he said, craning his neck so he could hear the punchline better.

"Well, there's, um, what I believe is a... a... condom, um, filled with-- uh, anyway, it's, it's actually tied to your, um, your antenna."

Pause. I waited for him to hit me in the face. Instead he looked thoughtful for a moment until he replied,

"Humpf. That's the second one this week. Thanks, fella."

Well, Sour Some Pickles and Elect Some Dickholes, It's... DEAR APRON!

In celebration of democracy, in celebration of demockracy, in celebration of tea parties and Halloween parties and political parties, and dress-up-your-dog-like-a-fairy parties, and dress-your-fairy-up-like-a-dog parties, let's put the party firmly in our pants, where it goddamn well belongs, and shake it till we break it with another incest-friendly edition of...

DEAR APRON:

A male cousin sent me an invitation to his wedding. I have met his fiancee a few times at family reunions and weddings, and she seems very sweet. The problem is my cousin sexually abused me for many years when I was younger. I have no desire to attend his wedding.

Am I obligated to send a card or a gift? I don't want his fiancee to think I don't like her, but it makes me sick to think of celebrating his marriage after what he did. What do I say when other family members ask why I'm not going? Am I obligated to tell her what he did? -- NEEDS TO KNOW IN TEXAS

DEAR NEEDS TO KNOW:

Well, I have to say: big time props for you. This is the first wedding etiquette letter I've ever answered that is even remotely interesting.

I mean, usually they're banal and insipid whinings about how Aunt Frieda doesn't get along with my second nephew twice removed by cystectomy, but we've already made the seating chart and Aunt Flo's dripping all over the damask tablecloths and the officiant never told us how much he charges and we need a Gluten free alternative for Cousin Bethesda because she has several of those made-up diseases.

Thank you for writing a letter with some actual balls. Oh, I'm sorry-- is it not right to say the word "balls" to someone who was molested by his male cousin? You should just send him a giftcard to Target.

DEAR APRON:

I could never figure out why "Margaret," my wife of 20 years, married me. After our wedding she tried to give me an image makeover. She'd buy me clothes I left hanging in the closet. She'd contradict and correct me in public. In general, she'd find fault with almost everything I did. She put me down often, and if I reacted, she would either claim it wasn't what she meant to say or tell me, "You do it, too." I finally gave up and left her.

Margaret has an excellent reputation, so people try to pry into why I left her. When I tell them I won't bad-mouth her, they tell me she says plenty about me. My response is, "Then you know all there is to know, don't you?"

Two women close to my age, plus one college-age girl, are trying to pursue me. I'm afraid if I don't leave this area, Margaret will allege that I left her for one of them.

Your thoughts, please. -- KEEPING MUM IN CLEVELAND

DEAR KEEPING MUM:

My thoughts? Why, I'm so glad you asked.

My thoughts right now are centering around a foursome, obviously. And, co-starring a smooth, nubile, chestnut-haired, firm-breasted college-age girl, combined with some sexually educated and assuredly voracious middle-aged women-- it would most likely be a foursome that would require some significant quantities of Saran Wrap, a deck of playing cards, two-and-half quarts of Nutella, and several feet of bungee cord.

Oh, and Margaret's a fucked cunt. Next?

DEAR APRON:

My husband and I have been together for two years, and he still doesn't know my mother's last name (it's different from my maiden name), nor does he know the names of all of my siblings. He doesn't think it's a big deal. What is your opinion?
-- NAME GAME IN KNOXVILLE, TENN.

DEAR NAME GAME:

I'm sorry-- he doesn't remember the names of your mother and your siblings, or he doesn't know them?

If he doesn't remember them, then I think he needs a battery of psychiatric tests to rule out early-onset dementia.

If he doesn't know them, then you should tell him what their names are and stop concealing information from him, you fucked cunt.

Your name wouldn't happen to be "Margaret," would it?

DEAR APRON:

My husband, "Lance," is making a career change and has been offered a great opportunity. He is very excited about it. Because his experience in this new field is minimal, Lance asked for letters of recommendation from some professionals who are familiar with his work. He was hoping the letters would provide insight into his abilities that his resume lacks at this early stage.

The problem? All three of the letters he has received contain glaring mistakes. They are all from college professors and on letterhead stationery. While they do offer glowing recommendations, one letter omitted an important word in a sentence, another misused a common word, and the third refers to Lance as "Ms."

I told Lance the letters do not reflect negatively on him because he didn't write them. But he thinks they will give the impression he associates with sub-par representatives of the field. He refuses to ask for new letters because he doesn't want to offend the writers by pointing out the errors. Should Lance use these letters? -- STUMPED IN TALLAHASSEE

DEER STUMPT:

Im sorry tht Vince is havin suck a tuf time wit this rekomendashin shit.. i here hes a lazee fag, so u shud just be happe that thes pepl are wiling to lye abowt him and say hes a gud wrker and doesnt snif sharpies in the suplie closit.

Who Never Learned to Sing

Tonight, at a small brick-and-mortar music store (the last of a dying breed) in my neighborhood, it will be a game of "Spot the Faker" for bemused citizens sitting in folding chairs as the principals in a local production of Gilbert & Sullivan's Iolanthe will sing selections from the operetta as part of a First Friday event.

(Hint: I'm the faker. The tall, skinny one with the glasses and the airplane hangar-proportioned proboscis.)

See, I never learned to sing. Strangely enough, in middle school, you could find me in the chorus. Stranger still, in high school, I was in musicals. But the weirdness didn't reach its height until two years after college ended, when I auditioned for my first Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, and audition committee heads turned to each other in stupification as I crisply and excitedly sang "When I Was a Lad," the patter song from H.M.S. Pinafore, (a song I had been singing in the shower for years) memorized, with silly little homespun choreography.

And here we are, six years later, seven operettas later. One more under the belt. They only wrote fourteen together, as all particularly proper 'peretta pedants know.

Yeomen of the Guard
Patience
H.M.S. Pinafore
Ruddigore
Pirates of Penzance
The Sorcerer
Iolanthe

I'm halfway home.

And I'm as scared to death as ever, because I never learned to sing.

I barely learned how to read music. When I was in first grade, our overweight and impossibly coiffed and painted music teacher did a note recognition exercise with us. If she held up a drawing of a quarter note, you got down on your knees. A rest, you sat down, Indian-Style. A whole note, you stood up with arms outstretched, and so on. As we got better at recognizing the funny symbols, my music teacher sped up the game, frantically holding up one card, then another, all of us sitting and standing like it was some sort of crystal meth-infused, gleeful church service for kids. The glee came to an abrupt halt when my ankle snapped after we were shown a rest and I sat down too quickly, and too awkwardly.

And so I became the first child to break his ankle in music class. Of course.

It's a cute story, sure, though it was embarrassing for a while, especially during the b'pimpled era, but I think it speaks rather uncomfortable volumes about my relationship with music, but specifically singing. I never quite stood up straight again, and I don't mean that literally, although I do have scoliosis, as is required by Jewish law. When I sing before an audience, there is always something being held back, there is always a reticence, something that is not quite sure it's supposed to come out, or wants to. And so I hide behind the comic G&S roles-- those funny, silly patter roles that were never written for operatic singers, real singers. They're written for a "comic actor who can sing," in the words of Sullivan himself, as opposed to the more lyric roles for the romantic leads and the heavies, people who must sing first, and act second.

And I hide pretty well, even though, at least in my own mind, I out myself every time I open my mouth. Although, to be honest, there's always a piece of me that's waiting for my other ankle to snap out from under me every time I sing and prance about a stage.

It's a shame, really, because I never get to enjoy what I do. Never. It's also a shame because I think my continued participation in these shows, the portrayal of characters traditionally inhabited by seasoned, veteran, trained performers, smacks a little bit of disrespect for the material I love so much-- the joyous and jocular, sonorous and sweet, precious and precocious material of two obstinate Victorian gentlemen who should have been sainted-- not just knighted-- just for staying together as long as they did. But I mean no disrespect, Sir William & Sir Arthur. Like an altar boy, I just want to celebrate you through the only means you handed down to me. And I've been lucky enough not to be found out yet.

Shhh-- don't tell. Anyway, no time for that now. As Gilbert said, "I have a song to sing, O."

If I Drank...

Most of you know, I think, that I am a teetotaler. It's not especially something that I wear upon my sleeve (well, except when I'm writing about it, or indignantly refusing an offer of alcohol by saying, with nose gallantly upturned, "Well, I don't drink!") but, at 30 years old, it does come up quite a bit. Like, at rehearsal last week, when one of the choristers was turning 21 and excitedly approached me to ask for my input on what ought to be her "first legal drink?"

"Um..." I hemmed, searching through the dusty card catalog in my brain that contained references to alcoholic drinks I have heard in movies, television shows, and in eavesdropped conversations with others who libate, "a Cosmopolitan?"

A woman with whom I worked ten years ago used to drink Cosmopolitans, and she introduced mention of this drink into almost every conversation we had, so it's understandable that it's the first "drink concoction" that would leap into my brain. This woman also told me, with great enthusiasm, that she enjoyed pleasuring herself to the sounds of Frank Sinatra's "My Way" whilst utilizing a battery powered device she referred to as "The Bullfrog."

I sometimes think about what I'd be like if I drank. I'd certainly be less, well, unique, and I suspect that's not an altogether small part of why I consistently abstain, because it's now a part of my personality, one of the bits-and-pieces that makes me me. Haha-- that looks funny-- "me me."

ME ME ME ME! LA LA LA LA! YOU YOU YOU YOU! FA SO LA TI DO!

Which brings me quite handsomely to my second thought about me knocking back a few: I suspect that my already dubious sense of humor would probably take a rather suicidal nosedive. Funny people (I'm funny, right?) who don't drink have to go through their lives being routinely accosted by drinkers who believe that we will "be so much fuckin' funnier drunk" and are often told, "Oh, man, I would LOVE to see you drunk! You'd be SO. FUNNY!" Well, I'm not so sure about that. I had always thought that humor was the result of carefully-constructed word-choices and/or unwitting sock + trouser combinations, and I don't know if I could muster the synaptic control to be funny if I were intoxicated. I would most likely be way too encumbered by feelings of guilt and obsessive fears that I could hear my liver changing shape inside me to be very witty.

Of course, nobody really knows what a non-drinker would be like as a drinker. Being a world-renowned featherweight, I suspect the first and most consistent thing I would be is passed the fuck out. That said, it is very possible that I would enjoy drinking if that is the usual result for someone my weight. I do love being seepie-bye.

What I can say with pretty cinder-block-like certainty is that, if I started drinking....

* I would pee everywhere.

Because alcohol lowers your inhibitions, your respect for law, order, civility, and public spaces, and increases your urge to urinate, I would totally whizz on your garden gnome's face.

* I would get arrested.

See above.

* I would not hit the Four Loko.

Not just because it's dangerous, expensive, trendy, and just fucking stupid, but because watermelon-flavored things never, EVER taste like actual watermelon.

* I would only drink drinks that require the obligatory donning of a smoking jacket.

Because, really, that would be, like, my goddamned alcoholic's uniform.

What's yours?

* I would go absolutely shitbroke buying all the high-quality paraphernalia.

Do you have any concept of just how much there is to BUY when you're a drinker?

And I LOVE to buy things!

If you're an insufferable fop, there's hand-engraved sterling hip flasks and delicate, cut-glass punch-bowl sets from the Victorian era, if you're an acne-ridden, knuckle-walking frat bra, there's beer towers with ice chambers and inflatable beer pong racks (yes, I looked this up: http://www.drinkinginovations.com/) and, if you're just a run-of-the-mill, semi-well-off middle-aged schmuck in the suburbs, there's a whole section of "Crate & Barrel's" website devoted to alcoholiania. Do you doubt me? Here's the subset of menu options stemming from "DRINKWARE":

Wine glasses
Champagne flutes
Beer & drinking glasses
Margarita glasses
Cordial glasses
Acrylic glasses (What, we're drinking acrylic now? Four Loko's got competition...)
Bar accessories
Pitchers and decanters ...and, finally and mysteriously,
Coffee mugs (I guess you need special ones for Irish Coffee)

* I'd drink to your health

Which, if you think about it, is pretty funny. So is, "Bottoms Up," if you're emotionally twelve years old. Or drunk.

Off Track

I try.

My God, do I try.

But, gone are the days when you get an "A" for effort. Or even an "E."

I don't deal well with ineptitude, especially my own, of which there is an abundance. Everywhere I look, there are failures positively grafittied with my own personal tag. Some of these blunders are small and rather innocuous, some of them are, well, larger. This house is a testament to my incompetence, my attempts at manliness and homeownerhood. For almost two years now, I have been striving against my Jewishness in a futile attempt to subvert every stereotype about men of my particular faith:

We're just no good at putting things together, or taking things apart, or building things, or creating things other than screenplays.

My maternal grandfather and my father locked horns very early in their relationship. My grandfather had been attempting to subvert our religion one day in 1973 by putting together a table. Of course, I wasn't there to see it, but I can easily visualize him, in his brown plastic eyeglasses, rumpled dress-shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pack of Marlboros showing through the thin fabric of the breast pocket, his gray suit trousers, argyle socks and Florsheims, standing in the living room with his hands on his hips, staring vacantly at a pile of wood and hardware, and an instruction manual on the carpet that might as well have been written in Farsi.

I can see it, plain as day. Because, now, I've been there.

He called my father, in a state of extreme frustration, no doubt, because men in my family, on both sides, do not ask for help. My father came in and, don't you know, he didn't just help, he put the table together in under fifteen minutes. Well, my grandfather freaked. He didn't want a magician, and he couldn't have known back then that he'd accidentally called one, he wanted someone with whom to commiserate-- an equal, not a better-- someone with whom he could share frustration, swears, sweat and, eventually, after maybe an hour or two, victory.

This was not a shared victory, and my grandfather knew it. It was a victory won by some hairy Middle Easterner with a two-foot-tall Jew-fro who was having sex with his daughter. And, way past his genteel, middle-class breaking point, poor Zayda popped a gasket. He didn't speak to my father again for three weeks.

While I had hoped that my father's brute strength and modicum of mechanical competence would be passed down to me, it seems that I have inherited only the ability to recognize my own bumbling nature, and I am truly Zayda's grandson. Yesterday was Tuesday, my day off that I somehow always manage to squander, and I decided that yesterday was going to be the day I was going to re-hang our louvered sliding closet door the right way (the previous owners of the house had hung it upsidedown, signaling that I'm not the only domestic retard in the world).

After catching my finger, twice, in the track and shouting several unfriendly words, I managed to get the door off the track.

[Sidebar: whoever invented louvered sliding doors should be disinterred and have his coffin and bones blowtorched.]

The pegs which go into the slots were driven into the door so hard that I had to use at least three tools to pry them out and switch them. In the middle of this process, I left the door lying on the bedroom floor so I could meet my wife for lunch at her work. By the time I came back, I was disoriented and the dogs kept running through my legs and generally getting on my wick but, wouldn't you know it, I got those pegs back in the door and, after catching my finger between the door and the track yet again, I re-hung the door.

Exactly.

The.

Same.

Way.

It.

Was.

Before.

That is to say, upsidedown, again. I stood there for a while, looking at my handiwork. I had my hands on my hips, corduroy trousers, beige socks, beige shirt, brown v-neck sweater, plastic eyeglasses, and I was tempted to scream, to laugh, to say "fuck it" and go watch some television or look at some porn or call someone, anyone, more competent and more heroic than I. More than that, I wanted to call Zayda and tell him, right at that moment, that I loved him more than I ever did when he was alive. More than any of us did.

If You Don't Vote Today....

....President Obama isn't going to like you anymore.

He pretty much told me so in a big, glossy oversized postcard he sent to my house on Saturday.

Because I want President Obama to like me (I don't have many black friends), I'm going to try my damndest to vote on Tuesday. Because I'm serious about him liking me, I'm voting Democratic. I'm also voting that way because I think they're the lesser of two bastards.

There's been a great effort to shame and guilt us Democrats, and people who vote that way because they want one more black friend in their corner ("Well, some of my best friends are black!") to shame and guilt us into voting, to try to make the mid-term elections as sexy as the real-deal was two years ago.

But we know that this isn't sexy. But we're going to vote anyway, because John Stewart told us to. And, when that Jewish man says "Jump," we ask, "With our clothes on?" Funny, when this Jewish man tells people to jump, they're never unclothed. And they just look at me funny.

I know a lot of you are reading this and are kind of on the fence about whether or not you're going to get out there and cock the vote or whatever they're calling it. Well, if I can sway you in the appropriate direction, I'm going to try, because I want you to know that...

...if you don't vote today:

* I'm not going to talk to you anymore. And if you think there's someone out there who's more, um, stimulating than your dear old Apron, well, you'd just better think again, Buster Brown.

* your mom's going to get herpes of the head, Zipper-Lips Syndrome (don't bother to Web MD it, it's real) and cloth tongue.

* everyone in New Hampshire will look at their license plates and will choose the latter.

* you will no longer get A&E-- so, say goodbye to "Intervention" and "Hoarders" and all that other good shit. Fuckin' forget about it-- no more for you, you democracy-hating shitdog.

* for every Democratic seat lost, an angel will get assraped with a frozen garden hose while being forced to eat her own wings.

* your teeth will be ripped out by a Ukranian dental student with acne and replaced with "After 8 Mints."

* your skin will fall off.

* sex will forever feel like taking a pre-Calculus examination.

* your friends will look at you and treat you as if you just bought a puppy from a pet store.

* the Starbucks barista with the cute B-cups and nose-ring will never flirt with you again.

* well, okay, she still will, but you'll now be forever cursed with the awareness that it's just to get tips.

* all ambient winds above two mph will smell like a mixture of semen, kale farts, and an Italian olympic swim team's ladies' locker room.

* you will no longer be welcomed here without a doctor's note and an autographed Fredericks of Hollywood catalog.

Jesus-- that shit is nasty. I can't believe that used to do it for me at 14.

The One With the Waggily Tail

When people don't know what to talk about with other people, they tend talk about their dogs, because it's slightly more interesting than talking about the weather, and it's definitely less provocative than talking about the latest technological advances in clitoral-stim devices, and it's usually more entertaining than talking about their cats. Unless the cats in question are consuming Christmas tinsel and/or string that then comes out of the cat's asshole.

So, people, I've noticed, talk about their dogs-- especially people at work. One psych tech with whom I work was recently bellyaching his misfortune at getting a "fucked up" dog from a shelter. The dog routinely runs, at full tilt, until he collides head-first with the wall, spins around in circles until it throws up and is thought to be, generally speaking, disordered in the brain department.

Spiking off this discussion, one of the nurses on duty approached me with her feelings of guilt that she had purchased a puppy recently from *gasp!* a pet store. She said that she agonized over the decision, because she knew it was "morally wrong" and that she "wouldn't be able to look in the mirror again" after purchasing the dog, but, as she drove away from the store, she called her friend to ask her what should she do, because she had fallen so desperately in love with this one puppy.

"Turn your car around," the friend said, "go back there, and get that goddamned dog."

And the nurse in question did just that, and she loves the dog to pieces.

"Seven hundred dollars later," she said to me, rolling her eyes. Another one of her friends, upon hearing that this nurse had purchased a dog at a *gasp!* pet store, stopped speaking to her.

And this, loves, is where my blog post for today comes in.

I have my opinions about pet stores, and the people and entities who supply pet stores with their, ahem, products. I have my opinions as a self-righteous, two-time "rescuer" of dogs from unpleasant situations. I have my opinions, and you know more than most that I am not shy when it comes to expressing them, but, when our opinions on issues get in the way of our friendships, well, then that is just very, very sad. You can have your beliefs, you can have your thoughts, you can have your views of how the world ought to be, and how others should behave, but try to have a little perspective with your lemon bread, you know?

Pet stores are not evil, the people who purchase pets as opposed to adopting them are not the devil incarnate, and there are breeders who operate responsibly, within the limits of the law, and do their best to respect the dignity of puppy life.

So. There.

Bark.