City on a Hill

So I'm back. Vacation was good. Yeah, kids are... you know... good. I... well, lots of shit happened. Fuck the preamble. Let's get vulnerable.

I decided to take the kids to San Francisco for vacation. There are several reasons for this: 1) It's a driveable distance from me. Or at least it appears so on paper. Seven-to-ten hours in a car with three sweaty boy-children turns meters into miles and miles into moonshots. All of this, the length of our nation's loveliest state, was lost on them in favor of tiny 3"x4" screens of Pokémon fighting Marios or some shit. AND YET they still found a way to annoy the fuck out of each other and, as collateral damage, me for just about the duration of both rides, up and back. Normally I embrace the distracting technology parents and educators disdain. I was promised soporifics and borderline catatonia from video games and I got neither. How can you be entirely disengaged AND joined in the most violent of verbal slanging matches at the exact same time? I think TV psychologists have got it all wrong. I think kids today might actually be multitasking social geniuses the like of which we have never been burdened to see.

2) I was also promised a full court recruitment of my kids by the Gay Community. I have no daughters, so I'm hoping at some point to convince one of my boys to turn out to be a homosexual. I like my kids, but what I've always really wanted was a son-in-law. Someone to make passive-aggresive comments about at Awkward Christmas. Someone desperate for my approval and attention, knowing full well it will always be reserved for the actual children of my loins, but still determined to try and try and try to impress me in that grasping, quixotic dance of failure only sons-in-law can really fully express. But no, no recruitment. Not a sniff. Every time we saw a couple of dudes holding hands I would nudge my oldest boy into them "accidentally" on the outside chance The Gay might actually be contagious, but still nothing. Not a single One Direction poster in his room. Ah well. I'm not out of options. I guess it's back to the Boy Scouts.

So the driving thing was part of a clever strategy to save myself money on this vacation. Where the plan fell down, I realize in retrospect, was driving to one of the top five most expensive locations in the world. San Francisco is not cheap. It can be, but I'm too hairy to be a twink but not quite enough to be a bear. I'm a tweener. I'm doomed to a life where I have to buy my own appletinis.

Some other shit happened, but I'm not ready to go all the way there yet. When I said "let's get vulnerable," I meant in relative terms. I was looking at a mostly blank page at the time. This is way more revealing than that was.

The only other thing happening is that I have a dog again. But only temporarily. See, I had two, the one died and the other I sent to live with the ex-wife. She has another dog, a bigger yard and a better premium cable channel package, so it seemed like the humane thing to do. Only she went away on vacation with the kids (ha, she'll fucking see) and the dog I gave her--the healthy dog I gave her--came down with horrible kennel cough and can't be boarded. So he's here now. I followed up my vacation with alone time in my big empty house wiping up little puddles of noisily-achieved dog phlegm. I don't know how your week is going, but I fucking win.

I'm going back to last week's post to watch the bunny video again. There is lightness in the world. Thank God we have the interwebs to help us find it.