Nonpersistent Memory

Well, this should have been composed weeks ago and posted at midnight, but age and circumstance are not my friends right now. Happy birthday to the official Best Kid Evar. May the road rise to meet you, Planet.

Fuck I'm old.

Happy Birthday, Kid

Yaddas. If I do one post a year (and I'm frightfully close to that), this will be it.

Happiest of birthdays to the coolest teacher in central southern big midwestern state. And, forever, the Best Kid EVar.

Fuck I'm old.

Incidental love to yo momma and daddy, while I'm here.

Old Sin

You will have noticed that this is not really a blog any more. It's an occasional postcard. Look, here's some art:

And well you might wonder, but as it happens, it's as good a symbol of why I'm sending a postcard today as any. You see, 30 years ago today, I stood one person away from the artist as she married this guy, who was the one person standing between us. There are only a few things I remember about that day, one of which is that I was already getting a little chunky and my suit was too tight. I remember the venue, because it was their house, and I remember some tidbits about other people in attendance because big social events for other people are always fraught with other other people, but I'm damned if I can remember who my date was.

Nah, I remember her too. Really, really bad choice, as it happened, and it took the artist a while to forgive me for it, a stance I found reasonable then, and now find unassailably reasonable. But forgive she did, and with a whole heart, because if she didn't, that art up there wouldn't be hanging on my dining room wall. So thanks for that, Earthgirl, and thanks even more for giving me the chance for you to become a beloved, too, after such a wretched twentysomething start.

Happy 30th anniversary, beloveds. Long strange trip and all that. For you, for us, for all. In March, I wrote about constants in my life, bedrocks of my creed. Y'all made one; y'all are one, individually and collectively. My wish for you is, always, to have the free to hike together. See you for the really weird thing soon.

The Post I Don't Screw Up Any More

Times change, old truths skate heartbreakingly and maddeningly close to less true, you get caught in a landslide, &c. One of the few constants I rely on is:

Yes, she really grew up to say that. There are witnesses and shit.  

Planet is a mind-blowing constant, to be sure. While, as I hope I've conveyed, I actually do love my children, despite one of them being the life's joy and labor that is Bam and the other being a parasite lodged in my central nervous system so deeply that Picard and Riker may never blast it out, Planet still holds her title righteously. Her family line is as my own, and grounds me maybe more deeply, given that my family line is best remembered for running at each other with scissors in one hand and Ba'al knows what in the other (scotch, guilt, recriminations, blue crabs, and more scissors are all well-established historical traditions there).

25. Fucking. Years. Old. She was the first baby whose scrunched-up little face I looked at while thinking, "What the fuck is the big deal? Are all babies this scrunched-up and freaky looking? Christ, I hope she gets over that."

She did, of course. Our Planet is a beautiful and bright and kind young woman, a newly frocked teacher (like her mama and her grandparents before her), and in a development that I will intellectually accept in the nick of time, an incipient bride (it took me a little while, because I vowed--25 years ago today, of course--to sit vigil on this kid's doorstep with a shotgun to keep her from the depredations of boys, a step that ultimately proved unnecessary).

Happy Birthday, beloved Planet, Best Kid Evar. Yes, I'm working on it, I promise. Soon.

Late addendum: I queued this post a few days ago, and it's still queued to go in a couple of hours, because as Ba'al is my witness, I'm never screwing up this post again. In the interim, it has developed that we are scheduled to get between 4 and 9,324 inches of snow between now (about 10 PM on the 20th) and the end of Planet's birthday. The 21st of freaking March. South of the Mason-Dixon line. While I'm annoyed that I will be shut in with my wife and the aforementioned children all day, I can't begrudge that Planet gets a day off for her birthday. Because as I may have mentioned, our baby girl is a for-reals teacher. Teacher.

I No Longer Believe in Math

I say this because it cannot be 24 years ago this evening that I stood on a street corner outside of a now-defunct hospital in the West End and happily smoked a very bad dime-store cigar with BFF to celebrate this person's birth. But the fucking calendar says it's so. And while you know what I say about the calendar, none of us could have believed for a moment how charmed we would be by her life and times, how brilliant and beautiful and kind she would turn out to be, an incalculably greater gift than (as BFF's mom used to note, not unkindly) our generation deserved.

Happy birthday, Planet, beloved. Sorry about the cluster. I try so very hard not to belabor the point, but it is, of course, your dad's fault. Love rules nonetheless.

It is traditional to remind that this child grew up to tell me that "Baby needs a new pair of fucking shoes."

That Snuck Up On Me

Happy birthday, kid. Looking forward to your approaching return to the right state.

It is traditional to remind that this child grew up to tell me that "Baby needs a new pair of fucking shoes."

What the fuck, 22, 23, 24, 48? I lost track. Happy birthday and all the love in the world.

Reaffirming Life To The Tune Of The High Knez' Daughter

I have posted nine times since Planet's last birthday. Three posts concerned progressively more sad milestone deaths. One was about Planet's daddy. One was about another birthday. Three were about sports. And one was my annual post about Bam-Bam and the autism spectrum.

Damn, my range and mindedness have gotten narrow.

Planet is twenty-two years old today. She is, as you know, the official Best Kid Evar of this here blog (though that designation must someday soon, by definition, come to an end as her eligibility expires), and I cannot recall a time when she has seriously asked me for anything of consequence, let alone more or less insisted (and lest I overstate, I must define "insisted" here as "Will you please?"). That has changed, and I was gratified when this beautiful child, this stunningly creative and brilliant young woman, asked me, back before the academic year started, to take a little trip for her at the end of the year.

And so, in fifty-five days I will fly to Ohio, and drive to the campus of a college I attended briefly until the pressure of having to consume alcohol and other drugs forced me to get the fuck out of there and back to familiar surroundings, and I will watch Planet graduate from that little school on a central Ohio hill upon which a drunk old bishop named Philander Chase collapsed back in 1824. leading him to found an institution in a spot where students would not be tempted by drinking and dancing and fucking.

By the way, that last part, about the drinking and dancing and fucking? Total fail. Embarrassing, really.

But not the point. The point is Happy Birthday, Planet, and congratulations on wrapping up an outstanding undergraduate career, and go forth and become the Best Millennial Evar, and enjoy the privilege of being the only fucking young person in the world who doesn't have to get the fuck off of my fucking lawn.

This child grew up to tell me "Baby needs a new pair of fucking shoes." Life doesn't get any more fucking awesome than that, bitchez.

Hey You

Because you're not 21 until I say you're 21, kid:

 

 Because I think it's awesome:

 

 Because not everything can be They Might Be Giants:



Because you know why:



Because this is what happens when you do too many fucking drugs and make sillyass Star Trek allusions:



Yeah, take that, Planet's Daddy.

Okay, fine, go be 21 now. Happies, with all the love ever.

 Uncle Weird

This child grew up to tell me "Baby needs a new pair of fucking shoes." Life doesn't get any more fucking awesome than that, bitchez.

No One Has A Head

Rushed and brief, and thanks to her Daddy for reminding me to pull my self-absorbed head out of my ass long enough to not be a bad faux uncle, and see there (or any previous March 21 here or there) for the pics and vids, but:

Happy 20th birthday, Planet. Best not-actually-related younger person evar. Love always.

Also, and unrelated: Fuck Duke.

Best Kid Evar

Always and forever.

Happy birthday, little Lord lady. Which is all relative and figurative, being as she's taller than I am. Still and all, Happy Fucking Birthday, kid.

Love,
Uncle Weird

Victory!

One of BFF's favorite stories to tell on me is that, years ago--Planet remembers it as being at a Maryland-Duke womens' basketball game, which puts her at about age 12 or 13--I was so deeply disturbed by Planet's stability, equanimity, poise, grace, and general goody-twoshoesedness that I offered her twenty bucks if she'd say "fuck," just once. She's faithfully refused ever since.

Until tonight. A mere three months in the bower of liberal academia has changed our darling Planet profoundly. It'd make your head spin, how fast the little pottymouth said, "Baby needs a new pair of fuckin' shoes."

Tear to my eye, that, yessir. Rock on, Planet.

Things To Say

Not much, but I had thoughts that I had to share. Yesterday was Bam-Bam's 11th birthday, following hard on the heels of Planet's high school graduation, which followed hard on the heels of the weekend from Hell that I circuitously referenced in my last post. Bam-Bam is still awesome, and Planet is so awesome that she's unique in category. She is the sweetest and most unaffected kid I've ever known, and she's going to college at precisely the right place. Looking around at the tramps and punks who graduated with her, I came to realize yet again how lucky I am to be part of her extended family. Congratulations and love, Planet, and see you at the party.

Bam-Bam rocks on, the anchor to which I tether. It's not that Ilse and Databoy are incapable of keeping me from drifting, or that they don't deserve their own satanic attention, but the pull of Bam-Bam is accompanied by its own song, its own weight, its own ferocity. He is also, in his weight class,  the sweetest and most unaffected kid I've ever known, a constancy of the unconditional. His aging confuses me. I am unsettled about his future, his adolescence,  his growth. It's stress in the light of love. I really don't know what the fuck to do about it. Or anything. Except babble.

I have often said that there's always an 80s dance party in my head (unlike BFF, who always has a New Order song in his head, and he's really better off, I think, because the people dancing take up an assload of room and they're thrashing around and shit). I started thinking this morning as I drove to work and realized that I really am a fucking sucker for idiot power pop, to wit:



That's what I got. Next post is the 500th, not sure when it will appear or what will be in it, but probably soon, because Monday next is an obligatory blogging day.

Crap Blogging

I am slowly recovering from the plague to which I referred in my last post. I'm loathe to say I'm recovered, though I am feeling considerably better and my body is not disrupting my life nearly as much as it was when I whined about all the disease vectors in my life uniting to liquefy my digestive tract.

Life advice: the way to rid yourself of an intestinal-tract bug is most emphatically not to get on an airplane two days after onset and take a 500-mile business trip. Just thought I'd let you know I did that science for you. Y'know, in case you were wondering.

I know that you are very happy to read this news, and I'm pleased to report that I'm not even tempted to simply leave this post at a single graf on the state of my bowels. Things happen even while I'm moaning, and many of them cry out for acknowledgment and validation:

-Awesome evening last night at the Plex, where United and the Phunions (TM) played a reserve game that also passed for a US Open Cup match. United won on penalties, having failed to assert a lingering lead after getting the high-school officiating crew to toss a Philly player (he deserved it, as did three Phunions who weren't tossed; we pass no judgment on whether Saint Piotr Nowak deserved to be shown red after Philly scored a tying goal as extra time waned, because we were on the other side of the field and don't know what magic words Saint Piotr said--presumably in pidgin English, as is his wont--to the incompetent boob of a ginger referee who very clearly had a short-man complex).

The Sons of Ben who showed up were fun--I shared smoke breaks with a few of them, a rare pleasure at the Plex, where stormtrooper poe-leece are not usually given to looking the other way over minor infractions--and they were sane, for a limited range of sanity that includes MLS partisans. It was touching that, in defeat, miles from home, they serenaded us with a few bars of "We All Hate Red Bull." It wasn't as much fun as when they were taunting us with "You're Moving To Baltimore" and I replied with "You live in Chester," but still and all, another unifying fan experience that demonstrates that we needn't all be lime-green retard barista-humpers.

Yeah, the game itself pretty much sucked--it looked mostly like an English Sunday pub league, and that may be an insult to pub leagues. But the weather was fantastic (Ilse will tell you her toes froze) and the company was magnificent--Himself, the Hamster, the much-beloved and too-long-unseen Planet, along with Ilse and Databoy, who actually spent long stretches of the game shutting the fuck up.

-On the topic of Planet, I don't recall mentioning this, but she made the right choice and will attend a small liberal arts college that I once half dropped out of (and half got tossed from). I applaud her good sense, good taste, and general sanity. I thought it might be the night that I'd finally start peeling off twenties to reward the kid for a public display of pottymouth, but no such love. I will not abandon my quest, though I suspect that I'll suspend it for our likely next encounter (her high school graduation), out of respect for her mother and her grandparents.

-I may or may not have a week off approaching, depending on how this week's round of congressional taunting and hyperbolizing and blame-shifting and other masturbatory activity turns out. The whole thing is appalling, though a good thing has emerged: Representative Paul Ryan's fiscal year 2012 budget proposal. You wonder why it's a good thing? They finally came out of the closet, for reals. There is no backing away for the Republicans now. Ryan's outlandish rapestand proposal, embraced by certain completely retarded alleged moderates as "courageous," makes it clear that the Republicans are angling for no less than the repeal of all domestic support programs and the total subjugation of the poor to the idea that greater wealth disparity is not only nonproblematic but desirable. The math is clear, and there's no further argument about this. If you support Ryan's proposal and refuse to admit that it's about making the poor more so, you're a lying motherfucker, full stop. And if you can read about Ryan's proposal and continue to believe, for real, that there's no difference in the flavors, then you're a whole lot of things I won't go into, because I have a feeling my BFF is one of those deluded Tinkerbell-lovers, and honestly? I can't even begin to fathom their reasoning here, after months of committed attempts to decipher the sophistry.

-On the shutdown itself, it's more of the same. A minority is asserting itself as the true rulers and insisting that anything short of their way is unacceptable disrespect to a fantasy mandate. Fuck 'em. The appropriate way for this to be handled is thus: punch them in the nose. When they whine, punch them in the nose and tell them that it's their fault that God made you punch them. Repeat as necessary.

What? It's how they're treating you.

Old. Really, Really Old

As her father is prone to say, holyfuck. This day was unfathomable 18 years ago, in the way that 18 years off is, from any given moment in time and space. We were not far past 30 years old, her father and her mother and I; the thought of where she would go to college (three big acceptances so far, with more to come, including my personal favorite) was as distant as the sun. Now? Damn, we're geezing.

Happy fucking 18th birthday, Planet. You remain the best kid evar, though the day when I'll have to adjust the noun is not far off. We'll try to see you sometime before you graduate--you're owed something major in the giftie department, as it happens. Maybe someday soon you can knock your uncle Bromark's punkass down and steal his United ticket?

Things I Learned on the Internets

After a dreadful week of banditry, I finally slumped down at my laptop to catch up on the Intertubes and find out what happened this week. I'm going to be a lazy dick and mostly not use links (it's a quiz; "Landru, I don't fucking care about your blogroll" does, of course, constitute a passing grade), but I'll note that I'm grateful to blackDogred for tips on some several of these bits of learning.

1. Libertarians are fucking retards. There is no respect in which this statement fails. Period.

2. One of my brother's school chums died this week. While the guy did a couple of remarkably dumb things--a (self-inclusive) hallmark of schooldays contemporaries, actually--he was also, it seems, pretty dedicated to the city of Gophershole (I imagine someone needs to be), and it's all pretty fucking sad.

3. The New York Times lies. A lot. I have no idea whether Richard Blumenthal is a good guy or a bad guy, but the Times sure Gorefucked the hell out of him.

4. It appears that my driving has not improved as much as I had thought, and that makes me sad and humble. Take comfort, aggrieved victim; no one will be in the back seat when I drive the exact same route next weekend.

5. As a corollary to number one, Rand Paul is a very special fucking retard who does far more than prove number one.

6. Some people are so fucking sick that they want to reflect on whether Dora the Explorer (who, as a victim of meme exhaustion, I dislike, but who is not actually a horrible thing) is an illegal immigrant. I have had enough. When my horrible, frustrated, anger-induced downfall comes, it will come over this incredibly butt-stupid issue, probably because some sick fucking racist retard has the fucking temerity to tell me how brown people are stealing our country and that doesn't make him a racist. Shut up, you lying motherfuckers.

7. Seriously, libertarians are actually fucking retarded, in a medical sense. They should have guardians appointed for them, be unallowed to manage their own affairs. They're that fucking stupid.

8. Some (likely British) assclown thinks Joe Cole is worth a lengthy blog post. That's really very funny. Quite possibly the funniest thing of the week.

9. Rand Paul is so fucking retarded that he is causing pigs to fly.

10. That's all some pretty grim shit, except for the Joe Cole thing, so I should wrap the list with the upbeat thing I learned from the Intertubes (not that I actually learned it, I'm just well reminded): Planet rocks. Classically. But rocks nonetheless. Might want to leave off with the Debussy, because French things that aren't food don't really do anyone any good. But Mozart loud and proud, Best Kid Evar, and rock on.

Best Kid Evar, Redux

So 17 years ago today, the best kid evar got birthed. Being the best kid evar, she knows which uncle loves her best, which only improves her standing among lesser kids. She's such a sweet kid that she lets her other uncles think they love her best, which is meet and right, because they're actual blood uncles, and that stuff's pretty important in whatever part of Transylvania her daddy's side of the family hails from, so no foul.


Like many wee folk of her time, Planet was borned in a place that is gone. I vividly remember standing out on 24th Street with her daddy on the evening she was born (or the evening after--time has fuzzed memory, though I suspect she was born in the late afternoon and my arrival was a day late). We smoked unfathomably cheap cigars. I didn't know it at the time, but I was about to embark on a 9-year odyssey of...well, I'm not sure what, but I hadn't yet embarked on it. It was the best of times, though any subsequent bumps in the road have been levelled off pretty considerably by her presence in this life. Planet has been one of the most secure grounding influences of my supposed adulthood, followed years later by wee ones of my own (sort of).

My favorite things to do with Planet are: 1) warping her young mind, which is more difficult than it probably sounds, given the unmatchable skill of her daddy and her uncles (and, probably less known to her, her grandpa) in this regard; 2) exposing her to violent athletic events; and 3) boggling that she's actually 17 freaking years old.

I'm looking forward to doing all three in a few weeks (I'll do my best to minimize the boggling), when we embark, with her daddy and Ilse, on a short road trip to the place I was birthed. That's gonna be awesome.

Happy freakin' birthday and infinitely more, Planet, and thanks, as always, for not making me sit on your porch with a shotgun.

Photograph shamelessly stolen from bDr, without permission, without shame, and without fear of reprisal.

Happy Birthday, Planet

Dear Planet,



Isn't it amazing how much an aging Fred Schneider looks like your Uncle Weird?

No, honey, I mean your other Uncle Weird.

Love,
Landru