Laid-Off Dad

#OccupyCraw!

I'm not sure why, but it disquiets me to see people already decorating their Christmas trees. It seems like such a big rush, you know? Can't the Thanksgiving carcass be cold for a few days, at least until it's actually December? I know it's the Holiday Season, and I'm as excited as anyone (especially if that anyone is planning to spend Christmas elsewhere with his family, so there really isn't a point to having a tree at all in his own house, when you think about it). But can't we have some kind of Festivus Interrregnum when it's sort of nothing for a few days?

These are the sorts of things that lodge in my craw when it's 11:45pm, my sons have celebrated their reunion after hanging out separately all day by wrestling constantly, and I need to get a blog post up before midnight. And while we're at it, why do all Mumford & Sons songs sound so much like so many other Mumford & Sons songs do? I bet those guys wait a week or so after Thanksgiving to put up their Christmas trees. They could probably use the time to write another very similar-sounding song.

We knew the risks

Steely Dan's "Black Friday" references the small town of Muswellbrook in New South Wales, Australia. Donald Fagen says he chose that lyric because the town looked to be at the exact antipodal point from where they were at the time.

That Black Friday is much on my mind on this Black Friday, as my flight from LaGuardia has been delayed four hours (so far) because there's a light on the plane that won't light on one side. If you've ever spent any time in the filthy Habitrail that is Terminal B, you'd also find yourself wishing you were in the exact opposite place.

Ten miles and a world away

In this, the week of the Opposite, it's been a joyfully disorienting couple of days at the extremes. Yesterday, we were stocking canned goods in a ruined church gymnasium and handing blankets to people who won't have heat or electricity for months. And today, I had my first non-homemade Thanksgiving at a posh eatery on the Upper East Side.

All of which makes me feel very thankful to fall somewhere in the middle.

This has been my best year since the divorce, since the (most recent) layoff, since I'd gotten used to the idea that my life had peaked long ago.

Today I celebrated how don't feel like that anymore. If the Mayans are right, I'm OK with it. I'm going out on top.

#OccupySandy

This will be a quick one, because I'm currently in the back of a van full of diapers headed for the Rockaways. I hooked up with an Occupy Sandy crew that will drop off these supplies and work the rest of the day at a distribution hub.

A lot of the supplies we're bringing came as part of a massive shipment from Occupy Sandy's "wedding" registry, where you can find what's needed and send it off to these devastated parts with a few clicks.

It's always gratifying when genius blossoms to fend off squalor.

Other than else

Have you ever had a stretch when you started doubting your instincts? It's tough enough to work for someone and be subject to decisions that you don't trust or believe. And it's more maddening when that boss is also you, and you're thinking of staging an OccupyYou movement to get you fired.

This morning, after I flew into New York at the crack of early, I found myself in front of the Seinfeld diner around Columbia right around omelet o'clock.

This was the chance to stage my very own Opposite Day, right down to the Official Costanza Opposite Meal: Chicken salad on untoasted rye, with a cup of tea!

This is my religion ... for the next few days. I even thought of not blogging, which would be the opposite of blogging, but then I thought that this blogging is the opposite of all the not-blogging I've been doing lately. And then my brain got locked into one of those infinite For/Next loops that make my head hurt.

There is surely no telling what can happen from this.

A night with the Wimpourage

I am acclimated to non-urban life. I now expect to find parking wherever I need to go. When I'm out with the kids, I don't need to hover over them so intently. And events are hardly ever sold out.

I say "hardly" because this absolutely does not apply to sporting events, where the faithful flock to the various stadia like so many maize-and-blue druids. But for most other things, attendance is a piece of cake. I can leave my house 15 minutes before a movie starts (as opposed to in New York, when you have pay a $2 service charge to reserve a seat for a film that will be released after the next Olympics).

You can imagine my shock (as well as my sudden flashback to more frenzied, crowded time) when we got to the book store on Saturday and was told there was no more room at the "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" Wimpapalooza.

The bourbon has landed

The crucial element of our Big Bourbonerama last weekend was my friend Oleg, who agreed to drive the six hours to Louisville while the rest of us flew. Sadly, if you're headed someplace with the specific purpose of acquiring lots of liquids in 750ml containers, you can't bring anything back by air. This is why the terrorists have already won.

Oleg is from St. Petersburg, Russia, and despite several years in the United States, he retains a rather thick accent. And after we packed his hatchback with our precious cargo and headed to the airport, the other three of us came to the swift, unanimous conclusion that we'd never see him again. He was an ingenious Putin operative who had launched his diabolical plan years ago by:

• getting a Ph.D. in astrophysics;
• earning a tenured position at U of M;
• teaching there six years to establish trust;
• suggesting a trip to the Birthplace of the Bourbonic Plague to three susceptible rubes;
• making up some crazy lie about having to present a paper at the University of Indiana, so he'd have to drive to and from anyway;
• (yada yada yada);
• driving off into the sunset with three grand worth of top-shelf booze, cackling like a Russian hyena.

After all that whistling past the graveyard, he and our 29 babies made it home safe and sound, and when he posted a picture to his Picasa account, it felt just like I was gazing through the glass in the maternity ward--except I got to take home more than one.

The final transfer occurred today, and before we carted it all off our separate ways, we took a team photo:

It's going to be fun winter.

A bug's life

Today began crappily, when I woke up unable to raise my left arm above shoulder level. There hadn't been any trauma; an old man just slept funny and would spend the day wincing his way through mundane tasks.

Later on, I was rubbing my shoulder rinkside during TwoBert's skating lesson, marveling at how agile and lean and he's become. I brought out my phone and flipped through old photos of his toothless baby face with long-gone blond hair, and before long I'd started into a classic lamentation spiral about the swift passage of time. And when the kids started their open skate, someone cranked up "Landslide" on the PA system.

"Children get older / I'm getting older, too."

Really, Universe? Of all the songs you could have chosen to pump up 40 kids born in the 21st century, you come up with a Lite-FM ditty that was produced THREE FORMATS AGO?

On the way home from the rink, I stopped by the bookstore where Jeff Kinney is signing his latest "Wimpy" effort tomorrow. TwoBert has latched onto them pretty hard lately and would have been really excited to meet him -- if the event hadn't been sold out.

The Three French Men rode all this out with "Rango" and a foothill of popcorn, and after that we were all into sticking our LEGO pistols in our pajama waistbands and putting away their milk one slug at a time. At some point in a boy's life, he needs to know the best time to say, "Leave the bottle."

You know how the saying goes. "Some days you're the windshield, some days you ain't."

Gold minus one

Remember that episode of Mad Men, when Roger Sterling's daughter got married on Nov. 23, 1963, the day after JFK was assassinated? That storyline has always stuck with me, because it almost happened in real life to my parents (seen here performing their nightly pre-meal snake-charming ritual):

After my folks got engaged, the two families perused their calendars for the right Saturday for the wedding, and the initial pass saw nothing but conflicts. Negotiations lingered on until, my mother says, she said Enough Already and decided randomly that HitchDay would be Nov. 16.

She could just as easily have chosen the 23rd. But as events played out, my parents were somehow spared the joyless experience of marrying the day after your president is killed. Instead, they were told by a worker at their hotel in the Caribbean, and got to spend the rest of their honeymoon wondering what kind of America was waiting for them when they returned.

One of my enduring fantasies is to go back in time and meet my parents when they were young adults, Back to the Future-Style. To see what they were like when they first got together, and how freaked out they must have been when some stranger on a beach told them their home was in turmoil.

It's also ironic to think that, on the show, the assassination is the life-jarring event that triggers the Drapers' divorce. So if my folks' wedding had been a week later, it stands to reason that one of them could have had a Massive Whoa Moment and called the whole thing off. 

I often think too much about things.

Happy 49th, Mom and Dad. I can't fathom how you did it, but I also can't fathom how people charm snakes. Maybe they're related somehow.

Halfway through, the 'stache debut

We've arrived at the midpoint of NaBloPoMovember 2012, and after 15 days of Utter Follicular Neglect, I've managed to come up with this:

The inspirational elements are pretty basic, because one of my first priorities was to shave off all the gray bits. From there, a little Guy Fawkes emerged. But mostly, it's inspired by ferocious French taunting.

As a bonus (and evidenced by the face on the right), I can make it look like a "T for TwoBert." Who, because of this, will undoubtedly launch a whole lot of French taunting at his older brother.

This is my third go-round with Movember (you can read about Years One and Two), and it's been gratifying to see the funds and awareness increase so dramatically. In 2010, I had to explain my mustache to almost everyone who commented on it; now, mustaches are almost as commonly expected in November as are N.Y. Giants losses.

If you're inclined and able, I'd be grateful if you'd donate whatever you can to the Dad 2.0 Summit / NYC Dads Group team to help promote awareness of and research into curing prostate and testicular cancers. All funds go to LiveStrong and the Prostate Cancer Foundation.

With luck, in the future there will be less opportunity to make castanets out of our testicles, already.