Feeling Kind Of Ghetto

Did anyone see tonight's episode of Growing Up Gotti?

Love that fookin' show.
Cangetenuffof it, eh, knowwhatimsaayyin?

Sweet Jesus

Mondays are the days that my wife works M.O.D.

M.O.D. is an acronym for Manager On Duty. She works at a hotel down the street and although it's close and really a motel (outside, exposed hallways), it has got its fair share of drama.

Tuesdays are the days my 4-yr.-old son Spencer doesn't go to school.

It's like a one-two punch some days(Sugar Ray Leonard style thank you)... like today when it's cold and raining. A two-day stretch that could really make or break the rest of the week.

My band and their respected families got together (www.thechestpains.com) the day 'fore and all but depleted the alcohol one needs to consume during two-day, cold weather stretches like this.

So I called the lady and asked her to bring home some beer.
The kids were asleep afterall.

She arrived with a 40 ounce'r of Olde English 800.
"Are you kidding?" I asked.
"Or just fucking with me."

"I went to the Buy & Go across the street," she said.
"I didn't see any Miller. It was O.E. or Schlitz malt liquor Bull."

It's been years since I swallowed rot gut malt liquor. But not an usual choice: I once fancied myself as a bit of a malt liquor connesiour. And my college rugby team freshman year was sponsored by Schlitz.

It's like dirty blow. Or shitty fast food.
Gets the job done but you'll pay in the morn'.

Zyrtec Smurtec

Because I have been so fixated over the recent surgery to my groins, I have neglected to take my zyrtec.

I've been taking zyrtec everyday for almost a year due to my chronic sinus problems. I once tried to quit because I had been feeling a lot better and didn't want to continue to pay $17 a month for my daily supply.

A few days later my body itched.

Everywhere.

It wasn't like I had hives because it wasn't one particular spot. And as soon as I'd start to scratch my head, my leg would itch. Then my back, then feet. It was fucking awful. I thought about things: did I recently switch soap? Use a different detergent?

The only thing that added up was that I hadn't taken zyrtec in a while. I did a quick search on Google and lo and behold - there was numerous entries on itching being a symptom of zyrtec withdrawl. Fucking silly isn't it? Cure the symptom, ignore the cause.

I don't have the crazy itching as of yet. it's only been two days. but damn my head feels like it's been filled up with rocks

St. George Starring As The Jackal

Check the absence of line breaks you douchebag.

Vamos a playa, bi-atch.

Panic In The Streets

Oh Lord. Weather forcast calls for 3-5 inches of snow with a half an inch of sleet/ice coating it by nightfall. My wife got caught up in the news hype machine and dragged the whole family out to Target for batteries and essential food items. I had done a quick grocery store run yesterday eliminating us from being the eggs, bread and milk kooks.

I always wonder why those are the three items people clamor for? I mean if you lose power how are you going to cook those eggs? Put your milk outside and it will freeze. And man can't live on bread alone anyway. Isn't that what they say?

Our cart was filled with bottled water (look, one earthquake and a couple of hurricanes under my belt and you realize the preciousness of uncontaminated water), beer, diapers, and a firelog amongst some general necessaties.

I got a hunch we here in central NC won't see much of the white stuff. The way it works here, we'll get two inches of ice and an assload of power outages. I chopped some wood for the fireplace earlier this morning although I didn't chop that much as carrying a load of wood seemed like a bad thing to do what with the possibility of my vas popping out of my scrotum. Alas, I did managed to gather enough logs and sticks to keep a fire going for a good day or two. There's no shortage of stuff to burn in my backyard - it's just a matter of keeping it under cover and dry.

This is completely off topic: When did Tom Arnold take over The Best Damn Sports Show Period?

People Don't Know Shit

During the course of thr week, I spoke with several folks on the topic of my procedure.

The women I know all applauded me for taking the plunge, er, the cut. "The burden of birth control is always placed on the woman, and that's just not fair," said one mom I know. Honestly, for me it seemed like a no-brianer: The vasectomy was covered by my health insurance.

Some girls I know don't have health insurance (like the ones I work with in the business of catering who tend to be in college or right out of college) and have to pay a lot for pills. Or sponges. Or whatever their choice of contraception is.

Another girl of the collegiate co-worker variety even told me that most boys expect the girl to provide the condoms. "I mean they say shit like 'I'm not the one who is going to get pregnant'. Can you believe that?" Well, I am a man, and I know most men are pigs, so sure I can believe it but I don't expect co-ed cuties to accept. Sadly I'm told, most do.

The men I spoke with were mostly knuckleheads who didn't have a clue about the specifics of a vasectomy. One dude, after I told him I had one, looked at me like somebody died and put his arm around me in an act of consolement. "They didn't cut my balls off man," I said. "Just cut the swimmers off at the pass."

Another guy figured you'd never be able to ejaculate again, taking the old adage "shooting blanks" literally. Most men were generally scared by the topic and didn't won't to hear about any kind of sharp object getting near the family jewels.

I'm not surprised, and you know why ladies? Because most men are pussies. Especially when it comes to their cock/prostate/butthole area. Men could never handle laboring a child. I'm sorry but we just couldn't. Conversley, women can handle reproductive issues with alarming grace because since roughly the time of their first period they go to the OB/GYN and get their coochies inspected on a regular basis. Men don't have anything like this and I'm starting to think maybe we should. Maybe there'd be less colon and prostate cancer if guys where acustom to having their plumbing checked. Most of the time early detection is the best way to combat cancer.

But we're men, we'll never change.

I Got Erection!

This post is for the jackals who have been posting in the commets section: I survived the first week of post-vasectomy life rather well. There's still some bruising going on and the stitches haven't fallen out yet and, contrary to popular belief in man culture, I haven't lost my sex drive nor the ability to get a hard on. As a matter of fact, Wednesday and Thursday I felt as if someone had slipped me a Viagra because my love pump just wouldn't go down. It was like being a little kid again as I found myself just staring at my twitching penis; back then you hadn't quite figured out what to do with the fella when he got to full mast. But this week it was off limits. I was given specific instructions not to "use" it until this weekend. Well goddamn the weekend is here! Hurrah for that.

Isn't It Ironic, Dontcha Think?

That one of the people posting in my comments section goes by the
name Saint George?

How is that ironic you ask?
Well this here lil blog is titled after St. Jude who is the patron saint of hopeless cases.

It's also the name of the elementary school I went to as a child
in Aspen Hill, Maryland.

Hungry?

I'm the tapas of blogs!

Welcome To My Nightmare

I don't know what is weirder?

Posting your own comments to other people's comments on your own blog?

Or having strange people anonymously slag you for no apparent reason?

I guess some people might come here looking for me blathering on about music, so tonight I will oblige in some sense. I've been listening to the new High On Fire, The Paybacks last one "Harder And Harder," that fucked up Sightings record I reviewed for www.dfbpunk.com, Kudzu Wish from Greensboro, and Neko Case's live on "The Tigers Have Spoken."

And my balls are blue. Literally.

I Know, Me Too...

Those line breaks in my posts are fucking killing me.
Off to find a remedy.

My Penis Is Fine Thank You

My 4-yr-old son Spencer keeps asking me if my penis is okay.

"Does it hurt when you pee?" he asked.
"It's not my penis that is hurt," I try to deftly explain,
"but the area below it called the testicles."
"Oh, well when your penis is better can we go bike riding?"

He just doesn't grasp the concept. And I knew when I left to go to
the doctor's office on Friday that I had some s'plaining to do.
I consulted with the wife. She didn't know what to say. So I went
to the straight ahead medical approach littered with technical jargon.

"I have to get my pinkle wink fixed," I said.
"Is it broken?" he asked.
"No, it isn't broken," I said before adding as I left the house, "Ask your mother."

For days now they've been told not to jump on daddy. They've also
been told to go easy on daddy because daddy is sore "down there."

Being the sensitive lad that he is, Spencer offered up some of his
stuffed animals to help me feel better. Two dogs to be exact.
You see the dogs are part of his football team. He's got about 8 - msotly dogs and teddy bears - on the team. He leads them through drills, plays defense against them or has them go to the locker rook (ie. his closet) to change out of their uniforms. Today he wanted to have team pictures taken. Yet he bitched and moaned about having the football games on all day... and I was even in a different room.


I have this fear that he's going to blurt out something about my hurt penis at his playschool. And then I'll get the call from Social Services.

Are You Ready For Some Football?

Well, I was ready for some football this weekend as the good doctor
recommended that I stay off my feet to help alleviate swelling of
the nutsack after the vasectomy.

Not one to pass up Doctor's-ordered couch time, I was doubley excited because championship football was going to be on. Not
that I'm the biggest football fan but it beat the other prospect:
mindless channel surfing.

I spent the majority of the weekend on the couch with a beer in one hand and a bag of frozen peas in the other. The peas doubled
as an ice pack which sat precariously on my swollen balls. When
I did get up, it was to pee or tend to the fire that raged all weekend long in the fireplace.

The football games were a bit of a letdown as the predictable teams won and the great hype over playing both games outside in a blizzard turned to zilch as the blizzard came a day early and not a flake of snow was spotted on the field in either game.

The better part of the Patriots vs. Steelers game was spent catching up with my old rugby teammate Gary who has just returned
from a 10-month Tour Of Duty of Iraq. He's glad to be back and
eager to defrag from the whole situation. So I helped him along
with tales from the vasectomy table, lots of beer and a healthy dose of some punk fucking rock.

Oh, My Achin' Gonads!

Okay, so shortly after 3pm yesterday I underwent a vasectomy procedure. It was very odd: walking into a clinic by myself, sitting
in a room sans pants and waiting for the good doctor to come in.
First up was the shaving of the balls, then an injection of lidocane into the scrotum.

Several minutes later, with the family jewels nice and numb, the good doctor proceeding to make a tiny incision, snip my tubes, cauterized the endings and put me back together.

All in all I'd say it was comparable to any major dental work, like getting a crown or filling. You could feel pressure and there was the ocassional whiff of smoke. Although at one point I felt like my whole groin was cut open and that the good doctor hand both his hands inside noodlin' around with my wiring.

It was a very unpleasant yet mostly painless experience. What helped was that the good doctor was from Ireland and we spent the majority of the the time talking about rugby (he was a fullback, me a scrum half), catholic school and penis jokes. It occured to me that urologists must be good at small talk because most of the procedures they are doing are routine and done in-house. Much like a gynocologist I guess - you spend most of your days touching people's private parts.

A little over an hour later the vasectomy was done. I was handed two specimen cups and told to drop off a sample in six weeks to check for any presence of sperm. I'm glad I don't have to jerk off in a doctor's office although the hilarity of such a situation was not lost on me.

I walked to my car with what the good doctor called the John Wayne gait and made a be line to the beer store. At this point, it felt like someone has just kicked me in the balls. It wasn't so much that the direct area of snip & tug was in pain, no that was still numb. But I had that feeling in the gut you get when racked - kind of like a extreme cramp.

I spent the evening laying on the couch and sipping pints while a bag of frozen peas rested on my nutsack. My wife had rented a movie, although a teenage drama with Lyndsay Lohan wouldn't have been my first choice.

At one point during the evening, she asked to she the damage, took an peek and then started singing AC/DC's "Big Balls" because my shit had swelled up like water ballons.

It's saturday afternoon and I don't feel so bad.

The Final Countdown

Less than two hours until Greg E. Boy becomes Neutered Boy.

Cold Sides

Please folks, could we get a round of applause for the cold side of the pillow?

Deep Thoughts

I started this blog for a couple of reasons.

One is that I'm a documentarian at heart; an archivalist like my friend Mike Daily would say.

There's an old adage passed around amongst writer types and that is this:if you write a page a day, you'll have a 365 page book by the end of the year.

It seems so simple, I know. I remember talking to a band I managed back in the mid-90s and having a conversation about how often they practiced. Once a month was good for them. So I broke it down in the same manner: if you only practice once a month, that's only 12 times a year. Surely, I asked them, that if this was something they wanted to keep them from getting day jobs, they'd have to practice more. Do you jerk off more than once a month I asked? Do you go to the bar more than once a month I asked? Is that paying the bills I'd asked.

Apparently, my philosphy didn't sink in as the band broke up a short time later. But the notion stayed with me. It's one reason why I chose to stay at home and raise my kids. I mean, why pay someone else money to do something I feel I can - and should - do better?

So that's another reason why I chose to do the blog. To put down in words my own experience. I've been writing about being punk rock rock dad on and off for two years now.

Is there a book in here? Maybe so.
A screenplay? Possibly.
A rock opera? Most defintely.

But the last thing I want to do is let the experience wash over me; I'm breaking down the fourth wall like kids singing the chorus at a Strike Anywhere show.

It's not only my choice (possible Warzone refence?), but it's my duty.

So step up or step back.

And always bring the noise.

Sleepytime Trio

It's 7 pm and my two boys have fallen asleep. Earlier than usual i might add. But the whole day was an off schedule-wise anyway. I guess starting school two hours late threw the kids off their internal time clock as much as it did me.

It was a wild ride.
Once my 4-yr.-old Spencer got dropped off at his playschool shortly after 10am, all hell seem to break loose w/ his younger brother Cole. First there was the the coffee incident.
I turned my head for what seemed like two seconds in the kitchen only to find that he had dug his hand into the trashcan and pulled out the spent bag of coffee grounds (Millstone's medium roasted Foglifter) and spilled the tablespoon unconsciously left in the bag all over the floor. Then he managed to open the drawer that houses most of the kid videos and sprawled them across the family room floor. As I was cleaning up that mess, he stood in front of the cabinet full of snacks and pulled and pulled and pulled until the child-proof lock gave in like a Kryptonite lock on a bicycle messenger in Brooklyn: they promised me safety but I didn't get it. Then, my little monster did his best Denise The Menace impression when he stormed into his older brother's room and took his recently-made-out-of-an-old-baby-formula-can hand drum and preceeded to try and eat the rubber band that held the decorative cover slash drum skin over the plastic cap and tried to eat it. "Eat, Eat!" he said with a big smile on his face and slobber in the corner's of his mouth.

The crash & burn was coming and I could see it. Parents call this "the meltdown." So I dressed Cole up nice and warm and a little after noon we set off to pick up his bro from school at 1pm.
I knew he needed a nap and I needed some fresh air. Homie was crashed by the time I got to the end of the driveway. So I bought a daily paper to catch up on stats from the UNC basketball game I missed while at band practice the night before. I drove down the street to Spencer's school and picked him up.

"They had cupcakes for Edward's birthday," said his teacher. "So he may be a little jeeped up." This is good I thought as I had to make a quick run to the grocery store and didn't want Spencer to fall asleep on the way; but I needed to drive far enough that Cole got a good nap in. When I got to the Harris Teeter a short time later, the parking lot was mobbed with SWACOSS types. That's Southerners With A Chance Of Snow Syndrome folks. You know, the people who panic at the first sign of flurries and run out and buy milk, eggs and bottled water. Beer? Don't forget the beer.
These people do the same thing when hurricanes roll through.
So I end up holding sleepyhead Cole while I push Spencer around in a cart trying to get a few meager essentials. By the time I'm in the checkout line, both are crashed out. Spencer in the shopping cart and Cole on my shoulder. All I'm thinking is goddamn I wish they had one of those lil Starbucks coffee bars in the joint because I sure could use a lift. I want a shoulder to nap on myself.

Wake Up

The kids woke up early today. Too early - 5:30am to be exact.
That's actually typical but last night I had band practice
and then when I got home decided to try the whole blog thing
so I didn't get to bed til after 1am. I feel pretty good for having less than five hours of sleep.

It's such a drag to have them be early risers because there's not much to do at that time of day except plant them in front of the television. It's just that I'm barely functional until 7:30am at least. Then I make them breakfast by 8am (today it was mini pancakes with butter and maple syrup) and usually have them both dressed by 9am when it is time to take my oldest son Spencer to preschool. Today he doesn't have to go to school until after 10am because of a delayed start time due to the bad weather. I often wonder how working parents deal with snow days. I mean when there's no school you better have a babysitter on hand or a very understandable employer who let's you take the day off. It's the two words no parent wants to hear: no school.

Spencer broke his collarbone in Decemeber (that's a whole 'another story right there) and didn't go to school for a week and then was off for winter break for two more weeks. So I had three weeks of a 4-and-a-half-year-old and an almost-2-year-old. Punch in at 5:30am and hopefully clock out around 8pm when the little ones finally go to sleep. Then I spend the next couple of hours trying to carve out some personal time be it watching bad reality TV with the wife, listening to music and try do some writing or - as was the case last night - have band practice. Wednesday nights have been officialy declared band night so it's one thing I can always look forward to: it gives me a sense of balance, allows me to hang with some adult men (there's not a dirth of stay-at-home-dads in this neck of the woods so kid playdates are usually spent with women - which has proved to be very insightful in many ways), and release some stress via the loud punk rock action.

They say we might get two inches of snow here tomorrow so I better go browse the internet for some decent indoor art/science projects to keep the boys entertained come Friday.

Tomorrow is also the day I'm scheduled for my vasectomy.
No more kiddies for me. No sir. Two is plenty and almost more than I can handle. My heart goes out to the single mothers/fathers out there - you are the true heroes.

good morning dur-ham city!

it's official. i now have a blog.
dear god what have i done.