It’s the little things that haunt you

Posted on July 19, 2010 by Exile on Pain Street

8-Year Old Daughter has developed a peculiar sleeping habit. When she goes to bed at night, she sleeps on top of her covers. She refuses to get under the sheets. Refuses! I had an epiphany the other day and realize where this behavior was born.

I do housework. Shut up. I just do. Among my other duties, I take care of making and stripping the beds. Daughter’s bed is almost impossible to make. It’s against two walls in the corner of her room and a chest is at the foot, which leaves just one side open. I get into terrible wrestling matches with the mattress trying to get everything tucked in properly. Sometimes I get so angry it’s comical.

It has come to pass that Daughter will not get under her covers because, in her words, “The bed is too hard to make.” Do you see what I did to that poor little thing? She won’t sleep under her sheets because she’s afraid it will displease me. I can’t tell you how bad I feel about this.

This is a small matter as things go, but I wonder what other little time bombs I’ve unwittingly planted inside of her head? I worry about how the world is going to hurt my kids but I forget that they hang on every single word that comes out of my mouth. I don’t want her to inherit my neurosis.

* * *

Front page story from today’s New York Times:

Pakistan’s Elite Pay Few Taxes, Widening Wealth Gap

Call me an old Pinko but that’s exactly what’s been happening here in the U.S. for many generations. Why would they expect Pakistan to be any different? Did you know that in 2009, General Electric made a global profit of $10.8 billion (That’s billion with a “b”.) and paid exactly $0 (that’s ZERO) in taxes?*

* Money magazine April 16, 2010

My beachy weech

Posted on July 17, 2010 by Exile on Pain Street

This summer’s fluff beach reading includes British comedian/ actor/ drug addict Russell Brand’s autobiography, My Booky Wook.

It’s a terrible title and he admits as much in the forward. I think it’s derived from Cockney slang, but I could be wrong. In the U.S. printing of the book, he helpfully includes loads of footnotes that explain British cultural references for us clueless American readers. It just came out in paperback, which is the only way I roll. It’s a fun read and surprisingly literate. Take a look at this well-constructed paragraph:

My relationship with Topsy quickly grew very intense. Perhaps because she was a problem dog, we had more in common than I’d initially realized. I sometimes cuddled her too hard so that she would yelp. “Here, have some of my painful love,” my febrile embrace would tell her. “It is constrictive and controlling and painful, like all love should be.” In later life, I have come to realize that any expression of love which ends in a yelp probably requires modification.

Isn’t that great?! I think so. And there’s plenty more where that came from. I’m a big fan of his work although I think his remake of Arthur with Helen Mirren and Jennifer Garner is ill-conceived. But it’s a perfect book when your toes are buried in the sand.

* * *

In the past 24 hours, 4-Year Old daughter has:

Peeled the wallpaper off the wall while sitting on the toilet (bad) at my mother-in-law’s house (worse).
Put a handful of pennies and nickles in her mouth. Gross.
Ate sand at the beach. Why? “Because I like it.” WTF!? Who in their right mind would try to consume the Jersey Shore?!

For new readers, this is the same demon who cut our curtains with a pair of scissors last year. What should I do?! 8-Year Old never did stuff like this. Can I put her on medication if she didn’t really need it from a medical standpoint? It’s second child syndrome. I hope.

I had some friends but they’re gone now

Posted on July 15, 2010 by Exile on Pain Street

We went to Washington D.C. for a surprise birthday party. It was held in a private room in the back of a bar. The place was PACKED. It was a nice moment. I don’t think the birthday girl knew ahead of time. She seemed truly taken aback. I was commenting to someone there about what a great turnout it was and he said that the birthday girl and her husband are two of the most socially active people he’s ever met. It made me sad and a little jealous. I don’t know very many people and I wish I did. The friends I’m closest to are 500 miles away and I only see them every year or two if I’m lucky. A surprise party in my honor would be a bit of a joke.

I wasn’t a high school loser, but I didn’t run with the cool kids. College seems to be the place where most people foster lifelong friendships. Birthday girl belonged to a sorority and is still close to many of her classmates. The Coast Guard kept me on the move for six years, so friendships were fleeting and transitory.

I lost touch with a lot of people when I left Manhattan for New Jersey. Mrs. Wife has taken me on several husband play-dates but I’m a fish out of water out there. Nobody gives a shit about the Andy Warhol exhibit that just opened at the Brooklyn Museum and I’m not interested in how many home runs Alex Rodriguez hit so far this year. They’re nice people but I have no chemistry or common ground with those guys. Most of the plays, museums and walks through Times Square that I enjoy are done alone. It’s probably why I enjoy this blog so much. My fear is that when The Daughters become self-aware, they’ll start to see their dad is a friendless drip.

* * *

Here’s a photo of the Coke machine in the hallway of our hotel:

Isn’t that sweet? A little baby drinking a coke. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that it’s probably not a good idea to give a COKE to a BABY. This idea is brought to you by the same idiots who would poison children by giving them chocolate encrusted breadsticks that you dip into chocolate sauce as a dessert after eating a pizza.

DC is cool. Aside from the usual Capitol Building/Washington Monument, I saw the I.R.S., the E.P.A. and a lot of other agencies I read about in the newspaper every day. It’s like spotting celebrities. Nice architecture, too. We went to the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. I thought it was kind of boring, to be perfectly honest.

The song lyric in the title is too obscure for anyone, right?

A meal fit for a king. Here, King! Here, King!

Posted on July 13, 2010 by Exile on Pain Street

I missed dinner with the family because I wanted to go to the gym. It’s been a while and my pants are a little tight in the waist. When I got home I was on my own and had to fend for myself. Mrs. Wife offered me some lovely leftover pasta and shrimp, but I decided to graze instead. Have you ever done that? Just kind of picked around the kitchen until you’ve nibbled about a meal’s worth of food? It’s hard to know when to stop. Here’s what I ate for dinner:

A tuna sandwich
A slice of (leftover birthday) apple pie
A handful of Life cereal
A half a dozen grapes
A dollop of Skippy extra crunchy peanut butter on my index finger
The rest of the Lay’s Kettle Cooked chips
A Klondike ice cream sandwich.
One red Twizzler

How positively revolting.

* * *

In the summertime, every New Yorker knows where to get dessert during their after-meal walk up the Avenue.

Mister Softee and the Empire State Building: two New York City icons

Be careful of imitations! Accept no substitutes! No matter where you are in Manhattan, from May through August, a Mister Softee truck is just steps away. They’re like cockroaches. The ubiquitous Mister Softee jingle has been driving New Yorkers mad for 50 years. There were so many complaints about the jingle over the years that, by law, it can now only be played while the truck is in motion. THAT’S what I call an earworm. Imagine what it must be like for the poor drivers.

Oh, how I love bad theater

Posted on July 11, 2010 by Exile on Pain Street

I love bad theater. The worse, the better, if you know what I mean.I hadn’t been to a play in about six weeks and I needed a fix. Stop all that eye-rolling. It’s my thing. You do whatever it is you do and I go to plays. Don’t judge, least ye be judged by my wicked hammer of sarcasm. You don’t want that, trust me.

This past season I feasted on a fairly steady diet of Broadway and off-Broadway plays that were celebrity-driven vehicles. Famous actors do a play for 10 weeks to burnish their credibility as artists. Sometimes it works (Scarlett Johansson). Other times, not so much (Catherine Zeta-Jones). I feel like I’d gotten away from the small, black box theaters. These are intimate productions of not-always popular material with actors in training. It’s where the rubber meets the road for actors and audience.

The Potomac Theater Project has taken up its summer residence at The Atlantic Theater Stage 2 in Chelsea. My mind was turning to mush by too much easy, popular fair, so I thought it was time to shut up, take my medicine and suffer through some avant garde theater.

I saw Plevna: Meditations on Hatred and Gary the Thief by British playwright Howard Barker. I knew what I was getting myself into. The two brief one-acts, each with a single actor, are called “theatrical poems.” In the program, Barker describes his work as “‘Theatre [sic] of Catastrophe’ in which no attempt is made to satisfy any demand for clarity.”

Oh, brother.

This stuff is hard to absorb. The dialog was Joycean in its complexity and my understanding (and attention) would fade in and out. But it was a Herculean effort by the actors and I can always appreciate that. The audience included an acting class and the students seemed impressed.

So that’s that. I’ll probably take in a few more of these small, serious, dreary, experimental plays before the fall season kicks it, just to keep my chops up. In a few weeks, the Potomac will present A Question of Mercy by David Rabe, which is a bit more mainstream. I might drop in on that. But no worries. In October, James Earl Jones and Vanessa Redgrave are doing a revival of Driving Miss Daisy on Broadway, so it won’t be long until my brain is back to populist mush. Darth Vader is subservient to an activist for Palestinian rights. That’s what you get with famous actors. A lot of baggage and preconceived notions.