I could never be a gangster. I know this. That is why I felt it was unnecessary that one time a reader from Compton, CA emailed me and explained to me how I could never be gangster.
This outspoken gentleman reached my blog when he googled a term that took him to my Silly Bandz vs. Slap Bracelets literary cage match post. I didn’t argue with him because apparently he was a gangster and I’m not sure if holding a gun sideways has the ability to make a bullet travel from Compton, CA to Georgia. One of my life goals is to not get shot. By either a sideways gun or a regular gun. Plus, he had a point, I did post about Silly Bandz.
Then, a while back, before this professional gangster informed me that I didn’t know anything about gangstering, I noted on twitter that I got home from work and realized that I had worn two different socks all day. I hoped no one had noticed it but, even more, I hoped it wasn’t some sort of gang sign. Because even then I knew I would be a terrible gang member. I’m slightly color blind so I’d probably wear the wrong color bandana, and my fingers aren't flexible enough to make words with them to flash in public. That’s one of the downfalls to having immobile fingers. Being a subpar gang member. And not being able to play the piano.
All of this is why I am thankful I got to do a guest post for Knox McCoy about ungangsterizing the act of ‘pouring one out.’ Hopefully, pouring one out will become commonplace and you will no longer have to be a gangster to do it. Plus, I tell the story about shooting a rabbit which I hope will help my guest post street cred since as I’ve mentioned before, my last two guest posts for Tyler Stanton involved men’s underwear. Though the story does end with me running away in tears, so maybe not.
Knox does compare me to McRib sandwich though, so that was nice. Ok, go read Knox's blog and tell him how awesome his name is. I’m seriously thinking about renaming John.
I could never be a gangster. But I can guest post.
The rapture didn’t happen on Saturday, but I did get to meet Clete, the man who sells meat out of the back of his truck.
I was home alone on Saturday, dutifully getting ready for the rapture by lying in bed watching random hilarious Youtube clips when the doorbell rang. I peeked between the blinds and saw a small brown pickup truck parked in front of our house with what appeared to be a deep freezer in the back tied down with bungee cords. There was a magnet on the driver’s side door that read: C and J’s Mobile Meats. Awesome.
I opened the door and there stood an overweight man, the kind of overweight that’s only overweight in the middle. He looked like a pear wearing flannel balancing on a set of undersized legs. He was also wearing a trucker hat that you could tell he had been wearing before that phase were wearing trucker hats became cool. The pear extended his hand.
Flannel wearing pear: Hey there. I’m Clete Thomas. You the head of the household?
Me: She’s not here, can I take a message?
Clete: Naw, just making my rounds and bout to head in, whatever I don’t sell, I got to throw away. Wondering if you want to take some off my hands?
At this point Clete had not clarified what he was selling. So, just as confirmation I asked. Clete then went into a spill that rivaled Bubba’s (from Forrest Gump) speech about shrimp.
Me: Sorry, I’ll have to pass. I have a personal philosophy not to ever buy meat out of the back of a pick up truck.
Clete: If I may be so bold, sir, to suggest that you don’t know what you are missing. Our meats are the finest, tenderest meats in the city.
Me: Wow. That is pretty bold, Clete but I think I’m willing to take that risk.
Clete: Sir, you said you don’t buy meat out of the back of a truck, right?
Me: Yes sir. It makes me nervous purchasing meat in my driveway.
Clete: Well, now hear me out, do you like Outback?
Me: Yes sir. Those Aussie Cheese fries are amazing.
Clete: Yes, I imagine they are. But how do you think their meat get there? You see any fields behind Outback? You think they walk out there and slaughter them cows in their backyard. Then cook’em and bring it out to your plate right then? No, sir. Them meats gets there on truck. Same thing here, we just cutting out the middle man. That's all.
Me: Touche, Clete. That is a very valid point. The only difference is if I get sick from an Outback steak, I can sue them or something.
Clete: You won’t be wanting to sue, you’ll be wanting to thank me.
Me: So, you are just going to throw away what you don’t sell?
Clete: Yes sir. I’d hate to waste it. Love to give you some.
Me: If you are going to throw it away anyway, why don’t you give me a couple filets and if I like them and don’t get salmonella or whatever, I’ll buy some from you next time.
Clete: No sir, can’t do that. I gotta make a little something.
Me: But if you don’t give them to me, you are just going to throw them away, right? Plus if I like them, I’ll buy some from you next time. It would be like an investment.
Clete: I need to make what I can make, you know? How about two filets, $10?
Me: I’m not going to lie, that’s a good deal Clete. But to tell you the truth, my wife is a couponer and I don’t have any authority to spend any money on food at all ever. The only way I can have anything you are offering is if you give it to me for free.
Clete: With prices like this, it’s just as good as free.
Me: There is only one thing that is just as good as free and that is free.
Clete: Just think if you had two filets fixed for your wife when she got home, she’d be so happy.
Me: I see you’re a romantic just like me. So, since I’m not going to get those steaks no matter what else is said, why do you take those two filets home and cook them for your wife?
Clete: Ever night. So you want one of those filets for $5 and go fix it and eat it before your wife gets home?
Me: I hate to waste anymore of your time, so I’m going to go ahead and shut the door. You have a good rest of the day. You should talk to my neighbor across the street. He likes steak.
Clete: Alrighty, thanks for the lead.
Then I shut the door long enough for Clete to walk across the street to my neighbor’s house. After he had been talking to my neighbor for a few minutes, I went outside to “check the mail” just so I could give a big neighborly wave.
In case you were wondering, I asked my neighbor on Sunday afternoon and he said he didn’t buy any deep freezered pick up truck meat either. Poor Clete.
Have you ever bought meat out of the back of a pick up truck?
If so, did you die?
The Rapture and My Baseball Career.
The internet is ablaze with talk of tomorrow’s impending Rapture. It all reminds me of my days of youth when I wanted to be a major league baseball player.
Do you remember the verse that talks about how no one, not even the angels, knows when Jesus is coming back? (Matt 24:36). When I was a kid, I remembered it.
See, when I was younger I really wanted to play Major League Baseball. I didn’t care what team, though if I had a choice it would have been the Atlanta Braves, but I knew it didn’t matter what team I landed on. I knew if I could hurry up and be old enough, I would be in the big leagues, grow a sweet Sid Bream mustache, and be a perennial 40/40 club member. So that verse was my safety net, ensuring that one day I would be old enough.
Every morning I would wake up and say, “I know Jesus is coming back today.” My reasoning being that since I knew today was the day Jesus was coming back, according to scripture, He wouldn’t. It was all very biblical and if I kept it up long enough, I would get my chance in the Bigs.
Eventually I got lazy. Occasionally, I would forget to say “I know Jesus is coming back today.” This meant I had left a window of opportunity for our Savior to return. I would panic. Now I’ll never get my chance to take Nolan Ryan yard or steal second on Benito Santiago, I’d think.
It only took this happening a couple times before I got smart. I made a slight change in my ritual saying – “I know Jesus will come back before I’m 50.” Now, I had secured my opportunity to have a nice lengthy baseball career while simultaneously taking the pressure off having to remember my morning maxim.
I say all this because I wanted to let you know, whether you are nervous about tomorrow or excited about getting to go to Heaven, nothing is going to happen. You're welcome or I'm sorry, which ever applies. I’ll be 30 in August, so you have a little over 20 years left before the Rapture actually happens. Use your time wisely. Maybe work on sitting back on that curveball.
For the record, I never did get my chance my in the big leagues. But thanks to a massive cold sore not allowing me to shave my upper lip all last week, I did get to grow that Sid Bream mustache. Unfortunately, LB did not rejoice with me as one my boyhood dreams finally came true.
Stomp the Linoleum
I made my second movie. You probably don’t remember my first movie that took a hard look at marriage from the inside out, that was over two years ago now. My new movie is a drama/action/dance film staring my son, John. We’re like Will and Jaden Smith only with a lot less money. And white.
I have a clip from the movie. I’ll set the stage. This is the climactic dance scene between John, Chef Elmo, and Monkey. We pick up after John has already danced Chef Elmo motionless, similar to the way B-Rabbit left Papa Doc speechless in the final rap battle at the end of the movie 8 Mile. John then begins to lay the smack down versus his arch nemesis, Monkey, on the dance floor. After John successfully out dances Monkey, he gives him a reassuring smack and we fade out with John triumphantly laughing in Monkey’s face.
Here’s the clip:
I’m thinking my next movie may be a prequel to this one detailing how John and Monkey became arch enemies.
I kept the kids for the day and John was pantsless before 10am
I’ve failed at blogging this last week. Mainly because there really wasn’t anything exciting to post about. No terrorist attacks on my car. No being saved from 8yr old vigilantes by his amputeed granddad with a zebra print prosthetic leg. No LB and me thinking we were going to be murdered by fireworks. It’s been pretty quiet lately.
I’m not creative enough to come up with posts on my own, I need crazy things to happen to me so I can relay them to you. Also, as I’ve said before, I need to post something on a regular basis or I’ll fall into a blog draught and that may never end. The longer I wait between postings, the more I back myself into corner and much like Baby, nobody puts me in a corner.
Luckily, LB went to Birmingham on Saturday to help host a baby shower leaving me alone with the kids all day. I logged the minutes, here is the recap:
-7:08am, Ada wakes up and comes into our bedroom. I’m not ready to wake up yet so I pull up Dora games on the computer and let her play until I’m ready to get up. I feel only slightly guilty about this.
-8:04am, John wakes up with a poopy diaper. While I was changing it, he has a breath holding spell and passes out. I lay him back down and he goes back to sleep.
-8:27am, I take a shower and shave. I have huge fever blister so I don’t shave my upper lip. Now I have the beginnings of a mustache. It is awesome, though I have a feeling LB will not like it as much as I do.
-9:13am, Ada: “Can I have pickles for breakfast because my feet don’t feel well.” “Are you pregnant?” “What?” “Nothing. How are pickles going to help your feet?” “I will eat them and they will go down to my feet and make them feel better.”
-9:16am, Ada eats pickles for breakfast.
-9:22am, John wakes while I’m in the middle of making an egg and cheese on an English muffin sandwich. I finish making it and eating it while listening to him jabber through the monitor. I do not feel guilty about this at all.
-9:35am, I walk upstairs to get John and upon opening the door, see this:
That's my boy.-9:46am, Ada: “My bottom itches in the back that is why I have to scratch it.” I don’t say anything because I am busy smiling and secretly thinking If she keeps this up, I won’t have to worry about boys for a while.
-9:55am, I begin loading them both up so we can go to Happy Hour at Sonic for a 99 cent Route 44 diet coke for me and a “wemonmade or purple grape flushee” for Ada.
-10:27am, We actually leave the house.
-10:42am, After going to Sonic, we take an improvised trip to the park. Across the street from the park there is a children’s soccer game going on. Ada decided she would rather go watch it, so we went to the soccer field. Amazingly, Ada and John sat there and watched the entire game.
11:05am, When the game was over we crossed the street to go to the park. Also, so did two soccer team’s worth of kids.
12:20pm, We leave the park to go home for lunch.
12:28pm, In the car on the way home from the park, Ada: “Daddy, I think one of those kids had gas because it was stinky in my nose.”
12:46pm, I am begin making macaroni and cheese. The fancy kind with cheese sauce instead of powder. As I was rolling up the cheese sauce packet trying to squeeze out the ever loving last drop, I look over to see Ada sucking the cheese out of the top of the packet that I had just cut off. We may be a bit overzealous about our cheese sauce.
-12:50pm, I serve Ada mac and cheese and orange slices for lunch. When I sat the plate down I remembered Gordon Ramsey or maybe Rachel Ray once saying that all the food on the plate shouldn’t be the same color. So I gave her more pickles.
-1:04pm, Light saber fights, fort building, tickle monster attacks and various other shenanigans to try and tire the kids out as much as possible.
-2:30pm, Rest time. John goes down for a nap, Ada watches cartoons. I read.
I just realized how long this was getting and how much you probably don’t care. I’ll summarize the rest of the day very quickly: Petsmart, Marshall’s (because that is Ada’s favorite place), Burger King, bathtime, bed, and then I watched a movie. The end.
I’m sorry if I bored you today, but hopefully this post served its purpose of breaking up my blog drought. We’ll see.
What did you do on Saturday?
Scenes from a Marriage: The Argument.
LB and I got into an argument tonight. I was playing on the internet while she was trying to do something and she said I wasn’t helping out. She said she felt alone.
I closed the laptop and moonwalked over to give her a hug as I sang Michael Jackson’s You Are Not Alone tenderly into her ear:
“You are not alone for I am here with you
Though we’re far apart you’re always in my heart”
She did not forgive me. Not even the King of Pop could reconcile the situation.
I found the above, like the CPR lessons, in my moleskin. So essentially, this was me writing in a diary late at night like a middle school girl.
The good news is LB has since forgiven me. Probably because I wrote both of our initials down encased in a heart. True love always!
Weekend Update not with Seth Meyers
Two confessions:
1) These updates span more than just the weekend.
2) I only titled it that in a cheap effort to gain more google traffic. I put not with Seth Meyers so you can’t be mad. It’s right there in the title. You need to be more observant.
2b) If this shameless attempt to drive more traffic my way works, I am going to insert random celebrity names into every post’s title from now on.
On with the updates:
-Last week I wrote a guest post for Tyler Stanton. It was a guide for going to movies alone. This was actually my second guest post for Tyler. I am aware that both of my guest posts for him mention men’s underwear. My bad.
-Speaking of movies, I took Ada to the $1 theater yesterday. We saw Gnomeo and Juliet. It is about red garden gnomes and blue garden gnomes involved in a bitter rivalry. I think is loosely based off some Shakespearian play about the Bloods and the Crips.
-Greatest moment of the weekend: We received Friday Night Lights Season 5 Disc 2 from Netflix on Saturday. After putting the kids to bed, we put it in and were disappointed to see the disc only had 3 episodes. We watched all 3 without stopping and then became sad because it was over. Until I noticed it said “More” at the bottom of the screen. I clicked it only to reveal there were TWO MORE EPISODES! There may or may not have been hooting and hollering. I’m not sure because I don’t exactly know what hooting is.
-Worst moment of the weekend: Friday night, our family went to Chili’s for a pseudo 5yr anniversary celebration. (Our real celebration was a couple of weeks ago.) Things ended early with John crying hysterically and Ada almost tugging LB’s dress off before our food even arrived. LB ended up taking the two screaming kids to the car while everyone in the restaurant stared at her as she left. I stayed behind to get the check and tweeted from my phone as to avoid making eye contact with anyone. I have a new appreciation for smartphones.
-A rare moment of seriousness from me, I’m sure everyone has heard about the record breaking tornado that swept through the south last week. I wanted to let everyone know you can donate $10 by texting REDCROSS to 90999. If you got it, give it; if you don’t pray for everyone that was affected. I can’t imagine what they are going through. I’m sure every little bit helps.
-Because I can’t end on serious note, I thought I would post this tornado related clip. If we named tornadoes the way we name hurricanes, this one would be called The Hamburglar:
