Yep, it's definitely alive

I used to wonder what Dr. Frankenstein must have felt at the precise moment when he realized that not only had he created a monster, but he’d created a monster.

I no longer have to wonder.

Last night Brady and I were cuddled in our denim overstuffed chair, preparing for today. I’d worked late, and had given him precise instructions by telephone earlier in the evening that if he would have his bath taken, jammies on, and teeth brushed by the time I got home we’d be able to play for a bit before he went to bed. To my surprise, not only had he done everything I’d required of him, he’d also pulled one of his toy boxes out into the living room.

The sole contents of this particular toy box, as it so happens, are the various bodies and body parts of probably twenty different Mr. Potato Head figures. There was Texas Rangers Potato Head. Dallas Cowboy Potato head. Old School Mr. Potato Head. You get my point. None of the MPH (Mr. Potato Head) figures were put together, which if you’ve ever spent any amount of time playing with MPH (much easier, right?) in your life then you know the limitless options that lie on the operating table before you – sort of a kid-friendly version of Frankenstein’s Monster in which you can hide random, leftover body parts in its hiney.

Before we could get down to the business of creation, though, Brady and I had an important matter to handle first.

I submit to you the following document, an account of the conversation that transpired between father and son, co-creator and createe.

Fade In:

INT. LIVING ROOM – NIGHT

BRADY (5) dressed in blue flannel button-up pajamas littered with snowmen and hair still wet cuddles with BRAD (37) in an oversized denim chair that’s seen better days, and in those days, lots of moments like this one. They are father and son.

BRAD

We’ll play Mr. Potato Head in a second, but

first… isn’t there something you want to ask me?

BRADY

                                    No.

                                                                        BRAD

                                    I think there is.

                                                                        BRADY

                                                            (giggling)

                                    Not really.

                                                                        BRAD

                                    Okay, if you say so. I’ll give you one more chance,

                                    then I won’t ask you again.

                                                                        BRADY

                                    Do we want to watch Survivor while we cuddle?

                                                                        BRAD

                                    That’s not it.

                                                                        BRADY

                                    Do we want to eat Oreos while we cuddle?

                                                                        BRAD

                                    Not it either.

Brady laughs. Not a silly, fake laugh, but one that suggests he’s only just begun with the witty banter and thinks he’s the funniest guy around.

                                                                        BRADY

                                    Doooooo you wanna play Hot Wheels?

                                                                        BRAD

                                    Nope.

                                                                        BRADY

                                    You wanna give me five dollars?

                                                                        BRAD

                                    Nuh uh.

                                                                        BRADY

                                    Twenty dollars?

Brad gives him a look. A get serious look.

                                                                        BRADY (con’td)

                                    A hundred dollars? Wait. A million dollars?

Yep, funniest guy around.

                                                                        BRAD

                                    Fine. If it’s not important to you, it’s not important to me.

                                                                        BRADY

                                    Okay, okay.

Brad slinks deeper into the chair. A moral victory.

                                                                        BRADY (cont’d)

                                    Daddy?

                                                                        BRAD

                                    Yes, Brady?

                                                                        BRADY

                                    Can I turn one hundred tomorrow?

Pandemonium ensues. A one kid laugh track.

                                                                        BRAD

                                    You know what? If that’s what you really want, then yes.

                                    Yes you can. By all means, turn one hundred tomorrow. Be

                                    old. Lose your hair. Lose your hearing. Lose your mind. Have

                                    fun pooping your pants again.

This grosses Brady out.

                                                                        BRADY

                                    Really?

                                                                        BRAD

                                    Yep. Old people do that. They can’t always control when and

                                    where they have to use the restroom.

                                                                        BRADY

                                    So they poop their pants?

                                                                        BRAD

                                    Why don’t you wait until tomorrow when you wake up and

                                    you’re a hundred. If you’ve pooped your pants you’ll know I

                                    wasn’t lying.

Brady’s scrunches his nose. One hundred doesn’t sound fun.

                                                                        BRADY

                                    Daddy, can I please turn one tomorrow?

Seriously?

                                                                        BRAD

                                    Sure, but you’ll still be pooping your pants, and

                                    you won’t know how to work the PlayStation anymore.

Brady gives it some more thought before locking eyes with Brad. It’s a war of wills, a Wild West showdown of sorts where new is trying to push out old. Old isn’t budging.

                                                                        BRAD (cont’d)

                                    We don’t have to do this. We can all wake up tomorrow

                                    and everything can still be the same if you want it to.

Brad makes a move to get up, catching Brady off guard. Brady stiffens, sensing the moment that could change his life forever is about to evaporate.

He grabs Brad’s face, cupping his father’s man-sized cheeks in his tiny hands.

                                                                        BRADY

                                    Daddy…can I please turn six tomorrow?

Brad thinks about it. No more fun and games.

                                                                        BRAD

                                    Will you still love me as much as you did when you

                                    were five?

                                                                        BRADY

                                    More.

                                                                        BRAD

                                    Oh yeah?

                                                                        BRADY

                                    Yep. I’ll be six, so I’ll be bigger. I’ll have more

                                    room in my body to love you.

Brad hugs Brady. This is the moment we’ve been waiting for. Old doesn’t have to give way to new – there’s room for them both.

FADE OUT.

THE END

Sentiment aside, that little turd played me the entire time. Brady knew, that with every turn in our conversation, he was baiting me. He understood that tradition has him ask me on the eve of his birthday for permission to turn the next age. It sounds weird, I know, but it’s all I have. The younger version of Brady eagerly complied. This new Brady 2.0, however, I wasn’t prepared for. It’s like he’s the Bionic Man of kindergarteners. Sure, last night everything turned out okay. But what happens when the day comes and it doesn’t? What happens when he says something so witty that even I don’t have a comeback for it? Daniel LaRusso was never better than Mr. Miyagi. Luke Skywalker didn’t best Yoda. Rocky never took a swing at Mickey.

And now, even as I write this, something Traci said to me reverberates through my mind. “What do you expect?  You created him.”

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A Man, His Nikes, & A Warrior-Sized Hero Complex

My mom texted me the other day. She wanted to know why I haven’t blogged in a while. “Are you mad at me?” she asked. Yes, Mom. I haven’t been blogging the last several weeks because I’m mad at you. You got me. Smiley face.

If you read this blog, you know I hit a wall twice a year: about six weeks before the end of each semester. It’s when I like to think that I’m forcing myself to “buckle down” and focus on school, when really it’s the semester caving in on me.

But these last two months have been different than the previous times. I’ve been reassessing what it is at 36 I want out of life. Is going to school to pursue a writing career really in my best interest, in my family’s best interest?

As many of you may also know, I spent several weeks training for the Warrior Dash. By training, I mean that I ate less pizza and snacked on fewer cookies. I tried to add a jogging regimen to my workout routine. Said routine wanted no part of that, outsiders aren’t welcome. But thanks to an Internet call-out by my baby sister’s husband, I had to man-up…or at least try.

My brother-in-law Jeremy raved of the warrior-sized obstacle course we’d attempt to conquer. He promised the finish line would be waiting with a warrior-sized turkey leg to reward my efforts. There was talk of a warrior-sized beer to wash down my warrior-like feast. All that was missing was a wench to satisfy my warrior-like needs - he’d said I could bring my wife; he was bringing my sister. Yuck.

He’d said that upon completing The Dash there’d be warrior-sized stories to tell my family and friends. I could tell the truth or exaggerate my warrior-sized accomplishments. The choice was mine. So this is where I tell you, my fledgling peons, that I conquered the race in the fastest time ran by any man, woman, and superhero, and despite what the photos-for-purchase that were taken at various points of the course might show, I didn’t walk at all. Not. One. Step. This is where I don’t tell you that my chariot to the Warrior Dash was my mom’s mini-van, because mini-vans aren’t warrior-like…despite the heroic antics of Flynn Rider in the movie Tangled playing for the kids in the back seat.

If I’m being honest, I didn’t think I was anywhere near ready to commit to something I thought was so challenging. Mentally, I wasn’t ready to do the work, so I didn’t do the work – not really. But as I ran to the first obstacle, I found my inner monologue telling my overactive brain to settle down, just have fun. So I did.

We finished the race in 47 minutes. Not great; not horrible. But being that Jeremy and I were running in the very last heat of the two-day race, my only real goal was to not be lapped by the volunteers cleaning up trash on the trail before calling it a weekend.

Despite as much psyching myself up and psyching myself out that occurred in the weeks leading up to the Warrior Dash, once the race was over, I’d forgotten about everything I’d previously feared. You see, after races like these there’s an option to donate your shoes to charity – they’ll be cleaned and shipped across seas to people in countries where used shoes are better than no shoes. The shoes I’d left behind that day were shoes I didn’t want to let go of. I know, you’re thinking I’m crazy for being so sentimental about a pair of Nike Shox that were nearly four years old. You probably think I’m crazy for spending the three weeks prior to the race questioning my decision to give up those Nike Shox, and instead wondering if buying a new pair of cheaper shoes to run in and then donate would be a better option. But something inside of me, no matter how much I tried to rationalize my reasoning for why I’d miss those shoes, wouldn’t let me run in anything else. So I ran. I walked. I waded through water. I crawled through mud. I crossed the finish line. Then I donated. That’s when it hit me: those Nikes had been with me when I’d experienced some of the most memorable moments of my life.

Those shoes were there when I’d finally gotten to watch a baseball game at Fenway Park. They’d been to famed Dodger Stadium, where Kirk Gibson became a legend, and John Cusack made out with a girl on the hood of a 1967 Camaro that was parked at home plate. They saw Derek Jeter collect his 3000^th hit in front of the home crowd in The Bronx. They’d seen Mickey and Minnie and all of their friends at Disneyland. They were there the day I took my first steps as a grown man and enrolled in classes at a university full of teenagers, and then again the day I almost backed out of going to my first class, a writing class. Those shoes walked down Hollywood Boulevard, and took part as I had my photo taken as I crouched next to Tom Selleck’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Those $140 Nike Shox that had been purchased one hot Texas July evening in 2008 saw Big Ben tower over London, waited patiently outside the Blue Mosque in Istanbul for me but were later allowed to step inside the Hagia Sophia. A few days afterwards, they walked in the rain through Paris at night as my wife and I looked for the perfect souvenirs in shops scattered on various streets at the base of the Eiffel Tower. Those shoes had seen more in four years then some people will ever see in a lifetime – more than I thought I’d ever see in mine. I loved those Nikes, as if they were an extension of my soul. And as I took them off and placed them in the pile of other participants’ memories, I knew they’d soon see a different part of the world without me. I found comfort, not regret.

Donating my tennis shoes that day was just the beginning though, there was a dumpster for unwanted race clothes as well. I’d run the Warrior Dash in a blue T-shirt that on the front read Her Living Room Hero. My Twitter address was on the back. I let it go too. Only fitting that something that represented my entire family and supported some random thoughts and anicdotes on an Internet page read in over thirty countries around the globe should make its way into the world too, apart from us. Somewhere, somebody owns the very first Her Living Room Hero souvenir. Sorry, Mom. I promise I’m really not mad at you.

So today, I write. I’m doing the work – something I’ve started waking up and telling myself every day. I keep those words on an index card, tacked to a corkboard by my desk. A reminder that nothing comes free, that everything requires some level of sacrifice. That effort might lead to frustration and even heartache, but it’s the only thing that’s going to make life happen – not just happen by default, but really happen. If I want to be a writer, I have to write – no excuses. I have to do the work. I want my kids to know that. Kacie turned 14 today. She has eleven days left before the summer that will lead her into her new life in high school begins. I especially want her to know that. Do whatever makes you happy, baby girl. Be who you want to be. Dream of the impossible if that's what you want. But do the work. You won’t get where it is you really want to go if you don’t, no matter how awesome your shoes might be.

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Nowhere Above The Influence

Bad association spoils useful habits. That’s what my mom tried to always teach us when we were kids. She wanted the five of us to surround ourselves with people that we knew wouldn’t willingly try to lead us down paths we had no business going down. She understood that it’s hard to say no to doing things you know you shouldn’t when you’re outnumbered and feel out of place. That’s why it’s ironic that my mom tried to play such a significant role in my demise today.

Those of you who’ve spent any significant time reading Her Living Room Hero know I’ve tried numerous gimmicks to lose weight. I’ve attempted P90X (which is less of a gimmick and more of a crazy, intense workout if you’re up to the task…), wrapping my chest and gut with Saran Wrap while I work out (almost had to turn my Man Card in for this one…), eating more times during the day (seriously trying to figure the logic behind this…), eating less times during the day (actually doesn’t work as well as you’d think…), drinking chocolate milk three times a day (yes, this is an actual diet…), no carbs (boo…), more carbs (hooray!!!...), and so on and so on and so on.

But in the last two months, something’s changed. I’ve found a determination and focus and drive that I haven’t been able to find before. I’ve found within myself an understanding to do what I can rather than worry about what I can’t. With that, I’ve lost 33 pounds. For those who are bad at math like I am and have trouble visualizing calculations of the sort in your head, I’ve lost a petite preschooler. My goal? To lose a full-fledged kindergartner by May.

This time around I’ve done well at making time to exercise; I avoid eating things I shouldn’t eat. But with that, I allow myself to indulge in certain junk foods, to kill the craving before it kills me. Because of this, Santa’s job is safe as I’ve pretty much punted cookies from my diet. Hard to believe, I know. The separation of church and state between cookies and I hasn’t been an easy one, but we’re making progress. I don’t miss cookies nearly as much as they miss me, but I do miss them, as evident by my loss of will Sunday night when I ate an entire sleeve of Thin Mints in what I can only conclude was my body throwing a coup d’état. Those damn Girl Scouts. I seriously hope they make this year’s naughty list.

I was pretty bummed. I felt like all my hard work had been for nothing. Dramatic, I know. Coincidentally, the next day I received quite the random consolation as a friend who lives over 2,100 miles away admitted that she too had eaten a sleeve of Girl Scout Cookies the night before. It was like we were living parallel lives in a land of awesomeness. I told her that if our cycles synced up I was going to be pissed. She laughed. I was being serious.

As crappy as Sunday had turned out to be, Monday proved to be much better. I’d eaten right. I’d worked out, hard. I’d slept seven hours. I’d even watched like six episodes of Good Luck Charlie with Brady. All was right in the world. I’d forgotten about cookies. I'd forgotten that for a moment the day before I'd been human. I was awesome again.

But today being a newer day than yesterday, I get this:

It’s moments like this I think about hitting up Mark Zuckerberg and telling him there needs to be a “Time Out” function on Facebook, you know, for when you want to teach your friends a lesson that it’s not nice to post photos of Oreo Cookies on your wall so early in the morning, especially when you’d give anything to eat three or twelve of them for breakfast. Seriously. That’s like posting photos of Marc Anthony on JLo’s wall, or posting Baseball Hall of Fame updates on Barry Bonds’ wall, or tagging The Hamburglar in your check-ins at McDonald’s even though he’s not even there with you. But being the most awesome, most forgiving guy in the world, I chalked Susan’s moment of what seemed like “haha, suck it!” up to being a good friend who wouldn’t want Oreo’s biggest fan to miss out on celebrating 100 years of yummy goodness and I let it pass. And then my mom decided to chime in:

Rationalization tried to set in. A war between my two selves. I’d been a good boy these last two months. A really good boy. I wanted to go to the ball, but I had nothing to wear because my clothes don’t fit anymore, not like the used to…all snug and tight and huggy-like on my bottom. I decided at that moment I was going to have to miss the festivities, despite the best efforts of my mom and one of my closest friends to sabotage the shrinking confines of my body's mass. I was not going to be influenced by the thought of heaven in my mouth. I was above it all.

But as the day progressed, my willpower faded. How could I let the single greatest union ever known to man go uncelebrated? How could I, on this anniversary of all anniversaries, continue to pull a Chicago and look away every time I passed by that beautiful blue packaging in the grocery store the last two months? Oreos had been there for me when I needed them. They’re even still hanging around now that I don’t. They’ve been a good friend to my many a glass of cold, lonely milk. They’ve comforted me in times of good, bad, and in between. Mostly in between. How could I not, only for today, raise my glass just once more in honor of them? And if not in honor of them, in honour of them? I opted to throw them the best 100 year bash ever. Go big or go home. My only concern: what do you get the cookie that already has everything? More milk, of course.

Look at me. I'm such a bad host. I completely forget to make introductions. Mom, meet Susan. Susan, Mom. Hope you two enjoy Time Out, because I enjoyed my Oreos. All twelve of them. Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s not really a party until somebody throws up…

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Redefining Greatness

Perspective. Probably one of the most important words in the English vocabulary. Right up there with love, compassion, understanding, kindness, and baseball.

Without perspective, we’d be a society of robots, all clinging to the same ideas and notions. We’d probably all wear the same, drab clothing. Eat the same, unimaginative foods. Watch the same, uninteresting television shows. Read the same books written in the same style and voice they’ve always been written in. But perspective brings with it a different outlook, a chance to see life through a pair of eyes much different from our own.

In my infinite fatherhood wisdom, I try challenging the kids to see life differently, to dream impossible. But I also hope to impress upon them the notion that sometimes things are just as they seem, that there is no hidden meaning or grand revelation hidden throughout the pages of a book or within the scenes of a movie. Maybe that’s because as an English major, I’m tired of having to explore what it is we’re supposed to think the writer was trying to say, what he wanted us to take away from his piece, what she wanted to tell us but for whatever reason couldn’t just come right out and say. Or as one graduate from the Pac-12 football champion University of Oregon’s English program told me earlier this week: “…but without lit majors, who would dissect the meaning of fog in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein? Priorities, Brad.”

A non-fiction essay of mine was critiqued in class last night. I’d written a narrative about the nine months leading up to Kacie’s birth, surrounded by scenes in the delivery room telling of moments from our arrival to hers. The critiques noted the piece to be funny. Endearing. A nice array of emotions from the eyes of a father-to-be. A couple of people couldn’t grasp my non-linear approach to storytelling, how I could shift in an out of time, between being in the delivery room at one moment to remembering key moments from the previous nine months the next, or going from pre-conception to morning sickness to the realization and fear that I was not only going to have a daughter but be in charge of protecting her from every penis in the world. Some felt the funniness of that last part took away from the tenderness of the scene’s self-realization. But I hadn’t written it to be funny. I was serious, and unsure of my abilities as her protector. I mean, name one dad in the history of fatherdom that hasn’t worried about his daughter’s virtue at one point in time. Deadbeat dads don’t count.

Most of the critiques were encouraging. Insightful. As a writer I definitely want to know what works for my audience and what doesn’t. But I also get that not everyone is my intended audience.

Then the critiques got interesting.

One person challenged how I’d crafted my dialogue, saying that she felt it was unrealistic, that she doubts I really speak to my wife in a jocular, slang tone. I knew immediately that she’s not a reader of Her Living Room Hero or else she’d have noticed a common theme, that I’m willing to put all of myself out there to be judged harshly by a world I’ll never meet while simultaneously allowing myself to live up to the cliché of what you see is what you get. In so many words, her critique noted that because of my writing style, my voice (which has always been received well), I’d never be one of the greats because I “don’t use language that is timeless” in my work. I guess that depends on what one’s idea of greatness is. If you ask me, the world can keep Ernest Hemmingway and Joan Didion. I’ll stick with Bill Cosby and Paul Reiser. While we’re at it, give me John Hughes as well. I aspire to suck as badly as these three did as writers.

All of this takes me back to perspective. Can’t something just be what it is because that’s what it is? The obsessive need to pick something apart promotes the notion that without a deeper or hidden meaning to something it holds no value. It’s like having a roundtable to discuss why a green apple is green and concluding after three hours of debate that it’s green, well… because it’s jealous of the red ones. Wasn’t it created to be green? Weren’t we too created to be different? To be unique? To be who we are? That’s my idea of timeless. Of greatness.

Doesn’t obsessing over what we feel someone is trying to say versus what they’ve actually said remove us from their perspective, thus making it our own? Doesn’t seeing something from someone else’s perspective afford us the ability to experience life the way it was meant to be experienced?

I don’t want my kids seeing the world through such a narrow-minded scope, because if they do, they’re going to miss out on so much of it. And life, well…life already goes by too fast. Nine months. Thirteen years. I can’t attest to where the time’s gone, but at least I have my memories, my perspective.

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Falling In Love With the Dog Next Door

Today is February 14^th. For cynics, it’s also Valentine’s Day. So perhaps it’s appropriate that today irony and coincidence collide in my world because I will be teaching my children Life Lesson number 1,429,754: falling in love means getting your heart broken.

I know I’m in no real authoritative position to be a dad. If my kids could just learn from my mistakes rather than my successes they’d be bound for greatness. Unfortunately for them, they have to watch every wild idea that never comes to fruition, strap in during the downward spirals, and laugh when the simplest of projects turns out to be one colossal disaster. But what they’ve seen in the last several days has been a new experience for them, one they haven’t been quite sure what to make of.

It all started on Friday. Had I not gotten home from work early I don’t know that I’d have ever seen her. But I did get home from work early, and I did see her.

She was pacing back and forth in front of our stairway. Short, deliberate steps. At first I thought nothing of her, she was with another guy. But then she looked at me. We held the other’s gaze for what seemed like hours. I couldn’t force myself to look away. There was something about her, something different from the rest, something that made me want to abandon everything I believed in.

The guy she was with caught our mutual affinity for each other. It was impossible not to.

“Hey,” he said. I hey’d him back. He watched as she unapologetically made her way towards me. I could feel my heart quicken in rhythm. I knew that walking past her was the right thing to do, but with each step she took towards me I felt myself losing all sense of right and wrong. “She likes you,” he noted.

Unable to make my legs work, a whirlwind of thoughts bombarded my mind. All of the conversations Traci and I’d had with the kids about choices and responsibility and timing and space began to invade my thoughts, trying to break the focus of my tunnel vision. I forced myself to break away from her stare, tried thinking of baseball. And still I couldn’t get past her.

“How old is she?” I asked, leaning down to pet my neighbor’s puppy.

“Six weeks.”

I ran my hand over her back, massaged her ears. Her black coat was smooth to the touch, interrupted only by the white patch of fur on her breast and a white tip on her tail. With every stroke she inched closer to me, eventually leaning into me as if we hadn’t only just met but instead had known each other our entire lives.

Her owner told me of how he really wasn’t her owner, but her temporary guardian. She was a rescue dog. A rescue dog in need of a permanent home. He continued to tell me how well behaved she was, and that because she was a Black Lab and German Shepard mix she’d be very loyal. He mentioned that for six weeks old she’d yet to have any accidents indoors. What he didn’t say was that she’d also be very big. Too big for our apartment.

For twenty minutes I allowed myself to live in the land of “What If” while I played with her. Despite our short time together, I knew that saying goodbye wasn’t going to be easy, but it had to be done. Before parting ways I asked my neighbor if he could do me a favor and hide the dog from my kids if he happened to be out walking her again while they were in transit from the car to home or vice versa. He said he would. I knew that he knew I wasn’t talking about the kids.

Over the course of the weekend Traci reminded me of how we’d preached to the kids that we couldn’t get a dog until we made the commitment to get a house. That was still a year off. I rebutted by saying that we weren’t just getting any dog, but a rescue dog – a dog that needed us. She couldn’t deny the idea’s nobility. But my wife defended her stance by noting we’d incur veterinarian bills, cost of food, grooming, our rent would go up, and we’d have to fork over $500 for the pet deposit. I wanted to ask her how she could be so totally right about something but still be so completely wrong. My options were limited to letting the idea go or bringing in reinforcements. I made the best choice I could at the time.

“We’re getting a dog!?” Kacie asked.

“No. We have the opportunity to get a dog,” I corrected her.

“We are not getting a dog,” our resident drill sergeant barked.

“Can it sleep with me?” Kacie asked.

“No, Kacie. It’s going to sleep with me,” Brady said.

“The dog’s not sleeping with anybody, because we’re not getting a dog.”

“Why not?” the kids asked.

“Because a dog is not financially responsible right now.”

“We’ll eat out less,” Kacie offered.

“Yeah. Daddy will eat less Raising Cane’s,” Brady chimed in. I wasn’t a fan of how easily he gave me up. But he had a point. There were a lot of unnecessary extras in our life that we could easily do without, especially if it meant rescuing such a beautiful damsel in distress.

“We’re not getting a dog.”

“You’re being unreasonable,” I said. She was being totally reasonable.

It was three against one, and yet those of us on Team Puppy were severely outnumbered. Before we disbanded, I suggested to the kids that they call their grandparents and hit them up for monetary contributions to our cause. I don’t think they ever did. The little Benedict Arnolds.

The weekend turned into Monday, and I couldn’t get the dog next door out of my mind. The talk of getting a puppy still lingered. Brady was now willing to give up In-N-Out. Kacie was willing to work extra soccer games on the weekends. I was willing to use the toll roads less. Traci wanted to come around, I could tell. My wife’s also the practical one of the lot, so it’s her job to be the killjoy in the family. It’s a role she hates but has become quite good at. Oscar caliber, even.

Monday night while filling a prescription for eye glasses, I tried telling Traci that it’d be pointless to buy a dog further down the road when we could make a difference now. She argued that the thousand dollars it’d take just to get a puppy in our home right now was not in the budget - that the unexpected prescription wasn’t even in the budget. I hadn’t thought about it that way. But I wasn’t going to give up. I reminded her of the things we could live without. She hadn’t forgotten and still had no plans of taking them into consideration. Despite my pleas, Traci wouldn’t waver in her stance on the subject: our family was not going to be a part of this rescue. Someone else would have to play the hero while I was left again as the hero wannabe, watching helplessly on the sidelines. My heart hurt. Weird, right?

My lesson here, kids? Falling in love isn’t as easy as it looks on TV. It’s hard work. Frustrating. That two hearts can fit together so completely and not belong together. That regardless of how cuddly the object of your affection might be, it’s still going to have to be walked at five in the morning and most likely going to chew on your shoes and toys, thus proving your mom right in that waiting to get a dog is probably the best thing to do right now. But please also don’t mistake the point of us not getting a dog to mean we’re going to In-N-Out tonight. That’s not happening either. 

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Creatively Writing...or something like that.

My mom recently told me that reading Her Living Room Hero was her very own way of being able to visit Planet Brad.

I’d never really thought about it that way – what people think when reading my blog. Sure I want readers to like what it is I put into the ether. Yes, I want everyone to tell their friends that they’re missing out on the single-greatest undiscovered talent out there, but I’ve never given much thought to what goes through readers’ minds while taking in what I can really only equate to my written version of diarrhea of the mouth. I write, well, because it feels good. And because I don’t mind telling the world how dysfunctional I can be at times.

With classes starting back up last week, I’m not sure how often I’m going to be able to publicly out myself over the next few months in this forum I've so deftly created. I really want to write for you every week to ten days. I’m not going to even pretend like that’s going to happen. What I am going to do is try something different – at least for this posting.

What you’re about to read is a short piece I just finished for my Advanced Creative Writing Non-Fiction class. The assignment was to write about a place. Any place. A place that holds a special interest to us. A place that we hate. A place we’re indifferent to. We just had to write about a place. Of course I can’t do anything strictly by the book, so I added my own twist. Made it my own. Paula Abdul would be proud. Without further ado, I give you...

Temple of Ted

For Norm it was Cheers. Probably because everyone knew his name. For Clark Kent it was the Daily Planet. Most likely because it was one of the few places he could hide in plain sight. For me, I’d have to say it was in Fort Scott, Kansas at our neighbor Ted’s house, but not because everyone knew my name or because I could hide there in plain sight. I spent many hours of my impressionable youth watching psychotic events unfold in Ted’s front yard, and eventually participating in. I learned something of myself at an early age: who I wanted to be when I grew up, who I didn’t want to be, and maybe more importantly, about who I was capable of becoming.

     It was at Ted’s house I’d learned karate. Sort of.  Not really. But nevertheless, sort of.

Ted lived across the road from us, in a slightly rundown house. With its peeling white outer shell, ripped screen door separating Ted’s private life from the rest of the world, its multiple broken windows bandaged with duct tape in the hopes of minimizing further damage, Ted’s house had seen a lot of abuse, but this was rural Kansas, and a rundown house was often a sign of stature – it meant you had enough money to sparingly invest in maintaining your house, unlike those with dilapidated houses who could not. This particular rundown house was more than just a rundown house though. It was also a dojo. Ish. Funny to think that my new stepdad’s last name was Temple – which in some weird way made it my last name too for the time being - and yet it was at Ted’s house I religiously received most of my early education outside of elementary school.

Ted and my stepdad were best friends, which never really made sense to me because Ted was several years older than my stepdad, and my stepdad, unlike Ted, was pretty cool. Maybe they were friends though because they were both overweight white guys who sported the kind of crazy afros that any self-respecting black man in the 1980s would have been ashamed to don. Maybe it was because they both liked karate. Or maybe it was because neither of them lived in dilapidated houses. I don’t know.

Ted and my stepdad always met up at Ted’s rundown dojo on the weekends to watch old karate movies before recessing to the front yard where they’d proceed to practice the fine art of not killing each other while wielding nun chucks and kendo sticks. They’d see who could break the most stacks of wood with their bare hands. They’d dance around in an oddball cadence of high flying acrobatic leaps and jumps that really weren’t so high flying. Or acrobatic. Instead it was more like a two man circus of idiots, both of them wanting to be Bruce Lee. One would wear a white karate outfit while the other a black, signifying good and bad. Honestly, the only thing they were any good at was being bad at karate. If you lived in southeast Kansas in the early eighties and felt the ground shake, it was sure to be one of two things: The aftershocks of their acrobatorial fleet of foot landings or Bruce Lee rolling over in his grave. Probably both. The nuts and bolts of it were pretty obvious in that neither Ted nor my stepdad were Bruce Lee, and more importantly to me, none of the three came close to being Daniel Larusso.

Wanting me to have a better education than this, my stepdad introduced me to the Church of Miyagi, which is where I became friends with Daniel, despite our own difference in age. Daniel and his instructor, Mister Miyagi, made karate look unlike anything I’d ever known it to be. For once it made sense. Daniel and Mister Miyagi taught me that karate meant more than seeing who could beat the crap out of whom or who could break the most things that were probably better left unbroken…like hands. Karate was about finding within yourself the desire to be something better than you’d been the day before, knowing when to stand up for yourself and when to back down – that backing down didn’t make you less of a man, just a smarter one. That you didn’t have to use nun chucks or be overweight with an angfro to be awesome. Before long I too began practicing karate at Ted’s, minus the nun chucks, garb, and earth shaking stunts.

Perhaps the most important lesson I learned from my time spent at the Temple of Ted and its eccentric versions of karate was that fear only controls you if you let it. When I moved to Fort Scott in 1980 I was afraid of just about everything. I didn’t really know it at the time, but I had good reason to be. When I left in the fall of 1984, I was stronger. Maybe not physically, but mentally. I was better prepared. Better prepared to face what awaited me in an unknown world called Texas. An unknown world, where, a few years later, I’d find Ted again.

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