Next Year I'm Calling in Sick

Just attended the 16th or so school curriculum night and, for the 16th or so time, I've come home with the same realization -- I hate all parents.

I hate the parent who asks moronic questions like, "Yes, I'd like to know what books you'll be reading this year?" Look you fucking assbag, every question you could possibly cook up in that bloated moose-head of yours is answered in the 900 page handout the teacher just passed around. Sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up so I can get the fuck out of here!

I hate the parent who knows all the teachers because she has older kids and has to point that fact out to all of us. "Hi, Sue. I know when Caitlin was in your class, you took a field trip to the Detroit Art museum. Will you be doing that again this year?" You know what? The teacher hated Caitlin almost as much as she's going to hate your little Taylor this year. And you know what else? She hates you, too. She hates you when you stop her in the grocery store to talk about Caitlin's freshman year at Moron State and she hates you when you stop her at the tennis club to see if Taylor can do some extra credit to get her grade up. No one cares that you know the fucking teacher. Your kids are idiots. Sit down.

I hate the parent of the kid who has been a complete fucking douche-hose to my kid for the last six years. Your kid's a dick. Literally everyone knows it. You're a shitty parent who is oblivious to the fact that your child is a sociopath who will, most likely, murder you with one of the many hunting rifles you keep in the unlocked cabinet in the garage. How can you not notice that your child is fucked up? He's in sixth grade and he has a full beard. His eyebrows are permanently in the "angry" position. I'm scared of him and he's 10 years old.

I hate the parent whose phone goes off in the middle of the classroom (ringtone: "Smells Like Teen Spirit" MIDI version) and they answer it. "Hello? Huh? Oh, hey. No, I'm at curriculum night. Yeah... uh huh. Well, get the plunger and fix it. It's in the garage. Huh? Then get the mop. Look... I gotta go." Oh, and nine times out of ten, this parent smells like they bathed in a mildew-caked tub filled with mothballs, asparagus pee and Pall Malls.

I really hate the parent who takes their five kids along with them to curriculum night, even though they got about 50 emails and flyers saying, "This night is for PARENTS ONLY." (I may just hate this parent most of all.)

I hate the parent who lives on the "fancy" side of town and has a pool. You know what? You'll never come close to getting back what you paid for that McMonstrosity, so fuck you and your pool. And Miss O says your daughter's a dick.

I hate the parent who I've met, like, ten times and who never remembers me. Look, I never even wanted to meet you in the first place but at least I have the common courtesy to remember you and acknowledge your presence, you selfish fucker.

And I hate all the other parents.

You Know What Really Sticks in My Craw?

(Warning: This was written yesterday, while still under the effects of "twilight" anesthesia.)

Be careful 'cuz I am now bugged. I'm wired for sound. In fact, this post is probably being recorded as I type, so comment at your own risk. Oh, I'm also still doped up on funny juice, so forgive the flrb mmrshn grm.

This morning, I had a "procedure" foisted upon me called the "Bravo pH Test" and boy, is my larynx tired. It's part of the endless barrage of tests invented by doctors to frighten, humiliate and, ultimately, relieve me of the spawnages' college money.

The Old Lady and I drove to the "surgery center" at the crackhole of dawn, I filled out some paperwork absolving everyone in the state of Michigan of my inevitable death, and then I was told to strip down to the waist, slip into a backwards shirt and put a shower cap on. It was nice to have a nurse order me to do that instead of the Old Lady, for a change.

Then they jabbed a needle in my hand (my hand!), rolled me into the surgery room and put what I think was a ball-gag in my mouth. Those stomach doctors are are some kinky-ass mofos (they put the "enter" in gastroenterology). Then a guy who looked a lot like Joe from the Three Stooges came in and told me what kind of roofies he was going to slip into my drip and it was off to fairyville.

When I woke up, one second later, I was in a different room, the Old Lady was standing over me with that "How did my life become this?" look I've grown to know so well, the ball-gag was gone and someone had drawn a Rollie Fingers mustache on my face in permanent Sharpie. Oh, and it felt like a homunculus was inside my esophagus, pinching the fuck out of it.

Basically, they snaked a tube down my throat (not a euphemism) and attached a small(ish) capsule to the wall of my esophagus that transmits a (most-likely lethal) signal to a little (genitalia sterilizing) receiver I have to wear around my neck that makes me look like a low-rent Darth Vader. There are three buttons on the receiver that I'm supposed to press whenever I have a specific sensation. There's one for "reflux," one for "regurgitation" and I think the third one dispenses a Pez out of my throat.

I'm supposed to wear the monitor for 24 hours and then turn it back in to the doc's office. Then, apparently, the capsule is supposed to release its death-grip and detach from my throat in "7 to 10 days." Seven to ten days?! I'll never fucking make it. I'll die from "pinched esophagus syndrome" by day three. No, if it doesn't detach after 48 hours, I'm grabbing the tongs off our barbecue and extracting that fucker myself.

Eating has been fairly brutal. Toast was a bad idea. Chips? No fucking way. Even chicken noodle soup felt like I was swallowing chicken-flavored fiberglass. So far, the only thing I can eat without wincing is ice cream so, fuck it, 48 hours of ice cream it'll have to be.

Five bucks says I gain 40 pounds and end up with "the diabeetus."

Mr. Commode's Wild Ride

The Old Lady found a frog on the toilet seat in our bathroom. The bathroom off of our bedroom. On the second story of our house. A frog.

What the shit, indeed.

There are many theories as to just how the fuck this wily amphibian made its way onto our crapper...

• It secreted itself inside either my, or the Old Lady's, asshole whilst we weren't paying attention. Say, when I was bending over and reaching into the garden to pick a plump tomato, or when the Old Lady crouched down on the sidewalk to retrieve a quarter. Then, while we were getting ready for bed, it hopped out of one of its sphincter-y sanctuaries and onto its toilet-y perch.
• While we were walking the dog, our froggy fugitive climbed aboard the dog's back and traveled, rodeo-style, into the house, up the stairs and lassoed itself onto the shitter.
• It hopped into my mouth while I was sleeping, survived a nightmarish rollercoaster ride through my colon, was blasted into the toilet bowl during my morning constitutional, then dredged itself up out of the muck and collapsed on the seat.
• It got washed down a sewer drain, swam upstream, weaving in and out of rocketing turdpedoes, into our sump pump, where it then crawled, Andy Dufresne-style, up the plumbing pipes and onto the throne.
• It's always been there and we just never noticed it.

I'm leaning toward the second theory because I just like the image of a frog riding a dog. Maybe I should make a little saddle for the pup and strap it onto his back before his walks. I could fashion it out of a piece of twine and a Pringle. We could get a whole stable of rodeo frogs, nay, Todeo frogs. We could charge admission and I could make the spawnage dress up as clowns and hide behind big barrels as the dog rocketed around the yard, desperately trying to eat both the frog and the Pringle off of his back.

This might just be the retirement opportunity I've been waiting for. To the pond!!!

The Log Days of Summer...

Question of the Day: Is there a dignified way to extricate a turd that's fused to your dog's ass-hairs, while he's yelping every time you tug on it and desperately trying to bite it off himself?

Answer of the Day: Nope.

To better illustrate the futility of such a task, let me relate it to you with a timely summer metaphor...

Imagine you're at the state fair, snacking on a delicious salted nut roll. While the salt is helping to replenish the precious electrolytes you've lost touring the sweltering fair grounds, you now crave something sweeter. You spy a cotton candy vendor and sidle up to the cart to watch a fresh batch being flossed into existence. As you peer into the giant silver reservoir, you lose your grip on your now-sweaty nut log and watch it tumble, headlong into the spinning candy webbery. By the time the vendor shuts off the machine, your nut-studded nugget is interwoven in a dense plexus of sticky candy reticula. Any attempt to remove the bolus from the hive's center will result in the vicious tearing of the delicate sugar-lattice and render both delicious treats completely inedible.

Such was my dilemma. (Although my goal was not to eat the dog's turd or ass-hairs, so i guess that's where the comparison falls apart.) So how did I resolve this doo-doo dilemma? I chased him around the backyard, hoping his spirited loping would help knock hunks of the fastened feces off his fanny, which it actually did, a bit. Then I got the hose out, switched the nozzle to "crappé" and blasted the remaining bits to kingdung come.

Mission Asscomplished.

Radon, It's a Crazy Feelin'...

Well, the verdict is in and, unfortunately, my basement is Radon free.

What does that mean? It means I have to find something else to blame my debilitating feebleness on, that's what it means. And I was really hoping to be dying of Radon poisoning, too. It's so mysterious and fancy.

CONCERNED PERSON 1: How did Crabbydad die?

CONCERNED PERSON 2: I heard it was... (whispering) radon poisoning.

CONCERNED PERSON 1: Oh man, that sounds horrific! What were his symptoms?

CONCERNED PERSON 2: Tiredness... occasional wheeziness... lack of desire to do anything substantial with his life... oh, and of course the chronic crabbiness.

CONCERNED PERSON 1: He must have been very brave.

CONCERNED PERSON2: Hm... no, not really.

So that basically leaves "being old" as the cause of all my symptomology. I'm tired because I'm old. My lung capacity is down because I'm old. I have a pulsing flesh-nubbin jutting out of my armpit because I'm old. I can't start or end my day until I make a nice B.M. because I'm old. I can't drink more than a glass and a half of wine without drying up into a dessicated husk overnight because I'm old. I don't have eyebrows anymore because I'm old. I constantly trip over my pendulous scrote that's dangling down around my ankles because I'm old. FINE! I GET IT!

It would've been a fuck of a lot easier to have had radon-poisoning, though.

Homeward Bound... and Gagged

Back from Portland and I have to say that I never truly comprehend just what a worthless shit-hole of a town I live in until I travel. Holy fuckstain. Every goddamn block in that town is an embarrassment of riches -- restaurants, food trucks, galleries, book stores, gluten-free bakeries, hemp refineries, hair salons specifically catering to rich white kids with dreadlocks, there's a patchouli river that courses through the city, and there are vegan gumdrops made with unbleached spelt and sweetened with agave nectar that rain down from the skies.

Here, we have Old Country Barfet.

I'm ready to move. My bag is packed. (Also, my luggage is filled with my belongings. Hello.) All we need is for a professorin' gig to open up at Portland State and we're there. Sure, the spawnage flip their collective lid every time we mention moving, but they'll get over it. Moving never killed anybody. You know who moved a lot as a child, according to Google? Tupac Shakur. And look how he turned out. Shit, he just performed at a concert as a hologram! The spawnage love holograms!

Anywhich, the trip was great. I don't feel like blathering on about all that we did, so I'll sum it all up in three bullet points:

• We went here.
  
• I got Chicken 'n' Waffles from a food cart.
  
• Miss O almost sharted at an outdoor festival.
  

Now if that's not a successful vacation, then I don't know what is. Of course, we fucked it all up by taking the brown-eye home on Monday morning. Or is that the "red-eye"? Whatever it is, it sure felt like the brown-eye. And now it's all just a distant memory... like "The Wire" or "my eyebrows."

Five bucks says I could even buy a set of goat hair eyebrow merkins from one of the many Alternative Body Hair Toupee vendors roaming the streets of Portland. Stupid Portland.

Go West, Young Crab...

We're off to Portland for a few days so I'll be taking a well-deserved break from posting. I mean, three posts in a year is an inSANE pace to keep up. I'm sure I'll have all sorts of crazy hijinx to post about upon our return -- tales of run-ins with patchouli-soaked, earlobe-plugged Oregonads, episodes of gastric pandemonium resulting from one too many hemploaf paninis and I'm pretty sure at least one of us will shart on the plane.

In the meantime, chew on this: I took Mr. Z to his cross-country physical yesterday and the doc filled us in on his growth stats since his last physical, two years ago. In 24 months the boy has grown eight (8) inches and gained 50 pounds. So you can better visualize this, here are a couple of equivalents...

He's this much heavier...

... and this much taller...

I don't know just what that means but now I'm hungry, so I'm gonna go make a muskie sub.

Pucker Up!

So, I'm finishing up my morning swim this AM and I'm wheeze-staggering toward the locker room. I've got Rush's "2112" coursing through my head because I decided to rock a Best-o'-Rush mix during my workout. Why? Because I hate all music at this point and I'm starting over -- I'm rewinding to age 12 and declaring a do-over.

As I fling open the locker room door, I'm greeted by a dude, naked as a plucked Butterball mind you, his ass jutted out, pointed at the mirror and his extended forefinger wiping some fucking unguent on his puckered bunghole. (I didn't see that his bunghole was puckered... I just ass-umed.) And I shit you not, this line from Rush was going through my head...

"What can this strange device be? When I touch it... it gives forth a sound..."

The dude didn't fucking flinch when he saw me. He just continued applying, like some kind of rectally agitated downhill skier who was "in the zone":

He did glance over at me for a second, long enough to see me half-grin as I thought "And there's my blog post for today!" But then he turned his attention to the mirror and back to the task at hand... er, finger.

My question is, what sort of person does this? Who moistens one's dumper in the middle of a bustling lockerroom? And, if one decides to do this, why does one need to look in the goddamn mirror? It's not like he was applying lipstick and didn't want to color outside his lip-line. The concentration and attention to detail -- it was like he was painting some sort of masterpiece on his taint. He's a regular Pablo Picasshole.

Dudes, man. They never cease to surprise and disgust me.

Radon O'Really?

I'm pretty sure I'm dying of Radon poisoning. It's a slow kinda dying and really only involves minor discomfort so far, so I suppose if you've gotta go, Radon poisoning is really not that bad of an option.


So I'm down here in the basement all day, freezing my nardules off because it's about 20 degrees colder down here than in the rest of the house. And since the Old Lady likes to set the air conditioner to about 1, that makes it about -19 down here. It's 99 degrees outside, my test-cicles have retreated up around my neck in this ice dungeon and I'm sportin' a fleece jacket and wool socks. (I have other things on, too, like pants, shirt and my unmentionables but they don't illustrate the coldness factor that well, so I didn't mention them.)

How does the Radon fit in, you ask? How the fuck should I know -- the Radon has probably already eaten away the part of my brain that would understand how it fits in. All I do know is that, all of a sudden, I've got issues with asthma that I've never had before, have to use this goddamn inhaler two times a day, my stomach is bloated all the time and I'm always tired as shit. If that's not Radon poisoning then, honey, I don't know what is. (Actually, it's more likely attributed to the fact that I'm 47 years old and that's what happens when you run your flesh suit full-throttle for 47 fucking years straight without changing the oil or emptying your spit valve.)

Anywhich, I bought one of those home Radon Test Kits from the creeps over at Ace Hardware. Actually, they're not all creepy... mostly just the older woman who seems completely normal until she turns away from you to go find your compact fluorescent light bulbs and you see the kiwi fruit-sized flesh orb sticking out the back of her head, coyly peeking out of her curly, gray tresses. I swear I could see the thing breathing. I shouldn't poke fun at it, of course -- mostly because it might pop and because that's probably what my fucking skin tag's gonna look like in a couple of months. To her credit, her flesh nubbin did have quite a nice shine to it, though. Maybe I could get some nubbin-buffin' tips out of her.

What was I talking about? Right, the Radon test kit. Bought it about three months ago and stuck it to the top of my computer monitor -- right in the thick o' the noxious death cloud I suck in throughout the day. I just shipped it off to the testing company on Monday and they say I'll get the results in about two weeks. I can't wait -- it's like waiting for a college acceptance letter! "Dear Crabbydad, We are pleased to inform you that your basement is chock full o' radioactive outgasses and that you have, at best, months to live. Congratulations!"

I've started pricing iron lungs and I think I found the perfect one:

I used to be such an iron-lung-half-empty kinda guy but I really feel like I'm more of an iron-lung-half-full kinda guy now. Things are looking up!

How Do You Work This Thing?

Where was I? Oh, right, the skin tag. Well, that fucking meat-ball withstood the dental floss noose and, if anything, has grown even stronger and fleshier. I've temporarily given up trying to remove myself from it, basically out of respect. Not only do I think that rubbery nub is sentient, I'm getting the feeling that it's way more intelligent than I am. Another couple of weeks and I'm not going to even be able to rest my arm at my side -- it'll just be perched atop the beanbag chair-sized nevus jutting out of my armpit. Frankly, I'm not that bothered by it anymore. It's kind of like having a new friend... or A friend. It's pretty lonely here toiling away in the basement. Now at least I have a co-worker. (Unfortunately, he smokes.)

So, yeah, I haven't written anything in a while. I think I started feeling like I had nothing left to say. I mean, how many times can you bitch about your kids or their schools or your health or having an itchy asshole... or poop?

Hopefully a lot more, because that's all I fucking know. So, I'm going to try to fire this mofo back up and see what happens. Do people even blog today, though? Is Blogger even a thing anymore? Aren't people now just Tumblring their Pinterest onto their BleepBlorp? I should probably just attend to my neglected Twitter account but encapsulating a thought into two sentences is way the fuck harder for me than blathering on for 10 paragraphs about how long my last shit was (like a fucking didgeridoo...doo).

So, yeah, we'll see if I can tear my skinny ass off the Tee-Vee watchin' couch at the end of the day, stumble back down here to this radon-soaked tomb and shit out some drivel about my meaningless existence.

Sounds fun!