A New Sexual Vocabulary

So my parenting alarms have been on high alert recently for some reason.

I think it’s because the oldest little bastard is nine now. He’s at that age where he starts learning things at school, which he brings home and kindly unleashes on to our seven-year-old daughter.

But for some reason all things related to sex have me feeling like I’m a sweaty crackhead in the middle of an intervention fumbling with my fingers, looking around paranoid as shit at everyone and everything near me.

Driving in the car the other day Kings of Leon, Sex on Fire came on and the boy’s singing the lyrics.

And I’m cringing, holding the steering wheel tight as can be as I hear a rare silence from the back seat. And all I can imagine is what’s going through his head….

Boy’s Head Thoughts:

“Oh look, something shiny. I should make a fart noise right now. Wonder if I have a booger? I really hate my sister. I wonder why my penis is bigger than my dad’s? I should ask for a play-date for the 438^th time today. Hey….this is kind of a cool song. Sex? What’s sex? Let me ask…”

Thankfully that question never came out.

And then there’s the bedroom situation in our humble abode. Three bedrooms literally on top of each other.

You can hear EVERYTHING.

So we deck each room with fans to cut down on hearing the boy snore. Hearing the girl fart all night (not kidding). And to eliminate any sounds of the wife and I having our monthly “relations.”

But at the end of the day, our door still doesn’t lock and we have no idea what’s happening in the hallway on the other side of it.

I guess I could pipe Kenny G. into the hallway to force them to wear earplugs. I could set trip hazards connected to pots and pans. Or we could just move our location to the basement next to the cat litter box.

So many choices…

Regardless I’m fearful because I feel the older the kids get the stealthier things will need to be.

I’ll never forget coming home as a teenager and hearing one of my parents have relations with a step parent. It was one of the most horrifying experiences. So I exited the house, re-entered and slammed the ever-living-shit out of the door just to make damn sure they knew I was home.

I cock-blocked the hell out of them and don’t regret it to this very day.

So maybe the best thing to do is to retrain ourselves and the responses we have to sex to sound like we’re having the most interesting conversation in the entire world.

So as my curious little bastards stand in the hallway they hear their mother emotionally saying:

“That’s sooooo curious!!”

“OH MY GOD!!!! I remember that time too!”

“Yes, yes, YES!! We can take the kids to Disney World if they stay in their rooms at night!!”

Or hear their daddy grunting:

“Oh, oh, oh those shoes match your outfit perfectly!”

“Yes, keep doing that to your hair cause it’s beautiful.”

“Oh my god I think I’m going to come to your holiday party this year!!”

But in reality we all know the real new retrained phrases will be:

Wife: “Are you done ironing your clothes yet?”

Me: “I’m sorry, I thought I’d last longer than that at scrabble.”

Parking Nazi

On Valentine’s Day the wife and I laughed as we sat next to each other saying, “we should totally pack the kids up, go to a mainstream Mexican restaurant and try to dine with all the other throngs of Valentine’s Day celebrators.

Ten minutes later we were in the car, in the thick of heavy, hungry, Valentine’s-celebrating traffic trying desperately to find our spot in parking hell just so we could dine in over-priced deliciousness on a Hallmark Day.

We had become pawns in the game we laughed about just minutes ago.

But that’s beside the point.

The point in hand was that the entire time this nightmare unfolded before our eyes, our 8-year-old was back-seat-driving like it was his job.

Some of my favorite quotes from the night:

“Daddy!! Right there!!! It’s right there…two lines!! Park between them…jeeze!!!”

“Ok…Ok..OK OK Ok, back-up now!!! Awe daddy you blew it, come on!!!”

“Over there daddy I see a line! Park on the other side of it and let’s eat!!”

What you didn’t hear in-between those jarring phrases were things like:

“Dude…that’s a handicap parking space!”

“I can’t back-up, there are human-beings behind us!”

“There’s a sign in that awesome space that says ‘Residential Parking Only.’”

I was so used to the wife front-seat-driving, clutching things as I drove down the Interstate, yelling at me with phrases like “there are children in the car!!” and “oh, you should totally take a right here because there’s this cute little antique store we should visit.”

It was as if the wife had completed some satanic ritual when I wasn’t looking and dubbed the boy “Parking Nazi” so that she would have more time to play Angry Birds on her phone in the car.

And the boy owned it like it was his job.

Me: “Dude! You know I’ve been driving for almost two decades right?”

Son: “What’s a decade? Oh…and right there daddy!!! Park there…turn, turn, turn!!”

Me: “OK, first – there’s a fire hydrant there. Second, a decade is 10 years. Third, shouldn’t you be picking on your sister or flicking boogers at her or something?”

We never found a space to park that night. We ended up going home defeated, dejected, and hungry.

The boy didn’t learn his lesson. He helped me drive the entire way back home.

The only difference was now he was back-seat-driving while flicking boogers at his sister as the wife played Angry Birds while mumbling, “you told him it was OK to do it.”



Top 10 Things I Freakishly Enjoy

Yesterday I pulled up to the gas station to piss away even more money to “the man.” I did my usual dumping of my car garbage, then grabbed the squeegee and started cleaning my windows.

Completely soaked in 22-day-old non-soapy water, my windows were ready to be squeegeed off. As I slowly pulled that first line of water off I felt the day’s tenseness go away. The second line I felt even more relaxed. By the time the entire windshield was done I felt like a badass and the entire day’s insanity slip away!

OK, not that good, but damn it was a weird spooky kind of relief.

I got back in the car completely freaked out by myself and thought, “that’s just one of those uncommon satisfying things in life that you just kinda secretly enjoy.”

So what are 10 other weird and spooky things that satisfy which I probably shouldn’t reveal?

1) Wiping down the bathroom sink so it’s absolutely spotless. Little dinky hairs, puddles of water, toothpaste globs, boogers…you name it. They collect in the most bizarre places of the sink. Taking my wet hand and cleaning it down is therapeutic in a freaky way.

2) Armor Alling my car dashboard. Seriously…when it’s done and the smell is in the car…I just want to put Led Zeppelin Physical Graffitti in the CD player, go for a ride with the windows down and blare the hell out of the radio.

3) Lawn dances. I won’t lie…I love them. Give me a wedding, eight beers, a shot of Jager, a good song and a dance floor and I’m in heaven. I’ll be doing the “lawn mower” and “weed eater” all night.

4) Speaking of weed-eating…creating perfectly trimmed grass along sidewalks and boarders makes me literally need to take a cold shower afterwards. It’s lawn maintenance porn.

5) Crossing the finish line of a half-marathon race. It’s indescribable. You’re happy, elated, sick, exhausted, motivated, and humbled all at once.

6) Turning my fan to the number 3 setting and sliding my dumb-ass into bed.

7) After 12 minutes of digging, cutting, digging deeper, and almost giving up, finally pulling that damn splinter from your body.

8) Holy shit do I love corn on the cob. The greatest thing ever invented. But damn those stringy annoying thingies that jam ever so strategically in-between your teeth! So when a toothpick slides one of those out from in-between my fucked-up teeth it’s so amazing!

9) Sliding a key along the spine of a new music CD to cut the cellophane that wraps it. Pulling it off, opening the case and the smell that tickles your nose of the freshly printed CD jacket and all the awesomeness it holds.

10) Clipping that annoying toenail. You know…the one that sticks out ever-so-slightly so that it rubs against the toe next to it and makes you want to rip someone’s head off?! Yeah…smoothing that bad-boy out is so freakin’ awesome!

That’s it for today’s freak-show. That’s just a few of my weirdness that is o-so-satisfying in a “daddy, you’re weird!!!” kinda way.

What’s yours?!!! Leave a comment.