oh shit!

With apologies in advance…

Over the summer, when I was dog sitting, I had a really bad night.  Wait, that’s not entirely accurate – the dog I was sitting had a terrible night.  At about midnight, I woke to the Max (the dog) breathing on my neck and licking my face. I had been with him for a few weeks and this was not his normal behavior.  As soon as I sat up, he darted to the front door with a very anxious look on his face (I am reminded of the trope that 90% of communication is non-verbal). I grabbed his leash, with the dog bags attached, and we darted downstairs.  

I had only one foot outside the front door before Max cured what was ailing him all over the sidewalk while I averted my eyes. Once Max was fully, but, as I would later learn, only temporarily relieved I was faced with a conundrum. Like a good citizen, I had my doggie bags with my but what I really needed was a mop or wet vac. I do my best with the bags but, if I am being honest, my best wasn’t good enough.

After a few minutes, I took Max back upstairs to discover that while I thought our trip downstairs was round one, it was, in an increasingly horrifying reality, round two.  The words equine and ziggurat best describe round one, which I some how missed piled high on the living room floor rushing out the door. After cleaning up and thoroughly washing my hands, I climbed back into bed and hoped for sleep. This was a foolish hope. About twenty minutes later, Max was back in bedroom and even more panic stricken.  I grab his leash, dog bags, and, this time, paper towels and we headed out for round three, which sadly marked not the end of our night but merely the halfway mark.  On our last trip downstairs, Max was, um, dry heaving from behind – poor dog. 

Bonnacon

A mythical animal that has a bull’s head with horns that curl toward and offer no defense.  The bonnacon’s defense is spraying acidic dung that burns the skin on contact. 

I’ve selected the picture below because I love the face on the man and bonnacon.

Subway Books

Dateline: Heading from W86th Street to Rockefeller Center on the B

One of the many, many things I miss about living in NYC is commuting by subway and having the dedicated reading time each day.  And one of my favorite activities while commuting was noting what books my fellow commuters were reading and if I noticed a lot of people reading the same book (I’d refer to them as subway books in my mind), I’d read them myself (The Help and Water for Elephants are just two examples). Sadly, the ubiquity of e-readers has pretty much put an end to subway books for me (even if I still lived in the City).

Xenagorabibliomania

an obsessive curiosity about the books that strangers read in open places.

Daddy?

Word of the Week is intended for mature audiences only and is specifically designed to be read by adults and therefore may be unsuitable for children under 17. This program may contain one or more of the following: crude indecent language (L), explicit sexual activity (S), or graphic violence (V). 

Editor's note: If you are Jackson’s grandmother, you may not want to read this one.

As I noted last week, Jackson and I spent last weekend in Vegas. Our Vegas trips have been an annual event for the past three years. It’s a great time for us to go away together and gives us the opportunity to connect outside of the hustle and bustle of work, school and the city in general. Although Vegas is more of an adult city, there is plenty for Jack and me to do, such as renting exotic cars for a few hours, trying west-coast restaurants like In-N-Out Burgers and Fat Burgers, and simply just hanging by the pool.

As early risers, Jack and I were wide awake around 5 am local time and headed down to Starbucks to get our morning started. Heading back up to our room, vittles in hand, a prostitute propositioned me while I was WALKING WITH JACKSON. “Hey, baby, you looking for a party,” she asked while holding a bottle of Patron in her right hand. And, she was a prostitute right out of central casting. Whatever images are conjured in your mind when reading Vegas prostitute are 100% right. To be clear, Jack and I were walking together side-by-side. And although Jack is turning fourteen next month, he’s a very young fourteen. Like, he still-showers-with-the-bathroom-door-open young.

When I asked Jackson if he knew what just happened, he mumbled yes. Do you know who she was? And he whispered the words every father wants to hear “Daddy, she is a prostitute.”  He was clearly stunned and when we got in the elevator he said “I didn’t think it would be that obvious.” I explained that sometimes life really isn’t that complicated.

Unfortunately, this was not the most uncomfortable conversation we had over the weekend. While taking a few laps in the hotel’s lazy river, music was utz-utzing in the background. I tuned the music out but Jack didn’t. The opening lines of the song, which I later learned was Lil Jon’s Get Low, are “To the window, to the wall! Til the sweat drop down my balls Til all these bitches crawl,” which then leads into the chorus — “Til all skeet skeet motherfuckers, all skeet skeet god damn!”

Jackson looks at me and earnestly asks “Daddy, what is skeet.” The easiest thing to do would have been to lie to him and say I don’t know. But I did know and had long ago decided to be open with Jackson regarding his curiousity around sex. “Skeet, Jackson, is a slang term for ejactulation.  But, in these lyrics I can’t tell if he’s using skeet as a verb, noun, or somehow as an adjective. (It’s always good time for grammar!!!). The look on his poor, little face.

I went to Vegas with the hopes of strengthening my relationship with Jackson, I’m worried it’s worse now.

Verschlimmbessen

making something worse during the act of trying to improve it.

German - the verb verschlimm means “to make things worse” and the verb verbessern means “to improve”)

What's in a name?

I had planned to fly to Vegas with my son and, although the person seated next to me looks like my son, my row-mate has eschewed watching movies to work on an English paper because “there won’t be enough time to finish it when we get back back on Sunday.” Who is this person and where is my son? Anyway, to this week’s entry.

I do many stupid things but would like to highlight only one here. Through work, I pay (on a pre-tax basis) for monthly MetroCards each of which is valid for thirty days from the first turnstile swipe. Here’s the stupid part, I get really excited when I can start my monthly card after the first of the montn because it makes me feel like I am getting a deal. For example, my May card expires today but, as noted above, I’m flying to Vegas so I won’t start my June card until Monday, June 4th - this delights me no end even though it makes no difference at all. 

Coincidentally, I ran into an old high school friend on the subway recently and was reminded of a something he told me in high school. His last name is Finale and his family is from Italy. He explained that his surname came from the fact that his ancestors' job was to extinguish the town’s streets, thereby marking the finale of the day and I always found that fascinating. It sparked my curiosity into last name etymology and, for the most part, they stem from a family’s occupation or trades (e.g., Carter was the last name of who transporter or carted good or geographical origin - a few English examples are Hamilton, Sutton, and London.  And the prefix Mc means son of, and the prefix O’ means grandson of.  Other surnames are derived from certain features of an area, such as Hill or Ford. 

There’s a good website to explore your last name here — https://www.ancestry.com/learn/facts

But, back to my stupidity, which might could be tied to my last name MORON-ey.

onomastics

1 a : the science or study of the origins and forms of words especially as used in a specialized field
b : the science or study of the origin and forms of proper names of persons or places
2 : the system underlying the formation and use of words especially for proper names or of words used in a specialized field

Anchors Away

I love musicals, so when I learned that this cruise ship puts on an original musical production, I was excited. It’s a one act show entitled The Gift, which left me with questions. 

In the first scene, we meet the protagonist, whose name I can’t quite decipher but he’s lost the love of his life sometime ago. He’s taken to the drink but is visited by a magical clock, which encourages him to love again. It’s hard to understand all of the words but a few are clear — this musical is set in Victorian England.

Scene 2, opens with, confusingly, a cover of Van Halen’s Right Now. The role of Sammy Hagar is hovering above the stage, strapped to the prow of a ship, and playing, I must admit, an excellent air guitar. When he’s done singing, I’m too confused to join others in the audience in the standing ovation. 

When the ship reaches shore, the protagonist heads to a park, that reminds me of Seurat’s Sundays in the Park with George. The protagonist encounters a coquette and attempts to seduce her. She’s playing hard to get. They picnic and share a chaste kiss. She tosses her wine glass and starts to dance, he joins. While the sun shines in the background, a pop song implores us feel the rain on our skin. They dance off stage. 

Scene three opens with the protagonist in a different part of London — still in the Victorian era. We meet a young man, on a BMX bike. He’s doing tricks. Not sure why he’s not riding a penny farthing, which would have been both more impressive and accurate to the period. Techno music blasts. 

But who is this kid on the bike? It’s the protagonist’s son! They sing of his deceased mother. The coquette re-appears. Ah, I see I was wrong, that’s the protagonists daughter!  Oops, I was way off in scene one.  I give myself partial credit for at least reading her body language correctly. 

Father, son, and daughter hug while We are Family plays. Another standing ovation, while my confusion deepens. 

mizmaze

• the way lies through … an intricate mizmaze of tracks —S. P. B. Mais
•  dialectal, England  : a state of confusion or bewilderment : whirlso surprised he was all of a mizmazeThe Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, often shortened to Vatican II, was announced by Pope John XXXIII in January 1959 more than 100 years since the last ecumenical council and the announcement stunned the world. The main reason for the surprise was that the First Vatican Council had strenuously reaffirmed the doctrine of papal infallibility, which stands for the idea that the pope, “when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church.” Rather than one man defining the doctrine for the whole Church, however, Pope John XXXIII had invited 2,908 other men, and exactly zero women, to decide the Church’s teachings.