How are you so sure?

Tomorrow a majority of people will go someplace and vote for who should be the next leader of our country, and at the end of the day about half the country will think we've gone nuts. After tomorrow our new President will either be:

a.) A 70 year billionaire who is definitely a pig, and may be a whole lot worse or...

b.) A 69 year old millionaire who might be one of the leaders of a fairly significant criminal enterprise, and who might be either hiding a serious illness or a substance abuse issue.

The 69 year old has portrayed the 70 year old as racist, sexist, xenophobic, and an imminent threat to our country's well being, while the 70 year old has portrayed the 69 year old as a career politician, career criminal (although the two things have become virtually synonymous), and an imminent threat to our country's well being. Facts and political issues have become immaterial, as both sides have people working for them who have determined (correctly) that people are less swayed by issues than they are by emotions, so basically at the end of the day the person of grandparent age deemed least scary overall will be your next President.

Some people are complaining that both candidates are terrible and wondering how these could possibly be the best two options available. One of the candidates looks half-dead half the time and is always falling over or shaking uncontrollably, but has managed to parlay that into wild amounts of success politically including the DFL nomination. The other one is a weird looking, orange colored person who hardly ever says anything of substance, except to periodically mention that as a billionaire he can wander into changing areas for the Ms Universe pageant and grab women by their pussies with no reprisal, but has managed to parlay that bizarre form into billions of dollars in the business world and the GOP nomination. It is frankly remarkable, but I think this is exactly what we wanted. The debates were not much more than 4 hours of insults being hurled back and forth, a geriatric "Real World" if you will, and people loved it, even if they told you they didn't. Check out the ratings as proof. It was good entertainment.

Some people have gone out of their way to post item after item on Social Media about how their chosen candidate will make things wonderful while the other candidate will bring upon certain doom to us, and quickly. Some people have said things like, "If you're voting for X, unfriend me now!!!" Friendships have been ruined, people have been assaulted, the country has been even further divided because of the certainty some people have that one candidate is absolutely necessary, and the other is pure evil, and we're fairly split on who the evil one is.

My question since day 1 has always been, "How are you so sure?" I mean, you are certain enough to post 10 things a day on Facebook, how did you get there? As far as I can tell, you have two candidates who are certainly flawed in some respects, but so is everybody, and with the advent of Social Media, no candidate will ever be an angel again, but I cannot say with any degree of certainty based on their past transgressions that either candidate should be disqualified from my consideration, especially considering the other candidate may be just as flawed. How are you so sure? I know only what has been provided to me from various forms of media, and I know that the media can have it's own agendas, so I have to assume that many of the things reported may be half-truths, or spun to make somebody look worse or better. How are you so sure? My political views don't really align with either party's platform (as far as I can tell because issues have been buried), so to say we're really voting for control of the Supreme Court down the road doesn't have a big impact on me because chances are I'll agree with their decision about half the time. How are you so sure? I would like to have a President who, at the end of 2020 I can honestly say that I think we're better off than we were, but how do I even begin to qualify that? I'm considerably wealthier than I was in 2008, and my life is a lot more stable, but not everybody feels that way, and does that have anything to do with Barack Obama, or is it more about my choices, and would I be in the exact same position if we had President Romney or President McCain? I'm not certain I guess, and there's no alternate dimension where Mitt Romney is the president so I can check. It seems impossible for me to know as I don't feel like I have enough information, so how are you so sure? And does it really even matter who the President is, or is he/she just a figurehead, smiling politely while trying to implement the policies of the highest bidder. I mean, there's a narrative out there that this country has been run by a few extremely wealthy businessmen for quite some time now, so is all this party siding pointless because the power won't be changing hands regardless of whether we choose blue or red? I don't know. How are you so sure?

Here's the good news though. I think we've reached a tipping point, and I think a lot of powerful people will get together and make sure we do better next time. Irrespective of how one of these candidates does as President, I think the process from here on out, from the early vetting of candidates, to the debates, will improve. I hope so. We need it to. Be safe voting out there, I still like you no matter who you cast your vote for.

The Perils of Coaching Kid Baseball

Recently I took on the responsibility of coaching my son's baseball team. The team is made up of 2nd graders of varying skill  from around the neighborhood. They are about what you'd expect, a bunch of sweet, goofy little people. They also are driving me nuts.

I understand and appreciate that they are learning, and I don't care that they drop pop ups and make bad throws, but I hate, hate, hate it when they aren't paying attention, and doing things like:

-Kicking dirt all over the place so a big cloud of dust forms and everybody chokes
-Staring at the sky for no good reason
-Picking up the base every time it gets one grain of sand on it
-Covering the base in sand and nearly getting crushed in the tiny testicles because you weren't watching when a ball came at you.
-Yanking out handfuls of grass in the outfield and stuffing it down their pants
-Excessive, unrepentant belching
-Whining about wanting the game to be over after 3 pitches in the 1st inning
-Wearing your glove on your head
-Holding the ball and staring at it while all your teammates, fans, coaches, umpires, and the seedy guy drinking Mickey's grenades at the picnic table are screaming at you to throw it in.
-Watching a ball drop two inches from you and not even attempting to pick it up
-Choosing "into a stream behind the bench" instead of "2nd base" as an appropriate place to throw the ball.
-Using your bat as an axe and whacking it against trees
-Not knowing where left field is still, even though you've played there 15 times already in the last 2 weeks
-Asking if we won right after we lost 8-0

I know, I know, they're little. We're working with them. They'll get better. I just have to stave off the impending insanity until they do

My Job is Not Like Your Job.

Not too long ago, I drove in to work and when I got there I realized I had forgotten my shoes at home. I was cleaning the garage a little bit before I left, and I was too lazy to put on shoes to do this, and I had intended on putting my shoes in the back seat, and actually gone so far as to picture them in the back seat in my mind, and then my mind got confused and forgot that I hadn't actually done put them back there. Hence, I had no shoes.

The nice part is that it didn't matter, as I am my boss and I was cool with it. It's one of the many perks associated with being self employed. I used to work for a large company and my suspicion is that they would have frowned on a shoeless employee and they might have shoved me in a broom closet as punishment, or made me eat all the old, unattached food in the community fridge.

It made me think about all the bonuses of having a job like mine such as:

1.) I work in my gym clothes, or what I slept in. Occasionally I wear khakis, but only if somebody is coming to the office that might give me money. Or take money away from me.

2.) I don't need shoes.

3.) I can fiddle around on the internet, write blogs, facebook stalk people, look at naked pictures of celebrities, shop for Russian Mail Order brides, and play violent Gangsta Rap music without fear of reprisal from anyone.

4.) When I do my job correctly, I feel it directly in my wallet. No additional incentive needed. If you ever see me with a wallet so large that I have to stack a Tolstoy novel under my left butt cheek to stay level, you'll know that I have been doing my job correctly. (Side note: I rarely carry cash, so this is more for illustrative purposes.)

5.) I show up whenever I get there, and leave whenever I'm done (unless I'm doing any of the activities located in #3.)

6.) There's none of this stupid, bullshit, team building crap here. We don't have potlucks, or Hawaiian Shirt Day, or Jeans Day, or Ugly Sweater Day, or Frozen Game Hen Bowling Day, or Boss Appreciation Day, or Hump-The-Person-In-Your-Adjacent-Cubicle-In-The-Stairwell Day. We just work. Sometimes with shoes...

As fun as that sounds, there are also things that suck about this job like:

1.) I have to do all the non-work work. Pay bills, run the dishwasher, buy food, fix broken shit, buy garbage bags, change light bulbs, shovel the entryway, etc. Blech!

2.) We own the unit I work in, so in addition to having to advertise any vacant offices, I am also a de-facto caretaker for the entire building. I have pitched a dead squirrel into the forest, chased a frog around the kitchen, and cleaned up old lady poop and pee. It's nasty business.

3.) If I screw up, I feel it directly in my wallet. Gone are the days when I used to do my little portion of the whole, with absolutely no regard for the health of the company I worked for. The company could be on fire, or run by swindlers and Ponzi schemers, or totally falling apart at the seams, and it was of absolutely no consequence because I still got a paycheck. Now I forget to carry a 1, and we go to Duluth and not Aruba for vacation. (Side note: That last part may be a little dramatic.)

4.) Sometimes, when the phone isn't ringing, the emails aren't coming, and I'm sitting in a Captain America T-Shirt and mesh shorts playing Scrabble, it kind of feels like it's not a real job.

5.) I'm at the mercy of crooked, greedy, bastards. I have seen first hand what the prospect of more money will do to some people, and it ain't pretty. We try to filter those people away from us, but it's amazing how we tend to look past some obvious, frightening flaws when a large sum of money comes in every month.

It's a big difference I'll admit, but I'm happy with the choice I made. Now where the fuck are my shoes???

I Suck at Fixing Things

Recently we filled the one vacant office we had in our office complex with a woman who does therapy and massage for crazy or sad people. One of her conditions of leasing with us was that all the doors have locks on them, presumably so that I don't accidentally stumble in during a confessional looking for rent money or a free massage or something, violating confidentiality of the patient, and HIPAA regulations and whatnot. So during all this, I realized I had no idea where the key to her office was. The last guy that rented that office never had a key because he had no secrets, and so I was very concerned that the key was just gone.

I eventually found the key, on my keychain, where it had been for the last four years, and I had no idea what it was or what it opened. This was fortunate because otherwise I would have had to go buy a new lock for the door, and take out the old lock, and I am about as mechanically inclined as your average retarded 6 year old. Basically I have 5 techniques for fixing things, and if these don't work then more or less the thing stays broken.

1.) Turn it off and turn it back on- This is my only option for computer type things. If turning off and then turning back on doesn't work, I give up and go take a nap.

2.) Whacking the side of it- This doesn't work very often, but i do get to take out some aggression and sometimes it actually makes the picture on the TV come back.

3.) Threatening it- There's nothing like swearing at the oven or a TV tray to let it know you aren't messing around and it had better figure itself out soon, because you mean business.

4.) Sticking your finger in there and swishing it around-This works more often than you might imagine, because sometimes dust and dead bugs are causing the problem, but it also sometimes leads to painful electric shocks. Those are just a hazard you have to live with when fixing things. My mom told me that one time she got a shock and it flung her backwards 5 feet. I've never seen something like that but I want to.

5.) Asking my wife- She can usually fix something in 3 minutes that it's taken me an hour to break worse.

I think the point is that things should never break around me.

The Worst Therapy Dog Ever

One time when I was a kid there was this clown at this kid's birthday party. The clown was very overweight, he couldn't make balloon animals, he didn't have anything fun to say, and he started to sweat off his makeup about 15 minutes into the party so by the end he wound up looking more like the Joker from Batman, except instead of trying to poison the entire party via a large parade balloon, he just sat in a chair and smoked a cigar. He was pretty much the worst clown ever. Normally you don't get to meet the worst anything ever, so it was somewhat interesting that on our vacation up North, to Bay Lake, we met another "worst".

We were sitting in the lodge eating, when I heard a muffled barking sound. I went outside and there was a little weiner dog chained to the deck, with an enormous, canvas muzzle on that covered his whole beak, with just a little hole for his nose. It looked like a sideways ice cream cone with a dog in it. The dog looked angry. A person walked by and said, "That's Sigmund. The muzzle is to make him not be able to bark." I found this odd considering he was clearly barking during her whole sentence. Then she said, "He's training to be a therapy dog." I was really surprised by this, but I figured maybe Sigmund was just a little aggravated because he was chained to the deck, so I reached my hand over so he could sniff it through the bottom of the ice cream cone. Sigmund snarled and backed away. I thought to myself, "This therapy dog sucks ass," and I walked off. Sigmund continued to bark constantly even though he wasn't supposed to be able to.

Throughout the weekend I saw Sigmund frequently, since we were on an island he wasn't going anywhere. He was always looking angry and barking or snarling at people, and he began taking little runs at the kids, presumably determined to bite their toes off. I heard he actually nipped somebody. Over the course of the vacation, it became obvious that Sigmund was the worst therapy dog ever. If I was some poor little kid suffering a debilitating disease, and they sent Sigmund in to play with me, I would just figure that the forces of evil were conspiring against me, and quickly die so they wouldn't get the satisfaction of seeing Sigmund bite my ventilator hose in two.

I am now of the belief the Sigmund was a "reverse therapy" dog, so if you were too happy all the time or something, you could send Sigmund in to bite your toes off and get you back on an even keel. Some people need a Sigmund I think.

Terrible Games

While we were up in Duluth last weekend, my son and I invented a really terrible game called "RockWeiner". Essentially the rules of RockWeiner are that you whip a Lake Superior rock at your opponent's weiner, and then he whips a rock at your weiner. This continues for an indeterminate number of turns, until you realize that getting hit in the weiner with a rock will hurt and you find something potentially less painful to do. It may be the worst game ever invented.

With that in mind, I'd like to review a list of things I played as a kid that I hope my kids never get thrust into.

1.) Shoot the Moose- A really horrible game invented by my across the street neighbor. One of you was the moose, and ran around the backyard aimlessly, and the other person was the hunter and that person stood someplace using his finger as a gun and made gun noises with his mouth to simulate shooting a moose. It always became contentious because it was difficult to prove that your invisible bullets had actually hit the moose, or if they had merely ricocheted off the moose's hoof. Nobody ever won.

2.) Find the Fart- A stupid game that ignored the obvious fact that fart smells vanish quickly. The object of this game was to fart, play a little Nintendo for a while, and then go roam the house trying to find where the fart had floated off to, so periodically you'd see me and somebody else walking around the dining room sniffing the air. One time I actually thought I found the fart, but alas, it was only a cat doo-doo in the corner (Side note: I didn't pick up the doo-doo)

3.) Potion Making- An obvious precursor to the concept of Potions class in the Harry Potter series, this dumb game involved taking every single ingredient in the kitchen, mixing it into a bowl filled with Diet Coke, or Milk or something, sniffing it and recoiling in horror, and then leaving the bowl sitting on the counter because you thought of something better to do, so your mom would find it, sniff it, and recoil in horror 3 hours later. Cinnamon, worcestershire sauce, cardamom seeds, salt, mustard, toothpaste, vodka, evaporated milk, cooking wine, pee, dish soap, toaster leavings, liquid smoke, cat food, ranch dressing, Ken Davis BBQ sauce, vanilla, pickle brine, and a dead fly all mixed together makes for an interesting bouillabaisse.

4.) Drink a glass of Hot Water- Fairly self explanatory, pretty stupid.

5.) Play in a Sandbox Full of Poop- This game didn't really get invented, it happened more by circumstance, again over at my neighbor's house. I think my parents used to send me over there as punishment or something. But we were playing in the sandbox, and I remarked that it smelled really bad, and he replied, rather nonchalantly, "Oh, that's because there's cat poop and dog poop and raccoon poop in it," and then just kept playing in it. It was troubling.

6.) Trampoline Wrestlemania- This game was more dangerous than stupid. My friend had the only trampoline in the neighborhood back in the day, and although his parents had concocted numerous safety rules that were posted on the door by the trampoline, apparently pitching 9 year olds off head first into a snowbank or the sidewalk was perfectly fine. It was convenient that there was a 9 year old in the neighborhood who was OK with being thrown off the tramp onto his head, but still I don't want my kids doing that.

7.) Burn stuff on the Space Heater- A stupid idea to begin with, this game eventually devolved into "Pee on the Space Heater and See What Happens". What happens is that the odor of boiling hot urine is so strong you can't even go downstairs for 3 days and you have to throw away the space heater and your parents are really mad at you, so you try to blame the cat but it doesn't work.

8.) Toilet Baseball Cards- A poorly thought out way to kill the value of your 1987 Topps Baseball Card set. You would sit in the den and flip baseball cards towards the bathroom. If you curved them just perfectly they might even land right in the toilet which meant they never had to play again. It was like getting into the Hall of Fame. But actually making it into the bathroom was pretty good too, along with landing someplace weird like in someone's shoe, in the sink or the shower, or getting stuck in the baseboards. The really irritating part about this game was picking up all the cards afterward, so that rarely happened.

9.) Kill Darts- The object of this ill conceived game is to throw heavy, metal tipped darts from close range as hard as you can at your sister's dolls. If the dart hits the doll squarely in the forehead and sticks there, it's a kill dart. If you miss and poke a bunch of holes in your thinly sheetrocked bedroom, well that's pretty awesome too.

10.) The Old Lady Basketball Association (OLBA)- A remarkably dumb idea I invented using all the bad things I knew about old ladies, and a Nerf Hoop. The teams had names like "The Dehydrated Boobs", "The Raisin Pusses", and "The Soggy Depends", and most games somebody would die running down the court because they were so old, so each team always needed at least one sub because of all the frequent death involved. Other than that, it was just your ordinary 1 person playing alone competitive basketball game.

So yeah, I'm really, really hoping my kids find something better to do with their time, because otherwise they might end up like me, and that would be pretty stupid too.

Brian the Plumber.

The other day I was sitting around at work picking my nose, hand picking Russian mail order brides off the internet, and occasionally working. I was doing this all in sock feet by the way, because shoes are jerks.

Anyway, as I was doing all these semi-important things, an angry looking woman walks down the stairs into our offices, stares at me suspiciously, enters our bathroom, and proceeds to take what must have been a painful, complicated dookie, because she was in there for about 20 minutes, and when she came out she was sweating and her hair looked like Nick Nolte's mugshot. She then eyed me suspiciously again, ran her hands through her hair, and walked back up the stairs. This surprised me, because as far as I know, our restroom is not open to the public.

After verifying with the mortgage guy who offices with us that she was not a client of his, I began to get concerned that homeless people had found our bathroom and were now going to try to live in there, and I have shy kidneys so it wouldn't be practical. While I was thinking about where else I could pee from now on, I heard a loud dripping noise coming from the bathroom recently vacated by the woman of unknown origin. When I walked in to check it out I saw that there was a fairly heavy stream of yellowish water cascading down from the ceiling vent onto the floor, like a uriney waterfall. This was not normal, so I stood there and scratched my head, to at least give the impression that I was trying to figure out what was going on. I decided to walk upstairs to see if I could find the source.

Our upstairs tenants are a bunch of counselors, and from what I could tell they were all in session because al of their respective doors were closed. Strangely, the bathroom was also closed. I knew this because someone had taped a rudimentary sign to the door which said, "Closed". I knocked on the door to make sure some counselor was counseling a weirdo about how to urinate efficiently or something. When I was sure there was nobody in there, I opened the door. What I saw was not promising, and by not promising I mean the toilet was overflowing all over the floor and there was standing pee-water everywhere. I was pleased that I had located the source, but also irritated that somebody would plug the toilet, and not have the common decency to plunge it before a flood happened, especially considering there was a plunger located 3 inches away from the toilet. Instead, they thought the best recourse would be to shut the door and pretend it didn't exist. So I sloshed over (in socks mind you) and shut off the toilet valve, and then I ran back downstairs to see if this would slow the waterfall, which it did. So then I went back upstairs.

When I got back up, I noticed the door was shut again, which was weird because I hadn't shut it. I knocked again, and an elderly voice said, "I'm in here! I'm using the bathroom even though it says closed. You may need to plunge!" I said, "What the fuck are you doing using a broken potty you dumb old idiot. Get out of there now before I strangle you with your own Depends!!" Actually I only thought that, what I said was "OK." So I go stand in the lobby and pretend to read mail, because this is all making me uncomfortable. After a couple minutes, she shuffles out and says, "Hello? Maintenance?" I assume she means me. I step around the corner, staring at her critically. She is at least 140 years old, is using a walker with tennis balls on the bottom, and is wearing a fur coat, complete with stole, even though it is like 92 degrees and humid outside. She looks at me and reiterates, "You're going to need to plunge." I kill her, throw her in the woods, and pawn her fur coat for crack (OK not true).

I walk back in to the bathroom and am overcome with an odor of dead skunks, parfum de couer, and metamucil, with a little pestilence mixed in for good measures. This decaying old woman has pooped in the broken toilet. This complicates things. I am now forced to plunge not only water and urine, but also the semi-solid droppings of an octogenarian's mom. I am not pleased. I flush the toilet and begin plunging. I am not pleased. A giant hunk of toilet paper pops out. Not pleased. Poopy wizz water splashes on my arm. Not pleased. The water all goes down after about six plunges. Really not pleased. I spend 15 minutes sopping up the water on the floor. I am wet. This is bad.

As it turns out our bathroom ceiling has a little discoloration on it

 but nothing major so that's fortunate. But Good Lord, if you're going to flood the toilet, fix it, and please don't crap in it even if you are extremely old and wearing fur. Yuck!