Alberty's Blah Blah Blog

Now, this little post may come off as snarky, but please know that it is not.

I love my family, and the topic of this post is one of the great reasons for that love.

My family, myself included, is perhaps the worst gift giving family in the world. And we don’t do it on purpose, which is what makes it so endearing to me.

I know that on several occasions I have sweated the choice of gift for my lovely bride and it has ended up something she has hated. Let me also say that we have a relationship where we can say, “Honey, I really kind of hate that gift that you sweated and cogitated over. I love you very much, but I hate that gift.” And, generally, we are okay with that.

So this year was another stellar what-were-you-thinking Christmas. Naturally, we don’t ask my family what they were thinking, we just sort of discuss it spousally.

I received from my father a “leather concealment vest.” First off, it’s a leather vest.  Second … it’s me. I put it on and my wife asked me if she could accompany me to the gay bar. Nice one. The word “concealment” in the name of the vest means that it can easily carry my 9mm Glock with up to three full magazines. Again…it’s me. I do not own a 9mm Glock, nor do I have up to three magazines, full or empty.

I’m pretty sure he purchased it off some infomercial on Fox News. He bought three: one for me, one for my legally blind brother, and one for legally blind and autistic nephew. Go Neocons! Fuck yeah!

My grandmother —Banana Grandma if you’re paying attention— gave me roll-on antiperspirant. I shit you not. It’s Avon, so I guess that’s … something. And it’s a roll-on. I didn’t even think they made that anymore. So there’s that, too.

But the best gift was for my patient and forgiving wife. My father gave her a Keurig Rotating 30 cup Storage Carousel for one of those awesome Keurig Single shot coffee makers. She looked up at me with a gleam in her eye and said, “Omen of things to come?” I looked at the boxes under the tree, turned back to her and said, “I don’t think so.”

The beauty of this is that we don’t have a Keurig single shot coffee maker. And we did not receive one for Christmas. My father thought it was a spice rack, which is also funny because my wife does not like spices, nor does she cook.

Even funnier is that he got it off her Amazon wish list…except it’s not on her Amazon wish list. Some other woman out there with the same name as my wife was oh so very close to receiving the Keurig Rotating 30 cup Storage Carousel that dancing through her Christmas Eve dreams.

Just one of the many reasons that I love my family.

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Clichés are clichés for a reason. They are truisms pointed out long ago and their observations ultimately overused. So, sorry for this one, but it’s on my mind.

This year’s holiday season has been a bit of a to do for my family this. My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and began chemotherapy. My brother was diagnosed with a couple of tumors on his kidney. My grandmother had a mild stroke four days before Christmas.

Now, if you know me, you know I am not religious. I am a deeply spiritual guy, but organized religion as lost its luster for me in my long-ago days of Baptist beatings. I have always felt that spirituality is a personal and joyous connection with a greater power, while religion is essentially a fear-based theology used to control large numbers of people. I’m sure that pisses some of you off, but there it is.

None-the less, religion, in its many forms, have given us great things: art, music, tradition, as well as focus, self-awareness, and community.

For me the thing is the Christmas holiday season. Not the increasingly freakish and frantic consumerist masturbation that rings in the season, and now slaps its hindquarters on the exit with the after Christmas sales. That just makes me angry and, quite honestly, a little depressed.

My thing for the season is the heightened nostalgia, the family, the almost electric recentering of my self-awareness on others and their importance to my now, my then, and my future. The Christmas season, the family dynamics of that season, the traditions have all played dominant roles in forming my character and personality.

And here’s to the cliché. I just want to keep these memories close, you know. I get so crazy busy with the kids, writing, directing, performing, that some family members unfortunately just become satellites orbiting the whirlwind of deadlines that is my world. I know that’s not right. But I’m not naïve enough to think that can or will change. I just need to embrace them when I can.

Which leads me to a sad understanding of my future in the life of my boys. There will come a time, probably sooner that I might wish it, that I will become a mere satellite orbiting their world.

Now, I remember the exact moment when my father realized this inevitable demotion. And, twenty-some years later it is still clear to me, it still holds some pain and little poison, I’m sure for both us. It created a rift for quite some time.

My hope is that I can be a bit more prepared for boys’ eventual DE tethering. This season makes me think of that.

Which leads me to a sad understanding of my mother’s future in the life of my boys. There will come a time, perhaps sooner than we imagined, that she will not be here for the holidays.

Now, I know that convention states that we should not say things like that out loud. But that is magical thinking, which although beautiful, sometimes allows reality to blindside us.

I still feel the slow chipping away of family that death has made. My grandfather, Dean; my grandmother, Opal, my grandfather, Alan. I’m sure if I had any aunts or uncles that list would be longer. But those are enough deaths to feel their loss, especially this time of year.

My mother gave my boys a copy of the book ‘Twas the Night before Christmas. It was the kind that you can record your voice reading the book, which she did. And when she showed me the book and we listened to it, she said that she wished we had her mother’s voice on something. It was the most self-aware moment that two of us have ever shared. It was clear to me that she was preparing for that Christmas with the empty chair. When my boys opened the present and my wife saw what it was she cried.

Now, I know these moments can and do occur every day of the year. But, for me, there is a heightened permanence to the image, because of the emotional closeness of the season. It makes the moment closer, more precious.

Those moments become ornaments that I remember to pull out each year and hang on my Christmas tree. I know they should hang throughout the year, but they don’t, mostly.

That is why this time of year becomes precious to me.

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So my son does not feel like a two year-old to us. He feels more four or five. I’m sure this comes from not living with a four or five year-old before, or a two year-old for that matter. But there is something about him — or perhaps us — that makes us expect him to act older than his years should demand.

I’m pretty sure that is a bad thing.

He’s got a pretty good vocabulary for a two year-old, at least we’ve been told. I think that creates part of the problem. Because my wife and I are always carrying on conversations with him — and he seems to discuss things with us — we assume he is cognitively following along.

Then he’ll throw food during dinner…for 7000^th time.

I’ll sit back and look utterly stunned. “Why did you do that?” I’ll say, utterly stunned.

My wife with her disappointed face will say, “We don’t throw food.”

“We don’t throw food,” I reiterate. “Do you see your mother or I throw food?” I ask perplexed.

He demurs and bats his eyelids. I shit you not, this kid.

“Look,” I say, “I would understand your seeming pathological impulse to throw food if your mother and I were continually flinging tandoori chicken or roasted broccoli everywhere, but we don’t.”

“We don’t throw food,” my wife punctuates the point.

It’s at this point I wish that my son had the wherewithal to blurt out, “I’m two!”

I’m pretty sure that would put everything into instant perspective.

When we’ve given him a time-out for …whatever his impulse of the day was, we’ll go into his room and I’ll say, “Okay, why are you in time-out?”

And he’ll tell me. “I didn’t stop when you said stop.” Or “I threw food.” Or “I kicked the dog.”

Then I’ll say, “That’s right. You kicked the dog. You know, we don’t kick dogs. Dogs are our friends and we don’t hurt friends. Dogs have been with us thousands of years. They trust us not to hurt them. They are our faithful companions and…”

“I’m two!”

Yeah, I’m pretty sure that would do the trick.

I thought briefly about teaching him to say that, “I’m two!” But then I rethought it. I don’t want him to use it later, you know.

“Son, why did you break the car axel on the curb?”

“But Dad, I’m sixteen!”

Or, “Son, why in God’s name did you decide to pee on that police officer’s car?”

“But Dad, I’m twenty-one!”

Or, “Son, why on earth do you need a 72-inch flat screen Wi-Fi television?”

“But Dad, I’m forty-two!”

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When I am stressed, as this season it is my usual state, there is nothing I hate more than the unwelcome and maddening game of Jenga that is emptying my clothes washer.

I mean, seriously, how does it so quickly and thoroughly entwine itself like some kind of freakish snake orgy ball.

And our washer, though relatively new, leaks water all over our oogy basement floor. So when I go to pull out a single clothing item, invariably the item’s snake-like lust has twisted it around some other item while, miraculously, attaching itself delicately to a pair of underwear or some single sock, so, as I attempt to deftly shimmy the single item from the washer’s gaping maw, I drag out multiple items, including the precariously attached undergarment that then unceremoniously plops into the disgusting puddle of washer swill at my feet.

See? See that? It so frustrates me that it makes me construct sentences like Dickens!

Now, normally I find this situation causes mild amusement, or sometimes slight consternation. But when the pressure is high, deadlines looming, kids all crazy, a tangled wet laundry mess can be just the thing to pop that weak vein in my left temple.

And that loss of perspective over something so silly and unimportant really ticks me off. I hate losing my composure, and losing it over laundry… I’m just glad my kids never see it.

Maybe there is some sort of laundry mantra I can learn to help me find comfort in the Gordian knot of my laundry. Perhaps I can view it as a learning opportunity to better my patience and discover a sense of grace in the face of my inanimate, nonsentient, woven nemesis.

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So, I got a little ink in our Sunday paper this weekend, which was kind of cool.

I got an email out of the blue from a Gazette reporter who said that she read on my blog that I was a stay-at-home dad. She was doing a story on the new census statistics about the proliferation of men who are taking on home child-care. And to be honest, the numbers she has stunned me.

In the Midwest 33.3% fathers of preschool children are noted as primary child-care providers. That’s a full third, which, even to my relatively progressive mind, seems rather high.

It’s a pretty good article. It actually caused some reflection about my position in the family and how I interact with my boys, as well as the near future and my place in it. I got some validation in the way I handle the boys. As silly as it sounds, sometimes I need that.

Here is the link if you want to read it.

http://thegazette.com/2011/12/18/number-of-stay-at-home-dads-surges-in-east-iowa/

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For some reason I thought of this the other day. I remember a crash that occurred on the corner of my old high school. I didn’t see it. I read about it in the newspaper. I can still the the pointillated gray photos of the two young girls from the crash. They were friends. One of the dads was driving. The father and one of the girls died in the crash, but both girls were so horribly disfigured that they couldn’t tell who was who.

I don’t know why I’ve been thinking about this lately. I may have already posted this poem, but the memory has been especially vivid the past few days, so here it is.

Life Lesson at Sixteen

Only one of three alive
in stillness lay
broken,
burnt,
ripped from the short ride home
on her crisp orange autumn day
at the corner
where my high school stands,
and the powder green pines grow—
at the corner
where the flag whips the air
from the platinum pole,
bright contrasts to pools of red
and metal wrung like wet rags
against the asphalt gray
they were.

All blood and blond,
their beauty stripped
by a quick-ran red,
an auto-ram impacted sides
with screams and squeals
and sweet-burnt rubber
and shimmering glass like
a giant’s shaken salt
on the gray road-plate—
their flesh offered
raw
for his consuming.

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Well, my new adventure began on Sunday. This time the show is Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde by Moisés Kaufman. It is, oddly enough, about the three gross indecency trials of Oscar Wilde at the end of the 19^th century.

If that doesn’t ring a bell, Oscar Wilde, the great English author and playwright (The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest) was put on trial in the 1890s for being what they called a sodomite. He was homosexual before that word was even coined. And it was illegal.

Anyway, this play is about those trials. It’s very talky and intellectual and kind of a tough show to do right.

The idea is to use about nine male actors to present about forty different characters, including women. It’s a tough task. I know. I’ve done it with The Laramie Project.

That’s why I’m pretty excited about the show. Because it’s tough to do it right.

The role of Oscar Wilde is, naturally, an important one. But some of the utility actors (people who must play multiple roles) have to be really good.

The problem isn’t just multiple roles, it’s multiple British accents, too. Good, believable British accents are not really that easy to do.

For an American audience, Kaufman has really set up for community theatre what could become a campy Monty Pythonesque British send-up. But this play is a serious, often uncomfortable drama where actors must change from gruff English ruffian into Queen Victoria within a page. That’s tough to pull off without it being funny.

That challenge excites me.

So tonight is the second night of auditions. Tomorrow will be callbacks. The play will be cast Wednesday morning and our first read-thru that night.

I love starting a new show!

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Sometimes I’m just so tired that I can barely type. Today is one of those days. Sorry.

Catch you on Monday!

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I have made no secret of loving language. It’s just so…well, I have no words for how interesting and exciting language is.

But once every blue moon I come across something that boggles my mind. This blue moon has brought me the two words “hard” and “hardly”.

Now, if you follow School House Rock like I do, you’ll know from the classic “Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here!” that with the Lollie’s exceptional L-Y attachment you can intensify any adjective. “Use it with an adjective,” sing the Lolly boys, “and it says much more, anything described can be described some more.”

So, if we take the adjective like “absolute” and add the L-Y attachment, we get “absolutely”. They are essentially the same meaning nuanced to reflect different states.

Follow?

Another example: “Happy”; meaning joyful, content. I am content. Add the L-Y attachment and get “happily” which shows how I am doing something. I could actually be happily happy. A redundant phrase, to be sure, but still it makes sense.

Adding the L-Y attachment merely makes the word, whether a verb, noun, or adjective a modifier. How did little Billy eat the Skittles? Voraciously!

You see how it’s positively very, very, necessary?

But — and here is my point —the words contain a similarity of meaning: happy and happily are still states of joy.

This is why “hardly hard” makes my head hurt. If I were learning English and someone said to me, “Eating a large pizza by myself is hardly difficult,” I would think, “Wow! I’m shocked. I thought all Americans ate large pizzas by themselves. But this guy said it’s not just difficult, it’s hardly difficult. That’s like twice difficult! I guess they must get fat a different way.”

I’m just saying, “hardly hard” should, in a sane world, mean really, really, hard. In fact the phrase “Diamond encrusted carbon steel Alloy 1090 is hardly hard,” should make all the sense in the world. But because the English language seems to teeter on that precipice of Bizarro-world it makes no sense whatsoever.

My head hurts.

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