byrneunit

Hey, did you know the Olympics are on? The Olympics are on! It’s true! Totally. Also apparently “Chuck” premieres soon.

I would not pretend to be unmoved by these games; I was completely blown away by the opening ceremony, even if the fireworks footsteps across Beijing were taped in advance and they totally pulled a “Dreamgirls” with that singing kid.

But I’d be lying if I said there weren’t something missing from these games for both E and me. One thing missing for each of us, actually; one person each, really. I’m speaking of course of swimming stars Inge de Bruijn and Ian Thorpe. As detailed here, our burning crushes on these two really brought the ‘04 games that much closer to our hearts, and their retirements have left us feeling that much less mildly dirty about the Olympics this year.

One moves on, I suppose, as one must, but it’s been difficult. For starters, Michael Phelps is just a straight-up mouth breather, record-shatterer though he may be. As for the lady swimmers, up until just tonight there was absolutely nobody on my radar, though in the last hour or so I’ve realized that Aussie gold medalist Stephanie Rice is not too shabby herself, and also I think she was looking at me earlier this evening. No, seriously, look:

I mean, that’s how E looked at me the night we met, is all I’m saying. If that doesn’t say “Hey there, good lookin’! We’ll be back to pick you up later!”, I don’t know what does.

Plus apparently she’s newly single and modeling underwear:

no, for real, just one more:

So yeah, all right, fine, I guess.

But I can’t help but think she’ll never understand me the way Inge did.

This, people. This is what we’re faced with as we slog about our business. Like we haven’t got enough fucking shit to worry about.

I would like all two of you to go read about how, with a lot of focus and practice and presumably some natural talent, an actual real-life person can enter the running (rolling) for something really, really spectacularly badass.

I mean, the Olympics are one thing, but dude, this is kind of seriously huge to me. Go Holly! Beat State!

I will not say I never knew that getting home from vacation is often the best part of any trip, because I totally knew that. I will simply say that it’s been especially sweet thus far.

The trip home was fine, mostly. Apparently a thunderhead imploded in Waukegan, just north of Chicago, which created a 20-minute weather lockdown at O’Hare yesterday; naturally this translated into a 90-minute sitting-on-the-tarmac-a-thon for our flight and god knows how many others. Henry was terrifically well-behaved, though; perhaps it’s his newfound three-year-old maturity. (More on that in a moment.) Our cab driver knew the wisdom of getting off the Kennedy as soon as possible and taking the streets to our house, a nugget of knowledge that saved us an extra half-hour or so of sitting in traffic; it was almost as if he’d done this before, and was some sort of professional. Damndest thing, that.

I hereby formally apologize to everyone we did not get to see on this trip to the Tulsa and Oklahoma City metro areas; I can only attribute this to poor planning on my part, along with kind of an awkward travel schedule between the two places. Please know that you’re in our thoughts, feelings, and pants.

And Henry turned three yesterday! Dear sweet merciful crap, three years old. He’s learned all sorts of things during his time with the grandparents, not the least of which is that apparently it’s incredibly gratifying to ask “What’s that?” and “What are you doing?” and “What’s he doing?” when he very, very, very clearly knows the answer already. (Sometimes he knows the answer because we told it to him 1.3 seconds earlier when he asked the same question.) But the language skills, my god, the language skills! It’s a tradeoff, I suppose. We’re awfully proud of him, though, and he remains among our very favorite three-year-olds. At least in the top five, and probably no lower than third on that list.

Aaaalll right then. So! Back to whatever it is we were doing.

A late entry to the pictoral account of our Stigler visit: One (1) tiny, tiny frog, catching sun in the wading pool.

Normalcy is the last thing I’ll claim is happening to me, people, but two days in Stigler has at least reminded me of the finer things in life. Those are, in no particular order:

• explosives
• homemade beer
• potato cannons
• smoked meat
• beans
• board games
• tiny dogs
• naps
• relatives who mostly look after your three-year-old
• tiny grandmothers who take shit from no one
• thunderstorms that hit miles away, but that bring with them incredibly nice cool fronts

Vacations bring with them a feeling of simplicity that often unfairly imposes that idea on the people whose lives take place where you’re vacationing. I suppose it’s only really unfair if your delusion of simplicity imposes on their day-to-day workings, like if you keep them out drinking and shooting guns until 4 a.m. on a work night. (We did not do this, or have not yet this vacaction, though the week, it should be said, is young.) That’s the real value of vacation time, though: When you’re able able to successfully delude yourself for a few days into a sort of fugue state in which life is simple and mostly enjoyable.

Rental cars can help achieve this effect, though they don’t always, necessarily. For example, our rental for the week is whatever peesashit knockoff Chevy came up with to try and draw sales away from the PT Cruiser, Chrysler’s peesashit. You get in the rental, the worries about your ten-year-old car suddenly developing a sudden and debilitating ailment miles from nowhere just evaporate, leaving only worries about your peesashit GM doing the same, interspersed with worries about whether or not you’ve given your concussion by knocking your skull into the doorjamb while entering the car (probably not yet) and worries about whether or not the light you’re sitting at is green yet, since you’re completely unable to see said light when sitting straight up (probably yes). Note to tall persons considering the purchase of a Chevy HHR: Really, don’t.

Coming into the tail end of the experience, though, I do hereby and unsurprisingly recommend, to those of you who have small children and who are planning visits home in the near future, that you ship them back a little early and let them make the rounds in advance; this will leave you free to spend your time in a more leisurely capacity, and not hauling your small person around to the homes of various relatives.

All this insight, and we’re only on day three! Tune in tomorrow, when I’ll awake with a solution to the world’s hardest math problem and a delicious recipe for banana pudding casserole.

We have Oklahoma, ladies and gentlemen. The flight was brief and we started earlier than we needed to. I didn’t get coffee until too late, which led to me typing the following.

The phrase “Cognitive Dissonance” doesn’t get used as often as it should when describing the baffling array of stimuli many of us face on a given day. I think if more people were familiar with the idea, more people might at least be comforted by the knowledge that they’re not alone in being overwhelmed.

Or at least I would have been this morning. We were up by 6:30 to be at O’Hare by 8:00 for a 10:25 flight. The check-in process at American Airlines has been retooled to the brink of utter chaos; rather than a line, there’s about 300 feet of kiosks that sit amid clots, rather than lines, of travelers. There appears to be one guy taking checked bags for the entire system. We hand him our bag; he takes it.

That the idea of removing one’s shoes, disgorging the contents of one’s pockets, sending all of it through an X-ray machine and stepping barefoot through a doorway that may or may not sound an alarm has become routine to most of us is a healthy indicator we’ve lost sight of normalcy. And the trip ends with a sit-down breakfast at Macaroni Grill, a restaurant I’ve only seen elsewhere by the gigantic mall on the South side of Tulsa, where we’re presented with ten-dollar breakfast plates we eat with plastic silverware presented on linen napkins, all the while serenaded with an aria from 16th-Century Italy.

Please don’t give me any of this shit about the New Normal. I’m not saying the New Normal doesn’t exist, or hasn’t existed since the first time things seemed abnormal after the word was invented. I’m saying this New Normal, and the several iterations before it, are quite probably driving us insane, and that we may be ignorant of the fact.

Something like 15 percent of Americans are currently taking, or have taken in the past, psychotropic drugs for depression. (I am included in this number, you will likely not be surprised to learn.) What’s so goddamn depressing, one might ask? “A blend of mini pretzels, honey roasted sesame sticks and cheddar corn bites.”

“Ingredients: Mini Pretzel Twists (Enriched Flour [Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine, Mononitrate, Riboflavin and Folic Acid]. Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Salt, Corn Syrup, Yeast, and Baking Soda), Cheese Corn Stick (Corn Masa, Soybean Oil, Seasoning [Dehydrated Cheese Flavor (Cheddar Cheese [Pasteurized Milk, Cheese Cultures, Salt, Enzymes]. Whey, Salt, Disodium Phosphate, Yellow 5, Yellow 6), Dried Whey, Salt, Buttermilk Powder, Dextrose Monohydrate, Natural and Artificial Flavoring (Containing Maltodextrin, Food Starch Modified, Soybean/Cotton Seed Oil), Onion and Garlic Powder, Extractives of Turmeric and Paprika, Citric Acid, Yellow 6 Lake, Lactic Acid]), Honey Roasted Sesame Stick (Unbleached Wheat Flour [Contains Malted Barley Flour as a Natural Enzyme Additive]. Soybean Oil, Sesame Seeds, Honey Coating [Sucrose, Wheat Starch, Honey]. Bulgur Wheat, Tack Blend [Maltodextrin, Xanthan Gum]. Salt), Beet Powder, Turmeric.

“Produced in a facility that processes peanuts and other nuts.”

Clearly the peanuts are what we need to be looking out for.

Tomorrow we shoot guns at the strip pits.

It occurs to me that we’ve got all these damn photograph-type-things lying around and we’re not doing a thing with them. So! Here’s a picture of Trucky with a frog on him. Enjoy.

UPDATE:

This one here, the cute one? With the fuzz and the whatnot? This morning at 2:45 he decided the other two cats had suddenly become The Enemy, and would NOT STOP YOWLING AND GROWLING AT THEM FOR LIKE AN HOUR until I made the executive decision to put him in the bathroom and shut the goddamn door, thus isolating him from the (apparently perceived) threat of Gus and Smudge.

At 7:00 when I got up, I went to, how you say, “pee.” The bathroom door was locked. At first I thought it was stuck, but it was sure acting locked. The thing is, it’s just got a deadbolt in there — the house is 90 years old, and it’s the original door. Removing the doorknob was A) impossible, and B) wouldn’t have helped, probably. Thank the Earl of Gloucestershire that Erin was able to discover a glaring security problem with our bathroom window, climb inside, and beat the shit out of Trucky; I was thinking we’d have to call the fire department to do it for us.

She climbed out after that and shut the window. We know how to get in now, in case we ever need to beat the shit out of him again.

TURDS. ALL OF THEM. TURDS.

So. Things I have learned during our two weeks and counting without our precious boy in the house:

1. The sense of purposelessness quickly dissipates.
2. It dissipates into a sense of overwhelming, vacationlike calm.
3. The awesome thing about feeling like you’re on vacation in the big awesome city where you live? You can do all the vacationlike stuff you usually want to do but don’t, only you can do it with your friends, who already live there.
4. Turns out the vacationlike stuff we want to do mainly involves drinking and going out to restaurants after work.
5. Sleeping in fucking rules.

We’ve done so little, and yet I feel we could do so much less for so much longer. Yesterday we went to breakfast (at NOON, thank you!) and then went to read magazines at Borders, and I was reminded of how we used to do that like, every single week back before we were with child, and how I’d completely forgotten that fact. It wasn’t just that I’d misplaced the knowledge, like usual; the fact had been completely obliterated, crumpled up and tossed down the memory hole in the Ministry of Truth, and replaced by one of the only truths I’ve bothered to keep up with since 2005, which is that there’s a small cute person whose butt I need to wipe with some frequency.

In short, it’s been a joy, an absolute goddamn joy, and as much as I’m starting to miss our tot, I’m comforted by the fact that from all accounts, he’s having a terrific time with both sets of grandparents. Oh hey, you know what’s fun? What’s fun is when you get to switch sides of the table with said grandparents, and call them up and chuckle bemusedly as they tear around the house after your toddler, keeping him both amused and uninjured. And then you say your pleasantries and turn in for a nap, often your second of the day. Experiencing this, I completely understand why everybody talks about how goddamn great it is to have grandkids. We are, for all practical purposes, retirees this week, and it is sweeeeeeeeeeet.

We’re on day two of the Great Child-Free Odyssey of ‘08, and I have not got the faintest goddamned idea what to do with myself. Tonight we ate kebabs and half-watched “Spider-Man 3.” Then I purchased three seperate versions of “Autumn Leaves” (did you know this is maybe one of my three favorite songs ever recorded? Because I think I’d forgotten until just now) from the Amazon MP3 store. Then I finished Erin’s beer when she went to bed. This handful of activity covers roughly four and a half hours. I’d say things have slowed down considerably here, except that on nights when Henry’s here with us, some variation on that incredibly mundane bit happens in pretty much exactly the same way, only over maybe two and a half hours.

I guess when you’re as much a creature of habit as I’ve always been, and thus as deeply steeped in routine, it’s more than just the usual kick in the parietal lobe when your routine suddenly has a chunk taken out of it. I kind of feel like I don’t know what I am anymore. Which sounds more melodramatic than it is, but is also kind of not a complete exaggeration. Factor in the fact that I’m prone to sitting and staring for long stretches, and presto! Now I’m wondering what I was before what I was became a guy who takes care of his kid, runs up credit card bills, drinks too much beer, and plays XBox 360.

I’m pretty sure it was all that other stuff, but without the kid. Or the Xbox. Since those weren’t around until sort of recently.

Soooo, yeah, back to drinking.