I woke up early, fed all the critters, knocked out my daily burpees, guzzled a few cups of coffee, and got a bunch of writing done. After all that, my son asked if we could go see the new Looney Tunes movie, Coyote vs. Acme. So we snagged some tickets online and headed to the theater. Which made for a pretty solid Sunday.

When I first started teaching, I included Ian Frazier’s original essay on my syllabus. A legal satire about Wile E. Coyote suing the company that sold him defective rocket skates, poorly wired TNT detonators, and any number of over-torqued trebuchets proved an effective method for teaching tone and irony.

Not that the movie needed to be an academic exercise. Saturday morning cartoons were the only religion we knew in my house growing up. The Wimbledon-caliber back-and-forth banter between Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck may as well have been Shakespeare. Foghorn Leghorn’s gift of gab was pure poetry. And I must have watched Yosemite Sam and Elmer Fudd catch the business end of a cannonball hundreds of times. It was art of the highest form. Sublime and ridiculous, I never heard a better explanation of how the world works—not in any school, not in any church.

Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner were my favorites. Yes, their storylines were the same every time, and yes, their storylines were brutally violent. But the damned-if-you-do cosmic irony made sense. Nothing invites the gods to laugh at us like our detailed plans. Every time the Coyote revealed his detailed schematics or his Rube Goldberg designs, my imagination would light up, pondering all the twists and turns that would send the poor schmuck airborne, where he would momentarily defy gravity before inevitably plummeting to the rocky canyon below.

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The movie was fun, not great but good. More than anything, it was like a warm bath of nostalgia, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s what every Sunday should feel like. My heart may have appreciated the warm, nostalgic bathwater, but my body did not.

We sat halfway back in the theater, which meant that we had to descend the stairs on the way out. I led the way, followed by my son and my wife. With three steps left to the bottom, my left calf muscle decided to cramp. It didn’t start to cramp. It just cramped, with all the violence and absurdity of a Looney Tune.

When the muscle cramped, it completely threw off my coordination in the darkened theater, and I missed the next step. Which is to say, I went down fast and hard, and my body smacked the ground like I had been loaded into a faulty Acme catapult.

It happened lightning quick. One moment I was upright and luxuriating in nostalgia, the next I was prone and wondering what sort of yacht my chiropractor was about to buy with all the money I was going to pay him.

I heard a shrink on a podcast a while back talking about human resilience. She said that humans are really good at recovering from natural disasters—floods, fires, earthquakes, and the like. We shake that stuff off pretty well. What we really struggle with is betrayal. When a human feels betrayed, the psychological aftermath is a minefield of scar tissue. Somewhere between the leg cramp and my face smacking the sticky popcorn-buttered floor of the theater, I had this thought—I was enduring a natural disaster and a betrayal. Maybe you’ve never had a leg cramp? Yeah, it’s not exactly a tsunami, but it feels like one. And, yes, betrayal is awful, but to be betrayed by my own body? The indignity of it all!

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And then there were the burpees. I’ve been doing 50 burpees every day since January 1st. If you’ve never done burpees, just know that they’re masochistic, probably invented by some Gulag fitness instructor. But our house has a lot of stairs, and we have a lot of four-legged animals who zigzag in front of and behind us, and the burpees have been a prophylactic solution, a way to shore up my balance, strength, and stability so I don’t break a hip anytime soon.

I probably don’t have to spell this out, but the burpees were basically a Wile E. Coyote-style solution that led to an Acme-style outcome. I hit the ground, and I immediately popped right up, not because it didn’t hurt—it really hurt—but because the pain of the ego overshadows the pain of the busted kneecap, the tweaked lumbar, and the bruised cheekbone.

My son immediately started laughing. And I love him for it. He’s a connoisseur of schadenfreude. If he saw that and started laughing, it’s nothing but validation. I’ve raised him right.

My wife didn’t laugh at all. She screamed, so startled that the coffee she was holding went airborne. And I love her for it. If she saw that and screamed, it’s nothing but validation. I’ve married the right woman, a woman who cares for my safety, for my everlasting soul, for my bizarre inclination to manifest slapstick.

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What was more bizarre, though, was the rest of the audience. They all saw what my wife and son saw, and not one of them reacted. No laughing. No pointing. No sympathetic “oohs” or “ouches.” No “You all right, bud?” Nothing. They just kept walking past me as if I didn’t just become a flesh-and-blood Looney Tune. Business as usual. Maybe they were being polite. Or maybe they become so accustomed to cartoon chaos that I barely qualified as entertainment.

I limped to the car, reassuring my wife that I was okay, sore but not permanently damaged. On the drive home, my son chimed in with the refrain every few miles: “That was so funny, Dad.” I crawled into bed with an ice pack, and as I drifted off to Advil PM-induced sleep, I could hear the Merrie Melodies outro, and I thought to myself, “That’s all, folks!”

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All Kinds of Funny and Other Serious Matters, Volume 1 is available in paperback and hardback! Click this link or the image below, and get your copies now!

If you like Elmore Leonard, Joe Lansdale, or the Coen Brothers, you’ll dig my novella, DIG. If it makes you laugh, cringe, or question your moral compass—do me a solid and leave a quick rating or review.

Get it at this link or click the image below: Dig: A Dark Crime Comedy

The name he went by included the misspelling of the word “dog” paired with an adjective that did little to inspire confidence. Still, this isn’t a Yelp review, and I have zero interest in slandering him, so let’s call him Scribbles (he had a lot of tattoos, many of them works-in-progress).

I was familiar with the business he was running. In college, I ran an after-school program to teach kids chess, so I knew a little something about organizing large groups of kids, keeping them on task, ensuring they felt safe, providing them extracurricular nourishment. It required vigilance and patience. Clear boundaries and precise expectations were essential. I was in charge of people’s children, and I took that seriously. Scribbles’ approach was considerably more relaxed. I would characterize his teaching philosophy as devil-may-give-a-flying… wait, what were we talking about?

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I got my kids to the meeting spot on PCH, which was a surf shop. I introduced myself to Scribbles and introduced him to Sam and Charlee.

“What’s up, fam?” he said.

“So is this where I should bring them every day this week? The surf shop?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

One of his employees, a blond girl who looked fourteen, maybe fifteen, nodded to confirm, apparently aware that someone needed to be in charge.

We waited around a few more minutes. I was expecting a speech, an address to the parents, some indication of what we should expect for the week. What we got was this: “All right, fam, let’s go surfin’.” And then Scribbles jaywalked across PCH with thirty kids in tow. I wasn’t sure I’d ever see my kids alive again, but something about Scribbles’ relaxed demeanor inspired confidence. I realize how ridiculous this sounds given the characterization I’ve provided thus far, but there was something calming about the way he ran things. In retrospect, it was probably just a contact high.

I picked up the kids at the end of “the sesh,” as Scribbles called it.

“How’d it go?”

“Good,” Charlee said.

“Sam?”

“Good.”

“Did you catch any waves?”

“For sure.”

“Like, all day, dad. That’s all we did.”

“Was Scribbles a good teacher?”

“He’s really funny.”

“That wasn’t the question.”

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And then they both fell asleep. A day at the beach will do that to a couple of kids, I thought. In retrospect, it was probably just a contact high.

On the last day of surf camp, my wife and I both attended. We wanted to see our kids in action. We wanted to experience the culmination of Scribbles’ instruction. Instead, we were greeted with some disappointing news at the surf shop. Scribbles addressed all the parents, really for the first time in any meaningful fashion.

“Yeah, so there’s a storm coming up from Mexico, and there’s some pretty big swells out there this morning. The lifeguards told us they’d rather we didn’t surf today… but it’s the last day, so we’re just gonna do our thing. Let’s go surfin’, fam.”

Becky shot me a look. Is this asshole for real?

“Take some deep breaths,” I told her. Either it’ll lower her heart rate, I thought, or the contact high will kick in.

We got to the beach, and it was pretty intense. Big sets were coming in at a regular clip, and the ocean had a tone that can only be described as aggressive.

Charlee strapped on a leash and started paddling out. Scribbles’ instructors helped her with the timing. Once a set of waves completed and there was a window of calm, they gave her the green light.

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Sam lagged a bit. He was talking it up with one of the instructors.

“That your kid?” Scribbles asked Becky and me.

“Yeah, Sam’s ours,” Becky said.

“That little dude likes to talk.”

“He sure does.”

Sam strapped on his leash and started paddling out, half-heartedly because, even from the beach, we could see that he was more concerned with talking to the other kids who were already paddling ahead of him.

My wife tried to keep the conversation going with Scribbles. “How long have you been teaching kids—”

Scribbles suddenly jumped up from his towel. The only emotions he had shown up to this point were various shades of mellow, and now he was overcome with existential terror.

“Sam! Paddle!”

He kicked off his flip-flops, ran into the whitewater, his hands pressed to his cheeks in a makeshift megaphone. “Sam! Stop talking and paddle! Paddle!” Scribbles gestured to his underlings to go after Sam. They looked up and immediately started paddling for him.

My wife grabbed my hand and squeezed. “What’s happening?!”

I looked at the horizon and saw rolling towers of ocean looming toward my only son. The face of the wave was so steep that the water was in shade, a wall of liquid chaos and evil.

My heart tightened in my chest. The taste of aluminum flooded my mouth. My vision went down to the size of pinholes. All I could see was Sam’s little body inching up the treacherous face of a watery mountain.

The crest of the wave started to topple.

The silence before the crash paralyzed my body.

Images of wheelchairs. Lifelong physical therapy. A whole collage of dark fantasies overwhelmed my imagination.

Sam spilled over the face of the wave just before it crashed. The whitewater erupted behind him. As it receded, we could finally see Sam, still paddling, pausing a moment to give a thumbs-up, as if everything went according to plan.

Scribbles turned around, out of breath, and shuffled back onto the beach, grinning. “That was sick.”

Yes, it was, Scribbles. Yes. It. Was.

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All Kinds of Funny and Other Serious Matters, Volume 1 is available in paperback and hardback! Click this link or the image below, and get your copies now!

If you like Elmore Leonard, Joe Lansdale, or the Coen Brothers, you’ll dig my novella, DIG. If it makes you laugh, cringe, or question your moral compass—do me a solid and leave a quick rating or review.

Get it at this link or click the image below: Dig: A Dark Crime Comedy

We parents like to wax poetic about how we didn’t truly understand the scope, the magnitude, the depths and intensities of love before we had children. We talk about it the way teenage boys talk about Hendrix after they hear Little Wing for the first time, and then we proselytize about our unbound love with all the devotion of a Jehovah’s Witness. But when it comes to parenting, fewer people talk about the rage.

I don’t mean the frustration and exasperation that comes from saying things you never imagined you would have to say, like, “Stop wiping your penis on the frickin’ credenza,” or “Lipstick is not a lollipop,” or “I don’t know what to tell you, but Santa Claus is also impacted by this economy, so you better get your shit together if you hope to make good this Christmas.” No, I’m talking about the fury, the violent impulses, the concentrated disdain you feel for your fellow man in certain scenarios.

Sure, we can all agree that massacres and war crimes (or really just wars in general) are unacceptable affronts to humanity and fundamental failures of human decency, creativity, and imagination. But even as I write these words, there’s a little voice in my lingering reptilian brain that says, “Maybe that guy said something shitty about the warlord’s daughter…?” Because when someone targets my kid, my allegiance to the peacemakers—the Dr. Kings, the Gandhis, the Thích Nhất Hạnhs—falters, and I find myself appreciating the practical uses of napalm or a good old-fashioned kick to the nuts.

Last week, while fires raged around my house and I stayed behind to protect it as my family evacuated, life continued. Specifically, my daughter continued to play varsity volleyball. My wife and father-in-law texted me video highlights and score updates, which went a long way in quelling the anxieties that came with an apocalyptic wildfire. That is, until my wife called. Apparently, some boys sitting in the bleachers from the opposing school were shouting at my daughter every time she approached the net to block or to hit.

What were they shouting? The name of a boy she dated a year ago. I think it was a boy. It may have been a goblin. Maybe a sentient piece of shit. Hard to say. Our daughter was young. She made a mistake. Anyhow, the shouts were an attempt to get in her head.

My wife didn’t hear it at first, but my daughter communicated what was happening when she rotated out of the game. It was the sort of cheap, unimaginative taunting you’d expect at a political rally or a union dockworkers’ charity talent show. My wife and I were already two exposed nerves due to the fires, and this nonsense had us ready to take a blow torch to the testicles of each one of those kids.

My daughter rotated back in the game, got a beautiful set, took a big swing, and killed the ball for a point. Then she pivoted toward the boys in the bleachers and shouted, “Fuck you!” before joining her teammates in the huddle, where they dapped her up. I could write you a list of my all-time favorite spoken words—my wife’s wedding vows, Chick Hearns’ many pronouncements that the “Lakers win the championship!”, anytime someone has said, “Today’s meeting has been cancelled,” etc.—but these two words—”Fuck you!”—in this context—they’re somewhere near the top of the list.

Even so, it’s disconcerting when your 16-year-old daughter is publicly heckled by a group of teenage boys. Also, “group” is not the correct word. What’s the collective noun for that particular species? A hormonal chaos of teenage boys? A pubescent nightmare of teenage boys? A wobbly scrotum of teenage boys? Note to self: submit “a wobbly scrotum” to the OED for inclusion in the collective noun lexicon.

My daughter’s team won in 3, and the boys in the bleachers left before the game finished. Apparently, it’s not much fun heckling when your team is being utterly dismantled and demoralized. As much as the win eased our rage, we remained perplexed. The turd special my daughter had dated didn’t even go to this school, so it seems as if someone had put these boys up to it from afar, a remote sort of social terrorism.

^^^A brief highlight of my daughter and the block party she hosted in the face of intimidation.

It felt far less remote at the next game—an away match at the high school of the cretin she’d dated. Same deal. A wobbly scrotum of teenage boys heckled my daughter, shouting the boy’s name, which—hand to god—sounds strikingly similar to No Shit-Head. And No Shit-Head happened to be at this game, so it seemed likely that he had a tentacle in this bullshit.

My daughter handled it with elegance and poise. She didn’t fire off any “Fuck yous!” but she did rack up an impressive tally of blocks and kills, not once giving into their silly taunts, even when they stormed down from the bleachers and onto the court, yelling at her from the sidelines.

Unfortunately, my daughter’s team dropped this game, losing in 4, but she played exceptionally well. Concerned that some members of the wobbly scrotum might accost her after the game, I waited for her to come out of the locker room, my hands shoved purposely into my pockets as a reminder to myself that it’s generally not a good idea to wrap my hand around the throat of a teenage boy, even if he has it coming.

My daughter seemed wholly unaffected. She came out of the locker room grinning. “I’ve got fans,” she said.

My wife was traveling at work for this second game, so she got similar text updates that I got in the game previous. Two games of heckling and my wife was ready to escalate the situation. “This has to stop,” she said.

“I agree,” I said. “I’ll start digging holes and sharpening the ax.”

“I’m thinking we write a letter to his parents.”

“Yeah, that’s what I meant.”

For some reason, probably because of some experiences I had when I was young, my go-to reaction to stress or perceived threats often involves violent fantasies and momentary flights of fancy that might be categorized as evil, wicked, or morally dubious. I’ve been working on striking a more peaceful demeanor, one not so easily provoked.

So this letter idea was a win-win. First, I’m not so bad with a pen in my hand, and second, I could use some practice in de-escalation. What follows is my drafting process along with some poignant editing suggestions by my loving wife.

I wanted a strong opening, something that would define the serious nature of the situation.

Hey, motherfuckers!

“Um…I like it,” my wife said. “But maybe we don’t need to be that aggressive?”

“Okay, I can pull back,” I said.

Dear, motherfuckers!

“Definitely an improvement…”

“But?”

“Well—”

“I used ‘Dear.’

“Yeah, I see that.”

“I reserve that for, like, you, my mom, and any hypothetical correspondence with Dolly Parton. These motherfuckers should be honored they got a ‘Dear’ from me.”

“The ‘Dear’ is great. But maybe don’t accuse them of being pornographically incestuous?”

“How else did they produce that shit bird kid?”

“I hear you, but we don’t want them to get defensive, at least not right away.”

Nikki and Ronnie, *Note: not their real names.

We hope this finds you well.

“Really?” my wife said. “You want to start like that?”

“For sure. It’s passive aggressive. Anyone who writes, ‘I hope this finds you well’ either doesn’t mean it or they regard you with complete disrespect.”

“Keep it.”

Nikki and Ronnie,

We hope this finds you well. It’s been a good long while since our paths have crossed, unfortunately not nearly long enough.

“No good?”

“Maybe you should just lay out what happened before you fire off the insults.”

“A little exposition couldn’t hurt, I suppose.”

Nikki and Ronnie,
We hope this finds you well. Since we last saw you, life has been abundant. For us and for you. Most notably, our daughter has grown even more lovely and independent. Meanwhile your demon seed seems to have reached maturity. Congrats! We know as much because he has found a wobbly scrotum of suckers to do his bidding—

“Wait,” I said.

“What?” my wife said. “I have some notes, but this is headed in the right direction.”

“I agree, but we should gut check ourselves. Are we sure there’s nothing Charlee has done to provoke these morons?”

“I’m pretty sure.”

“Me too, but what if?”

“What if what?”

“What if we are the ‘Dear Motherfuckers’?”

So we called Charlee into the room. “Tell us the truth—is there anything you can think of, anything you did, however insignificant, to provoke these boys?”

She thought about it for a moment, and then she said, “The first time they yelled at me, I screamed ‘Fuck you’ at them after I dropped a point on that team’s head.”

“Yes, and they deserved it, but was there anything else?”

“Nope.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. Those guys don’t even cross my mind.” We shared the draft of our letter with her. “I like ‘Dear, Motherfuckers!” she said.

I offered my wife my best I-told-you-so look.

“But, wait,” Charlee said. “I don’t want them to actually think they bothered me.”

“You weren’t bothered by them heckling you?”

She shook her head. “Are you kidding? I played awesome.”

“You did. You absolutely did.”

“Maybe instead of a letter to his parents,” Charlee suggested, “send all the boys an invitation to the next game and tell them to try harder.” And then she went back to her room to do homework.

My wife and I exchanged looks, a balance of heartbreak and pride. Heartbreak for the fact that our little girl needs us less and less every day, pride for the fact that our young woman has bigger balls than a whole wobbly scrotum of teenage boys.

Submit “wobbly scrotum” to the OED. Seriously, you need to get in on this. It’s time to contribute meaningfully to culture and the English language. It’ll take a group effort. Be part of something important.

If you smiled, laughed, chortled, snickered, LOL’d, ho-ho-ho’d, bahahahahaha’d, chuckled, busted a gut, or experienced any amount of joy, then please pay it forward. It’ll make you feel good. It’ll make others feel good. It’ll make me feel good. And really, isn’t that the kind of person you want to be?

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Feeling conversational? Yeah, me too. A few questions for the real ones:

1. What’s something you’ve had to say—to a kid, a parent, a friend, an enemy—that you never thought you’d have to say?

2. What’s the closest you’ve come to full medieval rage?

3. When did you give it right back to somebody who was asking for it?

4. I’m proud of “wobbly scrotum,” but I’m not married to it. If you have any other suggestions…

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And if you haven’t picked up my dark crime comedy novella Dig, just know that it’s a good time reading about bad decisions.

Not entirely. It’s 5:30-ish in the morning, and I’m waffling between that state of dreams and consciousness. In my slumber trance, I’m playing hopscotch with a three-legged bullfrog, but I still clock that, in the real world, one of our cats has jumped up onto our headboard—the headboard that I made.

Actually, I made our entire bed frame. I sourced and cut the wood, assembled the pieces, sanded it smooth, and conditioned and stained it. I even burnt a T.S. Eliot line into the board above my wife’s side of the bed. It’s from his poem “Burnt Norton”:

I love this as a metaphor for sleep, for dreaming, for the restorative nature of a bed. When my wife and I slip under the covers and catch these syllables that hang over our sleepy heads, the cleansing sighs are involuntary. At least, they used to be.

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While I’m aware that a cat has jumped up onto the headboard, I don’t think much of it. It’s not typically Mr. Thunder Jones. Thunder is a cool cat, chill and easygoing. I tell people he’s the Johnny Cash of cats. But as he’s gotten older, he’s become a fat bastard. Less Johnny Cash and more Elvis Presley with a peanut butter, bacon and banana sandwich lodged in his gullet.

It could be Sister Lightning Jenkins who is less cool cat and more odd duck. She spends most of her days pressing her head against the railing of our stairs to quell her anxiety. Though when she’s not doing that, she’s hunting houseflies to keep her wits sharp in the event that a bat or a rat finds its way into our house, which is more common than we’d like in our rustic canyon home. Despite her emotional limitations, she’s a competent cat, as gymnastic and athletic as anything with whiskers. Which is to say, I may have noticed her spring off my shoulder and onto the headboard, but it’s doubtful I’ll notice her dismount, which will have all the poise and silence of a ninja.

Finally, it could be Reverend Ed Pussington, our new orange kitten. Ed is a dick. I maintain this position. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he’s just a kitten. Blah, blah, blah…

He’s a dick.

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I’m skeptical about most kinds of certainty, but I’ll say it again: Ed is a dick. Still, he’s just a kitten, and he’s nowhere near Lightning’s level of agility or explosiveness. There’s no way he could get to the headboard, I think.

Confident that Sister Lightning is perched above me, protecting our bed and sleepiness from would-be rodents and pests, I allow myself to slip deeper into my dreams of hopscotch and lame bullfrogs.

I don’t know how long I’ve been asleep when I wake up screaming. Not from a nightmare, not from a night terror, not from a leg cramp, none of the usual suspects. No, I wake up because I feel a searing pain in my nose, more specifically in my septum. Something has impaled it.

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My hands instinctively reach for my face where I feel the culprit. It’s that dick, Ed. His hair is far shorter than Lightning’s or Thunder’s. Apparently, Ed now has the acrobatic acumen to mount our headboard but not the requisite grace to dismount in a way that is nonviolent.

The little fucker has pounced on my face, and in doing so, his razor-wire claw has lodged itself into my septum, leaving me writhing like a rainbow trout on a treble hook. It’s not that it hurts all that bad. It’s more that I was asleep and dreaming, and being attacked by a dickish set of furry steak knives is a little unsettling.

Immediately, my mind searches for the worst-case, best-case scenario. I remember an interview with Guns N’ Roses’ bass guitarist Duff McKagan. He told the story of how, from 1989 to 1993, he snorted his body weight in cocaine, so badly that he had to have his nose and nasal passages surgically reconstructed. To the best of my knowledge, Duff still plays, still tours, still lives his life. Certainly, then, I would be okay. I would survive this PTSD—this Pussycat Traumatic Stress Disorder.

As I try to pull Ed from my face, it becomes clear how stuck his claw is. He panics when I grab him, which seems totally backwards, and he lunges for the floor. Only his razor is still skewering my cartilage. I now read Moby Dick from an entirely different vantage point. It’s all too easy to empathize with the whale. Captain Ahab can kick rocks.

My wife has woken up at this point. She wasn’t impaled, but I imagine waking up beside your screaming husband who has a whisker-lipped domestic terrorist spiked into his schnoz is not exactly “the still point” T.S. Eliot had in mind.

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She manages to lull that dick, Ed, into a calm enough state so that she can dislodge his talon from my schnoz. We spend the rest of the morning trying to get my blood off of our comforter.

As the sun comes up, Ed curls into a ball at the foot of the bed, exhausted from the morning’s carnage. I look at T.S. Eliot’s words above my wife’s head.

Yeah, and at the foot of the bed, there the dick is.

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If you want me to send an All Kinds of Funny: Unsolicited love letter (of sorts) to one of your people, click this button:

Send a Postcard!

All Kinds of Funny and Other Serious Matters, Volume 1 is available in paperback and hardback! Click this link or the image below, and get your copies now!

If you like Elmore Leonard, Joe Lansdale, or the Coen Brothers, you’ll dig my novella, DIG. If it makes you laugh, cringe, or question your moral compass—do me a solid and leave a quick rating or review.

Get it at this link or click the image below: Dig: A Dark Crime Comedy

Not long ago, I took my son to a double feature screening of Donnie Darko and The Evil Dead. There’s a scene in Donnie Darko where Drew Barrymore’s character, an English teacher, stands in front of a chalkboard where the words “cellar door” are written. When one of the students asks about it, she replies, “A famous linguist once said... that of all the phrases in the English language, of all the endless combinations of words in all of history... that ‘cellar door’ is the most beautiful.”

It’s certainly fun to say. It makes the tongue perform gymnastics in the mouth, around the teeth, and about the lips. If you enjoy “cellar door,” a quick internet search will yield other beautiful candidates:

• Susurrous: Making a soft, whispering, or rustling sound.

• Effervescent: Sparkling, bubbly, and full of lively energy.

• Crescendo: A gradual increase in loudness or intensity.

• Limerence: The state of being infatuated with another person.

• Mellifluous: Having a sweet, smooth, and melodic sound.

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These are all great, but as is my nature, it makes me think in the opposite direction. What are the worst-sounding words? If “cellar door” is the most beautiful, then the least beautiful has got to be “say cheese.”

Of course, this is less about the sound of these words and every bit about the context. Nothing fills me with dread, chills my blood, and triggers my fight-or-flight response like those two unholy syllables.

Suffice it to say, I do not like to take pictures. Don’t get me wrong. I love pictures, particularly when they’re candid, when a photographer snaps a shot of an authentic moment of joy or delight, of love or excitement. When it’s a record of life in that moment—neither posed nor postured—then it’s something wonderful, something as beautiful as a cellar door. Here are a few examples of what I’m getting at:

The traditional picture, though—the let’s-all-stare-in-the-same-direction-and-smile photo—I hate ‘em. Clearly, I’m in the minority. Most people happily submit to this tradition. But if you want to see me look like a complete asshole, point a camera at me and demand that I “say cheese.” I tense up, I feel as if someone has just fit me for a diaper made of spiny cactus pads, and my mind overflows with hateful and self-loathing thoughts.

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This has been a decades-long point of contention for my mother-in-law (who I refer to as Molo). To be clear, I love Molo. She’s great—loving, supportive, kind, and generous beyond reason. She’s also a hall-of-fame-caliber grandmother to my children. In no way do I have that sitcom-style relationship between a mother-in-law and son-in-law. But when it comes to photos, we are profound enemies—philosophically and aesthetically.

When I first started dating my wife, Molo revealed herself as a traditional shutterbug, snapping photos to commemorate every milestone, however insignificant, however monumental. She had groomed my wife, my sister-in-law, and my father-in-law for decades, and the three of them can crack a smile and hold that smile for durations of time that defy logic and the limits of facial anatomy. Since the beginning, she’s been on me to “smile with my teeth.”

I can’t do it.

Even when I give it my all, when I sincerely try to meet the moment, we get the pictures back, and there I am—the literal picture of visual discomfort. I have some theories about why I’m so photographically averse. Here’s one: I don’t like being told what to do, not in any context. So when someone, whether Mr. Rogers or Mother Teresa, tells me to “say cheese” or “smile,” my immediate thought is, “Go fuck yourself, Mr. Rogers. You too, Tessie.” And matching that thought with sincere joy is tough.

Molo is the opposite. She loves to smile for a picture. And her smile might be the most consistent thing on the planet. It’s as if her lips and teeth are the product of German engineering. She is camera-ready at all times. No hyperbole. I have only seen her hair out of place, i.e., not camera-ready, two times in the twenty-five years that I’ve known her. One of these times was when we went on a ride at Universal Studios and had no idea that the attraction culminated in a waterfall emptying itself directly onto our raft. No pictures were taken that day.

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The other time was when my brother-in-law and I chased her down in Newport Beach, each of us grabbing an arm and a leg and then gently lowering her into the warm bosom of the Pacific Ocean in knee-high water. My wife was on standby with a camera to document this rare moment.

The photo above is my second favorite photo of Molo. There is another. It’s the pièce de résistance, perhaps the greatest portrait of any human being ever taken. To understand why, context is necessary. Aside from being the most photogenic woman who ever lived, Molo also appreciates the mise-en-scène.

If you haven’t taken a film class, just know that the mise-en-scène refers to what’s in the shot: the props, the setting, the costumes, and so on. She likes to accessorize the moment. For instance, if we’re taking pics over brunch, she’ll grab a cocktail, hold it up to accentuate the mise-en-scène, and then discard it once the shot is taken since she rarely drinks. It’s a charming, borderline crazy quality. But again, she wants to mark the occasion, make the memory, commemorate the moment…

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But in the picture you will see momentarily, there was a backfire (so to speak). We were on vacation in Hawaii. She had gotten herself a muffin and a thermos of coffee, and as is her custom, she enlisted my father-in-law to capture her pleasant morning repast. Pops did his husbandly duty, and neither of them thought anything of it.

You know how you hear those stories of people buying a rickety piece of furniture at a garage sale only to realize later that it contained in its cabinets a priceless Picasso canvas? This was sort of like that. We were swiping through the vacation photos when we discovered it: a compositional catastrophe so perfect that it elevated the photograph to high art. Like everyone who’s seen this picture, you’ll know it when you see it because you’ll bust out laughing. All I ask in exchange for the laugh is that the next time you take a picture, don’t tell everyone to “say cheese.” Tell them to say “muffins and buns.”

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Admittedly, I’m cynical. I’m slow to believe. I want evidence. Not just a little proof. I want a pattern of evidence that’s been kicked and stepped on. I want a history that’s been shaken, poked, and prodded. I want testimony that holds up to teams of bloodthirsty, greedy-as-hell Ivy League trial attorneys.

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I’m only really confident in the premise that there are too many confident people. Whenever I run across someone projecting confidence in the real world, my hackles stand at attention. Who is this joker? I wonder. What’s that smile doing on his face? Where did he get that upright posture, and why is that gleam in his eye so shiny? How long before he tries to sell me a monorail? At what point is he going to invite me to his church or his MLM or his crypto workshop? Who the fuck does he think he is?

You could argue that my distrust of confident people is more about my own insecurity. Fair enough. But here’s the thing. I own my insecurity. I wear it like a glittering badge of dishonor. All Kinds of Funny could easily be called The Great Many Humiliations of Norman T. Leonard or A Brief History of Norman T. Leonard Being Wrong and Getting Physically and Existentially Injured.

Most “confident” people I come across have no insecurities to speak of—at least no insecurities they will speak of. They’re the kind of people who say stupid shit like, “My greatest weakness is that I’m a perfectionist” or “People often mistake my confidence for arrogance,” which is like saying people mistake your grease fire for an unusually warm kitchen.

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Shortly after I finished grad school, just before the 2008 housing crash, I was still bartending in a restaurant near Coto de Caza. Pro athletes, C-suite executives, and The Real Housewives of Orange County were regulars. So were a lot of mortgage brokers. One in particular stood out: a twenty-something kid who had bought three Lamborghinis in different colors and wore tailored suits to match each of these vehicular compensations.

He regularly ordered expensive bottles of Cab but never finished them, and he paid his tab with a titanium American Express card—which was issued by invitation only, he liked to tell us. He treated the servers like servants, particularly the cocktail waitresses who, to their credit, were wholly unimpressed with his unreasonable confidence.

The last time I saw him, the well-done filet and Opus One had been replaced by a Coke and a side of fries. I was a vigilant bartender. I liked to keep things neat and orderly, and I was obsessive about clearing used cocktail napkins from the bar. Apparently, the kid had wrapped his retainer in one while he ate.

I threw it away.

When he realized what had happened, he called me a dipshit, demanded to know whether I had any idea how much a retainer cost, and then began to weep. Tears of confidence, I imagine. Try to disguise insecurity as certainty, and it’ll come out sideways, usually through your tear ducts.

While I was making notes for this treatise on unreasonable confidence, I asked my daughter who the most confident person she knew was. “Banjo,” she said. Banjo isn’t a person. He’s a dog, and he looks like this:

My daughter was right. Banjo is confident. Mostly. He’s unreasonably confident when he barks his goddamn head off at passersby in the interest of protecting our homestead. No reasonable person looks at this dog and feels anything resembling fear or intimidation. In fact, mostly his barking inspires laughter and pity. Aside from this ongoing delusion of grandeur, Banjo’s confidence is entirely warranted.

Occasionally, I take him around town, to the hardware store or to an outdoor mall, and you’ve never seen a dog’s tail wag with as much fervor. He walks up to every person, fully confident that he’s going to bring joy to their day, which only makes his tail wag more. So far, every available data point suggests he’s right. Going anywhere with Banjo is like strolling through Nashville with Dolly Parton. Nothing but love and joy and happiness.

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While I appreciate my daughter’s take on Banjo and his canine confidence, I’m never going to have a windshield-wiper tail or floppy ears or (I hope) a body that resembles a giant, furry, uncircumcised penis that disarms the coldest of hearts. Physically, Banjo offers me little practical guidance. His approach to people, however, is worth considering.

I see something similar in my wife, who leads a team of her own. I’ve worked with all kinds of leaders (and so-called leaders), and few of them come close to my wife’s impact. And to the best of my knowledge, she doesn’t attend Tony Robbins seminars, she hasn’t read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and she’s never identified her “nonnegotiables.” This is what she does. She loves people. And she does so with all the enthusiasm of a basset hound. Some people find her energy off-putting but just initially. Sooner or later, they recognize her authenticity, and they return her love—and then some.

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This is the difference between her confidence, which I admire, and the confidence of most people, which I detest. Her confidence is not singular. It’s not predicated on these sorts of claims: “I can do this… I can do that… Me! Me! Me!… I am the only one…” That sort of “confidence” is typical of politicians, cult leaders, AI innovators, and conspiracy theorists who “do their own research.”

My wife’s confidence is not about her. She’s not interested in being the savior. Most “confident” people want you to believe in them. My wife makes you believe in us. And that’s as reasonable as confidence gets.

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All Kinds of Funny and Other Serious Matters, Volume 1 is available in paperback and hardback! Click this link or the image below, and get your copies now!

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Get it at this link or click the image below: Dig: A Dark Crime Comedy

WARNING: For legal purposes, this is a work of hyperbole and exaggeration and is in no way an admission of guilt. For entertainment purposes, it’s deadeye accurate. Still, no bats were harmed in the making of this story. The abatement, though, well, that’s another story.

“Y’all got bats in your eaves.” That’s what our neighbor told us—a neighborly gesture said in a neighborly way. But it failed to capture the reality of what we were dealing with. The way the neighbor said it made me think we had a newlywed bat-couple hanging upside down on the edge of our roof, snacking on mosquitos, preparing to start their bat family while they pursued their fulfilling middle class airborne rodent careers.

The reality was less Norman Rockwell and more Alfred Hitchcock. When we asked our neighbor for details, she said we needed to look up at the back of our house around dusk. So we did. For the love of all that is holy, we did.

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And at sunset we saw in real life what I imagine was a deleted scene from The Lost Boys—a shot cut because the editor was like, “Yeah, nobody’s going to believe that many bats can be in one place at the same time.”

I recently learned that a buttload is an actual unit of measurement. In medieval times, a butt was a cask or a barrel, and it held between 105 to 130 gallons. Based on that metric, it’s safe to say our eaves contained a buttload of bats.

Bats aren’t like doves or butterflies. You probably aren’t going to see anyone release them to mark love or peace at a wedding or a birth or another Lakers championship. But we live in a rural area. From my treehouse (that’s right, it’s my treehouse because my kids didn’t help build it as much as they said they would) I can see a dozen breeds of dogs and barn cats, horses, alpacas, mini donkeys and mini horses, giant Sulcata tortoises, and a short walk down the street will bring goats, sheep, peacocks, and a llama into focus.

All that to say, insects and bugs are abundant (they come with the critters) and bats eat a lot of bugs. A nursing bat momma, for instance, eats as many as 4,000 bugs in a single night. That’s a buttload of bugs.

So bats are nature’s insecticide. You want them around the house. You just don’t want them in the eaves because as it turns out, if they’re in the eaves, they’re in the walls. We could hear them squeaking through the drywall in my son’s room, squatting like some obnoxious AirBNB guest with extreme entitlement issues.

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So we called an exterminator. The problem is you can’t exterminate bats. They’re protected. You have to abate bats. So we called a bat abatement company, and they sent out their rodent tech, which is a euphemism for sleazy salesman. People talk about politics and education and the opioid crisis, but the real problem with this country is that there are too many good salesmen.

Here was his pitch:

• Two-day job.

• Seal the eaves and install a fabric cone on day one.

• The bats fly out of the fabric cone to eat at night, and they can’t fly back in.

• Day two, remove the fabric cone.

• No more bats. Easy peasy.

We tell him we won’t be home on the day he wants to schedule because we’re headed to Mexico for my father-in-law’s 75th. Even better, he says. You’ll leave for your vacation with a problem and return to a problem solved. Sounded good.

Turned out to be a buttload of bullshit.

We did our week in Mexico, we drove home from the airport, and we opened the door to our recently bat-abated home to discover a scene of grisly horror. Dirt, spiderwebs, dead insects, and confetti caked the floor, the counters, and the furniture. The dirt, spiderwebs, and dead insects sort of made sense. When we put a new roof on the house, we experienced a similar thing to a much lesser extent when all the roofers’ footsteps shook it all loose. The confetti, though, was weird.

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We shoot a confetti cannon every New Year’s Eve, and some of it gets stuck on the beams. Every so often a piece will flutter to the ground and remind us of good times and Auld Lang Syne. This wasn’t that. It wasn’t a piece or two that had been knocked loose. It was much more—an aggressive amount of confetti. I used to associate confetti with fun and festivity, but now it’s a sign of horror, dread, and grotesque chaos. It’s been co-opted, sort of similar to how strippers converted glitter from a symbol of preschool crafts to evidence of bad decisions and a cocaine habit.

Before we could draw conclusions, my wife screamed. Like, the scream of a person in mortal danger. Only it wasn’t her that was in mortal danger. It was a bat. And it was dying under the watchful eye of Sister Lightning Jenkins, our house cat. Sister Lightning had shredded the poor bat’s wings as if they were a cheap shower curtain.

The next few minutes played out like this:

1. We found a second bat in our bedroom by my wife’s desk, this one dead with shredded wings.

2. We found a third bat in the upstairs bathtub, this one alive with shredded wings and attempting to crawl out of the tub. At this point, it occurred to me that Gary Oldman absolutely nailed his role Bram Stoker’s Dracula, particularly when he was all gruesome and looked strikingly like Bea Arthur.

3. We found a fourth bat, this one dead with shredded wings and inside of the bathroom trash. I could hear the late great Chick Hearn in my head: “Sister Lightning Jenkins with the slaaaaaaaam dunk!”

So the bat abatement happened on day 1 of our 7-day Mexican vacation, but the rodent tech failed to seal something, so apparently the homebody bats treated themselves to the inside of our house where Sister Lightning Jenkins played whack-a-bat for the better part of a week. In the melee, dirt, spiderwebs, and confetti were dislodged from the beams and the shiplap, leaving us with what looked like an apt visual metaphor for whatever goes on inside of Kanye West’s brain.

It took a couple hours to clean up the mess and abate the bats, and all the while we were wondering if there were any more bat surprises waiting to be found. After all, it was a buttload of bats, and it’s hard to account for a full buttload.

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I asked my wife if she needed a drink, and she nodded before she even heard the d-sound. We grabbed dinner and beers at a sports bar. The bartender committed the error of asking how our night was going, and while my wife regaled him with all of the gore and tragedy, I got a text from my daughter—my daughter who was sitting two feet across the table from me.

The text read: “OMG. Mom’s trauma dumping on the bartender.”

I laughed. My wife asked what was funny, and I showed her the text. She immediately began to ugly-girl cry. Big heaving sobs. A buttload of tears. The overwhelm was real.

In addition to the bats, we had a lot of other difficult stuff going on, but sometimes all it takes is a bloodthirsty cat named after a fictional nun to slaughter some flying rodents to break the emotional levee.

We finished our beers and went home. No new dirt or spiderwebs. No confetti or dead or mostly dead and shredded bats. Sister Lightning Jenkins remained a little wired, but I attributed it to her busy week.

I crawled into bed and managed to fall asleep. My wife, not so much. She read beside me and attempted to shake off the rest of the trauma. You can only dump so much on a wide-eyed bartender.

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Just before 1 am, our daughter slipped into our room. Low and deep and soaked in dread, she said, “There’s another bat.” I was reminded of learning about Rasputin, how he couldn’t be killed, how he just kept going. That guy had a buttload of moxie.

We went upstairs. Sister Lightning sat at the base of our fireplace and looked up toward the ceiling. Our fireplace was made of rock and stones pulled from the creek that runs behind our house—all shades of organic reds, oranges, purples, and browns. It’s charming. It’s also the perfect place to camouflage yourself if you’re a bat. We used our phones to zoom into the rocks where they met the roof. One of the rocks seemed to be breathing. Which rocks don’t normally do. Yes, a fifth bat.

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I tracked down my son’s BB gun. It took a while to find the BB gun in his closet, which looked more like the present state of Ukraine than, ya know, an actual closet. My son wasn’t any help. In fact, he had already bowed out and went to stay the night at my in-laws. He had a basketball game the next morning and needed his sleep, he said, which was code for, “I do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks, I do I do I do I do…”

I hadn’t shot a BB gun in 15 years. I’m not much of a gun guy, in general, but I do fancy myself the kind of man who protects his wife and family, his hearth and home. So, in my boxer shorts, drained from travel and trauma dumping, I stood on my stairs—a few extra feet to close the distance between BB and bat—and raised the barrel of the gun.

My wife stood by with a broom, ready to whack the bat if it came her way. My daughter stood by with her phone, ready to capture it all for social media. And Sister Lightning stood by with her commitment to the cause, ready to unleash feline hellfire whenever necessary.

I lined up my shot…

“Okay,” I told everyone. “On three.

“One…

“Two…”

THWAP!

I pulled the trigger. Direct hit. Like an Olympian in that weird Winter Olympics biathlon event where you ski and shoot for some reason. I was an assassin with a BB gun and boxer shorts.

At first, though, we didn’t know I hit it. It sort of fell from the fireplace, which is a good 18 feet up (we have vaulted ceilings) and then it started flapping its wings, haphazardly flying into one wall and then another before flopping to the ground. It wasn’t until we saw the blood on the walls and the hardwood that we realized I was basically Dirty Harry.

When I realized I had hit it, my daughter and wife were teetering between laughter and screams. And I soon joined them, as my joy overfloweth—“I hit it! I hit it! Bahahahaha! I fucking hit it!” I cocked the BB gun and shot it a few more times to end its misery. To end all of our misery.

Or so I thought. As it turns out, the mosquitoes have been off the charts this summer. And every time I scratch at a mosquito bite, I see a bat in my mind’s eye, and he’s saying, “That’s what we call revenge, you son of a bitch.”

Fair enough. But when the shit hits the fan—or when the confetti flutters to the hardwood—I know I’m the kind of man who will protect his family so they can dump the buttloads of trauma and get on with their lives.

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If you want me to send an All Kinds of Funny: Unsolicited love letter (of sorts) to one of your people, click this button:

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All Kinds of Funny and Other Serious Matters, Volume 1 is available in paperback and hardback! Click this link or the image below, and get your copies now!

If you like Elmore Leonard, Joe Lansdale, or the Coen Brothers, you’ll dig my novella, DIG. If it makes you laugh, cringe, or question your moral compass—do me a solid and leave a quick rating or review.

Get it at this link or click the image below: Dig: A Dark Crime Comedy

This is my go-to question when I hop into a cab, a Lyft, an Uber, or a rickshaw. One of the things you learn when you’re a storyteller is that misery, pain, and frustration are a wellspring of laughter and joy. The tragedy-plus-time equation is mathematically—and comedically—accurate.

The driver responses I get when I ask this question typically fall into one of two categories. Mostly the drivers try to avoid it. Maybe they’re concerned with gossiping, or they want to keep things professional? But occasionally, a driver is all too eager to regale me with nightmares and maladies. The driver I’m talking to in Tempe, Arizona is one of the latter.

“Worst ride? Easy. Drunk ASU white girl. God love her!”

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The fact that the girl was white is an important piece of information here because the guy who offers it isn’t. He’s a black man, as easy with a smile as anyone I’ve ever met. He has gentle eyes, a disarming demeanor, and enough gray hair that I’m not surprised he’s a grandpa, but I am a little surprised that he’s a grandpa a dozen times over. Proud-papa snapshots of his grandbabies wallpaper the dash of his Camry: Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Little Leaguers, ballerinas, spelling bee champs, high school and college graduates—an entire lifetime of active parenting and grandparenting on full display.

“Drunk ASU white girl?” I ask.

“Yes, sir.”

“I imagine you get your fair share of those.”

“Not no more. I retired from all that nonsense.”

“Retired from driving drunk ASU white girls sounds like a smart business decision.”

“Nothing good is going on after the sun sets and the bars start popping off.”

“What did this inebriated she-devil do? She puke all over your car?”

“Nah, nothing like that.”

“She get racist?”

“No, no, no. She didn’t really do anything. It was more about how the situation unfolded.”

“Yeah?”

“I should have known better the minute she got in my car. Actually, I did know better, but you know how it goes. Sometimes you got the knowledge but you ain’t got the wisdom to put it in play.”

“You ought to put that on a bumper sticker.”

“I ought to tattoo it on my forehead.”

“So this drunk ASU white girl gets in your car?”

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“Well, she didn’t really get in my car. Bartender sort of shoved her in my car. She was passed out cold, dead drunk. She was holding on to one high heel. Guess she lost the other one. No purse or phone or nothing. Bartender looked me in the eye and made me promise I’d get her home to the address he put in the app. I know it’s a bad idea as soon as I make the promise, but I think about my own kids and my own grandkids, and I know they’re gonna make a bad decision someday because everybody does, and I hope they’ll be some old man around that will help get them away from that bad decision to some place safe. It’s funny how quickly you can write up excuses after you make your own bad decision.”

“Sounds like you were doing a good deed.”

“Mm-hmm, and I got the punishment that goes with it.”

“Uh oh.”

“Yeah. The address I was driving to was about thirty minutes from the bar. That’s a long time for your imagination to get away from you. I started wondering about the bartender. Who was he? Does he really have this girl’s best interests at heart? Then I started wondering about her. How old is she? Is this really her address I’m driving to? Did somebody slip her something? Is she breathing? Then I started wondering about me. What if a cop pulls me over? What if I go to prison for the rest of my life? Things can go sideways pretty quick when there’s a drunk white girl in your backseat.”

“I imagine it can go sideways even quicker if you’re the black guy behind the wheel.”

“Oh, yeah. And it sure did.”

“She come to?”

“Yes, sir, she came to when we were still on the freeway.”

“What did she say?”

“Nothing, not a word. She just started screaming. Scared me so bad, I damn near ran this car right off the road.”

“What did you say?”

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“I tried to explain what was happening as calmly as I could. But she just kept screaming. So I pulled off the freeway and drove to a gas station. Told her I was going to let her use my phone to make a call or do whatever she needed to feel safe.”

“Did that calm her down?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Soon as I pulled into the gas station, she jumped out the car.”

“Were you parked?”

“Eventually, but she jumped out while I was still driving. For a drunk ASU white girl, she could move.”

“Where did she run to?”

“Not sure.”

“She didn’t go into the gas station?”

“She did, but she was stumbling drunk, she had no shoes, no ID. They just chased her off. She hopped some fence into a neighborhood, and I never saw her again.”

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“What a nightmare.”

“You don’t even know. It’s still a nightmare. If I have a bad day, it almost always leads to a nightmare about drunk white girls screaming in my backseat. It’s like she got a foothold in that part of my brain and never left.”

“I imagine something like that can make you feel pretty cynical.”

“Yes and no. I mean, it was a nightmare for me, but it was a nightmare for her, too. Hopefully both of us got more wisdom now than we got knowledge. And hopefully, she got home okay.”

I got out of his Uber with two thoughts: One, hopefully there are more men out there like this old man. And two, humor and horror are regular carpool buddies—they’re just sitting in different seats.

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If you want me to send an All Kinds of Funny: Unsolicited love letter (of sorts) to one of your people, click this button:

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All Kinds of Funny and Other Serious Matters, Volume 1 is available in paperback and hardback! Click this link or the image below, and get your copies now!

If you like Elmore Leonard, Joe Lansdale, or the Coen Brothers, you’ll dig my novella, DIG. If it makes you laugh, cringe, or question your moral compass—do me a solid and leave a quick rating or review.

Get it at this link or click the image below: Dig: A Dark Crime Comedy

It’s the 4th of July in 2010. Our son is just months old. Our daughter is two years and change. This means neither my wife nor I have slept for a good long while. More specifically, we pinballed between the ecstatic bliss that comes from being new parents and the psychological, sleep deprivation-induced carnage and never-ending onslaught of failures that comes from being new parents. A temporary insanity defense for any number of crimes could be won by the most incompetent of lawyers.

We’re at an HOA 4th of July event. There’s a manmade lake with little toot-toot electric boats full of retirees sipping Prosecco and low-carb beer. A local band plays Monkees covers. Pickup basketball and volleyball games are in full swing. Cherubic faces are being painted. The scent of grilling hot dogs and burgers wafts through the air, as does chlorine from the several pools on the property where swimmers of all ages tread water, practically shoulder to shoulder.

One of these pools is a perfect circle, about fifteen feet in diameter, only eighteen inches deep. It’s the kiddie pool. New mothers crowd the edges, their feet dropped into the water as they cradle their infants and watch their toddlers splash and squeal. If Norman Rockwell were still alive, this is what he’d be painting.

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“I dare you to do a belly flop in the kiddie pool.” This comes from my wife’s cousin. We are both prone to mischief and prioritize good-natured fun and silliness. Maybe they’re attempts to cling to youth? Or maybe they’re just the proclivities of two people who want to make sure they have stories to tell?

Those are questions for another time. The question most acute is this: To belly flop into a shallow pool full of young mothers and their babies? Or not to belly flop into a shallow pool full of young mothers and their babies?

I suppose this is hardly a question for most people. As for me, I wanted a little more clarity.

“Stakes?” I ask.

“Hundred bucks?” he proposes.

“Money? That’s boring.”

He nods. He knows I’m right. Merely taking each other’s money is the purview of those who lack imagination and creativity. To wit: betting a friend on the outcome of a basketball game where nothing is at stake but money makes for a boring story. But if the loser has to attend happy hour with the word donkey written on his forehead in thick, black sharpie and must bellow “hee-haw” every time the word donkey is said by anyone in the bar—well, that, my friends, that is what we in the storytelling business call a barn burner.

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He licks his teeth and stares off, searching for the appropriate enticement. At this point my wife draws my gaze. I know immediately what this look means. Sam needs his diaper changed. My wife and I place a fist on top of an open palm.

Rock, paper, scissors, shoot!

My rock busts up her scissors. The diaper change is all hers.

This—my wife’s spiritual exhaustion at losing, my momentary relief—gives my wife’s cousin an idea. “You belly flop into the kiddie pool, I’ll babysit your kids.”

This wakes me up like few things ever have. I immediately launch a risk audit in my mind, imagining all the reasons that accepting this dare would be a horrible decision.

Personal safety. In eighteen inches of water, I could crack a rib, break my nose, throw out my back, or split my skull.

Public safety. I could trip during my approach and plow headlong into the sweet woman hosting a tea party in the kiddie pool with her daughter. An outstretched swan wing could clothesline a toddler. A flexed foot could clip an infant's head. The ensuing splash could traumatize any number of babies, saddling them with a fear of water as intense as the one perpetrated by the 1975 release of Jaws.

Reputation. I don’t have plans to run for public office, but I’d rather not be catching community stink eye when I’m pushing my daughter on the swings at the park or buying avocados at Trader Joe’s.

Marriage. I like being married. I would prefer never to write “Irreconcilable differences as a result of an ill-advised belly flop” on any legally binding documents.

Legal. If I get arrested and a fellow inmate asks what I’m in for, I can’t imagine I would enjoy much cell block respect if my response involved an aerial aqua assault committed against preschoolers.

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I consider all of this inside of a few seconds. In the face of all this risk, I decide I need more clarity.

“How long will you babysit my kids?”

“One night.”

“As in, like, twelve hours?”

“No, a night, like a date night.”

“No way. I want a day. One whole day.”

“Like twenty-four hours?”

“Yup, one whole day.”

He takes a deep breath. “Okay, one whole day.”

“And you have to do a good job. Diaper changes. Feedings. All of that.”

“Of course.”

“And they have to remain safe and unscathed. You can’t let some moron belly flop in the kiddie pool while you’re watching.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’ll get them back alive. But this has to be an aggressive belly flop. You have to go all out. Full extension.”

“Hey, I’m a professional.”

“Okay, let’s see it.”

“Let me give the moms a quick warning.”

“No deal.”

“What?”

“It’s gotta be impromptu, and it’s gotta be right now.”

“Now?”

“Right now or no deal.”

“Come on, that’s—”

“This agreement voids in five, four, three—”

What follows is an out-of-body experience. I see myself rip off my shirt. I see myself push off my back foot. I see myself sprint twenty yards across the pool deck. I see myself leap over the mom holding the plastic teapot. I see myself launch into the air and reach the apex of my plyometric capabilities. I hear the confused yelps and shrieks of young mothers. I feel my arms stretch taut, my chest puff, my core tighten, my legs extend. I feel the liquid coolness as I plunge into eighteen inches of chlorinated bliss.

Without a doubt, this is the most athletic feat I’ve ever performed.

I emerge from the water, victorious. I turn and see my wife’s cousin nodding and smiling, and he begins to clap. My wife and the rest of my in-laws stare in disbelief and embarrassment. All other adults stare at me with righteous indignation. All of these reactions are justified.

“You are such an asshole!” the tea partying mother says, her hair soaked, her toddler’s lower lip quivering.

“I know,” I say.

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Her husband has scurried over to confront me. “Dude, what the hell’s your problem?”

I point at my wife’s cousin. “He said he’d babysit my kids for twenty-four hours if I belly flopped in the kiddie pool.”

The husband considers this. He takes a long deep breath through his nostrils, weighing the gravity of all of this.

“Twenty-four hours?”

“Twenty-four hours.”

He nods.

“I get it.”

Then he turns to his wife who starts to say something, but he relays what I told him, and then they both glare at me. But it’s no longer anger. It’s jealousy.

I walk back to my wife. “I can’t believe you just did that,” she says. And she grins, her imagination already at work, fantasizing about twenty-four hours of euphoric rest.

As I look back on this moment of unquestionably poor decision-making, I think about the unsolicited advice I always offer to new parents: It’s okay if you feel like you want to toss your baby out the window… provided you don’t toss your baby out a window. I should probably also add this: It’s okay to belly flop in the kiddie pool… provided the stakes justify the splash.

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If you like Elmore Leonard, Joe Lansdale, or the Coen Brothers, you’ll dig my novella, DIG. If it makes you laugh, cringe, or question your moral compass—do me a solid and leave a quick rating or review.

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Because Becky was born, I have gotten to fall in love. And after I fell in love, I got to grow in love. That second part is the good part, the meaningful part, the part that unlocks everything else.

Because Becky was born, I have gotten to have a wonderful marriage. Marriage ain’t for everybody, but our marriage is for me—for us—for our kids, our family, our friends. The marriage is the lighthouse, leading us back home when we wander too far into the dark.

Because Becky was born, I have gotten to have a Hall of Fame best friend. Yes, there are other friends in that Hall of Fame, but she is the cornerstone of the permanent collection.

Because Becky was born, I have gotten to be a father. Yeah, yeah, yeah, fathering children comes pretty easily. So let me revise: because Becky was born, I have gotten to serve as a father. And nobody has helped me understand more than she has that parenting is a state of action, not just a state of being.

Because Becky was born, I have gotten to laugh and laugh and laugh… This whole All Kinds of Funny experiment? Her idea. And when you’re constantly looking for reasons to laugh, life’s hard knocks turn into knock-knock jokes pretty damn quick. For the nay-sayers, I present Exhibit A, Exhibit B, and Exhibit C.

Because Becky was born, I have gotten to be an amateur zookeeper. Dogs, cats, barn cats (notably different from regular old cats), 80-pound sulcata tortoises, dozens of chickens, horses, bunny rabbits—so much fur, so many shenanigans, wild and domesticated.

Because Becky was born, I have gotten to live in a magical treehouse—a hand-built cabin with a couple of secret passages, a treehouse, a workshop, an imaginarium—a veritable castle for creativity and imagination.

Because Becky was born, I have gotten to write and tell stories and build all sorts of amazing projects. Sure, some people manage to make a go of the creative life without support, but nobody loves them and they have a small and sad inner life.

Because Becky was born, I have gotten to eat the best (and worst) food on the planet with the best company. Among my favorite meals is our weekly State of the Union Sunday dinner where we knock back a couple of Old Fashioned cocktails and gnaw on habanero hot wings and sliders while discussing the week’s family calendar. Generally speaking, I prefer variety and novelty when it comes to food. This is the exception. It’s one of the great anchors of our married life.

Because Becky was born, I have gotten to know what it’s like to live with sunshine. If you haven’t lived with sunshine, I recommend it. Five stars. 100% certified fresh.

Because Becky was born, I have gotten to have it all—everything this man could want and need.

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If you want me to send an All Kinds of Funny: Unsolicited love letter (of sorts) to one of your people, click this button:

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All Kinds of Funny and Other Serious Matters, Volume 1 is available in paperback and hardback! Click this link or the image below, and get your copies now!

If you like Elmore Leonard, Joe Lansdale, or the Coen Brothers, you’ll dig my novella, DIG. If it makes you laugh, cringe, or question your moral compass—do me a solid and leave a quick rating or review.

Get it at this link or click the image below: Dig: A Dark Crime Comedy

• I raise—and lower—the toilet seat.

• I practice dead-on-balls accuracy when it comes to aim (kudos to anyone who heard Marisa Tomei’s voice from My Cousin Vinny when they read “dead-on-balls accuracy.”

• Despite my marksmanship, I nevertheless snag a handful of toilet paper, and wipe down the top and inside edges of the bowl before returning the seat to its rightful position. I have several reasons for this, chief among them is that particular parts of my wife’s body—parts that are of great interest and import to me—sit on, and maneuver, around that chunk of porcelain.

All this to say, I maintain strict standards when it comes to bathroom etiquette. I enjoy South Park as much as the next guy, but I appreciate its potty humor from a distance. It’s not something I enjoy in the first person, as either perpetrator or victim.

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Related, I hate public restrooms. Which is hardly a hot take. If I had professed enthusiasm and passion for public restrooms, that might be a little more provocative, sure, but the inauthenticity of my sentiment would, as they say, stink up the joint.

While I’m grateful for indoor plumbing, I feel like we should do better when it comes to privacy. For one of the more intimate, vulnerable acts we perform as human beings, we’re pretty cavalier about personal space. “Here,” we say, “sit on this cold porcelain while another stranger sits an arm’s length beside you on either side, nothing between your stressed bowels but a flimsy panel of fiberglass that almost never stretches floor-to-ceiling, instead leaving a gap below and an opening above so that sounds and odors can pass freely for our collective humility.”

For men, urinals are even more exposed. A few weeks ago, I had an interaction with a man who, unlike me, did seem enthusiastic and passionate about public bathrooms. It was 8am. I was at the Anaheim Convention Center for my daughter’s club volleyball game (Go Saddleback!). Watching my daughter play volleyball (and my son play basketball) presently tops the list of my favorite things about being alive. Every tournament tips the fun scale; however, every tournament also feels like a prolonged anxiety attack, and as the anxiety ramps up, so do my visits to the urinal.

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Like any sane man, I try to put as much distance between myself and other fellow urinators. If there are a dozen urinals and the first is in use, anyone looking will find me at urinal number twelve. On this morning, the bathroom was empty, so I took the first open spot, reasoning you never go deeper into the bog of eternal stench than is absolutely necessary (there’s one for the David Bowie and/or Labyrinth fans). So despite the fact that maybe a dozen urinal options were available to anyone else needing to tap the ol’ kidneys, some guy entered and sidled right up beside me.

Normal looking dude, maybe a little older than me, late 40s or 50s. He unzipped right beside me and then sort of arched his posture, holding his palms against his lower back, opting for the hands-free approach. Kinda like this:

And as he did his business, he audibly sighed, like, multiple times. It was as if he was trying to make himself as large as possible while he did his business. His need for attention was up there with the Andy Dicks and Kanye Wests of the world. I hated him. And this was before he committed the ultimate coup de grâce of faux pas.

He farted.

Yeah, yeah, I hear you—the bathroom is where farts are supposed to happen. But this was no ordinary fart. It was aggressive. It was a fart that was trying to say something, maybe even start something. It wasn’t accidental, something that just slipped out. He had put effort behind this fart.

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And just as that thought occurred to me, I saw this man in my periphery. He had turned toward me, trying to draw out my gaze. I haven’t verified this in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but I’m fairly confident that urinary eye contact is a marker for psychopathy.

He held his gaze on me for some time. It’s difficult to say how long. As far as I know, time dilation hasn’t been studied in the public restroom context, but it ought to be because those ten or eleven seconds felt as long as back-to-back Catholic funerals. And I was holding my breath, sure to pass out at any moment.

Finally, I broke. My eyeballs panned over and I raised my eyebrows as if to say, What the hell do you want, you son of a bitch? The sound of his fart was still echoing off the ceramic tile. He exhaled out of his mouth, his lips flapping, and he nodded his head, as if to say, Brother, it’s gonna be a long day.

I gave him the courtesy of a single head nod. While I saw the urinal firing line as a place to get in and get out, he saw it as a commune, a place to empathize with his fellow man and commiserate via bodily functions on the excitement and anxiety that lay before us.

I left the bathroom and had this thought: The things we endure for our children.

I’ve written about my wife before, about her sunny disposition, her intelligence, her beauty, all the ways in which I’m a fortunate husband and father.

This little collection of pics is a solid example of the evolution of parenthood. You’re young, healthy, energetic. You smile a lot. The next thing you know, you go to a lunch party, and when you enter, your kids cling firmly to your ass while you balance precariously on wedges and hope against hope that you don’t face plant when one of their hands inevitably gooses your inner thigh.

The things we endure for our children.

I’ve had this thought many times since becoming a father—in fact, on the very first day I became a father. I woke up in the hospital on that tiny little bed/couch thing to watch my wife change our daughter who was only hours old.

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My wife had labored 36 hours—yes, 36!—and she looked the part. Her hair was everywhere. The 1980s would have said, “Uh, maybe your ‘do is a little…too much.” She had her glasses on. This was pre-Lasik, and her lenses were fit for a NASA telescope. The wrinkled hospital gown draped across her like a wet cardboard box. Still, she smiled as she changed Charlee’s diaper for the first time with all the grace of a bomb squad rookie. I wish I had taken a picture. It’s still my favorite image of my wife, the one I go back to in my mind’s eye the most, the one that told me that the great adventure had started.

The things we endure for our children.

For some reason, this refrain has come to me in moments related to bathroom business—in the urinal of the Anaheim Convention Center, during our daughter’s inaugural diaper change, and in the urinal of The Forum.

We had gotten my dad tickets to Dead & Company. He’s a lifelong Grateful Dead fan, and it was important to us that our kids go to a show with him. He’s smoked enough cigarettes that downtown Vegas should give him the key to the city, and he has a bumper sticker for having eaten “The Logger,” a 40-ounce Porterhouse served at McNally’s in Kernville, CA, where men know a thing or two about eating beef. Suffice to say, he ain’t exactly running marathons, but if you take him to a live music venue, he’s always the first and last one dancing.

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Dead fans—the OGs anyhow—are a little long in the teeth, at least those who still have teeth. Faded tattoos of dancing bears and 13-point lightning bolts cover their papery, wrinkled skin. Most of them have kept their long hair, but they also have bald spots, so it looks like their locks are slipping off the backs of their heads. Their leather fringe and tie-dye remain—it just looks a little different when worn by crooked postures and paired with skull-topped canes. And they’re a little cranky for the fans who espoused peace and love and gratitude. That is, until the music starts.

We were having a great time, and then my son asked me to take him to the bathroom. If you haven’t been to The Forum, you should know that it’s a shit hole. I know it was once a cutting-edge entertainment venue, but now, admission ought to come with a few doses of penicillin.

The men’s bathrooms require you to descend three or four stairs. Descend is the perfect verb in this case, as these bathrooms have a hellish quality. If you think a lineup of urinals is gross, The Forum takes that indignity one step further—it’s just one long trough. So I told my son during the descent, “We get in, we get out. Don’t touch anything, and don’t make eye contact.”

We unzipped and let it rip, and it wasn’t a few seconds before things went sideways. In my periphery, on the other side of my son, a sixty-something-year-old Deadhead stared at us. My son and I were aimed at the trough, ya know, peeing, and the Deadhead was aimed at us, closer to my son than to me. And he was just staring, saying nothing. He reeled side to side, as if he was unsteady. Probably drunk, I thought.

But then there was also the thought that he was closest to my son, which was weird. Was he a pederast? Did he think I was a pederast? Had we unintentionally disrespected him? Did my son make accidental eye contact? Was I going to have to fight this hippie in the bathroom at The Forum, which would all but guarantee any number of staph infections?

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Finally, I looked at him and said, “Can I help you?”

He sniffled and shook his head slowly from side to side. “Taking the boy to a Dead show… What a great fuckin’ father.” Then, hand to god, he wiped away a tear and ascended the filthy stairs, out of the bathroom. I’ve received my share of parenting affirmations, but this one is definitely, well, the most memorable.

We zipped up, washed up, and ascended the stairs ourselves. And then I had that thought—

The things we endure for our children.

We’ve endured ancient hippies. We’ve endured aggressive farts. We’ve endured bathrooms fit for a River Styx ferry. We’ve endured all the anxiety and excitement. And we’ll go on enduring as long as we have the privilege to do so.

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If you want me to send an All Kinds of Funny: Unsolicited love letter (of sorts) to one of your people, click this button:

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All Kinds of Funny and Other Serious Matters, Volume 1 is available in paperback and hardback! Click this link or the image below, and get your copies now!

If you like Elmore Leonard, Joe Lansdale, or the Coen Brothers, you’ll dig my novella, DIG. If it makes you laugh, cringe, or question your moral compass—do me a solid and leave a quick rating or review.

Get it at this link or click the image below: Dig: A Dark Crime Comedy

At seventeen, I hadn’t really been out of Lake Elsinore where I grew up, except to go to a handful of beaches in Orange County when my friends and I could scrape together enough gas money. I wouldn’t say I was sheltered—after all, Lake Elsinore boasts a hub for several outlaw biker gangs, as well as offshoots of the Bloods and Crips; a couple of serial killers; a phony kidnapping scandal involving a pentecostal evangelist; an algae bloom that washed ashore 225 tons of dead carp; and several other classic coming-of-age fun facts.

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Still, I was short on worldly experiences beyond Lake Elsinore’s stagnant, soupy, septic waters. Aside from being young and inexperienced, I was the first of my family to go to college, so I had little insight on what to expect, my mom even less so. You can imagine, then, my mom’s response when we pulled up to my new home—the Merrill College dorm on the UC Santa Cruz campus. A large mural greeted the new students, a beefy topless woman sporting a mohawk. A chain connected her nose ring, nipple rings, and leather collar, which played a nice counterpoint to her otherwise cheerful smile. A speech balloon had her saying, “We’re the ones your mothers warned you about.”

My mom started crying almost immediately.

This pretty much set the tone for my tenure as a Santa Cruz banana slug, which is the most accurate mascot the university could have adopted. It just fits. Unfortunately, I did not. Shy, insecure, and homesick for the familiar stench of Lake Elsinore, I struggled to find my footing. Everything seemed strange and unusual compared to the old stomping ground.

Gender fluidity is a vogue topic today, but 1996 Santa Cruz was ahead of the curve. Many of the young women shaved neither their legs nor their armpits, but many of the young men did. Many of the young men also wore makeup and the kind of clothes that would get you murdered in Lake Elsinore.

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Because I dragged my feet through the matriculation process, I didn’t choose my housing. Instead I was assigned to a dorm based on what was still available. So I ended up on the co-ed Asian Pacific Islander themed floor. This was only a challenge because many of the students were international, and I would describe our ability to communicate with each other as slippery at best.

This slippery component became all too real in the co-ed bathrooms. One morning I grabbed my towel and dopp kit to take a shower. The stalls were seemingly empty. No running water. No singing dorm mates. No sound or soul at all, as far as I could tell. Still, as per the rules, I knocked on the wall to let anyone know I was entering. No response, so I strolled right in on a petite naked Vietnamese woman. “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” I shouted, while averting my eyes. And she countered by screaming at a volume that made me contemplate how well I would survive in prison. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” I said as I beelined for my dorm. That was all that came of it. Neither of us made eye contact again, and we let any would-be slippery conversations just go on and slip right down the social drain.

On the theme of nudity, my calculus class started at 7am in a lecture hall that seated about 300 students. The professor entered the first day of classes looking like a hippie version of Batman’s Joker. He wore a purple blazer over a purple turtleneck with purple slacks, purple socks, and—hand-to-god—purple Birkenstocks. He took his spot at the lectern, scanned the auditorium, and grinned. “It’s so refreshing to see someone taking full advantage of the dress code.”

Everyone shifted in their seats to look for the student embodying the banana slug’s ostentatious spirit. About half way up the auditorium, there he was—a twenty-something calculus student, sitting cross-legged, naked as a jaybird, save a pair of—surprise, surprise—Birkenstocks.

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Live nude calculus is an odd choice. It requires a level of confidence I doubt I’ll ever acquire. I’ve been told the clothing optional policy at Santa Cruz has since passed. I’ve also been told diamonds are forever, but diamonds ain’t got shit on the trauma that comes from the sight of a calculus student’s 7am wiener. To the best of my knowledge, banana slug has never been used as slang for penis. But brother, it ought to be.

The coup de grâce of my time at Santa Cruz occurred on a beautiful, sunny December morning. I arrived in August, and it had basically rained the entire quarter. I grew up in a desert so hot it boiled tens of thousands of carp. By contrast, Santa Cruz had me freezing my ass off. I was always damp or wet. On that glorious December morning, though, the marine layer burned off and the sun shone warm on my face. I ripped my raincoat off to enjoy the momentary respite of warmth and mercy—which is when a Volkswagen bus sputtered past, its tires skirting the gutter and soaking me head-to-banana-slug with the still-flowing rain water.

I returned home to attend community college after one quarter.

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The funny thing is, looking back, I realize how much the experience left its fingerprints on me. The hippies and anarchists, the kooks and weirdoes, the introverts and eccentrics, the creatives, the artists, the storytellers—these are my people. It makes sense that I ran away from it. When a young man looks in the mirror and sees a banana slug looking back, it’s a little unsettling. It takes some time to get used to.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this because my daughter just graduated high school. She and all her friends are getting ready to go to college, to figure out who they are and what they’re made of. Most of her friends are staying close to home, within driving distance. A few will be a plane flight away. She’s going the furthest, 2,400 miles, all the way to New York.

Other parents keep asking me if I’m nervous or worried about her. I’m not. Not even a little. At eighteen, she already possesses the confidence, strength, and discipline it took me forty years to get. And she probably has more of it. Yes, I’ll miss her something awful, but that’s a price I’m willing to pay to hear about all the adventures she’s going to have and to see the young woman she’s going to become. I mean, I don’t necessarily want any naked young men swinging their banana slugs in her presence at the break of dawn, but you get the idea.

So I applied to UC Santa Cruz because it was free. My daughter approaches life with considerable more strategy. She mocked up the image below for her graduation party and made the suggestion that I include it in All Kinds of Funny. If you’d like to buy her a cup of coffee, some train fare, or perhaps some bail money, I promise that it’s a sound investment. Our little girl is the kind of young woman who’s going to remind the world how wonderful it can be.

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All Kinds of Funny and Other Serious Matters, Volume 1 is available in paperback and hardback! Click this link or the image below, and get your copies now!

I’ve never come close to committing coldblooded murder.

Still, there are times when I am certainly closer to homicidal tendencies than others. Once after seeing a David Lynch movie, I finished off a Slurpee and threw it into the bathroom trashcan before stepping up to a urinal. Another guy sidled up to the urinal beside me (there were other urinal opportunities, and he could have left a gap, but clearly he was a factory of poor decisions) and he said, “In one hole and out the other, eh?” Urinal small talk is definitely cause for violence.

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I’ve also spent my fair share of time on the 405, and I’m heartened by the fact that there are so few incidents of murder and mayhem on Southern California freeways. The number of violent fantasies I’ve had driving into Los Angeles could fill any number of true crime omnibuses. Hyperbole aside, the levels of restraint I’ve demonstrated are nothing short of super heroic. Thousands of BMW owners still waste oxygen as a result of my virtue.

And if you really want to fire up my bloodlust, be one of those people in a meeting who has no respect for rhythm, for give and take, for back and forth—ya know, those people who treat conversations the way Kenny G treats an E-flat. They use 5,319 words of verbal masturbation to put a bandage on their bruised egos, and all I can think of are seven words: “Hold still, I’m going to choke you.”

Which is why I’m grateful for gratitude.

Gratitude has saved me from depressions. It’s rescued me from any number of would-be faux pas. It’s the engine that drives my creativity. I write a lot of dark stuff—dark comedy and horror, thrillers and fairy tales, film noir and fantasy. Spending so much time one the dark side of my imagination has made me realize an important truth: things can always get worse.

A lot worse.

So it’s helpful to express gratitude. One of my more profound lessons in gratitude came by way of a family vacation. And I use that term loosely. The word vacation may conjure images of Maui or Niagara Falls or a Jackson Hole ski trip capped off each night with hot cocoa while nursing sore glutes in a jacuzzi on the deck of a custom-built chalet. This was not that.

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Money was tight when I was a kid, so we called vacations what most people call a shitty camping trip. And indeed we stretched the boundaries of the very concept of shittiness. We did a week in Lake Havasu. Note: I used the verb “did” in that last sentence since it possesses the connotation of doing a 5-to-10 stretch in San Quentin.

Some of you might roll your eyes and point out that MTV hosted spring break in Lake Havasu. You might even add that it’s often referred to as Arizona’s Playground. Fair enough. It does boast some world class water skiing, the London Bridge, and breathtaking desert landscapes. But again, we were camping.

In August.

In the 1980s.

When camping technology was closer to covered wagons than the Navy Seal-like innovations we enjoy today.

We had a tent, but it was essentially a nylon oven. Pigs have slow-roasted on a spit at lower temperatures than the inside of that godforsaken devil’s wet dream of a tent. And this was soul-crushing since we had to clear a quarter ton of granite rocks to pitch the tent only to learn that we had erected a sauna.

We spent the days, which hovered around 115°F, trying not to die of heat stroke while dodging dragonflies the size of station wagons. We spent the nights, which hovered around 95°F, moaning. The moaning served two purposes: to mark the agony, sure, but also to expel energy in hopes that sleep—or death—would come for us.

My mom attempted to soothe us by soaking beach towels in the ice chest and draping them over our backs to cool us off. It worked. It was just enough to make sleep possible until the sun fired back up the next morning. In a Lake Havasu August, the sun comes at you with all the energy of James Brown after snorting multiple rails of cocaine. And on one morning, that energy was compounded by mom’s bloodcurdling—quite literally bloodcurdling—screams.

To explain: we had two ice chests—one for sodas and beers; another for ground beef, chicken, and steaks. The meat locker, as it has come to be known, had been mishandled and the meat was no longer properly contained, so the ice chest was more accurately a bloodbath, which my mom—certainly reeling from the agony of triple-digit-degree camping—mistook for the ice chest of soda and beers. And that morning she woke up to the horrific image of me looking like Sissy Spacek’s stunt double in Carrie, only the blood had dried and caked in the creases of my neck, face, and belly button. Hence her bloodcurdling screams.

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After realizing what had happened, I remember thinking that it could be worse, that I could be dismembered and stowed in a styrofoam ice chest, my chilled blood used to soothe the sunburns of a family on a River Styx vacation. It can always be worse.

So I was grateful.

Fast forward thirty-ish years. I was married, and my wife and I were determined to provide our son and daughter a dream vacation, something that would indelibly impact their memories and strengthen our family bond. We took them to Hawaii. More specifically, we took them to Aulani, Disney’s resort on Oahu. It was a dream vacation from the jump. We got off the plane and got in the taxi line, and our taxi, for reasons still mysterious to me, was a limousine. Our kids laughed their balls off at the random good fortune of starting this vacation in a stretch limo fully stocked with juice boxes and Ritz crackers.

A half hour later we pulled up to the resort where we were greeted with leis, cocktails, and mocktails for the kids. I half expected Ricardo Montalbán to carry our bags to our room. After this, it only got better. If you’re unfamiliar with the Aulani, here’s the lowdown:

• A private beach, calm with little threat of undertow, as well as forty-foot nets that keep sharks from feasting on the spleens of toddlers, the thighs of fourth-graders.

• A manmade saltwater reef so that kids can swim among fish every color of the neon rainbow, without fear of being whisked away by strong currents, rogue waves, or Somali pirates.

• A volcano-themed set of waterslides that pour elegantly into a lazy river that shoots streams of warm water at the kids and ice-cold streams of Prosecco into the face holes of the adults.

• Soda fountains every fifty yards to jack the kids back up when the buzz of high-fructose corn syrup begins to wane.

• Day camps run by Disney characters trained to wear your kids out and ensure early bed times.

• A library of every Disney movie ever produced, even the ones the haven’t aged all that well.

• And too much more for me to list since Disney isn’t sponsoring this story.

I should also add that we upgraded our room to a suite, and it had a jacuzzi tub, one that actually fit me, with room to spare. Again, a dream vacation, not so much as a whiff of a Lake Havasu bloody towels experience.

But then it ended. The flight home from a great trip is always a long one, and this one was no different. In fact, it was even longer because we had to check into a hotel that night. We were driving up north for a wedding, and it didn’t make sense to drive back home only to double back the next day.

Before I reveal what transpired, I want you to know that I take great pride in my children’s manners. At restaurants they look servers in the eye. They say please and thank you. They write thank you notes. I remind them constantly that entitlement is fictional. That’s the problem with a Disney vacation. It blurs the line of what’s fictional and what ain’t.

The hotel we checked into was a Double Tree, a perfectly respectable accommodation. My kids stepped into the room and had a look around—two double beds, nightstands, a desk, a shower, a toilet, hotel art. . .

My six-year-old son spoke first: “This place doesn’t even have a jacuzzi tub.”

His eight-year-old sister followed: “What a dump.”

And then they threw their shit on the floor and turned on the TV. My wife looked at me and knew exactly what I was feeling. I say feeling because there weren’t really any cogent thoughts occurring in my brain. It was just base emotion. Anger. Regret. Self-loathing. Resentment.

My wife tried to calm me by reminding me that they were just children and children exhausted from a long day of traveling at that. When I finally could put a thought together, the only words that came out of my mouth were “Bloody Towels!”

In fact, “Bloody Towels” has become a refrain in our home, a reminder to practice gratitude, a prompt to count our blessings, a warning that things can always get worse.

In the spirit of gratitude, thanks for reading. You can practice some gratitude of your own by sharing this post (assuming you enjoyed it).

Practice Gratitude

And/Or you can practice gratitude in the comments. I’d love to hear the specific things, people, places, and blood-lustful experiences, that make you grateful.

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Fortune Cookies Baked By My Favorite People

My daughter graduates high school this week. Last year, in anticipation of this milestone, I sent the following text to a long list of friends and family:

If you had to make a list of favorite aphorisms, what would be on it? I’m creating a collection for our kids that includes my favorite people’s takes.

Many of these favorite people responded that they would get back to me as soon as they looked up aphorism. In the interest of getting ahead of that here: an aphorism is “a terse saying embodying a general truth, or astute observation, as ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ (Lord Acton).” —dictionary.com

My favorite people responded with a strong list, and they also threw in some bonus proverbs, maxims, epigrams, misquotations, malaphors, and twisted truisms. Some are thoughtful and poignant. Some are absurd and silly. All of them are useful in their own way.

My favorite people range from professors, artists, and producers to lawyers, salesmen, the woman partly responsible for sending Bill Cosby to prison, and everything in between, i.e, this is a diverse group with an even more eclectic medley of tastes and points of view. May their collective wisdom bless my graduating daughter (and eventually my graduating son) as well as all of us.

One quick note before I share the curated list. One friend contributed by identifying the aphorism he hates most: Everything happens for a reason. He offered a thoughtful, measured deconstruction of this old chestnut that I can sum up with a small tweak: Sometimes things happen for a reason. Most times you're just standing where the piano lands.

Note: Many of these undoubtedly have sources, and a more responsible editor would have tracked them down. Unfortunately, my daughter is graduating high school and leaving for college soon, so I am currently operating at the outer limits of my emotional bandwidth. Chasing citations at this moment would almost certainly result in my death, and while that would make for a memorable footnote, it seems an unnecessarily high price to pay. Please accept my apologies and enjoy the fortune cookies.

Soul Maintenance

• First and foremost, don’t be a dick.

• Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.

• Your perspective is your reality.

• Only the half-mad are wholly alive.

• If you think someone is normal, it’s because you don’t know them well enough.

• When someone shows you who they are, believe them.

• Be kind, for everyone you know is privately fighting a mighty battle.

• Silence is often the best answer.

• Forgiveness is the scent the violet sheds on the boot that crushed it.

• Be the person your dog thinks you are.

• You can change the world, but you can’t change your family.

The Hard Way

• If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got.

• Comfort is the enemy of growth.

• Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.

• You are taught the lesson over and over until you become the teacher.

• If you have to eat a toad, do it first thing in the morning.

• It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.

• Read it before you sign it.

• Know when to measure twice, cut once, or fail fast and fail forward.

• Always be two questions deep.

• Never underestimate the power of a good letter.

• Flexibility is the best ability.

Love, Friendship, and Other Poorly Supervised Activities

• If she’s willing to try a raw oyster with you on the first date, then she’ll probably be open to trying other things.

• The love we give is not lost, though we forget it.

• It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship, that makes unhappy marriages.

• A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.

• If someone is making an effort to ignore you, then he is not ignoring you.

• Say yes more often (unless it’s to your uncle).

Gravity Remains Undefeated

• Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past.

• It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.

• They muddy the water to make it seem deep.

• He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

• Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

• In matters of art, music, politics, and literature, the majority is always in the wrong.

• Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

• Praise the God of all, drink the wine, and let the world be the world.

Stop Standing Around

• Don’t admire your problems; focus on solutions.

• Wherever you go, there you are.

• Fun ain’t always easy.

• It’s not the end of the world.

• Nothing is truly lost until your mom or wife can’t find it.

• When you call a cat to come, you are an optimist.

Broken Fortune Cookies

• What if we pronounced Aristotle like Chipotle?

• There’s more than one way to bury a dead horse.

• That train has sailed.

• Shit or get out of the kitchen.

• This may come back to haunt you in your ass.

• That’s a tough nut to swallow.

• We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it.

• If a bear farts in the forest, do we smell it? And if we smelt it, odds are we dealt it.

• Tough titty, said the kitty, when the milk went dry.

• Even the tallest giraffe can stub its toe.

• You can lead a horse to water, but you’re going to get shit on your shoes.

• Don’t tell your grandmother how to suck eggs.

• Not everyone who shits on you is your enemy; sometimes it’s fertilizer.

• When in doubt, look intelligent.

When I share this with my kids, I’ll preface it with the greatest aphorism ever written, the one that rules all the others—truly the first and only commandment one really needs—and not surprisingly, it comes from Mark Twain: “The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.” Brandish the laughter, my children, and swing that weapon with all of your might.

If you’re of the mind and can add to this list of collective wisdom, please do:

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“God kept me alive after I ate my weight in gas station sushi.”

“Allah protected me from a blind date with a weird kink where he wanted me to sit on balloons until they pop.”

“My guardian angel saved me when the manure truck I was tailgating hit the brakes.”

“The Holy Spirit told me not to take that adjustable-rate mortgage in 2007.”

I love the creative ways people justify their faith. Rarely do these methods convince me of anything spiritual, unless we count narcissism as a religion. The idea that an all-powerful God is micromanaging our day-to-day affairs while the world burns strikes me as absurd.

I have an easier time believing that God reacts to self-righteousness.

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In the late ‘90s, during my swinging bachelor days, I briefly dated a girl whose mother remains the best evidence for God that I’ve ever come across. Her mother was a devout Catholic, and she committed to two practices each week without fail: she attended Mass every Sunday, and she played the same lottery numbers every Wednesday and Friday. I don’t remember what the numbers were, but the girl I was dating could recite them by heart.

Her brother could also recite them by heart. I only met her brother a couple times, and I was surprised. He was clearly gay. After meeting him, this exchange happened between me and the girl I was dating:

“Your mom is a pretty relaxed Catholic.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I mean I’ve never seen so many crucifixes or angel figurines in my life, and still, she’s pretty cool about your brother.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, there’s not a lot of support for his community coming out of Vatican City.”

“His community?”

“Your brother is gay, right?”

“What?! No!”

“Really? That’s surprising.”

“Why would you say that?”

“He just seems gay.”

“I hope he’s not. It’ll kill our mother.”

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Okay, her brother absolutely was gay, and no, it did not kill their mother. Instead, it delivered a fate far worse than death. Their mother prayed to win the lottery on the regular. She truly believed that God wanted her numbers to hit so that she could do the Lord’s work with the winnings. In her mind, it wasn’t if her numbers would hit, it was simply a matter of when her numbers would hit, and she was trusting God with that timing.

Well, her son did come out. He stepped out of the closet and into his authentic identity with courage, conviction, and more faith than his mother ever had. And she responded with all the warmth of a witch’s tit. She cried, she yelled, she gnashed her teeth. She worked herself up into such a dither, and she became so despondent that she completely forgot to buy her Saturday lottery ticket.

And her numbers hit.

She was out twenty-three million dollars. God answered her prayers—and with timing that can only be described as divine. I didn’t date her daughter too much longer after that. I mean, there was no money in it.

Kidding.

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I am grateful for this experience. I can’t see any evidence for the divine in a winning lottery ticket. But a mother mistaking judgment for love? Absolutely Biblical.

To be fair, I am hardly an innocent. Self-righteousness is a trap I’ve fallen into more times than I care to admit. It’s fun. It’s easy. There’s something deeply comforting in believing that I’m special, that I’ve figured something out everyone else missed, that I can see clearly while everyone around me stumbles in the dark, that I know what God knows.

But every time I’ve convinced myself I was standing above other people, life has reminded me—usually violently and with a healthy dose of dark humor—that I’m standing among them. As we all are.

Now (and I say this cautiously) I possess just one holier-than-thou point of view, and it is this: before you saddle up your high horse, remember that nothing triggers the Lord’s ironic sense of humor like self-righteousness.

Request: Cosmic irony is my favorite. If you have any examples from your own life—or that guy at the office you hate—I’d love to hear them…

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All Kinds of Funny and Other Serious Matters, Volume 1 is available in paperback and hardback! Click this link or the image below, and get your copies now!

If you like Elmore Leonard, Joe Lansdale, or the Coen Brothers, you’ll dig my novella, DIG. If it makes you laugh, cringe, or question your moral compass—do me a solid and leave a quick rating or review.

Get it at this link or click the image below: Dig: A Dark Crime Comedy

Grant is a writer and a poet. I know a lot of scribblers, and he is easily the most competent wordsmith I’ve ever met. His writing stirs. It splits time in half and lets you peek behind the veil that separates this world from the next, and you come away from it realizing that it’s all an illusion. There is no separation. You are not you. I am not me. We are us.

Here’s a quick sample from his long poem, Untended Garden:

And everything here
is merely the same
simple star ash rearranged.

Could it be that all is present,
that everywhere is contained
in where we are?

In addition to his masterful poetry, Grant also knows his way around a good old-fashioned dick joke. Makes sense. Like poetry, a joke has to be structured, timed, lean. They both drive toward surprise and revelation, and they luxuriate in wordplay. Like this classic:

What did the elephant say to the naked man? 
“How do you breathe through that thing?”

As I typed up that joke, I could hear Grant’s chuckle echoing in my head. He’s among my favorite people to make laugh, to tease, to banter, to verbally spar. He gives as good as he gets. We used to sit side by side in rambling meetings about curriculum and assessment and write lists with titles like The Last Thing You Want to Hear in This Meeting. And we’d pass the list back and forth like snickering teenagers enduring a World History lecture from the knucklehead who got into teaching so he could coach golf.

One year, at a Christmas party, I made a comment about Grant’s age. I like to take the ancient piss out of him at every possible opportunity. I said, “You know, Grant, you’re the same age as my mom.” Without missing a beat, he said, “Who do you think your daddy is?” And we laughed before pivoting to talking about the nature of God or the dream logic of David Lynch. That’s how we do. We slip in and out of the sacred and the profane with relative ease.

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All this to say, Grant was the perfect person to be talking to when I saw a particularly poignant bumper sticker. I forget what Grant was talking about at the time, probably something thoughtful and elegant, so I interrupted him—

“I wish you were here to see what I’m seeing.”

“What’s that?”

“A bumper sticker, except it’s not on the bumper. It’s on the rear window, probably because it’s way too big for the bumper. In big bold baby blue letters, it says: I EAT ASS.”

At this point, we both started laughing for a good thirty or forty seconds. What follows is a summary of the rigorous intellectual inquiry that emerged from this encounter, an exploration of the artistic, moral, and literary merit of such self-expression.

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I couldn’t see the driver, so the gender of the I EAT ASS sticker owner was unclear, but the mental gymnastics required to conclude that it was a woman were the kind usually reserved for Flat Earthers. So, yeah, it was probably a man. The baby blue color also suggested as much. And a quick Google search for ‘I EAT ASS sticker’ only strengthened the theory, yielding multiple news stories involving the notorious Florida Man.

While the driver wasn’t visible, the make and model of the car was. An early 2020s Toyota Corolla Hybrid. You have to admire the man’s intrinsic sense of irony. To balance the practicality and sensibility of such a vehicle with just three publicly indecent syllables—that’s a master at work.

The contrast brought forth a lot of questions specific to his process. I mean, this guy saw this sticker and thought, Yeah, this is an accurate representation of who I am. And then he exchanged legal tender for this sticker. He did work, received money, and then gave that money to a sticker manufacturer who, in turn, gave him a repugnant decal. And then the guy carved time out of his day to clean his rear window and prep the surface, position the decal—it was dead center and as level as a pool table—and carefully affix it to the glass, smoothing out the bubbles for a clean transfer. The obvious precision of the sticker’s installation suggests a high-wire level of commitment. There’s no way this guy second-guessed his I EAT ASS ethos.

You also have to respect his inclusive nature. I suppose one could assume that he’s using the word “ass” as a misogynistic sort of synecdoche. Ass = woman. But I can’t imagine a misogynist leaving that up to chance or interpretation. He’s definitely an equal-opportunity eater of all things ass.

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Also, it’s important to note that there was no modifier of ass. He doesn’t eat hot ass. Or fat ass. Or even nice ass. Just ass. All shapes, sizes, colors, ages. He’s clearly a man of the people.

As a man of the people, he must also participate in the mundane humdrum of everyday life. It’s entertaining to daydream about this guy pulling into his mom’s driveway for an afternoon visit. Or navigating the parking lot just before, or just after, Sunday service. Or ordering at a Chick-fil-A drive-thru where the employees are required to end each exchange with “My pleasure.”

The use of the present tense is also compelling. He didn’t eat ass yesterday. He doesn’t plan to eat ass tomorrow or someday in the near or distant future. He eats ass in the spirit of René Descartes: Culo vescor, ergo sum. I EAT ASS, THEREFORE I AM.

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And then there’s the confidence, the sure-footedness of such a statement. I wrote for a good long while—many years actually, thousands of pages—before I had the courage to define myself as a writer. I shudder to think how many asses were eaten before this guy summoned the audacity to make it his own personal brand.

Eventually, Grant and I moved on from our exploration of the ASS EATER’s intentions and artistic point of view. But after our conversation, I returned to Grant’s poem:

And everything here
is merely the same
simple star ash rearranged.

Could it be that all is present,
that everywhere is contained
in where we are?

Maybe everything here really is just the same simple star ash rearranged. Poet. Philosopher. Florida Man. Ass eater. Same atoms. Same longing to be seen.

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If you want me to send an All Kinds of Funny: Unsolicited love letter (of sorts) to one of your people, click this button:

Send a Postcard!

All Kinds of Funny and Other Serious Matters, Volume 1 is available in paperback and hardback! Click this link or the image below, and get your copies now!

If you like Elmore Leonard, Joe Lansdale, or the Coen Brothers, you’ll dig my novella, DIG. If it makes you laugh, cringe, or question your moral compass—do me a solid and leave a quick rating or review.

Get it at this link or click the image below: Dig: A Dark Crime Comedy

My mom plays fast and loose with words. Case in point: the other day, she tried to get my attention and said, “Johnny, I mean, Dave, um, Jack, Sammers, uh…Norman! I swear, I’m losing my mind.”

Let’s break this down.

Johnny is her brother, my uncle. She most often confuses me with him. He’s handsome, funny, charming. Still, not me. But enough points of comparison exist to warrant the occasional mixup.

Dave is my dad, but we mostly call him Pappo (technically, he’s my stepdad, but he showed up and did the dad work, so we’re going with dad). Still, not me.

Jack is my mom’s first husband (technically, he is my dad, but he didn’t show up to do the dad work, so we’re going with Jack). Their divorce lasted decades (not a typo). He does look a lot like me. Still, not me.

Sammers is my son, her grandbaby. Anyone would be flattered to be confused with his good looks and bright energy. Still, a boy. And also, still, not me.

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So in her search for my name, the trajectory was this: brother, husband, ex-husband, grandson, and finally—bingo!—son. Reminds me of that Robin Williams punch line: “Paging Dr Freud…”

And it’s not just humans that she mixes up. She also confuses artificial intelligence. She recently had this exchange with Siri.

Mom: Alexa?

Siri: …

Mom: Alexa, how do I get to Sam’s basketball practice?

Siri: …

Mom: Wait, not Alexa… Sorry, Serena, Syria, Sierra, Siri! Siri!

Siri: …

Mom: Hey, Siri!

Siri: Hmm?

Mom: Can you get me to Sam’s basketball practice?

Siri: Who is Sam?

Mom: My grandson.

Siri: “Sam, my grandson” is not in your contacts.

Mom: We call him Sammers.

Siri: Calling Sammers…

*iPhone begins to dial…*

Mom: Shit!

Siri: I don’t have an answer for that.

Mom: Alexa, stop calling Sammers. Alexa!

Siri: …

My fifteen-year-old daughter heard this and said it, “Made her laugh her balls off.” She’s her grandmother’s daughter.

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While language is tricky on my mom, so are directions. If you ask her what the greatest invention is in the history of human kind, don’t count on her to lobby for the wheel or the printing press or penicillin or the light bulb. For her, hands down, it’s any app that helps her navigate freeways and city streets. She once assumed the driving duties on a trip from southern California to Arizona so that my dad could sleep. He woke up and noticed palm trees, quickly deducing that she couldn’t possibly have driven all the way to Florida. Instead of taking the 10 east, she went west and drove to the bosom of the Pacific.

Let’s pump the brakes. I want to be clear. These mishaps are in no way a commentary on my mom’s intelligence. She’s exceptionally bright. In high school, when I was lost while studying T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, she helped me break it down, easily articulating and interpreting the figurative connotations. Intelligences vary. Hers is specific to emotion and fun and nourishment of the soul.

Refer a friend

She once saw a commercial of a family on a river rafting trip. She called the number on screen:

Mom: Hi, I want to know how much the river rafting costs?

Operator: Uh, the river rafting?

Mom: Yeah, it looks like so much fun.

Operator: I’m sorry, I think you might have the wrong number.

Mom: Really, I double-checked it. We’re so excited to go on this river rafting trip.

Operator: Um, this is the number to order Rogaine. We have a commercial where Rogaine patients are river rafting…

Mom: Well, can you put me in touch with them? The river rafting trip seems like such a blast.

Operator: …

Say what you will, but I prefer the person who concerns herself with good times first and hair loss second.

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And that optimism takes other forms, too. When I first started screenwriting, a producer optioned my script and submitted it to John Cusack’s company (my mom called him John Coo-sack). Essentially, that means my script was mailed in and stacked on a desk among hundreds, maybe thousands of scripts from eager young writers. Still, when I showed up to my mom’s work one day, one of her coworkers said, “Oh, my god! Congratulations! Your mom tells me you and John Cusack have been nominated for an Academy Award!” There’s a fine line, shaped like a silly straw, between delusions of grandeur and a loving, supportive mother.

My mom’s most recent slip occurred at the drive-thru of an In-N-Out Burger. For those of you who don’t know, In-N-Out is in the conversation for the greatest hamburger on earth (Anthony Bourdain said as much) and if you factor in price, it’s a hands-down winner. The company is Christian, but more subtle with their convictions than, say, a Chic-fil-A or a Hobby Lobby. They sneak biblical citations on the bottom underside of their cups and on their burger wrappers. I only mention this to underscore that they’re a more conservative organization. Their employees are friendly and clean-cut. If you squint your eyes, you feel like you’re in a 1950s soda shop.

And they have a secret menu, ways to modify your order. Ask for a cheeseburger “animal style” and you get a mustard-cooked patty, extra sauce, grilled onions, and pickles. Any In-N-Out patron who knows what she’s doing orders “animal style.”

Enter my mom. A secret menu with language-specific items and her disposition is a recipe for, well, an entirely different secret menu.

In-N-Out Drive-thru Operator: Welcome to In-N-Out! How can I help you today?

Mom: Hi, I’d like a double-double, fries, and a chocolate shake.

In-N-Out Drive-thru Operator: Would you like onions on that double-double?

Mom: Yes, please. In fact, I’d like it doggy style.

In-N-Out Drive-thru Operator: …

Mom: Hello… Did you hear me? I’d like that double-double doggy style.

In-N-Out Drive-thru Operator: I’m sorry, did you mean animal style?

Mom: Isn’t that what I said?

In-N-Out Drive-thru Operator: Um… no…

Mom: What did I say?

In-N-Out Drive-thru Operator: You said… um… you said you wanted it doggy style.

Mom: Oh, well… whatever it’s called.

When my mom pulled forward to the drive-thru window, a dozen clean-cut, red-faced teenagers stared back at her, trying and failing to keep from smiling, their hormones bouncing back and forth off the pristine white tiles.

I’ve made a pretty wonderful life for myself, and a lot of it has come by way of how adept I am with writing, with language and words. Makes sense. Being raised by my mom provided a linguistic gymnasium that T.S. Eliot would have difficulty imagining.

Mark Twain wrote in a letter that “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.” Of course Twain is right. I would, however, add that the difference between the right word and right wrong word is the difference between lightning and laughing your balls off.

Thanks for reading! If you want another story that features my mom, consider her grim directions in Bunny Rabbits, Kindergarteners, Epiphanies & Other Depressing Things. And if you want to get a sense for how my mom made perpetrated a different sort of mix-up on our family vacation, read Bloody Towels. Or for a little more restaurant humor: Claw and Disorder. You might also peruse how I’m raising my children with an eye on adventure and psychological trauma in Manslaughter, Santa Claus, and a Hatchet. Once you’ve gotten through all of those, maybe just check out the All Kinds of Funny Archive.

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Projectiles were lobbed haphazardly. Teeth were gnashed. The dogs of war had been slipped from their chains and given free rein to commit any number of crimes: war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes of passion, and too many property crimes to count.

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The first affront to peace and decency came by way of a stubby-legged infantrywoman who stood about two feet high, a highly decorated grunt, evidenced by the pair of berets that kept her wispy peach fuzz fixed to the top of her dome. She perched in a wooden high chair, eyes tracing the landscape as she gnawed on a fat carrot, a makeshift proxy for a Cuban-rolled Montecristo, easing the grueling pain of her ravaged baby teeth-cut gums. Her scars were earned, and so was her right to quiet the war inside her.

She possessed the affected demeanor of a soldier who had seen too much in her brief five months in the shit. Her squishy cheeks played counterpoint to her reckless, churlish, feral spirit. Her commanding officer sat just feet away, and it was clear that the superior rank was merely ornamental. There was no controlling this pint-sized wildcard. With no more use for the carrot, she flung it overhead into a crowd of civilians. It thumped an innocent upside his head, and she didn’t even clock the casualty. She was a crayon eater who loved the smell of breast milk in the morning.

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Further down the front, a shellshocked maternal commander struggled to keep her two toddling subordinates in line. The woman was battle-hardened but still vulnerable, which was corroborated by her voluminous belly—she had another pup incoming, an additional wide-eyed, green-as-they-come recruit to initiate into the line of fire. She had the weight of the world on her shoulders and in her womb.

Her rank-and-file troops had pushed her to the brink. They were breaking ranks, coming apart at the seams, unraveling under fire. Apparently, they had run through all their quarters, and with nothing left in the tank, they would have to simply sit down and eat. Oh, the horror! The horror of compliance, of sitting still, of nourishment and sustenance, imposed by the cold, callous will of the maternal top brass.

My wife and I watched in silence, each of us repeating a silent prayer, both for the mother’s patience and her troops’ safety. It was clear in the vacant expression of the young mother’s eyes that she was contemplating the benefits of friendly fire. Sure, she might spend some time in the brig, but the R&R would likely justify the court-martial.

The most heartening moment on the front came by way of a symmetrical family unit: a maternal CO, a paternal XO, and two boots on the ground—one barefoot with painted toes, the other a little older and wearing light-up Velcro. Most impressive was the orderliness and discipline of the two junior enlisted, a precision clearly subsidized by the suffering of the ranking officers.

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The mother’s cool demeanor was contrasted by her clothes and hair. Her cardigan twisted up under one armpit. Her blouse displayed any number of foreign substances, many of them bodily fluids. Her jeans had seen neither an iron nor a dryer in a good long while, if ever. The only comb her hair had seen in many days was what she could fashion from her own un-manicured fingers. It was clear she held no regard for civilian expectations of presentation and propriety.

Her paternal XO maintained similar standards, though his contribution was largely symbolic. Where she could still muster a warm smile, he could barely stay conscious—present in body, but otherwise on indefinite leave. SOP for too many young fathers. Still, their underlings were well-behaved, even quiet.

My wife and I watched all of this melee as we tipped back beers and reflected on our twenty-two years of marriage. Many of those years are framed precisely by the scenes described above. We felt compelled to grab each of the parents, pull them into an empathetic embrace, and demand that they lean in and enjoy the chaos. What feels like trauma—early onset PTSD, even—will soon enough give way to an overwhelming wave of nostalgia.

I once read a book—one by Sebastian Junger, I believe—that many retired soldiers yearn for the frontline. They want to go back to that place where life is lived at full tilt. I’m sure this sounds crazy to the ones neck-deep in fear and uncertainty. But once you’ve got the scars, it does make a certain wistful sense.

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Similarly I’ve heard there’s no love like that between soldiers who’ve seen combat. I’ve never been to war, but I’ve raised a couple kids, shoulder to shoulder with my wife. One of those kids is heading off to college soon. We can already feel the quiet looming on the horizon. As we raised a glass to honor our twenty-two years, those scars on our hearts started to ache—the kind of pain you love to feel because it reminds you of all the battles fought, won, and celebrated.

Happiest of anniversaries to my beautiful wife.

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If you want me to send an All Kinds of Funny: Unsolicited love letter (of sorts) to one of your people, click this button:

Send a Postcard!

All Kinds of Funny and Other Serious Matters, Volume 1 is available in paperback and hardback! Click this link or the image below, and get your copies now!

If you like Elmore Leonard, Joe Lansdale, or the Coen Brothers, you’ll dig my novella, DIG. If it makes you laugh, cringe, or question your moral compass—do me a solid and leave a quick rating or review.

Get it at this link or click the image below: Dig: A Dark Crime Comedy

Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to the Cobles. If you haven’t yet, please watch their story and consider chipping in. They’re one of the most fun families I’ve ever met, and I just love them.

Ray gave me carte blanche in terms of topics. I typically write nonfiction here on Substack, but Ray’s audience is generally interested in fiction writing, so I aimed in that direction. Specifically, I tried to answer the question most writers get asked—how do you come up with ideas? My response? You gotta start building a spaceship. I’ve pasted the article in its entirety below.

But first, if you’re interested in learning about storytelling or writing, Ray’s the best there is. You can find Ray’s Substack here, and you can see his face here:

Building a Better Spaceship

Genres are funhouse mirrors. I read horror for the scares, yes, but also because that fear is eerily familiar. I enjoy a good meet-cute in a romantic comedy, but what I really love is the characters’ vulnerability, which is terrifying and inspiring (maybe I’ll dangle my heart over the void like that?). Genre works because it distorts and magnifies what we all feel—hope, shame, longing, dread. And for us storytellers, that’s the shortcut—emotion. To wit:

Alienation → Science Fiction
Fear → Horror
Grief → Haunted House
Vulnerability → Romantic Comedy
Dread → Thriller
Anger → Revenge
Resilience → Western
Epiphany → Coming-of-Age

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When my life is spiraling out of control, I immediately think of Aristotle and fatal flaws. And then I look back at my decisions, those moments when apathy overshadowed my heart, insecurity hobbled my conviction, or selfishness impeded my compassion, and I pivot. At least I try to. I’d much rather own up to my doe-eyed naivete in a coming-of-age story than tragically kill my father, bang my mother, and live the rest of my life in literal and/or spiritual blindness. In this way, knowing the patterns and expectations of genre have real-world utility.

In the middle of junior high, I transferred schools, this on the heels of my parents’ divorce, which should have had its own reality show on Animal Planet. On top of our family carnival, I was stocky, shy to the point of mute, and I loved reading, all of which made me an easy target for anyone in my school district. I felt so out of place, I was certain I was a different species.

In fact, “different species” was the language I used when journaling about this time in my life. A few quick word associations—different… misunderstood… alien…—and my junior high experiences snapped into focus as science fiction. With the genre table set, I cozied up to my junior high self and started asking questions:

“Why do you feel like an alien?”
“I don’t have any friends.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“I’m different, I guess.”
“What are you doing about it?”
“I’m gathering parts to build a spaceship.”
“Where will you go?”
“Maybe… some place where people don’t hate me.”

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And there we go, I have a story that basically wrote itself. I’ve got a character who’s easy to care about—feeling misunderstood is pretty universal. The character has a goal—to build a spaceship. The character has a need—to love himself and to be loved. And there are any number of obstacles I can put in his path—bullies, skeptical adults, the outcast girl who crushes on our hero (even though he’s too insecure to realize it).

Puberty as horror? The jump from getting pubic hair to becoming a werewolf is a short (and curly) one. The jump from acne to zombies is even shorter. Puberty wasn’t any easier on me than it was on anyone else, and the horror material runs deep, as evidenced by menarche in Carrie, chest hair in Teen Wolf, and sexual awakening in It Follows.

There’s also my bouts with depression, those stretches where I feel broken, and a cynical film hangs over everything. Cold and corrupt, all these moments ache and burn for a hardboiled crime treatment. The crime? Not sure yet, but I know from my depression dance card that it feels like somebody wants me dead, and that’s a pretty great place to start. As far as the usual suspects go, there’s no shortage of personalities I can draw on to populate a police lineup: the junior high bully who smashed my teeth into the spigot of the water fountain; every highway patrolman I’ve ever met; or my junkie aunt who drugged me in the mall and tipped a sales clerk to watch me while she shopped. It takes little creative energy to imagine rounding these turds up in the third act, laying out all their felonies and misdemeanors, one-upping them with wit, cunning, and a world-weary soliloquy as I pin the ultimate crime on my deadbeat dad who, I must confess, fleshes out a mob boss pretty nicely.

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In marriage, I’ve been fortunate (and industrious—my wife and I put in the work) so there’s not a lot of conflict to draw on. Before I was married, though, I spent a brief time on the dating scene. Few things prepare someone to write Absurdism like dating. Roughly 1 in 100 people are psychopaths. I imagine that percentage greatly increases if we’re talking about single people. The pursuit of romance and companionship is fertile ground for nonsensical dialogue, circular plotlines, and existential angst galore. Any person who has swiped left, right, or otherwise knows what it’s like to Wait for Godot and can put their spin on that Absurdist yarn. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Seinfeld, The Lobster, Portnoy’s Complaint—all have heartbeats, irregular though they may be.

Speaking of Absurdism, raising my kids has offered infinite storytelling opportunities, particularly in the Western genre. Every parent knows that kids aren’t really human beings—they’re livestock that must be herded, fed, and protected against all manner of wildness and savagery. And laws? Good luck enforcing laws against a willful toddler. I’m pretty sure High Noon was written by a father who knew nap time was imminent.

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Just before I became a father, I attended labor and delivery classes with my wife. The entire experience fascinated me, and my wife’s body became even more epic in my mind than it already was. It became epic in terms of genre—tall tale, Old Testament-epic. I wrote a story about a woman whose pregnant belly grew to the size of a small mountain, and when her water broke, it flooded and drowned the entire village, which was populated by cruel, judgmental hypocrites. It was probably sacrilegious to write my own Book of the Bible, but you can’t perform miracles without offending the money changers.

Of course, these examples are filtered through my lens. Your lens is probably—hopefully—different. And that’s good. One person’s belly laugh is another’s slasher-induced scream of mortal terror. Leverage genre. Build a spaceship. Arm yourself for the zombie apocalypse. Or drift off in a hot air balloon and give your younger self the meet-cute you deserve.

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All Kinds of Funny and Other Serious Matters, Volume 1 is available in paperback and hardback! Click this link or the image below, and get your copies now!

If you like Elmore Leonard, Joe Lansdale, or the Coen Brothers, you’ll dig my novella, DIG. If it makes you laugh, cringe, or question your moral compass—do me a solid and leave a quick rating or review.

Get it at this link or click the image below: Dig: A Dark Crime Comedy

Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to the Cobles. If you haven’t yet, please watch their story and consider chipping in. They’re one of the most fun families I’ve ever met, and I just love them.

During film school, I interned in the Story Department at Columbia Pictures, which meant that I had access to every script floating around Hollywood. The rumor on the lot was that Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly were holed up at The Mondrian, knocking back beers, playing video games, and—ever so occasionally—drafting the script for Stepbrothers. Again, just a rumor, but not all that difficult to imagine.

I read all of the drafts—there were several. I laughed out loud. A lot. Probably more than when watching the actual movie. I do recall the moment in one of the drafts when they become best friends. It’s a series of quick exchanges in which they discover their common ground and commit to best friendship. What follows are some of my criteria for just such an opportunity.

Cheerleaders

You and I are driving down the street. We hit a red light. We notice a person on the sidewalk. Could be a man. Could be a woman. Doesn’t matter. This person is obese. Super fat. Like, carrying the sort of bulk you see primarily on reality show candidates. And this person is wearing shorts, a T-shirt, running shoes, and earbuds. The arms are pumping, the legs are shuffling, the head is bopping to the music—this person is giving as much effort as possible. It ain’t quick, it ain’t aggressive, it ain’t glamorous.

But if you look at this person and think or—better yet—say, “Fuck yeah. Get it!” Then you are my brother, you are my sister. This is the energy I want in a friend. It’s not enough to not be a bully. I want to keep company with people who root for underdogs, the ones who see anyone living a full-throated life and feel inspired rather than threatened. We need more cheerleaders.

Fun Seekers

My wife sent me a screenshot of a text message she received from a friend of a friend. The sender was asking if we wanted an 85-pound Sulcata tortoise. My wife followed up the screenshot with a response: “I kinda do want an 85-pound Sulcata tortoise.”

“Me, too,” I said. And so we got an 85-pound Sulcata tortoise who we named Sir Scooter Waddlebottoms. Scooter was an unmitigated disaster for our home, but a joyful disaster, one we would never have enjoyed had it not been for our commitment to fun. Which is how my wife and I make major decisions. Jobs, family, kids, life pivots of any kind—does it sound like it will be fun? If so, then we’re all in, practicality, personal safety, and harmonious living be damned.

To be clear, my wife and I aren’t just each other’s yes men. We are, however, each other’s custodians of fun. You get one wild and precious life. Why not know what that wild and precious life is like in the company of the largest mainland species of African tortoise?

Crossing Guards

It’s difficult to think of a more earnest occupation than protecting kids from vehicular manslaughter. If there is a heaven, crossing guards should get an express lane. Somewhat related, I bet thirty pieces of silver that the crossing guard for the Paradise Express Lane is Mr. Rogers.

High Stakes Intimacy

I love dialogue. Specifically, I love dialogue that exists in a context similar to that of a tightrope walker working without a net. I don’t go to the bank all that often anymore, but when I did, I loved opening the conversation like this:

Teller: Good morning, what can we do for you today?
Norm: Before I make this deposit, you can tell me how many times this bank has been robbed. 

In my experience, there were two types of bank tellers. One was definitely coached by HR and would try to change the conversation immediately. The other—my favorite—would meet the moment headfirst.

Teller: You’d be surprised. 
Norm: Yeah?    
Teller: Oh yeah. 
Norm: Tell me everything.  

And then I would get stories about bank robbers who were charming or clumsy or prolific. And I would get details about the tellers who talked back or wet their pants or were in on the mother-grabbin’ robbery.

This doesn’t have to be about crime, though. I love it when a person opens their arms to conversations that have nothing to do with the weather or traffic or their plans to eat stewed prunes on the cruise with their aunt Tess. The people who want to belly up to conversations about their odd obsessions, the STD they contracted in Juarez, the disdain they’re harboring for aunt Tess after she got drunk on the cruise and projectile vomited stewed prunes into the kiddy pool—these are my people. Let the vulnerability flow.

The Truly Powerful

I love people who are wrong, admit they’re wrong, and apologize for being wrong. Let me break that down. I love people who are wrong, which is to say, I love people. If you’re consistently right—or, worse, always right—it’s probably because you’re not taking any risks, you’re not learning, you’re not living, you’re not really a person. At least, you’re not a person worth knowing.

Admitting you’re wrong has nothing to do with imperfection and everything to do with growth. It’s a blessing to be wrong. It’s a spiritual windfall to concede your humanity. In fact, I would argue that humanity itself is defined by the unreasonable commitment to keep going despite a relentless stream of wrongness, of dip-shittery, of choosing the wrong lottery numbers again and again and again until you admit that somebody is going to win the lottery—just not you—and your money would be better spent on a Sulcata tortoise.

Polarity of Taste

I love the Philistine. I love the snob. I love when you get both in the same person. I want to eat bacon-wrapped hotdogs from a street vendor while discussing the deep focus cinematographic implications of Citizen Kane. I want to stroll through the Louvre while connecting the aesthetics of the Renaissance to The Evil Dead trilogy.

I want to wander through Costco, gnawing a rotisserie drumstick I haven’t yet paid for while debating Hume’s take on free will. I want to belly up to a dive bar that only serves beer, whiskey, pretzels, and Tums by the tablet while analyzing the nature of musical genius. I want to compare The Three Stooges to Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates. The best company pivots from chic to shenanigans and only looks down their noses to check their notes.

My Kinda People

The curious. The self-deprecators. The shameless hobbyists. The playful. The ones who always apologize for their shortcomings but never for their interests, passions, and commitments to a fun and full life. The children at heart. The ones who are only certain about their uncertainty. The ones who recognize an opportunity for adventure and lean in. And especially the ones who start a conversation like this: “Have you heard the one about…”

Leave a comment

If you want me to send an All Kinds of Funny: Unsolicited love letter (of sorts) to one of your people, click this button:

Send a Postcard!

All Kinds of Funny and Other Serious Matters, Volume 1 is available in paperback and hardback! Click this link or the image below, and get your copies now!

If you like Elmore Leonard, Joe Lansdale, or the Coen Brothers, you’ll dig my novella, DIG. If it makes you laugh, cringe, or question your moral compass—do me a solid and leave a quick rating or review.

Get it at this link or click the image below: Dig: A Dark Crime Comedy

Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to the Cobles. If you haven’t yet, please watch their story and consider chipping in. They’re one of the most fun families I’ve ever met, and I just love them.