think like a dad

I realize that ever since the stick turned pink that I've had a total change of heart of everything that relates to being a man, being married, and now being a father. This week I have learned something new. I have learned that I need to strike a balance between father and employer. It's hard, but here I am. I am doing it, and it's working. I don't like, and I don't feel like I want to do it, but I am ... and I have to remember how to balance this.

Lovely Bones: A review

I am reading Wicked and Lovely Bones simultaneiously. When the mood strikes I read Eat, Shoots & Leaves of Eat, Shites & Leaves. A word here about Lovely Bones by Sebold. I am enjoying this. I mentioned to friends that I wanted to write a novel about a dead girl, and they mentioned Sebold's novel. I picked it up last week and opened it Monday. I cannot put it down; it's simply written because it's from a 13 year-olds point of view. Actually she would be 13 if she was not raped and murdered. I am not worried about copying since my ideas differ. Perhaps I could lay it out there and say that this second book is also really about my brother, but it's more than that. And I am taking it somewhere I've never been. Somewhere my brother has only allowed himself to go once. And a place where Sebold's Susie Salmon could look down from her playground heaven and details him child like simplicity. I wonder if I can. I dream my book, and I tell myself what to write and I write it. I've begun. Not writing, but really thinking. You should hear my hell or my heaven. I cannot explain it, and I don't know how to but I will. We will get it done.

George W. Bush sucks my toe

If we have so many homeless people who have lost everything they have ever had, then why can't Bush pull our resources out of the Middle East and take care of Americans? Why are we over in Iraq when we could use our soldiers in New Orleans to rescue and rebuild? We're over there getting our people killed for no good reason, when we have people here dying and losing their livelihoods.

The Cornetts-Home

The Cornetts-Home

So I found this wacky website that some family put together. Isn't it odd? My website of the day. Go odd, dysfunctional people.

I should write a novel about the Russian stripper.

Here's the mug shot of my mom's cousin and the russian kid. He looks like Robin Williams from that movie where he was a psychotic photo man. Of course, the Russian stripper is messed up. Not to say people don't have their problems. Just some people have other people's problems , too.

Olga, the Russian stripper

My mother's cousin's brother, Bill, once lived in a trailer in the front of his father's auto business. I remember him with haphazard rat-like hair and a wife that left him or he left her. He was lonely, I suppose, and years later he bought a mail order bride from Russia. Now of course I never knew people actually bought Russian mail order bridges, but here we go. Her name was Olga (yes, I am serious) and she lived with him relatively unhappily for sometime, but perhaps she used him to get here to the U.S. Who knows, but anyway she eventually decided to get a job in town and eventually it turns out she was stripping at some bar. She would drive up the highway drunk, and hide from the cops in the brush along the road when she wrecked her car into ditches and would not let Bill see the boy. They had joint custody when she eventually moved out, and last weekend he decided not to return Daniel to Olga. Instead he left. They took off. Who knows where they went? Not me. Not me.

spiders

My kid's day care is infected with spiders, and they aren't doing enough about it fast enough. They saw Black Widows last week, and they never even told us. This isn't the gays in the military thing. This is my child's health we're talking about. I don't want creey crawlies to climb from the ceilings onto the babys' heads. Tonight they're spraying again, and I have no idea if I will get sick again like I did last week. Perhaps my throat will close up, I won't be able to talk, and I will feel like I have the flu for another week. I sure love the blackboard jungle.

Want to change our country?

Robin Williams' plan for our country...(Hard to argue with this logic!)

I see a lot of people yelling for peace but I have not heard of a plan for peace. So, here's one plan.:

1..) "The US will apologize to the world for our "interference" in their affairs, past & present. You know, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Tojo, Noriega, Milosevic, Hussein, and the rest of those 'good ole boys,' We will never "interfere" again.

2..) We will withdraw our troops from all over the world, starting with Germany, South Korea, the Middle East, and the Philippines. They don't want us there. We would station troops at our borders. No one allowed sneaking through holes in the fence.

3..) All illegal aliens have 90 days to get their affairs together and leave. We'll give them a free trip home. After 90 days the remainder will be gathered up and deported immediately, regardless of who or where they are…They're illegal!!! France will welcome them.

4..) All future visitors will be thoroughly checked and limited to 90 days unless given a special permit!!!!!!!! No one from a terrorist nation will be allowed in. If you don't like it there, change it yourself and don't hide here. Asylum would never be available to anyone. We don't need any more cab drivers or 7-11 cashiers.

5..) No foreign "students" over age 21. The older ones are the bombers. If they don't attend classes, they get a "D" and it's back home, baby.

6..) The US will make a strong effort to become self-sufficient energy wise. This will include developing nonpolluting sources of energy but will require a temporary drilling of oil in the Alaskan wilderness. The caribou will have to cope for a while.

7..) Offer Saudi Arabia and other oil producing countries $10 a barrel! for their oil. If they don't like it, we go some place else. They can go somewhere else to sell their production. (About a week of the wells filling up the storage sites would be enough.)

8..) If there is a famine or other natural catastrophe in the world, we will not "interfere." They can pray to Allah or whomever, for seeds, rain, cement or whatever they need. Besides most of what we give them is stolen or given to the army. The people who need it most get very little, if anything.

9..) Ship the UN Headquarters to an isolated island some place. We don't need the spies and fair weather friends here. Besides, the building would make a good homeless shelter or lockup for illegal aliens.

10.) All Americans must go to charm and beauty school. That way, no one can call us "Ugly Americans" any longer. The Language we speak is ENGLISH.....learn it...or LEAVE.....

Now, isn't that a winner of a plan?

"The Statue of Liberty is no longer saying 'Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses.' She's got a baseball bat and she's yelling, 'You want a piece of me?' "

California in the 60s

My grandfather was an alcholic, and I don't have much to say about that. He died before I was born, but my mother remembers spending a large part of her childhood in bars. When she was young my grandparents moved to California for a short period of time and my mother told me a story about how they were sitting in a bar with another father and small children. The man lived next door to the bar, and the little girl asked if my mother was allowed to go play with them in the trailer. She was permitted, and she had fun jumping up and down on the family's bed, which is something she was never permitted to do at home. This is something she remembered when I asked her today.

I realized that I don't know enough about what my parents' lives were truly like when they were children. We talk about my daughter or my siblings or work, but nothing else. They won't be around forever, and I want to know now.

Tammy Haas

HOMECOMING

Check out this site where a book was written about the tragic murder of the author's friend. THey never discovered who did it.

My baby is a friend of LIVE

I always assert that my first concert as a baby was John Denver in downtown Pittsburgh in mid-1975. Of course, my parents argue that I was home with the baby sitter the entire time. I remember it being dark, with a large yellowed spotlight shooting from the rear of the auditorium on Denver who sat on a stool in a yellow bell-bottomed suit with an acoustic guitar propped up on his leg behind a microphone. I can almost remember the swaying of the people around me, and my mother singing Annie’s Song and Sunshine on My Shoulder. But they say I wasn’t there.

This will never happen with my daughter. Today we took her to professional baseball game because with the price of a ticket you were able to stay afterward to see LIVE in concert. My best friend and I have been seeing LIVE almost every time we could since college and practically since Public Affection was still headlining shows in small towns in Pennsylvania. The baby, mommy, some friends, D, and I were there today and shouted along with a few other thousand people when Ed Kowalczyk took the stage. His dark blue designer jeans were held up with a light brown belt below a thin, bald frame. His tell tale brooding eyebrows were covered with dark black sunglasses before, and he broke into “Selling the Drama” before going into “All Over You” and belting out old and new tunes for 90 minutes.

The baby watched part of the show then cat nap on mom’s lap before waking later to watch Daddy and the concert. I took her and she danced on my lap for the last third of the show, while Mommy and A took photos.

I would have liked to hear TBD and some song from “From the Distance to Here” about shaking your hips. After the show, we hit Red Lobster to celebrate our first concert and baseball game, and now I sit here reminding me and everyone of her favorite show, so we cannot argue about it in 30 years.

John McCain for president, NOT

Tonight at the pharmacy I saw on the paper that John McCain is pushing gay marriage bans in Arizona, and he is planning to run for president. I've supported his past initiatives, but if this issue is black and white for him, then we don't agree. And with that, he will lose my vote. He may lose over 10% of 42 million peoples' votes.

$37.84

$37.84. This is how much Bank One will pay Exxon from my account for the tank of gasoline I purchased this evening. At $2.79 a gallon this is an enormous expense that I didn’t count on. If we can get our asses out of the Middle East, then perhaps I could save my money for my daughter’s education or a new house for my family or even a new vehicle that doesn’t pitter or patter down the highway to work daily while I press down on the rubberized pedal, hoping that it makes it another year until I get that large check.

Tomorrow I finish learning how to support kids from families who cannot speak the language of our country. Three more hours of this, and I am free to spend the day with my family and best friend.

Today was the first day of the rest of my life is a weak cliché that expresses much of nothing beyond the banality of expression so often heard in today’s American culture. But in actuality it is. My damn foot’s been bothering me for two weeks, and I swear that eventually I will learn to retain some semblance of flesh and nail down the side of my big toe when clipping my nails wholeheartedly once every couple of weeks. It’s didn’t even bleed, but occasionally after ear splitting mute screams I can express puss beading from the side of my red toe.

I picked up a book today called The Lovely Bones. I realize that this book was a New York Times Bestseller a few years ago about a young rape, murder victim. I had an idea to write a novel about a dead girl who was suicidal, then came out of her depression, and then was murdered in a school shooting. I don’t think this subject would be wise to write and work and I don’t want to be dooced. Especially from this job, at this time, or ever. I will read this book, and I will read Wicked. My colleague said that book was a bit too sexually graphic for her. I, for one, read Naked Lunch, so Wicked is like reading my daughter Mother Goose.

dooce

dooce

I gotta say that Heather's website rocks all of my world. My wife's not a huge reader, but Heather, write a book! Do It. I'd read it. I cannot stop reading it here online for free. It's so much what we go through with small children. Love it. Adore her. And Yes I've had a colonoscopy. Forgive me. Give me the pill. Please, God.

sick

I feel like I am hung over and have the flu at the same time. My head is full of cotton. I am popping tylenol and will pick up my pills tomorrow. I got a new phone today. I am relatively happy with it. It's the same as my old one, but it's new. Refurbished. New to me. Going to bed. Bye.

uteri

Tonight my wife and I saw a commercial about some drug that is suppose to keep your uterus healthy. And it said "if you have a uterus......". Now give me a friggin' break. How damn PC do you need to be? It's like the South Park where they cannot have any kind of celebration at all because someone will be offended. Damn them all to hell (or whatever they believe in!) and back.

baby t-shirts

Did you ever wonder what happened to punks when they settle down? I never did, but now I know. So we went to IHOP this past weekend to worship our funnel cakes, coffee, and strawberries. This interesting family walked in and they had a infant daughter with a black t-shirt that read in large white letters: FORMULA IS FOR PUSSIES.

Ha Ha.

Baby

Yesterday I went to visit my daughter and she was holding hands with a boy! I cannot believe it. Oh no. I'd shoot him with my shotgun, but he's not even 1 yet! :) They were in day care, and the kids were piled into a crib for a little journey. The two of them sat next to each other and were holding hands. It was actually cute, and for someone who never wanted pinky cutie clothes. I told the boy's mommy and she said "let's plan the wedding!" ... hahaha.

Today my daughter found her toe and stuck it in her mouth. And today my daughter decided to roll from her belly to her back! Finally! Next she will run a marathon.

Writing

Ten weeks until nanowrimo begins and I don't really know what I am planning to write. Perhaps an apocalyptic chess story or perhaps a story about high school. I'd like to write what I know, but the chess story has been festering since high school and I wrote a plot outline draft a decade ago. I really don't know.

I need to get something off my chest here. Last year someone told a good friend of mine that I said something bad about them. This was not true, but the person who said it is closer than I am to my friend. So, to this day I have no idea why I did not deny saying it. I profusely apologized that maybe something I did in fact say was taken out of context. It bothers me because I think my friend things of it from time to time, and I will never bring it up, but I never did say that. I didn't do it. I didn't. Now I've said it, and I am done.

CNN.com - Top general: Army preparing for 4 more years - Aug 20, 2005

CNN.com - Top general: Army preparing for 4 more years - Aug 20, 2005

We need to get our power hungry, bullying asses out of the Middle East. Send home the troops!

IHOP

IHOP rocks my world. We go Sundays. It's my church. Omlette's with cheddar and swiss and coffee and strawberries and ketchip and bacon and the Sunday newspaper that I pick apart piece by piece and leave in little piles as I leave the place. More tomorrow. And bowling, too.

Dumbledore Is Not Dead

Dumbledore Is Not Dead

While reading The Electric Cool-Aid Acid Tests, Wolfe mentioned that Ratched lobotimizes McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Damn them to hades and back into Olympus. I now do not need to read Kesey's masterpiece. So here's to you.

David Gale

Watching David Gale and thinking about The Crucible. The power relationships that emerge through Mary's relationship with Abigail are striking, and Gale's power and sacrifice are compelling, but who chooses who has power and does not?

Who knows?

Anyway, I got sick of my hair. Went to my barber and told her to chop it off. She did.

Crap

After a grueling evening of a very long meeting I came home to rest, relax, check my email, and then go to bed. Now it's 10pm. I am BEAT. Mommy woke the baby to change her and put on her jammies, and of course she pulled a Ponce De Leon and created her own little special fountain of youth all over the changing table, so Mommy said we needed to bathe here. Of course it's my turn so I get it all ready, take off the work clothes and drop them into a pile in the hallway, and then proceed to climb halfway into the tub with the girl. Halfway through her bath, she pisses and craps all in the water and all over her chair. Mommy grabs her and tosses her into a towel while liquid crap floats its way into my leg hairs swimming off the sides of my calves in a foot of luke warm bath water. Oh the joys of being awake now trying to type this, and wanting to be asleep, and knowing the baby wants to be awake, and knowing Mommy would shoot me if I did anything other than sit here. Knowing my daughter is an important person too, bowels and all.

Shite

You know who pisses me off now? People who come into committee meetings, agree to everything, and then walk away and do their own things. I don't give a good damn if it only affects you, but when you manage several other people, and they then come to me asking for information that differs from everything we've ever agreed to, it pisses me off. Then the manager makes excuses about why he chose to do something, without ever understanding that he was wrong or pissed people off.

Singapore

My father drank singapore slings on his 21st birthday in Singapore. I spent mine in the middle of a snow storm at Penn State in Zeno's bar and grill. My best friend was with me, and we drank some beers before I walked home slightly buzzed in the snow walking foot in front of foot through a snow trough, since the taxis were not running from the snow. At least I had enough to drink that I remained warm all the way home. Great memory.

Cut that grass

Tonight my wife cut the grass, but the baby kept waking up and crying so mom strapped the kid to her chest and mowed the whole lawn! Talk about one hell uv a woman!! We even took pictures. Hahahaa.

Maybe I should just move to Vancouver

Since so many people are coming into the USA who only speak Spanish, my state requires that we now take some damn classes to learn strategies to teach these non-native speakers English. Why, I continue to ask myself, as I sit in all day classes on Saturdays?

If someone is going to sneak into our country, why can't they figure out how to live? They come over here and sneak into my country, and then they want me to serve and support their children. I will send my daughter to Mexico in a decade. I will expect the government to supply her with free lunches at the mexican schools since I will not send my money with her. (Why should I, when they will pay?!). I expect all of the teachers in her school to sit in a small room outside their normal work day, to get paid measley money, and learn how to speak English because I want them to be able to teach her, even if I am not encouraging her to learn how to speak their language. I want them to use their funds to give her clothes, I want them to use their funds to send her for higher education, I want them to support my kid, while I do nothing to support her myself. You know what. Stay there. Keep your damn people in your country and let them feed your economy. If you want to complain about how poor your people are, then stop permitting them to sneak over the border into my country to steal all the jobs from the American poor.

Sure, you may argue that the Mexicans should do our grunt work for us (trim my trees, cut my grass, build my fence, etc...) but each morning I see homeless white Americans out at the corner of my road, near the highway, living under whatever shelter they can find, and begging at the red light for food. If the damn Mexicans went home and worried about the economical problems in their country, then maybe my white homeless brethern can get off their butts and stand on the street corners waiting for the contractors to pick them up, pay them sub-minimum wage, and let them work for a few bucks.

As I sit in these classes for the next three Saturdays, in the paper the politicians and special interest groups are pushing for allowing people to vote in my state and our country without showing a proper ID card that proves that they belong here. What is our country coming to? We are not a third world country. Perhaps I should just move to Vancouver.

You think you can dance?

This is one of the most mindless shows I have ever seen, and here I sit with the wife watching and wanting to get to sleep. I also know I have crap to clean up in the bedroom. We watched this show last night called Beautiful People (enter Manson and his beer bottle here)... It wasn't very good at all. It was even worse than Wildfire, which I find myself watching on Monday nights. I just want to know how things will work out, but as we get back into primetime T.V. what'll I do? And of course they changed my show nights, and now I believe I have 3-4 shows on Thursday nights. What ever will I do? I don't even know. And I don't even care. I find I care less and less about those things, but I do enjoy my mindless dribble.

I have been preparing my next novel. I have two ideas. One is easy to begin and harder to end, and the other would be obscenely easy to to end and difficult to begin.

I unveiled a new website at work today, and I think it'll be good. Of course when you have so many things to cover and so much to do it takes some time. I am three weeks late, but no one really cares about what I do with it. I do it for the community. I do it for me. And I cannot even send out an email regarding it because we're not permitted to send emails to everyone. Not complaining much but stupid emails ruin it for the rest of us. My philosophy is if I do not have the information to include, then I will not include it. That's it. Nada. Deal with it.

novel

Almost time to write again. www.nanowrimo.org. I am pysched. I want my narrator to be dead this year. I keep worrying I will not know what to write about, but then I remember that last year even as late as October 31st I didn't even know what I would write. Then it all hit me, and I was fine.

Tell me what the point of myspace.com is!!! It sucks. All these damn kids run around and have profiles there, but it's all surface crap they only write because everyone else writes it, and they share way too much information on there. I see phone numbers, cell phone numbers, D.O.B.s, etc.... everything. I could become a 15 year old girl if I really wanted to be one. It's that easy.

We Didn't Start The Fire

We Didn't Start The Fire

Wanna see a friggin' cool website on allusions?

Houses

We'd like to move into a larger house closer to work. Perhaps another bedroom or so, but that's a lot of work. For the most part, we're interested in doing this, but the real estate market in my area is ballooning and I wish I had bought a few years ago. I'd like 4-5 bedrooms, and a smaller yard. My dog can poop in a smaller yard, and I can see it. The damn landscapers finally fixed my sprinklers, and I will never call them again. Next time I will use someone else. Err... I know I cannot find a house for under a quarter of a million dollars... and that's for a smaller house. I don't really care if it's a cookie cutter anymore; I am more interested in location and storage. I'd like to live in the community in which I work. I hope to get out and get in sooner than later. Perhaps we will. I am better off in that than I was perhaps four years ago.

Work

Love love love my job. Everything about it. Even the free time my schedule affords me. All of it. The people with whom I work are a diverse group in which there belongs a strong cross section of my current community. I fear I hope to stay here for some time.

Tomorrow is my dead grandmother's birthday. She's been gone since 1993. My brother misses her more than anyone, and someday I hope he and I can sit down and share what he thinks. I love him and wrote him a book. I know he doesn't appreciate me, but I can hope someday...