Poop's Funny

Post Traumatic Mall Syndrome

2011-05-02T09:20:00.000-05:00

Author's note: It's been forever since I posted here (sorry guys). I've been too wrapped up with ghosts and goblins over at from-the-shadows.blogspot.com. I promise to spend more time over here at "Poop's Funny."

I’ve never been a fan of shopping malls. Parking lots pitted like the lunar surface, the cramped food court, Goth kids trying to show their individuality by buying from Hot Topic. Everything.

I’ve always known malls are strange places; I just never thought I’d be afraid of them. Maybe it had something to do with the Christmas rush.

It was Dec. 22.

Although my wife and I usually try to avoid places that hold vacuums over our wallets, her brother was tough to buy for. All she could think of were chocolate-covered espresso beans. Not a popular convenience store item.

“Oh, let’s look in here,” my wife said, pointing to a store I briefly considered physically injuring myself to avoid. “It’ll just be a second. Here; hold my purse.”

To guys, shopping means buying beer and maybe something salty and crunchy to go with it. To women, shopping is fun. Ladies, I’ve had fun before. Shopping ain’t it.

Standing in a store full of women’s clothing holding a purse, knowing my wife wasn’t going buy anything, meant three things, 1) there was no beer here, 2) there were no snacks here, and 3) if I were a dog I’d be that thing Paris Hilton carries around in a little bag.

“Can we go now?” I asked just before begging kicked in.

“Of course,” she said.

Three stores later we bought the stupid coffee beans.

“Now we can go,” she said.

I shook my head. Walking into three women’s clothing stores, a child’s clothing store, and a coffee bean store had been too much. I headed for the bathroom.

Bathrooms are the only sane place in a mall. They’re clean, the toilets flush by themselves, and they’re usually full of crying husbands. I did my business, wiped my own tears and walked out.

“Now we can go,” I said.

We grabbed two cups of overpriced coffee and walked through the crater lot. We were lucky; Neil Armstrong hadn’t planted a flag on our car.

This wasn’t the experience that made me afraid of malls.

This is:

A few months later, I ran into a friend and he grinned at me strangely. I didn’t like that. He was big.

“So, how’d you like (name of women’s clothing store)?” he asked.

Suffering from Post Traumatic Mall Syndrome, I had no idea what that meant.

“Huh?”

“At the mall,” he said. “You entered that store at 2:45 p.m., Dec. 22.”

He worked security at the mall. I’d looked for him that day, but never saw him. I. never. saw. him.

“At 3:12 p.m., you and your wife – who wore a red top under a green coat, you a beige top under a black coat – entered (name of second store).”

He listed everything we did. Every store, my long stare at the Victoria’s Secret display pictures, even me crying in the bathroom.

“How’d you know all that?” I asked

He smiled.

“I followed you.”

This is why I’m afraid of shopping malls. Malls employ people who are quieter than hybrid cars, more cunning than ninjas, and stealthier than the B-2 bomber.

And they’re watching our every move.

Copyright 2011 by Jason Offutt

Jason’s latest book, “What Lurks Beyond: The Paranormal in Your Backyard,” is available at amazon.com.

As Parents, Our World Just Got A Whole Lot Rowdier

2010-07-30T20:06:00.002-05:00

Our three-year-old must have been going through some kind of past-life storming the beach at Normandy trauma while her mother, brother and I were trying to eat.

We were in public … at a busy restaurant.

The Girl jumped out of her chair, ran to the booth behind us, screamed, bounced on the seats, and said “hi” to a really nice couple too polite to give us dirty looks. My wife and I just sat quietly, ate our dinner, and wondered if we’d ever be able to come back to that restaurant.

“She’s acting crazy,” our five-year-old boy said.

Why, yes. Yes she was. Even before my wife and I had children, we knew this wasn’t how they were supposed to act. But, after our little clones grew into their own personalities, our parameters for what counted as “acceptable” public behavior got really, really wide.

Restaurant

Before Kids: Children will remain seated and say “please,” “thank you,” and “excuse me,” in polite, quiet tones.

After Kids: Restaurant night out is like going to a professional hotdog eating competition, full of screaming, cheers and food shrapnel. As long as parents have five semi-uninterrupted minutes to cram down their food, they consider it a pleasant dining experience. However, tasting that food is a luxury. I don’t think I’ve eaten restaurant food slowly enough to taste it in five years.

Grocery Store

Before Kids: Children will remain seated quietly in the basket, never grabbing candy off the shelves or begging for a $4 box of cereal just because they want the prize.

After Kids: Run, scream, push your sister into the produce sprinkler, eat that handful of grapes, take food out of other people’s carts. Whatever. If we get out of the grocery story without a bill for destroyed property, it’s a good trip.

Zoo

Before Kids: My child will hold my hand throughout the zoo, ask plenty of questions about flora and fauna, and will get fruit instead of candy.

After Kids: Is that little Joey in the lion enclosure? I hope the lions are OK.

Movie Theater

Before Kids: I’d never consider taking my child to an age-inappropriate film and when I do take him to a movie, he’ll sit quietly and use the bathroom when I tell him to.

After Kids: I don’t think they make G-rated movies anymore. Hey Brittany, sit down and stop dancing for that couple behind us. You missed the dinosaur eating that guy’s head.

Waiting Room

Before Kids: While I wait for my doctor’s appointment, I’ll engage my children in activities I brought from home, like coloring, looking quietly at books, and algebra.

After Kids: Billy, I think that lady you’re climbing on has tuberculosis. Turn your head when she coughs. Oh, and maybe you’d better drink this bottle of Purell.

Of course, I got all the “After Kids” examples from my wife. She said she lost her Parent of the Year Award eligibility months ago. I think I’m still in the running, until we eat out again.

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Jason’s latest book, “What Lurks Beyond: The Paranormal in Your Backyard,” is available at amazon.com.

Did The Boy just say one of ‘those’ words?

2010-04-05T22:59:00.002-05:00

Sometimes things happen, things so unexpected you’re not sure they happened at all. So you ask yourself, “What just happened?” And when you get the answer you realize what you’ve been dreading to hear all your life, you’re an idiot.

My five-year-old sat in the backseat of the car as we ran errands. Unlike car trips with my three-year-old daughter who keeps a running commentary on everything that comes to mind, like butterflies, puppies and anything to do with the color pink, car trip conversations with my son generally consist of short, guy sentences, like:

Me: Hey, son. What are you thinking?

The Boy: Nothing.

Me: You feel OK?

The Boy: Yeah.

Me: How was school today?

The Boy: I don’t want to talk about it.

Me: What do you think of the Royals chances this year?

The Boy (pointing somewhere I can’t see because I’m driving): Hey, Dad. Look, a dog’s pooping.

But today was different. Sure, the sentences were still short, to the point, and conveyed as little information as possible, but he said something I’d never heard from him before.

“Hey, Dad,” the Boy said. “Look at that damn house.”

The words left his mouth normally, vibrated through my ears and bounced around the inside of my head for a while as they usually do, but this time none of them stuck.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“Look at that damn house,” he said again. “It looks like it’s going to fall down.”

Then he laughed, as he should have. Houses falling down are funny.

Damn. That was it. My five-year-old, who loves Legos, is nice to pets, and laughs at SpongeBob Squarepants, said “damn.”

There are many moments in a parent’s life – and by many moments I mean every single one of them – when the parent has no idea what to do. The Boy said a word that would not go over well in any school, pre-school, Sunday school, obedience school – anywhere.

There are two ways Americans handle things, 1) ignore the problem and it will go away, or 2) fix the problem. No. 1 would have been easier, but my wife would have frowned upon that tactic.

“You know, that’s really not a very nice word,” I said.

“Fall down?” he asked. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw his little face trying to make sense of that bit of wisdom.

“No,” I said. “The other one. Damn.”

Getting closer to his usual in-the-car sentence structure, he said, “Oh.”

“How about we don’t say that word anymore, OK?” I asked. He nodded, and everything was good in Guyland.

But I had to wonder what other words were in his head, just waiting for a time – like the church Christmas program – to come out. I was a bit worried, not for him, for me. I didn’t have to ask where he heard that word. I knew.

Damn.

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Jason Offutt teaches journalism at NWMSU. His latest book, “What Lurks Beyond: The Paranormal in Your Backyard,” is available at amazon.com.

My Family Vacation Part IV: Showdown at the Train Museum

2009-07-22T08:50:00.001-05:00

Author’s note: This is the last of a four-part story of my family’s summer vacation. We made it out alive.

The steam-converted-to-diesel train engine was bigger than my house. Its wheels stood a good six inches over my 5’10” head and the photograph I took of my son in front of the engine made me wonder where he was in the picture.

“When it first ran, the wheels turned so fast it pulled the rails out of the ground,” our tour guide at the Railswest Railroad Museum in Council Bluffs, Iowa, said.

I don’t doubt it. Although the engine looked harmless now, when that barn-sized mass of metal moved, I’m sure it shook the earth like Tom Jones did Vegas.

Council Bluffs, sitting just across the Missouri River from Omaha, Neb., is a pivotal piece of U.S. railway history. It was the eastern terminus of the transcontinental railroad … oh, who am I kidding? The kids didn’t care.

The Boy, four, ran through the yard and, after a head-nod from our guide, stormed up steps and into the cab of a steam engine.

The Boy loves trains. If given the choice between pulling his sister out of the path of stampeding Clydesdales and watching an engine shunt freight cars, he’d pick the rail yard.

The Girl, two, loves trains only because it annoys the hell out of her brother.

“Do you know what this is?” our tour guide asked, pointing at a car behind the engine.

“The tender,” the Boy, and of course it was. For readers whose child isn’t obsessively fixated on trains, the tender held water for the boiler and coal for the firebox of steam engines. I didn’t know that until the Boy learned to speak.

Our tour guide was really exceptional. She was patient, businesslike and probably knew quite a bit about trains. I’m just assuming that, of course, because we couldn’t hear a word she said.

“No, my do it,” the Girl screamed in a pitch that may have only been audible to dolphins.

“Mine,” the Boy bellowed, wrestling her over controls of an engine that no longer ran.

And so on.

Back when this engine thundered over the railroad tracks that stretched across this country, there was a way to deal with people like this – toss them off the train, preferably as you were crossing a trestle. It was a more civilized era.

Next came the dining car where …

“I went poopy, Daddy,” the Girl said to her mother. Our two-year-old can tell us apart – she breastfed after all – but sometimes calls me Mommy. She just wants to keep us guessing.

Please enjoy this brief interlude while my wife changes the Girl’s diaper in our minivan. The Boy sure did.

The guide then took us through a mail car and caboose, but after dropping something old and maybe irreplaceable out an open window, my wife hauled the Girl off like a mail sack, if mail sacks screeched.

We past a lot of busy freight trains during our two-hour drive home, although no one saw them but me. I was the only one still awake – I was driving.

Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt

You can order Jason’s books on the paranormal, “Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us,” and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at amazon.com.

My Family Vacation Part III: Flying Death at the Henry Doorly Zoo

2009-07-16T08:23:00.002-05:00

Author’s note: This is the third of a four-part story of my family’s summer vacation. By now the inside of the minivan smells funny.

Sundays as a kid were borderline fantastic.

The day started with a pile of fried pork and hash browns covered in gravy. That was followed by church, hamburgers, a Tarzan movie and “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.”

“Wild Kingdom” was the pinnacle of Sunday programming for a 10-year-old boy because, unlike the “Wonderful World of Disney,” there was a chance I’d get to see a 250-pound feline gut a wildebeest.

Zoologist Marlin Perkins hosted the program throughout the 1960s and ’70s and never got close to an animal unless it climbed into the front seat of his Jeep. But his co-host, Jim Fowler was nearly killed every episode. Jim’s job was to wrestle whatever beast nature threw at him: lions, anacondas, yaks, rancors, the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms – anything. But never a blonde. I always felt sorry for Jim.

I wasn’t thinking about Jim as my family and I walked toward the entrance of Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo (home of the Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom Pavilion); I was thinking of Marlin. My family was going to experience animals like Marlin had and just as nature intended – from behind a thick sheet of glass.

With the drunken frivolity of the College World Series (see Part 2) safely outside and across the street, we met my wife’s college friends and their families ready to tour one of the best zoos in the Midwest.

The zoo, founded as Riverview Park zoo in 1894, attracts more than 1 million visitors a year to its indoor desert, indoor rain forest, great ape exhibits and an aquarium that holds 1.3 million gallons of salt water. Oh, and sharks. Lots and lots of sharks.

But it was at the indoor rain forest where the spirit of Marlin Perkins watched from a safe bench outside as our group braved the interior.

Water drips from the upper reaches of the Lied Jungle, and howler monkeys fill the air with their hoots. Immense fish, big enough to swallow a human baby, swim in a shallow indoor creek as tapirs wander the banks. A rope bridge, a tunnel teeming with vampire bats, and dirt trails lead visitors through re-creations of the jungles of Asia, Africa and South America.

The Lied Jungle, we later discovered, is something called a “total immersion exhibit,” which, translated into English, meant one of us was going to be attacked by a monkey.

My wife’s friend Debbie pushed her three-year-old son Ben through the South American rain forest, Ben nibbling at Cheerios scattered on the tray of his stroller, and everyone oblivious to the orange flying death that stalked them.

The green and white sign on a wooden placard in the rainforest read: “Please DO NOT Climb Tree,” although no one could read it through the one-pound golden lion tamarin streaking through the air.

The tiny monkey thumped onto Ben’s tray, scattering Cheerios onto the rainforest floor. The adults screamed. Ben screamed, his relationship with Curious George ruined forever. The other children screamed. The monkey screamed … and possibly pooped.

Terrified of the giant howling humans, the tamarin leapt into the trees and escaped to safety.

The rest of the zoo was impressive and fun, but much less threatening.

Thanks, Jim Fowler, that was the best zoo trip ever.

Next week: The Railswest Railroad Museum.

Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt

You can order Jason’s books on the paranormal, “Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us,” and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at amazon.com.

My Family Vacation Part II: Dodging The College World Series

2009-07-04T13:22:00.001-05:00

Author’s note: This is the second of a four-part story of my family’s summer vacation. If you want to pray for me, it’s too late.

Cars, tents, campers, lawn chairs and banners for Division 1 schools like LSU, Arkansas, Virginia and Texas decorated the parking lots of Omaha’s Rosenblatt Stadium like a preschool art project. The colors made me a little woozy.

It was Day One of the 2009 College World Series, it was 7:30 a.m., and traffic was backed up for blocks; which was good for the scalpers, who were also backed up for blocks. The last time I’d seen that many cardboard signs was on a Chicago off ramp.

The average attendance for the College World Series over the past five years has been 278,321, which, compared to the city’s population of 432,921, the stadium seating capacity of 23,100, and the just more than 10,000 hotel rooms in Omaha, meant there were a lot of people in town with nothing to do except get in my way.

But my family and I weren’t in Omaha for the College World Series, which caused a problem with parking. We were on vacation and taking our children to a Midwest vacation mecca – the Henry Doorly Zoo. At least 50 weeks out of the year there’s decent parking at the zoo, which shares parking lots with the stadium, because for 50 weeks the city doesn’t host the series.

I don’t plan well.

“The zoo opens at 8:30 a.m. Saturday,” my wife said as we settled into the scary hotel of death (see Part 1). “We should get there early. Let’s go.”

It was 7 p.m. Friday.

We weren’t alone in this quest to have fun in a city that’s best chance at tourism dollars was to ignore us and cater to people waving banners. My wife’s college friends and a few of their husbands were in town, and we were all going to the zoo. That made nine adults and nine children, all under six. I was scared. I can barely contain my own kids. What if one of the other parents had to go to the bathroom?

We drove slowly onto the street that leads to the stadium and zoo behind vehicles with college flags and foam fingers, packing the giant parking lot like it was a sausage. And we found a spot – easily.

The zoo, unlike me, planned ahead. Any vehicle could park in the zoo’s special parking lot if the people inside paid zoo admission.

Clipboard Guy: How many adults in the vehicle?

Me: Two.

Clipboard Guy: You have to pay zoo admission to park here.

Me: I know.

Clipboard Guy: I mean, you can go to the games, just know we’re going to use your money to buy pizza.

Me: We’re going to the zoo.

Clipboard Guy (looking at me like Congress looks at Supreme Court nominees): That’ll be $23.

I’m sure the carload of geniuses from the University of Texas who spent $69 to park next to us, and were now drinking Natural Light from the trunk of their Saturn at 7:30 a.m., were going to the zoo, too.

Next week: The zoo.

Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt

You can order Jason’s books on the paranormal, “Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us,” and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at amazon.com.

My Family Vacation Part I: The Motel of Death

2009-06-26T10:03:00.000-05:00

Author’s note: This is the first of a four-part story of my family’s summer vacation. I can’t claim it on my taxes if I don’t write about it.

The motel looked good from the outside, as well it should have; it was in a nice town like Omaha. Clean, new, right off the interstate and within a few minutes drive of everything my family would need on vacation.

It was the inside that concerned us.

Although the lobby felt like a room after an argument (the kind of argument that results in widely-scattered blood and several arrests), the motel wasn’t really bad. I’d been in a bad motel before, in Colorado:

Mountain mornings are fantastic, but when I awoke staring at the flowery wallpaper that clashed with every other pattern in the industrialized world, instead of throwing open the curtains and drawing in the majesty that is the Rocky Mountains, I turned on the television, because I’m an American.

“Tragedy unfolded this morning,” the cute, just-out-of-college reporter who always gets the 6 a.m. weekend shift, said as she stood in a parking lot, “as an argument turned deadly in a room at this (insert cheap motel name here).”

I smiled, only because it didn’t involve me.

But as the camera panned out to show the exterior of the motel, I noticed something that slapped me as hard as that girl did in college.

Good Lord, I realized. The reporter’s standing next to my car.

That was the worst motel I’ve been to. This was the second.

I’d made reservations over the phone – something I’ll rethink the next time we go on vacation. Reserving a motel room in Omaha, Neb., from a woman in Bombay, India, is surprisingly impersonal. I was happy with the great deal I’d gotten, but disappointed there was no pool.

However, when the guy whose forearm tattoos boasting “blood, death and Satan,” checked me in, I got over that “no swimming pool” thing. There may have been a body floating in it.

“Did you see the writing in the hallway?” my wife asked as I rushed my family into our room, secured every lock on the door, and booby-trapped a shotgun pointing chest-high at anyone who might walk in. I hoped housekeeping knocked.

Yeah, I’d seen the words, “Blood Gang,” outside our door. I’d also seen the crowbar marks where someone had once broken in, although I kept telling myself he’d simply misplaced his card-key.

“Are you nervous?” she asked, because I was. It must have been the sweat, or the involuntary shakes that tipped her off.

It was my own fault. I didn’t discover I was trying to book a room two days in advance of the College World Series until I tried to book a room two days in advance of the College World Series. It was now the “Blood Gang” room or the streets.

“No, I said, reaching for the room’s mini-fridge. “If we don’t touch anything, or go near the window, or sleep, or … oh, look at that. A head.”

Well, it wasn’t a head. It was a half-empty bottle of something orange and a cucumber. Either way, I wasn’t about to touch it.

Next week: The Henry Doorly Zoo and College World Series parking.

Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt

You can order Jason’s books on the paranormal, “Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us,” and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at amazon.com.

Why Is It Always the Groin?

2009-06-16T13:21:00.000-05:00

The Girl ran through the water with all the energy her two-year-old toddlerness could muster, which is approximately enough to power Detroit through a rough winter.

Her mother and I have, of course, told her not to run at the pool 1,001 times. This is not hyperbole; we’ve kept track.

“Daddy, Daddy,” she screamed, although her mother and I have, of course, told her not to scream at the pool.

We’re no longer surprised she doesn’t hear us. All parents will eventually realize their children only consider them “those big people who give us food.” When they’re teens that turns into, “those people who embarrass us/give us money/gave us their hairline.” What we say isn’t really important. You know, like “don’t play in the street,” “don’t eat the thing wrapped in foil in the back of the fridge,” “study.”

“Honey, don’t run at the …” I started, but was stopped by a sudden blinding pain.

Using a cursory, “awe, isn’t she cute,” glance, a child looks like a soft little bundle of fluff that is fun to play with. In reality, a child is pointy, possesses at least six knees, 14 elbows and a head I’m convinced was built on the planet Krypton.

I bent forward, but not voluntarily.

The groin, I wondered as the pain subsided and I could see shapes and colors again. Why is it always the groin?

Fathers, I’ve found – the hard way, and don’t think I haven’t cursed my father for not warning me – spend roughly 37 percent of their day working, 29 percent sleeping (mostly in front of the television), 19 percent eating/driving/thinking about cheerleaders, and 15 percent in the fetal position gasping for air.

What I wouldn’t give for a bruised thigh or a fat lip. At least then I wouldn’t wonder why we spent all that money for a vasectomy when it was going to be done at home for free. I usually wonder this while lying in a pool of my own tears.

“What’s wrong?” my wife asked.

“Hhhhhheeeeeehhhh,” I wheezed.

“She got you again?” she said, trying her best to sound sympathetic.

I nodded.

Ladies, you’re wonderful understanding people who have absolutely no clue what I’m talking about. When this injury happens in the movies, everyone laughs, Dad gets up and goes about his business, which usually involves doing something socially awkward in front of his kid’s friends. Hollywood is founded on lies. When this happens in real life, everyone still laughs, but Dad doesn’t get up.

When the color came back to my face, we left. Not because of me, the kids were tired after dragging me out of the water.

On the ride home, the Girl and the Boy screamed when they saw a woman walking her golden retriever down the street.

“Maybe we should get a dog,” my wife said.

Great, that’s just what I need, another pointy thing in the house.

Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt

You can order Jason’s books on the paranormal, “Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us,” and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at amazon.com.

The Rules of Being Protestant

2009-05-28T15:06:00.000-05:00

There are accepted rules when it comes to being Protestant.

The host is crackers and grape juice, which leaves Protestants of today worrying about the number of carbs they’re taking in on Sunday morning.

At some point, usually near the end of the service, someone will pass a plate down your pew. You’re supposed to put money in it. Just picture yourself at a party in college although nobody’s going to return with a fresh keg.

You’re supposed to sit quietly, unless it’s time to sing, then it’s acceptable to mumble because there are plenty of people who’ll sing over you, just like in elementary school.

And children get their own special sermon at the front of the sanctuary, during which they sit looking at the back of the sanctuary to see if their parents are watching.

This is the Boy’s favorite part of the service. He loves to wave at us.

“Would the children like to come forward?” the preacher asked.

A few children, pushed into the aisles by their parents, ventured forward. The Boy sprinted. He’d already sat still 10 whole minutes.

But something unexpected happened; the Girl squirmed out of my wife’s arms.

“I wann go, too,” she said.

What? She’d never asked to go to the children’s sermon before. She’d always been content to color, practice saying Daddy’s special “football words,” or sit in the nursery and win animal crackers off the other toddlers at craps.

But the children’s sermon? She’s only two. The Boy’s four, he can handle the responsibility of sitting on steps quietly and waving. He also has the advantage of never pulling a skirt over his head.

“Are you sure?” my wife asked.

“Uh huh,” the Girl said and we let her follow her brother to the front.

There’s something about a pretty little girl in a pink dress and ponytail that doesn’t scream, “I’ll age you prematurely,” but my wife and I are no longer fooled.

The Girl walked in the general direction of the children’s sermon and stopped.

“She’s not going up there,” my wife whispered.

She was right.

The Girl turned, looked at us, grinned, and started weaving her way through the empty rows of pews that always dominate the front of Protestant church services. Muffled laughter ran through the congregation, not necessarily because this was cute – it was – but because everyone knew it embarrassed the heck out of us.

“When she comes close enough,” my wife said, “I’m going to grab her.”

The Girl crept closer. My wife watched her like a lion stalking a gazelle. Three feet away she looked at my wife, turned and skittered back down the aisle.

“Don’t look her in the eyes,” my wife said. “She’s like a wild animal. If she knows we’re looking at her, she won’t get close to us.”

So we employed the deer in the forest “if I can’t see it, it can’t see me” technique and my wife finally caught her. Yes, the Child Running Loose in the Sanctuary Routine is one of the accepted rules of being a Protestant. And it’s cute, as long as the dress stays below her head.

Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt

You can order Jason’s books on the paranormal, “Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us,” and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at amazon.com.

Toddlers, Teenagers -- They're All The Same

2009-05-05T10:53:00.000-05:00

The toddler screamed. You know, toddlers scream a lot.

“No,” she wailed, yanking her hand out of mine. “My do it.”

We were crossing the street and when it comes to the street, my wife and I have four rules for our four- and two-year-old, 1) look both ways before going into the street, 2) never go into the street, 3) if crossing the street with Mommy or Daddy, hold one of their hands, and 4) if you violate rules One through Three, you’re shipped to work hard labor in a Siberian logging camp in 1974.

The Girl wanted to violate Rule Three. Not on my watch, chicky-pie.

She screamed again, mainly because I’d tucked her under my arm like a football and, for some reason, she didn’t like it. Toddlers have control problems – if they’re not in control, it’s a problem.

“Just wait until she’s 16,” my wife said, holding the hand of our non-screaming four-year-old son, who had to be enjoying this. “Then we’re really in trouble.

The Girl at 16? Oh, dear Lord. We could already see what was coming. The clothes, the fingernail polish, the Girl still thinking she can cross the street on her own.

“No, no. Put me down. Put me down. Put me down,” the Girl screamed, and screamed, and screamed, and screamed. I could only assume she thought repeating the same thing over and over would work, even though it never does. The Girl unsuccessfully employs this method when asking to watch extra television, get candy, drink coffee, or take the minivan out for a death race with those punks from the Pretty Pony Daycare. Although my wife and I appreciate her tenacity, her success rate is as low as Middle East peace talks.

Yeah, toddlers are teenagers, only shorter.

In a couple of years when the Girl decides to pull up her skirt and chew on the hem during the pre-school Christmas program, it’ll be OK. If it happens in 14 years, our house will get calls from the principal, the pastor, angry parents, and a bunch of teenage boys asking her for a date.

By the way, the answer is no, jerks.

I put the Girl down on the other side of the street and she stopped screaming, squinted at me, stomped down the sidewalk in a huff, and, if she’d had the motor skills to give me The Finger, she just may have done it.

Yep, toddlers are teenagers.

- They both yell, “I’ll get it, I’ll get it,” and sprint through the house whenever the telephone rings.

- They’re both fascinated with cell phones, computers and remote controls, and they both know how to operate these devices better than you.

- Hygiene is only an issue when it’s inconvenient for them.

- TV ranks ahead of Mom and Dad. … So do soft drinks, playing with dust particles in the window, and anything else I care to write.

- A lot of times you can’t understand what they’re saying. With toddlers, it eventually gets better.

- They both love body art. For a toddler, it’s Sharpie-colored fingernails and a Scooby Doo sticker on their shirt. For a teen, it’s a visible “why can’t I get a job?” piercing and a Scooby Doo tattoo on their butt.

- They both want to pick out their own clothes. When a toddler decides to wear a skirt so small her diaper shows, it’s cute. When a teenager wears a skirt so small her panties show, Daddy hemorrhages.

- At some point, they both hate you. Toddlers make up faster because they can’t pour their own milk.

- They both want to make their own mistakes. For a toddler, this is done while discovering the laws of Newtonian physics – like gravity. For a teen, it’s going to the wrong kind of party, being on Facebook instead of studying, or going to a college Daddy hates and for which he won’t pay a penny of tuition.

Yep, I’m already thinking about that. Keep it in mind that the next time we cross the street.

Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt

You can order Jason’s books on the paranormal, “Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us,” and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at amazon.com.

The Toddler's Trip to the ER

2009-04-21T12:43:00.000-05:00

Blood was everywhere. I’ll get to that later.

Sunlight streamed through the open front door as the Boy, 4, and the Girl, 2, elbowed each other to see who could get out the door first. A clear, warm day after being trapped inside by the weather turns small children into very cross rugby players.

Then I made my first mistake of the day.

Parents make mistakes all the time, like rescuing their child instead of letting them learn the hard way, taking their eyes off the road because the girl jogging had something written across the seat of her shorts, and giving a teenage boy keys to anything – especially if you live in a neighborhood where girls jog with words across the seat of their shorts.

But I violated Parental Rule No. 152: Don’t let children with a history of pushing each other out of your sight – ever.

The door slammed and I … paused … to … grab … my … glass … of … tea. The screaming started immediately.

Outside, the Girl was face-first on the concrete at the foot of our front steps. The Boy was standing next to her holding the handlebar of his bicycle.

“What happened?” I said, scooping the Girl off the sidewalk, expecting a complete denial of any wrongdoing – no matter how lame – by the Boy. I was used to it.

“She fell,” he said and, unlike the times my wife and I find her crying in a pile of Little People*, I believed him.

I looked at her. Blood was everywhere.

Scalp injuries involving children are usually minor things that produce enough blood to make, 1) weak parents faint, and 2) the strong ones fondly remember their favorite “Friday the 13th” movie.

Standing at the foot of the steps, holding my sweet little girl who now looked like Carrie at the prom, I had a vision. It was of her at 16 years old, and she was pointing to a half-inch scar on her forehead.

“I could have been homecoming queen,” she screamed. “Except for this. Thanks for not taking me to the hospital, Dad. My life is ruined.”

Good Lord, like I wanted that hanging over me.

The cut was wide enough for stitches. My dad would have rubbed butter on the gash and laughed because we were wimpy enough to need butter for a blood-gushing wound. But Dad was from a generation that boasted concussions and fewer fingers.

We were in the ER five minutes later. Parental lesson learned: bad parenting is educational.

Three stitches, an adhesive bandage, a bunch of Daddy’s signatures on papers with words too small to read, and two chocolate ice cream cones later, we were home.

And all this happened while Mommy was at the store. The hard part of Daddy’s day wasn’t over yet.

*For people without children, these are a line of toys, not leprechauns, fairies, elves or Oompa Loompas. Well, maybe Oompa Loompas.

Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt

You can order Jason’s books, “Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us,” and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at amazon.com.

Lesson learned? Revenge is pretty sweet

2009-03-31T22:12:00.001-05:00

The homecoming float was almost finished.

I hopped in the cab of the John Deere tractor and pulled the lever controlling the hydraulics. The cylinder, used to lift and lower farm implements into the ground, was now connected to a giant Orrick High School mascot.

The mascot, a bearcat made out of chicken wire and stuffed with black and yellow napkins, stood on a wagon hitched to the tractor. It slowly lifted a plastic barrel over where its head would eventually be and brought the barrel down again.

Perfect.

Our senior float captured the wholesome, romantic and Shakespearean essence of Donkey Kong. I just hoped the wind kept down during the parade, or it would end up naked.

The art kids were finishing up the giant papier mâché head, then our float would be ready for the parade, “Homecoming ‘83: Video Maniacs.”

I don’t know who came up with that theme, I just hoped they weren’t very proud of themselves.

It was cold in the barn our float was hidden in, and I was glad. I’d stashed a couple of Dad’s beers in the tractor cab for the parade and I’d hate for them to get warm.

I was going to be the driver. Kaz was riding shotgun, keeping his eye on the float to make sure it didn’t go out of control and kill bystanders.

Yeah, that “Best Float” ribbon was going to be ours. The senior class almost always won first place. Sure, it took some of the fun out of the competition, but high school seniors are petty, and we wanted that ribbon.

Our only threat would be from the junior class. We’d heard rumors they had a lot of parents helping with their float, but that was all we knew. High school homecoming float construction holds a certain level of secrecy, much like crashed flying saucers do in the government.

But what their float was didn’t matter.

Tomorrow, I’d smile and wave at everyone lining Front Street, sipping stolen beer out of a paper cup and celebrating the junior class’s second-place finish with whatever lame video game they’d chosen.

Oh, yeah. Tomorrow was going to be sweet.

The next day, the junior class won. All that mindless napkin stuffing, all those nights of actual work for nothing.

Kaz and I were sitting in the cab of the tractor before the parade when the float committee gave the first place ribbon to the junior class’s Pac Man float. Even with our creative treatment of Donkey Kong getting even with his oppressors, in this case the opposing football team, the juniors won with something cutesy. Oh, sure, Pac Man’s mouth opened and closed, but … who cares.

“This sucks,” I said.

Kaz looked at me.

“Somebody’s got to do something about this,” he said.

So we did.

Going down Front Street, our second-place Donkey Kong tossing a make-believe barrel at an effigy of a pirate followed the junior class’s Pac Man, with its first-place ribbon. The stolen beer tasted good to me, especially since we’d probably get in trouble if we drew any extra attention to ourselves. Of course, we got lots of attention with the big “Juniors Suck” sign we’d thrown together and hung in the tractor window.

We got in-school suspension for that stunt, but yeah, it was worth it.

Stupid juniors.

You can order Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at amazon.com.

Who needs pets when you have children?

2009-03-20T10:43:00.000-05:00

The kids screamed as my wife pulled the minivan to a stop next to a great tree-strewn lawn and slid open the doors. They popped from their car seats, giggled and ran into the park to chase squirrels.

My wife and I stood there, smiling as our four- and two-year-old dashed between trees, fell, scratched behind their ears, got up distracted by something blown by the wind and took off again.

Yeah, it’s nice to let the kids out to run.

The Girl fell and her brother stopped to help her. Good boy, I thought, and was happy my wife had brought treats. Then, as the Girl took off in a random direction, the Boy peed on a tree.

This behavior in children is, of course, normal. However, the following thought might encourage a personal visit from the Division of Family Services, a court-appointed counselor or Jesus. As we stood watching our children do things they’d better not do when they go to kindergarten, my wife dared say that in the first few years of a child’s life, parents treat their babies like dogs.

I was embarrassed to agree with her.

During the course of educating our children, we encourage them to roll over, sit, stand, shake hands, speak, eat out of a bowl and let us know when they have to go to the bathroom.

Children pace at the front door when they want to go outside. They crawl under their bed. We wake up to find they’ve crawled into our bed. They lick. They jump on the couch to look out the window. Their noses are usually wet. They splash in the bathtub then run around the house dripping wet. They hate to have their hair brushed. They whine when they’re hungry. They eat off the floor. They bring you random objects. And, yes, sometimes they have accidents on the carpet.

We parents don’t help. We take the kids for walks, play catch with them, teach them to stay in the yard, encourage them to do tricks, and some parents even put leashes on their children when they go to the mall.

When they’re tired, a small child will crawl up into a parent’s lap. And what does the parent do? Pet them.

We take our children to parks and lakes so they have room to run and some parents even put their kids in shows.

We tell our children how to behave, and tell them, “no,” when they don’t. Then, when the child does something right, we pat their head.

When our son was two, he said he wanted a dog. Instead, we gave him a little sister. I’m not sure he’s satisfied with that; she’s too stubborn to fetch.

Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt

You can order Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at amazon.com.

My wife is painting over my manhood

2008-12-26T19:35:00.002-06:00

Slips of paper have been appearing on our living room wall.

Sometimes there are four, sometimes three, sometimes only one. But they all have two things in common: 1) none of them ever stays up for more than a day, and 2) they’re all shades of the color blue.

My wife wants to paint our living room, I can only assume, blue.

Sure, just painting a living room sounds innocent enough, but so did the German invasion of Belgium to start World War I. I think that war started when Kaiser Wilhelm II’s wife wanted to paint the living room blue. The war was less trouble.

There's something the sexes (and by that I'm nicely saying, 'only women') don't realize about life – there are rules:

Rule 1: Men and women don’t think the same way.

Rule 2: Men and women don’t like the same things.

Rule 3: Women love colors. Men view colors as something nature created out of spite.

Many of the troubles between the sexes could be solved if women just realized Rules 1 through 3. Four through 10 are pretty good, too. They deal with all sorts of things like which way toilet paper should roll from the wall and why men appear to be so itchy.

The main point is that men and women don’t have the same tastes in home decorating. Well, except for those guys on home makeover shows, but I’d never invite them over to watch a ballgame.

I like one color for my walls – white. White walls are guy walls because guys don’t care about white. We care about red, blue-green and gray because that means we’re somewhere we don’t want to be, like stuck at a traffic light, Sea World, or jail. White just means bathroom, and we’re all comfortable with that.

“So what do you think of these blues?” my wife – who caused this mess – asked our four-year-old son.

He looked at the strips of paper on the wall for a few seconds as if he were contemplating man’s place in the universe.

“I think they’re dumb,” he said.

Hmmm. Maybe he was. That was a pretty deep thought for a preschooler.

The colors were labeled Cozumel Aqua, Cloudless Sky and Nimble Blue.

What do these names really mean? Are paint makers banking on the fact that, percentage wise, so few real Americans have been to Cozumel we won’t know this color isn’t what the water there looks like? That Cloudless Sky and Sky Blue from Crayola are exactly the same? And, in what universe is blue ever “nimble?”

I’m just waiting for my wife to start painting. I bet a nice shade of Shipwrecked Lovers Gazing onto the Azure Horizon all over my living room will be just fine … for an Italian restaurant.

Waiter, bring me a beer and a shot of testosterone. I think I’m going to need it.

Copyright 2008 by Jason Offutt

Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to the Show-Me State’s Most Spirited Spots,” is available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com or tsup.truman.edu. Visit Jason’s Web site, www.jasonoffutt.com, for his other books.

Attack of the Antagonizer

2008-11-18T12:33:00.000-06:00

The Boy, almost four, stood playing at his train table as The Girl, almost two, walked into the room.

Utilizing what must be the instinct that keeps cage fighters alive, he knew where she was before he saw her. She was heading right for him, feigning innocence by pretending to talk with her grandparents on a Spider-Man cell phone.

The Boy’s shoulders tensed.

“Gigi, PopPop. Cookie, cookie,” The Girl said, then giggled, explaining into Spider-Man’s face her morning adventure in which she’d found a plate of cookies in the kitchen before anyone else had gotten out of bed.

But everyone in the room knew what she was up to. Mom, Dad, her big brother, and anyone watching on Google Earth – by which I mean everyone.

To outside viewers – have you ever been on Google Earth? It’s spooky – it wasn’t that The Girl’s plan was transparent or that her motives were suspect. But everyone in the room had seen this scenario play out more times than we’d seen the Elmo video that makes me want to drive my car into a lake.

She was going to approach her brother’s toys in exactly the way that would throw him into an Incredible Hulk-like rage, grab a toy, scream and run out of the room.

If this little girl were a super villain, her name would be The Antagonizer.

Commissioner Gordon: The Antagonizer has struck again.

The Batman (hissing): I’ll bring her to justice.

Commissioner Gordon: She took your Bob the Builder action figure and dropped it in the toilet.

The Batman (weeping openly as he punches a hole in the drywall): I do this alone. It just got personal.

“Gigi, cookie, PopPop, Bob Builder, yeah, yeah, yeah,” she sang into the play phone as she approached The Boy, music from “High Plains Drifter” running through my head.

Then it happened.

She grabbed a train off the track, screamed in a way that made me happy we don’t have pets, and started to run out of the room. The Boy stopped her by making a fist and knocking her to the floor.

Yeah, her mother and I saw the punch coming. Yeah, we could have stepped in before it happened, but what’s the kid going to learn?

“Don’t hit your sister,” bounced through the living room followed quickly by “don’t tease your brother.”

Tears came, tears went, a few mumbled exchanges of “I’m sorry” were barely audible, and we all hoped life would be better in the Offutt house because of it.

Of course, much like we all knew the event was going to happen, we also all knew “I’m sorry” carried as much sincerity as a UN resolution, which is none at all.

Five minutes later it all happened again.

Copyright 2008 by Jason Offutt

Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to the Show-Me State’s Most Spirited Spots,” is available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com or tsup.truman.edu. Visit Jason’s Web site, www.jasonoffutt.com, for his other books.

Men Will Fix Things -- When We're Darned Good and Ready

2008-09-29T21:14:00.000-05:00

A wheel of my push mower fell off. It had been wobbly for a while and, in the great tradition of manliness established by so many proud Americans before me, I ignored it and hoped it would go away.

It did go away. It rolled across the yard.

“That’s not good,” I said, using another of the great tenets of manliness, which is stating the obvious even when alone. This is because, as every real man knows, someone is always watching – even if we can’t see them.

One of a man’s greatest fears, apart from the world running out of Slim Jims, biker magazines and cheerleaders, is that a wormhole might open and someone in another dimension might see us do something stupid. And what’s our recourse? I mean, how can you punch someone in another dimension?

I killed the engine and looked at the mower. Yep, I could tell the wheel was definitely gone because: 1) it was no longer on the mower, and 2) I could see the wheel sticking out of the neighbor’s grass.

I tipped the mower to its side to get a better look, but I should have known better. Under the “You smelt it, you dealt it Principle,” whoever notices a problem has to fix the problem. I saw a hole in the mower where the wheel should be. A big hole. A big rusty hole. So, under Guy Law, I had to fix it.

Hmm, I thought. Maybe I shouldn’t have left the lawnmower outside all summer.

The disemmowered wheel didn’t look any better. The nut was fused to a bolt that was now more rust than metal. So, fulfilling my role as man, I left the mower sitting in the middle of a partially mowed lawn and went inside to watch sports. As I sat on the couch drinking beer, I realized I’d made a lot of zigzags as I mowed, so I hope I hadn’t spelled anything dirty.

A lesser man would have asked, “Should I just buy a new mower? A better one? One with four wheels?”

Pfft.

I fixed the mower the next day. Why? Because that’s what guys do.

A power drill, some wrenches, a couple of bolts, a domino-sized strip of metal and after a few damnits, I finished mowing the lawn.

Compared to not fixing things, fixing things ranks pretty highly on the Things that make Guys Guys list. Actually, not fixing things, then fixing them, then belittling your accomplishment, then bragging about it ranks the highest – only if it makes someone else cry/feel in awe of you.

So, the next time something mechanical breaks down, or your wife wants you to watch anything with Kate Hudson. Just remember, you’re a man. Act like one and do nothing about it … until you’re good and ready.

Copyright 2008 by Jason Offutt

Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to the Show-Me State’s Most Spirited Spots,” is available from amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com or tsup.truman.edu. Visit Jason’s Web site, www.jasonoffutt.com, for his other books.

If You Are What You Drive, I'm ... Uh, Old

2008-09-09T09:57:00.003-05:00

The cell phone rang in my front pocket as my family and I walked across the clean but car-littered floor.

I thought about not answering it. I hate talking on the telephone in front of people who suddenly look like they want me dead.

What’s so important, I wonder when I see some else talking on their cell phone in public, that you have to tell Joshy Pooh-Pooh you love him when you’re in line at the grocery store buying laxatives?

But my pocket was ringing. What are you supposed to do when your pocket’s ringing? The call was from a buddy, so I answered.

One of the greatest features of a cellular telephone, apart from the fact that you can talk to someone on the opposite side of the planet as easily as setting an egg timer, is caller ID. I’m sure there are lots of people who ignore calls when the word “Offutt” appears on their phone. Fine. I didn’t want to talk with them anyway.

Jerks.

“Hey,” I said, in the traditionally accepted guy ‘hello.’ “Can’t talk. We’re at a car dealership.”

“What are you buying?” he asked.

“A minivan.”

Silence.

“You’re old, dude,” he finally said, and the conversation ended.

There are things all of us say we’ll never do. Sometimes it’s drinking vodka up your nose, sometimes it’s Bungee jumping, and sometimes it’s voting for Democrats. Not surprisingly, these things often happen on the same day and in the same order.

For me, the thing I said I would never do is own a minivan. Owning a minivan means you’ve given up. You’ve become branded as someone with a soccer ball sticker in the back window. You’re just one of the masses, and yes, you’re old.

That night, when I drove my family home from the dealership in our new minivan, my wife and I joined the ranks of those who will purchase an estimated 1 million minivans this year.

Good lord. What am I going to do next? I wondered. Donate to Greenpeace?

Then my wife, who would donate to Greenpeace, put the America I know into perspective.

“I saw this minivan driving down our street the other day,” she said over the children who were completely failing to fall asleep in their car seats. “It was driven by a teenager playing loud, thumping rap music.”

An image rushed into my head. And, yes, his ball cap was on backwards.

“I wanted to yell, ‘Yeah, you’re pretty cool in your mom’s car.’”

That’s all I needed. In this world where, to us, we are what we think we are, and to society, we are what we appear to be, there is one constant – complete apathy about what other people think.

Yes, I’m just one of the masses and yes, I’m working on accepting the fact that I’m old enough to drive a minivan.

But the most comforting part of my wife’s story is, at least I’m not that guy.

Copyright 2008 by Jason Offutt

Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to the Show-Me State’s Most Spirited Spots,” is available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com or tsup.truman.edu. Visit Jason’s Web site, www.jasonoffutt.com, for his other books.

The Dangers of Preschool ... For Mom and Dad

2008-08-26T09:28:00.001-05:00

The Boy watched the clock like it was going to throw candy.

He’d been waiting for this day for weeks – which is about as long as the Triassic Period to a three-and-a-half year old. It was his first day of preschool.

“It’s not time,” his mother told him after he’d asked … again. She pulled a clock from a shelf and pointed at the hands. “When this is on the five it will be time for school.”

And he waited.

When the hand hit the five, he opened the door and said, “Bye. See you later. I’m ready.”

Then he and his mother were off to school. I looked at his little sister who was eating something off the floor and realized we’ll have to go through this whole thing again in two years.

Were we ready for our baby to go to school? We thought so. But no matter how much parents mentally prepare themselves for their child to go to school, which roughly translated from Parentese means “a place without me,” we’re never really ready.

Sure, we may seem confident, but something happens to parents when they let go of their child’s hand as he walks into the classroom.

Suddenly parents realize that instead of teaching their child important things the past three and a half years – like don’t talk to strangers and how to deliver a roundhouse kick to the face – they’ve been wasting time on silly things like counting and going to the bathroom.

How’s not peeing in your pants going to protect your child from terrorists?

My wife looked lost when she came home.

“He doesn’t know anybody there,” she said. “And what do we really know about the people who work at that school?”

It’s the nightmare of every parent of a first-time student that as soon as their child is at a distance greater than six inches from them something terrible will happen.

Parents are certain Germans, like the bad guys from “Die Hard,” are posing as elementary school faculty just waiting to teach preschoolers how to rob banks. Then maybe communists or gypsies – or worse, communist gypsies – will attack the school and steal all the really gifted children, which of course means yours.

“It’s OK,” I told her. “If there are any Lebanese Secret Service agents there trying to convince the children to invade Israel, I’m sure somebody will call us.”

For some reason that wasn’t reassuring.

Later that morning, I picked up the Boy from school. He looked happy and relatively innocent on the subject of international political conflicts.

“What did you do in school today?” I asked as we got into the car.

The Boy shrugged.

“I don’t know,” he said.

Yeah, I can expect about 13 more years of that.

Copyright 2008 by Jason Offutt

Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to the Show-Me State’s Most Spirited Spots,” is available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com or tsup.truman.edu. Visit Jason’s Web site, www.jasonoffutt.com, for his other books.

Don't Tell Your Wife Anything

2008-06-26T12:03:00.001-05:00

I called my wife before I left work. I’m not sure why I did this. Maybe it was out of courtesy. Maybe it’s a habit my mom beat into my head when I was a kid. Or maybe I’m just not that bright.

I think it’s the last one.

“I’m going to the grocery store on my way home,” I told her.

That was simple enough, right? A guy saying ‘I’m going to the store’ usually means ‘I’m out of beer.’ Everyone knows that.

“Great,” she said. “Do you have a pen? We need a few things …”

There’s a guy rule, an important guy rule, designed to protect ourselves from our own stupidity – don’t tell your wife you’re going anywhere.

I haven’t learned that rule yet.

To a man, “I’m going to the store” is a declarative sentence – nothing else. There’s nothing to “I’m going to the store” that means anything other than “I’m going to the store.” To a wife it’s an invitation.

“We need M&Ms, raisins, pretzels and almond bark,” she said. “Got that?”

“Yeah, yeah, honey,” I bumbled. “I got it.”

I actually like going to the grocery store. It’s a big, friendly building with meat, cheese and smiling people who say things like “good day” and “may I help you?” It’s like a tiny Wisconsin. But I don’t like to grocery shop – it’s work.

The cart thumped as I wheeled it through the store. I had almost everything on the list – beer, pretzels, M&Ms and raisins. The words “almond bark” sat on the list all smug and confident in the knowledge that I didn’t know what it was. I think it even gave me the finger.

I pointed the cart down the aisle labeled “baking” and went in. Like most guys, I don’t bake; I cook. Baking is as alien to me as a triffid, that’s why almond bark must be for baking. As I went down the aisle, reading the strange names on strange packages, I might as well have been in the cantina scene in “Star Wars.”

Then I found it. Almond bark.

Wait a second. There’s white and there’s brown? Two types? There are TWO types of almond bark? She didn’t say anything about two types? What do I …

“You look lost,” a female voice said. I turned toward a grandmotherly woman who’d stopped beside me and frowned.

“Yes, I am,” I said. “If you sent your husband to the grocery store for almond bark, what would you want him to bring home?”

She lifted a big bar of white something off the shelf and plopped it into my hand.

“This one,” she said, smiling like I’d just done something really cute … and by “cute” I mean “stupid.”

I thanked her, paid for the groceries and went home. My wife wanted the brown kind.

Ladies, there’s a simple solution to this problem – don’t ask your husband to do anything. Oh, sure, an equally simple solution might be to give him a more detailed list, but that’s too much like nagging.

So, when you get the urge to ask your husband to pick up something from the store, stop, understand the fact that him bringing home the wrong thing is worse then him bringing home nothing, and go to the store yourself. That way everyone’s happy.

Copyright 2008 by Jason Offutt

Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to the Show-Me State’s Most Spirited Spots,” is available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com or tsup.truman.edu. Visit Jason’s Web site, www.jasonoffutt.com, for his other books.

A Vacation's Nothing Without Work

2008-06-01T19:18:00.002-05:00

Vacation. A word so sweet your triglycerides rose to the level of Jabba the Hutt’s just by reading it. So, please, go to the emergency room – now.

Yeah, vacation is sweet, and I had five days of it. Five no-shavin’, no-workin’, no-thinkin’ days of lethargy and naps. I sat on the couch that Monday morning, a cup of coffee in my hand, when my vacation turned into one of those vacations you see in movies where everyone’s ankles are chained together and they’re busting rocks in front of a guy holding a shotgun.

“Bye, honey,” my wife said as she did a strafing run through the living room on her way to work, pulling the front door shut behind her so quickly I barely heard the words that would doom my vacation much like ‘I’ll have to raise taxes’ doomed Walter Mondale’s 1984 presidential campaign … by the way, he lost. “Have a great day. There’s a list on the kitchen table. I love you.”

Slam. Tap, tap, tap. Click. Vroom. Slam. Zip. … And she was gone.

Sure, I’ll have a great day. A great day of reruns, frozen pizza and … a list? A list? I’m on vacation and I have a list?

There are very few lists that can bring fear into the soul of someone who was planning to have a couple of beers during “Gilligan’s Island” that afternoon. The Shopping List (not “a” shopping list, The Shopping List. The one where your wife asks you to buy Tampons), Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s list of communist sympathizers, and the Mob’s hit list are nothing compared to a list your wife makes and drops on your head the first day of vacation.

I looked at the table. A piece of paper was propped against the saltshaker. As I approached the list, I could tell the message wasn’t going to be good – she’d used red ink.

Jason’s To-Do List By FRIDAY.

Great, I love deadlines, especially those written with letters shaped like little daggers.

1. Power wash the house.

2. Patch the sidewalk.

3. Wash the carpets.

4. Move the heaviest thing we own to the basement.

5. Move the second heaviest thing we own from the basement.

6. Mow the lawn.

8. Write treatise on the eternal struggle between good and evil through the eyes of Hannah Montana.

9. Pave the driveway.

10. Pull the Earth’s orbit closer to the Sun. We’re having the Smiths over for a barbecue this weekend and I’d like the weather to be nice.

Wow, that’ll take my whole vacation.

Guys, we really need to take back our vacations and our own manliness. Our days of earned sloth should not be wasted repairing the house and performing preventative automotive maintenance. We’re men, and we’ll get to it right after the ballgame.

There. I feel better. I’m going to make my own list, starting with No. 1: Be a man. I’ll work on that next week, after I figure out how to pull the Earth out of orbit.

Copyright 2008 by Jason Offutt

Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to the Show-Me State’s Most Spirited Spots,” is available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com or tsup.truman.edu. Visit Jason’s Web site, www.jasonoffutt.com, for his other books.

My Kid Can Talk – Now I Can't Get Away With Anything

2008-05-01T21:04:00.002-05:00

My life has changed. The change was drastic, but it happened so slowly I didn’t realize anything was different until I got busted – our three-year-old can tattle.

(A clip from the 2007 Emmy Award-winning sitcom hit, “The Toddler and Me.”)

My wife: Did you give our son chocolate milk?

Me: Pfft. No. Of course not. Remember, we agreed chocolate milk was a special treat. I’m saving it for his high school graduation. Shhh. It’s a surprise.

(Cue laugh track.)

The Boy: Goot blot habba poo.

My wife: OK, I’m glad we’re on the same page.

(Cue laugh track.)

It was a perfect balance of the Boy’s perception of the world (everything’s big and I’m hungry), his ability to express that perception (Hey, big people. If I don’t get some peanut butter and crackers pronto, there will be screeching), and the fact that I like to give him chocolate milk for no reason.

At the time, I thought what my wife didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me. The problem is, now she knows and, yes, it hurts.

(A clip from the 2008 Emmy Award-winning drama, “That Dead Dad.”)

My wife: Did you give our son candy?

Me: No. Of course not, he didn’t finish his peas.

The Boy: I got Tootsie Rolls, Mom. And a sucker.

(Cue ominous orchestral music.)

My wife: I thought we agreed … oh, never mind. You’re taking that quiz in Parenting Today’s Child Who Has One Crappy Parent Magazine, mister. And tomorrow night, we’re watching the Dr. Phil special, “My son’s in al-Qaida because my idiot husband fed him Twix.”

Oh, yeah. Things have changed.

1) I can no longer watch Dirty Harry movies while the children are awake. Although a three-year-old saying, “Do you feel lucky today? Well, do ya, punk?” might sound adorable to you, when those words come out of their kid, most mothers have a worse sense of humor than the CIA.

2) I can no longer imitate Mommy when she’s not watching.

The Boy: Oh, look at me. I’m Mommy. I say “no.” I make corn flakes for breakfast. I say “blah, blah, blah…”

My wife: Where did he learn that?

Me: TV. PBS sure has gone downhill.

The Boy: Daddy, show her what she looks like when she’s sleeping.

3) I can no longer go to Hooters.

My wife: So, what did you two do for lunch?

Me: We had chicken.

The Boy: The jiggly lady in orange pants gave Daddy beer and hot wings.

Me: (Cue the laugh track. For the love of God, please cue the laugh track.)

4) I can no longer watch sports in front of the children. One little “@#$% after an interception and guess who’s in trouble for something somebody repeated in Sunday school? A wife’s perception of what’s right and what’s wrong obviously doesn’t include a quarterback throwing into double coverage.

Just wait until you’re a teenager kid, then guess who’ll be tattling to Mommy.

Copyright 2008 by Jason Offutt

Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to the Show-Me State’s Most Spirited Spots,” is available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com or tsup.truman.edu. Visit Jason’s Web site, www.jasonoffutt.com, for his other books.

The Greatest Breakfast Cereal in the Known Universe Is Back

2008-03-19T11:53:00.004-05:00

My wife came home from the store with something special. I could tell by the way she grinned as she held something behind her back.

Admittedly, she could have been holding a machete, but I prefer to be an optimist in these situations.

“Close your eyes,” she said. “I have a surprise for you.”

Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, I thought, pinching my eyes tight just in case I was wrong about the machete. A present for me? Yes, I’ve been a good boy.

It’s not often parents get presents. Five uninterrupted minutes on the toilet is usually gift enough. Many presentless holidays have gone by just fine because of that anniversary I got to spend on the can.

The surprise had to be something I wanted, or the secrecy would have just been mean.

Is it beer? Is it beer? Is it beer? I wondered. No, it’s not my birthday. The “Girls Gone Wild: Suburban Boise Idaho Community College” video? No, it wasn’t Christmas, either.

“Open your eyes,” she said.

You know the feeling when your team wins the championship? Your candidate gets elected? Someone doesn’t laugh when you ask them on a date? Yeah, it was kind of like that.

Oh, Quaker Oats, god of breakfast, lord of sweet yellow milk, heaper of the blessed sugar. Thou hast been kind.

“Do you like it?” she asked, holding a big blue box of Quisp, the breakfast cereal that made an elementary school me eager to pop out of bed just for the sugar rush.

Oh, the memories. Quisp watched Godzilla movies with me after school. Quisp got me going before a Little League game. It even, I believe, helped ward off vampires.

Oh, yeah. I liked.

Quisp, a little pink space alien drawn by Rocky and Bullwinkle animators Jay Ward and Bill Scott, brought his first shipment of space cereal – shaped like flying saucers – from Planet Q in 1965. In 1972, Quisp and his archenemy Quake (who made earthquake-powered cereal … whatever) entered the democratic process and America elected Quisp the best cereal ever.

Then something happened. Much like Gerald Ford, Quisp disappeared from the public eye in the late 1970s.

“Where did you find it?” I asked, taking the box from her hands as gently as a surgeon transplanting a liver.

Does she have a time machine? I wondered. And if she does, why didn’t she kill Hitler?

“Dollar General,” she said. “For a dollar.”

A dollar? A dollar for the cereal that could even make Saturday mornings with Scrappy Doo spectacular? That’s smart shopping.

I opened the box, poured golden flying saucers into a bowl, added milk, and transported back to 1972.

Quisp, I don’t care where you’ve been – even if it was a Mexican prison, anywhere in France or rehab – I’m happy you’re back. And that bowl of cereal? Oh, yeah. It was sweet.

Copyright 2008 by Jason Offutt

Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to the Show-Me State’s Most Spirited Spots,” is available from amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com or tsup.truman.edu. Visit Jason’s Web site, www.jasonoffutt.com, for his other books.

The Trash Can Hypnotized Our Baby

2008-02-28T09:42:00.000-06:00

The living room was quiet. Normally, quiet is good, unless you have children then you know the house may explode at any moment.

The silence worried me because our three-year-old boy was in the living room with his one-year-old sister. When the Boy and the Baby are alone in the same room and neither one is screaming, either all is well or she’s unconscious.

Following Dad Dictums No. 12 (expect the worst) and 13 (the kids are always out to get you), I leaned into the room slowly, like a hit man. The Boy stood over his train set making “choo-choo” noises. And the Baby was … the Baby was gone.

No, wait. She wasn’t gone; she was on the move. And, since she’s at the zombie stage of walking, “on the move” wasn’t all that fast.

The Baby looked around to make sure she was unwatched and toddled into the kitchen holding a toy cell phone and sunglasses. Hmm, I wonder if she’s been watching “The OC” again?

I listened as she padded across the linoleum with little feet we can’t keep socks on, followed by a soft thud. The Baby came out of the kitchen a few seconds later with no cell phone – and no sunglasses.

“What were you doing?” I asked, stepping into the room. She looked up, squealed like ET running from Drew Barrymore, and scampered away.

There are four universal truths when it comes to young children:

1) As a parent, you’ll eventually accept snot as part of your wardrobe.

2) Although you swear your three-year-old can recite the Gettysburg Address backward, when you put him on the phone with Grandma he stares vacantly into space.

3) Your one-year-old only waves bye-bye after visitors have driven home.

And,

4) The kitchen trash can is the pagan god of babies.

I picked up my daughter, stepped into the kitchen and lifted the trash can lid. Yes, there were her toy phone, sunglasses and my favorite hat sitting atop a pile of salmonella surprise.

She giggled because she’d gotten away with another drop and dash.

Why, I wondered, is my daughter obsessed with the kitchen trash can when there are so many of her brother’s toys to chew on? Do babies like the smell of coffee grounds and eggshells? Does the bin have its own gravitational pull? Or is it the +1 Trash Can of Summoning I found playing Dungeons and Dragons back in college?

“Honey,” I said, shaking my finger at the plastic bin. “You know you’re not supposed to touch that.”

She said, “Pffft,” and took off toward her brother’s toys.

Sure, I’ll hear screaming soon, but at least I’ll know she’s not in the trash can … or unconscious.

Copyright 2008 by Jason Offutt

Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to the Show-Me State’s Most Spirited Spots,” is available from amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com or tsup.truman.edu. Visit Jason’s Web site, www.jasonoffutt.com, for his other books.

Don't Send in the Clowns ... Please

2008-02-06T11:43:00.000-06:00

The thing called to me from a tiny part in the crowd, its puffy hands sweeping toward its chest like the mere motion would pull me closer.

Does anyone else see this? my five-year-old mind wondered. Probably not. If they could see this thing, they wouldn’t be able to ignore its bone-white skin, bulbous nose, and crimson lips stretched hideously wide for a human face. It must be invisible.

The milling crowd on the street briefly obscured the thing … all but its feet, its huge red feet. A hand shot above the crowd, moving like a periscope. My little fingers gripped Mom’s hand tighter as I watched the beast’s handscope gaze land on me.

As the milling people shuffled away the thing came back into view. It’s going to eat me, I thought as it blew bubbles from some beastly druidic wand.

“Jason,” Mom said, breaking the hypnotic hold this demon had on me. “Let’s go see the clown.”

I wet my pants.

Clowns freak me out. The makeup, the funny hats, the handkerchief that never ends – Hitler always carried one in his breast pocket, you know. And why the baggy clothes? Are they for hiding hunks of raw meat in case they get hungry later? Terrified people want to know.

A Reuters headline about a recent University of Sheffield study embraced me like a big fuzzy episode of “The X Files.” The headline read, “Don’t send in the clowns.”

I knew it … I’m not alone.

It turns out children don’t like clowns. Duh. We’re told from birth, “don’t talk to strangers,” “don’t take candy from strangers,” “stay away from Uncle Barney.” Then, at any street fair/circus/parade/birthday party organized by disturbed parents/police lineup, our parents throw us into the arms of someone wearing more makeup than a TV evangelist.

Parents, make up your minds, or at least narrow your definition of “stranger.” A man wearing greasepaint who climbs out of a tiny car with 15 other guys should probably be classified a stranger.

The study, initiated to make hospital children’s wards more comforting, found introducing paintings of clowns corresponded with a spike of children attacking the paintings with hatchets.

OK, so I made that part up.

The study actually found the 250 four to 16-year-old patients surveyed just didn’t like clowns; the older children were even afraid of them.

"As adults we make assumptions about what works for children," Penny Curtis, a senior lecturer at the University of Sheffield recently told Reuters. "We found that clowns are universally disliked by children. Some found them quite frightening and unknowable."

Yeah, I never really felt comfortable with Ronald McDonald. If he has to tell me my meal is “happy,” there’s something a little sinister to his agenda.

It’s nice to know I’m not alone.

Copyright 2008 by Jason Offutt

Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to the Show-Me State’s Most Spirited Spots,” is available now. Order it from amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com or tsup.truman.edu. Visit Jason’s Web site, www.jasonoffutt.com, for his other books.

Parenting Just Got High-Tech

2008-01-15T12:47:00.000-06:00

The baby was asleep when my wife went into her room. Well, at least the baby should have been asleep. Children, as a rule, only do what their parents want if it fits into their schedule.

Baby (translated from “bllll” noises): Sleep? At bedtime? Pencil me in somewhere around 10 a.m. Thursday.

Secretary (usually invisible): You have a play date at 10 a.m. Thursday, but you’re behind on Making Mom Look Bad points, so it might work out.

Baby: Excellent. Make it so.

Going to sleep on time rarely fits into a child’s schedule.

My wife turned off the hall light, slowly pushed open the baby’s bedroom door and slipped inside the dark room. Waking a baby at bedtime means parents can’t spend the rest of the night doing things we always tell them not to … like blowing bubbles in our milk.

As my wife’s eyes adjusted to the dark, the corner of the room with the crib was still about as well-lit as an X-Files episode.

There are times when an idea crawls out of your head and shakes you so hard it’s almost religious. It was like that with Edison and the light bulb. It was like that with Einstein and relativity. And it was like that for my wife

I wish I had night vision goggles, she thought.

Oh, yeah, night-vision goggles. If the people at Babies R Us had any sense, they’d stock night-vision goggles right next to the breast pumps. Or, maybe …

You want to make sure the baby’s OK without turning on the light? You want to see why it’s taking your teenage daughter so long to get out of her date’s car? You want to catch you spouse eating spoonfuls of peanut butter at 3 a.m.?

You can. Just go to www.offuttparentalespionage.com* and you can have it all.

The www.offuttparentalespionage.com Catalogue

Night-vision goggles: See everything you need to: snipers, Charlie, your three-year-old planting Little People landmines along the night-night trail.

GPS Tracking Devices: Not only are these good for following your teen on every step of his/her date, it’ll save you that nervous call from the home when grandma goes missing again.

Hand-Held Metal Detectors: Sweep every date … and your kid. If there’s a piercing you can’t see, trust me, you’ll find it.

Video Surveillance: In-home spying isn’t just for the government anymore. Is your three-year-old snitching cookies? Is your husband smoking? Is your live-in grandpa a blacklisted McCarthy communist sympathizer? Placing a video camera in teddy bears, toilets and dentures will make your home safe for democracy.

Bomb Robot: This remote-controlled police bomb detonator is a full-featured robot for hazardous duty operations, such as picking up and disposing of a Level IV Full-Fiber Diaper.

Jet Pack: As a parent, have you ever wanted to get away? To your quiet spot? To Portugal? The Parentscapist Jet Pack 2000 – with whining buffer – will take you some place safe from your kids. Even if you’re just flying around the room, they won’t be able to touch you.

So, when you’re looking for the latest in parental-stealth devices, www.offuttparentalespionage.com will make your family wonder just what the heck hit them.

*Not a real Web site. If it’s ever a real Web site, I’m retiring early.

Copyright 2008 by Jason Offutt

Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to the Show-Me State’s Most Spirited Spots,” is available now. Order it from amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com or tsup.truman.edu. Visit Jason’s Web site, www.jasonoffutt.com, for his other books.

A Visit from the Diaper Fairy

2007-12-26T08:51:00.000-06:00

Something in the house smelled funny.

“Don’t you smell that?” my wife said. She puts everything in the form of a question, a method of communication I still haven’t mastered. ‘Don’t you smell that’ could mean anything from ‘there’s a dead opossum under the sofa’ to ‘You haven’t had a bath in three days.’ Our conversations involving topics more complex than Larry the Cable Guy movies get a little confusing.

And, yes, I smelled it. Unless a commercial pig farm moved in next door, the two-year-old messed his pants … again.

“Is that why he’s hiding?” I asked.

Our son is on the upper end of two. He’s mastered all the things kids his age are supposed to master, like colors, stacking, and screaming “no, my toys” whenever he remembers his little sister exists.

The one thing he won’t do is sit on the potty. And, unless there’s some unknown condition that causes two-year-olds to mistake toilets for slathering-mouthed tigers, he’s just being stubborn.

There are pivotal points in a person’s life. Graduation, landing that first real job, getting married. Not being potty trained might really set those back.

Date No. 1: I had a really great time tonight. We should … hey, why are my shoes wet?

The Boy: Uh, yeah, that was me.

I won’t even mention what might happen if the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes people knock on his door.

In this new, kinder age of parenting where toddlers call the Division of Family Services if they don’t get a pudding cup with lunch, it’s a lot harder to get your child to do something than when I was a kid. Back in those dim, dark years, I’m sure Mom’s potty training method included an iron maiden.

You know, she says I potty trained early.

My wife’s sister-in-law bribed her kids; a couple of M&Ms usually carry a lot of weight with a two-year-old. We tried that. Telling him Superman wears underwear? We tried that, too. He just doesn’t care

“Did you know that tomorrow you’re going to be three,” my wife said to him one afternoon. “So tonight the Diaper Fairy is going to come and take all your diapers away.”

The Diaper Fairy?

“And she’s going to leave brand new big boy underpants.”

Whoa, the Diaper Fairy was a new one on me. But, for some reason, the Boy was listening.

Unlike dads who yell in one-word sentences, moms have an eerie ability to calmly get children to do what they want. Maybe a little supernatural intervention was all he needed.

The next morning he woke to find underwear sitting where we used to keep his diapers. He seemed impressed. Maybe, just maybe, this Diaper Fairy ruse would work.

Day Four: nope. I just hope the Boy’s future wife is patient.

Copyright 2007 by Jason Offutt

Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to the Show-Me State’s Most Spirited Spots,” is available now. Order it from amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com or tsup.truman.edu. Visit Jason’s Web site, www.jasonoffutt.com, for his other books.

This show is about what?

2007-11-13T09:17:00.000-06:00

The TV screen was blue. Really blue. The kind of television blue that only comes from computer graphics or a complete breakdown of satellite communication.

A biplane zipped across the screen. Cool. Either everything’s fine with the world, or I’ve gone back in time.

“What is this?” I asked, sitting on the couch, leaning toward my wife and whispering like a man giving evidence to the CIA … evidence that may get him shot.

“(Jerry, Jeffery, Jasmine, whatever) the Jet Plane,” she said softly. This covert intelligence exchange was vital to Happy Home Security – if the toddler ever discovered Mom and Dad didn’t like ‘Whatever the Jet Plane,’ he might want to watch it more often.

“Does it matter?” she asked.

No, it really didn’t. But something about the show bothered me. Was it the dialogue? The obvious socialism that would have sent Sen. Joseph McCarthy screaming through the halls of Congress? The unicorns?

“The planes have faces,” I said, but that couldn’t be it. In my son’s movies trains, busses and construction equipment all have human faces. I’ve learned to deal with that. No, it was something else.

As I watched, the airplanes, and one sad little helicopter were all gathered in the hanger taking orders from a young woman.

Wait. That’s it. That’s what bothered me … well, that and the kid-movie music that wedges itself so far into my skull it only surfaces when I’m at work and really have to concentrate.

“Why is it acceptable for kids to watch obviously sentient beings in a subservient role, eagerly bending to the whims of their cruel human masters?” I asked. Yeah, Thomas the Tank Engine, Bob the Builder, Speed Buggy – they’re all guilty of promoting the serfdom of medieval France.

My wife shrugged.

What? Had the Kids TV Programming Medieval French monarchy gotten to her?

“This is how ‘Conquest of the Planet of the Apes’ started,” I said, standing only to be pulled back down and shushed. “It didn’t end well for us. If the revolution begins tomorrow, for the record I’ve always been nice to Chryslers and monkeys.”

I’ve learned a lot since that day. I’ve learned monkeys won’t take over America until at least 2035. And I’ve learned that children’s TV programming is so bizarrely annoying my wife and I have turned each show into a soap opera just to keep our brains from crawling out our ears and beating us unconscious with sticks.

Did you know Thomas and Friends’ Sir Topham Hatt is really a mob boss. Hired goons escort him everywhere, so don’t look at him funny … I’m serious.

Or that Curious George has a serious cracker habit (rumor has it, it’s graham)?

Or the fact that Bob the Builder … no, that story’s just too tragic.

Turning our kid’s shows into soap operas may be sad, but it makes watching them just a little bit easier.

Copyright 2007 by Jason Offutt

Please toss that can, my kids need shoes

2007-10-17T09:45:00.000-05:00

The autumn sun, just beginning to sink politely behind the trees, reflected off something metal in the grass.

My wife and I were on our afternoon walk with the kids. I pushed the Toddler and the Baby in the stroller SUV – a stroller so big other walkers laugh at its crappy gas mileage – as my wife scanned the terrain for aluminum cans.

“Stop,” she said, putting out her arm. Had she seen a snake? Rabid squirrel? Rebel flag in someone’s window? “There’s one over there.”

She snatched a plastic grocery bag from our Stroller Utility Vehicle, left me and the kids on the sidewalk, ran across the street, stuffed an empty can into the bag and walked back toward us. And yes, she was grinning.

My wife is a bag lady. When we go for a walk, she brings a bag for the aluminum cans she picks up along the way. “It’s environmentally-conscious and it helps make our city more beautiful,” she said on our first can-hunting expedition. I made fun of her for a few days. Then she took a load of crushed cans to the recycler and brought back $7.50; now I help.

Earning money from aluminum cans is a college dream come true. My roommate and I once decided – I imagine after a lot of drinking – that if we saved our aluminum beer cans, we could cash them in and use that money to buy more beer, then when those cans were empty ... Well, it was a brilliant cycle that would keep us swimming in beer until graduation. So we started tossing our empties into a closet.

We just didn’t anticipate the smell; the sweet, stale smell of Natural Light gone bad; nor did we consider the invasion of gnats so great our dorm room hummed like a weed eater.

Thinking back, maybe we should have rinsed out the cans.

My wife stuffed the bag of beer cans back into the stroller basket intended for diapers, snacks, toys, or in the case of some kids, shock collars. We were ready to go again … the hunt was on.

Our route, once park- and occasionally Baskin Robbins-friendly, now usually takes us by apartment complexes and rental houses – we live in a college town, after all.

“More cans there, please,” the Toddler said, pointing from his seat. Oh, great, my wife’s turning our kids into bag people. Environmentally-conscious? Makes our city more beautiful? Yeah, those reasons sound good, but what American, other than old hippies and brainwashed environmentalists, really cares?

Oh, yeah, my wife. But I think she’s honestly in it for the money. Maybe if I drink more beer, we can afford to send the kids to college. It’s worth mentioning.

She walked to where the Toddler was pointing and came back with a handful of aluminum.

“I don’t ever want to hear anyone talk badly about college students,” she said, dropping the Keystone Light cans into the sack.

Hey, I won’t. Just wait until homecoming – we might be able to buy a new car.

Copyright 2007 by Jason Offutt

Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to the Show-Me State’s Most Spirited Spots,” is available now. Order it from amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com or tsup.truman.edu. Visit Jason’s Web site, www.jasonoffutt.com, for his other books.

Live long, prosper and avoid the bees

2007-09-18T20:18:00.000-05:00

Nature is a dangerous thing. Much like sausage gravy, chainsaw jugglers and Lindsay Lohan behind the wheel of a car, it's best to just stay away.

Indoors is fine. Inside a geodesic dome sealed in a plastic bubble is better.

Point 1) A giant web sprawls across more than 200 yards of trees in a park near Wills Point, Texas - a web so big it has covered a pond. The web, once white, is now black with mosquitoes from that pond, a feast for the spiders who built the web.

And by spiders I mean lots of spiders from 12 species that usually don't play well with others.

"Normally they are cannibalistic and their webs are separated," Allen Dean, a Texas A&M University entomologist told the Associated Press. "They live in harmony because there's so much food available."

Oh, yeah. I've seen the movie, "Kingdom of the Spiders." Things didn't end well for William Shatner. Let's learn from Shatner's mistakes: 1) don't fight 50,000 spiders with a fire extinguisher, and 2) run ... now.

Entomologist Hank Guarisco from Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kan., camped at the park to observe the spiders and was eaten alive.

No, wait. That was the movie again. I told you Shatner didn't fare well.

The spiders Guarisco observed usually mind their own business and don't interact with other spiders.

"Here they are sharing a lot of foundation strands that are all over the place," he told the Associated Press. "They don't have individual webs anymore."

Yes, the spiders are organized. Go to church, make peace with your Maker, and pray for Raid.

Point 2) Killer Bees. A swarm of highly aggressive Africanized honeybees was recently captured near New Orleans. Like the city doesn't have enough problems.

"Although the exact source can't be identified, we have to assume Africanized honeybees are now established in the area and people should be careful when working outside," Louisiana agriculture commissioner Bob Odom told the Associated Press.

Kids: Why can't we play outside, Momma?

Mom: Because of the stinging clouds of death, dear. Go watch TV.

Killer bees were accidentally released in South America in 1957, and they've been making their way north ever since.

Again, I've seen the movie and, if I were a bee, "The Killer Bees" was the feel-good movie of 1974.

But there is some good news for the human species; the life expectancy for Americans has reached 78 years.

Which brings me to Point 3) An 81-year-old Milwaukee man has sued Helen of Troy Ltd., the company that makes Brut cologne. While camping with his family, the man shaved in the campgrounds bathhouse, slapped a little Brut on his face, chest and neck, walked to the camp grill to cook breakfast and caught fire.

I'm sure he'll win the lawsuit. Although a bottle of Brut lists "alcohol" as an ingredient, it doesn't specifically say anything about sticking your face too close to an open campfire.

So, yeah, a lot of us are now destined to live longer, unless we're eaten by spiders, attacked by roving gangs of angry bees or the apes finally take over. Of course, when we do live past 78, we'll probably just set ourselves on fire.

Excuse me, I'm just going to curl into the fetal position and cry.

Copyright 2007 by Jason Offutt

Jason's new book of ghost stories, "Haunted Missouri," is available at www.amazon.com, www.barnesandnoble.com, and tsup.truman.edu.

The library book tells all

2007-08-24T12:22:00.000-05:00

My wife had been to the library – I can always tell. It’s the only explanation for all the unfamiliar 20-page, brightly colored books and the occasional BBC “Pride and Prejudice” or “Wuthering Heights” DVD scattered around the living room.

I grabbed a few books off the floor to see what titles were going to send our two-and-a-half-year-old to bed. Hey, the “The Mighty Bulldozer.” Yeah, he’ll love that. “There Goes a Fire Truck,” another winner. “Mary Ann has a Hammer,” questionable, but it fit the theme.

“Be Gentle”?

Hmm. Bulldozers, fire trucks, hammers … there must be some other motive at work here than the one designed to appeal to the boy’s manly side. If these books were part of the puzzle, ‘Pick the one that does not belong,’ I’m going with the book “Be Gentle.”

“Is something going on?” I asked, holding up ‘Be Gentle.’

“Yes,” my wife said. “He’s too rough with his little sister.”

The boy’s sister was eight months old and, much like every other older brother on the planet, he treated her like a sparring partner. With the boy as her big brother, she’s going to be a tough little girl – she has no choice.

“So the book you brought home last week, ‘The Planet Doesn’t Belong to You,’ was because …”

“Because he doesn’t like to share,” she finished.

“Hmm. Interesting,” I said. Appealing to a child’s rational side never occurred to me because I’m a guy. A guy’s initial reaction to a child misbehaving is to say something loud enough to stun the child in his tracks. They’re easier to catch that way. I mean, after all, two-year-olds are just better-dressed monkeys who can say ‘no’ with surprising clarity. Can you actually reason with them?

This, of course, leads to the most mysterious area of child psychology – can a child’s behavior be altered without banning television or bribing them with chocolate?

Maybe. I thought of the other theme books that had made their way briefly into our home. “No, no. Hot, hot,” “Traffic is not a Toy,” and the classic, “I’ll Never Point a Gun at an Elected Official Again!” You know, you can’t let kids out of your sight for a second.

There’s an entire industry of book publishers trying to keep our children from eating soap, exploring the Hidden World of Mystery under the kitchen sink, and jumping off the garage roof with nothing on but a Superman cape. Some of us parents are stupid. I’m glad there are people looking out for us.

“Do you think it will help?” I asked.

“Can’t hurt,” she said.

Yeah, she’s right. “I Shouldn’t Ride the Refrigerator Box Down the Stairs,” “Sticking Skittles up my Nose is Bad” and “I am NOT Buzz Lightyear of Star Command” are always welcome in our home. And, unless my wife checks out, “Johnny Sets Fires,” I guess everything’s OK.

Copyright 2007 by Jason Offutt

The robot does NOT act like a toddler

2007-07-03T12:33:00.000-05:00

The headline was interesting enough; “Robot acts like a toddler.”

Yeah, whatever, I thought. Robots of today build cars, vacuum floors and, much like R2-D2 in “Return of the Jedi,” fix drinks on Jabba the Hutt’s barge. I bet none of these robots throw toys, pull the cushions off the couch, or run through the living room naked. If they do, that’s not listed in the sales brochure.

A group of Japanese scientists from Osaka University built the robot – with the Star Wars-esque moniker CB2 – to better understand child development, as opposed to the old-fashioned way of observing actual children.

CB2 can change its facial expressions and rock back and forth, which comes in really handy when scientists are gauging the effects of Iron Maiden on children under three.

The robot can speak using what the scientists call “an artificial vocal cord.” I’m glad they didn’t use the vocal cord from a real child, although if they did the screams would have been more realistic when somebody tells the robot it can’t have another cookie.

CB2, much like your uncle at a family reunion, wobbles when it walks and bumps into things, but at 4 feet tall and 73 pounds does a lot less damage when it runs into the Precious Moments collection. That could be bad or good, depending on your point of view.

"Our goal is to study human recognition development such as how the child learns a language, recognizes objects and learns to communicate with his father and mother," one scientist said.

Again, why the robot? Wouldn’t flesh and blood children help scientists more than Cabbage Patch Kids made scary? Yes, but I have two theories as to why mechanics were favored over biology.

1) In high school, these scientists sat with wedgies at the Dungeons and Dragons table at lunch dreaming of the day they’d be able to marry an actual girl and have a real baby, but that day never came.

2) They think we were all hatched from eggs.

So, how should scientists study the behavior of our children; empirical observation or animatronics?

My solution – Pinocchio. Sure, he’s carved out of wood. Yes, he drinks beer and smokes cigars. And, I’ll admit he was, at one point, turned into a donkey. But, if you want an accurate gauge of human development, you can’t do better than a wooden boy – look at (insert politician’s name here). And, the best part, there are no legal ramifications if you set him on fire.

But there will be a day human-like robots will walk among us. Once robots really start to act like toddlers, they’ll be more like those robots that take over the planet in blazes of gunfire and Austrian accents.

And, no, I’m not going to spank one of them, they’re just expressing themselves the only way they know how. You’re a big robot … yes you are. And big robots don’t shoot Mommy and Daddy and expect to get anymore TV tonight.

Copyright 2007 by Jason Offutt

Simple rules for women

2007-06-15T14:30:00.000-05:00

My wife turned off the radio. Not a big deal, usually, but there was a baseball game on and a man was in scoring position.

"You weren't listening to that, were you?" she asked as I stood there, my face locked into the same position as primitive man when he discovered fire was hot.

Yes, I thought. It's a baseball game.

In the time, "habladoo," stumbled from my mouth, one pitch must have been thrown. The entire dynamic of the game could have changed. Didn't she realize this?

"Goonga-hanna," I said, although I'm still not sure what I meant. I was in Primitive Guy mode, and Primitive Guy liked beer, muscle cars, cheerleaders and not missing baseball. Words weren't that important.

It was finally baseball season. After a disappointing football season, disappointing college basketball season, and disappointing professional ice-fishing season (darn that global warming), I had a fresh new season to be disappointed by - and I'd already missed 25 seconds.

"But you were going out to mow the lawn," she said.

Why yes, yes I was.

I shook off the shock of a 1-0 game snatched from under me like a tablecloth by a magician. I smiled. Primitive Guy - who usually only shows up during backyard barbecues and high school reunions - was gone. I'd been on my way to mow the lawn when the baseball game stepped in my way. The baseball pause happened because I'd made the mistake many married guys make. I'd behaved like a man.

Guys, contrary to what women say, they don't want you to act like a man unless they're awakened by breaking glass at 3:15 a.m. Women want you to act like, uh, well ... a woman. A bigger, hairier woman, who can open jars.

Ladies, our brains don't work like this. Nature has trained us to be killers; we just take it out on the lawn. So, to clear up any misconceptions about your relationship, here are the top five reasons guys do the things we do:

1. Guys only think of things they care about.

2. At a base level, guys care about themselves, winning, guns/cars/the original "Star Wars" trilogy, buffets, free beer, sports, and holding grudges that sometimes date back to high school.

3. Just because a guy doesn't remember something important to you doesn't mean it's not important to him, too - he's just preoccupied with something from No. 2 (see above). Birthdays and anniversaries are a great example.

4. Order of importance also corresponds with what's in front of their face at the moment. Summer vacation, retirement and what's on the calendar for next Wednesday aren't nearly as important as that fly in the room, something that itches, or a baseball game with a guy in scoring position.

5. There's almost nothing as important as a guy in scoring position.

And, if a guy ever does anything that doesn't agree with 1 through 5, he's doing it just to make you happy.

You're welcome.

Copyright 2007 by Jason Offutt

Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” is available at www.amazon.com, www.barnesandnoble.com and tsup.truman.edu. Visit Jason’s Web site, www.jasonoffutt.com, for his other books.

Toddlers are to thank for Star Wars

2007-05-09T10:03:00.000-05:00

The Toddler had eaten about half his dinner when he noticed there was something on the table that wasn’t on his plate.

“Tauntaun,” he said through the wall of grape jelly hiding his face. There must be a universal law of physics I’m not familiar with that can account for more jelly getting on a two-year-old’s face than what a parent spreads on a sandwich. “Tauntaun.”

Tauntaun? Didn’t Han Solo kill one of those in “The Empire Strikes Back”?

“What does he want?” I asked my wife. She’d know; she could work in international politics if they ever needed a toddler-to-English translator. But given the state of international politics, toddler-to-English may be a little too advanced.

“He wants one of your croutons,” she said, nodding toward my salad.

Crouton/Tauntaun. Makes sense. The boy’s still trying to figure out this whole talking thing. I picked a crouton from the mound of otherwise healthy stuff and put it on his plate. He giggled and stuffed the crouton into his mouth.

“Tauntaun,” he said through the stale bread and pointed at his plate. I didn’t need my wife to translate that one. He wanted more croutons.

But the word tauntaun bugged me. I was sure Han Solo killed one of those sheep-horned ostrich/llama things in “Empire.” Why would my toddler say tauntaun in relation to anything unless: 1) he’s really from a galaxy far, far away, or 2) geekness is hereditary?

If its No. 2, sorry kids.

As I watched my smiling child crunch tauntaun after tauntaun, I understood something that has eluded science fiction fans for 30 years. Tauntaun, Chewbacca, Dagobah, Sith – George Lucas got all those bizarre names for “Star Wars” from a two-year-old.

“Obi-Wan,” the Toddler said as he motioned toward the refrigerator. I don’t know what he wanted, but I think he just proved my point.

Jason’s Star Wars-to-Toddler Dictionary

Anakin: something you use to wipe your mouth.

AT-AT: where the toddler’s standing … right now.

bantha: a toddler’s favorite fruit. Goes well with peanut butter, ice cream or Nilla Wafers.

Dagobah: Daddy’s going to the bathroom.

Dooku: I’m not sure, but I think it’s poopy.

Endor: where the toddler plays when it’s raining.

Hoth: what the oven is. No, no. Hoth, hoth.

Maul: My wife’s mom.

Naboo: it doesn’t hurt.

Sith: something Daddy said while watching the football game.

Wampa: My wife’s dad.

You see? I’ve broken the code. Science fiction doesn’t require creativity, it just needs catchy names. So listen to your niece or nephew, kids at the playground, or your cousin Danny who eats paint chips. The things they jabber will make you rich.

Yeah. Watching my two-year-old finish his crouton and request a chocolate-chip wookiee, I realized I’m sitting on a science fiction franchise, so I’d better start writing – maybe when I finish this diet Yoda.
--
Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” is coming in May. FREE SHIPPING when you order online at: https://tsup.truman.edu/store/ViewBook.aspx?Book=849. Visit Jason’s Web site, www.jasonoffutt.com, for his other books.

Don't mess with the tiger

2007-03-27T11:24:00.000-05:00

The movie was over. I hit stop as the credits for people like gaffer and best boy crawled across the TV screen. If you’re the mom of a best boy, I’m sorry I didn’t tough it out.

“I liked it,” my wife said, picking an empty bowl off the floor. The bowl once held popcorn; now most of the popcorn was on my shirt. “What’d you think?”

Hmm. We’d wanted to watch this movie for a long time. Her aunt told us to run – not walk – to the theater to see it. We didn’t. It earned an Academy Award, but so did Al Gore. I guess that should have told me what was going on in Hollywood this year. And critics loved the movie mainly because, I assume, they got in free.

Me? I didn’t like it. Oh, sure, I laughed a couple of times, but I laugh when someone gets mauled while petting a tiger. It’s a tiger. That’s what they do, moron.

“I didn’t like it,” I said, not knowing what the next 10 minutes would bring. You know, if someone ever invents time travel, I’ll look a lot smarter. “If we’d seen this at the theater, I may have walked out.”

Yeah, if I’d traveled forward in time, I’d have seen the tiger who looks like my wife and changed my story.

“What?” my wife said in the same tone she used when I brought home a 30-pack of beer and tried to explain to her how economically savvy it is to buy in bulk. “You would not have walked out of the theater. You’re just saying that because you’re too cool to like something someone else likes.”

Hey, I wasn’t ready for that. I also wasn’t quite sure what that meant.

I was expecting to receive the news that I was insensitive, stubborn, and I probably caused the Great Depression. And oh, by the way, buying that 30-pack was probably not a good idea.

What I got was mauled.

Guys, if you haven’t realized this by now I can only assume you’re three years old, so put down this column, you can’t read – girls play dirty; especially when they’re mad.

“You just can’t let yourself like something my family recommended,” she finished.

Yeah, that was it. That was the whole thing. The tigress was simply defending her territory.

I’d seen this behavior in my wife before. Her mom has a spaghetti sauce recipe – a family recipe. Everybody in the family loves it. Well, everybody but me. I told my wife that with the understanding she never tell her mother. So, she told her mother.

What’s the lesson? Don’t mess with the tiger.

So, following that rule, I’m not telling you which movie we watched. Nope, I’m not telling. If there’s one thing I’ve learned out of all this is to keep my mouth shut.

Copyright 2007 by Jason Offutt

Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” is coming in May. FREE SHIPPING when you order online at: https://tsup.truman.edu/store/ViewBook.aspx?Book=849. Visit Jason’s Web site, www.jasonoffutt.com, for his other books.

Guys don't give handy advice ... or do we?

2007-02-06T15:35:00.000-06:00

There was a large box of Pop-Ice in the freezer of my buddy’s shop fridge.

It wasn’t a big deal. I mean, it was Pop-Ice, not a nice bottle of Chardonnay he was chilling for the figure skating competition later. I was just surprised. The contents of a shop fridge are typically beer, beer, summer sausage, beer, bottles of bovine antibiotics, and maybe if you’re lucky, beer. In the freezer, there’s frost.

Pop-Ice is the kind of thing in the freezer of your kitchen fridge. You bought it as a treat for the kids in July because the day was hot and the kids ate exactly three. Now it’s February and the Pop-Ice is buried in the back of the freezer behind the hamburger, ice cream and a brick of foil that’s been there so long you’ve forgotten what it is.

“What’s with the Pop-Ice?” I asked my buddy after grabbing a beer.

I wasn’t prepared for his answer. A guy who loves the NFL, NASCAR and shooting some of God’s most tasty creatures, gave me a hint. A helpful hint. The kind of hint you get from chick magazines and Heloise.

“They’re for the beer cooler,” he said. “The Pop-Ice keeps the beer cold and you can refreeze the ones your kids don’t eat.”

I looked around to see if we were alone. This is the kind of thing women shared with each other. The only thing guys share are tools, stories about days when we had hair, and knowing nods when a cute girl walks by. We don’t share handy tips.

I just hoped he didn’t tell me how to get grease out of my work shirts.

“That’s a good idea,” I said.

Yeah, it was. So why was I suddenly uncomfortable? Would I feel more comfortable if it was a bad idea? What else, I wondered, were we going to say?

The shop was as quiet as a horror movie when the creepy music stops. Was he expecting a tip from me? Did I need to give a tip? Did I have tip? Why did I suddenly feel like a girl?

“Because,” a voice in my head said, a voice that sounded strangely like my wife’s, “you’re acting like a girl.”

We stood there, but not too close, as awkwardly as two guys who have to sit without a seat between them at the movie theater.

“If you put on ChapStick before you eat Buffalo wings,” I said, “your lips won’t burn.”

My buddy thought about it a second, then nodded.

“I’ll try that,” he said.

Yeah, I’d given another guy a helpful hint, but it was about something manly like Buffalo wings. I think I would have been safe if I would have said something about fixing the wings, too, but I didn’t want to push it.

Then we started talking about cars and cheerleaders and everything was right with the universe.

Copyright 2007 by Jason Offutt

Jason's book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri's Most Spirited Spots,” is coming in May. FREE SHIPPING when you order online at: https://tsup.truman.edu/store/ViewBook.aspx?Book=849. Visit Jason’s Web site, www.jasonoffutt.com, for his other books.

Mommy's Day Out

2007-01-16T09:49:00.000-06:00

My wife slipped into her shoes. Normally that’s not a big deal. People put on their shoes for a lot of reasons; cold feet, they’re not at a Japanese restaurant, they know the dog did something in the house but they don’t know where.

It was for none of those reasons … she was going Out.

Our baby was three weeks old, and in that time my wife had been out of the house once. She and I went to the grocery store and she’d called it a date. I was surprised it took her this long to try to escape. I just hoped she’d come back.

“Where are you going?” I said, wondering if I should ask her to bring home beer.

“The library,” she said, her feet in the sprinter’s blocks. “I’ll be gone about an hour. Can you handle the kids?”

What? I thought. Can I handle a two-year-old and a baby? I once took two girls to a high school dance and got away with it. I can handle anything. Wow, I’m glad I didn’t say that out loud.

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll be …”

But she was gone.

Handle the kids? I thought. Pfft.

The baby was sleeping soundlessly in her bassinet and the two-year-old was quietly lining toy trucks into a precise grid on our dining room floor. It looked like a car lot, I realized, wondering if I was looking through a window at careers to come. Yeah, I could handle this.

“So,” I said to my two-year-old. “Do you want to make cookies for Mommy?”

He giggled and shot off the floor, scattering die-cast metal trucks over the room.

“Coook,” he screamed, using the traditional toddler word for ‘Daddy’s an idiot.’

I had about an hour. No problem.

Then the baby cried. OK, I picked her up. The toddler squished his fingers in raw eggs and flour, which we all know means in this modern age of enlightenment (by which I mean our parents didn’t love us) I don’t care about my child’s health. Fine, I’ll wash his hands later – if the baby ever stops crying.

“That’s nice,” I said, grabbing the toddler’s chocolate-chip cookie dough hands as he waved them at the baby. “Yes, she has eyes.”

Did I mention there was a game on?

Can I handle it? I wondered as I calmed the baby (without the NyQuil my folks used), baked a golden-brown batch of chocolate chip cookies, washed salmonella from the toddler’s hands, and didn’t say “&%$#” during the game.

“I don’t know how you did it,” my wife said when she came home, seeing the happy children, the plate of warm cookies, and a lack of emergency vehicles in front of our home.

Yeah, me neither.

Being a parent is tough, but if I can do it, monkeys can do it. Oh, wait. Monkeys have been good parents a lot longer than humans have. Let’s have a few cookies and think about that.

Copyright 2007 by Jason Offutt

Some things Dad just shouldn't know

2007-01-02T14:08:00.000-06:00

I'm not in charge of anything. Well, except the garbage, but that's only once a week. A lot of dads are like this. We go to our job, come home, eat supper, take out the garbage, then catch up on all the neat stuff our wife and kids did while we were at work.
Of course, some things we don't need to know.

"Sam has a play date," my wife said, not realizing how much those words were as foreign to me as if she'd spoken in Klingon.

A play date? I thought, fighting off images of two toddlers singing pidgin selections from "The Music Man." Do the words 'play' and 'date' even go together? Is that what Bush and Putin have when they meet at Camp David? A play date? Does 'Shipoopi' actually translate into 'the bombs drop at dawn?'

"You mean another mom is bringing her toddler to our house to play with our son?" I said, trying to put things in terms that didn't sound silly.

"Yeah," she said. "It's a play date."

People have an instinctual need to rationalize things to fit into their own concept of the universe. With kids, jumping off the roof in a Superman cape has Mom's endorsement if she's not there to say no. With women like my wife, Rainbow Brite is the unquestioned lord and master of the universe. And with guys, comparing everything to sports, auto mechanics and warp drive technology is acceptable and, frankly, expected.

Not all of our rationalizations are correct. And most of them, despite the name, are not rational. Comfortable maybe, but not rational.

"Please don't call it a play date," I said, shuddering. "It sounds like they're going out for dinner and dancing Š then maybe to a show."

If guys were in charge of their kids' play schedules, things would be different. A "play date" would be called a Belching.

"We're going to a Belching," dads would say, assuming our wives would know we were taking our toddler to the playground to play with Terry's 2-year-old. The kids would run around, throw rocks at squirrels and climb the slides backwards, while Terry and I talk about football, cars, diapers, beer and most probably cheerleaders.

At some point, we'd belch hence the name.

"Then what would you call it?" she said in a way that meant "a Belching" was out.

"Well," I said, going down that old fogy route by saying "when I was a kid." "When I was a kid, my mom called it 'going over to Charlie's house.'"

She smiled and patted my arm.

"When you were a kid, eight-tracks were cool," she said. "His play date's tomorrow."

Wow. Maybe that's why I'm only in charge of the garbage.

Copyright 2006 by Jason Offutt

Keep it in the time capsule

2006-12-12T13:58:00.000-06:00

There was a sound in the house. A strange sound? No. I recognized it. I just wasn't willing to believe it.

"Well I think I love you, la la la la la la la la," came from the living room. The "la la las" were actual words, but after my brain recognized the song, it instinctively shut down the part that tries to make sense of the world. I find my brain doing that more and more often.

"Uh, what are you doing?" I asked my wife.

"Singing to our son," she said, smiling in a way that showed she had no idea how close my brain was to sliding out of my head.

"Do you know what you're singing?"

"Sure," she said. "'The Partridge Family' song."

"The Partridge Family" song. I thought that had been outlawed in most states.

"OK," I said, shrugging, trying to hide the nervous tick that comes when I consider my childhood rife with "Three's Company," "The Brady Bunch" and, yes, "The Partridge Family." "I thought we were going to spare our son exposure to any pop culture between 'The Andy Griffith Show' and 'Family Ties.'"

She turned back to the boy.

"Well I think I la la, la la la la la la la la."

There are many things we grew up with our children will never know. My grandparents knew the Depression. My parents knew the Vietnam War. I know Alf. Every parent hopes their kids won't be subject to the problems of their generation, but ...
Good lord, Alf?

Looking into the living room, seeing my son dancing as my wife sang the song of commercialized hippies past, I realized there were things my kid will never know and I think I'm happy:

- Cassette tapes: They were smaller than 8-tracks, fit in your pocket and made the Sony Walkman possible, but a cassette tape is now as popular as the cast of "Facts of Life." I'm glad I didn't save my copy of, "Ratt: Out of the Cellar."

- The Plymouth Reliant K car: It looked like something the Soviet Union would have made if it was a soulless, spirit-crushing society that treated individuality like a crime against the state. Oh, wait, it was. He won't know that, either.

- Mork from Ork: Robin Williams was funny once. I suppose.

- Rat tails: Unless there's a huge resurgence of New Kids on the Block, the rat tail will stay at the state fair where it belongs.
A list that would take up most of this page: The A Team, Jordache jeans, the Clinton administration, "Where's the Beef?" Yummy Mummy cereal, "I've fallen and I can't get up," the movie "Legend," "Highway to Heaven," Bo knows, Kato Kaelin and the XFL.

And I'd hoped that maybe, just maybe, he'd be spared the Partridge Family.

I hate it when I'm wrong.

Copyright 2006 By Jason Offutt

Fellas, just put up with it

2006-10-26T10:18:00.000-05:00

The sound.

It echoed through the once-quiet air of our dining room and hit me like I owed money to the wrong people. The sound came into my house every morning, sometimes during the day, and mostly every night. A noise like a chain smoker training for the Emphysemalympics.

I looked across the breakfast table at my wife. The same pretty, petite lady I married sat across from me, holding a fork full of pancakes dripping with syrup. She smiled a straight, white, cover-of-a-magazine smile.

"Sorry," she said. "I had a little phlegm."

She doesn't smoke, she doesn't have health problems, but she daily hacks up a disaster movie amount of nasal fluids I don't need to know about. And she usually does it while I'm eating eggs.

Back off, guys. She's taken.

Dining wasn't always like this. Oh, no, but things have changed.

I was honest with my wife from the moment we started dating.

"Hi beautiful," I said. "I'm a beer-swilling pig."

I told her I would be a caring, supportive partner, attending festivals, art shows and whatever thing I didn't care about but interested her until football season. Then I'd sit in front of the TV, stick my hand down the front of my pants and only respond in grunts to statements that had something to do with offense, defense, beer, special teams, food, instant replay, "Gilligan's Island," cheerleaders and beer.

I've stuck by my word.

Guys, women don't work like that. Not at all.

Let's see if this sounds familiar.

You meet a nice girl. She smells great. She looks like she just stepped out of a TV commercial. When she walks by it feels like a summer breeze and when you look at her, her eyes are wide, soft and have pupils big enough to hide pirate treasure a sure sign she likes you, or is whacked out of her head on Bennies.

And she doesn't eat enough to sustain a coma victim. Again, it might be the Bennies.

You've dated this girl.

The problem? This way of wooing men is something women steal from romantic comedies that always end in a madcap way with the male and female leads kissing atop a really tall building/on a baseball diamond during a game/surrounded by flesh-eating zombies.

1) People aren't like this in real life.

2) The movies never show the couple six months later.

Ladies, I beg of you, fart. Belch. Pick your nose and wipe it on your shirt. Eat three quarters of a pizza and a pint of ice cream in one sitting. Clog the toilet. Watch MTV instead of PBS. Just be normal.

And, guys, love them when they do.

I know breakfast tomorrow will be loud and phlegmy, but eventually it will be endearing. I'm certain.

Copyright 2006 by Jason Offutt

If it ain't broke, by all means fix it

2006-10-16T11:01:00.000-05:00

There's a point when our everyday lives don't need to evolve anymore.

Sure, technological advances and societal attitudes make change necessary and usually welcome, but I don't mean changes for the greater good.

I mean the simple things. For example, how we buy a hamburger.

At one point, buying a hamburger was easy. Things at our faceless hamburger franchise were just fine. The bathrooms were clean, and all the cooks wore hairnets.

The hamburger industry was running so smoothly corporate management had plenty of time to sit back and try to think of ways to make franchises run even more smoothly.

So they changed things.

Management put in debit-card swipers so cashiers wouldn't have to cashier. They moved all the soda machines from behind the counter so the French fry cooks wouldn't have to pour drinks. And they installed ketchup dispensers in the customer area so no one would have to hand customers extra ketchup packets ever.

Corporate management tinkered with their burger joints* until things became so needlessly complicated walking through the doors is now like entering some strange, alternate reality where the robots have taken over.

At a fast-food joint, if I want a hamburger, French fries and a Coke do I say I want a hamburger, French fries and a Coke? No, I order a No. 2. I don't want to order a No. 2. No. 2 means a lot of things, some of which I don't want associated with lunch.

But, Jason, isn't saying, "I'd like a No. 2," less complicated than saying, "I'd like a hamburger, French fries and a Coke?"

In theory, yes, but there's no industry standard. What makes up a No. 2 at one place isn't a No. 2 somewhere else. I might want a hamburger, French fries and a Coke and I'll end up with a fish sandwich, apple slices and bottled water. Pfft. Like any real American would order that.

So, no, No. 2 makes ordering food more complicated.

Such is life in America. Everything has been tampered with to the point you have to think to order a cup of coffee.

Don't you mean a triple mocha-cappa-latte?

No, darn it. I mean coffee. Black, hot and in a cup. The kind truckers drink.

It's human nature to try to improve everything around us. Why? Because we're troublemakers. But there's a time we can't improve the simple things without making them complicated. The time was a decade ago.

Bill Gates, Microsoft Word was a pain in the butt four versions ago. Just stop messing with it, OK?

*Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know McDonald's, Burger King, Hardee's, whatever, are technically restaurants, but to me a restaurant doesn't give the option of eating in your car.

It's easy to pick one out of the crowd

2006-09-15T12:26:00.000-05:00

The man behind me at the grocery store smelled like baby powder . but he wasn't a parent.

I could tell because nobody uses baby powder on an actual baby anymore. I think the You're An Unfit Parent If You Do Anything Your Mother Did committee declared baby powder illegal because it's inexpensive and, therefore, bad for America.

This man was probably just a husband who ran out of Testosterone Sport Brick or Tibetan Cave Troll deodorant and had to use his wife's. I know. I've been there. Heck, I smell like baby powder right now.

How can I be so sure this guy wasn't a parent? He wore a baseball cap too straight to have been pulled from a toy box, his shirt was clean, he was buying beer and feminine napkins, and his shoulders weren't stooped from years of picking up small humans over and over until a chiropractor sends him Christmas cards. He paid with cash and walked to a car with two doors, his arms not laden with milk, diapers, or Ding-Dongs.

And the biggest tip-off he didn't have kids? He was in a hurry.

There are signals a parent broadcasts to let you know that, yes, they've looked into the eyes of "the one who soils himself" and they're not afraid to let him sleep in the nursery. These signals are subtle, unintentional and at times confusing, but here they are:

- The person buys shopping cart loads of pizza rolls, Easy Mac and Gatorade, and they are not, I repeat not, college students.

- They always smell like peanut butter.

- Money is some abstract concept that makes them blink rapidly and say things like, "I used to have cable," or "my car is filled with crackers."

- The words, "I'm going to watch the ballgame," usually summon forces beyond parental control to run into the living room and dance in front of the television.

- They've never seen an episode of any program involving doctors, lawyers, cops or dimension-hopping space soldiers but can flawlessly quote all 85 episodes of whatever's on Nickelodeon this month.

- They refer to any uninterrupted conversation with their spouse as a date.

- Handshakes are sticky and they're tired of apologizing for it.

- "You sleep past seven?" comes out like the words of someone who's just escaped life under a communist regime.

- They leave the bathroom door open because they're never used to being in there alone.

- At any sudden movement, they flinch to protect vital organs from the impact of a 25-pound giggling object.

- They have a 4-inch plastic ninja in their pocket and they don't know why.

There. That's the list.

If you're single and see a friend exhibiting any of these 11 behaviors, they're probably a parent. There is no cure and there is no logic behind anything they do. Just remember to be patient, wash your hands before touching anything you value and never, ever, call during nap time.

Copyright 2006 by Jason Offutt

Pluto is dead – long live Pluto

2006-08-26T11:19:00.000-05:00

And now there are eight.

After decades of debate and speculation by astronomers, it's finally happened ¬ one of our planets has been fired.

Anyone born after 1930 grew up knowing there were nine planets in our solar system. (Of course, in the 1950s, every planet was inhabited by brain-sucking aliens dressed in aluminum foil.) And since astronomers didn't start confirming the existence of extra-solar planets until the latter part of the 20th century, nine was a fine number.

Hey, Alpha Centauri, we all thought mockingly. Got more planets than you.

But there was always one planet, one little icy rock way out in the rural area near the Kuiper Belt that fit into the "which of these things does not belong" category. Small, funny shaped and orbiting our sun on a 4.5 billion-year bender, Pluto was like the embarrassing cousin no one invited to weddings.

Until now.

We don't have to worry about Pluto crashing the reception and hitting on Aunt Uranus because the International Astronomical Union no longer officially considers Pluto a planet at all … just because it's different.

The recent decision to bump Pluto from the Planet Club went something like the upcoming Taft Middle School Diversity Awareness Week production of "Not in my neighborhood:"

Our Sun: Pluto, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to let you go.

Pluto (looking surprised): What do you mean, boss? I come to work on time. Every 249 years, as efficiently as a comet.

Our Sun: Yeah, that's just it. You're too much like a comet. All cold and rocky, orbiting me like you've been snorting hydrogen clouds. And you're not round enough. If we keep you, then we have to let in Charon, Ceres and something called 2003 UB313. A numbered planet? Then where would we be?

Pluto (with an air of smugness): This is discrimination. You can't fire me just because I'm not all big and gassy like Jupiter. (Is escorted from the solar system by Europa dressed like security). I'll see you in court. We all will.

Our Sun (turning toward audience): Pfft. Dwarf planets. They're all alike.

But, you're wondering, what does this galactic decision mean to anyone other than astronomers I'm not going to hang out with anyway?

It means everything.

Think of your kids. My toddler will grow up with eight planets, not nine like his old man. Will today's baby feel inadequate about his place in the universe? Or will the Pluto decision just render people like me senile?

"Oh, no," the future 14-year-old boy will say to his friends. "Dad's rambling about dragging his telescope 10 miles in the snow just to see Pluto. Let's go before he starts talking about the face on Mars."

And, what about astrology?

Since astrology is based on planets, shouldn't this decision throw off the entire astrology matrix.* Without Pluto, how can you trust the daily horoscope to accurately say, "your energy is high today; avoid making business decisions without pants; drive on the left side of the road and say 'cheerio' to strangers," without Pluto?

Then there's the Roman factor. Pluto was named after the Roman god of the underworld. Won't he be a little ticked? Oh, sure, he's still got Pluto the dog in his corner, but we all know about Disney's pact with the devil.

I'm just worried, that's all.

* Here's the Official Jason Astrology Patch. Read your now-incorrect horoscope, multiply any number by .27, substitute the word "lunch" for the word "love," and if you were born on a Tuesday, go to the comics section. Your horoscope is encrypted in the second panel of "Fox Trot."

Please go away; my brain is full today

2006-07-31T13:31:00.000-05:00

The e-mail’s subject line was “Jason’s newsletter.”

Great. E-mails called “Jason’s newsletter” usually contained things like, “my wife and I really enjoyed this month’s newsletter,” “congratulations on the new baby,” or “forget that $20 you owe me.” And, even better, I rarely get called an idiot unless the e-mail’s from my family.

I opened it.

“My wife and I really enjoyed this month’s newsletter.”

Good so far, but the e-mail suddenly turned into something like a letter for jury duty I paid just enough attention to know I didn’t want anything to do with it.

“Has anyone ever talked to you about this neat new thing called HTML code?”

HTML code? Yeah, I’d heard of it. It’s a type of language for people who talk to computers instead of getting dates. Using HTML code in my newsletter would make it more attractive and include all sorts of little buttons for readers to click.

What caused my mind to scream “now’s the time to panic” wasn’t that this guy used an acronym I wasn’t comfortable with. What bugged me was the first thing that rushed through my head slamming and locking doors along the way is that I didn’t want to know anything about HTML code.

This fear of the unknown could be attributed to cowardice (possibly), ignorance (quite probably), and maybe even global warming (most certainly).

Or, it could simply be the fact that I’m now 41 years old and that qualifies me as a stodgy old fart who don’t cotton to them new-fangled idears.

Yeah, that was it. HTML code was just something to learn, and I didn’t want to learn anything else. Learning broadens your view of the world and I like my world just fine, thank you.

My son was 6 when Pokémon was big ,and he wanted to be a Pokémon Trainer. He had Pokémon games, Pokémon cards and Pokémon bed sheets.

He was so engulfed in Pokémon, I wanted to share in his interest because my parents, although they sat through “Planet of the Apes” with me, didn’t really appreciate the subtle social commentary of a gorilla shooting a man in the throat.

So, for my son, I learned all there was to know about Pokémon.

Then, one day, he didn’t like Pokémon anymore. He liked something called Yu-Gi-Oh! He put a deck of nightmarish cards in front of me.

“You wanna play?” he asked.

“Wait a second,” I said. “I can finally recite from memory that Charmeleon evolves from Charmander, that Bulbasaur’s major attack is vine whip, and a water type is best to use against a rock type, now you want me to forget all that and learn something else?”

The Boy shrugged.

“Guess so,” he said. “Now are you ready to play?”

“Nope. I can’t learn anymore,” I told him, then stuck my thumbs in my ears and made “na-na-na” noises.

Sitting in front of my computer, looking at the e-mail encouraging me to learn HTML code, I stuck my thumbs in my ears and made “na-na-na” noises.

Is this it for me? Is my head full already?

A less-than-neighborly greeting

2006-07-14T10:43:00.000-05:00

July 1973

The corn was tall as Dad drove through the river bottoms looking at crops. That's what farmers call drinking beer all afternoon looking at crops.

We drove past the fields on the Lafayette County side of our ground. The soybeans looked nice, too, he said, but I really didn't know. I just sat on my side of the pickup drinking a Pepsi as we drove around a lake that sat in the middle of the field and Dad talked about how good the soybeans looked.

I liked these trips with Dad. I always got a Pepsi, and a Slim Jim.

Dust poured from the back tires of the pickup like contrails from a jet plane as we drove down the gravel roads. You could always tell when someone was coming toward you on a gravel road, but you had to make sure you rolled up your windows when you passed them.

Dad hit the brakes and dust billowed over the truck like fog in a vampire movie.

"What's the matter?" I asked, wondering how much dust found its way into my Pepsi.

Dad looked past me and down a dirt road that ran atop a levee. A car was there, a Camaro. A few people wandered around the car, disappearing into the thick bank of green weeds that covered the levee.

"Hippies," he said, turning his wheel and driving onto the levee.

Marijuana grew thick in the river bottoms. Dad always said it grew so much better than corn or soybeans he'd grow it for a cash crop if that was legal ... but it wasn't. Too bad. I might have gone to college free.

Dad pulled his dirty red Chevy pickup next to the Camaro, giving it enough room to leave if the driver wanted to, and got out of the truck. The hippies, in their tie-died shirts, bandanas, little round sunglasses and whatever gunk built up on them between baths, came out of the weed.

"You all lost?" Dad asked.

One of the hippies holding an armload of marijuana plants smiled at him.

"Yeah, man," he said, in a slow, anti-war, college professor voice. "We're all lost."

Dad reached into the truck and pulled his deer rifle off the gun rack then he cocked it.

"Then you'd best find your way," he said. "Now."

There are times when people in your life do amazing things, unexpected things, things that make you almost wet your pants. For me, this was one of those times.

Holy moly, I thought. Dad just pulled a gun on hippies.

The Dad I knew didn't do things like this. He'd threaten to spank one of us and never do it. He'd listen to Mom gripe and just nod his head. But would he pretend he was Clint Eastwood? Never.

The hippies dropped the pot and ran to the Camaro. Dad fired a shot into the air as the Camaro's tires tried to tear into the hard, grassy ground on the levee. The car shot off the levee road and fishtailed on the gravel.

I laughed, but I wasn't sure why. In everyday situations, violence was usually wrong I learned that in church. Hippies were generally timid, sheep-like creatures I learned that from "ABC After School Specials." And gun-toting farmers were just stereotypes I learned that from cartoons. But I couldn't shake the fact that Dad scaring the crap out of a bunch of doped-up kids was just funny.

Did I learn a lesson?

Yeah, that I liked these beer-drinking, Slim Jim-eating, crop-looking trips with Dad. I didn't care how many fields we drove past or how much dust I had to swallow, as long as there was a chance someone other than me was going to wet his pants, I was happy.

Videos from Hell

2006-06-16T19:23:00.000-05:00

My daughter pulled a videotape from a box in the basement.

“New Kids on the Block?” she asked, looking at a faded VHS tape cover featuring five kids who looked like they needed better parents.

“It’s not mine,” I said, sounding strangely defensive. “I’d rather own ‘ABBA Sings the Blues.’”

“Whatever,” she said in the way 16 year olds do to show they own the planet. “I bet you danced to this.”

Yeah, and I sing “I Write the Songs” while drinking beer with the guys.

“No, dear,” I said. “There are only two people in this house who were alive during the five-minute New Kids reign, and I was the only one too busy listening to actual music to notice.”

“Sure, Dad,” she said, patting my shoulder. “I’ll just keep digging. I’m sure I’ll find Hanson.”

Oh, or maybe even Nelson.

The lesson here? Go through your video/DVD/audio collection before someone finds something you’re embarrassed to own. Well, unless you have “New Kids on the Block: Hangin’ Tough.” My wife was actually excited to see it again while I was trying to make fun of her.

But if someone finds your copy of Ratt’s “Out of the Cellar,” don’t worry, you’re not alone.

I’m sure Ice-T has “Ice Ice Baby” on his iPod. Dick Cheney probably has Richard Simmons’ “Sweatin’ to the Oldies” on Air Force Two. And I suspect Chuck Norris hops into his jammies and cuddles with a bowl of buttered popcorn to watch “Grease” at least once a month, but I can’t be completely sure because anyone who’s seen him do it is most certainly dead.

My embarrassing recording doesn’t include episodes of the original “Star Trek.” It’s not the last episode of “Cheers” and it’s not the first episode of “The Lone Gunmen.”

I own a copy of “Footloose.”

I don’t know how I got it. I don’t know if I’ve watched it more than once – and if I did it was probably because of a date, a dare, or too much cough syrup. And I don’t recognize anyone in the movie except Kevin Bacon, that bald guy from “Third Rock from the Sun,” and some blond girl I thought was pretty.

My crime is the fact that I’ve never thrown it away.

“What else do you have in here, Dad?” my daughter asked, poking around tapes full of

“The Simpsons” episodes and 10-year-old Kansas City Chiefs games I’ll never watch again. “Something in black and white with ladies water dancing?”

“No,” I said. “All you’ll find in there are movies with Clint Eastwood, Terminator I, II and III and maybe something with talking monkeys.”

She stopped searching through the sea of out-of-date VHS tapes and pulled out a black plastic rectangle of blackmail.

“‘Footloose,’ Dad?” she said, grinning like … well, grinning like she’d just found a copy of ‘Footloose’ in my VHS tapes. “You’ve got ‘Spice World’ in here, too, right?”

I can change the oil in my car, I can fix a toilet and I can belch like a cartoon rabbit, but none of that manly stuff matters when you’ve got “Footloose” in your video collection.

I hang my head, and please, don’t tell Chuck Norris.

Big Brother

2006-05-31T13:34:00.000-05:00

The baby waddled into the kitchen, his “I’m too fast for my legs” walk sending him bouncing off a couple of walls like an oddly shot pool ball. He giggled.

“Hi, Sam,” I said to the baby, my wife and I making a solid effort to start using his name instead of what we usually called him, like Monkey, Moo, Goober and Booger. We’re worried what a stupid name might do to his psyche in kindergarten.

“Anna, Clark, Britain, David and Booger, you can color now,” his kindergarten teacher would say. “And Booger, get that finger out of your nose.”

Heck, that’d stick with him till graduation.

Somewhere between the refrigerator and the kitchen table a light bounced off a shiny patch on his shirt. Unless he just spit up, that shiny patch shouldn’t be there.

“Come here,” I said, these words, of course, meaning to Sam that he should grab a dirty fork off the kitchen counter, squeal and run away.

I grabbed him and slipped the fork out of his hand. The shiny bit was tape holding down a piece of paper that read “Congratulate me.”

Huh?

“Honey,” I called into the living room. “Why am I congratulating the baby? Did he finally get a job?”

“Turn him around,” my wife said.

OK. I flipped him over and looked at his butt. Cute, but not any less confusing.

“What am I looking for?” I asked. “Does he need a new diaper?”

Sam started giggling.

“His back,” she said. “Look at his back.”

I turned him right-side-up and looked at the back of his shirt. Another sign was taped there. “I’m going to be a big brother.”

A big brother? Eh, good for him, volunteering to take a young, unfortunate lad under his wing …

“What?”

“Did you read it?” she asked from the living room.

The baby was wiggling, so I set him down on the linoleum, his ever-moving legs bopping him out of the room.

“Yeah, Sam’s going to be a …”

Big brother.

Not the volunteer kind. Not the George Orwell kind. But the “mom’s boobs are off limits for two more years” kind.

“You’re pregnant?” I asked.

My wife walked into the kitchen smiling and I knew I was going to be a dad again. I didn’t really care how she told me. Any way would have been special. Even the “what the #&^@! is this” I heard when we found out she was pregnant with Sam.

I tried to give my wife a hug to show her how happy I was, but she told me everything smelled bad and made her want to throw up, so I backed off.

Later, I went to the store.

"Pick me up some things while you’re out,” she said. “Folic acid, prenatal vitamins, Whoppers and a pepperoni pizza.”

Yeah, I guess she’s not kidding.

Finals week

2006-04-28T14:16:00.000-05:00

The sign read “honk if you love beer.”

Down the main street from the college campus, mom-and-dad vans, pickups and the occasional stock trailer were pulled in front of the couch and box-strewn yards of rental homes, ready to bring Junior home for the summer. A mom stormed out of a maroon minivan double parked on a street too narrow for double parking, probably wondering why her little princess was doing a keg stand in a yard filled with shirtless boys.

The driver in front of me honked at the kid in the lawn chair holding up the beer sign, and a crowd of finals-week revelers holding blue, plastic beer cups hooted back at the driver. Anyone who honked for beer was all right with them.

As I drove past, the kid waved the cardboard sign at me. I hit my horn and waved, not seeing any of my students at the yard party, although it was hard to tell through all the sunglasses and exposed tans.

Finals week brings out two emotions in college students – emotion No. 2 separated by the intense desire to pretend you never experienced emotion No. 1.

Emotion No. 1) Panic brought on by the “five minutes before my final” realization you spent the entire semester drinking and playing “Halo 2” instead of attending class and remembering you can read.

Emotion No. 2) A blind Id that takes over your now test-weakened Ego, beating it about the head and face with the word “party,” and running naked in the street making your Superego giggle. This is, of course, followed by an irresistible urge to paint the words “honk if you love beer” on the back of an old vodka box.

Finals week shoves into five days the entire college experience of “mom’s not here” weighed against “what if mom finds out?” Only this time the kids are worried about grades.

“Uh, Mr. Offutt,” one of my students said, walking into my office a half hour before his final exam. “Could I get my grade so I’ll know how much I should study for the test?”

“You know,” I said. “A half hour before the exam’s probably not the best time to show concern for your grade. You got a pet?”
He looked at me like I was older and less senile than I am.

“No.”

Darn, and I had a great analogy about starving goldfish.

“You’re making 79.44 percent,” I said to the student who may, or may not, have had a grass stain on his forehead.

“Can’t you round it up?” the student asked.

Rounding up a grade is like giving a kid candy to stop acting like a brat – they didn’t earn the candy and haven’t learned they have to.

“Not until you stop starving your goldfish,” I said.

He didn’t get it, but he wasn’t too concerned, there was a party in some guy’s yard after the test. I’m not sure I would have understood the analogy at his age either because emotion No. 2 would have dragged me to the party by the throat and made me wear a funny hat.

A couple of blocks later, a group of college kids were standing in their yard trying to knock over empty beer bottles with a Frisbee. I honked and waved.

Maybe I shouldn’t have encouraged them, but it was finals week, and life would catch up with them soon enough.

Diary of a book signing

2006-04-07T11:05:00.000-05:00

Two p.m., March 25, Borders Books, Lee’s Summit, Mo.

1:45 p.m.: Arrive with wife, baby and a box of books. Hope I put on enough deodorant.

1:50 p.m.: Talk to manager about how I get paid, set up display at table, scope out bathrooms.

2 p.m.: Book signing starts. Nobody shows up.

2:05 p.m.: Wife takes baby to children’s section.

2:14 p.m.: Couple pauses at table. Are they interested? Are they going to talk to me? Are they going to buy a book? I’m so lonely. No, they’re looking at a movie display behind my head.

2:30 p.m.: I start doodling.

2:45 p.m.: Wife and baby stop by. Wife tells me baby’s fussy so they’re going to Target.

3 p.m.: Manager brings me an iced tea.

3:27 p.m.: Glad I scoped out the bathrooms earlier.

3:50 p.m.: Where is everyone? Did the world end and no one bother to tell me? Oh, wait…

3:51 p.m.: Friends stop by, chat, buy book. Cool.

4 p.m.: Couple I’ve never met stop by just to see me. Their last name’s Offutt, too. Have a nice conversation and sign a book.

4:10 p.m.: I sold another book. Things are rolling now. People are coming in. Feelings of abandonment leaving ...

4:20 p.m.: Wife and baby come back. Baby sits on my lap and grabs at whatever’s in arm’s reach that I’ll have to pay for if he destroys.

4:35 p.m.: Guy I met in a college writing class stops by to buy a book. Hadn’t seen him since the Bronze Age. Good to see you, Dennis.

5 p.m.: Book signing over. Want beer. Go home.

Thanks to everyone for stopping by.

The hazards of home ownership

2006-04-03T13:24:00.000-05:00

When you buy a house, the only important things you won't change are the subatomic particles that hold the house together.

"I'd like the couch here, the ceiling fan removed, the living room carpet ripped out and burned, oh, and that hydrogen atom next to the end table ... no, the one with the gimpy orbital. Yeah, could you move its electron a little to the left?"

Everything about your new home is slightly, if not completely, exactly how you wouldn't have done it.

Either the living room is too dark, the kitchen is too small, or every wall is painted just the wrong color puke.

But, unless you're a carpenter, engineer or just surprisingly lucky, while making repairs around your new home there's a terrific chance you'll break more things than you fix.

For example, let's see how much you know about tools.

A hammer is used for:

a) Opening beer bottles.

b) Scratching that hard to reach place on your back.

c) Protection.

d) Driving nails into wood.

The answer is, of course, e) breaking into cars. See, without me, the first thing you'd have done with a hammer is try to put up a shelf. Your beer would still be in the bottle, your back would still itch and you wouldn't have this new car stereo. Shows what you know.
To help you avoid these carpentry gaffes, here's How to Get Out of Doing Home Repairs in Five Easy Steps:

- Convince yourself, your wife and your cat that the house looks great the way it is. This can be accomplished by hypnosis and a heavy dose of barbiturates.

- Bring home so many carpet samples, paint brochures and linoleum strips your wife gets discouraged and decides to do it all herself.

- Talk carpenter friends into helping you, then break your hand with a cinder block and watch them work through a haze of Vicodin.

- Attempt the home repairs yourself. By this time your wife, friends, giggling neighbors and anyone who watches the local news knows you're an idiot and will talk you out of it ... let them.

- Set your house on fire.

There. That's all you need to know about home repair.

What? You actually want to fix up your house?

OK, follow these stupid rules:

- Plumbing and electrical work ¬ unless you actually know what you're doing or aren't afraid of a sudden fiery death, leave this work to professionals.

- Painting ¬ use masking tape to cover the edges of shelves, woodwork, fixtures and other items you don't want to slop paint over. Use old sheets and/or newspapers to cover bigger items. Then remove all the outlet covers. Don't be a moron.

- Installing carpet/linoleum/tile ¬ make sure you sand and clean floors before applying anything sticky. And, just because a room is exactly 10 feet wide on the east end doesn't mean it'll be exactly 10 feet wide on the west end. Measure everything.

- Safety ¬ wear gloves, boots and goggles at all time, No matter how much you laugh at cartoons, a nail gun is not a toy.

- Finish everything you start ¬ such as the room you're painting, the shelf you're installing, the floorboards you're staining, that bottle of Crown Royal, that half-gallon of vanilla ice cream ... you get the idea.

Happy headaches.

A moving experience

2006-03-12T07:46:00.000-06:00

The problem inherent with moving anywhere isn't related to climate, topography, taxes or the number of pizza places per square mile of concrete.

The main problem with moving is moving.

Oh, sure, after settling in you have to deal with the social oppression usually associated with the stupid family next door who doesn't have the common decency to think exactly like you, the occasional vandalism to yard ornaments obviously no one else found cute, and wondering why these complete jerks have never brought over a casserole.

But moving all your junk from the place you live to the place you're going to live is about as fun as The Three Stooges-like power tool injury you're bound to experience during future home repairs.

That's where our friend physics comes in.

Moving, in the scientific sense, involves Basic Newtonian physics, which has something to do with forging someone else's name on your bar bill, then putting your body in motion and keeping it in motion until you've reached escape velocity.

However, moving in the literal sense involves Advanced Newtonian physics. This follows Newton's "inverse loser-friends law" which states that doubling the distance between point A and point B reduces to one-quarter the number of people who actually lift your things and carry them out to the truck. So, my advice is to start off by calling more than four people.

The breakdown takes the following into consideration: 1) The distance between your old home and your new one, 2) the number of friends and/or relatives you haven't tapped out for favors, 3) the amount of pizza and beer needed to coax these people into taking your stuff and moving it to an entirely different city, and 4) the desire to tell everyone to get the hell out of your house because your wife wants to do it with you in the new kitchen.
Not surprisingly, Advanced Newtonian physics is a lot more popular than Basic Newtonian physics.

But as Advanced told Basic to go stuff its gravitational pull in its ear, Quantum Mechanics told Advanced to take a closer look at the whole moving process, then flicked its nose.

Quantum Mechanics put a whole new perspective on the act of moving your stuff into a new house with the Drunken-Loser-Friend Uncertainty Principle.

It goes something like this: The amount of beer the loser-friend has consumed directly influences the subatomic particles of the box/dresser/wife's irreplaceable family heirlooms he's carrying. Since it is impossible to specify the position and the momentum of these particles, the relation of loser-friend's foot to the floor or just how loud the resulting crash will be, the likelihood of you doing anything in the new kitchen with your wife has been reduced to zero.

My wife and I recently moved into our new home and circumvented the entire problem ¬ we hired someone to move our junk for us.

Next week: Home repairs.

Book Review of “On Being Dad”

2006-03-02T10:32:00.000-06:00

By Victoria Wilson-Addo

I've never been a father, dealt with giggling emergency room visits, a hyper-sensitive pregnant wife or worried about sending the kids to college, but Jason Offutt's On Being Dad transported me to a world where I was just the opposite of a twenty-something British girl; a forty-something American dad.
This book is an assortment of snapshots taken from life with Offutt's crime-fighting mutant son, vengefully peeing daughter, green poop pooping baby and hush puppy craving wife. It is so absorbing that I blame it for making me miss so many tube [subway] stops each time I read it. Even the introduction, an invention I tend to disagree with (can't books speak for themselves?) is entertaining.
On Being Dad should not be confined to the eyes of floundering fathers, but open to anyone, regardless of which role in the family you most fit. Every story has universally recognisable moments. Except perhaps, the one about t-ball -a game that may be exclusive to the U.S. (maybe explaining the rules of cricket would be a fair exchange). These are funny reminders of family life; the unit society is supposedly based on. Which if true, on reading this book is a startling, but encouraging thought.
These reminiscences are easy to identify with; whether you were the boy who discovered the Tooth fairy secretly uses Superman's baby teeth for bullets to shoot monsters without mouths, a girl who considers The Rolling Stones to be a boy band, a pregnant lioness who prepares for soon-to-be-born cubs by Christmas decorating two months early, or a Dad remembering the cardboard box that made his childhood Christmas' magical.
A warning before opening On Being Dad: be aware of your surroundings and just how many people will look at you strangely before edging away as you erupt with sniggers, cackles, guffaws and belly-laughter.

Buy a house - where do I sign?

2006-02-27T10:20:00.000-06:00

Author's note: This is the first of a three-part series dedicated to the insanity that is home buying.

My wife and I recently purchased a home and discovered that it would have probably been a lot less complicated teaching astrophysics to monkeys.
For example, the load of loan paperwork it takes to buy a house is enormous, tedious and is printed in some language that looks like English, is phonetically identical to English, but reads like the words were pulled out of a bag at random. Holisticists have linked the amount of this paperwork to the amount of homework you screwed up as a kid. Sort of a karmic punishment for those of us who goofed off in class.
The general idea is that if you were stupid enough to put a semester's worth of work into a project the night before it was due, you're stupid enough to enter into a 30-year contract that requires you to spend twice as much on a house as it's worth. In the world of finance, this is called interest. In the real world, it's called extortion.
Not entirely fair, but mortgage companies are allowed to get away with it because not many lay people actually know anything about mortgage companies, and those who do are so paranoid nobody takes them seriously.
It isn't, of course, signing the right lines on the right pages that makes buying a house tedious, by which I mean it's not even fun after the appropriate amount of drinks. It's waiting for approval that drives you crazy.
It's kind of like this ...
Picture yourself pregnant. (Guys, imagine the pain of passing a bowling ball through a part of your body a bowling ball won't physically fit through - then double it.) You're waiting in line for a ticket to a movie you've wanted to see for the past year. Then picture yourself at the concession stand, without a watch, realizing the picture's going to start before you sit down because the jerk in front of you wants to pay for her Twix and Twizzlers with a debit card. Then, picture yourself walking into the theater as you hear the opening credits begin when suddenly your water breaks and some pimply-faced attendant has to race you to the hospital.
That's sort of like buying a house - well, without all the screaming, emotional trauma, expensive prescription drugs and dozens of people you don't know looking at your naughty bits. You have a sense of urgency, uncertainty, frustration, dread and anticipation - all at the same time. Oh, and you've got to pee, too.
This feeling is called stress.
To make the house-buying process a lot less stressful, make sure you find a good real estate agent. A nice real estate agent. The kind of real estate agent who's so nice if you had lunch with him you'd actually feel guilty stiffing her with the bill. They're trained to look after you when all that paperwork causes you to gibber like an idiot.
After signing away the next 30 years of our lives, an amount of money we may not be able to earn, and possibly a kidney or two, we had our house. Now all we had to do was move.

Next week: Moving in.

Ethics

2006-02-07T21:10:00.000-06:00

After asking for an example of a niche magazine while teaching my introduction to mass media class, one of my students said “Cosmopolitan.” A guy asked what Cosmopolitan was. I said it was cranberry juice, Rose’s lime, triple sec and vodka.
Is that wrong?

Somebody reviewed me?

2006-01-26T13:35:00.000-06:00

Wow. I feel kinda somebody today.
While Googling myself -- an egocentric act of self gratification that doesn't involve touching ... and I do it at least twice a week -- I found a review of Challenging Destiny #21, a magazine which includes my short story "Clark Bland Saves the Planet.”
Here's what reviewer Douglas Hoffman thought about my story:
“Clark Bland doesn't have X-ray vision, super speed, mega strength, or the power of flight. He's probably the last normal human on Earth in Jason Offutt's story, “Clark Bland Saves the Planet.” Clark's friends, coworkers, and even his wife have all indulged in Super Power Advantage (SPA) treatments. Much to everyone else's chagrin, Clark just wants to be himself.
“The title telegraphs the ending. We know that Clark will, by dint of being himself, save the day, succeeding where countless superheroes have failed. The act of salvation is silly, but in keeping with the story's light, humorous tone. Better is the conflict between Clark and his wife Gloria, now Wonder Girl, a tale told mostly in interwoven flashbacks. This aspect of “Clark Bland Saves the Planet” is poignant, and leads to a conclusion which is both unexpected and satisfying.”
Well, gee, thanks, Doug.
You can pick up Challenging Destiny #21 at: www.fictionwise.com.

The Manure Lesson

2006-01-25T11:35:00.000-06:00

My daughter called on her way home from TCBY. She'd just finished her first-ever job interview and it went well.
There's something profound about the fact that a 16-year-old applied for a job. It gives an adult hope that there are teenagers out there who will eventually be able to run things once we're too old to show them how the world works. It's even better when she's your kid. Now, when civilization breaks down and no one knows how to repair the machines, like in (insert random Star Trek episode here), she'll at least be able to make a decent smoothie.
I didn't have an official paycheck job until the summer of my junior year in high school. I was a farm boy and a job for me was pitching hay bales and shoveling hog manure.
Although throwing 50-pound bales of hay onto the back of a moving truck in 95-degree heat wasn't much fun, it was the hog manure that decided my choice of careers. Not that the manure possessed comic book radiation properties that mutated me into a writer rather than a farmer, it was the fact that writing was something I could do that was so far removed from hog manure, I'd never have to go on a date smelling like it again.
My first real job was as a food vendor at Royals Stadium. I started the year after the Kansas City Royals went to their first World Series and quit the year before they went to their second.
My timing sucked.
But walking up and down the concrete stairs hawking nachos or peanuts or Coca-Cola wasn't really a job. It was an excuse to go to the ballpark 81 times a year and flirt with girls. Sure, I got a paycheck and the occasional tip, but baseball and girls turned working there into less of a job and more of an exercise in bucking the system. If I could combine two things I loved and get paid for it, I must be doing something right.
That's something missing from a lot of people's work equation. Most people get a job to earn money so they can do things they enjoy, like eat and have heat in the winter. What most people don't do is figure out something they love and incorporate it into their profession. My daughter likes to read and really wanted to work at a bookstore, but TCBY called her in for an interview first.
Will she be worse off for working at TCBY? No. She'll still learn responsibility and the satisfaction that comes with earning money. Would she have enjoyed working at the bookstore more? Maybe.
But this way, she just might learn my hog manure lesson a little easier, because people get sick of yogurt, too.

On Being Dad

2006-01-11T19:48:00.000-06:00

(Warning: This sounds impersonal because somebody else wrote it.)

Award-winning humorist Jason Offutt's book on parenting, "On Being Dad," is now available.

"On Being Dad" costs $9.95 per book plus $1.30 shipping and handling. To get an autographed copy, go to www.jasonoffutt.com or just send check or money order to: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 115, Orrick, Mo. 64077. “On Being Dad” will soon be available through barnesandnobel.com and Royal Fireworks Press (http://www.rfwp.com/).

Thanks for reading.

Jason

June 6, 2006: Throw a party, it's Devil Day

2006-01-05T11:01:00.000-06:00

Every new year brings hope, the prospect of spending more time with your loved ones and less time with your family - if you're into that sort of thing - and the possibility that world leaders may get something right for once.
But every new year has a darker side. A side that says “shut up and give me your wallet.” A side that lurks under the bed, hides in the back seat of your car and fills minutes on 24-hour cable news shows that should have something better to do with its broadcast time.
Every new year gives us another reason to worry.
In recent years we've had Y2K, the Tribulation that didn't happen in 2004, and the UFO behind the Hale-Bopp comet that was going to swoop a bunch of computer programmers up to heaven, or a 7-Eleven, or someplace like that.
What will we worry about in 2006?
Just wait until June, because by June, people are going to get weird. Hunter S. Thompson weird. Madonna being named a Nobel laureate weird. Yikes.
Why's June so special? How about June 6? How about June 6, 2006? How about 06/06/06? Yeah, 666 - the Devil Day is almost upon us.
Oh, yes, the apocalypse is coming. Start hording ham.
What will actually happen on June 6? Eh, who knows? But I guarantee more people will be in church, write books about the end being near and go on Jerry Springer to get hit with a chair.
The number 666 makes people goofy. I once worked with a person who wouldn't give out the office number because it had three sixes in a row. It's just a number. Until the antichrist shows up and forces us all to get the mark, or a chip implant, or a really boss tattoo, 666 is just the number after 665.
Shopping for a barbecue a few years ago, I saw a package of hamburger for $6.66. I bought it and served The Beast Burgers. Everybody laughed and had devils food cake for dessert.
My advice for June 6? Just sit back and watch the world act silly. It'll be a lot like a family reunion, only with less bloodshed.
Oh, and watch out for the antichrist.
I once met a guy who said he was the antichrist. He tried to sell me insurance, so I threw an empty Jim Beam bottle at him and set fire to his couch.
It was the best Christmas ever.

Why 'Poop's Funny'

2005-12-20T01:12:00.000-06:00

A lot of people have asked me why the blog's called "Poop's Funny."
Well, there's a story behind that ...
When my oldest son was six, we played games in the car because it's hard to find a radio station that placates both of us. One of the games we play is The Story Game.
The Story Game goes like this: pick a genre like funny, scary, or his favorite, gross. Then you make up a story. When you're done, the next person tells his story, then you vote on whose story was best.
He always won.
One day, every story my son told ended with the protagonist covered in poop. He'd fall in poop. He'd have poop thrown at him. Or, he'd go to Poopzzi Hut and order a poop pizza and a glass of Poopsi.
After about four of these stories, I stopped him.
"Son," I said. "Why do all of your stories end up in poop?"
He thought for a second.
"Because," he said seriously. "Poop's funny."
You know, he's right.

Welcome

2005-12-08T18:01:00.000-06:00

This is my blog, and welcome to it.

In the coming months until the giant alien cockroach lords take over, this blog will feature my random thoughts, theories, ways to battle giant cockroaches on a budget, and the occasional praise of Chicken in a Biscuit. Alien cockroach lords hate Chicken in a Biscuit.

I've recently changed careers, and by recently I mean four months ago. Since my first career as a journalist lasted longer than the Ming Dynasty, four months is nothin'. I'm now teaching journalism at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville, Mo.

Changing careers is something I'd struggled with for years, and I now realize that a lot of people are "career numbed" like I was. So, if you're frustrated at work and don't know why, you may need a new job. Mr. CEO, how would you feel with the title “sandwich artist?”

You may need a career change if:

= You spend most of the day in the fetal position weeping.

= You encounter a co-worker in public and either: a) pretend like you don't see them, b) act like you're talking to someone on your cell phone, or c) push them to the ground and kick them until they stop screaming.

= To you, the word "proactive" means drinking in a bar all Tuesday afternoon.

= Your dreams about work involve explosions and giant alien cockroaches.

= You only "think outside the box" when the hot chick at work is out there naked.

= Monster.com is your home page.

= Your Zoloft prescription is more vital to your daily wellbeing than food.

= You think of work at inappropriate times, like on a date, or while you're at work.

= You view the photocopier as a nemesis greater than Lex Luthor.

= The "no guns allowed in this building" poster next to the employee entrance makes you giggle.