Painting Is Not An ED Commercial

You know the commercial that shows a young couple walking into one of those big box home improvement stores where they are excited and notably hand in hand?  They stand in front of the thousands of paint choices and laugh and giggle like they are picking out cupcakes.  They go home, still laughing, and start prepping some room for painting – maybe she dabs paint on his cheek and you wonder if this is an erectile dysfunction commercial because all those ED commercials are like that.  Some couple is “folding laundry together” and then a glance, which in the real world means, “get away from me” but in the commercial leads to sex.  But this couple isn’t having sex – yet – because they are having a great time painting.  And the room looks awesome.  They pull the tape off and the husband painted the Last Supper or some Andy Warhol work.  The couple hugs and smiles and are so proud of the really fun day the husband grinds up a bunch of Viagra and snorts it off his wife’s bosom. 

That’s bullshit.

When Bonnie and I were in our local home improvement store today she was holding two paint swatches which were dissimilar only in the way that a one additional drop of tan added to a fifty-five gallon drum of light tan paint would make.

“Which one do you think?" She said.

“I want nothing to do with this,” I said, “whatever.”  I was filled with despair.

What a difference, huh?

One of the things I hate about painting is that you have to prepare for it like a goddamn shuttle launch.  Curtains have to come down, cover plates have to come off, holes need fixed – then sanded, and baseboards need taped.  Furniture needs moved.  Basically you spend an hour doing things and you haven’t even opened your paint.  At least when you dig a ditch the very first thing you do is dig.

All I think about as I am carefully – and by carefully I mean not really giving a shit – painting is that when I am finished I will have another hour of work.  It's almost unnerving.  Those silly curtains and cover plates, well, they don’t reinstall themselves.  And then you have to clean the paintbrush.  Fortunately we have a slop sink in our furnace room that is perfect for this sort of thing.  Unfortunately, the furnace room is full of nine years of various boxes/accessories/Costco 300 packs of toilet paper so I end up straddling parts of a bunk bed and an old speaker while I clean the brush. 

And even then it’s not over.  All the photos and shelves and other stuff bought at those godforsaken parties your wife goes to has to go back up on the walls.

When I finally finished I wasn’t feeling joyous and what I felt like snorting wasn’t Viagra.  Forget The Last Supper, I was just happy I didn’t drip any paint on the carpet.  Those commercials really are bullshit.  Imagine that.

(Aged Parchment.  We painted the family room Aged Parchment.  Add a drop of tan to a fifty-five gallon drum of light tan.)

Dave Finally Buys A Damn Pillow - An Update

There is no way that being in Kohl’s department store should make you feel like an elitist, but as I stood in front of a wall of pillows that’s exactly how I felt.  There were all these pillows for queen and twin beds, but not a damn one for a king.  It’s not my fault we have a king size bed.  It’s not like we bought it to shove it up the ass of the bourgeois.  We just own a big bed, okay?  But now, I can’t find a king pillow and I am losing my mind. 

I spent thirty seconds massaging one of those Tempur-Pedic pillows, and man, they seem really badass.  But I feared that their weird shape, with that dip in the middle, would prove a costly mistake or possibly suffocate me if I fell asleep drunk.

What gets me is I wouldn’t even be here if a) my cheap pillow would have lasted longer than eight years, b) I could learn to love sleeping on something that felt like shredded corrugated cardboard, and c) I would have manned up at Bed Bath and Beyond a few days before (and as tragically outlined in my previous post.)

I was only at Kohl’s because I hate the thought of going to Walmart – whose parking lot I just pulled into.  The entirety of Kohl’s could fit into our local Walmart’s bathroom.  The only thing our Walmart doesn’t have is a hotel and spa.  Although the store is so massive it could be I just didn’t see it.

After walking three miles, and then back one mile since the pillows are decidedly NOT where I was told they were (thanks elderly greeter) I was in front of more pillows.  And by now, the entire experience had started to weigh on me.  I was exhausted and exasperated.  (However, on a fun side note, I was using the bathroom at Walmart – the one with Kohl’s inside of it – and while I was washing my hands a woman walked into the men’s room.  The timing was either good or bad depending on how you look at it.)

Stoned Sheep

As much as I hate to admit it, Walmart has their inventory issue solved.  Within thirty-seconds I found what I was looking for, a super firm pillow.  I was happy.  And then I read the package.  It said it had a “3 inch gusset for back and side sleepers.”  I’m a dedicated stomach sleeper, and what the hell is a gusset as it relates to a pillow?  Does anyone even look for such a distinction?  And if you do, are you crazy?  I buried that away the same way I ignore the warning labels on alcohol.  But the other weird thing was the picture of nine sheep on the plastic cover – all looking like they just came off a forty-eight hour bender at Studio 54.  Wigged out sheep does not inspire visions of Kate Upton dreams.  The whole thing makes you question the real meaning behind counting sheep (of all things), doesn’t it?

But since I had already spent too long on this endeavor and since I was becoming borderline manic, I bought the beast.  When I got home, I wrestled the pillow case on which made me feel like I was putting a condom on a flaccid elephant. 

When I crawled into bed that night, I tossed caution to the wind and turned onto my stomach, didn’t think of sheep (mostly) and embraced my elitism.  I don’t know if it was the beer or the pillow, but damn, I slept well.

We Should Have Went To Home Depot - How Dave Loses His Battle To Buy A Pillow

Remember that scene from Old School where Will Ferrell’s character says, “We’re gonna go to Home Depot, buy some wall paper, get some flooring.  Stuff like that.  Maybe Bed Bath and Beyond.”  Remember that?  And how funny it was?  Well, it’s not so funny when you find yourself at a Bed Bath and Beyond with your wife.  And it’s really not so funny when you find yourself there because you said, “I need a new pillow.”

So, on a blazingly hot afternoon, we strolled into the air conditioned and well lit confines of our local BBB.  And just like you can’t get just one lap dance, neither can you go into BBB and just purchase one thing.  Apparently, we needed a new dish rack.  I say, “apparently” because I had no idea there was a problem with our old one.  It seemed perfectly capable of performing its sole task, holding dishes.  But Bonnie insisted that though it did indeed hold dishes sufficiently, it was becoming moldy.  (Guys are just awful at recognizing this sort of thing.)

“I want to get another bamboo one,” she said, “I like bamboo, they just get funky after a while.”

Being a guy and what I consider a voice of reason, I said, “Well, why don’t we get one of these wire kind?”

I can’t express how quickly the next sentence came out of Bonnie’s mouth.  As soon as I enunciated the “nd” in “kind” she said, “I want bamboo.”  She did not at all express this in a way that was terse, rather, it was stated in a way that sounded like, “Your opinion is not at all welcome.”  So we compromised – and got the bamboo.

Bamboo dish rack in hand (and pillow nowhere in sight), we now were looking at wine glasses.  There is something to be said for a beautiful crystal wine glass.  Usually it’s, “Damn!  I just broke that beautiful crystal wine glass.”  Bonnie and I drink a lot of wine and we usually get so drunk we are always breaking the glasses.  I jest.  We were looking for something somewhat elegant that also had the durability of Tupperware.  Or, the four glasses for ten dollars.

Finally, after we passed the Soda Stream machine and the griddle that allows you to cook 300 pancakes at once, we arrived at the pillow section.  It was here that I broke down.  I have about a five-minute window in any one store where I can function like a human.  After the five-minute mark, my sole desire is to run like the building is on fire.  And now, here we were at an entire section of pillows.  Different sizes, different material, different whatever it is you use to describe how hard or soft it is.  It was fucking overwhelming.  And the prices?  Everything from $15 to $80. 

Sensing this was going downhill faster than an Obama fundraiser at the NRA, Bonnie said, “You really should get something.  It will help you sleep.”  I felt like saying, “Do any of these say, ‘cure for neurosis?’”  Instead, I said, “I don’t know what I want, let’s just go.”

We left BBB with a dish rack (that I didn’t know we needed) and wine glasses (that have a shelf life of about two months.)  We didn’t leave with a pillow (my own fault – see above comment about neurosis and add anxiety and despair).  Will Ferrell said he and his wife were going to go to BBB, “if they had time.”  I wish we didn’t.

Apparently, Writing About Your Balls Is Not Funny.

There are real benefits to being a Dicks’ Sporting Goods Scorecard Member.  For instance, for every $75,000.00 you spend, they send you a $10.00 gift card that arrives exactly one day after you just made a purchase.  You also get email notices asking if you would like to write reviews for products you’ve purchased.

Imagine my delight when I was asked if I wanted to review my recent purchase of a bag (a sack, really) of lacrosse balls.  My face lit up like Mitt Romney at a Cadillac dealership.

Here is my eloquent prose:

“This is the best sack of balls I have ever had.  I lost my old balls in my wife’s bush.  I only had one left – and who wants to play with one ball?  I played with my new balls all night and they still felt great in the morning!  I will always get my sack of balls from Dick’s.” 

Then there was the issue of accepting the terms and conditions of the review.  I’m sure somewhere in the small print there was something about not being a schmuck.  I checked with my lawyer who assured me that while I was not doing anything criminal, I was being an ass.  Since most of my life has been governed by that credo, I hit “submit” and waited for the chips to fall. 

I figured there was a 90% chance this was not going to make it past the intern whose job it is to review the reviews.  But, I thought there was maybe a 10% chance that someone would have a sense of humor (or be incredibly juvenile like me) and post the darn thing in hopes that it would go viral.  In which case, it would have drove millions of hits to Dick’s website and subsequently catapulted me from obscure blog author to “joke writing consultant to the stars.”

So I waited.  The next day I received an automated email that basically said, “What you think is funny we find childish.  (To be fair, some of us found it funny.  Unfortunately, these are not the same people who would have to testify at a class action suit that would most assuredly be brought against Dick’s for our corporate insensitivity.)  Therefore, we can’t print this.  (Though we have shared it around the office.)”   Or, it may have said that the review was found to not be in compliance with the “terms and conditions.”  It did, however, thank me for my playing and invited me to submit further reviews as long as I keep an eye on the “terms and conditions.”

I am grateful for the chance to redeem myself.  You see, I just bought a box of blanks, and I am dying to start me next review with, “My wife loves when I shoot blanks.” 

Moms Are From "Sure, I Will Go Out On Sunday Night To Get Poster Board" And Dads Are From "You're Screwed."

At 6:10 on Sunday night, we were enjoying a family dinner when my son asked, “Do we have any poster board?”


“Oh yeah,” my other son said, “I have that project too.”

Parents, we know the following to be true. Those who aren’t parents heed my words. Nothing good comes from poster board. It is a gateway to school project hell.

So last Sunday evening, a few hours from bedtime, we were about to make collages – with poster board that we were not sure we even had – that were due the next day.

And by “we” I mean the boys and my wife. The “I” part of “we” went to the family room to finish off the wine.

Sensing the encroaching swear-fest from me, Bonnie donned her “Ultimate Mom” cape and herded the boys upstairs.

Or so I thought. About thirty minutes later she came up from the basement –with poster board. “I snuck out because I didn’t want you to get mad,” she said. She did the right thing of course, teaching the boys a lesson by not getting them what they needed would be fruitless.

She did it because she “didn’t want them to be upset.” Would I have done this? Probably - but I would have made damn sure they were upset. I just feel that as the father of a couple of boys, I need to be, well, a prick sometimes. Now, this could be some buried passive aggressive wiring, but I don’t think it is. I liken it more to the “silverback syndrome” that gorillas display. You see, the second a baby boy is born, the silverback knows his days are numbered; he also knows his offspring is going to be way cooler than he is. Before he can pick the fleas off his wife, his son will be eating more awesome bananas than he ever had as a kid. The silverback will be envious. So, in the years that he is still physically more imposing and while his offspring still need a back ride to the clearing to play with his other gorilla friends, the silverback jumps at the opportunity to pretend he is still the boss.

For the kids, of course (gorilla or human) this doesn’t work. Dave Bowie sang, “And these children that you spit on as they try and change their world, are immune to your consultations. They’re quite aware what they’re going through.” So yeah, I would have gone out for the poster board, and I would have been pissed off. I like to think I could have pissed them off a little, just a little, for not telling us sooner. But they would certainly have been immune to my consultations. They know the Silverback would move a mountain for them.

Bending The Sub Lady To My Will (Where Dave Contends With A Knife Wielding Senior Citizen)

The lady brandished the 14” bread knife at me as she spoke, each syllable accented with a flicking of the knife through the air.

“That was not me, sir,” she said sternly. (Five flicks.)

“It absolutely was you,” I said.

Uncut

“Sir,” flick, “I would not have done that.”

“You did it last week,” my safety buoyed by the counter between us.

It’s rare you find yourself in a confrontation at the sub counter in a grocery store, but I sure as hell did.

It started three weeks ago, and like the Bloods and Crips, escalated to outlandish proportions.

You see, every week Bonnie and I order a 14” Italian sub to eat over the weekend. Well, three weeks ago when I ordered the sub I was told by the lady who would soon be brandishing the knife that they were running a special: buy one 7” sub and get a 7” sub for free. “Great,” I said, “I’ll take it.” I really was not paying attention, but at the very last moment, I noticed she cut the sub, made on a 14” roll, in half, wrapped each separately and gave me both pieces.

“Hmm,” I thought, “had I known that I would not have had her cut it.” Why? Because we bring our sub home whole, and cut it into thirds. Lesson learned.

The following week, I went to the counter and told the lady (who had no idea at this point in seven days hence she would be considering felony murder) that I would like the special, but just do not cut it.

“I can’t so that,” she said.

Before we go further, a few facts:

1. I was not asking for anything special, including: extra meat, half-toasted, double wrapped, the tomatoes not touching the lettuce or Swiss cheese with minimal holes.

2. Had the special meant I would get 7” inch bread, I would have been fine. I would assume they got a deal on 7” rolls somewhere. It was the EXACT SAME SANDWICH, just cut in half (and at the very end to boot.)

Round two was successfully mediated by a younger worker – kind of like the former gang member who goes back to the neighborhood. Reluctantly, she left the sandwich intact and just put two stickers on.

It was 1 to 1. The rubber match.

This week when I showed up at the counter, I thought the problem was solved. This is when the lady began wielding the knife, steadfast in her resolve. I felt like asking her if she forgot what the gang mediator had done last week.

After some posturing, she went to ask a manager.

“We can’t do it.” I think her teeth were clenching.

“You don’t remember this discussion last week? You were here last week, I remember. Just put two stickers on it, that’s all.”

Granted, I sort of felt like an elitist prick at this point. And truthfully, I really had no desire to upset this older lady. I brushed those feelings aside.

She went back to the manager who I am sure told her, “Okay, just don’t cut the sub for the elitist prick.”

“Okay, what kind of cheese do you want?” the knife back on the counter.

I almost said, “The same kind I asked for when I fucking ordered before you tried to turn this into a Federal racketeering case.” But I didn’t.

When she handed me my uncut sub, I also didn’t say, “See, that wasn’t so hard after all.” I did say, “See you next week.” I swear I heard the knife flick through the air.

Where Dave Eats A Fried Pig Head

“I wouldn’t recommend eating the eye,” our waiter said as he placed half of a deep fried pig head in front of me. It took a few seconds for my eyes to orient themselves; for the head to come into focus.

As it arrived.  The sunken eye is near the top

“It’s being held up by a piece of neck meat. Make sure you rip it open and dig around. I brought you a knife but mostly you just go at this thing with your hands.”

I found the eye, just aft of the jaws. It was crinkly brown with a little ball of hard yellow that had formed on the outside. (The iris?) I started with the cheeks.

Bonnie and I were eating at Cure, a newer restaurant in Lawrenceville, for her birthday. Our general rule for finding a new restaurant is that we don’t eat anywhere that my parents would love. This excludes anyplace that serves baked potatoes. Not that there is a thing wrong with baked potatoes, I just don’t want to spend money to eat one. (Our biggest restaurant avoidance is steak houses. Fifty dollars for a steak I can cook just as well on my Weber kettle grill? Kiss my ass.)

But back to the swine’s head. Imagine a mold of a pig skull with every cavity stuffed with juicy pulled pork then wrapped in bacon. Then deep fry it. Granted, you have to get past the wrinkled eye and the teeth, but beyond that, it’s really quite amazing. The snout was the one part that was a bit disappointing, with its bits of bony cartilage. On the other hand, the gums were a treat, like thinly sliced, crispy bacon.

Lest you think Bonnie was averse to this, she was not. She gamely devoured the pieces I placed on her plate of house made chorizo and gnocchi. I could not say as much for the young girl sitting next to us. She had a look on her face best described as a cross between someone who was witnessing an autopsy and someone who was questioning the wisdom of a fifth shot of tequila. I made sure to pull the upper and lower jaw apart when she was looking.

The halfway point.  See the teeth?

Bone exposed (God that was fun to type) and eye still intact (though I have to admit, the waiter said he didn’t “recommend” I eat the eye - he didn’t say to “not” eat the eye) we passed on desert which would have been a plate of locally sourced cheeses.

Here is a brief Q&A culled from several inquiries:

Q: Would you eat it again?
A: Hell yeah.
Q: It was BYOB, what did you drink?
A: Duh. A cooler of beers, a squirt bottle of vodka and some tonic.
Q: Did you say pickled beef tongue was on the appetizer platter?
A: Yeah, it was great. So was the creamy lard on baguette.

Anyone hungry?

(I highly recommend you visit this place.  Click here for their website.)