Atomictumor

Pigpen:

“Rem..

Remember, Dad

Remember.

Remember.

Don’t.

Don’t ever.

Remember.

Don’t ever say no to me when I ask for a pop-tart.”

7:10 AM

I’m sitting in the back yard, with the laptop on my lap, as the sun goes down and the crickets chirp up their always crescendoing music of late summertime business. I’ve spent the last five minutes actually on Myspace, of all places, leaving as cryptic as I can come up with messages on peoples things, and wondering exactly why it is that I’ve been doing that, while surrounded by nature’s cacophony, with the vague feeling that ants are crawling down my pants.

To say that my day was wonderful would be a sublime understatement, I had the nicest day, following the nicest weekend. I had planned for an extra day to be added to my Labor Day (which, I still maintain, is a communistic holiday, so fly your flags all day long but remember ol’ AT telling you to thank Karl Marx for it), to coincide with the day off that the ladyfriend (which, I haven’t maintained yet, but might just start, isn’t the best name for her on this thing, but she’s not very forthcoming in coming up with a new one) had, and we had some sort of vague idea of going up to her family lakehouse.

Which we did, and had a lovely time.

I’ve been seeing The Beauty all around me quite often lately, as it seems that most everything is slipping nicely into place. The only real iron in the fire is the vague feeling that my parenting is lousy, but from what I’ve always heard from the good parents, if you think you’re a lousy parent, you’re actually doing a good job. I think its the same kind of thinking applied to if you think you can breath underwater, you actually can, except that drowning is not supposed to be involved.

I digress.

No, work is going very nicely. The ladyfriend and I are getting along very well and overcoming many of those interesting, varied, and unnamed obstacles involved in being a widower dating (and dating a widower, which I wouldn’t really wish on a tick). The kids like her, the friends like her, the family (thats met her) like her, and most importantly, I like her, quite a bit.

Peachy keen.

So, point is, we had a damn good day. As I sit out here, vaguely wishing I had a beer, or a coffee, or something nice in my hand, I’m waiting on her to show back up over here, where we have some sort of plan of watching Kill Bill or something like that.

Yep. A peaceful easy feeling, except I hate (as The Dude before me did) the f—ing Eagles.

—

Today was Pigpen’s first soccer practice, and he ran around like a champ. Its so amazingly fun to watch the joy of a 5 year old in action.

—

Oh yeah, I completely forgot, one of the reasons I’m in such a great mood is that I found out, while tooling on myspace, that Christabel and the Jons are going to be at Oodles again on Friday night. Sounds good to me. And yes, they’re one of my Myspace friends. See, I’m kinda connected.

Bask in the glory.  55 mighty gallons of water, all protected by Iron Man and bubbles coming out of the eyes of skulls.

Oh hell yes, its AT’s new fishtank, and the culmination of my fishtank aspirations.  Simply because anything bigger would be, well, damn expensive.

The cost of this bad boy was offset a bit by that Franklin that MastaG conned Papaw out of, so he paid for a good chunk of it.  Setting it up, well, it was a busy day.

First, I had to work, as is my usual wage slavey wont.  After work, off to Realtorchick’s house to pick up MastaG, where he gets off the bus, on account of if he rides the bus here its like a 50 minute ride, and I wouldn’t want to wish 50 minutes on a 100 degree middle school bus on a dog.  I swung by there, he was working on homework with RC’s kid (can’t remember his super awesome internet name).  I fell asleep to a Pearl Jam concert on the TV (what normally happens to me when I hear Pearl Jam), woke up, went to pick up Pigpen from Eave’s house (I have kids scattered all over this town, lemme tell ya), swung back, got G, and then busted ass out to the east of Knoxville to acquire MastaG’s mighty trombone.

Lemme tell ya, that was an ordeal.  I can’t say I was unprepared for the rush hour traffic, both on the road, and in the unairconditioned music store, but it still had me grinding my teeth.  Still, moods were light (as has been my light-mooded wont lately), and we got the thing.

MastaG’s comment: “What the heck have they been DOING to this thing?  Couldn’t you have gotten me a NEW one?”

My reply: “whack”

So, busted back home, where I had to be on account of my ladyfriend, who happens to be the manager down at the pet store that sold me the fishtank (woot, got a connected ladyfriend), was expecting a tasty filled dinner in exchange for setting the tank up.  And lemme tell ya, she did a damn fine job.  That tank is wicked awesome.

In my defense, dinner was nice too.  There was one weird moment where Pigpen and MastaG decided that they would be Daddy and Pigpen, respectively, looked at me, asked who I was (I decided to be Pootytater, our catfish), and then turned their glance at Ladyfriend.

Pigpen started saying “And you can be M…”, but she jumped in and said “Mailman!  I can be the mailman!”

Whew.  That was almost awkward…

Crisis averted.

—

What?  Why are you all looking at me that way?  Is it the fishtank?

I haven’t really been living in my house much lately, been spending a lot of time at friends houses, or out and about, and all that kinda stuff, and over the month of July and the first part of August, the house has been in a fairly constant state of trashed.

It drives me crazy to have a messy house. I get stressed, I’m in a bad mood, I snap, and it makes me lazy, because I see this big ass mess, but its so daunting that I just don’t know where to begin, so I pick up a book, or beat a hasty retreat, or bang my head on the wall until blissful sleep comes to me (which doesn’t help the mess at all, what with all the bloody head marks on the walls in the house).

I guess I’m lazy, but its so much nicer to spend the days that we wind up at the house unwinding, or decompressing, or something else, because cleaning up is an ordeal. Pigpen requires constant supervision and micromanagment to get jobs done, and MastaG requires a lot of patience, because he tends to whine about how hard his life is when he’s cleaning, which quietly infuriates me. If I yell at him, it makes for an ordeal, because now he’s sullen because I yelled at him, and I’m kinda seething because yelling at MastaG, well, its like crack. I mean, that first time you yell at him, its so nice. You get all this pent up stuff about how your little baby is growing up and turning into a (very occasionally) whiney assed little guilt wielding 10 year old, let it out on the boy, and it kinda just wants to keep coming out.

I’m good at yelling at kids, and for that reason I don’t like to do it very often. I guess I’m a sucker for the guilt thing.

I digress.

So, anyway, point is yesterday it came to a head, of sorts. It was made perfectly clear to me that the house looks like 3 boys live there. The bathroom was, well, ugly. Toys, clothes, trash, scattered all over the bedroom and living room, and the hall, and the playroom, and the kitchen. Week old dishes were sitting out.

It was time for action. Time for men (and boys) of true grit to get out there and clean it the hell up.

And we did. I picked MastaG up, met his band teacher to find out what path of instrumentation he’ll be going on (trombone, just like his old man, woot), and brought the boys home, under the understanding that IT WAS ON.

3 hours later, it was. The needful had been achieved. I scrubbed out the bathtub, even. Something that hasn’t been done since, well, before November (I’m not gross, I mean, I washcloth it down before Pigpen’s baths, but we’re talking scouring the bastard with some Ajax).

The result? Its like another freakin place. The immense peace I got, just from going to bed and waking up in a house that doesn’t look like 3 boys live there, was undescribable.

And then I managed to catch a showing of “Gorillaz: Live in Harlem”, with Dennis Hopper presiding, on the high def music channel, at damn near the beginning. Ahh, rewards.

So here it is for you people:

Now I don’t mind inviting you people over…