Don’t Talk To Me

Although I’m at the near-death age of 44, I think that I look, act and feel like a younger person.  What you call immaturity, I call youthful exuberance.  What you call a fat idiot pathetically trying to recapture his youth, I call me.  But regardless of the moral judgments you might make of a mid-40’s dude continuing to play “Over the Line” after practice with the 8 year old girls on his softball team, the truth is that I am simply more comfortable doing things that most of my contemporaries don’t.

For instance, I don’t want to talk to anybody anymore.  Kids these days have it right.  They don’t talk, they text.  Or email.  Or IM.  If they are forced to talk to somebody, like if they have a grandmother in Europe who gives them money but only after having a conversation, they use Skype.   I’ve seen five twenty-somethings standing in a freakin’ circle and texting.  Each other!  My company inadvertently received the texting bill from an employee’s 19yo son and the kid spent more hours texting that month than there were actual hours in the month.  I don’t know how he pulled that off but, clearly, he’s got the makings to be a great attorney.

I feel exactly the same.  I don’t know why I’ve suddenly developed this intense aversion to speaking with live human beings.  Maybe it’s the pressure to come up with something clever off the top of my head rather than having an afternoon or two to mull over my email response.  Maybe it’s the fact that I can’t say three words without using the word “fu*k” and eventually somebody’s going to get offended.  I’m not real sure of the reason.

Nevertheless, I avoid virtually every conversation now.  My voice mail box is perpetually full because listening to them would require actual, y’know, listening, and I can’t even handle recorded conversations anymore.  I’m ridiculously fast in responding to email and texts.  Generally speaking, I respond to your emails before you’ve even clicked “send”.  It makes complete sense.  If I wait too long to respond, there’s the outside chance that you might call me to find out what’s going on, assuming you’re over 40, too, and still engage in phone conversations.

Anyway, what’s my point?  I don’t have one.  I’ve just got 37 posts left to this ridiculous year-long insanity I’ve subjected myself to and this is the only thing that’s popping into my head at the moment.  Tomorrow, I’ll probably write about the grass growing on my front lawn.

Happy texting!

Sleep

I stopped listening to people a long time ago.  This often happens when you’re a super genius who knows everything there is to know.  I certainly would never listen to an attorney because they can barely say “good morning” without lying through their teeth.  I don’t listen to doctors either since I’ve now had five surgeries since I turned 30 and I can still barely get out of bed without screaming in pain.

So, as the world’s foremost expert on everything, it’s sometimes tough to deal with little issues that pop up in my life like, say, the fact that I haven’t slept more than three hours a night since the late ‘90’s.  My cycle is so entirely eviscerated that my body has now decided that the optimal hours to sleep are between 6pm and 9pm which leaves me, oh, about ten hours before I have to get up for work.  Due to this nightly “me time”, I’ve learned that watching more than six infomercials in a row can cause you to break out in fat.

I had resigned myself to spending the next thirty years in a state of suspended exhaustion until I can mercifully be killed by cancer or a bullet from my son’s pistol. I knew that no doctor could help me because their universal prescription of “rest” certainly won’t help the disease of “no rest.” A lawyer friend of mine tried to give me advice but he’s a lawyer so I wouldn’t believe him if he told me the sun rises in the East every morning.

Then, crazily enough, I was talking with a guy I work with and I wasn’t simply lecturing him on why I know everything which, of course, is my typical conversation.   On the rare occasion, I listen to this particular guy because he’s from New Jersey so he might hit me if I don’t.  When I mentioned the sleep issue, he looked at me and said, “well, what do you eat?”

Naturally, I assumed he had ADHD and hadn’t paid attention to my whining about sleep so I said, “who cares what I eat? I can’t sleep.”  I then called him names in my head but glanced at the Tony Soprano picture on his wall and decided not to actually say them.

He just laughed at me, which he does often, justifiably.  “Idiot,” he continued.  “Your problem is that you don’t eat correctly and your blood sugar is all screwed up.  If you eat five or six little meals a day, like me, rather than three massive feasts, your blood sugar will be regulated and you’ll sleep like a baby.  A stupid baby.  But a baby nonetheless.”

Well, I was insulted.  Who the fu*k was this guy to tell me what to do?!?  I mean, he’s not even a doctor or a lawyer, or somebody with an advanced degree like mine to show that he knows anything.  He’s just some dude from Jersey.  With less hair than me!!!

Then, I thought, y’know what, whatever, maybe I’ll try his stupid idea just so I can walk back into his office and tell him he doesn’t know what he’s talking about because he didn’t go to law school, didn’t get  his brokers’ license,  doesn’t even have a blog.

So for the last three days, I’ve done exactly what that older, balder, questionably ADHD guy told me to do.  I’ve eaten the same amount of food I normally eat, just spread into six little meals instead of three big ones.  Retarded, huh?

The last three nights, I’ve slept seven straight hours, did not suffer from a narcoleptic fit between 6 and 9pm  and haven’t felt this good in decades.

Thank God I finally figured out how to conquer this problem through my own super genius skills of investigation, analysis and execution.

Jealousy

When I’m not eating or sleeping, I try to spend most of my time being jealous.  Although my kindergarten teachers taught me not to be jealous of what other people have, that was before Al Gore created the Internet so what the hell did they know?

My jealousy takes many forms but, being from Los Angeles, I try to make sure that most of the things I’m jealous about are petty, superficial and/or available from a plastic surgeon’s office.  I can be jealous of somebody’s house, their car, their washboard abs or the fact that they can attend an outdoor groundbreaking ceremony for 30 minutes without roasting half of their forehead off after forgetting to bring sunblock.

Now that I’m well into my mid-40’s, it’s much easier to be jealous of other people than in the past.  When I was 25, no matter what somebody else had, I knew that I was only a couple years away from getting it myself.  Youth gives you hope and drive and optimism.  It’s not until you hit at least 30 that all those absurdities get flushed down the toilet.

Of all the myriad things that I’m jealous of, though, you’d think sperm would never come into the equation.  Yup, you’d be wrong.  Here’s why:

I was having lunch the other day with a friend of mine.  He’s an extremely cool guy and I’ve known him virtually my entire life so you would think that I’d be happy for him when he tells me that he’s just been named CEO of a multi-million dollar company.  Umm, nope.

My jealousy nearly blew my third-degree-burned head off before we got our panini’s and it didn’t wane when he told me that the company is the largest sperm donation and umbilical cord blood bank in the country.

Huh?

Is it possible that I could actually be jealous of a guy who’s running a company that keeps porn magazines in the men’s bathroom stalls and actually congratulates a guy when he comes out of one of said stalls after masturbating to completion?  Of course I was!  The guy’s a CEO and all I am is friggin’ sunburned.

I tried to maneuver my way back to social superiority by mentioning my recently-commenced real estate project and casually dropping my Jaguar keys into his Diet Coke.  Didn’t help.  He just pulled out a notebook full of umbilical cord bank reviews showing that his company was sitting on the largest pool of ejaculate in the Western Hemisphere.

I give up.  If I can’t beat a guy who’s going to make a fortune by jerking off, (“beat” the guy!  Get it? Haha), it might be time for me to hang ‘em up.

But then again, now that I think about it, anybody got some umbilical cord blood in their freezer?  I’ve got an idea for a business.

Mad Dadz 2.0

I am coming into the home stretch of this year-long blogging experiment and it is clear that I have made one singular accomplishment: I am probably the first person in the history of the blogosphere who wrote more than 140,000 words in ¾ of a year but has fewer readers in Month #9 than Month #3.  This is practically a miracle.  It was my understanding that it would be mathematically impossible for Google to send fewer people to my site if it contained 140,000 words than if it contained 140 but, apparently, my contrarian status carries the day. The more tweets I post, the fewer followers I have; the more blogs I write, the fewer readers I get; thank God that the more I eat, the fatter I am or the entire world would be thrown off its axis.

In light of my blog’s complete failure to garner any attention, I read a bunch of other daddy bloggers who allegedly have tens of thousands of readers each month.  As you might imagine, the tone and content of their blogs is significantly different than mine.  Accordingly, I have decided that I am going to begin writing my blogs – starting with this one – just like all of those guys.  There seem to be certain patterns in the way these guys write and, as a lawyer, I’ve been plagiarizing for decades, so it shouldn’t be tough to mimic their writing style and immediately bulk up my Google Analytics numbers.

Here goes:

First, let’s talk about my kids in standard daddy-blogger –speak:

“My beautiful wonderful children, You are my sun, my moon and my rain.  Since the day I first laid eyes on you, I knew that you were the most awesomest, most spectacular, most caring, most intelligent, most doggone great child who ever walked this earth.  It has been my honor and my privilege to watch you grow.  When you first pooped on the potty – almost six days ahead of schedule according to the childrearing books your mommy and I devoured, I might add – it was clear that Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi and Abraham Lincoln had been reborn.  I can’t wait to hang out with you and your supermodel wife after you have hit the World Series-winning home run on the same day that your cancer cure gets approved by the FDA.”

Now, let’s move on to my wife, again in the melodious tones employed by much more successful bloggers than I:

“My beautiful wonderful wife, You are my sun, my moon and my rain.  Since the day I first laid eyes on you, I knew that you were the most awesomest, most spectacular, most caring, most intelligent, most doggone great woman who ever walked this earth.  It has been my honor and my privilege to be married to you.  When you cooked your first meatloaf – with six, maybe seven, more spices in it than the recipe required, I might add – it was clear that God had blessed me with a woman equal to Mother Teresa, Martha Stewart and Kristi Turlington combined.  I can’t wait to grow old with you and experience your touch, your smile and your sunny disposition in a cascade of everlasting love and devotion.”

So there ya go, Blog Reading World.  Ya happy?  I’m sure you’ll be much more accepting of this kinder, gentler Mad Dadz.  My next blog will be about how heartwarming it is that gays are starting to be accepted and then I’ll put one together about the life-affirming joy I feel when my children play with their new puppy.

In the meantime,  I’ll continue to sit here in this sh*thole bar waiting for the readers and advertising dollars to pour in so I can afford to let my wife divorce me for the pool guy and send my kids off to boarding school.

Bartender?  Any more Glenfiddich left in that bottle?