Out-Numbered

Here I am again. On the train. To and fro. Today I'm sitting next to a woman that smells like rice and burnt hair. Fro and to. Two hours a day. I begin to imagine eating a bowl of rice and burnt hair. 5 days a week. Under normal circumstances I would change my seat but she is sitting on a piece of my shirt. Pinned to my seat like a passenger in a car wreck, waiting to be rescued by the jaws of life. 52 weeks a year. Today I'm on one of the older trains. The perpetual smell of shit and bleach fill the air. The two scents  are paradoxical yet destined for each other like Hannah Horvath and Adam Sackler from Girls.  25 years. Which is worse? The smell of shit or the smell of bleach? I want to believe there are more important things to contemplate.  I'm a working man. These are my cash and prizes. Bleach and shit. Rice and burnt hair. I mathimatize. Give or take I've spent about 11,000 hours of my life on the train. "Siri, how

I have lots of conversations with my kids. Shit, I've built an entire library of short anecdotes based on those conversations. But... Meatball - "Hey dad. Why does the dog lick his penis?" Me - "To clean himself." Meatball - "But he licks my face." Me - "But you let him lick your face. So..." Meatball - "That's rude." Me - "He's a dog." Meatball - "So what? Would you lick someone's face after you licked your penis?" Me - "No." Check please.

So I've had really bad back problems for the last 6 months with no relief. Surgery hasn't helped and I feel pretty lost. I can't quite describe how painfully frustrating it has been for me. So I figured I'd let Dr. Seuss take a stab at it. There once was a Chap who was perfectly fine. He steered clear of all trouble almost all of the time. But he found himself stuck in a floopidy flam and his back couldn't handle all the plans that he planned.  He was helping a person bail out of a flood but instead he wound up on the ground with a thud! The pain that he felt made his eyeballs see white as he squirmed on the floor without much of a fight. He winced and he moaned and he whined until dawn, still his body resembled the shape of a prawn. He went to see doctors and surgeons and flipples and a Peabody Poobear who would cut off his nipples. So he spoke to the Poobear who would cut off his nipples and he begged it to help him in exchange for some

Maybe it's because my back is killing me. Maybe it's because I've had this chronic shooting pain in my leg since the summer. Maybe it's because the surgery that was supposed to fix it all doesn't seem to be working. It could be that someone less than considerate stole all of the damn tires off my Jeep the other night. Or perhaps it's that my oldest daughter told me to "fuck off" on Instagram the week before last. Whatever it was made me sit in my car, alone in the driveway, in silence. It made me pick up my phone and scroll through my voicemail messages. I wasn't checking for anything new. I was looking for something old.  I knew exactly where it was.  Third from the bottom, right after the message from the meatball when she was 3, asking me if I'd be home for dinner. Man, she had such a cute voice.  I save old voicemails like I save old photographs. I keep them stashed in their digital drawer and

I'm telling you up front that I'm writing this blog on my phone, on the train and I don't give a shit about spelling or grammar or punctuation or anything for that matter. Not today anyway. When I write I look up synonyms of words online so I sound smart when I can't think of words to describe what I'm feeling. I love synonyms. I also love cinnamon but only on French toast. There is no synonym for cinnamon. Just FYI. This brings me to my point. What the fuck am I supposed to tell my kids when people get shot for no good reason?  Yes, I said "good" reason. Wait. Sorry. That isn't really the question. The question is what the fuck am I supposed to tell my kids when people get shot for no good reason on a regular basis? On a regular basis, in towns like ours. On a regular basis, in towns like ours, in schools like theirs. I'm 99% positive my 9 year old doesn't even know what happened in San Bernardino. Do I

I've never been a huge risk taker. When I was younger, I used to think I was doing crazy shit but in reality it didn't qualify as anything close to certifiable. I was doing what I now like to refer to as, "Long Island Jewish kid crazy" types of things. Long Island Jewish kids don't bite the heads off of bats, ride Harleys or drink moonshine from a jug. We don't snort bath salts, hang out in  brothels or get tattoos of screaming eagles. When Long Island Jewish kids rage we do stuff like play tackle football without pads, drink Rumple Minze from shot glasses stenciled with Greek letters and sometimes we would even borrow our older cousin Steven's fake ID. But even that was a long time ago. When my oldest daughter was born, I started to dwell on my own mortality and the fragility of life. I would look at her and thank God for her 10 tiny fingers and her 10 tiny toes. When she would fall asleep on my chest, I would get lost in the absolute miracl