A Love Letter To Chase Utley

Dear Chase:

I hope you don't mind me writing so often! I left some messages on what I think is your number (you wouldn't BELIEVE what I had to do to get it), but you haven't called. I know you're SUPER busy, but I just wanted to hear your voice, you know?

I was so proud to hear you hit your tenth home run yesterday! You're really having a SUPER AWESOME season. So much better than that Ryan Howard guy who made them give him all that money. Ten million dollars, and his OPS is .652? Ridiculous!

I shouldn't tell you this, but today at lunch I wrote "Mrs. Matthew Utley" all over the cover of my notebook. It just looks so PERFECT, you know? I mean, it just DOES!!! right?

Anyway, I just wanted to say HI! Write or call back soon! Or, you know, look me up on Facebook, I would TOTALLY friend you but I can't find you. Not sure if you're not on there, or what. How could someone not be on Facebook? It's like 2008 or something! Ha ha!

Love,

Me

Why, oh why, did I not go into dentistry?

I was getting my molars scraped and poked last week, drool puddling on my chin and dripping onto my collar, when it occurred to me that being a dentist might just be the best job in the history of mankind. Unless you have a particular aversion to putting your fingers in and your face next to somebody's filthy mouth, I can't imagine a better one. It wouldn't bother me in the least; having changed hundreds of Charles's diapers, halitosis holds no terrors for me.

(I should point out that my dentist, Dr. Bond, is a fantastic tooth man; I've been seeing him for something like 20 years with no complaints, and one of these days he's going to retire and I really don't know what I'm going to do at that point.)

It seems like dentists have all the benefits of doctors (high salaries, exalted social status, cool acronyms after their names) but without most of the stresses. Doctors have sick people showing up all day, blowing germs on them; who goes to the dentist when they're sick? Doctors have to deal with actual emergencies, like people getting shot or catching TB or something; dentists have to be on-call to replace chipped crowns. Worst of all, doctors occasionally have to tell people they're going to die, or tell family members that somebody's already dead. The worst thing a dentist is going to tell you is that your gingivitis has turned into periodontal disease and you're going to need seven root canals and a gum scraping.

(I don't really know what a gum scraping is, but my mom's had a couple of 'em to reduce gum inflammation, and it apparently hurts quite a lot.)

Meanwhile, dentists get to make the same ridiculous money and buy the same awesome boats and beach homes as specialists. The only thing I can imagine being more lucrative is orthodontia, but then you have to deal with annoying children all day. (Having a child, I've found, does not decrease one's disdain for poorly behaved kids. In fact it seems to heighten it.)

I wonder if HW would allow me to quit my job and go to dental school. We'd have to live in poverty for a while to pay off school loans. I'll ask her later.

In a related story: is it just me, or does dental work get more painful as you get older? Maybe it's just the newer technology, but when I was growing up, I'd go in for a cleaning and they'd scrape off the plaque and send me on my way. It was all very gentle, and I always got a cool new toothbrush out of it, with Transformers on it if I was lucky, and dental floss that I threw into the bathroom closet and never used. (To this day there is probably 50 sample-size containers of spearmint flavored floss in the back of my mother's bathroom closet.)

Last week I went in for a routine cleaning and checkup, and they:

• Got out some kind of sonic-screwdriver-water-pick that scraped away tartar and plaque with all the gentleness of a jackhammer;
• Stabbed some kind of miniature ruler in between each of my teeth and my gums to measure inflammation;
• polished my choppers with some kind of miniature angle grinder.

It hurt like the dickens, though of course being a stoic, John-Wayne-type manly man, I took it with nothing more than a grimace. Of course, I had cavities, so I had to go back later in the week to get drilled and spackled, and I swear to you on the souls of my cats that the dentist put a die grinder in my mouth.

Did my mouth just become untenable for the less intrusive techniques? Or did dentistry become more sadist?

Are you coming to see The Wizard of Oz at Brandywine High School? It's running tonight, 4/10, to Saturday 4/12, nightly at 7pm, with a matinee on Saturday at 2. If you AREN'T coming, you better live far away, 'cause I'll be making a list of everybody I know that doesn't show up and KICKING THEIR ASSES. But I'll make exceptions for people of great distance 'cause it's just not worth the drive.

(Note: I'm no more capable of kicking an ass than I am of impregnating a tree. But did I at least sound tough and manly? It'd be a first!)

The show is going pretty well, although having all the extra rehearsal time we have this year (the shows are roughly 3 weeks later in the year than the last spring production, which went up in mid-March) actually made us a little lackadaisical for a while. Learn that chorus? Bah, we've got three months! Oops, now it's April. Still, Sarah was able to teach all the choreography in record time, which was nice, and I got all the chorus stuff taught pretty early, for me.

In the end, the show came together, as shows always seem to do. We had our touch-up rehearsal yesterday, which went a long way towards polishing things, so I'm looking forward to tonight, not least because I spend the few hours before a performance trying not to throw up, but once it starts I'm too busy to think about how nervous I am. I know what you're thinking: Nervous? Matt Hearn? That's ridiculous! It's true I don't often get nervous before I have to SING anything, but then you have to remember that I'm a REALLY good singer, but a mediocre conductor at best. I consider a show a success if I take the tempos slow enough that none of the dancers hurt themselves.

Don't let the possibility of injury dissuade you from coming, though, 'cause remember: I'LL BE KICKING YOUR ASS. (No I won't.)

Okay, so here is what has been going on, and it is crazy.

We have a new customer at work, about whom I can basically say nothing, except that

1. it's actually a pretty cool client to work with, and
2. contractual obligations have required us to have things in place on an INSANE timetable.

So, in short, I've been working ridiculously hard, something that is anathema to my very soul. This has left little time for sleep, not least because the stress prevents me from sleeping very well, and when coupled with the spring high school show we're doing again this year (Wizard of Oz, April 10th,11th,12th, be there or be crushed by a flying house) and the supposedly-only-21-months-old-but-the-size-of-a-3-year-old toddler that's destroying my house, I end up doing things like writing 89-word run-on sentences with multiple nested parenthetical asides (like this one (and this one)).

Luckily, things at work have slowed JUST a teense (although I still have some stuff ramping up that I'm hoping to get ahead of before it gets too insane), just in time of course for the musical to get super busy. Extra-luckily, we learned from our mistake with last year's show (doing it in mid-March after only about 2 months of rehearsals, many of which got snowed out) and are doing it almost a full month later this year, plus not many rehearsals got snowed out, so we're in good shape. Of course, we have to deal with spring break in the middle of rehearsals, because Easter is about as early as it can possibly be, but that's a small price to pay for, say, not opening this weekend, which would have me cutting my legs like emo girl.

Plus, I found a little time to start working on a novel. Yes, I'm writing a novel! As you might expect, it's pretty bad! Like, almost painful. But I've decided that dammit, I'm gonna finish it, even if it's just a practice one. If it turns out to be not a complete embarrassment, I might share it with you. If after about 17 drafts it actually ends up being half-decent, I might send it around to some publishers, as soon as I figure out how to do that. This is not likely, however, as so far the only redeeming quality seems to be that some of my fishing reel trivia is correct.

See? I told you. BAD.

Later this week, you'll have one more righteous picture update from Charles, and I might actually take a break from going insane to tell you all about going to see "In The Heights" on Broadway last week. Hint: I HAVE DANCED ON THE BROADWAY STAGE!

This will come as a surprise to everyone, I'm sure: 89%DRUNKARD

To celebrate the end of a month of being insanely overworked, I bring you: the best thing produced by the internet to date. Turn your sound on.

So: Heroes. HW and I are about halfway through the DVDs of season one, usually knocking out 2 or 3 episodes a night while cleaning, or working on our lappies, or whatnot. So far, here are my thoughts:

• I am on the freaking edge of my seat. Seriously, it's all we can do to get to bed by 11pm, and invariably when there's any doubt, we watch another episode. We're starting to reach the point, though, where keeping track of all the various plotlines is taking its toll on our sanity; about 10 episodes in, they introduced yet another new character, and Sarah paused the DVD, looked at me, and said, "Oh hells no."
• The show is deceptively gruesome. Early on we watched a few episodes with Charles in the room (not that he pays attention; the only things he likes on TV are "The New Yankee Workshop" (he likes to say "Morm!" when Norm Abram appears) and "Days Of Our Lives"), but after a few episodes I realized that the despite the fact that there's very little actual violence in a given episode, there's a heck of a lot of shots of the results of violence. For example, in an early episode (mild SPOILER ALERT), Niki rips a couple of mafia goons to shreds, quite literally. You don't get to see it happen, but you do get a couple of glimpses of corpses with significant limbs in alternate locations. Later on, some people get their heads sawn open; you don't see it happen, you just see the results. Pretty gritty stuff. IT'S AWESOME.
• HW extols the acting of Ali Larter, who plays (another SPOILER ALERT) a chick with multiple personality disorder, but I don't think it's that hard. There's no real subtlety between the two characters; one is timid and nice, and the other is insane and likes to tear people limb from limb. It's interesting to see her switch back and forth in the span of a few seconds, but I think any actor outside of Keanu Reeves could probably do that. None of the acting is really that exceptional, although that's mostly because the characters just aren't that deep. They all have funny abilities and are conflicted about them. The best of the lot is probably Adrian Pasdar, playing politician Nathan Petrelli, because he's the only one with more than 2 layers. (I don't count Ali Larter here because she's basically playing two separate characters who happen to look identical.) Nathan has his politician mask, his win-at-all-costs shark persona, his mild confusion and conflict about his abilities, and underneath all that, there's a foreboding menace that's hard to describe because we've only gotten to see glimpses of it yet.

  Hayden Panettiere is a little disappointing, mostly because her half-hearted attempts at a Texas accent falls WAAAAY short. On the other hand, she's so hot that I have to put on loose pants to watch the show. So I can't be truly objective about her acting. And don't remind me that she was probably only 16 when season 1 was taped; I already have to counteract my shame and guilt with massive amounts of high quality English gin. Although I don't feel so bad, now that she's dating Milo Ventimiglia, who is 8 months older than I.

• The inside jokes and shoutouts to other films and TV shows, usually involving Hiro Nakamura, are SLAYING me. When he tries to travel backwards in time a few minutes, and accidentally goes backwards approximately 6 months, he says "Great Scott!", an obvious reference to "Back To The Future." Later, we noted that his father was played by George Takei (aka Mr. Sulu), who rolls up in a limo with the license plate "NCC1701." It's also worth noting that Hiro is the most amusing character in a prime-time drama since Thomas Magnum. And Hiro's cuter. All the nerdgirls I know crave his hott parts.

Right now our DVR is choked with episodes from Season 2; hopefully we can wrap up Season 1 in the next week or so and start to get caught up. If only to see what happens when Hayden Panettiere's character hits her slutty college years.

I don't know when the hell I got so old, but somewhere between the ages of 18 and almost-30 I lost the ability to play a game of football without being crippled for days. I played some beach tackle football with my old Ychrome buddies yesterday, and as a result I can barely walk today. Every muscle in my thighs is on fire, my lower back is basically sending a constant series of "F U" messages to my brain, and also I think I dislocated part of my nose because I got elbowed in the face while trying to tackle the QB.

I also learned some things about my athletic ability:

1. I am not an accurate thrower. What I am is a hard thrower. So the best option is to have someone park themselves near the line of scrimmage so I can throw the ball at their heads, like Peyton Manning. If they run to the endzone, I whip it far over them. So I am useless at that position. We tried it for 2 downs and I never threw the ball again.
2. I am not an effective receiver, because I am fat and slow. This means that, despite the fact that I can pretty much catch anything thrown within reach, I never get open enough for someone to throw to me, unless they have specifically drawn a play up for me.
3. I am a good runner, because I have no problem simply lowering my shoulder into whomever is attempting to tackle me. Since I was one of the 2 largest players, and the other one was on my team, the 80+ pound weight advantage was key.

In the end, we won, mostly because we had actual athletes on the team, but also because there were a few opportunities for me to run over people. Fantastic times. Except that now my groin hurts. And Charles has a fun game where I'm required to lie on the floor so that he can jump on my nutsack. So I've got that to look forward to later.

This is the cold that never ends. It just goes on and on, my friends. Some germs got in my body made me feel filled up with fuzz, I can't seem to get rid of them and it's all just because this is the cold that never ends...

It's not a BAD cold, it's just ANNOYING. Just a sort of general ague that leaves my nose running, though I can still breathe through it, and my throat filled with various goos that I can't seem to cough up. Plus my earache comes and goes, that's an added bonus. I managed to fight through it for a Messiah performance yesterday, but that's mostly because my solos were all in the first part, so I didn't have to try and save myself for stuff towards the end. All the worrisome bits were done by intermission, which meant I could just stand up and sit down and periodically yell in baroque counterpoint, while stuffing cough drops into my mouth and yawning to drain my eustachian tubes. It was good times for all! Yes, yes it was.

The performance went superbly, actually; we had some new soloists this year, a tenor named Ken, and an old acquaintance named Gus singing countertenor. Dude sings like a lady! It's awesome.

The rest of the weekend was spent completely ignoring my self-imposed dietary restrictions in favor of chips, fudge, and alcohol. These are a few of my favorite things, particularly when the chips are Grandma Utz's, the fudge is handmade by yours truly, and the alcohol is in vast quantities. Plus my wife let me sleep in on Saturday for no good reason at all. If I could have figured out a way to not get called for work all weekend (despite not actually being on call; my job is really great) it would have been very restful.

I hope your Christmas shopping is in a better state than mine; my usual effort to make up for being a dick 364 days a year by spending too much money on friends, family, and charities is WAAAAAAY behind. I have some stuff, but need to make an inventory before making any further purchases so I don't end up with a situation in which I have 17 items for my father and 3 for my mother. (This is hyperbole, you understand, but I'm pretty sure as of now I have 2 or 3 big presents for Dad and not one thing for Mom. Although I think Sarah has stuff for her; I'll just replace her labels with ones that say "from your loving eldest progeny." Just like every year!) Usually by this time I've already basically completed my purchases and just have to make with the wrapping, but it's been a busy fall. BTW: people that want good presents make and update their Amazon wishlists. If you leave me to just buy you whatever I think you might like, well, that's how people end up with CDs like this.

I'm still sick, and it's starting to become a Nuisance. For example, I have to sing in a Messiah on Sunday, and during last night's rehearsal I developed what felt like an ear infection. Today it seems better, but I'm all clogged up again.

Is this God's punishment for that time I wiped a booger on another chorister? Uh...my bad.

More heavenly disdain is being communicated to me by the fact that my /? key is faulty. In order to get it to work I have to push really hard on it; I think there's a pretzel crumb under there, or a piece of salt, or maybe another chorister's boogie.

I wonder if I could hook a vacuum to my head to relieve all the pressure. A few months back I bought a 16-gallon 6.5HP Wet/Dry Super Industrial Kickass Vacuum/Leaf Blower; the thing could suck the stain out of an Affleck end table (just like your mom! Ha ha!). I bet I could suck mucus out of my sinuses with it. Maybe I'll try later.

Speaking of furniture, my lunch today consisted of a 220-calorie bowl of Kraft Easy Mac, which I got from a machine and heated up, and which tasted like wood glue. I think the Diet Coke I had with it was more nutritious. Dieting straight sucks, lemme tell you; I could've also run to the Wendy's down the street and had 4 Junior Bacon Cheeseburgers, a "Biggie" Fries, and a "Biggie" Diet Coke for like $7 and then just gone back to work and had a nap. It would have been fantastic, and I wouldn't have the raging headache I have.

Yep, it's bitch bitch bitch bitch, all the time, at matthearn.com! Glad you're here. Now go forth and sin some more.

Let's chat about humor for a moment. I'd just like to take the time to address a big problem in the world, and that is that a surprising number of people have a misconfigured sense of humor. Oh sure, some things are universally funny:

• Fart jokes
• Actual farts
• Reference to the sex lives of the Amish
• That story your dad tells every time he gets hammered about the time he took a dump in a mailbox
• Any joke involving a priest, a rabbi, and a 300W rainbow-colored marital aid
• Covered wagons, aka Dutch Ovens

The laughs never end, when those topics get broken out at parties. Particularly if the party as at my house, and the participants have drunk between 5 and 17 bottles of homemade Continental Pilsner apiece. But certain topics seem to make certain folks laugh, and other folks whine in great dismay.

For example: my wife is in the business of assisting the differently-abled. (They used to be called "handicapped," and before that, "crippled;" by 2015 they'll be called "Judiciously Improved.") I fully support this, except that the Political Correctness Brigade has now weaseled its way into my very home. During my adolescence, it was perfectly acceptable, when someone did something stupid, to call him "retarded." And mirth would result. Now, I have to expend great amounts of brainpower trying to not say that word in front of my wife and her coworkers. (In a similar vein, we were allowed to call anything we disagreed with "gay," as in "Dude, homework is totally gay," or "Bobby and Jimmy kissing behind the school was so gay." No longer. The internet has invented a substitute word, "ghey," which is totally gay.)

As far as I can tell, the word "retarded" is no less funny than it was in 1993. And yet nowadays people get their undergarments in a SEVERE bunch if you break it out anywhere but a hockey team's locker room. This is a disturbing indicator of the path we're on, in which I won't be able to say things like "Dude, your new subwoofer has a totally fat sound" without some overweight ninny saying "What did you say? Fat? How dare you!" and then attempting to kick me in the nards but failing because her thigh-fat precludes any actual upward motion of her legs. (Note: this would actually be HILARIOUS to witness.)

And lest you think I'm just some completely irreverent buffoon that would laugh at a baby's funeral, let me show you the depth of my intellect: I have seen the other side of the coin, albeit for a totally retarded stupid reason. Last night I was watching David Letterman, something I normally avoid because Paul Shaffer's voice makes my ears bleed, and they were doing the top 10, which was something like "top 10 ways you can tell that gasoline prices are out of hand." #3 was, "Anna Nicole Smith married a Texaco franchisee." My initial response was "Damn, that's cold. Her bloated corpse is barely cold yet." But then I realized that, due to the Writer's Strike, all the late shows are in re-runs until like 2009, and the joke dated from 2005 when Anna Nicole was still barely alive. Why did the fact that she's dead make the joke seem less funny and more mean? It's ridiculous. It should be the other way around; now that she's dead, it's not like she's gonna hear about it and get pissed off. The joke is just as funny as it was in 2005, which is of course to say that it's not funny at all and never was. (Brian will probably have a heart attack, but I've always found Letterman (and all the late-night guys since Johnny quit) to be pretty overrated when it comes to bringing the funny.)

I got to thinking about this, because a few weeks ago I set my Facebook status message to something like "Matt Hearn is wondering how people can confuse 'they're', 'there', and 'their'; is it because they have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome?" Which you have to admit, if you don't have FAS, is pretty funny. I still got some irritated messages about it. If you do have FAS, it might be perceived as insulting, but 1) if you have FAS and know the difference between those three words, then obviously the joke isn't directed at you and 2) if you have FAS and don't know the difference between those three words, then perhaps my little jibe will inspire you to go to school and study hard. It's win-win! And if you don't have FAS, but have a problem with sand in your vagina, just go to the bathroom and rinse it out. Stop annoying me because Uncle Gropey took away your girlish laughter.

It's hard to avoid being insulted by certain jokes. I think the secret is not to flip out about it. If you hear a joke that offends you, just laugh along with the rest and tell your own insulting joke right back. Note: this may only work with minorities.

The human body is a strange thing. And not just because the last few days mine has been filled with phlegm and other gross things and has been completely unresponsive to medications. (My throat feels like Rachael Ray has been trying to zest it, which, if you aren't familiar with basic cooking techniques, is less fun than it sounds.) I've been dieting a bit over the last few months, basically just trying to avoid stuffing my face with bacon and Mimolette long enough to maybe fit in a few leaves of romaine. Anyway, because of my moderately freakish size, my weight fluctuations are...out of the ordinary.

The 2 weeks before thanksgiving, I had managed to get down to about 233 pounds, 9 pounds of which I lost in about 7 days due to the magic of water weight. Then, over the break, I gained 11 pounds in about 10 days, back to 244 as of Monday. Today, 4 days later, I weigh 235. It's all very amusing, except for the part where I still have a big ol' gut and my ass looks like a pair of basketballs stuffed into cheap khaki. That part, well, that part sucks.

Today's post is in the style of Samuel Pepys.

Tuesday, 6 November, 16672007

Up, and to lessons; much accomplished on Ravel's Prelude. The nimbleness of my fingers quickens, despite my recent frustrations. All the morning spent at the computational room, that I might improve the notes thereon, but was denied. Submitted necessary forms to be allowed to continue my efforts. Meetings through the afternoon, accomplishing little, and wasting much tyme. To the in-laws to retrieve My Lord and bring him then home; there we made much merry whining. A bath, and then idle. Ate sparingly, and to bed.

---

Notes:
Lessons: Piano studies.
Frustrations: On Monday, Hearn was so incensed by his inability to play a Brahms waltz that he punched a dent in the adjacent drywall.
Meetings: Technically, conference calls.
Idle: Technically, 3 hours of Flight Simulator.
Ate sparingly: Hearn is on a diet, and hopes to lose about 15 pounds, despite the Holidays.

WOW. WHEW boy. THAT woke everybody up, didn't it? Apparently I need to throw a little more controversy up on here! Stir the pot, I guess. Okay, here goes:

Gay men are better at interior decorating than straight men.

Is that going too far?

Anyway, I suppose I should respond to the responses, but I should post a few disclaimers:

1. Sunday school is routinely held at the same time as choir practice in all of the churches at which I've worshipped. Since I've been singing in choirs of one kind or another since I was roughly 12, I haven't had a lot of theological instruction in almost 2 decades. Any insight I have on the subject is stuff I've gathered from Dilbert cartoons.
2. My theological beliefs are entirely colored by my experiences, not the other way around. I'd like to believe God exists, but so far He hasn't revealed Himself to me fully. And that's fine; maybe He will someday. Meanwhile I have to live my daily life in a Schroedinger's Cat situation of "God exists/God doesn't exist," so I hedge my bets (example: instead of donating all my cash to the poor and wandering the earth in sandals and a robe, I toss a few bucks to worthy charities occasionally and spend the bulk of my money on, say, housing, food, diapers, and high-end electronics). What I'm saying is, if God really "hates fags," then he needs to find a better way to say it than Fred Phelps, 'cause the gay folks I know are pretty much all awesome.

Having said that, let me make a few points:

• To quote my boy HeavyDluxe:

  Interestingly, the Bible itself really presents you (in numerous places) with an all or nothing proposition. It either is all true, or it's a complete lie. Doesn't really give you a middle ground, sadly.

  I'm not sure about that. The fact that the Bible is technically the Word of God as written down by fallible humans means to me that, if we were to assume that God Himself was telling folks what to write down, some things got lost in translation. Genesis, for example, was passed down orally for generations before being put to parchment somewhere between 900 and 450 BCE. The New Testament is obviously different, since theoretically it was written down by people who knew Christ, or at least knew Him second-hand, but it speaks volumes to me that there are numbers of gospels and other documents that were considered for canonicity and discarded. It'd be nice to think that they were excluded because historical documents abounded showing them to be false testaments, but from what I've read it seems like often they were thrown out because they showed Jesus in a light that the church leaders didn't like (as more of a man than the earthly manifestation of the divine, etc.).

  What I'm saying is that there are probably parts of the Bible that are true, parts that are outright false; most is somewhere in between. My view of BELIEF of the Bible, however, is either you believe it wholeheartedly, or other. (Other can be "I believe it's not a literal account of anything, but shows a greater truth" or "I only believe the New Testament, because it's clearly intended as a replacement for the Old Testament" or whatever.)

  I do concede the point that the rules outlined in the Old Testament may be there to show that nobody can be perfect, and the New Testament shows the way to heaven despite our imperfections. I had not considered that before. So in theory you CAN believe that the Bible is entirely literal, and still get your bacon on. I'm not sure that I like the implication that God is basically saying "Okay, here are the rules. Now don't worry about them, break them as much as you want, but MAKE SURE YOU BELIEVE IN MY SON."

• The Bible is merely one of many documents, including the Koran, the Vedas and Upanishads, etc. that purport to show some kind of True Way (although they all seem to lead to different places). The only reason most Americans follow Christianity at all is because it's what they were raised with. It's like preferring steak and potatoes (Mmmm...steak) over vegetable curry (Mmmm...curry).

  If an alien was flying through space alone, searching for the meaning of life, landed on earth, and decided to pick himself a religion because he wanted to believe in SOMETHING, which one would he pick? They're all pretty much equally well-documented. If he wanted to pick one based on which had the EARLIEST documentation, it'd probably have to be Hinduism. If he picked the one followed by the most people, it'd probably be a form of Christianity. If he landed in downtown Mecca, he'd probably pick Islam. In the end, he'd have to make a decision based on whichever religion felt right to him. It's all a matter of faith.

  I guess what I'm saying is that when it comes to religion, you have to choose what FEELS right. To get back to the reason I originally opened this massive ridiculous train of thought (anti-homosexual feelings in the Christian church), a God who makes a person gay, and then denies him the right to be who he is, is not a God who feels right to me.

• One more HeavyDluxe quote before I get back to my usual thoughts of booze and women:

  God = Holiness + Justice + Love + Wrath Against Sin. God without wrath/justice/holiness is neither God nor loving.

  Which makes sense short term, but not eternally. For example, I love my son. I show this by smothering him with hugs and kisses whenever he gets within reach, and also by disciplining him when he, for example, tries to touch a hot light bulb, because I don't want him to get hurt. With God, it seems like he wants you to believe in him, and if you don't, you get eternally damned. Which is similar to Charles refusing to acknowledge me as his father, so I kill him. That's not an act of love. That's solely an act of vengeance.

  Of course, that's projecting human feelings onto an omnipotent being; I obviously can't know how God thinks. What I do know is that I have a hard time having faith in a God who is reported to be loving and yet supposedly lets people burn in eternity, often for the simple act of growing up in a remote place that hasn't heard of Jesus yet. I actually have a much easier time believing, for example, that if you are a dick to people you get reincarnated as a tapeworm, but I like celebrating major Christian feast days, so I'll stick with what I got.

Okay, I'll shut up now. Remember: I DO NOT KNOW WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT. Next week: how God demonstrated Himself to me by way of a massive jolt of electricity through a 5-iron!

In poking around Facebook recently, I came across the True Love Waits group (link only works if you're, you know, in Facebook). I'm not much a believer in it myself, but I do think that overall it's a good idea, because the numbers of young people who are too stupid to be having sex before marriage seems to be growing (because they won't stop having sex, you see, which often results in reproduction). If we could maybe get all these folks in one place and maybe get them to hold off on the nooky as long as possible, or lordy at least until they're in HIGH SCHOOL for heaven's sake, the world would be a better place. Unfortunately, of the people that I've met who joined the True Love Waits organization, all tended to be people who weren't going to be having any pre-marital sex even if they weren't opposed to it, due to significant personality/body mass/acne problems.

Upon viewing the group, I noticed the "Recent News" section, and read through it, and it's a bit terrifying. It starts rather tamely:

Purpose of Group: I do not want to be the one who secludes others because they simply believe differently than myself and how I interpret God's moral code. Even though I believe in absolute truth, I believe in showing love and respect to all first (even though I heavily disagree). First, I want to address why I created this group, this group is meant to be a place of encouragement to others who have decided to be virgins until marriage.

Great idea. If someone wants to remain chaste until they get the gold band, I'm all for it (though I have to admit, if I were single, and went on a date with someone who revealed they intended to wait until marriage to give up the punani, well... I probably would not call her back). But scroll down further, and things start to get a bit creepy:

This group is based on God's absolute word revealed to us in the Bible, and the God that I serve is a God of love (who is also a God of justice and wrath)...

Uh, okay, sure. Unfortunately, the love>justice+wrath prioritization doesn't seem to hold with what comes next:

The concept of Homosexuality if [sic] strongly forbidden in the Bible. Such examples include Leviticus 18 (Old Testament) and Romans 1 (New Testament). I cannot and will not condone such actions to be pure or holy in any shape or form. Homosexuality is a direct perversion of God's created sex and therefore I will not allow any such discussion in this group.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay, first of all, congratulations on not having made any intellectual progress since, oh, about 1840. Secondly, looking above, it seems like you're FAR more interested in the God of Wrath than you are in either the God of Love or the God of Justice. Thirdly, let's talk about the absolute truth mentioned in the first quote. As I see it, the Bible can be looked at in one of three ways:

1. The Bible is the absolute truth: God made the universe in 6 days and partied on the 7th; He really did kill all but 8 people and 2 of each animal with a huge worldwide flood; and he actually sent His Son to earth, had him killed, and then raised him from the dead; etc. If this is what you believe, then you're ignoring valid science (which led to, among other things, the computer you're looking at, the construction of which isn't detailed anywhere in the Bible) in favor of a document that is between 1800 and 6000 years old, depending on which section you're reading. At least no one will ever tell you "Don't be so smart."
2. The Bible is Man's version of God's word, and therefore flawed, but still contains valid instructions that must be followed. Of course, these instructions include things like:
   • Deuteronomy 22:5 - The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God.
   • Deut. 21:18-21 - If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them:
     Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place;
     And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard.
     And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.
   • Deut. 22:23-24 - If a damsel that is a virgin be betrothed unto an husband, and a man find her in the city, and lie with her;
     Then ye shall bring them both out unto the gate of that city, and ye shall stone them with stones that they die; the damsel, because she cried not, being in the city; and the man, because he hath humbled his neighbour's wife: so thou shalt put away evil from among you.
   Those are from the King James Version, and say, in order: if a woman wears pants, it is an abomination to the Lord; if your son is a jerk, you and your friends must kill him; and if your fiancee gets raped but doesn't scream loud enough, she and the rapist get killed. Definitely an authoritative moral code for the 21st century. Oh, and don't forget all the dietary laws that somehow get ignored these days.
3. The Bible is, at best, a collection of jazzed up stories handed down by word of mouth and eventually put to paper. It contains some nice ideas about love, and how to treat other people, particularly in the New Testament, but should never be taken literally.

How anyone can believe option one is beyond me. And yet a surprising number of people do, even young folks, which astounds me. How can you sit through a basic 5th grade science class and still believe that the world was created in a matter of days? Doesn't it make more sense that, maybe, JUST maybe, some skeevy priest made that story up in 4000BC because people kept asking him how the world came to be and were getting tired of just hearing "God did it?"

The second option I can at least understand; follow the rules, and you go to heaven. Don't, and you go to hell. Super simple. However, since the Bible contains all those crazy Old Testament minor commandments about keeping kosher and stoning disobedient children, which even hard core conservative Christians seem to ignore these days, folks are just picking and choosing which rules they want to follow. Which leads to the question: what exactly makes you think that the rules you've chosen are the ones that really count? For example, the most frequently quoted Anti-Homosexuality Bible provision is Leviticus 20:13:

If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.

But in Lev. 11:12:

Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination unto you.

So crawdads, lobsters, shrimp, crabs, etc. are all abominations too. Not to mention, of course, how pigs are unclean (which I gather is one step below abominable), and yet I don't see the churchgoers at the Bob Evans on Sunday afternoons asking the servers to make sure the cooks hold the bacon. What fundamentalists are saying is basically "Okay, you only have to obey the IMPORTANT rules, and we get to say what those are." Sorry, but no; either you obey ALL the rules, or you don't get to condemn others for saying that the prohibition on homosexuality is no more valid than the prohibition on eating delicious pork chops.

What scares me isn't that some people believe that gay folks are going to hell. You can believe that Jesus appeared to you in a vision and told you to sell all your possessions, buy a used Harley Softail, and ride around Arkansas preaching Rastafarianism for all I care. What terrifies me is that folks that believe this crazy stuff have a tendency to band together and convince the government that they have some kind of True Path, and that True Path involves telling the rest of the world what they may and may not do. Religious fundamentalism is religious fundamentalism; the difference between telling homosexuals they can't get married or adopt kids and stoning them in the streets is just a matter of degree. And time.

Even if fundamentalist Christianity starts to decline, I'm still saddened by the fact that, assuming popular statistics hold true, 10% of them are repressed homosexuals. The likelihood is that they'll force themselves into marriages, and then get divorced many years later when they can no longer contain their own sexuality; the results of this are never pleasant, particularly if there are kids involved. I was hoping we were moving into a time where we'd see less of it, but I guess not.

I apologize for this not being even remotely humorous; I don't know what came over me. Stupid facebook.

Like many Americans, I am on a diet. And also like many Americans, I hate it and it's not working. Well...it sort of is. I can't tell.

The problem is that I weigh exactly the same as when I started, roughly 240 pounds. (What can I say? I got a BIG ASS.) But my pants fit better, my belt is on a thinner notch, and people have been asking me if I've lost weight. I'm all, whaaaaaa? I have lost no weight! I weigh the same! And yet am thinner!

Perhaps my guns are getting bigger. Yeah, that's the ticket. And my MASSIVE PECTORALS! Or, and this is far more likely, my neck.

In other news, I have gotten addicted to MS Flight Simulator 2004. I don't think I've played a flight sim since about MS FS 4.0, which wasn't actually a half bad game, but 2004 is way bitchiner, with full training programs, a number of built-in airplanes (plus bajillions of downloadables), real-time weather, and the ability to connect to the VATSIM network and interact with amateur air traffic controllers.

It's not a bad deal, really; FS X is now out, so 2004 is a steal, brand new, at Amazon for $19.99. I got a Logitech Extreme 3D controller at Target for $26.99, and it has more gizmos than my car: throttle, twistable stick (for rudder control), trigger (in case I get a combat sim some day; meanwhile it controls the brakes), and 11 other configurable buttons. I haven't crashed yet. Even on purpose! Although I've flipped a few planes by taxiing too fast.

I've gone through enough training to get my Private Pilot's Certificate, and it makes me wonder; how much harder could it be to do that in real life? I mean, aside from the written test, and the costs, of course.

So now of course I'm looking at how much it would cost to someday buy a used airplane, and wondering how easy it is to make a flight in a single-engine airplane from New Castle County Airport to Mason, Texas. As usual, I'm whole hog into something that will be forgotten in 3 weeks. YAY FICKLE BRAIN!

Yeah, I was working crazy hours last week, blah, blah, usual excuses. In exchange for not having anything new, here's something that will probably take you DAYS to wade through: Anything Goes, 2007! Enjoy.

I found a picture of your mom, and her friend, and the man who might have been your dad if he hadn't gotten stuck in traffic:

(Yeah, I'm posting a lot this week. So? Shut up.)

I think I have mono. I don't know why. I haven't been near anyone who has it, as far as I can tell, but I am just EXHAUSTED. I guess getting paged at precisely 1:15am every night for the past 3 has something to do with it, but it's KILLING me, whatever it is.

I'm tireder than a one-armed paper hanger who also has mono. (You can tell how tired I am because my humorous comparisons make even less sense than normal.) It's 12:40 pm and I'm ready for a nap. I NEVER nap. I consider it an affront to all that's good in the world; it's not dark outside, so why would I be asleep? That's CRAZY talk.

I once got into a really stupid argument with my wife about this; I think we were on vacation with some friends, and I was downstairs playing video games and carrying on and getting frustrated trying to beat some kind of level, and she was upstairs attempting to nap. Eventually she came downstairs and asked me if I couldn't possibly shut the hell up, and I told her it's daytime, I'll make exactly as much noise as I want to. At some point during the argument, I uttered the brilliant observation, "I have no respect for anyone who sleeps in the middle of the day."

It was not one of my kinder moments.

What I had probably meant to say was "I'm sorry honey, I'll quiet down. Can I get you a drink? Foot rub? Vicodin?" but as frequently happens with me, the words that come out of my mouth have absolutely NO relation to the words that were formed in my brain. This is how I end up saying things like, "Sure, I'll drive you to the airport on Friday at 5pm!" when what I mean to say is "Hire a bleeding cab, you putz."

This all points to one thing: I'm a dingus.

Hi, my name is Matt, and I'm a Facebook addict. Here is my story.

A friend suggested I sign up, so I did so, back in August. I was immediately intrigued by the complete lack of all the annoying crap that makes MySpace suck donkey teat (ads, overwhelming page designs), but was frustrated by the fact that I couldn't FIND anybody. I could only seem to search my own "network," and only in a way that basically presented to me every Facebook account in the Greater Wilmington Area, which is several thousand people. Left with no option (I believed) but searching through poorly alphabetized lists of people I don't know, I said "F This" and went back to my life of chasing my son and watching Doctor Who.

And then my boy Shaun TC added me as a friend; I got the notification email, and said to myself, "Meh. Let's go see." I confirmed his friendship, and then scanned his friends list for people I knew. Hm...there were many. I added them. Then I added their friends. Then I added my friend's friends' friends' friends. Plus, I discovered that the way I had been searching was faulty; once corrected, I found even MORE people.

Now my social life has been quantified: I have 144 friends. The ramifications of this are as yet unclear. Also, I'm in touch with people I quite literally have not communicated with since 1994. And I refresh my Facebook homepage every 15 minutes, looking for new Wall posts and pictures.

When do I sleep? I don't.

In an completely unrelated story, "Under African Skies" by Paul Simon just popped up in iTunes, so you'll forgive me, I need to take a brief moment to bust it.

Bust what?

A move.

Mmmm...autumn. The time of year when I leave my house in a heavy jacket and long pants because it's 54 degrees at 9am, and end up having to strip to my knickers when I get out of work because it's over 80 and the AC in the house isn't on. I kid, because this is pretty much my favorite season. I love the leaves changing, I love the cooler temps, I love wearing layers, I love the smell of people getting their fireplaces going for the first time since March, I love the way my wife smells in the fall. (Musky.)

I've always been conflicted, though, because growing up I was not such a fan of school. And September was the beginning of it. I remember going to first grade on rainy Tuesdays and depressed all day, not least because I was a Talker, and was therefore usually on punishment. I think I spent the entirety of that year with my desk pushed far away from the rest of the class because I had problems "shutting the F up," as Mrs. Morgan put it to my parents during parent-teacher conferences.

(Note: Mrs. Morgan probably never said that. I don't know, I wasn't there. But I wouldn't be surprised if she had. I was . . . frustrating.)

Now, of course, I have to work my 8-9 hours a day year round, and I combat the depression with ill-gotten meds, but I look at Charles and think: dang, boyo. If you're anything like me (and he's almost identical to me, so far), in about 5 years you're going to be sitting in first grade, talking a mile a minute, until your teacher throws a stapler at your head.

(Note: no teachers ever threw staplers at my head. Mr. Eshelman hit me in the eye with a piece of chalk once, but he assured me it was on accident. Though I did see him collecting a sawbuck from Ms. Shepard later, as if he had won some kind of bet.)

And as much as I enjoy cooler temperatures, the timing of them kinda sucked; it was warm most of last week, until I drove to the beach on Friday and the temps hovered in the high 60s all weekend. Not exactly "fling oneself into the surf" weather. Luckily, we (Sarah and I and her coworkers and friends) combatted this by drinking staggering amounts of red wine, and eating enough Mimolette that I still ain't poopin' right. (Which you totally needed to know.)

It amazes me how one can get trapped in an information hole and miss all kinds of important stuff. I've been working like a beaver on meth for the last week or so, and then today I casually went to Wikipedia, and found myself clicking on the recent deaths.

Remember last Wednesday how I mentioned I was thrilled to find three books by Madeleine L'Engle? She died on Thursday. I can't help but feel responsible.

I scroll down a little further, and discover Pavarotti died! What in the holy hand grenade? How did I miss that? Something like that, you would think, would be SOMETHING THAT WOULD COME UP IN CONVERSATION WITH OTHER MUSICIANS. But nay.

Nay.

This is the worst short story ever. By me. Based on true events from Monday.

Robert didn't think of himself as high-strung. He was a pretty relaxed individual. Which is why it was such a surprise when he killed that guy.

All he'd wanted to do was go for a bike ride. So he put his bike on the rack on his car, packed up his helmet and other associated gear, and went to work. Around lunchtime, he gathered up his stuff and changed in the bathroom.

"Damn it!" he said to himself. "I forgot a towel." Hm. Robert was going to have to shower after the ride, but without a towel he'd have to stand around air-drying. Just then he thought, "Wait, I only live 5 miles from here. I'll just ride home, throw a towel in my backpack, and then finish out the ride!" Good thinking, Robert.

So that is what he did. Sort of. Except for the retrieving a towel part, because Robert got all the way home and was pulling into his driveway before he realized he had forgotten his keys.

So, he spent a few minutes trying to figure out a way to break into his house, but being a security-conscious soul, every door was locked, and every window latched. "Well, that's just great." Robert considered his options, and realized there wasn't much he could do. So he headed back to the office.

The sky grew ominous as he rode along route 40, and eventually turned into a torrential downpour. Robert was soaked to the bone, but didn't slacken his 15-mile-per-hour pace. He stopped only to check his phone and make sure it wasn't going to short out and melt or anything.

After 8 miles of being really pissed off about being stuck in the rain, Robert came back to the office, went to the bathroom and showered. He came out and prepared himself to just stand around while waiting for the water to drip off. Just then, a man came in to change for HIS workout.

"Rainy enough for you?"

So Robert beat him to death with a cycling shoe and dried himself off on the man's pants.

Weird Dream Number 1: Saturday night, after hanging out with my college peeps, I dreamt one of them (Todd) was picking a fight in a diner with someone much larger than he. They went outside, and Todd tried a sneak attack in which he punched the guy in the junk three times, but it didn't faze the big dude, and so Todd basically got his ass kicked for a while. Then some kind of clown showed up to break things up, and I ran outside to help, ending up putting the big guy in a choke hold that involved forcing his jaw open so far that I nearly cracked it. Later, the guy came into the diner, but it was a different guy (but the SAME GUY!), and he kept talking smack, so I put him in a choke hold again. Then later he kept talking about how he was going to find out where I lived and come over to hurt my family, so I held him against the wall with a butter knife to his throat and asked him what it was going to take to get him to go away.

Just then several naked women came in.

So the guy says I have to pose with two of the women (who somehow found some clothing to put on, meanwhile) while reading a note he handed me, that I can't remember the exact wording of, but the gist of it was that since I was married, I was never going to have sex with these other women, and he videotaped it. I assume that mollified him, because after that I woke up.

Dream Number Two: I had gotten involved in some kind of massive benefit concert in which I was going to be the headlining act, except that I hadn't rehearsed, didn't have a band to back me up, and in fact hadn't even picked any songs to perform. I did have all my instruments with me (not an insubstantial collection, at this point), so I set them up, and started asking around for people to play them.

The concert was to be outside, so at some point I wandered away from my stuff to inspect where the stage was, which was sort of in a big field with the stage set in the shade provided by a wooded bit. Then I went back to the main area and was alerted to the fact that the wooded stage was only for the warmup acts; the main attraction (me) was to be playing on the main stage nearby, which was already packed with like 40,000 people.

At some point Brian showed up and I recruited him to play bass or something. Then I woke up.

What's wrong with me?

This may be the most rambling, disjointed post I've ever put on here. And that is seriously saying something.

I dreamt last night that I got my truck back. The circumstances surrounding it were vague, but for some reason I found myself at the Ford dealership, and the guy that originally sold me the truck said, "Hey you know, we have your truck outside." And I drove off in it without having signed anything. Immediately I scratched the hood of it on some kind of post.

Anyway, I was so ecstatic to have my truck back, but I felt a great deal of guilt because somehow, despite not having signed anything, I knew it was going to cost me money that I don't need to be wasting, since HW and I are trying to figure out how to move back up to North Wilmington. (As it turns out, most of New Castle is a cesspool. Our particular neighborhood isn't too bad, but go 1/4 mile in any direction and the people have fewer teeth than my son. I hate to sound like a snob, but I need to move back to a place where people drive late model Camrys instead of 1993 Ford Tempos with Monza exhausts and plastic rims. Just seems like a more...intellectual environment. Plus, most of the things I do outside of work (church, drama productions, etc.) are in Wilmington, and both sets of parents are up there.) I recently got a pretty decent payraise at work, but we need to save up some serious down payment money, and also we need to prepare ourselves for the fact that our monthly mortgage+tax+insurance payment is probably going to DOUBLE.

So anyway, I felt guilty for having the truck, and was trying to figure out a way to return it. Then I found myself playing softball with a bunch of people I don't know, and somehow I was managing them and attempting to put together a lineup card while the leadoff batter was already at the plate. At this point Sarah woke me up 'cause it was like 9:15am and I needed to get to work.

Oh, the reason I slept in until 9:15? The Brandywiners "preview night," in which they give a bunch of tickets to current members and participants, was last night. Since they do the show in an outdoor theater at Longwood Gardens, they have to start hella late or it's not dark enough to use the lighting system. So the show didn't end until just after 11, and then we had to go to Applebee's for mad delicious flava.

Oh yeah, Applebees: I used to hate that place, but now I don't. The reason? The one by us is really really, really REALLY bad, and the one up by Longwood is less so; the Walmart-adjacent one we went to a couple times had service worse than a prison cafeteria. Plus it seems like Tyler Florence's influence has improved the quality of the food a great deal, such that I had some kind of shrimp fettuccini and it was heck of enjoyable.

This concludes the most rambling, pointless thing I've typed since my 6th grade "Invent A Country" project. (Its name: "Hoyaglitchland.")

I'm going to see John Mayer tonight with my sister, and here's the plan: we're going to sneak backstage, and then Liz will distract the various roadies and Ben Folds (who is apparently there in "support" of John, which I assume means he'll just be cupping his balls during the show, which is nice in that John gets a nice little lift, and Ben Folds has something to do to keep him from actually singing) while I grab John and kiss him full on the mouth, probably with a measure of tongue.

That is my plan. Your thoughts?

Yeah, I was heck of up all hours of the night for work, so we're going to do a link day. But before we get to that: have you ever listened to a song, divined what you believe the lyrics to be, and think wow, that's amusing/cool/sublime/sexy/etc., only to find out later that the lyrics AREN'T what you thought, and what they really are isn't as cool?

I've been rather suckered in by Timbaland recently, such that he can release a completely repetitive song entitled "The Way I Are" and I'm immediately listening to my head and singing along. At any rate, during the chorus, Timbaland sings something that sounded to me like:

I'm about to strip
And I'm well-equipped
Can you handle me the way I'm are

The "well-equipped" part always amused me, for some reason; I assumed he was alluding to the massiveness of his wang, which was about to be unleashed on an unsuspecting Keri Hilson. Imagine my dismay when I looked up the lyrics to try and figure out something that Keri sang, only to discover what he's really saying is:

I'm about to strip
And I want it quick
Can you handle me the way I are

Which is less funny, doesn't rhyme well, and is just disappointing from every perspective (except I guess from Timbaland's, since I'm sure he's raking in unbelievable dough off the single). I was very saddened by the whole thing. Anyway, if you've got any examples of similar lyric anomalies, let me know, I'll be amused by them.

The linkz:

• Best. Headline. Ever.
• What in the heck is this? I am beyond confused.
• Now, THIS guy is really on the ball.
• I don't know many Canadians, and yet from the ones I'm closest to, this isn't even remotely surprising.
• And let's close things down with a quote from Bill Simmons's latest mailbag. This may be the funniest thing I've ever seen on the internet:

  I want to go to the top of a really tall building, take a leak, finish, zip up, and then have my pee hit the ground. I want my entire pee to be airborne. Man I love beer.

  What more needs said?

omg no time to talk on vacation just go here look at new pictures ok thnx bai

Seeing as how I'm a bit of a gadgetphiliac (which is like being a fecalphiliac but with marginally less, you know, poop), I cannot tell a lie: I love the new iPhone. I covet it. Deeply. Which is completely stupid because it's a PHONE. A $600 PHONE. (Which I want.)

But I won't buy it. (Not least because if I spent $600 on a phone there's a non-trivial chance my wife would kill me with a thatching rake.) I just don't need it, which is how I justify most of my expensive doohickey purchases:

• New acoustic guitar: $800. Needed because my sister wanted back her guitar, which I had been borrowing. Or something. (I'm not sure she noticed she didn't have it.)
• New camera: $900. Needed to take pictures of my adorable infant. (The camera I already had, well, it just didn't DO it right.)
• New 50mm lens for camera: $100. I totally needed it to take more pictures of my adorable infant INDOORS. (I will use a similar justification next year when I spend $400 on an external flash with wireless remote.)
• New 28mm-300mm zoom lens for camera: $250. I just wanted to take better pictures at baseball games, really. But I do take pictures of my adorable infant/toddler with it.

Spending money is like an addiction, though, and sometimes it takes a hard moment to break one of it, like when one checks one's bank account and discovers that one has overdrawn same. Not that I have, of course. But in the last few weeks, I have discovered that I need new pants, so I had to buy those; I couldn't find my softball glove, so I acquired a replacement; I needed new batting gloves, so I bought those too; it adds up! Luckily, when taxes come around, I will deduct all these expenses because I'm writing a new novel about them, or at least that's what you're going to tell the IRS on my behalf if you get subpoenaed during the audit. (Burning questions: can other people be subpoenaed? Is "subpoenaed" the hardest word I've had to type all day? If I sell a single picture of Charles to my mother for like 50 cents, can I deduct all the camera-related purchases?)

Listen up people: here is the big news. Me and Old Navy are BOYS. Or...boyz? Boyxi0zrzx? I can't keep track anymore. Anyway, once again, Old Navy has saved me from a fate worse than death: not owning any pants that fit over my Beyonce-style derriere. (Note: this fate is worse than death for anyone who may meet me in their daily travels. For me it'd be fine; I'd go naked most of the time but for the restraining order and all.)

My pants situation has been worsening, 'cause I'm hard on clothes; my inability to eat without dribbling colored liquids onto my lap, coupled with general clumsiness and the fact that my junk and booty both apply TREMENDOUS pressure on anything attempting to contain them, means that pants just don't last very long. I finally had to throw away one of my few remaining pairs of good khakis on Monday because I sat down to eat my morning omelette and split a hole right through the crotch, through which my various Bits attempted to fairly LEAP. I think I ended up putting on pajama pants to go to work.

The big issue is that I am just fat (38-inch waist) and tall (34-inch inseam) enough that nobody bothers to stock clothes for me. Target has fat kid waists up to 42 or so, but doesn't carry any 34" inseams once you get past about a 34" waist, because apparently people over 6 feet tall are NEVER anything but completely skinny. The same thing happens at pretty much every store at the Christiana Mall, including Macy's, Aeropostale, The Gap, all that good stuff. A notable exception is Penney's, which does have a boss Big-'N'-Tall section, if you don't mind wearing Dickies, which I do.

Old Navy, however, has 34-inch inseams all the way up to 40 and 42-inch waists, and is therefore my solution for all fat tall kid pants. Yesterday, HW and I finally found time to go (I bribed her by also taking her to Red Robin for gourmet burgers; mine had guacamole in it and was SO GOOD (and yet I wonder why I have a 38 inch waist)), and I picked up two pairs of pants that make my ass look absolutely delicious. For reals: one of the sales girls got that look in her eye, you know the one where they're all "I want to bite you on the butt," but she managed to restrain herself, probably because she saw that my wife and son were there.

And no young boy should have to witness his father's booty getting chomped on by someone other than his wife.

I'm a picky guy, but only in the stupidest ways. For example: I'm picky about certain foods; macaroni and cheese for example, which I only like if it came from a box with a powdered cheese mix that you mix with a half-cup of milk and a half-cup of butter and then eat straight out of the saucepan after between 7 and 12 beers while watching The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I'm picky about my clothes, and yet own a blue shirt that you can see my nipples through. (And I don't mean you can see the shape of them when it gets cold; I mean literally you can tell that I have a weird hair issue in which my right nipple is dramatically hirsute and my left nipple has a total of 3 hairs, one of which is at least 4 inches long.) I'm picky about what grosses me out, in that I can watch movies in which nuns are decapitated and spray gore onto schoolchildren, but the House episode in which a guy's testicle exploded made me curl up into the fetal position and whimper softly for a good 10 minutes.

One thing I'm picky about is women's hair. Mostly, hair doesn't bother me; even if it's bad, I usually find it very amusing, such as this fetching look, which probably cost that woman over a hundred dollars (money that would have been better spent in a money market account, saving up to have her nose reduced by 75%). But there's one thing about women's hair that annoys me, and it's bangs. I don't know why they drive me crazy, but they do. The feeling they give me is mostly "Wow, that girl has such beautiful hair, it's too bad that she feels necessary to chop off most of the front rather than investing in a 50-cent barrette or something."

Let me draw you some pretty pictures to show you what I mean.

This is Margaret. She's very pretty, is she not? She spent roughly $150 getting her hair done, including removing the grays to get back to the jet-black mane she grew up with, and a set of stylish bangs that hang down just ever so slightly into her eyes. It's all layered, and very well done. She tipped her hairstylist, Alejandro, $25. Now let's look at her sister:

This is Molly, who has her husband Joe cut her hair with a Flowbie. She hates having hair hanging over her ears, so she just leaves it long in the back and short in the front and sides, a classic mullet.

As you can see, the only difference between having bangs and having a mullet is maybe 2 extra inches of hairline on each side. In fact, were you to tuck your hair behind your ears, there's a good chance you'll get embroiled in a conversation about Dale Earnhardt Junior driving for Hendrick Motorsports and whether or not this is a travesty. (Yes.)

I have a problem. Namely, I have a TRULY GIGUNDOUS HEAD. Being a totally hep (hip) guy, I like to make sure that my hairstyle is up-to-date and super-duper stylish. This is hard when one's cranium affects tides, for a variety of reasons. Number 1, any short haircut, which was the style from about 1995 to 2003, looks ridiculous on me because you can see my scalp, which leads most folks to comment "Holy crap, look how much skull that guy has!" It's depressing and said. And number 2, long haircuts make me look like a goddamn hippie, because clothes aren't made to fit my frame, and I hate to iron, so I end up dressed like a 1992 fat chick, all hiding my frame with baggy sweaters and loose jeans and with a mop of unkempt hair.

This is just NOT cutting the mustard, people.

So, I've made a study (I ran "fat head" through Google Image Search) to get a sense of what other nogginly-blessed folks are doing with their hair. The following is the result of that study.

Here we have Alan, who is getting in some early combover practice in case he starts to bald, which is pretty smart planning, when you think about it. It's not something I'd wear out of my bathroom, but then I wouldn't do a combover outside my bathroom. In fact, if I ever go bald, I'm going to spend the rest of my days lying in the tub, having HW bring me bon-bons and cognac.

I like to think Ray here went to his hairdresser and said, "Listen, I'm starting to develop a little lazy eye problem here, is there anything you can do to cover that up?" And the hairdresser replied, "Oh honey, if I can hide the fact that Mrs. Nelson lost an ear to a rabid Great Dane, this'll be easier than finding love at Club Fist."

And Ray slowly sat down in the chair, and Ray prayed.

This is Jimmy. He may or may not be French. Either way, he walked into the stylist hoping for "Gordon Gekko" and walked out with "Joe Dirt". On the other hand, he's wearing an argyle sock as a tie, so his style is clearly rather avant garde.

Remember when I mentioned I can't wear my hair short? Yeah, this is why. Also, Paul here appears to be 80% jawbone. I can't imagine how he talks, let alone chews.

Or perhaps he got jaw implants? Now THAT's a solution to a self-esteem problem! Here I've been considering tasteful liposuction to eliminate the ENORMOUS MASS OF FLESH HANGING OFF MY RIBS and I could just be getting collagen injected into the sides of my face!

When in doubt: take it back to the 80s. I don't know what kind of band this guy is in, but I GUARANTEE it could have opened for A Flock of Seagulls, or maybe Devo. I also guarantee that it never, ever, EVER ever ever, would have opened for Styx.

This guy is clearly at a Styx concert, meaning he's wearing a band's shirt to go see that band, which makes him That Guy, which we can all agree is a bad thing to be.

Yeah, I dunno. I guess it's your dad, or something? Search me.

If you can pull it off, add a gold chain to the mix. A necklace can make all the difference between "mildly overweight guy" to "guy named Tony who could probably make you disappear with a minimum of fuss."

Alvin here is totally rocking the "Boring Literature Professor" cut. I say rocking because, as it turns out, Alvin is the largest collector of antique nursemaid rocking chairs in all of Devonshire. He even has a stuffed one that he sleeps with!

Shaving cool designs into a close-cropped cut is a hip way to show your support for the local football or cricket club, or even give a shout out to a recently imprisoned/murdered homey. Or, as seen here, your favorite walrus down at the inner-city zoo!

I feel pretty, oh so pretty, I feel pretty, and witty, and HOLY COW AM I WHITE! I think a tanning bed would do more for Pat here than a haircut, so let's just move on.

Oh, I'm sure that's exactly what you want these people to believe. You know something, Bender? You ought to spend a little more time trying to do something with yourself and a little less time trying to impress people. You might be better off. All right, that's it! I'm going to be right outside those doors. The next time I hafta come in here...I'm cracking skulls!

Did you think I'd leave out my African-American brothers? Of course not! That would be racist. This is Steve; he sports a classic black man's cut, cropped tight around the ears, but without the careful trimming of the edges that indicates true sophistication. This haircut says: I'm not paying more than $15 for a haircut, and that $15 is COMING OUT OF YOUR ASS, BOY.