ME VS. BABY: WINNER TAKE ALL

I hate kids. Okay, maybe hate isn't exactly the correct term. I shouldn’t say that I hate them. I'm just completely disgusted by them, and the poop in their pants, and their goo-covered fingers, and their bizarre, crooked, no-toothed grins.

If by chance we ever meet, and you happen to bring your kid along don’t be upset if show very little interest at all in it. Don’t take it personally. It's not that I think your kid in particular is gross as much as it is that I think all kids are gross.

There’s a reason I paid a doctor to take a scalpel to my nuts up in my early twenties and it sure as hell wasn't because I adore tiny, useless bags of chubandspitandcrap.

On the off chance that you find my dislike of wide-eyed, foul smelling, sticky-fingered human beings confusing, let me take this opportunity to at least explain myself.

One day my wife and I stopped by her aunt’s house briefly to say hello and get a good look at the new addition to the family.

"The babies here! Come over and see the baby!"

“Ohmygawd the baby will be here for a few hours! Hurry up and come look!"

"Baby! Come see the baby! Come see now!"

“HOLY SHIT! YOU’VE GOTTA SEE THIS MOTHERFUCKING BABY!”

These are the kind of phone calls my wife gets on a regular basis and believe it or not she’s actually excited when she gets them.

Personally, I don't get it.

The kid doesn't walk. The kid can't talk. The kid can't sing me a song, or tell me a story. It can't chat with me about comics, or music, or make useless small talk about the weather, or pretend to be interested in any of the mostly pointless nonsense that spews from my mouth. The kid can’t really do anything other than poop. It can poop and it can drool, and when it’s done doing that it can poop and drool some more - right on top of the previous poop and drool.

Maybe I am missing something or maybe my soul is too black and my brain too jaded, but babies in general seem pretty damn useless.

I don't know.

I guess it's just me. It has to be, right? Why else would there be so many people on the planet - you know, other than the fact that people really like sex and really hate to cover their dongs in latex?

Even if it is, that doesn't necessarily make me wrong.

Call me when you can help me with my taxes at the end of the year. Until then, good luck with that whole diarrhea diaper thing.

Anyway, I was sitting on the couch next to my wife’s cousin – who was also the father of the little bundle of joy - and he has the squirming, fleshy creep show in his arms.

Did I forget to mention that he’d just announced to the room that the kid had in fact, shit her britches?

Wonderful.

With this bit of knowledge in my head, I notice that the baby is looking right at me. She was starring at me with a peculiar sort of smile on her face. She's was looking me over and scanning me for weaknesses. The little jerk was planning something. Something flashed behind those dead blue eyes – inspiration maybe – undoubtedly nefarious in nature.

She knew exactly what she was going to do.

She knew that the shimmery dollop of slobber on her mouth and the bulge of compacted crap ballooning her diaper was freaking me out.

Oh yeah, she knew.

With a bubbly, baby food smelling gurgle, she began crawling toward me. In no time at all the horizontal crawl turned vertical. Suddenly she was climbing up me.

Within seconds she was a mere three inches from my face, leaning wobbly on my shoulder on her stubby legs. Her blank eyes latched onto mine. Her mouth opened and a river of spittle rolled over her chin. Her soaked lips curled into a crooked smile. Here expression was undeniable. Without ever saying a word she was telling me, "I've got you now, you uncomfortable pathetic loser."

And she was right.

The river of mucus drool was hanging perilously from her chin, swaying back and forth as she wobbled on uneven legs and glistening in the light from the window behind us. I had to get rid of it. I needed it removed from my field of vision before my brain exploded inside my skull.

Breathing heavily, I snagged the sleeve of her little baby suit and used it to wipe her face clean. "You um…you got a little something there, don't ya? Yeah, let me help you out with that."

Mission accomplished.

While I felt slightly less queasy, the poop remained, encased in her diaper and smeared against her baby-soft butt cheeks. I could smell it. It was pungent and it was foul and it was permeating the air. A crash, or a call, or something drew the attention of her father for the moment. My mind was too preoccupied with the bouncing bag of crab dangling from my shoulder to know for sure.

He stood from the couch. “Crap. Can you watch her for a minute?”

I wanted to grab him by the wrist, toss him to the floor and kick him square in the scones! What was he thinking? I wanted to watch his kid about as much as I wanted to sit though a weekend long retrospective of the collected films of Michael Bay!

The kid’s hand moved unexpected to my face and I froze. She was pawing at my cheek and poking me in the eye with the tips of her sticky fingers.

The balls on this kid!

The unmitigated gall!

She was blatantly invading my personal space! She was touching and slapping and, and looking me right in the eyes and doing it with a devilish grin so devilish that Beelzebub himself would have blushed.

The nerve!

The absolute moxie!

I was moments from screaming when her father returned to the couch, scooped her up and pulled her away. He tossed her over his shoulder and carried her to the next room to clean the feces from her flesh.

She was smiling at me the entire time.

While I can’t be for sure, I think she might have even given me the finger.

The audacity.

I don't get babies.

I never have and I never will.

I don’t understand the allure.

They are essentially human beings who mumble, cry and crap their own pants. I don’t even particularly care for human beings that don’t do any of that stuff.

You know what they call homeless guys on the street who do the same thing?

They call them crazy people.

As a society we’ve made it a point to catch crazy people and toss them into mental institutions, and deservedly so.

It should never be acceptable for human beings of any age, to stew in their own still-warm feces – even if they happen to be involved in some sort of feces-stewing competition or something.

Speaking of which, if such a thing exists, it really shouldn’t.

Please don’t let it exist.

JINX MEANS THE END OF MY MARRIAGE

Let me just preface this story by saying that, when you get right down to it, I'm barely more than a ten year-old boy sporting a man sized penis. I am. I know it. I’m not ashamed to admit it.

I’m also using the term “man sized” quite liberally.

On top of that, I’ll also admit that this is a combination more dangerous than Pop Rocks and a can of Coke, or Beyonce and a microphone, or the parents of Beyonce and a condom with a hole in it.

I really don’t like, Beyonce.

Sometimes in a marriage there are words and moments that simply can’t be taken back. More often than not these words are said out of anger or frustration, and once they’ve escaped your mouth and entered through the holes in your significant other’s ears, they're stuck there - forever.

When such a thing happens, you’ll likely never look at each other the same way again. The touch of your fingers won’t produce the same closeness and the kiss of your lips won’t elicit a spark.

Like paying full price to see a Will Ferrell movie that isn’t Anchorman, these are the moments you can’t come back from.

Such a moment has occurred in my own marriage.

"Jinx!"

That was, me - screaming jinx with every ounce of breath in my lungs, just moments after my wife and I muttered the exact same word at the exact same time.

You've heard of the game of jinx, right? Of course you have.

It’s simple. If two people happen to say the same thing at the same time and one of those people utters the word jinx, it forces the other person to remain silent until the curse of jinx has been released.

Come on, you’ve heard of that before, right? Everyone has heard of jinx - even an idiot like you.

Oops. Wait. I didn’t mean to say that.

I wasn’t talking about you.

I was, um. I was talking about the guy behind you. Yep, that guy right there - that guy in the hat.

He’s an idiot.

Not you.

You’re awesome.

When my wife presented me with the opportunity to proclaim jinx, I took it! I devoured it! I ravaged it! I took it harder and faster and deeper than an automated sex machine! And I did it in impressive fashion I might add.

I was pretty proud of myself – snagging the moment and making it mine like that.

It was an impressive thing.

You should be impressed too.

It was a big moment for me. The selling of my soul to the devil for a single moment of glory years ago had finally paid off. In that instant I was a man among men. I was I was a young Steve McQueen, riding around on my motorcycle and batting the ladies away with stick.

I was a superstar and I was on cloud nine.

I was on cloud fucking nine with a totally nude, Salma Hayek and a DVD copy of the seventh season of Star Trek The Next Generation - until my stupid wife had to do and ruin it.

"Steven, did you just say jinx?"

"What the hell do you think you’re doing? You know you can’t talk, right? I jinxed you!"

"Steven, I'm not playing jinx."

Son of a bitch.

This was how she was going to handle the situation?

The balls on this woman.

I wasn’t going to stand for it. "Sorry, you have to. You've been jinxed. You can’t talk until I say you can talk. You don’t really have a choice in the matter.”

"What? That's not even how it's played. I thought I had to buy you a coke or something?"

Oh. Dear. God.

Did she really just have the nerve to bring up the moronic “buy you a Coke” version?

The nutsack on this woman!

"That's how girls played it. I don't acknowledge that version of jinx. No one should. People with penis’ play the old school version and in the old school version you can't talk until I tell you that you can talk…so shut up."

She was looking at me like I was an idiot - like I was an eight year-old dancing around the room in a pair of He-Man Underoos with a racing stripe down the crack.

On the flipside of that coin, I was looking at her like she was from another planet - like she’d just dropped her pants, took an alien dump in her hands and smeared it seductively onto her sixteen alien nipples.

Why was she even talking? She wasn’t supposed to be talking! The woman had been completely and thoroughly jinxed! There was no question as to what occurred and no question regarding the legitimacy of the jinx! She was spiting in the face of everything the game stood for! She was trouncing on a gentlemanly pact spanning three generations! She was committing a crime against the very laws of nature itself!

It was blasphemy!

It was a slap in the face of what whatever God you happen to believe in! She was backhanding Buddha! She was kicking Jesus right in the scones! She was throwing handfuls of peanuts at Ganesha and using the robe of Zeus to blow her nose! She was standing backstage at a Journey concert in 1982, and telling Steve Perry his mullet looked stupid!

She was just asking for trouble.

"Steven, I'm not playing jinx."

Unbelievable.

I should have slapped her right then and there. I should have slapped her so hard that my hand left a print she’d have to wear like the scarlet letter.

"Why not?"

"Um, I don’t know. Maybe because I'm a grown up?"

Now she was being sarcastic?

Last I checked there wasn't a get out of jinx card that came with the dropping of balls or a first period. Age wasn’t excuse and I wasn’t buying it. She knew better than to tamper with the very fabric that held the universe together and yet that’s exactly what she was doing. She knows better than to mess with jinx.

"So, you're just going to keep talking then?"

"Yep."

“Not going to shut up?”

“Nope.”

It was on.

When she reached for the phone to call someone from work, I intercepted it. I wedged the receiver between my butt cheeks and let one rip. It was a good one - a good stinky one. It was the sort of rip that rattled the windows and registered on the Richter scale – the sort of rip worthy of the word rip.

"You don't want to play jinx, fine.” I handed her the phone. “Go ahead and call someone on your poo phone, then."

Personally, I think I went easy on her. 

GOODWILL, GONE BAD

My wife and I have two cats. Actually, my wife has two cats. They only became my cats as a result of marriage.

I hate them both.

Okay, scratch that—maybe hate is too strong a word. I should probably reserve the word hate for people like Hitler, Pol Pot, Perez Hilton, and maybe Wilford Brimley.

I don’t have to check my blood sugar if I don’t want to.

You don’t own me, Brimley.

While I can’t honestly say that I hate my cats as much as Blood Sugar Brimley, I don’t really like them all that much either.

They’re old, and they’re needy, and they’re always cranky. They yell at me when they’re hungry. They walk on my head when I’m in their way. They steal the pencils from my drawing table and bat them around the room. They gnaw on my shoestrings. They leave hair all over the place. They puke. They attack my feet while I’m sleeping. They’re always fighting and knocking things over and digging in the trash and walking on the counters.

They’re plain old rude—and they’re annoying.

If they were people, they’d be assholes.

If they were rich people, they’d be Kardashians.

A year or so ago, I was cleaning out the garage when I noticed that it smelled a lot worse than usual. Since we keep the little jerks' litter box in the garage, it tends to always smell a bit “pooey” in there—especially in the summer months. This was something else, though. This was something more. No matter what I did—no matter how hard I scrubbed or cleaned or wiped or disinfected—the odor wasn’t going away.

It was rancid, and it was old.

It smelled dead.

Try to imagine the corpse of a greased up Jonathan Winters, slathered in rotten eggs, tossed in the oven, and cooked for thirty minutes at 450 degrees. Maybe there are couple spoonfuls of guacamole over his eyes? Maybe a trout wedged in his butt crack?

That’s how this smelled.

After a bit of sniffing and searching around, I traced the scent to my car.

Did I run over a skunk?

No. The tires were free of skunk brains.

When I leaned in the open window, the odor slapped me in the face. After it smacked me once, it coiled back and delivered a backhand. As I was reeling, it traveled up my nose, into my skull, and spread outward like a fart cloud laced with Agent Orange.

Whatever the ungodly stench was, it was emanating from inside my car.

Standing at the doorway leading into the house were both the cats. The jerks were just standing there beside each other. They were watching me. They were watching me with their smart little cat eyes. They knew exactly what I’d stumbled upon and what I was about to see.

They were watching me, and they were laughing.

Cats are smarter than you think. They understand, they formulate, they plan, and they strategize. Cats are working out all the angles when you’re still settling on a first move. Cats are whisker-deep in semester two of Calculus 101 when you’re still struggling with long division.

             With the little bastards watching me from across the room with their unblinking eyes and grinning from behind their whisker-laden cheeks, I opened my car door and crawled inside.

I could swear I’d stepped into the fifth circle of hell.

My eyes watered, and my chest heaved. I used two fingers on one hand to pinch my nose and the other hand to cover my mouth. I couldn’t breathe, and I didn’t want to breathe.

On the passenger seat was a dried up pile of cat plop. On the floor beneath my feet was another, and in the little drink holder between the two seats was another still.

Damn it. What sort of sick bastard drops a load in a drink holder?

The back seat was filled with it too—piles of dried-up cat dump—crumply like rocks and discolored with weeks of decay. It was wedged between the mattresses, flattened against the floorboards, and spread across an old magazine. Some of it was drenched in piss and stuck to the seats.

Partially because we were away on vacation and partially because I work out of home, the car hadn’t been driven in a while. There was no telling how long those sons of bitches had been using my car as their personal four-thousand-pound litter box.

That’s when I remembered it—the Goodwill stuff.

There were at least ten garbage bags of stuff we planned on giving to Goodwill in the rearmost section of the SUV. They’d been there for a while. I told my wife I’d drop them off months ago, but laziness got the better of me—as laziness tends to do.

I dislike laziness almost as much as I dislike my cats.

Still wobbly from the odor, I hobbled on spaghetti legs to the rear of the car and opened the back door.

What greeted me was a sight no human being should ever have to see.

Rock-hard feces spilled out the door and onto my feet. The bags were covered in pebbly crap and caked with blackish-yellow stains. Everything was sticky and crumply—crusty and moist in ways that didn’t seem scientifically feasible.

It smelled like a mass grave—like a hundred corpses were buried somewhere beneath our bags of old clothes and ill-fitted shoes. It smelled like what a Civil War battlefield must have smelled like.

I started to cough, and when I started to cough, I started to inhale.

It was inside me. Poo particles coated my nose and filled my lungs. Once inside, they set up shop, joined together, and began to procreate. They sent their kids off to school and invited their friends over for a barbecue. They were planning on staying a while.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the cats still in the doorway.

I was lying before when I said I didn’t hate them.

I charged in their direction, and they scattered. One of them zoomed beneath my legs, causing me to stumble forward, and land on my face—inches from a rocky-stiff cat turd.

I spent the afternoon cleaning, spraying, and cleaning my car again. When I was done, I repeated the process.

If I thought for a second that my wife wouldn’t kill me, I’d kill the cats.

If I thought for a second that I wouldn’t go to jail, I’d kill my wife.

If I thought for a second that he wouldn’t be dead in five years anyway, I’d kill, Wilford Brimley.

A BUTT FULL OF BLOOD - PART TWO

Nothing’s worse than a butt full of blood.

Okay, so maybe I’m exaggerating a tiny bit. There are probably a bunch of things worse. At the very least, a blood-butt is deserving of a spot on the list. I’m not saying it needs to be in the top ten or even the top thirty. I won’t go that far. I do want it on the list, though.

Somewhere in the top hundred, at least. I’m thinking that ninety-eight might be a comfortable little spot.

At least give me ninety-eight.

I’m not just talking out of my ass here people (which is a fantastic little play on words). I can say without an ounce of hesitation that a butt full of blood legitimately sucks. It sucks hard. It sucks harder than the time I used the vacuum for my own sickening sexual perversions.

You see, about a year and a half ago, I was admitted to the hospital when massive amounts of blood began spraying from my rectum. At first, most of the staff assumed it was simply a busted hemorrhoid. It became obvious to all involved that something was seriously wrong when I passed out during a routine x-ray and woke up in a disgustingly warm pool of my own fecal insides.

There was a lot of blood—a whole lot—and a fair amount of poop to boot.

In fact, I’d lost so much blood from the hole between my cheeks that the doctors considered a transfusion. The biggest problem was that no one seemed quite sure where inside my body it was coming from.

When they shoved a camera down my throat, they found nothing. This meant that whatever was happening, was happening in the lower half. It also meant they would have to insert another camera into me from below.

Yep, I was going to get it from both ends.

Air tight, baby.

Before the second camera could begin its march from the southernmost caverns of poo, a nurse shoved a tube up my nose and down my throat in order to feed a gallon or so of something called Golightly Colon Cleanse directly into my belly.

Let me just say that the name Golightly is a massive misnomer.

It should be called Goheavy or Gountiltheresnothingleft or even Gosomuchyoullbecomedisgustedwithyourselfandlifeingeneral.

Unfortunately, the doctors needed me as clean and empty as I could get before they went in, and they needed it to happen quickly. I spent the night emptying the blood-coated contents of my intestines into a tiny plastic toilet next to the bed. The bathroom was too far away, I could barely walk, and it was the only option.

It was awful.

It was shameful.

It was awful, and it was shameful, and it smelled worse.

It was more embarrassing than when my grandma saw me for the first time in ten years and proclaimed to everyone in the room, “Stevie! You got fat!”

Every hour on the hour, I’d roll from my bed, peel the disgusting, blood-sticky, poo-encrusted gown from my butt cheeks, and squat over a bucket so small it nearly wedged itself between my pasty orbs. When I was done, the nurse would empty it, clean it out, and set it up for me to destroy again.

Early in the morning, the family of the old guy in the next bed over came to visit. The smell of my shame hit one of them square in the face, and she nearly collapsed. Her husband lowered his head, covered his nose with his forearm, and looked at me like I was a terrorist on my way to blow up the Capitol. I responded the only way I could—with a very 1980’s sitcom-esque shoulder shrug.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t any laugh track.

It would have been funnier with a laugh track.

Even my wife couldn’t manage to stay in the room with me for more than twenty minutes at a time. She kept finding excuses to exit for a breather.

“I think I might have left the stove on at home.”

“I need to ask the nurse something.”

“The Joker is blowing up banks in Gotham. I should probably take care of that.”

Thankfully, the probing of my backside later that day offered up an answer to the bloody shit storm I’d unleashed on my wife, the nurses, and the family of my poor, poor roommate. It was a polyp.

Not just any polyp, mind you. No, this was the George the Animal Steele of polyps. It was massive, and it was hairy, and it liked to chew on the ring post. It also had the hots for Miss Elizabeth at one point, but that’s another story entirely.

The doctors said they’d never seen one quite like it.

Aren’t I special?

Apparently, this oversized lump growing from the walls of my intestines ruptured and was bleeding. When it was done bleeding, it decided to bleed some more and seemingly had no interest in deviating from the norm.

The surgeons chopped it out and sent it off to the lab to see if it was cancerous—which it wasn’t—and that's precisely why this particular bout of bloody-butt is only at ninety-eight on the list.

After another twenty-four hours in the hospital, they were ready to send me home. I hadn’t showered or cleaned myself in days. My backside was coated in blood and speckled with poop. I was crinkly, I was crusty, I was stinky, and I wanted to go home.

Turned out the male nurse tasked with the job of pulling the various wires from my flesh was in a bit of a rush as well. Instead of sliding the needle from my arm in the gentle manner I was expecting, he ripped it away like he’d caught me sleeping with his wife.

Immediately, the dime-sized hole in my arm started to gush.

“Do you eat a lot of salad?”

That’s what he had the nerve to ask me.

“What?”

“This is really bleeding. You need to start eating more salad.”

Salad, huh?

Boffo advice, Mr. ShitPullWires.

Next time my ass starts to spit blood like something from the set of Evil Dead 2, I’ll just grab myself a handful of iceberg lettuce.