Neal Pollack's The Maelstrom

Well, now that Regina and I have been denied insurance from California Blue Cross--she because of a benign breast cyst that she had in 1985 and me because I have the gall to want to continue my antidepressant prescription--perhaps we can open a "health savings account." President Bush only devoted one paragraph of his State Of The Union speech last night to that diabolical piece of Newspeak. The speech in general was Bush's usual revolting mixture of unfettered corporate toadyism and Flaming Sword Of Jesus claptrap, dusted with little shavings of unjustified imperial hubris. What an asshole. Still, the health savings accounts stuff really got to me. As I said earlier in this pompous paragraph, I don't have health insurance anymore.

Or at least I won't soon. We somehow persuaded our old insurance to give us an extra month while they checked to see if they could somehow transfer our old policy. This seems somewhat obvious, because both companies are Blue Cross affiliates. Health insurance membership transfers should be as easy to get as a Costco card, or at least no more difficult than a driver's license.

If bureaucracy were our health-care system's only problem, I wouldn't have this pervading sense of dread. The Bush Administration is simply a milksop for the insurance and HMO industries. Let me give you a preview of how these savings plans will operate:

Working class and middle class Americans, not all, but many, will be persuaded by government propaganda that it's somehow smart to ditch their reliable, employer-based health insurance plans in favor of a savings account they can "control." This will give them "personal responsibility" over potential life-and-death situations, which is, of course, exactly what everyone wants. Then we'll start saving money, assuming there's anything left over once we're done paying off our insanely exorbitant credit-card interest-rate bills, which really got jacked up by government fiat on January 1. But let's assume we save. And then someone gets sick. Let's say I get sick.

Let's go all out. Let's say that I get testicular cancer. It will then be my responsibility to "negotiate" fees with HMOs, while I'm facing a life-threatening disease. I have no knowledge of how much medical treatment is going to cost, and I won't be going to a kindly country doctor, because they don't really exist anymore. The health-care system is going to ream me for everything I've got, and I'll be forced to put my bills on my credit card, which I'll never be able to pay off, and then I'll go into bankruptcy, which is no picnic anymore since the new bankruptcy law that took effect on Jan. 1.

Basically, we're fucked six ways to Sunday. If these savings accounts are going to take flight, then it will be the final death blow to an already aggrieved American middle class.

Do you think I exaggerate? Well, at least my son has health insurance. That's right. Elijah got medical and dental, for the sum of $79 a month. So at least it's relatively inexpensive to insure children.

Well, not according to the latest House budget cuts passed today. Let me quote from the UPI story: "The bill trims an estimated $6.9 billion for the Medicaid health program for the poor by giving states more flexibility to pare back benefits and charge higher co-payments for services. It also cuts some government payments for prescription drugs..."

The key phrase is "charge higher copayments." That spells out Bush's health-care policy, and, in many ways, all his domestic policies. My family is lucky. We're middle-class enough so that a Medicare cut isn't going to screw us directly. But Bush and his health-care industry cronies are not just gunning for the poor. The squeeze is on, people, and "health savings accounts" are leading the way.

Posted by at 11:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (71)

A few posts ago, I made a remark about "oversexualized" children's television characters, and the comments section started buzzing a little bit with interesting nominations. Someone actually disagreed with me about Little Bear because, she said, Little Bear has to run around naked while the other animals remain clothed, which makes some sense to me.

I countered with June from the increasingly omnipresent Little Einsteins show. While the other kids explore the world in dungarees and T-shirts, she wears a tutu, cocks her hips, and is always twirling around. Forced to watch a pirate episode of Little Einsteins the other day, I couldn't help but notice that all three of the other Little Einsteins were wearing dorky skull-and-crossbones hats while June was wearing a pink bandana, as though the dorky hat weren't dignified enough for her. Over the holidays, my brother-in-law and I were trapped in my parents' living room with our kids and a Little Einsteins episode, and when June did her little "dansey dansey dance," he looked at me and said, "am I seeing this right?" and I said, "I believe you are."

Another comment mentioned Stephanie on the Nickelodeon show Lazy Town, which is a live-action/puppetry hybrid produced by a leading Icelandic aerobics instructor (this is true), with the aim of getting kids to eat well and exercise. There are two human males on the show, the hero Sportacus and the lazy villian Robbie Rotten. Then there's eight-year-old Stephanie, the mayor's niece, who arrives in town in a baby-doll dress and a bright-pink bob wig and immediately starts dancing around and singing lyrics like this, to a techno beat:

Bing bang diggiriggidong
Funny words I sing when I am dancing.
Bing bang diggiriggidong
Silly words that can mean anything.

"Stephanie" is played by a 14-year-old Broadway actress whose name is sort of like Juliana Margulies. While she isn't really my speed, which is fortunate because I'm 36 years old, I can see how many preteen boys might be using her as a comfortable springboard to adult sexuality, much in the way that Lynda Carter opened the gates to so many of my generation. Apparently, according to this bulletin board and this one, I'm not the only person who recognizes the phenomenon. It seems that a lot of moms around the world like Sportacus.

So I must beg the question here: Do the makers of kids' TV shows occasionally make little deliberate nods to the moms and dads in their audience, most of whose sex lives have withered like kiwi fruit in winter? Is it accidental? Am I just being a pervert? Why were the cheesy sex icons of children's television in my childhood, like, say, Electrawoman and Dynagirl and Daphne from Scooby Doo, actually adults? Were is that gronwup eye candy for dads now? And are the rumors true? Are there adult women out there who really want to fuck the Wiggles?

People. Let this discussion continue. Together we can change the world.

Posted by at 11:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (461)

I've received a deluge of letters because of my "Preschool Of Rock" essay in today's New York Times Magazine, and by deluge, I mean one. The respondent, a dad, is about 15 years older than I am, and he wrote apologetically that he and his kids listened to The Beatles and The Who together when his kids were younger. There's nothing to apologize for. I didn't write the article because I think that other dads should share my lousy musical tastes. I'm no more trying to "teach" my kid about rock than I am trying to "teach" him about the first season of The Muppet Show. We're just having some fun. I like to play with my kid and I like to make mix CDs. This is a method of combining the two. Great dads have bad taste in music, and lousy dads have way better taste than me. The piece is really about having a good time with my kid, within a limited framework.

With that in mind, I took Elijah for a Big Wheel ride in the neighborhood yesterday. This is a good area for Big Wheels, because there are hills and also because the neighborhood is slightly neglected, which means that occasionally the sidewalks bulge unexpectedly. This makes for a challenging ride, and helps my kid with "problem solving." One problem I've been trying to solve is how to find playmates in the neighborhood for Elijah. The other day I was parking the car on the street. I met a woman with two kids. She was pulling into their driveway. Her boy looked to be about seven and the girl appeared to be about three. Perfect for Elijah. I introduced myself, and she told me to come over anytime.

On our Saturday cruise down the street, I noticed that their door was open, and that kids were playing inside. So I knocked on their door. A man answered, with the little girl peering out from behind his right side. Elijah gets very excited when he sees other kids, and he started jumping on their porch, shrieking excitedly. The man looked at him with worry. Apparently, he's not from a culture that raises its sons to be spazzy drama queens. I introduced myself.

"I was talking to your wife the other day."

"Why were you talking to my wife?" he said.

"About the kids. She said we should all come over and play sometime."

I looked down at the girl. She had paint on her nose.

"Someone's been painting."

"She likes painting," said her dad.

"I SEE YOU!" Elijah said.

"I see you back!" said the girl.

"We go to the park sometimes," the dad said.

I thought I saw a Bible in his left hand, but upon closer inspection, it was just a CD carrying case.

"I'm sorry you can't come in right now."

"Aww," Elijah said. "Aww shoot."

"Some other time then..."

And the door was closed. Regina later pointed out that some men don't like it when other guys talk to their wives. It hadn't occurred to me that would be a problem. Personally, I like it when men flirt with Regina, because it validates my choice.

Meanwhile, our neighborhood continues to be populated by a endlessly flowing stream of sketchy dogs. Today I took Elijah to Walgreens with a very hip shopping list: anti-dermitital shampoo, diapers, Krazy Glue, a four-watt lightbulb, and Wellbutrin. When I came home, Regina was sitting on the couch with Hercules. They were both shivering.

"We got chased by three dogs when I tried to walk him," she said.

"How come I never get chased by dogs?"

"Then there was a pit bull that looked like it was going to jump the fence. It wanted to eat us."

"You're exaggerating," I said. "Is the cat back yet?"

Gabby, my pet with the longest tenure, got out of the house a couple of weeks ago, and stayed out for three hours. Something happened to her out there--she either got reamed by a hot alley tom or found a secret cache of fish--and she wants more. This morning, she slipped away at 8 AM, and as the hours ticked by, we just assumed that she'd become pit bull dinner. We went to a barbecue in the mid-afternoon and came back after sundown. No Gabby. Regina started to tear.

"I feel terrible. We just left her to die."

"No we didn't," I said.

"She got mauled or eaten or hit by a car."

"Maybe it was her time."

"How can you be so cruel?"

As I write this, Gabby has been home for thirty minutes. She lost her collar but appears otherwise unharmed. Thirteen hours out there, she was. What did she do, go to the beach? Thus, I still live with two cats. One is 15 years old. He weighs 30 pounds, his body is covered in benign cysts, and he only pees outside the litter box. The other licks all the fur off her front legs whenever I go out of town and spend most of every night chewing on my ear. Very rock-n-roll.

Posted by at 9:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (47)

Oprah is wearing Blue Velvet. Oprah is Pissed. James Frey, Oprah's gaze indicates, is a Cocksucker. Even worse, he's a Dickless Cocksucker without Balls. Also, he has a Beard and he is Ugly. Well, not Ugly, exactly, but unappealing and rodenty. The Face Of Evil is Pink and Bearded.

Commercial Break. Oh, man, is this gonna be entertaining. At last, three years of focused, bitter hatred will be justified. At last, I will vindicate my Cock Tattoo, which caused my Cock to bleed when I received it from a bisexual drug addict with AIDS. So now, James Frey, I want you to Suck My Cock Tattoo That Reads, "Suck My Cock, James Frey."

Back to the show. Oprah feels Duped. James Frey wears Khakis. Oprah doesn't know what it True and what isn't. James Frey, you are an asshole. The Smoking Gun was right! Goddamn it, Frey. What is your fucking problem?

Frey "Made A Mistake." Frey Is A Mistake. I am eating your lies on Oprah and Shitting them out and eating the shit for lunch, Frey! My wife used to be a Prostitute, and then she killed herself because she found out you were a Liar. Yesterday, I removed my Teeth with a Pliers and then removed someone else's teeth with the same Pliers and replaced my teeth with them. Because you are a Liar, James Frey.

James Frey, I am hitting you over your head with a Chair in my Mind. I Fucked Lily on the day she died. I Fucked her after she was Dead. I Hung myself while she cut her wrists, but I didn't Die. No, I'm kidding. I was making that up. But it was still true. Or at least it was a Memoir. My Friend Leonard is dead as well. Also, I Fucked Him. And I Fucked your Friend Leonard, too.

The book is about Drug Addiction and Alcoholism, and that makes it true, Frey says. In order to celebrate that retarded statement, let me take a hit off this Pipe, which contains White Widow. And that's true. I'm struggling with my Drug Addiction right now. My Face is on Fire. Actually, I just want to eat a Candy Bar.

Frey is lying about the Dentist scene. Even if he's not, he's still a Pussy. I once performed heart surgery on myself without painkillers, James Frey. And I wasn't even sick. Good lord. Are all writers this Wimpy? James Frey, you put our noble profession to shame. Oprah has called James Frey a Liar A Million Little Times on this show. James Frey's career is Over. I still think he should be thrown in jail for longer than Sixteen Hours so someone can perform a Root Canal on his Ass.

Why does Joel Stein get to appear on Oprah as a pundit? Why do James Frey and Joel Stein get to speak for my Generation? At least Joel Stein isn't a Dickless Liar, and he looks better without the glasses.

Nan Talese has had a Root Canal without Novocaine. But she didn't write a damn Memoir. Goddamn it. Oprah is smarter than everyone in the Book Business put together. Except for the people in the book business who I know or who I might meet someday. Nan Talese thinks the book had "Authenticity"? Sure, Nan, and Gay wasn't fucking around on you while he was writing Thy Neighbor's Wife." I'm kidding, Nan. Please invite me to a Dinner Party sometime. Please don't turn the National Book Awards committee against me.

Nan Talese edited Rosalynn Carter's book. And she says that Rosalynn Carter is a Liar, too. I thought it was strange that Rosalynn claimed that she liked to go go plane crash sites so she could fuck Dead, Charred Bodies. But it's a Memoir. And it's her Truth.

You'd better drink that water, Frey. Or is it Vodka mixed with Blood?

Oprah is Embarrassed. Don't Fuck With Oprah. A Novel Is Something Different Than A Memoir. I Have A Headache. If I were to write a Memoir of my Drug Addiction, it would be called, I Smoked Pot And Sent A Silly Email To My Ex-Girlfriend, And Then I Watched Futurama For A While.

Maureen Dowd really Turns Me On sometimes. James Frey has a Bony Little Butt, indeed. Joel Stein is apologetic for the book, a little, because I think Joel Stein would do it if he had the chance. I know a little something about Literary Ambition, and I can see it in Stein's eyes. Did he snort coke off his coworkers' tits at Entertainment Weekly? Oh, I'm not being fair to Joel Stein. If you read this, Joel, I live in L.A. Buy me Lunch.

Richard Cohen is addicted to Bagels. God, he is such a Jew. Oprah is our country's Principal's Office. I want to see Oprah Spank him. I want Maureen Down to Spank me. But she can probably do better. Check that. I once had a Three-way with Maureen Dowd and Richard Cohen, but Cohen split long before I Came.

By the way, everything in my forthcoming memoir is True. Really. Frank Rich is talking about Truthiness, but I really don't dabble in that. Some things really are true. The only thing that's not true is that I'm not a Holocaust Survivor. But that will come out in the editing.

Oprah is not interested in bashing on Jessica Simpson and the Bush Administration. She's too busy for Cultural Journalism. It is very obvious that Frank Rich eats Rich Franks sometimes. But hey. The guy's earned it.

I bet that this is the only time that Roy Peter Clark will appear on Oprah. Especially because of that lame Halle Berry joke. Did James Frey really write "Remember The Truth. It's All That Matters?" God, he's such a Cocksucker. If he'd written about "certain events in a different way," as he says, then the book would have been fucking boring, and he wouldn't be on this show at all. James Frey Died For Our Sins. But not often enough for me.

I came here and I have been honest with you, Oprah, James Frey says. He lied. And he's a Better Person because of it. He Learned From His Mistakes. Good for him. No one deserves Redemption more.

Posted by at 3:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (121)

Now that this space has become, until I get interested in or have to promote something else, a child-rearing website, I feel that I must, from time to time, comment on various developments in parenting culture, since the entire concept of "parenting culture" is patently absurd. The only culture most parents experience, other than what satellite TV offers up after 9:30 PM, is the goop at the bottom of the sippy cup that got rolled under the sofa 10 days ago. Chocolate rice milk, I've learned, produces unusual spores.

So with that in mind, let me call your attention to this item. Fisher-Price has instituted a world-wide recall of its Laugh and Learn: Musical Learning Chair after a child received a "slight welt on their neck". As far as I'm concerned, the "toy" should have been recalled the moment it was created. Would you look at this fucking thing? I would not sit my kid in something whose face looks like it might appear on an Ecstasy tab.

My kid has a couple of chairs. One of them even has Clifford The Big Red Dog painted on it. But none of our chairs attempt to emulate "role-play in the home." If they did, would they have rosy-cheeked smiley faces on them? Does anyone play those roles in any home? If we really wanted to role-play the reading experience in my house, we'd have to sit the kid on the toilet and get the cat to climb on his shoulders while he tried to steal 15 minutes of daytime reading. That's more or less how I read these days. The idea that this toy even exists has created a slight welt on my brain. I'm convinced that the toy industry is trying to destroy us all.

Along those lines, we all learned today that the Disney brainwashing corps have devised a magazine called Wondertime, for "education-obsessed parents." Apparently, Wondertime will inform us "how parents can play games with their children in the supermarket: concepts like sorting and math can be taught with apples and oranges in the produce section, and color names can be pointed out while perusing the yogurts."

Ah. How very handy. We also play games with our child in the supermarket, such as "if you don't stop touching the avocados, you won't get any ice cream," and we also teach him very important concepts. For instance, strong-tasting cheese is better than weak-tasting cheese. Don't buy jarred capers unless they're on sale. And, most importantly of all, you only get to eat four yogurt pretzels because I said so.

Do you really need a magazine to tell you how to teach colors and counting to your kids? Here's how you should do it at home, thereby saving you money on your Wondertime subscription.

"Hey, Elijah. This is an orange. What color is an orange? That's right. Orange. Now then, how many oranges am I holding up? That's right. Two. Now how many? That's right. One. OK. Do you want to watch TV now?"

Why don't we have a kid's magazine that teaches parents something important, like how to make a decent IPod playlist for a birthday party? Also, assuming someone else is driving, I think a lot of parents would like a list of fun things to do at the zoo while you're stoned, or maybe a run-down of the ten most oversexualized children's TV characters. Hint: Little Bear is not one of them. But who will provide such a service? Who? Who? Who?

That's right, Elijah. Daddy just wrote three who's. Just like an owl. And owls like to eat bunny rabbits. Isn't that cool?

Wondertime, my ass.

Posted by at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (527)

The child charged into our room at 6 AM on Friday. We had a six-hour drive to Phoenix ahead of us that day, so I knew there wouldn't be a lie-in. But we'd already predetermined that Regina would take first sentry and that I'd emerge an hour later. Here's what I heard:

"Neal! My eyes won't open!"

"What are you talking about?"

"They're glued shut."

"What do you mean, they're glued shut?"

"They're crusted!"

"Oh."

"It must have been that milk they put in my coffee yesterday."

"Right."

"I told them to give me soy milk."

Regina rose from bed.

"I need a hot compress!" she said.

She staggered toward the bedroom door, arms in front of her, staying low to the ground so as to minimize injury. I thought back to 1998 or so, to a time when we lay naked under a ceiling fan, not particularly worried about our health, glowing after some solid, steamy sex, discussing our plans for the future. This was not one of those plans.

I turned over. A call rang out from the other room.

"Neal!"

"What? What goddamn it? What?"

"Elijah flushed something down the toilet."

"So."

"So I'm on the toilet and my eyes are still crusted shut."

"Wait. He flushed something down the toilet while you were sitting on it?"

"No! The other toilet."

"Oh."

"Would you go look, please?"

With a moan, I got up, wearing a pair of red paisley boxers that I probably should have gotten rid of during the Clinton Presidency. Those had been carefree days. I went into the kitchen, where Elijah was pulling a bag of frozen broccoli out of the refrigerator.

"Elijah," I said. "Did you flush something down the toilet?"

"It was just toilet paper! One piece!" he said.

"Are you sure?"

"Not a bar of soap or a piece of my toy blender."

Those were other items he'd flushed down the can in the past, causing us to rack up tens of dollars in plumber's fees.

"Do not flush the toilet," I said.

Oh, wait. That was bad advice.

"Unless you go potty. And you should go potty. How about right now?"

"No thanks," said my son. "I've got a diaper."

About half an hour later, I got out of bed for the final time when Regina ran into the room, hysterical because she thought that our car's brake lights had been on all night. Just once, I thought, I'd like to wake up to something other than an emergency. If I'd wanted to be a goddamn fireman, I would have volunteered.

"But they're OK now," she said.

"Then why..."

It wasn't worth the conversation. I went into the kitchen, where my kind and generous wife had already started the teakettle for me. I saw a sliced cucumber on the counter.

"Did Elijah eat cucumber for breakfast?" I said, hopefully.

"It's for my eyes," Regina said.

When you don't have health insurance, folk remedies are all that remain.

Posted by at 1:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (39)

I had the full intention of staying in Phoenix Sunday night so I could attend the Suns/Sonics game, but at the last second, I chickened. Elijah had school on Monday, I figured, and besides, the Sonics were a feeble approximation of the previous year's team. This wouldn't be much of a game. But I didn't take into account the fact that ordinary teams seem to gear themselves up for superhuman performances against the Suns. In this case, it led to the highest-scoring NBA game in a decade, in which the teams set a record for combined three-pointers made. Watching the highlights on ESPN (overshadowed by the latest Kobe look-at-me dog-and-pony show, though this one was, admittedly, mega-impressive), it seemed like the players, Shawn Marion, Luke Ridnour, and Ray Allen in particular, were playing at twice the level possible for normal humans. But, you know, what kind of a champion gives up 152 points? I found this particularly strange because in the two previous games, against the Clippers and Lakers, the Suns' defense had been more than adequate. The Seattle game was the NBA equivalent of forgetting to wear a condom.

Anyway, my friend Jason emailed me the second the game was over, saying "that one hurt. Why can't they win these overtime games?" Since I've been having trouble adjusting to the fact that by 9 PM Pacific, the sports day is basically over, I was at that moment looking at luxury hotels on the Internet. I like to look at luxury hotel websites, even though I'll never be able to afford them. Every day is a virtual vacation for me. So, yeah, I had no idea that the game had ended, or what had occurred. So I had to look at the highlights numbly, in hindsight. Maybe they'll play it on ESPN Classic soon, though hopefully with a different ending.

I also would like to report, along basketball lines, that I've finished book number 3, Crashing The Borders, by New York Times sports columnist Harvey Araton. It's a passionate and critical look at the post-Jordan NBA, saving its harshest criticism for the psuedo-professional college system and its sycophantic, careerist coaches. Any capitalist exploitation of the game, Araton argues, starts there. He also seems to imply that David Stern was getting a little racist in his older age, though not deliberately. Araton doesn't care about a dress code, or an age requirement for league entry. He just wants to see a return to the team game. And that's where the Suns come in. He ends the book with that awesome play from last year's All-Star Game weekend, where Steve Nash bounced a ball off his head into the hands of Amare Stoudemire, who put it down with a rim rattle. The Suns define teamwork, he implied. Mike D'Antoni is the coach-savior. ESPN may be advertising Kobe Vs. 'Melo, but the Suns are changing the game.

I also read book number 4, Paul Ford's novel Gary Benchley, Rock Star. I enjoyed the Gary Benchley stories when they ran on the Morning News, and they haven't lost their bite or silliness in book form. The book veers a little into sentimentality toward the end, but then again, the lead character does have sex with a one-footed fundamentalist Christian during a tour stop in Austin. Hard to fault that. Gary Benchley, Rock Star will probably stand as the most accurate document of New York City's hipster era. It doesn't try to hard, and holds together beautifully as a comedy of cool manners. Hello, Santa. Do you like the Pixies? Read the book, and you'll know what I mean.

Finally, I hope you like the new look of this site. Kenan Hebert saves the day again. Thanks, Kenan.

Posted by at 1:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (38)

Wednesday afternoon, I sat at my desk exultantly. There were many reasons. First, I'd passed my driver's test earlier that day. Second, I'd learned that the New York Times Magazine would be publishing another excerpt from Alternadad on January 29. I'd also received an assignment from Nerve.com to write a short-story for their Sex In The Future issue, which is sponsored by a vodka company. For a freelance writer, the days rarely get better than that. I decided to celebrate, pre-4:20, by pulling out my vaporizer. But before I could get that sweet nectar mist down my gullet, my cell phone rang. It was Regina.

"It has begun," she said.

She'd gone to pick up Elijah at school. I knew immediately what she meant. Those of you who've followed our epic family saga from my first Salon.com article until this moment know as well.

"No," I said.

"He bit someone today."

A brief paused occurred while I gathered steam for my temper tamtrum.

"Goddamnit to hell!" I said. "Shit! Shit! Fuck!"

"His teacher said she sat him down and talked to him for a long time about it. Apparently, some kid took his toy."

"What is wrong with him?"

"I think he's still freaked out about our move. He loved his school in Austin."

"Fuck the fucking move! He can't bite other kids!"

"What is wrong with us?"

"I don't know."

"I'm going to talk to him on the way home."

While she did that, I did what any sane person would do in a moment of histrionic family crisis. I called my own mother.

"He's ruining our life!" I said to her.

"You need to get help," she said.

"We can't afford help!"

"Neal, you just said your son is ruining your life. You can't afford not to get help."

"He's not ruining our life overall. Just right now."

"Well, I don't know what you want me to say."

"I don't want you to say anything. I just want him to stop the goddamn biting!"

"Don't yell at me. It's not my fault."

"I didn't say it was your fault and I'm not yelling at you! OK, I am yelling, but not at you..."

This went on unproductively for a few minutes, and then Regina and Elijah came home. She'd learned certain things about the incident, which had found its genesis in a dispute over a toy. This didn't thrill me, but I felt a little better, since Elijah's previous biting jag, which had occurred two preschools ago, seemed to have been based in some sort of quasi-sexual obsession with a little girl. Biting a boy in a toy dispute, while not acceptable, at least fell into the we-can-deal-with-this range. Elijah looked sheepish, and you would as well if you'd just undergone a 20-minute car ride that turned into a lecture about using your words and about how if you bite someone you don't get a popsicle. There wasn't a lot I could add to the conversation, other than to calmly tell Elijah that he had to be a good boy.

A couple of hours later, a college student came over. I'd happened upon a cache of babysitters a week earlier while walking Hercules around the neighborhood. He fell into a game of yip-and-sniff with a Boston/pug mix puppy that made Herc look like Ernest Borgnine, and Herc is usually the cutest dog in the room. The dog was so cute that I knocked on the door of its owners' house. It turned out that the owner is the track coach at Occidental College, and therefore has an ever-replenishing roster of young women who need babysitting money. I felt a little sad that I was at the point where a roster of girls' phone numbers meant nothing more to me than child-care options, but that was quickly replaced when the sitter arrived, which meant Regina and I got to go to the Suns-Clippers game.

We took the train downtown, making us the Los Angeles equivalent of carny freaks. But the Gold Line is pretty close to our house and we avoided the traffic on the 110. The whole ride, we talked about how we'd failed Elijah as parents and about how difficult Elijah was. We wondered how anyone ever survived having two kids. Regina seemed to think that no one else ever experienced behavior problems like the ones we'd been experiencing. I told her that the fact that a couple of her friends have mellow kids doesn't constitute scientific proof.

Anyway, the Suns played great, as has been their hallmark since around mid-December. I enjoyed the requisite Shawn Marion alley-oops, but my favorite play occurred at the end of an insane 22-4 second quarter run. Steve Nash hucked an outlet pass three-quarters of the way down the court, just to the left below the foul line. Leandro Barbosa caught the pass but bobbled it, droping to his knees. He turned and handed the ball to Eddie House, who had been right behind him on the break. And then House drained a three. I thought it was a freak piece of genius improvisation, but then they pulled the same stunt last night against the Lakers, only this time more smoothly. Only the Suns could run a set play like that and get away with it. I'm increasingly convinced that this team could actually win a championship this year. Mike D'Antoni is the most revolutionary NBA coach since Phil Jackson began handing out books in the triangle offense, and god knows he's got the horses.

We got home around 11 PM. The sitter said Elijah had been great and had gone to bed without any trouble. The boy woke up the next morning in a good mood, informed us that he wasn't going to bite anyone at school anymore, and went off happily. Later, he came home full of news that he'd ridden a bicycle of sorts and that he'd tried to feed clay to a goldfish. Since then, he's been a delight, even if our conversations go like this:

"Daddy, is the Iron Giant a giant robot?"

"Yes, son."

"Is he a giant robot dinosaur who lives underwater and fights sea monsters?"

"Um."

"Do sea monsters smell like tigers?"

"Um."

"They do."

"OK."

"And also like monkey poo!"

The devil had become an angel. Myth teaches us that they're very difficult to tell apart.

PS: I'd like to add that I've upgraded to a new version of Movable Type, which, for you non-blog geeks, means that you no longer have to register to post comments here. Apparently, this new spam filter is good. So you fine people can now feel free again to discuss various topics of importance that I bring up here. Hopefully, the penis enlargement links won't follow.

Posted by at 3:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (57)

My only real problem these days is that I don't have any health insurance. Regina forwarded me this story the other day, and, let me tell you, I can really relate to senior citizens who are up against the health-insurance bureaucracy and the prescription drug industry. The Clinton Administration's failure to enact real health-care reform is a political tragedy, and a failure. But what's happening to health care now, like so much else in the Bush Years, feels like a criminal enterprise.

I know this first-hand, and I'm not even affected by the new Medicare law, or, as Janeane Garofalo calls it, the "fuck grandma up the ass bill." Instead, I'm currently waiting for Blue Cross California to pass judgment on my fitness for health coverage so I can have the privilege of paying them more than $500 a month. This is because I had a doctor in Austin prescribe me antidepressants a few years ago. They're waiting for the doctor to fax them "more information," though I doubt the information he'll give them is anything more complicated than what I just typed. Also, the facts that my wife had one little skin carcinoma and a benign cyst on her thyroid (sorry for revealing that in a quasi-public forum, Gina) somehow make us--non-overweight, organic-food-eating, yoga-doing, relatively healthy art yuppies in their mid-30s--risky investments for health insurance.

It's been like this ever since I quit my newspaper job more than five years ago. Premiums go up. Services get canceled. Hidden costs creep in and jack up credit-card debt. But we continue to take it from the industry, because if we don't, then if one of us gets in a car wreck, we're finished. It's almost too ironic to consider that if I died in a car wreck, my family would be secure for life, but that if I were only seriously injured, we'd be ruined.

Last year, our desperation got to the point where, before we left Austin, Regina slapped my cell-phone number on a website that offered "free health insurance quotes." For the next six weeks, I fielded at least two calls from shysters a day, always hanging up on them. Unfortunately, Regina also answered the phone. Like an old lady living alone, she is quite susceptible to scams. I guess that when I'm tired and scared, so am I.

I came home one day to find Regina engaged in serious talk on the phone, taking notes, nodding, and asking about prescription drug benefits.

"Neal," she said. "I want you to talk to Charles."

"Who's Charles?" I said.

"Just talk to him."

Charles, as it turned out, was a salesman for a "medical savings plan" company, and he could promise us great health coverage for under $300 a month, plus a small enrollment fee. He told me that if I was unsatisfied with the service, I could get all my money back minus the fee, though he told Regina she could get the fee back as well.

He ran down a vast list of benefits and "discounts." He gave me the name of a Texas life-insurance company that was underwriting the policy, and of a professional association that was sponsoring it, along with another company in Connecticut. Before I knew it, he'd sold me, and I was talking to another guy for "verification," or, as it's known to non-suckers, "giving your credit card number to a stranger over the phone."

As the days crept by, I began to realize that I'd been had. The companies he'd named to me existed, but none of them had any connection to one another. Research into health insurance scams turned up several examples of what I'd undergone, and I really started to feel like a rube.

I made calls, but suddenly my questions got turned over to a "benefits center" in El Paso. I left repeated messages for a nameless "supervisor." Upon calling the original "registration center" to complain, I was told that neither the salesman or the verification man worked there anymore. Instead, I was referred to someone whose email was aid@customeraid.com, and she didn't have a voice mail. The guy who answered the phone after 40 rings now told me I could get a full refund, less 40 or 50 bucks. The customer aid person said they'd send me a "paper check," which was a "new policy," but they never bothered to ask for my address.

After much screaming to various customer-service representatives, I got my bank to stop payment on the original fee, and to block any more deductions from the company. I filed a fraud complaint, which the bank is currently investigating, though I have a suspicion that my stop payment will be overturned, prompting another battle.

The moral of the story is that I'm an idiot for getting scammed, but it's also that stories like this indicate that the ranks of the uninsured in this country are growing. We are a healthy middle-class family, and we can't get coverage. What about the people who actually have health problems, or who really couldn't possibly afford an emergency if it occurred? How many of them are currently on the phone with their "medical savings plans," trying to get answers? Who will speak for the people who, unlike me, don't have the time, energy, or resources to battle evil, opportunistic health-care scam artists? How many people like me are out there?

This is health care in America. The center cannot hold.

Posted by at 10:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (87)

This weekend marked a new stage in the social evolution of my family. We attended our first Hollywood birthday party. Well, technically, it was a Silverlake birthday party, but it was close enough to Hollywood that we could pick up takeout from the original Zankou Chicken when it was over.

The party celebrated the birthdays of identical blonde-haired, blue-eyed twin girls, provocatively named Trixie and Lulu. They're in Elijah's class at the Jewish Community Center (Orange Stars, according to the school's Lucky Charms-like class naming scheme), and, even though he's only been enrolled for two weeks, their parents were generous enough to invite us to the party.

We appear to have, quite by accident, fallen into something resembling a community, where every parent of every kid gets along, and where newcomers are welcome like old friends. This is a great change from our social standing with parents at Elijah's previous schools, which, with a couple of exceptions, ranged from cool indifference to "if you hit my car door with your car door I'm going to sue you." Regina says she feels like we're a little out of our league. They seem to be able to afford nannies in addition to day care. They also seem to have jobs. I remind her that our temporary state of financial fluidity will dissipate soon, when the riches of Hollywood wash our troubles away in a warm golden bath of reward.

So yes, the birthday party. It was actually pretty low-key, if you can call a party attended by at least 40 toddlers and their parents low-key. They had a nice enough house, with a fenced-in front yard, but it certainly didn't exist on a scale that made us feel insecure. Also, when we saw it, the house was filthy with mud, and, as we later learned, things worse than mud. But it had been raining all day, and I'd like to see any parent do any better. I noted that their kitchen seemed smaller than ours, but Regina pointed out that they probably own their house while we pay a lot of rent every month to a Beverly Hills-based wicker furniture designer named Lucy.

The parents rented the de rigeur jumpy castle, and Trixie and Lulu had a pile of gifts that would have made post-adoption Little Orphan Annie blush. I don't remember the parents' names, though I'm guessing, from the artistic photo of Henry Rollins that occupies a prominent place in their living room, that they have some connection to the music business. As the party went on, I admired the mother, who was running a fun, efficient party, but was also drinking wine from time to time. The father wore a porkpie hat.

Elijah didn't leave the jumpy castle, except for a five-minute cake binge, for the entire party. Therefore, he missed the entertainment. At around 5 PM, a guy in a bear suit showed up. And when I say a guy in a bear suit, that's what I mean. He went around saying "I'm a guy in a bear suit! Wanna go for a ride on my back?" If that bear had a name, it would have been Irony The Bear. Or should I say "bear"?

Irony The Bear left, then he returned a few minutes later without his bear costume to do some magic tricks and make balloon animals. We were outside the jumpy castle talking to other parents, one of whom used to be a staff writer for Muppets Tonight. I want to travel back in time to steal her old job. Her husband is a staff writer for Without A Trace. I wanted to ask him, "What's Anthony LaPaglia really like?" but I couldn't get the nerve.

The Muppets Tonight writer informed me that there was dogshit all over the yard, and that kids had been tracking it into the house. She'd taken it upon herself to clean the off the shit that had gotten on the slides, because that's what had infected her child, but danger remained on the ground. Parenting inures you to bodily functions to such an extent that the act of cleaning excrement off playground equipment feels almost mundane. "Is that all you've got?" you want to say. "I've cleaned shit off of curtains."

For the first day in years, no one in my family got shit on themselves. The very nice birthday party came to an end. And then we went home.

THE END

Posted by at 4:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (49)

Since this site is destined to become a dual clearinghouse for the dozen people in the world who are interested in both potty-training and literary scandal, I offer this following piece of half-assed opinion, spun out of my brain in a fit of insomnia last night:

James Frey, appearing on Larry King tonight, had this to say about the controversy over his book, from which it looks like he'll emerge undamaged: "A memoir is within the genre of nonfiction. I don't think it's necessarily appropriate to say I've conned anyone. You know, the book is 432 pages long. The total page count of disputed events is 18, which is less than 5 percent of the total book. That falls comfortably within the realm of what's appropriate for a memoir."

Who, I wonder, is this guy to tell me what's appropriate for a memoir? I just finished a memoir myself. The final draft of my manuscript was 500 pages long. I guarantee that there will not be a single disputed page among them. Why? Because I took notes every day that I was writing it. Because when I was recounting events that were less than immediate, I checked and double-checked and triple-checked with the parties involved. I did my document work. In short, I was honest. Or, as James Frey would write, Honest.

I don't understand why, suddenly, people are saying that it's OK to embellish in a memoir or that everyone assumes that everything in a memoir is embellished. Or even worse, people, or, excepting people, Oprah, seem to think that it's OK to just make things up. I've taken great pains to write something true-to-life, and so do most people who attempt to put their stories onto the page in a nonfictitious way. What good is an autobiography if you can't account for yourself fairly and accurately? Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go fuck a prostitute and shoot heroin into my anus before I drive my son to school.

Posted by at 11:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (258)

I begin my first post after James-Frey-is-a-liar-gate (which jacked my Alexa rating up into at least the top 500,000) with a sort of rebirth. After falling one distressing book short of the 50 Book Challenge last year, I have vowed to make my mark this year, even if it means skimming The Great Gatsby for the 20th time on December 30th. Certain people of high intelligence and no personal life are trying to jack their reading up to 75 books this year. But I have a kid, and I also now have HBO for the first time in my adulthood. So I must pray again for 50. I would blame HBO's Rome and Curb Your Enthusiasm marathons for keeping me from my 2005 goal, but it wasn't HBO that caused me to cut it so close in the first place.

Fortunately, I'm a professional writer, so publishers send me books to blurb, which allows me to supplement my library check-outs and my late-night online splurge purchases with books that I can pretty much guarantee no one has read yet, except possibly the Bookslut people. Therefore, I have read two books for blurbing since the turn of the year. The first is called Mammals, by a French writer named Pierre Menot. Because it's a French novel, Mammals is a savage denunication of bourgeois hypocrisy. There are also some funny scenes about working in an aeronautics museum. My blurb will, I'm sure, help sell tens of copies.

My second book was an unexpectedly pleasant surprise. I've known Jami Attenberg for many years, though mostly through Internet contact, and I've always found her clever and friendly. However, I wasn't prepared for Instant Love, a sad, funny and knowing collection of linked stories that examine the sacrifices intelligent young women have to make to fit our society's definition of romance. The stories recalled, to me, Tom Perrotta, Denis Johnson, Margaret Atwood, and even Alice Munro, in their perceptiveness, their attention to detail, and their wisdom. Again, I don't know Jami well, but I sure am proud of her.

I'm equally proud of my Phoenix Suns, though for entirely different reasons. After all, they don't need my endorsement. Not when they have Tim Legler's. But hey. Eight wins out of ten, including a two-night sweep of Miami and San Antonio. The only losses came on the road, in triple overtime. The Suns, according to ESPN News (hosted by Michelle Bonner, who I'm sure is annoying in person, but her eye makeup always matches her jewelry perfectly and there's not much else at midnight for a guy who's on his couch in striped boxers and black socks pulled up to his ankles), are the first team in more than 50 years to play two triple overtime games in a ten-day period. Steve Nash is going to have to spend three days wrapped in one of his patented towel cocoons. The very thought of two triple-ovetime games makes me feel fat and old, though, to be fair, so does the thought of everything else. Yes, I am a man and I have body issues! Let's work through this together.

In other news, my pathetic cat Gabby has decided she wants to spend most of her time outside, in a neighborhood ruled by Rottweilers and hot rods. We're trying to stop her, and to catch her if we can't stop her, but at a certain point, I think our hearts will leave the game. I, for one, am tired of Gabby constantly pawing at my crotch, and I don't like it when she eats flowers and throws them up, either. In general, I'm hoping for a feline leukemia outbreak in my house. No one will ever have to know that I bought the strain from a local weapons dealer.

Elijah, meanwhile, is generating little of interest. We did go out for dim sum on Sunday, and rode the train to Chinatown, thank you very much. He celebrated by eating very little, though he did bite the heads off every single one of a plate of head-on salt-baked shrimp, and he ate those heads, too. Regina thinks he was unaware that these were heads, but I have hope that he was, in fact, very aware.

Later that night was storytime. The usual mix these days is Richard Scarry, Maurice Sendak, and Tintin.

I spent some time living in Belgium as a little boy, because my father was employed by a large hotel corporation there. There will be no complaints about the experience here. Living in Europe is great if you have the means, and we did back then. One of the few remants of that period of my life is my reasonably large collection of Tintin and Asterix comics. Elijah prefers Tintin.

Who wouldn't, though? Elijah's two favorite books each contain an exploding volcano and a plane crash, not to mention the perpetually drunk seagoing playboy Captain Haddock. There are lizards and spiders and rats and bats and secret tunnels. People are always bumping into doors. This is just the speed of humor for a kid who howls with laughter at blooper shows on Animal Planet, and who thought that the dog-getting-flushed-down-the-toilet scene in Meet The Fockers was the funnniest thing ever put on film, other than perhaps the dog getting dragged behind the car in National Lampoon's Vacation. I know these aren't appropriate movies for kids, but kids' movies suck. I don't particularly like Meet The Fockers, but it sure as shit beats The Land Before Time.

So yeah. When I "read" Tintin to Elijah, it usually goes like this:

"Uh-oh. Look. The ship's cook is making something for dinner. It looks like he's making spaghetti! Here comes Snowy to eat the spaghetti. Naughty Snowy. Oh, no! The spaghetti fell!"

"He's running around with noodles all over him!" Elijah says.

"Yes."

"He's a noodle dog."

"Yes."

"Noodle dogs are silly, and so are, so are...pasta dogs!"

"OK."

"Monsters don't eat noodles, daddy."

"OK."

"No! They do eat noodles!"

Like sand through the hourglass...I am now one more night's sleep away from becoming worm food. Aloha.

Posted by at 12:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (185)

My loyal readers. I've decided to tell all after these many years of pretending to be something that I'm not. My role as father, husband, and semi-employed reformed literary hipster is a lie, a cover for the terrible reality of my actual self. Writers, after all, must always tell the truth about themselves. The truth.

I may be a father, but I am also a murderer of children. Several thousand of them have died on my watch, some in secret government-sponsored air raids in foreign countries that no longer exist. But it's more depraved than that. I killed all those children while addicted to crack, and weed, and heroin. That was very hard to do because I couldn't see very well due to the massive quantities of blood that were streaming from the always-open wound in my forehead, which was given to me by my childhood rabbi after he sodomized me at a strip club that we owned together. Also, I'm a transgendered prostitute who writes poetry, my mother was a whore, and my father was a sailor from Athens who was murdered by the original members of the Black Gangster Disciples after he tried to steal a shipment of amphetamines from them. I'm on the top ten wanted list in 37 states, and in the top five in the other 13. I've never met a woman who didn't want to fuck me.

It's been a hard life because the cops won't start--I mean stop--beating me up. The other day, I spilled coffee on the passenger seat of my 2006 BMW Convertible. That pissed me off so much that I stopped off at the closest Catholic church and hired a bunch of bums to gang-rape a nun. That's how much of a bad-ass I am. Meanwhile, the rumors that I've been hiring an actress to play me in public are only part true. I did hire one, but I killed her after I made her give me a blowjob under the table at the Paramount backlot commissary. If you're wondering where all the records of my various crimes have gone, well, they were destroyed in a fire a few years ago, a fire that spread across neighborhood police stations in every state. You didn't hear about that fire because of another fire that night, this one afflicting newsrooms.

And yes, it's true that an Egyptian princess found me in the bullrushes and raised me as her own son. The fact that I was 16 when she found me didn't stop me from fucking her, hard, and then killing her to claim her throne. As soon as that was over, I sent Gus Van Sant, who is making this blog entry into a movie, a dried elk's penis as proof.

If any of you question any of my claims, you're an asshole. Actually, you're an asshole anyway, and I'm going to kill you if I get drunk in your presence. I'm sorry about all the bad things I've done. Now buy my books.

Good day.

Posted by at 11:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (48)

I feel like I've been on an airplane for the last 48 hours, my circadian rhythms having been totally destroyed by an all-night Thursday visit to the Commerce Casino with two Austin friends in town for the Rose Bowl. It was the closest to Entourage I've come in L.A, the only difference being that instead of partying at The Playboy Mansion, I was playing 2-4 blind Texas Hold 'Em with a bunch of drunk Chinese ladies. The evening's highlight arrived when I, ignoring the table because I was eating a delicious order of spicy prawns with rice, took a pot from a Russian guy who was wearing a blue velvet tracksuit. As soon as the spot to my right cleared, the Russian moved his stack next to mine and started making absurd bets in at attempt to drive me to the nearest almshouse. I escaped with $43 in winnings, which just about covered the cost of the gas required to drive my friends to LAX.

I managed to sleep until almost noon the next day, but my poker binge caught up with me the following night as I lay awake, grinding my teeth, while my disgusting cat kneaded my scalp with her clawless paws. Then it was 7 AM. Elijah burst out of his room, slammed his door, and jumped on our bed, declaring that he was a shark-eating dinosaur. I was so tired upon rising that I had to eat three toaster waffles with extra syrup. Soon after, we were getting into our station wagon to drive to Elijah's preschool's weekly Shabbat celebration.

Somehow I secured Elijah a spot at the Silverlake Independent JCC's preschool while still living in Texas. I guess the director figured that any guy who's willing to make a long-distance call to a preschool at least once a week for five months must really need his kid out of the house. We visited the school once before we moved. Children ran berserk with no seeming purpose. Several of them had dusty clothes. A pretty little girl sat on a bench, sobbing, because her diaper rash hurt so much. The director had to take over the kindergarten herself because both her teachers called in sick. It was perfect for us.

Now, the JCC is "independent" because some sort of Southern California JCC organization tried to shut it down a few years ago. The neighborhood rallied to save this beloved institution, but they didn't raise enough money. Now the JCC is actually just a preschool, though they did just refinish the gym floor and are holding yoga classes for parents every Wednesday morning. There's much love being put into the structure, and also a new roof, though if you turn right onto Bates Avenue off of Sunset, you'll see that the front entrance has been tagged almost beyond recognition, and that a rather large pile of trash has accumulated behind the locked main gate. The director recommends parents come around the back.

The J's playground exists on several tiers, each with a sand floor and individual play structure, each tier progressively below Sunset Boulevard. I try not to think about the fact that transvestite prostitutes have, for years, been giving blowjobs to johns on the street about 30 feet from where my son rides his tricycle every day. Anyway, on Friday mornings, the concrete central play yard becomes a sort of de facto temple as the community celebrates the Sabbath together, willfully ignorant of the seediness occuring just outside the gates.

Ruthie, the director, stands at the front, while all the parents, kids, assorted grandparents and teachers sit on sheets and blankets. Backing Ruthie is a band, called The Klezmers, that's comprised entirely of parents from the school, many of whom compose TV and film music for a living. On this day, The Klezmers included a standup bassist, an acoustic guitarist, an electric guitarist, an eight-year-old boy bongo player, and a woman with bright-pink hair who played the recorder while a slinged baby clung to her chest.

We sang several lovely songs, including "Oseh Shalom Bimromav" and "Bim Bom," both of which I swore, in 1981, never to approach again after the trauma of seeing my rabbi's ass crack at the bottom of his overalls while he played them on the piano at summer camp. But here I am, on the other side of the generational divide, and I suddenly find myself drawn to those traditions again, though maybe for no more noble reason than I scored a lot of girls through Jewish youth group and I want my son to have the same opportunity.

Elijah lasted about four songs before he started getting yitchy. I can tell already he's going to be the guy who leaves the concert halfway through because he wants to go to the next bar. On this day, eighteen years before his legal drinking age, he twitched his head around.

"Hey," he said, looking up. "What's that?"

He was a first responder. Little tufts of white vapor were drifting up from the roof of the building behind us. Then someone from the back started shouting that they smelled gas. In the middle of singing "Minnie Mac," the director changed course and immediately ordered us all into the parking lot, which stank of gas even worse.

I found myself standing next to a guy in a University of Texas baseball hat. He looked like everyone I knew in Austin, and I found myself longing for my former home's casual ways.

"Well, I won't have to use my vaporizer later," I said, assuming he'd get the pot reference.

"I think that smell might be me," he said. "I had Cajun last night."

A construction worker appeared out of a deep hole a half-block long, which comprises the J's Eastern border, the Western border being a shuttered crack motel. Gentrification is fast approaching that block of Sunset, but I sort of began to realize why the center had almost shut down in the first place.

Anyway, the worker informed us that someone had struck a gas main about a block away, which was why we had the smell. Nothing to worry about, he said. Indeed, none of the parents seemed particularly concerned about a gas leak next door to their children's preschool, and we all went back inside to finish "Minnie Mac," only to be joined by three firemen, who marched around the facility to make sure that nothing was, I guess, on fire.

We got Elijah into his classroom, gave him his challah and apple juice, and left. I overheard another parent say: "Just another day at the Silverlake JCC."

I turned to Regina and said, "Man, am I tired."

"Me too," she said.

Suddenly, we realized that our main reason for exhaustion wasn't going to be with us for the next five and a half hours. We were in a new city and we had much work to do. In order to stay afloat in the hyper-competitive corporate entertainment rain forest that is L.A., we needed to be efficient about our time. And thus we decided to go out for a second breakfast.

Posted by at 11:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (300)

Big news from Tinseltown, where unimaginable glamour meets cold-blooded reptilian business sense at the crossroads of your dreams. In the last two days, Teacake, my wife's enormous ancient arthritic tabby who is covered in benign cysts, has urinated on my bathmat twice, my favorite pair of jeans once, and my treasured shoulder bag. I've told Regina that if he pisses on anything else I love, either he goes, or I go. Even if that ultimatum lands me in a residential hotel in downtown L.A., I'm still standing fast to the principle. She says it's because I don't clean the litter box often enough. As if.

The other hot holiday gossip is that Elijah took a shit in the bathtub last night. We've experienced most iterations of fecal matter since becoming parents, but this was our first floater. We stared at it with equal parts admiration and horror before flushing it down the toilet. Then we drained the bathtub, cleaned it and filled it back up again, because baths keep Elijah busy in the evenings and we wanted to have a glass of wine.

But now the meat of the matter. There's a house directly behind ours, owned by the same landlord. In it lives a French woman, who's a bioengineering graduate student at USC. She's friendly enough, though she never thanked us for the cookies we gave her on Christmas. The other night, she knocked on our door in the middle of a terrific freezing rainstorm.

"I have a leetle problem," she said.

"What?" I said.

"Eet's a dog."

She opened the door further. Behind her was a medium-sized terrier. Its fur had been torn away in chunks from its torso, leaving a rash of red-raw skin and sores. Its bones were eminently visible. It was soaked and desperate to come inside. It stank like an entire animal shelter full of filth, with that certain kind of desperate putridity that presages death.

"Eet followed me home. I don't know much about dogs."

"We have a dog!" I said proudly.

"I know," she said. "That's why I'm asking you for help."

I'd been in town for two weeks, and was already feeling useless. This was the perfect mission to break my slump. A great surge of heroism and duty welled in my chest. I began barking orders.

"Regina! Get me some dog food! And a bowl! No! Two bowls! And a towel! And some treats and some doggie shampoo! We're going to clean this mutt up!"

A few minutes later, I walked through the rain to the back house. The French girl's place already smelled like the dog throughout.

"Eet's a he," she said. "I looked."

He hovered in her kitchen, but when I offered him doggie treats, he just looked confused, like he'd been hungry so long that he'd forgotten food's purpose. So I skipped that step, picked him up in a towel, and carried him to the bathroom, where I placed him in the tub, soaked him with water from a cup, and scrubbed him town with Johnson's Baby shampoo. He behaved himself. At least the water was warm.

When we were done, he still smelled like death, but at least it was now a clean death.

"Now what do I do?" she said.

This woman had obviously spent so much youth in microbiology labs that she had no idea how to function in the world of the mundane.

"Um. Call a vet?"

For some reason, she handed me the phone book and phone. So I called the Eagle Rock Emergency Animal Hospital.

"Yes. I have a dog here. I found. Well actually, my neighbor found him on the street and took him home and then I gave him a bath. Where should I send him?"

"You need to call the humane society," said the man on the other line.

"OK."

"And, because you handled the dog, you might have mange."

"What?"

"Mange. Scabies. You should check with your doctor in two weeks. It usually doesn't set in for a month to six weeks. And if you have it, then everyone you come into contact with will get it too."

"Are you saying I shouldn't touch anybody for a month?"

"Just to be safe."

"Mange?" I said. "Are you sure I'm going to get mange?"

"Go to your doctor," he said. "You have mange."

This seemed impossible. I bathed the dog with disinfectant shampoo and washed my hands afterward. I've come into contact with stray dogs many times. And yet mange is not on the list of diseases I've contracted. Nevertheless, I ran home in a panic.

"We have mange," I said to Regina. "You need to take off all your clothes and put them in the washer. NOW! And Elijah's! And take the collars off the animals! Except Teacake!"

So soon, my entire family was sitting around in its underwear, watching Monsters, Inc. Remember that image if you haven't yet decided to have a family and do with it what you may.

The next day, it was determined that Hercules' heartworm medicine protects him from mange. And that mange for people and dogs are two different things. The dog had been taken to the shelter, where I fear he will not meet a good end. Our panic had created nothing other than fear of the packs of lunatic dogs that roam our neighborhood. But we probably should be fearing them anyway. There still remains a possibility that the cats will contract mange. One can only hope.

Posted by at 1:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1563)

I humbly stand before you defeated by the 2005 50-Book Challenge. The defeat is even more humiliating because I finished book 49 on December 26, and therefore had plenty of time to make quota. But for various reasons, I failed. In 2006, the quest begins anew.

One notes about this year's list: It was largely made up of crime novels, appropriate since this was the year my book of crime fiction appeared, and also new novels in translation. Since I began reading seriously more than 20 years ago, I've always been drawn to what reductively can be called "world literature." England, while definitely part of the world, doesn't really count, because that country's literary culture, while certainly distinct, has too many ties to the States. But novels from other countries feel like secret messages, even when they're not good. I should probably read that Turkish guy, who is, status-wise, the Garcia Marquez of our time (not that Garcia Marquez is dead yet, mind you), but no one's sending me his stuff for free in the mail. And that marks another trend: This is the year that the books I get to blurb improved. I'm getting more interesting offers from better writers than ever before. I have no idea what that means, except that it jacks up my stats. Now, on with the sad recitation of failed challenges.

Book 47 was The Line Of Beauty, by Alan Hollinghurst, which won the Booker in 2004. A little heavy on the Henry James referencing. Did the protagonist really have to be a James scholar? I get it, I get it. The days of the "obscure hurt" are over, replaced by larger, deadlier hurts. In general, the book's milieu was a little bougie for me. I show my ignorance when I have no idea why Strauss, either of them, is significant for a scene. Still, lots of good, subtle observation, and a well-earned, deeply-moving final act.

Book 48 was The Demented Dance, by a French-Algerian writer named Mounsi. This one's set in the late 80s, among the crime-ridden "red line" suburbs of Paris. Poor suburban French alienated Muslim youth: No one would call this book irrelevant. Unfortunately, I found the translation a little plodding and pretentious. It was 20 pages before anyone spoke in anything but generalizations. I feel expecially bad because I bugged the publisher for months to send me a copy of the book, which I thought sounded interesting. It was, in fact, interesting, but I was in the mood for something a trifle more felicitious, I guess.

I wrapped up the year with The Time Traveller's Wife, which my wife had just done in her book club. It was sitting around, and I knew it was set in Chicago, so...anyway, a bit girly-girl for my tastes, but it's one of the more romantic novels written by someone with actual skill in a long time. I found the voice precious at times, and the ending left me scratching my head a little, but Audrey Niffeneger certainly got the details right. Artsy types would have gone to see a Peter Greenaway film at Facets Multimedia on a Friday night in 1991. The Violent Femmes did play the Aragon. And crazy women, too smart for their own good, sometimes shot themselves in the head.

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