Neal Pollack's The Maelstrom

Vacation time is upon us, my friends and loyal readers. As such, I'm putting this site on hiatus until after Labor Day, after which it will steam ahead full-bore in anticipation of the release of Alternadad on January 9, 2007. Please feel free to preorder the book here, or to join the swelling Alternadad MySpace playgroup, which is really going to get active once my much-needed, if not much-deserved, summer break ends.

Meanwhile, for you Minnesotans in the crowd, let me point your attention toward an event coming in October. I'll be appearing with my friend and former literary agent John Hodgman, who has recently catapaulted to fame on The Daily Show and as a spokesperson for a small upstart computer company out of Washington. Hodgman rode on my coattails for many years, and now he's giving me a ride in return. The show should be a lot of fun, though I find it hard to believe that a "group of 15 or more" would be interested in attending anything I have to offer. I also find it a bit strange that I'm being placed on a cultural nexus with A Prairie Home Companion and The Roches. Still, it's a very partial living. I'm sure I'll figure out a way to fuck it up somehow. Details follow immediately:

Friday, October 6th, 2006 at 8:00 p.m.
Neal Pollack and John Hodgman

89.3 The Current presents The Current Fakebook with John Hodgman and Neal Pollack at The Fitzgerald Theater on Friday, October 6th at 8:00 pm. The two authors, familiar to public radio listeners for their appearances on This American Life, talk about their latest literary endeavors. They will also perform with musician Jonathan Coulton, and the band Poison Control Center of Ames, Iowa. The evening will be hosted by The Current's Mary Lucia. Tickets are available for $15.00. Minnesota Public Radio Members receive a discount. Group discounts available for groups of 15 or more.

Meanwhile, for those of you who came here for your Elijah fix, I offer this small anecdote:

This evening, our neighbors stopped by for instructions on not killing our cats while we're away. Elijah, who they haven't seen much of since they moved in behind us a couple of months ago, charged into the living room, wearing his bathing trunks on his head. Just another bedtime for us, but they were charmed.

"Hello, Elijah," they said.

"This is my night hat," Elijah replied.

"Oh."

"I wear it every night, and it makes me handsome."

"I see."

"I am a superhero, and my name is Laundry."

"Laundry Man," said Regina.

"No, Regina," I said. "Laundry. It's a one-word name, like, um, Starfire and Wolverine."

"I will get you with my laundry power!" Elijah said.

I'm sure this will be a very relaxing trip. See you all on September 5.

NP

Posted by at 11:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (23)

Even by the standards of The World's Most Disorganized Aquatic Center, Elijah's current session of swim classes has been a chaotic disaster. The original teacher came down with an eye infection. His replacement went off to college after three days. Then came two days where teachers were getting pulled from other classes to teach this one. Add to the mix a five-year-old boy who spends half the class on the deck, howling for his mommy, and you this all equals my son not really learning how to swim.

Yesterday, Attachement Boy attempted to drag Elijah under the water and hold him there while the lifeguard stood by and did nothing. I rescued my son and called the teacher's attention to the fact that one of her students was trying to drown another. She disciplined them limply. Once that got settled, I turned back to my conversation with a mom who I'd met at the pool and had subsequently befriended.

This mom told me the story of how she recently had to fire her babysitter because her babysitter took the kids back to her house to let them play with her pit bull, and then told the kids to lie about it. Parenthood is nothing but constant disappointment and paradise lost. I relayed some of my own tales of middle-class woe. For fifteen minutes, we discussed the difficulties of raising a white child in a gentrifying urban neighborhood.

"But you know, I should be grateful," said the mom. "I don't have any problems that can't be fixed by money."

"Yeah," I said, while thinking, I've got problems that would probably make your problems seem like orgasms. This was proven true immediately as our kids got out of the pool. She and I made nice talk about how we should get the families together sometime.

"Oh my goodness!" she said.

I turned around, and Elijah was peeing all over the pool deck.

"Elijah!" I shouted. "Stop peeing!"

"Heh, heh, heh," Elijah said.

And thus it came to pass that I found myself uselessly grasping for my son's penis as he uncorked publicly. None of the other parents said anything at all. Maybe they were judging me silently. Or maybe they just had their own problems.

Posted by at 1:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (31)

Once a day, and sometimes several times a day, Elijah announces to me that he wants to "play rough." This is how playing rough goes in our house: He and I get on my bed, we smack each other for pillows for a while, he leaps on my back, and I flip him over my shoulders. Then I grab him by his ankles, turn him upside down, and swing him around. Sometimes our moves are a little different, but that's the essence of the battles. Meanwhile, he keeps up a constant patter that sounds something like this:

"I am Hot Man! And you are Dr. Boney! And then I turn into Batman and Remote Control Man and I freeze you with my invisible power! You will fall on the Floor Of Dust and the mosquitoes will come and bite you. You can never defeat me!"

The result of playing rough is that Elijah has no fear of heights or of getting spun around. More than once, he and I have spent a good number of minutes watching roller-coaster clips on YouTube. And he also, judging by the way he acts around his school friends, doesn't seem to mind mixing it up with the boys during their daily wrestle.

However, I wouldn't exactly say it's toughened him up.

This morning, Elijah and I walked out the door on the way to school. He was behind me, and his feet got tangled coming down the steps. A howl emerged, and he sprawled.

"WAHHHHHHH!" he screamed. "THERE IS BLOOD ON ME!"

I looked around. He'd skinned his knee, so I guess, technically, there was some blood.

"AHHHHHHH! A BOO-BOO! A BOO-BOO!"

The balance of the day had been shattered.

Regina and I took Elijah inside. She put hydrogen peroxide on his knee, and a little antibiotic cream. He continued to howl, even after we gave him a popsicle.

"Now my boo-boo is bleeding and wet!"

"It's not wet," Regina said. "That's cream."

"I don't like cream! I don't want to go to school! I'll never be able to walk again!"

He had to go to school, though we agreed to forestall walking for a bit. I carried him to the car and put him in his seat. He continued to sob all the while.

"Sometimes you get boo-boos, and it hurts," he said. "It hurts weawy badwy and then other people get boo-boos, too. OWWWWWWWWW!"

I briefly contemplated showing this kid, with his slightly skinned knee, footage of children writing in pain in Iraqi hospitals, just so he could have some perspective. But that idea went away fast. Instead, I decided to make him feel better by making fun of his favorite Johnny Cash song.

"Hey, Elijah," I said.

"What."

I sang:

I fell into a burning ring of poop
I went down, down, down
And the poop burned higher

He laughed, and victory was mine. Then he tried his own lyrics.

I fell into a burning ring of ice cream....
And it's cold, cold, cold,
That ring of ice cream
That ring of ice cream

I carried him into his classroom and sat him on a rug. His friends surrounded him, but he didn't try to stand. When I saw Elijah next, it was 4 PM, and he was scooting around our living room on his butt. He'd negated his swim lesson for the day, his bath, and any activity at all, really, other than eating carrots and watching David Bowie in Labyrinth, because of his boo-boo.

"I can't play rough with you today, daddy," he said.

"Oh, darn," I replied.

Posted by at 11:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (19)

Sometimes, spending 30 bucks can be the worst feeling in the world. It can buy you some shameful things: a few minutes of phone sex, some bad Thai takeout, or two tickets to a Nicolas Cage movie plus a small butterless popcorn and a syrupy Sierra Mist. And then, sometimes, you buy a loge seat to watch Greg Maddux take on Jason Schmidt in the best pitching duel seen in Dodger Stadium since Orel Hersheiser decamped his Mormon ass to Cleveland.

Maddux went eight innings and threw 68 pitches.He gave up two reasonably hard singles in the first and then made a spectacular spear of a Barry Bonds line drive, turning it into a double play. Not one more Giant reached base on his watch. Schmidt was just as good, if not as economical; the Dodgers looked like they were swinging sticks of butter against him. As the anonymous, underrated comedian who runs the Dodger Blues website wrote, "Once in a while there's a game that makes you remember what baseball used to be like before steroids, shitty pitching, and the disappearance of fundamentals. Sunday was that game--a pitcher's duel straight out of the 1970s."

Speaking of the 70s, my grandfather used to take me to games in that godforsaken decade. We didn't go to Dodger Stadium, because he lived in San Diego. So I cut my teeth at Jack Murphy, with a little Dave Winfield and a lot of Ed Spezio.

I only mention this because my grandfather used to pretend to talk to the Padres manager on his watch. He'd tell me that the skipper didn't make a decision until he called it in. I believed him, largely because I wanted to but also because the Padres were, for a time, managed by their play-by-play announcer, Jerry Coleman.

On Thursday night, I passed the baton down to my son.

With a man on first in the middle innings, and the game nearing a turning point, I whipped out my cell phone and told Elijah that I had to call the manager in the dugout.

"What's a manager?" Elijah asked.

"He's a guy who tells the players what to do. He's usually fat and fights with the umpire."

"Oh."

"I need to tell him what to do."

I leaned into the phone and said,

"Hey, Grady, Drew should pull the ball to right...hang on, my son wants to talk to you."

Elijah stared at the phone blankly.

"Talk to him," I said.

"Pull it right!" he said.

Later, at home, we were telling Regina about the evening.

"Elijah, what did daddy do with his phone tonight?"

"Oh god, "Regina said. "Please tell me that you didn't."

"I did," I said.

Elijah said, "Daddy talked to the director!"

"The manager. And what did I say to him?"

"PULL IT!"

And now back to our regularly scheduled game story.

At the Maddux-Schmidt game, I did what I usually do on those meditative evenings when I attend alone: Switch seats a lot. Tonight, I didn't have much of a choice. I happened to land next to a droopy-eyed man who seemed, from the frequency with which he was grabbing his girlfriend's boobs, to have graduated from The Joe Francis School Of Lady Treatment. Also, whenever Barry Bonds shifted his jockstrap, he'd put his hands to his lips and bellow "STEROIDS!" at the top of his lungs. I bailed before I got into a fight.

By the end of the game, I was on the first-base side of the loge, away from most of the anti-Bonds bellowers. I share their sentiment, but not their tactics. Also, I'd managed to inch my way down to the padded rows. If you wait long enough at a Dodger game, you'll be able to snag premium seats. As the game turned into a 0-0 tie in the 9th, at least 2,000 people rose in unison, heading for the parking lot.

Well, they missed a game-winning homerun by a rookie catcher whose middle name is Coltrane. I've seen some good Dodger moments in person, albeit most of them in 2004, but this game really iced the cupcake for me. But I don't know if I'm going to bring Elijah again or not this season. The playoffs loom. No more of this leaving after the seventh inning crap. Still, if I'd been talking to the manager on my cell, I definitely would have advised him to have Russell Martin pull the ball.

Posted by at 10:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (23)

Greetings to all of you who found this wonderful place via my Slate piece on the Los Angeles Dodgers. For novitiates, this is basically a website where I chronicle my adventures with my son Elijah, who a fellow writer once called "a precocious three-year-old with an unstoppable imagination." You'll see what that means if you scroll down the page or read my archives, or both.

This is also a place where I talk excessively about my book Alternadad, a memoir on the same topic, which will be published by Pantheon in January 2007. You can preorder it here. Meanwhile, Alternadad has its own Myspace page! Sign up and be part of the revolution of, um, parents who aren't lame.

So some Elijah updates. As advertised in the Slate piece, I did take Elijah to Dodger Stadium last night, though he made me leave after seven innings, thus forcing me to miss a go-ahead homerun, a behemoth reliever getting tossed by a trigger-happy umpire, a tying triple and throwing error, and a game-winning single by Kenny Lofton. Elijah just lost patience. If only those Richard Scarry books that I brought to distract him were a little longer...

Meanwhile, Elijah has invented two new superheroes in the last week. The first is Remote Control Man, who has buttons all over his body and can turn you invisible or make you very cold. Plus he has really long arms, "to reach bad guys." The second is Mr. Dang, whose power, according to Elijah, is that he "doesn't eat healthy food." Seems like more of an anti-hero to me, along the lines of Ghost Rider, but, hey, it's the kid's world. I just blog in it.

Posted by at 1:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Elijah is a Johnny Cash fan. I know that sounds pretentious, but it's true. He's rejected a lot of other music I've played for him, but The Man In Black can do no wrong.

We imprinted the cult of Cash upon him from an early age, by putting a Hatch Print Shop poster in his room that shows Johnny Cash, in triplicate, holding a guitar. One of Elijah's first ten words was "Ja Ca," and by age two, he was saying "Good night, Johnny Cash," before he went to sleep.

So when Columbia House released The Johnny Cash Children's Album earlier this year, I had to buy it for the boy. It immediately became the top disc in our car rotation. Elijah particularly loves the first two tracks, "Nasty Dan" and "One And One Makes Two." But every Johnny Cash song, no matter how great, gets tired after 100 listens. It was time to introduce Elijah to "Dirty Old Egg-Sucking Dog."

One day, I pulled one of my many Johnny Cash CDs from my aging library and popped it in the car stereo. Elijah intitally protested, screeching that he wanted "Nasty Dan," but from the first notes, he was entranced. What boy wouldn't be?

Well he's not very handsome to look at
Oh he's shaggy and he eats like a hog
And he's always killin' my chickens
That dirty old egg-suckin' dog

Egg-suckin' dog
I'm gonna stomp your head in the ground
If you don't stay out of my hen house
You dirty old egg-suckin' hound

From there, the disc didn't stop surprising the boy. Our next tune was "Orange Blossom Special," which is full of awesome train sounds, and then "Ring Of Fire," which may be somewhat thematically inappropriate for a four-year-old, but Elijah loved the trumpets. Also, the chorus is catchy and easily memorizable. I felt deep pride the day I put on the album and I heard Elijah singing, clearly, from the back seat:

I fell into a burning ring of fire
I went down, down, down
And the flames went higher

And It burns, burns, burns
The ring of fire
The ring of fire

"Daddy," he asked. "What's this song about?"

"Um," I said. "A ring of fire?"

"OK," he said. "Is Understand Your Man next?"

"Yes it is."

"I like Understand Your Man, daddy."

"Good."

"Understand Your Clam."

"Understand Your Ham," I replied.

"Munderstand Your Wham."

"Whatever."

Posted by at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

I've got a couple of things for which I'm contractually obligated to shill: One is the relaunch of Cracked Magazine, which the comedy dorks in our audience will remember from their pimple-filled youth. The magazine has been totally reimagined and redesigned top-to-bottom by a bunch of guys who only occasionally get laid. It's now a "comedy lifestyle" magazine, full of parodies and comics and interviews with funny people like Rob Corrdry and Ed Helms. I'm a contributing editor, so it must be good.

Also, I must put in a good word for Guilt And Pleasure, a quarterly magazine of Jewish literature and culture put out by Reboot, a Jewish revival cult to which I belong. The new "Magic" issue features work by Shalom Auslander and Lisa Crystal Carver, among others, and lots of sexy photos of the new Jewish diaspora. Highly recommended.

Posted by at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The phone rang around 8 PM on Friday. It was my sister. There was a playdate scheduled for the next day. Her daughter Ali, Elijah's cousin, was excited.

Elijah was in the midst of a pre-bath temper tantrum at the time.

"Ali wants to say hi," I said.

"NOOOOOOO! I'M AFRAID OF WATER!" Elijah said.

"Not a good time," I said to my sister.

Why, I wondered, do girls always call Elijah the day before their playdate? And why is it, when Elijah plays with his cousin, that they always end up jumping up and down naked on her bed? A very strange family tradition has been born.

After that occasion was in the books, I made a call on Saturday night to set up an impromptu Sunday playdate for Elijah with Ariel, his little girlfriend from school. As soon as I got off the phone with Ariel's mom, the phone rang again.

"The princess wishes to speak with the duke," Ariel's mom said.

"Elijah," I said, handing him the phone. "Ariel's on the line."

"Hello?" Elijah said.

"Eliiiiiiiijah!" said Ariel. "Are you going to push me tomorrow or are you going to be nice?

"I'm going to be nice," said Elijah.

A pause. Then...

"Heh heh heh. Eliiiiiiiiijah!"

"Heh heh heh," Elijah said.

I'm guessing it's about four years before it's no longer cute that girls are calling Elijah all the time. And I'm also guessing that he's never going to have to initiate the calls. Regina and I have already discussed what we're going to say in case the early evidence pointing toward Elijah as a bit of a player comes to bear: Son, it's OK to have a lot of girlfriends. But always treat them with respect, and never lie to them.

Also, no jumping naked on the bed, unless we're out of town. Even then, you should be careful.

This above all: To thine own self be true.

Posted by at 11:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (32)

Today's craft suited me much better. The teacher passed out a picture of undersea life, because this was kelp forest day, and the kids were supposed to color. Amazingly, many of the moms in the class took the pictures away from their kids and did the work themseleves. Are their lives so empty, I thought, that they have to do their kids' craft projects for them? Does it really matter whether the fish are colored properly or not? And here I thought that the uber-mom was a near-extinct breed. Good god, this class is full of the beasts.

My attitude translated to Elijah's project. He scribbled on the page with brown crayon for about five seconds. Then he grabbed a scissors from the project box, along with a stray sheet of paper, and dove under the table. The mother next to me made a "tsk" sound.

"Elijah doesn't set much of an example," I said good-naturedly.

But whereas a normal person would say, "oh, he's just being a kid," this woman turned to her son and said, "That's OK. My Roger knows what he's not supposed to do. Isn't that right, Roger?"

I thought, yeah, lady, it's so goddamned awful that my son is sitting under a table. Screw you. When Elijah emerged, this mom decided it was time to show off Roger's extensive knowledge of undersea life.

"What kind of fish is that, Roger?" she asked.

"A garibaldi," Roger said.

"Good boy."

I could match her. Elijah knows hundreds of types of fish, and has for a while.

"What kind of fish is that, Elijah?" I said, pointing to a difficult example that I was certain he could identify.

"Poo poo fish," he said.

Great.

"Roger used to call things poo-poo," said the mom. "When he was two."

A foul blackness descended over my soul.

"He used to think it was so funny. But he and his friends all know now that there are different ways to be funny. What do you say now instead of poo-poo, Roger?"

"Silly fish," Roger said.

Oh, yeah, Roger. I thought. You're hilarious.

"Poo poo fish," Elijah said again.

"That's right, Elijah," I said. "That's a poo poo fish."

To end this delightful triptych, it came up during class that kelp is a kind of seaweed, and that seaweed is used to make sushi, because I guess it's impossible to bring up seaweed among the social class of people who can afford to send their kids to forest camp without also bringing up sushi. I made one last attempt at making nice with Roger's mom. God knows why.

"You're from Pasadena, right?" I said.

"Uh-huh," she said.

"We've taken Elijah to that place where there's sushi on the boats. You know, on Colorado Boulevard. He has fun."

"Oh," she said. "We don't think that place has enough vegetarian options, do we Roger?"

"No," Roger said.

"We're vegetarians."

Lucky you, I thought.

"But I know that some people like it there."

I thought: All right, you condescending, pathetic, Gen-X suburban house wench. You're gonna get it now.

"Elijah eats shrimp," I said. "With the heads on."

I leaned toward her and whispered, so I wouldn't offend little Roger's delicate sensibilities.

"And he fucking loves it. He even eats the eyes."

Elijah had my back.

"The eyes are yummy and squishy," he added.

I don't think we'll be having a playdate with Roger anytime soon.

Posted by at 9:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (53)