I'm sure many of you have been wondering what Regina's up to these days. Well, first of all, she's now being represented by Black Maria, an art gallery in Los Angeles. That website is here. More time-consumingly, she's starting a business with my sister. If you've ever wanted children's furniture brilliantly custom-painted with a design featuring a retro-looking robot and his pet dog (or with any of dozens of other designs that Regina's come up with), Spitting Image Studios is the place where you must turn. The business is doing great, and I'm proud of them both.

That said, Spitting Image Studios has forced Regina into a dreary pattern of 10-to-12 hour workdays. She toils upstairs from me, custom-painting children's toy suitcases just for you. I, on the other hand, am what they call "between projects." Alternadad doesn't appear in stores for five weeks (though you should still order it right now), and I've just turned in a draft of the Alternadad screenplay.

This means that I've got lots of time to be a dad.

I've been taking Elijah to school in the mornings, and picking him up in the afternoons. Some days, I haul him out to the Valley to play with his cousin. Other days, I try to keep him occupied and full of ice cream for however long Regina needs us out of the house.

Yesterday, I ferried him to Kidspace, in Pasadena, where we met a half-dozen of his classmates. None of these children is nannied, so it was me and six mothers. Fortunately, these mothers are all intelligent and unpretentious, and I don't dislike any of them. This is no mean feat, as I dislike many people. Still, when the conversation turned to breast-feeding, I drifted away from the crowd and sat on a bench by myself, far away from everyone else, including Elijah, who was happily racing a tricycle.

The sun went down. The air grew chilly. I stared at my hands and tried to remember a time when my days were my own.

Occasionally, I get alone time. On Sunday, around 11 AM, Regina took Elijah out to my sister's. My mother was in town, and she wanted a visit. Therefore, I had the day to myself. I pulled my beloved vaporizer down from its shelf of honor. Within minutes, I was as baked as I could possibly get.

For a while, I did what you might expect a stoned man to do on a sunny Sunday afternoon. I went for a nice long walk. Also I watched lots of football. It was a great football day, what with Reggie Bush's debutante touchdown ball against the 49ers, LaDanian Tomlinson's continued dominance, that crazy 60-yard field goal in Tennessee, and the glorious implosion of the unlikable Eli Manning-led Giants against the oddly likable Cowboys. Even the Seattle-Denver game had some entertaining moments.

However, at a certain point, my domestic side took over. I looked around the house. There was a thin layer of hair around the toilet. The dishes needed washing. So did the towels.

I began to do housework. I scrubbed and mopped, washed and dried, fed the fish, even went over the bathroom grout with a Q-Tip. The cat hair got vacuumed up. Some toys got put away. Papers and whatnot got rearranged. Laundry got folded. Doo-de-doo! What an excellent stoned househusband I was.

Then Regina called to give me the 45-minute warning. At that point, I decided to cook her dinner. I cleaned off the table, put out placemats and candles, and pulled a disc of sexy Indian music out of CD-rack exile. I trimmed and washed some Romaine lettuce and tossed it with blue cheese dressing. I heated up some tomato soup, touching it off with cream and a couple of handfuls of crabmeat. For Elijah, I prepared mac and cheese, with frozen green beans and frozen broccoli. I put a little chunk of smoked salmon in the salad bowls. It wasn't a fancy dinner, but it sure tasted good.

Later, Regina showed her appreciation by bringing home my bacon, so to speak, and frying it up in a pan. After that was done, I let her put in a DVD of Friends With Money, a movie about bourgeois L.A. married couples who are having trouble coming to terms with the limitations of relatively privileged adulthood.

I couldn't relate at all.

Posted by at 1:15 PM | Permalink