I wish I knew how to quit you.

fire cracker

when I was a teenager I had quite a lucrative babysitting racket going on. I unwittingly stumbled onto a goldmine: the field of specialization babysitting-- handling boys --which earned me hazard pay. Most of the families I sat for had packs of grubby feral boys who were (for some odd reason) like wet sauerkraut in my hands. This was not because I allowed them to smoke/drink/use foul language (although I suppose I did from time-to-time) but anyway, I never sat for sweet little girls who wanted me to play dress up with them and brush their hair and have tea parties and read Amelia Bedelia aloud to them.

No, I sat for boys who wanted to catch lizards and put them in the freezer and then play with them while they were semi-frozen and mostly in shock, or worse, they wanted to stuff the occasional firecracker into the mouth of the pop-sickled lizard, and, well, you know. They wanted to pee in the yard and ride their bikes off the diving board or roof into the pool and try to start their mom's car that was parked in the garage and look at their dad's Playboys and take bites right from the loaf of Velveeta and, well, I allowed that boys will be boys and so I let them now and then and so it went. The word spread among the moms in the neighborhood desperate for a night out that ell was cool sitting for boys and the boys liked me fine and I was booked all the time and made great money babysitting the cast of Lord of the Flies and it was good.

One of my favorite families to sit for was the Martins. They had two little tow-headed boys who were sweet as pie and the parents had a great collection of borderline-naughty paperbacks stashed on the top shelf in the TV room that I liked to peruse after I put Greg and Brad to bed. My favorite was The Sensuous Woman followed closely by The Happy Hooker.

The boys' mom was a statuesque redhead who worked at a nearby children's hospital and their dad was a fun-loving bad-boy type who I realized after I became an adult was what my dad calls "a ne'er-do-well." He had one job after another--none for very long, one venture after another that didn't quite pan out, wild hairs, crack-pot ideas and nothing that ever really took off or stuck. The boys were lucky that their mom was a grown-up and stable because their dad was Peter Pan. At one point he worked in the area making appearances as Ronald McDonald.

One night I went over to babysit and there was a pool table in the living room where a nice traditional set of living room furniture had been the week before. A month later he wallpapered the new "pool room" with tin foil and painted huge planetarium-ish spheres on the walls in hues of bright cobalt blues and deep bottle greens. Lovely, really, but kind of odd. The mom and dad split and got back together a few times. I could see that she was in love with him, but I could also see that she was embarrassed by his failure to step up to the plate and be a grown-up. They were not similar in any way. He married up when he married her and I think she was never not aware of that reality.

Eventually they split for good and he kind of faded away. I ran into him at a party when I was home one summer during college and we had a few drinks together and he seemed sad and depressed, kind of a sad, big kid.

The youngest of the two boys is a professional chef now and he lives out west. His mom and my mom are still friends and last week my mom mentioned that Brad is going to be on a new TV show on NBC called "Moment of Truth." It is one of those heinous, soulless game shows that gets people to vomit up all their pain and humiliation on camera for the chance to win a lot of money but they have to do it while attached to a lie detector machine. If they lie they lose all the money they have won. I am sickened that Brad is going to be on this show next week. It breaks my heart. His mom told my mom that one of the lines of questions the show's producers asked Brad was about his dad and they actually flew his dad to LA to surprise him on stage with a forced reunion. I say forced because under the circumstances -- on national TV --isn't it? They have been estranged since the boys were little. I guess it has a happy ending. At least for the segment that will air. Who knows what will happen afterwards. I hope it's good. I hope.

we hired the lesbian to tile the bathroom

Because the other two tile guys who came by to give us an estimate leered at me AND my kid. Ew. I told the GITB that if I have to be subjected to an ass crack in order to get the bathroom re-done, I much prefer Cathy, the strapping young lesbian, (who I KNOW will do a fabulous job because she's a girl) who, by the by, does not wear her work pants slung below her beer gut. She wears a belt, thank you very much.

Happy New Year

Things are going well. Too well. So rather than worry about what is not going so well, I now have anxiety that things are going so well that a major shitstorm of epic proportion surely must be around the corner. But maybe not. Maybe my karma ratio has finally evened out. Maybe the good stuff is finally catching up with the not-so-hot stuff and all this is gravy--good gravy that will not rise from the gravy boat and sucker punch me when I least expect it. Here's what I do know for sure: when I am making an effort each day to not be an asshole, I feel so much better about myself and the whole world. Even though one day we will all be dead and no one will give a shit.