Thinking

If we treated each other with the same love and respect as we give the guy who made our cell phones, we wouldn't need Words With Friends. We'd be having Dinner With Friends.

Happy New Year, Part III

Welcome to Cynical Dad, your daily source for mass animal deaths!



I'm starting to get spooked.

Happy New Year, Part II

You can add 100,000 dead fish to your 1,000 dead birds:



End of days? Nah. God just hates Arkansas.

Happy New Year!

Imagine waking up on January 1st and finding 1,000 dead birds littering the yards of your hometown.



Get your house in order, bitches! The end is nigh!

The Paver

So there's been one of those big road paver things sitting at the end of my street for the past twenty-eight hours. I don't know the technical term for it -- it's that piece of equipment with the big rolling pin on one end of it to flatten things with. I think there's one of them on Bob the Builder.

Like I said, it's been a member of our community for twenty-eight hours. It's guarded by orange pylons. No big deal.

So why hasn't a single kid gone out there and messed with that thing yet? I mean, when I was a kid, my friends and I would've thought it was Christmas to come home and find one of those in the cul-de-sac. Hell, I'm tempted to go out there NOW and sit on it and I'm a grown-up. Or at least I'm old enough to be a grown-up.

What is wrong with kids today?

The Turtle

You're like a turtle, man.

No, seriously. You look like a turtle to me. A neurotic, little turtle.

I could say something like "Break out of your shell, dude," but I don't want to get all meteoric metaphoric on you.

Instead, I'll just let you know you look like a turtle to me. And you're driving everyone away.

But I doubt you're listening.

The Porcine Plan

Sometimes I think it might be easier just to write down all of Olivia's Rules of Life and pattern your life from what she says.

That'll do, pig. That'll do.

28 Days Later

28 days ago, I turned 40.

28 days later, I'm still alive.

I had a hard time turning 40. So I decided to give myself a little present.

I stopped smoking.

Three days prior to turning 40, in the midst of my midlife crisis emotional breakdown, I decided that it would be a damn fine time to break a habit I'd been handcuffed to for over 25 years.

I-di-ot.

28 days ago, I took the kids to school. I came home, sat down at my usual smoking spot on the front steps, and had what I hoped would be my final cigarette.

28 days later, I'm still cigarette free.

I hope I can say the same thing 28 days from now.

I hope I can say the same thing 28 years from now.

Safe House

I have been to the NC Zoo many times over the last 20 years. At least twice a year on average.

I like the zoo. Today, I learned how to let a chimpanzee know that I am friendly. And it really worked!

SPOILER ALERT!

You just drag your knuckles across the glass. Apparently, it lets the chimpanzee know he's in charge.

I do not know if that works in the wild. I guess you would need to carry a pane of glass with you at all times.

END SPOILER ALERT!

The NC Zoo has over five miles of paths that connect the exhibits. It is situated on 1,458 acres (according to Wikipedia, it is the largest walk-through natural-habitat zoo).

It is quite large.

And I'm totally convinced you could live in the woods at the zoo, undetected.

And you wouldn't even need any Rambo shit to pull it off.

40 Is The New Midlife Crisis

It's Cynical Dad Day!

Yeah, whatever.

So this morning didn't feel any different than any other. I woke up alive. No new aches and pains. And like James said, I didn't start craving Metamucil.

So there's that.

However, I'm still having a hard time dealing with this. 40 just seems so fucking old.

Oh well.

Last year at this time, I said that I would stop blogging today, claiming that 40 was just too old to have a blog. This might disappoint some of you, but I've decided to keep at it. And more frequently, too.

What else do I have planned? I don't know. Maybe I'll get a tattoo. Maybe I'll dye my hair purple (I looked good with purple hair). Maybe I'll run for public office. Maybe I'll start a Violent Femmes cover band. Maybe I'll just sit around and play Scrabble with unsuspecting victims on the web.

Or maybe I'll just get over myself and realize 40 isn't any different than 39, 38, or 26. Maybe I'll buy into that whole "You're only as old as you feel" line of bullshit.

Maybe not.

***

I'd like to thank everyone for all the well wishes I've received through comments, Facebook, Twitter, and email this week. I appreciate it.

Changes

I have come to the realization that I'm no longer cool.

To be 100% truthful, I've come to the realization that I've never been cool. I've been doing a damn fine job of lying to myself for quite some time. Denial is fun, fun, fun!

Anyway, a combination of factors have contributed to a recent change in my diet:

• Cynical Dad Day will be no fun this year as I'm one day from turning 40.
  
  
• They took my sports radio away.
  
  
• I recently completed an 800-mile trip in a car borrowed from my father-in-law (long story) where the only disc in the glovebox was an Elvis Gospel CD.

Somewhere in the mountains of Virginia, a song came on the radio. Normally, I would've immediately changed the channel. But the pickings were slim, so I listened to the song. Really listened to it, for the very first time.

It was Lady Gaga's Paparazzi.

I listened.

And I liked it.

I became a Lady Gaga fan. Not just Lady GaGa, either. As the trip wore on, I found more Top 40 songs that I liked. But GaGa stuck with me. When I got home, I downloaded the album. Watched and enjoyed her performance with Elton John at the Grammys. Watched some of her music videos.

And I came to the following conclusion: Lady GaGa is the last rock star on the planet.

Don't get me wrong. Despite my newfound love of Top 40, there are still plenty of songs I won't listen to. Taylor Swift still sucks. So does that lameass Fireflies song.

And if you refer to the police as po-po, I'm switching the channel.

Oy

A week from today, I turn 40.

Forty.

That's really old.

I'm having a hard time coming to terms with this.

I've been debating dying my hair blue, putting my earrings back in, and getting a tattoo.

It's cheaper than buying a Corvette.

Man In Car

Rejected. Again.

Maybe it was the repulsive stench of fear, desperation, and awkwardness that permeated through every pore of my body.

Maybe it was the robotic spiel where I spit out a thousand words in ninety seconds without coming up for air.

Maybe they watched me rehearse in my rearview mirror. A Comedy of Errors. Practicing my lines, smiling, laughing, acting confident. I look human. A total lie. The guy in the mirror is so much easier to talk to than the guy behind the counter.

Every once in awhile, they throw me a bone. Maybe out of pity. Maybe I'm scaring the customers. Maybe they really do want to help.

But not this time. I go back to the car and drive to another place.

And start working on my lines.

The Bootlegger

Last week, I had the privilege of completing a four-hour roundtrip journey to four supermarkets just to secure thirteen bottles of juice. Such is the life when you have a son on a highly restricted diet.

A few days before, I went to our regular organic grocery store to buy some juice only to discover the juice was out of stock. Since it had been on sale, I didn't think too much of it. The next day, I hit some other organic groceries in town and the surrounding areas and found they were out of the juice as well.

So I turned on the computer and started freaking out. I checked the manufacturer's website and found that the flavor was still being produced. Fortunately, I found a chain of grocery stores about 90 miles from my home that carried the juice. I started calling the stores and found four stores that had thirteen bottles between them.

After dinner, I headed out. I found the juice at the first three stores with no problem. The fourth store had told me they would put the juice in the Customer Service area, so that's why I saved it for last.

Big mistake.

I got to the store around 9:30 PM and found the Customer Service area dark and closed for the evening. I could see the bottles of juice on the counter, a mere five feet from where I was standing, mocking me. But since I don't have arms filled with a red, jelly-like substance like Stretch Armstrong, I was unable to reach the bottles. So I turned around, looked at the cashiers, and waited for someone to make eye contact with me.

Finally, the teenager manning the self-checkout area saw me and came over. "Can I help you?" she asked.

"See those four bottles of juice over there?" I asked, pointing to the bottles. "You guys are holding them for me. I'd like to buy them."

"I'm sorry, sir. Customer Service is closed. You'll have to come back in the morning."

"Yeah, I see that," I replied as I noticed The Old Biddy who had stopped ringing up her customers and was now watching us. "Is there any way I can get them tonight?"

Then The Old Biddy yelled, "What does he want?" from her lane.

"He's here to pick up some juice that's behind the counter," the teenager replied.

"Tell him Customer Service is closed! Come back tomorrow!"

"But the sign says that Customer Service is open until 10 PM," I pointed out to her.

"They left early! Come back tomorrow!"

I realized I wasn't going to get anywhere with The Old Biddy, so I decided to use all my wiles and charms on the teenaged self-checkout girl.

"Sorry," she sheepishly said to me.

"That's okay. You know where Chagtown is? That's where I live."

"Wow. That's a ways away."

"I know. I can't come back tomorrow."

"But I don't have a key to open the door." The "door" that was roughly forty inches tall.

"How about I jump over the counter and get the bottles?" In my mind, I could see myself sliding across the counter to retrieve the secret plans from the Communists, Nazis, or some other Faceless Evil Force, as bullets whizzed by my head and explosions went off all around me. Never mind that the secret plans were only bottles of juice, the only Evil Force was The Old Biddy, and nothing was on fire. You take your heroic adventures when you can.

"I'd probably get in trouble," she said.

"Okay. How about you go back to your station, turn your back to me, and I jump the counter without your knowledge?"

She giggled. I was in! "She would probably call the cops on you," she said as she nodded toward The Old Biddy who was still giving me The Stink Eye.

"You're probably right," I said, defeated.

"But you know what? I could jump over the counter!"

"Oh, no. I can't have you do that."

"I've done it before. It was kind of fun," she admitted.

"No, please don't. She'd probably call the cops on you, too."

So we stood there for a few seconds, staring at each other. I was getting ready to explain about my son and his restricted diet when she said, "Hold on a second."

She walked over to a bagboy and I could tell she was explaining everything to him. He walked over to me, looking every bit as surly and uninterested as a teenaged bagboy can, and said, "Yeah?"

I told him the whole story. The distance I traveled. The kind man I spoke with earlier who put the bottles aside for me. I even told him about my son. He looked at the girl. "So?" he asked.

"Can you jump over the counter and get the bottles?" she asked him.

He looked at her like she was crazy. He looked at me. I guess he could really sense my desperation because he answered it with a sigh of disgust. He then walked over to the door, put his hand on the other side, and opened it.

"I didn't know you could do that!" the self-checkout girl exclaimed.

He snorted at her as he made her way over to the bottles and handed them to me. "Thank you, you two," I said as I put the bottles in my shopping cart. "I really appreciate your help tonight. It means a lot to me."

The girl blushed and said, "You're welcome." The monosyllabic bagboy nodded and walked on. The Old Biddy merely shook her head as I walked by.

I smiled.

How My Mind Works

On my post about The Myrtle Beach Sea Monster, SeattleDad left the following comment: "And don't be surprised when the knock comes on your door and 'they' haul you away, shut down this site, and threaten those of us who have commented."

But as I passed a DOT sign (the kind that normally only speaks to Steve Martin) on the highway today and noticed it read "Military Exercise 1 Mile Ahead," I immediately thought the same thing. I realized that the government had found out about my post and had set up this whole "Military Exercise" as a way to kill me. It would be reported that I was "accidentally" killed by "errant gunfire" during the "Military Exercise."

So what did I do? I turned the car around.

If you give me advance warning, I'm going to take it. I may be crazy, but I'm not a fool.

Better luck tomorrow, bitches!

My New Quirk

Over the weekend, I discovered I have a new problem. On Saturday, I started itching. Not just in one spot, but all over my body. This lasted for about thirty minutes. It was a fun way to pass the time.

On Monday night, I started itching again. I was talking to someone I had just met, someone with a good deal of respect in the community, and I was nervous. It was then that I put two and two together. I was also nervous about something on Saturday when I started itching.

Now when I meet new people, in addition to looking at the ground, stuttering, and sweating, I'll be itching up a storm as well. Nice.

And people wonder why I'm not going to BlogHer. I'd need a U-Haul just to pack all my neuroses and insecurities.

Prey Of Birds: The Prequel

It's not like I woke up one day and decided to hate our avian friends. Taken separately, their attacks against me may not seem like much, but when you look at the sum of the parts, you'll see that I had no choice but to declare war on birds.

1984

I guess it all started during the final days of the summer of 1984. I was walking along the boardwalk in Wildwood, New Jersey, euphoric from the recent win of some cheap, plastic trinket acquired by putting roughly 183 nickels in those coin waterfall machines (the official gateway drug to slots). The sun was hot, but I was hotter in my "We Came, We Saw, We Kicked Its Ass" Ghosbusters t-shirt and my wrap-around shades.

I may be mistaken as my memory is somewhat foggy, but there's a damn good chance I was strutting down the boardwalk, a dangerous mix of summer sweat, hormones, and Bill Murray memorabilia, until a bird shit all over my exposed leg. I looked up in the sky and saw the laughing seagull heckling me as he headed toward an unsuspecting elderly couple sharing a bag of popcorn. The strutting turned to running as I hurried back to my grandparents' rental to clean myself up because, let's face it, it's hard to flirt with fourteen-year-old girls when you've got birdshit all over your leg.

1997

Many years later, I was sharing an apartment with my then-girlfriend/now-wife and our lovable, but dumb basset hound. Four or five Canadian geese also called the apartment complex home, though I think their rent was much cheaper. During the spring of that year, they became extremely territorial. When I would take my basset out for a walk, we would often stumble across a goose or two. I tried to keep her away from these beasts, but more often than not, we would find ourselves within striking distance of a goose.

When we got too close to one of the devils, it would start hissing at us. Hissing, not honking. Honking is what they do when they're flying overhead in their v-shaped formations, trying to fool you into thinking they're cute. Hissing is what they do when they're readying to attack. Unfortunately, my dog thought this hissing was goosespeak for "Wanna play?" So she ran toward the goose, tail-a-wagging. The goose mistook my basset's friendliness as an affront, so the goose opened its mouth, displaying its eight-inch-long teeth.

While a good majority of the population is blissfully unaware that geese hiss, I'm sure an even greater number of people do not realize that geese, despite their tiny mouths, possess eight-inch-long teeth. I think they must be retractable or something.

Not wishing to have my basset hound get its eyes pecked out and eventually mauled by a pissed off goose, I picked up my dog and ran as fast as I could back to the apartment while carrying sixty pounds of hound with a goose hissing at my heels.

2004

Despite my fear of birds, my pregnant wife talked me into taking two-year-old Zoey to a nearby pond to feed the ducks. I figured if push came to shove, I could probably take a duck, so I reluctantly agreed.

The three of us were down there for about half an hour, feeding pieces of bread to the very sweet and grateful ducks, taking photographs, and enjoying the autumn day when I heard the bloodcurdling cry of one of nature's deadliest creatures.

HONK!

I froze.

I looked across the pond and saw three Canadian geese standing on the shore, eyeing us. Finally, they entered the water and began swimming toward us.

HONK! HONK! HONK!

Watching the geese closing in on us, I felt like Chief Brody as the great white barreled toward the Orca. But since I did not have a rifle and the geese didn't have oxygen tanks in their mouths, I did the only thing I could do: I swooped up Zoey and yelled, "ELLA! GEESE!" We all ran back to the car and watched the geese chase the ducks away and dine on the remaining breadcrumbs.

1991

It was springtime and I was a twenty-one-year-old college student, a moment in time that most people would look back on fondly as their Glory Days.

Instead, I was trying to figure how to get to class alive.

Every morning, I stood in front of the library, psyching myself up for the impending battle. I secured my bookbag tightly to my back. Knowing damn well it could've been my last cigarette, I sucked that thing until I tasted filter. Finally, I took off across the street in a fast gait, all jittery while constantly looking ahead, behind, to the left and right, and above me as I made my way toward the chemistry building. I must've looked like a crackhead.

It never struck from the same spot twice, but for two solid weeks, a bird would swoop down from the sky, grab some of my long, blond hair in its beak, and try to rip it from my head. Once the attack began, I would swing my hands blindly at my head as my fast gait turned into a full-out run, accompanied by a girlish scream.

I tried hats. I tried walking with my bookbag over my head. I tried alternate routes. The bird still found me.

And my hair.

But after two weeks, the attacks stopped. I never saw the bird again and can only assume that it had finally accumulated enough of my hair to build a proper nest. I later found out that I wasn't the only one it had been targeting: a female classmate with hair of similar length and color had also been unsuccessfully trying to fend off the bird.

Conclusion

I seem to have a lot of stories that involve me running from birds.

But it's time for revenge.

The chickens are coming home to roost.

Prey Of Birds

I neither live in Canada nor do I live near a body of water. So can someone please explain why Canadian geese have taken up residence in my neighborhood?

I've always been smart enough to keep a safe distance when it comes to geese. I know my place in the pecking order.

But it's becoming harder and harder to steer clear of the geese. They're quite brazen. I see them all around the neighborhood, snarling traffic and daring people to hit them.

Yesterday, I saw two geese standing on my neighbor's roof. Have you ever seen a goose standing on someone's roof?

No.

No one has. Geese don't stand on people's roofs.

There are only two reasons to explain the sudden increase in the goose population in my neighborhood.

Either they're here to help me in my quest for world domination.

Or they're here to kill me.

My money's on the latter.

I hate birds.

Driving In The Dark

I was driving to my son's school for lunch and was beginning to think I'd never make it there alive.

Somehow, I had gone blind.

I wasn't really blind. I could see. I just couldn't fully open my eyes.

My eyes were barely open. If I concentrated hard enough, I could make out the colors and design on my t-shirt. My field of vision was severely limited: I could make out about 5% of what I normally could see.

If I tilted my head back far enough, I could sense the blurry blobs that were the other cars on the road. I could hear the horns blaring at me, the tires screeching. But like those little old ladies I often curse, I kept on driving, ignoring the protests of others. I had somewhere to be.

I would try to open my eyes. When I did, my eyelids would flutter faster than a hummingbird's wings. I was having enough trouble driving without the added strobe effect.

It took a near rear-end collision with a yellow Volkswagen Beetle for me to finally pull the car over into what I thought was a parking lot.

I sat there for a moment, readying myself. I started praying. I started crying. I summoned all my strength and --

I woke up in the car, forty-five minutes before lunch.

Like We Didn't Have Enough Crap To Worry About

Study Finds High-Fructose Corn Syrup Contains Mercury

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to puke.

And start a farm.

Song of the day: Opus 40 by Mercury Rev