Zoe is sick with a stomach flu today, puking her little guts out. I set up a little couch cushion camp for her on the family room floor in front of the TV and she’s spent the day there watching Nickelodeon, sipping Sprite, and puking into a bowl.

(What is it with me and people puking around me this month?)

At one point Zoe was retching into the bowl I was holding and her hair dipped into the bowl and the watery goodness within. I tracked down a hair tie for her (and had a depressing flashback as it occurred to me that I didn’t need to look in my bathroom drawers for one because it’s been a good ten years since I wore my hair in a ponytail), and then I tied her wet, puke-dripping hair back and rubbed her back while she heaved.

And I reflected on how parenthood completely obliterates your barriers to other people’s bodily… excretions. Poopy diapers, drool, wet beds, vomit; it’s all part of having a kid. You can’t be a real, involved parent if you aren’t getting upclose and personal with the excretions. You learn to live with it, you learn to not let it gross you out. Hell, Zoe’s even pooped in my hand when she was an infant, and I just sat there holding a handful of warm shit for another minute or so until the rectal thermometer I had crammed up her butt had registered its reading.

Dating, romance, love, sex, whatever you want to call it, that’ll knock down your barriers too, but at least then you get something out of it. Sex is all about the exchange of bodily fluids (and some people mix the piss and blood and shit in with that, but that’s just fucking weird). As a general rule, sex is the one time in life when you actually want to go dabbling around in another person’s excretions.

Or at least the promise of sex. Because as I was holding Zoe and rubbing her back while she dry-heaved into the bowl, I had a flashback to a drunken evening I enjoyed somewhere around age 19 or 20, circa 1980-something. I was out with Rhonda from across the street, and Rhonda had had a bit too much to drink. I had a huge crush on Rhonda and wanted to get into her pants in a MAJOR way and so I held her hair away from her face and rubbed her back as she puked into the gutter and all over my brand new Kangaroo high tops. I have the age and experience now to know that all holding a girl’s hair while she’s puking will get you is puke on your shoes, but I had the best of bad intentions then and it seemed like the thing to do.

So I remembered that while I was holding Zoe and I noticed the similarities between parenthood and dating. But there’s one critical difference, at least for me: I love Beth and I married her and I’ve been with her for more than 10 years now — but Zoe’s the only girl I will ever let shit in my hand.

And no guy had better ever let me catch him holding Zoe’s head while she’s puking in a gutter.

Here’s 2000 words for ya:

I think that pretty much says it all.

The good news is, with your help I raised $306 for the Love Ride.

The bad news is we didn’t hit my target of $500, at which point I said I’d post a picture of me doing something of your choosing.

The good news is you don’t have to see another picture of me doing something stupid like this:

I mean, once you’ve had something like this burned into your brain, I think we can all agree that you really never need to see its ilk again. Missing that $500 target was probably a good thing. And I apologize like hell for posting that Boobie-thon picture again.

So I’ll be heading out on the Love Ride tomorrow morning, and due to a last minute change of plans I’m not going alone: I’m taking Zoe with me. Words cannot describe how thrilled she is about this.

Or maybe they can. When we got home from picking up the registration materials from Glendale Harley-Davidson today, where we surprised Zoe with signing her up to ride with me, she made a beeline for the phone to call her best friend, and the 30-second conversation went a little something like this:

Hey, remember that motorcycle ride with all the motorcycles I told you about that my dad is going on? I’M going! Yeah, I’m going too. Way. Yes-Way. Uh huh. Okay, I’ll see you Monday. Bye.

Short, sweet, almost breathless, and bursting with pride that “I’M going!” It makes me glad that I can make her day like this.

So we’ll be riding two-up tomorrow, me and my Peanut. I’m sure this will be a major memory moment for her, which is one of the cool things about being a parent. And later in life she’ll be able to say that her first concert was Lynyrd Skynyrd at an outdoor motorcycle rally. I think that’s pretty cool too.

Thanks again to everyone who donated to the cause. I appreciate your generosity in helping me to help others. Thank you.

Backstory: Zoe had a little mid-playground collision with another kid at school the other day and now she’s sporting a nice purple goose-egg right smack in the middle of her forehead.

Real story: Zoe and I are at the supermarket…

Wait. Sidestory: At the supermarket, Zoe asks if she can buy a giant Hershey’s bar. No way, I said, you’ve got about 10 pounds of Halloween candy at home! And she gets a little sheepish and tells me that it’s not for her, it’s for “someone else” and she’s embarrassed to tell me who. My tingly Daddy senses scream “BOY!!!!” And later, when she’s having me help her pick out a greeting card to go with it, I am proven right: it’s for her “new friend,” a boy in the 5th grade. There are so many thing wrong with this turn of events, not the least of which are that 1) It’s a BOY!!!!!, 2) it’s for an OLDER BOY!!!, 3) she’s giving him chocolate, 4) she has me picking out a card for him, and 5) I’m paying for it all. This is so Not Good I can’t even tell you.

Anyway. Back to Real Story: Zoe and I are in the checkout line and I notice how dirty her face is and say something to her about it, that she’s filthy and we need to throw her in the shower when we get home for her weekly hose-down. And I noticed the woman in front of us sort of half-cocking her head to eavesdrop on us, and then she snuck a surreptitious glance at Zoe, followed by a disapproving scowl to herself at just how filthy Zoe was.

So then I said even louder: “And, wow, look how big and purple the lump on your forehead is. Does it still hurt? I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have hit you so hard, Peanut. Daddy gets mad sometimes but you know he doesn’t mean it.”

I thought the snoopy ol’ biddy was gonna stroke out right in front of me. Ha.

And hey, look at the pretty Love Ride icon. Lots of people have donated and there’s a growing list of folks who plan to with their next paycheck. Don’t be left out!

The trick-or-treaters have been and gone, so I guess Halloween is officially over now. Zoe went out with one of her friends and made a pretty good haul and now she’s being all greedy with it — won’t share at all. Fortunately, I have Parenthood on my side and can ground her if she doesn’t give me all the good stuff. It sucks being a kid sometimes. But it rules being a grown-up!

Another of Zoe’s friends was supposed to go out with them tonight, but that girl’s mother is in-fucking-sane. She called us at 8-fucking-30 this morning (caller ID gave her away) and I let the call go to voicemail because do NOT fucking call my house before 10 a.m. on a weekend because we’re slackathors and prefer to sleep our weekends away and what the hell is anyone doing up before 10 on a weekend if you’re not skiing or scuba diving anyway? And then the stupid bitch called AGAIN 30 minutes later! Wide awake now, I answered the phone. Surely something critically emergent was happening that required her to call us twice in one morning 30 minutes apart, something threatening Life As We Know It. And indeed it was That Fucking Important: her daughter would not be trick-or-treating with us tonight after all. Something about her attitude needing adjusting and making better choices and what-the-fuck-ever. So I grunted and hung up. Because what the fuck? You had to call me at fucking dawn to tell me that? Twice? And you couldn’t just leave a message the first time? She’d better run the next time I see her. Fast.

Seriously, that kid’s mom is nuts. Her kid is a handful, there’s no getting around that. Behavioural issues, poorly socialized from previous foster care, not the sharpest tack in the drawer, and just an all-around weird kid in general just for the sake of being weird (at least that’s what I think). During one of her sleepovers here I found her sitting alone in Zoe’s room staring slack-jawed at the light on the ceiling. I asked her what she was doing. “Uhh…. Just staring at the light.” While still staring. So, seriously, the kid is a freak. But I doubt she did something so out there that it warranted banning Halloween. That’s just mean. I felt badly for her, and I half suspect there was a Mommy Dearest moment going on over there after I got off the phone.

But anyway… So Zoe did the trick or treating thing while I stayed home and handed out candy. I was Fat Elvis and Zoe was an age-appropriate not-sexy teen witch. Check out the super fantastic fabulousness of our costumes. FYI, that’s a TCB necklace I’m wearing and a peanut butter-and-banana sandwich in my bathrobe pocket. For verisimilitude, ya know. (I was going to do Dead Elvis but I couldn’t come up with a toilet I could put on the porch to sit on.)

I wished everybody Happy Halloween and thanked them for coming in my Elvis voice, and one kid made me sad when he said I sounded like Johnny Bravo. You’re wrong, kid, I told him. Johnny Bravo sounds like ME. I’m Elvis, baby, I’m the King, and don’t you forget it. Ask yer momma, she’ll know, momma-baby. This kid didn’t get the good stuff: Snickers or Reeses. No, he got the crappy Bottle Caps. Six-year olds. No frame of reference. Pitiful.

We had a little jack-o-lantern disaster out front too. This seems to happen every year, probably because Zoe and I can’t wait to get started and carve the pumpkins too soon, but our pumpkins start wilting in the heat. And getting moldy. And oozing. And collapsing. And it happened again this year. The big pumpkin held up okay, but the little one — the one we called Frankenpumpkin because it had scars extending down both sides of its face — well, the little one suffered a loss of structural integrity. Its face collapsed. It was very Nicholas Cage/John Travolta in Face/Off, only the story was believable and the acting didn’t make you cringe.

Here’s how it looked burning merrily away pre-disintegration:

And this is post-disintegration. (Zoe added the Kleenex for comic effect. It represents the pumpkin’s guts):

There was still some open space inside the spoogey mess after it collapsed and I didn’t want to see it die in vain, so I crammed a candle in there and lit it. It wasn’t much of a jack-o-lantern, but it tried, dammit:

And… That’s it for this Halloween. Now I’m going to go raid Zoe’s candy sack.

I’m going to try something different for Halloween this year. Last year, I was in Fresno, and I was in Memphis the year before that. This year I think I’ll spend the holiday at home.

We’re all about Halloween around here. It’s probably my favorite holiday (after you rule out the good ones where people give you stuff), and Zoe is taking after her old man in that regard. Her costume has been lined up for weeks now and today we finally got around to carving the pumpkins like she’s been bugging us to do.

First, let’s talk about her costume. Here’s the picture from the package:

Let me just say Oh. My. God. Zoe looks nothing like that in it. If she did, several things would be happening: A) she would not be wearing it or anything like it, ever, B) she would be locked away in a boy-proof room somewhere in an undisclosed location, and C) I would be standing guard outside that room with a locked-and-loaded 12 gauge Mossberg. Now, all those things are going to happen anyway once she hits puberty, but this costume reminded me that I need to get started making the preparations. She is, as Beth likes to say “8 going on 16.”

Anyway, the costume’s been in hand for awhile now, and today we got started on the pumpkins. Zoe “helped” with scraping the guts out. Here she it working on one of them:

She was disturbingly fixated on the pumpkin guts. She collected them all in a bowl and then spent the next hour kneading them bare-handed until they had been reduced to a disgusting porridge of orange goo. She was quite proud of herself and insisted that I post the following picture.

Before = pre-gutting, After = post-gutting, but pre-kneading. I didn’t get a picture of the fully-kneaded goo because it was just too disgusting, even for me. Picture a frothy bowl of stringy Orange Julius with a soundtrack of squelching and Zoe muttering “Cooooooollllll!!!!” Blech!

The finished product came out looking pretty good, I think. (The jack-o-lanterns, not the goo.) Here they are in the dark:

And here they are out front, carefully positioned to strike fear into trick-or-treaters.

There’s more to do out front — I still need to build a graveyard in the entry way and set up the fog machine and put the giant spiderweb up next to the front door, but we’re officially under way now that the pumpkins are carved.

Stand by for more Halloween goodness…

It’s almost a cliche now to blog about what ninnies Southern Californians are when it rains, especially those in the Los Angeles area. It’s also becoming a cliche to note that our TV news weather reports when it’s raining are always hysterical exhortations about “The Storm of the Century of the Decade of the Year of the Month of the Fortnight of the Week of the Weekday of the Day of the Afternoon of the Hour of the Minute!!! And Oh My God It’s Raining And We’re Melting AAAAIIIEEEEE!!!!!” All that kind of goes without saying. (Even though I just said it. Redundantly, even.) But L.A.’s ombrophobia is very close to home today so I’m going to talk about it anyway.

The phone rang at 7:30 this morning. It was Zoe’s school calling to inform us that classes were canceled for the day. It rained, you see. Well, to be fair, it rained and part of the campus was flooded. But still, they could have worked around it, I’m sure. But as I’ve noted before, this is a school that will cancel classes at the drop of a hat, and if they have to drop the hat in the first place, then so be it. So lest children (and more likely faculty) melt, school’s out for the day! And you working parents, good luck lining up childcare! Bye! Fortunately, we have an unemployed parent hanging around the house these days, which comes in really handy when school is cancelled for precipitous reasons and chilluns need minding.

The phone rang again about twenty minutes later. One of Zoe’s classmate’s fathers was on the line. His wife was out of town and he had to go to work and could his daughter maybe come over to our house for the day? Yes, word of the unemployeed and thus available for chillun-minding adult was spreading fast. So I said sure, bring her over. Two kids are easier to mind than one because they entertain each other and leave me free to play online poker all day.

The phone rang again ten minutes after Beth left for work. It was the nanny of another classmate wondering did Zoe want to come over for the day since there was no school? And that’s when Camp Daddy was born. I already had two kids here, what’s one more? I suggested she bring hers to me and I’d watch all three and she could have the day off. She leapt at the idea. Camp Daddy was in business.

So now it’s me and three kids and pouring rain. I’m being about as watchful as any dad you’ve seen in the movies might be: I’m letting the girls run rampant while I’m holed up in my office. I poke my head out from time to time and listen for screams or breaking glass or ominous silences, then I go back to letting the inmates run the asylum.

They’re eating a cheese and bacon pizza for lunch right now. The activities so far have included bouncing on the back yard trampoline in the pouring rain, jump-roping in the pouring rain, running in screaming circles in the pouring rain, and sitting at the window watching the pouring rain. These kids are clearly not fully-grown Angelenos yet because they are not afraid of the rain. This will come in time.

All things considered, Camp Daddy is working out pretty well. I may be on to a new career path here.

One last bit about the name dropping, an interesting story (or maybe not — you be the judge) about one of the kids who slept over last night.

Zoe asked me to come to her class once for Show and Tell — she wanted to show off my tattoos. (The one on my left arm — the biggest one — has her name spelled out in it, which is why I was to be her Show & Tell item. Click here to see it.) So I showed the kids that one and they all oohed and aahed and Zoe got to puff up with pride, and then I pulled up my other shirtsleeve to show the Elvis tattoo.

Now, The King is long before their time, so I figured I should explain who he was, so I asked, “Have any of you ever heard of Elvis Presley?” The kid who slept over here last night, whose mother is an actress, piped right up and stopped me in my tracks:

“I do! I do! My uncle is married to his daughter!”

I stopped for a moment and considered that statement and realized that in fact it was true — her aunt had once been married to the actor who went on to briefly marry The King’s daughter. So, technically, she was right.

Which meant that I was only four degrees of separation from Elvis. Through a 3rd grader.

Hey, I’ll take it.

Still bored, still wasting time at the keyboard here. From the other room comes peals of children’s laughter — Zoe is having a sleepover with two kids from school. So I’ll write about the kids … sort of.

Zoe attends a private school that’s popular in the entertainment community. Lots of celeb’s kids are there, so we rub elbows with Hollywood’s movers and shakers at school functions. It’s a little weird sometimes, straddling the divide between their world and mine, between having to budget your vacation days from your job to cover the school holidays versus jetting off to Paris at a moment’s notice and letting the nanny take care of the kids while you’re gone. But they’re just normal people, people just like us … but with a fuck of a lot more money.

Without naming names for the Google spiderbots and thus violating these folks’ privacy, here’s a rundown of some of the folks we bump into from to time.

For tonight’s guests, one’s mother was the subject of a hit song by the 80’s band Toto, and the other’s father is a member of a popular vocal jazz group named for a New York City borough “X-fer.”

Last year I was looking forward to this. It didn’t happen — last year. This year? Oh yeah. I want to invite mom over for a sleepover.

Parents of former classmates who’ve moved on to other schools include two producers of an NBC sitcom featuring a gay lawyer and his female best friend, an actor famous for a role as a ticket scalper in a 1982 “fast” movie about the “times” at a California high school (he’s a really great guy, I like him a lot), and a singer whose first name is also that of a department store and whose last name is a neutral color.

In the schoolyard and at school events we frequently see:

• A prominent actor who was in two movies about talking gorillas
• An actor most famous for three recent science fiction movies about a computer generated world (his godchild is here tonight, Beth tells me)
• An actor who’s not a very “old man” who recently appeared in a “serious, black” role in two Harry Potter movies
• A “Monkish” fellow and his actress wife who once nearly had her “body snatched.”
• One of Charlie’s original angels — the smart one
• A prominent actor who played a Don in three Mafia movies and a Cuban drug lord with a scar on his face in the 80’s
• The founder of a musical duo named for “crying” for “what scares you” that just reunited and me and Beth are seeing them in concert next month
• The object of Gib’s (and my) fantasies and the namesake of one of my all-time favorite movies The Sure Thing
• A pretty lifeguard from a TV show where they “watched” the “bay,” who was also once the TV “charge” of a guy named “Charles”
• An “always-lazy” member of Monty Python’s Flying Circus (I was a major geekboy the day I met him, let me tell you)
• The T-1000 Terminator from T2.
• …and numerous other behind-the-scenes entertainment industry players whose names I recognize from the trades but I don’t know their faces.

Good lord, I’m an idiot. I’ve been trying to be all coy as I write this and not use their names or even link directly to them on IMDB because I didn’t want their names to even appear in the HTML link code … and I just realized IMDB doesn’t use names in the link; it’s an internal numerical code. I could have just linked straight to most of these people without being all disingenuous talking about “a movie with talking gorillas” and all.

Okay, fine. I’ve gone back and stuck in all the direct links I could have done in the first place. But you know what? I spent so much time and meager brainpower being all clever about dropping their names without actually dropping their names that I’m going to leave all that cleverness in there, even though it’s no longer necessary — and not all that clever. Feh.

What a tool. A name dropping tool.

Twentyfour hours from now I’ll probably be sixty feet deep. Yes, kids, it’s scuba time again. I’m going to Catalina Island with a group of people from my local dive shop, where I’m going to meet up with another group of people from Scubaboard.com (I’m CHUD there, sign up and say “hi” if you’re a diver), and we’re all going to jump in the water and blow bubbles together. I can’t wait.

But, really, I’m writing this entry because I want to share this picture. It’s me and Zoe in the pool at a Labor Day barbeque with a bunch of scuba people. Me and my kid, scuba diving together. How cool is that? I can’t wait ’til she’s old enough (10) to get certified and go in the ocean with me.