Springtime in New York

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Summer is fast approaching here in the city and the tell tell signs of springs are everywhere.  Why just yesterday the mayor announced that cycling fatalities were up by 15% from last month.  You can also tell it’s spring by the lack of clothing woman wear around town.  Unlike the west coast, New York women are undaunted by their long hibernation from vitamin D, preferring instead to just put it out there like a bunch of morgue escapees attending fashion week. 

Speaking of fashion, Spring also marks a very short window where woman can wear the expensive mid-weight jackets that comprise 80% of their closet space. This creates a frenzy of custom changes over five week period until all genders are relegated to “wife beater” teeshirts to stave off the sweltering summer heat.  

It seems summer is happening earlier and earlier and for those of you that still think Global Warming is a hoax, let me offer these scientific data points for your consideration.

1. Old jewish people are now migrating north for the winter. 

2. My family in Texas are experiencing empathy towards Mexicans. 

3. A Beaches resort is opening in Nova Scotia. 

4. New York City now has a hurricane season.

5. In eastern Long Island, deer ticks are at an all time high due to the mild winters and it’s now a status symbol to contract Lime’s disease in the Hampton’s.

6.  The new “it” pet to have in LA is a camel.

Of course, this morning I’m standing on the Westside Highway with the kids, trying to get a cab and it’s freakin’ freezing.  April 24th and it’s 35 degrees.  Can’t you just picture Fox News anchors throwing darts at an old Al Gore campaign poster.

The Barista Sessions

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It’s raining again so I duck in to my favorite morning coffee place.  My barista, Dan, is a wiry Dominican kid from the Bronx. I come here most mornings after I drop the kids off at their overpriced kiddie college. He is by far the most talented foam jockey in the city. He can literarily create any animal from Noah’s Arc with a stir stick and some steamed milk.  He hands me my latte. Floating on a frothy cloud is a smiling unicorn.  Wow!   I’m sure that creature wasn’t on the arc but who cares… it’s a unicorn!  

I usually sit at the bar where Dan and I take turns talking about our lives.  As a single gay dude, his life is full of late nights down in the west village not finding love in all the wrong places. As a hetro dad, mine is riding scooters to the park and apologizing to unsuspecting tourists as my girls run over their feet. Despite this, I really believe he thinks of me as the accepting older brother he never had. As a result, I like to give him advice on things I know nothing about, like dating. This morning I’m telling him to act more straight.  He asks me what planet I lived on when I was single. I explain to him that most men, gay or straight, are goal orientated.  For straight men, the ultimate goal is bedding the unattainable woman. For gay men, it’s to turn a straight guy.  My theory is if he appears to be straight at predominately gay gatherings, he will differentiate himself…duh! marketing 101!  Dan mocks a look of someone having an epiphany and says he’ll visit a Banana Republic right after his shift to purchase a disguise for the weekend. Now, of course I know he’s screwing with me but at least he’s thinking strategically. 

Dan is also worried about his career so we start working on that next.  He doesn’t know what he wants to do beyond his current job at the coffee shop and his other role as a part-time dog walker.  He likes all the CSI shows and thinks he should be a forensic lab technician.  I tell him to forget about that and concentrate on triangulating his talent, passion and work.  “Christ Dan!”,  I start, “You’re the best damn barista in the city, so can we please just focus on skills we can leverage now?”  

After a few minutes of brain-storming, we decide he should collaborate with a writer friend of his on a children’s book that loosely retells the Chronicles of Narnia with illustrations of his crema creations.  He’s still a little stuck on the CSI concept so we decide the book should include a hard-to-solve murder.   He’s excited now and to prove it whips out a lion, a bear, a warthog and a rat for his next five customers.  He asks me where I learned all this stuff about careers.  I tell him I once attained a Tony Robbins weekend where, in-between walking on hot coals and hugging a lot of people, I picked up a thing or two about following your bliss.  Oddly, that seems to be enough validation for him. 

The rain is letting up outside so I decide to make a dash for the office.  I tip him a little extra today because the dog he usually walks had some kind of mental breakdown and won’t be leaving his crate today.

Homo Erectus

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Thing 1 is studying early man right now in her social sciences class.  She killed a pig for food in a simulated survival game on her school issued ipad?  We thought the swine slaughter was a little extreme but given the importance of bacon in our society, I suppose it’s important to instill some sense of where it comes from.

It’s only a matter of time until the school gets to the part where these early dwellers reproduce, so I want to inform my girls that males aren’t necessarily evil but merely prisoners of a reptilian brain that fails them consistently. I want to be more evolved than the fathers who tend to cast all boys as homicidal teen rapists, hellbent on booty pilfering.  All that strategy has ever really gotten any dad is girls craving the very thing we want them to be repulsed by.  We also what them to marry one of these degenerates one day and make grand babies and therein lies the dichotomy of being a dad with daughters.

Since I am a stanch believer in the laws of evolution, I’m sure I can find clues in primitive culture that explain the current day behavior of boys in a more inclusive philosophy.

My thesis begins with the first primordial man who ever grabbed the hair of a primordial woman and attacked her with his dirty little uncircumcised wennie.  In this case, I imagined a day in the life of a hairy, horny, cave man.

5:00am:  He wakes up in the cave at first light with a morning boner. He then rolls over to the first available female and backdoor’s her while she sleeps because face to face sex with morning breath is not conducive to natural selection. 

5:03am:  He pre-maturely ejaculates because drawn out sessions with his moleskins around his ankles would leave him vulnerable to attack from other alpha males or a saber tooth tiger. At least that’s his excuse.

5:04am:  He falls asleep because of the natural post orgasmic sedative that gets release by the male nervous system.  This insures he stays close to the female so another male can’t jump in, thus cockering him and negating his genetic material . 

6:00am:  He sets out following the tracks of a wild bore. She tells him the tracks are at least three days old.  He turns around,  clubs her on the head and follows the trail anyway, not asking anyone for directions. 

6:15am:  She staggers up, gets the kids to cave painting class and sets out in search of berries and water.

6:00pm: She comes back to cave with fresh water, berries and an antelope carcass that died of natural causes. 

6:45pm:  He comes back empty handed and kicks their pet armadillo in frustration (yes, armadillos did exist back then).

7:00pm: He bones her out of spite and resentment, falls sleep. 

7:15pm:  She uses a vibrating Madagascar roach to pleasure herself while he drools on the new water buffalo pelt she just cured.

7:30pm:  He has a disturbing dream about bathing with his hunting buddy, thus propagating the myth made by all gay men, that every straight man is secretly gay (maybe thats where the term Homo Erectus originally came from).

So, what have we learned from this exercise? First, we have traced the roots of the post sex phenomena that occurs in males, where fevered passion turns to lethargy at a speed that it can only observed through the lens of an IMAX stop motion camera.  This on/off switch, which seems to confound young girls, is nothing more than a developmental lag that will take several more thousand years to correct.  Put another way, no matter how domesticated your pet scorpion, no matter how many tricks you teach him, he will still sting you, even on your birthday. It’s just his nature… he’s a scorpion.  Maybe someday the scorpion will eventually evolve into a harmless creature but not until he loses his stinger and that ain’t happening anytime soon.  

Second, once a young girl obtains this blueprint of the male brain, she can make informed decisions about her romantic life during those awkward teenage years. She might even decide to forego all the aggravation of boys and become a lesbian, because as any straight man will tell you, all woman are secretly lesbians. 

So, after careful consideration of the whole issue, I’ve decided to opt out of being a chaperon on next month’s field trip to the natural history museum until I’m better prepared.

Ahhh, another parenting crisis procrastinated!