Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dad

Tuesday is one of the days when I’m Trixie’s primary care provider, so I get to play Mr. Mom, or as my wife likes to call it, “Dad.”  Trixie and I spend the day together while my wife works. When she gets home around six we have dinner, give the baby a bath and put her to bed.  Last Tuesday my wife had to work late which meant I was on my own for dinner, bath time and bedtime. I don’t get too flustered by the tasks required of fatherhood, so it was no big deal.  In college, I babysat my three younger siblings during the summers. The older ones were 7 and 8 and the baby was 8 months old one summer and 20 months old the next, so I’m no stranger to changing diapers, making bottles or entertaining the endless monologue of questions which can come out of kids.  Naturally, it wasn’t a problem to feed and bathe my daughter. In fact, when it’s just me and her, I kind of love it because I get to make all the decisions. I think of myself as Lieutenate DeWitt. LieuteNate ...

My wife and I are trying to build a house.  We have a lot of know how and raw materials.  I have lots of hammers and saws, my wife nails and screws and fasteners.  We have everything we need. But the house I grew up in flooded in the basement when it rained and my wife’s was cold and dark every winter.  We know what we want to build, but we don’t have any blueprints. Our couples therapist, along with our spiritual practice, allow us to become the architects of a home in which we can flourish. Ilene helps us use our tools and resources to build something substantial and sustainable, with solid supports.  Otherwise my wife and I would be like some kind of Three Stooges act, with me clobbering myself in the hand with a hammer while she spins around trying to hoist too much lumber. We still gets splinters and we screw things up but Ilene helps us remember why we put on our hard hats and come into work every morning.

I know I have to get older but does it have to happen so slowly? Everyday brings some new aspect of my mind or body which functions a little less effectively than it did the day before.  The suspense of seeing what’s gonna break down next is what’s really killing me.

Hop on Pop by Dr. Seuss has been delighting children for generations and my daughter is no exception. I've probably read it to her 100 times by now.  Unlike many children's books, each new reading of Hop on Pop reveals something new in the text.  Buried in the subversive narrative, I think I've found evidence which can prove Hop on Pop is an early example of Queer Children's Literature.   First, let's consider the title.  The idea of 'Hopping' on pop is subversive as it suggests leaping atop conventional symbols of power, in this instance "Pop."  The title also connotes "Daddy" imagery which is popular in gay culture.   In further examining Hop on Pop's homosexual connotations, we come to Red, Ned, Ted and Ed, four males seen here sharing a bed.  It's possible this image is just a rendering of young boys at a sleepover, perhaps there's nothing sexual or gay about it.  However, considered in the larger context of the na...

Jordan Peterson is a professor of Psychology at the University or Toronto and he taught at Harvard, which is the Mount Olympus of academia for people who don’t know much about academia or Mount Olympus. As a professor at the University of Toronto, Peterson felt he was oppressed when he was asked to refer to students who identify as queer or transgender by their preferred pronouns.  He threw and enormous academical hissy fit and took his case to the internet where he has found fame and fortune as a right wing guru railing against political correctness. Dr. Peterson’s whole POV is that human beings are capable of doing evil deeds while believing they are doing the right thing.  Drawing examples from Nazi Germany and Socialist Russia, he argues adhering to an Ideology - in this case the ideology of political correctness run amuck in his eyes - creates blind spots in personal morality. As a form of security in a chaotic world full of people who believe they are doing good but ...

I hate the current Commander in Chief.  It’s visceral, my desire to rebel. But in America, the idea of the current Resistance actually leading a conventional revolution against him becomes problematic under this President because all those Americans most prepared to revolt, those in the armed forces and police, people with the know-how and weaponry to lead a rebellion largely support his agenda.  “We’ve got the guns but they’ve got the numbers.” Jim Morrison sang to rally up the youth, forgetting of course that they’ve got the guns! When they have a monopoly on bullets, the only option is the ballot. But after the election there’s still the guns.   Say you run a grassroots campaign with socialist candidates using many small donor contributions and face-to-face politics to get the message of big love government out to the masses and there is truly a blue wave in this country. That’s not it, it’s not game over.  The people who support this president would then p...

Advocates of a free and open American society who cry “Fake News” are right to distrust the media, though their logic for doing so is severely flawed.  It’s difficult to blame these people, however, as they are products of a society in which the American media has been misrepresenting reality since its inception.   The media over simplifies serious political issues.  Due to limited space in publications and limited airtime on networks or cable channels, news outlets are forced to truncate and simplify stories.  Long speeches are reduced to two line quotes or 10 second sound bites . Thus, it becomes difficult to provide full context for stories or accurately convey the spirit and experience of an event.   In their oversimplified coverage of politicians and serious political issues, the media tends to frame politics as a sport, focusing on the horse race aspects of elections and on keeping score of what bills have the votes to pass rather than focusing o...

My daughter is like a slot machine: old people love her, she makes  a lot of loud noises and I keep pouring money into her.  But lately, parenting is feeling even more like a gamble because she won’t let me hand her food directly. I have to put whatever I want her to eat on the tray of her high chair, then she picks it up herself, inspects it and decides if she’ll accept it. It’s like handing a blackjack dealer money in Vegas: sometimes some of what I give her comes back to me, but mostly I just get back shit.

I’m going to assume you know about the Titanic, the colossal boat that sank in the North Atlantic, not the 1997 film about the two lovers on the colossal boat that… well, I won’t spoil it for you.  You may not know that the Night Captain who spotted the iceberg was inexperienced and thought putting the engines in reverse would help; instead, the swirling water created a vacuum, pulling frozen doom even closer.  Still, the luxury liner was engineered to withstand a head-on collision with an iceberg. There would have been damage of course, but the ship, 1,503 people and that enormous diamond would not have been lost. However, the newby Night Captain thought it wise to turn the ship, trying to avoid a collision.  In so doing, the iceberg caught the side of the hull, where the ship was weakest, fastened together with cheap rivets to save money. As a result, water flooded areas no engineer imagined it could reach and, after a harrowing struggle, the ship was swallowed by...

One of the few upsides of having been a real judgemental dickhead when I was younger is there’s all this great art I dismissed out of hand then that I can discover now.  Here are some bands and albums I used to hate that I was big time wrong about. Fleetwood Mac    I used to joke that I lived my life in a Fleetw ood Mac Free Zone, which was constantly moving, three foot radius that revolved around me.  Their hyper-produced, glistening blow rock was antithetical to everything I thought popular music should sound like. Though I’ve always loved, “Dreams” because of Stevie Knicks witch-like hypnotic abilities, the rest of their songs seemed like they were written to be listened to when you’re half asleep.  Somewhat ironically, I fell in love with “Rumours” on a trip to Los Angeles which was full of spiritual awakenings, largely triggered by a very, very stoned listening to “Rumours” on vinyl. This listening, and the guttural sobbing which accompanied it,...