On Nov. 4, my fellow Californians and I will vote on Proposition 8, an initiative to ban same-sex marriages, which were made legal by a state Supreme Court ruling in May. I know a guy — let’s call him Trog . . . Trog seems to have emerged from the mists of time untouched by human evolution. Not surprisingly, Trog supports Proposition 8 and he feels strongly enough about it that if you stop by his office, you’ll see a fair amount of Yes on 8 campaign material. Now I have to say that the idea of two people of the same sex getting married and making out with each other — provided they’re female and hot — does far less to tarnish my view on the sanctity of marriage than does the thought of some woman allowing this mouth-breathing ape to clamber on top of her and deposit his… Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Marriage
Santa Ana Winds
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge. — Raymond Chandler, “Red Wind” Read more →
It Could Have Been Worse
We took Lightning to the Huntington Dog Beach this morning . . . As we were parking the car, my wife asked, “Do they have bathrooms here?” “They have portables,” I said, pointing them out. “OK, you guys go ahead and I’ll meet you down at the beach.” Later, when we got back to the car, I asked, “Where’s my coffee?” “It’s all gone,” she said. “It may be all gone now but it wasn’t all gone when I left it here.” “I had to pee in it.” “You peed in my coffee cup?” “I can’t use those portables.” “Why couldn’t you pee in your own coffee?” “I had to make a judgment call.” “Well . . . thanks for not setting it back and letting me drink out of it.” Read more →
Nigeria Rules
You may be thinking “Nigeria Rules” now, dude, but wait till all 86 of your wives have PMS at the same time . . . Read more →
At the Lakers Game
My son and I went to the Lakers game last night, a pre-season game against Utah . . . Pre-game As we were walking in, he pointed out an Asian girl with a spiky-haired Asian guy wearing an Olympics jersey and said, “That guy with the Olympic jersey pulled a hotter Asian woman than you.” The girl was hotter than my wife is now, but not hotter than she was at that age. “You don’t know anything,” I said. “Mom was pretty hot.” “Yeah. Right.” Game Pretty good game! The starters played more than I thought they would. Andrew Bynum is back. He looked good! Jerry Buss was there. He looked terrible. Thirty minutes before the game, a guy rolled him out in a wheelchair to the end of the court. It took him several minutes to hobble from there to his courtside seat. My son said he had a… Read more →
No One Listens to Me
My wife is on the warpath this morning . . . “Can you believe this?” she says to no one in particular. “I hate that printer. I’m throwing it away. It ran out of ink again! I’m trying to print something and now I have to go buy more ink!” So I say, “You print a lot of documents. Do you get rid of your car when it runs out of gas?” “Oh I can’t wait to throw away that printer,” she says, storming off . . . Read more →
The Downside of Effective Communication
What I re-learned in Crucial Conversations class is that you can have “better” conversations with people if you’re able to control your initial emotional reactions and apply some learnable communication skills. I say “re-learned” because I got the same takeaway years ago from reading How to Win Friends and Influence People and Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. And while it’s been my experience that these techniques really do work, I haven’t used them as much I could have because they also seem to take a lot of the zest out of being alive. For example: Several years ago, we had an electrical problem at the house, where we weren’t getting power in any of the front rooms. My wife was home when the electrician came out — I was at work — and he fixed the problem in five minutes. When I got home, she was unhappy… Read more →
How I Met Your Mother
From Michelle “There is no safety net for anybody” Obama’s DNC speech: You know, what struck me when I first met Barack was that even though he had this funny name, even though he’d grown up all the way across the continent in Hawaii, his family was so much like mine. He was raised by grandparents who were working class folks just like my parents, and by a single mother who struggled to pay the bills just like we did. Well . . . if you take all that at face value — and why wouldn’t you? — it only goes to show how shallow I am, because what struck me when I first met my wife was what a nice ass she had. Hubba hubba! Read more →
A Business Model for Selling Crack
My wife loves to keep bags from the grocery store. Why does she love to keep bags from the grocery store? Your guess is as good as mine. Probably better if you haven’t been drinking tequila all afternoon like I have. My son walks into the kitchen . . . He says, “We’ve got enough bags here to open our own store.” “Good idea!” I reply. “You know what we’re going to sell? All the crap laying around in your room.” “For a second,” he says, “I thought you said ‘crack.’” “Crack . . . hey, that’s a good idea too! Ordinarily, you want to buy crack, you’ve got to go hang out on a street corner in some undesirable location. We’ll bring upscale ambiance to the crack business. ‘Paper or plastic?’ Who would suspect you’re toting crack around in that Trader Joe’s bag?” Read more →
You Gotta Have Heart
My son’s going into 10th grade and he’s started to go out in boy-girl groups . . . “Whoever he has for a girlfriend,” my wife says, “has to have a good heart. Has to be very giving. Because he’s an only child so he’s used to it being all about him.” “Do you think you have a good heart?” I ask. “Yes.” “You don’t think you’re a little bit too aggressively angry pretty much every day?” “That’s not about heart.” “What is it?” “You don’t think you’re a little too annoying? Same thing.” Read more →
Brush With Greatness: Postscript
I told my wife this story . . . it turns out she doesn’t know who Sugar Ray Leonard is either. “I know Muhammad Ali and Joe Foreman,” she says. Read more →
Randy Pausch, 1960-2008
Brick walls are there for a reason: they let us prove how badly we want things. — Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture If I could only give three words of advice, they would be, ‘Tell the truth.’ If I got three more words, I’d add, ‘All the time.’ — Ibid. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. — Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” Randy Pausch was lucky in that, thanks to the worldwide fame he achieved from his lecture and book, he died knowing that things he did and said would not be forgotten after he was gone. Without the pancreatic cancer, he couldn’t have achieved that. Let’s face it, you can’t peddle the kind of pabulum cited above as “wisdom” in the absence of a terminal illness. We own this book because my mom sent… Read more →
Why I Don’t Tell Jokes to My Wife
I say to my wife, “I saw a cartoon today . . . a husband and wife are standing in their living room looking at a huge painting on the wall, a portrait of an elderly man in an armchair, and the wife says to the husband, ‘I thought he was your grandfather.’” My wife says, “Who was the guy?” “The wife thought he was the husband’s grandfather and the husband thought he was the wife’s grandfather.” “So why was his picture in the house?” Read more →
Mother-Son Advice
. . . and one thing you don’t want to be is annoying like Dad. Read more →
Is the Front Door Locked?
Every night at bedtime, my wife asks me to check and make sure the front door is locked, even though we live in the Safest Big City in America. It’s annoying — and not just because it’s always locked, but because sometimes she waits until I’m already in bed. Then: “Did you check if the front door is locked?” And I have to get out of bed to check it. She’s out of town this week. I got up this morning and noticed that I’d left the door unlocked all night . . . Read more →
My Father-In-Law Died Today
My father-in-law died today. Or, maybe, tomorrow; I can’t be sure because of the time difference. He’d been sick . . . my wife was planning to visit him one last time this summer, but it was always one more week, too much work to finish, and finally he couldn’t wait any more. I cried a little when she told me, even though he lived in a far-off country and I never met him, because all of a sudden she seemed like a lost little girl, and I wished I could do something for her and I couldn’t, and for all the other things I’ve wished I could do for her and I couldn’t . . . Read more →
My Wife’s Philosophy
You win some, you lose some, but I prefer to win them all. Read more →
The Competition: A Sonnet
“Get off,” my wife says — but the pug Just looks at her and doesn’t move. He’s lying in his favorite spot Beside his master on the couch. “Off,” she says — the dog just stares; He could win a test of wills But when she moves to pick him up He concedes defeat and jumps. “I want to sit there,” she explains. He looks at her, he looks at me Then jumps up from the other side, Lying down across my lap Sideways, facing down his foe As if to say “Your move.” Read more →
Wives of Spanking Husbands Club
From the front page of the Los Angeles Times 70 years ago today, Jan. 26, 1938: Wives of Spanking Husbands Form Girls’ Auxiliary to Club SIOUX FALLS (S. D.) Jan. 25 (AP) — Wives of Spanking Husbands’ Club, organized in Sioux City, Iowa, and parent organization of fifty-nine such clubs throughout the nation according to its own figures–reached out for another slice of territory today. The Iowa housewives who consider it a mark of esteem for their husbands to wield a disciplinary hairbrush once in a while, announced plans today for a junior auxiliary–Daughters of Spanking Parents. ELIGIBLE GIRLS A letter received here from Sioux City and signed “Rita Rae, general delivery,” told of plans for the new organization for which she claimed an initial membership of seventeen. Any girl above the age of 11 years is eligible to join, Mrs. Rae wrote. “We think all parents should spank their… Read more →
Ike Turner, 1931-2007
Ike Turner, whose role as one of rock’s critical architects was overshadowed by his ogrelike image as the man who brutally abused former wife and icon Tina Turner, died Wednesday at his home in suburban San Diego. He was 76. — Associated Press The news of Ike’s death hit me like a slap in the face . . . Read more →