May 2007 Archives

Last night, I put laundry detergent in the dishwasher. I didn't mean to, it just happened. Regina was in Elijah's room, reading to him from some 1970s Jacques Cousteau book about sea predators that we'd found in a dusty box during our move last week. I thought I'd show my commitment to our domestic situation by doing the dishes.

Our new house is full of Hollywood glamour. For instance, our stackable washer and dryer are in the kitchen, less than two feet from the sink. This is how all the muckety-mucks do it in L.A. But since we haven't fully unpacked yet, there's stuff all over the kitchen counters. I pulled a plastic jug off the counter, opened it, and poured some of the contents into the dishwasher.

The liquid was white and goopy. Also, it smelled forest-fresh. I looked at the label, which informed me that it was Seventh Generation laundry detergent.

"REGINA!" I shouted.

"What?" I heard from the other room.

"I just put laundry detergent in the dishwasher."

"You're an idiot!"

"What should I do?"

"Clean it up with a paper towel."

"But it's environmentally friendly!"

"Idiot."

"Yes, dear," I said.

So I sopped up the white goo with half a roll, and then replaced it with an equal amount of green goo.

After Elijah went to bed, Regina informed me that The Right Stuff, one of my very favorite movies, was on HBO Family. As always when watching The Right Stuff, I wept during key scenes, but especially the one where the Mercury Seven astronauts confidently walk toward the camera, wearing their spacesuits for the first time.

When I was a kid, this scene made me cry because of all the possibilities it portended for my adulthood. Now it makes me cry for different reasons. It was no accident that I found myself identifying with Gus Grissom, who fucked up his only solo astronaut mission, as an adult. I have a reasonably fulfilling life, and I'm happy most of the time. But I screw the pooch at least once a day. There won't be a ticker-tape parade.

Elijah and I are in Phoenix, at my parents' house. We decided as a family that it would be better if Regina stayed at the new house to unpack because she's got that decorator's gleam in her eye, Elijah would be in the way, and my unpacking strategy generally involves staring at the boxes, confused and overwhelmed, and then sitting on the toilet for an hour.

I swear I'll tell the full story of the move soon. It will be entertaining. Stand by your RSS feeds. But for now, an interlude...

This morning, I woke up just before nine to find the house empty. I would have slept later, but some guy was hacking at my parents' grapefruit tree with a chainsaw. Yard-maintenance noise, I've decided, is the curse of middle-class humanity's existence, the price we pay for relative prosperity.

A cup of tea, some email, and a lot of Offsprung perusal later, I heard the garage door, and then the familiar, and increasingly fast, clomping of Elijah's feet.

"DADDY!" he shouted.

"SON!"

He arrived at my bedroom door, naked from the waist down.

"Where are your pants?" I asked.

"I pooped and peed in them," he said.

"Oh," I said. "And where did you do that?"

"At the gym."

My dad approached, his voice loud, defensive, and maybe even a little hysterical.

"It's no big deal, Neal," he said. "It's fine. He's fine. Everything is fine."

My mother followed behind him.

"He's fine, Neal," she said. "Fine, fine, fine!"

I wanted to say, hey, parents, relax, I'm not blaming you. Besides, you'd have to really fuck up for me to play the Bad Grandparent card. It's not something I want to throw out every time my kid shits himself, especially because it rarely happens anymore.

My oddly calm response to the crisis earned me some story details from them.

My parents spent much of my childhood smoking cigarettes and eating pork chops, but after I turned 30, they suddenly became people who go to the gym every day. This time, they took Elijah and left him at the Kid's Club. Apparently, the Kids' Club gets a lot of small kids, so they keep the bathroom locked. It's proved a very successful strategy, as the LA Fitness at Tatum and Shea Boulevards has a perfect safety record when it comes to kids drowning in toilets.

Regular readers of this space know that Elijah is a smart kid. On the airplane yesterday, he looked at my Sound Of Young America T-shirt, featuring a rocket trailing sound waves, and asked, "is that the rocket's echolocation?" But even smart kids lose their senses when they have to go to the bathroom really bad. It was locked, and he was feeling too shy to ask an attendant to unlock. So he went to the top of the play structure, stood in a corner, and unleashed the fury of his waste. Later, my parents found him playing innocently. Apparently, the club's crackerjack staff hadn't noticed the accident.My parents took off Elijah's soiled clothes in the car, and he rode home half-naked.

At the house, Elijah got into the bath.

"Elijah," my dad said, "We need to soap up your bottom and your legs."

"Seriously?" I said.

"You didn't see it," he said.

Thank God for that, I thought.

So sorry I haven't been updating more frequently, or even at all, but we're in the middle of moving and my thinking/writing time is limited. That's right. Moving. More details soon.

Meanwhile, I'm going to be in a show. I'd put the poster up, but the image is too large for this publishing program and I can't figure out how to make it smaller. The show is called "Dia De Los Padres," and it will be at Largo in Los Angeles on June 18. Performers include Jeff Garlin, Greg Fitzsimmons, Eddie Pepitone and, for some reason, me. The headliner, Dana Gould, has been hired by Warner Brothers to write the screenplay version of Alternadad. Muhammed is obviously smiling upon Alternadad. Dana Gould is possibly, next to Newt Gingrich, the funniest person I've ever met. Is "funniest" really a word? It doesn't sound like one. What about "parenting"? Is that a real word?

Regardless, I'm sure I'll figure out a way to accidentally demolish my professional relationship with Dana Gould. Is it wrong that I'm calling him five times a day? I don't always leave a message.

Some nice clips over the weekend:

Author Judith Warner writes kindly about "dad lit" in her TimesSelect column, and an enterprising site deselects the piece so the hoi polloi can enjoy it as well. Read it here.

The Nashua Telegraph publishes a thoughtful and flattering review of Alternadad, ignoring the "hipster parent" angle almost entirely:

"The Pollacks’ story is an outing of the ugly truths about the struggles young middle-class families are facing under the current administration in this country. Like many young middle-class families, the Pollacks struggle to find affordable health insurance and decent preschools to send their son. They find themselves hapless in the search to find safe and affordable neighborhoods to buy a home and raise a child, sending Pollack into a political campaign to clean up the street his family lives on in Austin...To some, this may come across as more bitching by Gen-Xers who don’t want to do for themselves, but the Pollacks’ problems – and here I can speak from experience – are not unique, and they can’t be simply attributed to apathy."

Finally: Stephen King, Jonathan Franzen, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, Neal Pollack. Which one of these things is not like the other? Nonetheless, the Times came a callin'.

Not every conversation in our house is about the Phoenix Suns. Only every other one. The rest of the time, we talk about animals. Sometimes Elijah, who's informed us that he wants to be a zoologist when he grows up, asks Regina and I unanswerable questions, like "Who would win in a fight, a jackal or a hyena?" or "What's the most powerful snake that lives in Egypt?" Other times, he informs us of important animal kingdom half-truths, like "walruses and polar bears try to eat each other all the time."

The other night at dinner, Elijah started the conversation, as usual.

"You know what would be funny?"

"What, son?"

"If predators and prey reversed themselves."

"That would be funny," Regina said.

"Hippos would probably be the most powerful animal," I said. "Because they have big teeth."

I half-realized it at the time, but fully realize it now. We wanted to push this conversation along, because we thought it was fun. Either Elijah has turned us into enthusiastic zoology humorists, or our brains have melted out our ears. Regardless, we spend much of our mental time in a strange imaginary world where animals rule and people don't really matter at all.

"The giraffes would run really fast and eat the lions," Elijah said.

"The manatees would go totally nuts and start eating alligators," Regina added.

"That would be hilarious," Elijah said.

"Also," I said, "there would be some pretty powerful rhinos."

Elijah said, "The plants would start eating the fish."

"Crazy," I said. "What would start eating humans?"

"Monkeys," said Elijah. "And everything else."

"Don't forget the elephants," said Regina.

"Yeah," said Elijah. "The elephants would eat a lot!"

Those possibilities exhausted, we moved on to other topics:

"Do you think the Suns are going to win tonight?" I asked.

"Maybe," Elijah said. "Hey, daddy?"

"Yes, son?"

"Why are some whales actually dolphins?"

Today on Slate, the beginning of a legendary correspondence between me and Paul Shirley, former Phoenix Sun and current author of the very funny Can I Keep My Jersey?, a memoir about his days as an intinerant professional baskeball player. Note that my emergency "third post" concludes that "David Stern is evil." After hearing him dress down Dan Patrick on ESPN Radio today, I can only conclude that he's evil and an arrogant, self-righteous asshole, the Paul Wolfowitz of basketball.

Let me quote Coach Pornstache:

"We have the most powerful microscopes in the world here in Arizona. You could use them and still not find a shred of fairness or decency in this decision...look at how this effects the league. It penalizes good play. It's not good for the fans, it's not good for the teams, it's not good for the league. I would think making a decision based on what's best for everybody would be what would matter."

Fuck the NBA.

"Daddy?"

"Yes, son?"

"Why are the Suns losing tonight?"

"I don't know. They've been doing a lot of whining."

"The Spurs whine, too."

"Not as much."

"Yes they do. They whine all the time. When the game is over, the Suns will say "Yay! We won! Let's all go get some ice cream." And the Spurs will go, "WAAAAH! We lost! We want some ice cream, too." But they can't have ice cream when they lose, because their coach won't let them. And they'll whine all night long."

"That would be nice."

"Don't think bad thoughts, daddy. The Suns are only losing in your mind."

"OK."

"They are going to push the Spurs until everyone is on the side of the court, and then there's going to be a crack and the Spurs are going to fall through until a crocodile eats them."

Suns 104
Spurs 98

For those among you who don't spend Sunday curled up with a mocha latte and the pages of the Grey Lady, let me call your attention to this piece, written by me, about a very important topic. When I was a kid, I dreamed of writing for the Times, but those dreams usually involved me reporting from Capitol Hill or someplace like Afghanistan. I didn't imagine that I'd be writing about giving a bad dance party at my son's preschool. My editorial presence provides a sure sign of the paper's decline, yet there it is, on the microfiche for all eternity. Does microfiche even still exist?

In other news, Mother's Day involved dim-sum, as well as a two-hour wait for dim sum with seemingly every Chinese-American in the San Gabriel Valley. These were no Silverlake brunch tables for three. We had many groups of 20 to wade through before we got to watch Elijah eat two strands of jellyfish and several iterations of fried shrimp paste. Regina got her taro ball, though, and she was happy. There were presents small and large and a trip to Costco where we bought a three-foot salami and a jar of 1200 jellybeans.

You really should check out Offsprung. When I thought of this site a year ago, I never imagined it would be this good.

Here's a YouTube link to the Nightline piece on my family. Note two things: How ordinary (if well-spoken) we are, and my kid's unbearable freakin' cuteness. Apologies that I can't embed the video. But follow that link, and you'll be fine.

Happy Mother's Day, to you mothers.

Paul Coro writes in The Arizona Republic today that Suns fans are waiting to see if the Suns will make it to the championship before they really begin rooting for their team "For now," he writes, "the Valley's interest is like an alligator in the water: Only its eyes are visible."

I can be silent no longer. Suns fans, you are lame! You've been presented with an incredible gift, potentially one of the greatest teams in the history of the NBA. This is no time to exercise quiet patience. Wake the fuck up!

Do you see what the fans are like in Golden State? Or Utah? They're cultish, crazy, and powerful. In San Antonio, fans rise as one whenever the Spurs make a basket, even if they're down by 20. The pretentiously entitled Lakers fan base knows how to bring it, particularly for the playoffs. These are fans who know that it's important for a team to have a crowd on its side.

But the Suns' rich, bloated, privileged crowd just stands and politely applauds like it's attending a J. Fife Symington rally. Well, I've had enough of this crap. I know that there are true Suns fanatics out there. I get emails from them all the time. Great passions bubble just beneath the surface of calm, boring Suns-fan land. The people who are lucky enough to get to go to the games had best pick up the pace, and fast. Because if you're not going to back the Suns as insanely and as thoroughly as Warriors fans boost their team, well, then, I bet there are 17,000-plus people out there who'd gladly take your ticket. Get off your Lexus-driving asses!

The gauntlet is thrown.

Go Suns!

Midnight, 5-9-07. The view from our upstairs window.

"What's the matter, Daddy?"

"I'm worried."

"Why?"

"Because the Suns have trouble beating the Spurs."

"Why?"

"Because the Spurs are good."

"But I thought the Lakers were the most evil team."

"They are. But the Spurs are better."

"Anteaters are noctural, Daddy."

"If you say so, son."

Suns 101
Spurs 81

Once upon a time, there were no websites for parents. That made parents very sad. Their lives felt lonely and meaningless, and they were forced to seek advice from unqualified strangers, and even their own relatives. But then, starting in 2004, a certain class of people began to reproduce with purpose. Soon, thousands, perhaps millions of kids were born to tech-saavy parents with money to burn! Prophets predicted a great baazar. The Internet responded.

So, then, Offsprung, the perfect online antidote to a parenting culture gone mad. We feature the sharpest, funniest writers on the Internet, each one eviscerating, or at least challenging, a different excess of that culture. Here are some of them now:

–Matthew Tobey brings us The Cleaver, the final word on the absurd and semi-evil world of celebrity parenting hype.

–Christopher Monks has created Dadsmacker, the first-ever blog totally devoted to taking on the pretensions of “hipster” parenting, a ridiculous movement that no one on this site has been involved with in the slightest.

–Amanda Marcotte, the scourge of Catholicism, brings you Unsprung, which should make Christian right “pro-family” moralists shake in their hypocrisy suits.

–Amy Davis keeps the shark from jumping on Huxtabled, serving as our primary tastemaker in the world of video-based children’s entertainment.

–Leigh Anne Wilson, operator of the Honeysuckle Shop, a well-regarded online sex-toys establishment, writes all about matters orgasmic in Lock The Bedroom Door.

–Dara Grumdahl, a James Beard award-winning food writer, puts the American diet to shame with Defamisher,.

–Alternadad* Neal Pollack will dispense parenting advice with the help of his trusty Silver Surfer.

And they are just the tip of a thick, brilliant iceberg of talent. Over the next few weeks, Offsprung will launch nearly 20 blogs, all of them hilarious and incisive. And we’ll be bringing you so many other features. You’re not going to believe what hit you, people. Soon, it will be hard to imagine your lives without Offsprung.

So come on in. The water’s pretty warm and the surf is perfect for boogie boarding. There’s room for thousands more.

Welcome to Offsprung.

Late afternoon yesterday, when it was cooling off, I took the dogs out. A few houses down from mine, Hercules did his little squat walk on the grass strip between the house and the sidewalk. I picked up his business with a plastic grocery bag. An angry man stood in his doorway.

"Why you letting your dog shit on my lawn?" he asked.

"I picked it up," he said.

"Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't," he said. "I watch you."

"What do you want from me?" I said.

"Why doesn't your dog shit on your own lawn?" he asked. "You ever thought about that?"

"He does, sometimes."

"Maybe he should do it more often."

Yeah, I thought. Next time, I'm gonna pick it up and put it in your mailbox, asshole.

"Screw you, man," I said.

"I'll take you out, you clown," he said.

"Whatever," I said, and I walked on.

A couple of houses down, I looked behind me.

"I'm still here," he said. "You want a piece?"

It's time for me to leave this neighborhood.

I have a new piece on Jewcy today that discusses how, of all things, a book by a child psychologist helped Regina and I with some Elijah-related discipline problems. For once, I've written something useful and possibly meaningful. I encourage you to check it for yourself.

Meanwhile, the family returns in four hours, bringing an end to my sabbatical. As I pulled out of the driveway today at 12:30 to run some stuff to the post office and also stop on the way home for a pulled-pork sandwich at the Oinkster, I realized that I hadn't left the house, save to walk my dogs, for 48 hours. I may never enjoy a period so fallow again.

Don't forget to join the Offsprung Revolution!

"Daddy?"

"Yes, son?"

"Today the giant crocodile dinosaur is going to fly through the roof of the building and it's going to eat the Spurs."

"I hope so."

"It's really going to happen."

Sometimes, son, the monsters bite the good guys.

Spurs 111
Suns 106

Now the Nightline piece has been pushed back to next week. I can tell I'm losing you people. Hang in. Here's the printed version of the piece, because, you know, you haven't read enough articles about me already. My life is SO INTERESTING.

Meanwhile, Regina and Elijah are out of town for four days, leaving me to do the sorts of things that I don't get to do when they are here. For instance, I just ate an entire tin of sardines with mustard sauce. It looked like a fly's breakfast and smelled like Satan's anus, but it tasted pretty good. The fun never stops in Pollack-town!

"Daddy?"

"Yes, son?"

"Are the Suns mammals?"

"Yes they are."

"Is it because they breast-feed their babies?"

"No. The Suns are men. They don't have breasts."

"Then why are they mammals?"

"There are lots of reasons."

"OK. Tonight the roof is going to open up and all the predators in the world are going to fall out of the sky and eat the Lakers up. Would that make you happy?"

"Very happy, son."

"That's what's going to happen."

Suns 119
Lakers 110

The seemingly endless decline of American journalistic standards will hit rock bottom on Thursday night, as my family is profiled as part of a feature about hipster parents--on ABC News Nightline.

Because I was a child-nerd, I grew up watching Nightline. I may have been the only nine-year-old in American who thought it was more fun to watch the Iran Hostage Crisis than go bike riding. Even if Ted Koppel is gone, I'm still really excited to be on Nightline.

In any case, set your TIVOs if you've got 'em, and try to treat me with kindness and objectivity. Remember, television puts on ten pounds, recedes your hairline by about an inch, and makes you automatically sound 30 percent stupider. Thanks in advance for your continued support. Go Suns!

Regina and the boy were at Target yesterday. They'd gone there because Regina had left the teapot on the stove for three hours accidentally, and the pot got a wee bit burned. I stayed home. You burned the teapot, I said. You run the errand.

Elijah wanted a bunch of things at Target. He got one of them: A video of extremely highbrow Spongebob Squarepants cartoons, which Regina decided to buy because we're sick of pausing the TIVO every time a commercial comes on Nickelodeon. The other stuff, Regina ignored. This pissed Elijah off.

"Mama," he said. "I'm tired of your melodrama!"

"Oh, really?" she said.

"Yes! I want to talk about my melodrama, all day long!"

Son, your wish is granted.