Ask a Stray Dad

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ASK A STRAY DAD: AWAKE IN ALBUQUERQUE

Q: What time is it? What are we doing up?

It’s 4:35 on a Tuesday morning. It was even earlier when my brain shook me awake, but it took me a while to look at the clock because first I had to unpack that recurring dream where I really have to use the bathroom but the only available toilets are right out in the middle of a very public town square. Normally I’d lie here another 30-ish minutes, eyes bugging out, trying and failing to telepathically wake my wife so she can reassure me that she remembers the door codes to every Starbucks restroom in America. But that just seems like a waste of time right now.

My better half, for much of her adult life and particularly over the past decade, has struggled with getting to sleep. It took 9 years for a variant of her chronic malady to infect me via pillow-to-pillow contact, but now I’m that guy: the one who has trouble staying asleep. Any given day sees about four hours where everyone in the house is unconscious, which feels like a low figure given that there are typically only three of us here and no one’s working as a baker at a donut shop. And while normally I appreciate shared duties, it definitely feels like we’re taking shifts as lookouts, which is wholly unnecessary given the neighborhood is gated and the locks on our doors are so robust as to barely allow me in or out. H stays awake worried about whether we’re doing the right thing by being here and wondering where we’re supposed to live; I bolt out of bed with a Kelly Clarkson song pummeling my eardrums from the inside, or gasping for the air my subconscious has been strangling out of me over my apparent lack of purpose in life. At that point, despite the early hour and the desperate need for sleep, every brain cell I have left is playing demolition derby against the others, as they rearrange themselves and reassign basic tasks to all the wrong folks. Memory, in charge of appetite? Why not! The pleasure center, taking over basic motor skills? Let’s give it a try—the normal way’s been a disaster.

When The Awakening first started I put it down to having trained myself to get up early in order to write. Inherently flawed logic, given that I could sleep through someone clear-cutting a forest as long as it happened on a Sunday. The sleeplessness seemed to mildly coincide with us moving down here last July, so the finger wagged disapprovingly at environmental factors. But even in this weary, stupefied state I could see that wasn’t the case: I’ve never collapsed into a comfier bed, in a quieter house, in a duller neighborhood. If some external stimulant was prodding me awake, it was too sly to detect.

The more I tried to sleuth out the origin of the problem, the worse it got. Was it just needing to get up in the middle of the night to pee? No, but now that we’ve got that in our head doesn’t it feel like we ALWAYS need to go? Was it anxiety? Wait, what do we have to be anxious about? Did you want a list? I’LL GET A PEN. I started popping a melatonin, before I read that too much too frequently essentially breaks the chain on your sleep cycle, making it harder to get the sleep you need. So out went that remedy, which wasn’t really working anyway—I still woke up long before the sun did. The only thing melatonin managed to do was make me fall asleep even faster than before, leaving my very awake wife sitting ramrod-straight next to me, alone and spinning in her own mental tornado.

So I put it down to age, because the inevitability of it—while depressing—at least allows me to shrug it off as something beyond my control and therefore not worth the stress. People talk about the biological ramifications of getting old, and most of it seems to center around a few cliches: hair sprouting like weeds across an abandoned corporate parking lot, gravity dragging every proud part of your anatomy dirtward, and backs going out more often than a teenager with negligent parents. I’m now closer to 50 than I ever thought I’d be; tomorrow I’ll be even closer. And while all of those side effects have certainly managed to worm their way into this meat sack of mine, so far their impact remains more like a shadowy threat than an actual gerontological explosion. My “evolution” into a non-sleeper seems to be sticking, though. And I have enough evidence just lying around to justify this reasoning that my increasing in years is to blame for my decrease in slumber.

Anecdotal: I’ve found my mother reading mystery novels in an uncomfortable armchair at 4:30 more often than I care to count. And my old track coach used to talk about how much more he was able to accomplish than everyone else with his 20-hour days.

Quantifiable: Sometimes while waiting for the sun to rise I’ll Google why do I wake up in the middle of the night and read research papers, just for fun. And there are plenty out there more than willing to tell me that while age does not affect the amount of sleep we need, it definitely impacts our ability to acquire it. One of the more disturbing tidbits came from an article in the journal Neuron, where researchers discovered that an aging brain loses the neural connectors that would normally tell you you’re sleepy. And while they know that it happens, so far they’ve failed at figuring out what to do about it. Though apparently they DID have enough time to determine that the lack of sleep that one experiences as a result actually accelerates the aging process. Which means a) I’m still on my own with this, and b) if I can’t devise my own plan to stop “Since You Been Gone” from rattling my internal speakers it’s only going to get worse from here. Especially after Google showed me one very early morning that chronic sleep deprivation is linked to a variety of very troubling health issues:

High blood pressure
Diabetes
Heart attack
Heart failure
Strokes
Obesity
Depression
Dementia
Reduced immune system function
Lower sex drive

The recommended amount of sleep for a person of my age is between 7 and 9 hours. On average I’m getting about 75% of the bare minimum, and 55% of the maximum. This is supposed to be an advice column to myself, so: What to do?

Most of the advice you find online about this falls under “patently ridiculous,” particularly when the issue isn’t going to sleep, but staying there. How much more conducive to sleep can a bedroom be when all the lights are out, the shades are darkened and your partner is comatose 6 inches from your face? One suggestion I’ve managed to ignore so far is going to bed earlier. A lot of that has to do with my rage-against-the-dying-of-the-light wife, who hates being told what’s good for her unless the message comes directly from her doctor, the only professional anything she has ever trusted. Including herself, because we both receive frequent signs that we should be putting head to pillow far earlier than our standard 11:41 time slot. Most nights, depending on what book I’m reading to the kid, you can find both H and I asleep—her on the bed next to our daughter, me on the floor with my forehead keeping the book cracked open—while P waits patiently for me to finish my sentence. Even when I do manage to make it to the end of a chapter, neither of us recall more than an iota of what I’ve read. (I know, for instance, that Percy Jackson is the son of Poseidon, but ask me anything else about what’s happened in the THREE PJ books we’ve read so far and you’ll get nothing but a blank, pleading stare out of me.) There have been at least a handful of occasions when I’ve woken up, called out to H, gotten no response, and just turned out the light and closed the door on the both of them. She is a reasonable person. She loves me. She wants to take care of herself. But if I mention that maybe we could go lights-out at 10:30 she’ll ask, rhetorically, “So what, we’re old now?” and stay up to midnight—albeit reading a Fredrik Backman novel with a heating pad under her lower back—just to prove me wrong.

If “going to sleep earlier” is off the table, the possibilities for finding the extra 2 hours of sleep seem fairly limited. I’ve already given up coffee, as one of my doctors informed me that I am—his words—already agitated enough as it is. I don’t smoke. I limit my alcohol consumption. Our bedtime routine includes listening to a meditation app I rarely can stay awake through the end of. Regular exercise is supposed to help, but I already run 6 miles a day during the week—if I extend that to the weekends, my Achilles are going to snap like old rubber bands. Has any of it helped?

Do you see what time I started writing this?

As long as it’s the case that I can’t manage to put myself back to bed once the buzzing of my cerebral alarm starts, my only remaining method for turning 5 hours into 7 would appear to be naps. But I’m not 4. Nor do I live in Spain—and even if I did my company is one of those let’s-figure-it-out-in-a-series-of-all-day-all-team-meetings workplaces, so a mid-Zoom siesta would mean the end of me.

I’ve run out of obvious solutions. But rather than dig any deeper, lest it being another thing my brain wakes up wanting to talk to me about, I’m going to adopt the standard stubborn-middle-aged-guy approach to everything: Ride. It. Out. I figure I’ve got only about 13-18 more years of this before I can retire. And the day that happens, I’ll turn my “waking” hours into a series of naps alongside whatever mangy pack of dogs we’ve collected by then, and stay up as late as my wife wants, watching whatever show about vampires the world is into. At that point, if my brain wants to wake me up at 3:47 with Kelly belting out “Because of You” I will—finally—be willing to accept it.

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ASK A STRAY DAD: BLOCKED

Q: SO, WHY HAVEN’T YOU BEEN WRITING?

It’s so sweet of my attention-starved psyche to pretend someone’s actually been wondering this. You see—

NOT SO MUCH A QUESTION AS BERATING YOU FOR WHATEVER THIS AIMLESS, FRUITLESS, SPINELESS PERIOD OF YOURS IS.

Do you think you could at least let me finish?

You’re right: This is—hands-down—the least productive period of writing I’ve had since I was probably 14 years old. For 30-plus years I wrote my way into and out of every incident, no matter what was going on or how little time I had. And now we’re at a point when this should be getting easier, only I’m like a clear-cut forest trying to understand quantum physics: stumped. A fundamental aspect of who I am vanished with no explanation and no note. Of course no note: that would’ve required writing something. And sure, technically I can still do it—my fingers remain intact, and even if they weren’t there’s voice dictation now; we could get pretty close. But not if my brain keeps the creativity hose kinked.

It stands to reason that the trick to undoing this is to figure out what’s causing it in the first place. And while my brain definitely doesn’t want me sleuthing out its intentions, I have managed to uncover a few possibilities that, while not amounting to much in isolation, may combine—Oceans 11 style—into a force powerful enough to pull this job off:

EVERY TIME I OPEN MY LAPTOP, MY CAT SITS ON IT. O’Malley Thunderpaws wants nothing to do with me 23 hours and 37 minutes a day. I can’t get near him without him getting spooked and tearing ass for the highest, most precarious ledge in our house. He’ll bring a wounded mouse onto our back porch and bat it to death, staring me dead in the eyes as he does so, like a warning. But if I deign to get up early in the morning and crack this Macbook open just a hair, that JD Salinger of cats suddenly becomes the neediest damn feline alive. I can’t type around a nine-pound furball circling the keys and howling at me, so I toss him to the end of the couch. Next thing I know, he’s clawing the rug, damaging furniture like some jilted ex-lover (I assume; no woman I’ve dated has ever had strong enough feelings about me to damage perfectly good property, even if it was mine). I get up, toss him outside; by then, like clockwork, the appetite to write has vanished.

THE EDUCATION OF MY CHILD BEGINS ASS-CRACKINGLY EARLY. My daughter’s in fifth grade, and the elementary school to which she’s assigned has decided, for reasons that must have to do with the Vice Principal’s standing tee time, that a respectable school day begins at 7:45. As in AM, an hour that should be reserved for coffee, pooping, and Wordle. Her previous school started a full hour later, which meant that I could get up at 5:30, write for a couple of hours, THEN wake her up. Here, getting up that early yields about an hour, and not a very quality hour at that; I’m groggy, I’m kicking things in the dark, my vocabulary is fuzzy and limp like an arm that’s fallen asleep. I’ve maybe pecked a dozen words out before the alarm goes off to wake her up; forget about getting in a flow state. And yes, I could wake up another hour earlier, limiting myself to about four hours of sleep (my better half’s a night owl with insomnia issues; if she’s awake, i have to be awake). I could also drive roofing nails into my kneecaps. Both acts would be about as painful, and equally conducive to cranking out pages.

I HAVE NOTHING TO WRITE ABOUT. Okay: technically this isn’t true. We moved from Oregon to New Mexico on little more than a coin flip, to take care of my ailing father-in-law. That’s not “nothing.” The culture shock alone of going from waterlogged hipster food capital to high-desert muscle car Mecca is notable, at the very least. And the immersion into a bizzarro family dynamic is more raw material than I’ve had on hand in a while. But the proximity to some very tender feelings and the potential damage I fear one miswritten phrase might cause has given me serious pause. So while I catalog all of these thoughts surrounding this very landmark-laden moment in our lives, I am terribly reluctant to share those thoughts flippantly on a blog that just about no one reads but that, were the wrong person read something, might cause an in-law or two to write my wife out of their will.

I HAVE BEEN GRINDING MYSELF TO A PASTE ON A SINGLE PROJECT FOR A VERY LONG TIME. AND NOW THAT IT’S DONE, AND I’M SENDING IT OUT TO AGENTS AND HEARING ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, IT MAY HAVE BROKEN ME INSIDE. I can handle the fact that it took me four years to complete a middle-grade sci-fi novel that any half-well-read sixth-grader could polish off in a rainy long weekend. I was fine working and reworking it on the edges of every day until it’s my favorite thing I’ve ever written and the type of book I’d love to read to my kid. (I’d say “kids,” but the older three are hopefully a bit past this.) What’s gnawing on my will to do pretty much anything is the soul-wrenching method one apparently has to subscribe to in hopes of getting the damn thing published. Sending these queries out to agents who did not ask for it makes me feel like a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman in 2022. And their terse, delayed and impersonal-as-possible replies, if they show up at all, do nothing but reconfirm my own fears that this is all a bit pointless. They’re reading no more than 10 pages of a 218-page novel; it takes them (or their assistants) no more than 20 minutes to do so. Their reply is never more than “I’m afraid I’m not as interested in this as I’d need to be.” Dispiriting fails to cover it; getting a handful of these letters with no real feedback plucks at the feathers of confidence until you can no longer get airborne. Like I said, this is my favorite thing I’ve ever written. And now, thanks to this process, I have no idea whether it’s any good. Do I keep plugging away at stuff like this, or do I need to completely shift gears? How about I quit entirely, is that what I should do? WHO KNOWS? NO ONE’S TELLING ME ANYTHING. You try writing anything while mucking around in this kind of literary purgatory. Seriously: Come to my house, sit down at my laptop, and see if you can get “us” kickstarted. I’ll pay you $100 if it’s decent and gets me out of this deep, dark hole I’ve dug for myself. And if it’s not, I’ll pay you $100 to dig a deep, dark hole we can bury my laptop in.

Look, I don’t want to be writing about this stuff. There’s nothing more insufferable than a lowercase-w writer writing about how they can’t write. Which means it’s up to me to figure out hot to undo the paralytics that have created this unfortunate scenario. The first couple are easy: the O’Malley can go “live” out the rest of his cat “lives” on a “farm” somewhere just a little too far for us to regularly visit, and my daughter can drop out of school and go work at Arby’s. She’ll have an 11-year jump on the college grads shaving beef alongside her.

The last factor is largely out of my hands. I can keep submitting, keep pretending not to care—only I do care, very much. It would be ludicrous not to after four years. If a high jumper spent four years getting ready for the Olympics, then failed to clear the bar on their first three attempts and was disqualified, you couldn’t ask them not to feel disappointed. Same thing applies here—so until someone decides that it’s worth a damn, I’m going to struggle with my own self-worth, which is very much wrapped up in those 80,000 words.

Which means preserving my sanity and identity depends on #3, and whether I’m able to walk around that cinderblock wall of rejection and on to something new. Whether I can find something to write about, and then actually sit down and write it. I mean, it’s been done before, right? All I need to do is force myself to confront the discomfort, to prod the void with a ball point pen until something bursts. Easy enough.

But just in case it isn’t, I might need you to hold me accountable. So if you don’t hear anything from me in a week or so, could you—

DON’T YOU DARE DUMP YOUR BULLSHIT PROBLEMS ON US.

Fair enough.

ASK A STRAY DAD: EMOTION SICKNESS

Q: You went to Universal Studios? How was Harry Potter World?

By the time the broom lifted me off the ground for the second ride around, I just knew breakfast was pulling an Eggs Benedict Arnold, and that I was in deep, deep trouble.

The hard part should’ve been over. Our newly minted 21-year-old hated surprises. Sniffed them out at every turn. Shook Christmas packages and declared their contents like a border patrol agent. Knew we were pregnant with her younger sister a solid month before we told them. And yet we’d managed to trick her into believing we were sending her back from Christmas break to college, alone, for her birthday—whereas in actuality we’d booked flights for all of us, plus her college roommate, down to Burbank. I photoshopped a fake boarding pass, feigned the need to park the car for a proper goodbye, dropped her, her corpse-sized bags and her mom and sister off at the terminal, swung into the long-term lot, then lugged three people’s carryons back to where I left them. As I rolled up, the wheels of two suitcases clattering on the saltillo tile floor like the clack-alack of a railway train, E’s eyes bugged out. For the first time in forever, she looked like she had no idea what was going to happen next. Because she didn’t.

“Want to go to Harry Potter world?”

Hell yeah, she did. She’d been talking about this exact thing—Harry Potter World, on her 21st birthday—for seemingly as long as there’s been a World containing Harry Potter. It was too much for her to process at once; she didn’t so much explode with joy as leak it out over the next several hours. As we loaded her checked bags onto the conveyor belt I looked back to find her shaking in happiness and disbelief.

But that was Friday. By the time Sunday rolled around and we were actually inside the park, on our second-consecutive spin through Hogwarts on a Forbidden Journey^TM it was my stomach, and apparently my inner ear, doing the quivering.

For a kid who was scared of pretty much everything, I’d taken great pride in maintaining my counter-characteristic love of rollercoasters—like an iguana that was good at jigsaw puzzles. So I didn’t think in a million years that a little indoor ride inspired by a set of kids’ books was going to take me down. But something about the interaction between the flashes and dizzying motion of the movie screens in front of us and the ride itself tossing us like pancakes on a spatula bubbled up all kinds of trouble. We heaved to a stop in front of Hagrid, who asked our car, “You haven’t seen a dragon, have ya?” And I responded—too softly under all the commotion for anyone to hear—“You don’t happen to have any dramamine, do you?”

Thankfully I made it all the way through the story of the Boy who Lived without being the Man who Puked. But the insider’s guides had all recommended hitting the thrill rides all at once and as early as possible, so off we went down to the lower level—my wife, two daughters, E’s roommate and I—with me and my gurgling stomach hanging out at the back, trying to keep up and trying even harder not to make a scene.

E’s statements on how she would celebrate this exact moment had taken on familiar themes over the past, ooooh, three years. “I would be DRUNK, sipping on BUTTER BEER, in my ROBES and with my WAND, at the front of ALL the rides!” In fairness to her, she played it far more responsibly. Yes, there was a breakfast cocktail, though it was more Shirley Temple than Rob Roy. Around noon a friend Venmo’d her money for a fruity frozen drink in a plastic Tiki cup that looked all-too-much like the bad-luck idol Peter and Bobby Brady tried to bring back from Hawaii. But the smell of mango overrode any alcohol it may have contained. She sucked it down before we reached the front of the Jurassic World ride, none the worse for it. Even our youngest was handling it like a pro. “Honey, if any of this feels like a lot just know that it’s all perfectly safe,” my wife told P as we passed a sign that warned people with motion sickness not to go any further. I swallowed hard and stepped forward, with all the enthusiasm of a man volunteering to be eaten by an oncoming T-rex so that the children might be spared.

Two down. Two to go.

I breathed the deepest sigh of relief my organs could manage when I saw that the Transformers ride had been temporarily shut down. “I guess it’s on to the Mummy then,” said my wife, a little too quickly, as the younger three skipped ahead.

The good news about the Mummy ride is that it actually moves, rather than just shaking you like a in 2-liter of soda front of a screen. The bad news is it does it in the dark, removing the ability to anticipate which way the car’s going to throw you. And then it does it backwards, with relish, just to mess with you. We came back out into the light and our youngest shouted, “Let’s do it again!” and everyone else said “YEAH!” except the wet, queasy blanket of a dad clutching the safety rail. But the backpack was already stuffed inside the locker, and Nintendo world looked about as fun as watching other people play Super Mario Smash Brothers, and it was E’s birthday. So of course I went along.

Lurching off the ride like a drunkard for the second time I finally confessed to my wife that things were going south for me and my digestive tract. She eyed me, head to toe.

“I think it’s food poisoning,” I said, choking down what felt like a river of lava rising in my throat. “I think it’s the eggs benedict.”

She and I had been splitting meals at the hotel restaurant with P, our youngest. Granola with yogurt had sounded like perfectly responsible pre-adventure fuel to me. Runny poached eggs with hollandaise sauce on a bed of pastrami had been our daughter’s preference. No need to guess who won.

“You sure? That was only a couple of hours ago,” H said.

I nodded, worried what would come out if I opened my mouth to speak.

“I think you’ve got motion sickness,” she said, and I waved it off like she’d just diagnosed me with scoliosis. It’s one thing to be born with an aversion to heights or an inability to whistle; no one likes admitting that a thing you used to love and be able to do all day long can turn on you so suddenly.

The afternoon took pity on me and calmed the hell down. We took the studio tour, slithering along the back lots in an open-air bus, casually watching Jaws wreak fiery havoc on Cabot Cove’s dockside fueling station. To avoid getting sick I closed my eyes during the King Kong and Fast and Furious 3-D portions, as well as whenever Jimmy Fallon came up on-screen. The kids, now aware of my condition due to both me confessing and the Voldemort-like pallor of my skin, seemed content to mostly wander around Hogsmeade, making displays dance and chimneys catch fire with the flick of their wands, and begging us to buy them things. (The wands, fortunately, did not work on us, though apparently other parents were affected.) Still, I saw the sign everywhere; the red-outlined circle with the slash through it, right across the person holding their stomach as they…toss both themselves and their cookies off the front of a boat while being chased from behind by a life preserver? Seriously, what is this?

The Despicable ride was my last attempt at overcoming my brand-new personal flaw, and I failed just as hard here as I had elsewhere, going so far as to turn Minion-yellow right before the vehicle stopped jerking us around. The girls rushed back to Hogwarts for one last intestine-turner before departure, while I stayed with the bags just outside the castle gates, sucking down whatever water was left in the bottle and feeling very much like a kid who’d just rammed their head into the column during a failed attempt to reach platform 9 ¾.

Still, I took it. I’ve been E’s stepdad since she was 9 years old, and 12 years—most of it adolescence—of up-and-down moments, with seemingly more dips than peaks, will leave you hanging on for dear life to these all-too-rare glimpses of sheer happiness. Particularly if and when you have anything to do with it. I’ve often remarked to H that I feel like I’m making myself sick trying to have some kind of parent-kid bond with E. Before this trip, I’d only meant that figuratively. But without a doubt it was worth all the Pepto Bismol in Los Angeles to hear E say “thank you” and feel the soothing power of deep gratitude behind it.

ASK A STRAY DAD: DROPPING THE BALL

Q: How did you ring in the New Year?

A: We made even less of a deal out of it than we normally do. In an average year we let talk show hosts boozily introduce singers we can’t stand while we binge-eat Christmas cookies and donate to causes we love but have totally forgotten about for the past 11.5 months at the literal 11th hour. Last year we got particularly ambitious and all did paintings on cheap canvases, based on what we wanted our “theme” for the year to be.

This year we rolled into town after a 7-hour drive and fresh off a visit with my parents, to a fridge devoid of food, a bare liquor cabinet, no art supplies, even less money, and no real plan. I poured wine from a box for those of age and we made nachos out of thin air and watched whatever was appropriate for our youngest and still capable of holding the attention of the older kids who are still around for the holidays.

At 9:15 our time we told P it was time for bed, but her older sister blurted out, “doesn’t she want to watch the ball drop?” which elicited a near-Pavlovian response from P. Apparently her teacher has been talking about this Times Square tradition, and now she’s been waiting “her whole life” to see it.

We’re in the Mountain time zone, so that meant keeping a borderline-narcoleptic kid awake for another 45 minutes, or roughly 90 minutes past her bedtime. To see something that I silently predicted would be a confusing disappointment.

And in that regard, it did not disappoint.

We arrived in Times Square, via YouTube, approximately 15 minutes prior to launch and smack-dab in the middle of a discussion on human trafficking. We get a few promos on some investigative series on fentanyl, whereby we made the call to switch to Dolly Parton and Miley Cyrus—a call I immediately regret, as it means seeing David Byrne lower himself to singing “I”m unstoppable” with Sia—and to be clear, he isn’t singing a real song called that, just those two words, about seven thousand times. The next thirteen minutes and 55 seconds are the longest of my life to date—and the best part is, we get to see just how slowly each second ticks off by the clock in the bottom-right corner. Eventually we switch back over, to a glittering ball looming like the sword of Damocles over New York City.

But is it, though? At first, all we get to see is a bunch of 20-somethings in purple paper crowns from Planet Fitness, looking like the kings and queens of the Greater Moline Mardi Gras festival. With about 15 seconds to go the camera cuts to the top of a building, and…I…think…we can see it up there? It’s hard to tell, what with the giant freaking KIA corporate logo piercing the night sky like a knockoff bat signal. I look over at P, who’s squinting at the TV despite it being approximately 50 inches bigger than the one I watched the ball drop on when I was her age.

“Can you see it, up there?” I ask. She shakes her head, but by then we’re full-on into countdown mode.

When we hit “3” I can tell she’s anxious for something cool to happen, some life-shifting moment. Albeit two hours early than when it’s actually going to be 2023 for her. She needs this to be great. We’re trying to make it great for her, despite the evidence to the contrary. We’re all shouting, “…2…1…HAPPY NEW YEAR!” and watch as the ball doesn’t drop so much as disappear into the night, replaced by a giant “2023.” And there’s that damn KIA logo again.

“That’s IT?” P is irate. “That’s ALL? Why didn’t it DROP? If you say there’s going to be a ball drop, you should GET TO SEE IT DROP?” She’s kicking couch cushions with her heels. We move her tea away from her arms, which are flailing in exasperation. Her rant, which would’ve made Lewis Black proud, goes on for several more minutes, lulling into quiet grumbling before erupting again in disbelief that THIS is what she stayed up until 10 for.

She wasn’t wrong. A ball of light that is there one second and then isn’t the next was hardly how I remembered this whole spectacle during my childhood. Fortunately, YouTube had my back on that, too, allowing my to relive pretty much any year I wanted with just a couple of key words. Back in ‘87 a glowing red apple actually did descend before the year stole its spotlight in a blaze of lame numerical graphics. A Gumble and a Muppet were the ones leading the countdown that year, and it looked, dare I say…authentic? Like there might’ve been actual joy in the air? And I know how I sound but did we really need a reminder that a Korean car company has cars for sale, and those models are out right now, in 2023? Must we wear purple paper crowns to remind us all that the Planet Fitness membership we got last year as part of our resolutions is still automatically deducting $50 a month from their checking account, despite us not walking through the front door of that place since last February 15th?

We turned off the TV with a sigh of relief. Better to pretend that the whole thing had never happened, to go to bed early and thank our lucky stars we weren’t out in some crowd somewhere pretending to have fun, pretending that Dolly and Miley didn’t just murder the ghost of Whitney Houston with that version of “I Will Always Love You,” pretending that this mattered, that we needed to feel something in this moment other than sleepiness. We turned in, grateful that we were in jammies and not puffer coats and paper crowns, grateful to be safe and warm and completely unfazed by all this New Year, New You bullshit. There will be no resolutions here. No taking stock of our lives and vowing to do better. Maybe we will save that for our birthdays. Or April Fool’s day. Feels better there, anyway.

ASK A STRAY DAD: HOLIDAY PREP

Q: ARE YOU ALL READY FOR CHRISTMAS?

A: If by ready you mean, “Does it look like Santa’s been using your place as a safehouse for the past 6 weeks, and are your children about to be buried beneath an avalanche of presents—none of which will be a surprise to any of them?” then yes. And if by “are you all” you’re actually asking, “is your wife ready, because she does damn near everything when it comes to this,” then yes again. She knew I was terrible at planning ahead when she married me; if it were left to me, we’d be celebrating Christmas in March.

I have but one job when it comes to holiday preparations: write the letter that goes out with our holiday cards. It was a gig I’d had plenty of practice at, long before I even met H. I started writing these back in 1993—a different one, I haven’t been writing the same Christmas letter since 1993—as a high school senior smartass still living with my parents, very much in love with the attention but blissfully unaware that I would keep writing them, to the tune of 30 and counting. The deadline sneaks up on me every year, bringing with it a certain rib-rattling pressure to get it done. It’s a Christmas miracle that somehow, despite a snow-white emptiness in my head at the beginning, it always seems to come together by the end.

To bastardize a quote by John and Yoko, “So this is (the) Christmas (letter).” I know we (probably) don’t know each other, but I want to thank you for indulging me on this silly site. Happy Holidays!

Dearest Friends and Family,

It’s our least-favorite annual tradition: No sooner is the tree through the front door, unbound and in place in the living room than we’re forced to shuffle the entire house around to accommodate it and the four Rubbermaids full of holiday decorations. When we lived in Portland, the excuses came freely—the house was a tiny bungalow with six people living in it, after all. But what do we have to say for ourselves now, with a three-car garage and only one car that barely fits inside? Where did all of this stuff come from? How do we get rid of it? Can Santa help? Could we make it a 3:1 exchange for each present he leaves? At this point I’m basically begging the Grinch to steal Christmas, as long as it means we can safely close our linen closet door.

With only half of our family living full-time in the house these days, and with that house being more than roomy enough to accommodate double the population, it’s a bit odd and more than a little frustrating to go hunting for a screwdriver and find it inside a toolkit inside a cooler inside a cooler inside another cooler, like a redneck Russian nesting doll. Rest assured, it definitely feels to us like we’ve transitioned out of Portland and into New Mexico. We are finding things that make us happy here, that make it easier to stay, that make us less homesick for the PNW. And yet: Are we ready to give up the last couch all six of us sat on as a family in the living room where we all started off together? HECK NO. And that is why our new living room has three couches in it and looks like a Jennifer Convertibles showroom. Three-quarters of our kids are now out of the house. But their elementary school work is stacked in tubs behind the ping-pong table, just in case their Political Science professor wants proof that they could draw a decent flower in kindergarten. And I’d bet you the contents of the piggy bank I just found in a cardboard box marked “kitchen appliances” that those tubs will remain intact through our next move, no matter how far away that is.

Clearly, we’re holding on too tightly to some things. And the reasons why are starting to crystallize—just like the frost on the three-year-old Girl Scout cookies in our back-up freezer.

Maybe we keep all this stuff around out of love. But if I’m honest, fear feels like the more likely culprit—fear that we wasted time we thought we had, let things slip we figured were permanent. Maybe these holdouts are an attempt to anchor us in a moment where we still kept growth charts on the door frame and squished around a table for a loud dinner whose conversation always reverted to bodily functions. Maybe we’re hoping they’re talismanic relics that might allow us to travel back, do it all again, right our wrongs or just relive the highlights. Maybe they’re weighing us down; maybe that was the point. But does that even matter, if you have to crawl across the shards of middle-grade ceramics projects just to get to the wrapping paper?

Looking at it all feels a bit silly sometimes. We are not those same people, and thank goodness—every day that goes by I’m a little less in the dark on how to be a dad. But as we prepare to welcome even more inanimate objects into our home, we have to get past the point where saying goodbye to things feels like letting down or letting go of the person who gave it to us. I remember my own dad’s Christmas wish list shrinking down to nothing, him being impossible to buy for, and now I think I know why: He grew to want what couldn’t be bought. We’re feeling that now, too.

That’s why I can’t wait until we are all gathered together again. I cannot wait to look them in the eye, pull them close, and embrace them warmly. Then hand each of them a trash bag and say, “Here. Fill this.”

Peace, Love and Joy to One and All,

J, H, B, S, E & P

ASK A STRAY DAD: DOCTORED LYRICS

Q: So, how was your weekend?

A: On Thursday a doctor in Ruidoso induced my sister-in-law, to try and evict the twins that had been living rent-free in her uterus for the past 9 months. As the Cytotec opened the front door and gave notice that Baby A and Baby B were to vacate the premises ASAP, we drove from Albuquerque to their home in Roswell to fulfill our familial duties—that of moral support, meal-prep, and pet-sitting. Heidi was the one extra visitor allowed in the delivery room, her sister having explicitly and repeatedly asked for her to be there; I think Jamie would’ve chosen my wife over her own husband, given Heidi’s experience in these matters. But P and I, we were going to be shut out, like some snot-nosed, sunburned hoodrats on the wrong side of the gates at a Sandals resort.

On the way down P put her headphones on and binge-watched Amphibia, and once Heidi and I ran out of ways to complain about our jobs we began to do what we often do on road trips; take a stroll backwards in time through Apple music’s library for the carefully curated greatest hits according to both Heidi’s childhood and her mother—may Judy rest in peace.

This means a lot of Fleetwood Mac and Fleetwood-Mac-Adjacent; first and foremost Stevie Nicks’ “Edge of Seventeen.” The rhythmic chucka-chucka-chucka-chucka, chucka-chucka-chucka-chucka of the guitar rolled in like a freight train, and as soon as it was clear that this is what I think it is and not “Eye of the Tiger,” which totally ripped off this guitar bit, I waited for my wife to follow with the vocals. She came in strong and sweet, like she’d just finished an Old-Fashioned. She was on-tempo, on-key—a blessing, but never a guarantee—and sounding exactly like Stevie. Except for one thing.

“Just like the one-winged dove / Sings a song sounds like she’s singing. Ooh, baby, ooh. Ooh.”

“Wait, did you say ‘ONE-winged dove?”

We are having this conversation over the top of the rest of the song as I narrowly avoid hitting a woman walking in flip flops and a torn blue dress while carrying a plastic Wal-Mart bag along the shoulder of the fast lane on I-40. And someday I would love to know the story of whether that one-winged woman made it home alive. But in that moment we had more important things to attend to. Like getting to the birth of these twins, and hearing how it came to be that Heidi’s been singing the fourth word of one of her favorite songs wrong, hundreds of times, for the last 41 years. Like all good missteps in childhood, this one can be blamed on her mother, who sang one instead of white, and so the kid followed suit. “And you know, there was no internet back then to check the lyrics, so that was the way we sang it.”

No internet, no. But, you know, an inside album cover or cassette sleeve with all the lyrics printed directly on them, if had anyone bothered…

“You’ve ruined it for me,” she said, though the smile whispered she didn’t mean it.

“Have I really, now? Or has this made it better? It’s like you and your mom have you own version.”

“All I know is mine makes more sense. Aren’t all doves’ wings white? I just thought it meant that she couldn’t fly, so she sang instead. Or maybe it was a cry for help.”

We stopped talking for a bit. Surreptitiously I pushed the button on the steering wheel to turn the volume one notch higher. One-winged dove it is.

Technically, Heidi and Jamie are half-sisters. Pragmatically, Heidi has been raising Jamie since both were kids. Their mom—a bit of a trainwreck in the same way that the Hindenburg was a bit of a blimp accident—departed this earth when Heidi was very early into her 30s and Jamie was just barely learning how to be an adult. But long before then, really from the time Jamie was born, Heidi was looking after her in ways that their mother wasn’t. It didn’t really come as a shock, particularly once we moved within driving distance, that Jamie wanted Heidi to be not just at the hospital when she delivered, but in the delivery room.

Heidi got the call early Friday morning that Jamie was moving along towards deliverance, at least to a degree that Heidi risked missing the whole thing if she didn’t get in gear and make the 80-minute drive into the mountains. She left P and I with three dogs, a long grocery list, and a borrowed truck, on a 105-degree day in Roswell—a day so hot even the aliens knew better than to be there. Once the fridge was stocked and the dogs were kenneled we headed past an abandoned missile silo and the site of the murder of John H. Tunstall and toward the modestly cooler temperatures of Ruidoso, thinking we might get to see the babies through the hospital window. Thirty miles outside of town Heidi called to let us know that things had taken a turn and they were going to take Jamie in for an emergency C-section. And that Heidi was going to stay. Which is exactly what she did. We killed time at a lake then drove back to Roswell for leftover pizza; Heidi stayed in a hospital to make sure her sister lived through this.

By the time she got home the chili and teriyaki I’d made were cooling on the counter and the dogs were conked out on the couch. It took Heidi deep into the night to unwind from seeing Jamie go through such an ordeal. But early on Saturday we were off and running to the hospital again, P and I hanging out in the parking lot under a tree while Heidi checked in on her sister, who’d had to have a second surgery to stem some significant internal bleeding. Jamie was so weak and medicated that she couldn’t hold her brand-new babies, let alone give them names, so Heidi held each child in turns until her arms gave out and everyone in the room, including the new mom and dad, were asleep. We swung by a lake afterward to take a dip and cool off before heading back to Roswell, where I made two more dinners, including a double-batch. We ate, we drank, we passed out well past midnight.

You’d think by the end of two days of doing this Heidi would’ve been eager to stay in bed for the last day before heading to the hospital one last time and then home. Surprise surprise, she got us up dark-and-early instead, bought us Starbucks, then took us on a field trip to Carlsbad Caverns, 100 miles in the opposite direction. Spending that near-silent time together in one of the most spectacularly otherworldly natural settings I’ve ever seen felt like ice cream for my brain; a cooling treat, a reward for, well—what, exactly? All I’d done is cook a couple of meals. Heidi had badgered hospital staff into taking exquisite care of her sister and nieces, keeping all three of them alive and healthy in the process. And of course Jamie’d done even more, pushing until she had nothing left to give and then toughing it out through two surgeries and enough blood loss to make Paul Verhoeven wince. For a guy locked in existential anguish regarding his purpose in life, it sure doesn’t help to be reminded, so easily, of how inessential I truly am.

On the way home, via the now familiar route to the hospital, we went straight back to the classics of our childhood. This time she even gave me a turn as DJ. We pulled onto I-40 on the outskirts of town as Jon Bon Jovi tried to belt out the chorus only to have Heidi steal the mic.

“I’m a cowboy / On a stale horse I ride.”

“Aw, come on, seriously? It’s ‘steel.’ He’s talking about a motorcycle.”

“But he says he’s a cowboy. A motorcycle isn’t a horse.”

You’re right. It’s a metaphor.

“Okay,” I said, “but before we do this again, please explain to me what a stale horse is.”

“Well old, obviously,” she said. “Or really dry. I always pictured the two of them riding across a desert.”

“The two of them. Bon Jovi. And his stale horse.”

She persisted, undaunted. “I only get song lyrics wrong when it applies to animals.” A long pause while, fingers interlaced near the gear shift, we both consider that.

Then: “I think maybe I give them an ailment so that they need taking care of.”

“And you’re just the lyricist to do it.”

She smiles, shyly. The seatbelt tightens against her shrugging shoulders.

If I think too hard about it, my guess would be that her mom was singing as the one-winged dove. And Heidi, even at the age of 6, knew that she was singing it as the person who was going to nurse that wounded bird back to health. Or at least take care of it for the rest of its life.

That must make me the stale horse.

If only I could be so lucky.

ASK A STRAY DAD: HOT AIR

Q: What’s the climate like up/down there?

A: Well…

Portland:
Altitude: 50 feet
Total Precipitation, 2021: 35.58 inches
Today’s High Temperature: 68

Albuquerque:
Altitude: 5900 feet
Total Precipitation, 2021: 5.50 inches
Today’s High Temperature: 92

The first thing to hit me was the altitude. One week into living at 6,000 feet I brushed my molars too vigorously and blacked out on the bathroom rug; fortunately the ultrasonic toothbrush has extensive training on how to respond to these kinds of potential disasters and vibrated like a jackhammer against the saltillo tile to alarm the rest of the family, sparing me the embarrassment of a frothy-mouthed death by asphyxiation. (Rest in peace, Michael Hutchence. I hope your breath was equally minty fresh.) I would eventually recover. But adding insult to near-fatal injury, running—my lone self-generated antidote to insanity for the last three decades—slowed to a power walk any time I turned up hill, a physical rejiggering that did more harm than good. There’s a reason elite runners come to New Mexico to train during the winter. There’s also a reason you don’t see anyone running here who doesn’t look like a whippet that’s been taught to walk on its hind legs.

Next came the heat. We moved down here in June, when Portland’s dress code remains firmly saturated in sweaters and rain jackets. But like a moist pile of hay when the sun hits it, all those damp clothes burst into flames in a pile on the driveway upon our arrival, leaving us with nothing to wear but tank tops, board shorts and high-top basketball shoes. On the bright side, it allowed us to immediately assimilate into the Burque fashion scene. Still: it was hot, too hot for my blood—I would be feeling pretty good about myself, take a step outside, and before reaching the car everything in my body would thicken to concrete—and from there until what seemed like Thanksgiving it just kept getting hotter.

Against all our tree-hugging hippie-fied tendencies we’d applied for membership to the local country club in hopes of making good use of their pool; whenever the thermometer went over 105 I imagined myself slowly drowning my worries in the deep-end/concession stand bar adult beverage menu. A year later we remain in the same lowly position on the waiting list, and have resorted to occasionally sneaking in through the back gate and past the flirting teenaged lifeguards with the Stranger Things mullets and the fanny packs to soak our wrinkled skins like rehydrating raisins, one eye on the concession stand attendant in case they get wise to our heist.

Through it all the tank-sized air conditioning unit on the top of our roof hummed nonstop, and the power meter spun likewise, and H paid the electric company and I donated less than that amount to some conservation society, too little to save even three square feet of the rainforest in hopes that maybe we, as a society—particularly this high-desert society—could move one degree away from Mad Max: Fury Road.

In spring the dust devils came, plumes of dirt kicked up and twisted silly by the winds. What didn’t show up was any rain, which of course my cynical insides knew was going to happen. It hasn’t rained here since September 30 of 2021, and if you think I’m being hyperbolic I’ll wait here while you Google it. Right now the humidity is 14%, and the dew point—a thing you never hear about in the Pacific Northwest—was 29 degrees. It’s so dry here that my feet are turning to hooves like the badly behaved boys in Pinocchio. Paper cuts are the #3 cause of death in Albuquerque, behind heart attacks and asphyxiation during tooth brushing. When she moved to Portland in my wife, who’s from here, couldn’t understand why her bath towel was still wet three hours after hanging it on a hook. I used to think she was being ridiculous, but now I know that I have to lean right into the soil of a plant if I don’t want the water to evaporate before it ever reaches the leaves. You can tell someone who wasn’t born here, but who’s lived here awhile: they have skin that has gone way past leathery, to looking like an abandoned Trex deck. And I’m just a few house planks shy of joining them.

As hard as all this climate change has been on my body, it seems to have taken a greater toll on my brain. Before we moved down here I was as prolific at writing as rabbits are at…eating carrots. But while my lungs have adjusted to the altitude and my watch tan is trophy-worthy and sometimes I go out to the car just to warm up from the air conditioning, my mind simply cannot cross over. This post is the most I’ve written in months, and look: it’s nothing but me, complaining about the weather. I’ve become this thick-craniumed, foggy-brained, noodle-fingered non-writer, with no cause to defend in prose and no end in sight. And believe me I wish I had something else to blame it on—first and foremost my own lack of motivation or imagination, or my inability to stick to a schedule or insistence upon having some nebulous notion of “perfect conditions”—but that’s not it. I WISH it was some kind of existential road block that my subconscious has erected in order to prove to myself and everyone who knows me that nothing productive can come from this predicament, and that all I need is a change of perspective. But no. It’s not that. Can’t be. It’s all this arid, hot, oxygen-free air that’s made me this dried-up puddle of procrastination and incompetence. And the only way I can see to break this writer’s block is to stand up, walk out that door, and aw who the hell am I kidding it sucks hot-ass wind out there.

Maybe we’ll try it again tomorrow. Assuming we remember what it was.

ASK A STRAY DAD: SELF-DEFENSE

Q: So, uh, what the hell, man?

A: Wow, thanks for asking! This stupid blog started as a way for me to figure out how to write about being away from my family while living and working in (and making fun of) New York. And then the world went to hell and, well, we all went back home (in my case, back to Oregon) and stayed at home and locked our doors for a while, didn’t we? So suddenly I wasn’t stray anymore, and writing about silly shit didn’t really feel like something worth doing anymore. It felt like a time to be serious and somber; a time to turn inward towards the family I’d been away from so often, and in the process keep my ridiculousness to myself. So I paused.

Meanwhile, life went on a bender. Much of it hurtful, and none of it all that great, you know? Looking around for things to make fun of while everyone within earshot was in pain didn’t make a whole lot of sense. And the last thing I wanted this to turn into was some kind of affliction-measuring contest, because everybody—you, me, all of us—had enough to worry about. So I went from pausing to full-stopping, an equal but opposite reaction to all the events unfolding for our family. Our older daughter had gone off to college and we were all still working and going to school remotely in March 2021 when we came down to Albuquerque to check on my wife’s dad, who was diagnosed with ALS in 2014 and had not seen a doctor of any kind in over a year. By then we’d already sold our house, and were just living there, rent-free, until the end of the school year. Seeing his deterioration first-hand prompted us to reconsider the easy way out of just moving to a different home within Portland. We drove around streets with names like General Kearny or—egads—Confederate Drive, rubbing our arms after our first dose of Pfizer vaccine and looking at homes to buy that were within emergency distance of Mike that didn’t look like the inside of a watered-down burrito joint.

Miraculously, we found one, and moved down shortly after school ended for our youngest. In a hair over a year, I’d gone from New York to Oregon to New Mexico. And not written a word about any of it.

(Note: Something feels wrong about having Oregon sitting there awkwardly between two “New” states. So for the sake of symmetry and in honor of the Lewis and Clark expedition’s St. Louis origins, from now on we’ll be referring to Oregon as “New Missouri.”)

There was, in all honesty, plenty to write about. Plenty to make fun of—including myself, a duck so far out of water in the Land of Enchantment that my webbed toes cracked open and bled. (Seriously, have you ever spent more than a week in a place where the humidity tops out at 10 percent?) But by the time I regained the itch to verbally vomit every Albuquerque observation, this blog had become the equivalent of the friend I’d taken too long to call. So I did what I always do in these sorts of situations and chickened out while pretending that I wasn’t feeling like an utter failure.

It’s time to admit, though, that this thing I deemed stupid five paragraphs ago actually served a purpose. For me, above all else. It was, when it came down to it, really a way for me to figure out why I couldn’t seem to be happy no matter where I was. And if I could figure that out, maybe I could convince my brain how to be ha—

Q: I meant what the hell did you do to my Silverado?

A: But I didn’t—

Q: Like hell you didn’t. I parked it outside of the Applebee’s, and when I came back with the leftovers from my 2 for $24 meal, there was a scratch down the driver’s door right at the same height as the side mirror of your Honda Fit. Same color, too.

A: Wait. Which Applebee’s?

Q: Lomas and Hotel Circle.

A: Couldn’t be me. I only go to the one on Academy and San Mateo.

Q: The one by the Boot Barn and the Arby’s?

A: That’s the one.

Q: Oh, sorry Man. There are, like, 10 of them in town.

A: Don’t I know it.

ASK A STRAY DAD: BRANCHES OF SELF-GOVERNMENT

Because I’m so damned pissed at the world right now. That’s why.

Q: So what the hell’s been—

A: Shhh. We’ll get back to that sometime soon. Meanwhile, here’s a thing that happened after my general revulsion at all the horribleness (and horrible people) in the world started doomscrolling through an entire feed of inspirational self-aggrandizing IG poetry:

the right to bare limbs
on my days off
i head to the woods to think.
also: to train the trees to fire semi-automatic rifles.
if the day ever comes,
i want them to be ready to defend themselves.

ASK A STRAY DAD: WEAR AND TEAR / FRIDAY

We made it to the end. And what have we learned? Probably nothing.

5 Days, 5 Ways to Style the GrandPro Rally, Day 5:

Does this feel like an overcorrection? Absolutely.

And what, exactly, were you thinking? That you saw a couple of friends wandering around their neighborhoods in their wedding dresses, just as a way to break up the monotony and bring a little levity. And you thought, “hey, yeah: that seems like something fun and positive.” Only you got married in a plain ol’ black suit. So now guess what you look like? You look like just some schmo in a suit.

No, wait:

• You look like one of Ross Geller’s pallbearers on a very special episode of “Friends.”

• You look like a trainee teller at Bank of America.

• You look like you’re launching a doomed bid to become the mayor of Pensacola.

• You look like the assistant coach of the second-worst basketball team in the Middle Valley Conference.

• You look like you’re about to lose custody of your red-ribbon-winning Shih Tzus in a surprisingly brief court hearing.

• You look like the type of person who sends soup back because it’s too hot.

• You look like the guy in a romantic comedy that the heroine leaves for the man of her dreams.

• You look like you think that I might be interested in purchasing a car from you today.

• You look like one of the randos Neo kicks into oblivion on his way to Agent Smith.

• You look like it’s Friday, and you’ve finally reached the end of this week, and you wanted to give it your last best shot but secretly you can’t wait for this to be over so you can go back to wearing jeans and tie-dyed T-shirts like the Shaggy Rogers that you are.

Which, thankfully, it is.