ASK A STRAY DAD 10:

ON HOSERS: An Existential (and Ultimately Fruitless) Interrogation of One of New York’s More Curious Habits.

What are you doing?

Why, rinsing off this patch of sidewalk with a garden hose, of course.

Why? It’s 6:30 in the morning.

It’s just a thing we do. New Yorkers. We New Yorkers. Us.

Did someone throw up or poop there?

Not that I know of. In this town anything is possible, though.

So it’s just…dirty, I guess?

I mean, maybe? No dirtier than the rest of the sidewalk. But like I said: It’s what we do around here. We hose things down. Every day, and twice on Sunday. Can’t walk down a single block in this town without having to step outta the way of a guy hosing the sidewalk down, thank the Ghost of Joe DiMaggio. It’s tradition.

Plus I can also rake the leaves this way. Though it takes about ten times longer.

But couldn’t you just, well…use a rake?

I don’t own a rake.

They cost, like, 5 bucks.

Hey man, easy. I’m not Jeff Bezos.

But you’ve easily sprayed $20 worth of water down the gutter by now.

Totally worth it to not get my rake out.

AHA! You DO own one. Can you just admit this is some phallic thing? You look like one of those fountain cherubs, peeing nonstop into the pool below.

Yeah, fine, whatever. This is probably about me feeling insecure about my masculinity, or not even really knowing what that concept means these days. If it even has any meaning. Should it have ever meant anything? Shouldn’t it be enough to be human? Why divide any further than that? And, going a little bit deeper while I point the jet directly into the crack between two concrete slabs: If I don’t know what it means to be a man, then what is this thing I’m holding between my legs and waving around at stuff even doing any more? If it’s just a means by which I can either a) procreate or b) urinate, and I’ve made it medically impossible for the former, then its only remaining job seems to be the anatomical equivalent of the plug on a cooler—it’s there, but it’s not why you bought the cooler. Is this all one big metaphor for me as a human being? Am I relegated to cleaning up after messes of my own making? Am I here only to consume, and then purge? This, this…hose used to stand as testament to my ability to water the plains—to continue the growing rest of the human race, as it were, if called upon to do so. Not that I ever wanted to do that. But now I most definitely cannot do that; and so unless I occasionally drag it out into the street and spray off SOMETHING with it then what am I even DOING around here, you know?

But also: look at how CLEAN the sidewalk is now!

So, um: I just realized I have an appointment across town that I am going to be at for a few days. Could you at least water the flower boxes while you’re standing there, spraying a single cigarette butt across century-old concrete?

Why would I waste water like that?

I will never understand this place.

And it will never understand you either, Weirdo.

ASK A STRAY DAD 9:

ON EMPTY CALORIES: The effects of cooking comfort food, thousands of miles away from where you feel comfortable.

Q: I am living on my own for the first time in forever. What the hell am I supposed to eat?

A: Well, tonight I had “Eggs in Purgatory.” Read whatever you want into that.

Look, you can eat take-out every night until you die of hypertension, but you and I both know: food’s value always extends far past nutritional and deep into the emotional. And right now the preparation and consumption of food is hands-down the most emotionally confusing act I regularly engage in. So maybe I’m not the best person to ask this question. Maybe I never was.

I learned to cook at a fairly early age. Not “my-parents-own-a-Cantonese-restaurant” early, but close. At 11, already bored with the narrow array of cookies that served as our month’s worth of Christmas desserts, I begged my mom to put me in charge of that part of our holiday dinner. And she—a notorious non-baker, the type of woman who would buy half-price pumpkin pies from Safeway on Black Friday, freeze them, then thaw them out on Christmas Eve and not even so much as try to hide the fact that they were resting in disposable aluminum pie plates—happily abdicated this responsibility. Only to watch in horror as I, only recently certified to make instant oatmeal without burning myself, picked the most complex dessert from Bon Appetit’s Christmas issue.

Three layers! Two different ganaches! Hand-painted holly leaves of dark chocolate and butterscotch! That torte was the last year she helped. From then on, I was on my own.

Baking melted into cooking once I hit adolescence, and realized that the girls I liked were equally as impressed by shrimp-and-goat-cheese stuffed Poblano peppers as they were acoustic guitar chord progressions. (My awkward fingers were never going to understand guitar chord progressions.) In college I hosted Easter dinners for the kids who couldn’t make it home; once I left school anyone passing through was an excuse to cook.

The crafting of food took on even greater significance when I met my wife, Heidi. Thirty-three and divorced at the time, I’d regressed to eating burritos from brown paper bags and speed-dialing Thai takeout; but because we were dating long-distance, every visit southward to see her in Phoenix was an opportunity to awe her with my culinary prowess. When she came to Portland I wanted to run her through a progressive buffet of the tastiest places in the city as a way to woo her north to my stomping grounds; when I was on her turf I wanted her to know that I would be able to keep her and the kids well fed every night we stayed at home.

My plan worked to perfection.

For most of our years together in Portland we split the cooking duties. The kids had their favorites, many of which resided in their mother’s dog-eared, hand-written binder, so force-fed with loose printouts and recipes written on the backs of envelopes and Trader Joe’s receipts that any time I was asked to find something in it, I gave up and handed it to the nearest kid. In that binder resides the recipe for cinnamon rolls and biscochitos, posole and strogonoff; recipes that to this day I dare not touch. On taco nights, or quesadilla nights, or Frito pie nights, I played sous-chef. Or—more likely—barkeep.

But the rest of the cookbook shelf belongs to me, and relentlessly I have encroached upon her turf as the resident chef in the family. It started when I won the kids over with baked ziti and steak teriyaki. But the kitchen shift became permanent when, about five years into our marriage and six months into her new job, Heidi crossed her arms over a haphazardly scribbled grocery list and confided in me: “You know what I hate almost as much as meal planning? Cooking.”

Hate was a word she passionately discouraged, but it wasn’t hard to see how she’d gotten there. Every night at dinner we would wait for the two remaining teenagers to come home from rowing practice. They’d burst through the door, cold, wet and weary; dump their duffels somewhere between the doorway and the dining room table, slump into their assigned seats, then wait for the plates to arrive. There was no offer to set the table, not even so much as a washing of hands. She would try to time it perfectly, so that the food came out hot but they didn’t have to wait for it to be served. And it would never be right, and the meal was never just what they wanted, or the chicken was bumpy, and their thanks when they remembered or were goaded to utter them sounded like muffled minor-key trumpets. On the nights when she tried to spice things up with a new recipe she braced for and was predictably met with open hostility from at least one of the children being served a hot, home-cooked meal. Adolescence needs an outlet for all of its hormone-soaked hostility. Their mother was the safest target they knew, the one who would absorb punch after punch and keep bouncing right back up off the rug and returning, defenseless, for a reconciling hug, and so she was that outlet. And food—the high-effort, multi-sensory show of unabashed affection that it can be, and in fact is for people like Heidi and I—was the easiest and most obvious trigger into that place of anger. I don’t think they consciously knew that they were hurting her. But after so many versions of the same basic argument (you never make anything good / I ask you every week for ideas and you just shrug your shoulders / well, we didn’t want THIS…) it was clear that dinners had become Pavlovian. The food was served. And immediately the shrill rings of discontent would commence.

It took me too long to catch on. Rather, I never really caught on at all; not until You know what I hate more than meal planning? But it changed that night. I plucked the pen from her hand, wrote the rest of the week’s meals out, and officially claimed the duties as head chef. I would take the heat for any and all food that was served, and Heidi—already doing nearly everything else for our family—could finally get out of the kitchen. From that point forward almost every breakfast, lunch or dinner that Heidi and I and the two girls ate—a total of about 60 meals a week—came from these two hands.

It became a source of great pride to me. To a stepfather still unsure of his footing with ¾ of his kids, this new official capacity presented an opportunity to prove that I was invested; though I certainly never would’ve told them that. I cooked family favorites, then sought adjacencies that would keep them happy while keeping me from growing bored with the same 10 meals. Pinterest became my own personal version of the binder. I knew we were getting somewhere when E started messaging me things she wanted me to make. And when, the weekend I cooked waffles for “Easy Like Sunday Morning” Breakfast, she put in an early request for buttermilk pancakes the following week.

The meal train chugged on like this for about a year and a half. I shifted my work schedule so that I could get home early enough to have dinner on the table when rowing let out. The lunches progressed from ham and cheese sandwiches to antipasti plates. By the time school let out in June of 2019 I was essentially operating a restaurant whose only patrons were the people who slept either above or below the kitchen.

Then I moved to New York.

You’d think I got the better deal out of that. After all, Heidi went from chief taste-tester to responsible for the feeding of our remaining family literally overnight. Here on the East Coast I’ve cut my number of patrons by more than half, down to just myself and sometimes B, an enthusiastic omnivore who is rarely around to chow down at the same time I make it and—I’m coming to believe—was eating popcorn for ⅔ of his meals at the time we started living together. The bar was low. He had no plates, two spoons and a fork, and in the beginning we ate whatever I had managed to make in the lone skillet off of the two plastic cutting boards he’d picked up somewhere between moving out of our house and arriving here, at our shared apartment. The first night I made rigatoni with tuna, fennel and Kalamata olives, and by the end we’d both given up and were eating straight out of the pot. This should not be a difficult standard to hit.

But she has donned the apron with honor and grace, while I’m the one who’s struggled.

Things have improved at least functionally: we have a full set of cookware, six dishes, six bowls, a full complement of mugs and enough spatulas to, more or less, scrape any sauce free of its hiding spot. The spice rack is more than just two kinds of salt and a five-year-old jar of chili powder. But a very demoralizing reality remains as long as I am here and the rest of the family is in Portland. For almost a decade I have cooked to connect to the people who matter the most to me. Today I do the same, but under far different conditions. I am three time zones and 2,893 miles away from my wife and most of my kids, the people I most enjoy cooking for. And so, in lieu of cooking for them, I cook to remind myself of them. I cook to remind myself of home. Which makes sense and does tend to settle me down a bit.

Until I go and try to eat the thing that I’ve cooked.

Because eating the thing that I’ve cooked reminds me in no uncertain terms that I am not at home. I keep cooking comfort foods, but their effect is the opposite. I am sitting alone at a cheap Ikea table that’s barging its way into my tiny living area, eating a meal that I’m meant to have made and be eating with my family. That realization is the opposite of comfort. So: discomfort food.

It makes me blindingly sad. Sliced-red-onions sad. And yet I cannot stop trying to find some secret recipe that will fix things. This week it’s Eggs in Purgatory, Chicken Shawarma, Chicken Teriyaki, and homemade Pesto Pasta. None of which have rewired my tastebuds in any substantial way.

There’s always a lot left over these days. For starters, there’s my vanishing appetite. But on top of that, I am accustomed to making food for a crew. When Heidi and I first started there were five hearty eaters and then, when P came along and got four serviceable teeth, six. We doubled every recipe out of habit and necessity, and during rowing season sometimes that wasn’t even enough. Scaling down from the full-sized dinner party that was our family to its current state, I’ve found that habit hard to break; and though I know better these days, I’m certainly not about to start halving meals. So B and I always have leftovers; they’re even sadder than the first heating. Tonight an extra mini-ciabatta loaf and four eggs, poached in a latex-paint-thick spicy tomato sauce, will go into a Tupperware and then into the fridge. I’ve never had the opportunity—let alone the inclination—to reheat eggs before. I wonder if my workmates will silently curse my name when I overdo it with the breakroom microwave. I hope it doesn’t come to that.

(One thing that brings me no small measure of satisfaction is knowing that I’ll wake up in the morning, zombie-shuffle my way into the kitchen, and inevitably find a wooden spoon teetering on the cutting board indicating that B has used it to shovel at least half of the leftovers into his face in the dark of night.)

So, to (finally) answer your question: I really don’t know what the hell you’re supposed to eat. If this were purely a matter of nutritional sustenance there would be an easy answer, and it would be constructed in the shape of a pyramid. But I guess I’ve been trying to say that at least for me it’s become more complicated than that. That bringing a random assortment of ingredients together into something fragrant and warm and delicious should be comforting, and yet I’m at a point in my life where I find that to be impossible. That I wish I could take a pill that would give me all the nutrition I need to survive, then another to make me forget that I need to eat. That over the course of several years food has come to mean family, and their absence is felt in every bite.

What I’m trying to say is that I have eaten all the food I need.

And also that I am absolutely starving.

ASK A STRAY DAD 8:

ON RED-EYES

Q: ANY TIPS ON TRANS-CONTINENTAL TRAVEL?

A: Uh, don’t do it? Avoid it at all costs? Consider NOT living thousands of miles away from your family, whom you apparently love but who can even tell at this point?

Q: BUT YOU MUST BE RACKING UP A LOT OF MILES…

A: Not enough to win some kind of prize, I can tell you that much. I am the kid who just plunked $150 into a skeeball machine so I could win enough tickets to take home a $6 digital watch. Only I left the tickets on the table, and the same kid who ate all the pepperonis off the pizzas took them, and now he’s got a brand-new Miami Marlins hat with a silver sticker on the brim that says “OFFICIAL MLB MERCHANDISE” and I only have enough left over for a plastic starfish.

So this is no jet-setting lifestyle I’m leading. But if you want to know what it’s like to travel as a member of a minor league soccer team, or if you really want to feel better about how you spend your Thursday and Sunday evenings, allow me to regale you with my rules for travel:

1) You must pick one departure location, and stick with it. For Portland this isn’t a problem. No one’s flying out of anything but the world’s best airport, even if there were another option within 100 miles. But on the other end I have access to three major—though painfully flawed—options within a dozen miles of the Manhattan office. For one reason or another LaGuardia hasn’t come up the big winner on any of my early searches, so already that’s been nixed. That leaves Newark and JFK.

And Newark: I just want to say, I’ve tried. But you’ve made it so I essentially have to swim the Hudson, perform a divine act, and THEN catch the randomly scheduled Northeast Corridor train, PLUS the AirTrain, before I stand in security behind 300 people who apparently have never flown or even seen an airplane before. I mean, they can’t ALL be on Rumshpringa, can they?

So: JFK it is. And that’s just fine by me, because JFK means both Delta (trying REALLY HARD to repair its reputation) and JetBlue (the cool kid in class that I have no idea why I’m trying so hard to get them to like me but I am). Speaking of which:

2) Try to stick to one airline, if you can. This isn’t for the sake of miles, or some kind of rewards, but about giving your brain a break. The fewer variables with this kind of repetitious long-distance travel, the better. JetBlue’s got some nice perks: they tend to be cheap—without making me set fire to my luggage—and their flight schedule meshes perfectly with a person who needs to leave both locations at the last possible moment. But the best thing they have going for them right now is that I’ve flown them enough to know what to expect. I know they’re going to be a little bit late leaving JFK, but will more than make up for it in the air. I know their flight attendants aren’t going to be laying on the sass at 2 in the morning. And I know that when I land, I’m going to come out of the gate and turn left. Really, at this point, it’s all I can ask for. Speaking of things that shouldn’t be too much to ask for…

3) Those U-shaped pillows are borderline useless for anyone with a human-sized neck. Still, they’re better than nothing. Someday, someone’s going to invent a pillow that will allow me to fall asleep on an airplane without throwing my entire spine into a week-long paralysis. And when that day comes I will empty my retirement account.

My typical flight schedule is out of New York on Thursday night at 8:30 or so, and into Portland by 11PM. I take a Lyft home (fingers crossed it’s Alex, the guy with the 5-star rating and the neon trim on the back doors), shower the transit off me, then hit the pillow, hoping to wake Heidi up with all the noise I’m making. It never works. On Sunday night I’m at the airport by 9:30, for an 11PM flight that gets me in at 6AM. One hour and three trains later I’m back at the apartment, with about 90 minutes to spare before I need to leave for work. On those two flights I average about 45 minutes of sleep. With a good pillow I feel like I could top at least four hours, and show up at work on Monday with a halfway decent chance of making it to the end without drooling on a coworker. But as long as this is the best neck pillows can get I will continue to look and feel on those days as if I am a concussed Fred Savage, cast as an extra on “The Walking Dead.”

4) Remember: No seat is perfect. Heidi has made a habit of checking me in for my flights. Not that I’m incapable; she just gets notifications, and likes to do things for me from afar, and this happens to be one of the things she can do. JetBlue sometimes offers cheap upgrades to the first few rows, which have the added benefit of more legroom, so whenever they’re reasonable she splurges on me and suddenly I find myself in Row 2 of 25. Sounds great, right? It mostly is. Until the time an elderly couple loaded full of vodka and white privilege stumbled in, screaming at each other, and took up the three seats directly in front. For the next six hours I had an almost-front-row seat of the two as they removed their shoes, put their feet up on the bulkhead, and argued over whether she was being ridiculous about not being able to see out of her right eye. Upon takeoff she lost an earring, and he decided that was the perfect opportunity to berate and belittle her, at a volume no set of headphones was going to be able to overwhelm. And then I felt him grab my foot and move it in search of said earring, and I will admit to having kicked back—just a little—and whispered “what the fuck, dude” as a response. They bickered and/or searched for that earring for the entirety of the flight. They said some awful things to each other. She cried for a solid 40 minutes at one point. And when the front wheel touched down he immediately withdrew his iPhone 5 from its holster and speed-dialed the airline to file a lost item complaint, despite still being seated directly over the location of its disappearance. And as soon as the Airbus came to a complete stop and the seatbelt sign went off I did, indeed, rise, open the overhead compartment, move her Louis Vuitton duffle bag—which she had shoved over mine—back as far away from those two shitheads as possible, and lo I did exit the plane first, and repeated several mantras essentially thanking the heavens that I like the person I married as much as I do.

Point being: Life is random, the best you can do is try to get a good seat, and if it doesn’t work out, at least write it all down. It’ll either make for a good story, or an accurate statement to TSA.

This is getting far too long. Let’s Buzzfeed this sucker:

5) Wear slip-on shoes.

6) Never pick a TSA line whose X-ray machine is being operated by a man who looks like Steven Seagal.

7) Don’t eat shrimp at the airport. ANY airport.

8) If there’s ever been a time to say yes when a man in a suit and waistcoat offers you a double gin and tonic, it’s when you’re in the middle seat over the wing of a 6-hour flight out of Newark.

All for obvious reasons. And remember:

9) That magazine in the pocket in front of you? That’s yours to keep. Fingers crossed no one’s attempted the crossword yet!

Safe travels, everyone.

Next time: How to immunize yourself from homesickness! Or not!

ASK A STRAY DAD LIGHTNING ROUND!

ON TRAFFIC

It’s been too long, and I’m not finding the time for a longer post these days. So in the meantime, here are just a few of the questions that come to mind while walking down the streets (or riding a subway through the greasy intestines) of New York:

Q: I like to wear AirPods and watch The Mindy Project while walking down some of the busiest streets in America. Should I weave in a discernible pattern, or stagger my steps randomly?

A: I vote for random, and as herky-jerky as possible. People don’t have enough excitement and unpredictability in their lives and who knows—you might finally meet that someone special!

Thanks. I have just one follow-up: Should I turn my head and look or do anything that might give me any indication as to what’s going on around me before stepping into traffic and crossing the street?

A: Now why on earth would you do that?

Q: I’m 72, an avid cyclist, and enjoy sticking the nose of my bike into crossing traffic when they have the green light. Is a helmet REALLY necessary?

A: It’s only going to needlessly protect the one non-functioning part of your geriatric backside. By the way, love the high-visibility vest. Is that so the cars have a better vision of what they’re trying to hit? Are you doing this on purpose? I’ve brought my bicycle onto the hood of a car with me before and trust me, you do not want to go out like that.

Q: Sometimes I’m walking down the sidewalk, totally minding my business, and a person coming the other way just starts walking towards me, until I have to move in a somewhat drastic fashion to avoid hitting them. It’s like I’m magnetic. And it’s happening all the time, multiple times a day. What is going on? Am I crazy?

A: You’re not crazy. But you are also not magnetic. That WOULD be insane, That would mean that the people walking toward you are made of iron or steel, instead of some other much lighter metal.

There does seem to be a slightly confrontational nature to walking around here sometimes. It’s like people—already short on space—are trying to claim a portion of the sidewalk, and if they’ve already got a stretch then they’re eager to take yours. I can’t explain it. But I have found that if I start growling, they tend to back away.

Q: Is that, like, the 17th time we’ve heard “Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough” today?

A: Official song of NYC, baby! I get that sometimes great art comes from terrible monsters, and that it can be hard to stop appreciating that art. But it’s like the entire city is thumbing its nose at the idea that Michael Jackson’s bio needs a little bit of a rewrite. Moving on…

Q: Those motor scooters everyone’s so wild about look downright scary. Maybe we shouldn’t ride them.

Not a question, but you’re right. Let’s walk. Only I’m going to be on my phone, watching The Mindy Project, so you’re going to need to be on the lookout for all the motorized Schwinn mountainbikes jumping the curb and careening our way. They belong to food delivery people, and those people do not give one single shit about human life—not theirs, and certainly not ours.

Q: I feel like we’re being tucked inside someone’s armpit down here. Why is it so freaking hot in this subway?

A: Oh, it’s not just this one—it’s all of ‘em. But here’s the thing: it’s actually a city-wide humanitarian effort. We all pitch in a couple bucks a month to pay the heating bill to keep these underground passages warm enough so that the gators who live down here are at the optimal temperature for moving around and procreating. New York’s transit authority is actually responsible for the world’s most successful large reptile breeding program. You’re welcome, America.

Q: This train is too crowded. We’re going to have to stand, and I’m worried I’ll fall into someone. What do I hold on to?

A: If you’re tall enough, the ceiling. It’s the only thing that hasn’t been held/leaned on/licked by at least 3000 people already today. If you’re not, I recommend holding onto any of the rails with your right hand, and a bottle of hand sanitizer with your left.

You know what? Here: Just wrap an arm around me. I’ve got us.

This hand was already dirty anyway.

ASK A STRAY DAD 6:

ON BOOZY STEPDADS

Question: I’m a stepfather to three adolescents. Am I drinking enough?

Answer: Probably not, according to every book, movie or television show I’ve ever seen. But let’s check via this handy quiz I pulled off the internet*, shall we?

Scenario 1: You are having a nice dinner with your new family. Your middle stepson has a friend over, from his soccer team. (You’d prefer to think of him simply as your son, but when you met him he weighed 120 pounds—hardly a newborn—and so, for clarity’s sake, we’re going to stick to the legally correct terms.) You have a crystal highball glass in front of you. Is it:

1) Half full

2) Half empty

3) Half empty, but it’s your third so who the hell cares anymore; she’ll fix you another one once these rugrats are sent to their rooms.

4) About to be thrown at the wall because one of the boys snickered and you’re sure it was that little shit Braden, who apparently finds it really damn funny that you’re wobbling a little and called asked if someone could pass the “pashed motatoes” and just tried to cut your chicken with the back side of your spoon.

Scenario 2: You are waiting on the front porch for the oldest kid, 17, to come home. It’s 9 minutes past curfew when he strolls up, acting like it’s no big deal. And normally it wouldn’t be, but tonight it is because:

1) You drank the last can of beer from the fridge hours ago and he was supposed to pick some up for you,

2) You have an entire sixer in you, have been doing a lot of thinking, and figure it’s high time he learned a thing or two about respect,

3) You just wet your pants and need someone—HELL NO, ANYONE BUT HIS MOTHER—to go fetch you a fresh, dry pair from under the bed.

4) You’re buried beneath a pile of cans so deep that if he doesn’t pull you out immediately you’re going to suffocate.

Scenario 3: It’s your 11-year old’s elementary school band concert. She plays the saxophone. Her band played first, and had only one song—Hot Cross Buns, natch—though the program clearly states that you are obligated to stay through the entire show. You are staying hydrated by sipping from a flask filled with:

1) A single-origin Pinot Noir

2) 112-proof barrel-aged bourbon, neat

3) Expired rubbing alcohol

4) Rhino tranquilizers, dissolved in a Moldovan vodka whose bottle is shaped like a bundle of dynamite.

Scenario 4: Your wife has (rightly) thrown you out of the house, due to you being an immediate and ever-present danger to yourself and, more importantly, your family. You:

1) Walk around all night until you sober up; then return home, solemn and humble, vowing to get yourself clean.

2) Find the nearest bar in which to drown your sorrows. Who gives a shit that it’s not open at 2:47AM; that’s why God invented bricks.

3) Sneak back into your own house, grab the secret stash of moonshine you’ve been distilling in the basement, and set forth to live among the fairies and hobgoblins you’ve been spotting around the neighborhood more and more often of late.

4) Can’t remember, frankly. You blacked out hours ago. Last thing you remember you were having a totally pleasant dinner, and that midfielder from Michael’s soccer team was there, and you had that highball of whiskey in your hand, and…

Congratulations on making it this far with a BAC as high as yours. Now: Add up the corresponding numbers to each of your answers. If the total’s anything less than 14, it’s time to pick up that bottle and goose that liver of yours and really commit to living that Stepdad Life. AmIright, guys?

At least, that seems to be the unseemly role we parental outcasts were cast to play. Even in something so innocuous as Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. Who knew there would be villains in Boyhood? Stepdads, that’s who. Man, had I been excited to see that movie. After years of lounging in icebox-cold multiplexes watching nothing but CGI’d-down-to-their-nutsacks superhero movies and Johnny Depp swashbuckling his own legacy into dust, here was an honest-to-god film whose preview spoke to me. And it said, “This kid’s not going to do a whole lot in the 12 years we spent filming him, and you’re going to love it.”

But by the time we walked out, I was in lockstep with my oldest stepson’s assertion that the movie was kinda bullshit. Not for his reasons—he, an aspiring actor, couldn’t believe that a kid who seemed unwilling to put forth any sort of effort was gifted a role in an Oscar-nominated film seemingly based solely on living within a three-minute bike ride of the set. No: while I was fine with blank expressions, and truly appreciated a scene where two teenagers can drive recklessly down highways and NOT have their car overturned unexpectedly by a) a semi-truck, or b) an alien, or c) an alien that can transform from a semi-truck into a robot, I had a real problem with the men Patricia Arquette continued to pick as horribly misshapen father figures to her children.

“She has terrible taste in men,” I whispered to my wife.

“Shhhhh,” she replied.

“YOU would’ve seen the signs,” I said, a little louder. “He’s making an ass of himself.”

My wife patted the top of my hand, turned her face back to the screen, and smiled.

“Oh, sure. I see.” I grabbed another handful of popcorn. “But we’re talking about this later.”

I had never thought much about the typecast stepdad-as-villain role before I turned 33. But once I fell in love with a mother of three children, stepdaddery and its accompanying stigma became inevitable. The kids were 14, 10 and 8 at the time, positive that their family of four contained the exact right number of humans, and that it was best if things stayed that way. They fought like hell against making any of this feel normal or easy. Still, Heidi and I weren’t about to be deterred, and so just under 18 months after we started dating, I married into the archetype, becoming the first step-dad I knew. (That’s a dirty word around our house—their mom would rather they refer to me as anything other than that, though thankfully after a little bit of awkward tongue-twisting everyone just settled on my real name.)

I’d already read enough mid-century literature to know that we, as a subspecies, got a bad rap. But in a case of Baader-Meinhof phenomenon gone rampant, once I became one all I saw were the worst kind of examples. Not in real life, of course; out on the street it’s impossible to tell which luggage-lugging lug is a late-to-the-party father figure and which one’s the real deal. But soon it became apparent every guy who walked onto a screen and into some kid’s life was going to abuse a substance, or that child, or probably both. Boyhood was the last straw. Boyhood couldn’t even stop at one liquored-up putz; they had to throw in multiples for the poor woman to fall for, and the poor son and daughter to endure. Boyhood made Ethan Hawke—ETHAN FREAKING HAWKE!—the sane, stable heroic male role model of the movie. It was enough to make a stepfather give up booze entirely.

Over a whiskey soda at dinner that night I continued my list of grievances against the way men of my ilk (or, rather, circumstance) were eternally and incessantly portrayed. I swore up and down there had to be more good guys helping raise some other dad’s kids than there were alcoholic monsters of irrational anger. I argued that the archetype was dead, or at least incapacitated; that people these days knew better; and that we needed better examples shown on screen, so people didn’t get the wrong idea.

Boyhood came out five years ago. I’m still waiting.

My kids and I—and they are my kids, not in terms of I possess them but rather I will defend them with my own life if it ever comes to that, and in addition I’m not about to correct anyone who tells me how much they look like me—have come a long way since we began together. It was to be expected. It was not always easy; that, too, was to be expected. I might not have been a drunk deadbeat when they met me. But I had a lot to learn about parenting, and the three of them pushed me into that deep end while clinging to my neck. I needed to learn how to breathe through my frustration and listen to them, even when they didn’t have a lot to say. How to reserve judgment, start from a place of trust, give them the benefit of the doubt, recognize that my childhood did not in any way match theirs. They, in turn, needed to understand that I wasn’t out to get them.

It took FOREVER, or at least it felt like it.

But I’m so glad that I didn’t try to coat my brain with liquor just to get around the bumps. (Although I will admit: there were times when I was tempted.)

These days, when B is home from work and I’m still awake and roaming tight laps around the tiny apartment we share, I pour us both a drink—one single drink—and we sit and chew over our wins and losses on the day together. We talk music, politics, movies, and of course the family that we both somehow found ourselves in. And then the glasses go in the dishwasher and we say goodnight and I call his mother and tell her how much I miss her—but that yes, her husband and her son are both doing well. It feels good to say that aloud without it containing so much as a thread of fabrication. And though it might sound a bit crass, it warms my heart nearly as much to know that, after almost 10 years around each other, my kid and I are both finally old enough to drink.

To all my fellow step-dads out there: Stay sane, and (mostly) sober. We’ll get through this—with or without Hollywood.

Next time: Surviving air travel!

*This is a lie. The quiz was a complete fabrication. Though anyone else is now free to pull it off the internet, so I guess there’s that.

ASK A STRAY DAD 5:

ON GRIEF.

*Note: This was originally written on September 17.

Q: We had to put down our 14-year-old chocolate lab, Gus, a week ago.

A: Is there a question in there somewhere?

Q: No. I just felt like I needed to say it.

A: Oh. Sorry. Why?

Q: Because I miss him. But probably not as much as the rest of the family misses him. And because I wasn’t there for him at the end—a thing I feel terribly guilty about—but our older daughter certainly was, and she needs to be applauded for that. She carried him from the house down the steps and into the car; and then, later, from the car into the veterinary hospital. Later on that night, at a time when she normally would’ve been fast asleep, E had to hold her dog’s head while a vet administered a lethal dose of opiates to send him after one last tennis ball. He died in E’s arms. She held him and cried long afterward, long after his bladder had released onto the floor, even after the warmth of his body had started to leave him. She did more for that dog that night than I ever would’ve dreamed of doing. And I have never been more proud of her.

Gus had been with that family longer than I had, through leaner times than I was, and was as faithful a companion as dogs can get. So faithful he would get pissed off whenever we left without him, and would throw temper tantrums around the house. He would eat anything within reach whether it was truly edible or not; poop on the hardest to clean areas of the entire house; and tear any paper he could find into saliva-moist confetti. Upon our return he’d slink to the back door, knowing he’d done wrong, knowing he’d do it again the next time. It used to make me beyond furious. I look back on his psychotic separation anxiety now with the kind of deranged romanticism only a pet owner could summon.

I will miss his water-bowl-dampened, almost-always-infected ears. I will miss the way he’d rub eye boogers against my pant leg right before I left for work. I will miss him standing in the way any time I was carrying something heavy. I will miss the walks where it seemed like we peed on every upright piece of vegetation along the mile-long route. I will miss encouraging him to keep going or get back up when aching hips and dementia turned that mile into two blocks, and a risky two at that.

There’s a lot more. Of course. But when I remember him, it will most likely be one of three ways:

First, most recently, when in the midst of cooking I looked over to find him standing behind me in the kitchen, side-by-side with our youngest daughter’s life-sized stuffed unicorn, as though he’d found a new best friend and they were going to go out back and play.

Secondly, bounding into the surf again and again to fetch some other dog’s tennis ball in San Diego on the morning I was to propose to Heidi. I had decided to delay my plans until he ran out of energy. 90 minutes later I had to drag him out of the water and wrench the ball out of his mouth, whereupon he yacked up his breakfast on a pile of kelp. We moved to a different beach, where he kept me company while I wrote my proposal to her in the sand.

And finally, back at the very beginning, when I was staying with my brand-new girlfriend (and future wife) at her house down in Arizona. I woke up from a nap on the couch to find him curled up and asleep, the nape of his neck underneath my hand. We’d known each other all of 18 hours, and he’d accepted me like that unicorn, like we’d been life-long friends.

All dogs are good dogs. But Gus—that magnificent pain in the ass—was the best.

ASK A STRAY DAD 4:

ON SURVIVING.

Q: How’s New York?

A: Not the worst!

Q: Good to hear! I myself have been considering a move from a town I’ve grown very comfortable in, to a much bigger city. Any tips on how to survive — or even thrive — in that transition?

A: You’ve gotta be more specific than that. There are lots of big cities out there, and let me tell you, each one is — oh, no, you’re right, they’re all exactly the same.

Maybe these instructions will be a little bit bunk if you’re trading Walla Walla for Mexico City instead of, I presume, Des Moines for Prague. But if we agree to keep this as general as possible, maybe you’ll get something out of it. Not the keys to the city and a tony townhouse, but something a step above shivering in the corner of a subway station in a pool of (your own, hopefully?) urine.

Onward!

Step 1: Accept the fact that you will be living in some form of cramped, decrepit squalor.

With millions all occupying the same severely limited space, square footage is at a premium — so whatever you’ve been paying for rent or mortgage back home, be prepared to at least double it just to get a semi-reliable roof over your head and a splash or two of running water. Everything else will cost you mucho dinero. Also know that the shower drain will back up within two days of the beginning of your lease, the culprit being a dead mouse that has floated to the surface and gotten stuck there. Oh, and only one of your burners on your stove is gonna work, and by work we mean it’s going to either be at full blast or just leaking natural gas into your “kitchen,” which is really just the only part of your living room where a minifridge would fit without looking ridiculous. Your bedroom window — if you have one — is going to look out on a scene that years later you will describe as something a person just can’t unsee. Point is, every city apartment you’ve ever seen in a movie (unless it was Taxi Driver) was a total sham, fabricated on a sound stage in Los Angeles by an interior designer who wouldn’t know a walk-up from a hole in their ass. Now, go take everything you own, put it in your bedroom closet — then try to find a place to sleep. This is your future. Adjust accordingly.

Step 2: Order. Everything. Online.

I know, I know. Amazon is the devil, and all that. But I schlepped across this great city from one borough to the next for three straight days looking for a single rug and two nightstands. Seventeen trains in all, and a total of about 22 hours searching, with nothing but sweaty pits and a thick film of city gunk on my skin to show for it. Ikea had it in stock — only they didn’t. The one at the flea market looked right — until I tested it for stability and the leg nearly fell off. It didn’t feel like I was asking for much. The city felt otherwise, and felt free to prove it to me.

In the end a four-minute Google search finished furnishing my entire bedroom. And I didn’t even have to use Amazon! I’m not saying stay inside while the rest of the city goes out and lives their lives. I’m saying save your time for farmers markets and bazaars when you already have everything you need and the only thing you want is a knickknack to rest on top of the mini-fridge.

Step 3: Get some plants. They’re more than just a reminder that nature exists.

The first thing I missed was the back yard. We had even picked a Brooklyn neighborhood with “Greene” in the name, one whose avenues are lined with trees, but not being able to step out a back door and into a garden full of flowers and fruits and veggies was disorienting on my best day and downright depressing the other six a week. Ten days in, I raided a nursery like a drunk with a key to the 7–11. I read up on their care, gently laid them down in spots where they were likely to thrive, and left notes on what to do for them, and when. They all got names. They have become de facto family members, ones whose lives I am terrified of ending due to my own horticultural ignorance. The Tillandsia, Dorothy, is my favorite. She sits in the bathroom window, her long fronds stretching for the ceiling until the weight takes them down. Tillandsias absorb water through their leaves, not their roots, and one day I accidentally set a full coffee mug too close, in the fronds went, and now Dorothy wakes me up in the middle of the night telling me she can’t sleep and could she please get a rematch in Scrabble, the board’s already set up in the living room and everything.

Step 4: Embrace public transportation as though it were your closest friend. Even knowing it will betray you.

It takes me 75 minutes and costs me about half a Benjamin to go from my office to the airport via taxi or Uber. It costs a total of $5 to make the same trip by subway, and takes 10 minutes less. Such is the case almost everywhere in the city — plus the people-watching is phenomenal. Who knew you could wear a bathrobe with Crocs for your trip to the zoo?

Truth is, I love the subway. Not only is it the best option for the environment shy of walking, it’s far more entertaining and convenient than any other way to get around. Right up until it isn’t. Right up until you show up at a train platform expecting a Brooklyn-bound C to show up any minute, only to have that minute turn into 25. Until you skip the completely packed train car for the mostly empty one right behind it, then have the doors close behind you and you’re hit hard with both searing heat and a nosehair-searing stench, along with the realization as to why it’s just you and the cock-eyed, wild-haired dude with the maniacal laugh staring you down from the other end. The subway is your friend. It’s always around, and most of the time it’s a good friend. But it’s also a friend that’s always a single step away from surprising you on the street, slipping something into your drink, dragging you out on some wild goose chase, and then abandoning you in the middle of nowhere, having taken all everything the photo of your G-Ma out of your wallet. Don’t delete your Lyft app just yet, is all I’m saying.

Step 5: Keep a “recon” dossier of your new town’s tendencies and idiosyncrasies.

Firstly, because it’ll make you feel like a spy — and spies never get lost or homesick! More importantly, it’ll help you figure out the place, and discern your way within it. You’ll find things you enjoy that you never expected, and have an eye out for the particulars that people — even locals — miss. Finally, it’ll be fun, years from now, to look back at how odd you found at things that have subsequently become commonplace to your new, citified self. I know that six months from now I won’t give a French Bulldog another thought, but the fact that every other pooch in Brooklyn is a flat-faced furry-Jon-Favreau-looking motherfucker who huffs like Darth Vader and couldn’t clear a tree root if its cardiac-event-shortened life depended on it is just astonishing to me. And don’t even talk to me about the fact I’ve seen exactly two Subarus in the three weeks I’ve been here. What I’m saying is: Write. It. Down.

Step 6: Safety first.

This list could continue until I drop dead, but I realize no one has the patience or time for that — and besides, I plan on kicking around for a while. Instead, I’m going to call upon the wisdom of those who’ve come before me. In this case, that’s PBS, who wrote a truly enlightening article about surviving an encounter with a bear. I’ve maintained their article to the letter, the only modification being I’ve changed the words “grizzly bear” to “city” whenever relevant to this discussion. Enjoy. And keep your hand firmly wrapped on that pepper spray…

“Here’s what the experts say:

If you encounter a city, do not run.

Avoid direct eye contact.

Walk away slowly, if the city is not approaching.

If the city charges, stand your ground (you cannot outrun it).

Don’t scream or yell. Speak in a soft monotone voice and wave your arms to let the city know you are human.

If you have pepper spray, prepare to use it.

If the city charges to within 25 feet of where you’re standing, use the spray.

If the city makes contact, curl up into a ball on your side, or lie flat on your stomach.

Try not to panic; remain as quiet as possible until the attack ends.

While in city country, be aware that you may encounter a city at any time.

Be sure the city has left the area before getting up to seek help.”

Words to live by. Good luck with your move, whoever you are.

Got a question you’d like a Stray Dad to answer? Ask it in the comments. Next time: We’ll finally answer how much booze is too much!

ASK A STRAY DAD 3:

ON CRYING.

*Note: This was originally written and posted on August 14. Thank you for your patience as I migrate everything over from another—ahem—Medium.

Q: Why am I crying all the time? I’m a grown-ass man. What is wrong with me? Can you help me fix this, so I don’t look like a freak in public?

A: Whew! So much unpacking to do. And that’s before we get to the luggage sitting in the corner of your depressingly empty apartment.

Let’s clear some air, though: “Grown-ass man?” Come on. That Twinkie of a sentiment that men need to suck their tears back inside their sockets for all but the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and even then only for a select few — their, mother, children, or their boyhood heroes (much respect, Walter Payton) — is long past its expiration date. Showing that you care enough about someone or something to mourn its loss or tearfully celebrate its arrival shouldn’t be the sole privilege of women and children. It’s what makes you a human being, and the sooner we shed terms about “manliness” and what it “means”, the sooner we’re going to be better human beings. Having feelings and being able to express them is a far greater sign of strength than staring at a coffin without so much as a lip quiver could ever be.

As for you in particular: You are crying all the time (untrue, but fine — whatever) because you are turning your entire life inside-out, ya ding-dong. It’s extraordinarily painful. There is absolutely nothing wrong with you. And in case you needed proof, let’s check the footage and see exactly when you’ve cried, shall we?

Monday, August 5, 10:53 AM. Your 7-year-old daughter is rolled into surgery to remove her tonsils and adenoids. This is the first surgery for anyone in the family that involves them going under general anesthesia. She is your baby, the only one of the kids you’ve been around since birth, and though you know this is a minor operation that’s been around for millennia oh gosh is she quiet and looking super-small all of a sudden. And as she shrinks into the bed at the sight of the doctor you get a double-kick to the gut when you remember that the recovery time on this is about two weeks, which means you’re only going to be around for less than half of your daughter hurting and healing. You are about to leave your baby girl in pain and become completely unable to do anything to soothe her, at a time when it feels like she might need you the most. So yes, of course you’re going to cry there.

And when she emerges from the 20-minute procedure weary but okay, sitting up and moving well even though she’s drugged to the gills and finding it hard to swallow? You’re going to cry there, too, from sheer relief (and raw guilt).

Friday, August 9, 9:45 AM. A bunch of your coworkers gather to see you off. One keeps bursting into tears and telling you the myriad ways you’ve helped her over the years, and how much you’ll be missed. This all comes as a bit of a shock to you, as you only worked together occasionally, and never all that closely. She will not be the last person to tell you something similar. You get choked up with each hug, as this is the first time you’ve been made aware of any sort of impact there in — well, forever.

Still Friday morning. The two people who worked for you have just presented you with the Michael Scott “World’s Best Boss” mug, plus a letter that openly wonders how the place is ever going to operate without you around. Dammit, this one’s hard.

Friday night, at dinner. This is essentially the Last Supper for the family, and you mostly hold your pieces together until your 7-year-old daughter — still only speaking about 1/50th of the amount she normally would and still no eating anything more solid than really over-cooked noodles — grabs your hand and squeezes it for no real reason.

The next morning, Saturday. Saying goodbye, naturally. Waving to your wife and youngest daughter from the wrong side of security while the three of you cry at a distance from each other feels like the worst. But it prods you again on the plane, when the turbulence hits, and you think of your wife squeezing your hand out of fear during flights, and you wish you had hers in yours at that very moment and perhaps for the next 192 straight hours.

Saturday night. You have just arrived at the apartment you and your eldest stepson are going to share for the next year. An apartment you have only seen in FaceTime videos and a real estate app. Upon entering, you are hit with a) the smell of mildew, b) a facefull of about a dozen reusable shopping bags, all loaded with cheap straw boater hats and being carried by a man with a once-lit-now-mostly-extinguished cigar in his mouth, and c) the notion that the gulf between your kid’s version of “really nice” and yours might be too wide to cross. Then follows a tidal wave of loneliness.

Saturday night. Still. You go to open the window in the kitchen just to get some air, because oh good lord we are going to suffocate if we don’t get some fresh air in here, and the entire windowpane falls out and hits you on the temple. Kind of a one-off, but it certainly counts.

Sunday morning. You look around for a mug to put coffee in, and see that the only option is a chipped mug that says “Fuck You! I’m a Prophet!” on the side. Further digging concludes that you will be eating all of your meals and drinking all of your beverages out of this Fucking Prophet mug, as you have no dishes. No other glasses. Also: No table. No chairs. No wastebasket. Your life feels like you are starting completely over. Who wouldn’t cry at that?

Late Sunday night. Going to put groceries away, you notice the salt grinder is stuck to the inside of the cabinet. A wipe of the finger reveals a 1/2-inch layer of cooking grease. You spend the next four hours — from 9:30 to 1:30 AM, on the night before your first day at the new job that brought you all the way across the country — cleaning years’ worth of grease off of every surface in the main living area, then steam-mopping the past three tenants’ dirt off your floors. You will deal with the clog in the shower some other time, because it’s just all too much to bear.

Very early Monday morning. Finally turning out the light to sleep. Four hours until you need to get up. The light is centered on your current nightstand — a 48-roll-count box of toilet paper.

And finally: Monday morning, on your first day at work. Not only is your wife not there to kiss you good luck, but she won’t be awake for another three hours after you leave the clean-but-only-slightly-less-depressing apartment.

Let’s face it. This is a lot. You are an emotional person who feels things on a deep, sometimes debilitating level, and this week has been the hardest, most earth-shattering one you’ve ever had. Your daughter’s surgery feels like it was a lifetime ago. It was just over a week.

All of this has built up inside you, while you’ve spent every waking hour (and those waking hours have been in greater quantity than usual) trying to do everything necessary to survive this. It’s natural to be sad, and stressed, and lonely, and feel like this is a terrible idea and wish you could close your eyes and go back and make it all disappear.

But going backward is the opposite of what you were wanting to do, correct? This is what growth feels like. You remember adolescence, right? That pain that overwhelmed your knees until you could barely stand upright? Well this is exactly like that, except in your brain. And you don’t want to go back to where you came from any more than you want to go back to being 5’4” and 112 pounds.

So cry. For shit’s sake, let it out. Feel sorry for yourself, miss your family, want a better situation. Then when the tears stop you can take a few deep breaths, wipe your eyes, and — with the first clear view you’ve had in weeks — take the inaugural and incredibly tiny step forward towards whatever is going to make this a little bit better.

Because if you really think about it, that’s all tears are—the body’s window wiper fluid, blinking away all the emotional gunk to finally let you see where you need to go.

You know what I also think? That I’ve probably just had too much gin tonight. I’m gonna go lie down for a bit. Here’s a box of tissues. Go talk to someone sober who cares.

Next time: How much booze is too much booze?

ASK A STRAY DAD 2:

ON QUITTING.

The world’s most useless advice column tackles asses, doors, and whether the two should meet upon one’s departure.

(*Note: This was originally written on August 4. Forgive me, as I’m migrating all this stuff over from another site…)

QJ: I’m considering resigning from my long-term place of employment. Any tips on how to do it?

Before we get started: Let me be the first of doubtless hundreds of folks to say OH MY GOSH — CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR ESCAPE. And if you work for some Fortune 500 behemoth, feel free to round up on that estimate. More corporate drones fantasize of quitting their job and opening a hygged-to-death, solar-powered combination B&B/ lavender farm than will ever, ever let on.

Also: Of course! Now that I have about a week’s worth of very fresh experience at this, sure to translate to any and all scenarios, I’ve been basically begging for someone to ask me to share. Thank goodness you came along. Consider these your 10 Commandments for Quitting:

Find yourself a hype person. Being nervous is natural. And if you’re anything like me, so is that accompanying bowel-clench and the pitting out of your button-down. But no combination of those will equal the impression you want to impart on your way out the door. In this moment you need someone to remind you that you’re awesome, and that there’s a very good reason why you’re doing this. In my case it was my wife, Heidi, who called me as I paced the back stairwell of the building: “You’ve wanted this for so long, and it’s about time you got it.” If she’d been talking to me between rounds of a championship bout I would’ve gotten back inside that ring and — well, gotten the shit kicked out of me. My jaw is made of pure glass and the only punch I’ve ever thrown was a juice box, at Brian Giddings during my 9th birthday party. But I’m telling you: After that pep-talk, I would’ve looked into the murderous-yet-childlike eyes of Mike Tyson without hesitation or concern. You have a hype person like this somewhere in your life. And there is no better time than now to let them know they need to step the fuck up.

If fate offers you a hand, shake it until it falls off. I went into Outlook to book the come-to-Jesus meeting with my boss, unsure of what to call it (working title: “Very Extended Out of Office”) only to find that he’d already scheduled a half-hour “Catch-Up.” Telling him I was quitting seemed to fall under that theme, so PROBLEM SOLVED. When the meeting began he laid several org charts in front of me, then started his spiel about the team’s five-year plan — and where I fit within it. “These look great,” I said. “I have just one suggestion…”

Be sure to make multiple references to the fact that you’re leaving. Be sure to clarify you don’t mean for lunch. Five minutes after I was almost positive I’d said, “I’ve decided to leave the company,” we’d moved on to talking about the shortcomings of a long-suffering fellow coworker, which somehow transitioned into what makes a good mai tai, then whether Kevin Durant would be able to recover in time for next year’s playoffs. And as I listened to his philosophies on mixed beverages and the super-healing powers of elite athletes, I began to panic that maybe either a) he hadn’t understood what I’d just said, or b) that I hadn’t said the words at all. Maybe I’d chickened out and mumbled something ridiculous like “I’ve decided to leave my hairdresser,” and he was just shrugging it off as the ravings of a sleep-deprived lunatic and moved on. “Just to be clear,” I said, “My last day working here — as an employee — is August 9.” (The as an employee part didn’t sound nearly as dumb in my head as it did aloud. It looks even worse here.) He smiled, nodded and said, “Oh, yeah. I got it. Let me just fix this,” before putting a “NOT” in front of my name on the new org chart.

Try to avoid the word quit if you can. Nobody likes a quitter. Here are some synonyms: Resign. Leave. Depart. Move on. Withdraw. Bow out. Hang it up. Take a walk. Surrender. Any one of which sounds less like you’re throwing a temper tantrum than “I quit” does. I almost said it to our HR rep, watched her left eyebrow arch like it was half of a McDonald’s logo, and pulled myself out of that tailspin. The words “I quit” are just going to result in someone 30,000 feet above your pay grade asking you a lot of questions you really don’t want to answer. At least not yet. Speaking of which:

Now is not the time to mention all the ways your exit could’ve been prevented. I know, I know. This is the moment you’ve been waiting for. But simmer down and think about it, because I certainly have. Thanks to the modern misery that is open-floorplan workspaces, my boss and I are forced to sit facing each other, our desks touching, for 8-plus hours a day. At any point during my two weeks’ notice, even with his limited wingspan and brittle lower back, he could easily reach across and strangle me if he wanted. So while I certainly abide by the “what are you going to do at this point, fire me?” philosophy for one’s last 80 business hours in hell, I’m saving myself for the exit interview — and there’s a reason those torchings tend to be scheduled when one of your feet has already crossed the threshold of the fire exit. Which is why when he said, “Well I’m sad for us, but happy for you. It felt like, for the last couple of years, this place had been killing you,” and my tongue nearly leapt out of my mouth to respond, “Then maybe why didn’t you, as my manager, do something to STOP MY PLACE OF WORK FROM KILLING ME,” I instead bit down hard, and nodded, and smiled. Remember: Victory is getting out.

As much as you think they’d be ready for this, you’re going to take HR by surprise. Unless you work for Pizza Hut, your company is unfamiliar with people wanting to leave. This is not the reason they got into HR, and they rarely have to do it. Think about it: One person leaving your department per week would feel like a mass exodus. So maybe HR does one a month. How good is anyone at anything they do once a month? Well, ask yourself—how good am I at hot yoga? In other words, it pays to do your homework. Because HR’s probably not going to do it for you — and even if they did, it might only be C-level work.

You’re gonna wanna talk to the IT Department. This was the biggest tip I got from the HR rep. “Get to the IT bar as soon as you can,” she said. “They need, like, all two weeks of this just to get your phone switched over.” I have as much trust in my company’s IT department as I do in bitcoin and the camera at the top of my laptop screen, but I hustled out of there and down to the line of non-nerds bowing before the uber-nerds as quick as possible. In 2019, the thought of trying to use the bathroom without a functional phone in front of me is one I simply cannot bear.

Keep word of your future plans vague. That way, both your biggest fans AND most insecure haters get the fun of imagining what you’ll be doing a month from now. It’s free entertainment for everyone!

Don’t bite too hard on all the “that’s brave” and “I’m so happy for you” confections. Yes, people are happy for you, and should be. Also yes: They are likely over-romanticizing your next life into something that isn’t just completely unattainable, but dangerously so. A dream job? It’s still a job. And you didn’t beat cancer or stare down a tank armed only with two grocery bags — you just walked away from a bad situation, which is a thing that every person should absolutely do — so brave isn’t really the correct nomenclature here. For your sake, let’s keep your own expectations and perspective in the right place. Unless you followed “I’m leaving the company,” with “To fight poachers away from threatened rhinos in the Serengeti.” In which case, YOU SOAK UP ALL OF THAT PRAISE LIKE YOU’RE THE COMPANION BAGUETTE TO A FIVE-STAR BOUILLABAISSE. I AM SO PROUD OF YOU.

If they want to throw you a going-away party, by all means let ’em. You may be done with the place. But no matter how surly you were before the end, there are people who are going to miss you, and who you are going to miss — whether you’re ready to admit it or not. Accept their invitation with genuine warmth and enthusiasm. You wanted this kind of fuss over you and your work the entire time you were there. You deserve to receive at least a fraction of it, even if it does feel a little late.

Alright: Now stand up, breathe deep, kick your desk chair out into the hall, barge into your boss’s office without knocking, and don’t walk out of there until you’re unemployed.

You’ve totally fucking got this.

Next time: How to say goodbye to literally everyone in your life!

ASK A STRAY DAD 1:

On Existential Crises…

*Note: This was originally written on July 27, 2019.

Question 1: This doubles as an introduction. Why are we here?

That’s easy. As a doting husband to Heidi and father(-ish) of four (I’ll explain later) about to embark on a super-dicey and potentially disastrous life change, I needed a place to ask myself hyper-specific questions and wrestle over the advice. And I figured having an audience, no matter how small — hi, Sweetheart — would hold me accountable.

I didn’t mean it that way, and you know it.

Fine, and you’re right. Ignoring the more existential nature of that four-word question did feel a little like cheating. But seeing as I’m still figuring it out myself, maybe it’ll help to break this many-headed beast down into its basic components:

Who are “we?”

Call me Jason. And because asking a question only to answer it yourself might be viewed by some as C-R-A-Z-Y, this “Jason” of which we speak shall henceforth be subdivided into two parts: Question Jason (QJ) and Answer Jason (AJ, duh). Bingo: we have a plurality! Oh, and let’s not forget about you. (We would never forget about you.) You are a marvelous and priceless work of art, and we are grateful for your time and attention. Thanks for dropping by. Help yourselves to anything in the cupboard — except the bottle of single-malt with the packet of peanuts duct-taped to it.

QJ: Where is “here?”

AJ: Here is the coffee aisle of a Portland, Oregon-area Whole Foods, and here is where I am having the latest in a two-month-long dotted line of panic attacks. A little bit ago I was tapping my toe, humming along to “Milkshake” by Kelis and contemplating whether fair-trade, single-sourced Guatemalan beans would shroud the smell of a carne asada burrito fart from my fellow shoppers the same way they hide cocaine from police dogs. The next instant I found myself perilously short of breath, sweating profusely, heart swim-kicking my ribcage as I clung to a passing child while I waited for the floor to stop shaking.

Because here also happens to be the place in my life where I got so frustrated with my career that I took a very professional leap off of a very imposing cliff.

I have spent 17 years at the same company, doing roughly the same thing, slamming my same thick skull against the same flimsy-yet-remarkably-resilient cubicle walls, until Facilities took those walls down and the only thing left for me to bang heads with were fellow coworkers. Neither had yielded much in the way of results — certainly not enough for my own fidgety and fragile ego. After 32,000-some hours spent struggling and failing to make any sort of name or place for myself at the job, I felt like an object in a side mirror: larger than I ever would’ve appeared to the rare few who might ever bother to look. Also: two-dimensional, and completely backwards. I had watched the company quadruple in size in real time, had strained under the added workload weight that growth had dumped on our tiny team. In turn I became the person who groaned about how much everything had changed; about how much better being there used to be. And I grew to feel like a stagnant, stupid, and shelled-out version of the person I’d been upon entering.

I viewed my 15-year anniversary as an occasion to recommit to doing everything I could to change either the place itself or my mind about it. Two years of false starts and flameouts later, the only option that felt like it made any difference or sense anymore was leaving.

I suck at breakups; always the last one to figure it out, pack up and move on. After so many ups and downs over the years this certainly had felt like a marriage—one of the Trumpian variety, where I got paid for my participation, and where everything the two of us did seemed to bug the shit out of each other. I knew every idiosyncrasy, from whose ego was going to shoot down the latest novel idea to whose hands weren’t going to be washed when they exited the bathroom. What I didn’t know was how to get out, or whether anything would await me should I manage to pull it off.

Compounding my struggles with self-confidence was a slow-grown ignorance about the outside world. It may have been time to find somewhere else to hang my hat and shingle (as if that were still a thing), but I had no idea 1) what to look for, or 2) where, and 3) whether — or even how — anyone would see a single shred of usefulness in me. How did this matchmaking process even work anymore? All the technology and methodology had changed since the last time I’d had to market myself like this. Extinct were the thick-stocked, bone-colored resumes and spiral-spined clip files I once lugged around in leather-bound sacks. People younger and wiser than me told me I needed apps — lots of ’em, even though most were showing the same jobs for which I was either utterly uninterested in or completely unqualified. I populated forms on job boards, exposed my bare-naked, mostly featureless resume to recruiters, and fired applications into an amorphous, directionless void. Then I would wait, unable to avoid the suffocating sense of disappointment as days passed by. The rejections, if they came at all, did so without any interaction with a living human being — unless that human’s name happened to be Automated Response.

Soon another thing became clear: my mind had been monster-truck-tire over-inflating the size of Portland’s job market. The only companies offering jobs were direct competitors I wanted no part of, or quirky startups expecting the moon in exchange for a peanut-based salary and a ping pong table in the common area. It was my wife who actually suggested broadening the search, so one night while slow-walking our ancient chocolate labrador we scribbled a list of West-Coast cities to which we were willing to relocate on the back of a receipt that I kept in my wallet. As the weeks passed we added towns—up into Canada, then east to the Rockies. On rare occasions I would find something, and apply. Nothing ever reached back. We kept expanding the list and its boundaries, trying to think of the now nearly limitless search more as a possible adventure than an act of desperation.

It took weaponizing the New York option on the job-finder apps before my shovel hit anything of substance. A job that seemed a little too good to be true popped up. I applied, and within a day their HR director had contacted me. Two weeks and eight separate phone interviews later, I was thrilled when they asked to meet in person.

Still: New York.

Although the interview went smoother than someone as unfamiliar with these gauntlets could have hoped for, my concentration was elsewhere. I spent both cramped legs of the journey and every waking minute in-between chewing over just how insane the idea of packing up our family and moving to Manhattan sounded. Our older daughter only has her senior year of high school left. Our younger one is just getting settled into a rhythm at her school, after a few false starts at others. We couldn’t pull them out now. Which meant that if the job came through I would be striking out on my own for about a year, leaving my wife and half of my kids behind. (No, I’m not taking the other two with me; one’s in college in Victoria, BC and the other would be my likely roommate in New York.) This was the opposite result of the gentler job with the shorter commute my job search had intended. Pull this off, and I would go from 75 minutes on public transportation to 5 hours and 25 minutes, in a middle seat on JetBlue. I hadn’t been away from my wife and kids for any more than a couple of days since my youngest daughter was born. The thought of watching her grow up via FaceTime was the last thing I remember pondering before my first panic attack, which struck at cruising altitude somewhere over Minnesota. The man in the seat next to me leaned hard into the aisle.

For the entire two-month-long courting process that followed Heidi and I agonized over a decision we weren’t sure would ever come. The possibility and its pitfalls ate up every square inch of brain matter. I gave up trying to dress myself in the morning and defaulted to a wardrobe of jeans, whatever flannel shirt was hanging in the rightmost slot in my closet, and the same pair of white-yet-gradually-graying slip-on sneakers. Choosing pizza toppings became a crippling process. I would get lost sometimes on my way to work and have to backtrack down streets I feared I would one day grow unfamiliar with.

Finally, they made an offer. An unrefusable one, though attempts were certainly made. We threw every detail out on the table, looking for the one that might possibly be able to axe the idea to pieces. Cried when we found none, when that made us realize just how incredible this opportunity was — and just exactly what that meant. We berated ourselves for not thinking all of this through sooner, back when it was a pure hypothetical, back before it threatened to separate our family. I’ve been miserable so long that it’s all I can remember…why couldn’t I have stuck it out one more year?

We negotiated amongst ourselves, consulted with family and friends who had completed their own version of this odyssey before. Everything short of visiting a tarot reader and paying extra for the good cards.

On the Sunday night before I was supposed to get back to my potential new employer with a decision we had yet to definitively make, my wife said, “What if we just think of it as you have to travel for work?”

It seemed ridiculous. At first. But it was one of two factors that finally tipped the scales.

Here’s the other:

I would doggie paddle in shark-infested waters with raw tuna stapled to my armpits for a life where my wife and kids are free and emboldened to pursue their dreams. Part of that is building a safe and sound enough home that they’re able to see, try out and then become who and what they want. The other is leading by example. It began to feel like showing everyone what was possible for them came down to doing the same for myself.

(If that sounds like the sort of delusional rationalizing that could only come from a self-centered scoundrel, just know that I’ve thought about that a great deal, and fear you’re probably right. Although I hope with all my might you’re not.)

My dream had never been to settle for going to work angry and coming home frustrated and exhausted. Granted, nor was it ever living in isolation on the opposite side of the country from my family, though at least that’s temporary — and besides, there’s a reason Boeing’s still in business. A year from now — more or less and one way or the other — we’ll be living together again. Meanwhile, I have that span to make something of myself, even as I memorize the flight schedule of every major airline coming in and out of Greater New York.

QJ: How do you feel, particularly when you talk to your kids and wife about it?

AJ: You ask too many damn questions. But for the record, it feels like my heart is being ripped from my chest and thrown down the disposal while I watch, helpless. I question this decision every second I’m awake, and it haunts my dreams as I sleep.

I hate myself for doing this.

I would hate myself if I didn’t do this.

I give my notice tomorrow. Hence this latest and strongest round of stomach cramps, neck pain, dizziness, sweatiness, shortness of breath, and now the unshakable feeling that I’m going to have a heart attack and die in a cloud of methane on the floor of an upscale grocery store in front of all of my neighbors.

Seventeen. Fucking. Years. Gone in the wave of a hand. With nothing yet resting in the other. We will make it work. We are going to have to find a way to make it work.

QJ: But…

AJ: Why?

Yeah, I got nothing. Let’s just skip this one for now. We’ll come back to it when we have an answer we can live with.

Tune in next time, when I provide ill-timed advice on how to quit your job!