You Don't Need A Quadraphonic Blaupunkt. What You Need Is A Curveball.
Ah, spring. The time of year has come when a young man's fancy turns to... well, if he uses the word "fancy" very often, probably other young men.

I know, I know, we still have two weeks to go until it is officially spring, but here in Southern California, we like to justify our ridiculously unjustifiable cost of living by reminding the rest of you pale, hairless, lamp-eyed, snow-buried gnomes why it is exactly anyone in their right mind would pay $2,500/month to rent a 600 square foot one-bedroom apartment out here.

Today in Riverside: 84 degrees, light and variable winds, zero clouds, no noticeable humidity. Ha! Eat it, Everywhere Else!

Of course by the end of the week it's supposed to be over 90 out here and will remain so until about mid-November. And there will be no rain between then and now seeing as our four-week "rainy season" is now over. So we should expect a couple of 1,000+ acre forest fires to blot out the sun a couple of times. And the occasional rolling blackout. And water rationing.

But still! No snow! Again I say: Ha!

Well, except for that one time, but that was a fluke! And it only lasted long enough to spook the homeless people. Really, they come here to live under our fancy freeway overpasses for the express reason that our ERs do not have a proper slang term for a hypothermic and/or frozen solid homeless person (see: bumsicle). If I were a homeless person living in the greater Los Angeles area that day, if I hadn't already snapped to the point that I was socially non-functioning to the point of utter helplessness, I totally would have snapped.

I know it's spring in Cali not just because of the weather (which never actually changes) but because this week we started baseball practices again for my boys.

I say "boys" because I meant to indicate the plural. Seriously, just by adding an S to the end. Language is a marvelous thing.

We have two of them in this year, one in proper pitch/hit baseball and the middle child in his first year of T-ball. Two kids in. Hooray for me. That means twice as many practices, twice as many futile sessions of catch in our pathetic backyard, twice as many ass splinters climbing the neighbor's wooden fence to fetch the ball that inevitably goes over, twice as many times I have to explain to a prepubescent boy that the hard plastic cup is there crushing his testicles in order to protect him from having a struck baseball crush his testicles.

Dad work is hard.

The good news is that since they're still young and producing their own human-growth-hormone in abundance, I don't have to spend any time or money trying to procure any on the black market, just like their professional role models might. If I were smart, I'd harvest that stuff myself and sell it. But then I can't get my son to give up where he keeps his pituitary gland. I never should have let the sneaky little ingrate know I have no medical knowledge of my own. I told his mother that Operation game would come back to bite us in the ass. Which I know is somewhere between my shoulders and my ankles.

Don't worry, I'll keep you all posted on how the seasons progress, and in true Bucket fashion. Expect lies.



This post on the Narcissus Scale: 9.1


Pops

Labels: homunculus

- posted by Pops @ 12:53 AM