I wrote a book called What You Didn’t Expect When You Were Expecting.  As of today, you can buy it on iBooks or Amazon.  The title may seem like something you wouldn’t expect from me, and that assumption will probably seem more accurate once you crack open the book.  If you read it without knowing the author, I’d bet my name wouldn’t pop into your head for any of your first ten guesses of the author.  But, that doesn’t mean I didn’t pull it off, because I did.

It’s time you all meet my friend Maurica Rodriguez.  When you’re done here, hit the Ditch Films channel on youtube and enjoy the genius.

My wife is a medical professional, and because of this I seldom complain about anything that might be wrong with me.  I had to learn this the hard way after several incidents where a seemingly minor discovery in my home quickly put me on display in a hospital bed surrounded by her coworkers.  There are lots of situations where I would enjoy being surrounded by large breasted women in low cut scrub tops.  Sadly I’ve never been in any of them.  The only one’s I’ve ever been in involved me pulling my thick neck thru my shirt to reveal a well groomed beer gut that must be examined to determine why I’m making that funny noise when I cough.  A janitor’s finger in my ass seems less intrusive.

Several years have passed since the last time she P.T. Barnum’d me thru the hospital doors and stepped up on stool to show the lobby a spot on my dick.  I mistakenly thought those days were behind me, and three months ago she found a bump on my back.  When she found it, it felt like a pimple, looked like a pimple, so I told her it was a pimple.  She said it felt like a pimple, looked like a pimple, so it was probably a tumor.  You see now why I keep my fucking mouth shut?  I opt’d for the “it’ll go away” plan and she choose the option of reminding me I might die every time she felt my back and found it was still there.  It made for some awkward moments, but at least she was crying during sex for a different reason.

The story continued like this up until last week when I rolled over in the bed and almost cried from the pain.  I went to look in the mirror for the piece of glass stuck in my back, only to find this bump had grown to the size of a golf ball, it’s hard as a rock, and black.  After that statement the racist jokes are already in your head, no need for me to continue down that path and fuel your fire, not with my accent.  The point is this thing was back there for who knows how long and I didn’t seem to care.  The wife sees it, starts poking at it, and now it’s huge and hurts like hell.  Per my parental guidebook, if you have an ailment and keep messing with it, you’ll make it worse.

One more piece of back story that may bring all this together.  Occasionally I drop a joke on stage about giving my wife cervical cancer as a form of birth control.  On most days when asked she will reply that nothing I say in my act bothers her because she’s been putting up with my shit for years.  I think this NYC thing has made a little bitter. So bitter in fact that she poked me in the back until she gave me cancer.

This is not the way we left it

I wanted to take a break from the “Hick’s eye view of NYC” type stories I’ve been writing for Cringe Humor and tell one that I’ve never told before.  I’m actually not sure why I’ve never told it before.  It doesn’t stir up any particular emotion.  I guess it just all seemed surreal until we moved.

In September of 2007 my wife and I were sitting in the waiting room of her OBGYN with the suspicion that in eight to nine months she was going to spit out another reason we don’t own a boat.  For no other reason than to make everyone around us uncomfortable she yelled at me thru her magazine, “I can’t believe you did this to me again.”  My response, “Should have kept your knees closed whore,” gave us both the satisfaction of ruining the day of at least 20 people, and is part of the reason we’ve been together for 12 years.

After we left the doctor’s office with confirmation that we would soon be raising another witty asshole, we decided to take a break and go on vacation quickly before we lost the opportunity.  We packed our shit and went to the beach for what was supposed to be a week.  On the fourth day our nanny, who had stayed behind to give us some time alone (or because she was an idiot and an annoying bitch) called as I was walking my daughter out to the beach after breakfast.  The conversation when like this:

Nanny, “I just opened your back door and your house is full of smoke.  What do you want me to do?”

Me, “I don’t know stupid, what the fuck do you think I want…

Nanny, “I’ll call you back.”

You have got to be shitting me.  Every second that passed was causing me to loose more possessions and this bitch was going to get back to me.  For the record, it is impossible to call 911 from two states away.  Several minutes later I got a little relief when a neighbor called to tell me she had called the fire department.  My request to toss the nanny in the burning embers was ignored, but at least someone was coming to attempt to save our shit.

Explaining the emotions of what happen after your house burns to anyone who has never been thru it is impossible.  Everything that could go wrong in your life just did, so anything bad that happens after that point is like someone kicking you in the nuts after they’ve already stabbed you in the gut.  Lots of things went wrong for us, and continued to do so for over a year.  The first disaster started when we pulled in the driveway to meet the fire department and insurance adjuster.  The fire department explained the fire was caused by linseed oil spontaneously combusting under the steps.  At this point we weren’t aware of what linseed oil was, but now I can narrate a 30 minute special on the uses and dangers of the product.  We had purchased the house after the previous resident died and made a deal that the family could leave the shit they didn’t want and we would clean up the rest.  Apparently he had some linseed oil stored under the steps in the basement.  After spending several hours walking the house with the insurance adjuster, I realized he was asking me the same questions about how the fire started over and over in a different way.  I sent my family away and let the conversation come to a head at the end of our driveway.  For the fourth time, he asked me what I was using the linseed oil for.  That was the one that pushed me over the edge.  I leaned toward the adjuster and and explained that I knew how many times he’d asked me that question and I knew I’d answered it honestly the same way each time.  I also explained that my time in the south had made me just country enough to “monkey stomp his ass in the middle of my fucking driveway” if he made that accusation again.  I don’t know what a monkey ass stomp is I just tend to pull jungle creatures into my threats when I loose composure.

In review I have a pregnant wife, I’ve just lost my home and all my possessions, and now I’m being accused of arson from two states away.  It couldn’t get any worse.  To test the theory we sent the kid over to a neighbor’s house while we piled all her black and melted toys in the back yard for inventory.  Yes, inventory.  In order to get your stuff back you actually have to take the remains of your stuff and present it for review by the insurance company.  You end up saying things like, “that box of ashes over there, that was all my underwear and some sticky pictures of a girl I used to bang.”  The pile of toys was quickly growing taller than expected and just as we were carrying out the last load a four year old girl walked into the back yard.  We all stood stunned as we saw the expression on her face change five times as the realization that she just lost all her shit slowly set in.  Before it got any worse I quickly handed a blank check to the helpful neighbor and asked her to take the kid to Toys-R-Us.  I told her I didn’t care what the kid wanted or how much it cost just buy it and rent a trailer to haul it back if necessary.  It seemed to make her feel better but for the next two months we carried all those new toys everywhere we went because she was so scared any building she left them in would burn down.

So now the wife is pregnant and increasingly more emotional, we have no house, I’m being accused of arson, winter is looming, and all we own is a trunk full of toys and beach clothes.  We need a roof over our heads so I call a hotel to book a room only to find out that its race week and all the hotels are triple the rate and booked up for a 200 mile radius.  NASCAR and its fans were attempting to force my family into the street.  Yet another reason to hate them all.  I managed to pull some strings and got us a room for a couple nights before the first race started.  After that we were homeless again.  Our days were spent inventorying the house and our nights typing up the forms the insurance company gave us.  I amused myself by forcing my wife to place not emotional but monetary value on her adult toys as I held them up for our friends and family to add to the inventory list.  My wife amused herself by openly laughing at all the items lost that she personally hated and knew I loved.  She’s a peach that one.

At this point the wife is still pregnant and becoming increasingly more bitchy by the minute, we’ll be homeless again in a day or so, I’m still being accused of arson, and we’re probably getting cancer from breathing all the chemicals burned in the fire.  All our friends and family were helping in anyway they could, that is, all of them except one.  One person was a little upset at us for getting all then attention.  What do you do when you loose all your fake sympathy to a real disaster in your family?  When you’re my psychopath mother-in-law you fake a heart attack and insist that your homeless, destitute, pregnant daughter be the one that picks you up from the hospital.  I’ve made it no secret how I feel about this bitch (www.juliankross.com/2008/11/), but at the time I thought even this was a bit much for her.  Looking back on it now, I’m surprised she didn’t toss a match down in the hallway of her trailer instead.

I could continue on for several chapters but I think by now you understand what a situation like this can do to a person.  I’ve basically explained what happened during the first week after the fire, and things didn’t settle down for almost a year.  An arson investigator eventually cleared me and then spent about an hour expressing his hatred for insurance adjusters. Before we moved back in the house my wife had the kid and if the inhalation of chemicals had any effect on her it was that she’s a little more of an asshole than the first one.  We eventually replaced most of our stuff including my wife’s dildo.  And my mother-in-law is still a cunt.

If you haven’t heard we packed our shit and moved up north.  Here’s a post about our move on Cringe Humor.

I spent $200k on an education I could have gotten with $10 worth of late charges at the library $20 worth of data charges on my phone

I just spent 30 minutes explaining what encyclopedias are to my 7 year old.  The majority of the time I was talking it felt less like an explanation, and more like a justification for their existence.  I should have known which tone the conversation was going to take based on the question that sparked it, “Daddy, when you were too young to have a phone, what did you use to google stuff for school?”

“When I was a kid no one had cell phones and most of us didn’t have buttons on the house phones.”

“What’s a house phone?”

“The kind that your grandmother has.  Never mind that, when we wanted to learn about something we looked it up in an encyclopedia.”

“Is that what they called google then?”

“No, it was a series of books with topics sorted in alphabetical order.  There were 25-30 books to a set and they were so expensive people use to save up for a set and one year after they bought them they would be out of date.”

“Then why did you buy them?  Why didn’t you just borrow them from the library.”

“Probably because people thought it made them look better if they owned a set.

“Oh, like when you drive around in your Porsche?”

“No, cars make you look cool.  Encyclopedias made you look smart.  If you have them now you’re a hoarder.”

“What kind of stuff was in them?”

“Almost everything.  If you were writing a report on gorillas you could find a whole page on gorillas in the G book.”

“How did you write a whole report on gorillas by just reading one page?”

“We wrote big, and we double spaced.”

“It doesn’t sound like you could learn much from those books.  I’ve read a whole book on gorillas and I saw a bunch more at the library that had different stuff in them.”

“You couldn’t learn everything from them, you just got a summary.”

“Like the search results from google?  If you want to learn everything you just have to click them and read the next page.  What did you do?”

“You could go get other books on the subject, I usually just made the rest up.”

“Why didn’t you just start with the other books and then you wouldn’t have had to buy that expensive set of encyclopedias?”

This led to 25 more minutes of conversation that I see now I could have prevented if I’d simply answered, “Because back then we were stupid.”

Those at know me well are the people that quickly understood I live my life leaning forward.  I always have ten things going at one time and because of this I make decisions and act on them quickly.  I’m usually awake and doing something for 18 hours per day, I have little time for chit chat, and seldom talk on the phone for more than 2-3 minutes.

This lifestyle is one of the reasons I love XM (yes I know they merged with Sirius but that part of my service sucks ass so I don’t acknowledge it exists, where’s my Soulstreet channel you communist pricks?).  It makes long rides seem like short trips across town.  I can be listening to anything I’m in the mood for in seconds and the on air talent says “fuck” a lot so I feel right at home.  This is what makes it so unfortunate that I find myself so infuriated at the company itself.  Over the last few days I’ve been attempting to call them to give permission to convert my account to a corporate account.  At the same time I need to pay the remainder on the balance before the conversion but no one can seem to give me that total without adding in extras that I didn’t ask for.  I spent two hours on the phone yesterday and mistakingly thought the former Yellow Brick Road cast member had fix all my billing issues.  She took the time between drooling and clapping for cupcake time to inform me that she couldn’t actually give me a final balance because it had to process over the next day or so but I would receive a bill in the mail and would not get an interruption in service.  That was yesterday.  Apparently the rules changed today.  First thing this morning I received a call from an automated service informing me my XM was about to be cut off if I didn’t press one to speak to someone about it.  Through a series of trick questions and couple rounds of the shell game and I was able to get Peggy, the bearded man on the other end of the line, to tell me that nothing I asked for was done and it would be more than happy to transfer my call to a different department/back to the US.

Again, friends see this coming, this is when I snapped.  I don’t have the time to do your job for you.  But in a change of heart, this time I didn’t yell.  I simple asked Peggy to place this message in my account notes:

“I gave specific instructions to an authorized representative of your company concerning the work I need completed on my account yesterday.  Today you have threatened to cancel my account and wasted more of my personal and business time.  Just as you submit an invoice to my attention for your services, I will be submitting an invoice for mine.  XM will receive a bill for my hourly rate of $125 per hour for the amount of time I have spent instructing your employees on how to manage my account.  If my service is discontinued due to the error of an employee of your company, a separate invoice will be issued that will include the cost of replacement audio entertainment including but not limited to fees of audible.com, iTunes, and rental from my personal CD collection.”

The invoice that was sent to XM accounts payable this morning was for $250 due upon receipt.  They better not push this too long or I’m applying late fees.

This morning I was eating breakfast in my local BBQ joint because none of the women in my life have ventured to the grocery store in the last couple weeks (don’t judge me, I’ve been busy).  The first part of the meal went as it normally does, drinking coffee, checking email, ignoring everyone else in the building that isn’t bringing me food.  About 10 minutes in, the regular breakfast table of the local crew of grumpy old fucks stately retirees suddenly got much louder than normal.  These guys argue every morning (most meals end with them agreeing they hate each other) but today it was louder than normal.  MUCH louder.

When I started paying attention it was going down something like this:  Fat Fuck stood up to inform Skinny Fuck that Jim’s property isn’t that damn big and there’s no way it reaches all the way to that road A.  Skinny fuck smirked at Fat Fuck and in a quiet cocksucker bashful tone replied that he didn’t have time to teach an idiot geography.  Black Fuck started laughing at Skinny Fuck’s remark so Fat Fuck (still standing over the table) requested to know just whose side Black Fuck was on.  Before Black Fuck could answer Fat Fuck screamed he knew the property was attached to road B because he’d been walking those woods his whole damn life.  Black Fuck reminded Fat Fuck that he has lived 5 miles away for the last 50 years and he’s never known him to walk farther than from the truck to the door.  Fat Fuck, unable to disprove Black Fuck’s theory, did what most old men do when they’re wrong, he ignored the comment and continued attacking Skinny Fuck.  Skinny Fuck asked how in the hell a piece of property attached to road C could ever be attached to Road B?  Fat Fuck replied “because the world is all fucking attached [Skinny Fuck].”

So far I was pleased with where this was going:

1.  Because I seemed to be the only one not at the table actually paying attention.

2.  Because old men where yelling obscenities in public.

3.  My eggs were really good today.

What I didn’t expect was for it to get even better.  Up to this point I hadn’t noticed that Fat Fuck’s son was sitting at the end of the table eating and ignoring.  He was wiping the remnants of his last bite off his face as he leaned into his bag and produced an iPad.  Within seconds he pulled up the satellite image of the area overlaid with property lines and parcel numbers.  As Fat Fuck’s son’s leaned over the table pointing at a particular area on the iPad screen he uttered three simple words, “You’re both wrong.”  Then the son sat down at his chair and giggled with Black Fuck as Skinny Fuck and Fat Fuck pouted in silence for the next 5 minutes.

The iPad did what man could not.  It told an ignorant old man to shut up and sit down, and he did it.

Even today I'd rather bang the one on the right

When our children check the history books for this week in 2010 they will find two entries the world will never forget.  The legendary and talented Lena Horne died at age 92, and Teri Hatcher (that old actress who showed her tits in Tango and Cash) launched an advice blog for women.  Lena Horne was one of the greatest singers and actresses of all time.  Terry Hatcher quit college because she got a bit part on The Love Boat.  Ms. Horne lived thru the Great Depression, graduated college, and succeeded in her career despite over 60 years of racial oppression.  Teri is the daughter of a nuclear physicist and a computer programmer and she’s still a fucking idiot.

Lena Horne once said, “You have to be taught to be second class; you’re not born that way.”  This came from a woman who was told she was “less than” the majority of her life.  No one insinuated she might not have what it takes they told her she was shit because of her race and she carried on and succeeded in spite of those people and their opinions.

Teri describes her new blog (gethatched.com) as “a web destination ready to help you break out of your shell and discover what was there all along … one empowered chick!”  This is half ass line written by a room full of barefoot elitists curled up on comfy furniture in a 3,500 square foot sitting room while brown people brought them tea without making the mistake of actual eye contact.

Lena Horne was born in 1917, was 92 years old when she died, and I can’t find a single item where she was ever anything less than proud of her age, race, gender, or heritage.  Teri Hatcher has a history of being victimized, named her son after a VCR, and supposedly turned 40 in 2004.  That last one’s stumped me because she quit college after 2 ½ years in 1977 when she would have been 13.  I’m saying that puts her at about 53, but her shoulders look like they may be 70 or so and parts of her face are going to require carbon dating to get a real confirmation of age.

So ladies if you’re looking for a role model upon which to base the life and career goals you’re currently setting for yourself I suggest you pick up a Lena Horne biography and start realizing you don’t have any real problems holding you back.  But, if you’re looking for relationship and homemaker tips from a divorced millionaire idiot who took a soap opera gig because her money makers dropped level with her elbows, then jump on over to gethatched.com.