Hey bro can I borrow your hatchet?

My two year old was playing with dolls. My wife’s uncle was watching TV. We were in the living room at his house. On TV some dude in a robe walked into the scene and opened the robe to reveal stab wounds all over his body. I’m kinda prudish so I took my kid down to the basement to play with the art supplies. I thought about giving the uncle stab wounds all of his body. I’m also in a shitty mood. Earlier today I yelled at another driver “fuck you you fucking piece of shit I hope you die of cancer!” and thought about how giving other people tumors wouldn’t be a very cool and cinematic superpower but it would be very satisfying. Being more honest, my reaction to the content of that show was really only half the story at most. Really I was annoyed because the show looked stupid, and it was distracting - lots of hoarse whispering and dramatic pauses - while I was trying to read E.B. White talking about his chickens laying too many eggs.

In the basement I had to actually parent, another annoying thing. Man… fuck that uncle. I put my book down and helped my kid unscrew the cap on the craft glue. She dropped quarter-sized dollops all over a piece of paper and stuck torn up strips of tissue paper in them. Of course I love her but I’m kind of parented out. It’s been a long week.

Today at the zoo we saw chimps and gorillas and a bunch of different kinds of monkeys. I think I’ve got enough backhair to carry my kids large primate style, clinging with their fingers wrapped in my fur, but their grip strength sucks so instead I carry them with my arms. I hold the kids up high, ranging between my belly button and the top of my sternum. I feel it in my arms, back, abs. My wife carries them on her hips, but my hips don’t stick out and seem basically useless.

The night before the zoo we went to a wedding for a dear old friend, where we saw many other dear old friends. These were ‘we were young and unemployed together’ friends, the ones I got drunk and abrasive a lot with. People who like to fuck with people but try to stop before anyone cries, because their moral compasses point solidly north. We had the occasional thrown beer cans and shouting matches and fuck yous, but also a ton of drunken I love yous and quite a few sober ones. I haven’t lived around any of those people for I think ten years. I have kids now and long since stopped being young and dumb (being old and dumb’s okay, I guess). The wedding meant a lot of catching up, and a lot of music. That’s one of the main things we all shared.

I danced with both my kids, and mostly the older one, for about two hours. Both our kids fell asleep. My wife and I danced together holding our passed out progeny to our torsos. I sobered up and we left, just in time for the kids to wake up.

We stayed in a loft room we’d rented for the night. I’m kinda paranoid. Maybe more than kinda. Movement outside my house makes my insides jump. Too many bad memories from when I was a kid, I think, and lots of bad associations from TV news and pop culture in the 80s. I set a folding chair in front of the door, because I’m like that. As we were giving our kids a snack just before bed, someone opened the door to our room, banging it into the chair, knocking onto the floor the bag of apples I’d forgotten was on the chair.

“Can I help you?” I said.

The person stopped opening the door, stuck one arm into the room and waved limply then shut the door.

“Should I go see what that was about?”

My wife shrugged.

I’m sure it was nothing. There are lots of very reasonable explanations. My heart was beating really fast, though. All the wedding reception warm fuzzies had turned to cold pricklies, or more like hot panickies and frozen stabbies. I knew I was being unreasonable, but that knowledge didn’t make me any more reasonable.

My older kid have already picked her bed…. the one closest to the door.

“I want to sleep in this bed,” I said, “it’s closer to the air conditioner and I’m really sweaty.”

“It’s mine, I chose it.”

“I know, but what can I trade you?”

“I don’t want to trade.”

“An extra scoop of ice cream tomorrow.”

“No.”

“Two scoops.”

“No.”

“Okay, look. I don’t want to make you worry, but I feel uncomfortable that that person opened the door to our room. I want to sleep in the bed closest to the door so I can be the one to tell them not to come in here in case they come in again.”

“Why?”

“Because. It’s like how when we walk down the street, I like to stand closer to the street-side on the sidewalk so I’m closer to the cars instead of you. It makes me feel like you’re safer.”

“I understand that but not this.”

“Please. Just please?”

“Okay. If you give me FIVE extra scoops of ice cream next time.”

“Well…”

My wife added, “you probably can’t eat that much ice cream.”

“Okay, extra five scoops,” I said.

“Okay. I’ll trade.”

She went over to her new bed then ran back to me, “no, it has to be SIX scoops, and also you have to give me a penny.”

“It’s a deal, but we are done negotiating about this now.”

“Okay.”

“Okay, now go get in your bed and we’ll read bedtime stories. Who is reading to you tonight?”

“Mama.”

“Okay. Good night.” I kissed her forehead. Then I grabbed a cinderblock from the heap of art supplies in the corner of the room and put it a half inch from the door, under the folding chair, so the door would smack the chair and block if someone tried to come in. Then I figured out how to work the switch on the rickety-looking doorknob that would maybe lock the door.

After my kids went to bed I tried to fall asleep. The old-ass air conditioner would click or pop or rattle every 20 minutes or so, and I would startle and turn over and look at the door, which hadn’t moved. This went on for what felt like the whole night. I told myself I was being ridiculous. That just added shame to the emotional mix, and didn’t relax me. I tried to relax by counting my breaths, slow and deep, and succeeded, until the air conditioner clicked and I startled and tensed up and looked at the door again. I thought about what would happen if someone did come into the room, should I shove them out the door? pick up the cinder block to hit them? should I go down to the kitchen a floor below and bring back a steak knife? why was I like this? I mean, I know why, but why had it lasted this long? I’m almost forty! Other than the self-loathing that was all slightly calming, actually. Eventually I thought I’d try to think about all the people I’ve had sex with, on the theory that that would be distracting. It was - I got slightly less jumpy, but only slightly - and it added a bit guilt and self-loathing to my emotional cocktail because what kind of creep thinks “someone might bust into the room to chop us all up into little pieces, remember that time we had sex in the ocean?!” and what kind of megacreep thinks about sex in the same room with his young children? Ugh. Fuck.

I managed to fall asleep, but slept fitfully, waking up several times to squint with my useless mole-man eyes at the curtain hanging over the window in the door, through which streamed light from the landing outside our loft room. My kids woke up bright and early. My big one crawled into bed with me. “Daddy! It’s time wake up! I love you! Tell me a story!” I kissed the top of her head and told her “I slept really badly last night. That’s my story. I want to sleep some more.” She kissed my forehead and said “my special daddy” then got up. I pulled the covers over my head and tried not to think about how I had to pee. I think the whiskey and coffee that had been my final drink had been a mistake on the nerves- and on the needing-to-urinate-when-trying-to-sleep-front. “Daddy! Uppy!” said my littler one. I picked her up into the bed with me. She put her head on my shoulder, then shouted “RRRAARRRR!” “Ahh! A lion!” “Baby lion,” she said, then patted my forehead, adding “daddy lion. Bye!” She climbed down from my bed then came back with a book about cat ballerina that she made me read to her three times. By that point staying in bed was less appealing than getting up. So I got up, dressed, went down to the bathroom and took care of business, went back up and helped my wife get our kids ready for the zoo. As I climbed the stairs back to our room I realized my abs were really sore. Apparently pogoing while holding 45 pounds of child is good core workout, and my feet hurt too.

The zoo was fun, baby gorillas and shit. Literally shit. The big gorilla shat in its hand and ate it. The chimp cage had shit smeared all over the window. Both gross, and both a big hit with all the kids around. We walked all over and I carried my kids a lot too so by the time I got into the car I was sore basically everywhere. Then we drove back to my wife’s aunt’s house where we’d been staying before the wedding, where the living room’s taken up by a big TV that is really distracting, and where the floorboards are really creaky, and there’s no insulation between the ground floor and the basement, and no ceiling tile in the basement, so every sound travels, especially in the morning when the aunt, dog, and my kids pop out of bed.

I’m sleeping in the basement because the guest room is too small for our whole family. I don’t mind because the basement’s cooler than the upstairs. The family members we’re visiting are cheap, and slim, and have slow metabolisms. I’m the opposite on all of those. I love when I stay in hotels by myself when I travel for work because I can crank the AC to 65 or 62. (By the way some damn hippie designed an exhibit on the environment at some damn zoo that made my damn kid say things like “it makes the polar bears cry if we don’t recycle” and “walking to the library is better for the polar bears than driving.” Someday she’ll learn about the air conditioning being bad for the polar bears too and I’ll have to look her in the eye and say “the polar bears can all die, sweetie, Daddy feels too sweaty to care.”) This is the part of the year when I am a swamp, damp and mucky and stinking all over. Someone please, drain and plow me under, or whatever the fuck it is people do to wetlands when they develop them and destroy them and replace them with something habitable. (Nate Hawthorne: Worthless Real Estate.) The basement also means less contact time with my immediate and extended family, about which I can only cheer. I love my kids, but they are tiring and I am tired.

The tradeoff is that the basement has been pissed in by the family dog so much that the urine smell now wafts out of the dry basement floor. To be totally honest, I may be unfairly overstating that. The pee scent could come from previously undiscovered piss puddles like the one I found with my sock last night as I pushed a laundry basket aside to reach an outlet to plug in my phone charger. Also in the basement: the cats’ litter pan, and the stairwell leading down there is freshly painted. There’s some mildew scent too, though it’s possible that’s just my clothes and/or body. This potpourri of grody is still worth it because I get to be alone sometimes during this trip. Except when I have to parent my kid in the basement because the living room is full of shitty violent TV in which I can not read my book.

The particular book I was not tonight managing to read is White’s essay collection One Man’s Meat, which I typoed at first as One Man’s Mean. Surely more than one. Many Men’re Mean would be a more accurate title, though I suppose it could be about a man averaging something. (One Man’s Median, Another Man’s Mode.) I’ve read a few of the columns in the book. I like it. It make me want to write more, which I rarely feel. I have a vague recollection that the title is the first half of some old cliche. One Man’s Meat Is Another Man’s…. Murder? Mystery? Mistake? Nephew? Cock? Tofu? Potatoes? Pasta Noodle? Revenge?

I got that book out of the library the other day. I went in and looked around for something to pass the time. I looked up E.B. White, saw they had this collection and felt really stoked. I found it on the shelves, took it to the checkout desk. “Are you still at the address we have on file?” “Yup.” “Do you have any idea?” “No I left everything but my library card at home” I said as I put my library back in my wallet next to my drivers’ license. “Your card expired two years ago.” “I don’t have any ID on me.” “Well… okay. You can check this out but next time you come in you definitely have to renew the card, which means bringing your ID.” “Of course.” This will be the last time I use this particular library, since I haven’t lived in this town in 15 years and now have an out of state ID.

I’m tempted to keep the book, because I’m petty and selfish. Plus it looks old. It’s copyrighted 1944 though I don’t know when it was printed. It has one of those old pre-computer checkout cards in it. The first stamp is from 1978. The last is from 1994. It was checked out thirty times in that period. I am also tempted to give it back because I’m fearful of rules and authority figures and my own ability to feel guilty for doing unprincipled things like stealing library books. Plus if I steal it it’ll just be another fucking book to have to pack up and carry when we move.

We are moving again in about a month. I don’t need more books or anything else to carry. Last time we moved I cut my book collection more than in half. I think my back is in better shape this time than last time, because I’ve gotten into carrying around a sandbag for my exercise – it’s appropriately Sysiphean to fit with my mood – so at least that’s something.

With the moving come up I live in terror. Well, I live in additional moving-related terror, compounding the ordinary everyday terror I feel, a lacquered top set across the opening to the trunk of fears that sits in the center of my head and neck, reaching deep into my torso. Among these moving related terrors: what if we never find a new place? what if we find a new place and there is something horribly wrong with it like black mold or lead paint dust and it hurts our kids? what if we find a new place and it just kinda sucks, like the place we’re in now where the stupid shower has so little water pressure it’s hard to actually get your hair wet (even with my very little hair - head hair I mean, I have loads of hair otherwise, just not anywhere anyone would want it), and our basically uninsulated walls in two rooms and so the cold and the extra expense from that. I live in terror as well of our cats, that they will freak out again and get lost. (I have scars from our last move, from the deep bloody claw marks. One of them cuts across one of my tattoos. [I should say, if I’m being totally honest I don’t mind the scars. They’re on my forearm and make me look tough, until I say they’re from my wuvvly widdle titty tat, but that moment of tough-look is kinda cool.]) I am also in terror of fucking up my back carrying all the dumb shit we still own, like books, and clothes, and dishes, and a mattress. (Did you know you can herniate a disc lifting as little as ten pounds? And that herniated discs increase your chance of cancer and impotence by 300%? I made all of that up, but it feels true and when I am done writing this I will google to find out the actual truth which I am sure will be even worse, because the truth is always worse by virtue of it being true, and the truths I will no doubt learn this time will be that I am in great medical danger, or that I am not and that I am a pathetic hypochondriac, or maybe both.) I am also in terror of my wife and kids, who will surely dislike how I pack boxes and load the truck and get in the way while I’m doing so, about which I will grump because I know myself, unfortunately (I would be a stranger if I could), and that excessive grumping probably ruin my kids and my marriage. And what if we find a place too far from my work, or too far from the things we want in our family life? What if something goes wrong with the moving truck? What if we have too much stuff to fit? Or not enough, and so we spent too much on a truck we don’t need? Terrors abound. Moving-terror is small and stunted, which in a way is a gift, compared to the massive ones that lurk around here much of the time, like the one that woke up when that person opened the door to our room.

That’s a bonus to the basement of stench. I’m not scared of anyone breaking into it. That leaves me free to contemplate my menagerie of lesser horrors, like all the spiders that live down here. I feel safe from the bigger horrors because no one would ever come down here to murder someone because it’s just too inconvenient (murderers are notoriously lazy, I bet), what with the rickety staircase and big fucking basement centipedes, and all them nasty smells, though come to think of it this might be a good place to hide a body if you happened to already have a corpse on hand, like if, say, you had hypothetically taken a hatchet to the face of a certain uncle of your spouse in retaliation for that uncle forcing you through his television and poor social skills to actually have to care for one of your offspring. Hypothetically speaking. Totally unrelated, anyone got a hatchet I could borrow?