Somewhere in my blog travels, I stumbled across Crunchy Betty, who is (super pretty and) having a contest thing where you send her a picture of food on your face. I thought, “Boy, that sure sounds fun, and maybe I should keep up with this blogosphere elbow-rubbing thing.” You know, instead of being that pissed-upon loser blog in the corner.

And really, does it get any better than applying balls of sugary Trix to your face in ninety-degree heat, using peanut butter as adhesive? I had to take these pictures faster than I jump into bed at night. (I don’t like standing next to the bed after dark because SOMETHING MIGHT LOP OFF MY FEET WITH A SICKLE, so I usually do a little running leap, like I’m some goddamn gymnast in fear of being whipped by Bela Karoli.)

There. That was fun. But no one wanted to kiss me…?

[ETA: I’m sure I did this wrong, now that I think about it. I have this incredibly rich habit of glossing over words like a sixteen-year-old fresh out of Adderal and I’m wondering if I was supposed to actually make one of the facial mask recipes on Crunchy Betty’s blog. There might be a do-over in the future.]

Success is managing to photograph the subject without getting sprayed with milk and dirty boy spit.

Vic Fuentes from Pierce the Veil, fuck yeah.

I haven’t even come close to collecting all my thoughts about Warped Tour 2010, but when I was going through the pictures from yesterday and came across this one, there was no way I could wait to post it. Pierce the Veil’s set was the highlight of the day for me; nothing else came even close. As far as I’m concerned, that one short set was totally worth the price of admission and enduring the unrelenting sun beaming down 100 degree rays of pain and torture on us all day long.

I cried through their entire set.

There’s much more to come! You know I’m a wordy motherfucker. (Plus, there’s still Butler County Fair stuff to post about, including a REALLY MAJOR secret I learned about Alisha!) But until then, anyone who thinks Warped Tour is “gay” or maybe just doesn’t get it should check out this article by Alternative Press’s Scott Heisel, because it made me simultaneously say “Fuck yeah” and cry. Music turns me into a pussy, what can I say.

Filthy disgusting boy-hands, all day, every day.

It is hot. We don’t have air-conditioning, except in the bedroom. Just putting four pictures in a post is making me sweat and it’s not even 10:00am yet. Words will have to come at a later date.

(And I have a lot of them, because Alisha and I went to the Big Butler County Fair, OMG.)

I grew up with an in-ground pool at my disposal and central air. Ten years I’ve spent in the hell that is this piece of shit house in Brookline, and I have come to the conclusion that acclimation isn’t a real thing. I actually wished I had to work yesterday, just to get a reprieve.

“You had a REAL pool when you were a kid, and all I get this cheap balloon-thing?” Yep, pretty much, Chooch.

People passing our house yesterday were actually willing Chooch to splash them.

Tomorrow, it’s supposed to be 96 degrees for Warped Tour.

But at least it’s open space, and not the brick prison I call home, which is essentially Hell with a lid on.

When Alisha moved into her current apartment last summer, I was immediately entranced by the old-time creep factor of the house’s foyer and had been wanting to take pictures of someone in it ever since.

I just wasn’t sure who. Finally, Alisha’s pug, Bonzi,  was like, “OK fine, I’ll do it. You can lose the number to the Humane Society now, Jesus Christ.

”

I wish I had a flapper to drape across Bonzi’s lap.

Miraculously, we were able to get Alisha’s cat, Fallon, to sit still for a couple of shots. This one was my favorite, sitting with their backs to each other in typical sibling fashion.

Doubly miraculously is that Chooch was there and managed to keep his big head out of all the shots, and only tripped over the lighting once.

Henry brings home a donut for Chooch every Sunday. He looks cute eating it for approximately .002 seconds before all the sugar activates his Asshole Switch.

Hey look at me and my mommy blog!

I’ve been having conflicting feelings lately. Feelings that have made me want to seriously pack a bag and just go away, possibly never come back.

I suspect that maybe this is normal, that other moms probably feel this way at times, but it’s hard when you can’t find anyone to admit that, when you feel that just saying the words out loud will have you ostracized from humanity. Makes you feel kind of alone in it all. Lately, it’s seemed like Chooch and I fight with each other more than anything else and I hate that. I hate going into work with blood-shot eyes, trying to suppress that sniveling reaction your body goes through when you’ve been crying all afternoon. I miss being able to just enjoy my kid instead of constantly yelling at him and having him defy me over and over. Usually this starts as soon as he rolls out of bed.

I don’t hate my kid. But I’m starting to hate being a mom. I don’t want to hate being a mom. Last week at work, I overheard one of the analysts in her office, talking on the phone to her nineteen-month-old. And she sounded so happy talking to her son, praising him,  repeating over and over that she loved him and would be home soon. I remember those days, too. And they seem like they happened forever ago. When my co-worker hung up, she said to herself, “I love being a mother.”

Fuck you.

Most days I’m too stressed and disgusted to “enjoy” being a mother. The five hours a night I spend at my job, in a clean and quiet office, is what I enjoy.

And that makes me feel like shit.

So I’ve been looking at baby pictures. Reading old LiveJournal posts from when he was in his first year. It’s been helping. And he’s been good this weekend, like the old Chooch that I thought must have been devoured by zombies because it’s been so long since I’ve seen him.

***

Yesterday was really good though. He was actually sweet, cooperative, suggested going to the cemetery to take pictures. THAT’S the Chooch I used to know. I convinced Henry to give him a faux hawk because I haven’t been able to stand the way his hair has grown in from that horrible shearing Henry gave him last December. In my mind, his bad seed behavior can be traced back to that horrible buzzing his scalp endured.

“Ugh. I look like Jimmy Neutron,” Chooch said when he looked in the mirror. But I was like, “Well, I like it and that’s all that matters.”

I don’t know where Henry got those shorts for him. I don’t approve.

“And then JESUS….woked up from the DEAD….and saw a ZOMBIE! and then died again.”

Literally an hour later, he realized that his hair had been sculpted into a cement slab. [More photos here.]

***

I do love Chooch. That’s never changed. I just need to find a way to get back to loving my role in his life. Maybe I’m an asshole for having the audacity to admit all of this.

But hopefully, there are moms reading who maybe feel the same and now they know they’re not alone. Because god knows I know how much it sucks to feel alone.

We decided to take Chooch to the Evans City Cemetery yesterday, where Night of the Living Dead was filmed (even though at least 5 cemeteries in the surrounding areas of Pittsburgh claim to hold that title). I think he was disappointed that there weren’t really any zombies there.

There was, however, a freshly buried body, and two old men hovering atop the loose earth who stared at us suspiciously across the way. I’m sure the locals just love getting visits from assholes like us.

They’re coming to get you, Barbara.

It was about as anticlimactic as you can probably imagine.

Afterward, I was hungry, so hungry; the kind of hunger that’s so intense, it devours any shred of patience and rationality that might still exist somewhere within my dark self, and I turn into the type of woman who might yank the steering wheel from the hands of the driver, causing the car to careen over a bridge into some disgusting river, if only to prove her point that dead bodies do exist beneath the filthy surface.

“How about Hank’s?” Henry suggested. “It’s Mexican.”

He made to pull into the lot and I yelled, “Um, I am NOT eating at a Mexican establishment named after some guy named HANK.” Then I saw that you ordered through a window and were expected to eat outside, at dirty picnic tables. (So maybe I wasn’t close enough to actually see the surfaces of the tables, but I just know. I just know.) “Oh and I am NOT eating outside,” I added, crossing my arms and scowling out the window. This is truth right here, not hyperbole.

“You know, I think you only do this shit to me,” Henry said, on his way to poutsville. “I bet when you’re out with other people, it’s never this hard to find a place to eat.”

At least three dozen traumatic food-finding scenarios with Christina flashed through my mind, but I said nothing.

“If you did this shit to Alisha,” Henry added. “she wouldn’t still be friends with you.

“

This is probably very true.

We settled on a stupid place called Ree’s Family Restaurant. It was bad enough the cheese wasn’t melted on my grilled cheese, but when you bring me a slice of blueberry pie and it’s been over-refridgerated to the point of coagulating into a pie-brick, and the crust tastes like the less-flavorful bastard offspring of one of those packaged Hostess pies, you can go choke on a dick, OK? It’s not often that I pass a piece of pie across the table after one fucking bite.

I should have just buried my food expectations in the Evans City Cemetery. Maybe they could make a cameo in the 8th remake of Night of the Living Dead.

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Henry and I waited until 9pm last night to get shit for the Easter basket. I mean! To tell the Easter Bunny what Chooch wanted.

Not that it mattered, because the first thing he went for was the one thing I actually had bought well in advance – a pull-apart zombie doll from Think Geek. He hasn’t put it down since, except for the 2 seconds it takes it him to pillage a package of chocolate dinosaur eggs.

“How did the Easter Bunny know?

” Chooch exclaimed. “I’ve been waiting so long for this!” Meanwhile, the box it was shipped in had been sitting on the coffee table for like, three weeks.

We sat next to Jesus at an ECHL hockey game last night, so I’m especially feeling it today.

I think Marcy’s a little dejected because ever since Chooch was born, the frequency of me shoving a camera in her face waned a bit. Or maybe she’s happy about that, but I DOUBT it.

She went to Pampered Pet for a little groom-session on Saturday morning, so she’s been looking real luxurious and I couldn’t resist shoving her inside a photoshoot oven last night. Unfortunately for Marcy’s son Don, the battery died during Marcy’s sesh. I had big plans of wrapping his head in a babushka but I guess I’ll do that tonight since I have no job again.

I know it’s horrible to play favorites, but of my four cats, Marcy’s IT. She’s the equivalent of poking a hornets nest. I feel like my reflexes are outstanding because of her.

Anyone who meets her usually leaves with a strong feeling of either love or hate. You know who really loves Marcy? My friends Bill and Jessi, who were actually just here last week for a quick visit on their way back to Michigan. Bill can never resist dangling his hand in front of her, which inevitably gets him maimed, and then you have Jessi crying and screaming, “Billy! Why do you have to touch her?! You know she’s going to attack! I hate that cat so much!”

When they were visiting in October, Jessi was trying to use our computer to finalize some wedding stuff;  Marcy jumped onboard and sat near the keyboard, daring Jessi to extend her fingers. Marcy was glaring and growling, and Jessi was yelling for me to come stop the madness, but I just sat on the couch and watched. It was exciting!

Remarkably, she hasn’t attacked Chooch yet. She has just recently got to the point where if he approaches her daintily (which is a feat for him), she will allow him to give her a small goodnight peck on her head. But she’s not happy about it. I think she knows that if she ever hurt Chooch, Henry would punt her out the front door (and then I would leave Henry). So when Chooch screeches, “Marcy!!!!111 Watch me play cars!!!!” she disgruntedly obliges. Mostly she sits stalk-still, hoping he’ll mistake her for a furry statue.

She draws blood from 8 out of 10 people who enter this house. Maybe you’ll be one of them.

I just love her so much!

My grandma was finally released from the nursing home yesterday. There’re both pros and cons to that, I guess, as nursing homes can be negligent and have proved that several times during her stay. However, being back home with my aunt Sharon isn’t really such a hot idea either, as she will likely fall right back into a routine of little movement and no outside interaction.

In any case, Sharon sought Henry’s shoveling skills so that the paramedics would be able to get my grandma safely into the house. Chooch and I went with him, because I had wanted to get some new pictures of Chooch anyway. It was sort of a bad idea. And I don’t even mean the fact that Chooch was being completely uncooperative and dickish with me. It was just sad being at that house. I grew up there, and to be outside of it, with the sunlight highlighting all the mossy overgrowth, broken lanterns, rusted railings and caved in gates? It was a bit much for me.  Especially when I followed Chooch into the backyard and saw how decrepit and forlorn the back patio looks, the pool nothing more than a gaping leaf-filled hole in the ground and the accompanying  shanny overtaken by weeds and God only knows what kind of wildlife.  That used to be the summer hot spot, right there, but since my Pappap died it has quite literally been consumed by nature. It breaks my heart to know that my kid will never get to have pool parties there like I did.

Maybe they should rent out their backyard to be used as a horror movie set. Because I honestly had the shivers being back there. And the back of the property is hugged by an expanse of woods, so God only knows how many bodies are buried there.  I used to walk out there daily when I was in high school and there were times when the hair on my arms would stand erect in ninety degree weather and my heels would instinctively fling me into a pirouette and send me running back home.

Chooch ate chicken nuggets while Henry teetered on the edge of Heart Attack Mountain in an attempt to break through blocks of ice on the front porch. Apparently, after the big fucking snowstorm that left Pittsburgh looking like Antarctica gave birth in its background, my aunt was trying to solve the problem by throwing salt on three feet of snow, which only resulted in layers of it melting and then freezing into sheets of ice. Which in turn became Henry’s problem. He should be used to cleaning up after me and my family by now, though. Like the time I tried to vacuum liquid from the bottom of the fridge and didn’t realize that it was pouring out of the hose and onto the kitchen floor behind me. Immediately became Henry’s problem.

While Henry was shoveling, Sharon called me from inside the house to inform me that Henry is an angel and that I better never let him go. This schmooze fest went on for a few minutes while I’m struggling to not blurt out, “He better never let ME go! I’m the awesome one in this arrangement!” but secretly I knew she was right. Goddammit. At one point she said he was god sent and I was like, “OK, I have to go.”

There’s a large shed that’s also in the back of the house. Chooch was like, “What the hell is this, a farm?” and I almost blurted out, “No, this is where I hid my boyfriend Mike when he ran away from home.” It was unlocked, but I was hesitant to open the door.

It just feels like everything is going to break if I touch it and I guess I would just rather remember it the way it used to be. And not some rotting cavity filled with broken down mowers, lawnchairs  and ATVs. And probably dead animals. Actually, after my Pappap died, a “family friend” broke into that shed and stole most of his stuff, anyway (and later fell from a ladder, broke his neck, and died). So it’s likely filled with nothing but stale air and shitty fucking karma.

He later bitched the whole way home because for some reason HIS PANTS WERE ALL WET, WAH.

I used to roller skate up and down this lane. There were speed bumps on it back then though, which my Pappap was responsible for. The story was that there was a family who lived at the end of the lane and their teenaged son used to get a little overzealous behind the wheel. Apparently he almost ran over my aunt Susie when she was a kid, so in went the speed bumps. Every one hated them, especially once my friends started driving, because no one ever thought to SLOW DOWN for the SPEED BUMPS and perhaps save the undercarriage of their cars, and I don’t know, a LIFE?

After my Pappap died, some of the neighbors got together and had the speed bumps taken out. Even though I had already moved off that street and into my own apartment by then, it really upset me. Like a piece of him had literally been ground into dust. Ew, I couldn’t stand it. I hate the fuckers who live on that street.

I shudder to think what will become of my grandparent’s house once my grandma is gone. Being there yesterday was kind of terrible.

9 comments

Because Henry was being a little angel by cleaning for game night (more on game night horrors later), I decided to do the grocery shopping. But really it was so I could use the shopping list tab in my Awesome Note app, which is so far my favorite app, aside from Words With Friends, which is apparently good for meeting future husbands on top of learning new two-letter words.

What you should know about me, and probably could have guessed, is that I am no grocery shopper. Basically, I’m a fat red “F” upon an essay on the topic of housewives. I mean, there was a time a year ago when I wanted Henry to make sugar cookies and he was all, “If you want cookies then get your jigglin’ ass to the store and buy the ingredients.” Even after writing it down, Janna and Blake still had to come with me to make sure I didn’t fuck it up. For Christ’s sake, this is what my fridge used to look like pre-Henry:

(Lol @ Zima. That was probably for Janna.)

So yesterday I made Alisha go with me. I didn’t need a lot of stuff. In fact, I had given myself a budget, which I never actually put a number to, but just kept chanting ‘budget budget budget” in my mind as I roamed sadly through aisles of shit you can make food with. Alisha is pretty no-nonsense when it comes to shopping, so I sort of felt safe. I was even really impressed when I called Henry to see if he wanted me to get stuff for spinach dip and Alisha already knew how to make it!

And even where to get the ingredients! (Although I still felt it necessary to send Henry a photo of the packet of Knorr’s vegetable powder shit to make sure it was right.)

I was going to get salsa, but the kind I like is nearly $5 and I was like, “Oh, not from my checking account.” I’ll save that for Henry’s next trip. In another aisle, I found myself wondering how I got to the point where $3 for a bag of candy inspired me to clutch my heart. Jesus christ, I can’t tell  you how much I hate to spend money when it’s my own and not my mommy’s.

Every single person in that store I hated. Every last one of them. Were you at Giant Eagle in Brentwood, PA yesterday? Hated you. Handicapped? Still hated you. A baby? You were ugly and I hated you. I was sick of the squeaking wheels on my cart; sick of the ugly babies; sick of the women who camped out in the aisles with their carts, chatting to other uppity soccer moms they know from their swinger parties; sick of the $14.99 price tag on the Penguins coffee mug I was eyeing up (Alisha considered getting it for me for Christmas, saw the price, and then picked up a shot glass and said, “Uh, can you just drink your coffee out of this?

” and I thought, “Well, it’s better than the arsenic-laced thimble Henry pours my coffee in.” TIMES, THEY ARE TOUGH!).

Alisha even asked me if I was crying at one point.

But then I saw it. It was in the aisle with all the baking bullshit. We were there so Alisha could get marshmallows for rice krispie treats. It’s all because of Alisha that I found a bag of gigantic regular and strawberry marshmallows, made in some unknown, off-brand factory, probably in Arkansas, and ready for me to buy them for only .

99.

“What the fuck are you going to do with those?” Alisha asked hesitantly as I tossed them in the cart.

“Make something awesome,” I said. I mean, duh.

Then we had to go down a bunch of other aisles before checking out. “I love grocery shopping,” Alisha said, which you know warranted a look of incredulity from me. “It’s fun because you can find cool stuff.”

“That’s what European travel is for!” I sighed, moments before Alisha chose the WORST POSSIBLE LINE TO STAND IN and I started getting hot flashes and our cashier was some slow-as-shit young kid who I think might have been exisiting solely on canned cheese. I texted Henry and thanked him for not making me grocery shop on the regular. Can you imagine?? No wonder people say I don’t look my age yet – it’s because I’m not forced to supermarket sweep.

But it was all worth it, newly cultivated gray hairs and all, because I got to come home to a clean (semi-clean) house and make these beautiful marshmallow monsters that were supposed to serve as game night referrees but instead just sat on the coffee table, frosting-hair congealing into poison and candied eyeballs slowly sliding down their sugared faces. To tell the truth, I am quite smitten with them and plan on preserving them so that their friendly facades can be enjoyed by all for years to come. Amen.

Henry and Alisha kept giving me annoyed looks as I tediously labored over them in a very Dr. Frankenstein fashion. I like to pretend they’re my army. With their help, I’ll be mayor of this town. Or at the very least, the person who gets to ring the bell in the clock tower. After Henry builds me a clock tower.)

Because I’m obsessed, I tweeted another photo of them  today. Henry was sitting next to me and when the tweet came through to his phone (yes, he gets  my tweets to his phone; that’s TRU LUV), he glanced at it quickly then put his phone down.

“You didn’t look at the picture,” I whined, insulted.

“Um, I know what it is. It’s those stupid marshmallows. And they’re right there on the table.” OK it’s true, they were right in front of him. But my photo was from a different angle. No excuses.

The one on my right is my favorite. He’s my little edible scene kid! (Although, I wouldn’t actually eat these. Chooch helped with some and well, he touches his butt as often as a dog LICKS his butt. Also, I saw him lick a toothpick-arm before spearing it into the side of a monster.)

I might make more, turn them into ornaments and sell them on ETSY. LOOK OUT WORLD (and Regretsy).

Henry and I used to letterbox back in 2004. The definition of  “used to letterbox” can be loosely translated to mean: we did it 2 or 3 times in the span of a month before it made us hate each other even more.

Letterboxing is like the primordial version of geocaching, where you follow clues and natural landmarks to reach a treasure consisting of a tupperware box with a booklet and rubber stamp inside. Letterbox purists make their own rubber stamp to use as their signature inside each letterbox they find. You then scribble the date next to your marking and take the rubberstamp supplied inside the letterbox to stamp your own booklet. It’s kind of like getting a Passport stamped and using it to remember where you’ve been.

Maybe I’m making this up.

But the way Henry and I do it is this: pick a letterbox within Western Pennsylvania, print out the directions, argue the entire time about who’s right and who’s wrong and who should just get pushed into a ravine, find the letterbox and then remember how pointless it is when we:

• a. don’t have our own stamp because I justcan’t find enough time to carve that intricate design of Satan with a vagina
• b. always forget to bring a pen to write inside the booklet
• c. remember that it’s not actual treasure we’re scavenging for

And then it’s always awesome when we’re looking for a box that was planted in 2004 and almost none of the natural landmarks are still there. “Look for the gray bunny standing next to the bubbling brook.” Yeah, sorry, that bunny’s long been filleted and skinned by a serial killer in-training.

But letterboxing is a good poor man’s hobby, and since we are a house of poor (wo)men I thought that maybe it would be something fun to do with Chooch, who only vaguely cared that we were searching for “treasure” and then stopped caring altogether when we passed a playground on the way to the pathetic bounty-hiding park.

I wanted to hug this tree and say, “Don’t worry, tree. I’m po’, too. So much that I had to ask to postpone my art show because I have no money to make anything to, you know, SHOW.”

The first letterbox we found (where “we” is a pronoun for HENRY who monopolized the directions as usual) was on the side of a hill. I’m sure in the summer it’s a cake walk, but autumn’s moist leaves could make an ant hill treacherous. It’s a good thing I have an itchy (camera) trigger finger, because I totally knew Chooch would fall.

I can’t remember the name of the “park” this was at, other than it was in Shaler, PA and it was less of a park, more of a great place to get yourself raped, stabbed, and then thrown over a waterfall. It had a very ch-ch-ch-ha-ha-ha ambiance that I loved/hated. The path was swampy from the rain we got the night before and mama didn’t like that one bit. I’m such an indoorswoman that the tiniest burr on my shoe has me shrieking “GET IT OFF!” And Chooch did just that, calmly wrenching the burr from my laces, but not without giving me an annoyed scowl full of incredulity.

There was a lot of aimless trekking, in search of a path that had two fallen trees strewn across it. We never found the fallen trees. BECAUSE A SERIAL KILLER HAD ALREADY CHOPPED THEM UP TO USE AS FIREWOOD TO FUEL HIS BODY INCINERATOR.

This is my favorite picture because it details Henry abandoning his family. Apparently Chooch and I are “annoying.” I’m sorry, but when you’re deposited within an enclave of trees, you scream as loud as you can. Everyone knows that. The Girl Scouts teach you that. So SORRY if that’s ANNOYING to you.

This was the second box we found. I had to stick my hand under a crappy wooden bridge and yank it out. It was horrifying and I kept waiting for a troll to bite my hand and give me HIV. This was about the time Chooch realized that, what the fuck, letterboxing is a fucking crock.

Henry is a rubber stamp enthusiast and likes to thumb through the booklets to admire all the handiwork. It’s something he got into when he was in THE SERVICE and all his SERVICE BUDDIES were out getting laid. However, I have no idea what that is in the picture. It’s definitely not a rubber stamp, and looks like some crude sex drawing scribbled by a passing-by serial killer.

OVER IT.

This time, I at least had the foresight to bring some of my art cards with me, so I stuffed those in the Ziplock bags. Henry didn’t think it was a good idea, but whatever. He also didn’t like the way I jammed everything back into the baggie, left it unsealed, and then attempted to punch it all back into the letterbox.

So then he would have to yank it off me, take everything out and start from scratch. I wish he were that precise and anal about HOUSECLEANING and peeing INTO the toilet.

There were a lot of little bridges there. I think maybe that’s why this particular Letterbox locale was called Little Bridge something or other. Maybe? Yeah? Chooch almost fell off this bridge while I was snapping away. Don’t worry, he probably wouldn’t have died.

On the way back to the car, I was trailing back slightly and kept tapping Chooch on the head. He’s like Henry and has a strong threshhold for ignoring me, but eventually he cracked, spun around and yelled, “Would you stop doing that??”

“It’s not me, it was the man who was walking next to me,” I shrugged, like it was natural for a strange man to fall into cadence next to me without me screaming my face off.

“Oh, Chooch, we know that’s a lie, because if there was some man walking next to mommy—”

“I’d have run off with him by now,” I finished for Henry.

There was a moment of silence as Henry considered this. “Yeah. I guess it could go that way, too.”

I’m determined to plant my own letterbox someday, probably just in my backyard so I can sit on the porch and wait for idiots to come digging. The directions will be so simple:

• Start at Robin’s Meth Lab
• Walk approx. 100 feet
• When you hear what sounds unmistakably like a murder between brick walls, turn right down the driveway
• Pass the carelessly strewn hypodermic needle
• If you stumble upon a pretentious kerchiefed hipster wearing peddle-pushers and planting carrots in her trendy Devendra Banhart-soundtracked garden, you’ve clearly gone too far. (I really hate the girl two houses up from me, FYI. She is single handedly spearheading a movement to bring back the Donna Reed mentality in women and I’m just not down with that bullshit at all. I hope she rides her fucking vintage wicker-basketed bicycle into a goddamn cyclone that’s en route to 1959 where she can cook a meatloaf for someone who cares and let me stew in my anti-domestic bliss. FUCK GODDAMN SHIT.)

No words. Just pictures.

Henry and his sister want to give their mom pictures of all the kids for Christmas, so his sister asked me to take the pictures because she knows I’m a trillion times better than Henry.

While I’m good at bossing around Chooch and Blake for photos, I don’t really know Kelly’s kids all that well so I’m kind of shy and a lot awkward around them, which sucks because I had some good ideas I wanted to try out.

Because of this, Henry attempted to help me out by yelling directions to them, and all that  resulted in was really unnatural postionings, like he was aiming for the look of a studio family portrait shot in the 70s.

I fired him after this one. I’m not sure what he was trying to achieve by pulling his niece Stephanie out to the side like that, except inducing doubts of self-worth.

I’m amazed that Chooch stood still for all the group photos. And Blake too, for that matter.

“Call me.”

This is the only one I really like; it makes me want them to start a band.  I’d like to try it again some day, when the sun isn’t blinding everyone and my nerves don’t have me in a full nelson.