Sugar and Spice. Snakes and Snails. Kabblammo!

Let’s ease back into this Childish Man blog with something kind and supple. How about GUNS. (I intend to avoid the tired Second Amendment vs. Gun Violence discussion and hope your comments will do the same.)

A few weeks ago I began looking for a movement, an effort, something to which I could dedicate my energy and help “make the world a better place” not only for myself but especially for my kids. Nothing gets me emotionally bothered quite like framing an otherwise out-of-mind issue in a way that seems to threaten children. “Is your attic infested with Brown Recluse spiders? Your kids may be in danger!” Next thing I know I’m climbing up there with a flamethrower.

So my mind listed for me some choices that included collecting belly button lint, squirrel taxidermy, sous-vide cooking (sous-vide from the French meaning “eat raw food out of a Ziploc”), and gun control. I see now that this was a set-up from the beginning.

At this point I had little more than an opinion that guns are basically dangerous.  Clearly I needed to be more self-righteous before stroking a check to the Brady Campaign, marching a downtown street with a painted placard, or yelling obscenities from the balcony of a legislative chamber of my choosing.

As I often do, I began my research with some YouTube demagoguery. I watched videos of NRA hit man Wayne LaPierre. And then some tear-jerking clips of moms talking about their gun-murdered children. After a day shifting between rage and uncontrollable sobbing, followed by a few hours of bad whiskey sleep, it was time to sober up with some concrete numbers.

Before I continue, I must admit to being under a self-imposed news blackout for most of my SAHD (stay-at-home dad) days. With my battering ram of an 8-year old son who needs constant attention and a 5-year old daughter that is frequently in or recovering from yet another surgery (something I will get to in future posts), I don’t feel like spending my remaining time on news from Crimea or even from a few miles away.

Keeping in mind my blissful ignorance about gun statistics, and my general awareness of the emotional sensitivity that dominates the gun issue – the sadness of gun control advocates, the Obama-fueled paranoia of gun show retailers, and the mutual contempt that both sides seem to have for each other – I expected the statistics would blow away the competition in a manner of speaking.  Or at the very least that gun death numbers, when compared to other causes of death in children, and the relative sizes of the associated campaigns to save lives in those areas, would be fairly equal. To my surprise, they aren’t even close.

I’m not going into the numbers because, unfortunately, it isn’t terribly interesting.  I will let you visit the CDC WISQARS database and search the numbers on your own (and see the dreadfully formatted summary table below.  Sorry.  Click on it for a larger image). It is my conclusion, and perhaps it should’ve been all along had I cared to look, that if I am truly concerned about the safety of my kids I should be far and away more concerned about car safety, suffocation, fires, and drowning than about guns. Mind you, I’m not suggesting that any parent worry about or fear cars let alone anything else, rather that a healthy concern represent the risk. Unfortunately I don’t see passionate pleas from a Million Moms nor dollars flowing through lobbyists and political campaigns concerning the kids who die from burns or from drowning, things that kill children in greater numbers than all circumstances involving guns combined – intentional, unintentional, or suicide.

For the record, I don’t like guns. I don’t own any. And I don’t want any. In my life and  in my community, no matter how often gun rights advocates tell me otherwise, they are unnecessary. I feel sorry for the victims of gun violence and their parents, families, and friends. But I also feel sorry for people who live in a shadow of fear of their fellow man, a shadow so dark that they spend hundreds if not thousands of their dollars on weapons, and even more lobbying for expanded “freedoms” to take guns into more places, like churches, bars, and airports.   The fear conjured by both sides is, to me, unjustified.

I have recently become a fan of Dr. Aaron Carroll, a pediatrician and health policy researcher at Indiana University School of Medicine. He summarizes what I said beautifully, though it only touches briefly on violence, and I recommend at the very least that you see the video below about risks and our fears about them. In fact, I recommend that you subscribe to his HealthCare Triage videos as well as to his articles on the WordPress blog (www.theincidentaleconomist.com). I’ve found some great stuff here to help me temper my little crusades about washing hands (anti-bacterial soap) and even drinking milk.

Thanks for reading!

CM

Hello, Again

I’m back and hopefully I’ll stay awhile.

But, I am changing the format of this blog. If you’ve read CM (The Childish Man) in the past you know I used to pull stories from my strange life to make you laugh. I hope some of them did. But within a few months I learned that writing humor is exceptionally difficult.

Humorists like James Thurber and David Sedaris and others put humor in their writing almost constantly. Rarely does a paragraph go by without a shock, bizarre metaphor, or at least a tickle. And although, from my experience, some of these bits come up easily, most of them require a finger down the throat, by which I mean not only that it’s unnaturally difficult but also that it burns afterwards. Whether self-deprecating or judging others, humor can get nasty and raw and this is often done unintentionally. It just comes out that way. This, along with the temptation to embellish didn’t sit well with me.  So I quit.

So now I want to write about my life and other topics with humor as a tool instead of an objective. I am still a self-emasculated Childish Man who also happens to be a husband and stay-at-home father of two. Therefore, this blog will cover parenting, but that’s not all.

Having been at home for five years now, I want to get back to some kind of work, though I don’t know what. The fear of job searching at age 43 after years of meal planning, laundry, and baseball/soccer practice logistics scares the shit out of me and it deserves attention. To say the least, it has been challenging to think about my life in terms of its outcome (“being happy” or “making a difference”) as opposed to its inputs and processes (“I cleaned up vomit today” or “I successfully avoided the temptation to drive into a fucking telephone poll”).

Perhaps I should make no promises about what this blog will become. At the very least, maybe we can all get through it.

Coffee Totally F***in Rocks!

Within a few minutes of drinking my first cup of coffee this morning, I was busy drafting out a vision, or rather a lingering memory, of last night’s pee dream.  You know, the realistic and worrisome, but partially waking, thoughts you get when your bladder is full and it’s telling you to get up before it demonstrates to you and your wife how much closer you are in life to wearing Depends than to the night-time pullups your kids wear.

Last night’s episode was about what I would be like, how I would react, when I finally admitted that I had a brain tumor (I don’t, fyi).  Would I pull my kids out of school to spend the two remaining months of my life with them, or would I embrace a life of “letting myself go” by swearing off clothes, personal hygiene, and personal dignity?  Would I be a reluctant bastard screaming at the gods, or be accepting of the reality that I would be never feel what sex is like in my fifties, sixties, or seventies?

Then I wrote down some thoughts about Boba Fett living in the northern suburbs of Atlanta, taking his little Fetts to private school and then hunting down a drive-through sausage biscuit. Next came the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle of Parenting, in which I determined that both the whereabouts and attitude of my children cannot be accurately known at the same time.  I also made a note about the uncertainty of this Uncertainty Principle – that once you discovered this truth, it would no longer apply.  A sort of “opposite day” in Quantum Mechanics, thereby giving rise the Opposite Day of Quantum Parenting hypothesis.

I wasn’t done.

Under this I also wrote:

• A list of my favorite Christmas marches, including Bizet’s “Farandole,” of course, but also “Carolan’s Concerto” as performed by The Chieftains and The Belfast Harp Orchestra.  Although not a traditional holiday tune, the Concerto sounded Christmassy this morning as I whistled it while completely stripping and re-decorating the tree
• “the pipsqueak terror?”
• “basket of sundry goods to the Jewish mafia”
• And, finally, what I can now only decipher as “Xmas mauphes.”

After returning from taking the kids to school, I began searching frantically through the kitchen for my notebook, which I eventually found in my pocket.  But during the search I noticed inside the sealed glass jar where I keep the coffee grounds was a two-tone brown of a dark shade atop a sediment of tan, like a wholly uninspired attempt at sand art.  I realized I had forgotten to blend the caffeine and decaf grounds that I normally brew, instead going pure and uncut.

And now, I’m going back to bed.