Starting a blog, like beginning anything worthwhile, is never easy. It takes resolve, it takes planning, it takes patience. It takes a few drinks, preferrably right after lunch and yet before your wife gets home from the store.
“What on earth are you doing?!” my wife asks me. She’s just walked into the living room and found me sitting at my computer, having just made myself comfortable in my nice black leather chair that I think I stole, if memory serves. But from who? Or is it ‘whom’? I should know this.
“Writing?”
“I can see that, but where are your pants?”
I gesture to the couch without needing to look. “There.” And now back to writing…
“Well put them on. My friend Max will be here any moment and I don’t want you doing the mad scramble to get into your pants while I answer the door. Then she’ll walk in and you’ll be zipping up your fly and she’ll be thinking we were fooling around…”
“Well, if she’s going to think it anyway…” I implore. She looks at me like I just asked her if she might be willing to consider exotic dancing as a night job. “I mean, I’ve already got my pants off…”
She rolls her eyes so hard I swear it makes a sound and then she gestures impatiently toward my pants, which, quite frankly, my pants don’t deserve. I spontaneously decide, on my own, to put them on.
They’re a nice pair of gray slacks that I’ve ‘hemmed’ with a pair of scissors. It wouldn’t be so bad except that the only scissors I could find that day were left-handed safety-scissors for kids that have a decorative wavy edge better suited to cutting brightly colored construction paper. I tried to counter the waviness by cutting in a counter-active wavy manner, sort of like one sine wave cancelling out the other to create a straight line, but…
“Chris! Would you stop admiring your pants and put them on?” my wife says.
“Oh. I didn’t realize you were still in the room. My bad.” I put them on, one leg at a time, just to show how bourgeois I am. Sure, a guy like me has a way of putting them on both legs at once, but it involves model rocketry and some on-the-fly (Ha!) calculations and some advanced theories about quantum chromodynamics and Strong Force that I’d rather not fool around with right now. Especially while the wife’s watching.
She walks out of the room to do who-knows-what. Grout the tub maybe.
Honestly, the amount of work she goes through when a guest is coming over to our house is astonishing. New potpourri appeared in our bathroom when that girl from Craigslist came over to look at the recumbant exercise bicycle, just in case, I’m guessing, she decided to use the bathroom. A new throw-pillow spontaneously came into being when my drummer came to pick me up for a gig. A decorative basket of fruit teleported onto our kitchen counter last week, when that guy came around looking for his black leather office chair. It amazes me. Really.
“When is she going to be here?” I call out towards the other room.
“I don’t know! She said she’d be here when she got off of work!”
“Well, when’s that?”
“Anytime between now and nine!”
I take a look at my watch. Jesus, it’s 4:39PM. Cable repairmen give you a smaller window than that.
“Tonight, I trust? I mean, she’ll be here technically today, right?”
My wife walks back in the living room while putting on some earrings and I start putting on my shoes. “Well, duh. We’re not waiting all night for her.”
“Why the bloody hell not…” I grumble. “we’re already waiting all damn day…”
“Oh, stop your grumbling and just be ready when she comes because we’re leaving right when she gets here. Besides, this was your idea. We’re going to go see that movie you wanted to see.” she tells me.
“What movie?”
“That one. You KNOW. That one we saw the trailer for online when we were at my parents and you said ‘Oh, that looks funny’. And I was all like, no, that looks stupid. And then you said ‘But it’s got that guy from Shaun of the Dead in it’, and then I said, oh yes, that IS him and so now we’re going to go and see it. With Max.”
“Why on earth do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Every time you imitate me, like you just did, why do you always make me sound like I’m mentally handicapped?”
“I don’t know. I guess it just comes out that way.”
“I don’t actually sound like that do I?” I ask seriously.
“Oh, baby, of course not,” she says and comes over to where I’m now sitting and puts her arm around my shoulder. “No, you sound more like a cross between Fozzy Bear from the Muppets and Billy Bob Thorton from Sling Blade.”
“Now you’re just being cruel,” I tell her as she leaves the room again. I worry that it might be true. I’ve actually heard my own voice on tape before and it’s something I never want to ever hear again. It lacks depth. Let’s just leave it at that. Perhaps someday I’ll do a podcast and you’ll all hear it. Whoo! Movin’ on up into the year 2002!
Alright, now that I’m dressed I can get back to writing.
Starting a blog is never easy… But then again, what the hell do I know? I mean, this is only my second blog ever and I started my last one with a story about being mistaken for having masochistic sex with my decidedly male drummer in Mississippi.
Starting a new blog, though, reminds me of another first in my life: Sex. With a woman. Specifically, my first time. Let me explain.
There was some trouble with getting it started (not on my end, I assure you), but I knew it would mostly be a worthwhile venture that might change my life for the better. I knew the motions I needed to go through, but I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to get from point A to point B. (I hadn’t even thought about points C through M, and my wife would gently, yet firmly, introduce me to points N through W on our honeymoon. I think she’s saving the rest of the Latin-based alphabet for our wool/copper anniversary. Then, who knows? Perhaps Cyrillic?) Then there was that boring part where I forced myself to think about tennis. And then, in the end, I felt that, had I not offended all parties involved and left them wanting more, I wouldn’t feel like I’ve done my job properly. As a blogger, I mean.
And so that’s my first real post here. Kinda proud really.
Peace out!
Tags: sex, metaphor, blogging, writing, marriage, funny, bickering
