Word Games

While I struggle a little to finish some of the several essays I have started recently, I agreed to post more old stuff, and maybe some shorter pieces to keep something happening here.

This essay was written a couple years ago, post-divorce, but before my kids came to live with me. I still like it.

Word Games

fucking Pacific
coldest ocean in April
my kids run from waves

My friends and I play dumb word games. We play them mostly with our mobile phones. We exchange text messages. These messages contain the intellectual pieces of whatever game we may be playing.

One of the early games we invented, and my personal favorite, was screwing up clichés on purpose. We dreamed this up, like all other dumb word games, while we were drinking. The idea is that you write a cliché into a text message, but you fuck it up, either by mixing it up with some other cliché, or missing the point all together. As an example, one of us would send all of the others a text message that read

Don’t throw stones in glass houses. You'll get burned.

Or else we would send a text message referring to being "up a tree without a paddle." I think you get the idea. It really isn't very complicated.

For the record I think it is fair to mention here that some of us do use capitalization and punctuation in text messages. I don’t always do it. But I do it most of the time. Also, I have no idea the way to properly cite text messages in an essay. I am sure some college kid could tell me.

As you can imagine, this kind of game cannot go on forever. There is a finite number of clichés available to be fucked with. Speakers of English have been historically very efficient at dreaming up and using such idiomatic phrases that almost anything can quickly become "cliché." And my friends and I tend to frequently engage in a couple of specific activities. We read a lot. And we drink a lot. We are a Hemingway novel waiting to be written. We still sometimes think of phrases not previously considered, like when my buddy's new house was built from "the best laid bricks of mice and men" or when I wished I could "walk a mile in his hat" but as you can imagine, we quickly ran out of pieces and players for that particular game of genius.

More recently we switched to haiku. This seems to have a longer shelf life than previous dumb word games.

Our haiku are not traditional. In fact, they only have two rules. They have to stick with the old 5 - 7 - 5 syllable scheme, and they have to begin with the word "fucking."

Two syllables are lost as soon as you start. It is a sacrifice which must be made.

I don't see my kids as often as I would like. As most non-custodial single parents would tell you, it sucks. When we first have babies, we all plan to be there for them every day, for every milestone, for every issue, every important conversation. But life is kind of fucked up and gets in the way far more often than it should. Something always happens in our lives that ultimately screws things up for our kids. It is tragic. But I have never known even the most selfless parents who can avoid such trappings. Lots of people make claims, but their kids are usually pretty small.

Recently I have new opportunity to spend time and do new things with my kids. It has become a goal and a routine for me, and for them, that we spend much of our time together learning, seeing, and experiencing new things. With their mom they get so caught up in the daily routine. And she is a homebody with them. She never takes them anywhere. My job, as their new weekend dad, is to help them learn to gain new knowledge and new experience so that they can keep it up the rest of their lives, maybe eventually turning some of it into the ever-elusive stuff known as wisdom.

Like all parents, I want my kids to be better than me. I also want to have some great times with them along the way. As long as I am going to be a weekend dad, I may as well take advantage of the opportunities weekend dads are afforded, which are difficult to match for married, full-time dads. Below, my readers will find a partial list of some of the benefits associated with being a weekend Dad.

Benefit #1 – I don’t have to fight with them.
Example – “Dad when we get done swimming can we have spare ribs and ice cream for dinner?”
“Well hell yes. That’s just what I was thinking.” Their mother will feed them well.

Benefit #2 - We have nothing but free time when they are with me.
Example - “Dad if you let us stay up until just 1 a.m., we promise to sleep in tomorrow”
Fuckin-a. I wanted to watch more Spongebob anyway. That dude is hilarious.

Benefit #3 - Everyone gets out of our way.
Example - Pick the best spot on the bank for fishing. No matter who is there first, when I show up with five little kids, the spot is all ours.


I make a point to do something with them, and take them somewhere, every weekend they are with me. It is our routine. Most times we just do the same stuff. We go the lake for swimming or fishing or rock climbing or hippie-watching. We wander around geocaching in odd places while they bitch and moan about how much they hate geocaching, then almost pee their pants with excitement when we find something. In the winter we drive up in the mountains to play in the snow at frozen-over airports. This summer we are planning an epic camping road trip to see the Grand Canyon.

We also have a list of things to do (roller-skating, mini-golf) when we have the chance (I am fairly certain that these activities will end with grave injuries – for me) and places to visit (Monterey, Las Vegas, Washington D.C.) which they haven’t seen. We always have an agenda for the weekend.

Last Sunday morning we woke up late, had burritos for breakfast and did some laundry.

We decided we needed to leave Sacramento, and maybe scratch some locations and/or activities from our lists. My poor kids have lived in California for more than a year now, and in that time they have not seen the ocean. So we drove to the Pacific Ocean. It seemed the closest and most convenient ocean to visit.

We got dressed, and piled into the Suburban at the crack of noon.

We drove west from Sacramento, about two hours total, to Stinson Beach. Stinson is a little tiny Northern California beach town nestled in a sandy spot between two sets of gigantic cliffs to the north and south. The drive into Stinson along California’s highway 1 is precarious. It is all hairpin curves, cliffs, rocks and ocean. The drive made all the kids just nauseous enough for it to seem like a real adventure.

Northern California beaches are not known for their warmth any time of the year, but particularly not in April. And as soon as we all parked and walked out on the sand we were freezing to death. Being a weekend dad, I did not pack jackets. That sounds like their mother’s job.

But we had come to Stinson under the notion that we would dip our toes in the Pacific Ocean or die trying. And we were all motivated. We shed our shoes, rustled up as many sweatshirts and blankets as we could from the Suburban, otherwise tucked our arms into our t-shirts, ran as fast as we could to the waves, and dipped our toes in the salty splash. Then we ran as fast as we could back to the car.

As we drove back up highway one through the curves and cliffs, we decided we should score some lunch somewhere, so we hit a fancy seafood restaurant near San Quentin. As we walked in with our arms tucked into our t-shirts, I told the hostess we had one adult and five children in our party. It was awesome. I am such an obvious weekend dad.

Our lunch conversation centered around why on earth we each had two forks but no spoons, and who washes all these napkins anyway? My children, being out of their normal element yet each confident in his or her ability to try and master new things, behaved perfectly. They were so awesome. My kids are the fucking coolest.

After a $95 lunch (with no booze, my kids can't hold their liquor), we drove south across the Golden Gate Bridge and into San Francisco. This was huge for them. They had seen pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge. They had heard rumors of the Golden Gate Bridge. But they had never imagined that it could be located on any given Sunday afternoon. And we could drive on it! They watched all the crazy people walking over it and freezing to death as they each imagined out loud what the results might be of hurling various objects, people, and animals over the side of such an infamous bridge.

After a quick driving tour of San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts, Golden Gate Park, China Town, and Embarcadero Plaza, we headed east on the Bay Bridge to get them home to their mother right on time.

We did all of this Sunday afternoon between noon and six p.m. We crossed no fewer than four bridges (though two were really the same one twice), and drove through three tunnels. Those of you with kids know how amazing that can be.

Some experiences are difficult to describe. Some emotions associated with experiences are even more difficult to describe. Dropping my kids back “home” on a Sunday night, is one of those experiences that involves some of those emotions, particularly after a day like Sunday. It is the silence that seems overwhelming as I drive away. The silence of my huge car full of empty seats mocks me as I count the days until our next adventure.

And all I can do is write haiku to my friends, and tell my favorite bartender, Siobhan, how great my day, my weekend, and my life really is.

I am an incredibly wealthy man two weekends per month.

My friends, and dumb word games fill in the rest.

I have nothing to complain about today.

fucking dumb word games
keep the silence from my mind
I wait for the noise