The clothes make the man crazy

Surveying the pile of old clothing that I needed to bag up and haul off to Good Will, I couldn’t help but feel angry once again at the fashion industry for tricking guys into wearing carpenter jeans while I was in college.

“That looks ridiculous,” I said the first time I saw a friend wearing jeans with a hammer loop partway down the thigh, about two months before I bought my first pair. Eventually, every guy had a hammer loop on his jeans, even though very few of us were building barns. These days, you’ll still see a rogue hammer loop from time to time, the useless vestige of a bygone era, like the wings of a flightless bird, or cursive.

I’ve come to imagine that fashion is, quite literally, a group a people sitting around in a room trying to figure out which clothing items everybody just threw away, so that they can make those items cool again.

“Bellbottoms! Corduroy! Huge sunglasses!” they yelled out at a recent meeting.

“Tight jeans on dudes!” someone called out, and a hush fell over the room.

“Yes, tight jeans on dudes,” someone repeated, slowly, as everyone nodded.

Their diabolical scheme appears to be working. On a recent visit to New York City, I noticed a disturbing proliferation of tight jeans on dudes, which means they’ll be coming for the rest of us soon enough. Apparently we, as a gender, can be convinced to do just about anything. Either that, or we’ve decided to try harder to get someone to objectify us.

Fashion has been on my mind lately, in part because it’s time to clean out the closet, but mainly because we’re coming up on the season when dudes must dress themselves. Your average slob gets enough help during the holidays that he can probably coast through the cold months wearing shirts that somebody else bought for him. But in the warm weather, a man must fend for himself.

“Dude, Abercrombie?” my buddy Jered said recently, pointing at the cargo shorts I’d been wearing since college, implying that my bald spot disqualified me from wearing them any longer.

Jered failed to understand that my ultimate goal with any garment is to get its per-wear cost below one dollar. At an initial cost of forty bucks, after ten years, those shorts probably cost me about a penny per wear, making them excellent performers. My wife Kara has a closet full of shoes that have the same per-wear cost as their original cost. And I suspect that calculating the per-wear cost for some of those shoes would require dividing by zero, a feat I haven’t attempted for fear of creating a rip in the space-time continuum.

As much as it pains me, it’s time for those shorts to go in the Good Will pile, too, knowing that they can never be replaced. A simple stroll past your nearest Abercrombie storefront in the mall will explain why my last pair of their shorts is behind me.

“Pleh! Ew, dude, I can taste the cologne,” Kara said as we pushed the stroller past our mall’s Abercrombie, where they must blow Axe body spray out the door the same way Cinnabon wafts the aromas off its bubbling cauldrons of lard and yeast.

I looked through the doorway to see a photographic mural of an athletic, topless teenage dude, his gigantic nipples following me like the eyes in a painting on a PBS murder mystery.

“It’s too loud in there. How does anyone think?” Kara shouted over the pounding music.

That, of course, is the point. The doorway to Abercrombie is designed to be an assault on the senses of old people. It’s like those ultrasonic shrieking devices that keep gophers out of gardens. Teenagers don’t even notice, but it makes adult heads explode.

You can dress Mike Todd up and take him anywhere at mikectodd@gmail.com.

When pregnancy and anti-pregnancy collide

“Where’s the little guy?” the sandwich artist asked as he slid my footlong down the line.

“Probably picking up some new viruses at daycare,” I replied. We’d become regulars at this Subway when our son Evan was very small, helping to decorate their floors and walls about once a week with whatever shredded lettuce Evan could get his hands on.

After many visits, we became such VIPs that, not only did they agree to sell us select footlong sandwiches for just $5, but we were also admitted into the elite fraternity of people who know the secret difference between two nearly identical menu items.

“What’s the difference between the spicy Italian and the Italian B.M.T.?” I asked one day as the lady assembled my sandwich.

“There’s no ham on the spicy one,” she replied.

“That’s it?” I asked.

“Yeah, I guess that’s it,” she said.

This revelation explained why you so often enter a Subway restaurant to hear someone exclaim, “Yeeeeow! Sorry, I just burned my mouth on this complete lack of ham.”

Anyway, on this visit, the ponytailed sandwich-maker threw my sandwich into the giant toaster and said, “You know, I’m a dad now, too. My son was just born a few weeks ago.”

“That’s fantastic, congratulations,” I said. “What did you name him?”

I expected him to say a new-sounding name, like Aiden, Hunter or Teflon. Naming children has turned into an art form, where giving your kid a name that someone else might already have apparently turns your child from an original work into a print. It makes sense, I guess. In the third grade, I had two other Mikes in my class, and my resale value plummeted.

“Jacob,” he replied, and I was taken aback. A normal name? People don’t do that anymore. Hopefully, he spelled it Jaykob, or else he might have already ruined an otherwise mint-condition child.

Fortunately, we won’t have to worry about the stress of picking out another baby name, as long as my wife Kara’s pregnancy pillow stands guard. A giant U-shaped fortress, the pregnancy pillow conveniently doubles, after childbirth, as an anti-pregnancy pillow, complete with defenses that are, appropriately, impregnable.

“Are you still over there?” I’ll ask Kara from my side of the bed, the full-length pillow between us towering toward the ceiling.

“Shush,” I swear the pillow says as it pushes me into the bedside table.

In any event, the new father at Subway seemed completely enthused about being a dad. We had a nice little talk about his life as he finished making our order, and he was happy to chat about his new family. Afterwards, I realized that it was probably the most personal information that had ever been transmitted to me across a sneeze guard.

A few months later, I stopped back in and saw him again.

“How’s fatherhood treating you?” I asked.

“Great! It’s so much easier than everyone says,” he replied. My face agreed with him, but my brain did not. Many words come to mind when I think of the work that goes into raising an infant. Most of those words are positive and some of them are not printable in a family publication, but none of them are “easy.”

I’d expected to commiserate with him about how tough it is to raise a baby, but instead I searched my mind in vain for any anecdote that might conform with his conclusion about how easy it is to do something so extremely difficult.

“Except every night, he screams for two hours straight, like clockwork. The doctor says it’s colic,” he said, somehow smiling.

That didn’t sound easy at all. I wondered how he wasn’t curled into the fetal position, hiding under a pile of 9-grain honey oat loaves. But then we got distracted and chatted about other things, and in a few minutes, I was chomping away, trying not to scorch my mouth on the absence of ham.

You can write fresh to Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Parenting is such a gag

“I’m losing my mind,” my wife Kara said last week as we drove home from a weekend visit at her parents’ house.

“Hwwwwargh!” our son Evan replied from the backseat, his fingers crammed down his throat.

“No, Evan!” Kara said, whipping around in her seat and grabbing his hands out of his mouth. He giggled and kicked his feet, excited that Mommy was still playing the new game he’d invented earlier in the weekend.

While parenthood holds many joys, there’s not really a great way to prepare yourself for some of its horrors. A potential parent surely knows to dread the changing of diapers, though the reality of that chore has only rarely reached the level of cataclysm that my pre-parenting imagination had once conjured. But if you’ve never had kids, how could you possibly imagine a future that involved lunging into the backseat to keep your child from intentionally barfing on himself? You couldn’t, unless you had the kind of twisted, deranged mind that might be better put to use writing bestsellers.

As soon as Kara settled back into her seat, Evan started playing again.

“Hwwwwargh!” he said, his eyes watering. He’d invented this game on the drive up, two days earlier, which is when we discovered how the game ends if we choose not to take our turn: with a stop at the next exit to change all of Evan’s clothes, and a search for some kerosene to torch his old ones.

“If you pay me attention, I’ll never stop. But if you don’t, I’ll barf all over myself. It’s quite the Catch-22, isn’t it?” Evan said from the backseat, with his eyes.

“We’re never going anywhere again,” Kara said, her head between her hands. “If it’s further than the grocery store, forget it.”

“Can you tie his sleeves together?” I asked, immediately mortified that I was dead serious. Every parenting expert will tell you: when you can’t get your toddler to behave, you should attempt to fashion a crude straightjacket out of his clothing.

“Hwwwwargh!” Evan said.

“Stop it!” Kara yelled, unbuckling her seat belt and diving for Evan’s hands, to his great delight. The dog jumped up from the other seat to lick Kara’s face.

I stared straight ahead, trying to keep focus on the road as pandemonium ensued throughout the vehicle. Before you have kids, you should really have to take the driver’s test again. But this time, the tester should sit in your backseat, gag himself, scream, throw sippy cups at your head and dump full bags of Goldfish on the floorboard. If nothing else, that guy would have the best job in the entire Department of Transportation.

“Evan’s waging biological warfare against us,” I said.

“I think I’m having a breakdown,” Kara replied, buckling back in.

“Hwwwwargh!” Evan said.

To keep the proper perspective, you have to remember that children are not urinal dividers. You won’t always be glad that they’re there.

Once we got home, the Internet told us that we didn’t have anything to worry about. Pediatricians have advised that gagging “is a new sensation for the toddlers! It feels weird and strange to them and wow, what a reaction they get from their own bodies and their parents!”

Still, some parents have taken to dunking their toddlers’ hands in vinegar, which is a variation of a technique we once used to keep our ferret from chewing on our electrical cords. Perhaps, with some time and patience, we could also train Evan to roll over in exchange for raisins.

Already in the past week, just as the Internet promised it would, this phase shows signs of ending. Which is good, because we’ll need to leave the house again at some point; the cupboards have been bare for days. Fortunately, we’ve been able to survive on the Goldfish from the floorboard.

You can refuse to pay Mike Todd any attention at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Theater of the lost mind

Arm-in-arm, we approached the ticket taker, excited to be out on the town once again. This was our first time in a real theater, the kind with a mezzanine and velvet ropes, since our son Evan was born almost two years ago.

“I hope this goes okay,” my wife Kara whispered to me.

“Enjoy the show,” the ticket taker said, and we followed the crowd inside, ready to take in a matinee performance.

The first indication that we weren’t attending a normal show occurred a moment later, just inside the doors, when an usher turned to us and asked, “Would you like a booster seat?”

“Sure,” I said, taking the foam pad. Evan followed close behind, his arms over his head, grasping the fingers of a grandparent on either side.

“Hey buddy, are we going to see Elmo?” I asked.

“Welmo,” Evan agreed.

Evan had brought his entourage to see Elmo’s Green Thumb, a Sesame Street Live production designed for the more discerning theater-going toddler. The hallways buzzed with hordes of kids sporting $15 Elmo T-shirts and spinning $15 light-up Elmo toys. Elmo’s thumb obviously wasn’t just green because of his gardening acumen. The fuzzy little guy didn’t miss any opportunities to create some commerce. Perhaps the show should have been called Elmo’s Green Palms.

But the price of admission (and accessories) was worth it as soon as the characters started coming out on stage, with Evan waving to Cookie Monster and Big Bird from his booster seat. There was magic in the air as Elmo enjoyed the loudest reception that our nation’s youth bestows upon any non-Bieber entity.

Evan absolutely loved it, for at least ten minutes.

To be fair, that was eight minutes longer than the previous record for anything holding his attention, dethroning a Taco Bell sauce packet.

About halfway into the second musical number, I pontificated on the nature of survival instinct. Is it truly an instinct, or is survival a learned behavior? I began to lean toward the latter as Evan attempted to climb over the mezzanine railing.

“No, Evan,” I said, pushing his knee back down. We were in the first row of the mezzanine, which is a much more relaxing place to be when nobody from your party is attempting to hurl themselves over the edge.

“No, Evan,” I said as he tried again. And again.

“AAAAAHHHHHH!” he screeched, turning around to glare at his unreasonable father, who never lets him do anything fun.

We took turns passing Evan between the four of us, trying to keep him involved in the show. During one of my off shifts, I peered over the railing to see half of the audience playing with its twirly Elmo lights.

“Why don’t kids have any attention spans?” I thought. Then I noticed that the other half of the audience was texting.

Toward the end of the show, I followed Evan as he explored the empty seats at the back of the theater. It would have taken a rig similar to the one from Clockwork Orange to get him to watch the rest of the show from his seat. As he climbed into each seat in row ZZ one-at-a-time, I looked down to see his mother and his grandparents learning important lessons from Elmo about, well, about something, I’m sure. I have no idea what happened after intermission.

After the show, Evan bopped down the sidewalk with a $10 Elmo balloon floating over his head, all smiles. Our first theater experience as parents may have been a bit more aerobic than we’d expected, but we felt a sense of accomplishment for lasting until the final curtain. Still, we’ll probably wait a decade or two before tackling Phantom of the Opera.

You can keep Mike Todd from climbing over the railing at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Sometimes, the gym hits you back

If these words appear to be written by someone in peak physical condition, it’s only because we just put a new elliptical machine in our basement, and the effects are starting to kick in. I haven’t actually used it yet, but with the amount of money my wife Kara just spent on this machine, I’m already feeling the burn.

Actually, it’s kind of nice knowing that the machine is down there. Just being in proximity to exercise equipment makes you feel like you’re in better shape. It’s a similar theory to how just smelling doughnuts makes me fatter, because then I eat them.

As Kara has noted several times, we’re going to save money on this deal. She just quit the gym, so with no more monthly membership fees, we’ll break even on this purchase sometime around the Tuesday before the sun burns itself out.

You might notice that I only mentioned Kara quitting the gym. I tried to quit, too, but we ran into some murky issues when it became apparent that I’d never been there before. The gym is a place I’ve avoided ever since teachers stopped making me go there, in part because it’s a fundamentally dishonest place, designed to fool your body into thinking it needs more muscles than it actually does, and in part because of all the oddly unashamed naked people wandering around.

“This lady was just standing there naked,” Kara reported after a recent visit to the locker room. “Like, not to get changed. She was just chatting and hanging out as if she had clothes on.”

In my limited gym experience, it seems that one’s proclivity for walking around naked is directly proportional to how many years a person has under their nonexistent belt. I’m not sure if this is a generational phenomenon, perhaps inspired by gym classes of yesteryear in which kids were comfortable showering and changing in front of each other, or if you get to certain point in life when you think, “You know what? I’m going to wander around for a while before I put my pants on.”

When you go to the gym, you’re telling your body that you need more muscle to perform your daily activities. But if that was true, wouldn’t you have those muscles already? The cavemen who needed to catch animals ran faster because they were chasing animals all day. The ones who needed to carry rocks got stronger from lugging rocks around. The ones who developed caveman software got flabby. And they were happy with that, until their systems crashed and they got the Blue Rock of Death, which was much more gruesome than its modern counterpart.

So Kara and I have called another piece of exercise equipment into being. I’m not saying we won’t get our use out of it, but the vast majority of these dust-collecting basement-dwellers are born of hope, only to die of neglect. Perhaps the lone exception is my dad’s old exercise bike, which was purchased in 1971 with three pinto beans and an extra scratchy burlap sack, and which he still rides several times per week. That thing has more miles on it than Air Force One.

We might as well decide we like having the machine in our basement, since it’s four inches wider than the only exit door. I’m pretty sure the delivery guys welded it together down there, creating our very own ship in a bottle. People may come and go from this house, but that machine isn’t going anywhere without a long visit from a blowtorch and a hacksaw. Hopefully, when we stop using it for exercise in a few months, it’ll make a nice drying rack. And I can always use the cup holder in front for my chocolate shakes.

You can snap Mike Todd with your towel at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Thirty going on therapy

“I think I’m having a premature midlife crisis,” my friend Josh wrote to me last week, his nerves fraying from the pressures of work and parenthood. Josh isn’t the kind of person to complain, so I understood that he must have been in serious need of a sympathetic ear.

“Don’t worry, man,” I told him. “It’s not premature.”

It’s a strange phenomenon that the better friends you are with someone, the worse of a person you can be toward them.

“I don’t feel like you’re taking my MLC seriously,” he responded. At that moment, I realized the severity of the situation. If you’re planning on saying “midlife crisis” so much that you can save yourself a significant amount of time by acronyming it, you probably need your friends to act more like friends, and less like the people who used to draw anatomical diagrams with Sharpies on your face when you’d been drinking too much. (Note to our children when they’re old enough to read this: Drinking too much warm milk.)

“Let’s catch up on the phone soon. If that doesn’t sound like a plan, you could always just purchase a car with eight cylinders,” I replied.

I recently bumped into an acquaintance from college who overachieved on his own midlife crisis by purchasing a car with twelve cylinders. That’s at least 50% more cylinders than the average fragile male psyche requires.

“You know, there are twelve cylinders in there,” he said, pointing at the hood.

“What a colossal waste of gas,” I thought.

“Cool car,” I said. I had to be nice, since we weren’t really friends.

When Josh and I finally caught up on the phone the next day, he said, “Remember when we used to complain about having a quarter-life crisis?”

A quarter-life crisis happens when you worry about getting a job after you graduate. A third-life crisis follows shortly thereafter, when you worry about getting married, having kids or how you’re going to avoid doing either one.

I didn’t have the heart to tell Josh, who is gainfully employed, happily married and frantically child-rearing, that once you’ve weathered the 1/4- and 1/3-life crises, any subsequent crises must be of the midlife variety, since we’ve run out of denominators greater than two. Nobody has a two-fifths-life crisis.

Really, though, I have a hard time mustering sympathy for anyone who gets well into their thirties without even a hint a bald spot, as Josh has done.

“I lost my job,” a friend will say.

“But you have a full head of hair,” I will reply, as if this evens things out.

As a small group of friends drove to lunch last week, our friend Judi commented from the backseat, “Nice haircut, Mike,” which was clearly a setup for a punchline.

“Thanks,” I said, bracing myself.

“You can barely see the combover anymore,” she said.

As someone who has been ever-vigilant about striking down proto-combovers when they appear in the bathroom mirror, I took great umbrage at the suggestion that I’d ever let one take root. Still, as my hair continues its great migration from my head down to my shoulders, I am developing a new understanding for how Giulianiesque cranial situations occur. A couple more hairs jump the part every day, innocently enough. Repeat this process for years or decades, though, and your ear becomes the only thing stopping your part from sliding right off your head altogether.

The good news for Josh is that even though he got no sympathy from me due to his unfair follicular advantages, his crisis appears to be short-lived.

“Everything’s fine. I’m just stressed out at work, but that should get better in the next few weeks,” he said.

If not, he can always count on a little extra support from his friends. And if that doesn’t work, there’s always the dealership.

You can invite Mike Todd to combover at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The roof might be on fire

Last week, for perhaps the first time in my life, I paid attention to the stop sign in our neighborhood, mainly because I was on foot. I still didn’t come to a complete stop, but I did break stride for a moment when I saw this message about halfway up the signpost: “Welcome. This is a neighborhood watch community.”

Was anyone going to tell me? We’ve lived here for almost four years, and our neighbors have gone dangerously unwatched the whole time.

“I’m a little offended nobody’s tried to deputize us,” I said to the dog as we rounded the corner, scanning the horizon for any suspicious activity.

While we didn’t find any crime out of which to take a bite, I did notice that several of our neighbors still had Christmas trees at the ends of their driveways. The trees had been buried for the past couple of months, just recently left behind like old mammoth bones as our own personal glaciers finally began retreating. The bedraggled things sure didn’t look too festive anymore. Perhaps their owners could stick some Guinness cans in their branches to turn them into St. Patty’s trees.

In any event, you’d think the Neighborhood Watch would be banging at my door to sign me up, since I’d recently invited half the emergency response vehicles in the county to come visit us.

Several weeks ago, when the snow was still deep enough that you could only be halfway sure that your patio furniture was still under there somewhere, I took the dog out for her morning constitutional at about 6am, shortly after the toddler had crowed. As soon as I stepped onto the deck, I heard, “Beep beep beep beep beep,” coming from the neighbor’s house.

A moment later, I reemerged from the house in snow boots and jammies to figure out what was going on. The best detective work is always done in flannel pants.

In a few minutes, I’d determined that our neighbor’s fire alarm was going off, and either they weren’t home, or they slept wearing air-traffic-controller earmuffs.

Fortunately, they’d given me their cell phone number, so I called them and found out that they were away for the weekend.

It’s funny how when you tell someone, “Don’t worry, I don’t see any smoke billowing out of your windows,” it doesn’t really seem to stop them from worrying.

After I took a stroll through their house and couldn’t find anything wrong except the cleanliness of our own house by comparison, we decided that I should call the fire department. I got the answering machine there, so I had to call 911 for the first time in my life.

“Hi, this isn’t really an emergency, I don’t think,” I started.

A few minutes later, a cop car rolled up. I made an excellent sidekick.

“That beeping? That’s what tipped me off,” I told him.

“We should really stay out here, in case it’s carbon monoxide,” he replied, and suddenly, I was even more relieved than usual to still be alive.

A few minutes after that, a fire truck roared into their driveway. You might not realize this until you’re standing next to one, but you never really lose the awe you had as a three-year-old for fire trucks, especially if you’re still wearing your jammies.

“They’re lucky to have a neighbor like you,” one of the firemen said before heading inside, apparently not familiar with my “The Wind Will Take Care of It” leaf raking strategy.

Still, getting complimented by a firefighter felt pretty awesome, like I was a kid he’d just let borrow his hat.

“Thanks, Mister,” I almost replied.

In the end, the problem turned out to be a fire alarm that was dying, but didn’t feel like going quietly. So my vigilance didn’t actually stop anything bad from happening, but I fully expect to be invited the next time our Neighborhood Watch forms a posse.

You can let Mike Todd borrow your hat at mikectodd@gmail.com.