All My Children

Behind those soulless eyes is a mind plotting feverishly to kill you.

In a little less than a year, I will officially be a severely depressed married man. The days of marathon sessions of masturbatory depravity will be at an end. Long nights spent huddled over a pile of scribbled papers, desperately and obsessively editing my Boys Don't Cry fan fiction will also become a thing of the past. Those fleeting, yet brilliantly hilarious impressions of a Ken doll (in which I pull the loose flesh of my scrotum up and over my penis, creating an androgynous lump betwixt my legs) will have to be put on the back burner. For on that severely depressing glorious day, I will have to do that which I have been dreading and seemingly incapable of on a basic genetic level: grow-the-fuck-up. I'm going to be someone's husband for Chrissake! It's going to be time for me to put the Playstation controller down, shut the comic book, take the batteries out of the Fleshlight. I'm going to have to start taking on some pretty serious responsibilities. Marriage will have it's perks-I'll finally be allowed to legally hit a woman-but it also comes with some pretty big challenges, and I'm going to be forced to confront a plethora of serious questions. Where do I want to live? Should I take that new job? How long into the marriage do I bring up that whole herpes fiasco? But beyond those inexorable questions, one rises above all others. One single question stands tall and prominent, like a psychological monolith: Do I want to have kids? It is a question I have asked myself time and time again. More than "Lotion or bare-handed?" More than "Shit first or shave first?" More than "If I drop this on my face do you think it will hurt?" Now, I'm sure that most couples will have this question answered before their wedding. I'm sure that a lot of couples sit down and have long, complicated discussions about when and if children are wanted, when the right time will be, how much of a financial burden will it be. Other couples, suffice it to say, leave it up to a busted condom or a guy who won't pull out because it feels too damn good. If that's the case you better hope the girl has been staying on those kegel exercises and can push that shit out, otherwise you'll be down there with a straw telling yourself it's just warm orange juice you're sucking out. Anyway, children and marriage go hand-in-hand, so I have to figure out if after becoming a husband, am I ready to become a father too? For years I have had to listen to my own parents say to me, "Eric, I hope you have a kid just like you!" See, I was always crying when I was little, so much so that my mom refused to let my dad into my bedroom at night for fear he might straight up murder my ass. So basically, all the hell that my parents went through raising me, they now are wishing that upon me. So what don't I think I can handle about having kids? For one, I'm always dropping stuff. High school taught me that I can't catch a football or a baseball for shit. Even Nerf slid through my grip. Fuckin Theresa Uchytil could catch Nerf. And I'm dropping dishes all the time. My fiance still hasn't forgiven me for letting a Fiestaware plate slip through my fingers. What would happen if I dropped my baby? "Nice hands, Feet!" I doubt I could just pick up the shards and dump it in the trash and hope Steph doesn't notice that the red one is missing. Plus, you gotta understand, I'm an incredibly shallow person. I'm so consumed by this grating self-loathing that I have to cast immediate judgement on other people just to transfer the hate somewhere. The only reason I'm on Facebook is so I can make snide remarks under my breath about a person's status update. So I have this almost paralyzing fear that my children might be ugly. It could happen, and I think genes have little to do with it. I mean, my older brother Dale looks like the result of a three-way between Adonis, Casanova and a goddam Aston Martin. And me? I have a body that a school nurse described as "pretty fleshy" during a scoliosis screening. So, part of me is concerned with what my children will look like. Another part is how they will behave. I wore sweatpants to school until I was in the ninth grade. I bought White Town's Women in Technology CD, and listened to it religiously! I was the kid who sneezed and farted simultaneously in grade school. I've come to terms with the fact that I'm probably the reason my old man came home from work every night with a fresh twelve pack. I'm not sure I could take having an asshole for a kid. What would I do if my son becomes one of those guys who tucks in a t-shirt! A t-shirt for fuck's sake! What if I have a daughter? The thought terrifies me. How the hell does one make certain that his little girl won't develop "daddy issues." What if I hug her too much? Or too little? Will that send her into porn? I have a retarded World of Warcraft player's understanding of women, so how the fuck can I create and maintain a healthy father-daughter relationship that won't send her flying spread-eagle to the champagne room? What if she's a slut? God, could I ever be so oblivious? I mean, I knew loads and loads and loads of sluts in high school, small towns are ripe with em...sluts are a small town's main export. Every once in a while I would see a father of one of these sluts, and I would think to myself, "Does he even know? Does he even know that his daughter gives head in the parking lot before school? Does he even know she took on three guys at a party last week?" I doubt it. The one thing all these sluts have in common, other than crotch itch, is ignorant fathers, and no amount of soul-raping John Mayer songs can fix a man's head after realizing his daughter is the football team's official sperm bank. You know what? I wish I could just lease a kid. Try one out for a few years and then decide if I want him or not. Why shouldn't you be allowed to swing through an orphanage a pick one out, like a fresh black one, and take it on a test drive. After about five or six years you can either keep it or trade it in. "You know what, I think we'll stick with the African. He's already on his way to becoming our little athlete." Or, "Gosh, you know, I thought I would get along with the female model, but she started developing this nagging...I think I want to try the African." Or how about, "Yeah, it's great. It handles well, barely cries, and cleans up after itself. But it's going on eight and still hasn't got the training wheels off the bike. I think it might be a lemon." Of course, if such a thing existed there would have to be rules, like if the kid comes back to the orphanage molested then you have to buy it...something like that. You see, I think the thing that scares me the most about having children is the permanence of them. Once you have them, they're your responsibility for, like, ten- fifteen years. Christ, I've got tattoos that I regret! What am I gonna do if five years down the line I think, "Ah, why did I get that? It looks like shit. Isn't there some way to remove it?" Also, I'm a projector. I project my neurosis onto other people, especially my fiance. Pregnancy is a serious medical condition, so I know that for nine months I am going to be freaking out about the health of the woman and the health of the baby...smoking and drinking and listening to Tim McGraw's "Don't Take the Girl" on repeat with all the lights shut off. Then the Big Day will come, and I'll have to watch in pure horror jubilation as my wife pisses and shits everywhere (which won't be so bad, as this behavior falls well within my umbrella of sexual fetishes) until a baby does to her vagina what the fucking Cenobites do to a guy who solves the Lament Configuration puzzlebox. Of course, it won't be as bad as I think, after all, a baby will only be the second biggest thing to pass through my wife's vagina. Of course if some type of medical condition arises, or Steph decides she doesn't want her clam to look like a monster in an H.P. Lovecraft story, she might opt for the C-section. But is that any better? All I can picture is Tom Skerrit holding onto John Hurt's hand as a pink and bloody alien rips its way out of the latter's stomach. I assume the comparison is fairly accurate. There is also the possibility that I might not even be able to have kids biologically. I mean, as much as I jerk off, I gotta believe the well is gonna dry up at some point. Hell, a few future presidents and starting Yankee shortstops probably found their way into more than a few pieces of tissue paper. If sterility is a factor, I guess adoption is always an option (Ah, mad rhyming skillz. I still got it!). They say variety is the spice of life, and with adoption you can mix it up a little. Maybe I won't even want a plain ol white baby. With adoption I can get an Asian, a Hispanic, a black, an Indian, a construction worker, a biker, a cop...the combinations are endless! But there is something special about having a son, a real son, not a fake adopted one, that I can pass my name onto, a little slice of myself that will ensure my immortality, at least for another generation. But that's a romantic notion. Back in the day, say four hundred (400) years ago, having sons was a necessity. Back then, women were essentially just pods to grow people in, Matrix-style, so a man needed sons so they could inherit his land and his money. In fact, because the survival rate for infants was so tiny, a man would give his sons all the same name, because he didn't know which one, if any, would survive. God, I couldn't imagine that. Me and six brothers, all named Eric, poised in some drawn out Darwinian battle of survival of the fittest. Thank heaven it's not like that anymore, otherwise I would have died of starvation years ago after discovering the most effective way to get rid of an erection, which is manually. Plus, I really don't have a legacy to pass on to my children, other than a pair of disturbingly small hands and a more-than-slight drinking problem. And do I really want a little baby crying, pissing and shitting, breaking things and monopolizing my wife's nipples? Everyone has heard the cynical legend that after marriage your sex drive decreases, after children you might as well be castrated. "Excuse me, Eric Jr., have you seen my libido?" And my dear son will say, "Actually, Dad, the last time I saw your libido I was strangling it to death with a pair of soiled panties. It's buried in the backyard somewhere." Thanks, son. I guess I have to ask myself if my life will be less enjoyable, unfulfilled, if I don't have children. When I'm seventy, will I look back on my life and wonder, "All those tranquil years of exotic travel and spontaneous sex with the wife, what a waste!" Now, I don't mean to beat a dead horse (A Dead Horse is the name of my penis), but I just rack my brain back and forth over these questions. Kids, no kids. I dunno. Not now anyway. I guess I'll know when I know. With my luck, Steph will get pregnant with triplets on our wedding night. Jesus. Remind me to keep a wire hanger handy.

The Moore You Know: I think of all the fictional celluloid universes that exist in the movies, the most terrifying has to be the one that Steven Seagal's characters inhabit. This is because, at any given moment, Mason Storm or Nico Toscani or Gino Felino, might find themselves in a fight for his life. Nowhere is safe for these men. At least Batman has a cave. Harry Potter has Hogwarts. But these men, these immortal characters created by the equally immortal Steven Seagal, they have no haven, no refuge from the endless parade of short-tempered psychopaths that exist everywhere John Hatcher or Casey Ryback goes. There is a reason, of course, that these men live in a world where every background character is just itching to pull out a switch blade or throw a painfully inept punch. Steven Seagul has the acting ability of a turd sliding slowing against a porcelain landscape into the waiting waters. No one watches a Steven Seagal movie for the emotional depth of his characters, or to see the man put on a motherfucking acting clinic. You watch a Steven Seagal moving because you want to see some goddam Jamaican thugs get their asses kicked, or Tommy Lee Jones get a knife put through his fucking skull. So in order to fill the void that exists between the beginning credits and the part at the end where Michael Caine gets thrown off a building, Forrest Taft and Orin Boyd need an excuse to snap some necks drop some great one-goddam-liners ("I'll take you to the bank...the blood bank."). In order to accomplish this feat, the director has no choice but to make every single character that isn't played by Steven Seagal a potential threat. Think of all the meaningless, arbitrary and totally random fight scenes in a Steven Seagal movie...They're all the same. Jack Cole or Frank Glass is minding his own business, walking the dog, heading to the bank, and while performing these completely normal tasks, he accidentally bumps into a random guy on the street, or maybe he intervenes on a man who is threatening to beat the shit out of his girlfriend way too loudly for being in a public park. Steven's character might say something like, "Excuse me, sir. I didn't mean to bump into you." Or, "Excuse me, sir, but you shouldn't speak to your girlfriend like that." And then, for no apparent reason other than the fact that everyone in a Steven Seagal movie is a bipolar steroid junkie, the stranger will respond with, "WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU SAY TO ME! YOU'RE A FUCKING DEAD MAN!" And then Austin Travis or Jonathon Cold will have to put down the situation with a karate chop to the neck, a kick to the balls, or some cut-the-shit murder. That's what is so scary about the Steven Seagal universe: he has to leave his house every morning not knowing how many people are going to want to kill him for no goddam reason, but he knows that someone is going to want to kill him for no goddam reason.

©Eric Moore - 2011

Where It All Went Wrong

The year I spent in the fourth grade was probably one of the most important times in my life. It was a transitional period for me, in which I moved away from the lackadaisical freedoms of childhood and into the rigid seriousness of prepubescent adolescence. In the summer of 1994 my family was living in the town of Columbia, Illinois, and in the fall I would be starting school at Immaculate Conception School, which was the extravagantly named Catholic school in town. Since I was the new kid in town my parents thought it imperative that I assimilate with other youths as quickly as possible. In order to accomplish this my brother and I were quickly enrolled in an organized soccer league. Now, in previous summers I had to suffer the humiliations of Little League baseball, so I was used to having my summers interrupted by the vicious demands of Sport. However, this was the first time that I entered a competitive soccer league. One thing I realized very quickly is with soccer you have to run...a lot. I would have to say that 100% of the time a player is either running or moving at some kind of accelerated pace. Now, I have mentioned in the past that at age ten (10) my body was not built for any form of physical activity. I was a great sitter and an even better recliner, and I could watch the hell out of a TV, but running? Michael J. Fox has a better chance of earning a degree in calligraphy than I had at running. Soccer practice became hour long endurance tests in which my only motivation was to not be the shittiest player on the field. Games were obviously worse, because the thing I hated more than running was competition. I have found that there is a very strong correlation between how good I am at something and how much I give a shit. I have no doubt in my mind that had I been a soccer prodigy I would have relished the competition, but I wasn't a prodigy, although my old man did refer to me sometimes as the Garbage Disposal, because of how much food I could put down. Anyway, the natural drive that an athlete has to win had died inside me long ago. It was buried under the bra and underwear section of the JCPenney catalog and countless episodes of Ren & Stimpy. I was forced to play soccer, I hated it, and simply didn't care if we won or lost. My whole philosophy on the sport was Stay Away From The Ball. I hated playing the forward position because that meant I had to run the entire length of the field, and I had the lung capacity of an aborted fetus with a pack-a-day habit. On occasions I would be selected to play goalie. I assumed that it wasn't for my insanity-inducing reflexes, but was more for the fact that the goalie is the position that can always be furthest from the ball while still considered an actual player. But the goalie position was a two-sided coin. I like playing goalie, because I didn't have to run. I could usually lean against a post and get some good counting done. On the other hand, I was the last line of defense. The entire game could rest on my shoulders. Move this way and we lose, move that way and we win. I couldn't take the pressure. My defense consisted only of praying that my teammates would not let the ball get to me. If that failed then I would occasionally flail a hopeless limb, most of the time in the opposite direction of the careening ball. My only true victory in the sport came during a Saturday tournament. Before our game was scheduled to start, my mom gave me some money to get some food and pop at the concession stand. As I was returning to my teammates, who were stationed at the bottom of a hill by the fields, I noticed that the game was about ready to start and I wasn't there. So, against all my instincts, I began to run down the hill. Walking a few yards in front of me was a boy who looked a couple years younger than me. He must have heard me lumbering towards him, because he looked back at me and I saw his eyes widen in fear. He let out a yell and began sprinting down the hill in front of me. It was the only time in my life I have been able to intimidate someone. The only good thing to come out of soccer was that I got to meet the boys that would become my friends during the school year. The boy I became best friends with was a lanky red-haired kid named Matt. He was rail-thin, had perpetually uncombed hair, and a set of wild blue eyes that would haunt Charles Manson's dreams. Matt may have suffered from some form of A.D.D., because the kid was very smart, but he was fucking nuts. I remember being at an arcade with him once and he actually said, "I'm gonna fight this guy." And then he walked up to a kid playing a game and started talking shit until a fist fight erupted. I maintained my usual safe-distance. I thought maybe Matt had some kind of emotional problems, stemming from what I have no theory. His dad might have pissed in his mom's pussy while he was being conceived. That's one way to dilute the quality of the sperm [citation needed]. Although I considered Matt to be my best friend that year, we had a sort of love-hate relationship. We were friends, but we fought all the time. Matt could be very mean-spirited, a trait shared amongst the gingers. There were times when I would show up to school not knowing if Matt would be my friend that day or not. But more often than not we got along fine. We did sleepovers, birthday parties, all the stuff normal boyhood friends do. And if I'm being honest, I brought a lot of Matt's ire on myself. You see, in fourth grade I was a pathological liar of Casey Anthony proportions. I lied about everything to everyone. And it was always the most pointless shit. I mean, I lied to cover my ass when I was in trouble, but I also lied about movies I saw, books I read, presents I received. And a lot of my lies were aimed at Matt. One time I told Matt that my family was going to Busch Stadium that night to watch a Cardinals game and we had an extra ticket. "Do you want to go?" Matt was so excited. I told him I would call him that night and my family would pick him up to take him to the game...But it was all bullshit. My family did have tickets to a Cardinals game, but no extra ticket. I'm not sure why I lied, but if I had to venture a guess I would say it was because between the time I asked Matt to the game and when he figured out he wasn't going to be picked up, I was his fucking hero. I came through! For that brief window of time I was the man. The anger he felt towards me later on was worth the time he spent thrilled that I had asked him to go to a ball game. When my family got back from the game Matt had left multiple messages on our answering machine asking if everything was OK. I wasn't sure what I was going to say to Matt the next day, but I figured I would wing it. Turns out I didn't have to say anything. When I approached him, he simply turned towards me and spit a loogie right in my face. That was the gist of our relationship. It was built on lies and insults and suspicions with moments of genuine friendship. Fourth grade was also an important year for me, because it was the year that my brother Dale had completed his Homeric quest to find my father's porn stash. This quest was all predicated on a hunch we had that our dad just looked like he was the type to own porn. After two years of searching, Dale discovered a large stack of Playboys stuffed inside a Xerox box that was marked "Easter." Those Playboys, which covered the 1986-87 season, were my first real introduction to sex. I believe that sexual orientation in genetic and unchangeable, because at 10 I had no concept of what it actually meant to be gay. Gay was just a concept, an insult. It was looking at those pictures and centerfolds of fully nude women that I moved from being an asexual child to a fervent heterosexual. I was fucking mesmerised by those magazines. Dale and I looked at them whenever we had free time. We would stash a few in our room, then switch them out with a new batch when our erections had grown immune. The thing about naked women in the 1980s is there was always a lot of hair...gallons and gallons of hair. Most of the women in the Playboys I was looking at could wear their pubic hair in a ponytail. And of course the idea that a woman could shave her pubic hair was nowhere near my thoughts, so I was forced to look at beautiful women with enough hair between their legs to weave a rug. And since the vagina itself was hidden behind this fucking eagle's nest, it really didn't do anything for me. I had no idea what a vagina looked like, and all I saw in those magazines was just the absence of a penis. So I became obsessed with breasts. I would go crazy thinking about them. Since I went to a Catholic school it was mandatory to attend church as a school during the week. Every once in a while I would sit behind a seventh or eighth grade girl whose bra straps were visible through her shirt. At that point my mind would shut off and I would just fucking stare at these straps for a whole hour. Dale had a girlfriend that he brought over to our house every now and then, but she was so flat I think her chest was actually concave. The gods are cruel. So in fourth grade I discovered I sucked at soccer, I was terrible at lying but didn't care, and I discovered bewbs. Fourth grade was also the year I found out I sucked at math. Elementary school math was generally easy for me. It was simple adding and subtracting, multiplying and dividing, no big deal. But in fourth grade they introduce equations. They put goddam letters into the problems. I absolutely hated math class. It was my worst subject. And as with soccer, since I sucked at math, I didn't care about math. The teacher would assign a section of our math workbook and then give us some time to get started on it, and I was shut that motherfucking book right then and there and shove it into my desk. I truly never did the assignments. I handed in so many papers where only one or two of the problems were even attempted. Of course my apathy caught up to me at the end of the year. I passed math class with a D-, but was also given a letter that said if I did not maintain a certain grade in fifth grade math, I would have to take fourth grade math over again. But for some reason Fate keeps saving my ass from true humiliation. That summer, my dad was once again transferred from Illinois back to Omaha, so by fifth grade I was back in my hometown of Treynor, Iowa, with all my old friends. And the issue of nearly failing math never came up at school. My year of fourth grade will always hold a special place in my heart, because that was when I began my journey into the man I am today, a man who is kinda a dick, kinda not.

© Eric Moore - 2011