The Funniest, Saddest Thing I’ve Ever Read

Hey! Did you JUST LOVE that Gene Weingarten article from a year or two ago, about parents whose kids died in the back seats of their cars? I know: HI-LAR-IOUS! Right?

Well, then you’re gonna love-love-LOVE Aleksandar Hemon’s piece in this week’s New Yorker (subscription required), in which he and his wife deal with his 9-month-old daughter Isabel’s horrible, horrible, horrible, depressing, awful, miserable illness. I read it last night, and was in tears by the end. Then I made my wife read it, and she cried too. It’s total parental-worst-nightmare porn.

Okay, serious mode: This is an incredible article, beautiful, beyond sad, moving. It makes me wonder, though, about how (or even whether) a writer should balance the beauty of his/her art against the tragedy of real life. Hemon’s daughter’s illness was diagnosed a mere 11 months ago, and he’s already converted the entire awful saga into an incredible, insightful piece of writing. As they said after 9/11: Too soon? Or, as Hemon himself points out, is this really just the way we writers process the world, by turning it into stories?

But then, on top of everything, I try to imagine Hemon dealing with his editor on the story—negotiating the contract, dealing with copy editors, fact-checkers, proofreaders, cashing the check. Does it all count as a tribute to the child’s struggle, or is that check still lying in Hemon’s desk drawer, in an unopened envelope, a hefty reminder of a decision he’s still wrestling with? That, too, may be another story he’ll have to tell one day.

The Filth and the Fury

If you have kids, you have dirty clothes. Stains—disgusting, untraceable stains—stains that appear as if by magic, stains that appear as you watch, those ice-cream drips falling in super-slow-motion, almost as if you could stop them. Stains on their clothes, on your clothes, on stainless-steel countertops. (Whuh?) Stains from food, from dirt, from grass, from blood and shit and piss and… what made that stain? I don’t even know.

Which is why you need a washer and a dryer—they are just about essential to urban parenting.

So, guess what I don’t have right now?

It’s not that I haven’t tried to replace the Frigidaire Gallery washer-dryer we used to have, which died a little over a month ago (though not before staining several loads of laundry with rust spots). I have tried. In fact, just over a week ago I bought a new washer-dryer, a stackable Whirlpool Duet (on sale for $998!), at the nearby Lowe’s, and arranged to have it delivered and installed today. I live in a fourth-floor walkup, I told the salesgirl; would that  be a problem? Nope, she said, no worries, they deliver everywhere.

So, guess what turned out to be a problem this morning?

Look, I understand that delivery guys don’t want to haul 300-pound appliances up narrow stairways. But most of them (and the companies they work for) will do so for an extra fee. An extra fee I’m only too willing to pay—what’s another $100 or $150 on top of the $1,000+ I’m already spending?

No, what I’m pissed off about—so much that I’m wasting your time with this rant—is the incompetence of the salesgirl. She sells fucking appliances in fucking Brooklyn for a living, and she doesn’t know that 3P, the company Lowe’s contracts deliveries to, won’t carry appliances up past the 3rd floor! I mean, I can look up the fucking washer-dryer’s specs and reviews online—she doesn’t have to know anything about it whatsoever, except the price and how to get it into my goddamn apartment. That’s it! Nothing more! And she doesn’t even know that!

I’m doubly pissed, in fact, because while Lowe’s is a massive (and probably failing) corporation, with little need to treat its customers well. Ride Brooklyn, my neighborhood bike shop, is the exact opposite: a small business that needs customer loyalty. But Ride, too, has been fucking with me:

Sunday afternoon, I brought my bike in to get a blown-out tire replaced. It’ll take an hour, they told me on the phone. It’ll take an hour and 15 minutes, they told me in person. Fine, I said—and went off to do some shopping and drink a beer. Two hours later, I returned to find out they hadn’t even begun working on it. Texts started coming in from my wife (“Where are you? Baby us awake and asking fir you.” [sic]), and still I was waiting. Finally, at 5pm, three and a half hours after I brought the bike in, it was ready, presented to me with apologies, but only apologies.

Let me make this clear: I don’t care that my bike took three and a half hours to fix. If Ride had told me it would take that long, I’d’ve been happy—I could’ve gone home, had a nap, played with the kid, and returned at 5pm. Instead, the shop made me wait, and wait, and wait. If this were a one-time thing, I’d understand, but it happened not six weeks ago, too, when I bought my wife a bike: They kept promising it would be ready imminently, and we kept taking up space in their crowded premises.

I understand; they’re busy. Things come up. But they’re busy all the time, and things come up all the time. Shouldn’t they, after so many years in business and so many busy, things-coming-up days, be able to accurately predict how long a particular assembly or repair job should take? And if they can’t, maybe they should learn how?

It’s things like these that make me despair for America’s future. Are these businesses incompetent? Or just indifferent? I don’t know—I just want to ride my bike with clean underwear for once.

An Open Letter to Anthony Weiner

Weiner, looking the other way.

Dear Congressman Weiner,

I know I’m a little late in writing to you. By now, we’re all hoping, the city and the country have moved on to other, more important things than the (your?) much-Twittered crotch shot. But on the off chance that everyone is still obsessed with it, I just wanted to tell you something: I get it.

What I mean is, I understand, to some degree, why you’re being such an idiot about this whole case. To you, this is just another in a lifelong series of “wiener/weiner” jokes—the stupid, insulting jibes you’ve been putting up with since you were a kid. Why should you respond to that kind of thing with calm, reasoned language? Why respond to it at all? Instead, you’ve just been making vague, noncommittal declarations, in the vain hope that the world will move on.

As I said, I get it. I, too, grew up with an easily ridiculable name: Gross. I mean, it’s no Weiner, but for years and years I had to deal with sing-song taunts like “Matt is gro-oss” and also “Matt is gro-oss.” (Kids really aren’t very imaginative.) But now that I’m an adult, if I hear something disgusting described as “gross,” I don’t automatically assume it’s being said just to make fun of me. It could actually, you know, be kind of gross.

Which I think is what’s happening with the (your?) crotch shot. You need to realize that this is not a playground taunt, that someone has put a cock on the Internet with your name on it, and you need to give some straight answers. Otherwise, you really are a dick.

Sincerely,

Matt Gross

P.S. You’re lucky your name isn’t Anthony Asshole. (And so are we.)

Revenge is…My father’s

I got this email from my father the other day, in response to my post on why I”m such a dick (or was, depending on how you feel about me):

It is entirely refreshing and gratifying to read your realization that as a kid you were a dick. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord, but us Dads get a chance every now and again. Yours will come 30 years from now.

Now, of course, given both the tone and topic of his email, one might feel entitled to ask: isn’t this just a case of the pot calling the kettle a dick?

But out of sympathy for my father–if I’m a dick isn’t he to blame?–I’ll concede the point and write a little bit about baseball.

As I mentioned earlier this week, JP has begun to take an interest in the national pastime. My plan for the summer, along with playing ball with him, is to take him to a few professional games.

Many of my fondest memories from childhood involve going to Shea and Yankee stadium(s? stadia–copy editor? ) with my father and brother. To an extent these memories even have something to do with baseball itself (I remember a few Reggie Jackson home runs, and I was a huge Dwight Gooden fan), but mostly they had to do with all the treats I got to eat at the ballpark, and not just the proverbial peanuts and cracker jack, neither of which I ever much liked.

This, of course, was in the 1920s when men were men and hot dogs cost two bits (whatever the hell that means), and the tickets were actually free. Not so today. A contemporary outing to Citi Field with JP is going to run into the low six figures, taxes not included, so I will have to be a little judicious in what I spend on food.

Or maybe not. To this day, a major resentment that I hold against my father were his periodic efforts to bring food with him to the ballpark. For a young child there is nothing worse than watching all the other little folk around you sucking down hot dogs and ice cream while you eat a fricking ham and cheese sandwich that has gone mushy from the heat and a poor wrapping. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

And yet here I am contemplating doing the same thing to JP. Sins of the father…