There is an old saying that goes “you can pick your nose, you can pick your friends, you can even pick your wife in most situations, but you can’t pick your relatives.” I don’t have any issues, at least for the most part, with my actual blood relatives. However, those who are related to me through marriage are an entirely different story. One would think it’s all Shirley’s side of the family and their poor choices when it comes to getting married but it’s actually an in law on each side of the family giving me blog worthy material. I have referenced Super Dave on a number of occasions. I made the mistake of inviting him into my golf league roughly seven years ago and he was legendary. First off he was terrible at golf, second off he was terrible at masking what a conspiracy theory lunatic he was and still is. Just to refresh everyone’s memory, he claimed last year at Thanksgiving that the O’bamas were responsible for the death of Joan Rivers. The obvious reason behind this was that Joan Rivers had called Michelle O’bama a tranny or bull dyke which resulted in her early demise (even though she lived to be 113). I believe what actually happened was that she died while undergoing plastic surgery for her 13th face lift.

Regardless, Super Dave made another appearance at Thanksgiving this year and he outdid himself. First of all, he had my sister text me early in the week and the text read “Dave wants to know how you are doing the turkey?” My response should have been, turkey? I’m not making turkey, I’m doing a vegetable lasagna. (when I was in college my grandfather’s new wife did do a lasagna for Thanksgiving, that’s fucking treason in my book). Anyhow, I eventually responded that I was smoking the turkey like I do every year. What was he going to do, not come if I didn’t use his preferred method to prepare the turkey? In hind sight I probably should have asked my sister what way does Dave not want me to do the turkey? And then told her I was doing it that way. Also, I had a sneaking suspicion my sister was pregnant again, she already has four kids six and under and she spaced those kids 18 months apart. She claimed to my mom when my mom was alive that the last two were accidents, there’s no way you can accidentally have sex with Dave, he probably talks about crypto currency during foreplay. When he arrived at our house he started with his usual “did you get your bitcoin yet?” He is the primary reason I want bitcoin to go to zero, that coupled with the fact that it seems like complete bullshit strikes me as a basis for it to fail ASAP. The good news is that my sister and Dave always come over to our house in separate vehicles so that Dave can get back home to his mine. The mine was actually confirmed on Thanksgiving along with my sister being of child. If you want to know what it is like to hang out with my sister and her brood just visit any daycare with at least 15 kids under the age of 7. She doesn’t have that many kids, but when you have 4 spaced out so closely you stop parenting and the four seem like at least fifteen. One of my nephews took a dump at our house and left it in the toilet, there was no toilet paper in the toilet, no 4 year old has a cutter good enough that they require no toilet paper. My sister just never got around to emphasizing the importance of toilet paper or flushing.

At some point amid the chaos Super Dave mentioned his mine, I though he was joking, but he wasn’t. My brother and I always joked that he sent his kids down to work in the mine, somewhat explaining why he was willing to have so many kids, the other part of it being that attempting to procreate is probably the only time he gets sex. He went on to say that he is mining ethereum and that he is able to mine roughly $28 a day. However, with the vast swings in crypto that seem to occur, I am guessing that he frequently spends more in electricity than he makes creating crypto. Ultimately, I took my dog Max for a long walk hoping that when I returned everyone would be gone. Unfortunately, they were not, but Dave was. The following day we were heading to my sister’s in the afternoon because they live near a Christmas tree farm and my brother who was in town with his wife, two year old, and newborn, wanted to pick up a tree to avoid having to go to the big lots parking lot in Gary this year to get one. My sister sent me another text about Turkey, actually two Turkeys, Dave and the left over bird I had in the fridge. She indicated that Dave was mad at her when she got home for not leaving the kids with us, as well as not bringing home any left over Turkey. She was hoping I could bring some with me. So, I grabbed two snack size zip lock bags (roughly half the size of a traditional zip lock sandwich bag) and filled one with dark and one with white. I also packed a gallon size bag of turkey for him that I presented to him after I gave him the two ziplock bags. The look on his face when I gave him the two bags was as if I had told him my sister was having triplets.

Typically when I write these blogs that hone in on how crazy my relatives are I delete them within 48 hours of being posted, it’s kind of like snapchat but for blogging. However, I may just leave this one up, no way Dave has the attention span to get through this entire thing, but if he does stumble upon it and read it I am going to really regret spelling Ethereum correctly.

There are a number of downsides to getting old but one of the worst parts about it is that I continue to get stinkier as I age. One of my odor problems has had nothing to do with my age, I have always produced foot sweat that smells like cat piss. Yes, my foot sweat replicates one of the worst odors on the planet. Before I could afford multiple pairs of basketball shoes to rotate, I would wear a pair for six months or so and the smell was so pervasive that when I would put my shoes in the trunk the funk would make its way into the passenger compartment. Unfortunately, this smell seems to be genetic in nature. Last week I took Aiden to get basketball shoes and when I took off his shoes to try on some basketball shoes I was pummeled by a familiar stench. Apparently, the cat piss foot stink gene is dominant. As if the kid doesn’t have enough problems to begin with, now he has to be concerned about taking his shoes off. “Aiden, most of the people who go in our hot tub take their shoes off.”

” I’m just going to keep them on Mrs Smith, I feel more comfortable leaving them on.” Typically I see something like this as an opportunity to ridicule my children so that they can experience what I went through as a child, examples which I may have mentioned before are as follows. My dad called me pizza face due to a bit of an acne problem that ironically was passed down to me by him. In addition, he would tell my younger brothers not to squeeze my head or it might explode. Lastly, he also called me bean pole because I was quite skinny. However, I chose not to mention the pungent smell that almost made me throw up in my mouth.

I have managed to control my foot stink by purchasing an inordinate number of basketball shoes as well as foot powders and arm and hammer balls that you can put in your shoes to keep them smelling fresh. However, I don’t think there is much I can do to combat the smell the rest of my body creates. On Sunday morning I played tennis against some random guy I hooked up with online, it’s not as scandalous as it sounds. The site I joined allows people to find other people to play tennis against and Eric and I squared off Sunday morning. Unfortunately, Eric was out of shape and we only played five games, bye bye Eric. Due to the fact that I did not get my tennis fill for the day I ended up Playing Joe that afternoon. I showered after playing Eric but somehow managed to start stinking so bad that I noticed it five minutes into my warm up with Joe. I smell so bad that our dog will go up to the laundry basket and stick his entire head in it and rub up against my soiled basketball clothes, he fucking loves it.

The fact that my dog loves to stick his head in my dirty laundry, roll in dead stuff, and cover himself in the seepage that comes out of our santicart when I clean it out as if it were cologne that attracts female dogs like moths to a flame, makes me wonder why I, and all other dog owners, other than Michael Vick, love our dogs so much. My dog is a royal pain in the ass, he takes the insole out of one of every pair of my shoes that he has been able to gain access to. I walk with a limp because my shoes are uneven and I have no idea what he does the insoles, I am hoping someday I will eventually find all my insoles along with all the socks I use to have who have lost their mates. That day will be the best day ever. My dog also wanders about the house sleeping in no less than a dozen different places at night, one of them being on my pillow above my head. He’s not a tiny dog, he is an Australian Shepard and is a medium sized dog. He also licks my bald head while he is on my pillow and will sometimes lick my pillowcase trying to lap up my head grease. If one of my kids came in and tried to sleep above my head on my pillow I would lose my shit, but I just pet max and move down on my pillow out of his tongues reach.

The torment Max inflicts on me pales in comparison to what he has done to the children. This past summer Shirley’s nephews were here and we went out to Green Lake for the day. The two of them were out on the water carpet that was attached to our walk out dock. I was sitting in a chair about fifteen feet from Max and saw him see them, unfortunately another disadvantage to aging is you don’t move real fast, before I could stop him he had made his way to one of Shirley’s nephews, nipped him, made him cry and quickly moved on to the next one, nipped him, and made him cry. His instinct is to herd and he was trying to herd them, and he thinks he must herd all children that come into his purview. My initial instinct whenever kids cry in front of me is to immediately tell them to stop being pussies. The reason I have this instinct is because that is exactly how I was raised. Neither my mother or father showed any type of sympathy for me or my siblings. Had I walked into the house with my arm pointing the wrong direction after playing with my friends they would have told me to shake it off. That is why my kids know to seek out Shirley when I acting like pussies and claim to be injured.

The reality of it all is that Max is the only one who is waiting for me at the door when I get home with his butt wagging (Australian Shepard’s get their tales lopped off) ready to jump up on me and greet me after I put in three to four hours at the office. The kids are on their devices, Shirley is up in her office working and oblivious to anything going on in the household. The only communication carried on is one of them asking me whats for dinner. It’s that unconditional love you can’t get anywhere else, that’s why I put up with Max-hole.

Legalized sports gambling has finally taken the country by storm and is legally recognized in most states. This allows those who choose to do so to sweat out bets where they need “their” team to cover by six in overtime after neither team has scored. Now when I say they, I actually mean me, I had picked the Cowboys to cover by more than a field goal against the Patriots and they didn’t manage to score a TD on the opening OT drive. Why was it crucial for that to happen in order for me to win? Because the odds of Dallas scoring a TD were akin to that of Joe Biden garnering a positive approval rating and turning his presidency into something that would even resemble a success. Was there a chance? Of course there was but I needed a miracle and that miracle came in the form of a missed tackle and Cee Dee Lamb managing to find his way into the endzone.

Normally, after the initial drive of OT fails the team that prevails just kicks a field goal to win because the game turns into sudden death at that point, and that is what Mike McCarthy, one of the dumbest coaches to ever put on a headset, planned on doing until Cee Dee Lamb pranced into the endzone. Normally it goes the other way for me, some miracle happens to prevent me from covering my bet not covering my bet. The reality is that sports gambling is full of anxiety and fraught with regret. Why didn’t I take the Eagles to cover against the Lions? Why didn’t I take the Harlem Globetrotters on the money line against the Washington Generals? Regardless of where you are at as a gambler, there is one gamble that is even higher stakes than betting on sports and that’s gambling on a fart. Typically I am inflicted with Diarrhea at least once a month so I don’t really get too worried when I get a case of the squirts because it usually lasts a day or possibly two max. However, my most recent bought started Saturday and didn’t end until Thursday. I have no sympathy for someone who lost on niners last week when 99% of the money was on them because they were going against Colt McCoy, yes they lost to Colt Fucking McCoy. You know why I don’t have sympathy for them because I lost my underpants after gambling on a fart when I was forced to discard them in a trash can at the park. (This may have actually happened to me more than once)

Diarrhea can be a nice change of pace when its for a day, but when it starts pushing a week, it’s exhausting. The uncertainty of never knowing if you sat on the toilet long enough, nope, there goes my stomach gurgling again, guess I need to go sit on the throne for another five minutes. I had two things putting the kabosh on my extremely regular poop schedule when the runs got me. The first was the runs and the second was being in Phoenix and a different time zone. I’m an 8 am EST pooper and then if it’s a good day I may have another around 10:30 am and if it’s a great day, I have another after lunch. My schedule usually has me arriving in the office for my first dump of the day which also has me with my phone surfing the web. However, my morning ritual goes to shit when I have the runs. I’m too focused on getting it all out to allow my phone to distract me from the task at hand. After morning number three of the squirts keeping me from my most favorite screen time of the day I decided it was time to take something for it instead of letting nature run its course. For a minute it seemed to get the job done but within hours of thinking I was out of the woods, the shits began to reek havoc again.

My return to Grand Rapids on Tuesday didn’t seem to settle my stomach so I doubled down and added pepto bismol to my imodium after a Wednesday night that saw me get out of bed four times in once night. I’m use to getting up twice a night to pee due to my age, but four times to poop is entirely unacceptable. Finally by Thursday night I began to feel somewhat normal and celebrated with a trip to Culvers after my bowling league. Did I jump the gun by going to Culvers? Only time would tell, that afternoon I had ripped off at least a half dozen farts without shitting my pants, why not put my bowels to the test by ingesting some fast food? Friday morning I experienced even more joy than the last time I hit a three team parlay, I had one of the most gratifying deuces in quite some time, oh what a feeling to be back on solid ground and only gambling on sports.

I have been meaning to write for quite some time but I had a couple things going against me. First of all, my laptop suffered an untimely death when it did a number of things I didn’t approve of a few weeks ago. It felt good to destroy it until I realized I would have to buy a new one or just spend the rest of my life without a laptop. The second problem was that my work computer needed to update it’s browser, a task that would be simple for most people, but nothing is simple for me when it comes to technology. Ultimately, I was forced to switch my browser from Safari to Google Chrome in order to have a browser up to date enough to continue on with my blog. A lot has transpired at the Jansma household since Max ate Parker’s helmet, here are a few of the highlights:

• Aiden continually uses the term “deez nuts” in response to just about everything even though he knows it will result in a ban from his devices. His defense is that everyone at school says it. Shirley and I’s response is that it isn’t funny, Shirley claims it was funny originally, I disagree, regardless it is no longer funny.
• Our dog Max seems to have a thing for the neighbor according to Parker, he and Shirley take Max to the bus stop every morning and the red rocket comes out when August mom appears, to Max’s credit August’s mom is kind of hot.
• Shirley signed Aiden up for basketball in Caledonia and this past Saturday morning at the skills evaluation, or lack of skills evaluation in Aiden’s and a lot of the other kid’s cases there were roughly 100 parents there and only one dipshit parent was wearing a mask, hopefully the guy had diabetes, asthma, and cardiovascular disease, other wise he should be hurled into the sun for his stupidity and failure to go along with what everyone else is doing.
• Parker’s football team had a BBQ at the coaches house and Shirley and I attended. I haven’t broken into the inner circle of the football dads on his team, nor do I plan on it at any point in his playing career, but it was weird to stand around in a circle with a bunch of dudes (and one mom) and have absolutely nothing to say. There was a story I wanted to tell but I got too nervous as to how it would be received by the cool dads who are part of the inner circle so I didn’t tell it, it was similar to the feeling you get when you want to tell a joke to a group of people but you only know a few of them well enough to be offensive and have it be acceptable.
• Shirley and I were invited to go to Boo at the Zoo with Aiden’s friends parents family. Shirley told me she turned the invitation down, which is quite unlike her since she loves the opportunity to engage in awkward small talk with complete strangers. I felt kind of bad, no idea why, and asked her if maybe we should reconsider, her response “I already have enough friends”. I don’t know if I have ever been more proud of her, even though she didn’t truly mean it, this has been my mantra almost my entire adulthood and something I frequently tell her when she involves me in plans with people I don’t know.

Those are some of the highlights and now I will get into the nitty gritty. Two Saturdays ago Parker had his final game up in Rockford. He had somehow managed to make his way onto the starting defense and his coach told me in an email how impressed he was with Parker’s improvement over the season. A normal parent would be proud and tip their cap to their child but I’m not a normal parent. I keep an eagle eye on Parker during the games as well as the scrimmages I am present at and I have seen little improvement when it comes to his aggressiveness. I am not saying he’s not able to be a good football player, because I think he can, I think he just doesn’t really care. Regardless, his attitude did change towards the middle of the season and he insisted on getting to practice early to make the most of the experience. I was half tempted to ask the coach if he had Parker confused with someone else but I decided to keep my mouth shut so Parker would remain on “gold” defense. The final game was slotted for a 10:30 kickoff and Shirley brought Parker up to Rockford where he had to be by 9:30. Upon her arrival Shirley was informed the the game had been pushed back to noon. She left Parker in Rockford and headed to a work related Halloween party that thanks to Parker’s game I was able to skip.

Parker didn’t have his water bottle so I brought it over to him on the bench, as I was walking towards his team Parker was headed in my direction, but not to get his water bottle, he had to hit the porta potty. Parker’s team was on offense so he thought it was safe to take care of business but they ended up turning the ball over right as stepped into the john. I ran towards the team but it was too late, the defense only had 10 players on the field, fortunately Parker typically runs away from any action on the field so it didn’t really matter that he was in the can with his uniform pants around his ankles. As I headed back to the stands he passed me and informed me he only had to do a rewipe not actually take a shit. Parker’s team trounced Rockford but Parker didn’t see much of the field in the second half. Not sure if it was due to the rewipe incident or the fact that his head coach wasn’t there and the playing time was controlled by a group of the inner circle who decided to play their kids the entire time. Either way it was bullshit, I didn’t drive all the way up to Rockford to watch someone else’s kid shy away from contact and run away to the other side of the field when the ball came his way, I was there to watch my kid do that. As we walked back to my truck I asked him if he was upset that he didn’t get to play much in the second half, he wasn’t.

On Monday Parker decided he needed a haircut, Pokemon cards, and new shorts in no particular order. When I got home he insisted that I take him for all of those things. When I told him I couldn’t because I had to make dinner he asked me again thirty seconds later, when I gave him the same response he asked Shirley and then came back and asked me again. I told him we could go on Tuesday instead only to get a text from Shirley mid day that we had plans to go out to dinner with Aiden’s friends mom and her boyfriend. (different parents than the Boo at the Zoo couple) Parker was not aware of the dinner plans and called me when I was on my way home from work. Things are a little different from when I was growing up, instead of utilizing a land line to call me, Parker calls me on our Alexa and it comes up as Shirley’s number. By now I should realize when I receive a call before 7pm it is one of the kids and not Shirley. It always catches me off guard when I hear a prepubescent voice on the other line and they start out with “Dad” followed by “Can you” or “Can I” or “Will you”. I informed Parker it would have to be Wednesday since his mom and I had dinner plans. Five minutes later the real Shirley texted me that the dinner plans were canceled freeing up my night and allowing me to be Parker’s bitch. Is Parker creative enough to send me a text disguised as Shirley in the hopes that it would make his shopping trip happen? I’d like to think so, but probably not.

We also decided to take Aiden with us since he needed some wardrobe upgrades as well. The kids initially wanted to go to Tanger but it was too cold to go to an outdoor mall so we settled on Woodland and landed at JC Penny. There was a lot of stuff on sale and we managed to compile quite a few items for what I deemed to be a fairly reasonable price. However, I do regret not speaking up when Parker picked out a couple of the ugliest pairs of shorts I have ever laid eyes on. When we got home Shirley chastised me for not vetoing the purchase and said she was going to return them, which means they will sit at our house for months before we drop them off as a donation at Goodwill. I also regret letting Parker badger me into buying him a white pair of Champion slides that were $25. I am certain I could find similar slides for a fraction of the price at TJMax or Marshals. However, having Parker constantly bother me until I brought home new slides was definitely not worth the money I would have saved.

On our way into the mall I told the kids about a client I had who “assisted” in an armed robbery that had taken place at the food court in the mall. I figured since they had just watched the first three episodes of Squid Games they were ready for a real life story about gun violence. They were quite interested in my story but bummed that no one actually got shot. There was one thing that made our trip to the mall even more catastrophic than witnessing an armed robbery, the discovery of the Van’s store. Last week I bought a pair of Van’s at Dick’s Sporting Goods that I had had my eye on for quite some time (I admittedly have an Imelda Marcos sized shoe fetish) and already have had one unsolicited compliment from a black guy about the shoes. I have received other compliments from black guys when I am in court complimenting me on my suits, whenever a black guy tells me they like what I am wearing I know I have done well. My parents never took me on a spending spree to JC Penny where I was able to pick out whatever I wanted but had there been a Van’s store when I was a kid my parents wouldn’t have even let me enter it just to look around. The store is just awesome, that’s all I can say, it’s has this warmth to it that makes it so you don’t want to leave and the skateboards on the wall are a thing of beauty (even though I am not a skateboarder). Ultimately, I was able to resist the temptation of adding another pair of Van’s to my extensive shoe collection but I can’t say the same for the kids. They settled on the same pair of Van’s and both of them wore them to school today. While Aiden is a roller blader at heart (I will explain in tomorrow’s blog) my hope is that Parker graduates from the long board I bought him a few years back to a skateboard so I can take him on many more trips to the Van’s store and not feel like such a poser.