Tubby custard hobblicoition

Andrew Hicks

I learned something new today, from the DrGimpy corner of the Internet. The term “abasiophilia” describes the fetish of having sexual desire for someone in a cast or on crutches. My wife is not an abasiophiliac, and I’m pretty glad she isn’t. If Tiffany did have a cast fetish, I’d probably always be suspicious that she was trying to push me down the stairs or run me over with the car to achieve her own perverse ends. Because nothing turns a lady on like having to do all the housework and pay all the bills yourself while your husband is immobile. That’s white-hot, “Funky Cold Medina” stuff right there.

The DrGimpy contingent was unable to provide me with a term for wasting an entire paragraph of your readers’ time describing the practice of being physically aroused by orthopedic assistance devices. So I’ll make up a term: “hobblicoition.” That’s pronounced “hah-blih-coh-ish-un.” Next, I’ll make up a term for wasting a second paragraph of your readers’ time by making up a term to describe the subject matter of the first paragraph you wasted your readers’ time with. And so on. This blog’s going to write itself today.

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Hurricane Sarah trashed the downstairs family room and headed off to bed a couple hours ago. 23-month-old Sarah’s favorite new toy is her baby brother’s giant canister of formula powder. She uses every square inch of the coffee table to roll and slide the canister, then she turns it upside down and drums on the metallic underside. I do my dadly best to be right next to her and make sure the plastic lid doesn’t get pried off. That kind of mass powder dispersing would be a catastrophic mess, almost as bad as that scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen sneezes into the L.A. hipster character’s voluminous cocaine stash. Baby formula is almost as expensive as coke, from what I understand.

I vaguely remember, during the pregnancy and Sarah’s first couple months, pledging I’d be a truly conscientious, revolutionary parent. My child would not eat McDonald’s. My child would not watch television. My child’s carbon footprint would not be any larger than her pinkie toe. That was an Andrew who was unaware of the reality of round-the-clock parenting. That Andrew had no idea that McDonald’s french fries make a hysterical toddler stop crying in the car. That Andrew also didn’t know the sheer amount of wet and poopy diapers he’d be tossing in the garbage over the next two years.

That guy especially didn’t know how much he’d come to rely on the TV. It’s really easy to brag to strangers that you’re not gonna let your kid be babysat by television, but it’s tougher to resist when you figure out babies really love television. This is a tough reality to resist at seven in the morning when baby is wide awake and you still have two very crucial hours of sleep to catch up on and “Sesame Street” is just starting on the channel your tax dollars fund. Well, not your tax dollars, necessarily, but the tax dollars of people who earn real money.

Sarah’s first TV love was “Teletubbies.” Pre-parental Andrew had always bought into the conventional wisdom of cynical twentysomething adults, that the Teletubs were for drool-mouthed nincompoops only. I was especially put off by the knowledge that the producers of the show would have the TTs do something inane like jump around for a minute, then have them yell, “Again! Again!” and just loop identical footage. At the time, I didn’t understand or consider the target audience for the Teletubbies – babies aged 91 to 445 days. The vast majority of whom do have drooly mouths.

The Hicks household invasion of Tinky Winky, Dipsy, La La and Po reminded me of the media furor in 1999, when the late Rev. Jerry Falwell yanked Tinky Winky out of the closet. Watching the show now, yes, Tinky Winky is purple and dances impeccably and has an upside-down triangle instead of hair, but I believe Falwell’s remarks were narrow-minded and completely off-base. The truth is, all four Teletubbies are gay. They all carry around purses, they all try on dresses, and they all enjoy the taste of “tubby custard.” Whatever that is.

Jerry Falwell is in heaven. The Teletubbies live on at my house in sparkling VHS. Fal’s well that ends well.

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BABY PICTURE OF THE DAY

 

Baby Silas is not quite ready to be a Bumbo sitter, but this is an excellent dome view of his male pattern baldness.

 

DrGimpy’s dirty dream

It’s been almost three weeks since I went into surgery for my broken ankle. Still visible – on the outside of the big toe of the foot that was operated on – is a black Sharpied X, smaller than the size of a quarter. A nurse drew that on there as a visual aid for the doctor. So he’d know which foot to operate on. You know, I think the inked-on X was much less of a beacon than the bloody ankle bone protruding three inches from the foot that was hanging limply to the side. But  thank God for the X. Imagine if he’d operated on the good foot and left  the bad one hanging. Seven-figure-settlement territory there. Instead, I’ll probably go into medium four-figure debt over the incident.

I’m still not quite able to bear weight on the broken ankle. I go back to the doctor on Monday. Meanwhile, I can tell you without a doubt, do not Crutch While Intoxicated. I had free tickets to the Funny Bone on Wednesday night, and I shattered the two-drink minimum. It was the dumbest thing I’ve done since the ankle break itself, and I owe my mom a pile of guilty apologies. Still, really quite a good time, right up until I had to negotiate the staircase into my mom’s house. She ended up keeping the baby in her room that night. Bad adult child.

Turns out I was also Facebook friends with the opening comedian. Never underestimate the power of Facebook. It can make you a billionaire at age 23 or it can get you the two tables right in front of the stage for a Wednesday night comedy show. My cast leg was propped on a chair and hanging over the stage itself. Headliner Mike Lukas spent probably ten minutes working jokes about my broken ankle into his set. My cast got more stage time than the emcee. My cast really should have charged a performance fee.

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Baby Silas is having his mid-evening nap so he can stay up until 4:30 am. Tiffany’s driving up to meet me right now. I’m looking forward to seeing my Sarah for the first time since Sunday. I love that little girl so much. I think Sarah already has a 21st century attention span. She’ll bring a book to me and beg me to read it to her, but then she wants to flip the  pages rapid-fire. So we hurry up and get to the end, then she immediately wants to start over. And I’m thinking, “Sure, you want to start over. You didn’t catch any of that the first time.”

I’m eager to get back to a normal life, walking and working and having my family all together at my house. I’m starting to go crazy from too much time spent non-productively at odd hours. There’s only so much you can go hunt down on the Internet. I got bored and searched Facebook for other people with the same name as me. My wall reads “Andrew Hicks and Andrew Hicks are now friends,” like I’m finally at peace with myself.

I’ve been looking at my own blog stats a bunch too. My site is still largely a secret – it’s not that I’ve kept it a secret; it’s just that no one talks about or visits it – but it’s getting linked from what look like junk personal finance sites run by bots. Does anyone else know about this phenomenon? Does WordPress just blindly release links to their blogs for these automated websites to put up in the corner under the “Support This Site” header? I don’t have a joke for this, I genuinely want information.

The blog stats also show me what terms people have searched for to find their way to my blog. One person found their way here by searching for “leg cast stories.” Now, I was bored myself and searched for “leg cast stories,” and I was surprised to learn there’s a percentage of Internet users who are into, well, dirty leg cast stories. By dirty, I mean erotic. And according to their stats, they’ve got more readers than I do.

Someone with the screen name CastBytch even writes sensual cast-themed poetry (“My heart skips / Breath shallow / Our eyes meet / Over fiberglass”). I’ve never thought of my condition as anything but an inconvenience. It’s Fracturophile and DrGimpy’s ultimate fantasy. I guess it’s all a matter of perspective. I wonder if user Wantabrokenankle would help pay my mounting medical bills if I attached a couple provocative closeups of my leg cast and hairy toes, complete with Sharpied X. Desperate times, desperate measures.

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BABY PICTURE OF THE DAY

Sarah chomps dad's hat