Is happiness a warm gun, or an electrified fence?

Sorry for the posting gap again. I've been debating whether or not to purchase a semi-automatic rifle, to protect my family from the roaming hordes that have begun terrorizing my neighborhood.

Let me take a step back.

I grew up in the suburbs (Glendale, WI, represent!). To me, people who looked their car and home doors were paranoid, or feral cityfolk. I thought you only had to worry about such things in places that also had sidewalks, and streetlights, and stoplights that kept working after 9 pm. Only suckers had to fence themselves off from their neighbors, was my firmly held 9-year-old belief.

Eventually, though, I moved to various cities, and learned the value of keeping my stuff safe. I also learned to never make eye contact on public transportation, to not flash your lights at a car without its lights on at night, never wear red or blue in public unless you want to be get wacked in a drive-by, and fuck the po-lice.

But for whatever reason, I thought Pittsburgh, specifically Squirrel Hill was different. It's the midwest! People are nice, obey speed limits, and are afraid of bridges and tunnels. Kids play ball in the street. People let you skip in line. Fathers will let you walk their young, nubile, naive daughter home at night, because you're such a nice-looking boy.

So I got sloppy. And I forgot the first rule of home safety - never expose bright shiny things to the seedy criminal element.

What I'm trying to say is, some fuckers stole our stroller.



It's not a TV. It's not a car. It's only the means by which I transport my child. No, these people aren't vile, scum of the earth. They are the lint from within my sweaty armpits. They are the goop from an infected ingrown toenail. They are weeping sores upon the testicles of society.

So what do I do? I'm locking everything up, tying everything down. I'm getting bulletproof glass for my car, and hidden machine guns in the headlights. I'm going to run an electric current through my grill so anyone who touches it gets 20,000 volts up the ass. I'm teaching child Kung-Fu, and giving Wife brass knuckles and a spiked bat. I'm having motion detectors put on my house, so anyone who approaches within 300 yards sets off piercing alarms and spotlights. I'm also training release the hounds with bees in their mouths so when they bark they spit bees at you (thanks, Homer, once again, for your brilliant insights).

So do I buy a gun, or what? Am I that guy? Do I have a rocking chair I can move to my porch and from which can eye suspiciously each and every passerby? Do I put my Glock in a locked case next to my bed, or get a thigh-holster and become a cowboy? Or one of those under-the-armpit bra-type thingies? Ankle holster? Attach it to an apparatus around my head? I need some good advice about joining the NRA.

Oh, and I have a kippah tan. That's right, because I'm bald, and whiter than Francis McKenzie Smithson, center for the Ku Klux Klan iter-racial basketball team (team name - the Alabama Pale Horses).

On the losing of hair in unfortunate places

As some of you may or may not know, I am in the process of losing some of the hair on my head. I refuse to call it "male pattern baldness" for a few reasons:

1) There is no pattern. There is only chaos, and blindingly white skin, whiter even than my upper thigh, which is also mindbogglingly pale. Ask Wife, if you dare.

2) Male pattern baldness sounds, depending on the day, either too harmless or not harmless enough. On the one hand, it's only hair. On the other, it's the hair on one's head. Unless there's a pattern I don't know about, one that wends its way down a man's chest to his toe hairs, those most precious of growths.

OK, there's really only one reason, because the second was neither interesting nor funny. It just shed an uncomfortably harsh light on my toe-hair fixation.

Anyhoo, I'm not terribly attached to hair in general, really just the ones on my head. Is there a pattern of baldness that attacks, say, the armpit? Or the "happy trail?" The public never hears about these unfortunate cases, maybe because there aren't commercials showcasing remedies. Remedies, by the way, that I refuse to consider. Because the pattern of my baldness is interesting, even mesmerizing. Like a shallow but strong rivulet of water it wends its way from the original, traditional bald spot forward to the forehead, leaving a trail of the aforementioned pearly white scalp. And I stand at the mirror, transfixed by the ever-growing blank space.

Questions to consider as one stares at the most prominent visual sign of aging:

- When is the proper time to just shave it all off, go Kojak?

- What compels a man to consider a combover?

- What does the Google Earth image of the top of my head look like?

- Are there topographical considerations as to the pattern? In other words, could a phrenologist have predicted the direction, and width, of the pattern, back when I was wee lad possessing full, lustrous hair?

- Is every pattern unique, like snowflakes?

- If I hold my head just so, can I still hit on high school chicks? Maybe they won't notice...

- 20 years from now, if there's a cure found, would I take it? Would it freak Children out a little too much? And would that be an incentive or disincentive?