Here’s how I view the relevant differences between fathers and mothers:

Mothers are nurturing. They hold you when you’re hurt, help you with your homework when you’ve fallen behind on a project, and coach you through life’s mysteries as you grow older.

Fathers, in the words of Royal Tenenbaum, are meant to “brew some recklessness” into their boys. My pop taught me how to play poker (our favorite was always 3-5-7), how to body surf through an impending tropical storm, and how to use colorful language to get your point across. But these are just a few things I learned from my dad.  Here are my all time favorites:

How to get rid of an old car.  Back when I was little, the apartment my mom lived in backed up to a wooded area in Houston. It was a great place for little kids to play in. To build forts. To play jailbreak in. And a prime spot for your dad to dispose of an old car in.

My dad has never been much on fancy cars. Or working cars. Not long after my folks were divorced, they moved into apartments not far from each other. My dad would frequently come by and visit and on more than one occasion, the car might have trouble starting back up. Dad would tweak something under the hood or maybe get a jump and the car would be back and running in no time.  This happened on a succession of cars over a number of years.

One car in particular gave my dad fits though. I can’t remember the make or model, but I do remember that it was green, old, and big as hell. It had died in the parking lot of my mom’s apartment complex and in my dad knew exactly how he’d handle this situation. Instead of getting it towed or figuring out what the problem is, my dad instead recruited me, Andy, and 3 or 4 of our pals from the neighborhood to help him get rid of the car. As my dad steered the car, he had 5 or 6 8, 9, and 10 year olds pushing the car through the street. We weren’t exactly sure where we were going but we made a turn to head back behind the apartment complex. We kept pushing, the car getting heavier and heavier (they made cars out of raw steel and iron back then I could swear) until we pushed the car over a curb and right into the woods (and we didn’t exactly make a great effort to hide the car either. It was basically on the edge of the woods). The kids were kind of giddy (especially Andy) because we knew we were doing something wrong but this time, we had adult supervision — if my then 45 year old dad could be called “adult”. To this day, whenever I think of the final days of one of my cars, I wonder where I can find an undisturbed, pristine section of woods that I can use to dispose of my car.

Exploiting child labor. When I was probably 10 and Andy 8, my dad experimented with getting out of the restaurant business for a few years and instead managed a Radio Shack. About once or twice a month, pop would take us to work with him. This was pretty much the coolest “take your kid to work” situation I could’ve hoped for. While my friends went to sit in a cubicle with their dads, I got to hang out at the mall and play with the cool gadgets Radio Shack sold (remote control cars! color computers!! short wave radios!!!). However, more often than not my dad motives other than mine and Andy’s enjoyment when taking us to work.

Every month (or quarter, I can’t remember), Radio Shack would make their stores count inventory. In most retail establishments, this is probably not a huge deal. But did you ever go to a Radio Shack in the 80s? And did you see how much tiny, microscopic crap they sold? Diodes, LED lights, the stuff that goes into electronic equipment!! This was a monumental pain in the ass for the average manager.

But not for Bruce Muehleman

He would take his two youngest boys, ply them with $5, a slice of Sbarro pizza, and maybe some free time at the arcade, and get them to do the counting. Andy and I thought we’d died and gone to heaven. Now we’re getting PAID to go to work with Dad?!?  This was AMAZING. Maybe we weren’t the most reliable inventory specialists in the organization (we were, after all, little kids easily distracted by remote controlled cars) but we always got the job done. And dad was always very pleased with our work.

Bonus child labor exploitation story: Brewing recklessness wasn’t limited to the Muehleman boys. He also didn’t hesitate to get Amy involved in the racket. Back when he owned a restaurant, he’d get Amy, then 15 or 16 (or thereabouts) to run the bar when things were slow. This was great until a representative from the Texas beer and liquor licensing department came in and noticed this transgression. Whoops?

To my dad, Happy Father’s day.

And to all the father’s out there, don’t forget to brew some recklessness into your kids.

It usually starts with heavy breathing. I’m in that half sleep, half awake state and I hear the breathing near by. I also have that nervous feeling that someone may be watching me. Two thoughts cross my mind: a robber broke into the house, ran up the stairs, and is now watching me (this could either be a fear or a fantasy of mine. but I digress). Or, Holly has woken up and is trying to snuggle with me. But then I remember we’ve been married for over 9 years and, ha, that just doesn’t happen.

As I emerge more and more out of my slumber, more evidence emerges pointing away from the Robber Theory or the HP Spooning Theory. I feel something very coarse up against my arm. Like an SOS pad but organic. I slowly open one eye to investigate my surroundings and through the blur, I see the faint outline of big, pointy ears. This is where theory 3 comes into play: I’m being attacked by a gremlin. Alas, that’s a passing thought on my way to concluding who, or what, is really the culprit:

Marv is awake

Our youngest dog, Marv, is unlike any dog I know. He’s at the point now where he wakes up most mornings at 6, will carefully, slowly, creepily move to our end of the bed, and stare at us, boring holes through us in the hopes that we’ll wake up and take him on his morning walk. Some mornings this takes little effort. We dutifully wake up, take him out, and he’s back asleep by 7.

Other mornings he has to try harder. The staring and deep breathing last approximately 30 minutes before he moves on to phase 2: sleeping on my back. This method has mixed results. In the event that it doesn’t work, phase 3 is the Marv equivalent of the nuclear option: he stands on my back.  Now how can standing on my back be that much worse than sleeping on my back you might ask. It goes like this. Marv weighs about 25 pounds. But his paws should carry the load of a 5 pound dog. Using some rough math and a basic understanding of force exerted by midget dog paws, i’m figuring Marv could plug that oil gusher in the Gulf. Whenever he walks on my back, I think I’m inches away from either the best massage i’ve never had or from getting a punctured lung. He moves up my back until he brings to bear the full force of his menacing ways: the heavy breathing, the pointy ears, the coarse, water proof hair, and the paws in the back. At this point, i’ll do anything to make it stop.

With this in my bed, who needs an alarm clock?

We are breaking from our regularly scheduled broadcast to talk about something serious. Typically I wouldn’t talk about something like this on such a public forum, but I think I need this catharsis.

Early this morning, my younger brother Andy died. He was 30.

It’s a drag to be certain. And I usually bemoan people who share stuff like this in such an open setting. But as someone who blogs frequently (or not so much of late) I can see the draw to sharing something like this here. I don’t really care how tacky or informal it is.  I think writing about it will make me feel better.

So here we go.

It was siblings day the other day (it’s really a day. I swear) I figured I’d tell some stories about my little brother. Andy was almost exactly 2 years younger than me. Always a bit scrawny, I pretty much spent my formative years dominating him in basketball, video games, or any competition you could think of.  We’d play h-o-r-s-e, 1-on-1, Pitfall, who could throw the football the farthest, who could jump the highest, who gave the best Ralph Macchio flying sidekick impersonation the best, you name it. We competed over it. We did all these things night and day. But our favorite competition was always “sockball”

When we were 9 or 10 or 11 years old, we were both baseball crazy. We wanted to run, catch, or throw anything we could, whenever we could (I’m not sure we’re any different to this day). Simply playing little league wasn’t enough to sate our appetite for the game. So we worked out a 1-on-1 baseball game that we played in our driveway or in front of whereever we were living at the time. We started with a real baseball. That lasted about 3 minutes. You can imagine how that worked out (have you SEEN me hit a line drive?).  A tennis ball, while less damaging to the body, still flew a little too far to make it workable. So we put the best of our Muehleman problem solving skills to work and came upon a genius creation: sockball. We wadded up a pair of old tube socks and used a an old cedar rod from the closet as our bat. This made for the perfect game. The “ball” wouldn’t fly too far, we could play 1-on-1, and best yet, we could throw the “ball” at the other one’s body to get them out. We played this for years and maybe had a fight or two (or 30) over whether someone was actually tagged or not, illegally tagging the other one in the nads, or just generally being a jerk.

As we grew older, our fights became more fearsome. One time we were playing whiffle ball (by our teens, sockball seemed soooo juvenile) and i was running my mouth at Andy. He ran by me, smacked me, and ran inside the house. I followed in hot pursuit almost catching him as he got to the top of the stairs in the house. He ran into his room and slammed the door right in my face. I started pounding on the door, begging him to come out. I even promised him $10 if he came out and let me beat him up. He didn’t budge. Finally, I accidentally punched a hole in the door. Just as I took a step back to marvel at my raw power, Andy opened the door, looked at the hole, looked at me and said “dude, you are in HUGE trouble”. We then both schemed a way to repair the door.

As adults, we were close some years, distant in others. In the last few years, we’d drawn closer as we both matured. But it didn’t take long for us to revert back to our younger years with various crude name calling and  dares of who could do what better (as an adult, he turned into a much better athlete than I could ever hope to be). Last year I gave him the DVD Eastbound and Down for a gift (if you haven’t seen it, don’t watch it with children in the room. That’s the advice I gave to Andy anyways). It took a fictional, washed up baseball player to bring us close again. Is that ridiculous or what?

I could write a thousand stories about my brother, all of them drawing a laugh from some or a “wow” from others (mostly parents). He was a good kid and he tried hard and I’ll miss him.

p.s. I can bet $1,000 that my next post will be some trite, reckless story of mine. So don’ t be scared to come back.

p.p.s I’ve disabled comments. Sorry everyone.