Reservoir Dad Has Moved To www.reservoirdad.com

Reservoir Dad Has Moved

2010-03-01T10:57:00.003+11:00

Reservoir Dad has moved to

www.reservoirdad.com

The Original Mentally Sexy Post

2010-02-26T09:30:00.002+11:00

The new website is not quite ready so, as promised, here is the post that spawned the Mentally Sexy Movement. As you can see, the competition has evolved a hell-of-a-lot since then. - RD.

I hate soup but it’s the requested dish and while I’m doing my best to be enthusiastic about making it I’m far too conscious of the fact that I’m really just trying to turn water into a meal even though I’m wealthy enough to buy real food. Reservoir Mum is standing by the sink expressing milk with an electronic pump, watching me. I suggest that we could try eating some nicely grilled grass-fed cow and then drink a glass of water afterwards but she won’t have it.

I can’t hide the fact that I’m annoyed. 'Soup is Nana food,' I tell her. 'After I’ve finished cooking I’ll knit myself a nice blanky to hide my incontinence pad and keep my legs warm.'

I glance at her for a response but I get nothing and my gaze is drawn, predictably, to her boobs. They are being savagely handled by the electronic pump and I am suddenly conscious of the fact that they have received a lifetime’s worth of attention at the hands of milk-sucking machines and children and I feel anxious as I wonder if I will be allowed any access at all when it's finally my turn to handle them again.

As I begin to peel carrots I am taken over by a nightmarish image of myself waiting in line to sit on Santa’s lap. There are thousands of kids and machines ahead of me. I can’t take my eyes off his rosy red cheeks and all I want to do is get close enough to squeeze them but as the hours and days pass and the line shortens and it’s finally my turn Santa – who is just totally over all the attention – tells everyone that he’s going for a quick cigarette behind the carousel and we never see his rosy red cheeks again.

I realize that to ensure Reservoir Mum doesn’t one day disappear behind a carousel I will have to hold her interest in me by maintaining my current level of sexiness for eternity and as the dirty peel falls from the carrot and reveals the more appealing orange flesh beneath I consider removing my shirt, or perhaps even cooking in the nude, to titillate the good lady wife. As well as doing this I may also need to stop complaining about making soup as I’ve heard that constant complaining and sooky-ness can be a turn off to some women. Also, I read an article at Dad Blogs that sexiness to a woman is as much mental as it is physical and so I must remember to tell her how sexy I am, on an hourly basis, which will prove to be doubly effective because – yes – women are mental but they also like to talk a lot.

After removing my shirt I turn to her and say, 'My abs are visible all the time now.'

I’m overwhelmed when she says, 'I’ve noticed.'

'Yes,' I tell her, 'It’s like I’m wearing armor.'

Wow. Turning on women seems effortless and I’m more than chuffed. I remove my pants to combine the visual with the mental and deliver the killer punch. I’m so pleased with myself that my imagination runs away from me and I see myself standing shoulder to shoulder with all the other Dads at the Northern Dads Group. We are dressed in Leopard-spotted loin-cloths and sexy young women are marching up and down inspecting us carefully in order to bed the one they find most attractive. Again and again they choose me.

'You know,' I say to Reservoir Mum, "I’m certain, that if the whole Northern Dad’s Group was standing in a line wearing nothing but loin-cloths most women would choose me as the most attractive.'

I am just about to put the carrot down when Reservoir Mum says, 'I don’t know… Jack’s fairly good-looking.'

I suddenly feel cold. Jack is good looking. He’s also very smart and – who the fuck knows – he probably loves soup. Suddenly I see myself one back in the order of most attractive and before I know it I am comparing myself to each Dad individually. Simon is an artist and a teacher and has a head full of hair. Dan helps the underprivileged and has a sexy accent. Joe builds houses and lives in a nice leafy suburb. Kelvin is a librarian who knows a lot about books. Tony is very exotic and champions women’s rights.

My confidence wanes as I realize that while I may outmuscle them all physically and even break even with several of them when it comes to having things like a nicely shaped head or semi-dreamy eyes I have to be honest with myself – I am being slaughtered when it comes to the mental side of sexy. Simon’s art and Dan’s caring-ness and Joe’s vision and Kelvin’s cataloging genius and Tony’s awareness of female issues versus my blogging which, in all honesty, does nothing more than highlight my growing insanity and my constant desire to talk about myself.

I imagine that I am part of Reservoir Mum’s harem and all the other Dads are eating grapes in the bathing lounge and waiting to be summoned while I mop the hallways and try not to annoy everyone with my constant limping.

When I look down at the cutting board I see that I have absentmindedly peeled the carrot into a thousand transparent slivers and I have my arms folded across my bare chest. I feel vulnerable and afraid.

As I pull on my clothes I consider the fact that being mentally sexy means not complaining about making soup and so I make the effort to stop this, immediately, but I try to be subtle about it by making up a story, 'You know, when I was a boy a school bully poured soup on my crotch while I was sitting in the middle of the quadrangle and everyone called me soupy-pants for an entire year. Making this soup today has been hard but I feel that it has been necessary for me to let the incident go. I think I am ready to enjoy soup again.'

When I turn to her I see that she’s staring at me intently and after a moment of deep reflection she says, 'I think you’re mental'

Bingo. I feel as if I am on the road to being sexy on multiple levels and I have this confirmed when she reaches over, squeezes my butt and whispers, ‘I liked it better when you cooked naked.’

I watch her walk out the door minutes later and I can’t help but feel that, despite my obvious shortcomings, the world continues to turn just for me. I stare triumphantly at the water as it cooks in a big pot with the real food and I formulate an idea that is so choccas-full-of-genius that it will allow me to challenge the other Dad’s and steal the title of Most Mentally Sexy Dad in one short year – every Monday, starting January 4 2010, I will post a photo of a recognizable pair of my own underwear on a new object, animal, or person. It will run for fifty weeks total. The final ten weeks will be a countdown featuring my underwear on the top ten Most Mentally Sexy Dads and will end on week fifty with my underwear where it rightfully belongs – on the chief selector and therefore Most Mentally Sexy Dad ever. Me.

Most Mentally Sexy Update

2010-02-24T14:05:00.012+11:00

The Mentally Sexy Movement is changing the world and all I can say is it's about time because although I have always been a fan of the catch-cry 'A woman can do anything a man can do' I think it's about time the men got their chance to turn it around and say 'A man can do anything a woman can do' and yes, that includes washing, ironing and raising children. I am so heavy with pride that I may need to start doing some pelvic floor exercises.

Some exciting news for The Most Mentally Sexy Competition.

1. I am super excited to welcome Catherine Deveny to Reservoir Dad as the first Most Mentally Sexy Judge! Catherine is a television comedy writer, stand-up comedian, author, social commentator, broadcaster and columnist in The Age newspaper.

Dads, you'll need to make your entries sharp if you're going to impress Catherine. She is a funny, insightful, prolific writer who could tear Reservoir Dad apart with the effortless flick of her wit.

2. Suzanne Robson from The Leader Newspaper contacted me yesterday. Apparently the first story on The Most Mentally Sexy Competition received such overwhelming positive feedback that they have no choice but to run a follow-up article in a few weeks. I am pleased to say it will include a pictorial spread of some of the Most Mentally Sexy Contestants. The Northern Suburbs of Melbourne are rupturing with Mental Sexiness and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

3. Joe Schatz, author of 'Daddy, Where's Your Vagina' and founder of Dad-Blogs, has been working tirelessly on the new Reservoir Dad website and its unveiling is imminent. To this old dog of a website, which has served me well for over two years, I'd like to say, 'Move over, you're shit.'

The new website is so good. Last night, while staring at it and listening to Cherish I lost several hours of sleep, just as I did several times in my early teens staring at a poster-size picture of my first girlfriend, Madonna.

I'd be very grateful if you could help me to thank Joe by purchasing a copy of his great book here.

4. I have been so busy preparing the articles on the new site, as well as fielding calls and emails, and staring at my computer screen, and maintaining a semi-decent house and child-rearing schedule, that I won't be able to post my usual Friday ramble this week.

In its place I will do one of two things - unveil the new website, or if that's still not quite ready, repost the first article that spawned the Mentally Sexy Revolution.

5. If you'd like to see the Northern Dads Group Round Table Discussion of the term Mentally Sexy, go here.

6. Keep an eye on The Search For America’s Most Mentally Sexy Dad here. They're getting some great entries and they will do their best to take the World Title away from us.

7. There is now a fan page at Facebook titled The Search For Australia's Most Mentally Sexy Dad. Please visit, become a fan and suggest that all your Facebook friends become fans too. Don't miss out on this crazy ride.

This is the way to the new world, Dads. Get on board, or get left behind.

Mentally Sexy Monday - Brad

2010-02-22T11:13:00.006+11:00

Brad

Brad is the father of Georgia, 2 and Nate, 4 months.

"I’m Australia’s Most Mentally Sexy Dad because I know that work doesn’t just happen from nine to five, five days a week. My wife doesn’t get to knock off at five and veg out, so why should I? There is a lot of work associated with raising a family.

When I get home, I put the bags down and I’m into it. I’ll clean up around the house, stack the dishwasher, bath the kids, cook a few days a week, whatever’s going. The day ends when the kids are in bed and things are in shape.

It works because if I’m sharing the load with my wife we both get a little bit more time for each other at the end of the night and it means there’s not as much to do on weekends, so that we can both get out with the kids and have some fun.

In the picture I am at the Children’s Farm with my daughter, Georgia."
_____________________________________________

Nice work, Brad.

This Wednesday - Mentally Sexy Updates.

Go here to see all other contestants.

Go here for the official rule page, with details on how to submit your (or your partners) entry.

Go here for the official pictorial guide to the Reservoir Dad Most Mentally Sexy Competition Clothing.

Check in on Fridays for my usual ramble.

School Days

2010-02-19T10:50:00.007+11:00

Day 1

We’re driving the short distance from our house to Archie’s school. It’s his first day, ever, and I’m conflicted, because I’m battling an overpowering sadness at the same time that I’m sharing in his excitement and feeling a level of pride that I generally only ever feel when leading the line dance Nutbush – to Tina Turner’s Nutbush City Limits – at family parties.

As we pull up to the school I use a hearty, ‘Let’s go Arch,’ to clear the emotion in my voice and we exit the car – Reservoir Mum, Arch, Lewy, Tys and Me – and stop for some photos in front of the school’s sign, and while I watch him moving around awkwardly, balancing forward with his giant backpack, I realize that this moment is as mundane as it is momentous, because although it will happen to just about every family, and to just about everyone, it will only happen three times to our family, and to Archie only once.

Day 4

I have all three boys in the car with me and Archie is still buzzing. He loves school. He has new friends – Aiden, Monique and Jacob (who has shoes that make him go very fast). He’s so special, and I’m aware of the fairy dust in that statement even as I think it, but he’s right there, a firecracker in my rear vision mirror, chatting, smiling, humming and gyrating in his seat. I can’t help but think that he looks so cool in his oversized uniform, which I am pleased to say is a combination of blue, aqua and maroon, and all that I could think to add to it would be a Members Only Jacket and possibly a nice set of Ray-Ban Wayfarer Sunglasses.

On the way out of the grounds, the principal asks me to put in an application to join the school council. I suggest that she might want to reconsider that request when she sees The Preston Leader Newspaper. ‘No,’ she says, ‘If you can get into the paper, you might be able to help us with fundraisers.’ I suddenly see the entire school wearing Reservoir Dad T-shirts. I could change the world.

Day 6

While we’re waiting, before school, Archie tells me he has more friends now - Aiden, Monique, Jacob (who has shoes that make him go very fast), Bo (who has yellow hair), and Jai (whose hair is orange). Then he says, ‘Dad, two girls here really, really, like me,’ and I laugh and say, ‘Of course they do, Arch.’

The preliminary bell – which is always music that signals the preps to line up with their class against the wall – is a droll, depressing, country-ish type song, which I find to be not only distasteful, but potentially damaging to young minds. I tell Archie to cover his ears as he joins his classmates and I make a note to change the music to something more appropriately rousing, like Run DMC’s It’s Tricky, once I am elected to the school council.

Day 7

Even though this is predominantly Archie’s journey, I am his most regular tag-along, and it’s opening a whole new world to me. Every morning and afternoon, there’s a mass of parental variety waiting at the bottom of the school steps – business suits, moccasins, tattoos, tank tops, dark mascara over beige foundation, tired eyes carrying dark bags, frowns that have been worn all day long, smiles – the genuine and the forced, and the conversations I overhear range from the trivial to the semi-serious, and from the polite to the gossipy and underhanded.

I’m wearing board shorts and a gym shirt stained by this morning’s bacon and eggs. If I were to categorize myself among the parents I would place myself in the scruffy group, but I don’t care, because Archie appears at the top of the steps and he’s waving at me, and I’m his Dad, and we know – more than anyone else – how cool we are.

Day 8

I watch Archie disappear inside a classroom, again, and then I wander up the hallway to the office and nominate myself for the school council because today’s Preliminary Bell song was Keith Urban’s Kiss A Girl which made me wish I’d skipped breakfast, and the fear that Archie may return to me at the end of the day humming it, is enough to make me break out into a cold sweat.

Day 11

As I arrive at the school steps to pick up Archie I catch sight of him getting a kiss on the cheek from two girls who are way older than him – Grade 3 or possibly even Grade 4. While we’re walking to the car, he says, ‘They’re the girls that really like me,’ and I say, ‘Arch, you are cute, smart and funny. Of course, those girls really like you,’ and when he drops his vision, looking a little confused, and replies, ‘I know,’ I see, right there, that he’s already on his own path, growing away from me, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

I pick him up, kiss him and hug him, because there’s a strong chance that I won’t be able to do that when he’s going to his first day at University, and I can even anticipate the day coming, when I take him to high school and he says, ‘Dad, just drop me off around the corner, no one likes your 80’s music. It’s embarrassing,’ and the only thing to help me deal with that likelihood is to gather the family in the living room and pump up Tina Turner’s Nutbush City Limits, as often as I can, because I’m a proud Daddy and I do the Nutbush really, really well.

Mentally Sexy Monday - Garry

2010-02-15T09:03:00.005+11:00

The Americans are finally getting their act together – Dad-Blogs has received some very good submissions and the global battle to be crowned the World’s Most Mentally Sexy Dad is going full steam ahead.

Reservoir Dad has also received several more submissions for The Search For Australia's Most Mentally Sexy Dad and if they continue to roll in at this rate, we may have to start putting up more than one entry per week. I promise you this though – no legitimate entry will miss out on having a shot at the title. Even if we receive 100 submissions I will find a way to feature them all.

Since the recent publicity for the competition, I’ve been asked several times what the official definition of Mentally Sexy is. To me, the Mentally Sexy Man is one who takes responsibility in maintaining the passion in his relationship.

One of the greatest aphrodisiacs for women is being desired? Yep, I think I read that somewhere… and so it would follow that a man, in a committed relationship, who is pitching in with the housework and child-rearing, to allow more time for intimacy, is displaying to his wife, in a very practical, visual way, that he still desires her very much. I call that a win win for both husband and wife.

Let’s not shy away from the importance of a good sex life in a happy marriage. I am no Maureen Matthews (sex columnist, Sunday Age) but I’m pretty certain that sex, in itself, is a very good thing. Frequent sex between couples increases the likelihood of happiness, as well as improves intimacy between couples, boosts self-esteem and even improves health by relieving stress, boosting immunity and reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease (look it up) – all these things are very helpful when you’re doing your best, in a cluttered world, to give you and your partner the greatest chance at a happy, passionate marriage

There is some tongue-in-cheek involved in this competition, of course, and we want to have as much fun with it as possible, but let’s not forget that what we are promoting here, in the end, are good Husbands, good Dads, great men.

In other news –

• I am going to leave Mondays free for new contestants from this day forward and include other developments and news about the competition in the new Mentally Sexy Update which will be posted on Tuesdays.

• Every Wednesday, I will include a Mentally Sexy Tip/Quote Of The Week. Feel free to email Reservoir Dad - reservoirdad@gmail.com - if you have any quotes or tips yourself, or if you’ve come across any that you’ve read in the newspapers, or heard on the radio, or seen on TV.

• I am in the process of designing a website for Reservoir Dad, with the help of Joe Schatz, co-founder of Dad-Blogs. I hope you like it when you see the end result.

• You’ll notice the change in heading from Unday – The Search For Australia’s Most Mentally Sexy Dad to Mentally Sexy Monday. I did that because it just makes sense.

Now, to today’s Mentally Sexy entrant –

Garry

Garry is the father of Emmett, 3, and Milly, 1, and he offered us this -

"This isn’t the only example of my Mental Sexiness but I think it’s a good one because it highlights many of my Mentally Sexy skills.

Put simply, I made my son’s birthday cake. And on it’s own that may not seem like much. But there is more than flour and egg in this cake.

Inside this cake there is an awareness of my wife’s needs – she eats organic and so I had to find only natural ingredients. The icing is natural, the coloring is natural and there is nothing artificial in the sprinkles.

Inside this cake there is my high level of commitment to my wife and family. I stayed up until midnight making it – there is nothing I won’t do for my son and my family. My wife was also freed of another responsibility, and after preparing for the party, which was on the following day, was able to go to bed early and get some needed rest.

Inside this cake there is love. Love cracked the eggs and mixed the ingredients. Love fashioned the shark from the slab of cake. Love bent over the shark with a warm knife and applied the icing.

Inside this cake is pride in myself, in my family. As you can see I was the proudest Dad in the world carrying the cake that I made out to my son’s birthday.

As far as being sexy to my wife, the only thing I could have done to be any sexier was to jump out of that cake in a g-string."

Go here to see all other contestants.
Go here for the official rule page, with details on how to submit your (or your partners) entry.
Go here for the official pictorial guide to theReservoir Dad Most Mentally Sexy Competition Clothing.
Check in on Fridays for my usual ramble.

The Stay-At-Home Meltdown

2010-02-12T16:52:00.009+11:00

Several nights of Tyson teething and a lack of sleep, and the way I’m feeling, right now, has parallels with my one-and-only foray into dope-land many years ago. I was nineteen, cajoled into sharing joints with some hard-core pot-smokers, when suddenly, the walls rushed in at me, my legs were overwhelmed by a marathon-runner’s fatigue; rendering me immobile, and every thought that entered my mind was besieged and dragged into madness by a whirling frenzy that was not pleasant.

I am there again, but this time I’m doped up on sleeplessness, and my mind is becoming increasingly erratic, the longer I walk back and forth along this same short stretch of carpet. Sleep has her arms around me, and she is warm and coercive, but I cannot lay with her – the option is not mine – because I have my arms around Tyson, who, despite being deliriously close to unconsciousness, and way past due for his day-time nigh-nighs, remains stubbornly, hellishly awake.

Hours seem to pass as his eyes open and close and his legs kick out and he drifts off and then wakes again and just as I’m reaching a fatigue and repetition-inspired hysteria and wondering if I should just put Tyson down, set a mobile above his cot, and play some low rhythmic baby-ish music, so that I can go downstairs and gouge my eyes out, he sighs and falls asleep. Just like that. When I place him down and watch his face press against the soft mattress, I feel only envy.

I’m going down the stairs slowly because I’m entirely focused on avoiding all creaking sounds and this is why it’s such a shock, when I lift my vision, to see the entire living room and kitchen covered in toys. Archie and Lewis have opened every box and emptied every crate and I think I can even see a bag of rice opened on the carpet, and something smells like cream cheese, or Burger Rings, and Archie says, ‘We had to find that,’ and points to Lewis, who is holding a plain, undersized, marble, between finger and thumb.

I’m beyond reacting to this. No motivation, no desire, no sense of responsibility can drag me away from this exhaustion. I somehow manage to walk to the sliding door and stumble into the backyard and the fresh air, the slight chill in it, is an awesome relief.

As I sit down next to the guinea-pig cage and take out Nugget – the fatter, friendlier guinea-pig – for a pat, the earth shakes, and ripples run through everything I see, as if someone has thrown a stone into the middle of my vision. I reason that I must be hallucinating, but still, as our five chickens gather around me, one sane thought enters my head – maybe I should stop writing at night and go to bed as soon as the kids are asleep.

Yes, that would be sensible. It may help me to avoid infrequent but powerful moments of this drug-like misery and, anyway, writing might be a big fat pointless waste of time because in the meeting I had with the publisher, he said, ‘I really liked your Phuket posts. I love stories of the exotic, of faraway people and places,’ and though I remained relatively conscious from that point on, and even continued with the conversation, my synapses ceased firing, my heart rate dropped, and my mind released its hold on all expectation of a publishable outcome, as soon as he mentioned the word exotic.

The earth shakes again and as Marley and Echo – our two short-haired Border Collies – lumber over and sit at my feet for a pat, I reflect on my motivations. I am interested in people – relatives, friends and those I bump into at the park or the supermarket. And I do like places because I tend to meet relatives, friends and those I bump into, at them, but, I will never write about places outside this tiny backyard, this slightly bigger suburb, or the boundaries of this state, unless circumstance takes me beyond them, and, much to my relief, that doesn’t happen very often.

As I reach over to scratch Marley between the ears, she opens her mouth into a wide stinky dog yawn and says, ‘You’re up yourself, RD’ and hiding my hurt pride behind a quick reply, I say, ‘There’s nothing more exotic, Marley, than the inside of a person’s head, and if you’re looking for something foreign, a little unusual, even alien, you don’t have to go any further than here,’ and I’m tapping my temple for emphasis, reasonably pleased with my ramblings until, Marley, clearly unimpressed, says, in a manner that could only be seen as an attempt to mock me, ‘Uh-huh….’

A bird flies overhead, circles me twice and then lands on my shoulder as Nugget taps me with her nose, and says – in a French accent that is quite becoming – ‘Never mind the Border Collie. You know, RD, a rabbit I was holed up with in the Pet Store, once said to me, that misery is like a monkey swinging from tree to tree. You never know when it’ll share its weight with you, pick at your fruit and bend your branches to the ground…’

I interrupt her to ask, ‘So I’m the tree?’ and she looks confused, drops the French accent, and says, ‘What tree?’ and the ripples appear for a split second, and the bird on my shoulder says, ‘What she’s trying to say, Amigo, is that every town is different, and even though you may ride in on the horse of Misery today, tomorrow you might ride in on the horse of…’. She pauses, struggling for the right word, before Echo, who was quietly licking his arse, sits up and says, ‘Contentment?’ and the skinnier, angrier, guinea-pig says, ‘Joy?’ and one of the chickens, says, ‘er… Happy?’ and the bird on my shoulder covers my ear with her wing before whispering, ‘Don’t listen to a fricken chicken, whatever you do’ and I reply with, ‘The chickens give me eggs, man. What do you give me?’

The bird hesitates, sniffs, and then flies off screaming, ‘Stuff you, ya privileged bastard,’ and just as I begin to think that I have no way out, Nugget yells, ‘Let’s just sing the darkness out of him,’ and all the animals shout, ‘Yeah,’ and Marley, always up for a hearty sing-a-long, pushes PLAY on a 1980’s Beatbox, and I hear the familiar, moving, but up-tempo sounds of Elton John’s Sad Songs, and all the animals link paws and claws and wings with my strange pink-looking wormy hands, and we begin to sing together, as one, and as Elton sings, “Guess there are times, when we all need to share a little pain” I feel the other side of a druggie’s high – weightlessness, euphoria, a sense of belonging to everything – and I realize the over-sensitive bird on my shoulder was right to stuff me, because I am, without a doubt, a bastard of privilege.

This music, this singing, this experience, is nothing short of cathartic.

Suddenly the music stops and I suck in lungful of air, and everything is bright, and when my eyes adjust I see Lewis standing above me, holding a cupfull of mud with my toothbrush sticking out of it.

‘Dad?’

‘Yes, mate?’ I say, rubbing my eyes.

‘You’re asleep on the ground.’

‘What? Really? Can’t be…’ I say.

I sit up and shake the debris from the back of my arms and Lewis climbs up on my shoulders and starts slapping continuously at the top of my head, as if I’m a human drum, and the playfulness, and the slight sting of it, brings me out of my sleepy dullness. There are no ripples any more and the ground is still. I’m overwhelmed by a feeling that my backyard is good. My backyard is great.

‘Hey Luey,’ I say, ‘Let’s make up some stories. Let’s make some really, really cool stories together.’

‘Okay,’ he says, and he begins, as always, with ‘And then…’ and I like that, because it puts me right in the middle of the story, and I’m hanging on to his every word, and soon Tyson will wake up and Archie and Lewis will fight, and then befriend each other, and then fight again, and the house will have to be cleaned, and I will battle through the lack of sleep, and a million dramas will unfold in front of me in a manner of minutes, but it’s okay, because these are my people, and the story I’m telling about them is as exotic as any – it reaches through past, future and present, and offers me a place that has everything I need and, as far as I can see, inside and outside, it has no end.

The Preston Leader and The Red Symons Breakfast Show

2010-02-11T16:53:00.005+11:00

A crazy week at Reservoir Dad.

First The Preston Leader Article appeared featuring Reservoir Dad in Most Mentally Sexy underwear on the FRONT PAGE.

Then I received a call from the Red Symons Breakfast Radio show on 774, and before I know it, I'm on air, waffling about The Most Mentally Sexy Competition and topping it all off by asking Red Symons when we can expect to see his Mentally Sexy entry. He responded by coughing a couple of times and ending the interview.

Since all this media attention the Reservoir Dad blog has received a steep increase in traffic, some more Mentally Sexy Entries and a hell-of-a-lot of inquiries. I will address a few common questions here -

1. You can follow this link to find Preston Leader e-paper with the picture of me and Archie on the front page. The article is on page 5. I'm really looking forward to seeing how the neighbors react to this... not to mention the kids swimming instructors and teachers.

2. It is okay for wives and partners to nominate their husbands as the Most Mentally Sexy Dad and enter on their behalf.

3. We do have prizes. Just yesterday we had a brand new IPod Shuffle donated as a prize to give to Australia's Most Mentally Sexy Dad. We also have Australia's Most Mentally Sexy Dad Finalist 2010 T-Shirts for the top 5, donated by GRASHAN - The Screen Printing Experts. And we are working on others.

4. We do not have a prize organised for The World's Most Mentally Sexy Dad just yet, but we are working on that with Dad-Blogs and will announce it as soon as we have it.

5. Some more Mentally Sexy Clothing is being printed as we speak, and I will have a variety of sizes to fit all Mentally Sexy Entrants.

6. We're getting some great entries and all will be revealed over the coming weeks. The Americans are starting to shake in their boots, as you can see in this article. I urge you to keep the pressure on them, Aussie Dads. Be creative, be daring and lift your Mentally Sexy Skills to a new level.

This is the brave new world. Get on board or get left behind.

Reservoir Dad's Search for The Most Mentally Sexy - The Story So Far

2010-02-10T08:20:00.008+11:00

Click on the names of contestants to see their official entries.

The Beginning

Simon

Joe

Deano

Shaun

Marty

Garry

Brad

Go here for the official rule page, with details on how to submit your (or your partners) entry.
Go here for the official pictorial guide to the Reservoir Dad Most Mentally Sexy Competition Clothing.
Check in on Fridays for my usual ramble.

Unday # 5 - The Search For Australia's Most Mentally Sexy Dad

2010-02-08T15:13:00.008+11:00

It’s nice to feel appreciated. It really is. We’ve been together for 14 years now and it’d be easy for Ian to think he’s got me in the bag. When he does things, spontaneously, like tiding up or making me breakfast and dinner, it makes me feel wanted and cared for. And a man who can make a women feel like that? Well, there’s nothing sexier.
- Virginia, Mother of three

Welcome to Unday #5! Things are progressing at a serious pace with four new, official, competition-grade Reservoir Dad Most Mentally Sexy items of clothing ready to be worn by all the Dads out there who are dreaming of being crowned Australia’s Most Mentally Sexy Dad and getting the chance to represent their country at the highest level.

Remember, the rules for the Australian leg of the competition are very simple. Send a Mentally Sexy Spiel to reservoirdad@gmail.com detailing your Mentally Sexy attributes and activities, and how these impact on your wife and your relationship. Include your postal address with your entry and you will receive an item of clothing of your choice – underwear, boxer-shorts, singlet or t-shirt – so that you can look the part in your Mentally Sexy Photo. Send the item of clothing back in the reply paid envelope, email your photo in, and we’re away.

In further developments –

1. GRASHAN – The Screen Printing Experts, have donated five Mentally Sexy 2010 Finalist T-Shirts to Reservoir Dad, so that our top five Dads at year’s end can brag about their accomplishment, and let everyone know how great they are, without even opening their mouths. More details about GRASHAN to come.

2. This week, Reservoir Dad will be posting almost every day, to set up some reference pages for future posts, and allow visitors to the site easy access to all the ins and outs of the Mentally Sexy Competition. Here’s a gig guide –

Tuesday – the Most Mentally Sexy Rule Page. (see Dad-Blogs if you're impatient)
Wednesday – You can go here to see the Pictorial Guide to the official, competition grade, Most Mentally Sexy Clothing. I will also be putting up the Mentally Sexy photos of the five contestants.
Thursday – The Preston Leader article featuring Reservoir Dad with photo.
Friday – The regular Friday ramble.

3. Don’t forget to duck over to Dad-Blogs to read my article – and to keep an eye on the American Mentally Sexy contestants.

4. We have received a few emails from women offering some quotes to include with each Unday. They’ve been great but we want more. Keep them coming. It gives us Mentally Sexy hopefuls an insight into how our efforts affect our better halves.

5. Remember, this is a global competition. Battle hard, for although contentment and happiness will come to all who follow the Mentally Sexy Path, glory, Dads, is only for the winner.

Now to this week’s entrant.

Marty

Today’s entrant is Marty, father of Patrick, 3 and Isabelle, 2.

“My wife takes care of most of the child related responsibilities. I own two gyms, run a powerlifting club five days of the week, see clients for general fitness and strength building and outsource to professional clubs as a strength coach. My days are varied and motivating and I try to be conscious of the fact that staying at home to look after the kids is a tough gig – it can be isolating at times and it’s also difficult to focus on personal goals. For this reason I do my best to give my wife some child free time, so she can get her fitness and training goals met every week.

Sometimes it means I take the kids to work with me and as you can see in my picture, it can create some dramas. They’re always very keen to help out. I’ll set up a picnic blanket, with drinks and games and hang with them. It’s fun.

This is how I exercise my Mentally Sexy attitude and it works on many levels for both of us. My wife gets to maintain her fitness for her sporting goals, she feels great after exercise so she is much happier and she can really put the child-raising and household issues aside for that period of time.

For me? I get a much happier wife, who is happy with herself and her body and more relaxed, which means I’m happier. The kids are happier too. The bedroom benefits? I might just keep those details to myself. But hey, we’re both very fit…"

Unday - The Beginning

Trauma And Reward - Archie's Fifth Birthday

2010-02-05T09:43:00.011+11:00

The glass I am drinking from only needs to be filled twice to empty an entire bottle of wine and the songs I am listening too (from my self-titled playlist – Reservoir Dad) range in years from 1980 to 1989, and the glare of the computer monitor is so soothing I feel like a freshly hatched chick under a mother hen, and if theatrical is not the word to describe the way I feel then I guess I’ll just have to settle on describing my current state of awareness as lax and stupid and the potential I have to reveal too much of myself, and to express myself in an overly emotional way, is huge, and I hope that by the time I have finished writing this post that I am strong enough to stop myself from posting it to the world wide web without a good night’s sleep and a morning’s reflection.

A few hours ago, after a long enjoyable, exhausting day at Archie’s birthday party, I was sitting on the couch, watching the present opening through the lens of a video camera, noting how Archie’s eyes widened in surprise at each new present before he discarded it and started, feverishly, on the next one, and I couldn’t stop myself from remembering various scenes from his birth – five years ago today – and right now, with the kids in bed and the mournful yet uplifting sounds of Guru Josh’s Infinity washing over me, I have a desire, for the first time ever, to send myself back in time to write about it.

Archie appears in the world sporting a cone-head bruised from his posterior birthing position. His skin is purple-ish, and guck-covered, but it is his withdrawn, Elmer Fudd-ish chin that steals my attention, and even though I was fully aware that a baby was coming today I am still so surprised – as well as knackered and exhausted and traumatized from my role as a bit player in this thirty-hour, harrowing labor– that my first stuttering words to the nurse are,

‘Will his chin stay like that?’

It occurs to me, only a second later, that saying something so lame may become my greatest, irreparable mistake, because Archie isn’t breathing, and as the nurses and doctors whisk him away to work on him in the corner of the room, and as I fight back the desire to knock them down and take over, I look to Reservoir Mum, who, after lasting an ordeal that would have killed Muhammad Ali, Genghis Kahn and at least one John Farnham comeback concert, is moving her head slowly from side to side, eyes closed, totally at the mercy of yet another doctor, who is trying to stem her relentless hemorrhaging, and I can only watch helplessly, and hope – with whatever I have left – that Archie will breath and that Reservoir Mum will not bleed out, and that my lame first words to Archie will be something trivial and funny to talk to them about in the years to come, and not the last horrible thing I ever say to them.

This wine is a good drop. I scored it at a family wedding, for free, several years ago and as I pour myself another glass, Human Leagues Don’t You want Me – which is a good song, but lacking in its ability to evoke a reflective mood – begins to remove me from the immediacy of Archie’s traumatic birth, and so I return to Guru Josh and set Infinity to repeat itself, for as long as is necessary for this confession to feel complete.

At least a litre of blood has pooled under Reservoir Mum’s bed and there are no sounds coming from the tiny operating table in the corner of the room and a sense of horror is beginning to steal the strength from my legs, and my hands are shaking, and I am seriously – perhaps irrationally – considering that I may be leaving here alone and reentering the world as a man who does not have everything he wants, and does not consider himself to be luckiest of the luckiest.

As a human often does, I begin to imagine the worst possible tragedy and the room begins to cool and harden, the doctors and nurses become nothing but strangers, officials, incapable of offering comfort or condolence and everything is beginning to blur and fade and I am certain that I am going to lose it, lose everything, but just as the possibility of leaving here without my baby boy and the love of my life drives me to the near side of hysteria, I hear the first tiny squeak of a new life, and as I hold my breath to listen more closely, the doctor managing Reservoir Mum’s hemorrhage says, nonchalantly, ‘There we go,’ and begins removing her bloodied gloves for the bin, and then the squeak becomes a siren and a baby is finally placed upon Reservoir Mum’s chest – which I am thrilled to see is rising and falling with her steady breathing – and when she opens her eyes and looks directly at me, I experience something I’ve never experienced before – complete, authentic relief.

Although I still feel like I’m going to fall I manage to tell the nurse, ‘We might call him, Archie,’ and even though I remain stoic, and restrict a public showing of emotion – by appearing outwardly relaxed while contracting inwardly at my duodenum – I know that I am only a familiar bed and some ‘me-time’ away from total meltdown.

As I finish the last drop of wine the need to write begins to wane and I feel I have finally purged myself of one of the most traumatic events of my life and I decide that it’s time to listen to something more uplifting and reflective of today’s successful, joyous party. I settle on Pump Up The Jam by Technotronic, and within seconds, I’m smiling.

I remember the look on Archie’s face when he saw Reservoir Mum’s Giant Cookie Cake, and how he laughed as two little girls, Lucy and Lily, chased him around the Playcentre to claim him as their friend, with a kiss on the cheek. I remember how Lewis screamed in a jealous rage and tried to tear a hole in the mesh of the ball-pit, as Archie ran past with Aiden and Fayez and the twins, and how, for the whole day, he was surrounded by family and friends who were transparent in their desire to hang out with him, because he’s just a great kid, he really is – one of the most thoughtful, loving, considerate, energetic, creative, brilliant kids ever – and I don’t need a bottle of wine or a cool playlist of 80’s classics to know this about him, or to know, that I am the luckiest of the luckiest to be his Dad, and to have this time with him.

Happy Birthday Arch!

Unday # 4 - The Search For Australia's Most Mentally Sexy Dad

2010-02-01T10:52:00.007+11:00

I pull on a tight tank-top and don the Most Mentally Sexy Underwear, pick up the vacuum and start fake-vacuuming the carpet, as Archie hangs over my shoulder looking at the man who is kneeling behind me a short distance away, snapping photographs for a newspaper that will go to everyone in my neighborhood – and some distance beyond – and my heart slows as I experience a flashback to a time when I was sitting in my classroom, Grade 2, cross-legged, answering my teacher’s question, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ with ‘I want to be a fire engine’ and I can’t help but think that maybe if I’d been more specific – more correct – in my answer, and not chosen to be a large red vehicle, which is clearly impossible (even if I really, really believe), that I may not be here, as I am, wondering how the hell I got myself into this.

But I am here – into this and, to be totally honest, I’m into this in a big way and (without telling too many people) loving it more than a rabbit loves digging holes because I’ve always had a way of ending up on the strange side of life and now, three years into my role as a stay-at-home-dad, I can finally say that the weird life is the life for me.

So if you get yourself a copy of the Preston Leader Newspaper this week and you see the bald guy poking his arse in your general direction with the words Most Mentally Sexy blazoned across his tight black underwear I don’t want you to feel sorry for him, or embarrassed, because you’re looking at a content man, a man who has found his niche, his calling, his joy.

Some developments before we get onto our fourth contestant in the search for Australia’s Most Mentally Sexy Dad –

1. Dad-Blogs is all linked up and ready for action. The search for America’s Most Mentally Sexy Dad is on and that means that the international contest to find the World’s Most Mentally Sexy Dad has also officially begun. Have a look at Joe Schatz’s sample entry to see what us Aussies are up against and then get motivated and send your Mentally Sexy Spiel here - reservoirdad@gmail.com - so you can get your hands on the Mentally Sexy clothing and get an entry in.

2. Dad-Blogs and Reservoir Dad have penned the official Most Mentally Sexy Competition Rules which you can also see at Dad-Blogs.

3. Due to several emails from sensitive types who desperately want to enter the competition but claim there is no way they will ever be seen at Reservoir Dad in a pair of underwear I now have, in my possession, a pair of official, competition grade, Most Mentally Sexy Boxer Shorts and Tank Top. You can now choose what you wear although, I will point out, the judges will look more favorably on those wearing the underwear so if you’re not wearing them, your entries had better be super-creative.

4. I am now a columnist at Dad Blogs, so head over there to check out my articles and articles from the other great columnists there.

5. I have just about wrapped up three female judges for the Australian leg of the competition and am not too far away from announcing the prizes that will be available for the top five Most Mentally Sexy Aussie Dads when the National leg of the competition ends in October. Stay tuned.

Now to this week's entrant.

Shaun

Our fourth contestant is Shaun, father of daughter Ollie, 4 months.

‘I think I am the Most Mentally Sexy because I work hard and long but help out as much as I can with little Ollie when I get home. I’m a hands-on Dad and wouldn't even think of leaving all the child raising responsibilities to my wife. I insist on doing the nappies and getting her to sleep. I love it and miss being with her all day. On weekends, when I’m not working, I make sure I’ve got a handle on her at all times. I even make a point of carrying her around at parties as you can see in my photo. My wife definitely appreciates my efforts and tells me it's very attractive that I am so in love and involved with my daughter. RESERVOIR DAD RULES!’

hehe. Thanks Shaun. – RD.

Unday - The Beginning

Unday 1 - Simon

Unday 2 - Joe

Unday 3 - Deano

Hang Like A Man

2010-01-29T09:54:00.003+11:00

Of all the clichés I hate, the image of the character staring up at the sky and seeing shapes in the clouds is the one that irks me the most and if I happen to come across it in a book, or a DVD, or a toilet cubicle wall I am more likely to tear the page out, return the DVD, and take my business to another cubicle than I am to bear through it and keep reading.

Strange, then, that only a minute ago I was lying on the kid’s trampoline – freed from my child-rearing duties by Reservoir Mum, heavily dulled by the first giant glass of wine, cooled by the evening breeze, covered in pork crackle pieces, neglectful of the many household chores that lay waiting inside, wearing a new pair of competition grade Mentally Sexy Underwear (to gauge size and comfort), so totally lax in body and mind that I was only aware of vague images passing me by, and unaware of who I was or where I was in time and space – when a sudden bouncy-ball type sound caused me to flex at the hip and sit up rigid and I found myself pointing at a cloud screaming, ‘Holy shit, that looks like a fucking Marlborough-smoking Lama using a vending machine!’

Recovering my bearings I turn left and right in a mad panic, hoping desperately that I haven’t been seen or heard, but to my utter despair I see Jack – the young Muslim boy who lives next door – peering over the fence at me.

‘Could you get me my ball?’ he says.

Totally flustered I fall awkwardly from the trampoline, collect his ball, attempt twice to bounce it between my legs, hitting my foot both times, before trying to pass off my cloud-scream to someone else: ‘Hey Jack… did you hear that crazy… thing… that someone crazy… must have yelled from… I don’t know… close by here?’ I say.

With his ball tucked safely under one arm, he narrows his vision and stares at me, unconvinced, and so - resigned to the fact that I am looking irreparably stupid - I say, ‘Look, let’s just keep this little outburst to ourselves, okay?’ and even though I want to add, ‘Or next time I’ll take my favorite pair of scissors to your precious little ball,’ I decided to leave it there, and instead offer an awkward friendly smile.

‘You’re the funny man who hangs washing like a lady,’ he says, as he disappears behind the fence.

Even though I walk back to the trampoline, in my mind I claw my way there on my stomach, dragging my legs – actually two bloody stumps – behind me. I have been wounded by a young boy, and even though it’s not the first time, it is the first time that the child has not belonged to me.

As I lay back on the trampoline looking at the darkening sky, trying not to see shapes in the clouds – like the one that looks like twelve Maori dancers doing the Hakka, or the one that looks like a whale spanking a baby hippo with a walking stick, or the one that looks like Jeff Probst, the host of American reality show Survivor, getting a shoulder massage from Nicole Kidman (when she was playing a teen hero in the movie BMX Bandits) – I actually do see a cloud, that I just can’t ignore, that looks like a bottle of my favorite shower gel: Radox For Men, complete with the raindrop like appearance and pipeline-wave image that adorns the easy-to-handle, aesthetically pleasing casing.

As my mind drifts, cloudlike, in the Radox direction, and I think of the combination of sea minerals and herbal extracts that deliver a refreshing yet masculine fragrance, it occurs to me that my little friend next door might consider the use of a body wash – even one that has been dermatologically tested to deliver a skin-friendly, PH-balanced, soap-free wash – to also be more indicative of something used by a lady.

Hearing that Jack is still bouncing the ball around in his backyard I decide that I need to nip this old-fashioned, backward, socially-limiting belief system in the bud and I make a pact to start with those people located in close physical proximity to me, before making my way in an ever-widening spiral until I have achieved world-wide domination.

‘Hey Jack,’ I say, climbing the fence. He stops bouncing and eyes me warily. ‘Lots of men use skincare products these days, you know, even football players, truckies. I know a bloke named Daniel who’s a powerlifter – benches like 250kg – and he uses the Gillette Series Pre Shave Facial Scrub with Aloe Vera, and he’d have to be one of the manliest men I know. Totally full-on masculine. And there’s a builder I know – Rohan (pictured left) – who uses a Cleansing Exfoliator by Loreal Paris, which not only eliminates impurities but also resurfaces and refines the skin for a clearer, more youthful complexion. I mean, this guy built his own house for Christ’s sake. The point is, Jack, the world is a large and varied place and your opinion on skincare produ…”

Another cloud – a cloud of dread – passes over me as I realize that I have just been talking to a child about a conversation that only ever occurred inside my head, but as the humiliation reaches its crescendo and I watch him edging away, towards his back door, a strange sense of calm washes over me and I say, with authority, ‘I don’t hang washing like a lady, Jack. I hang it like a man.’

Jack disappears inside his house and as the slamming door echoes out into the night and the moon takes over from the sun to bathe my face in its silvery glow, I look up at her and say again ‘Like a man, Moon. I hang like a man,' confident in the knowledge that I am part of a growing movement of Dads – a revolution of Dads – who are making the world a better place, a fairer place, by tearing away at the established order, one old-fashioned opinion at a time.

Unday # 3 - The Search For Australia's Most Mentally Sexy Dad

2010-01-25T10:26:00.009+11:00

George developed an understanding several years into our marriage that he was more likely to get me in the mood if he helped with the housework and did his bit with the kids. I’ve always found it hard to get intimate with him if there was a sink full of dishes or a laundry full of dirty clothes waiting.
- Christine, mother of three

Keep your pants on folks, the new pairs of official competition grade Mentally Sexy Underwear will be ready this week and so we’ll have some pairs to mail out to Mentally Sexy wannabes who are too far away from Mentally Sexy Central to do a hand-over.

Also, I’d like to appeal to the partners of the Mentally Sexy entrants. We’d like to include a quote each Unday to give us Mentally Sexy hopefuls an insight into how our efforts affect our better halves. So, women, if you’ve got something to say (see Christine’s quote above for a guide) either leave it as a comment or email it to Reservoir Dad.

Dads, the Mentally Sexy bandwagon is rolling on and who knows where it will take us. American site Dad-Blogs is on board having created a Mentally Sexy link on their website, with the promise of more to come this week, and as the competition intensifies I urge all Aussie Dads to get original with submissions. Take risks, push boundaries and make your Mentally Sexy spiels and photos as eye-catching and creative as possible. The Americans have vowed a mighty fight and we need some seriously motivated, wife-focussed Mentally Sexy Aussie Dads to go toe-to-toe with them.

This is your chance to represent your country at the highest level. Don’t leave it too late. Get your submissions in by emailing resevoirdad@gmail.com

Deano

Today’s entrant is Deano, father of Allanah, 4 and Emily, 2.

"Women hate filthy toilets. Seriously hate them. My wife is no exception. I clean ours every day. Every single day because I know that even if we are emotionally connected and spiritually centred and right on track for a physical connection one short trip to a filthy toilet can shift her mood dramatically. I never want the mood to shift. I love my wife and I want her to be thinking about me, not the toilet."

Unday - The Beginning

Unday 1 - Simon

Unday 2 - Joe

A Mental Airbrushing

2010-01-22T10:27:00.012+11:00

We’re on our way to Joe’s house to attend this week’s Northern Dads Playgroup and we’re listening to What I Am by Edie Brickell. It’s a really good song – as in foot massage good – and I can’t help but find the line what I am is what I am to be personally affirming because, recently, an acquaintance introduced me to a group of strangers with the comment ‘He’s not quite usual’, and even though I laughed about it at the time and even started shimmying my shoulders and rolling my eyes – to signify that I could just shrug it away – the comment has stayed with me and clouded my mind for several days.

As I’m doing my best to convince myself that other people’s opinions don’t matter I notice, on a massive billboard, the image of a woman who is visually perfect and even though I know her image has received some significant technological enhancement I am still impressed and Archie has to call my name several times before I am able to focus on what he is saying.

‘Today I was pretending that our dogs were wolves and I had to climb things to get away from them,’ he says.

‘Cool!’ I say.

‘…but then when I told Lewis to play too he said no and wouldn’t let me climb things and kept pushing me.’

‘Did you do that Lewis?’ I ask.

‘Yes,’ Lewis says. ‘And I threw things at him.’

‘But then I just ignored him and just walked away from him,’ Archie says.

‘Well, done Arch,’ I say, ‘That’s exactly what we talked about. Just walk away.’

‘Yes,’ says Lewis, ‘And then I followed him.’

‘Oh…’ I murmur, as another billboard catches my attention – a tall angry looking brunette, who is simply overwhelmingly stunning, sitting in a cane chair and wearing an oversized pair of sunglasses. I pause long enough to consider the genius of the person, the computer wizard, who can take a photo of a normal woman and airbrush it until she is so perfect that she seems to possess an almost alien beauty and as Archie rounds out the conversation with ‘And then he followed me up on the trampoline and then we pretended the dogs were wolves,’ it strikes me that out of all the people who will ever look at that billboard I may be the only one who admires it for the artistry of the airbrushing and with that realisation the pressure of the ‘not quite usual’ begins to settle over me again.

To distract myself I tell the boys how happy I am that they worked out the wolf problem themselves and that although it is possible for them to have fun on their own, it’s always more fun to play with others, and then I continue mumbling something about two heads being better than one and their combined ages of seven being better than their individual ages because seven-year-olds are notorious for the amount of fun they have, before my voice trails off into nothingness.

It’s only after Lewis throws a sandal at me – and a good thirty seconds pass before I even think about screaming “I’ll turn this damn car around!” – that I realize I am locked away inside myself and I suddenly feel horribly neglectful. I look at their ruddy little faces in the rear vision mirror and make a pact with myself – I will share my inner-self more and, like a bull-rider bursting from the gates on a wild bull, I will drive my thoughts into the real world to make myself wholly present and ensure that every moment I have with my kids is a bonding moment.

‘Boys,’ I say, ‘Sometimes I have doubts about myself because I don’t quite fit “the norm” and while I’m generally okay with that – and aware that I possess many many outstanding qualities – I do find, in moments of weakness, that I doubt myself, just a tad, and wonder if perhaps I should be doing things a little differently. I wonder if I’m not doing things quite right….’

‘Lewis just stuck his finger in my ear, Dad,’ Archie says.

‘Lewis! … and here I am, a poetry-writing, powerlifting, stay-at-home-father with a strong aversion to actual paid work and so pragmatically-challenged that I’d prefer to write thousands and thousands of words of embellished reality-based fiction than spend even five minutes researching more practical and worldly concerns like – shit I don’t know – our family’s personal finances or… if global warming is real or… if Kevin Rudd is an actual person or just the product of a really really good cartoonist.’
Lewis’s finger is back in Archie’s ear as we pull up to Joe’s house but apart from that the boys seem unmoved. Still, I decide to persist with the idea of sharing my thoughts because it seems to be potentially freeing. After drinking some coffee, handing Tyson a rusk, ordering Archie and Lewis out onto the backyard play equipment and situating myself in a circle of several Dads I say, tentatively, ‘I was thinking, just today, that modern airbrushing techniques really have added to the field of unrealistic beauty, with the main beneficiaries being billboards and those who look at them.’

To my great relief, one of the Dads nods and says, ‘I gave up looking at Billboards for… a long time… but airbrushing has definitely revitalized the genre and I find myself looking at them more and more lately…’ and then Joe – who is hosting the group – interrupts us to say, ‘Hey, I’ve got a great idea for the Most Mentally Sexy challenge’ and within minutes he is wearing a pair of my underwear and I am suggesting different positions to photograph him in, and it is only afterwards, when I am showing everyone the photos and we are discussing, earnestly, which is best that I consider for a moment that our Dads group might also be described as ‘not quite usual’ and I feel a strange kind of sedation – a joyous letting go.

On the way home Archie asks if he can listen to Stomp by The Brother’s Johnson and Lewis counters this with a request for We Built This City by Starship but, as we pass the hotly airbrushed model once more, I feel centered and I say, ‘Boys, stay-at home-dads are situated somewhere between the usual and the unusual but like aliens cloaked in human form we’re waiting patiently as more of us appear here there and everywhere and when our numbers reach a certain level of saturation we will receive word from the mother-ship that the time is right to rise up and take over the world.’

I tell them that we are going to listen to Edie Brickell again, probably several times in a row, because what I am is what I am – she’s absolutely right – and, for this moment at least, I can accept that there’s no point in trying to be anything else.

Unday # 2 - The Search For Australia's Most Mentally Sexy Dad

2010-01-18T10:07:00.010+11:00

‘Women’s feelings about their husband were shaped by perceptions of fairness around housework,’ she said. ‘If the resentment factor was high that’s when their sex life was not great. The best sex aid a man could use was a vacuum cleaner.’
- Barbara Pocock, director of the Centre for Work and Life, University of South Australia

Cripes! The search for Australia’s Most Mentally Sexy Dad is really taking on the life of a raging love-struck beast. Thanks to everyone for your submissions, enquires and enthusiasm for this world first competition. We are currently in the process of making several other pairs of competition grade Reservoir Dad Mentally Sexy Underwear which will be music to the ears of all our interstate applicants as we will be able – thanks to Australia Post – to reach all corners of Aus.

Dads, it takes a strong man to walk the path of the Mentally Sexy. The early days are not easy and some of you may make several attempts before finally getting it right. Unfortunately, there will also be those who will simply fall by the wayside. I promise you this though – if you are relentless in your pursuit, forever vigilante to your partner's needs and fully committed to the cultivation of the Mentally Sexy Mind, the rewards will come. And what rewards they are!

JOE

Our second contestant is Joe, father of five-year-old Jasmine and two-year-old Rex. Along with this sensational photo Joe offered us this –

"My wife’s generally a pretty relaxed person but if she’s had a rough day or she’s a bit tired I notice that small things can get to her – so I like to keep certain things in order so that she’s able to take it easy and focus more closely on her time with the kids and me. She works her arse off so she deserves it, I reckon. I try to keep the bench tops uncluttered and clean and the kid’s dirty clothes out of sight in the laundry. And because my daughter’s room is in sight from the living room I do my best to keep it neat (which is tough) by packing the toys away and stacking the books in the book shelf. Since pushing myself to maintain a bit of order I’ve noticed that she’s been more relaxed and spontaneously ‘affectionate’. I should have been doing this shit years ago, instead of wasting time and money on those bloody gym memberships."

Unday – The Beginning
Unday #1 – Simon

The Motorcyclist And The Dominatrix

2010-01-15T08:13:00.013+11:00

We’re on our way to the local playground and despite the cool breeze the sun is beating down on me like a Dominatrix with a burning whip and if it’s having this affect on me I can only imagine what it’s doing to Archie and Lewis and Tyson but as usual they seem oblivious to the weather – Archie is hoping along the footpath, Lewis is stopping frequently to pick up rocks and sticks and Tyson is kicking his legs and throwing his arms around in the shade of his stroller.

Lewis turns with a large rock, strikes a wide-stance pose and with a Hulk Hogan-ish facial expression tells me, ‘This is my powerrrrrr!’and then throws his power in my general direction and so I am forced – for the ninth time today – to adopt the crouching position and look him directly in the eye and tell him that what he did was naughty and dangerous even though I know that this approach will simply encourage him to apply his usual countering tactics of humming, or looking up to the sky or dancing a little jig or singing something childish and condescending like, ‘Oh yes Daddy! Thank you, you psycho!’

I love all my children in equal measure but Lewis has been testing me out lately with his stubbornness, his defiance, his repetitive misbehaving. If it wasn’t for his undeniable cuteness and his moments of spontaneous hugs and kisses and the way an ‘I love you’ comes out of the blue I would seriously question my parenting abilities and believe that I am somehow stuffing him up and failing him in a permanent way.

As we continue along the path the sound of a motorbike in the distance hangs over us like a mosquito buzzing over a sleeping man and even though I love where we live – because of the open spaces and the public reserve directly behind our backyard – damn-it-all-to-hell I hate motorbikes and two shitheads have driven past me and my kids at a thousand miles an hour already which drives me crazy because it’s not only illegal, it’s also mind-numbingly stupid – riding a dirt-bike in a public reserve is not a sport, is not challenging and makes about as much sense to me as sitting in your lounge-room recliner and extending and retracting the leg-rest repeatedly –

‘Hey, Mum, I’m just going to open and close the leg rest on the recliner for a few hours.’

‘Okay dear. Be careful. And don’t forget to wear your Helmet.’

What a bunch of arseholes.

I imagine for a moment that I’ve tied some fishing wire between two trees on opposite sides of the path and have managed to slice a bastard motorcyclist’s head off on his return trip but as much as this image pleases me I have to accept, at the same time, that killing someone is just as illegal as riding a motorbike in a public reserve – possibly even more so – and while I may consider the activity of collecting the fishing wire, searching for the right spot, tying the appropriate knots and sitting down anticipating the end result to be fun, others might find it disturbing – it may even make them angry – and contemplating this allows me to get some insight into the motorcyclist’s motives and by the time we reach the playground I have considered that I may have found a way to make my peace with them.

Archie and Lewis high-tail it towards the twirly-wirly slide and although Lewis had the head-start Archie cuts him off and gets to the ladder first. Lewis stops short and screams, ‘ARCHIE!’ and seeing the potential of the situation I yell, ‘Lewis, it’s okay you’ll both get turns, you’ll both get lots and lots of turns and if you yell and get angry you’ll just ruin it for yourself and…’

It’s too late. He’s lost it. Lewis is now a Gatling Gun spraying the slide with pieces of bark and debris and I have no choice but to scoop him up and carry him to the park bench. I secure the pram and wait for the kicking and screaming to subside while I watch Tyson oohing-and-ahhing at the falling leaves and feel the pleasant breeze on my baldness and try to not debate with myself if Lewis is a more difficult child because I don’t pay him enough attention or because I intervene on his activities too much and pay him more attention than is actually healthy.

Ten minutes pass before Lewis and Archie are best friends again – squealing and hollering and egging each other on. Lewis screams, ‘Watch Dad!’ and hurls himself with enthusiasm down the twirly-wirly slide but half-way disaster strikes – Lewis’s leg sticks to the side and holds its place as the rest of his body folds over and sends him into a death roll to the bottom. For a moment I consider my options – should I run to him and pick him up and hug him and sit with him and tell him it’s going to be okay or should I wait and let him work it out himself to toughen him up a little and build some independence skills and will either way make any difference to the Lewis-centered behavioral issues I’m dealing with and hey, are they behavioral issues at all or just normal behaviors related to the developmental stages of little boys and why is there a fishy taste in my mouth, I mean I ate some tuna yesterday but I’ve eaten so much since then and flossed and gurgled Listerine….

Lewis is standing in front of me covered in debris and holding a medium-sized stick. He points it towards me, adopts the pose of a UFC wrestler and yells, ‘This is my powerrrr!’ and then runs off to the slide to start all over again. He is a stubborn little bugger but it suddenly occurs to me that in this circumstance, the stubbornness is good.

As I remember a blog post by Teacher Tom the playground's circular swing creaks loudly in the wind and moves a poofteenth in its circumvolution and a strange calm overwhelms me. My children are influenced by many things and these many things – some of which have been right there from the time of their conception and are more powerful than I could ever be in shaping them – are continually circling, minimizing and maximizing, working towards a balance and my boys are being shaped by the world as much as they are shaping themselves against it and – just maybe – I simply need to watch them more, relax and enjoy it, head off the occasional extreme and let the process take its course.

Another loud creak confirms it for me – too much parental intervention can offset the balance. I can’t stop Lewis from being stubborn anymore than my parents could stop me from imagining a headless motorcyclist and a flaming Dominatrix into my writing. This is what we are and while we may not please everyone and even inflame some and infuriate others the world and all its influences will shape us, as we shape ourselves against it, and we will find our place.

In the distance I hear the buzzing of a motorcycle. It’s hurtling towards us as Lewis and Archie hurtle down the slide, as Tyson hurtles a fine spray of raspberry-flung spittle onto my hand and as my mind finally stops hurtling inside itself for once and plays out a pleasing scene – I am walking alone looking for some appropriately placed trees on either side of the motorcycle-shredded path. In my hand I hold a nice length of fishing wire…

Unday # 1 - The Search For Australia's Most Mentally Sexy Dad

2010-01-10T21:29:00.007+11:00

Just as the applications start to roll in and the search for Australia's Most Mentally Sexy Dad begins in earnest, we hear news from afar that a great challenge looms - American website Dad-Blogs - via co-founder Joe Schatz of "Daddy Where's Your Vagina" fame - has accepted the challenge to run their own competition to crown America's Most Mentally Sexy Dad.

This is now a global fight, Dads. The five most mentally sexy Dad's from each country - as chosen by female judges yet to be named - will battle it out to claim the title of World's Most Mentally Sexy Dad.

The stakes don't get any higher. If you are an Aussie Dad and think you have what it takes to fight for the Australian and World titles email Reservoir Dad - reservoirdad@gmail.com - to enter this heated contest.

Please provide a short paragraph detailing your Mentally Sexy activities and how these have impacted on your relationship with your wife. For examples of what we're after go here and check out, Simon, our first contestant below.

You now have an opportunity to represent your country and become an international super-star. Don't miss out.

On this historical day the people of Reservoir Dad are pleased to present the first contestant in the search for Australia's Most Mentally Sexy Dad.

SIMON

Simon is a father of two young girls and offered us this -

"I've worked hard on my mental sexiness recently. I decided to take note of what bothered my wife on a day to day basis. I found that listening to her before sleep gave me the best indication of what household issues were playing on her mind and then I went about trying to remove those issues if I could. I started slowly by picking up one or two chores and I have to say I noticed a change in her within a few days. I'm a man - I'm ready for intimacy every minute of the day but I'm really starting to appreciate how different women are. They need a clear mind for the mood to hit and that's what I tell myself I'm doing as I unclutter the lounge room or hang out the washing - I'm clearing my wife's head. So when we go to bed at night we're both in the right frame of mind and we're not talking about household chores..."

Unday

Tasty and Licky

2010-01-08T09:58:00.010+11:00

It's 5.30am and the traffic is light and I can’t stop scratching this fricken mosquito bite on the inside of my left thigh and as I head to the Elite Sports Performance gym to begin a massive year of powerlifting where I will smash all my previous 'personal bests' I am almost vibrating with excitement and aggression and this is most likely the cause of a white flash of anger that overwhelms me when I see - through the rear vision mirror - that I am being encroached upon by a Red Porche hammering its way towards me in my 1989 faded red Toyota Corolla .

The Porche is very very flashy and supercool and as the right-hand blinker signals the driver's intention to overtake me I am relieved that I fitted my Corolla with two hubcaps and a nice aerial only ten years ago as I am sure this will not go unnoticed.

He's going way too fast and the fact that he's doing so is purely an expression of his desire to dominate me and while I am trying to maintain my rage to attempt a 300 kilogram deadlift at the gym I feel my foot pressing into the accelerator hard and as I fight against the urge to burn this prick off in a car that was previously owned by a ninety-year-old lady who only ever drove it back and forth to the corner Milk Bar I notice that he is not only speeding but also talking on his mobile and the arrogance this displays and the danger he poses to the average motorist gives my accelerator foot no choice but to hammer down hard.

Disappointingly, my Toyota Corolla with the hotted-up aerial has just reached 65 KPH as the Porche begins to disappear over a rise one hundred meters ahead and in a mad rush to gain back some sense of power I attempt to flip the bird to his rear vision mirror but am impeded by the Dictaphone I hold in one hand and the IPod I hold in the other... suddenly I am aware of the fact that I can only really be so furious with his mobile phone-compromised driving if I was equipped with three or possibly four arms and so I sheepishly put the Dictaphone down.

Fuck him anyway. I am going to lift 300 kilograms and I'll be doing it at a place where such a display of useless strength is much more impressive than a useless Porche and a useless suit and a useless pooncy gel-filled hair style.

This frickin mosquito bite itches and the more I itch the closer I get to drawing blood and this reminds me of how badly Archie was bitten last week at a family barbecue and how Lewis escaped unscathed which in turn reminds me of a story that Reservoir Mum told me and in order to remember this story so that I can blog about it later I pick up the Dictaphone again, press the record button and begin to recount the details.

'Well,' I say to the Dictaphone, 'Reservoir Mum is driving Archie, Lewis and Tyson to Nanny and Gramps’ house so that she can go to work and I can pick them up on the way back from the gym.’

I pull up to traffic lights. I suddenly feel like I am being watched. As I turn to the right I see a middle-aged woman sitting in her car. She looks forward – rat-trap fast – when she realises I’ve caught her spying. I reason that she’s probably a bit freaked out by seeing a bald guy who is dressed in filthy filthy powerlifting clothes while sitting in an old lady's car and talking into a dated piece of electronic equipment – like some relic from the days of tape recorders and Rubik's cubes – and I like this very much and so wind down my window and talk loudly in her direction.

‘So, Reservoir Mum told me that, on the way there in the car, Archie licked his fingers and said ‘Mummy I just licked my finger and it was tasty.’ to which Reservoir Mum replied, ‘Don’t lick your finger Arch, you never know what’s on it.’

I look down momentarily as I scratch again at my insect-inspired welt and see that I have created a rash that is approaching the outskirts of my nether-regions. When I glance to my right again I see that the woman is staring at me and shaking her head and I lose some of my previous confidence and feel just a tad self-aware and so speed off as fast as I can to get in front of her when the lights change. I get to about five KPH above the speed limit and put some distance between us so that I can continue recounting the story.

‘And after a long pause Archie says,’ I say, to the Dictaphone…

Another red light allows me to go back to scratching around the mozzie bite's edges, furiously – back and forth, up and down, round and round and damn it all to hell the woman has pulled up beside me again, this time on my left side. To my horror she goes right back to staring at me, with an expression on her face that makes me feel like I am a big pile of poo she’s just stepped in but despite this I am determined to appear as if I am not intimidated by her and I continue, but only after I slink down a little – and whispering...

‘Archie says. “Oh, I know why mozzies bite me Mum – it’s because I’m cool and mozzies don’t like you to be cool.”’

Reservoir Mum says, ‘Maybe that’s it, Archie…’

I turn the Dictaphone off and put it on the seat behind me as I once again race forward to get ahead of the staring woman and I’m feeling rattled – here I was psyched and ready to lift 300 kilograms and now after being attacked by the Porche guy and the staring woman I don’t even know if I have enough energy in the tank to pull 200.

Taking the Dictaphone I do my best to finish the story. ‘Um, then Archie, after licking his finger again, says “Oh! No! Mum! I know why the mozzies bite me now! It’s because I’m so tasty!” and Lewis, who has remained quiet till this point almost bursts from his car seat restraints to say, “Yeah! And I’m licky!”’

I am now convinced that hell has opened up and released this she-devil upon me. I am at the traffic light and she is beside me again. Her eyes burn into me and – having just watched Drag Me To Hell recently – I am approaching a level of fear-induced hysteria. I throw the Dictaphone down, turn to her and mouth, helplessly, the words ‘What do you want from me…’ and then, following her line of vision right down to my groin, I become horribly aware of what furiously itching that area of myself must look like to someone outside my car. I suddenly see that I am not just a bald guy dressed in filthy filthy powerlifting clothes sitting in an old lady's car talking into a dated piece of electronic equipment. To the staring woman I am a bald guy – badly dressed, sitting in a rundown car – who is leering at a middle-aged woman, pleasuring himself and recording the moment for posterity, and that is just filthy filthy filthy.

When the lights change the staring woman takes off and I sit there watching the back of her head as it gets smaller and smaller and I feel just a tad under permanently humiliated.

A few blocks later she finally turns off and I drive on feeling safer, but weak and small, and as capable of a big deadlift as the anti-hero Strawberry Jelly Man – who is not a real anti-hero but someone I made up just now to represent my level of physical power and intellectual esteem.

To prevent myself plummeting further into the realm of insignificance I shuffle through my IPod for something uplifting. The Dictaphone lies beside me like a dead bird. I have forgotten the rest of Reservoir Mum’s story, but she’ll remember, and the fact that I will blog about the funny things my kids say allows me to feel some justification for all the madness I draw into my life. One day they will love to read about the things they said and how I took the time to write about it. That’s what I’m hoping anyway. Plus, the sound of the partially angry song Monkey which is so great – in a gay-ish, George Michael-ish kind of way – may lift me again, if I give it enough time.

Unday - The Search For Australia's Most Mentally Sexy Dad

2010-01-04T17:38:00.013+11:00

We all want to be sexier to our wives. It's just that we don't know how to make that happen. I mean, I tried doing push-ups and wearing multi-colored Y-fronts... but shit, I dunno...' - Brian, Mentally Unattractive Dad, Hexam.

After reading an article at Dad Blogs that suggests that sexiness to a woman is as much mental as it is physical the people at Reservoir Dad have decided to search for Australia's Most Mentally Sexy Dad to serve as a guide for all of us who are interested in becoming more attractive to our wives and staying that way for eternity.

The contest begins in earnest next Monday with a photo of our first Dad engaged in a mentally sexy activity while wearing the official Reservoir Dad Most Mentally Sexy Underwear which will combine the visual with the mental and deliver the killer punch.

Dad's from all over Australia are welcome to email Reservoir Dad (see right) to enter this heated contest. Please provide a short paragraph detailing your Mentally Sexy activities and how these have impacted on your relationship with your wife. See these recent entries as examples -

"I sometimes will just rub her hair and touch her arm, like in an affectionate way, and also try to listen to her talk and then... just leave it at that, you know, without trying for anything else. This is a new thing for me. And usually, a few hours later or the next day I'll catch her looking at me weird, like in a sexy way...'

'I clean the toilet. I have also started making the kids lunches before we go to bed so that she feels less pressured and more relaxed. I'm going to try some other stuff because it's made a big difference - our 'snookins' time has increased by twenty-five percent, she touches my butt sometimes as she walks past me and we both seem happier more often. Oh, and she's also started taking photos of me and putting them on her Facebook Page.'

The people at Reservoir Dad will choose contestants based on strict selection criteria.* In fifty weeks, at competitions end, a panel of wives - headed by Reservoir Mum - will select the top twelve Most Mentally Sexy Dads for a 2011 Calendar which will serve as a visual guide to Mentally Unattractive Dads everywhere.

*Distance from the official underwear and limited places will affect selection.

Worming Away From Death

2009-12-24T14:27:00.020+11:00

We’ve just finished singing a bedtime song – Stomp by The Brothers Johnson – and I’ve demonstrated some dance moves between the boys beds – The Worm and the more simple but rhythmically engaging Running Man –and going by the foody aroma coming from downstairs I think I’ve timed our nightly ritual to perfection. My 650 gram Rib-Eye steak is just about ready and I’m so hungry that I’m extra careful not to drool on Archie and Lewis as I kiss them goodnight. I'm very pleased with myself and consider reneging on my nightly mopping duties so that I can fill my guts with cow and watch something nostalgic and affirming like Wayne’s World 2 or The Return of The Living Dead.

Just as I’m about to pull the door closed Archie whispers for me and says, ‘Dad, when will I die?” and my first thought Oh fuck is quickly followed by my second thought Fuck because I'm about as prepared for this discussion, right now, as a Rabbi is prepared to buy $8 shots at a strip club.

As I kneel down next to Archie’s bed and scratch his recently clipper-ed head affectionately and tell him that he doesn’t have to worry about dying for a very long time I feel conflicted – I’m heartbroken that my four-year-old already has an understanding of death at the same time that my biological drive for food has me believing that I can actually hear my meal sizzling in the oven. I have to make this quick.

‘So, I will die?’ Archie says and before I know it I’ve answered. ‘Everything dies, Arch, but most people live for a long long time until they’re very very old,’ which Archie quickly counters with, ‘But I don’t wanna die,’ complete with watery eyes and a wobbly lip. He’s so tiny in his giant bed.

I reason that I have about fifteen seconds to come up with some clever answer or some sneaky diversion to avoid a pillow-full of tears and weeks and weeks of death-obsession and before I know it I’m singing Stomp again and breaking out The Running Man with more energy and head shaking enthusiasm than I ever thought I was capable of.

The Running Man becomes the The Barely Jogging Man when I see the faraway look of concern in Archie’s eyes and by the time I accept that my distraction technique is failing I’m doing The Walking Man which is quickly replaced by The Standing On The Spot Bobbing Weakly at The Knees Man when I realize that my steak has almost definitely moved from the preferred medium-rare range to very well done.

I decide to give up on the fullness of time angle and run with the idea of heaven. I’m uncomfortable with this approach because I feel like I’m lying to him but then I have been telling him, for the past month, that a jolly fat guy is going to break into our house in the middle of the night and leave a bunch of presents under a Christmas tree and if I can influence his behavior with something as ridiculous as that surely I can soothe him temporarily by saying, ‘Some people, Archie, believe that when you die your body stays here but you go to Heaven with God.’

‘What’s heaven?’

‘It’s a place where everyone is happy all the time and you get whatever you want.’

‘Where is it?’

‘It’s up in the sky somewhere.’

‘How do I get there?’

‘You, um, float up there.’

‘Will our chickens get up there?’

‘Yes, if you want them there.’

‘Why?’

‘Because… it’s heaven… you get to have whatever you want up there Archie – lollies and toys and pets and giant well-seasoned steaks cooked to perfection…’

‘How will our chickens get up there?’

‘They'll float too, I think… I mean, I suppose they could fly.’

‘How?’

‘Because everything is better up there, Arch, and the chickens really want to fly on earth but they can’t…’

‘You cut their wings…’

‘Yes, I did cut their wings… but when they get to heaven they can get their wings back and… do you know, if a little boy doesn’t have any legs on earth, but really wants legs, he gets to have legs when he goes to heaven.’

‘Could he have wings?’

‘Yes, I suppose he could.’

‘Why?’

‘Archie, are you getting this, when you go to…’

‘Will my Teddy’s go there?’

‘They’ll already be there, Archie, you know… with God.’

‘Who’s God?’

‘This old guy, with a big beard, who made everything.’

‘Is he Santa?’

‘No Santa’s the guy that brings presents once a year. God is the guy who waits in heaven and gives you everything you want… so, yeah, I guess they’re basically the same.’

Archie fiddles with the ears of his Teddy for a short while before saying, ‘Will the dogs be there?’ and I’m just about to curse God for making me an Atheist when Lewis, out of the blue, cries, ‘I don’t want to go to heaven,’ which inspires Archie to say, ‘Me either’ and in a panic I say, ‘Well, you don’t have to go to heaven,’ to which Archie replies, ‘So I won’t die?’ and I feel like I’m Bill Murray waking up to that same fricken alarm every morning on Ground Hog Day and – thank you subconscious – that gives me an idea.

‘Boys,’ I say, as I tuck them both in and arrange their Teddy’s, ‘Do you know what’s going to happen tomorrow? You’re going to get up and have breakfast, and change in to your clothes and watch a little bit of television and eat some food and play with some toys and maybe paint a little and go outside and jump on the trampoline and have some more food and fight with each other and walk the dogs and do something naughty and sit in the naughty corner and eat some dinner and read a few books and have a bath and go to sleep and then do you know what’s going to happen?’

‘What?’ Archie says.

‘You’re going to wake up and have some breakfast and change into your clothes and watch a little bit of television…’ and when Archie starts to giggle at my repetitiveness I realize that I am on the right track and even though my steak is probably way beyond repair I repeat myself in this fashion for at least twenty minutes until Archie stops laughing and Lewis falls asleep and finally, as I notice the hint of charcoal in the air, Archie’s eyelids dip and flip and finally close.

I walk a tightrope to the door and enter the hall and walk down the stairs and sprint for the oven to find my steak is so well cooked that it will leave bruises on my gums to chew it but I’m determined and after covering it in Dijjonaise Mustard I sit in front of the computer.

I feel a sense of triumph, for some unknown reason, at the same time that I feel gutted – four Christmas’s in and my son is already death-aware. I decide to listen to some terrible, sad music to purge myself of this heavy feeling as quickly as possible and as I start to you-tube, ‘A Touch Of Paradise’ by John Farnham, I’m startled by Archie who appears at the computer-room door holding his Teddy.

‘Daddy,’ he says, ‘Why doesn’t the little boy have any legs?’

And so I forget about John Farnham and instead you-tube Stomp by the Brothers Johnson, push my lump of charcoaled cow to the side and start shaking my arms and legs limber so that I can bang out The Worm for the little guy and finally put the issue to bed.

Reservoir Dad’s Search For The Most Mentally Sexy

2009-12-18T10:34:00.011+11:00

I hate soup but it’s the requested dish and while I’m doing my best to be enthusiastic about making it I’m far too conscious of the fact that I’m really just trying to turn water into a meal even though I’m wealthy enough to buy real food. Reservoir Mum is standing by the sink expressing milk with an electronic pump, watching me. I suggest that we could try eating some nicely grilled grass-fed cow and then drink a glass of water afterwards but she won’t have it.

I can’t hide the fact that I’m annoyed. 'Soup is Nana food,' I tell her. 'After I’ve finished cooking I’ll knit myself a nice blanky to hide my incontinence pad and keep my legs warm.'

I glance at her for a response but I get nothing and my gaze is drawn, predictably, to her boobs. They are being savagely handled by the electronic pump and I am suddenly conscious of the fact that they have received a lifetime’s worth of attention at the hands of milk-sucking machines and children and I feel anxious as I wonder if I will be allowed any access at all when it's finally my turn to handle them again.

As I begin to peel carrots I am taken over by a nightmarish image of myself waiting in line to sit on Santa’s lap. There are thousands of kids and machines ahead of me. I can’t take my eyes off his rosy red cheeks and all I want to do is get close enough to squeeze them but as the hours and days pass and the line shortens and it’s finally my turn Santa – who is just totally over all the attention – tells everyone that he’s going for a quick cigarette behind the carousel and we never see his rosy red cheeks again.

I realize that to ensure Reservoir Mum doesn’t one day disappear behind a carousel I will have to hold her interest in me by maintaining my current level of sexiness for eternity and as the dirty peel falls from the carrot and reveals the more appealing orange flesh beneath I consider removing my shirt, or perhaps even cooking in the nude, to titillate the good lady wife. As well as doing this I may also need to stop complaining about making soup as I’ve heard that constant complaining and sooky-ness can be a turn off to some women. Also, I read an article at Dad Blogs that sexiness to a woman is as much mental as it is physical and so I must remember to tell her how sexy I am, on an hourly basis, which will prove to be doubly effective because – yes – women are mental but they also like to talk a lot.

After removing my shirt I turn to her and say, 'My abs are visible all the time now.'

I’m overwhelmed when she says, 'I’ve noticed.'

'Yes,' I tell her, 'It’s like I’m wearing armor.'

Wow. Turning on women seems effortless and I’m more than chuffed. I remove my pants to combine the visual with the mental and deliver the killer punch. I’m so pleased with myself that my imagination runs away from me and I see myself standing shoulder to shoulder with all the other Dads at the Northern Dads Group. We are dressed in Leopard-spotted loin-cloths and sexy young women are marching up and down inspecting us carefully in order to bed the one they find most attractive. Again and again they choose me.

'You know,' I say to Reservoir Mum, "I’m certain, that if the whole northern Dad’s Group was standing in a line wearing nothing but loin-cloths most women would choose me as the most attractive.'

I am just about to put the carrot down when Reservoir Mum says, 'I don’t know… Jack’s fairly good-looking.'

I suddenly feel cold. Jack is good looking. He’s also very smart and – who the fuck knows – he probably loves soup. Suddenly I see myself one back in the order of most attractive and before I know it I am comparing myself to each Dad individually. Simon is an artist and a teacher and has a head full of hair. Dan helps the underprivileged and has a sexy accent. Joe builds houses and lives in a nice leafy suburb. Kelvin is a librarian who knows a lot about books. Tony is very exotic and champions women’s rights.

My confidence wanes as I realize that while I may outmuscle them all physically and even break even with several of them when it comes to having things like a nicely shaped head or semi-dreamy eyes I have to be honest with myself – I am being slaughtered when it comes to the mental side of sexy. Simon’s art and Dan’s caring-ness and Joe’s vision and Kelvin’s cataloging genius and Tony’s awareness of female issues versus my blogging which, in all honesty, does nothing more than highlight my growing insanity and my constant desire to talk about myself.

I imagine that I am part of Reservoir Mum’s harem and all the other Dads are eating grapes in the bathing lounge and waiting to be summoned while I mop the hallways and try not to annoy everyone with my constant limping.

When I look down at the cutting board I see that I have absentmindedly peeled the carrot into a thousand transparent slivers and I have my arms folded across my bare chest. I feel vulnerable and afraid.

As I pull on my clothes I consider the fact that being mentally sexy means not complaining about making soup and so I make the effort to stop this, immediately, but I try to be subtle about it by making up a story, 'You know, when I was a boy a school bully poured soup on my crotch while I was sitting in the middle of the quadrangle and everyone called me soupy-pants for an entire year. Making this soup today has been hard but I feel that it has been necessary for me to let the incident go. I think I am ready to enjoy soup again.'

When I turn to her I see that she’s staring at me intently and after a moment of deep reflection she says, 'I think you’re mental'

Bingo. I feel as if I am on the road to being sexy on multiple levels and I have this confirmed when she reaches over, squeezes my butt and whispers, ‘I liked it better when you cooked naked.’

I watch her walk out the door minutes later and I can’t help but feel that, despite my obvious shortcomings, the world continues to turn just for me. I stare triumphantly at the water as it cooks in a big pot with the real food and I formulate an idea that is so choccas-full-of-genius that it will allow me to challenge the other Dad’s and steal the title of Most Mentally Sexy Dad in one short year – every Monday, starting January 4 2010, I will post a photo of a recognizable pair of my own underwear on a new object, animal, or person. I will call it Unday and it will run for fifty weeks total. The final ten weeks will be a countdown featuring my underwear on the top ten Most Mentally Sexy Dads and will end on week fifty with my underwear where it rightfully belongs – on the chief selector and therefore Most Mentally Sexy Dad ever. Me.

Lewis's Birthday - Every Now And Then I Fall Apart

2009-12-11T10:00:00.017+11:00

I have an image of myself as an eighty-seven-and-a-half-year-old sitting in a cushion-less cane chair outside a single bedroom commission home on a creaky old porch covered in chicken shit and dead flies. I’m mumbling to myself and throwing darts at ants as they emerge from the gnarled lump of an old tree and as my heart beats one of its final beats my eyes are shocked wide by the one regret that has followed me my whole life and will now settle forever among the ashes of my urn – I spent my son’s third birthday crying like a baby in the toilet.

The cubicle is clean and free of graffiti and although I am physically exhausted I can still appreciate that the place I have chosen as my retreat is unexpectedly free from the smell of urine and unburdened by messages such as CALL BARRY FOR A GAY TIME as this allows me a brief interlude of clear thought - the future is not fixed and I only have to change my actions today to earn a happier end.

This disaster started last night. I had a dream that a tap was leaking a slow and steady drip and when the monotony of it finally roused me I discovered that it was actually my nose that was dripping and my pillow was as sticky as an unfinished Paper Mache balloon. Damn it all to hell, I thought, as I stuffed tissues up both nostrils and turned the pillow over, this Phuket adventure has fucked me.

I woke a few hours later – the day of Lewis’s third birthday party – stricken, and the tissues I had shoved up my nose had become so soggy with snot that they had slid down my face and neck during the night and solidified in my chest hair with all the strength and consistency of day-old chewing gum. As I was drinking a very strong coffee and working my chest over with a pair of scissors Reservoir Mum informed me that my pillow was also stuck to the back of my neck and from that point on I knew I was in for very bad day.

I am now at an Indoor Play Center and despite taking twice the recommended dose of cold and flu tablets my joints are screaming like the rusty hinges of an old gate and my head feels as heavy as a 64kg kettlebell . Outside this cubicle there is a series of multi-colored tunnels teaming with children. There is a pit full of plastic balls, two super-fast slides, a jumping castle, several toddler-sized bikes, mesh for climbing and other play equipment I do not have the names for. What concerns me is that at some stage Lewis will want me to play on some or all of those things and the effort required to do this may be beyond me and I feel an unavoidable dread at the thought that I will have to deny him the pleasure of my participation. There is also the dozen or so mothers gathered around Lewis’s birthday table and the effort it will take for me to converse with them.

Dead people, amoebas and even St Kilda supporters feel better than I do right now and this, coupled with the disappointment I feel at not being 100% present at Lewis's birthday releases a flood of raw emotion and I find myself fighting back tears as I fan my stiffly spread fingers at my flushed cheeks and when I start hyperventilating through my gaping mouth I am left with no choice but to slap myself several times in the forehead so that I can stop comparing myself to Halle Berry at the 2002 Oscars.

As the fever works to fry my brains and the dull but constant pain behind my eyes intensifies I have an image of Lewis sinking slowly into the ball-pit. He's calling out for me as he passes through the balls-only-layer into the balls-plus-once-edible-food-layer into the balls-plus-once-edible-food-plus-lost-socks-and-nappies-layer and finally into the layer-solidified-in-a-bed-of-crumbs-and-urine-where-all-items-including-children-will-be-trapped-for-centuries-until-a-team-of-archeologists-dig-them-out-and-display-them-in-museums-so-that-people-can-speculate-on-their-daily-lives-and-the-circumstances-surrounding-their-deaths, and I find myself heaving with love for the little guy and I know that I must somehow rise against this illness – while I am still free of pustules and lesions – and be there for him on his special day.

I stand and pull up my pants at the same time that I realize there was no need to pull them down in the first place and I flush the toilet just as I remember that there was nothing to flush and as I lower the lid – just like Reservoir Mum has taught me too – I notice a scribbling by the side of the cistern. Graffiti! It reads

every time you masturbate God kills a kitten. Please, think of the kittens

and I realize two things – there is no such thing as a clean toilet and there is no way that any illness could ever stop me from making sure that Lewis has the best third birthday of his entire life and as I reach for the door, shaking and at the point of delirium, I see a more positive image of my final moments -

I am an eighty-eight-year-old man sitting in a vibrating recliner inside a two bedroom retirement home that smells of new carpet and roast chicken. I’m mumbling to myself and throwing darts at a dartboard engraved with the words Happy 80th Dad as Reservoir Mum busies about the house talking to one of our grandchildren on the phone and as my heart beats one of its final beats my eyes are shocked wide as I remember all my children and all the birthday parties and all the fun and my only regret is that I have to leave everyone and all of this behind.

Happy Birthday Lewy.

Reservoir Dad’s Adventures in Phuket – Home

2009-12-04T10:09:00.009+11:00

Even though I have told my mind to shut up and sleep a dozen times it continues to move from one unordered thought to the next. We arrived home from Phuket at 7.15am without a minutes sleep and the house smelt dusty and well and the air inside was cold and refreshing and I saw that, outside, the chickens had shat all over my shoes as well as they possibly could.

It’s now 2am and I am in bed, desperate for sleep, and my eyes are so wide open and motionless that they remind me of the mannequin me and my schoolmates stole and kept in a deserted old train station behind my house. We also kept a bow and several arrows that we stole from the school gymnasium there and one day I shot Jimmy in the leg from a short distance. I can still hear the noise – thoooomp! – and even though it was a blunt arrow it still penetrated his leg about a centimeter and made him bleed and I felt a little bad about that at the time even though Jimmy was a bit of a turd and the sort most people would take pleasure in shooting with whatever weapon they had on them.

I drift away from Jimmy into semi-wakefulness and my ears are being throttled, again, by the noise of the airplane engines on our flight home from Phuket, and Archie and Lewis are entwined and asleep between me and Reservoir Mum and we’re doing our best to stop them falling to the floor at the same time that we’re trying to keep Tyson sleeping through the relentless ping of the turbulence warnings. Thoooomp!

I see the Thai air hostesses in those long tight traditional-looking dresses shuffling around the plane as if they are bound at the ankles and everything about them is so polished – the blackened hair in a tight bun, the makeup-ed face as smooth as a sugared almond – and the shape of their bums are on display and their cleavage has me glaring and their patterned smiles and warm but wary eyes make it seem like my attention is acceptable only because they don’t expect anything else.

Thooomp Thooomp Thooomp. It’s now 2.45 and I have shot Jimmy in the leg seventeen times and each time I wonder at how pithy an event it is – two boys in a tiny country town versus the rest of the world – and yet here I am trying to convince myself that it didn’t matter and I realize that I am stuck in a vicious cycle because I am so hammered by sleeplessness that I am remembering irrelevant events in a dramatic and engaging way that makes it even more impossible to sleep.

Putting the flights to and from Phuket aside, the holiday was awesome and I only have to think of Patong and Surin Beach and the Buck’s Night and The Wedding to acknowledge this but as the ticking continues and the night begins thinning I struggle with an uneasiness that may take me a while to shake. We stayed in a five star holiday apartment for two weeks while the locals lived in shacks made of corrugated iron or bamboo and lived one day to the next on whatever the tourists threw at them. Thooomp. And then I remember the arrogant old men buying girls for thirty Australian dollars a day to perform whatever service was required and I think about money and how the uneven distribution of it makes these things possible and I want to hurt these men for what they do at the same time that I see my part in it and the only thing that stops me from feeling a level of disgust at a world that allows such unfairness is that the locals I met and got to know seemed genuinely happy all the time and I can forget about the poor living conditions – as easily as I forgot about Jimmy’s wound for so many years – by convincing myself that what I saw was an actual happiness and not simply something I perceived to quell a rising sense of guilt.

Before she fell asleep tonight Reservoir Mum watched me reading an old newspaper article about the Geelong 2009 Premiership and said, ‘You’re very simple, aren’t you? You only need football, powerlifting, sex and writing and you’re happy’ and I wonder if this is the real reason I’m awake. Thooomp. I am simple and if I get a taste of those four things on a regular basis – with sex being shuffled through the order depending on desire – I am as content as an individual can be but this does depend on my ability to ignore certain sufferings that exist all around me, all over the world, and I reflect on that fact as I remember that an old school friend told me, several months ago, that Jimmy is now very fat and drinks a lot and has a tattoo of a pizza on his ankle and I wonder if me shooting him in the leg had anything to do with that.

As I am about to shoot him, for the twenty-first time tonight, he makes a strange whimpering sound – which only makes me want to shoot him more – before he says, ‘Seven billion people, man. Can’t you go and shoot someone else?’ and my mind shifts to the size of the world’s population, reflected by all the people I saw at the airports, and for a moment I have no way around the fact that being one of so many is dwarfing to the individual and I wonder how I can convince my children when they are older that even though they are one tiny part of seven billion they are still vitally important if I don’t really believe it – on a consistent basis – about myself.

There is no way around it. Thooomp. A level of selfishness is required to live in this world when you have it as good as I do. The holiday is over and now I must narrow my vision, again. Among seven billion I am nothing but to the four people who I am around every day I am everything and I only have to remind myself of this whenever I feel the world is working to make me disappear or overwhelm me with its sufferings and complexities, and a simple thing – like teaching Tyson to sit and crawl – becomes the most important thing and makes me indispensible.

It’s 3.50am, thooomp, and the arrow fits nicely into the hole that has permanently opened up in Jimmy’s leg and I am finally at the point where sleep is inevitable. When we got home this morning I noticed the backyard was overgrown with weeds, and the cracks in the walls and the stains in the carpets and the overstuffed disorganized cupboards and the lack of storage space and all the other things that plagued me daily before our vacation re-enter my thoughts immediately and I can’t help but smile because all these concerns seem petty and familiar and altogether safe.

Thhhhoooooomp!

Reservoir Dad’s Adventures in Phuket – The Wedding

2009-11-26T07:27:00.006+11:00

Only moments before Kelly walks down the aisle I become aware of the fact that the heat of Surin Beach, male sweat glands and white shirts are not a good mix. The way one of the groomsman keeps pulling at the material and shaking it away from his body reminds me of the under-fit men in the Olivia Newton-John film clip Let’s Get Physical.

What captures my attention most, however, is that the wet and clingy shirt is accentuating the slight overhang of his nipples, and having studied myself in the mirror, at different angles, at different times and in different clothes in the bathroom mirror in our hotel room every day since arriving in Phuket, I am more than a little concerned that the groomsmen beside me is not the only man in possession of the dreaded bitch-tits. I consider hunching my shoulders, or crossing my arms or even resting my hands causally on top of my head to pull the skin tight over my pecs as Kelly moves into position and holds Todd’s hands.

Todd is awash with emotion and the shock I feel at his public display of tears makes me realize that the potentiality of my bitch-tits has very little to do with the importance of this moment and yet I cannot erase the feeling that people are stealing a glimpse at me, and every shuffle and every photo flash and every unconscious cough from the crowd seems to inflame my nipples to the point where I am sure that, given the chance, I could upstage Rudolph for the honor of guiding Santa’s 2009 Sleigh.

My gaze drifts towards my family. Archie is drinking diet coke from a straw and bopping his head to a song only he can hear, Tyson’s little arms and legs are flailing excitedly at a toy hanging from his pram and as I turn my attention to Reservoir Mum, who is physically restraining Lewis in a figure eight grip we learnt in a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu class, I am beset by a charge of emotion and a strange feeling of relief – there is no other life I could have ever possibly wanted and happiness and joy for me is a simple matter of holding my attention on us and while I will continue to strive for personal goals and push myself in certain areas of my life there really is nothing else to achieve beyond what the five of us are together.

Suddenly my self awareness softens and my focus sharpens and I realize something very important – my nipples have nothing to do with Todd and Kelly’s marriage.

Kelly finishes her wedding vows and they are pronounced Husband and Wife as the soft wind slows and the ocean settles to a glassy lake and the laughter and chatter echoes as cheeks are kissed and hands clasped warmly and the tops are popped from Champagne and beer bottles and the groomsman start ribbing Todd about his tears and the photos are taken as the sun disappears and there is a sense that we need to immerse ourselves in celebration as much as possible because this night will end too soon.

The guests leave the sand for the Catch Club which will hold the reception but I decide to stay with Archie on the beach, beer in hand, with nothing else to do for the next few minutes but watch him. He’s doing circle work in and out of the water, squealing and hollering, stamping his feet and I’m laughing at the same time that I’m feeling slightly melancholy. Archie is showing me the way to live – be here and now with whatever emotion or energy moves you. It’s a clichéd truth that carries with it an undercurrent of sadness because like most adults I move from one moment to the next with baggage from the past and concerns for the future and the only time I really ever get a taste of the unfettered happiness I see in front of me is by-proxy through Archie and Lewis and Tyson, and even then it suffers under a certain fear and a certain weight because I love them.

Archie stops and giggles and makes me choke a little on a mouthful of beer as he squiggles out of his shorts and starts peeing into the water. Feeling brave under the cover of night, I join him and we laugh together as we have our first sword fight and then we zip up and I chase him around a little just to hear him squeal excitedly one more time and we’re up to join the rest of the party.

The food is delicious and the speeches are great and we get a special mention from Todd for making the effort to bring the whole family over and we feel honored for the mention and then all of a sudden it’s time to get the boys to sleep.

Reservoir Mum sits with Tyson as I walk Archie and Lewis along the beachside strip of open-air restaurants in our Phil and Ted double-decker pram. The boys are pointing out the lights that snake their way up several palm trees as I hear a tune that I find familiar coming several restaurants ahead and when I realize it’s Land Down Under by Men At Work I feel such a sense of elation that I have to physically grab my own throat to stop the moronic chant Oi Oi Oi.

The song is cathartic and I get a sense of myself that pleases me – I am uncultured, I don’t like to travel, I hate adventure beyond lifting heavy weights and I want to go back to Victoria and live with my family there and never ever leave again and it feels so good to know this about myself and not want to change it that I start singing and kicking my legs out a little and jigging the pram left and right and coaxing looks from the restaurant patrons. I am enraptured by a crazy sense of freedom.

When I get back to the wedding reception Archie and Lewis are nigh-nighs and I park them at our table and take Tyson from Reservoir Mum with authority and self-assurance. ‘You finish your dinner,’ I say. ‘I’m a stay-at-home Dad and I don’t care who knows it.’

I choose to stand in front of a restaurant that’s playing Let’s Groove by Earth Wind and Fire because it’s the perfect rhythm for rocking an infant.

Within minutes – maybe even seconds – Tyson’s asleep. I feel a great sense of achievement. This is what I do. Give me your sleepless human baby and I will cure it.

I walk to the reception backwards just for the hell of it and as I pass the table where the Bride and Groom’s family are seated I lean in and say, ‘Three down in record time, mutherfuckers,’ before continuing my backwards jig to Reservoir Mum.

‘We need someone to watch the boys’ I say to her, as I lay Tyson down on his belly, ‘Because I’m going to request the DJ play the classic electro breakdance hit Rock It by Herbie Hancock, and then I’m going to dance, and I know that this is typical of me after I’ve had a few drinks – and I appreciate that you’re doing your best to restrict yourself from rolling your eyes right now – but you’re not going to want to miss it this time because I’m feeling pretty good about my life and I just might do a head spin.”

“Okay,” she says, as she leans back against me.

I look over at Todd and Kelly and they seem overwhelmed at times and there’s no doubt that the wedding has gone as well as it possibly could and I think briefly about my other childhood friends – Gazza and Scratcha back in Aus – and I hope that we’re all hanging out together ten years from now, having BBQ’s, insulting each other and watching our families grow.

I nudge Reservoir Mum and point down at my slumbering boys and say, “I’m fucking good at this.” She reaches up, scratches my stubbly chin and says, ‘Yep, you are,’ and I eye the DJ and prepare mentally for my dance solo because I know there are seven billion people in the world and I am crazy lucky that out of that massive number Reservoir Mum, Archie, Lewis and Tyson happened to me.

Reservoir Dad’s Adventures in Phuket – The Buck's Night Part 2

2009-11-19T16:09:00.005+11:00

Cheap fucking Christmasy lights and tinny music and seedy open-air bars as far as the eye can see and I am so stung into wonder by the unbridled debauchery of the Patong nightlife that I find myself skipping - happy little girl style - and pointing at everything I see in such a way that all the traders are approaching me with the ching-ching sound of a cash register in their ears.

There’s madness everywhere and while I am impressed by the up-frontery of the hookers who show me their wares, and the persistence of the tailors who work 24/7, and the casualness of the animal handlers and the ferocity of the salesmanship in the Pirated-DVD guys, I am mostly impressed by the continual allusion of sex which overwhelms every nook and cranny of Patong in the same way that a house decorated with a freshly chopped Christmas tree is overwhelmed by the smell of pine.

Todd is wearing a T-Shirt with the word’s “TODD’S BUCK’S NIGHT written across the back in black marker. On the front is a grid with 36 squares and 36 tasks that he must complete by the night’s end ranging from sculling a beer to enacting a ‘Mick Dundee’ on a Lady-boy – which basically entails cupping his hand around her meat and two veg – and while I have my doubts that Todd can complete every task I am certain that he will dig deep and give it his very best shot.

A man dressed as a monkey selling half price passes to the Phuket Zoo appears on one side of me and I feel a scratchy weight on my shoulder as another man appears on the other side of me yelling, “You want photo? You want photo?” I do my best Arnold Schwarzenegger slow-mo glance in the direction of the scratchy weight until I bump my forehead against the open mouth of a giant fricken Iguana.

“Get it the fuck off me!” I scream, as I bolt ahead of the group thrusting my hips back and forward and shaking my chest like some crazy hot dancer from the 80’s hit Maniac. I am the cause of much mirth for the Buck’s group and Dennis comments, in a way that could be interpreted as semi-serious, that I have some impressive moves. Being in such a buoyant mood and happy that the man actually caught the giant Igauna before it fell to its death, I have to agree with Dennis – I did move very well and I’m sure that if I had performed those steps in a different context, say at a Blue Light Disco, I would have been an inspiration to many.

We find our way to The Malibu Bar which was secured for the Buck’s Night exclusively nights earlier and within seconds of perching myself on a bar stool three waitresses begin massaging my shoulders, arms and hands (I italicise waitresses here only to save myself from the effort of writing prostitutes and Lady-Boys). The effect it has on my intoxicated mind and body could only be matched by a shot of morphine and by the time I regain my clarity I am in need of a napkin to wipe the drool running from the corner of my mouth and something else to drink with a little kick in it.

Todd lines up several shots and we down them quickly as Jamie climbs a stripper’s platform and starts thrusting against the pole and within minutes of watching him gyrate and kick and swing I am convinced that he has participated in the highly popular pole-dancing fitness classes back in Aus. I make a note to tell him how impressed I am with his talent as I strike up a conversation with two of the other Buck’s – Buck 11 and 12 – who I met only hours before, and within minutes the inevitable, “And what do you do…” question is raised.

“I’m a stay-at-home-Dad,” I say.

Waitresses appear from nowhere to break the lingering silence with their shoulder-loosening fingers. After several seconds Buck 11 says, “That’s great. No, really. I’d love to be able to hang out with the kids all day. Go to the park and that.”

My mouth opens and then shuts and then repeats that pattern several times until I stick another shot into it. I then buy the waitress a shot, which guarantees her 50 Baht from the bar, and distract myself from replying to Buck 11 by refocussing on Todd’s efforts to cross off every box on his T-shirt. As I watch him proposition a Lady-boy, swap pants with a stranger, scull a pot while standing on his head and offer a sexual service to a merchant for 100 Baht, I am suddenly aware of the fact that Archie, Lewis and Tyson will one day start reading this blog and that this very post may be the one that confuses them the most.

I am interrupted by the urgent need to urinate and hightail it out and notice the toilets are right at the end of the long thoroughfare of bars. Todd, who is still negotiating with the Merchant – they have agreed on the sexual act Todd will perform but the merchant will not go above 80 Baht - stops the intense negotiations when he sees that I am heading in the direction of the toilets. “You should seriously think about taking someone with you, when you go for a slash,” he says. “The waitresses and Lady-boys can be very persistent about getting you into their bar.”

I shrug it off, laugh at him, and start walking in the direction of the toilets. I feel confident. I feel great. If the women and the he-she’s pressure me too strongly to enter their bars, I’ll simply ignore them and walk right by. I am a big, big boy and I can handle it.

As I approach the first bar several waitresses gather at the entrance so I hold one hand up, offer a pleasant expression and mouth No Thanks. Like a clumsy adolescent boy trying to reach second base on his first date it takes me a moment to realise that my raised hand has been seized. I am being dragged, violently, towards the bar by two waitresses and I whimper, pathetically, No I don't want it, as another grabs my leg and yet another goes directly to my nether-regions and works her hands in such a way that the meat is separated from the two veg in what appears to be a bizarre measuring-up ritual.

I am being shunted towards the bar paralysed and conflicted by the fact that my genitals are being handled so expertly by a woman – who may or may not have a penis herself – at the same time that my will and sense of self is being shattered by an effective Phuketian gang-tackle that I lose all ability to think my way out, and it seems my fate is sealed, until another waitress jumps on my back and reignites the memory of the giant Igauna, and I know what I must do.

I channel the energy of the Maniac with every ounce of effort available to me and recreate the dance that served me so well only hours before, and to understand the effort and emotional intensity involved I urge you to watch this clip –

In my mind I am suitably dressed in tight black leotards with white cotton wrist bands and I flick and gyrate and buck and thrust and jump and dive and punch out and one by one the waitresses release me and fall away until I am back out in the thoroughfare panting like an overworked racehorse and jerking all around like that little squirrel chasing the nut in the Ice Age series. With urine on the horizon I have no choice but to Maniac my way past all the bars on the way to the toilets and in this fashion manage to deflect and avoid dozens of genital-scented hands without more than a few mills of leakage.

After doing my business, I stand at the sink for several minutes convincing myself that I have what it takes to make it back and then I hear Todd behind me.

"It's okay. Wait for me. I 'll show you how."

He returns a minute later and guides me to the entrance of the thoroughfare.

"Don't leave me," I say.

He smiles, takes off like Usain Bolt and screams, "Let's just keep going RD. Let's just keep going!" as waitresses bounce off him or dive back inside their bars for their own safety.

I decide I need some real motivation to gee myself up and give me every chance of making it all the way to the Malibu Bar and so I settle on what I feel is the most appropriate song to sing - "My body's nobody's body but mine, you've got your own body, let me have mine," I bellow with all my might, as I take off running faster than I have ever run in my life, not sure if I actually have enough energy left to break free of the waitresses clutches.

They lunge, reaching for me. "Let me have mine," I scream.

Let me have mine.... !

Reservoir Dad’s Adventures in Phuket – The Buck's Day/Night Part 1

2009-11-13T13:32:00.012+11:00

The boat is fanging its way towards Phi Phi Island with fourteen semi-decent to non-decent males on board. I’m almost certain that I’ll get seasick and so I distract myself with inner dialogue about the overweight boat-boy. He’s wearing nothing but a pair of cheap board shorts and I’ve been trying to count the roll lines on his belly but he keeps bending, stretching and reaching for things and so I come up with three different numbers – two, three and seven. I’m about to give up, add the numbers and divide the total by three for an average when he finally stops moving and looks stoically back towards Phuket’s shore. I’m surprised to find that his belly wobbles out into a perfect podgy sphere with no lines at all. I ponder the size of his omentum for a moment before we burst through a large wave and I’m jolted back to reality.

Todd, the Buck, told me weeks earlier, that we were in for a day of swimming, diving, snorkelling, lunch and beers on a chartered speedboat. He then asked me which of those activities I would be participating in and seemed surprised when I replied, categorically, lunch and beers.

The Captain yells ‘In case of an emergency….’ over the roar of the boat and that’s about all I hear. I’m not concerned because if this boat capsizes or crashes or is attacked by sea monsters the result will be the same for me whether I understand the emergency procedure or not – death, so I pretend I'm listening, nod seriously and turn to Jamie, Todd’s brother and best man, who is tapping me on the shoulder.

“You have to snorkel,” he says.

“I don’t see any point in snorkelling,” I tell him. “It’ll make me wet and then I’ll have to dry myself.”

“Everyone will be doing it. Are you scared?”

As all visible sign of land disappears I have the impression that the sea is overwhelming us – like cookie dough overwhelms a chocolate chip – and I see no reason to change my decision.

“I’m not scared, I just have a care factor of zero for this particular activity. I’m happy to sun myself and drink beer on the boat. Are you okay with that?”

“I’ll lose a little respect for you,” he says.

“Respect for me? I won’t be the one splashing and squealing like a little girl in the water,” I tell him. “How about I bypass the snorkelling and when we get back to Phuket I’ll find a sprinkler to spread my arse over. You can be the one to turn it on if you want.”

Jamie laughs and even though I’m appearing as blasé as possible I am stuck on the ‘respect’ thing. I like Jamie – he’s a cool dude in a doofusy, Clarke Kent-ish, Gilligan from Gilligan’s Island kind of way and Todd is one of my best mates from right back to High School days and I am suddenly struck by my predicament – I can do what makes me happy or I can do something, marginally painful, to make the groom and the best man happy on what is an important day for them.

I decide to consult the oracle and so reach for a can of beer and pierce the end with a pen. I shake it just a little and then shotgun it in what I feel is under three seconds. Even before I lower the empty can-slash-oracle my 2009 Geelong Premiership Cap is blown right off my head and out of the boat and I take this as a clear message to stay on board and refuse any water activities until Jock – Todd’s father – hands me my cap back and says, ‘It just blew into the back of the boat.’

I swallow a wellspring of emotion and am certain of two things – Geelong will win back-to-back flags 2009/2010 and I will be dipping myself into the ocean for the benefit of my long term friend.

The boat boy waddles past and starts collecting diving equipment as we round Phi-Phi Island and find a ‘good’ diving spot. I reason that he is a good choice for a boat boy for this particular group. Most of the guys have taken their shirts off already and this has to have something to do with how good we feel about our own abs in comparison to his.

Todd is in his element, surrounded by his friends and family – beer drinking foul-mouthed mostly Aussie lunatics – and he leads the diving group into the water. I pull on a pair of flippers and a snorkel and waddle my way to the edge and I can’t help but think that if the boat-boy ate an all meat diet for a month and did some basic exercise that he could switch from Buck’s groups to Hen’s groups and probably make a lot more Baht.

Suddenly I’m in the water. Several fish swim by, I can see right to the bottom of the ocean and am aware that this is what divers and snorkelers talk about – the clear water, the colourful fish – as the carrot of the experience, so I do my best to get taken away. I see a school of barracouta, a big flat fish, some skinny white fish and a very fast fish with yellow stripes. The chorus from The Dream Police is replaying itself over and over in my head. I have no idea why.

What strikes me, apart from the fact that I am just about brain dead bored, is that all the fish are so fricken calm. Why aren’t they eating each other? Where’s the violence? The Dream Police is replaced by the echo of a radio advertisement designed to raise awareness of people with disabilities with the catchphrase - ‘See the person not the disability’ and as I float lifelessly, so disinterested that I can’t even be stuffed paddling, I have to be honest with myself and say that every time I meet someone with a disability I always see the disability first and it is only with great effort that I then see the person, if time and circumstance permits. I also notice the fat in fat people first, the old in old people, the bushy eyebrows on hairy people, the height of the very tall or very small and the pus-filled zits on the pimply. I feel semi-guilty about this until I consider the fact that when I look at myself in the mirror the first thing I notice is the baldness, the sickly whiteness of my skin and the very very slight appearance of bitch-tits on the bald, white, nearly bitch-titted man looking back at me.

Four really big brown fish swim past and look right at me and I barely notice until I see the look in their eyes. They’ve encountered yet another snorkeler and they’re thinking, ‘Oh, there’s another one of those, again.’ They’re as bored with the activity as I am.

Some ocean gets in my snorkel and I lift my head choking and spluttering as Jamie swims by. I look back at the boat. Ten minutes of snorkelling has to be enough to get the respect Jamie has on offer.

The boat boy offers a hand to help me on board and in this position I can see five very distinguishable rolls of fat. I decide that five will be the official number. The flippers and snorkel are discarded and I decide I will now revert back to my University attitude for the rest of the day/night and so open another beer. I have at least half an hour to empty several cans. The Captain turns on the radio and sits down next to me. We look out over the expanse of what is the most beautiful scenery – Islands, massive rock formations, clear water, blue sky – and within minutes he is telling me how he picked up a Phuketian lady-boy by accident.

“Like you pick up your mates keys instead of your own?’ I ask, ‘That sort of accident?”

“No, man,” he says, a little pained, "I mean, I bought her for the night – 1500 Baht – but I thought she was a real woman."

“What did you do to her?" I ask.

“Just about everything,” he says and then goes into detail. “(Content removed by author).”

“How’d you find out she was a lady-boy?”

“I just realised when I woke up in the morning.”

I think, Bullshit to that. You wanted to sleep with a lady-boy and now you want to talk about it. You really really love lady-boy but I really say, “That’s crazy man.”

He nods as The Empire of The Sun start singing Walking on a Dream and I feel awesome about my decision to snorkel for only a few minutes because I would have missed this little story and I know that people are crazy and while everyone’s out there skydiving and scuba diving and ab-sailing I’ll be sitting around watching and waiting for a crazy person like the Captain to spill his guts to a crazy person like me and when asked about my Phuket trip in the future I’ll be talking about how crazy-cool this dude is before I talk about a couple of colourful fish.

The Captain continues his frank discussion about lady-boys and even though I am now aware that there’s a strong chance he is trying to pick me up I start to look forward. Soon we will leave this boat behind and get sucked into the night-life of Patong where there’s a constant atmosphere of insanity, where everyone seems to be laughing at one another as they bargain money, sex, experience and time from each other. It’s going to be crazy and as the rest of the boys climb on board and start reaching for the cold beers I get this tingly, drunken, excitable flutter about the night ahead.

Reservoir Dad’s Adventures in Phuket – The Jellyfish

2009-11-06T12:14:00.012+11:00

I’m in a lazy sun-slash-beer-slash-food stupor and comparing myself to the recently fed, highly-sexed lion, lazing under the shade of a tree in the sweltering African heat. I come to the conclusion that I stack up alright – Lions eat lots of meat and I have eaten double helpings of every kind of animal available in Phuket. Lions have sex fifty times a day and I have already thought about sex at least fifty times today. And when not aroused into action by sex or food lions do nothing at all and I am also doing nothing very, very competently.

I open my mouth to let out a groggy roar but the effort is beyond me and I resign myself to a dopey smile and several smacks of my recently beer-soaked lips when I notice a blurry shape to the right running down the beach towards me. I lift my head to see Reservoir Mum walking at a steady pace with Archie, crying, and Lewis in toe. A mild panic strikes me and I’m on my feet, suddenly alert.

“He’s been stung by a jellyfish,” she says. “Don’t make a big deal out of it.”

“Oh Jesus, is he going to die?” I scream.

Reservoir Mum rolls her eyes and tells me to go ask the locals for some ointment. I run as fast as my legs (which are fatigued by my extended period of stagnation) can carry me, to a woman selling massages for 100 Baht and tell her that my son, who has encountered tremendous peril at the hands of a jellyfish, needs her special magic ointment to ward off any chance of death. She fails to understand me and calls over another woman who cannot understand me who calls over a man who holds two hands up and says, “What do you want?”

I say, “Jellyfish sting ointment.”

He speaks in Phuketian and the second woman dawdles off and returns with a slice of lime. I ask her if she perhaps forgot the cocktail that goes with it.

‘Rub it on the sting’ the man says.

I’m unconvinced but scream Konichiwa as I head back to the scene of the drama and within minutes Archie is fervently licking a chocolate coated shark-shaped ice-cream and standing confidently on his lime-soaked legs.

***

The boys are asleep and I’m watching a pirated copy of Management with Reservoir Mum but I lose concentration shortly after the bum scene.

“I want to hunt that jellyfish down and kill it,” I tell her. “It’s out there somewhere with bits of my child’s skin on its bastard tentacles.

“Don’t be silly,” she says to me, “Stuff like that just happens.”

I feel angered by her Buddhist nonchalance at the same time that I feel enamored by her coolness. “If Archie had been eaten by a lion in Africa we’d hunt the feline arsehole down and skin it alive. Wouldn’t we?”

Reservoir Mum begins to talk but her words are lost in the shoosh of the ocean. I can see myself on a jet ski. I am high-tailing it towards the horizon. When I look behind me I see Archie on the shore. His leg is very, very red and the tears in his eyes renew my resolve.

When I look down I see a school of the bulbous jellyfish bastards, undulating as they do – their tiny heads and their pathetic wispy tentacles. I don’t trust anything without eyes and mouths but these child-stinging mongrel sons-of-bitches are also missing noses and ears. I secure the snorkel and goggles to my face and dive into the deep blue. My legs clamp together and I buck and flex my hips like a mermaid (without boobs, long flowing hair, a tan and a general female allure).

Within seconds I am upon them. They scatter like rabbits but regroup meters ahead and circle me. I am in water – their favorite place. They have the home-ground advantage and they know it.

To my right I see a jellyfish with something on its tentacles. It can only be human flesh, the flesh of my child. I lunge for it and my hand is consumed by jelly. I whack at it, bite it, punch it, poke it, give it a Chinese burn and my rage is so focused that it’s only after I deliver a thorough thrashing that I’m aware of the dozens of other jellyfish that cling to my legs, my arms, my torso. The pain is so dictionary complete.

I swim one jelly-fished stroke, one tentacle covered kick at a time until I feel the waves rise and carry me to the shore. I am dumped on the sand resembling a large summer sweet. Beautiful exotic Phuketian women run from everywhere with slices of lime and rub me from head to toe for 50 Baht a stroke and the jellyfish recoil and fall like vampires splashed with holy water.

A crowd forms. Archie is crowd-surfed over them and placed at my feet. He looks at me, still scarred by a reddish or perhaps now pinkish-white barely visible line around his ankle. He notices the jellyfish I still hold in my hand and recoils but I beckon him near. I raise it in the air and feel a surge of unnatural strength, that only a father whose child’s life is threatened feels, and I say, to the jellyfish, so that all – the crowd, the women but most of all Archie – can hear, ‘You’re going to the naughty corner. Two minutes. And then you must say sorry.’

Archie laughs and falls to his knees in relief as the crowd cheers. The Phuketian women, still lovingly applying lime juice to my legs, ask me to marry them but, alas, Reservoir Mum and my country will only allow me one wife.

The shoosh of the ocean and the adulation of the crowd recedes and is replaced by Reservoir Mum’s voice. "We should buy him that blow-up shark floaty thing on the way to the beach tomorrow though, to encourage him to get in the water again."

"Yes," I say, "He’ll love that" and within minutes I can see Archie floating out into stormy seas. I am guiding my hang-glider through lighting and rain, honing in on him. The Phuketian women are wearing wedding dresses and singing a particular song from Moulin Rouge which I can’t quite remember the name of……

Reservoir Dad's Adventures in Phuket - Flight Of The Wolf

2009-10-26T14:16:00.010+11:00

We’re five hours into a nine-and-a-half hour flight to Phuket and all I really want to do is watch a movie. I’ve had several attempts at the new flick Management but am only twenty-five minutes in and can only blame it on the seating arrangements.

Reservoir Mum, Archie and Tyson have three seats together. Me and Lewis are sitting in the row behind them.

Lewis. Lew-is. I don’t think I can emphasize Lewis enough here. Tyson is an angel baby whose temperament is more closely related to Spock’s (with smiles and giggles), than it is to mine, and Archie will watch television – in a house, with a mouse, in a box, with a fox, in a drain and on a plane – for hours on end. Lewis is, on the other hand, as Lewis does and Lewis does need to release massive amounts of toddler turbulence every five to ten minutes.

My crazy mixed-up mind suddenly considers the idea that Reservoir Mum has a good thing going on and that she has probably been aware of this from the moment she began planning the trip over several months ago. My suspicions are confirmed when she turns in her seat and says, ‘I’ve watched two movies and one sitcom so far. Have you had any sleep yet? You should get some. I feel so much better.’

I look to the emergency exit lever and am overwhelmed by a longing I have never felt before. I want to buy it flowers, massage its feet and disembowel myself for the sweet relief it promises.

The food arrives, neatly packed on small trays. I place Lewis’s tray in front of him with all the enthusiasm of a diffuser cutting a random wire on a bomb. For a moment, as he chews on a piece of lemon chicken in a cow-like fashion with his eyes on the TV monitor ahead of him, I feel like I’m in the clear and my muscles systematically relax until my bones are fully reclined in a seated position for one of the few times in the entire flight.

Ahh my darling food. Lamb – terrible airplane packaged lamb – but lamb nonetheless. I take the remote control from my arm rest and rewind Management to the scene I have already watched several times. Jennifer Aniston says to Steve Zahn , 'Okay, you can touch my butt but then you’ve gotta go.'

Admittedly, I could be a little further into the movie than this if I didn’t appreciate the artistry and the performance of this particular scene. Jennifer Aniston’s butt is also worth watching, no matter who’s feeling it and, yes, I understand that there are issues to explore here – the sexual appeal of dominant women, Groundhog day fantasies (would you like a desert island and a coconut, or an airplane and Anniston’s butt with that?) and the fact that I am becoming increasingly aware that I am a dirty old man in a relatively young man’s body – but they are issues that will await further posts.

I’m piercing a piece of marinated lamb with my fork and guiding it to my mouth with such anticipation that I am almost choking on my own saliva when I am suddenly struck in the cheek by a stream of milk. I scrisper (a scrisper is a scream tempered by a whisper) and the ‘s’ in Lewis turns me into a sprinkler that gives my TV monitor a bath. Lewis is grinning with a small container of milk in his hand that has been partially opened. I snatch it from him, knocking a third of the lamb on to my lap.

Words cannot capture the rage. The spirit of the wolf possesses me. I focus entirely on my food despite the potential embarrassing disaster developing beside me. I am over a carcass. The other wolves are circling. I only have to growl, bare my teeth, and devour the most edible parts of the kill as quickly as possible. As I shovel my food into my mouth I am semi-aware of Lewis standing and spilling his tray – water, main meals, sweets and all – but my body swells further, my face extends into a snout and my skin constricts to reveal a heavy coat of fur. The mind is thereabouts but overwhelmed. I am physical, animal, and food is my only concern. Unless there is some intervention this lamb will be devoured and then I will tear this fucking plane apart.

To the rescue. A stewardess pours me a cup of coffee and my claws retract into human fingers even as I am taking the first sip. I help Lewis to finish his meal spoon by spoon while she talks to him and plays with him. He smiles shyly for a moment but then begins to perform, making up songs, gyrating in his seat. The stewardess seems to be melting with affection for him. A few more minutes pass and I am smiling at him and laughing with him and filled with pride that he can have such an affect on someone.

I love the little bugger – the tiring, stubborn, funny little bugger – and no matter what happens that undercurrent of love is always there.

The coffee settles well. I can relax for the moment. The mind has replaced the wolf and life is good but there are hours of flight to go, two airports and a Taxi ride through Phuket to our apartment before we can settle.

I focus on the TV monitor and rewind to Aniston’s butt again. I’ve seen this scene nine times now and it keeps getting better every single time I see it.

I Do My Little Turn On The Catwalk

2009-10-13T11:39:00.024+11:00

As Reservoir Mum and Tyson are flying off to Sydney for a conference, Archie Lewis and myself are on a three hour trip to the country to see the grandparents. The kids are watching Alvin and The Chipmunks on the portable DVD player with a lap-full of crackers and nuts and I can hear Alvin's squeaky little tone and I wonder who it could be supplying his voice - probably someone famous like Jack Nicholson.

I scream out, 'Nooo', as I glance at the rear vision mirror and notice that Lewis is nearly asleep. If he has even five minutes of sleep during the day his bedtime ritual can be put out for up to four hours and I just can't handle the impact that would have on my schedule. I will be watching the 2009 AFL Grand Final DVD tonight and I don't care who knows it. I wind down the back windows and blast an icy wind on his face. A nappy, half the MelWay and a small puppy I had bought to surprise my sister are sucked out onto the highway but Lewis is laughing himself awake and I am satisfied that the disaster has been averted.

Bang. The chipmunks are singing 'You Can't Touch This' and I am locked inside myself again. Reservoir Mum fills my mind. I miss her after only waving goodbye an hour ago but I'm not surprised because music from my teen years fire my neurons with a mix of euphoria, depression and alcoholic type blackouts.

A bus passes me in the left hand lane and I can't help but wonder if anyone saw me absent-mindedly shift my jeans-constricted genitals a little bit to the left. The very likely possibility reminds me of an article I read in a doctor's office about the sexual fantasies of middle age women. Driving past trucks with the skirt hiked up around the hips and the breasts bared rated very highly and all of a sudden I am thinking about boobs. I can see a pair of them waving from side to side in front of me like a hypnotist's watch and it occurs to me that I never really was a breast man until my sons arrived to take them away from me. The mirage of a pair of breasts becomes two MC Hammer's in baggy yellow pants dancing on Reservoir Mum's chest singing You Can't Touch this and I'm back with the chipmunks and Archie and Lewis and another hour, at least, of driving and I feel desperate for a seventies/eighties/nineties music fix.

I swerve into an exit off the highway that leads into a BP convenience store and within minutes am back on the road with a CD called 'Guilty Pleasures' that is just bulging with nostalgic hits - ABC, Cyndi Lauper, Starship, Tears for Fears etc - and I'm shaking with excitement. I skip straight to MC Hammer-the boob-denier's You Can't Touch This for the real version and within seconds I am flexing and relaxing my glutes to get a bopping-up-and-down-on-the-carseat-dance going. Archie and Lewis are laughing and I can't help but be enthused by this. I dip my head to the left and the right, slap my hands together semi-rhythmically and point at them in the rear vision mirror. This just about incites a riot as the boys go ballistic. They wanna be like me, their cool Daddy-O.

They dance well. They dance very well. Picture two hamsters on a medium-to-hot frypan and turn up the heat. One of Lewis's arms break free of the restraints and in all the excitement it's only natural he smacks Archie right in the face. I scream,'I'll turn this damn car around!' and change tracks.

Rick Astley is Never Gunna Give You Up but he won't stop Archie chewing at his car seat restraint to enact a horrible revenge on his brother so I fast forward to I'm Too Sexy by Right Said Fred. Bingo. We're off again, dancing like the freaks we aspire to be - there are a thousand spiders in our hair we just can't get out, no matter how hard we try.

I drift again and see a long catwalk. Everyone we know is there lined up in their Sunday best, screaming for us. Archie, Lewis and Reservoir Dad strutting up a storm, singing, dancing, gyrating our way to a life of fame. We do a little jig in a circle and then jump higher than anyone expected us to and finish with a spinning back kick. I'm thinking move over Jackson 5.

Archie stops me mid strut and brings me back to the long road ahead.

Dad, he says, what is sexy?

Oh shit. Sexy. I know what it is but should he know yet? I run through good definaitions of sexy in my head - concerned predominantly or excessively with sex, someone or something that is sexually appealing, Wilma from the Flintstones - Uh, no. Anything that has anything to do with sex has the potential to lead to other words like penis, vagina and vas deferens. I tell him that sexy means you wear nice clothes and I feel okay with that cause its kinda true in the round-about way that not telling the truth is kinda like telling the truth.

The sexy smoothness of Sam Brown singing Stop joins us and I turn it up saying, 'Okay. This here, Arch. This is sexy.'

I watch them staring silently as Sam soothes them. They're so cute. Like little chipmunks. They're the cutest kids. I feel like screaming 'Line up your kids people! I dare you. None of your kids are cuter than mine!' For a moment I consider that Arnold out of the Cosby Show may have been their equal in the cute stakes but only directly after he said, 'What you talkin' 'bout Willis?'

I think of Tyson and I miss him - his wobbly bubby cheeks, his husky little giggle, the way he drools and wees on me and how it doesn't even bother me. I wonder what he's doing and Sam Brown enhances the emotion to put me on the verge of homesick-like tears but I'm well aware that I'm a man and that crying in public is considered an outrage and so I tilt my head to the side and watch the road through the corner of my bleary eyes, just in case another bus comes by.

Within a split second of thinking of the bus coming by I remember the sexual fantasy article and I think of boobs again and I'm almost certain that Tyson is breastfeeding and I remember that I have now been banished from breastland for nearly five baby-suckling years and the boob mirage appears again just out of reach in front of me on the open road. My mind morphs images and the boobs become two Geelong Premiership Flags, one from 2007 and and one from 2009, blowing in the breeze. For most of my life I thought they would always be just beyond reach but here they are, mine forever and the message is clear.

I turn the music up and listen to We Built This City by Starship because it just seems like the right time to do it and I'm feeling buoyant, suddenly. My boys are awesome. The way they dance and punch each other! The way they eat nuts and crackers and watch DVDs! They are works of bleeding art. I feel good that we made them - me and Reservoir Mum - and I know, and I'm sure Reservoir Mum knows, that the boob-time we sacrificed to make our kids the best kids ever was well worth it. And I'm thinking, as I tap my fingers on the steering wheel and shift my jeans-constricted genitals back to the right, that my boob time will come again.

Oh yes, it will come again.

Wild Waters

2009-10-07T13:18:00.016+11:00

When I finished high school, I moved to a town on the beach. Ten minutes walk would take me to a wide blue horizon, a cool sea breeze, soft warm sands and waves that were the perfect size for surfing without any real risk of injury or death. I lived with mates who were keen surfers. Our bath always had a trail of sand leading to the plug, wet suits hanging from the shower curtain rail and the smell of turtle wax and seaweed lingered from one side of the house to the other.

With all that you’d reckon I'd have leathery brown skin, a smattering of sun spots, freckles across my face and the ability to hang ten, duck dive and swim like a fricken otter.

Truth is I have pale white skin, a few suspect moles and my water skills are limited to the ability to drink it when I can’t find a Coke Zero.

The beach has never appealed to me and getting wet has been reserved for showers and baths. In my time by the seaside I went into the water twice. Once because I was trying to impress some girls by skinny dipping, another time because I fell asleep on a blanket and the tide came in.

So – shitmanandfarout – it was hard for me to adjust to the idea that I’d be going to swimming lessons with the kids. It was Reservoir Mum’s idea of course but even I can understand that kids should be skilled enough to keep their heads above water if they were ever unfortunate enough to find themselves in it. I was just hoping that swimming lessons would be Reservoir Mum’s domain, (or nanny’s, or a distant relative's, or the guy who runs the late night Kebab van in Preston) but no such luck. We’re booked in every Tuesday for (what feels like) eternity. Arch at nine am, Lewis and me at nine thirty and Tyson and Reservoir Mum at ten.

Yep. That’s right. Lewis AND me. In the water. With other people who may not have showered and are probably peeing.

Here’s a report of our first trip to the pool as a family...

The muggy air and the echoey screaming and hollering makes me feel like I have a concussion. Fucking togs – on entry into the water trapped air escapes and makes fart bubbles right next to several of the Mums I’ll be spending the next half hour with. Yes, of course, I am the only Dad. Lewis loves the water. I love it about as much as I like dipping into tubs of cow shit and worms but I do my best to pretend that I am pretending to love it cause Reservoir Mum is watching. A woman brushes against me. Her legs are hairier than mine (I’m talking bear-in-the-rapids-searching-for-salmon hairy) and I’m thinking Lewis better enjoy this a hell-of-a-lot. The group instructor seems to have her sense of self built around the fact that she is very stern. 'The kids will get used to it,' she says. I want to tell her to keep her I’m a tough girl and I don’t care who knows it routine to herself but I notice something on one of the mother’s teeth and am almost certain it’s a pube. We start singing ‘The Wheels on the Bus…’ and I feel ridiculous enough to consider putting my face under the water into Faeces-ville. The instructor yells ‘And what do the Mummy’s on the bus do?’ and avoids eye contact with me. I think Mummy’s? What the fuck do I look like? before internalising a vision of myself pooncing around in a circle with a bunch of women. Oh, shit. Still, I stew on her discrimination for a minute and am just about to scream Are there any fricken dads on this bus! when she introduces the next chorus with, ‘And what do the Dads on the bus do?’ and I bite my tongue. Take it easy man. Just take it easy. We start swimming through the pool to collect floating toys. We’re told to get one each and return it to the toy tub but I think Stuff it, this is my chance and me and Lewis return five toys in record time, biceps bulging from the effort. Sure, some of the other kids are a bit upset but my point is clear – I’m feeling insecure and DADS RULE! More dancing. Safe entry lessons. Lewis is losing interest and telling me he wants to get out. I want to get out too but I can see Reservoir Mum on the sidelines. She looks so happy so I do my best to last the full thirty minutes. Lewis scratches my stomach with his toe nails as we’re told to get in a circle and hold hands. The cute little girl next to me smiles as we bounce in unison to the left. I grimace at her cause that faraway look in her eyes tells me she’s pissing and I’m bouncing right through it. Then we change direction and I realise the giantess instructor is holding my other hand. She has that same look in her eyes. We’re outta here. Fucking togs stick to my skin and reveal every nook and cranny of my nether regions. They might as well be painted on. Wet towels. Debri stuck to my foot that feels like cigarette butts and mouse poo. I line up my wet arse with a dozen hairy old men arses in the change rooms. My cold wet jocks stick to my ankles. I can’t kick them off. I resign myself to bending over and nearly fall. For one of the few times in its life - before I regain my footing and clamp up - my anus is exposed to the cold air. The old men chuckle. My pool experience has lived up to expectation.

It was a torture I never want to revisit but Reservoir Mum, Archie, Lewis and Tyson are as happy as hell as we waddle our way with bags of wet stuff to the car. They love it. I love them. So, I guess I’ll suck it up next week and do it all again.

The Top 5 Days Of My Life (as dictated by Geelong Premierships)

2009-09-29T13:31:00.014+10:00

Some people - those who are not wise in the ways of the world- have told me, over the years, that football doesn't really matter, that there are more important things in life, that football is just a game. Up until 2007 when Geelong won our first premiership in 44 years, I would reply 'If only that were true,' such was the pain of having to live through four grand final losses without seeing the ultimate success once.

In the last quarter of the 2007 Grand Final, when we were already 100 points ahead and certain of the win, I sent out a mass text to family and friends that said something like this -

I love yous all. This is one of the top 5 days of my life.

Reservoir Mum and a few astute others sent a message back asking what other events filled the top 5, suspecting that maybe I didn't have too many other passions that would really trouble the list. I replied -

1. Marriage to Reservoir Mum
2. Archie & Lewis's birth
3. 2007 Geelong Premiership

It dawned on me that they were right. I was two short of top 5. So being the clever dick that I am I filled in the top 5 to come up with this -

1. Marriage to Reservoir Mum
2. Archie & Lewis's birth
3. 2007 Geelong Premiership
4. 2008 Geelong Premiership
5. 2009 Geelong Premiership

I was stupidly happy. It was happiness mixed with relief and emotional fulfilment and a sense of accomplishment and a ton of pride and a shitload of getstuffedallyoubastardswhothoughtwecouldn'tdoit.

That day and that night I hugged thousands of blue and white clad strangers and thought about my life and what the Geelong Football Club was to my childhood and my family and my sense of self and I could only come to the conclusion that it was a great thing to be so passionate. It's a wonderful thing.

So when I was confronted with ‘It’s only a game,’ by the few naysayers who thought that my celebration was excessive, my reply was simple - 'Thank God it is not.'

It's only a game they said again in 2008 when I watched us lose a fifth Grand Final. The pain was so overwhelming that I was forced temporarily back to my pre-2007 reply, 'If only that were true.'

And the Top 5 Days of My Life had to be altered -

1. Marriage to Reservoir Mum
2. Archie & Lewis's birth
3. 2007 Geelong Premiership
4. 2009 Geelong Premiership
5.

2008 left a glaring hole that made 2009 a very long season. Tyson was born and I said to Reservoir Mum several times how I'd love to have a child born in a Geelong Premiership year. It wasn't looking good for a while. We had been stung by the Grand Final loss and not many gave us a real chance of winning the Flag. There were several sides capable of winning and as the season wore on the Geelong team started to stumble, losing players to injury, dropping form, losing games.

But the Cats regrouped. Players returned from injury just in time and form lifted. The spirit was there and we played some of our best footy to make the 2009 Grand Final.

I was a nervous wreck leading up to it. I neglected most things except for the kids (sorry Reservoir Mum) and spent most of the week locked inside myself. Another loss would be disastrous. Another win would bring euphoria. Both of those scenarios played themselves out in my head, over and over.

I read all footy-related print media, watched every news report and footy-related television program and listened to SEN on the radio from morning to night. I took the boys to the open training session at Skilled Stadium on the Monday and took them to the Grand Final parade on the Friday. I spent a lot of money on Grand Final tickets for me and my old man.

Finally the day arrived and we were off the Grand Final breakfast at Etihad Stadium where we dined on fine cuisine, drank champagne and beer and were entertained by comedians and musicians. But nothing could ease the tension or distract us from the significance of the game ahead.

As we boarded the bus from Etihad to the MCG the fire in the belly grew. The jaw clenched. The forearms flexed. The us against them mentality overwhelmed and I looked at St.Kilda supporters with contempt. I hoped, desperately, that it would be them falling to the ground in despair as the final siren sounded, and not us.

I got my wish. The Cats won their second flag in three years after a gutsy, brutal, desperate game. I'll never forget the elation. After the game a St.Kilda supporter squeezed past me, as the Cats did their lap of honor. He said,’ Congratulations' with a tear in his eye. I said, 'Bad luck, mate. Awesome game' with a tear in mine.

A great day was made even better because I got to share it with my Dad, and good mates Garry and Brendan. It's something we'll have forever.

With this win comes another redrafting of the Top 5 Best Days of My Life. Having thought about it, I probably shouldn't squeeze Archie, Lewis and Tyson into one day just so I can include more Geelong Premierships. They really do deserve there own birthdays (hehe). So here it is -

1. Marriage to Reservoir Mum
2. Archie's birth*
3. Lewis's birth*
4. Tyson's birth*
5. 2007 and 2009 Geelong Premierships**

Just a game?
Thank god it's not!

*Numbers 2 – 4 are interchangeable.
**I know that's technically six days but it's my list, so back off. Hopefully, I can add several more to number 5 in the years to come.

I'll Show You Some Good Parenting (Take 2)

2009-09-24T10:36:00.014+10:00

Like every parent, I’ve read a lot, heard a lot and tried a lot of parenting techniques. We shouldn’t push our own agendas on to our kids. That’s the rule isn’t it? We shouldn’t push them in the direction of one particular sport, or one particular profession. We should encourage a diverse range of activities and support them when they begin to find a passion for one or two in particular. As they grow older we shouldn’t form their political or religious beliefs, we should promote an open dialogue, play devil’s advocate occasionally, build a solid base of reasoning so that our kids can form their own ideas and opinions and… and…

...and there’s no way in hell my kids are barracking for any team other than the Geelong Cats. Yeah. That’s right. I agree with most of the advice in the first paragraph but when it comes to who my kids will pledge their allegiance to, I’m determined to steer them in the right direction.

Compare the angels they are now -

to the people they will become -

The second photo is of Brendo, Gazza and myself celebrating the Preliminary Final win against the Pies last weekend. It warms my heart to see the Geelong supporting bogan-ish human-like creature I have become.

To Archie, Lewis and Tyson. The above photo represents your destiny. I will not let anything stand in the way. That’s why I put the blue and white beanie on your head only hours after you were born, Tyson. Lewis, that’s why I snuck away and hid your soccer ball in the garage when you started to show more interest in it than the glorious Sherrin. Archie, that's why I always use the plural ‘we’ when discussing the Cats – We barrack for the Cats. We hate Hawthorn. We hope Ablett wins the Brownlow.

Yes, I have been relentless. And I am already reaping the rewards of my hard work. Archie and Lewis now know the Geelong team song, Archie can also identify several players and Lewis walks around with a toddler-sized Sherrin under his arm (Geelong colors of course).

That’s tear provoking stuff because I know I am molding these young boys into a Geelong Cats-addicted AFL junkies just like me, just like their Pa and just like their late Great-Grandfather. They have now been added to a family history that includes four generations of Geelong supporters and over 90 years of history.

Very soon, probably even next year, three generations of my family will be going to Geelong games together and screaming our guts out. You can’t buy that sort of life-long bonding material.

There are some things, specific to family culture, which overrule all those otherwise solid parenting guidelines. When they are much older I will show Archie and Lewis this rant and they will love me for it. Just like I love my old man for forcing me down this path many years ago. It set up years of Saturday afternoons together. Years of phone calls and visits to discuss ins and outs, injuries, team form, draft choices, disappointments for past seasons and hopes for upcoming seasons.

My Dad was born in 1951 the year the Cats won their first of back-to-back flags. He was clearly too young to remember it. I like to imagine my Grandfather listening to the radio, hanging on every minute of the game. He would have loved it. In 2007 The Mighty Cats won their first flag in 44 years. Dad and I witnessed our first Geelong Premiership together.

Last year was gut-wrenching and I'll say no more about it.

This weekend the Cats are up for their third successive shot at the title. It’s an emotional week. Dad and I will be riding every minute desperate to see the Premiership cup back in the hands of Captain Tom Harley and Coach Mark Thompson. We will party long and hard and I’ll have some great stories for Archie, Lewis and Tyson to pass on to my grandkids.

I love the fact that I had no choice in being a Geelong supporter. I had been at my first day of primary school and was mixing with a lot of wayward Corio kids, a few of who were filling my head with some crazy ideas. When Dad came home from work I ran up to him and said, ‘Dad, I’m barracking for the Bombers now because they Bomb ‘em’’. A very cute, child-like thing to say. Dad dropped his bag, knelt down, looked me in the eye and said, ‘You barrack for The Cats, mate, or you're moving out.’ That’s some pretty special parenting right there. Thanks Dad. Go Cats! Premiers 2007/2009.