THE SUMMER OF WOW

Wow, as they say… WOW. Wow, drawn out with at least 4 o’s. WOW, uttered in a low-note minor key of shock and awe. It’s the sound of amazement echoing thru the empty tunnels of a million mouth-breathers. It calls to mind the how-fucked-are-we-mothership-cresting-the-skyline moment we’ve all been waiting for: WOW. Until something that exceptional actually happens, we’ll practice the living shit out of these WOWs: build funeral wreaths for poached lions with them, lower a WOW-based gender-norm sneeze guard between ourselves and formerly male Olympians, wave a flag of WOW’s—your choice of stars-n-bars or rainbow. America: land of the free, home of the incredulous. Wait—that was way too wordy. I mean WOW. Just WOW.

I’ve taken the abundance of WOW’s allotted me as a suburban auslander, and as is my wont, fashioned a high tower crowned with crenellations from which I can tip over pots of boiling hot WOW’s onto the barbarian hordes, which is—trust me on this—an all-day job here in the Cubburbs. But somehow, I’ve managed to stitch up a comforting quilt of the more delicate WOW’s to cuddle into after a long and difficult day of WOW dumping. And yet, I have so many WOW’s to spare and share with you, bullet-point style, my lucky-lucky babies! As an added bonus, I’ve ranked each with a special WOW rating: the more O’s, the more WOW.

• We’re Bad, We’re Nationwide (WOW rating: 14 O’s) Same-sex marriage is finally a national reality. Kate and I can now carry on our decade-long debate of who’s not listening to who and who’s losing their mind, coast-to-coast, like a Lincoln and Douglas who occasionally give each other shoulder rubs and take turns wiping their toddler’s behind.
• Welcome To The Family, Keef! (WOW rating: 4 O’s)  According to the box it came in, this baby can grill up to “20 hamburgesas” at a time.  And because it has the capacity to smoke up the entire neighborhood, I’ve named it after the heaviest smoker alive today, Mr. Keith Richards.

• Fare Thee Well, Grateful Dead (WOW rating: 4.5 O’s) I know I’m way late to the party, but has Bob Weir ALWAYS looked like he was being goosed by the Grim Reaper?

• Go Set A What, Man? (WOW rating: 6.3 O’s) It’s probably pointless to be spoiler-sensitive now, but just allow me this moment to gloat about my decision to put all my eggs in the Flannery O’Connor basket, way back when, at the Southern Women Writers State Fair.

• “I’m a big girl. No binks. I’m not a baby!” (WOW rating: 8 O’s) After a two night pacifier-less stand, our daughter Lu has renounced all the trappings of babyhood.  We are now a family of “big girls”, just in time for me to begin my slide into liquid dinners and adult diapers.
• Slide Report (WOW rating: 4.6 O’s) I continue to grey like nobody’s business, and am widening quite nicely, thank you very much.  I loom on the horizon like a goddamn prairie menace full of golf-ball sized hail.
• Deep Dream Fry Daddy (WOW rating: 13 O’s) All of the photos featured here today have been tossed into an app I’m calling the Deep Dream Fry Daddy. Some, multiple times.  Judging from the reactions I’ve been getting on social media, it’s pretty polarizing.  I like to think that it doesn’t just bring out the dog in every picture, but every square out of the woodwork.  All you have to do is say “That’s just creepy!” and I know exactly how cool you aren’t.

• Charlemagne Oakes Shake-Up (WOW rating: 12.2 O’s) It started with the sudden demise of a beloved educator in May, and yet another one in July, and now the town is covered with ribbons and freaking the fuck out.  I am standing at ground zero of a sort of Cubburban carpe diem that is both bracing and disquieting. It’s manifesting itself in an anxiety spectrum ranging from the adorable uptick of neighborhood BBQ’s, to game-changing divorces, and perhaps most disturbingly, abrupt mid-life genital piercings. It’s brought out the best in some people, (see Girl Scout pic below), and the worst in others.  As is the order of things, the two people no longer with us were paragons of kindness and compassion, cut down in their proverbial prime, while those of us who have fallen short of their moral goals are left behind to sneak cigarettes behind their children’s backs and write cynical blog posts about a small community’s grief and loss.  But hey, Keef and I did host two BBQ’s; I can’t be all that bad. Hopefully not good enough to get cut down, though. I have a lot of fucking up yet to do.
• Welcome, Jenny And Donnie! (WOW rating: 3.98 O’s)You two crazy kids moved to Charlemagne Oaks in just the nick of time! We’ve been through a lot lately. Our chubburb turns its lonely eyes to you.  To further summon the ever-quotable “Mrs. Robinson”: “wooo-wooo-wooo”. I’m sure you can see, there’s at least one WOW in there somewhere for your troubles.