chris brown

You down with OCD, yeah you know me…my Toiletries regiminent revisited

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Anyone who knows me can tell you that I am under absolute duress to be ready for anything in any reasonable amount of time. Even more than that, I can’t even get ready in an unreasonable amount of time. Celebrities don’t take this long to prep for the Oscars – but for me to run to the supermarket is a production. I have tried things to quicken the pace, but sort of like a gentle soufflé, you cannot rush certain things.

My wife always argues with me about how long it takes me to get ready, but while she looks absolutely perfect and requires very little touch-ups from the moment she rises out of bed, when I wake up I look like one of the zombies marching in back of the float in the Welcome to the Black Parade by My Chemical Romance video.

My toiletry regimen alone is a great big process in and of itself: I set my Ipod for one song and then get in the shower. It should not take longer to shower than one random song. That’s not the time-consuming part. The exception to this one-song rule is if you have fallen into the cesspool (Lance) or had a plumbing pipe full of shit (literally, full of shit) explode into your mouth and onto your chest (Hal) – At that point, take as long as you feel necessary in there and no one will say a word.

Back to the routine; I like to start at the top and then work my way down. The opening act, or my first facial scrub, is just a tingly little wake-up call and then we head straight for the follow-up nourishing face wash and immediately into the Bliss face wash after that. I then grab my two thickening shampoos (it’s sort of the same philosophy that I have with Pumpkin muffins, where if one is good – two will be much better) and wash my hair. Obviously, the shampoo is dripping down my body and I would need to scrub again after it – so it just makes sense to use the body bar after the hair is done. Moving on to my Oil of Olay Age Defying soap for certain parts of the body – though never on this gentle face with a bar soap! I actually don’t understand why anyone would choose to use a bar of soap to wash their body and then use that SAME bar to wash their face. Any bar of soap that touches my feet or cleans my balls surely isn’t going anywhere near my face!

Blue Body wash is next for the rest of my body that the soap doesn’t cover. I don’t mind scents, but I feel like it needs to be blue or it won’t fully clean me. I don’t know why blue body wash strikes me as more thorough – but I just can’t use another color. Then I dry off and get my robe and waist towel (what my wife lovingly refers to as a skirt) and put on my Birkenstocks so my clean feet won’t touch the ground. Did I forget to mention that I HATE to be barefoot and just cannot do it? Nothing gets me worked up more than that. OK, the beach does – I mean you’re sitting in dirt – It doesn’t make any sense!!!

(I actually had a mini panic attack at the airport last summer when I rushed out of the house in flip-flops not thinking and then had to go through security when I got to the airport. I almost scrapped the whole trade show that I was going to for work when they told me I had to take the flip-flops off. I asked for some napkins or paper towels so I wouldn’t have to walk on the floor – but they looked at me like I was the crazy one. Needless to say the sight of me scrubbing my feet in the men’s bathroom sink immediately after going through security didn’t go over well. Two people looked at me like I just escaped from the mental hospital and another told me that I was crazy. Screw them – people can shave in the sink and hair is everywhere, but one foot on the counter sets them off? I was balancing like Nadia Comaneci because if one of my barefoot little toes had touched that disgusting airport bathroom floor – they would have taken me out on a stretcher right into the ambulance.)

For my next act, I move straight into oral hygiene and start with my Listerine pre-rinse and floss and Q-Tips to check for wax or and then grab my Radius toothbrush to start on the choppers with my Tom’s of Maine fennel toothpaste. Don’t let them fool you, if it’s not fennel – it’s not fine. I will not use a toothbrush that isn’t Radius – it just gets the job done! If you haven’t tried it – get one right now. Your brushing will shoot right up to the next level and you’ll be thanking me for it for years to come. The zesty tingle after a good brushing just starts me on the right path and keeps me going all day.

If you were just thinking that I was finished and ready to leave the bathroom, you would be mistaken. The next stop on the OCD Express is my eye serum for the bags under my eyes (regular face creams are just not gentle enough for this area) then we move on to the T-Zone cream (for the nose and forehead) which tends to be an oilier area so you have to use a product of a different consistency and then I finish up with my gentle SPF Facial cream for the chin, cheeks, and neck area.

I hit the Styling Paste to spruce up this thin crow’s nest I’m calling my hair these days, and then an extra healthy spot of Rogaine Foam. Rogaine is the only one of my toiletries I have a heavy hand with – you never know. I now head for the brush to get my hair under control and give it a “look.” With my hair, I try to go for the “messy, cover-up” look to make it look thicker, but it usually just comes across as the “desperate, comb-over” look.

We haven’t even gotten to the deodorant (Spray? No way!) and cologne yet. Lately, I have been going back and forth between Tiffany for Men and Diesel. I’m actually a little scared of using the Diesel at full force with more than one squirt – so I go very sparingly. It says right there on the bottle in big letters to “Use with Caution” and I take that warning very seriously. Seriously, the last thing I need is to go waltzing into work after one too many squirts of Diesel and set that little minx in Accounting off into a Diesel infused stupor. Instead of her flirting with the Subway guy at lunch like she usually does, she’ll be trying to steal the pickle off my McRib sandwich! That’s the power of Diesel!

I grab the tweezers for a quick little maintenance check and to make sure there is no hair trying to escape out of my nostrils or ears. There is absolutely nothing more offensive or careless than nose hair. There’s just no excuse for it. Why don’t we use this as the general rule of thumb for nose hair from now on: If you can grab it and twirl it or if small children can jump rope with it – there’s a problem. If your nose hair is long enough to floss your teeth with – stay the hell home and trim it!

If this is you – by all means trim that!

One last check in the mirror for the once over and then I am ready to leave the bathroom and pick out clothes to wear. I did leave out one minor detail which doesn’t help my time spent in the bathroom: I have to do all of these things a certain number of times and simply cannot veer off of that. If I don’t brush my teeth forty-five times – I need to start over. If I don’t rub the Rogaine on my head into a circle seventy-five times – I need to start over. Also, if I go out of order in my routine in any way, I need to start over. That’s not a joke either – I don’t think of it as compulsive, I think of it as thorough. I will literally get back in the shower and start over.

If this sounds excessive or crazy, just imagine that I shower multiple (3 – 5) times a day. When I wake up (obviously), every time I take a shit, if it’s summer and I’m sweaty – add at least two more showers that day, before I got to the gym, when I get back from the gym…It’s actually a good thing that I’m overweight and have decided to cut out my time at the gym so I don’t risk a heart attack or I would have to get up even earlier than I already do to take another shower.

This doesn’t even take into consideration me wearing gloves to sleep in after I apply the hand cream. Since I wash my hands so much, I constantly have really dry hands. They’re so dry that when I shake hands with someone, they wince in pain because my paws feel like sandpaper. Add my blinders that I can’t sleep without and you can imagine how much my wife enjoys co-habitating with me.

If you didn’t feel bad for my wife before this – I’m sure you have now joined the growing crowd that does. I actually used to feel really bad for her too because she is so patient, but then one day I stopped. The day that I stopped feeling bad was the day that her and her crazy sister actually jumped me in their mother’s basement to try to “Cure me” of my OCD. They had seen a documentary where this lady got a vacuum cleaner dumped on her head while she was duct taped to a chair and they got inspired. She sat there crying her eyes out and the light bulb went off above their heads.

When I say that they jumped me, I actually mean that they jumped on top of me and threw me to the ground while the two of them tried to remove their shoes and put their bare feet on my face. Their fucking bare feet on my face! Who they thought that would help, I certainly don’t know, but I went all Wu Tang on them like I was back on the streets. OK, I was never actually on the streets and there are grade School kids tougher than me, but at that moment – I imagined myself a gang member or as the epitome of strength and courage: Chuck Norris.

At this point in the game when two crazy bitches get all up in your grill like that – the “don’t hit a girl” rules fail to apply. I was all Chris Brown throwing punches left and right at those girls. Luckily for them I have as much coordination as a newborn kitten and I punch like a five-year old girl, so I was mostly hitting myself. I was screaming for help to old lady Ann that lived next door but to no avail. I was bobbing and weaving like Muhammad Ali and was finally able to get away and run up the stairs to freedom (and another shower.) Yep – they knocked me to that basement floor and there was no way that I wasn’t going to need a shower.

I grew up in a house with a crazy kamikaze sister who would turn into the flying Whoozini and attack out of nowhere and now here I was married to another ninja attacker and her crazy wombat sidekick. Needless to say, it’s been years since that happened, but I still never turn my back on either sister at family functions for fear of a repeat performance. Sometimes life just isn’t fair!

St. Patrick’s Day Part Two: I thought I knew it all until I took a fall, I went chin to the tin and made a disgrace of my face! It wasn’t a rave, hitting into the pave(ment)

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You’ve heard one example of my version of March Madness and now here’s another reason why St. Patrick’s Day sometimes hurts – literally. I don’t mind the crowds and all the tacky lime green clothing, but the real truth is that I keep getting injured on St. Patrick’s Day. I am clumsy normally, but my dilapidated sense of coordination is heightened on that day more than others for some reason and I always end up face down – ass up covered in bruises.

I will tell you the event that actually was the tipping point of why I can’t go out on St. Patrick’s Day anymore. My wife was pregnant and had no interest in hanging out with a bunch of drunk fools (i.e. me) so she went out for the day without me. If you think this is leading towards me blaming her, it isn’t.  I have tried blaming her and just cannot find a single soul to back me up; what happened next was my fault – whether I like it or not. Stupidity cannot be blamed on anyone other than the fool himself!

I went out and met up with some of my friends from work to watch the parade and then headed to the bar that we frequented almost every night. We didn’t even make it three steps into the bar before Darren saw us and already had the beer out on the bar for us. Not five minutes went by before we were finished with number two. Did I mention that it was before 11 AM and we hadn’t eaten anything yet? That’s never a good way to start the day or it’s actually the perfect way to start depending on who you ask.

So the parade was a blur and the aftermath was just getting uglier as time went by. Darren announced that my wife had just called and insisted that we do shots and it never occurred to me that it might not be the truth. It didn’t occur to me the first time he said it that it might not be true, nor did it faze me the fourth time he lined them up. It was then that I had the brilliant thought that I should probably eat something before I blacked out.

We laughed like crazy and apparently, I have never been funnier. That could be because a) I’m hysterical when other people are really intoxicated or b) I’m a stupid ass when I drink heavily. I’m inclined to go with b) here since we aren’t talking about looks (which is the funniest thing about me.)

Looking back, I guess it is kind of obvious why everyone thought that I was so funny...

 After multiple drinks, a terrible lunch, and many laughs it took me spitting on a client (for telling me that he had chosen to go with a competitor) to realize that I needed to go home. Don’t judge me, who brings work talk into the bar? It was a ptthhh kind of spit – I’m Italian, that’s what we do. There was no phlegm involved, it wasn’t spit spit. Also, it’s not so bad because I didn’t fully remember it until I called him the following Tuesday morning not realizing that we had spoken on St. Patrick’s Day at all until he mentioned it. Good thing he’s a high-functioning alcoholic too and thought it was really funny…

I bid adieu and waited outside the bar for my cab to come. I finally got sick and tired of waiting and started to walk home. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had never actually called. They aren’t psychic and I was standing there forever thinking they were on the way to get me when, in fact, I had never even called for the cab. I only lived up the street, but it took forever in my drunken state. Did I mention that I also stumbled past and stopped to rest at that Popo Station on the corner? (The Popo Station is a Police Station for those of you that aren’t street like me.)

At the time, we lived in a townhouse in a gated community. It may sound obvious, but that means the development is surrounded by a gate. The front gate was a long wall of gates connected by brick pillars. If you see where this is going, you’re doing much better than I was that night. As you get to the entrance of the development, there is a gatehouse that is manned 24 hours a day. The “guards” in the gatehouse are the kind that refuses to accept a package for you if they have to leave the gatehouse in the rain and get wet or the type that will let anyone enter no matter what they say their name is. My sister actually used to drive up, push the buttons and answer Al Qaeda when he asked who she was and they would always let her in. No, we didn’t pay more for the high end security, don’t be a smart-ass!

Anyway, as I was stumbling up to the entrance, it was like something out of a cartoon. I lost my footing and smashed face first right into the brick pillar and then collapsed face first into a heap on the ground.  As I was on the ground crumbled in a heap, assuming the gatehouse “guard” would come to my aid since he had just seen what had happened, my cell phone started to ring. It was my wife and she actually thought that I was kidding when the answer to her “Where are you?” was met with my “On the ground covered in blood.”

I thought my teeth had been forced out of my mouth and that my nose was broken for sure due to the sheer amount of pain and the massive amount of blood that I was covered in. My eye felt like it had a pencil sticking out of it and I didn’t realize how scraped up my hands and knuckles were until I actually tried to use them to answer the phone. I was in a bad way and she said to stay where I was as she was only around the corner and she truly thought that I was exaggerating. Since it was raining, I couldn’t really stay put and I finally managed to get myself off the ground. Would you believe that as I stumbled past the gatehouse, the guard actually waved at me? Here I was mangled, nose, mouth, and hands gushing blood and that asshole waves at me. Guess who was off my list and didn’t receive my wife’s homemade cookies in his Kwanzaa basket that year!

I finally made it to our front steps yet didn’t have the strength or dexterity to open the front door. My wife approached slowly and she was shocked with how badly I was hurt. She took me in and cleaned me up. As unbelievable as my cuts, abrasions, brick wall road rash, and swollen face was – all of the injuries were only on one side of my face. I actually looked like Harvey Two-Face from Batman. It was a like someone had drawn a line down the center of my face to spilt it in tow and then proceeded to beat the shit out of one side of it. 

As I sat at the Hospital intake room with the admitting nurse to gather my information, she actually swung around on her stool and accidentally (or so she said) hit me in my mangled face with her fist. I screamed so loud, that they took me to x-ray immediately. I swear that if I had any sense of co-ordination left, I would have knocked her out. As she rolled my wheelchair down the hall, my wife said “Don’t you want to know how this happened?’ she looked right at her and smirked “Honey, it’s St. Patrick’s Day, I’m Irish and I have three older brothers – I know exactly how this happened!”  

By some grace of luck that I’ll never comprehend, I didn’t break anything. I went to bed and slept forever only to wake up to voices.  The doctor did give me painkillers, but these weren’t the usual voices in my head so I trudged down the steps to our Living Room. As I entered, there was a room full of my wife’s family and they all got quiet and just stared at me with looks of pity and some of actual disgust -due to the discoloration and severe bruising. No one said a word at all, nothing but stares.

“Oh my God, is this an intervention?” I muttered and felt nauseous. That apparently broke the ice to make them laugh. I had forgotten that they had previously planned to come over and spend some time with my wife and since they just got there she hadn’t fully filled them in about my face. I guess they didn’t expect me to come down the steps looking like Rhianna did after Chris Brown was finished with her.

I had to cancel all my appointments that week because there was no way that I could go into work and see people looking like that. I also couldn’t shave half of my face due to the road rash I got from the brick wall so I actually called my boss from the parking lot and said “Come outside and look at my face – if you want me to work I will.” He took one look at me and said “Oh God, Please go home” and I was in too much pain to even be offended.     

I know what you’re thinking right now: At least he’s learned something from this. No, what I learned from this is that Darren is a liar. When he offers me a drink, forget about me because I have no self-control. I need to start hanging out with people that will say no for me and make sure I really do call a cab to go home. I don’t think the drinking was the problem, I think the problem was that I didn’t eat anything before it. Thank God I’m this overweight and my body was able to absorb all that alcohol or I would have fallen even before I left the bar and been more hurt than I was.

So, as you stumble down the bar for a refill this week, think of me safely in my house drinking nothing but Diet Pepsi and watching It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia to satisfy my bar fix wearing this:

Does this snuggie make my hips look big?

From OCD to TKO in a Heartbeat

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Anyone who knows me can tell you that I am under absolute duress to be ready for anything in any reasonable amount of time. Even more than that, I can’t even get ready in an unreasonable amount of time. Celebrities don’t take this long to prep for the Oscars – but for me to run to the supermarket is a production. I have tried things to quicken the pace, but sort of like a gentle soufflé, you cannot rush certain things.

My wife always argues with me about how long it takes me to get ready, but while she looks absolutely perfect and requires very little touch-ups from the moment she rises out of bed, when I wake up I look like one of the zombies marching in back of the float in the Welcome to the Black Parade by My Chemical Romance video.

My toiletry regimen alone is a great big process in and of itself: I set my Ipod for one song and then get in the shower. It should not take longer to shower than one random song. That’s not the time-consuming part. The exception to this one-song rule is if you have fallen into the cesspool (Lance) or had a plumbing pipe full of shit (literally, full of shit) explode into your mouth and onto your chest (Hal) – At that point, take as long as you feel necessary in there and no one will say a word.

Back to the routine; I like to start at the top and then work my way down. The opening act, or my first facial scrub, is just a tingly little wake-up call and then we head straight for the follow-up nourishing face wash and immediately into the Bliss face wash after that. I then grab my two thickening shampoos (it’s sort of the same philosophy that I have with Pumpkin muffins, where if one is good – two will be much better) and wash my hair. Obviously, the shampoo is dripping down my body and I would need to scrub again after it – so it just makes sense to use the body bar after the hair is done. Moving on to my Oil of Olay Age Defying soap for certain parts of the body – though never on this gentle face with a bar soap! I actually don’t understand why anyone would choose to use a bar of soap to wash their body and then use that SAME bar to wash their face. Any bar of soap that touches my feet or cleans my balls sure as fuck isn’t going anywhere near my face!

Blue Body wash is next for the rest of my body that the soap doesn’t cover. I don’t mind scents, but I feel like it needs to be blue or it won’t fully clean me. I don’t know why blue body wash strikes me as more thorough – but I just can’t use another color. Then I dry off and get my robe and waist towel (what my wife lovingly refers to as a skirt) and put on my Birkenstocks so my clean feet won’t touch the ground. Did I forget to mention that I HATE to be barefoot and just cannot do it? Nothing gets me worked up more than that. OK, the beach does – I mean you’re sitting in dirt – It doesn’t make any sense!!! (I actually had a mini panic attack at the airport last summer when I rushed out of the house in flip-flops not thinking and then had to go through security when I got to the airport. I almost scrapped the whole trade show that I was going to for work when they told me I had to take the flip-flops off. I asked for some napkins or paper towels so I wouldn’t have to walk on the floor – but they looked at me like I was the crazy one. Needless to say the sight of me scrubbing my feet in the men’s bathroom sink immediately after going through security didn’t go over well. Two people looked at me like I just escaped from the mental hospital and another told me that I was crazy. Fuck them – people can shave in the sink and hair is everywhere, but one foot on the counter sets them off? I was balancing like Nadia Comaneci because if one of my barefoot little toes had touched that disgusting airport bathroom floor – they would have taken me out on a stretcher right into the ambulance.)

For my next act, I move straight into oral hygiene and start with my Listerine pre-rinse and floss and Q-Tips to check for wax or and then grab my Radius toothbrush to start on the choppers with my Tom’s of Maine fennel toothpaste. Don’t let them fool you, if it’s not fennel – it’s not fine. I will not use a toothbrush that isn’t Radius – it just gets the job done! If you haven’t tried it – get one right now. Your brushing will shoot right up to the next level and you’ll be thanking me for it for years to come. The zesty tingle after a good brushing just starts me on the right path and keeps me going all day.  

If you were just thinking that I was finished and ready to leave the bathroom, you would be mistaken. The next stop on the OCD Express is my eye serum for the bags under my eyes (regular face creams are just not gentle enough for this area) then we move on to the T-Zone cream (for the nose and forehead) which tends to be an oilier area so you have to use a product of a different consistency and then I finish up with my gentle SPF Facial cream for the chin, cheeks, and neck area.

I hit the Styling Paste to spruce up this thin crow’s nest I’m calling my hair these days, and then an extra healthy spot of Rogaine Foam. Rogaine is the only one of my toiletries I have a heavy hand with – you never know. I now head for the brush to get my hair under control and give it a “look.” With my hair, I try to go for the “messy, cover-up” look to make it look thicker, but it usually just comes across as the “desperate, comb-over” look.  

We haven’t even gotten to the deodorant (Spray? No way!) and cologne yet. Lately, I have been going back and forth between Tiffany for Men and Diesel. I’m actually a little scared of using the Diesel at full force with more than one squirt – so I go very sparingly. It says right there on the bottle in big letters to “Use with Caution” and I take that warning very seriously. Seriously, the last thing I need is to go waltzing into work after one too many squirts of Diesel and set that little minx in Accounting off into a Diesel infused stupor. Instead of her flirting with the Subway guy at lunch like she usually does, she’ll be trying to steal the pickle off my McRib sandwich! That’s the power of Diesel!

I grab the tweezers for a quick little maintenance check and to make sure there is no hair trying to escape out of my nostrils or ears. There is absolutely nothing more offensive or careless than nose hair. There’s just no excuse for it. Why don’t we use this as the general rule of thumb for nose hair from now on: If you can grab it and twirl it or if small children can jump rope with it – there’s a problem. If your nose hair is long enough to floss your teeth with – stay the fuck home and trim it! 

One last check in the mirror for the once over and then I am ready to leave the bathroom and pick out clothes to wear. I did leave out one minor detail which doesn’t help my time spent in the bathroom: I have to do all of these things a certain number of times and simply cannot veer off of that. If I don’t brush my teeth forty-five times – I need to start over. If I don’t rub the Rogaine on my head into a circle seventy-five times – I need to start over. Also, if I go out of order in my routine in any way, I need to start over. That’s not a joke either – I don’t think of it as compulsive, I think of it as thorough. I will literally get back in the shower and start over.

If this sounds excessive or crazy, just imagine that I shower multiple (3 – 5) times a day. When I wake up (obviously), every time I take a shit, if it’s summer and I’m sweaty – add at least two more showers that day, before I got to the gym, when I get back from the gym…it’s actually a good thing that I’m overweight and have decided to cut out my time at the gym so I don’t risk a heart attack or I would have to get up even earlier than I already do to take another shower.

If you didn’t feel bad for my wife before this – I’m sure you have now joined the growing crowd that does. I actually used to feel really bad for her too because she is so patient, but then one day I stopped. The day that I stopped feeling bad was the day that her and her crazy sister actually jumped me in their mother’s basement to try to “Cure me” of my OCD. They had seen a documentary where this lady got a vacuum cleaner dumped on her head while she was duct taped to a chair and they got inspired. She sat there crying her eyes out and the light bulb went off above their heads.

When I say that they jumped me, I actually mean that they jumped on top of me and threw me to the ground while the two of them tried to remove their shoes and put their bare feet on my face. Their fucking bare feet on my face! Who they thought that would help, I certainly don’t know, but I went all Wu Tang on them like I was back on the streets. OK, I was never actually on the streets and there are grade School kids tougher than me, but at that moment – I imagined myself a gang member or as the epitome of strength and courage: Chuck Norris.

At this point in the game when two crazy bitches get all up in your grill like that – the “don’t hit a girl” rules fail to apply. I was all Chris Brown throwing punches left and right at those girls. Luckily for them I have as much coordination as a newborn kitten and I punch like a five-year old girl, so I was mostly hitting myself. I was screaming for help to old lady Ann that lived next door but to no avail. I was bobbing and weaving like Muhammad Ali and was finally able to get away and run up the stairs to freedom (and another shower.) Yep – they knocked me to that basement floor and there was no way that I wasn’t going to need a shower.

I grew up in a house with a crazy kamikaze sister who would turn into the flying Whoozini and attack out of nowhere and now here I was married to another ninja attacker and her crazy wombat sidekick. Needless to say, it’s been years since that happened, but I still never turn my back on either sister at family functions for fear of a repeat performance. Sometimes life just isn’t fair!