April is the month I’m swearing to myself I’ll be jumping back into open mike hell. Well, maybe I might not be the demon seed, but no doubt there will be others practicing “comedy” who will be as funny as a hot poke in the eye with a flaming stick.

I have been writing in my head, obviously not here. And, not on that quaint old-fashioned stuff the old folks call paper.

I found thinking while raking, weeding and mowing helped. Actually, as I listened to the loud, disaffected noise of my youth, I was able to rewrite entire sagas in my head. Only this time they don’t quite involve leaving the hell of my high school existence or weeping at my misunderstood sole and alienation from my quote-unquote loved ones. It was more of a whistle while you work kind of a thing.

Jesus, how frighteningly bovine and contented I have become. But I was weeding like a motherfucker.

Here’s one thing I was thinking could work it’s way into onstage story-telling humor. Some how, with some writing or thinking or something.

Here I am, actually we are, playing house just like a grownup, so inevitably we’re standing side-by-side at the Depot, the Home Depot. What we were needing was a fresh supply of spooled plastic to stick into the joy that is our Black and Decker Grass Hog 700. Wait it might be the Grass Hog 400. I may have opted for the smaller cheaper Hog.

As I flipped through the packages, remembering which Hog was in fact the Hog we had, M. hectored me at my shoulder — “Why didn’t you write it down? You don’t know what we need, do you?” (Nota bene: I did know, but I started to doubt when every package they had didn’t fit our model.)

Right about the second it was going to get ugly, a fine-looking middle-class, suburban couple strolled up the aisle with their charming little tot dragging by the wrist and shrieking, howling like the demons unleashed from a particularly ugly lake of brimstone, crying at the top of her know-doubt healthy lungs. They walked right up to the display of various Grass Hogs and Grass Hog supplies, and they, too, started to overturn the same boxes I was, in search of their needed spool.

I could see in the corner of my eye just the wrong synapse fire in M.’s gray matter. He rips the display Grass Hog that I had said was our model off its display hook and marched down the aisle shouting that he’d “get the right one.” About 30 nanoseconds later he reappeared with a woman in an orange bib, who brought him right to the shelf I was searching. Unhelpfully she explained that’s where to find the replacement spools and that’s all there was.

M. was then mute. We got the hell out of Home Depot Dodge. In the parking lot the inevitable outburst descended. M. raised voice and clearly elevated blood pressure announced, “I don’t care what you say, we are not having any children.”

What, um, huh? Seriously, what children? You mean the ones I never asked after? The ones who don’t have and I’m not itching for their existence, those non-living, non-conceptualized, unconceived of or just unconceived, those children?

Oh, OK.

I think I reacted the only way possible, I burst into laughter.

The minute I saw that couple and their spawn approach, I just knew my day would change. And, that is why, we don’t have any children. Well that, and so for 9 times out of 10, I can shop at the Depot without a whole lot of screaming and tears.

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