I recognized immediately that it was a joke, and the way I knew it was a joke is because babies can't hold their liquor. Not only that, but they're terrible at video games and it takes them forever to work their way through a piece of beef jerky. And that's why, for my friends and me, having a baby is simply not an option. A baby would threaten everything that we, as a group of young, spirited and most of all, flatulent males, hold dear. By which I mean Guys Night.
Because everybody knows that Guys Night and babies do not go together.
First of all, when you're in the middle of a heated competition to see who can fit the most M&Ms up his nose, you can't afford to lose your focus because some baby is shrieking his head off in the background. Just because the baby decided to poop his own pants doesn't mean that he should ruin the night for everyone else. I mean, look at my friend Patrick: he pooped his pants hours ago, and is he sitting in the middle of the floor crying about it? No! He's outside grilling burgers and throwing horseshoes like a real man!
And secondly, no one, and I mean no one, can defeat Sauron's army of orcs and banish the One Ring into the fires of Mordor with a baby in his arms. I'm sorry, but there's just no way you can execute Aragorn's Wrath of Numenor attack move with one hand - not to mention the Orc Bane! I mean, please! While you're at it, why don't you just march into Shelob's lair without activating the light of Erendil? Loser.
So needless to say, when my friend started flapping his lips about babies and fatherhood and responsibility, I didn't buy it for a second. Between playing rock and roll and watching football, most of us barely have enough free time to change our socks each week. Making one of us responsible for the welfare of a whole other human being would be like putting someone who can't even pronounce the word "nuclear" in charge of the deadliest military force on the planet.
I tried to explain all of this to my friend, but he kept insisting that he and his wife really were going to have a baby. I felt bad for him, because I could tell that he really believed it. It was cute, in a little-kid-leaving-milk-and-cookies-for-Santa kind of way. So I just let it go, figuring that sooner or later my friend would realize that having a baby wasn't even in realm of possibility. It would be like a pig flying, or Nickelback writing a good song.
A few months passed, and I didn't give the issue any thought. But then, by early fall, I started picking up on a few signals that made me suspect my friend was right about having a baby. Just little things, like how he painted one of his rooms blue and set up a crib. And how his wife started waddling when she walked, and how her belly puffed up like she was trying to smuggle Emmanuel Lewis around under her shirt. And how someone threw her a baby shower. And how she totally had a baby.
When I first got news of the baby's birth, I felt a little conflicted. I was excited for my friend, but I just wasn't ready for a baby. I needed time. But did my friend ever stop to consider my feelings? Did he have the decency to consult with me before having a baby? No. Evidently, I'm not even part of this equation. Evidently, anyone can just run off and make a baby whenever he feels like it, without any regard for how its going to affect his friends and/or the integrity of their booger-flicking contests.
And that's when it occurred to me that the booger-flicking contests might be a thing of the past. Maybe it's time to grow up. Our whole group of friends is hovering around the 30-year mark. We are old. We have passed our prime. We are like shriveled old raisins floating numbly in the breakfast cereal of life. It's time to accept our fate.
Full of melancholy and regret, I trudged into the hospital to see this new baby, this living symbol of the mundane adult life that loomed on the horizon.
I found the hospital room, rapped on the door and pushed my way in to meet baby Owen.
And there he was, a baby boy, a picture-perfect baby boy with glistening eyes, a wispy patch of hair and these impossibly small hands, his tiny fingers wrapped around his mother's thumb, his little heart bravely thumping away inside his tiny little frame, all warm and fragile and miraculous. He was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen.
I knew immediately that I had to have one. Babies are like iPods - you have to actually hold one in your hand before you realize how meaningless life is without them. They're even better than Guys Night.
There are definitely a few logistical problems I need to work out before I get a baby, like how I'm going to keep my Jack Russell from eating it. And I need to find somewhere to keep it. But then again, babies aren't that big, so finding storage space shouldn't really be a problem. I'll just clear off a shelf somewhere.
And then I guess I kind of need to run the idea past my wife. I definitely need her on board if this baby thing is going to work out. Either that or I need to get my own uterus.
Until I get it all sorted out, feel free to send any extra babies you've got lying around the house to the Fly Magazine office, attention Team Last Call. It would make for a really great Christmas gift, and I'm pretty sure babies are tax deductible. Unless they're not. I don't really know.
Anyway, Happy Holidays from all of us here at Team Last Call.
When Team Last Call tracked down American Idol alum Clay Aiken in late November, the spunky singer was one week into his annual Joyful Noise holiday tour.
Maybe it was all the eggnog, or maybe it was the fact that he’d been sitting on his butt all day doing interviews, but Aiken had more energy than a toddler with a sugar rush. He giggled, he bounced, he talked at about a thousand words a minute. In other words, even after selling millions of albums and becoming one of America’s biggest pop stars, it appears that Clay Aiken is still the same lovable goof we first met three years ago. There’s something strangely comforting about that.
Team Last Call took the opportunity to pick the animated Aiken’s brain about his holiday tour, his pet goat, and what it’s like to be the world’s least likely sex symbol.
Team Last Call: So, by this point in your career, have you gotten used to the lifestyle that comes with being a pop star?
Clay Aiken: Strangely enough, yes. It’s not something I ever thought I would get used to. When I first started doing it, it was like, “Oh wow! An interview! A signing! Yay!” Now an interview or signing is like, “Oh, god …” [laughs]
TLC: [laughs] Well, let me ask you the same question you’ve been getting all day then: What can we expect out of the Joyful Noise Tour?
CA: We did the Joyful Noise Tour last year. We did a full-orchestra run with a 30-piece orchestra onstage and sang the songs from the Merry Christmas With Love album.
I didn’t want to do the same thing that every other artist who does a Christmas tour does. During the holiday season you can pretty much pick any day in most cities and go see some artist’s Christmas concert. [laughs] So I was trying to figure out a way to make it different, to maybe string all of these songs together with some type of dialogue, or figure out a way to make the stories connect. It changed from me talking to having someone else do it, to having characters do it, to having specific characters doing it. It became a storyline, really.
TLC: Do you feel like you’re able to wrap your head around everything that’s happened to you so far?
CA: Yeah. It took a while. I don’t ever want to get to a point where I can wrap my head around it all. If I ever get to that point, I think it’s time to quit. Every day there is something new and different and there’s something exciting.
There are plenty of times I could stop and say, “Wow, look at what I’m doing now!” I could stop right now and think, “This is completely different,” even though I have done 55 interviews today. [laughs] It’s still something I wasn’t doing in North Carolina two years ago. I have to be thankful for it. It becomes a little more routine and you become accustomed to it, I’m sure like any job. When I was a teacher, the first time I did it was much harder than the third and fourth times. This is kind of the same way.
TLC: Another thing that’s changed is that you’ve become this full-on sex symbol for a lot of people!
CA: That part scares me! I haven’t wrapped my head around that. [laughs] That just frightens me. I’m worried about America’s taste! [laughs] That’s probably something I’m not ever going to quite get. It’s flattering, so I won’t complain, but I’m baffled.
TLC: In a position like yours, everybody’s so interested in your personal life. Suddenly I’m reading things about you, everything from stories about your childhood petsto speculation on your sexual orientation and everything in between. Does that weird you out?
CA: It’s tough. At the very beginning of the process, it’s quite a shock. You don’t understand why people are asking these things. I had a goat – who cares? And I didn’t tell anybody that. There are times that I look on the internet or read a message board and they’ll know things about me that I didn’t know. [laughs] “I never told anybody that! How did they find out?” So at first it’s a shock. And then later on it’s not as shocking but still upsetting. And then after a while, it’s just like having a gnat in your nose. You just want to kill it. [laughs] It becomes unfortunately a negative part of what you do, and you need to kind of live with it. But if you could get up your nose and kill it, you would do it. [laughs] It’s not so easy sometimes.
TLC: You’re almost becoming as known for your humanitarian work as you are for your music. Why is that so important to you?
CA: I kind of came into this not necessarily wanting to or knowing how to be a celebrity or whatnot. I mean, I was a teacher! And I made a promise to myself as I did it. “If I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna try to be something other than self-serving.” I think that every single person who’s in this industry and who’s a celebrity and making money off the public – I make my money directly from the public – has the responsibility to pay them back in some way. I think each person in my position is a role model whether they want to be or not. Somewhere out there are kids who look up to you. And some people take that seriously, and some people don’t. To me, I don’t understand why people don’t take it seriously.
UNICEF does amazing work. I thought I was a worldly person, and then I started working with them and realized I don’t know as much of my world as I need to. And if I don’t know as much about my world as I need to, then many, many, many people don’t. So I’m thrilled to be in a position to be able to talk about it. And so I’m gonna.
TLC: Do you think about the kind of things you still want to achieve in your career?
CA: Everything that’s happened so far has been because I’ve kind of been available to opportunities. I don’t like to set plans. It’s kind of a strange thing to hear come out of a teacher’s mouth, but I don’t like to set goals because I think when you set specific goals you end up losing sight of other opportunities. I had the goal of wanting to be a teacher. I wanted to continue being in education for a long time. Had I made that a hard, fast goal, then I would not have had the opportunity to do this now.
We do want to have an album out in the first half of next year, and then we want to make sure we can go out on the road again at some point. But other than that, I kind of just let what happens happen. Let go and let God.
TLC: So if somebody wants to put you on another TV show and make you the world’s most famous dancer or something, you can do that next!
CA: [laughs] I said I’d be open to opportunities and I’ll take a look at them, but just because I’m looking doesn’t mean I’ll do ’em!
*Reprinted from Fly Magazine
