TEAM LAST CALL

I cant prove it, but Im pretty certain that when they sent my body through the Heavenly Assembly Factory in the sky, the angel who pieced me together accidentally gave me girl hips.

Maybe my angel was suffering from a distracting migraine, or worrying about a suspicious mole on his shoulder. For all I know, it wasnt my angels fault at all that I ended up with the curves of Delta Burke.

But the damage is done. No matter how fit or fat I may be, it will always look like I just shoplifted a hula hoop. And no matter what my mom says, having bigger hips than your date is not OK with women.

But my freaky hips are just one of many factors contributing to my larger problem. Namely, I am shaped like Winnie the Pooh, to the extent that it was an actual nickname of mine in middle school.

That's why I've started this fantastic "nutritional approach" called the Atkins diet. It's both simple and effective. Here's how it works:

Walk into your kitchen and open the refrigerator. Look around inside. See all that food? You can't eat it.

Im exaggerating, of course. Its only the food you like that you cant eat.

No pasta, no pizza, no fruit, no desserts, no sugars, no beer, no rice, no bread. So now Im that jackass standing at the fast food counter trying to order a hamburger without a bun. The girl behind the counter is looking at me with an open mouth like I just tried to order a fried poodle on a stick.

Its been a very difficult diet so far, although a very successful one, provided that the goal is to make me so grumpy and miserable that all I can do is lie on the couch, write spiteful editorial columns, and feed pieces of my $4 Atkins-approved protein bars to my dog.

I think that life would be considerably easier if God would just give us a phone call every now and then, just a quick chat to clear up some of those nagging questions we all have in life, like, Why am I here? and What should I do with my life? and Will I always be shaped like a Disney character?

After particularly demanding days at the office, I fantasize about coming home to find my answering machine blinking with some Heavenly voicemail.

Hi Jeff,

Its me, God. Sorry I missed you. Hows it going?

I heard that youve been a little confused about the meaning of life, so I thought Id give you a call. I did a little research on your life. Its kind of a funny story, actually. Um, see, it seems that there was a little switcheroo up here in Heaven, and it looks like we accidentally gave your life to some guy named Ben Affleck. Whoops!

Plus, your real body ended up on Brad Pitt. Sorry about that.

I thought it would only be fair if we compensated you in some way. That explains why youre so incredibly well-endowed. Oh, wait Im sorry, I was looking in the wrong file. It looks like you ended up with the ability to never, ever grow a full beard.

Anyway, about your future I was going to turn you into a rich, famous playboy, but unfortunately it looks like the last celebrity slot was just nabbed by some guy who won 30 Seconds to Fame by lifting a cinder block with his penis.

But the one thing youve got on your side is time. As I take a peek in your file to check your expiration date, let me just reassure you that the average American male lives to see 73, so Im sure youve got plenty of years to go. OK, lets see. It says right here that oh, my.

You know, its really the quality of life that counts, not the quantity. Ahem. Im sure that you have plenty of great moments still to come in your life.

Babies, awards, blah, blah, blah. Lets look in your file here at some of the highlights ... Oh. Oh, boy. Er ...

You know what a good motto is? Carpe diem! Youve really got to live each day to the fullest, like it could be your ... cough, cough ... last. But never you mind.

The good news is that you have a pretty wife and a cute albeit retarded Jack Russel puppy. The two of you shall go forth and multiply (you and the wife, I mean) and raise little athletically challenged children like yourselves. Provided that you survive that long. Lets just say that your love handles dont really fall into the fittest category. Hey, you should try that Atkins diet!

As for a career, I was thinking that you could make a living out of writing funny little editorial columns. We just have to find some sucker who will give up space in his magazine to publish it.

Well, that about covers the basics.

Oh, heres a tip: if you go to your 10-year high school reunion, whatever you do, dont try the crab dip. And at next years Fourth of July party, keep as much distance between you and the grill as possible.

And by the way, the third installment of Lord of the Rings coming out in December: freaking awesome!

Alright, good talk, bud. Ill catch you on the flip side. Literally!

Oh, and sorry about the girl hips.

At first glance, it appeared that we were finally going to end up with a relatively normal set of neighbors, by which I mean people who won’t wake us up with loud porno movies at 3 a.m.

No Nazi flags in their windows, no pentagrams on their foreheads, no NRA stickers on their giant SUVs – there was nothing overtly evil, at least. My wife and I didn’t want to get ahead of ourselves, but we couldn’t help but hope that maybe, just maybe, these neighbors wouldn’t be the devil.

Yes, it was looking good. That is, until we were introduced to the new neighbors’ pets. They were those nasty little animals, those smelly and ugly ones with pointy little teeth and beady little eyes. What do you call them again? Oh yeah. Kids.

We watched in horror as they ran around our yard, drooling on their clothes, chasing our cats up the trees, and relieving themselves in our garden. There were hundreds of them. Short ones, tall ones, skinny ones, fat ones, all clumped together in a dark mass of dirty fingernails, skinned knees, and Cheerios breath. And they were multiplying by the minute.

In a matter of days, the children had worked their way into our lives like sand in your swimsuit. Look out your window in the morning – there’s a grubby little kid making a blowfish on the glass. Walk outside to get the newspaper – there’s some kid, vomiting up a nasty albeit colorful pile of Mike & Ikes right onto the sports section. Pour some cereal into your bowl – a kid comes tumbling out of the box, his cheeks stuffed with all of the orange stars, yellow moons, and green clovers.

You can’t even walk out to your car in the morning without seeing some dirty little kid with his finger up his nose peeking out from behind the front tire. Then you blink, and instantly three more children appear where the first one was, all three of them with a finger buried two knuckles deep into their nostril.

Blink – there’s five more, hanging upside down like possums from your exhaust pipe. Blink – there’s a dozen more, square-dancing on your hood.

Blink, blink – now they’re inside the car, giving you the middle finger and pressing their butt cheeks against the glass.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for children, provided that they’ve had their shots and are properly leashed. But had I known our neighbors would be so, uh, prolific, I would have invested in some more solid fencing.

The most challenging part of dealing with our neighbors’ several hundred children is the fact that I’m expected to act like a mature adult regardless of the situation. As my monthly columns attest, I have difficulty acting like an adult under normal circumstances, let alone when, say, a pair of snot-nosed 7-year-olds are trying to pee on my dog through the fence.

“Hey, guys” I say, trying my hardest not to pee back on them. “Waddya say you stop trying to pee on my dog? Huh? Wouldn’t that be nice? To not pee on my dog?”

“Arf, arf, arf!” says one of the children, subtly shifting his line of fire closer to my shoe.

"I have a penis!" yells the other, and sticks his tongue out at me.

“Yes, yes, I can see that,” I say. “How about not using it to pee on my dog?”

“Your belly’s fat, but your legs are skinny,” observes the first boy.

“I have a pee-ee-eenis!” yells the second boy.

"Oh yeah? Well, I have two!" I yell back. “Now get out of here before I call the police and they arrest you and break your toys and never let you see your parents again!”

The boys stare at me in disbelief for a moment before running into their house. I take a few seconds to enjoy my triumph before realizing that there’s just no way I could sound cool bragging to my friends that I totally scared the crap out of two 7-year-olds. Then I start thinking about the phone call I’ll be receiving from the police later that night. “You told them you had two what?”

Sure, maybe I was able to solve the problem of those two particular boys trying to pee on my particular dog, but what about the other few hundred kids? Lord only knows what they’ll try to pee on when I’m not looking.

I tried launching a counter-offensive. I hid just inside my door, armed with a secret weapon. I threw the cat outside as collateral damage and waited until the children gathered around it, holding knives and forks in their dirty little fists, their red eyes rolling around in their heads like marbles. That’s when I unleashed the dog. He plowed through the mass, tossing their little bodies in every direction. They scrambled out of the yard, but not before our brave little Jack Russel debriefed at least half a dozen of them. Tiny underoos were scattered across the lawn.

But it was, and remains, a losing battle. Even as I lie in bed at night thinking of ways to take the kids out, I can hear them scampering across my roof like fat squirrels with a sugar buzz. But I look at it this way: at least they’re not old enough to watch porn in the middle of the night.

“Oh, look at the little three-legger!” my wife squealed in a voice that I knew meant danger. It was a voice that said, “What we need in our house right now is one more brain-damaged animal.”

I knew the voice well. That sweet, irresistible voice is my wife’s trump card. No matter what we’re arguing about, when the voice comes out, the discussion is as over as Kathy Gifford’s career.

Here’s an example:

My wife: “So, I was thinking, maybe we should sell all of your books and CDs and your car and your birth certificate, and then I can use the money to buy new shoes.”

Me: “I’d rather take a bath in a tub full of fire ants.”

My wife (now using the voice): “Please? I’d really like some new shoes. And by the way, I double-checked my math, and it looks like we’ll need to sell your computer, too. And probably all of your pants.”

Me: “Yes, dear, that sounds like a good idea.” Later that day, my neighbors watch from their windows as I load my car with all of my possessions and head to the pawn shop, wearing nothing but a T-shirt, shoes, and a pair of tighty-whiteys.

So you can understand the futility of arguing with my wife about the three-legged dog now that the voice had come out. The best I could hope to do was distract her.

“I think my appendix just burst!” I said, dropping to the ground and clutching my stomach.

“It looks like it’s going to rain,” my wife said, stepping over me. “We’d better get Three-legger indoors before he gets all wet.”

Note the subtle yet important transition that occurred during that exchange. The dog was no longer referred to as the three-legger. The dog had simply become ‘Three-legger.’ Now he had a name. He was as good as pooping in my bed.

My wife squinted across the parking lot at the dog, which stood teetering in the wind like a cardboard cutout. I could tell she was sizing him up. Would the reindeer antlers we make our pets wear at Christmas fit onto Three-legger’s head, or would we have to buy another pair? Would Three-legger be able to make it up the stairs at night, or would we have to move our bed down into the kitchen? Would there be room for Three-legger on the bed, or would Jeff have to sleep on the floor?

I, for one, think that we have enough “special needs” animals living under our roof. Consider, for example, our senile cat, Mr. Puddy, whose immense fatness makes it impossible for him to execute even the most basic of cat duties, such as “washing,” “getting up,” and “not peeing on our furniture.” He spends most of his day sprawled out on our living room carpet, his fat spreading out across the floor like pancake batter in a skillet.

Apart from relieving himself on our couch, Mr. Puddy has a few additional less-than-desirable habits, not the least of which is his tendency to bite anything that is moving. He opens his mouth and comes charging like an angry slug in slow-motion, his head wobbling from side to side in nearsighted confusion.

So, to summarize, Mr. Puddy is an extremely old, extremely obese cat who can’t clean himself, pees on our furniture, and likes to bite us. While some people (me) might argue that Puddy’s time on this earth has expired, others (my wife) would argue that the logical solution is to invest lots of money in cat anti-depressants, which she then must force down Puddy’s throat as I try to hold him down and get all the skin clawed off of my forearms.

Just to balance things out, we also have an extremely tiny, extremely needy kitty, Maggie, who at all times must have at least one part of her touching one or more parts of you. Which is fine, unless her part is a claw and your part is your bare stomach while you’re sleeping.

If she can’t manage to wake you up by carving her initials into your skin, Maggie will resort to using the little air-raid siren lodged in her throat.

“Reeeeeeaaaaaeeeearrrrrrrr!” says Maggie at 3 a.m.

“Aaaack!” says my wife, shooting straight up in bed and smashing me in the face with her elbow.

“Hoooo!” I say, falling out of bed and onto Mr. Puddy.

“Errrrr!” says Mr. Puddy, biting my leg.

“Roo! Roo! Roo! Arrrooooo!” says our dog, Henry, adding, “Arf! Arf! Arf!” and “Yap!”

Faithful readers of my column (by which I mean my mother) will remember the article I wrote about Henry last February. For those who missed it: imagine one of those wind-up toys shaped like chattering teeth. Now imagine that toy powered by a jet engine. Cover it with fur and put one of your favorite shoes in its mouth, and you’ve got Henry.

Could our house possibly contain another “challenged” animal? And more importantly, could my self-esteem handle me being knocked down from No. 4 to the No. 5 slot on my wife’s priority list by a three-legged dog?
As she marched across the parking lot to retrieve our new baby, my wife was stopped short by the call of a woman from an adjacent house.

“C’mere, Bonkers,” called the woman. “Here, boy!”

And just like that, our Three-legger went galloping away (ba-da-bump, ba-da-bump) into the arms of another family. My wife spun around and got back into the car without a word.

As we drove to the mall, I waited, and waited, and waited, and there it was – my wife started sniffling.

“It’s OK, baby, we’ll find another dog, maybe even one with four whole legs,” I said.

“But I loved Three-legger!” my wife said.

“I know you did, honey,” I said, making a left turn towards the Humane Society.

“The foxes,” whispered my sister, “have sharp little teeth and sharp little claws and like to feed on little boys just like you when you’re sleeping!” Squinting her eyes, she would lean towards me and start wiggling her fingers around as if she were one of them. “I’d watch out, if I were you!”

Then she’d jump in the air, wave her claws at my head, and scream, “Fox attack!” I’d scream and pee a little in my pants.

At night, I would lie in bed, the blanket pulled up to my nose, staring wide-eyed at the ducts in my ceiling. My only protection from the foxes was the three-foot Jesus nightlight hanging on the opposite wall, looking down on me. I knew that, as long as Jesus was watching, the foxes were too afraid to crawl from their hiding place to eat me alive. I sang church hymns to keep his attention.

Every now and then, I thought I saw one of the foxes stick his head out of the duct to see if I was asleep yet. He would look at me, smirk, and then shake his head at the foxes behind him as if to say, “No, not yet. The kid’s still awake, and Jesus is watching.”

This is one of many memories I owe to my mischievous sister, Pam, to whom I dedicate this month’s column in honor of her 30th birthday. Now my sister’s all grown up with a baby daughter of her own – a baby daughter who, if there is any justice in the world, will turn into a raging terror of practical jokes and messy pranks as soon as she learns how to walk.

Don’t get me wrong – I love my sister dearly, and will admit to everyone but her that her childhood jokes were funny. But you can be sure that, as soon as my niece understands English, I’m going to make sure she knows all about Mommy’s incapacitating phobia of mold.

My childhood terrors weren’t limited to the foxes in the air conditioning ducts. There were also the mutant spiders hiding behind the downstairs toilet. They were big, fat, hairy spiders with fangs as long as your pinky finger. Woe to the unlucky soul who sits down unawares on the toilet of death, for here come the bloodthirsty spiders to bite him, wrap him in their gooey web, and carry him into their den of darkness for a midnight snack.

While I didn’t ever see the spiders for myself, I knew they were there, because my older sister told me so. And, as everyone knows, older sisters don’t lie.

I was terrified. Mutant spiders were even worse than tiny foxes! I pictured them with napkins tied around their necks, rubbing four sets of knives and forks together in greedy, drippy-toothed anticipation of eating me for dinner.

Coming into physical contact with the toilet was clearly out of the question. But even when I was standing up, how could I be sure the spiders wouldn’t crawl across the floor and onto my feet? Clearly, my only option was to hop back and forth from foot to foot to make sure they didn’t. I may have sacrificed some accuracy, but at least I would be alive to sprinkle my tinkle another day.

Fortunately for me (and for the carpets), there was also an upstairs bathroom. Unfortunately, there were alligators in the upstairs toilet. It’s true. Just ask my sister. Little alligators lived in our pipes and waited for you to sit down on the toilet, at which point they would crawl out and give you a bite on your most tender of parts. My sister wouldn’t just make up something like that.

Man-eating spiders downstairs, nippy little alligators upstairs – it was a precarious situation. But sometimes nature calls, and when it does, it doesn’t concern itself with the wildlife that may or may not be lurking near the toilet facilities.

I would stand in the bathroom as far away from the alligators as possible, which sometimes meant taking my shoes off and stepping into the tub. Then, facing the toilet, I would get up on my tip-toes, arch my back, and do my best to hit my mark. Sometimes I didn’t. I blamed the dog.

Maybe now my parents can finally understand why I resorted to peeing in my trash cans. At the time, it seemed like a perfectly logical compromise between peeing on the floor and having my hiney bitten by a miniature alligator.

My mom discovered my new habit one day while emptying the trash from the wastebasket in my room. She looked up at me with a mixture of wonder, confusion, and annoyance. “Honey,” she said, “Did you pee in your trash can?”

I was going to explain the whole complicated matter of the mutant spiders in the downstairs bathroom and the miniature alligators in the upstairs bathroom, but thought it would be easier to just run out of the room crying.
It was a traumatic period of my life. To this day, I still get creeped out in the bathroom until I can check behind all of the fixtures to make sure there’s not a pack of miniature monkeys waiting to stab me with their tiny bananas. For example.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that my sister was lying to me. For all I knew, packs of wild animals were simply a harsh reality of domestic life. But I did think it was odd that my parents were so relaxed all the time, considering the fact that wild foxes, mutant spiders, and miniature alligators were running rampant throughout their house and trying to devour their children.

If you ask my sister about the terribly mean childhood pranks she pulled, I’m sure she’ll bring up some petty example of mean things I did to her, like hiding under her bed in the dark for hours at a time and grabbing her ankles when she came near.

To which I say: That’s a complete lie. And Mom always liked me best.

To which she says: In the end, truth and justice will prevail!

To which I say: Yeah, but truth and justice don’t have their own opinion columns, and I do. Nyah, nyah, nyah.

It’s baseball season once again, that special time of year when young, Major League hopefuls gather on the little league diamond to fine-tune their swings, practice their fielding skills, and give long, painful wedgies to kids like me.

I was something of a hot-shot on my midget league baseball team. I don’t like to brag, but the truth is, I actually managed to get a hit each of the three seasons I played, except for the first two seasons. That works out to one base hit in just three seasons of play, which is really, really good, provided you are either 3 years old or don’t have any arms.

It’s a longstanding tradition in baseball to give affectionate nicknames to the game’s top players (“Joltin’” Joe DiMaggio, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, “Incontinent” Elmer Merkle, “Barry” Bonds).

Something similar happened to me in midget league ball, except my nicknames were more along the lines of “The Fat Kid,” “That Fat Kid Who Always Strikes Out,” and “Fatty McStrikeout.”

Part of the reason why I struck out so much was that I was afraid of getting hit by the ball, and the reason for that is because I got hit by the ball all the time. My gigantic head had some sort of gravitational pull that drew the baseball towards it like a magnet. “Plunk!” went the ball off of my helmet.

“Plunk!” “Plunk!” “Plunk!”

“Oomph!” I said. “Oweee!” “Zimmmaaah!” “Gack!”

The reward for getting hit in the head with a baseball is that you get to go stand on first base as if you actually got a hit, which is all well and good until the next guy gets a hit, in which case you have to run around the bases.

Because, as the first half of “Fatty McStrikeout” implies, speed wasn’t really my forte. I would take off for second base, desperately holding up my husky pants by the belt loop and panting like an asthmatic piglet.

Meanwhile, the second baseman caught the ball, tagged the base, went home, did his homework, graduated, got married, and had a son of his own who joined the team and was waiting at the bag to make fun of me when I finally got there.

“You’re out, fatty,” he’d say.

“Shut up, Joey Junior!” I’d say.

I played right field, which is a very key position on a baseball team – the cornerstone of the defense, if you will. Or at least, that’s what my mom said. Of course, she also said the coach made me ninth in the batting order because he was “saving the best for last.”

“I couldn’t hit those pitches either,” my mom offered in her endless attempts to cheer me up. “And it’s just baby fat. You’ll grow out of it,” she added. Last week.

But the truth is that right field is reserved for people with the athletic prowess of an earthworm. You could put a drunk cat with four broken legs into right field and still win the game. Nobody ever hits the ball into right field. I spent most of my time singing Christmas carols to myself and popping the heads off of dandelions. “Oh, holy night!” Pop. “The stars are brightly shiiiiiiiining!” Pop. Pop.

Eventually, I’d notice that everybody from my team had walked off the field, usually when some overweight kid with glasses from the other team showed up beside me with his finger up his nose and a big mustard stain on his shirt.

“What a loser!” I’d think to myself as I stood up to find my glove, fasten the safety pin holding up my pants, adjust the corrective inserts in my shoes, tape my sunglasses back together, wipe the dog crap off my hat, and waddle over to our bench to join the rest of the team for the between-innings pep talk. “Remember,” our coach would say, “a team is only as good as its weakest player. Incidentally, it’s your turn to bat, Fats.”

It’s one, two, three strikes, I’m out at the old ball game. It’s not like I wouldn’t try to hit the ball. I swung all the time, but usually in self-defense.

My big base hit happened when, as a 70 mph fastball gravitated towards my head, I closed my eyes and did a big tomahawk chop with the bat – and I actually made contact. The ball dribbled down the third base line and, much to everyone’s surprise, I was soon standing on first base with my first bona fide hit.

Why I thought it would be a good idea to try to steal second base is anyone’s guess. I chalk it up to temporary insanity. By the time I was halfway down the base path, the game was called because of darkness. Fortunately, play was resumed the next afternoon just in time for me to slide into the bag and get tagged out.

But I was not discouraged. I had become a new kind of ball player – the kind that got hits. I had the eye of the tiger. I stepped up to the plate for my next at-bat with full confidence. I was prepared for greatness. As the pitcher went into his wind-up, I pointed at the fence with my bat. This was the day that I would become a man. This was my moment to shine.

I dug in my heels. I began my swing. I gasped in horror as the ball curved in towards my head.

“Plunk!”

To this day, “Surprise!” is still one of my favorite games, right up there with “Pee Your Pants in Front of Your Fourth Grade Class” and “Get a Prostate Exam.”

Here’s how the average game of “Surprise!” went. My mom would begin by hiding at the bottom of the stairs with all of the lights turned out. I would eventually come down the stairs, most likely on my way to do some selfless act like feeding the homeless or raising money for poor, starving orphans. I would round the corner, and my mother would jump out of the shadows, wave her arms around, and scream, “Googley-boogley!” My reaction would be to silently drop to the floor, cover my face with my hands, and somersault across the carpet like a lopsided soccer ball.

Every man likes to think that, when faced with danger, he will react with courage and honor. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered, at an early age, that my natural reaction to danger is to stop, drop, and roll.

After nearly passing out from laughter, my mom, of course, would go scurrying off to tell the rest of the family what had happened. The story of my roly-poly self-defense mechanism has since become one of those embarrassing anecdotes that, like my childhood tendency to pee in trash cans, will simply never go away. I mean, the tendency went away, but the story didn’t.

The vicious cycle continued. My mom kept jumping out of the shadows, I kept rolling around on the ground. My sister was always kind enough to break the news gently to my girlfriends. “Look at it this way,” she said. “If the two of you are walking down the street, and some thugs cross your path and try to set your feet on fire, Jeff will be there to roll around and put out the dangerous flames.”

My reputation as a sissy spread far and wide. Little old ladies started offering me their seat on the bus. Babies started stealing my candy. I got mugged by a gang of Girl Scouts.

But all of that came to an abrupt halt last December when I got my cowboy hat.

My wife and I traveled out to Arizona over Christmas for a week-long visit with her sister’s family, during which time I was left alone for hours on end with my monster-truck-driving, tobacco-chewing, horse-wranglin’ brother-in-law.

We sat around the house, desperately trying to find something in common to talk about. It was just me, a five-foot-nine marshmallow-with-legs, and my brother-in-law, a 300-pound grizzly with a Fu Manchu and a passion for machinery. I spent one entire afternoon reading Salman Rushdie in his garage while he overhauled the engine of his truck.

We decided to spend that evening driving around the desert. (He had to lift me up into the truck.) With the windows down and the ZZ Top cranked up, it was virtually impossible to talk, so that was a relief. I mostly concentrated on picking the bugs out of my teeth and wondering how many potholes we would have to hit before the handgun in the glove compartment went off. Then, without taking his eyes off the road, my brother-in-law reached under his seat, pulled out a ridiculously large cowboy hat, and jammed it down on my head.

I felt something magical happening. I was going through some sort of transformation. I became a new Jeff. Cowboy Jeff. Wranglin’ Jeff. A Jeff who would strike fear into the hearts of men. A swearing, spitting, truck-driving Jeff. A Jeff who would no longer take bullies sitting down. Or rolling around on the floor.

I brought the hat back to Pennsylvania and began wearing it around the house, much to my wife’s horror. I could tell it would be difficult for her to accept the fact that I was no longer the poetry-writing, “Ally McBeal”-watching muffin she married. I even grew a chest hair.

I knew that transforming myself into a true cowboy would take some work.

I can’t even spit without it dribbling down my chin. I have the alcoholic tolerance of a 2-year-old. I can fall down and break my arm just by looking at a horse. I had to practice.

I began by trying to lasso my cats with one of my neckties. They put up quite a fight, but I did eventually manage to catch one. OK, so maybe I used a sheet instead of the necktie. And maybe I didn’t really catch one of my cats as much as I caught my wife when she rounded the corner with a basket of laundry. Surprise!

I thought that maybe, if I tried harder to dress the part, I could coax my inner-cowboy to the forefront of my personality. Accordingly, I went out and got myself a new pair of chaps. While I did feel more manly, I couldn’t help but notice the terrible draft. I had been strolling around the park and strutting my stuff for a good two hours before the nice policeman informed me that yes, you are supposed to wear pants underneath.

It was a small setback for Wranglin’ Jeff. But things were looking up.

People were starting to treat me differently. My wife was completely turned on by my newfound manliness. My friends started dressing like me. My co-workers regarded me with a hushed awe.

My dog, unfortunately, was not as impressed, and decided to eat my cowboy hat.

Yes, the dog, man’s best friend, was the undoing of my manhood. Of course, I was the undoing of his when I took him to be neutered, so I guess we’re even. I came home from work this afternoon to find my hat in tatters on the floor, right beside a mangled shoe, half of a banana, and a shredded box of Girl Scout cookies.

Girl Scouts? Oh, crap.

For example, there is my inability to throw out a tissue, because maybe, just maybe, there is a useable inch on it somewhere that might come in handy later.

And there’s my mental blockage that prevents me from putting my clothes into the hamper. Instead, I’ve created a clothing purgatory on the floor where the clothes that are not-quite-dirty but not-exactly-clean have piled up into a monstrous heap that has sprouted arms and legs and I’m pretty sure is responsible for the mysterious disappearance of our cat.

And then there’s my inability to ever (Ever!) remove my socks. (I know what you’re visualizing right now. Stop it.) I can’t help it. I need them. My wife married me, socks and all, and it’s too late now to ask me to change. My socks. (Riotous laughter.)

But I admit that I probably am to blame for the thing that bothers my wife the most. Namely, my irresistable compulsion to make fun of her while she’s doing yoga. I should probably mention that my compulsion also involves lying down on the couch with a bag of potato chips and giving play-by-play color commentary.

“Whoa! You’ll feel that one tomorrow!”

“Those unitards really ride up on you, huh?”

“Wow, that’s not a flattering position!”

“That one should be illegal!”

“Smile for the camera!”

It’s really nothing personal against my wife. I’d pretty much make fun of anyone I caught rolling around on a rubber mat in a Spandex suit in the middle of my living room. Especially if that person was Anna Nicole Smith.

Now, I understand that everyone has his methods of relaxation. What I don’t get is why my wife’s method has to involve a video tape featuring Captain Banana Pants giving yoga instructions in nothing but a pair of immodest purple tights.

“Begin,” says the Captain, “by lifting both legs over your head, like this, and placing your right elbow into your left ear, like this. Good. Now, yank your own head back by the hair and firmly insert a finger into each of your nostrils. Advanced students may opt to insert the entire fist. This position is called Beautiful Flower Drinking Rainwater.

“Now, point two fingers directly at your eyes. Slowly bring your fingers in towards your face. At the last minute, raise your left hand and hold it in front of your nose, thereby blocking your fingers from poking you in the eyes. This is called the Nyuck Nyuck position.

“Lowering yourself to the ground, slowly coil your body into the Cobra position, unhinge your jaw, and swallow your own leg up to the knee cap. And remember, folks – relax! That’s what this is about, after all!”

As the Captain speaks, his students writhe around on the floor, contorting themselves into positions normally reserved for people being eaten by a dinosaur. Meanwhile, my wife is managing to make the whole painful process look easy, gracefully shifting her body from the Spitting Camel into the Surprised Chipmunk with the greatest of ease.

Nobody enjoys my wife’s yoga sessions more than the dog, who always manages to squeeze in a round of his favorite game, King of the Mountain, on my wife’s head. One minute, I’m watching my wife stretch out on the floor. The next thing I know, our little Jack Russel is perched on the back of her head with a look that says, “Look what a good dog I am!”

“Mmmph!” my wife yells.

“What?” I say.

“Mmmmmmph!!!!” she yells.

“I can’t understand you, there’s a dog on your head,” I explain.

And then we laugh. Well, I laugh.

I can usually lure the dog off my wife’s head by waving one of my potato chips around in the air for a few minutes. I’d get off the couch and help, but I don’t want to get my socks dirty.

Another hazard of my wife’s yoga is our cats’ drive-by rubbings. The cats, who have been lying in one spot giving themselves a bath since 1998, decide that now is the time to show how much they love my wife by running up and flopping all over her feet. Which is OK if she’s standing up straight, but a little precarious if she’s in the middle of a One-handed Inverted Moose, for example.

I think the most unsettling thing about her yoga has got to be the breathing exercises, which involve the kind gutteral snorts and phlegmy growls one might expect to hear from a congested grizzly bear. The first time I heard it, I thought an angry rhinocerous had somehow meandered its way into our living room. I ran in from the kitchen with a flyswater and a frying pan, ready for battle, to find my wife in a leotard with her leg wrapped around her neck three times, a cat stuck to her shin, and our dog perched on her forehead.

Who said that yoga wasn’t a spectator sport?