Exploding Unicorn by James Breakwell Podcast (private feed for andy@afbray.co.uk)

The Bug Strikes Back

I am alive.That doesn’t sound like much, but to me, it was the accomplishment of the century. I was laid low by a sudden and unexpected stomach bug that kept me horizontal for nearly all of Saturday. Given all of my actual near-death experiences, this one was only “near death” because I’m a whiner. In the midst of it, though, my survival hardly felt assured. This is the tale or the worst Saturday in recent memory. That only applies to me. For one of the kids, it was the best weekend of her life.My Saturday started off early. I had to get Betsy to the high school by 8 a.m. so she could spend the next seventeen hours at a show choir competition on the other side of Indianapolis. Anyone who thinks sports are the biggest time sink has never encountered their school’s music department. Since I was already up, I continued on to the gym. It’s a place I go every day of my life, making it a good litmus test for my health at any given moment. Something has to go catastrophically wrong for me to cut a workout short or to skip one all together. One time, when I showed up to the gym with no symptoms, I ran out of energy after the first exercise. I came home and tested positive for covid. Another time, I gave up mid-workout because I could no longer sit on the machines. A few hours later, I was in septic shock from an abscess on my butt. Then there was the time my appendix exploded. I drove myself to the emergency room at 3 a.m. in incredible pain. The doctor on duty sent me home because I was a big baby and there was nothing wrong with me. I went home and slept for a few hours after slamming an ill-advised quantity of Tylenol. I didn’t go to the gym after I woke up, but I did run an entire morning’s worth of errands. I was in septic shock before noon, and had been in and out of surgery by dinner time. Being unable to lift light weights in my low-intensity workouts is the canary in the coal mine warning me that something is about to go very wrong with my organs. Not that anything with me is ever completely right.Saturday, I made it through half my workout before I felt the sudden change. My next exercise involved bending over at the waist. A new discomfort in my stomach made it clear that, if I attempted that feat, I might suffer the kind of catastrophic humiliation that would require me to change gyms if not zip codes. Rather than risking it, I cut my workout short. I had planned to make my weekly grocery run afterwards. Instead, I drove straight home. It was the last time I was fully upright for the rest of the day.Exploding Unicorn by James Breakwell is a reader-supported publication. It’s like PBS, but completely unhelpful and slightly evil. Join today!I crashed on the couch and stayed there for hours, getting up only to run to the bathroom. Okay, it was more of an urgent shuffle. Meanwhile, the three remaining kids gradually woke up and ventured downstairs. They’re slow risers on the weekend, which I fully support. It’s hard to get into trouble when you’re unconscious. The girls were surprised to find me looking more pathetic and feeble than usual. More importantly, I was taking up nearly the entire couch. I could have at least had the courtesy to die on the floor. My brother-in-law Jerry texted me to ask if Waffle and her cousin could play Minecraft together. It was cross platform, so it required some troubleshooting. Solving complicated tech problems is exactly what I want to do when my stomach is on the verge of nuclear detonation. After Jerry and I got them set up, I slowly retreated upstairs to my room. I couldn’t handle listening to the kids argue. They were playing on creative mode, so they had infinite resources in infinite space. Of course they wouldn’t be able to agree on how to share it.I fell on my bed, exhausted, and pondered the strangeness of my plight. No one else in my house had had so much as a runny nose for weeks. I by far have the least human contact of everyone in the family. Then again, I did go to a Pacers game with ten thousand other people last week. None of them were particularly close in my mostly empty nosebleed section. It’s not like I ran up to other rows for victory hugs at the end of the game. Lucy was there with me, and she was no worse for the wear. Then again, as a kid perpetually surrounded by other sick kids at school, her immune system is tougher than mine. Food poisoning was another possible suspect, but the rest of my family disproved that theory. We all eat the same things. If one of us goes down, we all go down. You take your life into your own hands when you submit to my cooking.Alone in my room, I wallowed in illness and self-pity. Lola had left after lunch to attend Betsy’s marathon show choir competition. It was just me and the three younger kids. I deputized my twelve-year-old, Mae, charging her with keeping me and her siblings alive until Lola got back. I didn’t need much. Late in the afternoon, I texted her asking for Gatorade and oranges. She conveniently never checked her phone. I spammed my list of family contacts until Lucy finally answered. She brought up the few foods I thought I could keep down. That’s what taking your child to a Pacers game gets you: basic delivery service in your darkest hour. I need to prioritize getting the other three kids to a game so they’re less likely to abandon me. For the added medical coverage, those basketball tickets are a steal at any price.No round of the flu is ever convenient, but this one was especially ill-timed. I was supposed to drive to Illinois that evening to attend a trivia night at my former elementary school with my parents. I texted my mom early in the day to tell her I wasn’t feeling well. I said my plan was to sleep it off. After hours of lying down, I was sicker and weaker than ever. I had to cancel. My parents managed to come in second without me. I’m sure they missed the zero questions I would have answered if I were there.The Gatorade bottles were a low point. I make fun of Lola and the kids for struggling to open them. I’m not the strongest guy in the world, but I can twist off the cap on a plastic bottle. Saturday afternoon, I could barely open the ones Lucy delivered. I couldn’t ask for help. I would have died from shame long before dehydration. Instead, I twisted until it felt like my arm was going to fall off. Finally, the cap gave way. I’d say I was as weak as a kitten, but I’ve seen some pretty strong kittens. Just try pulling them off the curtains after they dig in their claws. The Gatorade bottle confirmed my worst fears. In the elderly population, lower grip strength is correlated with a higher risk of mortality. I was thirty-nine going on eighty. As ever, my body was my own worst enemy.I dipped in and out of consciousness while watching European soccer on ESPN+. Those soothing English accents are the world’s best sleep aid. At some point, I smelled something cooking two floors below. The kids managed to make themselves grilled cheese sandwiches without burning down the house. The lack of an uncontrolled blaze was appreciated. If there had been a fire, I couldn’t have moved fast enough to get out.While I was busy wearing myself out with strenuous tasks like adjusting my blankets and using the remote, Betsy was a whirlwind of activity at her competition. She and her show choir group came in first in their category, winning the world’s largest trophy. Lola proudly sent pictures to every group chat she’s in. At 4’ 8”, the trophy was only four inches shorter than her. It’s every performer’s dream to one day win an award bigger than their mom. With that honor came an additional obligation. Betsy’s group had to compete again at 8:25 p.m. for an overall prize. Her choir director messaged parents to let us know the kids were expected back at the high school at the perfectly reasonable hour of 1 a.m.. That meant either Lola or I would have to stay up that late. It certainly wasn’t going to be me.Lola drove home after Betsy’s first performance. She didn’t trust any of us to be unsupervised past midnight. It was my job to keep Lola awake until 1 a.m. so she could retrieve Betsy when she got back to the high school. I did a very bad job. I had recovered enough to stay awake through a full movie, but I was still asleep by 11 p.m.. Lola must have managed without me. When I woke up the next morning, Betsy was here, so she got home somehow. This household functions best when I’m not involved.Sunday morning, I felt better but not fully normal. I could at least stand up and move around. By lunch, I was well enough to go to the grocery store, which felt like a monumental accomplishment. While there, I heard a strange screeching. I assumed there was a bird in the rafters. It was actually a guy walking around Walmart with two parakeets on his shoulders. He attracted quite a crowd. I’ve done a lot of sad things for attention over the years, but even I haven’t resorted to bringing birds into the produce aisle. None of the store’s staff confronted him. They either didn’t see the guy, or, more likely, didn’t care. Walmart is like international waters when it comes to pet rules. I left with my groceries, unsure if what I had seen was real or the last remnants of a fever dream. Little did I know the real fever dream was going on at home.Lucy was down for the count. She had a fever of a hundred degrees and the reddest cheeks I’d ever seen. She didn’t have the digestive distress I had experienced, but she was feeling just as weak. Perhaps the Pacers game really had done us both in. She also might have gotten it when she ventured into my room to bring me food and fluids while the other kids stayed away. Natural selection seldom favors the kind. The timing was even worse for Lucy than it was for me. Sunday was the Blue and Gold Banquet, where Cub Scouts graduate into BSA Scouts. Lucy had been looking forward to it all year. Many of the decorations were swine themed in honor of her patrol, the Powerful Pigs. I’ll give you one guess for which kid named it. My influence on that poor child has been destructive in every area of her life. Here’s hoping she spends more time with her mother.Thanks for reading Exploding Unicorn by James Breakwell! This post is public so feel free to share it.Lucy was devastated that she couldn’t go to the Blue and Gold Banquet, but not as devastated as Lola. We still went to the ceremony to help out and support the other scouts. Shortly after we got there, Lola asked me to take her home because she couldn't stop crying. She's a small person with big feelings. Let the record show that she wasn't nearly that upset about me missing trivia night. Thankfully, Lucy’s new BSA troop leader came to the rescue. She offered to have a private crossover ceremony for Lucy at the next meeting. Lucy will get to walk across that wooden bridge after all. Even better, we got her, not one, but two cakes at the dessert auction at the banquet. One of them was pig themed, of course.Update: Lucy and Mae both threw up over night. It seems this round of plague is here to stay.Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.James This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jamesbreakwell.substack.com/subscribe

Winter Gardening

Planting season is upon us. You might be confused because the ground is still frozen solid. Then again, you might think the previous sentence makes perfect sense because the weather is great where you live. Shout-out to my three readers in the southern hemisphere. For the rest of us in the higher latitudes, the world is still a frozen hell escape. Nonetheless, it’s time to get this year’s garden started. I know because my ten-year-old told me.Lucy is a lot smarter than me when it comes to plants—or maybe just in general. She reads the back of seed packets like other kids read books. Actually, that might be a bad comparison because I don’t know that most kids read anymore. She reads the back of seed packets like most kids watch YouTube. Being an overly-indulgent father, for Valentine’s Day, I spoiled my kids with the finest products the dollar store had to offer. It’s actually the $1.25 store now thanks to inflation, but I bought the girls my usual number of gifts. That means I love them twenty-five percent more than I used to. Along with the typical assortment of candy, I gave them a bunch of seed packets, which were five for $1.25. I suppose that made them a quarter each, but I didn’t think of them that way. If you try to buy things at the dollar store and increments of less than $1.25, you go directly to jail. On the morning of Valentine’s Day, Lucy brushed aside the chocolate and grabbed the seeds. She immediately began counting down the days until she could get them in the ground. It wasn’t nearly as many days as I expected.Lucy has been this way since she was a toddler, when she was fascinated with the seed catalogs that would come in the mail. Last year, I let her pick out whatever she wanted—within reason. If she intended to plant a forest of oak trees, we’d have to double check with her mother. Never one for malicious compliance, Lucy instead chose a modest spread of flowers. She waited for the packages to arrive like a dog watching out the window for the mailman. I’m lucky she didn’t bark. When the packages finally arrived, they were a letdown. I ordered a thousand edelweiss seeds, which sounds like enough to cover a field. Instead, they fit in the smallest plastic baggie I’ve ever seen. Each “seed” was an imperceptible dot. I can’t be sure that was actually a garden starter and not just a bag lined with specks of mold. Whatever was in there, it never grew, and we didn’t end up with a single flower from the lot. The other plants she picked out were similarly disappointing. She spread them out amongst the landscaping of the front yard. For months, I was afraid to pull weeds lest they were actually her flowers. They weren’t. Instead, Indiana’s wildest and most unwanted plants took advantage of my leniency. It looked like I was farming weeds before I finally pulled them out. I told Lucy to take heart. There was always the next planting season to look forward to. Little did I know it would start in February.Exploding Unicorn by James Breakwell is a reader-supported publication. It’s like PBS, but completely unhelpful and slightly evil. Join today!I have long-term plans for her planting skills. I hope to use them to beautify the ugliest part of my property. We don’t have a garage or a driveway, but we do have a large concrete parking slab on the back corner of our lot. The previous owner had planned to build a garage half over the concrete and half over the yard, taking up pretty much all of the space behind the house. That’s how you know he didn’t have pigs. I could never build such a structure. It would wipe out all the grazing space. For us, the parking slab will always remain a parking slab—except that we don’t usually use it for parking. Most of the time, it’s more convenient to park on the street in front of the house. I only detour to the back if all the parking spots out front are full or if the cars are spaced too closely together. I’ll die before I learn to parallel park properly. Some day, we’ll need that big concrete slab for its intended purpose. If spaced perfectly, we should be able to fit four junkie cars for four young drivers. It’ll look like the sketchiest used car lot ever. For now, it’s an empty eyesore. I want Lucy to turn it into an urban garden with raised flower beds. It’s a mission she takes more seriously than I ever dreamed.I didn’t want to buy her all the raised flower beds at once. You can never be too careful when indulging your kids’ passion of the moment, even if that passion has lasted for their entire lives. My house is full of hobby items my other children absolutely had to have but lost interest in as soon as I purchased the necessary supplies. I bought Lucy her first raised planter last year. It’s a 1’ by 3’ plastic trough on legs. I told her I’ll buy her an additional one each year going forward. That serves multiple purposes. First, it gradually increases her workload so as not to overwhelm her. She might lose interest if I force her to farm at an industrial scale. Second, it lets her grow her skills as she grows her plants. There’s no sense in buying ten flower beds if the plants in the first bed won’t grow. Last year, the items in the raised flower bed didn’t fare any better than the ones amongst the front yard landscaping. Only a few vegetables popped out of the ground. Lucy gave them more love and attention than I give my children.The first bit of green to emerge from the dirt was kale. Lucy had never eaten it before. Neither had I. I once survived for months on only ground beef. We’re not a family that’s big on salad. Lucy became obsessed with the idea of eating it. When it was big enough, she tried a few pieces and was solidly underwhelmed. You can only get so excited about rabbit food. She pushed the rest off on her mom, who used it in a small salad she took to work. All told, Lucy spent weeks of effort to generate what was probably less than two hundred calories worth of nutrients. That’s a typical rate of return for most micro-farming efforts. Anyone who thinks their home garden will help them become self-sufficient and live off-grid is delusional. Or maybe they’re just better gardeners than my family.Lucy got one other thing to grow, and it was very impressive: a giant cauliflower plant. I’d say a head of cauliflower, but that would be a lie. It never grew the actual food part. It was just a giant stalk. It grew throughout the spring and summer—and fall. Lucy never picked it. It was still there, proud and strong, while the kids played in the snow on the back slab. There was no point in harvesting it since it didn’t offer anything to eat. Lucy let it stand as a towering symbol that she could get something to grow, even if that something wasn’t edible. That cauliflower plant mastered an interesting survival strategy. It gave my daughter hope without giving her a reason to kill it by pulling it from the ground. Unfortunately for the cauliflower, it had no way to pass on that trait to its offspring. I suspect it’s supposed to reproduce through the food part. Its genetic line died with it, encased in ice two feet above cold concrete. Serves it right for leading Lucy on.This year will be better. In practical terms, it has to be. If she raises even one edible cauliflower plant, she’ll beat her old record. The worst she could do is tie it. Saturday, Lucy started planting. I wasn’t the only one who had been buying her supplies. Lola purchased a neat set-up of multiple flower pots attached together in a big tower. You can water all of the pots by pouring water on the top one and letting it cascade down. Lucy put on her gloves and winter coat and ventured out onto the front porch. She assembled the flower pot tower by herself. She went into the basement and pulled out the leftover potting soil from last season. She filled up each pot and then carefully planted her seeds. I don’t know if she watered them yet. It might be a wasted effort. I suspect the water would simply freeze on top. Then again, the back of the flower packages might say otherwise. This is yet another case where I’ll defer to Lucy’s expertise as the only Arctic gardener in the world.I’ll wait until March to get her the next raised flower bed for the back slab. I suspect that’s how long it’ll take for the hardware store to get them in stock. Lucy is likely the only potential customer risking frostbite to take care of her seeds. This is more of a season for indoor gardening. It’s a great time to start seedlings in tiny pots on window sills. Lucy has some of those as well. In fact, she has the greatest indoor plant of all: The kind that eats meat. I hope she’s not too good at raising it or it might devour us all.Lola got Lucy a tiny Venus flytrap for Christmas. It came in its own self-contained biome, which was just a tiny bottle with a cork on top. The instruction specifically said not to open the bottle until it looked like the Venus flytrap might break out on its own. The container had just the right balance of nutrients and carbon monoxide to keep the green monster growing. I don’t know why they call it a Venus fly trap when it seemed perfectly happy living on the mixture of blue goo it was floating on. I suppose “blue goo trap” doesn’t sound quite as impressive from a marketing standpoint. It’s also only a temporary phase. Like a baby outgrowing formula, the Venus fly trap now craves solid food. After she finished up outside Saturday, Lucy came to me in my role as the holder of the credit card. She requested that I make an urgent purchase: bloodworms. I did a double take. For a second, I thought I was raising a Klingon. The next thing you know, she’ll want a bat’leth and a ride to Sto-vo-kor. Thankfully, the bloodworms weren’t for her, but for the Venus flytrap. It was time to properly feed the predator in our midst. It won’t be long until it’s big enough to pop out of a pipe and eat Mario.Thanks for reading Exploding Unicorn by James Breakwell! This post is public so feel free to share it.I told Lucy to research what kind of bloodworms she needed and send me a link. She found some fine specimens. Too fine, in fact. They were out of my price range. Per ounce, freeze-dried bloodworms are as expensive as gold or printer ink. I did some additional searching, by which I mean I read the two reviews below the expensive option. One of them said those fancy bloodworms were no different than the ones you can buy in the aquarium section of a standard pet store. I went with those instead. The price was three dollars per quarter ounce. That’s exorbitantly high if you extrapolate out the price per pound but not a bad deal when you consider how little a Venus fly trap eats. The plant only needs a small pinch of bloodworms every other week. The three-dollar bottle I brought should last multiple years as long as Lucy isn’t overzealous with her pinches. Here’s hoping her fingers stay small. May she remain my little gardening girl forever.Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.James This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jamesbreakwell.substack.com/subscribe

Down with the Sickness

This season’s sickness finally found my house. After a day around hundreds of other kids at a regional robotics competition, Mae is down for the count. She joins roughly half the students in the school district, who are experiencing this cold and flu season to its fullest. My children have never met a germ they didn’t want to bring home like a stray pet. We’re now in quarantine mode, even though we know there’s likely no stopping this. Within the next week or two, all of us will have a turn feeling just as bad as Mae does now. Sharing is not always caring.The silver lining is that we appear to be back to normal cold and flu seasons. We’re not worried that Mae’s ailment is a superbug that will shut down the world. That doesn’t make Mae feel any better. In an era when technology is on the cusp of solving all of life’s problems, our tools for dealing with the most common of illnesses aren’t much better than when I was a kid. We gave Mae some Tylenol to knock down her fever and told her to sleep it off. She’s lucky we didn’t apply leeches to drain her bad humors. There are flu shots now, but those are little comfort once you’re already sick. After the disease breaches your initial defenses, all that’s left is the old standbys while your body holds out. It’s the Alamo, but instead of soldiers, your defenders are chicken noodle soup and frequent unconsciousness. There are few maladies that can’t be at least somewhat rebuffed by a good nap.Mae made a critical mistake by being sick on a long weekend. There’s no chance she’ll miss even a single second of school. Not that it’s possible to truly miss school in the age of remote learning. Mae could knock out all her school work for the day from her iPad while sick in her bed—if she had the energy. If she truly wants a break, she needs an internet outage to coincide with her fever. That would also wipe out all of her entertainment options. She would have rest, but she wouldn’t have YouTube. She’d rather be dead.Exploding Unicorn by James Breakwell is a reader-supported publication. It’s like PBS, but completely unhelpful and slightly evil. Join today!There’s a small chance the rest of us will get lucky and Mae will keep her germs to herself. Illnesses don’t spread as quickly here as they used to. The kids are getting older. Not only do they have more robust immune systems after years of catching every cold known to man, but they also somewhat socially distance themselves from each other. They’re not completely separate. My cardinal rule of “don’t touch each other” will never truly be obeyed. Random flying kicks to the back will always have their place. The kids do, however, touch each other less often than when they were younger. They used to always be in a big pile. Now, they spread out to separate rooms to watch their own individual screens. Technology is doing what it can to stop the spread. Antisocial behavior is pro-health.Mae’s symptoms aren’t too bad so far. She has a high fever and is tired, but she hasn’t thrown up. Fingers crossed that it stays that way. Cleaning up puke is my least favorite part of being a parent. Correction: cleaning up puke off carpet. The first time one of my kids was old enough to aim their puke at a tile floor instead of a rug, I heard angels sing. Even better, they now try to make it to a toilet or trash can, leaving nothing to clean up. There is no greater milestone in parenting than when your child is finally old enough to follow proper barfing etiquette. The times when one of my offspring can’t make it to a proper receptacle are becoming rarer. That also means my tolerance for dealing with it has diminished, making those one-off times when they fail that much worse. Long gone are the days when I could deal with a massive diaper blowout in the middle of dinner and go right back to eating. I’ve lost my immunity to things that are gross.My wife’s sister Alice and her husband Jerry are still in the thick of it. The current wave of whatever this is hit them first and knocked out their entire family. They have a toddler who goes to daycare. That’s like bringing a germ bomb into your house every night. Their older kid missed half a week of school. Jerry feels awful, and Alice hasn’t had a voice for a week. Their rage baby, meanwhile, is filled with twice as much rage as usual. She feels bad, and she’s taking it out on parents who are more achy and sleep deprived than normal. It’s amazing that any marriage with small children ever survives cold and flu season. Thank goodness it takes too much energy to file for divorce.It’s been a long time since Lola and I have had to deal with a crisis of that level. We were only severely ill at the same time once. Every other cold and flu season, we had the good fortune to stagger our down time. The flu should always be turn-based. On the one occasion when we were both incapacitated, our oldest daughter was big enough to run the house for short stretches. It’s the first time I remember her making a meal for her siblings. If she hadn’t been able to, the kids would have gone hungry that day. That was back in my carnivore diet phase, when the amount of ground beef I ate per day was measured in pounds. All of it came back up. It was a situation beyond the limits of deep cleaning. We almost had to move. When Lola and I were finally upright again, we discovered the children were doing well. Our services as parents weren’t quite as vital as they used to be. It felt good to be less important. Even better, none of the kids got sick that time. Lola and I had been so out of it that we couldn’t get up to share our germs. The severest strains are their own worst enemies. It’s the mild but inconvenient ones you have to watch out for.We might have already had a brush with that this season. Lola and I each had a day with bad headaches. It’s hard to know if that was caused by a virus or literally everything else in the world. It would be easier for me to make a list of the things that don’t hurt my brain these days. Neither of us had fevers, though. Quite the opposite, in fact. Unlike in my younger years, when I could sweat through a t-shirt in a blizzard, at my current age, I’m always cold. I want to normalize wearing mittens indoors. That would keep my fingers warm and stop me from swapping germs through handshakes. Not that I do a lot of handshakes in the first place. I’m a big fan of greeting people with a curt nod, if even that. Never make an actual gesture when a blank stare will do.As usual, schools are getting the worst of this. Teachers have to figure out how to make their lessons work when a third of their students might be out on any given day. By now, they’re used to it. Every educator knows that at some point over the winter, their attendance log will turn into a casualty report. It’s the biggest reason why attendance awards are a bad idea. I know schools don’t want students skipping class for frivolous reasons, but they should also encourage them to stay home for good ones. Stopping illnesses from spreading should be at the top of that list. When I was a kid, I didn’t miss a day of class from my late elementary years through the end of high school. I distinctly remember sneaking off to throw up in the bathroom so I didn’t get sent home. I really wanted that perfect attendance certificate that was ultimately destined for the recycling bin. There should be an award for smartly quarantining yourself instead of taking your peers down with you. Misery loves company, and I’m misery. If I ever invite you to one of my board game nights, you should politely decline.The upside of illness season is it makes my house quieter. I can tell who’s healthy by which kids are screaming at each other. I’m happy to report Lucy and Waffle are still fine. They just had a shouting match over the incredibly fraught group activity of getting dressed. Never use your indoor voice when yelling at the top of your lungs will do. As much as I dislike the noise, I hope Mae keeps this illness to herself. I used to think silence was priceless, but there is a price I won’t pay. I’d rather have my kids healthy and upright than have to go around the house passing out over-the-counter medicine. My Tylenol budget only goes so far.When the kids are down with the sickness, their experiences are very different from what I went through at their ages. It’s not just that they can still do their school work remotely if they feel up to it. Their entertainment options are also worlds apart from what I had. For decades, every school-age child had the unforgettable experience of watching The Price is Right on a sick day. My kids don’t even know what The Price is Right is. If they were aware of it, they might wonder why it exists. There’s no sense in trying to guess the price of anything. You can just Google it—and have it delivered to your house with same-day shipping. Looking back, I don’t know that any of us really liked The Price is Right. It’s simply what was on. We remember it fondly because it was better than staring at a wall. If I had had Netflix when I was twelve, there’s no way I would have been speculating on the price of laundry detergent. I would have instead chosen infinite cartoons. That’s what I’d like to believe, anyway. If the viewing habits of my children are any indicator, kids actually prefer poorly-produced videos of twentysomethings screaming and using indecipherable slang while playing games my children already own. Quality counts for nothing in cyberspace. No wonder I was able to carve out a second job here.Thanks for reading Exploding Unicorn by James Breakwell! This post is public so feel free to share it.With any luck, this bug will end with Mae and the rest of us will have a narrow escape. Using a sick day doesn’t appeal to me. I’d most likely just do all my normal stuff while feeling slightly worse than usual. As an adult, I only realize I was sick in retrospect. Hopefully the rest of you are more self-aware. Stay healthy out there. The first step toward that is avoiding my kids.Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.James This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jamesbreakwell.substack.com/subscribe

Makeup Games

As you might have heard, there was a major showdown over the weekend. No, I’m not talking about the Super Bowl, although I’m sure that was fine if you’re into that sort of thing. I’m referring, instead, to my daughter’s show choir competition. She and her squad of dancing singers (or singing dancers. I don’t know which one comes first, but I’m sure I’ve somehow slighted both skills.) faced off against other schools in their first official performance. As with the Super Bowl, I wasn’t important enough to be there in person. That job fell to my wife Lola. I was merely part of the support staff, alternately fetching things or staying out of the way depending on the needs of the moment in the week leading up to the big day. Putting twenty girls on stage takes far more work than getting eleven players on a field. NFL starters don’t have to worry about their hair and makeup.To the surprise of no one, I have zero knowledge about foundation, blush, or any of the other compounds or powders a person might need to beautify themselves. Lola wears makeup sometimes—or all the time. Men think women are lying when we say that we don’t notice if you’re wearing makeup, but it’s true. The main thing I pay attention to with Lola’s face is whether or not she’s mad at me. If her eyebrows aren’t in attack position, I breathe a sigh of relief and immediately turn my attention back to whatever screen is most interesting at the time. Gazing lovingly into your partner’s eyes is no match for college basketball.I might not appreciate the importance of makeup, but, as with most of life, it’s not up to me. There’s a reason I’m not in charge of literally anything. Show choir requires the girls to use makeup. That seems like the wrong message to send. We spend their entire lives teaching them not to judge others on their appearances, and then we turn around and have a competition where they’re scored on how they look. There’s an official point total and everything. Maybe makeup isn’t scored separately, but your overall look definitely factors in. It could be the extra element that puts you over the top of your competitors. In a superficial world, only the shallow survive. Makeup is vital to the competitive scene. Past champions bare that out. Past show choir national winners include both Kiss and Insane Clown Posse.Exploding Unicorn by James Breakwell is a reader-supported publication. It’s like PBS, but completely unhelpful and slightly evil. Join today!That’s how dramatic the makeup would have to be for me to notice it. I have trouble even telling which kid is even mine from a distance. During a performance, there’s a bunch of girls of similar heights and builds dressed identically and crowded together on stage, twirling around like their lives depend on it. Figuring out which long-haired brunette is mine from halfway across an auditorium is a challenge even for my twenty-twenty vision. At non-competitive performances earlier this year, I may or may not have spent entire songs watching the wrong kid. The problem was that Betsy wasn’t wearing black and white clown makeup. If she had been, I would have immediately been able to spot her—unless the other girls all wore it, too, in which case it would have canceled out. For the competition Saturday, all the kids were expected to have less makeup than Juggalo nation, but not by much. The colors had to be visible from a distance to make sure the judges knew you met the minimum criteria for vanity. Betsy’s team expected everyone to showcase their individual talents by pulling off identical looks. That meant a supply run, which is my specialty. I make myself useful by having a driver’s license and a pulse.Earlier this week, I took Betsy to Walmart to acquire the necessary beauty products. It wasn’t exactly Sephora, but it got the job done. (I’ve never been to one, but Lola told me that Sephora is an expensive makeup store. Please disregard that last comparison if she was messing with me and it’s actually a paper mill or car company.) Lola did a tutorial with Betsy and then sent us out the door with a list of everything we needed. Betsy scoured the makeup aisles while I bought cottage cheese, which was just as important. That part doesn’t have anything to do with this story. I just like dairy products. Back at home, Betsy experimented with her new makeup on herself. There’s no animal testing in this household. (Even if there were, I doubt the animals would cooperate. Putting lipstick on a pig is easier said than done.) From time to time, Betsy would emerge from the bathroom to show off her handiwork. Sometimes, it was just her normal face. Other times, it was her normal face with extra blue. To me, that color indicates a lack of oxygen, but apparently it’s also a sign of beauty. Hopefully the judges would be coming from the fashion industry and not medical school.I thought we had all appearance related concerns squared away by Friday night. Betsy spent the evening packing the nine hundred individual items she would need to get ready on site. Meanwhile, I burrowed into my couch and prepared to rot in place. I was wearing no fewer than three layers plus a blanket with the Purdue-USC game in my earbuds and Halo fired up on my Xbox. I didn’t plan to move again for the rest of the night, or possibly ever. There was a very real chance I would never leave that cocoon of my own free will. That’s when Betsy burst into the living room in crisis mode. She needed fake eyelashes. The issue was of the utmost importance. News about assassinated archdukes has been delivered with less urgency.I didn’t understand the conundrum. Why would someone want fake eyelashes? Betsy already had a perfectly fine set of real ones. Would the competition venue have an especially high amount of dust filtering down from above? Perhaps the auditorium was still under construction. According to Betsy, that wasn’t the case. All of her friends would be wearing fake eyelashes, and if she didn’t have them, she would stand out. That made me question how closely the judges have to look at these kids to notice the status of their eye hair. I assume everyone sitting ten feet away at the judge’s table was watching the competition through a telescope powerful enough to see Neptune. Otherwise, how could they tell these kids even have eyelashes? It’s certainly not a feature I would detect. I don’t say that out of jealousy. In fact, I have some of the nicest eyelashes in the world.I know that because a woman told me. Back in 2008 (I receive so few compliments that I remember when and where I got each one), the female reporter in the next cubicle said she wished she had long, girly eyelashes like mine. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t a compliment, but it was a statement of fact. I asked Lola about it, and she confirmed that I have the kind of lush, feminine eye coverings that any lady would be happy to have. You probably didn’t know that about me because they’re only visible if you’re standing a few feet away. If you’re that close, it’s a good time to take three full steps back and possibly to slam a door in my face. I don’t know what to do with the knowledge that I’m blessed in the eyelash department. If I were to wake up tomorrow without eyelashes, I wouldn’t notice—until I was partially blinded by a random speck of dust. Even that wouldn’t be so bad. I’d look cool with an eyepatch. I assumed that I had passed down my magnificent eyelash genes to my offspring, but I guess I never checked. Apparently Lola’s regular eyelash genes got in there and mucked everything up. If only I had known that would happen before I married her. Then again, that would have required me to look at her face for more than just an anger check. This was all a very long way of saying I wasn’t getting out of an emergency trip to buy Betsy fake eyelashes. With a heavy sigh, I emerged from my blanket cocoon and grabbed my keys. A girl dad’s job is never done.Except that my job actually was almost done. Saturday morning, I woke up early and took Betsy to school. She had to be there by 7 a.m. to get some extra practice. Apparently all the other practices I drove her to all week were just practice for the main practice on the morning of competition. After that final tune-up, the girls needed a substantial block of time to do their makeup, apply emergency fake eyelashes, and drive to the competition site an hour away. The full group wouldn’t compete until noon. Lola volunteered to be there for that part. If Betsy’s group made it until the final round, they wouldn’t be home until after midnight. Show choir has too much action to pack into a single day. The earth would slow down its rotation around competition time if it knew what was good for it.It was better to have Lola on hand than me in case Betsy needed help with any last-second touch-ups. You don’t want the leader of your pit crew to be the guy who doesn’t know how to drive a car. Actually, I have a better idea: There should be a show choir competition where dads—and only dads—are required to do their daughters’ makeup. It’s not that fathers are incapable of correctly applying it; we just don’t have any experience. We start out ugly and stay that way. Society is okay with that. It’s the single greatest part of being a guy. Letting us take the helm in a situation we know nothing about can only lead to good things. I wonder if it’s possible to apply makeup with a paint roller? There’s only one way to find out.Thanks for reading Exploding Unicorn by James Breakwell! This post is public so feel free to share it.There are enough competitions during show choir season that they could afford to let dads ruin one. Betsy has a competition every weekend from now until the end of time—or just the end of the school year. I’m not sure if that’s when things wrap up or if it’s just when the printer for the calendars ran out of ink. That’s a grueling schedule by my standards. I’m not a fan of all-day anything. My favorite competitions to watch are cross country meets. Almost every kid is done in less than half an hour. There are no extra innings, double headers, or overtime. You run, and then you go home. Its efficiency incarnate. It’s a shame other sports added extra stuff like balls and rules to slow things down. Show choir sounds like all of the rules and none of the running. It also sounds like a chorus of angels. Betsy and her friends can really sing. They’re great dancers, too. I’m writing this Saturday night before I know how the competition turns out. Regardless of what those judges say, she’ll be a winner to me. Especially if, next time, she lets me do her makeup.Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.JamesAddendum: I just remembered that I didn’t take Betsy for that first makeup run. I drove her to the store for a bunch of other things (that’s my main job as a dad), but I didn’t handle that specific one. She went with her mom that time. I know I handled the eyelash trip, though, because I really didn’t want to get off the couch. That should set things straight. Let the record show that I would never lie to you on purpose, except for all the times I totally did. Anyway, that’s all—for real this time.James again This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jamesbreakwell.substack.com/subscribe

The Conveyor Belt of Life

Life is like the conveyor belt at a pay-by-plate train-themed sushi restaurant: It never stops, and, if you’re not paying attention, the best stuff will pass you by. Also, the expenses add up way faster than you’d like. That lesson hit home this weekend through three seemingly unrelated incidents involving a birthday dinner, a maturing daughter, and a declining dog. My wife said there was no way I could tie those anecdotes together, so now I have to in the weirdest story parlay you’ve ever read. Brace yourself for awkward juxtapositions, unexpected non-sequiturs, and maybe even a feeling or two. It was a weekend of recognizing the significance of insignificant things. Welcome to my Saturday.To make this narrative arc sort of work, I’ll start near the end: We met a friend at a Japanese restaurant for a birthday dinner he organized for himself. That’s adulthood in a nutshell. It’s a fool’s errand to treat others how you want to be treated. Skip the middleman and treat yourself. I’m not a huge fan of sushi or of restaurants in general, but only because I’m a massive fan of food. I want the maximum number of calories for as few dollars as possible. The sushi restaurant was the opposite of that. A conveyor belt went around the room in a big U, carrying sushi on small plates in a continuous loop. Each plate had a color corresponding to a price. The black ones were $2.75 while the purple ones were $6.50, with various tiers in between. Regardless of the contents, each plate was exactly four bites, maybe not for a normal person, but definitely for me. I have a big mouth and an infinite appetite. For reference, I went through a one-meal-a-day carnivore phase where I would eat five pounds of ground beef in one sitting. That’s not hyperbole. I literally split up a five pound roll of 80/20 ground beef into twenty four-ounce patties, cooked them on an electric skillet where they simmered in their own grease, and ate them all in less than half an hour. Sometimes I even added cheese. For those of you keeping track at home, with dairy products on top, that was approximately 7,200 calories. This wasn’t some weird eating challenge, either. It’s simply what I did for my regular meal every day for months. For comparison, the four-hundred-pound tigers at the feline rescue we visited a few months ago only ate three to four pounds of meat per day. What lightweights.Exploding Unicorn by James Breakwell is a reader-supported publication. It’s like PBS, but completely unhelpful and slightly evil. Join today!Clearly I didn’t actually need that much food, but the point is I was capable of eating it. It’s why I now use a calorie tracking app to tell me when to stop shoving food into the black hole that is my stomach. My hunger response doesn’t provide me with useful information. It just says, “If there’s food, eat it.” I inherited good survival genes. I’m built to add fat in times of plenty to make it through future famines. That instinct would have served me well in caveman times but was an absolute disaster at a conveyor-belt-based restaurant. There was no way I could possibly fill up for less than the of the cost of a new home. I’m not talking a starter home, either, but one of those HGTV houses with an in-ground pool and space for entertaining. I told Lola to grab whatever she wanted off the conveyor belt and I would eat half of it. The food was absolutely delectable to people with more refined palates. To me, it all tasted like tuna wrapped in rice. That was until I discovered the condiments at the table, at which point everything tasted like soy sauce. I maintained my discipline until close to the end, when I finally broke down and grabbed a few plates for myself. I paid for it—literally. When the waitress came to tally up our colored plates, she had to summon a second person to count my stack. It was the hardest I’ve ever been shamed by basic arithmetic. No wonder I wait so long in between going out for good food.According to Lola, the last time we went to a dedicated sushi restaurant, our oldest daughter was a toddler. She says we only had one kid back then. I trust her recollection. Lola classifies all memories based on how many children we had at the time because bringing each one into the world was a tad more traumatic for her than it was for me. That time, we met Lola’s sister Alice at her favorite sushi place. I don’t recall what was on the kid’s menu at a fancy venue like that, but it was something that broke down into tiny pieces. Betsy exploded it all over the floor. I doubt a single crumb reached her mouth. By the end of the meal, we were so embarrassed. It looked like someone had spread edible confetti under our table. The saintly waitress wasn’t upset. She was genuinely delighted to have a toddler in her section. It was a unique experience. Everyone else was too smart to bring a kid that young to such a place. Despite the server’s kind words, we had enough self-awareness to never return. I waited more than a decade to go out for sushi again.Thirteen years later, we were walking out of a different Japanese restaurant when that same daughter called Lola. Betsy was at home babysitting her three younger sisters. She was in tears. None of them were hurt. This was something much worse: She had dropped her cell phone down the stairs. The screen cracked and transformed into an unwelcome rainbow of colors. The device still had power, but it didn’t respond to any inputs. She was calling us from her sister’s phone. That sister was presumably watching Betsy nervously lest she also drop that phone down the stairs. The damage to her own phone sounded catastrophic. The cost of our already expensive night had suddenly quintupled. I never should have taken that last plate.I wanted to give Betsy a lecture about responsibility, but it was unwarranted. My once messy toddler was now babysitting my other children for free. In fact, earlier in the day, she had achieved an important milestone. She’d been keeping her siblings alive at home for years, but this time, she did it in public. My ten-year-old, Lucy, really wanted to see the new Dog Man movie. Lola and I really didn’t. There were no other movies showing at the same time that interested us. Then I had a brilliant idea: I offered to let Betsy take the rest of the squad to the movies while Lola and I stayed home. Betsy agreed. She wasn’t interested in the movie, but she didn’t ask for payment, either. The power trip was reward enough. I dropped off the four girlsat the theater a mile from our house. Betsy used Lola’s credit card to buy the tickets. An hour and a half later, she called me to take them all home. I patted myself on the back for how smoothly the process went. Having older children was truly wonderful. I failed to realize the downsides. While children are sometimes less work as they grow up, their mistakes also become more costly. A cell phone tumbling down the stairs was only the start. Just wait until Betsy picks the wrong college.On the drive home from the restaurant, I fumed over the extra money I’d have to spend, but I couldn’t be mad at Betsy. I depend on her too much. I need her to not only look after her sisters when I’m away, but also the dog. Niko is too frail to be left alone anymore. That very morning, I discovered that he’s now functionally blind. His senses have been getting worse for a while. His ears gave out years ago, which is why he stopped barking. He can’t hear himself make sounds, so he gave up the attempt. His sense of smell, on the other hand, has never been great. He was bred to be cute, not to track down game in heavy underbrush. That saved him from ever having a real job. If you can pull it off, always try to get by on just your looks.In his prime, Niko’s situational awareness was a force to be reckoned with. A woman once credited him with saving her life. She was walking down the alley next to our house after her closing shift at a bar. A strange man followed her in the dark. Niko and his late brother charged outside and barked until the man turned away. Days later, the woman came back to my house to thank me for my little dogs. They were heroes as far as she was concerned. Another time, Niko found a man passed out on the parking slab behind our house. The guy had some sort of medical issue but was also quite drunk. He and his bike were both sprawled out on the concrete. I talked to him briefly. The man said he was okay, but he also didn’t get up or offer to leave. I called 911. It was an example of small-town living at its best. When the cops showed up, they recognized the man. Rather than arresting him, they called a cab and tossed his bike in the back. That was the best use of tax dollars for everyone involved. Niko also sometimes pretended that he couldn’t hear even when his ears were fine. Once, a raccoon climbed through the doggy door and onto our enclosed back porch. Niko “slept” through the whole thing despite the fact that he was just feet away on the other side of a second doggy door leading into the house. He could hear a man snoring outside but couldn’t detect a miniature bear tearing into a bag of dog food on the other side of a thin plastic flap. He knew how to choose his battles.These days, he chooses none of them. The pigs used to fear him, even though they weigh literally ten times more than he does. He was a predator. They were prey. They respected him for it. Now, they push him around, so he avoids their room entirely. He won’t go outside on his own and mostly pees in diapers. I still put him outside a few times a day, if only on principle. I have to carry him out. I also have to carry him back in because he gets lost in the small yard that he’s roamed for his entire life. When I brought him inside Saturday morning and set him on the kitchen floor, he didn’t know where he was. He ran face-first into the trash can, then the cabinets, and then the fridge. I say “ran,” but really it was a slow walk. He doesn’t go anywhere fast these days. No wonder. He can’t see where he’s going. Yet the dogs still eats. He reminds me of a car I used to own. All the knobs on the dashboard fell off, and the leather on the seats split wider than the Grand Canyon, yet the engine ran perfectly. If it hadn’t been destroyed after an unfortunate encounter with a teenage driver, that thing would still be on the road today. It could have been Betsy’s first car. Niko is the same way. He’s nearly seventeen years old. All his accessories are falling apart, but his engine is still cranking away. As long as he’s still moving, I’m going to give him all the fuel he wants.Thanks for reading Exploding Unicorn by James Breakwell! This post is public so feel free to share it.That’s the new rule in this house. He used to bark when he was hungry. Now, he tippy-taps in place. That’s our signal to fill him up. By my new decree, he can have anything at any time, be it dog food or human leftovers. His diet doesn’t really matter at this point. It’s the way end-of-life care should be. My maternal grandmother entered hospice care around the same time Betsy was a toddler making a mess in that sushi restaurant. In her final days, Grandma mostly just ate ice cream bars. The nurses approved. The only thing she was getting her body ready for was heaven. I’m going to treat Niko the same way. If he wants to eat, he’s getting whatever ridiculous leftovers he can handle. It’s going to be a good time. A celebration of life should be an actual celebration and not just a euphemism for a funeral. The hospice workers had to shush my grandma and her visiting adult children for being too loud. It was a party in there. Their fun disturbed the other patients, who took dying more seriously. Every hospice should have a party room. Every funeral home, too. When I came home Saturday night, Betsy had a broken phone but a happy dog and three healthy siblings. I’m going to buy her a new phone; I’m going to pay for overpriced sushi; and I’m going to fatten up that little dog until he refuses to eat anymore. The conveyor belt of life never stops. You have to grab those little plates before they’re gone.Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.James This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jamesbreakwell.substack.com/subscribe