In case you haven't noticed, I'm a guy. And as such, my behavior is governed by a simple set of Guy Laws, most of which are concerned with fixing things that are broken, or breaking things that offend (the rest are generally centered around beer-guzzling ettiquette, comical farts, and creative use of fire accellerants). The Guy Laws have served the male end of humanity well for millenia, but like any system, they have shortcomings and incompatibilities with various phenomena encountered in the course of one's life. I was intimated with one such incompatibility recently, when my daughter Veronica came down with a cold.

I'm not talking about a mild case of the sniffles here; no, I am talking about 105-degree fever, wierd red spots from head to toe, and raging torrents of baby snot. Ronnie Lou was miserable, and as the only way for a 7 month-old to express her misery is to scream at the top of her disproportionately powerful lungs, Tobi and I were miserable as well. Actually, 'miserable' doesn't really capture the mood as well as 'scared four notches past batshit,' but I digress.

There is nothing more inexcusable in the Guy pantheon than to do nothing when you could be doing something, anything, to fix a broken situation. When something makes my daughter suffer, Guy Law is very simple and explicit in my directed course of action:

1. Identify the offender.
2. Find a bat.
3. Beat said offender into tiny, unrecognizable pieces.
4. Repeat if necessary.

While this procedure works perfectly for telemarketers, used-car salesmen and most home appliances, it is useless against an insensate microorganism that only knows how to reproduce and overrun its host environment, much like Pentecostals. My expertise on farts, beer and homemade napalm proved equally ineffective in the face of Ronnie's sickness, leaving me fully acquainted with the concept of impotent rage, which, it turns out, has nothing to do with angst over losing your erection.

A trip to the Children's Hospital, followed by a consultation with the drummer for Dr. Funk, who is also a pediatrician, led us to conclude that Ronnie needed little more than Tylenol, Motrin, some antibiotics, and a few days' worth of patience. While it felt good to finally do something to fix the problem, gently squeezing a tube of Infant Tylenol down Ronnie's gullet lacked the Guy panache and satisfaction of pounding someone's deserving face into gooey red mush, but no one seems to know who invented the cold. Here I am stuck with unrequited Guy Rage, even though Ronnie's rash, fever and screaming fits subsided days ago. I was genuinely concerned that I might lose my composure at any given moment and just randomly nut up on some poor bastard who just asked me if I had a light, until a more experienced (read: spear bald) father gave me a piece of excellent advice on my pent-up dyspepsia:

Save it for when she starts dating.

I'm sure I'll encounter many, many more daughter-related problems that I cannot solve through perfectly sensible Guy Violence. This will constantly add to my inner store of white-knuckle stress, so that the time Ronnie hits dating age (somewhere in her late forties), I'll be primed to meet her various and sundry suitors with a bloody axe and a drooly grin, because frankly, I will have lost my mind. I'm going to enjoy that phase of my life 'way too much, but I will have earned it.

It is statistically impossible to get from one end of your life to the other without doing something stupid. The trick to staying above the fray (by which I mean becoming a habitually stupid person) is to avoid an immediate follow-up with something even dumber. This is harder to achieve than you might think.

And I'm not talking 'wups, I thought that was black pepper' stupid. No, I refer to a life-perturbing act of self-impediment that will go down in the annals of friend and family folklore as "hey, you remember the time Clem set his own testicles on fire? And then blew up the east grain elevator?" Or something to that effect. Your name may not be Clem.

It's not that any of us are particularly dim; it's simply human nature to really screw the pooch and then run over it with the station wagon at least two or three times in our lives. It's happened to me, and it's probably happened to you as well. We can take comfort in the fact that it will probably happen again. Maybe 'comfort' is the wrong word.

Once an act of double idiocy has taken place, however, it is best not to stand around criticizing yourself and generally getting depressed about things, because, in all likelihood, you will have more pressing concerns to address anyway, such as where to hide the body, or aiming for a soft patch of ground before you lose consciousness. Trust me, you will have plenty of time to deal with critiques ("Why in God's name did you even have that much petroleum jelly in your bathroom in the first place?!") from every other person you talk to for at least the next three weeks, depending on the nature of your multi-gaffe and, if applicable, the blast radius.

Once the hubbub and ambulence sirens have subsided, the true test of your character lies ahead: moving on. Embarassing stains and bullet holes are far easier to mend than rips in the psyche, be they your own or to the poor bastards who saw you naked. Ultimately, you must try to resume your life, possibly with a new identity and in another country. You can do it, Bjorn.

As luck would have it, and only because I am so selflessly committed to the greater good, I have an example of my own:

Never slam your finger in a car door, but if you do, don't yank your hand back before -- and I can't stress the "before" enough -- re-opening said car door. You're welcome.

Our original intentions were to spend this, Tobi's first Mother's Day, up on the North Shore with the Clute clan, gorging ourselves on Mama Cronin's spectacular cooking. The weather was gorgeous, Tobi had made cookies (pecan sandies), Veronica was behaving well, and I was thoroughly suffused with the almost-smug sense of satisfaction that a man gets only when he knows he has accomplished manhood's prime directive (I made a baby with a pretty lady! Beer's on me!). As our Jeep trundled down the expressway towards the Lake Ponchatrain Causeway, it was as if I had found myself encased in a moving bubble of joy, a mobile perfect moment.

Then the CHECK GAUGES light came on.

Tobi was driving, and elected to get off the expressway at the first exit, which turned out to be the worst possible place you can go when your vehicle is not running well: City Park Avenue. The exit ramp spits you out  at a pit-like intersection, so that no matter which way you go, you're on an incline. Naturally, the Jeep chose this place to sputter and die. In the middle of traffic. We jumped out and started pushing, and with the help of a Good Samaritan who leapt out of his Wrangler and pushed from the back, got our dead and smoldering hulk out of harm's way. I'm pretty sure I heard him slam into the hatchback when Tobi leapt into the cab and hit the brakes, but he jumped back in his car and was gone before I could thank him and look him over for contusions. After waiting a while for the temperature needle to unstick itself from the "Holy Jesus" end of the gauge, I restarted the Jeep and managed to get us back home. From the ominous rattlings and smoke from the engine, however, I was convinced that I had killed the Jeep in the process.

Veronica slept through the entire episode.

Once the Jeep was cooled down enough to futz with, I checked all the fluids and found that our radiator (which we had just replaced three months ago) was empty, but I could find no signs of obvious leakage. My oil level was fine, so I refilled the radiator and took the Jeep for a short drive to see what would happen. It ran fine, and after conferring with my dad, it was decided that I probably have a bad thermostat. A sticky 'stat will stop the water from flowing around the engine, and will cause even a full and completely sealed radiator to bleed itself out. Fortunately, replacing it is a very simple and cheap affair.  I could even remove it from the water loop completely and the engine would run fine, which sort of makes me wonder what the hell it's doing there in the first place. It's like the appendix or wisdom tooth of an engine; it's not really necessary and when it goes bad, you have to have surgery.

But the real point of this story (Yes! There is one) is how I handled the problem when it arose. Rather than go my usual route when something like this happens (launch into a furious, apoplectic tirade detailing the various ways in which I will, with my bare hands and maybe a fender ripped off of the Jeep, kill the guy who sold it to Tobi, while she fumbles through the bathroom medicine chest for my blood pressure medicine and maybe some Thorazine for herself), I took comfort in the fact that I had at least gotten everyone home safely, and we didn't have to worry about towing the Jeep anywhere. We decided to make the best of what remained of our first Mother's Day by hanging out in the back yard with the dogs, relaxing and taking pictures of Veronica, who by the way loves to grab her dress and pull it up over her head like she's on Babies Gone Wild or something. I can't wait until she's old enough to start dating.

It's not just because I have high blood pressure that I need to take more situations like this in stride; to be frank, this is just a taste of what's in store for Tobi and me as Veronica gets older, smarter, and inevitably more troublesome. She is, after all, the daughter of two people who have lived full, colorful and often legally dubious lives, and she will in some way or another reflect us with the decisions she makes and the homemade explosives she builds. A heat-zonked Jeep in midday traffic may seem like a guaranteed embolism when it happens, but on the scale of things we could and probably will experience, it's really small potatoes. I need to be in a calm, collected state when my little peanut comes home with her first date and shows me the tattoos they got together at that dump on North Rampart (you know, the one where they clean their needles by wiping them on their armpits). Or when I get a call from the school saying that the Department of Homeland Security won't let my daughter near a chemistry set anymore.

Yesterday may have been Mother's Day, but this daddy was the one who got the most obvious lesson: calm the hell down.

When people go out of their way to make your life difficult just because they love to share the misery of their own pointless existences, it’s hard to remember that there are decent, compassionate people out there who will go just as far, if not much farther, to help put your life back on track again.

Take my friends Marianne and Robin, for instance. This mother-daughter duo would knit life jackets out of their own bellybutton lint with their teeth if that’s what it took to help Tobi, Veronica and me out of a jam. When the Gretna Police napalmed our Easter this past weekend, Marianne not only carted us all over the West Bank in hellish traffic, trying to get our Jeep out of impound, but she even loaned us the cash needed to pay off the DMV and the wrecking service (and by "service" I mean "syphillitic whoremonger"). Robin, who already volunteers nearly every spare moment she has to helping us take care of Veronica, was my ride home from work that horrible Friday afternoon.

Most people can’t get this kind of help and support from their own blood relatives. Indeed, Robin and Marianne have become closer to Tobi and me than a significant portion of our own families. They are possessed of a peculiar, gleeful selflessness that is tragically too rare nowadays. One of my greatest fears is that the world in all its self-centered ugliness will one day wear them down, but I suspect that they are made of stronger stuff than most people. They are two examples of everything that is right with humanity, and my adoration for them is surpassed only by my amazement at the sheer depth and power of their simple, undying love. I have spent the past 24 hours trying to think of a way to repay their kindness, only to realize that such things cannot be repaid, only passed on. I only hope I can live up to the standard these two magnificent women have set.

I would be neglectful if I left readers with the impression that these are the only two noteworthy friends I have; they aren’t. But they went ’waaay beyond the call of duty (something a lot of my friends do routinely), and I wanted to give credit where it was due.