It’s been a couple days now, and it keeps happening — and at the oddest times, too. Sometimes I can control it and sometimes I just let it happen, let the people on the subway stare. My breath hitches kinda funny, hiccups, and my throat and voicebox shake like a bus on a bumpy road. My eyes tear up every time and I’ve just sort of stopped wiping it away.

I can’t tell if I’m happy or sad when it happens, mostly I’m just swallowed up by the enormity of the feeling. It’s like being a particle of plankton and getting swallowed up by a gigantic, benevolent whale.

America elected Barack Obama to be the President of the United States on Tuesday night, and the emotional aftershocks just keep coming.

So along with the spontaneous, random sobs of joy and relief, I’m having this recurring hallucination. Or maybe it’s a daydream. But whatever.

Every time I see, hear, or imagine somebody doing something incredibly well, that person has Barack Obama’s head.

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Everything’s unwrapped, the champagne’s gone flat, and even the hangovers are over. While my holidays were full of warmth and good cheer and that uniquely Simmermon brand of stressed-out love, I’m glad to be entering that great grey yawn of real winter. Running around outside SUCKS until mid-April and when I have my daily panic that my life is slipping past, I can look out the window and feel fine about having a laptop strapped to my face. In the factory-blended oatmeal that is an East Coast winter, every numbing day that ends like all the rest is at least one day closer to spring.

My New Years’ was spent having cocktails and a home-cooked meal with my girlfriend, best friend, his wife, and their new baby. My New Years’ celebrations in years past have also involved copious amounts of booze, screaming and vomiting, but this years’ was different.

While the first decade or so of David Allen Browne’s life is going to be happy and full of love, he’s going to have no choice but to become grim, selfish and willfully ignorant in order to rebel against his hilarious, brilliant and loving parents once he hits puberty. Hopefully he’ll snap out of it before it’s time to take the SATs.

Christmas was different, too. I brought my girlfriend home, for one thing. It’s a big deal for me to bring somebody home for a number of reasons:

• My sister and I have pretty well inoculated our parents against cultural/racial hangups, accidental profanity, body art and punk-influenced fashion choices … all known causes of heart failure to conservative parents. My mom can even say “fuck” without making a face now. But my family can smell a bullshit heart from a running mile, and the false politeness that ensues is deeply embarrassing. Nobody makes it across the threshold of the Simmermon unless they’re top shelf for real.
• Also, my grandmother kind of hates anyone that me and my uncle have ever dated. She comes around eventually, but I can take no responsibility for any eye-rolling, interrupting, or ignoring until she does. Folks that can’t handle it don’t make the cut.
• The relationship must be about much more than the physical. As I mentioned before, my family can sniff out a bullshit heart. In a small house with two parents, a sister, two lively and curious dogs and a “no ring, no shared bedroom” policy, that physical side is going to have to take a little holiday of its own.

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Behind that adorable black face, behind those sweet mournful eyes lies the soul of an unapologetic shit-eater.

For real.

That is not a metaphor. She’s gone from stealing fruitcake and puking it under the tree last Christmas to full-blown coprophagia, gobbling it right up from between dead leaves on the ground at night. Cold and hard or piping hot and still steaming, she doesn’t care and she does it quick, too, too quick to catch sometimes. She just can’t help herself.

Layla’s my sister Jess’s dog, half-beagle and half lab with incurable separation anxiety. She was taken from her mother too young, and consequently has massive incurable anxiety. Jess has tried training camps, reading dog books, everything. Nothing works. Every time Jess is gone for a little while, Layla overindulges in something she shouldn’t: fruitcake, shoes, a purse, now fecal matter.

All training methods exhausted, my sister now just spoils the dog completely rotten, talking to her in a high, squealing voice, carrying her in her arms like a large infant and allowing the dog to “kiss” her directly on the lips.

A few weeks ago, Layla vomited a five-inch turd onto my parents’ living room carpet. My mom called Jess up immediately to report the news, saying only

“Your dog has vomited a massive turd onto the carpet. Yes, a turd. Go ahead and let her lick your lips again. As a concerned mother, I hope you’ve got good health insurance,”

and hung up.

Such was the climate of the household this Thanksgiving. Everyone was exhausted and frustrated with this new habit, this repugnant fetish for a newly repulsive creature that’s far too cute to kick.

Jess and I spent Thanksgiving day over at my aunt and uncle’s taking care of my grandparents. They moved in sometime last summer for a few weeks while my grandpa recuperated from an operation, and it’s become clear that they’re in no shape to live independently. My grandpa’s 88 years old with congestive heart failure, kidney failure and diabetes. He needs a walker to get around now and can’t lift his legs by himself.

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You may have noticed this site loading slowly and crashing a lot this afternoon. That’s because at some point today, my post about the nastiest pizza in the world hit the main page of Fark.com. It had already been a busy week, as apparently a LOT of people wanted to have a look at this thing. It’s been linked all over the Web for the last few days, and the traffic has been staggering, at least for me.

Have a look:

It blows my mind, really. I revamped this thing to try and get some traffic, slap some ads on here and maybe get a little cash for my obsessions. But man, overnight? I know this is all going to die down in a few days, but right now, it boggles the mind.

I’ve done so much writing on here, so much original photography, etc. And it just amazes me that these photos (which are admittedly pretty cool and nasty) would have this much appeal. But man, you never know what you’re going to get when you get what you think you want — and you never know where you’re gonna be when the lightning strikes.

So yeah, in a nutshell:

1) Sorry about the slow page
2) but it was for a really good, exciting reason
2) one you look past the fact that it was just about some junk food.

I’m sure things’ll be back to normal next week.

I’ve written about my mother on here before — and words are really failing me here. But this is my mother on her wedding day. I think she is younger than I am now:

In this photo, my mom is actively teaching me how to love the way she does: the right way. She hasn’t stopped. And in return, I haven’t stopped being grateful.

I went home this weekend to visit my mom and grandma … my mom’s mom. We took my grandparents out for ice cream, which holds special significance for me. It was perfect. The day was sunny and warm and my grandpa was feeling good, which had my grandma feeling great. Daro’s a bit of a pistol, and she’s not afraid to just touch somebody’s motorcycle when she’s in a good mood:

The ice cream parlor had sugar-free butter pecan ice cream, which thrilled my grandpa no end. My grandma tore up her sundae, too. Here’s my mom and grandmother enjoying their ice cream:

It’s more or less impossible to shop for my grandma. She’s got her husband and kids that happily take care of them both — no replacing that. But there’s a million reason her kids and grandkids want to take care of her, and I thought I’d share one of mine.

In 1984, I made the severe mistake of reading the Creepshow comic book, written by Stephen King and illustrated by horror master Bernie Wrightson — to my fragile little mind, the most compelling and terrifying stack of paper and staples ever created. Now I love that stuff, but at that time, bedtime was freaking CANCELLED until further notice. My grandmother, in her wisdom, slept in my room every night for a week until I could settle down, even though she knew I knew I had brought that terror on myself.

Love, real love, is made of a million tiny kindnesses that the giver forgets immediately and the recipient always remembers. I wrote down my memory of that event for my grandma and gave it to her for Mothers’ Day — you can see it here if you want:

There’s no real conclusion, no big thought to wrap this up. Just love and gratitude, which anyone know are way too big for a tight closing sentence.