Man of the House: Being the fall guy for autumn in suburbs

For me, exasperation is a form of exercise. You should’ve seen me at the soccer game Saturday, big gasping breaths as if drowning. I recommend it to anyone looking to lose a few pounds while tiptoeing the fine line between sanity and suburbia.

“You look like you’ve lost weight,” our friend Barbara said after the game.

“I’m mostly wasting away,” I explained.

“You look good,” she said.

Thanks.

The team performed well, except that in the second quarter I realized that my players seemed unable to run sideways. They performed only forward and back, a broken waltz.

One defender, propelled by a sudden attack of gas, actually left the Earth during a clearing kick. Again, he did not move laterally, only forward. We’re going to work on that Thursday in practice, this technique of moving side to side. Naturally, we’d like to use our gas attacks as effectively as possible.

Speaking of exasperation, another good source of this is college kids.

The other day, I did a very brave thing: I had an opinion. I even voiced it, which is really going out on a limb in our house. Personally, I’d rather tumble off the roof than argue with another female.

The issue: Who was paying for the college girl’s weekend trip, where word had it she and a couple of her sorority types were shacking up in some fancy Chicago hotel?

So, I politely inquired, “WHO IN GOD’S NAME IS PAYING FOR ALL THIS?!!” knowing full well that I was, but you know, just asking, because I love to see their pupils dilate when they’re lying.

We seem so clueless sometimes, dads do, so beaten down by children and the fickleness of this year’s NFL outcomes. (My bookie won’t even return my emails.) But a lot of dads are paying more attention than is generally believed.

“Hey, do you know who’s paying for all this?” my buddy Eugene asks over the phone.

Eugene’s daughter is also going, the beautiful and quiet Quinn. But as we all know, still blonds run deep.

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I’ve experienced some scary things in my life — car crashes, natural disasters, William Shatner singing. But nothing prepares you for autumn in the suburbs.

There is a pile of costumes on a chair in the living room, meaning that either Halloween is approaching or someone is planning a major bank heist. Secretly, I’m hoping for the heist.

“Um, ouch.”

“What, Dad?” says Darth Vader.

“Why did you clunk me with your lightsaber?” I ask.

“I really can’t see that good,” Darth Vader explains from behind the heavy mask.

Notice that there is no “sorry” in his answer. I guess when you’re Darth Vader, you don’t need to apologize. You just plow through life, clunking things with your lightsaber.

So the little guy is trying out the pile of costumes that the leggy dentist dropped off, her son having outgrown them. The little guy is in Halloween heaven, trying out a Superman, a cowboy, a ninja, a Peter Pan.

“One Peter Pan per house, please,” my wife, Posh, announces.

Hysterical, huh? The bludgeoning implication is that I’m some sort of Peter Pan, just because I still wear Scooby-Doo underwear — not every night but enough.

In fact, I’ve come to terms with middle age. It really is the greatest age of all.

Last weekend, just to remind ourselves of where we are in life, a bunch of the other dads and I played our traditional touch football season opener. You know, just to pinpoint the places where we’re really old.

I mean, we all know our knees aren’t what they used to be, but to determine exactly where the arthritis is settling in, there’s nothing like running up and down a field at three-quarter speed with a bunch of other dunderheads. Like the soccer players, we tend not to move laterally.

Poor Matt, on the third play — while trying to blast free of a defender — he tears the Achilles right off his heel. The tendon hovers in the air there for a moment, laughing at him, like a soul leaving the body after death.

It was so serious, none of the other players even made fun of him. It was so serious, we even let him use the beer ice to ice it down — which violates about 14 bylaws of our touch football league. Don’t mess with the beer ice.

On Thursday, he had surgery.

Which is nothing compared with what happened to me when I asked Posh if she could wash the team jerseys, still sweaty days later and carrying a funky dad musk — motor oil, plus soggy cigar stubs, plus decaying human flesh.

A good stench, obviously. The scents of autumn.

She didn’t greet this as eagerly as you might hope.

chris.erskine@latimes.com

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