Zach to read new short story at “Afterbirth” show this Saturday!

Zach wrote and produced this piece for TBS Digital starring the Sklar Brothers.

Sklar brothers
By Zach Selwyn

My wife and I once hired a hippie nanny named Sioux who hid little bags of weed for me around our house. I remember the day we interviewed her – she was about 19, naturally slender with long blonde hair and she was wearing a skirt that looked like it was stitched out of the AIDS quilt… She had on Birkenstocks. She smelled like lavender. She was gorgeous. My first thought was, “I would have totally dated this girl back in college.”

I would have totally dated this girl back in college.

When you’ve been married as long as my wife and I have, the best way to say you think somebody is attractive is to say that you would have dated ‘back in college.’
Of course, I told my wife this very fact.
“Well keep your hippie dick in your jorts,” she responded.

I laughed. I love my wife. Meanwhile, after a few conversations, I was sold on Sioux to become our nanny for our then five and two-year-old kids… but my wife wasn’t so into it.

“I don’t know – she seems flighty,” she remarked.

“Cmon, what’s the worst that can happen?” I asked. “She gets high and eats all of our ice cream?”

My wife agreed, mainly because we had a wedding that Saturday night and our other go-to nannies were already busy.

“If she fucks up, that’s on you,” she said.

She didn’t fuck up. At least that first night. In fact, when we came back from the wedding a little buzzed from the wine, we stayed up late with her and talked about the kids, how hard it was to meet guys in Los Angeles and eventually, she secretly told me that she hid a tiny bag of weed for me underneath the sage candle she had lit to ward off bad spirits on the coffee table. As she left, I thanked her and imagined that if she was my age in 1995, we would have been one of those hippie power couples that I was always jealous of at Phish concerts.

My 1995 hippie dream.

The second time Sioux babysat, I casually came downstairs wearing my old Grateful Dead 1992 Spring Tour shirt. She went ape shit. Told me it was the coolest thing she’d ever seen. I immediately felt like Phil from Modern Family, pretending that I didn’t even know I had the shirt on… even though I had been calculating the move since the week before. From the corner of my eye I saw my wife shaking her head while watching my pathetic attempt to connect with Sioux over a t-shirt.

“Nice shirt, babe,” she said.

“I guess I’ll go get ready,” I added before running upstairs to change.

When I came back downstairs, Sioux had prepared some food for the kids (all macrobiotic) and smiled one of those young hippie smiles at me – as if we were college sophomores peaking during a Run Like an Antelope solo. My wife smiled at me. I smiled at my wife. She smiled at Sioux. I kissed my kids. Sioux leaned in and hugged Wendy. They separated. The kids ate. My wife watched me as I leaned in and hugged Sioux. As I did, I stupidly whispered a single word into her ear…

“Candle?”

Sioux smiled. My wife looked confused. I brought myself out of this fantasy hippie love triangle and said, “OK, bath at 7:15 and bed by eight.”

My wife and I walked outside to catch our Lyft.

In our ride to the birthday party that night, my wife cleared her throat and calmly asked me exactly what “candle” meant.

I told her.

“Last time she babysat, Sioux left me a part of a joint underneath the candle on the coffee table and I smoked it.”

“Oh great, so she’s high around our kids?”

“Well, I mean… so what? Sometimes I’m high around our kids.”

“This is her last night babysitting,” my wife said.

I could understand her frustration. It wasn’t because Sioux was this macrame Goddess with rings on her fingers and bells on her shoes… but face it – if your nanny was sneaking joints around your two-year-old daughter, you might think about getting rid of her too.

Still, I argued that we had nothing to worry about and that by the time we returned home, we would be thrilled to find our kids in bed and that maybe we could even split the little bag of weed I was expecting to find underneath the sage candle on our coffee table.

Until we got back around 11:45 p.m.

As it turns out, Sioux had started a bath for the kids upstairs… and forgot that she began running it. She turned on the water and then came downstairs to get the kids and somehow got distracted… By what, nobody knows – food? A text? A documentary on YouTube about the benefits of Dr. Bragg’s Apple Cider Vinegar? Whatever the case, she suddenly remembered that the bath was on just as drops of water began seeping through our living room ceiling and landing on the floor. The puddle stain on the roof was large and substantial and we knew we were looking at some serious water damage and mold repair.

Sioux was in shambles.

Our ceiling

As she tried to explain how she forgot to turn off the water, we examined the damage and quickly lost the hippie buzz we had all generated earlier. I informed Sioux that we would pay her for her time, but that we fully expected her to be responsible for the damages once we had the roof inspected. She agreed and left, her head hung low, embarrassed and ashamed.

“OK, so she was probably high and forgot about the bath,” I said.

“Ya think?”

Stupidly, I checked beneath the candle for some weed.

There was nothing.

The damage came to over 1000 dollars. Sioux was broke and we felt bad charging her, so she offered to babysit for free until she could pay us back. Amazingly in Los Angeles, that’s only like, five nights of work…

However, my wife and I chose to not use her again.

The last I saw on Facebook she was living in Oregon with a Spanish guy named Pau.

Lucky bastard… He was living my hippie dream…

Preview an upcoming song from Zach’s new album!

dad blog essays funny hippie girls hot hippies humor mom blog nanny national lampoon parenting short stories Zach Selwyn
Zachariah & the Lobos Riders

“Ghosts in This Guitar”

Skywriting (c) 2014 Papago Records
I moved to Hollywood in 1997 and was quickly initiated into the music scene, which at the time was hanging by a thread to a lost rock-n-roll dream that grunge had laid waste to a mere six years earlier. The glitz and glam of Sunset Boulevard had moved east – away from Gazzazri’s and their tasteless “hot body bikini contests” to more turtleneck and ponytailed night clubs like the Roxbury, where cocaine became less of a party drug and more of a designer hangover from the 1980’s. (Yes, the Will Ferrell-Chris Kattan sketch was based on a real place). MTV VJ Riki Rachtman and his Faster Pussycat partner Taime Downe had closed the Cathouse Club when the metal crowd aged out and the less-than-subtle meat market shoppers grew more comfortable in the darker corners of places like Johnny Depp’s Viper Room and Jon Sidel’s Smalls on Melrose. About the only remaining Sunset staples were the pay-to-play stalwarts that seduced high school bands from the Valley into bringing their friends to watch them hack their way on the same stages once shredded by Guns N Roses, The Doors and every cheese metal hair band with a name like “Durrty Toyze…”

So, at 22, new to Hollywood with a dream of fronting my own band and a love of all things Rock-n-Roll, I was intrigued by the Sunset Strip. I longed to see the Rainbow, flick a cigarette where Axl Rose did in the November Rain video and make my rounds through the streets where Nicolas Cage drove around in the film Valley Girl improvising lines about dudes getting mohawks from his buddy’s convertible. For a few months, I stumbled in and out of the fading bars like Dublin’s and occasionally chased women out of my league into the SkyBar and Argyle Hotel. I often caught glimpses of people like Dr. Dre, Vince Neil and Hugh Hefner only to end up back at my tiny apartment wondering if I would ever find my scene in L.A. After all, I had successfully traipsed through the bars of my MTV rock video youth, but I was certainly a good 10-15 years younger than the majority of women I chatted up at bars who often bragged to me that they had once dated C.C. DeVille before he had joined Poison.

On most of these lonely Los Angeles evenings in the late 90’s, my friends and I would end up back at some tiny apartment off of Fountain where some stranger we were partying with claimed he had a line on good weed… and we would make a call, page somebody and then wait for 45 minutes for it to show up. Most of the time it didn’t, because we were too drunk or high to figure out how to share directions so occasionally we would have to venture OUT to score the grass ourselves. Whenever we went to retrieve the dope, the scene often unfolded with two or three of us crammed in a smoke-filled hip-hop basement studio pooling together 60 bucks to buy a sack of weed from a crew of 11 guys with six loaded 9 millimeters on the coffee table. We’d pay and leave and feel like we just survived a bungee jump or something. Eventually, we would go home and smoke and drink and watch episodes of South Park. (Yes, that was still on back then.)

Alas, when the weed or the beer ran out, most nights ended up with the most sober member of our crew suggesting a quick trip up to the market for more supplies. After a bunch of cash and waiter tips were collected and handed over, we flipped a coin to see who would drive and we made our way up to the large, often-crowded grocery store located at 7257 Sunset Boulevard.

A place notoriously known as “Rock-N-Roll Ralph’s.”

Ralph’s grocery store is about the most basic, mid-range priced supermarket in the southern California basin. It is way cheaper than say, Whole Foods or Gelson’s, but comes with its own set of problems. It is much more crowded, much dirtier and offers low-level produce, terrible customer service and has a way more scandalous (if not homeless) clientele. This has been true since Ralph’s expanded its locations to over 200 in southern California and monopolized the market for well… markets. In Los Angeles alone, there are 22 Ralph’s Supermarkets at the time of this writing, and I have most likely set foot in every one of them. And the funny thing is? Some of these stores have been given permanent L.A. nicknames.

The Ralph’s grocery store at 260 S. La Brea Boulevard has been known as “Model Ralph’s” for decades. Located near where a number of modeling and commercial casting offices are, patrons of this establishment may be treated to seeing former Calvin Klein underwear models buying orange juice, cute actresses from Modern Family searching for organic eggs in yoga pants and even Flo the Progressive Insurance lady wheeling a cart full of frozen food towards the checkout stand. Most LA residents consider “Model Ralph’s” to be fairly safe and it boasts one of the city’s youngest clienteles.

Another Ralph’s on Los Angeles’ radar is located on Western Avenue and Sunset – and is referred to as “Ghetto Ralph’s” by all of the locals. This rodent-infested flea trap not only boasts of the worst parking lot ever designed by a human being, but it shares a building with a Ross Dress for Less upstairs where I once bought a single sock for 39 cents. “Ghetto Ralph’s” is also where I once witnessed a homeless man walk in, load up a full shopping cart with ten bottles of vodka and just WALK OUT, unscathed and ignored by security. As impressed as I was by his brazen activity, I eventually took my adult shopping back to the much cleaner Gelson’s up the street.

Then, down south of USC, where I went to college, there was a Ralph’s known as the, “Don’t Ever Go In There Ralph’s,” where the deli counter was operated by a woman who I once saw lose a hair extension into my container of potato salad.

So when I first heard of “Rock-n-Roll Ralph’s,” I was intrigued… What could be going on there? Was it like the Hard Rock Cafe of grocery stores? Full of gold records and live music and signed guitars from dudes like Don Dokken on the wall? Were rock stars drinking in there? It sounded interesting and somewhat dangerous. The store was up on Sunset, somewhat close to Guitar Center, Sam Ash Music, and the late Voltage and Vintage Guitars (both now vape shops). The Seventh Veil Strip Club, as memorialized in the Motley Crue song Girls Girls Girls, was within stumbling distance. The best thing was that it was far away from the spent casings of the Sunset Strip after-hours bars, where the ghosts of metal bands that once fired blanks into the Hollywood night aiming for world domination still believed that a deal with Mercury Records was one showcase at the Coconut Teaszer away. So, the first time I heard about “Rock-N-Roll Ralph’s,” I knew I had to check it out. I remember calling my new LA friend Reese, who had already slogged five years in the City of Angels, and asking him about it.

“Dude, it’s so bad-ass,” Reese told me. “Slash and Duff are there all the time, Sebastian Bach buys wine there, I heard Sheryl Crow gets her tampons there and I’ve seen Lemmy, Nikki Sixx and one of the Living Colour guys… I think”

“What do you mean you think?” I asked.

“Well, he was a cool looking black dude with spandex and dreadlocks and it was like two in the morning… of course that was like, three years ago.”

“What about tonight?” I inquired, the clock approaching 1:15 in the morning. “Do you think we can expect to see a rock star buying something if we go there now?”

“Hell yeah,” he said. “My girlfriend said Tommy Stinson was there two weeks ago.”

That did it. Tommy Stinson? Slash? Lemmy? I was never a HUGE hard rock fan, but I knew that LA was crawling with heroes of my youth and I was gonna be damned if I didn’t get a chance to run into some legendary guitar slinger while buying a 12-pack of Coors Light. Shit, with any luck, maybe I could get a guy like Tommy Stinson to come back to my apartment and jam with me… THAT would put my music dreams on the map.

So, Reese took me on my first trip to “Rock-N-Roll Ralph’s.” Forty minutes later, after wandering the aisles like a wide-eyed kid hoping to see a celebrity while on the Universal Studios Backlot Tour, I came to a rather jarring conclusion:

This place was simply a filthy grocery store.

Reese and I failed to run into ANYBODY remotely famous. The highlight of the evening was when the checkout guy told us that Adam Duritz had been in earlier that afternoon and bought a Honeybaked Ham.

The legend of “Rock-N-Roll Ralph’s” extends back to the heyday of the 1980’s Sunset Strip scene. Those years were documented by Penelope Spheeris when she turned her camera on the pretty boys and girls parading up and down the boulevard, preening and praying for a record deal to propel them onto the world stage. Re-watching The Decline of Western Civilization Part 2: The Metal Years in 2023 is a harrowing experience, for many reasons. The sheer amount of sexism, hedonism, desperation, alcohol abuse and unbridled debauchery is enough for you to question why you ever begged your mom for a Quiet Riot t-shirt back in 1983. But, what I admired more than anything, was that back then, these musician kids lived 10 to a room, in abandoned Hollywood warehouses and apartments. They were survivors. Dreamers. They were just like me, except that dozens of females in fishnets weren’t floating me cash to pay for cigarettes and rent for a rehearsal space. To survive, these future lords of Los Angeles would rummage through Hollywood and Highland BEFORE there even WAS a Hollywood and Highland, begging for change, turning tricks and selling homemade merchandise that allowed them enough money to get high, laid and yes… buy booze at “Rock-N-Roll Ralph’s” at closing time.

“Rock-N-Roll Ralph’s” was the type of place where the bag boys concealed tattoos beneath their aprons, the checkout dudes claimed that their band once “opened for Kix at the Roxy” and vixens casually dropped produce on the floor just to bend over in case a casting director was there scouting for the next Warrant video. It was the type of establishment where you could get 30 steps inside before being asked to put out your cigarette. You could shoplift a few batteries for the apartment boom box and not be questioned. It was the type of place where young starlets just getting off of the Greyhound from Indiana could get pregnant in the bread aisle.

Today, if you drive by the store, you will notice that they have embraced their history and Rock-n-Roll nickname. Someone high up on the Ralph’s food chain commissioned an artist to design a signature Les Paul ‘Ralph’s-logo’ guitar on the front door beneath a silhouetted rock band. This weird mural is an artistic homage to a lost time in this city and to the nickname given to a random grocery store by some long lost L.A. resident. There is one problem, however: Rock-n-Roll in Los Angeles hasn’t been Rock-n-Roll in a VERY long time.

Think about it. Since the Grunge revolution, can you name five ROCK bands that have come from Los Angeles and conquered the world? Are you still thinking about it? I thought so. That’s because there aren’t many. Maroon 5, love them or hate them, are the closest. Although they’ve adopted LA as a home, Counting Crows is technically a San Francisco band… and far from “hard rock.” Rage Against the Machine, Jane’s Addiction and the Red Hot Chili Peppers were able to carry the flame by being original enough to march forward and you can say the same for Beck. But after that, the city is awash with a cavalcade of one hit wonders like Foster the People, Incubus and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes.

The bottom line is that Hip-Hop is king. So, if I was the manager of “Rock-n-Roll Ralph’s,” I would tear down the silhouetted rock band and Ralph’s guitar and replace it with a logo of Kendrick Lamar spitting bars into a fucking champagne bottle.

A few days ago, I went up to “Rock-N-Roll Ralph’s” just to see if anything had changed. I passed through the guitar doors and inhaled the familiar unclean scents of rotting produce. I noticed how the prices had risen dramatically and I looked at some sale prices and perused the wine aisle, considering taking advantage of the ‘30 Percent Off if You Buy Six Bottles’ deal. I noticed a few neighborhood residents buying dog food and diapers and remarked how the interior hadn’t changed at all since I first went in back in 1997. I was disappointed. After coming to terms that this store was no longer something to be enamored with, I chalked it up with the rest of the long gone LA rock palaces. Somewhere in the trail dust of the mid 1990’s, “Rock-N-Roll Ralph’s” went the way of The Cathouse, Gazzari’s and the Starwood Club.

As to not look suspicious by wandering around the grocery store, I decided to get out of “Rock-N-Roll Ralph’s” for the final time. I grabbed a Kombucha and paid for it at the self checkout aisle before hopping in my 2016 electric vehicle and driving away to my two-bedroom home in the Valley.

Not very Rock-n-Roll at all…

(Check out the Ralph’s-inspired album cover of Zach’s single “Haven’t Seen Much Morning Recently”)

bukowski Comedy David Sedareis Guns N roses Hair Metal Hollywood hunter s. thompson Jonathan Ames Los Angeles Ralph's Rock N Roll Ralphs SHort storiy Zach Selwyn
https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=2515935575/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/tracklist=false/transparent=true/

americana freestyle hick hop Los Angeles Music Outlaw Country Selwyn ZAchariah Lobos Riders
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-3-scott-macarthur/id1217686743?i=1000383315241&mt=2

Kaitlin Olson Might Bang Missi Pyle podcast Scott MacArthur songs The Mick Zach Selwyn
Sadly, we had to postpone our summer shows – but we still have our merch! New T-shirts below! $25.00 – shipping included. DM z@zachariahmusic.com for info!

ALSO – our new EP CLOUD ROAD will be streaming everywhere in May 2020… HEADS UP! Early reviews have called it “Mac Miller meets Steve Earle.”We’ll take it!

See you in the FALL!

Z and LR!

chris kro Cloud Road Mac Miller Outlaw Country psyedelic country springsteen steve earle tour tucson Zachariah ZAchariah Lobos Riders
https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/13GPmO6r3oBc46TRpaeGNd?utm_source=generator

attack of the doc Attack of the Show Comedy funny improv Kevin Pereira Olivia Munn Zach Selwyn
I had been at the Great Wolf Lodge for roughly an hour when a drunk and angry ex-firefighter threatened to kick my ass at the indoor water park. He was pissed off at me for disrespecting the “sanctity” of the Great Wolf Lodge… I am 100 percent serious. Let me start at the beginning…

Spring Break. These are two of the most beautiful words in the English language… if you are a child. To parents, these words concur up feeling of hopelessness, anguish and despair. And for some reason? Today’s elementary school kids get two whole weeks off for “Spring Break…” TWO WEEKS! When I was a kid we got TWO DAYS. In college we only got a week. And as far as I recall, it wasn’t even a thing in high school.

But sure… the rigorous schedule of counting, handwriting and connect the dots can be so gruesome and torturous for a second grader – that a two-week vacation at the end of March is exactly what the school nurse ordered… So, if you’re like me, you suddenly begin scrambling to find activities for your kids to do during this gratuitous vacation. So, you make plans…

You drop $75.00 to go see shitty movies like Sherlock Gnomes.

You gain 12 pounds by not being able to go to the gym on your regular schedule. And, in some extreme cases, you agree to take your kids to the GREAT WOLF LODGE for two days…

Which is exactly where I found myself last week, riddled with anxiety as I nibbled on a chicken finger ten feet from a wave pool full of screaming children. Praying for death.

Welcome to the 10th Circle of hell.

If you have never heard of a Great Wolf Lodge, let me put it this way… Consider yourself lucky. With 13 locations across the country, the kid-friendly indoor water park is to people like me the end of the fucking world. Known for its indoor water park and “wolf-themed” decor, the franchise has drawn families from far and wide to spend their entire monthly paychecks on shitty food, arcade games and the guarantee that you will contract the Norovirus within three spins in the “Lazy River.”

I mumbled something under my breath as I loaded the car, preparing to journey down to the hotel with my wife, our second grade girl and my very unenthusiastic pre-teen who was pissed because he was missing roughly 48 hours of the video game Fortnite.

The drive down was actually somewhat exciting. I was anticipating the water park summer days of my youth, when I met a cute girl in line at the snack bar, chatted up an 8th grade crush and passed a Sony Walkman around with my buddies listening to Straight Outta Compton. Those days were nothing but innocent and fun… and I was hoping my kids might make some amazing memories of their own…

When we arrived, however, my entire demeanor changed. After looking for a space in the self-parking garage for 30 minutes, I was met with the sudden reality that there were a lot of people here during Spring Break. I mean, a lot of people. Like, thousands. And all of them had kids. Small, sweaty, stinky, gross, fat, weird, uninhibited kids…

My first moment of clarity happened when I was presented with a pair of felt “wolf ears” as I entered the lobby.

“HOWL you doing today!?” A bubbly 20-something dude named Bryan asked.

“PAW-SOME!!!” I responded sarcastically.

“Woah! Someone’s got the Great Wolf spirit!” He screamed. “AWWOOOOOOOO!”

I looked around at the hundred of fathers traipsing through the lobby wearing these ridiculous wolf ears… The looks on their faces all read the same: FAILURE.

There is a certain look a man knows when he runs into another man at a place like the Great Wolf Lodge. It is a look of defeat. Of mediocrity. Of deficiency. Like we all expected to be the dads who take our kids in Hawaii or something, but ended up at the Great Wolf Lodge in Anaheim. I recognized this look on every man’s face I encountered.

We checked in and got to our suite, which we were sharing with another family we knew from from LA. Everyone changed into bathing suits to go hit the indoor water park. A small part of me was hoping it would be a fun day, and after all, as long as they had a jacuzzi I figured I could kill a few hours relaxing and hanging out with strangers.

There was no jacuzzi.

And the water park was massive. And loud. And it smelled like feet.

“Daddy! Come in the lazy river with me!” My daughter squealed.

I took a deep breath and stood up. I took off my shirt and walked over towards the lazy river. The first thing I noticed about the water park was that somehow, I had THE BEST BODY THERE.

In my 42 years, I have never been the “ripped” guy at the pool. Ever. Even when I was 18 I had the beginnings of a dad bod and now, at my age, I had been keeping trim and eating well to the point where at the Great Wolf Lodge in Anaheim, California, I was a SWIMSUIT MODEL. Seriously. I was 30 pounds lighter than the average man. My wife, who has always been in terrific shape looked like Hannah Jeter posing for Sports Illustrated. We were “Anaheim 10’s…” and pretty proud of it.

This was the best body at the water park.

As I strutted around my new Adonis-like physique, I watched as my daughter slowly dipped into the lazy river among what seemed like hundreds of other kids. I put my leg in, noticed it was much colder than I had anticipated, and began walking around the river behind her.

And then some kid’s fleshy leg rubbed up against mine under the water. I froze. It was like in Star Wars when that Dianoga Monster rubs up against Luke in the trash compactor. A gross little bare human leg rubbing against my inner calf. I stopped to gather myself. I felt like a part of the #metoo movement. I was rattled… And then another kid wrapped himself around my chest for support as he floated by… I shuttered. Looking around, I suddenly became keenly aware of little yellow swirls of urine accumulating in certain areas. I also counted three loose Band-Aids and numerous clumps of hair floating in the water. A few more kids hit me with inner tubes as they raced by and finally, when a little girl wiped her snot off of her face and tossed it into the water beside me, my afternoon at the water park was OVER.

“Baby, I’m getting out,” I yelled as she floated down the river.

Her frown broke my heart, but the place was already too much for me. I was done. I had been at the Great Wolf Lodge for less than an hour.

The lazy river… Grabby kids, urine and hair clumps.

After drying off, I noticed the small line of men waiting for beer. I grabbed my “Wolf Band” which had my credit card and room number on it, and bought my first beer of the day. It was 3:30, but if I was going to get through this place, a buzz was certainly needed. Looking around, I noticed that day-drinking was certainly the norm here, like the way it is in airports when people order beers at 7:00 in the morning and nobody thinks twice about it.

After paying, I turned around, noticing three men behind me waiting for drinks. Two of them had “Lakeland County Fire Department” shirts on. The other was shirtless, proudly showing off a fading Tazmanian Devil tattoo from the early 90’s… I toasted the guys with my beer.

“Gentlemen,” I said. “What happened to us? We were all once virile men… with dreams, passions, desires… goals. NOW? We’re on vacation at the fucking Great Wolf Lodge. What the fuck, am I right!!?”

Suddenly, the shirtless man took a threatening step my way and got directly in my face.

“Are you disrespecting the LODGE, bro?” He asked in an accusatory way.

I wasn’t sure if he was serious. I laughed.

“Sounds like you are,” he continued aggressively, the vapor of liquor prominent on his breath. I felt scared. I backpedaled.

“No, man.. I was just, you know – joking-“

I was taken aback. If I said the wrong thing here, there is no doubt in my mind that this guy would start throwing punches. And whereas a pool fight might be the perfect excuse to get banned from the Great Wolf Lodge forever, I decided to lay off. Meanwhile, his friends tried to calm him down.

“Don’t get into another fight, Jim,” his friend told him.

Another fight? Holy shit… this guy Jim was out here kicking dad’s asses all day.

“No, man, I was just joking around, you know…” I mumbled.

“No, I don’t know, bro,” he said. “I’m a retired firefighter… I don’t back down from shit.”

And then, suddenly, there was an extremely loud wolf howl coming from the wave pool – This was the signal to swimmers that a fresh set of waves was about to begin… 200 kids screamed in delight as the call of the wolf echoed through the waterpark.

AWOOOOOOO! AWOOOOOOO!

“Ohhhh shit, what’s that?” I asked the guys.

“That means the waves are starting up…” Jim said. “That’s the call of the Lodge, bro… you better embrace your inner wolf… because like it or not? You made the decision to come here.”

He was right. I could make the most of this experience and embrace my inner wolf… or make myself suffer.

“Hey man, I’m sorry – it’s my first time here… I was just making a bad joke…”

Jim calmed down. His whole demeanor changed and he became aware that he was not in the octagon, but was at the Great Wolf Lodge. If he had wanted to kick my ass, he would have… but my honesty seemed to have chilled him out.

“Screw it,” he said. “Sorry to get up in your face, bro… come on, I’ll buy you a beer.”

Jim and his pals bought me another beer and I returned back to our deck chairs and told the story to my wife and her friend. They weren’t interested. They were concerned about something much more important.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

Apparently, another mom had just told my wife that Pink Eye was going around the lodge that weekend… The woman’s two kids had been infected on the water slide and her husband was in the hotel room with his eyes swollen shut.

“Welp, I’m fucking out of here,” I said.

I took my beer upstairs and went to the bar to watch a baseball game. As I walked back through the water park, I began observing a few things.

I never realized how many adults have tattoos of their children’s baby footprints.

I saw 35 of these tattoos.

I had no idea that BIG DOGS Clothing was still a thing. There were also a lot of “Exercise…Eggsercise…Eggs are sides… Eggs are sides for Bacon” t-shirts and ‘water pun’ shirts. Like a picture of a snail holding up a seashell to his face beneath the words “SHELL-FIE!”

Finally, the majority of these adults seemed fine eating garbage for breakfast, lunch and dinner. One dad in line at the snack bar even highly recommended the pork nachos.

I thought we were in Anaheim. Somehow we ended up in Wisconsin.

Upstairs, I found a few other dads watching the Dodgers game. I made some new friends – including a pest control guy from Alhambra and a Target general manager from Riverside. We drank a few beers and talked baseball. As a way to make my new pals laugh, I recognized Bryan, the same guy who had checked me in earlier, eating on his lunch break. I approached him.

“Hey Bryan, quick question… do they have a Great Wolf Glory Hole up in this piece?”

The bar got silent. My new pals hid their laughter. Bryan did not seem amused. Within 30 seconds the bar manager tapped me on the shoulder.

“Just a reminder, sir…” He warned. “This is the Great Wolf Lodge… not the Great Wolf of Wall Street Lodge.”

My afternoon concluded in the arcade, where the kids have given up on video games requiring any sort of skill in favor of games where you spin a wheel,… and win tickets. It’s not even a challenge. It’s just a prize wheel. When I arrived, I found my daughter hoarding what looked like 15,000 prize tickets.

“I’m saving up for the stuffed wolf!” She said. I saw the wolf on the wall. At any CVS store across the country, this dumb little stuffed animal would cost $3.99. My wife told me they had already spent $60.00 trying to win it. I went back to the bar.

These tickets cost us roughly $60.00

That night, after ordering pizza to our room, my wife and I shared some wine as the kids fell asleep. At that moment, we heard a rustling in the hallway. Peeking outside, I noticed two security guards dragging a very drunk man from his room.

“How long has he been drinking today?” They asked his wife, who looked terrified.

“Since brunch, I think,” she said.

“We’ll take him to the first aid area and get him some fluids… We’ll check back in 30 minutes.”

I asked the lady what had happened.

“It’s just my dumb husband… every time we come to this place he gets blackout drunk.”

“That makes two of us,” I said, raising my wine glass.

She shut her door on me.

The next day we were set to check out. I was excited to get home and back outside – as we had been indoors for roughly 18 hours straight. The Great Wolf Lodge is like fucking Vegas in that way. You have no reason to ever leave the place… I started packing and preparing to head back to LA.

“Wanna meet us at the pool?” My wife said.

“We’re not leaving?” I said.

“I figured the kids would want another day at the pool,” she said. “I mean we paid for it.”

And just like that, we did a second day at the water park. At this point I officially gave up. I began day-drinking at 11:00. I howled every time that dumb wolf noise started in the wave pool. I contemplated buying a Great Wolf Lodge t-shirt in the gift shop that was on sale from Halloween (Or as they put it… HOWL-ween…)

Deep down I knew that finally, I had reluctantly embraced my inner wolf.

I looked around the pool again. I was a little bloated from the first day and slightly hungover. I was no longer had the best body there. I was one day into my “Midwest” period.

I went over to our deck chairs and ordered the pork nachos…

WATCH ZACH’S NEW SERIES “ONE MINUTE MUSIC MINUTE” at OLE TV! @oletvofficial

amy adams amyschumer Anaheim beer Comedy essays family funny great wolf lodge humor Naitonal Lampoon norovirus pink eye Sedaris short story SNL steve martin water parks writing
Zachariah’s new song explores the corporate logo marketing travesty that all of us 90’s kids endure every time we see a Nirvana or Ramones shirt for sale in Target or Wal-Mart. Back in 1992 I had to go to the concert to buy a $30 shirt. Now the logo is on onesies.

DOWNLOAD SONG HERE! – https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/nirvana-t-shirt-single/id1035706248

dave grohl kurt cobain nirvana Ramones Zach Selwyn Zachariah t shirt