See the guy in the middle up there with the big guns and the buzz cut? That’s Trent Reznor, the mastermind behind the industrial-rock juggernaut known as Nine Inch Nails.

I am quite fond of Mr. Reznor and his music. (This is what we in the writing business refer to as “an understatement.”)

His first two albums, “Pretty Hate Machine” and “Broken,” were the soundtrack to my early ’90s “Women were created by the Devil and he has instructed them to rip your still-beating heart from your chest, throw it to the floor and dance a little jig on it” phase.

His tour behind 1994’s “The Downward Spiral” included a career-making performance at Woodstock ‘94, during which he and his bandmates threw the entire three-day event over their collective lap, spanked its ass red, grabbed it by the hair and dragged it away like a caveman. I was there. It was that good.

Over the past two decades, I have probably been to a couple hundred concerts. NIN’s June 2000 tour stop in Phoenix — part of the group’s roadtrip behind 1999’s “The Fragile” (a two-disc album to which the word “masterpiece” can safely be applied) — ranks in the Top 3.

Trent takes his damn sweet time between albums. There was a six-year gap between “The Fragile” and last year’s “With Teeth.” During those six years, I cultivated many a contact in the music industry. And so it was with great joy that I landed a pair of free tickets to his most recent concert in Boston.

The night finally came. The seats were terrific. The lights went out. The group hit the stage.

Unfortunately, the aforementioned group was this one:

I have always sucked at math, but, even with that handicap, I am willing to go out on a limb and say that the odds of Nine Inch Nails and The Wiggles choosing the same night of the same year to perform in the Boston area are somewhere in the neighborhood of a bazillion to one.

Seemingly slimmer still were the odds that my head wouldn’t detach itself from my body, blast itself into orbit and explode like a confetti bomb over the prospect of missing the NIN gig in order for Wonder Woman and I to take our resident Wiggle-a-holic to his first concert. But, lo and behold, not only did I not mind (too much) … I actually had fun.

And this, boys and girls, is called “parenthood.”

231.) DO NOT assume that your wife won’t mind you posting on the Internet details about her personal life—such as a sarcastic and mostly unpleasant account of your Valentine’s Day experience.

232.) If you should choose to disregard No. 231, DO NOT include in the sarcastic and mostly unpleasant account of your Valentine’s Day experience a passage in which you cynically describe the act of buying your wife Valentine’s Day cards on behalf of her young children as an exercise in which you and she “pretend” that the children got her cards—especially when you’re writing about the fact that you forgot to get her those cards.

233.) Too stupid to heed the advice put forth in Nos. 231 and 232? Well, then DO NOT be surprised at how much of a total and utter heel you feel like when your wife, after reading your Valentine’s Day narrative, describes to you how the card that she bought for your 2-year-old son to give to you was one that “he picked out by himself at the store and asked [her] to read to him a dozen times, and then scribbled his ‘name’ in all by himself while telling [her] that the scribbles said, ‘Dear Daddy, Happy Valentine’s Day. I love you. Zan.’”

233a.) Seriously, dude. Trust me, you will feel like a gigantic turd if it comes to that.

WARNING: If you are actually dumb enough to let things progress as far as item No. 233, you better hope to hell you at least remembered to get her a card and some roses.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, that’s good to hear, because I’m much too tired to write now that all the excitement of good ol’ St. Valentine’s Day has worn me down to a nub.

Yes, the air at Maison de Scratches was thick with romance. Highlights included me forgetting yet again that I am supposed to purchase Valentine’s Day cards that my wife and I can pretend are directed to her from our toddler son and infant daughter. Unfortunately, my Cro-Magnon-like brain continues defaulting to the concept that Valentine’s Day is all about wooing your sweetheart—which is fine, unless your sweetheart is expecting to receive cards from her toddler son and infant daughter. It does not improve matters if your sweetheart remembers having the same conversation with you last year.

Hey, nothing that a little wine, candlelight and the smooth sounds of Barry White can’t fix, right? Unfortunately, we had none of the above, and instead were serenaded with a lengthy cacophony of shrill screaming courtesy of the aforementioned infant daughter, who usually would have been slumbering oh-so peacefully, but whose sinuses are glued shut thanks to yet another winter cold, and whose first teeth are taking their damn sweet time breaking through her insanely sensitive gums.

We eventually got her settled down … but not before one normally level-headed woman had smashed to death the expensive (albeit shitty and unreliable) universal remote control that works the TV, TiVo, DVD player and stereo receiver—in other words, the most important item in the house. To be fair, the remote sealed its own fate by choosing to showcase its shittiness and unreliability at the same moment that the person holding it was beginning to bleed from the ears due to the sustained, knife-like screams of the baby in her arms.

So, rather than write about all of the steamy, sultry and sensuous goings-on here at the Love Shack, I figured I’d give you a post-blizzard glimpse of my backyard, evidence that The Perfect Storm did, in fact, lay the smackdown on us.

fa·nat·ic / fəˈnatik/
• n. a person filled with excessive and single-minded zeal, esp. for an extreme cause.
∎ inf. a person with an obsessive interest in and enthusiasm for something, esp. an activity: a fitness fanatic.

2.) a person (usually a New Englander) for whom the phrase Truck Day actually a.) has specific meaning, and b.) is cause for genuine excitement.

Without going into detail, I will tell you that my part of your conception was fairly weird. It involved first being alone in a room at the doctor’s office, and then being fully clothed at the moment you were actually conceived. Not exactly the route I had hoped to take.

As I gazed out the window today and took stock of my sunlit and snow-free backyard, I thought to myself, “By golly, what a mild winter we’re having. Just look at my backyard. It’s sunlit and snow-free.”

Within hours, I saw this:

Oh goody.

It would appear that Jack Frost is about to lodge his boot firmly in the East Coast’s collective ass.