Is it thinly veiled homophobia?

Can anybody explain to me why so many parents have such a stick up their ass over their kids climbing up the slide? Go to a park sometime. I guarantee within five minutes you'll hear, "No no, honey, slides aren't for climbing... No, no, honey, we only go down the slide." or some variation therein.

Seriously my-generation, did you read some study that I somehow missed? Why are you so afraid of your kid going (gasp) the wrong direction on a slide? I understand if there's actually another kid at the top waiting to slide down. But barring that, they ain't gonna pop the tires.

Coolness and puke do not mix

Everyone knows that becoming a parent changes you, often in ways you never expect. First of all, whether you know it or not, whether you accept it or not, once you have a kid, you are no longer cool. It just doesn’t happen. You can try and hang onto it, try and tell yourself and others, “Hey, I’m still the same guy I was before,” but no, it’s gone. All of it. The only thing to do is to reinvent yourself as a different kind of cool. You know the kind of cool where you know lyrics to Laurie Berkner and High School Musical songs. Nick Jr. cool.

Still the thing that changes most once you become a parent, is your level of tolerance for gross things. You obviously have to get past what a normal person’s gag reflex would be since you’ll be changing about nine thousand diapers per week. But it doesn’t stop there. What ends up happening is that grossness actually becomes a matter of convenience. That’s why you see mothers upending their infants, putting a nose to their diaper and sniffing. It’s just faster and easier to smell for poop than to undo a onesie, pull back the elastic on a Huggies and check to see if there’s something inside. When you see a dad pick a booger out of his toddler’s nose, the ick factor is simply more convenient than searching the house for one of those little bulb suction thingies—which said toddler probably hid inside the VCR anyway. This elevated yuck threshold obviously goes hand-in-hand with the loss of coolness I mentioned, because you simply cannot be cool while sniffing a person’s butt on a daily basis. It just doesn’t happen.

But this grossness thing reached new levels of abominableness when my entire family was recently sick with the flu. On one of those fun-filled nights my one-year-old, Jesse threw up on Lauren. But he didn’t just throw up on her. He threw up on her while he was nursing. You get that? He threw up… on her breast. This wasn’t just some relatively harmless baby spittle. This was full on, chunky, stomach flu ralphage. And do you know what Lauren’s response was? After her initial, knee-jerk, “aw gross” reaction, she quickly composed herself and said, “Okay, well at least it didn’t get on the couch.”

The couch? She has vomit on her boobs and yet she’s happy because it didn’t get on the couch? That’s how far we’ve come as parents—getting thrown up on has somehow become the preferable alternative to something else. When the hell does that happen anywhere else in life? Short of getting killed by an axe-wielding psychopath, how is getting thrown up on not the worst possible outcome of any social situation? I mean imagine you’re walking through the ethnic foods section of the supermarket and some guy just walks up and blows chunks all over you—lifting up your shirt and exposing your chest before doing so of course. Could you ever find a silver lining in that? Yet somehow, as a parent, having somebody puke all over your bare naked BOOBS is actually seen as a somewhat positive thing!

Man, I really hope my kids grow up to be rockstars because it would be a shame for them to siphon so much coolness out of me and Lauren and not put it to good use.

Mo-o-om... Marvin keeps taking my miles!

My family recently booked a flight on US Airways. A few days later I got an email from them encouraging me to sign up for their “Dividend Miles” club. The basic gist of the email was, “Hey, if you sign up right now you can still get these miles.” But they didn’t stop there. The email continues on to say, “If you don’t sign up right now, we’re going to give your miles to Marvin!” I’m sorry, but why should that be the detail that ultimately convinces somebody to sign up for this program? If you’re not inspired enough to earn frequent flier miles for yourself, why should losing them to “Marvin” (swear I’m not even making that name up) in any way sway your decision?

Apparently US Airways is trying to appeal to the three-year-old sensibilities in all of us. I can’t tell you how many times my daughter and niece—who are three and four respectively—have broken down crying simply because one of them wanted to play with a toy that the other one already had. “Mommy, I want the Littlest Pet Shop Bulldog!” Mind you, the crying child wanted nothing to do with that stupid bulldog thirty seconds ago, but now that her cousin has decided to play with it, that is suddenly the only thing on earth that could ever possibly make her happy. You can try distracting her with food, movies, other toys, but no. As long as her cousin continues to possess a bulldog that should have been hers, nothing else will make her happy. The three-year-old mantra seems to be: “I don’t want this. I don’t want that. I want what YOU have!"

I guess we never really grow out of that. That’s where the whole “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality derives from. Your big screen standard def TV was just fine two years ago until everybody around you started buying plasma HD. Now, god forbid they have something you don’t have. US Airways understands this mentality better than we do apparently. And the thing is, I’m almost certain the scare tactic works amazingly well on their customers: “Oh god no! I can’t imagine that I’ll ever fly enough to make these Dividend Miles worth the effort of signing up, but damnit I will not let that bastard Marvin (who might actually find some use for them) get his grubby little hands anywhere near my miles.”

Well hey Marvin, you can have our miles. I don’t think my three-year-old is going to notice.

At my feelers, unleash hell

As a father, I am really really looking forward to the age where ant farms become appropriate toys. I loved my ant farm as a kid and I can’t wait for the excuse to have one again. For the uninitiated, a typical ant farm consisted of two-panes of glass (or plastic) spaced a couple of centimeters apart which you filled with soil from your yard. You’d go gather up about twenty or thirty ants from the same colony and transport them home in a peanut butter jar. After jimmying them one-by-one into the ant farm with some food (the instructions suggested sugar water curiously enough) you’d just sit back and let them go to work for about a week, digging tunnels and settling into their new home. After that the real fun would begin.

You’d start by going out and collecting about twenty ants from a different anthill. Your next move was really a matter of taste. You could drop all twenty of the rival ants into the ant farm at the same time and watch as both sides fought to the bitter violent death, leaving behind only one or two befuddled sentries. On the other hand, you could drop them in two or three at a time and watch as the colony ganged up and tore them to pieces. Occasionally, one of the intruders would put up a good fight and take down a couple of the ravenous mob (especially if you were lucky enough to find a colony of red ants), but in the end he was still inherently doomed.

This was the way I chose to put my rival ants to work. I’d gradually up the number of intruders over the course of an hour or so, giving my colony plenty of practice against increasingly difficult odds. Then, after I felt that all of my little six-legged soldiers had been sufficiently trained up in the art of war, I’d give them a real challenge. I’d go out and find myself a big freakin’ SPIDER and drop that into the farm. Here’s where the action really got interesting. Unlike ant-on-ant battles, which pretty much always came down to whoever had the bigger army, you never really knew how a spider would fare against an entire colony. A spider is obviously big enough and tough enough hold its own against four or five ants at once. And if he positions himself properly the narrowness of the tunnels can actually work to his favor, preventing the ants from swarming him in numbers he can’t easily handle. But ants are nothing if not coordinated. It all boils down to how fast they can rally a multi-pronged attack, sending flanking units to the surface to come around and attack the spider from behind. Once the ants can pin down the intruding monster on both sides, forcing him to split his attention, it’s only a matter of time before they get past his long legs and onto his back. After that, the outcome of the fight is pretty much a foregone conclusion. Now it’s just a matter of how many ants the spider will be able take down with him.

When people think of little boys and ants, they usually conjure up images of us incinerating them with a magnifying glass, or dousing them with gasoline. They really don’t give us enough credit. We came up with way way way more f---ed up ideas than that. Ant farms gave us a staging ground to recreate the Roman Coliseum! We made countless drones fight for their lives purely for our own amusement. We let swarms of opposing armies slaughter each other just to see who would come out on top. We put trained fighters into the ring with the equivalent of Bengal tigers just to see how many would die before vanquishing the beast

Now I know what you’re thinking: serial killers in training. But trust me, no mass murder has ever wasted his time executing insects. They killed cats and dogs and birds and things. Things with faces. Things with personalities. Things you can love, sympathize and identify with. But who ever identified with a freakin’ ant? And I mean a real ant, not that cute puppet thing from Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Sure we were messed up. All boys are. But hey, at least we purged our homicidal curiosities on creatures that everyone kills on a daily basis. Is it really so messed up that we got additional entertainment value out of it? And is it really so messed up that I can’t wait to share that joy with my son?

Mothers, please don't beat your babies

Allison and I were just chillin out tonight, listening to the Happy Feet soundtrack while we cleaned up her room, when she suddenly says: "This is the one where they don't beat baby girls."

That made me stop for a second. I was trying to remember a place in the movie where the penguins beat up the baby penguins. I know there was a part where the dad was worried that he'd drop an egg. But I don't remember them actually beating one of the babies.

"When do they beat the babies?" I ask.

"No they don't beat the baby girls I said."

I crinkled up my forehead trying to think what the hell movie she could possibly be talking about when I realized which song was playing. It was Nicole Kidman singing the Prince song, "Kiss." And that's when I realized what the first line of the song might sound like to the unfamiliar brain of a three-year-old: "You don't have to be rich to be my pearl," becomes:

"You don't have to beat baby girls."

Now my question is this: Is it weird that Allison understood that as a perfectly innocuous line?

Shooting little people RULES!

Damn I'm whooped. The fam and I just got back from a place in Pennsylvania called Peddler's Village. It's a very toursity place to go and buy lots of crap that you don't really need. Fortunately we didn't go for that reason. They also have a mini-amusement place there for kids called Giggleberry Fair which consists of a merry-go-round, a playroom full of dress up clothes, musical instruments, puppets, etc... But the coup de gras at this place is "Giggleberry Mountain" which is a GIGANTIC contraption made of nets, ropes, tubes, slides, and anything else you can imagine a kid might want to climb. It goes up for six stories!

Lauren and I took turns following Allison up and down this monster obstacle course. I've gotta say this about my kid: that girl is STRONG. She's climbing from level to level like it's nothing, often using nothing more than arm strength to hoist herself up. Because the place was built with little people in mind, it seemed to be harder on the adults than the kids and Allison was often having to wait up for US.

BUT, the best damn thing about this whole place, the thing that makes ME want to go back again and again: on the bottom two levels of Giggleberry Mountain are a series of air canons for firing little NERF-like balls, of which there are literally hundreds scattered here, there and everywhere. On the lower level there are canons that fire large volumes of balls up into the air and on the second level are swivel cannons that you use to fire at opponents on the other side of the well. Or you can do what I did and fire down into the well... into the crowd.

The best part is firing on those kids who have just walked in and don't quite realize what the room is all about. Out of nowhere a little ball suddenly plunks them in the head. They look up like, "What the fuck was that?" When they shrug their shoulders and look away, you blast them again. Seriously, how awesome is that? Where else in America can you go where it's actually okay, and even ENCOURAGED, that you shoot little kids in the head? Nowhere, that's where!

And I just want to say that I think I earned the title of "Funnest Grownup on the Muthafuckin Planet" tonight. Most parents were only shooting at their own kids. Well, my kid was off with her mother climbing nets. So I just started unloading on anyone who was at least six-years-old and within the lateral range of my cannon. At first they'd be like, "Holy crap, was that an adult who just shot me?" But after the second or third direct hit, they smartened up and started returning fire. By the time we finally moseyed on out of this place, I had a good twenty kids all ganging up to blast me with cannons or, when that failed, flinging them like baseballs and cheering like Mardi Gras whenever they pegged me in the face. No kidding, almost every single kid in that well was ignoring every other person at every other cannon and focusing all their firepower on me. It was like being on American Gladiators where I was the Gladiator.

It... was... AWESOME!

My Daughter: The Bad Influence

It’s amazing how ten minutes in kid world can so often become a microcosm for life in general and, if you look hard enough, a fast forward glimpse into what these little rugrats have in store for you. Lauren and I recently took the kids down to the pool for an afternoon and Allison made friends with a little boy who was there with his mom. At three years old, Allison has pretty much grown used to always being the youngest kid in a group, but this boy was only two and it was obvious from the first moment that he was in love with Allison and would follow her anywhere. Allison must have sensed this too, because she almost immediately began testing his loyalties.

Standing on the side the two of them would talk for a second, then Allison would spontaneously announce, “I’m going over there,” and run to the other side of the pool. The little boy would have a moment of hesitation where he would look at his mom who was standing in the water, then at Allison who was beckoning him from twenty feet away. Then, making the hard decision, he would run, with many looks back, to Allison. His mom and I would swim our way over to the two chatting kids just in time to hear Allison once again announce that she was going to go back over there and run in the direction from whence we had all just arrived, forcing the little boy into another hard decision.

Personally, I didn’t mind shadowing Allison all over the pool – that’s why we had come down here after all – but it was apparent this boy’s mom was tired and really didn’t feel like swimming back and forth just to follow her son while he followed a girl. When she and Lauren struck up a casual dialogue earlier, we’d learned that she had just had another baby about six weeks before and this was one of the first times she’d been able to get out of the house. But it was apparent her little boy was indeed prepared to follow Allison no matter how many times she ran away from him. And the more Allison scurried away, the less he looked to his mom for approval before pursuing. Sensing the mom’s lack of energy, I suggested to Allison that we stay in one spot. Not to be deterred, Allison immediately changed tactics and began subtly taunting her new little friend.

“How old are you?” she asked, knowing full well what the answer would be since she’d asked the same question a half dozen times already. It took the younger boy a few seconds to formulate his words and position his fingers into the correct number of digits to say, “I…two!” Allison would immediately shoot back, “Oh well I’m three!” After about the tenth round of this exchange with Allison asserting her numeric superiority, the boy actually started lying to sound better. “I…tree!” he said. Allison, knowing better (and knowing full well what she was doing I might add) would mock, “You’re not three! You’re two! I’m three!”

The mom, trying to keep her part in this whole thing as jovial and non-confrontational as possible stuck up for her son with a lame, “Oh he’ll be three in a few months won’t you buddy.” Allison looked at her, considering this for a moment, then looked at the boy and decided to taunt him another way. “That’s my daddy,” she said, pointing to me. “Your daddy’s not here.”

Oh crap. My stomach dropped. In five minutes time, she’d already progressed from a coy little game of cat and mouse, to throwing veiled insults at the boy, to now throwing veiled insults at his family. I was honestly rendered speechless. I couldn’t see scolding her over this. It was a perfectly normal three-year-old conversation topic after all and she wasn’t outwardly, blatantly mocking this kid by any stretch. But I knew better. We all did by this point. This wasn’t a mere casual observation on Allison’s part. It was a well-calculated dig hidden behind the mask of innocence. The boy’s mom once again spoke up in defense, “His daddy is at home watching his baby sister so mommy could go to the pool.” I jumped on this and rallied to the mom’s side, “Oh see, they have a baby just like us Allison. His daddy is home with the baby.”

Allison, already bored with this new line of dialogue, once again changed tactics. “I wanna jump, Daddy!” She shooed the little boy away with a flip of her hand then leapt three feet off the edge of the pool into my waiting arms. She looked back at her newfound puppy dog with a look that said, “See what I just did.” Earlier, before Allison and this boy became fast friends, he too had been attempting this same kind of stunt with his mom… only he didn’t so much jump into her arms as lean out until he was in contact with her hands, at which point he just kind of fell the rest of the way. I’m fairly certain Allison saw this and remembered it. Now, off the boy’s look of hesitation, Allison threw her arms around my neck, laid her head on my chest and said in a loud clear voice, “I love you, Daddy.”

That settled it. Even at two years old this kid knew that to impress a girl and steal her away from the current man in her life, he couldn't just match what she had done. He had to do it three times bigger and five times more dangerous. Just behind the ledge where Allison had jumped was a slightly higher ledge. Just behind that was a brick wall about two feet high. The little boy, who not ten minutes earlier had been afraid to jump from the ledge two inches above the water, was now attempting to climb the wall for a stunt that was certain to impress the cute little redhead who he was quickly falling in love with… if he didn’t split his head open in the process, of course. Fortunately, me, Lauren and the boy’s mom all had the good sense to stop him before he took a flying leap off Blind Man’s Bluff. One of us made up some lame but plausible excuse that would allow us to separate the kids before Allison could convince him to run away with her.

Like I said earlier, I’m so used to Allison being the youngest in a group of kids. By extension she’s almost always the shy follower, the one eager to please her friends… and even that is only when she isn’t deathly afraid of the other kids. But boy oh boy, I can already see that she is going to have the potential to be that girl who the other moms view as a “bad influence.” She speaks well. She’s sweet and courteous. She has a soft porcelain face that absolutely cries, “Innocence!” But let us not forget that fiery red hair and the temper that comes along with it. This kid is smart, shrewd, calculating. She’ll learn how to wrap people around her finger and use them to her liking. I only pray she uses them for good and not for evil. I don’t want to field phone calls from angry parents over why their son missed curfew. I don’t want to answer questions as to why one of Allison’s boyfriends ended up in jail over a dare. I really don’t ever want to think of my daughter as being that proverbial “Madonna and Whore” package. It does give me hope that when the boy and his mom finally left the pool, Allison watched him go, forlornly waving goodbye, and spent the next two hours sadly asking, "Where the boy go?" She really did love him. She just didn't know how to express it. Maybe we’ll just keep her away from the pool for awhile.

It's not like we were watching porn or anything

I don’t generally find myself having the same usual hang-ups with my daughter’s playtime that a lot of parents tend to have. I don’t freak out when she crawls in dirt, runs through puddles or climbs on things she’ll most likely fall off of. I have been the recipient of multiple double takes at the park where other parents stop dead in their tracks, wondering if I truly just said, “Sweetie why don’t you roll in this mud instead,” or “Honey if you’re going to throw rocks, throw them that way.” I’m equally lax when it comes to language. I don’t use the word “silly” to describe something when the word I really mean to use is “stupid” or “dumb.” I don’t shush Allison when she starts talking about “poopie” or “pee-pee.” I don’t give her timeouts for saying, “butt” or “crap.” Off those same double takes, I usually respond, “Hey that’s why those words are there… so she doesn’t say ‘ass’ or ‘shit.’” But a few weeks ago, even I found myself putting the kibosh on what is normally a fun and innocent game we play – all because I was afraid of what other parents might think. And justifiably so I think.

A little backstory on this game. Allison is at that age where she’s really learning how to manipulate words and language. Rather than simply parroting stock phrases that she hears from us, she’s realizing now that she has the ability to rework the structure of her sentences in order to elicit various responses. It’s simple stuff really, mostly substituting one word for another for comedic effect: “Twinkle twinkle little TIGGER. How I wonder what you CINDERELLA!” A turn of phrase like that will generally set off a good five to ten minutes of Allison and I trying to top each other with our zany substitutions. One popular version of this game is to alternate the names of various body parts into our base phrase of choice: “Oh no, I stepped on your… [foot, eye, elbow, chin].” Of course, because Allison is at the potty training age, and because she has a baby brother who gets his diaper changed about a thousand times a day, words describing the various male and female genitalia will inevitably come into play: “Oh no, I stepped on your… [butt, tushie, nipple, penis, balls].”

Like I said, I normally consider this to be a pretty innocent game, but a few weeks ago we were hanging out with my sister and her future in-laws when Allison suddenly decided to play. Unfortunately, the base phrase that she chose on this particular occasion was, “I want to kiss your…” Now she started off by saying “hair,” but I knew where this path would eventually lead. All I could think was that these people had met me once. They didn’t know what kind of person I was. Where was their mind going to go when Allison inevitably said, “I want to kiss your… [well, ya know].” Because I know where my mind would go: “Holy shit (because ‘crap’ would not be an adequate expletive in this situation), this guy is totally pedophiling his daughter.”

Now I didn’t want to create undue attention or perceived guilt by outright ordering my daughter to stop that now. So I tried laughing it off and saying, “No, you don’t want to do that.” But she persisted, thinking this was some new part of the game I’d just made up. “Daddy, I want to kiss your… beard!” Paralyzed and unable to think of any better diversion, I just laughed and said, “Naw!” hoping she would end it on her own. But no. “Daddy, I want to kiss your… neck!” At this point I asked her to come show me how she jumps off the kitchen table and we vacated the living room before the irreversible phrase could be uttered.

I realized that night that this is how most parents must feel when they see their three-year-old smearing mud on another kid’s clothes. Of course in that particular scenario there’s probably very little chance that the incident will result in jail time or child services being called into the fray. I really do still think the game is perfectly innocent, but holy crap.

Hey, she could have said "schlong"

We’ve been getting Allison ready for what it’s going to be like when her baby brother, Jesse, arrives sometime in the next month. We, of course, are having a homebirth, so we’ve been telling her how mommy is going to be yelling and crying and making grunting noises, but that she’ll be okay because she’s just pushing Jesse out of her belly. Beyond that, we’re preparing her for what it’s going to be like with a new baby in the house, mainly the idea that he’s going to cry a lot and mommy is going to be giving him milk (which Allison calls “mooky”) to make him feel better. For the longest time Allison, who has been weaned for months now, kept telling us that she was going to share mooky with Jesse; “Jesse get ‘dis side and I get ‘dis side.” But we’ve finally gotten her to realize that, no, Jesse gets both sides and Allison gets chocolate milk and macaroni and smoothies and granola bars and yogurt raisins and stuff like that.

The one last thing we’ve been preparing her for is how Jesse is going to look different than she does, because Jesse is a boy and Allison is a girl. So we tell her, “You have a tushy, but Jesse is going to have a penis.” (I don’t know why we euphemized the girl parts and not the boy parts. “Penis” is just a cuter word than “vagina” I guess.) So she’s gotten really good at understanding the differences between boys and girls – since mommy is a girl, she has a tushy, but daddy and Jesse have a penis.

Well it was bound to happen eventually. I was at the playground with Allison a few days ago. She was on the swings when this older girl (four or five I guess) came over and wanted to give her a push. Pretty soon they were playing and talking and Allison told her she had a baby brother named Jesse. The girl brought Allison over to see her own baby sister who was sitting in her detachable car seat on one of the benches. Her mom was there and the little girl told her all about how Allison has a baby brother. I clarified and said, “Well, almost. He’s going to come out sometime around Christmas.” The mom… I’m sorry, let me clarify… the very hot mom and I started talking about all the stupid random things parents talk about, laughing and joking and whatnot while Allison and her daughter ran around playing together.

Well at one point they came back to look at the baby again and Allison said, “That’s your brother.” I corrected her, telling her that that was the girl’s sister because she was a girl. I then made the mistake of adding on, “But Jesse is going to be your brother because he is a boy.”

Do you already know where I’m going with this? Allison, well coached at this point, looked up at the mom (don’t forget, she was quite hot) and told her, “Jesse has a penis and daddy has a penis.”

The hot mom nodded her head and said the only thing a hot mom can say after receiving that type of information, “Um… oh… well… good…”

I think I handled myself well though. Rather than get embarrassed, or scold Allison for something that, let’s face it, we’ve been putting into her head and praising her for when she says it back to us, I looked the hot mom dead in the eye, and with no sense of irony whatsoever, said, “Yeah, you know, important information to have.”

Important information to have??? I’ve had several days to think over that response, and as dumb as it sounded at the time I have not been able to think of a better one that wouldn’t make it seem like I was trying to cover up some kind of illicit incestual pedophilia going on at home. Deadpan acknowledgement (of the fact that we were passing along important information to our daughter, not of illicit incestual pedophilia) was the best I could come up with. But you want to know what I’ve really been thinking about? Had I been a single dad (or a scumbag husband for that matter) and she had been a single mom (or again, I had just been a scumbag who didn’t care), I think I could have used that embarrassing little exchange as an icebreaker to try and… what’s the phrase they’re using these days… oh yeah – hit that. I really think it would have worked. I think if I was ever in that position where I was actually using my kid to pick up chicks, I would make sure to coach them so they’d just bring up penises in conversation. Mind you, I always have been a total dork when it comes to picking up women, so I’m not sure what my follow up line would have been to the whole tour de force “important information” opener. But hey, at least I’d have had a foothold.

Am I right ladies? Yeah you know it.

Impressionable songs

It's funny how powerful first impressions of certain songs can be, and how long they can stick with you. There are certain songs that, whenever I hear them, I remember exactly where I was and what my general state of mind was the first time I heard them. "When I Come Around" by Green Day will always make me think of Winter Carnival my junior year of high school, outside at night with twenty other friends building a big Winnie the Pooh snow sculpture. "You Spin Me Like a Record" by Dead or Alive will always remind me of the bar I worked at when I first moved to Los Angeles, and the cheesy 80's cover band that always sang it as their finale.

But what's really funny about first impressions is how they sometimes just can't allow you to think of a particular song any other way - like when hear a song that is actually a cover of an older song. You get so used to hearing the new version that when you actually hear the original, the one most of the rest of the world recognizes as the "true" version, you can't help but think that the original sounds, well... weird. For the longest time, I only knew the Sheryl Crow version of Led Zeppelin's "D'yer Ma'ker." When I finally heard the original version, I at least knew enough to keep my mouth shut about the fact that I liked the Sheryl Crow version better. That rightly would have been considered sacrilege by the classic rock loving people I grew up with. Fortunately, I managed to get past that first impression. Others stick with me to this day.

At the beginning of Offspring's song, "Pretty Fly for a White Guy" some weird German guy says the nonsensical phrase, "Gunter glieben glauchen globen." This clip was actually taken from an earlier song, "Rock of Ages" by Def Leopard. I'm sure when most hair metal fans heard that clip in the Offspring song, they were like, "Hey those bastards ripped off Def Leopard." But never having heard that particular song previous to "Pretty Fly for a White Guy", I will always associate the phrase with Offspring. On those occasions when "Rock of Ages" comes on the radio, it always seems strange to hear that funny German voice and to not have it followed immediately by, "Give it to me baby! UH HUH, UH HUH!" But I almost have an excuse for that one. It's not just first impressions. I legitimately hear the Offspring song on the radio way more than I hear "Rock of Ages."

One song that I don't have the luxury of that kind of excuse is "Under Pressure" by Queen and David Bowie. Some of you already know where I'm going with this. There is a guitar riff at the beginning of that song that was picked up and sampled in the early-90's by white rapper Vanilla Ice in his one hit wonder "Ice Ice Baby". Once again, my first impression of that particular guitar lick was from "Ice Ice Baby." And like every other white pubescent male of that time, I loved that song, knew all the lyrics, and was too dumb to recognize the irony. So when I first heard "Under Pressure" two or more years later it struck me as immediately weird. "Whoa, that's the same tune from 'Ice Ice Baby'." But here's the really weird thing. I don't think I've actually heard the song "Ice Ice Baby" in... I'd say a good five years or more. And I haven't heard it with anything resembling frequency for a good fifteen years. "Under Pressure", on the other hand, I hear on a fairly regular basis. They play it quite often on the classic rock stations. But here's the thing, every single time the song starts, every single time I hear that opening guitar riff, my mind immediately thinks that I'm about to hear "Ice Ice Baby." It literally takes a fraction of a second to realize what a stupid conclusion that was to draw, and remember what song I'm actually listening to. But it never fails; every time "Under Pressure" comes on the radio, for a split second I think "Ice Ice Baby."

But even that isn't the most ridiculous first impression of a song to stick with me. By far, the most idiotic lasting impression I have is for "Für Elise" by Beethoven. Every time I hear this most famous of piano pieces, every... single... time... I insert lyrics into the tune. That's right, lyrics. And not just any lyrics. The lyrics to a McDonald's commercial. It's all because of The Wizard of Oz. Remember when they used to air The Wizard of Oz like once a year on TV and how it was always, for some reason, a big deal? Well one year, when I was still in elementary school, my family taped the movie off the TV, commercials and all. And one of the commercials that repeated several times over the course of the movie was this McDonald's commercial. Back then, McDonald's put titles on all their commercials and this one was entitled, Recital. The thirty-second plotline involved a little girl who was scared to play the piano at her recital. Her dad gives her a boost of confidence by telling her that when it's all over, they'll all head over to McDonald's. The girl, still scared, walks up in front of the big crowd and begins to play "Für Elise". As she plays, she sings along in her head:

How I wish I were already there,
Instead of here,
Playing this song.
Oh I would have a big choc-o-late shake,
And cheeseburger,
And also (woops) and also fries.

And I would eat
My fries myself,
And not give any
To my dumb brother.
Hands off, they're mine, all mine, all MINE.

Oh boy my recital is almost done.
It wasn't bad.
I'm still alive.
And now I can have my choc-o-late shake,
And cheeseburger,
And also (woops) and also fries.

She finishes off the ditty with a piano version of the McDonald's theme song of the time: "What a good time... for the great taste... of McDonald's."

I swear to you, every damn time I hear that song, to this day, I hear those lyrics. Fortunately, I know it's not just me being lame. And the reason I know this is because a couple weeks ago I was hanging out with my sister and said, "What do you think of when you hear this song?" When I started humming "Für Elise" it took her all of two seconds to say, "That McDonald's commercial from The Wizard of Oz." God love my sister, the first impression got her too. They really are that strong.

(((And my gosh, isn't modern stupid technology wonderful. Here's the Recital Commercial from YouTube.)))

Tag, you're gone!

(deep SIGH)

First they took away Dodgeball, saying it was too violent. Then a couple of kids fell off the see-saw and monkey bars, so away they went. Soon after that, all the tall metal slides were replaced by short plastic corkscrew slides that don't allow you to pick up any speed at all. Before long somebody also said that even swings were too dangerous for playground play. Now just when you thought parents and schools couldn't get any more ridiculous and pussified than they already are, you know what some school board in Attleboro, Massachusetts decided this week? Apparently the game of Tag is no longer an appropriate game. Tag! I mean... TAG for Christ's sake! Claiming "Recess is a time when accidents happen," the Willlette Elementary School has now deemed one of the most basic, elemental and pure games of childhood to be too rough and dangerous for kids to play. What's more amazing is that there's nothing amazing about this particular decision. Apparently schools all over the country have been taking similar measures for years. In 2002 a Santa Monica school banned the game saying that it "creates self esteem issues among slower and weaker children."

I just don't even know what to say about this decision that isn't already self-evident to anybody who grew up in any previous generation, though I think George Carlin definitely said it best a few years ago when he said: "Grownups are taking all the fun out of being a kid just to save a few thousand lives. It's pathetic."

I'll skip all the remarks and comments of how stupid and moronic this decision and other decisions like it are (I'm sure all of you reading have a least a dozen comments of your own that you could insert here... and if you don't, well then you're a hopeless case anyway who should never have kids of your own) and instead skip right ahead to the big picture and its long term implications.

Every generation fears the generation that comes after it. Our grandparents were horrified by the rock-n-roll that our parents grew up listening to. Our parents were horrified by the brain-numbing MTV programming we watched like Beavis & Butthead and Singled Out. It's expected. You think your parents are prudes and you wish your kids would be into the wholesome things you used to be into. But now that my generation is stepping into the roles of parenthood a new and disturbing trend is happening. We're actually saying that all the things we loved about being a kid are no longer good and valid forms of entertainment. Instead, we claim they're damaging to the body and psyche of our frail little children. That's what we're saying, but the more I think about it, the more I think it goes deeper. Parents aren't really vilifying things that are dangerous. What they're really trying to forbid is any activity that kids can participate in without the direct supervision of a group of adults.

I never made that leap of logic until I read a short article that talked about how soccer is now the number one sport engaged in by the youth of America. And what immediately occurred to me was that the article or the study or whatever it was had left out one key word from that declaration. What it should have said was that soccer was the number one organized sport in America. Whenever you see American kids playing soccer, it's almost without exception a structured, organized event with official teams, coaches, referees, and soccer moms from the boosters club selling refreshments and car magnets in the shape of soccer balls. You almost never see a group of four or ten unsupervised kids trying to kick a soccer ball through a makeshift goal they set up using a couple backpacks. That's what kids in every other country in the world do, but not in America. No, in America I would stake my life on saying the most popular sport that kids engage in, irrespective of any kind of supervision, is basketball. Kids don't need an organized group of parents in order to play basketball. As long as they have a ball, a net and a hard surface they'll shoot hoops for hours just for the sheer joy of playing. But since there's no way to poll every pickup game on every cracked asphalt court in the country, soccer is the sport that wins the most popular title.

And that suits the parents of my generation just fine. For some reason, parents my age just can't stand the idea that their kids could be having any kind of fun in any activity that they didn't personally orchestrate and supervise. Give kids the opportunity and a rubber ball or three and they'll organize their own game of dodgeball. They'll monitor themselves, coach themselves and referee themselves. Give them the chance and they'll run around for an hour, chasing each other and tagging each other in the most unstructured game ever created. There's no need for parents. There's no need to keep score. There's no need to even determine a winner. You just play the game until you get sick of it, at which point you move on to something else. I'm not sure why, but games like that, games that we ourselves used to play, freak out the parents of my generation. It's inconceivable to them that their kids would do anything without their direct influence. And that's why things like playground equipment and unstructured games like tag and dodgeball are going away. "Safety" and "self-esteem" are just easy scapegoats for the real truth, which is today's parents are scared shitless that their kids... might not need them.

I don't know where all this insecurity originated and why it seems to be unique to the parents of my generation. Is it that we wish our own parents would have spent more time playing with us that we feel compelled to make sure our kids never spend a joyful minute outside our presence? Is it the reports of kids being stolen out of their own yards are making us too scared to let our kids leave our personal guardianship for any reason whatsoever? What is it that makes games like soccer, where literally dozens of kids can be supervised all at once, more preferable to games like tag where kids can supervise themselves? Why on earth is our generation unique in vilifying ourselves by vilifying the things we used to love? And where will it end? How much of our children's lives will we attempt to structuralize with no thought given to what we're depriving them of?

10 Years

This is a little late in coming and I intend on doing a more in-depth write up on this eventually, but for now this will have to do...

I went to my 10 year high school reunion last weekend. I was honestly pumped up about this event. Not because I'm some huge success and wanted to go rub it in people's faces... not because there was the prospect of hooking up with the ex prom queen... not because I wanted to see how miserable the lives of my enemies had turned out... None of those things were the reason. I was simply, purely and genuninely interested in what my old friends were up to.

My highschool, I have realized, was different from most. Although there were definite cliques and there were definitiely people who were more popular than others, by and large, we all kind of hung out together. I wrote a whole essay about this about six years ago. Basically, it wasn't just that the jocks hung out with the nerds and the kids in the band... the jocks WERE the nerds and the kids in the band, as well as the arty granola hippies and the vocational school rednecks. Pretty much, we were all friends. At the very least we all knew each other's names, which doesn't happen in a lot of schools.

So I really and truly was just excited to see people again and find out what they were up to. The thought of being nervous never crossed my mind... Right up until the point, and I mean the INSTANT, we pulled into the banquet hall's parking lot. Just as we turned in off the road, I saw somebody getting out of their car. It was a guy I graduated with whose name was Glen, but who everybody called G.W. I hadn't seen G.W. since the summer after graduation but I recognized him instantly. He looked exactly the same... yet remarkably different. I mean, it was just G.W.... only ten years later. He'd grown about 4 inches and put on about fifty pounds of solid muscle. That's when the wave hit me. Suddenly I felt dizzy. For whatever reason, at that moment the realization hit me that I was going to be seeing all these people I once knew... only ten years later. In effect, all these people who I only remember as kids would now be grownups. I know this is an obvious observation, and I honestly didn't expect it to hit me as hard or as ludicrise-ly as it did. But suddenly I seriously felt as though I didn't know where I was.

We got out of the car and there was a bearded man standing next to his car dressed in ripped jeans and an old baseball hat. I didn't recognize him until my friend Jesse said his name, Colin. Oh my god, it WAS Colin. I remembered him as a young kid without a trace of facial hair and now he was a man. He spoke with a deep Maine drawl that I never remember him having and when he talked it was slow and quiet and deliberate. Sixty seconds into our conversation I had to sit down. Literally, i just sat right down in the dirt parking lot, knowing I was on the verge of passing out.

I'll hopefully get into the rest of this evening later on. But suffice it to say much of it felt a lot like these first two encounters. In fact I still feel like i'm tripping out right now. Dozens of faces of people I once knew. People I instantly recognized as the kids I'd hung out with, but who had, as far as my mind and memory were concerned, aged ten years in an instant.

There was no pretension shown by anybody there that night. Everybody greeted everyone else with genuine hugs, and for those first few minutes the conversations and tones of voice were those of the 17-year-olds we once were. And even as we discussed jobs, families, mortgages, land value and other typically grownup topics, these were still just my high school friends. I honestly can't figure out if it felt "weird" or "right."

All I know is that it was a truly awesome evening. When I left this place I always envisioned breezing back into town from L.A. speaking of whatever fabulous movie or TV show I was working on at the time and regaling everybody from this small hick county with stories from the big city, from show biz, from all the cool things I was doing and the people I was meeting. Instead, I came into town as just another Mt. View graduate, no better or worse than anybody else I knew. I actually found myself most amazed and intrigued by the stories of people who had stuck around the old homestead. Some actually were homesteading (one girl had built a house that had no electrcity or running water), other's were farmers, like real down home Maine farmers, and loving it. The aforementioned G.W. spent his days working his land up on Hogback Mountain (yes, it's actually called that) and putting out a local alternative newspaper. An independent movie crew just recently finished shooting a film up on his land and he helped them out with everything from cooking to standing in as an extra to all the miscellaneous tasks that go along with a film shoot.

What blows me away most is how much people still looked inherently the same. Nobody had gone bald. Nobody who was once skinny became fat. Nobody who was once plain became a super model. We're all doing so well, and what's even better is we're all doing well in our own unique ways. Hopefully as I spend more time thinking on it I'll be able to articulate all this better. Right now I still feel tripped right the hell out and my head is just buzzing with strong feelings that I can't even identify much less figure out why I'm having them.

Because wolves don't suddenly decide to go vegetarian

Has anybody else from my generation noticed how the classic story "The Three Little Pigs" has been changed to become more "accessible" and "kid friendly"? Everybody remembers the basic story structure. There are three brother pigs who go off on their own to build houses. Two of the pigs are lazy and build their houses out of straw and sticks respectively. But the third little pig is an industrious forward thinker. He knows there are wolves out there who would try to knock down his house and eat him, so he builds a strong house out of bricks. Well low and behold, along comes the Big Bad Wolf who proceeds to "huff and puff and blow the house down" on the first two pigs. But the third little pig's brick house is too strong and the wolf is foiled.

Exactly how the wolf is foiled has evolved over the years. Well first of all, in certain versions of the story that I had read to me as a kid (or told free form) the Wolf actually ATE the first two little pigs. I don't think there is a version around anymore where this grisly turn of events still takes place. I think even if you manage to find a classic book of stories with "The Three Little Pigs" in it, it will have been changed so that the first two little pigs, after having their houses blown down, run to the house of their better-prepared brother. This specific rewriting doesn't bother me all that much. I know the original intent of that particular plot line was to reinforce the Christian work ethic in kids everywhere, basically saying: "Don't be idle and lazy or you'll DIE!" But as a writer, I know it's hard to enjoy good light and happy literature if two such lovable characters die a particularly gruesome death. So I don't mind creative license being taken there.

What bothers me is how history has tried to rewrite the ultimate fate of the Big Bad Wolf. Again, in the versions I always heard, the Big Bad Wolf died at the end of the story. After failing to blow down the brick house, he goes up on the roof and comes down the chimney where the little pig (or PIGS depending on the version) have put a kettle of boiling water into the fireplace. The Wolf slides down, lands in the water and is boiled to death. Again, depending on the version, his death goes down in one of two ways. Either a) the little pig(s) cooked the wolf and ate him or b) (the more palatable version) the wolf simply boils away into non-existence. Either way, the wolf gets his due comeuppance and the little pigs are freed from his reign of terror.

Well, that is not the way it happens today. In every modern version, the Wolf slides down the chimney, burns his bottom on the boiling water then scrambles back up the chimney and runs away into the woods where he decides to never bother the little pigs again.

(((I guess I should acknowledge the caveat that this isn't necessarily a new way of telling the story. The popular Disney version of the story includes this kid-friendly non-violent ending - and that cartoon came out in 1933. I guess it was too heavy to actually show three cartoon characters carving up another character on film. But as of the early 80's, when I was growing up, there were still plenty of printed versions of the story that included the wolf's boiling demise.)))

I know we're trying to save our children's fragile psyche's by eliminating all mention of death in their stories, but I must state for the record that I HATE this version of "The Three Little Pigs" with its non-violent climax. From a purely storytelling point of view, there is nothing satisfying about the Wolf escaping with just wounded pride and a sore bottom. I mean he just spent the better half of the story doing everything HE could do to kill and then devour three helpless little pigs whose worst sin was having lazy work ethic. Why shouldn't the Big Bad Wolf die at the end when, if he had succeeded, the pigs would have been the ones who died? It's just plain gullible to believe that the Wolf is going to give up after this. Do the rewriters really expect us to believe that the Wolf is just going to sit around moping in the woods and never bother the pigs again? Please! As soon as his ass heals, he's going to come back. Knowing he can't penetrate the house, he'll just patiently hide outside, knowing that these pigs are going to have to come out eventually and then he'll pounce. No, the only way to have full closure on this story, the wolf has to die or be subdued in some way. Maybe the pigs manage to tie him up and send him to Abu Dhabi or something. (Pat yourself on the back if you caught the Garfield reference).

The reason why I hate this version of "The Three Little Pigs" on a larger scale however, is because it is so indicative of the society we live in today. Though really, it is more indicative of the patty-cake-playing ultra-liberals who, when a psycho is arrested for chopping up his entire family, want to make sure the guy is treated well and gets basic cable in prison. When some evil dictator slaughters 100,000 people, rather than marching a battalion of tanks up the guy's asshole, they want to impose "sanctions" and "U.N. Resolutions" and other cute little solutions that equate to about as much as giving these people a little smack (or a burn) on their butts. But most of all, this ending epitomizes the growing mindset so many people in this country have of no consequences for your actions. You can be a non-stop maniacal prick, and the second somebody calls you on it, you can just run off into the woods, nurse your burned bottom and wounded ego and wait until people have stopped thinking about you to return to your former prickish-ness.

I know I'm overreacting, and I know it's just a kid's story, but if it is just a story then why are we so gung-ho about changing it in the first place? Why can't we meet half-way and let the wolf dissolve into vapor in that boiling cauldron? It's harmless. It leaves no lasting gruesome images. And it makes for better storytelling and lesson-teaching.

Not fair at the Fair

Last night, against my better judgment, I allowed Lauren to drag me to “Southampton Days” the local county fair, which is finishing up tonight. This was your typical traveling carnival complete with rickety rides that carnies assemble and breakdown in a matter of minutes; games boasting sometimes difficult, sometimes impossible, sometimes dishonest odds, all for the chance to win a giant replica of Spongebob Squarepants stuffed with packing peanuts; greasy carnival food that most normal people only ever eat at a fair; greasy fat white trash people who you can tell eat carnival food every day of the year; local businesses giving away balloons, rubber bracelets and other chintzy trinkets to kids in the hopes that their parents will come into their tent and buy anything from blinking neon sunglasses to a new checking account; a little main stage featuring local performers (and sometimes nationally recognized ones depending on how big the fair is) putting on everything from boring puppet shows to lousy multi-instrumented musical revues.

But no fair would be complete without the final element, the one that makes all the other crappy things at the fair worth it. Actually, this final element is the only reason any of us ever put up with all those other crappy fair things: the local high school girls slutted up something fierce, wearing clothes that you’d swear they must have stolen from their older sister’s closet… provided their older sister was only four feet tall and far far skinnier than her younger sibling. I tell you it’s a sight to behold and really quite amazing actually: short shorts, hot pants, tight-fitting low-cut midriff shirts, bellybutton rings, push-up bras, open mesh baby doll t-shirts over bikini tops, not to mention lipstick, blush and eye shadow lathered on streetwalker style. Mind you I’m not judging, nor am I condoning. Just pointing out that it’s enough to bring the statutory rapist out in any man.

Especially at this particular fair. Every fair I can ever remember from my childhood and adulthood involved a much higher percentage of ugly, obese white trash women wearing tight and revealing clothes that they should not have been wearing – with the occasional token hottie sprinkled into the mix here and there just to give us hope. But apparently in Southampton, either the contingent of hot girls is higher, or else the less attractive ones are smart enough to know not to wear the kinds of clothes that make us turn our heads and notice.

So I walked with Lauren around this fair last night, pushing Allison in her stroller, and repeating this mantra to myself: “You have a daughter and a beautiful wife who you love… You have a daughter and a beautiful wife who you love… You have a… DEAR GOD, that twelve-year-old has bigger breasts than Jenna Jameson!”

Now the only reason I spent so long speaking about the slutted-up teenage girl element of state and county fairs (beyond the fact that I’m a sick, perverted F---) is to point out another element of fairs that I found conspicuously missing from the Southampton Days: creepy stalking older guys who prey on said slutted-up teenagers. Now by “older guy” I don’t mean middle-aged men or really old farts. By and large, these guys are in their mid-20’s to early thirties. They’re young-enough-looking that it doesn’t seem overtly weird that they would be hitting on the hot teenage girls. They’re generally relatively good-looking, or at least good-looking enough that the girls they’re preying on aren’t immediately grossed out by them. The way it usually works is they find a group of girls who are clustered together and either ask them if they want to go get high or if they want to go to some party that his friends are (supposedly) throwing. They know that generally only a couple of the girls from the group – usually the ones with low self-esteem, false-high self-esteem, or just with something to prove to nobody in particular – will actually come with them, detaching themselves from their group and effective safety net. In a good scenario, these gazelles cut from the herd are only the victim of quasi date rape. They end up so high and intoxicated that they’re only more than will to do whatever the guy (and possibly his friends) wants.

Worst-case scenarios can go pretty much as far as your grisly imagination can take you. That’s why fairs have always kind of given me the creeps. Not the fairs themselves, with their brightly lit amusements, rides with loud calliope music, and, by and large, families and friends having a few hours of harmless mindless fun. It’s the areas just outside the fairgrounds that make me uneasy. Since these are usually ragtag operations set up on the cheap by traveling companies in towns that don’t want to pay a lot of money, there’s generally no security or cop presence outside of the actual carnival. “Security” pretty much means the local geriatric WalMart greeter who’s directing traffic out of the elementary school parking lot. As soon as you step outside of the brightly lit midway, the surrounding fields are by contrast almost dangerously dark and shadowy. Those lurking shadows are the perfect place for a murderer-rapist to do whatever he wants to a frail slutted-up teenager, trusting that her cries for help will be muted by the speakers on the Tilt-a-Whirl blasting 2 Unlimited’s “Get Ready 4 This.”

There’s a reason the vampire movie The Lost Boys was set where it was. The shifty, leathery teenage vampires (of whom Keifer Sutherland was their leader) took most of their victims from the carnival boardwalk or just outside in the parking lot. As a father of a little girl who I can already tell is going to grow up to be a head turner, it scares me to death thinking of letting her and her friends go alone to one of these things, knowing the kinds of people who might be lurking there. But as a parent, you can’t just not let your kids go. You just can’t. They have to be able to do their independent thing, be with their friends and have fun with that feeling that they run their entire universe. Honestly, they need to go out and dress sexy and know that the teenage boys from school (as well as their fathers and grandfathers) are ogling them. After all, as I said, that’s the very nature of the local fair. As a parent I guess you just have to hope to God that you’ve raised your kid the right way to know that she’s going to be responsible and isn’t going to leave her group of friends to go off with any members of the creepy older guy element.

But as I said, that element wasn’t even there last night. At least not that I could detect. Honestly, Lauren and I were the only people our age I saw there last night. Everybody else was either sixteen, forty or sixty. I’ve mentioned before that we live in some kind of generational vortex in eastern Pennsylvania where people somehow just skip their twenties and go straight from high school to middle age. So any guys accompanying a group of teenage girls were likewise either teenagers themselves or their parents. So unless that creepy stalking man presence has just gotten better at concealing itself, it just didn’t exist at this fair. I can’t imagine that though because as a teenager, that element was always very conspicuous, mostly because you couldn’t help but notice that they were stealing all the chicks that you wanted. Who knows, maybe Southampton just isn’t as easy pickings as other places. After all, any area where the ugly girls have the self-esteem to not slut themselves up as much as their much-hotter friends, its obviously an area where the girls are smart enough not to walk off into the shadows with strange guys offering drugs. It gives me hope as a dad.

Russell Crowe had NOTHING on these guys

You know what TV show I used to love as a kid? American Gladiators. What an awesome show that was. To a ten-year-old boy, that show was like gym class for superheroes. I mean you had dodgeball, except the balls in this case were tennis balls fired at you from a high speed canon while you shot back with giant Nerf crossbows and rocket launchers. There was a rock wall with the added element of a really big guy chasing you, trying to yank you off. You had an obstacle course, though it was more like a mythological gauntlet full of smoke, flashing lights and really big guys trying to knock you down.

I don’t know if that show would impress kids these days, what with the gluttony of fast-paced action-filled cartoons and kid shows they already have at their disposal. But when the most exciting shows we were used to watching were Growing Pains and Muppet Babies, American Gladiators was like a forbidden look into the hidden lives of action stars or something. The fact that it came on late on a Saturday night, right after Saturday Night Live where I lived, only added to the allure that you were somehow breaking the rules and seeing things that only grownups were meant to see.

As kids who played sports, my friends and I would often talk about wanting to go on American Gladiators. To be honest, I don’t even know what kind of prizes the winner of each show received. For us, it wasn’t about winning, it was about competing. But really it was about playing. Hardcore, meat and muscle, violence-for-fun playing. Running inside a giant metal sphere and bashing into your opponents in an effort to score points. Walloping a guy twice your size with a big foam jousting stick, trying to knock him off his ten-foot pedestal. How freakin’ awesome would it have been just to be allowed inside that auditorium and be given the chance to compete in any of those games.

I read in TV Guide one time the qualifications needed to be considered as a contestant for American Gladiators. I don’t remember them all, but I do know you had to be able to do something like thirty chin-ups in a minute. That was crazy. Even at my strongest I’ve only been able to do ten of those things. I’m sure other qualifications were you had to be able to run a mile in less than five minutes, you had to be able to lift a certain amount of weight with your legs and arms. Stuff like that. Stuff that only somebody at the very peak of physical strength and fitness had any hope of accomplishing.

I wish they’d bring back competition shows like that. Shows where you actually had to have, not just talent, but extreme talent to compete. What an awesome bar that gave us to shoot for. To get onto American Gladiators you had to aim high and work hard. These days, most of the competitions shows you see on TV require no other qualifications than not being a convicted felon. Survivor, Big Brother, The Amazing Race. Anybody can, in theory, appear on those shows. The only thing that increases your odds of being chosen isn’t superior strength or talent, but above average looks and a quirky personality. I guess that appeals more to people these days. The average viewer can watch these shows and actually picture themselves on that screen competing as they are, without any new skills or improvement. Hell, William Hung taught us that you didn’t even have to be a good singer to appear on American Idol.

Is this all a sign of where we’re headed as a country? As a civilization? As a species? The bar used to be high. Impossibly high no doubt. None of us were going to attain the superiority required to appear on American Gladiators. But in the end, was that really such a bad thing? It gave us something shoot for and even when we didn’t hit that mark, we landed higher than we would have had we shot for a low mark. These days, there’s no mark to shoot for. The message competition shows send out today is, “Just be yourself… your regular, stupid, talentless self, and you too could be a star.” If this trend continues, the human race is doomed. Evolution cannot progress if we aren’t constantly challenged in our daily lives.

I’ve split no hairs about my thoughts on the abomination that is “Reality TV.” I refuse to watch any of it. But I promise all you TV executives out there, if you were to bring back American Gladiators, I would watch. But it’s got to be the real thing. The standards have to remain high. Contestants actually need to be able to pass a physical test to compete. And for the love of God, if I don’t see ugly people in the mix along with the hotties, I’ll tune you out forever. Because strong people with talent come at all levels of beauty.

Bring back American Gladiators. The future of the world depends on it.

Now this time watch Daddy blow up the building

I really do have a blast playing with my daughter. She’s right at that fun age where she can run around and do things, she has good manual dexterity that allows her to maneuver blocks and other objects with her hands, she’s happy and energetic and full of life and laughs a lot, squeals with delight and jumps up and down clapping her hands at some new game that we just made up. But I swear I must be setting her up for some kind of violent streak in her future.

It’s not intentional. It never is. But somehow all our games end up turning violent. I mean, you know, violent in a cute, piggy-tailed, two-year-old girl kind of way, but violent nonetheless. I think it started around the time she finally figured out how to walk and then soon after, run. We started playing this game that we simply called “DING” where basically I would chase her around the apartment tickling her and yelling (you guessed it), “Ding!” every time I poked her. Well that quickly got boring for me and so I added an extra element to the game: a beach ball. Now instead of just chasing her around, I also chuck a beach ball at the back of her head and body in an attempt to knock her over. The beach ball in question is incredibly light and bounces off her with practically zero force. You could probably throw it at somebody with all your might and they’d barely feel it. I, of course, know this because I’ve thrown it off of Allison’s head with all my might and she only laughs harder. Really, the only time that thing knocks her over is if she happens to be rounding a corner and I catch her around the legs just right, causing her feet to get tangled in each other and down she goes.

We made up that game about a year ago and we still play it several times a week. And god forbid I should start chasing her empty handed. We’ll get about five seconds into it and she’ll stop, turn around and say, “Beach ball?”

When we play with blocks, we don’t try to build a tower as tall as we can so much as build a tower just tall enough so we can knock it over. Actually, now that I think about it, Allison is the one who started that one. Though again, it was probably my fault. A couple times she accidentally bumped the tower knocking it over and I exclaimed a big “Whoa!” which made her laugh, and so now the object of the game became to knock the tower as far across the room as possible.

A couple months ago we inherited a box of Matchbox cars and a box of plastic animals. We set the animals up on the coffee table and had about three minutes worth of fun making them walk around, drink water, eat food, climb Couch Pillow Mountain, etc. But then I got bored and honestly I could tell she did too. So it wasn’t long before we pulled out the Matchbox cars and started a new game called (I swear I’m not making this up), “Hit the Pig.” Basically we arrayed all the animals on the table with the pig figurine at the very end. The goal was to run the cars down the gauntlet and knock the pig off the other side. Each run begins with the war cry (again, you guessed it), “Hit the Pig!” Then I… WE send the cars charging down the track with the appropriate VROOM sound effects, and end the run with a resounding PAAAUUUGGHH as the car flies over the cliff and bursts into flames. Whenever we actually accomplish the goal of the game and “Hit the Pig,” we celebrate with a sadistic, “RREEEEEeeee….” as the pig plummets to his death.

Well now we’ve got new toys in the house again. Allison got a couple Little People playsets for her birthday last weekend: the Little People house and the Little People garage. I think I may have lasted a good twenty minutes this time around. I made the mommy push the baby around in the stroller, made the daddy sit at the computer and check his e-mail, put the older sister on the potty and had the little brother open and close the refrigerator a couple dozen times. In the garage I had the mechanic drive the car around to the gas pump and pretend to fill’er up. We made the cars go up the elevator and down the spiral ramp and drive into the oil change area a few times. But it wasn’t long before I had the mommy and daddy jumping off the roof, had the dog getting hit by the tow truck coming through the car wash, and had the baby stroller rolling off the table cliff. We pulled out the infamous Matchbox cars and had them make death defying jumps onto the top level off the garage, careen around the corner with appropriate tire squealing sound effects and then pile up with lots of smashing sounds at the bottom of the ramp.

I know Allison is entertained because she busts a big old gut every time we sit down (or run around) to play something. But man, am I setting her up for some sick fascination with violence where nothing is fun unless it involves mayhem and destruction? Honestly, I must admit I’m being more than a little melodramatic. While everything I have described is one hundred percent true without the least bit exaggeration, I truly don’t think I’m screwing her up in the least. If anything I think I’m giving her a harmless outlet for the violent impulses that, let’s face it, are present in every single one of us. I’ve always been a believer that kids need to play games that involve pretend killing people and breaking things. It allows obsolete evolutionary impulses to manifest themselves in a way where nobody actually gets hurt. As long as it’s tempered with a responsible adult making sure the kid understands the difference between make believe and real life then they should be just fine. My hope is that Allison will get out her aggressions on fake plastic people (and pigs) and not turn psycho on the real ones.

Of course that’s all assuming she even makes it to three years old without getting knocked down the stairs during a particularly intense round of DING.

Dress it down kiddo

I know we’re several months off for this, but I was thinking the other day about just how retarded Halloween is when you have a kid who is too young to go trick-or-treating. The last two years, people have asked me, “So what is Allison going as this year?”

For some reason, my response floors them, “Uh, nothing.”

What’s the point really? She isn’t at the age yet where she gets a kick out of, or really even notices, what she’s wearing. It’s hard enough to get her to wear a hat, nevermind a mask, a pair of angel wings, or a set of bunny ears. She hates it when we wash her face, so why would we aggravate the task by smearing on hard-to-remove makeup? She’s too young to get the concept of trick-or-treating, and to be honest, we’re trying to keep her away from candy for as long as possible anyway, so why would we bring her around the neighborhood filling a bag with it?

Let’s be honest, parents who dress their two-year-old up for Halloween are doing it for themselves way more than for their kid. They do it so they can take that one adorable little picture which they can show to all the other parents at Mommy and Me and share one of those phony my-kid-is-better-than-your-kid chuckles.

“Oh look how sweet. Broderick went as a Hobbit this year.”

Nevermind the fact that Broderick probably screamed for thirty minutes while mom tried to force him into that costume. Nevermind the fact that he got bored after the first two houses and fell asleep on Dad’s shoulder as he carried him from house to house. Nevermind the fact that if mister ((my parents used my name in a vain attempt to show everybody just how simultaneously creative and trendy they could be)) had actually ever SEEN Lord of the Rings at two years old, he would be waking up with night terrors until he was thirty-seven. I’m sure little “Broderick” would have been just as happy wearing a bowl on his head all night while dumping Cheerios into his plastic pumpkin. But that doesn’t make for good photography does it?

I’ve never really bought into the whole cliché dumbass parent thing of taking your kid somewhere and pretending it’ll be so much fun for them, when really, it’s all about rounding out that photo album that you bought at your last Pretentious Memories scrapbooking party. Do you think there’s a two-year-old on earth who really truly gives a crap about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny? At BEST they don’t care. More often they’re full fledged terrified because the giant flesh eating rabbit from their dreams has finally manifested itself. As far as I’m concerned, any activity where a parent finds themselves saying, “Honey stop screaming, Mommy’s trying to take your picture,” you might want to rethink your motivation for it.

Like taking your kids to Disney World. Oh we all have such a warm place in our heart for Disney World. And as soon as we become parents, we want nothing more than to fill that Daisy and Donald photo album that we found on sale at WalMart with pictures of our family vacation to the happiest place on earth. We build it up in our minds just how perfect it will be. The kids will get to see Mickey Mouse. They’ll squeal with glee on all the rides. They’ll giggle whenever their ice-cream cone accidentally bumps their nose and mom and dad have to kiss it off.

BULL… S---!

Disney World is a disaster waiting to happen for any family who brings in a kid under ten years old. After all, you’ve just shelled out enough money pay for a really high-class hooker and now you have to get your money’s worth. But of course your kid is too scared to go on ninety percent of the rides. So you wait an hour in line just to ride thirty seconds on the lame flying Dumbo’s only to spend the entire ride hovering along the ground because your kid freaks out every time you press the button to make the elephant go up. Finally, by the end of the ride you’re shouting at your five-year-old, “We waited in line for an hour because you wanted to ride the Dumbo and how we’re going up in the goddamn air! Stop screaming and wave to Mommy!”

It’s a hundred degrees out. Water costs five dollars per eight-ounce bottle. The line to see Mickey Mouse somehow corresponds exactly to the capacity of a young child’s bladder. And forget about kissing the ice-cream off your kid’s nose. If you’ve ever been to Disney World you’ve seen at least one crying toddler holding an empty waffle cone, standing next to a splattered chocolate scoop, and a red-faced parent screaming into their child’s face, “Look what you did! Didn’t I tell you to hang onto this?!? I did, didn’t I! Well that’s just great! Ten dollars right down the f---ing drain!” It’s truly a special moment when you see somebody inducing childhood neurosis over a chocolate dip.

For your money and relative aggravation you’d be better off shelling out sixty bucks a night at the Musty Fart Motel off Interstate 4 and spending the entire week using the in ground pool. It may have no diving board, no slide, no flotation devices and no pool toys, but you’ll never hear a five-year-old say, “I’m bored,” or “I want to go home.” He’ll spend five hours just jumping off the side into the shallow end over and over again, squealing, “Okay everybody watch!” before each jump. Get him a five-dollar pair of goggles and you’ve just bought him a bonus three hours of entertainment. He’ll put those things on and examine every square inch of that pool and never fuss for a moment. The only thing you have to do is act like you give a crap for six seconds when he wants to show you how long he can hold his breath. It really is the perfect vacation. Seriously, how can anybody get mad at the motel pool? The only tears that are ever shed happen when water goes up somebody’s nose. But thirty seconds later, they’ve already shaken it off and are begging you to watch their cannon ball again.

Allison is going to be two-and-a-half this Halloween and no, we will not be dressing her up. Maybe we’ll put a dress on her and say, “Look, you’re Maggie,” a girl at daycare who wears dresses every day. For Halloween, we’ll likely do what we do on any other day. Take her to the park, let her swing on the swings, climb the rock wall and slide down the slide, unencumbered by some ridiculously bulky costume that only frustrates her and gets in the way. We’ll go home, have dinner and let her have some chocolate milk before bed – which is as close to candy as I want her having right now.

You never forget how much it hurts to ride a bike

I haven't updated in over a week because Lauren and I have been on vacation down in North Carolina's Outerbanks with the whole family. So the next few entries will include some observations from our week away. First of all, I've got to say that this was the most relaxing vacation I've had in a long time. We went to Hawaii this summer, but it was far from relaxing. After you spend over a thousand dollars on plane tickets and fly for nearly 12 hours each way, you feel the need to GO GO GO and do as much as possible in a week's time. Compound with the fact that Allison caught a cold and was a bear all week long and it didn't add up to a whole lot of R&R.

Well, Allison ended up getting sick this time around as well. Me too for that matter. But in spite of that little snag, this was an incredibly easy-going week. The good thing about going to the Outerbanks in April is that the tourist season hasn't started so there actually isn't a whole lot to do. We went to a couple lighthouses and a few of the tourist areas, but other than that, we mostly just chilled out. Lauren's uncle owns a house down there and he let the family use it free of charge. We hung out around the house, played board games with the in-laws, ran around on the balcony with the kids, walked to the beach, walked around town, sat around and read. I can't tell you how good it felt to be able to sit in a lounge chair in the sun and the breeze and just READ without worrying about what else I could be doing.

On our first day there, Lauren and I rented bicycles with the intention of riding them around a few times during the week. I know they say you never forget how to ride a bike, and I didn't forget, but man, I sure don't remember it hurting so much. We weren't a quarter mile away from the rental place before our legs started burning. I mean burning. It was a five-mile ride back to the house and by the end my heart was pounding and my legs were ready to give out. I couldn't seem to stay on the seat very well and every time I slid down, it wedged the underwear up my butt a little further. I remembered that as a kid, whenever we'd ride our bikes and wanted to go faster, we'd stand up and peddle. I tried that for about two seconds, shouted, "Ah crap!" and sat back down. The burning in my quads had multiplied with that little stunt.

How did we do this as kids? I know that I was using muscles I don't normally use and all, but geez, I don't remember feeling pain the first time I rode a bike - I mean, you know, other than the pain of my skull slamming against the concrete when I wiped out. If it had hurt like that the first few times, I don't think any of us would have ridden bikes. Kids aren't like adults. We don't find fun in painful activities.

Unfortunately, that ended up being our only ride all week. For several reasons. Like I said, I ended up catching a cold part way through the week and didn't feel up to peddling. Plus, we'd rented a bike with a kiddie seat on the back for Allison to ride in, but the helmet they'd given us was way too big for her - and it was the smallest size they had. I tried wrapping a towel around her head to make the fit a bit more snug, but she was having none of it. So we eventually just gave up on it. Oh well. At least I had my book.

Jack, no George, no Frederick, no Sue, no...

I took the day off today and spent the whole day with Allison. Around lunchtime we went down to visit Lauren at the birth center. On Thursdays they have a sort of "Mommy-and-Me" get together and the place was filled with moms and their babies. While we all sat around talking, there was one mom there who had just had her baby about two weeks earlier. And apparently, she still hadn't named him yet. The kid is two weeks old and still has no name!

This is hardly an unusual occurrence. In her years as a labor-delivery nurse, and now as a midwife, Lauren has come across I'd say at least a dozen couples who, by the time they leave the hospital, or even by the time they come in for their TWO WEEK checkup, still haven't been able to come up with or agree on a name. How does that happen? Seriously, how? Believe me, I understand the dilemma that comes with picking out baby names. Lauren and I started brainstorming names before we were even married. It took forever to agree on one we both liked. But even then, that wasn't the end of it. A lot of times, I'd be crazy about a name which Lauren was opposed to. After months of bringing the name back up again, she would finally start to come around to liking it... right about the time I decided, you know what, that's actually kind of a dumb name. Boys names were (are) the worst. We've got all our girls names picked out one after the other until one of us goes either barren or senile. But after nearly 6 years of discussions, we still haven't found a single boys name that we both liked consistently, and at the same time, for more than a month or two.

So yes, I get the hardship that comes with picking out your kids' names. After all, this is a decision that will be with them for their entire lives. But to not have a name picked out by the time your kid is born, much less two weeks AFTERWARD! It's not like it was a surprise that the kid was coming and would need a name. I mean, you had at least... let's say seven months from the point when you first figured out you were pregnant. You're telling me in all that time you didn't spend a little time thinking about what you might name this kid? That's kind of like putting off writing your doctoral dissertation until the night before it's due isn't it? Or really, it's like handing it in TWO WEEKS LATE.

So as of now, this poor kid still doesn't have a name. What do you call a kid - your kid - for two weeks if you haven't named him. The birth certificate and hospital papers can just say "Baby Boy" but geez, can two parents coo that informally over their own son?

Can somebody who has gone through this little dilemma personally please explain it all to me? Because I just don't get it.

And I Used to Watch Rambo at 8

I took Allison to the park the other day and while we were there another father showed up with his five-year-old son. The kid was your typically rambunctious boy - loud, excited, lots of energy. He'd brought with him to the park a toy gun. A very realistic looking toy gun. Like the kind that could get you accidentally killed by the police in the wrong situation. I was surprised they made those anymore. Don't toy guns have to be painted bright green or something now?

I know all about playing guns when you're a kid. My sister and I used to play a game we called "Spies" which was essentially just hide and seek with guns. And I really hate the way the pansy-girl ex-hippies have tried to ruin good harmless pretend violence. I hate how as soon as a kid uses his finger as a gun and pretends to shoot his friend in school, all of a sudden people freak out, call the principal, put the kid in counseling. I personally think we're setting ourselves up for more disaster by NOT allowing kids to get out their aggressions in a playful manor.

But when this kid started pointing his play gun at me and Allison and making loud "POW POW" sounds, I'll admit, something inside me said, "This is wrong." And it didn't stop there. The kid started shouting, "Better watch out or I'll shoot you. Watch out or I'll kill you." Mind you, he was laughing the entire time. There was certainly no malicious intent behind his words. He was just playing. And I KNEW he was just playing. I was even playing back at him, pretending to be hit by a bullet when he shot me. But even so, something rubbed me very wrong about this whole situation. Especially when he ran up to other random kids and started shooting THEM.

Why did I feel that way? Have I allowed the patty-cake liberal movement of the 1990’s to infect me? Or was there something truly unique about this particular situation? Perhaps it’s simply a matter of the fact that I didn’t know this kid. He didn’t know me. He didn’t know Allison. He didn’t know any of the kids he was shooting at. I guess when I was a kid I never pretended to shoot anybody a) who I didn’t know and b) who didn’t know for certain that this was a game and they could shoot me back. We never said, “I just killed you,” to random strangers, even as we said it constantly to each other, to our friends and siblings. Maybe that’s the difference.

Man, I HOPE that’s the difference. Otherwise who knows what other core values I may have gradually turned over to the creampuff bourgeois in the last 15 years?