Black Hockey DadCentric Reviews: Kids Talking

There's constant danger lurking around the edges of writing about being a Dad. The truth is surrounded by dishonesty on all sides. You want - believe me I really do want - to write about children as if everything they do and say result in epiphanies that alter your destiny in profound ways. But that's not true. So you try to pepper it with the hard stuff. However, when you start writing about the negative, you run the risk of harsh criticism - the harshest criticism comes from yourself - about being a terrible parent and then some idiot asks you why you even had kids in the first place when you hate them so much. Well first of all, I never tried to have kids, but that's beside the point. And if you give me a bunch of jazz about not having sex if I didn't want kids, then this conversation is over because Black Hockey Jesus just gots to have it. Anyway, complaining about kids doesn't mean you hate them and wish you never had them. It's just that sometimes you really wish they'd shut the fuck up.

The 10-year-old boy, still overwhelmed by his fresh confrontation with Being, is an enthusiastic collector of facts. Nothing escapes his interest. He wants to know if beetles fart. He wonders why clouds produce rain. If this were the whole story, it would be easy to romanticize and write long sweeping posts about the insatiable curiosity of childhood.

"Behold! The boy goes forth and yearns for the world to reveal her exquisite story!" or

"The boy is but a sponge who aches only to sop up the cool, sweet water of Nature's knowledge!"

But, you see, the 10-year-old boy doesn't merely want to know about Nature's massive storehouse of odd little facts. Knowing them is not good enough. He must share them. He needs to pass them on. He needs someone to listen to and appreciate every... single... little thing... he learns. And usually right on the cusp of his learning it.

So it doesn't matter if you're working on a novel or a blog post or just really, really focused on Sasha Grey for the moment. The 10-year-old must tell you that cows can't walk downstairs. And he's your son, so you nod and say "REALLY?!?" like some interested asshole because that's what you do. I often wonder, though, if my son can sense how much I don't care about cows and stairs. People will tell you how observant kids are, but I think he buys my enthusiasm when I'm willing to sell it. Because if he knew I was faking it, don't you think he'd feel bad and stop talking? Maybe not.

So then he spaces out his outbreaks of must share Jeopardy knowledge. He waits for you to settle back into what you're doing and allows you to feel safe. Then he tells you about a lady in Texas who married a rock in front of 20 guests. "THAT'S CRAZY!" I shout in mock amazement. "Were the guests people or rocks or kinda split down the middle with people on one side of the church and rocks on the other?" He just shrugged his shoulders and told me how Ben Franklin died. I tell him that I'm not completely certain you can develop an abscess on your lung just from sitting by an open window every day. But I'm no doctor. What the hell do I know? "There's this woman." he says, "They call her the cat lady. She lives in a trailer with over 900 feline companions."

I tell him there's a kind of art to the transition. If you seek them hard enough with a penetrating eye, you can find connections between anything. But it's the conversationalist's job to highlight these connections as a kind of bridge between subjects. If the transitions are too abrupt, your listener may lose interest and want you to go play while he gets some work done.

In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche reflects back over his life and attempts to articulate a force that served as his unconscious guide. He never knew why he worked so dilligently on any particular something; it just always felt right. And in his last complete work, Nietzsche detected a thread that he believed took steps toward unifying his life's many directions, giving them all a new, higher sense.

I revel in the fantasy that my son is collecting this swarm of disparate facts in order to utilize them for some great task in the future. Maybe he'll direct a film about a rock widowed woman who lives with 900 cats that conspire to teach a cow to walk downstairs because the cow needs a vet to check her lungs for an open window induced abscess.

But who knows? I just know that it starts out kinda cute and it always winds up with a frustrated me saying something like. "Dude. I love you. I really do. But I can't handle any more information. It's like a bunch of pebbles in my stomach that I can't digest. I'm working." And he walks away dejected. The way he walks away gets no stars. And the burning need to tell me everything? Well, that's kinda cute and it gets 4 stars but his sense of when enough is enough? Thumbs fucking down.

Have a great 4th of July weekend. Did you know that 3 presidents died on the 4th of July? Yup. John Adams. Thomas Jefferson. And James Monroe. But only one was born on the 4th and that was good old Calvin Coolidge.