DadCentric

What's At The End Of The Road

I have a thing about the end of the world, namely that I believe in it. Worse still, I’m sure it will happen in my lifetime. According to a life-expectancy quiz I took this week, I should make it to age 77 assuming nothing random happens to me like choking on a marshmallow or being hit by a flaming meteor (which we all know could totally happen).  In any case, simple math dictates I’ve got 37 good years ahead of me. This is plenty time for either A, the Democrats to confiscate all of our guns and force us into same-sex marriages thus leaving us defenseless against a Chinese invasion or B, the Republicans take control and plunge 98% of America into extreme poverty after funding a pork barrel project that results in a zombie army, hence setting the stage for a World War Z.

Truthfully speaking, my beliefs on the earth’s demise are aligned with the events prophesied in the book of Revelations which are totally plausible according to a Discovery Channel special and Kirk Cameron. Nutty, I know, but a guy’s got to believe in something, and besides, what’s the harm? If I’m wrong you all get to come back to this post and tell me, “I told you so” in the comments.

Lest you think I’m about to go on a religious tear, allow me to put your mind at ease. I’m not. Unlike the crazies that manage to end up on FOX and Friends, I actually respect other people’s beliefs because who’s to say I’m 100% right. This reminds me of a joke.

Fairy Dusted

The Peanut believes in Fairies. Hard. In fact the Peanut believes that she is a fairy. Possibly their erstwhile ruler banished long ago because of some horrible bureaucratic oversight. This belief was implanted by her mother, the Aunties in Maine, and me. There have been fairy houses built from shoe boxes and birch bark and love (you need a glue gun for the love part) hidden in dappled glens in the nearby Maine woods. Gifts left and found and reciprocated at sacred stumps in the light of a full moon. Notes written in the strange language of the Fae folk. Use of the phrase "Fae folk." We really go overboard. We encourage this belief in part because she is so tiny, so mercurial, so ethereal in her way that not only is it appropriate, we hope it's good for a little confidence too. Maybe it'll give her a bulwark against always being the smallest. "I may be the smallest kid in class but eventually I'll be able fuck your shit up magic style, so it's all good." Or something to that effect.

Eventually because the deal is, she's not a fairy yet. She's got fairy blood sure, but to become an actual fairy takes years of training. Years of studying things like wood craft and fishing, reading and writing, math and science, wild edibles, swimming, and flying. It takes eating your fruits and vegetables and being nice to your brother. It takes being kind to animals. It takes a lot of manipulative parental bullshit.

 But she believes now. She'll often tell you she can, "fly for one second" before jumping in to the air and flapping her arms like a hummingbird. She'll ask you to touch her ears sometimes and then ask if you can "feel how they're getting pointier." Joke's on her when she graduates from college with a Forestry degree and an entire wardrobe of bedazzled camouflage only to realizes the only magic power she has is the ability to apply for a job at Starbucks.

The Peanut of Doom

"Daddy, When I'm a grown up, you'll be really old?"

"Yep. When you're 25, I'll be . . . 59."

"Wow. That's really old."

"Yup. And when you're 39 like me, I'll be 78."

"Really?"

"Yup. And when you're 78,I'll be . . . 117."

"That's older than a hundred!"

"Yup, it is." 

"Daddy, I don't ever want to die."

This issue has been popping up of late. Worrying about mortality. It was bound to happen. She's already five years old, after all. Only 45 years to go until she's AARP eligible.

I blame the cats. Two of them had to be euthanized in the past two years. At first, she accepted what we told her. That they went to a quiet place where they could rest and be comfortable and not hurt or be sick anymore. 

Then one day she realized they weren't ever coming back and she cried in the backseat of the car for a good 15 minutes. Lately, she's started to worry about her own--and her parents--mortality more. Every once in a while she'll just come out with it. She'll ask what happens if we die. Or tell me she doesn't ever want us to die. We're on the same page with that, she and I. 

She lost a great-grandmother this past year, too. They weren't close, but we did see MaPa not long before she died. She didn't go the same way as the cats, though. 

I was a bit of a mortality worry wart when I was young. I don't know if it started at five necessarily, but I do remember laying awake at night worrying about it when I was around seven. The year I lost my great-grandmother, come to think of it.

We're not heaven and hell folk around here. But neither do we want to look at our 5 year old princess ballerina angel and tell her that "everything dies, it's called entropy, there is nothing but the void, please finish your asparagus." Hence the quiet place. I thought that might get us through for a few more years, but I guess not. 

One thing we try to do is remain calm when the issue is brought up. I've also been trying to remember some of the things people told me when I was younger: 

"You live on in your memories."

That one sucks. When you're a kid engaged in an existential crisis, "memories" don't cut it. At least they didn't for me. My ego said "fuck that, I don't want to live on. I want to live. I want to live and breathe and have birthday parties and get hugs and presents."

"When you die, the energy and electricity in your body dissipates and then co-mingles with all energy, because energy can never be destroyed."

My parents hung around with a lot of hippies. And when I was in college (read: smoking weed), that one was pretty comforting. However, my daughter doesn't to my knowledge smoke weed, and again, dissipated energy doesn't get to play with new toys.

So I guess for now we'll stick with the Quiet Place (that looks so ominous when it's capitalized). That and of course we tell her not to worry. That she is not going anywhere anytime soon and neither are we. That we'll be here with her and her brother for a long time yet. Which reminds me, it's time to take my cholesterol medication. 

 

Knee Jerk

Then there are those moments where you’re just like, “What the shit am I doing?”

It’s a few days from Easter. We’re in the car. Wife’s driving, I’m passengering, boys are in the back strapped into their seats. Our usual seating arrangement. My youngest, my four-year-old, is in a babbling mood, and on this occasion the subject of his babblings is Easter and all the eggs and candy that the Easter Bunny is going to leave for him.

“Fake!” declares his brother, two years his senior. “Fake! Fake!” And so on and so forth.

I turn around in my seat, give him a look. “Stop it.”

The babbling goes on unabated, as if he hadn’t even heard what his older brother just said. Not one to be silenced when he knows the truth’s on his side, my eldest lays out his case again. “Fake! He’s! Not! Real!”

I swing around to him again, actually getting kind of mad now, and again I tell him to stop. I say it like I mean it, which in that moment, I do, I really want him to just shut his noisehole with regards to the existence of giant magical rabbits with a penchant for hiding hardboiled or in some cases plastic eggs, if he could do that for me, that would be just nifty.

The kid just smiles back at me and mouths the word…FAKE!

Jaws Was Never My Scene, and I Don't Like Star Wars

"Dude."

It was Simmons.

"What's goin' on, man?"

"I've got some Donald Duck, dude.  Wanna go see Star Wars for a buck at Leohman's ?"

"Go see...wait...Donald Duck?" I said.

"It's blotter, dude.  I got some..."

"Yeah, yeah, I know what it is," I said.  I had never done acid before, but I knew the lexicon.  Just needed some context.  "Umm...Star Wars?  I thought they were showing 2001: A Space Oddysey." 

"No, dude, Star fuckin' Wars! Huh huh huh. C'mon, let's go!  My mom'll drive."  Star Wars had come out three years prior.

"Nah, dude," I demurred, "I gotta wash the fuckin' van today.  I can't get out of it."

"All right, loser.  Have fun," he said.  Later."

"Later." 

I walked the yellow receiver back to the kitchen, untangling fifteen feet of boinging spiral cord from the basement stairs, and clacked it onto the wall, averting my eyes from Mom's scrutiny.

A Gallery Of Disturbing Christmas Tree Ornaments

This Saturday was Tree Decorating Day, so the whole family went to our local Target to pick up some ornaments. We told the kids that they could each pick out a special ornament to hang on the tree. I picked this one for myself:

Lucas picked a motorcycle, and Zoe picked a Christmas-attired Winnie The Pooh, and...wait. You're bothered by the Beer Ornament, I see. Well, if you think that's bad, wait until you see what's after the jump. I had to take some pictures. Because ho ho holy shit, they're just awful.

Werewolf Bar Mitzvah - Spooky! Scary!

My MacBook is still in the shop and I haven't put together a Halloween costume. So here's one of our favorite holiday classics to tide you over. And don't forget to check your kids' candy for razor blades, hallucinogens, steroids, alien microtransmitters, and/or hidden Prayer Cards. Trick or treat!

Bin Laden's Daughter Watched Him Die, Just Like God Said

Embedded in a CNN article about the White House's decision not to publish pictures of the dead Osama (or to sell any "dead Osama" action figures) was the following:

One of bin Laden's daughters has told Pakistani interrogators that she saw her father shot, a senior Pakistani intelligence source said Wednesday. The daughter, believed to be 12 or 13 years old, was among those left behind at the compound after Monday's U.S. raid, the source said.

So, even though this cat followed a fundamentalist sect of the Quran-reading set and spent his "golden years" plotting against the EVIL, INFIDEL, GOD-FEARING, ALLAH-SPURNING West, his death may have verified a foreboding admonition from the Christian Old Testament:  the sins of the father are visited upon his children (See Exodus 20:5), an idea the Quran directly refutes (See Quran 35:18).  Ain't that a bitch?

You:  But dude was a terrorist!  Of course his kids are going to get brought down for being associated with someone who kept the company he did and committed the atrocities he committed!

But does his daughter deserve to watch him die?  Via gunshot wounds from infidel SEALs? 

Just because an outcome may be predictable doesn't mean it's acceptable or justified.  However, religious beliefs aside, any of us who've been alive for a couple decades have seen that such habits as drug abuse, infidelity, smoking, gambling, and alcoholism (not that having a bourbon or 6 is a sin) will provide negative consequences for the offender's progeny.  So, regardless of whether or not a father's sins "visit" the sons or daughters, his poor lifestyle decisions will certainly affect them. 

Which is why I, for one, prefer to drink alone.

When Puberty Strikes Like Lightning

You can see the storm coming for sure.

But sometimes you just don't know when it is going to hit.

Sure, there were signs: he pointed out that J Woww's boobs were big, his voice has gotten deeper and his penis is a popular topic to discuss.

But then there were questions I wasn't prepared to answer.

Like the day he blurted out, "I don't believe in the story of Adam and Eve."

"What do you mean?" I asked. "Like that all people came from those two?"

"Yeah," he said. "I believe in evolution. Because the other way is gross."

"You mean like you shouldn't kiss your sister, that kind of thing?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said.

And it was left at that. It was left with me scratching my head and him probably wondering just how people become people. The head scratching because Adam and Eve is a story of religious bent and I'm not sure where he heard it. I mean public school can't teach religion, right? Okay, I live in the South so who am I kidding? Can they teach evolution? Suddenly I felt lost. I felt like I didn't know what my child was learning or where he was learning it from and I knew it was time to step in.

His sudden interest in boobs and growing fascination with his cock & balls signified it was time to have the father-and-son talk about the birds and the bees. 

But the goddamn school beat me to it.

The Truth About Cats and Gods

Well, the cat's dead. Was she the best cat ever? That is a childish question. And yes. Empirically. If you want, leave a comment and I'll email you the documentation. I'm not here to eulogize the cat though. That's over on Cat Fancy's dead cat of the month page. 

The P-Nut turns 4 in April. She's getting pretty hip to what's going on. Including the fact that the cat--Xiu Xiu (zhu-zhu) the Eldest--had disappeared.

We had to have The Conversation. 

I went through a lot of strategies in my head. Wait until she asks, then offer ice cream. Wait until she asks, then shout "Look over there!" and then run away. Make her watch a particularly brutal nature show and when it's over go, "There. That's what happened to Xiu-Xiu, understand?" Tell her she was cheating on us with a second family. Business trip. Called up by the Reserves. Time traveler.