Death By Children

With the assis­tance of his attor­ney, my boy pushed the allowance of an x-box on our trip to THE WORLD’S FAVORITE THEME PARK because park hop­per passes and wads of cash and total inde­pen­dence AND A FRIEND are just not enough.

At four in the morn­ing on the day of the trip, I haul my car­cass out to the rented Tahoe and secure the lug­gage to the top. Allow me to edu­macate you on the dynam­ics of large scale SUV archi­tec­ture: if you are, like your hum­ble blog­gist, of sub stew­ardess height, then for the love of god rent some­thing short. I tried to yoga my fat ass into posi­tion to load lug­gage into the lug­gage bag onto of the three-story SUV. I looked like a junebug try­ing to doggy style a bowl­ing ball.

The kid comes out drag­ging a suit­case you could use to smug­gle a dwarf and yells at me, at 4:30 in the morning:

“Don’t drop this this is very impor­tant do not let it fall!”

I swing the thing up and into the nano trunk (nice bailout usage, Chevy).

“What’s in it?”

“My Xbox and some tow­els and a blan­ket or two)”

It takes up the entire micro­scopic trunk space. It’s so big, Cold­well banker is try­ing to stake a sign in it.

My attor­ney arrives, unloads every­thing I’ve been load­ing for two hours, and repacks it using thau­maturgy and sci­ence and not only does it all fit, we have room for more. Except the xbox/blanket/towel trunk is repacked into a shop­ping bag which the boy insists should go on top of all the trunk stuff.

We drive to a Cracker Bar­rel in Ken­tucky, open the trunk, and he xbox slams into the asphalt like it was hurled by a trubuchet. There is a sick­en­ing crack. We all cringe, antic­i­pat­ing the hur­ri­cane of abuse he is about to unload on us .

He picks it all up, tosses it into the trunk like last year’s news and shrugs.

“I don’t know what the big deal is, I’m gonna be at firkin Dis­ney the whole time.”

We’re going to visit a major theme park. Its in Florida. Its reach, as a cul­tural meme, as a his­tor­i­cal pres­ence in the global fun­scape, as a gen­er­a­tor of a continent’s weight of awk­ward snap­shots with suited mas­cots, is mas­sive. Incal­cu­la­ble. Leviathanic.

And due to some serendip­i­tous shake, we’re able to allow the min­ions to bring a friend each.

Imag­ine the insane hella good time they are going to have with pre­paid meal cards, passes to all of the var­i­ous king­doms of this major theme park, a lit­tle pocket change, their BEST FRIEND, and the one thing that really, really mat­ters: a cell phone. They will, essen­tially, be free to roam.

Here’s what the girl asks: does the place we’re stay­ing at have a pool?

Here’s what the boy asks: can I bring my x-box?

This on the very day he arrives home from a week at com­puter camp at North­west­ern Uni­ver­sity where he had a room in a grey­stone frat house with air con­di­tion­ing and wifi, where he was taught the nuances of build­ing online gam­ing word maps; this, after a sum­mer of six flags, skate­boards, and the Vans Warped Tour; this after we feed him.

Can I bring my x-box?

No, you unabashed, ungrate­ful lit­tle ponce, you may not bring your !@#$%^ X box.

I can­not tell you how proud I am to accept the “One Lovely Blog” award from the ines­timable Sarah Garb, blog­gist extra­or­di­naire over at sarahgarb.com. The cash prize was not ter­rif­i­cally impres­sive but let’s face it, I live for recog­ni­tion alone.

I rarely post links to other sites, which may explain my sad obscu­rity. But the link below is to one of the fun­ni­est email Re:Re wars I’ve ever read. Just very, very funny. Check it out:

http://www.kevmo.net/2010/07/07/missing-missy-perhaps-the-best-email-forward-of-all-time/

I get this text to wake me up: “Dad, I’m almost out of clothes.”

Well, no kid­ding. It’s Wednes­day. He’s worn two and a half days worth of clothes so far. Roon has a ten­dency to wear under­shirts. But he uses his other shirts as his under­shirts so it looks like he’s wear­ing two t-shirts. Well, he IS wear­ing two t-shirts. But I only packed on t-shirt per day so per­haps he’s run through his stu­pid rock-n-roll t-shirt batch.

I’ve already been out there once to sneak him his lap­top and enough snacks to last him a week which adds up to a met­ric ton of beef jerky and chips. How­ever, I’m the world’s worst dad and the power chord that was WRAPPED AROUND HIS LAPTOP in his room was NOT HIS POWER CHORD. Hommes was, shall we say, non-plussed.

I expected to be upbraided for my slackard ways. But instead his morn­ing text emer­gency is that he might be run­ning out of clothes.
I’m rais­ing a fash­ion maven.

I took the kid to com­puter camp yes­ter­day at North­west­ern. He’s stay­ing in one of the frat houses. It’s all gray stone and ivy and makes we want to kick myself in the ass for drop­ping out of col­lege and becom­ing a dare­devil. But such is life. We shoot for a bet­ter life for the kids and when we score and they get it, there’s a cer­tain ele­ment of jeal­ousy, a twinge of envy.

This twinge is off­set imme­di­ately upon check-in. We get there and the peo­ple run­ning this camp, an all day com­puter and game design train­ing camp run by indus­try experts and pro­fes­sional nerds that will jack my son’s blos­som­ing com­puter savvy arro­gance into the mesos­phere from whence height he will lob ego shat­ter­ing duhs onto our plebian queries and induce grav­i­ta­tional shifts with the rolling of his eyes, check us in.

Roon takes his bags, his pil­low, and fan and starts walk­ing into this cin­e­matic ivy league frat house and I make for a good­bye hug and he KEEPS WALKING. So, ok, I get it. No PDA. What­ever, so I shift into hi-five mode and he turns to me and says, “I got it, Dad,” and dis­ap­pears into the dorm.

I stood there with my mouth catch­ing flies until I caught the eye of a mom check­ing in her three newly teened boys. She made a face so clearly sym­pa­thetic yet so obvi­ously amused, a look that said “Join the club.”

I knew it would hap­pen. I knew a soon as he got taller than me (by three inches now) and soon as the suf­fix –teen was appended to his age, that he’d dis­miss me as irrel­e­vant and pos­si­bly retarded and indeed he has.

I sup­pose I’ve joined my own fra­ter­nity now: Omega Delta Phi, the Order of Dis­missed Par­ents. We know each other by the sad look in our eyes as our chil­dren grow up, turn their back on us, and walk bravely into their future as they casu­ally ditch us in their past.

5. I’m drop­ping the kids off at the pool …
4. I gotta man­i­fest some des­tiny …
3. I’m park­ing a Buick …
2. I’m research­ing dark mat­ter …
1. RELEASE THE KRAKEN!

My kid comes out of his room after going to bed. He does this some­times because he got a dou­ble DNA dose of a head on fire and his brain, she don’t slow down much. On the occa­sion, he comes out with a what the hell look on his face, poses a query, and asks for clar­i­fi­ca­tion. I am his Google.

Tonight he wan­ders out and asks: What if, secretly, Mor­gan Free­man is retarded?

I still can’t stop think­ing about it. I mean, first of all, what if Mor­gan Free­man is secretly cretinous? Like he’s the ulti­mate idiot savant only instead of glance-counting a jum­ble of Rain­man tooth­picks, he can mem­o­rize an infi­nite num­ber of lines and speak with such appar­ent inner con­vic­tion that we’ll believe any­thing he says BUT as soon as the cam­era turns off, some­one has to hand him a juice box and turn on cartoons.

Sec­ond, where in the last scorched acre of Hell’s back forty was my son’s mind when he stum­bled over this impon­der­able? You’ll never see this kind of thing under a Snap­ple lid.

Finally, the real kicker, the thing that might just fuck­ing keep me up at night: why did he think I would know?