MY DAUGHTER HAS BEEF TOO

As a response to Benjamin’s post about kids wrecking your work: Check out this fucking masterpiece I put together on the plane. I went far beyond simply coloring in the lines and delved into the mechanics of how pressure affects the density of the colors. When Sophie saw it, she took in the beauty immediately (how could she not?) She noticed how the sunset is so real it’s like you’re looking through a small window into the dusk.

Then she ripped it.

That’s right. She ripped it out of the pad and threw it on the ground.

I did what most victims of abuse do. Nothing. I bottled up the hurt and made a commitment to put less of myself out there in the future. I rarely draw these days and the majority of my time is spent building a brick wall around myself to keep out the pain, the fear, and the hurt. Goodbye Grover. Goodbye sweet sunset.

LIVE DADDY BLOGGING THE MORNING

She awakens: “Mommy? Mommy?”

I go in and she starts screaming and convulsing on the bed like Santa was replaced with Jeremy Piven. Good morning to you too. Eventually my wife gets her settled and goes back to bed (we got back from England last night so jet lag brings this whole ordeal to 4:30 AM). I’ll nap later.

1- “I wanna go downstairs wif you.” Done.

2- “I want oatmeal with dinosaurs.” Done. This whole time Duncan is whining because he’s all frazzled with the time change and he wants everything she’s having. No problem.

3- “I wanna go in the basement.” Done.

4- “I wanna watch a TV show.” No. “Why?” TV’s bad for you. “Why is it bad for you.” Well it is in this case it’s because you’re using it as a crutch due to a lack of imagination. Do you want to have a debate about it? Wanna go on fucking Charlie Rose and debate it? (I’m not saying this of course. Just mentally blogging it.)

5- “I wanna go potty.” Fine. Knock yourself out. This will be about the 500th time you’ve gone potty. What would you like me to do, warm the fucking toilet seat with my huge tits?

6- “I wanna candy.” Er, all right. You’ve been going potty so long I’m not sure using the toilet deserves a candy. All I get when I go potty is a painful reminder of my hemorrhoids. Anyway, yeah, I’ll carry Duncan back up stairs with you to get a candy (he’d freak out if we left him here alone).

7-”I wanna Go Yogurt.” We don’t have any. How about a yogurt drink?

8- “I want juice.” Fine. Done. Then she starts crying because she misjudged the depth of the cup and spilled a few drops on her dress. Oh yeah, I forgot one: “I wanna butterfly dress.” So I got that and help her put it on.

9- “I wanna go snuggle with mommy.” OK but she’s sleeping and that means you have to go to sleep. She starts to go upstairs. “I don’t wanna go to sleep.” OK unlock the baby gate again so you can come back to the living room.

10- “I wanna sit on the couch and have milk.” OK. So I get the milk but she doesn’t like the cup it’s in and has decided some basket full of blankets is a better place to sit. I offer her the milk there and she looks at me like I’m out of my mind – which I’m about to be. Oh yeah, I forgot the part where she found a present left for Duncan by Trevor and Stacey so she plays with it, doesn’t let him try and gets bored of it immediately.

My wife comes down and I’m about to snap. Now she thinks I’m an asshole that can’t handle the kids. I tell her, “She said she wants her butterfly dress and I got it down for her but then she spilled apple juice on it which she had barely one sip of and we’ve been upstairs and downstairs about 20 times and she said she wanted milk on the couch but she sat in that basket instead and didn’t even want the milk and she stole Duncan’s toy and I don’t even know where it is now.” My wife rolls her eyes. “And the worst part,” I add “Is that I have a ton of shit to do from being away for so long. I have all these emails and I’m trying to get through them under the worst work conditions – ever.”

Now she’s finally got the kids and I can get down to work. Here goes. Ahem.

She awakens: “Mommy? Mommy?”

I go in and she starts screaming and convulsing on the bed like Santa was replaced with Jeremy Piven. Good morning to you too…

It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere

When I was in my twenties the average non-work day went something like this: Wake-up around noon, throw eggs at my hangover, do nothing for a couple hours then start drinking at about four.

But now I am in charge of a living breathing alarm clock who is hard wired to wake me up at 6:30 am no matter what went on the night before. This means that everything has been pushed ahead by at least six hours. Consequently by the time Beatrice takes her first nap (9:30 am until about 11:00 am) I feel like I’ve been awake long enough to crack a Coors Light. It’s actually hard to wait until a reasonable time of the afternoon before having a drink.

Okay so that’s the morning. Now onto the evening. I still go out once an a while but not nearly as much as I used to. I also go to bed earlier on nights that I stay in. This means last call has been moved ahead by about four hours. So basically if you keep an aspect of your nighttime social life alive you end up adding about 12 extra hours of drinking to your weekend.

I think this is why fathers become alcoholics. Not because they hate their lives but because their internal Miller Time clock never resets.

My Daughter Has Beef

At times like this, my mind often wanders to the words of Woody Allen:

“Basically my wife was immature; I’d be at home relaxing in the bathtub, and she’d come in and sink my boats.”

In other words, I know that the following complaints aren’t the concerns of a mature man by any stretch of the imagination; nonetheless, I’ve got a problem that has fucked with me for a good five years, and it’s one I think other dads will relate to.

Now, I don’t want any credit for holding down a six figure income at a 60-hour-a-week job in New York City. That’s my responsibility.

I don’t want props for abandoning my artistic hopes and dreams to work my balls off and wait in 90-degree Subway stations every day. I know full well that art and “writing” are for jerkoffs who don’t care if their kids go to college. I’m comfortable with doing all my personal artistic work “on the side” (read: abandoning it completely.)

But if I’m sitting around on a Saturday, being a good parent and drawing pictures alongside my kids – the LEAST they could do is give me some breathing room, and not fuck with my drawing.

My youngest one is the biggest culprit – she is absolutely determined to make sure that I have NO artistic outlet in my life, and that every creation I attempt is sabotaged. It’s not enough that she’s destroyed my artistic life at a macro level – she needs to control every artistic instinct that still attempts to ooze from my defeated, blackened muse.

Lest you think otherwise, rest assured that I have NOT in any way set up a confrontational relationship with my daughter. I’ve done NOTHING to provoke her attitude.

I PRAISE her little doodles and pen scratches as if they were frigging Rembrandt etchings – I lavish her with admiration as I secretly analyze her scrawl to determine whether her complete incoherence and lack of artistic ability could be symptomatic of a larger, more serious disorder.

All I ask in return is that she not fuck with me. Let me have my 5 minutes – five minutes on a weekend to express myself in crayon – leave me to my own limited ability, and let me build and achieve what I can.

But no.

For example: Last weekend, I hooked up a DOPE Don Martin Fester Bestertester – shit used to be my trademark character in the nineties when I had a life. Somewhere in the Freedom Tunnels, one of these badboys still exists.

I was just putting the finishing touches on his glasses when she says, “Daddy I can help you!”

Oh no.

“Umm, why don’t you do your picture,” I coaxed, “Baby? See? You have one all of your own because you’re so big!”

“Noooo, daddy I help you color ok? I’ll help your picture!”

“No, come on baby, let me see you do your own- you’re so big!”

“Nooooo!”

Then comes the turning point- my wife comes into the next room and starts rearranging papers and eavesdropping and shit – probably because she had detected that I was having a fun for more than five seconds.

She can hear us.

I’m not getting into this fucking argument, (read: I’m not admitting this shit to my wife) so I think of a compromise: I’ll allocate a small section of Fester Bestertester’s forehead, and my daughter can color that part in and help Daddy.

She may not be old enough to color within the lines, and I’d cut her some slack for that, but believe me: She knew exactly what the fuck she was doing when she went ape-shit and started stabbing my picture like it was a friend of Sharon Tate’s.

Just look at this shit:

The bottom line is that she’s jealous, and like all toy graffiti writers, she simply paints for beef.

Most dads would probably “grow up” – “snap out of it” – be “supportive.” FUCK that shit- isn’t it just as important that she learn about respect for other people’s creativity?

I’m her father, and the point is, she better recognize.

Fair is fair, and she needs to understand how the world works. What goes around comes around girl:
Before:

After:

Is my wife supportive of this lesson? Do you even have to ask? Hell no; She has her head so far up her ass, that after I dissed the picture? She went and took it down off my daughter’s wall.

Immune To Reason

I don’t know about you but I generally like to take advice from people who know what they are talking about. And knowing what you’re talking about doesn’t mean simply having had an experience with something. Say for example I am in a car crash. I’m not going to ask the mother of a car crash survivor to reset my bones. I’ll probably let a team of doctors manage that. The same is true if my kid has autism. You can fucking bet I’m not going to take advice from Jenny McCarthy, a silicone enhanced celebrity advocate for one of the most pernicious medical myths going: That there is a link between vaccinations and autism.

McCarthy of course famously believes that vaccines caused her son to become autistic. She also believes she “recovered” him by eliminating wheat and dairy from his diet. This former Playboy bunny and nursing school dropout can’t open her mouth without mentioning it. And people listen despite the mountain of facts that prove the opposite.

Don’t believe me? The federal court of appeals special vaccine compensations program spent 10 years looking into the matter. Here’s what one of the tribunal’s three judges said in her ruling:

“Petitioners’ theories of causation were speculative and unpersuasive…To conclude that Colten’s condition was the result of his MMR vaccine, an objective observer would have to emulate Lewis Carroll’s White Queen and be able to believe six impossible (or at least highly improbable) things before breakfast.”

Need more proof? No problem. The genesis of this bunk came from a study in The Lancet. No researchers have ever been able to duplicate its findings. And now it turns out that the author of the study may have relied on fucking altered data. Ooops! Meanwhile Britain’s herd immunity to measles no longer exists and for the first time in 14 years measles has been declared endemic in the UK. There have also been large outbreaks in Austria, Italy and Switzerland.

Jenny McCarthy is a sociopath. Here’s more proof: a link to her blog where she talks about farting on an airplane. And for good measure here’s another post where she writes about examining her own shit and the turds of her seven-year-old son. Next time you’re constipated give her a call. She’s a wealth of shitty information.

DEAR DAD HOMIES

“Gavin,

The TV is FUCKING CRUCIAL article was brilliant.”

-Byrd Leavell (my fucking literary agent)

“Hey Gavin,

I just wanted to reach out and tell you how much I appreciate your new dad blog. Somebody sent me a link today and I have poured over it. I have two kids seven months and four years old and was probably waiting in line to do bumps right behind you back in the day. You nail the tension, reality, humor, fear, insanity of all of it. And my wife being an English, Guardian reading European socialist as well I sympathise with the predicament you mentioned in TV is FUCKING CRUCIAL.”

Jimmy Jelinek (Editor of Playboy)

Dear Jimmy and Bird,

Thank you for you kind words but I didn’t write that article. A noname rookie shithead nobody named Benjamin did. FUCK!

Sincerely,

Gavin McInnes

I TOLD MY DAUGHTER ABOUT GOD AND SANTA – OOPS!

My daughter is seven years-old.  You can call Child Protective Services now if you want because I’m telling you: my child’s father is a total jerk.  How do I know?  I am her father and if I know anything about anything, I know that I am that jerk.

I remember when my daughter first asked me about god.  She was probably three or so and simply queried, brow furrowed, “What is god?” [I like that she asked what god was as opposed to who this might be.] Without hesitation I told her, “As far as I know, god is a character in a story called the bible that a lot of people believe that “he” is real because they are afraid of dying and haven’t learned enough information to think for themselves.  God is pretty much like Santa, the Easter Bunny, Elmo and the tooth fairy.  Not real.  No one has offered any real proof that a god has or will ever exist.”  The mother of my child cringed.  She does that a lot.

I know!  The kid was only three but my expectations for her intellectual upbringing is quite high given her lineage (lots of high IQs, artist, and PhD. types in this clan).  Besides from what I see most kids are being fed so much bullshit that someone needs to tell them the truth at some point.  May as well be me.  No chaser.

My response to Tooth Fairy became a little homework project for her:”You mean to tell me some kids actually believe that a winged fairy flies gets into their house and leaves money under their pillows?”  I instructed her to ask the kids the following questions and let me know how they replied (or have the kids to ask their parents):

1) Where does this fairy get money to hand out to kids?
2) Has anyone seen the tooth fairy?  How do we know it exists?
3) Upon what is this tooth-for-money relationship based?
4) How does the fairy know when a kid looses a tooth?
5) Why do parents lie to kids?

The result of that exercise?  No one could provide any logical structure to the tooth fairy questions.  But she clearly sees that parents are not telling the kids the truth about the world.  The parents of her friends glare at me.  They do that a lot.  Now I just buy her teeth straight-up buck a tooth.  I’m the fucking tooth fairy.

And Santa Claus.  Jolly old St. Fucking Nick.  Seriously?  The other parents whine, “Whaaat’s the haaarm, it’s a fun story; a tradition.” Well the Confederate Flag is “a tradition” too but I ain’t flying that evil motherfucker in my yard because I DON’T BELIEVE IN THAT SHIT either.  And the harm is that you are telling your children something important to them then at some point your going to tell them that you were “just kidding.”  Reconcile that, parents.

Our next door neighbor, Liza, is seven also and still BELIEVES in the Big Three: Mr. Claus.  God.  Tooth Fairy.  Her mother worries how to ”transition out” of the Santa belief structure.  My response?  “You shouldn’t have lied to her in the first place.  Now she has reasonable doubt about everything you’ve ever said and everything you ever will tell her.  The teen years will be terrific for you.  Good luck with that!”

I am that jerk.

Here’s what I tell my kid:  Listen.  This whole Christmas thing is a story.  A fun story for lots of kids and parents.  You can believe in Santa all you want but have you noticed that each store we go into after Thanksgiving has another Santa?  You want to know why?  Santa is a guy in a costume whose job is to get parents to spend money in that particular mall’s stores because the kid is being primed to beg for specific loot.  In fact, Christmas is all a big trick to get people spend all the money they have or, in many cases, all the money they don’t even have yet.

Fortunately religion was not forced on me as a kid.  I had the option of pursuing what I was interested in within limits, of course.  I chose the arts.  But I’ve seen most of my friends grow up with these ”moral values” forced upon them.  How is that good?  And most of my smart friends have learned that all that was bullshit and harbor a little resentment for the misdirect.  More lies to fill the collection plate.  Parents can provide structure, values, and guidance without relying on a thousand year-old novel.  Heaven?  Hell?

no heavens nor hells
i don’t believe in fairy tales
proportions blown beyond belief
jingoistic source of make believe grief

People should be groomed, prepared, to get to a point where they can formulate their own beliefs and opinions.  If my kid wants to believe in UFOs and Vishnu when she’s an adult, that’s on her.  But I tell you, I didn’t get into the parent business to tell my kids a bunch of lies that I’ll have to hide or retract later.  I have my credibility to manage.

I am that jerk.

THE JOYS OF STARING AT A SMOKE ALARM

Going to Home Depot yesterday I was reminded (by a smoke alarm box) of the sheer bliss it is to stare at a smoke alarm with your child. The hours simply fly by as you bask in the security that little ionization chamber provides. Take advantage of this moment while you can because both things grow up so fast.

Scare Tactics

When I was a kid my mother used to love scaring the living shit out of me and my siblings. She would read to us from a book called Struwwelpeter. It was a German translation and in one story a boy gets his thumbs cut off with giant scissors. She would send me to the basement to get potatoes then hide around the corner holding a raw chicken and lunge at me when I came upstairs. She’d throw rubber snakes at me while I watched Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.

None of this sounds that scary now. But I used to lose it and she would double over in hysterics. At the time I couldn’t figure out what possessed her to do these things. Now I know. Scaring your kid can be fun. I don’t mean giving them lasting fears of black people or money. But just giving them an innocent little fright so you get to watch them freak out and try to figure out what’s going on.

Masks are a great place to start. I picked up this cheap plastic mask of Yasser Arafat at a party supply store in Beirut. (I guess it’s totally normal buy balloons, streamers, noisemakers and a stack of Arafat masks if you’re throwing a party for a two-year-old in Lebanon.) For the best results follow these steps:

1) Make sure your kid sees your face and recognizes you.
2) Turn away and put on the mask.
3) Now turn back and show them your new “face”. If your baby doesn’t freak out right away, they will when you take the mask off. I’m sure they think you have literally peeled off your visage.

Unfortunately this trick has diminishing returns. I tried it this morning and she barely flinched. After masks I moved on to the Variable Uncanny Embryo Horrible Creep In Dark. Again, the first time my daughter Beatrice confronted this wonder of Chinese manufacturing, she lost it. The second time, as you can see, it was almost no big deal.

I’m not sure how much further I want to push this though. I could wind up instilling in her some weird phobia about buying cheap souvenirs. She would never forgive me.

MAKING BABIES

(This is me if I waited as long as you)

Very few of the guys at my wedding are married or have kids. They think marriage is a sexless shithole and kids are a pain in the ass so they’ve decided to wait. Some things to consider.

1-    In a study called Our Sexuality by Crooks and Bauer they discovered it’s actually a myth married couples don’t fornicate. What happens is, they stop fucking when there’s babies and toddlers around because they’re exhausted. Once the kids start playing independently and going to pre-K however, the sex comes back with a vengeance. We hear about the drought more than anything because that’s when people whine the most.

2-   Raising kids is a young man’s game. Not only is it physically demanding; It’s emotionally draining too. This is a fun workout at 30 but when you get into your 40s, it’s bordering on self-abuse. When I was 18 my dad could kick my ass and that kept me out of trouble. Can you beat up an 18 year-old you at 60? Do you really want to be 70 at your daughter’s wedding?

3-    Old sperm has been linked to autism.