Gen X Dad – The Gen X Dad

Selling Buicks in a Toyota

Vomit is the litmus test for the depths of one’s love. I think John Donne said that somewhere between ‘Death Be Not Proud,’ and ‘The Flea.’ My son tested me with the christening of my car a few days ago, and each bodily fluid that our progeny sends our way makes us stronger.

It’s taken me a few days to commit the moment to posterity because, well, it’s fucking gross, and I am a wimp of the first order. Give me fictional Stuart Gordon and Takashi Miike all day long, but make a stifled “urp!” in your throat, and I am checking myself for signs of nausea.

I knew I passed a serious test of fatherhood when I made it through the ten-minute car ride home with the windows doing a weak ass job of wafting the smell down the freeway and my son doing a valiant but equally weak ass attempt to dab stomach contents off his face.

But, I steeled myself, put on my big boy pants, and cleaned my kid and the car. Let me tell you, little people are much easier to clean than automobile interiors. I didn’t have to triple swipe a washcloth inside any human crevices to make sure there were no wayward chunks of breakfast baking in the sun.

My son felt bad about having choofed in the car, which in turn made me feel bad. It was just a minor bout of car-sickness, but it was potent enough. I kept my calm through the whole experience, but I still had to massage some feelings. I had a New Years Eve date once who punctuated the evening with a much larger display of gastric volume, and, come to think of it, I handled that one pretty well, too. We’ll chalk that teachable moment up to the benefits of club drinks and drugs in your 20s.

Moms are made of tougher stuff, so please don’t feel excluded when I say to my fellow dads, cheers to you who have caught chunks in your hands, on your lap, in your car, in your bed, on the sofa, in your hair, on the dog, in your home, or in public. You have a battle scar that cannot be removed with lasers or grafts.

Keep your head high and your lunch down.

Have a good day!

Otto Scungy

Plop, plop, fizz, fizz

Stand by me, and hold my hair.

A bucket for monsieur (you have been warned)

https://youtu.be/veE1pGEaJig

It’s ok, honey.

Have a good day!

Otto Scungy

One Lemonade, Please!

My son can’t hold together a continuous storyline with his action figures for shit, but boy does that kid have a thing or two to teach me about business.

My wife and I had, in our picturesque vision of parenthood, promised to help my son with a lemonade stand this summer. A few weeks ago, we paid up. We got him outfitted with two pitchers of lemonade, a table, some chairs, a sign, coolers full of ice, a fan, some tunes, and some sunglasses. My boy went to work. With his arse parked in a too-big-for-him sized chair and his visor, my son showed me what’s what about patience, market demand, and giving back.

It took a while for people to get rolling around the neighborhood, but once they did, he had them in his clutches. My wife and I sat and helped with keeping change straight and hoofing the ice chest. Until people started trickling in to shop his wares, he was content to sit in the sunshine and listen to our carefully selected, bubbly music.

We convinced my son to only charge what people wanted to pay, and people apparently wanted to pay about a buck each, some paying more. As my dad says, people like choice. He made about thirty dollars, and he donated half to the state wildlife center (they have, after all, taken in our donations of baby birds, opossum, and squirrels). My wife and I promised to match whatever he donated, so we may have at least paid for the food for our animal refugees.

I never had a lemonade stand as a kid. In fact, I don’t remember any money-making enterprise other than trying to sell toys to neighbors. I never understood why they wouldn’t buy my discarded shit. I am proud to have helped my son with his lemonade stand, no matter how profitable. I am proud of his patience, a virtue from which he regularly lapses. I am proud that he donated half of his money to a cause of his choosing. I think I can ride this happy feeling for a while, and, if I apply myself, even employ his sales practices in my own work.

Thank you, son.

Have a good day!

Otto Scungy

Let’s make lots of money!

I like cold beverages

This Duck Song is an earworm

I’m a happy miser!

Have a good day!

Otto Scungy

There Will Be Blood

If there’s one thing I know, it’s that kids will probably freak the fuck out if they see a parent bleeding. There’s also a pretty good chance that, within the larger group of kids who will freak the fuck out when they see a parent bleeding, there is a subset that will also freak the fuck out if they see a parent faint. I can’t say that I’ve done scientific due diligence here, but I have made close observations in one, unplanned case.

My son, much like his father, runs high on the sensitivity scale. We were riding a pretty positive wave while my wife was out of town this weekend, and I felt like I could at least place in the top ten of a Fun-Dad-Of-The-Year pageant. We were two dudes living the life: playing board games, watching movies, pleasantly doing chores around the house, laughing, playing catch, and feeling the gift of warm spring sunshine. That is, until I decided to make friends with a stray tomcat.

Our family is an animal friendly one, and sometimes animal friendly people take some unwise risks. Our oldest cat, who still has some metaphorical balls if not actual balls, is more bluster when it comes to fighting. In his advanced age, he will acquiesce to neighborhood cats if a good holler doesn’t work. I tend to forget that, and I did so when I saw him sitting with an un-neutered, gray tomcat. The strange cat meowed a friendly kind of meow to me from under a bench on our front porch. I decided to make a new animal friend by trying to scratch him under his chin. Acting from a cornered position and seeing a giant, bald human reaching for him, he decided to tear me a new asshole.

The cat placed my new asshole on my hand, and probably hit a vein on one of my knuckles. The result was a bloodbath that put a slight damper on our otherwise nice weekend. I ran to the sink, freaking out, and my son followed suit when he saw my bloody, new-assholed hand. Now, I’m what you might call a “fainter.” As being one of these “fainters,” I staggered to a clear spot on the living room floor to make way for a good faint. Well, my son, not being accustomed to his dad in full-on faint mode, mistook the slow ebb of consciousness as my soul leaving the earthly plane. Yep, he freaked the fuck out.

This wasn’t the first time I have passed out (ask my phlebotomists) or got hurt by trying to make an animal friend (I got my face hurt trying to give a cat a hug, once), and it certainly won’t be the last. All in all, the rest of the weekend was good, my wife gave me a good talking to when she got home on Sunday, and I have an appointment to get antibiotics. Maybe I toughened my son a little. Maybe I took one for the team to teach a life lesson that might spare him his own bloody, fainty experiences. Probably, though, I just added to the litany of stories in the book of Dumb Shit My Dad Did. C’est la vie.

Have a good day!

Otto Scungy

Animals (not humans) fainting

“I ain’t got time to bleed.” Well, maybe I do.

\m/

C’st La Vie

Have a good day!

Otto Scungy

Ravenous, Infuriating, Hell-Spawned Hippos

I enjoy playing games with my son. I enjoy watching him happily amusing himself with a game, learning new skills through playtime, but I want to smash Hungry Hungry Hippos with a hammer. I owe my parents a giant apology for playing Hungry Hungry Hippos when I was a kid. That they didn’t sever my arms after listening to the “clack-clack-clack-clack-clack!” saves them seats with the saints. If Damien from The Omen had a game he enjoyed as much as tricycle riding, it would be Hungry Hungry Hippos. I try to avoid saying that I hate anything. Hate is too strong a word for any negativity I feel for anything or anyone. Hungry Hungry Hippos is one of the closest things I can think of that makes me feel anything close to hate. It’s more of an activity than a game. It doesn’t even really require hands or thought, just the ability to somehow mash a lever over and over again and the joy some find in pulling the legs off bugs. The designers of the game should be forced to wake up in the morning to the sound of a Hungry Hungry Hippos tournament.

I need to grow some tolerance regarding Hasbro’s torture device disguised as a game. If kids like it, it must have some value. Maybe Hungry Hungry Hippos is one of those tests that prepare people for true, peaceful Zen experience. It’s like monastic training, where you increase the time it takes to go from “No, it’s fine; go ahead and play,” to “Please, stop playing that thing so we can have just a goddamn minute of quiet!” I have steeled myself that my son will have a few only-child issues, but playing Hungry Hungry Hippos by himself pushes the envelope. When he plays the game, which is normally with my wife, the house turns into one of those scenes in books where authors set ominous tones with places devoid of animal life. Our pets would rather fight ten vacuum cleaners than have to be near Hungry Hungry Hippos. I should rise above the sentiment of our pets and just accept that different people enjoy different types of games. Maybe there is an inherent part of ageing that makes Baby Boomer dads, Generation X dads, and all dads extra sensitive to sounds like the number of times a patio door opens, the number of seconds a refrigerator door stays open, and the number and intensity of each cacophonous “Clack” of a hungry, hungry (good Lord, is it hungry) hippo. In the future, I’ll do my best to smile and not let Hungry Hungry Hippos get the best of me. I think I’ll go mow the lawn.

Have a good day!

Otto Scungy

Hungry Hungry Hippos – 80s commercial