I haven’t been following this year’s election all that closely.  The closest thing I’ve come to watching the debates between the two candidates is SNL and that is probably the best way to take it all in.  However, through osmosis I have picked up on one candidate continually proclaiming that he is going to make America great again while at the same time saying he is going to put up a wall to keep people who shouldn’t be here in their current location.

I am fully aware of the fact that the person making these proclamations, along with all of his campaign staff, probably isn’t politically astute, but if you want to keep people out of a place you don’t claim you are going to make it great again.  “Hey buddy, we just opened this strip club, it has all former playboy playmates in various states of dress and undress, unbelievable, but you can’t come in here.”  If it were up to me my slogan, that is if I was as exclusionary as our republican candidate is, would be make America terrible again.  Let’s get back to the 70’s when people didn’t know how to dress, had to wait in line to get gas, (can you imagine waiting in line to get gas?  If that actually happened I’m pretty sure everyone would be driving electric cars in about two weeks, “excuse me sir, I just waited in line for 15 minutes for this gas, where is the I phone that comes with the gas?) and there were only like four or five television stations to watch, and on top of all that awfullness,  inflation was skyrocketing at a rate that has only been rivaled by the recent increase in the cost of college education.

Seriously, you want people to abandon their dream of immigrating to the United States you have two options, elect Donald Trump or create a world similar to that in the Walking Dead.  Would a post apocalyptic world be worth keeping immigrants out of our country?  Probably not, but I may be in the minority when it comes to that opinion, at least among white people living in the midwest.  Dodging flesh eating zombies on your way to the grocery store is way better than having to see your hard earned tax dollars go to the education or health care of some person who doesn’t deserve to be here, at least if you aren’t the token black guy in the zombie apocalypse scenario.  The problem with being that guy is that once another black guy shows up you’re a goner, there’s no room for two black guys in a post apocalyptic scenario just ask every writer who has ever been involved with a movie or tv show involving zombies, or pretty much anything else.  (Will Smith can back me up on this, my heart goes out to you Will, your life has been full of racial strife and struggle, keep up the good fight)

Imagine making the United States so crappy that people are willing to immigrate to Mexico?  I don’t think the Zombie Apocalypse scenario is enough to get that done, but I do know what is, if we could somehow make the rest of the United States resemble the Zeeland, Hudsonville, Holland try-city area no one (other than Dutch People) would want to live here.  Christian Reformed churches on every corner, garage sales every Saturday, and liquor laws that make it almost impossible to get bombed on Sundays.  There’s nothing quite as frustrating as wanting to get your drink on and realizing it’s Sunday and the nearest liquor store is three towns away.  I’m actually shocked it took Chick Fillet so long to open up a franchise here with the incredible Zeal West Michigan has for making Sundays suck.

Maybe shooting for a country that makes people think Mexico is a plausible alternative to living int he United States isn’t enough.  Maybe we need to go all out just to make sure no one comes back and no one else wants in.  We need people to be so down on the US that they are willing to take a one way trip to Canada.  Mexico for all of its short comings still has nice weather and a lot of water.  All Canada has is ice and Tim Horton’s.  The question is is other than nuclear annihilation, how do we make America that bad?  Not even a Trump led country is that bad, sure people will say I’m moving to Canada but they never mean it, in the history of the Untied States no one has ever actually moved to Canada because they didn’t like the current president.  Hey Steve you said you were moving to Canada, what’s the deal you’re still here?  Dude, it’s fucking cold up there, I ain’t moving to Canada, even if Amy Shumer became president and I have to hear daily press briefings about her unfunny Vagina I wouldn’t move to Canada, Costa Rica or a warm weather climate, maybe, Canada, hell no!  Can you imagine her State of the Union address?  I think George W probably got more laughs during his speeches than she would.  Seriously, there isn’t much that’s less funny than a vagina, have you ever seen one close up?  Not funny.

My kids are slowly creeping up on an age where they should probably engage in some extra curricular activities.  The only problem is is that I don’t want to watch them engage in said activities because from what I can tell these are mostly on Saturday mornings which I have reserved for sleeping in, watching my kids watch cartoons, and eating doughnuts.  The primary activity that seems to be the default go to is youth soccer.  One of my problems with soccer is that it sucks balls to watch even when professional athletes who are being paid millions of dollars play it, there’s no way it isn’t horrible to watch when five year olds are engaged in such a uneventful sport as soccer.  Not only does my high level of intelligence and insight tell me youth soccer is god awful, I also had a brief career as a referee for youth soccer when I was in college.  I knew very little about actual soccer rules,  but it didn’t really matter because youth soccer isn’t really about rules, it’s about trying to keep the kids from attracting to the soccer ball as if they were frat guys who stumbled on a hot chick mere drinks away from passing out.  That being said and despite my lack of knowledge of the so called “rules” of soccer, I did have one thing going for me, I was the one who kept time.  I had a stop watch and the halves were suppose to be 12 minutes, by the end of the day they were 7 or 8 minutes.  Some of the astute parents may have noticed, but they were probably greatful,  I’m sure they  wanted to watch college football just as much as I did.

I have had people tell me soccer isn’t that bad, it may not be that bad but is it as good as sleeping in? Watching your kids watch cartoons?  Or eating doughnuts?  Of course it isn’t and I’m not trading any of those things in right now so that I can be forced into attending a youth soccer game, plus I’m sure there is a practice or two during the week that I would have to drag my kids to as well. (This is not an endorsement of football, football is just as boring as soccer with three times more injuries, most of them being catastrophic in nature) I’m not caving into the peer pressure of forcing my kids into playing a sport that they could give two shits about and that in all honesty, I hope they never play.  The crazy thing is, and I don’t know how this happened, but my oldest, Tod, all of a sudden decided he wanted to take karate classes.  I had hoped he was like his mom in the fact that she gets an idea in her head, is diligent about pursuing it for maybe 48 to 72 hours and then completely forgets about it, I would like to attribute it to her ADHD but who really knows what the exact cause of it is, it may have something to do with the fact that she has a vagina, I have a sneaking suspicion a lot of women are like this.  On that note, I’m sure she has had the idea of replacing me pop into her head but at some point realized it would take too much work and follow through to pull off, instead she decided to up the value of my life insurance policy.

I am digressing somewhat from where this was going, so bare with me since it’s been a while since I have blogged.  Shirley has had a number of ideas that have struck me as compulsive and not very well thought out.  One in particular was her desire to buy a camper.  I hate camping even more than I hate soccer so I played along and went to see some campers at a few places that sold campers, I even pulled a few used ones up on Craig’s list and showed her them just to keep the ruse going that I was as interested in a camper as she was.  Sure enough, a week went by and the camper idea fell by the way side like many of her other ideas had.

Unfortunately, her trips to Costco don’t allow me to implement this type of strategy in limiting her purchases.  Her latest fiasco occurred when I was golfing on a Saturday morning.  I came back and we had a brand new blender.  Here’s what happens with brand new blenders similar to what happens with tread mills and Nintendo Wii, they get used for a week and then the next thing you know they are being sold at your garage sale.  Normally I don’t even bother to ask how much something costs, but this blender appeared to be the Cadillac Esacalade of blenders so I had to at least inquire.  (the most I have ever spent on a blender is $30). As I inquired, Shirley indicated that it was probably as much as my golf all summer had cost, immediately I thought to myself “holy shit!” and then realized that my wife had no idea how much I actually golf and what the total sum of those greens fees would be, but I was still a bit alarmed.  She ended up spilling the beans and told me the blender was $500, my reaction was as if I had missed a three foot putt that would have won me the Masters, I was quite livid.  Here is what I don’t understand, how can a watch be thousands of dollars and how can a blender be $500? They do one thing, tell time and blend.  Fortunately I was somewhat calm in my approach to explaining how absolutely ridiculous spending $500 on a blender was.  As Tod and Ted watched on drinking their freshly blended smoothies, Shirley agreed to return the blender.

As with Shirley’s typically unsound wants and desires, I thought I could put off Tod’s request to attend karate by prolonging my search for the perfect karate class.  However, he kept bugging me on a weekly basis about going to karate.  I finally caved and found a karate class that received rave reviews on Google.  We arrived about two minutes before the scheduled 5:30 class, which was a gold star for us, and I signed the paper work to get Tod started.  Unfortunately the class was geared more for older kids and Aiden appeared to be the youngest enrolled by at least a year.  The instructor lined them up and had them do some rudimentary stretching which Aiden was struggling to accomplish.  Bad sign?  Hell yes, but what was even worse was when they got to jumping jacks.  He resembled an epileptic gold fish who had been spilled on the bathroom floor on the way to being flushed down the toilet.  I’m pretty sure at that point the instructor thought to himself as did I “this kid is in way over his head”.  After the failed attempt at jumping jacks the instructor paired the kids off and they began to do some karate moves.  The problem here was that most of the moves required the participants to do two things at once, the only activities Tod is capable of doing in conjunction with one another is eating and watching television.  He was on the struggle bus from the get go but was a good sport about it and gave it his all never feeling as self conscious as he should have.

One thing I did fail to mention was that all the other kids had their black karate robes on and Aiden was wearing jeans and a long sleeve t-shirt.  This was my bad, I could have at least brought along a pair of weenie benders for him to wear so he didn’t look entirely out of the ordinary.  (a karate robe is part of the deal if you sign up for three months of classes, I’m tempted to just buy him a karate robe on line and forego the classes). Initially he was quite concerned about not having his robe which is truly remarkable that kids that age realize when they are different and are actually that self conscious about it.  Ultimately, the karate maneuvers were completed and the final exercise was a team race where the kids were split up in two different teams.  Each team had to race to the end of the room and around a karate punching dummy with a bean bag balanced on their head.  Aiden’s team got out to a spectacular start but were severely bogged down when he came up and trudged his way around the dummy.  Fortunately for him there were some other inept kids  on his team and the loss could not solely be attributed to him.  The second event in the race involved a similar goal but instead of running they had to do high leg kicks the entire way.  This was even more of a struggle for Aiden but his team somehow managed to barely come out on top so his ineptitude was overlooked by his teammates but not by his dad.

As I was shuffling out of the class the instructor caught my attention.  I was worried he was going to try to talk me into bringing Tod back for another round, but I hadn’t given him enough credit.  Instead he told me about a Monday or Wednesday class for Young Dragons that is geared towards 3 to 5 year olds where Tod can work on his motor skills and core muscle development, as well as probably get beat up by his three year old brother since he can also be enrolled in the class.  When I told Aiden the news of a different class his response was “do I get to wear a robe?”  I answered in the affirmative and he asked me at least a half dozen more times on the way home about the robe.  While watching 3 to 5 year olds engage in karate exercises isn’t my ideal way to spend a Monday after work I still have sleeping in, watching my kids watch cartoons, and doughnuts to look forward to.  I love my Saturday mornings.

Some time ago I was riding in my truck with Tod and Ted and Tod asked me this question “Dad, do you love golf more than you love us?”  It was quite evident Shirley had been not too happy with the amount of golf I had been playing at the time, and that’s just the golf she actually knew about.  Ultimately I questioned her about the propaganda she obviously was hurdling upon the kids in regards to their father, and she denied it completely.  My kids are smart, but there is no way at this age they should come to the realization that I love golf more than I love them.  Eventually they would have figured that out on their own, but for now let them live in complete ignorance Shirley,  ignorance is bliss.

I will admit this, the question caught me off guard, but the appropriate response would have been this.  “That’s an interesting question.  Tod, you and Ted really like ice cream don’t you?  You would eat it three times a day if you could, right?  Now there’s some ice cream that you like better than others and when that ice cream is available it makes you really happy, way happier than eating vanilla ice cream, right?”

“Of course dad, ice cream is the greatest thing ever.  I can’t imagine there being anything I like more than ice cream.”

“Tod, I would love it if ice cream was always your favorite thing in the world, but I have a feeling when you get into your teenage years, if memory serves me correct, there is something out there that is going to blast by ice cream as if it were standing still, there will be an appropriate time and place for me to apprise you of what that is, and right now is not that time and place.  So back to my point, your happiness when it comes to ice cream is probably correlated to how long it has been since you have had ice cream, the type of ice cream you are eating, and the amount, right”

“I’ve always been happy when I have had ice cream, are there different levels of happiness?”

“Of course there are, when we let you watch a half hour of tv your happy right?  But how happy are you when we let you watch an entire two hour movie?”

“Really happy?”

“Exactly, and that’s what I am trying to get at here, wether or not I like something better than something else is contingent on a whole lot of things.  If I’m playing a real nice golf course, it’s a beautiful day, and I’m playing well, golf is my favorite thing to do, even above spending time with you guys.  This is especially true if its the day after I have had to  take care of you guys for three nights in a row because your mom has had to work late and you guys were being dicks the entire time.  I still love you guys, but I don’t like hanging out with you and  I like playing golf way  more than spending time with you guys.  But on the other hand, if it’s a crappy day, I’m slicing the ball and have absolutely no idea where it is going to go, and I haven’t seen you guys in a couple weeks, I would probably, and I’m not saying that I’m 100% sure, but at least 80 percent sure, I would want to be with you guys instead of on the golf course.”

“Besides where did you get the idea that I love golf more than you guys?  Which I don’t by the way, I would just rather golf than hang out with you guys, I’m sure the tables will be turned in 10 years when you figure out how to masturbate and suddenly gain interest in the opposite sex, you’ll begrudgingly talk to me once in a while but that will be about it and it will likely only be for the sole purpose of hitting me up for some money or to use my car”

“Well mom said you spend way too much time golfing and that she never gets to have a Thursday to herself because of your dumb golf league.”

“Well, you guys should probably hear this now, what you have to understand about married women, which includes your mom, is that their entire fulfillment hinges on their husbands.  Married women will pretend to have friends, but they are really just people who  they choose to hang out with who also have kids so that they can sit around and talk about you guys, I know, right, totally boring.  Guys on the other hand engage in activities that allow them to get away from their families and avoid talking about their kids.  We have hobbies such as golf, bowling, and watching sports that allow us to retain some degree of sanity.  Don’t get me wrong, there are women who have hobbies, but they are called lesbians and you probably want to steer clear of them because they will probably be better at most of the so called hobbies than you are, and that can be quite emasculating.  So, the harsh truth is that as much as your mom wants to bad mouth my hobbies and interests, I have encouraged her to do the same as me and find some hobbies and interests. In all reality, I’ve actually encouraged her to engage in hobbies with attractive women, i’ve suggested she start with pillow fights and see where it takes her as well as to make sure to document it via video, unfortunately she hasn’t taken me up on it yet.  Here’s the deal, the problem is she doesn’t want to hang out with other women on a regular basis because women are boring.  Does that all make sense to you?  You guys probably already know this, but there are maybe three women in the entire world who are actually funny, and then there’s a large group of women who have been artificially labeled funny because their women, kind of an affirmative action form of humor labeling for women.  That’s probably the primary reason women don’t’ hang out with other women all that often.  I don’t know about you guys but I like to laugh, and I’m not laughing when I’m with a room full of women I can tell you that much.  Does that make sense?”

“Not really, can we go get some ice cream?”

“Sure.”