https://youtu.be/GPlW9DiCRDM

Last Sunday I was invited to an annual poker game where among other things, I ran up against quad tens when I was initially dealt A/k (aka Big Slick).  I either hit a king or an ace on the flop and was firing at the pot completely oblivious to the monster hand that was about to kick my teeth in.  The party went much longer than I planned on staying because I needed to get home for some business time.  Similar to not wanting to see myself engage in pretty much any activity, I have never taken video of business time, heck I don’t even like how my voice sounds on a recording, can’t imagine getting footage of myself doing the deed.  Regardless, I am pretty sure the idea I have in my head of how it appears is completely inaccurate, and it is akin to this video.  Unfortunately, Aiden managed to interrupt business time before business time could be completed by pounding on our door and when we didn’t answer it in three seconds, he began crying.  I managed to get up in a somewhat timely fashion and escort him back to his bed, but he was beside himself.   Apparently earlier that evening his bed broke and he woke up and the first thing that popped into his head was an irrational fear that he was going to fall out of his bed.  I have no patience to begin with, but under these particular circumstances I knew there was no way I was going to calm him down so I turned things over to Shirley.  I wasn’t real sure why he was so concerned about the functionality of his bed since we were about twenty minutes from him and his brother coming in to sleep on our floor.  Not sure if I have shared this fact, but the sleeping bags the kids received for Christmas work much better than the comforter that we originally turned into a make shift bed for them next to Shirley’s side of the bed.

Eventually the tables will be turned when my kids reach middle school and we find them doing what every teenage boy does at that age.  (wish I would have known this fact when I was a teenager, the needless guilt I went through multiple times a day).  However, until that happens the children I somewhat willingly brought into my life will continue to interrupt business time.  The Monday after the business time incident, Shirley attended an event at the kid’s school that was aimed at prepping parents for what’s lurking on the internet that our kids shouldn’t see.   Back in the day when kids wanted porn they had to get it the old fashioned way, they had to stumble upon it.  One of my first exposures to porn was discovering five Penthouse magazines in one of the outbuildings on my parents property.  Jackpot, right?  Looking back, it probably was a little more than a fourth grader should have been seeing at the time.  Sneaking the JC Penney or Sears catalogue  to look at the underwear section (women’s I don’t even think they had a men’s underwear section) was completely harmless, but seeing what a vajayjay actually looked like was horrifying.  On top of that, we are talking about Penthouse magazines that were from the eighties, the hair around the naughty parts resembled the hairstyles of that day, you would have needed a weedwacker to trim up some of those bushes.  Eventually guilt and a fear of being caught with our magazines led my friends and I to secretly dispose of them when my dad was burning brush and other things that were combustible.  However, as I grew older there were plenty of occasions to stumble upon naked women either in still photography or in VHS format.

The amount of pornography kids were exposed to back in the good ole days seems appropriate when looking back.  Also, unless you had some really sick and twisted relatives, it wasn’t the type of detestable material you can stumble upon with a simple Google search.  It’s my understanding through what people tell me, and not via personal experience, that anything can be had on the internet and that the majority of the inappropriate content is free and little can be done to assure that an age appropriate person is viewing the material.  So, what is a parent to do?  We already have allowed our kids on to our phones to pacify them at restaurants or in the car.  Those very same phones have access to pretty much anything you can imagine, it’s a smorgasbord of raunchy material for anyone who knows how to perform the right search, and even for someone who doesn’t.  When I was growing up there wasn’t an internet or cell phones.  The only way you were able to access dirty material was if it was tangible.  What if parents banded together and kept phones and internet away from their kids until they reached a certain age?  Somewhat unrealistic I realize, my kids already claim to be bored when they ride in the car for more than 30 seconds without an electronic device to keep their attention.  What I wouldn’t give for my kids to have to go through the torturous road trips to Colorado, Florida, and Maine that I endured as a kid with nothing to do but play the sign game where you had to complete the entire alphabet using the first letter on road signs, or look out the window hoping for the apocalypse.  Can you imagine the current generation of children and teenagers being forced into finding pay phones to make phone calls?  Granted, I realize there are about three functioning pay phones other than those in jails, in the entire Untied States but if there were a sudden demand for pay phones businesses would accommodate that demand.

Is it possible to child proof devices so that our children are unable to be exposed to raunchy material no matter how hard they try?  Some thing tells me kids will find a way around such safeguards and what if you as a parent are similar to the car salesman my brother in law ran across a few years back.  The salesman claimed that the sunroof in the model they were taking for a test drive was child proof and wouldn’t close on his hands.  A demonstration was in order, and the sun roof closed on his hands causing him to scream “Open it up! Open it up!” or something similar to that, I wasn’t there.  First of all, why would anyone even think to create a sun roof that won’t close on someone’s appendages or head?  Is this an epidemic I was unaware of?  Who sticks their head or hands out of a sun roof?

https://youtu.be/Lqsy-2_BlaA?t=3

(This may be disturbing if you love cats, but fantastic if you feel as I do about cats)

This is the only video I could find of a living creature having a run in with a sun roof other than some kid in china whose dad shut the sun roof on his head, but that video wasn’t nearly as entertaining as this one.  Seriously, was the car salesman thinking to himself “you know what will really close this deal, if I mention the safety feature no one will ever care about, the child proof sun roof.”  My brother in law would respond accordingly “you know I was leaning towards the Infiniti but unlike the Lexus, they don’t have a model with a child proof sun roof, which is a definite must in my book, my wife likes to get real drunk and stick her head out the sunroof, I can’t even count how many times I have almost decapitated her.”

Imagine if as a parent you are similar to the car salesman, you think you have sufficiently child proofed your phone, but due to your inability to navigate technology, you have actually done nothing and your kids are free to wonder about the internet looking any assortment of disturbing images on line, the most troubling being this:

It would take years and years of therapy to get my kids through the trauma created by stumbling upon this video.  While I am pretty sure they wouldn’t ever google “Stinky gross vaginas of  fat unfunny comedians” you never know.  While I have mostly poo pooed the fuss over content on the internet and have thought to myself on numerous occasions “how damaging could the things they see on the internet actually be?” stumbling upon this video really opened my eyes to what a land mine of filth and moral decay the internet could be, not to mention the irreversible damage my children would likely suffer if given unfettered access to the world wide web.  Just one more thing to worry about as a parent, Damn you Al Gore!  If you hadn’t come along and invented the internet life would be a whole easier.

The other day I went over to my parents to watch the Michigan game, yes the Michigan game. (not the Michigan State Game) They were playing Michigan State and I was expecting them to take more of a beating than Roy Moore.  However, as luck would have it, the Wolverines prevailed and it was the rare occasion where Michigan fans could hold their heads high.  I guess Michigan is a basketball school after all.  Jim who?   Anyway, while I was watching the game with my dad a commercial for Opdivo came on, I believe it is Latin for worst drug ever.  What caught my attention was the following statement “Can cause your immune system to attack normal organs and tissues in your body which may become serious and lead to death.”  A list of the other side effects stated in the commercial are as follows:

• chest pains
• Severe Stomach Pain
• Swollen ankles
• Constipation
• Shortness of breath
• excessive thirst or urine
• Diarrhea

Sign me up for that, what’s the co-pay?  I’m totally in especially if it somehow causes me to have diarrhea and constipation at the same time.  The truly troubling thing is that at the end of the commercial it said “these are not all the possible side effects of Optiva.”  If they put all of those in, what did they leave out?  Can yo imagine putting this commercial together and deciding what to include in the copy for the advertisement?  Ok the organs being attacked by your immune system isn’t great but it is not nearly as bad as what we discovered in our clinical test, test subjects actually had their sphincters fall out when they were taking a dump, but we paid them a nominal amount of money and the waiver they all signed is air tight, air tight I tell you.  Hold on, you didn’t tell me about that, that actually happened?  Yeah, a lot.  Well, FDA rules only allow us to keep one major side effect out of the advertisements so I guess we are going to have to leave the possibility of death in our commercial.

Granted, facing death will cause people to endure almost anything, but I would imagine having your liver, heart, and lungs attacked by your immune system can’t be worth the extra six months of time you buy on this earth.  What’s somewhat unique about this advertisement is it actually tells you what it is meant to treat.  Many of the pharmaceutical commercials out there don’t even mention what the purpose of the drug is.  Obviously, there are some drugs that don’t even need to tell you what they are there to cure.  If only attractive people who are in their late forties to early fifties comprise the commercial it’s a boner drug.  You know what would solve most of the ED in America?  If guys got to shag the chicks in the boner commercials.  If you actually believed the commercials, ugly people don’t have sex.  However, that can’t be the case because 75% of the population is undatable.

I have watched a lot of tv in my time and seen a lot of commercials peddling prescription drugs.  Most of them leave the consumer completely clueless as to what the advertised drug is for and if they may actually need it.  Hey Doc, I saw this really cool commercial the other day for a prescription drug and everyone in the commercial looked really happy and healthy, can you get me some of that?  What’s the name of the drug?  Amberen, it looks like a real game changer Doc!  Last time I checked you weren’t a 50-70 year old women going through menopause, so I am going to have to deny your request.  There is an old saying that curiosity killed the cat, I can tell you what actually has killed a lot of cats, being a cat, but is this the creed that drug advertisers are going by when they create their commercial?  I have got a terrific idea, lets do an advertisement with a lot of people in a field full of daisies basking in sunshine as we describe our drug and list the side effects.  Shouldn’t we tell the consumer what the drug’s purpose is?  No, why would we do that?  We cast a lot bigger net if we attract every single person who is in need of a prescription drug, let them find out if they need it or not by doing their homework and contacting their doctor.

It may seem strange to some that I am devoting a blog to prescription drugs until you find out my back story.  Prior to attending law school I stumbled upon an Advertisement in the Grand Rapids Press looking for subjects for a drug study at Upjohn, I don’t remember if I signed anything precluding me from writing or speaking about the experience but here goes anyway.  I called the number listed (this was before Craig’s List and when people actually used the newspaper to attract attention, not just light campfires).  Ultimately I made the cut and ended up staying at Upjohn for a clinical trial that lasted 11 days.  During that 11 days we were not allowed to leave the building and had to eat the food they provided us. I smuggled in pop tarts and some other tasty treats knowing I was going to be eating hospital food which would likely be unpalatable.  We were housed in a four story building but we were relegated to one floor.  The building had a rooftop deck that we called the cage because it was fenced in entirely, it even had a wire fence roof.  They let us go up to the cage once a day and the only way we could get exercise was by walking the halls.  Each room had four people staying in it, and most of the participants were college students, although there were a small contingent of people who were rumored to do this for a living.  One of the guys I was bunking with claimed that one of these so called professional human gunna pigs was caught on a previous study washing his ass in the sink, which didn’t make a whole lot of sense since we had showers, until you met the guy, then it made complete sense.

I managed to make it through the entire 11 days with my sanity and cashed in for I want to say $1100, which in todays money would be at least $1150.  It doesn’t seem like a lot, but when you are stuck on the floor of a hospital for 11 days eating smuggled in pop tarts you don’t spend a lot of money.  Did I take my money and run?  Hell no, I signed up for another study that was 45 days and paid $3800.  However, the problem with this study was the fact that we were now approaching spring time and being confined to what surmounted to a hospital floor for an extended period of time was going to be torture.  There was a lot of outpatient stuff that had to be done, but there was also a four day stay and then to conclude the study we had to stay 11 days.  The drug we were testing was an HIV drug, this was when HIV still morphed into AIDS and killed people.  (I actually had someone ask me if I had AIDS when I told them about the study). I think there were almost 40 participants to start the study, but they started dropping like flies as the study progressed.  Looking back it’s a bit troubling that the people were being taken out of the study because their ticket to getting out of the study was irregular liver levels.  One of my buddies who was in the study with me got the heave ho midway through the final 11 days, lucky bastard, he still received all of his money.  Unfortunately for me, due to a lot of practical use of my liver, my readings never sky rocketed and I made it all the way to the end of the study.  On the plus side, they did give me a bonus check for having such a kick ass liver. Ultimately, I think there were only five or six of us who made were able to proudly cross the finish line.  Yeah Me!

One would think that that was the end of drug studies for me, little did I know that the entire economy would take a dump upon my graduation from law school due to the Dotcom bubble bursting and I would have to lease my body to science a couple more times to make ends meet as a I scrounged for one of those highly sought after lawyering jobs.  In the fall prior to receiving my bar results I was in a drug study testing a Parkinson’s drug.  It may have been that study or another study where they had to do hourly blood draws one of the nights, this required them to wake you up on the hour every hour to take your blood.  Guess what, they don’t get the best nurses for the night shift blood draws.  The particular nurse assigned to that night shift was north of 75 and her hands were about as steady as the value of bit coin.  Pretty much every nurse I had during these studies commented about how great my veins were and how easy they were to find (on my arm, this may be hard to believe but I never used this as an opportunity to make inappropriate comments about my penis).   For some reason Florence Nightwatch had a hell of a time finding my veins, I’m blaming it on her cataracts.  Not sure if it was Florence Nightwatch, the deplorable conditions, the threat of walking in on someone washing their ass, or all of the above that may have caused me to snap, but at some point I was removed from the study, it had nothing to do with the state of my health and everything to do with my attitude.  I think they actually paid me in full but moving forward I was blacklisted and would never take another experimental drug, at least one that needed FDA approval, ever again.  Being kicked out was bittersweet, I never like failing at anything, but in hind sight what I regret the most is that I didn’t have the where with all to eat a pop tart on my way out the door.

https://youtu.be/KLkVKdsqQ1c

I have to get my kids but have some thoughts percolating after a big weekend that started with tragedy Friday morning.  Can lightning strike twice in the same spot?  Apparently it can at the Jansma Household.  Nature called Friday morning and in an attempt to make Shirley’s life as stress free as possible I headed to the kids bathroom to drop a deuce.  Shirley had warned me that their toilet had been acting up so I was ready to close the water valve at the first sign of any plug-age, sure enough, the water was heading the wrong way so I went down to shut the water source off behind the toilet but the water seemed to flow even faster.  Some one who plans ahead would have had the plunger at their side, but we all know I do very little planning ahead so I was forced to sprint to our bathroom and grab the industrial strength plunger to eradicate the clog.  By the time I got back it was the fecal version of  Niagara Falls in my bathroom and sticking the plunger in the toilet only exacerbated the problem.  The turd filled water was making a run for the hallway carpet so I threw a bunch of towels down as a blockade, had it made it to the carpet we would have been putting the house up for sale that day.   (I asked my brother in law who has a real estate background if that is something that would have had to go in the disclosure statement and he said no).  After what seemed like minutes but was probably ten to fifteen seconds, the clog went down and I was left to clean up the natural disaster that had sprung upon the bathroom floor.  Unlike the previous toilet clog, it was my shit I was cleaning up, but it was still shit none the less.

(This was the least disgusting picture I could find, and doesn’t accurately reflect what I went through, I had chicken wings the night before)

After cleaning up the mess I had to get my kids ready for school, I told them to go watch tv while I was mopping up toilet water and they were still in their pajamas when I went down stairs.  So, I had to fish clothes for them out of the laundry room (they were clean just not folded, and lying on the laundry room floor in the dryer and in front of the dryer a sign that it was clean, had it been in front of the washing machine there would only be a 50/50 chance it was clean) and then I had to make them lunches and get them out the door.  When I realized that the only ingredient suitable, if you want to call it that, for a sandwich we had in the house was pepperoni, I realized I was at a fork in the road.  I could continue living life as if I was still in college and financially and emotionally incapable of getting my shit together, or I could make some changes.  It is actually a blessing that schools hate peanuts and I was unable to go with the traditional PBnJ as a lunch option, (we always have peanut butter) because if I had been able to do that I don’t think I would have come to this revelation.  “Hey, Parker, do you want cheese on your pepperoni sandwich?”
“No, dad, just pepperoni.”

The problem with getting my shit together, is I can only get my shit together, I can’t make anyone else get their shit together.  An additional problem is where do you start getting your shit together when none of your shit is together?  I was going to take the kids to the Y after daycare but called an audible and made them dinner and then let them watch tv while I  attempted to begin to get my shit together.  I went through Aiden’s drawers and pulled out all the clothes he doesn’t wear and organized the remaining clothes, which were in piles in his drawer, into folded organized rows.  I then went downstairs and threw out all the left overs and other things we were never going to eat that are in the fridge, not sure why we even bother keeping left overs, they just sit in our fridge until I throw them a way, typically in a state that leaves you wondering what it actually was originally.  The same thing was done to Parker’s clothing as well and I took all of the pots and pans, storage containers, and other odds and ends out of the cupboard so that Shirley could dispose of them as she saw fit.  I had organized the pantry a week before, as well as thrown out all the chips and other snack food in the cupboard above the fridge that  we were never going to eat.  Pita chips are my primary enemy when it comes to doing this, for some reason Shirley feels a need to have four bags of opened pita chips in our house at all times just in case she gets a serious hankering for humus.

Everything is fairly organized at this point, other than my sock drawer which is a job I will tackle next week.  I have at least 12 to 16 socks that don’t have a partner in that drawer and I think it’s time to say goodbye to them.  Will things stay organized? No, not a chance, I am fighting an up hill battle against Shirley and my kids.  I knew this going in to my organizational efforts.  The reason I did it is for my sanity.   When it all goes to shit again, likely in 48 to 72 hours, I can say to myself “I tried” and then I can say “fuck it!”

On a more exciting note than trying to get your shit together, I went to the Y to run on the indoor track yesterday and there was a women who insisted on running in the fast lane even though she may have had polio as a child.  There is a sign telling people to stay to the right and let faster moving traffic use the left lanes.  Just because you are running in the fast lane doesn’t mean you are fast, just like the idiots who drive in the left lane of the highway at speeds not exceeding 65mph.  What did I want to do to this women? I wanted to throw a body block in to her that would have sent her sprawling into the wall, but all I could do is scowl the 18 times I ran by her, and she probably just thought I was trying real hard.  Not to be outdone by the lady with polio, there was an entire family carrying weights around the track, had Zombies been trying to eat them these poor bastards would have made it three feet tops.  Needless to say, it was clogging the track up even worse than the deuce I dropped on Friday clogged my toilet.  Way to go, a family that exercises together bugs the shit out of everyone!

Prior to getting ready to run I thought to myself, can I use the family locker room?  I have a family, they aren’t here, but does that allow me to utilize the family locker rooms?  MVP locker rooms are terrible, but the Y takes it to a whole new level.  The lockers are smaller, the floor is tile (MVP has carpet) and there’s no tv to watch naked on pleather furniture.  What are the parameters for a family locker room, and what are the parameters for a handicap stall in a public bathroom?  I always hit the handicap stall when it is available, you can really sprawl out in there and a lot of times the toilet is higher, giving you the feeling of pooping on a throne.  I don’t think I have ever had a handicap person waiting for me when I exit the stall after doing my business.  However, it would be quite awkward if that did happen.  Would they have a right to be mad?  Also, I have another question, is it littering if you throw an apple core or banana peel out the window of your car?  I feel like that doesn’t count because it occurs naturally and will just biodegrade or be eaten by a homeless person.

On my way out of the Y  I ended up in traffic behind a familiar car.  My sister in law drives a Subaru Outback wagon, not because she is a lesbian, but because they have a five star rating in every single safety category.  So, they are extremely safe, and good in the snow.  However, just to make this all wheel drive even safer (she also always drives 10 mph under the speed limit) it has snow tires on it with no hubcaps, it’s a great look, but I guess if you drive an outback wagon you don’t give a shit about looks.  My point isn’t to speak out about my sister in laws obsession with safety, because that is primarily the result of her husband (their the vegetarians) but to ask another question that came to mind.  My sister in law was driving which is normal if it was just her, or just her and her four year old daughter, but her husband was riding shotgun.  Now, I like to think of myself as fairly progressive, my wife is capable of a lot of things and can fix things and put things together way better than I can.  However, I drive when we are together 99% of the time.  The only time I don’t drive is if I am drunk or I want to text and I don’t want her yelling at me about it.  We went to a Pistons game Saturday night and I drove both ways, and it was just assumed that’s how it was going to be, plus it made it a lot easier to fake she had a headache on the way home.  (the kids were gone for an overnight I should have seen that one coming).   Am I old fashioned?  Or was it right of me to view my sister in law driving her husband around (which I think happens all the time) as an oddity akin to a Dutch person picking up the check at a dinner with friends?

 

When I went off to college I encountered an entirely different strain of Dutch.  The only Dutch I was accustom to was the West Michigan Dutch.  However, there are pockets of Dutch communities in other parts of the country such as South Chicago and Northwest Indiana, parts of California, Montana, and New Jersey.  My exposure to the Chicago land Dutch opened my eyes and made me cognizant of the fact that not all Dutch people are the same.  This was discovered when I was talking to my girlfriend who hailed from Lansing Illinois and I told her about how we only heated a couple rooms in our house.  She actually laughed at this practice and thought my family was crazy, she was right, but there were a number of other reasons we were crazy beyond our desire to only heat 400 square feet of our house.  The refusal to heat the entire house made existence a struggle during the winter months.  My siblings and I all had electric blankets.  For those of you who haven’t had to depend on electric blankets for survival they are similar to a heating pad, but they cover your entire bed.  In order to make the transition from frozen bedroom to bed one would have to plan ahead and turn the electric blanket on roughly ten minutes prior to bed, similar to heating up your car before you drive away.  Sometimes we would leave our electric blankets on all day either because we forgot to turn them off or we didn’t want to forget to not turn them on prior to bed.  Either way, if our parents discovered this we wouldn’t hear the end of it.

I’m not certain if my parents chose to heat our bathroom, but even if they did, the heating vent was the size of pocket comb and wouldn’t be able to warm up a dollhouse let alone an entire bathroom.  This was problematic for a couple of reasons.  One problem was that it was a bitch getting into the shower and the second issue was that you never wanted to get out of the shower.  My parents would also turn the heat down to about 32 degrees at night so that in the morning the entire house, not just our bedrooms, was an ice box.  I will always remember getting out of bed and sitting in front of the heat register trying to keep from suffering hypothermia.  Obviously, it went the exact other way in the summer,  we didn’t have air and had to rely on window fans to stay cool.  Guess what? blowing hot air from outdoors to the indoors isn’t an effective way to battle the oppressive summer heat.

Temperate comfort wasn’t the only thing I was deprived of as a kid, my parents refused to spend money on suitable transportation.  My dad had a chevy citation for a significant portion of my formative years.  It was a stick shift that was rusted out to the point that it had holes in the floor board and water would come into the car when you went over puddles.  Monza, Grenada, Caprice Classic station wagon, these were all vehicles owned by my parents.  When they rolled up in these clunkers my first inclination was to pretend like I didn’t know them.  Additionally as self esteem deflating was how frugal my mom was when it came to clothes.  First of all she had no fashion sense, that combined with significant budgetary constraints, resulted in a serious blow to my self confidence.  I distinctly recall when frosted jeans came out, man did I want a pair of those.  One of my best friends had multiple pairs and they attracted chicks like bears to honey, or so I thought.  The only problem was a pair would set you back at least $30, which is roughly $800 when you factor in inflation and how incredibly Dutch my parents were (100%).  In order to fashionably dress I was forced to get a paper route and then secure a job working on a celery farm when I reached the appropriate age.   As stated previously, I was the triple threat back in the day, zits, mullet, and braces.  The only way to overcome these multiple afflictions, or at the very least compensate, was to dress fashionably.

(My preference was for Levi’s but I probably would have taken a pair of Lees)

As a parent I feel I deal with this one question time and time again, what do I spare my children from that I had to suffer through as a kid and what do I force them to endure that I was forced to also endure growing up?  If it were up to me, my answer would be everything, well almost everything, but due to the over protective nature of their mother I am fairly limited as to what, if any, adversity is thrown their way.  This morning I was getting Parker ready, Aiden had already dressed ahead of Parker, possibly the first time this has ever happened, and Parker was being so particular I would have thought he was attending the academy awards.  He had a zip up under armor shirt and nike athletic pants but needed something under his zip up.  He thumbed his nose at six different shirts until I finally was able to coax him into wearing one that he claimed matched. He was insistent that the under shirt either be Nike or Under Armor.  On top of that he is now out of the gold toe sock phase and insists on socks that go all the way up.  When we were heading out the door he asked if I could buy him a bunch of Nike shirts before school starts, meanwhile Aiden was playing away on his tablet completely oblivious to the fact that nothing he had on matched or looked good together.

On the way to school they wanted to hear a Chucky Chuckerson story so I told them about the time Chucky’s mom signed him up for youth basketball.  Chucky’s mom didn’t have any fashion sense and only bought MTA Pro (Meijer Thrifty Acre Pro, I think they still manufacture this shit today) athletic apparel for Chucky.  When Chucky showed up for practice he was ridiculed for his attire and went home and complained to his mom.  Did he get a paper route so he could buy his own clothes? No! did his mom cave and give him an ensemble of Air Jordan from head to toe? No!  She forced him to suck it up and things continued to spiral.  Eventually, Chuckie’s mom caved and bought him head to toe Air Jordan apparel and suddenly Chucky went from the worst player on the team to decent.  Parker asked me mid way through the story if Chucky was good looking (Parker isn’t even five yet). His desire to be fashionable and fascination with important things such as looks and appearance couldn’t make me more proud.  Ultimately Chucky ended up hitting the game winning basket in the final game of the season, which just so happened to be his first basket of the season.  I followed up the story with the question “does that make you want to play basketball?”  They both responded “No!”.

So, what am I to do?  Do I give all of their name brand apparel to Goodwill and replace it with Champion and MTA Pro gear?  (I would have actually been satisfied with Champion when I was growing up, but I sense it is now on par with the gear Fed Meijer churns out). I really can’t do that to my kids, the scarring inflicted upon me today is still fairly evident.  I play a lot of pick up basketball and everything has to match and most of it needs to be Nike, specifically Air Jordan.   Curtailing the toys would probably be my best way to inflict a childhood upon them that was similar to mine but for Shirley.  Four days after Christmas she decided she wanted to get the kids legos, funny she didn’t just purchase them as Christmas gifts.  When she arrived at the store she determined they were too expensive, however the kids had been promised legos so she felt obligated to purchase them a substitute toy.  I mentioned to her when I got home and discovered the purchase that we just had Christmas, she received my statement as if I had been speaking in Latin.

The harsh reality is that my only true option to inflict emotional distress and emulate my upbringing would be to buy a $500 car and use it as the only thing I transport them with when they are with friends when they reach the age where something like this matters to them.  I could show up on a lawn tractor to pick them up now, and as long as I let them play on my phone it wouldn’t phase them.    Granted, driving a $500 car will be a bit of a struggle at first, but it will make me appreciate my car all the much more.

(this is an exact replica of the citation my parents had but it is missing all the rust, however the color did mask the rust fairly well)