Heck of a good week this past one: Barney stopped taking craps on the beds; Canada’s hockey squad fell to the precision shots and spectacular goalie of the US; I’ve actually used the new treadmill, ate something with fiber and cut my cigarette intake down to a couple a day; and the kids have given me an easy ride for a while now. Matter of fact everything has been going so freaking swimmingly swell that it’s a struggle finding inspiration to write. I guess I shouldn’t thrive so much on negative input from life but it’s far easier to turn into satire.

   So what to say? I thought about a roster of the funniest obscene words I could think of but didn’t feel like creating dictionary style definitions for the obscure ones like gant, furnood or tween.  So I shuffled through the news; either too much to discuss or nothing at all. Got an email from the Bruins’ CyBear Club telling me to cough up $250 to go celebrate the 40^th Anniversary of their Stanley Cup! Well, after noting that it would be the same as stressing forty years without a championship there just ain’t much funny to dredge out of that topic.  But then came a glimmer of hope…

   It wasn’t apparent at first, just a kid at Elsie’s preschool screaming gibberish as I picked her up yesterday.  Nothing notable there as the country is rife with spastic little bastards (or maybe I should say “Autistic” children, as 1 in 3 parents will have their spastic bastards diagnosed by next year) but I did catch a little flash of crimson under the howling brat’s nose. While asking Elsie about her day I threw in a little inquiry,

   “Looked like Liam had a bloody nose…did the freak slam his face in a wall or something?”

   “That wasn’t a bloody nose, Daddy – It was a bloody booger!”

   Awwwwwe-some!  Boogers are one of largest factors in my general distaste for children.  It’s not that I’m squeamish about snot, per se. I love rummaging around my nostrils for good, crusty nose-goblins as much as the next guy. But when it comes to a kid with a sticky, shiny, green & gritty upper lip?  Well, that’s a plain lousy sight and truly un-fucking-necessary.

   Lucky for us, our kids have blessed us with low mucosal output.  They ooze the clear stuff while playing out in the winter, sure – we all do. And they’ve been into blowing/wiping their own noses from an early age; got into that late myself, being a back-horker and user of Sleevex until I was 18 when it got in the way of dating. I love blowing my nose all the time now and it was probably my circus seal performances which turned the kids on to tissues at a young age*.  We also take the clean up into our own hands when the apes are too sick and wiped to notice the sinus viscose.  So that gives me some high ground here to wag my nose-pickin’ finger at over-boogered folk.

   Why some kids are more prone than others to snot manufacture is a mystery unnecessary to ponder for my purpose here.  Why some others seem to be in constant production of dark green, yellow and brown blobs which look more like internal organs is just a failure of natural selection. It’s probably too extreme to suggest those kids be given swimming lessons in burlap bags, but their moms and dads might consider spaying and neutering themselves out of the gene pool.

But today’s diatribe would’ve never been necessary if parents were a little more vigilant about the scuzz-faced tendencies of their offspring.

   I can’t put my finger on why people allow their runts to maintain mucked up faces in public. You see it from all ends of society – from welfare moms at Walgreen’s, too stretched trying to control five climbing kids to worry about the slime on the one in the stroller, to well-heeled ladies in boutique toy stores who assume that if they ignore the flotsam cascading out their princess’s blowholes then everyone else will. Matter of fact, it was an instance of the last which ultimately cemented my snot biases years ago. That was pre-blog era for me, so the rant had been bottled up for bit.

   It was at Stella Bella, a groovy toy joint in Inman Square.  It being Cambridge, the clientele was naturally comprised of 90% self-impressed, organic dipshits, though that hardly detracted from the cool set-up and selection of stuff.  One afternoon after getting belly-stuffed at Muqueca (Brazilian, eat there now!) I took Jack to Stella Bella to look for something cool to play with or just romp around the play area. The entire time was spent constantly running up against a French lady and her ghastly tyke in an oversized stroller. This kid was to snot what Hostel was to horror films:  more than enough to make the point.  The thing’s face was a swamp of chunks and rivulets which it kept pawing at so that its hands became glutinous atrocities as well. As she insistently ignored the growing sump in her carriage the kid kept grabbing toys off shelves, trying to eat them. When she came to let the muculent creature loose in the play area all I could cough out was an aggravated Jesus Christ, lady! What really needed to be done was to knock her down, drive a knee in her chest and yell Get a goddamned rag and mop that freaking baby up! S’il vous plait!  Ack.

   So there it is rookie parents.  Had to reach back in time to find the lesson of the week, but don’t forget it: keep the Kleenex handy and teach your children how to use it because they will never be precious if you present them to the world as snot-pasted little gremlins.

*Note to new parents: there’s good parenting to be found in sight-gags and silly sounds

Coming Next: Conspiracy Watch, Obama’s Surgeon General Advises Soothing Irritable Bowels with Yogurt, a Food Muslims Have Been Known to Use as Food…