Tag Archives: kill

Retards Revisted

Posted on by Frank
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(Originally meant to be posted last month, this had to hover around Facebook while the Red Frog database was crippled..

 

Jack used to have the craziest habit of incessant baby-style talk.  (See here)  Used to drive me up a fucking wall, dragging me as close as a dad can come to pure, patri-filial hatred.  It began shortly after the birth of Elsie when Jack was about three years old and continued until he was six.  Don’t know if it was ultimately solved by slick parenting maneuvers (engaged discussions, praise for age-appropriate language use, making him carry diapers on the bus, electro-therapy…) or if he simply outgrew it. But it did finally cease at some time last year.

Of course it all just came back. With a vengeance that pulled along a slew of other regressive behaviors in its babbling, whiny, shriek, fucking wake.  Why?  Who the hell really knows why? I like to toss these tribulations to inescapable doom; that fatherhood means never having any permanent relief from anything. Ever.

He talks with hands flapping like a duck with Parkinson’s. He pushes his chin into his neck to facilitate the nasal vocalizations* of said duck getting castrated.  Sucks his shirt, whines or cries at the slightest denial, and sits upside down and on the side of his freaking skull to watch TV. But it’s the screaming which is going to get him into a state-run living facility.  It’s insane and usually from out of nowhere: perfectly silent interludes die in a flash storm of loud, brain-melting shrieks…

… Just happened a couple of minutes ago too.  I was taking a pensive slurp of coffee, wondering if “perfectly silent interludes” was hokey or homoerotic, when the family room exploded with a small population of B-actresses in spacesuits getting their eyes plucked out by clawed vampire squids from Alpha Centauri. His competitive kid sister just had to join immediately in the high-frequency challenge. I clenched the coffee mug in my teeth, stared at my fingers, wondering how quickly I could rip out my eyeballs and stuff them in my ears.  Fuck, where does one summon up the love to not make them die?  To die horribly as monsters should, that is.  My mouth was telling them they’d be in their rooms for an hour or so if they screamed like that again. At the same time my mind was a parade of chipper-shredders, gravel eaters, piranha tanks, fire ants and guillotines…

*Elsie picked this talent up as well, the two becoming psychotic mallards circling the house in a stereophonic sonic lobotomy.  Makes it hard to give up things like nicotine or grain alcohol.

Lately, after wiping himself out from a solid morning’s session of semi-pro autism he’ll curl up with Otto in a fetal lump of fatigue.  Otto.  The beloved plush, blue critter of his toddler years saw its time as Jack’s best friend come to a close a couple of years ago.  As late as five years Jack was strangling him lovingly at bedtime. Then it all ended and Otto’s, one and all**, took up residence in the closet as Velveteen Somethingorothers, longing for a fairy to come and turn them into real, living monsters of indeterminate shape and species.  Saddening. Nothing could be more heartbreaking.  Except for the boy fetching Otto back from exile at seven to bring along on car trips and to hockey practice and to sleepovers and to hide behind any time his dad yells at him for all that fucking lisping and quacking and shrieking.

**There are actually three Otto’s living here.  Jacko had cuddled the living crap out of Otto I early on, quite nearly sucking it’s fabric tongue off. We bought two sub-Otto’s for circulation when the main guy needed a bath.

The tragedy of Otto and all these regressing behaviors hits a climax whenever I see the cute blue fuzzbag wrapped in Jack’s arms, at night…in my bed.

So…what’s the cause of such backward-ass behavior in kids and why does it lead to revulsion in me? For the first part it’d be easy to just say my son is just being a kid; they move forward and they crawl back at times. Probably true, at least as part of the explanation.  Then again it’s just as true to say there’s been some developmental guidance failures on my behalf.  Like the sleeping arrangements.

Used to be I’d read to Jack in his bed, he’d conk out and that was that.  Elsie was always a little more challenging; fidgety in bed and unlikely to pass out even over dull-as-fuck reads like the Velveteen Rabbit (“Even Timothy, the jointed wooden lion, who was made by the disabled soldiers, and should have had broader views, put on airs and pretended he was connected with Government” Awesome kid-grabbing prose…) and with her earlier bedtime the expedient way was taken and she’d get tossed into our room to nod off with an episode of Calliou or Hi-5 before carting her off to her room.  On nights when I worked it was also easier, and more comforting to the kids, to let them crash with mom until I came home.

Now, closing in on eight years at this family-raising stuff, you’d think I’d have seen the entrenchment coming.  Biggest bed in the house, reassuring company for burgeoning imaginations in the dark, etc., it wasn’t long before I was up several times a night redepositing little people who kept wandering back in.  Since night time is a perfect time to embrace laziness I was soon doing less of that too. Jack would ask me to stay with him in his room so I would. Daughter would climb back into bed, wife would roll over to accommodate her and dad would grumble on back to son’s room to have a fair shot at not sleeping off the edge of a mattress. Some nights arriving home from work  meant being exhausted, having a couple of drinks to unwind, looking at Jacko’s big empty bed and just taking it, leaving the crowd in my own bed. Next step was just to let them all settle in my bed even on nights I was home.  It was a pretty stupid thing to let go down; an act I’d once derided when hearing about other parents doing such things. I’d set my ass on the rail of that downward spiral and took the slide.

Taking steps to correct that lately. The goal is to have the apes go to sleep in their own rooms every night by the time the new school year starts.  We’ll let them crash in my room on work nights for a while, to minimize the shock of change. The current rule is any return to mommy and daddy during the night requires a sleeping bag and enjoying the bedroom floor.  It had been a big fucking fail on my behalf and it struck me that some of their infantile behaviors of the daytime have roots in our over-mollifying behavior at night. Fix that and maybe the kids will return to asking for ice cream in full sentences rather than pointing and punctuating the request with incoherent babble.

As to the way I address the issues in the day? That has had, well, issues. I lump the irritations all together and too frequently react wrongly and without taking a good look at it all.  Jack, you’re being a crybaby idiot spazzoid and it’s driving me freaking insane even though it’s my fault for letting you sleep with Mommy and for allowing you to watch The Penguins of Madagascar…To some extent these behaviors are separate in origin.  Some of Jack’s mongoloid mayhem stems from his need to be a clown while also being under-experienced at it.  Much of the whining and reactivity may indeed originate in being excessively coddled.  They have the natural fears of any little kids – anxiety over being alone through the night, face-eating goblins under the bed and spider-faced villains in the closets waiting to pounce – which weren’t fully exorcised before we allowed them all to reinforce.

I’ve found I can easily begin addressing things from a better engaged parent standpoint. At least as far as instilling more confidence in them and getting them to feel a bigger sense of pride* for acting in ways befitting their ages.  And to take more deep breaths before launching into bellowing tirades when they start whimpering over TV times or stick weird things in their mouths.   Matter of fact I’ve barely raised my voice in months, reserving enraged howls as the reaction for punching little sisters in the face. As for Jack honking and barking like a brain-damaged harbor seal, and all the other uber-retard vocalizations he performs I’ve finally realized that he mostly just wants to be funny and his comedic repertoire is still under construction.  And I’ve forced myself to swallow the fact that part of me is just disappointed that his act isn’t any better yet.  I’ve been like a baseball father disgusted that his second-grader hasn’t been recruited by the Yankees. What’s getting me over it is a little tool dads commonly forget to reach for: Memory.  You have to look back to where you were at the same age, trying reacquainting yourself with your own skills and anxieties at that point in life.

So what did I see a few decades into the past?  How about little Frankie Roberts getting sent to the corner of the classroom for trying to crack up his buddies with an oratory spoken in Drunken Walrus. And what did I do while facing the walls in punishment?  Why, I let loose a harangue of forced burps at the multiplication tables and pictures of the solar system.  That was fourth grade.  I was nine years old and every bit equal to the moron my boy is now at seven.  Maybe, just maybe, I’ve pulled some dismay over my youth and thrown it in his face. The path is clear to me now: there’s no room for disappointment in Jack’s buffoonery.  There isn’t time for that since I’ve got to lend a guiding, encouraging hand so he can develop his schtick.  Maybe teach him some blue jokes and a few advanced, fucked up noises he can make; anything to save him from being half the dipshit his old man was at a little later age.

 Tomorrow:  How to best clean your kids when they return from the woods smeared in blood and carrying shovels….

Cilantro Scented Delusions

Posted on by Frank
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    About freaking time someone published a study like this:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/health/research/12allergies.html?emc=eta1  Some Stanford affiliated-folks made an exhaustive assessment on the crazy amount of allergies Americans seem to have developed lately; nearly a third of the population has it in their heads that they suffer from at least one allergy or another.  Which isn’t to say the belief is without merit, as a small fraction of these allergy victims do have an actual allergy. To the tune of about 8% of all children and 5% of the big people population. 

   For nearly 25 years now, allergies have been a regular factor in my days (a period which had nothing to do with chucking beehives, peanut butter balls and oyster shells at the sickly kids in the hood – that was much earlier…)  Allergy madness became a daily issue once I joined the restaurant industrial complex.  In the beginning it didn’t seem all that big a deal; you see a larger cross-section of society as it moves through your joint to glut, waste and complain. In a restaurant one would expect to encounter more nut or shellfish allergies than you would in a normal life.  Even still, in the mid-late eighties the number of diners claiming allergies was pretty small.

   Things changed appreciably by the early nineties.  I was working in busier Boston restaurants and encountering exotic, cosmopolitan people with exotic, cosmopolitan allergic conditions. My first live-in girlfriend had an apple allergy (lips would swell like balloon animals) as well as an intense reaction to lidocaine (discovered post-Vagisil use; similar comic ballooning, more personal area…) I met cilantro allergies for the first time in Boston – we didn’t have that one in the RI suburbs as the herb wasn’t in use there yet. The roster of patrons with life-threatening reactions seemed to expand exponentially, many more customers who couldn’t have eggs, or wheat, or dairy and so on.

   I’d already become suspicious of the veracity of these claims; many people like to blur their dislikes into the notion of allergies. Then I became the lucky waiter to serve one tragically afflicted woman at Joe Tecce’s, the megatypical red-sauce Italian slopchute in the North End.  She came with a trailing scroll of foods that were likely to kill her – Peanuts and shellfish, of course.  And dairy, eggs, cilantro and black pepper. Oh, and rice and tomatoes and broccoli too. Not to mention garlic and basil and especially lettuce. Lettuce?  I was stumped when she asked me what she could eat – we didn’t have feeding tubes or sterilized bubbles to dine within anywhere in the restaurant.  But when she characterized her wheat allergy as so, no bread but pasta was okay, it was obvious she could have a dish of all those verboten ingredients as long as she ate them with a fistful of psychotherapeutic drugs.

   After that allergy caveats from diners did little more than elicit eye-rolling. People with allergies were proliferating at a mad pace but in the service business you had to accommodate them.  In the end, a few people are actually endangered by certain foods and many others are simply morons.  You can’t change either so you have to cater all of it. Peanuts, shellfish and even eggs can have deadly effects and had to be taken seriously.  As for the herb freaks, well, we just leave the stuff out they hate.  No point in getting sued for making somebody’s mouth feel yucky.   

   Allergies thus became a minor nuisance in life. Until the arrival of my first kid, that is, when they resumed pain in the ass status. Allergy warnings came from everywhere: friends, pregnancy/infant literature and doctors weighed in gravely on them.  First there’d been the encyclopedia of foods pregnant women could not ingest at the risk of delivering stillborns or flipper babies. Then came the forbidden edibles that would kill your children in their highchairs. No peanuts from conception until year-two of a baby’s life?  Was that for real? If they were really so universally lethal then why haven’t the populations of Asia, Africa, South America, the Caribbean and Dixie USA already been decimated? Not only subject to overpopulation, you can’t breathe deeply in some of those places without swallowing a peanut.

   The anxiety of feeding my boy was up a bit – not experts, we were compelled to listen to those who said they were. Couldn’t throw my new lad’s health into harm’s way because a gut feeling said the hazards weren’t necessarily there.  But the more I read the more allergy prevention looked like hype rather than health scare. Was withholding certain foods for the first year really the way to stave off development of allergies?  Shouldn’t that initial year of life be the prime period for children to grow inured to things in the environment? 

   The issue became resolved anyhow and Jack was released from his restricted diet by accidental exposure to nuts at eight months of age.  My mother-in-law was over, feeding him some Indonesian gado gado because I’d left it right next to his regular veggies in the fridge.  When I saw what was in his bowl my first reaction was,

   Holy crap!  That stuff is wicked spicy!

   Oh, I didn’t know!  Well…Look, he really seems to like it.

   He sure did, as the container was nearly empty.  But then the real issue hit me,

   Oh my god!  That stuff is loaded with peanuts!

   It was a tense minute or two, waiting for Jacko to asphyxiate or squirt blood from his ears, but he was just fine and banging his bowl on the tray for more. After that we began introducing him to scrambled eggs, shrimp and lobster.  That settled it, next time we had a baby I’d instruct the doctor to wear latex gloves dipped in crab bisque and lubricate the birth canal with Skippy.  Ultimately, having the most say on her own canal, Elisa nixed the idea.  No worries however, when little Elsie came around I could dip her bottles in Fluffernutter if I felt like it since not only had the nut scare been lifted but…Elsie’s breastfeeding experience lasted all of a half day!  (Dig the following excerpt from the above article:   “Authors of the new report — and experts on the guidelines panel — say even accepted dogma, like the idea that breast-fed babies have fewer allergies or that babies should not eat certain foods like eggs for the first year of life, have little evidence behind them.”) 

   Parenthood would bring all the wonderful, magical, eye-popping and retarded things one gets to witness in a widening circle of other parents. In the realm of allergies you get the feeling that children have far fewer allergies than their parents want them to have.  Or that allergies are parent-driven in other ways: moms taking up half-baked, malnutritive diets during pregnancy; parents setting up over-sterile (and thus non-exposing) environments or continuing crazy, low nutrient regimens (like breast-feeding) well into a kid’s walking life. Where twenty-five years ago we all knew at least one child with a serious allergy, today you’d be hard pressed to think of one who doesn’t.  It’s as though having hair-trigger antibodies was fashionable and the list of antigenic dangers were picked from glossy catalogs. Peanuts and Shellfish are now the low-brow players, kids have developed slicker allergies to stuff like vanilla, oranges, grass, wool, green beans, popsicles, cotton, bleach, ice, shadows, Christmas trees, rollerblades, rainbows, and Calypso music.  Yeesh, if the world has become so toxic, why the hell do these dingbats keep having children? 

   Often, when some moms hear of my culinary background they’ll ask if I can come up with some really good recipes for their kids who can only eat, well, almost nothing.  I gave it a shot once for a cousin of a good friend.  But only once – just looking at the mom and her allergy besieged boy I felt guilty trying anything. He looked ill, pale like he’d been sick for a while and hadn’t eaten…

I pass on such requests nowadays – it feels more like helping a parent with their tragic fantasies rather than helping a kid eat happier.  

   Another itching, burning, asphyxiating question is this: what drove those 12,000 studies mentioned in the article and what does it benefit doctors to just give the green light on allergy diagnoses to so many patients?  During some reading for this post I came across this tidbit – A doctor diagnosed a woman with a cilantro allergy because eating Indian food made her mouth itchy.  Makes my ass itchy; should I carry an epinephrine injector in case I pass gas after some vindaloo? Cripes, I shoulda gone to medical school.  How hard could it have been to get through it?

The Ed Gein Special at Denny’s

Posted on by Frank
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Ever have a slice of ham that was so mind-meltingly delicious that you wanted to kill any other guy that ever looked at it? To tie it to a barber’s chair and lock it up in the basement so it would always be yours and yours alone? To tear sheets of your scalp off as it goes on taunting you even in it’s desperate dried out state?
Yeah, I just ate that slice of ham.