Why We Suck (5 page)

    

    

    

    See? That didn't take too long. I may have just spiked the sales of this book by several thousand copies. I didn't take time to overtly offend the Muslims because, well, they actually BLOW YOU UP when they get pissed.

    That's why-for all of its faults and fat pets and celebutards and warmongering figureheads-this country is still the best chance humanity has. There may be a lot of noise and news conferences and finger pointing but-in the end-you pretty much get to do or say whatever the fuck you want. Whether you are an idiot or a true sage-it doesn't really make a difference.

    I'll take five Anna Nicole Smiths for every Martin Luther King. And if Reverend King wants to sleep around while he's sacrificing his life in the name of a world-altering civil charge-hey, line up the ladies.

    Loud, stupid and overeating will suffice as long as we also have the funny, the fierce and the intellectual.

    C-SPAN versus pay-per-view porn.

    NPR versus Howard Stern.

    Monster Truck Races versus the national Scrabble competition.

    I want it all and I want it available 24/7.

    Let the terrorists have their seventy-two virgins.

    I'll take an actual, experienced hot forty-seven-year-old mom.

    And a pizza.

    

    

    Yeah yeah-we know. We all know. Your kids are special. They are talented and gifted and smart and gorcial. They are talented and gifted and smart and gorgeous and endlessly cute and full of unbelievable inner light and extraordinary ability. They walked early talked early have expansive and unique motor skills and they should be kid model/stars. They have the most beautiful eyes and the most plump little red cheeks and the tiniest little toes and they are so endlessly fascinating that you just wish you could eat them all up in one big happy bite.

    Yeah well-here's another headline: they also suck.

    A lot.

    To anyone outside of the precious inner sanctum that includes you, your spouse, the kid's grandparents and some of the tiny dimwit's classmates-your kid sucks so bad he or she is a living breathing vacuum of suckitude.

    Everyone else hates him/her.

    The dog. The cat. The other kids in the family.

    The aunts, the uncles-even the godparents.

    I am an uncle and godparent. I know of what I speak.

    Yes, the kid may sometimes be cute and maybe even-every other odd time-on occasion-even almost bearable.

    But most of the time he/she is a whining sniveling selfish thieving angry violent midget who not only makes a baboon look like a major intellectual but also uses his/her small size to advantage full well knowing no matter what evil he/she decides to create-my mommy and daddy will think it's cute.

    Here are the actual facts: your kid is a gimongous germ factory. A walking talking coughing pants-pissing snot-snotting shit-directly-into-whatever-outfit-I-happen-to-be-sporting sniveling crying where's my mommy noise machine.

    They have no sense of the real rules or how to behave or who not to puke on or what not to throw absentmindedly in any given direction that happens to strike their tiny unmanageable pealike brains.

    When they want something they want it now. Right now.

    And they have no idea what sharing is. Mine mine mine. Me me me. Mine, me, mine, me-me me me me me. What's mine is mine and what's not I will steal. Or break. Or hide.

    They will defecate happily into their trousers and then walk around acting as if-literally-their shit don't stink.

    As a matter of fact the only reason they shit in their pants is because THEY HAVE PANTS ON-otherwise they would shit directly onto whatever surface they happened to be standing over-the floor, the couch, the sidewalk-you name it.

    The only thing separating children from wild jungle monkeys IS pants. Kids have them. Jungle monkeys don't.

    To children-the world is their immediate and utter personal oyster. They do not know that all cookies are not THEIR cookies. That too many cookies can kill you. That cookies-or the elements involved in making them-cost money. That in order to gain cookie money you must have a marketable skill that results in your getting paid cash at the end of the week-thereby allowing you to not only purchase the cookies and/or the items needed to make them-but, in fact, giving you the power to eat all of the cookies bought/made yourself or decide to disseminate them amongst several other humans and animals who are either:

        a. Nice to you

        b. Listening to you

        c. Painting your house/shoveling the snow around your housed.

        d. Somehow related to you and too small to perform the duties required to get the cookie money but have had the rules explained to them and behaved well within the boundaries of those rules-one of which is finishing all of the normal food on their plate on this particular evening before being allowed to have a cookie.

    

    Children are born without knowledge of cookies and playthings. When they first arrive the only sustenance they know of and seek is the milk they find at their mother's tits. But once they get a taste of the real fun stuff-BAM! Just like junkies-they become bottomless black holes waiting to take advantage and fill themselves up with sugar and chocolate, surround themselves with every single toy imaginable and make themselves king of the hill they happen to live on.

    And why wouldn't they be selfish black holes?

    They have lived inside a soft, warm, pouchy round sac in which they were fed endlessly and floated in a near constant sleep state for nine peacefully pain-free months.

    Then someone unplugged the juice and yanked them out of dreamland right smack out into a cold hard world. Sometimes with a hard fast slap on the ass.

    Why wouldn't they think of anyone but themselves?

    It's like the old joke about men: you spend nine months waiting to come out of a vagina and the rest of your life trying to get back in.

    So this whole theory about children being born as innocent and sinless vessels waiting to be ruined and overcome by the darkness and anger and hatred of an already evil world is a total crock. Kids are born as pure, untempered one-way evil beings. They get that umbilical cord cut and all holy hell breaks loose. First it's just the tits-which they almost never manage to relinquish. Then once they get a good look around while sucking on those nipples, they instantly become what they are born to be: round mounds of unending, unblinking and eager chaos who will use their newly discovered cuteness to curry favor and gain more access to people and things they wish to eat, gnaw, lick, damage, hurt and break.

    They will walk up to other kids-most times their own blood relatives-and violently attack them. Biting, whacking, kicking and screaming.

    They will take sharp toys and jab them into the face of the family dog.

    They will grab the dog's tail and try to yank it off.

    They will lie about anything and everything all the fucking time-like Richard Nixon on crack. Odds are if you have kids what you hear all day every single day is some version of this: I didn't break that I didn't hide those I didn't shit my pants I didn't piss in the corner I would never ever, Mom! he's hitting me again, Dad! she's looking at me Ow Ow Ow Ow Ow Ow and so on and so forth and blubbedy blubbedy blah blah blah.

    At some point in every day that passes, you will also witness many of these lovely and memorable moments:

    Amazing little Ashley-dressed in her diminutive Vera Wang dress, accented by her Kenneth Cole kid patent leather shoes and the Paul Labrecque Salon tiny highlights in her hair-will yank the largest snottiest green snot out of her tiny evil nostril and then calmly deposit the pulsing glob of mucus into her angry mini-mouth. And then consider the taste as if she were consuming a dollop of the world's finest French wine.

    Joyous bundle Joshua-such a tough little tot in his tiny Wrangler blue jeans and his lit-at-the-heels Nike King James kicks will offer up his impossibly angelic, heart-melting Hebrew smile mere moments before whacking the new baby kitten across its whiskered fluffy face with a hefty plastic baseball bat. His only regret? That the baseball bat wasn't made of wood. Or better yet-aluminum.

    Cute and yummy Chase-sporting his Baby Gap khakis and his color-coded Baby Gap oxford blue polo-looking so much like his tall, preppy trust fund-encrusted papa-right down to the barely there slivers of comb-over hair-will suddenly stop socializing and stand in the middle of the living room with a strange, fuzzy focus ambling across his cute-as-a-button face. Then-a mere five or seven seconds later-the stench of crap and an acrid plume of urine will fill the room. Yes. He has in fact laid a giant Baby Gap load-along with enough piss to jam a juice box-into his don't I look like my dad one-hundred-and-fifty-five-dollar pants.

    Elusive and oh such a handful Elizabeth-who refuses to keep her clothes on!-runs naked through the house screaming gay little screams and stopping only to roll around the floor so free and unashamed and full of boundless expressive energy-like a newly minted dance member of a jazzercise class she rambles from room to room until she stops to eat a bite of her dinner-look how she uses her fork-just like a grown-up little girl-and everyone is smiling at what a character she is-until she turns to her baby brother and stabs him in the head.

    Stabbing screaming puking farting pissing shitting crying complaining whining moaning kicking angry goddam jellyfish.

    That's right. Jellyfish. It may be the most inhumane trick they can pull out of their awful, incredible bag of tricky little tricks: The Jellyfish Move.

    Those dirty filthy spineless mini-criminals.

    The Jellyfish Move is a gift given only to the very small.

    A true super-power that God imbues them with-apparently as a self-defense mechanism to avoid being captured and killed by angry parents and other adults whose patience has been worn down to the very bare barren marrow of their giant bones.

    After the stabbing or the spilling or the screaming or the crying or all four combined into one elongated and loud private or public tantrum they run away on their vicious pudgy legs and once you actually corner them and manage to get your hands on them-finally grabbing ahold of their fat-filled midget arms-they become-literally-spine-free.

    They squirm and collapse onto the floor or the sidewalk and suddenly-no matter how hard you try-you cannot lift them up. It's like trying to hug a bucket full of steam. It's as if you are trying to gather up two armfuls of slimy squiggling eels. No matter how hard you try-how hale you may hug-how gainful the gather-you cannot get a handle on them. They slither and slather and wiggle waggle out of your grasp and leave you cursing first under and then above your breath.

    Twelve minutes later you stand there with sweat pouring down your brow and your face contorted into a bleak mask of Halloween terror-lips pursed, teeth grinding-and you finally break down and go to give them a nice hard whack on the ass and guess what-you miss because the human amoeba has somehow swaggled its ass out of your aiming area.

    That's when you snap. You start chasing them as they slither and slather down the hallway-aiming and whacking and missing by so much your arm almost flies out of its socket.

    And if you find yourself lucky enough to make some good, solid, sudden hand on ass contact-guess what again?

    It works.

    It sends a blood-rushing, breath-stopping shock right from their ass up into their elbows and out of their wickedly wide-open eyes. First there is a moment of absolute silence and then-of course-they start to cry. That's the key moment-when they squinch their eyes tightly shut and begin to howl you gotta grab 'em before they begin the amoeba dance again. Grab 'em and whack 'em a second time and carry them off to bed. This, of course, is all based on the fact that the tantrum has occurred in the private inner sanctum of your own home.

    Because if it happens in public? All bets are off. You get a kid who wants to pull The Jellyfish Move in a store or in a restaurant or God forbid out on the sidewalk and pushes you to the point where you have to whack him or her on the rear end? Get ready for almost every passerby to call you out as a bad parent or to shun you like you bear a scarlet letter on your chest or to beckon a nearby officer of the law and claim themselves a witness to child abuse. And once a kid realizes you can't get away with hitting him or her in public? Those tantrums will happen over and over until the toy or piece of candy or place they wanna go is handed over in a split second. They will cry and kick and jellyfish their way to every little thing they want.

    And you deign to tell me they are angels.

    You dare to call them cute.

    Hugs not drugs?

    Bullshit. I say drugs. Drugs with a capital D and plenty of them. Drugs in all kinds of colors and flavors. Foolproof kid-type drugs that look and taste like candy and ice cream so they greedily suck them down like the one-way elves they are and end up getting knocked on their self-centered pink-cheeked hair-free little asses.

    They wanna use the dreaded Jellyfish Move and become immobile unassailable amoebas? Good. Let's ply them with sweet-tasting sugar-coated chemicals that will make them pure putty in our nonsilly gi-normous parent hands.

    We owe it to ourselves and all the innocent, childless people on planes, trains and other forms of public transportation.