briangrayisfullofshit-blog

[briangrayisfullofshit-blog]

Father of the year: i

                     The other day I made my seven-year-old-son say the “c”-word. I was waiting at the front of the school where all the parents wait to pick their kids up, because like them, I actually enjoy having a child. Seriously, if you let your kid take the bus, you’re basically saying to them “This whole feeding, clothing, and shaping you as a person isn’t really rewarding enough, so enjoy the Thunderdome on wheels, Billy, we had a good run.”

                    So all the parents are out front, doing what we always do while we wait: Silently judge the many while secretly sexualizing the few. Sometimes you can judge them based entirely on who you catch them fantasizing about, because some of them don’t realize they’ve been staring slack-jawed at the same person for eleven straight minutes. You say to yourself “Really? This dude’s been staring at ‘Lazy-Eye-Yoga-Pants’ for a while now...Just wait until his wife ‘Potatorso’ hears about this shit right here, she’s gonna be fucking pissed.”

                   The bell rings, and school lets out, and out of nowhere, my son comes plowing through the middle of this sea of children, and takes a fucking Bruce-Lee-style flying-kick off the top of the dozen or so cement steps, and he lands on his feet at the bottom, and even though he stuck it, you could tell that it basically ruined his day, because he’s now frozen in this sort of superhero-landing with his legs all spread out, one fist on the ground, and breathing really, really, really heavily. And all the parents and I are frozen in shock, like “Holy shit...Does this kid just have floppy little bags of sand for feet now?” After a couple of seconds that feel like hours, he finally looks up at me with nothing but regret on his face and goes “...Shoot.”

                  I make sure he’s okay, and put him up on my shoulders so he doesn’t have to walk, because at this point, I’m pretty sure a stiff breeze will guarantee he’ll be like Stephen Hawking for the rest of his life, and we start navigating through the crowd of parents. In the middle of this gathering of the most judgemental, petty, gossipy, passive-aggressive monsters life has to offer, my son says to me in a very outdoor-voice, “Don’t worry Dad, I said ‘shoot’ back there, not the other ‘s’-word.” Now I’m still on all these parents’ radar from the Crouching-Tiger shit that just went down before, and now I feel dozens of gazes hit me at once from the corners of their eyes. I’m trying to laugh and play it off like a “Cool Dad”, so I say “I know, buddy.” And then for no fucking reason whatsoever, this little Benedict Arnold slips an icy dagger between the ribs of my perceived parenting by saying, at the same volume as before but now with a “brassy-black-lady-on-the-TV” sort of tone, “I’m just glad I didn’t accidently say the ‘c’-word.”

                Now the crowd has abandoned this whole corner-of-the-eye-thing, and they just want to get a good hard look at the piece of shit who may-or-may-not be raising this little Teenage Mutant Ninja Andrew Dice Clay, so I pick up the pace about seven-thousand percent. Basically the bottom half of me is at a full sprint while the top half remains motionless so I don’t drop my only son to the pavement below, bringing this exhibition in stellar parenting to a bloody crescendo, but it doesn’t seem to matter, because now my son is bent backward, almost completely in half, flapping in the wind like a snapped power-line in a hurricane.

              We get about fifty miles or so away from the people I now have to avoid eye-contact with for a minimum of four months, and I set my kid down, and my mind is racing, because while I think there are far worse things you could do as a parent than swear in front of your kids, even the “Cool Dad” thing has a threshold, and the last thing I want or need is to hear my son call the dog a “fucking cocksucking piece of shit” because he stubbed his toe, so I can’t even believe he knows about the “c”-word, nor do I know where he heard it. Naturally, I want to pin this all on his mother when we get home, but I need hard evidence...I needed to hear him say it.

 So I put him down, pop his little spine back into place, and I say “Listen, buddy...I need you to do me a favor, okay? I need you to say the ‘c’-word for me.” He looks at me like I just suggested we dangle our wieners over a shark-tank, and says “But Mommy said-” and I cut him off, saying “I’m sure your mother would shit herself completely inside-out if she heard you say it.” So five minutes later, when we were done laughing at that mental image, I’m wiping tears out of my eyes and say “Okay, seriously dude, I need you to say it right now.” He looks at me, still trying to figure out if this is some sort of trap, and after this I can fulfill some sort of sick dream I have where I never have to buy Pokemon cards again, and after a second, he takes a deep breath and says...

“Crap.”

[briangrayisfullofshit-blog]

The long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long road to manhood: I

When I was about thirteen years old, I attended a private catholic school in Michigan. You know Michigan, famous not only for being the “Motherland of the Juggalo”™, but also because it’s official state bird is a man blowing a dog.

I was miserable from all the boners, and eager to find a way to vent some of this pent-up aggression that was roaring inside of my whole body 24/7. (No, there wasn’t such a thing as wifi, or cell phones, and I wasn’t on the internet yet, so it was a sort of “Dark Age” before endless free porn, and I couldn’t just beat my dick like I caught it fisting the family dog, Scruffles, any time I pleased. (Scruffles died mysteriously a few years later in a tragic fisting accident.) 

Naturally, then, since speaking to a girl was off the table thanks to actual “bowl-cuts” from my Mom, tucked-in shirts with no belt, and a slouch that announced to the world I couldn’t pick a vagina out of a line-up, the only venue for this was fighting. It just so happened that there was a kid in my class who had the most punchable face I’d ever seen. Let’s call this kid John. 

Here’s the thing about John: He was a farm kid. I didn’t know it at the time, but every day I saw this guy in our shared miserable universe, he had been up since 4 a.m. tossing hay-bails off a truck that weighed more than I do now as a 35-year-old man. At our tender young age, he already knew the meaning of a hard day’s work, and I knew a shit-load about sharks...And that was pretty much it. It probably goes without saying that I certainly had no idea what was going on at any given farm in the wee hours of the morning, and that this kid could’ve probably kicked my dad’s ass. So things were going to go exactly as planned, no question.

One day, I had decided it was “the day” and I was going to punch his weird potato-esque face until it was hash. It was early winter, there was a light dusting of snow on the massive black-top church parking lot behind the school. It was recess, so literally every kid was outside, and the teachers who were watching us were probably shooting heroin or something, so it was pretty much Mad Max out there, if the cast was entirely made up of children, and everybody was dressed like a mormon instead of a dusty homosexual. 

It’s just the two of us, face-to-face, which I had orchestrated masterfully by pushing him from behind and calling him a faggot, correctly assuming he would immediately be on board for our fight. He starts peeling off his thick winter gloves, and I immediately began shitting in my pants. I hadn’t thought of this. For some reason, in my mind, he’d leave his gloves ON, and I could easily slip a quick Tyson-style upper-cut to his weird root-vegetable of a jaw and get on with feeling like a big man. I began to protest, but I barely squeaked out a sentence fragment went he sent a haymaker into my head that instantly made me lose control of every muscle in my body. I hit the black-top in a fraction of a second, and I remember distinctly feeling my freshly paralyzed sphincter begin farting wildly, to the point that I thought my ass was somehow breathing. 

He walked away, no doubt informing me that I had no penis and my mother was an over-weight prostitute, as I lay there thinking surely I was dead, and I had better trouble St. Peter for one of those little brown paper bags, because my asshole had begun to hyperventilate.

John taught me a valuable lesson that day. Don’t get me wrong, my mouth moves faster than my brain to this day, and I still know more about sharks than fighting, but if I were to say, see John in a bar and were to decide to have a two-and-a-half-decade-later re-match, I’m not saying I’d necessarily win, but I could jump into it with the confidence of a man who has seen a Vietnamese woman put a live eel in her snatch on 4chan.