meet the cleavers
It ain't easy
doing the Ward Cleaver
thing here at the end of the
millennium.
With Damoclean mortgages
hanging over our dadly heads,
the requisite
kowtowing or hustle
to keep or create a revenue stream
so
the Beav can get teeth straightened
or
one-up silver-spoon cronies with some
video game hardware coup, and the
ceaseless
demands on diminishing free time,
dads in the '90s are
expected to shut up,
toe the line, bring home a
paycheck with
measurable regularity, and be damn
happy
about it. Any deviations and we find
ourselves tagged as having a
"mid-life crisis," or worse, our ass
winds up
in some 12-step thang.
Enough is
enough.
We're gonna vent on the Web,
and it starts
right here today, with the
inaugural issue of "dads.com".
Find me a dad doing face-time in some corporate
gym with an issue of some insipid parenting
publication tucked in his duffel, learning how
"to parent." Find me a place on the Web without
saccharine-soaked drivel about the joys of parenting
and little Bippy's crayon-smeared vision turned
jpeg and dangled like a pee-stained sheet on the
'Net for the whole web world to see.
It's not that these sorts of things are totally
without value, they're just not anywhere close
to the reality of reality. They don't talk about
your 140,000-mile car giving up the ghost to abject
systems failure and body cancer and
being
reduced to a one-car family in a
two-minivan world.
They don't tell you when your
dog is old and sick,
that you wind up with the
happy job of executioner,
driving doggy to its
greater reward. They don't help
you deal
with bodily fluids of every conceivable
texture
and hue spewing on you, from child and pet
alike.
But likewise, they make you too analytical to
give
yourself over to those supreme moments of pride
and
of love, when your kids pull something off that
brings
that lumpy thing up in your throat and
makes you bawl like a girly-man
(hopefully when no one is looking).
This is the stuff that dads.com is all about.
Like it or lump it.
If you want smarmy succor,
go linking to
bleeding-heart-land on the Web.
You know and I know
that we all have to make it
all up as we go along
anyway.
And so, we'll commiserate
in the pathetic wilds of dads.com. Yeah, it's tough
out here in Ward Cleaver's
land-o-the-middle-class-dads.
But sometimes, when you
get lucky, the headaches
go bliss, and you get your
Warhol-fame-time, even
if it's just somewhere in your
head.
NEXT TIME: cars from
hell, and something for the kiddies --
all here on dads.com,
ward cleaver's prozac fever.
RETURN TO dads.com
(c) 2003 Arhythmiacs
Special thanks for
the bandwidth to the fine folks @ multiverse.com
Graphics courtesy Christine Penko
Design appropriation with apologies and gratitude to
http://www.suck.com