I've been considering the post modern family lately and I've come to the conclusion that I really ought to transport my entire family back to 1843 so we can spend the day in the parlor drinking sasparilla and playing Parcheesi. I ought to have a swallow tail coat and a monocle and sit on my son's bedside at 4 in the morning and wake him with the dulcet quatrains of Paradise Lost, in Latin, while [My Attorney] milks the yak and my daughter prepares our early repast of hand harvested goose eggs and blood sausage. That's what ought to happen.Instead, I woke the boy child up at 7:40 this morning, about twelve hours before he usually wakes up, so he can play Halo 3/ODST before school. This is the post modern child: a determined, pre-dawn, mirthless killing machine.
I am so proud.
I've pondered this predicament previously here at Death by Children, the post-modern dad not planted in the bleachers but plopped onto a divan, laptop afire, headphones playing a raconteur's stack of Tom Waits and the Decemberists, occasionally glancing up into the great high-def maul of home entertainment whereon his progeny, the fruit of his loins, is racking up a collection of the kind of long range head shots that would make Lee Harvey Oswald vote Republican and it is clear what's missing: the joise de vris, the gut revelations, of what happens in the bleachers when your kid knocks one out of the park, and you leap, involuntarily, into a fist-pumping-Irish jig-roundabout-pimp-swagger-plexy screaming THAT'S MY BOY! THAT'S MY BOY!! THAT'S MY BOY!!! and knock over your beer.
Us pomo pops don't get that much. Our kids hate baseball. They really do. They're into wireless networking, Family Guy ephemera, and globally linked high definition explicitly graphic games of death wherein they can jack up their kill ratio and digitally t-bag their opponent's dead avatar.
Which is exactly what mon homme petit was doing this morning from 7 until 8:45. Now I know he's good. He routinely despleens vast populi of players from London to New Zealand from the comfort of his dirty-ass room. His deeply inked and tatooed uncle took him on the other day and Connor killed him ceaselessly in the most embarrassing and improbable manner possible. He was being creatively cruel in the dispatch of his uncle's avatars—a cat and mouse kind of thing—when his uncle, a technically proficient highly competitive swagger junky started asking questions about the response time of the controllers, the virtual analog of saying the sun was in my eye. Roon called him a pussy. The kid is ruthless.
And I want to shout out THAT'S MY BOY! I want to manifest manic proud papa turrets syndrome but there's no one here to see it so what's the point. I can email people. I can Facebook it. I can Tweet. But it's just not the same.
So do all I can do: I pat him on the back as I go into the kitchen for another double espresso and I say what every great pomo pop says to his kid:
Nice kill, son. Nice kill.
