Father’s Day.
It’s also Ray Davies’ birthday, true grounds for worldwide celebration, but …
it’s Father’s Day!!!
Was just sitting outside with Gracie, got to thinking about the three most important lessons I tried to teach our kids. The ones I’d love the opportunity to pass on to our grandson:
1) Don’t ever – and I do mean EVER – tell someone they shouldn’t feel the way they do. Never ever. There are many times people don’t even understand themselves why they feel the way they do, and there is no way you know how they feel better than they do.
And it they do have a barely tenable grasp on why they feel the way they do, and it doesn’t make sense to you? I don’t give a shit, ’cause that means less of a shit than the one I don’t give. It doesn’t have to make sense to you. You’re not that important in the scheme of things. You actually don’t matter. Really. You don’t.
If you want to help them try to understand why they feel that way, God bless you, because that might be one of the reasons He put you in their lives to begin with.
If all you want to do is tear them down for feeling that way, shut your damned pie hole and consider the fact that you really, really don’t have all the answers for yourself, much less anyone else.
2) Whoever talks the loudest and the longest and the last doesn’t always “win”. More often than not, they’re not even in the running.
Someone’s silence in response to such a buffoon usually doesn’t mean concession, it means they’re just fed up with trying to actually converse (or maybe even compare opinions) with someone who is obsessed with being “right” even when there’s no possible “wrong” answer to the question at hand …
meaning to say –
opinions are never wrong. They’re never right. They are neither irrefutable facts nor brazen and outright bullshit, and very often there are really no verifiable facts that can support those opinions or render them useless.
These days you can just mention in passing that you like the taste of Coke over the taste of Pepsi, and I guaran-damn-tee you more people than you might think will tell you that you’re wrong.
There are some people out there that are obsessed with being right or winning the “argument” when it’s just not possible. Even when there isn’t any argument.
And that is when they start talking the loudest and the longest and will keep going long after they’ve run out of words or coherent thoughts on the subject.
The infamous, and thoroughly over-rated, “last word”.
And finally, Number Three.
And this might be the most important out of the bunch.
Write it down for future reference. Cross-stitch a sampler, frame it, put it on the living room wall next to the big screen:
3) Never stop laughing at farts.
When the urge hits you to go out and play in the mud, then go outside and play in the mud. Middle of summer? The ground is the consistency of concrete? Break out the hose and play in the mud.
Eat desert before you even touch your veggies.
And never, ever, EVER stop laughing at farts.
It revives the childlike enthusiasm that too many of us buried under the shroud of adulthood way too early in life …
AND it’s the Great Human Equalizer.
You’re sitting in your fourth grade class, taking a math test, you can hear a pin drop in the classroom all the way down the hall, and someone tosses out a cheeseburger?
Ain’t gonna be a single person in the room who isn’t fighting back a chortle or chuckle or two.
The saintly, hallowed chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States of ‘merka. Nine semi-continent geezers in robes deciding the fate of Roe v. Wade or Obamacare or Citizens United or the Satanic onslaught unleashed upon the moral fabric of fine upstanding citizens by a bunch of faggots wanting to get married.
A little gastric melody floats gently – yea, even subtly – into the open air outside of one of those robes? Ruth Bader Ginsburg might burst a blood vessel trying to stifle a giggle. John Roberts (who seems to harbor a certain proclivity for blowing it out his ass) might actually concur and smirk at the very least.
Scalia would blame Obama.
Farts are the one parcel of common ground upon which all mortals have trodden. They neither acknowledge nor kowtow to insignificant specifics such as race, creed, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, native language, political affiliation or how many weapons one keeps in an unlocked, Stars-and-Bars flag draped cabinet in their bedroom in case the black helicopters are circling late one night and they need to lock ‘n’ load on a split second’s notice.
You quit laughing at farts and you’ve pretty much abandoned all vestiges of humanity remaining in your hopelessly shallow soul.

Oh yeah:
never swing at the first pitch.
And rock ‘n’ roll is made to be played loud.
And that’s all I have to say about that.

the Grandson and me, day after Father’s Day, 2015