Monthly Archives: September 2010

Longboard

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Longboard.

I’m sorry; I’m a bad, bad writer to start a story with a single word.

But I can hardly think of anything else. I tried to think of something else. I even scrunched my eyes really super tight and imagined giant rainbow-colored butterflies carrying fluffy chocolate cupcakes to me on sparkly golden platters suspended from strings of iridescent pearls. But my happy thoughts spat themselves out onscreen as “longboard.”

*Scrunch*

*Butterflies*

*Fluffy cupcakes*

Longboard.

See what I mean?

It’s my son’s fault. Gabe wants my wife, Kerry, and me to buy him a $272 longboard.

We <3 Gabe but don’t want to buy him a $10 longboard. We don’t want to buy him a free longboard.

He wants us to buy him a longboard more than he wants anything else in the whole world.

We have a lot of long discussions about it. They start at about the same time we get home from work, and go something like this:

Gabe: “I want a longboard.”

Us: “No.”

Gabe: “I promise on a stack of Holy Bibles to start wearing my helmet and wrist guards so I won’t get hurt. I’ll read the Bibles, too.”

Us: “No.”

Gabe: “I found one for a good price, but I have to get it now before the deal ends.”

Us: “No.”

Gabe: “What’s wrong with a longboard?”

Us: “No.”

Gabe: “Why won’t you let me get a longboard?”

Us: “No.”

Gabe: “All my friends have longboards.”

Us: “No.”

Gabe: “You wouldn’t have to take me everywhere if I had a longboard.”

Us: “No.”

Gabe: “I’d get better grades in school if I had a longboard.”

Us: “No.”

Gabe: “You’re horrible parents.”

Us: “Yes. No, wait! We mean no. No.”

And so on, and on, and on–until the sun comes up, and we’re too hoarse to talk anymore.

Maybe you think I’m exaggerating. But let me tell you a little bit about our son to help you understand what we’re dealing with here.

Gabe is a teenager.

If you’re a parent, I don’t need to tell you more. You already understand the misery that is choking our once-happy household like thick, black smoke. You’re nodding empathetically, unable to read any further because your eyes are burning with tears of recollected anguish.

But if you’re not a parent, or you’ve successfully drunk away the painful memories of raising your own teenagers, “teenager” is a word that may need a bit of explanation.

Teenagers aren’t fully human.

They’re hideous, hideous mutants–bewildered, human-shaped sacks of hormones hell-bent on destroying the world for their own personal gain. Remember the scary creatures in Predator and Alien, the ones with huge fangs and hydrochloric-acid drool and an insatiable hunger for human flesh? Teenagers are like that, except there’s more of them, and they’re meaner and harder to kill.

Gabe is 15 years old, soon to be 16. But he has been a 15-year-old teenager for as long as we can remember, maybe since the day God scooped up a handful of dirt, spat into it to form ball of mud, and breathed life into it. We have been sucked into a whirling vortex of teenage doom from which we cannot escape.

Longboard.

Some parents are lucky enough to raise twee sons who crochet lace doilies to raise money for the high school drama club. These gentle boys are quiet and delightful. They do their chores and homework without being asked. They clean their rooms. They respect you, and do what you ask with a smile, or at least a minimum of whining.

Not Gabe.

To Gabe, being a teenager means he’s a man–a man with exceptional physical and mental talents, and a strong sense of moral superiority. Like Superman, but without the tights or the bothersome drive to be a do-gooder.  

We, on the other hand, are evil, bumbling overlords whose tyrannous reign must be crushed in order to set the world free.

He is control.

Or wants to be.

Or will be soon.

Or is.

I’m not 100 percent sure anymore, because his jackhammer mouth makes me very, very sleepy, and confused.

Raising Gabe is like wrestling an enraged Sasquatch. In a word, he’s stubborn. When Gabe sets his mind on something–and he’s always got his mind set on something–he literally won’t rest until he gets it. In four words, he’s stubborn and obsessive-compulsive.

Gabe’s been this way since he was small enough to smother.

When he was about 2-and-a-half years old, for example, we blithely encouraged him watch a highlight reel of the Denver Broncos’ Super Bowl victories. He watched it about five times in a row. Then he started imitating the twisting, slashing movements of the team’s star running back, Terrell Davis. He did it with exact precision, rolling and tumbling through lines of imaginary defensemen in our living room in slow motion, just like it was filmed.

We were relatively new parents then, and still stupid enough to believe Gabe and his hobbies were cute. So we rushed out and bought him a football and a football helmet and the sweetest, teensiest-tiniest Denver Broncos’ football jersey you’ve ever seen.

It was a big mistake, because every day for the next year or so, he put on the jersey and the helmet and carried the football under one arm everywhere he went. He wore the teeny-tiny jersey to preschool. He wore the teeny-tiny jersey to bed. He wore the teeny-tiny jersey until it finally came undone and fluttered to the ground, too tattered and torn even to be used as rags.

That should’ve tipped us off that we had a serious problem on our hands.

But it didn’t.

We still thought it was cute.

And so the football was followed in rapid succession by the basketball, the baseball, the soccer ball, the bicycle, the trick bike, the mountain bike, the road bike, the rollerblades, the hockey skates, the snorkeling gear, the hockey gear, the golf clubs, the juggling kit, the hacky sacks, the lacrosse sticks and the skateboards. One year, when Gabe was about 8 or 9 years old, he spotted someone riding a unicycle. Naturally, we bought him a unicycle. He started riding it almost as soon as I finished assembling it, and within a week he’d combined unicycle riding with his newest obsession, juggling. Within two weeks, he was playing street hockey on it, and winning.

Not that all of Gabe’s obsessions have been sports oriented.

Over time, he’s also fixated on a list of things as diverse as Yu-Gi-Oh cards, collectible pins, trading cards, iPods, mechanical pencils, hats, tennis shoes, pocket watches, laser pointers, drawing, algebra, vampire novels, haircuts, magic tricks, skinny jeans, hamburgers, video games, cologne, and cell phones. Recently, a kindly teacher loaned him a Rubik’s cube and challenged him to solve it. Gabe frenetically worked on it for days. If we tried to take it away to feed him dinner or to get him to do his homework, he screamed at us to leave him alone.

He solved it, though, convincingly demonstrating that one of the upsides of stubborn persistence is success. He solved it five or six times in a row, and then tossed it into a discard pile along with the Yu-Gi-Oh cards, the broken laser pointer, his baseball glove and a lot of other stuff we don’t even recognize. I don’t suppose he’ll ever touch it again.

Longboard.

Gabe first saw somebody riding on a longboard about two months ago.

That’s when the discussions about the longboard began. Gabe pleaded, cajoled, intimidated, begged and browbeat us for days and weeks, barely pausing between tactics to breathe or sleep. We steadfastly said no until our tongues bled, and we prayed to go deaf.

One night, I came perilously close to giving in. Not because I wanted to say yes, but because my friend Rena wrote me an unexpected note offering to give Gabe her longboard, which she stopped using when it tried to kill her by repeatedly dumping her on the asphalt. She had planned to give it to her father, who won it from her fair and square. But he didn’t want it, and she thought Gabe might enjoy it.

Rena’s offer seemed remarkably prescient, and more than coincidental. She doesn’t know Gabe. I never once mentioned that he wanted a longboard. Was this a clear sign that God in His infinite wisdom and desire to make me suffer wants Gabe to have a longboard?

Perhaps it is, I mused, and who am I to argue with God?

I’m not Gabe.

But I suppressed my fear of heavenly reprisal and denied God’s will, if God’s will it was. I didn’t mention Rena’s offer to Gabe, or even to my wife. On stern principle, I exercised my God-given right to free will, and kept it completely quiet. I didn’t say yes instead of no. And to my complete surprise, Gabe stopped demanding a longboard.

Until I sat down to write this story.

About six paragraphs ago, even though he couldn’t possibly have known what I was working on because he was in the kitchen and I was in the living room, he suddenly shouted, “Hey, can I get a longboard?”

“No,” Kerry and I replied somewhat flatly, but in unison.

“Okay,” Gabe said. “I just want you know that I still want a longboard. I haven’t forgotten.”

And I don’t believe he ever will, which is why I’m going to do something a good writer probably ought to do very rarely, if ever: end a story abruptly, and with a single word.

Longboard.

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The Tragedy Of The Cookies

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What looks like a huge, delicious stack of chocolate chip cookies is actually a finite resource requiring careful management.

Cookies can be hard to find in my house.

It’s not that we don’t buy cookies. It’s just that my kids tend to eat them all before I get any.

I used to think this was a petty familial problem, one of dozens of niggling irritations that parents like me reluctantly deal with every week. But it turns out that my inability to pop a chocolate chip cookie or two into my mouth when The Late Show with David Letterman comes on also explains why humanity will probably destroy the world and eventually be forced to colonize Mars or fly rocket ships to distant galaxies in search of Earth-like planets to inhabit.

Environmental policymakers refer to my problem as “the tragedy of the commons.” Simply put, the tragedy of the commons posits that if a group of people are interested in using a common resource such as a reservoir, game preserve, forest or a bag of ginger snaps, they’ll selfishly exploit that resource until it’s depleted, sometimes irrevocably.

We know this is true both instinctively and from our recent environmental experience, not to mention our squabbles over snickerdoodles. But nobody had fully explained exactly why it’s the case until 1968, when University of California biology professor Garrett Hardin published a highly influential academic paper called The Tragedy of the Commons. Hardin’s paper specifically addressed the growing problem of world overpopulation, but the theory behind it has since been applied to nearly every environmental problem the world faces, from the management of our fisheries to climate change caused by air pollution. Hardin’s work is interesting partly because even though it was revolutionary at the time, he based some of his thinking on the work of early 19th-century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and the obscure 18th-century amateur mathematician William Forster Lloyd, who probably didn’t eat enough cookies growing up.

I almost always feel miserably unhappy when I don’t get my Oreos. But Whitehead depressingly yet correctly points out that “the essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.” He adds that “this inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is only by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the future.”

Or, to paraphrase Whitehead’s thoughts in the vernacular of the day, life’s a bitch and then you die.

Don't let Alfred North Whitehead's smirk fool you. His theories about "the remorseless working of things" can really harsh your mellow.

Lloyd was even more disheartening than Whitehead in a way because he described Whitehead’s expression of the inevitability of tragedy in the cold, hard language of math. I’m not much good at math—I’m horrible at it, in fact—but given some time and the aid of a calculator I can add and subtract simple numbers, which is exactly how Hardin explains Lloyd’s equation.

Imagine that a group of herdsmen freely graze their cattle in pasture. As long as they all use the land within its carrying capacity, everything will be okay because the pluses and minuses of cattle ranching will balance one another out in a zero-sum equation. But if one of the herdsmen decides to add one extra cow to his herd, he’ll gain by +1. Because the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, however, the negative utility for his decision is only a slight fraction of -1. Mathematically, then, the most sensible course of action for the herdsman—and, by extension, each of the herdsmen who share the field—is to increase the size of his herd, singly at first, then as the consequences of his self-interest aren’t immediately self-evident, without limit.

Eventually, though, the day of reckoning will arrive, when a confluence of overgrazing, drought and disease suddenly collapse the herds and plunge the herdsmen and their families into famine. Hardin argues that neither appeals to conscience nor technological advances in ranching can prevent this disaster, partly because it only takes one herdsman to crumple moral resolve and ruin it for everybody, and partly because technology can’t evolve fast enough to meet rapidly evolving and changing environmental conditions.

“Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all,” Hardin says.

Until recently, my family didn’t know anything about Hardin’s bummeristic tragedy of the commons. But when the kids persisted in eating unfair shares of coconut macaroons and oatmeal raisin cookies, we stopped buying them, explaining that if everybody can’t have their fair share, then nobody will get any at all. (Except mom and dad, of course, who keep a secret stash of cookies hidden under the Christmas napkins in the china hutch.) That led to a great deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth.

My wife, Kerry, calls this approach to correcting undesirable behavior “natural consequences.”

I usually refer to it as a form of punishment that leads to “endless bitching and moaning, and is driving me to drink.”

But Hardin and other environmental-policy theorists who later built on his highly influential work would probably call it “mutual coercion.” Mutual coercion is an agreed-upon social arrangement that produces responsibility at the same time it leads to the responsible use of finite resources. Neither free-thinking liberals nor conservative free-market advocates like to admit it, but in order to be successful, communities and societies must agree on thousands of similar policies that are based in mutual coercion, from laws making it illegal to rob banks and rules limiting parking downtown to 2 hours to taxes that fund education and social programs that provide basic health care to society’s weakest members.

Such rules always infringe on somebody’s personal liberty and often seem onerous, especially around election time, when cries of “rights” and “freedom” fill the air. But as Hardin points out, “What does ‘freedom’ mean? When men mutually agreed to pass laws against robbing, mankind became more free, not less so.”

I’ve tried to explain Hardin’s logic to my kids when they complain about being limited to eating two cookies when they want three.  

“Injustice is preferable to total ruin,” I say, quoting Hardin.

But they just stare at me blankly, like I’m a complete idiot or speaking a foreign language. Then they usually either suggest that we buy more cookies—money apparently being a renewable resource in our household—or wait until my back is turned to sneak another one.

And I rarely find out what they’ve done until David Letterman comes on.

Which is a real tragedy.

Author’s note: This post is dedicated to my new friend, Lois Sterns, who is a careful reader and accomplished writer with refined tastes.

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Mike & Kerry Go To The Chicago Institute Of Art

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Mike & Kerry Go To The Hockey Rink

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Today’s update:

The Tbird’s lost their first game of the season 3-2 this morning to the Chicago Fury. Gabe had an assist in the game and crushed a few bodies, but neither he nor the team could get a rhythm going and they floundered against a very tough opponent.

There was one bright spot for Gabe that only a hockey parent will understand: He hit several kids very hard, sending them back to their benches to ponder their lives and chances of success in a less violent sport, such as karate, boxing or mixed martial arts. He hit one kid so hard that the kid left the rink with a bag of ice pressed against his head, and the kid’s father stormed over to the rink door to glare at my son as he stepped off the ice between periods for the Zamboni. I rushed over to intervene in an argument if necessary, but when the dad saw Gabe he decided to swallow his anger.

Smart fellow.

Fully padded teenage hockey players who are armed with hockey sticks and buckets of excess testosterone make really bad opponents when you’re a 45-year-old man who has hasn’t done anything more strenuous than lift your beer to make wedding toasts for a couple of decades.

And, yes, I realize that hockey parents—myself included—need therapy for what I can only describe as their shameful love of violence.

The Tbirds won their next game 5-2 against the Cleveland Barons, and Gabe had a goal and two brawls that developed out of a furious scrum in front of the net, so it was pretty much a perfect game for him. Gabe kept his cool during the fights, and wasn’t penalized, which is what the coach rightly wants. No point in getting ejected from a game and hurting the team.

But Gabe loves a skirmish, and was grinning from ear to ear when he skated by Kerry and me after the fight broke up. The three of shared a brief moment of pure joy with only the glass separating us.

I imagine this is how some parents feel when their sons go to jail and they get to visit them on Saturdays.

Wonderful!

P.S. — I hope you like my drawing. I put some extra effort into this one to add extra human figures and get the perspective just right. Donatello would’ve been proud of me.

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Mike & Kerry Go To Chicago

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Hello from beautiful Chicago!

Here’s a quick update on today’s games for all you hockey fans:

My son, Gabe, is playing for the Colorado Thunderbirds, which is the national championship defending team at the U16 AAA level. The Tbirds had two games today against their opponents in the Midwest Elite Youth Hockey League.

The Tbirds came from behind in this morning’s game to tie the L.A. Junior Kings 3-3, and came from behind again this evening to beat the Chicago Mission 3-1. Gabe had an assist in the first game, and a nice sniper goal in the second game. He has laid too many hits to count, including a couple of bell-ringers that probably gave the recipients rather unpleasant headaches. He received one penalty in each game, one of them bogus, but also pulled three to four penalties.

On Saturday, they play two more games. I worry about Gabe because he’s a very physical player, and a two-game-day schedule is hard on his body. On the other hand, it’s also hard on anybody he comes in contact with, proving once again that the universe has a way of balancing things out.

My wife, Kerry, and I are having a great time here. We love watching the games, seeing our old hockey friends, privately ragging on those parents who are assholes (there are plenty of them in competitive hockey), and boasting about future NHL star.

I’d tell you more, but I’m trying not to spend all my time on the computer. I lieu of words, I drew a cartoon for you. I know many of you will be surprised to learn that I can draw about as well as I write. Not to brag, but I am a successful graduate of the Evelyn Wood’s Speed-Drawing Program. 

Enjoy your lives. Each day is precious, and filled with new and exciting experiences.

Well, not really. That’s bullshit.

But it is true that some days are better than others.

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