Month: May 2025

I swear, you can’t leave your kid home alone for 20 minutes before things go to sh*t.

So tell me, Pro Parent, how you plan to deal with it…

“daddy are you home yet?’

“Awww, that’s precious! Checking in on me already…”

Not too long ago, after a late-night daddy-daughter date to see the Broadway play, Kimberly Akimbo[,ref]Parent’s tip: maybe wait until your kid is closer to 17 or 18 before letting them see this…it has a rather, um, ‘healthy’ dose of adult language. It even uses a word that I can’t bring myself to say or type (hint: it begins with ‘C’ and oddly does not rhyme with ‘aunt’).[/ref] a had to leave the aforementioned 12-year-old home alone so she could get ready for bed, while in the meantime I drove our younger daughter’s babysitter¹My mother, in case you were wondering. home for the evening.

Given that my journey was about 25 minutes round trip, I was surprised to see that she had already texted me from her smart watch about 10 minutes before I had pulled back into our driveway at 12:15 a.m. I mean, it was too early for her to be worrying that I had gotten into accident, right?

But then my eyes drifted down and saw that she had sent me a few more messages showing her concern.

“Hello?”

…

“Daddy?”

…

“Answer me?”

…

“Daddy?”

…

“Daddy!!!”

…

“Are you ok?”

…

“Hello!!!”

I kinda chuckled to myself, “Man, her concern for me really escalated quickly! Better text her even before I get out of the van and go in the house, just to put her mind at ease.”

“Hi”

“I was driving!”

“In the rain”

…

“Ok” was her succint reply.

I hopped out of the van and up the steps of our front porch, only to be about knocked on my ass I attempted to open out front door and bounced off it like a rubber ball when it didn’t open as I had clearly expected it to.

“Of course–she locked it behind me when I left! Well, I’m proud that she’s safety-minded enough to do that on her own…though, uh, I can’t believe I forget to tell to do it. Welp, Daughter #2 is already fast asleep, so I can’t ring the doorbell…better send her text…”

“Can u let me in,” I pounded on my key pad with my sausage fingers, being sure to use the lingo the youths are using these days.

We have glass panes either side of our front door, so I could see her silhouette as she approached the door to let me.

As the door swung open and I stepped in, I about immediately had to take two steps back.

“Why are you answering the door wielding a kitchen knife with a 4-inch blade?!? I about impaled myself on the second-largest knife in this house!”

“I thought I heard someone in the house,” she replied.

“Oh. I see. So that’s what was up with all those texts,” I noted.

I surveyed the house, wondering if she had just been hearing things or what. I was pretty confident that there was no one in the house, based on the principle of ‘chain of custody’. The babysitter had been at house pretty much all day, and I was quite sure that no one had been slipping into our house in the middle of the day and quietly hiding out for 5-12 hours. And if my dear daughter had indeed locked the doors right after I had left, then, I assure you, child, no one was in the house making noises…

“So can you tell me again what happened?”

It was late as it was, and I was happy to get the kiddo to bed and hit the hay myself. It was quite improbable that we had an intruder lurking about, nevertheless, there we were in the thick of some Sherlock Holme’s nonsense.

“I was in the bathroom, when I heard somebody in the kitchen,” she said, still clearly with an edge in her voice.

Both bathrooms did share a wall with the kitchen, so I wasn’t too surprised she could hear something in there. For example, both our regular fridge and our mini fridge for beverages had both been running pretty loud as of late.

“And then what happened? Was it perhaps a humming or vibrating noise?” I inquired.

“No it sounded like somebody moved something on the floor or the counter for a few seconds, then stopped, then moved it some more.”

“Interesting, interesting…”

Honestly, both of her grandmothers have quite the track record of hearing suspicious noises that may or not have had actually been made. Was she starting to take after them? But…this early in life??

“Well, okay, I’ll keep thinking about what it could have been,” I reassured her, as we walked through the kitchen and back towards the adults’ bedroom.

To my credit, I actually was trying to come up with a plausible theorem to serve as an alternative the whole intruder chef narrative. For example, I did consider the possibility that a mouse could have stowed away in a pizza delivery box that we had brought home earlier that day. It wasn’t that far-fetched, actually: earlier that day, somebody had posted on FaceBook that they found murine turds in their pizza box from that same joint.

As I opened the bedroom door and walked in, I immediately noticed something out of place: our closet door was wide open. Within nanoseconds, all the pieces of the puzzle came together.

Once I stopped laughing and came up for air, I explained my air-tight theory to my firstborn offspring, and reassured her that she had been safe this whole time.

“You can put the knife away, now, dear child,” I said, as I was just now realizing she had been still carrying it out with her this whole time.

Indeed, the sounds she was hearing, while startling when you’re barely 12 and left home alone at night for the first time, were, shall we say, perfectly natural…

“Wha–?!? What are you doing in here? I thought you were brushing your teeth?”

I’ll admit that I was taken by surprise when, as I was settling in and getting ready to brush my teeth myself, our bedroom door had silently opened to reveal the image of my daughter in the doorway, somehow holding an even bigger knife now.

“I need somebody to come to my room with me. I’m not going in there by myself,” she stated matter-of-factly.

It was in that moment that I realized that her experience of the whole matter was a world away from mine. Here I had been playing Dr. Watson, so focused on solving the mystery, that I had overlooked the clues that she had been giving me.

So I paused for a moment and finally gave her what she had been needing all along–and it wasn’t some humorous-in-hindsight explanation.

I then proceeded to escort her through the kitchen, into the foyer, and down the dark hall to her room.

“You go in first,” she said, pointing the knife first at me and then at her door.

“Dammit, kid, don’t be talking with your hands while you’re holding a knife–especially in the dark! Give me that thing! You about stabbed me!”

“No. I’m holding onto this until I know nobody is in my room.”

“Fine,” I said, too tired to argue about this sh*t.

I turned on her light and did a quick once around her room, including her closet, verifying that nothing was lurking about.

“All clear,” I said. “Now can we brush our teeth and get to bed before 1?”

“I suppose,” she said. “But can I sleep with the knife on my nightstand?”

“No, you cannot be sleeping with a butcher knife on your nightstand, my dear.”

“How about my pocket knife then?”

“Sure, go ahead,” I sighed. “Feel free to whittle away at any monsters that may visit you in the night…”

The point of the story is when your kid is freaked out, sometimes you gotta stop and just give them a big hug and let them know that you’ll keep them safe. They’ve just been mildly traumatized, for f***’s sake–even if they know what was making those spooky noises, it doesn’t mean their system has calmed down just yet.

And what exactly was making those spooky noises, you may ask? The answer to that is–hopefully–not blowing the wind, my friend.

The bathroom she had been chillaxing in not only shared a wall with the kitchen, but also a wall with our closet…where we kept the litter box for our two cats.

And, well, when Dumas Chesterfield, the male and notably large of the two, drops a Number Two, he sometimes has trouble covering up his business. And he can be rather loud in his attempts to claw litter onto his turds of unusual size.

And yes, I found it ----- hilarious that in the end, it was the cat sh*tting that had scared the sh*t out of her…

Content created on: 25 May 2025 (Sunday)

I ain’t green like Kermit, and I ain’t orange like Ernie nor yellow like his rubber ducky.

Why, ain’t no reason why I’m so darn lucky…

“A big surprise?!? Really?!?” I eyed my dear mother with a bit of suspicion. “Really?”

I wanted to be excited, but she also had a history of anti-climactic ‘surprises’. Even worse, she threw in some that were downright anti-surprises! Have I mentioned the whole banana split fiasco(s) yet? If not, well, that’s another lovely tale of childhood trauma that needs to be told.

“Well…” she paused somewhat thoughtfully. “I’m not really sure how excited you might be about it. I think you’ll be excited.”

“Ok, where on the ‘Dudly-to-Studly Scale'¹For the life of me, I can distinctly remember making up a goofy-ass name for a goofy-ass scale, but can’t remember exactly what that name was. Dammit. I’m not getting sleep for the next month. would you say it lands?” I inquired cheekily.

“Uh, you’re going to have explain that scale to me. How would you calibrate it again?” she said, humoring because obviously she was excited about whatever secret she was sitting on.

“Well, I would say a ‘1’ on the Dudly-to-Studly scale would be something quite underwhelming,” I said, tapping my finger to my peach-fuzz-free 11-year-old chin, deep in thought. “Maybe, say, like buying a new grill for cookouts this summer. I mean, that would be like polishing a turd. This sh*thole of an apartment doesn’t have much of yard or porch to even use it!”

I gestured around at the duplex we had been living in for the duration of my fifth grade year. While calling it a ‘sh*thole’ might have been a bit overly dramatic (and also something of an artistic liberty taken by the autobiographer), we–Mom, me, and my slightly older bro, 1SkinnyJ–all agreed that our domicile at the corner of Kellett & Kearney in good ol’ Springfield, MO wasn’t exactly the proverbial lap of luxury (even by rather low economically-challenged standards). Especially with the ass-hat neighbor who was apparently fine with chain-smoking in their apartment. What a ----- jerkoff.

“Okay,” Mom replied, “No need to use that language. But, anyways, what would you consider a ’10’ on this so-called Dudly-to-Studly scale?”

“Oh, that’s much easier,” I said perkily. “How about a day or two at Six Flags Saint Louis? Hint, hint…”

“Um…well, unfortunately, the surprise isn’t going to quite hit a 10 on your scale,” Mom said, trying to let me down easy.

“Damn.” I muttered. “Welp, a boy can dream, can’t he?”

“Well, if you really need a number from me, I would say maybe this would land around a 5 or 6, so just temper your expectations a bit there, Young Dreamer.”

“Alright. Cool. Well, when do we get to find out what this modest 5.5 surprise is?”

“I can’t say anything until I know for sure it’s a done deal, but I can give you a hint,” Mom said coyly.

“Well, don’t keep me waiting! What’s your clever hint?”

“Okay, you ready for this? It might actually involve buying a new grill.”

“Dammit, Mom, not again with the ----- grill…”

“Welp, it’s official!”

Mom came waltzing just a few days later into our sh*thole apartment waving some papers around in the air.

I looked up from a very intense game of Dr. Mario on my Game Boy.

“What’s official?”

“You know those nice apartments for, uh, ‘underfunded’ people like us over on Delaware Avenue?” she said, almost squealing with excitement.

“Yeah, they’re pretty sweet. But wasn’t there a long-ass wait list?”

“NOPE! No more wait list! WE’RE IN, BABY!”

“WHAT?!?” I about dropped my precious Game Boy. This was big news–huge!

“Yes, it’s TRUE–and we’re moving at the end of the month!”

“Ooooooooh…” I could barely form words. “Whaaaa?”

“I’ll give you a moment,” Mom said, clearly very pumped by my reaction.

“Oh, ah, well,” I said grasping for words. They finally came to me.

“Five-point-five?!? You thought this was a 5.5 on the D2S scale??? Yeah, maybe if you multiplied it by 2! These go to eleven!”

I was about to pass out. Like, you don’t even understand, bro. While we never truly had lived in a complete dump–save for the roach motel we stayed out for the first week when we moved to Springfield from Kansas, but that’s almost another story for another time–we never had lived anywhere that had been built before 1965. Every time I would stay over at rich friends house (and by “rich”, I really mean “at least marginally richer than us”), I would always fantasize about living somewhere with proper air conditioning and carpet that wasn’t slightly suspect. This boy can–and did–dream.

But in less than 10 days, that was all about to change: ‘twould not be a dream no longer. My lucky ass had somehow just won the Po’ Boy lottery…

“Man, moving to those nice apartments back in ’92 really was life-changing, wasn’t it?”

Roughly 30 years later, something had reminded me of the 2 wonderful years we had lived there, and I found myself reminiscing with my dear mother about the whole experience.

“Yeah, that’s an understatement. What was really nice was that we finally had room for our piano again, and you could start taking lessons again,” Mom added.

“You know, that whole ordeal…it was just so…surprising. Like, finding out that we had got into those apartments totally blind-sided me–in the best possible way, of course–‘cuz even I knew that when you applied for them in what? March of that year? That there was a sh*t-ton of people in line front of us. So for some reason I had the number in my head of 8-12 months to get to the top of the wait list…”

“Mmm-hmm,” Mom murmured, not bothering to interrupt the unexpected 3-decade old rabbit hole I was tripping into.

“Yeah…I hadn’t really thought about that since…well, basically since you told me the big news right before we moved there…hmmph…”

Mom continued to say little to nothing.

“It’s just that alot of people must have died in the 2 months in between. Like, it’s a statistical understatement to say that we got freakin’ lucky!”

As I finally came out of my halcyon days daze, I realized that mom had been oddly silent this whole time.

“What? Why are you looking at me with that half-smirk on your face?”

“Um…yeah, I guess one could call it ‘luck’,” she said somewhat cryptically.

“Uhhh…what are you talking about?” I could tell that she knew more than she was letting on, but I was still clueless.

“Well, let’s just say it wasn’t a coincidence that we got into those apartments so freakishly quickly…”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, just out with it already!”

“Well, I don’t think you ever met her, but the woman who handled all the applications? Real nice lady. She, uh, ‘fast-tracked’ our application to the front of the line…past many other qualified and deserving applicants, who, shall we say, didn’t need nearly as much sunscreen as we do.”

“Wait, WHAT?!?”

“Yeah…I found out from our mutual friend that not too long after we got into the apartments on Delaware that she got fired for it. I’m not sure if we we’re the only white folk she hooked up, though I’m sure there had to have been plenty of other poor white families mysteriously appearing in all the nicer subsidized housing in statistically disproportionate numbers.”

“Holy sh*t, Mother…”

I was trying to wrap my head around that bomb of a pseudo-family secret that had just been dropped on my head.

“It all makes so much sense now…

The point of the story, kids, is that White Jesus really does answer your prayers.

Well, either that or systemically-ingrained socioeconomic-agnositic privilege for pale people all across the pale spectrum is, unlike White Jesus, actually real…

Content created on: 17/18 May 2025 (Sat/Sun…and yes, I missed my deadline by a week and just backdated this post instead.)