Fathermucker by Greg Olear

TELEVISION IS BAD . High-fructose corn syrup for the eyes. Unfiltered Luckies for the brain. KILL YOUR TELEVISION is a popular bumper sticker around here, and an even more popular sentiment. TV, or not TV: that is the question. When chatting casually on the subject with other Hudson Valley parents, I find myself qualifying, if not outright apologizing for, our decision to let our kids watch TV. If I permit such deleterious activity, you see, I must at least recognize its inherent and unequivocal evil. (Tacit disapproval is still disapproval, and often harder to counter than the explicit variety.) So, the obligatory caveat: I don’t think kids should watch adult programs, commercials especially, and I don’t think they should spend all the livelong day in front of the boob tube. But I don’t see the harm in my kids catching a little Noggin while I gird up for the grueling day. It amuses me to wonder, when Roland wakes up particularly early—four o’clock, three thirty early, as he occasionally does; Asperger kids require less sleep—how these über-parenting zealots would handle him, without the Athenian aid of the TV. What would these Kill Your Televisionaries, what would Gloria Hynek, do with Roland? A fucking craft ? She would sit and make beaded fucking bracelets with my boy for the three hours till the sun came up? Really?
    The truth is, my kids could spend the next half-hour watching the South Park movie, and I wouldn’t mind, as long as I got to take a shower and they didn’t memorize the words to “Shut Your Fucking Face, Uncle Fucker.” If that makes me a shitty parent, well, alert Child Services. That’s U-N-C-L-E-Fuck-You. The number’s in the book.
    O N THE TOILET , I FLIP YET AGAIN THROUGH LAST WEEK’S WELL-WORN Us Weekly —the new issue should arrive this afternoon; one of the (sad) highlights of my (pathetic) week—hoping to discover a page that I’ve missed during seven days of heavy bathroom perusal, but I keep coming back to the same full-page HOT PIC of Gwyneth Paltrow strolling down an unnamed London street, hand-in-hand with her two sickeningly adorable kids, that I’ve seen about a thousand times since last Friday.
    Study these pages long enough, and you discover certain trends. For example: although there are a fair number of Tinseltown Ethans and Madisons, celebrities as a rule prefer outside-the-box names for their spawn. And if you read the tabloids as religiously as I do, you know that there’s a fine line between outside-the-box and ridiculous . Like, Nicolas Cage, who was rumored for years to be playing the eponymous role in a Superman movie, has a son named Kal-El—the Man of Steel’s name on the planet where he (and, by all indications, Cage as well) was born.
    Kal-fucking-El!
    Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban have a daughter named Sunday; she was born on a Saturday. Jenna Elfman has a son named Story. If Story grows up and has a son with the same name, the little guy won’t be a junior, but a Second Story; you might say Jenna’s getting in on the ground floor. Jason Lee’s little lad is named Pilot Inspektor. Spelling it with a “c”, one assumes, would just be too conservative.
    â€œ Dad -dy,” comes Maude’s trumpet-like voice, all singsong, “another Max & Ru -by !”
    â€œBe right there,” I tell her, also in singsong. “I’m in the bathroom.”
    The daffiest of all celebrity baby names, it says here, belongs to Paltrow’s daughter, Apple. Apple! Forget, for a moment, the fact that she’s named for a either a monopolistic corporation or a piece of fruit, or that the word itself is ugly; Apple’s old man—the father whose eye Apple’s the apple of—is Chris Martin, Coldplay’s front man, whose surname she shares. What that means is, Apple Martin is one “i” away from being a Happy Hour special.
    â€œAnother Max & Ruby