It’s becoming increasingly obvious that I will not be a father any time soon. Maybe it was the way my wife looked me in the eyes over dinner a few months after we started dating, placed her hands on mine and whispered, “I am never fucking having children.” I nodded and poked at my appetizer, and she continued to repeat the word “never” well into the dessert course. Kind of chanted it, really. But there is a longing inside me, not for a child, but to dish out fatherly advice. Don’t touch that thing, this is how a baseball works, stop looking at daddy, etc. So, here’s some wisdom that I would kick down to my children if they would ever come out of their goddamn bedrooms and face me.
Kids, sometimes, there’s going to be a pipe in your basement, and you’re not going to know what it does. And that’s ok. Your mom and I had a pipe like that in the basement once. “Hey, what do you think this pipe does?” I asked her. She was upstairs so she didn’t hear me. When you’re married, you’ll understand that most of your time will be spent talking to people that aren’t in the same room as you, then getting mad when they can’t hear you. Anywho, one day I went into the basement to switch the laundry and noticed that the floor was covered in water. Immediately following this discovery, I noticed that the toilet in the basement (which I dubbed “the murder toilet” the first time I saw it) was… how do I put this… erupting goddamn raw sewage all over the fucking place. You know the beauty and majesty of Old Faithful? Kind of like that, but a geyser of shit.
You think you can take your old man?
Remember the mystery pipe from a few sentences ago? OK, well sewage was also pouring out of that. So I stood there, shit water at high tide, and called your mom downstairs and screamed WHAT THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO DO ABOUT THIS? She made some phone calls while I got down on both knees, pointed my middle fingers to the heavens and snarled at God. Why God? What did I do to deserve this besides only asking for help when the Powerball goes above $300 million?
Long story short, the sewer man came and removed an errant rag from the sewer line, which was diverting Shit’s Creek into the basement. He proudly held it up like a fisherman that just caught the world’s most unappetizing mackerel. “Do you want it?” he asked. I said no, as we’re more of a catch and release household when it comes to shitty rags. So kids, the moral of the story is, if you panic enough, someone that’s better in crisis situations will step in and make it all better. In this example it was your mom and the sewer man.
Actually, now that I think of it, that’s really the only advice that I have to give. Let other people take care of everything all the time, kids. Specifically when it comes to shit geysers. I love you.
You can watch me scream and yell all of my recent posts on AwesomeTalk! It airs every other Tuesday on our YouTube channel, where you can also find past episodes and other psychotic vlog vids.
Nevertheless, I am part of the 25% of troubling first memory havers. When I was around 3 years old, the gas station two doors down from my house exploded. I guess that happens sometimes? So we all run outside to watch the carnage unfold, and everyone on the block is just standing around, like, yup. That bad boy’s on fire all right, flames are gettin’ real hot. But it was probably the sight of the gas station owner on fire, rolling around on the ground, screaming, attempting to pull his melting flesh back onto himself like some kind of skin cardigan that made me think, hmm here’s an image I’m wildly unprepared for. Oh, it’s just the nice gas station man pleading OH GOD HELP ME as the flames spread to his giant flammable beard, his face seconds away from pooling into a chunky puddle in front of some barely concerned neighborhood onlookers. The fire department showed up, and there was nothing on TV, so we all watched them put him out instead. I shook uncontrollably as the grand marshal of the block party from hell was extinguished.