Troy's Rants and Ravings

Let us start out with a very honest statement: I love all my kids very, very much.

James, Sarah, Caitlin, Michael and Daniel. I love you all.

Now that I have got all that out of the way, it’s time that I explore the strange fascination I have with irritating/terrorizing my oldest son.

I really think that we have loved bugging each other ever since the time he learned, as a baby, to crash into my shins with his baby walker…He quickly found out that this technique was especially gratifying when I was napping. Helluva thing to wake up to… I’d wake up screaming and he would start screaming because I was screaming. This is fairly typical behavior that actually still continues to this day. Kinda like:

Then there was that period of time as a pre-kindergärtner where he was moving so fast, that as he ran down the hallway to his room, he would let his arms fly out behind him…right up to the time he would miss the damned doorway and crash into a wall. Funny as hell. He literally made for the door so damned fast his arms shot straight back, his head went down and off he went – right into the wall and on more than one occasion a closed pocket door.

Did I ever mention that intelligence matures slowly in this family? Hmm, maybe I should have…

Things did not get much better after we moved from an apartment in San Diego to  a house in Spring Valley, Ca. either.

We found we had an affinity for blowing each other up in computer “Death Matches” of one sort or another.  This progressed with my son constantly blowing me away in these contests with very close scores of 10,471 “kills” for him to my astoundingly impressive 3 “kills” (and I was able to accomplish that only because my other kids would spy on his screen and run to tell me where in the maze he happened to be waiting for me).

I got my revenge by writing to our favorite morning radio show hosts and inventing stories about his nefarious doings at school… Which I was very proud of writing and hearing being read over the radio. And while the DJs cackled, I was smug in knowing that The Oldest Boy was terribly embarrassed. His embarrassment was due to the fact that these er, uh, stories were so close to actual truth that kids at his school knew it was him because it just sounded like something he would come up with. He would come home and rail at me about how he over heard kids laughing about it and then all turning to stare at him.  This was reinforced when I went to his school and sat in on his classes during “Bring a parent to school” day. After I accompanied him to school and made a mockery of everything he, the teachers, the administrators, the campus police  and the National Guard (who were called out to quell the rioting) were trying to do, I was formally banned from coming within 4 planetary diameters of his school.

Damn, that was a good day!

My moving to Arizona and his going off to College kinda put a damper on things for a time… But really we could not keep a lid on our special relationship. Thus was born the desire to “one up” each other during the Birthday and Christmas holidays. For the past few years  I have been upsetting his holidays in as likely a  manner as a hand grenade in a bowl of oatmeal during a formal wedding.

I started out with sending models of Medieval Weapons of Mass Destruction. Not content with Nerf ® Brand Crossbows, I swung for the bleachers with Trebuchets and Onagers capable of hurling golf balls and tennis balls into the next county. Fearing that after 9/11 he would be waterboarded for his possession of banned weaponry (it was California, after all) I switched gears and started getting him really annoying toys. Things like a rubber chicken that if you even looked at it would starting playing The Chicken Dance over and over and over… To get it to shut up you had to Choke The Chicken (literally squeeze it’s neck) until it started squawking and making strangling noises. His friends all thought this was highly amusing even if James did not. I started looking for the most outrageous gifts my sick mind could come up with. I mean really, who in their right or even left mind would ever send their son an Angry Mob for his birthday or Christmas?

Well, this went on for a while. Then, The Boy finally started firing a return salvo of his own with the infamous “Flying Fuck”.  Then he follows that up with a series of books that he says the hero of reminds him of ME!! Oh Gee!! Thanks, Oldest Boy!!! The hero of these books is constantly getting his ass kicked, he’s constantly nursing battle wounds, everybody disrespects him, his assistant reads “romance novels” and encourages the men in them to rip the dress off of the heroine and ravish her in rather explicit terms,  he only gets laid about 4 times per DECADE!! and good, bad or indifferent everyone “uses” him as their own little tool and tosses him away when their done with him…

OK, so maybe he has a point.

Anyway…

I have already decided what he is getting during the latest battle for the occasion I  like to call the Holiday Blitzkrieg. I was able to come up with stupidity that is right up his alley since he enjoys calling me as he walks to the BART station in San Fransisco and regaling me with his latest exploits in the world of counting light bulbs (and let me tell you, thank God he spent 5 years in college to raise himself to such a pinnacle,  such a lofty goal in life, the realization that he can get a Mechanical Engineering Degree to be qualified to count light bulbs!!). He says he does it all in the name of saving the planet. That may indeed be the case. However, I still feel that putting a full court press on that beautiful brunette (the one that he was texting lurid comments to while running around in his underwear on campus drunk out of his mind) would be a better use of his time…

Ah well, sooner or later he will be put in his place as I, the Great Moron that I am, once again claim the title Supreme Overlord of Stupid Gift Giving…

Family

At last someone else is seeing things the way I do:

Will this glaring photo prompt urgent federal action?
September 14, 2009 | 1:12 am

An unidentified American sports fan, caught in the uncomfortable perils of global warming and climate change, awaits emergency federal guidance from the Obama White House on how best to combat the sun’s glare at an afternoon athletic contest.

After eight years of failed Bush-Cheney Republican policies, potentially millions of Americans like this remain uncovered and in similar straits threatening their basic healthcare, a predicament the protective Democratic administration finds unacceptable in an era of rapid change for a country that can put a man on the moon.

According to uninformed Washington sources, under the multi-billion-dollar Cash for Caps program being discussed, American residents who qualify (including illegal immigrants) will receive personalized instruction for up to six weeks on precisely how to properly position a visored cap to protect the face against the harmful sun’s ruthless rays.

– Andrew Malcolm via the Los Angeles Times 9/14/09

All I can add to this is:

Who will help us protect ourselves from the next bunch of idiots who choose fashion over function. I find this situation equal to:

1. Lifted  Trucks
2. Lowered Trucks
3. Lowered Accuras
4. Lowered Hondas
5. Wings mounted on the REAR of a FRONT WHEEL DRIVE CAR
6. 24″ wheels and tires in place of stock 13″ wheels and tires
7. TV Fashion Reality Shows
8. Fashions shows (unless it features the Victoria’s Secret Models)
9. Gigantic “Paris Hilton-Style” Sunglasses ( look, if you need that much protection, wear a welding helmet, Beatch!!!!)
10. “Tennis Shoes” that cost more than a single paycheck.  Look, pal, if you only bring home $72.50 a week, that is your tennis shoe budget.

Catch my drift,  Coo Coo?

Ok, So I'm an Idiot...

Just so everyone is clear on this, I love my sister.

In view of our latest conversation (the one where she insisted that I write about her) I take keyboard in hands to write about her so that she can tell me she is too damned busy to have any kind of fun at all and that she sure as hell does not have time to read anything I write about…

So the above not withstanding,  here is the latest thing she does not have time to read…

My sister is not like me.

She has that whole “Diplomat” thing going on. She, for some “unknown-but-to-God” reason, feels she needs to be sensitive to angry, jerk-off, no account, horse faced bitches and assholes who call themselves “parents”. You know, the ones who drop their kids off at the Daycare Center formally known as Middle School. The same cretins who have declared “What happens at daycare either makes me happy or ends up in my attorneys office…” She feels that it is,  for some “unknown-but-to-God” reason, her job to educate these heathen bastards so they will actually be able to count their change and know that the number 10 is NOT, in fact, a prime number…even if it says it is right there in the God damned text book.  She feels that she has to be “Sensitive to their needs” when some parent gets on the blower and says that their little piece of shit “had better not fail!!  Ok, so he/she/them/it did not turn in the last 142 assignments, had to be duct taped to the chair, had to have his/her/their/it’s tongue cut out to shut him/her/them/it up and will not stop bringing his/her/their/it’s Bazooka to school, that’s no reason to give him/her/them/it a D in mathematics!!!! And beside that, the little girl whose hair he/she/them/it set on fire? I hate her mother’s guts so she probably deserved it…”

She tries to be diplomatic and resolve these issues in a calm non-threatening manner.

And I don’t.

Ever.

My sister views parents this way.         

I see it this way.          

There! Nice and neat. No muss, no fuss.

The whole idea that somehow teachers are there to make damn sure your kids gradgeeates Hi Skhoooll wit a deeplomba at all costs is selfish as well as idiotic.

Here’s an idea: chain the little bastards up, take away everything not absolutely needed to sustain life: Videos games, cell phones, skateboards, TV, Movies, explosives (yeah I know, I have a hard time keeping away from them myself, but dammit  something has to be done), I N T E R N E T, until they can prove to a jury of successful business men like Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Colin Powell, Vlad The Impaler, Genghis and Kublai Kahn (who, incidentally, were the Penn and Teller of their age and and coincidently will be opening for my band Nuns with Nasty Habits at Carlin’s Bar and Grill, 59th ave and Bell Rd) etc. The jury will evaluate each student to ensure that they do, if fact, have some use other than to piss me off…

I am getting to the point where I want to form labor camps just for these snotty little bastards and their snotty parents and make them see what real work amounts to. Turn schools not into social clubs but places of, gee, LEARNING. If your child does not excel in their classes, the PARENTS and the their children are sent out to pick up trash, paint houses, build orphanages, build freeways ( by hand ) and do other civic works.

The liberal idiots who are running around telling us “You can’t do this or that or the other…” are so busy finding who’s to blame that they have never bothered to look in a mirror and see it is themselves. Liberals can’t get it through their head that there are going to be failures. This is NOT the Special Olympics. Not everyone is going to get a ribbon. People are NOT going to make it to college and worse yet, they should not be in college!! Stop trying to make them all go…assholes

And so, it is along these lines, as The Supreme Overlord, I now will be making my list of demands clear.

1. All teachers are to be equipped with bull whips. There will be a mandatory 1 year of intensive training with their whip after which they will be free to use it as needed on students as well as parents, fellow teachers, liberals,  school and school district administrators.

2. Eliminate tenure and promote those teachers that can actually teach. Teachers who fail to make the grade are to be ground up and served as  processed lunch meat in the cafeteria.

3. All students and faculty will be required to eat lunch in the cafeteria.

4. Any parent who complains about the teachers, will be required to pass the High School exit exam. Failure will be punished by being ground up into dog food.

5. Once a year, teachers who have survived the previous year with more than 2 limbs still attached will vote on which administrators will be fed to the science department shark tank.

6. All unmarried, handsome male teachers of suitable age and disposition will be required to date my sister until she tires of them and has them ground up into Meow Mix.

7. Eliminate Cheer Leading camp.  What the hell does that do for kids anyway?

8. Make sure all female gym teachers are gay, just so we don’t have to guess anymore.

9. Marching bands will save money and not force us to buy their trash offerings by actually marching to their destinations instead of being put on buses or airplanes. Stragglers will be left to die unless they have a signed permission slip to be picked up and returned home at quadruple the actual expense which is to be paid by the parents who did not ensure that the child was fit enough for marching band in the first place.

10. In the interest of a stronger society, fighting in the hallways will be encouraged. Losers are to be flunked in all classes and sent to boxing school for a minimum 1 year sentence. Winners will be given a free sundae at Baskin Robbins 31 Flavors to stimulate the local economy.  However, if in winning, this makes the winner late for class, the winner will instead be staked out in the football field and be used as a tackling dummy for a period not to exceed one week or (as determined by voice vote of all lower class-men) be tied to the monkey bars and all underclassmen get one (1)  free kick to his groin.

I have Spoken.

Let the ridiculing begin.

Ok, So I'm an Idiot...