Irritating the oldest boy
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…