The Most Emo Pre-K Workbook Ever

• Remember, it's down the road, not across the street.

• While most kids cry for their mommies, some just cry for attention.

• Soundtrack: Punk Goes Raffi

• "YOU JUST DON'T REMEMBER WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE FOUR, DAD!"

• This is why I'm against letting toddlers where long sleeves.

• This is what happens when your kid gets into your My Chemical Romance CDs. Never keep My Chemical Romance around the house. Or anywhere.

• And here I thought I had been the only cynical, self-deprecating five year old.

• Actually, using safety scissors for this type of endeavor is less a plea for help than an exercise in raw dedication.

• Next thing you know, he'll be skipping out on day care to smoke cigarettes behind the 7-Eleven with nine year olds and shacking up with the chubby goth girl from playgroup.

• And listening to The Smiths.

Adolescence is a time of subtle nuances and blind, willful self-deception

At the local book store today there was a gaggle of kids about 15 and 16 years old hanging out at the toddler-scale round picnic table in the kids department, as there has been since the dawn of time (for that store I guess). They spent maybe fifteen or twenty minutes simply complaining about hipsters.

Really.

"Oh man, you know 'International Kick A Hipster Day' is soon, right?"

"Really? Oh my gawd! What's Yorktown going to do?!"

Ah, regional jokes. I remember that time, when Yorktown was a hellhole and we were awesome for not living there. It was great until a couple years after I graduated and a girl from my high school stabbed a girl from Yorktown to death because she was standing next to a girl who was sleeping with her boyfriend (who was incidentally also sleeping with said murderess' aunt, whose low-income, subsidized condo they agreed to meet at). But hey, I met a girl in college because of that. And then she got married to a nice Irishman. Yet I digress more than I meant to.

What stuck out in my mind was these children's … shall we say, "personal choice of stylistic expression." They were little scenesters.

Guys: both skinny, black jeans, black graphic tees, jet black straight hair all down and in their faces, black Cons, various facial piercings (ear, lip, brow).

One girl: brunette, baggy men's sweatshirt, dark hair, little round, mostly looking like the guys but pale instead of tan-due-to-ambiguous-heritage. The other: cute as hell, blonde, dark wash blue jeans, teal-and-white striped scoop neck tee with a matching teal knit beanie and pink stripes in her hair, and I think one lip ring.

Irony of them bitching about hipster: Through the roof levels. Not just off-the-charts, it's astronomical. You would have to literally be standing on the surface of a different heavenly body to read the precise scale of a graph if one were to graph irony over time for that precise interval of my walking past these teens.

I really wanted to tell them, too, to explain why everything they thing is shallow like a kiddie pool, all deep and meaningful when it's all you've ever known and yet immediately adjacent to a much grander picture than you've ever experienced.

But of course I didn't.

Firstly, they would have railed against me for calling them hipsters. I would surmise that to them a "hipster" is an unshowered, unshorn hemp-hugger living the bo-ho hobo chique lifestyle in deference to their tidy trust fund, eschewing Starbucks for free-trade grinds they fish out of their uncle's restaurant's dumpster or some such nonsense. I'm positive they would draw a very clear distinction between "hipster" and "scene kid."

Of course they would. No one likes to be labeled, especially a label they despise. What does it matter if they're driving around in a car their parents paid for, wearing $80 jeans and get to go to at least two different Sublime shows every year? No, they're not rich and tasteless. They don't all dress the same and wear ill-fitted clothing. They weren't all totally beaten up in grade school by the same guys who went on to be very good at extracurricular activities that involved running towards something in some capacity. Nope. Totally different.

And in any event, they're 16. They're supposed to think their kiddy pool is the hottest shit this side of Memento and Donnie Darko. They know how to swim without their swimmies and they're getting cocky. They've even learned how to look like they're just hanging out on the side of the pool when in fact they've very strategically found that one spot where the water jet is….

Who are we to pull them off of that water jet and throw them, boner-clad, into the deep end without so much as a swim test and a hot lifeguard upon whom to fixate? Let them grow up and be embarrassed about how they dressed and how they thought they knew everything when they were really provincial and intolerant.

We all were 16 once.

On Mini Bikes

Despite my enduring illness, I chose to go out in the sunshine and cool breeze today, endeavoring to blow the germs off me.

This is what I call a lie. In actuality, I went out to play a couple half-assed rounds of Wiffle Ball. However, in doing so I was able to witness a young boy of perhaps fourteen years cruise past on the nearby sidewalk, riding on of these:

This is what is called a "mini bike." You can understand where the name comes from, if you were to look at one and say, "Well, that just sort of looks like a … mini … bike, as it were. Huh."

You hear that last, "Huh," echoing in the back of your head? That's the part of your brain that hears warning claxons every time real life conflicts with supposedly common sense. It's registering "WTF?" or more often, "WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?!"

Frankly, I have no idea. As best I can figure it's a type of novelty, something First World nations buy out of Brookstone catalogs with rebate checks from the taxes they cheated on, the type of thing that makes people who are well off (but not well enough to actually afford their own) think, "Well, maybe the terrorists do kind of have a point about us."

Let me put it another way: The kind of people who would buy an mini bike are the same people who think that it is alright doing this to their pets –––>

What's that dog thinking? Doesn't he look happy?

NO! He's thinking, "GODDAM IT, YOU FUCKING BITCH, PUT ME DOWN! I AM A DOG! I SHOULD BE ON THE GROUND! YOUR REFUSAL TO LET ME USE MY LEGS IS GIVING ME CANINE DIABETES! DO YOU SEE MY TONGUE OUT?! I'M NOT HAPPY! I'M A DOG; I DON'T SWEAT! THAT IS ME DEHYDRATING AS YOU DRAG ME ACROSS THE BEACH, YOU FUCKING WHORE! WHY DID YOU EVEN BRING ME HERE?! I HAVE SAND IN MY EYES! THIS IS A TERRIBLE PLACE FOR A DOG! GODDAM SHIT ASS!" (I may be paraphrasing.)

These people have no consideration for how things are supposed to be. They see something cool, like a car:
and immediately assume that anything smaller than a regular-sized thing is either hilarious or adorable:






Yes, this might apply to animals, or hand-carved miniatures, or even little metal Monopoly pieces, but the sad fact of the matter is this does not apply to motorcycles.

Let's look at a motorcycle.
Yeah, that's a motorcycle, alright, but it looks a little like the mini bike, doesn't it?

This is what Big Strong Manly Men call a "crotch rocket." You sit like the more receptive partner in a gay relationship, waving your big, brightly colored attention flag which shouts, "Lookit me, lookit me!" as you drive by.


Real men prefer something like this:



Just look at that. That is what, ideally, I will own before I'm thirty-five. That is a black Honda Rebel. It's not some little Japanese sport shit, that's a road bike, technically a touring/cruiser hybrid, with great gas mileage and a starting price of only about three grand. Plus it's a Honda, which means it's actually made in Ohio by American jobs. This is the bike you get as a first bike, something to dent and ding and wipe out in so you're all practiced by the time you get one of these:

Yeah, babe. That's a Harley. No one questions your heterosexuality (out loud) when you're blasting down the street on one of these monsters. These things start at an asking price the same as a foreign car, dude. A foreign car with options added.

Even with a gay little windshield and a bitch seat and the sissy bar and a couple of those saddle bags I can't stand strapped to its motor-ass like a combustion pack mule, these animals look sick.
I'm probably going to stick just to the Rebel because I know I'm not man enough for one of these. That's how badass these are.

Which brings me to my final point: smaller versions of things are cuter than regular-sized versions of things if those regular things are already supposed to be cute. Tiny versions of many things are not manly. Tiny motorcycle? Not manly. Tiny King Kong? Regular monkey.

In fact Manly Things only get progressively more manly when they get bigger.









Manly beer. Manly steak. (That's one steak.) Manly giant saw thing.

I guarantee you no man riding a giant motorcycle will look as stupid as a man riding on a ridiculous little mini bike.























Alright, unless it's wearing tiny little training wheels. But still only maybe, then.