Musicology

I know I keep going back to the well of vacation experiences but it’s basically undeniable that an idle week in the Outer Banks is much more novel and full of noteworthy happenstances than the ensuing week back home. Life back home is perhaps equally idle (installation of pet-portholes notwithstanding, and by-the-by I have been requested by my better half to hasten to add that the cat door is inside the house, to allow the cat but not the dogs access to the basement-located litterbox) but also well-covered territory.

So, roadtripping with someone in the backseat. And that is indeed what the little guy is inarguably evolving into, a someone. As opposed to a sleeping/screaming something. He takes everything in and, sooner or later, he repeats it back to us. This is cute, sometimes achingly so, but a bird with a facility for mimicry and a dog who performs tricks on command are also cute. Birds and dogs are not likely to make life choices, not in the sense that we understand the word, and even if they did would most likely not be influenced in their decisions by any random noise to which we expose them. Whereas the same cannot be said of children. I may be jumping the gun a tiny bit, but I feel like we are right up against (if not already over) the line where our little guy crosses from “cherubic myna bird” to “actual possessor of human agency trying to form a cohesive worldview”. To which: uh oh.
We were listening to the satellite radio on the way home from NC and flipped to a Weezer song (I believe it was Pork And Beans) and a rapid cascade of thoughts went through my head:

1. This song is not one of Weezer’s better efforts
2. I’m pretty sure We Are All On Drugs is and always will be one of their better efforts
3. We Are All On Drugs is actually one of my favorite songs of all-time, but more because the hooks and the beat really grab me
4. But the bald-faced declaration of the title is a hilarious point in its favor, too
5. The little guy must never ever hear me singing along to We Are All On Drugs because that might Give Him The Wrong Idea

I know I’m late to the table on this one but who decided it was a good idea to give me a kid? When my generational cohorts and I were in college and developing our snarky reputations as the foremost worshippers at the altars of Irony, did anyone seriously raise the question of what was going to happen to our own children, introduced to the world as seen through the filter of their parents’ jaded senses of humor and cynicism and kitsch-veneration and reflexive rejection of anything not at least half-subversive? Or was I too busy watching bootlegs of MST3K to notice the alarm being raised?

I suppose at some level this speaks directly to the common wisdom that people stop being cool at precisely the moment they start rearing children. It’s not so much that changing diapers and mushing up peas and picking up strewn wreckage of toys and sorting out legal repercussions of biting incidents leaves precious little time to go to arthouse movie theaters or take a flier on downloading a new band’s EP (or it’s not entirely that, at any rate). It’s that all the things that are cool are bad for little kids pretty much across the board, and you can’t have it both ways, and so you protect your children from harm by removing all the harmful elements and avoiding future exposure to them, even including exposure to the very mention of them.


Which is not something I ever saw myself buying into when I was younger. (I know shocker, a teenager didn’t really get what it was like to be a grown-up, alert the media.) I remember writing essays in English class about censorship and feeling an absolutely rock solid conviction which I tried to put down on paper, that spraying bullets into a crowded McDonald’s was a bad thing but writing a song about spraying bullets into a crowded McDonald’s was just giving voice to a thought with no inherent power to harm. But of course that assumes that a 15-year-old is sophisticated enough to know the difference between considering a notion because it’s viscerally fascinating and actually acting on the idea, and that in itself can be a stretch. And there’s really no way to argue that a 6-year-old or younger can make those distinctions. There’s a continuum in between, of course, but toddlers are unequivocally on the “need to be sheltered” side, I see now. Right …?

There’s some significant research endorsed by the American Pediatrics Association that says no child under the age of 2 should watch television. At all, full stop, case closed, Baby Einstein can go take a flying fug. My wife and I felt like that was reasonable enough parenting advice, at the very least in the sense that there was no harm and no skin off our nose in following it, and why risk flaunting it? So we had never parked the little guy in front of the tv, and honestly tried not to have it on in the background while he was up and about too much. (He keeps us way too on our toes to sit and watch anything when he’s active and on the loose now, but the occasional daytime ball game has been known to glow warmly in the corner from time to time.) But the little guy’s second birthday is tomorrow and our resolve … well, we had a good run. Vacation actually turned out to be our undoing, as it happened.

As the week at the beach house wore merrily along, the little guy started waking up earlier and earlier. We got in some sleeping-in early in the week, and Pop-pop thankfully covered for us one morning, but by the second weekend there was nothing for it but to get up and get the little guy out of his rent-a-crib when he woke up pre-6 a.m. Fortunately our room had a tv in it and a cable package including both Cartoon Network and Disney. So my wife sat the little guy between us and, while his parents dozed another half an hour, he watched some tube.

It was, no pun-intended, a somewhat eye-opening experience. One morning he watched most of an episode of Ben 10:Whatever Subtitle They’re Up To Now. My wife astutely summarized the premise of that show as “aliens punching the crap out of each other”. This of course brings me back to my own misspent youth, glued to animated adverti-sodes for various violence-themed toylines. But yeah, they do have even more punching action now than back in the day. The other morning, the little guy watched – I swear this a real thing – Chuggington, which is a CGI-toon about anthropomorphic trains (so quite literally right in the little guy’s wheelhouse) and is 100% punching-free and also imparts important life lessons like how you shouldn’t make fun of slowpokes that burn fossil fuels because if there’s a power outage then your electric motor won’t work and only your coal-fed friend will be able to finish the overnight deliveries while you are paralyzed in a field far from home. (Well that’s what I got out of it, anyway.)

If either Ben 10 or Chuggington had existed when I was in college I probably would have thought the former was good for a regression-indulging laugh, preferably while buzzed, and the latter was just an example of how insipid the adults in charge of the world assume the pablum fed to small children has to be. Now that I’m an adult (only nominally in charge of a very small portion of the world) … I don’t know if I feel holistically better about my kid watching Chuggington than something more action-figure-sales-driven, but I suppose I feel safer? It’s the lazy choice, extra appealing before the sun comes all the way up on a vacation day.

Of course the larger issue slowly dawning on me is that of vetting what my own kid gets into. I’ve spent so much time in his short life thus far thinking about the first time he and I will sit down to watch The Incredibles together or when some other old favorite of mine might intersect with his burgeoning interests and we can bond over it. But what about the stuff I know nothing about? Do I have to watch all movies and shows with him if I haven’t already seen them? Will I require him to check all music purchases at the door and let his old man give them a spin before declaring they can stay under my roof, lest he get too deeply into transgressive death-blügrass with pro-prostitute-murdering lyrics with me all unawares? I can hear perfectly rational voices in my brain that say yes, that’s what you signed up for, that is in fact the bare minimum amount of parental involvement in a child’s life that constitutes Raising Them Right. And I can also perfectly hear equally rational-sounding other voices in my brain saying that’s crazytalk, that’s smothering and suffocating and helicoptering and I want my son to feel trusted and capable of discernment of his own sooner than later.

I don’t know, man. I just don’t know. On the bright side, I still have a bit of time to figure it all out as best I can. Tomorrow there will be licensed toys in the form of anthropomorphic trains to be unwrapped, and there will be cake to be eaten, and if I listen to any hardcore punk satirizing the U.S. military policies of the last ten years, it will be long after my little guy is tucked in for the night.