Graphic by Avery Bilanin
Pokèmon cards. Comic books. Anime figurines.
These are the things my dork of a son has asked of Santa for Christmas. Not baseball cards, not BB guns, not even testosterone pills. What a sissy!
When I was Andrew’s age, I was chasing fast cars, looking up cute girls’ skirts, and trying to score some hoo-hah at the old rollerink. All my son does is stay up in his room all day playing Mario Kart. But when I try to show him NASCAR, he can barely stomach it. Sorry, Andrew! Mario is a plumber, not a racecar driver. Danica Patrick is a racecar driver; she’s practically the Susan B. Anthony of NASCAR.
I just don’t get this nerd! I was the star quarterback of the Washington High Football team. I threw four touchdowns in the Regional Championship! But my son, my only boy – named after my grandfather and mack daddy role model Andrew Jackson – is disgusted by football. He prefers playing Dungeons and Dragons with other gross virgins in our basement. Andrew believes these woke studies that claim football causes “brain damage.” Sad! I played football until I was twenty-two, and I am very smart. You don’t become Steven Bradbury, Donald Trump’s Deputy Secretary of Transportation, by having brain damage. They only allow smart people that high up. I got there without ever even taking public transit!
We slammed boys like my son into lockers. We pulled their pants down in front of the hot cheerleaders and gave them lifelong intimacy issues. I was cool back in those days. I was practically the king of the school. But my beta son is perfectly content being the lowest bum on the totem pole.
He’s not even masturbating. This concerns me greatly and I think about it a lot. When I was a boy, I was cranking hog every day and night. I had gobs and gobs of pornography. Playboy Magazines, nudies of Elizabeth Taylor, and salacious, bodacious pictures from my Peeping Tom days. My son’s women (if you can call them that) of choice are waifus and e-girls. Posters of Mikasa Ackerman, Hinata Hyuga, and Belle Delphine hang in his room.
Nevertheless, my ex-wife Tammy pampers him. She refuses to give him the belt for yammering about manga too much and lets him carry on with these low-testosterone activities. Whenever I confront her, Tammy responds only in platitudes. “He’s allowed to like what he likes” or “let him live.” One night, she screamed in my face, “Steven, he’s not you! You cannot live vicariously through your son and shape him to be the man you never could be, you pathetic man-child. This is why I divorced you!”
Sigh. Sure, I may be divorced and wholly unfulfilled, but at least I don’t watch One Piece.
