Author: Mark Myers

I am a husband of one, father of four daughters, a dreamer, a builder, a believer, and most enjoyably a writer. In 2015, I became a reluctant Childhood Cancer Advocate as we lost our youngest daughter Kylie to the disease. Kylie taught me to steal joy from even the worst of circumstances and I will always be on the lookout for happiness among the thorns of life. Join me for a generous helping of laughter and tears.

Don’t Teach the Old Man

.Reading time 4 minutes.

We interrupt your regularly scheduled Wednesday post to let you know that we’ve hijacked Dad’s blog. We hate that we had to do it, but there are some things that need to be said.

Dad is old. This should be obvious and it probably is to everyone… except him.

It used to be okay because he worked and played around people his age. But now he has a few millennials in his office and they’ve been teaching him things. Bad things. He came home the other day and said we were “acting all boujee.” Did he use it in context? Yes. Should he ever use a word like boujee? No!

Someone is responsible for this and it has to stop.

Actually, it all started a few years ago when he heard Boom Boom Pow in a spin class. The fact that he was in a spin class is worrisome enough. More troubling is how many times he said we were, “so 2000 and late.” Seriously! He kept calling himself Mark I Am until we finally convinced him that the nickname was a play on the guy’s real name, William. After we caught him singing Apple Bottom Jeans we stole his iPod, wiped it, and changed the iTunes password so he couldn’t reload it. Desperate times…

But other things began happening:

  • He started wearing sleeveless shirts to the gym. We thought it was a phase, but day after day he was wearing something akin to a high-schooler’s bro-tank.
  • On a shopping trip to Old Navy, he wandered off and we caught him trying on skinny jeans. Skinny jeans! There he was, giggling at himself in the mirror. He knew it was wrong. But still, the man was in skinny jeans.
  • He downloaded Snapchat. Fortunately, he can’t figure it out and can only play with the filters, but still.

Now he’s decided that he’s woke and is using words like boujee. No, just no!

phil-dunphy

You cannot teach the old man modern words. He is not responsible with words – he never has been. Every school report card he ever got has a comment in the behavior column that goes something like this, “Mark needs to think before he speaks.” Obviously, he never learned and needs guidance. Listen, someday (probably sooner than we think) we will be guiding him to the toilet. That’s not going to be your problem, it will be ours unless we can move far away. We’re just asking for a little help on the words issue.

You might be wondering why this is a big deal. The ramifications of his behavior are far-flung and harmful to our family as well as himself. If he won’t stay in the appropriate word zone, he starts feeling younger than he is. Not only does he embarrass himself and us, he feels chipper enough to do things old folks just shouldn’t do… like climb ladders. We found out what a disaster that can be last year when he ended up in the emergency room.

This is for his own good.

Right now he’s sitting in his chair trying to figure out why his password won’t open anything. 1234… Seriously? This is who you’re willing to trust with modern dialect? We will let him back into his electronics soon, we just need some assurances that you people won’t feed his delusions of youth. I think we can agree it isn’t good for him or society in general.

 

 

“What the Hell?”

.Reading time 5 minutes.

I was raised in a home with clean words. To be honest, I never understood the notion that a certain subset of words are “bad” while the others are not. Who gets to decide? I suppose it’s up the parents when you’re in a family. But boys love to muddy their hands in life’s gray areas and their tiny brains perk up when told something is wrong.

As for words, there was such allure when I heard one deemed naughty. The offending word simply had to be repeated. My recitation would start quietly at first – in the shadows of my room where the word bubbled out, tasting heavy and wrong as it escaped my throat. I would stand in front of a mirror practicing my elocution and intonation like a Shakespearean actor rehearsing lines. As I adjusted to the word’s weight and volume, at some point, it didn’t seem “bad” anymore. It was just a word. Inevitably, this word seeped out during normal conversation and I found myself on the wrong end of the word police. Yes, I’ve tasted soap a time or two.

I’ve raised my family in a home with clean words – we called it our little bubble. We’ve never had trouble from the kids; rules-followers who are like their mother. Sometimes a word has escaped when something heavy dropped on my foot, but I’ve mostly toed the line in the bubble – even though I still have a problem with the word-regime who decides such things.

But there are times in your life when June Cleaver-esque words such as heck, dang, and darn just aren’t strong enough. When events swirling around you are so far beyond comprehension that the only thing you can say is, “What the hell?”

“What the hell?”

I’ve woken up to such news a time or two in my life. Natural catastrophes or tragic events don’t cause this reaction. Bad things happen, I’ve come to accept that. Unfortunately, crime really doesn’t even surprise me anymore. This world is full of bad intent. No, what causes this reaction is the shocking revelation of the darkest side of humanity. People infused with hate cause it.

It’s all you can say when incomprehensible evil flashes across the news.

“What the hell?”

Are there really still white supremacy rallies? Where did the people with tiki torches come from? Who knowingly drives a car into people just because they disagree with him? What the hell is happening here?

This is all mind-blowing to me. I walked around in a funk all day trying to digest what I had seen and read. But I couldn’t. It’s like a brussel sprout: you can lube it up with all the butter you want and you’ll never get it down!

Hate of that scale is un-wordly. Hate like that doesn’t belong here and that is why “What the hell?” is the only way to describe it. Because that’s precisely where it comes from: hell.

Evil like that demands immediate condemnation, not flippant, non-committal words offered in 140 characters or less. There is a wrong side… and it’s obvious. I would like to propose a very simple definition: If you consider yourself superior to anyone because of a genetic difference, you’re on the wrong side. Actually, let’s make it simpler: If you consider yourself better than anyone…

 

Evil like what we saw last weekend can’t win, can it? We live in a democracy. We choose what wins by either accepting or rejecting its premise. In order for evil to win, we have to give it power over us. And now, I’m haunted by the obvious question, “Have we?”

 

***A disclaimer for my dear mother. Please rest easy. I’m only implying the use of the word as a curse. It’s just wordplay. A title tease to get people to read. I’m trying to cleverly use it in more of a Biblical sense – as in the opposite of Heaven.