Empty Calories & Male Curiosity, #5

Does Colin Cowherd have E.D.? Plus a dog, a book, and a GOING DEEP about love.

QUICK HITTERS:

1. Holy cow, 10 new subscribers last week - welcome! And I’m pretty sure only one of you is a Russian minx looking to extricate me from all of my money. Huzzah!

   If you haven’t joined the SilentPunt community yet feel free to subscribe for free below….

2. We are only two days into a week’s vacation in the Caribbean but so far I’ve managed to keep the fact that I only remembered to pack one pair of shorts from my wife. At least I remembered underwear this trip.

3. Cowboys vs. Eagles this weekend. I’m putting the odds at 70-30 that the Birds will be a better team with Kenny Pickett under center. I don’t think he’s a long-term solution but I think his skill set might be just what this team needs to be legitimate Super Bowl contenders.

Maverick’s ready for gameday

4. How small must Colin Cowherd’s penis be to have the set of his TV program look like this?

This would have to be the only time, literally & figuratively, that Cowherd could look down upon Tom Brady.

5. What I’m reading right now: The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. I am unequivocally not a fiction guy. However, I loved this show so figured I’d give it a chance. Loving it so far!

Coffee stir sticks make quality bookmarks.

6. This week’s GOING DEEP below is a bit of a departure. It is a chapter I wrote two winters ago for an unpublished book I completed last year titled, “Re-Defining Masculinity: Fatherhood in the Post Me-Too Era.” If any of you are agents or publishers you may want to contact me asap as clearly I am fielding lots of offers 😂.

GOING DEEP:

Beagle Children: Love’s Evolution

I spend much of my time waiting. As the father of a teenage girl without a driver's license I am left with a choice: spend my time driving back and forth, or just wait it out while she does whatever it is she is doing. More often than not I choose to wait it out. Sometimes I bring a book, sometimes I write, very often I find a bar nearby and have a beer.*

(*we live in Wisconsin, there is always a bar nearby)

On one particularly sunny Sunday recently I found myself chilling in a chalet. Before you go thinking I’m some fancy pants Frenchman understand that this chalet is at the foot of one of Wisconsin’s not-so-famous ski hills. We don’t have mountains here, we have hills. This particular chalet is nice and cozy. They even have a big indoor fire pit that gives off just the right amount of heat. 

The chalet most definitely did NOT resemble this one.

Since it was an unseasonably warm day, probably one of the last days where there would be snow on the hill, the fire pit area was pretty much empty. Perfect for me and my book. Just as I settled into reading about Mongols in Russia a six pack of pre-pubescent kids sat down next to me. Well, shit…there goes that. 

What reading time I lost was made up for in entertainment value. Of the six kids, five were boys and one was a girl. The lone girl looked to be the oldest of the group, twelve maybe. Immediately the youngest boy was intrigued by something at the table,

“What is THIS?” he asks the other boys while holding up a sugar packet.

“Oooohh, that’s good. It’s like Red Bull in a packet!!!” one of them replies.

“Give ME some you dyslexic little rat!” a third retorts. 

The five boys spend the next 15 minutes chugging sugar packets of various colors and debating their taste and efficacy.

“Ewww, this blue one is gross.”

“This brown one is chunky.”

“Yeeyahhh, this white one is tingly.”

Gateway drugs.

As the inevitable sugar rush started to hit they became more agitated. Like the future heroin fiends that they clearly were they didn’t see this as a time to stop. 

“Drinks! We need drinks!”

That’s all I hear and then see the youngest head to the bar with a fist full of singles. This is not as rare a sight as you might be thinking, because again, Wisconsin. He comes back to the table with five* plastic cups filled with blue liquid. Any blue liquid, whether designed to be consumed by kids, adults, or athletes has one thing in common: sugar.

(*The girl didn’t have one. Nor did she partake in any of the sugar packet consumption. I would say she was the voice of reason for this group but she absolutely was not. Think of her like that friend you have that eggs you on to do stupid shit when you’re hammered).

As they pound their blue dranks and scroll on their phones the little guy starts to get pissed,

“What’s your problem dude?”

“I got kicked off my app because my time is up.”

“And you don’t know your parent’s code to add more time?”

“No.”

“Just guess it then.”

“No way. Then when I mess it up three times I get locked out of EVERYTHING!”

Next up came a discussion about credit cards. There was a very interesting back and forth on how to steal your parents credit card number to buy stuff in the app store. I draw the line at credit card fraud however so I took this as my cue to go for a walk.

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You’ve already read about our family’s dog situation. A brief reminder: it is a shit show. To review:

• Lucy: The oldest of the group, 8 years old. Yorkie. Absolutely terrible.

• Darla: 5 year old pit bull mix, rescue. Super sweet. Not snuggly. Has an ongoing feud with the UPS man.

• Maverick: Beagle puppy. Was supposed to be a foster but we kept him. Insane. We love him dearly.

• RIP Gertie: Our first dog…. Also a a beagle. The best dog ever. In heaven, seated at the left hand of the father. 

Lucy on the left; Ava as a toddler on the right, helping us bathe Gertie.

In attempting to train a puppy again (and a beagle no less) I’ve come to the conclusion that raising kids is in some ways like training a puppy. The more work you put in up front the easier your life will get as time moves on. That is of course unless your child is one of the few people in the world that are just born to be pieces of shit (I may or may not be looking in Lucy’s direction as I write this).

While Ava was definitely not like the sugar packet chugging refugees from the Lord of the Flies described above, she was (and still is) indeed a human, so not always perfect. As with many children when making the transition from taking baths to showers Ava put up some resistance. At first it wasn’t that big a deal because when she was 7 or 8 it would typically take her days of not bathing before smelling. So we picked our battles and fought when necessary. 

But as the hormones start to kick in so does the ripeness. And as Adam Sandler taught us all in the movie Big Daddy, none of us want the smelly kid in class. Here is a typical snippet from one of our arguments:

“WHHHYYY do I have to shower?” Ava would say in her whiniest voice possible.

“Because you smell” was my simple reply.

“But I don’t waaaanaaa shower.” was Ava’s answer. It was said in the “nails on a chalkboard” tone that all children can muster when necessary. My skin is crawling right now just imagining it.

By this point I’m done…..”Fine, I give up. Come here and I’ll just Febreeze you.”

____________________

I think the common denominator here is love. The previous paragraphs may not seem to exhibit it, but it's there. Why work so hard to train a dog? Or raise a kid? 

But not just one type of love, two types. There is the love of who they are right now. Adorable. Sweet. Crazy. You just want to scoop them up and hug them. Or lay in bed next to them and watch TV.

Then there is the second type of love. The love of who they can be. You want them to have happy lives. Successful lives. Even if the pinnacle of that success comes from not dying because they’ve eaten a sock (I’m talking about Maverick here). 

The arguments about showering, homework, and whatever comes next are just the price parents are willing to pay. Because we know better. If they smell they won’t have friends. Or maybe they’ll have smelly friends. Either way, not good. If they don’t do their homework they won’t get decent grades. If they chug sugar packets they will become crackheads. 

Bottom line, you are doing it for them and not for yourself. It would be so much easier to just let them eat the sugar packets. Smell like crap. Put off their homework. But we love them so much that we fight for them even when they don’t want us to.

And I think that might just be the most important kind of love of all.