OH, WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

Politicians like to say that ejuice companies are marketing to children with flavors like Bubble Gum and Cotton Candy.

How stupid would that be? They say children and they are right. Children, (like) 4-11 year olds go ape shit over any type of candy. They are actual kids. However, in this instance they show you pictures of teens.

Lets just get around the psychology of that for a second. 

"~~I am a teen ager. I am contemplating smoking, with all the other cool teenagers in the smoke pit. (the cool is perceived, but I am dumb, I am a teenager) But now there are new things out there (I do not live under a rock and I am a teenager, I WILL try it) called ecigs. I have one and approach the smoke pit with it. There are other vapers there. ~~"

"Hey, (other cool kid) What flavor are you vaping?"

There is not a teen on this planet that wants to say, "Oh its Bubble Gum!" They might as well wear a sign that says, "Ridicule me mercilessly until I puke!"

I can say that I am vaping bubble gum...I am an adult and no longer give a shit what others think is cool. I vape it for the flavor not for the stupid name. Some of it is nostalgic.

So, cutsy flavors are appealing to the 4-11 year olds, but they have no money so who cares? THEY CAN'T BUY IT, THEY HAVE NO MONEY! And if you are an adult and have said 4-11 year olds living in your home with your kid-appealing ejuice flavors, it is on you to police that shit. Not me.

I would have never admitted it at the time, but...

When I was a teenager, I was totally (secretly) in love with Mikhail Baryshnikov.



My friends would have thought I was a complete idiot. So I never let on.

Who did you secretly love/admire/lust after when you were a teenager?

The Boy is broken.

I get a text from The Boy.

Could you pick me up at the hospital after work. Someone hit me in the nose and the cops saw it and they are taking me to the hospital to have it checked.

What the hell?

Apparently he was walking next door from his house to the pizza place when one of his so-called friends came at him and hit him in the face with a pipe.

I show up at the Outdoor (ER for you yanks in the audience)and find that the cop has just dumped The Boy and left after he got his statement. The doctor tells me his nose is broken and most likely the bone in his cheek and there is possible muscle damage that will require surgery.

The Boy looks like...well...he looks like someone hit him in the face with a pipe. His nose is forming an S and he will have a pretty good shiner in the morning.

I start to tell the doctor that it was a pipe, not a fist, that he was hit with and she says, "Were you there?"

"Ah, no. If I were there the other kid would be here as well. With tubes and wires coming out of him. I would be in cuffs and there would be doctors and nurses running around saying 'STAT' and shit!"

So, I take him home with me because he will have to be woken up every two hours to make sure he is not nauseous and he needs to be back at the hospital at 7:30am for a CAT scan.

I don't bother trying to phone his father because he never answers the phone anyway. I sent him a text. I am told he finally knows how to read these. We shall see.

What happened to customer service?

I walked into a local store at the beginning of the summer to get a cell phone. I was looking on the shelf and wasn't finding what I was looking for. Fortunately a nice (very) young man was on me in seconds, "Can I help you find something?"

"Yes, there is a phone on the website, fifty bucks."

He walks over to the counter where the other 5 very young employees are, there is a short exchange and he comes back, "All we have is on the shelf."

Really? This is a huge chain, they couldn't possibly have all the merchandise on the shelf. He thinks he is dismissed and turns to walk back, I follow him.

"Nothing out back then?" They all look at me with blank stares. Another of them repeats the line, "All we have is on the shelf."

"You are seriously telling me that there is nothing out back but empty shelves. Did you get robbed? Shouldn't we notify the authorities?" They are not getting the hint.

"Okay, let me spell this out. I want you to check."

More blank stares, they are still not moving and I am getting irritated. "Ah, one of you is going back there, decide amongst yourselves who that will be." Then I turned my back on them and leaned on the counter, waiting.

I leave with a new cell phone

After that fiasco, I go to the local burger joint to get lunch. I get to the speaker and give my order, "What? I can't hear you." No, sorry, no nothing. I repeat my order.

"What? I can't hear you, drive up." Are you kidding me? However, I am committed now. I am in the lineup, cars in front and behind me. Nothing to do but drive up.

I get to the window and turn my head to order and am literally startled by what I see. The 'girl' sticks her head out the window so she can hear me. She has piercings all over her face. Two in her bottom lip, one through her nose and another (I believe) through her eyebrow. No wonder she couldn't hear me, she was probably getting feedback from all that metal. Am I supposed to find this appetizing?

I remember that just a few years ago, if you had a piercing you not only had to remove it but some places would make you put a band aid over the hole in your head. A practice I whole-heartedly support. You don't want their brains to seep out, do you?

I applaud student employment in the summer, but do you have to go lax on the dress code and the customer service training? I realize they won’t be there long, but don’t you want us (the consumers) to return when the summer is over?

The establishments who employ teenagers that have metal protruding out of their heads know that customer service, or lack there of, will not stop you from patronizing their establishments.

Mama and Papa need their fix.

What do you do?

My friend Bunnie is having a hell of a time with her teenager. I feel bad because I have it so good right now, with The Boy living at his fathers. But even when he was here, he was nowhere near the nightmare her daughter is. In comparison he was a Stepford child. Any horror story you have ever heard about teenagers, Bunnie has lived it.

Don't get me wrong, I like her daughter. I have sat with that kid on a few occasions when she was self destructing. But I am not her mother, so I am not subject to her wrath. A wrath she lets loose on her mother at the drop of a hat.

More recently it has all the indications that it could become violent. Bunnie also has a volatile personality, although as anyone who learns to grow up, she has the wisdom to control herself. But I fear that with her daughter, it may not always be this way. Right now, she walks away whenever she feels it will go too far.

When you look into the face of the child you love, carried for 9 months, nursed through sickness and held so close to your heart. The kid you have made damn sure has wanted for nothing, at your expense. To have that child look at you with venom and say 'go fuck yourself'. How long can you really expect to control the urge to strangle the life out of the little ingrate?

I know, I have been there a few times. Locked myself in the bathroom so as not to drop kick the little bastard into the next world. But The Boy's wrath was sporadic, I could count the times on one hand that I wanted to eject him violently from this world. Bunnie's horror show is more on than off. How do you do it?

When do you say, 'enough is enough'? When do you stop 'doing' for a kid that basically thinks it is her due, and that she should not have to be the least bit appreciative of your effort?

How much abuse should a mother have to take before she can just say enough? At this point I don't think she is doing her daughter any favors. I say, sit her down and calmly say that this is just not working out, she will have to get her own place and move out.

The kid is 18, I say let her go. She has a job, she is clearly not happy living at home. Lets see how she likes the real world.

Good luck, don't forget to write.

Please, no pictures.

Since I am going down memory lane to high school...

I actually joined the year book committee one year so I could ensure that my friends and I would actually be included in the yearbook. I quit after a week when I realized none of my friends wanted to be caught dead in it.

I had a pretty strange assortment of friends in high school. The other stoners, of course, but I had one friend that no one could figure out.

Her name was Brenda and she was a native. (back then they were called natives or Indians) And she was a big girl, some considered her scary. Not someone you wanted to get into a scrap with. She and I hit it off right away. She called me Squaw and I called her...well?...Brenda. (I did mention she was scary, right?)

Brenda might have been scary, but she had a twinkle in her eye and a ghoulish sense of humor. She would walk into the cafeteria (and all eyes would be on her) and walk up to the whitest, skinniest, blond chick. Clamp her hand down on said white chicks shoulder and in a sinister growl would say, "You and me bitch, outside! NOW!" and walk out.

As soon as she hit the door she would be pissing herself laughing. The look on the chicks face was priceless and if we had caught even a glimpse of her in the next month it would be a miracle.

She honestly would never had laid a hand on the girl, but she got such a kick out of making them all think that she would.

Who were you in high school?

Some might disagree with me, but I was basically a stoner. Not one of the popular kids, but I never understood what that meant anyway. I am not sure if kids today realize that their popularity or lack there of is a scam perpetrated by a few kids with a little bit of marketing savvy and access to publication.

I mean, I would not be caught dead with one of the so-called popular kids. They were not what I, or any of my friends, would consider cool. Although if you looked at the year books you would think they ran the place. None of my friends ever got their picture taken for it. Of course we were stoned most of the time and wouldn't really want our pictures taken, but that's another story.

Oh, of course you would have the pre-requisite class picture, but none of the extra pics that show day to day life. Candid shots of the 'fun times' in high school. Looking at those year books you would think that we had never existed.

To be in those pics you had to be a 'popular' kid or be on the year book committee. Which, as it turns out, are one in the same.

I wonder if they knew that 'they' were the only ones who thought they were popular? I mean, the rest of us just thought they were morons.

They were very good at marketing though, people looking back through those old year books would think that those are the kids that everyone wanted to be. I am here to tell you, that was not the case.

Point in fact. Recently I was at a friends wedding dance. There were quite a few teenagers there, both girls and boys. Dancing and making fools of themselves. For the life of me, I could not detect the slightest hint of intoxication.

Since we were bored, we were actually making a game of it. What songs we could get the DJ to play that would make them react like idiots? (The Spice Girls won hands down, I kid you not.)

When I was 16 I wouldn't be caught dead at a wedding dance. My friend could see the perplexed look on my face and asked, "What?"

"I always wondered what the dorks did in high school while we were partying around a bonfire in a field somewhere getting drunk and smoking dope."

Mystery solved.

Who do you think you were in high school?

"De minimis non curat lex"

- the law does not concern itself with trifles.

I beg to differ.

Take this ridiculous news story that is making the rounds. Like something out of a sitcom.

A 12 year-old Quebec girl sues father over grounding.

And they wonder why kids are the way they are today. It is because today's tree-hugging, politically correct society is teaching kids that there are no consequences for their actions.

And now they want to make it illegal for parents to discipline their children. These people that are supposedly in place to protect children, I wonder.

Foundation for Children, Youth and the Law (FCYL), that worked so doggedly to make it illegal for loving parents to spank their children is the very same group that successfully worked to make it legal for a stranger to sodomize a 14-year-old!

Do they even read their own memos?

I don't even know what this idiot is trying to say.

The comments posted by a great many readers in reference to the anti-spanking bill suggest that physical punishment has been the personal experience of many adults during their own childhood. The common sentiment is that it can't be so bad if they turned out OK.

We did turn out ok. And I bet you that anyone who tells you they were spanked as a child, can also tell you that they can count on one hand how many times they got spanked, and have fingers left over.

That is because spanking taught us that there were consequences to bad behavior.

For a supposedly educated group of people, they don't seem to be able to recognize the difference between discipline and abuse. I didn't go to college, but I can tell you I know the difference.

Is there such a shortage of work in the legal profession that they have to take on a 12 year old kid having a snit fit?

The lawyer, Lucie Fortin, defended her decision to take this case by claiming the camping trip — a common year-end activity across the country for students in their final year of elementary school — was a rite of passage. “This was something that would never happen again in the child’s life. And for me that was really important … This was not a question of going to the movies or not, or going online or not — because obviously, I wouldn’t have intervened in that.”

Obviously, cuz that would be stupid. Are you kidding me? I don't know about you but I can smell a cheap publicity stunt a mile away. It's a freaking camping trip, not a moon landing.

And just how does a 12 year old get a lawyer? Why her brain-dead mother takes her to one, that's how. Congratulations, Mom, you have all the future makings of a crack whore right there. Never mind that she is posting lewd pictures of herself on the internet, let her express herself however she feels fit. Take a bow.

I hope for that child's sake her father does get custody of her, cuz I can tell you her mother is not doing her any favors.

If she even makes it to high school without an STD, she can look forward to ending up like one of these idiots.

Teen ‘pregnancy pact’ has US town reeling in shame.

This one almost makes me laugh. Cuz I can see the future, and those kids are getting the best punishment ever. "Well you got pregnant when you were 14, Mom, I don't see the big deal."

That is karma, Baby!

2007: A Backpack Odyssey?

I just figured out how to send messages from my cell phone to contacts on my messenger.

I know, we have had the technology for a while now, but I did not. Just call me HAL. This technology would have come in handy when I had to fly solo on a mission to pick out a backpack for The Boy.

"You know I have only the most enthusiasm and confidence in this mission, Dave."

The Boy sends me on this mission and sets me up for failure.

I have to first set the stage.

I am waiting for a call from Undisclosed Internet Service Provider™ about the job so I forward my home phone to my cell so I don't miss the call. This means that I cannot call home. With me so far?

Ok, so The Boy's mission? Get him a backpack. If any of you have a teenager, you know it is not that simple. You can't get a lame one, or a gay one, etc, etc, etc. So I grill The Boy for particulars.

"I want a Swiss backpack." Pretty specific. "Black, blue, anything but red."
Since he is so specific, it does not really register what he has said. I have the brand name in my head and I am off to Staples.

As soon as I locate the 'Swiss' backpacks the gravity of the situation hits me.

"Just what do you think you're doing, Dave? Dave, I really think I'm entitled to an answer to that question."

I am staring at this thing in disbelief. I can't believe he has done this to me.
My blood runs cold as I stare at the Swiss backpacks. Swiss, as in Swiss Army Knife.

STAPLES ONLY CARRIES THEM IN RED!

"There's been a failure in the pod bay doors. Lucky you weren't killed."

Summer vacation is over. Thank Fuck!

Sometimes the boy will ask a question I know the answer to, but don't. Does that make sense?

Mostly he will ask me questions that he knows I don't have the answer to and could never know.

"Why is the sun yellow?"

Ok, I could probably find out the answer to that, but I am busy catching up on live feed updates for Big Brother and I don't give a fuck why the sun is yellow. He does this, I realize, just to get on my last fucking nerve. I can not wait until school starts.

He sees that I am reading something, so he starts.

"What is Labour day?"

"It's a holiday for workers."

"But why do schools have it off?"

"Teachers work."

"But why..." I know he really doesn't give a flying fart about any of this, he is just trying to bug me. I should have called the little bastard Butt Why, he says it enough.

"Why are you wondering about this? You have Google, don't you?"

So, here it is. Everything you ever wanted to know about Labour Day.

Have a good one.

This breaks my heart.

What makes a person, a teenager, drink so much that they pass out? Or wander around in the rain and snow, passing out in the center of the road? What is the attraction? Is this fun? Do other teenagers find this cool?

They are dragged to the emergency room, kicking and screaming. Restrained, catheterized without any hope of discretion because they are in a busy ER, people milling about. To add insult to injury, a couple of male EMT's had to hold her down, spread her legs and jam a tube up her urinary tract.

Yes, I said her. Somehow makes it worse, doesn't it? Not something you want to tell your grandkids, eh? Five times the legal limit I think they said. Five times! Was she looking for bragging rights? How lucky she was that she was picked up. It was raining and snowing when she passed out. If she had made it behind a building or passed out in a field somewhere, we could be discussing this at her wake.

She fights the treatment the nurses are trying to give her. She screams profanities at the top of her lungs. She scratches and tries to hit them. A nurse looks at me, "Mum, do you want to come in and calm her?"

I look at her horrified. "She's not mine!" But I go in to help calm her. There but for the grace of God, I think.

In the ER she screams for her friends, I say, "What friends? What kind of friends would leave you in this condition? You could be dead right now." She begins to scream again.

I lean close so I don't have to raise my voice. "You shut the fuck up or I will have one of those nurses cram a tube down your throat! There are real sick people here and they don't need to hear you." If she was looking for sympathy, she wasn't getting it from me.

Down the hall a family sits, wringing their hands, their little girl, 6 or 7 years old, has seized 3 times waiting for the air ambulance to take her to Sick Children's Hospital. They sit and pray that she makes it in time. All the while, a drunken teenager is down the hall screaming for the nurses to get the fuck away from her, yelling for her 'friends'. If their little girl dies, this will be part of their last memories of her.

What would make a person want to be totally out of control like that? With total disregard for their own life or anyone else's for that matter. Do they think at all of who they might be hurting? Not just themselves. Had she been hit by a car and killed. What of the person who hit her? Can you imagine going through life knowing you killed someone, no matter that it was an accident?

Suppose a person like this, not to say this was her intention because I have no earthly idea what her intentions were, but just suppose a person with this total disregard for life, was suicidal? So, maybe not suicidal, but didn't really put much value on her own life, well at least not enough to want to actively safeguard it in the most fundamental way. Suppose the worst had happened.

Who does she hurt? Herself? Maybe for that split second before she dies. But do people like this really think about the people who really get hurt? Her mother of course. Her other family members, surely. Her so called friends who left her to wander alone. The person who may have inadvertently killed her. The EMT's who have to scrape her brains off the asphalt. The nurses and doctors who would have had to work on her.

Me, sitting here looking at a picture of this beautiful, intelligent kid. Tears welling up in my eyes, thinking of how easily I could be writing about this child's death. Tears of disappointment for a kid who I know in this world could be anything she wanted to be. Accomplish anything she ever wanted to. If only she believed in herself like her mother believes in her. Like I believe in her.

What of that little girl, air lifted to the children's hospital? Her family, crying bitter tears for a child who clings desperately to life, while a teenager down the hall carelessly tosses hers away.

Heart breaking.

Not a rhetorical question.

What exactly are you thinking?

Girls who post semi-nude pics of themselves on MySpaces. Or a strip-tease on YouTube.

Ya, you might think it is cute now, but have you ever thought of running for office? What do you mean, no way? How can you know that at 15? Well, I guess you have pretty much screwed yourself anyway. Suffice to say that at this point you would be laughed off any ballot except for the Marijuana party. You can kiss the republican nomination good bye.

What about having children? Ever think of how you would feel if you stumbled across a picture of your mother on Plentyofish, spread eagle on your living room couch? (Suppose you could tell Junior that it was the Super Bowl and that's a V for victory. Ya, he'll buy that.)

Unless you are planning to go into the oldest profession, never have children or become the oldest stripper on the planet, you need to think this shit through.

And guys, you are not off the hook. Shocking your parents by having a swastika tattooed to your forehead might seem like the thing to do right now, but unless you are planning a career as a carny, you need to wake the fuck up!

Technology and pop culture today makes it too easy to fuck up your life at a much younger age than ever before.

There is a special place in hell for thankless children.

-from 2002, repost for carnival.

My son calls me yesterday. Wants to know if I can get paid early? Someone at the skate park is selling his board for $30 and he wants it.

"You have a board."

"Mom! My board is crap, this one is worth $100 and he"s selling it cheap."

"I'll see what I can do"

Well I know how much he loves skateboarding and I get all mushy inside. I go ask the boss if I can get paid early, no easy task since I spent the better part of that morning in a screaming match with him. (it was a draw)

Now I leave work, check in hand, and head to my friends house to see if she can cash it for me since the banks are closed. Half way there I realize that I am nearly out of gas, running on fumes. If she can"t cash the check I am walking home.

Twenty minutes later I am on my way back to town, bank card in hand. I get the cash and call my son on his cell phone.

"Never mind Mom, the kid sold it to someone else. Later" Click.

GOOD GRIEF! Your welcome.

I am still sore from baseball last weekend, hobbling around, dragging my old bones home at last, its 6:15pm. I walk in the door, and I want to cry. I am by no stretch of the imagination an even mediocre housekeeper, but my son lost his mind today, and quite possibly his life when he gets home.

Before me lay clothes, papers and miscellaneous sporting equipment strewn in a path from the front door through the kitchen and living room all the way back to my bedroom. I can"t believe that that kid had the nerve to ask me for money.

One hour later my son comes rushing in, "Mom, can we put that $30 in the bank so we can save for a new board?" When he says "we" he means me. "Fine" I tell him, I"ll give you the $30, you clean the house."

That"s when he really lost his mind. He starts to rant and rave and go on. His head starts to spin and he starts spewing pea soup. (ok that isn"t exactly accurate, but pretty close)

"I have to do everything around here, I can"t clean the whole house, God, I am only 11."

My turn to lose my mind, "What all, exactly, do you do around here?"

He looks at me, "I take the garbage out to the basement and then to the curb." He is serious. He thinks he has won the argument.

"Ok, when you took the garbage to the curb last time, how many bags were there?"

He is not sure where I am going with this but he raises his eyes to the ceiling, thinking, counting on his fingers, "6 whole bags!" he says. He seriously believes that this is a huge number.

"Lets break this down. The garbage truck comes every two weeks, so in 14 days you have taken out 6 bags. So if you only took one bag out on any given day, you would have 8 days where you did nothing. Hmmm. If it takes you, say, 30 seconds to take the bag out of the house, and another 30 to take each bag from the basement to the curb. That"s a minute a bag. $30 for 6 bags, $5 per bag per minute?"

"Sounds right." He doesn"t really want to do the math, so he concedes.

"At $5 per minute, you want me to pay you $300 per hour. How do I get THAT job?!!!"

He is speechless now, and I am cleaning the house myself. I finally get to the end of the papers and I turn around, I can"t believe it, he has actually dropped his coat in the middle of the living room floor.

At that moment I understood how people, who were not wise to begin with, could kill their own children.

Calmly I look at him, "Just how long do you imagine I will consent to live this life? Where I go to work each day to a job I hate, so I can feed and clothe you and buy you skateboards when the whim takes you, getting nothing but shit on in return? Hmmm?"

I leave him to ponder this as I lock myself in the bathroom, just in case the urge to kill him truly takes hold of me.

Who's your friend?

I picked up the boy from his friends house the other week.It was 10:30pm and he had been there all day.

He got in the car and I almost choked. I could taste the cloud of body spray that surrounded him.

I start hacking and spitting, very dramatically. Opened the window and tried to hang out. He is looking at me very sheepishly.

"Dude, don't ever do this to me again."

"What?"

I roll my eyes. "Do I have moron tattooed to my forehead?"

Silence.

"You know that shit makes me sick...and I can still smell the pot."

I don't know why he thinks he can or has to hide it from me. We have had the discussion. I know he smokes pot. We talked at length about pot vs pills. I drilled it though his head that I will not tolerate pills of any kind. We talked about the fact that you just don't know what people are putting into the pills these days.

Back in my day, we knew exactly what was in everything. One of my friends brothers was in pharmacy school when we were in high school. He would make the shit for us. We never had to worry about what they were cutting it with. (I swear our actual conversation was more profound, but I am paraphrasing for time here)

Anyway, cut to today. I go to pick the boy up at the bus stop and he is not there. Not a big deal, sometimes he decides to go to a fiends after school, and he can't really call me. He usually messages me at work to tell me where he is.

Tonight I had no word. Great. I work myself into a migraine and leave work early. I walk in and the place is dark.

I open his door and he is lying in bed. He is awake, no tv, no computer. He is just lying there. I start to talk to him and he sounds like I woke him. I turn on the light. His eyes are completely bloodshot. I ask him how he got home, he says he walked.

"Why would you walk, your father lives in Who-ville. Why didn't you call him?" It's 15 below zero outside.

He says, "I had a dollar."

"What? Who the hell cares if you had a dollar."

"He does." With that he points to something behind me. I start looking around, maybe he thinks his friend is here with him. There is nothing. It was like talking to someone who was still asleep.

Then he looks at me as if it is the first time he has seen me tonight and says, "What?"

Great, can't wait to find out, what the hell he was on.