In the spirit of stimulating under-stimulated minds, my high school would convene assemblies to hear speakers debate the issues of the day. That was the occasion for an event that still rankles me to this day, and, in part, explains the appeal of Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh and all of our friends in the T-Par-T. It also explains why, to a trifling but measurable degree, many of us write.

The school hauled out a local yokel from the NRA to do battle with some liberal hippie teacher about, you guessed it, gun control. After they had gone through the expected pantomime of debate—the liberal decried the scourge of guns in our cities, while the NRA representative, honest-to-god, actually said, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”—the floor was opened for questions.

Of course, being an NRA member, the pro-gun fellow trotted out the Second Amendment time and again, really never defending the primacy of or need for guns other than the usual “you have to be able to protect yourself and your family” canard. And I had a line of inquiry for him: What if there were no Second Amendment? Why are guns “good” things to own in a modern world when most of us don’t hunt for our grub? Would people really be defenseless without semi-automatic weapons? Would a citizen’s militia really be able to hold off a government takeover by the military?

I don’t think these were half bad inquiries for a 17-year-old boy, especially since 94.7% of 17-year-old boys’ brains are fixated on sex. Unfortunately, I never got to ask them, because when the moderator pointed to me when I raised my hand, a classmate sitting behind me named Miles jumped up, and, in a voice trying to be far more mature than his years, blurted out the following: Hey, man, how can you say that guns shouldn’t be illegal when the whole point of them is to kill people?

When she was good

In retrospect, it isn’t as stupid a question as I’d like to remember it being, but just imagine it being asked in a disaffected voice with a snarling lip and finger pointed at the stage. Miles was Marlon Brando in “The Wild One” without any intelligence, charisma, good looks, or any semi-redeeming feature. Though I had full sympathy for Miles’s point of view, I had nothing but contempt for how he asked it—or really, I was contemptuous that he got to ask his question and I was silenced.

Granted, I guess Miles was par for the course. Teenagers really aren’t particularly bright or mature, and I couldn’t expect my fellow classmates to be Cicero or Clarence Darrow. But the incident eats at me still, 28 years after the fact. I envision it repeatedly, thinking that had I actually gotten to pose my questions and debate the NRA bozo, I would have annihilated him in battle, and won the gun-control debate. Q.E.D.

My recurring desire to relive that moment is much to my discredit, showing my self-centered nature and desire to be the center of attention, no matter how right or wrong I might have been. Which, if you think about it, is really what makes Glenn Beck go, since we have a college dropout convincing much of the nation that he is smarter and knows better than a former editor of the Harvard Law Review, not to mention a gun-totin’ “grizzly momma” who thinks plain ol’ common sense (which those pointy-headed liberals lack) always trumps nuance or pointed inquiry, and that complicated problems don’t require complex solutions.

Before he discovered carbohydrates

People want their voices heard, and would rather have their own ideas validated than challenged; there is comfort in having someone “speak” for you even if it means they have no command of fact or total command of prejudice. Even though Beck and Limbaugh may actually believe the hateful drek they spout, they realize it does their bank account well, and would say it no matter what they actually thought.

That’s actually one reason I write: nobody speaks for me but me, and I have enough ego and not enough humility to believe my ideas actually matter—you don’t have to read between the lines to see the anger in my voice.

And I still want to throttle poor Miles, who I understand now works at the Kerplonsky’s Carpet Discount Warehouse, supervising the guy from the NRA.

Anybody who has taken any fiction workshop will hear the following: no matter how well-written a sentence, paragraph, passage, or chapter might be, if it doesn't fit the larger narrative, it's gotta go.

You may not hear it phrased so brutishly. One may be treated to churlishness masquerading as advice, largely from fellow workshop attendees who are there only to flaunt their literary chops or have praise heaped upon their own work:

The writer fell in love with his own voice. (Said snottily)

If you can't kill your "children," then you really shouldn't be in this line of work. (Said contemptuously).

Don't bore the reader with digressions about fly fishing and the protagonist's ex-lover dentist-soldier of fortune named Dirk. (Actually, I would listen to that one).

I have deleted thousands of unnecessary words in my day, but what's much harder for me is getting rid of ideas. I collect them like a compulsive hoarder, never trashing a single thought, no matter if the bulk of them are threatening to keel over and smother me like Homer and Langley Collier. I used to count how many ideas I had for plots, characters or structure, but I lost count after about 200.

I found the blog titles in my blog's "drafts" queue. Some have a few hundred words already; others, none at all. To my horror, I realized that many of them were about not writing, but complaints about the world's indifference towards poor, poor pitiful me.

Worse, I could not remember what many of them were actually about.

So, because I need your help, here is a sampling of unfinished or not-started blog ideas residing in my drafts folder. The meaning of some are obvious, but what about those with no apparent meaning at all?

Care to take a guess? Yours is as good as mine.  And if you come up with something clever, I will actually blog about it.

"Verbal Ex-Lax"

"Being Good Vs. Being Good"

"Less Matter and More Art"

"Honesty is Not the Best Policy"

"VEX Contents"

"Genre Fiction: A Genre I Can't Write"

"How to Not Hold Yourself Accountable"

"Zadie vs. Zadie"

"Write Right Baby"

"Readers, Friends, and None of the Above"

"The Greatest Band You've Never Heard"

"Writing the Bookfraud Way! (Badly)"

"Twitter THIS"

And, my personal favorite, the meaning of which is lost on me forever:

"Beckett, Yah"

I know it was about Samuel Beckett, but whether it was his about his haircut, wrinkles or something about his writing forever remains a mystery.

If hell is other people, the ninth rung is other students at State U.

Yes, the worst part of attending a large public university is that with a little luck on test day or a couple of good years at a community college, pretty much any village idiot and his cousin could gain admission, as long as they lived in state. Such was the person who lived across from me my freshman year, a community college transfer by the name of Frank who was by no means stupid, but appeared to have been raised by wolves, racists, or racist wolves.

He once made a derogatory remark about a cheapskate to me by referring to him as "such a Jew," then made matters worse by the ignorant scoundrel's first (and worst) defense: "No, it's not an insult. It's just a common usage." Yeah, maybe from under the rock where you were raised, Frank.

He harbored other unpleasant attitudes that might have made him feel at home at a white supremecist rally. And, tellingly, he was a Clint Eastwood fan.

"Fan" does not do it justice; "insanely obsessed" would suffice. And not just your typical Clint Eastwood spaghetti western, but his movies featuring that all-American vigilante bigot "Dirty Harry" Callahan, who had the charming distinction of hating every ethnic group on the planet.

In an era before DVDs and widespread VCRs, Frank had seen every Dirty Harry movie at least 10 times, and could quote them at length. If I heard Frank say "I gots to know" or "Make my day" one more time…well, you have to ask yourself. Did I shoot six times, or…are you lucky, Frank? Are you lucky, punk?

I was thinking about Frank and his ilk after watching "Invictus," a recent movie that Eastwood directed. It tells the true-life story of Nelson Mandella trying to help build South Africa via rugby and the South African national team, the Springboks, winning the rugby World Cup. 

Inspirational stuff, even if you don't believe for a second Matt Damon is Afrikaans or if you weren't completely distracted by the movie's lousy pacing, crummy dialog, and rugby sequences that look like an eighth-grader choreographed them. Actually, it's way, way off the Clint Eastwood ranch, and shows. 

Although a mess, "Invictus" does have the charm of being adamantly anti-Frank, I mean, anti-racist. Both black and white South Africans are taken to task, of a sort, and all eventually end up cheering on the Springboks, the beloved (by Afrikaans) and despised (by blacks) rugby team to the World Cup championship game, in which they defeat the New Zealand All-Blacks, named for the all-black uniform and the irony of which is not lost on anybody with an I.Q. over 50.

Hey Frank, go ahead. Make my day

That would probably include Frank, who, as I mentioned above, was not a complete moron, though when he claimed Richard Nixon was the greatest president of the 20th century, I had to question not only his brains, but sanity. I wonder if Frank, whose last name (thankfully) escapes my memory and may or may not be having a lucrative career as a lawyer, ever saw "Invictus," and what he'd make of it.

Probably, not much, because like most chunkheads like him, he really believed that Clint Eastwood and Dirty Harry were one and the same. Dirty Harry was an important barometer of American cultural stupidity—say what you will about Clint Eastwood, but he has never stuck me as a fool. He knew that Detective Callahan was not the type of dude with whom you'd want to share afternoon tea, much less run the world. I imagine that he would have probably found many of his Frank-like fans personally distasteful, though, much to his discredit, Eastwood kept taking the paychecks.

In fact, if I were to encounter Frank today, I wouldn't bother arguing with his racist, anti-Semitic worldview. It's just not worth the breath. But he was at least worth a blog entry. The first in a month…

I had written this about a week ago, in my pathetic attempts to be "current" and link the current news o' the larger world to perspectives on the smaller literary community I pretend I'm a member of. To wit, I just ended a sentence with "of." And I was too busy to actually publish this when it had more than three iotas of cultural relevance.  Naturally.

It is not without some irony that one of the top Google searches to turn up both "LeBron James" and "Saul Bellow" are a news page with Bellow's obituary coupled with an item regarding James' desire to be a billionaire. 

As Mr. James takes his act from the cold warrens of Cleveland to South Beach, and Cavaliers fans are burning his jersey in effigy, the literary world takes little notice. Perhaps we should, as this episode reminded me of nothing save for Saul Bellow.

You must obviously see the connection.

Mr. Bellow, a Canadian, Quebec-born–Quebec, that not-so-somber province–and who went at things as he taught himself, free-style, and made himself one of the preeminent American novelists of the 20th Century. A genius, author of one of my favorite novels, and a Nobel Prize winner.

Mr. James, an American, Akron-born–that extremely somber city–and who has also gone at things as he taught himself, free-style, and has fashioned himself one of the world's great professional basketball players (though whether that office is one worth occupying is debatable). An amazing athlete, not one of my favorites, and two-time NBA MVP.

See how they're connected, don't you?

OK, let's start from the start. For those of you currently living in a tree or without any connection to the wider world, LeBron James left the Cavaliers to play for something called the Miami "Heat." Any objective reader can see the mistake in this, for while you can envision a Cavalier, a "Heat" is beggars the imagination. How does a "Heat" dribble, pass or shoot? Is it a bonfire with arms? A female dog at that time of the month? A crappy movie?

You can say, "I'm a Celtic" or "I'm a Sooner" or such, but will anyone ever say, "I'm a Heat"? (Or "I'm a Magic," for that matter?)

I'm a Heat! Douse me with a fire extinguisher, damnit!

The opprobrium aside, I could not give a flip about where or for whom anybody chooses to ply his or her profession, and the nation writ large could show show the same passion about for jobs being sent abroad as Clevelanders had for LeBron leaving, perhaps we would still consider Ohio's largest city a bustling metropolis instead of The Mistake on the Lake.

What James did that was less-than-savory, according to people who write about these things, was that he took what should have been a routine (ok, not "routine") job change and turned into a media circus worthy of Lindsey Lohan, except lacking the interesting bits.

To his credit, James was forthright about his narcissism, and apparently did not leave Cleveland because he dislikes the town or that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is located there, while anybody with more than six brain cells knows it should be in Memphis.

Yet Saul Bellow did a similar thing in 1993–he decamped the University of Chicago, his long-time employer and base, for Boston University.

James: Witness this

I remember reading an interview when it all went down. The thing that struck me, and reminded me of this LeBron James foolishness, was that Bellow basically said he was leaving Chicago because it wasn't literary enough. While ostensibly leaving because he was "tired of passing all the houses of my dead friends," he bemoaned the fact people in his adopted hometown did not recognize him: here he was, already a Nobel laureate, and yet when he ventured around Hyde Park to a 7-11 or perhaps to the North Side to hang out at Kingston Mines or Buddy Guy's, people didn't say, "Hey, it's Saul Bellow, the brilliant, amazing, award-winning novelist!" but instead, "What's this old guy doing at a blues club?"

I have written enough times about Saul Bellow to make it obvious that I have a love-hate relationship with him: I love his work but am not the greatest fan of his personal behavior. And I am not in a position to judge anyone's motives for leaving one university employer to another.

But even that he would admit that he was miffed that he wasn't famous enough in Chicago was jolting. It just shows that no matter how brilliant of mind an artist may be, it offers no protection against rot of the soul. Not that I would know about being brilliant.

Just think about all that fried chicken goodness…

Please, I'm dying here.

I knew there was a problem when I couldn't read. 

It was not a matter of recognizing letters, making them words, and stringing them into sentences. That I could do just fine. But a certain book, "The Boat," a collection of short stories by Nam Le, threw me into a funk so unfortunate that I, like Will Barrett in "The Second Coming," might as well have fallen into a sand trap off the 15th green and not understood why.

Or maybe it was more like Binx Bolling, the protagonist of Percy's justly famous "The Moviegoer," a man who can only find emotional connection in films or wandering around New Orleans. That's what's happened to me–I seem to have lost the ability to emote save for a few precious things, like movies, or certain books, or my family. So now I'm living in a Walker Percy novel.

There was something about "The Boat" that threw me into immediate despair after reading just a couple of pages, a deep, existential funk Sarte or Kierkegaard would have been proud to have emoted. It was not Le's lyricism or penetrating insight into the human condition that made me shed tears of nihilism inside my soul. To be prosaic about it, the fact Le is talented, young, and actually writing fiction dropped me into a spiral of self-loathing from which sex or drugs or any of the pleasures of the flesh could not be the most addictive of lifelines.

Fortunately, instead I started reading "Revolutionary Road," a novel painfully beautiful on its surface and so corrosive that the pages seem to shed acid. Of course, this immediately lifted my spirits and made me want to write once again. Its author, Richard Yates, writes sentences so immaculate that they could double as English gardens, yet the protagonists, Frank and April Wheeler, are in such an awful state of existence they really could be…in a Walker Percy novel, if they were Catholic, Southern, unable to love or even express emotions.

And you thought your life sucked

So to recap: about three pages into a book by a successful writer turns me into a semi-suicidal mess while a novel by a successful writer turns me back into a writer.

The difference, besides tone, subject matter, and ethnic background of the writers is that Nam Le is alive, while Richard Yates shuffled off this mortal coil about, oh, 30 years ago.

Yes, it's come to whether or not a writer is alive if I'm jealous of him or her. Also, reading writers who are among the living (and, to be fair, only under 40 years old), makes me a nauseated mess of nerve endings ready for a quick hibernation to the psych ward.

Know what I mean?

I had a terrible dream about attending a summer writers' conference, which I've been contemplating doing again. After last night, now I'm not so enthusiastic.

In the dream, I walked into a workshop, and the teacher, a paunchy fellow in his mid-forties with a goatee, looked around the room, and without as much introducing himself, said the following:

Before we start, let's get a few things straight. First of all, I'm not going to be your buddy, I'm not going to hang out with you, and most of all, I'm not going to help your whale-turd of a novel get published—I only have so much of that kind of capital with my agent and publisher, and I'm not going to waste it by submitting to them your cruddy book.

So don't come to me with your manuscripts, because I'm throwing them away as soon as you're out the door. If I do read them, it's for my own amusement. With the emphasis on "amuse."

That leads into my next point. About 98 percent of you are not, I repeat, not going to publish your novel. About the same number of you are not going to publish a collection of stories or have a play produced. Why? Because there's thousands and thousands of more talented people ahead of you in line, with better books, better agents, and more marketing synergy.

Somehow, I feel like I've seen this before

Yes, you heard me, marketing synergy. If you think publishing is unlike any other business, you've been watching too many reruns of "Fantasy Island." If you're well-known already, you've just increased your chances exponentially of getting your book published. What, do you think celebrities can write more than their own name on a contract? Do you think Madonnna or Ethan Hawke or Bill O'Reilly would have gotten published if they weren't on television and in films?

But let's just say—oh, for the hell of it—let's just say that you do manage to get your novel published. And, for the sake of argument, let's say it's a brilliant book, though if you had that much talent, I promise you wouldn't be begging the likes of me for help. Are you delusional enough to think you can make a career out of it?

Look at me—I've published collections of stories and a novel, all to great acclaim. Yet I'm still teaching at Northwest Bubba State Tech, pulling down a massive $35,000 a year and no tenure ahead. Why do you think I'm teaching here this summer? Because some of you will throw yourselves at me for some easy sex? I get plenty of that from undergraduates who think that bedding this hairy, corpulent body will increase their self-esteem or make it as a writer. It's because they're throwing a few grand my way to stand here and bloviate about the meaning of the writer's life.

I mean, if you've taken a week off of work to come here, or if you're a housefrau working on your sixth unpublished book, you've really just wasted your time. Of course your husband or wife wanted you to spend a week here, because that's a week they get to spend unfettered with their girlfriend or boyfriend.

Do not try this at home

So, if you're smart, you'll just sit back, relax, and listen to me say puffed up shite about writers I like, which means you'll get to hear me reading from my collection (which I highly recommend you go out and buy; don't worry, I've got copies in my briefcase now I'll sell you for $5—less than the remaindering pile you'll usually find them).

Maybe you're here for practical writing advice. Just don't worry. I'll dispense lots of gems you could read about in any decent writing book.  "Never start a story with dialog" or "Never describe a lesbian sex scene 'lezzin' out.'" 

But I will say one thing, right now, an ironclad rule you must never, ever, ever use dream sequences. Not in your novel, short story or even your blog. Especially your fuck-ass, suck-ass "blog," Bookfraud!

And then when I woke up.

I remember once, a long time ago, sitting in a library and thumbing through a first-person expose of the medical profession, written in the late 1950s. The author apparently had done some pretty scummy things, and so "Dr. X" wrote anonymously. So when I say "Dr. X" was the name of the author, it was literally "by Dr. X."

Dr. X posed on the cover wearing scrubs and a hood, back to the camera. The not-so-good doctor was not about to be outed for his sins.

Fast forward about 60 years to 2010, when an excerpt of a memoir, "Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man,"*  appears online. If the catty comments are to be believed, the last thing the reading public wants is yet another memoir of a white, upper-class addict. But there it is. 

The excerpt left me less-than-interested, not because it was poorly written, that I lacked sympathy for the writer, or even because I never wondered what a literary agent goes through when he trades his life for some crack (though I always felt my former one had done something similar). The problem is that I feel like I already know what it's like to be a crack addict — because it's been written a million times over already.

It used to be chronicling tawdry excess was not only shocking, but gave a first-person view of a world many of us would rather read about than witness. 

But we have seen the bazillion and one memoirs of addiction, be it addiction to booze, coke, heroin, crack, meth, painkillers, gambling, or sex. We have seen those that are fake or horribly narcissistic (then again, what memoir isn't?), and even those that actually have a greater purpose than mere solipsism. Though any memoir may be superior than those that walked before it, the ground has been covered by a million little semis filled with wet cement.

That the usual compulsive behaviors haven't stopped the memoir industry, which publishers happily embrace as the reading public can't get enough of it. So since running out of topics about the usual compulsive behaviors, there memoirs about addiction insomnia, or to sexual acts depicted in movies with titles such as "Butt Sluts Go Nuts (Vols. 1-34)." 

Dr. X's masterwork did not detail an unquenchable lust for morphine or golf, but was unflinching in its honesty. Today, that won't cut it. As one critic put it, "Candor is surely too epidemic in the popular culture, these days, to qualify any longer as courageous." 

Instead, there are two constants in addiction memoirs: 

1. The author must describe his or her spiral to the bottom, in gory, graphic detail.

2. The author must describe his or her recovery, in gory, graphic detail.

And for this, you get a book contract

The latter condition is important because, face it, if there wasn't a recovery, there wasn't gonna be a book. When was the last time you read a memoir of an addict in the midst of his illness? Who just ain't gonna make it? Probably never (Amy Winehouse or Linsey Lohan, here's your chance!). One senses recovering addicts write their memoirs because it's part of their recovery. 

What all this means, as a writer, is that no longer is it important to say something new or repeat old verities in an interesting manner. Because, once you get past the details, every addiction memoir is pretty much like all the rest: bad childhood, turn to drugs, ruin one's life, recover, write.

I wonder what Bill Wilson would think of all this. A taciturn New Englander and the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, "Bill W." viewed recovery as being uncompromisingly honest in examining one's motives. He would have appreciated that all these crack or heroin or booger-eating addicts got help, but I am sure he would have cast a gimlet eye upon their motivations.

Why did they really need to share their tales of debauchery in print–with their faces plastered on the cover–instead of simply in a roomful of fellow addicts puffing Camel Lights and throwing down black coffee?

Winehouse: words cannot do justice

I think he would hit upon the reason quite quickly: yet another compulsive behavior, the need to write and be noticed. Which, let's face it, is the reason why any of us wretches are doing this writing thing, anyway. At least me.

*Weird coincidence: the person writing the memoir is a literary agent who once contacted Wife, not long before the events described took place. Small world.

Compare that processed, digitized, lump o' donkey dung to the awesome, kick-ass perfection of the original:

Book 'em, Danno, for murdering the most totally awesome TV music ever.

It's fucking Hawaii Five-0, goddamnit!  The theme song has to kick ass! The new tune makes it sound like CSI: Honolulu.

Now excuse me while I watch another part of my childhood crawl off to die.

There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance, that imitation is suicide, that he must take himself for better, or for worse as his portion. And that "Ni hao kai lan" is the most goddamn awful thing ever in the history of children’s television.

It is the very definition of "animated excrement." Worse than the Mr T. cartoon show. Worse than "Hong Kong Phooey." Even worse than "Wonder Pets."

If China does surpass the United States economically, militarily, or culturally, it won’t be for the obvious reasons. It won’t be the trillions in debt we’re in hock to the Chinese government, China’s increasing nationalism, or a stupid, Glen Beck-esque plot to infuse the kung pao chicken at Mr. Wong’s takeout with enough MSG to kill the entire cast and crew of "The Biggest Loser."

No, it will be "Ni hao Kai lan."

Little Boy is obsessed with this seemingly innocuous show, which features a little Chinese girl named Kai lan and her friends prancing across the countryside. Her friends are a tiger, panda bear, monkey, pink rhino and other assorted cute ‘ums that make me want to take up big game hunting.

Their names are, Rintoo, Tolee, Hoho, and Lulu, respectively. That I know their names without having to consult Wikipedia or Little Boy himself scares the living crap out of me.

Before anyone starts accusing me of being racist or trying to poison Sino-American relations, I realize nobody in China actually knows about this show, or is using it as a means to destroy America (we’re doing a great job of that on our own). I also realize that there’s nothing about a show with Chinese characters that inherently is intended to turn little children anti-American (that’s for The New York Times, damnit!).

But in this global market, children watching "Ni hao" become stifled, uncreative, non-competitive robots. They are junkies, unable to tear themselves away for more productive endeavors, like, say, reading. For evidence of this, see below:

The decline of America in 52 seconds

Is your average three-year-old in China or India watching this drek? I think not! They’re translating the "Decameron" from Italian into Esperanto into Sanskrit! They’re doing differential calculus! They’re reading "Bookfraud"!

"Ni hao" is a traditional greeting in Mandarin, and one must hear it repeated approximately 8,403 times an episode. Not to mention hearing the same songs with the same lyrics and same cloying cuteness that would make Hello Kitty herself toss her Tender Vittles.

Also—and worst of all—little ol’ Kai lan says the exact same thing to close every single episode: "You make my heart feel super happy!" as she cups a heart shape around her chest and a giant valentine floats into the air.

Feel free to get sick yourself.

Children of all ethnicities (and both genders) are fanatical about "Ni hao Kai lan." This is about as welcome a development as when Barney the Dinosaur crawled out of his prehistoric time machine and into the hearts of millions of now-mentally disturbed children.

One knows that that Kai lan has cultural currency (among parents of young children, at least) when Anthony Bordain referenced it in his "No Reservations" television show, telling a befuddled Chinese guide in a restaurant how the dumplings resembled those featured in an episode of Kai lan when Hoho urinated on Tolee’s face or something like that.

Of course, my missive in the great tradition of fathers slamming some part of their children’s youth.  In my youth, more than one parent probably thought "Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood" was vile, and "Fat Albert" represented a problem as pressing as Watergate or SALT II talks. And I realize that I come across as a major league asshole curmudgeon in complaining.

But, yes, like Barney before it, "Ni hao Kai lan" is less about teaching our children valuable lessons about life than being as addictive as heroin or crack; turn "Ni hao" off in the middle of an episoide, and Little Boy turns into Raging Maniac. It’s twice as bad when he doesn’t get to see, say, five episodes in a row.

Consider that after visiting Chinatown of a certain city, Little Boy started wailing. And why?

Banality of evil

"Because I didn’t get to see Kai lan," he said, tears running down his face. Even I didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth.

Then again, perhaps I’m wrong. He’s always thrilled to see it. There’s no sex or violence. We don’t have to hear about Justin Bieber. 

"Why do you like Kai lan so much?" I finally asked him, threatening to shut the show off forevermore.

"Because she’s happy!" he said, literally jumping off the couch.

I put the remote down, marveling at the purity of his joy.

Boy wins, Dad loses. Again.