SUCK!

My son Ethan and myself like to play a game called SUCK!. The game consists of, out of the blue, for no reason what so ever, he'll say something like "Hey dad," and I'll say "Ya?" and he'll say "Suck!".



Good times!

This is a game that started with, I'm guessing him and his friends and soon caught on with myself. Every chance I get, I'll play.

Standing at the counter at the grocery store, the guy ringing us up.

"Ethan?"

He has his headphones on, Satan Kills the Dali Lama screaming in his ear, assuring me I'll have a astronomical medical bill for his hearing loss. I pull a audio-plug from his ear.

"What, dad?!"



"Suck!" Ha, ha, ha!

Ethan rolls his eye, plugs his ear once again and walks away to stare at the Lotto scratch ticket machine. I'm sure he's thinking how good he has it with me as his dad.

Truth be told, though, he doesn't like playing it much anymore. Not with me anyway. I think it ran it's course with me and isn't all that much fun with his old man. A game that was meant to be played with teenage, pimple poppin' punks and, by throwing me into the mix, it's lost some of it's 'cool'.

I don't care. The fact is I am cool, he just doesn't know it right now. It may take him years, he may sixty-three, but I know a tsunami of realization will wash over him and it'll click at how damn'd cool I really was while raising him.

At least I don't make him listen to 'country' music in the car as my dad did. Wouldn't let us kids change the channel, even when The Knacks 'My Sharona' was all the rave.

"That crap will rot your brains!"



My dad wouldn't let us watch the 'After School Special' because there was chickens to be fed, the lawn to be mowed or his car needed a washing. He liked to call them 'After School Chores'. That was my dad's sense of humor.

My dad certainly would never have played Grand Theft Auto with me, or as I like to call it, Find A Super Fast Motorcycle, Run Over as Many Innocents and Then Hit a Wall at Seventy-Nine MPH Hour Crushing Every Virtual Bone in My Body.



See kid, I am cool! HA!

Of course, when I play GTA, this is the only time Ethan likes to play SUCK!, but I have my suspicions he's saying it less like a proper noun and more like an adjective describing my game play.