In retrospect it seems fairly obvious that this was a bad idea. My brother decided that for April Fool’s Day he would play a small prank on his daughters, Sonia (7) and Georgia (4). He snuck small plastic cockroaches into their lunchboxes and sent them off to school, thinking of all the hilarity that would ensue when they opened them up and discovered the bugs that will survive the apocalypse nestled in between the wax-papered souffle and hand-crafted châteaubriand (my brother is a chef). Great idea!

Reports from their respective teachers weren’t long in coming: Georgia, the younger and more readily adventurous of the two, found it funny. Sonia, however, who is more careful, was, reasonably enough, scared shitless, and spent the good part of her lunch break in tears.

Once the girls were home my brother had some explaining to do, which he did, and by the time he was done, Sonia, no fool, had sharped him into promising her a new pet (context: the dog died recently and he’s refused to get another one), in this case an insect.

Off to the pet shop with the girls where he had a conversation that went like this:

“What sorts of insects do you sell at this fine establishment, good sir pet purveyor?”

“Insects? You mean bugs?”

“Yes, bugs, roaches, creepy-crawlies, what have you… No, seriously, what have you?”

“We don’t have none of those … except for this here giant Madagascar hissing cockroach!”

“Oh, dear. What, pray tell, do you feed a giant Madagascar hissing cockroach the size of my fist?”

“Dude, it’s a roach. It eats everything.”

These are the dilemmas one faces as a parent who has decided to prank his young children and now must decide if he actually wants to spend money on purchasing a cockroach. He must, he does, he leaves the store with the bug.

Once home little Georgia wants to play with the family’s newest addition, and my brother allows her to open the small box said Blattaria was sold to him in. The roach, being a roach, makes a run for it, evades Sonia, Georgia, my brother, his wife, and the cat, and takes refuge in the walls of the house, never to be seen again, assuming no one counts an eerie scuttling noise you can just barely make out at night.

Now, you might say that it’s only one giant Madagascar hissing cockroach, and with no one to breed with,where’s the harm? The harm? Do I even have to say it, in an appropriately stuttering and self-conscious actor-y kinda way like Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park? The harm is that life finds a way. And life now lives in your walls and is a giant Madagascar hissing cockroach.

Sorry, bro, we’re not coming to visit this summer.

Despite co-founding a parenting blog that is ever-so-slightly better than its peer blogs, I’ve never considered myself an expert on raising kids. Far from it, in fact, and I readily concede that there are reams of kiddie-related things of which I remain blissfully unaware.

For example, I’ve never watched “Yo Gabba Gabba!” (JP is a “Blues Clues” man). I let my kid eat peanut butter. I have kept JP, and intend to keep Ellie, current on their vaccinations. I have no policy whatsoever on self-esteem or imaginary guns. I have changed many diapers but have no strong opinions as to which brand one should use (which is probably why DadWagon has failed so miserably in the selling-out realm). I’m just me—a schmuck with two kids living the current version of the American Dream, which today seems to include financial deterioration, shaky employment in a dying field, the inability to do more than ten pull-ups, and a shitty apartment that is both dirtier than I approve of, smaller than I require, and more expensive than I care to admit.

All that is a suitably long-winded way of saying what the fuck is the Labyrinth Celebration? I first learned of it in a nice short essay (by which I mean it is nice and happens to be short, not that I feel that essays to be nice must be short) on the GQ Magazine website. It’s a passing reference in an amusing story about a bum writer’s kid who gets thrown out of the Kindergarten:

My son’s hippy charter school did not do Christmas. Instead, the administrators created an artificial, substitute holiday called the Labyrinth Celebration, and they took it very seriously. So seriously that the teachers didn’t think twice about marching dozens of children—and me—outside in howling winds and numbing cold for an hour to practice a stupid song about a shiny lantern.

The rest of the story is well worth reading, but I got stuck on this Labyrinth thingee. Is it real? Does anyone know? I tried a bit of Googling to determine its origins, and the closest I got to it was this: “A Secret Labyrinth: A Celebration of Music from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.”

Same thing? I don’t know. I’m not so fussy about my offspring’s gift-receiving-oriented festivals to really care if it’s real or not. Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Festivus, whatever makes you as a parent feel okay with showering your little one with worthless consumerist shit. I would, however, as a putative parenting expert, like to be kept informed any new developments in this category.

Let the experts come forth to enlighten me.

Partly because I’m a bit hungover, this appeals to me: An expectant dad somewhere in western Pennsylvania—okay, Fayette County, wherever that is—lit up a joint in the hospital smoking room. To celebrate or something. As Sasha has started saying, “Oh my God!” Quoth the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

Uniontown police Sgt. Jonathan Grabiak said a Uniontown Hospital nurse noticed the distinctive odor of marijuana when she took a cigarette break in the facility’s designated smoking area early Tuesday morning. … Grabiak said both men had glassy eyes. One of the men admitted to smoking marijuana in the shed while awaiting the birth of his child.

“I’m having a baby and wanted to get a buzz,” the man told Grabiak.

Anyway, good for him. Cigars are disgusting, and getting drunk is inappropriate and leads to hangovers. Oh my god.

Alas, the paper declines to name said fellow, who we’d definitely interview if we could. Anyone got a lead? Or an Advil?

Actually, no love for this father. A San Jose police officer finds out his 14-year-old daughter was banging some skinny little slip of a 15-year-old boy, and decides to scare the young man by coming to his home in full uniform, handcuffing him and talking ominously about filing an “informational report” to the sexual assault investigator so they might “file charges … for having sex with a minor.”

That was the story as it went around the media last week. But there are more layers of outrage within this stinking onion of a story. For one, after the boy’s parents went to the police department internal investigators with the video below of the arrest (and who is “stupid” now, officer, letting yourself be filmed doing this?), both the teenage boy and the daughter were cited for having underage sex. This is disturbingly common behavior, essentially pursuing charges against people who bring a legitimate complaint about police misbehavior (no word on what will happen with the cop himself). But it’s also sublimely ridiculous, treating teen hormones as a matter of law, criminalizing consensual sex between reproductively mature humans. I know teens aren’t perhaps emotionally ready to handle sex. But they do get laid, and no amount of legal bullying is going to change that. Teenagers in freaking Iran have sex, uncowed by much harsher laws than even this cop is ready to contemplate.

The other thing that struck me is how this cop, in bullying the boy, shows himself to be a bully of a father as well. He talks about his daughter in this way:

“Are you aware that that girl isn’t even old enough to remember how to take care of herself when she has her woman thing every month? She has to be reminded to take a fricking shower a couple times a week. But she just wouldn’t do it. And there you are. You make me sick. Both of you guys.”

Leave aside the Archie Bunkerism about her “woman thing” (which was, funnily enough, falsely transcribed in the video below). These are deeply uncharitable and unkind words, and his efforts to basically try to gross out his daughter’s boyfriend strikes me as a fundamental betrayal of his daughter’s privacy and personhood. Though this must be the default stance of any father who still treats his teenage daughter’s body as if it were family property, a costly Persian rug that this boy has defiled with his fluids.

The arrival of this particular bad dad on my laptop screen reminds me of a passage from Michael Chabon’s lovely Manhood for Amateurs (thanks for the book, Gil!), in which Chabon finds this gripe against the God of the Old Testament:

In His infinite capacity to engineer and experience disappointment, in His arbitrary and capricious cruelty, and in the evident pleasure He derives from the exercise thereof, there is probably a sharp insight into the nature of fathers generally, since at one time or another, if not on a daily basis, each of us fathers is the biggest asshole in the world.

I unabashedly include myself in this group of occasional assholes, though I will venture to say this cop is closer to the “on a daily basis” kind of asshole. Video below: