The past couple of weeks, I’ve been mostly MIA from this site, at first because Jean, Sasha and I were in Taiwan visiting Jean’s family, and then because I was wandering around Indonesia on my own. Now, however, we’re all back together in Brooklyn—and with a few new additions to the household.

That is, we have a new boxful of crap for Sasha to play with. Taiwanese crap. Electric, light-up, dance-music-playing crap. A dildonic neon maraca. A spasmodic robot frog that crippledly jumps and jives. Toddler-size sneakers whose hair-trigger LEDs scar the corneas of unfortunate passersby. And a Teddyvision, whatever the fuck that is.

The sneakers, luckily, have already been hidden away, and I’m hoping that the rest of it will break or disappear in the near future. I hate this stuff not just because it’s horrible, unimaginative, chintzy dreck that serves only to clog our landfills with poisonous chemicals. No, I hate this stuff because it’s simply stuff. Jean and I have so far resisted buying Sasha lots of toys: We don’t want to be the parents who every weekend wind up adding to the pile of plastic junk in the living room. Which is not to say we buy her nothing—there’s that box of Duplo blocks, and the magnetic dress-up dolls, which she loves. Oh, wait! Actually, I think those were all presents from other people. Which maybe shows we’re doing the right thing.

This reluctance to buy Sasha toys has, on top of everything, a certain philosophical ulterior motive. What I’m trying to do is to make Sasha bored. Sure, she’s only 2, so it may be too early, but I want her not to rely on a constant flow of new toys to keep her amused. She needs to learn how to do it herself. And for the most part, she can, so far. It’s not uncommon for her to play with her Corolle doll, Baby (a worthy purchase), or one of the 10-cent tchotchkes that’s come from who-knows-where, like the plastic fairy from the dentist’s office, and to with total concentration invent bizarre scenarios for them. What did Baby do to deserve that Time Out? Only Sasha knows. But it’s wonderful to watch her figure it out.

Apparently, this all means something. In other words, I’m not the only one who sees the value, in our modern-day world of constant entertainment, of boredom. Over at plucky DadWagon subsidiary Slate.com, Matt Feeney looks at David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel The Pale King through the lens of boredom:

On one hand, defending boredom seems stern and unsympathetic, like a Depression-born mom impatient with her complaining children. (Hi, Mom.) But the depression-era parent urged a kind of stoicism, bearing-up against fake or minor suffering as a moral lesson of childhood. For today’s middle-agers, relishing the image of a teenager thrown into fidgets by a dead cellphone, boredom is not merely fake suffering. It’s important in its own right, a state of latent fertility. It leads to creativity. The contemporary defender of boredom is not a stoic. She’s a graying humanist, the martinet as art teacher.

Actually, Feeney takes his time getting around to discussing Wallace and boredom, but when he does it’s to point out that Wallace doesn’t actually share this Romantic view of idle time:

But The Pale King takes boredom beyond the latently redemptive or secretly terrifying lack of stimulation. It imagines boredom as complete immersion in tedious experience. For the characters in The Pale King, boredom is something that comes at you, relentlessly, redundantly. It is inescapable. There is no layer of inspiration or freedom beyond or beneath it, which you might access through one of the Romantics’ escape hatches.

Here, I think, Wallace is both right and wrong. His novel is set in the early 1980s, before Entertainment became as ubiquitous as it is today. In fact, you can read his Infinite Jest as the answer to the question posed by The Pale King: How do we deal with the miseries of boredom? By submerging ourselves in electronic gadgetry and narratives, eventually losing all ability to function outside of our identities as viewer-readers, possibly to the point where removing the Entertainment from our lives causes death or, worse, madness. Ah, good old David Foster Wallace—how we’ll miss you!

But of course, that point of view is crafted by a clinically depressed genius. Me, I subscribe to the more Romantic view, I guess. I, too, remember days of boredom: coming home from school and not knowing what to do, despite having a roomful of Legos and Star Wars figures, a backyard with a creek running through it, and friends and siblings to play with. “I’m bored” was a line often heard around my house, and yet somehow I survived that boredom. I played, I kept myself busy, I learned to inhabit my own mind. And even today I employ those same strategies, whether I’m on a 16-hour flight to Hong Kong or just stuck on the F-train with nothing new on Instapaper. I have what elementary-school art teachers want their kids to have: imagination. Perhaps even an overactive one.

The short version of all this: Being bored as a kid teaches you not to be as an adult.

And the corollary: The best toys we can give our kids are the ones that are, somehow, deficient. Toys that need to be assembled, that lack whiz-bang features, that require the kids to come up with storylines, motivations, action. These toys don’t just stave off boredom—they inoculate against it.

For those of you who read the offering of DadWagon’s newest guest blogger yesterday, it might seem that this site’s official position is anti-Parenting Magazine. In general this would be true. Typically we are more inclined towards the publishing aesthetic of Parents.

Yet, we here at DadWagon strive, as ever, to resist a monolithic approach to the world of shitty parenting-oriented publications which seem to exist as little else than vectors for disseminating information on shit that shitty parents can buy when they’re not paying for other shitty things they need as parents.

All that is a long way of saying I found this blog post at the Parenting website funny and well-written, even if I have no interest—or sympathy—for its primary topic, namely, “apps” for the shitty dad and his shitty iPhone. Please enjoy:

The first great invention for fathers was the vas deferens. I like to imagine that this vital duct in the male reproductive system—like every gadget available today—once had its own product launch party. I can see it now: it’s 50,000 B.C., and cavemen and cavewomen are standing around eating grilled mammoth and gossiping about each other (“Ugh, look at that pelt,” one of them says. “That is so last Ice Age.”). After the big unveiling, they learn that not only is the vas deferens the best gadget for producing babies, but it comes standard with all members of the male species.

I basically agree, at least in reference to my own equipment, which is, quite frankly, as cutting edge as it comes. [Editor’s note: No, I will never stop making bad sexual puns on this website.]

Almost as soon as the controversy began, it ended… with Amazon’s apparent capitulation. The controversy, of course, is about the bluntly named Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child-Lover’s Code of Conduct by Philip R. Greaves II, which as fellow dad-blogger Ron Mattocks pointed out when he tipped us to it, had risen to #97 in Kindle sales, just above the Bible.

I would like to think that he didn’t just point it out to us because we are pederasts or because many of you fine readers only find our site through Googling child sex acts (for the record, we use lots of foul language, but this is a non-sexual, barely deviant blog, ok?)

There’s plenty to say about Mr. Greaves’ completely bizarre quest to show the orderly side of pedophilia, and more yet to say about the difficulties of censorship. But for now, because I have a parade to catch and some veterans to thank, I would like to say this: don’t gloat too much.

It may be a good thing that the blogosphere reared up on its hindlegs and showed some fang over this book. The backlash over the title had the desired effect on Amazon. But before everyone gives each other high-fives, remember that child abuse is primarily not learned from books. It is not the invention of anonymous Internet predators. It predates the Kindle by about 10,000 years, give or take.

What child abuse is: a crime of cowards, usually known to their victims, usually part of the family circle. A father, stepfather, boyfriend of the aunt. And that means that child abuse has to be combatted, really, the way Israel protects its airplanes. You can’t ban every book or shutter every NAMBLA meetup, just as Israel can’t stop every bomb from being assembled in some apartment somewhere. But you can do what their airport security does: interrogate. Get to know the men (and women) who will have time with your children alone. And teach your children to be their own best defenders. Let them know they always can say no, that they can always talk about anything with you, their parent.

You can’t keep Philip R. Greaves II and people like him off the Internet. But you can keep them out of your lives.

It was a week of action and reaction aboard the Dadwagon. Consider:

Theodore can’t keep up with the housework, and can’t put his crib together, and misses the days when kids could play in the street. So he decided to watch some stoner TV, and retreat to the unexamined life.

Matt came back from god-knows-where to a kid he barely recognizes. So he offered us jokes about vomit.

Nathan realized that his daughter is trying to psych out his son. So he informed her about the existential nature of death.

And Christopher retreated into dreamy nostalgia for the glory days of the space program, and for newspaper columnists who made sense. So he bounced back into the modern world with praise for the wonders of modern dentistry.

Back next week, when the meds to treat this bipolar disorder finally kick in.