Civilization Goes "Boink?"

As many of you know, my wife is having a boy. A trendier man would have probably used the royal “we”’ in the previous sentence, as in, “we are having a boy,” but that is simply not true. My wife will have the boy in late May, and I will be close by her side in the delivery room, doing my best not to pass out.

I enjoy being a father, though, and I am looking forward to having a son despite what I’ve been told about baby boys and their habit of peeing in faces. When my wife was pregnant the last time and folks found out we were having a girl, their reaction was generally sweet and smiley, filled with “awwws” and “Oh, she’ll be so pretty.” This time around, however, reaction has been a bit blunter.

“Well, I hope you’re ready to get peed on.”

For the most part, I’m not.

I have been peed upon, of course, most recently by a certain toddler who SAID she did not need to go and thus could be held, sans diaper, because she was, and I quote, “chilly willy.” But this is not the same as being ready for such an event, and so I think the question, in and of itself, assumes quite a bit.

Baby boys, due to anatomical specifics, simply go on things more often than girls. Even I, apparently, once went in my grandmother’s face many years ago during a routine diaper change, and thus the karmic implications are clear.

I have it coming, and I have been warned.

Despite all this, it is important to note that most boys outgrow this tendency in practice, if not always in theory, which leads us rather clumsily into the actual focus of today’s column.

Many years ago, during the zenith of American history (the 1990s) an immensely talented man named Bill Waterson wrote and illustrated an immensely entertaining comic strip by the name of Calvin & Hobbes. Calvin, named after the 16^th century French theologian John Calvin, possessed an inter-dimensionally sized imagination that he often used to escape his humdrum life by exploring space, fighting monsters, or merely building dozens of decapitated snowmen. Hobbes, named after the 17^th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, possessed the wonderful ability to change between a rather normal stuffed tiger into a wry, philosophically-gifted real tiger that was prone to spastic bursts of intense, good-natured violence. Together these two ruled the world of late 80s and early 90s newspaper comic-strips.

Watterson was an artist, though, and, like many artists, he often let his integrity get in the way of good old fashioned American commercialism. Fed up with the hounding of his employers to market Calvin and Hobbes—ever hugged an authentic Hobbes stuffed tiger?—and weary of newspaper editors throughout the country voicing their own annoyance about his strip taking up so much space, Watterson left the comic world in the winter of 1995. He accomplished, thus, what very few entertainers ever do: he retired at the top of his game with an unsatiated fan base asking for more.

A few years later, a likeness of Calvin began appearing on vehicles. This twerpy little doppelganger looked almost exactly like Watterson’s version except this character was relieving himself on the number 24. Or the number 3. Or a Ford emblem, or a Chevy emblem, or just about anything you might imagine a person would secretly want to pee on but could not because of our society’s draconian laws forbidding such behavior. Thus, if you did not like Jeff Gordon the racecar driver and needed a straightforward way to express this disdain, you simply bought a decal of this kid doing what he did on top of Jeff Gordon’s racing car number. Problem solved.

What this said, in effect, was this: “My contempt for Jeff Gordon is so profound I really, really wish I could just go to the bathroom on him. But I cannot, both because it is illegal and because I’m not certain where he lives, thus I will instead verbalize this contempt by placing a decal of Kalvin P. , (who represents my inflated Id) peeing on the number 24 (which represents that nasty NASCAR driver I despise so much.)

In closing, what more, really, can be said about a society that finds the energy, time and resources to place a decal of a peeing comic strip character onto so many of its vehicles? What kind of society does this? My guess is that it’s probably the same civilization that pays athletes millions of dollars a year to play games while it also still buys gasoline from people who want to blow it up. Or perhaps I’m getting it mixed up with the culture that would rather watch morally anemic drop outs cuss at each other on television instead of, say, a beautiful sunset.

Sometimes I get confused.