by Jim Lindberg
“I think seven, but I lost count after you knocked the goal post over that one time.”
By the sixth or seventh game, during team huddles, the coach will tell the other players to do whatever they could to help her get the ball. Eventually I had to tell her to ease up because I think some of the other parents were starting to get a little bummed out that their kids had to just sit and watch her score goals most of the game. I thought some of them might ask me for their registration fees back.
We had one of her games at my old junior high school in Hermosa Valley, and while she racked up goals, I looked around and thought about all the memories I’d made there. In sixth grade, on this field, I had made my first lifelong friends, and had kissed a girl for the first time. After that first year of junior high, though, things began to change. Everyone started to brag about how far they went with their girlfriends that weekend, first base, second base, etc. Then we started stealing booze from our parents’ liquor cabinets, and my one friend who had older brothers turned us on to smoking after class one day. After that, our grade school innocence was lost forever. As I looked at all the little kids running around the soccer field, with my daughter scoring goals and playing and laughing, I hoped she wouldn’t grow up too fast, that she’d hold on to that innocence a little longer than I did, and that for her, sixth grade would seem to last a lifetime.
I LIKE FOOD, FOOD TASTES GOOD!
An Australian promoter’s assistant in charge of shuttling me to and from the show told me that his five-year-old kid will eat anything: meat, fish, crab, vegetables, liver, and he’ll clean his plate every time. On his birthday he told his son that he could go wherever he wanted for his birthday dinner, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, wherever. The kid chose sushi. Can you imagine? A kid who prefers raw fish over a Big Mac? As an American I find that impossible. He once asked his dad while eating a thick lamb chop if lamb was really a sheep like they’d seen in the countryside or in a barn, and his dad told him it was. He thought about it for a second, shrugged, and said, “Poor sheep,” and kept on eating. I instantly hated him.
Our evening meals have never been an easy affair. Our kids have a problem sitting in one place for more than five minutes in general, so getting them to use their manners and stay seated while I’m trying to stuff my own face with food can be a difficult task. Daughter number one has reduced her diet to a point where she now only eats plain pasta and broccoli. She had always been kind of squeamish about gross slimy things. A typical girly-girl, she didn’t like snails, fish, or slugs, or anything “disgusting.” One day her cousin came over and informed her that scrambled eggs came from chicken butts, bacon was made from dead pigs, hot dogs and hamburgers were made from ground-up cow intestines, and when you ate chicken nuggets, they were the dead bodies of real chickens you were eating. This was all my five-year-old needed to begin her boycott of all foods that ever had a face or walked around a barnyard. Soon she stopped eating everything from Domino’s Pizza to Quarter Pounders to Taco Bell tacos, all the staples of an American diet. Now our dinnertime rituals, which were once exceedingly happy affairs where we would gorge ourselves on great cuisine like turkey meat loaf and barbecued ribs, have descended into stressful encounters where Jennifer and I try every trick of parental coercion and persuasion to force feed the hunger striker.
The meals start by daughter number one asking what we are having. Invariably she absolutely hates what we’ve cooked and tells us it’s the worst thing ever and why can’t she just have a bagel for dinner. We then explain calmly that her body needs certain proteins and nutrients to develop correctly and that if she doesn’t get a well-balanced diet she may stop developing altogether and soon only her fingernails and hair will grow and she’ll go into high school looking like a tiny hair ball with claws and how would that look for her senior portrait? Then she gets scared that we’re serious and starts to whine and then I start to think why can’t we just have one meal where everyone eats what’s in front of them and we’re all happy and all of a sudden I’m Al Bundy all over again.
During the time when we were trying to get her to keep eating meat, thinking it would help her grow up strong and tall, we made the huge mistake of trying to secretly mix in a little ground-up chicken with some noodles and vegetables and covered it with copious amounts of teriyaki sauce to throw her off the scent, but somehow she found us out. The two-year-old must have tipped her off. Now she eyes every piece of food placed in front of her like a diamond cutter examining a precious stone, scouring its surface for any trace of alien food particles we might have secreted into the mix without her knowing. I have to spend hours explaining to her that the little green specks on her noodles are just basil seasoning that makes them taste better and not tiny pieces of shredded cow or lamb. Even if I beg and plead and try to convince her we haven’t doctored up her pesto noodles with ground-up veal, she won’t believe me.
Daughter number two isn’t picky but she can’t possibly stay seated in her chair at the dinner table for more than a minute, which makes me miss the days when she was strapped into a high chair. Daughter number three ate anything and everything up until she was about two and a half, when she started systematically eliminating food items from her diet, and now just wants to drink juice boxes all day.
The reality with kids and nutrition and finicky eaters is that they are usually getting the right amount of food for them. My kids take a multivitamin every day, eat a bowl of whole grain cereal or oatmeal for breakfast, scarf down a sandwich and carrots for lunch at school, and then eat as much yogurt and fruit for snacks in between. We try to limit the synthetic snack foods drenched in sugar, hydrogenated oils, and preservatives because there’s probably a lot of truth to the assertion that the chemical additives that make us crave these foods are what’s clogging our arteries, turning our insides into plastic, and making us into a country of people who can’t fit into a single chair at the movie theater. Here and there, though, when time and availability are short, a Chips Ahoy cookie or bag of chips won’t kill them, either.
When dinnertime comes around, it’s not surprising, then, that they don’t want to eat the braised duck with snow peas recipe we wrote down from the cooking show. We try to keep it as simple as possible so they’ll actually eat something and stay seated without me having to yell at them to be quiet and eat the entire meal. They’ll usually eat tons of rice, cheese quesadillas, and broccoli, and chug down a big glass of milk, all while they’re telling you stories from school that day and singing songs they heard on the radio. As long as they eat something and they’re not living in a fast food line, I guess I shouldn’t complain that they’re not eating enough from the carnivore side of the menu, and considering what I’ve heard about factory meat farming, I’m sure it’s probably only a matter of time before I’m eating a nice rare tofu steak right along with them.
KIDS OF THE BLACK HOLE
The punk generation was one of the first to be brought up with a TV constantly on in the background during our daily lives. It was relatively new technology for our parents, but for us, we can all probably pinpoint each period in our history based on what shows we were watching at the time. Age seven: Casper and Scooby Doo. Age ten: Six Million Dollar Man and Happy Days. Sixteen: Mork & Mindy. Over the years, though, I’ve started to distrust my closest friend. I’m never really sure when I’m not being sold something, whether it’s a secretly partisan network news show coloring every bit of news with their party’s political agenda, or watching some scripted reality show with a plot line devised to hook you in long enough for not-so-subtle product placement in the background. I never thought Casper or Steve Austin was trying to put one over on me.
Our kids have about seven million channels now to choose from and can easily get sucked into a void for an entire afternoon. TV has always had the power to either teach kids something valuable or to screw them up tremendously. Kids are little tabula rasas and they tend to imitate whatever they see on the screen. When my kids were watching cartoons with whin
y, mean-spirited, sassy kids in them, they started behaving this way at home. They thought this was how normal kids were supposed to act. That being said, TV isn’t all bad. I know from experience that I probably still wouldn’t know the alphabet if it weren’t for the hour each day before school I spent watching Sesame Street and eating a bowl of Cocoa Pebbles.
It’s amazing to me how much the television can hypnotize us into thinking a certain way, influence our spending habits, and play on our darkest fears. After watching TV for a few hours I’m convinced that there are armies of silent, moldy, carbon dioxide killers invading my home, that soon we’ll all be attacked by Africanized bees, and that I need tons of Tupperware containers to store all my stuff and plastic discs to move my furniture around. TV has a way of distorting the facts and begins to cloud your ability to look at the world objectively until, one day, you’re watching the tube and suddenly realize you just bought a twelve-disc set of R&B classics performed by a guy with a bamboo pan flute for five hundred bucks.
Kids will watch TV for hours on end if you don’t keep an eye on them, and the stuff they watch today is usually horrible. There are a couple of good shows here and there that are educational, but to me, most sitcoms are filled with a bunch of snobby, shallow teenagers insulting all the geeks and nerds in valley girl accents, perpetuating the idea that this is how kids are supposed to think and communicate. Maybe some of these shows just put a mirror up to our culture, but many of them become a self-fulfilling prophecy of how kids will behave after watching TV characters with the cool clothes and perfect skin on their favorite shows act this way. I get really disappointed when I notice the kids have left the room and I’m the only one watching.
I know a lot of people who have started to say no TV whatsoever. I could see myself getting to that point soon. It’s a problem, though, when everyone at school is talking about the new show on Disney Channel and your kid doesn’t know what they’re talking about and so they think he’s a freak. We severely limit the amount of TV they’re allowed to watch and sometimes use taking it away as a punishment when we’re really desperate to get them to stop doing something. I’m sure the experts will probably say this is totally messing them up, but we use what we got. I think it’s probably best to try and strike a balance between the crappy stuff they watch and some good educational programming. Either that or I’ll rip the thing out of the wall and tell them to go play a board game instead.
I JUST WANNA HAVE SOMETHING TO DO TONIGHT
Tonight was a show night for punk rock dad. We’re playing three nights at the Henry Fonda Theater in Hollywood with No Use for A Name, Suicide Machines, and Love Equals Death, and after that we have fifteen more shows on the West Coast with two days off in between. The sadistic booking agent has routed it so after L.A. we go through Bakersfield, then up to Santa Cruz for two shows, but instead of going a couple of hours farther north to San Francisco, we go all the way back down to San Diego, then over to Vegas, Salt Lake, and Denver, before making it back up to San Francisco. It looks great on paper to him, but I’m the one who gets to pile in crowded passenger vans, get middle seats between two portly businessmen on an over sold shuttle flight, take long cab rides through rush hour traffic with grumpy cab drivers, and basically zigzag around the western U.S. like a spastic child with an Etch-a-Sketch for the next three weeks.
We are a working-class punk band. We don’t have our own Lear jet flying us to shows like Led Zeppelin or Aerosmith, and usually fly coach when we can’t use our meticulously monitored frequent flyer miles for an upgrade into the rarified air of business class to sit feeling out of place among the commuting CEOs and business executives. When we can, we splurge on a tour bus, only because we’ve already paid our dues by doing multiple U.S. and European tours with band and crew piled tight into the back of a Dodge passenger van, sleeping butts to nuts like a package of hot dogs. Our backstage show rider doesn’t feature chilled bottles of Dom Perignon and bowls of M&Ms with all the green ones taken out. We’re lucky to get a case of lite beer and a bag of Doritos.
There’s always a certain amount of dread that accompanies the start of a tour for me because unlike other elder statesmen of rock ’n’ roll, like Neil Diamond, who barely break a sweat on-stage crooning out mid-tempo soft rock hits with an industrial fan blowing cool mist through his hair while he serenades his adoring, seated audiences, five nights in a row for the next three weeks, I’m going to scream, and bark, and yell until the veins in my neck bulge and look like they’re going to pop out and explode at any minute, singing along to songs that register in about the 250 beats per minute range, in other words ridiculously fast, urging on a seething mass of about a thousand amped-up adrenaline junkies, in a hot, sweaty box of a nightclub somewhere in a decrepit strip mall in middle America. Every night I’ll come off stage drenched in sweat looking like I’ve just stepped out of a swimming pool, my whole body will ache from twisting and contorting and stage diving and crowd surfing and getting scratched, pummeled, and stomped, and my heart will feel like it’s about to beat out of my chest. Every night I basically just have a complete human physical and psychological freak-out for an hour and then collapse. Knowing this hour awaits me on my day planner every day for the next several weeks kind of gives me a strange but satisfying stomach ache. My body is rebelling against it, but something in my psyche is saying, “Bring it on!”
So when I’m staring down a few weeks worth of shows, I need some quiet time to mentally and physically prepare for the warfare I’m about to go into. I’d usually be busy getting ready packing my bag full of changes of underwear and socks and jock itch powder, but after school today there was a marathon play date, then a brownie meeting, and at the same time daughter number one has a piano lesson while number two has soccer practice at a local elementary school across town. Jenifer takes the piano lesson and I take daughter number two and her baby sister to soccer so she and I can watch ten screaming six-year-old girls run around a field and not listen to a word their coach is saying. While they’re practicing I get to chase the two-year-old around the iron play set built in the 1940s and try to stop her from gnawing on the chipping lead paint of the monkey bars and keep her from following too close behind the three-year-old on the slide, who has double barrels of lime green snot pouring out his nose and a cough like a lifetime smoker. If she catches his cold she’ll give it to me, I won’t be able to sing, but I’ll have to play the shows anyway, and everyone will come away saying the singer’s losing it and should hang it up.
When the future soccer star, the two-year-old, and I get home, I sit down exhausted at the Herculean effort it takes just to get two kids in and out of a car four times, when Jennifer gives me a lightly delivered, off-hand comment that sends an electric charge down my back.
“Don’t forget I have Bunko tonight.”
“You’re not serious.”
“I told you five times this week and you said you’d remember and that you were okay with it. It’s written right there on the calendar.”
On the calendar hanging on the kitchen wall, every square-inch box representing a single day in time is covered in multicolored ink pen and pencil scribbles and scrawls of “Dentist Appointment, 10:30. Early school pick-up today 1:30. Swim class 2:30. 4:00 piano. 8:00 Emotional Meltdown,” until it looks like some kind of Egyptian hieroglyphic diary of a demented nuclear physicist.
“Are you kidding me? How can I read what that thing says? When did you tell me? I don’t remember that. I’m playing a show tonight. We’re leaving for tour. I have to pack. There’s no way!”
“I know I told you that, and you nodded your head and waved me off and said ‘fine, whatever.’”
“Honey, you know that’s my response to everything you say to me. I can’t do this. There’s no way!”
Bunko is basically a dice game women like to play that is really just a thinly veiled device the mommies of America have came up with to give themselves a night off twice a month in order to gather in someone’s dining room a
nd drink white wine and gossip. Other covert sham events they’ve come up with include “Book Club,” “PTA meetings,” and the generic-sounding, all-encompassing “Girls’ Night Out,” which is impossible for you to deny them if you ever plan on reciprocating with your own “Guys’ Night Out.” These are little more than an excuse for my wife to get out of the house for a few hours and make me appreciate what it’s like for her when I’m on tour. So tonight, on a night when I have to play a show in Hollywood in a few hours, I’ll be in charge of procuring dinner and putting the kids to bed by myself. I fear this more than the three-week torture tour following it.
After Jennifer leaves the house with an “I’ll be back whenever,” I don’t have the strength, ability, or skill to actually cook them dinner myself so I order a pizza and we all plop down on the couch to watch Disney Channel. The sad part is when you realize you’re watching the Disney Channel and you’ve seen the episode already several times, but you’re still watching it again anyway. The pizza comes but the big girls don’t like the way it tastes, because Mom orders it from somewhere else, and now they say they had pizza for lunch at school anyway, so I end up eating an entire large pizza with the two-year-old, adding to the rapidly expanding fleshy tire around my gut. Now I have to get up and make the older two a gourmet meal of hot dogs, cottage cheese, and carrots, which they both eat only a few bites of in front of the TV but still manage to scatter all over the couch, floor, coffee table, and remote control. Once they finish, I clean up the carnage, flip off the TV, and tell them it’s time for baths and bed. I might as well have told them I accidentally flushed all their Barbie dolls down the toilet, judging from the multi-syllabic, “Daaaa-AAAAA-aaaadd!” cry-whine response this announcement receives.
Like most people in the world, I used to really like to watch TV after dinner. First the evening news shows so I can be further convinced of the hopeless trajectory of modern society, then some PBS documentary about the dietary habits of Neanderthals or Carl Sagan’s insights into the billions and billions of galaxies, and after that maybe a stupid sitcom or lazy basketball game, and if I was really desperate, a how-to-remodel-your-deck or cook-Peking-duck show. There’s nothing like sinking in to the couch with a nice beverage for several hours to be entertained by the mindless distraction of television. Whatever was on the tube, from about six o’clock until the time I started nodding off after Letterman, I’d be watching.