Flies, Lies and Crime Fighting Dogs

fliesI hate flies. They repulse me. If there are too many of them occupying a room in which I’m planning to eat, then I can’t eat. Not until I’ve blasted each and every one of them from the sky with a precision towel flick, or taken the fight directly to them on every wall, ceiling and light-shade upon which they’re bold or stupid enough to land.

My 22-month-old son has observed the ritual many times. I settle down to eat, and before I’ve even ingested so much as a morsel one of the poo-eating ninjas whooshes out from behind a curtain and tries to 9/11 my mashed potatoes. I have to kill it. My jaws lock with disgust, my appetite drops dead. Before I can eat another forkful, I have to kill it, else I’ll spend the remainder of my meal-time imagining its filthy little body crunching between my teeth. So I jump and curse and flail and rage, mad-eyed and spitting, demanding that every human eye in the room become part of my fly-detecting CCTV network.

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It’s rubbed off on the wee guy. He’s become my most trusted fly-spotter. “Daddy… FLY!” he’ll shout any time he sees one, lifting a finger aloft to mark its final resting place. Sometimes it’s a spider, or a fleck of paint, but what he lacks in accuracy he makes up for in vigour. If you ask him, “What do we do with flies?”, he’ll smack his palms together in an almighty cymbal motion and start shouting ‘FLY! FLY DIE!’ And my heart will swell, and I’ll think, “That’s my boy!” I’m surely witnessing the first delicate shoots of his first verifiable inter-generational neuroses, handed down from father to son. It’s truly a landmark moment. So he probably won’t be a Buddhist… but if keeping flies alive is the cost of admission to Buddhism, then I’m glad to have priced my son out of that disease-saturated market. Death to Fly-SIS!

You’ve got to really think about the way your kids see the world at this age, and consider the things they’ll cut and paste from you and the world around them to compile their own personalities. We went to a funday at the weekend and watched a police dog display. Hitherto he’s considered dogs to be plodding, docile beasts that put up with his shit and occasionally lick his face. The police dog display taught him that these furry fuckers he looks upon so fondly are also capable of taking down a fully grown man with a bounding gallop and a single arm-snarling leap. As he watched the dog savage the downed policeman’s arm, I had to make it clear to him that this wasn’t the norm. I framed it for him thusly: “This dog is a special dog. It helps the police. It helps the police fight the baddies.” His face bunched up into a frown before breaking out into a smile. “Fight baddies!” he said, nodding to himself, before shouting out “BATMAN!”

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“Yes, that’s right,” we told him, “the dog fights the baddies like Batman.” (He’s a big fan of the cartoon.) He then proceeded to spend the next five minutes pointing at the dog and shouting BATMAN over and over again. BATMAN! BATMAN! BATMAN! Rather than remark on how clever he was, bystanders unaware of the context in which he’d processed the dog’s actions might’ve thought we’d raised a fucking idiot.

I always want my son to see the mechanism behind things. I’ll probably clue him in on the whole Santa Claus cover-up when he’s a little bit older, so he can use the knowledge to hoodwink and manipulate his daft-ass school friends. Perhaps he’ll tell them that Santa’s a ferocious half-rat, half-alien killing machine that’ll kill them in their beds unless they leave a pile of their mum’s panties on the living room floor. Or that unless they all pay him a fiver each Santa won’t be able to afford enough magic dust to fly on Christmas Eve. The possibilities are endless. In my imagination, that is. Something tells me that my missus isn’t going to allow me to take our little boy’s dreams in my fist and crush them like rice cakes. Spoilsport!

badsanta

Just before I left the house last night I slipped a fake rubber hand up the sleeve of my jacket, and held my ‘hand’ out for my son to shake. At the climax of the handshake he found himself holding a disembodied human hand and staring at a bloodless stump on his dad’s arm. His world-shaking shock lasted only a second, before my real hand spat out of the stump accompanied by a happy TA-DA! “Pretend hand!” I smiled. “…tend hand,” he nodded. I then repeated the trick from the beginning a few times, showing him the whole process from start to finish. His mum did it for him too. He’s now cool and happy with the rubber hand, and I fully expect him to be using it to put the shits up his grandparents by Christmas. Unfortunately, I think part of him now believes two contradictory things at once: that I have two real hands, but also that one of my hands is fake. As I left the house and waved him goodbye with my real hand, he shouted: “Bye pretend hand!”

Is it possible to fuck someone up in a good way?

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