O.K, Ernio Hernandez, I’ll play.

How My Son Will Kill Me

I’m not sure when it happened. It might have been when the two of us went to see Fury Road together. After it was over I turned to him and said, “That was fucking great.” His eye’s lit up and I knew he had just found his generation’s Mean Streets. My suspicions have been further confirmed with his dissatisfaction and anger after each new episode of Game of Thrones. He goes on some nerdy rant about the depiction of Tarlys and I smile and think, “exactly.”

I can’t pinpoint the moment, but somehow in these interactions I became aware of my hamartia, the source of my life’s greatest tragedy.

I had hoped that through wisdom and forethought I could raise a kid able to negotiate a path between the Scylla of “race to nowhere” competition and the Charybdis of adolescent slackerdom. With careful parenting, I was sure my son would find his way to meaningful adulthood sometime before the age of 40.

I have failed. He comes home from his job at the grocery store and asks me if I want to watch South Park. I laugh louder than he does at the Boogers and Cum song that ends the Yelp episode. He is eager to smoke pot and have sex with strange women. As I mumble some of my parent’s Victorianisms, I realize that I am too. He tells me the reason he may have failed trigonometry is because he has discovered that, despite his aptitude, he “really doesn’t like math.”

“What do you like?” I ask.

He says, “I don’t know,” and his answer makes me aware of my own lies.

In the truck he plays podcasts of comedy darker than anything I could have imagined. I’m thankful he has found them. We eat giant meals at the dirtiest sandwich shop around. He finishes a whoopie pie as I look on, not with disgust, but with envy.

I can’t tell you the pleasure I get from having my genetic doppelgänger looking at Magic the Gathering cards while I thumb through magazines at the local comic shop, but I never wanted any of it. I tried my hardest to not have him at the computer next to me playing video games while I waste my time on Medium.

My hard fought adulthood crashed against the siren song of my most narcissistic project. I made a copy of myself and hoped to change my own narrative.

The tragedy is that one day, and that day may be rather soon, he will get up and walk out of the computer room, leaving me to sit and re-watch Apocalypse Now by myself, lamenting and mythologizing not one adolescence, but two.