Fathers Day Is Upon Us

put your tiny hand in mine

Goooooood day everyone. It’s about to be fathers’ day and as a father, I’m gonna go ahead and do what we do best, besides run out for a pack of smokes and never come back. Namely, I’m gonna emotionally distance myself from the pain that’s tearing the people around me apart, have a drink and make it all about me. In fact, I’ma do a fathers’ day gift round up. Ready? Let’s do it. 

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Ah, fathers’ day. It’s a weird one. Whether your dad is dead, aloof, convinced you’re a loser, shitty and distant, a pervert, furiously angry, a closeted, self-hating sexually confused shell of himself, totally wasted, a wimp, living in Palm Springs with that bitch Missy or just kind of a bumbling pud, everyone’s got a thing with their dad (except of course for the brainwashed jocks and the women who learned how to manipulate their dads before they even learned to read), which makes the idea of Fathers’ Day even existing a little weird. 

HOWEVER! If there’s one thing I know about us men, it’s that if women get something, we at LEAST get it too, so since there’s a mothers’ day (which there absolutely should be), of COURSE there’s gonna be a fathers’ day (because, ya know, fathers are the familial representation of hegemony, and so on and so forth.)

With that in mind, and speaking as a father myself, I’m gonna run down some common gifts that people give their dads for fathers’ day. I hope my kids read this, but they probably won’t since this pack of smokes I ran out for turned out to be a few hundred miles away and from the messages I’m getting, everyone’s “sad” about it. But, in the words of all the best dads ever, that shit just builds character. So in a way, I’m probably doing an even better job parenting from this Motel 6 parking lot that I’m stealing wifi from than I would be if I were home. I mean, how ELSE am I gonna teach my family about disappointment and abandonment and the fleetingness of all things beautiful and so forth? 

But that’s neither here nor there, is it? Let’s get to it.

Okay. Up first:

Ties

Classic Fathers’ Day shit right here, the tie. There are almost no ties on earth that anyone cares about, and if you’re like me and you DO care about ties, you’ve already got the only one you’re ever gonna wear and a backup for emergency situations. For me, a black skinny necktie is all I’m down with, and if I got some whimsical “chicago hot dogs” tie from some well meaning offspring, it would be like giving me a roll of sentimentally charged toilet paper that I couldn’t wipe my ass with without feeling guilty.

That actually sounds like a cool tie too! I’m just saying, really nice try. No one actually has to wear ties any more, and, more to the point, no one who does have to is wearing wacky ties at all, unless your dad’s a fucking dork, which, that’s okay too...I just mean that attorneys aren’t wearing funny ties. Financial planners aren’t wearing funny ties. Maitre d’s aren't wearing funny ties. 

Unless your dad is some kind of bank teller or malpractice lawyer at the childrens’ hospital or something, he’s not ever gonna be able to wear whimsical ties to work. No attorney can wear a tie where it’s two pigs fucking in all the kama sutra positions, ya know? NOT that that’s what you, as children should be getting your dad anyway. But you get my point. The tie is dead. If you MUST get your dad a tie, get your dad a nice skinny black tie that’s kinda shiny (not too shiny) and another black one that’s wider and more matte. This is 100% of needed ties. Anything else is basically wearing branded crocs on your chest like you’re a full human sized version of some German at Disneyland’s feet

Mugs

Harmless. A mug is like a greeting card that you don’t have the immediate urge to throw away. It shows a vague whiff of sentiment while still being someone else’s idea entirely. If your dad is worth a shit, a “World’s Greatest Dad” mug will come in handy when he’s smoking meth with his buddies in the garage and Jericho dumps over the stash and your dad can hold up his moonshine filled fathers’ day gift and say “see, that’s why I have this ‘#1 DAD’ mug and you have all those restraining orders from Janice.” 

Ultimately, a mug is just another thing to find a place for in the cupboard. If you’ve reached the point of “father,” you’ve reached the point of having so many shitty plastic cups and sippy cups and tiny unbreakable bowls and shit everywhere, and therefore you’ve realized that there’s no room for anything else, so if your significant other takes your child aside and is like “yo, Breeexxxit, I think your dad could use a mug” you should seriously consider how fucking out of their mind your spouse is. Do they not have to put shit away? To add a new cup to this lunacy is like to just add a fourth guitar player to your band or something. It’s verging on Hoarders type shit.

But, that said, mug: not bad overall. It’s like when someone tells you they wanna fuck you but then gets too tired and passes out. It’s a nice thought and it kinda does the job of making you feel good even though ultimately who fucking cares? 

Pipe

Nobody smokes a pipe anymore and more to the point, nobody wants their family members to smoke anything AND NOBODY wants to give their child a pipe to give to their dad because the layers of bad messaging are so through the roof it’s the gift equivalent of the one ring to rule them all. You’re kinda fucking up every single person who touches it along the way. That said, you should do this, and specifically for these reasons because fuck it all. We will all be dead soon anyway, let Roger smoke a pipe already. It’s not like he still loves any of you. 

Slippers

I did an acoustic tour of the UK and Europe about...jesus...it was about ten years ago...fuck. I’m old. Anyway, it was with Dan from Alkaline Trio/The Emergency Room and myself and we happened across a pub in the UK called The Pipe and Slippers. We decided that that was the best name for a hip hop duo ever and dubbed ourselves, newly minted MC’s, as such. I believe that I was Slippers and Dan was The Pipe (because of his legendary hog). 

Have we made any real moves to come up in hip hop since then? We have not. Anyway. I dunno. Doesn’t your dad already have a shit ton of slippers? I’m personally fucking swimming in slippers. Probably, this is the kind of gift that you (as either the other dad or the mom) get for your kids to give your spouse and then immediately regret and then secretly throw away during the next cleaning spree. But yo, that’s why they’re called slippers. They’ll slip right out of this mortal coil and you’ll be none the wiser...yo, whenever I hear that phrase “none the wiser” it makes me think of Budweiser, and speaking of…..

Sweater

No. Don’t get a dude a sweater. Just take him to the vet and lop off his balls and get it over with. No dude wants to be walking around in a sweater his spouse gave his 2 year old to give to him in a passive aggressive way to get him to stop wearing that Pearl Jam shirt every saturday. Most men worth a shit can’t do a sweater....Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I’ve only ever been one dad, and I can say fuck a sweater. I’m born to run, baby. I need some breathing room. If you’re wearing a sweater comfortably, you’re either too healthy or unhealthy for me to be comfortable around. I get sweaty as hell in that shit and it’s a whole pain in the ass to put on and remove and no thanks. 

I have literally one (1!) sweater I like and I bought it for myself while out with my inlaws for dinner at the Budweiser brewery (hence the segue) the day after christmas, which, ostensibly is a time when you get stuff. To buy something for yourself on Dec 26 is the height of hubris and/or a rejection of all the bounty that has just befallen you, but there i was. Do you know why, y’all? Because there ain’t no good sweaters out there for a man. I saw one and I dove on it like a fucking cop onto a toilet after a trip to Shake Shack. 

Anyway, to change lanes a BIT I think a hoodie or something is fine. Dads like to feel like they’re still cool, and nothing absolutely radiates the illusion of cool like a hoodie on an old dad. It’s the combover of clothes, but whatever. Hoodies are great. If you wanted to, say, go to the Lawrence Arms merch store and grab a hoodie or preorder the new record, Skeleton Coast, for the father in your life, you’d be doing the right thing, but that’s kinda a different paradigm. That’s getting into non traditional fathers’ day gifts at that point. So fuck it. Go to the merch store. Okay, let’s do some wild gifts now.

Life Saving Diabetes Medication

Jesus christ. If you’re giving this to someone as a gift, you surely live in America. Just give em one of those burgers that’s between two donuts instead and get em out of here, so they don’t have to live in this hellscape where no one who has the power to do so cares about changing the plight of people with conditions like this. Greatest country on earth, y’all. Now THAT’S a present. Too political? Okay, I’ll get off my soapbox. how about:

Bag of Cocaine

Heeeey, now here’s a gift everyone can get behind. You give this to the father in your life, suddenly, he’s gone for 36 hours, and when he comes home, he couldn’t fuck you if he wanted to, whether you’re his wife of 30 years or his son. Trust me. Great gift. Everyone wins! Just give it to him and say “love you, sleep on the couch eventually” or whatever and you’ve got a Fathers’ Day for the record books.

Blowjob

This is like what “doggy dads” get for fathers’ day because you have NO idea what being an actual parent is like. Dads of human kids talk about the blowjob like old people talk about an old radio show or Moxie soda or world war 2: “Oh, yeah. I remember the Blowjob Hour, sponsored by Ovaltine. It was on every day forever and then one day some new contraption came along and it was gone. You can’t imagine. It all happened so fast.” Anyway, the fathers’ day blowjob is a lot like Mohammed Ali in his final days: on the rare occasion that he didn’t cancel his appearance, he showed up quick, left before anything cool happened and his presence only served to sadly remind us all of a glorious champion we terribly miss, the likes of which we may never see again. 

Cool Dinner

This is a good fathers’ day thing. It’s weird now because cool places aren’t all open and the places that are are hard to get into, but I like going with my family to get some ribs or some fried chicken or some shit of that nature. If I get “sleep in/cool breakfast/lunch/cool dinner,” I’m pretty happy. In my opinion, that’s what a fathers’ day is. Sleep in: cool meals. Oh, and I don’t do the dishes. I don’t need anything else. That’s already truly asking a lot. I mean, I’m about to sneak off to hawaii in the middle of the night to start my life over as a strip club DJ anyway, so this is probably all I deserve

Bone my hot friend

Now, if this is your thought process behind what you’re giving the dad in your life for fathers day, hopefully you’re the spouse and not the kid, first off, but also, uh...I don’t know. This could probably go tits up really fast. It’s a WEIRD thing to do on Fathers’ day, but hey, I’m not here to tell anyone what’s cool and what’s not. You do you. Let your dad bone your hot friend, I guess? It’s hopefully unexpected, at the very least. This seems like a gift between people who should be giving ME advice rather than vice versa, tbh, since this seems like a pretty Shaolin: restricted area level of gift craftsmanship

Books

I LOVE getting books. But I don’t necessarily love getting books from just anyone. I dunno. To me, books are the kind of thing where i REALLY need to know someone very specifically to be able to want to read a book they recommend. And that doesn’t mean that I even have to like the person recommending the book. There are people I hate who could recommend a book and I’d read it in a heartbeat and there are people I love who have given me books that I will simply never read. This is because A) Books are a bigass time commitment, and B)  the human mind is an asshole in its own right. I’ve been wrong about so many things and I will continue to be forever. Y’all’s recommendations are bound to suffer from the same level of general failure.

The last book I read on recommendation was The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter and I enjoyed it quite a bit, but it was a trusted recommendation. When someone’s like “have you read this book by this guy on SNL’s new cast? It’s amazing!” the truth is, it may very well be amazing. That guy has already accomplished more than I ever will and I’d do well to stay immersed in the ideas that are going into creating the zeitgeist of the time (this is a demonstrably laughable statement as calling SNL anything remotely adjacent to the zeitgeist of our time is kinda like calling Hall and Oates a new band) but I ain’t gonna do it. But hey, maybe YOUR dad or spouse or baby daddy or whatever is more open minded than me and wants to read the Pete Davidson Chronicles. And that ain't a bad thing. 

Final judgment: Can’t front on a book. It’s about as good of a gift as it gets. 

Golf Clubs

I have hit golf balls one day in my life. I get the hang of it generally, but it took me all day to learn. I had to do this in front of my children, who have already golfed more than I ever will. The experience was not totally Alpha Wolf shit, to put it mildly. Don’t get anyone golf clubs or a bowling ball or a guitar or a harmonica or a table saw or any shit like that unless you KNOW the EXACT thing they want. 

Getting a gift that is almost right with a “well, just return it and get what you want” clause is worse than not getting a gift. I don’t want to deal with the bureaucracy at Target or Home Depot or Guitar Center or LaFontaine’s Pro Shop. I didn’t buy this for myself and I was not planning on HAVING to spend my time going down there and standing in some shitty covid line (which, even without the virus shit would be terrible, btw)  to make sure that your inept purchase could somehow be validated. It’s supposed to be FATHERS day and I don’t want this particular leaf blower. YOU take it back. Or, and here’s the real shit, fuck it. I can just throw it in the corner and pretend it doesn’t exist. I don’t believe in a gift that’s ostensibly for me that involves me going to a store and standing in a customer service line. The only gift worth doing that for is a blowjob. 

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xoxoxox