Helicopter Parenting and the Nuclear Family

Off the wall in Vans: me at 16. Tender little bitch, ain't I?
As I leave the shop for a test ride, two kids are playing around with a demo bike we have parked outside, screaming like hormonal hyenas as their mothers ignore them from 30 feet away. The trophy moms of the Marina are confused when their nannies get a day off, though they tacitly acknowledge Juanita may have a little brown family of her own.

As I ride back to the shop, the little boy is backpedaling the cranks furiously with his hand, while the little girl pokes her fingers at the whirling teeth of the cassette where it interfaces with the chain.

"If you keep doing that, you're going to cut off your finger," I tell the girl.

They look at the scary bald dude and hustle toward their mothers, who tell me, "We're sorry about that."

"No problem," I say. "It's not my finger."

Though I do thumb my nose at you, mothers who hover at all the wrong times. You're probably more concerned about your kid's peanut butter (organic almond butter, perhaps?) than their fingertips.

Excess packaging will be the end. To paraphrase Nikita Kruschev in a way his vodka-addled borscht brain could've never envisioned: it will bury us.

The world needs another, even colder war, to embrace the eternal, paternal coziness of a fasco-Republican republic. A womb for grown ups! A veritable Mit fit for a man! I learned to love the bomb as a child: the shooting of Korean Airlines Flight 007 from the sky was my Lourdes. It was our mini-Missile Crisis, an adrenaline hit in the dog days of summer, just before succumbing to the lingering sickness of school. Shot out of the sky by a Soviet fighter on the way home from vacation, or a business trip; first peanuts and Coca Cola, next, fiery, howling death at 35,000 feet.
I drew a lot of mushroom clouds/skulls/mushroom clouds that looked like skulls/skulls that looked like mushroom clouds on my Pee-Chee folders that year.

"Radical man is the CIA and we say no!"