Spring Break with My Boys: Philosophy with a Sprinkle of Scatology

The Fractured Buttwhole???

I'm mostly working from home this week, on a spring break with my oldest and youngest sons contaminated by my to do pile that I have not dented enough during my normal work hours.

To each his own: if I don't work some on vacation and a bigger avalanche hits me when I return to work, the stress erases the benefit of vacation so I accept my lot for now. It makes sense if you think about it: working moms are always working anyway so I have years of habituation to rehabilitate from.

So, I'm pleasurably blogging in the living room before attacking that pile for a few hours and my 21 and 16 year olds and two cats are hanging out too. My 21 year old is reading Paris Trout. Our 18 year old is not on Spring break. He had dinner with us last night but went right back to his dorm after. My 16 year old is playing something ridiculous, a game based on Southpark.


There is blood, pooping, hamsters in cavities, ubiquitous flatulence jokes and sounds and those nasal grating voices.


My son is having a blast.


So slowing down for a minute before we get back to the living room and its inglorious happenings: my husband and I resisted getting a game console for the boys for YEARS; till about a year ago.

What happened during these years was straightforward and simple: censoring at home. Playing and sleepovering at friends who owned consoles. We never censored friendships and even if we had done it on the basis of console ownership vs. not, the pickings would have been vanishingly slim.

So, we got a console for the last birthday of our youngest, who is, for his age, eminently reasonable and ethical, wickedly funny (playing cards against humanity since 11-that what happens with two older brothers) and also in the position to live alone with parents for a couple years since his brothers left for college.  So, a consolation prize of sorts. Also we knew we had lost any hope of censoring the exposure and were at the stage of let's see what material he consumes and for how long.

Something like that.

So I have sat, perplex, through fragments of "God of War" and some other game with a cowboy that goes on laconic (him-the women babble more) adventures.

Nothing had prepared me for the Southpark game though.

"What are you doing?" I ask with a slightly anxious pitch as I take in the slightly disturbingly familiar bopping roundness and middle school voices of Southpark characters.
My 16 year old answers: "this is hilarious. The Southpark game. I poop in that game."

My mind does a somersault at the prospect of a game where the characters poop and the attraction this presents. Then, a microsecond later, my mind remembers that a 16 year old teen boy would indeed find this tremendously attractive.

James Baldwin (and I'm mentioning him because to balance this living room situation, we were talking about other things last night at the dinner table including Mr. Baldwin and his contribution to American culture) said: "Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up."  

Well, you could really say that about parenting, of course...parenting is love,  a kind of love.


Till Later,

Anne