My dad has a Twitter account. He doesn’t use it except to follow Justin Halpern, which I turned him on to about 5 minutes after a friend turned me on to it several months ago. Would have been quicker but I had to change pants. The stuff is wet yourself funny.
So, me being a Twitter geek, I had to buy him the book for Father’s Day. My niece gets him Chicken Soup for the Golfer’s Soul–Dad has a single digit handicap–and I get him this book with a bad word in the title. My stepmother promptly hid the offending item lest the children see it and be permanently damaged. I was fresh off shooting about a thousand so there weren’t any words in the book I hadn’t put to use already that day.
On Saturday, while Dad was shooting 77, I was at the pool with my kids and conversing with another Dad about how completely at sea we are with today’s parenting challenges. By the time e-mail hit the mainstream, we were already working. Texting is something our kids or their babysitters taught us. Our parents had to cringe and have conversations about sex and drugs, but even in a worst case scenario, our ability to broadcast our foolishness and recklessness was limited. Now, in my capacity as president of the swim team, here I was talking to a guy about an inappropriate post his youngest son–a good kid from a strong family–made on the team’s Facebook Page.
Anymore, right along with sex and drugs, we have to talk with our kids about online behavior. Short story is that the stuff you type follows you everywhere, forever.
So if you’re going to talk filthy on Twitter and Facebook, make a career out of it. Just know that Halpern’s 1.5 million followers don’t show up there for the bad words; they come because those words are part of an original, well-constructed comedic tapestry that entertains.
And if anyone has the book, please invite me over to read it. I’m at that stage of life where my kids are young, perceptive and inquisitive and I’m far too protective of them to have that thing in the house but I am absolutely certain I would love it.
Pretty sure I’ll hate the TV show, though. The Geico cavemen didn’t translate and this won’t, either. Perhaps we’ll learn that just as the book is always better than the movie, the TV show will fall short of the standards set by Twitter.
Dad, thanks for everything. Including all the funny…stuff…you say.
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