Unfriended

I've already warned my son that the day is coming, and soon, where he will hate me, everything I stand for and everything I stand with, nearby or on. I thought I was being clever (and, serendipitously, better rested than most) by choosing very carefully not to stand for anything in particular. As an act of purely spiteful pre-emption, I've made an effort never to be seen in his presence making a clear or conscious choice that might betray any partisan affection he might one day reflexively denounce in an effort to mark out his space in the world in the standard antifilial contravention whereby adults are (eventually) made. It's made ordering in restaurants a challenge.

A conspiracy of feng shui, the current limits of spatial dimensions and gravity has robbed me of total freedom of self-actualization in this though, as I find it difficult to avoid things to stand next to entirely or, more troublesomely, on. Yes, it turns out that no matter what your intent or conviction, this world is always going to stick you with something. It's the curse of human reason and sensory perception that we're limited to function in a mental universe of glommy, sticky association, rendering us always vulnerable to sidelong and indirect attack. Even if I were able to deny him the anchor points by which he may drag me down, he'll hate the town he's from or the schools he's forced to go to or, most cruelly, the things of himself that most remind him of me. He carries that shit everywhere he goes, man. What chance does a guy have? Sure, sometimes I half wish he were blind just to give me a fighting chance, but he'd just figure out a way to despise me purely by smell. Which, since I've taken up leather tanning as a hobby, I wouldn't entirely blame him for.

This weighs on me now as the boy, just this week, in an act of brazen defiance, has crossed the Rubicon of teen-dom. That's right, I'm the dad of a 13-year-old. The good news is, he still likes me. I'm hoping that only having him here half the time as part of the joint custody agreement with his mother will blunt or at least stave off some of the pointier spears of hormonal vitriol, no doubt aimed but as yet unthrown. Between that and all the noncomittal sex with strange women... I was on the fence about it at first, I'll admit, but this divorce business seems to have paid off in the end, in shocking, almost anti-facebook levels. Dividends on top of dividends. And sometimes also on top of dividend's drunk old college friend visiting from Colorado.

We're in the lull before the storm, before the cascade of testosterone and self-awareness pours from the opening skies, but although my original defense plan may have failed, I do have a Plan B. It involves lots of porn. See, there are no child-rearing strategies in place for people my age for avoiding porn. When I was a kid, you had to have a brave enough friend with dark enough downy, pre-facial-hair facial hair to convince a liquor store owner to sell him a copy of Oui if we wanted our porn. Not really that hard to regulate, as far as parents are concerned. The ubiquity of internet porn (with its ingenious, mostly undetectable hiding place in Magic Bolts of Invisible Electricity) is a completely different animal. Like an angry rhinocerous. No idea why, but it's the first thing that thrust itself into my head.

No, instead of being terrified of porn, I've decided to embrace it. The way people charged with removing bears from residential neighborhood trees have embraced the tranquilizer dart. I'm hoping he'll be so intoxicated by the lure of nudity-on-demand, he'll be less likely to realize the only thing standing between him and his happiness, man, are me and my outdated, old-person ways and probably fascism.

The trick is not to let on about my own appreciation for internet porn, potentially putting him off it. But there's another benefit of my failed relationship with his mother: we were married for 12 years. Nobody knows better how to hide a porn habit than I do.