Will You Put a Leash on That Fucking Thing?
The monkey from Outbreak is running around the grocery store in a baby blue snowsuit and nobody seems to care but me.
By Daniel Ian Taylor
Posted February 4th, 2007
The woman who sits in the cubicle next to mine at work has two children, and she is annoyed… No…
No, that’s not the word.
She is genuinely incensed, livid, horrified that I have taken it upon myself to write a parenting column, having never been a parent myself. She thinks it’s disrespectful to parents, children, and the time-honoured social mechanism of The Family. She thinks I’m shooting off my mouth in directions I have never been. She thinks I am an irresponsible smartass with no right to be saying the things that I am saying. And she is probably right, but I am never going to let on that way.
“So we’re just supposed to carry the children everywhere we go?!” she exclaims, indignant and bewildered by my opinions on strollers.
“Yes!” I shout, accidentally knocking my stapler onto the floor as I throw my hands in the air, drawing frightened looks from around the office. “There should be some kind of obstacle course or something, and if you can’t make it through with a 60-pound bag of flour in your arms, then you don’t get a parenting licence and you’re not allowed to have kids! And it should be long, like it should take at least six hours to go through.”
She did not like this one bit, but there are a lot of things that we don’t agree on. She likes the terrifyingly warm weather we’ve been having lately, because it is easier to start her car and she doesn’t have to shovel her driveway or walk her dog in the snow.
I tell her that of course she likes it, because she isn’t going to have to live through the next 50 years, with the peak oil crisis and the melted icecaps and the nomadic bands of warring tribes and the extinction of polar bears and pandas and oh, what the hell, probably all the bears.
And she of course gets angry that I presume her old enough to not have another 50 years left in her, forgetting all about the bears and the world her children will have to grow old in, and making it about her and how she still looks good for her age and will live forever. I think that this is a predominantly female characteristic, this getting mad about being seen as old, but I would never say this aloud to her, because it is an opinion-based, gender-driven claim. And that is wrong.
She does not show me the same courtesy, however, and goes on and on about the things that I do and say and about how they are all caused by the fact that I am a man. And that is why I feel no compunction about lampooning her on the internet like this.
You shouldn’t have made those sexist comments about me in the workplace, Sandra.
For example, this week I have been quite sick with a very bad cold that I caught from — you guessed it — children. And I have been, I will admit, sniffling and sneezing and carrying on about how badly I feel. And this is, apparently, for no other reason than that I am a typical male. Evidently only men complain about their cold and flu symptoms. It’s a proven scientific fact. It’s in any medical text book worth a good god damn. Look it up!
And so. This week I’ve been sitting there, snuffling quietly and mourning the dearly departed good health of my poor little self, asking why oh why oh why, but every once in a while my sore throat and aching muscles stir a great anger in me, and I lash out violently at the thought of the grubby bastard that gave me this godless ailment. Sometimes you can pinpoint the exact moment that you contract a cold, and you think to yourself, “There it is, I’m going to be sick for a week now.”
Long story short, a child looked me straight in the face and sneezed.
So, every now and then, my coughs and groans give way to the grinding of gritted teeth and I spit angry words at the computer screen in front of me and Sandra is scarcely sure that she heard the words “filthy little fuckin’ asshole” float over the cubicle wall.
And she can’t help but ask “What is it now?” and that is all the invitation that I require to let loose on her, drawing the frightened looks from around the office that I am getting more and more frequently these days:
“It’s those wretched little fucks that gave me this awful disease!” I growl. “I hate them! I hate them all so much! Running all over the god damn place with their outstretched arms and slobbering mouths and their lolling, unseeing eyes! Like a bunch of little fucking Frankenstein monsters! Like a bunch of little Voltrons!”
“Who?”
“The big robot from Power Rangers!” I paraphrase this lazily, not wanting to explain the historical ins and outs of television shows involving robots that form together to make bigger robots to a 40-year-old woman. “And the germs are the people inside, working the levers and buttons and steering the kids wherever they want them to go! They’re like all-terrain assault vehicles for viruses to ride around in! That’s all children are!”
“They’re little people!”
“That need to be quarantined! For god’s sakes, you’re a mother! DO something about this!”
“Oh, so we’re supposed to keep the kids from leaving the house from October to April just so you don’t get sick?”
“Ideally, yes! Or at least contain them when they go out in public, so they won’t sneeze in my face at point blank range and wipe their gummy little hands all over the food in the produce aisle!”
“Like a bubble?”
“Or a hamster ball! Or just cover their hands and faces with plastic bags or something!”
“You want to tape a plastic bag over childrens’ heads?”
“If you’re not going to teach them to contain their interminable oozing? Yes! Yes I do!”
And that is pretty much that, and I am more or less left with my sniffling and muttering and occasional flurry of angry words, and Sandra says nothing more to me that day, except that I have a lot of deep-seated issues, which I’m sure she thinks is a typically male characteristic.