I’m getting what I deserve.

Last fall, I wrote a post called Ballstober where I talked about my wife’s love of horror movies and me and The Boy’s attempts to gird our loins and watch them with her. There were a couple things I neglected to mention:

1. The Honey Badger wants to be like her mother when she grows up
2. There are some of these movies I actually enjoy

I cut my eye teeth on watching (and coming to adore) movies like Alien. And John Carpenter’s The Thing. The prequel to the 1982 gross-fest came out last October and hit my OnDemand this week. Sounds like double-feature night to me.

The Boy and the Honey Badger have approached their academic responsibilities with all the fervor of Shaq at the free throw line: poorly. What began as a repossession of a tv (yes, they even got a letter), has culminated in the worse punishment you can render a child of the 21st century: confiscation of all things electronic. That’s right. Listen to the radio. Flip the pages in that book. Feel that? It’s called paper. They make it from trees.

So these cats are walking around singing Huey Lewis and the News, trying figure out how to get back to the future. And I feel bad because they’re fiending for electrons. Which brings me to double feature night. “Hey kids, let’s have movie night,” I say. I’m a dummy.

And am now renewing my application for Fisher Price to make a taser.

Two reasons. First, look at the clock. Go ahead, I’ll wait. See, if you’re reading this, it’s a normal I-should-read-a-blog time, right? Maybe you’ve had your coffee. Maybe you’ve even had lunch. For me, it’s four o’clock in the fucking morning and I’ve been kicked out of my bed and banished down the hall because the Honey Badger is scared. Came in my room twice, woke me out of a deep sleep sponsored by my super-sexy CPAP machine, saying she was scared of everything. Who is scared of everything? With the Fisher Price taser, this could have been an easy one: ssskzzapp! Go to bed.

Secondly, with the Fisher Price taser, I could have handled their homework malfunctions early too and avoided all this nonsense in the first place. You forgot to turn it in? Ssskzzapp! Didn’t bring it home? Ssskzzapp! They’d become model students for the low cost of rechargeable batteries. Problem solved.

The moral of my story is if I’d have had a Fisher Price taser, I would be nestled in my bed, my children would be better students, and I would have the immense satisfaction of being able to tag their asses at will without killing them. Life would be better. This is now a quality of life issue. How can they not do it? Maybe we should start a petition. Who’s with me?