The Blogfathers

There’s a Toys-R-Us near our house, and apparently it has suddenly gone out of business, because they were paying a few poor schlubs to hold signs announcing “50-70% off all toys!” on all the local street corners.

Now I make it no secret that I am a cheap bastard who finds it hard to pass up a deal, and we have been in the market for one of those little toy strollers for our 13-month-old daughter to push around the 500 square feet of our apartment as much as she wants, so we dropped in.

Apparently the rain puddle in front of the Toys-R-Us doorway that muddied my wife’s cuffs was really the River Styx, because when we entered the store we found ourselves in hell. A Cassandra in the form of a package-bound molded-polyurethane Lindsay Lohan met me as soon as we had abandoned all hope, screaming, “this is what you’re in for Dutch. You are doomed to eventually buy me and my pimped out tour van or whatever it’s equivalent will be seven years from now, moo-hoo ha ha ha ha. . .” I left her cackling and mumbling to herself, denying her prophecy. No way, girl. There’s no way I’m ever going to buy any crap like that for my daughter. But the future versions of myself, toting eight-year-old girls around the store, shoving their way towards the best deals seemed to indicate otherwise. I’ll be different, I said. I won’t cave. “That’s what we all said,” came the chorus of weary guys in pleated khakis pushing shopping carts full of pink. “As you are now, so once were we.”

It had been years since I’d been in a Toys-R-Us, and man was I shocked. Have toys always been such crap? Everything looked like it was ready to fall apart and get shipped off to the land fill even before it left the shelf. But people were going crazy for it all.

I looked for the toy strollers while my wife let Juniper ride “Cinnamon the Hobby Horse” and suddenly I found myself standing before the “Wall of Bratz.” I had heard about these things, dolls that are designed to look like the kind of girls you don’t want your daughters to grow up to be. They all looked like the girl in your junior high PE class who would let boys touch her boobs for a pack of Bubblicious; the kind of girl who would get drunk off her mom’s boyfriend’s hooch; the kind of girl who. . .you get the picture. Apparently preteen girls love these Bratz dolls. The lame out-of-touch father side of me kept rising to the surface as I stood there and stared at the Wall of Bratz. I wouldn’t let me daughter hang out with girls who looked like that, I thought. They look like the high school kids who are mean to me on the bus.

But what disturbed me most were the Bratz “Rock Angelz” two packs. They come with the obligatory female Brat decked out with a red guitar, but apparently also with a dude Brat who has a set of turntables. Now if there’s anything in the world that drives me absolutely crazy is guys who own turntables, claim to be DJs, and refer to their artistry as “spinning.” To top it all off, the dude Brat had a soul patch. A fucking soul patch!  Why do they need a guitar and turntables? One can only assume in order to create some really horrible rap-metal hybrid music. The horror! I had to turn away before my brain exploded.

The whole store was a real eye-opener for me. Living in my sheltered San-Francisco handmade-wooden-toy world, my daughter’s desires are not yet formed by any peer group but by whatever piece of crap I throw her way that doesn’t mess up the aesthetic of my living room. It’s easy to be a cool, hip parent when you can still control your child’s aesthetic because she is too dumb to know the difference.

But things are going to change, boy. Lindsay was right. Juniper saw some baby dolls and just about had a fit in my arms trying to reach out for them, nanananananananana! she shouted. That means I want. There was a look in her eyes that I had never before seen. It was the look of coveting plastic crap on a store shelf.

We got out of there as soon as possible, but not before I spotted this out of the corner of my eye:

Holy crap! A ninja deluxe weapons set? They never made anything that cool when I was a kid. Check out that ninja on the packaging. He’s so badass, there are like badass energy marks shooting from his head! Throwing stars? Nunchucks? Bow-and-arrow? Two (count them) two katana blades? 

The next one had better be a boy. —Dutch

Spring Cleaning, Swag, Action, Samurai, Ninjas