The Doofus Dad Podcast

Being a dad can be downright scary, and I’m not just talking about the baby stuff. How you appear in the eyes of your impressionable 12-year-old son or daughter can be as terrifying as driving a newborn home from the hospital. Let me explain…

Being a dad is not for the faint of heart. Frankly, it can be nerve-wracking. Even downright scary.

And I’m not really referring to the obviously scary baby stuff, when you literally have no idea what you’re doing. It’s a wonder that any first-born child survives their first-time father, because I can think of no more confounding and serious a job a person undertakes with so little practical training. Women come somehow prewired for motherhood and miraculously know what to do, but most fathers have never even held a baby before they hold their own, and within a day or two, they are abruptly promoted from a green intern to the company’s CEO, all with the world’s worst resume. It’s like that dream when you find yourself on stage with a trombone in your hands and are expected to play it having no clue of even how to correctly hold it.

But there you are, standing beside your car in that covered pick-up area of the hospital. A polite but clearly disapproving nurse makes sure the baby’s car seat is properly seat-belted in before handing you your tiny replicant of yourself and sending you on your way out into a world akin to a river full of hungry crocodiles. That drive home from the hospital is easily the slowest and most careful drive of your entire life, both before the arrival of the baby and after.

But no, I’m not talking about the baby fear, which is bad enough. I’m talking about the anxiety that begins to creep in when your child — especially if it’s a boy — manages to reach, say, middle-school age despite your many failings as his father. This is when you, the dad, begin teaching your son life skills. You know, things like how to change the oil in a car, or how to fix a fuse, or replace the string of a weed eater, or power-wash a sidewalk.

Why is this so scary? Because, number one, who the hell knows how to do those things?? And number two, your little boy, who holds you up as the Knower of All Things is watching.

There seems to be some collective notion that physiologically becoming a father automatically transforms one into Bob Villa, the guy from This Old House, or perhaps, Richard Proenneke, the famous Alaskan naturalist who we watch build his own cabin with traditional tools every year during the PBS fundraiser on TV. These men probably spent most of their lives learning and perfecting these amazing skills, but simply by successfully impregnating our wives, we normal dads are expected to be magically imbued with the same kind of manly knowledge and then, are pass this on to our sons and sometimes, daughters.

I mean, most of the time, I can’t even clearly SEE or REACH the item in question, let alone repair it. I mean, what exactly IS a carburetor or a deckplate or a duplex rabbet plane or a spackle??

Making matters worse is the fact that there is always a real-life handyman in our circle of friends, whether a relative or a neighbor or one of the Cub Scout dads who insists on building the campfire, who fits the bill and by comparison, makes you appear like the most unmanly man on the planet. This guy will waltz in with his giant tool bag, say something like “Oh, no problem. Glad to do it,” and perform some mechanical miracle while you stand by making lame conversation and checking your phone for imaginary important messages. This guy can always grow a better beard than you, too.

So what are us average, unskilled-but-good-at-getting-our-wives-pregnant dads supposed to do? We’re men, too, right?! We have testosterone!

Well, I’m here to give you the secret in one word, although it sounds like two. It’s a word that was unavailable to our fathers and grandfathers, much to their disappointment. It didn’t even exist then, but now it does. Ready? Here it is:

YouTube.

YouTube is your friend. YouTube is there in the wee hours of the night, when nobody is watching, to anonymously teach us everything from how to fix a leaky faucet to recharging the air-conditioner in our cars to correctly sharpening a chain saw to using white vinegar to kill mold and weeds and get the rust off the grates of the barbecue grill, and yes, those examples are very specific because I’ve used it for those exact things, among others. And I’m not all that ashamed to admit it.

Of course, to make all this YouTube magic work, you’ve got to happen to own all the correct tools and materials, and you never, never, ever, do, because if you did, you wouldn’t need YouTube to show you how to do things. So what happens? You inevitably end up drilling a 3/16-inch hole in the drywall for a wall anchor that is made to fit a 1/8-inch hole because your 1/8-inch drill bit has been lost for years in the bottom of some random drawer, so now you’re screwed because you can’t make a hole smaller, and before you can stop it, an F-bomb slips out. And all the while your very impressionable 12-year-old son is watching carefully and taking notes.

THIS is why being a father is so scary!

God definitely has a great sense of humor as well as a penchant for practical jokery. Here, I look at one of His best jokes related to parenthood.

God, I’m convinced, enjoys a good practical joke.

Now, I really do believe that He wants only the best for us in the long run, but I see God as kind of a successful but very strict high school basketball coach; He’s going to make the players work for their success and, sometimes — just for good measure — He’ll make them squirm a little, and possibly even give ‘em a Divine wedgie every now and then.

I mean, the Big Man clearly has a great sense of humor. He made the platypus, right? This appears to be an assemblage of random kitchen appliances and whatever else was laying around at the time. He also made the pink fairy armadillo. And the star-nosed mole. And something called a “blobfish,” which must have come at the end of a long, tiring day when God didn’t feel like going to the trouble of creating any discernable features aside from an exaggerated frown.

“Meh,” said God. “Too much trouble. I’ll just let this pile of goo go as it is. There. Blobfish.”

When the Almighty Creator was bored with making silly balloon animals, He turned his attention to pranking his greatest creations — us. There are lots of good practical jokes God has played on humans in general — and I’ve covered several in other posts. Examples might be … infusing teenaged boys with out-of-control sexual hormones while simultaneously providing them with acne and smelly underarms, thus making them repugnant to the very objects of their desire. Or making mosquitos and gnats active at precisely the same time of year when humans desperately want to be outside. Or, for older men, replacing the once-handsome and luxurious locks from our heads with horrible tufts of wiry hair springing from our noses and ears and other random places. Could someone please explain the logic behind this??

The Good Lord also saved some of his best trickery for parents. In fact, I think he actually gave us special consideration.

“Let’s see,” I can hear Him saying, His bearded chin in hand. “What can I do to really mess with parents because, y’know, the whole dirty diaper and sleep deprivation thing isn’t nearly enough. Oh, I know! I will imbue parents with all kinds of useful life knowledge and experience, charge them with the responsibility of passing this on to the next generation, and then make their own children the least likely people — on a planet of billions — to accept this invaluable gift. Yeah! This’ll be great!”

And so it is. Upon reaching a certain age — usually one that includes the suffix “teen” — most children will flip the “Listen to Mom and Dad’s Advice/Counsel” switch into the “off” position, and in a single, deft movement, they simultaneously flip on the “Mom and Dad are Idiots” switch. I envision this switch to be much larger than a normal light switch. Instead, I see it like the lever shoved forward by one of the minions on the Death Star when Grand Moff Tarkin (y’know, the skinny guy played by Peter Cushing in Star Wars, Episode 4) ordered the destruction of Alderaan by zapping it with a giant death ray. In this case, though, instead of blowing up a planet, the death ray obliterates any remaining parental credibility left over from the elementary and middle school years.

It’s a horrible moment, this switch-flipping. When it happens, all the other parents in the world feel a little nauseous and dizzy for just a moment and have to sit down.

“I just felt a disturbance in the Force,” these parents say in Alec Guinness’ voice, oddly. “I’m pretty sure I just heard Bob and Suzy Leibermann from down on Maple Street crying out in terror before being suddenly silenced. Their 14-year-old, Jeremy, must have flipped his switch.”

Sure, I exaggerate, but not much. When a young person flips their switch, he or she is suddenly emboldened by a faulty but overpowering sense of independence and all-knowing omniscience. Seriously! In that moment, a teenager suddenly has all knowledge of all things. For the parents, though, it signals the onset of the Great Statement Debate. This is when any definitive statement of fact made by the parent during a conversation with the kid must be challenged by said kid.

Parent: “The sky is blue.”

Kid: “Well, not really. It’s more of a blue-green. It may have been blue in your day, Mom, but things have changed.”

Parent: “Today is Tuesday.”

Kid: “Well … okay. I guess. But next year, today will be Wednesday, so … not exactly accurate.”

Parent: “Those shoes don’t fit. You are a size 12 and those are nines.”

Kid: “They fit just fine for me. I identify as both a 12 and a 9. This is my truth, Dad.”

The act of correcting or otherwise arguing with the parent becomes a regular companion piece to practically any conversation, just as the acceptance of a parental statement by the child is rare, almost non-existent. There are, however, a few statements that are OK with the kid.

“This is a $20 bill I will now hand over to you, no strings attached” is an example. Another might be, “Hey, that gallon of moose tracks ice cream in the freezer is yours, and you may eat all of it whenever you choose.”

But if you dare venture into the territories of, say, how they should be treated by their boyfriend/girlfriend or which college degrees they might consider or whether or not to take out a student loan or, God forbid, how to approach voting for political candidates, you will be eternally subjected to the Great Statement Debate.

So what’s a parent to do about this? Is there any way for us to follow through with our directive of not only feeding and clothing our children until roughly their 30th birthdays, but also imparting to them our hard-earned life wisdom?

No. Not really. If this were actually possible, then our teenagers would be navigating the pitfalls of high school like the Kathleen Turner character in that movie, “Peggy Sue Got Married.” They would know what to do and what not to do. Imagine this superpower! It would be the classic “if I only knew then what I know now” scenario, and our superhero kids would sail through life without making a mistake. (Or at least, not nearly as many.)

Clearly, though, this isn’t the way God set it up, and far be it from a doofus like me to try to understand His intentions. But here’s what I’m guessing. I think our teenagers are meant to make their own mistakes and learn from them, even though their missteps are simply a replication of our own and those of our parents and grandparents and ancestors all the way down through history. Sure, the details may be different, but teenaged judgement is teenaged judgement, no matter the generation.

I’m also guessing that Moms and Dads are meant to improve their skills of patience and humility — neither one of which I’m great at, truth be told — and deepen their reliance on faith. (And if you’re not a believer in a higher power, that faith may be directed towards another person, I guess.)

We’re never going to have it completely figured out. Humans are, by nature, fallible creatures, and regardless of the fact that parents are supposed to have all the answers, we’re collectively just stumbling through life, trying not to make too much of a mess. Unfortunately, the physical act of procreation doesn’t automatically endow us parents that same all-knowing superpower that teenagers seem to have.

So what are we left with? A lot of imperfect people doing the best they can, in my view. Try your best to counsel your kids, even though they don’t want you to and there is never, ever, a good time for them to hear it. Expect the eye-rolling and the “that’s not the way it is now, Dad” responses and the Great Statement Debates. Expect them to not only not take your advice, but in many cases, do the exact opposite. Expect all these things but say what you need to say anyway.

Maybe, just maybe, a tiny bit of it will sink in and us Doofus Dads won’t be left feeling like blobfishes.

What is the image you project to the outside world? How we choose to see ourselves is pretty much how we act and how the world views us, so choose wisely!

OK, today I’m going to play therapist, although my psychiatry training was limited to the 8 am “Psych 1” class I took during my freshman year of college in 1984, and even then, the majority of my attention was directed towards the rangy brunette who sat one seat over from me and whom I never conjured the courage to talk to, much to my dismay. I do recall some mention of Freud, but that’s about it. So everything henceforth is only my doofus opinion and must be taken as such.

Good? OK.

So, living long enough to have college-aged (and above) children is interesting, to say the least. There are all the normal, mundane parts of life: jobs, vacations, school functions, athletic triumphs, deaths and tragedies, holidays, world events, and so on. If you’re old enough to have 20-year-old kids, you’ve seen a lot of life. But how about the intangibles? You know, those internal things that keep tapping your shoulder and reminding you that your existence is passing you by at breakneck speed.

For example, as you move through life, your view of yourself — or self-image — changes. You see yourself a certain way in middle school, high school, college, and into your 20s. When I was in high school, for instance, I saw myself as a skinny class clown who played basketball and the guitar fairly well, and because I created this persona for myself, that’s how I acted. I was usually “friend-zoned” by the hot babes in my class, liked by my teachers (not because I was a great student, but because I was funny and polite), and generally tolerated by the more outgoing sect of school’s population.

In college, though, my view of myself changed dramatically, mainly because I began playing music publicly. Over a couple of years, I began adopting the image of an already established stereotype: the brooding, introspective, long-haired, singer-songwriting, lady’s man. That’s how I acted and that’s generally how the world responded to me.

All of this, of course, is total bunk.

Stereotypes are not three-dimensional people. The real, authentic us is usually the person our family knows, not who we project to the outside world, and it often requires 20 or 30 years of being assaulted by life before the real us reveals itself, even to ourselves.

I spent all of my 20s perfecting the long-haired, super-cool musician persona, but since having children in my mid-30s, that self-image has been steadily eroded and reshaped into something much closer to reality: a balding, white-bearded, sometimes-silly, often-grumpy, constantly-worried-about-money dad. It doesn’t matter how hard I try to cling to the earlier image.

Kids, you see, are impervious to any cool former self you can conjure up even if you have photographic evidence. Your children could give a rat’s butt, and to them, your photo evidence is about as conclusive as a blurry Bigfoot photo. Your kids only see you as the person who feeds and clothes them, makes them go to school, embarrasses them in front of their friends, counsels them with absurd, out-of-date advice, and is completely and entirely ignorant of anything currently cool and cutting edge.

Case in point: My 18-year-old daughter texted me from college yesterday and asked me to send her a high-school picture of myself. She explained that she wanted to prove to her roommate that as a young man, I looked exactly like Woody from the “Toy Story” movies. Not George Clooney. Not Johnny Depp. Not a young, smoldering James Taylor.

Woody. From the “Toy Story” movies.

And just like that, another sliver of the cool persona is chipped away, never to return.

(For the record, I have nothing against Woody personally. He is a perfectly pleasant-looking toy cowboy, and she could’ve said I looked like Mr. Potato Head.)

As the 1980s tennis champ Andre Agassi once famously said, image is everything, and in many ways, this is absolutely true. In my case, the self-image that I liked most has been relegated to old, plastic-page photo albums, as ancient as the Roman Coliseum and as irrelevant as a car CD player.

So what’s to be done about this? Do we simply settle into our current roles as worried, out-of-touch parents and grandparents and spend our remaining years playing with grandchildren and pining for the past?

Well … not me. I do, of course, look forward to playing with future grandchildren, but I intend to make more of my remaining time which, Good Lord willing, might stretch over another 30 or 40 years. But how this manifests itself will hinge on which self-image I choose for myself. Remember, it’s really all choice. I can no longer choose the lady-killing 20-something-year-old musician or identify as an NBA basketball player or an astronaut, but I still have a variety of choices.

For example, I could go with a sport coat-with-patches-on-the-elbows-wearing, pipe-smoking novelist who lives on the Upper East Side in a brownstone full of books and leather chairs. Or how about the good natured retiree who cashes in his 401-K, sells his house, buys a Winnebago with a tow-behind Isuzu Trooper, and travels the country, one KOA campground to the next? Or, perhaps, a left-wing activist who grows his remaining hair into a stringy gray ponytail, wears Grateful Dead t-shirts, smokes weed and drinks kombucha tea, and drives his sticker-covered Subaru from one angry demonstration to the next?

Nah. I don’t think I’m a good fit for any of those, although I don’t judge if they sound appealing to you. I’m still trying to work out what my old-man image will be, but whatever it is, I’m determined to make it interesting, fun, and fulfilling.

I’ll leave you today with this. Just because you have created one or more children doesn’t automatically mean that your best years are in the past and that you must now adopt the stereotype of a worried, grumpy, overworked parent whose remaining years must be lived vicariously through his or her offspring. Sure, your self-image will undoubtedly shift, but you can choose what it shifts to. Be a great parent and a great role-model! Show your kids that being cool and doing cool things is not the exclusive domain of youth! Coolness is where you find it.

OK, pep talk over. Pop a couple of those “Balance of Nature” vitamins, strap on that knee brace, and get out there!

If you have a scowl on your face every time you look in the mirror, and you’re losing friends on social media at an alarming rate, there might be a problem. You may be too political. Here’s a surefire way to find out.

So, it’s Friday the 13th and the election is over. Kind of. But the madness continues. Across America and the world, people are still shouting the same stuff at one another, only with a slightly different narrative and with no less passion and gnashing of teeth than in the weeks leading up to November 3, 2020.

It seems that Republicans and Democrats are two stubborn whitetail bucks who, after banging heads for months, have finally locked antlers and are now in a desperate battle to get loose from one another. Now, those outdoorspeople among us know that in real life, this often results in the agonizing death of both combatants. Just pointing that out…

This has had me worried about my kids, two of whom are now in college. When you become an adult, you are inundated with life choices that must be sorted out. What will I do for a living? How will I present myself to the world? Will I have religious faith and how will that manifest itself? How about sexual orientation? For that matter, how about gender? Am I a girl or a guy? (This seems to be something that people choose, these days, which I guess I’m not quite evolved enough to understand, but that’s a topic for another podcast.)

Young people have to decide where they come down on hot button issues like abortion and immigration and climate change, and this, of course, leads to politics. Am I liberal or conservative or something else? Or should I just ignore the whole thing?

I can see where this must be tough for a young person. If you watch any television news at all these days or scroll through social media, you will likely be led to believe that the world revolves around politics alone. It is all-invasive, creeping over us like an insidious, seething mass of angry kudzu.

Can we escape politics? No. I don’t think so, at least. Even Usain Bolt isn’t fast enough to outrun politics. For me, the more important question is: How political should we be?

OK, that might be impossible to answer, so let me rephrase the question: How do you know when you’re too political?

Now, we’re getting somewhere. Here are my Top 5 Ways to Know You’re Too Political.

As a kid, I was taught that some topics were not proper to bring up in casual conversation. For example, you shouldn’t ask someone how much money they make or how much their house cost. Never ask a grown woman her age. And don’t bring up politics around people unless you are 100-percent sure that their political leanings align with your own. I am amazed, these days, how often folks simply assume you are a conservative or liberal due simply to your occupation, friend group, religion, or some other unrelated identifier. If you are expressing a political view in a conversation with a relative stranger, you’re too political.

I’ve covered this ground somewhat in other posts, so I won’t beat a dead horse here, but it seems that a large swath of social media users have convinced themselves that by repeatedly posting snarky memes, making aggressive political declarations, and trolling Facebook and Twitter like a hungry leopard, ready to pounce on the first unsuspecting conservative or liberal impala that blunders underneath their tree, that they are changing the other side’s mind.

They aren’t. Nobody is changing anyone’s mind on social media. You aren’t. I’m not. Nobody is. Wait, maybe the Russians are. They seem to be pretty persuasive, with their bright lights and tempting bottles of vodka. But nobody here in America is. If you believe you are, it means you’re too political.

I’m under no allusion that friends and even family members must remain on the closest of terms from Day 1 until death. That’s not how life goes. People move in and out of each other’s lives, and that’s OK. However, I personally don’t think that political difference should be THE variable that destroys an otherwise good relationship with someone. Let that be about something important, like sports. If your espousal of a political view is alienating your friends and family — and you know it — you’re too political. It’s not their fault. It’s yours.

If we consume enough media — social, podcasts, television, whatever — and believe that what it tells us is 100-percent true, it’s easy to genuinely view the other political side as evil turdheads who are bent on destroying the world from their lavish underwater lair. Remember, most large media outlets have their own financial agendas, so stirring the pot is how these people have jobs. If you can’t use simple common sense to weed through the rhetoric, you’re too political.

And my No. 1 way to know you’re too political…

Sure, I know politics are important. Of course they are. I think it is our patriotic duty to vote every time an election come up, even if we have to hold our nose to do it. But unless politics account for your actual source of income — like, you’re a paid lobbyist or you work for an elected official or you are an elected official — life should be about other things, good things, happy things. Spending your precious and numbered days forever pissed off over who is in office or who isn’t or what law is still on the books or what law should be is no way to go through life, in my opinion.

Before dementia took over, my dad would devote hours on the phone with me complaining about politics and warning what would happen if the other side regained power, etc., etc. I finally told him one day, “Dad, unless you’re gonna run for office, there’s nothing else to do but to go cast your vote. Now if you don’t mind, I’d rather talk about the kids or fishing or how the Braves are doing.” For him, politics had become close to the most important thing in life and, looking back, in makes me a little sad to think about how much time he invested in being frustrated about it.

My opinion is this: America is still a free country where people can have different views on things, so let’s respect that and move the hell on. If you just can’t do that — sorry… You’re too political.

Every time a national election rolls around, I’m reminded of the kindness and consideration of social media and how I never, EVER, long for the days prior to Facebook and Twitter. Because life was so much worse then and we’re all so enlightened now. No, really.

A few nights ago, Holly and I stumbled across “The Social Dilemma” on Netflix and watched the entire thing without moving, not even to go pee. Have you seen this? It is a 2020 documentary about the rise of social media and its somewhat shocking effects on our American society. It pretty much scared the hell out of me. It also got me to thinking about social media during this election cycle.

Now, as a self-described Doofus Dad and disgruntled well-seasoned male human (that’s code for “grumpy old man”), I have carefully curated a disdain for social media throughout the years, but as a communications professional and entrepreneur, I’ve felt trapped into using it. I mean, how could I not? Being a business person without using social media in today’s world would be akin to the public-address announcer at a college football game yelling through his own cupped hands rather than using the PA system. It would be impossible to be heard and taken seriously. Chances are very good that without social media, you wouldn’t be reading or listening to this right now.

So yes, there are clearly some good things about social media. It’s fun. It can be informative. You can catch up with and stay in touch with old acquaintances, even the ones that you didn’t really hang out with in real life. Social media has created a sense of togetherness that was absent before. The big question is, though, is this a good thing? Were we really missing this togetherness prior to social media? And do the positives outweigh the negatives?

Honestly, I’m not so sure. For those of you who are seasoned enough, project yourself back to, say, 1997. What was life like? First of all, if we had a cell phone, they were for one thing and one thing only: making phone calls. That’s it. They literally did nothing else. So unless you were either dialing a number or pressing the “answer” button to receive an incoming call, you were rarely if ever looking at your phone. Because you weren’t looking at it, you were looking at other stuff, like 1) each other, 2) the outside world, 3) a book, or perhaps 4) a computer screen. If you were looking at a computer screen, it was probably work-related and just a bunch of numbers or words, unless you were playing computer golf, solving a game like Myst, or waiting impatiently for a naked photo to slowly download, I’m told.

Regardless, your personal sphere of influence was most likely limited to your immediate friends and family, coworkers, and neighbors. You had no idea what they were doing on a daily basis unless they told you with their voice, and as far as your old high school and college buddies were concerned, well, you were clueless. But you didn’t think twice about this because why would you? People moved in and out of our lives all the time, but the ones who really mattered were those you interacted with day in and day out. There were Past People and there were Present People and we were all just fine.

Without social media, we were who we were, not who we projected ourselves to be. We interacted face-to-face, so unless you were simply a real-life asshole, excuse my French, you were nice to people almost all the time. Because we were speaking to each other in real time, we had to be witty, sarcastic, hilarious, or profound off the cuff, and those words instantly disappeared into the atmosphere, never to be heard again. There wasn’t a “like” button or a smiley-face emoji; we either liked what the other person said or smiled at them with our actual mouth or both. And then, it was over and we moved on to things that mattered, like working hard to put food on the table.

One thing we definitely didn’t do in 1997 was to constantly try to influence each other, especially about politics. Things were simple. You showed up at the polls on election day and voted. That was it. The only way to try to influence another person politically, short of running for office, was to either talk to them face-to-face or be one of those people who stand on the corner with a campaign sign and wave at people as they drive past. To be quite honest, we usually didn’t know each other’s political preferences and didn’t care to know. As a matter of fact, it was considered to be impolite to discuss politics around those whose views you were unsure of.

But not in 2020 and especially not on social media. Imagine, just for a moment, that we said the kind of things in real life, in a face-to-face conversation, that we say to each other on Facebook and Twitter these days, as it relates to politics. Just think of that. There would literally be carnage in the streets. Everyone would have broken noses and black eyes.

This leads me to my main problem with social media: civility. Remember that thing? Yeah, social media killed it. Facebook and Twitter, in particular, have provided a platform for humans to openly express the worst sides of themselves. Of those two platforms, I think that Facebook is slightly worse because we are — to use an old expression — showing our butts to people that we know, rather than to strangers, like on Twitter. A few weeks ago, for example, I wrote a piece on how I could vote for President Trump, and my story was entirely non-partisan. It was a comment on the changes in our national media, on how the truth is difficult to get at in today’s untrustworthy journalism, and on voting based on your own values. At no time did I try to influence the reader politically, other than to say that for me, conservative values worked better than liberal ones. I didn’t say that one was better than the other for the reader, but just for myself. But in simply explaining my voting process, I unleashed a torrent of nasty and hateful comments from friends — yes, friends — who would never, EVER say those things to me in real life, face to face.

How does this happen? Simple — distance. It’s easy to be a jerk to someone you’ll probably never run into in real life. When I was in middle and high school, if you said someone’s mom wore combat boots (an insult I’ve never really understood) or belittled them or laughed at them, you’d better be ready to mix it up. In my case, that meant a rendezvous in the boys’ bathroom or on the school bus or maybe behind the bleachers at the Friday night football game. There was a word for this; it was called “accountability.” You were physically responsible for what words came out of your mouth.

Social media, especially during an election year, contains zero accountability and encourages conflict at its most vitriolic level. So instead of enjoying photos of each other’s children and laughing at funny memes, half of the Internet is actively pissed off at the other half, everybody is unfriending each other, and we end up right back where we were in 1997, when we had 10 or 20 actual friends instead of 800 virtual ones, the only difference being that we were happy then instead of pissed off now.

Y’know, all of this started when Mark Zuckerberg created an online poll for his college buddies at Harvard to rank the “hotness” of the girls on campus, which I’m sure they were all enthusiastically on board with. So it began with shallow, inconsiderate divisiveness and has progressed … absolutely nowhere.

So for the next few weeks, I’m asking you to do something for me. Every time you feel the urge to ridicule or belittle someone for their political view, step back, take a deep breath, and instead post a video of cats being frightened by vegetables, or perhaps, goats that scream like crazy people. The Internet will thank you, and so will I.

There are a few reasons I named this blog “Doofus Dad” and they’re not all about self-deprecating humor. The American view of fatherhood isn’t what it was during the days of “The Andy Griffith Show.”

I recently realized that since launching the “Doofus Dad” brand some three years ago, I’ve never really given a good explanation of why I named it that. It has been suggested (by me) that large swaths of the population representing literally 10s of people lay awake in bed, fretting over this conundrum.

“If I only knew what Johnson means by ‘Doofus Dad,’ I may be able to actually sleep through the night,” they whisper aloud into the darkness, startling their snoring spouse into a nearly undetectable change of position.

So to keep the marital peace among these vast uncountable (for a baby) numbers of confused citizens, I’ve decided to explain myself.

I was essentially raised by two fathers — my real, biological one and the fictional Andy Taylor of Mayberry. Both Hal, my dad, and Andy modeled for me a tradition of strength, discipline, caring, and common sense within the institution of fatherhood. Aside from the fact that I had two older siblings and the World’s Greatest Mom, I was, essentially, Opie. (I’m making an assumption here that you, one of my 10 readers, are familiar with “The Andy Griffith Show.”)

Somewhere along the way, America’s view of fatherhood has changed, it seems to me. I’m no sociologist, but my guess is that this has something to do with the social and gender revolutions of the ’60s and ’70s. At some point, the tradition of a dad serving as the “leader” of the family has become frowned upon, as if a strong and capable father and equal rights for women are mutually exclusive.

You have to be at least nearing the age at which you start receiving AARP direct mail to remember when dad’s weren’t routinely portrayed as doofuses in popular media, especially TV sitcoms and commercials. Back in the ’60s and early ’70s, there were quite a few shows that featured a single dad, like the aforementioned “Andy Griffith Show,” “Mayberry RFD,” “Bonanza,” and others. In most cases, the father character was usually the solver of problems created by others, and displayed a strong sense of morality and, again, common sense.

But Hollywood began turning this model on its head in the late ’70s to the point at which, today, the doofus dad has become standard television fare. The website www.tvtropes.com lists the “bumbling dad” as its own trope, stating:

Born out of the sitcom dysfunctional family, he’s a deliberate subversion of the standard ’50s father. Now so ubiquitous, the older trope is nearly forgotten.

Although he’s clever at times, he’s not usually allowed to be smart. He’s lazy, gluttonous, and has miscellaneous other glaring vices. His children may love him, but they often don’t respect him. However, he is still a sympathetic character; the source of his charm is his complete love and loyalty to his family, even if the main way he shows it is by fixing problems he caused himself.

Just think about nine out of every 10 TV commercials that you see on a regular basis that feature both a mother and a father; Is the dad solving the problem or creating it? You know the answer. In almost every case, the dad (who is inevitably less attractive than the mom) is creating a problem that his wife solves.

By pointing this out, I am in no way lessening the role of motherhood. I’ve just never understood why society — specifically, popular media — has found it necessary to elevate the role of women by demeaning that of men. Why not elevate both?

Erica Scharrer, a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, wrote this in her recent article “Why are sitcom dads still so inept?” which I found at a website called “The Conversation.”

For our study, we identified 34 top-rated, family-centered sitcoms that aired from 1980 to 2017 and randomly selected two episodes from each. Next, we isolated 578 scenes in which the fathers were involved in “disparagement humor,” which meant the dads either made fun of another character or were made fun of themselves.

Then we studied how often sitcom dads were shown together with their kids within these scenes in three key parenting interactions: giving advice, setting rules or positively or negatively reinforcing their kids’ behavior. We wanted to see whether the interaction made the father look “humorously foolish” – showing poor judgment, being incompetent or acting childishly.

Interestingly, fathers were shown in fewer parenting situations in more recent sitcoms. And when fathers were parenting, it was depicted as humorously foolish in just over 50% of the relevant scenes in the 2000s and 2010s, compared with 18% in the 1980s and 31% in the 1990s sitcoms.

At least within scenes featuring disparagement humor, sitcom audiences, more often than not, are still being encouraged to laugh at dads’ parenting missteps and mistakes.

Wow. So, according to her study, dads are getting worse, not better, in the view of traditional media.

Don’t get me wrong; I enjoy the comedy associated with doofus dads like Homer Simpson, Tim “the Tool Man” Taylor, Al Bundy, and Ray Barone of “Everyone Love Raymond” as much as the next guy. But I also think that this relentless barrage of incompetent television fathers has affected our modern view of fatherhood in a decidedly negative way.

By naming my blog, “Doofus Dad,” I was poking a little fun at this stereotype. All humans are, at times, doofuses. However, I don’t really believe that any one classification of humans is consistently dumb or incompetent, as Hollywood seems to think of fathers.

I often refer to my wife, Holly, as “the brains of the operation” and use self-deprecating humor to make my points, which are usually meant to be entertaining and nothing else. It is perfectly accurate to say that Holly runs our household in many ways, including almost anything that involves numbers, math, and somebody getting a shot at the doctor’s office. But it is also accurate that I am generally viewed within my family as the “leader” of the Johnson clan, and I take that responsibility very seriously. In this way, although I certainly make mistakes, I don’t view myself as a doofus.

I think that most dads are closer to the character played by Tom Cruise in the 2005 big-budget film, “War of the Worlds.” Although Cruise’s character, Ray Ferrier, was predictably divorced (because a strong, successful two-parent family has long since fallen out of the favor of Hollywood scriptwriters), Ferrier was nonetheless competent, fairly smart, and fiercely protective of his two children. Although certainly fallible, he would do whatever it took to keep them safe in the face of a deteriorating world, even at the risk of alienating himself from them at times.

In a more figurative sense, I think this is where we’re at. The Andy Taylors and Hal Johnsons of 2020 are doing their level best to raise highly functioning, moral kids in the face of what often seems like a crumbling, immoral society. Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be easier to fight off giant, brain-sucking, three-legged extra-terrestrials.

This, I believe, is the responsibility of today’s fathers, not Hollywood’s doofus dads.

There are definite advantages to being gainfully unemployed if you look hard enough and make several of them up.

In August 2016, I left my full-time communications job for greener pastures. At the time, I wasn’t certain what those greener pastures might look like, only that they would be greener, whether by a better annual salary, a more fulfilling job, or literally access to a pasture that has been properly fertilized and irrigated, and therefore greener. (Don’t scoff at this. Browner pastures are no fun at all — ask any cow.)

It was the first time in some 13 years that I was not “gainfully employed” by some company or organization. As you might imagine, this took some getting used to, but I easily fell back into my longtime role as a “freelancer,” which is Latin for “doesn’t make money.”

Working from home is different, I admit. It’s not the same as climbing into a nice pair of khakis, driving into an office five days a week, reporting to a supervisor, receiving money on a consistent schedule, and so on. Sure, there are predictable stresses that come along with not having a steady job — annoying things like food, housing, and college tuitions — but since this isn’t a serious article, I will carefully ignore those.

Now more than four years since I was gainfully employed, I consider myself a veteran unemployed person. I’ve “settled in,” as people like to say, despite the fact that during these past four years, I’ve launched two home-based companies and have been busier than I ever was before.

Nevertheless, I now have some serious street cred in the world of not having a real job, so much that I’ve compiled my Top 9 Best Things About Being Gainfully Unemployed. I won’t organize them into any particular order (except for No. 1) because that would be too much like work. And what does “gainfully unemployed” even mean? Simple. These are the advantages or desirable things I’m gaining by my unemployment.

Let me start by dispelling the tired old cliche of the freelancer always working in his or her pajamas. Come on, people! This is an absurd falsehood.

Sometimes I wear sweatpants.

Honestly, for the past four years and counting, I have been dressed in clothing OTHER than some combination of gym shorts, t-shirts, pajama pants, and sweat pants like TWICE, not including church. Once was for a job interview (I didn’t really want it anyway) and once for a wedding, which was lovely and I only had to wear the tie for less than an hour.

You’ve read about those people who dress in formal attire every day to work in their home office, right?

I’m not one of those people.

However, much like a real office, I do require a dress code. It looks something like this:

Sorry. Rules are rules.

Any employed married man knows that superhero, kickass hero, and war movies may only be legally viewed on days when he’s home sick or when the wife is away at a conference. But when you’re unemployed, it’s open season because, um, who’s going to stop you? I watched “Taken 1, 2, and 3” all in one sitting — absolutely guilt-free. I now understand who the “Avengers” are, all except for the guy with the bow and arrows. (I’m still not sure if the “X-Men,” “Fantastic Four,” and “Avengers” are somehow related, though.) Fortunately, I stumbled across “Deadpool” before naively allowing my then 9-year-old to view it and therefore become warped for life.

(Author’s Note: “Kickass hero,” my own term, refers to guys like Liam Neeson or Matt Damon who dispatch approximately 86 head-shaven Eastern European bad guys during the movie and by the end of it, are only slightly winded, possibly with one arm in a sling.)

So, to retain the delicate balance of the cosmos, my wife watches “90-Day Fiancee” and “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” while I’m not around. (Correction: It’s “The Real Housewives of Orange County.” Holly wanted to make sure her smutty, guilty-pleasures show was listed accurately.)

I’ve always suspected that indigenous wildlife behaves very differently on weekdays when they know all the humans are away at work, and now I know I was right. For example, we all learn in elementary school that “nocturnal” refers to animals that are active at night. But now I know that it really refers to animals that are active at night and between the hours of 8 a.m. and 5:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, except for state and federal holidays. This includes all the deer, possums, raccoons, armadillos, and owls in my heavily wooded neighborhood.

I always assumed that they were either sleeping during the day or at least deep in the woods somewhere.

Wrong.

They behave much like the toys in the “Toy Story” movies, springing to life when people aren’t looking. Assuming that I’m still driving off to work at 7 a.m. and not spying on them out of my bedroom window, the wildlife often gathers behind our house at random times during the day to smoke clumsily rolled cigarettes and determine who’s going to eat my landscaping via a spirited game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. (Bigfoot was there one time, too, but suddenly became very grainy and out of focus when I tried to film him with my phone.) During the commonly accepted wildlife hours, they go back to grazing peacefully or flinging themselves in front of our vehicles.

All the cable guys, pest control technicians, and HVAC repairmen are frustrated now that I’m home all the time because it’s ruining their deal, which is trying to make the human race crazy by making us book a “3-hour block of time” during a weekday to show up at our house, and then showing up an hour later. This is their goal because they are all sadistic madmen and women (any present company excepted), but they didn’t count on me working from home. If I need something these days, I simply call the help desk and say, “Sure, sometime between 7:30 a.m. and 11 p.m. for the next six months will work just fine, because I’m here all day, plus one hour.” They hate that.

I honestly believe that staff meetings are simply a way for a supervisor to justify his or her status as a boss. I know this because I’ve been a boss and have succumbed to this urge.

“At the appointed time, we must all sit around the same table with matching chairs, sip coffee, and look at each other. This will take roughly one hour. When we are finished, we will have successfully removed one hour from an otherwise productive day and possibly have scheduled another such meeting for next week.

But just to make sure, we will send around a calendar invitation to confirm the next meeting so that you can use another 3-5 minutes responding to that email and opening your cloud-based Google calendar to make sure it automatically saved itself there, which cancels out the ‘automatic’ part of the whole process. Good meeting, everyone. Dismissed.”

Becoming unemployed meant that I would immediately become employed as chef for my family.

Now, I wasn’t too shabby in the kitchen to begin with, truth be told (don’t try to verify that statement), but suddenly having my afternoons free has expanded my horizons as a culinary genius in ways I couldn’t have anticipated. No dish is off limits, no cookbook is safe. I’m deftly handling complicated things like “sautéing,” “simmering,” “browning,” and “heating up in the microwave.”

Word is spreading internationally among all the best gourmet restaurants: Johnson is available! The calls to hire me as Head Chef are pouring in. Strangely though, these are all restaurants that only serve what my kids call “white pasta” (fettuccini Alfredo using spaghetti noodles); crockpot chili; over-cooked hamburgers shaped like footballs and shriveled black hotdogs; and scrumptious tacos made from a “kit” — but served only on Tuesdays so everyone can gleefully proclaim “Taco Tuesday!”

I used to do this when I was Gainfully Employed, too, but there was a difference; I felt bad about it. Now, not so much. Or at all.

When the rest of the family is crawling into bed, I’m just getting started. I can safely retrieve the Bad For You Snacks I Don’t Want to Share from their various hiding places, kick up my feet, and settle into a good History Channel documentary or jump into “Jaws,” “The Shawshank Redemption,” or one of the Jason Bourne movies two-thirds of the way through, which is fine because I’ve seen them all 32 times.

If I feel really productive, I’ll actually take the time to switch the TV over to Netflix and binge-watch “The Office” until, say, 12:34 a.m. This is roughly the point at which I suddenly realize what an idiot I am for insisting on staying up late and begin the never-ending process of turning off lights throughout the house, putting away the leftovers that have been sitting out on the kitchen counter for six hours and will probably give us all ptomaine poisoning tomorrow, and making sure neither of the cats is trapped in a closet.

And then, I do the same thing the next day because I can.

My wife calls it the “Sunday Night Freak-Out.” It’s the inevitable anxiety that begins to creep in sometime Sunday afternoon and builds to a crescendo by bedtime, ruining all the fun stuff you’re trying to do by continually tapping on your subconscious shoulder. “Hey. Hey. Hey. You’ve got work tomorrow. Your two-day reprieve is almost over and you’re not ready. You didn’t do that thing you said you were going to do over the weekend to prepare. Hey. Hey. Hey.”

Don’t get me wrong. For the most part, I’ve had jobs that I really enjoyed and worked with people who became my friends. But none of that matters, and you know it. The Sunday Night Freak-Out always overshadows all of the positive feelings about work somehow, even when work is perfectly fine.

But now? Not a problem. I greet Sunday evenings with the good nature of encountering an old friend on the street, offering a warm hug and a pat on the back. The Freak-Out simply cowers before me and squeaks away, impotent against my superhuman powers of unemployment.

And now, I present the No. 1 Best Thing About Being Gainfully Unemployed…

(Caution: Slightly Serious Stuff ahead.) For many people I know, the word “change” elicits fear and loathing. For them, to live a comfortable life is to have the same job, live in the same house, and socialize with the same people day in and day out, and I understand that; with familiarity comes security. It’s just not the way I’m wired, I guess because I enjoy the concept that I don’t know what’s going to happen next. I’m a writer, which means I may be learning about or working in ANY given topic or industry tomorrow.

Uncertainty brings with it a world of possibilities!

I’m sure this makes some of you squirm with anxiety (not the least of whom, my wife), but that’s OK. After all, if we were all freelancers, the world would be thrown into anarchy. Imagine all the un-validated supervisors seated at empty conference tables, playing on their iPhones alone for an hour before slinking back to their offices, dejected. The Bunn Coffee Maker and Culligan Water factories would either shut down or be forced to retool their assembly lines to produce sweatpants, creating a boon in the cotton industry. Traffic in and out of major metropolitan areas during rush hours would grind to a free-flowing, uncongested, luxurious, no-brake-needing, 70-MPH Autobahn.

And, as this is an update to a post I wrote only months after beginning my gainful unemployment back in 2016, I can happily report that this dreaded change has, thus far, resulted in two new companies, an epic two-week trek to Mt. Everest Base Camp in Nepal, the publication of two books with more on the way, the creation and release of two weekly podcasts, and many, many wonderful and unexpected memories.

God bless change, and God bless America!

It’s an uncomfortable topic, but one that needs to be addressed, I think. The process of having children simply affects men and women differently — no matter how tight you are with your soul mate — and no greater is this difference than where it applies to shmex, as my 19-year-old son calls it.

What with the incredible challenges and upheaval facing humanity these days — wildfires, presidential elections, pandemics, Supreme Court nominations, and rioting in our cities, just to name a few — I felt that it was time for me address what I consider the most confusing, frightening, frustrating, and divisive issue of all: married-with-children sex.

For most people, sex in any form is an enormous enigma. We all want it at some point in our lives, but excluding the paid kind, the process of getting it is fuzzy at best and impossible at worst. Training is entirely on the job, and it’s difficult to know how well your form is and whether or not it needs work. Much like fly-fishing, we know from magazines and movies what sex is supposed to look like, but the actual execution is usually embarrassing, awkward, and often ends up with something getting tangled or stuck.

I’ve got to hand it to Him, God was clever about sex. He knew that it was necessary to keep His human species in existence, so He made sex pleasurable and addictive, like strawberry Now and Later candy. Everyone would want to get involved, either now or later.

Now, far be it from me to second guess the one Almighty God of the Universe, but when my time comes and I hopefully end up in the good place, I will have some a few questions. Like, what’s the point of mosquitoes and poison ivy? How about wisdom teeth, which we seem to be better off without? Was male pattern baldness absolutely necessary?

I’d also have this question regarding sex: I get the reasoning behind making it so fun and addictive, but couldn’t you have kind of evened things out after the procreation part was taken care of? In other words, couldn’t you have installed an “off” switch in us men — more specifically, us married fathers?

I’m thinking this is a fundamental design flaw. You see, before babies, men and women seem to have fairly equitable sex drives. It’s all fun and games, and the fact that marriage makes it perfectly acceptable should, you would think, ramp up the good times even more.

But after that first kid appears on the scene, things change. In their minds, many women (I won’t say all) no longer view themselves as one half of a fun naked-wrestling duo, and they switch over into mommy mode. Any natural, hormonal urges that once manifested into naughty, Cinemax-worthy, late-night behavior suddenly becomes redirected into making sure that this onesy isn’t too snug on the baby’s bottom or that the diaper bag has been fully restocked prior to a five-minute drive to the grocery store.

Now, there’s no question that mommy mode is the correct mode. Being a mother is clearly a demanding gig and requires full-time attention and concentration unless the parents decide to turn their children out into the backyard to be raised by squirrels. I get this. After careful consideration, I have come out against children being raised by squirrels.

But mommy mode can have disastrous side effects. For some, the sheer concept of remaining sexy and desirous becomes distasteful and, perhaps a little inappropriate, regardless of the encouragement and pleadings of their aghast husbands. As their innate mom-o-meter skyrockets, their once-dominant sexy-wife-o-meter plunges. They are clearly mutually exclusive.

But not in the minds and/or the loins of us doofus dads and husbands. Sure, our paternal instincts of family protection, barbecuing, and the execution of a proper Nerf football spiral are ignited, particularly with boy children, but our sex drives tend to remain at dangerous, pre-kid levels. Nothing in our bodies has really changed between the before and the after of that first kid’s arrival. The equipment, after all, doesn’t know that it’s already done its job and is being placed into early retirement.

“What the hell??” the equipment demands, flabbergasted. “I’m at the top of my game! I signed a long-term contract!”

This is the point at which God should’ve installed an on/off switch in men.

I mean, imagine how nice things would be. A Raquel Welch movie would come on, and we’d be entirely unmoved. An unexpected exposure to the Farrah Fawcett poster would stir nothing in us but nostalgia and the urge to watch “Charlie’s Angels” reruns. Saturday mornings in bed with our wives could be comfortably devoted to sleeping late rather than to … well … not sleeping late.

It’s not that our long-suffering wives don’t gamely try to play along. They do their level best, God love ‘em. If the meteorological conditions are exactly correct and the stars are in proper alignment, a wife may actually initiate sex, although this is exceedingly rare in nature. Recent studies have shown that this phenomenon happens at roughly the same frequency as the appearance of Halley’s comet or the complete freezing over of Niagara Falls. And when it does happen, a husband is often so confused and thrown off, he may simply become paralyzed and unable to function at all.

Again, all of this angst could’ve been avoided if God would’ve simply put men and women on the same page, instead of in entirely different books.

The other problem is that not only do men have equipment that functions well past its expiration date, but they also have very healthy egos. Sure, they understand the whole “mommy mode” thing, but they also want to be desirable to their wives, and the idea of sympathy sex is nearly more distasteful than no sex at all. (Mind you, I said “nearly.”) The almost last thing we want is for our wives to play along while secretly hating the process and hoping it will be over as quickly as possible. I mean, nobody is all-the-way OK with that!

So how is this universal and time-honored conundrum to be solved? Is there nothing that can be done, no flashy “Men in Black” pen thing we can use to hypnotize our wives into forgetting that they have given birth to children and make them believe that they’re 22 again and that their husbands are still super hunky and wear size 32 jeans??

Wow, I now realize that I gave way too much thought to that scenario.

Seriously, though, if I had an answer, I would undoubtedly be a very wealthy man by now. I think that the realistic approach is to continue to work hard in providing for our families, do our best to raise and counsel good, caring children, be as romantic as possible as many days of the year as we can to our loving, long-suffering wives, superimpose a hologram of Brad Pitt’s head onto our bodies at bedtime, and hope for the best.

This is a question I hear a lot these days, especially over social media. People have various reasons for voting or not voting for a particular candidate, so I wanted to make a suggestion on how we Americans should approach the process of casting our ballots this year.

Ah, yes. Good ol’ election time. It’s truly a wonderful season and something I look forward to, kind of like how a dog looks forward to going to the vet to be neutered.

As much as I hate to admit it, there are strings attached to the freedoms associated with American citizenship. In return for living in a relatively stable country where John and Thomas and Benjamin and George and all those other Founding Fathers gave us the opportunity to pursue happiness, we lucky Americans are asked to vote every so often for presidents and representation in Congress and such. Frankly, I don’t think it’s too much to ask.

So, as the husband of someone who worked with international refugees for 21 years, I’ve had a chance to see America from a different perspective. (Mind you, I’m talking about refugees here, not illegal immigrants. Huge difference.) Trust me, if you are an American, you are lucky and blessed — whether you believe that or not — even in 2020. Our problems these days seem pretty bad, I’ll grant you, but they aren’t as bad as watching your loved ones hacked to pieces with machetes or forced to swim across crocodile-infested rivers due entirely to their religious beliefs or ethnicity. This is the kind of stuff folks deal with in other countries, and I’m not exaggerating. I personally know an Iraqi man whose brother was literally eaten alive by Saddam Hussein’s guard dogs because the man was suspected of not supporting Hussein’s government. I don’t mean he was trying to overthrow it; he just didn’t support it. That, my friends, is actual tyranny.

I try to keep this in mind when Presidential election time rolls around. This is usually the worst of times for many of us, and 2020 has ramped that up even more, what with the wildfires, hurricanes, pandemic, violent rioting, virulent partisan politics, incessant MyPillow.com advertisements, and your other basic End-of-Times scenarios.

Not the least of these worries has to do with our American media. For example, I’m old enough to recall a time when we could kind of believe what mainstream journalism told us. Remember that? You could pretty much take Walter Cronkite on his word. He just told us what happened, and we appreciated it. He even assured us that “That’s the way it is” at the end of every news program. Then we made our own decisions on things, and this all worked out quite well.

In 2020, though, the word “journalism” has essentially been replaced by the word “propaganda.” Now I’m a big believer in freedom of speech, but this is different. When I took journalism classes at East Carolina University back in the 1980s, the first thing I learned was that objectivity was the key to good journalism. To be more specific, it is wasn’t objective, then it wasn’t journalism at all. Use correct grammar, construct your sentences properly, and tell THE truth, not YOUR truth. But this isn’t the case in 2020. The word “truth” has become as ambiguous as the word “journalist,” and I can’t understand how the truth can change depending upon the person saying it.

“OK, but what does this have to do with voting for Trump?” you’re saying, slightly annoyed.

Fair question. The problem is, we can no longer have faith in our “truth-tellers,” the mainstream media, because they are clearly no longer objective. Instead, we are forced to base our decisions on, essentially, the flip of a coin. Who do we believe, the Left or the Right? Which candidate is the Lesser Evil? Unless we have a personal relationship with that person — and almost 100% of the American population does not — none of us can really know the candidate we’re voting for. We only know what we’re told.

That brings me back to the original question: “How THE HELL can you vote for Trump?”

Look, I’m under no illusions about the guy. Trump has the stupidest hair in the history of hair. (And that’s coming from a bald guy.) Trump’s skin tone is one rarely found in nature, unless you’re a tangerine or a basketball. He has an odd voice and makes funny faces when he talks. He says and tweets things that are blunt, improper, silly, and unlike any President we’ve ever had. He brags about himself constantly and his wife is way hotter than any First Lady should ever be.

I get all that. I really do.

“So how the hell can you vote for him?!” you’re now screaming at me.

Here’s how, and I’ll ask you to lower your voice, please: because I’m not voting for Friend or Pastor or Role Model. I’m voting for President.

“Yeah, but…”

Hang on. Let me finish. See, as much as it pains me to say this, we have moved past the days when “presidential” meant something, and we have the Internet to thank for that, in my opinion. Prior to the mid-‘90s, our view of a President was presented to us via a fairly believable and unified mainstream media working in tandem with the White House public relations team. Back then, our government pretty much did its work and went on, and the public was none the wiser. Sure, there were scandals and leaks and “gotcha” stories and all that stuff, but that was all small potatoes compared to the modern world of social media, where everybody has an opinion and facts are largely ignored.

The problem is this: Presidents, unfortunately, are people. People are fallible. People have dark sides. They do stupid things and make mistakes. People — even the ones we love most — sometimes fail us, disappoint us, embarrass us, and make us not want to vote for them for dogcatcher, let alone President.

So, I’ve said this before and I’m going to repeat it now. The only way for us Americans to vote responsibly is to vote not for a person, but for a platform. Even though journalism has become subjective, voting shouldn’t be. It should, however, be an objective process of listing your deal-breaker values and comparing those to the platforms you are being asked to choose from, much like deciding on the floorplan of your dream home. What does that ticket want? What does that platform stand for when it comes to the economy, the military, international relations, abortion, civil rights, taxation, individual liberty, COVID-19, Constitutional law, and all the other elements at play? It’s unlikely that your preferences will match perfectly, but which one gets the closest and which issue is most critical to you? Whether or not the name at the top of the ticket refers to a weird, blowhard, orange man with an epic comb-over or a tottering confused lifelong politician hiding in his basement is inconsequential. Both are fallible humans who are destined to lie to us, embarrass us, and disappoint us.

So that’s how I can vote for Trump. Of the two unfortunate choices I’ve been given, his platform more closely aligns with the values I’ve developed over my 54 years on this Earth. If I was voting for who I’d most like to hang out with, I’d probably choose Biden.

I’m not trying to get you to vote my way. I just encourage you to examine your values and vote accordingly. Be a doofus around your wife or your husband or your kids, but not in the voting booth. It’s just not fair to the folks who risked their lives to set up this country or to that Sudanese or Kurdish or Somalian refugee who would give anything to be in your shoes.