Man In The Moon

So, I’m sitting there with my thirteen-year-old daughter watching an action movie the other day. You know the type, right? The hero is chasing the bad guys, pulls himself out of a horrible car wreck, runs through traffic on the freeway, gets hit over the head with a chair, continues the chase into a warehouse, and then gets shot through the left shoulder inches from his heart. Cut to commercial. My daughter and I both look at other and say, “Uh oh, now he’s mad.”

That’s right, we both said it at the same time. Right then and there, it occurs to me to question the kind of father I’ve become. So I open my mouth to say something, and I’m suddenly channeling Will Smith. You know that trademark backpedaling thing he does where he tries to fix something stupid that he’s just said or done and ends up making it worse and worse until someone has to put their hand over his mouth to make him stop. Well, imagine a white guy doing a crappy Will Smith imitation, and you’ll be pretty close to how I actually sounded as I tried to “fix” the situation.

“Cause…uhm…you know…uhm…when they dropped the helicopter on him, that…uhm…it missed him…and the…uhm…building that exploded around him…uhm…just messed up his hair and…uhm…gave him that nasty cut on his forehead…but, when they shot him…that…uhm…uh… Look, you know that this stuff isn’t real, right? Cause that would actually be really bad stuff to happen to someone, and they wouldn’t be able to just–”

“Dad,” she says, interrupting me. “I’m thirteen, and we’re running out of commercials. Can we go get some snacks now?”

“Oh, yeah, right. We gotta hurry!” And thus ended my brief lapse of parental perception. We cheered the guy through the rest of the movie, watched things blow up, watched him single-handedly take out a small army of bad guys, watched as the authorities showed up too late to do anything, and generally went on about our lives.

Now, as much as I would love to delve into the deeper moral implications of all of this–NOT–my family will be back from the video store any minute with the sequel, and I promised to have a few snacks ready.

Lesson Learned:

Commercials aren’t as long as you think; go faster.

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