You may have heard of this show.
My son has, in the last few months, become entirely obsessed with… whatever the fuck these things are. They come in types, apparently, Water and Fighting and Nonsense and Flatulent and Clown and probably a few others I’m unaware of. And they live in little plastic balls, except for the little yellow one, who won’t go in the ball. And they only come out of the ball when it’s time to fight each other, which they are willing to do at any time and for any reason.
Except, see, they don’t know how to fight. They have no fucking idea how to fight even though fighting is literally the only thing they’re for, or at least it’s the only thing they’re for once they go in the ball. The ones out of the balls seem to live perfectly normal wildlifey sort of lives. So they need people to tell them how to fight. All of their moves have names and they have “trainers” who tell them, step-by-step, how to fight each other. Picture somebody outside a boxing ring hollering at a boxer to “Use Jab!” and “Duck!” and “Use Roundhouse!” or “Use Spousal Abuse!” and you have the basic idea.
The main character is a homeless orphan named Ash. His last name is Ketchum, because his job is to catch all of the Pokémon– to catch ’em— and this show is nothing if not fucking subtle. He only has one set of clothes and his electric rat lives on his shoulder. He literally wanders around in the woods with his friends and looks for other electro-rats and fire-bears and flatulence-sloths and such and he finds them and he makes them fight his electro-rat or whatever and then if he beats them he gets to stuff them into a ball and keep them.
I think. It’s hard to pay attention to if you’re grown.
Then there’s these assholes:
These are… the bad guys, I think? They seem to really want the electro-rat. So maybe they want to steal him, or something, or maybe they just want a different electro-rat to go with their weird horn-cat thing they have, I don’t know. But here’s the thing: there are eleventy fifteen thousand different versions of Pokémon. There’s Pokemon XY and Pokemon Black and Pokemon Silver and a bunch of movies named after individual Pokébeasts and all sorts of shit. And I’m pretty sure these three are in every one?
And every time they show up on screen they introduce themselves with the same rhyme.
I’m pretty sure that this is actually supposed to be happening in the real world. Not, like, in their heads or some shit like that.
Try and imagine knowing these people, and every time you see them they have to introduce themselves with this stupid fucking rhyme. Each and every single time.
These may be the most annoying people in the history of television, and we live in a world with Super Why.
So… four years ago, maybe? my son contracted the nastiest case of hand- foot- and mouth syndrome I’ve ever seen. This isn’t saying much, as I know so little about the disease that I keep insisting on sticking the word hoof in there whenever I have any reason to bring it up. The boy, to be clear, lacks hooves. But whatever he had, it was Goddamned horrible– there were scabs all over him, particularly around his face and his eyes, and he was basically a giant ball of horror and misery for a week and a half or so before it finally cleared up.
The boy’s back in day care now that school is out. This is his fourth day with his new group, which I can only assume has a mess of other new kids in it as well since just about everyone just got out of school. Today was the first day I’ve picked him up, though. As I walk in, he and another boy are a a table playing with a bunch of plastic dinosaurs. He looks up and sees me.
This is what happens when you have a kid who likes books and two parents who really like books but you cheap out on the bookshelf in his room and buy a piece of flatpacked, chipboard junk from Target instead of a proper bookshelf for your kid: one night, as your wife is putting the boy to bed, the fucking thing explodes.
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