DADWAGON

Yesterday, as many of you no doubt are aware, was April 20th, which according to the High Priests of Wiki (at whose altar I, and my lazy kindred, worship), is a “counterculture holiday,” where druggies “people gather to celebrate and consume cannabis.”

Now, I too went to college, which means I have consumed my fair share of doobage (from the French), but I have long since stopped. I point that out for no other reason than to show that I don’t care who smokes what, and I’d rather smell someone else’s weed than his Marlboros.

But yesterday, as I was strolling through my neighborhood, I encountered a group of about four teenagers passing around a very large blunt (look it up, geek). Standing with them was another teen, this one watching with disapprobation. One of the kids took notice and told her friend “it’s 4/20 day, bitch!”

Such is the state of our world.

Again, no judgments. I will instead leave you with this little tidbit from Sex and the Single Dad about the author’s not-so-pleasant experience with a teenage marijuana smoker:

Let’s jump in the Hot Tub Time Machine and go back a few years…I was dating this chick who ended up being a complete bitch. Her daughter was 16 and proudly admitted that she was a bitch. I’ll call the daughter The Saint….Anyway… around April 17 or 18 I’m sitting in my home office, writing something for someone and she comes in, sits down and says that she needs me to help her with a problem…I told her that I would do what I could and asked her what she needed help with. She informed me that she and a couple of her friends wanted to celebrate 4/20 and she wanted me to supply them with the key ingredient.

“What the hell makes you think I smoke and why the fuck do you think that I know where to get weed?” I asked her. She was unfazed by my swearing and said she wasn’t sure if I smoked or not but she named three of my friends and said that she was 100% certain they did and that I could get some from them.

I looked at her for a moment, trying to decide if she was serious with this request or just being a little bitch. I determined that she was serious and told her that there was absolutely no way in hell that I was getting her weed. If she wanted to celebrate, she had to find another source. What she said next completely blew me away…

“If you don’t get me the weed I’m gonna tell my mom that you came onto me. I’m hot, so she’ll believe it.” WTF???? This chick was gonna play the pedophile card? Not cool, yo! Not cool. I looked at her, asked if she was serious and she said that she was absolutely serious. I needed to buy an hour or so until her mom got to my house, so I told her that I would think about it.

Who doesn’t love kids?

(This is the Tantrum, in which Dadwagon’s writers debate one question over the course of a week. For previous Tantrums, click here.)

Any reader who has been following these Tantrum threads–we know that there are thousands of you, and by “thousands” I mean “possibly dozens”–is starting to recognize my role: that of the appalled scold. Well, I’m staying true to type. I’m not posting a picture of my child here. In fact, you regulars may notice that I don’t even use his name, even though I admit that a little investigation could figure it out easily enough.

Two reasons. One, the Internet is, pretty much, forever. Once a picture gets out into the world, it can’t be un-got-out. Call me controlling, but I don’t like the idea that someone could take that photo and alter it, deface it, place his face in a pile of poo. The genie can’t get back into the bottle, and the smoke won’t go back in the radio. In the most extreme case–let’s say, God forbid, we somehow end up part of a news story–I’d like to avoid handing everyone one of those snapshots that end up in the New York Post.

Second, he can’t consent. No, a child’s permission is not something to be asked for: I am (as we all learn to say) the dad, and what I say goes. But that won’t be true forever, which brings us back to my first point: If he doesn’t want pictures out there when he’s old enough to have decided, I don’t want to have made that decision for him.

But I’ve granted myself one exception, and I know that it has the potential to blow up. I have, in fact, posted my share of baby pictures on Facebook, for relatives and friends to see. I tell myself this is a closed community, one where only people I’ve approved can see what I’ve uploaded, and that’s true. But I also know that half those people—current and former colleagues, freelance writers I’ve worked with—are employees of media companies. If that news story ever does erupt, they know where to look, and they will. Ulp.

In the meantime, I offer one other solution: go analog. Yes, I take plenty of digital pictures of my kid, but I also shoot him, often and far too expensively, with a Polaroid camera. Because a Polaroid picture has no negative and no digital file, it is entirely contained. If you don’t scan it, and you keep the only copy, that’s it. It’s yours. It can’t escape onto the Internet or onto the AP wire. (Polaroid itself has quit the film business, but a new manufacturer has jumped in, and Fuji makes instant film as well.) It’s pricey but also very pretty, and I am slowly but surely assembling a sweet little album of his first couple of years that is entirely sui generis. It was good enough for parents in 1970, and although you can’t e-mail it to the grandparents, it’s mighty nice.

From our polymath friend Pacing the Panic Room comes word of a new documentary that is looking for, I suppose, contributors: One Day on Earth. October 10 of this year (10/10/10!) will be documented from Amazonia to Athens by everything from FlipVideo to those fancy Avatar cameras, I presume, in an effort to capture the human experience in a single 24-hour cycle. More information, and a trailer, directly from his blog.

I can’t quite decide whether this is a video editor’s greatest dream or worst nightmare: trying to cull a movie from thousands of broadly solicited, undoubtedly shaky-cam, clips. And then using that edit to make a statement about the Human Condition. But you have to applaud the ambition.

And I myself was serially changed by those coffee-table books that were in vogue in the 1980s, the Day in the Life series. Editors Rick Smolan and David Cohen would bring together 200 photojournalists to capture a single day in some country or state. They photographed America on May 2, 1986, in the book that I had growing up. It’s a simple construct (repeated for other countries and other decades—and about to be repeated again in May, according to the New York Times), but the photography was rich and extremely appealing. Without putting myself on the couch too much, my exposure to the series may well have something to do with the way I signed on as a writer at a magazine whose real strength, if we’re being honest, is often its photography. On a lot of the stories I’ve written, I remember some of the images better than my own writing (shout-out here to David, Shane, Samantha, Yuri, Keith, Ken, Kadir, Thomas, Jon, Andrew and all the rest: you guys freaking rock).

So my advice: get in touch with Pacing the Panic Room or the filmmakers. Be part of something that looks like it could be pretty cool.