DADWAGON

There are many things I blame Michael Douglas for. I blame him for not just acting in but also producing The Jewel of the Nile. I blame him and for trying to make us think that Demi Moore would sexually harass him in Disclosure. I blame him for glorifying anti-cholo violence in Falling Down.

I would not blame him, however, for the fact that I asked my girlfriend to smuggle me heroin inside an electric toothbrush. But that’s exactly what Douglas’s son Cameron, 31, did in a New York courtroom last week.

In a legal strategy best described as fame-blame, Cameron’s lawyers said the his father’s success as an actor caused the son’s (repeated) troubles. Said Dan Gitnar, Douglas’s defense attorney:

(Douglas’s) serious heroin addiction (stems from) notoriety that is not due to any acts of his own but by dint of birth and a difficult upbringing.

Gitner gets one point for using the phrase “by dint of birth.” He loses many more points for letting a full-grown man blame dope-seeking on his dad. Gitner’s dad, by the way, was a powerful CEO, the former head of Trans World Airlines — but that didn’t make Gitner a drug addict/dealer.

It’s not just drugs they’re blaming Michael Douglas for. At an earlier February hearing another defense lawyer blamed a whole catalog of “reckless” behavior on him:

Not violent, just screwing up in every way — car accidents, motorcycle accidents, tattoos. I think a lot of it had to do with who his parents are.

I don’t know what kind of father Douglas actually was. Am I wrong to assume that any man who marries a woman nearly his son’s age may have had difficulties accepting the task of father the first time around? He admitted to being “no angel” and being absent a lot. But seriously, Cameron, you’re an adult. Leave your dad out of it, unless he was the one asking for the dope.

Speaking of accountability, the courts might want to take a look at themselves. I am no fan of the War on Drugs, but it’s worth pointing out that when Douglas was first arrested in a raid on his room at the Hotel Gansevoort, he was charged with dealing meth. But in short order he was released to house arrest at his mom’s $9 million New York apartment. That’s where he tried to get his girlfriend to smuggle heroin in the toothbrush (by the way, don’t people keister anymore?).

If anything has been troubling Cameron, it might be that the legal system has a double standard for the rich and famous (see lying chauffeur-slayer Jayson Williams, eligible for parole in 18 months). For once, I’d like to see Cameron’s lawyers push a more honest claim in court: Your Honor, my client has been damaged by a lifetime of leniency from starfucking judges like yourself.

Did I sense a bit more ambivalence over fatherhood this week? Although we started off debuting our very first video feature—a trip to the Toy Fair, yay!—and successfully redesigned America’s favorite lethal foodstuff, the hot dog, we spent a lot of time angsting over who our children are and what we’re doing as parents.

The awful truth, as Ted put it, is that our kids don’t particularly want to be around us. Nor, as Nathan explained, do we necessarily want to be around them: Given the right price (say, a cockatoo and $175), we’ll gladly wash our hands of the rugrats. Christopher, meanwhile, was torn between admiration for Yitta Schwartz, a 93-year-old Holocaust survivor with 2,000 living descendants, and criticism of the ultra-conservative religious world she lived in. Make up your mind, Bonanos! Me, I made unnecessary confessions: to wanting to put my daughter in a pet carrier, and to having apparently fathered a celebrity model’s child. Who knew?

But we were also nice and happy! Or at least amused. Like when Dalia had a bad hair day! Or when she wanted to marry her brother! Or when JP out-haggled his dad! Or when Chris caught fancy-pants Upper East Side moms tossing their babies around like cats! Oh, those were funny. Boy did we laugh!

Whatever our individual cares and concerns, we were united, as usual, by the Tantrum, in which we tried to figure out whether to go broke getting our kids decent educations, or let them go to public school and wind up idiots. Either way, they’ll be smarter than we are.

Blizzard permitting, we’ll see you next week…

As Nate said earlier today, it’s a snow day. As a 10-year-old, I would’ve considered that the best possible treat. But when you work on a weekly magazine, you can’t shuffle work from day to day as you can in some places. Deadlines are measured in hours, and not in doses of 24. In our case, most of the magazine goes to press on Wednesday and Thursday nights, trailing into Friday morning. And one of this week’s Friday pages had my name on it, which meant I couldn’t really stay home. Add to that some Web work that I’ve taken on — stuff that was meant to go up online no later than noon, or thereabouts — and my day was no longer my own.

None of this would matter if we were a single-income household, but of course we’re not. My wife’s job is plenty demanding, too, and since she runs a lot of  her company’s finances, and today is the last workday of February, nobody would get paid if she didn’t go to the office. So that had to happen, just as sure as I had to hit (some approximation of) my deadlines.

We split the difference: I worked the morning, she got the afternoon, and each of us hoped a nap might occur during our shift. So far, no sleep this afternoon, and in fact that means… I gotta go. Snow’s just about stopped, and we have no driveway, but I’ve still got to (metaphorically) shovel out.

Nathan’s somewhat mournful post from earlier today (Coors really bums me out), about work and snow and parenting, reminded me of one of my few straightforwardly sincere posts on death (most of my thoughts on slipping the mortal coil are outrageously funny).

As I wrote earlier, one of the teachers in JP’s preschool passed away and the school had made the policy decision not to tell the children anything about it.

Because this is New York and the 21st century, a flurry of parent-email-list hand-wringing ensued. (I hereby decree that any future email sent to me that runs longer than two paragraphs be required to involve my winning the lottery, free Mets World Series tickets — in 2040 — or dirty pictures.) Most of it was critical of the school’s decision; child-psychology theories were advanced; poignant details about earlier death conversations were related in memoiristic detail; and generally the yadda-yadda-yadda flowed.

Then the kids started talking. Now, JP hasn’t breathed a word and, in fact, hasn’t yet seemed to notice that his teacher is gone, which is sad but kind of a relief, as I wasn’t all that keen on explaining the whole meaning-of-life thing to him just yet. But apparently, if the next round of tiresome emails was to be believed, some children got wind of it, questioned the parents, concepts were explained, and a few tears were shed.

Anyway, bottom line is now the school wants to tell the kids. They are bringing in a child psychologist to discuss it, which means God knows what, other than that now I will likely have to reckon with it, which isn’t so bad but still kind of sucks. I’m still not sure what’s better: to explain a difficult concept like this in the context of someone he wasn’t attached to, when the stakes or low, or when someone he truly cares about passes away. No easy answers.