DADWAGON

You gotta love the Internet.

My three co-d‘s and I launched DadWagon in November with noble intentions: make earnest jokes, raise serious questions, commiserate about fatherhood in New York City and elsewhere. We hoped to get readers to drop by because they like the conversations we’re having here.

And sure enough, we’ve been getting a good amount of traffic. I thought that was because we were, you know, building community.

Actually, thanks to the merciless truth-telling of StatPress, I’ve found that at least some of our success can be chalked up to two words: Bibby Bang.

That’s the second leading search term that brings people to our site (the first is “DadWagon“). Almost a third of the people who reach us through Google do so because they are trying to get a definition for (or watch a well-lubed video of) bibby-banging.

This quest leads them to DadWagon because one of our 160+ posts was my piece about a vengeful brother who posted, on Facebook, his sister’s list of dudes she wanted to hook up with. In passing, I asked about the meaning  of two terms the sister used, Bibby Bang and V-card.

Our readers came through. DadWagon friend Dan P., who has a wife and child of his own and really shouldn’t know as much as he seems to know about teen sex slang, immediately answered that “bibby bang” means “titty bang.” Fair enough; I commend the young woman’s efforts to get some without getting knocked up. V-card means virginity, as in, you turn in your V-card, which sounds a little dry and transactional to me, like passing through a tollbooth.

So there. Are you happy? Now you know what Bibby Bang and V-card mean, and you’ve come to a site written by fathers of little children to find out. Clearly, you think an Internet portal is just another truck stop glory hole.

I am not anti-democratic, though, so in order to keep our randy traffic flowing, here are a few more sex terms the 4Chan crowd might be googling (with thanks to the Nude, the Naked and the Nekkid):

Arsometry: Anal sex!

Cyesolagnia: Pregnant lady fetish!

Shitagidorobo: Japanese underwear thief!

Avisodomy: Breaking the neck of a bird while penetrating it for sex. Oh my god, do you see what the Internet has made me learn? That’s it, I’m done here.

UPDATE: Dan P. is totally right. Just looked at Nerve’s copy of the hook-up list again and sure enough, the word is titty, yet I and half the porn-crawlers on the Internet read it as Bibby Bang. So this poor girl’s flowery ‘t’ is flooding DadWagon with people looking for the definition of a slang term that doesn’t exist. Good Lord, the Internet is an odd neighborhood.

Peter Orszag, President Obama’s budget director, got a little unwelcome tabloid attention this weekend. Just as his ex-girlfriend Claire Milonas gave birth to their daughter, Orszag announced his engagement to a TV-news reporter named Bianna Golodryga. The New York Post put this on its front page, with a lot of talk about his “secret love child.”

Now, I am not going to wade into this seamy story, for the simple reason that the inside of a couple’s machinations is never exactly what it seems. For all we know, the new baby’s parents may not have wanted to be married. Maybe they (or at least Claire M.) wanted a baby; maybe their daughter was a surprise. Maybe the breakup and the new girlfriend occurred in sequence; maybe they overlapped. Maybe Orszag and she agreed to raise that kid jointly in exemplary fashion, separately; maybe he’s a thoughtless jerk who’s onto the next phase of his busy life. We just have no idea. (Full disclosure: Claire and I have met a couple of times, through the informal but tight network that is Greek-American New York, but I know nothing about her life.)

But I will say this: Can we all agree, starting with the New York Post, that “love child” is a term that ought to be retired? Unless you are Diana Ross, you have no business using it. It implies a severe moral judgment, in a country where 40 percent of babies are born outside a marriage. Even if you believe marriages tend to be better places for kids to be brought up–and you can have that argument forever, and neither side will ever win, because you can’t say that an awful marriage is better than a loving single household–eventually you have to accept the fact. Between divorce and never-marrying and gay adoption, we are no longer a culture in which the norm has a married mommy and a daddy living under the same roof, and it’s time to end the tacit finger-wagging. Old habits die hard, particularly among headline-writers at the Post (where the word “coed” also still has some currency, as if most colleges are just now admitting women). But c’mon, folks, it’s time.

When I saw this Vespa rocking horse, my heart stopped. It is just too perfect—how is it that only now, today, this exists? I want it!

But not for Sasha. She can have a blow-up bouncy elephant or whatever toddlers these days are riding. I want it for me.

And that’s because I’ve given up riding scooters. I mean, I’ve never ridden one in the United States. But back when Theodore and I lived in Vietnam, it was how we got around, on our little 70cc or 100cc step-through Hondas and Honda knock-offs.

But when I had Sasha I thought that maybe, just maybe, she’d want me around for the next couple of decades. And, remembering all the near-death experiences I’d had on motorbikes in Southeast Asia, I decided never to ride one again. Or at least, not in any horrifically crowded urban center. On my last trip to Vietnam, almost a year ago, I actually managed to hew to my promise. I took only taxis.

So, fine, I’m going to try and acquire one of these fine rocking Vespas and I’ll rock on, at home, remembering my glory days. If Sasha asks where Daddy is, tell her I’ve hit the road.

I have never played golf with my father. Never went fishing. Went camping once or twice, but never on a hike. Never went skiing, horseback riding, played touch football in the yard (didn’t have a yard), and while I am old enough to have played stickball, it was with the father of the kid downstairs, not my own.

In my household, with my father, the primary dad-kid activity was watching television, sports primarily, and this was something we shared from a very young age. Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden, Keith Hernandez, Lawrence Taylor (why were all my sports heroes addicts?), watching them succeed and fail, were the fly-fishing-in-Montana moments of my youth.

Let me get this straight–I don’t approve. I have tried as best as I could to be active with JP–hiking, biking, going to museums, playing in the park, even just taking a walk. Heck, I even bought a book on learning how to tie knots, so if and when we ever go sailing (I have a buddy who owns a boat), I’ll be able to pull my weight.

I simply don’t want him to think of me as the guy he couldn’t or wouldn’t get off the couch. And yet…

I still like watching sports. This wasn’t one of my weekends with JP, so there was no conflict about my watching a bit of football (and my girlfriend, god love her, actually likes football), so it was no problem. But what of next weekend? And the Super Bowl?

JP, to date, has shown no interest in watching sports. It’s not that he in particular doesn’t like sports but rather that he doesn’t really like TV, which is good. But what if he never likes sports? Does that mean I can’t take him to the Mets? Or that if I don’t want to be my dad, then I have to give it up? And if I encourage him to watch, am I manipulating him into a bad habit?

Oh boy. It’s (almost) enough to make you want to quote Philip Larkin:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
  They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
  And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
  By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
  And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
  It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
  And don't have any kids yourself.