ALL SACRILEGE ASIDE

More important than the Iowa caucuses. More historic than the New Hampshire primaries. More democratic than Super-Duper Tuesday. It's Spike Poll 3! Make your vote count! (It's just off to the right hand side there... a little down... a little further... there, you found it!)



Dear Spike:

I don’t know where I was when I first heard Desmond Tutu speak. I can’t tell you when I first heard U2’s Bono sing. And I’m not sure when my long and tortured relationship with St. Augustine began.

But I can still remember the very first time I heard a Weird Al Yankovic song.

I was in the third grade. My class was out in the playground, standing around the outside line of the dodgeball circle. Mrs. Tillman was leading an aerobics class. She had a big black boombox, in which was playing a mixed tape of Weird Al songs.

I’d never laughed so hard in my entire life.

Granted, I was only 9 years old, but still.

Sometimes you chose your personal prophets. Sometimes they choose you.

I know, it’s all kind of blasphemous, right? I mean over here, behind Door No. 1, we’ve got the archbishop emeritus of Cape Town, who helped end apartheid in South Africa, won the Nobel Prize, and whose ticket for heaven is rumored to read: “Section 1, Row 1, Seat 1.”

And then over here, behind Door No. 2, we’ve got the guy who sang “Dare to be Stupid.”

To wit:
“Put down your chainsaw and listen to me,
It's time for us to join in the fight,
It's time to let your babies grow up to be cowboys,
It's time to let the bedbugs bite.”

But all sacrilege aside, I’d be really thrilled if someday...

... you know, before you fall in love with some talentless bunch of boy band eunuchs, and beg, beg, beggggg me to buy you a $150 ticket to go watch the corporately contrived group of hacks lip sync in front of 25,000 other preteen girls, all screaming at octaves and decibels that even Dick Cheney would concede violate the Geneva Conventions ban on torture...

... your first concert was a Weird Al concert.

And maybe your first date could be your dad.

And maybe we could sing along to “Yoda,” and dance along with “Fat” and laugh as the rail-thin, accordion playing singing comedian from Lynwood, Calif. belts out his version of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody — polka style.

There will be plenty of time, later on, for us to discuss the lessons of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation commission and to debate whether Augustine’s just war theory is adaptable for modern humanists and to argue over who your generation’s Bono is, the way my father and I once pondered who my generation’s John Lennon would be.

And yes, I expect we’ll have some of those conversations.

But sometimes it’s simply best to...

“Settle down, raise a family, join the PTA,
Buy some sensible shoes and a Chevrolet,
And party 'til you're broke and they drive you away,
It's OK — you can dare to be stupid.”

Love,
dad