The Death of Cool

You have reached the “Always Home and Uncool” blog.

Kevin Uncool can’t come to the blog right now, so fellow at-home dad Ron Mattocks (the Clark Kent’s Lunchbox blog, the hilarious book Sugar Milk) will be subbing today with a probing tale about the probing of his tail. Maybe.

Beeeeeeeeep.

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This week I had a checkup with my gastroenterologist. It’s been several years and I figured it was time. Or, in other words, he shut off my prescription refills until I scheduled an appointment.

As we headed out to the his office, my 8-year-old stepdaughter, Allie, asks me, “So, Ron, is the doctor going to give you the finger test?”

What the—

I chalked the question up to her mother who derives a great deal of amusement from coaxing my stepdaughters to interrogate me on all manner of invasive subjects, like say, “the finger test.” Still, I felt compelled to determine Allie’s level of comprehension on the matter. Based on previous experience, I find it helpful to know such things as it comes in handy when filling in the blanks for the girls’ teachers after one of them uses share time as an outlet for enlightening classmate on the gory details of, in this case, their stepfather’s encounter with the business end of another man’s probing, latex-sheathed digit.

“What’s the finger test, Allie?” I asked as if it were no big deal.

“You know,” she responded. “When they take your finger and prick it to make blood come out.”

I chuckled both out of amusement and relief.

“No, sweetie. Not today.” At least I didn’t anticipate one. Still, it wasn’t out of the question either, and I shuddered at the image of my doctor spreading lubricant along his extended pointer finger as if he were squeezing the contents of a ketchup packet onto a hotdog.

At this point you’re either laughing to yourself, screaming, “TMI, TMI,” or shaking your head in disgust over the relative ease with which I willing to divulged the gory details of my partially defunct digestive track. Incidentally, in case you’re curious, no finger tests of any kind were preformed on me; however, it was the physician’s opinion that I needed a colonoscopy.

And there I go again.

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The vast majority of you have no clue who I am and yet here I am guest posting with my proverbial pants around my ankles. Not exactly a great first impression, I agree, but then again first impressions aren’t exactly my forte, something Mr. Home and Uncool himself will attest to after we had the opportunity to meet this past February during CureJM’s participation in the Austin Marathon.

There we sat at a late lunch — his wife, charismatic, personable; his kids, adorable, funny; and Mr. Uncool, witty, intelligent, there in support of a cause bigger than himself. And then there’s me — stilted and awkward, the greasy juices of a hamburger streaking from the corner of my mouth. In fact, were it not for my lovely wife who balanced the conversation out with her natural charm, I not so sure Mr. Uncool would’ve excused himself as soon as the moment presented itself.

This ranks among a litany of occasions where my better half has bailed me out when meeting other bloggers like The Stiletto Mom, and Mr Lady who claimed to “orgasm slightly” after being introduced to the piano bench autographed by Tori Amos for my wife. I couldn’t make a mangy, starving dog come using a dumbbell-size Milk Bone, and yet my wife can induce that special tingly feeling in another woman merely by showing off a few of her prized possessions.

Yes, cool I am not. As alluded to earlier, even furniture retains more points in this category than I do. Want more? I like Coldplay. Not cool. I’m a faithful fan of America’s Next Top Model. So not cool. I got all teary-eyed watching Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. Matthew McConaughey might be cool, but the premise of the movie may have you wondering why I haven’t made an appointment to have my estrogen levels checked.

Thus, I consider it a dual irony that I, an uncool person, am guest posting on a blog advertised as “uncool” by an owner who is so not uncool. It baffles me further to be invited to guest post after my latest bout of uncoolness.

A few weeks ago, Mr. Uncool e-mailed a bunch of us dad bloggers, questioning the validity of a Top Dad Blog award we had all been informed we had won. The catch to such an accolade: the organization bestowing this great honor was a medical transcription service. Exactly. This minor detail obviously warranted suspicion, and thus Mr. Uncool’s e-mail wasn’t so much of a, “is this legit,” as it was a “who do these cats think they’re fooling.”

I was already familiar with this scam. I had posted the award’s badge on my site, not suspecting anything until later noticing a line in its HTML coding directing people to an online MBA program. Further investigation revealed this coding gets your site flagged by Google as a spam site.

So, wanting to earn some “street cred” with the other dads on the e-mail, I responded with these details. Ah, acceptance at last.

Nope. A few moments later an e-mail comes back: “What did Google flag you for? Gullibility?”

Reading this, I envisioned these guys hanging out behind the school doing what cool kids do – laughing their asses off at me. Yeah, you got flagged for gullibility. Ha, ha! Good one dude.

I suppose the lesson in all of this, if there is one at all, is that the worst thing I can do is try to be something other than myself. Admitting to everything above or the unabashed way in which I portray myself in this other thing I wrote (no, no, scroll to the bottom of that post—not the crap at the top), doesn’t concern me. My hope is that if my kids can see how comfortable I am with myself, they will one day reach a point when they shrug off the futility in trying to be what the world says they need to be, and instead, they tackle life as the person they really are.

In the words of cartoon legend, Popeye “I yam who I yam, and that’s all that I yam.” Profound indeed.

Epilogue

As I was finishing this post, Allie walked into the office and sat down. “Hey, Ron, have you ever read the book, The Golden Finger?”

I ignored the question. If her mother was behind this, I didn’t care. My head was still throbbing as a consequence of pounding, Lord only knows how many Zima’s the night before at the happy hour party celebrating my recent promotion to Content and Social Media Director at Clark Kent’s Lunchbox. There might have been karaoke? I may have sung “Dancing Queen” … shirtless.

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Want to do something totally cool? Go here and vote for Cure JM to receive a $250K grant to be used in the fight against Juvenile Myositis. We finally reached second place, now we need to hold this position until Sept. 1!