Stupid is The New Awesome

As most of my friends already know, I was sort of ambushed by fatherhood, taken by surprise and forced to adapt as quickly as I can to the new complications and responsibilities and headaches and smiles my little boy brings into my life. While Dash’s mother has no real ambitions in life other than raising him, I have always had a fairly clear idea of a trajectory for my life, where I achieve a certain level of success in a creative field. Right now that field is comedy/film (though in the past it has been theater, and before that, visual arts.) But being involved in any artistic endeavors takes a lot of time and energy. My biggest fear with Dash’s birth was that to be a decent, committed dad I’d have to devote so much time to the kid that I wouldn’t be able to do all the other projects I’m (theoretically) always working on. While my creative output did suffer over the summer and into the fall as I dealt with the massive emotional ordeal of Dash’s impending arrival and the blow of being laid off shortly after he came home, the past couple of months have been a pretty productive period, artistically speaking. A major part of this creative renaissance has come from me killing two birds with one stone, and spending quality time with Dash while filming him for a series of internet videos I’ve started about a negligent father and the hilariously unsafe situations in which he puts his child. Dash loves being in these videos, since he’s the center of my and his uncle’s (my brother Christian) attention. And, he loves staring at lights and we use some big, soft-focus Chinese paper lanterns to light our scenes that he can’t take his eyes off of. He doesn’t feel exploited since he’s too young to have any idea what’s going on around him, much less understand the concept of “camera” or “digital video” or “internet superstardom.” And, I get to feel creative while spending time with my kid and finding inspiration in the very situation I was afraid I would stagnate in— parenthood.

Wow. You’re a new father and you love your son and can’t get enough of him and want to make him the center of everything!? That’s a real deep realization there, Brainiac. That’s so smart, how on earth did it ever occur to you that a parent might be totally obsessed with their baby? You must be some kind of goddamn genius.

When Dash was a possibility but still not a definite, I told my mom that I hoped that as a father I would actually find a renewed focus on my creative endeavors, perhaps feeling that I no longer had all the time in the world to “make it” or whatever would encourage me to work harder at getting it done. Mom laughed ruefully and expressed her belief that my logic was flawed. And yet, I think that’s just what’s happening: I’ve never been good at getting things, any things, even things I was psyched about, done without deadlines. By putting Dash in my movies, he creates his own rolling deadlines, as he grows bigger at such an alarming rate that if I don’t get things produced soon, he won’t be a baby anymore, and therefore no longer fit to star in my “baby in peril” videos. I also think that he’s a positive enough influence on my life to bring me out of my semi-perpetual funk and get me back into a motivated kind of mood.

There are, of course, some difficulties to having an infant star in your films. First, continuity is a disaster, since as I mentioned above, he grows so fast that if you let 2 weeks go by between shooting one sequence and another, he will have already gotten so much larger by the time you shoot sequence 2 that unless you frame the shots creatively, his expanding mass is obvious. Also, to get Dash to act in these videos I have to use the same technique that was used to get Lassie to “act:” If you put a camera on a barely-sentient being for long enough, its face will display the whole range of sympathetic emotions in existence. Then, all you have to do is cut out everything but the one giggle or frown or eye roll you want. Given X amount of time (where X is boundless) and limitless tape, I could make my son (or, say, an orangutan) appear to be the equal of a De Niro or Seymour Hoffman.

Also, though not a major problem so far, evidence is pointing toward my boy being a southpaw. That’s right. A sinister left-hander. I found out recently that my dad apparently would take things from my hands as a child if I picked them up with my left and would switch them to my right to avoid this dark, devious predilection. That’s all well and good for a man who lived with his firstborn son 24-7. But I only spend 3 days a week with mine, and that’s just not enough time for quality control. If he grows up to be left handed, he’ll murder me, just like the prophesy foretold. Sure, it’ll make a man out of him. But it’ll make a corpse out of me. Unless I can do him in first…