Oh the frustrations! A tongue-tied kid, wanting badly for wit, timing, and bravado, I never could say the right things to the girls, the toughs, the parents, nobody. Yet as I mature, one by one the missed zingers crystallize. Great spaghetti monster, grant me the power to go back! Permit my return to the most frustrated and botched of childhood conflicts, and I will emerge the imaginary verbal victor.

Childhood Conflicts Re-imagined After 3 Semesters at Reed College:

Clean Your Room!

Dad:    Clean your room!

Me:      Later. I’m doing something.

Dad:    Yes, you are doing something and it’s called cleaning your room.

Me:      Cleaning this room? Given the regressive gender roles in this house, I assumed that Mom would just add my room and laundry to the cleaning she does for you.

Dad:    Watch it. She’s busy preparing dinner; the Robinsons will be here within the hour.

Me:      House guest, in an hour? Will she have time to iron her most   festive Burqa?

Dad:    You’re the one who ought to hide his little face in shame. Your mother is worried sick Gene Robinson will see this sty of a room and have the house condemned. He works for the city.

Me:      Really? Your guest plans to tour my room? Why? So he can report back to the council that we’re in compliance with the regime?

Dad:    Save the theatrics – showing guests around one’s home is a normal, polite social convention. Which is more than I can say about the smell in here, what is that?

Me:      Mussolini couldn’t have said it better himself. Maybe Mom should iron one of your brown shirts while she’s at it.

Dad:    …it’s like cheese, but I definitely don’t want to eat it – is it coming from your feet?

Me:      So you’re sure he’s coming up here? Does that not strike you as sick? You offer this Gene Robinson a scotch, only to have him decline until after he’s done perusing my underwear drawer?

Dad:    What’s sick is living in this filth.

Me:      Does he plan to go through Sheila’s hamper, too? Jesus, where do you meet these fascists?

Dad:    You’ve got a pretty smart mouth for someone eliminated in the first round of the spelling bee.

Me:      How dare you! That spelling bee was a sham.

Dad:    The only sham is that hippie school. Four grand a semester and they can’t teach an eleven year-old to spell the word night.

Me:      I can and did spell it: N-I-T-E.

Dad:    Incorrect son.

Me:      So now you’re a prescriptivist too? That judge was a linguistic Nazi. Countless English speakers acknowledge that N-I-T-E is a perfectly acceptable variant, but he felt entitled to pack them off…

Dad:    I’m about to prescribe a size eleven steel-toed suppository. Clean this room. Not tomorrow, T-O-N-I-T-E.

Me:      Like mop it?

Dad:    Yes genius. Take a mop to the carpet. No, do not mop your room. Just deal with this mess.

Me:      Oh so you mean re-order my room?

Dad:    I mean for you to return this room to the way it smelled when I bought the house, which makes the room not technically yours, since last time I checked I own still own the place.

Me:      Ah, property rights. I suspect you do hold the title to the house, although if you’re going to get all capitalist I think you probably owe Mom big time for unpaid housework.

Dad:    I’m going to owe you an unpaid beating if you don’t clean this room.

Me:      Clean it with a mop? Or re-order it?

Dad:    At least three opened bags of Doritos sit in your sock drawer, but the whereabouts of your socks remains a mystery. And your bed is covered with some sort of magazine clippings. Are you scrap-booking? Or making a collage? Re-order it before I re-order your calendar to permanently grounded.

Me:      Well that’s just it Dad. It’s one thing to make a legal claim on this property and ask me to clean it, although why I should be cleaning your property is a whole separate question, but we’ve established that you’re asking me to re-order my living space. As in, make choices about where certain items go in accordance to your preferences.

Dad:    You prefer trash on the bed and cheese-like smell?

Me:      Yes! You’re asking that I move certain highly-valued artifacts, such as these liner notes on my bed or the panoply of flavored corn chips I’m sampling as part of an experiment, and place them in a location of lower prominence. To reconstruct my most immediate reality so it complies with your perspective. In short, you’re not just asking me to re-order this room, which may be yours, but to alter my very innermost values. Surely that’s going too far?

Dad:    Christ on a candy cane. You sound like a Gilmore Girl.

Me:      Paris or Rory…wait, how did you? Have you been going through my things? I’ve just been watching those to critique the socio-cultural implications of new family…

Dad:    You’ve just been hiding the tapes under your mattress since Season Two. Your poor mother has deluded herself into thinking it’s smut just so she can sleep at night.

Me:      Hey, I think someone’s at the door. I’ll get it.

Dad:    No, I’ll get it. Clean your room now.

Me:      Later.

Me:      Ok, ok: right now. Keep your voice down.

Dad:    Clean.

On the next installment of Childhood Conflicts Re-imagined:

Childhood Conflicts Re-imagined After a Summer Backpacking Europe:Finish Your Dinner!

Mom:   Finish your dinner!

Me:      Finish this dinner?

Mom:   No, the salad bar at the Golden Corral. Yes, the plate in front of you. Those peas are getting cold.

Me:      Ach, the peas. My blunder! I assumed you’d plated these in the Andalusian tradition, as a small dish to share. I hadn’t wanted to seem greedy.

Also coming soon:

Childhood Conflicts Re-imagined After Reading the Complete Works of Thomas Wolfe:Lost in the Richland Mall.

And:

Childhood Conflicts Re-imagined After a Two-Week Voluntour of Nicaragua:Your Poor Mother!