At Last! I Am the Cool Dad!

But how cool is that really?

Growing up, I was asthmatic, poorly dressed, scared of girls, and obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons at a time and a place where that was not in any way a social boost. Still, even the saddest social disaster has dreams of becoming less disastrous. It didn’t really happen in my teens (the scared of girls thing). Nor did it happen in early adulthood, as my artistic efforts of various sorts failed to impress anyone in particular. But even so, I thought my time was coming. If I couldn’t be a cool kid, or a cool young man, maybe, just maybe, I could come into my own as a cool dad.

And I did! I am the cool dad. I am Crispin Glover at the end of Back to the Future, but cooler, because that movie thought being rich is what makes you cool, and since we are not rich, we know that’s not true.

There’s only one problem. Being a cool dad, it turns, isn’t that cool.