Unwanted Advice

“How to Raise Children to be Selfish Little Assholes”
by Scott Erickson

As a parent, it is your primary responsibility to equip your children with the skills they will need in life. Do you want your children to grow up to be sensitive, honest, responsible adults? Or would you rather have them grow up to be successful?

You are a caring parent who loves your children and wants them to have a full and satisfying life. And by following only a few simple guidelines, you can show your love by raising them to be the kind of selfish little assholes that are capable of having a full and satisfying life in today’s highly competitive world.

Examine Your Own Beliefs and Values

Children learn comparatively little from what you say compared to what you do. They carefully watch all your actions and absorb. Think of children as little sponges, with slightly more intelligence. Therefore, the first and most important step in raising asshole children is to be an asshole yourself.

You have to be serious about this, because little children have excellent bullshit detectors and if they perceive weakness the little freaks will eat you alive. For this reason, it’s important to conduct a brutally honest examination of your own motivations for being an asshole.It’s important for you to truly enjoy being an asshole, and not just do it for appearances.

Faced with the duality of personal happiness versus compassion for others, most people seek to find some sort of balance. Screw balance. Remember: You’re not doing this for yourself; you’re doing it for your children.

Be an Effective Role Model

Self-described “caring” parents (idiots) put parenting first, which only serves to demonstrate to their children that the parents have no life of their own. It’s important for you to serve as an example of a fulfilled person who makes things happen. And you can’t be a fulfilled person making things happen if you spend all your time catering to the whims of some little ankle biters.

Resist demonstrations of selfless behavior, which your children might emulate. If one of your children asks you a favor, such as making them dinner or applying a bandage to a severed artery, ask the child: “What’s in it for me?”

Your children need to understand that concepts such as “conflict resolution” and “win-win scenarios” are for losers. Show your children that if they yell the loudest and hit the hardest they’ll never have to settle for second place. Other parents teach their children the importance of values such as courtesy, consideration, and sharing. This is extremely important, because such children are necessary to serve as cannon fodder for your children.

Rewards and Punishment

After you’ve knocked down the waitress who mixed up your order, invite your children to give her a few kicks to know how good it feels. Reinforce the feeling with a reward of candy or a cracker. After your children have learned to associate asshole behavior with a treat, eventually they will perform asshole actions and then salivate in anticipation. Pavlov knew what he was doing.

It’s important to train your children in motivation via rewards and punishments, in order to break them out of the bad childhood habit of doing things purely for personal enjoyment and to satisfy their growing curiosity. Therefore, your children need to understand that success and satisfaction are measured materially. Otherwise your children may grow up to be artists or social workers or something equally worthless.

Good parents know that it’s important to set clear limitations to raise good children. Don’t make that mistake. Limitations are for losers. You are raising children to be winners. Good parents know that failing to set limitations produces self-indulgent, out-of-control children.In other words, your children.

Teach Values

Responsibility helps children to understand that they are not the center of the universe. Therefore, avoid giving your children responsibility. Household chores are to be avoided. If possible, hire maids and gardeners to give your children early experience in exercising power over others. Encourage them to fire a few servants if their service is less than satisfactory, or for no reason at all.

Emulate appropriate heros and role models. Make sure that portraits of people like Bill Gates and the Olsen Twins are prominently displayed. Use photos of Gandhi and Jimmy Carter to line the cat litter box. Your children will get the message.

Utilize the grand spectacle of nature as a teacher. When watching nature documentaries, ridicule animals like deer that just wait around to get devoured by wolves. Tell your children, “The deer are peaceful, gentle, and cooperative creatures see what happens?” Call the deer “morons.”

Encourage your children to form friendships with children that are small, stupid, emotionally vulnerable, easily intimidated, and rich. Set the pattern for adult friendships that will help your grown children to get ahead.

Money and Finances

Absolutely do not teach your children how to manage money responsibly. This may seem counter-intuitive in today’s money-conscious world, but you have to think about your child’s long-term success. If your children don’t learn how to spend it until it’s gone, then your children will never learn the valuable skills of how to con, manipulate, and cheat others who have learned how to manage money responsibly.

Encourage entrepreneurship. If neighbor children earn a few dollars with a lemonade stand, encourage your children to go to the police and tell them that the children’s daddy touched them inappropriately. The children’s daddy will likely settle out of court for many thousands of dollars.

Emotional Damage

It’s important to engender self-loathing in your children, which will make it much easier to loathe others. There’s that expression about the need to love yourself in order to love others. It also applies to hate.

The best way to do this is to deprive your children of pleasure and satisfaction. The resulting self-hatred has a variety of positive benefits, such as the inability to relate to other children, the continual search for scapegoats to punish for their own inner emptiness, and the drive to succeed financially to compensate for lack of self-worth.

Since all these behaviors consist of vicious cycles that reinforce and amplify themselves over time, a little effort spent in this area early in life guarantees asshole behavior for your children that will serve them for their entire lives. Giving your children self-loathing is truly giving them “the gift that keeps on giving.”

In Conclusion

To paraphrase the old saying, “Give a child a fish and that child will be fed for a day. Teach that child to fish and that child will be fed for a lifetime. But teach that child to be an asshole and that child will grow up to be the kind of person who has the power to buy and sell the kind of people who go fishing.”

“Shoplifting: the Anti-Drug”
by Tim Cushing

Being a teen or tween in today’s society can be tough. Between the pressure of school and the demands of family and social life, today’s youngsters often find themselves turning to the incredibly comfortable embrace of drugs.

Good for them, I say! You don’t want to spend the rest of the “best years of your life” stressed out and closed-legged. You’re only young once! Live now, while you still have your whole future to destroy!

But remember, each teen or tween is very different in very similar ways. Some of them are natural-born leaders, willing to lead the pack down the various dark alleys and cul-de-sacs that make up life.

Others are the pace-setters who establish the speed the pack will run, neither leading or following, but rather middle-managing.

Still others will cull the herd, picking off those without proper clothing, musical taste or an older brother who can buy them beer.

The rest will run with the pack, nose-to-anus, following blindly. They are still an essential part of the whole, like pawns in a chess match or civilians in a war-torn but heavily televised country.

With all these essential pieces forming an inseparable and indistinguishable whole, it’s easy to forget those who take the “road less traveled.” In fact, it’s incredibly easy to forget them, as you most likely will never see them again until you’re delivering Pepsi to their multi-store retail chains or detailing their Jag while they get a blowjob from your girlfriend at the nearest Holiday Inn Express.
There are some people from all walks of life (Note: “all walks” = ages 13-19) for whom drugs are not the answer. Surprising, I know, what with all the enhancements, side effects and crippling withdrawal that drugs have to offer.

For some, the thrill comes from skirting the law. It may start with random jaywalking or curfew violations. From there they may move on to cheating on their finals or entering false information on their Census forms, always seeking a new “high” or “rush” or “other co-opted drug metaphor.”

Before they know it (which is most likely before you know it, especially if you’re the victim), they’ve fallen into a life of petty crime, filled with illegal football pools and un-itemized deductions. It’s as if they can’t stop themselves. Soon their auto insurance has lapsed and they’re carelessly smoking well within the confines of the 200-foot “No Smoking” zone.

If this goes unchecked long enough, these low-level thugs will have clawed their way to the top of the criminal heap using that most heinous of misdemeanors: shoplifting.

It’s now a very dim future for these malcontents as they travel down a lonely, yet heavily populated, road to ruin.

Watch for these warning signs:
– Heavy clothing during warm months.
– Heavy clothing during cold months.
– Heavy clothing during promiscuous, meaningless sex.
– A sudden increase of small items and knickknacks with no verifiable income increase.
– A sudden detainment for shoplifting.
– Incessant humming of Jane’s Addiction’s hit, “Been Caught Stealing.”
– Your Father’s Day gifts include a caseless DVD, 16 Bic lighters, a laser penlight, 12 assorted packs of unpopular gum and a deck of cards.

It’s not too late! Grab your teen or tween (gently and appropriately, of course) and set them back on the drug path, with its relative safety in numbers and proven track record of lazy ineptness and occasional home invasions. Remind Grandma to put the Oxy-Contin in the gun safe.

Remember: You can’t prevent drugs from being the problem. You can only prevent them from being the solution.

“Chicken and Waffles”
by Dewan Gibson

She cooked fried chicken for ME, filled and refilled MY wine glass and thanked ME for coming over. I couldn’t believe it. She was different. I thought to myself, “Thank me? Shit! All I did was come over and eat and drink and crack a corny joke or two.”

Well, I also did something else. But even that, though full of effort, was just short and intense- like a preview for a suspense film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and probably not worthy of thanks.

“So no!”  I thought. “Thank you!”

Fast-forward months later: past the laughs, drinks, long talks, tears, movies, lunches, dinners and everything else you do with your better half.

Again she stood in the kitchen, having just made fried chicken. We sat on the bar stools and began to eat. I splashed hot sauce on the chicken. She hated when I did that without first tasting the food. But I couldn’t help it. Hot sauce is a part of my culture, black American culture. We sneak that shit into the movies and put it on popcorn. Shit, I have an uncle that sprinkles it on pumpkin pie every Thanksgiving.  Man, put it like this:  I even know a divorced black couple who litigated over who gets to keep the big bottle of Louisiana Hot Sauce from Costco.

Wife got it, husband is appealing to the Supreme Court.  Justice Clarence Thomas has recused himself from the case.

Anyway, before going to town on the chicken I asked her, “How was your day?”

Without hesitation or reflection she answered, “It was crazy! I’m pregnant.”

I did what I always do when I’m speechless.  I laughed. I thought, “Well, I don’t think she got pregnant at work today so . . . oh I get it!” I laughed some more and then I said, “Cool . . . that’s crazy. Wow.”

She stared, worried, attempting to read my nonverbals. I said, “Wow . . . . no it’s fine. Cool.”  She looked relieved that I wasn’t going to leave her and run back to Cleveland, pay no child support and have the audacity to make rap songs about how the mother of my child is tripping. Songs with titles like, “In Maury We Trust” and “Half on a Baby, But You Pay for His Lil’ Ass.”

I’m sure there was more conversation, but it’s now a blur. This is crazy because the only other time I recall blanking out is when Mama forced me to cut off my rat tail. Or maybe that time in elementary school when I won the Monopoly tournament. I also drew a blank when the sixth grade bully, who happened to be a girl, beat me up. But I don’t like to speak on that. What I’m saying is that this was some hellafied life-changing news!

I gathered my thoughts and went right back to throwing down on that fried chicken. The tension was gone and I felt excited about having such an adorable little tax credit. So much so that I spread my legs and imitated a woman in labor, just so she knew that I understood what she would be going through. I guess.

Then I called my parents and gave them the news they’ve been waiting for since I hit puberty.

Mom was in disbelief about the pregnancy, but said she didn’t want to get her hopes up until we got closer to the due date. I assured her that neither Planned Parenthood nor $300 would be involved in any of this. Not even if they end up starting that special “No Interest, No Baby” nine-month financing plan I heard they were planning to implement in minority neighborhoods.

I told Dad and he was pumped, too. He even gave great advice, specifically, “Don’t give that baby no black name like we gave y’all. Dewan, LaShaunta, Durrell- just making up shit and we don’t even know what it means.”

The next few hours and days were spent telling friends. Responses ranged from surprise and congratulations to “Man, we have to kick it hard before the baby comes.”One really smart friend asked, “How’d you get her pregnant?” He has a couple kids himself.

I also asked a friend, who has four kids, for parenting tips. He responded by bringing his hands together to form a large circle and saying, “You gotta wait at least six months for that muthafucka to ratchet back down. You gonna wanna hit it right away, but that muthafucka gotta ratchet back.”

I tried to clarify that I was asking about parenting tips, not vaginal elasticity. Then he said, “I know, nigga. But the relationship wit the mama is the key. Once that muthafucka ratchet back down, you gone be cool.”

The circle was now made with his index finger and thumb. It was tiny, like a snake’s pussy.

“OK . . . thanks . . . so it gotta ratchet back down, huh?”

Then the advice started pouring in from everyone. “Just ask for Pampers at the baby shower.” “Read to the baby so he can talk when he’s real little, like Baby Jesus did.” “Teach him not to call anyone if they’re already having a good text message conversation.”

It all started to feel a bit overwhelming, and I hadn’t even had the chance to (watch the mother) change a diaper. Damn!

But then I calmed down. Where can we possibly go wrong? The baby will have a sane and loving mother of high moral quality and a peculiar father who has trouble expressing emotion verbally, but will be sure to show the illiterate baby lots of love through his writing. Damn.

I guess we’ll figure it all out in due time. Probably over a plate of fried chicken. With hot sauce.