We Kept Our Kids’ Baby Teeth And It Was Weird

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. And buy Drew’s next book, The Night The Lights Went Out, while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about soft cookies, sex on Thanksgiving, lingering pandemic angst, difficult last names, and more.

Before I dig into the ‘bag, just wanted to remind you that you still have a chance to win a care package from Penguin of three of my books, including The Night The Lights Went Out. But hurry! The deadline to enter is Friday. After that, your luck runs out and you DIE.

Your letters:

Matt:

I can’t pinpoint the date the jig was up in our house, just as I can’t remember the day I, as a child, realized that the Tooth Fairy was a lie. I think my mom just flat out told me, but that’s not a lock. The Tooth Fairy is always the first domino to fall in the childhood myth genre. First you learn the truth about the Tooth Fairy, then the Easter Bunny, then Santa, and then you learn that American history was all a lie. That’s the usual order of events.

The 9-year-old lost a tooth a year ago and I said, “Now put it under your pillow!” and he laughed at me. He knew I was full of shit. My wife and I have been unreliable tooth fairies over the years, forgetting to put money under the pillow or trying to slip it under without waking them up, only to fail. We didn’t do a good job keeping up the charade, which is why it’s fallen with such relative speed. The stakes with the Tooth Fairy are much, much lower than they are with Christmas. I’m pretty sure the youngest kid also knows that Santa is imaginary as well, but he enjoy the fat man’s payload way too much to bother openly debunking it. He wants the loot. Our oldest kid now helps put out the gifts and stuff the stockings on Christmas Eve now, so we’re already making the transition to them assuming the mantle of Santa for themselves, and in many ways that’s more rewarding than their earlier beliefs.

Now here’s the funny part. I assumed that we had thrown all of the kids' teeth away. I was wrong. My wife actually kept them all in a single plastic container. She opened it up for me and the kids the other day and we were all, including my wife, totally creeped out by the sight of all those little teeth. The statute of limitations of their cuteness had long since evaporated and what remained looked like souvenirs that H. H. Holmes kept of his victims. Throw the teeth away. It’s not like your kids will ever need to chew with them again. They lose one, and then you marvel at it for a few seconds (“Oh wow look at the blood on the root!”), and then it becomes garbage.

Tom:

Let it slide. Everyone is coming out of the pandemic at their own speed. If you’re a Floridian, you spent the entirety of 2020 in a hot tub with 19 strangers and voted for Ron DeSantis to cut off the state’s water supply. If you’re me and your youngest still isn’t vaccinated, you cut loose after you yourself got vaccinated and then got stuffed back into a toothpaste tube after the stupid Delta variant hit. And then there are people stationed somewhere in the middle of those two poles, or people who hid in the fruit cellar in March 2020 and still refuse to come out.

All I can control is what I choose to do. I can’t make other people be exactly as cautious as I demand they be, and neither can you. So my days of being a rona cop are long over. If two bros wanna split a vape at a concert, that’s fine. Maybe they get each other sick for a week or, and this is more likely, they have a good time and nothing else happens. If you’re freaked out that these two will somehow prove responsible for the pandemic lasting into infinity, I got bad news for you about how tens of millions of other Americans have comported themselves over the past two years.

I can’t gnash my teeth over Americans being selfish assholes anymore. It does me no good, and it won’t change anything. And I’m not gonna cry out THIS IS CRAZY! whenever I see two (vaccinated!) people dare to enjoy a normal social interaction. That’s what everyone has been craving since the pandemic began. The thought of being able to live again is what kept a lot of people getting up in the morning. So handle your own shit and let it go.

By the way, the Delta variant is on the wane as we speak. It could come back, or there could be a new Double Crunchwrap Supreme Variant that emerges and resets the clock all over again. But as it stands now, cases are going down, all kids are back in school, young kids (including my own) are about to be vaccinated, and mask mandates are slowly being lifted in places that were never politically opposed to them. I even took my 12-year-old to a D.C. United game on Saturday night. We didn’t wear masks in the stands. No one did (except in the bathrooms, where they were mandatory). It was a great night. I don’t regret it. There’s good shit happening all around you, but it’s easy to get stuck on, like, Nick Rolovich firing himself for Takes instead. I’m probably guilty of steering you in that direction, and I apologize. But appreciate the progress where you can find it.

Steve:

Kershaw. I know QBs and basketball players sometimes have to play with their fingers all fucked up, but their tactile needs still pale in comparison to the average pitcher’s. You just saw Major League Baseball spend an entire season frantically trying to end years and years of gunk innovation. Those pitchers wouldn’t have bought/used gunk if they didn’t prize the right feel for the ball above everything else. Fuck with that feel by a single degree and a pitcher notices. Especially if that pitcher is a big fat chokeboy like Kershaw.

Charles:

It’s Bama, so I would assume he’d be automatically installed as governor if that happened.

Matt:

Your instincts betray you, Matt. John Hughes, who wrote Home Alone, fathered two kids. But also, John Hughes was a remarkably wealthy man who built his career making successful comedies about rich Chicago suburbanites being mildly inconvenienced. So it’s entirely possible that A) he spent his entire adulthood resentful of his children forcing him to wake up at a grown-up hour, B) he made his wife do everything, or C) he and his wife hired a nanny to do all that shit. He, perhaps, was Uncle Frank: an oblivious, anachronistic dickhead.

Or I can be more charitable and note that Uncle Frank says they have to LEAVE the house at 8:00 a.m. Not get up at 8:00 a.m. Leave at 8:00 a.m. Now I am my mother’s son, which means that if I have to leave the house at 8:00 a.m. to go to the airport, I’m getting up WAY before then. I have to shower, get dressed, make breakfast, deal with the kids, check my phone, have some coffee, turn off everything in the house, jerk off, make sure everything is packed, and stare out at the driveway for an hour to make sure the airport shuttle arrives on time. That means I’m up before 7 easily, and I’m making that fact plain to the kids the night before. If you’re my age and you still wanna be Mister Daredevil and wake up 10 minutes before that ride, don’t expect me to be awed. Get your shit together.

Two more fun John Hughes facts before I move on. First, my daughter thought his last name was pronounced HOO-guhs until I corrected her a week ago. Secondly, Hughes was friends with P.J. O’Rourke. If you’re my age, you might remember P.J. O’Rourke as a political “humorist” back when humorist was a word people actually used. And what humor!

John and I never bothered to talk much about our politics. What we did talk about was the 20th century’s dominant scrambled egghead bien pensant buttinski parlor pinko righty-tighty lefty-loosey nutfudge notion that middle-class American culture was junk, that middle-class Americans were passive dimbulbs, that America itself was a flop and that America's suburbs were a living hell almost beyond the power of John Cheever's words to describe.

Jesus Christ this guy couldn’t write for SHIT.

JJ:

I’m certain I’ve used commentating before. Probably because, in my mind, that’s what I envision a TV commentator doing. Anyone can comment anywhere, but commenting for a live television audience? That’s commentation, baby. My personal favorite writer, A.J. Daulerio, just used that word in his newsletter a month ago. I barely even noticed. But now, JJ, I will notice. And I will rage out whenever I see it.

John:

Not if the ref is Carl Cheffers, he can’t.

HALFTIME!

Joe:

Thanks to Joe, I just realized that I myself have never gotten laid on Thanksgiving. WELL THAT CHANGES THIS YEAR, MY FRIENDS. This year, I’m gonna cook Thanksgiving dinner wearing an apron and NOTHING else. I’m gonna massage the raw turkey seductively in front of my wife. Then I’m gonna hold up its raw neck and ask her, “Remind you of anything else that tastes delicious?” Then I’m gonna insist that we watch NO football. Instead, I’m gonna leave the TV off and play nothing but Jodeci on a continuous loop. I’ll banish the kids to living underneath the trampoline. Then I’ll ask my wife if she wants me “scattered and smothered,” then cover myself in gravy and cream of mushroom soup. And then it’s go time. Gonna be the most erotic Turkey Day you’ve ever seen.

Matt:

It’s laziness. Give or take that first syllable, “Roethlisberger” is pronounced phonetically. It’s not a difficult last name to master. No sports name is. I can say Giannis Antetokounmpo’s full name without much difficulty now, even though I put off learning it WAY longer than I should have. Ditto Tua Tagovailoa. I’ve called Tagovailoa “Tua” years now because “Tua” is a cool first name, but also because it’s a cheap stall tactic to learn a last name that, again, isn’t hard to master. Tung-oh-Vie-LOH-ah. Say it like, three times in a row and you’ve got it. I didn’t bother to do that until far too recently. Treating name pronunciations—especially non-Anglo ones—as an insurmountable challenge is lazy and racist. You gotta put in the work, and even then it’s barely any work at all.

Ryan:

Well, Republicans use those tactics, which is of course why they win things. I remember I was working for GQ once and I pitched my editor on a post on a take where I would say that Obama, who was president at the time, should threaten other legislators to do as they were told or else he’d sic the FBI on them. My editor then reminded me that this would be “illegal” and “evil,” but I still think Obama should have broken at least a FEW kneecaps.

That said, I think less violently about politics than I used to. During the Trump administration, I wrote angry and thought angrier. I absolutely daydreamed about Trump, Mitch McConnell, and the rest all dying hideous deaths, preferably with their loved ones bearing witness. Those people all still deserve the guillotine, but it does me little good to try to make that happen. When I was younger, I fantasized about a shit-talking outsider pulling a Bulworth and becoming president. That actually happened and it was so, so, so much worse than I thought it would be. I also fantasized about Americans storming the Capitol steps to revolutionize the government. Again, that actually happened. Again, much worse than I’d hoped. I didn’t want THOSE people to storm the Capitol. But they did. I can be on the correct moral side of any imagined war and it’ll still be what war has always been.

As for Joe Manchin and his accomplice Kyrsten Sinema, I try to keep the rage at bay. These are undeniably shitty people who enjoy both the lobbyist money and the undue attention they receive from thwarting progress. I would love to hock a loogie at both of them. But I should be old enough now to know that this is how it’s always gone. The government has always been a mess, politicians (even the ones on my side) have always let their constituents down, and progress never happens in an instant. There’s also evidence, according to the Washington Post, that ratio-ing all of these fuckers ends up producing the opposite effect of what's intended. When I pile on a shitty Manchin tweet, my goal is to be like HEY EVERYONE LOOK AT THIS GUY! WHAT A CORRUPT REDNECK FUCKHEAD WHO DESERVES TO GO TO PRISON, AMIRITE?! Data-wise, most people absorb that first sentence when I do that, but not the second. No such thing as bad publicity, etc.

Also, all of the news building up to Biden’s infrastructure bill has essentially been the news equivalent of pre-draft smokescreens. There’s lots of bullshit posturing, and the political press is all too happy to serve up that posturing as actual news. The final bill will be watered down from its rough draft, because that’s what happens when things are negotiated, but it’ll have some decent shit in it if/when it finally passes. And then everyone can freak the fuck out about whatever bill comes next.

Again, the best thing I can do here is vote, donate, and live my values, no matter how corny that last part sounds. If I overreach, I’ll just end up with a politics-induced form of bipolar disorder, which is easy to contract when you have access to every single news item about every painful step that fucking bill has had to take toward its final form. If the only news I got about Build Back Better was its passage, I’d be ELATED. I’d be like OH SHIT THEY DID SOME SHIT, and I’d be content. Instead, I’m compelled to watch the sausage get made in real time and cry war any time an ingredient I deem vital gets left on the kitchen floor because Thrift Shop Karen from Arizona thought it would be super girlboss to swap in a thimbleful of human bile instead. I’m better off not looking TOO closely at how America works. Life is better with my head in the sand.

Cory:

I’ll eat stale Oreos. I have no fear. I also enjoy stale cereal more than the average bear. And then there’s the entire culinary cinematic universe of stale bread products: croutons, bread pudding, ribollita, and on and on. Bread is the king of all stale foods. There’s a difference between stale and rotten. True foodheads (just coined that) know this intimately.

By the way, I’m like Cory here in that I prefer a soft cookie. My wife likes ‘em thin and crispy, but I need those shits soft and chewy. When Keebler introduced their Soft Batch cookies eons ago, I got a little fat kid boner, even though I knew that those cookies weren’t soft because they were fresh. Keebler definitely uses a chemical softening agent with traces of uranium waste in it. I am not deterred.

I also need my cookies warm. Why bother eating a cookie cold when all you have to do is nuke it for 10 seconds to get a whole new cookie? I will wake up WAY before 8:00 a.m. to make this effort. I’m just that brave.

Mike:

It’s never angered me, although if someone COMMENTATED one of their games and said it, I might get pissy. But in general, I’ve accepted the Team USA moniker for pretty much every American international competition. It’s generic, and it brainlessly fills the American need to give every team a proper name, even if it’s a stupid one. If you tell me that “Team USA” is playing on Channel 6969, I’ll be like OH WOW OUR BOYS ARE ON THE TEEVEE! And then it turns out to be an ultimate Frisbee friendly with New Zealand that we’re losing 87-4. I have no one to blame but myself in such instances. As you can see, there are so many things about this country I need to stop paying attention to.

Sean:

You already know I’m gonna say no, so no. You picked the Leafs, you gotta live with them. I have to live with MY asshole team, so I don’t see why you should get a break. Besides, the Kraken aren’t even good yet. Imagine if I had ditched the Vikings for the Houston Texans. Would that have been an improvement? Against all odds, it would not.

Email of the week!

Christopher: