“A New Gun Folds Up to Look Just Like a Smartphone”

—Huffington Post, March 30, 2016

Gun that folds up into a teddy bear.

Gun that folds into a bottle.

Gun that folds into a dozen roses.

Gun that folds into a condolence card.

Gun that folds into a conference pass, a baseball ticket, a ticket to anywhere.

Gun that folds into your golden retriever, the usual tail wag. The jolt of
electricity through the tail when you say its name.

Gun that folds into another gun.

Gun that folds into a prerogative, into an absentee ballot.

Gun that folds into a bulletproof necktie.

Gun that folds into rope.

Gun that folds into a grin without a face.

Gun that folds into legislation, and folds and folds again until so thick it
can’t physically be folded again.

Gun that guns into a fold.

Gun that folds into an opening.

Gun that folds quietly.

Gun that folds into a weather forecast, a travel agent.

Gun that folds into a car key.

Gun that folds into a door key.

Gun that folds into a body.

Gun that folds into a mirror,

that shatters.

Gun that folds into a crane, into another crane, into a history lesson.

Gun that folds into an anti-NRA sign.

Gun that folds into a picture frame.

Gun that swaggers into an argument.

Gun that folds into a pen. Gun that unfolds an ink cartridge.

Gun that folds white as paper, that writes its wishes.

Gun that folds its fingers into a steeple.

Gun that folds into a pantry.

Gun that folds into a knife fight.

Gun that folds into a sitcom episode without an ending.

Gun that folds into itself, that becomes more gun.

Gun that folds in err, in human.

Gun that folds into a cell phone; gun that calls your children home.

Brandon Amico lives in North Carolina. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Booth, The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, Slice, and Verse Daily. You can follow him on Twitter, @amicob, or visit him at www.brandonamico.com.

The Poetry Section is edited by Mark Bibbins.

Here’s the one non-terrible thing.

You know what’s terrible? Everything. But let’s focus on the positive: There is a new Eluvium record out on September 2, and here is a track from it. And that’s it. That’s all that is positive out there. Sorry, but I’ve looked pretty hard. This is what you’ve got. Enjoy.

★★★★★ The clouds resolved their unfinished business and yielded the sky to clear and brilliant sun. “Perfect weather!” someone exclaimed, walking up Fifth Avenue. Was it perfect? Could a day in the first week of August ever be perfect? Wasn’t the sun maybe a little hot? A motorcyclist went by. A Miata, faded red, passed with its top down. After the daylight it was almost too dim to see inside the coffee shop. One the long way back to the office, by Union Square, a woman sat with her back against a lamppost, eating a tomato from her hand, with an open box of tomatoes across her lap. The sun dug in under the shirt collar a little. Before long, though, enough clouds had come back to allow a genuinely cool breeze to blow. And then there were just enough more clouds to make the missing sun regrettable—after which, having made their point, the clouds cleared away, leaving a richly lit sunset over a mild and welcoming evening.

A listicle without commentary

15. DILF

14. Boomerang Dad (A.K.A. Classic Dad, model 1.0)

13. Shirtless Dad

12. Dadrock Dad

11. Hot-as-a-younger-man Dad

10. Hapless Dad

9. Jeans Dad

8. Stay-at-home Dad

7. Irish Dad

6. Twitter Dad

5. Dead Dad

4. Coffee Dad

3. Tom Hanks

2. Sitcom Dad

1. My Dad

But let’s talk about me.

In 1995 I was working in an office in Rockefeller Center and the mayor at the time (I don’t want to talk about it) declared it “Tony Bennett Day” in town. A friend of mine called me (on a phone, that was hooked into the wall, from another phone that was hooked into the wall, because that was how we communicated in those days) to suggest that we go see the free mini-concert he was giving outside at Radio City Music Hall. As much as I loved Tony Bennett (and still do) I demurred, on my longstanding principle that doing anything that tourists will also do makes you somehow less authentic as a New Yorker. (I still secretly think this but I don’t let it drive my decisions as much anymore because now that nobody’s afraid of New York it’s almost impossible to avoid them.) “Come on,” she said, “how much longer will we have him around?” So we did it. It was fine. He did three or four songs, mostly from his new album and, of course, “San Francisco.” I’m glad I went. But also, I didn’t need to, because today Anthony Dominick Benedetto turns 90, and thank God for that. If everything works out the way it’s supposed to he’ll be around a lot longer than I will.

Why do we love to poke fun at fathers?

It’s time we had the talk, about where dads come from. We are living in the Age of Dads: “dad” is used these days as a modifier as much as it is a generalized proper pronoun: “dad rock,” “dad humor,” “dad bod.” But what exactly are we talking about when we talk about dads? Dads can’t possibly be a new “thing,” first and foremost because the very last thing dads are is of the moment. Dads have been celebrated, profiled, and explored in pop culture, especially on TV and in movies. This is in part because the shift over the past half century toward gender equality has resulted in some pretty entertaining scenarios for dads — think: Don Draper, Ross on Friends, Three Men and a Baby, Mrs. Doubtfire, Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor, Bob Saget, RANDY QUAID. Dads are eternal; this is why dads are such a powerful trope: dads are self-evident. Dads don’t warrant explanation, but they do invite exploration. Join me.

Dads have never not been in the news, because one of the defining characteristics of dads is that they’ve just…always been that way, for as long as we can remember. It’s an election year, so of course our favorite kinds of dad memes are political in nature. Our current flavor of the week is Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s pick for vice president. Over at The Daily Dot, dad expert and Awl pal Jaya Saxena wrote about the “dadification” of the Virginia senator, whose dadliness connotes likability and trustworthiness. At first, Kaine appeared to be a sleepy, boring choice, with good ol’ American everyman appeal. And then dude opened his mouth, and he became a dad one-liner generator:

I’m pretty sure everyone at that Black church Tim Kaine goes to describes him as “That nice man.” He’s a sitcom dad.https://twitter.com/politico/status/760552561820700672 …

 — @youngsinick

Let’s start at the beginning, i.e., the second edition of the OED:

dad, n.1 colloq.

(dæd)

[Occurs from the 16th c. (or possibly 15th c.), in representations of rustic, humble, or childish speech, in which it may of course have been in use much earlier, though it is not given in the Promptorium or Catholicon, where words of this class occur.

Of the actual origin we have no evidence: but the forms dada, tata, meaning ‘father’, originating in infantile or childish speech, occur independently in many languages. It has been assumed that our word is taken from Welsh tad, mutated dad, but this is very doubtful; the Welsh is itself merely a word of the same class, which has displaced the original Celtic word for ‘father’ = Ir. athair.]

1.1 A childish or familiar word for father: originally ranking with mam for mother, but now less typically childish. Cf. daddy.

2.2 Used as a form of address to a person, not necessarily elderly, other than one’s own father. colloq. (esp. in Jazz talk).

dad, n.3

A deformation of God, in asseverations: now dial. or U.S. (Cf. adad, bedad; also dod.)

A DEFORMATION OF GOD!!!! Let’s just move right along.

We also love political dads in the off-season. In July of 2009, President Barack Obama threw out the first pitch at Busch Stadium in St. Louis for Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game. He received near-instant ridicule in the media, not for his perfectly serviceable left-handed lob, but for his faded, wide-leg, slightly too-short Levi’s. The blue jeans were immediately nicknamed “dad jeans,” echoing “mom jeans” — the high-waisted, tapered, and wildly unflattering denim pants lampooned in a memorable Saturday Night Live sketch in 2004. Obama later admitted “I’m a little frumpy,” but he defended himself, saying “those jeans are comfortable.” (He later implied that Michelle retired the offending pair.) But the public never really let go of the caricature of Casual Obama: riding his bike on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, a dorky All-American dad more concerned about his teenage daughters’ safety than seeming cool.

It’s not like dad jeans were a new concept; indeed, Obama’s jeans looked about fifteen years old. (To say nothing of Bill Clinton or George W. Bush before him.) Two years ago, the New York Times claimed dad jeans were making a comeback, as though they had never left. But what are dad jeans anyway, except denim pants, half a generation out of style, kept in the back of the closet because why would you throw away a perfectly good pair of twenty-dollar Levi’s? But the article was notable more for its tone, “Don’t donate those Jerry Seinfeld jeans to the Salvation Army just yet.” The jeans were almost beside the point, which was light praise of the uncool — the new trend is un-trend. So have dads become cool, or did it just become cool to make fun of dads?

Judging by very recent history, it’s more of the latter. Last year, Scaachi Koul had a short humor piece published under The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs rubric, titled “Dad Restaurant,” which is a “restaurant with a name that will be easy to remember the next time someone asks you where you went for your birthday.” GQ’s video department for some reason featured a day in the life of a “GQ dad” — move aside, dudeitors; now we have daditors. We also have Twitter dads (a personal favorite), which are users who, with varying levels of frequency, embody and/or tweet about the travails and the spirit of dadhood. An investment analyst on CNBC once called Twitter “a tool for dads,” claiming it is more aimed at businesses and older users. It’s a bit simplistic a divide, but Twitter is a space for verbal jokes — brevity and wit — where Facebook is a place for more emotionally earnest content — viral videos, charity, and kidposts. Men tweeting about their kids is forgiven as charming and even humanizing, whereas women have been taught to compartmentalize the shit out of their working lives.

Hey #dadtwitter: on a scale of 1 to like, Randy Quaid, how crazy would it be to drive cross country solo with a 1-year-old?

 — @maxlinsky

As moms and dads begin to share more equal responsibilities, we’ve embraced The Domesticated Dad. And we are in a moment of real celebration, encouraging the flourishing of the dad persona. Last year, a group of BuzzFeed staffers were “The Founding Dads” for Halloween. The Internet is flooded with compilations of “epic dad saves,” mostly catching babies or toddlers with one hand with a beer or a baseball in the other. There’s a real dad magazine and a parody dad magazine. There’s a whole genre of faux-complaint: crying “Ugh, dad!” as a reaction to things that make us cringe, from Drake’s dancing style to Martin O’Malley’s acoustic rendition of a Taylor Swift song. Is it a very gentle way of poking at the patriarchy? Buzzfeed said, “Bridge of Spies is going to be your dad’s favorite movie” (does that make it good or bad???). The bar is pretty low for dad content, because somehow, after all these years, we find it charmingly newsworthy that a celebrity dad should get covered in his celebrity baby’s shit.

I spoke to Jaya Saxena and Matt Lubchansky, the creators of “Dad Magazine,” a series that ran on The Toast that consisted of poorly Photoshopped magazine covers with dad-like cover lines, such as “Thinking About Buying a Boat? (Us Too)” and “Bulk Shopping!” (It was also released as a book earlier this year: Dad Magazine: America’s #1 Magazine for “Pop” Culture). I asked Lubchansky the million-dollar question: Are dads cool?

The two uncoolest things are age and responsibility, which dads both have (even young dads). But also, the coolest thing you can do is not care if you’re cool or not, and dads certainly don’t care! So it’s a tricky middle ground they inhabit. There’s sort of a specific “dad cool,” where they don’t care, they unapologetically like the things they like, and that’s something everyone wants.

But what should account for the flourishing of dads, except the ascension of moms into the ranks of professional employment? Dads discovering and embracing domesticity, in all their hapless glory, have half a century of social progress behind them. They’ve been ushered into a brave new world of interacting with their children on a consistent and regular basis, who can blame them for entertaining themselves and us while they do so? In many ways, dads are not unlike young children, discovering facts about the modern world as they bumble through it. how else can you know the GoPro is filming backwards unless you give it a whirl?

So if dads are the flip side of the mom coin, then how come we don’t make fun of modern moms? It’s easier to poke fun a a man in a house than a woman in an office, but the sooner we can make fun of cringeworthy things women say and do and not have it be considered sexist, the closer we’ll be to a certain kind of quality. Humor should be an equal-opportunity sport, and characters like Leslie Knope on “Parks and Recreation,” Selina Meyer on “Veep,” and Leslie Bream on “Silicon Valley” are just the beginning. Where we’re going, we’ll need a critical mass of women in power. A woman is currently running for President of the United States — we’re close.

Back-catalog sales numbers of note from Nielsen SoundScan.

The definition of “back catalog” is: “at least 18 months old, have fallen below No. 100 on the Billboard 200 and do not have an active single on our radio.”

Dads. Dad music. Dad bands. 1776 copies…America…Dads! Never heard of a band called Foreigner but they were a “rock band” in “the late seventies” so that falls under the Dad rubric. I threw Selena in there at the end because that is a genuine surprise and there’s no accounting for taste, etc. I bet Edward James Olmos owns a copy of Ones!

8. FOREIGNER RECORDS 3,566 copies

10. HALL & OATES VERY BEST OF DARYL HALL & JOHN 3,399 copies

28. CLAPTON*ERIC ICON 2,275 copies

45. BON JOVI SLIPPERY WHEN WET 1,776 copies

45. CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL VOL. 1­CHRONICLE­20 GREATEST HITS 1,776 copies

62. CHICAGO CHICAGO 17 1,623 copies

179. EAGLES HOTEL CALIFORNIA 988 copies

180. ALABAMA THE AMERICAN FAREWELL TOUR 980 copies

181. SELENA ONES 978 copies

(Previously.)

Real life: What is it?

I cannot think of a better way to tell the world that your existence up until now has been one of safety and predictability and an complete lack of curiosity than to ask, about something that even slightly varies from what you have been brought up to expect as the norm, “Is this real life?” You have no idea. Anyway, please stop doing that. Thank you.

In other news, there is this, which reminds me of three or four different things that I love which turn out to be not unpleasant in combination. Perhaps you will enjoy them as well. I certainly hope so.

★★ The temperature had made it all the way down to coolness, till light jackets and cardigans could be seen in the morning. Down in the subway, though, the old heat had not escaped, and soon enough topside the sun broke through and the cool started to flee. The clouds returned, though, to force a standoff. Lighter and darker spells traded off irresolutely through the afternoon and into evening, now and then with a drop of rain in them. The failure to settle into a pattern was settling into a pattern.

And other answers to unsolicited questions.

“The Olympics are coming up. What sports should I be watching?” — Sportsy Sue

I’m way more of a Winter Olympics person. There’s just something much cooler about competing when the weather is cold and there’s tons of snow on the ground that makes those sports seem even more awesome. Like take this tiny sled and go down this track at 100 mph. But the Summer Olympics can be pretty great, too, if you’re following the right sports.

The first week of the Olympics coverage on NBC is usually all swimming and gymnastics. I used to be a breaststroker in high school, was pretty good until someone playfully pushed me off a starting block and I hit my head on the bottom of the pool. Ever since then I have liked swimming less. And Olympic swimming is kind of weird. You win a medal for going one lap. You win a medal for going two laps. You win a medal for going 4 laps. You win a medal for going 8 laps, etc. So swimmers just pile up medals. I know Michael Phelps has won lots of medals, but is he a better Olympian than Jesse Owens, Usain Bolt or Caitlyn Jenner? I don’t know. Consistently being great is very impressive, especially when you put down 12,000 calories a day.

Gymnastics, like Figure Skating, I’ve always found weird. I don’t like watching young women fall off of balance beams. And I don’t like watching skaters hit the ice. The immense pressure that gymnasts and figure skaters must feel makes this not fun for me to watch. It was nice when Kerri Strug nailed that vault. But otherwise I think it’s not much fun to watch people falling. I think they are very impressive athletes, but I am excited about other sports.

Team Handball is one of the most underrated sports in the Olympics. It’s basically water polo without the water. Water polo is also pretty awesome, but most of the awesomeness is obscured by the water. But in Team Handball you get to see people flinging themselves at a soccer-like net, firing a mini-soccer ball at a helpless goalkeeper. I have no idea if the goalkeeper ever stops a shot. I think possibly they must just sometimes get lucky and stop one by accident. So lots of scoring, lots of fighting for position, and lots of splendid aerial hucking of balls at a defenseless person in goal. Will you get to see Team Handball on NBC? Probably not — the US teams did not qualify.

I’m also very excited about watching Olympic Badminton. Last time around there was a giant game-throwing scandal that really spiced-up my interest in this sport. When you throw games to avoid tougher teams in knock-out rounds, that’s my kind of sport. And is there anything cooler than the soaring path of a shuttlecock? I say no.

“The world seems to be going insane! Everything seems worse than it’s ever been! What can we do?” — Worried Walt

I think things are actually pretty OK. There is no black plague going around. We haven’t had a World War in a while. I was pretty sure we were all going to die of Thermonuclear War in the 1980s. That’s been a pleasant surprise that that hasn’t happened yet.

We are certainly more aware of the things that are not OK in the world. Thanks to 24-hour cable news and Twitter and endless political Facebook posts, we know every stupid thing that happens everywhere almost instantaneously.

And, perhaps more than ever, if you want to know how the Political Sausage is made you can watch it as it slowly oozes through the gears. There used to be a glossier package on our bad ideas. American Politics may have gotten a little more brass-knuckled, but there’s just nothing right this moment in the USA that is the worst it has ever been. Except maybe our literacy level.

Some things are downright great. They didn’t have any Games of Thrones back in the day. Harry Potter’s got a new book out. It’s a play, but it’s still Harry Potter. Have you tried Pokemon Go? That is pretty cool, as long as you don’t walk into a telephone pole.

Sure, maybe we have more mass shootings than we’ve ever had. But those are probably a fad. Like planking. Do you remember planking? No, nobody does. And nobody planks any more. We can send naked pictures to each other that disappear after a couple of seconds, put dog faces on our regular faces in photos, share things with thousands of people around the world instantly. My TV is crystal clear. We get to hear all kinds of music instantly, whenever we feel like it. I’m typing this naked on my toilet, not seated at a giant typewriter, pecking away.

So, just settle down. We haven’t been conquered by terrorists, there are no bread lines we have to stand in all day to get like two slices of bread. There’s a new Jason Bourne movie out. Things could be a lot worse. We didn’t get bird flu or ebola, there are no roving bands of radioactive monkeys (unfortunately, yet). What are you complaining about? You feel like you lack connections in the universe? You yearn for a mythical time when everything was simpler? There was no time when everything was simpler.

As you get older you get nostalgic for stupid bullshit, but that’s just because you’re getting soft. Don’t blame the world because you feel like everything is slipping away. Humans live for a while and then die, and before they die they yearn for the good-time comforts of yesteryear. Pull up a rocking chair, grandpop. And enjoy the ride as you bustle towards your own irrelevance. I will probably still be naked on the toilet when you get there.

Jim Behrle works at a bookstore and lives in Jersey City, NJ.