It's not the distance or the destination that did me in. Instead, it's the fact that I used up all of my threatening cliches in a futile effort to convince my children that their continued fussing and bickering was ruining any chance they had for a continued existence on this planet. In response, my kids totally ignored every implied and explicit threat hurled in their direction.
The worst part of the whole thing is the fact that we didn't see it coming. And that's because my wife and I were completely out of our minds when we conceived this trip in the first place. Is it any wonder that we would fail to recognize the inherent danger of traveling without an adequate supply of effective Car Behavior Warnings?
That's not to say that we didn't put any thought into our little adventure. We planned extensively, we just never spent any time thinking about the challenges of taking a long trip in extremely tight quarters with three kids who have enough bottled-up energy to avert the next oil crisis.
In our own defense, all we had to go on was the average amount of cliche usage expended on our normal trips around home. Even under the most egregious of circumstances, there were always enough meaty cliches to scare the peedoodle out of the girls when they were misbehaving. We never even carried around any spares.
But let's face it, folks, when you leave on a 3400 hundred mile trip with your kids, you can chuck all the parenting magazines out the window. No matter how clever you try to be, it's a death sentence that starts with the fraying of the nerve endings and works its way all the way up to blunt trauma of the cerebral cortex. By the time we got to Virginia, my wife and I were both flatliners.
On a trip to the northernmost reaches of the country, you need at least a year's supply of time-honored oaths and affirmations. You gotta' have cliches that mean business - the kind of stuff used during the Spanish Inquisition comes to mind.
As it turned out, we weren't even to the county line before we lost control of the situation. In the middle of a three-way quarrel over a bag of Cheetoes, we panicked and went through everything we had in thirty seconds. After that, the kids had the upper hand.
We tried to recycle what we could, but they weren't buying it. In desperation, I even bundled together a colorful collection of my best cliches and I launched them like a ballistic missile toward the backseat. There was enough heat blowing off my vocal cords to singe their eyebrows, but the entire verbal projectile just bounced off their helmet-like heads and fell to the ground.
I not only used up all my cliches, but my wife's, my parent's, and even a few cliches I borrowed from truck drivers along the route. More than once, I fully expected someone to find our dried up little carcasses somewhere along I-95. And when they did, I figured the kids would still be trying to poke each other's eyes out in the backseat.
So maybe now you can understand why I missed my deadline and how hard it is to concentrate. And before you say anything else, I don't particularly care what all the other writers do. If I have to stop this column and get out, you're going to be sorry. Just try me and see what happens.
I mean it this time.
http://accesswdun.com/article/2002/7/191916