Before Daddy says his final goodnight, his magical pitch-perfect daughter says, “Daddy, what do you do after you put me to bed and tell me what to dream about?”
Do It Dad gets a tad huffy, cagy in response to his daughter’s innocuous inquiry, and snaps back with, “I squeeze in some me time, alright.” The reality is, Do It All Dad loved tucking in his firstborn in his old office, which his daughter took over after her baby brother Samuel was born— way more so than hearing his younger brother bemoan, over the phone, how their Dad is no longer into him as much because the old man was burnt out upon hearing about his youngest’s non-stop pity party, knowing he had a cushy restaurant manager job in the city now and was happily married, allegedly when other family-run generational restaurants had become obliterated forever in a post-COVID constrictive universe gone wild.
At the same, tact was never Do It All Dad’s younger brother’s forte. For example, after his second child was born, Art Show USA, his younger brother, calls Do It All Dad and says, “Hey, bro, congrats. Figured I’d call you while taking a piss.” Do It All Dad, always quick with a snappy one-liner, replies, “So glad you could squeeze the call in between doing more bumps of coke into your late thirties, only hearing the last call from the bathroom stall.”
Now, Do It All Dad wasn’t a drug-free monk. Even after becoming a father of three, he took a daily hit of pot downstairs in the garage at night, which was a reward for posting another short story on his blog or from performing a new chapter piece from his upcoming book The Koshterarian Comedians on his Do It All Dad Year Podcast, which he would listen to after a puff of his cherished green. He knew it made his material come more alive, in addition to chilling him out after another day of banging out more sheets of comedy gold in his relentless pursuit to become the star voice behind the remote work revolution and earn some book advance money sometime this millennium, so he could continue to grow closer to his kids and God on the Stay At Home Comedian front, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Still, Do It All Dad knew that cocaine was the most overrated, soul-sucking drug of all time, which played the main role in getting his father addicted to Ambien, knowing how much his younger brother’s ongoing cocaine incidents, including getting arrested, stealing money from their ATM account, being shipped off to boarding school for it, going to rehab, and fucking up every new golden restaurant manager opportunity played no role in Pops becoming the deepest sleeper in the world anymore, either.
Do It All Dad had always resisted telling his parents about his younger brother’s drug woes. However, whenever he did alert them to his younger brother falling into a dark hole of a druggy abyss with no flicker of light in sight again, little bro would resent his big brother’s intervention. This was despite him knowing that only their father could put the fear of God into his little brother during another predictably dark dive into pity party played-out land, again.
Do It All Dad also knew what a manipulative, lying cunt his younger brother could be as a result of being a cokehead for more than two decades in a row and counting. So he was more sensitive than most about the residual damage early teen drug use can cause in families, which never ceases to tear the trusting, binding fabric between family members with relentless precision at the seams.
So when Do It All Dad’s nurse wife started pushing melatonin gummies on his precious Bashert daughter, he got tense immediately because he didn’t want his daughter to develop an addiction to any drug or sleep-inducing vitamin (despite it being all natural—whatever the fuck that meant, because nothing felt natural about a mother drugging her daughter to sleep).
Knowing of his dear Matilda’s effortless, warm, sparkly glow made Do It All Dad feel most alive in her presence, come rain or shine. She wasn’t some deadweight conversationalist snooze who was better off forced to bed prematurely before she bored everyone else to fucking death in the family, in the process.
Now Do It All Dad was applying for freelance writing jobs to keep his marriage together, because the endless sheets of comedy gold banged out for the wild enjoyment of his Do It All Dad Year audience wasn’t paying off the mortgage any time soon, either.
Today, he even applied for a Sleep Niche Marketing Copywriter position which sells sleep masks, and fired off an email to his potential hiring benefactor that read like this: “I’m a great fit for this role because I have vested interest in promoting any sleeping aid which helps my daughter go to sleep without it feeling like the Neverending Bedtime Hour.
“Plus, I hate my wife pushing melatonin gummies on my daughter because it’s a gateway drug for Ambien, and I don’t need my daughter to sleepwalk into my room at night, only to ask me again, “What should I dream about, Daddy?”
” I can only say: ‘Dream about dunking over your younger brother while farting in his face so many times, before the idea loses its forceful funk forever.
“Lastly, I’m a creative, funny writer who loves to sell. Like the late great Joan Rivers used to say, ‘Can we talk?'”
Matilda, Do It All Dad’s daughter, didn’t enjoy Mommy pushing melatonin gummies on her or her younger brothers, either, knowing that she didn’t see her mama nearly as much at night, compared to Daddy. Plus, nothing screams ‘leave me alone already’ than the automatic pushing of melatonin gummies at hard seven, every night.
Little did mama know that Matilda, similar to lipsyncing grace in her parent’s house, was also pretending to swallow the gummy before spitting it out in the trash soon after. Matilda has been doing this routine for almost a whole year now, so her tolerance for melatonin gummies was at an all-time low. This got freaky for her fast, one night, when she forget to spit it out because it was a new brand of melatonin gummy dipped in eucalyptus oil from the faraway hinterlands of the Aussie outback, which had been taken over by Chinese big pharma companies looking to expand past the market for muscle-soothing Tiger Bomb, which is the Aussie football team’s cooldown lotion of choice.
Mama got a good deal on these gummies on Prime Thursday, and couldn’t resist. For some reason, these melatonin gummies were real creepers and didn’t kick in until far later, after Dada tucked in her two younger brothers to sleep.
Mama was downstairs watching the Great British Bakeoff while Dada read to his daughter from their Weird But True book about a ghost tale from upstate New York. This triggered a pleasant stroll down memory lane when Dada said to his daughter, who was resting her head on his chest, “You were conceived in upstate New York—outside of Cooperstown, NY, in a cornfield, to be exact.
“It was the 4th of July weekend, and Mama and I were there to see a Further show (which was the new version of the Grateful Dead). The show was only twelve miles away from the Baseball Hall Of Fame in Cooperstown, NY, which is why I’ve always called you an American-made beauty from the start.”
Daddy gets inspired and asks Alexa to play ‘American Girl’ by Tom Petty. Then, Matilda runs into her room to grab her favorite new American Girl doll, Layla.
Once Matilda re-enters the room, American Girl’s eyes looked more tweaked than usual and she says, “Daddy, do Layla’s eyes look bigger than normal?”
Dear Dada says, “Nothing out the ordinary. Layla still freaks me out whenever I catch her in the bathroom watching me take a piss. I’m just playing—I’ve never had Layla check me out in the bathroom, but you know what I mean.
American Girl Dolls can be creepy realistic, making Chucky look like a harmless Cabbage Patch Doll, in comparison. Then, again, I was raised on Garbage Patch Kids trading cards, so you’d think I can handle an American Doll batting her eyelashes at me with such pronounced real-deal feeling.
“Also, it’s hard to feel like your own man when you’re Stay At Home Dad, Matilda, which is another reason I want you to stay clear of all gateway drugs while your brain is developing, especially in high school. I don’t want you taking any pills besides aspirin; got it?
Now Mama receives a notification every time I make another questionable purchase, before Mama texts me, “Hey, babe, so how was Bride of Chucky?”
Matilda says, “I have a confession to make, Daddy. I took one of Mama’s new melatonin gummies by mistake tonight (meaning, I forgot to spit it out later than usual), and I think I’m hallucinating since feeding my head with melatonin (which my body produces naturally, from concealed darkness, last I checked on Google).” Do It All Dad says, “Let’s put a sleeping mask on Layla so her eyes flickering eyes don’t freak us out as much.”
Matilda says, “Why don’t we just close all the curtains and snuggle? But no guided mediation music, please.”
Daddy says, “I hear you Matilda. Trying to sleep off the acid to Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in my freshman year college was the worst idea of my life. At least we don’t have any distracting, flickering black light constellations to contend with, in here.
“Just know that you’ll always be the light of my life, and if there’s one person on this earth who doesn’t require any form of chemical-induced enhancement to make your magical way of being any more spectacular than you already are, it’s you. You’ll always have me and God in your heart, no matter what.”
Matilda says, “Daddy, what should I dream about?”
Do It All Dad says, “Castles made of melatonin gummies. Before Daddy eats them all to cure his loud man’s disease, so Mama doesn’t get freaked out as much from me blaring too many ‘holla for challah’ chants during my next Do It All Dad Year Podcast, whenever she is home.” Matilda says, “I love the loud you, Daddy. So why don’t we make the castle out of diet cokes and some hidden Adderall pills, instead—not that you need it. I don’t care that you’re naturally louder than Busta Rhymes at a midnight showing of Higher Learning.”
Michael Kornbluth
Do It All Dad Year Podcast Blog 