Why We Suck_ A Feel Good Guide to Staying Fat, Loud, Lazy and Stupid - Denis Leary [21]
Now if you find yourself still hung up on a morals hook here-let's get very specific. We all know that a completely exhausted kid is a kid who still has at least two or three hours' worth of kicking and random screaming left. And the final stretch of random screaming is often the worst-it's the Daytona 500 of guttural effects. After nine o'clock at night-when a kid gets on that endless crying jag treadmill-you will hear sounds emerging from the tiny beast that even Bigfoot would run away from.
I'm talking noises coyotes can't even make. Forget howls. We're talking yowls. Yelps. Caterwauls. Peals of terror so highly pitched that entire shelves full of glassware may explode-not to mention synapses in your own brain.
So if you don't relish the idea of shopping for new dinner plates and coffee mugs while one side of your face is frozen and you are dragging your limp left foot behind you-give the little shit a dose of NyQuil. Or Benadryl. Two great forms of morphine in a bottle that has been so watered down you don't need to have a discussion with a doctor to get it. Just walk into any drugstore or pharmacy and pick up as many bottles as you want. And stop worrying about the side effects-that's why they make CHILDREN'S NyQuil and PEDIATRIC cough medicine. Smaller doses for smaller kidneys and smaller brains.
Why do you think they make these products in kid-friendly flavors? To make it easier to get it down their goddam gullets, that's why. Hey-I think they should chock these products full of all the vitamins and daily nutritional supplements every kid is supposed to ingest on a day-to-day basis and make them taste like every type of food kids love-cheeseburger flavor, Chicken McNugget flavor-pizza, popcorn, fudge-you name it. That way we could feed and drug them at the exact same time and keep them under control for the first three to ten years of their uncivilized, unruly, bad-smell jammed little lives-just long enough for us to get regular sleep and enough free time to do what we want-travel and watch football and read and jerk off. Then-once the rules have been ingrained in their thick-and-only-getting-thicker skulls-we slowly wean them off the baby drugs and up onto the adult doses of antidepressants and alcohol and recreational drugs we adults need just to get through life as it has to be lived.
Now maybe it's the product names that are putting you off. Maybe it's the ny in NyQuil or the dryl in Benadryl. That's a pretty easy fix. Would you like it better if we called them LoveQuil and BenAsleep? Or even better maybe QuietQuil or PeaceQuil. Or just cut right to the chase and name them after what YOU have to gain from putting them into a parent-induced mini-coma: Sexadryl.
When I was a kid-oh yeah, there are definitely gonna be a lot of those types of speeches in this particular chapter-my parents gave us whiskey when we were sick. First sign of a cough or a sniffle or a sneeze or a sore throat and they got a nice hot toddy down your throat. Hot toddy being a cute kid-friendly name for Irish whiskey heated up on the stovetop. Two minutes later we were fast asleep. Supposedly fighting off the onrushing effects of the flu. I don't remember whether my parents tricked us into drinking hot toddies even when we weren't feeling sick but hey-that's another positive example of just why you should be drugging your kids. Twenty, thirty-even forty-five years later they won't remember a goddam thing.
Although I do bloody well remember getting whacked on the ass by my parents and the reason I remember was because it hurt. And whatever it was I had been doing wrong-lying, cheating, stealing, biting, whacking-or all five things at approximately the same time?-I stopped doing right away once they whacked me.
I also have a scar worth about a hundred stitches on my left arm that runs from the bottom of my palm all the way up my wrist-halfway to the elbow. How did I get it? Fooling around