Shit My Dad Says

My dad is planning a trip to visit me in the city, and he recently sent me a list of must-do activities:

• Fly kites
• Write poems
• Read and sing to old people at a retirement home
• Go huntin' with Junior
• Beg for spare change and loosie cigarettes in front of Penn Station
• Offer bike taxi rides at Central Park, but just with regular bikes so people have to sit on the handlebars. It's NYC, someone will take us up on it.
• Create our own performance art in Bryant Park that involves us punching each other in the stomach. You friends can take shifts. People must be punchees if they punch (one simple damn rule).
• Sell chicklets and Padre Pio key chains in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral
• Re-enact famous movie scenes in Greenwhich Village (because I think beatniks would like this).
• Camp out overnight in Central Park along side a road, and heat up a can of beans on the fire 'cause: My daddy tole me, look here Mac the best friend you'll have is a railroad track. So when I's 13, I said I'm rollin my own, and I am leavin and never comin home. And I'm lost, I'm lost at the bottom of the world. Sittin by the fire with a busted nose. The moon's the color of a coffee stain, and I'm lost, I'm lost at the bottom of the world.

I am pretty sure he is serious. These are just the kind of activities my family and I do together. When I am home for Christmas, we basically just get drunk in front of the fire place, eat dinner every night at Dontinos, and occasionally we will have a Twisting Competition or throw my cats Fish Taco Fiestas and make them wear sombreros. (Following the Twisting Competitions are always hours of bickering over who won the Twisting Competition. Dad's twisting style, if you ask me, is a little too wild and doesn't even really resemble twisting. Mom's is a little to unenthusiastic. Mine is just right.) I also go on long runs in the woods with my dad, and I go shopping with my mom. We lounge on the couch and watch Lifetime movies.

And when people come to stay with me in New York, I am a pretty shitty host. Every time my friend Patty visits, we dream of doing these awesome things, but we often just sit in a coffee shop and make farting noises or pile into my apartment and play kazoos. When my mom comes, she specifically says, "I don't want to go to any goddam museums. No cultural activities." (She openly "hates art.") We drink, shop, make fun of people, and smoke hookah. And that is pretty much what people can expect to do when they come visit me.

So I guess what I'm saying is, if you want to visit me, you've been warned. (And you may want to brush up on your twisting style.) And I'm also on the hunt for anyone willing to participate in my dad's punching-eachother-in-the-stomach performance art. Let me know if you're interested.