"Diamonds & Wood" is an ongoing series in which music critic Shea Serrano breaks down the 5 hip-hop tracks you need to hear this week.
This Sunday will be Father’s Day. And I’m excited for it. This is exactly how it will go:
Step 1, Sometime 8:30amish
I will be shaken from my sleep by Boy A and Boy B, who will give me a card with their names scribbled down inside of it, a balloon that they’ll ask to keep almost immediately after and some sort of terrible* gift that they made that I’ll pretend is the goddamn Mona Lisa**. The first Father’s Day gift that they gave me was a painting. They were one or two-years-old (their first five years on Earth have all blended together in my brain because I don’t think they did one single thing of true consequence). It was probably the shittiest painting that’s even been. I heard Boy A spent a significant amount of his time painting trying to eat the paint. That’s how nice it looked. Anyway, that’s step 1.
*My dad still has a bunch of the Father’s Day stuff I gave him. There was, like, a fifteen year stretch where all I did was buy him San Antonio Spurs hats for every holiday. I’m not sure how many heads I thought he had, I just know that I wanted all of them to reflect how much he liked David Robinson.
**I picked the Mona Lisa here to hint at some sort of semblance of cultural character. The Mona Lisa ain’t so impressive, really. A bulldozer, that’s way more impressive. I’m saying, if you’ve got a bunch of debris to move, nobody’s calling the Mona Lisa, bro.
Step 2, 9:00am to 1:30pm
My wife will cook me whatever breakfast I want (more than likely it’ll be migas, which is a traditional Latino dish that’s mostly just eggs and tortillas and hot sauce, which I guess is basically every Mexican breakfast that’s not menudo). I’ll eat it too much of it, then I’ll lay on the couch for probably two hours and remind her over and over and over again that she MAXIMUM HAS to makeout with me that evening. She’ll play coy for a bit before finally confirming that she understands. Boy A and B will be running around in their playroom or in their bedroom or outside by the street. I don’t know. It’s not my job to know where anyone is on Father’s Day*.
*What I came to learn about Father’s Day after I became a father: very little of it has anything to do with actually fathering. In fact, outside of receiving handmade gifts from your kids, I’m pretty sure the whole point is to take the day as an excuse NOT to spend time with them. Like, THAT’S IT. That’s the whole reason for Father’s Day. Anytime you’ve ever seen a dad out on Father’s Day at dinner with his kids, it was the wife’s or the kids’ doing. He might’ve looked happy, but he was fucking miserable. Guaranteed. Dads aren’t interested in that. Not even a little bit. Dads want to eat meats and cheeses alone in front of a large television and be left alone.
Step 3, 1:30pm to 2:00pm.
I’ll eat whatever foodstuffs is placed on a plate on the kitchen table for me. I’ll hope that it’s a cheesesteak sandwich, but that will be unlikely because the only place I like to get cheesesteaks from is 20 minutes away and I like not eating cheesesteaks and not having to take care of my children for 40 minutes more than I like eating cheesesteaks and having to take care of my children for 40 minutes. Instead, I’ll settle for anything that isn’t cold.
Step 4, 2:00pm to 7:00pm
I will cease to exist. I will be weightless. I will be little more than an unshapely abdomen in a pair of basketball shorts. I’ll lay on the couch and definitely not move and barely even blink. Paraplegics will have never been as motionless.
Step 5, 7:10pm to 8:00pm
I will listen to Wife as she gets A and B ready for bed (she’ll have already laid down Boy C). She’ll feed them and bathe them and read to them and then she’ll say, “Give your daddy a hug and kiss and tell him goodnight” and I will rise from my stupor and they will give me a hug and a kiss and tell me goodnight and then sprint upstairs to their room. As we’ll have neared the sexy part of the evening, and as I’ll have assumed that watching me walrus around the living room for the previous six hours has done little to encourage her sex drive, I’ll once again begin reminding Wife that she is required to makeout with me. I’ll only ever say the phrase "makeout," but we’ll both know what all* that entails.
*Specifically: kissing, rubbing, oral sex, then intercourse, but only in a position that requires me to do little more than lay there. I’m no Antonio Banderas.
Step 6, 8:10pm to 11:00pm
TV + light flirting + more food, most likely something from Sonic, as that’ll be one of the only places open. She’ll go pick it up, of course.
Step 7, 11:10pm to whenever (but probably 11:45, but maybe 11:20)
We’ll both retire to the bedroom and I’ll thank her for another beautiful Father’s Day and she’ll say something that I’ll translate as “You are the only man I’ve ever truly lusted for,” and then I’ll immediately try and stick my tongue in her mouth.
Malibooyah.
Game time, hoes.
That’s Father’s Day.
1. Big K.R.I.T., "What You Know About It"
Big K.R.I.T. does all the right things.
2. Asher Roth, "Blurred Lines"
OMG ASHER ROTH ISN'T DEAD?!?!?! I HAD NO IDEA!!!!!!
3. A-Trak, "Jumbo," featuring Galantis
Dawg, i have NO idea. I love it though.
4. Freddie Gibbs, "Freddie Soprano"
Dudebros, we were THISCLOSE to having a song by Freddie Gibbs called "Freddie Serrano." God's not that nice though.
5. Joey Bada$$, "95 Til Infinity"
Including this here solely as empirical research. I'm having a hard time deciding whether or not Joey Bada$$ is SUUUUPER boring or just really rap nerd meta, so I figured I'd post it here and then come back in a week and see if he's been eviscerated in the comments or praised up as the next king. It could go either way, I guess.
Shea Serrano is a writer living in Houston, TX. His work has appeared in the Houston Press, LA Weekly, Village Voice, XXL, The Source, Grantland and more. You can follow him on Twitter here.
