By now you’ve heard of the restaurant owner in Maine who yelled at some toddler who allegedly screamed for 40 minutes at a table.

I don’t want to talk about that. It’s boring. We have no idea what happened. As messed up as it is to squeal at a stranger’s baby (and that lady seemed pretty damn unhinged), it’s pretty messed up to let your kid cry for that long in a restaurant (if that’s even what happened).

What I want to talk about is the “debate” that surfaces between people with and without kids whenever an event like this occurs. In case you’ve been living in a yurt on a New Mexican bluff, the two sides go like this:

1. Babies should not be allowed in nice restaurants because they’re assholes.

2. Babies should be allowed in all restaurants because THEY HAVE RIGHTS even though they’re assholes.

I added the last part.

Anyway I find this debate ridiculous. Well, no. Not really. What I find ridiculous is that the whole thing could be cleared up instantly if everybody could just stop being dicks.

Let’s start with the parents.

Hey parents, How to not be a dick in a restaurant with your baby, toddler, or kids:

1. Remember above all else that nobody likes your kids as much as you do. To you they are special snowflakes. To you they are the expression of your divine purpose. To everybody else they are tiny sticky creatures with unimpressive palates, limited conversational skills and a baffling inability to sit the fuck down.
2. If you have a toddler and want to eat out, maybe don’t go to the tiny hipster joint full of humans too artistically profound to have children. They hate you, your uterus and the mammal it housed. They don’t think your kid is cute. They wish you’d stop ruining the fucking planet. Now pass the boutique beer.
3. Perhaps also avoid the white-linens-only church-vibe restaurant without a dish below $50. Why? Because toddlers are fucking annoying and nobody wants to be annoyed in a $50-per-plate restaurant.
4. I get it. You want to still go to these places. And YOU CAN. On Friday, when grandma has Johnny for the evening. I know you think you deserve all the rights and privileges of those without children. I know. I get it. But check it out: One of the rights of people without offspring is the ability to sit in a restaurant and enjoy themselves. Sure they have no meaning, depth or hope in their lives, but THEY HAVE ENJOYABLE DINING EXPERIENCES. Let’s give them that. It’s the least we can do as superior human beings.
5. Or go to a loud, big, raucous family joint. People that hate children don’t go there. Or if they do, it’s their problem.
6. But don’t let your toddler cry there either. That’s still a dick move. I have kids and I still don’t want to hear yours. I barely want to hear mine.
7. So if your toddler cries or screams for more than a few minutes, TAKE HER OUT OF THE RESTAURANT. This is not rocket science.
8. If you leave a big mess on the floor, pick it up or leave a giant fucking tip. And I mean a BIG TIP. I’m not going to pick up rice kernels on my hands and knees for 20 minutes after my baby (because I used to work in a restaurant and happen to know bussers have sweeping tools for that sort of job), but I sure as hell am going to leave at least a 25% tip. Because I try not to be a dick.
9. Back on topic: Don’t let your kid run around. Don’t let your kid scale the booths. Don’t let your kid throw food. Don’t let your kid scream. Don’t let your kid bang things on other things. If a grown human did these things they would be escorted out of the place and instructed to stop smoking meth.
10. So, as a general rule, do not let your child act like a tweaker.

These are not hard rules. These are easy rules. As parents I think we should be aware of the fact that we are bringing highly annoying humans into a place where adults are attempting to not be annoyed. Unless it’s a family restaurant.

Hey world: DO NOT GO TO A FAMILY RESTAURANT AND EXPECT AN ABSENCE OF FAMILIES.

There’s no boutique beer here, asshole. Only slick menus and chicken strips so leave me alone.

Really it isn’t IF my toddler is going to be annoying, it’s HOW annoying my toddler is going to be. And sometimes that level is so high I just pack our food up and eat in the car while regretting every decision I’ve made in the past 10 years and wondering if anybody would notice if I moved to a yurt in New Mexico.

Alone.

But then I remember that people without kids have no meaning, depth or hope in their lives. Whew what a relief.*

DODGED THAT BULLET.

On the other hand, toddlers need to learn to how to behave in restaurants so they don’t grow up to be the dude I sat next to a few weeks ago who was doing things with his sweet & sour pork and vocal cords that made me wonder if perhaps somebody should intervene.

So hey, maybe restaurant-goers sans kids can work with us here a bit too, and show a shred of compassion as we dig in our purses, pockets and souls looking for something to entertain this highly annoying small human with a limited palate so we can get some fucking nourishment.

(Trust me we aren’t expecting to enjoy ourselves. Going to a restaurant with a toddler is about as enjoyable as trying to corner a feral cat while the world looks on, judging.)

Cut me a bit of slack. Five minutes. Maybe 10. TEN AT THE MOST (not of crying. crying gets 12 seconds.). And if it doesn’t get better, I promise I’ll take my special snowflake outside to melt on the sidewalk so you can eat in peace.

Let’s just try not to be dicks. All of us.

Even in restaurants.

Kumbaya. Bon appétit. Feral cats. Whatever.

Hi, I’m Arlo, and I’ll ruin your fucking life in a restaurant.

*DEAR INTERNET: I do not actually think people who don’t have kids lead meaningless lives. I am making fun of that mentality. There are numerous cues in the writing indicating that. If you can’t find them, please ask somebody who knows how to read to help you.

I don’t have many regrets in my life. Not because I haven’t made mistakes. Lord knows that ain’t the case. When I got sober there were memories so dark I spent the first year of recovery shaking my head occasionally – literally, physically – in attempt to rid the thoughts from my brain.

As if I could rattle them out of there.

The person who helped me get sober told me that the only way we can survive those memories is if we transform them into a way to help others. So I talk to other alcoholics. I talk to alcoholic mothers. I tell them how it was for me – the dark shit too, perhaps most importantly – so they can understand that I’ve been there too, and I lived, and found a way to stay sober.

And in that way, the present day infuses my past with a vague sense of meaning. The faces of the sick people in front of me give those experiences a shred of value. It’s not much, but it’s all I’ve got.

If I could do it again, I would not do it again. I would not hurt the people I hurt. But I can’t change the past any more than I can erase the memories.

My life brought me to my knees, flattened me into damn near nothing until I had no choice but to see the truth of myself and change.

I can’t regret that. Without the failure of my life I would have remained who I was. And nobody wants that.

So I don’t regret much.

But I regret the last year of my grandmother’s life.

In 2008 my paternal grandmother, who was one of my favorite humans in the world, with whom I felt a special affinity and understanding since I was a young girl, was dying. She was fading into dementia, passing into the gray.

I did not visit her once.

She was born July 26, 1920. She would be 95 in a couple weeks. She died in September of 2008, at 88 years old.

On the day I found out she passed, I went to a local dive bar and threw a few back in her memory. I went to her funeral pretending to be sober. Though I was sober that day, I was out of my mind with alcoholism, absent in thought and spirit.

About 6 months later, in March 2009, I found the beautiful “bottom” alcoholics speak of and crawled back into life after years of attempts at lasting sobriety.

But she was already gone, and I never said goodbye, and I never told her what she meant to me, and I never wrote her life history as I always said I would (she was a renegade journalist and mother of 5).

I can’t even recall exactly the last time I saw her.
How is such a thing possible? How is such a disaster possible? The extreme self-centeredness of alcoholism, the immaturity, the inability to tell the true from the false. Yes, all of that.

I try to make peace with it, but it feels like a terribly twisted up, skewed, inappropriate final scene of our lives together. A sick representation. A lie. A lie I cannot set right.

That was not what we were, and yet it is, forever, precisely what we were. At the end, at least.

You don’t know what you got til it’s gone.

It never seemed real that a force like hers could be gone.

But the years pass without her and the words I wished I would have said hang as if in purgatory. Unsettled ungrounded unheard and aching. Like hungry desperate spirits.

I guess this too is about me. She is at peace. I’m all tore up, at her birthday, on the anniversary of her death, thinking about how I would give almost anything for a chance to stop by her house one last time to say “Hey grandma I love you and goodbye.”

Maybe she wouldn’t have even recognized me. Maybe she had forgotten about me weeks before in the ages of a fading mind. Maybe it was best I didn’t show up, so she never had to see me quite so sick: Barely employed, separated from my children, lost lost lost.

And I, her.

I don’t remember her mind as faded.

Maybe she would have wanted it that way.

I want to beg you to go see your people. I want to shake my fists in your face and demand that you just fucking GO, NOW, no matter what, no matter how much they pissed you off last Christmas.

I want to say it so I can feel like 2008 has meaning, like it isn’t just the lack of understanding, selfishness and laziness of a 29-year-old granddaughter too young and dumb to realize what she was missing.

But you probably won’t go. Not if you’re like I was. One of the luxuries of our young lives is not having to go because they’re still here.

Until they’re not.

One of the luxuries of having your people alive is that you don’t have to think about them being alive.

I don’t wait any more. I don’t hesitate any more. I say it now, yesterday. Words hanging in the gray, scratching at my brain. Go ahead. Go on. Get outta here.

A few weeks after I got sober I was asleep in a bedroom in my mother’s house with just my little dog in his bed when I heard the door open. I sat up in bed, watched my dog jump out of bed and stare at the door. Then I watched the door shut. Assuming it was my mom, I got up to see what she needed, but when I walked out into the hallway I saw her bedroom door shut, and heard her snoring.

There was nobody there.

The dog settled back into his bed. I sat on the edge of mine and stared at the wall, overcome with the feeling that my grandmother had visited me. It was peace to my bones.

After years of struggle and alcoholism, I was finally getting well and my whole family knew something was different, something had changed. Finally.

I thought perhaps she opened the door, looked in, said “Well I see you’re okay now, Janelle.”

And left.

Settled?

I tell myself that was our final meeting. But in my guts it isn’t quite enough.

Happy birthday, grandma, a little early. You always hated the damn things anyway.

And to the rest of you, go say it.

Did you see what I did there? I used sarcasm to explain how annoying it is when people can’t read sarcasm.

(Actually it was hyperbole but if I say “hyperbole” my joke won’t work and it’s humor above accuracy here, people.)

The point remains: If you read that sentence and are now saying to yourself “Well that’s offensive! My Christian sensibilities are officially offended!”

THIS POST IS FOR YOU.

I don’t know what sort of excessive-focus-on-the-literal death hovel you grew up in, and I suppose I should have compassion for those who lack the ability to see when somebody is fucking joking, but I’ve tried working with you. I’ve tried being patient, but you aren’t getting better.

It’s like you’re not even trying. I write something completely ridiculous and there you appear, eventually, lurking in the shadows of intelligent life, peeking your head around the corner and tapping away, earnestly, just long enough to make me wonder what, exactly, is wrong with humanity. We’re all happy and laughing until BOOM. You appear, with your heartfelt helpfulness and misguided appraisal.

In other words, you ruin everything.

You need to get off the internet.

Or stop commenting. That would also work.

But, because I’m not totally heartless, I’ve decided I’m going to give you a list of pointers to help you read sarcasm because thou shalt love thy enemies or some shit.

Here we go:

Hint #1: If a person openly says something that could get them arrested, there’s a good chance that person is joking. For example, in this post, I suggest that every time your husband pisses you off you should kick him in the balls. Now let’s work through the possibilities here:

Option 1: Woman actually in real life physically abuses her husband then writes about it on the internet.

Option 2: Woman is joking.

Which do you think is more possible? See? This is not hard. This is actually quite easy. You’re going to be fine.

YOU ARE NOT GOING TO BE FINE YOU NEED HELP AND I HATE YOU.

Hint #2: If everybody else on the thread is commenting with words like “LOL” and Buahahahahahaha” and “OMG Dying” and “Hilarious!” and “I needed a laugh this morning,” CHANCES ARE YOU ARE READING A PIECE OF HUMOR.

NASA science right here.

That was sarcasm. Not actually NASA science. NASA science is difficult this is not difficult which is why you infuriate the rest of us with your defective reading skills.

Maybe you don’t think sarcasm is funny. Maybe you think it’s crass and base and unrefined. Perfect. Perfection. That’s amazing.

As long as you know it’s a joke, we’re good. I can work with you.

But that’s the thing, most of your kind don’t even recognize the joke AS A FUCKING JOKE even though the hyperbole is dripping from my fingertips as quickly as the point of life is screaming past your head.

Which brings me to helpful hint #3: If it seems ridiculous, it probably is. For example, in this post I say that all people with tidy houses are lying. Hmmmm. Let’s work through this for a moment. What are the chances I really think having a clean house literally never happens?

Slim, right? I mean, that doesn’t even make sense. You really think an adult human could live her whole life having never witnessed a neat person with kids?

Wait. What’s that you say? Matt Walsh is fucking ridiculous and he’s serious as hell? GOOD POINT VERY GOOD POINT. Some people have absolutely inane ideas and aren’t kidding at all (sadly), which means we have to look for keyword pointers to indicate whether we’re reading a piece of sarcasm or seriousness.

Going back to the “All people with clean houses are lying” concept: After that brilliant assertion, I write:

“You can’t fool me. My light may be dim but it ain’t that dim. Or, I’m wrong. That happens. Been wrong at least 4 times so far this year.”

 BOOM THERE IT IS: “Been wrong at least 4 times so far this year.”

Self-deprication. Ridiculousness. “My light may be dim” – I’M CALLING MYSELF A MORON then following it up with “But I’ve only been wrong 4 times this year.”

Please for the love of all that’s holy work with me here. Those words are ridiculous. Those words are giant flags waving in the abandoned desert of your mind. On them are written: This broad is not serious.

But no. You refuse to see it. You insist on writing comments like “How dare you imply that my housekeeping is not real.”

And (this one is direct quote): “Maybe your house, but I know plenty of mothers who have a tidy house, AND have time for their kids. What a negative article!”

Yes, it’s negative. Of course it’s fucking negative. That’s what dark sarcastic assholes like me live for. Why?

Because it’s funny.

I know. This is all very complicated. I’ve written 869 words attempting to help you learn how to read sarcasm/satire/hyperbole and I’m guessing your head is just spinning because throughout this post there are threads of sarcasm and now you just don’t know WHERE to turn – Is she serious or not?! – AM IF OFFENDED OR NOT I NEED TO KNOW HOW OFFENDED I SHOULD BE

so to simplify I offer this helpful flow chart.

Learn it. Live it.
Don’t be the antichrist.