Joey (43-year old lobotomy).

There are times when I feel incredibly confident as a parent, like when I’m sure-handedly changing a diaper with one hand on a moving train in the dark and terrorists are trying to board and I’ve got to stay calm and cool and take care of shit, both literally and figuratively. I’m reasonably confident in those scenarios.

And there are times I feel completely ill-equipped to know what to feel as a parent, and as a result I can feel my confidence slipping away, oozing into the darkness. They’re generally telegraphed by a look from one of our children, sizing me up, analyzing, observing, preparing to say something that could literally go in any direction, but will likely in some way not do anything to raise my self-confidence.

43-year old bearded guy in a coffeeshop wearing a scary Ramones t-shirt with a sort-of AB Garamond typeface.

He looked at me, analytically observing with those maddeningly-perceptive nine-year old eyes - which somehow makes whatever is coming next worse, because there’s a foundation of (apparent) objectivity, so if it is demeaning or denigrating…he’s probably right. I just waited, knowing there was nothing I could do.

Finally, he nodded, eyes roving across my shirt in various patterns.

“That shirt you’re wearing,”
he began,
”…looks really scary.”

“What does that mean?” I asked cautiously. “Is that a bad thing? Or a good thing? It’s just my old Ramones shirt I’ve been wearing since long before you were born.”

“I know,” he nodded dismissively. “But it’s definitely scary. Maybe it’s the AB Garamond font.”

My heart did flying kick. It does this whenever my kids start geeking out to typography. “Is it Garamond?" I asked. “The main band name is definitely not; it’s a sans-serif, right?”

“Maybe,” he said. “I was talking about the other text around the circle design. It looks really scary.”

“Really!” I said, unsure of whether this was a good thing, or bad thing, or something else.

(spoiler alert : I don’t find out)

“It’s just scary,” he said. “It makes you look like a teenager from the 1950s, like 1954. Or maybe 1975.”

“I like the decades you’re going with,” I said, “so…is that a good thing, or - ?”

But he was already gone. I simply don’t know. But I do know that am a terrifying figure today, and apparently every day I wear my AB Garamond Ramones tee.