Week 78: 1970 Monte Carlo

Debuting in 1970, the Monte Carlo is a mean looking muscle car, with that crazy long hood keeping you at arms length and that V8 leaving you more than a few arms lengths behind. What a great car, even if it holds a touch of bad guy dread.Tint the windows and the Monte Carlo looks even meaner, like a tough guy with sunglasses.

I con't wear sunglasses unless I want to walk into a telephone pole since my eyesight is bad without prescription glasses and contact lenses now limit my computer/writing work -- yup, that bifocal thing. I did have a pair of progressive glasses that darkened with sunlight and I could somewhat kid myself  that I had on cool shades, but I've since switched glasses and these don't even try to pretend they are cool but simply stay clear. These new glasses are not bifocal/trifocals, either. Big mistake.

I don't like progressive lenses -- I always felt like I was looking through a peep hole in order to get the right little area to be in focus, and it wasn't even a peep hole with something exciting on the other side, but one looking out at the sexy world of shopping lists, traffic signs and unidentified goo on the wall put there by one of my kids. When my vision changed I decided to stop doing the jerky lizard head dance of the bifocal/trifocal crowd and go back to single focus lenses. No worries, I thought. I'll just take them off to read.

Oh man, how I miss those annoying progressive lenses.

I can't see anything now. I have tried every nonchalant movement I can think of to unobtrusively remove my glasses to read something, but in the end I just flip them up on my forehead and squint. If I thought it was uncool to wear progressive trifocals that at least tried to look bad, if only in bright light, I've realized there is nothing cool about the squinty mole thing I now do. No, I should have stuck with being a lizard than a little burrowing rodent.

Going back to the bad attitude of the Monte Carlo, however, the other day my soon-to-be-three son came up to me and excitedly told to be "the bad daddy."

"You be the Bad Daddy, and I'll be Spider Man," he said excitedly, immediately making a steam valve noise with his mouth as I was covered with imaginary webs.

I didn't understand the request, and we went back and forth, with Baby G repeating, "You know, the Bad Daddy."

Finally he showed me the picture of the Bad Daddy, found on the cover of his brother's spiral notebook.

Now I don't know if I actually look like that when I'm reaching to take away a yardstick from my son to stop him from beating the walls, but for some reason that picture of the bad guy (The Sandman, by the way), was a picture of a Bad Daddy to my son. G has now shortened the moniker to BadDad.

Whatever the case, I got to be a bad guy, and even if I did lose every battle with Spiderman, I was tough, and any squinting I did was purely for effect, like in an old Clint Eastwood western -- or so the world thought. Sure, G wasn't using "Bad" in the sense of "hip" but in the sense of "angry and cantankerous" but so what.

I was the BadDad, and next time, Spidey better watch out.



Thanks to Phil Pekarcik for the photo of the Hot Wheels Monte Carlo, which I bet is in focus even though I can't really tell.









While basically obvious, I feel obligated to state that Marvel owns the rights to Spider Man and the Sandman while Mattel owns the rights to Hot Wheels.  I own the right to take out the trash tonight, as trash day has moved to Wednesday.