This is one of the harder things I’ve ever done.
For starters, I don’t think his hands are grown enough to hold most of the things that are really great. Xbox controllers would only baffle his tiny fingers. A Zippo lighter would look ludicrous in such a tiny fist. Even the smallest of swords is probably too heavy for a baby, and crawling with a sword seems very unsafe somehow.
So where does one shop for a baby?
I thought, Oh, Babies R Us.
Despite my reservations based on the complete abandonment of the English language in their name, I figured what the hell. Babies r them, him r a baby, so it am making sense 2 me.
Well, don’t be tricked into that one. It turns out that Babies R Us is mostly clothes. Which is asinine. I don’t think many babies really give a hot damn about what they’re wearing. If they did, they probably wouldn’t defecate in their favorite pants. If you care about your clothes, REALLY care, you know that some pants are for defecating in, some just aren’t. It’s just not done.
So then I thought where I would want to go if I was a baby. That was boring, so I went and ate barbecue for lunch.
Then I figured, Aha, Target. Target has everything. A lot of people would prefer to hide out in a Wal-Mart in an apocalyptic situation, mostly because of the guns. But I figure I have almost no chance, so I might as well enjoy polished floors and flatware I might actually put in my kitchen during my last days of life.
I had to ask myself a lot of tough questions. Are babies allowed to eat candy? If so, which ones? Are Crybaby candies offensive to babies?
The other shoppers were not helpful, not the ones shopping for candy anyway. What would you say an appropriate response might be if someone asked you how many Starburst an average baby could eat in one sitting? Would you say walking away with a concerned look is the only response? Because that’s the only one I got.
But I’m a man of means, so I decided to change tactics. Maybe someone had registered for their baby’s birthday, and all I had to do was pull one up on the little computer. It was just a matter of guessing a popular name of a kid who is about one until a registry comes up. I guessed everything I could think of:
Mike
Dum-Dum
Peter
Nothing.
Damn it.
Finally, there was only one thing to do. When I have a really hard time making a decision, I like to do this thing where I spin and then pick whatever comes up first. Or, sometimes the spinning makes me so ill that the decision is no longer necessary. For example, doing this in a restaurant with serious force might mean that you’re not even hungry anymore and you can just spend the meal enjoying having your head down on the table and breathing heavily.
So that’s what I did. I spun, man. I spun my heart out. Then I pointed out a finger, stopped, wobbled, stumbled into a lady, and then came to rest with my finger pointing squarely at the perfect gift.
Happy birthday, baby. I’m sure that your Pocket Chair, as seen on TV, will be just about perfect for you when you’re old enough to have pockets, walk, be tired of things, and just want to goddamn sit down for a second.