CABLE GUY

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to another glorious Monday in this f-ed-up world. I had just finished a tasty bran muffin moments ago, when my stomach started twisting into hateful knots from resting my gaze upon this sickening headline:

“A Texas couple who named their son ESPN after the cable sports network will soon get a visit from the toddler's namesake.” (From the Associated Press article)

Reading about how a couple names their own flesh and blood after a cable sports network does little to restore my dwindling faith in humanity.

‘Rebecca and Michael McCall said their son's name started as a joke after they heard on the radio about another couple naming their son ``ESPEN.'' ‘

I can see McDonald’s-eating, floppy jowls guffawing good-heartedly all across America. Is this real, or just some sick marketing ploy on the part of ESPN? “I guess there's no better testament than when someone names their child after your product,” commented ESPN spokesman Dave Nagle.

The future of marketing and branding: your own flesh & blood.

Stories such as this leave me with images of a dark, stillborn life to come. You might say I’m reading too much into this, but I imagine the McCall boy’s life might turn out something like the following.

“Thanks for naming me after a goddamn sports channel, Dad. Now not only will I face a lifetime of ridicule and irritating jokes, but I will also get free athletic gear forever. I will see my own tortured face on every snowboard, baseball bat and Kobe Bryant-signed basketball sent gratis. Of course I will detest anything to do with professional sports from the moment I’m able to understand why I’m considered “unique” and “different” from everyone else. I will suffer from severe depression and various addictions, which will require me to hock all that free sports junk with my imagined face on it. I will be pawning off my own soul when I doubted the existence of one in the first place.

I can just imagine how it all went down, Dad. There you were, merging your podgy, lard-addled ass into the new leather couch on a Saturday afternoon, enjoying the game between Budweiser belches. In your sudsy stupor you probably looked like one of those balding, average Joe America slobs on Best Buy or various car commercials that try, in a humorous way, to target pussy-whipped, debt card-wielding husbands such as yourself.

In one last, desperate attempt at asserting yourself in a disappointing marriage, you decided that your first-born child would reflect everything you ever wanted to be but never could achieve. Throughout my stolen childhood, Sundays at Outback Steakhouse would be your opportunity to shine. “Yeap, that’s ma boy!” you’ll say to everyone who stops by our table to interrupt our dinner and gawk at the bespectacled, unspectacular spectacle of me. “Esssss-pen!”

Our relationship will deteriorate as years go by, since I will never be able to live up to my name. You will constantly compare me to the other two unfortunates spread out across the nation who share my name. “Why can’t you be more like that ESPN boy in Ohio?” you’ll ask me. “He got into Kent State on a basketball scholarship!” At least you got free cable, Dad.

I will become the opposite of everything you ever dreamed I would be, leaving you without a son to live through vicariously. I will spend my every waking moment searching for an older man who will love me for who I really am, rather than sniffing around the Cinemax girl’s house down the street. Eventually I will find a small scrap of purpose in life beyond patriarchal revenge, in the form of my debut autobiographical novel “Cable Vision.”

Desperate and broke from various addictions and small royalty checks from the publisher, I will be forced to drive around a van covered in corporate advertising to pay the bills, just like you did when you put the first down payment on the house. There’s nothing like selling a little piece of your soul for a little empty recognition. Right, Dad?
- posted by Hal Miller @ 11:21 AM