Ah, grandparents taking the babies to breakfast … how charming … urp.

I stopped at Marine’s Coffee Shop (Bergen and 5th Avenue, Brooklyn) in Park Slope for breakfast yesterday. The menu on the window said they had a Spanish breakfast. I’ve never had a Spanish breakfast. It seemed like a prime opportunity to break two fasts at once, and at $4 it was cheaper than a plane ticket.

I settled into the corner table – after stripping off three layers of bicycle gear – and ordered cassava and eggs. (There’s a short review on Marine’s in the Google map on the main page of www.neoflaneur.blogspot, if you care.) About five minutes after a tucked into people-watching mode, a couple in their late 40s or early 50s came in with two girls under five.

My initial thought was, “Aw, grandparents out for a day”. But this is Park Slope and I forgot to take into account a particularly New York disease. One of the girls was whining about how she was cold, she didn’t want to eat eggs, she wanted ice cream.

“Mommy doesn’t like it when you talk that way,” the crazy woman said.

“Daddy doesn’t like it either,” the idiot with her said.

I got a little throw up in my mouth. I took a sip of coffee to clear away the bile and shook my head to clear it. People smart enough to make enough money to live in Park Slope aren’t smart enough to know that children are either the result of youthful indiscretions or, if deliberate, a young person’s sport. Not in New York. It is something you see all the time. Grown people completely out of their minds and ill-equipped for the physical and emotional abuse that come factory stock with children. If the damage was localized to the reproducing idiots, I’d have a problem with the disease but I’d get over it. The thing with late parentitis, though, is that it has an impact on everyone … for generations

Hillary Clinton was wrong. It doesn’t take a village to raise a child. It takes a clue and a cattle prod.

Mommy looked at this whiny little creature she’d deliberately conceived at Lord knows what cost and, in what can only be one of the best examples of clueless parenting I have seen in years, said in a high-pitched, goo-goo voice best reserved for pocket dogs and the mentally thin, “BABY, you’re a big girl now, not a BABY.”

Urp. Fuck me. I could taste where this was going the way I could taste the bile in the back of my throat. There is nothing sadistic little bits of the human variety like more than mixed messages and this cute little Satan spawn was just handed an Tech 9 and a full clip. She sprayed the restaurant. Her sister, not to be left out of the firefight, reached into her own arsenal gathered from a lifetime of over-entitled “Daddy loves you. Please stop. Really, please stop. Ah, baby, pllllllleeease. Have a candy bar. Daddy loves you”, loaded up and fired two rounds into the ceiling.

“Alright, everybody, on the ground. This is an emotional hold-up.”

Fuck me.

At this point, I should have done something constructive. I should have handed daddy a pair of balls, maybe, or mommy a pamphlet I’ve not yet written titled “Never Let Them See You Sweat: An adult’s guide to raising what seemed like a good idea at the time”. I didn’t. I just stared and shook my paternalistic head in a condescending way every time one of the parents scanned the room in a panic. It didn’t help, but I enjoyed myself and that’s what I was out and about for.

I’m a bad man.

Here's a google view of the joint.


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