Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches

by John Hodgman

Insecurely teasing a teenager is a privilege of fatherhood. And I grew my second mustache for the same reason all your weird dads grew theirs: it is an evolutionary signal that says, “I’m all done.” A mustache sends a visual message to the mating population of Earth that says, “No thank you. I have procreated. My DNA is out in the world, and so I no longer deserve physical affection. Instead, it is time for me to turn away from sex and toward new pursuits, the classic weird dad hobbies such as puns, learning trivia about bridges and wars, and dreaming about societal collapse and global apocalypse.”

As a father now myself, it’s sobering to think about how the smallest comments will ripple through your children’s lives, with some leaving permanent warps.

They were two handsome, big white men with big white smiles. One was maybe fifty-five years old and the other was in his very early twenties. I knew they were father and son, because I had seen this in the American South before: prosperous fathers and sons hanging out together and dressing exactly the same. They were both dressed like dads: white roll-collar Brooks Brothers button-down shirts, no ties, chinos better than Dockers that still look like Dockers, loafers, blue blazers over their arms. They radiated contentment. The shriveled weirdo in me both recoiled from them and fluttered to their light.