Diary of a Mrs Dad 11: Blokedown
Dude: Why did she go to the doctors?
Dad: Dudina had a virus.
Dude: So, she has to be destroyed and rebuilt as a robot?
The Breadwinner and Dudina went down the coast to visit a friend for two days, but the Dude had a sleepover and couldn’t go, which left him and me to have a bit of bloke time. When two or more males gather, the testosterone will fill the house: flowers wilt, dishes grow mould and the talk turns to movie violence. The Dude had visited Healesville Sanctuary (an Australian animal zoo) with a mate and got so bored during the talk given by the nervous Tasmanian Tiger attendant, they counted the number of times she said ‘Um’ (132).
On the first day of Blokedown, I popped out to get supplies. On the way back from the shops, my neighbour expressed surprise that I was not down the coast as well. I told her that the Dude and I were the only ones home, which was why I was carrying two pies and Coke.
‘Are you going to watch a bad sci-fi movie too?’ she asked with a smirk.
‘Two, actually,’ I replied as I headed inside with plans to bunker down for two days.
First up, there was the rearranging of the furniture. The Xbox took its rightful place in the lounge room, permanently plugged into the television, and the two couches became makeshift beds or ‘reclining televisual apparatus’.
Dude: Dr Alliance! I have joined you!
We embarked on a few Halo missions at first; always a favourite from the time the Dude was young, and so afraid of the aliens he would cry out, ‘Help me, Dad!’ and I’d burst into a spaceship cabin, spraying bullets or plasma bolts, cutting down the fierce-looking aliens and rescuing him. It’s not often I get to do that – stopping him from running into traffic is as close to it as real life gets – so to be covered in green alien blood as I pumped shotgun pellets into ugly aliens and saved my boy was a dad’s dream. Now the Dude is older, he’s not quite so afraid of computer bad guys; in fact he has become so adept at the game, he is the one rescuing me, armed only with a pistol. The Dude is a new-generation gamer, so he can sit transfixed, barely moving a muscle except for the blur of his fingers and thumbs. The old dad is from the Dungeons & Dragons era of gaming, so I lean, duck and weave, much to the young bloke’s amusement.
Blokedown Day One movie was The Terminator. The Dude is eleven years old, so I was wondering if he was too young for the violence, although I remember watching Enter the Dragon and Five Fingers of Death when I was his age and the effects haven’t been long term, apart from my desire to swing nunchakus when someone pushes into the line at the supermarket. Since we watched Predator, the Dude thinks Arnie is the funniest actor around (thanks to Arnie’s thick accent tripping over the words ‘You’re one ugly motherfucker’), though he thought the robot effects weren’t very realistic. ‘But he’s a robot, that’s not very real,’ I argued as I enjoyed the jerky movements of the Arnie robot skeleton, which reminded me of the spooky Ray Harryhausen skeleton fight in Jason and the Argonauts. The animatronic Arnie head removing its eyeball made the Dude hide his eyes, even though he thought it looked fake and I thought the animatronic version equalled the human Arnie’s acting ability. The Dude found The Terminator quite tense and the ‘son sending his dad back in time to die’ conundrum fascinated him a bit too much for my liking.
Blokedown Day Two movie was Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which the Dude embraced wholeheartedly. The effects showed a huge jump in quality from the first and I didn’t mind the movie as much as when I first saw it (other cinemagoers stared at me when I booed at the end of the movie because I hated them turning one of cinema’s best bad guys into a good guy). Robert Patrick is still creepy as the T-1000 and Linda Hamilton’s transformation into buff Amazon Sarah Connor has influenced every tough chick role since, but the most outstanding moment for me in both movies is the death of the scientist Miles Dyson, played by Joe Morton. While holding a heavy weight over the trigger for some explosives, he expires like a goldfish out of water, gulping for breath and stopping mid-gulp as he dies (cue ridiculously huge explosion). It’s one of the truly great cinema deaths, which had the Dude copying the gulping-for-breath noises for days afterwards.
I wondered if parenting could get any better as I cradled my son in my arms while the T-1000’s sword arm punctured a milk carton and pinned a man’s head to the kitchen wall.
‘Don’t worry, Dude,’ I assured him, ‘that only happens to stepdads, not proper dads.’
Dude: Hmm, cool. The world. When I’m bigger, I’ll like it.
Matt Quartermaine is a Melbourne-based writer and comedian. With Matt Parkinson, Tim Smith and Andrew Goodone, he produces ‘The Chat’, a weekly podcast in which ‘four grown men in comfortable chairs spill their guts’. Click here to download it for free at iTunes.
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