A few months ago, I had a flashback. I was drunk and listless at a bar in Austin, Texas, 4 or 5 years ago, when I ran into a friend. He started giving me crap about something. My lizard brain stirred. I began to shriek, much like my son does when he's having a tantrum, and I flailed my hands crazily. I hit my ex-friend on the side of the face with a beer bottle, chipping one of his teeth. As the bouncer tossed me onto the street, I didn't feel tough. I felt like a drug-addled idiot.

I started thinking about what I'd tell my son in the future about that fight. Would he be proud of me? Probably not.

Actually, one drunken episode is fairly excusable. But Elijah ain't gonna be proud about the years of publicly-accessible essays chronicling his toddler foibles, including his crying jags and failure at karate.

Remember, privacy begins at home. The first step to stopping writing about your child is admitting you have nothing else to write about. Actually, Neal, you might try for a NYT Magazine story out of your struggle to stop child-blogging!

[MSN/Mens Health]

The essay repeats the sad claim that Gawker (via Joshua Stein) attacked a 4-year-old when we professed our annoyance with his father, who turned his real-life son into essentially a shitty character in his alterna-dad narrative. This is what blogging does to your loved ones! They become mere extensions of your online Brand, your crafted persona, as much Fair Game for mockery and abuse as you yourself, because you are using them.

Bazelon worries that in writing (or blogging) about children, mommybloggers and their ilk are creating a nation of oversharers. She even says their children might end up like—horror of horrors—Emily Gould! But this is the problem: we are pretty sure Emily's parents aren't the over-sharing ones? And, in fact, it is the mommybloggers—in the guise of, say, Dooce—who ushered in this terrifying new era of no filters or propriety. Dooce, who became famous for relentllessly writing about herself, her family, and her job. And who even more famously lost that job because of it. She doesn't write about her kids anymore, though, so she's ok!

Still. These parents NEED TO STOP. It was not, for example, 16-year-old Teresa herself who explained to the New York Times that the other kids called her "Uno Brow."

So be warned, bloggers with kids! We will continue hating your kids, because you leave us no choice.

Roughly a year ago, Pollack started his "Playground" discussion forum. In the last couple of weeks, Griscom's Babble started a similar forum called "Babble Playground."

"We felt usurped, if not completely ripped of," Pollack wrote. Some of his commenters went and started a thread on the competing discussion forum about how their own Playground was totally better. Mature, right? Griscom deleted the thread, which he called "inaccurate and kinda tacky."

Then Griscom sent an email saying, basically, What, you exist? I'm sorry, I hadn't noticed your little chat board. ("We had no idea that you had social networking functionality on your site... I haven’t been there in some time.")

Then Pollack asked his legal counsel if Griscom could somehow be sued and made to starve in the street for daring to copy his brilliant "Playground" naming scheme, and they said Uh, definitely not.

So Pollack exercised the only attack vector left at his disposal, calling Griscom a yuppie and a square:

Babble is an expensive downtown urban loft rehab, where everything looks pretty, but it all feels so perfect, so smooth, so sterile, so target-marketed, so…fake. Offsprung, on the other hand, is like going over to the house of a good friend, a friend who has three kids and can’t afford to even dream about a nanny. The house is imperfect. It’s loud. There’s a weird yellow stain with hair clumps behind the toilet. But it’s home, and it’s comfortable, and it’s yours.

Then all the hipsters went back to ruining their children and the world forever, The End.

[Offsprung via NYM]

In this article—much like his recent diarrhea-soaked paean to Josh Brolin—Pollack manages to phone in thousands of words about spending quality time with a celebrity without even making an attempt to do anything except to confirm the most simplistic version of the conventional wisdom about said celebrity. It is also badly written. We find out, therefore, that Woody Harrelson is "a guy fully at ease with himself, but still unique, even deeply strange."

Woody's decision to "hang with the fam" was the "Best decision I ever made."

How does he like his home in Maui? "I'm sure glad I found it."

Woody greets a woman "as if he's known her his whole life."

A friend reveals that Woody is "an affable character."

The lone possibility of an intriguing passage emerges when Pollack touches on Woody's father, who was a contract killer who died in prison. Pollack kills it.

"He was asked to do some special things for the government. The wanted to know if he really wanted to serve his country," [says Harrelson].

"What are you referring to?"

"Let's leave a little ambiguity there."

This is obviously a source of deep discomfort for Woody, who is normally open to talking about anything.

So does Woody think his dad was a government assassin? We don't know. What Pollack does tell us is: Woody Harrelson is smart enough to know when he meets the cool folks. Here are the final two sentences of Pollack's story, and hopefully the last of his we will ever see:

When I get home there's a text message from Woody, my new best friend, waiting for me on my cell phone.

"Pleasure hangin' bro," it says.

We drove back.

"So, you looking forward to getting home after this?" he asked.

"Sure."

"So you can shit out the stuff we just ate earlier? How you feeling, by the way?"

"I'm looking forward to getting to a bathroom," I said. "Try to save it for the home toilet, not have to pull over in a gas station."

"Oh, you don't want to do that, dude."

Brolin started making diarrhea noises.

"Ahhhh! Plllllllllpppppp! The pain will hit, and you're on your bathroom floor, in a fetal position, can't even make it to the toilet."

Pause.

"What do you think," he said. "Huh?"

"I don't know. I don't think it's gonna be that bad."

"It might be, though."

Though my Bose QuietComfort7 headphones fit snugly around my ears, I could still hear Elijah tapping his pen against the pages of Buber's I and Thou. "I don't get it," he complained, "is Buber saying people aren't supposed to treat others as objects to be used?" I looked at his befuddled face, illumined from underneath by a clip-on LED book light. He looked like a cherub or a turnip. Something in my chest fluttered like the engine of a Ford Dart turning over. I went back to watching Jules et Jim on my 56" MacbookPro but couldn't concentrate. Was Elijah tapping Morse code for "I love you" with his pen? Just then there was a knock at the door. "Lemme in, guys," squealed a nasal voice. I opened the door and there was Delancey Sohn.

Her shorts were short and terry cloth. Across the butt was written "Lit Critter." Elijah looked up from his book, relieved to see her. A smile shone across his handsome face and my heart sank like coffee grounds to the bottom of my chest. Jeanne Moreau drove off a cliff; the credits began to roll.

Delancey sprawled herself across Elijah's twin bed. She reached out curled his blond dreadlocks coquettishly around her fingers. "I like bad boys," she said. She looked at Elijah significantly. He looked at his book. Buber's watery eyes looked at me from the back cover.

I remember when we first all met, playing ga-ga at a camp for children of authors. It was called Camp Muse. In every cabin, there was a one-way mirror behind which sat our parents, anxiously observing our antics. Those were days full of chewing on candy necklaces, nights playing hot and buggy and hormonic bouts of Scrabulous. Delancey read to us racy bits from her mother's book Spitting on Matzo. How we laughed as we read, in vivid detail, about how Delancey was made—until, all of a sudden, Delancey's mother Amy sprang from a cupboard in our cabin and ripped the text out of Delancey's hands. A fleck of spittle dangled from her thin furious lips.

"Delancey," she screamed, "how many times do I have to tell you? You can not just read excerpts out of the book! It's meant as a work of literature and it requires context."

Ha! She was so mad she didn't realize that Delancey and Elijah were naked.

Delancey lost touch with Elijah and I after that summer. Amy's book deal with Hyperion to churn out a memoir every eight months detailing how and where and with what lack of passion she made love got canceled. She took Delancey back to the family home in Rockport Center.

So imagine our surprise when we ran into Delancey during N.Y.U. orientation. She had sparkles on her eyes and was that night she was walled-in by boys at the Caliente Cab Company. But when we came near, her sparkles reflected only in Elijah's own eyes. I knew right then that our barely-heterosexual pair-bond might finally fray.

Tonight we're sporting on the town to live low: Off the Wagon, a bar for the people, and then to Smalls, the jazz club. This was Elijah's idea. I'm going to ask to accompany us the cute Ghanaian girl from 5D with whom, during orientation, I have listened to Bob Dylan's early albums and smoked opium. Elijah's dad let him use his ID. (How cool is that?) Howsoever Elijah—who weighs around 70 pounds and suffers from alopecia—can pass for the hirsute obese and lonely 62-year-old Neal is a source of constant amazement to me.

Today was our first day of class. Elijah and I are in Bobst. He's been in the downstairs men's bathroom for so very long! What is he doing down there? No one knows. Anyway, this morning when we walked into Conversations of the West and looked at the syllabus, we both came upon quite a shock. There, under a section of ancillary reading for Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, we saw Sundays with Mordy: A Divorced Father's Lessons from His Prodigal Son by Joshua David Stein and I Kid, I Kid: The Hilarious and Often Embarrassing Contretemps of Elijah Pollack, from the year previous, by Neal Pollack. Mortifying! Will we ever escape our parents?

And it's worse for Elijah, believe you me. That part when Elijah is like to his high school girlfriend, "I'm a virgin," but she thinks he's saying, "I'm a version," and she's like, "Version of what?" And he's like, "Version of sex!" And then Neal, who was in the family room and listening in, clarifies through the speaker system he set up through the house: "He said 'VIRGIN,' like he's never had sex before!" Oh, hilaaarious! And then both Neal and Elijah blogged about it!

Of course I don't come off well in my father's book either. That time when I was 13 and on the bima when I said, "Smegma, Yeast is real" instead of "Shema, Yisroel" and the rabbi got soooo very peeved with me!

Everything about us is interesting!

The only annoying thing about living with Elijah is that his dad calls like five times a day to check in. "Eli, I'm out of stuff to write about. Quick, what are you up to?" But all's well though, because Elijah puts the calls on speaker and they are totally hilarious. Oh wait. One other annoying thing about Elijah is that he refuses to eat at the dining hall. I told him that he should have no qualms. After all, it is catered by Dean and Deluca. (Joel Dean is the Dean of Client Services. We call him Dean Dean!)

But Elijah, despite his populist leanings, says his father raised him as a turophile and he's not about to break bread and spread brie with uncultured co-eds. He'll be so utterly flummoxed when he finds out that I have switched the Azeitao he was keeping in the fridge for Garrotxa. Oh, I really like college!

Previously: My Son Mordecai And I Read Proust

My wife walked in, carrying a dozen madeleines she had picked up at the bakery. From the other room Mordy called out, "Ooh madeleines, Poppa, want to come read Du côté de chez Swann with me?" Themed eating! I entered, a warm madeleine in my hand. Mordecai had turned to page 63 and began reading, "Et dès que j'eus reconnu le goût du morceau de madeleine trempé dans le tilleul que me donnait ma taint—

"Taint?" I asked. "I think you meant tante. Taint is something else entirely."

The little angel looked up at me, embarrassed. His blue eyes were teary. "Papa," he asked, "you aren't going to blog about this in ways that portray me simultaneously as precious, precocious and a little bit autistic" Mordy began to quake and quail with the thought that I might be leaving a well-documented record of all his embarrassing youthful missteps. A wet spot began to form on his corduroys. It soaked the pages of Proust.

"No," I assured him. "That I would never do."

Bulk Buddies [Epi Log]

From Pollack's latest post on Epicurious:

went to the grocery store with my family today and wandered around in the haze of my most recent public identity crisis, dutifully loading the cart with apples, bananas, and whatever else Regina told me to get. My exchanges with Elijah were minimal. I swore that I wouldn't mine this trip for blog material. Enough already.

And then we reached the checkout line. Or at least my body did. My mind was somewhere far away, in a place full of waterfalls and self-pity. I heard Regina's voice echo in my skull.

"Neal," she said.

"Huh?"

"Look what your son is doing."

I turned around. Elijah was sitting in the shopping cart, smelling a pack of bacon, and going "mmmmmmmmm."

"Elijah," I said. "Why are you smelling the bacon?"

"Because it smells so good," he said.

He turned the package over.

"And the back of it smells even better," he said.

"Is he not supposed to be doing that?" I asked Regina.

"Well," she said, "it's a little weird, but I don't see how it's harmful."

So we let him smell the bacon until we had to put it on the conveyor belt. Later, at home, there was ham for dinner, at least for the boy. Regina and I knew that our dinner would be too spicy for him.

We did this because, he tells his fans, "I wrote an innocent little blogpost about how he likes to eat cheese." Well, Neal, not quite.

Try this: "Because I understand that if I fashion a literary character out of my son—regardless of whether I bracket him as fictional or nonfictional—I thereby expose him to criticism; because if I make that character particularly irksome, as I have, Elijah blowback is then inevitable; and because I have spent this latest iteration of my career milking my son Elijah for material."

To have your son do all the heavy lifting in your career! There outta be a law against that kind of thing. Oh, there is: Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA, ch. 676, 52 Stat. 1060, June 25, 1938, 29 U.S.C. ch.8). Heh.

His letter:

Dear Friends, Colleagues, Supporters, and anyone else who might be interested:

Today, the gossip website Gawker.com launched a disgusting sneak attack on my four-year-old son.

Why? Because I wrote an innocent little blogpost about how he likes to eat cheese.

I recognize that, largely by my own design, I'm a public figure of sorts. And when I say something obnoxious in public, or even just appear in public, I'm fodder for snarky websites like Gawker. I may not always like what they say, but for the most part I don't mind the press. And I've certainly slung enough snark in my time to warrant some payback. But when they start calling my sweet, innocent son a "horror" and "the worst" and barely even mentioning me at all, then I start minding.

This is the kind of treatment that the media tends to reserve for the children of the truly famous. And even then, they rarely attack the children. Why? Because they're children . I may be a relatively
well-known writer, but I'm not rich. I'm not famous. And I don't live in New York. Why is Gawker going after a middle-class four-year-old from California? What purpose can that serve? The post isn't satire.
It isn't relevant. It's borderline insane. And I've had enough.

I don't know what recourse to take here. Maybe none. Maybe I brought this upon myself by trying to make a living telling silly parenting stories.

Honestly, I don't know if I'm asking you all for help, sympathy, both, or neither. I just know that I'm appalled, sad, and even a little sick about this, and that I'm obligated to defend my son.

Thanks so much. I hope this finds everyone well.

Best,
Neal

PS: Here's the link again, in case you missed it the first time:
gawker.com/news/the-sins-of-the-fathers/elijah-pollack-is-going-to-be-a-horror-304568.php

NP

As a father, it's my duty to pass down my loves [of cheeses] to my son. We're training Elijah for cheese snobbery. The other day, at the grocery store, he did me proud.

There were three cheeses on taste display. The first was a nine-month-old Murray Bridge cheddar from Australia. I popped a cube in my mouth. It was pleasant but innocuous, something you could easily put in a child's lunchbox. Elijah tried one as well.

He shook his head.

"This cheese is too boring for me," he said.

The next selection was a "mammoth cheddar," cut from an enormous wheel made God knows where. It's cheese for people who don't like cheese. Elijah almost spit out his piece, but showed enough manners to swallow.

"Don't buy that one, daddy," he said.

The festival consisted of: hordes of people thronging booths set up along Borough Hall Park, each representing a small press or literary magazine or extremely motivated author, or a corporate Festival sponsor such as Target. Most Festivalgoers were pushing demanding toddlers in expensive strollers. All the men looked like John Hodgman and all the women looked like Miranda July.

Amy and Neal were both wearing really dorky shoes: black Nike running shoes for Neal and practical low-heeled, square-toed boots for Amy. Clearly, they were parents. They were speaking on a panel called "Mom and Pop Culture," which was moderated by the estimable Ayun Halliday, who has been writing wittily and incisively about parenting way before Neal or Amy's kids were born. She actually asked some tough questions! Like, to Neal: "The motto of your website Offsprung is 'for parents who don't suck.' What parents do suck?" He sidestepped: "If you think you don't suck, come on in."

There were other times, though, when Neal was less adroit at keeping his foot out of his mouth. When asked if he was grateful to his son Elijah, he answered maybe a bit too honestly, "If my other book had been successful, I would've followed down that road." He paused. "But I'm trying to do other stuff now. I'm sure [he chuckled] my literary career will be long and varied." No one else laughed.

Amy mostly came off as smart and assured, however, making us almost suspect that every time we've read a column of hers and thought "Oh god, she's got to be kidding," she actually has been, well, kidding! She talked about getting turned down for playdates in Park Slope after writing about her ish with stay at home moms. She also said, "When I had a kid, it seemed natural to me to start exploiting it for material." At least she is honest.

One of Ayun's final questions was, what do you think of the backlash against parenting memoirs? "I didn't know there was a backlash," deadpanned Amy. Again: Was she kidding? She went on to say that people seem to have a big problem with parents openly seeming to complain about their children, which is pretty far down on our list of our problems with most parenting writing. (The list looks kind of like this: "1) self-indulgent 2) self-indulgent 3) self-aggrandizing 4) self-indulgent...")

Neal's theory was that complaining about one's children is a venerable Jewish tradition. "If you don't like our books, it means you're an anti-Semite!" Amy rolled her eyes at Neal. "I think people are just jealous, actually." It was hard to discern Neal's facial expression through the terrible wraparound Oakley sunglasses he wore, but he seemed to nod in agreement.

In a recent entry, Pollack has the following exchange with his first-born son:

"Daddy, I'm hungry," Elijah said.
"OK," I said.
"That means I want something to eat."
"I know what it means."
"I might be starving."
"I doubt that."
Then I realized that we had some leftover pizza in the fridge. We'd made it the night before, and it had proved quite delicious. My son was about to get a real gustatory thrill.
"Elijah," I said, "How would you like cold pizza for the first time?"
"No thank you," he said. "I want a hot dog."
"Seriously, though, dude," I added. "Cold pizza is possibly the greatest food in the world."

"After my wife's miserable pregnancy and near-death experience on the Caeserian [sic] table, and after the financially and emotionally taxing toddler years, and after living here in Los Angeles, where children often serve as reflectors of the parents' social class and little more, we have decided that one is more than enough. If, for some reason, we are elevated to wealth, we may adopt someone of color. But as far as parenthood goes, we've done it, we're doing it, we get it, and if we want to stay married, we're not going to have another."

But Neal, what will your schtick be once Elijah leaves the nest? Oh I know! Maybe it'll be "giving the world pompous unsolicited advice that you yourself don't follow"? See, later in the same thread, Neal acknowledges that "the urge [to procreate] is always there. However, the planet is groaning under the weight of excessive humanity." Wow, it sure is.

Gimme That Baby, You Warthog From Hell [Offsprung]