I’ve decided that it’s time to make my son into a man.

Or at least move the process along.

There are a couple of reasons for this that have been bouncing around in the back of my melon. The first is that, quite frankly, the little guy has lived a pretty sheltered life. Then, secondly, there’s the whole looming end of the world thing.

I recently finished reading The Road. Not to give away any big spoilers but I think that the story would have had a much better ending if the main character (the father) wasn’t forced to haul a boat anchor (the boy) around for the whole thing. Looking at my son through that filter, I worry that I’m going to end up lugging a pretty heavy sack of needy-hungry around if and when my own piece of earth turns to ash.

Thanks to the rigorous video game training course we’ve been putting him through, though, it’s not all bleak. Since he was first able to hold one of those little Xbox controllers in his hands, we’ve been ingraining all sorts of post apocalypse / alien invasion / pimp survival skills in him. I’m pretty comfortable in the belief that should push come to shove, he could certainly hunt us down some mutant rat person when needed. Assuming that we can get his hands of one of those sniper rifles he’s so fond of.

He certainly knows the best places to shoot a zombie should something like come to pass.

But I fear that that there are a couple of gaps in my son’s education that need to be completed before the words of the prophet Roland Emmerich come true. Namely, I need to work with getting the boy familiar with women and male conflict.

Women will be kind of tough. I sometimes wonder if his perception of how women behave is a little skewed towards the barking-at-the-moon crazy example he’s getting from the women in our family. To be clear, nobody has recently gone off the rails over the use of wire hangers, but there’s definitely an aura of bat-shit crazy here from time to time. Which I’m pretty sure to experience another example of 10 seconds after my wife reads this post.

It’s probably too late for the little guy on that front.

I think I could probably do something about male conflict though. I’m just unsure what would be the best method to take.

I could send him to some sort of mixed martial arts classes. But 2012 is sort of looming over us at this point and I’m unsure if we really have that kind of time.

Option two would be to just get him into a fight at a truck stop somewhere. I can’t remember, though, whether it’s better for him to win his first big coming-of-age fight or learn some sort of lesson from getting the crap knocked out of him. That’s not the sort of thing that you’d want to get wrong. There are really no do-overs, if you muff that up.

And I have my doubts that child protective services will sympathize with my goal of preparing my son for the end of the world by telling a 290 pound trucker that my son called him a punk bitch and is waiting for him outside.

It’ll probably also be hard to find a 290 pound trucker willing to instruct an eleven year old boy in the gentlemanly art of closed fist fighting when said boy is balled up in the corner of a parking lot crying.

Now that I’m thinking about it, I guess we’re stuck just sticking with his current course of video game training. Thank the gods for M rated video games being there for us parents.

 -dr