Art by Kate Miller
Look at it. Just look at it. That’s my ugly baby, and he just sits there, doing nothing, being nothing, and most importantly: earning nothing.
Before my wife and I decided to go all in on the “content mine” known as starting a family, we had to take a good look at ourselves and ask, “What kind of child are we really going to get?” Was mashing our genitals together endlessly even worth it? And I don’t mean in a mental or physical well-being sense, lord no. I mean, will our children be a good on-camera presence? Running on the idea that the truest predictor of future results is past performance, we set to work on sifting through our family photos. Going back as far as we could, we learned that my dearly departed Aunt Alice — God rest her soul — can’t take a picture to save her fucking useless life, but that my wife’s family all have large heads and small bodies, or as we call it in the business: charisma. While you may see a freakish lollipop-looking ghoul, the camera sees MAGIC. The exact proportions needed to burst out of the screen to get those likes and subscribes.
Technology was also our friend; we used a DNA ancestry site to fill in a few gaps in the hairline predictor. My wife also found out she is 1% Jamaican, so she has been laying on that accent THICK with no guilt or shame. Sadly, my DNA filled another unfortunate gap in that Uncle Elmer has been positively ID’d as the Zodiac Killer. Uncle Elmer, you old card! We shook our collective family trees, and the answer fell out: have a baby.
But, in order to turn a profit, we had to go all in. If one child’s online presence could make somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000 per month, that’s only roughly $120,000 per year. But three children with three separate and distinct online personas, and the possibility of a fourth group-centric page? Those numbers are so large that I can’t even find a calculator with that many zeros. That will put us in the neighborhood of a really nice goddamn neighborhood. It’s not all gravy though; we had to keep in mind that for a very brief period at the start of their lives, they will not be able to earn much at all, and, shockingly, we’d have to actually take care of its basic human necessities. Bummer! But, you have to spend money to make money, so we got to the task of endlessly making love, but this time in a wholly non performative sense. Yuckie, I don’t want to get into that part. Google it, but, remember, I already warned you.
I began my planning. Our first child, a masculine child, would be Ronnie, the prankster, just like his old uncle Elmer, the aforementioned zodiac killer. Images danced in my head of him running up to a man on a crowded street and yelling, “DON’T TOUCH ME, YOU OLD PERVERT!” to get everyone’s attention while I follow behind holding a GoPro. The man, not in on the “joke,” would no doubt be traumatized while I would already be counting my soon-to-be-earned dollars. Addisyn, my second, would a beautiful little social justice warrior. Calling out the wrongs and rights, we will decide her views based on whatever wind the populace is blowing on that day. You want mundane platitudes? We got a whole storage room full of those, so buckle up because they are getting screamed in your face by a child in front of a tattered American flag! The last child, Riggs, would round out the group by recording reaction videos to other people’s camping setups. I don’t understand it, but that is what the algorithms want, and we, as a family, will be sworn to please the machine.
The first child came, and with it, immediate failure. I wasn’t too pleased with the gene mashing that had occurred, to be honest. I tried to downplay it in the weeks that followed. Maybe I was still living in those initial moments, the baby so covered in goo after first being born that I couldn’t get over it, but no. The truth was this: the baby was ugly. I could have all the brilliant prank content in the world, but nothing is going to truly “latch” if the person delivering that content elicits an “ew” from everyone watching. In these days of easily tossed-away content, this child was easily tossed away and would have been if my wife hadn’t grown so attached to the damn thing. Looking at the overhead, time lost, and overall negative sunk cost, we were currently sitting at a turning point in our family planning. On one hand, there is the desire to immediately try again, roll the dice and hope they land in our genetic favor while maneuvering the first child to a behind-the-scenes, number-crunching role. On the other hand, there is my wife who served me with divorce papers and has called me a “monster” more times than I can count.
On the plus side, the algorithm for divorced single dads seems to be trending upwards. I might not have to return that tattered American flag after all.
