So Father’s Day this year was a blast for me and my dad. It started out, for me, with me working all night, and then I hit up Wal-Mart after that to get my Dad the new grill he’d been asking for. At least my shopping expenditure started out with a single great gift for my father. I really do love the man, but by the time I was done, I kind of felt like shit for not being able to pull off an equally impressive mother’s day for my mom, I mean I felt really bad.

So anyways, it started with the grill. Then I decided he needed charcoal for the new grill so I grabbed a nifty double-bag package of that. Next I decided that the charcoal was nice and flammable, but it wasn’t exactly all that easy to get started, so some charcoal lighter fluid was in order, so I grabbed a big ass bottle of that. Then I considered the age old problem of lighting it after putting all that fluid on and getting both your hand and your lighter out of the flame before you lost all the hair on your arm, so I decided one of those flexible long ass lighters would be a great preventative measure for that risk. Next, I reminisced about the last time we had a charcoal grill and the bags of charcoal wound up just inside the door where it would eventually get torn and the black charcoal would be everywhere. So now I needed some sort of container that we could leave outside that would hold all the charcoal, lighter fluid, and lighter stuffs, so I picked up a Tupperware container.

Next up was the Father’s Day card, I could have cared less what it said in it or on it, it had to be cool. I was going to get one of those singing cards, but one of the things that makes my dad and I kindred spirits is our loathing of Country Music and all that had were cards with songs by country music fags, so fuck that. Then I found it, a card that literally had a fucking light show built in. you hit the button on the front and the built in LED lights just started going fucking off. So I went with that one, it had some dumb message on/in it to the effect of “have fun, but not too much, last time you did, your sorry ass got stuck with me” but with more of a Hallmark tone.

Then, I decided breakfast was in order since I was doing all this shopping at 6:30 in the morning. And, with breakfast, he likes coffee, and that’s when I realized his coffee maker was shit and that it had more or less been sitting full of whatever was left in it from last winter, ever since winter was still the evident season. So I bought him a new coffee maker and some filters, but no coffee, I was banking on their being some left from the last time we bought some. He’s no coffee connoisseur, so those of you thinking the freshness of the well-roasted bean was surely lost and the java was obviously horrible, well, you are probably right, but the taste difference between fresh ground coffee and whatever I pulled out of the canister at home would surely have been lost on the man.

Then I ran across a King Size Hershey’s bar with Almonds, his favorite candy bar of all time, so I got him that, and a bag of ice to keep the beer that was already waiting at home cold. Then I went to Subway to get him breakfast as I was hungry too and they had a Subway serving breakfast right in the Wal-Mart. Apparently they make some decent biscuits and gravy as the way I hear it, he ate them quite rapidly.

When I got home I put everything that belonged in the tub, in it; and then stacked it on top of the grill, I made him some coffee in his new coffee maker and threw out the old one that was on the verge of growing legs and walking out itself. Lastly I stacked his candy bar on top of his breakfast (it came in a Styrofoam box) and his card on top of that. All in all I thought it was quite the perfect setup for a Father’s Day present.

Then I went to sleep, woke up, got ready, and went to the Father’s Day gathering out at my Uncle Shane’s house where I did nothing but drink beer, play cards, and eat grilled meat all day long, until the storms came…