Master of Disaster

The trouble began during warm-ups, for them and for us.

The blue team driver had crashed his Lego go-kart during a trial run and some pieces of the frame had come off. The show was Lego Masters and the boys were both rooting for the red team, the older because they had the better personalities in his view, the younger because, well, we weren’t really sure why. All we knew was that he wanted red team to win the challenge, and if they didn’t things could get bad.

“Yes!” the younger exclaimed as the result of the crash became clear. He stood on the couch, too excited to sit, shirtless and in blue jeans. He rarely sat, preferring instead to spring from chair to couch to chair and back again, practicing his animal moves, knocking the couch back off the corner of the rug.

“Too soon to tell,” the older said. “Both cars look good.” He sat on the corner of an ottoman, mostly safe from getting sprung onto.

We sometimes had trouble with reality competition shows in the form of temper tantrums and meltdowns over the results. They’d get intense at the end, and the younger would be heavily invested in one team. Sometimes it came on too late for us to realize how invested he was. If we could tell what was happening, we could get him to go to another room when the final result was revealed. He went without much protest. He didn’t like getting all worked up either, even though his brother thought a lot of it was performative. I didn’t think so. The shows were intense and he really wanted one team to win. He had difficulty controlling his emotions around disappointment. We were working on it.

The red team had chosen a smaller, lighter person to be their driver. And their car hadn’t been damaged in the trial run. Things were looking good for them as the race was set to begin. It had become apparent to me during that trial run that passing on the little track was going to be difficult. Whoever got in front would likely take it, and red team had won pole position in the aesthetics portion of the Lego go-kart building competition.

Sure enough, when the race began, red team shot in front and was on their way to an easy win, coming close to lapping blue team’s car. But then an unexpected twist: the cars had to take one mandatory pit stop. Damn Will Arnett and the crafty writers and producers of that mega-hit show in its third season on Fox!

During the pit stop the teams had to disassemble and reassemble the wheels, as a sort of changing of the tires. Oh yeah, they also had NASCAR legend Jeff Gordon on the set, calling the race, and doing some other bits with Arnett. The Rainbow Warrior had gained some weight, but he was telegenic and could deliver a line. And he still had no problems driving a car at 200 m.p.h. as demonstrated in an opening bit with Arnett strapped in beside him.

The pit stop proved to be a real monkey wrench, as blue team simply had a better technique for stripping down Legos and snapping them together in a hurry. They pitted out before red team and even though red was faster, the red car driver could not find a way around the blue car. There just wasn’t room enough on the track.

“Come on, come on!” Everyone was shouting. All of the contestants on the show and all of us watching it in the living room.

“She can’t get around! She can’t pass!” I couldn’t help but to trumpet my prediction from earlier.

“Shut up, dad! We know! We can see! We’ve got eyes!” The older had great phrases. I was never allowed to call my shot, especially right in the moment just before. I wasn’t sure why, but the older would always get mad and tell me to shut up. I think he thought that my predictions would upset the younger and lead to a meltdown.

But nothing was going to prevent this meltdown.

He sat (which was already a bad sign) with his hands over his face, his fingers half covering his eyes, pulling down on his cheeks, like that emoji, the one for complete and total horror, and erupted in agony as blue team crossed the finish line. I leaped up and gently took the remote from the hands of the older and quickly turned the TV off. No need for the post-race finale. The show had done its job. It had brought us together as a family for some quality time and entertainment. It had brought us to the edge of our seats in excitement on a weeknight after dinner. And now it had left my younger son wailing in sheer agony.

“The red team won! The red team won!” he screamed, his face turning red and tears starting to stream.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Red team won. They won. It’s fine.”

“No, they didn’t” the older countered. “Why does he always get to have it his way?”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “I’m just trying to cam him down.”

“Red team won! Red team won!” the younger was milking it now. His brother was kind of right about that part. But what was the difference? Whether you accidentally got mad or intentionally made yourself more mad? The result was the same, screaming, yelling, throwing stuff, which is what the younger was now doing, slamming his blanket to the floor, throwing a book across the room.

“No they didn’t,” the older insisted. “You’re just being a baby.”

“What!!! What did you call me??”

Oh, no, now he had gone and made it worse, and he was in no mood to quit making it worse.

“Are you nuts?” I said. “Stop it.”

“Why does he get to act like that? He is being a baby, and the red team lost!”

I had no answer. When it came to philosophical and moral arguments, the older had me beat. He could twist us all into knots.

For the younger, there was only one thing left to do: start punching.

He landed a few shots, but the older still had him size-wise and crunched him to the ground, which ended the fight, if not the tears.

“Okay, okay,” I said and picked up the pieces and moved us all toward bath and bed. The younger’s hurt feelings lasted all the way until lights out. Then he finally gave it up and let me kiss him goodnight.

The older liked Lego Masters but not nearly as much as he liked The Masked Singer, which is a story for another day. It was the younger who actually loved Legos. The older had never gotten into them. The younger had caught the bug pretty hard sometime around age 5. He loved putting the sets together. When he got one as a gift, he couldn’t rest until he had completed the build. Some of the builds took several hours. We had to factor that time in whenever he might receive one as a gift. Lego sets were at the ends of his sticker charts for chores. He obsessed about them, probably not to an alarming degree, not to the degree of the adult contestants on the show. But Lego could be all consuming to him at times.

Some of the sets he kept together, the “mechs” and the big vehicles. The rest he would build and then take apart and play with in pieces. He had started making his own original builds more, vehicles and such, some of it from different Lego books, some of it perhaps inspired by the show. He had a lot of older builds that were partially deconstructed. They weren’t in the regular play rotation, put away or to the side. Using the Lego Masters set as inspiration, I decided one day to reorganize his Lego bricks by color. I thought it might freshen up the play area and bring some toys back into rotation.

I sat down with some morning NPR on started disassembling the chunks and pieces of the unused old builds. Some of the bricks were impossibly tiny, little single Lego dots, thin layers of two-stud bricks stacked together in intricate ways, tiny gears and arms and specialty pieces, wheel casings and axels and hooks attached to spools of string from a crane model. Those models were never going back together, I thought, even with the instructions, which we had saved, which he had called the “constructions” when he was younger. I thought about his active little mind spending all of those hours focused on snapping all those tiny pieces together in precise fashion. The models may never get put back together. Or maybe they will. Maybe he’ll use the pieces for new builds, or maybe he won’t. They weren’t getting any use anyway. What was certain was that he had spent the time putting them together, and I had spent the time taking them apart and thinking about him putting them together. We had all watched Lego Masters and had enjoyed it, even though we got mad and fought sometimes at the end. We always made up by lights out.

On NPR I heard a story about adult toy collectors and how much money they were spending on toys for themselves this holidays, and how the toy manufacturers were marketing more and more to adult buyers every year. A man being interviewed was, of course, a Lego collector, who said that he had spent over a thousand dollars on Legos for himself this year.

Holy hell, what a loser.

Happy holidays, everyone!

PS Thanks for reading this fourth and final installment of Xuladad for 2022. My goal for 2023 is to publish at least five! So there’s that to look forward to. Peace.