Exploding Unicorn by James Breakwell Podcast (private feed for andy@afbray.co.uk)

Spaghetti and Pinewood

Little wooden cars are big business. This year, our Pinewood Derby event was tasked with funding the Cub Scout troop for the rest of the year. It didn’t allow gambling, although that can’t be far off based on the commercials for every sporting event these days. Soon, DraftKings and FanDuel will offer betting lines on the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show and the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Lacking the right lawyers to get Las Vegas involved, our pack went with the next best option: a spaghetti dinner. They paired the biggest (and smallest) race of the year with an all-you-can-eat pasta buffet to raise money. Carbs, cash, and gluttony are a winning combination. What could possibly go wrong?We used the fundraiser as a chance to flaunt our minor amounts of disposable income. Instead of buying individual tickets for the dinner, I booked an entire table. Unlike how I usually spend money, that was actually the more expensive option. My goal wasn’t to maximize calories per dollar; it was to minimize guilt. The dues for each scout only cover about a third of their expenses. The pack offsets some of those costs through volunteer labor. Parents give their time, energy, and craft supplies to cover the gap. I don’t have much in any of those categories. I have two jobs and too many kids. My surplus of children adds to my sense of obligation. I tax the pack’s resources more than most. When the scout leaders offered the whole-table option, I pulled out my wallet to overpay for pasta. For the first time in my life, I felt okay about wasting money. Good causes are the worst.Exploding Unicorn by James Breakwell is a reader-supported publication. It’s like PBS, but completely unhelpful and slightly evil. Join today!Having booked the table, I had to fill it. We had twelve seats at our disposal. I would bring six mouths by default. If I truly wanted the scouts to benefit the most from my donation, I would have left those extra seats empty, but I couldn’t bring myself to put my lack of popularity on display. I’d rather the other parents have to discover that on their own by doing a little bit of digging. To fill out our table, I invited my parents, Lola’s parents, and our board game friends, Peter and Delilah. No one was particularly eager to accept. Even the hungriest person in the world (me) can buy an all-you-can-eat portion of noodles at the grocery store for about a dollar. It was a tough sell to get Lola’s parents to drive forty-five minutes or mine to drive an hour for four quarters worth of spaghetti. But as with the donation to book the table, the point wasn’t the money; it was the kids. If you use children as the excuse, you can get people to do anything. All six of our reluctant invitees agreed to come. It’s their own fault for having consciences.The children weren’t the only draw. There were also cars. The Pinewood Derby is a big deal in 2025. Back when I was a child in the early Cretaceous Period, racing was simpler. Two cars at a time went head-to-head in a winner-takes-all, double-elimination tournament. Nothing was timed. It’s hard to track cars to the tenth of a second on a sundial. In modern times, the Pinewood Derby utilizes cutting edge technology. There are four tracks, each with an individual, automatic timer that measures finishes to the millionth of a second. I’m not sure if it’s actually the millionth, but there were a lot of digits. I don’t have the patience to count the decimal places. Every car runs in each of the four lanes once in case any one avenue offers a speed advantage. Then the times are averaged together. For a final element of fairness, instead of competing against the other three cars running at the same time as yours, you compete against the average times of every car in your age bracket. It’s a truly epic amount of science projected onto small blocks of wood with plastic wheels. As an added bonus, this year, the races had video replays. The last few seconds of the heat were displayed on a giant projector screen at the front of the room. The cars were so fast that that didn’t reveal much other than four colorful blurs, but it was a cool effect. It drove home that technology has reached its final form. We can shut down all the universities and research labs in the world. The pursuit of human knowledge is done.The races were set up to be perfectly fair in every aspect. That doesn’t help if your car is legitimately the slowest. That’s where I came in. The deck was stacked against my kids simply for being related to me. As with previous years, I didn’t cut or design their cars. I took the girls to a Pinewood Derby workshop run by better dads with superior tools. Those dads have been at it for decades, long after their own kids aged out of the program. They loved it so much that they couldn’t give it up. I let their enthusiasm make up for my lack of ability. My girls could draw whatever design they wanted on their blocks of wood and those dads would cut it out, no questions asked. Well, some questions. Waffle took the lack of limitations literally. She drew random asymmetrical zigzag patterns on both sides of her car. The dad at the saw asked if she was sure that was what she wanted. As with everything else in her life, Waffle was absolutely confident. The dad cut it out without any further hesitation. Lucy took a more traditional approach. Her design looked sort of like a lopsided dumbbell. I took the kids home, and they painted the cars themselves. Per usual, my only role was to take them places and give them supplies. They did the rest. They lacked the tips other kids get from more involved fathers about how to optimize their racers for speed. Only the final step of the car creation process would be up to me. Of course that was the part where I screwed up everything.All I had to do was put on the wheels. Each one is a plastic circle with a metal nail for an axle. There are pre-cut channels on the bottom of the wooden block where the nails are supposed to go. Pushing in those nails is easier said than done. Getting the wheels properly aligned is one of the most important factors in a car’s speed. Too tight and a car will drag, too loose and it will wobble. The nightmare scenario is that a wheel falls off while the car goes down the track. That’s the kind of public parenting fail that children remember for a lifetime. None of my kids’ wheels have ever fallen off, but they’ve never spun particularly well, either. More than once, I’ve accidentally snapped off the wood on the edge of the channel, forcing me to use super glue to hold the axle in place. The job of installing the wheels is so high pressure that I try to avoid it entirely. At the final Cub Scout meeting before the Pinewood Derby, the pack offered to let the kids make test runs with their cars. I took my kids’ vehicles without the wheels attached. In previous years, one of the more competent dads would sometimes install them for me. This year, no one made the offer. Everyone else’s cars were fully assembled and ready for their practice runs. I had to hastily push in the wheels without tools. One of the other scouts scoffed at me and asked why I wasn’t using an aligner. I’ve never even heard of that tool, if it is a tool. It could have been a piece of sci-fi technology he made up. I used one car like a hammer to pound in the wheels on the other car, and then switched. It was a step below a monkey banging two rocks together. Our outlook for the races was not good.Lucy and Waffle did their test runs. Their cars made it down the track with the wheels still attached, but their racers came in well behind the other few kids at the meeting. Lucy’s car was the more concerning of the two. To make a racer faster, besides keeping all four wheels on, you need to come as close to the 5 oz. weight limit as possible. Hers was only 2.6 oz. She wanted me to buy official Pinewood Derby weights, but those were kind of pricey and only available at a store in the next suburb. Instead, I dug through our basement and found two random screws that were kind of heavy. I convinced Lucy that they looked like rocket boosters. She was persuaded and let me glue them to the back of her vehicle. More importantly, I actually used two of the old screws I’d been saving for years for no reason. That’s every man’s dream. It’s also my wife’s dream. All she wants from life is for me to clean out the basement. At the rate of two screws annually, I should have the entire place spotless by the year 3000.We went into the race Saturday afternoon with intact cars and low expectations. At the official registration, both vehicles passed inspection. Each weighed in at 4.8 oz., which was pretty good for us. If their cars performed poorly, it wouldn’t be due to a lack of mass. It would be because of how I put on the wheels. As the patriarch of this family, I embraced my role as the universal scapegoat.The races progressed through the ranks, from Lions to Tigers to Wolves. Finally, it was time for the Bears, which was Waffle’s group. The top three cars from each den advanced to the final round. Waffle’s den only had three kids. For the third year in a row, she would move on by default. She was okay with that. Her car lost soundly to the other two kids in her group on all four runs, but she made the finals regardless. She was ecstatic. Lucy wasn’t as fortunate. Her group of Arrow of Lights is the biggest den in the pack. Her car also lost every race. She did not move on. In their post race analysis, Waffle and Lucy both concluded that the problem was Lucy’s wheels. I expected nothing less. What really mattered was that Lucy didn’t cry. This was our first tear-free Pinewood Derby. Now I might cry. My kids are growing up.Thanks for reading Exploding Unicorn by James Breakwell! This post is public so feel free to share it.Waffle didn’t fare as well in the final round. She was near the bottom, but not all the way down. There was one heat where she beat another car. I’ll savor that non-loss for the rest of my life. The biggest winner of the day was my mom. In between races and plates of spaghetti, she put in a bid at the silent auction for some fuzzy socks. She watched the bidding more closely than the action on the track. By the end of the afternoon, she was in the lead, but she was distraught. She thought she would have to leave before she’d get the socks. We likely won’t see her again until Easter, which would mean that she wouldn’t be able to put on the world’s warmest footwear until next winter. Then she had a stroke of luck. Right before she had to leave to get back to Illinois for one of her many side jobs, the pack announced the winners of the silent auction. Mom left with her socks in hand—or on foot. I wouldn’t be surprised if she wore them on the way home. It was a highly successful Pinewood Derby, even if we didn’t win any races. The only loser here was whoever that guy was who installed the wheels. I don’t recommend using him again next year.Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.James This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jamesbreakwell.substack.com/subscribe

For the Birds

What do you give as a Christmas gift for the people who have everything? If you’re my parents, all they want is self-improvement. Well, other-improvement. They would really like for me to be a better person. That’s not going to happen. For our extremely belated Christmas, I turned to blatant consumerism instead. I bought them a joint present that will either be the best or worst thing they receive this season. Because of the odd timing of our much-delayed holiday weekend, I won’t have time to write this newsletter after they actually open the gift. That’s ideal. I want to tell this story when there’s still a chance one or both of them won’t be overwhelmed by rage and disappointment. I might yet avoid the bad ending. I aspire for the medium ending where they just kind of shrug and have no strong feelings one way or the other. That’s way better than getting disowned again.My dad is the simpler of my parents to buy for. His interests are Bigfoot and birds. If it doesn’t start with b, he wants nothing to do with it. He’s also into beer and black coffee, but to a lesser degree. We’ve already given him far more caffeinated and adult beverages that he can consume in a lifetime. It doesn’t help that he displays a level of moderation he failed to pass on to his sons. He’ll have one or two beers this weekend. The rest of us will have slightly more. There won’t be any way to know who finished off those twin thirty packs. It was probably the dog.Bigfoot gifts are held back by the elusiveness of their subject matter. There hasn’t been breaking news on the cryptid front in a while. That’s led to a lack of new merchandise. We’ve gotten my dad every Bigfoot hunting kit, novelty mug, and Christmas ornament on the market. I wish they’d find the guy already so there’d be new stuff to buy. My dad would kill for a signed Bigfoot autograph. Short of that, the Bigfoot angle is exhausted. That just leaves birds.Exploding Unicorn by James Breakwell is a reader-supported publication. It’s like PBS, but completely unhelpful and slightly evil. Join today!Those flying dinosaurs have long been my nemeses. If Jurassic Park had been made with geese instead of raptors, it would have been even scarier. Too scary, in fact. Steven Spielberg passed on using them because he didn’t want his movie to be rated R. Recently, I’ve warmed up to birds, or at least regarded them with a reduced level of hate. It’s all thanks to a little board game called Wingspan. The birds on those cards are adorable. More importantly, they’re worth points. If I can gamify something and use it to triumph over my frenemies, it’s immediately more appealing. It might just trick me into liking birds yet. My dad doesn’t play board games, but he does like to look out the window. We’ve bought him a lot of bird feeders over the years. He might not have any tree branches or fence posts left to hang new ones. I’m surprised that his neighbors haven’t complained that he’s hoarding all the local birds. There aren’t enough of them to go around. That’s not my dad’s fault. If other people on the street want some feathered friends, they, too, should be impossible to buy for at Christmas.My mom is a more difficult riddle to solve. Outside of chocolate covered cherries, I can’t figure out what she wants. That’s the downside of leading a rich and fulfilling life. If only she were dependent on blatant consumerism like the rest of us. She likes her pets, and she enjoys catching wildlife on the security cameras in the backyard. Her postage stamp-sized green space could host a nature documentary. The actual grass area is probably twenty feet by twenty feet, but it’s broken up by a deck, swing set, and sidewalk. There’s more space in the front yard, but wild animals never go there. It has a four foot tall picket fence plus a line of privets, making it not worth the trouble to reach the dog poop it so jealously guards. The backyard is a different story. The fence is much lower on one side, and it defends not just dog droppings, but also an apple tree. More than once, the security cameras have captured deer in the early hours of the morning standing in that tiny yard munching small fruit. I have no idea where these animals hide during the day. My parents are in a very urban area in the middle of the city. Yet night after night, the deer show up, sometimes stopping to graze and other times just wandering up and down the alley behind the house to case the joint. My mom loves catching them on video. It’s animal voyeurism at its worst.My idea for a joint gift for both my mom and dad is a video bird feeder. It was originally just going to be for my dad, but nice video bird feeders are really expensive, so now I have to justify it for both parents. Hopefully my mom doesn’t read that part. There’s a chance they’ll both enjoy it. All of my siblings will also likely be getting my dad bird feeders, but hopefully of the lesser, non-video variety. Not everybody can be the best child in the family. My status in that group depends entirely on the premise that our parents’ love can be bought. When a bird lands on the perch of the video feeder, a camera automatically starts filming in 1080p. It then sends an alert to your phone to show you the bird and also identifies it using AI. More importantly, you can share that video with other people by sending a link. That’s the part I think will appeal to my mom. She loves filling the family Facebook Messenger thread with deer sightings. I’m betting she’ll get just as excited about birds if she has good, clear videos of them. If not, next Christmas I’ll buy her a really expensive gift and then make up reasons why it should be for both her and my dad. Maybe I can stack a giant mound of chocolate covered cherries in the shape of Bigfoot.The video bird feeder solves the worst problem with bird watching, other than the birds themselves. That downside will stick around, unfortunately. The other main drawback of bird watching is that the birds are so far away. They’re skittish by nature, which is how they survive. The birds that aren’t afraid of us are the ones you don’t want around. I’m looking at you, pigeons and seagulls. Actually, I’m not looking. I’m doing my best to ignore you. There’s nothing worse than flying vermin in search of trash. They won’t hesitate to get all up in your business. By contrast, even Canada geese keep a medium distance—unless I’m driving by that retention pond on the way to the gym. Then the geese take up the entire road and dare me to drive through them. I respectfully wait until they move. Fifty angry geese can defeat a minivan any day. I should have Lola bring the second van behind me to make it a fair fight.The birds you actually want to see always fly away. The video bird feeder gets around that. It sticks the camera right in their faces, and they don’t even know it. That means they’ll be completely unaware when it captures them in embarrassing poses with their beaks open and food hanging out. The hardest part of observing wildlife is the cringe factor. We’ll get to see birds up close and personal, flaws and all. Perhaps the reason they dart away at the first sign of humans isn’t because they’re afraid of being eaten, but because they know they look best from a distance. Nobody has invented bird makeup yet. I can’t wait to see all those acne scars and crow’s feet.Recording the birds should help my parents finally see the rare, cool ones. My mom and dad both still work. They can’t spend all day looking out the back window to see what flies or walks in. My mom has yet to see a deer in real time. They always show up when she’s in bed. It doesn’t help that she goes to sleep at 9 p.m. and wakes up at 3 a.m.. She’d even miss most diurnal animals with those numbers. If there are any night birds out there in search of a midnight snack, they’ll be caught in the act. Hopefully my parents know how to turn off notifications on their phones overnight. I don’t want them to wake up when the same sparrow with insomnia comes back for the third time. Then again, most flying animals don’t feed in the dark. It would probably just be bats and owls. Unless my dad fills the feeder with mosquitoes or mice, the feeder should remain untouched in the dark. That’s assuming the mammals stay away. Maybe those deer will be extra aggressive and check out the bird feeder now that there are no more apples on the trees. With how bold they’ve been on the rest of the property, it’s only a matter of time until one of them lets itself into the house to make a sandwich.My parents don’t have space for another bird feeder, but for one this fancy, they’ll have to make room. Maybe they can throw away one of the bird feeders I gave them for a previous Christmas. We live in a disposable society for a reason. I assume the new video bird feeder will be so superior to everything else out there that they could toss out all the bird feeders from my siblings as well. Unless my mom truly hates the gift and feels snubbed, in which case the new bird feeder will only film the inside of a garage closet. That could be okay, too. I’ve always wondered about the inner life of mice and closet ghosts.One limitation on the video bird feeder is nature itself. I’m not sure if my parents’ neighborhood actually has that many interesting birds. There are plenty of sparrows to be sure, plus the occasional robin and grackle. That’s about it. If we were playing Wingspan, I would describe all of those as garbage birds. They’re not worth very many points, and they’re not very special. Yes, I can make superficial judgements like that based solely on appearance. If you’re mostly bland colors and everywhere on my block, I want nothing to do with you. My parents live a few miles from the lake, which features more impressive birds, but it would be challenging to get them to stop by. If my dad has a few extra cans of sardines lying around, maybe he can attract a great blue heron. Seeing that thing staring into the bird feeder would be a truly startling experience. I’d rather not turn this avian Snapchat into a horror movie. The only thing that could be scarier would be if Big Bird showed up. I don’t know what species he’s supposed to be, but whatever he is, I hope he sticks to Sesame Street. This bird feeder is made for free samples, not three-course meals. My parents’ birdseed budget doesn’t cover an all-you-can-eat buffet for the largest Muppet in the world.There are other animals in the vicinity that might take an interest in the feeder. The regular security cameras have captured raccoons skulking about. They’re never up to any good. Their skulls are shaped exactly like those of bears, but smaller. They can also get into anything. I suspect they lurk around my parents’ house for revenge. When he was in high school in farm country, my dad made money by running through the woods shooting raccoons, whose pelts were worth fifty dollars each. He earned enough money to buy another gun to kill even more raccoons. It was capitalism in action. Based on the security camera footage, the raccoons remember. My parents better lock their doors. It couldn’t hurt to also dig a moat.Thanks for reading Exploding Unicorn by James Breakwell! This post is public so feel free to share it.The most dangerous animals, however, are humans. My parents’ security cameras have picked up police officers more than once who were looking for somebody on the run in the neighborhood. The video bird feeder is unlikely to capture such exciting footage. Perhaps it won’t appeal to my mom if it can’t can’t pump out an impromptu episode of Cops. I’m banking on the chance that she might welcome a change of pace. The tranquil snippets of birds eating might be a nice break from the chaos transpiring on the rest of the property. On the other hand, this could be the reason she uninvites me from Christmas next year. Only time will tell.Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.James This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jamesbreakwell.substack.com/subscribe

The Mystery Room

There’s a mystery room in my house. It’s hidden behind a steel door that only locks from the outside. Beyond that metal barrier lurks an eerie cold and, more dangerously, a low ceiling. That’s more of a threat to my head than any ghost. The room is an unfinished attic, and it’s full of totes and boxes whose contents remain unknown to any mortal being. My wife remembers what’s in them, but she doesn’t count because she keeps track of them with her supernatural wifely powers that let her know where all things are at all times. The secret is that the totes are empty. Whatever she wants simply appears in front of her, like a miniature Room of Requirement encased in Tupperware. That doesn’t explain why the totes are so heavy when I pick them up. Perhaps the magical world knows what I really need is something ungainly to move around. I wish the mystical forces of the universe would stop conspiring to make me workout.You might be confused when I claim my attic is a mystery room because I sleep there. It’s one of the reasons we bought this house. The large, Victorian structure had an unfinished attic that spanned the entire third floor. When we moved in, roofing nails protruded dangerously from the slanted ceilings, making it look like Hellraiser in house form. The insulation was between the second story ceiling and the attic floor, leaving the attic itself unprotected from the temperatures of the outdoors. It was scorching in the summer, freezing in the winter, and perfectly comfortable for exactly one day every fall and spring. That discouraged us from storing too much up there. Only some of my auxiliary items could survive being melted and flash frozen on a recurring basis. That wasn’t the only reason we didn’t fully utilize the space. It was three stories above the Earth. The only way things would get up there is if I carried them, which was a long way to go. It was a much shorter trip to take items to the trash cans outside. My lack of cardio and upper body strength saved us from becoming pack rats, which was a very real danger. Our unfinished, uninsulated attic offered nearly endless storage space. If only it weren’t located in low earth orbit.Exploding Unicorn by James Breakwell is a reader-supported publication. It’s like PBS, but completely unhelpful and slightly evil. Join today!Sometime after we had our fourth and final kid, we got around to renovating the attic. We had finished our family; now we needed to finish our house. We wanted another floor where we could escape all these kids. That had been our long-term plan all along. We figured that someday we’d hire a contractor and put something amazing on the top tier. When we first moved in, it was hard to imagine that we would ever run out of space on the main two floors. Lola and I were just twenty-two. Instead of buying a modest starter home, we opted to go with a giant (by our standards) house that loomed over the rest of the block. Only a year earlier, we had both lived in dorm rooms roughly the size of prison cells. From there, we moved briefly into an eight hundred square foot apartment before jumping into a three thousand square-foot, four bedroom, two bathroom house. The price was right, and so were the circumstances. The prior owners were desperate to sell. They were going through a divorce—hopefully not because of the stress of maintaining an old house, but we can’t rule it out. They had an offer that was contingent on the buyer selling their own house, which they hadn’t been able to do in a year. If we were wiser, we might have seen that as a sign of the coming 2008 housing market collapse, which struck in full force just months after we bought the place. We didn’t foresee any of that. All we knew was that this was a place we could afford, and that if we bought it, we would likely never have to move again. If we ever ran out of space, we could simply finish that rugged room in the sky. As if we would ever really need to. Who could possibly have that many kids?For years, our house was largely empty. We had entire bedrooms with no furniture in them. Lola and I were different people in those days. We invited over our college friends to play beer pong at the dining room table. It wasn’t like we had anything nice that could be damaged. All of our furniture came from dumpsters and estate sales. I’d sarcastically claim that our neighbors must have been thrilled, but we didn’t have any. To one side was a tiny church with no members, and to the other was a house turned into a business where no one worked. That was bad for the local economy but great for us. The only downside was the isolation. If our high school or college friends wanted to hang out with us, they had to drive in from another city, or, in my case, another state. Luckily, we had plenty of bedrooms for them when they got here. They just had to be okay with sleeping on the floor. That might explain all of their back problems today.Gradually, and with great reluctance, we grew up. We had our oldest daughter, Betsy, in 2010, roughly two years after we moved in. Children came fast and furious after that, with the emphasis on “furious.” We had another baby every two years until our youngest, Waffle, who arrived after a mere seventeen month gap. Suddenly, our big empty house didn’t seem quite so big or quite so empty. The proximity didn’t help. All three bedrooms were right next to each other on the second floor. (The fourth bedroom wasn’t really a bedroom. Based on its size and location, it was better used as an office, or, in our extremely normal family, a pig room.) The kids were stacked on top of each other, and on top of us. There wasn’t much privacy. The master bedroom door had a sliding lock I installed myself that, depending on the season and the tilt of the house that day, might or might not have lined up to actually latch shut. After spending so much time building up our family, it was time to escape it. We hired a contractor to renovate our attic. We were literally moving up.Like all renovations, this one took twice as long and cost twice as much as the initial quote. The final amount was about half the purchase price of the house. Like all contractors, ours had trouble showing up. He completely disappeared by the end, leaving the final five percent or so of the job undone. That was especially egregious when you consider that part of the space was supposed to be left unfinished by design. The new master bedroom and bathroom had both insulation and HVAC support. We splurged for luxuries like keeping our living space livable. That didn’t extend to the closet. It covers a long, L-shaped section on one whole side of the bedroom under the eves. Squeezing the closet into every nook and cranny of that half of the former attic gave us nearly infinite space for clothes but not much room for heads. That doesn’t bother Lola. I have to duck, but she could do jumping jacks in there. The closet is insulated, but it doesn’t have any vents. If we want it to get hot or cold air from the rest of the room, we have to leave one of the closet doors open a crack. Otherwise, before I get dressed, I’ll have to knock down icicles. Who needs cold showers when you have an old house? Just getting out of bed here is extreme.Those temperature swings seem moderate compared to the final space on the third floor. That’s the attic, or what’s left of it. It’s behind a steel door on the opposite side of the room from our closet. It has even more linear feet of storage than the closet under an even more slanted ceiling. To enter it, I have to bend over at the waist like I’m entering a Victorian coal mine. There’s a reason they used compact child laborers. There’s not even enough room for me to turn around. If I go down one way and want to go back, I have to crouch scoot backwards. Instead of a wood floor, the remaining unfinished attic space has the cheapest linoleum squares that loose change could buy. They’re great for sliding around plastic totes, which are the main inhabitants of the room. Clothes and decorations that are out of season all get stacked in a single row under the steepest part of the slant. The space is also the permanent home of the middle seats that we took out of our minivans, leftover fitness gear I no longer use, and the free author copies of my various books that I never sold or gave away. It’s a nicer storage space than our basement because, while it gets hot and cold, it stays dry. My leftover books might burst into flames, but they’ll never mold. I always hoped my writing career would end in a blaze of glory instead of mildew.The unfinished attic space is more than just storage; it’s also a powerful symbol of inequality. I’d like to believe Lola and I split all household tasks evenly, but the totes in the attic prove otherwise. Every article of clothing in them was purchased by her. She decides what gets moved from the totes to various dressers, what gets put back in long-term storage, and what gets given away. It’s for the best that I’m out of the clothing loop. I can barely handle dressing myself. I’m only brought into the picture if the kids require something in bulk. When Betsy needed half a dozen identical copies of black running shorts, I had her covered. All shopping should take less than thirty seconds and be done entirely from my phone. Actually going to the store is a form of torture.In my mind, anything that goes into the attic is meant to be forgotten—if I knew it existed in the first place. That’s why I was shocked Saturday when I saw all the contents of the attic come out. As usual, it was my own fault. I started the afternoon by leading my kids in the effort to put away the Christmas decorations. We filled up two holiday totes in short order after I figured out which child was causing the most problems and made them do chores by themselves in another part of the house. The key to good parenting is selective banishment. But before I returned the holiday totes to their attic prison, Lola decided to clean out and organize the entire space. Toddler clothes and shoes from ages past suddenly filled our bedroom. The memories came flooding back. As traumatized as I was to remember that my children used to be smaller, the kids took it even worse. It was up to them to go through the hand-me-downs from their sisters and determine what they would and wouldn’t wear. This was after I promised them that, if they helped me take down the Christmas tree, they’d be done with chores for the day. They should have known their mom could alter the deal. I lack the authority to make binding contracts in this house.Thanks for reading Exploding Unicorn by James Breakwell! This post is public so feel free to share it.To their credit, the kids got to work. Together with Lola, they went through everything, discarding massive bags of stuff that will now make their way to other families with smaller kids, to second-hand stores, or to a dumpster. It was an unexpected but brutally efficient decluttering that would have made Marie Kondo proud. The best part was it barely involved me. Whatever was left is now back in its attic lair, where it will remain until the next round of surprise cleaning in a decade or two. The next time we go through it in detail, it will likely be to pass down clothes to grandkids—if there are any clothes left. There’s no way to know what’s in there. As soon as I send this email, I’ll once again forget that our attic exists. That steel door in our bedroom will forever conceal a mystery.Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.James This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jamesbreakwell.substack.com/subscribe

Football in the Snow

Last week, my local NFL team, the Indianapolis Colts, eliminated itself from playoff contention with a historically embarrassing performance against the New York Giants. It was the kind of unnecessary face-plant that makes me feel a personal connection to the team. Choking under pressure is sort of my thing. Besides reminding me that I’m not alone in the universe, the Colts offered me the opportunity of a lifetime. Their season might have been effectively over, but they still had one game left to play. Real fans wanted nothing to do with it. That left just me. With ticket prices plummeting, I decided now was the perfect time to take my daughters to their first ever NFL game. I’m always looking for new and exciting ways to disappoint them.My kids don’t care about the team or the sport. They have only the vaguest idea of how football works. They get excited for the Super Bowl every year, but only because I take them to the dollar store beforehand to buy snacks. As for the game itself, they watch some of it if Taylor Swift is in the stands. They also like the commercials and the halftime show. All the other stuff with the ball on the field is an annoying interruption. It would seem like an especially bad idea, then, to spend money to take them to see professional football in person. That doesn’t take into account how truly awful the Colts are this season. The tickets to this game were basically free.The actual price was twelve dollars each on the secondhand market. Of course, I didn’t pay that. StubHub kindly added an eleven dollar service fee to every ticket. Apparently an employee hand-bundled the electronic files with the utmost care. Counting taxes, fees, and criminal extortion, I paid $143 for tickets for the six of us, which seemed like a steal. I could have saved even more money if I waited or if I wasn’t adamant that we all had to sit together. If I had held off until the hour before the game and bought individual seats in six different parts of the stadium, we might have gotten tickets for two dollars each. Then again, I’m sure Stubhub would have added a special twenty-five dollar fee to each one because their employees accompanied them with extra love. I thank them for their attention to detail. Even if I didn’t save the maximum amount of money theoretically possible, I still got off pretty easy. My discount wasn’t just because of the ineptitude that was expected to happen on the field. It was because we might not even be able to see it. Our seats won’t be in the nosebleed section; they’ll be in the oxygen section, as in we’ll have to bring our own. To reach our seats, we’ll have to take three escalators and a blimp. There are Himalayan mountain tops that are lower.Exploding Unicorn by James Breakwell is a reader-supported publication. It’s like PBS, but completely unhelpful and slightly evil. Join today!I put all this in the future tense because I’m throwing together this newsletter on Saturday instead of the usual day at the end of the weekend. The NFL rudely refused to move around its games to accommodate my writing schedule. This game is in the not-so-distant future for me and the not-so-distant past for you. Literally any disaster could befall us between now and when we reach your current location on the timeline. Just the planning stages for this expedition have given me more than enough to write about. There are a lot of logistics to consider when transporting four children to a downtown sporting event that they don’t care about. I appreciate their apathy. It allowed me to book the worst seats in the stadium without a second thought. I can tell the kids we’re watching a polo match and they won’t know the difference. Neither will I. From our distance, it will be impossible to distinguish a human from a horse.If we won’t be able to see anything, why take the kids to the stadium at all? For the same reason I took them to Mammoth Cave: It’s big, and it’s within driving distance. They might not understand the sport, but they can still experience the spectacle. We’ll be in a giant stadium surrounded by other people who get very excited and/or furious about whatever may or may not be happening far below. We say we live in Indianapolis, but really we’re far out in the suburbs. I seldom take my kids into the urban core, depriving them of whatever it is the city has to offer. We can’t experience a professional football game out in the boonies—except on our various large screen TVs, which would show us the action in high definition rather than giving us vague hints about what’s happening based on distant blurs and crowd noise. I managed not to take my kids to an NFL game for my prior fourteen years as a parent. It was time to break the streak and earn some good dad points, no matter how much my kids hated it.Before they have a chance to complain about the game, I’ll have to get them there. That’s easier said than done. The city expects me to pay money to park my vehicle. That’s highly offensive to a dedicated suburbanite such as myself. Where I live, there’s no place I could pay to park, even if I wanted to. We have more free parking spaces than people, like God intended. Things are more congested in downtown Indianapolis. I thought I had a hack to get around that final upcharge. My former employer will let me park on their property for free as long as it’s outside normal work hours. The problem is the distance. Their parking lot is over a mile from the stadium. In good weather, or with only adults, that wouldn’t be a problem. I’ll hike for three days if it saves me a dollar. It’s a different story with small children in January, especially with a blizzard on the way. All things being equal, my wife would prefer that we not freeze to death. She’s such a buzzkill.I repeatedly checked the forecast before I booked my tickets. I was hoping the approaching winter storm was more hype than substance. As of Saturday afternoon, it looks like I guessed wrong. Meteorologists are now calling for three to five inches of snow, which will be our first major accumulation of the winter. In Minnesota, that would be considered beach weather, but around here, it’s treated like an approaching apocalypse. People are already talking about what they’re going to do when they’re snowed in. I’ll be venturing out with my entire family to the heart of the city. The snow is expected to start before kickoff, but it’s not projected to get heavy until later that night. I’m hoping that we can make it in and out without much trouble. Everyone else is more pessimistic, which no doubt helped suppress the ticket prices. Nobody wants to get trapped in the stadium. Not with this version of the team, anyway. If we still had Peyton Manning, it would be a different story.Given the weather, hiking to my free parking spot with my family is out of the question. Instead, I could drop off my crew at the stadium, park far away, and hike back on my own. I checked Google Maps for an estimate. Given the traffic patterns, the app thought it would take me seven minutes to drive to my parking spot and half an hour to walk back. That’s a considerable chunk of time in twenty-five degree weather with light snow. Worse, I’d have to complete the hike in reverse at the end of the game when the temperature was colder and the snow was more intense. I wouldn’t actually be saving any money, at least not once you factor in how much it would cost to amputate my frozen toes. I don’t have a discount surgeon—yet. Hit me up if you have any recommendations.That left me scrambling for a plan c. A friend of a friend came through. He has season tickets and tailgates before every home game. He parks in a land that the law forgot. It’s a chunk of grass too small to be a park but too large to be a median. More importantly, no one seems to own it. He and some other fans have been parking there for two years. Nobody has ever asked them for money or told them to move. If I was feeling risky, I could join him on his pirate parking adventure. With my luck, the one time I tried would be the day everyone gets towed. I’d be inclined to take a chance if the spot was more conveniently located. While it’s closer than my former employer’s lot, it would still be a fifteen-minute walk. That’s fine if you’ve had a half a dozen trunk beers and want to enjoy a leisurely stroll downtown. It’s less than ideal if you’re sober and shepherding your family through a pre-blizzard temperature drop. There had to be a better way.There was, but it would cost me. I mentioned my predicament at a Pinewood Derby workshop Saturday morning. That’s where better dads with better tools carve my kids’ racers for me while I stand around and pretend not to be emasculated. A fellow scouting father clued me in on his favorite spot. He said he always goes to a parking garage for a hotel connected to the convention center. The price is thirty-five dollars, but it offers an indoor route via tunnels and skyways to reach the stadium without ever going outside. It sounds better than any of the other options. As of this moment, I’m planning to pay extra for comfort and convenience. It’s a slippery slope. The next thing you know, I’ll be flying first class and refusing to eat discount pizza. Behold my first step toward bankruptcy. Regardless, the high-price spot would also lead to the lowest amount of pre-game complaining and frostbite. The final price tag for the day keeps climbing.As for what will happen when we finally make it to the stadium, that’s anyone’s guess. I expect Colts backups to lose an extremely winnable game while my kids barely pay attention. I imagine they’ll be more impressed by the crowd and the venue. At some point, we’ll get up to explore, taking in such epic sights as the concession stand, the other concession stand, and the other other concession stand. We won’t buy anything, of course. I maxed out my budget for this excursion on service fees and parking. All of that indoor meandering will be a bonus. The main thing I hope is that my kids make it to their seats without having a meltdown. Getting them on that final blimp will be dicey.Years ago, my oldest two daughters went to a WNBA game with their summer daycare program. Their main memory from that day is how terrified they were to be sitting in the rafters. They’ve grown up a lot since then, but I’ve also added more kids. I’m not worried about Betsy. She gets on roller coasters with me all the time. She clearly doesn’t care if she lives or dies. I’m less confident about the other kids. They declined my last two offers to take them on a roller coaster trip. They seem to have inherited my wife’s fear of heights. At 5’ 1 ¾” (Don’t you dare let her claim to be 5’ 2”), she’s low to the ground and would prefer to stay there. When I told her about our seats, she immediately asked why I didn’t book a lower section. Then I told her the price difference. Now she plans to face her greatest fear. I’m not the only one who will do anything to save money.Thanks for reading Exploding Unicorn by James Breakwell! This post is public so feel free to share it.Of course, this could all be moot. After my extensive scheming, it’s possible that the winter storm will roll in sooner than expected. Then we’ll face a tough choice. If the roads are covered by inches of snow, even I might be inclined to cut my losses and stay home. I’d love to give my kids the experience of cheering for a local team, but the Colts can lose just as well if we’re there as if we’re not. The looming blizzard adds a wildcard I could do without. That’s old news to all of you in the future. Perhaps you already know that the storm amounted to a nothingburger, or maybe it was twice as bad as expected and you can’t believe I ever considered going out in it. For once, I’m rooting for the less interesting outcome. I already have more than enough to write about.Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.James This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jamesbreakwell.substack.com/subscribe

Rage Baby

Rage. It’s the purest human emotion. Who better to exhibit it than the purest form of human? My toddler niece is anger incarnate. She has a name, but I’ll call her Rage Baby here since it better captures her essence as a person and a force of nature. She’s the daughter of my wife’s sister, Alice, and Alice’s husband, Jerry. I write about them often. They, along with our friends Peter and Delilah, round out our core group of six with whom we play board games once or twice a week. Every time I see Rage Baby, she’s absolutely furious. Jerry and Alice insist that she’s only angry when I’m around and that I must somehow be the cause. That’s plausible. It’s been scientifically proven that I’m the worst. I’d believe Jerry and Alice’s attempt to blame me were it not for the multitude of reports from friends, family members, and police officers who confirm Rage Baby is also a terror when I’m not around. The most perplexing part is that she has absolutely nothing to be angry about. Her every need is met. She’s waited on hand and foot by nearly-perfect parents in a nearly-perfect family. No matter. She’s upset with everything and everyone, which is fair. I’ve made a second career out of complaining. The difference is that I do it in a newsletter, which is much quieter than an in-person temper tantrum. To make things even better, Rage Baby recently began a new round of teething. That distant rumbling you heard wasn’t a waking volcano; it was a growing toddler ready to destroy the world.You’d think I’d be used to toddlers by now. I’ve had my fair share of them. I had two kids simultaneously in diapers for a large portion of my adult life. I barely remember that stage, which is by design. Otherwise, no one would ever have more than one kid. I wanted to start a family right away after Lola and I got married at the ripe old age of twenty-two. Lola wisely insisted that we wait a few years. We had Betsy when we were twenty-five. We pumped out another kid every two years thereafter up until our youngest, Waffle, who insisted on waiting only seventeen months. She’s been impatient right from the start. There’s documentation from that era. I started my Twitter account in 2012, when Betsy was only two. I went viral in 2016, when Waffle was one. In my earliest webcomics, she’s a swaddled baby in my arms. Given my art style, she looks more like a pink football with a head, but I assure you that’s supposed to be an infant. Perhaps my own words will prove me wrong, but if you go back and reread everything I wrote in that era, I don’t believe you’ll find much anger. Chaos, yes. Destruction, almost certainly. But none of that made my kids unhappy. In fact, wreaking havoc brought them the highest levels of joy. More importantly, it didn’t bother me much. Perhaps I’m naturally wired to be an apathetic parent. You might think the damage would bother my wife, but she was quite chill, too. This wasn’t a case where one parent relaxed while the other parent did all the work. We were saved by our own poverty. We were starting out in life and didn’t have anything worth destroying. My kids’ choices were to ruin the college couch we got from a dumpster or the old-lady chair we bought for eight dollars at an estate sale. Life was simple, but we were happy. Our days were filled with poopy diapers and broken things, but we didn’t know any better. The people around us did. That’s why they all waited so long to have kids.Exploding Unicorn by James Breakwell is a reader-supported publication. It’s like PBS, but completely unhelpful and slightly evil. Join today!The surest proof that things looked different from the outside was the effect we had on everyone else’s family planning. For most of our twenties, Lola and I were the only people we knew who had kids. None of our friends did. None of our siblings, either. At first glance, that seems to make sense. On my side of the family, I’m the oldest, but only by two years. That doesn’t explain all the extra years my brothers and sisters waited to follow in my footsteps. My fourth child was nearly in kindergarten before any of my brothers or sisters decided to procreate. Our kids had to be far enough out of the toddler stage for my siblings to forget the horrible lessons we taught them. The chaos in my own house put a pause on everyone else’s family development. I owe apologies all around.The gap isn’t quite as pronounced on Lola’s side, but it’s close. Alice gave birth to our children’s first cousin about three months after Waffle entered the world. For years, Alice and Jerry both insisted one was enough. Their not-angry baby grew into a not-angry toddler and, eventually, a not-angry elementary school student. Then, one day, Alice stopped drinking. Everyone in our board game clique noticed, but none of us said anything. In today’s day and age, it’s never okay to ask a woman if she’s pregnant, even if she appears to be nine months along and she’s in the maternity ward on her way to the delivery room. The lack of alcohol was extremely noticeable. The cohesion of our friend group depends on adult beverages. It’s the only way people can tolerate the way I teach rules. Every time I introduce a new game to the table, it strains my marriage to the breaking point. In this case, though, Alice was the stereotype we all tried so hard not to acknowledge. According to both her and Jerry’s later retelling of events, as she approached forty, her body unexpectedly flipped a switch and demanded that she have one more baby. Jerry went along with it because men are stupid. In all of human history, no heterosexual male has ever turned down that offer. Now they have an enraged, highly mobile mini-human running their lives. I won’t say mistakes were made, but choices definitely were. Some decisions are more impactful than others.Things are different for Jerry and Alice than they were for Lola and me when we were in that stage. For one thing, Jerry and Alice are older and wiser. They know what they’re dealing with, but they also have less energy to handle it. Alice is out of baby mode for good. The only thing her body wants these days is a nap. Alice and Jerry also have more money than we did in that era. They’ve had time to acquire nice things, which gives Rage Baby many tempting targets to destroy. That raises the stakes—and the stress level. Rage Baby doesn’t realize she’ll be the last child. There’s zero risk there will be a kid number three. Still, Rage Baby’s biological programming tells her to be as awful as possible to dissuade her parents from creating more siblings with whom she’d have to compete for resources. If she were the firstborn, that tactic would have worked. She definitely would have been an only child. No mother would risk unleashing two of her on the world. One might be enough to bring about the apocalypse.That kid is always moving, and never toward good. Thirty seconds after she learned to walk, she turned on the stove. It was nice of the appliance designers at GE to put the knobs within reach. When we saw her Friday night, she tried repeatedly to eat dog food. And to go up the stairs. And to fall off the back of the couch. Every time she was denied in her attempt to hurt herself or others, she grew angrier, culminating in a truly impressive rage turd to end her night. It was a completely typical evening for her. It might sound like I’m being hard on Rage Baby, but she’s unusually restless, even compared to other toddlers. That’s not just the rose colored glasses of my inaccurate memories talking. There are a total of three or four toddlers between my and Lola’s sides of the family right now, depending on where exactly you define the start and end of that stage. None of the other toddlers are angry. They have their moments, but they also occasionally fall asleep or sit still. Like Chuck Norris, Rage Baby doesn’t sleep; she waits. You can see her on the baby monitor, staring into the camera and plotting her next move. Those crib bars won’t hold her forever. Alice and Jerry should have splurged for a maximum security baby cage with a roof.Perhaps this is all merely my wounded pride talking. For a brief moment, Rage Baby and I were close. At a game night months ago when Rage Baby was much younger but just as angry, she refused to go down for a nap. Shocking, I know. The other adults declared her to be inconsolable. I decided to lay my parenting reputation on the line. I’m awful at all things to do with children except for one extremely specific task: getting them to fall asleep. I use a tactic I learned from my dad. He used to bounce us up and down while walking around the room, singing a mournful dirge in a low baritone. The song was Three Little Fishies. If you know it, you’ll realize it’s actually an upbeat, jaunty tune. Not the way my dad sang it. When those three little fishies jumped over that dam, I thought they were diving to their deaths. No wonder I fell asleep so fast as a baby. I was trying to escape the trauma. I used that same method on my own kids when they were babies, and it worked every time. Their brains switched off to avoid further damage. Surely even Rage Baby couldn’t withstand my crimes against music. I picked her up and put my skills to the test.I walked around the room with her, bouncing and singing. When I ran out of lyrics, I switched to a sound that I would call a comforting hum but everyone else would describe as a zombie moan. It worked. It took longer than I would have liked, but Rage Baby went down. I laid her in her carrier and watched with satisfaction as she slept for a solid hour. I wrote an entire newsletter about it. I have no shame about celebrating even the most minor of my non-accomplishments. The problem is that I never got it to work again. Like a virus, Rage Baby adapted. She’s now immune to my attempts to calm her down. If anything, she gets angrier when I pick her up. She remembers the one time I got the best of her and won’t let it happen again. She’s destroyed my confidence in my baby wrangling skills. I never thought I was a good dad, but I placed myself on the upper end of mediocre. Now I wonder if even that was too generous. I might have been the worst father in the world. I was simply lucky enough to have babies who were especially easy. I won’t know for sure until my own daughters have babies—if they have babies. If they’re paying attention to Rage Baby, they might never have children at all. Thanks to one irate toddler, our entire family line might end here. Well played, kid. Well played.Thanks for reading Exploding Unicorn by James Breakwell! This post is public so feel free to share it.Thankfully, being a toddler isn’t a life sentence. Rage Baby has many decades to redeem herself. The extremes of her emotions could represent a power of will that will take her far. As she grows and matures, what now seems like a lust for destruction could translate into an insatiable curiosity. She could cure cancer or be the first person on Mars. Then again, maybe this is just who she is, but without the deceptive tools of adulthood to hide it. She could be the world’s first toddler psychopath. We won’t know until she grows up. As a certain senator once said to Anakin Skywalker, we will all watch her career with great interest. Let’s hope we don’t have the next Darth Vader in our midst.Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.James This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jamesbreakwell.substack.com/subscribe