Who Throws A Shoe, Honestly?

Read on for more dumb parenting stuff.

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The other day I’m driving with my toddler son, just the two of us in the car. He yells at me to roll down his window, as he often does, and I obey him because in the era of the inconvenient tantrum he basically has become my liege lord. “A new song, m’lord? Some snacks, perhaps? His lordship must be famished after such a journey!”

He likes to point out all the motorcycles on the road, and I think having the window open makes him feel like he can grab them. Which he can’t and I wouldn’t want him to anyway, but I find these little sorts of innocent toddler misunderstandings of the world impossibly adorable.

Even when he does objectively psychopathic things, like shout “WHERE’S MY BREAKFAST!” from the living room while I’m in the process of making said breakfast in the kitchen one room over, part of me finds it cute because of the tiny little voice producing the hateful sounds. I try not to let him know that when he’s being a dick, of course, but trying to keep a straight face while scolding a small human has been an unexpectedly enjoyable part of parenting.

So I rolled down his window for him, supporting his motorcycle fascination in the hopes that it’s a passing phase and that he’s merely bike-curious. We put his car seat in the middle anyway, so his arms don’t reach all the way to the open air, even if he stretches.

A few blocks later he’s shouting another thing at me from the backseat. Not an uncommon occurrence, but in this case he seems oddly insistent. He has his binky in his mouth (we’ve banned it at all times outside of bedtime and nap, but the entire point of the car ride was to try to get him to fall asleep) so I can’t quite make out the words at first. After a few squints and false guesses, eventually I realize that what he’s shouting is “I WANT MY SHOE!”

It’s a confusing phrase at first. I adjust my rearview mirror downward to get a good look at him, and it’s at this point I realize that he’s only wearing one of the shoes that he got into the car with. Ah, “I want my shoe,” now I get it. “Where’s your shoe?” I ask him through the rectangle of eye contact in the mirror.

“I threw it out the window,” he says.

“You threw it out the window?” I ask, not quite believing him.

“Yeah,” he says, a little softer.

I pull the car to the side of the road. I turn around in my seat to scan the back seat, expecting to see his shoe laying there or on the floor. I don’t see it.

“You threw your shoe out the window?!” I ask, more incredulous now.

At this, he’s silent. No doubt he’s sensed something in my tone of voice that suggests taking the fifth here might be a better option. Nonetheless, the evidence is mounting.

Still not quit believing, I make a U-turn trying to retrace our path for the last few blocks. I’m calculating angles, flight trajectories, potential wind resistance, noting that his open window was on the left side of the car… Suddenly I’m Vince Mancini: Shoe Detective. A few blocks and a few u-turns later, there it is, lying in the center turn lane: his little grey-and-orange low-top Nike with the Velcro strap. I pull over to the nearest shoulder and put the hazard lights on as I prepare to jog into traffic.

Sure enough, the kid managed to remove his right shoe while strapped into his car seat, then chuck it, either across his body or with his opposite hand, out of the driver’s side (left) window of a moving car, all without me noticing, and using only stubby little two-year-old arms. And the only reason I found out about it was because he almost immediately regretted it and starting yelling. They say your kids will amaze you, and they were right, but this wasn’t the scenario I envisioned. I’ll miss these little moments one day.

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Odds and Ends

-We recorded a new Frotcast, Road House edition. We got Bobby Hacker back on. Real heads may remember him as the director of “Cars” and “Next Star Wars,” which I’m not sure are even online anymore. But iykyk. Many years ago (“when I was a fat drunk”) I invited him on a podcast and basically forced him to be my friend. Now he’s a sober and ripped and we’re still friends, and he’s still one of the most genius directors and video editors around.

-As you may have noticed from tweets from my former colleagues, Uproxx seems to be in the process of yet another layoff cycle. This comes about a month after the news hit that Warner Music Group (Uproxx’s parent company since 2018) would be “spinning off” Uproxx, despite WMG posting record profits in the previous two quarters. I never quite understood why Warner Music Group wanted to own Uproxx in the first place, but I suppose “fire everyone and pay off the shareholders to boost the price of the stock you already own” has a sick sort of business logic to it. It’s weird to help build a thing you were quite proud of and then have management keep trying to turn it into different things (“Nice bike shop you got here; what if it was a laundromat?”). I’m not sure what is to become of it now or which parts are being sold off, but I’m hoping whoever takes control doesn’t disappear the entire back catalog of articles I spent basically my entire adult life writing like happened with Gawker and LA Weekly. Not that I wasn’t already worried about this exact thing.

-Diddy apparently fled the country the same day his houses were raided as part of a sex trafficking investigation. Wild stuff! True Anon has a pretty good episode breaking down all the various allegations against him, which were much stranger and more lurid than I would’ve expected. The first news was that his private plane was flying over Puerto Rico, which would be a funny destination considering that it’s part of the US, but people have speculated it’s in Barbuda en route to Cape Verde. Maybe try Israel? Brett Ratner seems to love it there, they’re quite welcoming of sex pests.