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A regular dad with something to say.

Rory Hughes

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In Defense Of The Minivan: An Open Letter To My Brother-In-Law As He Contemplates A Car Purchase

Volume 7 July 2023 >Reflection In Defense Of The Minivan: An Open Letter To My Brother-In-Law As He Contemplates A Car Purchase Dear Scott, Unlike you, I’ve never been a car guy. Not only do I not understand how they work, I don’t understand what makes people so fascinated by them. Horsepower, dual torque, CarAssist - all of this jargon is lost on me. To be fair, my parents raised me on beaters; much like the first time I had grilled chicken, it was a big moment at age 35 when I purchased my...

9 months ago • 3 min read

Volume 6 June 2023 >Reflection The Youth Sports Industrial Complex I’ve been meaning to send this one for several years, and the only reason it’s taken me this long is I know I’m going to eat my words. So there, I said it. This is more cathartic than anything. I don’t pretend to have the answers or even a sound argument. Tomorrow I might disagree with everything I’m about to say. But for now, here is where I stand - “strong opinions held loosely” and all that: The second weekend in June is a...

10 months ago • 4 min read

Volume 5 May 2023 >Reflection Family movie nights are getting easier now that the boys are six and seven. I could go on about everything that’s wrong with the new cartoons - bad storylines, self-righteous messaging, weak character development, seizure-inducing cinematography - but I’ll save that for another time. We’re not quite ready for Sixteen Candles, Teen Wolf, or Happy Gilmore, but we also don’t have to push back bedtime arguing about nine different poorly made cartoon movies on Netflix...

11 months ago • 2 min read

Volume 4 April 2023 >Reflection The Trash Dads A few weeks ago, if you’d seen the playground at my kids’ school, you’d have assumed someone had emptied a nearby dumpster. Strewn about were candy wrappers, gloves, masks, unfinished homework, calculators, deflated soccer balls, rotting banana peels, and just about anything else you could imagine a child might thoughtlessly toss on the ground at recess. Every day at pickup, I felt ashamed that my kids went to a school like this. I’m known for...

12 months ago • 3 min read

Volume 3 March 2023 >Reflection When My Dad Dies “Mark apparently had imagined that he was going to have his father around to hate forever. To hate and hate and hate and hate, and then, in perhaps his own good time, after the scenes of accusations had reached their crescendo and he had flogged (his father) to within an inch of his life with his knot of filial grievance, to forgive.” –from The Human Stain, by Phillip Roth Several years ago, when my friend Matt’s dad died, he said something...

about 1 year ago • 4 min read

Volume 2 February 2023 >Reflection I’m Fine With My Kids Playing Football; Am I Canceled? The other day, James came home from school with a library book titled History of The Detroit Lions. He begged me to read it at bedtime and was captivated by tales of the Bobby Layne curse, Dick “Night Train” Lane, Eric Hipple, Cocaine Wayne, Barry, Calvin, Pad Statford, and all the other characters and events from our sad history. The feeling was bittersweet: on one hand, he’s a football fan; on the...

about 1 year ago • 5 min read

Volume 1 January 2023 >Reflection A Beautiful Set of Testicles: My Vasectomy Story If you're reading this, at some point you’ve had or will have the vasectomy discussion. And much like every mom has her labor stories, every guy has his vasectomy story. Most are rather uneventful: schedule them on a big sports weekend, take some Ativan before the procedure, come home, sit on a bag of peas and get treated like a king for three days. A little pain, a little swelling, and you’re back to normal....

about 1 year ago • 5 min read
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