Muristek
when it comes with a super-catchy 70s pop classic tune
We noticed the boy was a bit poorly when he started neglecting his Boney M. We’ve been singing Daddy Cool in the mornings for a while now, which he adores for its soaring strings, doggerel lyrics and the preposterously overblown production familiar to all 1976 pop hits. Personally, I love it for its central message that I, his daddy, am cool. It’s a message he wholeheartedly supports, or at the very least, tacitly endorses, by shouting, ‘DADDDDDY… DADDDDY COOOOOOL’ at the top of his lungs. And yet here he sat; sullen, withdrawn, unable to muster his usual enthusiasm, which was suspicious as I’d been particularly cool that morning.
On closer inspection, we noticed his eye was oozing a fine trail of goop, the sort of sleep-build up that could trap a calf in a ditch. My son says he has snot in his eyes, leading us to begin correcting him and then, for the thousandth time, realise we’re not sure if he’s wrong. ‘Is it just snot?’ I say, under my breath. ‘No,’ my wife says, ‘it’s, like, eye stuff – water, or pus or something.’ Seeing we were quite clearly out of our depth, I consulted the experts. A quick Google informed me that a) searching for ‘sleep’ is quite difficult, and that b) Americans do indeed call sleep ‘eye boogers’, which is the sort of winning shorthand you only get from a deeply unpretentious country. Pro tip: the technical term for easy searching is ‘rheum’ which, like fried oysters, or the actor Billy Bob Thornton, is classier than most alternatives, but still somehow off-putting.
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