For most of their lives my children didn’t know a website existed that chronicled a great number of the things they did and said. Upon learning of it, their reactions followed a common trajectory.

Step 1: Confusion. Why would anyone do that?
Step 2: Questioning. Why don’t you just take a thousand pictures like all the other dads?
Step 3: Annoyance. Do you have to write about everything?
Step 4: Indifference. That's somthing my dad does--what are you gonna do?
Step 5: Appreciation. And the beginning of their dearmitt dot com age.

Bella has been in Step 5 for several years.

Alex just reached Step 5, after a longish indifference phase, during his recent semester abroad. Gotta say I can’t imagine a better salve for a cross-atlantic case of homesickness. In fact, he is the one who coined the phrase when talking to his sister, reporting that he finally hit his dearmitt dot com age.

Anthony is squarely in Step 3 right now. He is a junior in high school and a number of his classmates have discovered the site so there is little reason for him to be anywhere else on that scale. I recently asked him about it.

TONY
Imagine if socializing in high-school were a video game.

TROY
Ok. I can see that.

TONY
Playing the Socializing game when there is a website out there documenting your entire life is like playing that game in brutal-hard-god mode.

TROY
Oh. Yeah. I can see that too.

Now to be fair, Anfer is getting hit from two sides. On one side his father is writing about him and on the other side, his Mother who teaches at his school is talking about him. My favorite Marty mishap is when she once told a story about one of her young sons and his metal penis—believe it or not this was oddly pertinent to the biology lesson at hand. After a moment, one of her students asked if Alex, who was a current student at the school, was the metal penis kid. Marty quickly said it was not Alex but her other son, who was safely hidden away at another institution at the time.

Fast forward two years. It is Anthony’s first week at his new school and he spies his brother, who is a senior, in the lunchroom sitting with, by Anthony’s description, one of the cutest girls he’d ever seen. Taking advantage of the situation, he walked up and started chatting up his brother. In time the girl asked who he was and Alex introduced Anthony as his brother. Without the slightest of pauses the girl brightened and said, “Oh, you must the be the metal-penis boy.” Welcome to high school Anthony.

As far as I know his biggest dearmitt dot com hit came after some of his friends who have read the site, learned of Anthony’s favorite boyhood game, I get your weiners. Let’s call this his second welcome to high school. And with this you can start having an appreciation for the body blows he's absorbed through this two-parent assualt.

When it comes to the website, I’ve learned there are two kinds of people. There are those that will load a page, see their screen fill with text, think TLDR*, and move on. Then there are others who delight at a wall of words, especially when many of those words are about a friend of theirs, and triply especially when those words are about their penises. Anthony might have a friend or two in that second camp.

This is all to say Anthony might not yet be at the appreciative stage but I’m confident he will, one day, get there. And when he does he will occasionally, like the rest of the family, fall into the current and lose himself in the stories of our collective past. For me, this memory archive is, without a close second, my most cherished possession. And given my aging mind, it is a possession that grows in value every waking day given the gremlin running around my cerebellum, dashing my bottled memories against the wall nearly as fast as I can write them down.

* Let me save you from having to look up what TLDR means, like I did the first time I heard it. For some it means “Too Long, Didn’t Read”. For me (and people I like) it means, “Troy Lane DeArmitt Rawks!” and yes, the exclamation point is an important part of the definition. This is why I’m never offended when someone responds with TLDR about anything I put out there. Not only am I not peeved, I’m touched by their thoughtful compliment. This delusion is just a small part of the equation that makes me such a happy boy. Another part to my bliss is that I had the lucky foresight to document my family’s life and all our metal penis moments.