Why straight men shouldn’t be allowed to decorate

My Dad has always been into fishing.  Well, as long as I can remember anyway.  I used to love going fishing with my Dad.  We’d wake up at some un-Godly hour in the morning, get some donuts from the Red Barn, and then be on our way.  I’d sleep in the bow of the boat until a more reasonable hour, then wake up and eat some donuts and go fishing.  Good times.

The fish (but it used to be on a different wall, it got booted in favour of the new fish)

Anyway, fishing was good.  Until the day Dad brought home the fish. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem, men put them in their offices, den’s, man cave’s, garages, or what have you.  But not my Dad. Nope, my Dad put the fish, the giant stuffed, mounted ugly fish, on the wall in our living room.  Not just any wall.  He put it on the one wall that you can clearly see through the giant bay window that faces the road.

My family always compared the fish to the leg lamp from ‘A Christmas Story.  If you haven’t seen that movie, go out and watch it, it’s pretty funny.  My Dad always hated the comparison and as soon as he saw us watching the movie, annoyingly stated “don’t you compare that lamp to my fish!!”  Haha, that was the whole reason we started watching the movie.  Someone suggested it to us because of the lamp.  Makes me giggle just thinking about it…

When I was in high school, I was on the track team.  Not that I like running, I hate it.  I was a pole vaulter.  Anyway, they had special activity buses to take the people who had to stay after school for some reason home.  They usually took a long time, since there weren’t very many, and had to cover a wide area, but they did the job.  When you get on, the bus driver asks where you live.  “Oh, you mean the house with the fish?”  The driver asked me.  Oh. My. Gosh.  Everyone on the bus was looking at me, wondering what the fish is.  If only there was a hole I could crawl into….

But it doesn’t stop there.  Before the fish, Dad put up some nice landscape photos that he took and framed.  They looked quite

the second fish (where the first one was), the landscapes, and a chinese artwork

nice.  It was good to have something on the walls instead of  just the plain, white, boring paint.  But then the fish came.  The fish doesn’t match the photos.  In fact, it looked pretty silly (my Dad is going to kill me for writing this…not literally, no one call the police please).

Native American art plus the magazine covers

Slowly, he kept adding other things to the walls.  A framed magazine cover (under some native American artworks, neither of which went at all with the original landscape photos), some sort of bow and arrow, a cluster of random photos and paintings that neither match each other, nor anything else in the room.  He added another fish.

Recently, Dad started going to China for business on a fairly regular basis.  He brought home some hanging Chinese artworks and added those to the wall as well.  Looking around the living room, it’s kind of like my eyes are being assaulted with decoration overload.  What do I look at?  Why does none of it match?  What is that thing?  AARRRGGGHHH!

my parents room

My parents re-did (well, did, it was never actually finished in the first place) the bathroom downstairs.  My mom suggested a theme for the bathroom: Lighthouses.  It looks fantastic!  Everything matches, it’s cute, it’s interesting, it’s pleasing to the eye.  But then there’s the pink flamingo.  Everything matches apart from that.  Guess who put that there?  Yeah, my Dad.

And this, ladies and gentleman, is why straight men should not be allowed to decorate:  They have no idea.  I’m sure they think it looks good, but really, it doesn’t.  Sigh, my Dad is not going to like reading this (but I hope you did!).  I hope he doesn’t die of embarrassment.

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