I am still unsure how Bryson trapped himself with a plastic bag from Borders, but he was indeed securely handcuffed in such a way as to meet CIA standards for transport to Gitmo (as in “Can it Gitmo ridiculous than a boy locked in a bag?”)

We had just purchased a few books at the Borders Express in Sunvalley Mall, the usual sprawling complex of hot pretzels and overpriced fashions, this one in Concord, California, where we were visiting his grandmom and granddad. Once the purchase was made (two books, one a hardcover), I handed Bryson the bag, as he had carried such bags in the past without injury or incident. In fact, his track record for carrying bags was nearly flawless save for that time he dropped his cherry snow cone in among his new clothes because he wanted to save it for later. But that was when he was 5. Now he was 11, his bag-carrying skills at an all-time high.

So firm was my belief in his abilities, I took my eyes off of him for several minutes, so firm was my belief that when I again turned to him, both he and the bag would not only be there, but in a decent, non-threatening condition.

Such haughty actions were quickly punished.

“Dad, I’m stuck.”

Hmm, that voice came from very near, and it sounded like my son. But how could it possibly be him? Stuck? No, because we are outside of Hot Topic, where there is absolutely nothing that could trap a young boy other than the fashion display that whispers, “Hey, little man, come inside for the dose of coolness you’ll never get hanging around your dad.”

“You’re what?” I turned to him. Everything seemed just fine. Bryson, check. No trenchcoat-wearing strangers, check. Bag with books, check.

Plastic wrapped tightly around wrists with fingers turning blood-red, that admittedly seemed to be a problem.

Each of the bag’s handles dug into the flesh of Bryson’s wrists, his arms pinned together at the point of the restraints. Was this a sign we had all become handcuffed by our own wants in a society that emphasizes things over our own humanity? Or was this a kid who had somehow tied himself up with a book bag?

Let’s go with the latter.

“Bryson, what …? How …? I don’t even …”

He struggled against the plastic, wriggling his hands. The bag refused to give.

“I don’t know, I was just doing stuff and now I can’t get out,” he said.

“But what exactly were you doing?” I said. “Because this really took some effort.”

At this point it was difficult to take seriously. My son has been trapped by plastic, outwitted by a book bag. Inanimate object 1, straight-A student 0.

He struggled some more, trying to pull his arms apart. The plastic showed no sign of weakness.

A few shoppers slowed as they passed, gazing at the boy ensnared by a common mall container. Several looked at me with a “Aren’t you going to help him?” look, quickly judging by parental skills. A few merely smiled.

But others looked at me rather wistfully, as if dreaming of the day they too would be able to restrain their children with such a simple device.

I inspected his predicament a little closer. The plastic clearly was embedded into the area where small bones made up the wrist area. No way was he going to slip these bonds. We had to devise a more clever escape, something very Houdini-like in its nature to confound the bag and render useless its evil plan.

“Just twist your wrists and pull them apart,” I said. “It’s just plastic.”

Plastic, indeed. This was some sort of demon-infused plastic that refused to surrender to the writhing of small wrists. Not a millimeter did it give.

“I’ve been trying that and I can’t move,” Bryson said. “It’s starting to hurt.”

The beet-red glow moved from fingers to the lower part of the hands. Drastic measures must be taken. My fatherly instincts took over.

I pulled out my camera.

“Don’t even try!” Bryson said. “I can’t even believe you!”

He darted away, walking as fast as a boy attempting to hide he was handcuffed by a bag in a mall could. I caught up to him less than a minute later as he leaned against a gleaming marble wall of the Macy’s.

I snapped the photo, looked at the LCD screen. Dang, no flash. I called up the menu, switched on the flash and shot again. Perfect.

“Fine, are you happy now?” Bryson said. Tears welled in his eyes.

“Hey, remember that time Ryan got his finger stuck in the bowling ball?” I said. True story. Ryan, 7 at the time, actually got his finger stuck in a bowling ball. How does that happen? A manager used soap from the men’s room to extract it. “Remember how funny we all thought it was? Well, except for Ryan, who couldn’t stop … OK, look, let’s get this thing off of you.”

I bent down and he turned toward the wall.

“Just leave me alone,” he said. “I’ll do it myself.”

“If you could do it yourself, you would have already done it. Just let me look.”

It was like those Chinese fingercuffs. I searched for a clue, a part of the bag that might release its grip allowing me to unravel the rest. But it looked impenetrable.

“Just how did this happen?” I said. “Because then we can reverse what you did and get you out.”

“I don’t remember. I was just twisting it and stuff and flipped it up. Now I can’t move it.”

“So you were flipping it? Which way?”

“I think I sort of flipped it like this.” He swung his arms outward.

“So if we flip the bag backward we should be able to get this off you.”

I pushed the bag toward the narrow slot between Bryson’s arms. He pulled away.

“That hurts,” he said. “It won’t go that way.”

I looked inside the Macy’s. The woman at the cosmetic counter looked back. I balanced the possible solutions.

One, continue to struggle hoping we would find the plastic’s weakest point and bring it to its knees.

Two, ask the cosmetics lady for scissors, resulting in sympathy I neither wanted nor needed from a woman in a white smock.

Three, pretend everything is fine because a plastic bag can’t cause irreversible harm. Can it?

I went with four: Tear the damn bag. I ripped it open at the seams, the bag giving up its contents with one quick pull. Suddenly it wasn’t so tough.

Without the weight of the books, Bryson quickly untied himself. Normal color soon returned to his hands.

But now I was stuck carrying the books without a bag, walking around the mall looking like a shoplifter. Perhaps the bag won after all.

The new computer was still in boxes because dad, a dial-up guy in a broadband world, wasn’t about to try to connect the green plug to the green jack, or figure out what the hell a USB was, never mind where it goes.

The first thing to be done was to clean the hard drive of his old computer, something I would eventually do with a screwdriver and a hammer (with no apologies to the charity destined to get this relic, purchased in an age when Compaq wasn’t Latin for “piece of crap”).

As I looked at the screen, I was amazed at the number of icons that obscured the Compaq logo. Nearly every pixel was occupied by a launch button for various programs, most of which likely had never been clicked.

“Wow, this is a mess,” I said to dad. “The first thing we’re going to have to do is clear off this desktop.”

“Oh, sorry,” he said. “I can get a little messy.”

He reached for a small pile of bills lying next to the keyboard. “I’ll take these and if you hand me those papers over there, we’ll have this cleaned up in no time.”

This is why my father waited two months for me to visit before opening his new computer. Wise decision.

I got a tattoo for the same reason most guys my (advanced) age get a tattoo – a Porsche is way too expensive, wearing clothes from Abercrombie & Fitch would be trying too hard, and Botox only lasts a few months.

So I got a tattoo. OK, I made the appointment when I was drunk, plunking down $20 as a promise to return the next day at 3 p.m. I would find out later, while waiting for the tattoo artist and watching several sober people drop by to make appointments, that the deposit seems only to apply to those in an inebriated state as a tattoo always seems like a good idea after the fifth beer. If not for various health laws designed to keep drunks from making bad decisions (like driving), you would probably see tattoo booths in almost every bar. If I etched skin, I would want to set up shop on weekend evenings at TGIFriday’s, the center of the universe for those 40 and older who can’t hold their liquor. I could retire after a few months and hundreds of ill-advised tattoos later. My motto – “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

The pierced, tattooed Goth girl at the front desk (who knew tattoo parlors had front desks?) seemed surprised when my friend and I showed up the next day in an alcohol-free state. I was surprised too. Not that we were in a tattoo parlor. That we were in a tattoo parlor in an alcohol-free state.

She chose a tiny shamrock on her upper back. Must be an older woman thing. While there, another older woman was getting a shamrock on her ankle. Perhaps a latent attraction toward the Lucky Charms leprechaun. I went for a Kanji symbol, Kanji being Chinese characters used by the Japanese in certain writings (information I looked up later, thinking if something is going to be a part of me the rest of my life, I should know a little something about it, though I am still perfectly content not knowing exactly how my gastrointestinal tract works). I examined the chart of Kanji characters. You could assume there would be a symbol for diarrhea, but not that it would offered as a tattoo. My first, drunken choice was “father,” because if there came a time my son thought I was neglecting him, I could point to the tattoo and prove that I was still a father. But seeing the chart in a sober state, the character was a bit sparse, a box with a couple of accent marks. I chose instead “laugh, humor,” a symbol that applied to my personality and also one I considered cool, a fact tempered with the knowledge I considered my Toyota Camry cool.

The symbol happened to stored on the tattoo parlor’s computer (who knew tattoo parlors had computers?) and was printed on special paper that allowed the tattoo artist to transfer it to my skin. Yeah, the “artist” was no more than a guy really good at coloring within the lines. Since he had a series of very sharp needles at his disposal, I did not question his talent.

I picked a spot high on my right arm, easily covered by short-sleeve shirts. The only thing cooler than having a tattoo is having a tattoo no one can see, allowing you to be smug about your coolness. Hmm, seeing that in print, it seems rather silly. Too late now.

My friend shouted from the counter, her microscopic shamrock already in place.

“Twenty bucks if you make him scream like a little girl.”

The tattoo-coloring guy said, “No problem.”

What most people say when seeing your tattoo, after, “Why?” is “Did it hurt?” The best answer is, “Just enough to let me know what parts of me I don’t want tattooed.”

There is a stinging sensation at first, not surprising since a bobbing needle is piercing skin about 10 times a second. It s followed by a burning sensation is if a lighter is about an inch from your flesh. And then it begins to tingle, which is somewhat pleasurable (though not pleasurable enough to convince me to tattoo certain parts of my body). It’s as if your skin says, “Oh, is this all? No problem.” Every now and then there is a brief spike of pain, but nothing to make you scream like a little girl. Unless you are a little girl. And if you are, you are prohibited from getting tattooed, which I learned after signing a form swearing I was 18 or older (as if we had a problem there), that I knew tattoos could only be removed surgically (as I learned during the Angelina Jolie-Billy Bob Thornton tabloid adventures), and that I wouldn’t sue if my skin was allergic to the ink and my flesh started to slough off. Yeah, sure, whatever, just give me my cool Kanji.

About 20 minutes later it was done. The tattoo color-iner taped some Saran Wrap to it and told me to keep this “bandage” on for the next three hours. The Goth girl handed me care instructions, stuff about antiseptic cream and lotion and soap. Whatever, OK, you bet. Can I be hip now?

One last hurdle. When I mentioned a few months ago to Bryson, my 11-year-old son, that I was thinking about a tattoo, he gave me a look reserved for smokers (who receive the disdainful, reproachful look of a know-it-all kid every time he passes one, and I don’t have a problem with that).

“You can’t get a tattoo,” he said. “For one, you’re too old. Old people don’t get tattoos. You’re, like, 20 years too late. And only bad guys get tattoos. Whenever you see a guy with a tattoo in the movies, you know he’s the bad guy.”

Yeah, well, maybe bad guys just want to be cool, no matter how old they are.

“Bryson, can I tell you something without you freaking out?”

“I guess. What’s going on.”

“I did something.” When your father says, “I did something,” you probably expect to hear, “And we have to move so get packing.”

He just stared at me. I rolled up my sleeve.

“Is that real? That’s not real. Is it real? No way it’s real.”

“It’s real.”

“No it isn’t. Nice try.”

“It’s real. Trust me on this. I have photos.” I did have photos. Hey, you don’t break your tattoo cherry without getting photos, especially when you’re old.

He looked at it very closely.

“Touch it.” He rubbed it with his forefinger.

“It’s real! What did you do! I can’t believe you did that to yourself.”

The boy was giving me lessons on how to act when he turns 18. Wish I had photos of this.

“Hey, I’m old enough to do this,” I said, defending myself to a kid. “It took a lot of thought.” And a lot of beer. I didn’t mention that last one.

“You are way too old. Old people don’t get tattoos. Young people get tattoos.”

“Don’t you even want to know what it means?”

“I already know what it means. It means you’re crazy!”

Apparently we were going to have to agree to disagree. Later he still didn’t understand the tattoo, but he did accept it. I also acceded him the right to get his own tattoo. When he’s 40.

“No way, I’m getting one way before that so I’m not a crazy old person.”

Pandora, meet box. Box, meet Pandora.

Sometimes it’s tough to be cool.