Dear Lego,

You win. I submit. I am a broken man, and not even your product could rebuild me.

It was a misguided desire to make my son happy that led me down the Lego aisle at Target two years ago. (Who says kids need to be happy, anyway? When did the herculean act of keeping them alive stop being enough?) He was three years old and curious about the world, and I thought we could bond over building. Also, it’s possible I was hoping to steer him toward a career in engineering and away from his dad’s slightly less lucrative field of crossword-puzzle editing. So I bought him a garbage truck from The Lego Movie—your cross-platform, horizontal diversification is some next-level, NFL-type stuff, by the way—and we had a blast putting it together. And I’m sure we’ll have a blast when we navigate the maze of vendors at this month’s BrickCon at Seattle Center.

But like a mini-Rockefeller he had to expand. And he was insatiable. He erected a plastic empire, driven not by a desire to play with his creations but by the thrill of creation itself. Cars begat Star Wars snowspeeders, snowspeeders begat Iron Man Hulkbusters, and Hulkbusters begat…Sir Fangar’s Ice Fortress? Listen, even this lame dad knows your Legends of Chima line is hella wack. 

This was all my fault, of course; his addiction was my creation. And I fed it because the kid in me who still occasionally buys action figures today wishes he had Lego sets this cool—minus the Chima nonsense, obviously—30 years ago. For that I blame you, you ingenious bastards. Because you may market your product to grade schoolers, but it doesn’t take a rocket-building scientist to know that your target demographic is every nerd whose imagination outstripped your ability to procure blockbuster movie licenses in the ’80s. You’ve gotten so good at it, I’m powerless to stop you from bleeding me dry. 

In case I haven’t made my point, lemme tell you about a dream I had the other night. Well, you’d probably call it a dream, but I’d consider it a nightmare: I was in my kitchen, packing a lunch for my son when I noticed that my hands were made of Legos. (Sorry, Lego bricks.) Startled, I began to inspect the rest of my body, and as my gaze advanced up my arm and to my shoulder, I found that what was once flesh and bone was now tens of thousands—okay, hundreds of thousands—of interlocking, multicolored bricks. 

“That must have been so fun,” I can only imagine you and your product development team thinking to yourselves as you jot down the words human-Lego integration. And you know what? For a minute there it was kind of cool to imagine myself as a character in Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” video. But then that joy gave way to dread as I heard the unmistakable click of bricks decoupling. My legs began to weaken and I struggled to support myself. When I looked down, just as my body began to crumble, I saw my five-year-old dismantling me, one piece at a time. Plastic and immobile, I was powerless to stop him as he harvested my parts to build a new dad, one who bore a striking resemblance to me—except his eyes were a little less sunken, his face a brighter shade of yellow, and his wallet much, much fatter. If only he could have built a younger version of me, one who could enjoy the world he’s creating.

Please, stop being so cool,

Jeffrey Gunderson

President, DISASSEMBLE (Dads in Seattle, Anxiously Seeking Some Empathy, Mainly Because Lego Enrages)