I recently celebrated my fourth wedding anniversary, and my wife and I have spent those four years actively avoiding having a kid. I could pretend that our non-breeding is a political or environmental statement. Actually it’s because taking care of a child is an enormous amount of work, and I’m cartoonishly immature and irresponsible. My reaction to the idea of having a child is about the same as my reaction to someone asking me to huff some airplane glue and then perform experimental brain surgery.

“Wow, I can’t even begin to comprehend how badly I’d fuck that up.”

My reptilian lower brain still tries to sneak the “Hey, have a kid! Pass on your DNA!” message into my conscious mind from time to time, but one simple thought sends it scurrying back from whence it came:

I’d be a crappy dad.

Of course, that depends on what standard of fatherly conduct one uses as a goal. Compared to responsible, mature dads, the fact that the best-case baby-making scenario would involve my slack-ass parenting and sub-standard genetic material creating some bloated, semi-literate cretin who spends it’s unemployed days and nights huddled in my basement playing videogames, eating junk food and masturbating with a frequency and ferocity normally associated with caged lab monkeys would hopefully classify me as a crappy dad.

However, if my kid or the cops compared me to some really, really, really terrible fathers, I might actually earn a Father’s Day gift that didn’t involve paying bail.

My gold standard for “Wow, you suck at being a dad” had been a guy named Byron Keith Perkins. Byron had spent seven years in jail for armed robbery, and then later was arrested and convicted for drug and gun possession, which on it’s own would maybe merit a bronze medal in the Shitty Dad Olympics.

However, when Byron’s son Destin became ill in 2005 and required a kidney transplant, Byron saw an opportunity to go for the gold. In January of 2006, while awaiting sentencing, Byron told prison officials that he was willing to donate one of his kidneys to save his son’s life. He was then temporarily released from jail so that he could be tested at a nearby children’s hospital to see if his kidney was compatible.

Which sounds like a selfless gesture of paternal responsibility, except that rather than actually showing up at the hospital, Byron took a life lesson from Homer Simpson and fled to Mexico with both of his kidneys and his new girlfriend (who was on the run from a murder-for-hire conviction), leaving his ailing son behind.

Luckily, being a spectacularly bad father doesn’t make one immune to karma, and in April, Byron and his girlfriend were arrested in Puerto Vallarta and extradited back to the United States. While Byron was on the lam, a suitable, non-fugitive kidney donor was found for Destin.

The reason I said Byron Keith Perkins used to be my go-to example of A Shitty Dad is because recently I had the misfortune to read about William Gerald Collins. While my reaction to Byron’s asshole antics was “Maybe I wouldn’t suck that badly as a father”, William Gerald Collins is a terrible father on such an epic scale that my only response is, “Let’s vaporize all of humanity and let the chimpanzees and feral cats take over.”

William had been living with both his wife and her son from a previous relationship, but in 1995 his wife divorced him and kicked him out of her house.

William decided that he would use his stepson to get back at his ex-wife, but not in that “I’ll be the best dad ever and buy him lots of toys and let him do what he wants so he’ll love his awesome cool stepdad more than his nasty mom” way.

When his ex-wife allowed William to move back in, he decided to repay her hospitality by repeatedly raping her son over the next two years in an effort to “force him into becoming gay” and prevent his ex-wife from ever having any grandchildren.

While the abuse ended when Williams moved away, he wasn’t arrested until 2006, when he wrote a letter to a recent ex-girlfriend. In this letter, he both threatened to rape his ex-girlfriend’s 14-year-old daughter and confessed to raping his ex-wife’s son. After Williams pled guilty, a judge handed down the maximum sentence of 25 years in prison.

Yeah, can’t really follow that up with anything funny, can I? I’m normally not a proponent of capital punishment, but there are times where public executions really do seem like a great fucking idea.