I’m at the hockey game with my son the other night—not just any game, mind you, but the LA cross-town rivalry between the Ducks and Kings—when the boy taps me on the left elbow and says, “Dad, I gotta go poo.”

I’m fortunate. I know this. I have a great kid—the kind of boy I wanted to be when I was nine—and I treasure every moment I have with him. You’d love him. Everyone does. But god-dammit does that boy need clip a yam at the worst possible moments:

We spend twenty minutes lumbering through the chow line at the all-you-can-eat salad bar place, and when we finally set our trays down on the table and can practically taste the crisp cucumber slices—“Dad, I gotta poo.”

We go to the movies and just before the blue alien dude is about to “make the connection” with the blue alien hottie – “Dad, I gotta go poo.”

So we’re at the hockey game.

“Can you wait until the intermission?”

He shakes his head no, and though I would love to make an impassioned plea that he just cross his legs or stick a churro in his ass until the end of the period, I’m wise enough to know that when he tells me he has to go, that means the shit is crowning at his pooper and touchdown is imminent. So I grab his hand and we shuffle down the aisle—“Scuse us…pardon me…scuse me…son’s gotta spawn a buttfish…scuse me…”—and we high-tail it (pun intended) to the men’s room.

My kid locks himself into the big, handicapped stall because when Evans men go, we go in style. And lo and behold, just as he begins to really get into his work, three drunk-ass Kings fans stumble into the bathroom. They see me wearing my Ducks jersey and start in immediately.

“Nice jersey,” one guys says. “You get that of a crap heap?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Can’t believe what great shape it was in. You should have seen the way these white stripes reflected off the Stanley Cup.”

If this was a hockey fight, that would have been a straight forearm to the schnozz.

“That’s old news,” his buddy says. “Three years ago. Move on.”

“Oh, we have, dude. Have you seen the scoreboard out there? We’re kicking your asses right now.”

“Who cares?” the first guy slurs. “We’re going to the playoffs this year and you’ll just be sitting at home crying about how your little duckie-fucks didn’t make it.”

Suddenly my son hollers out from the handicapped stall.

“Dad?”

“Yeah, bud?”

“What’s a duckie-fuck?”

“Not quite sure of that myself. Apparently it’s what drunk, belligerent Kings fans like to call the Ducks. Maybe it distracts them from the sad truth that we’ve won a Cup and they haven’t.”

Drunk dude number two is seriously lost.

“Who’s in there?” he asks.

“Your mom. Duh.”

And with that my son opens the door to the stall and walks out while still buttoning his pants. So maybe his timing isn’t so awful after all.

The kids and I are flipping through the channels on a lazy Saturday afternoon at Evans World Headquarters, looking for something—anything—that might captivate our attention. My daughter doesn’t want to watch hockey. My son doesn’t want to watch cartoons. And I most certainly don’t want to watch yet another episode of Full House.

So we flip. Flip, flip, flip. And then:

“Ooooooh,” my son says, “Toddlers and Tiaras!”

“Yeah!” his sister says.

My knowledge of this show is minimal. I know only that it’s a reality show about kids who dress up for beauty pageants. I’m intrigued, so we keep the show on and watch for twenty minutes or so, at which point I am utterly disgusted and I demand we watch something more…I don’t know…sane.

It occurs to me more and more that the popularity of reality television is born of the fact that we like to watch mental illness on display. Perhaps it makes us feel better about ourselves to see others flail and embarrass themselves so resoundingly. Maybe our own imperfections seem insignificant in the light of mothers who dress their five-year-old daughters like sluts and people whose homes become overrun with trash and troubled young people who try out for singing competitions and are put on the air only because they are so completely out of touch with reality that they don’t know how badly they are embarrassing themselves in the process.

In so many cases—Hoarders, Intervention, Toddlers and Tiaras, The Real Housewives, and so on—so-called reality TV is merely a glitzed-up showcase through which we can watch people suffer through and struggle with genuine mental shortcomings. Is that entertainment? What if the diseases were more “conventional” and visible, like cancer or ALS? Wouldn’t we be collectively appalled if someone turned that kind of illness into a reality TV show? Naturally. So is our willingness to watch and be entertained mental illness a product of our ignorance of the subject? Or is it our need to feel smarter and more “whole” than our peers?

At least with Intervention and Hoarders, the premise of the shows is to intervene on the illness and try to help the subject get treatment. There’s some humanity there. But with this Toddlers and Tiaras nightmare, there seems to be a more callous intention. “Look at this crazy motherfucker! Look at her! Thank god WE’RE not that crazy.”

In truth, maybe we ARE that crazy. We're just not proving it on TV.