I can only cry in my bowl of Fruity Pebbles now

I love my dad, and I want him to be around for another 137 years, but no one lives forever.

When that day ultimately arrives, I want him to feel loved and respected, and I want him to be at peace knowing he no longer has to come over to my house to fix crap.

But the last thing I want him to see as he draws his final breath is Death, riding upon a yappy purple dinosaur that pounces on him and licks his face off.

Then he’ll know how much I wanted to see Flintstones Bedrock City on our family vacation to the Black Hills in 1989.

It’s been 26 years since my dad callously dismissed the South Dakota theme park/campground with a “Flintstones” motif as a “tourist trap” (and therefore, we weren’t stopping).

Instead, we had to go see some stupid mountain with the faces of four politicians carved into it.

In our family, my longing to visit Flintstones Bedrock City has become a nearly 30-year-old running joke.

Several years ago, when my parents drove through the Black Hills area on their way west to see my brother in California, they picked up a brochure for Flintstones Bedrock City and gifted it to me.

It was supposed to have been funny.

It kinda was, actually, knowing that as an adult, I could visit any B-grade Flintstones-themed campground I wanted, whenever I wanted.

And, believe me, I planned on it.

In fact, when we moved back to Jefferson in 2013 after 14 years in Ohio, I actually commented to my wife, “Hey! We’re that much closer to Bedrock City now!”

And then the unthinkable happened — after a half-century of operation, Flintstones Bedrock City closed this past Labor Day weekend.

Suddenly, the running joke was no longer funny. Like, Great Gazoo unfunny.

Truth be told, the original owner, now 74, merely sold the 62-acre campground. But it’s very unclear whether the new owners will be able to negotiate the rights to use the “Flintstones” characters from Warner Bros.

It’s all but assumed Flintstones Bedrock City will never reopen.

Did you read that, Dad?

I’ll never get to stand inside a crudely constructed, life-sized concrete replica of the Flintstones’ house. Never get to savor a brontoburger at the park drive-in.

To make matters worse, a related Bedrock City park in Arizona, open since 1972, is on the market for $2 million.

Yep. This has pretty much been the year my world crumbled.

I’ll admit, my wife walked in on me the other day trying to OD on Flintstones Vitamins, at which point it dawned on me that it would actually take about 1,829 more bottles of Flintstones Vitamins than I had.

But if you think about it, Flintstones Vitamins and Fruity Pebbles cereal are really about all that remains culturally of a TV cartoon whose characters were once household names.

They were initially products of the ‘60s — “The Flintstones,” which originally ran from 1960-66, was the first prime-time animated series in history — but syndication gave them a life far beyond that. They were no more of the ‘60s as “Looney Tunes” cartoons were of the ‘40s and ‘50s.

When I was a kid, I’d hear the laugh track on “The Flintstones” and think, “I wonder how I could get tickets to be in the studio audience?”

I was slow to grasp the concept of a laugh track.

Today, however, it’s awfully hard to find either “The Flintstones” or “Looney Tunes” on TV.

I’m not so sure kids today even know what, or who, they are.

Well, my kid does. Then again, the way I’m bringing up my son, who turns 7 later this month, reminds me of an Onion headline I saw on Facebook recently: “Cool Dad Raising Daughter On Media That Will Put Her Entirely Out of Touch With Her Generation.”

It’s safe to say my own dad probably didn’t think I’d still be pining to visit Flintstones Bedrock City after all these years.

But in that moment in 1989, when he dismissed it as a “tourist trap,” he single-handedly created this weird, Joe Jackson-Michael Jackson/father-son dynamic.

Visiting my house today is sort of like visiting Neverland Ranch.

I took to collecting original “Flintstones” art used in development of the show. Two of my most prized possessions are the original gouache paintings done in the ‘60s to create “Flintstones” jigsaw puzzles.

This is who I am. A damaged man-child.

I love my dad.

I only wish he would’ve been a lot less Fred and a little more Barney.

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