Week something or other.

Todd: You know you really have to be careful about what you name your kid because you're going to have that tattooed on your neck for the rest of your life.

M: Good point.

Some nights I just get online and stare at pictures of people that I don't know. I keep clicking though, watching them take a vacation on nice blue waters, the white sands nearly blinding or perhaps a weekend in the mountains with people that if I had had some other sort of life I would have known and liked. I imagine myself there, sharing a drink with all those people who are like stars in the clear night sky, visible yet millions of miles away. I think that they definitely would have liked me to be there, I would have bought them all shots at the tiny corner bar with the Irish waitress who called us all honey. I could have taken pictures of all of them together and tagged it the next day under the title, weekend party with friends. We'd have gotten along so much better if only we knew each other. I leaned towards the window and petted my cat softly, not waking her.

But who knows, maybe tomorrow I'll be walking down the street, and I'll recognize someone that I don't know. And I'll stop them in the road at mid-day, the sun making diamonds on the sidewalk and we'll talk about the quality of the dogwoods, how we both enjoy blossoming trees and aren't the pears in rare form this year. We'll look around at the houses on the street painted in bright colors, and with cozy lawns and decorative flowers that don't remind us of home. We'll wonder why we don't live there.

After a while it will become strange that we've never even shared a cigarette, or drank coffee while the rain beat slowly against the sill, making patterns that a children could make sense of. If we stared at them, we wouldn't have a damn thing to say. It will suddenly occur to us that what we've been saying all along about dogwoods, and the length of the winter, and the quality of this year's festivals all really mean the same thing, I'm lonely. And then they'll say, "excuse me" and lean down to pick up a piece of shit that their dog has put in the gutter. And we'll stand awkwardly together, with the plastic bag, and the steaming shit, wondering why even this moment could have gone so impossibly wrong.

In the morning I'll write a story about it, but this time I'll leave the dog at a neighbor's house. We'll spend the afternoon on hard sidewalks, admiring the large trees and their adequate tree boxes bordered by variegated pansies. We'll say of the weather, "It's nice. Damn fine day for a stroll," until we grow tired of one another and go looking for someone else that we don't know.

Some other day:

M: I'm going to name our child Mia. I don't care if K already has a niece named Mia.

S: I don't know.

M: I fathered that child, now you stay away!

S: That's kind of hard for me to pull off.

M: I'm going to make you have a cesarean section at four months and then inject the baby into my stomach.

S: Injected? I don't know why I'm wasting all this money on an OBGYN when I could just come to you.


Reminders are good.

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Aesthetics

One of the great joys of having children is to look at how cute they are and to coo at them and generally feel that you never imagined yourself cooing at something for such an extended period of time without wanting to take an ice pick from brain to eye. It's adaptive of course. If kids weren't cute the constant pooping and their insistence on crying instead of just being proactive and learning to speak are two primary examples. This leads us to pay an inordinate amount of attention to them and give up our own dreams of synchronized figure skating. And one day you're sitting in an old folks home and watching the sky, full of low clouds, purple tinged, and you can't even remember the names of these little things that derailed your dreams. Or so you pretend.

You know when kids aren't cute? In utero, early on. S apparently felt the pregnancy a bit more than I did, perhaps because it's in her stomach and kept sifting through pictures of what a child looked like in the extremely early stages of development. One such picture, roughly recreated above apparently created different reactions in the two of us.

S: Look at how it's developing.

M: What the heck is that?

S: Our baby.

M: Really, it's kind of ugly isn't it?

S: (Cries)

S: (Calls her mom later in the day) Andrew said our baby was ugly.

M: I meant to say aesthetically unpleasing.

Sure at some point the kids start developing things like a neck and hands and the like, but I'm not going to coo at amorphous blob. I'm just not....Do you think it would like a game of hide and go seek? I'd argue that that's why the good Lord didn't create things like sonograms but instead made babies. And that when we look inside a woman's stomach and notice that strange little thing, we are clearly violating some sort of ancient prescription and if I had my way, we'd have those machines brought up on charges of witchcraft. But, I don't always get my way.

Fiction

The crow was out in the yard, perched on an old tire, its charcoal foot and long black talons gripping the worn rubber, amidst the brown remains and rutted holes that had once been a fine Bermuda, laid down by the old man himself, some years ago. The crow’s black beak is darker still than the rest of its night sky body and charcoal leg. The late fall light is plentiful, and coming down in arcs, creating a sheen on the feathers, which when examined closely as if through the sight of a gun, carries a hint of green, that brings to mind an oil slick.

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Huh?

More naming problems. Naming a child is kind of a big deal, and so parents usually keep that process a secret, lying in bed late at night whispering, "Gregory? Samantha? Johnathan?" to each other until the husband attempts to lobotomize himself. The concern that S has is apparently that everyone else is somehow going to interfere with the naming and say something like, "Oh, I once knew a methusala in high school and that guy was a real dick." And we'll just end up crossing every name we could ever think of off the list. Guess what? I don't care.

I already tried to sell the naming rights Rumplestiltskin style, (and yes, I realize that it wasn't a story about naming a baby but go with me, it almost works. Although what the hell was old Rumpy going to do with the heir anyway?) to my brother in exchange for a privacy fence. Although, I did inform him that I was holding out for old stone wall.

Because once you have old stone wall you can really start gardening in earnest. And inviting over kids who think they have polio or something, but then they'll discover that what the needed more than a vaccine was to plant some ripe cherry red tomatoes. And everyone will start wandering into your secret garden and finding it's like a restorative place full of childhood joy, and maybe you'll put in a tree somewhere that kids can climb up on and sit on a limb, and look over the old stone wall at the street, or the sky or whatever.

Invariably the kids will age and you'll find yourself staring out the window with rheumy eyes at your teenage kids lighting up a joint against the old stone wall, while one of their friends stands in your freshly planted herb garden, and you'll go outside and yell at him, "Lance, (and now way is this f-ing kid's name Lance, but you don't care) get the hell out of my herb garden." And your son/daughter will be embarrassed and claim that you are turning them into a social pariah, and your eyes will clear up and you'll be proud that you fathered a child who knows how to use a word like pariah.

S: What about Kayle?

M: Kayle? Do you want our daughter running around with some low cut tank top heading up the cheer squad and dating guys who are twice as dumb as she is because their the only one's with enough social standing to feel comfortable asking her out? Is that what you want for our daughter?

M: I like Mia. Mia is that type of girl who is cute and sits in the back of class with a pair of glasses and secret is holding a candle for William Thackeray the laws of nature be damned. That's the sort of girl I want.

Note: We do not yet know the gender, but we're at sea without a paddle when it comes to boys names.

S: I like Ashleigh?

M: Ashley? Ashley? Ashley could be anything. She could be like the girl who is good at science and math but really knows her English, and how to play cool with the in crowd but still, you know, find time to hang out with the less fortunate, socially speaking. The type of girl who could be anything? Why would you wish such a life of indecision on our offspring? It's better just to be good at one thing.

S: You're kind of overreacting to this name thing.

M: Am I?

Because this song is nice.
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On voice registers and problems helping

As I was lifting weights the other day, (I should start every blog that way, it makes me sound very active) I, and several other people in the room noticed a blind man tapping his cane against the open door. He took a step back, moved along the wall, using the same tap until he came up against the metal scale. He then tapped his way back across the room, stepped again into the open door of the weight room before retreating. It was obvious to the four of us that were watching him that he was looking for something. He tapped his cane against the wall, again, stepped through the doorway before retreating.

Just then, a young man, (I love that I can say that about college students now) stepped up and asked if he needed anything. "I'm looking for the drinking fountain," the man said, and the young man guided him to it. Question? Why exactly did the four of us stare stupidly at this man who could have clearly used our help? It didn't arise (obviously) from any sort of desire to not help. In fact, I was conscious the entire time of wanting to go up and ask him if he needed help. And yet, I sat there, dumbly staring at weights while he tapped along the wall. Why is it that I was paralyzed in that moment? Why is it that I get embarrassed and allow that to prevent me from doing something that my mind is screaming at me to do? What is it about my fellow man that makes me so scared to help him?

I think it probably has something to do with this story, which I've posted before. Essentially, and sadly, I'm so self-involved, embarrassed for myself, that I don't reach through the third wall to help a person in need. It's a strange thing, and the sort of which it's rather easy to forgive ourselves, but I'd argue that the resonances are actually quite profound and problematic. This, self-involvement, pride of sorts. C.S. Lewis spent a bit of time on the subject

CONJUNCTIONS:28 Spring 1997
Two Stories
David Foster Wallace




YET ANOTHER INSTANCE OF THE POROUSNESS OF CERTAIN BORDERS (XXI)

AS IN THOSE OTHER DREAMS, I'm with somebody I know but don't know how I know them, and this person suddenly points out to me that I'm blind. Or else it's in the presence of this person that I suddenly realize I'm blind. What happens when I realize this is I get sad. It makes me incredibly sad that I'm blind. The person somehow knows how sad I am and warns me that crying will hurt my eyes somehow and make them even worse, but I can't help it--I sit down and start crying really hard. I wake up crying, and crying so hard in bed that I can't really see anything or make anything out or anything. This makes me cry even harder.

My girlfriend is concerned and wakes up and asks what's the matter and it's a minute or more before I can even get it together enough to realize that I'm awake and not blind and that I'm crying for no reason and to tell my girlfriend about the dream and get her input on it. All day at work then I'm super conscious of my eyesight and my eyes and how good it is to be able to see colors and people's faces and know just where I am, and of how fragile it all is, the human eye mechanism and the ability to see, how easily it could be lost, how I'm always seeing blind people with their canes and weird-looking faces and always thinking of them as just interesting to spend a couple of seconds looking at and never thinking they had anything to do with me or my eyes, and how it's really just an incredibly lucky coincidence that I can see instead of being one of those blind people I see on the subway.

And all day whenever this stuff strikes me I start tearing up again, getting ready to start crying, and only keeping myself from crying because of the cubicles' low partitions and how everybody can see me and would be concerned, and the whole day after the dream is like this, and it's tiring as hell, my girlfriend would say emotionally draining, and I sign out early and go home and I'm so sleepy I can barely keep my eyes open, and when I get home I go right in and crawl into bed at like 4:00 in the afternoon and more or less pass out.

I gave a reading at our church this morning as well. And, I spent the majority of the morning trying to come up with the appropriate reading voice to use during church. Should I use the extremely deep voice, designed to remind folks that God is almighty and powerful and most likely male? Or should I use a voice that carries deep inflections, landing heavily on words like the devil and sin, to remind people about things like the devil and sinning and how they are bad and how it's good to be reminded of that with some really solid vocals up front.

Bit of arcana, I read a random article that says that women like a flat monotone like George Clooney has. Apparently they find it irresistible.

Interpolation:

M: You know. I think I'm just going to read it without any inflection at all in my voice because women find that more attractive.

S: I think the point of this particular church reading is for women to find you attractive.

M:....

I managed to deliver the reading, which I was also nervous about, why am I so nervous to read and speak to other fellow humans? Walker Percy Lost in the Cosmos. And after a while, I eased up a little bit and actually enjoyed the process of reading.

Because it's a hell of a lot of fun to sing this song with a group of people you are rather fond of.

Week 1

S: I just hope everything is okay.

M: I kind of think that's setting the bar a little low.
One of the most common questions that you get when you're having a child is, "How are you doing? Is..." et al. What people are actually asking is, "were you planning to have this child or was there an accident?" I generally like to let people off the hook rather early by saying, we were planning on it. Though this is probably a mistake, and I should drag it out a little longer. Honestly I was planning on having kids when I was eighteen or so, I thought if would be fun. Then you start getting graduate degrees and buying houses, and you start to wonder if you should ever plan to have kids or if you'll have to wander around town begging for alms if you bring a child into the world. Sorry, I've just always wanted to say, bring a child into the world. It's funny how it makes people squirm a little bit when they're trying to figure out whether you intended to bring a living breathing entity into the world or whether it was some freak cosmic chance because either way it's a beautiful thing.

So yes, we planned it. However, it seems like an ill-conceived plan because neither one of us have ever done this before. I mean, I can plan plan to do anything. In fact, I'm planning to grow wings and fly to Australia, but that doesn't mean I'll have any clue how to get started. Hmmm....Maybe if I passed myself off as a baby in a condor nest....Anyhow, that's for another day. So, on the other hand, we were only planning as far as you can plan.

In other plans, I'm hoping to have a child who is fluent in three languages, is changing its own diapers by the time it's six months. I think two is probably a good age to take over lawn mowing duties. Note: We have one of those old-timey push mowers, so it's not as cruel as it sounds. It's crueler, those things aren't really dangerous, but they take some real leg power to get them moving.

I've got other plans to, but I'm planning on rolling them all out when I run for city council with my dad stache.


S: What do you mean?

M: I was kind of hoping for a mutant or something.

S: Like the X-men.

M: Wouldn't it be neat if our kid could shoot lasers out of his/her eyes?

S: The blood tests came back normal.

M: Hmmm. No lasers. You can't tell me you're not a little disappointed.

S: I'm not disappointed.

Week 1

Dad stache on the way.


Week 1. Your child is the size of nothing. You discover from your wife's repeated admonitions that a child doesn't grow in a woman's stomach, it grows in the womb. It really seems like a miscalculation since the stomach has so much more room. Would eating a large Thanksgiving type meal crowd a child, or give them more room as the stomach expands? I have so much to learn.

Days until it takes me to make a joke about the murdering wives statistic. One:

M: Did you know that the majority of murders that men commit on their spouses actually occur during pregnancy.

S: Wait. What are you saying?

M: I’m just making conversation here. You don’t have to read in to everything.

I arrived home with a burning desire to fritter away my time playing video games, but I subjugated them to spray down the poison ivy jungle in our backyard, mow the lawn, water the azaleas, and take out the trash. Why did we ever move out of that single bedroom apartment? There was so much less space to have to fill with love.

I don't really remember much else about the first week except that telling my family was nice. Mainly because I think they had begun to doubt my virility after seven years of a child less marriage. And let's be honest, one thing you don't want to have happen when you walk into a room chalk full of people is for them to start whispering to each other about your lack of virility. "Look at that guy. He lacks virility. Which, in my experience is the sort of thing that people at parties say to each other. Or, "Look at that guy he couldn't even get a fertile philly pregnant." Which they would be doubly embarrassed about, because I would never even sleep with a horse and why would they say that? But I would probably direct them to some passages in Leviticus that warned against this very thing, and they wouldn't be so embarrassed. And maybe we could just idly chat about how much we enjoyed crushed ice.

Naturally I called (my family) them all up and they said all the right things, "We're so happy for you or extended screaming, or you're going to love it. I'm so proud of you et al." But I know that deep down they were all feeling a little bit ashamed of themselves for doubting my virility, and I didn't even mention it because I didn't want it to be awkward, I wanted this moment to be special for them and not just this huge misunderestimation of me. I think that time that I grew that mustache I pretty much proved I was ready to father children or be on a detective show in the 1980's. Or Tombstone. And that people probably stopped on street corners for that one day and said, "that guy looks like someone's dad or at the very least a weird uncle." And it makes me happy to just think of how proud I am of me.

But then I was sad because I won't be able to make jokes about bestiality and stuff because I'm going to have a kid. And what you say to kid is, peek a boo. Peek a boo. Peek a boo. Can you see me? Peek a boo. Until they start crying and then you pass them off to one of the parents. But now, I'm going to be one of those parents, and I'll just be holding a crying baby non-stop because other people aren't willing to hold our baby when it's crying, and I can hardly blame them. But then maybe I'll play a game of peek a boo or something and feel better.

Week 1

So, yeah, maybe I did spend some time that first night trying to come up with a good baby name. I didn't really think I had that sort of crazy in me but there I was wondering what we were going to name our child. Naming is all kinds of important in the Bible, but now it's important to just name your kid something that won't have them getting their ass kicked in the second grade because you thought some sissy name was going to set the world on fire. It's kind of the beginning of the projections and fears that you have about an as yet unformed little being.

Remarkably S was bit more composed.

S: You're kind of freaking out about this aren't you?

M: Am I? That's supposed to be your job.

S: I'm just so happy.

M: I'd be happy if they'd lower college tuition. Is our child going to be happy?

For some reason it struck me on that first evening that it was of vital importance that we start worrying about everything as if that was going to help. The strange thing is that for me, it did. It helped to just start getting the wheels turning, trying to figure out what to do, and I remember S lying in bed next to me, looking sad. And her telling me that though she was happy she was sorry to be leaving behind a period of time in our lives. And I know that everyone tells you that it's amazing, but I have to say that it is sad to leave things behind.

For instance:
In Safeway, world's worst f-ing grocery store. This in comparison to Whole Foods where I normally shop, and not because I'm a snob or have money, we don't. But because I think it's a good thing to spend money on quality food. Diatribe complete. Anyhow, this elderly lady in front of me is kibitzing for upwards of five minutes with the cashier over the price of iceberg lettuce. And I'm standing behind her at my third store stop since getting off work wanting to either throttle her, or just give her the seventy cents to get the hell out of the store.
No problems so far. Besides the whole DFW speech, which pretty much nails this situation on the head with increased complications vis a vis impending doom.

Unfortunately when I started to drive home other cars were on the road. The audacity! As I was vainly trying to get through a red light by shifting lanes sporadically I sort of drifted a little too close to another driver who honked at me. This lead me to zoom through (zoom, really? Is that even a word we still use) the stop light behind her, which in turn, forced me to have to slam on my brakes, spewing groceries all over the back seat. I then proceeded to speed around (yes, I know, today, I was that driver) the car, (who really wasn't at fault at all) and whip back in, which earned me a second horn honk and them a gesture, which must mean I love you in some culture, but could perhaps be misinterpreted here as derogatory.

Point to the story. I can't do that six months from now. I'll have other little folks in the car with me, and I'll be railing at other crazy drivers on the highway as I go twenty five in a forty zone with a baby on board sticker in the rear window. (I'm not getting one of those). Goodbye crazy angry driving. I'll miss you. Signed,

Andrew

In my defense, I don't see why other cars are even allowed on the road when I'm in a hurry. I mean, what's the point of being in a hurry if people are just going to slow you down? Also, if you think that a grocery store may have wronged you on your purchase of lettuce, please ask the people in line behind you to take up a collection rather than arguing over it with the clerk. Time is money.

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Because this song is fun to yell/sing at your wife right before bed until you're asked to stop.