Category: Daily

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Day 140: Babies, Barbies, and Dress-up Clothes

There is very little reason for me to be tired.  Aside form waking up every 20 minutes feeling like it was a year of sleep and asking my oldest if she needed to go potty, I’ve slept better than I have in a long time.

Having a nearly constantly pregnant wife over the past four and a half years is a little like boiling water.  Heat keeps going in but the temperature stays the same.  Now that we’re done pumping heat into this mess I figure we can cool things off and move onto to the next stage: not killing and eating our young for the next eighteen years.  As clumsy or as inexplicable that metaphor is to you, I still get to go to stage two of family growth.

Lots of folks–nurses mostly–over the last 24 hours asked if we were shooting for a boy. No, we weren’t.  We were just having kids and they all turned out to be girls.  There’s alot of groaning about me having my hands full over the course of stage two, but frankly I don’t know what the hell everyone is worked up about.  Raising four people is the harder part not that they are four girls.  As for the 21st century version of a dowry–paying for a wedding–I seriously doubt that any of these four is going to look Daddy in the eye and demand cash for that.  Smitten, yes; in love, sure; made of money, no.

And I just don’t see their social education going that route anyhow.  Entourage of babies, Barbies, and dress up clothes that may argue to the contrary.

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Day 139: La Chiripada

This will be more of a diary entry than a creative endeavor.

The anesthesiologist for my wife’s epidural today shared the last name of a man that serves or served on the Philmont Ranch Committee.  It’s neither a common nor obscure last name, but you like to make small talk when a man’s jamming a needle into you wife, so I asked.  No relation as far as he know.  But he did share an anecdote about meeting a man with the same name I asked about at a rental car place.  Turned out since they had the same last name they’d tried to get into the same car.  This random guy was a CEO of a company in Illinois.  I look my guy up on the web.  Two pages later I uncover that my guy used to be a CEO of a company in Illinois.  Same guy.

I doubt Facebook can match that kind of serendipity.

On the way in to the hospital I thought about every pregnant woman in a movie or on TV and how it’s always a frantic race.  How nearly each time, some cop is involved to escort them to the hospital as if a woman even needs a hospital.  It was funny to me how the reality of a birth is never what you see on the screen.  From the drive in to the screaming and cursing the husband’s name to the beautiful pink child it’s not how it is.  Not even close.

Our Doc got pulled over by the police for speeding on her way back.  He let her off.

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Day 138: Three Empty Boxes

OK, bitch.

That’s tough talk from a three day loser. Take it for what you will.

I just finished an email to newly in touch old friend in which I describe my recent and record string of fail as an unplanned hiatus or an all out fuck up. Since I’m only accountable to me I’m tempted to light on myself, but that might not be all that productive. So let’s say I go instructional instead. That’s guilt inducing and constructive at the same time.

One of the tenants of the Seinfeldian Chain is that it’s addictive to keep putting little X’s in the boxes. That having a string makes you want to add to that string. It makes you want to avoid a gap like it’s the little red X version of getting pantsed in gym class–speaking of little and red. I am here to say I’ve thought of little else since I started this three day run of empty boxes.

The trouble is creating the gap at all, because once you’ve done that it feels like you just abandoned your power. Imagine a train muscling along the track: car after car after graffiti tagged car. Traffic backs up on either side of the crossing. Drivers put it into P or neutral and set the parking break. They roll down their windows and enjoy the evening air or curse. Either way this impenetrable locomotive commands them to stop. To take notice. To change their pathetic little plans. I am unstoppable! Then the last car rounds up the herd and lumbers by. The steel thunder fades. The blinking red lights abruptly don’t. The ding-ding arms go up. A gap.

“Fuck you train. I won’t be late for dinner now. Ha HA!”

The power resides in the continuity and the connectivity. If you can keep the gaps short the arms stay down. The lights blink. The thunder lulls but doesn’t die. A second locomotive appears on the horizon.

“Dammit. I bought ice-cream at the grocery for shit’s sake.”

Hopefully this entry will be the first of 863 more cars. Hopefully I can melt your vanilla.

I think I can.

Word count: 376