Fatherhood: The Blog - Eight Weeks

              Today Boone is eight weeks and three days old. Eight weeks isn't a terribly long time, depending on how you're spending it. Eight weeks can slip by without one barely noticing, or eight weeks (in jail) can seem like an entire life time. I used to work at a summer camp each summer for like five years. Some years I was there three weeks, some years I was there close to seven. I have so many memories packed into those summers that it sometimes seems like years worth of adolescence. When it comes to being a father, eight weeks seems very, very, short. It's honestly hard to even remember how things were before Boone was born. I mean, I can remember it in an intellectual sense, of course, but I can't remember what it felt like. I think, "Wow, eight weeks ago I woke up in the morning and didn't feel responsible for a little life? I had massive amounts of free time that I didn't realize I had? I'd never felt these feelings that I feel when I hold my son and stare at his wild little facial expressions?"

Boone meets his PawPaw Walker

              At the ripe old age of eight weeks, Boone is much bigger than he was when born (of course). It's hard to notice since I see him every day, but suddenly we'll realize some outfit that used to be too big for him no longer fits, or that he doesn't need the extra infant support cocoon thing in his car seat or Super Vibrating Chair 3000. Mag was holding him this morning (as he stared her in the eyes and smiled, something he refuses to do at me) and we were examining his arms and face and saying, "Look how fat he is!" "Look at all these rolls of fat on his arm!" with amounts of glee that we only reserve for the infantile obese. He is awake a lot, and loves to make tons of weird faces as he looks around at us (or just over my shoulder, as he has this game he likes to play called, "Never Ever Look At My Father Under Any Circumstances" which includes great fun such as turning his head, closing his eyes, and actually putting his hands over his face to avoid me) and constantly make silly noises. By constantly, I mean, "Every second that he's awake." He can't even really goo or gaa yet, but he makes little cooing noises, rattles his breath around in every which way possible, and likes to sigh a lot as well. His favorite noise, however, is grunting. He has 33 different grunts (one for every occasion!). There's his, "I'm hungry" grunt, his, "I'm staring at nothing" grunt, his, "I'm going to Houdini myself out of this swaddling" grunt, his, "Let's go out for chicken and waffles" grunt, and a variety of other grunts that I have not yet learned to translate.

            I realized the other day that in the eight weeks since Boone was born we've only been out to a restaurant twice, and both times it was for a quick dinner at a Mexican restaurant (a food I don't even like very much) while Boone slept on an upside down high chair (side note: This is a popular way to hold baby seats. Flip over a high chair and put the car seat on the legs and set it next to the table. Not only is this disgusting [the bottom of the high chair that's been on the floor of the restaurant for years is not a foot away from your food] it is highly dangerous as the top of high chairs are uneven and therefore, once upside down, prone to flip over at the slightest jostling. Nevertheless, we do it). I don't know how often we ate out before, maybe twice a week, but the number isn't the point - the point is that WE NEVER THOUGHT TO COUNT. Why would we, when we could eat out any time we wanted to? In the past eight weeks we've done practically nothing without him. Margaret went to see a movie once while I watched him, and I went to the shooting range once while she watched him (well she watches him all the time, but normally I'm busy at work, not leisure). This is all common sense - babies are completely dependent on others so therefore they're going to take a lot of time, no real shocker there. The revelation is that I don't care. I haven't missed going out to eat, or going to the movies, or going to do anything alone. Hanging out at the house and walking around holding a screaming baby is incredibly fulfilling to me.

          Boone can be quite the screaming baby. He rarely ever cries, just occasionally whimpers, but when it comes time to cry he screams with the intensity of a dozen banshees. He'll be dead asleep and then suddenly just open up with a full-throated scream and repeat ad nauseum. He usually only cries every few hours when he's ready to eat OR under another very particular set of circumstances: every single time Margaret walks out the door. It happens with far too much regularity to be a coincidence, he has some sort of sixth sense (I tend to think that what we call a "sixth sense" is our subconscious use of the untapped potential of our other five senses. The reason you have a, "premonition" that someone is about to come into the room is that your brain heard faint footsteps and jumped to that conclusion without you ever processing the sound of the footsteps through your conscious mind) that knows when she leaves the house. He'll be fast asleep and she'll step out to go to the grocery store. No sooner has she left the drive way than he wakes up and starts crying inconsolably varying pitches and tones to find new ways in which to inform me how inadequate I am in comforting him. I've learned a variety of tricks to distract him, however. He usually calms down if I lay down on my back and lay him on my chest.

              This is my favorite position for he and I. I'll lay on the couch and prop up my feet. He'll lay face down on top of me so we're chest to chest. He'll pop up his little turtle head and gawk at me (as it wobbles around on his neck, he's still getting used to it) and make a dozen different noises. He'll kick his legs and windmill his arms (and try to swim). Eventually he'll fall asleep, and grow heavier and heavier as his body goes completely limp. A few times I've fallen asleep as well and it's a great way to wake up - the first thing I see is my son sleeping on my chest and the first thing I think is, "Is this real?"  He's asleep in his bed in his room right now, all swaddled up like a caterpillar with a fat baby head wrapped tightly in a cocoon. I went in there and looked at him and I get this weird feeling of overwhelming excitement. It's like my mind is being blown as I stand there and I have to jump up and down because I can't quite contain it. I look at him and I can imagine how he'll look when he's three, and I can see myself talking to him when he's 12 and telling him, "I remember when you were just a tiny baby and you'd sleep in your bed in our old house and I would stand in your room and look at you." I realize that once, many moons ago, I was that little baby and my parents and my sister were looking at me, that Margaret was that baby and her parents and siblings were looking at her. I see his past and future all contained in this marvelously innocent chubby sleeping face and, as if that weren't enough to melt my mind, I suddenly remember that this thing grew in Margaret's belly! That he is part me and part her and was actually created from body parts and our own cells that divided and grew and divided and grew. I know birth is the most commonplace thing on earth, since it's happened to every single person ever, but it's still ridiculous when you actually stop and think about it.

                I feel that I was going through some sort of quarter-life crisis over the course of this pregnancy. I'm really having to force myself from adolescence into adulthood. I know a lot of dumb little kids have babies and their lives don't change all that much, but having a kid really reoriented me. I've been hesitant to take a lot of large steps toward adulthood in my life because I've always been afraid I was going to lose some vital part of my personality, or how I define myself, or who I really was. I've moved on past that fear in recent years and realized that we are who we are - I'm not going to undergo some huge personality change and be a completely different person at age 40 than I was at age 20. I'm sure I'll have different views, and I'm sure (I hope!) that I'll have matured in many ways, but Andrew will still be Andrew. Being a father makes me want to grow up. In the past my steps toward maturity have been strained - I would realize, "Okay, it's really time to take this step forward" and then force myself to do so even though every part of me was still singing, "I want to rock and roll all night, and party every day!" on a constant loop in my head. I know when I'm ready for something though, and I'm ready for this. I find myself thinking about investments and mortgages and those sorts of things and being genuinely interested and excited about them. I've sadly let a lot of life happen to me instead of, as Thoreau said, living, "deliberately." However, I know when something snaps into place inside of me and a chapter officially ends and a new one officially begins. Much of the maturing in my life has happened in sudden clear moments, not in a slow ripening process - I didn't slowly fall in love with Mag, I realized in a split second (and I still know exactly where I was and when it was) that I  was madly in love with her and then purposed that I would woo her and date her (and then not date her and then date her and then not date her and then marry her and then etc etc). Boone's birth has had something of that effect on me. Suddenly I'm ready to step into a new age, and it isn't with reservation our out of duty, but because I genuinely want to do so. Fatherhood, here I come.

Writing About Writing (To Keep From Writing)

            This is the paragraph where I'm required to berate myself for my lack of consistency in posting (which is undoubtedly shameful) and give a list of excuses for my absence. Excuses that include added responsibilities at work, the holidays, being a new father, travel, a variety of personal issues and struggles which I am in different levels of defeating, laziness, writer's block, and a host of other semi-true explanations which I could summon under pressure. When I was a young and reckless bachelor living in squalor in a 70-year old garage apartment with no climate control, a refrigerator empty of all but alcohol, a pantry empty of all but peanut butter, and a schedule empty of all but work, writing came easy. Every day after work I would sit on my couch that smelled of sweet tobacco smoke (it used to belong to my grandfather's office) low to the floor (I had knocked the legs off to get it in the door and never reattached them) and sit my laptop with the melted "F" key (due to a cigarette cherry) and the upside down "4" key (due to my cat scratching some of my keys off) and write. I'd write a blog post, a short story, a cryptic rumination, a fairy tale, or any other tale from any other genre I could imagine. I'd sit down and place my hands upon the keys and the words would begin to flow without effort. It wasn't that everything (or anything) I wrote was good, it was that it was the natural overflow that spilled forth when I was alone.

               Getting married changed that. After marriage I was rarely alone, for obvious reasons. We spent about 22 1/2 hours a day together for the first year. After that Mag started working a different job and while we spent less time together, nevertheless I was only alone and at home for about one hour a day. Spending my days at work listening to various podcasts, radio shows, and music, and then spending my time at home with my wife, left little time for creativity or creative output. I've had to force myself to write, and I do it at different times with varying degrees of vigor. I'll tell myself, "You have to start writing more" and do so for about a month and then trickle off again. I'll set up constructs for myself (such as the idea of a, "Fatherhood" blog) in order to chain myself to the idea of a goal and a deadline in hopes my output will increase. Sometimes I'll think, "Well if you have to force yourself to do it, maybe you shouldn't be doing it." I never think, "Come on Andrew, you haven't played video games in awhile, you really need to start doing that more." I suppose writing feels like something healthy, in a way. It feels more akin to saying, "You should spend more time outdoors" than it does to, "You should watch more movies."

                  The birth of Boone gave me even another reason not to write. Not only am I not home as much as I used to be (for example, today was my day off and I spent a good deal of it running errands, watching him while Mag was at the doctor, and then going with him to his hearing test and sitting in a hospital waiting room for eternity) but when I am home I am with him. He either requires my attention (and he can be quite insistent) or he's being sweet and peaceful and I just want to hold him and stare at him and attempt to burn every facial expression he makes onto my memory for all time. I took a shower the other night and turned on Monday Night Football and lay on my back on the couch with Boone lying face down on my bare chest. He would pick up his head and look and me and scratch my chest and make weird sounds. I don't know that I would have spent that time writing but I do know that spending time with him makes three hours feel like thirty minutes.

                 My iPod broke recently and I've been using Mag's while I work (because I like rocking out on a pink mp3 player. Makes me look all sensitive (and gay) to the ladies). The other day I forgot to charge it or something and had to go a whole day of about nine hours largely in silence. I had a lot to think about and deal with as I'm attempting to make a transition in several areas of my life and I kept my mind working at the speed which causes smoke to waft, not pour, from the ears. I realized though, that without constant input for my mind to receive and process (via the 16 or so podcasts I subscribe to) creative output began to reassert itself in my mind. I began about four blogs in my head, came up with the idea for a poem dealing with my battle with alcohol, and even wrote the chorus and three verses to an old-fashioned bluegrass song (and convinced myself I could learn the play the piano from YouTube and put music to the song by the end of the week). Now, I never wrote any of the blogs and all I did with the poem and song is scratch them down on some scrap pieces of paper and shove them in the drawer of my desk down in the basement but still. I know I would like to write more. I face the problems of lack of creativity, lack of motivation, lack of dedication, and lack of time. To make headway against even one of these is refreshing.

                I've decided to enter a writer's workshop on a website I sometimes read (the first step to eventually writing articles for the website) and am strategizing (made up word alert!) different ways to combat the other, "lack ofs" listed above. I recently acquired DVR ability with my new television service and it is a huge timesuck (did you know that Tosh.0 comes on 133 times a week and is insanely rewatchable? Did you know I have four episodes of, "Homeland" on my DVR even though I've never seen a single second of footage of the show?). I have a stack of books (that I've reduced from 17 to 6 since the beginning of the summer, but just bought another today) to read. Like I said, I want to teach myself basic piano (or basic "two hand" piano. I took two years of it as a child but could never get the hang of the left hand). I want to cuddle with my son and spend time with my wife and exercise more and visit the local ancient Indian mounds and go hiking and deep clean some areas of house and all sorts of other things. I need to figure out a better way of managing my time   and prioritizing the things I want to do in order to get them done. I'm getting better at it though! Today I watched my kid, ate roast and potatoes for brunch, and watched the documentary, "Cocaine Cowboys II: Hustlin' With the Godmother" all at the same time!

                   I'd like to write more. I'm going to write more. It might be on this blog, it might be someplace else. I understand that this post is pointless, and circular, and contributes nothing worth reading. It really is just me writing down my thoughts on writing instead of just thinking them. I'm going to write, and if the things going through my head are as boring to other people as I'm sure this post is, I'm going to write it anyway. I considered not posting this, just writing it for the sake of writing, but I haven't posted in so long I'm going to put this up as a pathetic little place holder. For those of you who have been so kind (or so bored) as to read all the way this far, I'll grace you with a bit of information certain to blow. your. mind:

CAN YOU BELIEVE HOW BIG AUSTRALIA IS?
I thought it was like the size of about two Texases. (Texii?)

Not so impressive anymore, ARE YOU ALASKA? 

                                   

How I Talked Myself Out of Time Travel

             You know the smile. It's the smile the man with the over-whitened teeth, over-ironed slacks, over-combed hair, and yet-still-not-quite-correctly-tied-tie gives you as he runs your credit report at the car lot. It's the smile the referee gives as he throws a yellow flag although three other referees have already thrown theirs. It's the smile the sadistic executioner flashes as he pulls the lever at the gallows, the switch at the electric chair, or pushes the plunger on the needle. It's the smile that screams, "This is my favorite part of the job." That's the smile that Mister Fib always gives as he asks the question, "Future or past?"

              They say (and by they I mean all the meaningless hacks who just repeat other inane proverbs without thinking about how little sense they make) that you can't judge another person until you've walked a mile in aforementioned person's shoes and by that logic I guess I can't accurately predict the questions I might ask (nor the glee I might gain from asking them) if I were the owner/operator of a time machine. I think, just based on the pure joy on the face of Mister Fib, that I would have to ask, at least once, "Past or future?"

             That's the conundrum we all face when we decide on time travel. Certainly there are other things to consider- alternate time lines, more knowledge than our modern minds can handle, the Grandfather Paradox, and the like, but the most basic question we have to answer, the One or the Zero, to reduce things to their most basic form always remains the same: "Future or past?"

             I think we all fall into two categories or, though it strains the mind to even conjecture, possibly three. In category One-A fall all the people who would time travel merely to observe. These are the people who want to see Abraham Lincoln shot, want to see Columbus land in Hispaniola, want to see King Arthur pull Excalibur from the stone (that happened, right?) and want to see the crab people rule a barren Earth presided over by a giant sun. Let us ignore these lame-asses and focus on the two groups that matter, One-B and Two. Group One-B are also interested in the past, but they are the Past Changers. While that title doesn't quite roll off of the tongue there is none that better describes the desires of this subset. These are the people that would go back and kill a youthful Adolf Hitler, or wait for Lee Harvey Oswald in the book depository (though how they could also be on the grassy knoll at the same time remains to be seen), or do something as simple and ingenious as buy stock in Apple in 1980something. While I both understand and sympathize with this position,  it is the wrong one.

           Group Two is my group. Count me in with the futurists. I want to know what are the results of the experiments we are now conducting, not what are the results of the experiment our parents and grandparents participated in. I want to know where and when and how I die - not so I can change it but so I can fully enjoy it. I want to know where the world will stand in 2050 - what countries will be super powers, what countries will no longer exist, whether we'll be on the moon or the moon will be on us, whether we'll have flying cars or have run out of oil or will be radioactive half-humans who continue to dance in a world without music (but with crab people!).

          The past is over and done with. I have many regrets, and there are a few things I would love to get another swing at. If I could place the mind I now possess in my body at age 8, or 15, or 19, or 23, there is no doubt I would make different, and better choices. These choices would give me different opportunities, some better and some worse than the ones I was presented with. I would make different choices based on those opportunities and therefore end up in a different place than I am now. Perhaps it would be better, perhaps it would be worse. However, none of those things happened. I can look at the past and trace the exact path that brought me to where I am today. I can, if we want to get mushy, pinpoint the exact moment I fell in love and follow that bright red pulsing lifeline over the course of nine years to the place where it has led me today. To this very basement, in this very pair of pants, with this very cat in my lap, with this very wife and this very son busying themselves above my head. I can see how it has affected many of my decisions, both for the better and the worse. I can see how it has changed me, both for the better and for the worse. If I could go back in the past would I change any of it? No, I wouldn't, and I suppose that is a testament to the fact that I feel that in the present I am a place of happiness, or at least in a place where I can achieve happiness. It doesn't mean I'm in a place of perfection, it just means that I've done good enough in life's casino that I'm not comfortable rolling the dice and seeing how they'd turn up on the second try.

              But oh! the future! That is what really matters. I'm still at the beginning of an only-just-unfolding story. Will I get divorced at age 55 and start dating one of my son's friends? Will I be a grizzled outlaw fending for my life as a pick my way through a post-apocalyptic landscape? Will I invest my money in something that seems reasonable and ends up being a horrific ponzi scheme that bankrupts my family as I lose everything I've worked to save? Will I leave a bar a little too tipsy and cause an accident that kills a family of three? Will I work hard, treat those around me with love, and one day sit on a porch in the mountains smoking a pipe and eating an apple that grew on a tree in my own property with my arm around my wife of 45 years? How will the things I am doing today affect my tomorrow? When will I know if the struggles were worth it?

              Here's what I told Mr. Fib, as I climbed into his poorly modified go-kart that he claimed was a time machine. I told him, "Count me in with the futurists, because it's only the future that will tell us whether the present was worth a damn."

         

Fatherhood: The Blog - Fatherhood For Real

          Well eddybody, I now have a son.

           I've struggled with writing this post for awhile now. I don't want it to be just a basic recounting of details and events because everyone who has ever had a child knows the story of that child's birth and, while I'm sure it's interesting to them, it probably isn't terribly interesting to everyone else. Besides, a mere list of facts has never been the point of this blog - I want to communicate how I feel about this child and how I feel about being a father. The problem is, I'd much rather spend my time experiencing those feelings than I would writing about them. The other morning I woke up and walked into the den where Mag had just finished changing our child's diaper and I scooped him into my arms and sat down on the couch to look at him. I didn't move for three hours [that's like three and a half blogs!]. I never turned on the television, opened my laptop, or set the tyke down. I just lay back and watched him sleep against my chest, drifting in and out of sleep myself, pulling back his blanket to watch the way he crossed his ankles and how he tucked one arm under his head and held the other across his torso. I've never looked at anything inactive for that long. Not a painting, not a beautiful woman in repose, not a picturesque sunset (granted, sunsets do not, on a general basis, last for three hours).

            On Saturday, October 15th, 27 days before my son's due date, Mag came home from work feeling like crap. Her back was hurting, she was having pre-labor contractions, and feeling chilled and goofy. After taking her temperature a couple of times and giving her a list of reasons why ignoring medical issues makes them all go away, she finally called her doctor's office. It was a Saturday and so they were closed of course, but the doctor on call told her she needed to go to the hospital. This felt like a bit of an overreaction to me, but we went on up there so they could monitor her and the baby. They decided to keep her for a few hours while giving her some fluids through an IV and some Tylenol to bring the fever down. Stubbornly, her fever refused to go down, her contractions (caused by the fever) refused to stop, and the nurses refused to let her go. They pumped her full of some drug that is supposed to stop contractions but all it did was make her very, "loopy" (that's a euphemism for straight up insane) and entertaining. We were both wearing University of Alabama shirts, since it was College Football Day so they moved us to a room so we could watch the game and then, around midnight, said they were going to keep her overnight. Nights spent in hospitals are never relaxing (I assume. I'd never stayed in one before) and this was not an exception. Since they were constantly pumping Margaret full of fluid she had to get up constantly to use the bathroom. I was perched on some hard bed that was five feet off of the ground and she'd call me when she needed to get up. I'd go unplug the monitors from the machine, drape the cords over her shoulders, pick up her IV pole and carry it into the bathroom, wait a few minutes and then repeat the process in reverse. It's comforting to know that her contraction and baby heartbeat monitors can become completely disconnected half a dozen times during the night without the nurses every noticing.

           The next morning they sent us up to another floor for a frightening ultrasound (where the super-professional tech said to the doctor, "He's not breathing" referring to our baby. This caused Margaret's eyeballs to literally pop out of her head and the doctor to immediately reassure her that babies don't breathe before they're born and then to chew out the tech and tell her that you should never use that sentence in front of a pregnant woman). The doctor who had just shown up was the doctor on call and, of course, not Mag's doctor. Her doctor that she's been seeing the entire pregnancy was on vacation that weekend and entire week. We met the new doctor and he sat down on the ultrasound couch with Mag and said, "Listen, everything's going to be fine. You have a high fever that we can't bring down and it's causing contractions. We can't figure out where the infection is and you're already dilated. You're going to have this baby today." He hopped up and shook our hands and said some brief jargon to the nurse and then disappeared. They pulled a curtain closed to give Mag and I a brief moment and we just sat there and kind of grinned at each other and said, "Oh well!"

            From there on out things proceeded pretty quickly. They put that stuff that causes contractions into her IV, the doctor broke her water at 11, and then he went to enjoy church and lunch with his family, telling us, "I'm inducing you, it's a month early, and this is your first baby. Prepare for a very long labor." Mag's fever kept rising, regardless of the fact that there were no fewer than 6 different bags of medicines and fluids hanging from her IV pole and being pumped into her, and they had been continuously giving her Tylenol every few hours since we had gotten there around 5 p.m. on Saturday. When she would have contractions Flip's heart rate would spike, hitting 200 bpm and setting off all sorts of alarms. They made Mag wear an oxygen mask to try and get her fever down and I crouched next to the bed with my face beside her stomach and coached our baby. "Come on," I would tell him, "I know you're trying to force yourself to be born immediately. I get it. You've won. You're going to be born today, but you're going to have to work with me now. We're going to get your heart rate down to 170. I know that sounds impossible but just listen to me and I'm going to talk you through it." He's an obedient and attentive son (and I'm a fabulous and handsome non-licensed medical professional) and within a couple of minutes we had his heart rate back down. I paced around the room watching the Falcons play the Panthers while Mag lay in bed looking like a cyborg and texting.

              Every 15 minutes or so a nurse and some specialist would come in and do some sort of procedure or hook up some sort of machine or take some sort of reading. First the doctor broke her water, then later the epiduralurologist (I assume that's the title) came in and jabbed the epidural needle in her back and started the pain medicine a'flowing. Mag was simply magnificent. I knew she would be fine physically. Mag is the youngest of five children, and the three directly above her were boys. She's the type of annoying little kid you see in the movies who is all, "I can do it too!" when the older kids jump across the creek and then tries to jump across, falls in, cuts her knee, climbs back out, and pretends like it doesn't hurt. Long story short, she's a trooper. What I was worried about, however, was the panic. I was already quite worried about my part in the birthing process, and my whole part is just to be in the same room when it happens. That seemed like quite a tall order to me. Mag had to actually do all the stuff, and it seems like there's a million things that can go wrong, and on top of it all she had a fever of 103, her baby was coming a month early, and the doctor was saying things like, "You're going to be fine. He's going to be fine. Because of all the things going on though, I have to tell you that you are at a higher risk for having to have an emergency C-section. Even if that happens though, everything will be fine, I promise." Not only was Mag great with the pain aspect, but she acted completely calm the entire time. I won't get into all the gory details, as it was really just a pretty normal birth, but her water was broken at 11:15 a.m. and our son was born at 3:25 p.m.

         I, the coward between the two of us, never felt one second of panic the entire time. The doctor and nurses all seemed so calm and rational and professional that I thought, "Well, even if a hundred complications arise, they know how to deal with them and they'll do so. I don't know the exact path from here to there, but I feel confident that by the end of the day I'll have a healthy wife and son here." I thought they were going to put scrubs on me or something but they just pretty much ignored me and chatted as if birth was the most common place thing in the world (let's face it, it is pretty common. Especially in hospitals.) I stood to the side and would pop up to hold Mag's leg and say boring things like, "You're doing good. Chill out, you got this." as she completely ignored me, lost in her own world of birthiness. After he popped out the doctor grabbed him and cut the umbilical cord (I had already explained to him that I wasn't doing it as, "It's what I'm paying you to do.") and handed him off to the nursery attendant and respiratory specialist who were creeping over in the corner of the room. I'll admit, as Mag was doing her whole PUSH thing and I noticed the nursery corner begin to fill up with specialists and nurses I started to feel a little worry, but squashed it down quickly as worry doesn't seem to help things very often. The folks crowded around our baby and talked quickly back and forth in hushed tones as I did my best to ignore them. He didn't cry for almost 2 minutes, and that was the scary part. I had no idea what was going on over there (except I could hear them slapping him around) but I tried very hard to just focus on Mag and try and keep her attention on me. There's no way me hearing what they were saying, or even the tone with which they were saying it, could make me anything except for terrified, and that's why I didn't walk over there or listen in. At some point you have to trust in the abilities of the people in charge and leave it in their hands. Our nurse kept reassuring us everything was fine, and after those two long minutes we heard him attempt a pathetic little whimper. They kept doing whatever they were doing and then he finally started crying a little. They wrapped his white, fleshy, waterlogged and semi-creepy looking body up and let us each hold him for about twenty seconds a piece and then rushed him off to the nursery.

         We already knew that they were going to take him as soon as he was born, as he was running a fever as well. They had to do tests to him and draw blood from him (twice in that first day, actually). It was a tiny bit troubling but we now know that everything is just a-ok with him and he's fine and pretty and healthy. The doctor told us that they wouldn't release him until at least Wednesday (he was born on Sunday) since he was premature, had a fever, had to have tests run, etc. He recovered so quickly and acted so charming to all the nurses, however, that they told us Tuesday morning, "You can leave as soon as it's been 48 hours." We got out of there at 3:30 on the dot. He really is amazing, for a tiny creature that doesn't do much of anything. He's been alive for 13 days and has had visitors on at least nine of those days, and most days it was multiple visitors. Mag told me in a text message this morning, "Boone is just too popular!"

           Speaking of that, his name is Boone Anderson O'Dell. We had yet to decide on a name (as we thought we had another month) but that's the one we went with. People seem to think that, "Boone" is very strange but we don't really care. I can see into the future and I know it's a fantastic name. It'll be super cute when he's a toddler, neat when he's a Boy Scout (or Gender Neutral Scout, as that's what we'll have by then), badass when he's a teenager, alluring when he's a young adult, and it works great as, "Grandpa Boone" as well. It's a perfect blending of old school and new school, and if you don't like it then you're just a bunch of phonies! (that's in honor of another name I thought of bestowing upon him, Holden). If he doesn't like it he can always go by Anderson and make fun of all the kids around him named Edward Cullen or Jayden/Kaiden/Aiden/Hayden/Braden for rhyming with one another.

              Mag is doing really well. I know guys say things like, "She did great! I'm so proud of her!" even if their wives spent the whole labor calling them all manner of unspeakable names and complaining over every little thing and are already trying to ship their newborn off to day care. Margaret did none of those things, however. After her labor she only had two things to say about the process: "Women are a bunch of wussies." And, "I can't believe I was watching Cam Newton play football as my child was actually being born. But at least I was watching him lose." Sometimes I think I'm the woman in this relationship.

             Well, I did what I said I didn't want to do - I just listed the facts about the delivery (actually I didn't! 6 lbs 7 oz, 19 inches long. People seem to care about this for some reason. I assume it's because that's the only information there is about a baby). Maybe it's interesting to you, or maybe he can read this one day and see a few details I inadvertently leave in out in my many recountings of that blessed day. In my mind though, the facts come second. What matters to me is the way this event makes me feel, and that's something I struggle to find the words to describe.

            I read a beautiful quote in the strange, fascinating, and yet ultimately unsatisfying graphic novel Habibi two days after my son was born. "The Sufi saint Rabi'a Al-Adawiyya was seen carrying a firebrand and a jug of water. The firebrand to burn Paradise. The jug of water to drown Hell. So that both veils disappear and God's followers worship - not out of hope for reward, nor fear of punishment...but out of love. " This is a foreign concept - love without reason. I've never loved like that in my life. I love a great many people, and some of them truly and deeply and completely, but none without reason, or without recompense. I've loved my parents as far back as I can remember - because they've always been good parents to me and because they raised me and provided for me and I would never have made it to the age my son is now without them. I love my wife, but because she loves me back. I expect something back for my loving her. I wouldn't go through my whole life loving her had she rejected me and never given me any love in return. I love my closest friends, but not because I chose a few people to love at random. I love them because of the things we share, the way we fit together, the way life becomes more enjoyable and magical when they're around. Until I had a child I had no clue what it would feel like to love someone with absolutely no expectation of compensation. Yes my son will love me back at some point and I will get great pleasure and pride from raising him. I will invest in him and I will be rewarded. But as of now he can't even recognize my face. He isn't developed enough to understand the concept of father, or provider, or protector, or anything like that. He doesn't love me in return or give me anything that I'm not projecting onto him in my own mind. Nevertheless, I am filled with an inexplicable unquenchable overwhelming love for him. One day he's going to be a teenager and say things like, "Just because you're my dad doesn't mean you own me!" and while I'll give him some response as old as parenthood itself, such as, "I brought you into this world and I can take you out of it!" (hawhawhawhawhawhawhawhawhawhawhaw) in reality, he'll be right. He hasn't given me anything, he hasn't taken anything from me, and he doesn't owe me anything. I love him for the sake of love. I love him because I am compelled. I love him because I am a father.

PreBaby GetAway 2011! Part 2

            As our most loyal readers (meaning those who can dedicate 8 minutes a month to skim over our pitifully scarce output) no doubt remember from the first thrilling installment in this two part saga, the chilling intermission came at the point where Mag and I had stopped a child from being sold into slavery, safely piloted a plane to the ground after the pilot and co-pilot tripped over one another and hit their heads, foiled a ring of international jewel thieves mid-heist, and just barely escaped to the mirage-like safety of the world's largest piece of granite: Stone Mountain (located, cleverly enough, in Stone Mountain, Georgia).

            Stone Mountain was formed back in the days when Earth was a roller rink and the continents were bumper cars, randomly floating around and bouncing off of one another willy nilly (this is science, folks). When Africa gave America a particularly unexpected whiplash inducing bump it set off a chain of events. The pressure created the Appalachian Mountains and forced some sort of molten minerals out from beneath the surface of the Earth. Not all the substances escaped, however, and this one in particular formed a giant bubble underground and eventually hardened. Over the course of a million billion trillion gazillion years all the land slowly compressed and eroded, eventually revealing the large hunk of granite (again cleverly titled as Stone Mountain granite). Then, in the early 20th century Georgia carved the world's second largest carving on the face of Stone Mountain. A carving of the President...of the defeated and disbanded Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis. Generals R.E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were also a part of the carving. And thus, Africa's entire goal when it originally hit America was finally fulfilled. That's called playing the long game, boys and girls.

          My, "soannoying" alarm rudely jerked me from my reverie in the early pre-dawn hours and I used every ounce of will and power to drag myself from the soft confines of our hotel bed and slither into the bathroom (where I had conveniently set out everything I'd need for my adventure the night before). Moments later I was stumbling across the 40 degree (Fahrenheit, not angle) parking lot and climbing into the car. Stone Mountain has a 1.3 miles hiking trail that goes up the side of the mountain and leads to the top of the dome. It's steep at times, but not all that difficult, and it's pretty cool. The park doesn't open until 10 a.m. but, my line of thinking went, since I was staying inside of the park I could find my way up the mountain beneath the crescent moon and watch the sun rise from on top of the mountain. Stone Mountain recently underwent a lot of renovations, attempting to turn it into some sort of family get away that takes it's cues from Six Flags. It built a little village with different activities and rustically carved signs saying, "Candy Shoppe" and a speaker system that continuously plays horrible, horrible, god-awful, mind-numbing children's music (side note: Why can't children just listen to regular music? Is the sound of it too complex for their brains to handle?). I suppose when revamping the park they spent a bit too much on faux log cabins and funnel cake emporiums and ran out of funds for some of the smaller things. You know, like signs.

           I drove around this park in circles in the dark (lyrics from an Iron Maiden song, I'm sure) looking in vain for the trail head parking lot. The only signs I could find (and trust me, I stopped and made sure to read every sign) said, "Park Exit" which wasn't very helpful, except telling me where not to go. The other signs said, "Parking" and there were about a thousand of these signs, which were each equally unhelpful. The park was surprisingly busy for 6:45 on a Sunday morning, with a lot of joggers running about like disturbed ants. I pulled into a parking lot, finally, and pulled up Google Maps on my phone. I looked around on the map trying to figure out which road the trail head would logically be located on, and then tried driving to it. Every way I tried to go was blocked by a barricade or lead to another parking lot or a dead end. Finally I got to watch the sunrise, while I drove in frustration back to the hotel. I walked in to find Mag lying in bed with the doors to our 4th floor balcony open, watching the sun rise above the lake and filter through the trees into our room. "How was your hike?" she asked. "It wasn't." I replied. So much for adventures.

           After getting ready and packing things up we went to eat a delicious breakfast at the hotel restaurant. Mag got us some overnight package at the resort that included breakfast, a night's stay, access to all the wonderful little resort commodities like hot tubs and outdoor heated pools and the sports bar and the spa (you actually had to pay for the massages, of course) and tickets to all the attractions at the new Stone Mountain Wonderland. The restaurant is run by exclusively foreign people. These are the type of people I like to refer to as, "Cruise Ship Foreigners." They aren't the type of foreigners you normally run into - people from Germany or England or Mexico or the Caribbean or India or the Middle East. They're all from places that we never really think about, like the Ukraine or French Guiana or something like that. They all have unplaceable accents and complexions that defy categorization. There was one guy with an impossible to understand accent who was manning the omelet station where he omelet of the day was, "Grilled Buffalo Chicken and Bleu Cheese." I was going to get him to make me one but I filled up on grits and eggs and sausage and bacon and hash browns and orange juice and coffee and all those other sorts of breakfast foods that you eat so much of that you immediately want to go back to bed.

The sculpture from the most awkward angle I could find. In the 70s
Spiro Agnew and others had a banquet on the horse's butt. 

            Go back to bed we refused, however, as we had many things to accomplish before the Falcons played at 4:15 p.m. Now that it was daylight and we were armed with not one, but two, maps of the park, we headed back out in search of the trail head where Mag would drop me off and let me run at incredible cheetah like speeds (with gazelle like grace) up the side of the mountain. However, even with both maps and both noggins a'thinkin' and four eyes a'searchin', we still couldn't find the place and nearly exited the park before I pulled the emergency brake and executed a brilliant three-point turn and headed back into the maze to do more searching. Long story short, there was some weird charity bike ride going on that weekend
called (and I'm not making this up), "24Booty." In honor of that classy and ingenious title, Stone Mountain had decided to close off and barricade the road leading to the trail head and greatly inconvenience all of the, you know, normal people who were going to Stone Mountain to do what people normally do there, which is experience the mountain of stone, not ride bikes on a road. Defeated, we turned and tucked our tails between our legs and went to execute Plan B: Operation Ride the Sky Car to the Top of the Mountain (we aren't smart enough to come up with catchy names like, "24Booty").

             The sky car was created for for people who find themselves unable or unwilling to walk to the top of the mountain. People such as fat people, old people, small children, disabled people, people in a hurry, but definitely not pregnant women. At least, that's what all the warning signs told us as soon as we got in line. Now, I know different people react to rules in different ways, but, every since I was a little child I immediately begin to think of ways to circumvent them. I'm one of those spirit of the law people, not letter of the law people. I understand why stop signs and red lights exist, but I run a red light and a stop sign every single morning on the way to work. Why? Because it's dark, I can see a long distance in every direction, and I know no cars are anywhere near me. I was once pulled over by a police officer for running a stop sign and when he asked me why I did it I told him, "Because I can see all five lanes of the road for a mile in either direction and you were the only car in sight and you were headed in the opposite direction from me. There didn't seem to be a reason to come to a complete stop." He gave me a written warning. Anyway, I knew that there was no way the sky car was actually dangerous for pregnant women - the rule exists just to protect Stone Mountain from lawsuits. Mag and I shared mischievous glances and then she zipped her jacket over her belly and slung her purse across it. When we boarded I walked between her and the ticket taker and just like that we were career felons.

This really looks like it should be flying
down like a person on a zip line.

            The sky car is pretty neat, it takes you to the top of the mountain passing to the side of the carving so you can see just how huge (and deep) it is. Once on top of the mountain we ran around for about 40 minutes, taking pictures and pointing at the Atlanta sky line and saying things like, "There's that spinning restaurant we ate at! There's the king and queen office buildings! There's mountains way off in the distance!" We walked around to a side of the dome I'd never been to before (and it doesn't look like anyone else has either in the past 20 years) and found our hotel down below across the lake. It's one really big rock, this Stone Mountain. It's really quite amazing when you're standing on top of it and feeling like you're on the surface of the moon which recently crash landed into our planet. Really though, if you aren't hiking there's only so much looking at rock you can do, and so we sneaked back aboard the sky car and rapidly descended back to the earthy loam of ground level. On the way down we were standing next to the door and I told Mag, "Imagine if these doors came open half way down. What would happen then?" Some old man who was clinging to a pole for dear life told me, "Don't say things like that!" and admitted he was afraid of heights. I thought that was cute. There was still one more thing I wanted to do in order to fully review the Stone Mountain Experience. (For those keeping track at home, so far I'd gotten up early and driven in circles, returned with Mag to drive in circles, waited in line to sneak on to the sky car, ridden up and then back down again). That thing was the astonishing ropes course (called something more like, "The Cloud Walkway" or, "Hangin' Around" or, "Tree Climbing Without the Fun Part (Danger)").

All the instructors got stuck because they were afraid so
this is when I was going to save them all and carry
them back down over my shoulders.

            This rope course is like three or four levels high, reaching heights of...I don't know about 40 feet, and is a series of walkways that are strung between poles. Some of the walk ways are just 2x4s, some are ropes, some are wooden lily pads, some are wooden bridges with no rails, some are rope bridges with a rope hand rail, etc. There are only so many different ways to string ropes between poles so you necessarily repeat some of the same obstacles along the way, but at different heights. It was fun and not scary at all, which was kind of weird. I used to work at a ropes course at a summer camp that was only about 15 feet high and for some reason that shorter one seemed much scarier to me. Perhaps it was because it was between trees, not girders, or perhaps it was because I knew it was being run by inattentive teenagers (as I was one myself) and that when I said, "Okay I'm ready to jump off now" the guy belaying me would let me fall until I was 5 feet above ground and then hold the rope taut, jerking the harness deep into my crotch and then everyone would run and try to swing from my legs as I tried to kick them away. Stone Mountain has come up with this really genius system where they put the end of your safety rope (the rope that catches you if you fall off of one of the obstacles) in a trench/runner sort of thing on the girders that run above your head. The only way to get it back out is at the very beginning/end of the course so you never need a guide to do anything to your equipment the entire time. You just move your guide rope along the series of runners, switching from one obstacle to another, sliding yours down a small dead end so someone else can pass with theirs, etc. I love this sort of thing, because it reminds me of a puzzle or a maze or something. I know I'm doing an awful job of describing it but I really found it rather clever.

         While on the course some evil red headed 9 year old girl in a pink track suit (why do red heads always wear pink? It seriously clashes ladies, just letting you know) who was next to me dared to tell me I was breaking the rules and I couldn't do what I was doing. Ignoring the fact that she was, of course, wrong, can you BELIEVE some little kid would tell me what to do? When I was nine years old I never would have told some manly hunk of self-possessed know-it-all that he was breaking the rules. Hell, I'm 27 and I wouldn't even have told that 9 year old that she was breaking the rules. Why do I care what she does? I of course paid her no heed and continued to do what I was doing, attempting to teach her the important lesson about life - no one really cares what you think. After finishing the course (while Mag walked around beneath me and took approximately 87 pictures) we looked around to see what else there was to do. They had all those super awesome events that are created to take up space in brochures but cost no money to host (such as, "Story Telling" and, "Pumpkin Parade" and, my favorite event, "Shopping") but nothing for two young spry (severely pregnant) adventurers. Deciding that the time had come to suddenly morph into old fogies, we bought a giant warm funnel cake and climbed aboard the train to take a ride around the mountain.

Mag looking at the far off city of Atlanta.

           Train rides are super boring, as everyone knows, and are a lot like riding in a car except louder and slower and more predictable. A widely known truth, however, is that anything can be fun if you really want it to be. This was proven in the cloying and sappy movie, Life is Beautiful which made even the holocaust funny (or the lesser known lost Jerry Lewis film, The Day the Clown Cried in which Jerry Lewis plays a clown that dances children into ovens in concentration camps). Mag and I told one another jokes and played pranks on one another and took pictures of her belly holding a fork and eating funnel cake and screamed and waved at people who were walking on the parallel trail (and moving about as fast as we were). There were two interesting things on the train ride (I'm telling you to save you the trip). One, the train went through an old town that consisted of about five buildings (a jail, school house, city hall, etc) that are now used as storage but were at one point the important buildings of an actual small town built right against Stone Mountain. Two, the tracks pass the side of the mountain that has deep quarries cut out of it as, in the most American of ways, business people found the world's largest piece of rare granite and immediately began harvesting it to make money. It's the same thing folks did when the found the Redwood forest - say, "Look at these amazing trees, there is nothing else like them in the world! Think of all the lumber they'll make!" and immediately started cutting them down. Thank goodness for national parks.

              After the train ride we headed back home, stopping by Babies R Us to buy our son a high chair since he was such a good sport over the course of the weekend. It was the fourth Sunday of the NFL season and the fourth Sunday I'd spent away from home. I was gone this past Sunday as well so with any luck I'll be able to spend all 16 Sundays busy and away and never getting to sit in front of the television all day watching football and seeing the same horrible beer commercials repeated over and over again. Stone Mountain is less than 2 hours from our house, and our entire mini-vacation lasted less than 24 hours, but we had a marvelous time and returned home equal parts exhausted and refreshed. Logically speaking, it's all a waste of money. We can sleep in our own beds, and watch football on our own TVs, and climb our own trees, and eat our own food, and get bossed around by strangers for no added expense. Psychologically speaking, however, the benefits of escaping the daily grind for a night or two can never be over estimated. Do it.

           

PreBaby GetAway 2011!

            One of the many loves that Mag and I both share is DOING STUFF. We like to go places and have little get aways and see things that we don't normally see. There is something fantastically refreshing about breaking away from one's normal schedule and rejuvenating through a little weekend excursion. We like to travel and have taken a few trips in our first few years of marriage to here and there in the local...eleven states. We went to the Dominican Republic for our honeymoon and I announced to Margaret at the beginning of the year that this fall, for our three year anniversary, we were going to return there and make sure all our bartenders were still doing okay. "For all we know we might have a kid next year," I said, "We gotta get going while the going's good." Our child has a fantastic sense of irony and therefore, upon hearing these words, cut to the front of line in heaven and said, "Excuse me Mr. Stork Master but - "
       "That's SAINT Stork Master to you, you rude little zygote!" a man with a (shock!) robe and beard said, peering down his large nose at my completely unformed son.
       "Right, well, anyway, I was wondering if I could go ahead and be created next."
       St. Stork Master pulled his glasses up onto his nose (he keeps them on a chain about his neck, naturally) and ran his finger down a large golden scroll. "Hmm. It says here that you aren't due to be born for at least another year and a half, if not longer. Do you have any reason for thinking that the rules somehow don't apply to you?"
       The zygote pondered this for a moment and then said brightly, "Well, it sure would be awful inconvenient for my mommy and daddy!"
        "Look behind you, you self-important cell cluster. This long line of soon to be conceived personalities are all going to be awful inconvenient for their parents. That's 90% of the point! Back of the line!"
        The zygote shoved his hands in his pockets in a gesture of defeat and hung his little imaginary head. He kicked at a (gold) pebble and slowly turned to the back of the line. Then, quick as a flash he scurried between the crotchety old saint's legs and dove into the kerchief of a stork that was just taking off from the runway. He turned back to the saint as he flew away to gain some not small amount of pleasure from his mischievousness but, as you may have guessed from all people constantly getting knocked up, Saint Stork Master is mostly blind anyway and doesn't really keep that close of a watch on who does and does not get conceived.

          As a result of this entirely true story, not two months later my lovely wife found out she was enceinte and we realized that the wonderful people of the Dominican Republic would have to spend another sad few years futilely scanning the horizon each evening, waiting for our triumphant return. Our child has now almost arrived and I told Mag, "Okay, we have to get out of this crummy little town for at least one night before he arrives." We began looking for some place up in the mountains to spend a night, and even looked into going to Jekyll Island, but remained undecided as it is much more fun to procrastinate. This weekend OUR (yes, we literally own the team) football team, Alabama, the Crimson Tide, the First and Only Forever Amen, was due to play the Florida Gators. While many teams in the SEC have some sort of rivalry against one another, Alabama's and Florida's is famous for when Florida put an end to Alabama's undefeated season during the SEC Championship game in 2008, and then went on to win the National title. The next year the two teams re-matched in the SEC Championship game, leaving Tim Tebow crying on the sidelines like a little bitch, and Urban Meyer being taken to the hospital with heart palpitations and saying he was quitting coaching football. Obviously, everyone who knows anything about football knows that anyone with class or taste doesn't like the Florida Gators, and I wanted to make things special for this weekend. (This is sad, but true. Once you get married you have to put all the energy you used to put into making yourself beautiful and clever and hunting dumb women who lack discernment into other unimportant things. That's why sports was invented). I was absolutely determined that I was going to eat alligator meat this weekend.

            One of the curses of the Internet is that everything is on it. Therefore, a simple question typed into Google like, "Where in central Georgia can I EAT A DAMN ALLIGATOR RIGHT NOW" doesn't yield to many helpful results. I did find a message board where, two years ago, some redneck was saying he wanted to kill an alligator and who wanted to buy the meat (he was quickly informed of the illegality of such unlicensed harvesting of one of the world's ugliest creatures). After a lot of detective work (which consists of rearranging the words in my original search to form new creative sentences) I found a few places in Atlanta that has gator on their menu and informed Mag, "Oh yes, this is really going to happen." Somehow this unfolded into an overnight stay at a resort and spa in Stone Mountain Park as our PreBaby GetAway 2011 Extravaganza!

            Now, I don't want to get into this in this post (though I'm sure I will at a later date. I am unable to resist airing all of my dirtiest laundry in the most public of places) but I decided on Friday morning that another drop of alcohol would not pass through this succulent lips until a pour a drink in celebration of the healthy birth of my son. Therefore, in order to make this the coldest of turkeys, I instantly leaped into a baptism by fire. Our trip began to the place I found with gator on the menu, a neat little restaurant in Atlanta called Six Feet Under (which is located right next to the famous Oakland Cemetery, where, among other semi-famous people, Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone With the Wind is buried). Clayton is the one that originally told me about this place so I texted him and asked him about it. "It's fantastic." He texted back. "And they have like 100 beers." Of course they do. From like 200 different countries. However, like a 20-year-old on a Saturday night date with his 17-year-old girlfriend, I ordered a Coca-Cola (rum not included), a calamari taco, a catfish taco, a shrimp taco, a side order of hush puppies, and, most importantly, a fried alligator appetizer. I like the restaurant, and the tacos were pretty good (some of the other stuff on the menu looked even better, but I wanted to try these tacos that had cabbage and wasabi and all this other weird stuff on them).

          Our drive took us through much of downtown Atlanta, passing Turner Field (where we shook our fists angrily at the empty stadium that should have been holding 95,000 screaming fans watching their team lose the play offs), going straight through Little Five Points (where we shook our fists sweetly at all the unattractive alternative people who embraced being alternative as an alternative to being attractive), skirting around the Atlanta Zoo (where we made sure not to smile or make eye contact with any beasts), and finally expelling us into the sudden mass of trees and awful drivers that hides the world's largest mass of granite...Stone Mountain (for exciting details on Stone Mountain be sure to check out "PreBaby GetAway 2011! Part Two"). We pulled up to the gate, hurled a handful of quarters at the old man manning the booth, and sped away toward our hotel. There are two hotels located actually within the park confines and this one is supposed to be the resort hotel. It's nice and all, but we had barely enough time to check in and throw our bags on the floor and our jackets on our bodies before we were back in the car and headed to the LASER LIGHT SHOW SPECTACULAR PRESENTED IN MOUNTAIN VISION!!!!11!1!!!1!.

This is a thousand times better than the real show

           You see, back before there were video games and when people used to do a lot of acid laser shows were popular. You would take a date, who was wearing denim cut-off shorts and a t-shirt with a rebel flag on it (you would be wearing the same thing, incidentally) and lay on the lawn and watch lasers projected on the giant rock face of the mountain. The laser show was revamped this year to be THREE DEE while still retaining many of the classic elements which made the original such a fine work of popular artistry. Mag and I laughed through about twenty minutes before we got up and left. It was horrible. I guess it was cutting edge back in 1983, but that was before the Internet was invented, hair metal was popularized, or we got an anti-American Muhammad worshiping socialist Kenyan in the White House. Times have changed. Part of the laser show is a super interesting tour through the state of Alabama (in a monster truck) that shows the interesting sites of Alabama such as...a Shakespeare Festival? This is demonstrated by a cartoon Shakespeare overacting in the same four poses for about thirty seconds straight. There's then a sequence where a house grows legs and is dancing and it's neighbor gets angry and comes over and shakes his fist. At this point the house eats his neighbor and then begins dancing with his neighbors house (evidently these laser shows were also designed by people on acid). The new, 3-D parts of the show just look like someone is shining a giant projector on the side of the mountain. Ultimately, I think that the age of laser shows has passed. It's pretty neat to see something projected across 100 feet of a giant granite boulder while lying in a field with a thousand rednecks but I can't imagine coming to the park just to see that, and then fighting traffic for an hour trying to get out afterwards. My parents took me and my siblings when we were little, so I can only assume they are better parents than I will ever be.

           We left early, as I mentioned, and drove back to our room. Partially driving our desire to leave, I must admit, was that the Alabama/Florida game had started. We dashed into our room and I turned on our TV to be confronted with the thing I hate most about hotel televisions - the official hotel channel. It's a ridiculous maze that always ends in porn and, when I finally find out how to get off of the menu page, I'm on a channel that plays a constant loop of a Stone Mountain Park promotional video tour. Of course it's at the exact portion of the video that is displaying "StoneWall's" the sports bar located on the floor just beneath us that is currently playing the game, serving marvelous drinks, and has pool tables, darts, whatever. I've stayed in hundreds of hotels, but never one where I turn on the damn TV and have to be tempted with a sports bar that is literally less than 120 seconds away.

Wha' happened?

           So instead my wonderful and supportive wife went and got some drinks from the Starbucks that was 100 yards from the door to our hotel room (and in the lobby). Normally this close proximity would send me into paroxysms of joy except for the fact that I'm not some strange creature created by breeding a sheep with a lemming whose eyes glaze over and who begins drooling and stuttering when hearing the word, "Starbucks." Also I drink coffee about four times a year. However, I must admit that the White Chocolate Mocha was a marvelous dessert that I drank about half of while jumping around the room and screaming at the television. It was fun to watch the game in the room with Mag (who was drinking her Chai Tea Latte). She lay across the king size bed and I sat in the office chair with my feet propped up (I had to have a good launching spot to spring up from every time Alabama did something good, which was frequently during our 38-10 route of the nation's 12th best team).

          The game ended and Mag turned on her sleepy eyes while I got a shower and climbed into bed. I plugged in my phone and set my alarm (titled: "soannoying" and featuring a ringer of a rooster crowing over and over again with no pause) for 6:30 a.m. "Why are you getting up so early?" Mag asked. I laughed evilly while I cracked my knuckles (a part of my nightly routine). "I have...plans."

             TO BE CONTINUED...

Fatherhood the Blog - Week 34

          I have an easy and laid back life (except for the whole getting up at 4 every morning to work thing) and not a ton to complain about in the way of busy-ness. Before Margaret and I got married people loved to give us hilarious advice like, "For your first year of marriage put a penny in a jar every time you have sex. After your one year anniversary take a penny out of the jar every time you have sex. You'll never empty the jar!" and, "Be careful honey, that ring on his finger will just attract women more," and, "She still likes you so enjoy it while it lasts!" All of this advice has been very helpful since it showed us that we will one day grow tired of one another and yet nevertheless stay together for the sole purpose of offering cynical advice to the single people that we envy. There's hope in that sentence! With a burgeoning lump of dough in the proverbial oven (I suppose the lump of dough is proverbial as well) people have been giving us the same sort of awesome and encouraging advice. Most of it centers around, "Prepare to NEVER SLEEP AGAIN" and, "I hope you love being covered in bodily fluids of the filthy variety" and, "Even another excuse for your wife to never sleep with you again!" Therefore I've decided to not have this baby. No, seriously people, while I'm sure your advice is funny because there's a lot of truth to it, obviously being monogamous and a parent aren't too terrible or no one would stay married or ever have a second kid. Flip, however, listens to this sort of advice with one ear pressed up against Mag's belly (I'm convinced that babies learn English in the womb but forget it once they're born because it sounds so different once you're out of yo mama. Have you ever gone underwater in a pool and tried to understand something that someone was screaming to you. Pretty difficult, huh? Reverse that). He has learned that he is supposed to take up an immense amount of our time and require constant attention so he's trying to do that already. That's why we were in the hospital on Friday.

             Evidently there is an awful little demon named no, not Lucius, no, not Baelzebub, and no, not Maleficent, but Braxton Hicks. He's a real prankster, Mr. Hicks, and his favorite trick is to pretend he's forcing you to go into labor when he really isn't. Braxton Hicks is a commonplace thing that every single person (who has read a baby book or who has a wife who has read a baby book and had to explain it to him) expects in a pregnancy, but it's still sort of creepy. The problem with a first time pregnancy is that the lady don't know jack! OR, doesn't know what real labor feels like, since she's never felt it. Our doctor told us that as long as Mag didn't have Braxton Hicks more than six times an hour she supposed we would be alright. Flip heard this of course, and made it his new goal to exceed six times per hour. After a lot of practice he was finally successful on Friday and that is what lead Mag and me to the hospital. They made Margaret get mostly naked and wear one of those super practical gowns that doesn't close in the back (in case you suddenly grow stegosaurus spines) and then strapped big ol' discs to her belly (one with a blue strap and one with a pink strap, to be cute) that read Flipper's heartbeat. They monitored her for about an hour, while I entertained her by telling her, "I saw your booty!" and opening every cabinet and looking in every drawer in the room (when we were left alone) and then they let us go. They didn't say much, really, just gave us a handy wallet-sized checklist on the differences between real and false labor.

             Saturday after work we rode down to Columbus and visited with Clayton at his brand spanking new apartment. His roommates (who I won't call nerds, but I will say that each roommate has their own alphabetized DVD section, and they own Buffy, Angel, and The Family Guy on DVD) were wonderful little people and we ate buffalo chicken dip (courtesy of Mag) and watched Alabama win (courtesy of Nick Saban). After spending the night with Margaret's parents, I dropped Mag off at her sister's house for her baby shower, hosted by her sister and her multitude of sister-in-laws (Mag was the last in her family to get married. I was the first in mine, unless you count my sister who is married and has 3 1/2 kids). I then left and went back to Clayton's apartment where we supposedly watched NFL football but really just talked non-stop about at least eight hundred and seventy-six topics (I said, "at least" because Clayton said by his count it was 877). Mag's shower was supposed to be a three hour drop in, but we all know women can't count, so when I went to pick her up I had to (I mean, got to) wait another hour and a half. Then we went back to Clayton's apartment with our ol' friend Danielle so we could all visit together some more. Long story short, we got home at about 8:30 p.m. that evening, unloaded an entire car that I had packed stem to stern and floor to ceiling with baby goodness, and I collapsed on the couch to watch the Falcons beat dog killing Michael Vick. In order to practice never sleeping again, I went to bed after midnight and got up at 4 a.m. to go to work. I love Mondays.

             We spent Monday both having rather busy days at our respective work places and trying to get ready for our evening activity. Mag got home at like 4:30 and had just enough time to primp herself before we dove into my truck and jetted down the highway to an abandoned building at an undisclosed location. We were participating in the most fabulous fad of the past eight years or so - a maternity photo shoot! I was a bit skeptical but this actually ended up being a great idea because A) I've done a horrible job taking pictures of Mag's belly over the course of the pregnancy, B) We haven't had any good classy pictures taken of ourselves since our wedding, and C) These pictures turned out great. It's was a stress free experience (and I speak as someone who hates having his picture taken. My beauty wasn't meant to be cheapened by mere digital reproductions). So, from Friday to Monday we had three rather large events that took several hours each to complete, didn't get a ton of sleep, and all the events centered around our unborn child. I'd say Flip is doing a good job shoving his foot in the door of our normal schedule.

            I had a song on my mind yesterday, so I went through my giant disfigured woefully out-of-fashion book of woefully out-of-fashion compact discs and found the album I was looking for - Two Lefts Don't Make a Right, But Three Do by the band Relient K. I used to love this band when I was a teenager, and this particular song hit me at just the right time. I'm a fabulous guy who has FOUR younger brothers and thereby am blessed in knowing a large group of guys that are going through things in their life that I've been through already. At different times some of these guys have approached me for advice or (much more often) been given advice without asking. In the realm of relationships I always give truthful and instructive witticisms but also usually tell them to break up/not get back together/let her go/there's plenty of fish in the sea. Why? Because a thousand people told me that about Margaret. I received a ton of advice about why I shouldn't be with her, and she received a ton of advice about why she shouldn't be with me. There are a lot more dirty little details that include excommunication, death threats, and speeding tickets, but the end result is that none of it mattered - we wanted to be together and that's the reason we're together today. If me saying, "relationships don't normally work out" is enough to end your relationship, your relationship wasn't going to work out. The song I listened to on the Relient K CD is called, "Overthinking" and the line that has always stuck with me is, when talking about The One For You, he sings, "If there's one in this world don't let me know you're not that girl." That's how I always felt - if there's one girl in the world who is perfect for me, fits me exactly, and connects with me in every conceivable area BUT isn't Margaret, then don't tell me. I've made my choice, many moons ago, and nothing will change that. If my son is going to one day be an ax murderer, or die at age four from a horrible disease, or be deaf, or hate me, or any possible negative thing, I don't want to know. I'm already in love with this kid. If I had to choose based on common sense or rationality, well sure, it would be better for him not to be born than to chop people up with a hatchet at some point during his life. However, I'm beyond rationality. I feel a connection with this child that defies anything I expected. People tell me that there will come a time when I'll hate my child, when he's going to be an annoying jerk of a teenager who will scream, "I WISH I'D NEVER BEEN BORN!" and slam the door and speed away in his hovercraft. They also tell me that there will come a time when I grow desperately tired of my lovely wife and think of creative ways to poison her. Maybe both of these things will happen, but if so, I don't need to know now. Maybe I'm going to die a horrific and painful death, but if so, I don't need to know now. How it all ends up doesn't change the way I feel today about life, or Mag, or Flip.

                        That's all a huge (and dark and twisted) rabbit trail, however. I must have been meant to be a rabbit because I always end up dashing down these things at the slightest opportunity. I sit down to recount facts, and I'm suddenly talking about over-exaggerated dream situations from thirty years in the future. Mag has all sorts of fun and interesting (sarcasm alert!) things happening to her such as swollen ankles and fingers, weird pains and lots of exhaustion. I'm also planning to read the chapter in the baby book about labor this week (Mag swears it'll make me feel reassured, so we'll see). I shall triumphantly return to record the cold hard facts about this lil babe later this week. Until then, may the Stork be with you.

9/11

            Since it is now de rigueur to begin every blog post with a long and desperate explanation of the unforgivable amount of time since I (or Clayton) last wrote, allow me to fulfill this stereotype. I like writing, I really do. I used to love it, but writing and I decided we were moving a bit too fast and decided to cool the jets for a little while, date other people, and see where we stand. There are times when I feel, "the inspiration" and I feel like a water pipe full of pressure, just needing the right shower head with which to blast forth. Other times I feel the pressure, but that the shower head is in desperate need of a good cleaning in order to stop blocking what I'm trying to get out. There are other times still, when I feel no inspiration. When I sit down to write and can't even think of a subject, much less a clever sentence. I feel almost an anti-inspiration - as if thoughts and ideas are being sucked from my brain before they can even formulate. I don't want to write anything, not even a grocery list.

             I suppose that writing, like love, is part inspiration and part commitment. I suppose. The other side of the argument is that I don't have to write. Why should I? Why force myself to do something that has no perceptible benefit to myself if I don't feel like doing it? This seems like a pretty winning argument, but it never is quite enough for me so I can only presume there is some sort of germ deep down inside of me that feels the need to express itself in front of other people. I actually have four different blogs bouncing around in my (otherwise empty) head right now, but none are grabbing a hold of me and pulling me by the arm to the keyboard. So...picking at random, here we go.

              9/11. Obviously the 10 year anniversary was this past Sunday. The only reason the 10 year anniversary is a bigger deal than the 11 year anniversary, or the 9 year anniversary, is because human beings are (customarily) born with ten fingers. However, it's good to use the occasion to step back and take stock of where we are. Mag and I did the usual, "Where were you on 9/11?" story telling thing to one another. Our stories are practically exactly the same. She came into her living room and found her dad watching one of the towers burning. I came into my living room and found my mom watching one of the towers burning. She thought it was a movie or something. I thought it was a freak plane crash. I'm sure that I had heard the word, "terrorism" before 9/11, but I don't remember it. Everyone likes to say, "The world changed overnight!" and in a way I suppose it did, but not really. Perspective changed - the way we saw things changed, but really my every day life hasn't been affected in almost any way.

                There's a weird one-upsmanship when it comes to tragedy. If you sit down with a group of six people and ask, "Where were you on 9/11?" people seem to fall into some sort of competition for the title of, "Most Affected by the Event." If they were planning on flying that next week, you'll hear about it. If one of their cousins lived an hour outside of New York, you'll hear about it. If they had thought about going on vacation to NYC the year before but went to Disney World instead, you'll hear about it. I don't know why we're like this. I think that perhaps it is due to the fact that our emotions feel strongest to us, of course. I feel my sadness more strongly than I feel your own. Your story of the morning of 9/11, told with just mere facts, doesn't nearly do justice to the emotions you felt that day. You need to add some sort of detail to highlight the truth that you really felt something, and it was different than what those around you felt.

                   I do the same thing. The story of my morning of 9/11 is super boring. I saw it, was confused and scared, and watched the whole thing on TV all day. It was a weird, shocking, and numbing feeling. I never felt in fear for my actual life, as I didn't live in any place a terrorist would ever attack (the religious intolerance and technological backwardsness would probably just make him feel at home. Except the fact that we like girls in short shorts). Still, I feel the need to let you know that I once stood in the World Trade Center on December 30th (or 31st) of 1996. That doesn't make me any closer to the tragedy, but it is weird to know I stood in a place that would later be destroyed by a foreign attack. I feel the need to tell the story about how in November of 2001 my sister and I flew to Mexico on American Airlines. American Airlines, of course, was one of the airlines famously used in the September 11th attacks. While we were there American Airlines Flight 587 (AKA, the plane wreck no one remembers) crashed into Queens, New York City, killing 265 people. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility and for a second or two everyone thought it was a terrorist attack. I was out of the country by myself at age 17, flying American Airlines (I wasn't literally by myself, but it wasn't a situation where I could run to my parents and ask what to do. I felt responsible for myself and my sister). Alone in my hotel room, I really freaked out. My passport, ID, and all my money got locked into a safe that no one could remember the combination to, and my mind went into full on problem-solving panic mode. I actually got tools, took the safe out of the wall, broke open the back, and started trying to chip away at the cement that is evidently inside of safes. Knowing that the passcode was 4 numbers long, I calculated there were only a possible 10,000 combinations. I came up with a plan that involved stealing a master key off of the maid's cart, throwing the safe off the roof of the hotel, and all sorts of other wild and panic stricken ideas. I had two roommates and so I had us work in shifts -  one started with the code 0001 and worked his way up, and the other started with 9999 and worked his way down. I started in the middle. I decided that if we didn't get the safe open by morning then I was putting my plan into effect, and then getting out of the country as soon as possible. I lay in the bathtub that night (fully dressed, with a blanket and pillow. It was my bed that evening) praying as I'd never prayed before, telling God, "If you get me back to America I will kiss the ground and I promise to never leave that country again." The safe opened sometime during the night, to combination 9871 (I still remember, ten years later). I got my stuff, and stayed in Mexico another 6 days. I've been back twice since.

                      What does this story have to do with anything? Not much, to be honest. I just like telling stories. Truthfully, however, I'm a very calm, rational human being. Don't mistake that for the inability to feel emotion, for I am full of passion and joy and excitement and stupidity - I just have a pretty good reign on anger and panic and fear and depression and those sorts of things. The above scenario of mind numbing panic I don't think would have ever happened without 9/11. If I was in a different country and a plane wrecked I'd feel pretty glum, but not that it had any sort of effect on me. That was just the fear and strangeness I felt about the terrorist attacks manifesting itself. 9/11 didn't affect me more than it affected anyone else, but it felt so real to me that I need to heighten the stakes to communicate that. Also, I'm very clever and use a discussion on how people feel the need to give all the details of their own not-terribly-interesting stories to give you all the details of my not-terribly-interesting stories.

                   I'm not terribly good at (nor terribly concerned with) stringing disparate thoughts together into a cohesive whole so allow me to jump to a related, but entirely different, subject: Conspiracy Theories. There have been a few articles that have come out around this 9/11 anniversary that discuss all the insane theories that sprung up after the twin towers were destroyed. As I may have mentioned in the past (paragraph), I am a rational and calm human being. I don't really believe in any conspiracy theories. I think Timothy McVeigh was behind the Oklahoma City Bombing, that man has walked on the moon, that Elvis is dead, Sirhan Sirhan killed RFK, that old guy killed MLK, and that Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK (this is the hardest one to believe, but I think that's only because we were taught  the theory conspiracies along with the facts). I also believe that we know the full story (or like 99% of the full story) about the WTC attacks. Al-Qaeda flew planes into the buildings and then they collapsed, killing thousands of people.

                  Conspiracy theories are so dumb. I think they're fun, in the, "let's be teenagers and smoke weed and sit around and talk about if aliens really built the Great Pyramid" type way, but they're super immature and they really piss me off. I get irrationally angry over conspiracy theories. Here's what I think - we don't want to believe that one man can change the course of the nation by shooting the President as he drives down the street. We don't want to think that two iconic skyscrapers can be brought down with little effort. These facts force us to realize that we live in a fragile world - that we live in a place where the only thing keeping someone from walking into IHOP and killing us over our pancakes is that we've all sort of agreed not to do such things. Our minds construct elaborate theories to convince ourselves that there has to be something greater pulling the strings - the faceless government actually killed all of these people to destroy some files they were trying to hide, it wasn't just a crazy man. A faceless god sent a hurricane to kill these sinners - it wasn't just a strong weather pattern that could kill any of us given the wrong circumstances.

                  A conspiracy theory, at the risk of sounding elitist, is the product of a weak mind. We've all known the guy or girl who, despite overwhelming evidence, refuses to believe that their significant other is cheating on them. It's obvious to everyone else - there's a reason that he isn't returning your calls during this certain time, or suddenly acting differently, or seems to be hanging out with a new girl but is, "only friends." Your mind doesn't want to believe it, so you construct a false reality, or believe his weak excuses, and then later after the relationship is over say, "How did I ever fall for that?" This is a small scale conspiracy theory. The problem with conspiracy theories is that the theory never comes near to matching up with the facts. You have to want to believe in the theory in order to believe in it. In the case of the Twin Towers, there are, let's say, five things that make one think perhaps there was something more going on. Why did WTC7 burn down? How did the building collapse? Was it a plane or a missile that hit the Pentagon? Blah blah blah. However, with any of the theories, there are a thousand unanswered questions that the theorist conveniently overlooks. That's called confirmation bias. You take the things that back up what you've already decided happened, and you ignore the rest.

                Most conspiracies seem to revolve around the case that our own government brought down the towers as an excuse to go to war, or to destroy something inside of them. They did this by conveniently hiding a thousand small explosives in the buildings' structures and then detonating them once they had a million news cameras recording everything (to make sure the conspiracy theorists would have some good footage to derive their theories from). Not only do the motivations not make any sense, but none of the facts line up. Theorists say things like, "There's no way a jet could bring down a sky scraper!" Really? Because every other time a jet has hit a skyscraper the buildings don't fall down? My favorite is the argument that a plane didn't hit the Pentagon, but that the government just said one did and really shot it with a missile. WHAT? So where is the missing plane? Why would the government even do that? They're obviously willing to kill thousands of Americans on a whim, but they couldn't afford one more plane to wreck into the Pentagon? They just had the genius idea, "Hey! Let's fire a missile at the building but tell everyone it was a plane and hope no one was looking!" Somehow our government is smart enough to pull off these giant conspiracies, but dumb enough that all the crackpot theorists can instantly figure them out.

               I really want to sit down face to face with one of these conspiracy theorists and debate them but they make me so angry it would just almost instantly devolve into me calling them names. They would say, "Jet fuel only burns at x degrees Fahrenheit and it takes y degrees Fahrenheit to melt steel - explain THAT to me." I would say, "SHUT! UP! I can't believe you are an adult who is allowed to drive a car and hold a job and raise children! Are you INSANE? Take a step back and look at how completely crazy you are!" Then I'd probably fly a plane into them. No, I can't explain how every single detail happened on 9/11 (though I can explain the temperature of steel thing) but I don't have to. I'm not the one coming up with insane theories that make no logical sense as a way to keep myself from believing that some poor guys from the Middle East could mount such an effective attack on our civilian population. The burden of proof is on you.

            Take a deep breath, Andrew. Now, the sensitive reaction to 9/11. Most right-wing people find me unforgivably liberal. Most left-wing people find me unforgivably conservative. I approach things issue by issue and try to use common sense and empathy in forming my opinions.  I would like to make one thing explicitly clear though - I love this country. I think we've done plenty of things wrong, and I think our militaristic reaction to 9/11 has been characterized by misstep after misstep and has played right into Osama bin Laden's hands (except the shooting him in the face part...or did we???), but that doesn't change the way I feel about this country as a whole. I feel about this country the way I feel about my family - they are genuinely good people who want to make the world a better place. They screw up, they do things wrong, they are at times angry or mean or dumb or self-centered (except for me of course, I'm known as, "The O'Dell Family Angel") but I love each and every one of them with a burning unquenchable love, and I would die for any of them in a second. I'm a mean old man, but I honestly get teary eyed almost every time I hear the national anthem. When man (and by man, I mean white man) discovered a new pristine world during the Age of Enlightenment (and named it America) they were given a chance that we'll probably never have again - a chance to start a new government and a new society and apply all the principles we learned through the trial and error of the past thousands of years while leaving behind all the baggage and tradition that we could. No one knew if this would work. It was a big risk, and a lot of people with a lot to lose put everything on the line. Our national anthem is a plea - tell me, is this experiment surviving? Is this new chance we've been given being wasted? Has it been destroyed? We will meet with adversity, we will face trial, we will have to deal with enemies - both the enemies without and the enemies of our own nature, but when the sun rises on the next day will the flag still be standing?

                  There is a ton to hate about America, and I dedicate a good deal of time to making fun of this country. I don't say, "This is the best nation in the world!" and I don't own a single American flag, and I don't take pride in how little I know about other countries or how little I identify with other nationalities. The fact remains, however, that I love my country. It's a marvelous place, for all it's inconsistencies and I am privileged to live in it and hope to, as my mother always taught me, to leave it in better condition than how I found it. I genuinely hope we're past the time when national man made tragedies such as 9/11 happen. I wish for a world where everyone progresses to 2011 and we don't have these weird first world versus third world conflicts. How has 9/11 changed me? It hasn't. I'm still alive. I'm still happy. I'm still foolish. I'm still free. I'm still irreverent. I'm still prone to bad judgment. I still laugh loudly. I still love. I still cry. I still work. I still want to make this world a better place. I still complain. I still make jokes in bad taste. I still offend.  I still believe.

          I'm still America.