Disparate Ruminations

           I don't know how else to say this but to just say it, my dear brother Clayton is a horrible, horrible, person. Two Tuesdays ago I went to his city of abode and went birthday shopping for my wife, hiring him (for free) to shop with me, to give me a woman's opinion and all. After spending around 20 minutes on our SUPERSMARTPHONES, attempting to discover which Enrique Iglesias album contained the song, "Tonight (I'm Raping You)" we gave up and went to eat fried sushi and drink hot sake. This may seem irrelevant but let me assure you it is not for two reasons: A) The song, "Tonight (explicit)" is evidently on the French re-release of Senor Iglesias's most recent album (Euphoria?) and B) It was on this little misadventure that Clayton assured me he would, that very night, post the first two entries in our O'Dellicious Celebrity Bracket. As you can no doubt reckon, that was 11 days ago, and Clayton hasn't contributed one single post to our collective blog since that moment. Now, I love the kid, but when I confronted him about this he said, "Well, since I moved I've been...well  for some reason it seems like I've been really busy but I don't know what I've been doing." While this is classic movie addict behavior, it is still inexcusable, and I post this now as an attempt to shame him into contributing, at least in part, to the damned blog that was his idea to begin with.

            Let's move on, shall we? I don't think I've explicitly stated this in the past, but I work alone. I encounter many people during a normal work day, but I don't (thank the good lord) have to spend much time with them. This has, of course, groomed in me a distaste for all humanity (along with a love for myself) but I feel I am wise enough to overlook this when it comes to most of my human interactions, and save it for the extreme and complicated threats I make to my cat and kitten, since they can't understand me (to be fair, they're both adults, but I consider one a kitten because the other is so disgustingly fat that in comparison to her any other creature seems to be a mere infant). I remember when one of my many younger brothers was a small child (like three years old) and, when he wouldn't mind me, I told him, "You know I'll pick you up and throw you through this second story window don't you?"  Oddly enough some folks found these threats to be abusive, but let's face it, when the kid one quarter of my size (and age)  is responding with, "No, I'll throw YOU through the window" it's pretty clear he doesn't feel threatened. This has nothing to do with anything, except for establishing the fact that all of my violence is sweet, don't ya know?

              Today I was at the local penitentiary when the guard said to me, "Son, you look different every time I see you! Now you got that hair all growed out. You must be trying to be a hippie or something." I like this guy, some old black dude, and I've run into him in public and talked to him before. He's a cool fellow, so I responded with, "Hippies? I'm not old enough to remember what those are, but I'm sure you are." This brought a round of laughter from the inmates (as you know, I'm always trying to get on the good side of convicted felons since I read Androcles and the Lion) and some spiel about the Vietnam War (conflict? I don't know what we're supposed to call it) from the guard. I wasn't paying attention, because I don't pay for anything that doesn't benefit me in some way, but I overheard a mention of the draft, so I asked him about it. "Hell yeah I was drafted," he told me, "You think they would have been able to send me over there any other way?" This got my astonishing little brain a'working, and thinking, and ruminating upon a great many things. Let's establish a few things: I love knowledge. I hunger for it. I want to know everything about everything. I realize that every single living creature knows something that I don't know, and I want to suck that knowledge out of their souls - for what purpose? I don't know, just to file it all away and die with it, I suppose. My main obsession is with American History, since that seems easier to comprehend, though I'm interested in all of history (and the future as well, my hunger knows no prejudice). I studied the Civil War, than WWII, and now I'm back on the Civil War (after all, it is the 150th anniversary). After this I really feel the need to move on to Vietnam, as I feel like it is probably the third most important moment in American history, but I really don't want to. It's so involved, and so depressing, and so...I don't know, futile and humiliating, that I don't want to get into it. I've met hundreds of people who fought there, and seen dozens of movies, and have heard stories from both of my grandfathers who fought there - hell, my mom lived there during the war, that I'm just too scared to really get into it.

                Anyway (if you haven't realized this yet, this blog entry is pretty much stream-of-consciousness, and has no real point) thinking about America in terms of our wars got me into thinking about America, and the world, generationally. I am, what I would term, an optimist. I've been called a pessimist by many people, and perhaps I was at one time, but I tend to think I've always been a realist, that perhaps once leaned towards pessimism, but now leans towards optimism. Let's take racism as the best example of what I'm trying to communicate - I'm pretty sure my great-great-grandparents were huge racists. I've never met any of them, and have no proof of any of this, but I just assume. I know my great-grandparents were. I'm not attacking them, nor justifying them, but I know they threw the word, "nigger" around, and it wasn't slang in their freestyle raps. Their children - my grandparents, were considerably less racist. They lived through the Civil Rights movement, and while I don't know their opinions on it, I know they accept the world they live in and have never heard any of them make any super racist comments. At the same time, I'm pretty sure my grandparents would be pretty uptight if one of their grandchildren brought home a black girlfriend/boyfriend. My parents are much less racist than their parents, and I feel like I'm less racist than my parents. I hope that my child (currently cocooned within my wife's womb) is even less racist than I am. This is all to say the following - if you follow the path of racism from my ancestors, tobacco farmers in the hills of North Carolina, and sharecroppers and oyster shuckers in coastal Alabama, to the present, you would have to graph it out as moving in the right direction. Humanity sucks, in a ton of ways, but we're getting better. That's where my optimism comes from. Racism is a huge stain on humanity as a whole, but you know what's amazing? That we know that it is. The genocide in Darfur is horrific, and makes people hate humanity as a whole but guess what? Humans are the only creatures who think that genocide is horrible. The fact that we have the capacity to find humanity immoral means that we are moral creatures.

              This actually brings up the problem I have with a lot of religions. Many religions view humanity as fallen, and falling. It's as if humanity was set afloat on the gorgeous, perfect, beautiful Titanic, and immediately ran it into an iceberg. We're sinking fast now, and our job is to herd as many people as possible into lifeboats as the rest of humanity sinks into the abyss, waiting for a greater power to come snatch us up at the last possible moment. I prefer to think of humanity as good and getting better. We have a lot to improve upon, certainly, but the fact that we know we need to improve is a good thing. Of course we'll never be perfect, but wanting to be, and trying to be, is a good thing.

              But then I go out in public and see everyone else who just doesn't give a damn, and suddenly I'm a pessimist again.

Fatherhood the Blog - Week 7-8

             Super interesting things I've learned in the past week and a half of Fatherhood:

- My baby is the size of a thumb tip, and has organs, but is translucent and still really creepy looking. It is, as the book reads, "unmistakably human" but only in the way that the little gray men who crash landed at Roswell are unmistakably human. We share the same basic anatomical make up, I mean, more so than like a human and a sea slug, but we really don't look much alike at all. I can only reason that if the entire baby is 3/4" long, than it's itty bitty organs must be like size of a sprinkle (I had ice cream last night) and that's insane to think about.

"Phew, thanks Mom, that was a
close one!"

- Evidently people bring fabric covers from their home to put on high chairs in restaurants. I learned of this via an amazing argument with my darling little wife about whether or not we were going to use one of those with our child (can you guess which side I was on?). In my defense, for the first portion of the argument I didn't know these things really existed and thought we were debating the value a hypothetical object. My impeccable logic was, "Listen, we didn't have these things when we were little and we never got any diseases. That wasn't 60 years ago, people didn't use these like FIVE years ago. If they were necessary than mankind would have died out thousands of years ago. Besides, germs are good for our kid! I want to build a super child by building up an immunity to every sickness by being exposed to germs!" Margaret would give her reasons or something (like I was paying attention) and then say, "We are going to use one of those things!" and I'd say, "Okay, we'll see." just to be annoying and keep the argument going while we waited for our food to be brought to our table.

- Uteruses (uterii?) grow. You find out all sort of things from reading a baby book. Sometimes you even find out things that you didn't really need to know. For example, I now know which week the uterus goes from being the size of a tennis ball to the size of a softball. Look, I'm a guy, and not just a guy, but a young guy, and not just a young guy, but a young American guy - I'm supposed to be ignorant when it comes to innards that women have that I don't have. The only guy who ever knew a lot about uteruses who wasn't a doctor was Jack the Ripper, and that's because he was removing them from his victims! (but who are we kidding, every one knows that Jack the Ripper was the King's Royal Surgeon, and a freemason, and a vampire).



            I've been considering some really important things about the raising of my future child today. For one thing, I was thinking about how one day they'll be a teenager, and I'm really not interested in dealing what all that bullshit. Teenagers are so annoying, as I can attest, having been one just 7 years ago. Sometimes I look back on some random opinion I had when I was 16, and think, "How could I ever have legitimately thought that? And I really thought it too! I was so convinced and passionate about it, but now it seems dumb." There are some things you just can't learn without actually traveling the distance to learn them - it isn't so much knowledge that can be passed on or communicated, but a certain lens that grows over your eyes as you view the past through the filter of time. It isn't that you know a different set of facts now, it's just that you see things in a different way. So how, when I have my own equally headstrong teenager, can I communicate the lessons I've learned when I know they can't understand it? That all gets too heady for me so I quickly move on to other concerns, such as....

            At what age should I introduce my child to the movie E.T.? This is part of a bigger multi-part question, which is about what movies I want to introduce to my child, at what age for each movie, will I let my kid pick any movies that he/she watches, how can I keep them from playing the same movie over and over, etc. I've already begun putting together a list of movies, or several lists really. One is for toddler movies - basically movies my 4-year-old child will enjoy that won't drive me crazy, and includes all the Pixar movies, How to Train Your Dragon, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, The Iron Giant and more. The list that has me excited the most though, is the movies to shape my child's manhood, should it turn out to be a boy. I saw the Indiana Jones trilogy when I was 7 years old, and I loved it. It felt like something I shouldn't be allowed to watch, but something awesome and exciting and, in The Temple of Doom anyway, genuinely terrifying. Seven seems pretty young, but I want my son to see those movies when he's still young enough to be scared by them, not when he can just watch them with a detached critical eye, noticing how cheesy the special effects look now. When will I show him Star Wars, and will I even let him know the prequels exist? These are serious things to consider - what a boy obsesses upon informs much of who he will become. I can't control whatever my child eventually loves, but I can expose them to a limited selection and try to brainwash them subtly.

That's gotta hurt.

          As you can see there are many things to consider when partaking in the incredibly slow process of becoming a father, but I think it's pretty clear I have all my priorities in order.