Lily, however, has other ideas, to wit: she's staying right where she is. She's overdue at this point, her mom is proclaiming things like "out, out, damn tot!", and dad is trying to figure out how she got in there so easily but won't come out.
So instead it became a visit with older family, not to mention Alexa, who is adorable as always. She has this little Etch-a-Sketch type drawing toy that she was giving me for a while, asking me to draw a happy face. The same happy face. Over and over again. She never seemed to get tired of it, nor did she tire of running in circles through the house, with me alternately chasing and being chased. "Uncle Ken" is a hit in that house. It's so cool.
And she's well-enough behaved that it's still possible to have adults conversing around her, which is wonderful and a testament to how she's being raised.
We're afraid Lily is going to be the anti-Alexa, a demon-child. I hope for Jim and Ally's sake that this isn't the case, but given the number of angels I've seen with fallen siblings...I don't know.
We got into some pretty good conversation, and Jim announced his Nerf Bat hypothesis. This is a fusion of the philosophies of Bill Engvall and Tim Nutt.
Jim believes that everybody in the world should be given a Nerf bat. Whenever somebody within batting range said or did something stupid, whap! with the bat. Not hard. Just a quick tap to maybe re-arrange your brain matter a bit.
On hearing this, my mind skittered back to childhood and I heard, clear as a bell, the stupid parental questions I used to not be allowed to backtalk replies to. Oh, it was so difficult, sometimes.
Do you want a spanking?
Hell yeah, mom, I'll take two of 'em!
What do you think you're doing in there?
Uh, I know what I'm doing in here...a better question would be, "what do YOU think I'm doing in here?
Or I'd come downstairs at night, all pee-jayed up with teeth brushed and bladder tapped and say:
Good night, Mommy.
And every single time I did that she'd say Are you going to bed?
No, Mom, I'm going out to paint the town red. Where are the car keys?
Of course, you can't take a Nerf bat to your parents, right? Mine would probably have responded with a real bat. But really, there's stupidity everywhere and some of us really could use a visit from Mr. Nerf.
I'm certainly not excluding myself in that. Hell, I should have a retinue of sluggers surrounding me, waiting to whap me one every time I say or do something dumb, because Eva has work to do and her arms would get tired after awhile.
Stupidest things I've ever done? You mean, besides almost drowning in a septic tank? Or besides going in to university for English without the slightest thought as to what I would do with that degree? The first stupidity was by far the most traumatic experience of my life, and the second has had the deepest, widest and longest-lasting implications.
Many of my stupidities come from absent-mindedness. Like the time back in university when I went to class without a critical textbook. This was early in first year, before I realized that the professors read the textbooks to you verbatim and you don't need to be in class. Anyway, I realized halfway to the Arts Building that I didn't have this textbook, so I turned around and went back to my dorm. I unlocked my door, threw my keys and book bag on the bed, retrieved the textbook from my shelves, and spent half an hour looking for the keys I had just had in my hand.
I'm famous for this sort of thing. I took summer school in the summer between grade 10 and 11. No idea why--it sure wasn't my idea to take math, let alone graduate a year early, but that's what I was doing.
It was a hot, hot summer, '88 was. For three weeks the temperature didn't go below 18 at night, and the daytime highs--I still have the diary wherein I wrote all this stuff, for reasons even more inexplicable than my taking math at summer school--were mind-meltingly stumid. (Stinky + humid.)
One day my stepdad decided to meet me at the door when school let out at noon. He didn't bother to tell me this. He should have bothered to tell me this.
I walked out, my brain leaking algebra all over the place. It felt like I was trying to walk through wet gauze. I was very much looking forward to getting on my bike and pedalling home just quickly enough to give my face some kind of breeze.
Psst...kid!
Nobody ever said psst...kid! with anything healthy in mind. Fuck, I was far enough from any school door at this point that I'd be tackled long before I could make it to safety. The only thing to do was to get to my bike and somehow get it unlocked (that was going to be interesting)...I could outrun Ben Johnson on my friggin' bike, steroids or not.
I walked faster.
PSSST! KID!
dead i'm dead i'm dead dead dead thudded in my head with my pulse.
I had my keyring out five paces before the bike rack. In the kind of smooth motion I can normally only manage if I'm drunk, I dropped to one knee, unlocked the bike and pulled it out of the rack while vaulting up on it--all in one motion. A part of me way below the flight/flight reflex was kind of impressed.
KENNY!
OH SHITFUCK HE KNOWS MY NAME I AM SO SO DEAD
Curiosity, that thing that kills cats, forced me to snap a glance over my shoulder as I got my bike moving. A drop of sweat ran into one eye and some quadratic crap ran into the other, and all I saw was a tall guy on what looked like a
JESUS CHRIST HE'S GOT A BIKE TOO TENSPEED NONONONONO
My bike at the time was a Supercycle six-speed with big knobby mountain bike tires. There was no way I could outrace a ten-speed on pavement. No point even trying. I run all kinds of routes through my head, trying to maximize my bike's off-road advantage.
Fuck it, I'll just tear ass across this field and play it by ear from there.
Kenny! It's John!
I wracked my brain for Johns. I couldn't think of a John who might want to beat me up--the only John I knew, really, that summer was my...
John?
And that's when the Nerf bat should have come out.
He rode home with me--thirty five minutes of easy pedalling. By the time we made it home, I think he'd stopped laughing.
I've walked past Eva more than once. If I'm not expecting to see something or someone, I won't see it or him. Everybody glad I don't drive?
And that's just the Head In Clouds Syndrome stupidity. I have other kinds, too--the kind that plagued me this past summer, for instance, that insisted in a very loud and very persuasive voice I was worthless and useless and that I should just --
Never mind, that voice is gone, now. It was pretty stupid while it lasted, though.
I'm still stupid, though. I'm a husband, it goes with the territory. Husbands, you know what I'm talking about, right?
Our first Christmas together, money was rather tight, and we had a $25 budget to spend on each other. At that time in my life, I was still very much certain that anything worth giving to somebody you even liked, let alone loved to pieces, was by definition worth considerably more than $25. In a gesture I'm sure she thought was helpful. she gave me a list of suggestions.
I looked at this list, nonplussed. That wasn't how Christmas worked in my family. I mean, sure, when you were young, you addressed your letter to
SANTA CLAUS
NORTH POLE
CANADA H0H 0H0
with a list of all the stuff you wanted (and why did I never question that? He saw me when I was sleeping and when I was awake and he knew if I'd been bad or good but he didn't know what I wanted for Christmas?)
Anyway, as I was saying, yes, as a kid you wrote Santa, but in my family, at least, my parents knew what I liked/wanted (and later) needed./wanted without me having to write out a list. And if I paid attention, I'd get some ideas for them--but really, I was just supposed to know them well enough to know what to get them. Asking "what do you want for Christmas?" was unthinkable because it meant I didn't know, which meant I didn't care about them enough to know.
Besides, if I bought her something from her stupid list, then she'd know what she was getting. What fun is that? Might as well not even wrap it.
So I got her
a cheap knock-off version of this thing that, for a wonder, I found fo $24.99. The little card that came with it said that in China, dogs symbolized loyalty and unconditional love and blah blah blah this is still the ugliest thing EVER and what were you thinking and I gave you a LIST!
See? A few good whaps would have cleared that right up.
I like Jim's idea, I really do. But I'm a little worried about it. Anybody who's been bulled knows that even Nerf can hurt if it's whipped hard enough at your head. ("Murderball" was taken literally when Kenny was playing.) You give everybody Nerf bats and...I just can't help it...
...I'd be a little nerfous.
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