Adventures in the Pointless Forest

They say parenting changes you.

It turns out that it is because one now lives with a two-foot-tall mad genius set designer and wardrobe director.

Our remote control is currently lovingly wrapped in two thirds of a sheet of crumpled white paper, secured with a rubber band. The handkerchiefs are mostly in use as bulky diapers (folded and tucked by me, on demand -- "Diaper please") wrapped around the hind ends of toy cars. There is now always a full laundry basket at the foot of our bed, excellently positioned for tripping on and swearing at, because Jane is short and our bed is tall, and she understandably feels that standing on a basketful of clothing is the best solution to this problem. A tidy row of wooden trucks can often be found tucked under the edge of the quilt, where Steve would like to slide in, and the shampoo is filed on the bookshelf between Dashiell Hammett and Jack Vance.

We can all frequently be seen around town with sprightly little bows in our hair. Jane generally prefers to put the fuchsia one on Steve. It must be said that he is the member of the family who carries off the bow with the most style. It's very fetching against his dark brown pixie cut.

I have no pictures for you, of these events or otherwise, because all my photos are currently trapped on another computer, the trackpad of which is not working thanks to some strategically splashed milk, and I haven't yet dug out a mouse from the depths of wherever it might be hiding. Fortunately you've all gone off and done other things, or moved to Peru, or turned to dust, or however you most like to respond to centuries of nothingness, so you won't mind. But I've missed you and am sorry to have been so delinquent. Tomorrow night I get to fly on a red-eye to Ohio. Without trying to wrangle a toddler at the same time, yay! But in a middle seat, BOO. Will the extremity of my general state of exhaustion permit me to sleep even so? Can the magic of Benadryl conquer the horror of the middle seat? Time will tell. 

This mini-post brought to you by the letter T.

Hi! We went on a trip, and then we came back. It was great. I had a million great conversations with swell people and stayed up late and ate piles of delicious food. Jane cavorted with doting five- and nine-year-olds, fed delectable brioche to a stinky beagle, and had countless mutually gleeful slapping fights with our hosts' feisty half-grown cat. Steve mostly worked. Poor Steve.

Soon Steve's parents will be visiting us, but I will try to get in at least one real post before then, because I missed you. 

In the meantime, here is a picture of Jane browsing the Times Literary Supplement in my best friend's parents' kitchen:

 

Banner day.

Today's mail included the July issue of Subject Area, and the January issue of Topics in Subject, each in its own envelope.

I am all greasy, and Jane has a rash around her mouth. 

Steve is stuck in the San Francisco airport, waiting for his delayed flight to arrive so that he can come home to my greasy, loving arms.*

Jane, incidentally, would like you to know that this direction is up:

Indeed, all day long, in the stroller, walking about, clambering on the furniture, having her diaper changed, she pipes: UP! UP! UP! and points accordingly, her index finger held proudly aloft like a tiny sceptre.

Yesterday I was untangling a wadded up set of onesie pyjamas and wondered aloud, "Which way is up?" Across the room, Jane's finger immediately flew ceilingward. How true, that way is up. Thank you!

*Oops, Steve's flight has been switched from delayed to canceled. He reports that he still might be able to make it onto some mythical last flight out via standby, but one rather doubts it. Isn't this breaking news exciting? Transit, like your humble narrator: the fascinatingest. 

And the servings are so small.

I am tired of this sedate and reticent posting schedule. It makes me feel that the posts I do make have to meet some minimum level of wit or significance, and this is not a plausible goal. So, away with wit! Down with significance! Up with frequency! Blather forever!

We are going out of town for part of August, and then people are visiting us, and then other people are visiting us and so on ad infinitum, so there are bound to be gaps in transmission, but let's see what we can do.

Since we last spoke, you and I, I went to Boston and attended a conference. While I was there, I discovered that it is VERY HOT in places where people have been complaining of the GREAT HEAT lately. Shocking but true. I also discovered that it is extremely possible to get brain-meltingly plastered from a mere two drinks in a hotel bar, which is frankly one of the last places I would expect such a thing to happen, but there it is. 

The next day, when all my responsibilities had been discharged, I went out into the GREAT HEAT and had a splendid evening with lovely people. On the way to the lovely people, I had the honor of sharing a subway car with a man who was not pleased that the train was not moving more quickly.

"This is not a professional subway. This is a terrible, amateur subway," he mourned. "A terrible, amateur subway."

As the ride went on, he warmed to his subject. "WAKE UP, PEOPLE!" he boomed. "Wake up from your sheeplike lives! This is NOT RIGHT. This is a terrible! Amateur! Subway!"

I am not sure what he wanted the rest of us to do about it, but point certainly noted. Take some inititiative and learn how to run a major urban public transit network, I guess.

Later someone told me that the T is sometimes delayed because the tracks catch on fire in hot weather. Can this be true? How does this work? Maybe the tracks themselves, being metal, get extraordinarily hot in the anvil of the sun, and then detritus on those tracks catches fire? Although a few smoldering coffee cups does not sound like enough reason to stop an entire subway train. ("That's my point exactly! Wake up, sheeple!") 

See you tomorrow. If you know anything more about this burning track business, I would love to hear about it.

Thank you for your incisive commentary on world events.

What, I wonder, do I think I am doing, blithering—not even particularly amusingly—about shell games on BART trains while everything is going swiftly to hell in a handbasket? Not that I have anything useful or insightful to offer on the subjects of Japan, death, destruction, civil war, mendacious politicians, or horrific radiation. 

Most Plant Workers Evacuate; Residents Told to Stay Indoors

How stir crazy batshit insane would you go under the circumstances, told to stay indoors? I am imagining myself inside some apartment with Jane, taping up windows and losing my mind. Christ.

Steve has distracted and cheered me for now by making me a drink and directing me to read this delightful Comics Alliance post about Neal Adams' impressively deranged Batman: Odyssey. I don't know what to say, except that gosh, that Bruce Wayne sure is hairy.

Also, he seems to be showing us Arm-Fall-Off-Boy's arm. "Take a look at this forearm! Hairy, isn't it?" 

Probably he has been driven mad from sealing up all the windows in the Bat-Cave. Understandable. Wait, are there windows in the Bat-Cave? Well, the whole project is certainly crazy-making, anyhow.

No musical numbers.

The other day we found ourselves on an exceptionally plot-packed car on the BART train to SFO. Several competing movies seemed to be playing out in one tiny airport-bound space, with us awkwardly in the way of all of them. 

A few stops in, a young man and woman a few seats down, in my line of sight, started quietly freaking out.

He, staring with amazed delight at his phone and at her: "Get the fuck out of here. Get the fuck out of here!"

They continued in this happy but nonspecific vein for some time. While I was doing my best to eavesdrop more effectively, a group of hustlers running a shell game poured into the car and set up shop right at Steve's elbow. Their setup was the shell game equivalent of a bong made out of a Coke can: three plastic bottlecaps for the shells and a little grotty piece of foam rubber as the pea. 

Steve entertained himself by silently picking out the shills from the marks as I concentrated on the couple. Aha! Someone wanted him for their tv show in some capacity. For Fox! "As in F - O - X!" But what? He seemed plausibly good looking enough to be an actor, nebbishy enough to be a writer. 

Meanwhile, the guy running the shell game waved a hundred dollar bill. "Show me your money. Show me your money." F - O - X kissed, held hands, stared together at the phone. "I don't even know what to say. What should I say? I don't know what to say."

A shill flashed his comically obvious carny roll.

"What if this weekend was just... some one-time magical thing?"

The shill "won" the hundred dollars and exchanged very studied daps with the dealer.

In another part of the car, a separate, not very good, indie drama was unfolding in which a tall guy in his early twenties, sending off little pings to my gaydar, ran into a co-worker and engaged in some pro-forma flirting with her friend. "No, honey, if you weren't scheduled, you weren't playing hooky! I'm playing hooky."

An apparent actual mark lost twenty bucks. (Who the hell bets money on a shell game, anyhow, when the phrase "shell game" is literally synonymous with "scam"? I mean, really.)

The nature of the F - O - X opportunity finally revealed itself: "I wouldn't actually be the cinematographer, but I would be the first cameraman." (Hooray!)

Then everything wound down in nicely coordinated style. The shell game broke up, the participants putting in a merely perfunctory effort to disguise the fact that they were together as they left the train. The budding director of photography and his girlfriend settled in for some serious making out, and the flirting friends went their separate ways. 

Having written all this out, it occurs to me that my New York friends are no doubt still waiting for the part where something unusually subway-eventful happens. For you jaded Gothamites, please imagine all of the above performed by bingo-playing Jedi getting married and not wearing pants. In duplicate.

All wet.

Soon, it will be Thanksgiving, poorly poorly planned Thanksgiving. Surely our three part, many hour flight across the country on the busiest flying week of the year, compounded by infant, TSA insanity, and jet lag, will be a merry adventure, yes? I'll be sure to let you know. On the other end of all that travel, at least, there will be three additional tiny cousins, each in his or her own personal state of mental and physical disarray. I think—I hope—that it will be so stark raving mad as to be worth the trip. At the very least we should get some good photos out of it.

In other news, one fault in our generally beautiful and comfortable house is that the bathtub is simply crap. There is a shower, perfectly good, with rather stupid sliding glass doors, and at the base of those glass doors is something that roughly resembles a bathtub. If you consider that a defining feature of a bathtub is to be a tub for bathing, however, it fails the test.

It is fine for standing in while one showers, but no good for bathing a baby in, thanks to the awkward arrangement of the doors, and really extra no good for bathing one's adult self in. It is short and it is shallow. It is not long enough to recline in comfortably, even if you are a stumpy short creature like me. The skimpy depth is worse. With so little water you cannot possibly soak. One is not submerged, one merely sits in a bath-shaped puddle.

The other consequence of the limited capacity, which I did not anticipate, is that the water gets cold very very quickly. The thermal mass of the bath puddle is no match at all for the cold tub and walls and air, which conspire to suck all the heat away in seconds. So, you see, it's quite hopeless.

Many people, I understand, have no particular interest in baths. They could take nothing but showers every day of their lives and be perfectly happy. I, however, have been having increasingly acute pangs of longing. It is a hunger. I want so badly to lie in an enormous, wasteful, GIGANTIC bath, up to my chin in water almost too hot to enjoy, steam rolling off the surface. While I'm fantasizing about this, and I more and more often find that I am, let me have several volumes of light fiction and a little shelf across the tub for a glass of whiskey. Please. I am getting desperate.

But good news! My mother has a proper vast iron claw-footed tub, and not long after our ill-advised trip across the country for Thanksgiving, we are undertaking another, this time to her house, for Christmas. I hope she has no ambitions of seeing or interacting with me, nor of using her bath herself, while we are there.

Travel broadens the mind.

We have been having good times with our friends in Berkeley, handing round our baby to be dandled on their knees and scampering off to eat olives and drink cocktails. Now—this very minute, even—we are in the middle of traveling back by train. It is a long ride, because there are many stops and you never do pick up all that much speed in between them. Ten hours! But I still feel it is the best way to go.

Steve is hanging out in our miniature sleeping compartment with Jane while she naps and I partake of the wifi in the parlor car. I am sitting opposite two large and affable Australians who seem to be enjoying gin and tonics. One has a single dangling cross earring à la George Michael circa 1987. 

The missing "p" key on Steve's laptop has lent a certain piquancy to the whole endeavor, and I have been relieved to find that there were not too many alarming emails piled up in my inbox. 

Later we will have lunch in the dining car, and then after a stint ambling about, we can retire to our seats for novel reading and more napping. If only all modes of travel allowed one both to walk about and to lie down whenever one wanted, how much more relaxing it all would be.

Earlier the conductor announced that the lounge car was open. Apparently this is the snack bar bit of the train. The conductor would like to head some frustrations off at the pass.

"When you get to the front of the line, please do not try to open your box," he says with the sad voice of long experience. "Please do not touch the lids. Please do not try to help. That will just make your fellow passengers have to wait in line longer. It will all go much faster if I do it all myself. Thank you."

I hope he gets his wish.

So it is all very civilized and pleasant, but the best part is the inhabitant of the sleeperette opposite ours. He is a ropy, white-haired, leathery sort of fellow who looks like he is probably from Maine (as Steve observed). His compartment door is closed, but the curtain is open, so we can see the glow of his laptop. 

What's more, he seems to have vision problems, because he has the screen set to display in quite large type. The type is so large, and the contrast so beautifully high, that it is nigh impossible to avoid seeing what he is reading—or perhaps writing? Oh, please, God, let it be what he is writing.

It is Harry Potter fanfic.

Hooray!

La Brea Carpet.

I like grey, post-industrial cities. I like their rough edges and brick houses. I like scowls and efficiency and please get the hell out of the middle of the sidewalk if you aren't going to go anywhere. I like being a hater.

But I have to admit that sunshine, comfort, and gorgeous fruits and vegetables are pretty good too.

"These avocados are really nice," a woman near me said to the man selling them at the farmers' market. "Do you have them all year round?"

"Eeeeehh yes, but..."

"I know," she said. "Some times are better than others."

"Yeah, in December they get a little blah." 

There is no denying that it is extremely pleasant to be able to walk with ease to two farmers' markets bursting with produce, an excellent cheese shop, a sweet little bakery just around the corner with quite decent coffee, a slightly further away cafe with really very good coffee, multiple superlative taquerias, et cetera, all in the nicest possible weather and terrain for walking in. There are also several venues for frozen yogurt, if you are suddenly seized with the need for some. I haven't been, but you never know.

At the same time, it's all a bit obscene, isn't it? At least the Tuesday farmer's market is laid out cruelly and has a horrible thicket of people who need to learn how to get the hell out of the middle of the sidewalk standing between oneself and the lovely food. And there is no shortage of horrible marvellous aroma types to kindle a hot little bonfire of mingled self- and other-loathing in my breast. Still...

When we spent the night in Tucumcari, New Mexico, I woke up in the morning, stepped outside, and said "Oh! I see! This is why people like to live in this part of the world." It wasn't midday hot yet, and the air was soft and dry. It smelled wonderful in a way that is nothing at all like other places. 

From the day I was born until I went away to school, I lived in just one city. Since then, this will be the fifth. It will be good to have a year of saying Oh! This is why people like Southern California! 

Also, no doubt, Oh! This is why everyone else in the world hates Southern California. 

Here is something I like without reservation. It is a water machine. It lives near our house, outside a convenience store just down the block from the garage where the Spanish-language AA meetings happen.

Final polishing step is exposure to ultra-violet light. 

 

There's a soothing cadence to the slight failure of parallel structure, isn't there? This is why people BEVERAGES COFFEE COOKING ICE PLANTS Southern California.

Reports from the road

Greetings from a motel on the outskirts of Tulsa. 

It is with great regret that I must report that we did not visit the J. J. Hawes Grain Elevator Museum in Illinois. Instead we stopped at what was surely the crustiest McDonalds in the state, if not the whole nation. We had chosen it specially for the presumed-to-be-sparkling bathrooms, so this was a real blow to our illusions. 

When we arrived, there was a sign up saying that the bathroom was closed for cleaning, but judging by what I encountered after the sign went away, their janitor robot got stuck on "Filthify" instead of "Sterilize." We had a lovely picnic on a bit of grass outside.

Here you see Nemo as a prisoner of conscience. I believe we will be hearing from Amnesty International shortly.

Missouri certainly has a lot of roadside adult superstores. One (at least) is conveniently located right next to a roadside church. I hope the proprietors have wacky adventures together. Also in Missouri, we shared a scrap of roadside rest area with a woman and her giant grey poodle. The poodle had bows on its ears.

"Look, Jane, it's Missouruh," Steve said.

I've remembered that my favorite thing about long road trips is the opportunity to engage in hours and hours and hours of amiable conversation about nothing. Today alone we have covered Nancy Sinatra, the best kind of pie, genderqueerness, Pope John Paul II, where to draw the line between faithful pronunciation of the names of states and dialect caricature, the plot of Carousel, bald eagles (as emblem of the United States, as emblem of the Order of the Cincinnati, and in falconry), stupid villains in Batman, and the world's largest rocking chair.

Tomorrow's my birthday! I will celebrate it by being old and eating the leftovers of this terrible pizza we just ordered. I think it might be the best one yet.