Don't forget, now's the time to mail your goddamn St. Patrick's Day Leprechaun candies!!

Yesterday I was shopping for a friend's wedding present in this one store that's filled with attractive displays of cockeyed things that nobody needs but you really want anyway, like a box built from old yardsticks and billiard balls with a handle made out of a garden spigot. So in order to keep Jackson from knocking over $800 worth of cowboy boot–shaped pizza cutters, I grabbed a little marble that looked like an eyeball and yelled, "HERE! PLAY WITH THIS EYEBALL!" (It's not a real glass eye, unfortunately, but there's a taxidermist shop up the street that could turn out to be a birthday present goldmine.) Naturally we took the eyeball home, and now I find myself saying things like, "Hey! Move your eyeball before I vacuum it up!" or trying to fit it into the notch between my nose and my eye socket so it looks like it's bulging out of my head.

There's no real point to my story, once again, but here's a recycled link to The Cinnamon Challenge 2001. ("McCormick's Brand Cinnamon: Cinnamon so strong it will make you bleed.") I posted this last year but I was thinking about it recently because it's still funny. Happy Friday! Watch out for cinnamon this weekend!

So the other morning we're lying in bed talking and Jackson is wandering around the apartment doing his early morning thing, and I hear him go into the kitchen and open up the refridgerator. I figure he's going to get himself a cup of water from the flat vertical water jug thing like I taught him, but all of a sudden he appears at our bedside, lifts up a cold Corona, and says, "Dada!"

That thing I said about teaching him to bring me cappuccinos? Fuck it. If we start teaching him how to use the blender now, it'll be Cadillac margaritas with rock salt by the time Wimbeldon starts.

Jackson will thank you for this someday, Rainy Greensfelder!

Some things I've been thinking about

1. This picture:

The Last Time Emmett Modeled Nude
by Sally Mann

It makes me think it's time to stop posting photos of Jackson. Because he has no say in any of this, and it's bad enough that I'm reporting his every excretion on the Internet (by the way, did I mention that he pooped in the potty the other day? I am still quivering with glee), and I feel like it's time to pull a thin blanket of privacy around his massive cranium.

2. The Random Surrealism Generator:





[muchas gracias, ATL Superstar!]


3. The beautiful things for which I am Googled, complete with original grammar, spelling, and punctuation:

~ can girls get cancer from shaving there private hairs
~ rilke your smile turned my heart orange
~ wicked,insane mother-in-law fuck story
~ pity cruiser photos
~ gas powered monkey bike
~ sexy fussy with milk

4. THAT SPOON. We have this particular tablespoon that I once used to clean out the cat litter box. (The poop scoop was broken or something.) Right after I scooped poop with this particular spoon I washed it with insanely hot water and then put it through the dishwasher seven or eight times, then I said a little prayer to the toxoplasmosis fairy and put it back in the silverware drawer. But still, every time I use it my saliva glands crinkle up. Maybe I should just throw it out.

5. These tampons I'm using are so absorbent I have cotton mouth.

Phew!
Not pregnant.

We're a Nielsen family this week. I am in charge of keeping track of what we watch in our cheap little TV viewing diary because Jack doesn't give a rat's ass. But I feel like, Well, they sent us five bucks, how hard is it? Maybe we'll watch some poor show that is struggling but has really high quality writing and we'll save it from being cancelled! Or I could lie about what we watch just to fuck with those Powerful Nielsen People, to make them think we're a bunch of goddamn Nazis who stay up until 4 a.m. watching the History Channel. (Why, you ask, do you say that watching the History Channel makes you a Nazi? Because the H isn't for History, it's for HITLER, it's the HITLER CHANNEL, every time you turn it on it's showing an endless World War II documentary loop. That observation was stolen from my brother-in-law, thank you very much.)

But I don't really see any point in lying about what we're watching, because the truth is far more subversive than anything people make up. The only reason to lie is if you just want to destroy the system by providing a lot of useless information, but then you have to get everybody doing that with you because if you're doing it alone you are just pissing into the wind. Which is gross.

What they don't get to see, however, is what's in the VCR/DVD player. We've discovered that we can actually watch a grownup movie with Jackson as long as the movie contains lots of animals, motorcycles, airplanes, or trucks. You should have seen our little Rex Reed the other night at dinner, sitting in his high chair, glued to Out of Africa. Animals: check. Airplanes? Check. People kissing? Hey! Checkcheckcheck. (Jackson likes it when people kiss. He is 100% love.) He was also moderately interested in Lawrence of Arabia last night, mostly because of all the camels, I think, because otherwise (to a little kid, at least) it would just be a lot of smug accents, prosthetic noses, and Bedouin tents flapping in the wind. You can call it brainwashing a child into numb submissiveness, but I call it being able to sit and eat my entire dinner without getting heartburn.

Who are these girls who fit the hems of their bellbottoms exactly around the soles of their platform shoes? It makes them walk like giraffes. Is that the new hot thing to do? Hot as in, makes you look hot? Not hot as in, makes you look like a sweaty, long-necked, spotted quadruped loping crazily across the sun-baked savanna. Every time I see one of these hobbled creatures I am driving a car so I can't take a picture, but as soon as I see one when I'm not piloting two tons of Swedish ass-kicking steel up the street I will take a photo and post it. My camera is ready.

Why was yesterday such a backasswards day? I don't know, maybe the moon was in the seventh house and Jupiter was trying to score some more crack from that crack ho Mars.

What usually happens: Jackson falls asleep in the car on the way back from Gymboree/the store/the park, and I whisk him into his crib, where he sleeps peacefully for two + hours

What happened instead yesterday: Gas-powered leaf blower in the driveway! Hi! Wake up, baby! How are you? Why are you crying? Don't be sad. Here, breathe some carbon monoxide, it will make you feel all funny inside and you will throw up!

Then we had visitors! Men in sexy Spandex bike gear! And a little boy visitor who stayed to play while the daddies rode their bikes away. Yay. An exciting hour of trucks, stuffed toys, train sets, and crayons. Until little visitor began to think they were all his and started gathering them up to take with him. Until he said, Where's my daddy I want to go home! And I said, Your daddy and Jackson's daddy will be back soon so why don't we go outside and play Dodge the Speeding Mercedes Benz! And not take a nap until it's practically dinnertime!

Dinner went off okay, if I recall (and I don't, I was drunk) (ha ha, just kidding, the serious drinking doesn't start until I get Jackson into the bathtub), but then just as Jackson got his feet into the tub he squatted down and took a big dump right in the water. I mean, dude, your potty is right there. And it wasn't a nice little log you could scoop out and pretend nothing happened; no, it spread like a floaty brown dangly oatmeal Portuguese Man-O-War through the whole tub, bringing bathtime to a seizing halt. Do you want to hear how it took a half hour for the tub to drain? But not before Jackson ran around the apartment buck naked, threatening every surface with his power to administer an oatmeal Portuguese Man-O-War shit stain? And then I had to disinfect the tub and about two dozen bath toys? While Jackson was pounding on the bathroom door demanding to be let in? And when I let him in he promptly threw his toothbrush into the chunky water? And then almost fell in trying to retrieve it? Yes, it was comedy night at the Kennedy compound, complete with cover charge, two drink minimum, and pint-size heckler.

Today, however, things have squeaked back to normal (which is tricky, at best, let's be absolutely up front about that), and since I have no other way to wrap all this up for you . . .

"Bruce hates you because you made him wear the 'alien hat'."
My cat hates you dot com
thank you, r

Jackson woke up Saturday morning and said, "Mom, Dad, I'm concerned about this thing with Iraq. How can we get the president to listen to ordinary Americans like us who want the U.N. weapons inspectors to be allowed to do their job?" And we said, "Son, let's go downtown and see if we can get us some of that thar media attention."

Some photos of Jackson's first peace march.









Click on photo for larger image, especially of the half-naked guy and his apologetic granny.

Don't shop at Amazon while you're drunk. Or even just feeling generous after a few glasses of champagne. Your hangover will continue to trickle into your home for weeks afterward and you will hang your head in shame as your partner either mocks you relentlessly or gives you the "Uh, thanks for this pocket edition of The Art of War" ultrablanklook. I guess on that champagney night, whenever it was, I was in the mood for some awesome ancient Asian warrior samurai hoochie-coo.

Take, for example, this little nugget of love from the introduction to A Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi. After killing a man named Kihei in single combat at the age of thirteen ("The boy threw the man to the ground, and beat him about the head with a stick when he tried to rise. Kihei died vomiting blood"), Musashi began his search for enlightenment by the Way of the sword. Finally, at age fifty, "concerned only with perfecting his skill, he lived as men need not live, wandering over Japan soaked by the cold winds of winter, not dressing his hair, nor taking a wife, nor following any profession save his study. It is said he never entered a bathtub lest he was caught unawares without a weapon, and that his appearance was uncouth and wretched." He wrote the book in a cave a few weeks before he died, in 1645.

God! That is SO! AWESOME!

Then I find this poem, which I saved from an old New Yorker, and which is also TOTALLY INCREDIBLE, and if you don't think so too YOU SHOULD GO VOMIT SOME BLOOD AND DIE. What? Huh? Enough with the poetry, you say? Well, FUCK THAT. (Again, the mature perspective you come here for IS NOT IN EVIDENCE TODAY.)

Samurai Song

When I had no roof I made
Audacity my roof. When I had
No supper my eyes dined.

When I had no eyes I listened.
When I had no ears I thought.
When I had no thought I waited.

When I had no father I made
Care my father. When I had no
Mother I embraced order.

When I had no friend I made
Quiet my friend. When I had no
Enemy I opposed my body.

When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.

When I have no means fortune
Is my means. When I have
Nothing, death will be my fortune.

Need is my tactic, detachment
Is my strategy. When I had
No lover I courted my sleep.

—Robert Pinsky

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go put on my Kendo pads and watch Yojimbo again.

Happy Valentine's Day.

Intention
Intention doesn't sweeten.
It should be picked young
and eaten. Sometimes only hours
separate the cotyledon
from the wooden plant.
Then if you want to eat it,
you can't.
—Kay Ryan

When a new baby hits the planet it's new parents filter their experience in unexpected ways.
To Burp a Mockingbird

Who was that madman running around the apartment last night before bath time with his balls swinging in the breeze who decided, being diaper-free, it was a good time to pee on the rug? And who responded with astonished enthusiasm to his dear mother's suggestion that he try to aim that thing at his brand new singing potty instead of the carpet. Yes, who was that big boy who sat down to pee like a little drunken sailor on his first shore leave with a song in his heart and the wreck of the Hesperus swirling around in his head?

That's my boy, yo.

After a super-sucky, super-sensitive Monday, wherein I did a lot of stupid things without thinking them through first, like getting all the groceries except for beer, and then getting all teary because after coming home from an eleven-hour work day Jack had to get back in his truck and go out again for a lousy six-pack; and getting snappy when Jackson did only mildly disruptive things, like making me take a half hour to get said groceries from car to apartment when I desperately wanted to get the goddamned grapefruit juice into the refrigerator and check my e-mail, but feeling guilty about rushing him inside because what kind of morning would it be for him if I just dragged him to the laundromat and the grocery store without a little neighborhood wandering/tree patting/rock throwing/peekaboo with the guy fixing the roof next door? But I just wanted to stay inside and dust repetitively because it seemed to be Tell Me To Have Another Baby Day. I am not philosophically opposed to having another child, but Jesus Fuck, I'm just getting back on my feet and you (You) want to knock me over all over again. Why don't we wait another year for the rematch between My Uterus and Your Bossy, Not Asked-for Expectations. 'K? Thanks.

It was especially bad because we had one of Jack's friends visiting over the weekend. When it comes to babies she's hilariously well mannered and says things like, "Hello there, young person," and they look at her like, "What the fuck did you just say? I'm going to stick this spoon in the cat's eye." It's not quite a meeting of minds, her and the young, pre-spoken-language people. She never had any kids of her own, never wanted any, so she's accustomed to just doing whatever she wants whenever she wants to do it, and how could she see that if she took Jack off somewhere it wasn't just them doing something together, it was her taking him away from the little weekend time he has with his son and me, and that if the Nut and I weren't invited along I was going to feel put out by that? So then Monday rolled around and it was just me and Jackson again by ourselves and again the long week stretched out before me like a mile-long Persian rug that takes a forever to roll up properly because you have to keep starting over to get the ends lined up, and I hadn't had enough selfish goofing off, getting sticky with pancake syrup and rolling around on the newspaper weekend time with my boys. It was wonderful to see her, of course, so I feel terrible about being so conflicted and ungenerous.

Me: neurotic or not? Why isn't there a site where you could vote on that? Who cares how my tattooed hide looks in a bikini when the inside of my mind looks like Barnabas Collins' cobwebby raccoon-infested potting shed? Really.

THEN, after all of that, (we're still on Monday), plus a lot of ankle-behind-the-neck yoga and a late dinner and passing out at 11:00 p.m., I woke up at 4:15 this morning and it was pitter-pat raining but the bed was cold and Jack, inexplicably, was getting dressed. It wasn't supposed to rain until tomorrow and one of his job sites wasn't water tight. So he drove off at 4:30 a.m. to crawl up onto a wet roof to cap a chimney in visquine so that a newly renovated house wouldn't be flooded and ruined. In the rain, in the dark, by himself, on a wet roof with a huge roll of plastic and a bunch of power tools with dead batteries. He came back just before 6:00, and I was glad to absorb the iciness from his ass into my sleepy warm abdominal/thigh/woohoo area. Then Jackson started yelling for me at 6:30. Please, God, how long before he's tall enough/steady enough to make a cappuccino and bring it to me in bed?

We seem to be okay today, though. Gymboree was a smash hit, I connected with a couple of hipster moms on the subject of death and malnourishment, Jackson fell asleep in the car on the way home, and I am back on the bed-making, squash-cooking, tea-drinking, PAP-smearing fast track. Zzzzz.

Nothing like getting ready to go to the gynecologist with your completely shaved-up cha-cha, and wondering what she's going to think about that.

Tomorrow, when your appointment is tomorrow, wondering what she's going to think about all that stubble.

Fucking Mondays.

Jack's response to my comment, upon returning from two hours of yoga, that I had discovered some new muscles in my abdominal area that were going to have plenty to say to me the next day:

"Pain is just weakness leaving the body."

To which we all must bow delightedly and say, Obi Wan! Your hair looks fantastic!

My satisfaction with yoga as a physical discipline has less to do with sinewy muscles than with a really childish thrill at being able to stand on my head or stick my ankle behind my neck. I mean, I know I'm breathing deeply and being all meditative and burning off loads of karma, but still, it's like, "Whoopee! Time for backbends!"

You come here for my mature perspective on life, don't you?

Jackson's most recent babysitter (let's call her Rosie) is a laborer on one of Jack's building sites. She's the only woman on the crew; right now she does a lot of sweeping and general cleaning up, but she wants to work her way up to being a carpenter. She has two kids of her own that her mother watches during the day.

So yesterday I'm getting ready to leave and Jackson's clinging to my leg because he sees the yoga mat and he knows what's coming, and after taking a shower Rosie decides it's a good time to clean out our refrigerator. I'm like, "What are you doing?" and she's all, "Well, I was going to do this last time," and she starts taking out six-month-old jars of applesauce and other horrors and lining them up on the counter. "You don't have to do that," I say as she starts taking the shelves out to bleach them. "You've been working all day," I continue, "it's okay, just go to the park and hang out with Jackson." But she says she's already started so don't worry about it, and I think, Okay, Rosie and her husband work six days a week just to keep their kids in clean clothes, and I spend my days lying on an unvacuumed floor watching my son try to eat banana peels, waiting for him to take a nap so I can tell the Whole Internet how hilarious our life is. What should my reaction to this little disconnect be?

a. Rosie, you go to yoga, I'll just stay here and scrub the toilet with a toothbrush.
b. Holy shit, I'm a lousy housekeeper, I'd better pay her double for this.
c. Thank God I Was Born in the United States of America to Republican Parents, Is This Country Great OR WHAT?
d. Fuck it, I gotta go work on my hamstrings.
e.

Mmmm, chocolate . . . mmm, cherries . . . mmm, $26 Williams-Sonoma Heart Baking Pan. Well, why not buy it if you really love somebody? AT LEAST THAT'S WHAT THEY WANT YOU TO THINK.

Last week I took the Nut to the doctor for a checkup, which has been happening every three months or so, you'd think the first eighteen months of life were, like, a time you could explode or spontaneously start parsing Shakespeare's sonnets, so we'd better keep a really close eye on you, Little Dr. Kaczynski. Anyway, our pediatrician, who as I've mentioned before looks exactly like Philip Seymour Hoffman, ends up repeating himself a lot. I'm sure he has a lot of patients, so he has to make sure we've all heard about the same dumb pair of lawyers who put Nestle's Strawberry Quik into their baby's bottle. That was last year; now we're getting the over-eighteen-months-old bits, like this one:

Doctor: "How's his vocabulary?"
Me: "Well, he's starting to put two words together, like 'more milk.'"
Doctor: "He's right on schedule. The next six months are going to blow your mind. He's going to start understanding plurals and possessives and abstract notions of time and space, and before you know it he'll be speaking in the pluperfect subjunctive."

In case you're sitting there blankly trying to remember what the pluperfect subjunctive is (and it's been awhile, hasn't it? or did they even teach you grammar at that reform school?), the doctor puts on a soft little accent and says, "Mother, I should like another glass of milk."

We've heard the pluperfect subjunctive bit twice now, and I think we can expect it at least one more time.

It's been hard recently because Jackson gets really frustrated trying to communicate about things he doesn't have the words for. I mean, he knows the words, he just won't/can't say them. The "s" sound is a particular challenge, and "nose," for example, inspires a fit of shyness. He will point to his nose when asked, but if you say to him, "Say nose!" he crinkles up his face and hides it in your armpit. I have also learned that he will have a total freakout unless I let him exercize a fair amount of choice. I let him pick what shoes he wants to wear, for example, and what color socks, and what sweater, and which stuffed animal gets to ride with him in the car. I do not let him choose, however, not to take a nap, or not to take a bath, or not to go to bed at all, ever. I've decided that he can make the rules when he gets big enough to knock me out cold, which, if he keeps up with the head butting, could be later today. But even after that he'll still have to take on the EMT personnel, several cops, and his dad.

Yesterday I took Jackson into a beauty supply store to buy some gel for Jack -- Jack's growing out his hair, so by day he's working the Pat Riley angle -- and when it came time to pay I sat Jackson up on the counter so I could get at my wallet.

Cashier Wearing Gobs of Makeup, referring to Jackson: "Gosh, he's precious."
Me: "Yes, and he has an enormous head."
CWGoM: "I mean, I don't even like kids and I think he's precious."

Okay, let's look at some other situations in which a similar comment would leave you in the no-fly zone between appropriate cashier-customer conversation and a punch in the mouth.

"Wow, normally children with severe Muscular Dystrophy give me the willies."

"Usually I run screaming from the Irish."

"People who haven't had plastic surgery disgust me, it's only your robust skin tone that keeps me from shooting you in the foot."

"I was raised to hate Jews, but that little circumcized penis has won my heart."

"I can't stand elderly people in wheelchairs, but that colostomy bag with the bunnies on it is just so gosh-darn cute that I won't run you over with my monster truck."

Yesterday I also received a free book in the mail. Normally, I'd say, Wow! Free book! But it depends on the book so much in these situations, and this book happens to be called The Holy Longing: The Hidden Power of Spiritual Yearning by Connie Zweig, Ph.D. I realized that a Putnam marketing person somehow tracked down my home address, thinking that I was still a fancy-pants magazine editor with the influence over, oh, dozens of readers that would catapult this book into the hands of the spiritually bereft across the nation, and sent me this advance copy. So now I'm not sure whether to write the marketing person a quick e-mail so as to take myself off her list and save her lots of postage, or just let it go and see if she sends me more books that I can sell for a few bucks down at the Book Den. I suppose I could skim it and write a review here on Fussy, but frankly I'm just too shallow to wear the mantle of tastemaker for dozens of influential thinkers (that would be you) across the nation.

Not to get all Textismistic on your ass, but forthwith an array of free stationery, mostly from m/hotels, collected by my salesman-with-the-massive-territory-covering-most-of-the-Western-states father during the sixties and seventies, and retrieved from a flooding basement by guess who. Ha! You're wrong, it was my brother, I didn't want to get my socks wet. Anyway, you'll see some classic letterheads here. I must add that in the last twenty years I haven't once received a letter from my father that wasn't printed on the blank side of a neighborhood real estate flyer or a restaurant take-out menu. Let's not call him cheap; let's just say he recycles. Click on small image to see an almost full-size piece of stationery! I don't know why this is so interesting to me! I have a thing about office supplies, too! Give me an antique Swingline and a box of rusty staples and I'm yours!*























*Metaphorically speaking. Really, we should probably just stay friends.