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i had a terrible dream

Last night I had a dream which I woke me, I think, because it stirred such a horrid feeling within me.

I was driving, on our street, heading towards home.  Keaton and Cohen were with me, Sharaun wasn’t.  As we passed our neighbors’ houses on the way to our driveway I looked out the passenger window and was startled to see a large wild animal loping along the sidewalk in the opposite direction.  In the dream the animal was non-specific, as dream-things often are, yet I knew that it was both a) scary and b) man-eating.  When I woke I thought maybe it was a hyena or coyote or something, but I don’t think it’s important.  Still shocked and now a bit concerned, I made sure to fully close the garage door before thinking about exiting the car.  And even though it was clearly headed in the other direction, I checked the mirrors to try and be sure the thing hadn’t followed us in.  Once satisfied that we were safely separated I proceeded to take Keaton and Cohen out of the vehicle and head inside.

We weren’t five steps inside the house when I heard it: A gut-wrenching scream from outside.  In my dream I knew the scream was from a child, a little girl maybe of eight or nine.  I also knew that she was screaming because that animal had found her.  Over and over again she said “Oh my God,” and pleaded at the fleshy edge of her screams, “Please!  Someone help me!  Please!  Oh… God!”  I froze, not even through the laundry room that separates our house proper from the garage.  I had set Cohen down on top of the dryer upon hearing the screams, and Keaton and I stood staring at the wall in the direction of the noise.

I was absolutely terrified.  I moved to pull Keaton close to me, but then realized I needed to help this poor girl who was, as I knew from that dream-knowing you get in dreams, being killed by the beast.  But I didn’t move right away.  I stood there while she called out and I knew the time to intervene was running out.  Finally I was able to un-root myself.  I told Keaton to stay inside and lock the door behind me and I left Cohen on the dryer in his carrier.  I went into the garage and grabbed some heavy metal implement, then I grabbed another and one more still.  I opened the garage door to silence.

I was already too late and I knew it.  My hesitation cost the girl her life.  But I still made a cursory walk of the block, recruiting other neighbors as I went and arming them with the extra shovels and breaker bars and whatever else I brought.  I led a circuit search with them behind me eager to help, but I knew that it was of no use.  All I could think of was where the thing had drug her body away to, and I remember hoping that we didn’t actually find it on our hunt – it would be too hard to see what I let happen.  Because I knew she’d be rent and broken and gone from the world and I knew it was because I failed to act quickly enough.

I awoke with my heart beating fast and I felt utterly ashamed and sad.  I’ve languished in the deepest pits of despair over real-life sins of commission, and I swear the dream-inspired shame and sadness over this sin of omission matched it.  Sharaun was sitting up in bed next to me feeding Cohen and the room was dark.  I told her about the dream and it made me feel better to acknowledge the un-reality of it all in doing so.  The feelings slowly lifted out of my chest as the realization that it was all in my head sunk in, and soon I rolled back over to re-join sleep.

Dreams are neat.

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the new “can i please watch a cartoon?”

Over the past few months Sharaun has more than once offhandedly mentioned to me that, during the days at home, she thinks about setting Keaton loose on the computer to play around. Keaton has an interest in the thing; how could she not? Her dad is practically tethered to one and her mom makes good use of the Facebook and the Tweeter on occasion as well. It’s only natural for her to desire to use this obviously magical machine herself.

So on Saturday I sat down and created a user account on the machine she could call her very own. For her user icon I used a box of crayons and the wallpaper is a huge spread of Princess Ariel (which she picked herself). I made the interface all magnified and simple thanks to the old-people options in Windows 7, and I got rid of all her desktop icons, notifications, and other distractions. She’s got one big icon in the middle of her desktop that launches Chrome and once inside I pre-loaded about ten or so bookmarks on the top ribbon for her to choose from. I installed AdThwart so she will see only content, and gave her a cursory lesson in mousing. And with that, she was off. Bouncing between bookmarks, she spends her time playing games on NickJr, PBS Kids, and a host of other edu-tainment centric kids’ sites.

Over the past few days she’s become quite good at navigating, and has picked up on the interface and controls surprisingly quickly (a child of a the technological age, I suppose). She knows how to repeatedly get to the same place consistently, figures out how to control games just by trial-and-error, and for the most part is self-taught. In fact, Sharaun and I have a rule that we’re not going to come to the call for “help” while using the computer. There are so many things she can do that will either take her away from where she wants to be or get her “stuck” or something that we told her up-front that if she feels like she needs help she can just click the ‘X’ in the top-right corner and start over. Hopefully that way she learns by herself and we don’t have to come running every thirty seconds (we learned fast that this should be our approach).

And now it’s all she wants to do. “Can I please watch a cartoon?” has gone by the wayside and, “Can I please get on my computer?” is the new hotness.

Hopefully we’ve done a good thing.  (Or at least a benign thing.)

Goodnight.

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she may have a point

2:30pm and truth be told it’s too hot to still have the house open.

Doesn’t matter; I’m stubborn about it.  Throw open the windows and throw open the doors.  Raise the blinds and turn on the ceiling fans.  Doff your longpants and don some shortpants, consider something that “wicks.”  “Too hot” be damned, what do we know from “too hot?”

For one thing, I love the fresh air.  You close a house for a few days and the air starts to feel “stale” to me, breathed to many times; recycled through dusty air vents too many times; stagnant.  It’s a psychological thing.  I also like the idea of being miserly and not running the air conditioning.

Hundreds of years ago the land where we live now was home to a Native American tribe that built stick-huts to shade themselves from the heat of the day.  Sometimes they’d dig down into the ground a ways before erecting the structure to increase the cooling capacity.  I feel like, if they made it through these 100°+ days with a dugout stick teepee, I should count myself lucky.  Somehow, thinking about the days those folks fared naturally makes me even more loath to trip the thermostat.

Sharaun, however, thinks that if the Indians had AC they would’nt have been so dumb as to not use it when it was hot.

She may have a point.

Goodnight.

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pointless little pockets

Saturday morning Sharaun had a hair appointment and I was on my own with the brood.

The job is many-fold, and yet ultimately defined by one prime directive: take care of the children.  Sharaun should not come back to find them A) missing, B) broken, or C) disfigured in any way.  As an adult, my brain tells me there are multiple paths to success when it comes to the directive.  In fact, the engineer in me reckons that, statistically, it would be very hard for me to not accomplish my charge.  So I take a nonchalant attitude towards the whole thing.  I’m a two-time dad, father of a four and a half year old girl who I think is pretty OK, I got this.

Anyway, on this day I was successful yet again – maintaining my streak.  And one of the ways I “personalized” my road to success on that particular Saturday was to choose “cute” yet undeniably manly outfit in which to dress baby Cohen.  In the end I went with a solid blue one-piece thing on top and these teeny-tiny little frat-boy khaki pants on bottom.  Oh man did that kid look sharp for a three-week old.

And as I was pulling on Mr. Cohen’s miniature Sigma Chi specials I couldn’t help but notice the level of “real pants” details, right down to the diminutive little pockets.  I had a moment then, thinking for a minute while looking at those small pants how absurd those pointless little pockets were.  “What’s a baby going to keep in his pockets?,” I wondered.  A spare pacifier?  Mylicon for those bender days on the boob?  Change for the tollbooth?  Kid’s got pockets and no way to use ’em, let alone know they can be useful.  I felt like putting something in his little pockets, just to give them some purpose.  Maybe a baby girl’s phone number or a stick of gum for his perpetual case of morning breath (you try staying fresh sleeping twenty hours a day).

In the end I left it as a lark.  But I really do love those pants on him.  One day he’s going to be my big boy and in his pockets he’ll have stuff like guitar picks and firecrackers and ball markers for the links.  For now I’ll let them be empty, symbolic of all the concern he has in God’s wide world.

Goodnight.

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BPF

Friday.  Watched the Arcade Fire’s live show from MSG on the big TV; the YouTube stream was surprisingly solid and high-definition.  Was great.  We should try and see them again when they come around for the new record…

I’ve written before about the plague the Lord placed on my face during my junior-high years.  Perhaps I was being punished for all the evil things I was doing.  With all my evil friends and all our evil urges and our evil homemade napalm and stolen cartons of smokes.  Whatever the reason for the curse, my previous entry recalls the way those pimples sunk my self confidence.  Sharaun, too, suffered from a particularly nasty attack of the pimples – although her time came much later in life.  Between the two of us then, we’re like an acne survivors support group.  We should be able to at least provide some empathy to our kids when their time comes.

I write all this because I was reminded of it by little baby Cohen’s “infant acne.”  Our poor little man has a pretty ugly case.  Keaton had baby acne too, but I don’t recall it being as pronounced as Cohen’s is.  Maybe that’s because his little-man body is simply bursting with awesome hormones (because his dad is so manly and strong).  I’ve taken to calling him “baby pizza face,” out of love, of course – and Keaton has even picked it up.  BPF, for short.  Oh nevermind you who say I’m mean… it’s a nickname and it helps me acknowledge to people who may see him and think, “Dear God, what’s wrong with that baby’s face,” that yes: my little kid has zits.

Don’t worry Cohen; don’t let the world get you down… that acne’s gonna clear up and you’ll have perfect newborn skin again until you’re twelve or thirteen.  Then, just when every flaw is under 100 social microscopes, it’ll come back to test your mettle.  And if it couldn’t best you when you were three weeks old, just think how much easier you’ll fare with twelve more years under your belt to thicken your skin.

That’s my boy; baby pizza face.

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musty smut

Sometime back in 2009 I started a draft entry about finding dirty magazines in the woods.  Wait; stick with me.

I had seen a funny thread that someone started online about the very subject, and was surprised at just how many folks chimed in to say that they, too, had seen some of their first pornography by virtue of “discovering” some mildewed magazine half-buried under a pile of rotting leaves.

Back in my day (wow, that makes me feel old), finding and then hiding your dirty magazines in the woods seemed to be a common thing (look on the internet here and here if you don’t believe me).  In fact I can remember we would go strolling through the woods with eyes on the ground for the express purpose of stumbling upon porn.  And we found it when we looked, too; if you were a pack of twelve year old boys in the 80s, you had some kind of Playboy sonar… and no camouflage could hide a Hustler from that.

As I wrote back then, the whole “chase” of porn is lost on today’s young men.  Porn is on your TV at night, no watching through snow required; porn comes to you on the computer; porn is on your cellphone.  There’s no looking anymore, there’s no “discovery,” there’s no state of un-knowing.  Back in my day, we relied on our found porn to reveal to us the magical secrets of sex.  Someone in that online discussion I read over a year ago, and that inspired this entry, put it best with the following:

We found an issue of Club in a garbage can, and in it there was a picture of a woman sticking her nipple into another woman’s vagina.

We acted all knowing with each other, like “Yeah, that’s something people do. You didn’t know about that?”

In this modern internet age kids have probably seen worse than that by 3rd grade computer lab.  Whither have the innocent days of thumbing through a tattered Jugs in a draining ditch with a couple friends gone?  Our poor young men today have no chance… Gone are the days of having to muddle through not understanding every other word in those Penthouse Forum articles,  having to guess from context and later being embarrassed whilst employing it incorrectly after getting up enough courage to dare use one as you’d self-defined it.  Oh man that was embarrassing to find out that “woody” doesn’t always mean a paneled surfer-mobile… kids can be rough.

I suppose I’m not really lamenting some great lost innocence of my day here, I mean there’s plenty more to be sad about aside from the mechanics through which our youth are introduced to smut.  In fact I’ve quite forgotten if I was driving to any point here or not.  I think maybe I just wanted to talk about finding porn, quote that hilarious nipple thing, and maybe opine about “kids these days.”  Mission accomplished?

Goodnight.

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cooing & head-petting

It’s only Tuesday.

Sitting here at 9pm reveling in the fact that the 9:30pm meeting I’ve been dreading since my 6pm arrival home from work is on its off-week of its every-other-week cadence.  Seriously, three hours of between time isn’t even enough for my work-brain to fully shut down and my home-brain to take over.  When a bad work day happens to align with one of those few and far between days where I have late-night meetings I clock-watch from the moment I get home until the moment the cellphone rings.  Stupid work, encroaching on my time.

We leave for a week in Florida around the middle of the month.  And even though I just had some time off work when Cohen was born, I’m ready for some more.  While there I plan to hang out with friends, maybe take walks by the river, spend some time in the pool and sit around reading.  None of the family back South has met Cohen yet so we’re all excited to give him his east coast debut.  Keaton might be most proud, she’s so in love with the idea of being a big sister and takes real joy in sharing him with other people.  She wants everyone to know how well she can perform her sisterly duties… and it turns out that, luckily, Cohen actually seems to be calmed by her cooing and head-petting.  Her very real ability to soothe him is a really cool thing for her (and us) and she wants everyone to know.

Let’s hope their relationship stays as sweet right through highschool.  Goodnight.