chuck klosterman So I'm reading this Chuck Klosterman book, which I thought was coming out in August but it's actually in mid-July, so I really need to get on the stick, which causes me to sit down and dig in promptly after Baldo's bedtime without even a post-bedtime smoke. And after five chapters or so I get up to obtain the post-bedtime smoke; I realize as I'm doing so that my regularly scheduled internal monologue has been replaced by Chuck Klosterman mental patter. I'm going for my pack and thinking that the design of the cabinet pull reminds me of that thing Ken Marshall throws at people in Krull, even though it's neither pointy nor deadly and at best serves to admit me to my Lair of Forbidden Parental Stuff (highball glasses, nicotine gum, half-empty packages of lemon Pez candy), and of course I wonder if I'd make a more sublime comparison if I wasn't always fruitlessly struggling to escape the spiderweb of 1980s mass culture. Am I really struggling? Should I be struggling? The self-awareness and constant cultural references aren't really bothering me the way they could be--mine nor Chuck Klosterman's--and I'm trying to pinpoint the exact moment at which I become annoyed with participatory journalism and the reliance upon mass culture to organize our perceptions of the world. I definitely have a cut-off point. I can't give you its location, but I know it when I'm there. Which is probably why I have no business reviewing books. You have to be able to explain these things to other people. You're not allowed to be vague or inconsistent.

I knew that when I got married and started a family that I was effectively abdicating whatever chance I had of becoming a navel-gazing peripatetic pop journalist. At best I can return to that path when Baldo is grown. By then I'll be 48 and of no use to anyone as a navel-gazing peripatetic pop journalist. I used to think that in the interim I could comment bemusedly on the phenomena of children's entertainment; it's a rich text, but nobody really cares about Marxist-feminist readings of Thomas the Tank Engine or your snarky cocktail-party observations of its BDSM overtones. The parents among us clap their hands over their ears and run screaming. And I don't blame them. Nobody sends David Foster Wallace to A Day Out with Thomas. As far as I know there's only one market for that kind of thing: Brain, Child.

(Note to self: Query Brain, Child. Again.)

It's also hard to resist the knee-jerk disgust engendered by the fact that some of us are allowed to traipse the countryside in search of rock death landmarks while some of us are walking behind leaf blowers and emptying bedpans. I don't have an answer to this quandary, and I probably never will. I guess it's just common sense to aspire to the former and work any angle you possibly can, using whatever resources are available to you, recognizing as you do so that some poor schlub is going to have to bus the table at the Cracker Barrel where you sat talking Kafka and dream logic with the waitress, and there but for the grace of God and meritocratic capitalism, blah blah blah.

In other news, the traumatic experience of having Baldo's foot X-rayed is over. Apparently there is no fracture.

shorts/shopping

3-D

shorts II

splashy

guitar

baldo the builder

the sprain We have Baldo's first sprain, obtained after toppling over at Radijazz. Not quite as punk rock as the nine staples in his head, but traumatic just the same. Worst are my attempts to apply an ice pack. No ice pack, none ice packs, NEVER!!

He keeps asking for a wheelchair, which is probably proof that he's inherited my flair for drama (at least when injured). I went to a screening of Murderball last week, and before I could leave I had to tell him all about the movie; now he wants a wheelchair. For a child who is terrified of movies, he certainly asks me a lot of questions about them. Sometimes he says he is "making a movie" when he's playing with trains or trucks or whatnot. "This movie is about a train," he'll say. Once he said, "This movie has a rack focus!" I swear. Not lying. The kid could recognize a rack focus before he could use a toilet. I think it's because I'm a giant dork and I yell out the camera moves whenever we're watching something together (which is rare, of course, due to his aforementioned fear of movies).

I still can't get him to watch the Muppets. I really want to see the Peter Sellers one. We did check out a Bob the Builder tape from the library. It's come in handy since the sprain, I will admit. It's not the worst thing in the world. There's a preview on the tape of The Wiggles; The Wiggles, I think, are the worst thing in the world. They have to be.

Discuss: The voice of Travis the tractor is Ben Stiller as Zoolander?

Discuss: Who among us can keep from laughing when made to read the line "If you need wood, Bob can do it!"? Not I.

baldo says "My peepoo looks like Darth Vader."

Fucking George Lucas. It's bad enough having to look at someone's every extrusion (he grabs me by the hand and drags me in to check it out). Then we have to have an informal debate: Does it or does it not look like Darth Vader?

Baldo (affirmative). RESOLVED: That the peepoo of Baldo Ingman does resemble Darth Vader.

Here's me: "It's in a loop! Darth Vader is not a loop!"

The three-and-a-half-year-old is a special creature. You bake cookies with him--oatmeal chocolate chip, your favorite--and he pulls a chair over to the counter so he can grab them and crush them with his hands. Laughs maniacally. The fuck?

Bad blogger. No yogurt pretzels! Sometimes I completely forget to write here. Starting a second book will do that to a person. So will marketing a first book. So will having a kid. So will summer movie season.

And then there's the cat. The cat hides during Baldo's every waking moment and emerges seconds after bedtime to bleat at me. I love this cat, but sometimes he jumps into my arms and vomits. Other times he likes to make love to my monitor. He drooled on it the other day--a kibbly sort of cat drool, with tiny crumbs. I went to go get a paper towel, and when I returned, he was licking the kibbly drool off.

The good news of late is that something is helping the eczema. Is it the UV? Is it the acupuncture? Is it the pomegranate oil, which is supposed to unblock his chakras?

Another good sign: "Why is Sammy Hagar singing this Van Halen song?"

Posted by Marrit at 07:52 PM

Father's Day There's a special kind of rage bubbling inside me as I peer out through my glasses at my spouse, who had LASIK on Thursday. They gave him Valium, too, the bastard. Did he share? No. He did not.

Oh, well. I got taquitos. Nothing is too bad if you have taquitos.

big pimpin' Hear me go blah blah blah about the book on LiteraryMama.com. If you wish.

oh, yes We treat that with vitamins!.

Grief I am saddened by the news that Alli Crews, an Austin mother and activist and friend of friends, died this weekend. Alli was the brains and the heart behind girlmom.com and the National Coalition to Empower Teen Parents. I met her on only a couple of occasions. On one of them she taught a roomful of women how to find our G-spots. That should tell you all you need to know about how much she rocked. Of course there's more.

pharmaceutical hijinks You want to know why the Supreme Court ruled against medical marijuana in Raich v. Ashcroft? (Yes, Marrit, please tell us.) Otherwise pharmaceutical corporations won't be able to bilk dying people out of their savings.

A friend of mine has cholangiocarcinoma, and the only thing that's helping her chemo nausea is Kytril. Which costs--wait for it--$50 for two pills. This stuff is, what, made from moon rocks? You're going to be sick every day until the end of your life, and the only (legal) thing that can return you to a state of relative comfort costs $50 a dose. Which of course Medicare isn't going to help cover.

I wasn't surprised to discover that Kytril was developed by your friends and mine at GlaxoSmithKline, who are medicating my whole family at the moment. GSK then partnered with Roche Pharmaceuticals to market and distribute the stuff. Roche Pharmaceuticals is based in Canada, so don't bother taking the ferry from Buffalo to a pharmacy there; it won't be cheaper.

Congratulations, all you assholes, on making sick people suffer. I hope you feel really great about that.

So then we're at the CVS drive-through collecting our own medication: our depression, our eczema, J's high triglycerides. The pharmacy tech says she can't give us another tube of Baldo's Locoid (topical steroid du jour) even though there are five refills remaining on the script.

"The insurance won't pay for it," she says. "They think you're using it up too quickly."

Too quickly? We use it four days on, four days off. We cut open the tube and scrape the last little bits of it out with a Q-tip. We are not cavalier with our Locoid. We just have to put it all over our kid. I mean, it's not like he has a little rashy stuff in two or three places. You apply something to a person's whole body, except the groin and the face, twice a day, and you might run out of it in a while. I mean, we have to put it in the folds of his ears. I don't like to torture my child thusly, but I assume when the health-care premiums come out of the family "paycheck" that I am at least going to be entitled to the service which allows me to do so.

I don't know what the answer is to all of this, but you know what might help? A nice big ol' fattie. Yeah, I could probably handle that.

Just. Don't. Say you want to check out a friend's band, and their own page of downloadable media is slow to load. So of course you fire up Limewire (which you only use responsibly, to discover new-to-you artists so that you can then go pay for their intellectual property) and search by their name. Which happens to be Teabag.

and then I plotzed, or Unexpected Late-Afternoon Nap Engenders Blogging, Kiboshes Bedtime Catatonically cruising the Rokenbok web site with Baldo and coffee early this morning, I bust a dam when I beheld the World Trade Center, as rebuilt by Rokenboking brothers:


I'm just now drying up. Baldo patted my hand and said, "It's all right, Marrit." Actually he does that kind of a lot. One of these days, there'll be a freak accident with the dishwasher, and our lives as the cast of Garden State will begin in earnest at last.

And now for too much information:

Usually when I read Nerve.com, I feel schlubby, old, comparatively sexless, and as if I never publish. And some of this is true. But looky, looky: the staff are marveling at a contraption I actually have in my house! Bwahahaha! Okay, so it's still in the packaging. But yeah! Hold on. I'll go get it.