…questionable odors, and immature situations. Parental guidance is suggested.

I was out running errands the other day, and I realized that I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt. I thought about it, but decided that was okay. I was just going to Jiffy Lube, and who gets into an accident just going to Jiffy Lube? I’ve never heard of anyone, and I’ve known dozens of people. None of the numerous accidents I was personally the cause of in my teenage years ever occurred while any of the litigants were enroute to Jiffy Lube. I wonder if there’s ever been a study on this phenomenon.

Still, putting on my belt is win-win. I should just do it. But then I’ll have to reach over and find it while driving, and is that really so safe? 

A few blocks after this inner debate, in the middle lane, I came up on one of those temporary road signs, the kind that has its own tires and tells you in words made up of yellow lightbulbs when lanes are closed ahead. Today, this one was flashing a message that read simply:

SEATBELTS SAVE LIVES

Huh. It blinked this message several times as I passed it, and I glanced at the back of it in my rearview, reflecting on the weird timing of the thing. If I got into an accident now, that sign would be a pretty colorful detail I could add to the story I’d tell people about the moments leading up to the wrecking of my truck. Unless of course I couldn’t tell the story, because of the injuries I’d sustained due to the fact that I wasn’t wearing a SEATBELT, therefore not allowing mine to SAVE my LIFE. Nobody would even know, just me and the blinking yellow bulbs, who had tried to warn me, and whose warning I’d chosen to ignore. So maybe I’d better belt up, after all.

Because it was also kind of weird that it was in the middle lane, just sitting there, out of place and kind of obstructing traffic, a little. And if you were trying to turn into Kinkos, kind of obstructing traffic, a lot.

Maybe it was a sign… and not just an actual sign, in the literal sense. What if it had been placed there specifically for me? Yeah. From someone in the future who knew that I was on my way to an accident, and this was their attempt to help me out? This flashing roadsign was his one shot to let me know that SEATBELTS SAVE LIVES, and that I should definitely be giving mine its chance to step up and do that. What if, for some murky time-traveling-related reasons, he couldn’t communicate with me directly, or ironically, he was pressed for time, and this rolling bank sign was the only means he had to communicate to me the danger I was heading toward?

What if this well-intentioned… ‘Futureboy’ was sitting in front of a viewscreen hundreds of years from now, watching me ignore his sign. What if he was thumping his balled fists onto some crazy future table that I could never understand, and yelling “C’mon! Idiot! Buckle uuuuuup!”, and maybe even spraying a little spittle onto his screen. And if that was happening, then it was okay, because maybe in the future, there are little spittle-cleaning nanobots that spring to life, push off against the side of the screen like a bloom of rolling pinpoints, and like scores of microscopic figure skaters, clean off the foreign saliva. Tiny single-minded scrubbing bubbles.

But he wouldn’t even notice them, because he’s so used to cool future stuff like that… stuff that would give you or me a heart attack if we saw it. Maybe he wasn’t even looking at a viewscreen at all, but instead, had an old yellowed newspaper spread out in front of him, and he was waiting to see if the headline would change from “Local Man T-Boned and Killed by Meat Delivery Truck” to “Meat Delivery Truck Overturns, T-Bones Everywhere”.

Actually, that’s not too logical. I mean, if Futureboy were truly trying to save my life, and the flashing road sign were his only means of communication, wouldn’t it make more sense to spell out something like:

BUCKLE UP BILL

It’s shorter, more personal, and impossible to ignore. If I’d seen something like that flashing in amber yellow, I can guarantee you there would have been no inner dialogue… no debate. I’d have been fumbling with that belt so fast it would have looked like I was trying to put a fire out on my shoulder. But it didn’t say that. It only said:

SEATBELTS SAVE LIVES

So. Future-Bill-Saving-Boy scenario is probably not a reasonable assumption to make. Maybe it was just a coincidence. Or maaaaaaybe…. maybe it was placed there by, I don’t know, the state highway commission. Or some seatbelt-use advocacy group… something like that. Maybe they were just trying to get the message across that seatbelts save lives. And this was their way to tell people that.

Once, my Basset Hound Gordon ate not a seatbelt, but an entire bag of Pepperidge Farms Cinnamon Swirl Bread. It was New Year’s Eve, 1999 - a year before Jill and I met. While everyone else in the world was preoccupied with the Y2K bug and was nervously eyeballing the sky for falling planes, I was nervously eyeballing my beloved hound attempting to digest plastic. He was lying down, sitting up, and lying down again, unable to get comfortable, and drooling like a broken spigot.

Gordon had followed his sniffing nose into the kitchen and bellied-up to the counter, then gulped down that loaf like a snake swallowing an egg. He’d left no evidence that bag full of tasty bread had ever existed - not a twist-tie; not a raisin - just some slobber next to the sink, pointing toward his escape route like a mutely accusing finger. And it wasn’t just a single bag that went down Gordon, Pepperidge Farms likes to double-wrap their Swirl, with both a bag, and a cellophane inner wrapping.

Over the course of several days, and during several trips to the vet’s office, it became anchored in his stomach and nothing seemed to be able to dislodge it. Not even two tubes of the stuff my vet normally prescribed to grease up the inside of cats that needed to pass particularly hairy balls. One tube of that stuff will last your average cat about eight years, and on the vet’s orders, I wrung two entire tubes of it down Gordon’s throat in a single night.

The shit was rolling out of poor Gordon like oiled smoke, but no bag.

For one perfectly awful moment, I had the irrational and horrifying thought that it would be semi-plausible for me to just reach down into his gullet, with the warm, wet curtains of his throat gripping my forearm like a blood pressure cuff, grab the end of the goddamn bag, and give it a good yank. If I did it fast enough and got out of there, maybe things would be okay. I shuddered and quickly pushed that image from my mind.

He eventually passed it, not through his puffy, laugh-inducingly large dog anus (seriously, it looked like a puckered ditch), but through a 6-inch opening in his abdomen. They had put Gordon under, scoped him, and made the determination that it wasn’t going to come out any other way. They were going to have to cut it out of him, or he was going to die. So, over the howling protests of my checking account, off Gordon went, to be indignantly shaved and cut into, yet again.

They took him about thirty miles away to a place called simply “The Farm”. He made it through the surgery fine, and was in hound recovery for three days. They had visiting hours, so I went down to see the old boy. I took Charlie, my other Basset, with me. We went inside, and found Gordon lying on his side in a large, roomy wall-kennel on several clean, folded blankets. They opened his wire door, and he rose on wobbly feet and came out to us. Whoever had been on dog-shaving duty the evening before had either been a little unsure, or a lot overzealous. The bald patch on G’s stomach was so far-reaching and grand that the sides of it almost touched and overlapped up over his back. His newly-exposed skin was baby-rat pink and he had black patches that didn’t quite follow the patterns of black fur he had when not shaved. But Gordon didn’t follow the rules, not even the rules of nature.

I crouched, and he stopped walking when his nose bumped into me, like a blind cow against a barbed-wire fence. I noticed that pitifully, he was hooked up to an IV, which trailed from one bald leg, across the smooth concrete floor, and back into his kennel. On his stomach was a clean, straight incision, pinched and folded a little at the ends, and bristling with stitches that looked a chorus line of spider legs.

At this point, it all became too much for Charlie, and she began to honk.

If you’ve never heard a honking Basset Hound, then you can’t really appreciate what I was dealing with. She was honking and trembling and honking, and even the normally stoic Gordon perked up his ears and began looking around curiously. Some of the other post-op animals were also starting to find their feet inside their cages, and one of the techs quickly came over. I asked him if he could watch Gordon for a minute while I took Charlie outside.

When we got outdoors, she started to unclench, and the honking ticked back down and settled on kind of a yipping whine.

I put her back into my car, at the time a sweet 1987 powder-blue Chrysler LeBaron. It being early January, I knew there would be no danger in leaving her there while I went back inside to pet Gordon for a few minutes and see him back into his cage.

Characteristically, Gordon was facing in the wrong direction when I went back in, and he had never looked so much like a half-bald, swayback donkey to me as he did in that moment. I grabbed handfuls of his loose, Bassety rolls of extra skin, said my goodbyes for the day, and went back out to the car. When I opened the door, the first thing I noticed was that Charlie was now in the backseat, and staring at me, wide-eyed. The second thing I noticed was that she had shit copiously all over both the driver’s side seat and its unspooled seatbelt.

That was a seatbelt that wasn’t doing anyone any good.

So… Futureboy. If you’re poring over old blog entries from 2008, and you happen to come across this one, how about forgetting about the unsolicited public-service safety announcement? Give me something I can actually use. Like:

PUSH THE BREAD BACK FURTHER ON THE COUNTER, ASS

Even backwards or forwards, Jill is my lovely navigator. Lovely? My, is Jill! Forwards, or backwards, even!

Click here to view in high resolution

Sir,

We are now 3 weeks past the date by which you estimated that we should have received our “Bio Force TNT System AS SEEN ON TV“. This morning, I noticed that you are no longer a registered eBay user, and in reply to my earlier email demanding an immediate response, I received an automatically generated one that informed me that you are on an open-ended vacation, with no mention being made of a return date.

At best, this makes you a poor businessman, and at worst, a thief.

As I mentioned in my earlier correspondence, I have contacted my credit card company and initiated a fraud complaint. Your Paypal account has been frozen, and I am to immediately receive my funds back via the fraud protection that my credit card provides. I suspect your account was already frozen, as I am probably not the first to undertake this action if you are in fact absconding with your customers’ money.

If that is the case, then it is my sincere hope that you get caught, and someone with blunt, unkind fingers disembowels you by way of your rectum, then puckers your newly-outed innards with a good salting.

May the last thing you see be the crows pecking at your drying gutpile.

Good day.

Maybe they want me to start paying in singles. When have you been most surprised by unexpected nipples?

Bill: “Do you hear that buzzing noise? I can’t figure out where it’s coming from.”

Jill: “I’ll tell you where it’s coming from. It’s coming from that motherfucking toy phone on Sam’s saucer. The batteries are dying.”

Bill: “That’s annoying. How do you even change them?”

Jill: “I don’t know.”

I am 9 and it’s summer. I’m visiting with my Gram and Papa King who live in the tall, narrow house, a portion of which was once home to chickens before it was remade to be Gram and Papa’s home. We’re on the front porch watching cars full of people wheel lazily past. I commandeer what I consider to be the cat-bird seat…the middle position on the wooden porch swing. I’d prefer to have the swing to myself, but I am sandwiched between two sensible adults. 9-year-olds and grandparents have wildly opposing theories regarding swinging techniques. I am silently frustrated by their conservative to and fro, their feet rocking steadily heel to toe, never leaving the green turf carpeting on the porch. They swing so gently that they don’t pose even the slightest threat to the white wicker table that has ludicrously been placed IN FRONT OF THE SWING! This is blasphemous to my kid brain and I long for a solo test drive in the wooden Buick to see how she really handles. Because, swings, even domesticated, docile porch swings, are surely meant to soar too! It is in the swing’s nature to leave your stomach hovering in the air on the upswing and threaten to dump your skinny ass onto the coarse carpet, which will keep a portion of your palm skin as payment for its use as a landing pad, on the downswing. Beware little wicker table! If you stand your ground, you risk being punted to the end of the porch when I get to man the giant battering ram!

Cars pass by us steadily on the road that arcs past Gram and Papa’s house and they wave to nearly every one. Not because they are being polite, but because they know the people inside the cars who thrust their sunburned arms out of rolled-down windows and smack their horns in greeting. I love this game and am completely uncool in my execution, hollering ‘hellos’ and flailing my little girl arms at strangers, like a parade float queen being electrocuted. When Papa waves, his is a large, graceful gesture, his hand shooting into the air and hanging motionless there for a beat as he subtly drops his chin to his chest in head-nod acknowledgement until the car rounds the bend. Sometimes a friend slows down and turns into their driveway, making the powdery limestone rocks ping and pop under the slow-rolling tires.

For lunch, Papa brings in tomatoes from their garden. Gram pulls the kitchen table out from the wall so I can sit on the built-in, vinyl bench, making the kitchen seem like a tiny restaurant that is open only for me. My finger worries at the small tear in the bench’s green skin and I bounce gently on the springy seat. Giant yellow and orange daisies grin down at me from the wallpaper. “Oooooh…You’re going to like this,” the flowers whisper as they watch Gram slice the still-warm-from-the-sun tomatoes into thick, red slabs. She spreads a smear of mayonnaise on each, and tops them with salt and pepper. And the flowers are right. The tomatoes are simple in their perfection and they are the best thing I’ve ever eaten in my life.

Papa does shift work and is working midnights. Gram makes his lunch and packs his shiny silver dinner bucket with sandwiches, fruit, and a thermos of coffee. I decide that this is a fantastic concept and that I, too, will go to work at midnight when I’m an adult, breaking the rules and obeying them at the same time. I love the juxtaposition of this world, of smelling the richness of morning coffee at 11:00 o’clock at night, of seeing Gram soft and lotion-y in her sleeveless summer nightgown kiss Papa, freshly shaved and dressed in his dark, rugged work clothes good-bye as he disappears out the door and into his pick-up truck.

I sleep with softly-snoring-Gram on the nights Papa works. The screened bedroom windows keep the bugs out, but allow their blaring, untuned, orchestral sounds to travel in, escorted on the arm of chilly night air. I lie awake on my back and listen to the harmony played by the single-note whine of tires on the road as a few straggling friends make their way past our home to their own. Their headlight beams chase each other in silent, white, zig-zagging arcs from one corner of the ceiling to the other, waving to me as I drift off.

On the nights that Papa doesn’t have to work, they take me with them to the VFW. All the people who drove by the house and waved, apparently, were headed here to wait for my Gram and Papa. They know everyone and they are celebrities. I am a celebrity by association. Gram drinks whiskey sours, Papa drinks beer from dark amber bottles, and I drink Shirley Temples that the brilliant bartender fills with equal parts ginger ale/grenadine and maraschino cherries. I love him immediately. I’m given an endless supply of quarters which I use to begin a long love affair with a juke box and a shuffle board table. Gram and her friends have me play Juice Newton’s “Queen of Hearts” over and over again. They are trying to capture the lyrics with paper and pen as Juice sings them from the jukebox, but Juice doesn’t know this and won’t slow down. “The Joker ain’t the only fooool-ool-ool-ool, who’ll do anything for you!” They include me in the game and whoop and holler when I catch a random bit of the song and shout it out so they can scribble it down.

Memory is a fickle thing, holding tightly to certain bits of information while letting others slip away before they can be tucked into a gray brain wrinkle. If you ask me how long I stayed with Gram and Papa that summer or why I was there, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. It could have been two days or two weeks. I might have been there because my parents were out of town or because Mum was ready to hang me from the porch railing with my own jump rope and decided to ship me out of the house for a while rather than resorting to murder and almost guaranteed jail time. Whatever those answers are, they are the smooth, wan bits of information with rounded edges that were too slippery for my brain to hang onto. But, the sensory laden memories of warm tomatoes and belly-turning porch swing rides and Juice Newton lyrics are rich with dimension, color, and texture. And these bits of information are much bigger and messier because of that and have no choice but to stick.

I don’t know if my Gram and Papa remember my visit with them like I do or if they remember it at all. It was business as usual for them, and I think that’s the magic. Like the warm tomatoes from their garden, the memories I have are organic. I hope that we’re creating memories like this for our boys…that we’re not trying too hard…forcing the fun.

I am 36 and it’s almost summer again. Bill and I have three little boys who we sandwich between us on our own porch swing now.

I have a hankering to grow some tomatoes.

These moments. They’re accumulating faster than I can take note of or savor them. They’re the little grooves at the edge of the Interstate that are supposed to keep you awake if you get too close - dozens and dozens, blurring together… shifting and flickering to form an unbroken whole. Together, they create a timeline, stretching out to the vanishing point - in front, and behind.

Stay awake, Da-da.

Of Rockets and the Geneva Convention

For Nate’s second birthday, he received his Most Favorite Toy Ever - The Little Einsteins Pat Pat Rocket. Rocket has a cockpit that opens, a speaker that emits rocket-type noises, and lights on the front that blink in time with these noises. He’s manned by all the Little Einsteins who Nate loves to watch in their various mass-marketed DVD adventures. Each Einstein has been given a single, defining character trait: Leo leads the group, June loves to dance, Quincy plays music, and Annie chain smokes.

Nate gleefully lumbers up and down the hallways in a barely-controlled fall, hunched over Rocket like Quasimodo, with one hand on each of Rocket’s flared back fins. Rocket’s cockpit canopy is prone to pop off a little too easily, and it is slightly beyond his ability to clip back into place. His growing concern over the fact that Rocket is in two pieces is unfortunately coupled with both an inability to fix it himself, and a stubborn insistence to attempt to do so anyway. 

“Doit! Do-EEE! Hep!” he demands, insisting on doing it himself and perplexingly, asking for help at the same time. About every third time he asks for hep, he will accept the hep. He slowly taps the loose canopy over and over against the clip it fits into. He’s like one of those hapless, disoriented beetles that try to mate with discarded beer bottles - there’s a lot of tapping, but no results. Sometimes, he comes tantalizingly close, and I resist the strong urge to simply snatch it from him, click it into place and hand it back. It’s like watching someone with an inner ear problem try to thread a needle in the back of a moving pickup.

His favorite Einstein by far is June, who loves to dance. He calls her “Dooooon!”, and the first few days he had the Einsteins, she went everywhere with him. Dinner, the bathtub… he even took her back to his crib. I’ll let the teeth marks on her head tell their own story. 

Liam also loves Rocket. When things are good, he and Nate take turns, with one watching longingly from the kitchen while the other shambles up and down the hallway. When things are bad, it’s pretty much the same thing, just with more screaming and a sudden spike in slap-fight activity. Liam has to hunch a little further over Rocket, but they both laugh and generally love it.

At night as we get one of them ready for bed, the other is usually at the sink in their bathroom. They’ve both adopted the curious and slightly disturbing practice of waterboarding the Little Einsteins. They each fill their miniature bathroom cups with water, then methodically pour water onto each Einstein’s face before dunking them headfirst into the cups, often leaving them under for extended amounts of time. Even June is not safe from this practice.

Of Tricksiness and Improbable Movements

Liam has stepped up his trickery. For example, we tell him to “Buckle up!” after he climbs into his booster seat, and he appears to be agreeably doing so, and most times, he is. However, we’ve noticed on several occasions that he was simply going through the motions, then hiding the buckles and keeping his arms over his lap. He’s palming the handcuff key.

If he’s supposed to be asleep for his nap, we’ll sometimes hear him jumping from his bed to the floor with all the stealth of a bucketful of bricks. Once, on about the sixth chandelier-shaking landing, Jill interrupted our conversation and said, “Did you know that Liam isn’t asleep? Yeah. He’s upstairs, jumping.”

Sometimes he sits on the side of his room opposite his bed and shakes the radiator pipes. Once, he was doing this, and I walked over downstairs and gave it a good shake back. I heard his footsteps scurry back across the room, where they presumably took him back into his bed and stayed there with him.

One afternoon, I opened the door unexpectedly on him, and caught him sitting on the floor with his blocks. I stared at him, and he stared at me. I struggled to keep my poker face, and he didn’t know which way the wind was going to blow. Finally, he broke the silence.

“Hi Da-da. Liam just woke up!” he lied cheerfully.

Another day I walked in to find him sitting in the middle of his bed, sucking his thumb. All his curtains had been pulled down, so I asked him how that had happened.

“Nay-nay did it. Nay pulled down all those curtains.” he replied.

“Really? So Nate got out of his crib, came into your room, pulled down all your curtains, then went back into his room and got back into his crib? Nate did that?”

He took his thumb out of his mouth, raised his eyebrows, and responded, “Naynay pooped in Weem’s diaper too.”

Of the Inherent Hilarity of Tooting

Sometimes, when I’m changing Liam, he tries to toot on Da-da. I’ll yell, “Don’t toot on Da-da! NO toots!”, and he’ll strain to the point that I worry he’s going to give himself a hemorrhoid. It probably doesn’t help that I’m either laughing or trying not to laugh the entire time. You try not to laugh while he’s grunting and pushing, and his ass looks like a dry-heaving starfish. Once, he succeeded in blowing the diaper cream completely off my finger, like he was blowing out a birthday candle. The lad got me.

Of Being Fat and Reaching New Gastrointestinal Milestones

Note to Sam: Sam, you’re fat. Maybe the heftiest of them all. Like, 97th-Percentile-Tubby. By definition, that means that you’ve got bigger tits than 96 out of every 100 other babies who were born when you were. Seriously, where are your wrists, dude? You look like a pack of Ball Park Franks. I bet you’d be delicious to an alligator - all chewy and pink - nothing to spit out. Of course, he’d have to get you after a diaper-change, because damn. Now that you’re on solid food, you’ve soared to new levels. You can spackle up some serious adult-sized stanky. And you smile when you do it. Of course, you smile at almost everything. And I don’t care if you annihilate a diaper or have dimples where bones should be. I love you, baby.

Of Sleeping and Waking

Sometimes, Liam does sleep when he’s supposed to, and he wakes up pretty cute and with a head and eyelids two sizes too large. Several weeks ago, he rubbed his eyes and told me, “Yellow egg is sleepy and his mouth looks like a pentagon.”

I sat on his bed next to him and listened intently.

“Purple egg isn’t sleepy; he’s just waking up slow.”

I wasn’t sure exactly what this meant, but I appreciated the number of words that were in each sentence, and how earnestly the information was relayed to me. I don’t know if it was that he was half-asleep, or half-awake. Maybe that he’s half-and-a-three.

Nate sometimes wakes up and cries in the middle of the night. One of us will go upstairs and hold him in the cushy Pottery Barn rocker until he calms back down. If you try to put him back into his crib too early, he’ll hug you like a Spider Monkey - a Spider Monkey that can say “No! Bed!”

Sam wakes up several times a night, or so I’m told.

Of Easter

All three boys were visited by the Easter Bunny, and he hid many eggs and baskets. Nate delighted in finding his behind the hallway door, and sat down immediately to explore its many unexpected treasures. We led Liam directly to his and basically pushed him towards it. Visibly agitated, he declared “No Easter Bask-KEEET!”, thereby continuing his unbroken streak of acting in completely the opposite way that one would guess a three year old would act. Sam sat in his highchair and smiled. They all got stacking robots, spinning tops, and sugared snacks. Sam also got a helicopter that was immediately commandeered by his brothers, which caused him to smile again.

Of These Scenes I Don’t Want to Forget

Nate, hearing any unfamiliar noise, dropping whatever he’s doing, finding one of us, then tapping his ear while asking repeatedly, “Whazzat? Whazzat, Da-da? Whazzat Muh-mum?” until we tell him whazzat is.

Me, trying to wash Liam’s hair while he screams, and eventually just stepping back and letting Jill take over. Then listening to her calmly talking to him, involving him in the process, and finishing the job as he looked up and actually smiled at imaginary airplanes.

Liam and Nate, dragging their disconnected swings back under the swingset and collapsing into them, understanding the ‘what’ and the ‘where’, if not quite the ‘how’. Then, with little hands firmly grasping the sides of each swing, sitting expectantly and waiting for something to start, like the guy in the old Memorex ads. Me, walking over to them sitting there in the grass like two broken puppets, and Nate looking up and saying, “Hi Da-Da!.”

Jill, under her umbrella in the backyard, kneeling and picking up toys in the rain.

Me, standing at the kitchen window, feeling the coolness of the glass, and watching Jill picking up toys in the rain. And appreciating how lucky I am. How lucky I am to have found my perfect accomplice. How lucky I am to be holding firmly onto her hand as we’re pulled along like two kids in a crowded funhouse through this uncharted adventure. And how lucky I am to be dry, and inside, instead of out there, picking up toys.

Sunday mornings that smell like cinnamon bagels, sound like slamming screen doors, and look like small boys running through tall grass.

Sam, giving us blueberry raspberries.

Of Seizing the Moment

But too much time has now passed between when I observed these things, and when I found the time to write about them. Most of these things are already done and gone. They were really gone the moment they occurred, and trying to capture them here is like trying to catch moonlight with a butterfly net. They are as tinny echos, chasing each other down hallways like carefree footsteps and pealing up through the unfolding leaves of spring, like laughter from a sandbox.

Rocket’s canopy is now in a different room than Rocket, and Nate doesn’t seem concerned to see one without the other. This morning, I saw June laying forgotten in a plastic pumpkin, alone but for Leo, group leader. I can’t remember exactly when I last saw Nate with either of them. He’s moving on.

Liam no longer needs to resort to slight of lap to escape from his booster, as with a little effort, he can defeat his buckles even when clipped. And when he does buckle up, he clips in not around a diaper, but around a Pull-up. So there’s no need for changing tables or diaper cream. He’s moving on.

It’s also stopped raining, so Jill no longer needs her umbrella.

Thankfully, Sam is still pretty fat.

For the moment.

Would it be the thin, barely life-sustaining gruel? The routine beatings administered by hardened Turks in the prison steam factory? The dripping waterpipes over your sleeping mat? Your roommate’s incessant crying?

I think it would be all the line-cutting in the gruel line, but not the Steam Factory beating line.

After dinner, Liam and Nate are watching the stellar kids’ music DVD, Here Come the ABCs by They Might Be Giants (Thanks Uncle Kevin and Aunt Jess!) TMBG must be up to their mic stands in some deadly black magic to have created a product that appeals to both the under 5 and the over 30 demographic. I highly recommend it to those of you choking on the purple swill that is Barney.

“Here Come the ABCs” is, obviously, about letters and the alphabet and features maddeningly clever songs paired with charming animation. In one song, a tin man reminiscent robot sings the alphabet in a gravely, synthesized voice as letters drift up slowly from his silver toaster head. As he is wont to do, Liam tries to take possession of the unpossessable. He informs Nate, “Those are Weem’s letters!” and thrusts his pointer at a ‘J’ as it puffs out of the robot’s head. He waits for the fight to begin, but Nate, who turns into our short-circuited little robot when in front of a TV, cannot process Liam’s transmission. Liam tries again. “Nate! NATE! Those are WEEM’S LETTERS!!” Nate continues his tree bark impersonation. Frustrated by his inability to goad his little brother into a duel, Liam leans across the table and positions his face two inches from Nate’s and says very calmly, “Those are Weem’s goddamn letters, Nate.”