I don't know if anyone's really noticed but I've had a terrible time finding the nerve to post much lately. I've been trying to figure it out -- is it burnout? Is this the end of Rico? -- and I honestly think it boils down to some sudden insecurity that hit me while reading about the Democratic campaign. I know that sounds ridiculous, but I felt like it's impossible for anyone, anywhere to ever be Right, capital R, Platonic ideal, absolutely correct about anything. I just started feeling wrong, whatever I said, spoiled and entitled and stupid and boring and white and incapable of understanding anything outside of my suffocating sub-suburban bubble.

Whee!

Jack and I had a giant fight the other night, a real "Fuck you!" "Fuck me? NO, FUCK YOU!" extravaganza. It certainly made Jackson stand up a little straighter. He was in the shower for the worst of it, actually, and when it was over and I was cuddled up in bed reading a book with him, Jack walked in -- you could tell he still had his back up but was wholly reasonable once again -- and said, "Jackson, do you know why I yelled at Mommy like that? Because I love her." I laughed, and later Jackson and I were able to have a good talk about how you can fight with someone and still be friends.

"But why didn't you cry?" he asked me. This was an astonishing echo from my past, as my Grandmother Marriott asked my mom the exact same thing. Generations of Marriott men have been yellers, evidently -- my grandma married one and so did my mom - and my grandmother always used to burst into tears to make it stop. But my mom never did, she just silently sat there and waited for my dad to yell himself out so she could go on with her business until he cooled down and apologized.

"I grew up with a dad who yelled a lot," I told Jackson. "When I was little, I'd hide in the closet. It took me a long time but it doesn't scare me anymore. Plus, I love Daddy and I know Daddy loves me. I know he wouldn't hit me, or leave, or make me leave, so it was okay to see him get angry and to yell back at him."

I found this clip on YouTube yesterday, it's Craig Ferguson, whose show I've never watched, talking about why he can no longer make fun of Britney Spears. It's about twelve minutes long so I forgive you if you don't have the time to invest in it, but if you do it's absolutely worth it, he's amazing and I'm a fan forever now because of this.

We bit the bullet and went to Costco last week and you know what? When you're throwing out half the food you bought there three days later because the fruit is moldy and the cheesecake tastes worse than sugared cotton balls, what's the point of paying a $100 membership fee for access to a bunch of rotten food? Certainly a person can buy only so much discount lawn furniture.

Hauling $25 worth of cheesecake to the garbage today, though, allowed me to reflect on the mindset of deprivation with which I was raised. My father would have made me keep the cheesecake no matter how many of my expectations it failed to meet, he would have clogged his heart with a fresh slice every day until it was gone. I once accidentally burnt a batch of cookies and he stopped me from scraping them into the garbage, saying, "That's good food you're throwing away!" -- black oatmeal cookies -- BLACK -- and to prove his point he stood over the sink and ate every last one. And probably enjoyed them. Food in our house was good only if it was cheap and sweet, not if it actually satisfied any nutritional needs your body might have.

Internet-trolling Dumpster divers, I welcome you to my discarded cheesecake. My conscience tells me I should maybe at least have composted it but there's no way to do that where I live, the condo association having a strict policy against leaving boxes of rotting food in the bushes. And what with us living so far afield, the nearest population of street scavengers is up in Santa Barbara where the police actively discourage the distribution of anything that would even temporarily clog a sidewalk with vagrants, runaway skater kids, or migrant workers.

What a weird world we live in.

So NATURALLY Cookie went into another heat cycle, because apparently I don't own a calendar, or any anticipatory consciousness whatsoever. Well, that's not true. Last month I'd gotten her in for a heart scan to make sure she'd be okay going under anaesthesia -- most vets worry about putting bulldogs under due to their mashed-up snouts and, in Cookie's particular case, a little click her heart was making that no one could figure out. And they still can't, but it wasn't something that would prevent her from being spayed, for which an appointment was helpfully scheduled, by me, to coincide with yet another biannual bleed.

Now, I wasn't all that worried about Cookie getting knocked up accidentally because Peewee's only, what, seven months old? Yeah, well, it turns out I have a Googling deficiency as well because seven dog months isn't the same as seven people months. Seven-month-old human boys have barely discovered their own ball sacks, whereas seven-month-old puppies have fully-matured sperm that would really like to meet any available fertile eggs you might be willing to introduce them to.

Except that Peewee, comically, doesn't have a fucking clue how to get 'em up in there.

I was loading the dishwasher this morning when behind me I heard an ominous thump! thump! thump! thunp! and I turned around and found Peewee trying to hump Cookie's head while it banged into the refrigerator. If he's not trying to hump Cookie's face -- hell, half the time we find her trying to hump him -- he's got his face buried in her coochie while she stands there quivering. If it goes on too long she just flops down and goes to sleep.

"Hey, she's just like you," says Jack. Ha ha.

Anyway, now Peewee's taking Cookie's neutering appointment, and by this time tomorrow his fuzzy little balls will be floating in a keepsake Mason jar on my desk. Oh, I thought about getting him some prosthetic balls, but they'd be for me, not for him, he's too stubby to get his nose down there for a peek, much less a lick.

So farewell, Peewee's balls! Although the vet says you'll still have sperm for up to another month and we need to keep you and Cookie separated, just say the word and I will carefully duct tape a bag of frozen peas to your affected area until the swelling goes down.

Here, I made this for you.

After watching Jack buckle under a horrible bronchial infection and flu last week it only served me right that after several days of sort of thinking he must exaggerating how bad it was (Really, an icepick? In your eardrum? Huh.), I would get it. That's some ancient Greek payback, right there. And a little extra for making him drive himself to the doctor. Granted, Jack's one of the tougher models of human being, he didn't even ask me to take him, he just walked out the door with his truck keys in his hand and a grim look on his face, but still.

The second time he went to the doctor (the first round of antibiotics was too WEAK) I was actually bundled up on the couch with Jackson, who'd come down with a fever, but I'm pretty sure at that point Jack got in his truck armed with nothing but a broken aspirin bottle and a steely gaze and the truck drove itself to Urgent Care.

Anyway, I shouldn't have been surprised when I woke up on the couch at 3:00 in the morning (Jackson gets super clingy when he's sick so I'd been sleeping on the couch with him and letting Jack bundle up and sweat it out in our bed) my first thought was, "Gee, I haven't felt this bad since I was in labor."

You need no more detail than that, gentle reader. I'm coming through it pretty quickly, which leads me to believe that I just got a half dose while Jack must have felt like someone had catapulted a hippo at him, and which led me to apologize (hoarsely, in a sweaty bath robe, with matted hair) for not having been as nice to him when he was sick as he was being to me. Sometimes I get so self-involved I want to shoot myself. Which, ironically, would only make matters worse.

When I was little my mom would put menthol rub on my chest when I was sick but without telling me exactly how that was going to help. (I think my constant childhood frustration with bad information is what turned me into such a relentless explainer.) Then a month ago Jackson's friend Sophie spent the night and I found that her mom, the brilliant Jennifer, had sent along a jar of vapor rub in Sophie's bag. She asked me to rub it on Sophie's feet and then put some socks on her before she went to sleep and that would keep her from coughing all night.

"You've got to be kidding me," I said, suspecting that with the act of anointing her daughter's feet with camphor and eucalyptus, Jennifer was secretly initiating me into her coven of Kentucky goblin witchcraft. "Her feet? This works?"

"I shit you not," said Jennifer.

So I risked my eternal soul and did her nefarious bidding, and it did work. Sophie didn't make a peep all night. A child sleeping through the night without being drowned in Triaminic? What madness this was!

No, I'd figured out a while back that rubbing that stuff on Jackson's chest was way easier than waking him up (how can sleeping children cough and yet also sleep?) and forcing a dose of candy-flavored syrup down his throat. But I liked the feet thing because it GAVE ME IDEAS.

I remembered I had a tube of lavender hand cream in my night stand left over from a birthday basket of l'Occitane samples my sister-in-law had sent me a couple of years ago. Instantly, the hamster that powers my cerebral cortex jumped on her little wheel and whiizzz! I had a plan. I put the lotion on its feet! Understand that I'm probably placeborifically sensitive to the calming effects of lavender, but what the hell, I thought, as my feet slowly turned into cloven hooves, maybe it will help me sleep? And it did. That shit works. I put it on my bony appendages every night now and I've had no insomnia ever since. Or rather, I should say that if I do wake up, it's really easy to drift back off to sleep. Unfortunately, once I ran out of my sample I discovered that l'Occitane likes to charge about $20 for a 2.6 oz tube of sweet dreams, but hell, it lasts longer than a bottle of Hornitos, though it's not nearly as delicious with chips and guacamole.

Normally at bedtime Jackson wants me to read him books with lots of pictures and not a whole lot of text. Lately, though, I've really felt the need to push him out of that comfort zone -- god forbid he should have a seamless and neurosis-free childhood -- and say, "Hey! You can read! Why don't you read Pete's a Pizza to me for a change?" Then I cough a little to show him that my vocal chords are dry with the strain of entertaining him with the sort of classic children's literature that I myself never enjoyed as a girl, because why not throw a little guilt on the fire as well. He is always adamant in his refusal to switch roles with me, though, and taking a page from my Great Big Book of How to Fake Shit to Get Sympathy, he limply and whinily exaggerates the exhaustion that reading out loud will inevitably exact on his delicate brainular mechanisms.

I play the game, I heave a giant sigh and the status quo remains unbroken. Wasn't it Erma Bombeck who said that her needs came after her husband's, and children's, and the dog's? So Jackson snuggles up against my arm and stealthily follows along as I do all the laborious speaking and page turning. It's my theory that he's afraid that if he actually shows me how well he can read I'll go, "Great! That means I don't have to do it anymore!" and abandon him with a copy of Harold and the Purple Crayon and a flashlight. In actuality, I still can't get over the fact he can walk upright and flush a toilet, and that this formerly walnut-sized chunk of cells and cartilage can now parse a whole strip of Calvin and Hobbes and the boxed set of Little Bear. Seriously, though, I get a little teary. Put "crying about my son's achievements" on the list of Things I Never Thought I'd Do, right after "get married" and "make a serious effort to get my foot behind my head."

Anyway, whatever it is, by last week I'd had enough of it -- not the doing all the reading, just the elementary storylines we were always strapped with -- so I very cruelly suggested that we set aside whatever Caldecott winner was at the top of the pile and move on to Charlotte's Web. Which very cruelly has not many pictures, just several heartbreaking Garth Williams illustration of a small pig bawling his eyes out.

I withstood the usual fit of floppy protestations, and I prevailed with the steely will of my German ancestresses. It doesn't hurt that the story starts out with a bang:

"Where's Papa going with that ax?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.

"Out to the hoghouse," replied Mrs. Arable. "Some pigs were born last night."

"I don't see why he needs an ax," continued Fern, who was only eight.

"Well," said her mother,"one of the pigs is a runt. It's very small and weak, and it will never amount to anything. So your father has decided to do away with it."

"Do away with it?" shrieked Fern. "You mean kill it?"

And that was all it took. You forget what bloodthirsty little heathens kids really are, but all that Grimm stuff? They really do want to hear about other children facing the horrors of life and death. At least my kid does.

So with that in mind, once I found that he could stand to follow a more complex story, I started reading him bits of my bedtime reading, Bill Bryson's wonderful A Short History of Nearly Everything. This is the most educational book I've read since Diary of Indignities and that's saying something. For instance, there's an enormous, live "supervolcano" underneath Yellowstone Park, did you know that? Those geysers aren't just there to keep the tourists entertained, they're heated by a reservoir of molten rock, a magma chamber forty-five miles across and eight miles thick. Guess how often the volcano beneath Yellowstone blows? About once every 600,000 years. Guess when was the last time Yellowstone blew? About 630,000 years ago. How far are you from Yellowstone right now? You better hope it's far enough.

This isn't the sort of information that seeds sweet dreams, however, so I moved on to a racy bit in the chapter about oceans, where a father and son team were experimenting with the effects of extreme pressure on the human body.

In the days of diving suits--the sort that were connected to the surface by long hoses--divers sometimes experienced a dreaded phenomenon known as "the squeeze." This occurred when the surface pumps failed, leading to a catastrophic loss of pressure in the suit. The air would leave the suit with such violence that the hapless diver would be, all too literally, sucked up into the helmet and hosepipe. When hauled to the surface, "all that is left in the suit are his bones and some rags of flesh," the biologist J. B. S. Haldane wrote in 1947, adding for the benefit of doubters, "This has happened."

Still not something you want your six-year-old to be meditating on as he drifts off, probably. So let's end with a nice little fact about crustaceans. You know all that carbon we release into the atmosphere? It falls into the oceans and little, tiny marine organisms use it to make their little, tiny shells. DID YOU ALREADY KNOW THAT? WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME? I find this absolutely incredible.

By locking the carbon up in their shells, they keep it from being reevaporated into the atmosphere, where it would build up dangerously as a greenhouse gas. Eventually all the tiny foraminiferans and coccoliths and so on die and fall to the bottom of the sea, where they are compressed into limestone. It is remarkable, when you behold an extraordinary natural feature like the White Cliffs of Dover in England, to reflect that it is made up of nothing but tiny deceased marine organisms, but even more remarkable when you realize how much carbon they cumulatively sequester.

And the limestone ends up feeding . . . volcanoes! And Disney has the nerve to sell us a bunch of stuffed animals and call it the circle of life. Despite the fact that we're now dumping far more carbon into the atmosphere than the tiny sea creatures can keep up with, nature is marvelous at rebalancing itself, even if it takes a few million years to do it. I recall about fifteen years ago, in the middle of a family dinner at my then-boyfriend's house, realizing loudly and fun-dampeningly that, hearty as our planet appears to be, it will do whatever it has to do to save itself, even if that means killing us off.

But I haven't told Jackson that yet.

I'm back! And I spent a portion of last weekend trying to take a nice picture of Peewee's tail. Want to see?



It's adorable, I know. And its health is, for the moment, attributable to tireless applications of Malaseb Pledgets. But guess who quickly found a way to utterly misuse veterinary antiseptic wipes? Me, that's who!

Sunday night Jackson was all, My butt itches! And he bent over and gave me the full goatse, thank you very much, Google it if you can't imagine what I'm talking about from the context. So I said, Hm! I have an idea! And I ran to the kitchen! Because why wouldn't you wipe your kid's ass with the same thing you use on your dog? I don't know. I mean, now I do, but I didn't at the time, I thought Pledgets were the veterinary equivalent of soothing Tucks medicated pads.

You don't know how many mistakes you have left as a parent until you witlessly apply something that you think will be healing to a very tender part of your child's anatomy, only to have said child run away screaming "IT BURNS! IT BURNS!"

Me: "I'm so sorry, Jackson, I would never had touched you with that if I'd known it would hurt you."

Jackson: "THE BURNING!"

Me: "I didn't think it would hurt, Peewee never cries when I clean him with one."

Jackson: "That's because he's a DOG! DOGS CAN'T SPEAK, MOM!"

It's actually kind of important to apologize to your child once in awhile, though I don't go out of my way looking for ways to maim him just so we can have make-up snuggle time. Anyway, it took some persuasion but he finally allowed me to come close enough to spread a little bit of Boudreaux's Butt Cream on the affected area and the burning soon stopped. But it will probably take a few months for his Protective Posterior Suspicion Level to fall back within normal limits.

Here are a few photos from the last few weeks that had been languishing in my camera.



Peanut butter cookies I made at my mom's house before I left. There's nothing I really want from her house when she's gone except those Bake King cookie sheets.



First day of spring break. We had some grand plans to go down to the tar pits and to the Getty, but instead we went to Borders and bowling. It's never too late to start lowering your child's expectations.



We went to the beach once, though.



Last time we went the sand kind of freaked Peewee out.



But he found his groove this time.



Hey, and I finally finished Jack's pirate hat! In Raiders' colors, naturally.

Uh, let's see. Then the sun came out and our neighbors threw a party! You never know what you're going to get when you hand your camera to a six-year-old.







It was a lovely party but I have limited personal strength for prolonged socialization without alcohol, so I went inside for a little restorative nonverbal communication.







This is where Peewee had an epiphany.



Here's where I found Peanut this morning.



Did I tell you that Jack and I went up to the Chumash ashtray casino to see Chris Rock a few weeks ago? Jack bought himself this souvenir sweatshirt and he bought me a t-shirt that says, "If you haven't contemplated murder, you ain't been in love." I think that sums up our relationship quite nicely.