I find it hilarious when thoughtful people respond to hatemail.

Chris is priceless.

“I’ve poisoned your awful child! He’ll be dead soon!” I liked to imagine their fictional reactions: “Oh my God, how can we thank you? Now we can buy things we like!”

Enjoy your weekend.

One thing I’ve hated lately:

Hearing adults use the word “mom” as an insult

One thing I hated and then liked:

The Corrections. I hated it at first because the characters had so much anxiety that I could identify with that just reading about them made my scalp feel too small. But then the characters, instead of just sitting there hating themselves, began to go out in the world, and the world stole their wallets and gave them back their childhood train sets and fed them some eggs and [spoiler deleted] and then they felt better.

Three things I’ve loved lately:

The way the air smells now. The way the angle of the sun is changing. Red leaves, even in this palm tree infested town.

Portrait of a chef as a young felon

Jackson: I can’t wait ’til I’m a big kid so I can cross the street by myself.

Me: What else do big kids do?

Jackson: Play with knives!

Hair History though a work in progress, is up here.

I brought a dozen doughnuts to our job site CPR training. This is a teeny bit like passing around cough syrup at a N.A. meeting. You just don’t offer bags full of colorful, artery-clogging goodness to people trying to learn how to save each other from heart attacks.

The second thing I learned was what to do if someone has a pencil sticking out of their eye.

1. Tear the lip off of a Styrofoam cup until the cup is about an inch tall

2. Punch a hole in the bottom of the cup

3. Position the cup over the person’s eye so the pencil comes through the hole in the bottom of the cup

4. Wrap or tape the cup securely

5. And while you’re at it, wrap or tape the other eye, because the eyes move together, and if you leave one eye unwrapped, every time someone says “Hey! Pokey!” the guy with the pencil in his eye will move his unwrapped eye to look, and you know how your eyes usually move together? The eye with the pencil in it will move, too.

6. *shudder*

7. Cup both your hands over your own (open) eyes and count to ten and listen to how strange your voice sounds

8. Sit there with your hands cupped over your eyes long after the instructor has moved on to another topic, and then remove them abruptly and look around to see if anyone noticed how you were stimming on the ambient noises of your cement-floored office

Also, if you get bit by a snake? Not just a little half-circle vegetarian snake jaw-print on your arm, but actual fang holes? Don’t do that late-night TV western thing where you slice the skin above the wound and suck out the poison. Because then you’ll have snake venom in your mouth. Where it will be absorbed into your system with breathtaking efficiency. And no tourniquets, unless you’re one of those people who looks forward to an amputated limb. If you’re not one of those people, just circle the bite marks and note the time with a ballpoint pen on your skin and call 9*1*1*.

Then save the ballpoint pen in case you need to give someone a tracheotomy.

We were watching Scooby Doo and Jackson asked me who I liked best. “I like Shaggy and Velma best,” I said. “I like Daphne and Fred and Scooby best,” said Jackson, which was great because it showed me he’s beginning to define himself as an individual in our little family herd.

But nothing prepared us for the other night as Jack and Jackson were watching the Yankees game on TV. After Jack and I chanted a rousing chorus of “Let’s! Go! Jorge!” a little voice from under a blanket called out “Let’s go Red Sox!”

Did I tell you I’ve been passing gall stones? I didn’t, did I. I’m not hiding things from you! I just didn’t want you to worry.

Remember back in April I mentioned that I had this weird ache on my right side, like I wanted to lift up my ribs and massage my liver? So I went to the HMO and wondered aloud about gallstones and Dr. White Hair said, “Gall bladder! We can remove that. No problem.” And I said, “What about those little pills that dissolve gallstones, so I can keep my gall bladder, even though it’s just there storing bile, because I kind of like having a bile middleman between my liver and my stomach?” And Dr. Old-timey Paternalistic Chatter said, “No, that takes forever! And what if you pass a gallstone? That’s very painful! You don’t need your gall bladder. We’ll just take it out.” And he scheduled me for a sonogram.

Meanwhile, I had also gone to my acupuncturist, who looked at my tongue and found darkness! And stagnation! And gave me gallstone dissolving herbs and liver cleansing herbs, and told me that if I was going to drink I should only drink distilled alcohol, which was great because then I could tell everyone I was cleansing my liver with tequila.

But then I had to switch acupuncturists, due to health insurance, and I went to my new L.Ac. and she was like “Tequila? To help your liver? He told you that?” Then she told me to start eating lots of green apples and radishes. Sure, lady! Fruits and vegetables! That’s a good one! If you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment with Dr. Margarita Mix.

Anyway, she gave me more herbs to take*, and my $15 copay qualified me for one hour of tongue examination, pulse feeling, and gall bladder channel poking per week. Over time the pain reduced and reduced, and then it went away! And then it came back! And then one day I was all (squeamish readers please skip to the next paragraph) Hey! There’s a cut on my butt! Like, inside my anus. Not normally being a bleeder from the ass, I put two and two together and said, Hey! Maybe I pooped out a gallstone and it cut my butt! But it was too late to go digging through my poo, and really, I’ve never been a poo-digger, like most people I prefer to hand off the poo-digging to trained professionals.

Meanwhile, I’d never *ahem* gone to my sonogram appointment, because I can put two and two together, Dr. Fatherly Advice! If you see a sonogram of my gall stones, then you will call me and tell me you need to operate! And then I’d have to shout “No! No!” at you and say “I’m taking herbs!” and hear you cackle with barely disguised disgust while I insist “The gallbladder’s simple function may be hiding deeper mysteries that you cannot see with your disaster-based, nonpreventive, black-and-white Western medical training!” And also, being a pure coward, I didn’t want to have to fight a doctor about keeping my gall bladder. So I never had the sonogram.

So I kind of don’t know if I’m passing gall stones.

But if I’m to believe this, passing a gall stone is, like crucifixion, a doddle. But I need at least another week to screw up the nerve to drink a pint of olive oil and really flush that fucker out.

*God am I sick of taking herbs.

This piece of Flash animation is based on what happens every night when Jack comes home. Seriously.

No, I’m kidding.

No, actually I’m not.

Thanks, Anil

Some tombstones that might be appropriate for me:

1. I’m done talking about it, obviously (*rolls eyes*)

2. Shhh!

3. Moved to a new url; please update your bookmark

As Halloween approaches Jackson continues to beg us to take him to World of Magic, a costume store that opens up for a month before Halloween every year, to look at all the fake amputated hands and moaning mummies. I bought him a secondhand book about mummies (which he pronounces “mum-ME” for which reason we know not why) which is really fucking gnarly, but he seems okay with the frozen bog guy mummy, and the horrible screaming Incan sacrifice mummy (if you define “okay” as “waking up at night crying and shaking”). We’ve actually had a few talks about death — killing a couple of goldfish helped illustrate the concept — but he hasn’t said a word about an afterlife, so, you know, whew. Because then it would be time for choices.

A Modern Child’s Choice of Vaguely Christian Afterlife Scenarios

1. Everlasting darkness (like you’re sleeping)

2. Some temporary darkness, followed by A Guy In A Beard assessing your entire life down to the teeniest decision you ever made, like when you stepped on all those ants!, followed by His judgement, followed by

a. an eternity of harp calluses, or

b. an eternity of futile requests for ice water

3. A long tunnel with light (and relatives, and perhaps pet GOLDFISH) at the end

4. (see below)

My concept of the afterlife was forever dented by a teenage reading of James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, a book-length poem detailing Merrill’s ouija board conversations with a newly-dead W. H. Auden, which paints the uberwelt as a sort of vast bureaucracy running at breakneck speed, overseen by huge black bats. Believe me, it’s very clique-y up there, with there being several competing versions of the Algonquin Round Table, apparently, and also a lot of talk about God-as-biology.*

It’s preferable in some ways to what I gleaned after skimming the first chapter of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, which describes the moments after dying as filled with an “intense restlessness,” which doesn’t sound that bad, but I bet once you’re there you’re like, Oh, shit, nobody told me! When they said intense restlessness they really meant INTENSE FUCKING INESCAPABLE ANXIETY THAT SHUDDERS WITHIN THE VERY MARROW OF YOUR BONES. But if you’re a Tibetan monk and you’ve spent your life (or perhaps several lifetimes) preparing for (yet another) death, then you’ve got a leg up on me, Lhundup old boy.

Anyway, I’m not going to tell Jackson about that just yet, he has enough on his plate right now with us sticking knives into pumpkins and disgorging their brains and toasting them with salt.

*I never told you about how I stalked James Merrill, did I? How I read the book, then I read the book again, then I wrote him a letter, then he sent a nice postcard back!, then I went to a reading and got introduced to him, and that’s when he saw that the look in my eye didn’t say “charming budding poet,” it said “insecure and CRAZY budding poet.” Extra Crazy, because I moved into a rental about two blocks away from Merrill’s house, in Stonington, CT, and then would stand on the sidewalk and stare up at his windows, and call his house, and get shouted at by his partner, David Jackson. *sigh* There are a lot of things I wish I could not do over again, and that’s one of them.