The Explainer may not have the answer, but She has an answer.

Jackson (at the Cabrillo Bathhouse, eating french fries): "Who made this place?"

Me: "It's been here for a long time, people built it before you were born, and before I was born, and before Daddy was born, and before Grandma was born."

Jackson: "But now we're big!"

Me: "Yes! And it's your birthday. What are you going to tell people when they ask how old you are?"

Jackson (by rote): "Three in June."

(Argument ensues on the superfluity of the phrase "in June." The first person to start crying wins.)

Jackson (wiping his eyes on his sleeve, returning to topic): "Who made the sand?"

Me: "Uh, the ocean made the sand! There used to be a lot of big rocks here a long time ago, and the water washed against the rocks for years and years until the rocks broke up into little tiny pieces of sand, and now it's the beach."

Jackson (casually yet doggedly trying to undermine The Explainer's credibility by finding a crack in her intellectual edifice): "What's under the sand?"

Me: "Hot lava."

Jackson: "Hot lava?"

Me: "If you dig deep enough you'll hit hot lava."

(This appears to be absolutely unbelievable, even coming from the normally reliable Explainer.)

Jackson (pointing to some boys digging a pit in the sand): "They're digging for lava?"

Me: "They'll be sorry when that shovel melts in their hands."

Jackson: ". . ."

Me: "Finish your hot dog."

Jackson (rallying, trying yet again to stump The Explainer): "Who made the fish?"

Me: "The FISH made the fish. A daddy fish and a mommy fish make a baby fish. Just like Daddy and me made you. All the fish have mommies and daddies and grandmas and grandpas all the way back for a jillion years."

(This is almost completely incomprehensible, and great effort is required to come up with an even stiffer challenge for The Explainer.)

Jackson: "Who made the ocean?"

Me: "Uh -- look! There's a sea lion!"

Jackson: "Where?"

Me: "You missed it. Who wants a milk shake?"

Later in the day, The Explainer goes head to head with The Dismisser

Jack (walking into the bathroom after I've been in the shower for ten minutes): "Leave some for the fish!"

Me: "Oh! God I love hot water." (Turning off faucet, grabbing towel, etc.) "You know, at the magazine we were always doing these stories about how you should brush your skin and how at the end of your shower you should turn off the hot water and take this big blast of cold water, how it would drive all your blood deep into your body . . ."

Jack: "Blow me."

Me: ". . . and how that would nourish your inner organs . . ."

Jack: "Blow my inner organs."

Last night at 2:15 a.m. Jackson woke up and barked like a seal. He was coughing so hard that milk -- milk that he'd had with dinner six hours earlier -- came out his nose. His cough was so dry he sounded like a dachshund choking on a splintered T-bone, and I put his little crying ass in my lap and called the emergency room. Why did we not just go to the emergency room? Because a long time ago I had a roommate who was a pediatrics intern at Lennox Hill Hospital, and she would never stop complaining about all the stupid shit people would bring their kids to the emergency room for. Hiccups. Pimples. She said that if people would just call first the nurses could help them over the phone and the doctors could get back to treating the real emergencies. It was then I vowed never to frivolously set foot in an emergency room.

Tired-sounding Emergency Room Phone Answerer: "Emergency."
Me: "Hi. I have a sick little boy here and I was wondering if I should bring him in or not."
TERPA: "What's the problem."
Me: "He's barking like a seal."
TERPA: "Ya know, I can't do anything without seeing him. Or you could call his doctor. Have you done that?"
Me: "Uh, no."

I didn't even know you could do that! Did you know you can call your children's clinic in the middle of the night? You can! They have answering services and a doctor checks their messages every hour! Jackson is sobbing and I am learning so much!

But we've just missed his doctor's call-in time and have to wait another hour, and my little boy is weeping with anxiety, so I say, "Let's go." We get dressed in our fuzziest, fleeciest clothes, and I put a toy and some books in a bag, and we're halfway to the hospital when I glance at Jackson in the rear-view mirror and he's just sitting there. I cautiously drive another block not looking at the road at all, I'm driving down Mission Street navigating backward through the rear-view in the dark so I can try to discern whether he's so quiet because he's actually dead. No, he's looking around. I hear a little noise come from his chest. "I burped," he says.

We turn our big rig around and go home. We sit on the couch and put on "Lilo & Stitch" and we wait. Jackson's actual doctor is on call and he calls my cell at five after three and diagnoses croup. Croup! It's a twenty-four-hour viral infection. I've never in my life had croup, I thought it went out after Laura Ingalls Wilder had the fever and ague. The doctor, who sounds tired (why does everyone sound so tired? I'm not tired at all, I'm wide fucking awake), says put a humidifier next to the bed, or make him sit in a steamy bathroom, or "take him outside and let him breathe the night air." Really. I mean, straight out of On the Banks of Plum Creek, no? Night air. Which is what he got a good faceful of on our aborted trip to the hospital. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Don't you wish that were the cure for everything.

So, just in time for the Big Third Birthday Weekend, just in time for a sleepover at Grandma's hotel with his cousins from L.A., Jackson's nose is running like a water faucet and I'll be addicting him to Triaminic Cough & Cold right directly. Praying that he does not infect a party of twenty children between the ages of three and five, so that along with your piece of chocolate Ninja Turtle birthday cake you do not also receive the fever and aig-yoo.

Gesundheit.

I'm not sure why I continue to flip through my college alumni magazine before throwing it in the trash, I'd be much better off taking it there straight from the mailbox. Actually, the way the recycling barrels are placed I could stand at the mailbox and chuck it over the porch in one graceful, socially responsible arc. The most useful thing about this magazine is that it stands as a record that white upper middle class lawyers and accountants not only date drunkenly, mate clad in Vera Wang, reproduce tastefully, grow old in the country house, and die at a clambake, but they are vain enough to request publication of the photographic evidence of these milestones in a magazine that is sent to thousands of people who either don't have a clue who they are or only vaguely remember them throwing up after a bad grinder at Mr. G's.

All that aside, I'm not really disgusted by it, people have a right to share their stories; God knows you wouldn't be here if you didn't agree. So when I saw a highlighted box in the corner of a page that said "ROOMMATE STORIES! Send your best (funniest, most exasperating!) roommate stories to us and you (and your former roomie!) may be featured," I knew the time had come for me to be improperly kerned along with my advertising executive brethren and sistren.

My freshman roommate was from Westport and her name was Wendy. By the time she arrived at our double in Larrabee, I'd already taken the best bed and taped up all my Clash and Sex Pistols posters, and I sat on my desk intimidatingly eating a box of Wheat Thins while her mother helped her unpack and hang up all her clothes on plastic hangers. When everything was folded and put away, I watched as Wendy rather reluctantly taped up a small print of a sailing scene. The beauty of the room's feng shui was that when I lay in bed I got to stare at her sailing scene, and when she lay in bed she had to look at Johnny Rotten.

About two weeks into a shared avoidance, we had a short talk and agreed that we really weren't cut out to be roommates, and I volunteered to ask the R.A. if we could be reassigned. The R.A. was a senior who was a lot shorter than me, and my reasoning was so thoughtful and free of blame (read: unfreshmanlike) that she agreed to file the paperwork and put us on a waiting list for single rooms.

The thing was, once we admitted we didn't really like each other that much, we became a lot more relaxed around each other, and one night we decided to have a wine and cheese party for ourselves and a couple of other new freshmen. This was back when the drinking age was 18 and the liquor store would deliver your jug of Mountain Chablis right to your dorm room (and they'd take a check), so after scrounging some plastic cups, a plateful of unbroken water crackers, and a hunk of gouda from Stew Leonard's, we got good and drunk and laughed our asses off. The next morning, when we discovered the red wax from the cheese balled up and stuck to the ceiling, we decided that we were okay being roommates after all. At the end of the year Wendy's mom came and packed her back up, and when we scraped the ball of red wax off the ceiling I bawled. For some reason this made Wendy uncomfortable, and after a sweaty hug she got in the car and drove away. I turned to cry on my boyfriend's shoulder, but the fucker gave me some excuse about having to study for his last final.

The last time I saw Wendy I had brought a different boyfriend up to visit her in Westport. She took us sailing, and he stared in awe at her ass the entire time. She got married and had a baby a good ten years before I did, and then I left New York and we lost touch, but I still have fond memories of my boyfriend and her ass before I went below and passed out in a dramamine fog.

I'm not sure my alumni magazine will publish this, but I'm going to send it to them as is, and maybe I'll be one of the few, the lucky, the Madras-clad! My memories glimmering at people who don't give a shit, gathering dust on Stickley nightstands all summer long.

This friend of Jack's who's a drummer, who's a really, really great drummer, who will haul out an SUVful of bongos for a $50 gig at the Brewhouse, is also the drummer for Los Lobos. Los Lobos! This, to me, is, like, a really big deal. It's hard to remember when everybody dug Los Lobos con as much mucho gusto* as all those L.A. punk bands they hung out with, like X and Black Flag and those nuts in Fishbone. Back before R.E.M. was weird. I daren't go on for fear I wouldst make a further asse of myselfe, since the early 80s are like so twenty years ago.

Anyway, I bought the latest Los Lobos album. It's good. It's even great in spots. But mostly I was psyched for Cougar. Besides being the guy we almost named Jackson after (and we would have, if Jackson had been born in a Mercury Cougar, but as we all know he was born on the toilet and -- you know, what? I think there are better ways to commemorate that particular location in our house than name our son after it) -- besides that Cougar is just totally fuckin' awesome and deserves to succeed. And so now he gets to play with Tom Waits. I said to Jack, "That is so cool for Cougar that he got to be in the studio with Tom Waits!" and Jack was all, "Tom Waits just sent them a tape of himself making that weird noise. Then they built a song around him in the studio."

Imagine my surprise: Tom Waits phones it in. What a bastard. You've got to hear what they did with the tape**, though, it's hilarious. It's like they were really cheesed that all they got was a dirty cassette of Tom Waits howling for thirty seconds, so they got this woman to come in and harrass him. You can just see her hands fly up in the air as she bitches, "Tom! TOM! Take your headphones off! and, It's not fair, I do EVERYTHING around here!

But I guess the most beautifully insulting thing they did, from a musician's point of view, was put a trombone over the whole thing, which is especially meaningful if you know this joke:

Q: What are the three most useless things in the world?
A: The Pope's balls and a trombone solo.

*Do you speak Spanish? Congratulations! I don't.
*That there's a 3.1 mg mp3.

Saturday night Jack and I were walking home after dinner and Tony Bennett at the County Bowl (another date! I know! It's incredible!), and as we passed a thirtyish woman talking to a fiftyish couple I heard her say, ". . . but he was just so old," and the fiftyish man said to her, "Don't you have a suggestion box?" And I imagined the woman walking around with a big wooden box on her chest with a hinged top, and people could put little slips of paper telling her what she should do. Or it could be attached to her back to receive anonymous suggestions.

Quit being such a slut.
Vacuum twice a week.
You are a good candidate for thong underwear.
Free chocolate milk and donuts!!!

Evany: "Seriously, he brings on that kind of long and deep laughter that twists your face beyond a smile into something primal and ugly, and pulls these alien, guttural deepsea sounds out of you. After ten minutes solid of that, your body actually starts to hurt a little bit, and even then you can't stop. And that lack of body control starts to make you feel a little worried, like what next, is my ass going to explode? And yet even that, the fear of a ripped-and-torn ass, isn't enough to make you stop with the laughing."

The other morning on the drive to work I was listening to a call-in show out of L.A. Normally I avoid that sort of thing -- being all too aware of the belligerence that surrounds me, there's no need to let it fill my car -- but this was an NPR affiliate, so I was pretty sure that gentleness and reciprocity would be the morning's watchwords. The guest was David Lipsky, and he spent four years at West Point and then wrote a book about it. Let me tell you -- and I'll tell it to you like this because Pulp Fiction was just on IFC -- that David Lipsky is one charming motherfucker. He made me want to go to West Point. It is a magical place, filled with talented, intelligent people who carry the weak when they have fallen behind and see beyond the color of a person's skin. Lipsky described the daughter of two Black Panthers who got in to West Point so she could subvert the white oppressor's system from the inside; but what she discovered was a true paradise of race relations, a place where colorblindness was so very rooted and genuine that in her weaker moments she began trying to plot how to keep civilians out of this good-hearted Eden.

One thing the host of the show wasn't addressing was the fact that many of these talented, intelligent West Pointers, 20% of whom are women, are being prepared to lead their sometimes less-talented and less-intelligent brethren through battlefields across the globe whilst figuring out the most efficient way to capture and/or kill some guys who may have never had the chance to pick a Shakey's Pizza out of their mustaches. This Lipsky fellow was just so seductively Alpha Male that I hadn't even really noticed this gap in the conversation, too busy as I was secreting glucorticoid hormones and grooming my fur. Fortunately, just as I was pulling into my parking spot at work a reasonably angry-sounding and clear-headed woman from Ojai called in to wonder when our jolly host and eloquent guest were going to discover the killing-other-people pot at the end of the military school rainbow.

I cut the engine just as she finished her question, confident that she'd squeeze a response out of him. No doubt Lipsky's answer was thoughtful, deferential but pointed, and slick enough to slip through her fingers. I heaved my laundry duffel up on my shoulder, waved a cheerful hello to the Mexican gardener -- the one who looks like a nut-brown Pete Postlethwaite -- as he raked my boss's gravel driveway, and pulled the ripcord on my mental parachute, wondering if today would be the day everyone would work out who was right and who was wrong.

It's gray and cloudy today, and while I was (or should I say whilst) driving through that roundabout thing that I complained about a few weeks ago, I found I was following an actual Mini. Not one of those fancy new ones, but one of those dangerously small, doesn't-belong-on-an-American-road Morris Minis, and I thought about this picture.



See how grey and cloudy it was in Actual Britain the day my father took that picture of me in 1985. And not a druid in sight.

So, while I was driving and thinking my cloudy thoughts, P.J. Harvey was singing I have no time for hate and love. But the way she sings that line, all hollowed-out and covered with guitar, pronounced closer to hade and love, I kept thinking she was saying I have no time for anal love, and I pounded the steering wheel and shouted, Yes! Anal love IS time consuming, isn't it! I mean, unless you want to just go at it with watery eyes and pass out halfway through, it takes a great deal of gentle maneuvering, not to mention an open mind, to make it work.

Yes, yet another complaint from busy mothers everywhere. Who? Who has time for anal love?

I have the mommy's equivalent of Alzheimer's today, i.e., I forget everything I want to post the moment I think of it. Due to general boy-mahem ("Mom! Mom! Mom! Mom! Mom!" "WHAT?" "A spider put a web around my head!" etc.). I did, however, snatch a moment to read this and enjoyed it quite a bit. Sample bit of Hollywood e-mail love:

Personally, I feel you've made a career out of being a sycophant to Carrey or Shandling or Roseanne, and when you weren't kissing ass you were stealing from lesser-known comics or leeching off other people's ideas ("Celtic Pride," "Cable Guy"). I noticed how outraged you were to not get a writing credit on "Cable Guy" until it came out and was panned. You dropped that cause like the showbiz weasel you are. You may not think you're a thief, but most comics know otherwise. And again, you know that too. Have you ever read "What Makes Sammy Run"? I think you'd like it. Get cancer.

Love,

Mark

Jackson takes after Jack in so many ways. He has the same hands, the same feet, the same chin, the same eyes, the same way of lifting his gun, pointing it straight between my eyes, and saying, "I know what you're thinking. Did he fire six shots, or only five? In all the confusion, I kind of lost track myself."

But there's one way he doesn't take after Jack. Jackson isn't circumscribed. Circumcised, excuse me. His foreskin (indeed, his whole penis) is still intact. This was the subject of some brief but emotional debates before the baby was born. Should the child be a boy, Jack wanted to have him cut, for a lot of reasons: most boys are, wanted his son's pecker to look like his, etc.

I, on the other hand, could not imagine someone taking a scalpel to his tiny sensitive weiner and making him scream in the most searing pain he had, or probably ever would, experience in his entire life. Even though I was later told that they do now, in fact, use a local anaesthetic before circomplexion, it still seemed beyond unnecessary: it seemed barbaric.

And yes, of the vast amount of penises I've been lucky enough to shake hands with, all but one has been circumultiplexed. And it was fine. I mean, it was unusual, and interesting, but it seemed to do the wearer no harm and we had quite a lot of fun in other non-foreskin ways, but this is a family blog since, um, about a minute ago, so if you want to hear more about my personal foreskin hoedown you'll want to buy me something with tequila in it and we'll have a nice long chat.

(I'd like to take a moment to point out an excellent site that I stumbled upon while taking a break to look for pictures of foreskin on Google and getting not nearly as much porn as I expected: circumstitions.com. The link goes to a page highlighting the treatment of circumliposuction on TV sitcoms, and there's a big chunk of Seinfeld dialogue that I thought was very funny.)

Anyway, when you have your baby at home with midwives, as I did, you're already traveling down the Nontraditional Highway, and you are calmly and nonjudgmentally handed lots of articles photocopied from scientific journals that describe how the pressure of squirming down the birth canal may be necessary for infants' brain development (i.e., C-sction kids miss out on their first big adrenalin kick), and other studies show that circumlocution can hardwire a boy's brain for pain and violence. (That link has another interesting quote from a medieval Jewish philosopher who stated unequivocally that "the real purpose of circumcision was to reduce sexual gratification." Do I now go looking for links about having sex through a hole in a sheet? Aren't you glad you came here today?)

When you have your baby at home, you learn a lot about your family. Most of them will be terrified that you or the baby will die without a large beeping defibrillator at your side throughout labor. But cooler heads will admit that they, too, were born at home, way back in 1928 (thanks, dad!). Others will discover that their father, who was born in 1925 on a farm in Indiana three months prematurely and put into a chicken incubator to either make it or not, was never circumpopulated, and managed to have a full healthy life that included, among other creative endeavors, the eruption of two manly sons. Learning this about his father helped Jack give in on the circumstinction issue. (He drew the line at cloth diapers, however, so I let him have the Huggies. Compromise is the essence of marriage.)

Once I learned that the whole "men with intact foreskin give their partners uterine cancer" thing had been overturned (take that, Anne Lamott!), I couldn't really see any health advantages to circumpimption. And since recent statistics showed that 40% (that's FORTY PER CENT) of newborn boys aren't (are NOT) being circumspliced, I knew that Jackson probably wouldn't be the only one in the locker room.

But one thing still gets under my, um, skin: most of the boys that I've seen on the changing table at Jackson's preschool are circumcircused, and they have, like, these fat little Vienna sausages bobbing around in their shorts. And Jackson has this rather aesthetic Michelangelo's David of a wang. And I'm like, does cutting off that bit on the end somehow allow the penis to splurt out and be free? Is the foreskin like some little penis corset, like penis footbinding? I know moms of children this age can be competetive about I.Q.s and speech and who knows their ABCs and who doesn't, but I'm kind of worried that my son's love tool isn't going to be monstrous enough.

So, yes, loving everyone and telling the truth. My new philosophy. How's it going with that, you ask?



I'll tell you. At first it's kind of fun! Loving everybody. Instead of assuming that everyone you meet is going to be a disappointing cretin, as was your previous approach to human relations, you're now freed up to imagine that each person you meet, no matter how surly their expression or threatening their body language, is about to tell you a really funny joke.



In other words, you greet each person you meet with hope!



Telling the truth, however, is so much more difficult.



Somewhere along the line it became my habit not to do so.



Because the truth can make people uncomfortable.



And God knows, starting back at that tender age where you think you'll never, ever be popular, you'll shut up and pretend to be anyone but your wonky self just to be accepted. By people whose main talent was growing breasts before you did.



People who barely noticed you anyway, because you were voted most likely to become a brain surgeon, in that highly reliable way sixth graders have of predicting the future, and everyone knows that in seventh grade the only thing worse than being dressed by your mom is being perceived as a "brain."



Couple that with certain powerful members your family being violently sensitive to being told they were assholes by a morose preteenager, and watch in horror as a lifelong habit of remaining silent in the face of hypocrisy falls into place!



And then THIS guy comes along, this guy who has no problem saying "No!" and "GO AWAY" and "I don't want to kiss Grandma!" This little person who needs you not to be lazy and compliant but to blaze a trail of truthfulness and bravery before him.



Which is fun for the first couple of days. Then you realize that you've signed on to act loving and truthful for the rest of your life.



And you're still waiting to hear that really funny joke.

Hi! Welcome to Fussy's new home!

Why the change? What was wrong with "whatsthefuss.com"? It sucked, that's what. But two years ago the bastards wanted $1,000 for fussy.org, and last week they wanted $100. I still have fussy.blogspot.com, too. So there! You will have no Fussys before Me!

Here are two pictures from the dog parade.

Trip to Denver: hilarious in some ways, like watching my fifty-one-year-old brother and nine-year-old nephew giggling uncontrollably while they played game after game of tic tac toe with a green crayon on a stack of cocktail napkins. And watching my husband near meltdown as he routinely missed exits and important turns while I sat in the passenger seat misprogramming the GPS and babbling my way into pothole after pothole on my own personal Highway of Reminiscences Fascinating Only to Me.

However, five days of room service went a long way toward maintaining our relationship's rosy glow. And let's not forget twenty-four child-free hours with unlimited hotel porn.

Segue to . . . some pictures of children! Jackson playing with his cousins and the wonderful kids in their neighborhood.

If you sent me a fussy mail e-mail in the last month and you haven't received a reply yet, would you send me your e-mail again? Due to whoops! general ignorance, I think I told my spam blocking service eat a couple of messages by mistake.