I'm having another wardrobe crisis, people. This means that once again I'm threatening to set my closet on fire and wear nothing but skateboarder t-shirts and these fantastic new jeans I got at the Levi's outlet in the "Husky Girls" section that bow out and make my legs look like I've been riding a pony all day. For shoes I'm thinking of strapping some bits of tire tread to my feet with electrical tape, or possibly organic hemp rope for a touch of Masai warrior chic. And it's all because I work in Montecito. I can't go to the goddamned post office without running a gantlet of plastic surgery victims tiptoeing up to the Montecito Market for their lunchtime bottle of Dom Perignon. In their context, suddenly everything I own, wear, carry, and drive feels like a statement. The dirty Volvo bought out of paranoia now makes me feel like a prep school mom. The sturdy Coach bag, once a practical investment, now feels expensive and showy. Women look at my fantastic, spiritually-superior yoga muscles and ask, "Who's your trainer?" Or, "Pilates?" And God knows what they think of my crow's feet, my jawline, my unBotox'd forehead. I'm so tired of feeling examined. But next month we're moving our office to downtown Santa Barbara, into half of a gallery space next to a tiny barber shop and across the street from that Mexican bar where all the local softball teams go to get plastered after the game. Hence I am hoping that my highly professional husky girl jeans, goofy t-shirts, and third-world footwear will propel me into ninja-like invisibility for awhile. I need a selfconsciousness break.

Here's a delightful post by woman who lists 100 things she is grateful to have learned from her mom. Naturally, this has inspired me to write a list of things I have taught Jackson*.

1. It's okay not to bathe for several days in a row. Like, three. Five is pushing it, but if it's after 10 p.m. and your fingernails are clean and you aren't developing one of those dirt neck rings, let's go see what's on the Cartoon Network.

2. No, you can't have gum for breakfast, but Ritz cracker sandwiches with fake cheese filling from last week's birthday party goodie bag seem to be okay, especially if we're late for school.

3. You want us to spend your college money on Power Ranger toys? SURE!

*Don't worry, I put a dollar in his Therapy Jar every day.

Janna did this smart-guy post about choosing five famous living or dead people she'd invite to dinner. And I was like, Hmm, should I go the Abraham Lincoln, Jesus route? Or should I do the same list I did when I was, like, 12, and the first person on my list was CALIGULA? And my brother was all, "You know, Mrs. Kennedy, the real Caligula probably wasn't anything like John Hurt." At the time we were white-knuckling it through the first American run of "I, Claudius" (or, as we called it, because of the limits created by trying to mosaic and/or chisel the alphabet, "I, Clavdivs"), and I found Mr. Hurt's Caligula devastating. So seductive; so willing to slit open your belly, tear the fetus from your womb, and smash its head against a tree. Which is what my brother was trying to get at. Still, a Roman emperor, after enough good wine? I think he'd have some stories.

Did I ever tell you about the time I met a real live Nazi? During Easter break during my year at the University of Edinburgh, my parents got on an airplane in Denver, and I took a few twisty train rides south (remind me to tell you about that some time), and we all found each other in the Frankfurt airport. Good luck on my part because after I managed to find the airport I realized that I had no idea (1) what time my parents' flight was due in, (2) what airline they were on, or (3) how to speak German. In my been-sleeping-sitting-up-in-a-coat-that-stinks-of-cigarettes-for-three-days state of mental dishevelment, I just happened to shuffle past the baggage carousel, and there they were.

My father is an absolute nut about World War II, to the extent that he reads endless volumes of World War II German army division histories, in German. When he runs out of new ones he rereads the old ones, even though, unbelievably, new ones are published every day. He occasionally corresponds with the authors of these histories, and he wrote to one author, named Otto Weidinger, who went so far as to supply my father with an autographed photo and an invitation to tea at his house. In Germany.


We showed up at a tidy middle-class house in Aalen, and were led to seats in a somewhat formal sitting room where the author's somewhat formal wife offered us tea and cookies. Unfortunately, the limits of my vocabulary force me to describe Herr Weidinger as dapper, as I guess I would anyone of a certain age who combs his hair with Brylcreem and wears a suit to his own living room. I could tell my father was nervous (certainly we all were underdressed -- Americans! tromping down the Rhine in Reeboks), but I wasn't sure how to encourage him. His German was great when it came to chatting with taxi drivers and Chinese immigrants*, but sitting there with a native speaker while a million questions rose up and then fled from his head, well, we had more than one awkward silence. Somehow it came out that he was seventy years old, a fact that my father repeated politely for my mother and me. "You're SEVENTY?" I shouted. I thought he was, like fifty. (This was 1985, so if he was fifty then, that means he would have been leading the Der Führer Regiment out of Oradeur at the age of ten. Yes, my grasp of living history was THAT STRONG.) Anyway, you should have seen his face light up. Nothing flatters a man more, apparently, than a young woman with no grasp of the historical timeline of the twentieth century. Then we hit upon the fact that Herr Weidinger spoke French, as did I, and the big spotlight swung over to me. Suddenly everyone looked at me expectantly, as though a hidden aquifer of sparkling conversational French would suddenly bubble over and drown the kitten of my father's shyly inadequate college German. Unfortunately, I did what I always do when under pressure: I underperform until somebody says it's okay to quit.

It wasn't until we were driving away in our rental Ford Escort that the 40-watt bulb that powers my brain finally flickered on. "Dad, was that guy a NAZI?" I asked. If there's one tiny flaw my father has, apart from his occasional but alarming alignment with the paranoid right, it's his belief that the holocaust absolutely did not happen. Kidding! It's his ability to defend an indefensible position with academic clarity. With footnotes, even. "Well, not everyone in the German army was a Nazi," he began mildly, and wah wah wah until I saw that by not answering my question he had answered my question, and I was left staring at the passing scenery with a fat gray cloud over my head, and the uncomfortable feeling that I had just eaten a bunch of cookies made from the ashes of thousands of G.I. Jews.

And the other people at the table would be Jesus, Abraham Lincoln, Betty White, and Al Franken.



*At some point in the trip we went to a Chinese restaurant for lunch, and I was shocked, shocked! to discover that Asian people emigrated to countries other than America, and struggled to learn a second language other than English. My father actually pieced together a conversation, in German, with the owner's Cambodian wife about the killing fields, and both of them were nearly in tears. If there's one thing I need to learn from my father it's knowing when to lay off the ghoulish interest in the details of other people's tragedies.

Can I blame the previous post on hormones? Sure! And while I'm doing that I'll go ahead and blame this whole Web site on hormones. Rare moments of miserable introspection sandwiched between endless amounts of egomaniacal white bread, making one big LOOK AT ME AND HOW GREAT I AM sandwich. Honestly. Therapy would be more efficient, but for some reason it's a lot more entertaining to blab at a bunch of people I can't see than to blab at one who kept smoothing her trousers and unobtrusively checking the time, who I couldn't figure out if she was a lesbian or not, whose name was listed in the phone book with another woman with the same last name, who who who who.

My skin's breaking out, my tits feel like someone's been using them for punching bags, and for about 24 hours there everything Jack did made me want to run around naked with my hair on fire screaming IT'S A BEAUTIFUL DAY WHY DON'T YOU TAKE YOUR SON TO THE PARK SO I CAN LAY HERE ON THE LAYER OF CRACKER CRUMBS WE CALL A CARPET AND CONCENTRATE ON THE LITTLE SALTY RIVERS STREAMING DOWN MY TEMPLES AND POOLING IN MY EARS.

And while we're at it, honey, can you quit taking care of everything? Because since the moment the Nut was born I have been acutely aware of my total dependence on you. I have no more money of my own, I can't cook, I have less marketable skills than the average middle school graduate, all I can do is feed spearmint gum to a little boy who thinks the height of comedy is to bend over and fart.

So, yeah, normally I can sweep all of this under our disintegrating nylon Home Depot faux-Oriental rug, but for some reason, with the tits and the zits and the hard look at my total lack of direction and purpose, yes, tears, and the inappropriate sharing of drunken self-portraits. When I start posting song lyrics, feel free to shoot me.

Kind of not thinking today, due to unexpected hormonal wig-out!! -- but here are a few things to chew on all the same.

1. This morning Jackson began calling G.I. Joes "G.I. Jews," but I felt, sort of regretfully, obliged to set him straight.

2. I've spent every spare minute of the last two days trying to fit three years of badly stored photo negatives into archival negative sleeves. And in the process discovering, well, this stuff.



August 1995, DRUNK OFF MY ASS and wearing my Zubin Mehta t-shirt. The summer I met Jack. This at his mom's house, while his step-dad was dying of cancer.



October 2000, HOO-BOY, THE SECOND HONEYMOON IN ZIHUATENEJO. Can you tell that I didn't know I was pregnant here, but spent the entire week weeping and going to bed early? You have to click on it to really feel the icy chill of my "Don't Touch Me" force field.

WARNING: BABY PHOTOS



July 2001, This picture always makes me think of Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects.



AAAAARGH!

About ten years ago my friend George wrote and directed a play about Carlos the Jackal. International jet-setting terrorists aren't really my bag, baby, but George is a talented guy so I did the drive down to Ventura for a performance, wearing, as I recall, a pleated plaid mini skirt. The only reason I mention that is because (a) it was the first time I met George's wife and I'm not sure how pleased she was with me looking like that and kissing her husband, and (b) to admit as an aside that I used to be kind of a jerk around wives and girlfriends, but (c) fortunately I seem to have grown out of it.

Anyway, if you don't feel like clicking on that link, I'll tell you that Carlos the Jackal was renowned for dodging Johnny Law (or, I suppose, Juan la Ley), and he slipped under the eagle eyes of justice many times by doing drastic things to modify his appearance, like plastic surgery and liposuction. [I hope you noticed the internal rhyme of drastic and plastic in that last sentence. You did? Awesome.]

Between acts the house lights came up and an astonishing (to me) song came over the loudspeakers. George meant it as a humorous comment on Carlos's liposuction, and the song was called, ha ha, "Three Hundred Pounds of Joy." And I was sitting there in my little Catholic-schoolgirl-gone-bad outfit thinking, Holy shit, I never knew a man whose larynx was made out of sandpaper could seduce women by singing through a broken radiator filled with potsherds.

I drove back up to Santa Barbara and found Jack sitting on my couch watching television, and I said, I just heard the most amazing song, and Jack was all, You've never heard any Howlin' Wolf before? I pretty much think of those first six months of our relationship as The Very Long Summer of Howlin' Wolf, with a few weekends of Etta James thrown in there for some rusty-voiced yin. There's an extremely embarrassing photo of me at the Bushmills-fueled ass-end of one of our record parties dancing to "300 Pounds"; I look like a lily-white but drunken bookstore clerk doing some kind of Frug variation whose energy and appeal absolutely did not translate from the lived moment through the eye of an idiot-proof one-shot camera and onto a cold, hard 4 x 5 glossy Kodak print.

Last Monday I was driving to yoga at 5:50 a.m. when Hello NPR! They're doing a story on, say it with me: Chester Burnett*, the boy raised 100 feet from the railroad tracks who grew into the man who made the incomprehensible leap from Delta farmer to Musical Force of Nature whose deeply religious mother rejected him for his secular success and broke his heart forever.

It actually turns out to be a good thing to have "Smokestack Lightnin' " going through your head as you coax your body through several early-morning surya namaskaras. It beats the hell out of Sting, or Krishna Das, or whoever's doing the Anglo-Indian popstar chanting these days. So now I must I give thanks for the cultural bridges of George, NPR, and my husband, bringing races together with respect, intelligence, peace, and harmony. But it takes a weirdo like me to roll up Howlin' Wolf in a yoga mat for you like a gift. A gift that smells like my feet.

*That's his real name. I just thought maybe you were sick of reading "Howlin' Wolf." Those apostrophes can be downright exhausting.

Yesterday I had the most terrifying food experience of my adult life. Jackson and I opened a box of Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans. I have no excuse for this $1.99-for-fifteen-jelly-beans extravagance, except that I'm one of those Harry Potter-reading idiots. Last summer I started the first book in the series as mindless beach reading, insisting to all those within earshot that I needed to vet it because Jackson would probably want to read it someday and I wanted to make sure it wasn't pure trash, or, as certain exceedingly Roman Catholic members of my family seem to think, full of the wicked magical temptations of a Satanic Beastmaster. With each new volume I shed my reluctance like so much sweaty lingerie, and I raced through the first five books in the series, pronouncing them excellent indeed. Almost everyone with whom I shared this revelation excused themselves to go vomit, with the exception of several homeschooled eight-to-thirteen-year-olds. (I sent the Harry Potter books to my smartyboots Ph.D.-candidate sister-in-law for Christmas, and was gratified to find that sometime around the third of January she was drafting a letter to J. K. Rowling demanding that she write and release the sixth Harry Potter book this instant. This proves nothing other than that I am insecure about my latent affinity for adolescent fantasy fiction, and need to have my tastes propped up by associating them with people smarter than me.)

ANYWAY, I bought a couple of boxes of the aforementioned Harry Potter-inspired jelly beans thinking that it would be fun for Jackson and me to pick through the pleasant tastes of grape jelly and toasted marshmallows and spaghetti and grass. I was kind of only half-processing the fact that other flavors included in the box were vomit, booger, soap, dirt, earthworm, earwax, and sardine.

And guess what? THE FUCKING THINGS TASTE EXACTLY LIKE VOMIT, BOOGERS, SOAP, DIRT, EARTHWORMS, EARWAX, AND SARDINES. Soap? Actually, it's rose-scented soap, and as it was one of the first of the more dangerous flavors I tried, the fact that it was halfway palatable gave me the courage to continue. Naturally, I didn't even know what earthworms tasted like until I popped one of those fuckers in my mouth and said to myself, Yes, that's pretty much what I'd expect an earthworm to taste like: a heady blend of dirt and the smell of squished worms on the wet sidewalk after a rainstorm in front of my house when I was five years old. Earwax was nothing, but I seriously almost puked after a bite of sugar-coated sardine. The only flavor they're missing at this point is Abyssinian cat shit.

Back before we had a child, when we had enough emotional energy to spare for several bloodsucking, freeloading cats, we used to get a chuckle from watching one little bastard in particular use the litterbox. She'd step in there so precisely, and then turn around and hike up her tail, and while she was releasing her poisonous fluids she'd get this fixed expression on her face, as though listening to a distant inner voice. She actually looked quite thoughtful.

It didn't take being caught on the pot more than once or twice for Jack to note that, in a similar position, I assumed a similar expression of blank concentration. To this day whenever he catches sight of me through our always-open bathroom door, he says "Kitty" to me in that gentle, aw-c'mere-sugar-here's-a-little-tuna-water voice.

So yesterday I was at the office, which has a separate entrance around the back of my boss's house, and I stepped into the house to use the bathroom. Unfortunately, Boss had been away for a week, and his housesitter had spent the previous three days at a bachelorette party, and Boss's Partner's assistant hadn't been real enthusiastic about getting after each and every itty bitty dried-up pool of neurotic Abyssinian cat shit that dotted every slate or tile floor of Boss and Partner's $3,000,000 dollar house.

And I'd be goddamned if I was going to scrape it all up with a butter knife.

So I picked my way through this minefield of an expensively tiled bathroom, and I was sitting on the toilet, in deep negotiation with my colon thanks to some new and slightly constipating liver-cleanse herbs, when I caught sight of a big yellow pool of cat piss in the corner by the shower, and I realized that I actually was shitting in a cat box; I had reached the nexus of my expression; I had finally achieved hypostatic Cat union.

The other day Jackson made his friend Anna cry. He was getting bossy with her, he didn't want to share his snack, he told her she needed to get her own bowl of nasty wheat-free corn-puff cakes dusted with white cheddar powder, and she burst into tears. Her mom took her home, and I called the next morning to make sure they didn't hate us, and a few hours later we were all at the kiddie pool, our Northern European shoulders blistering in the sun while our feet slowly hypothermiated and our toes broke off and floated away like little black novelty ice cubes in the unheated punchbowl of Los Banos public pool.

And then, by God, Jackson did it again. He took something away from Anna and wouldn't give it back, but bless her heart, she held it together and just went to sit on her towel and put her head in her mom's lap. And I said, What was that about? And Jackson said, Nothing! and pouted for a couple of beats, and then I watched him get up and walk over to Anna's towel and sit down in front of her. She kind of scootched around so he could only see the side of her face. At this point I broke away to do a quick scan of the pool because some big kids were playing with Jackson's ball and they kept glancing over at me to see if I was keeping track of them, and I kept giving them the steely eyeball, through my Lew Wassermanesque sunglasses, an eyeball that said, Yeah, right, you think we're all going to forget about our special floaty dolphin ball with the cute flippers and let you just take it home? Fat fucking chance. And then Anna's mom thwapped me on the leg and pointed at our kids, and they were hugging. And then they got up and they were all, Okay, you guys, you can quit staring at us, we know we just did the cutest thing in the universe by not talking about what happened, by not using our goddamned words but instead simply reaching out and allowing touch to heal our small rift, so you two can just shut up about it, okay? We're going to go pretend to swim now.

And they did.

Well dry, camel dead.

So in the interest of dredging up a good reason to live keep posting, I'm going to do this thing where I go through my bookshelves and just throw up the first page of whatever I find there. I did it for the far right sidebar this morning (it's now below), and then I thought, Hey! Wouldn't it be fun to have some actual writing on this blog! With a link to the book! Not that I've earned a cent on my Amazon Associates account for my assiduous linkage; no, I'm not doing this to earn points.

I'm doing this because I don't have a goddamn thing to say right now.

Et voilà!

1

Years ago, a child in a tree with a small caliber rifle bushwacked a piano through the open summer windows of a neighbor's living room. The child's name was Nicholas Payne.

Dragged from the tree by the piano's owner, his rifle smashed upon a rock and flung, he was held by the neck in the living room and obliged to view the piano point blank, to dig into its interior and see the cut strings, the splintered holes that let slender shafts of light ignite small circles of dark inside the piano.

"You have spoiled my piano."

The child would remember the great wing of the lid over his head, the darkness, the cut wires curling upon themselves, the smell of spice and the sudden idea that the piano had been sailed full of spice from the Indies free of the bullet holes that would have sent it to the bottom, resonant with uncut strings, its mahogany lid slicing the wind and sheltering a moist and fragrant cargo of spice.

What an idea.

Thomas McGuane, the opening page of The Bushwhacked Piano, 1971.

Chapter 1

"Tuesday: 17th February

I had dinner with Jerry at the Mayflower and took a cab to the station. The night was drizzly and warm. I'd had a week of it and I wanted to get back. The town was all lighted up, whirling with cars, and from Lafayette Square the White House looked clean as calimine in the floodlights. Clean and lonely behind the February elms. The Old Man was working late again.


I mentioned the weather to the driver and he said he didn't like it. The jacket hung in pleats from his shoulder blades. He came from Vermont -- most of them were Southerners -- and up there they had a saying that green winters make fat churchyards.

'Been this way all up and down the coast for a week now.'

'We'll get a blizzard to top it off,' I said.

Some of the rest of the week is blurred, but I remember everything about that night. Everything before I found Niobe's note and everything afterwards. It had to be a note. The theatrical touch. I felt that later in the whole city, New York, running wild like an idiot girl with some dream of lilacs in her little canine skull. Not quite, of course. For me, it was more like being the sober host at a terrific party where everyone else has a fine glittering edge. That is, until I got it too."

Vincent McHugh, the opening page of I Am Thinking of My Darling, 1943.

Hypothetical question:

If you were, say, having a beer in the backyard with your neighbor on the 4th of July and she told you that not ten minutes before you arrived a hawk had landed only twenty feet away with a cockatiel in its claws, and the cockatiel was writhing around and trying to escape, but the hawk just stood there with its claws in the cockatiel, waiting for it to die. And two big crows were up above in the eucalyptus tree waiting to see if the hawk would try to fly off with the not-yet-dead cockatiel, and if the hawk dropped the cockatiel then the crows would have a chance at it. And you're all, Wow, what a National Geographic Presents: Predators! moment, right in my own back yard! And I missed it. Dang.

And then, say, what if, the next day, you're talking with a different neighbor and she starts telling you how she punished her daughter for letting their brand-new $150.00 cockatiel fly away, the bird that the girl's brothers had each chipped in $40.00 of their allowance for, how they clipped it wings even, and how the girl was grounded for a week and sat in her room crying for three hours with no TV, writing "I'm sorry, I'm sorry" over and over and over again in her diary?

Would you say, Hey! I know what happened to Snifffer! Or would you say, Aww, that's too bad, I'll listen out for that little wolf whistle you taught him? Or would you get all nervous and start blabbing this story you heard about a contractor being up on a roof and all of a sudden a SNAKE falls out of the sky and lands right in front of him! It's writhing around up there on the peak of the roof, and the guy's freaking out because SNAKES are FALLING from the SKY! And your neighbor's all, Uh-huh, that's weird, and she's wondering what in hell that has to do with her kids' cockatiel flying away, and you're all, Blah blah blah, if I keep talking utter nonsense about HAWKS dropping SNAKES maybe I can steer us away from the painful and obvious connection between HAWKS and SNAKES and HAWKS and COCKATIELS.

So is that what you'd do, do you think? Or do you think your neighbor would rev up her chainsaw just to shut you up?

Several million years ago, in one of many failed attempts to stay in school forever, I took a graduate seminar in Melville and Twain. It was a great excuse to read some hunkin' chunks'a nineteenth-century lit I'd have otherwise overlooked. Roughing It, and Moby Dick, and Typee: all honest-to-God page-turners that I thoroughly enjoyed.



It was a small class, maybe a dozen students, most of whom looked like they were on a fast track to a spare room in their mother's basement. The professor was a cardigan-sporting sixty-something who led tame discussions about theme and dénoument. While several of my bookstore coworkers at the time were downtown at NYU being held at knifepoint by Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva, I was up at Hunter College being asked to produce the intellectual equivalent of croched antimacassers. I felt that once again, despite my usual effort to be where it was at, my life was about as cutting-edge as long underwear.



One wet evening at the beginning of class, à propos of nothing I can recall, the professor mentioned a magazine ad she'd noticed that day, and asked us if we didn't agree that it was more of a "waste" for a man to be a model than a woman. Implying that a man ought to accomplish more with his life than get paid to be pretty, but don't we all feel perfectly comfortable when a woman trades on nothing more than her looks? I refused to link arms and march with her homosexist opinions, but I was pretty much alone in telling her so; I think a few people were actually taking notes in case this might be on the final exam.



So now it's two days ago and I'm looking at a NY Times fashion layout displaying a man on a runway wearing surf shorts and a green feathered headpiece, and I'm thinking, Dear professor whose name I've forgotten, how many choices does a man with legs that smooth have? Do you really think he'd be contributing more to the human race by delivering appliances? Sure, in another era he might have written epic poetry, or raped and pillaged his way through the middle east . . .



. . . but what can a twenty-first-century father expect from a beautiful son with a thick head of hair and a miserable expression? Should he take over the family pet store? Male models have dreams, too, you know!



If you really want to face your assumptions about men based on the way they look, go on over to Match.com and take their physical attraction test. Three hundred or so snap judgements later, you'll start to see some patterns in your thinking.

"Frat boy, would think I'm weird," and "Weird looking, would get too clingy," "Date rapist," etc. etc.



The point is, some beautiful men have brains . . .



. . . and some don't.



There are smart ugly guys and stupid plain guys and stupid handsome guys, and so what if a few of the pretty ones are smart enough to have figured out how to get paid for swishing around in designer skivvies? Does that make them less than men?



Well, kind of. Sometimes, just a little bit.

Until it's staring you in the face, you don't realize how crucial is this one choice you have, the one the books don't tell you about: the choice to either have a sense of humor about small disasters, or not. For example, to quickly extricate by tickling the three year old who jumps across into the driver's seat and, while you're parked on a hill, takes the car out of gear. Because I guess everyone assumes you're either blessed with a humor muscle all toned up and ready to go from birth, or you're born with a weak little humor muscle, all withered and useless, and no way to flex it but with several grams of mushrooms and a leisurely afternoon in which to contemplate your fingerprints.

Parenting books go on and on about giving children choices (in our house it's usually just Corona or Amstel, and kids quickly develop their own preferences). But you have a choice, too. You can choose to cheer up a cranky preschooler by insisting that Monkey Boogers come out of his butt, or by pretending to vomit up a tennis ball, or by wearing a t-shirt from the local skate shop with the picture of Raggedy Ann brandishing a smoking gun.

On the flip side, it's a rare children's book or movie that rewards parents who are actually paying attention. There are many children's entertainments that you don't have to watch with your child and explain all the way through. Clifford the Big Red Dog, for example; you know nothing unpleasant's going to happen in a Clifford cartoon, except for that time the voice of Clifford, the late John Ritter, spent nine hours screwing a whore in Hollywood and got outed in You'll Never Make Love In This Town Again.

But if you do choose to pay attention, children's books and movies sometimes bless you with a genuine brief inward secret Wiley Coyote smile. Like that scene in Shrek 2 when Donkey walks into a bar and the bartender says: "Why the long face?"

Or that "Pinky and the Brain" cartoon you find yourself listening to a little more closely because it sounds like the voice actors are doing Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet.

Or this page from Walter the Farting Dog:





It's the little things that help me get through my days.