Dear Mr. Baby:
Lately you've been a generally fun guy to hang around with. Forgotten are what I now refer to as the Dark Times - the days of whistling the repetitive chords of the Mexican Hat Dance and lunging deeply, painfully, training-for-Olympian-feats-of-strength-ly so that you would sleep - attached to me like a soft, easily irritated leech - for just twenty minutes for the love of God. Gone are the bleary nights and mornings and who knows if it's day or night-ings, staring emptily at the cheese grater and considering the pros and cons of rubbing it against my unfathomably itchy eyeball. No, since you rounded the big four months, we've been relaxing, taking naps, petting the dog, removing fistfulls of his hair from your incredibly strong little baby fists, reading Goodnight Moon over and over and over again to your ever-renewed interest and surprise. Sure, you have been a bit drooly, and you still don't contribute much the household economy or clean anything up, but your soft fuzzy baldness and effervescent bum, your spontaneous, toothless grinning and genuine, charming appreciation of the well-loved children's song, Wheels on The Bus (provided that you actually go up-and-down and swish-swish-swish) more than make up for your apathy toward cleanliness and order. What a lovely baby, I have been thinking, as you gently gum my nose and make tiny, stinky farts while compiling one of your accidental pseudo-phrases, like aaaaaay nooooo or daaahg pyooo or my personal favourite, ooooooo shhhhhhhhht.
Then, one night, as we were all sleeping soundly in the placid tranquility of this peaceful dynasty, you awoke as you often do to babble incoherently but adorably into the air with soft little gurgles and round coos before drifting predictably back to sleep.
And then for for no apparent, logical, imaginable, or justifiable reason, instead of going back to sleep, you began to emit The Most Annoying Sound on The Fucking Planet.
What's so annoying about The Most Annoying Sound on The Fucking Planet? Oh, Mr. Baby, I don't know, really. It's the frequency, in part, up there in that provoking, exasperating octave reserved for smoke detectors and Mariah Carey's ego. It's the boundless, operatic lung capacity you apparently possess that allows you to sustain The Most Annoying Sound on The Fucking Planet for minutes that seem like tiny days - tiny, grating, irritating days. It's definitely something about the ridiculous, physically impossible volume you're cranked up to. It's the way you are so expressively panicked- or distressed- or angry-sounding in your articulation of this sound, sending everyone scurrying around the house searching for the source of your discomfort or excruciating pain or existential torment only to discover, again and again, that you have no problem, no problem whatsoever. There's nothing you want, there's nothing we can do, legally or ethically, to shut you up. You're just shrieking, delightedly. Just emitting this sound - this horrible, horrible sound Mr. Baby - for absolutely no fucking reason at all.
You're new on the scene and haven't, as such, had time to sort this out for yourself. But when people begin moving their lips in the shapes of the numbers one through ten, or quietly whispering things like, "My patience is a delicate white flower in a garden, and I am watering it with a can, in a quiet garden...'' with noticeable frequency around you, you have, Mr. Baby, probably stepped over the line. And so it's nice that you can make The Most Annoying Sound on The Fucking Planet, and I promise to put it to good use someday. Maybe I'll need a window broken or want to interrogate someone or just be really mean to some bats. Maybe someday I'll look back fondly at this time, and your dad and I will say to each other, hey remember when Mr. Baby started making The Most Annoying Sound on The Fucking Planet for five minutes at a time for no reason and there was nothing you could do to turn it off and we started to have migraines from it because the capillaries in our brains were actually bursting? I wish we could hear that again.
But for now, little dude, let's just turn it off.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Causes. Effects.
Dear Mr. Baby:
All the books say you're too young for this, but I say what the hell, let's give it a shot. Because it would be really really nice, Mr. Baby, if you understood these two concepts and their relation to each other. I'm talking about our friends Cause, and his not-so-distantly related cousin, Effect. These concepts would probably illuminate, to your great surprise and delight, some currently shadowy and blurred parts of your day.
You might wonder, for example, why you are sometimes lounging about in mid-air, enjoying the lyrical tales of Mr. Microwave and Mr. Basket in the tender and soothing tones of your mother's voice, receiving raspberry kisses and giggling mirthfully, and then suddenly being jostled to the harsh cries of ''aw, fuck, kid,'' bouncing jaggedly and swerving unceremoniously through several rooms to land, not at all gently, in your cold and lonely crib without so much as a farewell. This perplexing change of demeanor and location, this sudden withdrawal of motherly affection, would be infinitely more explicable if you could connect somewhere in that head of yours the aforementioned events, and the squishy feeling of your fingers coming into contact with a retina - to wit, your mother's - at high speed.
You could, as another example, more accurately deflect the accusatory expression on your face when your throat feels painful and itchy and your eyes begin to water and you are looking around the room for sympathy or the disposal of your disdain. If you knew about Cause and Effect, you would know that it is senseless to look at me then, because the plastic spoon repeatedly impacting and scraping your tonsils is not intertwined by any physics-defying magic to me, but rather held by your own hand, and therefore it would behoove you to cast your dour expression upon a mirror. You would also know that I am not to blame for you holding this object, because you reached out with your little claw hands and snatched it from me every time. Every time.
If you knew about Cause and Effect, Mr. Baby, you could perhaps link the sensations of angst and bitterness, and your desire to throw things at your mommy and yell hoarsely and unhappily for what must be very long amounts of time, percentage-wise speaking, of your life, with the idea of sleeping, which causes those feelings to subside if you just do it. It's a bit of a stretch, but you might also be able to associate Mean Mommy (you know who that is) with the nights you ''have a party'' in your crib. And then maybe you could come full circle in a web of enlightenment, and conjecture that most problems in your world are caused by a dearth of sleep, and maybe - I know these are vain and absurd vagaries, Mr. Baby - but maybe you could even accommodate the cognizance of your own, singular culpability in this intifada of insomnia and take it upon yourself to bring peace by just closing your eyes, and your mouth. Perhaps you could conjoin these closings with the pacific breeze that floats through the house, and the return of Nice Mommy.
When you begin to feel a slight headache, you begin to feel as though the world is a maraca and you are trapped inside of it, the close and claustrophobic swishing sounds begin to suffocate you and your temple becomes increasingly tender - you could look to your left, and see the repetitive motion of your limbs, and realize that it will all be quiet, if only you stop hitting yourself in the head with a rattle.
Oh, the places we could go Mr. Baby! In the morning, rather than waiting for the slow, wet stench of realization to ooze from your pants to your mind, you could instead think to yourself, ''oh hey, I'm about to take a crap again,'' and let someone know before it's all smashed into your bum. Probably you've wondered why it takes so long, in the cold, cold morning, to become warm again... if you just understood that it is almost impossible to put clothing on a simultaneously frantic and limp human being who is also pinching you like a crab and laughing like an evil doll, if you knew that the clothes are the thing, the thing that makes you warm, but only if you are wearing them. If you could understand that food must travel through your mouth and into your stomach to diminish your gnawing hunger and gnawing, annoying little protests about it...that smearing it on the dog and your face do not cause this journey to your stomach to happen....oh, the things we could economize, the filth and gunk and disgusting mire we could avoid, the body fluids we could quarantine, Mr. Baby. The racket we could attenuate....the pandemonium we could diminish...
Chimera, fantasy, delusion...indeed. Still. Give it some thought, Mr. Baby. It would really shed some light on things.
All the books say you're too young for this, but I say what the hell, let's give it a shot. Because it would be really really nice, Mr. Baby, if you understood these two concepts and their relation to each other. I'm talking about our friends Cause, and his not-so-distantly related cousin, Effect. These concepts would probably illuminate, to your great surprise and delight, some currently shadowy and blurred parts of your day.
You might wonder, for example, why you are sometimes lounging about in mid-air, enjoying the lyrical tales of Mr. Microwave and Mr. Basket in the tender and soothing tones of your mother's voice, receiving raspberry kisses and giggling mirthfully, and then suddenly being jostled to the harsh cries of ''aw, fuck, kid,'' bouncing jaggedly and swerving unceremoniously through several rooms to land, not at all gently, in your cold and lonely crib without so much as a farewell. This perplexing change of demeanor and location, this sudden withdrawal of motherly affection, would be infinitely more explicable if you could connect somewhere in that head of yours the aforementioned events, and the squishy feeling of your fingers coming into contact with a retina - to wit, your mother's - at high speed.
You could, as another example, more accurately deflect the accusatory expression on your face when your throat feels painful and itchy and your eyes begin to water and you are looking around the room for sympathy or the disposal of your disdain. If you knew about Cause and Effect, you would know that it is senseless to look at me then, because the plastic spoon repeatedly impacting and scraping your tonsils is not intertwined by any physics-defying magic to me, but rather held by your own hand, and therefore it would behoove you to cast your dour expression upon a mirror. You would also know that I am not to blame for you holding this object, because you reached out with your little claw hands and snatched it from me every time. Every time.
If you knew about Cause and Effect, Mr. Baby, you could perhaps link the sensations of angst and bitterness, and your desire to throw things at your mommy and yell hoarsely and unhappily for what must be very long amounts of time, percentage-wise speaking, of your life, with the idea of sleeping, which causes those feelings to subside if you just do it. It's a bit of a stretch, but you might also be able to associate Mean Mommy (you know who that is) with the nights you ''have a party'' in your crib. And then maybe you could come full circle in a web of enlightenment, and conjecture that most problems in your world are caused by a dearth of sleep, and maybe - I know these are vain and absurd vagaries, Mr. Baby - but maybe you could even accommodate the cognizance of your own, singular culpability in this intifada of insomnia and take it upon yourself to bring peace by just closing your eyes, and your mouth. Perhaps you could conjoin these closings with the pacific breeze that floats through the house, and the return of Nice Mommy.
When you begin to feel a slight headache, you begin to feel as though the world is a maraca and you are trapped inside of it, the close and claustrophobic swishing sounds begin to suffocate you and your temple becomes increasingly tender - you could look to your left, and see the repetitive motion of your limbs, and realize that it will all be quiet, if only you stop hitting yourself in the head with a rattle.
Oh, the places we could go Mr. Baby! In the morning, rather than waiting for the slow, wet stench of realization to ooze from your pants to your mind, you could instead think to yourself, ''oh hey, I'm about to take a crap again,'' and let someone know before it's all smashed into your bum. Probably you've wondered why it takes so long, in the cold, cold morning, to become warm again... if you just understood that it is almost impossible to put clothing on a simultaneously frantic and limp human being who is also pinching you like a crab and laughing like an evil doll, if you knew that the clothes are the thing, the thing that makes you warm, but only if you are wearing them. If you could understand that food must travel through your mouth and into your stomach to diminish your gnawing hunger and gnawing, annoying little protests about it...that smearing it on the dog and your face do not cause this journey to your stomach to happen....oh, the things we could economize, the filth and gunk and disgusting mire we could avoid, the body fluids we could quarantine, Mr. Baby. The racket we could attenuate....the pandemonium we could diminish...
Chimera, fantasy, delusion...indeed. Still. Give it some thought, Mr. Baby. It would really shed some light on things.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)