Category: The Ramble (page 174 of 462)

BEHOLD THESE LITTLE LADYBOOGERS.

I’m warning you, too, I have some new spider macros.

And I’m gonna post them.

Not this week. But next week, mos def.

I KNOW. I know! I said I wouldn’t. But they’re so cool. And spiders, c’mon — spiders are helpful little beasts. All those times you went to the doctor and you’re like LOOK AT THIS SPIDER BITE, and the doctor reminds you that 90% of spider bites aren’t actually spider bites? Spiders are great. They eat bad bugs. They’re like possums in that way — we hate on possums (sorry, “opossum”) but they eat thousands of ticks a week. And ticks are little monsters.

Anyway! Cool spider photos incoming next week. I will give you enough white space at the fore of the post so you never have to scroll down and see them ever, ever, ever.

What else is going on?

In a couple weeks I’ll be at the Orlando Book Festival, giving a keynote, signing some books.

On 6/22, I’ll be at Doylestown Bookshop, hanging out with Paul Tremblay and talking about his (really fucking amazing) newest, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock.

I may be at Let’s Play Books in July, too, to talk Star Wars.

I’ll be at SDCC in July.

Then in August, I’ll be back at the Doylestown Bookshop for the launch of Invasive!

You can preorder the book, signed, from Doylestown Bookshop here. (And if you don’t know, pre-ordering helps the author and the publishing ecosystem in a whole host of ways. It conveys to the seller and publisher that the author is in demand. It helps the seller stock the book. It helps the author FEEL GOOD ABOUT HIMSELF AND NOT WEEP OPENLY INTO HIS FROSTED FLAKES and stuff like that.)

I think that’s all, folks.

Maps are glorious things. With them we find treasure. We make our way across counties, states and countries. We use them to mark DANGER. Maps can be public, secret, or something interstitial. Maps can be magic or mundane.

Maps are cool.

So, you will write a piece of flash fiction that contains a map.

Not a literal, drawn map (though if you can do that, you’re extra-awesome). No, I mean, in the fiction itself, a map is a part of the story. That’s it. That’s the only stipulation besides the usuals:

Length: ~1000 words

Due by: Fri, June 10th, noon EST

Post at your online space. Give us a link in the comments. The end.

Steven Spohn is a writer and also the COO and outreach director at AbleGamers, a charitable organization dedicated to helping disabled people improve their lives through gaming. Steve wanted to write something about an upcoming film based on a novel, Me Before You by Jojo Moyes, and he asked if it would be a good fit here. And I think it’s important to have his voice heard with things like this. So, here’s Steven! (Oh, and don’t forget to read another post of his here — “Your Last Good Day.”)

* * *

An Open Letter to Jojo Moyes and Aspiring Writers —

As a child, I never really got to “see myself” on-screen in the same way that other children did in Superman, Batman or Xena.

Sure. I could watch Keanu Reeves as Neo, indulge the fantasy, dive into the escapism and picture myself as The Chosen One. After all, no one can fly or dodge bullets like Mr. Anderson, so the fact that I couldn’t walk like he does wasn’t exactly a stretch of my imagination.

Historically, Hollywood releases a movie with a profoundly disabled character once every few years. And although the frequency has been increasing as disability becomes more accepted in the mainstream, main characters with severe disabilities are extremely rare and (in my experience) never seen in romances.

In fact, the lack of main characters in books or TV with severe physical disabilities confining them to a wheelchair are so rare that if I had a quarter for every time someone asked me if my favorite fictional character was Professor Charles Xavier, I could literally buy you a Ferrari.

So, you can probably imagine when I first saw the trailer for Me Before You, a movie depicting a quadriplegic man romancing a young female caretaker and sharing some of the same thoughts most of us with severe disabilities have, I would’ve been excited. “Finally! A romance about a quadriplegic man and an able-bodied woman.”

(Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eh993__rOxA)

**Spoiler warning below for the book and movie Me Before You**

And I was, until I read the book.

The female lead Louisa is hired to take care of Will, which unbeknownst to her is a type of suicide watch. When she finds out he plans to go to Dignitas — a place in Switzerland that helps people commit assisted suicide, she’s distraught. Eventually Lou comes around and decides she will do her best to change his mind during the remainder of the six-month window Will promised his parents he would use to consider his choice. In the end, despite falling in love with each other and Louisa begging Will not to go, he decides to stick to his decision and end his life.

“I don’t want you to be tied to me, to my hospital appointments, to the restrictions on my life. I don’t want you to miss out on all the things someone else could give you. And, selfishly, I don’t want you to look at me one day and feel even the tiniest bit of regret or pity that — … You have no idea how this would play out. You have no idea how you’re going to feel even six months from now. And I don’t want to look at you every day, to see you naked, to watch you wandering around the annex in your crazy dresses and not… not be able to do what I want with you. Oh, Clark, if you had any idea what I want to do to you right now. And I… I can’t live with that knowledge. I can’t. It’s not who I am. I can’t be the kind of man who just… accepts.” (pp. 325-326)

Men and women who are severely disabled fight demons that speak the words above almost every day. There is not a man or woman who is quadriplegic or near the quadriplegic stage of a progressive disease who has not worried about being a burden to their loved ones or if being in a relationship is fair. Those questions are in the back of our minds every moment of every day.

‘Me Before You’ was an opportunity to create a commercially successful, Nicholas-Sparks-level, true genre-defining romantic movie starring someone who is severely physically handicapped conquering his demons, winning the girl and riding off into the sunset like we see in so many other Hollywood romances.

If those types of books and movies were more common, this movie wouldn’t even be controversial because it would just be one movie of dozens. Unfortunately, there are very few scripts written about severely physically disabled people, let alone in romance.

Moyes could have tackled society’s view of people with disabilities and sexuality. In the view of many people, just being disabled, in and of itself, takes sexuality away from being human. Instead, this story perpetuates the stereotype of sexually neutral disabled people by painting the picture of a sexually attractive quadriplegic man and then neutering him.

(The most sexually intense scene between Lou and Will is a few kisses.)

Instead we get a tragedy. We get thousands upon thousands of people with disabilities who will finally see a character like themselves on the big screen in a real Hollywood blockbuster who chooses to end his own life because being disabled is too hard.

Even though Will gets the girl, has ridiculous amounts of money, power, oh and A CASTLE, he can’t imagine living life with a ridiculously higher quality of life than most people with disabilities will ever be afforded.

So, if the movie isn’t about them getting it on or Will’s triumph over adversity, what is the point of the movie?

Will is a plot device.

The book was never about Will. The story is about Lou and how Will’s influence changes her life. Lou fails to show Will the joy that can still be had in the world, even if you find love, because you are dealing with some sort of disability.

Goodreads interviewed Jojo Moyes at one point directly asking if she consulted with anyone with quadriplegia before writing the book:

“Not quadriplegics. The thing that really informed it was a member of my family who suffers from a progressive disease. I have been involved in feeding her, taking her out, and that kind of thing.”

While it’s disturbing she did not conduct any interviews with people who are actually quadriplegic, Moyes has a deaf son. She’s personally seen the attitudes some people can exhibit around her son calling the negativity “frustrating” in the same interview. She knows what it’s like to have people presume things about you or your loved one without actually knowing them.

Supporters of this book hope it will help open a dialogue on the subject of assisted suicide. But what a lot of able-bodied supporters don’t understand is when you are living life as a quadriplegic person, you’re dealing with the dark themes presented in the book and movie every day.

I’ve had perfect strangers walk up to me and ask if “my dick works.” I’ve had the heart-wrenching conversation with lovers explaining the restrictions on my life and how those restrictions would affect them. I’ve had people literally say to me “I’m not as strong as you. If I was in your position I would’ve killed myself.”

In real-life, the girl doesn’t always get the boy, sometimes people decide to commit suicide, and love doesn’t conquer all.

The Christopher Reeves foundation released a brief but powerful statement on the movie:

“Me Before You touches on poignant themes about what it is like to both live with a spinal cord injury and care for someone as a family member and caregiver.

However, while Jojo Moyes’ book is defined as fiction, the character of Will Traynor is very real to 5.6 million Americans living with paralysis. At the Reeve Foundation, our mission includes enhancing quality of life, independence and health for all individuals living with paralysis.

The Reeve Foundation does not believe disability is synonymous with hopelessness or that living with a spinal cord injury is considered a fate worse than death.

“Disability does not sideline or disqualify someone from living a full and active life. Everyone living with paralysis can live boldly.”

After the former man of steel himself, Christopher Reeve, was in an accident leaving him completely quadriplegic, his wife Dana wrote how to be a wife, not a caretaker. That yes, there are some parts of someone’s care that can be challenging, but ultimately, you’re still human. A woman and a man in love, lust.

You see, for people like me, Christopher Reeves, and millions of other people who have quadriplegic conditions, this isn’t just a movie. This is people seeing a misrepresentation of what it’s like to be quadriplegic. It’s like if Hollywood took your life and focused on the darkest hours, ignoring all the triumphs, and only noted the worst-case scenario.

There are so many “meet cute” heartfelt, endearing, hilarious, sweet and tear-jerking parts of being in a relationship with someone who has a disability that you will probably never get to see on the big screen.

You probably won’t get to see a character working out like Rocky to be able to stand for just a moment on his wedding day like my friend, Marco, did. You probably won’t get to see a character smacking her boob off furniture trying to get into sexual positions more convoluted than the Kama Sutra like my girlfriends have done. You probably won’t get to see anything like most of the perfect romance or rom-com stories I know because getting Hollywood to back these kinds of plots in books or movies is difficult, and the one time they did it was written by an author who didn’t even bother to interview quadriplegic people.

The reason we’re seeing so much of an outcry from the disability community is that people with disabilities are often pigeonholed into inspiring others to “live boldly.” A quadriplegic man “sacrificing himself” so that his love can live “a better life” isn’t a heartwarming sacrificial moment, it’s a heartbreaking confirmation of our worst fears. Because our culture is so heavily rooted in Hollywood, young quadriplegic people could see this movie where the “hero” commits assisted suicide as confirmation that the demons in their head might be right. Maybe life isn’t worth living. Maybe the burden is too great.

So, I’m here to ask you, aspiring writer, please don’t make the same mistakes. If you’re going to write about a minority or disability, do the same level of research you would do about a foreign land or a subject you have never personally experienced. Realize that you could accidentally be playing into the fears of a group you’re trying to support.

Please remember that people with disabilities are not plot devices.

To those who are not writers: Please don’t approach random people in wheelchairs and ask if their private parts work.

(Edited to add: best to not approach any stranger to ask them anything about their privates. — c.)

Steven Spohn: Website | Twitter

Donate to AbleGamers here.

It’s the zoo’s fault.

No! Wait. It’s the parents’ fault.

No. It’s the gorilla’s fault — ah, yes, that’s it.

Hold up. It’s probably Captain America’s fault. Or Marvel’s.

Or Hillary’s, or Bernie’s, or yours, or mine.

This thing is the best, that thing is the worst. Ones and zeroes, baby.

Fandom is broken. Politics is a sewer plant on fire. Lady Ghostbusters is the end of cinema. A game is delayed and the only proper response is of course to issue death threats. America is a festering hole. We all shot that gorilla. The kid should’ve died. The zookeeper should be killed. You should be killed. I should be killed. God should flood us all again just to get it over with. The world is shit. Burn it all down. Burn it all up.

Everything is everything or it is nothing. We crave polarity. We loathe nuance.

This is a problem.

I read an article recently by the mightily hilariously wise Sara Benincasa about the election, and she asked a vital question: “Can you hold many truths in your brain at once?” As an adult, it seems to be that you have to. You must be able to hold many truths — not just about different things, but about individual things, as well. Sometimes these truths line up like little ducks, and sometimes they fight like snarly badgers. And yet, we reject that. We despise that level of complexity in our daily discourse — everything must be a toothy, wild-eyed dichotomy no matter how false it may be. Nuance is lost because nuance doesn’t bait you to click. The middle ground is widely populated with essential details, and yet it is at the fringes where we most find our reward: go to the middle and you get arrows from both sides. Stay behind the walls of your team’s fortification, though — ahh, now you will be celebrated, held aloft for your opinion, and all of you will drink and dance in frenzied froth-mouthed glory as you ready your next batch of arrows for THOSE OTHER MOTHERFUCKERS OVER THERE.

The gorilla is dead, and the kid is alive, and the worst news of it all is that it may not be anybody’s fault. Actually, perhaps the truly worstest news is that even if it is somebody’s fault, We The Unhuddled Internet Masses probably can’t actually fucking tell from over here in the digital bleachers. I’m sad the gorilla is dead. I’m happy the child is alive. I know some parents are not good with their kids, and I know some parents are great with their kids — and sometimes the parents who are great with their kids still miss the half-second window that their own child takes a header off the couch into the corner of a coffee table and needs like, 16 stitches. That’s not bad parenting. It’s just an accident. It’s just life. Life is full of things wonderful and horrible and a lot of stuff in between and it’s not always about WHO WE HAVE TO BLAME, WHO WE MUST HATE in order to make sense of it all. But blame makes it easier. Blame makes us feel just.

Captain America is a Hydra agent. Which means he’s a Nazi. Or it means he isn’t a Nazi. And he’ll be this way forever. Or for one issue. I have no idea. I know that I can hold multiple truths in mind. I know that I don’t believe the decision makes Marvel anti-semitic, nor are the creators and editors deserving of threats. I know that criticism against Hydra Cap doesn’t mean the critics deserve threats, either, and I know that the only way we seem to want to parse criticism is by dialing it up to 11 and then taking a hammer to the knob. Some troll either runs with the criticism and elevates it to death threats, or someone else says that criticism somehow punishes us all, even though criticism — agreeable or disagreeable as you find it — is an essential part of the pop-cultural conversation. And I know death threats are not an essential part of any cultural conversation ever, not against the audience, not against the storytellers.

I know that criticism doesn’t make you a hater. Or that telling a complicated story doesn’t make you a monster. Hate makes you a hater. And some stories are just stories and not sacred cows. I know that thinking the new Ghostbusters trailers didn’t look funny doesn’t make you a sexist, just as I know that hating the new Ghostbusters movie because it contains women makes you a total sexist even if you don’t tell us out loud that’s why you hate it. I know your childhood isn’t destroyed and if it is, that isn’t the fault or a movie or a TV show. I know wanting Elsa to have a girlfriend or wanting Poe to tongue-fuck Finn doesn’t make fandom broken. I know that not wanting Poe to tongue-fuck Finn doesn’t automagically make you a homophobe, unless the reason you don’t want it is because you think icky-ew-gross, then yeah, you’re a homophobe, you homophobe. I know fandom isn’t broken but it’s still got problems and problem-people and we need to see that, sometimes, and we need to talk about it even when it makes us uncomfortable. I know that social justice is not a see-saw scale from GOOD to EVIL, but rather, a delicate web, and sometimes you tug on one end and it shakes another part of the web you didn’t anticipate. I know that outrage is only outrage when it’s not the outrage you feel — because it’s easy to call something outrage when you don’t agree with it. People wanting representation in the storyworlds they love is not entitlement. People harassing creators and editors and artists are entitled and they are harassers, no matter how noble or ignoble their desires.

I know that Hillary is not a monster. I know that Bernie is not a savior. I know that if you look at both of them from a hundred feet up, they’re two qualified candidates whose policies are almost universally in line with one another. I know that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac killer. I know that this country might do better with more than two parties just as I know we live in a country engineered to reject the two-party dichotomy. I know that politics is corrupt. I know that Obama wasn’t the MAGICALLY PROGRESSIVE ANGEL we all wanted him to be, and yet despite that, he has done a lot of good for this country. I know that FDR revolutionized the country with the New Deal. I also know he put Japanese people in internment camps. We crave scandal and drama while shoving more complicated realities under the water so we don’t hear them kicking and screaming.

Many truths in your brain at once.

I don’t know where we lost that.

The Internet is probably a part of it. As I said yesterday in a rather long blabber-wank about fandom, I think the Internet is like a wonder drug. It does a great many things excellently, but it also has a lot of hinky side effects. Information moves fast on the Internet, and we’re more inclined to click the thing that either agrees or disagrees with us to the max. We don’t want somebody just to tell us we’re a little bit right — we want somebody to freeze-frame high-five us for just how fucking bad-ass right we are. We love confirmation bias. We greedily click the things that tell us what we already believe. We also seek to fulfill our wishes. This will cure cancer. This is what causes autism, ah, yes. My candidate is the best thing since masturbation, and yours is a pile of walking talking donkey shit and here look I have the polls to prove it, even though polls are notoriously unreliable and they require 1000 older people to answer landline phone calls at 2pm in Kansas. You’re stupid. I’m smart. America is the best. Wait, no, it’s the worst!

Maybe it’s the media, maybe it’s how we create and promote and read the news — news, after all, is just entertainment for the most part, isn’t it? Even in stories where we know there are real, genuine problems plaguing us — climate change or the post-antibiotic age — the stories either remind us how NOTHING IS WRONG GO BACK TO BED AMERICA or how EVERYTHING IS SO BAD WE MIGHT AS WELL JUST LIE DOWN IN THE MUD AND WAIT FOR A HORSE TO STEP ON US AND KILL US. Even there, nuance is lost. We push it away even in situations where we should know the score, where nuance and compromise both internal and external are key to tackling the tremendous problems we have in front of us.

Everything is everything. Or it is nothing. We won’t let one thing show many sides.

Maybe it’s just that we want answers. As our most renowned truant once said, “Life moves pretty fast.” Except we don’t stop and look around — we hard-charge through it, self-assured that as long as we have answers, as long as we are emboldened by unexamined singular truth, we can never be wrong. Rather than face the howling uncertainty of a gradational world, we want everything black and white. We need cancer to be cured because otherwise, that means children and mothers and really anybody at all can just die and nothing can be done. We need the zoo to be responsible, or we need the parents to face justice, because otherwise it renders that gorilla’s life meaningless. We need the thing we like to be a thing that is objectively best, lest we instead admit that so much of what we enjoy is subjective and not beholden really to any rules at all. Nuance is a lawless space, but if you’re willing to shuttle complexity to the curb, you can be assured. We are rewarded for our polarities — though, regrettably, one of those rewards is not progress, because when you’re willing to dig your heels in for everything and anything, and so is the other guy, it’s no surprise when the world burns down around you. (But at least you still have your principles.)

We need our enemies. We need our answers. We crave control. Can’t just be enough to think a thing. To examine it. We have to know the thing. We have to be faithful and ardent.

That’s not to say everything demands nuance. Human rights are vital. Representation is essential. Nobody should be starving, and they are. Everybody should have a right to use the goddamn public restroom of their goddamn gender-given choice, goddamnit. Donald Trump really is a demonic, Hitler-worshipping, self-tanner-drinking orangutan merkin who will almost surely lay waste to American Democracy the moment he presses his malevolent turd-cutter into the Oval Office chair. Not everything demands nuance and Devil’s Advocacy, no, and such diabolical advocacy can often be used to derail and dispute and distract (“Well, actually,” and “But, what if…”) — but the trick is knowing which fights need that ferocity and which ones don’t. If everything is a Crisis Level 1000, if everything is an echo of confirmation and an emblem of unswerving principle, nothing will ever get fixed, nothing will ever get done. Sometimes we need to swerve if only a little. Sometimes we need to be measured and uncertain. We don’t need Wicker Men. We don’t need heads rolling for every single transgression.

We do need nuance, sometimes.

We do need to hold many truths in our head, even as challenging and as uncertain and as muddy as that makes life. Everything can’t be everything or nothing.

Some things have to be many things all at one time.

P.S. Elsa needs a girlfriend and Poe needs a boyfriend, the end.

So, some very exciting news:

INVASIVE got a starred review from Kirkus. It’s my first starred review, actually, and so it’s made all the more exciting. It’s a crackerjack review, but I like the last couple sentences the best:

“Think Thomas Harris’ Will Graham and Clarice Starling rolled into one and pitched on the knife’s edge of a scenario that makes Jurassic Park look like a carnival ride. Another rip-roaring, deeply paranoid thriller about the reasons to fear the future.”

Thanks to Kirkus for the very kind review.

Also, thanks to Harper for making this book like aces. The inside pages look like this:

 

Little ants, crawling out from the binding…

And, since it seems a good day to post a relevant macro (click photo for larger):

Love that shot. Kind of a TAKE YOUR LARVAE TO WORK DAY kinda shot. You can, if you blow the photo up, see the fine golden hairs on the larvae that let it clump together with the other anty-grublings. Found this one when me and B-Dub were out in the woods looking around for bugs (“bug hunt,” he calls it), and we discovered a trail of carpenter ants carrying the brood — and the line went pretty much right up to the dead tree next to the writer shed, which leads me to believe these ants are the fanboys who sometimes make it inside when I’m writing.

You can pre-order INVASIVE now — it comes out in August. Nab from:

Indiebound | Amazon | B&N.

Also, today’s the day ZER0ES comes out in paperback! Hackers versus the NSA, baby. Note that while INVASIVE takes place in the same universe as ZER0Es, you don’t need one book to understand the other.

Grab the Zer0es paperback at:

Indiebound | Amazon | B&N.

And, Star Wars: Aftermath is a Bookbub promotion, so $1.99 for Kindle.

Aaaaand, last week saw the third issue of Hyperion come out from Marvel. I wrote it, art by Nik Virella, colors by Romulo Fajardo, so excited to see this one land. Grab digital here.

LOOK AT THE PRETTY PRETTY PAGE

And finally:

Kameron Hurley’s Geek Feminist Revolution comes out today (nab it here if you please) — as I said on my blurb, I’ll pretty much read anything Kameron writes, because she’s fearless and fighty and she gives the proper amount of fucks. This is a good book, a challenging book, and it dishes a lot of deep thought and sharp wit when it comes down to geek culture’s feminist intersections. Go read it. Thus endeth the lesson.

I appear before you on a rain-slick road. You’re driving. I’m ahead, my mouth open wide, my eyes open wider, my arms waving in panicked alarm. My lips are moving, but you can’t hear what I’m saying. And you look over to your passenger and you say, “We better stop, see what’s wrong,” and you ease up next to me. You roll down the window.

Lightning flashes. Thunder drums the dark.

And I whisper something in your ear —

Then I’m gone. Gone as fast as I appeared. As if I was never there.

And your passenger says: “Who was that? What did he say?”

You turn to your passenger and say: “…It was a warning.”

“What warning? Is the bridge out? Is there an accident up ahead? Oh my god, are we going to die? Tell me! What did he warn you about?”

And you say:

“Small children. He warned us about small children.”

* * *

Our son, the one they call B-Dub, turned five.

He has leveled up, and in a few months will DO BATTLE IN THE KINDERGARTEN ARENA.

This is amazing to me, because oh, what a glorious little person he’s becoming. He loves art and he bounces around like a springheeled monkey and he’s surprisingly compassionate. It’s terrifying to me, too, because time is like air in your lungs — you can’t keep it for long. You hold onto it long as you can, but eventually you let it out, and take in a new breath. Time slips in, slips out, and slips away. One day time, like breath, will stop for us.

But one of the most interesting and unexpected side effects of all the shit about which I had no idea. It’s not that I thought having a kid would follow a pre-designed roadmap. I knew it would be full of unexpected twists and turns, and that in basically generating a new human being you’re going to see some emergent weirdness as part and parcel of the process.

I had no idea what was waiting, though. Not really. Not truly.

And so, I appear before you now: a specter haunted by the realities of life with a tiny human. Some of you are thinking of having children. Some of you are already on your way to having them, or have children who are not just small, but very tiny, and those tiny immobilized larvae will one day soon grow up. You’re not ready. I wasn’t ready.

But I am here to prepare you.

preschool is a plague gauntlet

Here is a thing that will happen:

You will send your child to daycare or to preschool. Children at that age are basically just sticky wads of animated strawberry jam — everything gets stuck to them. Further, they are not creatures possessing adult manners. They don’t think much about, say, coughing on each other, or flicking boogers, or licking walls. It’s as if evolution has decided that children between the ages of three to five must engage in a Darwinian Thunderdome where they will test their immune system’s mettle at every possible turn.

So, they cough on each other, and it sticks. It sticks real good. All those germy bits, all those viruses and bacteria — your children are walking, talking petri dishes. Assume they are coated in a persistent grease of angry paramecia.

Here’s the problem, though: you, as an adult, have not had to test your immune system’s mettle in quite some time. Sure, sure, you go to work, but you go to work with other adults who by and large have beefed up their immune response in the normal way. But preschool? Preschool is a jungle. It is a rare bit of rainforest, dark and untested, and full of squirmy things that want to haunt your body. Bird flu? Fuck the bird flu. It’s the preschool plague you gotta watch, because as an adult, you are now going to run the same pestilential gauntlet your kid runs. At that age, kids rock around 8-12 illnesses (colds, usually) a year. That’s one or two a month. And ha ha ha you’re going to get them all. You can’t protect yourself. Your kid will sneeze into your eyeballs. He will touch your food with snot-slick fingers. And after a while you’re like, fuck it. Just gimme the sickness. Just blow your nose into my face. Get it over with. Welcome to Plaguetown.

Two winters ago, I was pretty healthy.

This past winter, I had pneumonia twice, flu once, and like, 80 colds.

THE PLAGUE GAUNTLET IS REAL

laughing at their jokes is a pathway to madness

Kids tell terrible jokes. They make almost no sense. They learn a joke format, but they have no idea what to do with it, and so it’s like, “Why did the washing machine eat the squirrel?” And you think there’s an answer there, so you say, “Why?” and then the child responds, “BECAUSE FOUR AND FIVE POOPYBUTTS LEMONADE STINKYTOWN PROBABLY.” It makes no sense. But it’s absurd, and funny in how not funny it is — and it doesn’t hurt that the young one is cackling like a witch with a cauldron full of village children. So, you do the natural thing.

You laugh.

NOW YOU JUST FUCKED UP.

You should not have laughed. It’s like inviting a vampire into your house. That joke, like the vampire, is here to stay. All day long the kid will be galloping around, yelling “FOUR AND FIVE POOPYBUTTS LEMONADE STINKYTOWN PROBABLY,” again and again and again. FOUR AND FIVE POOPYBUTTS LEMONADE STINKYTOWN PROBABLY. FOUR AND FIVE POOPYBUTTS LEMONADE STINKYTOWN PROBABLY. FOUR AND FIVE POOPYBUTTS LEMONADE STINKYTOWN PROBABLY.

For the small person, it just gets funnier.

For you, it’s like a worm eating your brain.

And you can’t get them to stop. Not until the next joke. Don’t get me wrong. It’s sweet, in its way. They just want to please you. They want to amuse you and themselves. But it will ruin you. It will eat your mind. Endless absurd punchlines. Around and around. Again and again. Until you’re hiding under the covers, shoving LEGO bricks into your ears.

nothing will ever be clean again, you filthy filthmongers

We have taught our kid to clean up after himself, and even still, he’s like a megaton bomb. He’s a little earthquake. He is a whirling mote of chaos in a formerly well-ordered existence, and his chaos is infectious. Nothing is ever really clean. Nothing is ever really organized. His room will be clean for five minutes, and then you blink, and instantly it’s a flood of stuffed animals, or LEGO bricks, or crayons. I’m not even sure half the things we find on the floor are his. I think children open portals to the rooms of other children, and toys flood in and out like a moving tide. Mess generates mess. CHAOS REIGNS.

all your base belong to them

My kid is a little over three-feet tall. He weighs as much as a couple pixels. He’s a scrappy, skinny little root, cute as a button, as innocuous as a bunny.

And he controls most of the territory in our house.

It happened almost overnight. He went from ROLY-POLY PILLBUG CRAWLIN’ AROUND THE FLOOR to JACKRABBIT WITH A ROCKETBOOSTER RUNNING INTO WALLS AT TOP SPEED and it just happened. He has his room. He has a playroom. You’d think — dang, for a new person, that’s a pretty good haul in a house he doesn’t pay for. Two whole rooms?

Basically a kingdom to a tiny person.

But the child, he is spatially greedy.

The living room. Our bedroom. The hallway. His toys creep in like possessing tendrils. His stuff, his presence, his chocolate-smeared handprints (god, that better be chocolate). You wake up one day and you realize: “I don’t own this house anymore.” Once, he had two rooms. Now we have two rooms. I have the kitchen and the bathroom. And even the bathroom isn’t exactly a sanctum sanctorum, either. You’ll be trying to do the unholy business of taking out the body’s garbage in peace and quiet — then you’ll see a shadow descend underneath the crack below the door. Gentle footsteps. A knob, rattling. Sometimes he won’t even say anything. He’ll just stand there. Other times he’ll yell — “ARE YOU DONE POOPING.” Or he’ll say something completely absurd: “I CAN STILL SEE WITHOUT A FACE.” All to remind you that he controls it all. Get used to it. The air you breathe is his air. The floor? His floor. You’ll know when you lay in your bed and damn near get a Boba Fett up your no-no hole. Your pillow is gone because he took it. He owns it all. YOU OWN NOTHING HOW DID THIS HAPPEN TO YOU.

sometimes they’ll draw things that look like dicks or boobies

The other day at breakfast — in public — I looked over to see that my son was very plainly drawing a dong. He had his crayons and his paper and right there was just — it was a dick. It had balls at the bottom. We’re not talking like, anatomically authentic, but a basic grade school rendering of an amateur hour wangle-dang. I said, rather hesitantly, “What are you drawing, kiddo?” And he said, “I’m drawing WALL-E,” and then he proceeded to add more details, all of which thankfully eradicated the overall dickness of it. Other times, the essence remains. “I drew a plane!” Yeah, no, that’s a dick. “I drew some clouds!” Oh my god, those are boobs.

To be clear, at no point am I suggesting children or adults should be shamed about body parts — or that they should be unaware of them — just that, they have a limited availability of shapes in their palette, and when they draw, sometimes it’s a stick with a couple of circles at the end.

poop butt pee farts also humongous deuces

Everything is poop and butt and pee. All day long. And the child will never not find it hilarious. (Sometimes, you’ll think it’s hilarious, too, which will as noted only reinforces the behavior. MOMMY LAUGHED AT POOP JOKE NOW HERE ARE 758 MORE.) They will insert the word ‘poop’ into a sentence and think it’s high art. “Do you want more mashed potatoes?” “I WANT MORE POOP MASHED POTATOES HA HA HA HA.” “Have a good day at school.” “YOU HAVE A GOOD DAY AT FART HA HA HA HA.” (Okay, that was a pretty good one.)

Also, sidenote: your kids will drop Herculean deuces. It will seem impossible that the log in the toilet — which is as big as a body-builder’s flexed forearm — came out of that small person. It will be a deuce larger than you produce as an adult. It will be the kind of turd produced by a slovenly man who just ate seven microwave burritos. You will take a picture of it in the off-chance the Guinness Book of World Records will come and give your child an award.

everything is feast or famine

Last week, we couldn’t get B-Dub to finish any meal. Even snacks he’d poke at, pick at, then set aside to go play. (Basically, the meals were boring, preventing him from far more interesting endeavors, like trying to ride the dog or drawing Kylo Ren lightsabering Iron Man in the face.) And we’d have that classic fight of YOU NEED TO EAT YOUR FOOD and he doesn’t want to eat his food, and we don’t want to force him to clean his plate because sometimes people just aren’t hungry but at the same time, we kind of need him to consume basic nutritional intake so he doesn’t get scurvy or rickets or some other wasting disease.

Now, this week? Flipped on its head.

This morning along, by 9:30AM, he had eaten: a bowl of cereal, a packet of applesauce, some saltine crackers, and a generous plate of scrambled eggs. I’m pretty sure he was thinking of killing and eating one of us to slake his howling hunger.

It’s not just with food, though. This is life with a small child. It’s EVERYTHING or it’s NOTHING. It’s 60MPH in one direction only. This week, he likes My Little Pony. Next week it’s LEGO. This week he wants to constantly be outside, next week the outside is poison and the sun is killing him and it’s terrible why do we torture him. Which leads me to:

goddamnit they’re dramatic

Speaking of which, your kids are are going to be mega-dramatic. Every slight against them is Shakespearean in its dimension. You tell them, “No, you can’t have that toy,” and it’s as if you shat inside their soul. It’s like you denied them vital life services. They’re going to die if they can’t have that toy. That toy is everything. That toy is life.

They get a boo-boo and it’s like, AGGGH I AM DYING, THEY WILL HAVE TO TAKE OFF THIS LIMB TO SAVE THE BODY, I’M BASICALLY GUSHING BLOOD OVER HERE, I’M PRETTY SURE THAT’S MY ORGANS OVER THERE ON THE FLOOR, FLOPPING AROUND LIKE A FISH TAKEN OUT OF WATER. Meanwhile, there is no actual cut, and when you ask them to identify which foot they injured, the foot changes every time they answer. “This one. No, this one. That one. The other one. Just give me a Band-Aid.” (Spoiler alert: Band-Aids are basically like injury stickers. They just want them. They think Band-Aids will fix bruises.)

We have at times offended him and he has made it very clear that he would now like to go to a different family, he does not like this house, he does not like his room, he does not like the food, he likes nothing about this place including the parents, and by golly, he wants to be adopted out elsewhere. “I want to go live with another family tomorrow,” he says. I can’t even twist it around on him. I say, “Okay, I’ll get the paperwork started,” and you think, ha ha, you tiny fool, you will think I’m serious. You expect him to backpedal, but oh no. You dig deeper: “Your next family doesn’t have a TV, lives in a dumpster, and has a pet crocodile who will bite your legs off while you sleep.” “GOOD,” the child answers, “THAT SOUNDS MUCH BETTER THAN HERE.”

Sometimes, they can hurt your feelings. They can hurt you in your very heart.

Our son is fond of saying, “You guys don’t make good choices.” It’s a surprisingly hurtful thing to say. He doesn’t mean it to be. It actually sounds rather mild as a condemnation, and we laughed it off at first. But as an adult you’re suddenly cast on a doomward spiral: OUT OF THE MOUTH OF BABES COMES WISDOM AND OH GOD MY LIFE WHAT HAVE I DONE WITH IT. You suddenly question everything from that doughnut you ate yesterday to your choice in a college degree.

you can’t negotiate with terrorists except you’re going to anyway

You’ll make a deal with them. Because it seems like the thing to do. Sure, sure, you’re a real hardass who would never negotiate with your kids, except somehow despite having the patience of an irritable, pee-filled chipmunk, somehow your child will outlast your stubbornness. So at some point you’ll try to negotiate.

You’ll say, I will give you the thing, but first you have to do the other thing.

And they’ll agree.

And you feel like, yeah. Wow. Compromise. It’s how everything happens. It’s the root of politics, of career, of life itself — compromise. And you feel surprisingly adult, because your child has learned a Very Valuable Lesson™.

Which is true.

But they learned a different lesson than you thought.

The child learned: MY PARENT IS WEAK AND WILL MELT LIKE ICE CREAM IN THE HOT SUN.

Next time, they show up, and instead of fighting, your kid offers the bargain right out of the gate. “I would like a cookie, so I will do this other thing to get the cookie.” Again you feel adult. Again you feel like — bingo, bango, bongo in the Congo, look at how well compromise works!

The time after that, though…

The child knows to test your resolve. If the small human can get a cookie after, say, eating five more bites of food, then how about four? And you say NO, IT MUST BE FIVE, SO SAYETH THE LAW, THAT IS HOW COMPROMISE WORKS, and once again, the child has rooted herself to the idea that there is literally no way in heaven, earth and hell she is going to eat five bites of food. It will be four, and there will be a cookie. Or! Or the child will eat five bites, but they will be bites so small they could be described as “molecular.” And the child will say with a cheeky twinkle, I ate my fiiiiive biiiiites. And you’re like, goddamnit, kid.

You stand your ground, of course. You plant your feet and make a decision. And maybe you “win.” But probably, the kid goes away having eaten no bites and nobody gets any cookies and now you hear about that specific cookie for the next six years.

Did I mention kids are dramatic? Yeah.

Finally, this leads me to:

never promise them anything ever

Do not make them a promise.

Because you will, by some strange universal law, have to break that promise.

And you think, oh ho ho, but it’s a small promise. Sure, we can have ice cream when we get home. Yeah, we can go swimming tomorrow. Yes, of course we can take Tiny the Owl (stuffed animal; not actual owl) to Little Jim-Bob’s house.

You’re a positive parent. These are easy promises. No problem!

Except: problem.

You get home, and there’s no ice cream, and the store is closed.

You can’t go swimming tomorrow because the pool is rented out.

You can’t find Tiny the Owl, or you remember that Little Jim-Bob is allergic to Fake Owls.

And now, now you’re trapped between the Scylla and Charybdis of a promise made and your inability to fulfill it. Adults, of course, can negotiate this disappointment well. And of course part of your job as a parent is in fact to inoculate your children against that kind of disappointment so that they can weather larger problems later. And yet, you made a promise, you fucker. Your child remembers. Your child never forgets that promise you broke. Not that night. Not the next night. I suspect your kid will remember it when he gives your eulogy, and he’ll probably tell everybody about that time you said you’d let him play Minecraft after school but you didn’t because basically, you’re a monster who hates fun.

I always wondered why my mother said two words to me very, very often:

“We’ll see.”

Now, I know why. Because you can’t promise anything. Not even simple things. Everything got the answer of “We’ll see.” Can I have ice cream? Can I have a puppy? Will there be air to breathe? Will I be murdered tonight? We’ll see, child. We’ll see.

Practice the phrase well, young parents.

Practice.

I Kid, Of Course

The tiny person is the best thing, ever. All these things aren’t really warnings (okay, the plague gauntlet is real), but is just stuff that may or may not happen and even when it does and it feels frustrating, it ends up fun or funny later. Having the kid is the greatest charm and the weirdest adventure, and happy birthday to him. We love him very much. Even though he’s taken over our house and says “poop” a lot.

And let’s be honest. I say “poop” a lot, too.