0M8.M21.M0M0
Chloroform: no parent’s kit can be complete without it, but somehow we never have any on hand. Little Miss Snooze ‘n’ Excrete has had herself some mighty uppity nights lately, and one gets tempted to apply a little sedative here and there. I’ve been taking the 2 AM feedings, since it lets Sara get a good solid four-hour chunk of sleep. So when Nat starts to peep and squawk, I feed her, clean her, finish feeding, redo the diaper, put her down - in the “bassinet” sense, not the “old sick pet” sense - and then let her get back to sleeping. Which she doesn’t do. She sleeps in the day and squalls at night, unless held. Fine - I just bring her downstairs, plop her on my chest, grab a remote and watch a movie. In fact, the other night I was sitting awake at 2:30, baby on my chest, watching “The Man Who Came To Dinner,” and I thought: if my wife saw this, she’d approve! No more of this “don’t stay up all night” - this baby gives me license to stay up until 3 AM watching action movies, because we’re Bonding!

Score!

Last night was fun. She sat on my chest and I whispered promises to her:

I will never make you play soccer, and if you prefer to stay indoors and read books, I’ll support you all the way.
I will never use you for political purposes.
No matter how bad things get, I will not sell you for parts. They either buy you as is, or the deal’s off.
I promise, when you’re 17, sullen, and ashamed of me, never to tearfully recount how you laid on my stomach, looked in my eyes, and issued a hindquarters blast so powerful it drove the top of your skull into my chin. I’ll just wordlessly play the tape I made of the entire event.

And other sweet nothings.

It was a fun night; I watched almost all of “Dinner.” Never seen it before. I’d been reading reviews of the revival with Nathan Lane, and it sounded like an interesting period piece. In a way, a pre-Post-Modern movie, full of self-references and truthful artifices. The main character is utterly modern - he talks on long-distance to other nations, has friends who take the airplane to see him; he has technicians set up a radio broadcasting equipment in a living room. He is at the center of a technological world, and it’s interesting to note how little has really changed. Planes are still the fastest means of travel; phones are still the quickest, most direct means of travel; broadcasting over the airwaves is still the preferred medium for reaching the largest number of people.

Favorite line of the movie: “I have very little time, so the conversation will be entirely about me.”

The character - Sherman Wood - is meant as a parody of Alexander Wolcott, omnipresent commentator in the Golden Days of radio. He was a gourmand, a man of a million opinions; he wore owly glasses and died on the air: that’s the way, uh huh, uh huh, we like it, uh huh uh huh. Not too many radio men keel over at the mike. (Actually, I think he just complained of feeling ill while doing a panel show, and left early, after which is overtaxed heart exploded.) Wolcott had almost complete media penetration in his day, and he is utterly forgotten now. Sic semper et cetera, but it’s a reminder that radio people are forgotten faster than print and movie people. Radio people leave few tracks, only reputations.

Speaking of which: I was coming back from Natalie’s first doctor appointment - she gained about 47 lbs over the last week, so we’re happy: she thrives! - and I was worrying about how I’d get a column out before I fell asleep. Turned on KSTP, and what ho, Bruce Gordon was doing the Souch show. Bruce and I used to work together at KSTP in the old, old old days; when he moved to another station he used to call me in DC for weekly reports. A fine fellow, and it was a pleasure to hear him. Now that I’m cellular-enabled, I decided to call the show from the road. I can’t remember if he asked or if I asked - probably the latter - but he ended up inviting me to come to the studio.

Of course I said yes - I have the talk-radio jones back in my blood lately, and I’ve fallen back in love with the medium. (Just in time to not have a show, too!) So I drove to the studio. Rephrase: on a perfect summer Friday afternoon I put the Brian Setzer disc in the CD player, rolled down the windows, popped the roof and drove at wheeeee-ha speed all the way to the studio. We did a speedy hour and a half, and had a hootin’ time; I owe him one.

It was 4:20 PM by the time I got to the office. Still hadn’t written a column. So I went upstairs to the cafeteria, got the biggest damn cup of the strongest Starbucks they sold, sucked it back and banged out Sunday’s column in an hour and a half. Hit SEND - drove home - ordered pizza en route - got home, kissed wife, kissed baby, banged heads with the dog, ate pizza, pointed self at bed:

ZZZZZZZZZZ

Up 17 minutes later, ready for another night of diapers & screeching & dog-scratching & movies & -

I turned to Sara tonight as we sat on the sofa, and said: What day is it, exactly?

It took her a few seconds.

0M8.M22.M0M0

This could be running water from the creek by my house. It could be my nose, still experiencing rhinorhea. I love that word, incidentally: it’s the medical term for gushing schnozz. Rhea means flow; rhino, of course, means nose. God forbid doctors could ever say “nose flow,” though. No one feels satisfied unless the expert they’ve consulted uses high-falutin’ words. You take this here physic, girl, it’ll stop up your snot-run like the river come loggin’ season. Y’heah? No.

Of course, this means that Carla from Cheers was played by Flowing Perlman.

Anyway. As I’ve been warned, colds last longer when you have a kid, because you’re always run down and vulnerable, a wet dank walking sponge that soaks up all the random fungoo of the world. So it seems to be. We’re both exhausted. We had another night of fussiness, so my wife and I are dead-eyed zombies. . . if only little Gnat was like my laptop, and occasionally crashed when she woke from a sleep state. Or at least just hung. It would be nice if babies hung from time to time, and you could shower and read a magazine before you reboot.

Last night I kept hearing strange cries on the baby monitor; I’d go upstairs, check. She’d be completely inert, carved from a single block of solid baby sleep. I’d go back downstairs. . . . Aeh! Back up. Asleep. Eventually I began to wonder if the baby monitor was picking up the newborn from across the street. Or maybe someone with a particularly cruel sense of self-amusement was driving around broadcasting peeps of mild distress on the baby-monitor channel. (Maybe extra-terrestrials were attempting to contact us on this frequency - if so, they’re hosed. Forget it. If they aren’t screaming, we’re not picking up.) This monitor is so sensitive it picks up stuff from outside - it hears the faint squeak of the neighbor girls’ trampoline, for example. It picks up Jasper barking downstairs, so when he barks in the kitchen it’s amplified through the kitchen receiving unit.

Yes, I really need that. Amplified dog-barks. That’s a big improvement around here. More, please.

In any case, Gnat woke up last night, and I did my two AM duty - pop in the bottle, guckguckguck, then back-spanking for the burp (which resulted in a cartoon cliche belch: deep, rich, rippling and resonant, barrruph!) and then an hour on my chest while I watched the rest of the movie and kept her pacified. The movie was “It’s a Mad (3X) World,” a Cinerama road-show comedy from 63. I saw it in 64 - perhaps the first movie I ever saw in the theater. Lots of money, lots of stars, longer than Shoah and less amusing, too. I watched it not for entertainment purposes, but as a cultural exercise. The best documentaries are the ones that aren’t. You can learn more from Dragnet than you can from Woodstock.

It’s an annoying movie - loud, frantic with purpose, so loaded with ham that they should have rolled barrels of mint jelly into the theater lobby. The “younger generation” of comic talent is represented by the supremely peculiar Dick Shawn, and Jonathan Winters. (For all of Winter’s vaunted character talent, why does he always seem to play the same character?) Everyone else is from vaudeville, or the borscht belt, or stage or TV. Berle. Benny. The Three Fargin’ Stooges, for heaven’s sake, although a dollar goes to anyone who can actually find them. All the comics are middle-aged, but it’s a middle-aged movie; just as boomers today watch Steve Martin - a fixture from their 20s - so did the middle-aged men watch Hope, Crosby, Caesar, Benny, and other guys popular in the 40s.

Which means today’s generation is doomed to watch Tom Green movies in 2020, I guess.

It’s 8:30 now; I’m on the back porch. It’s completely dark. Blame the cloudy night, in part, but that’s not all. Summer’s almost done. Fine with me. Never thought I’d ever say that - but this summer, this month, has been a blur; I haven’t really participated in summer, just looked at it, like the set for a stageplay. I look forward to fall if only from an aesthetic sense. And Natalie will focus and learn to smile: that’ll be a wonderful payoff.
Back to work

0M8.M23.M0M0

Among the many things I no longer seem to care one tiny tinker’s damn about:

1. Computer games. Tonight I installed a bunch of demos, just to see what I’d been missing lately. Answer: nothing. One of the demos was the famed ill-stared Daikatana, which consumed careers, millions of dollars, entire reputations, and resulted in a game in which you had to use your Ion Rifle on small, potent frogs. Piece of crap. I uninstalled it.
Then I installed Deus Ex, which I’d already decided not to buy. The more features and whistles a game provides, the less I’m likely to play it. If the box says “Customize your character through fifty different cyberaugmentations!’’ I put it right back, thank you. Life’s too short to spend an hour wondering if I should boost my psi factors or my dexterity factors. If you have the time to wonder about these things, you should turn off the machine, go outside and meet girls. Having met and married one, and produced another, I have no interest in retooling my cyberaugmentations.
Anyway. The game had a training session, which was enjoyable right up to the point where I was told that I would start with a 5% lockpicking skill, and would have to augment this as the game went on. Screw that. Look, when I rent a movie, I want to be immersed in the story. I do not want the story to pause for a week while James Bond attends a seminar in hydroplane maintenance. Just ROLL the DAMN MOVIE. Same with games.

So I uninstalled that one. Booted up the demo for DS9: The Fallen. It’s a third person game. I don’t like third person games. Nice graphics; nice sound; smooth gameplay. If you press C your character crouches, and walks around in a crouch for the entire game. None of the other characters seems to notice this, or comment on it; then again, you do play the captain, and if the captain wants to squat like a crab while he’s on an away mission, that’s his business.

Installed some Half-Life mods, since that’s the last game I played that I really enjoyed. They crashed the machine. Now Scandisk tells me there’s an invalid long filename, and I should run Scandisk. It’s really reassuring when a program tells you to run the very program you’re running. The PC is now completely hosed - three boots, a different error every time. Looks like a complete clean install of Windows is in the cards.

Gott in Redmond, I hate PCs. Macs I can fix. Macs I can resurrect no matter what. Never had to reinstall Windows before.

2. Computers. See above.

3. This web site. Having written two columns today, I am no mood to do anything that resembles work; I just want to do something relaxing.

Like play a computer game.

Or sleep.

Neither is forthcoming.