So, as most of you already know, Wendy was born perfect and healthy in late March.  I've been learning to cope with a two-child household quite well, all things considered.  Yes, Jason, the occasional dose of alcohol has been involved.  You can suck my left nut--the one I wish I had in a jar, but was irrevocably crushed when I stomped that asshat in the groin with my pointy slut boots in retaliation for his kicking me in the stomach when I told him I was "late".  I consider it mine, since I was responsible for its demise.  Kind of like taking war trophies.  (Speaking of which, have any of you seen the trailer for "Inglorious Basterds"?  I'm going to watch it nine times in the theater, if for no other reason than to see Eli Roth's crooked smirk again and again and again).  This was seventeen years ago, go ahead and hold that against me.  I don't mind.  These days, I find it easier and easier to be the scapegoat for every neck-bearded basement-dweller on teh Interwebs.  It costs me nothing, and gives me hours of amusement.

I'd write more, but at the moment I'm tired the hell out from my weekly "Friday Night Deck Party", consisting of me, a four-year-old, an infant, Project Playlist, fireflies, bubbles, baby Brie, and the hipster neighbors across the fence who don't have much to say to me since I'm not all that into Panic At The Disco but who can't get enough of water-balloon fights with my young'un. 

Oh, and Penny has expanded her repertoire from arm-locks to choke holds.  I can't *wait* for the visit from CPS once she's entered Kindergarten.

Damn, we're fertile.

There will be a new Nuckolls in the world sometime in April.

I'm too excited for exclamation points, even.

So, folks, I'm pretty damn sure I'm pregnant.  About a week along, if so.

Also, our front lawn has EXPLODED in golden chanterelle mushrooms.  Great for our bellies, bad for our relationship with our landlord.  Well, for tit's sake, would YOU run a mower over a crop-yield worth about thirty dollars a day?

. . . a female midget is waking up with a kiler hangover and perhaps a vagure memory of a strange blue-haired lady carrying her into her apartment.

You see the strangest damn things from the balconies of that town.  Sometimes those strange things fall down and start crying and you end up having to help them get home.

It's four in the afternoon, and I am fucking drunk.  And I have to sober up in the next two hours, so that's going to be fun.

A good friend of mine was staying with my family this past week.  Her one-year-old baby girl, Chloe, was undergoing open-heart-surgery at a hospital in my city. 

The surgery went fine.  About ten hours later Chloe suffered a massive stroke.  About thirty hours after that the doctors declared her brain-dead.  She was unhooked from everything but the respirator, placed in her parents' arms, and then the respirator was withdrawn.

Chloe died at 2:09 pm Saturday, June 21st.  I was there, and it was the most horrible, terrifying, painful thing I've ever been through in my entire life, and she wasn't even my baby.

A lot of my prayers lately have been about me taking on someone else's pain, at least just a little bit, if it will lessen their burden.  Fuck me, but I think it's working, and I almost wish I could take it back.

This morning when I logged onto Postsecret.com, I found a postcard that quoted Vonnegut, it read:  "Please find comfort in knowing that everything was beautiful and nothing hurt."  And now I know that something can be both a knife to the gut and a intangible teddy bear to cling to, all at the same time.

There will most certainly be more on this later, but right now, I need to go break some more shit, cry, and take a shower.  In that order, only put "cry" on repeat.

 

I can't believe I let this guy sign my boobies.  (Chuck Negron, not the blogger.  That would just be GROSS.)

 

Sort of.  I actually do quite a bit of whoring and mincing about before this scene, but this is the first one to be edited and ready for pre-viewing.

Dig the fake nail action, baby!!

 

So the new house is freaking perfect in every respect except . . . ants.  There must be a mutant mother-colony under this house, seriously.  I’m paranoid about leaving things like alcohol and  . . . um, resin from my tobacco pipes, yeah, that’s it . . . where the ants might possibly get to it, simply because those German-efficient fuckers don’t need any help in developing their master plan, right?

 

I tried all the natural solutions.  Borax mixed with oatmeal just made them swarm the butter dish like it was the G-damned coast of Normandy.  Cornmeal seemed to mutate them from scrawny soot-colored scurrying creatures into brawny, Iowa-quarterback-cocky motherfuckers.  A mixture of cayenne pepper and vinegar was fun for an evening spent painting them into stampedes, but proved utterly ineffective once the vinegar dried, as far as long-term control is concerned, and frankly, I don’t get drunk enough most nights to find much satisfaction in spending half an hour painting an organic barricade around the fresh loaves of sourdough cooling on my kitchen counter.

 

So I went to buy the hardcore, Armageddon-of-the-Ants-type poison bait-traps today.  Seeing as how I blew a radiator hose pulling into the store parking lot, it’s not terribly surprising that I didn’t immediately perk my naughty little ears up when the clerk required proof that I was over the age of 18 in order to purchase little plastic packages full of ant death. (Well, kind of surprising, since I’m reaching an age where a request for I.D. for any purchase just makes me feel like hot shit.)

 

But when I was putting them out tonight, I noticed that one of the packages bore an ominous warning to the effect of, purchasing this product for purposes other than those stated on the box is a federal offense punished by up to blah blah blah.

 

That, I took notice of.  Usually those types of labels are reserved for things that will, or can be used to make substances that will, get you high as fuck.  Or kill you.  Or both.  You know, it’s a free country and you’re free to kill yourself being a dumbass. 

 

Dammit, but I love being an American, most days.

 

Now, I’ve made a few horrible, lethal substances in my day, not even counting the time that I was six and decided that if bleach cleaned the toilet, and ammonia cleaned the toilet, then both together should clean the toilet twice as fast and I could get back to that awesome Steven King novel.  Lucky we had an attic fan, is all I can say about that. 

 

My dad and I made some home-brew Napalm back when I was going through the inevitable “Huh!  Fire!  Cool!” stage of adolescence, not to mention a few potato guns and a Floppy Disk of Doom or two.  (Did I mention my Daddy is cool as fuck?) 

 

Having a vagina and a big mouth, I was never privy to the *exact* formulas of the incredibly intoxicating substances that I helped manufacture and transport in the Long Long Ago of ten years back, but I got the gist of things, you know?  I may not have passed chemistry in high school were it not for my teacher’s middle-aged perversions and my own precocious development, but that doesn’t mean I never learned to pay attention when substance A met substance B and resulted in substance How The Fuck Did You Make That Shit, I Think My Brain Is Going To Explode. 

 

Never in my wanderings had I run into a use for ant poison that would either get you high or kill you.  But you know, I’ve friends on MySpace who regularly go out on weekends and ingest chemicals I’ve never even seen speculated about in sci-fi, so I had to jump on Google and check it out.

 

The worst I could find is that this chemical, hydramethylnon, might give you flipper babies and maybe shut down your liver if you eat it on toast five times a day for a year.  Maybe.  Of course, that’s just my inept boiling-down of what I read on three dozen abstracts or so, but still.  No poppingly sensational news articles on stupid shallow emo teens either trying to get off or get out by ingesting the substance in any fashion, no Asian apartment complex’s near-massacres attributed to its fumes, not so much as a wrinkled old lady collecting fraudulent Social Security checks after feeding it to a boarder over the course of five years.  Fuckin’ nothing.  What a waste of an hour I could’ve spent watching bootleg cellphone footage of Tori concerts, I tell you.

 

Just a bunch of shit that, when it gets boiled down, says, “This shit is poison.  Don’t let your babies eat it, don’t slurp it up if you’re pregnant, don’t slather your butcher-shop counters in it, try your best not to introduce it into the water supply.”

 

Since when did this require the threat of federal prosecution?  Sorry, but if you have your genetic immortality gestating in your guts but you’re still reduced to ingesting ant poison to either get high or raise your blood sugar . . . . it’s probably best that you die in a pool of your own vomit, or at the very least, that your retard mutant-child get expelled like a particularly gory visit from the Cardinal. 

 

Too bad, so sad . . . next, please.

 

Damn, but I’ve developed the soul of a DMV clerk, and I’m not even thirty, yet . . .

. . . I wanted to send a message explaining why I’ve denied your Friend Request here on MySpace.  While I applaud your devotion and exuberance, I’m afraid that I simply don’t share your belief that registering voters at bars and music venues will save American from its corrupt political machine.  In fact, your efforts to encourage douchebag idiots with no grasp of history or our Constitution to believe that they have any place at all in deciding which persons are qualified to lead this country may well, in fact, be viewed by future generations to be as enormous a mistake as the current war in Iraq.  However, if you decide to start recruiting volunteers to sit down with patrons at said bars and music venues and administer simple civics exams *before* handing them a voter registration form and tickets for two free well drinks, please get in touch with me, because that’s much more up my alley.

 

Thank you.