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1 Einstein, 35 A.T. (Nov. 10, 2003) - 11:48 a.m. In which our plucky young zero is recovered from uncling.The trouble with a kitten is that When I talk to CB about my nephews, she said I sound "broody". Or she just goes "Mmm." Either way, she's sounded convinced it's because I want children of my own. Up until Halloween weekend, I wasn't so sure she wasn't righter than I consciously thought. Spending quality time with other people's kids is a great way to awaken a parental impulse, or at least it is in me. On the other hand, as it turns out, Drew and Adam are separate handfuls considered on their own. Together, when you're responsible for them 24/7 for two days, they're at least a double handful. Spending small amounts of quality time with other people's babies makes me want a baby of one's own around the house and always has done. Spending large amounts of time as part of a baby's support mechanism, on the other hand, leaves me glad I'm not his full-time caregiver, or indeed anybaby else's. I'm so sorry, please forgive me My sister-in-law, after interacting with me and comparing my behavior patterns to those she's had to become familiar with as a special ed teacher, deemed my problem to be Asperger syndrome. My parents (who keep pronouncing it "Arzbarger") are convinced by the evidence she lays out; as I said before, I'm convinced by other things (like knowing exactly what the guy means about freshwater fish in salt water). The therapist I mentioned last time concurred with this amateur diagnosis. (Or else she was just humoring the 'rents until she can convince us otherwise, but that's not likely. I only entertained the notion because I genuinely believed that CB had no confidence whatever in the amateur diagnoses. The lesson being that, as St. Bokonon tells us, we should be careful what we pretend to be, lest we find one day that our faces have grown to fit the masks we wear.) Aaaaannyway, she got me on some medication which was meant to help me unskew my point of balance. I took the first half-pill late Saturday night (it would have been Friday night, but we were too busy wrangling nephews to get a pill cutter). At 2am Sunday morning, I woke up unbearably hot and tried to go to the bathroom. I spent several minutes on the commode, worried that something was about to (as the description of Chateau Chunder puts it) "open up the sluice-gates at both ends." I got up, head spinning, sense of direction utterly fucked, and tried to find my way back to the futon where I was sleeping (my bed having been yielded to Drew for the two nights of his stay, to be his first experience of sleeping in a big-boy bed). Sluggan, n.: A lurid bruise which everyone politely omits to mention because it's obvious [to them] that you've had a punch-up with your spouse last night — but which was actually caused by walking into a door. It is useless to offer the correct explanation because no-one will believe it. I remember several minutes of dreams before Mom found me. She'd been wakened by a noise and come out to see me in the apartment's hallway, lying on the floor, with a dandy red spot on the left side of my face where I'd smacked it into the wall. I abraded it pretty thoroughly; it'd just about healed as of the following Friday. At a quarter to eight, before I could have breakfast, I had to vomit up pretty much everything I'd eaten since at least the previous Friday's dinner (I recognized bits of sausage from one of the pizzas we had for dinner in Maryland). I didn't see any toenails floating in the bowl, but it wouldn't have surprised me. (I know this is going to drive at least one of my friends into shrieking flight if e ever reads this entry, but I'm too much of a gentleman to name names.) That purged me of the nausea, and apart from the sleep-dep caused by the previous night's wonkiness (and, the night before, by the combo of the futon's frame and the ticking of an ancestral clock), I was all right for the rest of the day (though in no condition to drive the tots back down to their parents' new house that night for spaghetti dinner). So, that was over a week ago. I started writing portions of this entry then, but I decided to let it rest until I'd had more sleep, because I remember the reaction I got the last time I posted entries written while running on little sleep. (The reaction I got looked to me like an assumption that I didn't appreciate the things I was writing about at all and that I was an ungrateful little snot who wanted everything in life handed to him on a silver platter and then reserved the right to complain because the platter wasn't gold.) And, of course, once I decided to hold it back, I started seeing things about it that needed fixing. Well, enough of that.
last time, on The Slack Shack - our next inciting exstallment 
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