cautery

Burning bridges give you even more than burning airlines. Because eventually they can send other planes, whereas a bridge takes time. If you want to be alone, start with the bridges. To burn a friendship fast throw insults, piss on the outstretched hand. To burn a friendship slow ignore it. When your friend drives past, turn off the lights so they can see you hide. Ignore the doorbell. To burn a relationship heap emotional abuse until you've chased the person out of town. Now call her every night and tell her how much you love her. (Tell her you're sorry, tell her you need your baby). Burn away your potential for sorrow, for kinship, for hope for anything beyond a sports score or a boatload of cash. Burn away love so the only other death you ever have to face is your own. Reach out just enough to maintain a perfunctory variable sex life. Burn away potential for emotion as a kind of cautery. Only keep hate, you need that as fuel. The others simply aren't cost effective. There are a lot of ways to burn memories. One technique is burn as you go-- pay no attention to anything that happens and you don't have to worry.

Father's Day night L. and I got a sitter and saw Up. I couldn't stop crying for the whole movie. I was happy to, it's been years since I was able to outside of being maudlin wasted. Part of being able to cry was that it was a beautiful movie, economically edited, exquisitely written, and wonderfully drawn. Another part was what parenthood has done, loving the little one without the slightest hesitation. Part of it is being more open than maybe ever, to the way I feel, the way other people feel. Part of it is that I wasn't eating popcorn or drinking a big fat soda. There was only the movie, and L and I holding hands, and our lives here.

cry it out

They say we're supposed to let you cry sometimes, that it'll help you develop. It's a counter-intuitive move that still has a certain logic, despite the fact that doctors say it. I picture a Ferber box or Freud administering liquid cocaine to cranky newborns. But I still -- almost -- get it.

And enough people that I trust as parents have said it makes sense. Yet I've clung reticent, even though I buy it to a degree, even though the lack of sleep from running to your side in the middle of the night has primarily impacted your mother.

The other night we were in a strange town, you were in a strange crib and you cried a little more than usual going to sleep. I sat on the steps outside your door and rocked back and forth, caught myself saying you're going to be okay, you're going to be okay. Caught myself reliving your first surgery, the one we had no vocabulary for, the one where I could feel our ancestors huddled around to make sure you were okay. The one where I paced the halls of the hospital willing you with them to be okay, to be okay, to be whole and right.

I haven't been drinking now for about a month, so the things I self-medicated into oblivion are starting to become conscious. One of the big but recently buried ones is the worry from the summer that you would have died at just a few days old. You didn't, you obviously didn't, but I still carry around the fear that you would have. And with it the worry that somehow we'll hurt you, or let the world hurt you.

Realizing the depth of that has helped me to release some of it. Made me more willing to let you cry it out. And here you are, you've gone to sleep. Your dreams each night add magic to the world, make more luck possible. The images, the plots must be absurd.

sailing ship telescope wizard

Little one you are safe, nothing will hurt you, nothing can. Your good dreams are premonitions of the world to come, your bad dreams are exorcisms. When you look to us for trust, we're worth it, we won't fuck it up. We won't drop you, call you names, or mail you cross-country 4th class in a box with air-holes and a feeding bowl, even if somewhere down the road you really get on our nerves and we're dying to see a movie in the theater.

Little one your schemes are forming, you lift your head and smile and laugh and talk. You know that music is music, that love is love, that it's better with friends around and how to make them smile. Your schemes become projects: roll 3 feet, eat a blanket, eat a ribbon, eat a pacifier, eat the cat. Continuity, beta version, entropy patcher, stalwart champion of addition and multiplication, erudite designer of cross-cultural constellations, box of apples, sailing ship telescope wizard, defeater of depressives, existentialists, and cynics, cloud catcher, befriender/tamer of ghosts.

You've probably seen them on TV: classes of infants clad in swimsuit diapers or only in what Mother Nature gave them, floating effortlessly through the water like little mermaids or piranhas. You want your child to learn basic water safety, but is tossing your baby into a pool the way to teach him?

Yes.