Used to Be

Used to be, we'd go to the Becker's Milk and play some type of video game to while away time and pocket money. I sucked at every game there was. Pac Man, Asteroids, whatever. No patience. All thumbs.

On Saturday I went to a friend's for some type of x-box gathering. In the last 20-odd years my touch has not improved.

We were playing a game called "Halo" or some variant thereof. For those of you who are (as I was recently) unaware of what this game involves please allow me to explain. This is a split-screen multi player game. Each character is heavily armed and goes around finding new weapons with which to kill my character which exists for two reasons. The first is to find new weapons which I cannot aim and fire and the second is to die frequently and horribly. I'm pretty sure they will have me back.

Outside of the tv set, things are good. As Mo has displayed, we have a new kitchen. I love that it's done. Done on budget, done on time. I like to cook in it too, with Mo, or with the kids around insofar as grating carrots can be considered cooking. The room is warm and light and one day we will have paid for it which will be nice provided we still have teeth to chew the food that we prepare in it, presuming of course there is food which we can purchase or grow if we aren't all underwater, or inundated with isotopes or free radicals, and bald and even our gums are too weak to dent food of which we haven't any on account of the isotope-enhanced weevils, or crickets, or triffids who have taken everything that matters away from us like food and even the Olson twins and reality television! So prepare canned goods now.

What I am saying is, our garden is doing well. Right now it is a vivid splash of green things which are growing impressively and the black dirt which is their medium. Like that Arquette girl. I like her. I also care so deeply about the environment, I bought 150' of soaker hose, so I can avoid evaporation, and the hose is made out of recycled Smurf figurines so the kids, as I can see, really enjoy the garden. So do the bees. And Gargamel.

We have many lavender plants, held over from the previous owners, which are presently a riot of purple, you could even call them lavender, blooms which are open for business. We are visited frequently by bees, many many bees, and they make a lot of noise. They are the reason our children cannot sleep during the summer. Cut down your plants, people, and pave, pave, pave!

Something else that likes to come to our kitchen: ants. Little black ants. One morning last week I came down with boyo and while I filled the kettle he cried: bugs! and there they were, in 4 separate lines, marching across the floor, hundreds, or at least tens, of them, marching through my kitchen and up the cabinets and around my dishwasher & c.

Permit me to pause here and state that I detest bugs. I know they are part of the wonderful and amazing circle of life which includes puffins, sea anemones, and Sandra Bullock but I want them all to die. I suspect this all goes back to a short story I was made to read in high school. There's a guy with a ranch somewhere in South America, and the ranch is being overrun by a powerful and fierce species of ants (like in this movie*, but without the manymanymany layers of unwholesome aerosol cheese) and all he has worked for is being consumed by these ants so off he runs and nothing will stop these ants, not even run-on sentences, until he reaches a river and then I think he does something with gasoline and a match and the end. So, I hate ants.

I looked up ants on the intertubes. Our visitors are likely little black pavement ants.** Thank goodness they are not fire ants, or the dreaded crazy yellow ants (thanks, Wikipedia). You cannot wipe out all of the ants, and only rarely can you destroy their colony, it says, but you can use borax and maybe wipe out a few cells... so don't bother, flesh creature, the ants are taking over! Nowhere in my research did I see "squishing" offered as a method of ant control. Nor "squishing ants with your thumb and leaving a mound of the dead near the door to your house through which you think the ants have entered as an unsubtle message to the ants who follow". If that was a game on on x-box I would kick ass.

Maybe I should find a hobby instead.

p-man

* The finest precis and movie review I will ever read.

** The amazing thing about these tiny black ants is they have a remarkably high moisture content.

Running With Scissors

(Wherein the author circumlocutes in an effort to avoid running down the in-laws immediately as this is is wife's blog and there may be some trouble in the non-binary relationship at chez Mo, but fails, as the allusion to the topic of the post is evident both from its title and the throat-clearing introduction through which he is presently struggling, and in an effort to avoid the subject he will, of course, attempt to discuss his own life, his family, and the perilous nature of memory.)

I just finished reading Blood Meridian. I am tempted to now begin each post as McCarthy did his chapters: Post 456...- talks around takes the stick - additional circumlocution in the form of literary reference - Self-disclosure - kindergarten - mean teachers - tight pants - parents - false memory - in-laws - dinner - safety lapses - self-recrimination

I grew up in a nice, safe, expensive neighbourhood on the west side. That is to say, it was a hive of WASPS or people who weren't but had white collar jobs to match our flesh tones. My dad, he grew up on the east side. He may have run with a gang of delinquents at some point (Our Gang, I imagine) before he, uh, became an accountant. My mom, she was an air force child (back when Canada's planes were new), and a high school drop out before she, um, became a teacher. They desired gentility and security, thus the picket fence. Nonetheless I was branded a juvenile delinquent by my kindergarten teacher. I was 5. "Precocious" my dad would say. Mom, on the other hand, reviled the evil and senseless teacher who did not understand me and would upbraid me in front of my peers on a regular basis. I can recall one lengthy lecture wherein I was instructed as to the proper manner in which I was to carry scissors. Humiliating. In fairness to the teacher, I developed into a fine juvenile delinquent, and I credit her for recognizing my early potential.

Tight pants. Love them? Hate them? Discuss.



So it went through much of my schooling. I was, in point of fact, disruptive or detached and a cause for worry to parent and teacher alike until I finally finished school at the age of... 28. The folks were supportive although dad did question more than once my pursuit of an arts degree. In hindsight, I agree with his assessment that it was a pointless exercise and I would have been served better by taking a career-oriented degree. The problem was those programs would have interfered with my desire to attain perfect dissolution. In any event dad still tells me I was expelled from kindergarten by the instructor whereas mom tells me she withdrew me after seeing how the nasty lady was treating me. I have no recollection of these events.

Why the avoidance of the subject, to wit, my in-laws? I am now a parent. I have two neat kids whom I love and whom wear me out daily. As a parent I am obliged to make decisions about what my kids wear, eat, sit on, ride in, with whom they interact, where they will be schooled, and other parlous subjects such as safety with sharp objects, such as scissors. In this house scissors are behind closed doors and usually at an altitude, or in a location, unavailable to the kids. Scissor use is monitored fairly closely. When our daughter wishes to perform her little wood-cutting projects (as she is wont to do) we watch very closely, after all, she is 2.

Some would say Mo and I are a little too risk-conscious. Take, for example, Mo's parents. They say it a lot. Every time my concerns are dismissed, or those of my wife are dismissed, a red mist descends over my eyes... a red mist. The black bile rises. I feel blue (which matches the language I use in the internal conversation which begins on the drive home from their place). Visits to their home are colourful affairs.



Yesterday E. had a day trip to her grandparents. To wrap the activities Mo, Me and A. joined them for night dinner. It was excellent. For once there was a meal the kids both sat down to eat. I wanted to eat it. Mo Ma got it right and I was awash with warm fuzzy feelings and self-chiding thoughts about how I am too hard on her, the well-intentioned old bat that she is. That lasted a good 15 minutes.

It came time to bathe the kids before packing them into the van for the ride home. E came down the stairs from the sewing room where she is now quite often 'helping out'. There she was carrying scissors (improperly, i might add) and complaining of a sore finger. She pricked it with a pin. A pin... a pin! I took a look in said Mo Ma's sewing room and indeed many a pin was to be found. Many a pin... and seven pairs of scissors (eight if you count the pair E had), a hem puller, a box cutter, a handgun, and a small nuclear device... I had no idea when we arrived all this stuff was lying about at kid height and that E had ready access to this material through the course of our visit (the increasing number of holes in her shirt should have tipped me off, I suppose).

It was in a state of shock that I reported this to Mo as she bathed our son. It was then I noticed the open can of comet on the table next to the tub. Comet. Open. Kid's eye level. Open. I had no idea & c...

I love my in-laws but they are beyond the reach of reason. What can I do?

P-man out.