The Eyes! They Burn!

Yeah yeah, I'm up way too late again, and I'm going to be sleepy in the morning.

Tomorrow (today technically) I'm going with The Wife and The Boy up to see my parents. Should be interesting, The Boy will get to show off all of his brand new talking and asking skills, so fun should be had by all, unless he's still repeating the language my Wife uses when she drives. We're going to a pioneer village, so we'll see how long it takes him to get into trouble. :)

I'm going to tell a funny, and that will be the end of that discussion. You've seen the ads maybe, for this insurance company that has various bad drivers, and one of them is this woman gripped in the fist of a powerful road rage, leaning out her window and screaming at cars that she doesn't have all day, bunch of jerks, etc. It ends with her literally propelling the car along the road in a herky jerky motion by throwing her body forwards and backwards in the seat while grunting with rage?

If not, behold my previous awesome description. The point is, the first time we saw that ad together, before I had even begun to form the first glimmer of a wisecrack, the slightest shift of a facial expression, the faintest scintilla of a change to my posture from "relaxing wise ass" to "active wise ass", my wife turned on me and yelled "I DO NOT DRIVE LIKE THAT". I responded with the universal signal for "perish the thought!", which is identical to the hand signal for "I am a helpless Mime, please don't shoot!"


She totally drives like that.

I am a complete wise ass.

Off to find Utinapishtim...

Well, I'm at the end of my rope, time to go and find the secret to eternal life!

Nah, I'm just kidding. Who wants to live forever?

I guess the question as to why, given my stated antipathy towards recording my thoughts for posterity.

Well fuck you, consistency is for idiots!

Kidding aside, this is just my chance to reconnect whilst in a sort of self imposed exile, a constant journey between work and home with little chance to sit and reflect, and a chance to vent about the existential frustrations that scrape the inside of my brainpan while I try to sleep.

As the description says, I'm a Father, Husband, Wage Slave and Writer/Film Maker in about that order, with the attendant joys and depressions that attend to each. Why is writer last? Well, the first two are obvious, the third puts food on the table, and the last is part of my masochistic streak. Father for four years, husband for ten, wage slave for... yikes, nearly fifteen now... sick puppy for as long as I can remember.

Let me talk about the writing/film making thing for a moment, it'll give you an idea of what this project will be about. The title of this blog almost ended up being "The Lidless Lobster Trap", and it comes from a joke I was told as a kid. As I get older, the joke has more and more resonance:

A US Coastguard boat is patrolling off the shore of Maine, when it spots a lobster trawler with Canadian markings near the edge of their waters. They sound their siren and tell them to heave to. Upon boarding the craft the Captain notices two things; the hold is bursting with lobster, and the traps have an unusual, bucket like design. He calls the trawler's Captain over and begins to question him.
"You know you're near American waters, don't you?"
"Oh, aye sir, I do."
"You've got quite a haul here. Can you be sure you haven't been taking American lobsters?"
"Oh aye sir, quite sure. We only take Canadian lobsters here."
"How can you be sure?"
"Well, you'll notice the traps we have, they ain't got lids, eh?"
"Yes, I've noticed that, I've never seen traps like them, how do they work?"
"Well, it's simple sir. If an American lobster climbs into the trap, it can eat its fill and climb out again. But if a Canadian lobster finds its way in and tries to climb up to the top, the other Canadian lobsters will grab it and drag the poor bastard back down to the bottom!"