July 11, 2010 - Breakfast

Well maybe this time it'll stick if I start it up again. I've gained ten pounds from the last time I measured; 20 from my lowest. Doctor shaking his head.

I didn't take this month's regularly scheduled bad news, delivered on Friday, very well. I knew I would not, said as much, and when the bad news came, I didn't. Spent a few days watching television and stumbling through work at a slow and uninspired pace. It's hard to unmope, living inside a big gray translucent plastic ball.

Unhappy with the incompetence of the old one, we've switched to a new fertility center, buried again in pamphlets. I am reading up on the high cost of egg hatching, a process that makes me think of a doctor squatting over a tiny stainless-steel nest, cackling. The bright spot is that I have earned enough money in the last few months to purchase the potential robot baby of our dreams.

On a train caught in the tunnel, waiting for the wheels to turn, or for the announcer to come on to apologize. Ladies and gentlemen, we are waiting for the dispatcher.

Wandering Brooklyn I see that any asshole can have a child; and then I think: well, that's why I'm here, too. Because any asshole can. I still feel the Protestant youth-group burden of love, except now that is transfixed on some potential human that, if we are very, very lucky, will emerge healthy out of my wife's vagoo. Love transfixed on the potential. And in there is a fear of lost opportunity, of the weirdness of the old childless couple, of the psychic exhaustion and cost of interviewing for adoption, of all the terrible-seeming things that loom across the barren plain. I retreat inside the big gray translucent plastic ball, for this reason, and help myself to spare ribs; or perhaps, in order to excuse helping myself to spare ribs, I tell myself that I am sad. I am not a reliable narrator here.

Maybe I should have been a pastor, at which pt. you can talk about Love being called a weird fag. But too much sweetness, too much love, and people stare at you wrong. This is an era where we email each other pictures of fatal head wounds and follow up with pictures of adorable kittens who can't spell. I like the kittens more. Every kitten is unique, whereas the head wounds are all the same. If the child doesn't come then all this suppressed love will need to go somewhere. I am an unburst pustule of fondness.

It might be time to look into pills, as ever, but first I should hang out here for a while. No pictures right now, though; I lost my camera. I still have an old one--1999--powered by rechargeable double-A batteries, bulky as a Kaiser roll (169 calories). It's packed up somewhere. Beautiful colors, from the days before gigapixels.