August 5, 2010 - Breakfast

So we're off for a required class on egghatching at the clinic, necessary education before we can spend the $12K for official dishsemination and implantery. Last night [Wife] shared with me a photocopied article from Self, provided to her by the support group, regarding the terrifying world of infertility—how everyone lies about it to their friends, this unmentionable disease. And while said plague descends upon 1/12th of reproducers, when a meeting was held on Capitol Hill they could not gather even 100 people to protest the lack of research funds. A most secret shame! At the end the woman used as a thruline did conceive, of twins. I did shed a tear.

But then her concluding line is: "I'll be too busy with my twins to fight for awareness for fertility." Which struck me as, you know, suck that dick bitches I'm pregnant! Look at my twins! I win. I wiiiinnnnnn!

Which is the problem with this whole thing. Fucking monkey bullshit. You want out of this club as fast and as finally as possible.

My thumb brushes the staple. Nothing makes you feel that you are in some sort of awful demographic like photocopied literature from a clinic. Unless it's a 1/3-width pamphlet with a cartoon on the front. Learning to Live! A big-nosed Kilroyesque character holding balloons. Or a girl looking out a window. With clip-art, we can fight despair.

My friend who not long ago dried out in Arizona said that for his time there, a month, he was allowed only recovery literature. I know that stuff. It lacks narrative; it affirms; it is unabashedly didactic and wears its intentions without irony. A month in Arizona with only those big simple typefaces, staring at the pink skin in the author's photograph on the glossy back. The lack of narrative would be almost as painful as the lack of stimulants. And yet I can see myself there someday. Clearly I have habits. I imagine myself jonesing for a history of World War II, aching for just a little Hitler to get me through my empty days.

When I was 15 I talked to a guy who had to go to jail for a DUI and read Anna Karenina. Which I thought was awesome. That guy also had a lot of canned food in his house. Hundreds of stacked cans.

"So what's with all the cans?" I asked.

"That's my friend Jake," he said.

"Wow. Poor guy," I said.

He just nodded. That was the first time I made a joke like that work. A big adulthood moment.

Part of this photocopied article is set at the clinic we attend, where I have now ejaculated only once but where I plan to ejaculate frequently in the coming months. Having worked in publishing I wonder if they asked for rights to reprint it, but I doubt it. I can't imagine they see the point of copyright, given that most of their work is about encouraging reproduction.

Again and again the photocopied article tells the reader how neglected this field is, how invisible. The writer is trying to make it feel normal, but it doesn't feel normal. And I personally read this news of national neglect as: I am morally obligated to write about it and publish on the subject; in particular I should be writing now, in the limbo, where it is at its most confusing, rather than later, when we have either—these are the only two possibilities—been blessed with the glorious smile of a tot or are shuffling in rags down an empty road, alone, to our deaths. I run down a list of national magazines who might want the piece: Men's Bare Chest really wanted me years ago, but do they want the literary twist that is necessary, and is Matt still editor? Fucker's Monthly, my alma mater, has become a car crash (although there is a good review to write there about fattiness); Tilley's Weekly Prose Pudding won't touch something like this; The Magazine of the Big Paper is switching eds; Technofucks, while they're happy to have me pitch, isn't going to want the despair angle, preferring solutions to emotional apocalypse. Or maybe them? Because the technologies, the techne of it, is a worthy throughline, a way to get at the humans. My relationship with that editor precludes the sort of necessary intimacies, though. I don't want him judging my semen. I could see if there's a way to rally at National Naptime Radio, but that's a cold call after four years.

A further anxiety—when you do a thing like that in a national way they want you to do things about it. They want you to sing and dance and promote. They ask themselves: how will he look on television? And the camera adds 120 pounds. Besides I am now consulting at a profit, and to suddenly be Mr. Infertility in any fashion is to damage that career. And if I do it right, if I pour myself into 6,000 words and hammer home this glorious piece of prose I'll get as ultimate payout the opportunity to have lunch with an associate editor from Crowning or Snurtlegoose and they'll say "I really think you have a book in you" and I will rip open my stomach with the silver butterknife and pull out a glistening still beating rectangular organ from my body and go, "yes, yes, you were right, I did have a book inside of me," and expire right there, right as the waitress comes by to ask if everything is okay with the halibut, passed out into the white tablecloth stained brown-red with gobbets of my blood.

So I'll do it!

None of this has, could have, anything to do with my sudden need, last night, for Chinese food and cookies. I got off my bike and, sweating profusely, sat in the nervous little restaurant and watched a man battle with his toddlers to make them eat noodles, while to my right a family of ancient Brooklynites discussed matters so mundane that they would do themselves a service by dying (You like shrimp, don't you, Herman?; I do like shrimp, yes, but the butter; I asked them for a soda but where is it? Where is the soda? Uncomfortable self-mocking laugh at her own outrage over the missing soda, which makes it somehow worse.). Achilles, slain by noodles.

Weight: 307 lbs