I said to the counselor at the clinic: I see the babies dying on Facebook and I get sad. I keep wondering why we're doing this if the babies keep dying out there.
Now see, she said, the babies don't all die. You have to reel that back. That's spiralling. You can't spiral like that.
Spiralling is kind of what I do for a living, I said.
Well then you need a new job, she said. But look: do it fast. Just set a time limit. Fifteen minutes. Play it out all the way to the absurd conclusion. Show how crazy you're being.
Fifteen minutes is actually about 1,000 to 1,500 words of typing time--two or three pages. As I said, it's my living. But two or three minutes maximum makes sense. I can get to Zombie apocalypse in two or three minutes every time.
It's 7:45PM as I write this. So what is my fear? My fear is that we will have a child and it will be born as a gelatinous amoebalike mass. That it will be a vampire baby wearing a tiny cape; that it will jump out of my wife's vagoo and turn into a bat and fly away. Or that it will be healthy and something will be slightly off starting a few months in, like it will have Blagojevich hair and will stare at us with unremitting fury and then at six month start speaking in full sentences, and angrily. Or that it will be bearded. Or autistic, of course, as that seems to be happening all over, or that it will never grow hair, or will be one of those children that ages prematurely so that by the time she is two she is two hundred. And then there will come soft rains and the hills shall melt; a chemical weapon will be released, which will in turn release a nuclear stockpile and [Wife] and 200-year-old-baby and I will lean against the wall behind a mattress like in When the Wind Blows and reminisce softly, the baby smoking a cigarette, as the radiation seeps into our body and I will wonder to myself: should we have taken the money for IVF and used it elsewhere? Like to buy a farm, or some lead shielding? And now it is 7:48 and that was three minutes and I'm not particularly soothed.
Maybe five minutes?
| Food | Qty | Calories |
|---|---|---|
| Beer, Amstel Light, 1 bottle | 4 | 380 |
| Pie, shepherds, 1/4 pie | 4 | 840 |
| Soup, French onion, 1 serving | 1.5 | 300 |
| Total | 1520 |