Wordpress, Here I Come!

Well, I think already I'm enjoying Wordpress more than Blogger, so if you're reading this right now, why not read http://silvagami.wordpress.com/ instead?

Sunshine and Happiness and the Apocalypse

I'm a big fan of Cormac McCarthy. I've been reading his books for years now, and damn if the Coen Brothers' No Country For Old Men wasn't my favorite movie from three years back. As such, when I heard there was a film version of The Road coming, I was all tingly with excitement. Plus it had Viggo Mortensen in it? He's always fun to watch, and who could have guessed that he'd be such a great actor that he'd steal every one of those Lord of the Rings movies. So of course, I was peeing myself over the coming of The Road. I could hardly wait. But I had to, because as far as I can tell, the film was never released anyplace near to me, which completely sucked ass. And so right up on my Netflix it went, so it would pop up in my mailbox as soon as I could get it.

So now here it is, and it's gorgeous to look at, that's for sure. Viggo looks perfectly balanced on the edge of madness and starvation.

You know it's going to be a comedic romp through Happytown when there's a scene of the father showing the son how to commit suicide with a pistol in the mouth in case everything gets to be too much.

These movies, these stories, they're almost too much for me to watch now that I have a child. Used to be, children in jeopardy stories didn't affect me any more than any other sort of plot did, but now, I'm screwed. Not of course for ham-handed "dinosaurs are going to eat my baby" sorts of stories, mind you, but serious stories like this. Stories that want you to think about if it would be a blessing for your child if you put a bullet through his head rather than let things continue as they are.

There's so much loss and hurt and anguish in this film. I'm drained already and it's only halfway through. I already know how the story ends from reading the novel, so I know it's only going to get worse before it... well, it never really gets better. It's absolutely killing me, but it is so, so very good.

I think I'm going to sleep with Sophie tonight.

A Monkey On My Lower Back

The thing I find funny about backs is just how stupidly easy it is to do something to them that really, really, really hurts. Seriously. First time I threw out my back? I was in my late 20s, and I'd just been camping over a holiday weekend. I was packing up my gear, everything had been loaded into the car, and I was bending down to pick up the tarp that the tent had been built on... and I went down, down, down, right onto the tarp.

What the fuck?

Completely out of the blue, that was. I hadn't had any sort of warning pains or soreness, nothing at all. Just bent over, and down I went. Have you ever thrown out your back? Hurts just a little bit. You know, just a little. Like every bone in your spine has been ripped out by evil coked-up Keebler elves and replaced with molten pig iron, and every muscle in your back has been infused with candy corn-sized pieces of broken window glass, which have been pre-coated in a solution of 1/3 parts lemon juice, 1/3 parts corrosive spit from one of those monsters from the Alien movies, and 1/3 parts Sarah Palin bile.

So yeah, just a little uncomfortable.

Seems Simple to Me Anyway

Look, see, I'm not being a bad parent, but here's the deal... two deals, actually.

Deal the First: if you're going to play with your Legos up in the bay window behind the sofa, and I repeatedly tell you to play on the floor instead because you keep losing your Legos piece by piece between the wall and that sofa, do not whine at me when you no longer have enough Legos to build your castle and expect me to leap to Lego rescue on the day I have injured my back and am waiting to see if an urgent care visit is in order. I am even less inclined to be helpful as your whining escalates in volume.

Deal the Second: I don't generally try to give you food issues to deal with later in life, but you know what? When you bring me a piece of pre-wrapped string cheese that you want to eat, make me open the package and then you take one tiny little bite before proclaiming that you want to eat something else instead, you are going to sit right there on the horrible Lego-devouring sofa and eat every last bite of that goddamn cheese, because A) pre-wrapped string cheese ain't cheap; and B) because I am a mean and horrible daddy that obviously doesn't love you.

Sophie's life is worse than being in a Stalinist gulag, I know.

Only An Asshole Gets Killed For a Car

Well, motherfuck. I was planning on going to bed before the sun comes up, but now I've got this wild hair up my ass to watch Repo Man for the millionth time, because that's just how my brain works sometimes. If I were smarter, I'd just leave it alone, go to bed, and watch it on the laptop tomorrow while Sophie is maybe watching Dora the Explorer or taking a nap, but honestly? I'd rather watch it on the big TV, and since I'm off tomorrow, when she takes a nap, I plan to be right there asleep with her.

Repo Man is fucking awesome. It's easily the best movie produced by a Monkee, directed by the guy that did Sid & Nancy, starring the King of Cool, Harry Dean Stanton, and the Not-So-Cool, Emilio Estevez, and a 1964 Chevy Malibu hauling radioactive alien bodies in the trunk that I've ever seen, and God knows I've seen every Monkee-produced, Alex Cox-directed, H.D.S. and E.E.-acted, alien-hauling Chevy Malibu movie ever made.

It's the Citizen Kane of repo movies. Also, the soundtrack kicks all sorts of ass: Iggy Pop, Black Flag, Suicidal Tendencies... I remember that my gang of friends back in high school passed around cassette dubs of the album like they were crack, and holy shit did I ever want to join the Circle Jerks after listening to it over and over and over and over... Many years later, when I saw that the soundtrack had finally been released on CD, I nearly pooped myself in excitement over it.

I should have lost my virginity watching this movie, dammit! That's how awesome it is.

Fuck and Run

Look, I’m not saying that I still don’t like Liz Phair. I’m just saying that I liked her better when she sang about blowjobs and doing it doggie style so that everyone could watch TV while they were fucking.

Liz Phair now, dear reader, is sort of like fucking your mom.

Liz Phair then was… well, okay, it was still sort of like fucking your mom too, actually. If you know what I mean.

Hah!

P.S. Your mom is hot.

Anyway, on a nearly related note, my iTunes is absolutely convinced that what I'm lacking in my life is more Willie Nelson.  I've got 12,000 songs shuffling around on there, and what keeps coming up but this seemingly endless parade of the red headed stranger. Don't get me wrong, I like Willie Nelson. I just like him better when he's singing about blowjobs and fucking while watching television.

No, wait. That's still Liz Phair.

Seriously though, I'm used to odd mixes coming up once the shuffle button is hit, but... well here, have a look at my recently played artists, in the order that they've been (of course) recently played: Norah Jones, Willie Nelson, Willie Nelson with Norah Jones, Rage Against the Machine, The White Stripes, Willie Nelson, Barenaked Ladies, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Willie Nelson & Merle Haggard, Liz Phair, The Decemberists, Ween, Lou Reed and Willie Nelson.

Is it a sign? Do I owe the government taxes? Should I start smoking prodigious amounts of weed? What does it mean, oh Magic 8-Ball?

More unrelated but still... weird. Sophie is in the bay window. Completely naked. With the top of her head shoved up between the dog's legs so that she is wearing his junk as a hat.

I don't mind if the kid is naked while she's at home, but maybe I should draw the line at rubbing the dog's unit with her head up in the window where any passing CPS representative can see them.

Obviously summer is off to a good start.

Straight From the Horse's Vagina

Sophie and Molly went to the bookstore today, because the library was closed and Molly needed a book right this minute. Molly came back with a copy of Twilight, which I’m not even going to comment on, since I prefer my vampires of the Salem’s Lot variety rather than the sparkly hairless-chested Jonas Brothers type. Sophie, however, definitely scored in the book department. She came back with a visible horse, which is just totally, totally awesome. Remember the Visible Man models from when we were kids? A plastic statue of a human man, with breakaway organs and bones, designed to show kids the anatomy of a person? Well, this is the same thing, only it’s a book with a plastic toy transparent horse in the center of it, and every page you turn reveals more and more of the underlying tissue and matter under the horse’s skin (and since it’s a three-dimensional model, as you reveal more of the horse on one page as you go, the pieces that come away on one page start to build up on the other, so that you’re constantly getting a breaking down-building up dynamic going).

Sophie is absolutely in love with this book. Her grasp of equine anatomy is shady at best, but she is all too eager to point out the various organs to you. She made me read it with her five times alone this afternoon, jabbing her finger at the bits and pieces as we went.

“That his brain, Daddy,” she said, pointing at the horse’s stomach with certainty. I could see where she would have trouble with this, because for a large animal, a horse’s brain sure is awfully small (at least in this plastic model it was; I’ve never seen a real horse’s brain, nor do I feel a deep-seated need to), and her stomach is right there, huge and obvious and  just waiting to be pointed at by a sticky little finger. Oddly, the only organ she nailed correctly each time we went through the book was the horse’s uterus, which Molly had explained to her was where baby horses came from. Sophie has been on a “babies come from mommy’s tummy” kick the past couple of weeks, so maybe this explains why she’s Dr. Doolittle all of a sudden when it comes to a horse’s reproductive organs.

When I got home from work this evening, after Sophie had gone to bed, I went up to check on her like I always do. She'd pulled her baby's crib upstairs and into her room, and there was a doll propped up in it, looking disturbingly like one of those old Victorian photos of a baby, dead from small pox or cholera, that you could use to show your relatives what the child looked like before the funeral, some five or six months before the arrival of said relatives by train from the other coast. Sophie was asleep in her bed with her visible horse book cradled under her arm, where I assume she'd fallen asleep while pointing out its uterus again and again to her terminally ill, pox-ridden baby.

I'm guessing the baby's autopsy begins in the morning.