the drugged snowdrift, a seed germinates in a decomposing log

A personality is starting to form, germinating in primordial reflexes like a seedling germinating in a decomposing log. Yesterday morning, after a particularly frustrated night of crying, you failed to grab my face and crumple it in your tiny hand like tinfoil, or whatever infant plan had shaped in your nascent frontal lobe. A freakout. Two minutes later you reached out and touched my face, then did it again. You have abandoned the fencer's reflex, a feat which even surprised you, two infant arms flexed like a miniature version of the incredible hulk on some miniature rampage. Your face changes with each development. Your eyes are not the puffy, almond-shaped orbs they were previously. Fifteen days ago, one of your moods would last a mere second or less, now, you can stay pissed off for five minutes or more if you really put your mind to it. You have two interests-breastfeeding, real and imaginary, and being swung around under the light of a dim edison bulb to the music of Tool or White Zombie. You have made it clear that the heavier part of the burden is to fall on your mother, and you scream in protest when any attempt to correct this inequity is imposed upon you. Still, I enjoy my late nights dancing to Tool, Kyuss, and whatever else Pandora.com finds for us though it leaves me feeling drugged all the rest of the day.

In other developments, the ice ages have returned to Chicago, sadly missing the imperial mammoth. I remember a science fiction story, read as an adolescent, where subterranean cities of future Americans waited out the ice ages in isolation from the rest of the world, tunneling beneath the earth and powering their operations with nuclear reactors. Frost inches up the second story window. Snowdrifts. A white apocalypse out there. The hairless cat snuggles with the turtle near the radiator.

Enjoying the perpetual terror of an infant faced with a horrible planet full of abominations

Its true. The infant is perpetually horrified at this big vast ocean of a place. It is the sort of world where a ceiling bulb can become god, the sublime strains of Bathory played for an infant twenty nine hours out of the womb, but sung to her the night before to keep the noise of a strange place constant with that cramped paradise that came before. How much of it do you still remember, Ruby? You do that thing with your mouth that you must have done in the womb, though less and less as the time goes on. How much do you dream of it nowadays, a week out of the place? Is it like visiting a strange country where a person dreams of home for the first few days, but then, home is the illusion of memory and here is whatever new place has imposed itself upon a person. You rule my life yet you are driven by impuse.....a clock, a creature not in touch yet with its own physiological needs. This charming selfish personality of yours will vanish like a coat of primer under a finish, but it will still be there for the rest of your life keeping you alive on your own.

more baby pictures

uby

This is probably the best pic we have of Ruby

We took this one in the hospital yesterday, getting ready to bring Ruby home. To me, she resembles her mom. Perhaps, she expresses a few of her father's alleles in the shape of her nose. Her knees remind me of her mom's..the shape is characteristic. A full head of hair, enough for a "hairstyle", pearly dark blue eyes. The appropriate fingers and toes. Alert from the moment of leaving the birth canal, probably before. She focused on my face 3 minutes after leaving the birth canal...and has spent the last couple of days running infant survival programs, forcing me to stare into her face (or she cries) so that we can memorize each other's features. Crying when she is put down, so that we do not leave her where predators can get her. She demands food constantly, and stimulation frequently, at night, everything we can provide, given that most of her homeostatic mechanisms are barely online, and her cortex has not wired itself to process much of what she sees.

WELCOME TO EARTH, RUBY

So, maybe it was one of the promises I made the other day, because you are here, Ruby. About the time I was goofing around with those posts, I get a call from your mom, "wondering when I am gonna be home from work"....this was directed wondering, I could sense it, so I cut things short and came home. As soon as I get there, Jan says "keep your shoes on, we're going out somewhere...anywhere..the bookstore. Ruby is coming." We figured that a little walking around would get things started. A few books, some caffeine for me, some fancy dinner, and 60 or 70 contractions later, our friend, Terri is over at the house and you are on your way...or so we thought. Things petered out Tuesday evening, after hours of intense prodromal labor.

We go to bed the next night, and I am imagining that you are still two weeks away. Nah. At 3.30 you wake Jan with the real deal. It is cold out, I drink coffee and call people...wake them up in the middle of the night. Soon, we are checked into the alternative birthing center, Terri is there with advice and back rubs, the midwife arrives, cheerful and stoked...woken up early. We check into the hospital at 4:30. By 9, we figure you must be close. Nope. The cervix is about where it was on Tuesday. It stays that way ALL DAY, till 3 or 4. By then, everybody is tired, and we are wondering what to do...the contractions will not stop, and you are not coming. The midwife and Terri try their goofy tricks, while I go home to feed the cats, so that my skepticism about goofy midwife tricks does not play a part in hampering them (homeopathic medicine actually stopped the contractions on Tues...I do not believe in any medicine that supposedly always does the right thing, that is impossible). I come back, and the contractions are INTENSE, like they are supposed to be. Their goofy tricks worked. I am impressed. There is some real drama here, because this was the point where they would have used pitosin, probably an epidural, all kinds of stuff. Jan was committed to a natural birth for you.

How committed? I remember cold washrag after cold washrag, every conceivable birth position, three trips to the bathtub.....more washrags, the birth ball, hands and knees, legs up in the air, on your side. We were holding our tongues about how bummed we were....at 9 only a little farther..but you had moved. They take a big risk and break your water...more your mom's idea than anyone else's...she researched everything about labor and delivery. At that point, you mom starts forcing you out, and gets REALLY TIRED. At some point around 10.30, I remember the midwife checking her, screaming "Oh MY GOD, We're gonna have this BABY!". You were finally committed to coming. Hours of pushing. Your head starts cresting at 11:30. Jan is exhausted..but she has totally taken over, really, nobody gives her any advice anymore, except when the midwife had her lay on her back to get your head over the pubic bone a little earlier. I was expecting you at midnight. I kept checking Terri's watch. Terri never flagged, was always encouraging, and always had water for your mom. Which is good. I held your mom's hand as they finally got you out of there. It was about six or eight minutes after midnight when you came out.

You looked "animatronic", "undead", "monstrous", the perfect grey baby, with an improbably short, Clive-Barkeresque grey umbilical cord.

I cut it. They let me hold you. You gurgle bubbles between cries, trying to get the knack of breathing air. Then, you get quiet and stare at me relentlessly, while the color comes to your face. That shot of me on this page was taken pretty close to then.

Turns out, your mom took a calculated risk in getting you out..she pushed like hell, and tore herself...because she knew she had only so much energy left. She is recovering from them now, on the couch, watching Freeway and feeding you. They made us stay in the hospital for a while. I slept on an uncomfortable couch and, at night when you want to PLAY, I sang Bathory songs to you and jiggled you to those Viking Metal bass lines. The cats at home were wondering where we are. In the middle of labor, Jan made me promise to buy her sushi the next day. I brought her sushi in the hospital, which is good, because the food was improbably bad...and delivered at unexpected times.

Now, you are home. Yesterday, they let you out. We were exhausted because you have adjusted our sleep cycles...and Jan STILL needs a good night's sleep she will not get for months. I try to help her on this, walking you around at night and dancing with you to Psyklon 9 and The Sword. Turns out, you DO like metal.

Welcome to this world, baby.

lizard men

I wasted my adolescence playing Dungeons and Dragons. Seriously. I played some Traveler, some Space Opera, some Gamma World, even some Paranoia, Toon, and Call of Cthulu, but mostly it was DnD, sucking my time, giving me a reason not to hang out near the 7-11 pay phone, smoking a cigarette, trying to look cool, joining a punk band, trying to get laid. Instead, I fought orcs, impaled paladins, befriended dragons, got disintegrated, built vast space empires. Looser. At the end of all of it, what I had to show for my time was a set of amazing writing skills and an even more perverse imagination, along with the knowledge that a mummy could not hope to beat a vampire in hand to hand combat, that hell is ruled by archdevils, followed by dukes of hell, that antipaladins can turn clerics, that wraiths get their power from the negative material plane, and that geodesic is good for mapping countryside, but nothing beats good old grid graph paper for mapping underground labyrinths.

Here are some highlights from the time I wasted.

1) I first got a copy of the original DnD rules on a family vacation to Minneapolis. It wasn't the boxed set, just the rule book. I filled in the rest. I remember calling my sister an Ogre, but getting the pronunciation wrong. Still, grandma's house was boring, and now I had an excuse to draw one dungeon after another. I still use their notation for doors, cliffs, windows, and trap doors.

2) The first time I fought a skeleton, it had something like six hit points. I had a mace. I was first level. I barely won. I don't think I got too much farther in the dungeon than that. It was in Walnut Creek, CA, and a friend's friend was Dungeon Mastering. He left with the module, whatever it was. I must have been in sixth grade at the time.

3) Keep on the fucking borderlands. Hell. I dunno how many times I burned this thing down and killed everybody in it. Sometimes I had the help of the hobgoblins in the caves of chaos, sometimes not. Sometimes, we killed everything in those caves too. This keep had a way of repeating itself in every fantasy world I constructed...it was they way fantasy empires project power, by replicating this same keep and dropping it all over the map.

4) Riding through a halfling village, on a warhorse, cutting the little fuckers down with a morningstar, or burning their houses down with spells like Flame Strike. I had a predilection for evil clerics, something I can directly attribute to Thulsa Doom's character from Conan the Barbarian. The ones that lived underground, we gassed with spells like Stinking Cloud. We led the women and children away as slaves, in chains, to build a ziggaraut to my mighty power.

5) As an evil, 29th level cleric, we fought the Indian Diety, Ushas, Goddess of Dawn, and defeated her on her own turf, thus destroying her. I still feel guilty about this. She was an awesome goddess. I now realize that we cheated (she should have used her divine command power to completely destroy us...I think we made ourselves deaf or some dumb shit). I don't know how I ended up using clerical spells against another god, but it made sense at the time, even in Elysium. Seems like evil magic should not work there. We had some sort of infernal army helping us. It was like 4:00 AM when we did this, and we were cracked out on Jolt and chocolate chip cookies. Funny, dawn came anyway, in the real world. In my goofy fantasy world, of course, eternal night....EEEVILLL. Everything everywhere must have perished. Dumb cleric, no followers. I was DM and playing with a friend simultaneously, this is something like playing chess against one's self...goofy. That explains it. Seriously, I never see a sunrise nowadays without apologizing to her, or thanking her for making us think we won. Tenth grade, probably.

7) I usually DM'd. I came up with so many fantasy worlds, I could never keep them straight. I remember one scenario where I was breeding armies of undead from caged ghouls and human hostages fed to the ghouls. I would then turn the undead. Another evil cleric. Animate dead was the basis of my power for a hell of a long time. Best third level spell ever, even better than fireball is for magic users, if used properly. One need never to fight opponents again, ZOMBIES do that for you now. Fuck having a thief around to check for traps, let ZOMBIES go first....and hundreds of zombies, led by some fuckwad on a warhorse, is a good time. Hell yeah.

8) I had this campaign with ultra powerful player characters. They were at about 24th level. I translated the book of Revalations into DnD format and ended the fucking world. It was awesome. Early on, they had to keep rolling on the random disease table (yes, there is one in the Dungeon Masters Guide, first edition) for the ailments they got from god, then trying to heal themselves. Somehow, the pagan gods they worshiped still had some modicum of power. There were armies of undead led by a badass antichrist....a big lion-headed beast that breathed sulfur. The PCs knocked those things down, no problem. More monsters though, and earthquakes....I think most of them got wasted before the end. A couple ended up in the lake of fire, tormented eternally. Good job.

9) My friend Rolf was a killer DM. Tomb of Horrors was the perfect module to fuck with me. I think we all died. I was a total pussy about it when my were-rat thief crawled into that fucking sphere of annihilation and disintegrated. I still think that cover is a shitty thing to do...you can clearly see them FIGHTING a lich. Instead, you get this crappy demilitch that is indestructible, and devours your souls forever...it was a total killer dungeon. At the time I was pissed, now KNOW why Gary Gygax wrote it, from the daughter of a woman that played with him all the time. HE DID write it to kill characters, he wrote it to kill her, specifically. This was the same woman who invented the rust monster, by the way. Figures, doesn't it? You DnD fans out there, your most memorable, miserable DnD experience resulted from a personal vendetta. Wouldn't have it any other way, now. Sometimes you are just fucked.


10) THANK YOU, ex wife, for the few times I got laid BECAUSE of DnD. Great times.

Dear Ruby

Dear Ruby,
It is your official due date, and I am waiting here for you. I can guarantee you that this planet has snow, the kind that requires a snow-suit, for making snow-angels. Soon, it will have rain, and sunflowers, and ice cream. It has fossils. It lacks Titanotheres, sorry, but it is well-stocked with arthropods. I promise to lay off on the loud death metal until I think you can handle it...you are more likely to hear Joanna Newsome and Tangerine dream early on. We have three freak cats for you to meet, and a little bassinet with a sheepskin. We have tiny socks for you.

see you soon.