I thought Mr F would like the one where they said he had to spread out like a starfish, but it turns out he'd rather not spread out like a starfish. Who knew?

Today we took the boys to yoga class.  It was Sweetie's idea, the yoga class, but (as we agreed on the way over there) it would be hard for her choice of outing to be less fun than two other loser trips I'd picked out this year, Festge Park and the trolley.

Festge Park was supposed to be a lot of fun.  Scenic overlook, playground, nature trail, the guide said, and also I'd driven by the park, which sits up on this bluff-type area, many many times over the last 17 years since I became a lawyer, and in particular a lawyer who had to drive periodically to Richland County, which is due west of us and which passes by the bluff where Festge Park is.  That trip -- to Richland County -- also used to include driving over my favorite bridge ever, only now the route has been moved to a new bridge, which is not my favorite.  You can still see my favorite, from the new bridge as you drive over it, but that is dangerous to do in that if you are driving over a bridge while trying to peer up the river at the other bridge, you're likely to drive into the Wisconsin River, which is one of the deadliest rivers around.  In all seriousness: people die in that river almost on a weekly basis.

Anyway, the real fun was in driving over the bridge, not in driving past it from miles away.

Festge Park actually had all three of those things. But the 'scenic overlook' was being monopolized by two teenagers who were making out, and that was hard to overlook.  (Get it?) while the playground was mostly under construction, except for an amazingly old set of horse-glider swings and a Merry-Go-Round, which you don't see much at playgrounds anymore, probably because of lawyers.  The nature trail, meanwhile, dead-ended in a cornfield and after that you had to walk back a half-mile along a road which led by a house that appeared to be all boarded up but which housed one of those dogs that emits bloodcurdling barks the entire time you walk by the house.  The kind of bark that sounds like the dog wants to kill you but has the last victim's femur bone stuck in its throat.

Not a great choice.

Yoga went better.  For Sweetie and Mr Bunches, anyway. It was yoga for special needs kids, and I was teamed up with Mr F despite Sweetie bragging that Mr F tends to listen to her more than to me.  It's true.  But she got Mr Bunches, so she got to do bridges and tree pose and "dragon," which is a real pose, while I got to try to wrestle Mr F into the roof pose and then chase him back when he wanted to go get his breathing ball again.

I am pretty sure you're not supposed to sweat as much as I did at yoga. You're probably also not supposed to wear plaid shorts, but we all have to make choices in life and I have made the choice to lead the kind of life where I only own one pair of athletic shorts, and those were still wet from swimming in Lake Mendota yesterday with Mr F and Mr Bunches when we walked out on Picnic Point, on a nature walk that was blessedly short of killer dogs, teens making out, and merry-go-rounds. It did have a beach labeled DANGER DO NOT SWIM, but that was okay because we found another beach and there were no warnings there, so SWIM AWAY.

Mr Bunches liked yoga, a lot.  He was not terribly good at 'tree pose,' where you have to hold your hands up in a "V" while balancing on one foot and tucking the other against your ankle, but he was able to do lots of them, and the rest of the group seemed to like Mr Bunches' sheer enthusiam, calling out the names of each pose and getting all excited.  Mr Bunches loves everything.  Even yoga.

We decided we'd go to the next one.  I can always use the workout, eventually Mr F might calm down and let our team do more than three poses in a row, and Mr Bunches liked it so much that we'd have signed him up for classes, if you had to sign up for them.

I've been really tired all this week which is why I haven't posted.

Here are some pictures.

Mr Bunches walking to the park with me, carrying his mango:

Mr Bunches with the doughnuts we bought last Friday morning, because we were going to have coffee WITH DOUGHNUTS.

 Mr Bunches learning to ride his bike:

Mr Bunches splashing in the river:

Mr F, enjoying some dirt:

Mr F climbing the slide at "Tall Park." He tried three times before he got the courage to go down, but boy was he proud when he finally did.

Mr F on the trolley ride last week. I'm with him: it was way more boring than I expected:

Mr F at the pond.

Crayons.

10 Minutes About Sad Science Fiction

I just finished reading CivilWarLand In Bad Decline by George Saunders and it might have been the saddest book I ever read and definitely included one of the saddest stories I think could ever exist, "The 400 Pound CEO." I read that story while I was sitting at a table next to the Milwaukee River, taking a lunch break, last week. It was sunny and windy and after I read the terrible (great but so sad) ending to the story I had to just sit and stare at the ducks for a while until I felt like I could stand up.

You don't read many sad scifi stories, and CivilWarLand In Bad Decline is full of scifi stories that are at the least speculative fiction and at the most full-on scifi with mutants and ghosts and stolen memories via mechanical devices and the things. As I read them, one a day only because too much of them would wear me down further (and I was already very down last week) I wondered now and then why it is that you don't see so many sad science fiction, or sad speculative fiction.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote very very sad stories.  I read most of his books one summer when I lived in Milwaukee, over two decades ago. It was the summer I worked at the Grant Theater and at Subway, and I was a sophomore or junior in college, living in a studio apartment on 22nd and Clybourn, near where one day Bill Clinton would stop at a diner. He didn't go there until 1996, when I was already living in Madison and going to law school, and I never went to the diner that he would later visit; back then I was poor enough that I had to work at Subway, because one of my meals each day was the free meal I would get eating at Subway. I ate a sub sandwich a day for nearly two years. Not that I was complaining, although I was very poor.

I would go get my books at the used bookstore near the Grand Theater, picking up paperbacks for a dollar.  It's funny; I realize now that I walked by the library nearly every day and yet I never went there to get books, even though I was so poor.

I read all the Kurt Vonnegut books that summer, working 60+ hours a week and not getting more than two days off the entire summer, and by the end of summer I was pretty depressed.  I always attributed it to reading so much Vonnegut, but now I see maybe it was just that I worked a lot and didn't make a lot of money and didn't have very many friends, and wasn't really sure where I was going in life.

But the Vonnegut didn't help.

Reading George Saunders was different.  I've got a really full life now, and even though last week wasn't great, it wasn't anywhere near as bad as when I was in my 20s and reading all that Vonnegut and walking nearly everywhere because bus fare was expensive.  But still, the stories were very depressing -- albeit, as I've said, great, well worth reading.  Maybe that's why I remember that summer so much, out of all the summers (46, now!) of my life: because of the sadness that stuck with me through the memories of Vonnegut.

David Sedaris wrote, in Leviathan, about remembering sad things:

Honestly, though, does choice even come into it? Is it my fault that the good times fade to nothing while the bad ones burn forever bright? Memory aside, the negative just makes for a better story: the plane was delayed, an infection set in, outlaws arrived and reduced the schoolhouse to ashes. Happiness is harder to put into words. It’s also harder to source, much more mysterious than anger or sorrow, which come to me promptly, whenever I summon them, and remain long after I’ve begged them to leave.

He was talking about how his memories of sad times stick to him, even in the  midst of good times.  Science fiction tends to be an optimistic field: the future, even when its an apocalyptic scenario, ends up being so bright we have to wear shades. The good guys win, the bad guys lose, inventions make lives better.  I think even Blade Runner had a kind of happy ending, although Phillip K. Dick could vie with Vonnegut and Saunders for the saddest writers around.

There's a place for sadness.  I used to like to listen to sad songs when I was down, letting the songs pull the emotions out of me, shape them into something.  Now, I sometimes use stories to do that -- my own stories, in part.  Over the last year, as I wrote a lot of short short stories, many of them came out sad.  Not all of them, but many of them.  Who could blame me? I had a lot going on last year: my dad got sick, I saw the end to 14 years of building a law firm, we had a lot of stresses going on.  Taking any stress, any sadness, any worries, and putting them into the mouths of robots and cowboys and dinosaurs, is a form of control.  I think that's what reading sad stories does now, too: it helps take an emotion that's too immediate and distance it a bit.  Oh that sadness, that's just from the story, I can think, and blame Vonnegut or Saunders or Dick and then later, from a safer distance, examine it and take it apart and put it back together.

That's 10 minutes.