The Sorta Great Wall

This is a repost from June, 2008.



Here's why I'm increasingly down on science: I've heard over and over that most of what we think of as "matter," which laypeople call "stuff," is actually made up of empty space.


Well, that's a lot of, as my dad used to say, "bull-lar."

I don't know what "bull-lar" was, but my dad said that a lot of things were "bull-lar." He'd say what we did, as kids, was "bull-lar." He'd be yelling at us for something, and say something parental, old-school parental, like "You think you can just take a car and race it along and jump it 100 feet off the road? Well you can't! That's a lot of bull-lar!" (It was not 100 feet, though. It was 110, at least.)

Between the frequent use of the phrase "bull-lar" and my dad's habit of holding my younger sister, who was only about two, while he yelled at us, very little 'punishment' actually soaked in because we spent half the time wondering what "bull-lar" was and half the time watching our sister mimic dad as he yelled.

I suppose "bull-lar" was one of those things that parents learn to say when their kids are young because they don't want to swear around their kids and are trying to be good role models. I try to do that, too, which was why a while back when I slipped while installing the stove hood and banged my head hard enough to draw blood, I didn't swear or cuss or yell. I didn't do anything for about 10 minutes except try not to explode, and I did it. I didn't swear at all. I just bled. So I'm a good role model, except that while I try not to swear and I never drink, I also regularly let the Babies! watch, on Youtube while they eat breakfast, a clip of Butters from "South Park" singing What What In The Butt, which I think is hilarious and the Babies think is hilarious, too, and it really helps us get through breakfast a lot easier.

I know, I know. I can hear you now: How can you possibly do that? How can you, of all people, possibly expose your not-even-two-year-old boys to copyright infringement? I feel bad about, it, too. But listen to my side: A family is an economic partnership. Everyone has to pitch in. So some people make sure that the Babies! get fed and some people make sure the Babies! get bathed and some people make sure that the Babies! don't fall out of windows. Those people, in our family, are Sweetie. Other people (me) have them watch South Park clips on Youtube and determine what occupations they will have in the future to make sure they make enough money that Other People (me) don't have to work after they're fifty. (Currently, Plan A is them having a Disney show, since if you are a kid and you appear on Disney TV you are instantly worth a billion dollars, and also, I like "Bunnytown.")

Plus, consider this: if someone in the family is going to take a fall for the rest of us, shouldn't it be the infants? Let's face it; someone has to pirate the South Park clips and illegally download music and make fun of Tom Cruise. If, when the hammer comes down, the Babies! take the fall, then they will receive shorter jail terms and lighter sentences because, well, they're cute. Cuteness is still a defense to most criminal charges, isn't it? I should probably know that.

But I don't know that. I don't know a lot of things because all my memory is taken up with everything "science" has filled my head with, like hokey stories about how everything is mostly empty space, how we are all made of "atoms" and that these are very small and are made up of mostly smaller things like "electrons" and "quarks" and "my paycheck" and that as a result of all this small-osity, things that we think of as solid matter, things that seem good and thick to us -- the table, the old shed, Kris Kristofferson-- are in fact mostly empty space.

Well, I'm not buying it. I'm not buying it because nothing is mostly empty space.

I'm not mostly empty space. I've tried, unsuccessfully, fitting into some of my more favorite t-shirts lately, and I've tried going jogging, and I can assure you that I am far from being made up of mostly empty space. Empty space would have a far far easier time lugging it's empty-space-belly up the hill at the end of empty space's running route, and empty space would not fill up a t-shirt quite so snugly. My own scientific analysis has led me to conclude, at this point, that I am mostly made up of Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch, which also is not mostly empty space.

Another thing that is not at all empty space was our old shed, which is finally down, and which somehow warped time and space in that the shed, torn down, managed to contain more actual material than it had when it was still standing. I can remember when it was standing, and it was four walls and a roof and some old household furniture inside. I would go inside, sort of. I would actually stand just outside the shed and look in, to see if there was a place to put more junk, in between the older junk and the raccoons, and the shed was full of lots of seemingly empty space, because it wasn't full of stuff and according to "science," things that aren't full of stuff are mostly empty space. I wish "science" had been here to help with the work. But, as usual, "science" never shows up until the work's done and the pizza's being served, when "science" tries to prove that it knows something after all by having your pizza remain superhot for longer than it should so that you burn your mouth even though you waited a really, really long time before eating the pizza.

Tearing down the shed was like battling the hydra; every board we tore out created three more. Every wall that came down left two more. It just kept multiplying and multiplying and we just kept hauling it to the second of two dumpsters using our specialized shed-tearing-down-tools of "old winter gloves" and "a garbage can with wheels."


Using that highly technical equipment, we threw away the entire shed which, when torn down created a pile of rubble that took up two dumpsters. Two. When they redid our roof last year, they only used one. So there was more stuff in that shed than there was in our entire roof on our house.

Of course, the roof of our house did not contain, as I found out the shed did, five live raccoons and one very very dead raccoon. At least I hope it didn't, because if there is that much wildlife in our roof, I'm moving.

There is nothing quite like pulling up an old board and seeing most of a raccoon skull sitting there in front of you, not quite attached to most of a raccoon skeleton. The only thing I could think was where's the rest of it? Is it on me? I still kind of feel that way. That's my most common reaction to nature, as I sit here and think of it: Is it on me? I'm not the outdoorsy type. Put me outdoors for any length of time, and I'll begin to think that the outdoors is on me, and not shake that feeling or the way it makes my skin crawl, until I get back inside, take a shower, and watch Newhart on DVD.
But it's done! The shed is down, and where there used to be a sagging, possibly haunted shed there now stands what looks like empty space but isn't. What it is, is a bare dirt area covered with leaves and bits of grass and the smaller debris that I decided to leave there. Trust me, it's an improvement, even if technically part of that dirt area is still made up of shed parts.

There's still shed parts there because I took The Boy's advice, something I only am ready to do when I've been working in the hot sun all day and am covered with raccoon flakes. We were hauling and hauling and I was trying not to think of what the pieces of animal would do to my lungs and, and we got down to the last two items of stuff to haul: the world's largest collection of cement cinder blocks, and a pile of stuff that included shingles but was, in my imagination, made up mostly of dead animal skin, animal skin that was getting on me.


We looked at that, me and The Boy and The Boy's Friend, who I'll call "Q," and The Boy said the smartest thing he's ever said. He said "Let's just let erosion do its thing." Who says kids don't learn anything these days?

I brushed some raccoon parts off my head and decided we'd do just that. We spread the pile back out and hoped for erosion to work more quickly than most so-called "science."

That left the cement bricks, which as it turned out made up a lot of what appeared to be the empty space under the shed. (They may also make up a lot of the empty space in me, if the doctor's scale is to be believed.) There were more cement bricks under that shed than I could have imagined. If cement bricks were money, we'd be rich. But they're not, so we're just tired.

We decided to not haul the cement bricks, and instead to turn them into The Sorta Great Wall. I began stacking them into a line of bricks along the lot line between our house and Q's house next door. I got permission to do this by asking Q "Do you think your parents would want us to stack those bricks there?" He shrugged and said he'd ask them, and then I began stacking them there before he could do that, because people can only tell you "no" if you give them a chance.

The Sorta Great Wall now extends about fifteen feet along the lot line, and about two feet tall, and will hopefully one day be very scenic. Until then, I'm hoping that Robert Frost was a little wrong. "Good fences," Robert Frost probably said, "make good neighbors." I'm hoping that "Crummy fences made up of things you are too lazy to haul to the dumpster" make good neighbors, too. Or least make neighbors not call the zoning committee on you.


That's what I've spent the first three days of my vacation doing: Tearing apart the last of the shed, beginning construction of The Great Wall, and pondering just why science is never right. Because I know now: matter is not made up of 'empty space.' It's made up of cement blocks and raccoon skins, and it's on me.

Dwight The Lady GPS takes us on a tour of Metropolis (Vacations)

Continuing the story of my [not so] recent vacation to Florida... read part one, "In Another Universe, I Am In Birmingham, Alabama, For Some Reason," by clicking here, 
or part two, "Why Would Anyone Want To Drive Through Illinois?" by clicking here. 
Or part three, " We Are READY TO GO. Well, almost", by clicking here.
Or part four, "Sometimes, a house" by clicking here. 
Or part five: "Superman and the Albino Squirrels vs. The Dentist" here.

Our original plan was shot to heck: we were not going to be able to get into Metropolis, unload the car, and then go see the giant Superman statue and maybe get a bite to eat downtown.

We thought that was because it was nearly 9 o'clock p.m. by the time we hit the town, but also that was because Metropolis is not the kind of place where you would get a bite to eat and/or walk around downtown, mostly because there isn't a downtown to speak of.

Or a town.

We got off the freeway at 9 or so, expecting that we would be in Metropolis, but that's never the case, is it? Unless it's a big city, the highway never goes right through it, and so when you get off the expressway you have to travel through countryside for a while before you get to the place you are going -- the place with all the sights you are there to see on vacation, because the roads no longer go directly past those sights.

Metropolis, Illinois, is about three miles off the highway, but it feels more like 20 when you are tired and it is darkening -- the longest day of the year had just happened and so we were not entirely in the night even at 9 p.m. yet -- and you don't really know where you are but you know you have to stop sometime and sleep.  The entrance to the town is heralded by a large sign that I was never able to take a picture of even though I very much wanted to because I like to take pictures, but in this case I didn't take pictures because of both momentum and crowds.

Crowds, in this case, Sweetie and The Boy (Mr F and Mr Bunches wouldn't have gotten to vote and wouldn't have voted against me in any case) keep me from stopping and taking pictures of things because they inhibit my decision to do so on the basis that I imagine this will happen:

CROWDS:  Why are we stopping?

ME: I want to take a picture.

CROWDS: Of what?

ME:  [gesturing vaguely] That.

CROWDS: What?

ME: That [sign, tree, interesting view, bridge, tower, building, thing].

CROWDS: Why?

When I say CROWDS instead of "Sweetie and The Boy," I mean that this effect applies to me whenever there are people around, period, or even if I imagine people.  The impact of having people, even imaginary people, see me doing something creative (even something as uncreatively creative as taking a picture) has a freezing effect on me, making me decide that the thing I thought I was creating isn't worth it after all.

This happens with everything including homemade pizza that I cook: If someone is even theoretically looking over my shoulder, I begin to second-guess myself and freeze up no matter what I am doing.  Let me give you a real-life example that, also, draws on vacations:

Once, Sweetie and I went on a brief long-weekend trip to Washington D.C., a trip that is in itself a whole different story in that we nearly starved to death, but that's for another day.  What is important for this sidetracked story in this vacation story is that we flew, and when we flew we flew out of a Chicago airport where our flight was delayed significantly so we had to eat dinner in the airport, and I got some pizza from a little shop that advertised that it had "Butter Crust."

Here is something you may not have already guessed about me but probably already did:  When I am suddenly made aware that a thing exists which includes things that I like, I go through a rapid evolution of desire that goes like this:

1. Learn of thing's existence:

"Hey, there's something called a butter crust pizza."

2. Decide thing is stupid.

"Gross."

3. Immediately lock thing into frontal lobe as the only possible subject for all 1,000,000 brain cells to work on:

"buttercrustpizzabuttercrustpizzabuttercrustpizzabuttercrust

pizzabuttercrustpizzabuttercrustpizzabuttercrustpizzabuttercrustpizzabuttercrustpizza"

4. Using a mental effort that would have been remarkably helpful on, say, someone's SAT tests, work through every possible permutation of said thing and determinate how many truly are gross.

"I like butter. And I like pizza.  And toast has butter, and I like toast.  Could this crust taste like toast with pizza?"

5. Decide for one split second that I want toast.

"I want toast."

6.  Focus.

"Buttercrust pizza?"

7.  Decide I want that thing more than any other thing I have ever wanted in my life.

"BUTTERCRUST PIZZA!!!!!!!!!!!!BUTTERCRUST PIZZA!!!!!!!!!!!!

BUTTERCRUST PIZZA!!!!!!!!!!!!BUTTERCRUST PIZZA!!!!!!!!!!!!"

 The process usually takes only about a millisecond, although sometimes I am distracted by people around me and so it takes longer and when that happens I might already be on the road again or in bed or on the plane, at which point I will be hit with a profound sense of regret that I might never get to try the new Pretzel M&Ms, and will sob silently inside while cursing the gods.  So I've learned to tune others out when this happens in order to avoid that.  You know what the old saying is: Nobody on their death beds ever regretted eating a McGriddle, unless that is what killed them.

I got the buttercrust pizza that time, and it was delicious, and since that time, I have, when the mood strikes me, tried to make a buttercrust pizza, because we do not have those pizza places around here and I can't always be flying to Washington, D.C., everytime I want to have some, especially because "when I want to have some pizza" = ALWAYS, so since I am an accomplished homemade pizza chef (also I have cooked bread, cookies, and once invented candy cane ice cream and made it)(and I made chocolate chip-banana ice cream)(it was delicious) I have from time to time tried to figure out how they made a butter crust, something I could probably do easily if I just looked up how to make it on the Internet, but that's not really the point.

 That is, it's not the whole point: It's part of it.  I could easily look up how to make a butter crust pizza and would do so but some part of me wants to create it myself, to figure out how it's done, to do that one little thing for myself instead of having civilization do it for me.  I'm perfectly content having my cereal come in a box and my milk in a carton and my cheeseburgers in a paper wrapping handed to me through a window: I love modern life and the fact that I have to do so little for myself that I am essentially coasting, a state of existence that has only really been possible for humans in the last 10 years or so, when even knowledge stopped requiring effort and started requiring only Google -- but the tiny feral part of me that knows that civilization could collapse, the part that makes me watch things like The Day After or read books like Lucifer's Hammer, that part of me wants to be able to do something on my own, and so occasionally I will do that, and this is one of those things.

A shorter way to put that? If there is an apocalypse, and I survive, at that big meeting where everyone gets together to rebuild society and some of the guys get to run the Survivor's Council and others have to go out and become monster bait, I will be hinging all of my hopes for a (relatively speaking) cushy life on "I know how to make a buttery-flavored pizza crust."

Only I haven't done that yet, and the point of this story if there is one is that one time when I was making an attempt at making that pizza, Sweetie walked in and said "What are you making?" and I hesitated and said "I'm trying to make a butter crust pizza," and she said, and I quote, "Oh." and suddenly the whole thing seemed silly, you know?

When we pulled into Metropolis, and I saw the sign advertising it as the home of the Giant Superman statue, I thought about stopping to take a picture of it, but that Oh feeling, and momentum -- we were in a car, we were moving, and Newton's laws of something or other say that we want to continue that, so even I am loathe to stop a moving car to take a picture -- kept me rolling forward into the city, and so I said 

"Remind me to stop and take a picture of that tomorrow?"

To which Sweetie responded: "Picture of what?"

I said: "That sign?"

She said: "Why?"

OH!

There wasn't much to Metropolis, but that didn't stop our GPS thing on our phone from making us see as much of it as possible.  It would not be until the next morning that we learned that Metropolis is essentially one street, with that street being empty every time we drove on it, and that street happens to lead directly to the riverside casino in town, and that casino happened to be right next to our hotel, but, again, we didn't learn that Saturday night, because our GPS, which ordinarily has a strong preference for making us drive on highways, for some reason wanted us that night to drive through people's yards, more or less.

The GPS program on my phone always prefers highways; I think it might be channeling Dwight Eisenhower's spirit to guide us, and I think that because I'm 94% sure that Eisenhower invented the highway, and I figure he would be proud of them and make us drive on them, so that's how that works, whereas if the GPS was haunted by the spirit of Jack Kerouac, say, we would always be traveling things like Route 66, and now I see that I've invented a whole new idea here: GPS personalities: Program your GPS for certain traits, like, say, a guy who wants to stop at all the roadside attractions, or the Dad who wants to push his car a little further even though the gaslight is on, or maybe "Wilderness Avenger," so you would only be directed to little grassy trails.

I'm going to be a billionaire.

Our GPS -- Dwight, even though it has a woman's voice -- loves highways, loves them so much that when I use it at home in Madison, which I do so often that it would be embarrassing to admit given that I have lived in Madison for 17 years but I don't care because I'm far to busy gauging whether I might like things ("breakfastburritobreakfastburritobreakfastburrito") to bother with learning where things are and remembering that when Dwight The GPS will do it for me, when I use Dwight in Madison, it will send me on to Highway 12 no matter what.  Highway 12 is the highway that circles the city and yes, you can get to every point in the city from that highway, but you can also get to those places from city roads where you would see the city, but that doesn't matter to Dwight.

In Metropolis, Dwight The GPS was confused perhaps by the utter lack of highway-ish roads, and so Dwight did not have us drive straight down the only real street of any importance in the city, directly to our hotel.

"Turn left," Dwight the GPS directed us as soon as we reached the outskirts of the city, and then a right, and then some lefts, and pretty soon we were traveling on a road that was only wider than our car by about a foot or so, through a neighborhood that in the dark began to seem sinister and creepy: little dark houses with large trees around them and cars parked on the lawn that may have been parked there because the roads were so narrow but for all we knew they were parked there because that's where the people ran out of gas when the ghost mutants were chasing them.

The neighborhood we were in, to be fair, was probably just poor, but that doesn't mean that 43 years of watching horror movies didn't factor into how we felt about the increasingly-mazelike roads surrounded by what seemed to be increasingly-dark and increasingly-dilapidated houses; a trip through an unknown, weird-looking dark neighborhood is alwaysthe way those ghost mutant attacks begin, and maybe it was our pop culturization or maybe we were just road-weary and convenience-store snack-food tired, but finally Sweetie said "This is creepy," and we all sighed with relief because we'd all been thinking that, probably even Mr F, but someone had to say it. 

That didn't help us get out of there, though, and as visions of how the newspapers would report our disappearance (MISSING FAMILY'S CAR FOUND IN YARD IN METROPOLIS; CONTAINED PLAY-DOH SET AND 1,000 BAGS OF CHEESE PUFFS; AUTHORITIES ARE BAFFLED) I began to doubt Dwight The GPS, but then suddenly she told us to turn right and your destination will be on your right, and she was correct: we turned right, and saw our hotel at the end of a long frontage road along the river, silhouetted against the backdrop of an old bridge which itself was starkly contrasted with the glow of stars and the moon.

"Remind me to take a picture of that when we stop," I told Sweetie.

"Why?" she asked.

NEXT TIME: Welcome To The Hotel California!  We won't leave the light on for ya! (But we will have a creepy man carrying a dog.)

Sometimes, a house. (Vacations)

Stuff that was NOT for sale at the Superman Museum

Continuing the story of my recent vacation to Florida... read part one by clicking here, 
or part two by clicking here. 
Or part three by clicking here.

TO RECAP: We were going to Florida to hang out with Sweetie's family for a week, and got waylaid by recalcitrant car lenders and three cases of strep throat. But it was 11:45 a.m. on Saturday, we had stopped and gotten McDonald's for the trip, and were ON OUR WAY!

Let me begin this portion of the story by pointing out that Mr Bunches and Mr F have only rarely left our house and never for this long a time. Their last real vacation was a trip to Florida back four years ago, almost four years to the day, when we had taken a trip with the then-Babies! and Middle Daughter and The Boy to go to Orlando to make use of the vacation package I had purchased in a spurt of optimism one time using our tax refund.

That trip is for another day, but the main thing we remembered about it, vis a vis Mr F and Mr Bunches, was that they had not slept.

Not at all, as far as we could tell, for four days.  Four days in a hotel suite with two little boys who would not, under any circumstances, sit down long enough to let them fall asleep at all, and consequently, we almost never slept on that trip, at all.

Since then, Mr F and Mr Bunches had not been away from their home for more than a single night, and those single nights had not gone much better.  We had taken them with us when we went to drop off Middle Daughter at college, and stayed in a hotel room that night, with Mr F having to be almost forcibly subdued before he would sleep: I literally took him in my arms, and laid with him on the bed, and held him immobile as much as I could for as long as I could, with him occasionally trying to worm out or kick me or just tap his tappers around on whatever was handy, e.g., my head.  He'd fallen asleep, that time, about 2:00 a.m. and woken up about 2:02 a.m. and we'd eventually packed up and gone home to get some sleep.

That was what we expected on this trip, too: we were all, Sweetie, me, The Boy, girding ourselves for a nightmare of no sleep for the week, trying to figure out how long we'd cope before we got exhausted... then started to hallucinate... then turned on each other and began infighting, so that eventually the authorities would find a triple murder-suicide at a resort in Orlando, with two little boys wandering around in their Justice League pajamas, bags under their eyes.

What we didn't know, and could hardly contemplate, was how Mr F and Mr Bunches would react, period, to being away from their house for 8 consecutive days, a period of time that was double their previous record, from when they were two and of which they had no recollection; all trips since then had been only one-day affairs and those had been tough enough.

So as we set out for the first leg of the journey, to Metropolis, Illinois, that was what I was mainly pondering: Would Mr F and Mr Bunches be able to handle the rigors of the road, and how would they react to not seeing their house and their stuff for over a week?

To help deal with that,we'd brought along a big chunk of their stuff, including one of the mattresses from their beds and a tub, literally a tub, of their toys, stuffed into the back of Sweetie's car with the bag of medicines and facial creams, the suitcases of t-shirts, and the bag of beach toys that I'd bought at Toys"R"Us to use at the ocean.  Our idea was that they might not miss their house so much if 90% of their house had come with them to Florida.

Loaded down, we began the most boring part of the trip: the beginning.  Starting out on a vacation, when you are driving, is always boring.  When you start on a vacation and you're flying, you are almost instantly transported into VacationLand, a wonderful place where you are unencumbered by the familiar, where you are free to make purchases that you would not otherwise make, able to read that book you have been saving for vacation, able to watch TV at 9:30 a.m. even though ordinarily you would never do that, because when you start out on a vacation and you are flying, you go to the airport and the airport is part of VacationLand, not part of Regular Life.

I have always loved airports, always found them exciting, and I finally hit on why with this latest vacation:: it's because airports are in no way connected with anything that I associate with real life.  When you walk into an airport, there are decorations (Chicago's O'Hare has dinosaur skeletons, Madison's airport has an airplane hanging up there) and there are security guards and there are those stores that sell t-shirts and books and candy and soda, with their stuff just all out in the open and spreading into the mall area because what are you going to do, steal a t-shirt and run past all the security?  There are newstands and shoeshine places and runways and TVs up in the corners, and all you have to do, to begin your vacation, is take a short drive and suddenly everything is different and you've got permission to buy a bunch of junk food, sit on a chair, pull out that book you bought, and watch CNN Headline News while you eat Circus Peanuts and read a sci-fi novel, which is what a vacation is.  Your vacation has begun, right then.

But when you drive on vacation, your vacation takes forever to start. We had loaded up the car and gone to our same old gas station and same old McDonald's, and we'd already been "on the road" for 20 minutes by that point and I could still see my house.

 Mr F briefly took an interest in our surroundings before deciding that tapping coat hangers together was more interesting than highway scenery.  (He was right.)

Well, not really, because my house is hidden by trees behind a hill, but I could still see where I would look to see my house if I could see my house.

When you drive on vacation, you drive through all the familiar stuff that you drive through all the time, and that takes forever.  When we "left" for Orlando this time, we drove almost the exact same route that I take on my commute to work for the first five miles, so I was on vacation and sitting in the exact same traffic I drive through every day.

Eating a cheeseburger, granted, but still.

From Madison we went onto the Interstate, which is not the best way to travel if you want to actually see stuff.  The Interstate Highway system is a great idea for getting people to and from places really quickly, but you know what's an even better idea for getting people to and from places really quickly? Airplanes, and the view is the same from an airplane or an Interstate: almost nothing.

This is the most scenic thing you can find on most highways: A wall.

When we'd decided to drive, which we decided because we weren't sure how the boys would react to flying and didn't want to be on the news for being the family that got kicked off a plane bound for Florida because one of their twins wouldn't stop freaking out, I'd told Sweetie that it was okay in part because I love road trips, which I do, and because we would "see the sights."

But I'd been mistaken on that latter one, and I can be forgiven, because the last few "road trips" we'd taken had been years ago -- taking the kids to California, where we drove a lot, and taking Sweetie to New York for our honeymoon, where we hadn't worried about the scenery -- and I'd had somehow, in my mind, replaced the actual scenery that accompanies an Interstate road trip:

Scraggly trees. Long fields of nothing.  Sometimes, a house.

With what I assumed was the scenery that accompanies an Interstate road trip:

Wacky tourist traps, panoramic city vistas, the sprawling majesty of the United States.  

You don't see none of that from the Interstate - or precious little, anyway, especially when the bulk of your trip is done in the Midwest, which appears to be a place that long ago got rid of all its scenery because decent folk don't need scenery, not if they're going to be respectable people, let those hippies in California have the scenery, we're fine with a few small trees and whatnot, which is why the only scenic place in the entire Midwest is now the Wisconsin Dells and in an attempt to hide that like a guilty teenager with a Playboy, we Wisconsinites have buried the Dells under waterparks and minigolfs.

All of which is to say: we drove on down I-90 towards the Illinois border and the excitement of finally being on the way was overcome almost instantaneously with the drudgery of the Interstate that exists in Wisconsin between Madison and Beloit, a city that I associate with the terror of being lost.

Beloit, Wisconsin, sits right on the border of Wisconsin and Illinois, and is a city that nobody goes to willingly, as far as I can tell.  The only time I've ever been to Beloit is when I have had to stop for gas on the way somewhere else, and I never actually venture into the city.  Of course, I may be biased, because my earliest memory of Beloit is that I almost ended up living there as a result of a fight between my parents.

I think.

Here's what happened: When I was a kid, I had lazy eye. 

I still have lazy eye, I mean, but it's not as bad as it was and it all started when I was a kid, so when I was a kid, I had lazy eye.  And to get it fixed, a little, I had to go see an eye doctor in Madison, which was kind of a problem in that we lived in Milwaukee, an hour away, and don't ask me why we had to go to Madison to treat a relatively common eye problem. But we had to go, and we were in Madison long enough that it got dark out, and we left Madison in the dark.

I was in the backseat, trying to read a book, which was what I did in the car when I was a kid, and it was made harder by the fact that it was dark, and also I'd had my eyes dilated and so couldn't see all that great, and my Mom and Dad were up front, driving and only paying attention to me to tell me to quit trying to read because I'd hurt my eyes, which was ridiculous because my eyes were already hurt.  Or at least, lazy.

We'd been driving along for a while when I became aware of a more tense feeling in the car, something that was not uncommon in my childhood, where tension was a constant companion, but this was starting to boil over as my parents were arguing about where we were headed and whether we were on the right route.

I don't remember all the details of the conversation/argument: it got bigger and more heated as my Dad claimed one thing and my Mom claimed another about where we were going or what road we should take, but I do remember this exchange:

Mom:  It says you're going to Beloit!

Dad:  F**K IT! Then we'll go to Beloit and we'll live THERE!

I, in the backseat, got suddenly sad and scared because I didn't know anyone in Beloit.

We didn't go to Beloit, of course, we made it back home, but that momentary fight, there in the dark of what I know now to be I-90, a road I drive all the time, made such an impression on me that nearly 40 years later I still think, every time I see Beloit:

"F**K IT! Then we'll go to Beloit and we'll live THERE!"

Every. time.

Think about that, if you are a parent or will be one: You will spend night after night after night trying to teach your kid to do math or be responsible or clean his room or something, and none of that will have as much of a lasting impact as one explosion of frustration that was not even directed at him.

Beloit, in other words, is the ideal marker for the edge of Wisconsin when we leave on trips, because only those memories of possibly going to live in Beloit would ever be the final impetus into doing what we did as we drove past Beloit on this trip, which was to cheer, as we crossed the state line past the sign that said "Welcome To Illinois!"

"ILLINOIS!" I said.  "YAY!"

"Illinois!" Sweetie said.  "Yay!"

The Boy was playing with his laptop and ignored us.  Mr F was tapping a coat hanger against the window and ignored us.

"Say Hi, Illinois!" I told Mr Bunches, who looked up from his iPad.

"Hi, Illinois," he said, in a small, quiet voice, and waved.

This is a McDonald's playland, somewhere in Kentucky, or maybe Tennessee.  Or Georgia?  All I know for sure is, it's really hot inside that top row and I should not have agreed to chase Mr Bunches through it.

We are READY TO GO. Well, almost. (Vacations)

Continuing the story of my recent vacation to Florida... read part one by clicking here, or part two by clicking here.


I may have mentioned once or twice my displeasure with the medical establishment, a displeasure that arises from their inability to deal with my own heart condition, which for simplicity's sake I'll just refer to as Yossarian's Liver.

One thing I have learned from my repeated exposures to Big Medicine is that Big Medicine doesn't like it when you come in there all knowing what you've got and uppity and all.  As I've said in the past, if you go into a doctor's office and tell them what you think you have, they will make up their mind immediately to never ever treat you for that thing and will probably use that little ear-light thing to inject your brain with test DNA they cooked up over lunch just to see what happens.  That is almost certainly a real thing that doctors do, in my mind.

So I at least never tell the doctors what I think is wrong with me.  My entire job in a doctor's office consists of two tasks:

1.  Act like I couldn't possibly have any clue what's happening to me even if I saw it happen, like, for example, let's say you were in your backyard with your kids and spraying them with a hose because it was hot out, and you upset a nest of bees you didn't know was there and you rescued your boys from the bees without them getting stung at all because YOU ARE A SUPERHERO FOR CRYING OUT LOUD but you got stung 17+ times yourself (your wife will say it was 16 in the future but you will want to be very clear that it was "at least 17" and that "there may have been more" because while 16 is a lot, 17 is more but sometimes you also think maybe 17 doesn't sound like that many bee stings.

Let's say that happened to you and you go into the ER because you're having trouble breathing.  The last thing you will want to do is tell the doctor that you got stung by a bee and are having trouble breathing, because that doctor will then not be able to treat you for bee-sting-related-shortness of breath while he goes to search for the experimental DNA to load into the ear thing, and you will be told "Okay, you're free to go" just moments before you pass out on the stretcher in the ER (which, if you are going to pass out on a stretcher, is a good place to do it.)

2.  Act as though I am going to die at any time and can't possibly focus on what is going on.  This is pretty easy if, for example, you go to the doctor when you can't breathe, or are having a heart attack (which they will diagnose as heartburn and try to send you on your way, also, something they only do when they run  out of Ear DNA) but it's harder to do if you just have a sore throat and cough and can't talk.

I knew those rules when  I took myself and Mr Bunches and Mr F, all of us sharing the same sore throat, cough, and lack of voice, to the Urgent Care on Saturday morning, but I also knew this:  just about two months before, there had been a run of strep throat through the boys' school, and I had gotten it.  I had lost my voice and had a cough and had a sore throat, and the doctor who I AM NOT EVEN KIDDING said "You don't have strep" also gave me antibiotics (he didn't say why he was giving them to me if I didn't have strep, so obviously he was just mad that I'd told him (A) there is strep throat going around and (b) I have it, but he was out of Ear DNA) and I was better in three days.

So that Saturday morning, I took a calculated risk and told the receptionist and the nurse and eventually the two different doctors we had to see ("On Saturdays, we have the children seen by the pediatric unit," Doctor One explained to me, all but adding "It's our way of further dehumanizing this entire experience and ensuring that it's as long and tedious as we can make it.") that I thought we had strep throat, and that also we were leaving on vacation just as soon as they were done and gave us antibiotics.

That led to THIS EXACT EXCHANGE:

Doctor: [peering into my throat with a popsicle stick jabbing my uvula]: Why do you think  you have strep?

ME: argharbaroisergasp.

Doctor [removes stick]:  Your throat is very raw and red.

Me: [hoarsely]:  I had strep about two months ago and it was exactly like this.  There was a case of strep throat going around.  Now I have those same symptoms.

Doctor:  I don't think it's strep.  But we'll do some tests.  Did you say you're leaving on vacation?

Me: [Nods]

Doctor: They'll take a little while.

Mr Bunches at the pool in our first hotel. That blur behind him is not a ghost; it's Mr F, who mostly moves too fast for ordinary cameras to catch proof of his existence.

 The problem with admitting to doctors that you're not at death's door, that you might only have a bug that they can knock out with one of their wonder pills they have right in their white coats is that it makes them feel unimportant, I figure -- after all, other people get to wear white coats, like scientists who discover Higgs Bosons or pharmacists who [foreshadowing] will try to sell you a drop that supposedly prevents water from getting in your ear while you swim, which is clearly impossible but which has definite applications for avoiding Ear DNA -- and so if all they are is people who come in, hear that you have strep throat, and give you a pill, they start to think "Why did I even bother going to medical school?  I'm just a pill pusher.  Is this why my wife left me? How is this guy so cool, for a guy who has strep throat?" and they have an existential crisis in which they begin to despair that they will ever be played by George Clooney in a long-running TV series.

So it's far better for you if you can, while you have strep throat, sort of lie on the floor in a fetal position and gasp weakly, possibly having an aneurysm or spontaneously amputating your own leg, if you can, because that will make the doctor stop reading that Why You Should Join Doctors Without Borders pamphlet and instead work on you.

In the end, two different doctors looked at our throats and listened to our chests and looked in our ears and made us wait in those little rooms which wasn't at all the punishment it was supposed to be because I'd brought my Kindle and so we played Plants vs. Zombies while we waited.

The fact that we were not dying in a heap led the doctors to conclude that they needn't bother doing anything about us, and they sent us on our way, saying that if the other tests came back positive for strep they'd "Give us a call," and with that, we decided to embark on a new career as modern-day Typhoid Marys and spread our message of goodwill and strep virus across America.

But first, we had to pack the car, which by now you have guessed was not the minivan we thought we had rented. 

Sweetie had gone back to the rental place.  She had that morning called up our credit card company and had arranged to electronically transfer enough money to pay the entire balance, so we had this credit card that had all kinds of credit on it and more than enough, at that, to rent two, maybe three minivans.

But when Sweetie and The Boy had gone to the rental company, the same girl -- who by this point was making it glaringly obvious that it would be a cold day in Hell before she let Sweetie take this minivan -- was again uncooperative, the difference this time being that the credit card company was imposing it's own arcane rules on her, too.

So what the credit card company told Sweetie she needed was the exact amount that the car rental would cost; Sweetie had to tell them, to the penny, what the car rental agency was going to charge her.

Sweetie, for some reason, thought it would be best to get that information from the car rental company, mostly because Sweetie was still under the impression that the car rental company was in the business of renting cars.  So the car rental company told Sweetie it would cost $982.17 for the week, and Sweetie, like a sucker, believed her, and reported that to the credit card company.

Sweetie then went to the car rental company, where the car rental girl rang up her total and said "The total is $970.17."

And the charge did not go through.

Because it wasn't the exact amount.  Sweetie called the credit card company and asked the problem -- with the car rental girl right there -- and they said it had to be the exact amount and this was $12 less.

So Sweetie, in desperation for something in this story to actually work, said to the car rental girl:

"Can't you just charge me twelve dollars more?"

But the car rental girl, who could have made $12 extra dollars that day, decided to live by the Apparently Very Strict Code Of Honor That Binds Girls Who Sit Behind Desks In Sears Automotive Centers, declined that bribe, and the entire transaction fell apart, resulting in me and The Boy sitting behind Sweetie's car in our driveway trying to figure out how to fit a minivan's worth of stuff into Sweetie's car.

Main Street, Metropolis, IL, at 9 a.m. on a Sunday morning.

Here is what we were packing into the car for our vacation:

My suitcase.
My laptop case.
My small case containing my Kindle Fire.
A case of all the cords and chargers for all the stuff we were taking.
Mr F and Mr Bunches' Ipad.
The Boy's suitcase.
The Boy's laptop case.
A bin of Mr F and Mr Bunches' favorite toys in case they missed them while they were in Florida.
A bin of Mr F and Mr Bunches' favorite snacks in case they don't sell the right kind of Cheesy Puffs and Cracker Sticks in Florida.
A foam mattress pad that would serve as a spare bed for Mr F and/or Mr Bunches in the hotels because Mr F doesn't like hotel beds and sometimes sleeps on the floor in hotels.
A suitcase for Mr F and Mr Bunches.
Another suitcase for Mr F and Mr Bunches.  ("Really?")
Approximately 14,000 suitcases for Sweetie including a plastic bin that included a hair dryer.
A giant pink hockey-equipment sized bag of  makeup, face cleansers, cold medicine, cotton swabs, and various and sundry other things.

Plus, we were taking us, but we were optional.

To pack the car, we used a time-honored system I like to call "Is this breakable?"  To use that system, you pick something up and consider whether it is breakable.  You can do that in a variety of ways, but the best way, I've found, is to ask a question:  Is it yours?  If it belongs to you, it's breakable.  If it doesn't, who cares?

Once you've sorted out the breakable from the unbreakable stuff, you pack them: If something is breakable, you put it on the bottom of the cargo area and stack things on it after first putting pillows all around and over it.

If a thing is s not breakable, you wait until you have packed the car impossibly full of breakable things, and then you pick up armfuls of the unbreakable things (i.e., things that belong to someone who's not you) and cram them into the car as fast as you can before slamming the trunk door shut and thinking to yourself "I hope we don't have to open that again EVER."

With that done, I announced that we were READY TO GO.

"Let's hit the road!" I said.

"The boys have to go to the bathroom before we leave," Sweetie said.

10 minutes later, with everyone in the car, I announced that we were again READY TO GO.

"Let's hit the road!" I said.

"We have to stop and get gas," Sweetie said.

10 minutes later, having spent $57 on gas and repacked everyone into the car, I announced we were READY TO GO.

"Let's hit...," I said.

"Do you think we should get something to eat on the way?"   Sweetie said.

And so, at 11:45 a.m. on Saturday morning, which is at least 6 hours too late to miss Chicago Rush Hour Traffic, with a car packed to the gills (cars have gills) with medicine and Play-Doh Dentist Playsets, and all of us holding McDonald's lunches, we set out on our vacation!

This is a city, as seen through our windshield. I'm not sure what city, except that I know it's not Chattanooga because it's not ugly enough.

Why would anyone want to drive through Illinois? (Vacations)

Continuing the story of my recent vacation to Florida... read part one by clicking here.

So the next day, Saturday, we woke up bright and early and sick.

I got up, on the first full day of my vacation, with a sore throat and a bad cough and a complete lack of surprise that those things were happening, as I'd seen them coming all week.  More than all week, in fact -- for about two weeks, since Mr Bunches got sick after Sweetie got sick.

Here's the thing about living with little kids, especially our little kids:  your entire body essentially becomes one giant test lab for viruses.  Although there are only four people in our immediate household (the three older kids pop by mainly to either borrow money, eat my leftover pizza, or recommend that we watch 21 Jump Street, the movie, calling it "the funniest movie ever" so that we will watch it, only when we do, we don't even laugh, AT ALL, through the entire movie.  The older kids owe me two hours of my life) it's like we have many more people than that, thanks to Mr F and Mr Bunches and their wide circle of "friends," some of whom are actually friends, like Mr Bunches' buddy "Basement" and some of whom are therapists.

I should explain about Basement.  The other day, I took Mr Bunches and Mr F to our local swimming pool, the one that's shallow enough on half of it that the boys can swim and wade without constant supervision, and also it's fenced in so that it's possible sometimes to take your eyes off a boy for as much as 0.000001 seconds, that being the longest break one can get when supervising the boys.

As we arrived at our usual picnic table there, and were taking off our Crocs and shirts -- having worn our swim trunks because I'm always able to plan ahead and save time by wearing my trunks to the pool, while I'm never able to plan ahead and think "But what will I wear home, once those trunks are soaking wet?" -- Mr Bunches looked and said "Oh, it's basement."

I was 100% sure he said basement, and only about 0.00001% sure what he meant, so I did what I usually do when I don't know what Mr Bunches is talking about, and I repeated what I thought he'd said.

Me:  Basement?

Mr Bunches:  There's my friend basement.

That also did not clear it up.  So I went to plan B:

Me:  Oh. Yeah.  Cool basement! That's great!

If you can't figure out your kids, at least try to be encouraging.  That's my motto.

So having slathered on the multiple layers of 110-proof sunscreen that Sweetie insists we use on them, including painting it on Mr Bunches' face because he is prone to sunburn on his cheeks, we hit the pool, and Mr Bunches immediately began playing with a little kid who said Hi to him and was calling him by name.

I thought Oh, that's nice, he must be a friend from school and focused on trying to get Mr F into the water.  Mr F likes to swim, but he doesn't like to swim with me, as he suspects that I am always on the verge of trying to trick him into actually swimming, which is fair enough because I am: my time with Mr F in any pool is divided equally between three areas of concentration:

1.  Trying to get Mr F to let me teach him how to actually swim, with arm paddling and leg kicking and face in the water and all, and

2.  Trying to remember that this is supposed to be fun for Mr F and not work, and that if he wants to swim he'll swim but if he wants to wade around in the pool and laugh like crazy he'll do that and I should relax and let him be a kid, and

3.  Feeling guilty because I'm either not teaching him to swim or I'm not letting him have fun and whichever one I'm doing I shouldn't be doing that one I should be doing the other one.

While I tried to coax Mr F into the pool, I heard a woman further down the edge say something to the boy Mr Bunches was playing with, and what she said was:

"Besian! Don't take his inner tube," by which she meant, I assumed, that Besian should not take Mr Bunches' tiny, impractical inner tube that I bought for $3.99 at Toys "R" Us but which was much smaller than I imagined and so isn't really good for much of anything but Mr Bunches loves it:

and by which she meant, also, I assume, the boy Mr Bunches was playing with, and I recalled at that instant that there had been a kid in Mr Bunches' 4K class named Besian and so, putting two and two together, I looked over at Mr Bunches, who was coming over by me, and said:

"Is that your friend, BESIAN?" pronouncing his name very carefully.

"Yeah," he said.  "Basement."

SO: Basement is one of Mr Bunches' actual friends, and he has those and therapists and friends at camp, where he goes for therapy, and what that means is that although there are only two little boys in our house, those little boys three times a week go to a large building where there are innumerable little kids, and when they're not at that camp, they have therapists coming into our house for five hours at a time, and those therapists are the same ones that spend their time at the camp with all the kids and go into other people's houses and see their little kids, all of whom (I assume) have their own friends named Basement and so the result is that you could wash your hands until they are tiny nubs and you still would have 13 zillion viruses on every surface of every thing you own.

What we do at our house is we cycle the virus of the month through us: Someone starts it, in this case, Sweetie, who woke up three weeks before vacation and had a cough and a sore throat and had lost her voice.  The rest of us try to be a little cleaner for an hour or two but by then it's pointless anyway: once someone in your house is sick, they've been sick for long enough that everything around you is seething with microscopic lifeforms trying to get into your body and reproduce, so when Sweetie wakes up sick I at first think "Drink lots of orange juice!  Wash your hands more!" and I do that for about a half hour before giving up, much the way Leo gave up when he was floating in the icy water holding onto Kate's hand.

From Sweetie, the virus had worked into Mr Bunches, who lost his voice and walked around hoarsely for a week.  Here's something fun: try to convince a 5-year-old boy with autism that he shouldn't talk to save his voice, and then as you think of ways to do that, remember that everything you've done for this boy in the past three years has been designed to do just the opposite and get him to talk to you.

Mr Bunches would come up to us and say something in his cute-and-sad little hoarse voice, rasping out that he would like "Blue bread, please"

(Blue Bread is a frozen french toast breakfast treet: it's shaped like a piece of bread, and comes in a yellow box, but there are two varieties: Plain and cinnamon.  The plain box has a blue patch on it that notes it's plain and so Mr Bunches calls plain frozen french toaster sticks "Blue Bread")

and I would be torn between trying to tell him not to hurt his voice and congratulating him on using words, which is what we're supposed to do; there's always the chance that if you tell him he shouldn't talk, he will take that literally and will not talk again, and that is a very real fear.

What I did was I tried to talk in a whisper, to show him how he could talk (which in turn made me wonder whether he would then spend the rest of his life whispering instead of speaking at a regular volume.  There's no end to worries in my life) and what he did was laugh at the way Dad talked because it was funny, and then when I'd say "You try to whisper" he'd respond really loudly "No, I think Not Whisper."

From Mr Bunches, the virus got into me, hitting my voice the same week I had to give a seminar, so I spent two days not talking at all except for the three hours I spoke to a bunch of lawyers, and then, on Saturday, I woke up feeling worse than ever and Mr Bunches wasn't better and Mr F had started coughing and he sounded hoarse, too.

"I think," I told Sweetie, "That while you and The Boy go get the rental, I should take us to Urgent Care."

...to be continued.

This is the bridge between Metropolis, IL and Paducah, Kentucky.  I made Sweetie take a picture of it because I was driving at the time.