13 Jul 4705 - Art Historian Tales End in Horror

Now I ask you.

It goes where it pleases on wheels.
It freely changes anything about a situation it doesn't like.
No one willingly stops it.
And no one else sees why it is a problem.

Am I the only one who can smell this? Board up the windows.
Now that you're done with that, how to begin?

My mother is better at random day-trips that include dropping by to see me than is my father. My father is an excellent itinerant, has things go according to plan, and builds in time to have parts go long, though they never do. This leaves us along for stretches of considering which bag of peat moss to buy among two practically identical bags, or sitting and drinking refills of soda while he describes some of the trivia surrounding the history of a president. There's always space to fill.
My mother doesn't build in any such thing, and is always behind schedule (I should specify that this aspect of her character only ever bleeds into things like day-trips, where being late or behind is largely irrelevant), which leads us on fantastic misadventures roaming around the Infinite Suburbs to find our way to something that I could have navigated to three other ways than the one I intentionally chose to get us lost. Maybe that's a little unfair of me. I think, anyway, that she stopped by only to taunt me with a large zucchini from her garden, deposit another case of my favorite soda that I can't get up here, feed me a steak from some joint, and remind me that as a 25-year-old, I am lucky that I wasn't like my father who, at my age, had a wife and a kid to take care of, and was barely scraping it out.

It reminds me of the story of my older brother's baby pictures. While I was a lad, I remember looking at photo albums and seeing what they were all about. My parents would show me pictures of myself as a baby. They had an excellent spread of me in two pages of four polaroid shots when I was one. Each is a straight-on mugshot, and in each one I am making a different sour face. My frown has a legacy. Anyway, there were a lot of pictures of me. Lots of Bill, my first younger brother. Lots of the boys, three of us together. None of Dave, my older brother, or very few.
And certainly no baby pictures of Dave.
One Christmas, Bill had been making a nuisance of himself by going through some of mom's things looking for photographs. Maman vouchsafed the booty from him, and got him to stop all the goddam looting and take his own bloody pictures. We were left with a small, old shoebox of things, among them a photo album. There were photographs of my older brother as a baby, and the family at the time. They were precious, because my parents hadn't had a camera at the time, and weren't able to snap shots willy-nilly, but the content of the shots revealed another reason why I hadn't seen these pictures before.
They were disturbing.
Dave was there looking at them with us, and the first thing he said was "How did anyone think I would live?" As a baby, he was shriveled and red. His thin, black hair contrasted his redness and his eyes, a normal size for a baby, looked large and buggy in comparison to his sickly frame. He looked more like Bat-Boy of tabloid infamy than like my brother.

So maybe I do feel glad I'm not more like my father was at my age. Here is a man with a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University, living in Blacksburg VA with a southern belle wife and a kid who may die randomly in the night because he just couldn't make it, supporting them with his entry-level job as a reporter for the local rock music radio station.

I think I'm also some ten pounds heavier than he was.
That's only funny if you know me. Right now the humor is a little lost on me because I'm living it.

Relevant facts.
I'm saying "screw it" to Magic Game Day for a few reasons. As exciting as Xth edition is, and though it brings a number of interesting things to the table with it, playing booster drafts and sealed deck matches of a core set is boring as magic goes. The day is designed with the new player in mind, too, and I have history with the game going back to 3rd edition. Finally, the whole thing is at Game Parlor, which today I remembered is a place I should not go to in general. The crowd there is awful, the games are turgid, and the staff is good for telling you not to lean back in the chairs, and good for little else. Magic Game Day, you shall not be missed; that is to say, you shall be missed.
Never been good at parting words. Better at joiningthem.

'Means that I get to do something else with my Saturday, which I choose as a repeat of my favorite running gag as a starting point. Even though no one comes knocking down my door asking when we can do that great thing again, I'm going to send out the summons and see who else among ye is interested in reading poetry and drinking coffee at Saxby's.
As I have said, it is lots of fun and a pretty cool place. This time, though, I'll try starting a little earlier, say, seven-ish.

So glad we had this talk.

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