deadpan opticon: thirty days of light and dark

Luke, I am your father.

I can now deliver this line in earnest, except the Luke part, but certainly the rest of it, if with slightly altered meaning and hopefully not preceding a righteous arm-severing.

I will spare you the details and get to the cogent points. 1.) Infants are not a lot like Tamagotchis, but they are a little bit. 2.) Infants are more like beloved pets, but not a lot more then they are like Tamagotchis. 3.) Infants are the least like human beings, and the most like aliens. 4.) The wailing and flailing of one's infant is perhaps more anxiety inducing than lying on a bed of nails with a sumo wrestler running backwards circles perilously close around you while chugging sake from a beer helmet blindfolded in a tight room smelling all-at-once of dried blood, sour milk and fear.

I could go on, but there's too much to say and not a lot of it would make sense. I will tell you that watching episodes of the Cosby show where Heathcliff Huxtable counsels pregnant women does not in fact prepare you for childbirth or being a father. In fact, it serves only to embitter one towards the lies perpetrated by our culture and leave one with an overwhelming desire to skip ahead to the salad days where kids only crash our cars high on stolen prescription medications, and at least spare us long nights of sleeplessness, rolled out nightmarish and punctuated by blood curdling screams only to be followed by eye-bugging days of heat and hallucinatory edginess spent waiting for the baby to sleep, perchance to dream.

But after 30 days, I say fuck all that. I am a warrior. The baby is not my enemy but the rough terrain upon which I do combat with sore bottoms, hunger, mucus, urine, sour milk vomit, tiny little bodies that can't help themselves etc. Besides, he is fun to take pictures of.

A little free advertising for the Mother Baby Center. The experience was "ok." I give the facilities a 4/5, service a 3/5, atmosphere a 4/5 and floor cleanliness a 1/5.

What would Foucault say? More, who would care to listen? Foucault is the site upon which discursive regimes of pretentious college professors inscribe themselves, tick-like, waiting to be overheard by nubile freshman. But seriously, the baby is 4 minutes old and he's being weighed, measured, scanned, and surveiled like no baby's business.

Measurements now reveal future aptitude for either basketball or jockeying horses

This picture is hard to look at. First, they smear greasy ointment all over baby's eyes then stab a needle into his leg. More, you've got dad standing off to one side taking pictures.