Why I Am a None

Meta: I've been reading the "Why I Am an Atheist" testimonials on Pharyngula's freethought blog with growing interest over the last few weeks. At first, I felt a twinge of discomfort at the idea of sharing conversion stories - for reasons you'll understand soon - but the more of them I read, the more I recognized bits of my own story. It made me want to share, too. I dislike labels, which is why I prefer "none" to"atheist" and I have noted that PZ disapproves of this, so whether he decides to host this tale on his blog or not is an open question. Either way, here is my story.


---

You know my dad was a nun. ... Cause whenever he was up in court and the judge asked "occupation", he'd say "none".      - Private Baldrick, Blackadder Goes Forth; "Captain Cook"

At age 11 I went up to the front of the congregation at the end of a Sunday Evening sermon and accepted Jesus Christ as my own, true personal savior. Everyone was singing "Just As I Am," and at the end, when everyone files up to greet new members and converts - a surprisingly frequent event in small churches - everyone hugged me, some cheerfully, some tearfully.

My conversion was not much of a surprise to anyone. My parents had hosted our church in our home when it started, and I had always been an eager and active participant in our services. I loved to sing in the choir, and I devoured the stories and lessons in Sunday School. It probably didn't hurt that I was one of the few kids in our little Southern Baptist church, and that our neighborhood was out in the sticks, so there was little or no "outside" influence on me besides my family and church. I knew that being Saved at 11 was kind of unusual, but it seemed like a natural enough thing to do.

It would be fair to say that I wanted to belong and be accepted. And I was. Everyone was proud of me, and I felt welcomed more and more into the adult circles around me.

My memories of my childhood are "normal" to me, which isn't surprising I guess. I never felt pressured to "join" the church, because it was always just there. My family was pretty low-key about the philosophical underpinnings of faith and the deep thinking necessary to question things; for us, being Christian was about behaving yourself and treating others kindly. It was straightforward.

Then there was my grandfather.

Grandpa Russ was the classic itinerant preacher, always on the move, going from church to church to bring the word to flocks who needed to hear the tough lessons he had to teach. (Those were the words we used for it in our family; the sad fact is that everywhere he went, he told people what was wrong with them until they drove him out.)

It hurts to criticize him, because I loved him, and I don't want my family to read this and feel hurt. I never thought of him as cruel or crazy, and don't want to sound like I'm tearing him down; but if I describe him honestly, what you will see is the photo-realistic portrait of a Christian conservative. Part Archie Bunker, part Billy Graham, and a little bit of white Al Sharpton for style. (And even though he passed in 2002, I still feel mean, traitorous and guilty describing him that way - he hated Al Sharpton.)

In Grandpa's mind, the reason he had to move a lot was because people couldn't handle the truth. I know now that no one can - not on Grandpa's terms. He had an odd relationship with truth, in the way that anyone who has dealt with this kind of person would recognize. But to me, he was Grandpa. He was an amazing friend to hang out with, he loved me, and he had Stories.

Grandpa's stories were always amusing. He could spin tall tales with the best of them, and my favorite stories had to do with him, as a boy in Depression-era Kentucky. The older I got, though, the more they tended to contain some admonishment about boys with long hair - and you know that means The Gay - or backsliders suffering through drugs until they find Jesus.

When mom, dad, or Grandma caught him pulling me to one side and filling my head with his tales, they would try to intervene. They were rational enough to recognize the ugliness of some of his ideas and they wanted to protect me from them, but I loved hearing him talk. I was a pretty lonely kid, and he kept me rapt as he told tall tales of his adventure in the war - getting lost in the fog at sea and ending up in Murmansk; being hired by Glenn Miller to sing in his orchestra, just before Maj. Miller's plane disappeared. No matter how outlandish or unlikely, I loved Grandpa's stories.

But I've always loved ALL kinds of stories.

I recognized early on how stories tell us hidden things about ourselves. They're puzzles with secret messages and lessons about how we tick. Old stories pick up details and layers like the sedimentary rocks that form fossils. If you know how to decipher them, all stories are true. I like to think I learned this from Grandpa, thanks to the inventive ways he would have to twist facts or events around to fit whatever he was trying to teach me. I recognized the dishonesty in what he was doing, but I was enthralled by his skill for spin, and the psychology behind it. From all of this, I learned at a tender age how to tolerate a great deal of cognitive dissonance - though it would be a dozen years before I would learn that term.

Of course, the Bible stories were literally true, as far as I was concerned. There was no question of that. I knew "real" from "pretend" - there was the Bible, and then there was "Star Wars." I was also an avid listener to Family Life Radio - the local Christian broadcaster that carried Dr. Dobson's "Focus on the Family", among others. Dr. Dobson's program was where I learned a lot of pop psychology - how people fooled themselves into thinking right was wrong. He also warned me about cults (ie, other religions), the occult and Satanism. These programs reinforced what I was learning in church, helping keep me focused on what was True.

Our pastor held an annual seminar on cults and the occult, so the he could explain to us why those false churches were wrong, and we were right. And of course, atheists, communists, and other godless people were mentioned along with backsliders and sinners of all stripes. So it was that I began my teen years a righteous, fiercely faithful soldier of Christ. I was accepted by my church and my family, and I knew what was right and what was wrong. I wasn't perfect, but I was Good. And I thought I was ready for the world.

Then things stopped making sense. It was no single thing.

It wasn't just that when I told Grandpa that I wanted to be a paleontologist he told me that fossils were put in the ground by Satan to test our faith - and meant it. It wasn't that I fell in love with a Catholic girl, and watched her turn on me bitterly after the passive-aggressive treatment she endured from my church family. It wasn't just that I began exploring music, and getting into strange things that my country-and-gospel family didn't understand. It wasn't that I wanted to fuck more than anything in the world, and couldn't figure out a way to do that within the strictures of our moral code.

And it wasn't that I began to recognize that I became a cruel and vicious asshole when "debating" any or all of these issues with my peers.

In the end, it was the stories that made me see it.

Everyone has a conversion story; a point where they go from believing one thing to believing the opposite - or at least something new that pushes out the old belief. One day, while arguing with a Mormon friend, something crucial dawned on me. He had used the same lines and logic to try to convince me he was right that I used on atheists all the time - not that it ever convinced them. He said the voice of God told him to believe, and he did. I told him he was ridiculous. After all, there is documented evidence that Mormonism was fabricated by Joseph Smith in the 1860s, and there is NO evidence that the Golden Tablet of Moroni or the Lost Tribe of Israel ever existed in North America (if at all).

As I blisteringly mocked his faith in a poorly written re-imagining of history published by a con man from New York, I realized that as ridiculous as it was to believe a hoax dreamed up in 1865, it was even more ridiculous to believe a hoax from 2000 years ago. They're all just stories, after all. If millions of people could buy into Mormonism after only 150 years, what did that say about Christianity? How could I trust the old game of Telephone as it played out across two millenia?

After I asked myself that question, I thought about Grandpa. A Man of God - who lied, and exaggerated  and sometimes just "got things wrong." Not because he was evil, but because he was dying from plaque forming in the arteries of his brain. If he was wrong about the fossils, the way Joseph Smith was wrong about the Golden Tablets... and the way George Lucas was wrong about that galaxy far, far away... how could I ever really know how to tell which stories were factually true, and which were just poetry and social memory? I suspected it would be a long and difficult road if I decided to take it.

I was 17.

I held on for a long time. I still don't want to appear to simply "convert" - I didn't know where to go from where I had been, and it's hard for me to describe to people where I am now. This is why I dislike labels; as soon as someone hears "atheist" they think they know what you're all about. Even if being atheist was the only justifiable position to take, I have always hated the pat feeling of the conversion story: "I once was blind, but now I see." I did not want to go from being the asshole defender of Christ to being an asshole defender of ... nothing.

The key was to stop being an asshole, and just be honest. I don't know if I'm "there" yet.

But I'm not struggling, any more, and that's something. I did not give up struggling until I was 34. At that point I had spent half my life as a devout believer, and then half as nothing, I decided to stop calling myself agnostic, and just admit that it was that I didn't know: I really didn't care. Since then I've realized that I don't have to "accept" anything to replace my faith. I don't have to have a conversion story, mainly because it's my story I'm telling, and it's okay if this part is all internal monologue.

All anyone else needs to know is that I don't simply accept things as "true" just because it makes a good story for them.

I am still interested in stories. The older I get, the more I appreciate the poetry and art in teasing meaning out of the universe. I'm interested in watching how people think, and seeing how they deal with life according to their different ways of looking at the world. I still feel somewhat sanctimonious about the common mistakes people make in their lives, but I am less interested in judging them and more interested in learning from their mistakes. If they ask, I will tell them what I know.

I write about faith sometimes - about others who have it, and how it impacts me. I want to figure out how to relate to people who are like I was. But mostly, I just want to enjoy the stories, and try to keep straight which are true, and which are just for fun.

Lucky for me, I find truth to be fun.

Sewer Saga

Since we started the construction of our upstairs addition this past spring, we noticed a few clues that something was wrong.  Discoloration and debris on the sides of the toilet and a ring in the unused tub - both in the downstairs (ie, finished basement) bathroom.  Occasional "bloop bloop" sounds from the pipes. All cause for concern, but dismissed because the drains were still working. We figured it had some relation to the construction.

But a few weeks ago, we couldn't dismiss it any more.  The tub backed up with brown sludge containing not only shreds of toilet paper, but a nasty mixture of ... stuff.  So, we called the warranty company.

We had two visits from the company's contractor to clean out the pipes. On his first visit, he wasn't able to clear the problem, and he identified dirt and roots in the muck.  This was a potential problem, because our warranty wouldn't cover a break in the sewer line.  We also learned that the county wouldn't deal with any break occurring on our property.

In order to get a "diagnosis," the first guy came out the second time with a locator.  He ran the transmitter end as far as he could from the access point (the clean-out) in our basement, then walked around with the receiver end on the driveway.  He pointed to a spot about 10 feet from where he estimated the pipe to come out of the house.  His guess was that the pipe out of the house was cast iron, with it being terracotta the rest of the way to the street.  If it was terracotta, a repair job was not likely to solve the problem; it would be better to replace the whole stretch with PVC.

"I can't officially mark this, but that's where I think your break is."

It wasn't.

Turns out that when they built the house in the late 1940s, they ran the sewer line out of the east side of the foundation at a 45 degree angle, turned 45 degrees toward the street, ran about 10 feet to a right-hand 90 degree turn.  That's where the "break" was.  From there the pipe went about 15 feet, and made a couple more 45 degree turns to get to the west corner of our property - a run of 90 feet from outlet to county sewer.

But we didn't know that, yet.  We got estimates for a straight shot - right down the middle of our concrete driveway, 35 feet to the east corner of the street.  We discovered that our homeowner's insurance would cover the replacement of the line and the removal/replacement of the concrete... but NOT the excavation. (Apparently, the driveway and the pipe are part of the residence, but the dirt between them is not. Effin' lawyers...)

We needed estimates (the lowest clocked in at $4,200), schedules (next week? NO! Now, please!), and a lot of planning. Since this was happening in November, right around the 3-day weekend of veterans day, we ended up have to get creative. I took clothes in a gym bag and showered at work for a week; the kids and Kate went to shower at our friend's house; and we spent WAY too much at the laundromat. Eventually, the crew made it out and spent 3 days destroying, learning, and replacing.

But rather than terracotta in a straight shot down the driveway (which was, of course, the first thing torn out), they found 90' of ancient cast iron following that path I described above. And worst (or best) of all: they saw no break.  Nothing in the pipe being ripped out; no obvious cracks; no wet ground showing weeks' worth of seepage anywhere.  All was clear and fine (and now it was all brand new PVC) to the county's pipe.

We had to let the new joints cure overnight, so it was a full 24 hours before we could run the water.  When we did, it still backed up. So out the County came, at 11pm, to run a snake down our newly installed external cleanout.  They pulled about a foot of tree root clump out, called it good and left.

Really?  All of that money, time, inconvenience and effort for a clump of tree root? We're supposed to believe that was all that was causing 90 feet of pipe to fill with water? Was that all that was needed in the first place? I was skeptical, and so was Kate. But perhaps we would be alright.

Turns out, no; Friday night, running a load of laundry, I heard the familiar "bloop bloop" and ran into the bathroom to see the tub filling with murky, cold water.  Out came the County.  They ran the snake.  Nothing.  But miraculously, the water was flowing. Until today. Same thing (at noon instead of midnight, this time!); men + snake = still nothing.

Next step: cameras.  Maybe they'll find some missing mythical creature nesting in the junction of our sewer: the Phantom, an escaped cold-weather Anaconda, or a competent and attractive alternative to Newt Gingrich.  Who knows what watertight abomination could be down there!

Meanwhile, I'm eyeing the drains with suspicion, and waiting for the next Bloop.

To be continued?

Clown Shoes

The opposition is convinced they will win.

The President is on the ropes, they say, and anyone could walk in and take the office from him.  They have a litany of complaints - dismissed by the President's defenders in the ruling party with a range of attitudes from snarky disdain to mock horror - and they have a list of candidates ready to vie for the chance to put their ideas on the national ballot.

But supreme overconfidence seems to be the theme of the primary race.  From the acknowledged establishment front-runner no one really likes; to the more appealing-but also less familiar challenger; to the out-of-touch Cold Warrior spouting ancient Soviet-era ideas; to the religion-tainted crackpot; to the exciting governor who implodes when he opens his mouth; to the untrusted dark horse with kooky ideas; and the unexpected denial of candidates who thought it was their turn - the opposition seems bent on selling ideas that have been roundly rejected by the electorate rather than gaining the confidence of the voters and offering any solutions to contemporary problems.

And after the dust settles, the President will walk away with a Mandate from the People to continue doing business as he has been doing business all along.  He will double down on ideas and strategies from his first term, and not only disappoint and alienate the independent electorate that chose him as the lesser of two evils, but also erode and embitter his own base. (Of course, most of them only dig in and defend him to avoid the appearance of "giving in" or to entertain themselves by watching their political enemies fume.)

Sound familiar? Yeah - the 2004 race sucked.

You would think that no one would want to repeat that experience.  After all of the agony and bitterness, not to mention the political losses on both sides, you would expect that more candidates might try to appeal to the sensible middle of the political spectrum. You would expect them to duplicate the "no drama" approach to campaigning; after all, that was what some 40% of us found appealing about the last winner.

Instead, the GOP has denied reality at every opportunity, has ramped up the viciousness of their rhetoric, and seems to have bought into their own alternate-history view in a way that even the 2004 Democrats - the "anyone but Bush" crowd - did not do.  The Democrats at least had legitimate complaints against Bush - I've documented my reasoning behind that opinion in this blog before. 

I'm not convinced that the Republicans have such legitimate complaints about President Obama. 

He has largely accomplished things that the GOP insisted they would do; from taking down bin Laden and Ghaddafi, to pulling out of Iraq in an "honorable" way (to use the word the administration uses). His domestic agenda has pushed through a lot of Republican ideas - to the chagrin of his Democratic supporters - only to have those ideas roundly rejected by the GOP and declared by their PR arm to be part of his alleged Socialist Plot to Take Over the World.  The GOP seems universally convinced that the rest of us believe what they believe about President Obama - and what they believe is on 24/7 display on FOX news networks.

Watching the current crop of candidates deny science, deny economic reality (really, guys?  Trickle down - still?), and insist that God is leading them to save us from the Gays, Foreigners, Communists, and Atheists has been occasionally entertaining, but it's still depressing to think that this is the best an established political entity can produce. 

Then again, they may have a point.  

After all is said and done, God may really WANT some of these morons in charge of our government. Remember - this is the same God that allegedly designed the camel and the platypus. 

Whole Hearted, Full Throated

If you know anything about me from my writing, or from talking to me over time, or from being around me, it is this: I love my wife.

Loving someone with your whole heart is terrifying.  You don't know in the early stages whether it is safe to dive in, and once you're in and comfortable, you have to guard against taking it for granted.  When I met my lovely bride, it was like a beam of sunlight parted my fog, and I did dive.  At some point, amongst all of the moving, failing, growing, and changing, we began to take things for granted.

Over the last few years, I've learned why people are so very terrified of love.  I've learned the hard way that our love has faded, and she has made it clear that she no longer wants to be married.  Not to me.

If you know anything else about me - and I leave evidence of this quirk of my personality lying around on the Internet - you know I tend to speak my mind.  I speak truth to power, I share my opinions, and I object loudly when I run across a situation which strikes me as wrong. I don't fancy myself as a fading flower who holds back when someone deserves to be told off.

And I have been wronged.

But I haven't talked about this as openly as you might expect.  Some of you know the whole story; it's not like I'm hiding anything.  If you ask me privately, I may tell you.  I just don't want to broadcast details all over the web.  I don't want to say things that my children will see.  And deep down, I want to keep alive the hope that when the dust - or this new patch of fog - clears, I'll be able to reclaim my bride.

So I keep broadcasting the one thing I do want you all to know.  I tell you all with no reservation that when she is ready, I will still be here with my whole heart - cracked, but intact - ready to cry out passionately to the heavens what has been true since the day I dove head first into her life.

Loving someone with your whole heart is terrifying - and no less so when you are taking that risk for the second time.  When you already know what you stand to gain, and what you are missing, it is no less tempting to wonder if you should make the leap.  No less so when you have good reason to expect the worst.  Or when you're making the leap without knowing for sure that you will land safely.  Diving into turbulent waters and realizing how close you are to the rocks beneath - seeing them rush up at you...

If I have misjudged, and if I am headed for the rocks, let my cry be this:

I love my wife. Whole Hearted, Full Throated.

And I am not even putting my hands out to break my fall.

The Impact on My Faith

Today, like every day of the last decade, we are feeling the effects of a deplorable act. My family's story is like that of most Americans; we were fortunate not to lose anyone directly, though some of us were close by. One of us could have been in the Pentagon that day; one of us was sent from the Air Force base in New Jersey in time to see the buildings come down and to help guide people away from the rubble to safety. We could have lost much more than we did.

This is about what we gained.

For many, the shock and the aftermath brought them to a place of renewed Faith. They turned to God - whether the God they had been raised to believe in and fallen away from, or the God they had never considered and now needed. "God Bless America" was everywhere in the years that followed the attacks. The ceremonies today are full of scripture, invocation of the name of God, and songs like Amazing Grace. 

But as my friends and family well know, I have not turned toward their God in these years. They've seen me begin to identify myself more as an atheist or nontheist; a believer in nothing, it would seem. To them, this represents a loss. I see it as a gain. While they draw strength from putting a name to the universe, and imagining that it cares about them, I've drawn strength from confronting a cold, indifferent universe in which I can thrive despite adversity.

It has been hard for me - a boy raised deep in the thick of Southern Baptist faith and tradition - to learn a new vocabulary of faith and strength that doesn't require the existence of God. Music has helped. Poetry helps. Keeping hold of the ideas behind faith - love, charity, and mercy as the virtues that should drive us - while shedding the mystical, thought-clouding emotions tied to Faith has been an intense, private struggle. And life streams by, with currents and eddies that make finding your footing seem impossible.

Despite the impossibilities, I go on. We all do. It's impossible that we could even exist, but we do. That is the fact that ties all of us together regardless of the names we give to the world around us. What I've gained in the last decade is a source of strength based on the impossible. I've learned (and am still learning) how my faith drives me. My faith is not in a god that controls the minutiae of my life. My faith is in the always reliable turmoil that generates and destroys life. It makes me choose what is truly important to me more carefully. It makes me fight harder for what I've chosen; for my wife and children. For a career that I think is an important part of preventing future acts of violence like those we are remembering today.

My faith tells me that people, while dangerous and unpredictable, are just like me and are driven by knowable forces - and ultimately, their understanding of those forces is sometimes given names that I don't have faith in. God. Allah. Karma. Jesus. Part of my faith requires me to let them have their point of view, and only contradict them when they truly threaten me, or when I have reason to fear their faith is taking them somewhere dangerous to themselves. We will always struggle with the cloudy grey areas where different understandings bump into each other; but I've learned that "assume good intent" and a general avoidance of revenge and violence can keep those struggles from causing harm.

As a "budding atheist" you might expect me to be uncomfortable with the invocation of God that comes with the ceremony of remembrance. I am. But because I understand that people need to relate to the world in a way that brings them peace and equilibrium, I try to treat the references to God, Heaven and a Higher Power as a code for the same basic things that I do believe in. To me, the names we choose don't matter as much as the stories and the lessons they teach.

It's up to each of us to pull the lessons of life and love from those stories; just as it is up to us to pull the laws of the universe out of observation and experimentation. You might venerate Doctor Who as much as some do Jesus, or your own ego as much as some do Buddha; it doesn't matter to me, as long as you find a way to stand up and face down your challenges. It doesn't matter how you express your faith, as long as you find a way to deal equitably with others.

I haven't become a perfect person in the last ten years. In some ways, I'm as lost and confused as I ever was; I'm certainly just as obnoxious and socially retarded now as when I was a young Christian. I may never reach the goals I've set for myself, and I may still lose the things that are most important to me. That is life.

But no matter what God or the universe have in store for me, I will love and admire my wife and children, and will do my best to lift up those around me. I will do what I can to make things better - even though "better" is a moving target. I like to think I would have gotten here without the influence of the September 11 attacks, but the truth is that they did impact me.  And this is where I am now.

Whatever your beliefs are, I hope your faith is taking you through the turmoil toward something better. I like what Admiral Mullens said on Twitter today: "Living well and for each other -- that is victory."

I hope that, whatever your beliefs are and whatever names you use for the universe, you find peace and strength in your reflections today.

The Snip - a Public Service Announcement

Warning: Severe Ick Factor Ahead!

If you are bothered by discussions of medical procedure, bodily fluids, or patients' eye views of urology, then I suggest you skip down to an earlier blog (you might have missed one or two). It's probably very rude of me to recount these events, but I consider this tale to be a public service announcement, and so I'm going to post it, anyway.

I told Bernie the boss, "I'm going to be out Wednesday, and I won't be back until Monday."

My friend Paul asked why I was going to be out (me, the guy known for working 72+ hours a week)... and I told him; time for the vasectomy. "Are you NUTS?" he shouted, then his cheeks colored and he shuffled off.

I understood how he felt; he was a single guy with all of his silly macho ideals still intact. But my lovely bride and I had four little kids in rapid succession. Due mainly to allergies, other options for population control weren't viable. It was hard to make the leap, but we decided we'd both make sure that IT couldn't happen again. And I was going first.

I went to the evaluation appointment, not sure what to expect. I did not expect a very cute, pixie-faced Doctor to explain my choices for the procedure in graphic detail while fanning illustrations of the options before her face. She showed me the three basic methods:
*Two scalpel incisions directly over each tube
*Two incisions made with sharpened shears (jab through skin, open shears to make 1/4 in. opening)
*One scalpel incision in the middle, and fish out the tubes with a probe...

She saw I had turned green, so she showed me the list of six doctors in the practice. "They will each perform whichever method you prefer - except Dr. Herzinger; he only does the sharpened shears. He says it heals better with a ragged incision." That's right, it was pronounced "Dr. HURT-zinger".

In the end, guess who was the only doc available for the forseeable future?

So I showed up the day of, having shaved as instructed. This was an awkward thing for me, and I followed the instructions precisely, marveling to myself that people would do this regularly. Feeling more exposed than I had since puberty, I lay on the table, only to have the Dr. shake his ancient head and say with sad disapproval, "Didn't do a very thorough job there, did you?" Then he seized a straight razor and deftly cleared half an acre I had never seen before. (Strictly speaking, I still haven't seen it.)

Once I was completely shorn, and utterly humiliated, the anesthetizing began. Have you had a dental procedure done? Or heard Bill Cosby's bit about Dentists? The way they jab in the needle, and then slowly wiggle it around while they inject their cold poison, was compounded by the feeling of my testicle being inflated to the size of a basketball. I white-knuckled the sides of the gurney, and just as I was certain he had decided to dispense with "incisions" and just POP the bastard... he stopped. I released my breath and my grip, grateful it had ended without any hitting or screaming.  The Doc nodded at me kindly and said, "Alright... now for the left one."

I survived, though, reminding myself that delivering four children was far worse for my wife than what I was going through was for me. Even watching him "tie it off" (like watching a rodeo bull-roping over the horizon of my own belly) didn't phase me after that.

And of course, I was expected to come back in two or three weeks for the Test. I needed to wait for everything to heal, of course, and then contribute a sample to make sure there were no stray swimmers finding their way out into the world.

Now, I had read "The Water Method Man", and had seen "Road Trip"; I had some preconceived notions (and not a little fear) of what this experience might involve. I was to be severely disappointed.

No "cute nurse" like in the movie; I got your basic Dundalk-bred troglodyte, complete with greasy ponytail and weak, acne-scarred chin, handing me a cup and saying, "Fill this to here, hon, and get it back within 45 minutes."

I was shattered. There was no "special room" for this, with porn or a fake boob or something? I didn't want to ask... there were scads of people in there! And Dundalkella had gone back to nibbling at a crab cake hidden behind her computer monitor. So I turned and left the office.

I went down to the car, and stared at the cup. It wouldn't take much, but where was I supposed to go? I only had (checking the clock) 40 minutes left, and home was twenty minutes away. Even if traffic was perfect, I only had a couple of minutes to try to produce a sample in a house full of screeching children! So I got out of the car and headed back into the building.

The men's rooms on the first three floors were either full of grunting patrons, or cleaning crews. On the fifth floor, I finally found some isolation. It was a dingy, brown-tiled orifice of a room, with peeling paint on the stall doors and no provocative graffiti. And there, despite fearful internal warnings about George Michael's arrest intruding on what I was trying to visualize -- I managed to produce my sample.

Handing the cup to the Gamorrean receptionist, she looked surprised to see me. "That was quick, hon!" I thought she had said I had 45 minutes, though. "Oh, for the love! You have 45 minutes from when you fill the cup!" At that moment, it dawned on her, and a few of the bystanders, just what I had done, and where I had likely done it. So I left.

"Man," I thought to myself. "I'm never doing THAT again!"

Decant the Midnight Lizard

Digging through old posts from 2003 or 2004, I found this:

I plunge my face into my pillow, and feel the cool fabric leach the heat from my strained and weary eyes. Clouds of the Sandman’s magic dust puff up around me, and I am already sailing away into a dream and relaxing into my pose of repose, which is not unlike that of the Coyote upon reaching the canyon floor in a Roadrunner cartoon.

“Did you empty the boy?” The voice of my lovely bride jerks to a halt my descent into slumber, and my body goes rigid as I fight my way back into wakefulness. I should have known I was forgetting something.

The Boy is three, and took to toilet training like a donut to coffee. The only problem he has is remembering to get up in the night to avoid drowning. It has become my job to empty him once before going to bed, and again in the morning before I leave for work. I don’t mind, except that he is an extremely heavy sleeper, as the twinge in my back will attest. I’ve lobbied against the nightly “dink o’walla” with all my heart, but have been consistently out-voted. I seem to be the only one who has made a connection between the 2.5 ounces of water he drinks just before bed and the 2.5 gallon deluge that issues forth from him between 10pm and 4am.

So, it falls to me as the last one down and the first one up to enforce the head call. If I don’t do it, he will awaken, cold and sticky, forty minutes before my alarm is set to go off, and will climb into our bed with his soggy drawers. The changing of sheets and pajamas (his and ours, now), and the wailing and crying (his and ours), and the rinsing off of his soiled body and tucking him into his remade bed generally leaves me with about ten minutes to go until I have to get up again. Not enough time to get any more rest, and too much time to sit and dawdle over my cereal.

This night, I am especially tired. The cold I have been fighting has resorted to guerilla tactics for the last couple of weeks. Gone during the work week, but suddenly appearing on Friday night. Sometimes it’s in my sinuses, sometimes in my throat, sometimes in my eye. I think it has a secret base in my liver, so I’ve been using the Russian remedy: one shot of vodka with a dash of pepper.

I drag down the hall, and grope about in his bed, looking for him. He is a small boy, and the bed seems large in the dark; he could be anywhere! He isn’t. I am about to give in and turn on a light when I feel something underfoot. It IS a foot. It is attached to the wee lad, who has made a nest under his bed out of stuffed animals, dump trucks, and a few Justice League action figures. Batman, devotedly standing guard, dives cowl-first onto my foot as I lift the boy like a sack of rice, and with a stifled yelp, I begin hopping painfully toward the bathroom, all while trying to keep a good grip on him.

Not many people fully appreciate how floppy the body of a sleeping child can be until they try to pick one up in the middle of the night. This one sags in the middle as I prop his head on my shoulder and drape his legs over the elbow of the other arm. It isn’t a problem until he startles awake and begins to writhe like a cat in a bathtub. I manage to prevent him from slamming his head into the door frame by slamming my head into the door frame. He will have an interesting vocabulary by the time he begins school. The blast of cranial pain distracts from the Bat-marks in my foot, though, and that helps me maintain my balance.

“Sh-sh-shh!” I say, trying to sooth him back into immobility. He relaxes a little bit, then suddenly drops back to sleep. I complete the journey to the bathroom with only minor limping, and try to stand him up on the little stool next to the toilet. His legs won’t go down. They waver bonelessly. They curl up under him, and he tucks his chin to his chest and throws his arms up, giving me nothing to hold onto. He almost slips away, but I manage to grab him by the elbows and haul him back up.

Now he’s mad, and his legs shoot out, as he explodes with furious activity. He is a whirlwind, a wolverine cornered, a many-tentacled rage beast desperate to get away from me.

Then, with a plop, all action stops. Something awful has happened. We stand there in the darkness, until realization dawns. He tears the night apart with his shrill, angry scream: “It’s CO-O-O-OLD!!”

He has planted his left foot squarely into the toilet bowl.

Yanking his foot free, he begins kicking savagely, liberally spraying toilet water hither and yon. Fortunately, it didn’t get on his clothing. After a brief tussle, I wrestle him up onto the sink, and jam his foot under the tap. I wash him, pat him dry, and stand him up - finally - on his stool. There, he proceeds to make water for an eternity.

I have time to wash myself up, dry, mop up the floor, check the pipes for wear, tidy the tub toys, and re-grout the tile. When he is done, I gently carry him back to his room, and place him gently in his bed, where he is supposed to be. I kiss him gently on the forehead, and whisper, “Sweet Dreams.”

When he whispers it back to me, all is forgiven, and I limp gratefully back to my own, sweet, welcoming bed.