I would like to say less, I really would. A little unspoken mystery sounds pretty cool. I can’t shut up, though, I think you’ll understand when I tell you.
Babies, man, woah.
It’s been a long time since I hung out with any babies, so I lost touch with that experience and energy. I was 11 years old when my sister was born. I don’t think I left her side for at least the first couple of years. I had all of these intricate little acts involving her Teletubbies and Pooh Bears, always trying to entertain her. I was enamored. Life is so funny; you think you have a sense of what’s going on and the parameters of existing, until something like the birth of a family member, and there is this whole other level of feeling things and you have no frame of reference for the intensity.
in 1997 The universe said to me, “Hey, Ev, remember how incredibly happy you were when you opened that Nintendo 64 on Christmas, and you thought you had reached the top of the joy spectrum? Well, check this out,” and it’s a perfect little baby sister. Or “Hey, remember how much you loved Phineas the Beagle? Wait until you see this little human.”
So, Maddy was a baby in ’97. After that, I didn’t have that much baby contact. There just weren’t any babies in my day-to-day social circle. There were occasional new cousins here and there, and they were all cute little miracles. Some people I knew had babies; they wisely disappeared from the party scene of my 20s. I didn’t think much about it. I was very busy being self-involved and drunk.
I certainly didn’t have any of offspring, and this is going to come off as an asshole thing to say, but I’m an asshole: I made every mistake in the book except for that one, and I am so grateful. I can’t even comprehend adding another poor soul to the ride I was on. It would complicate things way further than they already were.
Forgetting the whole miraculous energy of babies, I turned into a grumpy, cynical guy in his 30s in New York. Like, “Oh, these people, with their babies, so many pictures of babies all the time, blah blah blah, miserable Jeneane Garofolo-style misanthrope shit.”
On Saturday , I met my friend’s two-month-old son, and the power of proximity to a brand new human came back from the ’90s and hit me. I am still vibing from the energy. I know why you post thousands of baby pictures. Go ahead. Seriously.
What a fucking joyous occasion. It’s powerful from my seat in the audience. I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like to have one of those things, holy shit. This baby melted my cynical view of life, quickly.
Not that I imagine that I’m ever going to have one. No thank you. I can’t even take care of myself in a satisfactory and functional way. That’s more than enough work. My dream is just to have a nice corgi, really any kind of dog. All dogs are good. Oh yeah, maybe a nice lady if I can ever figure out how to deal with myself enough to deal with anyone else for extended periods of time.
My parents were 24 when they had me. I think about that a lot. When I was 24, I didn’t even know how to do my own laundry, let alone raise a baby. Maybe the economic situation of the late ’80s made it a little easier for young people to afford things like homes, diapers and college tuition. But still, I can’t imagine having a child at that age, and then doing it again in 1988 and 1997.
I was looking at it like, “You’ve got to be crazy to go and have children in a world like this.” And I do kind of still look at it like that, but I also see that you’ve got to have access to a lot of faith in a lot of things, mostly yourself and your ability to do something so risky and profound, with such vast ramifications that will touch every part of your existence for the entire duration of it. That is crazy, but in a beautiful way. The is really something to be said for faith at that level, not that i would know.
I neurotically overthink the route I’m going to take to Brooklyn, what kind of sandwich I’ll have for lunch, and which Super Mario game I should play today. There’s doubt in whether I can pull off anything I need to do on any given day, even if it’s fairly insignificant. You people are out here having babies. That’s amazing. Seriously, God bless you. You got this! Let me know how i can be at all helpful with all of that. Post more pictures, too!
this is the part of the blog post where i can mention the fact you can support my coffee intake if you feel inclined to: https://ko-fi.com/evr0ck17
and here is a link to other links of the various things i do:
