100 monkeys typing.

Dear Meghan Cox-Gurdon. How do you type with boxing gloves on?

Life is tough when you're America's Worst Mother™. Your husband makes appearances around the house only during sweeps week (sort of like David Duchovny during the final seasons of X Files). You have four unruly children who you have to feed and clothe and shelter and show some level of affection towards (at least according to the nosy nannies at Child Services). And then when you invite Doug Giles over for some "pastoral care", he takes one look at the Bambi screensaver on your computer, and well, you can guess the rest.

Without the Internets to soothe you, you're forced to grit your teeth and spend time with your darling children: Nantes, Phaedra, Mauve, and Tercel. At least you'll have lots of amusing anecdotes to tell when your computer is finally fixed. Right? Right?

I am typing intently, gazing into the screen as if into the eyes of an oracle. Here's another e-mail from my mother complaining that I haven't returned a phone call. "If you don't leave a message how can I know you called?" I type, a bit snippily.

If this were real literature, we would call this foreshadowing. Meghan finds her mother to be pushy and unreasonable, so she is subconsciously trying to cut the apron strings. Yet she is unable to. The reader is expected to imagine the AWM-TNG™ column written thirty years from now, when Phaedra Cox-Gurdon-Shapiro takes over and writes about how Meghan is interfering in her life.

"Mmmm...what?"

"I said, [Phaedra] just spilled milk all over the kitchen floor. The cork floor! All over it!"

Meghan has had sixteen days to come up with material for this week's column and this is the best she can do. One of her children spilled milk on the floor! And the rest of her children are too dense to use a towel to clean it up!

"Okay, that's fine, let me just finish this e-mail..."

[Nantes] turns to [Mauve] and in friendly, practical tones I hear him explain, "Now that she's got another computer, I guess we will have to start saying everything three times."

"Hey," I object, stung. "You will not. It's just that I haven't had e-mail for ten days and..." trailing off, I find myself glancing back at the glowing blue monitor, as if to include it in the conversation.

"Hey, you kids shut up! Can't you see that I'm busy being nagged by my mother!"

as I turn away from the children I feel myself relax — just from looking at the screen!

"Stupid whiny brats! Anything to get them out of my sight!"

"Uh-oh. Was that my inside voice or outside voice?"

"If it was my outside voice, they'll know how much I resent them for being born and ruining my career of being a highly paid pundette like Ann Coulter."

"No, I'm pretty sure I used my inside voice. My children remain unaware that I find the warm glowing warming glow of my computer far more soul-satisfying than I will ever find them to be. I just have to make sure I don't mention it in my column at National Review, which could end up being read by tens of people!"

"D'oh!"

I do something very brave indeed. I snap down the brand-new lid.

"I guess that can wait," I tell them, blinking a little in the strange atmosphere of unmediated offline reality. "Now, what?"

"Cork," [Mauve] mutters, pulling her thumb out and pointing upwards.

"No, sweetie," I reply. "Cork county is in the south part of Ireland. That means it's full of papists who are going to hell." I gently turn her hand so that her finger is pointing downwards.

This is a little game we like to play. We mention a place and guess whether the majority of the inhabitants are going to heaven (Texas!) or hell (Vermont!). With the innocence of youth, my children are optimistic that anyone can be saved through the grace of God. Sometimes it breaks my heart to have to correct them.

"Follow me!" Paris yells, bounding up the stairs. In the kitchen we find what you would expect to find when the words "Phoebe" and "milk" and "floor" are in the same sentence.

On the other hand, if this were real literature, it would have an editor.

Kneeling with a handful of paper towels, I feel a twinge of comradely sympathy for the murderer who tries to mop up some grisly scarlet Rorschach pattern before the FBI bangs on his door. If a forensic expert were to screen my kitchen for incriminating traces of dairy products, I'd be headed for the big house.

At this point, the only thing one can ask is: "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT,. YOU DEMENTED NINNY!" Milk is blood. Two minutes ago, Meghan couldn't tear herself away from the computer, but now the milk has to be cleaned up before the FBI arrives? This is incoherent even by NRO's standards.

Actually, I did my crying when the computer suddenly died. Everyone knows someone who knows someone to whom this has happened, and I am here to tell you that everything someone says is accurate. First there is panic, and a whacking noise as someone bangs the keys and they availeth not. Then comes disbelief and repeated cries of, "this is ridiculous," and "I don't believe it," and "oh, man, what am I going to do?" A short period of grieving follows, as you reflect on all the unanswered e-mails and unfinished proposals for articles and bestselling trilogies that died with the hard drive, and then — O bliss! — comes acceptance and liberation.

Panic, disbelief, grief, acceptance. Apparently, the real five stages of grief are copyrighted by a competing webpage.

The reproachful e-mails have vanished into the ether; long passages of hard-won, too-clever prose have vaporized, and you are free! You can be born again in Version 10.3.6!

I have nothing to say here. I just wanted to keep the bit where Meghan thinks her prose is "too clever".

Thanksgiving weekend is wonderfully quiet. ... [T]he hum of technology is so markedly absent that for a few days we return to a kind of pre-industrial agrarian existence, inasmuch as such a thing is possible in an urban townhouse. Out come the board games. Logs brought in from actual rural areas crackle expensively in the fireplace. The kitchen looks like something out of a Laura Ingalls Wilder book, minus the headcheese.

And just like in a Laura Ingalls Wilder book, Phaedra went blind! (Although unlike in a Laura Ingalls Wilder book, it was caused by drinking Ma's bathtub gin.)

"I am thankful for blueberries," [Phaedra] remarks as she digs her fork into a slice of pumpkin pie.

"I am thankful for my family," says [Mauve] loyally, and everyone loudly seconds her.

"I'm thankful about Lawrence," [Tercel] puts in. Lawrence is a seven-year-old whose education we recently began sponsoring.

Meghan glances angrily at the empty chair where Pa Gurdon should be. If he had been home instead of at that "conference" out of town with his secretary, there wouldn't have been the Incident, and the lawsuit, and the support payments.

"Me too," [Nantes] says. "But where is he going to sleep?"

"He's not going to sleep here," [Tercel] laughs. "He lives in Uganda, silly."

[Nantes] takes a swipe at her, and then turns to me, worried. "I was going to ask you something about him."

Oh no. It's the "why is Lawrence different from us and why does he have to live so far away?" talk.

"Oh, yes!" [Nantes] remembers. "Is Lawrence a Democrat?"

"Of course he is!" I snap. "He's black and poor -- what else would he be?"

"[Nantes], how can it — " I begin, dismayed, thinking that now it really has gone too far, this partisanship that surrounds us, that an eight-year-old boy would want to know the politics of a boy living in Kampala. How can it matter, why would he ask such a thing? Then it occurs to me that I don't actually know.

"So I called up my friends at The Monkey Cage to ask them. The Derb told me that it was the fault of the homosexualists, whose pert, firm asses are always distracting even someone like himself who is COMPLETELY 100% STRAIGHT. Jonah said it was the fault of Hollywood, because by being utterly amoral and avaricious, they stole the Republican Party's defining qualities. But K-Lo set me straight. 'Partisanship is entirely caused by the Democrats,' she said plainly. 'Every one of them hates America with a blind, unthinking fury 100 times worse than Osama's. '"

"Why do you ask?" "Because if he is," [Nantes] says cheerfully, pulling out of his pocket an Altoids box decorated with a kicking donkey which someone gave my husband at the Democratic convention, "he might like this as a present!"

Yes, it happened exactly like that.

Meghan, this column is meandering around even worse than one of Grandpa Simpson's. Could you wrap it up soonish?

It dawns on me that we haven't had a message since...October? No wonder the house has been so quiet. It turns out that a brief power outage six weeks ago mysteriously caused the answering machine in our phone system, which we don't use, to leap into life and override the message system from the phone company, which we do use. I approach my office with trepidation, and see for the first time a tiny, rapidly blinking red light on the side of the phone.

Beep!

There are thirty-one messages dating back weeks, starting with:

"Hi Meg, this is your mother. Could you please call — ?"

Et le happy end. Grandma Cox is bustin' Meghan's balls again, and all is right with the world.

Tune in next week for another pointless, rambling column that goes nowhere, starring America's Worst Mother™!

Posted by dave at December 10, 2004 03:15 AM | TrackBack