Yep, you know what that means. All baby, all of the time from here on in. For things that sleep so much, they certainly take up a lot of time. Imagine spending 12 hours a day on your cat. Or imagine lavishing all the attention that a generation ago was spread across a brood of twelve on a single baby. Such is modern, high-protein parenting—this is reproduction on the Atkins model: all meat, no bun. We’ve got the heir, so fuck the spare. Evolution without the safety net.

Life has become a revolving door of more or less stout women who teach us the things that our mothers should have, or maybe Aunt Agnes, or someone from down the street. The midwife, the doula, the lactation consultant for goodness sakes. And this is the low tech route. Most people have OBs, nurses, spinal taps, IVs, monitors and I don’t what the fuck shoved up their butts just to pop out a kid, and this inability to reproduce without the assistance of multiple professionals, hundreds of thousands of dollars of capital equipment and the support of the entire pharmaceutical industry is somehow seen as natural, ironic no? In our neighorhood the only things that outnumber university degrees are the squirrels, who homebirth to the last individual (or so I’m told), with children coming a distant fourth after Saabs and only marginally ahead of leafblowers. Point no point, really, though these empty quiet streets still unnerve me after the swarming alleyways of Cairo.

Fitna’s finally out. Major studio release on Youtube. I would be more interested if there were the slightest possibility of a sequel dealing with the Southern Baptists and the Old Testament (or even the Jews and the New York Times for that matter) and any translation of the Quran that refers to crispy fried turkey is going to make me wonder, but more than anything else it reminds me of a sequence from Bum Fights—you know, that series where they go out and get drunk mentally deficient guys on the street to fight for a bottle of cheap booze or a couple of bucks? I guess stupid people flailing about and calling each other bad names always has market value—squint at a picture of Wilders and you’ll see Archie Bunker (seriously, try it). Once this kid business has settled down I’m going to get something going here with inter-racial dwarf tossing. I hear there’s a franchise you can buy from somewhere out in Alberta.