The Min Pin Bark of Despair and Boredom

OK, there really can't be any more room left for this baby to get bigger. I am now a walking experiment on the ability of human flesh to contain a rapidly expanding, constantly moving mass, one which appears to have corners, and which has somehow crow-barred my ribcage wider and yet still manages to reach around the front angle of that ribcage. I don't even know how to explain that last part, but it's important that I do because it's that horrifying.

Another attempt: there's your breastbone, right? And then there's that space directly below it where you once managed to achieve something like washboard abs, but only the two sets directly above your belly button? Imagine that space as obscenely convex now, clamped on either side by bone, and then imagine a foot kicking out from that and over in front of the ribcage. I have watched too many cartoons and low budget sci-fi movies in my life because this phenomena convinces me every time that it just might be possible for my little boy to kick through my abdominal wall.

Also? There is nowhere to store the food I eat, or process it with any degree of efficiency or discretion, and though I am tempted to describe my intestinal woes in further detail, I will refrain. The good news is that I am finally sleeping more than an hour at a stretch, and am composing love sonnets to the good people at SoftHeat, who make a hell of a jumbo heating pad perfect for long, angry backs.

Why the overly detailed body update? I am housebound and slowly going mad. The Honda's in the shop and Pants has the pick-up, which leaves me with the 55 Fairlane, which is less a functionally reliable automobile for everyday errands and more a perplexing hobby for Pants and a mechanical means of playing dress-up for me. Floyd requires a certain flexibility of schedule, a certain philosophical abandon, with every ride, seeing as how it might end in being stranded any number of places. This is aside from the Hulk-like strength it takes to steer a hunk of solid steel without power steering, or apply regular brakes to said hunk once it gets moving. I look at little old ladies from the 50's now and know that underneath those puffy sleeves and white gloves were iron grips and ropey muscles, and that those shiny white pumps had to come slamming down, most likely both together, to get the car to stop.

So I'm here. Me and the dog and the cat. And the new neighbor's dog, a miniature Pinscher, or "Min Pin" if you're into that whole obnoxious abbreviating thing we do nowadays for Combination Things, or, as I see them, Things That Offend Nature and Should Not Be. This particular dog has a bark both high-pitched and petulant and brutally repetitive in rhythm and cadence, and since I'm poised to time things these days, I timed its morning outburst of rage at its own existence: two and a half hours, no breaks, going with the bark-bark-pause double cadence today instead of the bark-bark-bark triplet. Some tragedy of acoustics and military housing design allows this terrible bark to echo off our adobe walls, pierce their plaster and energy-efficient windows, and reach me in every room of our house with bell-like clarity. I picture the dog now, collapsed in futile despair in its tiny turd-speckled patch of hell, waiting for its vocal chords to mend like Prometheus's liver, only to be rent anew when it realizes that its life, against all fairness and certainly against my preferences, continues. (Another side effect of cabin fever: purple prose). Is it wrong that I'm thinking up ways to capitalize on this dog's temporary exhaustion, like dousing it in vinegar?

Eventually, of course, I will have to talk to my neighbor about this problem, and it will be less awkward and better for my case if I'm not holding the dog's dripping skull and attached spinal column when I do it. The problem is that my neighbor and his wife work all day, leaving around 7:30, which marks the onset of The Bark and returning some twelve hours or more later. Clearly, they are busy, as I used to be, and there's a good chance they might sigh in patronizing exasperation, as I used to do, at the plight of a lady of leisure, home all day building a baby and timing dog barks. All I can say in my defense is that I understand their side of it, and that when I was in the same position, I kenneled my dog inside and cleaned up my fair share of accident shits to spare my neighbors her glass-etching bark.

And now a chill runs down my spine because I just realized with little amusement that I'm doing the internet equivalent of the Min Pin Bark of Despair and Boredom. Time to collapse and await renewal.

A good man is hard to find.

Six days to go before my official due date and predictably, our world is showing tiny, worrisome cracks at the seams. A high-spirited trip to the commissary for chicken to throw on the grill ended in five men standing in a ring around the popped hood of my ancient Honda, hands on hips and taking the occasional swipe at the season's last stubborn flies, and floating fantastical theories about what the hell could be wrong with the starter relay. Various folklore fixes were employed ("Put it in park and we'll rock it back and forth-- that might kick the fly-wheel into motion," "Yank the gear shift through all its stations a couple of times"), until finally Pants and I were offered a consolation ride home in a very nice man's intimidatingly nice Tundra. (The cab of his truck was like a cockpit and I half expected a silky, English accented female voice to inquire if she could reprogram our destination.)

This is OK, I guess. I mean, it's well within the realm of we-can-handle-this minor emergencies, and we do have alternate vehicles, though our back-ups are Floyd, a finnicky pink and white sedan from 1955 and Babe the Blue Ox, a 1995 workhorse Ford pick-up, whose gearshift handily offered up a big, ominous snap this morning and now hangs limply when not slammed into position. All good and comforting atmospheric details to mix into my imaginings of one of the most important, albeit mercifully short, car trips I will take in a matter of days... or weeks, because, as one of my smirking docs reminded me, "Babies can't read calendars."

(Oh, the hilarity! The baby sits with his feet propped on his amniotic desk, helplessly paging through a desk calendar before tossing it over his shoulder and screaming into his Blue Tooth headset, "I can't read this shit! Tell them I'll get there when I get there! Jesus!" [Rubs his temples and sighs loudly]. I think doctors dream this stuff up in the half hour I spend shivering naked in a paper gown.)

So, sketchy transportation. OK. Manageable.

Next: the pets are acting out. Yes, I say "acting out," in that overly concerned, I-watch-pet-psychology-TV-shows kind of way. Linus peed on the futon a week ago for the first time in over a year, despite the fact that the last time he pulled this stunt I came dangerously close to cat-punching, and this morning, while Pants and I tried to choreograph the Ballad of the Abandoned Honda, Abby decided it was a good time to mix up some hot chocolate. She accomplished this by nosing open the sliding pantry door, selecting a packet of instant mix off one of the shelves, and retiring to the living room, where she shredded it and licked a giant Rorschach pattern of powdered chocolate deep into the grains of the carpet. Diabolical checkmate: I can't spray spot cleaner on this or add water unless I want an even stickier, larger mess-- plus the carpet already had some pet stains-- SO, in between taking the car battery in for a series of WTF tests, Pants took on the additional chore of renting a steam cleaner.

I feel for him now, I really do. He's got that mouth where his lips purse into a puffy line and then purse some more so it looks like he might be chewing on something but it's gotten impossibly stuck. He just spent the entire weekend sanding, staining, polishing, and wiping down salvaged antique furniture into something we can store baby clothes and blankets in (his mute protest against my love of all things IKEA, and therefore cheap and easy). On top of that, he's put up with my grunting and limping and chugging around the house like some kind of farm animal, and far from being put off by it, he's even gone out of his way to cook meals and then put up with the shocking volley of farts that results, enough to put an entire boys' basketball team to shame.

In other words, if anybody is nesting right now, it's Pants, and the sheer force of his preparatory energy is bringing out this crushing tenderness for him in me, crushing enough to make itself known over all the heartburn and gas, and this weird numb patch I'm getting just below the boob line from where baby spine abuts rib and cuts off circulation. This tenderness is enough, thank God, for me to see over the pee and the hot chocolate/dog spit combo and the mysterious vehicular ailments (turns out the battery's fine and now we're looking at the effects of a massive oil leak just behind the distributor cap, which may be leaking into and plugging the starter relay-- whatever the fuck that all means), and my growing inability to lever myself out of the couch, to see what's really there: a good man, the father of my child.