Sunday Night Free Association

Do most adoptive parents have other kids? Because if they do, why do so many "IA Stories" talk about their kids crying/hitting/throwing things/vomiting and or defecating? I mean, I'm not trying to be a downer, but...if you take out that stuff what ELSE is there to talk about? The life of a toddler seems to consist of the above plus refusing to eat anything but sliced white bread with the crusts off and lightly dusted with exactly 2.3 grams of cinnamon sugar (today, that is. Tomorrow it will be something completely different)

Is there something in raising a kid that prepares you for running a country, and is that why most pre-industrial societies required you to be a patriarch or matriarch before you could be the Big Kahuna? 'Cause it's gotta be that there's something in you that gets callused over the octeenth time your kid says "I don't love you 'cause you're a bad daddy" that prepares you to say things to strangers like "You have sat too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!"

Can you really trap GIs with beer? (see above) Okay, I know you can, but how cheap a beer can you go with and still trap enough to depress the population? Are we talking Steel Reserve or will Haffenreffer (aka the Big Green Death) or Milwaukee's Best work?

Does anybody actually remember BGDs? Talk about "dead drunk for two bits"...

Didn't there used to be a country called America, where the people there used to be proud of the fact that they stood up to tyranny, defied kings and their secret justice, their lettres de cachet and Chateaus d'If, that stood for justice before the law and freedom from the midnight knock on the door and the secret torture chamber?

Why are toddlers scared of taking a dump in the potty? Wassupwitdat?

Does anyone really want Barry Bonds to break the Hammerin' Hank's career HR record?

Who invented liquid soap? And why?

And how did Viveca Lindfors stay so sexy and cool all the way into her sixties, and was she or was she not the best part of The Sure Thing?

How can a three-year-old's feet stank like that?

Why is it that the barking dog next door can keep you up an hour between midnight and one and yet the dog's owners (fifty feet closer to the howling SOB) sleep like the dead?

Why the heck is Greg Ryan bothering scheduling those soccer powers Chinese Taipei and Iceland right before the Hexagonal? Is it doing the USWNT any good at all to hammer seven goals (or whatever the hell they put in the onion bag today) against the women's soccer equivalent of Brighton and Hove Albion?

It seems to me that I've spent so much of my life worrying and fretting about things I either don't understand or can't affect, and yet the big things, the important things, the life-and-love-and-death things seem to happen in their own way, regardless of what I'm thinking or doing.

Is there anything lovlier than the curve of her hip?

Paris Hilton. WTF?

Why do so many of my countrymen not CARE that our leaders are lying to us and pissing down our necks and telling us it's raining? Why doesn't this really piss them off, too?

Is there a God? Does it matter?

When you die, will you know?

Why am I still awake wondering about this stuff?

"I woke up thinking about Turkish drummers...it didn't take long - I don't know much about Turkish drummers - But it made me think of Germany and the guy who sold me cigarettes who'd been in the Afghan secret police who made the observation that it's hard...to live...

Then I was reminded of the proprietor of a Vietnamese restaurant in Quebec who used to be head of the secret police in Da Nang - and it occurred to me I was thinking about all this stuff to keep from thinking about something else... Isn't that just what secret police are all about???" - Bruce Cockburn "Get Up Jonah"