Everything we do is a self portrait.

Tip #1: When stuck in the mother of all traffic jams with a teenaged girl, parked there on the freeway with nothing to read, why not while away the time by playing Twenty or More Questions?

Q1: Are you a vegetable?
A: No.
Q2: Are you alive?
A: Mmmm, yeah.
Q3: What do you mean “Mmmm, yeah?” Are you a living organism?
A: Sort of. Look, those people in the next car are reading the paper.
Q4: Which paper?
A: Sorry, just yes/no questions are allowed.
[15 minutes later]
Q35: So you live on a person. Do you live on a person?
A: Yes.
Q36: Do you have legs? Wait, you said you didn’t have legs. How do you move around?
A: Yes/no, please.
Q37: Do you move around?
A: Sort of.
Q38: Sort of? What’s that mean? Are you a parasite of some sort?
A: No.
[Traffic moves ahead a few feet. Everyone jumps in their cars, starts engines, etc. Then firetruck and ambulance wend their way through the traffic. Resume game.]
Q67: You sure you’re alive? How can you be alive if you don’t reproduce?
A: I’m alive.
Q117: How about a knuckle sandwich? Would you like a knuckle sandwich?
A: No.
Q321: A hair? You’re a hair? You said you were alive! A hair’s not alive.
A: The follicle is alive. It’s a living cell.
Q322: Okay, my turn.
A: No, you have to guess where I am.
Q323: Gah. A butt hair! You’re a butt hair.
A: No.
Q324: [sigh] Face? Are you a face hair?
A: Yes. Where on the face.
Q325: Moustache.
A: No.
Q326: Beard.
A: No.
Q327: Eyebrow/eyelash.
A: Which, eyebrow or eyelash?
Q328: Eyebrow?
A: Yay! Got it. Your turn.

[Round Two]
Q1: Are you a butt hair?
A: That’s no fair. I get to go again.
Q1: Okay. Are you a traffic sign?
A: No.
[five minutes later]
Q12: You’re on a computer? You’re a computer part? Forget it. How’m I supposed to know anything about computer parts, if you’re not a mouse or a monitor? Forget it, I quit.
A: C’mon.
Q13: Tell me what you are, and I’ll tell you what I was going to be next time.
A: The “L” key on a computer keyboard.
Q14: The dead DNA in a serving of mashed potatoes.

Skimming through the CI* T*rture M*nual at lunch today, it occurred to me that if one were to substitute the words “parent” for “interrogator” and “offspring” or “child” for “resistant source who is a staff or agent member of an Orbit intelligence or security service or of a clandestine Communist organization”, this might do pretty good as a parenting how-to book.

I’ll keep you posted.

Raising Hell is looking for funny stories about kids. If you can write intelligent, funny, well-punctuated and brief stories about parenthood etc and don’t insist on being paid money, please consider sending your stories, in the body of an email message to Editor X at editor [at] rhzine.com. Thanks.

The plan was to type on the PC until the lunar eclipse in one big burst of creativity and inspiration. But after the usual two hours the monitor started going blink. Blink. Blink-blink-blink. Shutting itself off and turning itself back on at a rapidly accelerating rate. I had to turn it off, the monitor, and let it cool for 15 minutes in order for it to remain ‘on’ long enough for me to shut off the computer. The sky was crystal clear, the moon large and full and yellow, just waiting for that shadow to crawl across its face. I was tired, I went to bed. No way was I going to wait up until 1.30 or 3 or whatever for some eclipse.

This morning she was all, “two novels huh?”
“Yes.”
“About what?”
“Um…”
“Yes?”
“A guy who gets a job torturing people because he doesn’t feel sorry for them, and a guy who gets eaten by a tiger.”
“I see.”
“Warm up your coffee?”
“No, thanks. Why can’t you write about something nice?”
“A pain suit’s not nice? Tigers are nice.”
“How much did you write this weekend?”
“One thousand words. Then the monitor started the blink-blink thing. My goal is 4,000 a day.”
“So when you going to write that?”
“Good question.”

Here in the future, we do many things at the same time. Just now, I was relaxing on the sofa, reading Chuck Palahniuk’s “Diary – a novel”, digesting my lunch and serving as the east wall of a burrow a 6-year-old girl had built out of sofa cushions, pillows and her father.

She called it a tunnel, but it was a burrow.

Nietzsche’s mother and sister once gave him one for Christmas. He hated it.

Must keep typing. Must not stop.