New News

An all-new edition of Uncle Knuckle's Preposterous Narrations is ascendant on Amazon, now with illustrations by the mysterious Kat Philbin. Here is one now, for the story "Bigfoot's Best Friend," also featuring a few new paragraphs and a peppering of mulled-over modifiers. Still only $1, partly because I can't figure out how to include more than 4 pictures in the book without it crashing the Amazon uploader.

Funeral in Monsterland

Art show at Good Girl Art fast approaching. Not much new work happening, unless I can hang baby pictures and dirty diapers.

Prenatal Anxiety

The baby is here, already tired from managing all her tubes.

Unborn Unknowns

“Of all the major birth defects, this is the one to have.”

For a while, that was the good news. But the patient was no larger than an acorn, making the diagnosis difficult to pin down from our macroscopic viewpoint there on the outside of my wife. Sure, our doctor looked like Billy Bob Thornton and had a peculiar way of sitting on the edge of a chair, but there was no reason to doubt his esoteric, jargon-laced explanation of our first ultrasound: gastroschesis. He traced the glowing images with his pen, outlining the tragic dimensions of our bubble-on-bubble error in mitosis. To borrow the ruthless later phrasing of a cudgel-tongued friend of mine, our baby would be born with its guts in its lap.

Good news, because, in this age of medical miracles, it was deemed fixable. It is essentially just an epic hernia—a hernia from Hollywood, or from video games—except for the auxiliary complications. The ruptured section of intestine is unprotected, which can lead to “bowel death”—a phrase that is either funny or horrifying, depending on if you are or are not Beavis and Butthead. Worse, the test for spina bifida would come back positive regardless, because gastroschisis dumps the same chemical markers (and probably others) into the amniotic fluid. “Other related birth defects are rare,” states the gastroschisis literature. But one of my mind’s early assertions was, “Just because we have one problem, doesn’t mean we can’t have another.”

We were not yet parents, but we were getting a high-octane preview of that special anxiety accompanying the stewardship of life itself. We soon scheduled our own blood tests for genetic disorders, but how far would we go after that? Amniocentesis seemed inevitable (and we would have a narrow window for it after our bloodwork came back), until I learned that it came with a danger of miscarriage. After two recent miscarriages and a 40th birthday, my wife insisted that this was our last shot. (I asked her to keep an open mind, if for no other reason than to avoid the additional stress of  “last chance” thinking—but was I just keeping a door open for abortive thinking?) The options dwindled as the stakes rose.

Every parent-to-be faces the void of uncertainty, but bad news has a way of setting precedent. Although there is nothing you can do to fix it, do you just sit back and let it swallow your outlook whole, let it become, as they say, your “new normal”? The technology brought to bear at this stage, while amazing, offered no immediate treatments or solutions. We could only hang on our little tadpole’s every wiggle and sonagraphic phantom, watching it like a shadow-puppet’s negative in the dim theater of the ultrasound room. We listened to our doctors, but each night we became like banished Eskimos, adrift on our ice floe of worry.

In this morass of gloomy predictions and ethical dilemmas—another era’s “dark night of the soul”—one’s mind scrapes at religion’s root: Why did this happen? Is there nothing to be done for it? Operating on the faint fringes of medical knowledge, most people find faith their last assurance. Not only do we want, in the words of Nick Cave, to “call upon the author to explain,” we also might like said author in our corner. But in the author’s utter and everlasting silence, I have yet to pick out a central narrative, or identify a willingness to take sides.

Our bloodwork came back normal. Then new ultrasounds ushered in a new diagnosis: omphalocele would be our new nemesis. It’s rarer, and potentially more serious, and with a whole different set of correlating problems: high concurrence (40-50%) with heart defects and genetic disorders such as Down Syndrome and the variously evil “isotopes” of Trisomy. It is often more challenging for surgeons because it affects structures closer to the symmetrical core of the body, such as genitalia. The delivery might be moved to a bigger city, for access to specialists.

Luckily, omphalocele has no known risk factors, so neither of us had to assign blame or regret. Well, there was one, but it was insignificant: aspirin taken to reduce the risk of miscarriage may have doubled the likeliness of this defect—from 1 in 5000 to the ballpark of 2 in 5000. Almost negligible, but still enough to briefly upset Heather. And insufficient to erase the litany of other ticklish doubts—was it radon gas, cell phone radiation, weed killer, my offensiveness to God? I refused to color it with meaning, even in the karma-centric way. My sister, after giving birth to a dwarf, said the universe gives people what they can handle. That is a healthy worldview, as long as you can handle what the universe dumps on you (Can you handle it, AIDS-afflicted Sudanese woman watching your third child die of diarrhea and guinea worm?). On the other hand, I think “Shit Happens” is so tired that it doesn’t even make a good t-shirt anymore, much less an operable worldview, but it remains metaphysically irrefutable.

Of course, the cause mattered less than the effect. With our usual irreverence, we laid out our demands. Heather made a slogan-worthy statement which we repeated for our own amusement: “Maybe we can do without a bladder, but a central nervous system is a must.” We agreed that certain agonies are simply too much to ask. For those parents who want to go full-term with Trisomy 13, I wish them well, but I decline to fuel a misery engine. There’s only so much crippling a little bird can shoulder before I will step on it. For those who say human life is set apart, I say, if a life carries the burden of human inviolability, it should also be granted a modicum of human aspiration. I may lack religion, but I have beliefs. One is that death can equal mercy in a situation where suffering is the central theme.

Proto-parenting was now the most formidable of Gordian knots: one still knotting itself, deepening its own complexity, and bound by flesh and blood to the core of an indispensable person. We were already triangulating on the needs of three people: Could the child be functional enough to be happy, with a modicum of comfort? How would that measure against my own resentment of a lifelong burden for us all, or against my wife’s resentment if I vote to end a pregnancy that she is unwilling to end? Call me whatever you need to; I’ve saved as many turtles from the road as the next guy.

We failed, in truth, to draft a detailed agreement over conditions warranting abortion. While we are both politically “pro-choice,” Heather’s line is clearly drawn closer to pro-life than mine. Luckily, better (if indecisive) news began to trickle in—most organs shaping up, proper head-to-body proportions, measurements galore “in the normal range,” the favorite phrase of cautious encouragement from Team Prenatal.

At one point, we went through a period of information stagnation. After their initial, stunning pronouncements, our doctors became masters of the noncommittal. Dr. Billy Bob remained quick on the draw with laser-precise statistics, but holstered anything resembling positivity. Our soft-spoken genetic counselor offered sensible timeframes and testing options (and to anyone looking for political fuel, there wasn’t any— “abortion” and its euphemisms seemed nonexistent, though there were times when it hung over us like a shadow, and I wished someone would just say the word). We met with our surgeon-to-be, taking heart from his no-nonsense gumption and his Greco-Roman wrestler’s physicality. We met the heads of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, first a lady like your dream of the perfect kindergarten teacher, then an Indian man as tall as Paul Bunyan but otherwise very much the opposite of a lumberjack, with lush, aerodynamic hair and “a quarter-century of experience” in all things baby. All were helpful, comforting people, but their answers to any real questions were predictably vague, hinging often on the phrase “every baby is different.” One could tell that they were trained, either by schooling or experience, to be on guard against dispensing false hope—slippery in the highest sense. Litigative shyness aside, no one can navigate the impossible for you.

In the hinterlands between dread and hope, wishful thinking abounds. If you want people to pray for you, put a troubled fetus into play. People will pray. You only have to decide what that is worth. Even if you are a godless castaway like me, my advice is to accept. Their hotline to heaven may be as productive as burping down a well, but it’s free, and if you can’t stomach an irrational expression of goodwill, you might make the dreariest, most Santa-killing parent ever.

Peanut, rutabaga, grapefruit… as our baby grew through the many produce-themed size comparisons, our personality traits held fast. Faced with problems, I, like the horse in Animal Farm, will work harder—though not always on things that really matter. Some of Heather’s anxiety manifests in OCD subroutines that can border on the occult. When I recently took over the vacuuming chores, I discovered that the wincingly stale remnant of Sprite in a plastic bottle that I picked up and gulped down in mid-sweeper sweep, was apparently some sort of talisman: “Oh no!” she said, “that’s been there the whole pregnancy!” I guess I broke some kind of spell. But if the prayer people get credit for good turns, then I should, too: not only did I drink the OCD Sprite, but each day, I review the “Healthy Bibo wish collage stuck to our closet wall.

During the pregnancy, Heather has googled herself ragged, even against doctors’ advice. After months of daily worry workouts, she has a midwife’s expertise in gestation. I realize we fit certain stereotypes: I, the male “fixer,” and she, the planner and talker. But this equates to more than simple personality type or gender trope. It’s biological proximity—the baby is not inside me, and I am not chemically programmed to protect it. I only feel it when my wife takes my hand to her belly for some of the more inspirational wiggles and bonks.

In these final weeks before the birth, the tide has mostly turned in our favor. An early apparent pinhole in the baby’s heart went away, and a portion of the extruded organs actually migrated  into the abdomen on their own. Body weight reached the normal range, and energetic fetal kung-fu is a constant. But we still have anxiety to burn. Intensive care will likely measure in the months. Infection lore became reality when my mother-in-law contracted MRSA. Just yesterday, I brought my wife to a trickle of tears with a cartoonish speculation on prepping the baby for surgery with a tiny little spoonful of anesthetic. I know I’m a jerk, but all I want is a baby who can someday call me one.

Belated Red Rogue Easter Gag

22 years ago, I made a business-card-sized Red Rogue comic book, The Red Rogue Easter Special. It had 8 pages, each a scene where Red Rogue hid his eggs. Since I couldn't really draw, there were no people shown. Just eggs hidden in cow crap, high in a tree, by a mean dog, etc. By far the funniest thing abut the comic was the 5-cent cover price. Here is the joke to cap it off, for the immature completist.

And now, a seasonal tale of madness and redemption, and a stolen internet photo...

The Vengeful Egg

The Easter Bunny finished another successful holiday. He could barely walk because his paws were so sore from hiding over 400 million eggs in one weekend. “I’m so dogamuffin tired,” he said, deciding to take a nap. But the moment he fell asleep, he entered a dream of an Easter egg with a mean face that was coming to get him. The egg was so mad that its face glowed hot and it floated above a vibrating battle-axe. The Easter Bunny woke up in a fright. He looked around, and he looked under his bed, but there was no egg with a mad face. But every time he went back to sleep, there was the egg, always coming closer, growing angrier and hotter.

He decided to go see his friend, Damon, who was an old mountain man living in Idaho—pretty far away from Easter Island, but the Easter Bunny had a special network of tunnels that made long-distance travel a snap. When he got there, Damon was sitting on a pile of potatoes eating a smoking black donut that he’d just cooked over a fire.

“Hi, Damon!” said the Easter Bunny. “What are your plans for all those potatoes?”
“Eh?” said Damon. “This is the plan—I sit on ‘em.”
“Oh, well, I suppose there are a lot of potatoes in Idaho…”
“Yep,” said Damon, “so many I just pile ‘em up, use ‘em for furniture. ‘Cept for the fattest ones, which I put a little sugar on and roast into donuts.” Damon was weird, but he maintained a healthy constitution and surprisingly good teeth.

The Easter Bunny told Damon about his scary egg nightmares, hoping that Damon would have some advice, because crazy old people who live in odd places have been known to have Yoda-like wisdom, or at least wrinkly faces and lots of stories.
    “I’ve had that dream,” Damon said. “I think it means….”
    “Okay, I’m waiting,” said the Easter Bunny.
    “… that you are scared of eggs.”
    “I don’t think that’s what it means, Damon.”
    “Well, why ASK ME, then? If you’re so smart, go figure it out yourself.” Damon was a little grumpy.
    “Could you just try again? Think harder this time.”
    “Hmmm.” After about three minutes, Damon said, “I guess you’re just sick of eggs. Why don’t you hide potatoes instead? At least if a potato stays hidden, it might grow in the dirt and make more potatoes, instead of just getting rotten like a lost egg.”
    The Easter Bunny had to sit down because this was quite an idea to swallow. Finally he said, “Damon, find me a nice, lightweight, ergonomic potato that I can handle with these old paws, and get me 400 million of them, and you’ve got yourself a deal.”
    “That’s a lot of potatoes, high roller! Where do you think we are, Idaho?”
    “Yes, Damon. You’ve never even left Idaho as far as I know.”
    “I did once, but I hated everything that wasn’t in Idaho.” Damon looked mad.
    “We’re also going to need those potatoes in pastel colors,” said the bunny.
    Damon looked mad again, but he declared that Idaho’s potato-producing powers knew no limits, and if the world needed potatoes in pastel colors, THEN BY JOVE, IDAHO WOULD GROW THEM! So don’t be surprised if next Easter is all about potatoes.

Slug Slaughter

I feel a little bit bad about all of this passive murder, but something was eating "the Dickens" out of my broccoli plants. I spotted a slug one day, and decided to try this bowl of beer trick, adding a little sugar and water, recessing the bowl in the dirt on a rainy day. Holy shit! Dozens of slugs have drowned. On my second bowl, and still going strong. I guess beer is good for something after all.

Review of an Opulent Spring

A gush of warm weather incited a riot of blossoming over the past weeks.

Daffodils usually come first

Bradford pear--looks nice but smells like dead fish

Periwinkles

Even the henbit weeds are getting pompous

Big tulip tree goes off like a petal bomb

Tulip tree close-up

Candytuft I planted last year to block chickweed invasion

Plum?

Redbud buds--you can eat them

Violets, I guess

Potato Preview

A selection of scenes from "The Life and Death of a Potato," one year in the making and no end in sight. Because maybe you didn't know potatoes led such full lives.

Separated at Birth

Read Across America 2012

Another room full of 4th graders will soon test-listen to these fresh tales of dopey wonder, hot off the noggin.

The Legend of Golden Brown

Everyone knows all the bears in Yellowstone Park sleep through the winter, but there was this one bear who stayed up looking for food all winter because she didn’t get enough to eat. She wandered around looking for delicious things, but she was lucky to find even gross things. Two acorns are barely enough to feed a squirrel, but that’s all she found one day. She found a little dead grub-worm and put it between two pieces of bark, thinking “Oh what a sandwich I’ve made!” She bit into it and realized that the grub-worm was really just some old chewing gum someone spat out, but she ate it anyway. Thanks to her keen senses, a tickle of mint flavor left in the gum walloped her in the palate like an arctic blast.

In a campsite near Old Faithful, some slobs left a bunch of trash. The bear became very excited because she could smell ketchup and pop tarts. But when she licked all that garbage, there were only a few crumbs, and even those crumbs were tiny and stale. Everywhere she went, little birds and squirrels were already there, eating crumbs and seeds until there was no food in sight. It was very cold, so all the people were gone, probably snug inside their warm cave-boxes, just eating and eating and eating.

The bear found an empty coffee cup next to a dumpster. She licked one frozen drop out of it, then lifted one end of the dumpster and looked under. She saw a pack of croutons! She saw a frozen Tootsie Roll! She saw two pennies and a corndog stick! She scraped all those things into her cup and walked over to Old Faithful, which shot hot water high into the air. She put her cup out to catch hot water, about to turn her ingredients into a warm, comforting soup—but NO! The powerful jet of water grabbed her cup and blasted it high into the air. Her dream of hot soup was over, and she was hungrier and sadder than ever. She beat her belly with her paws and said, “Why? Why?”

Just when she thought she would give up, the bear spotted an orange pebble, enticing in its smooth, candy-like appearance. Could it be? Yes, it was a Reese’s Piece! It melted on her tongue, so delicious, but gone in an instant. She walked to the empty parking lot to search for more. Across the pavement, wind blew a thin layer of snow. All was barren, but for a few scattered gray lumps. She pawed them, but they were only dirty snow and ice—bumper-chunks fallen from the metal butts of cars. Maybe if she could drizzle them with some sort of syrup and eat them off an upside-down traffic cone...

Off in the distance she saw a rectangle on the frozen asphalt. Maybe it was a lost lunchbox, or better yet, a dead Happy Meal. Dead Happy Meals always smelled like human children, who leave behind a lot of food for some reason. The hungry bear could not understand leaving behind food. She was so hungry, she thought she might just punch out her own teeth and swallow them. She might even eat at Arby’s.

Tears wiggled in the hungry bear’s eyes so she could hardly see straight. She stumbled up to the dark rectangle, imagining it would be a box of graham crackers or a dead Happy Meal full of steaming fries and a fresh deer’s head. She planned on eating it all, including the toy prize, which would be a very fast but small remote-controlled Ferrari with gummy bears riding in it, except the gummy bears were actually a gummy alligator and a gummy Johnny Cash. Clearly she was going crazy at this point.

On top of the box, there were two knobs. She thought they might be Rolos or chocolate covered mints. “Dessert first,” she thought. Her long wet tongue licked them both—and stuck there! Her tongue was going crazy and her brain was buzzing, but she couldn’t get her tongue off the terrible chocolates of power, which were not chocolates at all, but cold metal knobs frozen to her tongue. Yes, the bear was licking a car battery. It was very heavy for a box the size of a dead Happy Meal. She lifted it in her paws and staggered away crying even harder. The battery made her so miserable, she forgot how hungry she was. In fact, she briefly lost all her higher brain functions, and waddled forward senselessly like a giant crying beast-baby.

Well, she wasn’t far from a ranger’s station, which had a nice warm light coming from the windows. She would normally avoid the rangers, because they tended to shoot her with darts and spray her with stuff that felt like bees stinging her eyes, but she wasn’t thinking straight. She walked right up to their door, broke the wooden steps of their porch, and banged on the door while moaning like Chewbacca when his spaceship won’t work. The rangers looked out their window. One of them said, “Get the tranks, Bobby! We got a live one!”

The bear woke up in a zoo, and never ate another dead Happy Meal. Instead, she grew fat and lazy eating good, nutritious zoo food, such as dead animals and whole grains. Her fur was now a rich golden hue, probably from the prolonged electrocution. She became known as Golden Brown, or Goldie for short, but only the park rangers named Bobby, Teresa, and Burt knew the whole story.



Bigfoot’s Dog

Bigfoot was very old, but still strong, and also a little bit stupid. He was always running around in the woods and mountains, staying hidden from humans, so naturally he got lonely. He decided to get a dog. He wanted a big dog that could keep his feet warm at night, and not be accidentally crushed by Bigfoot in the dark. It should also be unafraid of coyotes, wolves, and badgers. He’d had a dog once before, in the 1950s, and it got clobbered by a raccoon, which was just sad. It also died when it could not make it across the Missouri River, which was even sadder. Bigfoot felt bad for weeks, because he should have carried the dog across, but he was trying to toughen it up.

No, Bigfoot needed a serious, hefty, formidable dog. He refused to waste his time on a small, puny dog. He also needed a dog with a good, thick coat of hair for warmth, so Dobermans and Greyhounds were out. He thought maybe he just needed a wolf, but then he remembered, wolves are jerks.

To make a long story short, Bigfoot spied on some dog kennels and animal shelters, and eventually he got himself a dog. It was large, hairy, and somewhat stupid, just like Bigfoot. They were having a pretty good time running around, eating nuts, balancing on logs, and digging through sleeping people’s backpacks for candy bars and beef jerky at campsites in national parks. Once they even stole a canoe from an old man and left him stranded on a little island, but Bigfoot left him some beef jerky to live on. Then they hot-rodded that canoe all around Lake Superior. Because of Bigfoot’s ridiculous upper body strength, they could go nearly 40 mph in a canoe, which eventually led to a crash that left the canoe sticking out from the side of a cabin like a hatchet stuck in a log. By coincidence, the cabin belonged to the old man they left stuck on the island. So, when he finally made it home, he said over one hundred swear words.

So by and by, Bigfoot and his dog were living the good life, reaping nature’s bounty and maxxing out on fresh air. As if to demonstrate their carefree feelings, they lollygagged one day in a sunbeam. Bigfoot had his feet up on a stump. He picked his teeth with a little twig and fell asleep to the sound of his dog panting. When he woke up, the sun was going down. He looked around and thought something was missing. “Didn’t I have a dog here just a minute ago?”

Well, the dog had a lot of energy and liked to chase rabbits or weasels or whatever, so Bigfoot wasn’t worried yet. He listened carefully. He heard no barking, only birds singing and bugs buzzing. Five minutes passed, and then an hour. The sunset was over, and it was pretty dark. That’s when Bigfoot realized, he never named his dog, so he could not call it. Maybe the dog had waited every day to be named, and finally got mad and ran away! Bigfoot was very worried now. His eyes watered and his feet felt cold. “I don’t deserve a dog,” he thought. But he searched anyway.

It was almost dawn when Bigfoot’s outdoorsy stamina paid off. He found his dog, deep in a hidden mess of undergrowth. But something was different. The dog was in a large nest, laying on a bunch of eggs! “Oh, my dog is going to be a mother,” thought Bigfoot. He smacked his forehead. He could not believe he had forgotten that dogs like to lay their eggs in a private place. “I am so dumb,” thought Bigfoot. “I didn’t even know my dog was a girl, much less pregnant.”

Now Bigfoot was quite an eater of eggs. In fact, eggs were his favorite food. He really wanted to eat one, but the dog growled when he reached toward the nest. This reminded Bigfoot that eating his best friend’s eggs would be grossly uncivilized—even more so than his usual uncivilized lifestyle. So he made a resolution to eat none of the eggs, and be a good midwife to the dog until the puppies hatched. He saw feathers scattered all around the dog and said, “Oh, you are a good mama, dog! You even lined your nest with soft, warm feathers.”

For a few weeks, Bigfoot was running to and fro, fetching food and water so the dog would not have to leave her eggs. He caught her fresh salmon, and found some hunks of meatloaf from a trash can by a road. He stole a pillowcase from a clothesline, stuffed it with soft moss, and tucked it under the dog’s head gently. Everything was just right, but Bigfoot was a bundle of nerves. When would the puppies hatch?

Well, the magical day came. The eggs wiggled, cracked and peeped. The dog got up to help the babies out, licking them as Bigfoot cried with joy. He could hardly see, so he wiped his tears away. At first he was very sad, because the puppies seemed so ugly and weird. They had big wobbly heads, only two large feet (Bigfoot did like that), and weak little flipper arms instead of front legs. Something was very wrong with these puppies, but Bigfoot didn’t have the heart to give such bad news to the dog. Instead, he just patted her, saying, “Good dog!”