A MEANINGLESS ARCHIVE

Yesterday's lunch was kind of like being at an old boys club with a heavily pregnant woman drifting about serving hot plates of food. And one sympathized with her, because pregnancy is like having a tumorous growth in your nether regions for eight or nine months, increasingly problematic which you get used to because it's gradual, but everything always tastes off and apparently you throw up rather frequently.

And then over a several hour period you pass a cinder block.

At this point, many men in the audience are looking green.


My involvement in pregnancy was a one-time experience which I don't remember, and consequently I do not have any younger siblings.

This was in the day when nobody videotaped those things. Years from now the space aliens will discover compact discs and computer files which indicate that for inexplicable reasons our extinct species was "obsessive". They will be baffled. Sports episodes next to childbirth. Documentaries of shapeless little blobs in episodes all the way to highschool graduation, along with things involving balls and grass. Stuff recorded when someone was intoxicated. Very long events with females in hugely uncomfortable swathes of white. Accompanied by a pompous tune, flowers, and dull speeches. They will wonder how gestation fit into all of this, and why are there no pictures of an egg? Nor, remarkably, any funerals or cremations.

Fortunately, I do not figure in any of these. My generation was not significantly home-movied. Some childhood photos, the nicest of which shows a large foreheaded tyke trotting in the sunlight on a Southern California lawn. As a two year-old I was presentable.
The next two decades were not so good.

That Gangnam style dance-off in a cigar-smoking environment was mercifully not recorded.
It was the stuff of nightmares. I won it, but at what cost?


My apartment mate has also not been video-taped. Rather a pity, because she has always been cuter than me. There is a rather lovely photo I took of her warmly tucked into bed -- it was freezing in Amsterdam by mid-October -- barely waking up but already looking fierce, which she kind of hates. Cute Cantonese woman angry at dawn. Only the upper part of the face showing, everything else is a lump under the covers. One day I will show it to her nephews if I ever meet them. See, this is what auntie looked like then.

We'll have to keep it secret, because she'd clobber me.
I'm too pretty to die of blunt object.
Oh, the humanity.



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