Thoughts spawned by an overheard remark

While I was waiting for my colleague to join me at a B-movie diner last night, here is what I overheard a little girl saying to her mother:

If you purchase a book with your own money, you’ll take care of it and be good to it because you own it; but if it’s a library book, you’ll treat it bad because it was free: you didn’t have to work for it.

Now, I don’t know if everything that this little girl asserted is trust­worthy; but here’s what it made me want to preach unto my diary this morning:

Dear diary,

As far as I understand, humans are mammals. Among other things, this means that humans do not lay eggs—they bear live young: a living human comes out of another human’s body.

I might be wrong about this, but I think that a baby is created by a mother and a father. What happens is that the father plants the seed, which takes only a brief moment for him to do; but then the mother carries the seed inside of her body for about three quarters of a year, and, all the while, that seed keeps growing bigger and becoming more humanlike.

This is why fathers treat their children like library books & toss them about carelessly: it is no great effort for a dad to enkindle a child-fire. But, since mothers had to endure feeling super-constipated for month after month, they are like someone who purchased a book: they care about the condition of its cover. (They want their child to boast a high resale value.)

Neither parent cares much for the child’s text: the poetry of the child’s life: the words that fill the pages between the book’s covers. Parents are, as a rule, semi-literate. Although some are pre-literate, and a few are post-literate, none have the excuse of being genuinely illiterate.

What I’m trying to say is that if humankind could learn to lay eggs, human parents could stash their offspring in the choicest environs, to be raised by the noblest individuals. Though admittedly mothers would still have to go to the trouble of laying them, they could enjoy feeling nearly as aloof as fathers do about the contents of their eggs.

Inevitably, a fair amount of daughters will inform their mothers that snakes and birds don’t breastfeed. But let’s remember that the speeches of little girls in diners aren’t always backed by one’s local Creation Science Museum.

I’m sorry: this entry has become too insincere. I recently vowed to myself: No more cleverness or jokes! But sometimes one wakes up not wanting to do one’s job, not wanting to speak the truth to one’s stupid diary. Plus, when one tries to discuss the fine art of parenting, all sorts of defense mechanisms get triggered.

I’m one of those guys who’s always hated his dad; and my dad is a totally decent person—he wasn’t ever cruel or abusive; he was an adequate provider; he definitely doesn’t deserve my disrespect—but I just can’t bring myself to like him, not even one bit.

So let this be a lesson to all of you loving fathers out there: don’t take it personally if your son ends up despising you—it doesn’t mean that you’ve done anything wrong: some sons are just inexplicably satanic. To loathe parents is my natural instinct: it’s part of my blood. Some earthling claims that he sired me—I find the notion repulsive. If there’s got to be an authority, then I am the authority. Case closed.

Supposing, however, that there really is a Big Male God who devised our world: I am instantly mistrustful. Since he wanted anvils to fall always down to the ground and never just to float in midair unaided, God manufactured gravity—this doomed anvils to love the earth: they are not allowed to feel otherwise. Why weren’t anvils given the choice to follow OR disobey God’s law? Was God afraid that anvils would reject him, like his fellow deities did? The obedience of anvils to the dictates of their creator is false and cheap: it is a coerced righteousness. It’s not even as authentic as the righteousness of a mule who walks in the desired direction only because one dangles a carrot of salvation in front of its muzzle while threatening its hind­quarters with everlasting hellfire.

But we all know that God made known his greatest wish through the voices of modern politicians; and his greatest wish is not that anvils should fall earthward—no: God’s greatest wish is for us to prohibit abortion. Now here is my own opinion on God’s opinion:

Instead of making abortion illegal, why not simply make abortion impossible? I mean, think about it: you are God, which is to say: you created metal, you created eggs, and you created the reproductive system; so why not just install an ovoid, metallic lining inside of all wombs! This solves everything: for the uterus is now bulletproof; therefore it is impossible for doctors to terminate any more fetuses.

From this day forward, all babies shall be born happy and healthy, so that God can have the chance to slay them how he wants—some will be sent off to war; others God will strike down with disease; etc. And mice will still be able to eat their young.