Should You Read Proust?

In early March of 2025, I embarked on a personal quest to read Marcel Proust’s mammoth work, In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu in the original French), famous for being the longest novel ever written. Quibbling with that distinction is a bit like arguing over what is the tallest building: it all depends on what you call a novel and where the building ends and the decorative antenna begins. But all that is besides the point. At roughly 9.6 million characters, spread out over 1.2 million words, covering more than 3000 pages (3175 pages in the Penguin Classics Deluxe version I read), Proust’s opus is a massive undertaking with a terrifyingly long trudge to its highest floor. To put this in context, I have read Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1440 pages) and Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (1456 pages), which both come in at less than half the Lost Time page count.

    What really needs to be appreciated before one embarks on a Proustian journey, is the complexity of his prose. Proust wrote in long, complex sentences, filled with asides, parentheticals, and clause after clause connected by commas and semi-colons stretching to the horizon. A typical Proust sentence was often a paragraph, while a typical Proust paragraph covers multiple pages. In addition to holding the record for longest novel, Proust is also generally regarded as the record holder for longest sentence in French literature, coming in at 958 words. I will attach that lunatic of a sentence to the bottom of the article if you wish to peruse it yourself. Parsing a Proust sentence often requires a decent bit of focus and attention even in an otherwise straight forward descriptive sentence, such as one would use for the introduction of a character or the description of a walk through a park. In cases where Proust leaves the more traditional narrative storytelling and drifts into social analysis, history, and philosophy, i.e. a substantial proportion of the novel, multiple re-reads of the same half page sentence may be required for full comprehension.

    So to summarize: in addition to being very, very long, Proust is also a slow read, with extra effort required to comprehend and absorb.

    I have read other major works by so-called “difficult” writers, e.g. James Joyce’s Ulysses and Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, but while those are substantial novels, none of them require the sustained reading effort of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Recognizing the need to pace myself for a marathon, not a sprint, I decided to take it one book at a time (Proust’s novel is split into 7 physical books) and deliberately planned to read a different, less taxing book in between each Proust installment. Read in that way, it took me one full year of my limited lifespan to read Proust, although only 230 actual days were spent on the translated texts.

    So that is How I read Proust, but the better question – and the one I will focus on for the rest of this essay - is whether I Should have read Proust at all. Is reading Proust worth the effort, worth the time, worth focusing on at the exclusion of all the other works of literature that I did not read over those 230 days? Admittedly, one of the reasons I did read In Search of Lost Time is the same reason people climb Everest: if you enjoy testing yourself against mountains, there is nothing taller to climb. And I can not deny, completing such a gargantuan work is extremely satisfying, but what do I take away from the experience beyond my personal triumph over literary hardship. I mean, was the book any good?

    There are myriad novel elements worth discussing. While Proust’s prose can be tortured, it can also be lyrical and lovely. For someone who apparently had crippling allergies, Proust was a master of flower description:

Before reaching it we would be met on our way by the scent of his lilac-trees, come out to welcome strangers. Out of the fresh little green hearts of their foliage the lilacs raised inquisitively over the fence of the park their plumes of white or purple blossom, which glowed, even in the shade, with the sunlight in which they had been bathed. Some of them, half-concealed by the little tiled house, called the Archers’ Lodge, in which Swann’s keeper lived, overtopped its gothic gable with their rosy minaret. The nymphs of spring would have seemed coarse and vulgar in comparison with these young houris, who retained, in this French garden, the pure and vivid colouring of a Persian miniature. Despite my desire to throw my arms about their pliant forms and to draw down towards me the starry locks that crowned their fragrant heads, we would pass them by without stopping - Swann’s Way

People interested in history will find the impact and reverberations of both World War I and the Dreyfus Affair on French society revealing:

I confess it would be very irritating to die before the end of the Dreyfus Affair. Those scum have more than one trick up their sleeves. I don't doubt they'll be beaten in the end, but they're very influential, they've got support everywhere. Just when it's going best, everything gives way. I'd like to live long enough to see Dreyfus rehabilitated and Picquart a colonel. - Sodom and Gomorrah

Similarly, Proust’s exploration of homosexuality as a gay man pretending to be straight, condemning the behavior while simultaneously bringing it out of shadows, is a fascinating window into the evolution and history of western tolerance of gayness (or “inverts” as Proust labeled them):

He belonged to that race of beings, less contradictory than they appear to be, whose ideal is virile precisely because their temperament is feminine, and who are in life like other men in appearance only; …A race on which a malediction weighs, and which must deny its God, since, even if Christian, when they stand arraigned at the bar of the court they must, before Christ and in his name, defend themselves, as if from calumny, from what is their life itself; sons without a mother, to whom they are obliged to lie even in the hour when they close her eyes; friends without friendships, notwithstanding all those that their frequently acknowledged charm inspires, and which their often kindly hearts would respond to; but can we give the name of friendships to relationships that vegetate only by virtue of a lie, and and from which the first impulse of trust and sincerity that they might be tempted to show would cause them to be rejected in disgust.  - Sodom and Gomorrah

Considering this work’s scope, it would be surprising if Proust hadn’t managed to include many worthwhile elements.

        However, to really answer this question of literary merit, I need to describe what I found to be the three major components of In Search of Lost Time, the elements of the work the reader will spend most of their experience digesting: 1) the chronicling, lampooning, and dissection of the French aristocracy, 2) a deep dive into the interconnected worlds of passion, grief, and jealousy, and 3) the exploration of memory, sensation, art, and time. 

1)     If you pick up Proust, expect to spend and inordinate amount of time hanging around a wide variety of Parisian salons, either rubbing elbows with the aristocracy or groups of middle class bohemians that merely aspire to rub elbows with aristocrats (despite their protestations otherwise). Following a tradition that goes back to Balzac, Proust probes deeply into the morass of French socialites, exposing all their spite, foolishness and pettiness. Vindictive rumor spreading and gossip, like this from the Duchess de Guermantes, is the rule of the day:

“She's not a dreadful person, but, believe me, she's unimaginably boring. She gives me such a headache each day that I'm forever having to take painkillers. And it's all because Basin took it into his head to go to bed with her behind my back for a year or so. And if that wasn't enough, I've got a footman who's in love with a little slut and goes about sulking if I don't ask the young lady to quit her streetwalking profits for half an hour and come and have tea with me! It's enough to drive one mad!" the Duchess concluded languidly. - The Guermantes Way

At the same time, Proust can’t help but to also celebrate and elevate the Faubourg Saint-Germain (French shorthand for the aristocracy, derived from where they live in Paris), enamored by their connection to history. Over the course of the novel, we see a steady diminution of these French Dukes and Princes, as they are dragged into the 20th century and are forced to marry rich “commoners” to sustain their empty lifestyles.

        These French socialite sections of the novel contain most of the humor, filled with bumbling caricatures and empty-headed nobles attempting culture and wit. In this passage Proust describes a simple handshake, elevated into absurdity by his aristocratic friend:

when the Guermantes in question, after a lightning tour of the last hiding places of your soul and your integrity, had deemed you worthy to consort with him in future, his hand, directed toward you at the end of an arm stretched out to its full length, seemed to be presenting a rapier for single combat, and the hand was in fact placed so far in front of the Guermantes himself at that moment that when he proceeded to bow his head it was difficult to distinguish whether it was yourself or his own hand he was acknowledging. - The Guermantes Way

While these sections read quickly, they generally feel empty of the gravitas, complexity, and insight of the rest of the novel. I have no complaint with a bit of levity breaking things up, but these fancy parties take up a very large percentage of the book. I would not be surprised to find that half the book is spent with the narrator calmly ignoring the idiocy being spouted from one ignorant aristocratic snob after another. It is without a doubt a damning and exhaustive critique of the French aristocracy and socialite society of the La Belle Époque (1871-1914), but as an American living in the 21st century, the level of coverage in this novel seems a vast overkill. I kept wanting to say: I get it. The aristocracy is fading and they are almost all terrible people. Do we need more than a thousand pages (in a 3000 page novel) to get that point across?

2)     Proust’s original conception of this novel was a treatise on memory and time using fictionalized elements of his life, intercut with his take down of the aristocracy. That novel only needed 3 parts (as opposed to the eventual 7) and looked as if it was going to come in at just over a thousand or so pages. But then World War I happened and printing books of this sort stopped, giving Proust five years to further develop what he wanted this novel to be. What he did was to take a minor character, Albertine, and raise her up to become the major love of his narrator's life, which gave Proust the material he needed for a profound exploration of human passion, grief, and jealousy. Two of the new books, The Prisoner (book 5) and The Fugitive (book 6), are largely focused on this single relationship which covers roughly another thousand pages spread out across the entire novel. 

       Falling in love is a universal human experience that most people go through. It is often connected to some of the best and worst memories we have, which provides some obvious material for Proust to dig into for his exploration of memory. The problem in the case of Proust, is that his conception of what motivates passion, love, and commitment does not align very well with my personal lived experience. A major theme in Proust is that we want what we do not have, but become disappointed when we get it. While I agree with this to a point, Proust seems to take this notion to an extreme. He really focuses on possession:

women who tend to be resistant and cannot be possessed at once, of whom indeed it is not immediately clear that they can ever be possessed at all, are the only interesting ones. For to know them, to approach them, to conquer them is to make the human image vary in shape, in size, in relief, a lesson in relativity in the appreciation of a woman's body, a joy to see anew when it has regained its slender outline against the backdrop of reality. Women who are first encountered in a brothel are of no interest, because they remain static. - Guermantes Way

The moment he possesses someone, he becomes immediately bored with them. His interest is only rekindled, when he feels that thing he possesses is going to be taken away from him. He slowly comes to understand this means he can never be truly satisfied: 

I felt…that seeking happiness through satisfying my inner desires was as naive as undertaking to reach a horizon by simply walking forward in a straight line. The more desire advances, the more true possession recedes. So that if it is possible to obtain happiness, or at least freedom from suffering, what we should seek is not the satisfaction, but the gradual reduction and final elimination of desire. - The Fugitive

Albertine becomes his biggest, life defining passion because he lives such a large portion of their relationship in constant fear and jealousy that she will leave him for someone else, which is doubly antagonizing because that mysterious stranger might be a lesbian, which I guess also turns him on… which only makes him more jealous? Proust does get that people have kinks.

        Proust’s obsession is entirely internal. His narrator never appears to attempt open communication with anyone in his life, man or woman. The novel is an intense examination of the origins of jealousy and of the thought processes and obsessions that drive extreme jealousy:

Jealousy is also a demon that cannot be exorcised and always reappears, clad in a new form. Even if we managed to exterminate them all, to hold on to the one we loved for ever, the Evil One would take on a new, still more pathetic form: despair at having been able to win her fidelity only by force, despair at not belong loved. - The Prisoner

Jealousy is often nothing but an uneasy desire for domination, applied in the context of love. - The Prisoner

        While I personally don’t see my relationships in terms of possession (or at least, not to the extreme the narrator does), this sort of all-consuming jealousy is a very real thing that we regularly see out in the world and in people we know well, so Proust does deliver some useful insight into the human condition. I would also point out that while his love side of the equation might be icky with its demands of male total control, Proust’s exploration of grief and loss seems more universal and less off putting. He basically goes through the five stages of grief 50 years before On Death and Dying author Elisabeth Kübler-Ross came up with it. For instance, here he is in the fifth stage, Depression:

I cannot even say that what made me feel the loss of all those moments of utter sweetness, which nothing could ever bring back to me, was actually despair. In order to despair of this life, when we see that it will be irremediably unhappy for evermore, we must still desire to cling to it. - The Fugitive

More generally, I would describe Proust’s narrator (and probably Proust himself) as more disconnected from human interconnectivity than the typical person. The author did spend the last ten years of his life living like a hermit in a sound-proofed apartment. While his works are clear windows into memory, art, and grief, I think his views into passion and love are rather cloudy and disjointed, tainted by his own inability to connect deeply with his fellow man. With the addition of Albertine, he spends a lot of time – and pages – working on a universal guide to human intimacy that feels decidedly non-universal and is really more of a case study delving deep into certain broken people.

3)     The main purpose of In Search of Lost Time is to explore human memory and how it connects to our experience of time. From the earliest pages of the novel, Proust works to pull us back into early childhood memories: a young boy who can’t go to sleep without a good night kiss from his mother. Early on he also introduces us to the concept of the Proustian moment, the occasional mind lock we experience when a physical sensation – taste of a cookie, smell of wet earth, feel of a wobbly stepping stone – immediately pulls us directly back to a memory of the past when we felt that same sensation:

She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called 'petites madeleines,' which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory--this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? - Swann’s Way

The importance of such moments is that they bypass the normal process of memory, which our brains have organized and edited over time as we age. We are different people then the people we were in our youth and that is partly due to the fact we constantly re-contextualize our memories based on later experiences. A lot of the novel is spent helping us understand this constant death and rebirth of who we are, as the narrator constantly reevaluates his own desires, fears, and goals as he changes with time. Once we finally comprehend how memory is anything but objective and that the past is past and it is lost, that we have moved on… that is when the narrator revisits these Proustian moments, arguing that a memory accessed in this way – through a sensation – is actually a direct line to the past “being” you were, untainted by any of the more recent versions of you:

This being had only ever come to me, only ever manifested itself to me on the occasions, outside of action and immediate pleasure, when the miracle of an analogy had made me escape from the present. It alone had the power to make me find the old days again, the lost time, in the face of which the efforts of my memory and my intellect always failed. - Finding Time Again

This sensation memory bypass is a direct pathway to the past, and that means that there are ways to be free of time and, indirectly, death. And while we are still reeling from this revelation, Proust couples these direct connections to past selves to something essential about life and what it is to be human:

[the essence of things] languishes in the observation of the present where the senses cannot bring this to it, in the consideration of a past where the intelligence desiccates it, and in the expectation of a future which the will constructs out of fragments of the present and the past from which it extracts even more of their reality without retaining any more than is useful for the narrowly human, utilitarian ends that it assigns to them. - Finding Time Again

Pure memory, unsoiled by rational analysis, is a gateway into something universal, something that can be shared with one’s fellow man in a way that experiences filtered by all the broken baggage and biases we all haul around can not be shared. And sharing those moments where you touch the universe and transcend yourself: that is art:

It is only through art that we can escape from ourselves and know how another person sees a universe which is not the same as our own and whose landscapes would otherwise have remained as unknown as any there may be on the moon. Thanks to art, ... we ... have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists. - Finding Time Again

That is why he is writing this book in the first place.

    While I might debate some of the logical connections Proust has made, there is no doubt that these observations are profound. Because the author has laid such extensive groundwork – over the course of the novel he lays bare his entire life, every friendship, every love, every death – these conclusions hit hard. We see how the narrator at 5 years old is different than the adolescent narrator who is different than the narrator at 20, 35, 50… He doesn’t just describe his alterations with age. It is a 3000 page novel. We live the changes with him. So when he finally shows us the universal elements that run continuously through his life, it does ring true. Considering the years and years of writing and re-writing, the interruptions of wars, and the eventual death of the author before final proofing and publishing, it is absolutely astonishing how cohesive and self-reinforcing the main thematic argument holds. If there is greatness in this novel, this is it.

    But again, the question is not whether In Search of Lost Time has good stuff in it. It clearly does. But considering the time investment and mental effort involved, is it worth the time? Should other readers climb this mountain? Obviously, the answer will depend on the reader, so now that we have spread out all the elements, let’s do the math and recap, this time hitting the novel elements in order of effectiveness.

    The primary theme of memory and time is masterfully laid out, reverberates throughout the novel, and is delivered through the experiences of the narrator interacting with an epic cavalcade of interesting characters. In the final sequence the narrator is approximately my own age (the age at which Proust died), which is probably the perfect age to be hit hardest by his look back over his life not-so-well lived. I can’t guarantee others will find it as profound a work as I did, but I think there is clear evidence that it works for a good percentage of the literary world.

    Proust’s viewpoint on passion is very male and tied strongly to feelings of possession. While I identified with the narrator’s young, lusty adolescent self, as he grew older I found his love increasingly creepy and misanthropic. The trip down the jealousy rabbit hole is nearly bottomless, and the sheer extent of it really wore me down. The narrator is constantly trying to get one to agree that this is how love works, but he never really made that case for me. So while not worthless as a study in obsession, I’m not sure I would recommend this long jealousy journey on its own.

    The least satisfying element for me was the deconstruction of the French aristocracy and Parisian socialite circles. As an American far removed from the French classes and society of 100 years ago, the decline of these high status/low intelligence snobs just didn’t have a lot for me. Yes, it was sometimes funny. Yes, there were some good characters and good character moments. But there were also extensive descriptions of lineage, types of wit, and gradations of social circles that dragged on and on. I think in its time and place – early 20th century Paris – this sort of scathing, upper crust take down must have been riveting, but for its length I could have done without it.

    So to sum up and ridiculously simplify: the three main elements are excellent, ok, and blah. The problem is that Proust has intertwined all these elements. I tried to think of a way I could abridge In Search of Lost Time (others have tried). Were there books or passages I could suggest that would give just the Proustian highlights? I don’t think it is possible. One could cut back on some of the conversations at the salons or one could halve the jealous hand-wringing, but it would have to be done sentence by sentence, as all sorts of important elements are weaved throughout. Every character you cut and every behavior you removed will make the novel less complex, less epic, and provide less evidence for the final bringing together of all the threads. So I do think you need to take it all, or not at all.

    To get to the punchline, the title of this piece was all one big tease. I am not going to tell you if you should read In Search of Lost Time. Hopefully I gave enough details that you can make that decision for yourself. The novel is real work, with several elements that were not entirely satisfying to me, but it is also a truly masterful, epic, and profound work. I am glad to have read it, but there are enough bumps in its road that I can only recommend it with caution. As a final note, if you are still pondering taking on a truly gigantic novel, I will say I liked both War and Peace and Les Miserables better, so if you haven’t tried those, maybe work your way up to Proust.

The Longest Sentence in French Literature*

Their honor precarious, their liberty provisional, lasting only until the discovery of their crime; their position unstable, like that of the poet who one day was feasted at every table, applauded in every theatre in London, and on the next was driven from every lodging, unable to find a pillow upon which to lay his head, turning the mill like Samson and saying like him: “The two sexes shall die, each in a place apart!”; excluded even, save on the days of general disaster when the majority rally round the victim as the Jews rallied round Dreyfus, from the sympathy—at times from the society—of their fellows, in whom they inspire only disgust at seeing themselves as they are, portrayed in a mirror which, ceasing to flatter them, accentuates every blemish that they have refused to observe in themselves, and makes them understand that what they have been calling their love (a thing to which, playing upon the word, they have by association annexed all that poetry, painting, music, chivalry, asceticism have contrived to add to love) springs not from an ideal of beauty which they have chosen but from an incurable malady; like the Jews again (save some who will associate only with others of their race and have always on their lips ritual words and consecrated pleasantries), shunning one another, seeking out those who are most directly their opposite, who do not desire their company, pardoning their rebuffs, moved to ecstasy by their condescension; but also brought into the company of their own kind by the ostracism that strikes them, the opprobrium under which they have fallen, having finally been invested, by a persecution similar to that of Israel, with the physical and moral characteristics of a race, sometimes beautiful, often hideous, finding (in spite of all the mockery with which he who, more closely blended with, better assimilated to the opposing race, is relatively, in appearance, the least inverted, heaps upon him who has remained more so) a relief in frequenting the society of their kind, and even some corroboration of their own life, so much so that, while steadfastly denying that they are a race (the name of which is the vilest of insults), those who succeed in concealing the fact that they belong to it they readily unmask, with a view less to injuring them, though they have no scruple about that, than to excusing themselves; and, going in search (as a doctor seeks cases of appendicitis) of cases of inversion in history, taking pleasure in recalling that Socrates was one of themselves, as the Israelites claim that Jesus was one of them, without reflecting that there were no abnormals when homosexuality was the norm, no anti-Christians before Christ, that the disgrace alone makes the crime because it has allowed to survive only those who remained obdurate to every warning, to every example, to every punishment, by virtue of an innate disposition so peculiar that it is more repugnant to other men (even though it may be accompanied by exalted moral qualities) than certain other vices which exclude those qualities, such as theft, cruelty, breach of faith, vices better understood and so more readily excused by the generality of men; forming a freemasonry far more extensive, more powerful and less suspected than that of the Lodges, for it rests upon an identity of tastes, needs, habits, dangers, apprenticeship, knowledge, traffic, glossary, and one in which the members themselves, who intend not to know one another, recognize one another immediately by natural or conventional, involuntary or deliberate signs which indicate one of his congeners to the beggar in the street, in the great nobleman whose carriage door he is shutting, to the father in the suitor for his daughter’s hand, to him who has sought healing, absolution, defense, in the doctor, the priest, the barrister to whom he has had recourse; all of them obliged to protect their own secret but having their part in a secret shared with the others, which the rest of humanity does not suspect and which means that to them the most wildly improbable tales of adventure seem true, for in this romantic, anachronistic life the ambassador is a bosom friend of the felon, the prince, with a certain independence of action with which his aristocratic breeding has furnished him, and which the trembling little peasant would lack, on leaving the duchess’s party goes off to confer in private with the hooligan; a reprobate part of the human whole, but an important part, suspected where it does not exist, flaunting itself, insolent and unpunished, where its existence is never guessed; numbering its adherents everywhere, among the people, in the army, in the church, in the prison, on the throne; living, in short, at least to a great extent, in a playful and perilous intimacy with the men of the other race, provoking them, playing with them by speaking of its vice as of something alien to it; a game that is rendered easy by the blindness or duplicity of the others, a game that may be kept up for years until the day of the scandal, on which these lion-tamers are devoured; until then, obliged to make a secret of their lives, to turn away their eyes from the things on which they would naturally fasten them, to fasten them upon those from which they would naturally turn away, to change the gender of many of the words in their vocabulary, a social constraint, slight in comparison with the inward constraint which their vice, or what is improperly so called, imposes upon them with regard not so much now to others as to themselves, and in such a way that to themselves it does not appear a vice.

-- Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust

* If one researches longest sentence in literature, you will find that there is a 13,955-word sentence found in Jonathan Coe's Rotter’s Club (2001), which surpasses the famous 4,391-word soliloquy by Molly Bloom in James Joyce's Ulysses (1922). Both of these are stream of consciousness sentences, where the lack of sentence ending punctuation indicates the unending behavior of a mind just running from one thought to the next. Proust’s insane sentence is an (assumedly) straight-faced attempt to encapsulate the full complexity of a very complex thought in a single sentence. Discounting stream-of-consciousness and sentence stunts, Proust’s sentence is likely the true long sentence champion in any language.

Yearbooks and "Best" Friends

Nostalgia is a funny thing. As far as I can tell, the human brain does not store the memory of negative emotions very well. Sure, the really traumatic stuff gets indelibly etched up there, making us terrified of clowns forever (Why can't they stop smiling!?!), but the day to day stuff gets leeched of all the low grade stuff. The anxieties, the doubts, the minor shames and humiliations all fade with time, leaving memories that are all Good Times. Oh, and how we yearn for the days of yesteryear, not getting hassled, not getting hustled, keeping our heads above water, making a wave when we can...

Wait a minute, I think that is the theme song to Good Times. What we talking about again?

Ah yes -- Memory. All times are good times as long as they were long enough ago. Even if they were horrible times, we look back on the tidbits that were not so bad with a strong sense of nostalgia. It is exactly this sort of selective memory that drives bad couples back together again and again. They want to recapture that nostalgic memory high, like some poor junkie.

Yes, nostalgia is a dangerous drug, don't be fooled. You can't go home again, you can't go back to college, and you can't experience what it was like to experience everything for the first time again. Trying to recapture stuff like that just leaves you feeling frustrated and uncomfortably out of place. Now before you say, "Jesus, Seamus, you are all doom and gloom with this we are all gonna die someday crap", there is a pretty damn nice alternative to looking back. There is no way any of us can exhaust more than a tiny percentage of the possible experiences this world and life have to offer us. You just can't be afraid to move on to the next thing. Raising kids is completely different than getting so drunk you wander the UCSD campus on your own self-devised scavenger hunt (one mildly damaged EXIT sign, check), but it is awesome and amazing in its own, different way.

Not to say strolls down memory lane aren't fun. Researching my previous post, I cracked open all my old yearbooks, really for the first substantial read through since I graduated. A normal person would have done this before their 20th reunion, but I did it after. Go figure. Anyway, it was a blast taking a return peek into the weird world of pre-adult absurdity. In particular, I was amused by messages scrawled there by barely literate apes and those of my supposed "best friend", Brian Deacon. I thought it might be fun to give you folk a sample by reprinting all of his yearbook signings, year by year.

Please note these comments are not appropriate for children, those with delicate sensibilities, pregnant women, the Dutch, or anyone who believes in the pure and indomitable spirit of man.

1985: This was my seventh grade year and first one at Prep. It was my first yearbook ever and I believe I caught on slowly to the idea of having people sign it. Altogether I got 13 signatures, plus one that looks suspiciously like it might be me writing to myself. I didn't notice any obvious Seamus-meme or common gross reduction of my character and/or personality down to one or two common pieces of knowledge. This changes in later yearbooks. There are a couple of references to jokes and dumb comments in class, so a wise ass I have always been. As I was known to say, “Have sex, will travel” – Huh?

Dear Homosexual Bleep*

Drop Dead
The Deak

*Asshole Mother fucking dick sucking two balled bitch

1986: Eighth grade and I seem more dumbfounded by this yearbook signing process than before. I mean, seriously, is anyone gonna ever read these? I reach through time and slap the 13-year old me. There are 5 signatures, plus at least one person (Nicole) pretending to be another one (Joanie) writing that they are in love with me. Really not enough signatures to try and piece together a meme.

Seamus “The Gaylord Moron Idiot” Colbert,
You are an asshole. You are a mother fucker.
You are unbelievably short. You are ugly.
Deacon

1987: Freshman year and the class size doubled, but I still have only 11 signatures plus a double giant two page scrawl claiming “Seamus Sucks Dicks A lot”. Very classy.

There are several references to something about me being Greg Ahn’s bodyguard. I have the dimmest recollection of threatening people to stay away from Greg Ahn as a gag, maybe related to him becoming a Fine Young Cannibal? Cursed brain cells! I think I accidentally stored Seinfeld quotes on top of this information. Here there is an early mentioning of my T-shirts. For everyone who knows me there is probably a certain amount of nodding. There are also several references to how strong I was. I missed my calling as a pocket strongman, apparently.

By the way, the photo above is me playing Malachi Stack in Thorton Wilder's The Matchmaker. I actually played this part in my Junior year, but there is a real dearth of yearbook pictures previous to 1988. It was a great part. I had a soliloquy and then got consistently drunker throughout the rest of the play.

Seamus,
Fuck You!!
Have a summer. I really don’t care how it is.
Deacon

1988: Sophmore year and I am holding steady at 11 signatures. These includes a recap of my first three acting lines ever. -- Aldonza, I brought something for you. She won’t deliver. Why so hot about it? -- There are also multiple references to DEATH in capital letters, something from English class I assume. There are more references to my awesome shirts.

Here we start the Where's Waldo segment of yearbook pictures, starting with Ms. Cerri's Spanish Club. Quick side note: There was a television show that was popular at roughly this time called American Gladiators, where average people would have to engage in mortal combat with professional gladiators. That is, if by "mortal combat" you mean slapping each other with wet foam on a stick and if by "professional" you mean people on lots and lots of steroids. The Gladiators all had comic book hero names, like Zap or Lance or Thunder. My younger brother really liked the show and announced to the entire family that one day he would be a gladiator and his name would be Thor. After some mild guffawing, I was asked what my name would be. My brother answered for me, saying "Waldo". After people stopped crying and peeing themselves, I had a nickname that was tough to shake. So anyway, I suppose it really is a Where's Waldo puzzle.

Jim Billy IV,
Life is a terminal
Disease, there is no
Cure. So don’t enjoy
it too much. I have
decided to take
up too much
room while
writing.

HOW’S THIS?
I AM CLAIMING THIS
ENTIRE
PAGE. ENJOY
YOUR SUMMER IF
YOU WANT TO. I’M
GOING TO WRITE IN THE
UPPER RIGHT CORNER NOW.

Here I have included the actual Upper-Right Corner as Brian clearly labeled it. This scrawled masterpiece also included a cartoon of a rolling eye Dr. Cowett that you will find at the bottom of this post.

Catnip 4-Ever refers to an incident where a "friend" gave us a "joint" at a "party". Ok, I think it was actually a party. Anyway, the so-called illegal substance was really just catnip. Fortunately for Brian and myself, John Sprafka (the "friend") could not contain himself and started having paroxysms of laughter before we had done more than take a tiny puff each. So we were spared getting really high on nothing more than the idea of taking an illicit substance and thereby looking like complete fools. The story was still entertaining, however, and became widely known in certain circles, increasingly embellished with each telling.

The Marquis thing comes from a family myth that we are directly descended from the Marquis Jean Baptiste Colbert, one of the most important advisers to Louis XIV, the Sun King. I am the oldest son of the oldest son going back as far as we have records, clearly making me the heir to the Colbert fortune, whatever that might be at this late date. Pure fantasy (we are Irish, not French) but that is where this Marquis reference and the one scrawled over my Sophomore year picture at the top of the page came from.

1989: Junior year and I now have 43 signatures (Booyah!) and a piece of masking tape marked “Seamus Is My Babe” which I vaguely recall came from Kirsten Cochran, who was often alphabetically close to me. There was more talk about the T-shirts. Clearly it was my thing. Check out the AFS Club photo below (I went to Colombia one summer) and you will see the classic "Beer?" shirt that shows a bear with deer antlers. Hoo Ha. Classic shirt.

To my chagrin this book is also filled with Mr 1420 SAT references. Yes, I did well on my SATs. I guess when a single standardized test carries so much weight people obsess about them, but it drove me crazy that everyone locked on to it. I think it slightly surprised people I was so smart, despite taking every honors class, etc. I had a poor high school work ethic, what can you do? Next year when I retook the test to fix my Math score I became Mr. 1530 and wanted to crawl under a rock.

In other Junior year news, apparently Pre-Calc was hard for a lot of people. Armenia (the girl I knew from high school, not the country) writes that she would write crookedly just to piss me off, and you know what, 20 years later… it does a little bit. I find a very tiny, tiny bit of satisfaction that she was the victim of some Deacon graffiti a year earlier (see top of post): she had a slight English accent, so when she said banana it was funny.

Finally, someone had realized Shamus meant private detective… and told others. Sigh.

SHAYMASTER,
What can I say? I could baffle you
With my eloquence, but no, you’re not
Worthy. I hope your trip to Colombia
Fixes your problem. If you already know
What your problem is, then that’s a
Good first step. Look both ways when
You cross the street and don’t come
Back with more than 2 brain cells.
The Big ‘D’

1990: Senior year. There is nothing. Blank. I think I forgot to bring it on the Senior outing everyone else did signing on. I also was probably in a "F- all these people, I am out of here" mood. There are some nice photos of my triumphant performance as Elwood P. Dowd from Harvey. I really like the shot of me sitting on the edge of the stage like I own the place. Senior year. Nothing but Good Times.

Still, it is disappointing to have no signatures at all. Maybe I can still get Brian to write go fuck yourself in it.

All Apologies to Ken, Wherever You May Be

Most people like to think of themselves as basically good people. We all have flaws and moments of weakness and loss of self control, but over all every person thinks that come the day when the jackal-headed Anubis rips their heart from their chest and places it on the scales opposite the feather of truth, that Thoth will write down in his ledger that their heart did rise. [I suppose traditionalists would probably have preferred a St. Peter and the heavenly gates metaphor here, but you can not beat the Egyptian Book of the Dead for evocative imagery. If you fail the test you will get eaten by a monstrous crocodile-hippo-lion beast called Ammit, meaning "she who gobbles down". So eat your veggies kids.]



And while I do genuinely believe in the basic good intentions of mankind -- I attribute most evil to ignorance and fear -- clearly this world has more bad people in it than people who think they are bad people. That is, we all lie to ourselves. It makes sense. When it comes to oneself, it is a little hard to maintain an unbiased opinion. If you have two pieces of information that contradict each other and one says that you are good person and another says you are bad person, which one are you likely to go with? And who hasn't taken the side of a close friend in a dispute, reassuring them even though you knew them to be in the wrong. Being a good friend wins out over cold honesty most times, but it is this sort of thing that tends to skew a person's perspective.

It not my intention to come to a final evaluation of myself as a human being today (Interim Evaluation: Lazy Awesome), but instead to discuss a particularly dessicated bag of bones that is rattling around in my mental closet. We have all done things that we regret, things where we hurt people. Sometimes unintentionally and other times, well... When I look back on my life one major incident keeps ricocheting around in my skull.

This will probably come as a shock to most people, but as young lad I was just a wee bit nerdy.

No it's true.

I liked to read science fiction and fantasy books. I had big thick glasses. After reading came a love of computers and computer games. And then there was Dungeons and Dragons. I think you see where I am going with this. Like many young men, I entered my junior high years not exactly looking my best. I went from a diminutive, but adorable leprechaun of my elementary years, to a still not particularly tall but all stretched out and gangly teenager. Never the most outgoing of kids -- shy would be one way of putting it -- my realization that girls might be more interesting than I had previously thought did me little good. I switched from a public school to a tiny private school, so the pool of fish became very tiny indeed. And I was not one of the sharks, I knew that much.

It was here that I met one of my best friends junior high through most of high school: Ken. Ken loved all the same geeky stuff I did and we shared a similarly perverse sense of humor. He was ridiculously thin and of normal height, but walked with a bit of a permanent slouch. Along with my big buddy from elementary school, Brian, we made quite the funny looking threesome, I am sure. Geeks small, thin, and large. Pick your favorite nerd to pick on. Although actually, I don't recall dealing with anything particularly venomous that would even register on the grand scale of teenage cruelty. Helps to be a nerd at a prep school. Probably helps more to have a giant best friend (Brian).


It wasn't long before I began spending more and more time at Ken's place. It was where I was truly introduced to the dark arts of the comic book, a medium for which I still have a passion to this day. Ken lent me every single book he had, from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to the Dark Knight Returns. Many a Friday and Saturday night had me crashing on his bed or his floor. I became friends with his friends, like the always fascinating but difficult to pin down Ray (was he an American Indian? Did he have an inheritance coming at age 25?). And, of course, Ken turned 16 nearly a year before Brian and I did, making him the designated driver for all sorts of shenanigans that I probably still can't discuss, as I am not certain the statute of limitations have all expired. For instance, we shot bottle rockets off his car rooftop, while standing on his back bumper going 50 mph. We are so lucky to still be alive.

There was drinking and there was vomiting. We were stupid kids. I chipped a tooth when Ken jammed a gallon wine jug into my mouth as I was trying to take a swallow. Didn't hurt much at the time. Hurt a lot more later. We discovered Guns 'n Roses and KROQ. We set up electronic bulletin boards, which were like internet chat boards back in the dim and hard to recall pre-internet days. There was some petty piracy using 5.25" floppies. My tag at the time was Mad Dog. I think I made my signature blink and reverse to say God Dam. I am sure I felt that was very clever. Even earlier I remember trolling and flaming on the Compuserve chat boards. Such behavior didn't even have a name back then.

In general we had a damn good time, wished we had girlfriends, got good at computers, and managed to barely stay out of both jail and the morgue. Standard, if slightly nerdish, teenage fare.

Then something happened. I am going to say it took place during the summer between junior and senior year, but it could have been slightly earlier. There began to be a significant schism in our threesome, with Brian and myself on one side and Ken on the other. There were some other friends involved, but that was the main break. For whatever reason, Ken was getting to be less and less fun to hang out with.

Now I want to take a quick time-out here to warn that there has been over twenty years and a lot of water under the bridge since these events, so while I may now have a much better perspective, the details are certainly fuzzy.

At the time, the common refrain was that Ken was growing annoying because he seemed to be stuck at a level of immaturity that we were growing past. That seems like some unadulterated bullshit now. I do think he was increasingly bitter, sarcastic, unpleasant and abrasive. His mood was often down or dour, and his jokes seemed increasingly leaning toward the infantile or cruel or thoughtless. Worse, he began radiating a strong sense of self-loathing. He also became very clingy, showing up at our houses unannounced, wanting to hang out longer and not picking up on signals that we didn't want to do everything with him any more. That is what sticks out in my memory, anway. Talking recently with Brian, I was reminded that there was also a strong sense that Ken was becoming unhinged and maybe a bit dangerous. Brian recalled one incident:

The big memory for me, I think you gotta remember this one too, was the weird blowup he had [with a friend of ours named] Damien. I think Ken got overenthusiastic with some rough housing, Damien got annoyed and pushed him away or something (maybe hit him or cussed at him or something) and then Ken lost his shit and used some phrase like "I know you all just fucking hate me."... I think it sticks in my head because I remember my reaction being not just that it was a nutty thing to say even if there were tension, but that there wasn't even any tension to overblow into us "fucking hating" him. So I sort of took two mental steps back and thought to myself, 'Wow, that's something a crazy person says.'"

Our relationship to Ken didn't change out of thin air. Ken had some serious stuff going on in his life. I want to tread carefully here, because I am not Ken. I don't know all the stuff that happened and how it really effected him. And I don't want to tell too many tales out of school. But around this time period his home was falling apart, his parents separating. His father clearly had issues of his own which certainly leaked out into his relationship with his son. I will describe one incident that must have taken place our Junior year:

We had all gotten up at dawn to go paintballing and we borrowed Ken's dad's car. The paintballfest took place somewhere out in Corona, which was far enough away that I had no idea where exactly that was. On the way there we exited the freeway and hit a sandy patch on the off ramp. We were probably going a little too fast, but basically we slid into the railing. We piled out, but saw no major damage, and continued onwards. After a full day and hundreds of dollars in fees, gun rentals, and paintballs, we were tired, filthy, and several of us had significant injuries (cuts, bruises, turned ankles). Great sport Painball: putting 16-year olds up against Vietnam vets, I kid you not.

Coming back home, we could hear something rubbing in that wheel well. We must have bent something. Sigh. When we got home to Ken's place his dad was watching tv and we told him -- we TOLD him -- that we had had a small accident and something was rubbing the tire. I am sure we downplayed it as not a big thing, but there was no subterfuge. At dawn the next day he kicked in the door, leaped on the bed, literally sat on top of his son, and screamed into his face, "What have you done to my car?!" I was lying five feet from him on the floor. I am fairly sure there was cursing. That was how he behaved when other people were there.


So no two ways about it, Ken was probably going through a tough time. Just being 16-17 years old can be tough enough and he had more going on. He desperately wanted friends to lean on. To support him. So Ken probably tried to grab onto his friends tighter. Of course, we were looking for more space from him, so his actions had the opposite intent. He made us uncomfortable. His behavior was disturbing. His odd actions became the topic of conversation when he wasn't there. By grabbing so hard he pushed us away.

The details of the end of this friendship are a bit loathsome to me. Instead of dealing with the issue staring us in the face -- our friendship with Ken was no longer working -- we started ditching him. Hoping he would get the hint. What kind of crap is that? Tight friends for 4+ years and we wanted him to take the hint to leave us alone? It was not at all surprising that the hint was never taken.

My poor VW Scirocco took some of the biggest hits of this stupid policy. I believe it was an early ditch attempt that led to me shooting down a mountainous street way too fast and realizing way too late that the road was ~100 yards shorter than I recalled it being. Forty feet of skid mark later and the control arm holding one of the wheels had snapped clean through. It was definitely a ditching attempt when I tried to roll my Scirocco backwards down the driveway without starting the motor, so Ken wouldn't know I was sneaking away. You had to get out of the car to get the rolling started and, of course, I lost control and grabbed that open door with all my might, bending it almost entirely backwards on itself. From that day until the day it was given away to charity the door made a horrific CREAK every time it was opened and it had to be slammed shut. Because I tried to sneak away silently. I think there may be some cosmic justice there.

I don't recall how long this pathetic dance continued. I think it started off good-naturedly and infrequent and ramped up to angry and deadly serious. I do recall who it was that finally gathered up enough balls to go out and tell Ken that he was not invited. Me. Talk about mixed feelings. I am glad I finally put an end to this immature and truly mean ditching with some honest talk. But I also was the one who hurt him. Face to face, I used words to hurt him. To tell him to go away. That he wasn't wanted here any more. I spoke for the group and Ken knew it. He said fine, if that is what you want, and drove away. I can't even begin to process what that must have been like. No one has ever been that cruel to me. I can only hope he had, in fact, seen the writing on the wall. That it wasn't a bolt from the blue. His friends -- his friends for all of high school up that point -- telling him they no longer wanted him any more.

I do know that Ken never made a single overture to me after that day. I think we spoke a few times, but only in the most perfunctory, excuse me you are standing in front of the water fountain sort of way.

Look, clearly there are a lot of problems with trying to judge decisions made as a teenager from the perspective of an adult. If Adult-Me had an old friend going through some stuff so serious that it effected his behavior towards me, I would either try and help the guy through it, or at a minimum, just put some space between us until that guy had gotten his shit back together. But Kid-Me was simply not capable of that. Kid-Me had no clue what was going on, except that Ken was becoming more angry, more troubling, and generally less fun. Kid-Me addressed the problem by at first running away from it, before finally snapping under the constant pressure of running and telling Ken to fuck off.

For this I am sorry. You deserved better, Ken. I was just a kid and maybe I did not have the capacity for more a nuanced or braver approach, but that just explains why it happened, it doesn't excuse it. I strongly suspect there was no way of avoiding the trainwreck our friendship became. But handling it kinder would have been better.

We handled it with all the tact that 16 year olds at the bottom of the social food chain could muster, which is to say, very little. - Brian

Games

If anyone is reading this I have to assume they have this in their RSS feeds, because if you are regularly checking this blog at this point you are a champ, indeed. This blog more or less got really going as an outlet for all the stress and issues dealing with newborn twins and remodeling my home at the same time. Once I moved back home and the twins became potty trained, well, the NEED to get my thoughts out there became much more of a "need" to practice my writing chops. And with all things great and small distracting me, "needs" have a tough time making it to the top of the list these days.

I have decided to make another go of it. I am finishing my first "first author" paper since the girls were born (if you don't actually know me, I am a working astronomer) and that has played some role in the doldrums here at Kicker. I really shouldn't be writing a blog about whatever frothy thought flits into my brain when I need to be writing papers to keep my career on track. Long time readers will note how much time passed from this blog being dormant to the final (almost) publication of my next science paper. For new readers, here is the quick summary: A lot of time. There was really no connection between the two types of writing. I found plenty of other ways to procrastinate rather than write science that were much less fulfilling than this blog.

To get myself back in the swing of things, I will start with a light little bit on games. I am a bit of a board game guy. Nothing major. And I would have to say my playing time has dribbled to painfully small quantities with all this child rearing going on. Putting that aside for the moment, one of the classic board games in Monopoly. It has a lot of structural flaws: too random, too hard to reach end conditions (bankruptcy), and it requires significant trading cooperation among players to even remotely work and be fun. One Scrooge McDuck and this thing will grind on for hours. Still, there is probably no game board as well known besides that used for checkers and chess. And I loved it as a kid. My wife, to my mild chagrin, loves it still.




So here is one juicy tidbit I came across: How to win Monopoly in seven rolls of the dice. This comes from this web page. It prominently features a 21 second game consisting of nine moves. Later in the comments someone delivers the 7 roll variant that I believe is the shortest possible. All due credit belongs to them. They write it up further here. I am merely repeating their findings. Recall that all players start with $1500.

Player 1:

Rolls 5,5 -> Lands on Just visiting Jail
Rolls 6,6 -> Lands on Chance. Card is Adv to nearest utility. Buy it for 150. (P1 now has 1350)
Rolls 5,4 -> Buy Park Place for $350 (P1 now has 1000)

Player 2:

Rolls 3,1 -> Lands on Income Tax, paying 10% or $150 (P2 now has 1350)*

Player 1:

Rolls 1,1 -> Buys Boardwalk for $400 (P1 now has 600)
Rolls 2,1 -> Land on Community Chest. Card is Bank Error In Your Favor +$200 (P1 has 1000)

Player 1 buys 3 houses on Boardwalk, 2 houses on Park Place at $200 a pop (P1 has 0)

Player 2:

Rolls 2,1 -> Lands on Chance. Card is Advance to Boardwalk. Rent is $1400. He can't cover it.

GAME OVER

* It is my understanding that modern Monopoly simplified this rule, making Income Tax a flat $200. In which case, P2 is another $50 in the hole.

This example is great for two reasons. One it is demonstrates how much blind luck there is in Monopoly. In this admittedly freaky example, Player 2 got to roll the dice twice and then went home to weep. Imagine if this were a 3-4 player game. It would then last hours while Player 2 had time to catch up on his Spanish language soaps. "Oh mi amor. No soy Maria. Soy la hermana gemela de Maria, Chiquita! Y Roberto es tu hijo! No lo creo! Es verdad! [SLAP]" Most games in Monopoly are hours longer, but come down to the same problem. Player 1 got some good rolls early and that was that.

Second, I just find it amazing that I have that board emblazoned in my head like that. I was able to play along without even glancing at the board. And I bet many of you readers could as well. You might not know where Kyrgyzstan is on a map, but I bet you can find Free Parking and the Reading Railroad in your sleep. What an odd cultural touchstone.

Evolving Pains

Poor old Mr. Darwin has been the target of attacks from religious zealots for a century and a half now, when all he did was come up with a rational explanation for how all the complex life forms on the Earth came to be. While his original theories had some holes, the basic tenets have in fact been proven time and time again. Scientists watch things evolve all the time. But if you want to argue whether there is enough evidence to truly demonstrate evolution is and has been working on things as complex as man, go right ahead. I disagree, but skepticism is the core of good science so doubt away.

What drives me ape-shit crazy is the Creationists and backers of Intelligent Design attacking evolution, Darwin, and scientists using a logic system that is truly cringe worthy. The theory of evolution is not anti-religion or anti-faith. It provides a rational framework that one could easily believe a benevolent deity would put in place to bring about mankind. Just because something is not in the Bible does not mean it doesn't exist. Penguins are not tricks of the devil either.

Similarly, creationism is not "the other side" of the issue. One is a scientific theory demonstrable through experiment and one is philosophy/religion, revealed to us by God and requiring Faith. You do not teach them side-by-side as competing theories. Might as well complain geology is being taught without a proper mention of mythological volcano Gods. I am not saying this to demean the beliefs of creationists, but to select an example that shows how apples and oranges the two things are. You can't have a scientific argument that goes: You say lava is molten rock heated by the mantle of the Earth, but that cannot be because Vulcan would not intrude into the domain of Pluto, Lord of the Underworld. Both are accurate statements, but setting them counter to one another makes no sense. Knowing about Vulcan and the Greek/Roman pantheon is enriching, but it will not in any way help with the predictions of volcanic eruptions.

So what started me on this mini-rant? This YouTube video from the teen actor Kirk Cameron, famous for his stint on the sitcom "Growing Pains" in the 80s and fervent evangelism. To summarize for those unable or unwilling to watch the video, the big idea is to counter-attack all the media hoopla over 150 years of Origins of the Species by printing their own version of it, complete with a 50 page introduction giving the creationist argument. They will give the book away for free, bing bang boom, everyone will start attending a mega-church.



Because I am a glutton for punishment, I leafed through the introduction to the special Origin of the Species book, available here. Sit back, maybe get yourself a caffeine-free root beer and let me help you savor a fine piece of creationist propaganda:

It starts with 3 pages of introduction stolen from what I can only assume was a grade school book. Certainly not as sophisticated as wikipedia. The type size looks like 15 point Times New Roman. Then it spends another 3 pages giving you the timeline of his life, which they have unashamedly stolen from a Darwin 200th year celebration website (they cite it, but not sure if that forgives a full 3 pages of plagiarism). So yes, they summarize his life in 3 pages and then repeat the summary using a timeline for 3 more.

It is at this point I imagine most young readers would drop the book or skip over the introduction altogether. For those with stronger constitutions, they next start discussing DNA and how complicated it is, quoting scientist after scientist who die a little inside each time their own words are so mangled and misused. They then move on to how 4% similarity to chimps is not a big deal, before we hit the real meat: the section on transitional forms.

Again, I only skimmed this whole "Intro" (although it does not take long to read thanks to the giant type; 50 pages my ass) but this is the most effective section. Eight pages listing evolutionary hoaxes and failed attempts to identify missing links. Obviously there is some gross misunderstanding of what the fossil record tells us, but at least this attacks the scientific theory in a scientific way. From there they start to drift off into chicken and egg issues (which came first, heart or blood) and how darn complicated and interconnected the eye is, both of which I find to be very weak arguments, but at least it is still sorta attacking the theory. Finally we get a confused page on vestigial organs demonstrating that they don't really understand evolutionary theory (duh) -- somehow having extra organs we don't need is not an increase in complexity but a devolution? 29 pages in, 20 pages attacking evolution, the theory. That is all we are going to get.

Now comes the good stuff. A page calling Darwin a racist and a sexist, followed by a zen poem (not really, but it almost reads like one) about how man can not make one blade of grass. Seriously random digression. Then we finally get Darwin directly connected to Hitler. The section is entitled "His Famous Student" as if Darwin knew the man and hadn't died 7 years before Hitler was born. This is mostly 3 pages of Hitler quotes where Hitler uses the term evolution. Most of these passages out of context make little sense (I think they made little sense in context, too) and many are not even particularly ominous -- They are just an opportunity to italicize that Hitler liked using the term evolution in Mein Kampf. For instance:

In our case this term has no meaning. Because everyone who believes in the higher evolution of living organisms must admit that every manifestation of the vital urge and struggle to live must have had a definite beginning in time and that one subject alone must have manifested it for the first time. It was then repeated again and again; and the practice of it spread over a widening area, until finally it passed into the subconscience of every member of the species, where it manifested itself as 'instinct. -- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

Then we get a Hitler Hit List (Hitler should have been a Top 40 DJ), where he organizes the races of the world into their various levels of ape-ness. Hint: You want to be Nordic or German. 36 pages in and I am now strongly offended.

At this point the "Intro" goes off the deep end and becomes a Born Again Christian tract. 3 pages on how Darwin was not an atheist, two pages on how Pen Jillette (!) once wrote how he could understand evangelism if a person truly believed in a Hell, then 10 pages about a choice between the original Mona Lisa (it was important not to get a copy), the keys to a new Lamborghini, a million dollars (in cash), or a parachute. Somehow that was directly translatable into a choice between the four major world religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity.

Oh, and we are being pushed out of a plane, so don't even try to hang glide using the Mona Lisa because that frame is old and will not withstand that kind of stress.

Important to this discussion is the fact that on February 24, 2005, nine-year-old Little Jessica was kidnapped, brutally raped, and then buried alive clutching a stuffed toy. Yes, this crime is horrific and would normally be obscenely out of place discussing the great world religions (were we discussing world religions?), but it is important because it demonstrates that there is a Just God. Somehow.

Mix in hellfire, a random selection of sins from the ten commandments, condemn homosexuality (always important), and then ridicule and demean Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims by summarizing their faiths with single paragraphs based on the writer's in depth knowledge of similar single paragraph summaries he read ten years ago, before ending with the declaration that therefore, obviously, Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation.
------

That.... Is a big waste of money.

They have somehow deluded themselves into believing that this will counter the big, bad secularists with this book giveaway.

1st of all, 18-21 year olds is hitting the issue a bit late. Especially for getting people on board the gospels.

2nd, Origin of the Species is not exactly Robert Ludlum. Most of those kids are not going to even crack the spine of that baby, especially with all the other stuff they have to read.

3rd, Mainly, they are opening themselves up to ridicule. This reads like propaganda. College students love the feeling they are being manipulated by clumsy, transparent propaganda.

I am sure some confused young people might latch onto it as the truth they half-believed already, but I think it is equally likely a similar number will be convinced the other way by the multiple controversies/debates this will spark if anyone actually notices this going on.

---

But Kirk Cameron actually looked pretty good. He is almost 39 years old.
Clean living, I guess.

Terror, The Kind You Feel In Your Nether Parts

None of you understand. I'm not locked up in here with you. You're locked up in here with me.

This charming gentleman is Rorschach, the bracingly psychotic vigilante from the Watchmen. Eventually the law catches up to him and he is placed in a prison, where every thug he has locked up over the years is anxious to get their hands on him. At least, they are until it becomes apparent that the balance of power is not quite what they thought it was, as made apparent in his quote.

Similarly, every time you start to think you are getting a handle on this parenting thing, something comes along, knocks you on your ass, and makes you realize it is not your kids trapped in the house with you, but YOU who are trapped in the house with them.

WARNING: This post is a little darker than my normal fare. If you just want funny pictures, scroll down a bit. You have been warned.

It started out as a typical Tuesday. I am scrambling around trying to get the girls ready for Daycare. They need breakfast. They need to be cleaned up. They need clothes. They need suntan lotion. I need to get my own sorry self presentable. I need to load up the car. Tuesdays also offer the extra complications of house keeper, who comes once every two weeks, and gardener, who is relevant because I have to make sure not to leave the dog outside to run away or maul a poor dude making minimum wage with a leaf blower. This Tuesday had it all going on. And of course the girls are always taking advantage of my split attention to demolish something.

Finally we are ready to hit the highway (the housekeeper had gotten her weeks mixed up, so cross that one off the list), but we have to hit the potty one more time before the road. We are now into our 2nd month of serious potty training, where we have taken away the diaper safety net and now march boldly around in our underpants. The girls are doing very well, but they are far from foolproof. Sometimes they give you warning, sometimes they just pee on the floor. Thank goodness for hardwood floors is all I can say. However, if you are diligent and get them to the bathroom after meals, before car rides, and more frequently at the end of the day, they can stay 'Clean and Dry' as our personal mantra goes.

So here I am. End of another long morning, doing the last potty break before the road. I got Kayla up first because she had done close to nothing after breakfast and therefore was more likely to have built up a dangerous bladder level. As is almost always the case, they fight tooth and nail to avoid the toilet and then once there they want to stop and have tea and biscuits while discussing the events of the world. They don't want to go because they don't want to interrupt their playing, yet it wouldn't take very long if they just did it and went. For the girls I think this might be fundamental: They will keep playing up to the point that they wet their pants until they understand that they actually get more playing in if they go use the potty fast.

Also I think there is some basic clenching fine motor skills that need to be mastered, but I think I have digressed into childhood development of waste removal functions quite enough, thank you.

So Kayla is there on her special seat with steps when I hear Rylie getting into something in the kitchen. Earlier they had hit this one drawer filled with toddler/baby odds and ends, including a bunch of old pacifiers that they never used as babies but now like to suck on occasionally, mainly so that they can fight over the pink one. Now when they get into these drawers (which they are not supposed to do) they usually make a mess, scattering odds and ends around the kitchen floor, half of which then need to be washed as they were really not intended to be dropped into the dust bunnies under the stove and then placed in anyone's mouth (please recall the house keeper was supposed to be there today, so the dust bunnies are more like dust badgers). Kayla is definitely in no hurry to finish up, so I figure this is the standard twin distract and grab. I don't think they plan these (yet) but they know how to take advantage.

Now I am hearing some rustling like plastic bags and I know I have to go investigate personally, as Rylie has probably gotten into the sandwich bags and when they do that they tend to scatter them everywhere. And once again, a sandwich bag is not so good at holding sandwiches after being stepped on by dirty baby galoshes. I tell Kayla to stay put and go into the den/kitchen.


Since my massive remodel, the tv/den and kitchen have all become one big great room with an island sitting about two thirds of the way across as I enter from the bathroom. I can't see Rylie because she is on the other side of the island, which happens to be where the drawers with tantalizing kid oriented stuff and sandwich bags are kept. More plastic rustling. I make my way around the island and that is when I see Rylie.

With not one, but two plastic bags on top of her head.

I have seen my share of horror movies and murder procedurals, so I know what killing someone by placing a plastic bag over their head looks like. It looks like this.


Absolute terror, like I have not felt in a very long time with adrenaline released into the blood stream in a single giant splash. A wave of awful tingling traveling up and down your spine and curling around your groin. Real, honest to god I am being attacked by sabretooth tigers, primordial terror. The closest I can recall in my personal experience was the time when I got a call from a hospital nurse to tell me my wife had been in an car accident. Candy only had minor whiplash, but the thick-headed nurse not only failed to start the conversation by telling me she was all right, but actually stopped talking after relating only the fact of the accident, forcing me to ask if my wife was all right. When I found out she was my relief was almost matched by my anger. But as scary as that one sentence on the phone was, it contained no visual to match your child with multiple plastic bags completely over her head.

I let out a "Rylie No!" in a voice which did not sound like my own. It sounded like someone from a movie who had just discovered a dead loved one. So, that is what it really sounds like. It is basically involuntary, an almost hindbrain request that the reality presented before you be declared immediately null and void, as if by just stating a firm negative with all your will you can make it be not so.

There was no pause in my motion. The moment I turned the corner marked the moment I reached for that bag over her head. I think I got off the 'Rylie No!' at about the same time as I pulled the top bag off. It came free easily, its plastic sides sliding easily off the plastic below. Then I grabbed the second bag, which was smaller and more snugly gripping her head.

I think at this point (1 second?, 3 seconds?) I had taken in the scene enough to realize that Rylie did not seem to be in immediate peril. She was moving and not in obvious breathing distress. So when it resisted me I did not tear that second bag off her head with all my strength. But I still yanked that fucker off. Yes I did.

So there we are, on the floor. Rylie is balling because she has been completely overwhelmed by the vehemence of my actions. I am hugging her and telling her she must never ever never ever never ever put plastic bags on her head and hugging her and Kayla has now wandered out of the bathroom with pants around her ankles wanting to know what is going on and I am checking Rylie to make sure she is fine and trying to sound calm enough to not put Kayla into tears and she should never ever never ever put plastic bags on her head.

And I still need to potty Rylie and get her into Daycare.

With a little time to reflect I don't think she was in that much danger. Those plastic bags are actually small enough and, more importantly, stiff enough that I think it would be very hard to asphyxiate yourself with one. Also, the system seemed to work. Rylie got into trouble, the parent heard something going on, went to investigate and stopped it before it got too crazy. It has made me consider all the various plastic bags lying around. A really flexible and big one could be quite dangerous, particularly if it were strong enough to resist a thrashing 2-year old. Those dry cleaning ones strike me as Black Mambas of the plastic bag world.

From now on my clothes are either dirty or cotton or one time wear.



OK, I think that is enough of that. I'll put away the flashlight under my chin and we can leave the fire and go back inside somewhere with bright, artificial lighting. Not everything the girls put on their heads is a Johnny Space Commander product. Sometimes it is a simple pull-up diaper that transforms my terrible twos into terrible twojahedins.



The wifey did not want me to post these, her reasoning being that they were just too embarr- assing. That once something is on the internet it is out there for the world to see...forever. I have two things to say to that: #1 Everyone has embarrassing childhood photos and I suspect the next generation is going to be a lot more comfortable with the digital photograph and the ease with which it is transmitted around the world. I listened to a whole NPR episode about the kind of stuff kids are putting on facebook. Believe me, a diaper on the head is tame, tame stuff. #2 THEY PUT DIAPERS ON THEIR HEADS! Come on, that is just too damn funny to keep to myself.



And let me assure you, this was not a one time event. They have been crazy obsessed with putting those pull-ups on their heads for weeks. [So, yes, I suppose the plastic bag incident was a bit forseeable.] A week ago I went to do the final tucking of the girls into bed and had to pull the diaper off the head of a sleeping Kayla. She had fallen asleep with it on. Sigh. And let me also state for the record that at no time did anybody suggest or encourage this, except by laughing our asses off and taking pictures, of course.

Now you are probably thinking to yourself, "That was awesome. Diaper head pictures. Could anything be funnier?!"

The answer is, in fact, yes: Diaper Head Video.





If this ends up the next Dramatic Prairie Dog I am probably going to be in big trouble. Yes, that is a continuation of the Twin Mind Meld from over a month ago. I think mankind may be in danger.



So lets close this blog entry out with some pure, wholesome cousin adorability. Here are the twins and their cousin Claire on Easter. They are sitting on a mat in my dad's exercise room. The fact they are (more or less) sitting still for these shots is a minor miracle. I can only assume they are catching their breaths long enough to gather the energy to spring up into the air, off their father/uncle's cranium, across the room like spider monkeys, and onto the exercise bike from where they will leap without regard for any possible death or dismemberment onto the weight bench... which they will then promptly start licking. Yeah. Too many jelly beans.



And with that I will take your leave this week (month, half-year, whatever). One reason this blog entry took awhile is that my home computer died about three weeks ago. I have been getting by on laptops and the kindness of strangers, but the big post I had planned was basically tossed out the window. I also hope to get back to my previously planned format of old and new baby adorability, but just needed to get this slightly darker episode out of me.

I finally get it. Nothing is more terrifying than your own kids. Sorry mom and dad.