Proto-Socialism

Several weeks ago, I had the most meaningful experience of my adult life . . . I sunk my teeth into a flour-dusted ciabatta sandwich, lightly coated with dijon mustard but generously stuffed with soft-boiled eggs, prosciutto, caramelized onions, fig preserves, and a creamy, melted local cheese. I washed it down with a mango iced tea-lemonade mix garnished with mint. It made me reconsider my place in the world, my connection to the universe. Have I just taken a step in a dramatically different direction in life? Is my existential purpose profoundly altered? Do we have time for me to order another sandwich?

A couple weeks before that we had gone to the Austin Area Birthing Center. For some complicated feminine reasons that would bore you I'm sure, as they did me at the time, the midwife couldn't locate the kid's heartbeat with some glorified microphone she was rubbing around my wife's stomach, seconds after mysteriously coating it with gooey junk. This is called the Doppler device, and although we couldn't hear our baby's heartbeat with it, we did manage to forecast a frightful band of thunderstorms, with large hail and tornadic activity, heading south from Waco. (Naturally, I rushed out of the room and urged everyone to take cover if they knew what's good for them.)

So next, they had to roll in the high-tech machinery. I could feel the cancer cells in my brain multiplying as the midwife turned the thing on and the windows and walls went into a low-frequency buzz. Thankfully, she pointed the device away from me and directly at my unborn child. Doubly thankfully, we got this crystal clear image of our future Nobel laureate immersed in a gross biological liquid of some sort. It's going to really suck when they can broadcast these images in high-definition ("HD" -- I have to spell it out for all you earth freaks and stone-age losers. Suckers!).

But here's the really amusing thing . . . the little bugger, s/he's already plotting revolution. Isn't that so sweet?