Month: August 2014

Stream of Consciousness Saturday: Sprout Shenanigans

Pavowski7 Comments

Of course he’s awake.  I mean, why wouldn’t he be?  It’s only 5:30 in the morning.  The sun won’t be up for another hour.  His baby sister will be awake in about fifteen minutes, but after a light snack, she at least will go back to dreamland for another two hours or so.  But no, he’s awake.  Which means I have to be awake, because today is my day to get up early with the kids.

Make no mistake, the mind of a child is a lot more powerful than we give them credit for.

On some level, he knows that I agreed to get up for the early shift with the kids so that my wife could have one blessed day of sleeping in.  He knows that we had a drink or two last night and got to bed later than usual.  He knows that I want nothing more than to turn off their monitors and let them cry it out until they fall asleep again, or until I wake up of my own accord.  But I won’t do that, because I’m dad.

They work together in ways you couldn’t imagine, these kids of mine.  Sure, Sprout #2 pretends to be completely defenseless and powerless to do anything and completely dependent upon my wife and I (okay, completely dependent on my wife), but I swear she’s communicating with Sprout #1, who is developing a kind of literary and oratory prowess that unnerves me a little.  Just the other day, he was playing with his toys and without any prompting, warning, or cue, turned to my wife and quoted with authority the entirety of page 37 of Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham: “Would you like them in a car?  // I would not, could not, in a car!”  Confession time, that may not be page 37 of the book, but the quote is verbatim; I know this because I’ve only read it to him about four hundred times.  See, lately, he’s graduated from “want that” and “no beef stew” to actually using nouns and verbs together in the way they are intended, his tiny little stabs at formal language taking shape like so much silly putty being formed into the likeness of a sticky pink Statue of Liberty.

So I know he’s communicating with Sprout #2.  Covertly, of course.  While my wife and I think he’s just babbling incoherence or yelling for the sheer joy of hearing his not-so-tiny-anymore voice reverberate off the crayon-festooned walls, he’s slipping her messages.  I can only guess at what they are, but they are coordinating over the past several days in ways too numerous to ignore.  For example…

They don’t nap at the same time.  Ever.  The most we get is a fifteen-minute overlap, presumably the result of Sprout #1 falling too fast asleep and forgetting to wake up to hold up his end of the deal.

Sprout #1 will basically start crying whenever she stops.  He’ll find something to get upset about, something to want that he can’t have, something he wants to do that we can’t allow, something to fall off of and hurt himself.  When she’s crying or upset, he’s mostly cool, but as soon as she chills, it’s time for him to go to eleven.  Sprout #2, on the other hand, cries whenever I look in her direction, except when Sprout #1 is throwing a fit, then she falls asleep in a way that benefits us none at all.  Unless they decide to both go into full four-alarm screaming tantrums at the same time.  Then all you can do is sit on the couch and press your fingers into your temples until the world fades away.  Of course, then, Sprout #1 will throw a full bag of crayons at your unguarded privates, and then the whole screamy world comes crashing back into your cranium.

They can both go from being absolutely adorable to being nightmares out of a Stephen King novel in the space of about ten seconds.  All it takes for Sprout #1 to turn is tripping over a toy, or being told he can’t have a popsicle, or his daddy taking a little too long to get him loaded into the car to go to the playground.  Sprout #2, as I mentioned before, can turn on me in the space of a second for no reason I can discern.  I think she just likes to see if she can make me cry by crying at me, in a weird sort of reversal of the “let me imitate the face you’re making” game that kids apparently like so much.

They coordinate farts.  This cannot be made up, and I would not dare to embellish.  Just this morning (shortly after they both woke up prior to 6 AM) we were sat on the couch watching PUPPY SHOW (I’ve no idea what the show is called, LeapFrog something I think, but Sprout #1 calls it PUPPY SHOW so PUPPY SHOW it is), when I felt the tiny little burst on my left thigh where Sprout #2 was sitting.  Not a moment later, a somewhat bigger, juicier, louder brap on my right thigh.  Then a series of staccato fut-fut-futs on my left thigh from the newborn.  Then a deeper, gut-rumbling pfffththththth on the right. Then I’m sitting there, holding the two of them, laughing so hard I’m crying as their symphony of gastrointestinal woodwinds blows away in my lap.

And of course, they don’t let us sleep in.  No, she wakes up at 5:30 or 5:45 like clockwork for her early morning snack, and he’s up and kicking by 6:30, just about the time my wife is falling asleep again after providing the snack for the newborn.  But no, when it’s Daddy’s morning to get up early with the babies, they’re both up at 5:15 and there is no falling back to sleep for them or for Daddy until the sun is out and it’s so hot in the house no adult could sleep for fear of suffocating on his own sweat.

I love my children, I really do.  But I think they’re trying to kill me.  Not cold-blooded murder, you understand.  Just the long, slow, inescapable death of gradual exhaustion by degrees.

 

This post is part of SoCS:

http://lindaghill.wordpress.com/2014/08/22/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-august-2314/

Winter is Coming

Pavowski2 Comments

Summer is hot in the South.

“Hot” isn’t even the word.  “Miserable” is more like it, or “inhospitable for humans”, or “plague-level discomfort”.  Something about the proximity to the Gulf of Mexico, the overabundance of trees and grass, and the jetstream blowing clouds and moisture in our direction causes the weather to do some truly remarkable things in the South, like making seventy-degree nights feel like the inside of a pressure cooker, and ninety-degree afternoons like the surface of the sun, if the surface of the sun was also bathed in a thick, damp mist.

It’s uncomfortable, to say the least.  And it’s not a small part of why I run in the mornings — because if I get up before the sun, at least I don’t have to deal with the radiant heat of our nearest star pummeling my poor scalp into submission in addition to very nearly swimming through the morass or water-air that hangs in our atmosphere from April til September.

And I noticed, on my run this morning, something really unusual, which is that yesterday, when my wife headed out for her run at 5 in the afternoon, it actually felt cooler than it did on my run at 5 in the morning.  Now, human experience is subjective, and maybe I was artificially inflating my own misery, but a simple google search tells me that she completed her run in weather of 86 degrees with 54% humidity, and I completed mine in 70 degrees with 96% humidity.  I’m going to be totally honest here and admit that I don’t really know what the humidity scale means, because it seems to me like 100% or anywhere near 100% should basically mean that the air is literally liquid water.  Nonetheless, it felt a damn sight more uncomfortable when I stepped out my front door this morning than when I came in from work yesterday night.

But that doesn’t stop me.  I got my 5k in this morning, albeit a bit slower than I like (I blame the humidity because that’s what I do), sweating like a hog and not feeling any cooler as I did so.  Funny thing in weather like that — you’re immediately coated in a thin film of liquid when you step outside anyway, so you almost don’t even realize you’re sweating.  What you do realize is that it doesn’t do you any good (the film OR the sweat).  So I’m running and sweating and feeling like the inside of a tauntaun’s abdomen when out of nowhere, my brain reminds me that this heat wave, this godawful humidity, this really miserable weather won’t last forever.  It’s almost September, when the leaves will start to change and the temperatures will start to drop and stepping outside will begin to feel refreshing again.  Winter is coming.  For me, that’s a good thing.

Then, another thought crept in, like a cat darting around the door as you come in with your arms full of groceries.  “What about your shoes?”

See, I’m about 95% of a convert.  I started making the switch to Vibrams for my daily runs about a year ago and I’m finally there.  I think I used my “traditional” shoes three times over the summer: once for a really muddy race (VFFs give me blisters when they get wet), once when it was pouring rain (again, moisture), and once because my foot felt tweaky and I wanted to see if a bit more cushioning would help straighten it out (it didn’t).  They are a totally different running experience, and I think they’re awesome.  What they don’t do, however, is insulate your feet in any way.

What I mean is that, in addition to putting you very much in touch with the surfaces you’re walking on (still nothing to going truly barefoot, I know), VFFs make you just as aware of the temperature of those surfaces.  Wearing them on a blacktop in the summer feels not unlike walking across the stove on low heat in bare feet.  A chilly breeze — I experienced a few when we had that lovely bout of cool weather about three weeks ago — slices through them like paper.  Now, a little bit of heat is no problem; feet generate their own heat anyway, and I’ve never run when it was more than 90 out.  But when the temps drop down to 30 and below, am I not going to make like the T1000 from Terminator 2 and snap off at the ankles?  I have this vision of getting about a mile into a run and my foot just icing over, locking up and breaking off.  That may be hyperbole, but my honest concern is groundfeel (is that a word?  I’m calling it a word) when my feet start to lose sensation in the cold.  I’m also a little bit concerned that I might not be as aware of the movement of my feet in the cold — because of the decreased sensation — and, as a result, re-injure my foot.  (Show me a runner once injured who isn’t a little scared of future injury and I’ll show you a dolphin with a donut hat.)

Probably a bit of overthinking.  Not that I’m ever guilty of that.  I imagine as I run in the cooling temperatures of fall, I’ll adjust; and besides, I won’t have that many sub-freezing runs anyway.  It isn’t like I run with the caribou in Canada like some of you lunatics.  Still, I’m definitely going to miss my socks.

Anybody out there running in VFFs or even completely barefoot?  What’s your experience when the temps start to drop?

Things Writers Need — Sanctuary

Pavowski3 Comments

This week, in “Things Writers Need,” perhaps the last of the BIG ideas: a sanctuary.  If the series is to continue, it’ll have to start diving into the nitty-gritty, the finer, more specific things.  Lots to ponder.  But at any rate, the Sanctuary.

Let’s get one thing clear: writing is hard.  To be specific: coming up with ideas is hard, writing the ideas down in a coherent and meaningful way is hard, making the time to write is hard, not getting distracted from writing is hard.

On a good day, writing is like chasing butterflies with a net that instead of a net uses bubbles.  Just when you think you’ve snagged one of the buggers, the net bursts and you have to dunk your wand in the solution again.  (That’s not nearly as sexual as it sounded coming out.)  On a bad day, you have no net and must entice the buggers to land in your mouth using only the hypnotic ululations of your tongue.  (Also not directly intended to be sexual.)

On a good day, you’re tracking the movement of radioactive particles through the vacuum of space, standing in your backyard with a whacked-together dish of ceramic and tinfoil hoping to snare quarks from the ether.  On a bad day, meteorites are smashing your house to bits and your dish is on fire, and also the quarks are superheated and are burning your satellite dish to a cinder.  Burning it for a second time.

On a good day, you’re on the Atlanta perimeter trying to catch somebody using a turn signal.  On a bad day, the interstate has snowed under and everybody’s walking home.  Except you’re still in Atlanta and the walk home takes a day and a half.

That is to say that if you’re going to write properly, you need supreme focus, free from as many distractions as possible.  You need a sanctuary.  A safe haven from the world.  A bunker to protect you from the bombs, big and small, that blow up every day in your world.  A soundproof chamber to block out the low drone of life.  A treehouse you can climb into to escape the leaping jackals.  A little bubble of air at the bottom of the ocean.

Ideally, this would be a room of your own.  A room free of needless ornament and away from regular foot traffic, or maybe full of little bric-a-brac (is bric-a-brac plural?) that inspire you or fill your head with strange and wonderful ideas, and just off the hallway so that you can hear the soothing sound of footsteps as your significant other or your kids or your cats or your hamsters or the neighborhood dog approaches.  A room that has no television, or maybe one that has a television receiving no signal so that it only plays soft soothing static, or perhaps one hooked up to a DVD playing old episodes of Leave it to Beaver on repeat because that’s what stimulates your brain.  A room with no windows, or maybe a window overlooking the dense cruel cityscape below, or a window overlooking your children’s playground, or the soft contours of a white-sand beach, or the sweeping majesty of the Appalachians, or a painted backdrop of unicorns leaping over rainbows and farting out quarks for you to catch in your satellite dish.

Look, the makeup of the room is not a standardized thing; it should have the things that benefit the writer’s process in it, and it should forcefully reject anything that obstructs that process.  Writers need a space that keeps their heads level.  A space that can shut out the demons and distractions and the e-mails and the worries and the crises and the bills and…

Okay, I’m actually stressing myself out a little bit thinking about all the things that get in the way when I’m trying to write.  The simple fact is that there is no end to the stream of things that will try to stop a writer from writing on any given day.  If the writer is not equipped to fend those things off, they will sweep him under like so many tons of thrashing white water and deposit his soggy corpse with the rest of the broken dreams at the shattered delta of Unfinished Projects.  A simple place to write is one of the best defenses for keeping those things at bay.  It doesn’t have to be lush and finely furnished.  It doesn’t have to be lined with polished mahogany or stocked with leather-bound books or busts of famous dead people.  It doesn’t have to overlook a sunlit veranda or a tranquil garden.  It doesn’t even have to smell like scotch and candlewax.  It just has to be a place that makes a writer feel comfortable and safe and relaxed and creative.  It helps if it has a door.  But you know what?  It doesn’t even have to be a room.  It just needs to be a space where you do your writing.  Thoughts are semi-tangible things, I think.  Bits of them bleed out and seep into the walls, the floorboards.  They mingle with the air, and discolor the carpet over time.  You need that space to soak up the essence of your thoughts so that on the days when the ideas don’t want to flow, you can stew in those ambient thoughts to release some of the locked-in juices.

I’m lucky in that, at work, I can sneak a half hour at lunchtime, close my door and be alone with my thoughts in total silence if I like.  I’m not so lucky in that my house (which my wife and I once thought so huge and cavernous) affords me no such luxury.  Between two babies’ bedrooms, our bedroom, and a guest room (which has also sort of become a makeshift library and cat bedroom), there is no sanctuary to be found.  The best I have is the use of the desk adjacent to the kitchen, which butts up against the stairs which are essentially the heart of the house.  There’s no door, even, to shut the world out.  Also, of course, when I’m at home, I’m Dad, which means I am always on call.  So I have to make the most of my time at work and enjoy what little sanctuary can be had while I’m there.

That’s not to say that I can’t write at home.  I can, and often do.  But it only works because I’ve talked to my wife and she respects my time and space while I’m writing, provided I don’t ask for too much of it.  It works because I take that time when the kids are asleep and don’t need my attention.  It works, in short, because it has to work and because I make it work.

That said, when we ever get around to buying a new house, it’s gonna have to have at least a walk-in closet or something I can turn into a study.  You know, in addition to the basement we need, and the bathrooms with reasonable fixtures, and the less ridiculous plumbing situation, and a lot fewer trees in the backyard, and a porch that isn’t falling apart, and…

Sorry, I got distracted.

What’s the most important thing inside (or outside) your writing sanctuary?

Neon Carrots

Pavowski9 Comments

 

Aaand this one brings me firmly back into the wonderful wacky territory of WTF.

Chuck’s challenge this week is a story using a color in the title.  So I went to my trusty crayon box (okay, I went to Crayola.com) and started digging.  I was initially drawn to such fancy and whimsical colors as crimson and cerulean, periwinkle and chartreuse, but for some reason, when I saw the color “Neon Carrot,” my brain grabbed hold and wouldn’t let go, like a toddler grabbing hold of my leg hair.  (What, your toddler has never grabbed onto your leg hair?  LUCKY.)

So here’s “Neon Carrots,” a tale of vindication for every child who’s ever been a little bit leery of eating his vegetables.  I tried out a bit of a different style in this one: almost fairy-taleish.  Not sure if it reads or not.  Let me know what you think.

 

Neon Carrots

Zelda poked at a carrot, imagining that it jumped a little at the prick of her fork.

Bryan lifted a forkful of carrots and revered them under the fluorescent light.  “What’s with these carrots, mom?”

Mother gave a ceremonious clearing of her throat and smiled primly at him.  “They’re the newest thing.  I saw them in the grocery store this morning, and it was as if they were begging to be eaten.  I just had to try them!”

Father winked at Bryan and stuffed a bit of pot roast into his mouth.  “She just can’t help herself, your mother.  Sees something bright and shiny and it pulls her right in.”

“Well, aren’t they something special?”  She grabbed the pot and pulled it closer; the phosphorescent goop within illuminating her face from below like a campfire storyteller’s flashlight.  The orangey-yellow glow suffused her features and lent her a slightly sickly quality.  “Neon carrots.  Isn’t science incredible?”

Bryan and Zelda shared a look of mutual misery.  Zelda pushed her plate away.  “I don’t like them.”

“You haven’t tried them, dear.”

“I don’t have to try them.  They’re disgusting.”

Father leveled a steely eye at her.  “Eat your carrots, Z.”

“What about Bryan?”

“Bryan, too.”

Bryan scowled and elbowed her under the table.  “Thanks a lot, barf-bag.”

“Eat,” said father, in a tone which brooked no further argument.

Revolted, Zelda speared a slice of carrot and brought it to her mouth, pausing to take a deep breath first.  Like most of mother’s cooking, it was overcooked and undersalted, the end result being a pasty tasteless mass in her mouth.

Mother beamed.  “You can just taste the enzymes, can’t you?  They cross-germinated these carrots with bioluminescent kelp from the deepest part of the ocean to increase their nutritional value.  The glow is just a neat side effect.  Aren’t they fun?”

Bryan chewed thoughtfully before nodding.  “They’re not bad.”

Father winked at him.  “That’s the spirit.  Zelda, what do you think?”

Zelda swallowed.  They actually weren’t all that bad.  In fact, she suddenly felt compelled to try another bite, which she did.  She narrowed her eyes and bobbed her head up and down as the earthy undertones of the root, unnoticed at first, began to burst on her tongue.  She cleaned her plate and even asked for more carrots; mother grinned knowingly at father and spooned her another heaping helping.

They didn’t have the neon carrots again for a week, but in the meantime, mother brought home luminous squash and lustrous watercress, the latest genetically modified offerings infused with deepsea kelp and released by the Kane Farmers’ Association.  The children devoured their portions each more heartily than the last, with a zeal and excitement they had never shown for their food before.  Father became suspicious; he’d never known the kids to care so much about nutrition before.  Mother was just happy they were eating their vegetables.

*****

A week passed, and one afternoon while Zelda was playing with her dolls, she looked out the window and saw Bryan digging in the backyard like a crazed dog.  She dropped her princess and ran outside.  Bryan didn’t even look at her, he just kept scrabbling at the earth with mud-crusted nails, throwing handfuls of dirt and rocks over his shoulder.  His skin was oranger than usual, but she attributed that to the clay dust hanging in the air.  “Help me dig,” he insisted.

Zelda wanted to ask, “for what,” but she realized that Bryan’s digging wasn’t so strange, and in fact she felt like digging in the ground might not be such a bad idea herself.  They worked for the better part of an hour — neither of them thought to get shovels, and the feel of the raw earth under her fingernails oddly comforted her — and in the end had dug a little trench, two feet deep and three feet across.  Wordlessly, they nodded to each other, removed their shoes, stepped into the ditch, and began to cover themselves over with dirt — first the feet, then the ankles, then the calves.  The close, damp cold of the earth felt right around her toes.  They stood there, arms flat at their sides and chins upturned toward the sun, for a full hour before Father got home from work and asked them what they were up to.

“We’re neon carrots!” Bryan called, his face shining in the fading evening sun.

“So you are, so you are,” Father laughed.  “Come on inside.  Your mom’s picked up some incandescent cauliflower to go with the lamb chops.”

*****

During his bath, Mother noticed a tiny leaf on a tinier green stem just above Bryan’s ear.  She plucked it out, assuming he’d rolled in some grass, but Bryan began to howl and thrash in pain and could not be quieted again until mother agreed to give him another helping of carrots at dinnertime.

As they sat down, Zelda brushed her hair back behind her ear, deliberately showing him the tiny sprout at the nape of her neck.  “It’ll grow back,” she whispered.

Bryan wiped his eyes and grinned at her.

*****

Some nights later, signaled perhaps by the moon or a change in the weather, they met in the yard again to dig their ditches: deeper this time and faster, their bleeding fingers seeking the depth and the quiet and the dark of the earth, their vegetated brains numb to the pain.  As they stood in the earth with just the creeping tendrils of root and branch peeking up from the tops of their heads, they smiled at each other before entombing themselves in the ground until the harvest.

The bioluminescent produce was pulled from shelves a few days later with no explanation, and the Kane Farmers’ Association vanished like a thief in the night.

Mother and Father were upset when they disappeared, but  pleasantly surprised at the newfound bounty of neon carrots sprouting in the backyard.  Soon, Mother was pregnant again, and she was positively glowing.

To the Parents of Children Gassed in Ferguson (I Am Not Sympathetic)

Pavowski3 Comments

I’ve said it before, but it is not my intention to go around starting fires using this blog.  I try to speak from a place of my own personal experience and to generalize that experience when it’s appropriate to those unlucky souls who read what I write here with any manner of regularity.

That said, there are some things going on in Ferguson that I do feel comfortable making blanket statements about.

Look, what’s going on there is a tragedy and a travesty.  I’m not here to say that justice has gone haywire or that people are overreacting — it’s a capital “B” Bad Situation there right now no matter how you slice it.  That said, what the situation calls for is NOT people across the country jumping immediately to the blind defense of one side or another.  We simply don’t know all the ins and outs and it’s impossible for us to make a judgment on what should or should not be going on there from one day to the next.  But I do know ONE thing that protesters SHOULDN’T be doing, and that’s involving their kids in the protests.

A thing that’s getting a lot of play today is that apparently some children were on the receiving end of teargas used by the police to disperse one of the protesting groups (I’m being really careful not to use the word “mob”, because, again, I’m not there and I don’t know the situation).  And let’s not split hairs: that’s bad.

But.

The subsequent headlines and outrage and villainization of the police on the back of this unfortunate eventuality is all a fraud.  You can’t be mad at the police in this case and this instance because it is not the police force’s fault the kids got gassed.  You just can’t.  Sorry.  I know the narrative is supposed to be that the police are jumping to violence and becoming downright fascist and impinging on human rights down in Ferguson.  And the truth is, maybe they are.  But that’s immaterial in the case of these kids getting gassed.  No, if you’re a parent in Ferguson and your child got gassed, that is your fault.

“But the police shouldn’t be using teargas to break up peaceful protesters!”

Maybe not.  But they have been.  They did it on the first night of protests and they’d done it again since.  What makes you think it’d be any different this time?

“But those protesters were protesting peacefully!”

Maybe they were.  But those protesters are also fully and acutely aware of just how tense the situation is out there.  They know the cops have (and I really wish there were a better metaphor) itchy trigger fingers.  They knew and they know that it can go down at any moment out there.

“But those were just children!”

Maybe so.  But a mob is a mob (again, I’m not saying it was a mob, but I’m saying that the police are treating it like a mob), and when you’re dealing with a mob, you don’t have the luxury of time to say “oh, this person is physically trying to murder me and that one’s leading a hunger strike; let me direct my limited resources at the one that matters”.

No, the onus for any child getting gassed at any of these protests is strictly on the parents.  As a parent, your job, before anything else, is to provide for the safety of your child.  Your kid should have been at home, watching terrible reruns of cartoons you’ve seen hundreds of times, or — and I know this is pretty far out there — in bed, asleep.  Instead, you brought the kid to a protest.  A protest in a city where over the past week a teenager has died, reporters have been arrested, and teargas and rubber bullets have been unleashed on protesters.

Let’s not forget, either, the lunatic selfishness and self-importance that might cause a parent to bring a child to an event like this.  I understand the compulsion, and perhaps even the fervor that makes you feel like you have to be present, that you have to be a part of what’s happening when your community is in turmoil.  Guess what?  Your first job as a parent is keeping your kid safe; you have to either accept that and sit the protest out or embrace the idea that you’re putting your child in harm’s way for your own ideology.  I might as well bring my kid to an industrial finger-slicing factory for the educational possibilities and be angry when my kid sticks his hand in a machine (as kids are wont to do) and gets his fingers lopped off.  It’s not the machine’s fault that YOU put your kid in a dangerous situation.  The machine is just doing what it does.  The police in Ferguson are just doing what they’ve done since this whole mess started.  I’m not saying it’s right; it’s not for me to decide what’s right.  But they’ve been using teargas and rubber bullets since the first night, and you brought your kid to the protest?  You should be arrested for child endangerment.

The righteous indignation over kids being the newest victims of police brutality in Ferguson is as empty as the sympathy-pit in my cold, dead heart for these idiots putting their kids in harm’s way.  News outlets posting that “violence in Ferguson has turned against children” or “children are the latest victims of police aggression” should be ashamed of themselves.  Parents raising hell and boo-hooing and calling for the officers in question to be killed or arrested can likewise go take a hike.  The police are not knowingly firing on children.  They’re firing on a “mob.”  Let’s say you have a delicious piece of cake.  It’s glorious and has just the right amount of buttercream frosting and the cake mix is just delectable; it’s so perfect that no man living could say a cross word against the cake.  You stick the cake into a brown paper bag, light the bag on fire, and ring my doorbell.  I open the door, see a burning bag, and proceed to stomp it into oblivion to extinguish the flame, ruining a perfectly good piece of cake in the process.  You don’t get to paint me as a cake-hater.  The only way you get to say the police are targeting kids is if the police broke into your house where your child was sleeping and gassed him in his bed.

And if the cops did see the kids in the crowd?  Sorry, you still don’t get to villainize them, because now you’re hiding behind the defenseless to deter the threat of violence, which is the most cowardly of cowardly war acts.

Oh, and if you did bring your kids to the protest in the hopes that you would gain more notice for yourself or your cause by involving the kids, shame on you.  Kids don’t have an agenda; kids don’t have the capacity for that stuff.  At best they think it’s some intricate field trip, at worst you’re just indoctrinating them.  And, oh yeah, if you got your kid gassed at the protest you just had to be at, you’ve only taught him to hate cops and by extension all authority figures, which I’m sure is NOT AT THE HEART OF ANY OF SOCIETY’S PROBLEMS.

Let me reiterate that I don’t think the cops are right in this.  I don’t think that they’re wrong either.  It’s not my place to make that call, but if they have received death threats and if the crowds are growing unruly, then I understand their position.  By the same token, I don’t think the protesters are right in this, but I don’t think they’re wrong either.  A member of the community is dead and the police seem to be closing ranks, so I understand their position.  What both sides need is a good solid dose of calm-down juice and probably a more forceful authoritarian force coming in from outside to chill the business out.  Maybe the National Guard can help that today.  Either way, for the love of all that’s holy, leave your kids out of this mess.  They don’t deserve to be on the receiving end of violence that you’re helping to perpetuate, no matter what you believe about this situation.