Vacation-At-Home Log, Day Four:

We’re off to a bad start. I get up at three a.m. to get in some creative writing while the family sleeps, except the family doesn’t sleep. The Man Cub wakes up with me and starts chattering up a long, loud blue streak in his crib. So I have to whisk him out of the bedroom so The Missus can get some sleep (she didn’t get to bed till after midnight). Except an hour and a half later he’s still babbling so she comes in and takes him back with her and by then it’s almost 5 a.m. and nobody has slept or gotten anything accomplished in the last two hours and it’s still dark outside. Guess I’ll read the paper and head back to bed, I expect just about the time the boy wakes up again (exactly right, as it turns out. The paper finally gets skimmed late in the afternoon).

This is exactly why I don’t blog about family stuff. I slipped into a persistent vegetative state just re-reading that last paragraph for typos.

• Crime Story, season one. A Michael Mann TV effort from the mid-80s. The cover blurb hails it as “The greatest show you’ve never heard of!” Like most mid-80s TV shows, it’s most fun to watch for Big Hair, and faces that had been, or would become, familiar. Already, I’ve spotted a young, skinny Michael Madsen, a young Ving Rhames, the ever-sexy Pam Grier, even Miles Davis did a cameo. So far it’s alright, but in retrospect, maybe I should have Netflixxed it before I bought it. Word to the wise.

• Domino with Kiera Knightly. Big loud dumb movie, just the way I like ‘em. And what a babe in the lead role. Fellas, if you need a pallet cleanser after accompanying the S.O. to “Brokeback Mountain” over the weekend, this flick is the ticket. Bonus points for Tom Waits in an unbilled cameo role as an apocalyptic prophet (or something). Rented it the day before it was officially released because the video store owner considers himself a renegade.

• Back on the self-punishment track: My Pentacostal Mom on the mainland just sent me a CD of a sermon by her new pastor – some creepy kid I used to go to middle school with. Because my relationship with my Mom is important to me, I am listening to it. It’s not that he’s bad, he’s more like the first-billed comic on a 15-comic ticket. Yadda yadda yadda and little comedic asides that draw no response from the congregants. And he’s still arrogant, dismissive and condescending. Augh. I hope she didn’t pay for this fucking thing, but chances are, a Love Gift changed hands.

• Downloaded some new pix of the Man Cub. Here’s a good one:

• The rest of the day is a blur of dish-washing and diaper changing and aborted attempts at stealing some time for myself. Tried to crack Doris Kearns Goodwin’s new Lincoln tome ("Team of Rivals"), but that’s hard to do bouncing a babbling baby on your lap who has just learned how to grab paper and TWIST it. And tomorrow will be bookended by running errands in the a.m. and going into town for an MRI in the afternoon. Oh la!

• Day’s end. The lesson I’m learning is, when you’re married with children, there are no vacations, only reallocations of responsibilities. This “vacation” jumped the goddamn shark around Day Two. If I never take any more time off, that’ll be plenty soon enough for me.

Sign me…
Disgruntled