DADWAGON

To keep JP occupied on our vacation (when we’re not in the pool, looking at bugs, savoring American abundance, or hurting ourselves) my step-grandmother dug up a bunch of old toys. [Side note: Old toys are made from metal, not exclusively produced in China, and, amazingly, last over twenty years and killed fewer children than one might expect.]

One toy that JP was not allowed to play with was my mother’s collection of antique marbles. Not to say that these marbles are actually valuable or anything—they’re just old. She’s kept them from her childhood and didn’t want JP to lose or break them, as he most certainly would. Much merriment was had on my part at telling JP not to lose his marbles, which, yes, means that I like making jokes at my son’s expense even if he doesn’t understand them. I am a stinker.

Anyway, we went to the aquarium the other day, and as we were working our way through the gift shop on the way out (what is it with kids and gift shops? They are obsessed), what did JP find and simply have to have? Marbles.

I was happy to buy them, but as soon as we got them home we were faced with a dilemma: what the heck do you do with marbles … other than lose them?

I have been quite useless this week, first felled by some kind of evil Montezuman revenge (revenge that my kids, who gave me the virus, took upon me for some reason), and now flying out to California and promptly driving due east into some mountains that people don’t blog from.

Lacking the time to write something entertaining, let me just pass along a link to someone who has already done that. Via our old friend Monsieur Egg, who serves, from a foodcart in LA, the finest oeuf you’ll ever put in your bouche, comes word of Scott Tennant’s blog Pretty Goes with Pretty. I haven’t had a chance to look around a bunch, but I loved Scott’s 15 imaginary conversations about music with his toddler Cooper, while at the library listening to Black Sabbath and the Beatles and everything in between. Like this one:

2. Neil Young: After the Gold Rush

Me: They have three Neil Young albums that we don’t have already: Zuma, Harvest Moon, and After the Gold Rush.
Cooper: I hear good things about Harvest Moon.
Me: Me too, but I have this thing about filling in the older stuff before I get the newer stuff.
Cooper: I get that. I have this thing about needing a pacifier before I can fall asleep at night. Sometimes you just need to do things in a certain order, you know?

Anyhow, that look your baby has on his face? It’s not gas. It’s just the look John Cusack made throughout High Fidelity.

I took JP and a friend of his in to New Orleans for the day today, took in the Mighty Mississippi, had a sno-cone, walked a bit in the Quarter, went to the aquarium, and also went to visit the … the Audubon Insectarium, which is, amazingly, a $15-a-head museum filled with bugs, some live, some not, many in cages, a few you can pet.

Now let’s put aside the airport-style security checkpoint you have to pass through to enter the museum [editor’s question: exactly how many terrorist attacks have their been in third-rate museums in America’s smaller cities?] and confront the central question: who came up with the idea for a bug museum?

I mean, I’m all in favor of science and all that stuff, but a bug museum where you can touch insects as big as my thumb? (They’re slimy, folks, in case you were wondering.) There was a jar of termites; and a case filled with some sort of cockaroach that looked suspiciously like the ones I’ve encountered in my kitchen late at night quite without thinking they merited an exhibit in a museum; and finally, a “spider’s lair” where you go in and a spider attacks you and kills you (I don’t actually know this—JP’s friend, who had been to the Insectarium, told me this because he was too scared to go in, and JP was already crying).

Am I the only who thinks that a museum specifically dedicated to frightening small children is less than a thrill? Someone write in with the Science Guy answer and I will respond that eating cookies in a bug-themed cafeteria is plain nasty. And no, I’m not letting it go—what’s with the fucking metal detector?

See what happens when it’s too hot to go to the damn zoo! Here’s the lesson of my vacation to date, ladies and gents: America, she’s out there, she weird, and she’s got bugs!