Monday, September 24, 2007

No Dice

They say there are all kinds of things you should expose a baby to even while they're in utero. Music, reading, vitamins. So allow me to do some quality parenting and offer you your first taste of disappointment. In my experience you'll run into it more than vitamins.

Disney went the other way. Maybe they never bought the fact that I could live in Austin and spend every week in LA. Maybe it was the experience issue. Maybe they just realized that someone like me should be kept away from children (their lack of endorsement bodes ill for you). In any case, it now seems inevitable that your favorite movie, the one you paper your walls and inadvertently spend your college fund on merchandise for, will be the one that told your father to take a walk way back when you were the size of a coffee bean. I look forward to staring at stuffed reminders of this failure for years to come and having the words I didn't write seared into my brain as the film plays endlessly, helpfully sedating you in the back of some future minivan which I'll no doubt soon be piloting to things like T-ball, soccer, gymnastics, and other not real sports.

Obviously, I knew this was coming, but it's amazing how impossible it is to truly prepare yourself for bad news. It's just human nature that until someone finally tells you that it's over, really over, hope keeps creeping in around the edges. You want to shut it out, to blunt the inevitable kick in the teeth, but you build a wall, it just tunnels under (very illegal immigrant like, that hope). If you'd asked me to write down ahead of time what would be said when I answered the phone this morning I'd have been so close it would have blown your pre-natal mind. But even as I picked it up, there was a part of me I couldn't shut off, a part still saying, 'you never know...'

So what's the lesson here? Forget about crossing your fingers, rubbing lamps, wishing on stars, and all the other stuff that works for people when they're animated. In the world of flesh and blood, sometimes hope is just a pretty noose that you tie for yourself.

Is that too dark for an 8 week old? And to think I couldn't get hired to write a kids movie.

Novel - Big mess
Dunking - Still crippled
French - Mon Dieu

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