It rested on a small hill on a crooked foundation. It was brown inside and out, as though it’d been buried, unearthed, and then sprayed off. The porch sunk in various spots, and gnarled paint chips clung to the porch ceiling. The house had no air conditioning, either. In the spring, the sun would set almost directly on the face of the house, cooking the worn siding and convincing everyone inside that the Earth had abruptly switched orbits with Mercury.

There were eight shabby rooms inside the house–well, seven really. One was a large closet that had been transformed into a room by the unlucky guy who chose the short straw.  

I slept on a mattress on the floor in one of the rooms downstairs. The little money I had went not toward box springs and a bed frame, but feng shui. I nailed a giant maroon tapestry with a fancy design on it to the wall and invested in a bundle of incense that the neighbor girls later said smelled like wet dog.

On really hot nights, I’d set a box fan in the window next to my bed and blast it on high. Occasionally, I’d wake up in the morning soaked in a film of dead bugs that had been sucked in through the fan from the muggy outside.

Guests pretty much treated the house the same way it looked. The doors were always unlocked for anyone to pass through, so we were never entirely sure who our guests actually were. One time, I came home in the middle of a harsh winter to find our thermostat knocked off the wall and shattered to bits on the floor, as if it’d been bludgeoned with a crowbar. That night I doubled up on sweatshirts and lit a dozen candles around my bed for warmth. It was as though I was simulating my very own wake. Another time, someone had flushed a whole roll of toilet paper down the toilet.  The culprit was never caught.

To be fair, we who lived there didn’t treat the house with much respect, either. Once, we invented a nameless game where we would crank the music and hurl butcher knives at a dartboard hanging on the kitchen door. Our aims weren’t always a 100 percent accurate, which pretty much tore up everything within a 10 foot radius of our target.

Spring quarter, some strange entity living inside the house must have burrowed into my housemates brains. What else could explain why they decided to, out of the blue, pull themselves away from their Dallas reruns and mix a hulking, reeking concoction of all the old expired food in the house (and there was a lot of it) and dump it on our front lawn? It was pink, chunky, and heaving and looked like a pool of dinosaur vomit. I was at class at the time, or I would have tried to stop them.

When I discovered the toxic pool, I was so mad that I conked my housemates over the heads with the meanest sarcasm I owned. I mean, this stuff would attract every varmint outside of town. I imagined waking one morning to find a bear and her cubs lapping it up. Instead of retorting my remarks, though, my housemates just stared at me with goofy grins as if their minds had been taken over.

Eventually, the blazing sun boiled the dinosaur vomit away, leaving behind an ungainly dirt patch in the lawn. I half expected a small garden of radioactive plants to sprout there. Instead, it may have contributed to the birth of a new species.

Right around the time the vomit disappeared, an outer-space bug the length of a toothbrush with eyes as big as dimes and wings as long as a raven’s was found dead in the shadowy corner of the kitchen. Whether it died from natural causes or from the hostile environment of our house, we could not tell. The bug had no identifiable stinger. Nonetheless, a mean bite it most definitely had. Or, I’m sure, it could have simply knocked you unconscious with one of its wings. Looking back, I imagine its main food source was either rodents or trout.

We should have alerted some scientists about our great discovery. Instead, my housemates chose to hang it by a thread from the ceiling–a fitting ornament for the place.

Strangely enough, I kind of miss that house.

Most of the time, I worked first shift, which was ideal. Sometimes, though, the only openings available were second-shifts. Second shift isn’t too bad. Yeah, the hours are odd: you work through dinner and get off right when most people are considering brushing their teeth for bed. And scheduling a time to hang out with friends can be a hassle. But these cons are largely offset by the fact that you get to sleep in every morning. Plus, there’s little traffic to contend with coming home.

But twice, I got stuck with third shift. My friends were always gearing up for a fun night just as I was grabbing my steel-toed boots to take to the deserted, dark streets toward my gloomy destination. I drove through the cold nights listening to odd late-night-radio talk shows and thinking about how sleepy I already was until the flat, smoky tops of the warehouse buildings, Nos. 1 through 12, emerged in the distance. Often at this moment, I was overcome by an eerie sensation that if I released the steering wheel and let off the gas, a tractor beam would continue to pull me along to my parking space. I never tried it, though, for fear it might actually happen.

A dim, jaundiced light lit every warehouse I’ve ever worked in. It always took a minute for my eyes to adjust before I could clock in and hide the snack I had brought behind the expired creamer and Tupperware of mystery meat in the back of the break room fridge. Once inside the belly of the building, I walked with caution, for fear I might get struck by a fast-moving forklift or a skid of shrink wrap.  However, there were no known defenses against the dry warehouse air. By the end of the week, my lips would be chapped so badly they’d look as though I’d kissed a cactus. 

For this particular job, I worked as a package sorter on an assembly line. From my perch, I could see people being busy throughout the building. Interestingly, I was even able to uncover a few guys in my old high school class who I thought had been missing since my junior year. Occasionally, one would break free from his work, come up, open his wallet, and show me a mini photo of his baby.

But, overall, the racket of the machines and conveyor belts made it difficult to hear yourself think, much less talk to anyone. Some conversation would have been nice, too, but after I’d learned the gist of the job, they had banished me to a platform all alone.

Occasionally, my supervisor would tap me on the shoulder and tell me to take 15. Break time at 3 a.m., amounted to little more than my sitting in the break room with perhaps one or two other lone souls fighting to keep my eyes open until it was time to clock back in. Sometimes I’d stare at the plastic ashtray on my table until everything turned blurry. Other times, I’d pick up an ancient issue of Sports Illustrated that someone had left behind and read about the controversy surrounding the Brooklyn Dodgers’ decision to move to the West Coast.

I was put in charge of sorting little packages; that is, packages weighing less than 10 lbs (?). These packages held a variety of things, but most were green-tinted transparent bags containing biopsies being sent from hospitals to labs for testing. Each biopsy bag contained a sealed stubby cup of liquid, a vile of blood, or another transparent pouch containing a hunk of something, and they bumped down a conveyor belt from an unseen source. 

I can’t remember the exact details of the job. But whatever I did required my handling and separating these packages with latex gloves that waterlogged the skin on my hands so badly that it took nearly a half hour for my fingers to regain color and feeling. When it was finally time to go home, I’d pop the gloves off and wonder if my hands were ever going to turn back to normal.

Then I’d drive home just as the morning sun was poking through the trees. As I faded in and out of consciousness behind the wheel from lack of sleep, I’d wonder if any of those biopsies I’d sorted belonged to someone who draws cartoons for a living.

For one, they produce a stink more toxic than a napalmed skunk. It shocks the nostrils and coats the whole mouth with an invisible paste. I’ve never heard of a child going blind from the stink, but I’d be surprised if it has never happened.

Another thing is that sows — the big, mean momma hogs — hate when you castrate their young. They literally want to chew the nape off your neck. Luckily, they’re penned up and can’t maul you. They sure try, though. They try with all their hoggish might. They snort and spit and tear with their pig teeth at the flimsy iron rods of their pens, all the while trying to laser you dead with their murderous, red eyes. 

This behavior does add a dash of thrill to the job. But, in general, I took no pleasure in this dirty work. I naturally felt sadistic, not to mention squeamish. Because I’m a male myself, the very thought of castration makes me want to triple up on undies and wear granite pants. I’m still not sure how I ever did the job without hyperventilating. I must have compartmentalized the trauma of the task in my mind somehow, maybe the same way soldiers sometimes do with their fears during battle. 

To the pig farmer’s defense, castrating pigs is a necessary evil. I know that much. Should the practice ever be banned, everyone’s bacon would taste tough and rubbery like deflated balloons. Testosterone simply ruins pig meat, much as how the word slacks ruins people’s concept of pants. Furthermore, if left alone, these male piglets would ultimately turn into boars – ugly, vicious animals that would first overrun the farm and, eventually, the world.       

For the record, I did none of the actual castrating myself. I have neither the stomach nor the surgical hands for it. Instead, my job was to pluck the piglets from their pen, one by one, away from their 300-lb, snorting-mean mommas, with the principal rule being — steer clear of the sow’s bite.  

Then, I’d pass the piglets to my friend Shawn, who’d promptly clamp each one of their heads between his knees and grip their legs like handlebars for Uncle Wes, who performed the surgery with a razor and his best Freudian accent:”Yah goin’ ta feelu slight presha.” The procedure itself lasted less than 10 seconds; the mental images, a lifetime.

Wes would then douse the newly initiated eunuch with Bactine. Then it was onto the next piglet. Naturally, the female piglets were spared the rite of castration. However, they did get their curly tails lopped off. Pig tails, I learned, in their natural curly state, are prone to infection.

When we weren’t castrating pigs, we were either shoveling their manure in the heat or chasing one that had escaped back into its pen. So I learned a lot from working on a hog farm; for example, I learned that I would never want to own a pig for a pet, not even Wilbur from Charolette’s Web.

Before that summer, I was often guilty of entertaining the occasional romantic notion of doing strong, mean man labor on rustic landscapes under a setting sun. I imagined a tough but fairly painless work environment, where I almost always looked like Tristan (Brad Pitt) in the movie Legend of the Fall. It was typical for me to roam the countryside by horse – a horse that I had broke. Sometimes, I might free an entangled lamb from a thicket, rescue a bawling calf caught in the middle of a rushing stream, or scoop up the earth and smell the fragrance of my toil.  

Never did my hands turn into two hunks of bleeding blisters, or my lower back feel as though it’d been struck by lightening after operating the hay escalator for four hours. Nor did I ever imagine myself white-eyeing, which is, I learned, the name of the condition for when the victim’s eyes go goofy from the onset of heat exhaustion. But this was more the reality. Add to this: farm hours start insanely early.  

Every predawn for three months, Shawn would pick me up. I’d finish the rest of my previous night’s sleep in the passenger seat on the ride there, while Shawn drove, manned the radio, and got on me about being a poor conversation partner. Once at the farm, I’d stumble out of the car to a low-slung sun poking just over the trees. Then we’d go find Uncle Wes to receive our orders for the day.

For our first assignment, we were banished to the tobacco fields. When we started, the tobacco was already in the ground and blooming nicely. So, the main thing at this point was the vigorous task of weed maintenance. Wes, therefore, introduced us to the gas-powered tiller.  

There was just one tiller, so Shawn and I took turns guiding it through the lanes of the tobacco field. The tiller moved about an inch an hour, giving you considerable time to think. I usually just zoned out on one of the churning blades or something and let the muffled roar of the engine carry me away to a distant daydream. 

Yes, it was a fairly peaceful process, that is, until your forearms started to heat up from gripping the strong, metal levers that propelled the tiller forward. The pain would typically set in midway through, when Shawn or I, whoever was left behind to kick dirt clods, was just a speck on the horizon. It’d begin with a slight tingle, which deceived you into thinking you could take it. Then, suddenly, the deep, burning hurt would bite down. It was probably equivalent to injecting lava into your arms. Daydreams turned into prayers for strength and deliverance. And any screams were drowned out by the roar of the tiller engine and the heavy sense of isolation.           

Sometimes, while letting our forearms cool, we’d try to come up with ways to entertain ourselves. We’d wing dirt clods at a stationary target or swim in the pond with the pigs. Once we got so desperate, we shoved a bright green tobacco leaf into our mouth, to see if it tasted like the store kind. It did not, of course. It tasted like chemicals or a bad salad soaked in insecticide dressing. But we were glad we did it anyway.

When we weren’t in the fields, we were either baling hay or chasing pigs, which I will talk about next time.

From 6 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Monday through Thursday, in the white heat of the day, we’d rove the deserted county roads in a dusty white utility van in search of weed-covered guardrails. The van resembled an ice-cream truck stripped of all its fun. It had commercial-airplane passenger seats in back and a good-for-nothing stick shift that’d slip into neutral in mid drive. Our foreman behind the wheel, who I’ll call Gil, would call that stick shift all sorts of names until he wrestled it back into place.

Only a select few made up the weed-eating crew: three college punks — Pat, Lucas and me — and Gil, a retiree who worked summers, wore a purple polka-dot hat with a tiny brim, and suffered daily back spasms. The first few weeks on the job didn’t seem so bad. We got to sport safety face shields that resembled college-campus riot gear and wield gas-powered weed-eaters that roared like chainsaws. On breaks, we’d wrestle each other in the ditch, crack jokes, or listen to Gil under a shade tree go on about the world of antique collecting.

Our job mainly involved Gil pulling up to a guardrail, lighting a Camel No-filter and turning us loose. We’d massacre every weed in sight. Then we’d return to the van, weed guts and bugs plastered to our face shields. We’d climb into our respective airplane seats and doze off while Gil drove us to our next weedy destination, only the wayward stick shift or Gil’s growling through another back attack interrupting our dreams.

After about a week of this, I woke up one morning scratching my forearms to the dermis. My arms pulsated. They were bumpy, red and swollen, like Popeye’s, and had the texture of a gourd. Poison ivy, poison oak, poison sumac – I had all the poisons. To combat this, I wore long sleeves to work. Nights, I soaked my body to the neck in Calamine Lotion and wore knee socks over my hands to bed, to keep from scratching in my sleep.

Just as my forearms started returning to normal, what looked like inflamed anthills started dotting my ankles. I scratched the tops off until they bled and scabbed over. Then these tiny anthills started moving north. I found one behind my knee. Then behind my other knee. Then along every square inch of my inseams. Then in places I was too embarrassed to tell the doctor about.

Later I found out that these were chigger bites. Chiggers are these mean grass mites that live in tall grass and burrow into the skin, where they live for about a week before they move on. Although they sound lethal, they are generally harmless and go away, but not before they become your most-hated insect.

At summer’s end, we all desperately wanted off the weed-eating crew. We were so sick of weeds. So sick. The chiggers were relentless. And the blinding August heat just kept getting hotter. The van had no air condition, so we had to settle for whatever hot breath the wind blew through the windows and doors. We wondered why the tires on our ice-cream truck hadn’t yet melted into black pools of rubber and watched in disbelief as Gil lit up one hot cigarette after another.

Naturally, our van became a mobile insane asylum. I grew agitated and constantly swatted at imaginary ticks crawling up my legs. It wasn’t unusual for Pat, before disappearing into the weeds, to raise his weed-eater over his head, give it gas, and laugh like a lunatic. Lucas, rather reserved anyway, grew even more disturbingly quiet. We eyed him cautiously. And poor Gil let our sophomoric antics get to him. This became most apparent on the day he chased Pat around the van.

When it was all finally over, and my post-traumatic-stress-disorder symptoms had subsided, I was able to strike one more thing off my list of possible college majors: weed-eating.

My next article will be about my experience on a tobacco/pig farm.

I realize I haven’t submitted a blog post in a long while. Whatever small following I had has surely moved on. But like Joaquin Phoenix, I’m still here.

I’ve no excuses for my behavior, really. I’ve just been, well, lazy, I guess. Or, perhaps, exhausted is a better word. Fatherhood, although ineffably rewarding and fun, sometimes just straight wears me out. And when nighttime falls and the little one is tucked away safely in her crib, instead of blogging I choose to do other things, like sleep or pet the dog.

To my credit, though, my hiatus hasn’t been entirely unproductive. I was able to amass a small collection of crummy, half-written, unpublished posts that never made the cut (and could perhaps even incriminate me in some countries should Wikileaks get ahold of them). They’re lying about in the Land of Misfit Posts waiting for me to either edit or delete them into oblivion. It’s kind of sad. I never set out to destroy the things I write. It just comes with the territory of being a blogger, I guess.

Anyway, to make up for my long absence, I’ve decided to post an exciting series on the odd jobs I’ve held during my lifetime. I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked at a pig/tobacco farm and on a warehouse assembly line. I worked a paper route, waited tables and paved county roads. I’ve battled weeds along guardrails a mile long. I’ve almost died from heat exhaustion while baling hay. I worked as a bricklayer’s assistant and as a flagger on a deserted country road. I’ve spent a summer scraping and painting the side of my parent’s house. And I’ve held the trouble light for my dad during important home-improvement projects.

So stay tuned.

Sincerely,

Yofis

Our bathroom fan still shrieks like a wounded tree shredder since the day we moved in. Theoretically, I guess I could install a new one, but the sheer idea fouls up my digestive tract. So my temporary fix: I never flip it on, not on purpose anyway. And I always make it a point to warn guests about it upon arrival, out of common courtesy and in case they don’t prefer being startled to death while carrying a full bladder. 

It’s not that I’m apathetic about this handicap. I admit that sometimes I feel like half a man. Plus, a certain romantic aura surrounds the thought of having the ability to replace your own gutters. I daydream all the time about living in pastoral settings, where I repair fences, wield a grease gun, and curse the groundhogs for tearing up the foundation. But whenever a real call of duty emerges, such as confronting the running toilet in the guest bathroom, I fall apart. I grow anxious and listless all at once, for which the only real remedy is a nap.    

Occasionally, on those rare days I wake up packed with blind confidence, I look for ways to beat my phobia of the hammer and nail. I searched the Web once for conferences that  teach grown men how to be capable. I’m not sure what I was envisioning – a sort of Boy Scouts for an older crowd, maybe? So I Googled ”man camp.” This directed me to a website that scarred me for life. These men clearly had different goals than I did. Afterward, I was disturbed so roundly, I showered twice and vowed to never again stray farther than Homedepot.com.    

I can’t even work a mousetrap. I mean I can physically. I have hands that work and stuff. But I’m scared to death to set it. I’m always afraid of losing a finger. So once, when we had a mouse in the garage, I sent Jess to the store to find a friendlier mousetrap, one that made setting it feel less like I were diffusing a bomb with unmarked wires.

So Jess brought home a modern-day plastic mousetrap that was like a spring-loaded clamp with tiny teeth on the outer rim but hollow inside minus the trigger, where the bait went. To set it, you simply pinched the back, which locked the jaws in place. Wonderful! All threats of amputating myself had been eliminated.

However, I started seriously questioning the productivity of the trap. It didn’t look like it carried much force. I even tested it with a butter knife. It snapped shut swiftly but more gently than I like for a death device. At first I wondered whether the trap was supposed to kill the mouse or just hold it captive, like a sort of PETA trap. But the directions mentioned nothing about taking survivors. So I figured it for the real thing. The mousetrap people must know what they’re doing. Why sell one that was useless? So I used peanut butter for bait and put it in the garage.        

One morning, a few days later, I checked to see if I’d caught anything. The trap was nowhere in sight. It wasn’t along the wall, not under the cars. Perplexed, I walked the perimeter and found it at the far end, beside a microscopic gap between the floor and the garage door. The trap had been sprung and appeared to have been in a terrible crash. A quarter of it had been chewed away. At first, one might have thought that the caught mouse had become live bait for a yet larger more ferocious creature, particularly one that feasts regularly on livestock. If so, where was it? And was I next?

I used a broomstick to open the trap. It coughed up a tiny tree bud. It was as if the mouse, after chewing its body out to freedom, had left me a tiny present, thanking me for using such a stupid trap. But a closer examination showed the tree bud was actually a paw. 

I felt slightly sick. I wanted to kill the rodent, not torture it. But no matter how much I wanted it not to be so, all evidence pointed to the fact that I was a major accomplice in this mouse being forced to gnaw off its hand. The brunt of the blame I lay on the brain-damaged mousetrap people. Sure, I kept my fingers, but a poor mouse out there somewhere had just earned the new nickname Lefty.

I may never be handy. And I must accept this and move on. It could be worse; I could pretend I was handy, like the mousetrap people who make useless traps. It’s obvious these people are in denial. And as a result of their reckless neglect, there is probably a whole generation of mice that can’t stand up straight. And that is messed up.

Unproductive labor is what they call it when the labor winds to a halt without a baby to show for it. And Jess had stayed stuck at 9 and a half centimeters, shy of the 10 needed, for the last six hours of an agonizing 24-hour labor marathon. To Jess’ credit, she had fought well, had endured two shoddy epidurals that took only partway, as well as a number of medieval-like procedures to help the baby along. But we could no longer sidestep the fact that the baby just wasn’t coming out. 

The ink of our approval signatures on the liability waiver form had barely dried, when one out of a swarm of scrambling nurses chest-passed me a ball of scrubs for me to wear in the operating room and hurried my wife out the door. I trotted alongside Jess’ hospital bed in route to the operating room, where they would spring the baby free, so that we could finally meet our daughter, Ellie.

When the nurse finally waved me into the operating room to see my wife, they had her laid out flat on a stainless steel table, awake and prepped for surgery. She wore a tissue-paper blue cap like mine, and a series of tubes ran out from her to the humming, beeping machines in back. A makeshift curtain blocked Jess’ view of the surgeon’s work. But from my seat beside Jess, I could see as much as I could stomach, if I craned my neck. Exhilarated by a mash-up of fear and excitement, I held Jess’ hand and alternately consoled her and stole glances over the curtain. Jess didn’t hurt.

The procedure itself probably only took ten minutes, but to me it lasted longer than the 40 weeks of pregnancy it took to get here. It especially felt forever when it came time to extract the baby from its cramped little home. The doctor and nurses braced themselves. Their brows furrowed above their surgeon masks, as they put some muscle into it. Behind the curtain, Jess’ upper half jarred sickeningly in sync with the doctor’s digging and wrenching. Dislodging the baby wasn’t as easy as I’d expected. She was in there real good, still holding on as she did before in the delivery room. Jess was still okay, though.

Finally, a nurse appeared with a suction-cup device. It fished beneath the surface of my sight and caught a head, thick with jet black hair. Then followed the attached body, the color of a powdered doughnut. The doctor thrust it onto the operating table. I listened — there was the cry!

I left Jess for just a minute to find out about the baby. Across the room, at the nurse’s station, Ellie lay on her back all sprawled out as if she’d just swum the English Channel. She had her color now and was perfectly healthy. And I confirmed that she was, in fact, a girl, as the ultrasound had said. I would have been happy regardless, as long as the baby was healthy. Nonetheless, I did experience a pinch of relief that Ellie wasn’t an Eddie, because all our baby clothes at home were pink.

When I returned to report on Ellie’s excellent condition, I found Jess crying silently as the doctor sewed her back up. “Are you in pain?” I asked, ”or just emotional?”

She nodded.

“Emotional?” I asked. 

She nodded.

Sarah Palin reportedly said that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. Most modern-day scientists and public-school textbooks say the Earth is around 4.6 billion years old. Is Palin’s claim crazy? 

As with many of life’s important questions, I’d like to first look to Saturday Night Live for answers. 

There is an unsettling yet hilarious SNL skit where comedian Will Ferrell, a 37-year-old hairy-chested, mustachioed man is born to an unsuspecting, freaked-out couple in a hospital room. He comes out glazed in sweat, holding his own umbilical cord, stands upright and bellows, “Ah man, it was hot in there.” He then proceeds to thank the doctor (Charlie Sheen) for doing him “a solid” and offers a business handshake to his appalled new guardians, introducing himself as Ted Brogan. Astonishingly, Ted even managed to place a couple of bets in the womb and asks the doctor how his team is doing. 

Ted Brogan, not yet five minutes old, would appear to the average observer as having lived on Earth for nearly forty years. He walked and talked like an adult, and in many ways was already wise to his environment. (He and some other newborn adults end up taking off for Atlantic City. How’d he know about Atlantic City?)

Now imagine meeting Adam in the Bible a minute after his birth. By all appearances, wouldn’t one presume that he was in his mid- to late twenties? Should someone have asked him how old he was right then, wouldn’t he have said, to everyone’s amazement, something like, “Oh, actually, I was just born”?

By Genesis’ account, man wasn’t the only adult-looking newborn at Creation. Plants, fish, birds and land animals, too, fast-forwarded through their infancy years to adulthood. “Then God said, ‘Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on land that bear fruit with seed in it.’” (Gen. 1:11) In other words, the very first apple trees appeared wearing apples, ready to go.

Here’s another: ”And God said, ‘Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.’” (Gen. 1:20) There’s no mention of eggs or gestation periods or learning to walk. Rather, God made a special exception with the first creatures, to get the ball rolling. All of creation was born mature and already knew how to fly, swim, walk, or, in Ted Brogan’s case, place bets.

I often think about how it’d be to bump into Adam directly after his birth. All our tools of modern Science would reveal that Adam was much older than he actually was. And Science would arrive at this conclusion because, well, the idea of the birth of an adult baby is absurd, which is why the SNL skit works for gaining laughs. Creatures don’t just appear as adults. They need time to develop. They grow in progressive stages, beginning, naturally, as a seed or a cell, as every good elementary-school student knows, and go from there.

But God is good at shortcuts. He doesn’t need to fuss with planting seeds and waiting for them to grow up. God doesn’t even need parents for babies to be born. How’s that for skipping steps? In the beginning, God simply spoke and, poof, the world was filled with adult babies, or ”Ted Brogans,” everywhere: Ted Brogan trees, Ted Brogan livestock, Ted Brogan birds. It would appear to anyone just arriving on the scene that it has been business as usual for billions of years, when in reality the Earth was just born.

Jesus demonstrates with his miracles his knack for cutting out the middleman. For example, when he feeds the five thousand, the fish and bread he multiplies skips the necessary stages of labor that make them fit for human consumption. Rather than wait for Peter to catch and clean the fish or for someone to harvest the wheat and bake it, Jesus delivers the world’s first fast food. Baskets of fish and loaves miraculously appear, fully edible, oven-baked and showing all the signs of time having elapsed in their preparation. Jesus does this with healing diseases too; he bypasses the doctor or the prescription and patches up the person on the spot. No waiting for the antibiotics to kick in.

Since God is a master at creating new things that look old, it isn’t too far-fetched then for a Christian to propose that the age of the Earth itself may be an illusion. It could be only thousands of years old, instead of the billions of years purported by many scientists.

So maybe Palin does know what she’s talking about. Or maybe she’s just a Will Ferrell fan.

Since my wife got pregnant, we’ve watched the development of our hidden baby mainly through weekly progress reports and baby-inside-the-womb illustrations emailed to us from Babycenter.com. So it wasn’t too far a leap to imagine that the surly bit of turkey running amok inside my gut was growing at top speed into a full-blown turkey, a twenty-pounder perhaps, and later I concluded, a vicious gamecock. 

Yep, it looked to be an inside job, a little message from the ghosts of the turkeys I’d eaten for Thanksgiving. No number of Tums could tame the bird. And any shimmer of relief came only when I balled up on the couch, clenched my stomach, and let my mouth hang open so my soul could moan. Right then, death didn’t seem like such a bad option.  

At the first subtle onslaught, I hadn’t the faintest idea what I was dealing with. I thought it was nothing a mere trip to the bathroom couldn’t solve. But the pain swelled with rock-gut intensity, to the point where I wondered whether I’d be able to finish out my workday. Once home, I threw on roughly five sweatshirts and collapsed on the couch in the dark, like a wounded Michelin Man. My stomach continued to bloat and harden like road kill. I clutched the sides of the couch in emergency lifeboat fashion, waiting to hurl overboard.

When my wife came home, she asked me some dutiful questions about my condition, and then sealed herself up safely in our room, where she’d stay for the remainder of the evening. The plague and I were quarantined to the couch. Soon, I slipped into a shivering sleep, dreaming wild, maddening dreams, only to wake up again at an odd hour, burning up. The Christmas tree in the corner blazed with stomach-turning vividness. I prayed an angel would unplug it; the thought of doing it myself, for some reason, made my insides heave. Nonetheless, I mustered the energy to remove a sock, and that would do for now. 

I woke up next time convinced I had heard someone shushing me. I searched frantically around the room for the shusher and fought a good fight with the blankets and the sweatshirts that had turned against me sometime during the night, spinning themselves into an effective straitjacket. ”What! What!” I cried out in a semiconscious blur, only to be answered by the lurid lights of the Christmas tree. This turkey was pulling no punches; now I was hallucinating. Later I concluded that the night shusher was either my old high school librarian, Mrs. Matthews, who’d somehow broken in, or my dog sneezing beside my head.

To my surprise I did wake up the next morning. I couldn’t help but feel mildly victorious at having survived. I felt a little better but not much. I forced down a couple Saltines for strength and even tried some tomato soup, which smelled so pungently of tomatoes it nearly dropped me on the spot. After three spoonfuls I dumped the whole mess down the drain, warding off any feelings of guilt over knowing that that would’ve been two-day’s worth of food for an Ethiopian kid.     

The next few days consisted of more of me on the couch and were pretty much redundant, much too dull to write about here. But, in retrospect, if I had to pick through the ashes of my illness, I would take away from my experience this one thing: next Thanksgiving I’m sticking to stuffing.