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.

Two weeks have passed since my decision to cut coffee from my daily diet, and it has been anything but pleasant. Since then, I’ve discovered that I am NOT the morning person I once prided myself on being. In fact, it’s best if no one talks to me before 9 a.m. I’m not a night person now, either. I’m just this sort of weird middle-of-the-day person. And who cares to be wide awake then?

 Honestly, I can’t see how anyone has the natural energy to do life without coffee? Man, my hours of daily required sleep have soared from six hours to nine, and I spend just about any waking hours daydreaming about taking naps.

But deep down, I know I did the right thing. Since nixing coffee, my heart rate has returned to almost normal, and those mysterious reoccurring back pains and involuntary twitches seem to have subsided.          

I first got hooked on coffee a few years out of college. It’s shocking that its high-octane ingredients had been kept secret from me for so long. One cup gives me something like superpowers. Among other miraculous feats, I can run a mile, place a complaint with the cable company, and complete an entire Tolstoy novel — all in in the span of five minutes!

Coffee makes me feel as energetic as I believe I’ll feel one day in heaven. It’s like injecting a happy dose of lightening into your heart. With coffee, my blood just circulates better. My eyes don’t burn with sleep as much. My IQ increases tenfold.(Later I learned that I was equally as dense on caffeine, only, without blinking, I could let fly unrehearsed thoughts while maintaining a hazardous, warm, caffeine-induced false reassurance that everything leaving my mouth or pen was gold. This of course was rarely the case. In fact, after coming down off an all-morning coffee binge, I often found myself wanting to apologize to anyone I may have emailed or spoken with under the influence. But, despite these minor cons, drinking coffee promised to make life better.)

Had I known about coffee in college, I’d have knocked out a grade-point average at least ten points higher. Heck, I might even have graduated summa cum laude, whatever that is. Instead, I tried lesser alternatives to perk me up, such as soda and piles of sugar. I failed at pulling an all-nighter during finals week once by downing a two-liter of Mountain Dew. I barely got through my first page of notes before it sent me to bed in a heap with a stomach ache so violent I thought I saw Elvis. By God’s grace, I believe I ended up pulling off a C- on that exam.

What’s funny, I used to hate coffee. It tasted to me like a potted plant or dirty fingers. Back then, I was young and fancy free, untainted by the black caffeinated sludge that would later appear in my system as regularly as blood or bile. Then, one day, my old roommate got a job as a coffee horse at the nearby Starbucks. And everything changed.

I’d stop in to say hi from time to time, first only sporadically, then daily, then hourly. On days business was slow, my roommate would experiment with various coffee concoctions for me to try. The first one he handed me came topped with a ball of whip cream and tasted like chocolate mousse. I nearly spit it out all over my roommate’s green Starbucks smock when I learned there were three shots of espresso in there. This is coffee! You gotta be kidding. Can I have another? 

After that, I drank coffee every day. At first, it posed as a harmless habit. In time, I couldn’t seem to function without it. Whenever I knew I’d have to be somewhere for more than two hours, I’d panic over whether coffee would be served there. And if the hazelnut creamer in my fridge was to run out before I had the chance to buy a backup, then I’d verge on near-hysteria.

This is why I had to quit drinking it: it was slowly turning me insane. Plus, I’m kind of curious to see what I am like off coffee. It’s been so long I’ve forgotten. 

So, I guess you could say that this is a mission to rescue a piece of my true self, which, in this case, is the caffeine-free self. And so far, what I’ve discovered is that I am a very sleepy individual.

The other day, when I stuck my head out the door and called for Phoebe, our rabbit-size Chihuahua mix, she was gone. Worse than that: she’d escaped! 

Soon I discovered a wee gap of missing backyard fence accessible only from under the house. An emaciated squirrel could fit through it, tops. But, upon further inspection I noticed some give in the boards framing that tiny escape hatch. Maybe an animal Phoebe’s size could squeeze through, if she pushed hard and smoothed her ears back good enough.  

“She can’t get through that,” my neighbor said, after I revealed how I supposed Phoebe got out. ”What’s she look like?”

He squinted again at our fence. “Look on Craigslist.”

“What do you mean?” I said. 

A shadow passed over his face. “They’re stealing small dogs and putting them up for sale on Craigslist.”

And here, I’d believed she simply escaped! Man, I just saw Phoebe twenty minutes ago. Would they–whoever they are–have her up on Craigslist already? 

I imagined, for a moment, Phoebe’s mug shot on the website under the label “BABY DOG 4 SALE” and wondered how much she’d go for. I was torn between cursing these low-life dog-nappers and commending them on a job well done. An operation that could move dogs from owners’ backyards to virtual marketplace all in twenty minutes was somewhat impressive.

Before I could race inside to tell Jess to check the web, Jess, running shoes on, was a tiny speck way down the street. I decided to cover the other half of our neighborhood. Perhaps Phoebe was following the familiar scent of the walking path we take her on. I bolted down the sidewalk, praying the whole way that the Lord would find our dog and bring swift and terrible justice on those dog-nappers. How sad it’d be to live in a Phoebe-less world.

 My search had barely begun when around the corner a little cotton ball of a dog appeared. It was fleeing from a woman and a little girl who’d spotted the thing and was now calling it from the open doors of a recklessly parked station wagon. As the dog came toward me, I realized I knew that crooked gait anywhere. It was Phoebe!

“Phoebe! Come here!” I called.

Phoebe trotted closer. She then darted pass me like a tiny spooked horse. Finally, I worked up a sterner tone, and she rolled over as if dead. Instantly, I scooped her up and made for home to show Jess my find. But before I could take two steps, the woman and her granddaughter (?) pulled up in their army green station wagon.

“Jump in,” she said. “I’ll take you home. Your wife is worried. She told us about Phoebe.” Her grandkid, placed in the backseat like a sack of groceries, was mutely enjoying the excitement of the day. “I rescue dogs,” the woman announced on the way. 

You mean, as a profession? I wondered. Upon reaching my house, the woman bid me farewell, the kid waved weakly from the car window, and they sped off, probably hot on the trail of more dogs to save. And just like that, the answer to my prayers was gone. 

From the curb, I hoisted Phoebe up like Simba in Lion King, to show my neighbor the search was over. He killed his mower and came over smiling. But the celebration was short-lived. I was warned again of the dog-nappers.

So what if Phoebe escaped all by herself. I was just lucky; that’s all. Dog-nappers were still on the loose, lurking, plotting, documenting the times I let Phoebe out.

Nonetheless, I couldn’t help but be happy that we’d managed to keep Phoebe in our midst for at least one more day. In the meantime, I promise to work feverishly to teach Phoebe to never, ever take dog treats from strangers. Or from my neighbor, for that matter.

 Hunched low over my steering wheel, I’ll hit my blinker so all other cars know to back off. When these shoppers leave, their spot is mine. I’ll mumble things under my breath at the unsuspecting shoppers: “That’s it, just a little closer now. O.K., it’s that nice Dodge Neon there. Get your keys. Good. Now put your Footlocker bags in the trunk. Gooood. Now go around to the driver’s side and—NO! What are you doing!  Get in your car! Don’t walk away! Come back! Noooooo…”

Eventually, after an hour or so without success, I’ll ditch the stealthy manner altogether for a more forward approach. I roll down my window. “Hey!” I yell at shoppers. “You going to your car? You leaving?” Then I throw on my blinker and follow at their heels, often nudging their shopping bags with my bumper, across the length of the parking lot.    

This is just how it is with Easton Mall parking. You got to be cutthroat. You can’t be afraid to use your horn. You got to slip it into “survival of the fittest” mentality, because trying to land a parking space there is like playing a nightmarish game of musical chairs without chairs and a state-lotto’s chance of winning.

Once, when I dropped my wife off at Easton with orders to wait while I found a parking space, I meant I’d meet up with her in roughly two minutes. A half hour and several “where are you?” text messages later, I and a line of angry drivers were stuck in the third level of a parking garage behind an oversized Escalade with its blinker flashing, giving me welder’s eye. The driver had placed himself in quite a predicament. He’d done good work at stalking his shoppers, but when it came time for them to back out of their parking space, the Escalade, overeager to swoop in for the kill, had mistakenly pulled up too far, leaving them no room to get out.

A lot of reverse lights were happening, and we cars were already piled up against the Escalade’s bumper like Christmastime Wii shoppers inside GameStop. Every time the Escalade tried to move backward an inch, I imagined its monstrous tires rolling right over my hood. So I panicked and kicked it into reverse. The driver behind me did the same, and on and on down the line it went, until a maddening series of honks erupted from cars in the back who couldn’t see the mess we were in.

Finally, after some surprising maneuvering and the discovery of a loophole in science, the shoppers got out. The Escalade, a poor judge in dimensions and spatial matters already, apparently estimated the space it had made us all pay so dearly for was too small for its bulky frame. Instead of taking its prized spot, as we’d all rightly expected, it zipped ahead into the shadows, leaving behind a mob of drivers ready for murder. I, hit with a jolt of claustrophobia and the need to break free from the honking, revving chain of cars I’d been glued to for the past several minutes, wanted nothing more to do with that cursed parking space. I floored it out of there.     

In the end, I think I finally found a parking space on the roof of the parking garage somewhere, near the blinking apex of a radio tower. When I finally found Jess, she was wandering aimlessly with a Planet Smoothie cup in hand. “Where were you?” she asked, more out of dutiful concern than seeking a real answer. I didn’t have to say. She knew: survival of the fittest.

As we walked about the area and fell obediently into our shopper roles, and as we passed a parking lot, I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching us. Aaah, I was just being paranoid. But on the other hand, maybe, just maybe, we were being stalked.  

Our initial little-kid-Christmas-morning jitters from not having to work last about an hour. It is a Utopian period of unmatched courtesy and deference toward one another. “What would you like to do?” I’ll say.

“I dunno. What do you want to do?” she’ll say. “We have so much time!”

After this, the first hints of insanity start seeping in to our otherwise peaceful home.

This year, I took my wife’s spring break off. (Jess is a preschool teacher.) It was just three days but was enough time to transform us into complete psychotic maniacs. Little things like the sound of my teeth grazing a metal fork during dinner, things that typically go by unnoticed, dropped the argument equivalent of an atomic bomb on our marriage. Jess should be happy I even have teeth.

New weird habits cropped up too. For example, halfway in to our vacation, Jess developed this chronic fake laugh. I’d say something funny, and Jess would cock her head back and let out a laugh so insane my first instincts were to Google straitjacket sales. It rivaled Willem Defoe’s Green Goblin laugh in Spiderman. After she’d finish, her eyes would roll back into position and look me dead in the face. Her own face would hold a mysterious, challenging calm.

The first time she fake laughed I was caught off guard. I felt slightly embarrassed that she had mocked my jokes. Nonetheless, I just kind of rolled with it.  But by the hundredth time, it became obvious the fake laugh had no OFF switch. WEB MD offered zero diagnosis. I wondered if I should rush her to the doctor, the ER.  Maybe if I scared her it would go away like hiccups. But this was no hiccup…

You couldn’t reason with the fake laugh. Jess didn’t like it either. It had taken complete control of her. Her body was simply a host for it. It grew and swelled as our vacation went on, and the more you begged it to stop the stronger and more persistent it became, like a cable company telemarketer. 

Near the end, Jess started fake laughing at everything in sight, even herself. One time she was brushing her hair, getting ready to go somewhere, when I heard her crazy cackle from the other room. It startled me. Our dog trembled, got up and stood at the door.

“Jess, what are you doing?” I asked.

“Oh, just laughing.” 

Then one day, poof, it was gone. The fake laugh had disappeared as abruptly and suddenly as it had arrived. Yes, our vacation was over. Strangely, I was glad to go back to work. 

Now, we both act as if the fake laugh never happened, for fear that the mere mention of it might bring it back. It is a fear we live with every day.

As recently as Thanksgiving, I was telling everyone, including myself, that I was 31. I’d be 32 in February. Not until I worked the math in my head and then re-confirmed it twice on the calculator did I realize–no, wait…carry the two–I’d be 33.

Initially, I felt robbed. A year of my life had been smuggled, and now I had to kick my list of life’s ambitions into overdrive. Why, I was supposed to have appeared on Jeopardy by now. I was supposed to be holding down a successful job, a job that meant something, one that I was thoroughly passionate about, like drawing cartoons for Mad Magazine. But these were the least of my worries.

I still felt early-20s inside, but when I looked in the mirror the other day, my mug resembled a well-worn catcher’s mitt. I saw harder angles, a more rigid brow. And in some areas, mainly around the jaw line, my skin had adopted the qualities of Silly Putty. There was more extra skin than I’d remembered. It was as though my skull had slightly shrunk; not enough to cause people to stop and stare, but just enough for me to notice and feel self-conscience the rest of the workday.

Furthermore, my heart nearly seized two weeks ago when my wife, Jess, riding passenger en route to our birthday party (Jess has a February birthday too), started plucking at what she said was a straight white hair jousting from my curly head.  When she finally presented the rogue hair to me, it had the exact stubborn spring of a toothbrush bristle. You couldn’t bend it without it snapping right back into place. 

I’ve spotted random gray hairs before, but never ones with all the pigment wrung out. I thought this kind of thing only happens after one witnesses a traumatic event, runs into a ghost, or gets struck by lightening. I was very distressed about it. 

 But then I warmed up to the idea. Anyone who has ever looked at me probably has guessed correctly, either subconsciously or otherwise, that I wished my hair was straight. So, if the sample white hair was a sneak preview of my whole hair’s final outcome, I predicted, by 50, the curl in my hair would be no more. In fact, it would be straight. A slow, pleasant takeover was at hand, a straight-haired revolution. How fantastic!   

I knew it wouldn’t be the cool, straight variety with the long flowing locks. I’d have a bristle head, like an albino porcupine. But still! I couldn’t get over the thought of my dream of owning straight hair actually coming true.

Once this dream comes to past, I have good reason to believe that the rest of my dreams will soon be fulfilled, because, no matter what people say, this is a straight-haired world. Whereas Mad Magazine may be reluctant to add a curly-headed me to their staff, a straight-haired me would no doubt land the job no problem. I doubt I’d even need to show them clips or a resume. Yes, I was well on-track with my future goals.

So, 33 isn’t a bad age, I guess. But 50? Now that’s a good age. If you need me, I’ll be in the mirror searching for white, STRAIGHT hairs.

From K through 5, my bus route to school was fairly uneventful. Oh, there was the usual rambunctiousness found among a bus-load of healthy elementary-school kids, packed with wild monkey energy. But there were never any harmful intentions toward anyone onboard. I always rode along, head against the window, watching the world roll peacefully by, feeling generally safe in my surroundings. 

On occasion, the chocolate milk we had for lunch would surge through our veins, turning us half-mad, and we had little choice but to act up. Otherwise, our little-kid bodies would burst. Sometimes the excitement we couldn’t contain en route to a field trip would get the best of us, and someone would mess up and spit out the window or wet his pants. (Not me, of course.)

But during these turbulent times, when the bus driver peered at us through that movie-screen-size rearview mirror of hers and yelled at us to straighten up or she’d march us right into the principal’s office, we’d snap to immediate attention. Deep down we longed to be subordinate. We felt bad when reprimanded. In fact, let it be known, we wanted our bus driver to like us.

Not so in middle school. The middle school building stood on the opposite side of town. Therefore, my bus route changed. Instead of the once happy neighborhoods, it now crept through those of kids who despised their bus driver. I’d expect better manners on prison buses. They’d yell obscenities at the bus driver and laugh at her empty threats. You mean she won’t really turn this bus around and take us back to school?  Even more appalling, they lived to destroy the lives of their classmates.

The worst thing about it was that several of the mean kids on my bus were legally old enough to join the Army. I was terrified of them, defenseless. I watched in stark horror at their antics as I tried to make myself invisible. I’d take a backseat, white-knuckling my Trapper Keeper, so no one could bully me from behind. Most the time this worked. The mean kids took little notice of me. They’d turn their wrath on each other or on a kid who stunk or looked funny. But sometimes the backseats were taken, and I’d find myself in the shark-infested middle of them. 

Over the years, I have mostly tried to black out my sixth-grade bus route. But once in a while, when watching a beautiful sunset or something, I’ll get whacked over the head with a sudden violent vision of the past.

There I am, in sixth grade, on the bus, with an acne cluster on my forehead, just trying to make it to school. Then snap! I hear the nauseous sound of a thick rubber band cutting the air. It came from behind. This is quickly followed by a burning sensation on my nape, which spreads like lightening to my toes. I can feel my pulse in the welt that is forming. On instinct, I turn to confront the source. When I meet the eyes of the 18-year-old hoodlum in the seat behind me, I immediately know I made a mistake. But it’s too late. I already turned around. 

“What are you looking at?” barks the kid. He looks crazy, like he’s itching to hurt me. ”You gotta problem?”

“Umm…” I say. “Well, umm, I thought you might have accidentally flipped me with a rubberband.”

“Nope.”

“OK. Sorry.”

Sometimes they wouldn’t even use rubber bands. Instead, they’d simply flatten their hands like paddles, lick the length of their flag-pole-length fingers, and smack the Dickens out of some poor, unsuspecting sap’s neck. I guess the wetness allowed for greater sting. I quickly learned to pop my shirt-collars to absorb some of the blow.

Then, one day, out of the blue, my bus route changed, just like that. I don’t know why. I didn’t even question it. I just figured God had heard my prayers. At first, suffering flashbacks, I’d scurry to the corner of my seat and tremble whenever anyone getting on or off the bus would accidentally brush against me. But in time, this all passed. I started wearing my shirt-collars down again. I even befriended some older kids–who were nice.

Nowadays, I sort of feel like I did when I was on the bad bus route. But substitute the bus route for the present-day bad economy. One day you’re just riding happily along, feeling safe, and then suddenly a major, century-old financial institution goes up in smoke. Car companies run out of gas. And, instead of your neck, it’s your 401K that’s getting smacked around. Or your job gets a wet-willy. (For those who don’t know, a wet willy is when someone jams a wet finger in your ear.)

Yes, throw in some Joe Biden gaffes, and you got some pretty scary times. But for the sake of Optimism, I reassure myself that things will one day bounce back. I have hope that my bus route will once again stretch through the peaceful neighborhoods of the bull market. In the meantime, however, I don’t think it’s such a bad idea to wear my collar up.

I hadn’t planned it this way. Jess and I started out with dinner and a movie, prepping ourselves for the proper ringing in of the new year. By ten o’clock we were back home, as planned, watching Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve with Ryan Seacrest 2009. (Is it me, or does this title get longer every year?) By 10:15, I wasn’t ready for the surprising discovery I’d made. To my astonishment, I realized I had Dick Clark on more out of duty than enjoyment. 

I knew not wanting to spend New Year’s Eve with Dick Clark was wrong, un-American and, perhaps in some households, immoral. I felt strong with guilt. On TV, dedicated New Year’s Eve enthusiasts shivered in Times Square streets, like homeless revelers, sacrificing their comfort so I could be entertained from the warmth of my own home. Alternative Rock Bands straight off the cover of Teen Magazine plucked guitar strings with frozen fingers for my New Year’s Eve benefit. And here I’d rather watch Seinfeld re-runs.

How ungrateful was I? I tried to fix things. I resolved to get into a chilly so-so performance by a sleeveless Taylor Swift. Next, the Jonas Brothers, and their Tom Hanks haircuts, brought all they had, too. I swayed to their garage-band sound.

It was no use. My soul was simply unfazed, no, worse, it was bored. Not even Ryan Seacrest with his puffy coat and ear muffs could cheer me up. What was wrong with me? What did 2008 do to me to make me so calloused? Was it the government bailouts? Too much Hillary Clinton? Brad Pitt’s new trash-stache? I didn’t even know myself anymore.

Before Will.I.Am could finish his bit, I had flipped to a station showing the movie Elf. Jess, who was half-asleep by now, hardly put up a fight. Now I had seen Elf probably a hundred times already this Christmas season, but I loved it exactly the same every time. As Buddy the Elf (Will Ferrell) was singing his Christmas gram to his estranged dad, I promised myself that I’d flip back to Dick Clark before midnight.

Sadly, this never happened. Jess and the dog were snoring on the couch by 11:30, and secretly (I’m just now admitting this to myself) I was happy to call it quits for the night. In bed by 11:45, I decided to ring in the new year by reading a book. Beside me, Jess and the dog were unconsciously paying their last respects to the dwindling 2008.

At exactly midnight, I heard fireworks outside, which according to next day’s news reports some were actually gunshots fired at the sky. Evidently, some locals had celebrated themselves into believing they were figures of the Old West. Though not much for public safety, these urban cowboys were impressively punctual. The ringing of gunshots hit midnight right on the nose. I suspect they’ll show up perfectly on time for their court dates. 

It was 12:01 when a dull sadness caught me off guard. I tried to pinpoint the source. I guessed first it was simply nostalgia for the old year. That’s perfectly normal. Maybe it was because I’d missed the ball drop, and the count down, and all the magical feelings that come with welcoming in the new year with a formal fuss. People were blowing horns, wearing party hats, and kissing their spouses in the living rooms of the houses of my imagination. Not to be left out, I kissed Jess’ sleeping head. She didn’t budge.

Then I guessed it. My serotonin levels had experienced the equivalent of a train wreck after taking in the depressing Will Smith movie, Seven Pounds, earlier that evening. I won’t give away the ending, but let’s just say I hope I don’t accidentally see it again. I was sort of hoping to ride into the new year on a lighter note. But this dream, as were several other 2008 dreams I had, such as getting to hang out with the Burger King, were blatantly squelched.

Anyway, once I solved the mystery of my low mood, I was able to move on to the more serious question of the evening. Why couldn’t I care less about making a big to-do over New Year’s Eve?

By 12:15 I found the slippery solution: I was happily content with what I had at home. I wasn’t missing out on all the people and parties out there. They were missing out on me and all that was with me, i.e, my wife, dog, and Buddy the Elf. Comparatively, everything else, Dick Clark included, had lost its luster.

Whew…all this psychoanalyzing had made me sleepy. I killed the lights at 12:20a.m., January 1, 2009. From there I slipped into my first dreams of the new year. I can’t remember what I’d dreamed that night exactly, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it had something to do with paling around with the Jonas Brothers, firing guns into the frosty air, and looking-forward to getting home early.