Mad Elephant

It's a precarious place I'm in right now. All of Calvin's favorite "moobies" are in a red DVD wallet labeled "Portable Favorites." We had to start storing them that way because the boy's become so obsessed with our DVD collection that if he gets his hands on one, he pulls it from the case and uses it like a frisbee, or spins it on his forefinger, or gets it stuck on his forefinger (found this out once when his regular noises turned into the type of scream usually reserved for the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise). So if we want to have any DVDs left that are not scratched beyond any hope of ever playing again, we had to come up with a system. (P.S. Geeks, I love you, but now would not be the time to tell me that the DVD is obsolete technology and why don't I digitize, because I'm in a kind of mood to tell you exactly what you can digitize...)

Anyway, I mentioned the red DVD wallet labeled "Portable Favorites." It's gone missing. I'll give you a moment to gasp theatrically. This is the time of night where if my son doesn't settle down and go to sleep I might have to tear my own face off just a little bit. And tonight he does not want to settle down and go to sleep without his "moobie."

I've been walking around the house in circles like I've just slipped my straitjacket, muttering things like, "How the fuck can this happen, how the fuck can this happen, how the fuck can this happen." I don't know why I mutter in such a manner, because I know exactly how the fuck this happened. The last time I handled the red DVD wallet labeled "Portable Favorites," it was four o'clock this morning, and I had been up since one-thirty, because that was the time my beloved son sprang from his bed and began behaving like a squirrel who'd just polished off a case of Red Bull. So by four a.m. the only thing I could think of to do was to hand him the red DVD wallet labeled "Portable Favorites" and let him pick his poison and pray that it settle him down.

He'd picked Dumbo. I fucking hate Dumbo. You probably remember Dumbo as an adorable baby elephant with ears that were so freakishly large that the surrounding cruel world bullied and rebuffed him mercilessly. And you probably grieved with him when they ripped him from his mother because she'd gone a little ballistic defending him and got herself locked her up for being a "mad elephant." Yeah, I used to feel that way too. I felt bad for Dumbo and his poor locked-up mother. Now I hate the little bastard, hate him. Irrationally. Eight hundred fifty-two thousand viewings of an animated Disney film, usually somewhere between 1 and 4 a.m., will do that to you. And all I can think of when I consider Mrs. Jumbo's incarceration is how quiet and peaceful it must be in there so she should stop complaining, ask the Ringmaster for a copy of Fifty Shakes of Gray, and enjoy some time off.

I sat down to write to you all in order to distract myself from going truly insane. I think it's working. And I may have overreacted a little bit about Dumbo. I was just a little cranky. I don't hate him, he's very cute and sweet and I'm very empathetic and when Mrs. Jumbo rocks him tenderly in her trunk through her prison bars to the tune of "Baby Mine, Don't You Cry," I usually have to go hide in the bathroom and sob into a towel.

Plus, look at what's happened in the meantime.

And all is right with the world.

Now excuse me while I rip the house apart and find those goddamn "moobies," or we'll end up meeting back here tomorrow and I'll probably have a few choice words to say about Curious Friggin George.