On the Ex

I’m speeding back to New York after a day spent mediating a case in the hellhole that is Wilmington Delaware. I would have thought that with so many credit card companies and banks having their headquarters in Wilmington that the train station would at the very least sport the latest in air conditioning technology. After all, there are a lot of people wearing ties over collars that people can get hot under down here when the economy rolls up the red carpet and decides to head south for the summer. Yet, in the true spirit of Republican miserliness, the lightly taxed multinational banks contribute nothing to the City they call home, resulting in a crumbling infrastructure and a temperature of 95 degrees in the station and 98 on the platform. I was sent here to mediate a case involving an airplane and a pole and the parsing of responsibility for said airplane striking said pole, but was unavailing in coming to a mutually acceptable resolution. The only thing good to come out of the day was the delightfully greasy french fries that I had for lunch. Presently I’m relaxing in the relative luxury of the Acela “high-speed” train to New York, paid for by my employers, of course. After a day spent blustering and being blustered, a fastish train with a bar car and working bathroom are small but necessary comforts. It is here in the Northeast Corridor where one truly gets a sense of the impact of the current run-up in gas prices. Businessmen, “suits” in the internet vernacular, are deserting their automobiles in droves and flocking to the train to make the run from Washington DC to Boston and points in between. The result has been, regrettably, a longer wait in the bar car, but the overall effect on the environment has likely been positive.

Since E. and I moved in together I have been deftly avoiding the issue of how to integrate her ex-husband into our little domestic party. Clearly he has a right to associate with his son and be a part of his life, but his rights vis a vis D. do not, by implication, translate into the right to sit on my couch and raid my refrigerator. I was neither married to the guy nor did I have any of his children, so aside from the necessary contact involved in visitations and such my interest in getting to know him or have him as a member of my circle of acquaintances is less than zero. This is especially so because the first six months of my relationship with E, I listened to a litany of comments about what a manipulative, drunken, abusive, self-absorbed so and so he was, so I can hardly be blamed for harboring a less than rosy picture of him now. I certainly do not want Jack regularly exposed to a person with such a self-absorbed world view.

That said, I have neither the desire nor the inclination to get in between A. and D. D, for whatever reasons make sense to the three year old mind, is rather fond of his father and A., in his own way, seems to be genuinely fond of D. I’m a born cynic and I chalk up this recent interest in son’s well-being to his more innate tendency toward extreme narcissism rather than any desire to genuinely connect with D. A. was more interested in the bottom of the bottle than in D. for the last three years and even in the first months after he stopped drinking he was much more interested in making E’s life miserable than he was in becoming a part of his son’s life. Regular threatening phone calls, incessant focus on himself, etc. E. for her part, is one of the nicer people I have ever met and she is willing to give A the chance to repair his relationship with D. This is a kind and wonderful thing to do, but I know even as nice as she is, she’s doing it for D. not for A.

I wonder if the fact that I could never envision abandoning my own son for ANY period of time colors the way I look at A. Frankly, although he styles himself some sort of macho dude, (on his brief visitations he dispenses an awful lot of fathering tips to random people in the mall who have no idea that he sees his son for about ten hours a month) I see him so much less of a man because he couldn’t handle the responsibility of raising a child.

II suppose my ego is tied up in all this too. While I get to deal with the day to day heavy lifting he gets to show up every other week with a bag of toys and by virtue of his mere presence thinks of himself as father of the freaking year. Of course he is just playing daddy, while I am, in fact, an actual daddy. He chose to be absent from his son’s life and that is something I'm having a difficult time understanding. In my opinion If you haven’t wiped your kid’s ass or changed their diaper, you are merely an uncle, no matter what your genes say.

More on Vaccines

There is an interesting posting today on Broadsheet in Salon which notes that the pro-vaccine lobby has recruited their own celebrity, Amanda Peet, to refute the allegations made by Jenny McCarthy on Oprah last September that vaccines can indeed be linked to autism. In the letters section following the posting the two sides clashed in a pretty ugly display of collective ignorance, although the pro-vaccine side was far more aggressive and seemingly certain in their beliefs. The readership of Salonresides squarely in the left-of center side of the big tent we call American politics so I was a little surprised that the letters ran 2-1 in favor of vaccinations. Personally, I found it interesting how people who wouldn’t trust the government with their privacy somehow think that when it comes to health issues the government is beyond reproach. Here is Robert Kennedy’s story from Rolling Stone from 2005 where he discusses why the general public has carefully and deliberately been led to believe that there is no link between the mercury preservative themerosol and autism. As usual it involves corrupt politicians and the quest for drug company profit. American collective intelligence has become so dulled by incessant propaganda that all the government has to do to create a general belief that something is true (i.e. there is no link between mercury and autism) is repeat it incessantly and get the mass media to repeat it incessantly, and then paint anyone who disagrees with the official party line as a nutcase. They have done this successfully to opponents of the Iraq war and wireless surveillance and, apparently, with people who think that the health of their families is more important than shielding drug companies from liability for creating a generation of neurologically damaged children.

Here’s a pretty stupid idea. Make a brightly colored and tasty candy in the exact shape and size of small hard plastic Lego building blocks. I don’t know about you but I’m not entirely sure that my 18 month old is capable of discerning the difference between candy and plastic. Someone at Lego Headquarters better put the Corporate Counsel on speed dial. I can almost see the legions of plaintiff’s attorneys lining up to file lawsuits over this one.

I'm Back

The boxes are almost all unpacked, the cable and internet are hooked up and the commute is proving manageable and even pleasant. Thus ends the first week in Great Neck. I spent a rather manic day last week getting a slew of mundane things accomplished; parking permit, library card, parks card, DMV, a trip to Home Depot. Unlike the City of New York, you need a permit or card of some sort to access the services provided by the Village of Great Neck. I suppose they don’t want any interlopers from across the Queens line to sneak in and enjoy the cool refreshing waters of the Parkwood Swimming Pool. After living within the five boroughs of New York City for the last 20 years, it is a very strange feeling to be able to access parks, beaches and well-stocked libraries without filling out forms, waiting on lines or being ground into dust by the effort it takes to get to them. I remember discovering when I moved to Staten Island that on the week-end the MTA turned off all subway service from 14th Street to Battery Park (for repairs) every week-end. Going to Manhattan on a Sunday required a ferry ride, then either a cab (impossible to find) or a bus, whose appearance in the Wall-Street area on a Sunday was about as rare an occurrence as finding a unicorn in Red Hook.

The kicker is that I’m not paying for any of it. Since I don’t own a home I am simply leeching off the super-rich up in Kings Point who probably pay more in property taxes that I make in a year. Granted I don’t have my own personal tennis court or even a backyard, but if I exit my apartment building and turn left I can be in a pleasant fully-equipped –for-children park in less than a minute and there are something like a hundred million public tennis courts in Great Neck.

Of course the home front will take a little bit of tweaking until everything is up and running but that’s to be expected. The move is a big deal for all of us. Aside from some miscommunication earlier in the week-end Erin and I have been fitting together quite nicely and the kids have been getting along as well. I did have to hide the Shrek II DVD yesterday after realizing that D-Train was on his 3rd viewing and I was getting starting to get alarmed that he was doing some permanent damage to his brain’s processing unit. Jack has also been in rare form since he has 4 teeth coming in at the same time. This has made him rather unhappy and me a little jumpy. Last night he had clearly reached his limit for travel, pain and hunger and he let me know it in no uncertain terms. Children can make some very annoying noises when they’re upset. Noises that zero in on your one irritated nerve and pluck it like a bowstring. Thank god when I put him down to sleep last night he had the decency to just roll over, insert his thumb, and drift off to the place where there are no molars, the chicken nuggets are always crispy and the sippy cup is always full of juice.