The Blog of Wistar Watts Murray

Gentlemen, I know that sometimes babies can be scary. They like women better than they like you and  they can make you feel like a total zero by crying in your arms in front of other people. You don’t have boobs to feed them with and it’s hard to remember age-appropriate songs to sing to them. It’s all very unnerving. However next time you are in a nursery, here are some thoughts to fortify and encourage you:

1. You are much bigger than a baby. You could probably smash one under the heel of your shoe.

2. Babies are more scared of you than you are of them.

3. Bird babies eat throw-up. Human babies know that’s disgusting. Wouldn’t you prefer to wipe baby vomit off a onesie than to watch some little person swallow its own mother’s chunks?

4. You get laid more than a baby and you can hold your alcohol better. If you were in a fraternity together, these facts would make you a superior frat brother to the baby.

5. Babies that don’t talk yet are especially intimidating, because they could be thinking hateful thoughts about you. But you can use this to your advantage. You can imagine things a loser would say and then say them aloud in a baby voice. Everyone will get that you’re imitating the baby and they will laugh because everything a baby might say is stupid funny. “Sometimes I think I only have to fart and then I accidentally poop myself in public.” Secretly, you will know that the baby was just shamed. One day you can remind the baby that you won this early power struggle.

6. You really won’t drop the baby. Everyone thinks this is going to happen but it rarely does. And men tend to have bigger hands and more practical shoes than women so they are even less likely to spill the goods. If you are still worried, just sit with the baby in your lap in a comfortable chair, or if you are throwing the baby up and down, avoid doorways and concrete floors.

7. It doesn’t emasculate you to be majorly into babies. Most women find it really cool when a guy’s best friends are babies, especially if they all wear matching outfits and drink from the same bottle.

8. Here is a tip that I saw once on a television show. It’s for real and it works every time. If you have a crying baby in your arms, just keep saying “Shhhhhh” in a loud and sustained way right in the baby’s ear. This seriously works. The baby shuts up immediately and listens to you like you are God. I guess the sound reminds the baby of being in the womb. Anybody who witnesses this trick will think you’re a genius or a real life Baby Whisperer.

In conclusion, it’s always good to be fearless about babies because your girlfriend may or may not be lying to you about her birth control.

You already know that the biological legacy of our chemical supply is my pet cause. Here’s more from a CNN article today:

Michelle Hammond and Jeremiah Holland were intrigued when a friend at the Oakland Tribune asked them and their two young children to take part in a cutting-edge study to measure the industrial chemicals in their bodies.

[The] tests revealed that their children — Rowan, then 18 months, and Mikaela, then 5 — had chemical exposure levels up to seven times those of their parents.

“[Rowan’s] been on this planet for 18 months, and he’s loaded with a chemical I’ve never heard of,” Holland, 37, said. “He had two to three times the level of flame retardants in his body that’s been known to cause thyroid dysfunction in lab rats.”

The technology to test for these flame retardants — known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) — and other industrial chemicals is less than 10 years old. Environmentalists call it “body burden” testing, an allusion to the chemical “burden,” or legacy of toxins, running through our bloodstream. Scientists refer to this testing as “biomonitoring.”

As usual, some defenders of the chemical legacy say that presence does not equal proof. But wouldn’t we rather err on the side of caution, especially considering how sensitive our bodies are (especially our hormones) and how these same chemicals have been proven to cause cancers and reproductive problems in lab animals?

I hate it when the news makes me preachy. I wish there were more excuses to write about funny stuff, like gay wizards. Quit screwing things up, world!

Tonight I attended the Montessori School Spaghetti Dinner, a gala fundraising event that the children call a “sketti dinner” or alternatively a “spasgetti dinner.” We drank powdered lemonade out of paper cups and managed to maintain adult conversation over the din of students pretending to be either monsters or vulnerable peasants being attacked my monsters. Montessori has the world’s prettiest, most tattooed teachers, but they were tired from a day of molding young minds and cooking noodles. They were probably a little disappointed that no parents thought to bring a keg of beer to hide in the playground. I had a great time because I’m crazy about 1) dessert buffets, and 2) small children that other people have raised to be adorable. I heard one little girl on the jungle gym say, “I’m so shwetty from all this running.” After dinner it got dark outside fast and the kids sprinted back and forth like echo-locating bats while Darren and I stumbled around trying not to crash into playground equipment or cute outfits emerging from the night. It was like a scene from Children of the Corn but instead of a cornfield there were swingsets, sandboxes, and parents trying not to drop their cupcakes on the ground. Lastly, there were two canaries living in the dining hall and one little boy tucked himself under the blanket spread over their cage in order to stress them out to within an inch of their lives. I saw the back of his short legs and a convulsing blanket where his head should have been and I knew I had to do something. I caught the boy right before he tipped the cage sideways in order to grab a canary tail through the bars in his marinara-stained fingers. By saving the canaries, I felt like I did my good deed for the night. However our attempt at singing the birds to sleep was foiled because the little boy kept sneezing into the cage.

Excellent dinner, Montessori! May your children go easy on you Monday morning.

It seems like only yesterday

you taught your stuffed animals to read.

Now they are in college.

Your hair is so long

like a mermaid’s.

I borrowed your running shorts.

I’ll wash them before I give them back.

I’m glad your bed is high

with a net around it

so the boys can’t get in.

Since when do you play the banjo?

Am I the only one who would kill to live in a house like this? Think of all the pretend chores you could get done. I would probably be a creative genius today if I had grown up with a little fake washing machine to stimulate my imagination.

I want to put a Rose Petal Cottage in the living room so I can teach a certain someone how to do the dishes properly.

I’m sitting at home on a Friday night watching ABC because that’s what was on when I came home and I’m too lazy to get the remote from D because he’s on the other side of the sectional couch. Friday night TV is horrible unless you’re into news magazines and/or murders committed by the least likely suspect. But 20/20 just came on and changed my life in an episode entitled “How Young Is Too Young?” I was tuning in and out until halfway through the show, when a seven-year-old, born-again Christian boy started preaching to me out of the clear blue. He had flaxen blonde hair and was wearing a coat, tie, and shiny shoes. He stood in front of his very own church congregation and delivered a sermon about Jesus in a rich Southern accent. Later he was shown wearing a sandwich board in front of an abortion clinic, shouting “Don’t kill your baby!” at women walking in the door. The newscaster asked him if he knew how babies were made. He said no. The newscaster told him she was a Buddhist and asked if she was going to hell. The boy said “Yes, unless you get saved.” The boy said he’s been saved since he was three, when he had a crisis of conscience after he disobeyed his mother. So forget you, Saint Augustine, and your stolen pear. Forget you, Thomas Merton, and your substance abuse problem. You never had to reach maturity to absorb the life experiences and spiritual wisdom that would eventually lead you to the Christian faith. You could have just gotten your redneck fathers to brainwash you with a bunch of Tollhouse cookies and a kid’s illustrated Bible. And oh yes - I found video.

1. Website that makes the correlation between multi-vitamins and acne.

2. Website about how our contaminated water supply is making babies gay.

3. www.eatingpiewithcelebrities.com - Photoshopped pictures of me binge-eating with famous people.

Those are the only ones I have been wanting to launch for a while now. Lengthening the list would just be being facetious.

Tonight Darren and I were in charge of his two-year-old niece Harper. We took her to my parents’ house because they were throwing a dinner party there for my Wyoming brother Jack. I think Harper had a pretty great time. She ran up to my grandma who was laid up on the couch and shouted, “I have no underpants on!” She approached Drs. Murray and Morris where they were discussing the steaks on the grill and proudly declared, “Banana banana!” She ate sushi, peanut butter, rasberries, and pico de gallo. She also got fizzy water up her nose for the first time, which almost made her head explode.

Toward the end of the night Harper and I reclined on the backyard hammock to look at the stars. She heard someone speaking to my brother Brad (home visiting from med school) and she asked me about him.

“He’s going to be a doctor,” I said.

“For Halloween?” said Harper.

“No, when he grows up,” I said.

“When I’m three I’m going to be a doctor,” she said confidently. Shortly thereafter we retrieved her underpants from where they were drying on a pole made for hanging plants, and we said goodbye.

-Posing by the gazebo

-The second best date at the wedding, after the bride

-Gleefully instigating a dance fight

-What’s a wedding without a secret tree fort?

In my dream I was playing with a baby, making a fuss over her in sing-song and Motherese. She was just a few months old, cute as a button.

“I love you!” I said to the baby, overcome with maternal sentiment and delight.

“I only like you as a friend,” she said.