Sperm Wail

Today I walked out onto the Mother Theresa tarmac to retrieve Boy and saw him from all the way across the lot, beaming at me, loaded with promise. What a moment. I mean, he's like a little Kennedy doll and he's picked me out, made eye-contact, from like 50 yards and I know he's just bursting with pride. It's like he's barely containing a nuclear bomb of pride and I'm so glad. I could use it.

I had a bad day. My mac deep-sixed at THE VERY MOMENT I WAS UPLOADING A CLIENT'S FINISHED WEBSITE. I mean like as my finger hovered over the return key, as the space between the fingerprints and the Baleek china surface of the mac grew increasingly smaller until I could practically feel the nano indentation of the word "enter," the screen froze and my mac died it's third and least noble death.

Also, I absorbed the brunt of the snot gargling this week and received my dubious infection like a church wafer, spending most of yesterday lying in bed watching Top Chef re-reruns and wondering if I had the temerity to stand erect in the shower long enough to shave (I didn't). I actually went to the store in my "cold clothes"--cut-off -jersey-raggy-old-shorts that look like I cleaned a crime scene in them with a matching t-shirt complete with an espresso-tinged ellipses running down my front like some weird t-shirt semaphore, a semiotic self-referential version of "I'm with stupid," the kind of high-end hyper-intelligent garb Umberto Eco would wear to a micro-brew ten-pin bowling alley old-school martini joint.

And my guitar was out of tune.

And my headlight went out.

And did I mention my Mac had crashed? I mean, I had just spent something like 8 hours crunching through a Flash site from scratch, turning it into a beeeautiful work of art that screamed through transitions and just looked gorgeous--for free. And can't. Show. It to any. Body.

And I got bad customer service from the Mac store. This is what kills me. The MAC store, my place of worship, Middle Managemented me. I know the face, I've worked retail. I know when I've hit the customer service terminal wall.

So walking across the hot sticky tar (90 degrees in Sept!) and seeing my son broadcasting a radiant ear-to-ear and knowing that he's at this top-shelf school and knowing that he's finally working at the level he deserves, I'm thinking he's going to say something like:

• Father, dear, you were right! The Brothers Karamozov really is incredible!


• Wow; the similarities between Latin and English are stunning. Did you know . . .
  or even


• I owned pre-calc today!

Because your kid, smiling, smart, achieving, can blow the bad day away. That genuine enthusiasm, the kind of all-in yeah-baby crash-the-car bravado that only kids can provide, can clear it all out like a firehose. Reset. Do over.

And that's what I wanted. And just like any good Wuthering Heights remake, I loped in slomo across the blacktop to my prideful, beside-himself with accomplishment, scion of 5th grade intelligentsia, fruit of my loins, heir to my . . . fortune; mini me, my boy who drops in beside me and says:

Dude, today we totally talked about sperm!"