The Bleat, by James Lileks… And so it begins:

"Daddy, am I big enough to take a man's cock?"

Uh-oh.  Four and a half, and already she's asking about sex.  The worst part is when they start asking questions you don't know the answers to.  I have no idea where she gets it from, either, but my guess is one of my wife's new boyfriends.

"Daddy, how come you don't have a job?"

"Well, honey, I do have a job.  I write a local column for the newspaper and beg other people for exposure.  And that's kind of a job."

"Can you be fired?"

"It's not that kind of job, honey.  You see, newspapers are actually small catalogs of advertisements.  And the thing is, you can't have advertisements from different companies running all jumbled up with each other because then people have trouble figuring out whose ad is whose.  So the newspapers separate some of the ads with columns of text, which is what I help write."  I decide to skip the part about catering to an audience of senior citizens who read every column inch of the paper because they believe they can't die until they're finished.  Besides, I can tell her attention has wandered because she's hiked her dress up and is pooping on the floor.

Domestic Dad time again.  Unfortunately, halfway through the clean-up job Prat is shrieking a familiar demand:  "CHUCK E. CHEESE!  CHUCK E. CHEESE!"  I look up and she's humping our dog Casper and, I think, menstruating.

I can't figure out which part of this picture to jerk off to

It's Friday so I have four columns due and as you might imagine absolutely no ideas – plus in recent weeks I've been filling them with unrelated personal vignettes and passages from the operating instructions for my Casio wristwatch, and my editor at the Edina Weekly Shopper has warned me that he will be randomly reading future columns to see that it doesn't happen again.  Which means I have to throw Tuesday's work away and come up with something new, or at least something unrecognizable.

At the office today the dirty birdies were up to their old tricks:  arguing with me in short, pithy emails, mimicking my stammer, and kicking me in the nutsack until fluid leaks from my ears.  Just so everyone knows, I intend to rise above it.  Sure, I've felt surges of testosterone in the past, but those turned out to coincide with being raped.

It's not so much the physical abuse that bothers me – I'm told that vegetarians are more prone to violence – it's the lack of respect for my arguments.  When I say that I think Bush's inability to fluently argue and defend his own policies is an indication of political talent, I expect to see a carefully argued, scrupulously logical rebuttal, written according to imaginary submission guidelines, to which I will respond with an anecdote about Perry Mason or comic books that completely proves my point.  But what I get instead is the usual hate mail.  "Doesn't make any sense," "Are you actually praising him for being inarticulate?" and, "Is stupidity communicable?"

Fine, be that way.  Maybe you guys will win the next one and Hillary Clinton will cure all the world's ills; and, yes, that's my idea of a retort.  (posted by James Lileks)