Words and Thoughts: Hotel Bravo Oscar, Deighvid
Hello again, alleged readers! Have you ever just been sitting on the couch, trying to get HBO on the TV there, and your friends that have a baby are over, and they leave the baby in the room with you for a minute, and despite your best efforts to focus on getting the illegal cable box working, the baby, for no reason, puts its own foot in its mouth?
It’s like, “Small human, that’s not helpful at all”. But it has no idea what you’re saying to it. It probably has no idea that it’s not helpful. And it also almost certainly has no idea that in almost any other context, placing one’s foot in one’s own mouth is at the very least frowned upon. Yet there sits this living thing, “knowing” absolutely nothing, acting on presumably pure instinct, because I don’t know that what goes on inside a baby’s head can be called “thinking”. Just a living affront to Descartes: The baby undeniably exists. The baby almost undeniably does not think. Je pense, donc je suis mon pied!
And then when the parents come back into the room, while you’re still trying to get HBO to come in clear, are all, “Stav, where is Deighvid?” and I’m like, “Who?”, and they’re like, “the baby, where did the baby go?”. And in my head I’m like, “I didn’t know it had a name”. And then I start thinking about what purpose the baby having a name serves in that moment. It’s not like Deighvid is out there introducing himself to people, or even knowing enough to respond to “Deighvid”. He’s more likely to respond to a jingled set of keys than his name. Albeit that’s probably true of myself as well, for either his name or my name honestly for me; jingled keys really are the best way to get my attention.
So then you have to stop what you’re doing with the HBO and retrieve the child from behind the couch where you gently placed it moments ago because the self-cannibalism he was attempting was distracting, and the parents are perturbed that he’s covered in dust bunnies, and it’s like “he’s got bunnies on his onesie, but we’re gonna all of a sudden be selective about what particular bunnies the child is wearing?”
And then the dad is like, “Stav, you can’t just put him behind the couch”, and I’m thinking, “Wrong, because I obviously just did. I don’t know how you can sit there and ignore the empirical evidence that was right in front of you.” But you can’t say that to someone whose obvious disregard for logic would preclude a productive discussion, and then you think about calling Child Protective Services because it might not be suitable for Deighvid to grow up in a household devoid of logic, but you don’t because if CPS shows up and sees the illegal cable box they might end up staying because they want to watch Six Feet Under reruns, and you didn’t buy enough salsa if the CPS people do end up sticking around.
So like, when this happens to you, how do you get HBO?
