State-Of-The-Badass-Art.

Okay, so Brandon dropped off about five boxes worth of baby stuff for when the little creature pops out and rewrites our lives, and we were going through the stuff and cooing over the little onesies and sleeping caps and booties and whatnot (Rachel was cooing. I do not coo. I roar. Because I am a MAN. Sometimes I growl, and other times I mutter, but I do not coo, and anyone who tells you different is a goddamned liar), when I found one of those harnesses that lets you strap the kid to your chest, and I tried it on, and instead of being some dumb earth-first neo-hippy-ish "lemme bathe my kid in bottled placental waters while I chow down on it's dried up umbilical cord in some lame gesture of new-age fatherhood while some guru teaches Mom how to paint visions of primal scream therapy with her own feces" sort of contraption, this thing had buckles and snaps and ziplines and mesh parts and velcro and it was black and silver, and I swear to god, I felt like one of those Colonial Marines from Aliens...

...only without the whole "getting scarred by acidic blood and ripped apart by weird pseudosexual alien critters and eventually having eggs laid inside my belly so that it can burst out when it needs to feed" trip...um, on second thought, let's hope the Crazy Lady doesn't read that part.

Anyway: it felt cool, and I felt a little better about the fact that I can still play video games and read comics and maybe sometimes act out epic sagas with my Hellboy and Preacher action figures (Lobster Johnson vs. The Saint of Killers!!! The Big Red Goon himself vs. Jesse Custer, with play-by-play commentary by Spider Jerusalem and his two-faced cat!!! The Tick vs. a Rubik's Cube!!!), while at the same time being a DAD.

Of course, I'll feel even more comfortable once I figure out a way to attach a 10mm M41A Pulse Rifle with an over-and-under 30mm Pump Action Grenade Launcher to it.

In other news: walking downtown with Josh Barsky might get you into a fight with ten guys if you're not careful, as Josh has a tendency to mouth off to anyone passing by when he's drunk ("Alla you wanna piece of me? C'mon, Chris, let's kill 'em all! We can do it, and then the monkey in my head won't tease me any more! Ya gotta silence that shit by drinkin'! Hold on, I gotta vomit..."); it helps if you just push him into a wall, because then he starts to giggle, and no one wants to start a fight with a tiny giggling Jew.