oedipus ox

So Simon wants KWW to be his girlfriend.

Graciously, he will allow her to be my Momma. But his Girlfrend.

Thankfully, he has yet to mention anything about killing me to finalize the deal. Nor has he shown any bouts of eye-gouging guilt, even when he inadvertently broke the mother's day pot he made for her at his old school.

To this point of fatherhood, I have been reuctant to accept what the past hundred years' worth of experts say will inevitably happen. I want to belive in the individual, that perhaps I can concede that if you have a wide enough view things do track that way, but individually, it is not so. Not my kid. My boy won't be shooting up the house soon. The girl isn't going to be decked out in the frilliest pink, before bringing some guy home who looks a little too much like me to be comfortable with. They will have individual interest, molded completely by the controlled environment in which I keep them hermetically sealed, until they are old enough to go and get me more beer.

I was listening to Radio Lab online, as I do. They told the story about Sir francis Galton, 19th century elitist founder of Eugenics (the theory of broad racial superiority, used to great effect by your average Nazi or Charles Murray). Anyway, he went ot a county fair where they were selling tickets to have ordinary peasants guess the weight of a giant prize steer. Of course there was not a single steer-weighing savant in the crowd and everyone was wildly off. Then Galton asked if he could have all the lottery tickets, ostensibly to see if there was a pattern to these foolish chumps, who probably shouldn't be allowed to have kids anyway. It turned out that the AVERAGE guess was within one pound of the exact weight of a steer that was in excess of 1300 lbs. it is like the mob knew what no one part knew.

So, in listening to the freudian mob of child development, I will try to to say anything to Simon in the near future that could, potentially, drive him to patricidal rage.

I should even get the book to see how this all turns out in the end.