Bourgie Nights

T and I registered for our baby shower last night. Eek.

It took 3 hours. Eek, eek.

Negotiating the ambiguous area between acquiring things one needs and hoarding instant junk is tricky. Going bourgie triggers a nervous response for me; I've devoted much of my life to thinking about possessions and how to keep them from possessing me. I grew up, you see, in a place where people acquired all sorts of stuff--vineyards, mansions, jet airplanes, etc.--and nobody seemed particularly happy about it. Many of the children with whom I played seemed quite, if you'll pardon the expression, fucked in the head.

So, I'm interested in keeping my own impending child from also being fucked in the head.

Undeniably though, we will use the tiny clothes and the pad for the cradle and many of the other items on our list of 43 things for which we registered at (gasp) Babies 'R Us. But when I clutched a pair of miniature Chuck Taylor All Star sneakers, it was out of that false consciousness of consumer rapture against which I try to maintain a certain guardedness.

Around the age of 22 I decided books and films were the only material things I'd allow myself to indulge in buying regularly and with little restriction. And I have. This self-imposed rule has worked for me, and it has restricted my forays into spastic bourgieness. When I impulse buy, it's almost never anything but books or DVDs now, and I suffer little to no buyer's remorse.

But now I sense the rules are changing. The kid will want things. Worse, I will want to buy things for the kid.

A professor friend of mine, who teaches the Bible as literature and was herself once a nun, told me she could not lead a spiritual life (meaning, for her, an ascetic life) because she knew she took too much pleasure in material things to ever give them up. She lives in a big, beautiful house with marble everywhere. I don't know her kid, but he doesn't seem fucked in the head.

Still, I think it's necessary to regard temporal things with a certain contempt in order to have good character. And yet there I was, in a hideous crackerbox store in a hideous suburb, firing away with a scanning gun at bar-coded merchandise with the expectation that friends and relatives might spend their hard-won money buying some of it for us. And what does a baby need sneakers for, anyway?

My god though, those mini-Chucks are so cute. I gotta have them.

Love Plus One

So the other big change in my life is that T and I are going to have our first child. The due date is August. (Yes, I was prolific this year.)

We decided in November. (If you're clever and counted back from August, you're right—T got pregnant right away. Well, we had a thirty-day marathon, so "right away" is open to interpretation. I still feel tired just thinking about it.) At any rate, we made the decision in November, and I've been thinking about decisions and decision-making lately.

Daniel Dennett, in a New York Times article from 1/2/07, commented on making decisions. If you don't know his work, he's a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Tufts who writes about the concept of free will. He's a materialist. (A materialist in the scientific sense, as in a monist—I don't know if he has a big screen TV or drives a Mercedes.) Anyway, Dennett said that when we consider whether the traditional idea of free will is merely an illusion, as he seems to think, we confront "nihilism or despair." Thinking about whether we're just meat puppets driven by DNA and the vicissitudes of our endocrine systems, in other words, can be depressing.

But, says Dennett, his particular materialist view of choice isn't really a downer because we have what he calls "imagination": "We have the power to veto our urges and then to veto our vetoes." Whoopee. The story, then, runs something like this: after years of vetoing our urges, T and I vetoed our veto and conceived the kid. How parliamentary!

As a writer, I have to say I'm more than a little invested in free will and the imagination. I can't see how one writes a novel by vetoing one urge or another. I can't see how one has a child that way, either. [Insert joke here. (Probably a joke with the word "insert" inserted in it.)]

We decided, T and I, to live how we want to live—as ever. I prefer my philosophers to be nutty, so I'll quote some others who are more fun. Here's Deleuze and Guattari from A Thousand Plateaus (I think it's plateau #367), "Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly: the simple Thing, the Entity, the full Body, the stationary Voyage ... Yoga, Krishna, Love, Experimentation." Why try to fix definitions for "free will" or "imagination?" Why not exercise them instead?

Some of our friends might be worried that T and I will sell out or grow into bourgeois idiots because we're breeding. Well, perhaps I'm already an idiot. But I'm not going all bourgie. For one thing, I don't have the money. For another, I'm not giving up my art. (Which means, of course, that I'll never have the money. Damn.)

Having the kid, for me, is writing another kind of novel. This novel will be cool in the same way the ones made out of words are: she/he will generate his/her own metaphors in a manner wholly unpredictable. This novel might form a punk band or become a corporate lawyer (hopefully the former). This novel will almost certainly drop something expensive in the toilet by age four. But who knows? The way I look at it, I'm inviting a healthy dose of chaos into my life—the same way I invite chaos every time I sit down to write.

Yoga, Krishna, Love, Experimentation.