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Tuesday 
24 August 2004
winner and champion
who would win, t-rex or george washington? which wins, rock, paper or hurricane? what about rock, paper, lava?
i don’t know the answers to these all-important questions. i don’t even know why they’re important. but there they are, out there, demanding answers.
the temptation is to provide a non sequitur response, consistent with the question. but the reality is that such disinformation is remembered, with disdain, long after the question is forgotten.
what to do, what to do…?
more importantly, how did i get myself into this moral quagmire? oh, yes. i agreed to become a parent.
like any long slide into lifelong dependency, this one began innocuously. with a pair of kittens. “mikey,” my wife trilled sweetly. “we have to have the kittens.” i didn’t see the harm. cats are low-maintenance. sure, let’s have the kittens.
before long it was my sole responsibility to clean out the litter box. and still i did not see.
the next escalation came a few years later. enough time had gone by that, again, i hardly noticed. “mikey, we have to have the dogs.” not one, two. golden retrievers. famously good with children.
me, blindly agreeable.
a few more years, and our symmetry was still intact. two cats, two dogs, two married people. then, one blissful day, it came…
“mikey, we have to have the children.”
this time i noticed. and i saw the perfection, the patience, the persistence of the plan.
the slow start. the ramping up. the enduring commitment.
the seismic drop of the hammer.
my awareness came too late. i was invested in the cats and the dogs, not to mention my wife. dominoes fell, events transpired, births ensued. all led inexorably to the question: who would win, t-rex or george washington?
the answer is neither. the winner would be my wife, victorious without ever firing a shot.
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