This cat ain't got no snoozebar

The good news is that Benjamin is sleeping through the night. The bad news is that 'sleeping through the night is a technical term meaning he makes a milk run no more than three or four times in any eight hour period. The boy is killing us. Not that I'm in a position to complain (all I need to do is snatch the boy from the crib and feed him to the teta, which I can accomplish almost without waking up), but my poor wife is running on empty, her physical resources taxed to the point of metastatic protest, her new phenotypes huge ojeros, a zomby shuffle, and an absolute incapacity to understand anything I say.

This last feature is perhaps the most interesting. I bound from the kitchen trumpeting the glories of my new loaf, she dreamily responds "I think Zoogle will have blue eyes." I have scoured the Baby Books for references to spousal aphasia, and am astounded that nothing has been written about the topic. Can we truly be the first family to suffer total communicational atrophy within two months of having a child? It is as if the gremlins that run Catalina's language filters had issued a no-pass order for my particular pitch and cadence, allowing all the other language slop to pass unimpaired but cracking heads when they catch the slightest whiff of me. All the restrictions are on the antenna side, curiously: the transmission side seems fine (she's still doing criticism, still translating, still writing poetry. Still telling me to wash diapers and do dishes.)

Meanwhile, Gloobel's blooming language skills are causing the opposite problem in my own speech centers: my transmitters have been corrupted by baby noise so horrible as to result in an almost totally unintelligible signal. How I have always secretly detested these "oochy coochy" kinds of guardians who dangle dolls, screw up their faces, and speak in that horrid high pitched I-am-a-moron kind of tone that betrays a total lack of both self respect and social consciousness. Yet here I am, returning from my oh-so-sober day job, seizing Cosme Cohete by the armpits and making rocket sounds as I whirl him to the ceiling and back, cackling like a gypsy, screaming "goy goy goy" through puckered lips in perfect, inane imitation, fishing for a smile, or a look, or a sign that he finds me amusing. How can I have fallen so low? Where does this kid get his corrupting power?

The cats feel it too. They stand outside our door at night and yowl like Minnesota timber wolves. They know that the days of little mice on strings are long gone, as are the meticulous combings, the nail trimmings, the ear rumplings, the glam-shots in cardigans, the special treats. The hands that once lingered soft and loving on their bellies are now nowhere to be found, and they sing their loss to the moon, to the walls, to the downstairs neighbor, at night, behind the door, cold and in unison. And when morning comes they are still howling, and continue through the pounding of every goddamned shoe I can hurl against the door, shoes that go thudding like iguanas on tin rooftops, shoes that bore into the neighbor's dreams and wake my son and piss off my wife, but that do nothing, absolutely nothing, to silence the anguish of the cats.