My son is talking to me about Pokeballs and Bakugans and Action Replay DS. It’s making my head hurt and if he doesn’t stop I’m going to make him diagram sentences. All week.

It’s dirty job day so I’ve vacuumed many ants. I’ve called them many obscenities, I’ve also cleaned the hamster cage. The hamster cage has not been cleaned in some time and the hamsters are slobs. The ants are slobs, too, I bet but I’ve not found their cage and their slobby things are small.

Oh, and there’s a rat. I have a rat and a cat I hope the cat eats the rat, it could be a mouse I suppose. It just sounded very big. Sunday morning at dawn I was reading the Times as is my wont (established custom) and the rat started chewing at the walls. Scruffy heard it and Pumpkin heard it too and I banged on the walls like the rat was a bad neighbor upstairs until it stopped. There’s a scourge upon this house I just know it.

It’s spring break right now and I’m vacuuming ants. Next week, though, I’ll fly to Hawaii and then you can vacuum ants. That’s all I’ll say.

C. has a brilliant idea we’re beginning to work on. It involves, though, reading old posts. There’s a story thread, i agree with her. It’s ripe to be mined, we’ve found that there’s humor. But still, while thinking of it like that I must first read the sincere parts. And those feel, if not painful, then at the very least … well, weird.

I’ve begun at the beginning, which is March of 2006. And ew, my writing is stiff then, I hadn’t found a groove. But worse — there’s a woman who very genuinely believes that she’s married. There’s this “A.” person dropped all over the page, decorating anecdotes and such. Sometimes she speaks to him, sometimes it’s flirtatious. Sometimes (ouch) it’s cute. She seems, in other words, smitten with this “A.” She seems to very much like him. Who’s “A.”? I wonder as I’m reading what I wrote.

On the sidebar I can click on posts by particular month and September 2007 looms large — that’s the month “A.” admitted he began soliciting Craigslist sex. (There is ample evidence to suggest it was much earlier, but that’s nitpicking). So if I start reading there, that September, everything is colored with — Oh, he screwed a stranger that day. I wonder if he “hosted” or “traveled.” I wonder what the place they screwed in was like and how he felt driving home. I wonder how it felt, afterward, to kiss me.

It’s funny, of course –clueless (dim-witted?) suburban wife makes dinner, works, shuttles kids here and there while an hour-and-a-half away her photogenic spouse bangs craigslist chicks. Then crash, tinkling glass — it all falls apart and well, it is funny. Much of it, anyway. There were clothes on the lawn, there were things destroyed, there were words posted on a blog then taken back. There was some hiding from paper servers, awkward dating and not-dating. There were ants and a heater going out, there were sometimes comatose hours in a chair. There was screaming and not screaming. There was seething over the trite fact that the screwing was done with girls who couldn’t spell. It’s funny if i pretend it’s fiction, which I can do now. Most of the time.

But i still think it was trashy of “A.”, and also the girls he screwed. I still think they all kind of suck.