It Takes a Child to Raze a Village

Predator Press

[LOBO]

Playing a lot of Final Fantasy XII, I can only guess how many marriages and careers have been wrecked by this highly addictive game ... I’m already beginning to hallucinate little blue and red health bars hovering over people’s heads. But when Screechy (our six year old) was stricken by an unmerciful God with pinkeye, it kinda “shook me out of it.”

It was time for comedy.

A year or so ago Crackers, his oldest sister, playfully sprayed his neck with a perfume ... and as a result Screechy is also affectionately known as “Stinkneck.” Now of course with pinkeye, I say he has “Stinkeye” too. Psychotherapeutic technique is improving all the time, and he’s get a good ten years until then … let's get our laughs in early and often.

So I’m watching television and commiserating with him, and Go, Diego, Go! comes on. I’m immediately suspicious. I never trust children’s programming that wears punctuation like a two dollar whore, and in three words we have two commas and exclamation point. Is that even a sentence? Then it turns out this “Diego” character is a spinoff of another show called Dora the Explorer. So now I have huge chasms of missing information, and the first of which is their resemblance: is it a byproduct of the cartoon style, or is asking this question the equivalent of a racist comment on par with “all Hispanics look alike”?

Okay I’m like eight minutes into the show and I’m stressing out in a soiree of Politically Correct confusion. I speed-dial Terri, and she narrowly averts my cranial detonation with the news that Diego and Dora are indeed cousins -the likelihood if fast forwarding twelve years to find Dora putting a bullet in Diego’s noggin because he came home meth-addled and covered in lipstick, glitter, and Safari perfume are significantly reduced. This makes it all "come together" really: the glaring absence of Dora and Diego's parents -the ones that let their kids run around jungles and play with wild animals unsupervised- is now explainable ... they were obviously jailed long, long ago for child endangerment and neglect.

But just as I hung up the phone and the anxiety began to pass, Diego was now rescuing a Chinchilla on a breaking tree branch from falling into a waterfall with a hang glider. And even as I tried to piece together all the improbable physics required for this to occur, the Chinchilla looked at Diego and said -plain as day- “Gracias.”

Seething once again with questions, I tried to call Terri again ... but I kept getting her voicemail.

If the Chinchilla is bilingual, isn’t it fair to say that the stupid thing shouldn’t have been on that tree branch in the first place? And if I found out I just risked life and limb (and let’s face it: hang gliders are probably expensive) for a creature perfectly qualified to score a few hundred points on a SAT that I couldn't sue, I would be really mad.

And wouldn't a Chinchilla being rescued from falling into a waterfall by a kid on a hang glider be, well, freaky for a Chinchilla? This would be the human equivalent of a UFO abduction. Maybe the aliens are snatching up those people to try and explain why they should get the hell away from the trailer park before the tornado comes, but once confronted with the staggering opacity of the individuals, the discouraged aliens just anal probe the daylights out of them in sheer frustration.

Well, we’re all thinkin’ it so I’m just going to come right out and say it: we've been coddling the Chinchilla for far too long now, and it's high time they switched habitats with the trailer park people. The trailer park people would be far safer in the mountains where there aren’t any tornados, and the Spanish-speaking Chinchillas would probably know what to do with all those broken down El Caminos.

Anywho, be back soon.

“Backyardigans” is coming on.