We had our four month check-up today with the doctor in Fort Walton. She found the baby’s heart beat instantly — sounded something like rat-a-tat-tat, and 150-152 (old wives tales, anyone?) beats per minute when she showed it to me, 140 when she showed it to Nathanael. The ultrasound is scheduled for next month. We’ve decided not to find out the sex of the child. N. says the birth will be a surprise we’ll never regret, and that no child of his will be dressed in the stale and repetitious gender-locked pastels, anyway. I’m becoming horribly curious. It’s like having next years Christmas presents sitting on the piano in the living room, exquisitely wrapped in shining paper, begging to be opened. My impatience knows no bounds.

Garrison Kiellor pointed out in today’s Writer’s Almanac that it is the birthday of Weldon Kees, a jazz musician, composer, playwright, journalist, and painter, and one of my favourite, more obscure modernist poets. Kees disappeared on July 18, 1955. His car was found abandoned on a road that went on to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, where it is assumed he jumped, or disappeared into Mexico under the reccomendations of Hart Crane and Malcolm Lowry. Donald Justice, who edited his Collected Poems, published five years after his death, called Kees ‘one of the bitterest poets in history.’ His poem, ‘For My Daughter’.

Looking into my daughter’s eyes I read
Beneath the innocence of morning flesh
Concealed, hintings of death she does not heed.
Coldest of winds have blown this hair, and mesh
Of seaweed snarled these miniatures of hands;
The night’s slow poison, tolerant and bland,
Has moved her blood. Parched years that I have seen
That may be hers appear: foul, lingering
Death in certain war, the slim legs green.
Or, fed on hate, she relishes the sting
Of others’ agony; perhaps the cruel
Bride of a syphilitic or a fool.
These speculations sour in the sun.
I have no daughter. I desire none.

I do not know much about retirement plans, or even social security. Such things are under my husband’s care. Needless to say, I’m getting rather frustrated and bored with all this relentless prattling about the social security crisis. The Democrats say we’re jolly fine, the president says the system is doomed, very, very doomed, my grandparents’ monthly social security payments are dwindling, healthcare costs are rising, and the Baby Boomers will soon be retiring in mass numbers. All I can see is that yes, things do potentially look very dismal from what I’ve been able to observe, and shrug when both sides say the other’s lying. How would I know?

While driving to Niceville today, in the rain, on my way to do some errands, I heard a very interesting interview with William Saletan on Day to Day, a radio show produced by NPR and Slate Magazine. Saletan points out that both the president’s and the Democrats’ plans are very risky, and suggests an option that’s utterly refreshing, and perhaps, the best idea I’ve heard so far. He points out that Roosevelt’s administration marked sixty-five as the age when health problems prevented one from working, provides data that shows, due to excellent healthcare and a society that doesn’t rely as heavily on physical labour, the age at which one, on average, is no longer able to work due to physical ailments is between seventy and seventy-five. Elderly people whose conditions prevented them from working before, let’s say, seventy-two, would be put on a disability program until they reached the age of retirement.

Saletan says that this would more than save social security, that it could cut the government’s payouts by more than forty percent. By and large, people seem to have caught that outrageous supposition that we’re all owed a retirement at sixty-five when we’re still able bodied and useful, a large social security check, and a condo in Florida wherein we sail into death on a permanent vacation. This would be a dream unthinkable to previous generations, and is also… a pipedream of unbiblical proportions. Work until the day is done.

The more absurd aspect of this scandal, which The Sun calls a royal bombshell, is that the Queen is abstaining from attending the civil ceremony, but will be present at the church blessing after the ceremony to lend her blessing. The church refuses to marry the Prince and his consort-to-be because they are both divorcees, but it will bless their marriage. If the church won’t take itself seriously, why should anyone else bother.

Rob Mitchum of Pitchfork Media has an excellent Hunter S. Thompson tribute — making more sense of the man/event than most of the obituaries I’ve read and heard — who died Sunday night of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, somewhere around the time I happened to be lying in bed, looking sideways at our bookshelf, sleepily remembering that I need to read Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas groggily and fondly rememebering all the rum in Thompson’s The Rum Diary, sleepily excited that my husband had President’s Day off from work.

Few seem to have noticed that the absurdly exaggerated drug use of Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas is given a portrayal that is far from enticing, note-perfectly enacted by Terry Gilliam’s film of the book. To Thompson, his persona’s ingestion of drugs wasn’t a celebration of counterculture mind exploration, but a desperate self-inoculation against the increasingly diseased American atmosphere closing in on all sides. Fear & Loathing didn’t earn its place in American literature as a celebration of pharmaceutical joyriding, but rather as an obituary for the delusional promises of the 1960s–it’s a literary Altamont.