Whew. Our new “rookie” Gleeson seems to have thrown off my whole sleep/blog cycle. I took a little break from blogging yesterday, and I’m sort of still taking it. But I wanted to post something today, and then it hit me: how about an “open thread”? That’s what the big guys do.

See, the “open thread” means I’m not really blogging about anything, but y’all are invited to discuss any topic at all in the comments. I’ve never had an open thread before, so we’ll see how it works out.

Are folks who wear sandals conservative or liberal? How about people who buy organic vegetables? There are certain outward habits or mannerisms that are widely associated with left-wing politics, but really have little or nothing to do with public policy.

Now comes a new book by Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons, which aims to document “how Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of countercultural conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican Party).”

I haven’t read the book. (Incredibly, very few publishers bother to mail me advance copies.) But I have read Dreher’s CrunchyCon Blog, which focuses on what I assume are the themes of the book. It even contains a 10-point “Crunchy Con Manifesto”:

1. We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly.
2. Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.
3. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.
4. Culture is more important than politics and economics.
5. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship —- especially of the natural world — is not fundamentally conservative.
6. Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.
7. Beauty is more important than efficiency.
8. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.
9. We share Russell Kirk’s conviction that “the institution most essential to conserve is the family.”
10. Politics and economics won’t save us; if our culture is to be saved at all, it will be by faithfully living by the Permanent Things, conserving these ancient moral truths in the choices we make in our everyday lives.

Certainly, this list is open to criticism. Points 1 and 2 strike me as pompous holier-than-thou boasting, and point 5’s invocation of “stewardship” makes me wince. But “crunchy cons” do exist, and Dreher is making an honest effort to recognize them.

There are parts of labor that really hurt. Not me, I mean Phoebe. There’s this one part called the “transition,” which is the time after the cervix has… ah, you can look it up, this isn’t the Discover Channel.

The thing is, the “transition” generally means the baby will be coming out in an hour or so, and it really really, really hurts. When Phoebe was in this transition stage, she didn’t so much speak as gasp. So if I report that she said to me, “Sean, see if my mother will take the kids somewhere for awhile,” it is only for the sake of clarity. An accurate report would be that she said something like, “Sean, unh, it, Mom… ow, kids… away!”

Which wasn’t a bad idea, as the kids were going insane. Well, not insane, not legally, but without such stationary entertainments as television or computers, they were quickly reverting to more old-fashioned diversions, such as jumping off of the sofa, or banging on the wall with a spoon. Annette took them to her house.

And we were alone, and the house was quiet. The only light was the sun, and the only sound was the occasional distant birdsong, or pained scream from my wife. Phoebe and I sat in the bedroom, waiting for baby Theodore, or Beatrice. Or Bridget, or the OG+E man.
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“This is it,” she told me. “The baby will be born today.”

There were other things I had been planning to do that day. I had just gotten a check in the previous day’s mail, and I was going to go buy groceries and pay our overdue electric bill, for one thing. But all that would have to wait.

Phoebe’s mother arrived around noon. As with our previous births, Annette had one job to do: everything, except getting the baby out. Above all, she had to babysit our four extra-uterine kids. (Thanks, Annette.)

She brought a box of donuts, and a cell phone. The phone was not hers; she found it in the street in front of our house! Weird. I don’t have a cell phone, and I don’t really know exactly how to operate them, but by slapping buttons more or less at random, I managed to dial a number labeled “Work.” This, I deduced rightly, was where the phone’s owner was employed. A woman answered, reciting the name of some insurance company, and identifying herself as “Bridget.”

“Hi,” I said. “Did someone who works there lose a cell phone?”

“Why?”

“Ah, because I found a cell phone.”

“Where?”

“In the street. On 18th Street.”

“18th Street?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. It’s probably mine. Is it blue?”

It was. “Yes,” I answered.

“It’s mine. Where is it now?”

“Um, it’s, in my hand? I’m talking on it…”
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Our fifth child was born this afternoon, right here at home. Beatrice Anna (”Trixie”) Gleeson is a perfect creature, in fact the summit of all creation, the very image of God. Just like her brothers and sisters. And her mother.

I have much to tell about the birth, and I planned to write it tonight, but I find that I cannot. I will write tomorrow. Meanwhile, here is the best photo I took today, of Mrs. Gleeson holding our new cherished gift.

By the way, the portrait on Phoebe’s t-shirt is of architect Louis H. Sullivan.

In his 1896 treatise The tall office building artistically considered, Sullivan wrote:

All things in nature have a shape, that is to say, a form, an outward semblance, that tells us what they are, that distinguishes them from ourselves and from each other. — Unfailingly in nature these shapes express the inner life, the native quality, of the animal, tree, bird, fish, that they present to us; they are so characteristic, so recognizable, that we say, simply, it is ‘natural’ it should be so. (…) Unceasingly the essence of things is taking shape in the matter of things, and this unspeakable process we call birth and growth.

Good night; I’ll see you tomorrow.

In 1968 Lennon and McCartney famously asked, “Hey, Bungalow Bill, what did you kill, Bungalow Bill, hey, Bungalow Bill, what did you kill, Bungalow Bill?” Not getting a straight answer, they had to repeat the question several times, until they eventually gave up after three minutes and 13 seconds.

But they didn’t have the Internet, did they? We asked the blogosphere, “What did you kill?” and got more answers than we could count, in under two seconds!

Marky Mark answered,

i killed my hair! :O

and he’s got the photos to prove it.

Useless Information Man’s only regret is that he lost his recording of “Ramen, Ramen.”

I lost my copy of it when I lost my tapes, when I killed my car in (say it with me now) Danville, Pennsylvania. But I remember it darn well, and wish I could describe the vocal melody in some meaningful way.

But he does manage to reproduce all of the lyrics to this cherished ditty.

Anjan poses a conundrum:

The Question: My mother died and at her funeral I saw this handsome guy among the guests who attended. Even the strong current of sorrow after losing the hands that cuddled me twenty long years that was flowing in my viens could not stop me from falling in love with him. After a year I killed my twin sister. Why do you think I did that?

If you know the answer, please tell him. (Yes, him. Anjan is a guy in Germany.)

Andi killed her optical organs:

so today i stayed in bed till about 4 today. not because i was sick, but because i killed my eyes.

Xena ran over our hearts when she admitted:

i killed my own pet cat!!!!!! *screams in horror* poor stripes, poor poor poor poor little cat!!!!

Melon (who should consider giving up unsupervised chionging) writes to say:

i killed my leg tday; fell down the stairs while chionging for recess? i feel pathetically ridiculous. its probably the worst day of my life; i’ve said that line many times.

We were unable to reach Allie, because…

I killed my email. All I was doing was changing my password, and somehow that killed the whole f—ing account. The program won’t launch at all.

Eddy’s mismanagement of imaginary persons yielded tragicomic results:

Omgosh I killed my Sims family … the oven caught fire. Of course I was thinking, “eh, the emergency people will be here.” But they didn’t come. Then the fire started spreading and I swear I was horrified. I realised I had forgotten to purchase a smoke detector. Then the girl came home and I made her walk JUST into the front entrance area so that she could freak out and maybe call the emergency people but she kept freaking out for so long the phone burned. Then I tried making her move OUT of the house cuz the fire had spread from the kitchen, destroyed the living room and was going to her bedroom. Then SHE caught on fire and started screaming and … she wouldn’t MOVE like I told her too. The stupid idiot stayed in the house. So yeah … she burnt to ashes and the father came home and started sobbing…

That’s when Eddy exited, silently.

Rae was seeking advice. Bad advice…

I killed my good friends lizard. My friend patrick is going to school in Grenada and has trusted me to care for his pet bearded dragon since i have owned them in the past and would know how to care for him. well he’s dead. i killed him with poisonous gasses, on accident of course. Pat had Troy Oleary for 8 years and I had him for one before killing him; how do i break the news to him gently?

And she got it. The worst advice came from “keithbuff”:

What you do is buy a hamster, spraypaint it green and tell him that his lizard turned into a hamster. He probably won’t believe it, so put together a website (make it really professional looking and call it www.beardeddragonsturnintohamsters.com) talking about this crazy chinese flu that turns lizards into hamsters. He’ll be like “OMG I CANT BELIEVE IT” and you’ll get away with it and he’ll never know.