WAKE UP DADDY! I WANT TO WATCH MY SPACE VIDEO. WAKE UP! WILL YOU WATCH IT WITH ME? WILL YOU? WILL YOU DADDY?

this is how i was brought out of my saturday night sleep, all four hours of it. usually i'd just push the child away but this day was special. friday marty had shown me a movie alex had checked out from the library; a 1998 training video about internet searching. he picked it because of the cover art. on the bottom of the cassette case was a computer monitor showing an archaic browser and above that was a broad expanse of open stars and space, hence, space video.

alex. i don't think that video is about space. it's about something else. something very dull and boring.

IT NOT BORING! I WANT TO WATCH MY SPACE VIDEO DADDY! I WANT TO WATCH IT NOW!

six minutes later i'm snuggled under a blanket with alex listening to a woman in a red leather jacket (which she was wearing indoors might i add) talk to a computer animated girl named cyber-jane. before the rise of the internet, the leather-jacket girl was surely manning a suburban mall cosmetics counter. as for cyber-jane, i'm afraid all her previous work was in animated porn.

about eleven minutes into the video, bella groggily entered the tv room and fell into an open spot on the futon by my feet. she took one look at the television and groaned, WHAT IS THIS? IT'S TERRIBLE. i telepathically said to her 'YEAH! NO SHIT! AT LEAST YOU WERE SPARED THE FIRST ELEVEN MINUTES.' when she didn't acknowledge my mental message, i verbally and politically said, 'not everyone likes all the shows you pick bella'.

spending my sunday morning on this cramped futon watching an instructional video on a pre-google internet made me think of the day before. driving the kids home from a country sleep-over with my parents i got stuck behind a car in the passing lane. after several minutes of telepathic messages to the car's driver, also unanswered, i noticed their vanity license plate read BALLRM. the realization of how screwed i was at that moment just about matched how i felt right now (alex has never stopped watching a show he has started). if i could have only had a transcript of our mind's glassy-eyed thoughts while we took in this experience. i think bella was architecting her retribution towards alex for squandering his morning show on such an obvious loser. i myself was woeful in how pathetic and unexciting these two women made the industry i am part of seem. and alex, well poor alex, he was just wondering where the hell all the stars and space got to.