When Aunt R. arrived for my mom’s funeral she made sure to take me aside for a heart to heart. Behind a cloud of Medicinal Marijuana smoke and her signature Fendi perfume she told me, “When you lose your mother you lose your connection to the universe. You become untethered and the only way to restore the connection is to have a child.”

I assumed the point was this: Motherless children and barren women wander the world like an ex-communicated Mormon, consigned to utter darkness and oblivion. And though I am married I can say that no person’s life is contingent on me waking up every morning. Not even their happiness will be affected if I were to slip and fall in the bathroom. I go weeks without being outside or talking to another person. Solitude makes you weird and I play Hulu shows in the background between onboarding new employees and completing useless courses which will never get me a better paying job (not because life is unfair) but because the whole idea that fairness exists is a lie and even after all this study still not getting how to convert decimals into binary numbers but what does that matter because there is 1 and very soon that 1 will be divided into 0 and in that universe nothing matters…..

I now believe heaven and hell, god and all that that nonsense is a delusion born from the time we spend in our mother’s womb. My Wombeden is a perfectly calibrated hot tub outside of Ski Chalet in Bear Mountain (a favorite memory of my HS experience) with delicious food I can taste through my skin. In this warm and loving time machine its perfectly natural that we will fight and kill anything that threatens our paradise, even the host and creator Chevy Chase.

Apparently due to copyright laws the only hot tubs
 I can generate with people in them show this....

Imagine she's in here.

In the cases where there are more than one of us in the tub, if the water goes down too far its on like Donkey Kong with the winner getting to absorb all the yummy goodness of it’s fallen sibling. Such a Perfect Day. Then the horror….so awful that our burgeoning consciousness takes two years to heal. Even through that with our wiped hard drives, we remember a world where 2 was the base number.

So is it any wonder that when we emerge, though our hard drive is wiped, we dream of the Garden of Eden. The world is made up of 0 add 1 so we run away from 0 and the farthest we get is 2. Men have it easier because that drive to create can take many forms but society and the world shoves childbirth and motherhood down our ladythroats as the only solution. Those hot tub parasites make us dumb and slow prey for men who take our birthing of their children (She’s having my baby) for weakness and proof of their big dick energy.

Still, I am jealous of how sure parents are and have to be to raise little Rob Cordry. The fact that it took me 10 years to recognize my aunts’ words as advice and not a curse proves I am far too self-absorbed and self-pitying to make a good mother and have spent years explaining a decision that was taken out of my hands at birth. I always felt it as the height of selfishness to have children just to make yourself feel worthwhile, but 99 percent of people feel otherwise. The lessening of stigma from being a bastard proves that people like having children even if they don’t like taking care of them educating them or caring about them when social media beckons on bejeweled iPhones. Still, a rugrat to focus my attention on would have ameliorated my current middled aged nihilistic ennui turning the paintings of my existential angst into photos of my my former hot tub parasite.