Random thoughts

...while waiting for 305 to start in an effort to drive the pretty black girl I saw on the west lawn from my mind.

1. Pizza and beer is the best lunch.

2. People seem to think that I hate kids.

It's not that I hate children. I'm not an ogre. I just hate screaming, whining, crying and temper tantrums so endemic to children as a whole.

Take the two kids I met over the weekend while I was at work.

Saturday night, a 9-year-old girl was at work, eating with her parents. To be precise, her parents were eating, she was not. She was sitting there reading Calvin and Hobbes.

So I struck up a conversation with the child. Calvin and Hobbes is, she said, her favorite comic strip. Mine too! Cool! I said.

The mother's "My child is conversing politely!" smile fell hard and fast when I mentioned that I'm going to be getting Spaceman Spiff tattooed onto my arm.

"COOL!" the child said.

The other kid was a three-year-old boy on Sunday afternoon. He had a Day-Glo green band-aid on his chin and was eating his hot dog and bun separately. Turns out he had gotten stitches on his chin a few days earlier. We bonded (I showed him my own scar on my chin, visible through my stubble). It was awesome.

Especially when she told me that he had to be forcibly strapped to the operating table.

When I ran down a steep hill and into a fence in New Jersey, I was seven. I remember my mother, father and a nurse lying across my body and barely managing to get me still enough that the surgeon could stitch me up.

Either way, this kid was sticking out his chin and proudly displaying his wound. Then he lifted his shirt to show off the scar that ran directly across his belly.

"Chicks dig scars," I told the kid. Then he fist-bumped me.

Three years old. This kid is going to turn out well.