Da Flu Bug. I Have Brung it Home

And it's either my mom's nasty bug or something formidable that glommed onto me in that US Airways petri dish I flew home in. The flight with the child who DID NOT STOP SCREAMING FOR THREE HOURS. Every person on that plane was ready to dump her out of the cabin over Tulsa. And her mother too. WHY? Because the endlessly, epically stupid mother sat calmly reading a magazine while the Satanic spawn next to her screamed like she was being skinned alive. FOR THREE HOURS.

Thus, everyone watched the movie, to try to escape the demonic wails. But the headphones did not drown out the most hated child in the skies. The girl next to me who was sympathetic about the "poor unhappy baby" when we first got onto the plane, finally came over to my camp.

"I'm ready to choke the life out of this little bastard," I said. "Are you with me?"

"Yes," she said. "I will hold her down."

People were agitated. Positively radioactive with stress from enduring this rotten child. And yes, I know. It's the mother who is rotten, not the child. She truly did read a magazine the entire trip. Occasionally she would tap the kid on the head with a flat palm, like she was trying to get ketchup out of a bottle. Very loving. As my own mother said, stupid parents are not fair to the kid, because the kid ends up being hated and it's not their fault.

Unable to drown out the death screams, I sat daydreaming of a magical system in the universe where parents get a certain number of stupidity points. Once they go over the allotted number, their kid is whisked away from them and put into the arms of someone who has been longing for a child forever. Also, the reproductive organs of the stupid would be instantaneously replaced with, perhaps, a plastic version of the real thing. And just to show you that Candy is not entirely cruel, I would erase the stupid parent's memory, the part of it that included ever having had a kid. No pain. Society improved.

In this particular case, the third or fourth time the blisteringly stupid mother tapped her kid's head like a Heinz bottle, the child would have disappeared, landing in the cuddling arms of a lonely childless couple in Des Moines, and before another page turned in the stupid mother's plump In Style magazine, her original uterus would have been replaced with a lovely, flexible Tupperware one. I would even provide her with a snap-on lid for it so she could burp it at will. Think of the conversation piece (so to speak) she would have at parties! Instead of eggs that could be fertilized, she could tote nice paprika-sprinkled devilled eggs wherever she went on her very stupid way.

Oh, once we landed, and were waiting at the baggage claim, I saw that the kid was wearing a Velcro wrist band that was attached to a red nylon leash. There would be no leashes in Des Moines.