Birth control.

Today, while enjoying a fantastic meal (Thai buffet) with one of my favorite Bloomingtonians, I looked up for a moment at a commotion that was coming from the main dining room. My friend and I had, meanwhile, been crammed into a small corner of the restaurant in what I assume would have been a small sunroom. Anyway, a four-year-old blonde child had begun projectile vomiting a la Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Just when I thought he'd finished, that tiny mouth opened and yet more issued forth. With Pad Thai halfway masticated, I swallowed with the kind of difficulty that might be faced with when climbing Pakistan's K2.

The parts that disturbed me verily are thus:

One, the parents were feeding the child highly-spiced be-curried Thai food with sweet milky Thai iced tea and wee Thai donuts. I've met truckers who wouldn't have been able to keep that down for long. Is that child abuse? I mean, come on, give the kid some wet noodles and some milk and he would have been as happy as a hog in swill. I never had that kind of stuff until I could actually recognize what it was, and ask for it, but whatever.

Two, as the parents saw that the child was about to spew, they did nothing about it at all. They merely turned his head so that he would hurl into the very busy dining-room floor and not on their food. Emotionless and distant, they mopped him up with the kind of vigor one reserves for that strange stain you found on the floor of your shower that resembles Mao Zedong's profile. They left without even thanking the poor Thai woman who came out with the special gloves and the mop.

It gives me pause.

Tonight as I left my French class, which I attend as might one who is going to the gas chamber, I walked through the four-block forest that they've kept in the Old Crescent. Ordinarily I skirt around it but I wanted to be in my car, and home, as immediately as humanly possible. Ordinarily the forest is alive with the sounds of animals foraging and the hoots of owls, but tonight it was deadly quiet, like a bad horror movie just before the young scantily-clad coed is about to be gutted like a trout. In a small clearing I saw the flicker of four candles and four hooded (hooded sweatshirts, possibly) figures. For an insane moment I thought I was imagining things, but there they were. They were chanting. With candles. In a language I have never heard. Only in Bloomington would people worship the Hooved One in the Old Crescent forest on a Thursday night. God Bless the Republic.

Good night, Indiana.

Dom