For a while Abby and I were thinking of moving abroad; to Norway to escape America. The reasons are obvious: to do it and not to. One of the moments if not the moment that convinced us to stay was when we saw Abby’s cousin’s baby Sophie. She seemed very small at Thanksgiving the year before last. Looking at pictures from that day, she doesn’t seem very small at all. She seems quite big. Huge, even, at least when compared with Roby. 

Thinking about Roby it can be easy to fall into rythms of looking forward: to when she can talk, walk, sing, dance, and be a more noisesome nuisance. In such aspirations it’s easy to think about the timing of things. How old will she be when she’s doing This, or That? The reverse of that is thinking of other babys and children, like Sophie, and wondering how old they were when I saw them doing This or That.

Sophie was a about a year and a half old when we saw her and she was doing an awful lot. I watched her puzzle out how to take a nozzle off of a water bottle for about thirty minutes. Rapt.  

The real trouble with all this as I see it, will likely come once Roby’s whatever the age it was the baby in question was when we saw them doing the thing we’re looking forward to seeing Roby doing. Why’s she behind? What’s wrong?

The overwhelming amount of data we enjoy / are dungeoned by in modern society has a unique capacity to make us feel out of sync, off beat, and behind. I really aspire to not be so tortured by these imagined markers we’re missing, Abby and I both do. But avoiding data’s easier said than done, that’s the truth. Especially when some of it, or a lot of it, is in the best interest of your child to at last know about. 

Sometimes when I explain my interest in firearms I’ll explain it with a metaphor. In a world where only a minority of people can opt in to learn how to read and write, those who do have an unimaginable advantage over those who don’t. Those who don’t are essentially living their lives at the mercy of those who write contracts and make the laws and read letters and books and use the internet. 
The idea here is that by not owning a firearm we are at the mercy of those who do own them. The trouble is that we sign up for all the other issues assosciated with firearms, like suicide and misuse. There’s a danger to that power, a responsbility even. 

The funny thing I’m realizing about that metaphor is that literacy, and the unimaginable weight it carries in a world with Google in it, is far more dangerous than guns. We don’t lock the internet in a box most of the time, do we?
No, most of us take it to bed with us and stare down its barrel.