I was sick in a hotel room once and caught an episode of the Rush Hour television show. I don't understand why they would try to make an addition to the franchise of Rush Hour without Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker as the leads. Sitting there while I drank DayQuil from the bottle and forced crackers down to my stomach in an attempt to combat the illness, it all seemed like some sort of fever dream. Almost surreal, and I still don't believe that the show exists to this day. You will not understand what I am talking about while you read this years from now, but you probably know by now that you do not understand a lot about me and my past. And this is not a bad thing. You are of a different time. You will not understand my love for Morrissey as you either know him only as the racist he has been exposed as or the guy who your dad croons with while making you breakfast in the morning causing you to squirm in your seat while waiting for a plate of bacon to land before you. You won't understand when I complain about megaplexes or the empty lots that were once the strip malls of old or how this town use to be something else before whatever it becomes by the time you start understanding the world through your eyes and your mind. All of it will seem like I am still stuck in that fever dream to you, but that dream even exists for me with you. I was there when your mother was rushed to the emergency delivery room and we all cried like you did when you received your first breath of the Portland air into your little lungs. I was there when you routinely filled up new diapers right after we changed you out of one you had already blown out. I was there when you snorted, so cutely may I add, as you searched for your mother's nipple like a pig sniffing the forest floor among the trunks of trees looking for truffles. Or at times you were like a turtle, lying on your stomach and lifting your head up to look, sticking your neck out and opening your mouth as if to bite at that perfect leaf on a low bough. I realize that I have made a couple of animal similes now, and it may seem excessive. But as of right now, you are sort of an animal. Only the past two days have you shown a smile in reaction to me, and we are still waiting to hear that laugh of yours. But you feed constantly, and are always looking for more when you are not feeding. You cry for your mother and look confused when she is not there but you meet my eyes instead. You have only just recently began to show your humanity and that is beautiful; that is what I continue to look for in you. All of this feels like a dream to me and that is because I am still stuck in that fever dream and there are times where I don't even believe you are truly here with us still as one month old. But I am glad that you are.

Back to that emergency room where we heard your voice for the first time. What it must be like to take your first breath of the air that we have breathed for over 30 years now ourselves. You inhaled the world and all it encompasses. You inhaled the birds, you inhaled the trees. The blue sky fills your lungs. You can taste the love and the hate and the perjury in our world, you breathe the crime and the exhaust and the fallacy of what we are. You breathe out life for these things to thrive on and you do not know it. You are wonderfully ignorant to your place in the world. Every day you learn. Time really has no direct route to anything nor does it have anywhere to go. But you will. And you will because of luck and a great call by a doctor who wasn't suppose to be there that day. Your mother's cervix was not dilating on the right side well enough, and this was when we first heard that you may have to come out through a Caesarean section which was something that neither of us were expecting even though nearly 1 out of every 3 pregnancies in the United States come via this operation. Roughly 3,333.33 of the estimated average of 10,000 babies born in the country every day come out of the mother's tummy through a incision that is nearly on their waist line. This is due to some parents who wish to have the baby in ultimately a safe way rather than through a natural birth. Some mothers want to keep their vaginas primed, perfect, and how they like them rather than risk a perineal lacerations. And some parents, like your mother and myself, were told that we would possibly need this operation because your heart rate was dropping below the healthy numbers and it kept dipping. You rode the line for as long as you could, even coming back up in heart rate in which the doctor even said that a vaginal birth was possible. He left the room, and your mother and I were relieved as our plan was back to where we thought it would be. Not thirty seconds later, the doctor was back in the room and your mother was being rushed to the emergency room as I struggled to through on the gown that I needed to wear to remain somewhat sterile in the emergency room. I hopped down the hallway while I tried to get on the shoe covers looking awkward enough that a kind nurse, who's name is lost to me now, was about to take a knee and help them over my size 11 Chuck Taylor's I decided to wear to the hospital. They were skinny shoes that one of those covers easily fit over but I struggled so hard to get them on. From there, I was rushed down to a waiting area outside the emergency room where you were being cut out and removed from your mother's uterus. An older nurse was eating a chef's salad in a square tupperware outside and moved to allow me to sit down in the chair myself. From here, she comforted me which in retrospect was a kind gesture, one that a nurse is partly trained to do while also just showing general compassion and support as a human being to another human being, but all I wanted to do was to tell her to fuck off. But all I could do was nod. Nod and stare straight into the pure cream white wall in front of me hoping to see you through it. It's cliché, but the two minutes I was waiting out there felt much, much longer than that. But I was called in, and the first thing I heard when I came into that bright, full room of people surrounding your mother on the table was that voice of yours for the first time, screaming because you didn't know what was happening and your body temperature was changing and you smelled and felt more around you than you ever have up to that point. I was called to clip your umbilical cord which I was unenthusiastic to do so before you were born but I had decided at that moment that I would be the one to clip it. And I am glad I did. Your eyes weren't open yet but your mouth was and with the surgical scissors that the nurse equipped me with, it felt as if I was slicing through an unfilled sausage casing. This is when you were washed and swaddled for the first time and when I held you for the first time as well. You screamed the whole time. I gave you back to the nurse and then I made one of the biggest mistakes in my life so far. As I turned around to comfort your mother and to tell her how beautiful and healthy you were, I saw the body of your mother with the blood, the opening, and the uterus out of her body. It looked nearly purple among the deep blood that had yet been cleaned as the medical staff was getting ready to put your mother back together. When I think about your birth, it is the first thing I think about. That, and how I said your name directly to you for the first time. Another thing I remember perfectly from that day was a nurse telling me to pull out my phone for photos and how I thought it was odd that I was being asked to do that before I was being asked to comfort your mother or hold you or if I was holding up well myself. But I fought against my gown and it's stuck zipper and pulled out my cell phone to immediately start taking pictures that later I was glad I was able to take.

And this leads me to this day, about 38 or 39 days after your birth and what I received in the mail box on this day. My mother was moving out of her house in North Idaho, the house that I grew up in since I was five years old, in order to move close to two of her children down in Coeur d'Alene. While cleaning the house up she came across photographs of me as a baby, photographs that we didn't quite know existed until now. She sent me these photos and on this day, it was the first time I had ever seen myself as a baby, thirty one years later and you were just over five weeks old. This is but one of many things you will never experience in your own life, and possibly may have as much trouble grasping at this idea as I do with the idea of how adults decades ago could afford a house on a minimum wage job. But with the quick advancement of technology in cellular phones and even how many pictures of you, as someone who loathes the oversharing and overtaking of baby pictures, that I have taken with my device it has dawned on me that if you so wished, you could see a picture of yourself from most every day of your life so far. We could make a slide show and you could watch yourself grow in front of your own eyes in the matter of minutes. And here I sit with you in my arms and the only two photographs of myself when I was either 5 or 6 months old. And I can see you in myself. You have my nose. You also were born with your grandfather's hairline. I am sorry about this, but hopefully you will grow into a full head of hair soon.