IT'S UP IN THE HEIR

One of the great trump cards that men have held over women has been freedom from the biological clock. With our boundless fertility, we can father children well past our youthful prime, as long as there are plenty of Viagra prescriptions, young women with father issues and clever divorce lawyers.

Or so we thought. Medical research, that gloomy nerd who never fails to spoil the party, recently came out with a study saying that children fathered by men older than 40 are far more likely to have autism or other birth defects than children fathered by men in their 20s and 30s. Our sperm, it seems, is not immune from the ravages of age. Over time, it goes from swimming with the vigor and urgency of a salmon headed upstream to sluggishly drifting about like a manatee on heroin. And when it does reach the egg, it just might be as battered and damaged as something tossed about by really pissed off baggage handlers at LaGuardia International.

At 44, I find this information dispiriting for two reasons. First, it denies men their usual fallback position when things go wrong: blame the woman. "What?! Junior is showing no aptitude for sports at 3 months?! It must be because of all that Vogue you read when you were pregnant!" Or maybe "What?! Junior is playing with Barbie dolls?! It must be because of all that Britney music you listened to when you were pregnant!" The most assiduous practitioner of this was Henry VIII; in his quest for a suitable male heir, he ditched or beheaded four of his six wives, and he probably punished the other two by reading them his poetry.

Second, it presents a damned-if-I-do-damned-if-I-don't problem. A man's 20s and 30s might be the best time to ensure fathering healthy children, but his 20s and 30s are also the decades when he's most likely to spend the children's milk money on booze and strippers. So the kids might not be autistic, but they are far more likely to produce books titled My Dad, the Loser. Not exactly the legacy to be proud of. On the other hand, a man in his 40s has at last built up the wisdom and emotional patience to be a good, supportive father (by that I mean his doctor has told him to lay off the booze and he's blacklisted at all the local strip bars), but his children might wind up living in a world all their own that has no use for his wisdom and emotional patience.

So what's a guy to do?

Well, medical science can giveth as it taketh away and it can give us help with eugenics. That's right people, I'm talking genetic engineering here. I'm talking getting into the DNA and making sure that Junior has the mind of an Einstein and the hitting ability of Lawrence Taylor coming in unblocked off the edge. I'm talking about taking any chance out of the miracle of conception, and making sure that Junior is destined to make enough money so that I can borrow from him in perpetuity (the strip clubs, y'know).

But there is risk here, too. Suppose something gets lost in translation when I am laying out what I want in a kid. Suppose I say, "I want him to be as fast as a cheetah!" and it turns out that Junior leaves home at an early age to pursue his passion for chasing down antelopes on the African savanna. Or suppose that Junior becomes too perfect, views me as fatally flawed and packs me off on an ice floe in the Bering Sea. That would be a crappy end to an Alaskan cruise. Or suppose his impossibly good looks means that every time I try to date a woman 30 years younger than me, she rushes past me toward his embrace. Even when he is only 12. Then again, that could work to my advantage. Adonis-like looks could mean droves of hot chicks clamoring for his affections, and I could pick up what falls by the wayside. Of course, there is something very unseemly about a father pleading with his son "C'mon, son, c'mon! Just let me have what falls on the floor! Just what falls on the floor, if you know what I mean!"

Or I could just hope for the best and do the best I can for any kid I might one day have. I'll see if I can get my DNA altered to allow that.

ACCESS

I'm sure that many of you have been enjoying Stephanic's blog about the current Cherry Blossom Festival here in Macon. Stephanie is a worthy scribe and a hard worker, yet she lacks the access that I have. When you're as plugged into the CBF as I am (or just when people naturally adore you), a lot of doors are opened for you. Even the backstage doors for the rock stars of the CBF -- that's right, I was partying with the Bengal tigers. And here's proof of what I say

As for the details of what went on, hey, the tigers know where I live, man.

THE TATTOO

OK, one thing I forgot to mention about Lost -- what's really the deal with Jack's tattoo? In one of the flashbacks, we learn that he spent about a month in Phu Ket, Thailand, living in a hut on the beach and bouncing some hot Thai chick around the bed. The woman's brother is perfectly fine with this arrangement, or maybe he is just keeping the "imperialist running dog" rhetoric to himself. Anyway, Hot Thai Chick has a secret. And Jack has to know what the secret is; 90 percent of guys would have said, "Secret, huh? What were you born a guy? No? Cool. So we're still on for sex tonight, right?" and let it go. But not Jack. He tails Hot Thai Chick one night. His sleuthing (if you can call it that; HTC might as well left him a neon trail to follow) leads to discovering that HTC is a tattoo artist. OK, so, HTC plies a somewhat seedy and plebeian trade, and might not be a suitable date for that formal at the yacht club. But that's not her secret; her secret is that she can see what fortune has in store for her clients and tattoos that judgment on them. This talent, however, is reserved for her own people, some of whom apparently have no trouble walking around with ink that says, "I'm a big loser." Anyway, HTC butters up Jack by saying that he is a born leader and a great man, and he figures that that is good stuff to put out there with permanent body art. So he gets the tat: something in Asian characters. Well, Jack probably doesn't speak any Asian language with any fluency, so he can't be sure that HTC is actually putting something flattering on his arm. And we as viewers don't know until the end of the episode, when somebody asks Jack whether he knows what the ink says. Jack puts on his best man-of-destiny look and says that yes, he knows. But here's where things would have been better if I had written the episode: Jack's questioner would have said the ink said, "I find great pleasure in the embrace of teenage boys." An astonished, bug-eyed Jack would have spluttered that the ink really said, "he walks among us, but is not one of us." No, the questioner would have said, you're wrong. The questioner would have then called someone else over and asked what the tattoo said. The new arrival would have read it and then looked at Jack and simply said, "Pervert." For the rest of the show, a running gag would be Jack and his pains to hide that tattoo.

Yeah, that's what I would have written.

FAREWELL, PIMP KITTY

The food dish sits empty and undisturbed next to a jumbo-size container of cat food. Upstairs, there is an empty box in front of a window and covered with two towels that still have the impress of many an afternoon nap in the sunny spot. And throughout the foyer of the house, the pungent stench of cat spray grows fainter each day.

Pimp Kitty has left the building.

He pulled off his exit like the greedy opportunist he was, leaving for greener pastures when the gravy train he was riding here began to go off the rails. One of my downstairs housemates bought a dog, which as dogs go, is pretty harmless. He's a mid-size chow mix that's dumber than a bag of hammers and occasionally likes to launch himself toward the grillwork of my car. He's not going to make anybody forget Cujo anytime soon (unless he winds up in a realm populated by creatures who resemble Wilson tennis balls), but he did chase PK whenever they crossed paths, which was not too often. Having to ditch the saunter for the sprint was not PK's style, and so we now have a house filled by an absence. Sort of like the Cratchit house without Tiny Tim ... had Tiny Tim been a leering, debauched slackabout.

Which is a shame, because I had such plans for PK. With the Cherry Blossom Festival approaching, I thought this would be the year to dye him bright pink and see whether he could supplant the pink poodle as the festival's unofficial mascot. Of course, throwing his karma into the mix might have plunged the CBF into moral depths that would have made even Bangkok wince. Trust me, one glance from PK could have caused the festival queen and her court to turn a camper into a rolling brothel.

For Presidents' Day, I had thought of dressing him like George Washington, in the buff and blue of the Continental Army and wearing a powdered wig. Sure, he might have looked almost adorable in that get up, but the price would have been the mysterious collapse of the Washington Monument. That and a few litters of kittens born with powdered wigs.

Getting back to things cherry blossom and Japanese, I had hoped to try bonsai on PK, carefully reducing his food intake and pruning him until he became a tinier version of himself. There would have been dangers, of course. If PK got too much food, for example, he might have begun to grow back to his original size disproportionately. He could have been bonsai kitty over three-quarters of his body and have a hind leg return to original size. But in PK's case, something else would have grown back to original size first.

In any case, the brute is gone, and we won't see his like again soon. Though I could have sworn I saw a kitten hanging about recently, one with an oddly familiar leer ...

MY VISIT WITH HENRY

Two friends had a son they named Henry in September (fortunately, birth was during the work week and so did not interfere with football-watching), and I saw him a week or so after he was born. He seemed more interested in sleep at that time, and our conversation was a little limited when he was awake. but I figured his social skills would improve with time.

After five months, I went back to see whether there had been any change in the boy. He was a little bigger and a little more social this time, but the biggest change I noticed was the growth of his psychic powers.

All babies, you see, are gifted with the ability to see into the future. For instance, when an infant looks at you and smiles, it's because the babe is seeing the hilarious pratfall you will take as you leave the house, or whatever misfortune that strikes you whenever. Sadly, this foresight disappears with age, usually about the time they learn to construct coherent sentences.

Henry's parents did not know this. They took his gurgles and yelps to mean, "My diaper displeases me. Get me another one" or "I detest the strained peas you are forcing into my mouth, and I will take a terrible vengeance upon you later." Only I recognized that he was saying, "Mr. Bear is almost in the market! Sell now!" Or something like that. But whatever the case, I knew the boy's eyes were fixed upon a stock ticker of the near future that only he could see, and my greed and I were determined to extract that information.

But my experience with the psychic world is limited, mostly to playing with the Magic 8-Ball as a child. Well, sometimes you gotta go with what you know, so I began shaking the boy and asking him a question about my 401(k) investments (think Tommy Lee Jones interrogating the pug in Men in Black). Henry seemed to enjoy the experience at first, and when I stopped I could have sworn his eyes had "The outlook is not good" on them. Henry was less amenable to a second question, and a toaster flew off the counter by itself and came speeding toward my head. I ducked quickly, and the toaster instead struck Henry's father, rendering him unconscious and the boy and me bent double with laughter. (Henry's smiles at his father all made sense now.)

The belly laugh aside, I left the house with little material profit to show. But I shall go back soon ... with a Oiuja Board.