 By Dan Brooks |
Another Brooklyn bar bans babies, and—except for the headline writers at the New York Post, who are thrashing in their isolation tanks with glee at the alliteration—polite society girds itself in anticipation of another bitter argument. Nothing makes us angry like a baby. On Thanksgiving day, you can grab the turkey and make it dance around your friend’s kitchen like a puppet, have it drink a whiskey and tell a series of bone-and-breast jokes to his wife, then throw it back in the oven without even rinsing it off and be lauded as a great wit. |
But do the same thing with his baby and suddenly you’re a monster. A baby is like a pack-a-day smoking habit: it turns friends against friends and makes bars, funerals and other usual places of agreement into sites of bitter controversy. Ever since Brooklyn’s Union Hall unsuccessfully tried to ban strollers—and made the New York Times for doing it, thereby elevating the whole issue to the status of Real Thing That Is Happening—public drinking in America has fixed on one question: Should babies be the unwanted center of everyone’s lives? Or just their parents’?
No one wants to see this. Ever.
Like babies themselves, that last apostrophe is important but also maybe unnecessary. Let’s make one thing clear from the beginning: your friends with babies wish that babies weren’t around, too. Even if it wasn’t the result of literal, mechanical accident—your girlfriend got in a fight with her roommate so she replaced seven of her birth control pills with Dippin’ Dots; you were using the withdrawal method and you sneezed—every pregnancy is unintentional. No one intends to get so old that they have to take a full time job and marry someone and give up on their original dream of riding a dinosaur through space. That’s what you wanted to do when you were a kid, right? In retrospect, it seems kind of unreasonable—narcissistic even—which is why nobody wanted to talk to you at the bar back then. It’s also why, now that you’re thirty-four and not regular four, continuing to go to the bar even though your wingman is eating crayons and defecating them directly into his pants seems like the most important thing in the world.
