2003-05-27 | 11:02 a.m.
the artistry of escapism

this weekend jeff and i went to las vegas to visit my brother and his family. we barbequed and went swimming and had all sorts of fun. anyways, i wanted to share with you a story from my weekend. here goes:

we were sitting around the table at dinner when my sister-in-law, alicia, mentioned that she was trying to think of stories about the boys to send to her mom. i asked her if ben had told her the chainsaw anecdote. she said she hadn't, so i told it:

ben, my brother, was moving his tools from his car to his pickup. when he got out the chainsaw, he bent down to show my three-year-old nephew michael how it works.

"when i start this up, the chain moves around really fast and these hooks cut through the tree. see that tree over there," he said gesturing to a tree by their porch. "i could cut that tree down in five seconds."

"YEAH!" concurred michael excitedly, "and it would fall right on our house!"

everyone laughed including michael. he always loves it when people tell stories about him.

michael then turned to ben and asked, "daddy, do you chainsaw bad guys?" ben explained that he would never chainsaw anybody.

then michael asked, "but what do you do when people do bad things?" alicia explained to him that if people are doing bad things we can ask them to go away from us or, if they're doing something really bad, we can call the police, and the police will put the bad guys in jail so they can't hurt anybody.

"but what if the bad guys won't go away or stay in jail?" michael persisted. alicia said that there are locks on the jail so the bad guys can't get out.

"but what if the bad guys use their swords and guns to break the locks and get out of jail?" ben told him that the police take away all of the bad guys' weapons and guard them so they can't do that.

michael was undeterred in his quest to make sure there was no conceivable way that the bad guys could escape from jail. he proposed an alternate escape tactic, "but what if a bad guy says, 'hey! that's my dress you're wearing!'?"

we had no response to that.