No Babies Pictured Here

I'm returned from Salta. A grueling twenty hour bus ride that began with my favorite element of the human world. Babies.

I'm sure most of my readers are familiar with my hatred for these larval humans, but in case there is a Nathan-novitiate out there, I will summarize:

Babies are fat, bald, poorly-proportioned sub-humans who have few basic functions which they accomplish with alarming efficiency. They eat, they shit, they grow, they cry, and they rob you of all time which you might have spent on improving yourself or the world around you. I cheered when my asshole 10th grade English teacher got a kid and I combat daily the biological clocks of people upon whom I don't wish a fate worse than death.

I am happy hating children and waiting for the day I am old enough to get a vasectomy. My spreading reputation prevents me from having much contact with them, but in Argentina, it seems, the fools are still reproducing. And worse yet, they are putting them on buses.

My bus. My 20-hour bus ride bus. The one where the seats are too short to support my head and there are little boxes that lesser humans can put their feet in for comfort. There were babies on this bus. Two of them. To my left. Directly.

One of these puffy maggot-creatures cried for two hours straight. That is one hundred and twenty minutes of unrelenting wailing. Oh, and here is a bit of culture shock. Apparently, the Spanish trilled R manifests itself early in the speech development of these little Argentines. That is to say for seven-thousand eight-hundred seconds, this baby made noise like rattlesnake trying to mate with a race car.

Horror of horrors, this thing had a sister. One capable of walking, falling and therefore distracting her incompetent mother from the one screaming child she already could not handle. Naturally, being an abomination, this creature would cry too, her relatively-developed vocal apparatus giving her the volume her squawking brood-mate could only aspire to.

Why, yes. Yes, the mother was 6-months pregnant with a third child. Of course she was, how could she have been anything else? Frankly, I was surprise that she didn't cast the stentorian mite from her lap to give birth to her third little wretch right then and there.

I maintained my sanity by imagining all the scenarios in which I could kill them and translating one-liners I could say to her or the other passengers:

Supongo que no podemos ponerlos con el equipaje.
-I suppose we can't put them with the suitcases.

No encajarán en el baño.
- They probably won't fit in the toilet.

Aca señora, ese deber ayudar.
[En ese momento, yo le doy una percha]

Oops, I forgot to translate that one.

Thank all creatures in existence that there was this women who sat behind me, whose singing was both pleasant and effective in silencing the unholy cacophony, infinitely better than the combined care of the actual mother and her gray-haired attendant.

I'm serious about the unholy bit. When that baby would scream and roll his R's, it sounded like he was possessed by a demon.

Naturally, the little blight ran out of energy just as he was getting off the bus. He slept peacefully on his mother's shoulder, pale eyelids covering the unseeing coals of his hell-gazers.

If ever again this happens to me, I will lock myself in the bathroom for the duration of the trip. The scent of the high-protein Argentine diet is a much cleaner way to die.

Baby Killer