THURSDAY IS DAD DAY: You may have noticed that Thursdays are typically light blogging days. That's because I stay home to take care of my son every Thursday and, at nearly 15 months, he's a handful.

Since traffic has been so great of late, I wanted to give y'all something to read. So I thought, in the interest of novelty, I'd run one of the mini-essays I wrote in the early days of parenthood. Here goes:

OUT OF CONTROL AND INVINCIBLE

There's a game my brother and I play at Dave & Buster's. It's a competitive road race, where you pilot a souped-up vehicle over random terrain and contend with all manner of obstacles, hazards, and other bad things. Your goal is to reach a faraway finish line, although that seems less important than running over stuff along the way, making your opponent wreck, and just generally raising hell. It's a lot like Life, in other words.

Ah, but here's where it gets like Life with a Baby: As you navigate, you want to try and steer your way over these shiny magic pills; if you succeed, your vehicle hurtles forward at hyper-speed, ramming through obstacles, dodging bullets, and so forth. The pill sends you completely out of control, so that you really needn't bother steering. You go where you go, flames shooting out of your tailpipes, scenery flying by. Sounds dangerous, I know, but the other key thing is: You're invincible. So for the duration of the magic pill's effectiveness, you rack up ungodly amounts of points almost unwittingly, with no real regard for your (virtual) self or your vehicle. Running over the magic pills is the adrenal high point of the game.

Here's something you don't want to say to your wife hours after the birth of your first child, by the way: "I could die now." You know what I meant, the completeness of having procreated, of having contributed to posterity, of leaving a mark, or at the very least feeling like a Giver more than a Taker, just this once. But she didn't like it. "Don't say that," was her reply. "My God."

She was afraid, of course. It’s no time to talk of danger and loss. But I felt the opposite. And not because I'm not still afraid of Death, afraid somewhere deep down, somewhere fundamental. But because this little baby -- the one that's wrestling around in the Baby Bjorn holder just below my tucked chin as I type -- is my magic pill.

Wonder how long the feeling will last...

UPDATE: The answer, so far, is forever.