By Tim Sanders

It is not unusual, when my wife and I are lying in bed at night, for us to have meaningful conversations, which often go something like this:

MARILYN:" Tim!"

ME: "SNARK ... fweee ... SNA-A-RK!"

MARILYN: "TIM!"

ME: "MMMMMF ... sputter, sputter, snark ... huh?"

MARILYN: "You’re rattling the windows and I can’t–EEEEEEW–you’ve drooled on your pillow again!"

ME: "SNA-A-A-ARK ... fweee!"

Which is not to say that we never have more substantive bedtime conversations. Like the other night, when we lay in bed discussing a wide variety of topics, including the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s infamous spiritual advisor, longtime pastor, and certified loon. Marilyn wondered why it was that since I had no compunctions about poking fun at George Dubya’s grammar in my columns, I hadn’t made any comments about Obama and Wright.

"Well," I told her, "for one thing, there isn’t anything funny about this Wright guy. He’s David Duke turned inside out, which may be a little scary, but not funny. And there’s nothing really funny about a presidential candidate who argues forcefully that words DO matter, while sitting under that guy’s ministry for twenty years, either." It was my opinion that the good Reverend was seriously unhinged, and both he and his congregation would be better served if he were in a padded cell somewhere, ranting at the attendants.

Or better yet, how about an encounter group type TV reality show where four such wing nuts–let’s say Rev. Wright, Rev. Farrakhan, Rev. Fred Phelps (the "God hates all fags" guy), and a normal layperson, like David Duke–were all locked into an 8X12 room with only one TV. The TV would have two channels, the 24-Hour Brady Bunch Channel and the 24-Hour Jeffersons Channel. There would be one remote, hanging from a ceiling chain eight feet above the floor. It would be coated with Vaseline. As for music, there would be the Barry Experience, with three hours of Barry Manilow piped in through the air ducts on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and three hours of Barry White piped in on Tuesday, Thursdsay, and Saturday. On Sundays there would be no TV and no music, only the Rock, Paper, Scissors Waterboarding Game. Everyone would look forward to Sundays. The contestants would all dress the same, day in and day out, wearing only those attractive Sumo-style diapers. For exercise there would be two hours of that exhilarating party game, Twister, every day. As for their daily diet, the contestants would have to perform simple cooperative tasks–like passing a series of cockleburs held under their chins from one to the other–which would then allow food pellets to be dispensed from a plastic tube on the wall. And for those times when they all got on each other’s nerves, as often happens on reality shows, they’d be supplied with large foam Nerf bats. Marilyn said the idea had some merit, but she wondered about details, like just where the Spite and Malice House would be located. I recommended a warmer climate than Chicago’s. Much warmer. Marilyn said that was an uncharitable comment, and I assured her I was only talking about Florida. God’s waiting room.

So all this talk about senators and loons quite naturally devolved into the following serious political question:

ME: "Why is Senator Edward Kennedy like Donald Duck?"

MARILYN: "I don’t know. Does it have something to do with bills?"

ME: "No, it’s because both of them have a history of waddling around in front of their nephews without any pants."

MARILYN: "Oh ... Say, speaking of ducks, that reminds me of an interesting chicken question."

ME: "Donald Duck. Teddy Kennedy. No pants. Get it?"

MARILYN: "I get it, I get it! Now here’s a better one: Why do some hens lay brown eggs, and some hens lay white eggs?"

ME: "I think it has to do with their mood. Depressed hens probably lay brown eggs, and contented hens lay white eggs."
MARILYN: "Wrong! Actually, you can tell by looking at a hen what color egg she’s going to lay. Guess what you look for."

ME: "Okay, let me see. I guess you’d pick her up and look for some discoloration around the buttal area."

MARILYN: "WRONG! You look at her earlobes."

ME (envisioning a fully feathered Alfred E. Newman pecking around a barnyard somewhere): "HAHAHA! Shows what you know! Chickens don’t have earlobes!"

Marilyn informed me that chickens do indeed have earlobes..They are little flaps of skin under the chicken’s ears, and brown-earlobed chickens lay brown eggs, while white-earlobed chickens lay white eggs. She’d learned about chicken earlobes while playing Trivial Pursuit. Oh, yeah, and there was also a South American Araucana chicken that laid bluish-green eggs. There was no need for her to tell me that; she was just showing off.

ME: "So what color are the Auracana chicken’s earlobes?"

MARILYN: "I don’t know."

ME: "Okay, so what’s the punch line?"

MARILYN: "There is no punch line. Everything doesn’t have to be a joke, you know. Sometimes non-humorous information can be valuable, too."

ME: "Like chicken earlobe information?"

MARILYN: "That’s right, like chicken earlobe information!"

From there we "moved on," as politicians say when they want to change the topic.

The green egg reference brought Dr. Seuss to mind, and we decided that yes, he was most certainly dead, and no, his ashes weren’t stuffed into a top hat somewhere. The hat, of course, reminded us of cats, and of the fact that our cat, Sylvia, was 15-years-old. I was counting on my fingers, trying to figure out how old that would be in human years, when I sort of drifted off. "She’d be a hundred and ... she’d be ... she’d ..."

I don’t know how long I’d been asleep when I heard Marilyn say: "TIM, you’re snoring again!"

I was glad she woke me. I’d been dreaming about a big, green bullfrog named Jeremiah. He was no friend of mine. He had feathers. And earlobes. And no pants. It was horrible.