Monday, January 21st, 2013: 7:33pm

I got back awhile ago from making a test drive to the new hospital. I made the drive in 13:37, while navigating through significant traffic and also generally respecting traffic laws like not blowing through red lights, mowing down pedestrians and ramming inconsiderate assclowns off the road.

The poor time doesn’t particularly matter as the test drive was mostly to solidify the most accurate route within my head and familiarize myself with the precise locations of all intersections and other potential problems. It’s still not as good as the Kadlec route, but if needed, I feel confident that I could make the journey in less than 4 minutes.

After getting home I parked in the best spot, nose-out for quick exit if needed.

Unfortunately there haven’t been a lot of updates recently. Latent labor is kind of like a Mexican standoff except everyone is just waiting for the baby to make the first move. Lars Ulrich Luebben seems to be extremely content exactly where he is, which is right here:

At any rate, it gives me some time to talk about the miracle of birth, which isn’t a miracle so much as it’s absolutely disgusting.

I actually speak from a position of experience here. I’ve seen many births – numerous instructional videos which were nearly as magical as snuff films – but the piece de resistance was when, at the age of five, I witnessed my sister Sarah being born. It still remains one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever seen. If America really wants to promote abstinence-only sex education, they should make it a requirement to view uncensored births in schools.

There’s not really a need to go into all of the disgusting bodily functions that encompass a birth, nor the small subculture of mentally broken women who consume their own placentas – it’s readily available via a simple Google search. My larger point is that Hollywood has bastardized the birth process and created an image in everyone’s mind that it’s a beautiful, magical experience roughly equivalent to snorting a line of cocaine in a Disneyland restroom with the actresses who play Cinderella and Jasmine. In movies, after a bit of sweaty heaving and screaming, someone pops up from offscreen holding a baby that looks surprisingly like a baby after it’s been thoroughly cleaned and dried out for a few days. If the film is going to be edgy, it looks like a three-day-old baby that’s been dipped in chunky salsa.

You know when you’ve been in the hot tub or swimming for far too long and your fingers get all crinkly and waterlogged and turn a sort of leprous white color? Okay, imagine that ALL of the baby’s skin is like that, except instead of being pinkish white, the baby is some sort of diseased shade of red, purple, or blue, or possibly a terribly mottled combination of all three. Sure, after awhile the baby stops looking like some sort of horrible mutant and more like a normal infant, but my point is that there is nothing wonderful about birth.

Some scientists have speculated that a mother’s maternal instinct exists purely to override the logic centers of the brain that would otherwise react with revulsion upon glimpsing their spawn for the first time [citation needed].

I spent some time discussing this with the expectant mother to try and forewarn her about the terrors of newborns but she was moderately familiar with this. Apparently, someone had suggested that she film the birth which she pretty quickly shut down as people who want to film their births are clearly mentally ill.