THE SULLIVAN SHOW

Mary and Jeff returned from the antipodean climate they have been in for six months. They got back on Monday, which probably felt like Tuesday to them, and have been sleeping at weird times since. I was going to go out with them on Wednesday night, but I was very tired and had to be on my game at work the next day. I had a useless data entry task to work on and had to make progress, since I'd been putting it off for awhile.

So Thursday night I got to see them, over at Mary's sister's house in Willow Springs. Krissy (Sullivan) is pregnant and her husband Pat (who is probably reading this right... now) are having a baby in a couple weeks, and Krissy is carrying around this baby in her belly that looks totally fake. I don't remember seeing many of my aunts really pregnant like this, so this may be the first time I've seen up close a woman so pregnant. I'm telling you her belly looks like a special effect. It's weird and fascinating.

So Jeff and Mary were telling me about Thailand in between their eight-o-clock yawns and showing me pictures of a place that at once looks beautiful and also a clusterfuck, or an attempt at organized chaos. A beautful clusterfuck. Bangkok looks insane, like there's no room to breathe, and apparently there are no rules of the road either. There may be road lanes but no one follows them, so it's essentially a free-for-all. In a country of 15 million people, says Jeff, 10 million are in Bangkok. 10 MILLION PEOPLE!

Chiang Mai, 15 train-hours to the north, is much more sedate. From the pictures it looks a bit like a rainforest, all lush and verdant and greener than green. Except of course for what Pat and I were calling the shit-river. There was this river in one of Jeff's photos that looked like it was a big fucking river of liquid shit. Jeff said that he was caught up in a wayward branch while boating on it and fell in. And he thought the river got mad at him and stole his sandal, but then he heard a popping sound and saw it sail to the top. The image alone of Jeff falling into such a waterway to hell is absolutely hilarious.

Anyway, I should let them tell their own stories, and hope that they will soon. But it says a lot that Jeff and Mary were in the recently rated top three cities in the world (Sydney, Bangkok and Chiang Mai) in the last six months. So much beauty in one year of someone's life might cause eye strain, but the tests have yet to be concluded.

So after the picture show Krissy and her belly joined the conversation and she was showing us her fetus. Baby Sully was kicking and generally causing what looks like a painful ruckus. We were up close and staring looking for a bump somewhere when a whole arm, elbow to fingers, pushed up and moved the length of her belly as if it were flopping around on an uncomfortable mattress in a room without air conditioning. It was like a scene out of Alien and it thoroughly creeped me out.