December 30th, 2005 - Well, nearly a year of parenthood behind me now. Owen's first birthday is on Tuesday. And unlike some other parental blogger-types who make a point of writing monthly love letters to their kids, I don't feel all that tied to the phases of the moon or the earth's long journey around the sun. I just haven't experienced parenthood that way, which is to say, nothing has seemed to happen on a timetable or in a neat, tidy little package, ready for me to regurgitate here for you.

People refer to the day their child was born as the happiest day of their lives. It was not the happiest day of mine. It was a harrowing, horrifying, exhausting day. It was the painful jumping in ritual for admittance to the gang of parenthood.

No. The happiest days of my life have been the day Owen first smiled at me, the day I first heard him laugh, the spring day when he and his mother and I all went walking in the warm Vermont air and I looked at us all together there and thought I knew what life was for. Those were happy days, and there were more, including tonight when I looked up from the computer to see his tiny, rumpled, bare butt disappearing down the hallway into the bathroom and a waiting tub.

What I'm finding out about parenthood is that the particulars of it aren't particularly fun, giving baths, changing diapers, reading the same simple stories over and over. And yet, there is this inexpressible love you feel for your kid that makes giving baths, changing diapers and reading Goodnight Moon for the 250th time entirely bearable, pleasant even. When I read to Owen he has a way of nestling his soft, warm head into my shoulder that I would read War and Peace in the original Russian if we could just sit there in the gauzy lamp light forever.

There is something necessarily co-dependent about parenting, the joy you get from knowing you are this little person's entire world, a source of unconditional comfort for him when a fire truck screams past or when he's bumped his head.

Every day I say to myself, "God, I love this fucking kid." Whether he's crawling or walking or laughing or sleeping in my arms, that love, a love I'm still not sure I completely understand, is what my experience of parenthood is all about.

I know I was going to say something about Owen's first Christmas, but we're past that now. His aunts and uncles and grandparents showered him with material affection. We took some pictures.

We're off to Vermont for New Year's Eve. May happiness fall on your head like unexpected rain in 2006.

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December 27th, 2005 - The three best books I read this year were: David McCullough's John Adams, Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, and Javier Marias' Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me. I'm not much a book reviewer, but I'll tell you what I liked about each of these books.

I've been reading a bit of Revolutionary era history, working my way through some of the pop histories that have sold well in recent years, books including Joseph Ellis' Founding Brothers and His Excellency: George Washington, and Gore Vidal's Inventing a Nation. I enjoyed them all, but McCullough's John Adams stood apart for me. Though Ellis did an excellent job with his Washington bio, I thought McCullough did a far better job of breathing life into Adams. And Adams, in his own way, justified the effort by being equal to his more-heralded colleagues of the time. Because I live in Massachusetts, too, and travel many of the same streets that Adams rode and walked two centuries ago, I was able to climb inside this book and look out with a different perspective. And to me, that's what great books do, change your perspective.

Which brings me to Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year after her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly of a massive heart attack over dinner at their New York apartment, while simultaneously their daughter lay in coma at Beth Israel hospital. I've not read any of Didion's other work, so I can't really speak to how this book fits into the broader context of what she does. What I can say is that you will seldom read a memoir of tragic events that comes off as both genuinely sad and thoroughly perceptive at the same time. Good writing is honest, and this book is as honest as they come.

Finally, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me by Javier Marias, a mystery of sorts. Marias has sold millions of books in Europe and has been mentioned as a Nobel candidate, but for some reason, Americans don't read him. That's what got me curious about him, and Tomorrow in the Battle... told the rest of the story. Marias' style is very deliberate and meticulous. He takes a handful of events and examines them in great depth, exposing the psychological and emotional significance to seemingly innocuous snippets of conversation and driving the story forward on the back of his narrator's acute observations. I enjoyed the story. I enjoyed the stylization. I enjoyed the sensibility, which is decidedly continental, which is to say more unselfconciously thoughtful than most American or British novels.

The truth about my reading for 2005 is that there just wasn't as much of it as there has been in years past. The three books I've named here are all good and all worth your taking the time to thumb through, but they were the easy and obvious choices for the year. Last year I would have been hard-pressed to pick three from the long list of great books I read. Now obviously, I didn't read as much because I was busy learning how to be a father (and yes, I'm still learning), but one of my great hopes for 2006 is that I hit a rich vein of good books and find the time to read them all.

What have you read recently that moved you?

Next: Owen's first Christmas, first birthday and what I've learned about being a parent.

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December 23rd, 2005 - So, at the end of each blog lately, I've been trying to give an inkling of what the next installment is going to be about, and the other day I said, "Next: If a president breaks a law, but no one does anything about it, is it still a law?" which prompted one reader to weigh in before I'd even written what I was going to write.

How cool is that?

And in a very real way, she got me thinking about the question in a slightly different way and inspired me to write out my thoughts a little earlier than I might have otherwise, and that's very cool too.

So rather than coming at it as I was going to, all fire and indignation, instead I'm going to quote what I think is the crux of her argument, and then post my reply to her in full. Here goes...

She said, "I guess a better question would be is he above the law in certain cases? I personally feel the president should be entitled to do what ever he needs to do to protect this country if he sees fit, I guess even if he's breaking the law. Aren't some laws intended for the common folk. Like speeding. Cops break that law all the time and so do emergency vehicles on their way to a crime or accident. Do I want that to change. NO! Do we need to change the law in general about wire tapping, no I don't believe we should. So there lies a *not* so serious problem in my humble opionion. The government does plenty of things that they shouldn't everyday to protect us and I'm sure will continue to do so for the sake of the people and I for one don't want that to change."

And here's what I wrote back:

Mostly I agree with you. We absolutely have to take a practical rather than a literal approach to enforcing our laws, and the president should clearly be empowered to break the law, by executive order, in order to address serious threats to our security. President Carter did it when authorizing warrantless physical searches of foreign premises, and Clinton did it when authorizing other warrantless searches of foreign agents and property. In both cases, the executive order was written to exclude violating the fourth amendment by explicitly protecting American citizens from illegal searches.

What makes this instance different, in my mind, is that there was no reason for Bush to break the law. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 was written to give the executive branch the flexibility and agility they need to perform needed surveillance within the law. It is not hard to comply with FISA, nor does complying limit the president's power to spy on evil-doers. So why did Bush break the law?

Compelling evidence suggests that at least some part of this surveillance program was directed at anti-war groups within the US, which, to me, is a big, big problem, not only for its obvious illegality but also for the chilling effect government misbehavior like this has on free speech and open debate. In my mind, this is exactly why the fourth amendment was written, to keep the government at comfortable arm's length from the practice of freedom by the citizens of our country.

And so, it is true that the executive has a privilege to explore the gray areas in our laws in the name of protecting our ultimate interests and safety. But, I think this is a case of the president pushing through the gray area, straight into the black and white of constitutional law. Not only has he broken established laws, but he's admitted as much and been unrepentant in doing so. At a time when our stated aim is to spread democracy and freedom throughout the world, this violation of our law undermines our most basic projects while it erodes our core civil liberties.

People will be talking more and more about impeachment in the coming weeks and months, and while I too despise this president's policies, I'm not so sure we should rush to impeachment as a solution to the problem. Removing a president from office is a shameful process in which few can claim any really sense of victory. Love him or hate him, the president represents us, and to attack him is, to some degree, to attack and weaken ourselves.

In this too we have to be practical, not only principled (I would argue that the Clinton impeachment was neither). We have to find a way to send a clear message to the administration that their cavalier attitude toward this and other laws will not be tolerated, to check executive power with congressional oversight, as the constitution requires. I believe some sort of formal censure is in order with an attendant agreement to establish real, regular and regimented oversight, specifically of executive intelligence gathering activities. In my mind, Congress has dropped the ball with this president in a very serious way, and only because he was born on the same side of the aisle as the majority of them. The rubber stamping of bad presidential ideas has gone on long enough.

Certainly, both Republicans and Democrats have something to gain from putting this president on notice. The Republicans can show their constituents that they still have some independence from a president whose poll numbers have been south of 50% for a long time now, and the Democrats can show that they won't be cowed by Bush's insistent faux-patriotism and fear-mongering.

Enough is quite clearly enough.

Next: The three best books I read this year.

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December 21st, 2005 - I was afraid that once Owen was born my identity would be completely subsumed by the need to perform fatherly duties (which it very nearly was), that I wouldn't have time to work on writing projects (which I mostly don't) and that I wouldn't have time to read (which is also mostly true). I expressed those fears here in this blog, and my friend Foofie Q. Snubington, PhD, said to me: "You will be fine. You just have to keep doing your own thing, reading and writing and whatever you need to do."

Of course, when Owen was born my brain melted into a pool of sleep-deprived and responsibility-overloaded drool. I couldn't remember things. I couldn't piece together coherent ideas. I became, for about five months, dumber than I normally am, which should worry you since I make elementary and high school text books for a living. During this time, my reading slowed considerably, and the type of reading I did changed as well. I more or less stopped reading history, because I couldn't force my brain through the tumble pass of political philosophy embedded in each text. I began reading crime fiction. Crime fiction is fun. And easy.

So that's all well and good, but at the same time I stopped being able to write thoughtfully about the experience I was having as a new father because I felt completely overwhelmed by the experience itself. There was just no way to get enough perspective on it. Perspective is furnished either by physical or mental distance, and there was no way I could get either one while skimming along on three or four hours sleep a night.

That brings me to the subject of aimlessness.

It may sound a little disingenuous for me to say that I felt aimless after Owen was born (and really up until just recently), because when you have an infant in the house there is always something to do. Still, and despite all my daddy duties, aimless is just how I felt.

Up to that point, I had been deeply embroiled in reading about the American Revolution in order to get a deeper sense of both the intentions of the oft-referenced "founding fathers" and also a better handle on the political philosophy undergirding our democracy. I know. It sounds really fun, huh?

I was also working on a number of different essays, which have since languished, and was pretty happy with the old blog, streaming out in a more consistent and, I thought, more thoughtful way. The reading and writing, together, were the things I organized my mental life around (I am self-consciously omitting the word 'intellectual' here).

Of course, Owen became the mental, emotional and physical center of everything we did, and he left little room for much else, though I have managed to keep this blog going and to keep reading books of one sort or another. And to some degree, losing time to your child doesn't feel like much of a loss at all. You have less time for yourself, but you don't mind really because you're busy having your brain crushed by a megaton explosion of love for your kid.

Really, my feelings of aimlessness came less from not being able to read or write, but more from not being able to maintain the thread that ran through both activities previously. For the first time in some years, I didn't know what book I wanted to read next. I had trouble generating writing ideas. I didn't have a solid handle on what I was thinking about during all those moments when I didn't have to think about work or child. So I knew what I was doing when I was with Owen, but I had no idea what I was doing with myself.

Which brings me to Jeff Tweedy and Gertrude Stein.

I had been wrestling with the aimlessness for months, reading bits and pieces of things I had been interested in before, but none of them seemed to rekindle my curiosity. I kept asking myself, "What should I be reading? What should I be thinking about?"

And then I was reading this article about Jeff Tweedy, who is a musician whose music I have enjoyed, and it was talking about Jeff Tweedy reading Gertrude Stein in the context of developing some ideas about the music making process, and right then it occurred to me that it didn't matter all that much which mental thread I picked up and pursued, just that I pick one up and pursue it. I mean, look, it's not at all important to me one way or another that Jeff Tweedy reads Gertrude Stein. Rather, it's important to me that the association of those two names and the connection between them is completely random. It proved to me that there is no "should" when it comes to nurturing your intellectual curiosity (Yes, I know that sounds horribly nerdy and stupid, but what can I do?)

The thread that connects a popular, though slightly obscure, modern musician to a dead, European intellectual is long and rather thin, but it exists because one of them wills it to exist, and that, I realized, is all I needed to do to restore my flagging sense of mental selfness. I didn't matter what book I picked up next, or how what I read effected my writing. It only mattered that I picked up a book and that I thought about. So I did.

Next: If a president breaks a law, but no one does anything about it, is it still a law?

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December 18th, 2005 - Sorry. I'd have been along sooner, but I was downstairs cleaning up. I made stock today. Turkey stock. With the Thanksgiving carcass. I took my biggest pot and dumped the ravaged fowl corpse in it, picked out the lemons I'd stuffed it with for roasting, and topped it up with water. I added a couple of carrots, sliced, some celery, some onion, some bay leaves, some salt, some pepper. This was this morning. I'm always ambitious in the morning.

Well, that son of a bitch simmered all day, and it did what it's best at, which is filling the house with the smell of good things cooking. The carrots and celery break down. The meat still clinging to the bone slowly releases its grip. You skim the fatty scum that floats to the top, and eventually you strain it all into the biggest tupperware containers you own.

Of course, not content to lay in more turkey stock than any freezer has a right to, I figured I'd make a pot of split pea soup, too. Eight cups of the stock come right off the top, and go into another big vat with more carrots and more onions, the boiled, soaked and strained split peas, some smoked ham, four medium-sized potatoes, a couple more bay leaves, more salt, more pepper. And that all simmers away for a few hours too.

In the interim I chased Owen around the house, Owen, who is teething and is, if I'm reading the signs properly, wholly pissed off about it. It was a whiney day, a day that called for much screeching and blubbering, a day I was glad to end with a quick tub, a lullaby and a kiss goodnight.

At this point, I need to apologize to my mother who gave me a really nice set of glass storage containers when she and my father moved into the new, much smaller kitchen, in their new, much smaller apartment. I never knew tupperware could be so good. And unfortunately, I'm going to have to go back to using the old, scarred and stained plastic I was using before, because I tried to strain hot stock into the biggest one of my mom's and discovered the hard way that that glass isn't tempered. Not only did I lose about four cups of stock, but it took me ten minutes to pick all the glass out of the sink next to the stove.

On the upside, the split pea turned out really well, and I still had about six cups of stock for the freezer.

None of this really explains why I'm so late getting up here to the computer though. That explanation is twofold. First, have you ever cleaned up after making stock? Jesus, Mary and Joseph, there's bits of mushy flesh and unidentifiable vegetable matter everywhere. Cleaning your strainer alone takes ten minutes. And then there's the big, double bagged sack of still-warm turkey corpse and trimmings to deal with. There ain't no garbage disposal around that's going to choke that stuff down without producing a bone-fragmented, grease clog that requires professional intervention. And have you ever tried getting a plumber in winter, in New England, when every jack ass and their brother is letting their pipes freeze? As the British say, "it's just not on."

The other reason I'm up here, and up past my bed time for that matter, is that I'm trying this new thing where I don't do everything at break-neck speed. I've been dropping things a lot lately, making messes and breaking stuff, and Brittney pointed out to me that maybe if I went a little more slowly, then maybe these things wouldn't happen. So I cleaned up very methodically, and, lo and behold, didn't get poultry guts all over the kitchen floor.

And now that I've explained all that, I'm going to climb in bed with something to read, because tomorrow is nigh, and the children of America will want textbooks to learn with.

Next: Aimlessness, Gertrude Stein, Jeff Tweedy and the thread that connects them.

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December 14th, 2005 - Some ideas for the next edition of the OED first. 1) Blogger's Remorse - the crappy feeling you get the day after having written something really sort of stupid in your blog, knowing full well that you can't take it down without appearing to take yourself way too seriously; "Oh man, I spewed a bunch of crap about being a guy on a train last night, and now I have a bad case of blogger's remorse." 2) Fuckwith - change, especially regarding work; "How much editing does this next chapter need?" answer: "well, it looks like about a 50% fuckwith." 3) Facecold - a degree of coldness which causes one's face to hurt; "how cold is it out there?" answer: "Facecold."

We went to Vermont last weekend. It looked like this:

The place looks nice in this light, no? It photographs well, even though it is begging for about a 90% fuckwith inside, painting and patching and insulating and such. It wasn't facecold there, but it turned facecold when we got back to Boston. It was facecold again today, though tomorrow it's supposed to warm up to freezingasscold. Look it up.

Speaking of blogger's remorse, what do you think of the redesign? I went for maximum simplicity, but I think it works. I weeded out all the crap that no one ever read, like the horrible short stories and the car reviews I wrote for MDNews Magazine. I never drove those cars by the way. There. My conscience is clear.

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December 13th, 2005 - The film opens: a man finds himself aboard the wrong train. He leaps from his seat, but it's too late. The floor makes a herky-jerky movement under his feet and the platform begins to slide slowly past. The conductor comes striding up the aisle, all moustache and navy blue starch. His ticket punch dangles from a gold chain. The man returns to his seat, slumps over slightly in despair and leans his head against the cold window.

The man is me. The train is time. I don't know who the conductor is.

I just know that anymore I look out the window and see things whizzing by. I can tell that the trees are streaks of brown and green. I see that the buildings are mostly gray. But that's about it. If you're not on the train with me, as Brittney and Owen are, then I can't possibly make you out.

There is a scene in the book I'm reading now (Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me by Javier Marias), in which a woman undresses after a day at work. She takes off her blouse slowly, thinking about her day at work. There are long pauses before and after the removal of each piece of clothing, the stockings, the skirt. She is lost in thought. It's not a prurient scene, meant to arrouse or titillate. In the book, it serves only as a way to juxtapose the very mundane thing she's doing, undressing, with the less mundane thing she is about to do, die.

What struck me about it was that I could absolutely envision it. Her movements seemed so natural, and yet, I have not been so lost in thought, so self-absorbed in a long, long time. Now, everything I do is timed. I have 10 minutes to shower, a half hour to walk the dog. I have to leave work at precisely 4:30, so I can pick Owen up at 5:30. Dinner is at 6. His bedtime is at 7:30. Baths have to be given. Stories have to be read. At 7:31 there are dishes to wash. Then, between roughly 8 and 10, I can: watch TV, read, answer email, write this blog, edit any pictures I've taken recently, pay the bills, have a cup of tea, exercise, talk with my wife, play with the dog, call a friend. I can pick any two, unless one of them is TV. Then I can pick only one, because TV accelerates and destroys time, like cocaine or donuts.

At 10 I have to go to bed or risk being homicidally tired the next day. When I undress, there are no long pauses between shirt and undershirt. I'm throwing things at hangers, diving out of my work clothes to get to the next thing, which tonight happened to be some work, then some Su Doku, then this blog. By the way, it is, as I type, 9:59.

And I realize again, as I wind up for the night, that what I've written here will come off as complaint, the endless and typical ranting of a person who feels there just aren't enough hours in the day. But I'm less dismayed about it, and actually far more curious. I'm not unhappy. I'm just not in a position to be very thoughtful about what's happening to me at the moment. I have begun to say things to myself like, "Well, in a couple of years I'll have time to [insert name of activity here]," and rather than being depressed about that, I am more ambivalent.

It is easy to feel you're missing something.

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December 8th, 2005 - Quick! Go warn the others! Owen is walking.

I'm not talking about the stumble walking he was doing before, the three or four leaning, falling, desperate steps he was taking last week. Oh, no. I'm talking about walking, sliding down off the couch, throwing his hands up and out for balance and then toddling from the living room into the kitchen in search of his mother or the dog or most likely, the dog's food.

The thing that is so amazing about this milestone is that we had very little warning, or rather we had ample warning that he was working on this new trick called walking, but we had no idea that he would go from flinging himself about like an angry drunk to sustained and purposeful walking in the space of a day. It's as if the Walking Fairy came and whispered in his ear, "It's the balance, stupid."

Compounding my joy, he walks to me, that is, he chooses to walk over to me and then lift his tiny arms skyward in the universal gesture of "pick me up," which is heart-melting and day-making and reason enough to go on living.

But he is wrecking the house.

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December 7th, 2005 - I'm redesigning, which is why you're not reading some horribly self-involved bit of tortured prose right now. So far I have moved all the non-Owen pictures onto Flickr, because I ran out of free web space on my ISP's server. Why don't you check those pictures out now? Go ahead. I'll wait.

I also consolidated all the Owen pictures on one page so you can scroll through from his birth to the present. I know. I know. It takes a hell of a long time to load, but if you're clicking on the photos link you're probably family and so it's your duty to wait while the Internet clucks and sputters through every last shot of your (e.g. grandson, nephew, etc).

My overall plan is to radically simplify the site. I'm going to scrap my writing portfolio, move the blog to the index page and go to a three column format with navigation on the left, much as it is now, and a right hand column with links to my friends and favorites. When I'm done, I will give you the opportunity to tell me how badly it all sucks, or, since it will probably take me some months to get it together, you can bitch at me as I go. Whatever works for you.

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December 6th, 2005 - I did a poor job of relating the story of keeping my job in that last entry. In reality, the whole thing was far more sinusoidal, far more up and down. From the moment my phone rang and the voice on the other end intimated that there might be a job that I might be qualified for and that it might pay more than the job I have now, it was as if the flimsy safety bar dropped into place and the roller coaster click-clacked away from the loading platform. In the space of a week, I mentally quit my job three times, each time, reluctantly, going back to it, until at the last moment I saw that I needed to stay put if I wanted to be happy. Of course, it helped that I was able to extort an extra $10k out of my boss in the process, but when does extortion NOT produce a happy result?

So I got on the wrong train car on the way home tonight. You know, the car with the chatty, drunk homeless guy. This one was particularly interesting because he was wearing mucklucks (sp?) and a ski hat with ear flaps, much like the one I wear in cold weather. He had a voice like an old lawnmower, rumbling and fading in and out as it criss-crossed the lawn of his semi-consciousness.

He bent half way over in his seat to see the cover of the book I'm reading (The Collected Short Prose of James Agee), and then remarked, "I never heard of James Agee (pronounced Aggie), but he looks like a real important guy."

To this I nodded a vague assent, trying to be polite and yet send the message that I didn't want to chat about my book with a drunk in mucklucks. He grinned back at me, his face red as a smacked ass.

Luckily for me, a well-dressed older guy boarded the train and took up the seat next to the drunk, whereupon he was engaged in a discussion about whether or not we should come to Taiwan's defense should the People's Republic invade. His take? We should evacuate all the Taiwanese, bring 'em over here, and tell the Chinese to screw. The Chinese want to rule the Earth, and we have to stop 'em. Somehow his dapper neighbor managed to agree convincingly enough that the conversation halted temporarily, but it seems it was only a break in mowing while the gas can was located and the tank refilled. Soon enough the Chinese were coming in for more criticism.

All of this made it hard to concentrate on my book, but ultimately worth taking the train.

This morning, an older guy in a red satin jacket sat next to me. When an olive skinned fellow tried to escape the car a second too late, jamming his bag in the door to try to get it to reopen (you know the trick), the old guy turned to me and said, "That's why they set up the Immigration and Naturalization Service," as if that was going to make perfect sense to me while I watched this other guy try to get his bag back from the jaws of the door before the train pulled out of the station again.

What any of this has to do with keeping my job, I don't know. I guess it's all a matter of how much you want to engage the world. I could have taken that new job, but maybe it was going to turn out to be a China-hating drunk old man, and sure I would have had a nice seat while most everyone else had to stand, but can you ever really be sure the seat isn't an ass-warmed, germ bowl?

No. You can't.

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December 4th, 2005 - OK. Back now.

While I was away (or here, but not for you), I was offered a new job. It was quite a surprise. One day, a man called me at my desk and asked if I knew anyone who did exactly what I do and might be interested in a new opportunity. At this point in the story, which is to say early, I was the person he was looking for. We chatted for a bit about my work experience and then arranged a face-to-face interview for the following week.

I went to the interview.

I talked. And talked. And talked. Interviews are funny in as much as they afford you a guilt-free opportunity to talk about yourself for hours on end. And so I did. I preached and pontificated. I spun the tale of myself as a confectioner might spin sugar. I made it sound sweet.

It helped that I do exactly what they needed done, and that I was disgruntled with my current employer. At the end of the interview, the man said to me, "Well, I'll tell you what. I'm very interested in moving forward with this." And he arranged for me to come back a few days later to speak with some of the people who work for him.

I think he and I both knew he was going to offer me a job, though. He was desperate for someone who does what I do, and since there are relatively few of us, I was exactly what he needed, though I think I've mentioned that already.

I went back.

I met with the woman whose boss I would become. Then I went out to lunch with the man and his right hand man. Italian. I ate linguine with clams. It was very delicious. They paid. Then the man offered me a job. Actually, no. He offered me the job before lunch, and then we talked over lunch as if I had already accepted the job even though I hadn't.

His offer was a very good offer.

It was $20k more than I make now. The benefits were both more generous and more comprehensive than the ones I have now. The job itself was attractive as well. It was a directorship, a slug line on a business card that connotes something like progress, the climbing of ladders, the directing of things badly in need of direction.

For those of you who don't regularly tune in to this channel, I have been looking, albeit lazily, for a job for some months, ever since a confrontation with my current employer wherein I refused to take on additional responsibilities without taking on more compensation. I thought I knew then what I wanted from a new job. More money. More recognition. Better benefits. A higher profile.

But, as has so often been the case since...well...birth, I was wrong.

I have been reading this collection of James Agee short prose. It opens with a memoir of Agee by Robert Fitzgerald, and in the memoir Fitzgerald quotes Agee expressing an abiding hatred for his job at Fortune magazine. Agee waxes sarcastic and critical about the money lust his employer embodies, the basic wrongness of the enterprise as a whole, and then closes with this line: "But in the long run I suspect the fault, dear Fortune, is in me: that I hate any job on earth, as a job and hindrance and semisuicide."

Clearly, I have none of Agee's talent, but I match him for stubborn intrasigence.

And so I finished lunch and went away to consider this fantabulous job offer, to talk it over with Brittney and to somehow change my life for the better. But first I had to go to work, and this is where the story veers from its expected path (or, at least, the path I expected it to take).

All along I had been forthcoming with my employer about what I was doing, what opportunities I was pursuing, and what my progress was. It is my policy always to be honest. I had asked them for more money. I felt I deserved it. They felt I deserved it, but I was told no more money was available, though we both knew this was, at root, not true. At the time I made my request, I was clear with them that I wasn't looking for another job, that my request was ultimatumless, a request on its merits alone. Having failed to produce a satisfactory raise (it would have been my first in two years), I decided that I owed it to myself and to my family to test my worth on the open market. And thus my job hunt began.

And now, fastforwarding to the end of the hunt, I let my boss and my boss's boss know that I was on the verge of leaving. Upon hearing the offer extended to me, an offer even they had to admit was fairly impressively good, they immediately asked for time to come up with a counter-offer. I demured. I had dealt with them as candidly as I knew how in my initial request for more money. I had wanted them to do the right thing. Having foregone that course of action, I didn't think they deserved another shot now.

And then I changed my mind.

I have been withholding information from you gentle reader, like the mystery writer who doesn't introduce his murderer until the final chapter of the book. I haven't even given you the chance to guess at what was on my mind.

And this is what it was: my son.

My current employer is a multi-national company whose care and interest for its employees are like a prison guard's. They treat us only as well as they think they must. But, more importantly as I slowly realized, my boss and my boss's boss are good people, and there are a number of discretionary benefits afforded me that are hard to put a price tag on. Chief among them is the day I get at home every week, the day I spend with my son. Sure, I answer email and make phone calls from home. I take care of my business, but I also get to be with Owen. I get him all to myself for the day and thereby get to know him better than I ever could only being home on weekends when I share him with Brittney.

Thinking of the new job with all its glittery power and ego-aggrandizing glamour, I was nearly blind to the reality that I would be away from home a hell of a lot more. Realistically, I couldn't do the new job in any less than 50 hours per week, a work load I would have thought more than reasonable five or six years ago, but couldn't really fathom now (see above quote from James Agee).

And so, at about 7pm on the night on which I was to make my decision, the phone rang. It was the boss's boss, a kind and endearing Englishman with a typical British sense of embarrassment about anything even vaguely contentious, a guy who regularly soaks up wave after wave of my righteous indignance, nods along sympathetically, means well. He offered me an immediate raise of $10k and promise of an improved benefits package at the first of the year. He said, "I really hope you'll stay."

In my head, the equation chalked itself across the mental blackboard, $10k = 50 days at home with son. I'm no actuary, though I am sure everything in this life can be reduced to some monetary equivalence. Still, this one seemed obvious.

I'm not sure Brittney was quite as far along in her thinking about all this as I was. She remained angry at current employer for all the slights of the past, all the stinginess and obliviousness. She thought I should take the new job with the money and the status and the recognition of my ability. Current employer didn't deserve another turn in this game.

She's a good wife. The best.

And oh, there was an aching part of me that agreed with her. I am, lest you have failed to notice, a stubborn and dogmatic character. The chance to stick it to my current employer was beginning to melt in my hand, a waxy, sweet chocolate begging to be quaffed, bolted down in a frenzy, and yet, I couldn't do it.

All my anger, all my righteousness seemed at once useless. My time with Owen was worth more than $10k. The chance to advance, the chance to make more and be more and to invest myself more heavily in the world of working and thereby to be happier than I already am, was all of a sudden chimerical.

In the morning I called the man who had called me at my desk to thank him for his generous offer but to decline. I informed current employer that I was staying. Hands were shaken. Life went on.

And I only regret now that it's grown late and that I don't have the wherewithal to explain just what an internal oddysey all this was. The decision, once it came, was the right one for me, even if it was completely surprising. I felt, for the first time in my life, as if I'd been able to sublimate my ego in the service of something really important.

Do you know what that's like?

More on this soon.

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November 22nd, 2005 - I miss you all. Really I do. I have much to tell you and much to say about it once I've got it told. I have been busy. Busy with big life things. Perspective shifting things. It has been a happy, if a little frenzied, time.

The ceiling is up in Owen's room now. Once we get a chance to paint it, I'll be able to resume normal service. Look for me some time next week. Until then...

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November 19th, 2005 - No time for this. We're redoing Owen's room, which, in this case, begins with putting up a new ceiling, which, in turn, requires relocating Owen and his crib to the office, just behind me here, which precludes nighttime blogging rituals. Also, work has completely exploded, and there's a long story to that that I'd like to impart to you at some point, but that point is not now.

And so, in the meantime, this:

Thing I never thought I'd say aloud but have had occasion to say because I am now a parent:

"Hey, do you want help getting his pants off?"

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November 14th, 2005 - More on tattoos, past, present and future.

First, identity. The whole idea of getting another tattoo got me percolating about the symbolism of tattoos, the deadly seriousness of putting permanent marks on your body and more specifically, what the tattoos I've already got say about me. What I've got is the dragon from the Welsh flag, in one color (black) on back of my right shoulder, and the insert from a 45 record (remember the old Spin magazine logo) in black at the base of my back. The Welsh dragon is a desperate attempt on my part to cling to the withering ethnicity in my genes. I'm an American, but my father is Welsh, and I found it hard to preserve that in any meaningful way, other than getting it tattooed on my flesh.

When I evaluate whether or not I want a tattoo, I sometimes imagine myself being exhumed by a future archaeologist. What markings would I want them to find on my body, and what story would I like them to tell? The dragon marks me in the present as at-least-partially-Welsh, and connects me to a past line of shortish, hirsute and bandy-legged people that I'd like to be connected with.

The other tattoo is less clear cut to me. At the time, I really wanted to get another tattoo, and I wasn't thinking as clearly about being exhumed and needing to fit into some archaeo-sociological puzzle. I was a record collector, a vinyl enthusiast, and I prized my records and my music in a way that I thought was integral to my identity. Subsequently, of course, I graduated from college and had to get a real job and had less and less time for rooting around in dusty bins of obsolete musical media. And then I lost that compulsive interest in music altogether. I still listened, and I still played a little bit, but my interests broadened.

And so now I think of that tattoo, which I still like very much from an aesthetic point-of-view, as more a memento, a souvenir if you will, of that time in my life, a reminder of the person that I used to be. So that's fine, and it leads me to the new tattoos I'm thinking of getting.

The first is a knot of sorts, a twig I twisted up and handed to Brittney about two days after we met. She said she'd keep it forever. And did. And now I want to have that twig, which we used on wedding invitations, permanently affixed to my self. Brittney doesn't like the idea so much. She's superstitious about these things and fears it will bring about the end of our relationship, like Pam and Tommy or Billy Bob and Angelina. To me though, those people were always destined to split up, all just part of the fevered coupling and uncoupling of celebrity. Our knot is more firmly tied than that, and even if it's not, I've come to see it as the best symbol of our time together and the love that produced our child, who is, of course, the shining light of the universe.

And so there's got to be a tattoo for Owen, too. Probably the letter O in the font of my choice. I'm a big fan of the Courier and Times font families, but we'll see. You've got to be choosy when it's being drawn on your flesh.

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November 7th, 2005 - The benefits my company offers are not very good. In fact, I've never worked anyplace that had such a poor benefits package.

And today, the frost-jobbed HR lady from California was in the office to explain to us how it's really great that we've gone from having 5 paid sick days per year to having 2, that you have to acrue, like vacation. At the moment, I think I have about 3 1/2 hours of paid sick time. Great.

You see, this is really great, because under the old system every office had a different policy, some had 10 paid sick days, some had none at all. Well, HR determined that the average number of sick days taken, per year, per employee was 2, so they made that the new policy. And she explained all this as if we couldn't figure out that we were getting 3 less paid days off this year, as if the administrative burden being taken off her shoulders was the real benefit to each of us, though I'd never laid eyes on her before in my life.

"Why does everyone look so sad?" she purred, acting as if she'd just given us the keys to the Play-Doh Fun Factory. She told us that company was very generous, that many of the hourly employees used to get paid sick time, which is well nigh unheard of, and that the company had to cut that out entirely because it cost too much money.

Apparently people who get paid by the hour don't get ill.

At different points in the meeting, the frost-jobbed and manicured HR lady argued either that the company couldn't offer better benefits (lower health insurance premiums) because they're too small, or couldn't have HR policies customized to different locations and different employment markets because they're too big. She couldn't see how the highly specialized editors working our office were different from the shiftworkers in the manufacturing portion of the business, couldn't see how we have trouble hiring people with multiple master's degrees to work in our office because our benefits package looks like a half-used matchbook next to the packages offered by virtually all of our competitors in the city.

I swear, working for a big company makes me want to attend Socialist Workers' meetings and yearn for the day the proletariat will rise up and seize the means of production. At some point during today's meeting I just stopped talking, realizing I was doing more harm than good. Lady Miss Frost Job promised she'd communicate our "concerns" to the higher-ups. I couldn't help thinking...

Must escape. Must.

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November 3rd, 2005 - I hadn't been in a tattoo parlor for ten years, and I was nervous. How to walk in the door and ask for a tattoo, I didn't know. The last time, I made an appointment, blundered into the place with a photocopy and had a manic depressive put $200 worth of ink into my lower back. His name was Josh. A guy I knew had sold Josh about $2000 worth of drums, so I was ok. We had a connection. Josh did a nice job on my tattoo. For the fat lines he used a tool with six needles in it, all puncturing my skin in a vibrating sting, like a jellyfish or a small swarm of bees.

Do they even call them tattoo parlors anymore? I think now they're studios. But anyway.

This one was staffed by a heavily inked guy who looked like he'd smoked his whole stash in the morning and was doing his level best to stay awake at the front desk. He looked my design over and quoted me $150 for the work. I asked him when it could be done, and he toddled off around the corner to talk to the artist who was busy, evidently, inflicting an inky permanence on someone else. When he returned, the price had gone up $30.

Now I don't recall ever feeling comfortable in one of these places. Tattoo people tend to fancy themselves outsiders, so little things like "being friendly" or "getting to know the customer" are out. But this place seemed to be going out of its way to put me off. Fifty-Cent was blaring from the speakers, so that I had to yell at the burned out receptionist to transact my business. He asked me for a $20 deposit before I'd had a chance to process the 20% price hike.

So I made an appointment for next Thursday night, but I didn't give him the deposit. I told him I'd call early next week to confirm or cancel.

And now I don't know what to do.

Though I have a couple of tattoos, I am not really a tattoo person. I don't display my markings. If you've never seen me without my shirt on, you probably don't even know I have them. And that's fine. They're for me. After the first two, I didn't foresee getting any more, but some things have happened in my life now that have me wanting to add, if only modestly, to my collection.

But can I get tattooed at this place? Ten years ago I was a stupid kid who related to the burn out behind the counter who'd just smoked his whole stash. I thought what I was doing was cool. Now, I don't really think it's cool, and I'd like to explain to the kid at the front desk the finer points of customer service, the vagaries of growing a small business. What I'd really like is to meet the artist and talk a little about what I want done, and to make an appointment during which something mellow might bounce and drip out of the speakers. The feeling of a pulsating needle raking across your skin is intense. I don't need to amp up the intensity with the bowel throbbing bass of high-volume hip-hop.

Having said all that, tattooing is only recently legal in Massachusetts. There aren't a lot of parlors to choose from, and I don't have time to drive back down to Rhode Island to the nice place where Josh used to (and maybe still does) work. Is this something I have to insist on doing on my own terms, or is it more like a tribal ritual that has to be done in accordance with the rules of the tribe? Is Fifty-Cent not somehow implicit in the event now? And should I maybe just yield to it and see what it's like, go in eyes-wide and make a new experience?

Things to think about.

No really. Send me a comment.

November 1st, 2005 - I don't know what to say to you today.

I don't want to write about Samuel Alito being nominated to the Supreme Court. If Harriet Miers was the ineffectual jab progressives were laughing off last week, then Alito is the haymaker right hook that promises to clean their clocks this week. Congratulations to all of us who bemoaned Miers' lack of qualifications. What all our complaining got us was a frighteningly competent and qualified enemy of civil liberties and women's rights. Suddenly Harriet Miers seems so much more charming.

I also don't want to write about the Red Sox losing General Manager Theo Epstein. First of all, only a narrow slice of you care even an iota about the Sox, and of the narrow slice, only a few more care even an iota about the back office machinations of the local team. Suffice it to say, the team lost a whole lot of soul today, the hometown boy come good, all growed up to manage his boyhood heroes, and do it with style, class and most importantly, resounding success.

My anger issue and yesterday's fumbling self-analysis is also out for the day. Suffice it to say that I need to try hard to be a better, more positive person, so that Owen has a better shot at growing up to be happy and well-adjusted, which, in the end, is all I really want for him.

Books? No, not books. I am very in between in my reading now. Done with Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet and detective fiction in general for a little while, a dwindling interest in American Revolution era histories continues to dwindle. I really enjoyed Joan Didion's recent memoir, but I've not yet caught the tail of a new reading interest. If anyone can recommend a book that completely blew them away, offer it now. I can't promise I'll read it, but I would be grateful for the tip.

Music? Nothing much to say here. My iPod is filling, which is nice. My current project is to determine what exactly everyone sees in The Arcade Fire. As nearly as I can tell, last year's indie darlings are equal parts Bowie and Talking Heads, which sounds like a good combination, except the songs just aren't that great. Someone clue me in. Also, again, if anyone can name a band I haven't heard yet that will rock my tiny world, I am open to suggestion.

And finally, Owen. He should probably be everyday's topic. Endlessly funny and fascinating for his parents, I fear though, that you would be less than thrilled with a microscopic view of his infantile development. He walks now in short, unbalanced bursts. It's less like walking and more like directed falling. He's also been sort of clingy and grouchy this week. He hates to be away from his mother for very long, but I can relate.

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October 31st, 2005 - I really don't know where to start with this. I've been thinking a lot about my recent anger problems, and I've come to a few conclusions about what's going on with me. For starters, I don't express my emotions well. I have a horrible tendency to over-intellectualize everything (as I'm doing right now) instead of just engaging my feelings head on. Instead of allowing myself to feel angry or sad, I talk all around the source of the anger or sadness, jabbing at it ineffectually with half-baked rationalizations and coldly logical evaluations, until I feel satisfied that I've dealt with it maturely, which means, not at all.

So I've got all this suppressed emotion gurgling away beneath the surface like some sort of noxious stew. And occasionally it boils over.

I'm also short on sleep, because I have an infant child, and the constant fatigue shortens my fuse.

But there's more going on. I have been deluding myself about the world I live in. What I want very badly is for everyone and everything to be perfect all the time. I want people to behave as they should, to be considerate and conscientious and thoughtful. I want them to pick up after themselves, to use their turn signals, to read more. And I want the world to be perfect. I want the light always to be green. I want rich people to take better care of poor people. I want gravity to suspend it's pull on the objects in my immediate vicinity so that I never drop anything ever again.

I spend too much time focusing on how I want the world to be and not enough time on how the world is. Doing this has led to the formation of unrealistic expectations. Having unrealistic expectations has led to a state of near-constant disappointment.

This is no way to live.

What am I doing about it? Well, I'm not sure. For one thing, I am trying to teach myself that having to stop at a red light is not a sign that the apocalypse is nigh. I am trying to convince myself that other people's shortcomings are not personal attacks against me. I am trying to stop swearing.

What?

What could swearing possibly have to do with anything? Well, I don't know. I just decided this morning that I need to try to improve myself in some way, to find a better way to be in the world, and not swearing seemed a good place to start. I do whip myself into a rageful frenzy sometimes, swearing venomously under my breath. I'm hoping that restricting my vocabulary to more positive words will yield the result of a more positive attitude. And yes, I know that's goofy, but I can live with that.

So today was a good day. The sun shone. The sky was clear and the city beautiful, almost like the first days of spring. I rode the scooter to work and stopped at a number of red lights where I reminded myself that the makers of the traffic signals do not have a personal vendetta against me, nor do my fellow drivers intend to keep me from reaching my final destination. It is hard to remain positive when you've been negative for so long, like trying to force two magnets together, there is always a resistance. It will take much more practice and probably a better idea than cutting out profanity, but what can I do? I have to start. I have to learn to be a better person, if not for me, then for Owen.

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October 27th, 2005 - It's not my fault I'm like this. 36 hours since my last shower, I've been drooled on by the baby, whose new teeth seem to be high output, miniaturized drool factories. I've been licked by the dog, both on the hands and the face, the dog, who trails a plume of short white hairs behind him as he trots through the house so that each patch of drool or dog lick is lovingly frosted with fur. Also, I'm sweaty, but not heat sweaty, stress sweaty. And you know how that smells. I've got four projects at work at the moment, and this week all four of them have reached a crescendo of unforeseen crisis. I am dashing from conference call to conference call, scrambling to address each urgent email, dashing off spread sheets like a dealer dealing blackjack to hyperactive card counters. Last night I had both of my stress dreams, the one where I'm back waiting tables and I've got too many tables and don't know where any of them are, and the one where I'm back in college, but I don't know my schedule and spend the whole dream running through the halls trying to figure out which room I'm supposed to be in. They both suck, and to have them both in one night, in succession, indicates a level of stress that would kill most gerbils on most treadmills in most test laboratories.

Earlier today I stuck my hand directly into a fresh pile of baby poop during a diaper changing mishap.

So you see, it's not my fault I'm like this, dirty, unshaven and bathed in the excretions of a baby boy and a dog. Nor is it my fault that I've only been here to chat to you twice this week, and let's be honest, that last post was the sarcastic ranting of someone who is serially disgruntled, not the considered prose you've come to expect from me (HA!).

OK. So now that we've all agreed (I am interpreting your silence as aquiescence) that it's not my fault, let's get on with (more) regular business.

I've just finished the new Joan Didion memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, about the 12 months following the death of her husband of 40 years, John Gregory Dunne, a year complicated by the nearly fatal illness of their only daughter. Though it's a memoir, the subject is quite clearly grief and how we process the tragic events in our lives. I think becoming a parent amplifies whatever sense of mortality you have, both because parenthood is incontrovertible evidence of getting older (if only a little) and because you've suddenly got so much more to live for. And so I think this book came along at a good time for me, and I quite enjoyed it. If you are young and free of cares, do not take my endorsement as a reason to run out and buy it. Buy a book of poetry. F says Billy Collins is good. Buy that instead.

Warning: Complete Non-Sequitur Coming

Harriet Miers has withdrawn herself from the running for Sandra Day O'Connor's Supreme Court seat, which is great because I don't think she was qualified for the job, but sucks because now we're going to get some hardline Federalist Society schmuck like Antonin Scalia. Presumably the White House is going to be in turmoil tomorrow as the President's Chief Advisor and the Vice President's Chief of Staff are handed federal indictments, but, as is customary in this country (Nixon is the exception), the guys at the top will escape unpunished, allowing their seconds to fall on their respective swords and disappear into the night (by 'night' I mean high-salary lobbyist jobs). There is no justice in Washington. None at all.

You know what? Actually, I'll make a deal with you. If one person writes to me and says, "Please don't write about politics anymore!" I'll stop. It's really not that I fancy myself informed or clever. It's just that I'm angry all the time and directing some of it away from my friends and loved ones ensures that I have a warm, safe place to sleep.

Speaking of anger, I guess I should go ahead and confess that I had a violent outburst at work the other day. I smashed my telephone handset against the desk. I can't really tell you why I did this. I think it was the accumulation of aforementioned crises, set off by a needlessly long and whiney voicemail message. And obviously, slamming your telephone against the desk hard enough to pop the cover off the handset is inappropriate behavior for the office. I have these outbursts from time to time at home or in the car, but mostly only when I am alone. Unfortunately, I feel myself slipping into a violent rage more and more of late. This rage is never directed at other people. I'm not worried that I'm going to damage someone in a fit of anger. But it does concern me that I've let myself get to the point of acting out at work. Not really sure what the thing to do about it is, but it felt like putting it out on the table was the right thing to do. I have an anger problem. I sometimes express my anger in unproductive and inappropriate ways.

See. At least I'm up front about it. I'll write more about this soon. I have only just begun to really think about it. If you have any advice or insight, you know where to find me.

Send me a comment.

October 25th, 2005 - Because my new iPod has recently arrived I am currently all about music, music and music. It is very difficult to decide which CDs have to be converted to iPodable MP3s first. Also, the process isn't nearly fast enough.

Here are some movie ideas I had recently:

1. Patrick Fitzgerald's Big Fat Grand Jury - A romantic comedy about a stealthy federal prosecutor, an inept journalist and a whole White House full of lying assholes. Can this one possibly have a happy ending? If by happy you mean seeing the POTUS get implicated in the kind of shady, vindictive political crap he's so good at but never seems to get busted for, I sure hope so!

2. Inherit the Wind II: Intelligent Design - The sequel to yesteryear's blockbuster. In this one the forces of religious fervor try to tell us what is and isn't science. Oh wait, that's what the last one was about too. Well then, I have no idea what this one is about. No seriously, what could this possibly be about? Of Pandas and People? For just 35 cents more you can get the large popcorn and large drink. Want it? Do ya?

3. The Bridge Over the River Why? - An update on the Alec Guiness classic in which a bumbling president continues to build a house of cards around a failed foreign policy out of sheer pig-headed stupidity, even though he knows the whole thing is just going to be blown to shit in the end. This one doesn't have that cute British whistling thing going on, but it also plays as more of a comedy than a drama, so it's a wash.

4. The Truth About Harriet - A determined woman lawyer finds out that running the Texas Lottery Commission doesn't qualify you to sit on the US Supreme Court even if the smartest man you ever met says you're the best person for the job over and over and over again.

I realize all of this will come off as so much smug, liberal bullshit, but the smugness is born entirely of frustration. And we've got three more years of this crap? Don't we even get an intermission where I can sneak out and take a pee?

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October 19th, 2005 - Have you ever done squats? In the gym. With a weighted bar on your shoulders. Perhaps you know this exercise as the Smith press. I have no idea why it's called that sometimes or who Smith might be. I googled it, but you know I didn't find an answer in the first 50 links they gave me, so screw it. Let's call 'em squats.

I squatted for the first time the other day, at the gym, with my brother, who is an avid squatter, a big believer in the squat, quite literally a BIG believer in the squat. My brother and I are a little antithetical (can you be a little antithetical?) physically. He is large and powerful, able to lift large quantities of pounds with each of his appendages. He is tall, muscley and imposing. I am not. I am of average height, almost, and I am thin, lithe even. I can run great distances in relatively short amounts of time. At the risk of sounding immodest, I am very nearly graceful in my movements.

But not when squatting.

It is difficult to squat gracefully, which you no doubt know if you've ever crapped in the woods. If you're me, it's just plain difficult to squat. My brother put 100 pounds on the press and said, "alright," in the way that people need to say something to get you to begin doing something you've never done before, an abbreviated way of saying, "ok, now's as good at time as any for you to begin looking like an idiot."

I squatted. Ten times.

The first set felt alright, heavy in my upper quadriceps, but otherwise comfortable. I should say that I once lifted weights very regularly. I got stronger, if not much bigger, but I never went near the squat machine. It always reminded me of those massive guys with taped up knees on ABC's Wide World of Sports, eastern European men with necks like beer kegs.

Anyway, the second set didn't go nearly as well. Again I squatted ten times, but after the last one I felt a very warm feeling in my thighs, a buzzing sense of extreme fatigue, kind of like a dead leg feels after the initial pain. I told my brother I was going off to do some sit-ups and that I'd meet him over by the leg press for more punishment.

I couldn't do any leg pressing. My legs wouldn't press. They had emptied themselves at the squat machine, and now were good for, not surprisingly, squat. My brother looked at me with a mixture of dismay and pity. Oh, to be so weak and small. I'm sure he couldn't even imagine.

So I forced myself to run on the treadmill for 20 minutes, which is hard to do with dead legs, but I'm used to it from playing soccer for years. I willed myself through it, while watching CNN Headline News on the tiny treadmill television.

The next day I was almost too sore to roll out of bed. It seems that the muscles required to squat are not at all the muscles required to run. I had never actually been sore in the parts of my legs I was sore in that morning. It made it hard to sit on the toilet, which is way more information than you wanted, but now that you have it, what are you gonna do? I'm only trying to illustrate my point, which is that I was very, very sore. And I remained that way until yesterday, when I had the brilliant idea that I would save time on my commute home by running the portion of the trip that I would normally cover by bus.

I made several big mistakes in planning this masterful, time-saving expedition. First, I carried a bag. Generally, I carry a courier bag with a windbreaker, digital camera, cell phone and book in it. Yesterday I had to add my work clothes to that haul and ended up with a fairly hefty, ill-balanced load. Running with a bag is not so terrible if that bag is a backpack. Running with a courier bag sucks. More on that in a minute.

My second mistake was getting off the train in Porter Square, which is actually one stop before the stop where I would normally pick up the bus. Though not far from the next stop, the Porter Square station is particularly deep under the ground, which means that it has by far the longest stairways of any subway station I've ever been in anywhere (and I've ridden mass transit in major cities in many countries including New York, London, Paris, Munich, Washington DC and Mexico City). The second mistake I made was in thinking I would look extra tough and cool if I ran the goddamned steps instead of just riding the mile-long escalators like everyone else.

So I was completely winded by the time I reached the Earth's surface. And I was carrying a heavy, awkward bag. And I was trying to look cool. Had this been baseball I would have been clearly and irrevocably out. Because it was running though and because I was a long way from home, I had no choice but to run.

I ran up into Porter Square, down Elm Street into Davis Square (the Boston metro area is full of squares that are not really square), and on up Holland Street to Teele Square. There I crested the hill that Tufts University occupies and rambled down the back side to where I live, in a square house on a squarish lot. Oh, if anything in New England were actually square it might be easier to find your way around, but I digress.

Having run all that way (actually not that far), I was tired, and sweaty, and strangely already sore, except not in my legs but rather in my shoulder and neck, the result of the bag's being unbalanced and heavy. Brittney said to me, "How was that?" and I said, "Shitty" and she laughed, and I didn't.

This is what I get for trying to improve myself.

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October 18th, 2005 - Once a year I get interested in music again. The obsession of my late teens and early twenties (I used to buy an inch of vinyl every week then. I also got the insert from a 45 tattooed on my lower back.) has, by and large, faded over the last five or six years. The true obsolescence of vinyl records and a burgeoning obsession with books seems to be the cause. I don't know why, particularly when the leaves start to fall, I start listening more actively again, but it's just about this time of year that I buy a pile of new CDs and load my computer with MP3s.

Here's what I've been listening to and why:

Son Volt's Okemah and the Melody of Riot - Son Volt is Jay Farrar, once of Uncle Tupelo fame, and a gaggle of hired musicians. Farrar writes all the songs. He IS the band. Their first album, Trace, was amazingly amazing, and then, as with most good ideas, Son Volt went stale. Farrar eventually put out a couple of poor solo albums, which are listenable, only if you're a big fan of his song-writing, which I am. This new album promised a return to the bands rock roots, and it mostly delivers. It's good. Not great.

The Decemberists' Picaresque - I freakin' loved the last Decemberists album, Her Majesty...the Decemberists, which is full of kooky songs about chimney sweeps and other crazy Victorian characters. Colin Melloy, the main guy, has a masters' in creative writing and a sweet sense of melody that come together nicely. The bands' sound can be a little effete at times, owing to Melloy's high pitched and nasally delivery, but you'll get over it. Probably. I've only listened to Picaresque twice, but it's good. Worth it, if you have the time.

Big Black's Songs About Fucking - This one is a classic for people who enjoy music that hurts to listen to. I think it came out in '88 or '89. I don't remember now. Big Black was Steve Albini before he was in Rapeman or Shellac, back when he was making the loudest, most abrasive music he could figure out how to make. Later he produced the last Nirvana album and some other vaguely big-selling albums (PJ Harvey, I think). They all sound great. Don't buy this unless you know what it is, in which case you already own it.

Aimee Mann's The Forgotten Arm - Aimee Mann is, of course, the skinny blonde chick from Til Tuesday who were way, way better than that Voice's Carry single might suggest. Mann has kept on and kept at it, making some super great albums (e.g. I'm With Stupid), that you should absolutely own if you like female singer-songwriters who don't take themselves far too seriously. This one is a concept album, meant to be listened to front to back, telling a story about addiction and loss. It sounds pretty good, but I haven't listened that closely yet.

Mobius Band's The Loving Sounds of Static - Mobius Band is from Massachusetts. I saw them once in a small, small bar on Mass Ave in Cambridge. They sat on the floor and alternately played bits of guitar, cued samples and sang. It was electronica, sort of, but it didn't suck. I was confused. Their first three albums, titled One, Two and Three, are all good, but there's more sample than singing. This latest one though is very melodic and hews more to traditional song structures without losing that thing that is so interesting about what the bands does.

Ryan Adams and the Cardinals' Cold Roses - Ryan Adams, formerly of Whiskeytown, is sort of the darling of that whole alt-country thing that has turned out to be fairly mediocre, as most genres, taken as a whole, are. I really like Adams' music though. It's fun. Overwrought in a kitchy kind of way. Good to sing along to. This album hasn't actually shown up in the mail yet, so I don't have anything to say about specifically.

I also keep an audtions folder on my computer desktop that contains MP3s of band I'm thinking of exploring further. Currently residing in this musical purgatory are: Destroyer, The Minus Story and The Pernice Brothers. If anyone has any insight on any of these bands, please step forward and give it.

Finally, I've begun collecting poetry as well. I've got a bunch of Frost and some other bits and pieces, though I'm thinking I'll expand this soon. One of these days I'm going to get a portable MP3 player and I envision walking around town in the snow, listening to poetry. Goofy? Yes. But I'm going to do it anyway. Also, if anyone has any firm recommendation on exactly which MP3 player I should get, let me have that too.

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October 17th, 2005 - Here's the big idea for the week. Prepare yourself for blatant over-simplification and rampant generalization. Try not to be offended by anything that follows. Ideas aren't dangerous. The people who have them are. Here goes...

I believe that how religious a person is relates directly to his or her discomfort with the unknown. That is, the more uncomfortable you are with not understanding the world, the more likely you are to find refuge in faith. In as much as science can't provide all the answers, people who absolutely need them, who need a closed logical system in which to operate, often look to religion to provide it. Struggling to make sense of the death of a young child, you will sometimes hear a bereaved parent say something like, "God had a plan for her that we don't understand yet, but we have to have faith in him." To me this is the ultimate abandonment to religiosity, the ultimate example of finding comfort in "knowing" that some plan is being adhered to when, at the depths of our being, we just can't make sense of something. And who am I to judge a parent in this situation? We do what we have to do to go on. There is comfort in religion, whether you believe or not.

My father, who is an atheist, once told me this story when I asked him if he believed in god. He said, "You know, I don't, but I sure wish I could. I remember going in to see my Nana when she was on her death bed, and I was so scared. I walked into the room and it was dark and she was just sitting up in bed smiling. And I said, 'Nana, why are you happy?' and she said, 'Because I'll be with my maker soon,' and I could see that it gave her real comfort. She wasn't scared at all, and that really made an impression on me. In the end though, I just couldn't believe. I couldn't."

And I couldn't either. Ten years of religious private school was like a kiln for my own atheism, firing it, making it harder and more defined. Perhaps it was less about the church teachings we were given and more about the very real, human flaws of the people teaching them that shook any faith I was able to muster. I just know that I felt stifled by the religiosity of nearly everyone around me, alone in my disbelief. Those who question the necessity of the separation of church and state would do well to live in a country whose predominant faith is not their own. Trust me on this.

As a typically rebellious adolescent I became very judgemental of those who believed. Frankly I thought they were stupid. To me they were like so many wide-eyed children at a magic show, marvelling at the rabbit, newly pulled from the hat. As if the rabbit hadn't been in the damn hat the whole time.

As I've grown older, of course, I've become more tolerant of religiosity. Life is hard, wherever you are, and whatever you need to get comfortable, to move forward, to find happiness, I think you owe it to yourself to pursue that thing, whether it's high Catholic mass or prescription medication (or both). Whatever it is, my great preference is that you do it quietly, without bothering other people. We have our own lives to deal with, afterall.

I'm getting off point though.

The leap I'm trying to make is from religion as an antidote to anxiety about the unknown to an understanding of the seeming retrenchment of religion in American culture over the last two decades. I could certainly be wrong, but I think what we have seen, certainly since Ronald Reagan was in the White House, is a societal shift toward religiosity that comes as a reaction to the increasing smallness and unpredictable violence of the world.

Hundreds of years ago the threats to daily existence were mainly from famine and disease. People prayed for the harvest and for deliverance from the various plagues, both major and minor, that worked their ways cyclically through the populace. In this country, as we turned our abundant natural resources into wealth and power, and as science improved both the harvest and our ability to cope with disease, attendance at church dwindled. Certainly at the turn of the twentieth century our new status as a world power, coupled with our geographic isolation, led us into a period of relative contentment, a time when we didn't find other people's ideas so horribly threatening. Even after World War I, with the theater of battle so far away, we were able to swing through the '20s and '30s with relative ideological abandon. It wasn't until the great sacrifices of World War II and the ensuing Cold War that the world began to close in earnest on our American dream. Suddenly there was the "threat" of communism. We became reactionaries, seeking solace in the moral rectitude of days past. We turned back toward religion.

I wish I could say that this return culminated in the Reagan years when, as a school boy, I had the distinct feeling that nuclear war with the Soviets was imminent and unavoidable. To be sure, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Wall coming down in Berlin, seemed to rekindle our hopes for ultimate peace and tranquility. But any gains we made in the decade between '91, when David Hasselhof sang about freedom from atop the Wall, and 2001 when the World Trade Center collapsed, were fleeting. Suddenly the world seemed both impossibly small AND unfathomably dangerous.

The genius of terrorism is that it's so unpredictable. Its localized explosions continue to detonate and resonate in people's minds for days and months and years after the real dust has settled. Confronted by a world of unknown threats and shifting realities, people will invariably reach for something they can be sure of, a voice that never wavers, right or wrong. Religion.

And few people understand this dynamic better than George W. Bush and the current, conservative ruling class. This is a group that's come to power on a Doctrine of Sureness. It's better to know and be wrong than to be seen to be guessing and be right, better to decide in advance than to deliberate as the situation evolves. That politics have become conflated with religion should come as no surprise. The currency is the same, fear of the unknown, strength in resolve, a faith in the values of a bygone time.

If we are not careful we will end up ruled by religion. We are very close now. Just this week, Harriet Miers is being sold to Christian conservatives as a reliably religous Supreme Court vote. School boards in Kansas and Pennsylvania are deliberating the inclusion of Intelligent Design (creationism) in their science curricula. Separated to one degree or another for the last 218 years, there appears to be a reunion in the cards for church and state. We are a long, long way from an old woman, content and peaceful on her death bed. The new religion is less a personal safety blanket and more a pillow smothering our collective liberty.

And lest you think me only a disgruntled atheist writing little more than a polemic, let me say that I maintain that there is a place for religion in our American society. Our first amendment guarantees the right to religious freedom, a freedom of ideas unchecked and unlimited by government. The result should be a proliferation of ideas and the spread of freedom, not the assumption of religious laws to govern or limit our spiritual and intellectual growth.

And here at long last is the big idea: the problems of our country (and our world), it seems to me, can be attributed almost completely to people holding fast to ideas that hold themselves out as the one true idea, that exclude and alienate others. This is why we fight wars. This is why we kill each other.

Or maybe I'm wrong. I'm comfortable with that. I have to be.

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October 14th, 2005 - Owen is 9-months-old. Alright, 9-and-a-half. Still very young. Unlike Malcolm, who I wrote about yesterday, he doesn't have a century of walking the Earth behind him. In fact, he isn't walking yet at all.

Owen has four teeth, two long ones on the bottom in the front, two stubbier ones on the top with a gap between them. It's pretty comic when he smiles, which he does often, which is nice.

In addition to smiling and crawling and pulling himself up, he climbs the stairs, waves goodbye and points at stuff that interests him. Every day he becomes more and more interactive, more and more plugged into what's going on around him. Now when I read him small, cardboard books with mice and bunnies as characters he pays attention to the turning pages. Instead of writhing around, trying to escape my evil clutches, he nestles himself in the crook of my arm, leans his fuzzy, still-pulsing head against my chest.

Is it any great surprise that I am blindly and stupidly in love with him? I knew that one day I would be overawed by the simple fact of this small, innocent person putting his trust in me, seeking me as a source of comfort. That day has arrived, and now that it's here I see that trust and the resulting responsibility as an amazing gift he's giving me. Because he is guileless, simple, direct and honest, but moreover, vulnerable, his trust and affection are complete. He loves me unconditionally, and I feel it very, very intensely.

It feels like just about the best thing ever.

If it is possible to "get" parenthood, to understand what people mean when they say it's hard work but ultimately the best and most rewarding thing they've ever done, then I get it now.

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October 13th, 2005 - Malcolm is one-hundred-and-one-years-old. 101. Triple digits. And he still lives alone, three doors down from me, in a single-family house that is neatly painted white with green trim. I have been told that he has lived there since he was a child, which would mean since the house was built, probably between 1905 and 1915. The name on the mailbox is J.B. Watson, which is odd because Malcolm is the only one who lives there.

I usually only see him in the morning. A typical encounter is me walking up the street with the dog on our morning stroll. Malcolm is in a wool suit, the jacket laid aside, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up. He's doing yard work. He is meticulous about his yard, small though it is. He moves slowly and deliberately, concentrating on his task, a clear drop of snot dangling from the end of his nose. Eddie and I stride past. Malcolm glances briefly at our feet, smiles faintly, continues with his work.

Yesterday he was sweeping fallen wet leaves into a small garbage can. They were sticking to the street. I thought for a moment of going to get my rake and finishing the job for him quickly. It seemed like a good deed to do for an old, old man. But then I thought that Malcolm is probably one-hundred-and-one because he still does these things for himself, because he still thinks to clean the leaves and still moves his limbs in all the various directions required of leaf cleaning.

In truth of fact there was little cleaning going on. Mostly he was passing the broom over them again and again, brushing their surfaces but failing to move them in any appreciable way toward the small can. Malcolm either didn't notice or didn't mind. A man that age has nothing but time behind him and nothing but time ahead of him. The leaves would move eventually

I wish I knew more about Malcolm, but our conversations have been few and seldom, mostly pleasantries exchanged. I see him in his yard and sometimes on the bus, coming home with his groceries, always in a suit and hat. He is cheerful and polite with the bus driver, but there is a quiet privacy about him. He just goes on about his business. Keeps moving.

Of course my brother knows more. My brother will and does talk to anyone, anywhere, at any time. He once recounted a conversation with Malcolm for me. They talked about VCRs. Apparently Malcolm records a lot of TV programs and watches them before bed. He has piles and piles of video tapes in his house. This according to my brother. No clear indication of which shows he likes.

Though I have lived here for nearly seven years, people on the street, neighbors with whom I'm not close, will still say to me, "Hey, you know Malcolm is over a hundred-years-old?" And I know then that none of them really knows much about him, but, like me, they're all just a little bit proud to have him as a neighbor. He serves as a role model for us all, not only in his longevity, but also in his bearing, his dignity. We all hope to be old, old men one day, dressed in wool suits, cleaning the leaves from the gutter.

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October 11th, 2005 - I really like to walk around in the cool drizzle with a sullen and serious look on my face. I like to make brief eye contact with people, so that they have time to register my seriousness. Then I like to look away, to play hard to get, to leave them with the impression that I am sullen, serious and preoccupied. I don't know why I do this. I think, to some degree, it's a variation on the childhood "they'll be sorry when I'm blind" game, a way to project the hurt of everyday life onto other people, to impress them with my sadness.

Who will be sorry when I'm blind?

Well, for starters, C will be sorry. C, who refuses to return my phone calls, who has imagined some slight that is beyond the comprehension of my narrow mind. C and I have been friends for far, far too long for me to imagine bearing him an everlasting grudge for much of anything. Still, his silence has hurt me. I am hurt.

And then there is E, the proprietress of Human Resources at the company down the street with whom I've spent eight hours interviewing. E has been remarkably informative and organized as I've worked my way slowly through their hiring process, a process which seems now to have ground completely to a halt with regard to yours truly. I had an e-mail from E last week saying that they were still figuring out who to hire and that she wanted to speak with me on the phone. Subsequently, I have heard nothing from her and can only assume that my incipient blindness will weigh heavily on her conscience.

And there is always B, my beloved B, who never pays me enough attention. Is there enough attention on this green Earth for her to pay me what I require? I sometimes wonder.

If I were to wear headphones while walking around the city in the cool drizzle with my sullen and serious look, I believe the appropriate music would be Elliott Smith, who killed himself last year by stabbing himself in the chest with a knife. There is something really delectably self-pitying and quietly angry about Smith's music. It is tailor made for sulking around urban areas. As you can well imagine.

When I was a kid and wishing myself blind, I had this way of knitting my eyebrows together into a sort of monobrow of anger, a thin dark line above staring eyes that never failed to elicit great bursts of laughter from my parents, who, obviously, would have been really very sorry had I actually gone blind. Now I expect the look I affect causes the strangers with whom I confront it to think to themselves, "What's his goddamn problem?" if they notice me at all.

Another aspect of the look is the simple wish to be taken seriously for a change. As someone who takes himself far too eriously, one of my greatest wishes has always been to have other people regard me that way as well. Perhaps my predilection for fart jokes is working against me. The world's great intellectuals have seldom gone on record with humorous essays on the vagaries of flatulence.

In truth, I do my best thinking when it is cool and rainy and I am by myself, walking. There is no one else to make demands of my meager mental abilities. I'm not preoccupied with the sweat surfacing on my upper lip or the sun blaring in my eyes. Objects don't cast deceptive shadows, and the world is generally quieter, save the hum of the rain in the wind. This weather calls out other things that I think of as aids to thought, cups of hot tea, lamp lighting, comfort food. Perhaps I've got it backwards though. Maybe the tea and soft lighting come first. Who can know?

So today I walked in my special mopey, overly serious way to the post-office over by the little Puerto Rican enclave just off Tremont. I had to mail an old Tai Chi video that I watched once to the woman in Minnesota who bought it from me on Half.com. There was a guy in a wheelchair with a sleeping bag draped over him parked just outside the post office door. He was singing a song, something about his "corazon," that sounded much nicer than you would have expected. But not wanting to dip into Owen's college fund (aka my spare change), I didn't linger to listen. I went in and stood in the line that crept across the well-worn floor, marvelling at the crystalline slowness of the two women working behind the counter. I thought I recognized in their eyes, especially the black, grandmotherly looking one on the right, the same self-pitying sadness I was wearing around.

Afterwards I bought myself some maki and carrot juice from the upscale urban market around the corner. And of course, you can't be all sourpussed and serious walking down the street with spicy tuna roll and a bright orange bottle of carrot juice, if only because the juice provides something like 1400% of your RDA of Vitamin A, a frightening dose that should stave off blindness at least long enough for me to find a new job and figure out what the hell I did to offend C.

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October 10th, 2005 - The weekend away in Maine. A wedding. A torrential and unceasing downpour. Animals lining up, two-by-two. The sort of rain that carries people away and out to sea. Maine. The way life should be.

Tom and Christine, whom I introduced, now 7 months pregnant and getting married for the second time. This one for the friends and family, after tying the knot at the courthouse Tom works in downtown some months back. Tall Tom with sideburns and glasses, an everpresent grin. Quiet Tom, reserved and yet unreservedly happy. And Christine, tiny Christine, with the big laugh. Their baby, a boy, nestles like a basketball under her shirt, just biding his time until their December meeting.

The inn, quaint, right on the water. The water, not so quaint, right on the inn. Leaking into the dining room. Leaking on my arm. Leaking on my arm, damn it. The room, a suite in truth, luxuriously large and expansively carpeted, was perfect for Owen to crawl around. I spent much of the weekend there on the floor with him, building towers of blocks for him to knock over. And to chew on.

The wife, effortlessly gorgeous in that clingy, black-green dress, me a stoll she wraps herself in, me the backdrop for her beauty. I am lucky to be able to stand so close.

Owen the rockstar. The center of attention. Flirter. Coy smiler. Makes friends more readily than either of his parents. Scarfs Cheerios and litters the rug with them, too. Soaks in all the oohing and aahing and pretends not to notice when everyone (EVERYONE) says how cute, beautiful, adorable, fantastic he is. The little cad. He was a champ all weekend long.

Friends from near and far. Eliot with whom it was awfully nice to speak. And Kristen, his recent bride, who managed somehow to restore my flagging self-esteem with only a few words of unsolicited encouragement. They were charming in that way that people who are just married are charming. Also Jon Clark. With Jon, I discussed Mexican politics, Mexico City, cake-eating, baseball, etc. Always nice to run into him. Chris and Andy and Beth, who are good to eat with, and to walk, dripping, through the streets of Boothbay Harbor, umbrellas failing miserably at umbrellaing. Dancing with Rob and Ann, who are a fantastic pair and didn't point and laugh at me, gyrating in Brittney's smooth moving vicinity. Which was awfully discreet of them.

I gave a toast, the first toast, during which marginal amusement was given to the assembled, but mission was accomplished, the ice cracked, the room warmed, for others to get up and slay.

Drove back in still more rain, punctuated by brief bursts of rain with rainy interludes.

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October 9th, 2005 - Very briefly, because I have been away at a wedding and because we just wrapped a big family dinner for Welsh relatives in from overseas, let me just say that my son Owen is the best person I know. The most honest. The funniest. The best looking. The most insightful. The best.

I look at him and see the sun shining.

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October 4th, 2005 - Owen was 9-months-old yesterday. Here are the things he is doing, things that will seem ordinary and unremarkable to you, but left me slack-jawed and wholly convinced that he is, at the very least, a physical prodigy of some sort.

He sits down. Yes, he sits. He has been crawling for a month, and during that month his main destination has been the stereo cabinet where he pulls himself to standing and then rips all the CDs off the shelves with an abrupt bang and a plasticky clatter. You might think that this ability to raise himself to standing is the most impressive thing, but it's not. Apparently many babies do this. What they don't do is gracefully lower themselves back to a sitting position. It can take months to master sitting. It took Owen a day.

He cruises. Cruising, I discovered recently, is the process of pulling up to standing and then, while holding a couch or a table or something to steady himself, walking around. Owen began cruising about ten minutes after he began crawling. Last night he started at one end of the living room and walked right around the edge of the sofa to the other end, where he lowered himself to sitting, then crawled over to the stereo and completely emptied the country music shelf (yes, we have a shelf full of country music CDs).

He climbs the freaking stairs. Yes. He climbs the stairs. His first ascent took him, solo and without the aid of bottled oxygen, to the fifth step, the tricky narrow one just before the turn. It was at that point that he tumbled backwards into my arms. His second attempt got him past that juncture, but he stalled at the wide, wedge-shaped stairs of the turn. Finally, this morning, he powered onward and upward and completed the journey from living room to upstairs bathroom (all mountaineering at this stage seems to be inspired by an insane attachment to and need to be near his mother). It was a feat of physical strength and coordination that left his mother and I trembling with awe and no small fear for his future exploits.

The extent of his physical prowess is, of course, difficult to gauge. My side of the gene pool delivers little in the way of hope. We are more shark than minnow, more Marco than Polo, if you get my drift. My father captained his university soccer team (or the B team at least), but we are stocky, bow-legged people, not inelegant in our movements but too slow and too small to think much past the end of the bench. Brittney's side, on the other hand, holds some promise. Her father (Hi, John!) was offered a contract by the Phillies, though military service and some injuries prevented him from ever playing pro ball. If Owen (who, it must be said, bears a passing resemblance to his more athletic grandfather, big and bald with a lop-sided grin) ends up with a preponderance of St. Germain genes, then there is an outside chance I will one day watch my boy pitch opening day at Fenway or playing holding midfielder for the US National Soccer team. I have not yet made the various talent scouts from the assorted professional sporting clubs aware of his existence, but if he keeps climbing those steps and gumming his Cheerios, well, the sky is clearly the limit.

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September 30th, 2005 - My brother (who sits next to me at work) and I have been talking a lot about ideas for new businesses lately, million dollar ideas, or at least ways to make some extra. This morning we started out with the idea of an empanada stand. Some hours were spent debating the merits of an actual stand with steam tray and umbrella versus simply selling the empanadas wholesale to a number of restaurants. Rough calculations of cost of goods and sales pointed, I think, to the wisdom of going the wholesale route.

Later in the day, having opened our minds to the possibilities of marketing novel foodstuffs, we hit upon our best idea yet, a Hungarian-themed fast food place called Goulash Galoshes. We'd sell goulash in good safe, wearable galoshes. Customers would get a delightfully spicy Eastern European stew AND rubberized overshoes to protect their footwear from the harsh, slushy, salty gack that accumulates in Boston's gutters in the wintertime.

Additional income could be gleaned from licensing deals with appropriate sponsors. For example, the children's meals might be sponsored by Osh Kosh Bgosh, so you'd have Osh Kosh Bgosh Goulash Galoshes. You might have Disney specific promotions like, Robots Goulash Galoshes or The Little Mermaid Goulash Galoshes. We could serve one with jerked chicken and call it the Peter Tosh Goulash Galosh. We could serve beer in them at Fenway. Vendors would roam the stands shouting, "Get your Frothy Galoshes heeeeeaaaaah!" We could make dessert galoshes. Care for a Grenache Galosh?

You can see the vast potential of this business, not just as a stand alone but also as a franchise, perhaps paired with one of those 24 hour umbrella stores you see so many of nowadays.

September 26th, 2005 - This is why I am a political independent. I belong to a rather large (I think) group of people who are fiscally conservative (i.e. believe in balanced budgets) and socially liberal (i.e. believe in equality for all). From a party perspective, you might find a few centrist Democrats who share these basic views, but, in general, what we have now are conservative Republicans who place all their fiscal faith in the benificence of big business, free markets and long-term debt and are all for equality as long as it means some folks get to be more equal than others (e.g. heterosexuals, the wealthy, the religious, etc.). Or else we've got centrist Democrats who like balanced budgets sometimes and are less and less socially liberal as being socially liberal becomes less popular. There are a handful of liberal democrats (big budget deficits/big social programs) still slinking around in the under brush, but the two groups I've already named have so marginalized them that they now appear as so many screaming lunatics out at the fringes of current political discourse. At the very least, I admire them the courage of their convictions, which is, in the end, the most important thing to me.

First, let's talk about money. I understand that a certain amount of low interest, long-term debt is a good thing. I have a mortgage. What I don't understand is the unfettered spending of the current administration, the massive budget deficit that continues to spin itself out into our national debt. To be sure, international finance is a complicated subject, but, like foreign and domestic policy alike, I think it's an area in which first principles should be held to firmly. My first principle of economic policy is that you shouldn't spend money you don't have. My parents taught me that one. If it works in the microcosm of my household, it's probably a good way to go on the macro level too.

From a social policy perspective, I am probably more liberal than most. In addition to believing that everyone should have equal rights under the law, I also believe that services like health care and education can and should be provided by the government. Though conservative politicians have decried the possibility of the US becoming a welfare state, like Germany for example, where everyone pays into the same system equally and derives benefits as they need them (sounds like socialism, no?), I think the term "welfare state" is deeply misleading. Welfare has such negative connotations in this country. We somehow find a way to hate our poor here, and welfare is a program that benefits the poor. A better word, at least for our uses, might be "democratic." Afterall, the government is set up to benefit the people, all of them, not just the ones who can afford service.

In my national health care system, everyone would be covered AND the very sick and the very healthy would pay the same amount with the idea being that the very healthy will one day become the very sick. In my mind, this is what insurance should do, spread the risk over as large a group as possible, which means everyone regardless of age, income or infirmity. Likewise, education. Every public school district gets the same amount per pupil, spreading the dollars of the wealthy into the districts of the poor to create equal opportunities for all students.

I also think it's well past the time in our political development when we should have figured out what equality really means. After 229 years of violent social history during which we finally freed the slaves, gave voting rights to women and people who don't own property, provided equal access to voting booths and education to blacks and other minorities, we're still denying basic rights to various classes of people. Somehow the civil rights movement is over, but homosexuals still can't get marriage licenses? I don't get that. You don't have to like homosexuality to recognize that homosexuals are people too, that they have every right to all the governmental benefits you receive. This should have been "self-evident," to borrow Jefferson's wording, two centuries ago. Why are we still struggling with issues like this?

And moreover who, on the national political stage, expresses these views? Who is the politician, Democrat or Republican who espouses this same point of view? I've been very careful to say "espouses" here, because I actually believe that there are a number of politicians (mostly Democrats) who see the common sense in some of these points of view. They're just too afraid to say so. They've lost the courage of their convictions.

And this is why, at base, I think of myself as an independent. I am just sick to death of every politician in the land trying to sound like the last guy who got elected, thinking that mimicry is some sort of qualification for a leadership role.

Now clearly I am more likely to find sympathy with the Democratic cause than the Republican (though, to be fair, I have a good deal of sympathy for state's rights and other cornerstones of the Republican philosophy), but where are the Democrats now? They've been so beaten, so cowed by the Republicans, that they feel they have to appear conservative themselves to get anyone to take them seriously. It is true that the current Democratic leadership confines itself to defining its views simply in opposition to the Republicans. They feel safe, for example, saying they think the Republicans are prosecuting the war in Iraq poorly, but none of them will outline a cogent alternative plan. None will stand up and say we should pull out of the Middle Eastern morass (Russ Feingold alone has called for a timetable for withdrawal), or that we should institute a draft to increase the number of troops there. It's pure political cowardice. I recommend they all pull out their copies of Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, and read up on what it means to act in accord with your beliefs, to vote your conscience rather than calculating the political expediency of every move.

This! This is why I am an independent.

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September 25th, 2005 - The thing is, I could imagine never writing again. It's easy to fall out of the habit. I mean, it's not as if I could fall out of the habit of going to work or of taking care of my family (I suppose technically I could, but the ramifications of not going to work or taking care of your family are FAR, FAR more serious than the fall out of no longer recording your thoughts in words).

Currently, my schedule is so compressed that, unless I carve half-an-hour or so out of my day at work to email myself a blog entry, I seldom get any writing done at all. Most of the time now I'm writing so as not to disappoint YOU, to keep you from arriving here and finding nothing new. Again.

Some months ago, KDunk took up the topic of a writer's need to write. Someone had said to her that a "real" writer needs to write, can't imagine living without being able to express himself in words, is driven to it. In my recollection this opinion was rendered as something of a judgement and something of a warning: this is the true litmus test by which you should assess yourself as a writer. Can you take yourself this seriously? Do you possess the basic authenticity required of the job?

Here, months later, and spurred by nothing other than my own recent profligacy, is my response to any bozo who claims that "real" writers have to write and everyone else is merely a dilletantish boob:

First, let me over-intellectualize it for a moment. (I did a batchelor's in philosophy for my undergrad, ok, so I earned it.)

Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living," or at least that's what Plato says he said. Socrates never wrote anything down. And while that sentiment is nice, later thinkers (most of them German) began to believe that a life devoted to reflexive examination wasn't much of a life at all. Visceral experience was what they were after. Contemplation only cheapened things. I'm over-simplifying this of course, but bear with me.

As with most opposing ideas, the truth seems to lie somewhere in the middle.

Writing is, at its core, a contemplative activity. We write about experiences mostly, not so much about the experience of writing (which creates an infinite, closed and solipsistic loop of reflexive contemplation if you're not careful). Every writer has to engage life viscerally, experientially, to have something to write about. So, (to end this horrible pointy-headed, over-intellectualizing [is that even a verb?]), every writer has to strike some balance between experiencing life and writing about it.

What does it mean that a "real" writer needs to write then? That a "real" writer needs to write every day? Every week? Every year? Forever? And ever? Or else?

No. It's complete bullshit. "A real writer needs to write," is a neat way of planting insecurities in the minds of other people, to prejudge another person's attempt to express himself. What's the point? I've been blogging here regularly for two-and-a-half years, and I'm not sure I've written anything worth reading yet. Does my consistency make me somehow worthy of membership in the Real Writers of Real Words Club of America? How much are the dues? Will you take a check?

At the moment, as I said a before, I don't have much time for writing. I am too busy experiencing salaried labor and indentured servitude to an infant child. And I don't see either of them letting up.

Could I stop writing altogether? Yeah. I think I could.

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September 19th, 2005 - In the morning, I walk the dog, straight from bed to shoes, shorts and leash. Eddie bounds down the back steps in front of me and we're off. Sometimes we walk up past the gym at the college and back around the neighborhood on the other side. Sometimes we walk up the hill amongst the dorms and the surrounding school buildings. Sometimes we go down over the river and up to High Street, where Paul Revere made his midnight ride. It's thinking time. I've paced these streets so much since Eddie was a puppy, I often don't even notice where I'm walking.

This morning I was thinking that sometimes what seems like inertia is actually momentum. I was just getting up, walking the dog, going to work, coming home, eating dinner, going to bed, over and over again. Shampoo, rinse, repeat. And then all of a sudden (not really) there was a baby, and everything changed.

Maybe momentum isn't the right word. I'm not sure we were moving forward or gathering steam in the run up to pregnancy and birth. Maybe we were hibernating or molting, resting up for the big push of parenthood or sloughing off the skin of our prior life. I'm not sure. But the point is that we were actually doing something. Whether we knew it or not, we were getting ready.

And recognizing that puts so much into perspective and helps me feel so much more ready to do what I have to do next, which is raise a little boy.

The four of us, Brittney, Owen, Eddie and I, were out for a walk just yesterday, and Brittney said, "Look at us. Could you have imagined this six or seven years ago?" And of course I said, "no." And she said, "I'm so glad we're doing this now, instead of still doing that."

And I said, "yeah, me too."

Sepember 15th, 2005 - Boston is weird in the rain. Other cities don't actually seem to have people in them, only buildings and cars. My brother says Jacksonville is like that. LA is, in parts. So is San Diego. But Boston is full of people walking the streets, so when it rains, the city gets very quiet.

Sometimes, rain brings fog, the city swathed in gray cotton. You can't see the tops of the buildings, and it's sort of dirty-looking. I hate it when it's like that. It makes me feel smothered. Tonight it was clear, wet and blue. Very clean. Very crisp. It made me want to be outside, even though that meant getting wet, which I did. I almost never carry an umbrella. This will betray bits of my prejudice and bits of my vanity, but I really don't feel very manly carrying an umbrella. I'd prefer to get rained on. And so I do.

A lot of the bus seats were wet. People open the windows, especially when it's so muggy, to let some air in, but then the seats get wet and no one sits in them. They sit scattered around in the dry seats, and people stand, even though there are all those empty seats. I always sit in the back of the bus, near the rear door. I try to read, but the lurching way the bus moves makes me sick.

I'm reading Chandler's The Long Goodbye now. It's a very manly book, filled with very manly characters. Here's a brief passage I read today about living in cities:

The other part of me wanted to get out and stay out, but this was the part I never listened to. Because if I ever had I would have stayed in the town where I was born and worked in the hardware store and married the boss's daughter and had five kids and read them the funny paper on Sunday morning and smacked their heads when they got out of line and squabbled with the wife about how much spending money they were to get and what programs they could have on the radio or TV set. I might even have got rich - small-town rich, an eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader's Digest on the living room table, the wife with a cast-iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I'll take the big sordid dirty crooked city.

Like Chandler's Philip Marlowe, I think I have a love/hate relationship with the city. There's such a strong attraction to the shit storm of ideas raging on every corner, the shear density of humans trying to be individuals in such an irrepresible mass. But there's also a repulsion, to the dirty and noise, to the strangeness of all the strangers. I caught two kids smoking pot from a soda can at the end of my driveway last week. They dropped the can and took off when they saw me coming but then stood at the bus stop on the corner for fifteen minutes till the bus came. Stupid.

Tomorrow I'll do the last work of the week, and then the wife and kid and I will head to Vermont for the weekend. We'll get our peace and quiet there. And likely, a lot more rain.

Sepember 13th, 2005 - Oh, it's so complicated, beginning with the Indians. I need the Indians (or the As for that matter) to win enough games that the Yankees don't make the playoffs. Simultaneously I need the Red Sox to win. If the Red Sox make the playoffs and the Yankees don't I will call the season a success and not give even half a crap whether the home town team wins a single playoff game. The Sox are winning, by the way, on the bat of David Ortiz, who is a non-fielding, overweight designated hitter. I have, in private correspondence and public rants, disparaged players like Ortiz. I hate the DH rule. But all bets are off in September.

So that's one thing. Another is the current state of our home.

Last weekend I finished painting the front porch trim, which was a triumph of sorts if only because I never seem to finish anything I start. In the bonus round, I also scraped, sanded and painted the trim around the side door. These are things that needed to be done, though the foyer, stairs and upstairs hallway have been at a standstill, wallpaper scraped, walls primed, for nearly two years. I figure I need to be outside, doing the things that need to be done there, while it's still warm enough to be outside. I can finish patching and sanding the ancient plaster walls inside when it turns cold. Of course, then I need to put up a new ceiling in Owen's room, paint the walls in there and think about having the floor redone.

Then there's the schoolhouse in Vermont, where we need to put in a wood stove before the first snow falls. That will require picking a stove, arranging its out-of-state delivery, getting a carpenter to cut a hole in the wall and putting up a chimney. Not to mention splitting and stacking wood to dry and season. What am I, some kind of fucking lumberjack?

Oh, and the job search (no one is actually hiring lumberjacks at the moment) , which has turned into more of a wait-to-see-what-happens-with-this-one-job thing. I should be pumping my resume out the door. I should be plastering the moon with it. But I'm not.

Of course, the big time sink is Owen, who is crawling now, which makes him a double threat to break things, one of which might be his own head. The dog is completely terrified. We put that little critter down on the rug, and he makes right for Eddie's funny, curly tail. And the dog is so goddamned good that he just looks up at us with this pathetic, "what do you want me to do?" expression, instead of crushing Owen's tender bones in his steely jaws. The boy has reached the point where he is almost literally impossible to hold in your arms. He is, at all times, trying to escape your clutches, to crawl free, where CDs can be ripped from shelves and heads can be broken on hard wooden corners. We sigh an audible sigh of relief when he falls asleep in his crib for the night, the same sigh you hear lion tamers emit when the cage door slams shut behind the lions at the end of the act.

The confirmation hearings for John Roberts are on now too, so I've got to pay some small amount of attention to that, just so I can know exactly how far our civil liberties are going to retreat over the coming decades. Really, the whole political circus remains a source of constant bother. I am reminded again and again of Washington's warnings from the very first presidential farewell address:

All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.

However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

I will say what I always say: Parties don't solve problems. They only aggregate power.

Meanwhile, there's a war on, a war which I oppose. I mean, honestly, what difference does it make, Coke or Pepsi? It's just cola, and anyway they're both too sugary, too fizzy. We should all be drinking more water.

I shouldn't be so flippant about the fact that there are over 130,000 Americans living in war zones right now, but it's easy given the fact that so few people are actually talking about the war now. It's not in the papers. It's not on TV. I don't hear people talking about it at the water cooler or on the street. Hell, I even went to my barber last week, and it never came up once. We talked about the litter problem in the neighborhood.

So if I was a member of one of the armed forces returning from Iraq right now, I'd be pretty freaked out. I would have just come from a place where I was regularly concerned for my life, arriving in a place where almost no one was concerned for my life.

September 12th, 2005 - I am at that age (33), when all the hold outs are no longer holding out. They're putting the condoms and pills away and letting fly with the whole sperm and egg thing. T and C are expecting in November. F and D are pregnant too. J and L, who are not yet pregnant, bemoan the fact that everyone else is reproducing. Oh, the pressure!!

I have, with some limited success, been trying not to dispense unsolicited advice. What I've said is that you should get out as much as you possibly can before the baby comes. You should have fun together. The dynamic in your relationship is about to change fundamentally. You will spend some time mourning your past life, a simpler life, when you could have dinner out whenever you felt like it, when you could listen to baseball on the radio and go surfing, when you thought you were busy but were really just having too much fun.

The other thing I've said is not to buy into the current culture of anxiety that has been built around pregnancy and birth. You will be reminded that your child, from the moment of conception, is susceptible to all manner of crippling illnesses and deformity. You will be exhorted to test for all of the possibilities, to wring your hands in constant worry, to lay awake at night contemplating life with an autistic, cancerous dwarf. BUT, if you take your vitamins, exercise regularly, burn incense and recite the proper incantations there's a marginal chance that everything will go well.

And to be sure, there IS a chance you will have an autistic, cancerous dwarf. It happens. But this falls squarely in the category of things you can't control. And no matter what they tell you to the contrary, the American health care system, mighty though it is, can't control it either.

Finally, there is the issue of equipment, receiving blankets, spit up cloths, bottles and bottle washers, onesies and hats and breast pumps, baby shampoos, powders, swings and play pens, cribs and changing tables. You will be told that you need multiple incarnations of each thing and that to do without is to cheat your child of a healthy start in life.

That's all bullshit.

Having said that, common sense will tell you that most of the stuff is pretty nice to have, will make your life easier, and truthfully isn't all that expensive. Still, don't get too much crap, especially infant stuff. They're only infants for a very short time and you'll be so bewildered with sleeplessness and general anxiety that you'll feel more than comfortable using your favorite Replacements t-shirt to mop up the interminable, spoiled, milky spew that will issue forth from your darling child's mouth. You will, in short, make due.

The truth is, you don't want advice right now. Despite yourself, you don't want to know what it's going to be like. You can hear the click-click-click of the roller coaster climbing, and you don't want to know how steep the descent is. You will listen glassy-eyed as every parent you know dispenses their hard won knowledge to you, but in the end you will want to find out for yourself.

It's the only way.

September 11th, 2005 - It's September 11th, and I have nothing to say about it.

We let the garden lay fallow this year. With Owen's arrival, we just didn't think we had the time to do all the planting, weeding and watering to produce the cornucopia of vegetables we normally grow, the green beans, zuchini, tomatoes and carrots, the arugala and other lettuces. Of course, we've never been able to eat it all either. We end up giving away or composting half of it.

Just now, the beds are three feet high in onion grass, which puts up a spray of small white blooms when it's fully mature. There are bees, all sorts of bees, working diligently from flower to flower, so the whole garden is sort of buzzing and moving. It's nice.

Like this:

Shot from below, the onion grass looks like trees, doesn't it?

The birds have planted some of the safflower seeds from the bird feeder as well. Those grew, died and dried themselves in the sun.

Like this:

We also have some lemon verbena that survived the garden pogrom of last fall. And mint. You can't kill mint. The morning glories came back too, though they're purple this year instead of blue. Rob, at work, explained to me that they were probably hybrids, and that's what hybrids do. They revert to their true form, as opposed to heirloom plants that stay the same.

I realize this is sort of disjointed, this prattling on about the garden and sticking pictures in a word place. But disjointed is how I'm feeling. It's something to do with wars and hurricanes and having to go to work tomorrow, with little boys who skip their afternoon nap and dogs that spread themselves in the sun after a bath, with the college kids who live around the corner and the side of the house I still need to paint. It's all mixed up in my head.

And it's bed time.

September 6th, 2005 - A word or two about Hurricane Katrina (as if you haven't seen, read, talked and heard enough already). I feel compelled to mention it only because I grew up in Mobile, which of course got pummeled last week, and because we had a similar experience in Hurricane Fredrick in 1979. What we've heard, thus far, is that the Gulf Coast was horribly unprepared for this storm, and that, as a result, it is now substantively destroyed.

What I think is missing is some context about what "prepared" means. This is an area of the country that has seen a few hurricanes before Katrina. In '79, we knew to tape and board our windows, to fill the tub with water for drinking, to stock up on non-perishable food stuffs. This is how you prepare for a hurricane. Since Fredrick there have been a dozen opportunities to practice.

But to compare Katrina with other hurricanes isn't fair. The strength and size of the storm, coupled with its final trajectory produced an effect like none other in recent history. New Orleans, which has garnered nearly all the media coverage over the last week, has never been prepared for a storm this size, though the eventual arrival of just such a storm was a relative certainty. Cast in that light, the lack of preparedness both from a pro-active, civil-engineering perspective AND from a reactionary, disaster-relief vantage was criminally poor, much like the city that was destroyed.

When I was a kid and Fredrick's winds were literally screaming through the small cracks around our doors and windows, it all seemed like an adventure. Even though I was living it and the storm ripped the back porch off our house, I was never really terrified. The next day we were, predictably, without electricity and water. There were trees down all over our neighborhood, thick pine trees that blocked every road to the cars and trucks that needed to get through. To me, they were like so many jungle gyms to climb through and over, to jump over with my bike. Fredrick was a big, bad storm that left us without running water for three days and without power for weeks, but I was missing school then, and that wasn't such a bad thing.

I live in Boston now, about a thousand miles from New Orleans, and this thing just seems like a nightmare. Even from here.

August 30th, 2005 - Rain means train, not scooter. And train means bus and the expense of shoe leather on the pavements of both Medford Hillside, where I reside, and South Boston where, fortunately, I don't.

Let us begin with the stretch of sidewalk between my home and the bus stop at the corner of Boston Ave and Winthrop St. First I walk up to Boston Ave, a matter of roughly 40 feet. Then I pass the convenience store where a group of older men gathers in the morning to stand on the corner, drink coffee and chat with the Pakistani owne