May 31st, 2006 - It's not that nothing is going on, and it's not that I have nothing to say. But in these days of teething toddlers and breakneck domestic schedules, it's hard to focus, to be cogent and coherent, on any of the myriad topics cycling through my brain during any given day. I sit down to write and find only the thinnest threads of thought dangling at the ratty hem of a soiled mental garment.

So I'm gonna write about soccer again, cause it's the one thing that remains relatively clear in my addled mind. For those of you who have no interest in soccer, I'll give you this incentive. At some point in the next six weeks someone you know is going to bring up the World Cup. If you repeat one or more of the talking points below, you will appear to know what you're talking about. It works for the Republicans. Try it.

So everyone thinks Brazil is going to win the Cup again, and they're probably right. The entire Brazilian team could die in a fiery plane crash, and their replacements would still probably be good enough to win the tournament. To explain effectively Brazil's dominance of world football, you would have to read Futebol:The Brazilian Way of Life by Alex Bellos. Since I've read it, I'll save you the time though. Brazilians eat, sleep and crap soccer. What we are to coffee in paper cups, they are to the world's most popular sport. Also, all their players go by a single name. Ronaldinho is their big star, which is like saying John was a popular Beatle. They are all amazing, all super-human. Harp on this point at the water cooler and you won't look dumb.

Then there's Argentina. If Brazil doesn't win the World Cup then Argentina definitely will. They lack the star power of their South American neighbors, but they make up for it by working harder. As the Brazilians stroke the ball casually around the field, the Argentines cover every blade of grass. Twice. Also, they have nice uniforms.

After Brazil and Argentina there's not much to say, or rather, too much to say. Is it possible to have multiple dark horses, because really, after Brazil and Argentina all the other horses are dark. I have a lot of friends who think England has a realistic chance of winning the Cup, and this, I believe, is at the root of why England can't win. Because they're completely unrealistic. They have two players who play outside of England, which doesn't give them the kind of experience they need to adapt to different opponents. In Brazil's 23 man squad, 21 players ply their trade outside of Brazil.

Spain? Spain is the most talented team to have no shot at all of raising the Cup. Spain is famous for playing poorly at nearly every international tournament they've ever entered. Why? I don't know, but this has come to be one of soccer's eternal truisms. Spain will disappoint.

France? They won in '98, on their home soil, but that was when Zidane and Lizarazu and Blanc and Desailly and Thuram were all in their prime. They've got Thierry Henry now, who is arguably the best forward in the world, but that's about all they've got.

Germany? Their program is falling apart under Juergen Klinsman who was a great player, but hasn't done anything as a coach. Why would the German Football Association hire a guy with no coaching experience to coach their national team? It's so un-German.

Italy? The Italians don't play soccer. They play against soccer. They work very hard to make sure no soccer gets played. If they succeed in stopping everyone else at the tournament from winning games, then they might possibly get through to the final, where they'll lose because they won't score any goals. Also, there is a huge corruption scandal brewing in Italy now, a scandal that takes in several of the top clubs, the football association and a motley crew of nefarious characters. It's turning Italian football upside down and shaking it. Italy have no chance.

The Czech Republic are another possibility, but I don't know enough about them. Like Brazil, the Czechs got good by going abroad. They could be there at the end. But probably not.

That covers the potential favorites. The only other team of interest for you is the US team. And personally, I don't think they'll win a single game. My friend Don doesn't think they'll score a single goal. And that'll kill the American audience for this Cup. Americans really only like stories with Americans in them. It's too bad, because World Cups are great stories.

Always.

Send me a comment.

May 30th, 2006 - Four thousand words about our long weekend in Vermont:

We arrived at the schoolhouse.

Owen made use of the yard.

He went kayaking for the first time.

We left our shoes on the porch.

May 24th, 2006 - Redemption, or just a new camera?

The Boy - May 24th, 2006

Owen's world is rapidly expanding. It's his manifest destiny, his will to power. Yesterday, while I was folding laundry, I watched him drag the basket away, turn it over and then use it to climb up on one of the dining room chairs. From there, the table top was easy, and within a few seconds he was standing in the middle of the dining room table, smiling at me.

True story.

May 22nd, 2006 - Not enough hours in the day for this. Not enough daylight, wakefulness, concentration. Insufficient gestative time for ideas of any import to reach fruition. As it is, I am rasping away at the stained keys of my loud keyboard just 15 minutes before I normally turn the lamp's switch two clicks toward darkness. I'm cramming it in.

And it is crap.

I have begun to think that perhaps this is not the best use of my time, that I should turn what little temporal resource I have to the task of refining and revising some of the essays that lay fallow in my 'My Documents' folder. Or perhaps I should just spend my time reading. Not sure yet.

And to be clear, I'm not asking for you to help me decide. This is not a 'woe is me' post meant to elicit encouragement or some other sort of reader input. Sometimes I come here to think, and what I'm thinking right now is that I need to reduce the number of activities currently laying claim to my brain space. I can not play soccer and run and read and write a blog and work on essays and get together with friends and see my family and do the yard work and improve the home and be any sort of husband or father in the time afforded me for those tasks.

I'm frustrated with the effort of keeping it all going, each thing lurching forward awkwardly. I suppose I will find a solution. Or I won't.

If anything, this is a post about parenthood, about the sacrifices you make to care for children. I spend so much of my time wondering how other people do it. They write books. They run marathons. They have beautiful gardens. Me? I have a dozen, no, two dozen balls in the air, each one a project incomplete, each one a good idea slowly going bad.

Check back with me later when I'm not so sour. Or when I'm not here at all.

May 17th, 2006 - WARNING: If you have taped the European Cup Final and don't yet know the score, stop reading now. WARNING: If you don't know what the European Cup Final is, if you've never heard of Arsenal or FC Barcelona, if you don't know who Thierry Henry or Ronaldinho are, if you think that soccer is boring or that what is important to the rest of the world is unimportant to you, please do read on. You are missing something. You are missing something very beautiful.

Soccer. It is boring in the way that anything you don't know something about is boring. There is not enough scoring in the way that there is not enough scoring in chess. It's a game for foreigners and sissies, if by foreigners you mean it's a game for everyone and if by sissies you mean the best and most famous athletes in the world. But this is all argumentative and there's no point in arguing.

If you missed tonight's Cup Final, you missed Thierry Henry, lithe, quick as a whisper, dancing past the Barcelona center back, Puyol with one deft touch and then just barely failing to breach the Spaniards' goal. You missed Arsenal's towering German keeper, Jens Lehman, being thrown out of the game for taking down Barcelona's majestic Camerooni striker, Samuel Eto'o. You missed Sol Campbell rising high, impossibly high, above his marker to head Arsenal, playing with ten men instead of eleven, into the lead just before halftime. You missed the building tension of Barcelona with their extra man working the ball around the Arsenal box in wave after wave of attack, the English team's rear guard tackling heroically, desperately to keep their lead. You missed Eto'o sweeping the equalizer in at the near post, and then Beletti putting Barcelona ahead just minutes later. You missed Barcelona stroking the ball around, keeping Arsenal at bay, on the defensive, for the rest of the match, killing off the clock with patience and skill and cold precision.

It was very beautiful, and you missed it.

To be sure, soccer has most of the same problems that big American sports have, too much money involved, too many corporate interests being served, out-of-control fans, superstar egos, the ebbing of sportsmanship and civility. But soccer, like baseball and football and basketball and hockey, still has that one thing which is good and valuable and worth carrying on for, the game itself. Despite the money and the egos, players like Henry and Ronaldinho and Eto'o still regularly conjure a bit of magic, still defy Newton's laws with skill and inspiration. After the sponsors have been announced and the fans have packed in at upwards of 1000 Euros a ticket, the whistle blows and the dance begins, a great improvisation of 22 men and a ball, 21 after Lehman had been sent off.

I don't know what it means that Americans don't love soccer. The sport seems to have become a symbol of globalization run amok with rabid Japanese fans lining Tokyo streets for a glimpse of an English player, David Beckham, who plays for a Spanish team, Real Madrid. Is it that soccer is what the rest of the world does, and that's why we don't like it. Are we unique and special and not interested? Or are we just full of our own games? Is it a simple matter of not enough entertainment dollars to go around?

Sports are not important, and as a sport soccer is boring. There's not enough scoring, and it's best enjoyed by foreigners and sissies. This is all true beyond a doubt.

But I think that soccer is more than a sport. In a big world rapidly growing smaller, soccer seems the closest thing we have to a universal language, a thing that brings people together, that unites the rest of the world in common wonder. Now tell me this, if the whole world suddenly stopped what they were doing and went to a party, wouldn't you want to go too?

The World Cup starts in 22 days. You really shouldn't miss it.

Send me a comment.

May 15th, 2006 - I've been telling secrets, or so it would seem. I lost my voice, so I'm whispering, a hoarse and hoary breath broken by consonants, the merest hint of meaning that people lean in to understand. You'd be shocked to find that when you whisper to people they tend to whisper back. Even on the phone. So all day I've been conspiring and confiding, plotting and plodding through the most mundane of conversations.

The whole experience has helped me realize how much I talk. If you watch a soccer match, one of the statistics you will be given occasionally is 'time of possession,' which is, perhaps obviously, a measure of how much time each team had the ball. It will be given either as a number of minutes and seconds, or more often as a percentage. Team A had the ball 67% of the time. Losing my voice has helped me realize that I possess a lot more of most conversations than my conversatorial opponents do, that I am, to some degree, a talker. To those who know me, this will seem like less than a revelation. To them I say: I had no idea.

Was at Ming's Asian Market today procuring my lunch. Many of the cashiers there, rotund Chinese women in watermelon-colored shirts and aprons, don't speak much English beyond basic numbers and simple thank yous. Not being able to speak properly myself, I felt less silly for staring blankly on while they prattled away to each other in Cantonese. I had nothing to offer anyway. So I contemplated the fact that each of them works in multiple pairs of latex gloves both to afford a better grip on the bills and coins and also, no doubt, to protect them from the swarming germs we're led to believe inhabit money of every denomination. At the service desk, the enormous, lumbering security guard was attempting to translate between an elderly Haitian customer and the elderly woman who doles out the scratch-off lottery tickets.

I owe people phone calls. I need to call Charlie who is living on his father's boat for the week. They're winding their way up the East Coast, Fort Lauderdale to Charleston, bringing the boat north for the summer. He's left me two messages full of sun on water, dolphins alongside the boat, fresh salt air. The fucker. I also owe US Airways a phone call to find out why I can't use my frequent flier miles to book passage to California for the wedding of Marc Todd Weaver. Do they not realize what an event this is? It's like Wrestelmania XXIX and the Ultimate Fighting Championship #7 (I think that's the one where Dan "The Beast" Severn begins his reign of terror).

But phone calls are useless when all you've got's a whisper. Ask my brother-in-law Rob who made an awful lot of polite conversation before I clued him into the fact that his sister is out of the house tonight. Ask my dad, who wants to borrow the moving dolly tomorrow.

One more thing about not being able to talk that you should know. Not only do I talk entirely too much, but you do too.

Send me a comment.

May 12th, 2006 - I have been sick and I have been tired, but this morning I woke feeling, if not outwardly then certainly inwardly, better. The nose runs. The cough remains, but the soul is somehow mended.

I credit Hemingway.

Have been reading his A Moveable Feast, a name-droppy, recounting of his early days in Paris. Lunches with Gertrude Stein. Drinks with Ford Maddox Ford. Intense conversations with Ezra Pound at his small, filthy studio. Hemingway is at once charming and incredibly full of himself.

To me, none of that matters. Because between the glasses of stout red wine and the cups of cafe d'creme, he spends long afternoons puzzling out short stories in cafes and on long walks in the Luxembourg Gardens. He goes to museums. He fishes. Pardon the expression, but the whole thing makes me hungry for the city.

And so this morning I opened my eyes again. An old man on the train, in classic, rumpled tweed and subtle plaid pants, a pair of white bucks that looked as if they'd been dipped in the pond and left to dry. He'd nearly walked the soles off them. He sat two seats down working the New York Times crossword through tortoise shell glasses. His forehead wrinkling as he read the clues and then cast his gaze out the train window looking for the answers.

A plump and pretty young woman across from me. Freckled. In loud pink patterned rain coat and clashing red shoes.

The city was invisible, fogged in completely, a flittering grayness behind opaque milk glass.

I jumped off the train at Downtown Crossing, thinking to hop the Silver Line bus to ride through the theater district, but I couldn't find the machine that dispenses the transfers, so I headed back underground, walked the long hall to the Orange Line and rode up to Back Bay Station. It's such a great walk from there down through the South End, the old brownstones turned a rich red in the rain and wet. I spied a long, twisty stone path behind an iron fence, fording the garden alley between two rows of houses. I detoured to a corner cafe to get a coffee. It was all so goddamned nice.

This is not the experience you have if you buy your coffee at Dunkin Donuts, your books at Barnes and Noble and your lunch at McDonalds. At those places you are guaranteed a predictable experience. The coffee will always taste good and the same. The books can always be found on the same, dark, wood shelves, alphabetized the same way and displayed for maximum sale through. And the hamburgers will always be cheap, fatty and unsettlingly delicious. There is an attempt in places such as these to remove the human element from the experience, to strip away

But then, as Hemingway notes in A Moveable Feast, "...I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better."

So go to Dunkin Donuts. Have a coffee. Enjoy it. But realize that its returns will eventually diminish, that the good you seek will have to be sought elsewhere, perhaps not in the sameness or even the goodness of the coffee but in the place you buy it or, more likely, in the people who serve it to you.

Send me a comment.

May 10th, 2006 - Have been ill. Owen started day care last Wednesday. By Saturday snot was streaming down his tiny face, and his mother and I were getting by on less than enough sleep. By Monday we were both sick too. And based on how I feel (car hit, soul crushed) I can't imagine how the little guy was coping. He weighs 25 pounds for chrissakes.

Of course, he's fine now, and Brittney and I are still dragging, still waiting to feel better. People are telling us to expect this for the next 6 months or so. Sick then better. Sick then better. I guess building an immune system is a bit like learning another language. Without immersion it never really happens.

On a separate and completely unrelated note:

It's amazing the things you see in the city sometimes. Whenever I take the train to work, I walk past the Shawmut Construction tool shop on Albany St. They've got an indoor warehouse there and also a fenced-in yard for larger pieces of equipment. Today they had a collection of about 20 industrial, standing fans, each one about 6 feet tall, like a giant sunflower with a rotating head. And because it was so windy, they were all spinning. Even though I'm sick and it was windy and cold and raining, I stopped and stared for a full minute before slogging off to the train.

Send me a comment.

May 4th, 2006 - Last bit about Vermont here. I think Brittney and I were both struck on this trip by some of the poverty on display there, trailer homes beached on woody properties surrounded by dead cars and washing machines and all manner of brightly-colored plastic childrens' toys, all of it arranged as if by tornado. To me, these places seem less like homes than fortified compounds of destitution. I saw similar dwellings on the Indian reservations of Arizona and New Mexico, all chain-linked in and protected by small packs of howling dogs. The fences and dogs say, "Don't come around here." The effect is both forbidding and defiant.

And though I live in the city where there are poor people tucked into dilapidated apartments and living stacked on top of one another in multi-family homes, rural poverty is all the more startling because it is spread so unconsciously before you, the misery diffused across their naked half-acres, stretching out, filling up the space. The poor people who live in my city neighborhood keep the state of their affairs mostly packed away out of sight. Their dead cars get towed. Their dead appliances get hauled away by the city. Their children take the practical view that any toy left at street level will likely disappear in the night.

Fast forwarding to the guilt that necessarily arises from being confronted by the disparity between my own middle class wastefulness and their forbidding, defiant lack, I was surprised by how much worse I felt viewing the obvious poverty of the country, versus the covert poverty of the city. Of course, I'm sure if I ventured into the poorest urban neighborhoods the effect would be similar, but I don't go there, and I certainly would never think of vacationing there.

What to do?

I'm not proposing to stop wasting money on leather cell phone cases and TiVo (no, I don't have either one, but I do have 200 channels of television and 4 phone lines) and start donating all that leftover cash (is there ever any such thing?) to alleviating the suffering of the rural poor. Nor am I going to spew some standard line about learning to better appreciate the things I have. Suffice it to say that, connecting to what I wrote yesterday about doing the right things all the time, I should both stop wasting money AND appreciate more what I have. Those are just good and right things to do, the lessons of our dour and often miserable New England forebears.

So where does that leave me? I suppose that in any economic system, even social and commun-isms, there are rich, and there are poor. Perhaps the guilt arises not from being confronted with my own wastefulness (which is epic relative to Central American subsistence farmers but modest compared to say, Donald Trump), but rather from my own powerlessness to do anything meaningful about the poverty of those people who live in my own community. I am who I am, modestly successful and fortunately born, and they are who they are, poor. The thing to do is to try to learn the lessons of their suffering and try not to patronize them with your sympathy.

Send me a comment.

May 3rd, 2006 - In our Vermont hovel there is a small transistor radio that sits in the one window sill on the South facing side of the house. This is the only vantage from which we are able to receive a signal from WFCR, the NPR station out of Amherst, MA. Otherwise it's all classic rock all the time. The radio's pedantic drone begins roughly ten minutes after we arise in the morning and falls silent roughly ten minutes before we go to bed.

And so it was that I caught a funny little news story (aren't all the news stories on NPR funny and little?) about an email that has landed in many inboxes over the last couple weeks concerning high gas prices and what can be done about them. This email (which I have received) exhorts the recipient to boycott Exxon/Mobil gas stations, the theory being that reducing the demand for gas at Exxon/Mobil, the biggest player in the domestic gas market, will drive down prices there, thus instigating a price war with the other stations, resulting in lower prices for everyone everywhere. And if this plan wasn't so obviously flawed to begin with, the fine folks at NPR had an economist on to explain just exactly why their liberal listenership shouldn't begin a boycott with all possible haste.

According to the economist (and likely any high school-level economics class on offer), the plan would fail because those people boycotting Exxon/Mobil would still need to buy gasoline and so would drive up demand (and thus prices) at other stations. The real answer, the economist laughed at the end of his allotted time, was to drive less.

DRIVE LESS?!?

Amazing. So simple. So elegant. So, so, impossible.

Here, in America, just because you've offered a solution to a problem does NOT mean that said solution is actually a SOLUTION. In order to qualify as a SOLUTION, a solution has to both solve the stated problem AND be easy to implement. Driving less would be hard. It would require walking, which, as I'm sure you're aware, is very hard. It would require planning ahead, also extremely difficult. It would require doing without certain things sometimes, as if that's even on the list of things that might possibly be included in a list of things that is possibly possible.

We need a pill for this. I think they're developing one actually. It's called ethanol and, like all of those pills they advertise on TV, the ones to help you sleep more and/or fart less, it will come with some potentially oogy side-effects.

This whole gas problem is actually a lot like that whole obesity problem. The solution to obesity (for most people) is to eat less and exercise more, a simple manipulation of the calorie count, but, of course it's hard to eat less and even harder to exercise more. So we take pills. Lots of pills. Pills that don't work. Pills that are, let's be honest, just speed with less interesting names.

All of this makes me believe that the only real solutions to problems are the ones that start now and end when you die. We need to drive less today and tomorrow and the next day, ad infinitum. We need to moderate our eating habits on an immediate and ongoing basis. We need to believe in the fundamental rightness of doing things the right way, rather than buying into doing things the wrong way for a while with the hope that we can fix them on down the line, that one day, a pill will be available to make all our problems go away.

I believe, perhaps mistakenly, that if we just have the basic courage to do the right things starting today, eventually, we can solve our problems with: gas shortages, obesity, bad credit, bad teeth, bad personal relationships, squirrels getting in the bird feeder, corporate malfeasance, immigration, the hoarding of office supplies, et. al., etc., etc., etc.

I don't mean to come off as sanctimonious here (it just comes naturally, and anyway I think there's a new pill for it). I realize that it's hard for most people (myself included) to do things the long, hard, and usually-right way. It requires a sometimes blind faith that doing the right thing will pay off in the long-run. But given the things we're already demonstrating a pure and blind faith in (e.g. the benevolence of government, God and the pharmaceutical industry), having faith in the inherent rightness of exercise and not driving exhaust-belching machines around the neighborhoods our kids play in seems like not much of a stretch.

Send me a comment.

May 1st, 2006 - Back from Vermont after a week's break. A week of breaking the routine. Of putting on the brakes. A routine breaking of the weak bonds between our routine and our sanity. A sanity break to avoid a sanity brake.

And our place in Vermont, or the place the insects keep warm for us, where nothing is straight, plumb, flush or square. Where you begin to think you understand some things before the wind blows in through a gap in the floor and changes your mind, this actually being one of the benefits of its ramshackle state, that it is so readily perspective shifting. I mean, above and beyond the perspective shifting benefits of having 216 consecutive hours away from work, over and above the effects of leaving home and its comforts, I believe that Vermont, and especially our brokedown palace therein, has its own powers of therapeutic suggestion. It's the lack of right angles, the slight askewness of everything. It causes you to question what you're seeing and thinking.

Honestly, this vacation didn't recalibrate my world view quite as drastically as past breaks have, but one thing did occur to me, and that was that not everything I start needs to be finished. I don't have to do everything now. In fact, there are certain projects that I might begin whenever I like and finish them also whenever I like without any detriment to me, my loved ones or the fine balance in which the natural order persists.

So I began stacking stone.

I know nothing about making stone walls other than that the primary material used is in fact stone and that some technique (coupled with brute force) leads to those stones being stacked in such a way that they don't just come tumbling down whenever a stiff wind blows. No. Other than that I know nothing, but I didn't let that stop me from beginning to stack stone in a wall-like configuration at the front of our property. Nearly every shred of my rational being was screaming, "What are you doing, you moron?!?! You don't know how to do this, and even if you did, it's going to take you ten years to find enough stone to make a wall across the front of this tiny patch of earth!!"

But I ignored all that.

Because it occurred to me, as I said before, that if this wall-like configuration which I've begun to configure never culminates in the type of boundary marker that future generations point to as evidence of our essentially anti-social tendencies, well then that really isn't a big deal. AND! IF! On the other hand! I get some enjoyment from wrestling the remnants of the last ice age from their moss-covered homes, dragging them across the lawn to the road and stacking them in the sturdiest pile I'm capable of, well then RA-RA-ZIS-BOOM-BAH, there ain't nothing wrong with that. It might even look nice, Sisyphysean overtones not withstanding.

In those moments that I devoted to the relocation of stone, I extrapolated from this tiny realization that there are many other projects currently inching their way forward in my life to which I can apply the same devil-may-care attitude with similarly insignificant potential risk. As you can imagine, I felt a great burden rising from my shoulders, even as my shoulders attempted to square themselves beneath a heavy, stoney burden.

For some time I have rebelled against the notion that it's not the destination but rather the journey that's important. Let's be honest, often the journey sucks or is otherwise the pennance you pay to reach a necessary destination, the trip from where you're sitting now to the bathroom, for instance. But given my new, vacation-born perspective, I can see that a simple addition to this old chestnut will make it more accurate and perhaps more resonant for goal-oriented people like myself.

What do you think of this? "In those instances where you have nowhere better to be and/or there is no work responsibility involved nor bodily function to serve, it's not the destination but the journey that's important."

It won't fit as well on motivational posters, pen sets and t-shirts. That much is true. But I believe people respond to truth far more readily than they do to received wisdom, no?

I did have one other epiphany while I was away, vacating, a solution to the problem of high-gas prices and global warning, but you'll have to wait till tomorrow night for that. I have to begin the enlightening journey from here to the bed now.

Send me a comment.

April 20th, 2006 - Lest you have lulled yourselves into a comfortable stupor as regards the teaching of evolution in our American classrooms, perhaps as a result of intelligent design's resounding defeat in a Pennsylvania court, let me offer you the following bit of chastening evidence that publishers, if not the federal government, are still working to make your kids stupid.

The following is extracted verbatim from a contract circulated by one of the major educational publishers developing elementary and high school text books in this country right now:

Sensitive Issues - Do not include in the manuscript any subjects or language that may be inappropriate for children or may cause offense to some people. Examples: ghosts;witches;brand names;evolution;magic;religious imagery;sex or nudity;gambling;smoking;drinking;drug use;war and violence;derogatory references to height, weight, and body type; names of sports or media personalities; and political issues. Avoid stereotyping people based on age, race, culture, or gender. Make sure to balance ethnicity, gender, and persons with disabilities. (Emphasis added is mine).

So, let's see. Evolution, which is a time-tested and well-evidenced scientific theory which unifies the various fields of biology and is the basis for the vast majority of the productive scientific research being carried out today, is being equated to magic and religious imagery. Discussing this science is the same as glorifying sex or nudity, gambling, smoking, drinking, drug use, war and violence. Science is as inappropriate for your children as generalizations about short people, Mexicans and the elderly.

Sometimes I go to work and wonder whether I'm part of the problem or part of the solution. We used to joke around that we were doing it for the kids. Now I wonder if maybe we're doing it TO the kids.

Send me a comment.

April 19th, 2006 - Boston.com, the website of the Boston Globe, had a feature today (which I can't find again to link to)on bands they think should stop touring. Their list included: Madonna, INXS, The Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, The Cars, U2, Queen, Blondie, Ozzy Osbourne, et. al., and mostly chided the aging rockers for squandering their credibility by simply flogging their old hits for massive sums of cash. Of course, there are still massive sums of cash available to these bands because people still want to hear them play those old hits. I'm as big a music snob as you're going to find, but really, I think the brute force of economics argues for Mick Jagger and Bono to go on playing to stadiums full of drooling fans as long as they can stand up and carry a tune. Hells bells, people are still paying top dollar to hear Wayne Newton croon, if only in Vegas, but my point is, in music, good taste really never has anything to do with anything.

This is America afterall, where we prefer cheese that comes in individually-wrapped, plastic "slices." Taste is not our strong suit. So trying to shame a bunch of multi-millionaires into abandoning the thing they did (and continue to do) to make those millions seems to me more tasteless than the actual doing of the thing, which is, in the end, fairly innocuous.

I mean, the ubiquitous classic rock radio pumps the shit out at all hours of day and night, resurrecting music by bands that have not only had the decency to quit but by some who have gone ahead and obliged us by dying. Rest (in peace) assured that if Jim Morrison, the Lizard King himself, were still alive, there would be arenas full of young and old heads bobbing along to those horrible Ray Manzarek keyboard solos. Light My Fire. In fact, just set me on fire, cause I can't take it anymore.

The thing that really seemed to gall the Globe was that so many of these bands, the Cars, Blondie, Queen, INXS, are touring with only some of their original members. The Cars are missing Rik Okasek. Blondie is missing their original bass player, I think. Queen is missing Freddie Mercury, and INXS is missing Michael Hutchence. To be fair, in every case (except Blondie) the band is missing its most important original contributor. The Cars were nothing without Okasek's bassy, robotic vocals. Queen was nothing (if you call Brian May's guitar playing nothing) without Mercury, and INXS was more or less nothing, though Hutchence sure was pretty in the '80s. But really, so what? Cheese slices aren't really cheese, and I'm pretty sure they aren't sliced either. I think they're what's called cheese food, which is injected at high pressure into those clear plastic wrappers.

The truth is that music critics really ought to just stop doing what they do. I would bet all my monopoly money that 98% of music critics are frustrated former musicians who couldn't hold a candle to 98% of the bands they pan. Or worse, they're not musicians at all and so have no frame of reference for their criticism. Furthermore, what passes for an album review now would make the earnest kids at a poetry slam laugh out loud. Please, no more references to "swirling guitars" or "throaty vocals." Just stop. The masses interpret the phrase "critically acclaimed" to mean "you won't like it."

Look, Bubba Sparxxx featuring Ying Yang Twins and Mr ColliPark are currently at number 9 on Billboard's Hot 100 with their hit, Ms. New Booty. If that isn't evidence that taste and quality don't count for what the French call "jacque merde," then I take it all back and highly recommend you get down to your nearest CD-selling emporium or to the iTunes store and pick up T-Pain Featuring Mike Jones doing I'm N Luv (Wit A Stripper). It's the 17th most popular song in the country right now.

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April 17th, 2006 - Over 22,000 people proved themselves better than me today by running the Boston Marathon. Like I needed that. They were all over the sidewalks downtown when I scooted home, up Charles Street and down Beacon to the Mass Ave Bridge, their complimentary, silver blankets fluttering about like so many shiny badges of courage. It is impossible even to go for a jog on Marathon day without feeling like an idiot. Best to stay home, in the dark, with the TV on.

Anyway, some things that are happening:

1) Owen is going to day care. Up to this point, my sister-in-law has been watching him three days a week, but as she is herself about to birth a tiny human monster (a third one actually), it's time for Owen to join the other children at the high-priced day care center around the corner from my wife's office. We will be sending him two days a week, for which we will pay the same fee we paid my s-i-l for three days. My mother will pick up the slack, taking her grandson every Monday.

And so, in short order Owen's tiny world will be rocked. I have come to believe that he senses the impending shift of paradigm and comfort and has moved into a defensive posture characterized by frequent use of the word "No" and punctuated by waking in the night and then screaming until one of us comes to get him. For me there are remembrances of his newborness, sleepless nights filled either with his wakefulness or my anxiety about the potential for same. Tonight, over dinner, Brittney said, "I have a feeling the next six months are going to be difficult." Owen said, "No. No. No."

2) The nightmare project is over. Nearly my entire winter was occupied by a spate of work-related misery that has only just come to an end in the last week. I am celebrating by sitting slack-jawed at my desk for great lengths of time, occasionally deigning to answer an email or make a productive phone call. Seldom in my career have I been engaged in such thankless endeavor for such a sustained period. Its ending seems to me like that moment when the car alarm, which has been blaring outside your window since you went to bed, finally shuts off at 3am.

The end of the nightmare project coincides nicely with the budding of spring and the vacation I'll be on all next week. I seldom feel the urge toward religiosity, but if ever there was a time...

3) My camera is busted again. No power. No pictures. This is particularly irritating since it means a gap in the photographic record of Owen's growth. Of course, it means my Flickr site doesn't get updated with pseudo-arty pictures of garbage cans and/or those lamp post shots Brittney (and likely the rest of the planet) finds boring, too. So the obvious solution to the problem is to get the damn thing fixed, except that people don't get electronic things fixed anymore. They throw them away and buy a new one, and that pains me, not only because I like the old one, but also because I can't keep the image of a vast garbage dump filled with digital cameras out of my head. Thus far I am choosing the middle ground on the fix-it-or-trash-it question by simply not doing anything.

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April 12th, 2006 - Golden handcuffs. It sounds naughty, but really it describes that curious situation wherein you make too much money to be able to quit your job reasonably. It's the bondage of wealth. Oh, boo hoo! I really want to do something else, but what I do now pays me so much I could't think of leaving. I know people with this problem.

And I was thinking this morning that actually, as a nation, we have this problem.

We work longer weeks and take less vacation than any other first world country. It's the price you pay for having as high a productivity rate as we have, and it's one of the reasons we're so wealthy. It's American ingenuity and also the American work ethic. We're number one, which is really great. Except when it's not.

We've all somehow bought into this way of doing things, though it means we spend less time with our families and less time doing the things we want to do. We've even developed this bizarre idea that we should love our work. I'm pretty sure we'd have to call it something else if we really learned to love it, like maybe "hobby" or "masturbation," which might be interchangeable for some of you.

Anyway, it struck me this morning that I really want off the ride. I'd like to work less and get paid less and still be able to afford to live the unextravagant lifestyle I live now, modest and middle class. I know. I know. I'm a lazy malcontent with a sense of entitlement. I'm positively French.

Part of what I do involves managing Spanish translation projects, and as a result I work with a whole gaggle of Latinos. They come from Mexico and Colombia and Peru, and every day around noon they stop working, get together and have lunch. It's the most amazing thing. You should see it. While eating this lunch, they tend to talk about things not related to work. Cooking. Politics. Stuff. Occasionally they can be heard to laugh. It's totally bizarre.

Meanwhile, my American co-workers tend to jump up from what they're doing, pull something out of the refrigerator, nuke it, and run back to their desks to work while they eat. I'm reasonably certain they get more done that way.

And I got to thinking what it would be like if we weren't this way. What if we weren't the world leader in work-obsession? What if we weren't so wealthy? What if we were more like Italy? Or Spain? What if we had higher unemployment but lower collective stress? What if we had more time with our families but less consumer electronics?

It's a complicated question to ask, and I'm oversimplifying shamelessly here, but you know what? I think I know what I'd choose. I think I do.

What about you?

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April 10th, 2006 - Personally, I can't wait until Owen can speak. There's a lot I need to tell him, and clearly there's a hell of lot he's got to tell me. The kid blathers on almost non-stop, and quickly, before he adds too many words to his tiny vocabulary, I thought I'd collect them all together in a single Owen-dictionary (non-alphabetized).

Dah - Dog - His first word, usually followed by "woo,woo,woo." He has a preternatural ability to find dogs where normal humans wouldn't suspect there are dogs. He hears the neighbors dog barking. He hears the dog down the street and across the train tracks barking. He sees dogs on TV and pictures of dogs in catalogs. "Dah, dah! Woo, woo, woo."

Duck - Truck - Another obsession. We live on a busy street, so there are lots of trucks around. Also, cars are trucks, so "Duck, duck, duck!" is a regular refrain. We have a truck picture book, too, and it's his favorite.

Bus - Bus - His current favorite word, and the one he pronounces best. Odd that he can't use that 's' sound for other words. He yells, "Bus," when the bus goes by, and then says, "Bye bye, bus," when it's gone.

Nup - Up - As a small person, getting up high is a constant preoccupation. He toddles up to us, points skyward and exclaims, "Nup!"

Dada - Daddy - He calls me "Dada," which is nice, except that for some reason I've begun referring to myself in the third person, as in "No, Dada doesn't want the cracker you just had in your mouth. You should put it back in there, chew it up and swallow it."

Hello - Hello - Another word he pronounces pretty well, though he says "hello" at all the wrong times. He can say it, but I'm not convinced he knows what it means.

Bye Bye - Bye Bye - Usually accompanied by a wave, which is jarringly cute. He knows what this means and uses it pretty well, but never says it when you want him to, as when his grandparents are leaving. Clearly, he doesn't realize the potential monetary implications.

Jish - Juice - Juice is juice. Milk is also juice. And so is water. And tea. And coffee. And wine. And hot sauce. And soda. And anything liquid in a bottle or cup. Juice is also usually whatever YOU are drinking, rather than the thing in the sippy cup he's holding.

Shoosh - Shoes - He says "shoosh" when you're putting his shoes on, also when he's managed to get in our closet, grab a mismatched pair of our shoes and then drag them out to present to us. "Shoosh," he says, drops them and walks away.

Bath - Bath - He loves the bath and has a similar reaction to the suggestion that he take one that the dog has when he hears the word "walk." It's funny to watch him, fat and naked, trying to climb into the tub, hoisting his little leg skyward and not even coming close, all the while chanting, "bath, bath, bath."

Bew - Bird - This is a new one and not often used, but he knows what it means, and again, he has an uncanny knack for finding birds where you hadn't noticed any.

Buh - Book - Owen loves to read, or rather to be read to, and he has favorite books, like his truck book, Wheels on the Bus, and the ever popular Slide, which chronicles a young boy's discover of the joys of playing on the slide at the playground. He will often walk up to you with a book in hand, foist it on you and then say, "Nup."

Uh - Yes - Ah, the first bit of useful communication. "Do you want some milk? we ask. "Uh," he says, and nods his head. It seems a small thing, but it's not. It's actually paradigm shifting. Short of being able to say, "I'd like a pastrami on rye," the trial-and-error method using "Uh" and "No" works amazingly well.

No - No - More often he just shakes his head, but sometimes you'll catch him walking around the house saying, "No, no, no, no, no," which is funny, if not a little disturbing.

Hapt - Hat - Another one of his first words. For a while he was obsessed with hats the way he's now consumed with trucks, buses and dogs, but the hat-mania seems to have abated, and so there aren't a wide array of lids strewn about our house anymore.

Hoh - Hot - We taught him hot, so we could keep him from pestering us for our juice (i.e. wine, coffee, etc). We say, "No, that's hot juice," and he says, "Hoh," and mostly gives up on wanting it, but not always.

Natah - Outside - He loves to go outside, and you can't carry him past a door without him pointing and saying, "Natah?" It's cute, but it's still a bit cold just to be bolting out the door with a toddler all the time.

Mauw - Cat - We took the dog to the vet one day. The waiting room was full of dogs. And then a guy walked in with a cat, and Owen pointed and said, "Mauw," which killed everyone in the room with its astounding cuteness.

Eye - Eye - He pokes himself in the eye and says, "eye." Sometimes he pokes you in the eye and says it. More often than not though, it's the dog who suffers for this one.

Eee - Ear - This usually follows "eye."

Ay - Hair - After he's done pulling on his ear, he brushes the top of his head with his pudgy, little hand and says, "ay." Other times he reaches over and grabs a fistful of my chest hair before pronouncing the single, airy syllable. Then Daddy says, "Owwwwwwwwww."

And that's it. That's all he's got right now. I am trying as best I can to string together rudimentary conversations with him using only the 21 words I've listed here. It makes for not the most scintillating chat. I also spend a fair bit of time chanting simple words to him in the hope that he'll pick them up. Thus far this method has proven almost completely useless. When I hit on something that works, I'll be sure to let you know.

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April 5th, 2006 - Caffeine, that legal buzz, that slight bitterness that we tolerate because it produces such an excellent rush and push and tumble to our day. The fuel of X-Games America. The fuel of the cube-dwelling masses. More pernicious and deeply-rooted than its cousin nicotine, we buy caffeine in various and sundry (and mostly brown) forms, dressed up in a frothy, sweet cappuccino or in basic, inky-black espresso, infused in the plutonium yellow of Mountain Dew or riding shotgun with the chemical tang of diet cola.

When I was in college I became caffeine sick, which is to say that the caffeine I was ingesting regularly was poisoning me.

At first, I had no inkling though. I found I was nauseas most of the time, a gassy sick feeling in my gut. I was always bloated and on the verge of hurling. During my sophomore year, the persistent nausea led to persistent weight loss. I dropped from 150 to 120 in about six months. Even at 150 I hadn't been particularly stout, so at 120 I was whisper thin, bony, sallow almost to the point of translucence.

To be sure, it didn't help that while I was unwittingly poisoning myself with caffeine I was wittingly pursuing the same result with alcohol and nicotine. I think that's why it took me so long to figure the whole thing out. There were actually multiple things killing me, so it was hard to tell which one was the chief perpetrator at any given moment. Doctors weren't much help, either in the emergency room where I ended up twice or in their offices where they put me through a battery of tests to eliminate the possibilities of intestinal parasites and metabolic disfunction.

Finally, through my own frustration, and a lot of trial and error self-medication (I had been drinking a bottle of Mylanta every day for about three months), I thought to cut out caffeine entirely. I know. I know. It seems like one of the first things you would think to do, but remember I was still drinking and smoking and generally acting like an idiot, i.e. I WAS (am) and idiot.

Having eliminated what I have come to think of as "the everyman's speed," I started feeling better almost immediately. I was holding food down, enjoying it more, able to leave the house without worrying that I'd explode. I was stronger, and over the next year I put weight on. Since then, my notoriously bad stomach has all but stopped being a problem.

Except for recently when, for some reason, I began to drink coffee again, only occasionally at first, but with more and more regularity as my work became more stressful and my sleep suffered for it. I started by drinking lattes at home on the weekends. Then I began getting coffee (evil, Dunkin Donuts coffee) during the week on my way to work. And then, if only briefly, it went back to an every day thing. Coffee. Soda. Caffeine. Until my stomach flipped and my sleep became sort of a tortured dance, a stop-start affair that began well enough but usually ended around 4am.

And I don't understand why I've done this to myself.

What is it that we accomplish with coffee? Is it just as simple as introducing a stimulant to a system worn down by fatigue and mild depression? And if so, is our entire system worn down and depressed? Is our continued wearing down and the deepening of our depression the reason Dunkin Donuts has just introduced "Turbo Hot" coffee, a regular coffee spiked with an additional shot of espresso? Close your eyes and picture yourself in line at the coffee shop. Turn and look now at the people near you. Do they look happy or beleaguered? Are you all ashen and stone faced, shuffling forward silently toward the day's beginning, a day you can't possibly face without a little help, a little treat, a little bitterness just at the back of your tongue that will propel you headlong into morning meetings and/or the drudgery of the work day?

Do we drink coffee because we're unhappy? Or because it's just so goddamned delicious?

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April 4th, 2006 - Phil Chang was the first Afro-Chinese to win a bronze medal at the Summer Olympics when he beat Zuzu Takamura of Japan in the foil section of the men's fencing tournament at Sydney in 2000. Chang went back to China, specifically to Guangdong Province, a hero. Guangdong is China's primary manufacturing center, perched just north of Hong Kong. Many of the people who live there came from other places looking for work, which is what they end up doing six days-a-week, twelve hours-a-day, so that Chang's finding time to practice his fencing, and further to break into the famously closed Chinese Olympic system, made him the rarest of birds even before you factor in that his mother is Kenyan, a former distance runner of some repute, who moved to China on a whim after her career was cut short by chronic shin splints.

Haste is the tag and alter-ego of Joy Patterson, an MIT student. Joy is from Patterson, New Jersey, one of those irritating coincidences that she makes a point never to mention to people to avoid answering more questions about her last name than are strictly necessary. Joy Patterson was adopted by Bill and Candy Patterson when she was one year old. Her birth mother is a Kenyan distance runner and her father is a Chinese factory worker named Chang Lo.

Joy leaves her tag, Haste, on park benches and lamp posts and all the other places one would typically find graffiti, but her most daring tags are the string she painted on the outbound side of the subway tunnel leading up out of the Kendall Square station in Cambridge and onto the Longfellow Bridge. These tags were made at night, late, when trains are being moved around in preparation for the morning commute. Her tags are the ones furthest down the tunnel wall, and thus the most dangerous to make. And rather than leaving her normal Haste there, she instead scrawled Haster in the first solid block and then Hasted in the second, to connote the very real posibility that the Haster might be Hasted by a train emerging from the soupy blackness of the tunnel. She wasn't. Fortunately.

Now it is rarer for a tagger to be female. It is even more rare for that female to be Asian. And it is more rare still for that Asian female tagger to be the sister of an Afro-Chinese bronze medalist, but then the world is funny that way. I'm sure there's something completely odd and interesting about you too.

Isn't there?

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April 2nd, 2006 - Played soccer this morning. Pounded my legs to dust. Dragged myself about like one of those rolling suitcases business people all have. Stretched and swore and grunted and spat. Scored once. Pure luck. Apologized. Got knocked down. Knocked someone down. Apologized again. Ran till I blistered my two big toes, saucer-sized blisters, watery but firm. Layed down in the grass when it was over and thought about going to sleep.

My friend T was there, as he often is. T and his wife have a four-month-old. If I felt like creeping death, T looked it, all squinty-eyed like he'd last slept on Tuesday. T is at that odd, miserable juncture in early parenthood, the point where you begin to wonder if you can go on, to disbelieve that your child will ever allow you another full night's sleep. T's wife had woken the previous evening with a stomach virus of some sort. Crying baby. Vomiting wife. Alone in the dark.

Some years ago T and I met playing soccer. He had just started playing, at 31, and he and his girlfriend at the time (not his wife) would come out and play with me and my girlfriend at the time (my wife), with some other people of both genders and all abilities, and we did it for fun and were usually quite successful.

Now T and I play for our sanity. We're not out there to impress the girls anymore (as if they were ever impressed). I'm not even sure it can be reasonably argued that we play to stay in shape since neither of us can reasonably be said to be in shape. No. Now it's the thing we do other than carry children around. Now it's the two hours a week when our heads belong entirely to ourselves, and we gallop around the bumpy field, bumping into one another and falling down.

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March 30th, 2006 - Another in a series of seemingly unrelated events.

First, I'm on the train on the way home (christ, you'd think I live on the damn train I write about it so much), and I hear this guy saying over and over, slowly, "Anybody? Anybody? Anybody?" I can't see him or tell what it is he's asking "anybody" for, but he's relentless, persistent, irritating. And it's weird, because people are doing that thing where they back slowly away and/or avert their gaze, and it's making me really curious because for the life of me I can't hear what it is he's asking for or tell where he's sitting. I want to pipe up and say, "Anybody what? What is it you want? And where are you?" but I don't because, honestly, I can't imagine I have what he's looking for. I'm broke, penniless, and I don't smoke, so that rules out spare change or cigarettes. And he just keeps on bleating, "Anybody? Anybody?" until finally he punctuates it with, "Well, excuse me for asking."

Next, I'm sitting on the couch at home, eating a burrito and watching TV (after the train I hit the ATM to get some cash to buy the burrito to take home and eat on the couch. See I was broke before, when I was on the train, but then...well, you get it). And this PSA comes on, or rather I think it's a PSA. It's this little girl asking her parents what she should do in case of a terrorist attack, a message from the Department of Homeland Security. They seem to be suggesting that Americans make a plan for what to do and/or where to go in case of an attack. That much I get. But, of course, there're no actual hints as to what that plan should be or what a good meeting place might look like. The little girl wonders if grandma's house might work, but the parents are off-camera. They don't say anything. This is one of those conceptual pieces where the parents are only the understood listeners. I believe the ad is trying to put us, the viewers, in their place, as if to suggest that we're actually the ones responsible for this little girl's well-being. How incredibly unhelpful. I mean, if the Pentagon gets attacked again, are kids in Massachusetts supposed to catch a cab to their grandparent's house? Or, if Massachusetts is attacked, should we have some other sort of plan? Should we start building bomb shelters again? What is it we're supposed to do? We don't know, but the Department of Homeland Security thinks we should be thinking about it. Does that make any sense at all?

Anybody? Anybody? Anybody?

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March 27th, 2006 - F and his D-Bomb have reproduced. Aurora Blaize now graces the earth with her presence. Vegas odds-makers will have the line on whether she throws her lot in with the Mets or the Red Sox, whether she prefers the bugs (as does the Bomb) or the birds (as does the F), and whether she will surf or sew? F punctuated the announcement email, the one listing the time of birth and the weight, with the sentiment, "Hell yeah!" As always, his goofy, romantic happiness was palpable.

And this is F's bracing charm, his deep appreciation for the good things that befall him. It makes him a hell of a nice guy to be around, and it makes you want good things for him, which Aurora Blaize most certainly is.

F and I didn't like each other at first.

We met at college, circa '91. I had become friends with many of his friends while he was studying abroad in England one semester. During college, friendships are fungible, so it seemed odd to me that all I ever heard about F was how great he was, how much everyone was looking forward to him coming back, how much fun we'd all have when F returned, blah, blah, blah. That was the spring. In the summer I sub-let an apartment from his college girlfriend, $225 a month for a room in a fifth floor walk up that I shared with two slightly unhinged girls from Michigan and a creepy guy who kept a picture of himself with Ollie North.

Anyway, one weekend F and his girlfriend L came up to visit. I remember I was sitting on the couch reading a book when they came in. One of the other girls who lived in the apartment was with them. And one of the girls said, "Coach (that's what people called me in college, a topic for another post), this is F." And I looked up, if only briefly, and said, "Hey, what's up?" and went back to reading, which was the most passively aggressive way I could think of to say, "So the hell what? He's not so great. Look at me. I read."

It took a little time, but a common love of beer and vinyl record albums drew us together. Later we lived together in a big house in Union Square, where we played in a very bad band that we called Buick. When after graduation the bulk of our friends spent one last hedonistic summer camped on couches with beer and fried chicken and cigarettes, he and I worked our asses off at thankless jobs and commiserated about the misery of working for a living.

After a while he gave up on Boston and moved to New York. He'd call me from there and regale me with stories of his careless love life. The women he could convince to come home with him could never understand why there was so much sand in the bed. I suggested he buy a comforter to replace the sleeping bag he wrapped himself in every night.

Eventually he met the D-Bomb, who swept him off his feet with an unbridled enthusiasm to match his own. D-Bomb gave F someone to practice his Spanish with. As a kid she'd sold hot dogs at Shea Stadium. They were perfect for each other and got married in a fever hotter than a pepper sprout, to borrow a phrase made famous by JR Cash.

And now Aurora Blaize, may she learn the subtle arts of happiness from both her parents.

Hell yeah.

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March 22nd, 2006 - At auction, a brief catalogue of the sounds I heard while lying awake in bed last night after staying up to work on my taxes.

Lot 1: The honking of Canada geese. Notes: Not sure on this one. Can't think why we'd have geese flying overhead at 11pm on a school night. Mostly they congregate down by the river, either on the water or in the grassy fields that escort it out of town. Perhaps a winged attachment felt compelled to fly up to one of the athletic fields at Tufts, which would necessitate passing over our house. Or perhaps a bicyclist with an old-fashioned horn rode by, honking for the pure joy of it.

Lot 2: The stirring, itchy dog. Notes: The dog's bed rests on the floor next to our bed. The dog has myriad allergies that find him licking and scratching and generally squirming at all hours. It is truly amazing how loud a dog can lick.

Lot 3: The #80 or #94 bus. Notes: Our house is sandwiched between the commuter rail tracks and Boston Avenue. At night, it is hard to make out the sound of traffic, except when the bus goes past. The bus makes a distinctive rumbling hum that dies down as it approaches our house because there's a stop right on the corner. Then it torques up again as the lumbering beast lurches out of the stop and resumes its hum up the Avenue.

Lot 4: Cars driving down our street. Notes: We live on the corner, so automobiles coming down our street make a strange dopplering sound as they pass by. Something about the deceleration at the turn doubles the normal doppler effect, so that the car is loud then quiet then loud again before fading away down the street.

Lot 5: Angel, the neighbor's dog. Notes: Frank, my neighbor, is an electrician up at the university, and he works the late shift, 3:00 to 11:00. When he gets home, he lets Angel out in the yard. Angel barks. She barks at cars and buses and vague notions that occur to her fairly frequently. She is always barking, though she is a very timid and easily-spooked creature.

Lot 6: My wife. Notes: Brittney is a classic insomniac, and last night, with me struggling to sleep next to her, there was no doubt she'd be awake. Then she turned to me and said, "Can't get to sleep," but without the inflection that would indicate whether it was a statement or a question, so I said, "Me or you." And she said, "Yeah."

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March 21st, 2006 - One day a week I work from home so I can spend some time with my son and so that I can pay less for day care. Please note I never "work from home." When it appears in quotation marks like that it means "screw around while getting paid." People joke about working from home all the time. Not me. I can't really afford to screw around. I have too much to do.

No. I always work. In fact, I often start working earlier in the morning and finish working later in the evening than I would on a normal office day. It is now 9pm, and I've just sent the last batch of work emails for the day. I logged on this morning at 7:45. I also find that, having set myself up to be able to work from home, I do more post-work work in the evening than I normally might. So really, though I'm home one day a week, I think I put in more actual working hours as a result.

When I'm home, I spend much of the day with one eye on this monitor and the other on Owen, who toddles around the office pulling things off shelves and throwing himself on the floor. It's hard, and sometimes I give up, pull him into my lap, and type emails one-handed. Other times I take him down to the basement, put him the dryer and duct tape the door shut, you know, just to get a little peace. It's cruel, but he always smells so nice when I take him out.

Truthfully though, as much as I enjoy my one-on-one time with him, I still find it somewhat frustrating because I can't really properly spend the day with him, going to the park or the dog track, and I can't really properly work, showing up at co-workers' desks to make unreasonable demands and behave menancingly. I'm working, but I'm less productive. I'm spending time with my kid, but it's almost never doing fun things like finger-painting or huffing model glue.

The wife has a similar schedule to mine, but she has somehow managed to convince her employer that she puts in enough extra time during the week (she goes in earlier than I do, and "works from home" in the evenings), that it's alright for her to take Fridays off. So they do fun things together, or at least they will once spring finally arrives and it's warm enough to do fun things again.

You can't bring up the topic of staying home with your kids without someone saying, "You know, in Europe, they get a year of maternity leave. Our priorities are all wrong in this country." And I always find myself sort of shaking my head and thinking, "That's such bullshit. They do NOT get a year of maternity leave in Europe." But then I saw a 60 Minutes story on the German approach to family benefits and discovered we were both wrong. In Germany you get three years of maternity leave, state-sponsored, and the father gets a year of paternity leave. When Owen was born I took a month. Unpaid.

Insert diatribe about hypocritical conservatives paying lip-service to "family values."

Right. With that out of the way I will tell you this brief story of an errand I ran this morning, technically before working hours, though I'd already sent a slew of email after walking the dog and choking down breakfast.

I had to go to the vet to pick up a prescription for our dog Eddie. Prednasone. A steroid. To keep him from itching so much. He's allergic to everything. Yeah. Steroids. As they say here in Eastern Massachusetts, he's wicked huge now. And less itchy.

Anyway. None of that is important. I walked into the vet and explained that I needed more doggie roids, and they told me to sit and wait while they filled the scrip. Dutifully, I sat. Owen, who also sat, began pointing at the dogs in the waiting room and shouting excitedly, "Dah! Dah!" And I'd say, "Yeah, buddy. That's a dog." And he'd say, "Dah! Dah!" And I'd say, "Yeah, buddy. That's another dog." And then, just when I thought we were going to repeat the whole bit one more time, he pointed to a cat peering nervously from its small plastic cage and said, "Mrow." And every person in the waiting room turned and said, "Awwwwwww," simultaneously.

It was a nice moment, and it made me glad I spend one day a week at home with my kid.

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March 20th, 2006 - My ears are bent. Insistent people insist. The sales guy wonders if I think it's ok if the client pays us $20K less than they're supposed to for work that's already done. I think it's a crap deal, I say. I'd take $20K over whatever's behind door #2. It's usually a goat. He somehow doesn't think that's funny, but hey, he brought it up.

My brother says, did you see that? And I answer that I did. And I add that Newton should be shot for discovering gravity and daring that woman to defy it.

Rob says can you meet at 4? And I say, of course I can meet at 4. I can meet anytime you like. What are we going to talk about? Invariably we talk about work 50% and our prospects of getting laid 50%. And then we're quiet because it's inappropriate to talk about getting laid at the office where the walls have ears and we bend them at our own peril.

Francis says, how about Cuba? But Norman thinks Korea is going to win the whole thing. Francis doesn't care about Korea or Cuba, except that neither of them's the USA. Francis thinks our failure to win is a great omen writ across the sky, an omen of our imminent demise. We invented the car, he says, and now we all drive Japanese. We invented the TV, he says, and we don't make them anymore. We invented baseball, and now we're going to sit and watch the Koreans play the Cubans for the championship. Who am I to say he's wrong? And who would listen anyway?

Salon and Slate bend my ear. CNN and the Globe pitch in. And they're all just saying the Republicans are wrong. This I already knew. But if the Republicans are wrong, who is right? The answer not as obvious as you think.

I start to think there is a connection between everything I'm hearing, the salesguy pitching me a charitable contribution to the people who are meant to pay my bills, the rustle of polyester against an impossible curve and the subsequent insistece of my pulse in my own ear, the steady drumbeat of meetings and side conversations, the decline of our civilization, barbaric as it is, and the feedback of the media microphone. Just back up a half a step and that thing will stop screaming.

It's all just noise, things that need attending to. If you listen closely, perhaps you can pick out what's important.

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March 16th, 2006 - Only this: that I took a picture of a lost glove sitting on the back seat of the Silver Line bus as it caromed and careened down Tremont St. this morning.

And that the same bus with the same glove picked me up after work this evening, though it had been cast down onto the floor.

Coincidences such as this might lead one to think there is a grand design, that maybe a rainbow-striped wool glove means something more than that an exuberant school girl rides the same bus as you do, that there are a finite number of buses driving this route, that that same exuberant school girl was not so lucky as to return to her home on the same bus on which she'd lost her glove only hours before. You might think there's more to it than that.

But I don't.

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March 14th, 2006 - More on the prospect of moving to a cleaner, quieter place. I received a couple of considered comments on the topic. See below.

F, whose wife is preparing to pop, said, "I have been marvelling at how swift and strong the cultural stream is that sends educated middle- upper middle class white folk looking for communities with "good schools" once their kids reach a certain age (this is not your situation, I know, but it's kind of along the same lines, so allow me to digress). By most barometers, the schools in our town suck, or are perceived to suck. So when young white couples like us have kids that reach age 4 or 5, they move to the surrounding Winchesters or send their kids to private schools. It's amazing. It's like all the white parents are asking themselves, "so what are you going to do about the schools?""

He continued, "So the schools are all full of poor and minority kids, thus widening a gap that is probably more cultural to begin with. So I am mulling what's worse - sending your kid to a school that might not be that great academically (I question, actually the premise that these schools are not that great, academically, anyway) or sending your kid to one like the Catholic grammar school I went to in an era of low, low immigration levels - good academically, and lilly white, close minded and boring. I still feel like I'd rather have my kid have a lot of diferent friends of different colors and maybe score 40 points lower on the math portion of the SAT's. We're only going to able to afford state colleges, anyway. I find people who were raised in those kids of environments do so much better later in life - more adaptable, more street smart, etc."

His note closes with a warning about the "super-schedule childhood" so many suburban kids live now, one that doesn't allow for random games of street hockey.

My take on the whole school thing is that most schools give as much as they get, which is to say kids get out of them what they (and their parents) put in. If you're involved in your child's education s/he can get a pretty good education, even in a town where the schools aren't the best. I tend to think that a lot of education happens at home. Parents who read a lot have children who read a lot, etc. So I'm not that worried about the schools, though in our town something like 52% of the graduating high school seniors go on to college, while in the town we are thinking of moving to that number is 98%. Whether or not a college prep environment is somehow integral to a good education and a subsequently happy adulthood, I have no idea.

B came at it from the other direction, warning me of the perils of living in a wealthy community. She said, "What's wrong with where my children are having their idyllic childhood is that their friends get BMW's when they turn 16. That the women I was standing with after school spend February break at Eden Rock, Christmas at Stowe and the summer in various European destinations while their children languish in camp. One of Middle's friends has a suite of rooms larger than most of my house."

This doesn't really worry me either. I went to private school with wealthy kids, and I'm not an asshole. I had a slightly skewed perspective on money and reality when I was younger, but my parents were always frugal and practical, and most of that rubbed off. Certainly, going to college in a big city normalized my views of socio-economy in a big hurry.

Here is what worries me on both sides of the equation. If we stay here in Medford, I am going to be driven nuts by the noise and garbage. Horns honking at all hours. Sirens. Drunken college kids. Plastic shopping bags blow like tumbleweeds down our street. I don't think I want to send Owen out to play in that unsupervised, and I don't want his whole childhood to be a series of supervised play sessions. I want him to be able to hop on his bike and ride over to his friends' houses. I want to do a minimum of worrying over his basic safety. In short (not really), I want for him what I had.

If we move to Winchester, or another, wealthier community, I fear what? That he'll lack exposure to the crazy Brazilian lady around the corner who, in summertime, plays her music loud enough that she can hear it while she mows her 60 square foot lawn? That he won't be able to walk across the street and have French crepes prepared for him by an Algerian man? On some level I think these are valuable experiences, but how valuable? And how much more noise and garbage can we take anyway?

At root, I think we are no longer city people. The city is like an in ground pool. It's really fun sometimes, but eventually you find you just don't use it as much as you thought you would. It's an expensive extravagance, and I'm not sure we can finance our occasional revelry in the hustle and bustle with the meaty part of our kid's childhood.

I guess it's what I said before. We want for him what we had, quiet suburban fun. Riding bikes. Climbing trees. Playing football in the neighbor's front yard. Hell, we're probably fooling ourselves. Kids don't even play football anymore. They just play video games and do crystal meth and give each other STDs.

And I suppose you can do that anywhere.

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March 13th, 2006 - I am currently engaged in the making of 93 books and 6 indexes. The indexes (indices) are nothing: send out books, get back indexes, send indexes to client, correct indexes, done. Easy. The books, not so much. 81 of them are translations, which means getting English books in early phases of production, translating them and then waiting for English corrections to come in so that they can be merged with whatever language specific corrections you are already making. This is harder than it sounds, and when you think that each of those 81 books is broken down and trafficked in parts, up to 8 parts per books, you can see that it's really just way too much to keep track of. Of course the 12 math books I'm doing are harder still. You remember school, right? Math was hard. Well, it still is. Even when you're not the one doing that actual math, though I did bring some pages home tonight to proofread and correct, and I found myself, for the first time in maybe 15 years (ok, more) calculating the area of a prism. Fortunately, many of the questions were multiple choice. You know, it really is almost always C.

Work continues to kick my ass, unabated, and without rest.

During this time, it has been especially hard for me to be thoughtful about much of anything beyond whether or not the editor we have in (insert name of state here) is going to complete his/her work on time, and whether subsequently I will be suffering neath the yoke of the client's vocal and strident disappointment. See post of February 28th for comments on: helplessness, my occasional feelings of.

The one thing that does manage to barge in on work with some regularity however is a small man, roughly 2-and-a-half feet high, my young son. Herewith, then, some thoughts on my evolving parental situation:

1. The difficulty of parenthood is best represented by a sine curve of varying frequency (note the arcane math reference). When you first bring your baby home from the hospital, he or she is very difficult to care for, because you've never had a child before, and even if you have, you've forgotten how much attention a new born requires. Then, after a bit, it gets easier. You get used to sleeplessness and crying (yours and your childs). You begin to think you've got things under control. But. You don't. Your baby changes. It throws your life into convulsive spasms, spasmic convulsions. It's hard again. And then it's easier, cause you get used to that change, and the process of fooling yourself into thinking you're through the hard part begins anew. Up. Down. Like a sine curve, or for those of you who aren't currently making 12 math books, a wave.

2. The toddler's primary modes of communication are screaming and destruction. Screaming seems the best way to alert parents to changing needs. I NEED THAT MILK RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!!! Which, in toddler speak, sounds like, "AHHGREHAHAHH!" Destruction on the other hand is the toddler's way of affirming his place in the world. Like DesCartes declaiming, "Cogito ergo sum," your toddler sweeps all the books off your book shelves as if to say, "Aboleo ergo sum," I destroy therefore I am. Either that, or our kid just hates us and our god awful books.

3. Your child's needs are non-negotiable. Today was a bad day at work. Many problems arose. Many solutions did not. At 5pm, when I really needed to leave in order to pick Owen up from day care, I was neck deep in things that absolutely had to be done before I left. I could have worked another two hours and just barely met my commitments for the day. Instead I left the office, stacks of paper and unanswered emails obscuring the view of my desk and the computer thereon. It was a gear-grinding, head-splitting nightmare. And yet, the child can not be neglected. This much is non-negotiable.

4. It is possible to love your child with breathless urgency and still, in general, dislike children. Your child is the life raft of joy you cling to when all about the world seems dark and threatening. Other people's children act like assholes at the grocery store and make long flights unbearable. Your child is endlessly fascinating. Other people's children aren't being raised properly. All of this is also true of dogs.

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March 9th, 2006 - Was thinking on my way home about the possibility of moving to another town. Ours is sort of loud and dirty, and now that we've got a wee one, finding a cleaner, quieter place to keep ourselves seems to make some sense.

Medford, where we are now, is six miles from downtown Boston. We are two minutes from the major North-South artery into and out of town. We are two minutes from the Western escape route. We have bus and train access to the city, and we have a house with a yard and a driveway for off-street parking, which is a big goddamned deal if you live in a city where it snows. Medford has been good to us. We bought at the right time and have watched our house double in value over the last six years.

That doubling makes a move possible, and where we want to go, at least our number one choice at the moment, is Winchester, a scant two or three miles further afield. Winchester is a quaint little, old New England-style town. It has a charming little town center with manicured lawns and well-swept sidewalks. The houses have space in between them. There is money in Winchester. It's the sort of place you want to live.

But then I got off the 96 bus (relax; this is not another homage to the joys of mass transit) two blocks from our current home and realized just how different it will be to live somewhere else. In those two blocks I pass the businesses, apartments and houses of people from Armenia, Greece, China, Vietnam, Haiti, Algeria, Pakistan, Russia, Brazil, Denmark and Egypt. There is a college just up the hill, and the surrounding areas are infused with students and faculty and the bits of culture they drag along with them.

Winchester seems to be filled mainly with white, English-speaking people. And while that's not a bad thing in and of itself, I wonder if it might not be a good thing to bring our kids up here where they can meet people from all over.

What do you think?

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March 7th, 2006 - Big (and not very big) recent news stories and my chuckleheaded commentary. Because I'm bored and opinionated, and because, let's be honest, this is just about the end of the blog road.

The Headline: World Baseball Classic Plays to Modest Crowds.

My take: Just wait. The games have only just started in this country (the USA beat Mexico 2-0 this afternoon), and by the time this thing is over, all of baseball-loving America is going to be chanting U-S-A, U-S-A at their television. Except of course the 42 million hispanics who live here, who will all be chanting something else, perhaps, "Chiqui-ti-boom-ala-bim-bom-ba, chiqui-ti-boom-a-la-bim-bom-ba, a-la-vijo-a-la-bajo, a-la-bim-bom-ba, Mexico! Mexico! Ra! Ra! Ra!" I may even chant that a few times. It's fun. You try it.

The Headline: Video Shows President Bush Was Warned About New Orleans Levies.

My take: No shit. Anyone who was surprised by a Category 5 hurricane flooding the ever-loving crap out of New Orleans has probably been living in a cave in the Pyrenees for the last forty years. Wait. Strike that. I just read on News of the World that a survey of Pyrenees hermits turned up relatively little shock about the collapse of the levies and the subsequent Biblical-style flooding of the Big Easy.

The Headline: Owen Moves from Two Nap Schedule to Single Daily Siesta.

My take: I was really afraid of this happening, convinced that one nap (where the word nap means: "merciful intermission in the toddler created mayhem") was going to be half as good as two naps. However, he takes one long nap right in the middle of the day. It's easier to plan around, and because it lasts at least two hours you can actually get something done while he's snuggling with his stuffed animals in the other room.

The Headline: Crash Wins Best Picture at Oscars.

My take: Crash? What was that about? Was that the gay cowboy one? No? Oh, it was the other one. One of the other ones. The gay cowboy one won best director. Great. And vapid, self-obsessed stars and starlets wore designer clothing and stood eerily still while a million flash bulbs exploded in their faces. I hate the Oscars. I hate our American obsession with celebrity. It bothers me that Salma Hayek, who really looks best with nothing on, wore over $4M worth of jewelry instead. It bothers me that I know enough about this to comment.

The Headline: Vice President Shoots Hunting Companion.

My take: Who cares? Now honestly, I think Dick Cheney is evil, like high crimes and misdemeanors evil, like Henry Kissinger evil, like drowns puppies evil, but accidentally shooting a guy while hunting quail has no bearing on anything ever at all, even if he was drinking, as some of the more liberal news outlets tried to claim. Where I come from (Alabama) people get shot by accident all the time. Heck, my high school principal was missing two fingers on his right hand. He blew them off accidentally with a shotgun while climbing over a fence. While hunting. I mean, it happens. And no one tried to claim Cheney'd shot the guy on purpose, did they? So really, this whole story was only about the entire press corp looking to get their licks in on a guy who has, for too long, been utterly contemptuous of all they hold sacred.

The Headline: Iran Seeks Nuclear Weapons.

My take: Again, no shit. What would you do if you were an Islamic theocracy? If the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth had included you in his theoretical "axis of evil" and then invaded a country you share a border with? Well, I'll tell you what I'd do. I'd get me some nuclear weapons. And when the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth told me I didn't need nuclear weapons, I'd smile and say, "Yeah, the hell I don't."

The Headline: The Emlyn Project's Extended Illness Seems to be Abating.

My take: After hacking and sputtering for nearly two weeks, it appears that I might be better now, though women at work continue to say I sound awful (the men don't care). Brittney has been ill, too, which sucks, but not nearly as much as it might suck if Owen were to contract whatever illness (I suspect bird flu) we've been suffering with. When I'm sick, the dog gets a shorter walk, the blog lies fallow and my wife makes me soup. When Owen is sick all productive effort of any sort ceases and the world grows dark and cold. Please, god-that-I-don't-believe-in, don't let my little boy get sick.

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March 6th, 2006 - Thirty-three years ago today the most beautiful woman in the world emerged from her mother's uterus (Hi, Barbara!)in Neu Ulm, Germany, just outside Augsburg. Her father was serving at the military base there.

Fourteen-years ago tomorrow she knocked me flat. We were on our way to Cumberland Island, Georgia, to serve our fellow man. I think I actually fell in love on the ferry on the way over.

Happy Birthday, Brittney. I love you.

March 1st, 2006 - There's a potato masher in the bath tub.

That's because Owen prefers kitchen utensils of all sorts, whisks, wooden spoons, spatulas, to any of the myriad toys that his parents have supplied him with. Brittney sets him up on the kitchen floor with a sauce pan full of Cheerios and a slotted spoon and he sits there and "cooks." He can amuse himself this way for long periods of time.

So we have a potato masher in the tub, because he insisted on bringing it with him when I bathed him earlier.

We expect to find things out of place now. He picks up shoes (he loves my green checkerboard Vans) and carries them down hallways and drops them behind couches. There is a pestil (but no mortar) on the counter in the bathroom. There is sun block beneath the ottoman in the living room. There are books and CDs in all sorts of hard to reach spots. And cooking utensils. There are cooking utensils everywhere.

Among Owen's other obsessions are hats (also strewn about the house) and dogs (our now sleeps with one eye open). He toddles up to me, hands me a hat, pulls the hat off, puts it on himself, toddles away, says, "haup." The neighbor's dog barks, he says, "Dah." He points at the box of dog treats on top of the refrigerator, says, "Dah." You pass the dog food in the grocery store, he points and says, "Dah." I went out last week and bought three or four books about dahs. He loves them.

Oh, and books. He loves books. If he's not handing you a haup or pointing to a dah, then he's got a book in his hand and he wants you to read it to him. Five books. Ten books. As long as you'll keep reading, he'll keep getting books and climbing into your lap. He likes books about trucks. He says, "duck." Ducks might be the next big thing.

All of that brings me to words. He really wants to talk. He says "haup" and "dah" and "duck." When he wants to be picked up he points to the sky and says, "Nup." When you're putting on his shoes he says, "Jshsh." He uses the same word for juice. There are others, he points to his eyes and says, oddly, "eye." I can see that he really wants to repeat words back to me. He looks at me, takes in what I've said to him, and then produces some squeaky popping sound. He has no idea how to form consonants or vowels intentionally. He wants it, but he hasn't figured out how his mouth works yet.

That's probably because he's spending most of his waking hours figuring out how to run and climb. There is almost nothing we own now that is entirely safe from his prying and destructive little hands. I catch him climbing on chairs and tip-toeing himself up to reach shiny objects like picture frames or mommy's glasses. These will likely end up behind the toilet with my jshsh or in the tub with the potato masher.

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February 28th, 2006 - What I hate about my job is the occasional helplessness, the inability to control the bad things, to influence the results, which sometimes include being berated on conference calls by people in multiple states.

The thing is, when you're a project manager, you depend on other people in a way that few other jobs require. And, when those people don't come through for you, or perhaps your employer just doesn't give you enough people to do the work in the first place, well you're left holding the bag.

Here are ways I've recently described my current predicament at work:

1) It's like I've been asked to direct Gone with the Wind but my casting director hired the Marx Brothers to play all the parts. I've got Groucho in a dress made of curtains trying to play sexy, but no one is buying it, especially when all Rhett can say is, "HONK, HONK!"

2) It's like someone else is boxing with my face on.

3) I know how Scott McClellan must feel. Management screws up, lies about it and then sends him out to stonewall, and he's just got to stand there at the podium and act like everything is cool while the assembled press make him look like a liar or a moron or both.

So at some point the pain is going to end. The project that has infiltrated my dreams and infected all of my waking ours with preoccupying worry will eventually come to an end. The client will stop leaving me angry voice mails. No more editors will quit. No more writers will get sick or leave town without giving notice. Someone will gather up the various bits and pieces and send them off to the printer.

It can't happen a second too soon.

I've had bad projects before, but this one is the worst. I blame it for the flu that's laid me flat for the last four or five days. I blame it for global warming.

You should know that there are two things that I care far too much about. One is the weekend soccer scores in Europe. The other is my work. This is a character flaw. Were I a Greek God instead of a salary man, this would be the part of my body that hadn't been dipped in the River Styx.

Of course, there is a longer answer to the question, "What do I hate about my job?" That answer involves an examination of the perils of globalization and probably provides far too much detail about where I work and what's wrong with the company I work for. And much as I hate it at the moment, I do want to keep it, at least for the foreseeable. Cause a man gots to get paid, right?

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February 23rd, 2006 - Because I have nothing nice to say right now. That's why.

Next: What I hate about my job.

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February 20th, 2006 - Our trip to the playground: A Photo Essay.

First we saddled up and rode down to the playground.

Then we sized up the situation, unsure at first.

Quickly we became convinced.

That the playground kicks ass.

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February 14th, 2006 - What I have to tell may be beyond my telling in this one evening, so if I don't quite get there, please bear with me. This goes back a year or two now, to something I originally wrote about here in my blog, sort of a memoir-y sort of thing about my Welsh grandfather and how I'd gotten on the bus (again with the transit) one morning and smelled him, which is to say smelled something (someone actually) who smelled just like him, earthy, sweaty, mildewy, and how it triggered a cascade of memories and how I got to wondering about smell and memory and personal history and all that.

A short time later I was trying to put together a couple of the better things I'd written in this space for a series of essays that I intended to revise and polish until they were worthy of publication, which, rather predictably, never happened, though for this one idea about smell and memory I did manage to start some research and do a few revisions of the piece. What I liked about what I'd originally written were the sentimental bits about my granddad, and I realized after not too long that introducing a parallel line concerning the current science related to smell and memory was really just a cheap way to get my sentimental blather into some second-rate magazine. This is probably why I put the whole project on the back burner (that and having a kid), because I'd already written the part I was interested in writing.

Well, just recently I have been toying with the idea of picking that piece up again, continuing the research, continuing to revise. After a year or so of this thing bouncing around my cranium, I found I was curious about how smell works after all. I could, I thought, do some more research and see where it took me. And that's when I had a perspective shifting thought that changed my feeling about the shape of the essay and what I was trying to get across.

In the brief period when I was researching initially I came across a series of articles by a woman named Rachel Herz who teaches at Brown. Dr. Herz's work has to do mainly with the connections between "olfaction" and memory, and what I gathered from my cursory reading was that, though we believe that smells can conjure vivid and accurate memories, mostly because the parts of the brain that smell are near the parts of the brain that remember (I'm paraphrasing heavily here), we're wrong. The memories associated with smell have not been proven to be any more accurate than memories associated with other senses.

And so, finding out that the intense, almost visceral recollection I had of my grandfather as I rode the 94 bus up to Davis Square was very probably not an accurate recollection of him as he was, but rather a smell-enhanced reconstruction of an idealized grandfather based on cloudy reminiscences, well, my enthusiasm for writing the piece ebbed considerably.

Fast forward to last Friday morning. I'm on the bus again. I'm remembering remembering my grandfather. I'm sifting back through my reading on memory and smell and rehashing my disappointment, both with myself for not completing the essay and with the science for not backing up my original premise. And for once I realize that I'm also disappointed in the truth as told to me by Dr. Herz and the other doctors and scientists whose work I read.

Here's where it gets funky. Stick close if you can.

Just then I thought, "Oh my god! This is why people choose to believe in God when the truth of our human condition, the science of Earth's origins are so much more believable, so much more plausible."

It's because it doesn't feel good to abandon your hopes and dreams to the cold calculations of science. It feels, well, cold. We have this intensely random and cozy experience of living our lives and making relationships and striving for things, and scientists spend their time breaking us down into our component parts, analyzing our past behaviour and prediciting our future path. It is supremely useful work, but it's hard not to see that it all ends logically in determinism. And who needs that?

I myself have argued at length with those of my friends who are inclined to argue about such things, that free will doesn't exist, and that, in the end, that's fine, because for our tiny human brains, even the illusion of free will is sufficient to keep us getting up in the morning, going to work, abandoning ourselves to loves and lusts and, on occasion, to Sudoku.

And once my own tiny brain had processed these thoughts, perhaps I was even jarred from this line of reasoning by the bus driver exclaiming, "Davis Square! Bus and train connections!", I came back to thinking about the essay I'd wanted to write. It seemed to me then that I could do what I'd originally intended. I could set the sentimental reminiscences side-by-side with the scientific research, and, in conclusion, I could reject the science, not because it's wrong, but only because I prefer it the other way, the sentimental way.

I wonder if anyone would publish it.

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February 13th, 2006 - Just a smattering of random tonight. Unfortunately, work has pushed all comtemplativeness to the periphery. I am all schedules, all spreadsheets, all resource allocation. Do not approach me with sharp objects or attempt to elicit meaningful commentary. We'll do a conference call later. I'll send you an email. Wait to hear from me. I'm on it.

First though, something about my daily commute. I have written a lot about commuting in this space, both my summer commute by scooter and my winter commute by bus/train. On more than one occasion I have described for you the view of Boston from the Longfellow Bridge, a view afforded only to those who travel the Red Line train for the cars who share that bridge ride too low to get a proper look at the city as it stretches before them. I make it a practice, every morning, to lift my head from whatever book I'm reading and take in the scene, to assess the relative frozeness of the Charles River, to inspect the inlet where the Boston Public Boat House lives, to assail with my eyes the ribbon of brownstones that front the gray office behemoths behind, the Hancock Tower, the Prudential Center. It's then that remind myself that you have to look if you want to see. You have to look.

And last week I saw something I hadn't seen before.

Now normally I sit on one side of the train so that as we come up out of the Kendall Square tunnel I am facing Back Bay, the part of city that is most attractive (not like our anonymous downtown). As the train rises, first you see a smattering of trees planted in a small green space between Memorial Drive and the river. These trees are particularly nice on a sunny winter day when their leaves are down and the sun silhouettes them. I used to ignore the trees, thinking they only delayed access to the view, but now I look at the trees too. Trees always remind me of my friend Charlie who likes to point out that, especially in winter, they are the same upside down, one root system reaching into the ground, the other reaching into the sky.

But so, on this one day last week, I, for some reason, found myself peering backwards over my shoulder as the train rose into the light. That's when I saw the graffiti sprayed on the pebbley concrete wall of the tunnel, none of it particularly artful or even colorful, but somehow still captivating as the sun pushing through the train's windows lit it in flickery bursts, like a flip book of moving letters and designs that eventually faded and gave way to full daylight and then the city.

Now I look at the graffiti every morning trying to imagine sneaking down off the bridge into the tunnel after the trains have stopped running, ignoring the sign that says "Level One Caution Area," and hoping the MBTA doesn't need to move engines around after hours. I suppose this is why none of the graffiti is more spectacular, but really, if this was New York, someone would have found a way. That's what I imagine anyway. I don't know much about graffiti.

Though I did find a mostly full spray can secreted in my front hedge the other morning. No one on the block seems to have suffered the ignominy of having a 13-year-old "tag up" on their fence, but I threw the can in the trash to save us all the worry. The other possibility, something I just now considered, is that the can wasn't meant for spraying but rather for "huffing," which actually seems pretty plausible given the neighborhood I live in.

In Honduras, where my sister-in-law is from, there is a whole subculture of glue-sniffing street children called resistoleros, who huff and huff until the drool runs from the corners of their mouths. They call them resistoleros, because Resistol is the brand name of the glue.

When I was a kid, a good time with glue meant coating your palm with Elmer's White All-Purpose and seeing if you could peel it off in one piece after it dried. I remember holding the stretchy white skin, with all the same lines and cracks as my own, and wishing I could keep it, but always losing patience, losing care, eventually rolling it up in a ball and sticking it to the underside of a desk.

That's it, I'm afraid. Trains and graffiti and glue. That's all I've got. I'll have better tomorrow. I promise.

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February 9th, 2006 - OK. While I agree with you that it's totally and insanely stupid for people to be dying over cartoons, I would remind you that people the world over are totally and insanely stupid. It's a species characteristic. I would also add that this whole rioting and dying and setting things on fire business isn't really about cartoons. You know, it's like when your wife throws a shoe at your head. She's not doing it because of what you just said. She's doing it because of everything you ever said, you insensitive asshole.

One solution for dealing with the problems of Islamo-fascism and fundamentalist terrorism? The silent treatment. Brittney has never actually thrown a shoe at my head, but she is deadly accurate with the silent treatment. No one is better at silent treatment than my wife. So we could have Brittney not talk to Islamo-fascists (starting now). I usually crack in first 24 hours, but those Islamo-fascists are tough, so I'm thinking it might take a week to solve the problem that way.

Another idea is to just give them what they want, which is, if I understand correctly, for us to pull our military out of their holy lands, including all of Saudi Arabia, some of Afghanistan and some other places, to have all the Jews in Israel killed and/or relocated to Antarctica (Antarcjudaica!), for all women to cover themselves in public, completely and forever and for us to stop trying to sell MTVs and Paris Hiltons to their children.

I think we can find some common ground there, no?

I have heard people say (ok, I heard myself say it once) that the real way to solve the problems of violence and unrest in the Middle East is not to root out the radical, fundamentalist elements, but rather to give poor muslims better economic prospects. A guy with a job doesn't have time to throw rocks at police, or so the arguement goes. This is one of those common sense, seat of the pants types of solutions to what is, we have to admit, a pretty complicated problem. I'm going to go ahead and call bullshit, cause look, there are lots of poor people in the world who don't go and burn an embassy every time they get their knickers in a twist over some bit of overt cultural insensitivity. When people insult my culture, you know, by saying pro-wrestling is fake or by telling me I can't wear linen after labor day, my first impulse is not to burn their embassy down, it's to throw a brick through the front window of a Starbucks.

So I don't get it, this embassy burning thing. Not at all.

I do worry though that having typed the phrases "embassy burning," "economic prospects" and "throw a brick through the front window" all in one post, I am now in danger of falling down the data mine shaft being worked by my own country's "National Security Agency." I suppose I shouldn't worry too much. A little digging on their part will turn up nothing more than a deep faith in the authenticity of pro wrestling and a hearty disdain for cartoons in general, but most specifically for Garfield.

That fat, stupid cat.

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February 7th, 2006 - Last Friday night I went to my wife's office holiday party, celebrated, for some reason, on the first Friday in February. The party had an island theme and all were exhorted to don Hawaiian shirts and other stereotypically tropical garb, as if we all own Hawaiian shirts, though Brittney informed me later that several of her co-workers actually wear flowery shirts to work every day, so perhaps I'm the exception rather than the rule. I guess the idea behind the whole thing was to celebrate in a summery kind of way, even though it's freezing-ass cold out here in February and the coat rack was full of down parkas and ski jackets.

We arrived at the Marriott in Burlington at 8:10pm, ten minutes after the open bar closed, which, though I don't drink anymore, was unfortunate, because I like to have the option, you know, just in case. This Marriott is just like the giant, business traveller hotel near you, the one that's always awash in people who wear cellphones on their belts while they play golf. I imagined a cadre of expense-reporting guests upstairs in their rooms, trying to decide if they could get away with expensing a porno. These places are always so discreet with their receipts. It is, after all, a service business.

Downstairs in the banquet room, disco music was playing. In fact, at first I thought we had walked into a wedding by mistake. I said to Brittney, "When are they gonna play 'Celebration?' exactly three minutes before 'Celebration' came on. Oh, and it was loud, like Kool and the Gang playing live on my shoulder. It was so loud that it was nearly impossible to carry on a conversation. It's hard to make small talk in this sort of environment. It's hard to want to make small talk in this sort of environment. There was a palm tree made of balloons in the middle of the room. It arched up and over the bar, staffed by Hawaiian-shirted bartenders who all looked depressed, as if they'd drawn the shortest possible straw of all cool bartending assignments, one up from Isaac on the Love Boat.

We ate banquet food, again, island-themed, lots of skewered pineapple and citrus-tinged vinaigrette. It wasn't so bad, if only because it was available in large quantity and I hadn't eaten yet. Am I the only one who finds the smell of Sterno completely nauseating? I got over it. I had the cheese cake AND the papaya mousse for dessert.

Some time after dessert the DJ switched over from disco to hip-hop, which was, I think, an effort to end the party so everyone could go home to their children. That's what we did anyway. It felt good to walk out into a quieter, gentler world. I could finally hear myself think.

Which is when I realized what an insufferable snob I am.

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February 6th, 2006 - The things you see on the train. This morning a woman got on at Harvard Square, pretty, streaky blonde, but not trashy looking, expensive clothes, delicate features. She sat down next to a man who was reading, something high brow. He was youngish, like her, dressed sort of smartly, sort of stylishly without being overbearingly hip. He was in the seat next to the pole, several business casuals hanging off it, so that, though he was sitting comfortably, he had relatively little personal space, just enough for himself, bulky in his winter coat and the book he held in front of his face. And she wedged in next to him, drawing her bag onto her lap, compacting herself into the space, pressed up against him in that way that is only really appropriate on a crowded train. Sitting there, together, they made a nice pair, him studiously serious, her unselfconsciously lovely. They seemed hardly to notice each other at first.

The train rumbled down the tunnel, through Central and Kendall and up onto the Longfellow Bridge to Charles Street and then back underground to Park and Downtown Crossing, disgorging its cargo in fits and starts, the bell bonging twice just before the doors slapped shut. At Downtown Crossing most everybody got off except the man, the woman and me, across from them, mostly hidden behind my own book.

At this point I expected the pair of them, comfortable as they seemed, to separate. It is common train etiquette, once the train empties out, to slide over a seat to give the person next to you a little elbow room. And yet, the woman didn't move. The man continued to read. The woman glanced at him briefly, maybe to see what he was reading, maybe to confirm what she had surmised after previous, fervent glances, that he was good and decent looking, that he was possibly oblivious to her there next to him. She didn't even lean away, creating a slight separation between their two arms and two legs.

She just smiled slightly and stared off into space, not noticing me, noticing her, noticing him.

I don't know what was happening. The two of them got on at different stops, hadn't spoken a word, had hardly looked at one another, but there seemed to be a quiet agreement between them. It was as odd as two strangers hugging in the grocery store, in the frozen foods section, beside half-full carts. In fact, by not speaking and by not looking each other full in the face they preserved the appearance of it all being incidental, perfectly normal, just two people sitting in adjoining seats on the morning train. Whether she craved the contact, the warmth of another person, and he simply didn't feel comfortable breaking the spell by getting up and moving to another seat, rejecting her outright, I have no idea. Perhaps he was not only complicit but also happy to sit there with an attractive woman pressed against him. Or maybe neither one wanted to offend the other. They stayed stuck together there out of simple politeness.

I prefer to think they just liked the way it felt, that, in fact, they've sat together before, played at not noticing, each ridden a stop farther than they needed to. It just seems nicer that way, doesn't it?

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February 2nd, 2006 - It's like living with an amnesiac. He rises in the morning, fleece soft and cinnamon sweet in his footy pajamas, and toddles through his day learning new words, new gestures and new things about the world. To sit and watch is sublime cinema. It is thrilling in the way I found Evel Knievel thrilling when I was a kid. There are elements of awe and incredulity. You just can't believe he's doing what he's doing, like leaning in to kiss the dog, open-mouthed and sloppy, or waving goodbye to you for the first time ever. And he won't remember a bit of it.

At this stage of the game, children aren't forming long-term memories. Neurological pathways are forming at breakneck speed, but the brain isn't taking the time to write any of it down. That doesn't happen for another year or two.

So we're stuck as the lone witnesses to this amazing day-by-day development. Sometimes he just looks you in the eye and you can tell that he's understanding something new, that he's climbing the ladder, doing the math.

I write an awful lot about how much work it is being a parent, but I have given short shrift to the real joys of it. Oh sure, I wax rhapsodic about how ga-ga in love with him I am, but I haven't really properly put into words the things he gives back to me in exchange for lost sleep, diaper changing and general care.

He gives back a lot.

Beyond the pure enjoyment of watching him grow and learn and develop, he is also very, very sweet. He will, often without warning, turn, smile and charge over to you to administer a hug. He will kiss you, just because you are there and he likes you. These moments with him claim your brain. They push back the heavy tarpaulin of work and responsibility that covers each of us. They crowd past and future out of the picture. They cut tension like Ginsu knives through over ripe tomatoes.

Owen's contribution is not small. He is the perspective shifter. He is the hard stop on the workday. He is so goddamned great, it's a real shame he won't remember a bit of it.

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January 30th, 2006 - If I hadn't been flattened by a steamroller, blind-sided by a haymaker, had the rug pulled out from under me and finally had all my ill-mannered chicken come home to roost today, I would blog more expansively about the witty and generous response to my last post about having more children. But because I spent the better part of the day having my block knocked off by impatient clients, my ear gnawed on by needy and not-very-productive editors and my holy cards sorted by a team of Indian desktop operators, I don't have a lot of time or patience for this tonight.

I got home late.

Still, my inbox continues to swell and swelter with entreaties to further my procreative efforts and comiserations regarding the future difficulties created by such efforts. I particularly want to thank the parents who offered me their unvarnished advice, who simultaneously spun their tales of parental woe and yet held fast to the value of the parental experience. I cannot say that I have made a decision about what to do, but I suspect that we will hurl ourselves into the cold, dark ether and see what happens. All of this presupposes that we will be able to reproduce again, and of course there are no guarantees in this life.

Though to be perfectly (perhaps too perfectly) honest with you, it took us about ten minutes to get pregnant last time we tried. And that includes cuddle time.

I will have more to say about all this later. Also, I want to say something about the current state of Owen, who is growing like a particularly aggressive weed, like kudzu which has been known to eat houses.

Anyway, more on all that later, when I haven't been beaten like a rented mule or been made to clean the Augean Stables with my tongue and a roll of paper towels.

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January 25th, 2006 - OK. Here is the $64,000 question (though why the ultimate question should be worth $64,000 I never really understood). Here is the topic that has owned my brain for the last few weeks. This is what I am thinking about when I wake in the morning. When I'm staring off into space, this is what's on my mind. This: Should we have another kid?

Let me get all the obligatory crap out of the way right here at the beginning. We love Owen. He has been the most amazing thing that has ever happened to either of us. He is hilariously funny, endlessly fascinating and touchingly sweet. He is the wrecking ball crushing our hearts, and we have come to believe with all sincerity that the sun shines from betwixt his buttocks. OK? We love our kid.

But OHMYGODINHEAVENABOVEANDTHEDEVILDOWNBELOWTOO! it's a lot of work to raise a child. We have settled into a manageable pattern with the whole thing, but our relative comfort now belies the fact that we have rearranged everything we do around Owen's basic needs. We have abnegated our senses of self, sacrificing bits of identity to the greater good of the family collective. It has, at times, pushed each of us to what we would have thought of previously as our breaking points, only to discover that breaking isn't really an option, not when your child needs you.

So my great stress and worry is that having another kid will just be too much for me.

Brittney thinks it will be cruel to deprive Owen of the experience of having a sibling. Furthermore, she believes that we had better go ahead and deliver a sibling now while we're still young and capable of going for weeks on end without sleep. And I tend to agree with her on this latter point, that if we're going to have another one, we'd better bloody well get to work on it quick, get this whole babies-in-diapers-who-breast-feed-and-cry-in-the-night thing over with.

But do we really need to have two? My brother is eight years older than I am, so I was an only-child from nine on, and I'm not horribly damaged. And is having two actually twice as hard as having one? I've heard that it is, but I've also heard (from my friend Patrick who has four) that when you have two they entertain each other. Anyway, I'm appealing here to those of you who have children. Advise me. Make clear that which is shrouded in darkness. Tell me what to do.

I realize that, on some level, this stress I'm feeling is analogous to the stress people feel when trying to decide whether they're ready to have children at all. And to those people I always say, "There is no ready. You will never be ready. You should just jump in with both feet. Start now." Perhaps I should heed my own advice.

Or perhaps you have some wisdom to share?

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January 23rd, 2006 - I write about the weather too much. It's a sure sign that I'm prematurely old. Also, I watch birds. Yesterday we had, simultaneously, a downy woodpecker, a male and female cardinal and a dark-eyed junco, perched and snacking on the feeder in our garden. It was like the United Freaking Nations of Eastern birds, until a goddamned Starling showed up and pooped on the party. This is a digression though. It was the weather I was on about.

This is what is remarkable about New England (and perhaps the shifting currents of global warming). On Friday, I rode my scooter to work and basked in the sunny warmth of what seemed just like a perfect spring day. That night I stood in front of my grill in short sleeves, grilling hamburgers and feeling very, very lucky. On Saturday I met my pick up soccer chums for two hours of mid-winter fun/pain. Yesterday I left the house in a sweater, and though the wind suggested that perhaps I was slightly underdressed, it was still a lovely day. We shopped at the multiple grocery stores our list sometimes demands, and then went home to cook. We ate a lovely Southern-style chicken dish, I described in last night's missive.

We woke to snow. Snow globe snow, swirling and spiraling, diving and dipping. And most importantly collecting. Accumulating, as the meteorologists say, as in, "Expect two-to-four inches of accumulation."

This is, where we live, a dusting, except that it came down so quickly and unexpectedly. And then it switched over to rain, so that that the sidewalks are all swamped in an ash-colored slush. The city itself has gone opaque, like someone turned a giant plastic milk jug over on top of it. And by the time I get home, my sidewalk will be frozen solid with my neighbor's boot prints and the mail man's ugly galoshes perfectly preserved therein.

It will be well nigh impossible for me to get home without soaking my feet to the ankles. The building I work in will be cleared of snow and slush, but beyond that the city is literally awash in semi-solid brackish ick. I'll leave my boots to moulder on the basements steps, there where the jacket I wore to walk the dog this morning is probably already collecting the basements mildewy aromas. The barbecue implements, the long spatulas and forks live there on the basement steps too, so they'll hang on their pegs, mocking me as I tramp up the stairs in my sodden socks.

I'm not complaining. I'm just trying to juxtapose the day's meteorological conditions and the consequences they'll have for poor saps like me with the temperate joy we enjoyed only a day ago. Is it mother nature's moodiness? The redressing of some karmic imbalance? Or perhaps it has something to do with the cleaving of massive portions of even more massive glaciers in the ice blue waters of the arctic. I don't know. I don't get it.

But by now that should have been entirely obvious.

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January 22nd, 2006 - There is little about my youth in Alabama that I cling to with any real sincerity. Mobile, where I lived from the age of seven to the time I left for college at seventeen, is another one of those nice places to visit where living is a less attractive proposition. For me though, one thing worth cherishing is Southern food.

Brittney has been doing a lot more of the cooking over the last few months than she ever did before. Initially I did nearly all the cooking, showing her how to make some basic things. Gradually she built up a solid, if rudimentary, repertoire. But then something, possibly the Food Network, inspired her to greater culinary ambition, and now she regularly gives me pointers at the stove.

So I bought her a couple of Southern cook books for Christmas.

Tonight, she cut and quartered a whole chicken, sauteed it in butter, then simmered it with onions and celery until it was falling apart, at which point she pulled out the vegetables, poured in some arborio rice and watched it suck up all the rich, chickeny liquid. GODDAMN! It was good.

Last week she made this peppery shrimp dish that had me reminiscing about summer days on Mobile Bay. There is a strip of sprawling ante-bellum houses right on the water at the mouth of Mobile Bay, and I was lucky to have a friend whose family owned one of them. A house four doors down still had holes in its facade where Admiral Faragut had loosed cannon shot during the War for Southern Independence. My friend's house consisted of five high-ceilinged bedrooms sandwiched between front and back screened-in porches running the length of the structure, probably sixty feet in all, with rocking chairs and wicker and slowly spinning fans that teased the condensation off the cold drink you were always holding, regardless of the time of day. The kitchen sat behind the house about thirty feet, a precaution from a time when cooking fires were far more common.

My friend's grandmother supervised all the cooking at the Bay house, though there was always hired help around to do the real work of it. Some of the best meals I've ever eaten were at the long dining table on the back porch there. Smoked ham and rice with gravy, served with ice cold sweet tea. A crab trap out at the end of their wharf provided an ample supply of lump meat for salads or crab cakes. His grandmother made her own mayonaise, too, which made sandwiches of leftovers an event unto themselves.

Those were extraordinary meals, but in the South, even the crappy food is better, the endless fried chicken and biscuit joints whose fare will clog your arteries just like a Big Mac, only with a lot more style, the seafood houses who are aware that it is possible to do more to a piece of fish than fry it or broil it, the archaic cafeteria style restaurants with bow-tied waiters who bring out steaming roast beef and jello salad on the same platter. This is low cuisine to be sure, but it far outpaces the shitty sub shop eats of suburban New England.

I have lived here in the Northeast for more than half my life now, and on the whole I like it better, but New England has no culinary tradition to celebrate. The boiled dinners and broiled white fish that are stock in trade for restaurants playing the regional cuisine card leave me cold. Only the shellfish of the Cape and the northern coast, to me, save New England from being a total loss. Even those are prepared with so little art or imagination that it's hard to understand why they bother harvesting the oyster and lobster beds at all.

In the North, we eat for sustenance. In the South, they eat for pleasure. And in that regard, may the South rise again. I would happily support secession if it meant access to a decent bowl of gumbo.

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January 19th, 2006 - Spare a thought for Charlie. He bruised his brain, and it hurt so much he couldn't sleep for days on end. Spare a thought for him sitting quietly in a darkened room, wondering when the pain will let up. He broke six ribs and his collar bone. But it's true what they say, if you want to forget about one pain, think about another. He's sure his ribs hurt, but all he can feel is the rattling of his skull, the searing vibration of it, t