December 28th, 2006 - I have a zit in my ear, and it hurts. And I wonder why it is that I'm still getting zits in my ear when I'm going to turn thirty-freaking-five on Sunday. I mean, seriously, haven't I already had enough ear zits for this lifetime?

I was glancing at my driver's license picture yesterday (I had a big honking zit that day, too) and thinking how young I looked. I had just turned thirty. The last two years, the sleep deprivation, the worrying, the stress of parenthood, have put lines on my face. And while I certainly don't look old now, I do look older. Someone at work told me I had "daddy face."

I've never been much of a birthday person, by which I mean celebrating my birthday never seemed particularly important. When you grow up with a New Year's Eve birthday, you suffer a little for the joint-Christmas gift, and also for the fact that everyone already has ample reason to celebrate that has nothing to do with you.

I was really hoping Owen, who will turn two on January 3rd, would come a few days earlier, so that I could hand off my birthday to him. We always want to correct those things we disliked about our own lives in the lives of our children, don't we?

I have had a few good birthdays. There was the skate party I had when I turned eight, at Sunshine Skate Center on Hillcrest Road in Mobile, Alabama. And then there was my 30th, for which Brittney arranged a very large, very surprising, surprise party at our house. Friends came from out of town for it, which meant an awful lot to me. An awful lot. And still does.

Beyond the celebration, birthdays serve as a natural time to reflect on where you've been, where you are and where you're going. I've not really completed that process for mile marker thirty five, but I can say roundly that I'm pleased with where I am. Great wife, great kid, tolerable job. I lack for the time to do all the things I want to do, but I suspect everyone always feels that way. Those are the sorts of problems you want to have, I think.

The future is less clear. The longer I go on, the less idea I seem to have where I'm going and the less it really bothers me. And I think I've probably spent too much time thinking about where I've been, though without looking back it's sometimes hard to see why you are where you are, right? Like I said, I haven't sifted through it all yet. If I come up with any paradigm-shifting, head-splitting revelations, I'll let you know. Don't plan your week around it.

Marc dropped me a line today, saying that he was nearly done with a CD of the band we used to play in together. Seems he found a tape of one our practices, and got a wild hair up his ass to convert it from magnetic bits to bits and bytes. The end product will no doubt bear true testament to the awful racket we were once responsible for. This reminded me of another getting-older thing, which is the sad realization that I no longer rock. Let's set aside any discussion about whether I, in fact, EVER rocked, and just cut straight to the admission that I haven't pulled out my guitar with any real intent in several years. My friend F has recently gone so far as to hand his own electric twanger down to one of his nephews, a passing of the torch to the next generation of peace disturbers. And while I haven't yet taken the drastic step of giving my guitars away, I did participate in the purchasing of a new guitar rig for my own nephew this Christmas.

There he sat on the living room floor scratching and scrawling out ill-formed chords, the gain on the little practice amp I got him jacked up and the distortion crackling through their apartment. I showed him a few things, promised I would show more, lamented the fact that I never practiced enough and that after eighteen years can play little beyond the fast, loud oeuvre Marc is now excavating from its cassette tomb.

This is getting older. Realizing that the romantic part of your youth is past, that you're not yet old, but that you are moving inexorably in that direction.

I'm not letting it bother me. It's just this zit that hurts when I poke it.

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December 27th, 2006 - Spoiled. Spent. And ruined. The cocaine-like rush of pulling garishly patterned paper off a new plastic toy, brightly colored and handsomely molded. Oh, and once the batteries have been installed, the pluses and minuses laid head to toe in the secret compartment, then the real magic starts. Thomas the Tank Engine chugs around his blue plastic track. The dump truck speeds across the living room, caroms off the dog's hind quarter, giggles peel, grandparents ooh, ah.

It turns out there is only so much present opening a toddler can handle.

By the end of the day Tuesday, Owen had endured three separate gift swapping rituals. And by endured, of course, I mean "had his eyes opened to a whole new way of being in the world." He learned a new word: presents. Presents are the best thing there ever was. He loves them so much that he will happily and eagerly open yours for you. He loves them so much that when we got home from work today, Owen rushed into the dining room where the Christmas tree stands and yelled, "Presents?!?"

He took the news that there were no more presents with relative equanimity. I believe this burst of uncharacteristic calmness derived from the obvious presence of so many fantastically, fantastic new toys in the living room, toys whose allure, whose mystique, has not nearly worn off. There is a big green garbage truck with a driver that you can take out and a trash barrel mounted on the side on a conveyor belt. You can place actual garbage in this barrel and then hoist it mechanically into the back of the truck.

When I look at Christmas through Owen's eyes, I can still make out the joyous edges of the thing. It emerges from behind the end-of-year work stress. It cuts through the cooking and cleaning and frenzy of family coming and going. As much as I worry for his newfound obsession with pressure-molded plastic in various unnatural hues, I revel in his newfound obsession with pressure-molded plastic in various unnatural hues.

I can't wait to give him a bike.

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December 21st, 2006 - A typical conversation with Owen. He says, "What's that, Daddy?" I say, "It's a seagull." He says, "What's the seagull doing?" I say, "The seagull is flying." He says, "The seagull is flying?" "Yes," I say, "the seagull is flying."

More interesting to him, though, are trucks, buses, trains and airplanes. "Is that the garbage truck (pronounced: bardage duck), Daddy?" "Yeah, buddy, that's the garbage truck." "I wanna see the garbage truck, Daddy. Is there a man driving the garbage truck?" "Yes, buddy. There's a man driving it."

I don't know when he learned so many words. Voice mail. Remote control. Helicopter. "Is Daddy checking his voice mail?" Where does that come from? Not even two, and he plays cell phone with an old jewelry box. He opens it and says, "Buy! Sell! Buy! Sell!"

OK. I taught him that. But still.

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December 20th, 2006 - Have been putting a lot of thought into these holidays we're having. And after serious consideration and debate (with myself), I've decided they suck. In fact, I believe the entire American holiday calendar needs a revision.

The biggest problem we have currently is the unequal distribution of days off throughout the year. At my company we get ten paid holidays (which sucks), four of which come in the last week of the year. That leaves just six days off between January and November. That's wrong. Dare I say it, it's un-American.

So here's my plan. January, February and March need a good holiday. Since currently, all they've got is MLK Day (3rd Monday in January) and President's Day (3rd Monday in February) March has got nothing. Nothing! Under my plan there is a three day break in the middle of February called Great Americans Day. We eat an enormous 3 day meal (menu to be determined) to celebrate MLK, Washington, Lincoln and Evel Knievel.

We keep Memorial Day (last Monday in May), but expand it to cover the Tuesday too. On the first day we fast in tribute to and contemplation of the sacrifices made by those who died in service of the country. On the Tuesday we feast in celebration of the freedoms they earned us. Then there are fireworks. And a purification ritual that involves running through a sprinkler in your underpants.

Next is July 4th, which is already a kick ass holiday, but I want it to be a four day extravaganza that includes more barbecues and more fireworks. We're also going to move Election Day to July 4th, so people have the day off and have no excuse for not voting. If we're going to celebrate our Independence, let's celebrate it by exercising our democracy. And eating hot dogs.

How many days is that so far? That's nine. OK. Nine is good.

Labor Day (1st Monday in September) and Columbus Day (2nd Monday in October) are both pretty lame. Labor Day is good in concept, but lame in execution. Columbus Day is a poor excuse for a holiday. Columbus wasn't even first here. I'm going to merge them into one holiday at the end of September called End of Summer Festival (I'm open to other suggestions). Lobster will be eaten. Raw bar. There will be a ritual eating of soft-serv ice cream.

Next, Halloween. It isn't a holiday now. It will be in the future. Halloween deserves more time. People with kids have to leave work to take their kids trick-or-treaing anyway. Let's just make this easier and more fun for everybody.

Veteran's Day (November 11th) is a tough one. It's a good reason for a holiday, but we don't do a good job with it. I'd be in favor of merging it into the Memorial Day two day event.

Thanksgiving is good as it is.

And that brings us to Christmas. Christmas is great except for the whole birth-of-Jesus thing. As a secular holiday, with Santa and reindeer and trees and presents, it's awesome. But it's so exclusionary. It's also on the wrong day. It should be on the winter solstice and should be a celebration of having made it to the shortest day of the year. From that day forward we're just gaining light, which brings me to the other big thing. Light. As in Hanukah, the Festival of Lights, which has been totally twisted into a Christmas-light holiday for Jews. Let's scrap Hanukah along with Christmas, move it to the solstice, keep the gifts and Santa and reindeer, make it ten days to bridge us to New Year's Day.

That gives us 25 days off. Screw tradition. Who's in?

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December 18th, 2006 - Sometimes I think you're probably tired of my adventures on public transit. Sometimes I wonder why I find so much to think about on trains and buses and stalking the sidewalk between stops. I think it's probably because I read while I travel, which gets me thinking, and because I'm sandwiched there on the Red Line with the writhing mass of humanity in all its sensibly shod plurality. It's inspiring.

On the train this morning I was reading a Salman Rushdie essay, On Adventure, when I came across this bit: "In our increasingly vicarious culture, the adventurers are the people who perform marvels on our behalf. Escaping from their own roots, from the prison of everyday reality, they enable us to experience, if at one remove, something of the exhilaration of the successful jailbreaker. If urban society be a confining chain, then the adventurers are our necessary Houdinis, reminding us that change, difference, strangeness, newness, risk and achievement really do still exist, and can, if we wish, be attained."

And of course, you read a thing like that, and immediately start trying to convince yourself you're adventurous, that you're capable of great things, capable of serving as everyone else's vicarious thrill. But secretly you know you are not. I remember walking through Harvard Square about five years ago, coming to the cross walk at the heart of the Square, the one where JFK merges into Mass Ave, and realizing in a moment of clarity that I would never do anything really, really great. And that that was ok. We can't all be Steinbeck. We can't all be Aquaman. At the time I was comforted by the idea that I was off the hook for the great American novel, that I didn't need to harness the powers of giant sea horses to foil evil super villians.

But really, did Thoreau have future generations' regard for him in mind when he camped out at Walden or when he paddled through the Maine woods in a canoe with his brother? He didn't. He did what struck him as interesting things to do. He lived in his head a lot. He was by his own reckoning "well-travelled in Concord," which was an understated, Yankee way of saying he didn't really need to go anywhere to live a rich and adventurous mental life. It was a mental life school kids are still reading about nearly 150 years after his death.

I am not Henry David Thoreau. Or Aquaman. But I hope to find adventure. And to be well-travelled in Boston one day.

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December 12th, 2006 - Am I changing? Have I woken on my back, eight spindly brown legs sawing in the air, antennae probing the headboard, to a new kind of life? No. Not yet. Four halves of the tiny pink pills are having no effect, which is all fine and good and according to expectation, but when you've felt as I've felt for as long as I've felt it, it's hard not to obsess a little bit over every little fluctuation in mood. I can report that the typical side effects, dry mouth, upset stomach, rash and decreased menstrual flow, have yet to set in as well, so that's a positive. I have also successfully operated heavy machinery including a Subaru, an old Ford pickup truck and an electric toothbrush.

Fear of change and fear of no change, those are my two big fears. On the one hand, I was always reluctant to medicate myself for fear it would alter who I am, put a gloss on my perception of things and thereby turn me into a blunt tool. Now that I have sought medication, my great fear is that it will do nothing for me, that I will go on as before, most comfortable when alone and staring blankly out the nearest window. Now that I've leapt into the psychopharmacological void, I sure as shit want to feel better. But I'm being impatient. These things take time apparently.

If change is slow to come within, it is certainly pushing forward without. This morning I saw my first pair of hooded mergansers of the season, swimming nervously in a flock of Canada geese down on the Mystic. I have come to associate the mergansers with the settling in of the winter cold. They are quite possibly my favorite bird, if only because they're the first species that I felt compelled to identify after spotting a pair down on the same river three or four years ago. The hooded merganser is the bird that turned me into a bird nerd. Long may they dabble and dive.

Shifting gears abruptly, I have not at any point in this blog discussed my penis, and I am loathe to start now, but I will tell you two things you might find amusing. First, while walking the dog today, Owen asked me "Where did daddy's penis go?" To which I replied, "What?" And he coolly repeated, "Where did daddy's penis go?" And not wanting to turn this into a long, sidewalk-located conversation about penises, I said, "It's in his pants. Thanks for asking. Say, did you see that dump truck." Dump trucks, as it turns out, are far more interesting than penises. Secondly, yesterday, I received a piece of penis-related spam email at work with the subject line: CLAIM YOUR AWARD - MR. TINY WEENIE 2006. And though I didn't open it, I couldn't help wondering who the voters were for this prestigious prize. I immediately shot an email to my wife who professed ignorance, and suggested that maybe my mother was behind it, though, she admitted, it has been some years since my mother has seen the penis in question. Regardless, I feel lucky that I already own my own tuxedo, and I look forward to the awards dinner. I hope the buffet is up to snuff.

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December 8th, 2006 - Happiness is a fickle bitch, or at least she has always seemed so to me. And I have never had the good sense to buy her flowers or whisper sweet nothings in her ear, to beg and plead and cajole in hope of receiving her favors. And thus I have been depressed. I am not even really sure what happiness is anymore, though I am not always unhappy. Does that make sense?

I have been diagnosed (are there any more ominous words than these?) with Dysthymia, a chronic, low-grade depression that often takes route in childhood and lasts a lifetime if untreated. Sufferers often go decades untreated because the condition produces few periods of really severe depression. As a result, people with Dysthymia are more prone to suicide than those with more extreme conditions. Not exactly heartening, but I'm not planning my own demise, so I'll just take that on board as another piece of information.

I share this with you now, not to inspire a slew of sympathetic email, but rather as a way to destigmatize the whole thing for myself. I can't quite say why, but there's something embarrassing about admitting you're depressed. It's exposing weakness. It feels like whining. And who wants to be a whiner? I don't.

I have felt shitty for a long time, and now that I have a kid and another one on the way I can see how my shitty-feelingness is going to have a negative effect on my kids, and I really don't want that. So recently I called my doctor and started the process of getting better. This process has turned out to be much more complicated than I had at first imagined with a slew of appointments and evaluations and the offering of many different therapy options, all of which culminated yesterday with a prescription being written and an appointment with a therapist being made.

At the end of yesterday's session, the doctor asked me what my ultimate goal was with all this treatment, and I said, "I'd like to be happy more often," and she said, "And in your fantasy of this happier future, what does happiness feel like," and this is where I lost the plot. I sat there for a minute hemming and hawing and finally admitted that I didn't really know what it might feel like to be happy. What I wanted to say was that I want to feel occasionally like the people in television commercials appear to feel all the time, but that didn't seem like a real answer, so I just sat there and shook my head and admitted I didn't know. And in admitting that, I realized that though I am not always miserable, I really never feel an emotion that I would describe as happiness either.

I would feel sad about that, but I don't know what I'm missing so what's to cry over? The truth is that, like many of you, I work so hard at intellectualizing everything that happens in my life, that my emotionally faculties are underdeveloped. Christ! Read that last sentence again, and tell me I'm not screwy.

This morning I broke a little pink pill in half and swallowed it. I take halves for the first six days before stepping up to the full dosage. I see my therapist beginning in January. Apparently they're all booked up for the holidays, so I couldn't start sooner. At some point, I go back to figure out whether the medication is doing what it's supposed to do. Here again, how will I know? The doctor suggested that I would experience greater feelings of calmness and relaxation. Those are words I understand. We'll see what happens.

Happiness is a fickle bitch, but I am working on her. I am toning up. Working on my abs. I hope to win her back. And to introduce her to my children.

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December 7th, 2006 - It's like they're building new condominiums right on the heads of the old Chinese people that inhabit the strip of Boston between Chinatown and the Mass Pike. Their squat red brick apartments apparently weren't tall enough for someone. Either that or the sick and infirm are spilling out of the windows at New England Medical Center and they need more beds.

The bigger, more pressing question is, what was I doing on the outskirts of Chinatown at 11 instead of tucked quietly and productively in my ergonomically correct cubical eight blocks further south? I had a doctor's appointment, and it ran later than I expected, and I had to take the bus, so as not to show up in Davis Square after work with a scooter between my legs, even though it was definitely warm enough to scoot today, because Brittney has prenatal yoga on Thursdays and we have to effect a transfer of the toddler. Toddler's aren't allowed on scooters, which is funny because I'm fairly certain a ride on the scooter is what Owen wants most in the world. So I had to take the train and the bus, so that I could take the train and the bus home, which is alright because Owen really likes riding the bus too. But still, I didn't need to be in Chinatown. Really I should have been on the Silver Line, huffing up Washington Street.

But they don't sell wonton soup with roast pork and noodles on the Silver Line. For that you have to go to Chinatown Cafe, consult with little Chinese ladies wearing funny red bicycle hats with short brims and then wait for them to call your number in Cantonese and English. So that's where I was going, because you don't want to slide into your office chair, perfectly balanced, perfectly adjusted, and then have to get up less than an hour later to "trek up into the high Himalaya," by which clearly I mean "cross the Pike to Chinatown.

I had to fight my way past an overly aggressive panhandler to finally get to the office with hot soup, but I made it. And "shit," I thought, "it would be so much better to walk around Chinatown all day, drinking coffee and watching men deliver massive quantities of bean sprouts through restaurant bulkheads."

All day I felt like I was in the wrong place. At the copier, I felt like I should have been at my desk. In the kitchen, I felt like I should have been at my desk. Truthfully I should have been at my desk. I had so much to do. No Chinatown. No kitchen. No bus. No train. No doctor. But screw it, you can't always be at your desk. Sometimes you have to be wending your way up Harrison Avenue on your way to wontons and wondering whether the world really needs another condominium.

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December 4th, 2006 - Snow. The first of the year. It was raining when I got up, before dawn, to walk the dog, the rain pishing against the front of my down jacket, Charles Mingus in the headphones.

The snow started just after daybreak, and within an hour or so it lay on the hedges like powdered sugar. From the 94 bus I could see the college field where we played soccer yesterday frosted like a sheet cake. But then, by the time I'd gone below ground and come up again, the ground was just dark and wet. By noon the sun was out, though it was still cold. I figure this was a good fair warning of what's to come, a quick, testing jab before the real flurries come.

People always say the first snow is so beautiful, especially when it's all clean and untrudged. I guess I know what they mean, but this wasn't that snow. Winter isn't really on us yet.

I'll not say I'm ready. I'm still reeling a bit from the shock of daylight savings' end. You just never remember how much daylight can be squandered in a single dialing back of the clock. Suddenly, it's dark when you're leaving work. You half expect to get the light on the other end, but it's dark in the morning too. And believe me, walking around in the dark in the rain listening to old jazz recordings loses its charm fast when the rain turns to snow and the darkness turns into a mood.

On the way home tonight I was standing in Davis Square waiting for the 94 again when I saw a homeless guy spill a fresh, hot coffee all over the brick sidewalk. He stared down at it for a moment, probed the edge of it with his toe and then looked up at me. "I spilled my motherfucking coffee," he said. And I said, "Tough break." And he just shook his head and walked past me and out into the Square, as if he was going to find another coffee there.

At least it wasn't snowing.

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December 3rd, 2006 - Twice in the last three days I've done something I've never done before which is begin a post to this blog, get several crappy paragraphs in and then delete the whole thing. Generally I hold to the policy of posting everything I've written with very little editing and even less censhorship. But, I don't know, something about the last week has just been so dour and depressing, what with sick child and sick wife and a surfeit of work and other responsibilities that I found I kept writing self-pitying screeds of the most boring kind. I really didn't think I could do that to you. So I didn't.

I was thinking today about the last time I was in Mexico City, three or four years ago, for the wedding of my good friend Alejandro. It was, as travel often is, a surreal experience, people of every stripe swirling around speaking Spanish and English and German, servers in white coats and black ties bringing first a five course French meal and then later, after the dancing and drinking had lost their first wind, a second meal of chilaquiles meant to launch the party into its final phases deep in the night.

I was thinking of this because I spent much of the day in my own kitchen. For breakfast I made waffles, and let me be clear: I made waffles, which is to say I mixed eggs and milk and oil with flour, salt, sugar and baking powder and then waffled it on a hot iron. I'd hate for you think I pulled frozen waffles from the freezer and popped them in the toaster. I do that during the week.

I made chicken salad for lunch from some boiled chicken thighs I'd done earlier, and then I started a pot of black beans which I flavored with the bone from a spiral ham we ate last weekend in Vermont. It was while stirring the beans that I began to think about Mexico. I think it was the smells of chili powder and cumin that took me there. I remember summers as a kid, sat at one end of the dining room table in my friends' apartment, consuming ample portions of everything put in front of me. There was always a warm basket of tortillas and a container of hot chilis on the table, and we would have chili eating contests that Fernando, Ale's brother, usually won.

In the afternoons we would eat tortas, thick sandwiches of pork with beans and sour cream on french bread. We also once spent an afternoon in one of the city's myriad cantinas where men went to pass afternoons with beer and cards and the most comfortable food you can imagine, savory onion soup and tortas and other plates full of warmth and sustenance, the better for drinking away the afternoon.

Maybe it's this time of year. Maybe it's just a head-clearing Sunday after a week of fog and grimace. I'm going to hope these are merely portents of a better December.

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November 27th, 2006 - I am him. He is me. We are intertwined. I carry him up and down the stairs. He's heavy. He has half my DNA, and I'm afraid that will turn out to be a heavy burden too. When he sleeps I sleep. When he wakes, I wake. If he's sick, I stay home. I am him. He is me.

We had my family over for Thanksgiving.

Then we went to Vermont for the rest of the long weekend. Owen dug small holes in the dirt of the driveway, filling his toy dumptruck, then chanting, "BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! DUMP!" Inside, his father was burning our new wood stove, which means setting increasingly larger and hotter fires and putting them out. This process is supposed to keep the impossibly heavy cast iron box from exploding when your family is snuggling around it. While Owen dug and dumped and I lit and extinguished, his mother was making a baby, and making sure neither of us hurt ourselves. She's a good mother.

We came back early on Sunday and I went and played soccer. The field was heavy with mud, and I came back all dirty, which I like.

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November 21st, 2006 - Out walking the dog tonight. He didn't get his morning constitutional. It was cold. I opted for sleep and a shower instead. So, out in the dark, breath billowing, the sleeves of a down jacket swishing against my sides, The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour in the headphones, at every street light Eddie's sleek, compact shadow bouncing next to mine. He is the eggman. I am the walrus. Goo-goo-ga-joob.

We walk up the past the florist and coffee shop and on to where the new burrito place has just opened. There are cops inside. Eating. This is a burrito shop, rather than a taqueria. They put tofu in tortillas. They sell smoothies. They talk about freshness but not flavor. The place is very clean. I don't hold out much hope for them. Eddie doesn't even glance in the window.

And anyway, we're out walking. And the goddamned Beatles, I swear to you, Magical Mystery Tour is, to me, their most amazing album. They're at their prime here as musicians. They're at full experimental stretch, but not yet jaded or wistful. They manage to get "I am the Walrus, a dirty, skronking punk tune, on the same piece of vinyl with "Penny Lane," a syrupy pop masterpiece. They close with the anthemic "All You Need Is Love," which is far less smarmy than it sounds if you listen to more than the sugary refrain. "There's nothing you can do that can't be done," sings John. "There's nothing you can sing that can't be sung." All of which I take to mean: you're not nearly the asshole you think you are, a message that resonates oh so well between my two ears lately.

Up across the college campus we gow, passing aimless students and the grounds crew's night staff. The faculty have all ebbed back into their suburban homes I guess. I can't wait for winter break when the whole place clears out and we can walk up to the roof of the library and look out over all of Somerville with its rolling hills encrusted with triple decker homes and apartment houses. The Boston skyline rises up behind it, a crown on the urban chaos. It's a really nice scene on a cold, clear winter morning.

Back down through the neighborhood we move, slowly working our way back beyond the house, so we can walk up our quiet little one-way street from the other direction. I really like doing this, seeing my neighbor's houses lit for the evening, peering in at their living room warmth, sometimes the TV flickering, others the dining room bathed in yellow light, the family still ranged around the table. Or so I imagine from the glow in the front window. Life is manageable to me this way, outside looking in, the dog for companionship.

And then we're opening the side door and coming up the basement steps and into our own warm kitchen, and Owen is yelling, "Daddy!" and Brittney has made some soup, and the Beatles are actually singing "All You Need Is Love," and I remember that two of them are dead and I press pause on the iPod and sit down and eat.

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November 17th, 2006 - You are looking for me this week, but I'm not here. I'm at the back of the Silver Line bus, surrounded by a squadron of Haitian women wearing plastic bags for hats against the rain. I'm walking past old women, standing in apartment building doorways in Chinatown, staring through me. I'm outside the doctor's office, again, in the rain, waiting for it to open while the nurses stream past carrying giant coffees, wearing clogs. I'm at work in my cubicle with headphones on scrolling through schedule spreadsheets, scrolling and scrolling and scrolling.

I am not here. I am on the tiny couch in the boy's room with his tiny, sweaty head pressed against my shoulder. It's 5:30am. He's sick. We are dozing.

I am nervous that the scooter's rear wheel is not going to hold the road. It's misting. At 35mph mist is rain and man hole covers are ice, and I fell this way once before. But when you've got places to be the Silverline and its Haitian ladies aren't going to get you there. The Silverline is a place you go to sit with Haitians and Puerto Ricans and Chinese and listen to their conversations and have no idea what they're saying. Then you get off and get coffee from a crew of Brazilians and walk around the corner to your office. It's charming but inefficient.

I am with the dog. He's good. He trots at my side. It's raining, as it has all week, and I'm walking more like the scooter than the Silverline. Eddie likes that. He likes to go, ears back, shoulders swaying, gliding down the sidewalk in a way that humans in all their upright, opposable thumbness can't possibly achieve. I have headphones on, so I'm not hearing the cars roaring past, even though they're spraying the cuffs of my pants. And Eddie.

It's Friday night. I'm on the couch. If you are looking. This is where you will find me.

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November 14th, 2006 - I am tattooed anew, a simple, solid black band wrapping around my forearm, 1/3 of an inch thick. This is meant to be the letter 'O' in three dimensions. O for Owen, my boy. The width marks his birth date, January 3rd. The work was performed by a fellow named Matt at Pino Bros. Ink in Inman Square, Cambridge. I can tell you that my experience there was good. Everyone was friendly. Matt is nearly my age, so I didn't feel like I had entered some forbidden den of youth, wherein I was an aging loser. Instead, I felt like I was at the grownups' tattoo shop, except for the expensive ceramic water bongs in the display case in the waiting room. I didn't ask about those. Maybe people my age smoke more weed than I thought.

As ever, the pain was tolerable, pleasant even, cathartic. I expected the arm to be more tender than the back where my other tattoos are, but it wasn't. The inside of the arm was slightly more sensitive, but I didn't really hurt at any point. It took about an hour after Matt got the stencil straight, which took about half-an-hour itself. During the work, other artists would pop their heads in to see how it was going. They never said very much, just walked in, stared at my arm for a few minutes and then walked out. Almost reverent.

I had spent so much time thinking about this tattoo that it was a giant relief to get it done finally. I'm not going to wax rhapsodic about it, but there is something singular about having a symbol permanently affixed to your self. It is not lost on me that this marking will be on my body when I am old and gray, when I cease to be the proprietor of the shop. And it is truly something to look down at your arm and watch a phalanx of needles pulsing in and out of your flesh and know you will never be the same, and that your new self carries some bit of information about who and why you are.

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November 13th, 2006 - Dogs don't have lips, but I made Eddie sit on the little, multi-colored rug in front of the sink so I could peel back the corner of his mouth and perform a little dentistry. The vet gave me a scaler to scrape the plaque off the problem molar in his lower jaw on the left. Eddie doesn't enjoy having the corner of his mouth peeled back, nor does he enjoy the feeling of the scaler scraping across his tooth. He squirms and works his jaws but sits still and endures the ignominy of it, because he knows the poultry flavored tooth paste comes next.

Have you ever brushed a dog's teeth? The rubber brush fits over your finger. You goop it up with a bunch of chickeny paste (mmm...when will Colgate make this stuff available for humans?), and then you work your finger around in the dogs mouth while he tries as hard as he can to lick all the paste off the brush before you're done.

Then I rammed a pill down his throat and gave him a treat, which, this evening, was a green Denta-Bone, a chewy, minty composite meant to further enhance his enormously shitty breath. He plucked it gingerly from my outstretched hand and skittered away into the living room to bask in its wonderfulness. Most evenings he tears right into whatever treat he's given, but tonight he did something he hasn't done in months. He buried it in the couch, then stalked around it, tossing his head and generally taunting it with his wanton ferociousness. At times like this Brittney and I pretend to be discovering it ourselves and this only drives him further into a frenzy of prancing and lunging.

He's eating it now finally. I can hear it from away up the stairs with the door closed.

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November 9th, 2006 - I wish my Spanish was better. I took it in high school. I spent some summers in Mexico, with some very close friends, who are Mexicans. I grew up with them, and don't really speak their language. I have lots of other close Latino friends, too. Half the guys I play soccer with are Spanish speakers. My sister-in-law is from Honduras. And yet I remain horribly, intransigently, daftly unilingual.

The thing is it's discourteous. I have sat at long dinner tables in Mexico City with dozens of natives all speaking English out of deference to me. As a courtesy. Though I was in their country, and all of them were more comfortable in Spanish. Likewise, the Colombians I eat lunch with at work break from their fluent, perfect Spanish to include me in their conversation, in English.

Sure, I make halting, faltering attempts to improve my grasp of Spanish. I do play soccer in the language, calling for the ball "damelo atr‡s" and encouraging my teammates "buena pase! buena pase!" whether they're Latinos or not. I attempt jokes at the office. Which fall flat. Once I was trying to explain to Felipe that I wouldn't be at soccer because I had a problem with my foot, but instead of using the word pie which means foot, I used the word pedo which means fart. I have a problem with my fart. He's still laughing.

I wish I spoke more Portuguese too, if only to chat with the Brazilians who work at the Dunkin Donuts where I get my coffee in the morning. They're all from Minas Gerais. I used to work with a bunch of Brazilians in restaurants around town. I can say "Presesamos seche pratos en esa mes," (We need plates for seven at that table.). I can also say "Ten cuidado babaca o eu vo da pojada in sua cara fea, bundao," (which I won't translate for you). It would be cooler to be able to order in Portuguese and to make some small joke to separate myself from the construction workers and homeless people who are standing with me in line, not because I'm better, but only because I'm nicer.

I'd like to know more Arabic, so I could talk about soccer with the Moroccan and Algerian guys at the pizza place across the street. Or my friend Ibrahim at the gas station down the hill. I wish I knew some Creole, too. This town is crawling with Haitians, like Louis who I met at the coffee shop two weeks ago.

I wish I spoke whatever distinct language or dialect of my own that the people who are ruining my neighborhood speak, to be able to get across to them that throwing garbage in my hedges, driving the wrong way up my one way street and parking in the bus stop are all bad ideas. They're nearly all native English speakers. And yet, there is something about the way I ask them not to do those things, the body language I use to convey my dismay, doesn't make the point.

There's more to communication than vocabulary and pronunciation it seems. I wish I knew what else there was. I do.

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November 8th, 2006 - Obviously it was time for a fresh start. I think I mentioned once before that I've been cutting my own hair recently. An awkward disagreement with my barber convinced me that paying $15 every 5 weeks for a not-very-complicated haircut didn't make a lot of sense. In fact, I've taken what was a not-very-complicated haircut and reduced it to a ten minute head shaving, bent over in the bathroom so the hair can all drop neatly onto the floor.

I perform this bit of grooming with the same clippers my father used to shave my head with when I was a kid, squatting on an overturned bucket in the driveway with a towel pinned around my shoulders. There is something liberating about using this former instrument of childhood torture in my adult life. As if I am now bending it to my will even as it continues to perform the only function it has ever known.

I have four guards that fit over the blade. I use the longest one to do my whole head, then I use the second shortest to do the sides and then I finish the edges with the very shortest one. Thereby I achieve a look one of my friends once dubbed "boys regular."

And this morning I finished this signature look off with the barber's magic dust, Pinaud brand Clubman talc, the talc in the bright green bottle that gets sprinkled into the magic brush and waved all around your freshly shorn head like some sort of catholic blessing. Until today I had resisted buying and using my own Clubman talc, believing that the barber's magic equipment should be left in ever-more-able hands.

But, you know, screw that. When I wrested back responsibility for the appearance of my hair piece, I invested in myself with an unexpected new confidence. I too can apply the talc. In fact, I can apply it every day, gifting myself the scent of a fresh haircut permanently rather than waiting 5 weeks to be anointed anew.

Walking out the house this morning I had the unmistakable feeling of the whole country getting a fresh start. It's a wonder what a pair of clippers and a little bit of talc can do.

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November 1st, 2006 - The sun was warm and bright, so I stood at the bus stop in short sleeves letting it get all over me. I was grateful for this. I'd woken in a black mood and only found relief in the iPod and a brisk walk with the dog. I had forsaken the iPod in the summer. It's warm then and I take the boy with me on dog walking exercises. It would have seemed rude and otherwise unfatherly to ignore his toddler's prattle in favor of the rattle and hum of a pair of headphones.

This morning, free of the boy, I listened to Aimee Mann's The Forgotten Arm album, and it was sweet and melodic and just the thing I needed to ease me into reluctant communion with the world. I owe Aimee an apology, I think. When I was in college she dated a couple of my friends and was occasionally at the same parties I was. In fact, she was at a party at my house once. And rather than accord her the friendliness you might a random stranger, my friends and I instead treated her poorly. I believe D even sang the refrain from Voices Carry at her in his worst falsetto. We were music snobs and drunkards and louts. And now of course I think she writes lovely songs and she illuminated my morning with her digitized brilliance, and I consoled myself with the sure knowledge that she lives a better, richer, more glamorous life than I do.

After locking the dog away in the house where he will spend the day sleeping on various couches I dragged myself down to that bus stop to bask like a turtle on a rock. At this point I switched to wordless music, Brian Eno's Music for Airports, so as not to have it compete for my attention with an open book. I'm reading Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses just at the moment. Between the book and the headphones I was feeling sufficiently insulated against the world to venture into the city.

The bus took me to the train. The train took me underground.

Eventually, of course, it surfaced in order to cross the Charles River, and I've written about the view from the Longfellow Bridge there dozens of times. Goddamn do I love that bridge and its view of the city on a sunny day like this one. For me, this is a transubstantiating moment, one that turns my blood to wine and leaves me intoxicated. Ready to be urban.

I'll be away for a few days, vacation, DC, touristy things, my brother-in-law's new house, flying with Owen for the first time. Wish me luck.

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October 30th, 2006 - The living room is at the front of the house, and at the front of the living room is a bay window with a couch shoved in it. This is the south facing side of the house, so it's nice to sit there in the morning with the light flooding in and throwing your shadow on the floor. I nestled into the couch this morning and put some big band music on and watched Owen skitter around, picking up toys, playing with them for a minute and then casting them aside. The dog wandered in and out.

Eventually my parents arrived (they watch Owen on Mondays) and I chatted with them for a few minutes before heading out the door to the bus. Owen said, "Daddy takes the bus!" And I said, "Yes, he does." And he said, "Bye bye Daddy."

On the bus I had one of those experiences I remember from when I used to drink. I stood in line and paid my fare and trudged to a spot by the rear door, and when I got there a very plain looking, blondish woman caught my eye and didn't smile but just sort of stared. Eventually she smiled a half smile and went back to her book. I didn't think much of it. But then, a minute later, I looked up from my own reading and found she was looking at me again, scrutinizing me maybe. This was not an inquisitive gaze, not flirting. This was the look of someone who knows you and maybe doesn't like you.

So, as in the days when I used to drink until I blacked out, I began searching the beleaguered memory banks for some small shred of recognition. Had I met this woman? Had we spoken? At the coffee shop? At the bus stop? Do we have a mutual friend? What might I have said to her? How might I now be offending her?

When I was drinking this happened to me regularly, embarrassingly. Painfully. And for the flicker of a moment it hurt me again, standing there on the bus.

But this woman I didn't know. So I went back to reading, and when I found her looking at me again I smiled a squinty smile, a smile that said, "I don't know you, but I won't hold that against you if you don't hold it against me." And she smiled back so as to say, "I'm sorry I keep looking at you."

And that was that. Except that as I've walked around all day I've had to push back against the lingering feeling that strangers are staring knowingly at me.

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October 29th, 2006 - Was sick, flat on my back, dead, washed away and incapacitated on Thursday. Lay there the whole day, fully clothed, sweats, beneath the sheets, the wool blanket and the comforter. Shivering. Back aching. Knees hurting. Misery. I have truthfully not felt that badly in five years, maybe more. Then B gave me some Tylenol. I began to sweat. Inside fifteen minutes I was out of bed. I kept sweating. I came downstairs. More sweat. I ate something. Better. To the grave and back in under 24 hours.

Today I met Louis. Tall and smartly turned out in a blue-gray suit, a pocket square. He sat alone at a table at the corner coffee shop, his bible there in front of him, its leather case open. As I walked by on my way to the counter to help B move coffees and pastries and small boys to our table, he said quietly, almost to himself, "Is that your boy?" I was halfway past him before I parsed his accent, realized he was addressing me.

Louis is Haitian, probably about 63. His English is heavily accented, almost French but not quite, like the Creole he speaks at home. His hair is just beginning to gray. When he speaks he tends to wrinkle his broad nose as a way to communicate subtlety or indecision.

I don't know why Louis chose to speak to me. Maybe he was lonely sitting there by himself. The first thing he did was show me pictures of his wife and four daughters. Maybe after 23 years in this country he just wanted to practice his English. Or maybe he thought he had something to share.

Facts seemed to come out at random. His oldest works at the US Embassy in London. He's worked at Harvard for the last 17 years, but got hurt last year, did something to his leg that he tried and failed to explain.

Another daughter works in a bank. Three of his kids went to Tufts. The youngest recently graduated from Boston College. His wife and girls go to a church in Winchester, but he goes alone to the Haitian church in Davis Square. They do the service in Creole there. "I likes my Creole," he says.

Louis bought a multifamily house for $150,000 a lot of years ago. Buying the house was a big decision, but he saw it as an investment. He fixed it up. He sold it for $710,000. Money in the bank is good, but real estate is "money under your feet."

He said he felt blessed, and then he blessed me and shook my hand and turned back to his Bible. When we left, he looked up, smiled and nodded almost imperceptibly.

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October 24th, 2006 - Don't stop. Believin. Hold onto that feelin'.

Journey seeped in through the window, the carpenter's saw dust crusted radio straining to overcome the short, sharp shock of the pneumatic hammer and the low rumble of its compressor. Meanwhile I'm on the couch, one fevered toddler in my lap. Sesame Street is on. Cookie Monster is painting a cookie with cashews and raisins. The sick toddler wants to know who Cookie Monster is, so I say, "He's just like you, except he's furry and blue," to which the kid replies, "Oh."

Ever few minutes my cell phone rings and there's a college student on the other end. I'm setting up interviews for this semester's class of office interns. College kids are so funny now. They all have cell phones with messages that say things like, "Hey, this is Ethan! Leave me message!" So I left messages and now I'm getting calls back. They address me as Mr. Lewis, which I find both funny and slightly disconcerting. Because they're serious. They think I'm a grown up, which, based on the squirming, whining kid with whom I'm discussing Snuffleupagus (sp?), I must be, but, well, you know what I mean.

I have descended into another one of those all-action-all-the-time periods. I took on a couple of freelance writing gigs. We're having the front porch of our house rebuilt (it looks like a face without a nose right now). The three projects I'm developing at work are all coming to fruition simultaneously. We're preparing to travel on an airplane with Owen for the first time, which means getting his birth certificate and finding a dog sitter. Owen is sick. I need a shower. All in all, it's more than I'd like to take on all at once, but 'like' doesn't enter into it sometimes. 'Have to' is the operative phrase.

So I'm 'having to,' which is better than 'should have,' because it's still present tense. 'Should have' is one of the saddest phrases in our English language if you ask me. No other two words crystalize failure so succinctly, so regretfully. And, as the Butthole Surfers remind us in the opening strains of their Locust Abortion Technician album, it's better to regret something you have done, than to regret something you haven't done. 'Shouldn't have' can be quite satisfying. 'Should have' never is.

So yeah, there was this moment there today where Steve Perry sang to me, when my toy-littered living room became an arena for one of rock's purer sentiments. Don't stop believing. Hold onto that feeling. Or as the Butthole Surfers said, "SATAN! SATAN! SATAN!" which is also a fairly pure sentiment.

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October 20th, 2006 - There were hand-written signs in the windows of all the newspaper boxes at the bus stop: I FOUND CHRIST ON LSD. I couldn't quite decide whether that meant that the sign maker had discovered some previously dormant religiosity while high on acid, or whether s/he had happened upon the prodigal son who was himself tripping his face off. Either way, I suppose, it was newsworthy.

I rode the Silver Line with a gaggle of young black girls playing hip-hop through a cell phone, the tiny speaker struggling to render the track's heavy bass in anything other than pulsating fuzz. The refrain 'FUNKY ASS! FUNKY ASS! FUNKY ASS! FUNKY ASS!' cut through occasionally, frightening the Asian women in the next seat.

At East Berkeley I decamped into a sparse drizzle, the sounds of nearby construction (in Boston these days construction is always nearby) swirling together with the huff and hum of the bus's big engine. Across the street, I pushed through the front doors of Ming's Market and loaded my arms with all manner of cold, sweetened tea beverages, a two-liter of Oolong with Mineral Water, a squat can of Mr. Brown's Iced Coffee (READY TO DRINK!) and 500ml of Kirin brand milky tea, this latter being just about my favorite drink on this planet Earth. It's black tea, brewed just so, then spiked with comical amounts of milk and sugar and then chilled. For me, it's the day's rocket fuel.

I also picked up some heretofore untested baked goods, a Por Lor bun and a Zo Song bun, the former a dense and subtly sweet production with an unidentifiable fruit on top, the latter a torpedo-shaped roll with shaved, sweetened pork on top. Yes, shaved, sweetened pork. This is a taste treat we don't avail ourselves of in American cuisine, possibly for good reason. I ate it anyway. I'm like that.

This was by my modest measure, a pretty good morning. Despite the rain flecking the front of my windbreaker, I was entertained. I folded my magazine in half (every good commuter carries printed entertainment as prophylactic against monotony) and stuck it in my bag. I harbor the suspicion that every morning could be like this one if only I could open my eyes wide enough.

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October 16th, 2006 - Lots of questions today. Attempts at some answers.

First, what the hell did I do to my back? When I woke up everything was working. Then, some time between 8:00 and 8:30, a stabbing pain settled into my lower back on the left side, and henceforth I'm a hobbling, wincing wreck. Of course, when you're obviously in discomfort everyone is a doctor. I've pulled a muscle or pinched a nerve or strained a tendon. I need to stretch and/or take some ibuprofen or see a chiropractor or do yoga. Everyone wants to give me Advil, as if taking a pain killer wasn't the first thing I thought to do myself. I must be committing mortal sins in my sleep. This pain is only purifying my soul, like a stain stick on a dirty t-shirt.

Second question: What is the sound of a brick wall vibrating? They're building a restaurant in the space next to our office and, for some reason, need to cut holes in the wall that joins the spaces. We're in an old factory building, all brick, with high, thick-beamed ceilings, the type of place that once turned out shoes and pianos but now houses cube farms full of people like me tapping away at keyboards. I bet there are mastodons and woolly mammoths fossilized somewhere in the foundation.

And they're using a pneumatic hammer of some sort, a mini jack hammer, and they do it in bursts, so the sound is irregular and thus impossible to ignore. I know from having used one of these tools before that several hours of prolonged hammering leaves your hands with this buzzy numbness that can be quite problematic when you're doing even the most mundane tasks, like cleaning your ears with a q-tip. The sound of the hammer working its way through a two-foot-thick brick wall is a farting sound, a deep, penetrating rumble that sounds like the earth ripping one. Fortunately, there's no smell.

Third question: Why didn't I get any work done today? Well, I don't know. I'd have to think about that.

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October 12th, 2006 - Our Indian summer is drawing to a close, the last bits of breeze being allowed in through open windows. We're going barefoot across the hard wood floors. Yesterday I picked the last tomatoes.

I think it's important to remember these days, mundane as they may be in content, breakfast, work, dinner, bed, because the New England winter will be along shortly to wreck our heads. We'll have to remember the warmth we were afforded in October and cultivate a sense of gratitude that carries us through to March, or even April. Just as our forebears pickled and canned in the fall, so too must we prepare.

The cruelest cut is the loss of daylight. Even tonight, I showed up late (6pm) for soccer and only got a half hour in before the ball was more audible than visible, whistling through the thick dusk air before striking me full in the chest. I twisted my ankle in the half dark, a great way to celebrate the coming fall.

I won't dwell on it though. Don, the old Brazilian guy we play with, is always admonishing me to look on the bright side. We should count ourselves lucky to have had an Indian summer in the first place.

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October 10th, 2006 - Have been missing. First, internet lost it's prefix, became just net, net into which PC fell, ceasing to function productively as it thrashed around trying to disentangle itself. Finally, we through the whole thing overboard. Bought a Mac. I am now coming to you from a sleek, white laptop, easy, fast and online as soon as I got it home and turned it on.

So, sorry. Glad to be back.

We went to the ultrasound place this morning. The reproductive process is so strange, leading as it does to so many odd, dimly lit rooms filled with expensive and unwieldy equipment. We drove cross town, all the way across, parked in a dark garage, walked through a courtyard and up some stairs to an antiseptic waiting room that served as precursor to just such a room. The doctor squirted an ample amount of clear goo onto Brittney's belly and then showed us our future child, a tiny humanoid sketched on the black and white monitor. It's skull is 2 inches front to back. It's thigh bones are an inch long. We saw two little feet and a beating heart.

People tend to name their developing fetuses. Before Owen was born, we called him the Worm. Other couples go with cuter appellations, the Peanut or the Bean. For this second child, we're going with the Possibility. It smacks of optimism, and we like that.

According to the doctor, the Possibility looks healthy and has a large head. I believe the phrase she used was "inside the normal range, but large." She also mentioned perfectly formed lips. So possibly a lipstick model. Or a trumpeter.

We left happy. We are happy.

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September 29th, 2006 - I have really been resisting the temptation to blog about politics. No one cares what I think. I know this. But events of this week have pushed me beyond the breaking point. Cease reading now if you anticipate boredom and/or annoyance.

As you must know, both the Senate and the House passed bills this week detailing how detainees (what a nice word, eh? as if the people who have been living in open air pens at Guantanamo Bay have only been inconvenienced, stopped briefly on the way to the market perhaps, or asked to fill out some additional paperwork at the dentist's office) in President Bush's War on Terror are to be treated, tried and undoubtedly convicted of offenses against our country. And perhaps you're aware that the writ of habeas corpus has been denied these people, giving them no means to challenge their capture and indefinite holding. They are not guaranteed a trial at any point, nor are they to be given access to all the evidence against them, if the government, at its sole discretion, deems that evidence classified. It is possible in this newly codified system to be snatched from your native country by the US government, imprisoned with no charge and then denied any of the legal protections afforded by the US Constitution. Furthermore, the US military is now allowed to torture these detainees at the President's whim, and the evidence gathered by that torture will be admissible in a prosecution.

I'll not get into all the problems with this bill. I'm sure long, detailed books will be written cataloging its ills. But I will say this: On 9/11, the day the President says the world changed forever, I distinctly recall being terrified by what was happening, afraid that every circling jetliner, headed for landing at Logan International, might veer of course and slam into downtown Boston. This was a short-lived terror though. Two weeks later I became aware that this was a symbolic attack against our country. 3000 people were killed, and two of our talismanic buildings were destroyed or heavily damaged, but our country was intact, and what we represent to the world was essentially unchanged. We remained, to quote a song we all know, "the home of the free and the brave."

Except, apparently, I was wrong.

It seems we are not particularly brave nor committed in any meaningful way to freedom. We've let our fear of additional attacks drive us to kill tens-of-thousands of people in far off lands, and run rough shod on our own constitution and sense of what it means to be free. It turns out that when those 19 men knocked down our World Trade Center and crashed into our Pentagon and buried one final jet in a field in Pennsylvania, they set in motion the destruction of the United States, a slow toppling of the very institutions our country is built upon, so that today we see our own Congress writing into law the most Draconian of systems for dealing with those who we believe have wronged us. With this bill, we have stopped serving as the shimmering example of what's right with the world, abandoned the moral high ground and ceded our responsibility for guiding the unfree nations of Earth to freedom. In the ways that are important to me, the United States have all but ceased to be. We've become something else.

This may all seem dramatic to you, and to be sure I've pulled out my floweriest prose, but I think it's worthy of the event. I am certainly not ashamed to be an American today, but I am deeply ashamed of our American government. When every tragedy is politicized, when our elected leaders no longer trouble themselves to conceal their lies and when the rest of the world no longer trusts our basic mission, then I think we've failed.

Take a moment and think about what's going on right now and how you feel about it. Future generations will read about this time and wonder. When they ask, it will be nice to have an answer.

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September 27th, 2006 - I don't know much about autism. I know that everybody is worried about it. There are commercials telling us that 1 in 166 kids is autistic. This guy has an autistic kid that seems pretty charming and clever. I work with a woman who described the birth of her own autistic kid this way: "It's like you were getting ready to go to Italy. All your friends were there already. You learned Italian. You made an itinerary. But then when you got off the plane you were in Holland. And you didn't speak Dutch and didn't know where to go."

I bring autism up because it keeps coming up.

First there is our own current gestation, during which the doctors want to perform tests to determine whether or not our child is going to be autistic. Next, there are the aforementioned commercials. I also think one of the editors at work is autistic (Asperger's Syndrome). And I saw a documentary about Einstein the other day, and people think he had Asperger's too.

So it's on my mind.

And then there was last night's episode of House (the TV show), on which the patient de la semaine (of the week) was a young autistic boy with worms. It took them a long time (42 minutes plus commercial breaks) to figure out the problem, because these were a special kind of worms and the kid couldn't talk. He could only scream. Cause that's how autistic kids are apparently, not all cute like Dustin Hoffman in Rainman.

The show's writers took great pains to have House (the doctor) connecting with the kid in ways no one else thought to, because House is, of course, a genius. At one point in the show, one of House's colleagues suggests that perhaps House himself has Asperger's Syndrome (AS), a mild form of autism marked by intellectual obsessiveness, eccentricity and generally asocial or isolating behavior. It's named for Hans Asperger, the Austrian doctor who first described it. I can't help thinking Ass-Burger every time I hear it, but that's got nothing to do with anything.

And as I said some researchers believe Albert Einstein (and Isaac Newton) had AS. Einstein was famously focused on his work to the exclusion of all else, including his wife, his financial well-being and his less-than-snappy wardrobe. In general, he had a hard time relating to others. The AS diagnosis is only speculation though. What some people call genius, others call autism, not that, clearly, the two are mutually exclusive.

Anyway, at one point in last night's show, House upbraids one of his assistants who feels sorry for the autistic boy. He says he doesn't feel sorry for the kid. The kid gets to cruise through life free of social entanglements and the obligations of politeness. He gets to focus completely on himself. Far from pitying the kid, he says he envies him.

This was a pivotal moment in the show, one that was juxtaposed with a later scene in which the boy, now cured and walking out of the hospital, stops and gives House a gift. Despite giving so much play to House's eccentric and alienating approach to his patients, despite allowing him his speech about the potential happiness of autism, the show's writers imply with this ending that even the most socially inaccessible of us only wants to connect, that true happiness, what gets described in the scene itself as "a 10 on the happiness scale," only comes from that kind of human connection.

It was a crap ending.

House is a show that is constantly playing with the idea of genius, dancing around what it means to be brilliant. The drama (and comedy) is built on the foundation of House's eccentricity and his ability to both drive people away and bring them in close. On the one hand they want to hold him out as this eccentric, wise-cracking freak. On the other hand they want to humanize him. The value of intellect versus simple human emotion is a steady theme. Every episode begins with House pissing everyone off and generally acting like a callous but brilliant cad. Then he has an intellectual epiphany of some sort, cures the patient and connects to the world in some obvious emotional way. House is about the humanization of genius.

And that's what the Einstein documentary was about too, in a way. It had all these dramatic reenactments of Einstein being intolerably smart and/or charmingly oblivious. The truth is, and I think this is true about many people we call geniuses, he was completely focused on his work and the life that happened to him beyond that was mostly just circumstantial. It happened "to him" rather than "for him" or "by him," if you get what I'm trying to say.

It was the work that was important and nothing else. And the work sprung from curiosity. He, like House and Isaac Newton and so many others, was driven entirely by his curiosity about the world. House's speech about envying the autistic kid was really about envying the ability to follow one thread, the thread in your head, and not having to worry about anyone or anything else while you're following it.

And that's where it connects back to you and me, because we're not autistic, and we're not geniuses (I'm not anyway). But god do we wish we just had more time for ourselves, more time to get our thoughts together, more time to examine the world, to poke and prod it instead of getting poked and prodded all the time, which, I imagine, is exactly how it feels to be autistic.

In the end, perhaps it's all just a matter of degrees.

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September 24th, 2006 - A lot of dots to connect this week. After we received the news of Brittney's grandmother's passing, I heard a long radio story about Mount Auburn Cemetery, which is near our home. Mount Auburn was the first modern cemetery in this country. Built in 1831, it was the first landscaped park open to the public, the first to contemplate the cemetery as a place where people might actively visit. Before that, cemeteries were just clusters of slate headstones.

Then there was another story about the mortuary business and how it's in decline now that cremation has become more popular than burial. This story made mention of the green burial movement, which, as I understand it, holds that people should be buried in all their biodegradable glory, unembalmed and in graves that are unmarked by stone or marble. This is burial as fertilizer. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

On Friday we attended the funeral, and I was tasked with chasing Owen around the funeral home while the service went on in the chapel. This seemed, to me, an odd juxtaposition, attending a memorial service complete with somber hymns, eulogy and tears, while trying desperately to suppress the louder urges of a vivacious toddler. Together, he and I sat in the kids' room and colored on the walls while the adults reflected on his great-grandmother's life and recent passing. Eventually he bored of the kids' room, and I shuttled him outside where I fell into conversation with one of the funeral home's employees, an older man who recently became a grandfather for the first time. He confirmed that the business was suffering for the rise in popularity of cremation, but offered the idea that the pendulum would swing back as gas prices rose and cremations became as expensive as burials. This was his second service of the day. It was a busy Friday for them.

An hour later, the cemetery turned out to be much like Mount Auburn, a beautifully landscaped oasis on the fringe of Springfield's sprawling suburbia. Again, I chased Owen through the grass while everyone else huddled round the grave, clutching carnations to be placed on the casket. When the time came, I carried Owen over and he laid our single, red bloom down. I resolved to remember to tell him he had done so when finally he reaches an age where he becomes curious about his forefathers and mothers. I think Brittney's grandfather got some benefit from seeing Owen skipping playfully from grave to grave, an unsubtle and early reminder that life that goes on.

After a short reception at their church, the family headed back to the grandparent's house. We stopped at the grocery store and picked up a deli platter and some chips. At the house I chatted with Brittney's grandfather about the birds we each get on our feeders. He told me he once had seventeen turkeys in his back yard, and that a woodpecker once pecked a whole through the shingles on the corner of the roof by their bedroom. I told him about the family of cardinals we've had this summer, a mother, a father and two young.

I wanted to say something more to him, to tell him he had been lucky to have sixty-two years with a fantastic lady, that any of us would feel lucky to have had that. I wanted to tell him that the way to go on with his life was to get up in the morning and put his pants on and eat his breakfast and see what came next. But what do I know about anything? Who the hell am I? So we talked about birds, and then we went inside and I told jokes and tried to lighten the mood. This seems to be my role in both Brittney's family and my own, to ease everyone else's discomfort when none of us knows properly what to say.

Later we put Owen in his pajamas, tucked him into his car seat and drove home in the gathering darkness.

It's been a life and death week, my thoughts careening back and forth between the woman who's just passed on and the kid who is as alive now as he'll ever be, not to mention the child yet to be born, the lump in Brittney's belly. We seem to be in full flower, our little family, and yet simultaneously life is ending and we're having to deal with that as well. I'm afraid it's all too many dots for me to connect at once, and what picture would it make anyway?

Or rather, what picture wouldn't it make?

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September 17th, 2006 - Shirley Houghton, Owen's great-grandmother, passed away this morning. Owen and I returned from a bike ride to find Brittney on the back porch, her eyes moist. The phone had rung. The news had come.

Shirley was born in the '20s. She married Bob Houghton while he was home on leave from WWII. She worked in the factories then. Her perpetually dry skin had never been better, what with all the grease at the factory. She told us this story many times.

Shirley and Bob had three kids, who they raised in a house that Bob built. She decorated the place with the crafts she made, beautiful needlepoint and quilting, hundreds and thousands of little knick-knacks. We got some of these things as Christmas gifts too. The quilt made from Brittney's own baby blanket is one of our prized possessions.

Brittney remembers when she was a girl and she would spend days with her grandmother while her parents were off working. They would walk in the woods together, and Shirley would sing songs like Take Me Out to the Ballgame and How Much is that Doggie in the Window?, always singing and happy. They were good times for Brittney in a childhood that was not always so good.

I'm not sure I've met many women sweeter than Shirley. She liked dogs and children. She baked cookies. In fact, every Christmas she brought me a big tin of homemade cookies, peanut butter, snickerdoodle, chocolate. I will miss those cookies.

Shirley never threw anything away. Their basement was a personal Smithsonian, full of antique toys and old furniture. This was a constant source of bemusement for Bob, but all those things were important to her, keeping them, passing them on. Even now Owen has a little table in his room that his grandmother once colored on when she was a child.

When Brittney and I were together for a few years, we attended a party for Shirley and Bob's fiftieth wedding anniversary. Fifty years is a long time. When we'd been together for twelve or thirteen ourselves, we attended their sixtieth. Just last week, when Brittney and I had both forgotten our anniversary (it was the 9th), there was a card in the mail from Bob and Shirley to remind us. There was always a card from them. Shirley worked in at a greeting card company for many years, a perfect job for someone so thoughtful.

On Friday, Shirley, Bob and Brittney's mother, in state on business, came by for an unexpected visit. That they got to spend that time together seems very lucky. Owen may never know his great-grandmother, but she was happy to know him.

We will miss her.

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September 14th, 2006 - Strange kinda day. Went with wife to the OB this morning and heard a tiny, galloping heart beat, the kind that's due March 8th. It's an undeniable sound, that heart beat. I needed to hear it just to believe we're going to be parents again.

Then I sat across from a Turret's sufferer on the train, relentlessly mimicking the announcement of the station, "Next stop Charles/MGH! Mass General Hospital! Doors open on your right!" and so on, all down the Red Line. I had moved down the car initially to get away from a couple having a loud conversation about work. I hate to try to read while someone is talking right next to me. Instead I got the Turret's guy. Poor bastard.

Lunched at Miami Cafe, a chourizo sub and a mango shake, thickened with condensed milk.

Walked up to China Town in the rain afterwork, and on the way I saw a sea gull go splat on the sidewalk not ten feet away. Lost his footing on landing. Then he hopped onto the hood of a Honda Accord idling at a nearby light. The people in the car were confused. So was the bird.

Came home with a bag full of bi bim bop (very typical Korean dish, literally rice with vegetables, though there is also meat, and a fried egg). Scarfed that. Drank a cup of tea. Finished an article I've been working on for a magazine that pays me to write words for them. Went out in the rain to get milk and cookies for my pregnant wife.

Because I wanted to.

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September 10th, 2006 - Miami Cafe serves Cuban, Dominican and Puerto Rican food out of a small storefront on Aguadilla Street in the South End. We discovered it, about a half-mile walk from the office, just last week. Since then it has yielded papas rellenas, empanadillas filled with beef and chicken, traditional Cuban sandwiches with roast pork and sliced ham, a pressed sub with octopus, fried yucca, Jamaican paddies and the promise of many new lunchtime adventures to come. They've got goat cacciatore on the menu and fresh fried plantains. There are pidgeon peas and tripe stew to consider. This is how Howard Carter must have felt sliding the stone away from the main chamber of Tuttenkhamen's tomb.

Our first visit to Miami Cafe included a wrong turn down the wrong Aguadilla (In typical Boston fashion the street is neither straight nor continuous. Walking down Tremont you actually come to Aguadilla twice.), which had us striding through the heart of the Latino enclave the restaurant serves. From squat townhouses packed together and linked by sidewalks, curtains blow out open windows along with all manor of Latin rythm, trumpets blaring to accent the beat. It is an odd sort of neighborhood for Boston, more densely packed and uniform in appearance than most. When at last we arrived at the restaurant, hip-hop pulsed from a hidden speaker, and I could see the cook in the back lighting a cigarette from one of the gas burners on the stove. It didn't seem promising.

But I ordered more food than a single person could reasonably expect to eat anyway, blathering crappy Spanish across the counter, "no, no, una de cada typo de empanadilla, por favor," to a woman who seemed far from enthusiastic about helping me practice my language skills. And of course, on the way back to the office all those empanadillas (turnovers) and the Jamaican paddy (a turnover with spiced beef inside) had nearly soaked the bag with their grease. But oh, it was all good. So we went back.

On our second visit we were helped by the woman who owns Miami Cafe. I forget her name. She was nice. When I ordered the octopus sub, she said, "What would you like on that?," and I, wanting for once not to look so much like the stupid guerro, said, "However you would make it for yourself, that's how I would like it," to which she smiled, not condescendingly. I added a papa rellena (fried mashed potato with meat inside) to my order and stuffed myself again.

Truly, there are so many intriguing soups and salads and specials to be had that we'll be hard-pressed not to eat there everyday for the next month. If it wasn't for the demands of New Saigon Sandwich (the Vietnamese sub-shop on the edge of Chinatown) and Chinatown Cafe (where you can get fried chicken feet, though I wouldn't recommend it) we might just adhere to such a rigorous schedule. But life is not so simple. There are choices to be made, and I work in a neighborhood where people who come from other countries live. In other countries, it seems, people know better how to prepare and enjoy their food. They're not afraid of chicken on the bone. Hell, they eat the bones when they can. Neither are they afraid of fish in all its salty and fragrant glory.

If you live in Boston, I highly recommend a trip to Miami Cafe. If you don't, then I apologize for stimulating your appetite, especially if you live in a place where there is no good food. To live without good food is to die slowly and tastelessly. Like at Applebees. Or the Olive Garden.

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September 5th, 2006 - When I leave the house in the morning I see Myron, standing on the corner by the convenience store, just standing, sometimes eating a slush, always with a soda of some sort. Myron is Smitty's kid. They live down the street, backing up to the railroad tracks. Smitty's retired. His lawn looks nice. His people are from Nova Scotia, and he speaks with a broad Canadian accent. He made a living as a truck driver. Now he's bored, but he can't move back to Canada because of Myron.

Myron is probably in his middle 40s. He's small, almost pixie-ish, with dark hair and a whisper thin moustache with matching goatee. He always wears a hat. He's pale and wide-eyed, and you would think something is wrong with him if you didn't know that his kidneys are failing him, that the dialysis he gets several times a week are only putting off the inevitable transplant. I see Myron pacing a lot, walking up and down the block, sucking at some piece of candy or ice cream.

It strikes me that what Myron is waiting for as he stands on the corner there is for someone to die, someone with the right blood type, someone who matches his chemical make up in a myriad of ways. He's eating slush while he waits for them to die and leave him their kidneys.

Last I heard Smitty was trying to figure out if he was a match so he could give Myron one of his kidneys. But since Myron is still waiting and pacing and eating slush I assume Smitty is not a match.

Myron always says hello when he sees me, and I say hello and in the back of my head I think how awful it must be to have nothing to do but stand around and wait for a kidney that might never come. At least he's got slush.

I like the lemon best.

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August 30th, 2006 - I'm not much of a list maker. I make paper to-do lists when I begin to suspect that vitally important tasks might be slipping off the mental version scrawled between my ears. Other than that I resist giving top tens, and I eschew anything related to my life called "all-time" because it implies that nothing exciting is ever going to happen to me again.

But while we were on vacation a few weeks ago (could it be a month already? CRAP!) I found myself ensnared in a group discussion about the five best movies ever. Five. As you can imagine it is hard to make such a short list with so many great movies to choose from. We sat for roughly an hour naming films and reproducing whatever dialogue from them we had committed to memory, which was, dismayingly, quite a lot of dialogue. Through this process and some subsequent reflection I did come up with my own list.

1) Star Wars
2) The Empire Strikes Back
3) The Wizard of Oz
4) Citizen Kane
5) Animal House

In that order. Later, when I recounted my list for co-workers, thus beginning an unavoidable repeat of the first conversation, my brother offered as his first draft the entire American Ninja series in order, which I thought was very clever and convenient.

We ended up making the movie list part of our weekly discussion at the Project Managers' meeting I attend, and that begat a new challenge for next week, which is to name your top five songs. This is a much greater challenge than the movie list. I'm not much of a film buff, and I've passed that time in my life when I feel I need to name smart films to convince people that I'm worthwhile. If they don't know I'm not worthwhile by now, sticking 9 1/2 (Hayden was kind enough to point out that what I mean here is 8 1/2 but I'm such a dilletantish boob that I've somehow conflated 9 1/2 Weeks, a horrible film but still somehow an erotic milestone of my early teen years, with Fellini's classic) and Wings of Desire in some theoretical list of my most treasured film experiences isn't going to keep it secret much longer. The film list was easy.

Star Wars was the greatest entertainment experience of my life up until I started drinking at about 13. Nothing captured my imagination as a kid the way that movie and the action figures it begat did. Empire was a wholly worthy and not-disappointing follow up the renewed my mania for Luke and Han and Darth and Chewie and all things Lucasy. Before Star Wars, of course, I always looked forward to the annual screening of The Wizard of Oz on network television. It was the first movie I ever saw that felt like it had been made for kids. Citizen Kane is clearly my one concession to art film snootiness, though I think Kane is far more accessible, far more watchable and far more enjoyable over all than the other films that end up on all-time great film lists, movies like Rules of the Game or 9 1/2. Finally, Animal House, which, to me, is the perfect move for people with a sophomoric sense of humor. It is the pioneering work of a genre that includes: Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Porky's, American Pie and so many others. One summer I watched Animal House 32 times on Betamax.

Songs though? Shit. That's much harder.

At work this afternoon I made a preliminary list of 20 songs. It included a couple Uncle Tupelo favorites, a Minor Threat, a Husker Du, a Billy Bragg, a Fugazi, an Op Ivy, one Ramsey Lewis, a Thelonious Monk, a U2 song, a Hoodoo Gurus track, a Clash, a Sam Cooke, and some others I can't remember now. They're written down in the back of one of the mostly empty notebooks that litters my desk. The whole time I was writing them down I couldn't escape the feeling that I was leaving something hugely important and obvious off the list.

Brittney pointed out that there was not one single Beatles song in my first crop. My favorite Beatles song is probably I Am the Walrus, but I'm not sure that makes the top five. Blondie's Rapture was one of the first things I wrote down, not because I love it, but because it's the first single I ever bought for myself. It's the song that launched my early interest in music. Joan Jett's I Love Rock 'n Roll made the initial list for similar reasons. Brittney helped me see that just because a song was important to me, didn't necessarily make it one of my favorites, which is good because Rapture really sort of sucks. There's that bridge part where Debbie Harry raps, which was totally ground-breaking at the time, but pointed out right at the beginning that white chicks shouldn't be rapping. Not ever.

So I have a week to finish this stupid list. Any ideas? Especially if you went to high school or college with me, shout 'em out. This feels, in an entirely unimportant way, entirely important. Thanks.

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August 29th, 2006 - I've begun the process of converting all my vinyl to MP3s. Bought a USB turntable, plugged it in, started to record. First was Slint's "Spiderland." Not sure why. I guess it's one of those albums that you just don't hear by accident, so of the preliminary stack of roughly 40 albums I brought up, it leapt out as the one I'd heard the least of over the last decade or so. Next I did Op Ivy's "Energy," because it's just so syrupy goddamned sweet I can't help loving it. Just at the moment, while I'm typing these words, I'm working on Devo's "Are We Not Men?" It's a completely brilliant record, like nothing that came before it and nothing that came after it. It's so good that no one could properly imitate it, and that just made it better.

So I'm doing that. We'll see how long it takes. I have about 500 records, and I imagine at least half of them will become bits and bytes before I'm done. Maybe.

Another thing I'm working on is a comprehensive explanation of what I love about my son and why I want to commemorate his birth and ongoing existence with a tattoo. This is for the woman who is helping me design the tattoo, who insists that I use the creative medium in which I'm most comfortable to explore my feelings around the conversion of that love into some sort of symbolic representation. I'm paraphrasing there and making her sound much more touchy-feely/irritating than she really is. But of course I'm crap with assignments like this. I'll let you know how it goes. I'm sure I'll post whatever gets written here. Eventually.

Now I've got Rapeman's "Two Nuns and a Pack Mule" on the turntable. This is the sonic equivalent of root canal. It's the Steve Albini project that followed Big Black but came before Shellac. If you're confused, if you've never heard of any of this, do NOT investigate. You will not like this album. The offensiveness of the band's name and the album title presage the aural offense your ears will endure should you choose to ignore my warning. I love it though. Their cover of ZZ Top's "Just Got Paid" is one of my favorite covers of all time.

Just touching all this vinyl again has me nostalgic for the days I spent collecting it. Let me tell you, as an object a vinyl record is so far superior to a CD that I can't quite believe the one supplanted the other. Seriously, we're a country who loves packaging, and the size and shape of vinyl records makes them a packager's wet dream. I've never seen ANYONE frame a CD cover, have you?

A final project to make you aware of, another that you'll likely never benefit from in any way. I've gone back to carrying my camera with me (nearly) everywhere I go in hope that I will regain the eye I once had for mediocre picture taking. Good picture taking requires seeing the world in a different way, framing shots as you pass them by, anticipating the collusion of shapes in motion. The way this guy does, or this guy, or this guy. What is remarkable to me is that each of these photographers has this way of seeing but also manages to take pictures that are readily identifiable as his own. I do not have this.

But anyway I like taking pictures. I like to try to capture scenes that make me think or feel a certain thing and then hope that that thought or feeling comes across to people looking at them later. Mostly I think I fail in this as the pictures I've taken that I love most usually get a pale and altogether indifferent response from my wife and friends. Fortunately, I have no photographic ego. I don't suffer much for picture taking, and I'd like to believe it doesn't suffer much for me either. The results, both good and bad, will appear here.

Rapeman is nearly done now. I'm thinking of slipping down to the basement to get my copy of Thelonious Monk's "Monk." I love Monk, but not as much as this guy, who named his kid after the man.

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August 23rd, 2006 - Briefly: I have finally updated the Pictures of Owen page, thanks to T who would rather look at pictures of my handsome young man than work. In doing so, however, I have come to the very limit of the free web space afforded me by Comcast, and so, in the next day or so, I will be migrating this whole mess to a new host. I'll leave a link for anyone with a bookmark to the new site, which will be available at: theemlynproject.com.

But then it always has been.

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August 22nd, 2006 - C thinks I need to take dance classes. Well, not dance classes exactly. He takes dance classes. He believes it will be easier to meet new women if he can dance. He also believes that the act of learning to dance will bring him in contact with new women. He intends to meet new women while acquiring a skill that will facilitate the meeting of still more new women. C is very smart.

I don't need to take dance classes, or rather, I could certainly benefit from dance classes, but since I am happily married and therefore not permitted to meet new women, learning to dance will not bring the same benefits to me that it is bringing to C. It is entirely possible, nay probable, that my wife would like to take dance classes with me. It might be a new way for us to connect, which, after 14 years together, can not be undervalued.

But enough about dancing.

C thinks I need to put myself out there more. I had said that seeing all my old friends recently (at a wedding) had left me sad, because while I enjoyed seeing them, had a great time, etc., etc., they don't live around here, and it was sad to think that I will not likely see most of them again for some years. They live in Seattle and San Francisco and Santa Cruz and Laramie, Wyoming and New York and New Jersey, all places that are readily accessible for those with time and money, but hey look we both know how easy it is to put off travelling, especially once you have kids.

So C thinks I should make some new friends who live near me, which is probably a good idea, but really, with so many good friends already, spread though they may be across this great country of ours, I just don't know how many more I can allow into the inner-sanctum of my good graces. I'm selective. I would, frankly, rather be alone than with someone I didn't really, really like. I don't do company just for the sake of company.

But I don't have anyone to mountain bike with anymore. It would be nice to have someone to mountain bike with.

So C thinks I should look into the Middlesex Mountain Bike Association, or something like that, and see if I can't meet some people who I like and who like to ride the way I like to ride, which is to say very, very casually. I don't like to race. Riding for me is about riding, not competing.

So anyway.

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August 17th, 2006 - Two things.

First thing. At last I've found the perfect children's show to watch with Owen. It's called Fireman Sam. It's on PBS, and it's set in the fictional Welsh village of Pontypandy. Yes. That's right, a kids' show set in Wales. And what's more, Owen loves it.

Also, episodes of Fireman Sam run 11 minutes each, which means we can watch two and still stay under our theoretical limit of 30 minutes of kids' television per day. We don't want to turn our boy into a remote-control wielding automaton just yet.

But for me, the great thing about Fireman Sam is that each episode has a plot, which instantly differentiates it from Teletubbies and BoohBah, Owen's other favorites. In the episodes I've seen so far, a little girl sneaks a pet squirrel into her house over her mother's objections, only to have the squirrel chew the wires on her TV set and start a fire. Fireman Sam to the rescue! In another, Norman Price, the town troublemaker, gets stuck on a ledge on Pontypandy Mountain with a sheep. Fireman Sam to the rescue!! Finally, in the third episode I saw, Norman Price coats his sheep pal Wooley in mud and then tells everyone a strange beast is marauding the town. Fireman Sam to the rescue!

It's all done with lovely, lilting Welsh accents (except for the helicopter pilot who seems to be Australian), and the village shots look just like all the little Welsh villages I've ever seen. It's a relief to me that we've finally found a way for Owen to connect with his roots, and also I don't have to watch psychedelic, pseudo-alien creatures line dancing as much as I used to. Fireman Sam to the rescue!!

Second thing. I played soccer tonight as I do most Tuesdays and Thursdays. I play in Arlington, or Menotomy as it was known at the time of the Revolution. It is only about three hundred yards from the field to Massachusetts Avenue, which was once known as the Great Road. It was down the Great Road in 1775 that the Minutemen chased and harried the British army regulars retreating after the Battles of Lexington and Concord. As the regulars marched in formation back towards Boston and the safety of their barracks, the rebels crouched behind stone walls and nearby houses, picking red-coated soldiers off with their hunting rifles.

I don't know that there's a connection between the first battle of the American Revolution fought 231 years ago and the pick-up soccer I played tonight, but I can't help thinking about the one while I'm doing the other. This is one of the things I really enjoy about living in Boston, walking the ground on which so many historic events transpired, imagining the dead and injured lining Mass Ave, the rebels skulking in the brush at both sides of the road, knowing that the same asphalt I buzz along on my scooter once carried Paul Revere and John Hancock and Benjamin Rush on horseback.

I wonder what it is that makes me want to connect to the past, to Fireman Sam and Paul Revere, as if those things are important in some way to the here and now. I think I must be searching for clues, the way other people read the Bible or drink. It's guidance we want from Fireman Sam. It's a signal we want from Paul Revere. One if by land. Two if by sea.

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August 14th, 2006 - Today, on my way home, I found myself behind a woman in a fairly new SUV. She had a bumper sticker. It read: "Do not use the cell phone while driving. Allow Jesus to guide you." It said this in both English and Portuguese and had a tiny Brazilian flag and a tiny American one, too. I didn't see the connection between talking on the cellphone and letting Jesus guide me, but as I was on a scooter, a notoriously two-handed vehicle, talking on the phone wasn't really an option. And since I already know the way home having driven that way for some years now, I didn't need Jesus's guidance either.

None of this was remarkable to me. This woman was clearly Brazilian. The Brazilians in Boston are overwhelmingly evangelical Christians, and many of them have religious exhortations stuck to their cars. We live down the street from a Brazilian evangelical church. We see them waving their hands in the air as we pass by on Thursday nights. Counter to all the advice I've ever received, they wave them as if they care quite a lot. If the roof were on fire, I'm sure they wouldn't let the motherfucker burn. But I digress.

In truth, my Portuguese has been improved in some small way simply for trying to translate the various god-themed proclamations being made by passing Brazilian motorists and trying to decipher the sign at the Brazilian church, the Igreja Batista, Uma Nova Vida Para Voce (Baptist Church, A New Life for You). I sometimes also chat with a group of Brazilian painters that congregate near the church in the morning. Across the street, there's a hardware store that sells paint to all the commercial crews in the area.

So at first I just took note of the parallels between the Portuguese on the bumper sticker and the English translation. The English said not to "use" the cell phone, while the Portuguese said not to "fale" (talk) on the phone. This is a matter of colloquialism, I thought to myself, and noted the difference, wondering if it was the same in Spanish.

Then I noticed that the woman was on the phone. Immediately I surmised that she was speaking with Jesus. Further empirical observation suggested that Jesus's advice included the following: "Thou shalt not make use of turn signals." Also, possibly, "Pedestrians deserve no mercy," but that might have just been incidental to the first commandment.

When she turned left on Hampshire, I opted to continue on Florence Street. Then, smiling to myself, I realized that perhaps Jesus had guided me after all.

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August 13th, 2006 - Of the last seven days, I've spent three on Cape Cod, two at home and at work and two in Vermont. This is, quite clearly, how life ought to be. Find me the union that is working for the two day work week. Gather the sandy beaches and green mountains together and array them before me so that I might choose. And whatever you do, find the perfect day, a cool morning, a sunny afternoon, a breezy, autumnal evening and press pause on the cassette. This is the week I've just had.

Cape Cod is busy this time of year. Before Labor Day means still "in season," means cars streaming up and down Rt.6 in unbroken chains. Get to PJ's before 11:30am or risk waiting perilously long for your fried clam plate. We didn't let any of this bother us. We packed ourselves into a house full of friends and friends-of-friends and children (when did everyone have so many children?). Then we hauled the entire production around from beach to restaurant to pond and back again until we were all squinty-eyed with fatigue. Good fun.

Going back to work after this kind of diversion is the sort of let down you would expect. Fortunately for me, my master plan only required gutting out two days of cube-bound misery before it was off to Vermont for more recreation and relaxation.

Now, we own the place in Vermont, so the relaxation and recreation take on a different timbre there. We slept in Saturday morning (yes, even the kid!) and then went for a walk down by the dam at the bottom of the lake. We saw a Pileated Woodpecker there, which, if you're a bird nerd, is a rare and wonderful thing. Then we walked in the woods and talked and generally felt good about being alive. Afterwards we went home and the boy took a nap and the wife took a nap and I mowed the lawn. Between you and me, I love mowing. I love the smell of the fresh cut grass, the evenness of the lines, the uniformity of it all once I've finished. And the drone of the small engine is nice too. It lulls me into a meditative trance in which I think some of the world's very heaviest thoughts, none of which I'm at liberty to discuss with you.

After mow and nap, it was off to the lake. The boy likes to throw rocks in the water (who doesn't?), and I went for a swim. It's important, I feel, to swim whenever you have the chance, and the water was still nice and warm. When I got out the wind dried me inside of five minutes. All of that led, as most things do in Vermont, to ice cream. We ended with steak, green beans and grilled potato. I fell asleep on the couch, my book still open on my chest.

Tomorrow it's back to the five-day-grind, but I am hoping that, by focusing on the good parts (riding my scooter into the city in the morning and out again in the evening, playing soccer on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, romping with the boy in the morning before work, etc. etc.) I will arrive at Friday evening with my soul intact, and my appetite for ice cream unsated.

I recommend you each wring the last bits of joy from this summer while the sun still rises high in the sky and you don't need a sweater to stand in front of your barbecue grill. If you fail to capitalize on the opportunity before you, you will have no one to blame but yourself.

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August 10th, 2006 - You forget what America is like until you're out in it. Sitting in Gate A23 at the Phoenix Airport, I remembered quickly. From that vantage it was a lot easier to see how George W. Bush won reelection. And I don't mean that to disparage my fellow citizens, only that the cross-section of the populace I saw there seemed to play a fair bit more golf than the one I consort with back here in Boston. I understand that Democrats play golf too, but I don't really believe that. I think, to golf, you've got to be a Republican, if only deep down in the soles of your feet.

I left Owen and Brittney on the front porch last Thursday about 7am, all waves and smiles. I walked in heavy summer heat down to the bus stop and then passed through a series of hot and cold spaces (bus-cold, train station-hot, train cold, shuttle stop-hot, shuttle-cold, walkway to airport-hot, airport-cold) before deplaning in Phoenix where the outside temperature was 95, but inside was 30 degrees cooler.

On the plane I sat next to a silver-haired couple who ordered Bloody Marys with which to wash down the bags of Fritos they'd brought along. This was at 10:30 in the morning.

One of the things I really appreciate about airplanes is the tiny bathrooms. If you are a man and peeing standing up, which is mostly what your maker gave you as an advantage over the fairer sex, then you can lean forward and rest your head against ceiling/wall while you do your business. I have often wished I could do that at home.

At Gate A23 I was treated to the spectacle of a very fat man eating a Cinnabon with both hands, licking his fingers in lieu of napkining (Is napkining a word? It ought to be.). A couple from Boston came over and somehow divined my origins, and we talked about Boston for a while and then about Palm Springs where they live now. I couldn't help but feel that you'd have to go to Nepal to sit in an airport with no Bostonians in it. Even there, you'd probably find a Sherpa with a Sox cap on.

I arrived in San Jose around 7pm PST, presented a nice Latina with my credit card and drove away from the airport in a new, silver Mustang, a transaction that felt like something out of a holy book. I drove the aforementioned vehicle at very high speeds up over Rt 17, a steep and twisty stretch of highway that connects the boringness of San Jose to the sexiness of Santa Cruz. To live in Santa Cruz you have to be attractive. I snuck in under cover of darkness.

After meeting friends for drinks and dinner I had to drive back to San Jose to pick F up at the airport. By that time I was tired. Very tired. Mortally tired. And the drive wasn't nearly so fast or fun. We got back to the hotel around midnight, whereupon F and C (who had reserved a spot on the floor) went out and bought a twelve pack of Old Milwaukee. I went to sleep and left them to it.

The next morning we walked to a diner where I crammed myself full of machanga, then drove down to the boardwalk in Santa Cruz. There's an amusement park there with an old, wooden roller coaster and enough funnel cakes to fill the Pacific Ocean. I was tempted by the fried Twinkies but thought better of it.

Later we cruised out to the surfing beaches in the Mustang and gazed silently as a paddling mass of California coolness jostled for space on the waves. At one point a young girl slipped over the railing in front of us and yelled out to the knot of surfers, "Mom! I've been waiting in the car for half-an-hour," whereupon a mother-like-you-only-see-on-TV popped her head up from the crowd to say she would be right out.

The wedding for which I'd travelled this great distance came later in the day. It transpired on another beach, by the harbor, with sailboats wending their ways in and out to sea in the background. My college friends were mostly there, all adults now with houses and children and male-pattern baldness. It was great to see them and sad to think we hardly ever get to be together.

The rest of the trip consisted mainly of driving around in the Mustang trying to meet up with people, failing and being forced to walk around Surf City, USA, where everyone is tan, active and better looking than you are. All in all, fun. I flew the red-eye back Saturday night, sleeping in six minute increments despite investing in one of those awful neck pillows that only the most seasoned travellers have the temerity to wear. My connection was in Vegas instead of Phoenix, and we got a great view of the strip on our way in. The airport is, of course, packed with slot machines and gaudy Americans. Flying out again I had the feeling that I'd seen all of Vegas I'd ever need to. So that was nice.

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August 2nd, 2006 - The Emlyn Project will be on hiatus for a week, starting tomorrow. I know. I know. How will you be able to tell? In the meantime, read some of the sites linked over on the left. Hopefully, I'll be back next Thursday with tales of California travel (I rented a Mustang) and Cape Cod relaxation (I plan to eat ever mollusk on the whole stinkin' peninsula).

July 28th, 2006 - My work is very feast or famine. There are spells of frenzied busy-ness and periods of relative ennui. Over the winter I was frenzied to the point of developing a stress disorder. This summer, by comparison, has been like a long, mid-day siesta. Though I have two active projects currently, neither one seems to demand more than about half-an-hour of attention per day. As a result, I am exploring new ways to burn an eight-hour day.

The best way to kill time at work is by chatting with co-workers. I work in the publishing business where everyone (other than me) is over-educated and well-read. They are good people to chat with. Topics range from the situation in the Middle East and American Revolutionary history to how that fruity kid from N'Sync is actually gay after all and finding our Wu Tang Clan names on-line. Mine is "Temporary Spastic." The problem with spending all day talking shit with your co-workers is that it becomes increasingly obvious that you're not doing any work, which, if you're not very good at your job, is worrisome. I'm not god's gift to project management, but I don't mind killing large portions of my day socializing either.

You can kill two or three 10-minute spells engaged in long range rubber band shootouts with your friskier co-workers. I usually instigate these battles. I shoot at Brendan, because he seems least likely to be able to hit me with any eye-injuring return fire. Felipe is also a good target.

Of course the king of all time-wasters is the Internet. I read Boston.com, Salon, Slate, all the fine people linked at the left of your screen currently. I read two or three soccer sites. If there's an event I'm interested in, like the Tour de France, I will spend some time on a few sites that focus on it. I check my Yahoo! and Comcast e-mail accounts. I confirm the crappy performance of my investments. I do my banking. But there are days when I exhaust all of these on-line activities, and then look at the clock and see that it's not yet noon. Perhaps my problem is that I'm just too efficient.

So I blog. At work and on the company dime. As I'm doing right now, though I've managed to put it off until 3:30. When Owen came along and free-time at home got winnowed down to the few spare minutes after his bedtime and before my own, I resolved to carve time out of my working day to do a little writing. There was guilt involved in this resolution, but sometimes you have to borrow from Peter to pay Paul as the saying goes. I mean, Paul is a freaking leg-breaker. You can't mess with Paul. So I blog at work.

Speaking of guilt, I mostly don't feel any. When there's work to do, it gets done. I'm not for shirking work. I'm not a goof-off. In addition to being a project manager, I'm also the main recruiter for the office which means I spend a fair bit of time staffing other people's projects with writers and editors. And I'm involved in other organizational efforts and process improvement schemes. I contribute.

So that's why I don't hesitate to walk over to the 7-11 store, as I did about an hour ago, to procure the Cola Slurpee that makes staying awake through the latter portions of the afternoon possible, or even, if a day is particularly slow, to hike up to the Brattle Book Shop in Downtown Crossing to case their shelves for bits of literary treasure. These trips are necessary to steel myself against the crushing boredom of 4pm project managers' meetings.

I try to take an enjoy-it-while-you-can attitude, because I know the fall and winter will bring an onslaught of work, the type that will dim my familiarity with my family, strain the peace of my sleep and make the hours fly by like so many rubber bands, aimed at the back of my head.

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July 26th, 2006 - The US Army used to have a slogan, "The toughest job you'll ever love." I was thinking of those commercials this morning as I waved goodbye to my wife and child, headed off to day job and day care, respectively.

Yesterday I was home with Owen. We kicked off our day with an hour at the playground which was fun, because whereas he used to just wander around staring incredulously at the other kids, he's now really into swinging and sliding and running around. The running around continued back at the house where he amazed me by climbing his high chair like some sort of human fly, standing on its arms and reaching for the top of the door jamb, as if he might skitter across the ceiling next. At some point in all of this activity, I wrenched my back, which still hurts. Owen was unaffected. He was all energy and all play until noon, when he crashed, and I put him down for a nap.

So far, so good. Though I'm sore, I'm loving being a dad. He's loving being a kid.

The nap ended at precisely 3 o'clock. He woke crying, not sure why, but I staunched the tears with a cereal bar and a sippy cup full of 'deuce' (juice). The afternoon played out much like the morning had, capped by a screening of a new episode of Teletubbies that featured a segment on flamenco dancing and a bit where the Teletubbies wash their feet. So that was awesome.

Then mommy came home.

Owen loves his mommy. He loves her more than anyone or anything in the universe. Even more than 'deuce.' He shows her how much he loves her by whining at her, clinging to her legs and demanding to be carried everywhere for the remainder of the evening. This makes cooking dinner and relaxing after work difficult, if not impossible.

By this point I was growing tired and frustrated, needing to drag Owen away from mommy periodically so that she could take a breath and/or fart (note: my wife is not flatulent. In fact, she never farts. She's too pretty. But I thought I would say 'and/or fart' because it's funny. I'm juvenile like that.). My back was aching pretty significantly by then too, so my great day with Owen was beginning to go sour. I was beginning to itch for bed time.

After mommy put Owen to bed, I got in the tub to soak my back, which was nice. I lay there reading for about half-an-hour. Then I got in bed early and read some more, falling asleep about quarter-to-ten, which is a very realistic and totally normal bedtime for a parent, I think.

At 11pm, the baby monitor came to life with the cries and whimpers of one small man, and the crying did not stop, as it sometimes does, so, rising slowly to consciousness, it became apparent I was going to have to go see what his major complaint was.

He wanted water. I gave him water.

Then I laid down with him in the guest bedroom to see if I could get him back to sleep. Gloriously, we both fell almost instantly back to sleep. Occasionally he would cry out in his sleep, and I would soothe him and we would both return to the land of Nod. Again, I don't really know what was bothering him, and he didn't say. Toddlers seldom do. So we slept fitfully.

Until 4:15, when he woke up, smacked me on the chest and said, "Deuce!" I said, "No deuce. Sleep." And he said, "Deuce." And I said, "No deuce. Sleep." And he said, "Deuce." And I said, "No deuce. Sleep." And he said, "Deuce." And I said, "No deuce. Sleep." See, this is how conversations with toddlers go, especially at 4:15 in the morning.

Beginning to wish I was not only back asleep, but also possibly dead, I walked him to the window, pulled aside the shade and tried to make the case that, it still being quite dark outside, sleeping would be a more prudent course of action than waking. But then prudence is not a characteristic often ascribed to toddlers, is it?

We went downstairs.

He said, "Deuce." And I said, "No deuce. Milk." He said, "Deuce." And I said, "No deuce. Milk." And that went on for a few minutes while I poured him some milk, which he refused. On principle, I think.

We had some cereal together, and he had some crackers, because no meal is complete without crackers. He finally had some milk, too, either because he was too thirsty after eating all those crackers or because he had forgotten that he was not drinking milk to spite me. Then it was about 5:15, so I decided to shift to the couch in the living room where I proceeded to doze to the dulcet tones of Sportscenter while he pulled the furniture apart all around me. This required me to ignore some pretty gross transgressions of the vandalistic variety, but I just didn't feel up to being the disciplinarian at 5:15.

Mommy got up at 6:15, allowing herself 15 sinful minutes of extra sleep, and Owen and I went off to walk the dog together. When we returned home, mommy put Owen in the car and whisked him away to day care, a merciful deliverance for his father who was beginning, after so much fun together, to contemplate the possibility of retro-active birth control. I was tired. My back hurt. I felt sorry for myself. I was, in some ways, completely miserable.

But here's the thing. When he got in the car to go to daycare, I leaned in the back seat and he kissed me good bye. He smiled and waved as they drove off, and I sat for a few moments on the fronts steps of the house thinking about how much I loved him.

And that, for me, is parenthood in a nutshell, bone crushing fatigue and frustration mixed with love and warmth and a self-destructive desire to spend more time with your kid. Parenting deserves its own, new adjective. Something like 'horriwonderful' or 'fantastasucky.' It is the toughest job you will ever love.

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July 24th, 2006 - Growing out of last week's post about children's television, I ended up having a long e-mail back and forth with my friend Hayden about the worth of television in general. This exchange has forced me to rethink my knee-jerk snobbishness and to take back categorical statements such as: "People who read (John) Grisham have no intellectual life," and "television is brain death." I can see now that both these assertions were poor attempts to justify the way I slink upstairs after dinner every night to bury my nose in this blog and/or a dusty, old book.

Hayden believes, as do most reasonable adults, that there is good and bad on television, that for every Temptation Island there is a Deadwood. Of course, I've never seen either of these shows, but Hayden is a clever guy. I trust him. I think he actually said that television has some of the very best theater of our times or something pithy like that.

Just to further debunk my prejudices, I must concede that my father reads Grisham and most certainly does have an intellectual life. Further my wife watches So You Think You Can Dance? and has not, as of yet, been rendered brain dead.

Evidently, people watch television for different reasons. My dad watches for news and entertainment, some of which is intellectually stimulating to him. My wife watches to air her brain after a day spent exercising her intellect on technical problems well beyond both my experience and capacity to comprehend. She too sometimes finds stimulation in something she watches, like dancing. Television, my wife has said, helps her feel connected to the rest of the world. I suspect, they both read for similar reasons, with similar results.

So this is all about my own neuroses. Prejudices usually are, no?

My problem is that when I watch television I can't help but feeling beaten down by the shiny sales pitch in every commercial. Then there are the laugh tracks, the reality shows that are really just overwrought game shows, the comedies that aren't funny and the dramas that are just so brutally violent they give me bad dreams. The truth is I love it. I sit for half-a-minute, and I wake up three hours later, having surrendered the prime hours of my night to the beast that sells antacids and shampoo. Oh, television! I hate you because I love you so much.

Sure, occasionally I see something, usually a documentary (I am a snob after all), that doesn't leave me racked with guilt for having squandered time to the TV beast, but more often than not I just feel guilty after watching television, to have wasted the time, enjoyed every numbing moment of it, and walked away with nothing to show.

For a neurotic, pseudo-intellectual like me, reading and writing is like going to the bank. Every book I read sits on the shelf, embodying the 6 or 10 or 22 hours I put into reading it. Every word I write fills up this screen, staking out a place for me on this stupid internet. My words fill time and space. They are part of a continuous thread of reading and thinking and digesting and regurgitating ideas. And I think this somehow makes me better than most everyone else.

Though, obviously, it doesn't.

I mean I watch and care about sports for crying out loud. If religion is the opiate of the masses, then sports are their come down drug, the downer to religion's upper. Or perhaps it's the other way around. Regardless, I'm already stoned to the bejesus, before The Price Is Right even enters into it, and my preference for reading and disdain for TV are equivalent to the stoner's preference for mushrooms on his pizza, rather than pepperoni.

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July 20th, 2006 - Consider if you will, the NooNoo. The NooNoo is the robotic vacuum cleaner with the baby-elephant snout and the googly eyes that cleans up after the Teletubbies. The NooNoo is over-worked and under-appreciated. He (I am only guessing here) is my favorite character, far better than Tinky-Winky, Dipsy, La-La or Po. And based on the fact that Owen already knows to squeal "NooNoo!" whenever he comes on screen, I think he's my boy's favorite character too.

The Teletubbies, I'm relieved to report, are an acquired taste. What at first appears to be the television brainchild of a schizophrenic child-psychologist turns out to be fairly tame edu-tainment aimed at the pre-potty-trained set. Each show has a structure, a point, and a flow that make sense. The Teletubbies themselves, while odd, pear-shaped and overly affectionate, are not all that weird when compared to many of the muppets that populate the talismanic franchise of the kid's TV market, Sesame Street. I do still find their high-pitched baby-talk somewhat irritating, but the NooNoo makes them much more tolerable, the way he is constantly looking at them bumbling around their discotheque-style pod house and then turning to the camera as if to say, "Do you see the shit I have to put up with?"

Interspersed with the live-action puppetry, they show videos of kids doing things like playing in the park, baking bagels or painting. These segments are broadcast on the televisions embedded in the Teletubbies bellies, which is creepy, but it hasn't put Owen off yet, so who am I to criticize? See, they're tubby, and they have televisions in their stomachs. Teletubbies. Get it. Yeah. It's fucked up.

But not NEARLY as fucked up as Boo-Bah, whose main characters are a troop of aliens with big, round, empty eyes that light up while they perform odd, synchronized dance routines. This show is, I believe, the toddler equivalent of the Pink Floyd Laser Light Show. Boo-Bah has a better theme song than Teletubbies, but the rest is just irksomely bizarre. Again, Owen seems to like it, but we're not going to watch more than 1/2-an-hour of television a day with him, if that, and I'm afraid that doesn't leave any room for Boo-Bah, which might as well be called "Tiny Tot's Acid Trip."

Among the other shows aimed at kids his age are Bob the Builder, Jay-Jay the Jet Plane and Thomas the Tank Engine. Of those, Bob seems like a workaholic. He's one of those guys that always needs to be busy, and he's ALWAYS super friendly and helpful, which implies to me that he goes home after work, gets sloshed on warm vodka and then puts on a dress just to unwind, not that there's anything wrong with that. Jay-Jay the Jet Plane is just so sickeningly moralistic, teaching the virtues of reading and being nice to your friends and neighbors, that I fear it will turn Owen into a productive member of society, or a pilot. Either way, we're not interested. Finally, there is Thomas the Tank Engine, which I have watched and enjoyed. The problem with Thomas is that he's super-neurotic, what with trying to keep on schedule all the time and worrying about kids getting stuck on the tracks. Also, the train yard politics on that show are just way out of hand. Who knew heavy machinery could be so caddy?

All of this educational television is misguided anyway since it serves, based on my own experience, as nothing more than a gateway drug to non-educational television, which is not to say that some significant quantity of my personal moral philosophy wasn't formed by watching the Brady Bunch and Different Strokes. I mean, without those shows I wouldn't know that