December 20th, 2007 - Morning time and the snow is flying, not falling. It whispers sideways and eddies and swirls. It's absolutely beautiful if you only look up. Otherwise the city is gray, brown at the edges where tires and plows and snow blowers have churned up the dirt beneath.

A well-dressed Indian fellow sitting next to me on the train mumbled, "I'm not all here today."

I turned and said, "Don't worry. You've got a long day in front of you. You'll come good." Then I realized that tomorrow is the winter solstice. I turned back and said, "Actually, strike that. It's just about the shortest day of the year."

He smiled a baleful smile and wished me a good day.

I feel quiet now, the result, I think, of coming down off two or three weeks of stress. Stress leads me more or less inevitably to depression, which, thankfully, is fairly mild, but this week it's not responding to the massive doses of coffee and baked goods I'm plying it with.

That's alright. I can accept a bit of this.

It's the holidays, and the stress is mostly past. Tomorrow is the shortest day of the year.

December 19th, 2007 - The river was a skin of ice.

Once in the mass transit system I find I'm fairly swept along. Inertia takes hold. And then I'm at my desk, at work, with coffee and people needing things from me.

At the Silver Line bus stop an argument broke out between a woman and a guy in a wheel chair. The guy told her to move, that he was more important than her. She bristled at that. Then a tall black man, who let us all know that he was 68, said that it was the guy's attitude that put him in that chair, "all twisted up like a rat."

Brendan said, "Do you think these things are all omens, and if so, what do they mean?"

And I said, "They mean we ought not to take anything very seriously today."

So I didn't.

December 6th, 2007 - Seven or so random things about me (as tagged by SheShe) mixed with some random brushes with the semi-famous:

1) I was born in Southern New Jersey (in the same hospital as my mother) in the middle of a snowy New Year's Eve afternoon, but did most of my formative formation in Southern Alabama, right along the Gulf Coast, where the men drink beer and the women drink wine coolers. Or at least they did.

2) I began collecting baseball cards in third grade. By sixth I owned multiple Hank Aarons, a Mickey Mantle, a Willie Mays and a book full of other high value cards. I could, at that point, quote you values out of the Big Book of Baseball Card Values off the top of my head, and the other kids would come to me to price their cards for them.

Interstitial - Brush with the Semi-Famous: Aimee Mann dated a couple of my friends in college, and they brought her to my house where my friends mostly ridiculed her and made her feel like a jerk for being semi-famous. I feel badly about that now, especially since she's quietly assembled a very impressive ouevre of solo albums that I really enjoy.

3) I have a philosophy degree. It's as useful as you think it is, unless by 'think' you mean pass randomly across the manifold of perception or to analyze in an intentional and conscious way with the neuro-chemical apparatus you call your brain, OR if by 'you' you mean the individual vessel of thoughts that I perceive of as a unique 'other' whose name corresponds to the name you use to label your 'self.' In that case, it's not nearly as useful as you think.

Interstitial - Brush with the Semi-Famous #2: I met the guys from Rancid at the music store I managed back in the day. They were my favorite band at the time, and I blathered at them, "You guys were really great the other night!," to which they responded with mute looks of disbelief. I fucked off. That seems to have been the sought after result.

4) I was once "Chief Operating Officer" of a small web-design firm with 20 employees. My chief operating talent was to baby sit the wealthy owner and "Chief Executive Officer." I wasted two full years of my life there.

5) I spent the summer of 1986 in Mexico, visiting friends and watching the World Cup. I was in attendance the day Diego Maradona scored the "Hand of God" goal against England and the second goal of that same game, which is widely held to be the best goal in World Cup history.

Interstitial - Brush with the Semi-Famous #3: I used to wait on Nobel Prize winning playwright Derrick Walcott regularly at an Italian restaurant near Boston University in the early '90s. He was an asshole, a shitty tipper and was always there with attractive female grad students. I'm not saying...I'm just saying.

6) I have a tattoo of the dragon from the Welsh flag on my right shoulder. My father grew up on a small farm in mid-Wales, and I spent some of the best moments of my childhood there. I recently had the tattoo touched up.

7) I played guitar and sang in a band called Atari 2600 that later changed its name to Nofriendo. I am not good at either playing guitar or singing. It didn't seem important at the time.

Some people I'd like to do this meme: SBrendan, Hayden, Dan Quayle

December 3rd, 2007 - It's not a fine line. The line is thick and black and readily visible even to casual observers, the line between brave and stupid.

This morning I blundered right over that line and paid a cold, wet price for it.

I should have listened to my wife, my brother, my parents, the weatherman and that tiny voice inside that said I was being an idiot, setting off in the freezing rain on my bike. There was an inch of snow on the ground already and most of it was melting into the slushy, gray puddles that make winter in the city so charming.

I have to admit that the recent passing of Evel Knievel did factor into my decision to pull on my rain pants and pull my big, ugly cruiser bike out of the basement. I even pulled on my Evel Knievel t-shirt in an effort to steel myself to the conditions (or at least to prepare myself for the suffering).

I was listening to a radio interview with this guy Charlie LeDuff a few weeks ago, and Charlie said sometimes a man has to go out and get his ass kicked just to dispel the fear of physical pain. To know the suffering is to conquer it, he said. I'm paraphrasing there.

So I went out to suffer.

Within the first mile, my feet were soaked, which is bad when the temperature is only just hovering above zero centigrade. I thought briefly about locking my bike at Davis Square and taking the train the rest of the way, but then I felt a flare of Knievelism and pushed on into the slush and splatter.

Boy was that dumb. Like Evel jumping the Snake River Canyon on his rocket cycle.

I soon discovered that the rear fender on my cruiser isn't long enough to prevent a long, cold trail of gritty water from spraying up my ass and onto the back of my head. By the time I got to work I was really, really, really wet, straight through my rain pants. There was a puddle of icy slush in the seat of my pants, and my feet were squishing in their wool socks encased by two mud-crusted sneakers.

Why did I wear sneakers? What is wrong with me? I guess I just didn't realize how much water was on the streets already, which is like saying you didn't know the ocean was going to be so salty.

I arrived at work, a drowned rat. Is this how Evel felt on the ground at the end of the ramp at the Cow Palace in '72, his back broken, his skull fractured?

No. Probably not.

December 1st, 2007 - The man called Evel Knievel died yesterday. He was 69, which was far older than he ever deserved to be, but then that's part of the charm of a man who was our last real daredevil, today's "extreme" athletes aside. In the '70s, Knievel was a real life bionic man. He had broken more bones than anyone else. He had lept great spaces on a red, white and blue motorcycle.

He was a great inspiration to me.

My brother called to give me the bad news, and I explained to him that Evel Knievel wasn't really a man. He was an idea, and that idea isn't dead. I am sad that the man called Evel Knievel is gone, and further that the retro Evel Knievel playset I saw in a toy catalog the other day was going for $100, a price that seems thoroughly at odds with the spirit of Knievelism and the very low cost of manufacturing molded plastic toys in Southern China.

Be that as it may, I hope to live the rest of my life with a Knievel-esque insouciance, which is to say a real lust to live. Snake River Canyon be damned.

November 29th, 2007 - Ideas for Jihadi bumper stickers (mostly from my brother):

1) If you can read this, the detonator short-circuited.

2) My other car has 600 pounds of amonium nitrate in the trunk.

3) I brake for the suffering of infidels.

4) My brother went to Afghanistan and all I got was this AK-47.

5) My daughter wasn't student of the month.

6) Honk if you're holy.

November 14th, 2007 - It's been a long time since I rode the train now. There was a woman doing the crossword sitting next to me, trying very hard not to have any contact with any part of me as we sat pressed together. There was a man looking over her shoulder also doing the crossword. Across the aisle, a guy was reading, Offshore Investing Made E-Z.

When I arrived downtown there were people wearing TVs, handing out literature. I wanted to go closer to see what they were selling, what was showing on their TVs, but I didn't want to get sold anything so I kept walking.

On the bus, there was a young Japanese girl with bad skin, hennaed hair and bright pink sneakers. She got off at my stop and ran into the projects across the street. I can only guess why.

100 Addicts Project - #2 - Dan W. - Dan has around him an orbiting constellation of newly sober men. They follow him from meeting to meeting. They call him on the phone and seek his advice. He is sage and gruff and speaks in an earnest monotone. He tells you that you are alright, that you're a good guy. He puts his hand out to newcomers and makes suggestions to them. "Got a sponsor yet?," he asks.

I see Dan on Sundays. He is not so much the patriarch of our group as much as its travelling evangelist. He runs a meeting for veterans, at a shelter, every Wednesday. "All are welcome," he reminds us.

Dan drank hard and stuck needles in his arms. He woke up in hospitals vomiting blood, pulled his IVs out and fled without shirt or shoes. He did this many times, until the nurses learned to put him in four-point restraints. He left his wife and kids and lived on the streets. He tells his story without laughing once. Because it's not funny. He is now a successful businessman, handing his company off to his children.

Dan was 21 years sober last week.

November 11th, 2007 - The 100 Addicts project is an effort to help people who are not addicts to understand people who are. Each of the 100 Addicts profiled is a good person who suffers from an often deadly disease. There is not one among them who I would not call my friend.

#1 - Alex P. - Alex got off to a bad start, even for bad starters. Before he was even in high school his parents sent him away for a year for some unknown reason, widely said to be heroine rehab in New Orleans. It was probably not heroine rehab in New Orleans, but it wasn't good. Neither was the very laissez faire parenting he and his brother Jason got at home.

Alex was gregarious and likable, and when he returned to school he became one of my heroes. He was never pretentious, never traded on his reputation, never treated anyone (read: me) with anything but kindness. We both ran cross-country, and we listened to the same music. He would come over and borrow records and tape them and bring them back, and he gave me records too. We weren't friends, mostly because I was afraid to be friends with. I didn't believe anyone like Alex would be friends with someone like me. And I didn't even really know what that meant then. Now it just seems silly, because I can see that we were really just the same.

Alex began doing drugs (again?) in high school, mostly pills I think, and lots and lots of alcohol. He careened out of control, graduated, hung around, had some jobs, slept on couches. I saw him occasionally. He was always the same, friendly, a little crazy. And then I graduated, and went off and it was some short time later that I heard that Alex had put a shotgun in his mouth sitting on a curb outside a downtown shelter. He had pulled the trigger, too, and made a horrible, horrible mess of himself. The shotgun belonged to another friend of mine, someone much closer, someone who took a long time to forgive themselves for allowing Alex access to their gun. But then Alex was gone, and everyone, I think, felt very sorry that they hadn't somehow done something for Alex that he evidently couldn't do for himself.

Alex was a good person, and I'll never forget his kindness to me when I was an awkward teenager, still unaware of what was in store for me.

November 10th, 2007 - I'm here. I'm here. I'm here. I said it three times, so you know it's true. My Mac shat the bed last weekend, so I've been without for the better part of the week, and now I'm just coming back on-line.

I realized this week that I've been sinking in a morass of television and generalized apathy. Forced myself to start a new novel and do some more reading, and that helped a lot. Reading and writing are thinking. Must think more. It seems that if I'm not reading and writing then I quickly lose the thread of whatever meager intellectual life I maintain. I become aimless. Uninspired.

That's where I've been, too. Hopefully, I'm back now.

It's Saturday night, an odd night for blogging. Didn't sleep much last night, and spent the day careening from one errand to the next with one or more children in tow. Slept a neck-wrecking sleep on the couch during family nap time. Went over to my folks' place to make their TV play through their stereo. Also hooked up the turntable and listened to Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, which, despite its ubiquity in Starbucks and the Gap and hipper dental offices, is still just a beautiful album.

It cut through my weariness and planted a good mood.

Will start the Addicts project tomorrow. Have settled on 100.

Sleep well.

November 7th, 2007 - You're never supposed to blog about what you ate for lunch. It violates one of the cardinal rules of what you can reasonably expect people to read in a blog. But, you know, fuck that. I'm a rule-breaker. An interweb desperado.

And so...

My lunch: 1 can Hormel Beef Tamales, 1 can Chef Boyardee Beef Ravioli, 1 Army-issue MRE (pasta with vegetables in sauce) combined and nuked for approximately 3 minutes. My brother, who is in the reserves, provided the MRE, and though it was billed as "pasta in vegetables in sauce," what it really was, was thick minestrone soup.

I was only glad that the MRE provided our culinary melange with a guaranteed dose of complete nutrition, not to mention making me feel as though I was somehow more connected to the suffering of our men and women in the armed services.

Dessert: A dish my brother and I call "the doublewide," which is usually an ice cream sandwich with a Suzy-Q on top, but today we made it with a sports bar. I think maybe they don't have sports bars everywhere, or at least that they don't call them sports bars. Anyway, a sports bar is chocolate and vanilla ice cream in a chocolate shell.

They hawk them at Fenway Park, "Spoats bahs! Spoats bahs! Spoats bahs heah!"

I suppose that if they don't actually sell this delightful frozen confection anywhere else, you could make the argument that "spoats bah" is the proper pronunciation of "sports bar."

My brother has deemed Wednesday "Worst Lunch Wednesday," on which we're meant to eat the worst thing we can imagine actually eating. By that measure, I'd say today was a success. He has suggest further that none of the future ingredients in "Worst Lunch Wednesday" meals ought to cost more than a dollar.

That's probably a bad idea, huh?

November 1st, 2007 - Took Owen trick-or-treating last night for the first time. He was a fireman. I was the guy who lifts the fireman up so he can ring the doorbell and then prompt him to deliver all the correct verbal clues to the fawning and chirpy adults to entice them into filling his pumpkin bucket with sugary things. Does that guy have a name? And where on the truck does he generally ride?

Have been thinking much about this blog recently. I seem to have lost the thread. I can't get any momentum behind it. I don't want to give it up, but I keep waiting for things to come back on line.

Aw, well. No need to make a decision now.

Have been collecting some new music. New favorites: The Aggrolites. Old school ska and rock steady reggae. Also rediscovering some old favorites like Snuff, who make big, anthemic punk rock in the English tradition. Also, Suicidal Tendencies, who make speed metal/punk and Bad Brains, who do hardcore/reggae like no one ever has or ever will again. Against All Authority too. They do melodic hardcore.

Music is good.

Putting many miles under the wheels of my bike. Have this sense of creeping bike rage, where I hate everyone in a car and half of everybody I see on a bike. Don't even ask about pedestrians. I don't like this anger that simmers in me. I fight it, but it just comes bubbling up. I try to tell myself that the city doesn't belong to me. It's not everyone else's responsibility to get out of my way. They're all going someplace too. And what's my rush? I tend to see this road rage as just an outlet for all of the other things that bother me.

If only I knew what they were.

Seem to have lost my camera, which is a huge bummer. Am resisting the urge to believe the cleaning ladies did it. But I'm missing taking pictures. How can I be taking pictures with no camera. Might resort to cell phone snaps. Any port in a storm and all that.

Will get the 500 Addicts project off the ground soon. Might reduce to 100. We'll see.

Sorry for all this random, top-of-the-head crap. It's all I've got for now.

And I won't apologize for that again.

October 29th, 2007 - I regressed. I became my 12-year-old self, obsessed with baseball, living life between games, talking about pitchers and designated hitters and caring as if it was important, which, of course, it is, except when it's not. In Boston, it's usually important. Red Sox nation is a tribe, and the tribe is powerful.

So finally the Red Sox won the World Series (again) and now I can go back to sleeping and caring about something that isn't nine guys in funny pants playing a very, very slow game.

I resolved to blog tonight, but really I don't have it in me. I need to go upstairs and stick my nose in a book and forget that the world exists until I fall asleep, which should take roughly ten minutes.

There's a parade tomorrow to celebrate the World Series. It's a mad, mad, mad, mad world, er, city.

I am thinking of a new writing project which I might call 500 Addicts. It will be modelled on this. A lot of my friends (i.e. my imaginary interweb friends) are participating in that one, and I thought I might put my own spin on it. The stories I hear, the interesting ones, are almost always from addicts, and since I mostly don't know any of their last names anyway, it seems natural.

What do you think of that idea?

October 23rd, 2007 - It's my brother's birthday. He's 44. I'm glad he made it. I love that fucking guy.

I'm taking him to get tattooed as a present. He's having the insignia from his father's (we're half brothers, though I'm not really sure what that means...we're brothers) naval unit on his shoulder. His father died when George was only a few months old. He was a pilot stationed in Spain, and he flew on the planes that patrolled the Atlantic looking for Russian subs around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It is thought that the plane he was flying touched a wave with a wing tip and rolled. But no one knows. And George never met his father.

So he's getting tattooed. It's his first.

I'm having an old tattoo filled in.

The one at the bottom of my back. The 45 insert. I'm thinking of having it outlined in red, just to make some connection to the Welsh dragon on my right shoulder blade. Will have to conference with the wife first. She is, ultimately, the decision-maker.

What do you think?

October 21st, 2007 - He has come to save us all, my youngest son, with his blast furnace smile and his lighthouse charm. I walk through the grocery store with him and old ladies pass out, overwhelmed by the benevolence of his stare. Construction workers stop what they're doing to smile and marvel at him.

We, his family, his mother and father and even his big brother, can be prickly, easily frustrated, tempermental. But Ian, Ianto to us, smiles right through it. He brings a goodness of nature that we didn't have before. He will, in the end, save us all from ourselves.

Here he is charming his older sibling:

Tell me I'm wrong.

October 15th, 2007 - I'm not quite sure how to write about this without appearing to have gone completely off my nut. I've talked a little bit in recent months about bicycles and cars and the uneasy relationship between the two here in Boston, where I live.

Now I've come to see that my city suffers from a complete tyranny of cars. They clog all our roads, making riding and walking less safe and less pleasant than they ought to be. And, given the length of time it takes to get around town encased in 4,000 pounds of glass and steel, they really don't contribute much at all.

Boston is a famously difficult place to get around. All the roads are centuries-old cart paths. None of them is wide or straight. The whole place is a convoluted tangle of narrow lanes traversed by impatient, scofflaw drivers. Bostonians don't signal. They don't obey the lights or signs, and there are too many of them in too little space. The City of Boston itself has exactly two city blocks of bike lane. Riding here is a nightmare. And walking isn't much better.

The main street I live off of is four lanes wide. Two of them are parking lanes. Two of them are travel lanes. People drive 40mph. I have no idea what the actual speed limit is.

And let me stop now to say I am no better or worse than any other Boston driver. This isn't a self-righteous screed. I drive. I park. I live the way I've always lived (more or less) as a driver. In America, we drive. There are few who can claim not to participate at all in our collective car culture. So, I'm not trying to describe some system wherein I'm good and everyone else is bad. I'm just trying to state the problem, as I see it now.

So, long story short, we have a city that's built (poorly) around the idea that it needs to be accessible to automobiles. People should be able to drive everywhere. What we get is a place, even in dense residential areas, where it's not safe for children to walk, not safe for people to ride their bikes, not set up for people to be in outdoor public spaces. This all strikes me as bad, even more so as I get away from living by car.

Boston is a small city. You can literally walk the length of it in an hour. If any American city of comparable size lends itself better to living on foot and by bike, I haven't been there. And yet, we all drive, because so much money is poured into improving auto access rather than leaving auto access as fairly crappy and enhancing public transit and pedestrian options.

A fellow by the name of Richard Bergeron ran for mayor of Montreal a few years ago. This was his plan:

1) Invest massively in public transit to create a modern tramway system, update the metro system with elevators and better service, reduce price of monthly transit pass to $40 ($20 for students and seniors).

2) Make pedestrian-only streets out of the downtown portion of Ste. Catherine St., St. Paul St. in Old Montreal and Mount Royal Ave.

3) Add 10 kilometres of bicycle lanes to Montreal streets annually.

4) Reduce the volume of traffic in Montreal by 2.5 per cent annually, with the goal of reducing traffic volume by 50 per cent by 2025.

5) Reduce the number of parking spaces in the core districts.

6) Make motorists, especially from off-island, help pay for these changes through increased licensing fees, higher gas taxes, a parking tax and bridge tolls.

7) Impose a 10-year moratorium on major road and highway projects.

8) Reduce speed limits to 40 kilometres an hour across the city, 30 kilometres in residential areas and 20 near schools and parks.

This is pretty much exactly what Boston needs. I have read in the paper that Mayor Menino has a new interest in improving Boston's cycling life. He rides to work himself, but we suffer under a nearly complete tyranny of cars. A few bike lanes (which would be a few more than we have now) are not even going to scratch the surface of making Boston a nice place to live in (not just near).

I'd love to see large swathes of downtown turned into car-free zones. I'd like to see street parking drastically limited, and bike lanes criss-crossing every intersection. I'd like additional lanes (freed by eliminating parking) set aside for quiet, low-emission buses. As long as we continue to invest in auto infrastructure, people are going to continue to drive.

We need to do the things they're already doing in London, Paris, Montreal, Curitiba, Brazil and some other places, not just to decrease our negative environmental impact, but to make our actual, daily lives better. Otherwise, city living is going to turn us all into cold, morose, unpleasant people.

Oops. Too late.

I'm nuts. I know.

October 11th, 2007 - A rat ran across my path. This was yesterday. I was riding my bike to work, coming across Beacon Hill, and that little fucker scampered out across the road. I thought it was a squirrel at first, but then there was that tail. That tell-tale tail.

It was a medium-sized rodent with a nice healthy looking coat, and I couldn't help but feel (fear actually) that's its appearance was an omen (which, of course, I don't believe in (except when I do)). It disappeared beneath a parked car and was gone.

I have a cold. It's a one nostril cold. One nostril clear. One nostril blocked. And I can't even tilt my head to the opposite side and get the snot/mucus/stuff to drain over to the other side. This is singularly (ha!) annoying.

I don't believe the rat and the cold are related.

I sort of promised a vacation log before I went on vacation, but then vacation turned out not to be very vacationary. I (we actually) failed to realize that there is no such thing as a relaxing break when you've got two kids as young as ours. I had neither the time nor energy to reflect on what was happening and write about it. Thus, no vacation log.

Here are the Clif's Notes to the log that never was: We went to Cape Cod and didn't sleep or relax or recreate much at all, though I did manage to eat every fried clam within 100 square miles and a lobster roll and a lobster and some oysters and raw bar and ice cream and then some more ice cream, and generally returned home (three days early cause we couldn't take it anymore) feeling like a gluttonous glutton who should subsist on nothing but bok choy for the rest of the year.

I am chewing a Riesen chocolate covered caramel as I type those words.

Since returning to our normally scheduled programming, we've been dealing with one very disgruntled two-year-old, who began pre-school on Monday. Pre-school is kicking his ass. He seems to enjoy it, but he's an emotional wreck when he gets home, and he hasn't slept well as a result. Last night, me and my one good nostril slept in a sleeping bag next to his little race car bed, just to reassure him during the night when he woke up crying, which he did several times.

So, I'm exhausted, and I don't think that has anything to do with the rat either.

I thought maybe I'd been born in the Year of the Rat, and that the omen was an auspicious one (auspicious being a word associated mainly with omens), but no, I was born in the Year of the Pig, the Metal Pig actually. I don't know what the elemental metal bit has to do with anything, but then again, I'm not Chinese, so fuck it.

So WTF does the rat mean?

Seriously.

September 29th, 2007 - I'm off on vacation for a week. May post a vacation-log when I get back. We'll see.

September 27th, 2007 - I learned to ride a bicycle while visiting my grandparents at their tiny hillside bungalow in Wales in 1977. I don't remember whose bike it was, but it was very small and red with white tires that I believe were solid all the way through. My first two-wheeled ride was down the steep slant of their driveway and back up the other side. By the end of our three week stay, I was riding from the bungalow up the hill to my uncles' farm.

Here, without further ado, is my bike-ography. I'd like to think it tells my story in an odd sort of way.

The Purple Bike - (1977-1980) The purple bike was the first bike that belonged to me. It was a hand-me-down from my brother. It was also, quite possibly, the worst bike ever. It was small and purple as a grape, single-speed with a coaster brake. When you pedaled it, the chain scraped against the chain guard and then, somehow, made a loud clanging sound, so that the bike went, swishCLANG, swishCLANG down the sidewalk. It was horribly slow, and, not surprisingly, the chain fell off a lot. The Purple Bike made me the object of some derision and not a little sympathy in our neighborhood in Alabama.

The Apollo Racer - (1980) The Apollo Racer (similar, but not identical to the picture above) was my brother's bike, but I rode it some when I was big enough. Ours was banana yellow, and though it was a smooth ride, it was also terribly slow, as chopper style bikes generally are. I was pushing the Apollo Racer around while my friends were getting brand new dirt bikes.

The CPX100 - (1980-1985) Then I got a brand new dirt bike of my own, Christmas morning 1980. (The picture above is just like the red frame I had, but mine had wheels and bars and grips and things on it). I can tell you honestly that that morning was one of the best of my life, and certainly one of the highlights of my childhood. The newness and smoothness and toughness of that bike imbued me with a brand new confidence and sense of joy that lasted for months and months. With the CPX100 I went from worst to first in the neighborhood bicycle pecking order.

The Panasonic Villager - (1985-1989) Again, this was my brother's bike, but when I was nine (and he was seventeen) he went off to the Army, so when I eventually grew into it, the Villager became mine. I used it mainly to ride over to girls' houses so that I could make out with them. In that regard, I have a very fond memory of the Villager.

The Trek 300 - (1990-1991) This was the first bike I bought myself. I paid $300 for it at International Bikes in Allston, MA, before they moved across the the street to that giant showroom they're in now. It was a crappy mountain bike with a white crackled finish. I felt I had to have it after my college roommate Dave returned from summer vacation with a mountain bike. I rode this bike religiously for about a year. Then I loaned it to my friend Mike who locked it to something less sturdy than the lock, and it got stolen. Oh, the pain of a stolen bike, like the universe rent apart and spilled on the asphalt. I am still angry about this.

The Yellow Bike - (1991-1995) The Yellow Bike was another cheap Trek mountain bike that I spray painted yellow to protect against theft. Eventually I cut the handlebars down and put slick tires on it, and it became a really fun urban bomber. The Yellow Bike completely opened Boston to my curious brain. I rode it everywhere, in all weather and at all hours of day and night. Eventually, I gave it to my friend Paul, who got it stolen.

The Black Bike - (1995 - 2007) The Black Bike was (and is) an old aluminum Raleigh mountain bike I bought from my bike-geek brother-in-law. I turned this one into a slick urban bomber, too, and rode it for years and years around Boston and Cambridge and Somerville. It's got a black frame, and I pulled the decals off and made it all black. So it's sneaky. My brother rides it now. It's a hand-me-up.

The Trionfo - (1996-present) This was my first road bike, a shiny, brushed steel frame from which I carefully plucked the decals. It was $1000 new and came with all Ultegra components, which if you're not a bike nerd, are really nice. I bought it at an REI in California when I was splitting time between the coasts for work (I was THAT important!). I put a lot of miles on that bike and still sometimes bust it out of the basement when the mood strikes me, though I virtually never have time for long road rides anymore.

The Specialized Stumpjumper - (1996- present) Just like this one, but mine's blue. My first mountain bike purchased specifically for mountain biking. The Stumpjumper cost me $850. It's a front-suspension cross country bike, and it gave me as much joy as any bike ever did. Now it's in the basement with a flat rear tire from the last time I road it. Am thinking of resurrecting my mountain biking hobby, but probably won't until next year.

The Pista - (2007 - present) My current everyday ride. It is beautiful. I had a front brake put on, cause it didn't come with brakes, and I switched the track bars for pursuit bars (bullhorns) for comfort. This is the bicycle equivalent of a crotch rocket. When I am on it, I am fast.

The Vendetta - (2007 - present) I wrote about the Vendetta last week. I'll not rub your nose in it anymore.

What do you ride?.

September 23rd, 2007 - I celebrated 15 years sober today. If you are reading this, and you remember drinking with me, congratulations! You're old now!

It was a great day. I won't get into the details, but it was great.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Share your thoughts with me here, and I want 'em.

September 22nd, 2007 - I bought a new bike, not to replace my other new bike, the fast one, but rather to serve as the bicycle version of a restored Caddy that I ride only on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Unless I want to ride it more, which, lately, I do.

This is it:

It's called the "Vendetta," in case you couldn't read the slick ass logo on the top tube. I bought it from these people. It has a top speed, with me on it, somewhere in the vicinity of 12mph, and it's about twice as wide as my other bike, so I have to be careful in traffic that I don't get stuck between the moving cars and the cars parked by the side of the road (to whom it may concern, sorry about your rear view mirror, but my new bike is a tank, and really, you should have tried to park closer to the curb). Also, it's got a coaster brake, so I can skid it just like I used to skid the dirt bike I had when I was a kid. So that's cool.

I now own five bikes, a standard road bike, a front-suspension mountain bike, a fast single-speed commuter bike, an old heavy commuter bike and this cruiser. Five bikes is probably too many, but now that I don't own a car I feel less self-conscious about it. I am still lusting after a single speed mountain bike with 29" wheels, but I'm going to make myself sell one or two of the current fleet (and begin mountain biking again regularly) before I get one.

I have previously, in this space, ranted about how much better it is to ride a bike than drive a car, but now that I have this slow bike I've discovered a whole nother charm to cycling, cruising. Cruising allows you to see more, engage more with the people around you, and it teaches you patience, because it really doesn't matter how fast I want to go on the Vendetta. It really just won't go fast, even if you want it to.

Before I settled on the Vendetta I was considering this one and the Straight Eight you'll find on this page. I recommend you buy one of those. Don't get the Vendetta. I've already got it, and an exclusive license to ride it in the North Eastern United States.

I'm just saying, don't step on my cool, aight?

Get down with your bad self.

September 21st, 2007 - It's hard to know what to write after I've been away so long, so I'll just jump in and say: I SHAVED MY HEAD. I had shaved it last week and really screwed it up, which means that my attempt at creating a hairstyle with multiple length hairs combining to give the overall impression of handsomeness failed miserably.

I had to fix it. So I did this:

Cause sometimes to fix something, you have to destroy it.

Which, obviously, isn't really handsometastic either, but there are some things I like about it. First, it feels good. I love to reach up and feel my own head. It is tactally pleasing. Second, it is ultra-low maintenance. Just wash and go. Or, just go. Really, it doesn't matter. Third, there is something monkish and humble about it, as if I've renounced trying to be attractive, which, for all intents and purposes I seem to have done.

After two weeks away, this is all I've got for you.

Tell me I'm nuts.

September 6th, 2007 - Have not been writing lately. Have been too busy and then too tired and then too lazy and then bereft of ideas. Have hatched some ideas and then been to frightened to try to tackle them. Will tackle one now, or hurt myself trying.

Why I love my wife.

Our seventh anniversary is Sunday, and in light of recent conversations we've had, I thought now might be a good time to make a short list of the reasons I love Brittney more than any other human I've ever met. So here goes:

1) We live on the same planet, which is to say, Brittney belongs to a very small group of people who, when confronted with the same experiences as me, sees, hears and feels the same things I do. There are only, perhaps, five or six of us living on this planet, but it's a nice place, and she's a fantastic person to share it with. It is impossible to express the comfort I derive from being with someone who sees the world as I do.

2) Unlike the other people on Planet Emlyn, Brittney is fantastically beautiful. My body reacts to her body in a visceral way, on a molecular level. When I look at her, I forget about everything else. I am cowed. I am reduced to my base elements. I can't imagine another woman having this effect on me. Ever.

3) Brittney is smart. Smarter than I am. Smart in a different way. She solves problems analytically, breaks things down, accounts for details. Her skills complement mine. We are greater than the sum of our parts. Before I met her, I thought only my kind of smart qualified as smart. Now I see that my kind of smart is a pimple on the ass of a larger smartness. Brittney is smart a whole butt cheek worth.

4) I feel unerringly safe with Brittney. Even in tense situations, having her near makes me believe that everything will be alright. She is unquestionably on my team at all times and in all places. This may be a convoluted way of saying I trust her completely. So, there, I trust her completely. We had a joint bank account before we had anything to put in it.

5) She helps me feel hopeful about the world. I remember when we first met that I was a very closed-minded, angry person. Brittney changed that. She crushed many of my pre-conceived notions and led me out of my self-imposed misery, not intentionally, but rather by example, by being a good and hopeful person herself. She has been with me through the biggest and most difficult changes in my life, and I leaned on her hard all the way.

6) She is funny in a different way than I am. She is drier. She makes me laugh a lot. This laughter has a value beyond the measure of capitalist currency. It is meta-physical. Karmic. Tantric. Sexy.

7) She lets down her guard when she is with me. Brittney is a guarded person, generally. That she trusts me enough to let me in is an enormous gift, an honor.

8) We work well together. We have never, in my recollection, had an argument about responsibilities. We have a very intuitive and cooperative way of living together and raising the boys. The ease with which we dispatch the daily docket is a tremendous stress-saver.

9) Brittney doesn't ever bother me, which is to say, even when we're not passionately in love, we don't get on each other's nerves. This is no small thing. It is a very large thing, like the Grand Canyon. Or Mars.

10) Brittney is a fantastic mother. She has born me two beautiful boys. The three of them are my holy trinity, my yoke and plow, my bowling team. Brittney is always two steps ahead of me as a parent. She is teaching me how to be with the boys, while learning how to be with them herself.

I love my wife, and I think you both, i.e. her and the rest of the world, ought to know it.

August 28th, 2007 - Some pictures of the littlest Lewis.

Send me a comment.

August 24th, 2007 - Sometimes boys fall down.

Send me a comment.

August 24th, 2007 - I have nothing for you. Since last I waxed digital, some bad things have happened.

On Tuesday night Owen broke his leg. He was swinging from my arm in the grocery store parking lot and let go, fell hard on the asphalt, made a hairline crack in his tibia, his shin. We were up all night Tuesday night trying to figure out what exactly was wrong. Went to the doctor Wednesday morning, got x-rays, got sent to the hospital. Went to the hospital, got casted, dried tears. Carried on. Were up most of Wednesday night with him in pain.

Rode to work Thursday morning, only got half way there before crashing my bike. Was scratching my head, not paying attention, not riding with both hands on the handle bar. Thought the cars in front of me were moving. They weren't. Grabbed the brake (I only have one on my main bike), jack-knifed the front wheel and launched myself over the bars. Slid on my elbow for a few feet (had the fleeting thought "losing skin from elbow...must move elbow), pulled my elbow up and slammed the rest of me down on the road. Inspired some motorists to stop and enquire as to my well-being. In Boston, this is no small thing, so jaded are we.

Was hurt. Lost skin from aforementioned elbow. Hip. Bruised palms of hands. Shook cranium powerfully. Altered world view. Rode the rest of the way to work all twitchy and bleeding.

Work. Crazy. Bad time for bad times. High stress. Too many meetings. Not cool to bleed in meetings. Bled anyway. Rode home. Took nephew to play soccer. Against better judgement, played. Fell. Hurt more. Didn't care by now. Body beginning to feel like old can, empty and crumpled.

Was up most of Thursday night with Owen. Slept in sleeping bag on the floor next to his race car bed. Spent an hour rubbing his toes, sticking out of the cast. Woke feeling not nearly as crippled as I'd feared. Braced myself with Thai iced tea. Faced the day, today.

And now I'm too tired to tell you anything else. I'll try to post pictures soon.

Send me a comment.

August 18th, 2007 - Just me with both the boys since Thursday evening. Brittney off at a wedding. In Pennsylvania. A daunting task for me, this being mommy and daddy and full-time, no breaks caretaker. Nurturer. Feeder in the night. These are my Augean Stables, these two small boys.

I have to say, up to this moment, things have gone better than I expected. I have not raised my voice more than once or twice. I have not stormed around the house in irrevocable frustration or gritted my teeth against an angry outburst.

The kids have been good, which means that Owen has mostly cooperated with my plans to keep us busy in as many of the waking moments of the day as possible, and Ian, who we call Ianto, has smiled just enough to keep me from wanting to put him in the dryer (I kid! I kid! Put down the phone.)

I was thinking that this would be the sort of epic experience from which I would learn something profound about both myself and my boys. I'm not sure that it's been difficult enough, yet, to produce some really lofty bit of wisdom, but I have learned, usefully, that I can take care of my children. This is no small thing.

It banishes, if only momentarily, my feelings of fatherly inadequacy.

And the kids, well, the kids are beautiful. Jaw-droppingly, innocently, perfectly beautiful. And now they feel more like mine than they ever have before.

Send me a comment.

August 13th, 2007 - It was when I looked down at his fine toddler hair blowing dry in the wind as the boat sped back to the marina that I felt truly and deeply how special a time it was. He was snuggled up against me on the rear bench seat, my son, for warmth and comfort. This was his first time on a boat.

He wasn't at all sure he wanted to go. I could see that he was scared, but I cajoled him into the car saying we would just go look at the boats. When we got to the marina, he marvelled at all the big fishing boats up in dry dock. And all the while we wound our way down across the boat yard, down the gang plank and out onto the dock, he kept his stuffed duck, Emmitt, clutched to his chest.

I put a little life jacket on him.

By this time he was riding the fine line between thrill and terror, but we walked right out to Dave's boat, and by then Owen was fully entranced. When we pulled out of the marina he looked up at me and smiled, and I said, "Cool, huh?" and he said, "YEAH!!!"

The motor was loud and it scared him a little, but he sat in my lap and pointed out the sailboats and asked a million questions and smiled some more. We anchored at World's End, dropped anchor and jumping in for a swim. Owen swam eagerly, climbing up and down the ladder and clinging to my neck. He didn't want to go home.

And then, eventually we went back, and he was nestled against me and I bent over and smelled the top of his head like I used to when he was a baby, and it suddenly came home to me how amazing it was to have this experience with him, to see something utterly new through his eyes, to be able to share it with him. I thought to myself, "You can do these things, if only you're willing. It can be this good."

And then we went back to Dave's and ate burgers. Owen slept all the way home in the car.

Send me a comment.

August 9th, 2007 - Observations on an average morning.

Woken by a frightened toddler at 5:20. Pulled him into bed. Dozed with his sweaty head nestled in my armpit until 6:30. Got up with toddler. Fell down last two steps on way to kitchen. Saved toddler. Tweaked back.

Headed out door with dog around 7. Noted ache in my calf where I took a knee at soccer the other night. Tried to walk it off. Failed.

Since summertime is on us and the students are gone, walked to the roof of the library at Tufts. Surveyed the city from there. A single cloud hung above Back Bay. Otherwise, bright, clear and blue for the first time in recent memory. Brittney said, "It's like a fall day." Mercifully.

Ran back out to the ATM to get cash for us both. Stepped over a four inch long slug on the sidewalk. Amazing beasts, those slugs. Smelled the sweet rotteness of the garbage truck as it rumbled past. Stench hung in the air. Feared it might stick to me.

Carried that thought to ATM. Why do all ATMs stink? A powerful mix of decaying carpet and cleaning fluids. Got money that smelled like money. Returned home.

Packed wife and children off to school/work. Wife beautiful. Toddler refused kisses. Baby beaming. Felt tired once they'd driven off. Took out the recycling. Ate cereal. Packed my bag.

Mounted the bike. Pedaled. Pedaled more. Felt tired in the legs. Wondered why. Pedaled until I forgot.

Met K in front of her office on the way to my office. Received unexpected gift. West Running Brook. Robert Frost. Copyright 1928.

I said, "I hope you didn't pay for this what I suspect it's worth." She said, "Don't ask me questions about that." Stood speechless for some minutes. Continued to be speechless. Thanked K. Hugged her. Went to work.

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August 3rd, 2007 - It's the height of summer. Hot as hell. Humid like a fat man's shoes. For me, this is fairly miserable weather, but screw it, lemons and lemonade and all that. Here are some things that you should be doing this time of year:

1) Eating fruit. I know. I know. I sound like your mother (we ARE both really disappointed in you), but the summer is the right time for eating fruit. I love watermelon, and this is the time for it, sliced open fresh (not purchased pre-cut in a tidy little plastic container), and enjoyed cold, the juice running down your arms, spitting the seeds for distance, or just swallowing them, which is mostly what I do. Peaches, plums and pluots are all ripe this time of year, too, and that is some good eating, not to mention the various and sundry berries.

2) Swimming. It's hot. The water is cooler (mostly). Swimming is as close to weightlessness as most of us ever get, too, so it's relaxing in a way that drinking sangria is not (alcohol actually increases the effects of gravity, doesn't it?). I prefer swimming in lakes and ponds, as I mentioned yesterday, but I have plenty of ocean swimming friends. Pools are ok, but all that chlorine leaves me feeling cleaner than I like. I don't trust cleanliness. I'd prefer to get an ear-born parasite from a brackish pond. But that's me.

3) Slurpees. I love Slurpees, which is to say that I love the frozen soda product available at 7-11 stores, not the imposters known as Icees or sno-cones or any other pseudo-Slurpee type concoction. Also, I only really love the cola flavor Slurpee. I don't care for the blue one that purports to be vanilla. I do not want one redolent of berries and flavored with Crystal Light. I don't want Mountain Dew Red Alert or whatever the green one is, with it's movie tie in and its tongue-staining after effect. But a good cola Slurpee. That is summertime goodness.

4) Ice cream. You can eat ice cream any time of the year, but summer affords the opportunity to get a cone and then stroll with it, ogling all the pretty girls in the summer dresses with cookie dough on their chins and rainbow sprinkles stuck to their cheeks. Ice cream in summertime has a certain innocence to it. In winter it connotes a certain gluttony.

5) Riding a bicycle. You haven't done it for a while, but it's just like...well...you don't forget how. And riding along under your own power with the wind streaming over you is just so nice. It reminds me of being a kid and riding up and down the street for no good reason at all, just for the joy and independence of it.

6) Grilling. Not only does the grill impart a flavor unmatched by indoor cooking apparati, but it generates no dishes, so you can spend more time eating ice cream and watermelon. With a grill you can make hamburgers. You already knew that, but I just thought I'd remind you. I'll not wade into the contentious debate between gas and charcoal grilling. Charcoal clearly tastes better and gas is clearly easier, but whatever. Just grill while you can.

7) Being naked. I don't know what body issues you have, and I don't want you to email me about them, but seriously what's better than being naked? Being naked with someone else? Skinny dipping? Skinny dipping with someone else? Those are all good answers that underline the fact that it's a good time to be naked. I'm naked right now. At my desk. At work.

8) Sweating. This one might seem obvious, but what I mean to say is that you should exit the comfortable, air-conditioned space you're in right now and experience the heat of summer. You should go out and mow your lawn. You should go for a bike ride. Don't let the heat get to you. Don't let it turn you into a hermit or shut in. Get naked, go outside and ride your bike to the fruit stand. It's summertime and the living is easy. The fish are jumping. The cotton, high.

Send me a comment.

August 2nd, 2007 - Appropos of nothing, some things I love about our little place in Vermont:

I love to drive up to our house and see that it's still standing. The mice haven't burned it down, and the bugs haven't nibbled it to dust. If the grass is uncut and high, I get a pang of guilt, but otherwise I enjoy the squelching of our tires on the gravel drive, the sound of the heavy latch loosing he front door and the musty smell that greets us on entry.

I love to wake in the morning with gray light coming in the floor level windows of the tiny upstairs bedrooms. From bed you can look down onto the green, green lawn and know you're in a good place, where meats get grilled and Wiffle ball gets played and kids swing on swing sets and you're at your leisure.

At the lake, I love to swim out past the rope that marks the swimming area, pushing out slowly on my back, staring up into the clouded sky, I can hear the motors of passing boats, a high-pitched buzzing in my water-filled ears. The water is cold against my back, growing colder the further I get from shore. I have in my head that I will swim all the way across, lazily, languidly, but the buzz of the boats warns me off. They can't see me.

I love to buy soft-serv ice cream from high school girls and then eat it quickly to keep it from melting down my arm. I have to keep an eye on Owen, because he just licks at his cone and it does melt down his hairless little arm. I take bites to try to keep him from ending up too sticky, but there is a fine line between helping and stealing a young boy's ice cream. The napkins at those places are never up to the job of cleaning a two-year-old. Never.

I love the great, big dining room table that we all sit around, passing plates of food in the yellowy half-light of evening. Mostly this food comes off the small, bird shat grill that sits on the front porch, a gift from my parents when they moved from house to condo. That grill has fed friends and in-laws, cutting down on the dishes that must be done and spreading lovely, porky smoke into the woods around the house.

I love that Owen loves Vermont. He calls it "A-mont," and I'm pretty sure that when he says it he means the house itself, the concept of states delineated by invisible borders being somewhere well beyond the understanding of toddlers. Owen likes to dig holes in the driveway. He likes to throw rocks in the lake. Recently, he has discovered swimming, or at least. floating in a life vest. I can only assume that his little brother will also love Vermont, and that together they will skin knees and catch snakes and learn to ski there.

I love Vermont's awayness, its having nothing to do with our work or even the responsibilities of our home. I love to go there and get away, to be away, to bask in awayness, to turn my mind to more immediate concerns like: Is it going to rain? What are we having for dinner? What did the dog roll in?

And all this for $90k, the poor man's vacation hideaway.

Send me a comment.

August 1st, 2007 - My friend F wrote this in the paper he works for, and it got picked up by the wire service and run nationally. It's about immigration, and it does an excellent job of putting the current debate in some much needed perspective. Also, it stimulated a brief, but I think interesting exchange, with another friend, which follows.

I hope the paper he works for doesn't rain shit on my head for running the piece in its entirety without credit. Hee! Hee! Hee!

Here it is:

There are many solid arguments for why the United States should not grant legal status to illegal immigrants, as proposed in the Senate immigration reform bill quashed last month.

But throughout the immigration debate, one particular mantra was heard from opponents of legalization, perhaps more than any other:

"My ancestors came here legally."

So too, the argument holds, must today's immigrants. We're a nation of laws, we must be consistent, and we must not reward law breakers.

It's a mighty handy argument that worked wonders for opponents of the legalization bill. It's logical, and draws a clear moral distinction between previous generations of law-abiding immigrants and today's border-jumpers. It heads off allegations of xenophobia, allowing the speaker to say it's not immigrants he or she is against, just illegality.

It works, too, because it rings true with Americans. The images burned into our brains of previous immigration waves come largely from newsreels and photos of immigrants disembarking at Ellis Island, one at a time, orderly, legally.

There's one problem with the argument. It's utter hogwash.

First of all, for hundreds of years, as immigrants poured in by the hundreds of thousands from the 1600s to the early 1900s, there were simply no federal immigration laws to break.

Unless you were a criminal or insane (or after 1882, Chinese), once you landed here, you were legal.

Crediting yesteryear's immigrants with following the laws is like calling someone a good driver because they never got caught speeding on the Autobahn.

"Only 1 percent of people who showed up at Ellis Island were turned away," said Mae Ngai, author of "Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America."

"What that statement is ignorant of is that we didn't always have restrictions. It's a fairly recent phenomenon."

Level the playing field hypothetically, and the argument becomes even more preposterous.

Imagine today's immigration laws, which make it impossible for most poor foreign farmers to immigrate legally - in effect in, say, in 1849.

Somewhere in Ireland, a starving farmer turns to his family, their mouths green from eating grass in the midst of the potato famine.

"We could escape to America and have food to eat," the farmer says. "But I'd never do that without a visa. That would be a violation of U.S. immigration law."

Ridiculous, of course. That farmer would have done exactly what today's Mexicans, Chinese and Guatemalans are doing by the millions - get to the United States so they can feed their families, and worry about getting papers later.

Which brings us to the second reason the "my ancestors came legally" argument is absurd.

It's because lots of people's ancestors simply didn't.

Once Congress put immigration quotas in place to keep out less desirable Eastern and Southern Europeans in 1921, they began sneaking in by the thousands.

On June 17, 1923, the New York Times reported that W.H. Husband, commissioner general of immigration, had been trying for two years "to stem the flow of immigrants from central and southern Europe, Africa and Asia that has been leaking across the borders of Mexico and Canada and through the ports of the east and west coasts."

A story from the Sept. 16, 1927, New York Times describes government plans for stepped up Coast Guard patrols because thousands of Chinese, Japanese, Greeks, Russians and Italians were landing in Cuba and then hiring smugglers to take them to the United States, illegally.

Two years earlier, the immigration service reported that 1.4 million immigrants might be living illegally in the U.S., according to the immigration service's 1925 annual report.

"The figures presented are worthy of very serious thought, especially when it is considered that such a great percentage of our population . . . whose first act upon reaching our shores was to break our laws by entering in a clandestine manner," the report found.

The problem got so bad that the government was forced to legalize an estimated 200,000 illegal European immigrants by a process called pre-examination. These days, the process would be called amnesty.

Clearly, if everyone's grandparents said they immigrated legally, someone's grandparents were lying.

"When people cite their grandparents, they're basically operating with a very limited understanding of what immigration was back then," said Edward O'Donnell, author of "1001 Things Everyone Should Know About Irish American History."

"There's nothing people are more proud of than these huddled masses yearning to breathe free. It's based on a very skewed or no knowledge of history."

Stanford University history professor Richard White discovered that after he began researching a book on his family's immigrant past.

White found his grandfather tried to immigrate from Ireland through Canada in 1936 because he could not get a visa under the quota laws.

"He tried to come through Detroit. It was hard to get caught at Detroit, but he managed to get caught," White said. Back in Canada, his grandfather called his brother, a Chicago police officer, who crossed the border and met him there. The two then walked to Detroit, his brother flashing his Chicago policeman's badge to U.S. customs officers who waved the pair through.

"I wouldn't be here, my brothers wouldn't be here if illegal aliens had been rounded up and dragged out," said White, a 1992 Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Few people say what White does in public. But since Ngai wrote her book in 2005, she has heard from some of them. They're not going on talk shows, blogging or writing letters to newspaper editors. But they're out there, even if they don't know it.

Perhaps if the Senate's legalization bill comes around again, their story could be a rallying cry for those in favor of amnesty.

"Their voice drops to a whisper," Ngai says. "And they say to me, "you know, my grandparents came illegally."

S, who is also a newspaperman, wrote this in response. You should know that S is a foreigner, was educated in this country, and now lives abroad.

Nice work... My favourite museum in New York, if it's still there, is the lower east side tenement > musem, which is basically just a restored tenement building that >was shut up in the 1930s because the landlord didn't want t invest >in bringing it in line with new health codes. I like it for one >simple reason: it offers concrete proof that most ethnic groups came >to the city through the same place and went through the same things >while they were there. In one of the rooms they peeled back the >wallpaper and layer by layer you could track the italians, germans, >jews, irish, and freed slaves who had all come through the same >apartment. But the museum also does a good job of relaying the fact >that, as they began to prosper, each generation of migrants grew to >resent the next and to view it as a threat.

Viewed from this end of the equation, I tend to think of the outsourcing debate as an extension of that. There are all sorts of problems with the way it is done by companies. But in broad terms a large part of the resentment against it is based on our desire to protect lifestyles and livelihoods and out of a sense of settled immigrant entitlement. I see anyone, who, like any new immigrant, will work harder, longer, for cheaper in my job as a threat. My argument for the time being is that I am better at what I do than they are and bring something they can't. But I'm not sure how long that will hold true. Or that I have right to believe I am entitled to my job and some shirt/skirt in Bangalore isn't.

So I wrote this in response:

I think you are right that our knee jerk opposition to outsourcing is, generally, related to wanting to preserve wealth and lifestyle. In my case, I am in direct peril of being outsourced at any moment. I work for an Indian-owned company whose business plan is predicated on moving high cost work out of the US and into India. When I was managing the copyediting department, they wanted to try copyediting in India. Now I am back in Project Management, they want to try to do that from abroad as well. I understand their motivation. It's money. It's always money, as my motivation is also money, the money I need to pay my mortgage and feed my family, the money I need to live in the style to which I've become accustomed (but to which I am not necessarily entitled).

If it was completely obvious to me that someone in India could do my job just as well or better than I can, then I'd shrug my shoulders, admit defeat and look for another job. But just the opposite is actually apparent to me. I'm actually far, far better at what I do than any of the Indian's whose work I've seen, this owing almost entirely to the fact that I am a native English speaker, educated in the country for whom I make books. Further, I helped build our processes here through a long series of experiences, which my cohorts in India didn't have. I have relationships they don't have and will have a hard time forming from 12 time zones away.

When I rage against outsourcing it's not when rote jobs are passed on from American automatons to foreign ones, but rather when companies knowingly and willingly compromise on the quality of their goods and services solely in the pursuit of money. I realize that is the capitalist way, but I don't like it. And I especially don't like it when it threatens to come and take the job that I've spent a long time getting good at. In my mind, I guess I do have a certain entitlement, having blazed the path, established the methods, won the confidence of our clients, and earned lots and lots of dollars for my employer. I think they owe me continued employment. I don't think they should have to test the idea of outsourcing my job to know it's a bad idea. Presumably the market will tell them as much (that's my wager anyway), but they really owe me the benefit of the doubt.

I understand that the world is growing flatter, to use the jargon of the day, but it's not completely flat yet. I'd like to think that, for the moment, I'm standing on a piece of high ground. Time will tell, but I think I owe it to my family to try to preserve our current altitude.

So that was it. Going back to the original subject of public outrage over "free-loading" immigrants, I'd say there is some sense of entitlement at work, but there is also a strong element of fear. Cultures always grow and change when outside forces come to bear. And there is always an element that wants to maintain a status quo. Ronald Reagan won two terms as President on the simple promise of restoring an American pastoralism that might never have existed.

The fire and brimstone of the current immigration debate stems a bit from our desire for the glory of the past, a glory under attack by many, many outside forces. In some minds, it becomes easy to conflate Middle Eastern terrorists with border jumping Mexicans. Both, it might seem, are trying to damage our way of life, one with bombs, the other by washing our dishes and sweeping our floors.

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July 25th, 2007 - Almost all questions:

When did it get to be summer? When did it spring up from the dirt all green and flowery? When did the shower wet cloud of heat descend on our benighted Boston? How did puddles gather beneath the corners of the air conditioners? And why does ice cream taste so goddamned good just now?

When did my children grow large? When did the baby lose his knees in marbled, milk-fed fat? When did he learn to roll over and face the earth beneath him? When did the lights go on in his hazel eyes? And when did he learn to smile a smile that lights the room and lightens my tired heart?

When did Owen's legs thin out and dangle from the high chair? When did he learn to ask questions I couldn't answer? How did he manage to become himself so completely? And when will his obsession with garbage and the garbage truck and the garbage man temper itself with an interest in super heros?

How did I get to marry such a beautiful woman? And how do I continue to walk the earth when she strikes me dead every morning with her gorgeousness? If I just stay quiet and pretend it's just as it should be will no one come to take her away from me?

What is the rest of the world doing and should I even care? Is there anything much past the end of my nose that I can hurl myself against and make even the smallest mark? What am I afraid of, and what are the consequences of running away? Is that too abstract? Too obscure?

If we don't stop to mark the time occasionally, does life slip past us, until one day we wake up and it's July 25th, 2007 and we realize we've Rip van Winkled tectonic shifts in immediate surroundings and we wonder if our feet are still stuck to the planet by gravity and if our head is still properly oriented betwixt our shoulders and above our hearts?

I suspect so.

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July 23rd, 2007 - Things with which I am currently obsessed:

1) Robert Frost's poem, Acquainted with the Night. It strikes me as nearly the perfect evocation of depression, though it is entirely possible that Frost's intent was more impressionistic. I am toying with the idea of purchasing a copy of West Running Brook the collection in which the poem originally appeared. However, because very few copies of West Running Brook were printed, to purchase one would probably set me back $150. Do I need to spend $150 on a book of poetry? Probably not, but such are obsessions.

2) Coffee. I know. I know. Totally prosaic. Coffee is to the 30-something set what Mountain Dew is to adolescents. The wrinkle, in my case, is that I mostly drink decaf, which is just about the lamest thing ever according to people who don't drink decaf. Co-workers scoff and scowl as I set up the pot to brew. "Why even bother?" they say. And when they do I always wonder, "Why do you drink coffee? Only for the caffeine buzz? Do you even like coffee?" Because, for me, the caffeine just turns into a nerve-jangling, stomach-turning disaster, especially given the quantities I am prone to drinking.

3) The idea of getting a skateboard. In the '80s when all my friends were getting skateboards (and sprained wrists), my mother refused to buy me one, insisting that I would only hurt myself with it. And while she was certainly right, I have never stopped resenting (relax, Mom, it's a very, very small resentment) having been denied one of the obvious totems of youth, the skateboard. In adult life I have occasionally considered redressing the balance, but I could never convince myself that I had the time or inclination actually to ride the thing. But now we are moving our office a few blocks further from all the places I like to eat lunch, and I have decided, at last, that I will get a skateboard and ride it to lunch every day. Hopefully, by the time my boys are old enough to want their own skateboards, I will be able to teach them to olly and kick flip. And also, I will be able to get to the coffee shop faster.

4) Typographic tattoos. Lord knows, I don't need another tattoo right now. I got a new one, a monster, just three weeks ago, and that makes three in the last year, and that's plenty. But, you know, once these things get ahold of you, and once your flesh is already marked up, there is some momentum gained and if you're not careful you end up looking like a circus freak. I have been thinking about an ambigram tattoo of EMLYN, though the last four hundred drafts of it have all looked like utter crap, and I am thinking of getting a professional involved, except that I won't be getting any new tattoos until at least next spring, because, as I just mentioned, I've gotten too many tattoos this year already. Also, Brittney always tells me to wait a year between hatching the idea for a tattoo and actually getting it. That way, she says, you know you really want it, because you were willing to wait for it.

5) Batman graphic novels. Batman is underrated as a superhero, if only because he doesn't really have any super powers. Much of the Batman oeuvre is dedicated to pondering questions of morality, the possible good of vigilante justice and revenge. Batman is always conflicted. He takes little satisfaction from his crime fighting, and the public is equally ambivalent about him. I really enjoy all that grayness, and the way the character is used to probe at the edges of what is reasonable in a just society.

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July 18th, 2007 - Recently read this book, purportedly a novel, called Double Duce by Aaron Cometbus, who, in the probable case that you don't know who he is, gained some fame as a fanzine writer and editor, documenting the punk scene in Berkeley in the '80s and '90s. The book read just like his zine stuff, so I imagine it was actually all just true story with the names changed.

It's the story of a place and a time, the place being Double Duce, a crappy Berkeley apartment adjoining a liquor store, where Cometbus and a veritable circus of kooky punk characters, drug addicts and confused young kids shared too little space and too little money. There is little in the way of discernible plot, but it plays like a sort of bildungsroman, with all the aim/clueless kids whirling around the stoic and apparently more mature Cometbus, while they undertake the process of move in/renovation/destruction/eviction, a certain end more than foreshadowed from the outset.

It reminded me a lot of the house I lived in my senior year of college, 10 Islington. It was half of a duplex, and the other side was inhabited by a family of Armenian alcoholics. They had a still in their basement that produced some sort of raisin and cinnamon flavored rocket fuel. Some of my roommates, forced to imbibe it, swore it was nearly hallucinogenic.

We moved in there September 1st, 1992, Brian, Dave, Ben, Lauren and I, and chose bedrooms based on some contrived system that ensured that Ben got the worst room. I ended up with the best one, a big space on the third floor at the front of the house.

10 Islington is three stories tall. The stairwells skew left and right. There is a big kitchen, a dining room and a living room, on the first floor, though we set them up as two separate living rooms. The people there before us had used one as another bedroom, but they seemed to have people living in nearly every crack and crevice of the place, and the place was full of cracks and crevices. In the upstairs hallway you could see two or three different layers of linoleum on the floor. We repainted the walls, but it was like putting lipstick on the proverbial pig.

In the basement we had a practice space for our really terrible band, called Buick, after Dave's car that got stolen the summer before we moved in. We stencilled Buick on our trash cans and on the sidewalk out front and had the time of our lives making a horrible racket there in our subterranean hole. Some of that music, if you can call it that, survives through the miracle of modern digital technology, which Dave used to convert the old cassette tapes we made into MP3s.

It was at 10 Islington that I decided to stop drinking, and at 10 Islington that I spent much of the next year, holed up with Brittney trying to figure out what to do instead of getting shit-faced drunk all the time.

After our first semester there, Lauren moved out and Shawn moved in. Brian and Dave found various ways to inflict psychological and emotional cruelty on Shawn. Funny stuff. Meanwhile, Ben, who played bass in the band, developed a John and Yoko type relationship with his girlfriend, and he began showing up late to and sometimes missing practice. Brian wrote Blame it on Ben, the best scapegoat song ever.

Shawn got the dirty pots and pans stuck in his bed, when he left them in the sink, and Ben got the soaking bath mat in his when he left it on the floor instead of hanging it. We had a chore wheel that gave each of us a different cleaning job each week. The house stayed a mess.

We got robbed three times at 10 Islington, once while I was alone, asleep in my bedroom upstairs. Then the landlord put burglar bars on all the downstairs windows. One time a kid came to the front door and tried to pry it open with a crowbar. Brian, who was sitting in the living room watching TV, jumped up, grabbed a bat and chased the kid down the street.

Brian planted tomatoes in a scrap of the front yard, a stab at domesticity. I fixed the washing machine, which had somehow sucked a tube sock into one of its drainage hoses. We had loud, dark, crazy parties in the basement, and our band played and other bands played and Brittney and I would sneak away to my third floor bedroom when things got too weird, which was always.

At some point in the spring, Brittney moved out of her place on Brighton Ave and into 10 Islington with me. Her roommates were dealing drugs, and though we probably weren't ready, it was the only solution she could afford.

Then the summer came. It was an odd time, people all moving in different directions. Shawn moved out and Scott moved in. Scott spent a lot of time in the bathroom. Lisa, Brian's girlfriend, moved in and then dismantled their relationship slowly and painfully. I remember one episode where she hurled the newel post from the banister through one of the front bedroom windows in a fit of rage. Dave's girlfriend Pam stood out front, drunk beyond staggering, screaming up at the house, while Dave sat in his room, his head in his hands, waiting for it to end.

Brian and I took jobs, him at the local paper, me, managing a downtown restaurant, and we worked 70 hours a week, while Dave and Ben spent the summer on the couch, smoking cigarettes, eating Kentucky Fried Chicken and watching TV. In the end, it all blew apart. Ben went to LA. Shawn to Baltimore. Lauren to New York. Dave to Charleston. Brian hung around a year, but then moved to New Jersey. 10 Islington brought us together, and 10 Islington split us apart.

Either that or life just started when we should have expected it, but didn't.

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July 13th, 2007 - I said to Owen, "It's almost bath time, buddy." And he said, "I don't want to take a bath," and I said, "But you have to take a bath." So he said, "Daddy, I don't love you anymore." He tends to go for the jugular like that. It's the toddler way. So I said, "But I still love you," and he persisted with, "But I don't love you anymore right now." So I pretended to start crying, and that made him laugh, because he derives pleasure from his cruelty.

Felipe said to me, "In Colombia we say there are three ways you know you're getting old. First, your body hurts all the time and for no reason. Second, you always feel a draft. Third, you think every woman is beautiful." And I said, "Well, two out of three of those apply to me," and he said, "Yeah, you're getting old."

Portia said that my brother George had told her that he thought I'd make a good killer. George is in the army, so he knows something about what it takes to kill people, so I asked him what he meant by that, and he said, "Well, I just meant that you have the ability to be coldly calculating sometimes, and you can make decisions unemotionally, and those are two things that killers need to be able to do. That's all."

Bob said, "It was good to hear you today. It was a good counterbalance to all the God stuff that flies around at these things." This after I'd announced to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous that I didn't believe in God, that there were plenty of things in the universe that were more powerful than I am, but that I didn't call any of them God. Coincidentally, Bob looks just like me, but has less hair.

Tina said, "If it makes you feel any better, we adopted a male dog about a week and a half ago and he is going in for the snip on Monday. Perhaps the 2 of you will have something to talk about." Very cute, Tina. Very cute.

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July 12th, 2007 - Had a vasectomy today. Wasn't going to mention it, but after Schmutzie had the balls (couldn't resist) to document in full the diagnosis of her cervical cancer and subsequent historectomy, I would have felt a coward to have neglected to mention my own exit from the gene pool. And before I go on, let me not liken a historectomy to a vasectomy. They are not alike.

Doing it was not something I ruminated over. Must not have more children. Have enough. Have plenty. Big, healthy, tiring children. Blessed with them. Must not have more. Must remove possibility of surprise pregnancy. Must have vasectomy.

Accompanying this very practical and obvious conclusion, however, was an unexpected depression stemming mainly from a feeling that, infertile, I would no longer be of any use to my species (which is not at all to say that I have been of any use up to this point). There is a certain put-out-to-pastureness, a certain non-threateningness that goes along with being no longer reproductive. I'm not in the game anymore. Will beautiful women sense my inpotency (not to be confused with impotency...yet) and fail to smile from across the train car? Not to equate the ability to father a child with sexiness, but am I now positively actuarial in my appeal? I feel so fucking middle-aged.

My friend Chris laughed and said that after his vasectomy he "got more ass than a toilet seat," which made me wonder if he disinfected periodically.

So I got up this morning, my mind refusing to leave the subject of my impending unmanning, and walked the dog. A long walk is not a good way to get your mind OFF something. On the contrary. So I went home and buried myself in the Internet and straightening up the house and answering old emails.

Finally, I couldn't suppress my anxiety anymore. I prepared myself physically, a description of which I will spare you, and then took the bus to the doctor's office. The Munsters were on in the waiting room, which seemed odd to me, but then getting a vasectomy seemed pretty odd, too, so I kept my counsel and took a seat. The doctor ran late, as doctors do, and so The Adams Family followed The Munsters and I occupied a few minutes trying to decide who was hotter, Lilly Munster or Morticia Adams. After thorough consideration, I concluded that Morticia Adams with her droopy-eyed somberness and hourglass figure was far sexier. Lilly Munster, though pretty, always seemed so maternal, not the stuff of prurient day dreams.

The procedure itself was utterly bizarre, as if being awake while someone operates on your genitalia can be anything else. Once or twice I glanced down at what was happening but quickly regretted it. I found I was holding my breath most of the time, which made it hard to participate in the idle chat the doctor seemed to want to have. "So, what do you do?," etc. Periodically, puffs of smoke from the cauterizing pen rose from my crotch. Most disconcerting. Not to mention the liberal use of iodine with its yellow/red stain.

Then it was over and Brittney took me home, where I have remained, per orders, mostly horizontal. Beforehand I had resolved not to take the codeine-based pain killers I'd been prescribed, but quickly changed my mind when the novocaine wore off and the ice pack strapped to my groin ceased to provide cooling relief.

And now here I am, blogging in bed. I confess that, despite some discomfort, I am really enjoying being bed-bound. I don't recall the last time I had two hours together to lay down and read, even if the circumstances are less than ideal. Given the amount of anxiety and thought I put into getting to this point, I would have expected to have something thoughtful to say about being sterilized. But I don't. Or perhaps it's lost in the subtle codeine haze that has descended here in my room. Or maybe it just isn't that big a deal.

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July 11th, 2007 - I believe the automobile as we know it in the United States is obsolete. The design of the standard auto has moved so far beyond our base requirements that we are saddled with these big, loud steel and glass behemoths that will go 0 to 60 in under 10 seconds, can travel in excess of 100mph, seat 6-8, tow 10,000 lbs, play CDs, MP3s, DVDs, etc. etc. etc. All this to get from point A to point B, generally alone and at 30mph in stop start traffic.

Undoubtedly it was the automobile that freed us from the horse-drawn limits of our grandparents' lives, opened up the country not only to expansion but also to exploration. Cars spawned the suburbs. The suburbs spawned the sitcom, and the sitcom spawned pre-marital sex. All to the good so far.

But cars belch noxious smoke. You don't have to be a scientist to know the fumes issuing forth from your exhaust pipe aren't good for the air you breathe. Cars clog our cities. There's no where to park. You can't get anywhere quickly. They make walking more hazardous. The bigger they get, the bigger a danger they are to other cars and the people in them. The faster they travel, the more force they deliver when, invariably, they hit things.

Of course, I own a car. It's a station wagon, neither small nor efficient.

But riding a bicycle every day has changed my perspective on cars. What I accepted as normal and practical and entirely appropriate before, I now see as an incremental design run horribly amuck.

Why, for example, are cars so fast? There's no where in this country that it's either legal or safe to drive more than 70mph, and yet most cars travel 100mph easily, most of them topping out in excess of 120mph. Why? It's like making a blender that can turn aluminum cans into pureed metal. It'd be neat, but what would be the point?

And why so large? Mostly we travel alone. Occasionally, we have someone else with us. Families need larger cars, but do they need vans? In part, I suppose cars are so large, because they've got to accommodate engines that can propel them at supersonic speeds. Regardless, in Boston, we don't have space for all our cars. There's no where to park. The streets are clogged. Wouldn't it be better to have smaller cars and smaller roads? I know it would for cyclists, but I think it would be for drivers, too. Do I really need 2500 lbs of metal to propel my 155 pounds of flesh the six miles between my home and office?

And why do we continue to build big, fast cars when we know we're killing the planet with carbon dioxide? This is a stupid question. We build those cars, because those are the cars we've always built. Bigger and faster has always meant better. So that we think it's entirely reasonable to live in dangerous, car-clogged and polluted cities as long as we can ride at high speed in air-conditioned comfort, possibly watching a DVD or talking on the phone. I'm not trying to be sanctimonious here (it comes naturally), I do it, too. I always have.

But riding around on my bike, I am starting to marvel at what we've done with the automobile. Given our current situation, both as regards global warming and overpopulation, I think we need a radical redesign of our most basic ideas of personal transportation.

I won't take the pie-eyed idealist's view that everyone should ride a bicycle everywhere. Nor do I think we can remake mass transit quickly and efficiently enough to address our problems. No, there's some very large and very complicated solution out there that consists of more people riding bikes, more people riding the train, cars getting smaller and people moving closer to their work or working closer to their home.

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June 27th, 2006 - When Owen was born nearly two-and-a-half years ago, I worked it out with my boss so that I could spend one day a week working from home, both as a way to have some one-on-one time with him and also to save some money on day care. And so, when Brittney went back to work I began, and since then I've spent nearly every Tuesday with him.

He taught me how to take care of a baby, and I watched him drag himself up from the floor, from crawling to walking to running, to become a little boy. And it was fun.

Since Ian was born, I've been spending those Tuesdays at home with the whole family. Brittney was on maternity leave until Monday, so I was there with her and Ian and Owen and Eddie, the dog. And that was fun, too. Yesterday, Brittney took Owen to day care and left me home with Ian for the first time. This is the beginning of our one-on-one time together.

Up to this point I have been afraid of Ian. I love him the way you love a new baby, which, in my case, means somewhat tentatively. First of all, babies don't feedback much. You hug and kiss and smile at them. You make stupid sounds and funny faces and generally act like an ass. They drool.

When they're not screaming. And Ian has been a championship screamer, letting loose with long operatic squawls of howling and whimpering that proceed unabated until his mouth is brought in close contact with a milk-giving nipple. I don't have milk-giving nipples. I am handicapped that way.

I have, on a number of occasions, been caring for Ian when he goes into one of his fits, and it ranks among the most unpleasant experiences of my lifetime. Granted, I've had a good and easy life thus far, but nothing makes a man (and possibly a woman) sweat quite like the sound of your own child wailing, especially when you know there's nothing you can do about it. It is soul-tormenting.

My response to those experiences was to avoid Ian as much as possible and to decide that maybe I don't like babies very much. And also, to understand the cruelty behind the joke that men have nipples.

So it was with some trepidation, if not self pity, that I commenced this period of solo child care, and I have to say it went quite well. Ian smiled at me a lot, and that helped. He seemed genuinely affectionate for the first time, as though he recognized me and was happy to see me, rather than squealing like I'd stabbed him all day. He ate well. Slept well. We had fun, and I could see a tiny personality emerging from beneath the rolls of fat and puddles of drool.

This is a milestone in my fatherhood, and I'd be an idiot to let it pass without remark. We've done a pretty crappy job of taking pictures of Ian, and I'm afraid it's true that you make documentation a much higher priority with the first one than with number two. The next years of Tuesdays with Ian will give me a chance to know him as more than a lardish, milk junkie. And I'll start taking more pictures and writing more about fatherhood I'm sure.

I had the idea to begin separate sites for both of the kids, maybe The Owen Project and The Ian Project, and Brittney could then contribute thoughts and pictures, until one day maybe they could take over themselves, and then they'd have a complete record of themselves from birth to the time, just after the first gerbil dies, when they lose interest and start taking drugs. Just an idea though. I'm full of ideas and, like you, short on time. Do I have the time to update three web sites, write my weekly soccer column, take pictures AND be a father and husband?

Must learn to sleep less.

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June 26th, 2007 - Pictures in lieu of words again:


Head Upn

Beguiled

My Two Boys

Me and Ian

June 25th, 2007 - Because I am completely awesome in all regards I have been tagged with ANOTHER Thinking Blogger Award. I mention that this is a repeat honor, because when I was tagged before, I completely spaced the part where I was supposed to pay it forward by naming five other thinking bloggers. That's how much thinking I do, so much that I sucked up all the praise, like a black hole for praise, not letting any back out into the universe. I deserve a thinking of myself award.

The first time this happened it was my friend Blackbird doing the awarding. Every time I think I have an open mind, she pushes it open a little further, and she doesn't even know it. This time it's Schmutzie honoring me with her honors. Schmutzie quite honestly writes my favorite blog just at the moment. I'm not sure I'm allowed to tag her back, pretty sure I'm not, but I would if I could. Not only does she have great ideas, but she's a great writer. Great is insufficient as a word to describe what she's doing at her site.

So props aside, I need to name some good blogs, which is hard because I don't actually read a lot of personal blogs.

Right out of the gate I have to mention Hayden, who had the sublime pleasure of attending the same private, religious high school in Alabama as I did. Hayden was smart back then, and in the intervening years he's somehow managed to read every book, see every movie and listen to every album that I would have gotten to if I'd lived to be 247 already. He's a founder of the The High Hat, and the prime mover in a band. And he achieves all this while holding down a job, finishing his first book and being father to a small boy.

Next I would mention Defective Yeti, whom I've never met or spoken to or emailed or texted. I believe his name is Matthew Baldwin. He's a funny motherfucker. He will make you laugh. If he doesn't, it's your fault, not his.

S Brendan is a friend from work, and I name him here because I know he has a lot to say. He hasn't said it all yet, but it's coming. This is the guy who doesn't need to bother reading my site because he hears it all at lunchtime every day. Frankly, most of the ideas are his. Keep up with him. When he falls out of love with the scooter I sold him, he's going to tell you things about the history of Jewish humor and how it relates to the current zeitgeist in office funnies. He's going to liken Dr. Who to Aeneas. He's going to entertain. Brendan? Get on that.

Now I've got to open it up. And I don't really see the next two taking any notice of the award, but I also really like Glenn Greenwald, who writes a political blog for Salon and Gerard Baker, who is the US editor for the London Times. Greenwald does an excellent job of breaking down stories and pulling out the important parts, as well as criticizing other media sources for their shoddy work. Baker writes on a variety of topics, but what I enjoy the most is the way he comes at a story you would read one version of in the US press and finds a new, well thought out angle. I don't always agree with both of them, but they help me recognize my own biases.

I'm so glad that someone thinks I'm thinking. I don't feel as though thoughts are crossing my mind. Getting an award like this makes me want to work harder on my writing, and for that I'm really, very grateful. Thanks, Schmutzie.

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June 19th, 2007 - So I got tagged for a meme by my friend Hayden, and normally I would ignore that. I've never done a meme before, or I've never memed, or I'm not a memerizer. What's the right word? Anyway, the instruction is to look up the #1 songs from the year you turned 18 and wax nostalgic about five of them. I turned 18 on December 31st, 1989, so all of you who are older than I am can slap your forehead now and lament the fact that you are, theoretically, closer to the eternal dirt nap than I am. Those who are younger...well...I have nothing to say to you.

The first thing that struck me about the #1 hits from the year I was 18 is that I didn't really recognize that many of them, and I didn't like ANY of them. I attribute the lack of recognition to being drunk an awful lot. This was the second semester of my freshman year in college and the first semester of my sophomore year. I was drunk all the time. I smoked some pot. OK, a lot of pot. I did mushrooms. And acid. It was that time in my life. I attribute the not liking any of them to it being 1990, a horrible time for pop music, and to being a music snob. I was coming out of a regrettable Grateful Dead phase, thus the pot smoking, and went straight into a punk phase, inspired by Fugazi and Husker Du and a bunch of other shit my roommate Dave brought back with him from a summer in Bloomington, IL. Go figure. It was the year we discovered Uncle Tupelo and got soaked with fake blood at a GWAR show. Bob Mould's Black Sheets of Rain played over and over again in our dorm room. And the first four Bad Religion albums.

But that's not what the meme is about. It's about #1s, so here goes:

December 23, 1989 - January 13, 1990: Another Day In Paradise - Phil Collins - Here's my reminiscence about this song. I fucking hate Phil Collins. I hated Genesis (though slightly less with Peter Gabriel behind the mic), and I hated everything Phil Collins did as a solo act. In the late '80s and early '90s, he was well nigh inescapable. Smarmy, syrupy awful is what his music was.

February 10 - March 2: Opposites Attract - Paula Abdul with The Wild Pair - I really wanted to boink Paula Abdul. I don't remember this song at all. And who the hell were the Wild Pair? Her breasts? I actually sort of wish Paula Abdul had perished in a tragic plane crash in 1990. That way, my adolescent pinings might have remained pure, rather then getting ruined by American Idol. Bo Derek had the decency to disappear completely after I turned 20. God, I'd love to boink Bo Derek.

May 19 - June 8: Vogue - Madonna - I remember this song very clearly. I hated it. I thought it was just about the stupidest thing I'd ever heard, and because the video was on constant rotation I have the images of Madonna striking poses burned deep into my subconscious to spring out at inopportune times, like when I'm asleep. I understand that in New York this was an important song and in the gay community. I don't live in New York, and I'm not gay. The world would have been far better off without Vogue. And if Madonna had died in a plane crash after making Desperately Seeking Susan.

June 30 - July 21: Step by Step - New Kids on the Block - OH MY GOD THE NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK WERE THE WORST THING EVER! But they're from Boston, so they're completely forgiven. I remember walking through the TG&Y store (a precursor to Walmart) on Hillcrest road in Mobile, AL where I grew up and seeing a New Kids on the Block TV tray for sale. And I remember thinking, "Are you fucking serious? Who in the hell wants a New Kids on the Block TV tray? I don't understand the world. Not at all." It was sort of a defining moment, the moment I realized the rest of you people are crazy.

November 3 - November 9: Ice Ice Baby - Vanilla Ice - This song was actually brilliant. Of course it's a rip-off of Under Pressure, which was a pretty good song to begin with. And Ice Ice Baby would have been the greatest ironic hip-hop track ever, taking the piss out of all the bravado spewing bullshit artists who picked up the mic and embarrassed themselves. Except it wasn't ironic. It was sincere, and Vanilla Ice is a joke now. I prefer to believe he knew what he was doing the whole time. I prefer to believe he was a genius. And that he's dead now. Hey, it worked for Kurt Cobain.

In order to do this right, I'm supposed to tag five more people. That's the part of the meme thing that I really hate. It feels like a chain letter, and I'd hate to be responsible for a decade of bad luck for any of my friends, so I'm not going to tag anyone. If any of you would like to take on the challenge, I'd love to read about it. I'm just not going to tag you.

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June 17th, 2007 - My legs are all mosquito-bitten from sitting on the Vermont front porch and watching Owen dig in the dirt driveway. One of the crab apple trees has snapped a big limb and it's hanging down on the back of the lawn. The mice crapped all over our beds and tore up the wash clothes in the bathroom closet. I'd be upset about it, but the mice spend more time there than we do, so I think they've gained some ownership rights. The bats that were holed up in the roof above our bedroom seem to have gone. I think I miss them, but cleaning bat shit before putting the kids to bed was getting old.

The guy at the coffee shop is a Yankees fan, which is troubling, but his coffee is so goddamned good I'll get over it. They make their own donuts there, too. Really, really good cinnamon and sugar donuts. And the guy just loves Owen. Tickles him. Makes him slap him five over and over and over. He has a mustache. So there's that.

When we're in Vermont we mostly grill on this crappy little grill that used to live on my parents back porch. They bought it when they bought the townhouse they lived in in New Jersey, but never used it. So when they moved to Massachusetts, they gave it to us, and now we make hot dogs on it. The cover we bought for it has been shredded by the wind howling down our road, channelled by the trees. The same wind blew our neighbors quonset hut (storage shed) over and into the woods. It's windy there.

I cut the lawn on Saturday, and whacked the weeds away from the sad little stone wall I've been building. It's a big lawn, mostly flat, and it looks so good when it's fresh cut. I love the smell of it. The dog rolls in all the mulched cuttings and comes away tinted green. Owen calls the lawnmower the "pop-pop," because his toy mower makes that sound. He wants to push the big mower, and when I tell him he's not big enough yet, he says, "I'm not bigger enough yet. When I get more older I can use it?" And I say yes.

On Saturday nights we listen to A Prairie Home Companion on the local NPR station, and it sounds right, not like when you listen to it in your car in the city.

This morning we took our coffee and donuts and drove down to the lake and drank it and ate and looked at the water and up at the windmills on Searsburg Mountain. There was somebody water skiing, and a bunch of cars pulled up and older people got out and waked down to the nearby nude beach with towels tucked under their arms. Owen threw rocks in the water and shouted, "Here comes trouble!"

I drove us home and Brittney and the two kids fell asleep in the car.

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June 11th, 2007 - I wish I didn't have children. Just for a little while. A couple of hours. Maybe a couple of days. A week, tops. Because while there is no one thing I have to do to care for my kids, changing diapers, giving baths, feeding, etc., etc. that I can't handle, taken together they are sometimes too much. At certain moments it is all more than I think I can bear.

But, of course, I do.

This weekend featured a number of these moments of doubt and frustration. Owen refused to nap on Sunday. Ian naps often, but not for long, not for more than thirty or forty minutes. And then he's crying and needing things that we can provide but would really rather not when we're in the middle of trying to feed ourselves or clean up the unholy mess we call our house.

The mess is really bothering me, too. It's everywhere. I spent some time yesterday trying to get one room free of childish detritus. It took a while. And I had Ian strapped to the front of me, which slowed the process down a bit. Their shit is omnipresent. Little socks. Shiny plastic toys. A medicine dropper. Board books. Sippy cups. Dirty diapers. Clean diapers. Wipes. Wet shoes. Puzzle pieces. Wooden trains. Small blankets. Spit up soaked towels. Half empty bottles.

It's too fucking much.

And in writing all this down, my purpose is two fold. One, I'm getting it off my chest, which is nice. It helps me breathe, unfurrows my brow. And two, I'm admitting to you that all in our happy household is not joy and light. That my frequent posts of parental bliss, while certainly sincere, are not all of the story. You knew this. I didn't, perhaps, need to tell you that having kids is hard and frustrating, but you like to hear me say it (read me write it?), because it establishes me as at least a semi-reliable narrator. Call me Ishmael (though I probably have more in common with Queequeg).

You begin to think I might not be full of shit. Might. Not.

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June 7th, 2007 - Buncha different shit. First, Marc Weaver has reproduced. If you don't know Marc Weaver, well then you're a poorer human for it. Marc Weaver is good people, and since he's overcome his hyper-activity (to a degree) he's so much more relaxing to be around. And funnier, if that was possible. Marc and his beautiful Oregonian wife Iris have given the world a little girl called Clara Sofia. I suspect this little girl will suffer mightily for the stifling love of her hyper-active father. Won't that be nice for her?

Second, I've started a new blog, a soccer blog, on the Soccer New England web site, which should save you the trouble of having to read my soccer-related drivel here. You're welcome. I needed to do this, because I just found I had sooooo much free time on my hands.

Third, if anyone knows of a news outlet of any repute (by which I mean their reputation is either good or bad or no one has ever heard of them) that is seeking an uninformed blowhard to spew a regular political blog, forward their contact information to me. As an uninformed blowhard, I seem to be equally qualified as most of the rest of the political bloggers in the known universe.

Fourth, I met the president of our City Council the other day, quite by chance. He was at my coffee shop and having a cup with a guy I see there all the time who used to be a state senator, and so anyway I had about half-an-hour to rant in this guy's face, and I have to say it was fun. Talk about participatory democracy. As part of the same conversation, I met the owner of the local funeral parlor. So I have that going for me too.

Fifth, I've not really read any of the accounts of any of the presidential debates, either Democratic or Republican, but I do have a question that I'll wager none of the reports addressed. Why in the hell are they having debates already? The primaries aren't until next year. I'm going to be sick of the next president before they're even elected at this rate. Come to think of it, I might be sick of them now, depending on who they are.

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June 6th, 2007 - Owen is becoming a boy and Ian is becoming a baby. Previously, Owen was a toddler and Ian was nothing. Owen's legs have grown long and thin, and they are covered with bruises. In fact everything is lengthening, his arms, his curiosity, his attention span. And Ian has emerged from that amoeboid, postnatal stage that has no name, where babies' eyes won't focus and they can't hold their heads up. Now he's hard at it, watching his brother scream across the living room, smiling, drooling, and, most importantly, taking part.

We operate in a strangely private space, the four of us, five if you count the dog, a carefully choreographed dance of burping and diaper changing, of feeding ourselves and cleaning up, always and forever cleaning up. The dog has made a new home under the dining room table. It's a safe haven against little stomping feet, swinging plastic baseball bats and unpredictably thrown blocks.

Brittney has proven particularly adept at dealing with Owen's cantankerousness. She lies quite naturally, "When you finish your milk you can watch TV." And bargains like a used car salesman, "If you're really good we'll go get ice cream later. And mommy will let you drive the car." I suspect that she's honed these valuable skills dealing with me over the years, "If you mow the lawn, we'll go get ice cream later, and I'll let you drive the car."

We have become coffee-addicted, even though we perc decaf on the stove. The ritual of it somehow makes the work of rousting small children from their sleeping places less arduous, as if, with a coffee cup in hand, we are somehow still claiming something of the morning for ourselves.

If in the morning we are snatching at coffee cups to maintain sanity, in the evening, at bath time, there is a triumphal sort of tone. From bath to towel to pajamas and into bed, there is an inexorable slide toward grown up time. If we're lucky, we've got them both off to the Land of Nod by 8:30 and get roughly an hour-and-a-half before we pass out. And it's odd, but I'm somehow satisfied by this state of affairs. We've got two boys and they're growing.

They're growing.

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June 4th, 2007 - We lost two good men at the weekend.

One was Ellis Harter, my friend Dave's dad. Mr. Harter was a retired school teacher from Bloomington, IL. His family owned a bunch of formerly worthless property outside of town that became worth more when town sprawled, as towns do. He spent a lot of his later years doing real estate deals and eating donuts at the local shop. He was a funny, no nonsense kind of guy. He drove a truck in the Korean War. He raised two adopted sons. He was the sort of guy who would tell you he was coming for a visit, walk out, get in his car and drive twenty hours straight to see you. He had a number of useful things velcroed to the dashboard of his car. His middle name was Newton, and he hated it.

We also lost Russell Bloom from Jacksonville, FL, who helped my brother get on his feet when no one else (including me) was much interested. Russell was what you would call a philanthropist. He spent a couple years in the Peace Corps in West Africa, and then fifteen more in Colombia as a teacher. He worked with refugee resettlement programs through the UN. He worked with the Jacksonville Sister Cities Association, the Jacksonville Children's Commission. And he did a lot more things like that. He moved with equal ease among the rich and the poor. Thousands upon thousands of people across the globe (including me) owe Russell a debt of gratitude.

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May 30th, 2007 - It is well nigh impossible to communicate the subtle but extraordinary ways in which time and experience bend your perspective. But I'll try.

I have come to distrust utterly my perception of even the most mundane events. Not only the small details but the stampeding elephants too seem to slip past me unnoticed. I remember nothing. What I do remember resembles my dreams more than it does other peoples' realities. The difference between my conscious and subconscious seems to have something to do with whether or not my eyes are closed.

And yet, life makes sense in some limited, functional sort of way. When people say 'hello' to me, I don't respond, 'purple!' There is even some evidence of progress, which is to say I feel more comfortable with how the world works all the time, as if in recognizing my tenuous grasp on 'reality' I have freed myself to enjoy subjectivity much more.

And so, as I go along, I am not paying any more attention to what's going on, and I certainly am not remembering any better, but I do seem better able to focus on the important bits, the bits that help me love my family and connect to all the good things that are happening in my life. I couldn't have imagined having this perspective ten (or even five) years ago, but there you go. Our ability to imagine is rivalled in its poverty, only by our ability to recall.

My guess is that it's mostly to do with brain chemistry, not only for me who is currently taking little pink pills that hold my chronic depression at bay, but for everyone. Our ability to function is, logically, down to the quality of our equipment. I know for myself, that the pervasiveness of my depression prevented my from even entertaining many ideas that might have shifted my personal paradigm earlier in life. Removing the depression has opened my eyes to a lot of ideas, and thereby to perceiving the world differently.

I would love to believe that the power of thought carries us through this life, that reason is the great arbiter of happiness. Life would be much easier. But, unfortunately, all of my personal experience argues against that. Instead, I really think that we are complicated masses of electrochemical stimuli and responses, our thoughts, our emotions, the whole shooting match. The beauty of it is that it's complicated beyond our ability to understand, and so we're left with certain very useful illusions, such as free will and romantic love. I am, at this stage, completely comfortable telling my wife and children that I love them, and telling you, in equal earnestness that love is probably a biological force that ensures the survival of our species.

Having said all that, I believe less and less of what I think overt time. Slowly but surely all ideas about 'how the world is' are ebbing away. By the time I die, I'm sure to know and believe nothing, either through the long process of philosophical reflection or by the only slightly shorter route of neurological degeneration.

Of course, this is all probably bullshit, and I'll probably be quite old before I figure that out.

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May 26th, 2007 - All pictures, for those who have been waiting.

Uproarious - May 2nd, 2007


Primogenitor - May 2nd, 2007


Snack - May 2nd, 2007


Smiles McGillicutty - May 5th, 2007


Rocking - May 10th, 2007


Fat Nap - May 12th, 2007

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May 24th, 2007 - I shaved. I couldn't stand it, and I couldn't wait for suggestions, and in the end I decided not to do the funny moustache or any of the other silly shit I was thinking of. My face is not made for facial hair, and the few suggestions I did receive bear that out. Everyone wanted me to just shave.

The weird thing is that I feel compelled to grow facial hair only to prove that I'm manly, which sounds like a joke except that it's sort of true. I was a late bloomer, and I think I grew up with a sort of inferiority complex around the exhibition of secondary sexual characteristics. I realize that sometimes the wounds of adolescence take a long time to heal, but I'm thirty-five for chrissakes. So I shaved.

Speaking of shaving, some of my cycling friends are in the habit of shaving their legs. There are a number of reasons to do this if you're racing road bikes all the time and anticipate falling on pavement and tearing up your legs. I have never shaved my legs, because it would be difficult to know where to stop. If I stopped at the knee as some do, I would look like I was wearing a pair of hair shorts when I got out of the shower, which, like a certain style of moustache, would be funny, but only for a minute.

Veering away from the personal to the political (oh no! Not that!), I just wanted to take issue with a couple of the headlines I've seen in the paper recently. One was: "Cheney makes surprise visit to Iraq." I read that and thought, "No, shit." Can Dick Cheney make any other kind of visit to Iraq without being blown off the runway shortly after landing? The NYT made it sound like he showed up with a six-pack and a good fishing story to tell. Another good one was, "Bush says bin Laden ordered attacks on US." I mean, really? Seriously? This is news. I would suspect that "Order attacks on US" appears on bin Laden's to-do list right after "Say morning prayers" and "Sweep the cave." What would have been more newsworthy is something like, "bin Laden enjoys line dancing" or "al Quaeda planning memory quilt for suicide bombers."

It's all bullshit.

On a somber note, last night on the way home from work I saw a cyclist laying by the side of the road, a paramedic cradling his head. He'd been hit by a BMW SUV. It was a chastening sight. On that stretch of road, near Inman Square in Cambridge, there is a bike lane. It looked as though the person driving the SUV (I didn't see the drive) had jumped a stop sign and knocked the guy over. It just goes to show that no matter how careful you are, obeying all the rules, you can't control every situation. I would beseech all my reader(s) to please, please, please pay attention to cyclists and refrain from talking on the phone while driving. People don't realize how crappy they drive when they're on the phone. They think they're on top of it, but they're not. This is a particularly dangerous thing in the city.

I'm just going on and on now. The European soccer season is now basically over. Spain is still playing meaningful matches, but the European Championship game was last night. AC Milan beat Liverpool 2-1 in Athens. Both teams started the game with just one striker, as did both Chelsea and Manchester United in last weekend's FA Cup Final in England. Let me just say that playing with just one striker really, really sucks. It moves the whole game into the midfield, where we're forced to watch guys pass around for an hour-and-a-half, hoping that their one attacking player can somehow manufacture a moment of brilliance against three or four defenders. I love soccer. I really, really love it, but goddamn some people find the most horrible ways to make it boring.

I had an idea for a new kind of key party, a sort of update on the swingers ritual of the '70s. In my version you'd drop your keys in a bowl at the beginning of the evening, and at the end, instead of going home with the wife of one of your neighbors, you'd just drive their car home. There's something so deviant about pulling back the curtains the next morning and seeing someone else's SUV in your driveway. So hot.

And finally, speaking of cars, I am thinking about buying a new one. I just sold the pick up truck I've been driving (or mostly not driving actually) for the past ten years. We're down to one car, which is fine and good, and if it's not too ass-painish, then we'll go on as a one car family indefinitely. If, however, it proves horribly inconvenient, as it might next winter, then I'll want to get another car.

My requirements for this other car are many. It must have four doors to accommodate the accessing of two car seats. It must get very good gas mileage, because I'm one of those hippy-dippy, tree-hugging environmental types. Don't laugh. Someone has to save the freaking planet. Ideally, I would buy a hybrid. The car must have a hatchback, because the dog just doesn't do well riding in a trunk. The car must be front-wheel or all-wheel drive, because we go to Vermont in the winter and like to be able to get back. The only car I can see that meets all these requirements is the soon-to-be-released Honda Fit hybrid. It's supposed to cost around $16K, which is reasonable, and I think it's coming out next fall. Any other ideas? I don't like cars much, so the research process sort of sucks. I mean, if I was buying a Mustang with a big growly engine, maybe I could get excited about that, but these super practical cars. Who cares?

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May 23rd, 2007 - So I have this problem with facial hair. I hate to shave, and yet, when I let it grow I end up looking like I should be sitting in the back of the Mystery Machine begging for Scooby Snax. I'm also terribly bored with my face, so I've been experimenting with those patches of fur which grow reliably enough to configure into different patterns.

Mostly I look dumb. I usually maintain what is known colloquially as a "soul patch," but that's such a painfully bad name. Anyway, robots don't have souls, so it's not even accurate in my case.

Now I've gone and grown what people call a goatee. This is a very silly and passe facial hair configuration. My original intent was to use it as a springboard for something even more silly, like a moustache, but now I'm having pangs of ironic regret, which is to say, is it really right to make fun of people with moustaches by growing one and then acting like an ass?

And so, I'm taking suggestions. In a couple of days I will shave what you see here:

I know. Bad. My co-workers have all confirmed that for me. But what should replace it? Some pencil thin Italian job? A chin strap? I might be able to shave my initials in my chin. That could be neat. Of course, Brittney is hoping I'll just shave it all. Off my face, I mean. She's not weird. Not in that way, anyway.

In other, irreverent news, I had some ideas for children's shows, but they all got rejected by PBS, which is super lame because I actually know some people over there and it didn't help at all. What kid wouldn't want to watch Clifford the Coprophagic Dog, Bob the Syphilitic or Bi-Curious George?

I also had an idea for a North Korean restaurant. We'd have a huge menu, and you could order as much as you like for very cheap. What you'd get is just a teaspoon of dry rice and a piece of water cress. And if you complained we'd make you disappear. It'd be a theme restaurant.

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May 21st, 2007 - Some unfinished (unstarted?) business. First of all, early last month Blackbird gave me a "Thinking Blogger" award, which was really awfully nice of her, and I thanked her by not mentioning it, which was sort of an ungrateful think to do. Of course, I could spend some time disingenuously claiming that I'm really not worthy, that I couldn't possibly have provoked any thought with this stupid blog, but that too would be ungrateful and ungracious, and whatever you think of me and this site, I'm at least thoughtful enough to see that. So, thank you Blackbird. You know that I have two small boys at home that are limiting my time severely, and you know I'm not ungrateful. I'm very grate. I'm full of grate. I am.

Second, I've added Schmutzie to my links list on the left. Schmutzie, who is a year younger than I am (i.e. very young), has been diagnosed with cervical cancer, which sucks the most enormous ass you can comprehend. There is a woman who moved into a house on my block this winter who has one of the most enormous asses I've ever seen (I mean her ass is huge!), but Schmutzie's cancer sucks an even larger ass than that one, a cosmically large ass.