This is where my blog lives. It is random and sometimes incoherent. Entries appear irregularly.

February 19th, 2004 - I seem to have lost that writing feeling. Work is cutting short my time for self-indulgent mental masturbation. I no longer study interesting people on the train and write about them as soon as I get home. I have given up describing the view from the Longfellow Bridge. Hell, some mornings I forget to even pull my nose out of whatever book I'm reading to see the damn view. This is either a sign that I'm reading good books or that my assimilation back into the workforce is complete. Either way, I'm not getting enough writing done.

In 22 days I leave for Los Angeles.

Then I'll be able to crowd work out of my brain and refocus on what's important, the aforementioned mental masturbation. I will spend a month driving slowly behind three bicyclists, eating road food and jotting notes about the beauty of this country's wide open spaces. Or at least that's what I hope I'll be doing. I might just end up watching hotel cable and fattening up on bacon at the Shoney's breakfast bar. Come to think of it, that doesn't sound so bad.

When I get back, I'm going to reinstitute the One Project rule at the office, which is to say, I will not run more than one lame ass, middle school textbook publishing project at a time. To listen to multiple groups of whiney editors complain about the state of the pages they're receiving is just too much for me. It creeps into my dreams at night. I find myself having too many imaginary conversations in my head. Oh, I really give it to 'em then. I tell 'em what for.

In anticipation of my trip I've done a few things. First of all I've begun working much less diligently on the projects still on my plate. Mostly that's led to an increase in stress, which, fortunately, is counterbalanced by an equal increase in what I call 'who really caresitis.' It's also meant that I am far too up-to-date on Election '04 news and analysis. Also, that I'm completely disenchanted with and disillusioned by this country's political process. So at least I'm spending the time productively.

In advance of my departure, I've also started accruing a stack of books to take with me. I have "The Longest Night: A Complete Military History of the Civil War," Thoreau's "Walden," Rushdie's "Jaguar Smile," a bit of Hemingway, "Catch 22" which I've never read, and a random assortment of books that I've owned for some time without actually reading. In that pile is "The Makioka Sisters," my mother's favorite novel, and Robertson Davies' "Deptford Trilogy." I think my mother might have sent me that one too. Sorry, Mom. I have this vague idea that I'll get through a couple hundred pages of reading every day for 30 days. Also, I imagine I'll be bored enough to get through stuff like "A Complete Military History of the Civil War," which otherwise I would use to prop up one of the speakers here in my office.

When I left my last office job to try to make a go of writing I discovered that long periods of time could be spent in quiet contemplation of seemingly trivial things. When Brittney came home from work I would tell her all about what I had been thinking during the day, something like "you know, the automobile is really an obsolete technology." And normally she would just look at me, unblinkingly, as if to say, "and so?"

But the thing is, you need to have big chunks of time to think about stuff if you're going to write. It takes time to work your way through ideas, to feel you've really sussed the idea out.

Work is the enemy of thought. It remains in your brain once you've said good night to the receptionist (not that we have a receptionist) and walked out the door. It tires you out and makes you want to sit next to the dog on the couch catching up on 'must see TV.' And once you're there, you're doomed. The television sucks the brain right out of your ear and leaves you a panting, drooling mess. I have forced myself to read in the evenings, so much so that I'm increasingly neurotic about the number of pages I get through in a week. There are books I haven't read yet, and I'm working hard to correct that.

I think reading is something I do to feel better about not having the mental energy to write. If I'm not cranking out the words, I might as well be studying the masters, right? Masters, in this case, refers to anyone with the temerity and good fortune to get published.

I've let myself slide back into bad, old habits, working too much, not eating well enough, not exercising, becoming a slave to routine. Enough is enough. I will be a company guy up until March 12th. After that I'm back to the keyboard with a vengeance.

By the way, this is the one year anniversary of this blog.

February 16th, 2004 - We've been talking about the future a hell of a lot, and I think what we've figured out is that we have no fucking clue what's going to happen.

We were in Vermont over the long weekend, trucking ourselves all over the place, wading out in waist deep snow to look at pieces of land of dramatically varying shapes, sizes and topography. We saw one parcel with a potential view of a lake. We saw another right on the Massachusetts line. We looked at one right down the hill from our friends' place. There was one on Rt.9 (too close to Rt. 9 actually), and one that was really cool but none of us could figure out how to build a house on it without building a bridge first.

I know they say real estate is all about location, location, location, but for us it's also about money, money and money. We envision ourselves in a $300,000 dollar cabin with a heart-fluttering view, but what we have to spend is much less, both in terms of greenbacks and emotional capital. It didn't take us very long to grow frustrated with the process or with each other.

For us, Brittney and I, there are so many big things on the horizon. Soon we will attempt to procreate and I imagine that even our wildest imaginings will fall short of taking in fully how that might change our heretofore self-involved lives. There is also talk of Brittney changing careers, though I would refer you back to this entry's opening sentence for an elucidation of where we are in that process.

On the way home, the very charming and occassionally picturesque way down Rt. 2, I posited that the best way to address all of these major life events was to see which one happened first and figure out how its happening might affect the other stuff. For example, say we find a nice piece of land on which to build a modest little cabin retreat. Does buying that land compromise our ability to contemplate job changes? If not, move forward. If so, reassess hopes and dreams in light of new circumstances.

Brittney, I think, feels somewhat desperate to realize this dream of a second home, or at least to settle the question of whether or not we are going to do it at some point in the relatively near future. I can relate to that. For my part though, the low-level anxiety of parting with large sums of money for any reason (no matter how wonderful) overshadows any need I might have for expediting the process.

Did I mention that we're thinking of trying to make a baby soon?

Truth be told (and it always is, whether explicitly or not), fatherhood is much more on my mind than cabin hunting. Again, refer to this entry's first sentence for my general feelings on the impending procreative adventure.

Well and because I am preoccupied, first by babies and second by dollars, I am finding it really rather difficult to have reasonable conversations about perc testing land to determine the soil's ability to support the defecatory output of a three bedroom home. I can't keep straight whether it costs $20 a foot to lay in a driveway or $100 a foot. I know nothing, and have nothing to offer, on the legal intricacies of subdividing parcels of land, nor can I take seriously my friends' attempts to flesh out there own ideas with regard to septic systems, subdivision and gravel fill. With real estate, common sense seems never to apply.

And that's fortunate, because I'm lacking in common sense at the moment. I have the feeling of being swept along in a strong current, and though I don't know where I'll end up, I have this strange new faith that it'll be ok, that I might end up with a beautiful little place in the woods, a beautiful wife AND a beautiful baby. The key, I'm guessing, is not to think about it too much.

February 9th, 2004 - There's something about the way Vladimir Horowitz played the piano. This, it would seem, is a fairly obvious opinion to express, but I am hardly the connoisseur of classical musics and still I can tell the difference between his playing and say, Van Cliburn. To me, it sounds like Horowitz was sent by Chopin and Shumann and Beethoven and Liszt and Mozart as their representative. It's as if they whispered in his ear, 'here Vladimir, like this. It goes like this.'

I have an album of Horowitz doing Mozart piano concertos that I often listen to while walking the dog in the morning. Classical is good for my brain when it's still in that fuzzy, staticky, just-woke-up state. And because I am a little less plugged in to what's going on, to when the changes are coming, to the dynamics of each piece, things jump out at me occasionally. I hear jokes and punchlines in the notes. I hear sarcastic comments made as asides to much more serious discussion.

Tonight I stopped in Harvard Square on the way home and picked up 'In the Hands of the Master - Vladimir Horowitz: The Definitive Recordings.' It's a 3 CD set and I'm not entirely certain what makes it 'definitive' other than the marketing people at Sony Classical saying so. It was one of roughly 50 discs behind the little plastic Horowitz tab in the rack, most of them with pictures of him, tall and thin and invariably tuxedoed, either bent over the keys or turning to smile a cocky smile. It was on sale, $14.99, and I liked the packaging.

Part of what I like about Horowitz is that he was kind of a prick, or rather, he knew he was good. He seems to have been playing to make that point over and over and over again, daring anyone to play better. I also like the bow ties and the way he looked so comfortable in all those old wool suits. Even in the '50s and '60s when he was at the top of his game, he was like a throw back, like Eastern European royalty from the 19th century, stepping out of a time machine to entertain.

There is a caricature in my mind of the classical pianist. Tails, candelabra, heavy velvet curtains, a single spotlight drawing the audience's attention. Horowitz drew that caricature and was the only pianist that didn't look sort of silly in it. Later, Liberace drew a caricature of the caricature, maybe because he knew he could never measure up to Horowitz.

But what am I talking about? What do I know? I always sort of hated classical music, mostly because it's all my mother would listen to. I was tortured with it in the car on the way to school, on the way home, as we ran errands. She wouldn't let me change the station even later, when I had my license and would go alone to the grocery store for her. She said it was too hard to tune in again, the classical station in Mobile, AL, where I grew up, taking up a sliver of the FM register, down near the bottom.

There is something willfully ignorant and snobby about classical music. Its listeners tend to disparage pop and country and blues and bluegrass. Sometimes they make room in their musical ivory tower for jazz, but not very often. To me, that just says they don't know much about music, they're closed off to the subtle charms of three guitar chords forced through an overdriven twelve inch speaker at speed, to the twang of banjo and mandolin. They don't feel their music. They just think it sounds nice.

I still don't listen to a lot of classical. Much of it is too dramatic for my tastes and even I, a philistine, can tell that the popular classical stations play the same pieces over and over again. When I do put some on the turntable here in my office or in the CD player downstairs I almost never pick orchestral music. I'm not much for symphonies. I prefer a single instrument, one voice talking to me at a time.

Which brings me back to Horowitz. As I type, 'In the Hands of the Master' is tinkling out the tiny speakers connected to my computer, the bass notes lightly rumbling the sub-woofer under the desk. I wonder, if I was able to affect some kind of hypnotic trance, could I channel Horowitz bent over the plastic keys of this very much smaller keyboard, a beady sweat rising on my brow, each finger, arched perfectly, drawing some masterpiece out of the instrument.

February 5th, 2004 - Tea. Black, green and herbal. Maybe it's my Welsh genes. Maybe it's my inability to properly process the acid/caffeine rush of a good old cup o'joe. Maybe it's my aversion to paying $3.75 for a paper cup filled with hot water that's been strained through ground beans. But I love tea.

Even in the days when my stomach could still withstand the rigors of regular coffee consumption, I enjoyed a cup of tea, but I was much less particular then about leaves and proper steepage and certainly less aware of the vast panoply of teas and teasans available for short money and the willingness to search a little.

The very best tea in the world is a Japanese green tea/brown rice blend called genmaicha or more correctly genmai cha, the cha meaning tea. Now green tea with brown rice doesn't sound very appealing. This I can admit. But let me assure you that genmaicha combines the subtle stimulation of your normal, earthy green tea with a soothing, homey taste (a bit like Cheerios) that leaves me perfectly satisfied each and every time I drink it. I first tried genmaicha at the home of some friends down on Martha's Vineyard and since then I've pursued it high and low and am slowly working my way through a number of brands to determine which is the best. The original Eden Organics genmaicha that is available at some grocery stores is good. The 88 oriental supermarkets here in Boston sell a further five or six brands, including Wakamatsu and some others that I recognize by the colors of their boxes and not their names. Right now, I like Wakamatsu best, but the one in the light gold plastic wrap is also quite good.

Having dubbed genmaicha the best tea in the world, I should take a step back and make clear that genmaicha is actually the best every day tea in the world, good whenever and wherever you want it. There are some other teas which, when consumed in the right context, actually rise above your basic genmaicha to deliver a tea experience non pareil.

Once such cup is the special darjeeling they make at the Tibetan restaurant in Central Square, Cambridge. What makes their darjeeling so far superior to the other inky black sub-continentals is the method of preparation. Instead of steeping in water and then bringing you the result to cream and sugar to your own unsophisticated taste, they boil the tea leaves in milk and bring it to you in a thick, ceramic mug. I add a lot of sugar (preferably turbinado sugar), but not so much that you'd watch me do it and shudder. That darjeeling is a perfect cup of tea with no equal anywhere.

The other context dependent cuppa that springs to mind is the tea my Aunt Mair makes at Cymcignant Farm in Wales. I am sure she's brewing up a fairly mundane Typhoo or Twinings brand English tea in those creamy ceramic pots of hers, but what makes her tea so amazingly amazing is the fresh, whole milk that sits on the counter in her kitchen. Because Cymcignant is a dairy farm, the milk comes fresh from the milking parlor, unpasteurized and unskimmed. It's like liquid ice cream and it turns any tea is touches into a bionic concoction of astounding quality. My uncles Cyril and Phil drink it down like it was nothing, but I've live in a tea wilderness here in the States. I know better.

Another rock solid, every day tea is chamomile. And though you're image of chamomile is a thin, milky cup served by a matronly woman who wears her glasses on a chain and has cats, let me say that this beverage bears no resemblance to the chamomile I know. Sure, I have sipped at Celestial Seasonings Sleepytime tea, a chamomile blend, and I regularly enjoy a chamo/green tea mix I picked up at Super 88 in Chinatown. But by far the best chamomile I've ever had the pleasure to slurp was brewed from a tea ball packed with chamomile buds grown by my wife in the garden behind our house. You would never insult a tea of its pedigree by sloshing milk into the cup with it. That would be rude.

Now to brewing methods. My mother used to insist, when I made tea for her, that I boil the water and then pour it into the empty mug to warm it up in anticipation of the tea. That way the brew would stay hot longer. I hated doing that, but now that I'm a little older, a little more patient and a little more appreciative of tea's savory goodness, it's how I brew every cup I drink. For your average black tea, whether Earl Grey or Irish Breakfast, darjeeling or assam, it's best to boil the water and pour it, still bubbling into the cup or pot. For green teas and herbals I find it's best to boil the water and then let it settle a minute before steeping. Green tea is a little more sensitive and it gets bitter if you make it too hot. Also, never, never, never put the cream in the cup before the water. I won't explain why because if you make your tea this way you are clearly an oblivious boob and no explanation is going to penetrate your thick skull. Finally, only use cream or half-and-half with tea. Milk doesn't stand up properly in the mix. It doesn't add the flavor you want from a lactose-rich accessory.

I'm going to leave it at that for now. I've not even mentioned rooibos, lapsang suchog, oolong, kukicha, jasmine or barley teas. I've glossed right over the standing army of herbals. I've stuck to the basics, the stuff you'll find in my cup most mornings, afternoons and evenings when I'm just going about my daily business, and the superlatives, the truly transcendant teas, the consumption of which is more akin to a religious ritual than the brazen quaffing of hot water with dead leaves in it.

All of this is likely wasted on you anyway. You're probably the type of person willing to ask for something called a Vente Skim Mochachino and then trust a pimply college kid to serve as surrogate barrista shovelling it across the counter and expecting to hear your change tinkle in his audacious tip cup. I understand. You're busy. You need coffee to keep you going. You haven't got time to boil and steep. You haven't got time for a cup of tea.

February 3rd, 2004 - Today is Primary Day, the seven state romp that may well serve as coronation of the new Democratic king. Rivals spar and speechify. John Edwards went on an on about his two Americas. Joe Lieberman failed to ride the recent wave of Joementum to a top three finish anywhere, at least not as of the last counting. With 1% of the precincts reporting, we have a winner!!

Oh, I don't mean to be sarcastic (yes, I do), but frankly I have reached the end of my patience with Campaign '04. Honestly, what has all the news watching and paper reading this election season done for me? Nothing.

Here's why: I live in Massachusetts. We're not a primary state. We have virtually no impact on the choice of Democratic candidate. We get to sit by and watch while Iowa, New Hampshire and now these other seven get their say in who I might be able to vote for in November. But beyond being able to donate $2,000 to the campaign of my choice (as if I have $2,000 to donate to anyone) is my only real option for making my political voice heard over the din of minor states casting their official ballots.

Here's another reason I've been wasting my time by paying any attention at all: I live in Massachusetts. Was that the first reason I gave? It was? Well, it's the second one too. Massachusetts, and all its electoral college votes, are going to go to whomever the Democrats decide to nominate this year. (Oh boy! We do get to have the convention here in Boston, ironic since we will have had nothing to do with choosing the annointed one. Ah well, I guess a party is better than nothing at all). So I live in a state whose electoral votes may already be counted, and since the electoral college chooses the president rather than the popular vote, any vote I might cast for someone other than the incumbent crap for brains or the blowhard the Democrats pick counts for absolutely nothing. There's no linking up with a bunch of crazies in each state to deliver some infinitesimal bit of hope to a third party, any third party, any party at all that's not a convention designed as a de facto pep rally for someone the fine folks in Iowa and New Hampshire chose last week.

We don't have popular democracy in this country. We only pretend we do by trumping up 'get out the vote' campaigns and chiding our foreign friends who live under dictatorships or oligarchies.

Let me ask you this though, what's the difference between a nation of 300 million (us) with two choices at the polls, and a country of say 23 million (Saudi Arabia) with only one choice (i.e. no choice at all). Everyone laughed when Henry Ford said you could have your Model T in any color you wanted as long as that color was black, but we all bumble onward with the Republicans and the Democrats as our only political choices. And isn't it funny that the Republicans and Democrats are the ones who could change our system just enough to make every vote count, to rely on the will of the people rather than caucusing each state and counting voting blocks to determine who will get the most powerful position in the whole world? Answer: no, it's not really very funny.

Now hang on just a minute, because as I'm reading back through all this I start to wonder who the wackjob is behind this little rant. Don't misunderstand me. There are many issues (my mother hates that word) on which I share the views of an incumbent Democrat or Republican. I am not sounding the slightly unhinged battle cry of the Libertarians.

All I want is more ways to solve the very real problems Americans have, with healthcare, with the tax system, with foreign policy and unemployment. If I was a business looking for a vendor to complete a big and complicated project (like running the most powerful nation on Earth for example), I would sure as hell solicit more than two bids, wouldn't you?

So as Primary Day winds down and the plastic-haired commentators sift through the ashes to tell us what America thinks about the Democratic candidates for president and their (in)ability to topple George W from his perch, realize that the entire debate, the whole damn discussion, is already framed as a choice between two fairly similar ways of doing things. And think about how involved you are in that choice, how empowered you feel to make a difference in the way our country does things.

Jeeze, I'd vote for just about anybody who could find a way to give me a real say in what goes on.

February 2nd, 2004 - Today I sold myself back into wage slavery. After my wonderful wife afforded me the opportunity to take nearly a year off and pursue a writing career, I took a contract project management gig to asuage my guilt at not contributing meaningfully to payment of the mortgage. I was working three days a week and writing the rest of the time.

Then I took another project from the publishing services group I did the first work for and started working four days a week. Then, without asking, they gave me another project, so that I was working five days a week but still getting in at ten and cutting out at three or four o'clock in the afternoon.

Well today I somehow stumbled headlong into a fourth project, a doozie by the looks of it. Full-time labor can't be far away. I sat down with my de facto boss and explained that if I was going to work full-time I needed to get paid like someone who was selling the better part of their peak mental hours to an enterprise he wasn't convinced deserved them. Heads nodded. Sunshine was blown up asses. I left thinking a significan raise was somehow in the offing.

And for the first time in my life, I'm not sure I'm happy about it.

Don't get me wrong. I'm grateful for it. More money is (tautologically) more money, and that's very seldom a bad thing. But have I sold my dream, not to the highest bidder, but really to the first and only bidder?

On the one hand, we have plans. We are actively searching for a plot of land on which to build a second home. In the spring we will endeavor to make a baby. There is a very real and growing cost of living, and any extra money I can make will seemingly come in handy later.

On the other hand, what good are future plans if you're not in the right frame of mind to either execute or thereafter enjoy them? I've done this project management thing before and driven myself into a workaday misery at it. It happens just like this. You do a decent job on something. Your employer wants you to take on more. The new work goes fairly well. They want you to take on more. Eventually you're drowning in a sea of details and responsibilities that overwhelm any sense you had of self outside of work.

I don't want to repeat the pattern, but I'm afraid it's in my DNA.

I have this vague idea that if I can learn to compartmentalize, to keep work at work, then I'll be alright. When I was working three days-a-week it wasn't hard, but now it seems well nigh impossible. Perhaps I'm just not cut out for a career as such. Maybe the real message in all these work-related ructions is that I was meant to be poor, to live a leisurely if unmoneyed existence, to betray the work ethic of my forebears and run off on picaresque adventures.

Yeah. Probably not.

January 28th, 2004 - What I really needed was an editor, and that's why, last night, after I'd read what my friend Shawn had to say, and after Tom and Christine had expounded at length on what was good and what was bad with the piece I had submitted for our writers' group meeting, I felt buzzy and a little overwhelmed by it all.

On one hand there was so much good, concrete advice on the piece itself. I resisted the urge to sit right down after they'd left and knock out a revised draft, giving myself a little time and space to gain perspective. The things that need to be done, the bits that need to be trimmed out and pared down, keep repeating themselves in my head. I am excited to see what the piece turns into finally.

Finally I think I see the way forward. Beyond grammatical and mechanical help, my friends reminded me of some important rules for writing effective prose, not least of which is, know what it is you're writing about. It's amazing how you can so easily lose track. Now I see all of what I've written in the last year more clearly and feel better able to evaluate what works and what doesn't. That too is tremendously exciting.

At the same time I feel completely awash in thoughts of the future. These are mostly self-defeating. Will I ever be good enough? Am I really making any progress or just fooling myself into thinking so? Is this a collosal waste of time? What makes me different than any other would-be writer, doing my exercises and sending stuff to editors so overwhelmed with submissions you're lucky to get a rejection notice?

And yet I want to continue, to keep at something for once. I have always been impatient, with myself and with others. I want everything I write to spring out onto the page whole and perfect the first time. Those of you who live on planet Earth know this almost never happens for anyone anywhere. Me, I'm just getting the picture.

So writing works against my two (yes, two) biggest problems, impatience and laziness, though I think laziness might just be the natural offspring of impatience. Because I want everything now and think I might not be able to get it, I work less hard.

I suppose the best approach is to focus on the present, the piece in front of me, and write only for my own pleasure, independent of some future rejection or publication. Stop thinking about successes and failures. Think only of the next word to leave my fingers and manifest itself on this screen.

JESUS CHRIST! I'm not sure I'm built for this.

I know. I know. It's really not all that entertaining to read about another person's self doubt, or their self discovery for that matter. What we all want is to read about ourselves even if it's in someone else's words. So I will try not to bore you like this again. It was never my intention to turn this space into an on-line diary, though I've failed in that regard on more than one occasion. Tomorrow, I promise, we'll talk about you.

January 25th, 2004 - What is the urge to express opinions? And why can I not control it? Is it genetic? Is it some mild form of Turret's? Is their some undergirding delusion of self-importance at its root? Is their a prescription I can take? There seems to be a prescription for just about everything else now.

Those who know me might refer to me, affectionately, as an opinionated son-of-a-bitch, and I have done yeoman's work justifying the description. At dinner parties, over roasted pork loin, I have wrestled conversations away from their rightful owners, whipped them to a frenzy with impassioned arguements and sneering judgements and successfully killed whatever warm, collegial feeling existed before.

I am a rotten person to sit in a business meeting with too. I believe, apparently, that there is a right way to do things and also a wrong way. I am naively idealistic, honest to a fault and impatient with bad ideas. I am that awful prick across the veneered conference room table who keeps sighing every time you suggest we come up with a mission statement for whatever project we're working on.

Mission statements, by the way, are stupid and useless.

In fact, I am so wholly opinionated and so forthcoming that often I don't even realize I'm telling someone what I think about whatever it is they're doing. I just start talking and only figure out I'm offering unsolicited input when the expression on their face sours and the conversation comes to an abrupt and uncomfortable end. Oh yeah. It's charming alright.

So I'm trying something different. Brittney has begun a new musical project, a collection of lullabies. She and her fellow musicians are in the process of picking out songs and arranging them. I think they want to record a disc's worth and see how it comes out. I'm sure they'll do a very nice job.

In the meantime I'm killing myself not to say what I think about this song or that song or offer advice about instrumentation. I'm steadfastly adhering to a code of silence on this one, to let her do what she's going to do free of my meddling. I have absolute faith it will be brilliant, even if the effort of remaining quiet gave me a stomach ache this afternoon.

I also have a big writers' group meeting on Tuesday, the first one where we'll be discussing our work. I've submitted an essay I wrote about my grandfather, and I'm very anxious to get some feedback on it. Having said that, I might have to resort to duct taping my mouth shut so as to actually hear what my writing friends have to say. I have that horrible habit of answering every criticism before it's fully out of the critic's mouth, even though the criticism is what I really, really want more than anything.

Maybe that's the thing. I seldom really want to know what other people think. I only ask their opinions as a pretext for expounding my own view. I'm not sure whether it's egotism or a pervasive fear they might know something I don't. Either way, it's a pretty crappy way to be, don't you think?

January 24th, 2004 - I spent about an hour this afternoon flipping through a storage bin full of pictures in the guest room closet. There were about a thousand wedding snaps, none of them very good, two thousand shots from our myriad Cape Cod vacations, a random sleeve here and there of other vacations, Germany, Mexico, Iceland, and then a smattering of at home pics, Brittney and me in front of a Christmas tree, her gardening, me shovelling snow, that sort of thing.

The point was to go through and pick out the ones worthy of framing, either 4x6 or 5x7. I have sort of a mad framing project going on in the downstairs bathroom. You should check it out next time you're at our house and need to pee.

Anyway, I was thinking as I was flipping through all those pictures, it's funny the people who stick with you and the ones who drift off into the ether. I kept seeing these faces from the past, like Carolyn Elkins for example, who sat smiling next to me in a shot taken at Charlie and Nancy's wedding. They invited her because we all worked together at the time and because Carolyn sat through all the same boring meetings we did. Of course, we really never saw her outside of work, and that's why, when we stopped working together, we never saw her again.

Our own wedding pictures featured many of the same sorts of characters.

It's like you can see someone every day, know their kids' names, know where they're from and that they prefer Starbucks to Dunkin Donuts, but still somehow not really connect. So you pose next to them at office parties when the receptionist corners you with the digital camera. You keep it in strictest confidence when they tell you about the better job offer they've fielded from a company much closer to their home, and then you pay for their farewell lunch at the Chinese buffet.

You like them, but they're not really friends.

And as I sat their pulling stacks of snapshots out of their paper envelopes, mulling over the seeming fragility of certain sorts of relationships, the thin line between acquaintance and friendship, what I really wanted to know was: what is it that makes one person a friend for life and another person a throw away personality, just a smiling face in one corner of the picture?

I mean it's not as if I didn't like those people. I liked them. They were nice. They were funny. They were smart. I can only guess that maybe there's some sort of pheromonal attraction between friends too. Carolyn Elkins was nice enough, but on some deep, subconcious level she didn't smell right I guess.

On the other hand, there are those who did stick. If you're reading this, you're likely one of them. So let me ask you: What is it that draws us together? What's so goddamn compelling about me that you want not only to take pictures of me, but also have me over for dinner or make vacation plans together? Do you like the way I smell or the way I sit quietly in a chair reading a book? Do you think I photograph better from the left or from the right?

Today I framed Brittney's friend Jessica, walking barefoot with her daughter Isabella. Jessica lives in Hawaii now and just had her second baby, a boy. I also enshrined a couple of old black and whites, the first one of Ben, Chris, Dave and me in suits on the front porch of our old apartment in Somerville the day of Mike Doherty's wedding, the other, Eliot and Chris and me on the beach in Wellfleet on one of those Cape vacations. I did a smaller one of Esra and Lynn, who both live in New York now.

Sometimes when I hang a picture I wonder if it will still be hanging there when my kids are old enough to ask me who the person in it is. As I tap the nail into the wall my lips move in imagined conversation with a child yet to be conceived. I say, 'This is your daddy's friend Dave. We were college roommates, and when he got married I was the best man.'

Of course, the truth is Dave and I will probably still be friends then and my kids will know him and not need to ask who he is, and the people who drift away won't be hanging on the wall anymore. I will have replaced them with someone else, won't I?

January 21st, 2004 - More and more I find myself completely aghast at the way our government works. Forget the fact (and it is a simple and irrefutable fact) that our highest elected officials are beholden to a relatively small cadre of wealthy corporations and other private interests. Push past the inane bait-and-switch routine the sitting president has played with our reasons for going to war in Iraq, and then willfully overlook the bellicose maunderings of the current crop of Democrats seeking to replace him. Beyond all that, there remains so much to be shocked and awed by.

We are getting closer and closer to annointing a Democratic challenger to the incumbent buffoon, and we are doing that, not by a national vote of registered Democratic voters, but rather by heavily weighting the outcomes of a caucus in Iowa and a primary in New Hampshire.

WHAT?

120,000 people voted in the Iowa Caucus. Even less will participate in New Hampshire. And yet this group will, in effect, choose the Democratic candidate. Sure, other factors will come to bear, and certainly the good citizens of those two states deserve some say in the process, BUT HOLY CHRIST DO WE NOT HAVE A BETTER WAY OF DOING IT THAN THAT?!?!

Simultaneously, President Bush is beginning to turn his steely gaze (vacant stare?) toward election politics, and beginning with last night's State of the Union address he has begun to stake out some of his positions, one of which is spending federal budget dollars on a program to encourage poor (heterosexual) folks to get married. Actually, he's proposing to spend $1.5 billion on it.

WHAT?

As interested as I am (not at all) in the relationship dynamics of my fellow Americans, how can it possibly be the business of the federal government how we conduct ourselves in matters of the heart? And furthermore, this is a Republican proposal. Aren't they the small-federal-government-let's-not-have-a-lot-of-superfluous-federal-programs people? OH MY GOD IT MAKES ME WANT TO MOVE TO CANADA!!!!

Finally (luckily because I could go on and on), I read in the paper the other day (actually I read it in a number of papers) that little was likely to get accomplished in Congress this year, because it's an election year and everyone is too worried about alienating their base of support to take on any substantive legislation.

WHAT?

We pay these people to run our country and they dare take a year off? Someone call HR. Someone read the fine print in our contract. How could we possibly have come to a place where the federal government feels they don't need to do their jobs properly in an election year and the nation's press writes about as if it's no big deal?

Is this the great malfunctioning wreck of American democracy that we're trying to export to the Middle East? Are these the principles that our uniformed children are dieing for on foreign shores? Is this the payment we are making on our historical debt to people like Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, Fredrick Douglas, Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., the Kennedy brothers and others who led us forward out of the muck of our own hatreds and injustices?

Now I don't mean to be dramatic (too late). These United States have had so many good ideas over the last 228 years and gotten so many things right that the things we continue to screw up just leave me scratching my head. I want change, change for the better, so badly, and sometimes I feel so powerless, like I'm watching the train derail and crush the hapless school bus in slow-motion, that I wonder if the whole country has gone completely crazy.

I'll tell you what I think (as if I hadn't already). I think we've allowed ourselves to be deceived for so long, we don't even know what's right anymore. The president (or our congressperson, or our mayor) lies a little bit and we let him get away with it. Then he lies a little more based on the first lie. Shampoo. Rinse. Repeat. Suddenly you've got over 100,000 troops stationed in a desert nation halfway around the globe fending off random attacks from a nebulous enemy while the president's buddies bill the American taxpayer billions of dollars for projects they never bid on in the first place.

And to some people this makes sense, but I don't get it.

January 20th, 2004 - Today has been a wire-to-wire day. I convinced myself to push back the covers and dismount the bed at ten-to-seven, and then did the dress-in-the-dark thing while the dog got up, stretched himself and nosed the bedroom door to be let out. Ten minutes later we were taking our first skittering steps over icy sidewalks, which is when I realized how god damned cold it was. By the time we made the turn up by the gymnasium at Tufts my face was beginning to hurt as the wind really rather inconsiderately beat against it.

Home in one cold piece, I grabbed a quick shower and headed out for work. The first bus had the words 'NO STOPS' scrolling across its handy sign board. The second was the 80, bound for Lechmere Station and not much use to me. Finally the 96 arrived and I was on my way.

On the other end of the commute I froze large portions of my ass off walking across the Broadway Bridge with the aforementioned wind really beginning to piss me off. I have decided that I am over this whole winter thing now. Congratulations, Winter! You've broken my spirit by the middle of January! I can only assume you'll rub it in by remaining Saskwatch cold for another three months.

Anyway, after I'd unwrapped myself from all the fleece and wool stuff you're forced to don this time of year, I turned to my desk only to see that the little light on my phone was blinking, the one that means, 'You've got voicemail!' I hate that. Nothing ruins a morning quite like having something demanded of you right away. In this case it was a client calling to find out where the pages I promised her were.

"Well," I thought to myself, "that's an excellent question. Where are the pages I promised you, the ones I said would be waiting for you when you came in, the ones I assured you it wouldn't be any problem to get, the ones the editor promised me he'd send yesterday, the last 12 pages on a small project that I am only too ready to have done with? Where are they?

This and many other mysteries filled my whole work day, convincing me, once again, that fastidious preparation and planning are good for shit when other people aren't interested in doing their own jobs properly. In order to alleviate some of the stress I was feeling I sent a couple snippy e-mails to another client and then was passively aggressive on a conference call. That and a cup of luke warm tea got me through the afternoon.

After performing the mass transit tango in reverse, I stomped up the stairs to our front door and let myself in, only to see that our friends Dave and Elin, over to discuss the imminent, joint purchase of acreage in Vermont, had beaten me there and were already perusing the takeout menu of the pizza place across the street. Oh boy! Nothing caps a stressful day quite like a fat-laden dinner supped from a disposable, aluminum tray.

A few hours of frenzied and stressful discussion regarding the land purchase ensued. At some point I started talking about how I really couldn't see the deal working out and generally whining about the way real estate transactions are always full of so many unseen problems. The dog broke much of the tension by being a general pain in the ass, trying to lick everyone's face or entice them into playing tug-o-war with him.

And now here I sit, whining away to you, my Internet friend. You probably deserve better, but at the moment I could really care less.

Thanks for listening.

January 19th, 2004 - We've been in Vermont again. This time we saw some land we think we might want, or rather, this time we revisited a piece of property that didn't seem so great before but now seems much more attractive. We were there in better weather. We were there with friends who are thinking about buying the adjacent parcel. We were there with a better idea of how far our money (our very little money) will go in Southern Vermont.

The realtor is calling us back with particulars, and we have begun, against our better judgement, to get excited.

In keeping with my nature as a fairly cheap person, I am most anxious about the money. I am forever calculating mortgage rates and factoring in taxes and insurance and all those other things that seldom get considered when people buy houses. The catch in this case is that we would be building a house, albeit a very small one.

If I push my anxiety aside for a minute I can see that we have the money. We got the house we live in now (and what a wonderful house it is) for a very good price. Many of our friends have significantly higher mortgage payments than we do and get by just fine. In fact you'd be hardpressed to rent a decent two-bedroom apartment for what we pay for our handsome three-bedroom house now. The way I figure it, we could finance the building of a nice little second home without stretching our finances much at all.

But honestly, when I think about it I have all sorts of neuroses come bubbling to the surface. Like my father I am fiscally very conservative (read: cheap) and security is very important to me. I like to have a nice cushion between me and the poor house. I like to know that no one can take any of my stuff away from me, that I'm not in any way over-extended. I like things to be bought and paid for. I abhor making payments.

And I wonder if I even deserve a second home. Have I worked hard enough? Is it somehow bourgeois to dream of a little place in the mountains to retreat to on weekends, a place where the phone doesn't ring and there's no TV, a place we can take the children we don't have yet to ski and sled and tramp around in the woods? I don't know if I'm worthy of that. I'm not sure it's part of my birth right.

Clearly, there's a question of self-esteem involved.

I have a feeling I'm in a showdown with a dream. The dream is daring me to live it. Do I have the balls to plonk my money (our money) down and find out if reality matches up? Is there something self-defeating in my attitude that leads me to believe that it could never be what I want it to be? I think there is. And I think that's bullshit.

One of the things I whispered to myself when my friend Todd died was this: Do not underlive what's left of your time here on this planet. Do the things you want to do. Eat life.

Of course once you get past the dream part, this place seems like a pretty sound investment as well. It's ten minutes from a major ski area, ten minutes from a quaint little town and accessible from a major highway. If it doesn't work out, I'm guessing it wouldn't be hard to sell and move on. Really, the risk to reward ratio doesn't bear calculation.

But then, we might not even get to buy this land at all. And then where are we? At the very least we will have walked through the possibilities and discovered whether or not we want to press on in our search. We might also have tested our ability to pursue a rapidly developing vision for the future and evaluated a new set of priorities that doesn't hinge on the next business cycle of whatever companies we're working for at the moment.

Maybe we're aleady living the dream.

January 15th, 2004 - The Charles froze while the wind was still chopping it to a frothy mess, but I couldn't help wondering if it was safe to walk across now that the mercury has dropped clear out the bottom of the thermometer here. I can't imagine some wacky MIT kids not attempting to ford the solid rivertop, pushing a 200 pound dummy in front of them to check the ice for weak spots. For half a minute I thought about doing it myself. Can you imagine the thrill, standing in that one spot in this city that no one ever stands, the one spot that can only be occupied on a day as cold as today?

New Englanders have begun to mean all the things they're saying about the weather. Generally this is not the case. Complaining about cold or snow or rain or wind is normally just sport, something to laugh about, something to pass the time. But this week everyone is awed.

"I can't believe it!" they say, coming in from the cold and shedding half their mass in coats and scarves.

"My face went totally numb on the way here from the bus stop," they moan.

"Don't let your dog outside except to do his business," I have been warned.

That didn't keep Eddie and me from playing fetch in the field for twenty minutes this morning.

The paper ran a story yesterday on how to be safe in such frigid temperatures. Wear a hat, they said. You lose 40% of your heat through your head, which was a good thing to hear because people often repeat this bit of scientific fact to me adjusting the percentage to make their point about pulling a piece of stretchy wool down over your ears. I've got a fancy wool and fleece number with ear flaps and two little ties so you can make a bow under your chin. Yesterday I was cold enough to do just that.

Also, say the experts, avoid alcohol and caffeine. They increase the likelihood of hypothermia. Of course that hasn't stopped people from walking out of Dunkin Donuts with enormous styrofoam cups full of java. It certainly didn't stop the homeless guy I passed yesterday on the way to work from tipping up a paper-bagged bottle of vodka like a kid chugging orange juice from the carton on his way out the door to school.

Apparently we have shifting air currents to blame for all this. A blast of Arctic air that normally stays Arctic has slipped its reins and stampeded through New England. I hope our suffering is alleviating someone else's pain, that Finns are sunbathing in Helsinki this week. Those people deserve a break anyway, right? They've got the highest suicide rate in Europe.

On Saturday it is supposed to warm up into the 20s, and then we'll all feel the benefit of this precipitous dip in the temperature because 25 will seem cozy. When we got a few days respite last week, the mercury hovering around freezing, it honestly seemed quite comfortable. I left the house in a t-shirt and an unbuttoned wool coat and thought nothing of it.

In the back of my mind is the second week of March, that's when I leave for a four-week trip from Los Angeles to somewhere in the middle of America. I'm driving an RV as support vehicle for my friend Nancy, who, along with another couple riders, will be pedalling her way across the country to raise money for the Brain Tumor Society. Nancy has a brain tumor. Oh...and she'll be turning 40 shortly. I'll be the pit crew and chauffeur through the first four weeks of the ride. You can check out the route here.

Anyway, I imagine it will be warm where I'm going. After freezing her ass off in the Rockies on her last trans-continental ride ten years ago, Nancy set this one up to take in Arizona and New Mexico and the panhandle of Texas. I can't quite envision myself rolling down desert highways in a recreational vehicle, but I'm looking forward to it nonetheless. I think maybe, unlike tomorrow when I'm fairly certain I'll freeze my ass off on the way to work where they're having a contest to see who can wear the most ridiculous winter get up, the not-knowing-what-to-expect about my trip is what's so exciting. I hope to read a lot of books, write a lot of words and see a lot of places I've never seen before.

Until then, I'll be losing the stupid winter clothes contest and eating the free Japanese food (that goes along with the contest) that's meant to raise our morale on this coldest day of the year.

January 10th, 2004 - Midnight is a funny time. It's just gone 12am now, and though I've dated this entry January 10th, technically it's the 11th. The thing is, I'm not done with the 10th yet. I woke up and did a bunch of stuff, worked on a long article for the next Soccer New England, hooked up our new stereo, did some cleaning. Then I watched the end of the Patriot's game and went back to work on the article. And now suddenly it's midnight.

You should know that I'm not normally up this late. By 11pm I'm usually nodding off with a book on my chest. Occasionally, when Brittney can't sleep and is flopping around in the bed, I'm up a little later, but I'm certainly never sitting here in front of the machine this late tapping away.

The house takes on a different kind of vibe when it gets later. The dog is asleep. The TV is off. The light is all soft and mellow. And there's less traffic on Boston Ave. to fill in the background noise. A motorcycle just went by, and when it was gone all I could hear was the hum of the computer. Ah, the hypnotic hum of the computer. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

I'm up because I have so much work to catch up on and Brittney is out playing a gig at Roosevelt's up in Salem. She likes for me to be awake when she gets home all wired still from stage nerves. She'll want to eat something and chatter away at me for about fifteen minutes about what went right and what went wrong. Then she'll crash. It'll be very late by then.

One thing I notice about the writing I do after about 10pm is that it seems ok at the time, in fact sometimes it seems really very good, but then in the harsh light of morning it ends up reading pretty poorly. It's sort of like the person you hook up with at the bar (not that I've hooked up with anyone, anywhere in the last decade) just before last call. In the strained minutes before the bar closes people are cuter and funnier. If you're lucky, they crawl out of bed and catch a cab home before the sun rises.

I suppose there's little hope of these words doing that.

Can you imagine? You're walking down the street and a blog passes by in the back of a cab. You think to yourself, 'Jeeze, that didn't look good. I'm glad I'm not waking up to that.'

January 9th, 2004 - When I was growing up in Alabama and the temperature would drop into the 40s, we kids would say, 'It's cold as a witch's titty in a brass bra!' and then laugh uncontrollably and repeat it and laugh again. That's what it's like when you're a kid. I miss it.

And you Yankees, because that's how southerners think of you, are all scoffing because the 40s demand only a sweater and light jacket from your closet. The 40s are the balmy temps of late fall and early spring. The 40s are, to borrow a very short line from Monty Python, 'luxury!'

But then you Yankees haven't been to Mobile and felt the 40s that go along with always high humidity. You haven't sat yourselves on a dock overlooking Mobile Bay, where Faragut's cannonballs left holes in people's antebellum beach houses just up the way, and felt the sting of a wet breeze sweeping in off the water. If you had, you would know that the 40s can sometimes be 'cold as a witch's titty in a brass bra.'

Of course, in the 30s it begins to get earnestly cold. If the sun is shining and the air is still they are most bearable, refreshing even. These are the pleasantly brisk mornings when your breath clouds the air and your cheeks flush a rosey red. I have often felt comfortable with the temperature hovering only slightly above freezing.

But this is where the 30s can be deceptive, because 34 and raining is so completely and incomprehensibly different from 34 and sunny. The 30s have a way, in January and February and March, of worming their way down the front of your heavy coat, past the protective shield of your scarf and woolen fringe of your sweater, to impart what my wife calls a 'deep down body chill.' When I look out the window to see that the thermometer on the front porch is registering a temperature in the 30s, I am immediately distrustful. Often I will step out the door and stand for a moment, tasting the air and wind and moisture levels, like a wine drinker swishing claret under their nose. The 30s may be warm enough, or they may be deathly cold. Beware the 30s.

The 20s, on the other hand, are straighforwardly cold. There is a feeling you get in your skin, a sort of buzzing, hurting sting, often beginning in the ears and spreading to cheeks and extremities, when the mercury drops into the 20s. Fortunately, rain is not possible when it's this cold and falling snow has a way of warming the air, unless of course it's sheeting sideways in a stiff wind. When that's happening, you would more than welcome a cozy cuddle with the aforementioned witch, her titties and that magical brass bra.

The teens. The teens are brutally cold. The teens are face-painingly frigid. Cover your skin and move quickly. We had some very cold days last winter, noontime temps of 12 and 15 and 17, and I was bound to walk the dog in the woods just five minutes from our house. I felt like an Arctic adventurer, braving extreme conditions in the name of peace and order in the household. The dog does not understand cold, especially when it's 71 degrees in the house and he's staring out the front window and wondering why we haven't been out yet.

As a matter of fact, that's what he's doing now. Every few minutes he comes up the stairs and turns the corner into the office to give me that questioning look, 'why aren't we out walking around?' The reason is simple.

Right now, here at my home in Medford, Massachusetts, it is 1. Let me say that again. It's 1. 1 above zero. And the sun in shining and the breeze is only very light, but 1 defies the trappings of the word cold. If it's true that the Eskimos have so many hundreds of words for snow, then we Yankees should spend some time coming up with a few new words for cold.

I would like to propose the word 'cryotreacherous.' Or how about 'frigiviperous?' I would say the teens are cryotreacherous. The single digits give way to a more frigiviperous condition. Beyond this, when we eke our way down into negative numbers after nightfall, which is at about quarter-to-five this time of year, I would call it 'Siberovirulent.'

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to play fetch with the dog in the field across from the grocery store.

January 8th, 2004 - Be always writing. Be always writing. Be always writing.

This is me chanting to myself as I compose prose (comprose?) in my head as I get off the train and walk to the stairs and then climb up the stairs and then shuffle down the sidewalk and look at the faces and get reminded of people I know or things I think about people I don't know, like, 'it must be very hard to be an ugly person,' and that thought leads me to describing their faces in words that will never see paper unless I write them over and over and over and over in my head like kids once wrote admonitions on chalkboards.

Be always writing. Be always writing. Be always writing.

Except when it's time to read, and everything I read says, 'No, do it like this. Have you thought of this? Clearly, there is so much you have not thought of.'

Every book (well, not every book; some of them are crap, right?) is instructive. Every book is a how-to manual, or if not how-to-do, then certainly how-to-have-done, and I can't get enough books, and I can't read them quickly enough, and that's not even counting magazines, many of which I would like to read but have no time for because I am either writing (on paper or in my head) or reading (mostly off paper, but sometimes off computer screens, in fact much of the time off computer screens as you are reading this now).

Let us not forget the medium and how the medium is alleged to be the message, except I have this idea that only first year college students still read Marshall McLuhan and perhaps the medium is no longer the message after all. Maybe the message is, once again, the message.

If the message is the message, then all the messages are pretty overwhelming. I mean, there are a lot of messages coming in all the time, not only from books and magazines but from every object everywhere through every sense organ you possess. And every book and every magazine and every newspaper is like a note from the past, a reminder about something someone else was thinking about when they were walking down the sidewalk and maybe even looking at your face and thinking, 'it must be very hard to be so attractive.' You are, to be completely and sycophantically candid (or is that candidly sycophantic?), very handsome/pretty.

Some of the notes from the past you will read (like this one) contain information, and others just contain ideas with which to parse still more information, perhaps from the even-more-distant past or perhaps from the future, though once you've realized some idea might be good for passing some future piece of information through, say, for example, 'it's a good idea to behave nicely toward ugly people,' it's already too late, which is to say the person is already ugly and you've already been very mean by thinking them ugly in the first place. In this way, we are incapable of learning from history. We are, as someone once said and no doubt wrote down after thinking it, doomed to repeat it, history that is.

And in the end (is there ever an end?), most people spend their whole lives running through ideas with which to parse the information that comes from within their own brains, the information about who they are as people. They do this so as to have some sort of framework for deciding what to do next, except that, as we've already decided, it's impossible to make an actual decision about what to do next. You are doomed to do whatever it is you are going to do next, which, after enough nexts, is drop dead.

Perhaps that is one case where the medium really is the message.

January 7th, 2004 -You know that dream you have where you're trying to get someplace like a wedding or a test or a party of some sort and no matter what you do you just can't get there? Either you don't exactly know the way, or you know the way but things keep happening to prevent you from going? Often it's not a dream, but a nightmare instead.

Well, I'm kinda living it lately, except the place I'm trying to get is this blog. I mean, I didn't really want to leave you hanging with that last entry about my friend Todd dying. But not only am I incredibly busy the last week or so, but I haven't really been putting ideas together in a coherent enough manner to facilitate blogging, especially not in my usual essayish way. So today I'm just throwing a bunch of unconnected stuff out, half-formed images or half-baked ideas, and seeing what happens.

I reserve the right to expand upon anything contained herein in later entries. Consider yourself warned.

Thing 1: Pretty girls walk with their heads bowed low so as not to notice themselves being noticed.

Thing 2: A short story about a guy who feels compelled to process every bit of sensory data available to him, or rather unable to parse out the unimportant bits from the crucial bits, and so is constantly overwhelmed and incapable of ordering his thoughts. His solution is to blind himself in one eye, cut off one ear and scrape off all his taste buds.

Thing 3: A single sentence - The bell of her hips tolled three times softly as she crossed the kitchen, like a church bell calling me to worship.

Thing 4: The view of Boston from the Broadway bridge is unparalleled because it is unobscured by any tall buildings nearby and is the perfect distance from downtown from which to take in the whole skyline without getting a lot of sprawl around the edges. This time of year (and month) the moon sits in the right top quadrant of the view space and, when it's full, casts a lovely light on all the steel and glass.

Thing 5: I sometimes daydream about living in Chinatown and learning to speak Cantonese and writing crime fiction.

Thing 6: I recently learned a home truth about bird watching, and it's this: If you set out to see a specific bird, that bird will never let you see it, as has been the case with the pair of hooded mergansers that are wintering on the Mystic Canal near our house. I've seen them twice by accident. Brittney would like to see them, but we keep walking down there looking for them. My friend Brian, who is a far more accomplished bird watcher, confirmed my suspicion and added that it's just like fishing. If you go fishing intending to catch fish, the fish will never be caught. I never seem to catch any fish anyway, but I think there's probably a much bigger truth at work here. I think it has something to do with the Taoist notion of living in harmony with the world by not striving for anything ever.

Another example would be waiting for the bus. The bus never comes when you're craning your head out from the curb looking for it. It always comes as soon as you actually stop wanting it to arrive.

Thing 7: Which reminds me...I have a term for the speed with which the bus comes after I've arrived at the stop. It's 'bus luck.' If I walk out my front door and cross the street to the 94 lumbering its way up Boston Ave. to pick me up, then I've got good bus luck for the day. If I have to walk down to the stop at Winthrop and wait twenty minutes before the 96 comes, well, then that's a bad bus luck day.

You can also have bus luck at a restaurant, like when you walk in and the hostess seats you right away and then before you've even decided what you want, you look up and see that there's a line out the door.

Thing 8: Writers are like butterfly collectors, prancing around with big fluttery nets trying to capture something beautiful and pin it down on paper to be displayed later.

Thing 9: I am far more computer savvy than I give myself credit for being. I realized this as I was trying to explain the process of building and uploading a website to my friend Brian who is computer literate but had no clue what I was talking about.

January 4th, 2004 - My friend Todd died.

On the 24th I wrote about how he was on his way out but fighting still. Over the next week I exchanged e-mail and spoke on the phone with mutual friends about the tragedy of the situation. I fretted about whether or not I should try to see him one last time or give his family their space to deal with what was no doubt very difficult and very painful. Having decided I'd rather preserve my image of him as the robust and happy person I'd come to know and to spare myself the emotional walloping of gazing on a friend drawing his last breaths, Brittney and I left town, on the 31st, to spend New Year's in Vermont. It was my birthday.

When I got back yesterday I had a message that Todd had passed just as Brittney and I were on our way out of town. I was glad not to have known.

Regrettably, the Celebration of Life service his family held in lieu of a funeral was on the 3rd and was ending just as we were driving back into the city. After I found out he was gone I wandered downstairs and told Brittney. She could see I was sad and asked if I was ok. And I was. I am ok, though I've spent the better part of the last two days eulogizing the guy in my mind. I am eating breakfast and walking the dog and continuing to scrape wallpaper from the wall in the front hall, but all the while I am composing a eulogy for my friend Todd, a eulogy I will never deliver, words I will never even write down.

I went on the New England Revolution message boards at BigSoccer.com and shared with the people there what I had written here on the 24th. I contemplated writing some sort of obituary for Soccer New England. I also had imaginary conversations with his mother and his twelve-year-old son, and I spent some time thinking about what I learned from him and why we were friends in the first place.

What I learned from him was that you've got to eat life up. You can't mope through it. And if you can't find things to be positive and optimistic about, then you haven't got your eyes open.

We were friends because we trusted each other instantly. We believed in each other's abilities, and we respected each other's viewpoint. Other than that, we really didn't have a lot in common other than an appreciation of a really good chocolate shake.

But you know what? Now that I'm here and tapping away at the keys I don't feel so good about what I'm doing. I think I could write all night. I could transcribe every word that's scrolled across my brain for the last couple days and still not do justice to my friend or what's happened to him.

So I'm going to stop now. I'm going to stop and just let it be what it is.

December 30th, 2003 - Two days of intense and frenzied work at the day job have left me, now on the very cusp of my 32nd birthday, buzzing with a desire to get down to business. I have organized a writer's group which will, social schedules permitting, meet for the first time a week from Sunday. I have begun a fiction writing project with a close, if not fastidious, friend that will surely bear the sort of sour and oddly shaped, tropical fruit you ogle at the grocery store and then decide to leave for someone more daring. I have the beginnings of a couple of pieces that I hope to sell to magazines during the calendar year 2004. I have a long list of books to read and an unslakable thirst for more.

In short, I'm ready to rock.

It is entirely possible that I have become, albeit unwittingly, a manic depressive and that I am currently in an 'up' period that will be followed by the thing that follows 'ups.' But I don't think that's the case. I have, over the last six weeks, felt fairly constantly stimulated and inspired. Ideas swirl in my brain. Motivation bubbles beneath the surface. I am hopeful, optimistic even.

A large part of that optimism springs from the realization that just because I am not good at selling my work, the work still might be good. And really, to be drop dead honest with you, writing things I feel good about is infinitely more important than selling them. Sure. It would be good to sell some stuff, to get paid, to turn my passion to liquid cash, but it's not the most important thing. I can live with the day job for now. In a way, the day job even pushes me to improve, reminds me that a life of moderately-compensated, office toil is possible, probable even given my current trajectory.

There is also the matter of aging. 32 really isn't an important birthday, though it may well be the last one I celebrate without at least the promise of a baby to flutter my stomach and rob me of sleep. But overall I am happier to be getting older. So far, older seems better.

I was a depressed and overwrought teen. I was an ambitious and overworked twenty-something. The thirties, thus far, have been relaxing, mind opening and altogether much more comfortable. My father reads this space and worries that I'm on the verge of depressive collapse, but I think he just needs something to worry about now that he's retired. That's flippant oversimplification of course, but I'm writing about me, not him, right?

I have tried, here in this web log, to share my thoughts. Sometimes I am sad, as I was a bit on Christmas Eve after visiting my friend Todd in the hospital. Sometimes I am angry. OK. Often I am angry. Other times all is right with the world. If anything, I think I'm processing life's tilt-to-whirl of emotions much more readily now than I ever have before. Sadness and anger don't scare me as they once did. They are not, as far as I can tell, precursors to darker and more sinister feelings.

And so I head for the spring of my 33rd year excited about what's to come. I am just now really drawing a bead on what I want out of life, the vision of a future self resolving itself like a twelve-point buck on the muzzle tip of a patient hunter. I must remember to squeeze the trigger gently. It's when you hurry the shot that you miss, even with the wide spread of leaden fury a twelve gauge throws.

Anyway, Brittney and I are headed for Vermont in the morning. We'll spend the New Year with Charlie and Nancy relaxing in their log cabin up on Higley Hill in West Dover. I won't be posting anything here until at least Sunday, the 4th.

I wish you all a happy New Year. Thanks for reading, and as my grandfather used to say, 'May the blue bird of happiness crap on your windshield.'

December 28th, 2003 - I think I've got post-consumption stress disorder (PCSD), a recently identified condition marked by irritability, restlessness and strong urges to clean brought on by prolonged exposure to baked goods, free-time and newly acquired retail products. Faced with a fridge full of leftovers, a countertop littered with cookies and pie and a weekend in which my family commitments amounted to a few scant hours on the couch at Brittney's grandmother's house in Athol, MA, I find myself completely unable to sit still. I've been puttering around the house since the dog woke me just before eight o'clock this morning.

Since then I've done laundry, purged the house of gift-related cardboard, wrappings and ribbons, paid the bills, made the bed, ironed a pile of shirts, cleared the kitchen counter, brought in the hose from the back garden, scrubbed the dog crap off a pair of sneakers that had been ditched by the back door, tidied the guest room, framed some photos, walked the dog and taken out the trash. I attempted to read both the Sunday paper and the book I'm working on at the moment but only riffled the pages of each before growing agitated and needing to stomp off to another room to unsettle the dust bunnies and rearrange whatever piles of stuff might be collecting in a poorly lit corner. Even now I feel the pull of some unimportant chore trying to drag me away from the keyboard.

At some point I just couldn't indulge myself anymore. After fattening up on cookies and chocolates at work all last week, Brittney and I celebrated Christmas Eve with heaping piles of Chinese food. The next day, after ripping into the mound of brightly wrapped gifts under the tree, we slid a seven pound ham into the oven, fired up the mashed potatoes and prepared to host her mother, step-father, little brother and grandparents. Of course, Grandma brought a pie and mom chipped in with a plate full of cream puffs. Yes. Cream puffs. They also brought another pile of gifts which we duly separated from papers and ribbons and added to the piles from the morning.

On Boxing Day (that's the day after Christmas for those of you without British relatives), we drove out to Westfield to see Brittney's father, step-mother, step-brother, his wife and their two kids. There we had shrimp cocktail and nachos as well as sandwiches and more pie. They plied us with gift certificates and other bric-a-brac, all of which we were grateful for, and sent us on our way home, where we gorged on leftover ham and potatoes.

Then yesterday we made our final family call, arriving at Brittney's grandmother's house just in time for cold cuts, cookies and even more pie. She wouldn't hear of us leaving without making sandwiches for the road and her gift to me was a tray of ginger cookies.

So today I pushed back the sheets and brought warm feet in contact with cold floor expecting another day of wanton consumption. But, after pulling on a pair of boxer shorts and stumbling downstairs to switch on the electric teapot, I found I didn't have it in me.

Instead I made a pot of coffee for Brittney and washed whatever dishes were sitting in the sink. I swept through the living room collecting shirt boxes and other bits of cardboard. I began parsing and stacking our newly aquired treasures and shuttling them off to the rooms they belonged in, clothes to the bedroom, candies to the kitchen.

And the more I cleaned and straightened the more I felt in control of my life again. The roughly two-and-a-half slices of pumpkin pie remaining in the refrigerator sang to me their siren song, but onward I went, performing what seemed like a ritual of purification after the bacchanalia of holiday consumption.

Brittney suggested we drive out to the mall and exchange some things, maybe redeem some of the gift certificates we'd so generously been given, and we did. We drove out and parked in an out-lying area of the parking lot but were unable to complete any of the exchanges. Nor were we able to redeem any gift certificates, such was the crush of post-holiday consumers. Between the crowd and simple lack of spirit for the hunt, we lacked the will to bring home further material produce.

And so we returned home, where I fairly buzzed around the house, flying from task to task, unable even to sit and watch a holiday football game. Brittney looked at me with piteous eyes as steam rose from the iron and I flipped the fifth shirt to retouch its already perfect collar. After dinner she asked if everything was ok. 'I don't know what's wrong,' I said. 'I'm going to try to sit down after we eat and see if I can do some writing. Maybe that'll smooth me out a bit.'

It has.

I think I just let myself fall into a pattern of consumption that eventually became neither gratifying nor celebratory. Stuck in a store with a credit burning a tiny emotional hole in my pocket, I looked at the arrayed shirts and sweaters and pre-washed jeans and was unable to match any of them to a want anywhere within myself. Opening the big, stainless steel door on the front of our refrigerator I came face-to-face with a big bowl of whipped cream (my favorite) and couldn't even imagine slicing the pie or plating the cream puff that might serve as adequate substrate for it.

And hopefully I won't need to go on cleaning in order to atone for this holiday's sins of consumption. I like to think that I'm capable of affording myself a treat or two without demanding tariff in the form of a neurotic cleaning spree. Truth be told, I began feeling uncomfortable with the holidays almost as soon as they started. Today's antiseptic urges must only have been a reaction to days of overindulgence.

With all that behind me, the gift-getting and pie-eating and the rest, perhaps I can finally relax on the couch and read a book. That's all I ever wanted of Christmas anyway.

December 24th, 2003 - It's Christmas Eve, and I'm not sure I have the right words for this, but I'm going to go ahead and write about it anyway.

My friend Todd is dying.

I first wrote about what's going on with Todd here, and I'll summarize for those of you uninclined to parse through a piece I wrote for a soccer website nearly a year-and-a-half ago. Todd was the General Manager of the New England Revolution, my favorite soccer team and one I happened to cover for a couple of websites and a magazine. And so I got to know this big, tobacco-chewing, slow-talking middle American guy, and through a couple of interviews and some working lunches I came to like him.

Then Todd got leukemia.

I visited him in the hospital when he went through his initial treatment, and kept up with him straight through to the time he resigned his job and I wrote that article about him. There was a relapse that he answered with a bone marrow transplant and a bunch of other treatment.

After that we got together for lunch occasionally, spending afternoons talking about soccer and life and what he would do without a full-time soccer-related job. He made some abortive attempts to train for a marathon, minor setbacks in his treatment forcing him to give up crack-of-dawn training runs with his fiance' Lynne.

He lifted weights, took a job with the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and began writing a book about his experience. He and Lynne bought a new house together. He rode dirt bikes with his son Drake. He seemed to be nearly in the clear.

Then he started having problems with Sciatica, an inflamed nerve in his lower back. When he finally went to his doctor to have it checked they told him there was a large tumor pressing against the nerve. Further tests showed another tumor in his throat. Then the leukemia came back. There are a lot more details, medical minutia, chemotherapies and radiation, x-rays and CAT scans, but you understand basically what went on.

He was getting better until he wasn't, a sucker punch that caught us all.

Two weeks ago Todd came down with a fever. He went to the hospital and hasn't left since. Yesterday my friend Murph called and told me Todd had pneumonia. His white cell count had dropped to zero, leaving him defenseless, and the leukemia was rampant in his system. It didn't look good according to Murph. He thought I should probably get my ass over to the hospital for a visit.

That brings me to today and the trip across the river to Brigham and Women's. After parking at a meter, telling the dog to hold the fort and pumping quarters into the little metal slot, I walked on nervous legs into the hospital's bustling lobby. I got the room number from an Eastern European woman behind the information desk and walked through to the elevators. That's when I saw Murph standing in a cluster of people that included Todd's son and some soccer people I half-recognized. I walked over and shook hands all around and then stood back and listened as everyone talked around what was going on upstairs in Todd's room. Only his mother hugged me and thanked me for coming and said she was praying for a miracle.

Todd was napping apparently, so everyone was clearing out for a while, walking over to the local food court for a bite or hitting the road, some of them even catching planes out of town. I lingered there until everyone was gone, then I rode the elevator alone to the fifth floor.

There's no waiting room on the fifth floor, just rooms, or actually tiny berths, arrayed around a nurses' station set up with monitors displaying everyone's vital signs. Some of the tiny rooms were open, their patients sitting up in bed to entertain visitors. Other doors, like Todd's, were shut, and each one had hand written signs and cards taped on them, most with good, positive messages about recovery.

Lynne's brother Jon and his wife stood outside Todd's room and I made small talk with them for a while under the premise that Todd would wake up eventually and we could have a brief visit and then I could go. At some point another visitor showed up and Lynne came out and talked to us all.

She said Todd was really just working out how much longer he wanted to hold on now. He was, she said, deciding when he was ready to go. For the moment he was fighting, but she was clearly ready for anything, as ready as you can be for the person you love and planned on spending your life with dying.

Lynne is, without qualification, the most dedicated partner I have ever met. She is night and day. She is 24/7. The Rock of Gibraltar looks to her for a steadying presence.

She delivered the news about Todd without crying, though not without emotion. Then she went about the business of getting some little thing to comfort the patient. She looked in to make sure he was still sleeping. She walked away to talk to a visitor, and then returned and disappeared behind the door again.

I returned to small talk with her brother. He and I discussed the A-Rod for Manny trade like it was an affair of state in which we were both intimately involved. His wife and I laughed about her knitting project. We didn't even look at the door behind which our friend lay dying, slipping in and out of a painkiller haze. Eventually I left. The line of people to see a guy too tired to talk was too long. It was time for close family.

Back at the truck I was happy to see the dog. He licked my face as I swung into the driver's seat. I thought about crying, but didn't. I just drove home and walked in the door and kissed my wife.

Miracles are possible. To me, medicine is voodoo. It's magic. It's a pinball machine you put quarters in and pull back the plunger and hope for the best. Todd may live. The truth is, the man is an ox. He walked through the heaviest phases of his treatment like a kid playing in a summer sprinkler. He shrugged off the pain and kept on a brave face and even smiled when you'd expect him to be choking back tears.

In a way it's better I didn't see him today. Murph said he looked bad, said he couldn't weigh more than 120lbs laying there in his rumpled hospital sheets.

I'm going to try not to be sad, even though the thought of Lynne walking alone out of that hospital room just about crushes my resolve, even though Drake may go back to school from his Christmas break without a father. There's nothing I can do for them. I can't cushion the blow, and I can't insert myself in a place I don't belong. As I said before, this is a time for close family.

And I know that Todd would want me to remember him as he was that day last summer when he came and played pick up at the park with my friends. He was so rusty and out of shape that I almost couldn't belive he had been a professional just five years earlier. Still, he ran until the sweat poured off him. When the last goal had gone in, he stayed behind to play with some kids on another field. He couldn't get enough. I left him at the park.

I think I had the same thing in mind when I wrote that story about him leaving the Revolution. I closed it with this:

Todd Smith has resigned as General Manager of the New England Revolution. He will remain with the team through the end of the season, at which time his story will go on and on an on, even if soccer journalists like me stop writing it down.

Todd's story has gone on and on, and I can only assume it will continue to do so, even after he's gone, as long as we all remember him and how much he loved life, how he could never quite get enough of it. There is so much tragedy in what's happened to him and what will likely happen for Lynne and Drake and his mother and sister, but I don't think Todd would want me to dwell on that now. I think he'd want me to kiss my wife and let the dog lick my face and find all the happiness there is in this Christmas holiday.

So that's what I'm going to do. Merry Christmas everyone.

December 22nd, 2003 - I've lost the Christmas spirit. Where did it go? It was here. I had it. Then it disappeared, or I lost track of it. I'm not sure which. I just know it's gone. I'm wandering through the days now, shoving baked goods down my throat, wishing co-workers half-hearted happy holidays and buying last presents for those on my list who neither need nor particularly want what I'm getting them.

Here's what I know: I like buying stuff for people. I like making things for them too. I like to spend a lot of money at Christmas time, something I really try not to do most of the rest of the year. But beyond giving gifts, I like to demonstrate to myself every year that money is not important, that it can be given away with little thought. It's cathartic.

I also like Santa Claus, the man and the idea. He reminds me of the best part of childhood, the part that believes, albeit naively, that a jolly old man serves as benefactor to the world's children, that the things which seem so out of reach the rest of the year, candy and toys, are not only accessible but will be delivered in such a fantastic and beautiful way, with a clatter of hooves on the roof and an open-flewed entrance. To me, Santa is a symbol of unspoiled goodness, even if the mall is using some drunk in an itchy polyester suit to lure kids, and their spendthrify parents, into a bright and plasticky retail embrace.

Santa transcends that. Even though he gets pimped mercilessly, Santa remains cool.

So Christmas should be simple, right? I like buying things for friends and family. I like letting the money run through my fingers to spill on display cases and countertops and into the palms of acne ridden teens behind digital cash registers. And I like Santa. It should be case closed, right?

How then am I bereft of the spirit now?

I think it has something to do with all of the crap that adults project onto the holidays. There are office parties with yankee swaps (if you don't know what a yankee swap is, think secret Santa where the secret is you never get to keep the gift you opened and wanted and had already made plans for). There are get-togethers with people who only want to see you at this time of year, not because they like you, but because it's this time of year and that's what we're all supposed to do.

There are gifts for people you don't like. There are Christmas cards. Christmas cards!! Am I an asshole because I don't send those little envelopes filled with guilt anymore? Am I bad because I can't even bring myself to write and address a brief greeting to distant family and old friends once a year? And the food...I love the food...but I'm already starting to feel like a buttered cookie sheet, covered in sweets and grease. Somebody scrub me clean and leave me in the strainer to dry, please.

I have this vague idea that the holidays are a time to relax, to spend time with loved ones, to reaffirm your love for the world by buying it a big present. Instead, what the holidays have become is a marathon of forced meetings, obligatory salutations and overeating.

Maybe if I really had the Christmas spirit all of that stuff would fade into the background. I wouldn't mind so much. I would revel in the holiday despite its shortcomings.

But I can't do it. I can't.

Who ruined Christmas? Who's the asshole? I'd like to know. I'd like to slide down their chimney and push their tree over.

Fortunately, I remember that Christmas, I think it was 1981, when I woke to a shiny, red dirt bike parked in front of my family's fake tree. I remember pushing out the back door with it and riding down the quiet street. I could see my breath. I had on a green track suit from Oshman's. I pedalled it up to speed and then threw it sideways, skidding out the back tire with the coaster brake jammed full on. And I smiled, even though there was no one to smile to, and then I slid back into the vinyl covered saddle and kept riding. I'm not sure I've been much happier than that in my whole life.

And just when I think Christmas is lost to me forever I think of that day again. I stop what I'm doing and I daydream it, and I wonder if I'll ever have a kid to buy a bike for, and then I get a little giddy and a little excited. I do love Christmas. I do. Even if I sometimes lose track of why.

December 17th, 2003 - We live by the tracks. I'm not sure whether we're on the right side or the wrong side, but there they are about 40yds out the dining room window. The commuter rail runs the line mostly, though sometimes there are bigger, heavier and substantially louder trains. The nearest station is a mile away, and that's really only a pause on the engineer's schedule. There's not even a shelter there to keep the rain off eager passengers.

It was probably those tracks that made the house affordable, back when we afforded it. I guess too many would-be buyers heard one train trundle past and thought better of plunking down their life's savings. Oddly, we really didn't think much about the noise, which is good because it's true what they say about living near a noise. After a while you don't even hear it. Our brains must be tuned to detect intruders and emergencies, and once the earth-rumbling engine thunders past a few times without pulling calamity in its wake, we reduce the twenty ton behemoth to the level of a light breeze stroking the house with its gentle caress.

Sometimes when I'm out working in the yard the silver and purple commuter rail shoots past and I lift my head and think, 'oh yeah...the train.' And I wonder if the people who ride it every day look out the window and see our big, blue house and speculate about what goes on inside, the way I gawk, moony-eyed at the Boston skyline every morning as the Red Line crosses the Charles and try to reconstruct the whole city from memory after we've disappeared into the tunnel on the other side.

The tracks draw teenage boys like so many delinquents to a flame. They go down there and drink beer, set off fireworks, put stuff on the rails to get squished by the train, all the usual stuff. Back in my Alabama youth, my friend Edwin lived near some seldom used tracks, and we would go down in our wild pack and do all the same things, except in Alabama teenage boys sometimes carry .22 rifles and shoot doves and anything else they think will be fun to shoot. By comparison the kids in this neighborhood seem tame.

As some cursory nod to the quality of life of those who live along the tracks, the city planted a long, thin row of trees between us and them. In summer, the passing train is fairly invisible, showing itself as a scant few glimmers of silver between the leaves. In wintertime, the trees drop all their leaves and we're left fully on display to the leering eye of the commuter, our only cover the little dots of bird nest that remain perched in the branches. This year I've actually taken more than a passing interest in the denizens of those nests, and I can tell you with an inexplicable lilt of pride in my voice that the big one at the end of the block houses a red-tailed hawk.

The dog isn't bothered in the least by the train either. He and the neighbor's dog spend a portion of every morning communicating with a pal who lives in one of the houses on the other side of the tracks. They seem to be saying, 'I'm here! Are you there?!?' And he says, 'Yeah, I'm here! Are you guys still over there?!?' And they say, 'Yeah, we're here! You still there?!?' And on and on until I lose patience with it and call him in.

I should also report that living by the train has done nothing to enhance my wanderlust. Maybe it's that I know where the end of the line leaves its passengers, or maybe it's that train travel has no romantic tradition in this country, as it does in Europe. Sometimes I do think about what it might be like to ride the train past the house, just to see what it looks like from that speed and angle, but I'm probably not vein enough to need to know. I like to preserve my resident's status anyway. I don't pass through.

I live here.

December 15th, 2003 - Like you I was shocked when I turned on the television on Sunday morning and found out that Saddam Hussein had been captured. In fact, I sat and watched the by-now-burned-on-everyone's-retinas video of Hussein, looking like some kind of wistful wino at the public clinic, play over and over again while a succession of 'experts' talked about the possible impact on the insurgency, the race for the Democratic nomination, the war on terrorism, the spread of democracy in the Muslim world and the price of tea in China. Though I was stunned by the news at first, within a couple of hours the TV news media had beaten the expired equine of my fragile sensibility into a cynical glue pot. Still, I sat there until Brittney came downstairs and I could tell her what had happened. Then the spell was broken.

For me, Hussein's capture was something of a watershed event. It helped me realize how bitterly partisan I had become.

First of all, I will admit that my initial reaction was something like, 'Crap! This is going to make Bush look good.' And that's a crappy attitude to take, petty and small-minded. It smacks of prejudice against not only the man, but also the ideology of the Republican party. And if I'm unable to weigh conservative proposals to pressing issues fairly, then I'm not really in a position to criticize them in the first place, am I?

That this person, this evil dictator, who is responsible for so much death and suffering might finally be brought to some sort of justice (that's a sticky wicket unto itself, isn't it?) is a wonderful thing. That the Iraqi people who continued to live their lives in fear of his resurgence can now go on with something approximating feelings of safety is also good. Saddam was a bad, bad man, and it's good that he's gone.

Nonetheless I spent a solid half hour or so crafting a scathing liberal response to Bush's anticipated gloating. Clearly, the insurgency will continue. Americans will keep coming home in body bags. Our allies will still distrust us, and our enemies will persist in characterizing us as the bullies in the global schoolyard. We've captured one bad man. We have not fundamentally changed the world we're living in by this one act.

This carping and complaining rang pretty hollow though, even in my own head. Like Tom Brokaw on the set of the Weekend Today show, I was struggling to take in all the implications of Hussein's final defeat and looking for some firm footing, some vantage point from which to get an unobstructed view of affairs.

And then something strange occurred to me. It came unbidden and unexpectedly into my mind, and after I'd thought it, I spent the better part of the next hour working my way through it.

It was this: What if the Republicans are right? Not just about Iraq, but about taxes and trade tariffs and healtcare and all the rest. What if the hawkish far right understands some deep truth about cultural tectonics and the shifting of the cultural plates beneath the Earth's hot spots?

Frankly, I was cowed by the possibility. I might have even uttered a panicky 'Moo.'

On the television a woman with a heavy Arabic accent was prattling on about the prevailing mood in the Sunni population and the reaction that might be expected from the potentates of Syria and Egypt. Footage of Hussein opening up and saying, 'ahh' for the military medic ran in infinite loop behind her voice. 'Holy Christ!' I thought. 'He looks like Walt Whitman sitting there stroking that thick gray beard. I half expected the sound to suddenly come up with the world's worst dictator reciting Song of Myself.

After a while, after I'd heard Joe Lieberman slam Howard Dean and talk about how he was a better choice to run against Bush because he was so strong on foreign policy, and after Tony Blair has been on to remind everyone that he was right to go along with the Americans despite widespread protest in England, after all that I began thinking that maybe the big problem with people like Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush is that they're such polarizing figures. Hussein was the evil despot challenging the world to a thumb wrestling match, Bush the self-styled crusader for democracy and capitalism, taking every opportunity to say things like, 'you're with us or you're with the terrorists.'

Given just two choices, and neither of them particularly appealing, most of us will choose poorly. Bush forced the world to choose between the megalomaniac and the cultural imperialist. Soon, in this country, we'll be forced to choose between a bad Republican and a flawed Democrat. We talk a lot about our freedom and its ultimate value, but freedom of choice, minus the choices, isn't a hell of a lot better than having things dictated to you.

In the end I resolved to allow that Hussein's ouster is an unqualified positive. I decided to try to stifle my knee jerk judgements of world events, and to make an effort to increase the number of choices available to me.

As I mentioned the other day, I voted for Ralph Nader in the last election. It was a protest vote in a state that Gore carried easily, one that said I wasn't interested in George Bush OR Al Gore. I felt then that what America really needed was a viable third party, another choice, whether it was the Green Party (the most viable group at that time) or the Shriners driving around in those tiny cars with their fezzes on.

And I'm thinking I need to keep protesting. I need to protest Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush and Howard Dean. I need to protest capitalism and socialism, democracy and dictatorship, radical religious movements of every stripe. I'm against any philosophy - whether religious, political or economic - that holds itself out as the one true way. I'm opposed to systems of thought that define themselves as not like some other system of thought.

What I kept seeing in Saddam Hussein's face, other than winos and lyric poets, was that we need to keep thinking, that despite his capture we haven't got it all figured out just yet. Saddam Hussein is gone, an evil murderer undone by his own bravado and inability to repent. But Hussein, like the Cold War Russians before him, was just a straw man for our own senses of injustice and insecurity. Burn him up and they remain.

December 12th, 2003 - To the friend who confided in me the other day, I apologize. I said I wasn't judging you, but I was. You told me something personal and subtly embarrassing, and I contrived to instruct without appearing to do so.

The truth is I'm tremendously judgemental, and I thought what you did was dumb. Or rather, what you did was shabby, and how you tried to reconcile it with yourself was dumb. And where it sounds like you might be heading next is the lonely discomfort of a lease with only one name on it, and I'd hate to see that happen.

The topics of conversation were love and sex and monogamy and long-term relationships. And because I love someone (Brittney) and presumably have some sort of sex life with her and am also monogamous, and because we've managed to keep ourselves arranged that way for more than a decade, you thought I might provide some insight into your own situation.

But I didn't. I just talked around my own prejudices, rationalizing the choices I've made in my life and implying that you should choose the same, all while maintaining this facade of intellectual detachment. You should have seen right through that, and I should have been more forthcoming. Instead you listened to me say something like:

1) The vast majority of us come from homes in which sex was taboo and subsequently have lived our early adulthoods in mild discomfort whenever find ourselves naked in the presence of another person. We have the baseless belief that this should not be so, and yet efforts at recreating the lascivious scenes from the softcore pornography we stayed up late to watch on Cinemax as teenagers have largely failed.

2) Having floundered in our sexual primes and resigned ourselves to the pursuit of a singular and abiding love with an attractive and intelligent member of the opposite sex, there is little reason, other than the overt suggestions of newly mainstream hardcore pornography, to suspect that greater carnal fulfillment is to be gained by continuing to try on partners like so many colorful sweaters.

3) Accepting that only a select few men have both the physical and emotional hardware, not to mention the wallet, to divide and conquer that species of uber-frau known as supermodel, the very best hope guys like you and I have is to pin ourselves to a pretty girl, someone we love for reasons including but not limited to the hypnotic curve of breast and buttock. And once we've found that woman, it's incumbent on us to work with them to find common sexual ground. And though the theoretical lothario in me can accept that polyamory is a possibility for some people, the empirical puritan within believes that's all just a smoke screen for people who haven't figured out that monogamy is going to afford them the best shot at a meaningful relationship filled with trust, safety and yes, even sexual fulfillment.

4) Also and finally, after long periods of time together, sex becomes boring and subsequently takes place less often. This situation is normal and not irreversible. I know you're freaked out about it. Sorry.

Having talked around and around your problems for an hour and having deprecated all of my deeply held convictions as mere products of my own, possibly unrelated and surely flawed, personal experience, we ran out of time for further discussion. Mercifully.

And so, if you're reading, which you're likely not, let me say this: I'm sorry. Ignore everything I said. What I meant to say is, "I think what you did is stupid, and what you think might work for you won't. Pull your head out of your ass and see that adulthood brooks no Casanovas. You will only end up alone and chafed. Sometimes the well-worn path is worn for a reason. Following doesn't necessarily require compromising yourself."

Oh, and stop asking me for advice. I have nothing figured out.

December 11th, 2003 - There was an interesting opinion piece on Salon.com today by Sidney Blumenthal. Entitled A Rising Sense of Injustice, the piece talked about how Al Gore's endorsement of Howard Dean was an encouraging sign that at least someone in the Democratic Party had cottoned onto the idea that there is a vast liberal base that might be tapped in the upcoming election. Gore, it seems, has realized that centrism is not necessarily what America is demanding, or at least not what those who once proudly called themselves Democrats are demanding.

This is a topic I took up myself about a month ago (November 12th to be exact).

The crux of my own meditation on the subject was a distinction between leadership and representation. I argued that the Democrats chief flaw was their unwillingness to lead. As the Republicans have ridden high on the support of conservative Southern and Midwestern voters, the Democrats have made the mistake of scrambling after those same constituencies or, more often, seeking to poll their way to popularity. Too often, I claimed, the Democrats chose to try to represent the populous, rather than offering us a real alternative to the conservative hegemony.

Blumenthal's Salon piece struck me as particularly interesting because he takes up a similar line, but instead of indicting the Democrats for failing to lead, he instead faults them for failing to represent the right people.

As Howard Dean's popularity has surged, some within the Democratic establishment have recognized that the former Vermont governor's appeal derives from his ability to re-enfranchise liberal voters, the same voters who pushed Bill Clinton and even Jimmy Carter into office. Blumenthal posits that Gore, once a polling adict and product of highly-paid image makers, now sees that his failure to carry the electoral vote in 2000 can be pinned on his attempts to sing the centrist song the Republicans were already singing, even if their rendition was somewhat disingenuous.

So allow me to amend my position. It is not, as Blumenthal points out, that the Democrats are incapable of leading the country, but rather that they've been trying to lead (and represent) the wrong people. Perhaps that's why someone like Joe Lieberman, a religiously motivated social conservative, somehow finds himself in Democratic clothing.

Howard Dean isn't a genius. He's simply the only real liberal in the race, and therefore the only once capable of energizing the Democrats' traditional base.

Having said all that, I'd like to note that I'm not really ready to endorse Dean myself (not that Howard is sitting on his campaign bus wringing his hands trying to figure out a way to get me on board). I have a further problem with the Democrats that keeps me from whole-heartedly embracing the party I once canvased for in the semi-affluent neighborhoods of Mobile, AL (and let me tell you, trying to sell socially liberal candidates to good Christian Southerners was quite an adventure).

The problem is campaign finance reform. I simply can't see how a truly representative democracy can function with a steady stream of cash from corporate interests flooding into campaign coffers. As if having a president delivered to us by the energy industries hasn't taught us anything about how bad policies can be pushed through the government by deep-pocketed business folks, the Democrats blunder onward, taking their own handouts from whomever is offering.

It seems to me that an issue like this, especially in light of the popular disgust inspired by Enron, et al, is just what the Democrats need to separate themselves from the conservatives across the Senate aisle. The problem is, the Dems don't believe they can win without the money. They're not willing to take the leap of faith that effective mobilization of previously unserved voters can beat the hell-for-leather spending of the Republicans.

And until they figure that out, I can't really say my heart is with them. It's a big part of the reason I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, and it's still a factor in working out how I feel about the Democrats for 2004.

In all likelihood I will sacrifice this issue in order to push Bush out of office. I just don't think we can afford another four years of the neo-cons dim-witted foreign policy. But, campaign finance reform is important. It's the first step in restoring the relative democracy we enjoyed before Richard Nixon opened the floodgates on campaign tampering (what else would you call it?) in the early '70s.

When I forsook Al Gore for Nader in the last election it was because I didn't think he had a clue how to lead. Funny now that Gore seems to be leading his party to Dean, the one Democrat I credit with having a popular, liberal agenda. It almost make me wish Gore was running, himself.

Almost.

December 10th, 2003 - I decided I needed to do some writing away from this computer. Some months ago I bought myself a pocket-sized notebook to carry at all times, just some small scraps of paper to jot down ideas and inspiration. I haven't used it much, but this morning I decided to force the issue.

This is my morning.

I crawl out of bed late, 8:30, and rinse quickly in the shower thinking I'd better hurry my ass up. Then, in the middle of dressing, I realize there's no reason to hurry. I have no deadlines today, and no one cares when I show up at the office. So I go downstairs and get a bowl of cereal and come back up and eat it while sitting on the bed watching Brittney get dressed. It's nice, even after 12 years together, to watch Brittney get dressed.

Around quarter after 9 I'm out at the bus stop. I can't see Perry, one of the guys who runs Jay's Deli across the street, but I know he's there behind the counter somewhere. He stands there so much, at his station by the coffee maker and the cash register, that he probably knows when every single person in the neighborhood is going to walk past. He sees Eddie and I stroll by on our morning walk, and he knows I'll show up again at the bus stop an hour later. Here I am. Where is he?

On the bus, there is a woman with mounds and piles of curly black hair. She has some sporty get up on and too much makeup. Her eyebrow is pierced. She spends a few minutes trying to get a pair of headphones on, battling her hair and a brightly colored woolen headband that covers her ears, all the while juggling a coffee cup, an overly large purse and a bright green pack of Salem menthol cigarettes. Her tiny black sneakers complement a pair of shiny black sweat pants with white stripes.

At the T station they are fixing the escalator, and let me tell you, there is some kind of racket going on here. Either the Davis Square station is outfitted with prototype escalators from 1942 or whatever year they were invented and they're not designed to run more than three days without breaking down, or someone's bilking the T for some easy money. I don't mind walking the stairs. In fact, I like the exercise, but it's the principle of the thing, you know?

Up at the end of the platform some guys in orange neon vests appear to be fixing something, though I can't really see. One of them has a mask on, presumably to protect him from some noxious fumes of some sort. I wonder if I shouldn't also be wearing a mask.

The train comes.

Wintertime footwear has interested me of late. Most people are wearing heavy boots this week in light of the foot and half of snow that's mostly still sitting on sidewalks and streets, but some people persist with the sneakers and dress shoes they had on last month. Their feet are invariably soaked with snowy sludge. It makes me wonder what they're thinking, but then I remember the time when I couldn't afford boots or even a heavy coat for that matter. The winter WAS wet feet then and a hacking cough.

I listen to music on my daily commute. This particular morning I have The Chemical Brothers dig your own hole in my headphones. It's funny the bits of train noise and conversation that sneak past the big ear pieces and mingle with the music. The train is actually very rhythmic. I usually miss that when I'm not listening to music. It's just noise then.

Each station has its own prototypical passengers. Davis, where I get on, and Porter gather the working people of the suburbs and shunt them into the city. Harvard offers the fashionable, the tragically young and the older intellectual set. Central is full of color and ethnicity. Kendall is brainy and badly dressed. Charles/MGH is peopled mainly by nurses and lab technicians and the Beacon Hill types who lower themselves to mass transit. Park Street is the city's melting pot, the place the Red and Green lines collide. Downtown Crossing is a lot of young black kids and those at their leisure to shop during worktime. Downtown Crossing is also all change, one crew off the train, another one on. It's the underground north/south border in a city that divides itself very much along those lines. I'm one of the few who rides through every day. South Station is all commuters and out-of-towners, and Broadway, where I get off, is where the working poor of Southie mix with union guys on there way to jobs along the Expressway. Also, every station seems to have at least one skinny, pale, punk girl, dressed in black with technicolor hair and a facial expression that says, "I'm sad and lost. Don't talk to me." I never do.

There is a skein of gray/black ice on the river this a.m. It mirrors the skyline and the gray clouds above it. It's really quite beautiful, but also a little sinister.

Finally, there is a guy sitting across from me who really demands description. He has on dirty jeans and white sneakers. On top he wears a black anorak with a black jacket over it and a black wool hat. The hood of the anorak is pulled up and over the hat and cinched tight so that only his eyes and nose poke out. To complete the look, he sports a pair of dark sunglasses. He looks like that composite sketch of the Unabomber that was up at every post office in America a few years back, only the Muppet version. I think he means to look intimidating, based on the cultivated slouch he's affecting. Instead he just looks sort of pathetic and dorky.

So that's my morning, or at least what I recorded of it.

December 8th, 2003 - We've been whalluped. Gazzumped. Hit with the proverbial haymaker.

When I got up Saturday morning the snow was falling down, blowing up and sweeping from side to side. I used to think that snow globes got it all wrong, the way you shake them and the snow goes every which way. My mistake. Someone obviously picked up the Boston snow globe during the night on Friday and shook it like a pair of lucky dice.

We didn't even bother shovelling until late Saturday afternoon. By that time there was a foot of powder on the ground. Of course, powder is a funny name for it. Powder implies lightness, airiness, and maybe that's right when you're talking about a handful. But when you've got a foot high pile on the end of your shovel it carries more like mud.

By the time I was done, soaked through from both the snow still falling and the sweat pouring out of my skin, I felt sort of like Mother Nature had knocked me down and beaten me with my own shovel. Given a few hours to lay on the couch and rest, I felt worse.

Muscles that burned with exertion in the afternoon turned to massive, achey lumps in my back and arms at night. And there I sat, staring out the window, not quite believing the stuff was still falling. And falling. And falling.

On the TV, snow was all they could talk about. Strategically placed cameras brought me breathtaking views of streets just like my own, choked with snow, cars covered with snow and people shovelling snow into great white dunes beside them. My breath was taken more by the sad, sick feeling I'd have to drag myself out in the morning for more of the same, than by any sense of aesthetic appreciation..

At least there was cocoa. Brittney said, "I'm not sure I want all that sugar."

And I said, "Look, if you can't drink cocoa on a night like tonight, when in the hell are you going to drink cocoa?"

So we had cocoa, good stuff my friend Tom brought back from Mexico. Oaxacan chocolate with lots of sugar and a hint of cinnamon.

And then it was Sunday morning and the snow kept falling. I made some dense, doughy pancakes, which we both choked down with not enough syrup, and then we went out to do battle with the accumulated snow again.

On Sunday, with my back in something of a rictus, I decided to take my time. "Union job," I kept saying to myself. "Union job."

First I shovelled my way down the back steps and over to the side door, which couldn't be opened for all the snow piled against it. Then I worked my way back around the house to the driveway. I had to lean over the fence and push the snow away from the gate to get out there, but once I'd arrived, that's when the real work started.

I shovelled a narrow path along the side of Brittney's car, pulling snow off the hood and roof along the way. Then I continued down past my truck until I was out into the open and buried end of the driveway. I threw snow over my shoulder into the yard. I scooped it into a narrow pile on the other side of the driveway. I carried it across the street and tossed it in the bushes on the other side.

I leaned on my shovel. Union job. Union job.

Meanwhile, Brittney had come out and started working her way up the sidewalk. Because we live on a corner lot, we have quite a bit of sidewalk to clear though why we bother is somewhat mysterious. Only a few of our neighbors do it, so it's not like you can get anywhere by walking down our stretch of sidewalk, other than our driveway.

Here and there around the neighborhood I could hear snowblowers roaring away, grinding up the icey mush and streaming it into more convenient places. Jealousy drove me back to work, my arms screaming with every shovelful, until I had cleared the driveway and helped Brittney finish the sidewalk.

The neighbor's kid came out and made a pretense of clearing their patch, but I knew better. I helped him for a few minutes, against my better judgement, and then went in the house to collapse. Just to be clear, the neighbors have a snowblower. The kid could easily have liberated us both from our Herculean labors, but his dad had neglected to pull the thing out of their garage.

"My dad didn't realize there'd be this much snow," he said plaintively.

"Didn't realize there'd be this much snow? Didn't realize there'd be this much snow? Do you people not have a TV or a radio in that house?" This is actually what I said to him. You can say things like that to a 17-year-old.

"I don't know. I don't know what he was thinking," was the response.

So I went in with a clear conscience. Afterall, there's no guilt on a union job.

Ten minutes later the old man was out there with the snowblower blazing away at the 30 feet of sidewalk in front of their house. It seemed criminal. I swore out loud from the comfort of the kitchen window as the snow in my socks thawed and left little puddles on the floor.

I have to admit I've been thinking a lot about snowblowers over the last day or two, not only because I'd like to have one, but also because I'm not sure I can figure out why I don't already. Every year I tell myself I'm too young, that shovelling isn't so bad, that I can handle it. Every year I nearly cripple myself with the effort.

I mean, there's no way to stay in shovelling shape without shovelling regularly, and I'm not going to dig holes in the yard through the spring, summer and fall just so I can get through the four or five big snow storms we get every year without howling back pain and leaden forearms.

No, I'm thinking a little bit of four-stroke technology might be just what the doctor ordered, or what the doctor would order if I consented to lay on his sterile-papered table after moving two hectares of snow off this suburban parcel I call home.

Of course, there's probably not a snowblower available for sale within a hundred miles right now, and even if there were I'm not sure I could afford it. Trying to buy a snoblower after a giant snowstorm is probably like trying to buy SuperBowl tickets on the day of the game. And anyway the forecast calls for warm weather and a bit of rain toward the end of the week.

Maybe we've already seen all the snow we're going to get this year. Or maybe next time Mother Nature will just go ahead and KO me instead of working me over on the ropes with a shovel and a lazy neighbor.

December 2nd, 2003 - I should have known something was up with the weather. Not that I'm particularly prescient about these types of things normally, but I do keep a careful eye on the sky. I am watching, even if I don't know what for.

Yesterday there were brilliant light shows in both the morning and the early evening. The clouds sat low in the sky, though the air was quite clear and bright below them. The mirrored glass and polished steel skyscrapers glowed a pearly white, almost as if the sun had been replaced with a black light bulb. On the morning commute I was dazzled. On the way home I was surprised the strange glow persisted, this time enhanced by the inner lights that shone from each building.

This a.m., just after the dog had woken us, Brittney rolled from the bed and brushed the shade aside to take a quick peak at the out of doors. "Holy shit! It snowed," she said. "Everything is white." I laid there staring at the ceiling, not quite taking it in. Then I got up, put on a lot of clothing, and headed out the door with the dog and my Walkman. I was almost sorry not to be riding the train across the Charles to catch a glimpse of this first dusting on the Esplanade.

Outside, people were shuffling down the icy sidewalks blowing quick clouds of CO2, while the cars inched along belching their own exhaust. I walked down past the gym, across Route 16 and up past the dog grooming school and the Medford Community Center to the end of Boston Ave. Traffic was really in a snarl. Even the side streets were backed up with people trying to get on the main drags.

As I rounded the corner at High Street a well-dressed woman in a Mercedes rolled down her window and shouted, "Hey! What's going on up there?," gesturing ahead to the intersection.

I had to pull off my headphones to respond. "Nothing is going on," I said. "It's like this everywhere."

She made a show of being exasperated, and I pulled the left earpiece back over my ear, pleased to be walking the dog and then working from home for the day, rather than queuing for an endless series of lights. I yelled, "GOOD LUCK!" as her window hummed closed.

Soon enough, even I was slipping and sliding on the frosted pavement, and once a guy at a bus stop laughed a little laugh at me as I almost dished it stepping off the curb. He buried his head back in the paper as I turned to acknowledge my gaffe.

By the time I got home, sweating beneath my fleece and Goretex shell, the roads were parking lots. Slumping into my office chair and tripping the power button on the modem, my first e-mail was from Brittney, just arrived at work after a benign little fender-bender and a whole lot of stopping and starting.

And so, just as the fall fell one night in September, winter has come upon us suddenly. It's December 2nd. We should have known, but instead we slipped and slid, cursed both beneath and above our breathes and shivered and sweated in not enough and too many clothes. If we're lucky it'll all be over in three or four months.

If we're really lucky we'll find a way to enjoy it while it lasts.

December 1st, 2003 - Over the weekend, we visited Brian and Diana at their new home in Red Bank, NJ. On Saturday night, after we returned from La Chalupa, a Mexican restaurant near their house, Brian poured himself a whiskey in an effort to penetrate the heavy block of congestion in his head (a cold had come on a day or two before, and the fluidy, snotty mass stuck behind his eyes wasn't moving yet).

Brittney picked up the bottle and sniffed it as we discussed the relative merits of various hard liquors. Then she passed it across to me and I drew a quick draught of the vapory fumes, though only to remember what was once a too-familiar smell. An intense want flickered in my brain. I laughed a nervous laugh and pushed the bottle back across the table.

See, there was a time when I drank whiskey every night, on ice, in a small glass, after work. Eventually I had to stop. There's more to that story, but it's not the one I'm telling right now.

The smell of the booze and the slight twinge of desire for a short glass of my own got me thinking about liquor and how people drink it and what it does to them. It seems most folks (in this country anyway) are on the same trajectory alcohol-wise. They start drinking in their teens, increase intake and frequency thereof into their twenties and then taper off steadily through adulthood, plateauing when a glass of wine with dinner becomes the pleasant norm.

This seems like the wrong approach to me, someone who began like most other folks but plateaued at a daily six-pack and a pint of whiskey before giving up the whole thing in favor of clear-headed mornings and intact nights-before. More or less everyone I know follows the conventional path I outlined above because, as time goes by, the effects of alcohol on the body become more pervasive and more difficult to overcome. A glass of wine with dinner is the right amount to drink, but a single glass doesn't produce the kind of inhibitionless merry-making that a whole bottle serves up, so we pour the stuff down our throats while we're young, and stem the flow when our bodies can no longer handle it.

There's another factor though. See, the advance of medical technology has us living longer. In fact, we're living so long now that our brains give out before our bodies do. Even as I type these words, my grandmother, at the ripe old age of 94, is laying in her bed at Sunrise Assisted Living, trying to puzzle out what she ate for lunch yesterday. She remembers it was pretty good, but can't figure out what it was.

Consumption of alcohol would wear her body down to match her mental state and simultaneously numb her to the reality of her waning powers. No one wants to outlive their ability to enjoy life. Survival at all costs is not the point of living in the first place.

With that in mind, I propose we change the legal drinking age from 21 to 75.

At 21 you're full of piss and vinegar. You don't need three rum and cokes to inspire spring break skinny dipping. You just need to take your clothes off and jump in the pool. At 35 you don't need a drink to get through dinner with the spouse you can no longer stand to look at. You need some time apart, or maybe just some better time together.

At 50 you don't need to drink beers