September 15th, 2004 - Hello, Friends. Emlyn here. I just needed to pop in for a minute to let you know that blogging activities will be on hold for a little while. A confluence of events, the arrival of my brother as a permanent house guest, the tearing out of our upstairs bathroom to be replaced by a shiny, new bathroom, a towering tsunami of day job related stress and agravation, and a host of other small, pain-in-the-ass type things (e.g. Brittney's car has a flat tire) are keeping me from spending the kind of quality time with you that we've both come to cherish.

Also, we're off to Vermont for a week, starting Friday. It's a vacation. A much needed break from each and every one of the things I mentioned in paragraph one, above.

If we are both lucky (I more than you) I will get this file transferred over to my laptop and will be in touch from our little schoolhouse in Vermont. If that doesn't happen, take care of yourselves. I will miss you.

I should be back in steady rotation toward the end of the month.

September 12th, 2004 - The New Yorker did their "Food Issue" last week, and it got me thinking about my own relationship with food.

When I was a kid I hated eggs. Wouldn't eat 'em. And because it was the one food I never liked, it was the one food my parents didn't force down my throat, as they did squash (which I still detest), lima beans (ditto) and other mushy, insipid vegetables. I'd actually like to find the parent who pioneered the you-can't-leave-the-table-till-you've-cleaned-your-plate torture. Maybe by going back in time and wiping out the alpha-abuser I could save a whole generation of children stranded at darkening kitchen tables with a plateful of liver and the inchoate dread of dinners to come.

I like eggs just fine now, by the way. Sunny side up with tobasco and buttered toast.

In fact, you shouldn't take my youthful disdain for fried, poached and boiled chicken embryos as indicative of my overall pickiness at the table. I am an adventurous eater, rummaging the shelves of the oriental grocery for new and exciting tastes, ordering the arcane and unpronounceable from the menus of ethnic eateries across town and regularly quaffing cheeses whose aromas suggest that cleaning products might be a more apt accompaniment than crackers.

Despite my mother's insistence that I eat unsalted limas and horrible, microwaved vegetable medleys before excusing myself from the dinner table, I credit her with encouraging me to try new foods. She is the type of woman who can be counted on to produce capers and cornichons at the appropriate times. She is a lover of chutneys, an eater of raw shellfish and generally a good dinner companion who will actually lick a plate clean if it harbors a sauce she was particularly fond of.

With my mother I ate my first sushi, my first pappadam. From her I learned that we ate our pasta with homemade sauce because "that crap in the jars is all so sweet and disgusting," which, of course, it is.

Once, when I was ten, we went to visit my father in Brussels where he was working for part of the summer. My mother took me to a restaurant by the cathedral where we ate buckets (yes, buckets) of mussels accompanied by fresh pomme frite. It is a meal we still talk about.

Growing up, as I did, in Alabama, mussels by the cathedral, sushi and papadams (not to mention peshawari naan or saag paneer) were not the norm. Rice with gravy, sweet tea and boiled crawfish were more common, and I ate a lot of good "Southern cooking" as a child. My friend Bobby had a grandmother who made a peppery chicken salad with homemade mayo that I salivate just writing about. My brother worked at a crappy convenient store on the causeway fording Mobile Bay that offered these greasy, olivey muffelettas that rivalled anything you'd buy on the street in New Orleans. At that store, whose name I forget, I once bought and ate a pickled, pig's foot. Delicious.

Speaking of New Orleans, pecan pie, gumbo and crawfish etouffe, the Palace Cafe, salt and butter brought to bear in the most magical ways. That city sings with food, and it was just a two hour drive from Mobile.

Thought Boston is not a great food city, it represented a Neil Armstrong size leap up from Mobile. Indians had infiltrated Cambridge and made Central Square their own. Middle Eastern eateries dotted Commonwealth Ave, near BU, where I was meant to have gotten an education. A Korean roommate introduced me to bi bim bap and pork and kimchi bokum. I ate dim sum in Chinatown and learned to use chopsticks properly once and for all. In Allston there is Vietnames pho and vermicelli on every corner. And there was sushi. So much sushi.

At the beginning of my senior year at BU I met Charlie Caldwell, and turned a major corner in my understanding and appreciation of food. Charlie was (is) something of an intellectual malcontent who mollified his simmering anger with mankind by consuming massive quantities of high quality food stuff. We became fast friends and ready dining partners.

Beyond the million and one mind-bendingly good meals Charlie has prepared for me, and he is, without rival, the best cook I know, I recall one particular session at a narrow, dimly lit sushi place in Brookline where he and I ate nearly a hundred and fifty dollars worth of raw fish. The little, old woman who ran the place toddled out as we cleared the last piece of nigiri from the deck of the serving boat with a piece of paper in her hand.

"We run a summer special," she said. "It for four people, but I think maybe it be nice for you two guys." She put the paper down. It said: Summer Sushi Special for Four - 100 pieces of Sushi for $100.

After college, I managed a restaurant for a bit until I burned out working 70 hour weeks for next to nothing in salary. Meanwhile Charlie was working as a line cook and a succesion of restaurants, each better than the last, until he realized he wasn't ever going to make any money at it, whereupon he quit. We both thought restaurants were the logical career path for food lovers, but they're not. They're more like the women you cheat on food with, exciting and aggravating, but ultimately unfulfilling.

Eventually, we both settled for making more money as corporate wage slaves and spending generous portions of it in the city's upscale dining rooms and gourmet markets, places that satisfied some need we had to be worldly and well-heeled. In the end, I think we realized that food is not made better by being made more complicated. I bought Charlie a smoker as a wedding gift, and Brittney and I spent some of the best afternoons we've had eating brisket and pulled pork with him and Nancy at the old farm house they bought out in Pepperell.

Charlie once read me a passage from one of his cookbooks (he's got a wall full of them and reads them the way most people read novels) about the German idea of bodega schmeck (sp?), a phrase that describes the earthiness of a dish. Think of tamales made with hand ground corn flour and stuffed with slow-cooked pork. Think of spaetzle and wurst with stone ground mustard and sour kraut. Think of food that is good because it is good rather than expensive, or expensive food that is good despite its price. Think of food with love in it, with soul. Think of comfort food.

Food that reminds you of the people you love the most.

September 9th, 2004 - And now as near a complete list of my current complaints as I have the time and stomach to produce.

First of all, work makes me angry. Many, but not all, of the people I work with are not worth working with. That is to say, they're not good at their jobs and therefore make mine harder. Also, the management of the place seems wholly aware of who is not pulling their weight and how, but refuses for some reason beyond my feeble powers of comprehension to do anything about it. Of late I have simmered in rage at my desk while all about me the wrong thing gets done over and over, or more likely, nothing gets done at all. Being something of a pessimist and a depressive, I have trouble not extrapolating universal condemnation for the work habits of others from the specific and small incompetencies of the people in my office. I can be difficult to work with, even for myself.

Second of all, and still related to work. My clients just don't listen. At the risk of sounding immodest, I am good at what I do. I predict well in advance and with startling accuracy where projects will fall apart, when schedules will go awry and what last gasp measures will fail to bring results. Nonetheless, those I serve persist in letting things fall apart, letting schedules go awry and enacting last gasp measures in vain attempts to bring results. Once they find themselves in dire straits they invariably ask me to help them find a way out. Since they are paying the bills, I am less inclined to have them fired (as I would my profligate co-workers), but often I'd like to sit them down and explain in detail how they, not I, have managed to cock things up so completely.

Third, my ankles hurt. They hurt because I play pick-up soccer on poorly maintained fields against over-exuberant Latins. It is important for me to make clear that the ankles I'm referring to (the right and left) don't hurt in the conventional way, that is when put in certain reasonable but still avoidable positions. No. They ache when I am sitting still, as I am now.

Fourth, sometime during the day today the dog vomitted on the carpet in the upstairs hallway. In the half light of the evening, just after my return from work, I noticed a dark patch there and, assuming it was lint, stuck my hand directly in the vomit. I've said all I need to say about that.

Fifth, the students are back, the students who allegedly prop up the economy of our provincial but influential city. I came here as a student fifteen years ago. Like this year's models, I too littered the streets with cigarette butts, urinated publicly after loud and drunken parties and generally was inconsiderate to those around me who had to work for a living. For all those reasons I, who now have to work for a living, loathe the students.

Sixth, today is my fourth wedding anniversary (yay! for me, and yay! for Brittney), but we are so busy, so overwhelmed with plans and obligations that we resolved together not to get presents or cards this year but to celebrate with a nice dinner out at some point in the indeterminate future. The practical side of me feels good about this decision. We have a lot going on and forcing ourselves into paroxysms of romantic celebration seemed like a poor solution to a not particularly pressing problem. The rest of me hurts for this decision. Have we, in our rush to get life done, forgotten to smell the roses of our ongoing happiness? I think we probably have.

Finally, I am depressed. This depression that came from my father and probably from his father before him comes unexpectedly, stays until it is done staying and then disappears again without explanation. I feel sick. I feel sad. If you have been depressed, you know what I mean. If you have not, you don't.

And though my father will read this (hi Dad!) and worry about me, I know I'll be alright in a day or a week. Despite all the foregoing complaints, I live a great life. I am a happy person. I love my wife (hi, Hon!) and my dog (woof). My work is very manageable and really not as terrible as I make it out to be. I have time to play soccer and clean dog vomit and sweep cigarette butts from the bushes in front of the house. I have time to write my complaints and nail them to the church door of this website.

In short (too late) it has been a bad day, but I will recover.

September 8th, 2004 - Today. Rain, rain, angry rain. Blinding rain. The ground boiling with rain. Soaking through shoes and socks and creeping up the legs of pants. Running like rivers in gutters both concrete and improvised. Water finding its way in. All this despite the ineffectual umbrella and the "water resistant" windbreaker.

From wet forecasts to sales forecasts at work, the "bottom line" is that we're coming up short and need to revise, revise, revise. I'm told we're too accepting of missed deadlines, that we need to manage the client more effectively. I make the point that our schedules are best guesses at how months worth of work will unfold, and that our forecasts are guesses based on those guesses. This is too much thinking apparently.

At my desk in soaking pants and bare feet. I bury myself in spreadsheets and ward off potential intruders with headphones. They keep people from interrupting in a way that just being busy never seems to.

Lunchtime. I am summoned to a meeting. Meetings at my work are like black holes except that they actually eschew all matter. We seldom discuss anything that matters at all. Instead, these meetings consume the best hours of our days. Logic and common sense are anathematic. Today's lunchtime session is particularly demoralizing and useless.

Fortunately, Rossini's, the pizza place around the corner is open again after a week with its sliding metal grate down and a note announcing a vacation tacked to the glass behind. I leave the office, pass American Crane and Hoist, the Vietnamese jeweler and the black barbershop/stylist and walk through their neon-lit, Italian door. Three dollars later, a giant slice of mushroom pizza has saved my afternoon.

An afternoon of phone calls, my polite, work voice zooming down fiber-optic cable, criss-crossing the country, stirring writers to write faster, editors to edit faster and none of them to point out to me that the proper modifier is "more quickly." I coddle clients by taking on facets of their jobs, cooing mellifluously, reassuring them. Off the phone, I revise already revised schedules. I help a co-worker with a computer problem.

And then I'm on the train with my nose in a book, Rushdie's Fury. Two Indian men take seats next to me, one who says he's from Bombay and smells like cigarettes, the other from somewhere else, somewhere less cosmopolitan, less Bollywood, by the timbre of his conversation. I imagine the more garrulous one looking over my shoulder and nodding smugly. Yes, even here in distant Boston, one of Bombay's own (Rushdie) is the entertainment of choice.

At home the dog jumps on me, licks my face. Brittney has a recipe for Vietnamese Pho, which she promises to prepare while I make yet another trip to Home Depot to order bamboo flooring (don't ask). Despite last week's Home Depot triumph, I've soured on the place again. I believe the demons in the seventh circle of hell wear orange aprons and stare at the tormented in that uniquely blank way that says, 'no, I can't help you.'

Still, by being brusque and pacing impatiently I manage to get ahold of the special order person for the flooring department. Very slowly he enters my order into his computer. He gives me things to sign. I pay and leave.

And then I'm back home, sipping Brittney's pho and letting my brain dribble out my ear in front of the television. It feels good. A soccer game comes on, the rhythm of the announcers' voices lulling me slowly, inevitably to sleep. Outside it continues to rain.

September 6th, 2004 - One weekend. Three confrontations. I start to wonder if the whole world has gone crazy. First there's this people-still-willing-to-vote-for-Bush thing, which, for me, has heavy implications. Then there are these people doing stupid shit in my immediate vicinity, things I might have tolerated in the past but can't stomach anymore.

Saturday morning I mowed the lawn and trimmed the hedges. It felt good to restore some order to the domestic kingdom, to feel the pride of ownership in my home. When I was done with lawn and hedge, I swept the driveway.

Then as I was putting Rain-X on Brittney's windshield, that stuff that makes water bead up and run off, this guy comes around the corner and parks across the street from the end of our driveway. He's talking on one of those irritating Nextel two-way radios, barking into it and then letting it beep. I'm buffing the glass with a clean, dry cloth as instructed and glancing over occasionally to try to understand why he's parked there.

Then, all of a sudden, he wads up a piece of paper and throws it out the window into the street. THROWS IT OUT THE WINDOW!

I said (where said really means yelled): "Hey, what are you doing? I live here! Don't throw shit in my street!"

And he said (and really just said): "Oh...sorry. I'll pick it up. It's just a wrapper."

And I said (and this time really just said: "For crying out loud I know you don't want it in your car, but you can't just throw shit in the street. I don't care what it is." And I walked out and took it from him and put it in one of my garbage cans. And he started up his car and drove away with his stupid two-way still beeping.

Later that day we're at a soccer game, the US National Team vs. El Salvador, a World Cup Qualifier, a big game. The referee, a fellow from Trinidad or Tobago, is doing a poor job. He sends off one of the El Salvadoran players for a reason that is not abundantly clear to anyone. The crowd boos and whistles (the latin equivalent of booing). Booing was appropriate.

And then two rows behind us a guy yells, "fucking nigger!"

Fucking nigger? Are you kidding me? His friends are calling "culero" (asshole) and "hijo de puta" (son of a whore), things a referee is accustomed to hearing. But then he does it again, "fucking nigger!"

So I turn and yell (yes, more yelling), "Hey! Por favor! (Please)" One of the guy's friends looks at me pleadingly and says "Hijo de puta!" as if asking me if that's ok. So I say, "OK, pero el otro, no!" (OK, but the other one, no), meaning you can call him whatever you want, but "fucking nigger" is not an option. And his beligerent friend doesn't like it and says, "No one paid for me my ticket!" which I meet with a cold, even stare, because I'm tired of tolerating crap like that. Tired of it. Everyone around us is shifting nervously in their seats. They'll just let this crap go, but I can't anymore. It makes me feel like too much of a coward.

Finally, tonight. Just now actually. I'm out with the dog. He's peeing his last pee before bed. I'm putting the cover on the grill. We had burgers for dinner.

A car comes around the corner again and stops. The overhead light comes on. The guy on the passenger side gets out and starts to take a piss in the bushes. I'm incredulous. Where do I live? Is this the suburbs?

I yell (again): "Hey! This is not the place for that!"

The guy pissing stops and gets quickly back in the car. I hear: "Sorry, pal!" as they drive away.

I don't know what's made me so bold. I see this ebbing away of common decency every day. People littering. Driving badly. Being openly rude to one another. And I don't understand. It makes me angry, and though I'm sure I should be more careful who I'm yelling at, I feel so much better about myself having said what I've said, having stood up for myself and what I know is right.

It all takes the gloss of what was, otherwise, a relatively restful and relaxing labor day weekend.

September 2nd, 2004 - Here's what I heard. Brittney, rising from the couch, saying, "ok Buddy, outside." This is what we say when it's time for the dog to rise from his pre-bedtime nap to take the night's last piss. The sound of feet and paws travelling across the kitchen to the backdoor. The door opening. A scrambling of paws on the back porch as a rapid fire bark dopplers around the corner into the side yard.

And then I smelled skunk, and I knew the most horrible thing that can happen to a dog owner, outside of a car accident, had happened.

I rose from the computer and strode down the stairs. "Hon, I think the dog's been skunked," I said.

"Oh, no!" Brittney replied.

I crossed the kitchen, snapped on the back light and peered around into the side yard where Eddie could be seen writhing in the dirt like a surf cast fish thrashing in the shallows. I called him to the door.

There he stood, his right eye a little swollen and caked with muck, dust darkening his skinny flanks. He hung his head and scraped at his nose with a fervent paw. I bent down to sniff him and confirmed that he'd gotten it in the face, a searing blast of acrid stink. I choked back a mighty river flow of obscenities and prepared to deal.

Brittney grabbed the leash and shampoo. I pulled a V-8 from the fridge and some old towels. I went down to my workshop and got a pair of the latex gloves I use when I strip paint from old furniture and the heavy duty flashlight.

I snapped the leash on the confused and miserable dog and took him out back by the garden. Brittney went upstairs to look up recipes for dog de-skunking mixtures.

Donning the gloves, first I dumped the can of V-8 on his head and worked it in real well. In the flaslight's faint beam it looked like blood streaming from a wound behind his ear. The red juice mixed with the dirt and gave off a putrid scent that nearly made me gag.

I hit him with the hose, rinsing and repeating as directed. Brittney left to buy ingredients for the de-skunking stuff, hydrogen peroxide, baking soda and dish soap.

When his coat was clear white again, I put the hose down and squirted out two big handfuls of doggie shampoo which I applied to every follicle on his stinking little canine body. He looked at me pleadlingly, though I couldn't tell whether he was pleading for an end to the bath or to the stench.

I rinsed and repeated several more times, again as directed, praising him for standing still while cursing under my breath like a sailor who is also a truck driver.

I left the dog, tethered to the fence and shivering, and went to see if Brittney was done whipping up the magic mix inside. She was and handed it out to me with a paper towel coated in olive oil to wipe over his eyes to protect them from the stinging agents in the mix.

I rubbed olive oil in my dog's eyes and then went back to work lathering him up with this Googled stink cure. I lathered and lathered and lathered some more, intermittently pressing my nose to his tiny cranium to test the results.

After more rinsing and more lathering and more sniffing and then a final rinse I gave up and went to work with the towels. Eddie hates being wet and he pressed himself into the terry cloth as I dried him.

At that point I couldn't tell whether he still stank or not. The skunk's ample contribution to our evening hung in the air like some sort of noisome fog. Was the smell on the dog or on the breeze? Was it on my hands? Or was it on my soul? I couldn't tell.

Brittney came out and applied her own nose to the dog and proclaimed him not so bad, maybe even alright. Truthfully, she couldn't tell either. So we took him in and let him off leash, his fur fluffy and damp, his right eye swollen and red. He made a b-line for the carpet in the front hall and rolled himself frantically for a few mintues. Then Brittney took him upstairs and used the hair dryer to drive the last moisture from his coat.

I pulled off my gloves, my shirt and my shorts in the basement, washed my hands in the de-stinking mix and went up to the shower. By this time I smelled skunk everywhere. I was afraid the reek had somehow infiltrated the fine hairs in my nose where I'd never drive them out. I nearly threw up again, but got myself under control.

Now Eddie is curled up behind me on the couch, sleeping as if nothing ever happend. I still smell skunk.

September 1st, 2004 - An elaboration on last night's theme without the blow-by-blow and without the tiresome political ranting. Tonight's question: Why do people disagree with me and why does it make me so angry?

We all start out with the basic genetic makeup of human beings, which is to say the DNA of the two most unlike people on the face of the planet is statistically identical as compared to the DNA of chimpanzees, our closest relative among the primates. Genetically speaking, all humans share a perspective.

And yet people still disagree with me. And it still makes me angry.

Once sperm and egg tango, spinning out double helices of difference, all hell seems to break loose. Our perspectives, at once genetically identical and also as unique as snowflakes, get modified for complexion, hair color, eye color, height, weight and propensity for illness. We are ejected from the womb, screaming and gasping for breath.

We would all agree, I guess, that birth is upsetting, that the warmth and comfort of our mother's inner condo was far preferable to the incommodious demands of the outside world. Score one for agreement.

But then the world shines through the limitlessly faceted prism of nature and nurture. Our parents plant ideas in our heads. Suddenly we don't like pureed carrots or the films of Bob Zemeckis. We prefer boys to girls, or vice versa.

And this is where I really start to disagree with nearly everyone. Because while I'll concede that Forrest Gump was way over-rated and any movie with a volleyball as a main character (Cast Away) is probably reaching, the first Back to the Future was inspired movie making and he wrote AND directed that one. You're right about pureed carrots though.

At this stage of the game we can agree to disagree, whatever that means.

I think the problems really arise when you pick a god. Gods tend to overlay whole universes of other opinions on our up to that point fairly simple belief structures. Christian god loves Bob Zemeckis. Allah? Not so much. That Lea Thompson with her eyes on Michael J. Fox's underpants was clearly not a role model for the modern, veiled, muslim female. People defend their gods to the death, which is a big problem, especially if it's my death you're talking about.

For some folks, politics are like religion. The funny part is that we believe that all politicians are liars but get really angry when we catch them lying. Bill Clinton got a hummer in the Oval Office, but it wouldn't have been a problem if he hadn't denied it. If he'd just said, "Hell yeah! I did her! She could suck the clear coat off a brand new Cadilac!" he'd have been just fine.

But I digress.

What I'm getting at is that we invest ourselves in things to varying degrees. Over blockbuster teen comedies we can agree to disagree. When an aging redneck gets it on with a young, chubby, googley-eyed intern, we get bent. Over the nature of the divine and ultimate fate of our human souls, we fight.

Earlier in the day today, someone I don't even know said I was probably born under a rock because I wondered aloud how there could be ANY black women at the Republican National Convention. As if in wondering about this strange phenomenon of African-American women lining up to stand with a political party that opposes affirmative action for minorities, reproductive rights for women and civil rights for all, I was somehow equal in intellect to the common earthworm (oligochaeta annelida). Does this person not know that worms are excellent in garden compost, and that I, clearly, am not.

This person, this anonymous m long , posting his or her own point of view in an obscure forum unrelated to politics or African-Americans for that matter, made me mad. I can concede that I am not very smart. Anyone who defends Back to the Future as an inspired teen comedy when other sterling examples like Porkies and Fast Times at Ridgemont High are so clearly superior must be something of a dolt.

BUT...m long...what makes you so god damn smart? Is it that you don't capitalize your first initial and last name? Is it that you eschew punctuation altogether? Or is it simply that you're angry I should even begin to suggest that it never makes sense for a black woman to be a Republican? And am I angry because I disagree with you or because you questioned my intelligence?

I think that's what it's all about. There is no anger in disagreement. There is anger only in the implications of disagreement. It's not that I think this and you think that. It's that by thinking that you call me stupid, you invalidate my perspective, my journey from fertilized egg through natal trauma and into the pureeing blender of life. Your view cancels my view, makes it irrelevant, and for that I can never forgive you.

But we can agree to disagree.

August 31st, 2004 - Something about the presidential election was bothering me (ok, a ton of stuff about the presidential election has been bothering me, but I am opening my mind...slowly). What I haven't been able to get over is how the two candidates are polling at a virtual dead heat right now. I mean, from my unapologetically leftist vantage you'd have to be certifiably crazy to be supporting G.W. in this thing, but then my vantage is unapologetically leftist. I live in Boston, the bastion of liberalism (though we have a Republican governor who is also a Mormon, so someone will need to explain our intransigent liberalism to me sometime).

The question I have is: how is that seemingly smart, reasonable people are still planning to vote for George Bush?

I sent my friend Bob a note. Bob is a friend from high school in Alabama, a wealthy, corporate lawyer type who grew up in a steadfastly Republican household and who voted for Bush in the last election. I tried not to load the question, so I just asked him who he was thinking of voting for. Of course, he saw right through that. He's a smart guy.

Here's what he said:

I see this set-up coming a mile away. "Hey guys, I got this old friend of mine, he grew up in Alabama, went to school in Kentucky, and now lives in Georgia. He likes to hunt, and his friends call him The General, so I wonder who he's voting for."

OK, I'll bite.

I've actually given this a lot of thought lately. As you probably expected, I'm a registered Republican, and consider myself a "compassionate conservative," or a "moderate," whatever the hell that means. For the first time that I can remember, though, I've considered not voting this year. If I wasn't a firm "you can't bitch if you don't vote" kinda guy, I would probably pass. My vote won't really count anyway since Bush will easily carry Georgia.

I'm not happy with Bush and Republicans in general. Although I don't think Bush is as dumb as people make him out to be, I think he has his head up his ass. Having said that, on one level, I kind of respect him in that he appears to at least stand by what he believes in, and I don't blame him or his tax cuts for the economy stagnating, lost jobs, outsourcing, etc. I was really rooting for McCain four years ago.

If the Democrats had put up a respectable candidate, however, I probably would have been torn. However, I think Kerry is a real douche bag, and his tremendous melon scares me. I don't think he believes in anything but himself and his wife's ketchup. At the same time, if he loses, then its Hilary in '08, and hell will freeze over.

In the end, I'm likely to vote for the Libertarian candidate, Badnarik, since I'm probably more aligned with his platform, and it's sort of a message vote.

Your turn.

Now honestly, I never intended to get into this with him. I was really just hoping to find out that someone I knew and respected was going to vote for Bush and because he lived outside the stereotypically Democratic North East his perspective was simply different from mine. But maybe it's not a good idea to begin your research with a conclusion already drawn. The things Bob said got me thinking, and so I replied to him at length.

I wrote:

First of all, there's no set up. I don't have the energy to assail anyone else's politics at this point. I was interested in your view point because I assumed you were a Republican and I was curious to know if you felt Bush represented your viewpoint. His seeming disdain for state's rights and massive deficit spending don't exactly match the party's core values.

Suffice it to say, in my very liberal eyes, Bush has turned everything he's touched to crap.

Like you, I don't blame his tax cuts for the souring of the economy. I think that's a result of growing too fast under Clinton (i.e. it's Greenspan's fault as much as anything so complex can be any one person's fault). I do think his tax cuts didn't help at all and were an insult to the poor and working classes who needed a hell of a lot more help in terms of tax relief than the people who got it (i.e. the rich).

My bigger problems with Bush are around going to war in Iraq in the first place, screwing the whole thing up once we got there and lying about his mistakes when confronted with them. He has alienated the world community at a time when we really, really need friends. I think the "War on Terrorism" is as big a waste of time as Reagan's "War on Drugs." Both lack a clearly defined goal and approach inherently social problems with militaristic tactics. It's like declaring "War on Poverty" by shooting poor people.

On the domestic front, we are diametrically opposed on "moral" issues like stem cell research, abortion rights and gay marriage, so there's really no way I can even begin to contemplate four more years of Bush. Don't get me started on the environment.

I don't think he's stupid either, but I do think he's a religious zealot who projects his god-based morality onto an unwilling populace. He may have the courage of his convictions, but as a stalwart atheist and humanist, his convictions frighten me.

Having said all that, Kerry IS a douche' bag. He is as craven a compromiser as any bought-and-sold politician ever was. Furthermore, he isn't even properly liberal (much the way Bush isn't really a Republican). He opposes gay marriage, for chrissakes! What I wanted was an alternative to American centrist politics. What the democrats offered up was a prototypical centrist.

In the end, I'll probably vote for David Cobb, the Green Party guy since their platform most closely mirrors my views. Mine too will be a message vote, since there's no way Kerry won't carry Massachusetts.

So somehow neither of us is voting for one of the two candidates who have a snowball's chance in a very, very hot place, like Miami for example, of becoming the next president.

Bob wrote back:

Sounds like you are in the same boat I'm in. Well, maybe not the same boat itself, but similar boats on the same ocean. You hit on most of the problems I have with Bush - Iraq, deficit, etc. On one level, I was a fan of the tax cuts, given that it put a lot of $$ in my pocket. Its hard to imagine, given my debts, 2 kids, etc., but I'm supposedly rich. However, I would have preferred more $$ for jobs programs, tax credits, paying down the debt, shoring up Social Security etc., as opposed to just cash, but the cash was nice.

The "War on Terror" needs to be waged, but I don't know how to wage it. We've made our bed in the Middle East, and now we have to lay in it. My bigger problems with the Republican party in general are those that probably keep you up at night. We both have the same views on abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research, etc., and the party's line on those issues is becoming increasingly extreme. Even my wife, who I would describe as somewhat religious (me, I skipped church on Sunday - the wife took the kids - to clean out the garage), is opposed to the party line on those issues. There is a bright line that divides people who have strong personal convictions, and people with the same convictions who have the audacity to believe that their convictions are the right ones and would visit them on the rest of society.

Too many Republicans, at least the vocal ones, have crossed that line.

It's crap like this that restores my basic faith in mankind, and makes me think liberals and conservatives might be able to live side by side on this piano keyboard like Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder. And is it me or does Bob's interest in jobs programs, tax credits, paying down the debt and shoring up Social Security sound vaguely, ok not vaguely at all, like he's maybe a Democrat who just thinks he's a Republican because he owns a gun. I decided not to point that out.

I said instead:

See, you're exactly the kind of Republican I have no problem with. Ideologically you believe in small federal government, balanced budgets, firm but reasonable foreign policy and a live-and-let-live approach to social issues. We may not see eye-to-eye on some things, but I understand your point of view.

It's the radical right, who govern by the word of a god I don't believe in, who would have us dictating democracy and capitalism to the rest of the world, who would pursue their ideology whatever the human cost, that has me frightened to remain living in my own country. What boggles my mind is how these seeming extremists have successfully hijacked the republican party...

What Bob said next made me long for the beckoning comfort of my easy armchair liberalism. He hit the nail on the head. He named our apathy, measured our coming response to the current political shenanigans and walked away from the discussion.

He said:

Are you moving to Canada with Martin Sheen and Woody Harrelson? You could probably call me a coward, but I guess I fall in line with most of the rest of middle America. We don't like the way things are going, but we are too subsumed with our own lives to actually do anything about it. The country needs alternatives to the two parties we have, but most people, like myself, are not willing to make the necessary sacrifices to make that a reality.

Go looking for a reasonable Republican and you'll discover an independent. Go looking for an equally rational Democrat and you'll find the same thing. Unfortunately, presidential elections aren't rational operations, and there are no good candidates running in this one.

Hope, apparently, is not on the way.

August 30th, 2004 - Operation George. My brother. He's moving in with us shortly, after he's squared away his various debts and commitments down in Jacksonville where he lives now with his wife and two boys. They'll be staying with my parents in New Jersey while George gets a job and an apartment here.

It turns out that Jacksonville is not a place to build a career, to make a living. Jacksonville is in that part of Florida that belongs more properly to the pine trees and sandy soil of southern Georgia, Savanah and Valdosta, than to the saw grass and palm trees of Florida, Disney and Miami. George's degree in Russian language, fluence in Spanish, Serbo-Croatian, Russian and German have little value in a place like Jacksonville. It's not a cosmopolitan place, not a place where business is conducted in anything other than slow, twangy, painfully improper English.

George was actually born in Jacksonville, though he spent most of his childhood in New Jersey and Rhode Island. He was conceived just a few months after the tension of the Cuban Missile Crisis had ebbed out of the city where his father (not mine; we're actually half brothers, but how do you act like just half a brother?) served as a Navy pilot flying sorties out over the Atlantic to monitor the incoming Soviet ships. This father, George Sr., was killed in a crash off the coast of Spain before his son was old enough to form memories. After that, our mother went back to New Jersey, where she grew up to be near family and eventually to meet my father. It's safe to say George has no real childhood memories of Jacksonville.

That he ended up there is pure chance. Returning from a stint living in Honduras, where he divorced one wife, married another and produced a son, Jacksonville was the one city where he knew someone would pick him up at the airport, a friend he was probably better off without. And so Jacksonville became the scene for his reborn American dream, and he set about working and saving and making his way. Except, as I said before, that hasn't turned out to be possible there.

Operation George commences.

My parents visited us in Vermont this weekend (our first guests there) and George was the primary topic of conversation. There are hopes and fears attached to Operation George, hopes that all will work out well, that he'll find a good job and a good place to live and will require no more assistance from his parsimonious relations, fears that we're pissing into the wind, that we'll be no more able to give George a hand up into satisfied middle-classdom than he was able to give himself.

Somewhere in there, too, is a genuine gladness that he'll be nearby. We love him. He is our son, our brother. We want to spend holidays with his kids and cook meals with his wife. We want to be like other families who are together all the time, driving each other nuts and helping each other out of jams. This is all part of Operation George.

The phone rang tonight, 8:30pm. I looked at the clock. George was on the other end. He spewed information for a while, not so much in an informative way but in the way that people with too much on their minds empty the surplus through that teeth-filled hole at the front of their heads. He said things like, "Don't worry. I'm going to respect your privacy. I'll be visiting the kids on the weekends, so you'll be able to swing from the chandeliers," and "When I get there, I might freak out a little, but it'll be ok. I'll probably just work out a lot."

He is clearly trying to form a mental picture of his new life and failing. I know how he feels.

August 26th, 2004 - A happy ending to the Home Depot affair. Picture me standing in front of the laminate flooring display in a flight suit with a MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner flapping in the breeze from the ceiling fans behind me.

We returned to the giant, orange home improvement warehouse this evening and through a little judicious bitchiness, a little charm and a whole lot of cash dollars were able to place the necessary special orders to complete our bathroom renovation dream.

The Despot only had one designer on duty in the kitchen/bathroom area, a long-haired, moustachioed fellow with two hoop earings and slight paunch. When we arrived he was busy with another couple, so we made ourselves obvious to him by standing five feet away and more or less staring him down, and he said he'd be with us in just a few minutes.

A few minutes passed.

Then Brittney caught him helping another customer with who-the-hell-knows-what and she stepped up and dropped the unstable pregnant lady routine on him. I would have felt badly for him, but he had it coming, and I knew she was only turning the screws to accomplish our end goal. She's very Machiavellian that way.

So pretty shortly thereafter we were sitting across the design desk from Hendrick, that was his name, telling him exactly what we needed and running through the convoluted order forms to get it. I decided to play good cop when Brittney went to get a fresh order form for the Corian countertop we're putting on our new bathroom vanity, and by the time she got back Hendrick and I were chatting amiably about the neighborhood we both live in. He, as it turns out, owns a condo five doors down from us.

An hour later we had our orders placed, knew that Hendrick had once been a human relations engineer, that the college kids subletting the hovel next to his place thought it was fun to smash bottles in his driveway every night, that he runs a recording studio out of his house and that he came to work at Home Depot after about a year of unemployment.

He told us all about Home Depot, too. He said Home Depot employees work on a points system that punishes them for doing things like working overtime or not showing up for shifts. Apparently you can not show up to work with no excuse twice before they fire you. We agreed with Hendrick that that seemed like a pretty good deal.

At the end, I signed the acknowledgement that we will be unable to return the special order items we've ordered in the event they don't work for us, and so did Hendrick. He signed Hendrick David Gideonse XIX. Yes, XIX.

Hendrick is my new best friend.

And I take back what I said yesterday about Home Depot being staffed by rejects from Jane Goodall's monkey outreach program. I mean, Goodall worked with apes, not monkeys, right? I don't even think she has a monkey outreach program. And if she did, Hendrick certainly wouldn't be in it. Hendrick is a regular guy just like me, or just like me but with long hair, earings and a slight paunch.

It took us about 4 hours to get what we wanted from Home Depot, but we DID get it finally, even if we can't return it and have to wait an additional 4-6 weeks for its delivery.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

August 25th, 2004 - Sometimes I live a real smash and grab existence. This morning I rolled from bed as usual, pulling on sneakers to walk the dog. I was tired. I played soccer last night, and I never sleep well after that kind of physical exertion. A woman at work said it's because the endorphins are still coursing through my system when I shut off the light. I think it's because my muscles twist themselves into a gnarled rictus in protest at having been made to do work, and who sleeps well when twisted into a gnarled rictus? Not me.

So I was walking the dog, and because I walk the dog a lot I wasn't thinking about dog walking, but rather about an excerpt I'd read the other day from a new book by Bobby Kennedy Jr. The book's about how the Bush administration has set the environmental movement back about a century, but the excerpt I read focused on how the media is controlled by big polluters like General Electric (which owns NBC and censors stories about big time polluters on their news programs). None of that is important though (I mean it is, obviously, but stay with me because I might make a point in a minute and I'd hate for both of us to miss it).

I was walking the dog and thinking my armchair liberal thoughts and getting angry and all of a sudden I came up with, 'Money is the problem. Free market capitalism just doesn't work. Monopoly is the logical conclusion of free market capitalism and the logical conclusion of monopoly is plutocracy (which we have) rather than democracy (which we think we have).' These were the actual thoughts in my brain.

When the dog and I got home I announced all of this to Brittney who laughed a little laugh, kissed me on the cheek and said, 'that's nice dear; I have to go to work now.'

And that was probably the appropriate response.

Rolling into the office on the scooter, I successfully shook off any latent Marxist pretentions and the miserable Boston traffic, tossed back a cup of tea, pulled on my headphones and started to do some work. And though I was tired, the music (The Decemberists - Her Majesty, the Decemberists...buy it now) was cheering me up, and honestly I like working on spreadsheets. With spreadsheets, order and rules apply. I find that sort of thing very soothing.

Then the phone rang.

And it was a client, except it wasn't a client I deal with regularly. It was the boss of a client I deal with regularly, and she had my usual contact in her office and they spent about 15 minutes taking me to task for the execrable state of their manuscript, even though said state is entirely of their own making.

Somewhere in my head I heard the sound of rushing water. It was the sound of my day getting sucked down the karmic crapper.

I spent the rest of my working hours squirrelled away in offices and conference rooms conferring and meeting and calling and researching, trying to come up with ways to appease and please. It sucked.

Home again, home again, home again I rode, the scooter buzzing me through the evening gridlock like a prison guard releasing me from the plexiglassed visitors' booth at the big house. I couldn't have been a lot happier to see my lovely wife, her fulsome belly pushing out the light fabric of a flowery, maternity top, standing in the garden with a bowl full of just-picked tomatoes. The dog yipped and whimpered, glad to see me too.

Then it was dinner in the oven, dinner out of the oven, dinner on two plates and eaten in front of the TV. We had to be quick because this particular evening Home Depot was calling our names, and when Home Depot calls, smart homeowners run to answer. I don't believe in god, because a benign and merciful god wouldn't make a place like Home Depot, a warehouse size hardware store with everything you could ever want in it, and then staff it with rejects from Jane Goodall's monkey outreach program.

We're having our bathroom redone, which is the most terrible thing you can possibly have done to your home outside of a full kitchen rethink, or at least I hope so cause we had the kitchen redone two years ago and that sucked harder than a shop vac in a bucket of jello.

The other thing to know is that we had to go to the Home Depot (or Despot as I like to call it) tonight because we haven't yet ordered the fixtures for our new bathroom and the guys with the skills are showing up in four weeks to install them. By the way, the lead time on the real critical path fixtures like the vanity and the countertop is four to six weeks.

After fighting for about half-an-hour over what tile to get and what finish to put on the vanity, Brittney and I finally got the attention of the bathroom design woman. I thought we were saved. Unfortunately, she told us we had to deal with Mike, the baths and toilets guy, first and to see her after. She promptly packed her bag and left for the night.

Mike was slower than a three-toed sloth with a hangover though he did help us figure out that we really want to spend a lot more money than we have, and that's a useful thing to know, especially when you're working with a tight budget, which we are. After two hours at Home Depot we ended up deciding to buy cheaper, stock items for shower, tub and toilet. We thanked Mike for his expert tutelage, and told him that, yes, we would consider buying the power flush crapper.

Back in the car. Back through the Scylla and Charybdis of metro traffic.

When we got home we remembered it was trash night, recycling too, so there were five minutes of domestic grunting and straining required to complete that task, and then I ate a handful of cookies, stripped down to my underwear and plonked myself down in front of this keyboard to hurl another hopeless note into the great sea of blogging detritus.

Today has been smashed. Grabbed. And now it is done.

August 22nd, 2004 - More happiness distilled. Last night we spent our first night at the Schoolhouse (see photo here). We took our first showers in the enclosure we installed upstairs, slept our first night in the bed we painted and put together, ate our first eggs and mowed the lawn for the first time.

Never mind the fact that we slept like crap (it's hard to sleep in a strange new place), the tub still leaks (needs new washers), the eggs barely made it to the plates (we're not used to electric stove cooking) and the lawnmower died half-a-dozen times as I criss-crossed the sprawling yard (I think it has carburetor problems). It was a weekend of supreme triumph.

We were both amazed a month ago when we handed over a really rather large portion of our accumulated wealth and received a set of keys in return. The soul-stealing process of cleaning, renovating and emptying the crap out of a 100-year-old house muted that initial amazement a bit, but this weekend all the joy came flooding back.

I said outloud as we munched away at eggs, cheese and English muffins, 'this fucking rocks! We're here. We've arrived.'

And then there's the Lawn Chief to consider. The Lawn Chief is this ancient, beaten riding mower I bought off a guy who lives down by the highway for $100. The Chief got loaded in my truck Friday morning and driven up to Vermont through a driving rain storm. Cross-the-street neighbor David helped me lift him off the tailgate this morning, and though he started on the first pull, I had barely completed a lap around the lot before he was sputtering and coughing like he'd packed his peace pipe full of skunk weed. I succeeded, finally, in mowing most of the lawn, but not before the Chief put me through my paces, hopping off to pull his rip chord again and again, adjusting the choke and throttle, pushing him onto level spots to keep his engine from flooding.

I laughed through the whole thing. Clearly I feel I've cleared some sort of man hurdle simply by owning a riding lawn mower, even if it is the oldest, slowest, least reliable riding mower in the contiguous 48. In fact, I think the Chief's crappiness is something I take particular pleasure from. To me, the Chief is all too symbolic of what we're doing in Vermont, because really, how is it that a schmuck like me deserves to own more than one home? The Chief, like the Schoolhouse, is old. He has problems. In fact, some of his problems are what modern day office workers might refer to as 'show stoppers.' But that's ok. Like the schoolhouse, the Chief eventually gets the job done.

And that's what we're doing in Vermont. Getting the job done. The job is, of course, getting away from wage-slave, office-bound labor. Here again, the Chief is very symbolic, as you can no doubt see.

This afternoon we stopped working long enough to drive over to the lake (it's five minutes away) for a swim. Then we went to Wahoo's Drive-In in Wilmington and ate cheeseburgers and got ice cream cones and made fun of New Yorkers.

August 19th, 2004 - It was a soccer night. Tuesdays and Thursdays I rush home from work, throw my cleats in a bag and head up to the park for a little pick up game. We tend to get somewhere between six and twelve guys, so we set up a couple of small goals and run around as best we can until it starts to get dark. We don't keep score.

Some summers the game never really reaches critical mass. Not enough guys show up from one week to the next, but this summer has been good.

First I was playing with some friends who all play together on a Saturday league team. Tom and Chris were the ones you could count on. The rest are mostly too busy (or too lazy) to play during the week though, so I was relieved when Tito and some of his friends started to join in. Tito is a little Bolivian guy, 42 years-old, who works at a local cafe' and plays in a couple of music groups who do Bolivian traditional music. He's stands about 5'2", and he's barrel chested. Tito smiles a lot, and doesn't care that some of the other guys make fun of him for being slow.

His friends are other very short Bolivians. There's Ernesto who I've not seen this summer, and Americo who comes from Cochibomba and dribbles way too much without ever passing. Americo claims to be 19, but we all think he's more like 25. Neither he nor Ernesto is more than 5'4".

Once Tito and his crew joined up, we met Harold and Giovanni. Harold is also Bolivian, but younger and taller than the others. He's lived here since he was 13 and would rather discuss baseball than soccer. He plays a lazy, loping style that can be very deceptive, especially when he slots the ball between your legs and motors away with it. Giovanni is my age, 32, and he works as an electrician. He moved here from El Salvador as a teen also. Gio is fast and changes directions really well.

Kerim is Turkish. He rode up on his bicycle one day, announced he had a terrible hangover and has played with us ever since. He's forever sucking wind and saying things like, 'I need a drink.'

Much like Kerim, Steffan just showed up one evening, a tall German guy with a heavy accent and spiked blonde hair. Steffan is 40 and runs with a herky-jerky, splayed leg grace that belies his quite considerable skill. He's in the bio-tech business.

Alex is Tom's friend from college. He's Russian, married with two kids, not in very good shape, but you can tell he used to be a fair player.

There is a crew of Japanese guys that have been coming around lately. The ones I've seen more than once are Timothy, Josh and Mike. These are not, of course, their actual names. Timothy, after introducing himself, failed to respond even once when called Timothy. I think they all go to MIT or something like that. They're all college age anyway. Nice guys. They don't play much defense, but then they don't kick six shades of crap out of your ankles either.

Over the last couple weeks, we've had some Brazilians grace us with their presence. They all think they're god's gift to soccer, and it takes a little while for them to realize we've got a pretty good game going. Usually the second or third time someone goes by them like they weren't there they wise up and start to take things a bit more seriously. Frankly, I could do without them. They too like to dribble too much, and often you make a long run to get open only to have them forsake the pass in favor of dribbling into a nest of defenders and losing the ball. I'm generalizing, of course, but it's shocking how many of these guys play to type.

I love soccer nights. I love trying and failing to communicate in other languages. I love running until I'm soaked with sweat and it's too dark to see the ball. I love to play.

I've met all these people too. Some of them I've known for years now, though I never see them anywhere but at the park, and there are so many others who played for a while but they're gone now. Isaac from Cameroon with the persistent knee injury. Vincent the French concierge who lived here for a few years and then moved on to a hotel in London. Haitian guys and Jamaicans. Mexicans and Irish. Saleem from Algeria, and all his North African friends.

In the past I've played on teams with some of them, but I don't play organized soccer anymore. They always insist on keeping score, and once you start keeping score you start taking things too seriously. People get too competitive, too rough. I don't have time for that. I'm past it.

All I really want to do is show up at the park, shake the hands of some guys I know a little and play. When I win the lottery I'll buy a field somewhere and build a big locker room with showers and couches and televisions. I'll have my friends over for games and afterwards we'll sit and talk shit and watch games on TV.

Then every night will be a soccer night.

August 17th, 2004 - People ask, 'Are you excited?' Or they say, 'You must be so excited.' They smile. They nod.

I'm not quite sure how to respond. Mostly I say, 'Yes.'

But, 'yes' doesn't really encapsulate what I'm feeling about the imminent birth of our first child. 'Yes' scratches meakly at the surface of my feelings. 'Yes' covers one revolution in one of the tiny grooves of the record which spins out the song of my current and complex emotional state.

First of all, yes. I am excited. Excitement sneaks up behind me and brains me with the iron skillet of a peak at my wife's growing mound of a belly.

But hard on the heels of excitement comes fear, the kind of fear that leaves you speechless rather than screaming. Fear doesn't just sneak up, cold cock me and then run off like excitement does. No. Fear sits down on the love seat and stays for a while. Fear works me like an organ grinder. I'm the monkey.

I am afraid that I don't yet know what I don't know, that all my conscientous lack of preparation for fatherhood is just that, a lack of preparation. I have tried, up to this point, to seem blase', to seem thoughtful and mature.

I am neither thoughtful nor mature.

Fortunately, happiness arrives. This is the happiness of sublime love, as in, the deep and abiding love I feel for Brittney. I love her new moodiness. I love her occasional nausea. I love her fatigue. I love her changing body, and her willingness to put it through these paradigmatic shifts in metabolism and musculature. When I think of spending future days with this woman and whatever three-toed sloth she produces at the end of her gestation I feel happy. Happiness kicks fear off the love seat.

Happiness lives with sadness. They share a two-bed walk up in Somerville. Sadness reminds me that fatherhood will impinge on my cherished alone time, my sanity, my writing. Fatherhood will demand that I come home right after soccer rather than lounging in the grass in the twilight, talking shit with my soccer friends. I am willing to give these things up, but I am sad about it too.

There is even anger to be dealt with. I feel angry that Brittney will have to go back to work at the end of whatever maternity leave we can arrange. This is anger at myself for not providing adequately. This is anger at our economy for making one income insufficient. This is anger for life presenting the kinds of obstacles that lead people to say asinine things like, 'that's life.'

Anger, in all of these incarnations, may reasonably be said to be unreasonable and irrational. But then, isn't that what emotions are. I would argue that reason, thoughtfulness, maturity and rationality are illusions, things we convince ourselves we have so we feel better about the reality of life.

Living is like being shot out of a canon. Excitement and fear and happiness and anger all fight for primacy in our cerebral cortices. In the interstices between emotional shifts we struggle to say something meaningful about our experiences.

Mostly we fail.

And so, am I excited about becoming a father?

Yes.

August 16th, 2004 - Lost in the chaos of car troubles and house guests over the last week were a couple of important events. First of all, the worm is kicking and squirming. Brittney first felt something funny on a flight down to Newark for business last week. Since then, she says, at times when she's not paying attention, the worm begins its gymnastic routine.

Our obstetrics nurse, Serena, said Brittney wouldn't feel anything for a while yet, but that kid is asquirmin'. Brittney has already begun teasing me about our child's potential future as a world famous soccer player. I even felt a little kick on Friday. So that's big news. I've interacted, on some level, with my progeny.

Tomorrow I'll start teaching it to swear in Spanish.

The other thing that happened is that we went to see Dave Harter's brand new baby, Sam. He was like a little baby burrito all wrapped up with just his head sticking out. Dave and Elin are living in that sleepless, postnatal, twilight zone now, their every moment beholden to the tyranny of a ten pound human.

Sam was having trouble eating because he's tongue tied, that is there's a thin membrane on the under side of his tongue that prevents him from working his tongue the way he needs to. A quick snip at the surgeon's office will put that right.

Dave opted to have Sam circumcised on his second day of existence, and during a diaper change we got to observe the resultant wound. I was disturbed. Dave said he made the decision to go ahead with the procedure after a co-worker said two words to him.

'Locker room.'

Later in our visit we sat and watched while Elin breast fed, and despite feeling a little uncomfortable in the presence of another woman's enormous milky teats, I couldn't get over the fact that they seemed to have transformed themselves from erotically charged mating bait to giant-nippled feed bags. Elin said she felt her breasts no longer really belonged to her anymore, and I could see why. Dave sat on the couch and offered sporadic and amusing commentary on the proceedings.

August 15th, 2004 - Since returning to the car on Thursday to discover one broken window and one empty space where once there was a stereo, I have suffered a number of small but frustrating setbacks that have me on the verge of one of my tiresome, depressive episodes.

Friday passed without tragedy. Saturday, not so much. We needed to drive out to Western Mass for Brittney's grandparents' 60th wedding anniversary (can you imagine?) and the car, still reeling from its recent trauma, needed an oil change. The first place I tried, the gas station at the foot of the hill, said the mechanic had broken his shoulder and wasn't available for oil changes until Monday. At the next place, the garage over off the rotary in Arlington, I pulled up, hopped out and asked if they were doing oil changes. The bald, raspy-voiced mechanic asked, 'do you wanna leave it or do you wanna wait?'

I said, 'I'll wait.'

And he said, 'Pull right in.'

I went back to the car, stuck in the clutch, turned the key and got nothing. I turned the key again. Nothing. I turned the steering wheel to lock it and spun the key again. Nothing. I let the emergency brake out so the car could roll back a few feet, tried again and cursed under my breath when my efforts were met with tragic silence.

The mechanic stuck his head out of the service bay and said, 'come on, pull it in.'

I said, 'Now it won't turn over.'

He came over and repeated the series of quick fixes I'd tried to no avail. We push started it and pulled it into the garage, where he tested and then replaced the battery. Still, it didn't start. Even a guy with the mechanical aptitude of a one-armed badger could see the starter was burned out. I said, 'Looks like the starter's burned out.' The mechanic nodded.

So I walked home, where I met Brittney fresh back from a walk with the dog and limping pretty badly. Two weeks ago she'd had six stitched in the top of her foot after cutting it on a piece of glass. This was her first walk with the dog since then, so I assumed she was limping because of the cut.

I was wrong. She'd sprained her ankle. I pulled the ice pack out of the freezer.

I got my friend Tom on the phone. Tom wanted to borrow my truck, so I said, 'hey, you can come get the truck whenever you want it, but I need to borrow your car to drive out to Western Mass for this family thing.' I figured, 'that's one problem solved.'

Except that two hours, two ice packs and an hour outside Boston the Mass Pike turned into Mass Parking Lot. We stopped. We went. We stopped and went. We stopped and went some more, mostly stopping and only occasionally wenting. I was beginning to think that all my atheism was catching up with me, that god had woken from his oblivious slumber to punish sinners and heathens for their multifarious indiscretions. I had been indiscreet. Multifariously. And now it was my turn to suffer.

We got off the Pike and snaked down Rt 20 through towns I'd never heard of and never really need to see again arriving at Grandma and Grandpa's about an hour-and-a-half late. We visited. Then we went to dinner, which went on and on and on, and culminated in a sheet cake, a cup of decaf and a six dozen pictures taken with the happy, but clearly tired, couple.

We hit the road home about 10pm, making good time for about 25 minutes before the Mass Pike turned into Mass Parking Lot again. WTF? WTF? WTF? I have sinned, but I never killed anyone. I wasn't the Unabomber, and I didn't do that anthrax thing. I began to think the make-believe god who'd smitten me with traffic earlier in the day had turned not only vengeful but spiteful as well. With a belly full of sheet cake and a bladder full of decaf I silently reconstructed what I remembered of the Hail Mary. Traffic lurched forward and broke apart.

I took this, not so much as an omen that piety and religiosity might be the path to happiness, but rather as one last twisting of the karmic knife still sticking directly in my gut.

When the going gets a little tough like this, I don't hold up well. I get whiney. I am difficult to be around. I take random bad luck and minor set backs all too personally. I begin to see the world through puke yellow glasses. The tectonic plates beneath every mole hill heave and strain and become mountains of adversity, capped with the glacial snows of self pity.

Fortunately, my wife is beautiful and wise and smart, and she reaches across the divide between driver's seat and passenger's to lay a warm, concerned and loving hand on my forearm. She makes meaningful eye contact. She lets me rant and rave about all of the aforementioned trivialities.

We split a sandwich.

August 12th, 2004 - Dear Rotten Asshole Who Broke My Car Window and Stole My Stereo Today,

I wish you could have been standing there when I got to the car, in a rush to get to the airport to pick up my brother-in-law, and found the driver seat full of shatter proof glass. Then you might have seen the look on my face, the look of complete and total defeat, and heard the old guy who sidled up, looked at the window and said, 'bummer, huh?' You might have gotten a real kick out of that. Actually, you probably would have gotten a real kick right in the ass. I can tell you that I hatched spontaneous fantasies about cracking your skull with a baseball bat just the way you cracked my window.

I raked enough glass out of the seat so I could sit down without too much fear of lacerating my ass, but in the process of doing that I cut one of my fingers. Unfortunately I wasn't able to clean up more, because I was late. And while you couldn't have known (or possibly cared) that it was going to rain right in that window as I drove to the airport soaking my left arm, I'd like to think you would have enjoyed that part of your crime too. I mean, you're a rotten asshole. Rotten assholes enjoy that sort of thing, don't they?

And, Rotten Asshole Who Broke My Car Window and Stole My Stereo Today, I want you to know that when I call you that name I feel sort of bad, because I hate to disrespect rotten assholes. I mean, there are plenty of rotten assholes in the world who do what they do without ever bothering me.

You're more like a piece of shit, except, there again, I think that might be unfair to pieces of shit.

I'm not sure why you feel entitled to come and take something that I paid a lot of money for. I'm pretty sure I never took anything of yours. I'm pretty sure of that primarly because I don't take things that belong to other people, because I am neither a rotten asshole or a piece of shit.

You should know, Rotten Asshole Who Broke My Car Window and Stole My Stereo Today, that I don't believe in God or in heaven or in hell, but still, improbably, I hope God strikes you down early in your pathetic, misguided life and casts you down into a hell that furnishes you with a million different ways to suffer. I hope, in hell, you spend eternity having things taken from you.

This is all just anger talking though.

To be fair, when the last rotten asshole/piece of shit smashed the passenger side window and stole this stereo's predecessor I was less angry. I figured, you can't live in the city as long as we have without having one of these stupid petty crimes happen to you. I laughed that one off. I had the glass fixed. I bought a new stereo. You're getting more of my bile and hate, simply because you're not even an original piece of shit.

I imagine you don't do this only for the money. I'm guessing you have a drug habit you've got to support. Well, good. I hope the drugs kill you. I hope you wake up dead and blue behind a dumpster down by the expressway. The weak and infirm of the herd are always the first to go. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

Eventually, fortunately, ultimately, my anger will fade. I will wish less injury on you. I will return to my compassionate, liberal views of the petty criminal and resume pontificating in dilletantish conversation about the proper way to raise people up from the bondage of their poverty and lack of education. In the meantime I hope you get shot by an angry drug dealer. I hope the car my purloined stereo ends up in gets crushed in a head on with a big, stupid SUV. I hope, in your haste to finish the job of ripping said stereo from my automobile, you too cut yourself on the glass hanging from the door frame and that the cut gets infected and gangrenous and that you have to stop stealing car stereos because it's not quite as quick and easy with just one arm.

I know. I know. It's an awful lot of anger and spite for a silly piece of consumer electronics and a sheet of safety glass. The anger is disproportionate to the crime. But think of it this way. I work hard at being considerate of other people's space, privacy and well-being. I don't play my music too loud. I don't litter. I say 'please' and 'thank you.' I'm a good person. I DON'T DESERVE TO SUFFER THE WHIMS OF A USELESS PIECE OF HUMAN DETRITUS LIKE YOU. My anger is disproportionate to the crime you've committed because my goodness is disproportionate to your badness.

Do yourself a favor. Find Jesus. It's not what I would do, but you're not smart. And while you're at church it will be just that much safer for me to park my car.

With absolute and unequivocal malice,

Emlyn

August 11th, 2004 - Dave Harter is a father. The same Dave Harter with whom I smoked a million cigarettes in a horrible, linoleum-floored dorm room at college. The same Dave Harter who threw up on Vicki and Carla's couch one winter night when we were too drunk to get back into the aforementioned dorm. The same Dave Harter who spent the summer after we graduated sitting on the couch in our apartment eating fried chicken and watching daytime TV. Dave, who played drums badly in all of the bad bands I was ever in. Dave, who got Charlie his first tech job. Dave, who got cancer and beat it. Dave, who married Elin and bought a condo and went to work at Fidelity. Dave, whose major accomplishments during the last year include mastering Madden Football for the Xbox and talking his mother and step-father into going Dutch on a vacation home in Vermont. My friend Dave is a dad.

I feel a fairly overwhelming emotional response to the birth of Dave's first child because Dave and I are close and because I'm going to be a father too soon. There is a vicarious thrill. I feel like I'm peeking into my own terrifying future.

Elin had been in labor since some time Monday morning. They went to the hospital and were told that her contractions weren't yet painful enough, 'go away and come back later.' All day Tuesday she was in labor. All night Tuesday night. This morning she couldn't take it anymore. They went back to the hospital and she was 8cm dialated, which is, apparently, a lot, so they admitted her and got down to business right away. At 5pm on the nose Sam Jacob Harter came into the world, at 8 pounds 10 ounces, a good solid bowling ball of a kid.

Dave described it as the most intense and surreal experience he's ever had. He said, "Imagine the weirdest thing you've ever been through and then imagine going through it while on acid (another thing Dave and I did together in college). It's weirder than that."

Dave, known for a certain, almost irritating lack of emotion, was jubilant, exuberant, overjoyed. He described getting the baby from the pediatrician, cutting the cord and then sitting in a chair, holding his child, his mind blown and flapping in the wind.

The baby ate almost right away, taking to breast feeding like a bear to honey. He cries when someone's not holding him.

Elin is fine too. She's been up and walked around a bit, albeit gingerly. Mother, father and child will be in the hospital through Friday when they'll head home and begin their lives all over again.

Hooray for them.

August 7th, 2004 - It all started with an innocuous note from my friend Brian. He wrote:

Holy crap. This is so true it's really, really not funny. Link to alleged satire.

The satire, which you're not really obligated to read, is about a guy roughly my age who loses his interest in music. He was, as all my friends and I were, something of a music nerd, always on the lookout for some obscure new band. Then he lost interest. As Brian said, it wasn't really very funny, just true.

And yet somehow it managed to spark another in a long line of email threads about getting older, the topic du décennie (topic of the decade) for 30-something people everywhere.

Mike, a neurologist, wrote:

Does your resonance with this article mean the honeymoon is over? No more consumption? Fact is there are imaginative bands out there putting out good stuff all the time. The same can be said for authors, movie-makers and TV-producers. If you are a good American it is your duty to familiarize yourself with these products and pass the word on so that the entertainment engine of our economy fires on all cylinders. You need to discuss this very issue with your sister, urgently, so that she might re-orient you with how things in this country are done and what it means to be free, the alternative is move to France where you get what you can, not choose what you get.

The flip side? If, by your mid-thirties, you're consistantly entertained by bands possessing three chords, dress-up shtick, and a lyrical statement that ends in three minutes and involves lots of personal pronouns, you need serious help. Or a set of oil paints and an easel...

Now I know what you're thinking. This is a discussion about musical tastes, right? Wrong. Pay attention. The worm is about to turn.

Shawn, the foreign correspondent and recent acceptor of his imminent middle-agedness, chimed in next with this:

OK, so I was never the music head you guys were and this may not surprise a lot of you... But I have a confession to make: I like putting on Norah Jones (insipid soft jazz singer) sometimes when I sit down in my reading chair in the evening and I don't care that that may make me a frump... I also like having friends over for a quiet dinner more than going out to a bar. I think Rockports are comfortable shoes. I get bored when I hear 25-year-olds talk about the "latest" this, the "coolest" that. I am shocked by the clothes 16-year-olds wear nowadays and that they might somehow be having sex. I can't help thinking -- though I know it's ridiculous -- that 22-year-olds look much too young to be credible members of the workforce. Isn't this all just part of getting older?

That said, I had a strange wake up call re this very thing a few months ago when the NYT Book Review saw it fit to assign Joe Klein - ie bald old Washington insider guy -- to do a review of two books about Wilco (ultra-hip art rock band) and he waxed lyrical for a thousand words about Uncle Tupelo (a favorite group from our college years whose singer went on to form Wilco) et al...Change a few words and it sounded a hell of a lot like someone pondering the great work of Lynrd Skynrd (southern arena rock act) or some such band of yesteryear...

Shawn's note is the we're-getting-older-and-I-for-one-am-embracing-it entry. I think it pretty well represents one of the group's vascillating attitudes. On some level we all know we're not twenty-five anymore and have come to accept that not being cool comes with the territory. The transition to this stage of emotional development seems to require the adoption of attitudes we ascribe to our own parents and the denigration of most that is young and hip.

Chris was next. Chris makes video games for a living. He says:

I like watching the kids today. They do exactly the same dumb stuff everyone I know did as kids, and that's kind of comforting. And funny. And 22-year-olds may look too young, but they work a lot of hours for low pay. And 25-year-olds talking about what's cool has always been boring, even when you were 25. That said, I'd much rather discuss tire pressure and maximizing gas mileage than new music, and I sympathize a lot with the father on Viva La Bam (MTV program that features a pro skateboarder, the title's Bam, torturing his parents with youthful pranks).

Chris takes the stance that younger people are stupid, just as we were, but we need them to be stupid so that we can stand on the backs of their labor to earn our middle-class paychecks.

This is when I chimed in. I said:

I don't watch the kids today. Honestly, I'm not sure where they are. Oh, I see them sometimes, sure. They all dress the same, and not like me. But then, most people my age dress like me, and not like them. But I'm not among younger people enough to say anything substantive about them. They look young. That's about all I can tell you.

Also, pop music sucks now. But it always sucked.

I used to spend a lot of time tracking down indie bands that I thought were good and/or cool, but in retrospect a lot of them sucked too. Now that I'm less interested in or less capable of being cool, I find that the music I like finds me. It's much less work that way.

These attitudes transfer to books and movies and magazines, too, the things that, each in their turn, replaced music in my life.

I'll not expand on where I am in this process of trying to act my age. I'm having a kid soon. I just bought a second home. And yet, I'm a moron. I'm no smarter, and probably a lot dumber than I was a decade ago. Suffice it to say I'm confused, which is why this email thread has made it into my blog in the first place.

Soon after registering my thoughts with the group, Mike fired off another missive. He said:

Coach (my college nickname), you cannot deny that the band "The Streets" possesses a kind of lowfi brilliance only rivalled in the past twenty years with Billy Bragg's "Life's a riot with Spy Vs. Spy" or Uncle tupelo's "March 16-24". And he (the streets) emerged from the inky dark this past two years or so. That's the sort of stuff that compells me to keep paying attention. Sure, kids suck, but you know what, every now and then there's a genius among em, and nothing trumps genius.

Fact is, there are very few geniuses in their thirties and every decade thereafter the numbers drop exponentially. And yeah, you're right, pop music sucks, and always has, but so has every other entertainment genre, and back to point one, the citizen, with guile and judgement, lets you know what doesn't suck. And if they have a shard of business know how, they ride the genius' coattails in a symbiotic manner. Promote them, encourage them, employ them, mentor them, that's when things can get really fascinating. Not to mention the boat payments get a lot easier...

Furthermore, I have no problem enjoying the provocative style of the todays young ladies, if the past is any guide, the future should only be more titillating, and as I get older, this is only a good a thing. So you curmudgeons waxing your vinyl and dreaming of seeing a Red Cross, Mike Watt, Bob Mould triple bill, I pity you...I'll be sitting in the mall with my mall-walking club and my four-pronged cane watching the girls look so fine, thinking "Damn, life sure is sweet."

Incidentally, Shawn, You like Rockports? I Like Rockports! Got the black basics about five years ago and still wear em once or twice a week. A brief poll on who was wearing Doc-Martins at Brian's wedding? Not many as far as I could tell. Another indicator that the me-too punk scenesters have either sold out or grown up. Furthermore... You Like Puppies? I like puppies! Never got into Nora Jones though.. Next time you get a Nora Jones craving put on the Streets "Fit But You Know It" and you will be cured of any desire to listen to sex jazz...

I'm not sure, but I think Mike has the best perspective on this getting older thing. I would call his attitude 'yeah-so-what?' Rimbaud said, 'One must be absolutely modern.' In Mike's eyes that seems to mean listening to whatever good new music presents itself and wearing comfortable shoes.

Still, I felt compelled to answer some of Mike's charges. I replied:

Mike, I have the Streets first record. It kicks ass. It's one of those records that found me, and that's what I was trying to get across. I wasn't trying to be snotty or negative, though I can see how it came across that way. What I meant to say was, the good stuff floats to the top. I spend a lot less time digging through dusty bins at second hand music shops and yet my success rate in acquiring good new albums remains about the same.

To wit, new bands that have moved me recently: The Streets, The Shins, The Decemberists, Hem, Califone.

I also never said young people suck. I only said I don't know that much about them. I don't. I live next to a college campus, but I don't spend time with any of the kids. I suspect they spend their time doing what we did when we were their age: drinking and trying to get laid (at least that's what I did). The litter that blows down my street bears out this hypothesis.

You say you appreciate the "provocative style" of today's young ladies. Are you trying to say that young, hard bodies still get you going? Just say you wanna fuck Brittney Spears. Don't dance around it. Don't prevaricate. We all like tits and ass. Were tits and ass even a part of this discussion? If so, I cast one vote in favor of tits and ass.

Finally, Rockports? Fucking Rockports? Shawn and Brian pilloried me for owning a pair of Birkenstocks and you guys are going to sing the praises of fucking Rockports? This just goes to show that what's not cool about me is not my musical taste or my clothing choices. What's not cool about me is me. And that's ok. I can live with that.

Honestly, there was more back and forth after this, but most of it concerned the appropriateness of certain kinds of footwear. What the whole thing said to me was that we spend most of our lives awed by time's inexorable march forward. Culturally this awe is expressed by black greeting cards to be given on milestone birthdays like 'the big four oh.' Everyone has their own way to measure their progress on the great slog toward the grave. For my friends and me, music and clothing have been the yardsticks, but now that's changing.

When you're younger you tend to make totems of your passions. Music (or whatever else you're into) is all important. As you get older you grow bored and/or interested in other things. Young people get tattoos (I have two myself, leftovers from the early '90s when I was trying to forge some kind (any kind) of identity) to prove to themselves that they believe the things they believe and will believe them forever. It's part of telling (or trying to tell) the world who they are. As you age and the things you're telling the world about yourself begin to change you go through these necessary crises of identity. I imagine this process ends shortly before the beating of your heart does the same.

Maybe in a decade our discussions will center on our growing children, our flagging retirement accounts and the paucity of real, quality erections we're capable of, but I would bet that Brian will still have an opinion about which Husker Du album is best and a pair of really ugly shoes in his closet. Shawn will still listen, with guilty pleasure, to adult contemporary music, and Mike will irritate his by-then-teenage kids by trying to get them to listen to old Nick Cave records. Chris will still be making video games.

And we'll be older but hopefully not yet old.

August 4th, 2004 - Honestly, my mouth dropped open and stayed that way for the entire fifteen minutes of the ultrasound. First the technician came in, spread the conductive jelly on Brittney's rapidly rounding belly and then pointed out to us skull, heart, the lobes of the brain, the arms, the legs, the kidneys and bladder, the spine, the tightly curled little hands, the feet. The baby (the fetus) squirmed and rolled, resisting our prying eyes. I stole a slack-jawed glance at Brittney whose own jaw was slack, her eyes wide. The technician was non-plussed. She snapped a few pictures and beat a quick exit leaving us with the classic, 'the doctor will be in in a minute.'

The doctor turned out to be a trans-gendered woman, that is a woman who was once a man (I think). I mention this, not because I have any problem with men who want to be women or women who want to be men, but rather because it was a surreal element in what was already a surreal experience. There we were marvelling over the skeletal soundness of our child-to-be with the doctor lending running commentary in an odd, hormone-heightened voice. When he/she said, 'are you finding out boy or girl?' we said, 'no. We don't want to know.' And we didn't/don't.

Anyway, there's nothing quite like live-action video of the fetus developing inside your wife to drive home the message that YOU WILL SOON BE A FATHER! A father. Like my father is to me. I will have that relationship with another human being. I will gain this perspective that I have spent so many years trying and failing to understand. I might have drooled a little, just before the doctor snapped the machine off and turned to go. He/she (she really) said something, but I have no idea what.

Brittney wiped the goo off her stomach and said, 'I wish we could do this every day so I could see how it changes and grows.' I sat there, my mouth still agape.

In retrospect this experience was not at all surreal. In fact it was hyper-real. It was the latest exhibit in a pretty air-tight case that proves we're reproducing. First there was the plan to get pregnant. Then there was the sex (THE SEX!). Then the missed period, followed by the two pink lines instead of just one, not once but three times in a row. Then the doctor's office, the nausea, the fatigue, the doctor's office again, the hardening lump in Brittney's abdomen and this ultrasound thing that blew my mind.

We're having a baby. WE'RE HAVING A BABY!

Seeing is believing.

August 2nd, 2004 - It was a shitty way to end the weekend. We'd spent Saturday and Sunday frantically painting and cleaning at the schoolhouse in Vermont trying to get it ready for guests, and after driving the two hours home we arrived to a letter from the Town of Whitingham informing us that a neighbor has complained of a stink emanating from our property. The septic system, it said, has quite possibly failed.

Brittney called the town health officer this morning to find out more. It turns out the neighbor complained directly to the previous owner but hadn't made a formal complaint because he didn't want the owner's tennants to be evicted. Once he saw that they'd moved out, he phoned the town office. Unfortunately he chose to do it the week after we bought the place.

Is there a conspicuous green patch in the lawn where the grass seems to be growing better than the rest? That's what the health officer wanted to know, because crap, seeping into your lawn, brings vital nitrogen closer to the surface. She suggested we perform a dye test to see if our tank is leaking.

Shit! Shit! Shit!

This is not the kind of thing you want to get into two weeks after buying a house. I had visions of a big, yellow excavator parked in the yard, tearing up vast chunks of earth to extract a 30-year-old septic tank. It was like a $10,000.00 sucker punch. We flush that stuff for a reason. The reason is that we never want to see it again.

I went to work worrying about the money and spent a good portion of the morning reading up on septic design and leach field clogging. I learned about the scum and sludge layers. I learned about the thick, black biomat that collects in the leach field. Think of river silt and then add a billion parts per billion bacteria.

Now, if knowledge is power, I was growing more powerful, but if a little knowledge is dangerous then I was becoming less powerful and more dangerous by the minute. I called the town health officer back and got the name of a septic specialist in nearby Wilmington.

Mel Mundell is a septic engineer. He spends his days drawing up plans for large tanks with baffles and overflow chambers for human feces. According to the health officer, Lynette, Mel knows more about septic systems and the state regulations pertaining thereto than anyone she's ever met.

He's friendly too.

Mel put my mind somewhat at ease. He said stink is something that comes from septic tanks that leak, but it's also something that comes from septic tanks that are functioning perfectly. 'Go over and stand near the vent stack and you're going to smell something,' he said.

The green patch isn't necessarily an indicator either, according to Yoda, I mean Mel. Green grass might just be a sign that the soil is absorbing well and the grass is actually helping to clean the waste water in the leach field. The real warning sign for a leaking tank is a 'black, greasy' spot that's wet to the touch and stinky to boot. This I haven't seen yet.

Mel said I should walk the property thoroughly, looking for this greasy spot and applying my sniffer to the various parts of our land. If the smell is coming from the vent, as it should, then we can buy a charcoal filter from a company in West Brattleboro that used to specialize in building concrete vaults for banks but now mostly sells concrete tanks for holding shit. He also said I should track down this neighbor and find out where and when he's smelling the smell.

I can imagine the conversation.

Me: So we stink. Can you tell me when we stink?

Him: You stink all the time. But especially you stink right now.

Me: Well, I'd like to take care of the stink.

Him: Well, I wish you would.

And so I go to sleep tonight less fearful that I'll have to pay $10,000.00 to a man with a big, yellow excavator (though I likely will) and hopeful that a $30 filter will ingratiate us with the denizens of our new home town. This is just one of those things you deal with when you own a house, and now that we own two (and they're both roughly 100-years-old) the list of shit (literally) to deal with has grown considerably.

My friend Shawn recently expressed a burgeoning desire to move back to States (he lives in Indonesia) and settle down to a simple, domestic life. Well, Shawn, there's nothing simple about domesticity. You can spend your entire weekend painting and scraping and fixing and improving your home only to find $10,000.00 worth of shit in your mailbox. The joys of home ownership are often tempered by the liabilities. Remember that.

July 28th, 2004 - There is an awful lot of political chat going on at work these days, which seems like it would be a bad thing except for the fact that more or less everyone I work with is staunchly liberal and most of the conversations are about how evil the Republicans are and how we need to do whatever it takes to run them out of town on a rail (whatever that means). We stand around in the kitchen recounting the reasons we shouldn't have troops in Iraq and bemoaning the long-term consequences of the Bush tax cuts. In other words, we spend a lot of time agreeing with each other.

And then Jeff the IT guy walks in and all goes quiet. Jeff is the office conservative. Discussing politics with Jeff is like trying to get to work on a riding lawnmower. You get no where fast. Jeff listens to Bill O'Reilly in his little IT cave during the day. Jeff thinks President Bush is doing the best he can in a bad situation.

And the problem is, Jeff is a pretty thoughtful guy. Baited into a debate on the relative merits of the aforementioned tax cuts, Jeff will harangue you with stories of the inefficiencies of the federal government in actually reaching needy people with the money given to them to reach needy people with. Jeff would rather give his money, or more specifically his time, to helping people in need than giving his money to bureaucrats charged with the same task. Jeff is a participant in the Big Brother program, mentoring a young Brazilian boy in need of some sane, adult guidance. He walks his talk, which is more than can be said for most of the liberals in the office.

And perhaps because Jeff is the only one representing the conservative viewpoint in the office, he has become so entrenched in his beliefs, so steadfast in defending the keepers of the conservative flame, that I avoid engaging him on political topics for the most part.

Jeff has taught me that Republicans are not evil people. They just see the world differently than I do. And I think that realization helps to diffuse my own dogmatism and recognize that labelling your belief system as one thing, either liberal or Democratic, or libertarian for that matter, is essentially limiting and counterproductive when it comes to solving real problems like, say, poverty or homelessness or the seemingly pressing need of religious fundamentalists to kill innocent people.

Because for all the political pontification that goes on all the time, but really nauseatingly non-stop during the conventions, the focus remains on the dichotomy of Republican vs. Democrat, as if there are only two possible solutions to any problem.

And as I was explaining all these thoughts to someone by the water cooler today it struck me that perhaps the reason so few people take the time to vote is not that they are, as I had believed previously, too lazy. It's that they don't recognize, in the paucity of political choices presented to them in our current system, any candidate worth voting for. It's not that people are neglecting to cast their votes. It's that they're too often choosing 'none of the above.'

By the way, Jeff has a 100% voting record.

July 26th, 2004 - It was the first day of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) today, and something strangely wonderful happened to Boston. It emptied. There was no one there. No one to complain. No one to honk their horn (ok...I honked the scooter's high, piercing and surprisingly loud horn twice, but only to wake up the napping drivers in front of me. They were short, polite honks. You would have approved.).

There were an awful lot of police officers.

I felt like the kid who was underwater when the lifeguard yelled, 'EVERYBODY OUT OF THE POOL!' Lights that are normally backed up through other lights held back two or three cars each. Sidewalks that are normally packed loosed trickles of pedestrians into crosswalks, well-dressed pedestrians.

The office was mostly empty. People worked from home, which I take to mean: slept in and then watched soaps. Those who deigned to show up spent a lot of time chatting about politics and lingering over lunch. Someone said that 70% of the people working in Boston took the week off to avoid the chaos the convention was supposed to cause.

And man, were there a lot of cops standing around!

Much has been written in recent months about all the money the city will lose for the privelege of hosting the DNC, all of the hassles commuters will endure. People fretted about protesters descending on the Fleet Center where the convention is being held. Others feared potential terrorist attacks. As nearly as I could tell, nothing happened. I read about some anti-war protesters exchanging pleasantries with a group of anti-abortion folks, but the same kind of thing happens on the Common all the time and it doesn't make headlines.

Maybe I just don't work close enough to the show. Or maybe the convention, like its presumptive nominee, got off to a slow start. What it seems like, though, is that Boston's idea of hosting this most auspicious of political events was to vacate the premises and leave the city to the nation's left-leaning political operatives for a week.

I'm not even sure what these conventions are for anymore. We know who the nominees will be. We have access to all of their positions on all of the key issues (though we never take the time to actually read them. We vote for the guy who looks best on TV). What's the point? To have a pep rally? To corner the media market, if only for a few days, in advance of the election?

Whatever the point, I like it. We should do this every summer. Clear out for a week and let the asphalt breath a little. Let the cops stand on corners and deter crimes that won't be committed. Let a bunch of out-of-towners come see our town and leave with the impression that Boston is a nice, clean, quiet place. We are probably losing money hand over fist this week, but we'll get over it. And in the end, this will be our Y2K, the event that was supposed to precipitate the riding of the fabled horsemen across acres of our rotting and wasted corpses, but instead just cost a lot of money and gave us all some much needed time off.

July 25th, 2004 - Too much to tell, but suffice it to say that we are homeowners twice over now. We signed the requisite papers at a little second floor law office on Main Street in Brattleboro on Friday. The flakey Manhatenite who sold us the place spilled keys across the conference room's antique table and held each one up to the light to gauge whether it went to a front door, a storage shed or an old suitcase she thinks is in a closet back in New York. After much shaking of hands and signing of names we emerged with a deed and a giggley kind of excitement.

We drove over to our new home in the evening and Brittney and Nancy, along for the ride, began pulling down curtains and piling trash on the back porch. Later we ate a celebratory dinner.

On Saturday we painted. All day. Charlie and Nancy both wielded brush and roller in the name of friendship. We bought burgers from a stand down on Rt. 100.

Spent, after a long day of physical labor and heavy, noxious paint fumes, we went back to Charlie and Nancy's cabin and Charlie cooked steaks with water cress and blue cheese. There were garlicky sauteed mushrooms on the side and parmesan summer squash from his garden. When I've made my millions I'll pay Charlie what he deserves to cook food for me that I don't.

Sunday called for painting, painting and more painting. Also we put a new shower enclosure in one of the bathrooms and bolted new seats on the toilets. We are inching toward inhabitability.

When we really couldn't work any more, bags full of garbage were loaded in the truck and we came home, arriving at dusk, happy to be in a place that didn't demand more work from us. Our new home is 124.2 miles from our primary residence, here in Medford. We made it in 2 hours and 10 minutes.

It was an up and down weekend. I feel simultaneously joyous that we've been able to make this fantastic little place in the woods our own, and daunted by the prospect of doing all the necessary renovation. Brittney keeps reminding me that rustic homes are supposed to be rustic, that it's ok, no preferable, for everything to be a bit rough. This is fortunate. My home improvement skills and our now depleted bank account won't get us all the way to shabby chic.

I have more to say about this whole experience, but I'm far too tired now to say it. I feel I've done something big, or that I'm beginning to do something big, that quality of life matrices are shifting in upward and positive directions, that whole new vistas of fun are now accessible. I feel rich.

July 20th, 2004 - On Friday the Schoolhouse is ours, the little red and white home in the hills of Southern Vermont that Brittney and I have been wanting for a long, long time. Checks will be cut. Papers will be signed. Lawyers will say things that I will nod in response to, nodding being the way to make them stop talking and expedite the process of being handed the keys by the once and former owner.

Then dream and reality collide.

All the conversations we've had about what we want this little schoolhouse to be, a place for our family to gather away from the demands of home, a place for our children to grow and play and get to know what's so great about being outdoors, a place for friends to eat barbecue and argue over the arcane rules of wiffleball, a place to sit on porches and read books, to eat expansive meals around big, old tables, a place to stoke fires in the ancient wood stove, a place to gather mismatched pieces of silver and flatware, a base from which to fish and hike and ride, all of that and more will begin to write itself on the century old floors and walls and in the grass of the long, flat meadow that serves as a yard.

Or at least, that's the dream.

The reality is that we'll spend much of the rest of this summer and a generous portion of the fall painting the walls and the exterior trim, upgrading and repairing the bathrooms, pruning trees and grading the earth around the foundation, insulating the plumbing under the front of the house, treating the well, replacing the hot water heater and trucking a significant subset of our possessions there. But then, we take all this work on willingly, because we realize, though perhaps a little late, that dreams come true rather more slowly than advertised.

As good as I feel about closing on this second home, this seems to be the season of anticipation. Remember, there's a bun in the oven, and when we're not talking about what color to paint the bedrooms in Vermont, we're assaulting each other with long lists of possible names for boys or girls or fretting over what Brittney is or isn't eating.

And then there's the matter of my brother moving in and beginning to establish himself here in New England. Will he need more than a place to stay temporarily? The realist in me, hardly in evidence thus far in this entry, says he will need much more than that. He'll have to book time between painting and birthing class, between weekends away and ultrasound appointments. I'll have to remember to show him where the refrigerator is.

My mother called the other night and said she is leaving her job at Barnes and Noble. It's time, she said, to begin paring down their own possessions in anticipation of a move north, to be closer to us. I only wonder how we'll find it to be so close. The last time we all lived in the same state my brother was persona non grata, my parents were trying to decide whether they wanted to stay married and I was busy trying to drink all the beer and smoke all the pot in southern Alabama (no small feat).

I'll be honest. Family scares me. I have very successfully crafted for myself a life with which I am screamingly happy, and though I'm sure ruining this beatific happiness is the last thing on my family's mind, no one really understands how families work, or more specifically how families work on each other. We are dangerous to one another. Kids disappoint parents. Parents irk kids. Everyone is way too sensitive about everything. Ancient roles are reprised and played to the melodramatic hilt.

I am banking on the fact that we are all older and wiser now, that we finally understand what we like (if not love) about each other, and that most importantly we know what's to be gained from banding together once more. Brittney and I often talk about how great it is to be married, because you always have someone who's on your team when times get tough. I am thinking of this reconvening of my family as an expansion of the team.

So it's a strange time, full of anticipation (read: dreaming) and a little worry. The final capture of the Schoolhouse represents the first bit of reality setting in. Next comes my brother and all his kookiness at the end of the couch, eating our chips. Then we have a baby and undergo the paradigm shift of parenthood, a seemingly cloistered existence with diapers and breast pumps. And after that my parents move up and reenter our daily lives.

I can hardly wait.

July 15th, 2004 - Too many things beep. This morning I awoke to the asynchronous beeps of the smoke detectors in the house across the street. It's being renovated. This isn't the first time they've committed the sin of beep.

When I got to the bus stop there was a flatbed truck backing up to a clothing-donation dumpster at the church nearby. As the driver slipped in and out of reverse the loud safety beeping bored a hole in my skull.

At work there's something wrong with the fire alarm panel. It's been emitting an evil and relentless tone every five seconds for nearly a week.

Brittney's cell phone beeps as it passes in and out of service areas, which is more often than you'd think.

My cell phone beeps when I have a message. My computer beeps when I do something I shouldn't, which, again, is more often than you'd think. The doors on the subway cars go 'bong-bong' just before they slide shut. The change slot on the bus chimes when you've put in correct fare. The cordless phone on my desk here at home beeps when you replace it in its cradle so you know it's in properly and ready to recharge. In fact, it beeps when you dial numbers. Every number has its own tone. My digital camera beeps just before the flash goes off. The dishwasher beeps as you press its buttons, as does the microwave.

Brittney will tell you that I make too much of all these sounds. I let them bother me. I become fixated. I bask in shear annoyance. She doesn't even notice half of them.

I understand that things need to make sounds. We need evidence that we've done something, recognition that we've performed a task properly. Or conversely we need to know something's wrong. Alarms need to be both instantly perceptible and persistent.

But for the love of God couldn't we come up with something better than a beep? Maybe the Germans were onto something with the cuckoo clock. Maybe the haunting notes Brian Eno contributed to Microsoft to signal a welcome to the wonderful world of Windows would be better. Or what's wrong with a click? A nice simple click? Things 'click into place.' When things are going well, people say they 'really started to click.'

Even the chirruping of grasshoppers, though innocuous to some, would be better than the lobotomizing sonic anvil of a digital beep. May it never infiltrate your dreams, as it has mine, and inspire the kinds of nightmares that wake you, head achey and irritated to a new day.

July 12th, 2004 - A woman I work with, Stella, told me today that I should enjoy myself as much as I possibly can right now because once the baby comes, life as I know it will end. Minutes later an editor I work with called on the phone and recounted a story about the day before his first child was born. He went out for a drive in the car by himself and kept thinking, 'alright mate, this is it, the end of your freedom.'

I'm starting to get scared.

The first week we had Eddie, our dog, was overwhelming enough. For me, following a puppy around while he sniffs out his new home, stopping occasionally to piss on something, was completely nerve racking. He didn't sleep through the night at first. He had kennel cough and a skin problem. Brittney would come home to find me near tears, the dog perched in the window, staring out at the street.

I'm pretty sure babies are harder to take care of than puppies, and two years later the dog more or less takes care of himself. He doesn't need to be spoon fed pureed carrots and then burped.

'You need to know,' said Stella, 'that once the baby comes your wife won't have any time for you. All her attention will belong to the baby. Now you are a couple. You are together. Soon you will be mostly alone.'

Ironically, I suspect the dog will become my primary companion in the first months of our child's life. Brittney won't have the time or energy to walk him, and he'll probably be feeling even more jilted than I will. At least I know what's coming. He has no clue. In fact he's downstairs curled up on the couch with Brittney as I type. Poor little bastard. It'll be the cold, hard floor for him.

Last week I was so pleased with myself. I had decided that if this was the big life change I couldn't possibly prepare for, then I simply wouldn't prepare. I'd square my chin to the blow and wait for the bell to ring.

Today Stella told me, 'It's true. You can't possibly prepare, but you need to be aware of what's coming.' I have no idea what she meant. It was actually her last day in the office. Tomorrow she's off to Mexico for three weeks of vacation, the first vacation she's had without her husband or her children in seventeen years. She's going to go to the theater, to the bookstores. She absolutely glowed as she told me about it.

'I can't wait,' she said in the end, and I said, 'yeah, me neither.'

July 8th, 2004 - I was at the bookstore, Lorem Ipsum on Hampshire Street in Cambridge. A woman came in with a toddler in a stroller. She was blonde and heavily made up and lean like someone who does regular physical labor. She wore a white tank top and a denim mini-skirt.

At first I ignored her as I searched the shelves, working methodically from A to Z, but she was taking up a lot of space in the middle of the small store and I am an inveterate eavesdropper. She went to the counter, asked the woman if there was some money for her. She had left a bag of books to sell. I think she asked for the owner by name, Matt.

Matt wasn't there, but the woman who was, Sarah as it turns out, said she would go through the books and come up with a price. The blonde woman with the child said she'd wait, decided to browse the shelves.

Finally a price was arrived at. $6.82. The logic behind that final number escaped me, and I thought, 'I won't sell books here,' and then, 'who am I kidding, I never sell books. I only buy.'

And then the blond woman with the child said, 'Cool. Thanks. Times are sort of tough. I'm going to use that money to buy some dish soap and maybe a pint if I can get her (meaning the kid) to sleep early enough.'

And there was something very off-putting about it. Why would you tell someone you don't know that you're selling books to buy soap and beer? But then, that was only a prelude to more talking. She went on and on about what her husband does, and the poor woman behind the counter (I think it was at this point that she introduced herself as Sarah) tried at first to hold up her end of the conversation, explaining that she was a film maker but just working in the bookstore because she was tired of television work and the bookstore thing seemed like a good idea, but eventually she gave up and started answering the blonde's questions without asking any reciprocal questions, effectively killing off the conversation which was pretty clearly just a ploy to gain the attention of an adult listener. The kid sat quietly in the stroller.

Blonde-mommy-lady wasn't listening. She was talking right over Sarah, talking about herself, going on and on. Eventually Sarah mentioned that she was sorry she couldn't give her more for her books, but that she could do better in a trade deal. And the blonde started talking about all the books she'd read and sold and bought and reread. She'd read all the classics, and couldn't Sarah maybe recommend something else, so Sarah went to work trying to point out books that she had enjoyed though honestly mostly she only read non-fiction anymore.

Well this went on for a while until the blonde said, 'what do you think of Martin Amis? I hear he's good.'

And Sarah said she didn't know anything about him, but that she'd look him up in the computer and see what they had and then she started reading titles off her screen, 'Money, Other People and The Information. That's what we have.'

And just then I saw (or rather heard since I was still trying desperately to find a novel to call my own) that Sarah was never going to get to the end of this. She was floundering. Film school hadn't prepared her for the rough and tumble of bookstore clerkery.

I said suddenly, and unexpectedly for everyone in the room including myself, 'The Information is his best book. You should get that one.'

The blonde looked at me and blinked. Sarah smiled.

'OK. I'll take it,' said the blonde. And then she thanked me for the recommendation, took her book and pushed her stroller out the front door. I picked A.S. Byatt's Matisse Stories and Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake off the shelves and apologized to Sarah for interupting.

Then I paid and left.

July 6th, 2004 - There is a tunnel, the Bankhead, that runs under the Mobile River, connecting Mobile, AL, where I grew up, to Spanish Fort on the other side. Anyway, as kids we used to see if we could hold our breath all the way through. It took probably a minute-and-a-half, and sometimes I could do it with no problem. Other times I'd have to keep taking little in-breaths without letting any air out in order to make it. Somehow this was allowable under the rules.

Now I find myself taking those little in breaths again, waiting, waiting, waiting for all of the paperwork to be completed on our purchase of a 100-year-old schoolhouse on Wilmington Cross Road in Whitingham, VT. It's red with white trim, ten minutes south of Wilmington just off Rt. 100. It's got four little bedrooms and an ancient wood stove, and it sits on an acre-and-a-quarter parcel which is mostly a grass meadow perfect for grilling and playing wiffle ball.

Today we had the inspection, which means following someone who knows a hell of a lot about old buildings as he flashes his flashlight into all of the house's dark places looking for rot and pointing out things that need to be fixed. I didn't follow him under the house into the crawlspace. He didn't blame me.

Everything went well, too. Nothing turned up that we didn't expect.

Also, while the inspector removed the electrical panels to check the wiring behind and turned on all the baseboard heaters to make sure they were still functioning, Brittney and I paced the floors discussing plans for fresh paint and new lighting fixtures. I think we've mortgaged our entire fall with home improvement projects, every last weekend. The dog poked around and sniffed things. He even went upstairs, which is quite a thing for him. He hates stairs. Perhaps it's a good omen.

After shaking the inspector's hand, locking up and stashing the keys in the current owner's not very stealthy hiding place we drove down into Brattleboro and had lunch at the Chelsea Royal Diner. I had spanikopita and salad. Brittney had a reuben. And it was then, sitting in the diner listening to other people's conversations that I began to feel like maybe I belonged in Vermont, if only a little.

I know that property ownership doesn't make you a native, and that many in Vermont cast a leary eye our way as we wiz past with our white, Massachusetts license plates, snug in the four-wheel drive authenticity of their green-plated trucks. But there is something in our dreaming of Vermont that makes us worthy, something in our simple of love of the place.

Over the long weekend we found a nice spot to swim, off the big rock next to one of the boat launches on Harriman Reservoir, and I confirmed that they don't sell ice cream sprinkles at the Rite Aid in Wilmington. One morning I drove from the 'Used Books' store on Rt. 9 in Marlboro to the 'Old Books' store at the north end of Main St. back in Wilmington and then over to Bartleby's Books. I spent 2 hours and 2 dollars tracking down 13 Days, Bobby Kennedy's memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis, went back to the cabin and read the whole thing before dropping off to sleep that night. The next day it was pouring rain and I walked out the cabin's basement door with a towel, shed my shorts and t-shirt and showered in the heavy flow off the roof. We belong in Vermont.

There were a few times, as a kid in Alabama, that I began to really worry as we drove through the Bankhead. My temples throbbed as my brain screached for oxygen. My peripheral vision went blue. My chest heaved, choking back the urge to let the air come streaming back in.

And I suppose there is only the remotest possibility we won't get to buy this little Vermont schoolhouse despite our offer being accepted and a contract being signed and the inspection not uncovering an ancient Indian burial ground or the remains of a bombed out nuclear reactor.

But still I'm holding my breath.

July 1st, 2004 - Our neighbor Pauline died this morning. Her husband Frank came over to tell us, stepping gingerly through our gate as if his legs might shatter beneath him. Pauline had cancer that started in her breast and got just about everywhere else before it was done. She had been terminal for quite a while, passing her days in an upstairs room Frank fixed up for her. As I was leaving for work this morning I could see that the shade was raised and the lace curtain pushed aside.

I told Pauline's story in this space once before. It's a sad story, and I won't tell it again now. Happily enough, she lasted long enough to see her son Paul graduate from Medford High as salutatorian. After his speech he came down from the dais and handed her his diploma while the entire crowd applauded. Frank teared up telling us about it.

When we moved to this house in '99 Pauline was a fat, lumbering woman with a head as round as a bowling ball. Her voice was high and shrill, and she was forever sighing about one thing or another. Despite her less than sunny disposition, she was pretty likable. She always had something funny to say about the city council or the high school. If something pissed her off you knew about it. She had a character she played in these moments called Sissy.

'They don't want to deal with Sissy,' she'd say about an incompetent bureaucrat at the school, 'but if they don't figure it out, I'm gonna take Sissy up there and straighten it out.' She was very protective of Paul, a kid seemingly big enough to take care of himself. You can imagine that her heart nearly stopped as he strode across the stage to collect that diploma. She was so proud.

As Pauline grew more and more ill she shrank, and she actually looked pretty good the day she told me she had run out of hope with the treatment. She was thinner and more mobile then, though the pain killers left her with a far away look in the eyes and a silence where words once flowed. In the end she was living on bottled oxygen and whiling away the time rooting for her Red Sox in that upstairs room. She loved baseball and you could see the TV flickering in her window when games were on.

Paul will go to Tufts in the fall, living up in one of the dorms instead of here at home. Frank wants him to have his independence. I worry for Frank, but maybe he'll be alright. He was bearing up well enough this morning to come over and deliver his news without breaking down. Pauline's death has been a long time coming.

Pauline was the first neighbor we met at the first house we ever owned. I'll miss her.

June 29th, 2004 - Life is so funny in the way it constantly serves up the absurdly unpredictable. If you're lucky, the unpredictable is a lottery win. If you're not so fortunate, it's the skinny end of a bus at 40mph.

With a baby on the way, the pace of unexpected events picks up considerably. Each visit to the doctor seems to offer a jaw-slackening event. And everyday my wife's body changes in perceptible ways, perceptible because I've become so attuned to her shape and size laying next to me in the bed.

And yet things beyond the arc of gestation are still happening, things I wouldn't, or at least couldn't, have predicted. My boss takes my advice for once and actually gets more money out of a miserly client. A good friend decides to drop his career and go back to school. We find a place to call our own in the hilly countryside of Southern Vermont.

And then there's my brother, the older one who lives in Jacksonville, sober and settled with a wife and kids after years of wandering the Earth like that guy on Kung Fu, except drunk. George was not like the other children and still isn't. He speaks and reads five languages, but answers phones all day for an insurance company. Things don't work out for George. He jokingly refers to himself as a 'Jonah,' and contemplates grabbing a cannonball and throwing himself over the side of the ship, if only to save the rest of us from his downwardly-mobile curse.

Now the idea that George and his family will move North. Not only did I not expect it to happen so soon. I never expected to be the one to suggest it.

I don't know what's happening anymore. It's as if we did things the same way for so long that the whole thing just got a little fragile and began to crack up all at once. We were happy enough, but change had to come. And now that it's coming, I think we're still happy. Funny, huh?

June 26th, 2004 - To know or not to know, that is the question. Yesterday we held our breathes while the doctor searched around Brittney's abdomen for our baby's heart rate. Neither of us said anything, but we were both thinking, 'please be there...please be there...' And then after a minute of probing a sound came, a clip-clop-clip-clop sound. The doctor said, 'Baby's heart beats sound either like ocean waves or galloping horses. Yours sounds like a galloping horse, 143 beats per minute. Very normal and healthy.'

We breathed. We smiled. Our eyes met.

This was our first meeting with Dr. Wilkerson, a friendly and warm woman who lives in our neighborhood. We both liked her right away.

'Are you going to find out boy or girl?' she asked.

Again we looked at each other and smiled.

Brittney said, 'We haven't decided yet,' and I said, 'I've changed my mind. I don't want to know anymore.'

When people find out you're expecting they always want to know whether you're going to find out the gender. The questions go like this: 'Are you gonna find out boy-or-girl? Do you have a preference? Do you have names picked out?'

I think we can say pretty safely at this point that the answer to all of the above is: NO.

Our friends Dave and Elin are expecting in August. They found out they're having a boy and have set about decorating accordingly and focusing their arguments about potential names on Dwight, Sam and other x-chromosomed monikers.

Some people have said to me, 'Think how nice it would be to be surprised.' To them I say there is nothing that has not been and will not be a surprise. Thus far, even the things I've expected have struck me as curious, miraculous and strange. To think that, in the moment my first child enters the world, there will be any space in my emotional consciousness for MORE SUPRISE is wildly off the mark. You could tell me with 100% certainty that an albino monkey will emerge from my wife's womb in six months. Its eventual appearance would still, no doubt about it, knock me flat with surprise.

Other people, more practical, and let's be honest, less romantic types, have said that we should find out, because we can. It helps you plan better, and it's exciting to be able to visualize your life with either a son or a daughter. To them I say, my imagination is not nearly up to the task of envisioning life with a baby, regardless of gender. We have no intention of doing any gender-specific decorating, and knowing that a girl will come rather than a boy, or vice-versa, will only serve as a catalyst for the setting of expectations for this child, expectations I'd really rather not have.

Furthe