December 30th, 2004 - There's no denying we lack a sharp sense of perspective. What started out as 1,000 dead in Southeast Asia has climbed day-by-day to 114,000 today. I have watched as my co-workers pull CNN.com up on their browsers in the morning to news of the tsunamis that struck India, Sri Lanka, Sumatra, Thailand and other Indian Ocean nations. They wince. They purse their lips and make a hissing sound, as if they've just set their hands on a hot stove. 114,000. That's slightly more than the entire population of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where many of the people I work with live.

Tomorrow the toll will no doubt be higher. This is, we are told, the worst human tragedy in the last 100 years, perhaps the worst ever. Since Sunday, everyone on every coastline everywhere has asked themselves if something like this might possibly happen to them. Disasters like this one call into question the limits of our human ability to know what's going to happen in our world, to feel completely safe.

For a moment, as I pondered the enormity of what has happened half-a-world away, I thought how the right thing for the United States to do would be to pull all of the roughly 140,000 troops stationed in Iraq out of the Middle East and send them to Southeast Asia as aid workers. It would be something more than a grand gesture, a way to help our fellow humans AND rehabilitate our image as the world's greedy landlord. It would demonstrate, perhaps for the first time, that our priorities are in the right place.

Dear Iraq, We came to rid you of a murderous tyrant (regardless of why we said we came in the first place). That job is done now, and though you've still got quite a row to hoe here, there are now people who need us far more than you do. Best of luck. Call us if you need anything, The United States.

Instead our President read a prepared statement about tragedy and suffering and our committment to the relief effort. If ever in history there was a moment for a world leader to dig deep and tap into a wellspring of charismatic compassion, it was Monday morning in Washington, DC. Remember the French newspaper headline of September 12th, 2001, "Today We Are All Americans." Unfortunately, our president wasn't in Washington. He was at home in Texas, on vacation. Oh, and he's more or less completely inarticulate, so when he did speak about the disaster it was with all the warmth and benificence of the computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Come to think of it, that computer had a nicer speaking voice.

On Tuesday evening I saw a news story about the 12 Americans that were killed by the tsunamis. 12. Not to make light of the deaths of those 12 people, but really, are we kidding with this? 12. 12 out of 114,000, and we're taking news time to talk about them? It's as if precious American lives are more valuable than those of the swarthy, full-time denizens of the places we vacation. "Wow!" this story seems to be saying, "those tsunamis really weren't discriminating when they swept ashore, snuffing thousands and thousands of lives in a salty swirl of ocean water and marauding tides."

I shouldn't criticize though. I'm really not sure how to process this disaster myself. When I first heard about it I immediately thought of that scene from the first Star Wars movie. Luke and Obi Wan have recently secured passage on the Millenium Falcom, and they're on their way to try to save Princess Leia from the evil clutches of Darth Vader, who is busy trying to extort information from the Princess. To demonstrate his resolve he trains the Death Star's massive lasers on her home planet of Alderan and annihilates it in one quick blast. Just then, Obi Wan clutches his chest and slumps into a seat. When Luke asks what's wrong, Obi Wan says something like, "There has been a great disturbance in the Force, as if a million voices cried out and then fell suddenly silent."

The difference, in this case, is that a million voices cried out and only a portion of them fell silent. The rest continue to cry and will keep on crying as they die of mallaria, cholera and dysentery, as they struggle against starvation and dehydration to rebuild homes and businesses, to rebuild lives that were, in many cases, only patched together to begin with.

In this country, we lack a sharp sense of perspective, but events are conspiring to clue us in. Let's hope it doesn't take a 20-foot-high wall of water to finish the job.

December 26th, 2004 - So that was Christmas. Ten minutes of tearing paper and muttering thanks and trying on new things, then French toast and bacon and orange juice until we were all as full as we could get. It was good to see the kids, my brother's two boys, shining happily over their gifts. In the evening we went to their place, just around the corner, for a roast pork shoulder, sweet potatoes and pecan pie.

Brittney and I remain, of course, completely consumed with thoughts of baby, labor, delivery and all the rest. We've been walking zombies for a week, and I imagine we will remain in this singular trance until the baby actually arrives and breaks the spell.

Just a few minutes ago we were laying on the unmade bed talking about how lucky we both feel to be healthy and warm and safe, to be achingly yet soothingly middle-class, to be young still and in love. And each of us confessed a deep fear that one day our great luck might run out.

I don't really believe in luck, but I think any time you find yourself in a situation where you don't think you can control the outcome, the idea of luck creeps in and you start doing all sorts of cosmic math to try to divine it. Brittney pointed out that really, just because we've been lucky so far, there's no reason we shouldn't continue to be. I mean if you don't believe in luck, past good fortune can't be linked, causally, to future prosperity, right?

You know what? Screw all this luck stuff. We just want to have a healthy baby. We want an easy labor, a healthy newborn, and an easy time of breast feeding. We want to sleep through the night and wake up rested and know that we've done the right thing.

Yesterday I asked Brittney if this wasn't a little like waiting for Christmas to come when she was a kid, what with all the nervous excitement and anticipation. "Christmas never made me nervous," she said, and that's all she said.

Honestly, I don't know how much more I can write about this stuff, or how much more, more to the point, you can read about it, before there's an actual event to justify all the hand wringing and breathy analysis. I'm going to cut myself short now, go downstairs and try to figure out what we're having for dinner. It's been snowing all day, a light, powdery snow that the wind blows sideways, drops on the ground and then picks up again so you can't tell how much is still falling. I suspect I might be headed out into it, if only the grocery store is still open.

December 21st, 2004 - I've not been myself. I was sitting in the obstetrician's office this morning, watching my wife undergo a pelvic exam, when I realized that I've been completely freaked out for about two weeks now.

I just don't want to think about anything. I mean, more than usual, I don't want to think about anything. As a result, I haven't been returning phone calls or doing much in the way of work. I have been nodding and smiling at people like someone who doesn't speak the language but doesn't want to let on. On a meta level I haven't been participating.

At this point I will warn friends and family not to get their hopes up for Christmas this year. I haven't done much in the way of shopping. Last week I wandered the streets of Harvard Square, winding in and out of book and record stores, staring blankly at the bright displays and trying hard not to get in anyone's way. Eventually I bought a few small things.

You'll be getting those few small things this year. Ho. Ho. Ho.

And Thatch, are you reading this? Hey man, I got your call, and I really meant to call you back. I did. I just wasn't up to conversation. Brittney says you guys are going to be in town over the holidays. Stop by. We'd love to see you.

The thing about conversation is that I'm really not able to hold up my end. Everyone asks how Brittney is doing. Everyone wants to know when the baby's due. Everyone wants to know if I'm excited. To the first question invariably I answer, "Large," to the second I say, "January 1st," (jokes about an early birth and subsequent tax deduction usually ensue), and to the third I say, "Yeah, I'm very excited now." I'm sure everyone assumes that I mean excited like a little kid who's just found a brand new bike parked in front of the Christmas tree. In actuality, I'm more excited like the female lead in an old detective film just before the gumshoe grabs her by both arms and then slaps her across the face.

To most everyone in my personal and professional lives who expected things from me, things like prompt answers to straightforward questions, I've by and large made the excuse that I'm very busy at the moment, too busy to be relied upon for straightforwardness or promptness of any stripe. The truth is, I am not that busy. I am simply overwhelmed by an incapacitating desire to sit on the couch and stare into space. In the evenings I have been coming home and parking myself into Fox Sports World, "America's Soccer Channel." I find soccer highlights very soothing, just short video clips of goals and near goals and miracle saves. I think I could sit there in a state of near catatonia as nimble men with unpronounceable names dance on the screen until the moment when Brittney turns to me and says, "It's time."

In a way, I'm glad it's Christmas time. I'm required to shop and to plan meals with the family. There are things I have to do. Having to do things serves as a distraction of sorts from our inexorable march toward parenthood, or as my friend Dave, a recent father, put it in email today "the abrupt and horrible end to life as you've known it."

And so, in closing, let this serve as an official apology to friends and family for my behavior of late, also for the withering disappointment you'll no doubt feel as you tear the wrapping paper asunder to reveal this year's lame effort. It's not that I've been too busy. It's just that I don't really care right now.

For those of you who are not friends and not family, be thankful your orbit doesn't bring you too close the above named sphere, and prepare yourself for the transition from a lot of self-involved ranting about becoming a father to a lot of self-involved ranting about being a father. In the final analysis I am only a clown making balloon animals for my own amusement, a self-involved, freaked out clown with a very, very pregnant wife.

Merry Christmas.

December 19th, 2004 - An odd sort of weekend. On Friday, Brittney and I had a date, a last dinner and movie together before the baby comes. We saw I HEART Huckabees in Harvard Square, then ate Indian food at a place down on Brattle St. The movie was pretty good. I'm not sure I hearted it, but it was enjoyable. And the food was alright. I had lamb. Brittney had curried peas. After dinner we strolled a little in the cold, then got a cup of tea and took the train home.

I said to Brittney as we we pushed through the turnstile in the station that I could tell we were ready to start our family because we were about to get home before 10:30 on what we both knew would be our last night on the town as a childless couple. I said, "You know, we're just not going to be missing anything." She laughed. Agreed.

It feels like the countdown to babygeddon has begun. This afternoon I strapped the car seat into the car. When I told my friend Lauren that, about an hour ago, on the phone, she asked if maybe it wasn't a little early still. But you have to have the car seat in the car to bring the baby home from the hospital and my wife is due in less than two weeks. By the standards of today's anxiety-ridden parents I was late. I feel late on a lot of things.

My problem is that I don't know how to wait for something like this, a life event far beyond a summer trip to Europe or having your wisdom teeth out. When you're getting ready to leave on a big trip, you feel anxious, maybe you don't sleep very well, if you're me you have explosive diarrhea. When you're having your wisdom teeth out, you don't eat 24 hours in advance, you lay in a supply of movies, you let work know you won't be in. These events are memorable, but seldom actually life changing.

But holy cripes! Becoming a parent is a real mind fuck.

You have nine months to wrap your head around it. You go to the doctor's appointments and watch your wife grow, and though you remain mostly incredulous right to the end, there is an acceptance, a used-to-the-idea-ness, that settles in.

Of course, there are myriad logistical details to work out, too. You have to organize some sort of nursery. You have to get clothing for a person that doesn't yet exist. Have you ever held a newborn's clothes by the way? They are ridiculous and funny. You have to put the crib together and figure out the stroller. Maybe you go to birthing classes where they teach you things about reproduction you never knew before, practical things, things you probably should have written down.

Then, at the end of the process, there are all sorts of last things to do. Your friends all want to see you one more time before the baby comes. You're urged to catch up on your sleep, to spend quality time together, to relax and have fun. As if any of that was possible.

As the moment draws closer I think I'm actually finding it more hard to believe it's really going to happen. I mean, up to this point I've just been convincing myself that Brittney was pregnant, though the evidence was pretty incontrovertible as much 5 months ago. Now I'm convincing myself that soon Brittney won't be pregnant, that we'll have a squealing little pink blob to take care of morning, noon and night instead.

To me, reproduction is a little like having someone tell you that you're going to perform a really complicated magic trick and then not explaining how to do it, but then, after flailing around for nine months, you find out you didn't need it explained. You're pulling the rabbit out of the hat...and then feeding it and watching it grow for twenty years.

December 15th, 2004 - This afternoon, at the company holiday party, I did something you're never supposed to do. No, I didn't get it on with anybody. And no, I didn't photocopy my ass. No, I discussed religion with my co-workers. I expressed opinions and made clear that I was an atheist. Zach, from art and design, said he'd never met an atheist before, or at least he'd never met anyone who admitted to it.

I found out that Anne and I both went to Episcopalian, private schools. I found out that Neil, Glen and Kirsten all go to Unitarian churches, though Neil says that, in his heart, he's a Quaker. Zach was a catholic, but now he's thinking about becoming a congregationalist, which apparently is catholicism without the fondling and the going to hell. Meanwhile, Abby is Jewish, which apparently is catholicism without the Jesus and the dairy products.

Because I'm about to be a father, people were interested in hearing how I planned to address the issue of religiosity when my child is old enough to be curious. Would I take them to an array of churches to expose them to a broad range of ideas? Or would I raise them as atheists, telling them early and often that god is only a means of separating fools from their money?

I explained that church shopping wasn't on the agenda, that I am interested in exposing my child (or children) to a lot of different points of view, but that touring a bunch of christian churches didn't really qualify in my view as exposing them to "a lot of different points of view." Neil wondered if buddhist temples and muslim mosques might be added to the mix, to which I replied, "no, I don't think so." I'm willing to answer my kids' questions about religion with as much candor and open-mindedness as I'm capable of mustering, but I don't feel obliged to actually take them to places of worship for a sample indoctrination.

Kirsten pointed out that my kids would likely just believe whatever I told them to believe without really questioning the nature of the universe and coming up with some personal set of beliefs, to which I replied that I would much rather, if my kids were to take someone's view of the world, that it be mine than a stranger's. I said that I had had little trouble figuring out right from wrong without a book or a two-thousand year old murder victim to clue me in, and that probably I was capable of teaching my children without the help of a minister of some sort.

Still, Kirsten thought I was missing something big, a concept of god as something separate from and more powerful than human beings. Kirsten has a personal spiritual connection with god, speaks to him, thinks he's cool. She thinks the world is a beautiful place and that god is responsible for that beauty. Oh, and if my kids don't believe in god but receive all their "spiritual" (I place it in quotes here, because I've yet to meet someone who can define the word in any cogent way) guidance from me, then won't they ascribe the beauty of the world, the mystery of life, to me?

Uh, no.

To be fair, I believe Kirsten had exhausted her drink tickets at this point in the conversation. You should never discuss religion with your co-workers, but you should really never discuss religion with your co-workers when they're tipsy.

What I would like to do with my kids is exactly what my parents did with me. Neither of my parents believed in god, and we never went to church as a family once in my entire childhood, but I was allowed to go with friends to more or less whatever wacky, Southern, fly-by-night church they belonged to (and some of them were pretty out there). Also, as I mentioned before, they sent me to an Episcopalian, private school. The education was better than the Alabama public schools. And so as I grew I ended up visiting the catholics, the presbyterians, the episcopalians, the baptists, the mormons and the jews. All in all, I got a pretty good dose of religion, and my folks rarely expressed their opinions about god, church or religion.

As I explained this, Neil jumped in and suggested that perhaps my parents had a plan, which was to allow me all these experiences with the firm conviction that I would size them all up and arrive at atheism on my own. But no, I don't think that's what they were doing. I don't think they had a plan at all or were much bothered whether I ended up a heathen or a zealot. I think what they had in mind was that I could and should believe whatever it was I felt I needed to believe in order to go on living, whether it was evangelical or taoist. Now clearly, they weren't above questioning my choices, and as I grew older we discussed religion more and more, usually at my request. But I never really felt pushed one way or another except when I was at church being told to repent or go to hell.

My great fear is that I will lack my parents' laissez faire attitude, that I'll just tell my kids there's no god and hope to be done with it. I am too often too sure of my own opinions. It is a character flaw I hope not to pass on.

At root, I abhor any belief system that holds itself out as the one and only way, and I will encourage my children always to consider other points of view. But pluralism can be a trap too if it doesn't allow a person to settle on a single way of thinking. Atheism can be a religion as stifling as catholicism if you let it be.

Fortunately, the Yankee Swap started up and people's attention wandered from my heathen rantings to the pile of gifts, each valued at ten dollars or less, that were being opened one-by-one and passed back and forth according to the cruel laws of office holiday party etiquette.

I got up from my chair, grabbed my coat and went back to the office to photocopy my ass.

December 13th, 2004 - When you're nine-years-old, about to be ten, reality tends not to be an obstacle to the enjoyment of life. Witness my nephew George, named for his father and his father's father, sitting on the basement steps as Brittney puttered around and I painted a small wooden dresser to go in the nursery.

George said, "I wish I was psychic and had a clone."

And I said, "Why would you want to be psychic and have a clone?"

"So I could foresee what we were going to do in school for the day, and if it was boring I could send my clone," was the reply.

So I said, "Why not have a clone that speaks Italian (they study Italian in 4th grade here in Medford)?"

And he said, "Why would I want that?" Then he said, "I actually want a genetically altered clone."

Brittney chimed in here. She said, "If it was genetically altered, it wouldn't really be a clone, would it?" I thought that was a pretty good point.

But then George said, "They had a whole army of genetically altered clones in Star Wars (TOUCHE!!). Besides I'd need it to be genetically altered so it could be my age without having to wait nine years for it to grow up."

After that, George stated the opinion that E=MC² was stupid, because it didn't mean anything. When I explained that E stood for energy, M for mass and C for the speed of light, he revised his view a little. Then we talked about what it meant to square something, to multiply it by itself. After that I gave him a quick run down of the Law of the Conservation of Matter.

He said, "You mean like when you burn ants with a magnifying glass you're not really destroying them; you're actually converting them to heat energy?" And when I said that, yes, that was correct, he said, "But what about when you shoot something with an energy beam and it disappears? What about that?"

Later, randomly, he said, "I'm not a very good forensic scientist," then went into a lengthy commentary about the best way to make fake vomit. Cream of mushroom soup with peas and carrots added is best. George recommends heating it also, so it steams when you make your barfing sound and throw it on the floor.

He recited a list of items he once bought from a magic store: garlic candy, gum that turns your mouth blue, a two-headed quarter, a pen that writes invisible ink. He had written a letter to a mean kid with the invisible ink pen. It contained no swear words. He promised. He gave a piece of the candy to his mother and some gum to his little brother.

George said there was some profanity written in pen on the back of the seat he sat on on the bus this morning. It said, "Fuyodick," then "the F word." He admitted he didn't really know what it meant.

We told him we didn't either.

December 12th, 2004 - You know this whole record collection move has me all screwed up. Not that I was constantly sitting in front of the turntable. Not that I was listening to any of it. But now I'm thinking about the records that are stuck down there in the basement, the ones I don't have on CD, and wondering when I'll hear them again.

This morning I got up and drove to Vermont, just to sort of close the Schoolhouse up for the winter, to finish painting the upstairs and pull the wicker furniture in off the front porch, not that those of you planning on spending time there this winter aren't still welcome. You are. But just in case you lame out, the place is ready for deep freeze.

Anyway, two hours each way in the truck demanded a temporary augmentation of the in-truck audio selection, and, with the old record collection in mind, I pulled some CDs out of the shelf in the living room, a couple of albums I spent the money to have on disc, too.

First of all, I don't care what anyone says, "Goo" is the best Sonic Youth album. No, it's not their first. In fact, I think it's their first record on Geffen, which makes it a "major label release." I don't care. It kicks ass. I'm not even that big a Sonic Youth fan. I saw them once, at the Avalon in Boston, on the "Dirty" tour, an amazing show, a total aural assault. They played their guitars with baseball bats. With fucking BASEBALL BATS. Unreal. A recording doesn't even come close to reproducing what they do on stage, or at least what they did. I haven't seen them since 1992.

I would argue that you really only need two Sonic Youth records to understand what they do and how they do it. I have six of them, and this is what I've learned.

When I listen to "Goo" now, as I did today between Shelbourne Falls and Petersham on Route 2, I'm more critical than I once was. Now I can see that maybe every song didn't need to begin with a caterwaul of distorted guitar. Also, Kim Gordon's off key warbling isn't quite as charming, but still "Tunic" is totally brilliant. Not enough people have written songs about Karen Carpenter. I also really like "Dirty Boots," the first song, and "Mote," a long, noisy squall that is excellent for driving but not the sort of thing you want to listen to while having dental work.

After the Sonic Youth I threw in the Pixies' "Surfer Rosa." The Pixies are very topical as they've recently reformed and begun to tour again. My friend Dave saw them a few weeks ago, here in Boston. He said they were good, though all old and fat. He said Black Francis looks like the 300-pound version of his four-month-old, pudgy and bald.

"Surfer Rosa" is what I would call a perfect album. There is not one moment on the whole thing that sinks into even momentary mediocrity. Every recorded second is brilliant. In fact, I'm shocked anew every time I hear it because it has that quality of seeming very random and jarring and yet completely coherent and compelling, that quality that all obviously original work has. No one had written songs like that before, and no one has since. I particularly like the bits where they sing in Spanish. I love "Surfer Rosa" so much that I put it in as I passed through Athol and left it in, playing around and around as I rolled back into the city.

There's some line in one of the songs on that album that made me think the following thought: All the most important, the most formative experiences of my youth happened in parking lots. You know, the substantive parts of life don't happen at the dance. They happen in the car on the way home where you've got the time and privacy to work out what happened at the dance and clarify your position in relation to the universe. That goes for feeling up girls and smoking weed and a whole bunch of other stuff too.

What any of that has to do with the Pixies or Sonic Youth or my record collection I have no clue.

December 7th, 2004 - Somewhere between the room-formerly-known-as-my-office and the basement a major chunk of my life became expendable.

We are in the process of shifting furniture and possessions to make room for the baby, and it was decided that my office would become the "nursery." Simultaneously (or as simultaneously as you can move three rooms full of stuff) our bedroom, the largest of the three, would be combined to serve as both guest room and office. The guest room would be our new master boudoir. When we made this plan back in the summer it made so much sense. Now that we're moving things around, it's proving a bit challenging.

First, more decisions had to be made.

When we moved our bedroom into what was the guestroom, we left behind the small, retro-style writing desk. There was just no room for it, and rather than serving as a nice little spot to sit and write in the evening it had become more of a shit magnet, attracting all the useless crap, spare change, old make up, seldom worn jewelry, that collects at the periphery of bedroom activity. Our new bedroom is nice and cozy and offers few places to pile already-read-magazines and clothing that needs to be returned. As a result, the new bedroom is tidier, more efficient.

Moving the guest room into our old room was easy. The guest bed, a nice, old, barrister's bookcase, a trunk, a small TV and a stereo shifted over nicely, leaving yawning gaps for the contents of my office.

But this is where the problems started, because my office was packed full of stuff. First, there was the overly large desk with computer, printer/fax machine, cable modem, speakers and subwoofer. Then there was the double filing cabinet, bookcase, the long couch by the window that is my reading couch and the series of shelves and platforms that housed my record collection, turntable and speakers. Altogether, we're talking about 24' of wall space taken up with furniture or furniture-like objects.

The desk with computer and associated peripherals wedged into the corner of the new guest room/office and the filing cabinet went in next to it. I sandwiched the bookcase under a window. But then the room was full, and a sad reality dawned on me. The ship that was my office was sinking fast, and my couch and record collection were going down with it.

Brittney gave me that couch for our last anniversary. I wanted a place to sit and read while she occupied the living room with the television and the dog, a place to stretch out after paying bills or blogging. I love that couch, but alas it belongs to the baby's room now, a place to stretch out after singing lullabies. To me, the couch was easy come, easy go. I'll still lay on it. It's still a couch that lives in the upstairs of our house.

The stereo and record collection had no where to go. There was no room in the new guest room/office, and no baby I've ever met needs all the Apple AND all the Capitol versions of the Beatles' oeuvre at arm's length, you know, just in case. And so this collection, this massive boat anchor of a collection that I spent money I didn't have to amass, searching for hours in the dusty bins of second hand stores, this collection that I trucked from apartment to apartment without the aid of a forklift, this musical biography scratched in vinyl and sheathed in cardboard had to go into the basement.

The first armload was mostly classic stuff, Traffic, Beatles, live Aerosmith. The second trip was bluegrass and country. After that came the hodge-podge of classical, jazz, bag piping and accordion stuff that occupied half-a-shelf near the floor. There was Englebert Humperdink in there and an album that promised to turn me into an expert bridge player. There were a few polka records. Finally, achingly, I transported the punk and indie shelves to their final resting place. I couldn't help stopping to pull Husker Du's 'Zen Arcade' out of its pile, sliding the lime green, marblized vinyl out of the sleeve and holding it in the light for a minute. It was all I could do not to flop down on the floor in front of the turntable and blow the evening on a waltz down memory lane.

I know. It all sounds so terribly nostalgic in an aging hipster sort of way. How very High Fidelity of me. How very lame. Well, look, I'm sorry. I was one of those guys in college. I was. And at least I didn't wax on about the gems in my 45 collection. Cut me a break.

As I trudged down the basement steps with armful after armful of old records, I couldn't help thinking I was passing into a new stage in my life not already identified with coming parenthood and mounting responsibility, no, not just an adulthood with wife and kids in it, but an adulthood with wife and kids and very little room for much else, an adulthood with lots of future and not so much past. It is true that up to this point I have been something of a pack rat. I still have the first record I ever bought, Blondie's 'Rapture' in a yellow papered single sleeve that matched the AutoAmerican album cover. It came out when I was eight. But I am learning that part of becoming a parent is shedding the trappings of your former self to make room for the trappings of your child's current self.

The room-formerly-known-as-my-office now houses bouncy seats and changing tables, bags and bags of tiny clothes, odd-shaped books with heavy laminate covers and very few words on each page, the stuff of early, early childhood, from which this child, my first, will pack away some small scrap as a reminder of what they once were.

Meanwhile, down in the basement Blondie moulders next to the Beatles whose jackets were pretty torn up to begin with. I may set it all up down there, the turntable and speakers, away in a corner where I can escape to listen while the baby screams its tiny lungs out in the nursery. Or maybe I'll just pack it into boxes and put it out on the curb. That seems to make just about as much sense.

I tell myself I'll buy a phono pre-amp and pipe all that fantastic vinyl static and scratch into the computer to spit out MP3s, but I think we both know that's never going to happen. Part of me believes I'll slowly sell it all on eBay, whittling it down to only the best stuff, the original 'All Things Must Pass,' 'Their Satanic Majesty's Request' with the hologram on the front, some other true artifacts. But who the hell would pay me for that Squirrelbait LP? And what am I going to do with even a fraction of what I've got now?

No. I think what I've got to get through my head is that my record collection was something I did more than something I had. Like my useless liberal arts degree, it prepared me for rambling conversations with other people just like me. It gave me the answers to all sorts of trivia questions no one will ever ask. It prepared me to hate whatever music my offspring bring into the house.

It's garbage now, but I will miss it.

December 5th, 2004 - I am the last guy on the block to finish raking and bagging his leaves this season. The fucking maple tree in our side yard just held his leaves until the very last possible second, the bastard. Wouldn't you know it, the town has stopped leaf collection for the year, too, so I'm either going to truck the leaves across the street to the train tracks and dump them surreptitiously, possibly under cover of darkness, which pretty much all my neighbors do, or I'm going to roll the bags up tight and pack them in the garden where their rotting will have some reasonably benign effect.

I suppose it's winter now, no longer fall. We're coming to the shortest day of the year, December 21st, after which I take no small measure of solace, despite the wet and cold, from the fact that the days are beginning to lengthen again. Funny the way daylight shrinks and expands with hot or cold, huh? Like water. Like time.

Oddly, something about Brittney's pregnancy has changed my concept of time slightly. When we first realized she was knocked up nine months seemed like a long time. We behaved as if we had an eternity to plan for the baby's eventual birth. Even midway through, when she started to show, the future, which is to say this time now, seemed far off.

But now that we're four weeks away from her due date, it's rushing at us like a cross-country freight train. I've come to see everything in my life as temporary. Brittney is big and unwieldy and uncomfortable, and I feel badly for her, but then, it's only temporary. In a month she'll have her body back, or mostly back. Similarly, we're not parents yet, but that's only temporary too. In a month we'll have a baby, and that baby will grow so quickly that temporary will take on newer and more emphemeral meanings as we go along.

But I wouldn't bring this whole temporary thing up if I was only going to talk about the fleetingness of the big events in life. 'Time flies' is such an old idea, the ancient Romans froze it in amber, tempus fugit. And now crafty old women embroider it on throw pillows just to preserve its universal truth.

The thing is, as things speed up, as time flies, it also slows down.

I was out in the yard earlier with my back to the stiff, chill wind, scooping leaves into tall paper bags, and I was thinking about myself as the man of the house, the one out in the yard tidying up, the one about to become a father. I suddenly felt sort of old. My father used to be the one raking and bagging, and now it's me, like I'm fulfilling some destiny, repeating some ancient cycle of suburban renewal. Suddenly I could see the rest of my life laid out before me in stark detail. I felt, if only for a moment, like a rerun.

I wondered what the hell was the point. Do we give birth to children so the next generation has a chance to bag leaves? Did my father bring me up to rake better than he did? Better than his father before him? Honestly, if that was the point, then I'm probably letting down the side. After all, I'm the last guy on the block to finish his leaves.

But it's not about raking. This is what I was thinking, out there in the yard. It's about happiness. By repeating so much of what came before, whether that's raking or anything else humans have been doing for generations, we actually create timelessness. We slow things down. The breaking news is that humanity has, on some level, automated the process of being a human. Sure, you still have to rake the leaves, but because you're hardwired to know how to do that, you have all sorts of mental bandwidth left over to contemplate the simple happiness of being alive. Once the script is written, all that's left is enjoying the performance.

The scene opens. It is late fall. A bare maple tree stands in the background. Leaves, dry and brown, are heaped in a massive pile in one corner of the yard. A young man, soon to be a father, stands over the pile. He is underdressed and doing an embarrassingly poor job of filling purpose-made bags with the leavs.

Don't worry. He'll learn. He has time.

Note to all male readers of a certain age: You are your father. You will be born, struggle through childhood, become an awkward adult, fall in love, marry and reproduce. You will rake leaves and then you will die, and the big message of all that is that you are obligated, by your father's sacrifice and by the unalterable similarity of your genetic code, to try to wring every last bit of happiness out of every moment.

Every. Single. Moment.

You have an eternity to get it right. Begin now.

December 2nd, 2004 - You'll have to excuse me if I'm a little wound up this evening. I'm on a homeowner's high.

You see, in the course of owning a home, you are presented with certain basic challenges beyond what might be termed normal maintenance. Normal maintenance consists of things like mowing the lawn, taking out the garbage and raking leaves. In the category of homeowner's fun beyond normal maintenance are smalltime renovatory projects like painting, installing light fixtures and plumbing of any stripe. Beyond that (hors category, if you will) are things like kitchen and bathroom remodels, the epic stuff for devotees of obscure home improvement programs at the outer reaches of the cable television universe.

You can tell a lot about a person by their attitude towards their home. There are the people who hire professionals to come and dispatch any distasteful chore quickly, quietly and always expensively. I think of this kind of homeowner as more of a Hotel Dweller. Yes, they own a home, but they'd really rather have someone come in every day to make the bed and scrub the toilet. Hotel Dwellers usually have a lot of money and very little aptitude with tools, and I know it's horribly judgemental and shallow of me, but I think of this sort of person as essentially weak. I mean, honestly, what good will they be to the tribe when the apocalypse comes?

After the Hotel Dwellers come the Thought I Coulds. A Thought I Could is willing to do the work of owning a home, but just isn't capable, usually by reason of a liberal arts education and an upper-middle class upbringing. Thought I Coulds are often the children of Hotel Dwellers. When you go to a Thought I Could's house you see that they've painted, but neglected to remove the switch plates first. The Thought I Coulds get an A for effort, but they're about as much use in a real crisis as a Hotel Dweller, and remember, after the bomb drops, you won't be able to get room service.

That brings me to our third group, the Real Deals. A Real Deal can paint a room without leaving paint splatters all over the hard wood floor. A Real Deal probably owns multiple sanders and saws. Real Deals take on more home improvement jobs than they can possibly complete, because, at root, Real Deals believe they are capable of improving their home, but also know when they're out of their depth. Real Deals always "have a guy" when it comes time to call a professional and get something done the right way. Still, Real Deals suffer because many of their friends are Thought I Coulds who need help fixing the latest thing they've f'ed up.

Finally, you have the Over Achievers. Over Achievers take down walls and winterize porches. Over Achievers own pressure washers and drive pickup trucks. Over Achievers own pants with loops for hammers. Over Achievers are possessed of a magical combination of patience and confidence that seems to make any home improvement job possible without the oversight of a licensed tradesman. They are smug and irritating and also the people you want to be snuggled up next to in the shelter as the noxious cloud of post detonation radiation dissipates making life on the Earth's surface possible again.

Through diligence and an intransigent, underlying cheapness, I am somewhere between Thought I Could and Real Deal. I paint well. I own tools. But many of the projects I've started have finished badly. I've been refinishing an old rocking chair for about six years now. The kitchen table I built for our last apartment doesn't have one good level spot on it where you can set a drink down and feel confident it won't tip over. Now it lives in the basement, its legs amputated and stacked next to it. The truth is, often I get in over my head and need someone to bail me out.

Which brings me to this evening and the clog. One night earlier this week I put a really obscenely large quantity of food down the garbage disposal, food that had collected in the refrigerator and transformed itself into a grade school science fair project. The next morning I went down to the basement for something and noticed that the sink there, the one I use for rinsing paint brushes, was full of oily water with what looked like black beans floating on top. It smelled like the dumpster at the Mexican place I worked in high school. It was bad.

So being a conscientous home owner I did what I knew how to do. I went to work.

When I got home I returned to the basement hoping that somehow the miracle of drainage might have taken place, but it had not. I went for the plunger. And I don't know how many clogs you've faced in your lifetime, but I can tell you from my experience that plungers really never work on sink clogs. If you've got a tampon trapped in your toilet drain, they're magic. Otherwise they're only good for splashing oily bean water all over the front of your work shirt.

I moved on to the jug of drain opener that we keep under the kitchen sink. Using drain opener is usually sort of dicey if you ask me. Sometimes, though rarely, Liquid Plumber or Draino or Ram Out or whatever brand you buy, does the trick. You pour it in, wait ten minutes, then flush with warm water. Voila! But in the instances it doesn't work, using it only makes the situation worse, which is to say the clog is still in residence and now all the water it's holding back is corrosively toxic.

Once I'd toxified the oily bean pond in my basement I went and got some latex gloves. I keep them on hand for when I refinish furniture (or at least that's what I tell people), and I find they come in super handy when you want to root around in toxic, oily, bean ponds. I also busted out my 25' plumber's snake.

Cue music, bring up lights, there's a stud on stage and he's hot, hot, hot.

That's right. I own a plumber's snake. My house is old, and this isn't my first clog. Also, do you know what it costs to have a plumber come to your house? No? Me, neither. I'm way too cheap to call a plumber.

So I went to work with the snake, and I'll leave out the parts where I splashed myself in the face with liquified nasty, shuttled out to the yard with multiple buckets of foul run off and threw my power drill across the basement in shear frustration. Suffice it to say I gave up after a few hours and resolved to find out how much it costs to have a plumber come and exorcise the demon in my drain.

But the next day at work, today actually, I got cold feet and decided I'd give it another try. At nine o' clock sharp, just after Brittney and I finished wolfing down some Chinese takeout, I stomped down the basement stairs to do battle. And again, I'll leave out the blow-by-blow, but say that plumbing is a dark art, mystical in its own way. The movement of water within copper or PVC piping may not be governed by the laws of physics. Every house's system of drains and vents is like an Escher drawing in 3D. I have the utmost respect for plumbers and do not begrudge them the heaping piles of gold and treasure they extort from hapless customers in exchange for their toil.

Brittney had her head pressed to the basement floor trying to figure out how far down the main house drainline I'd worked the snake when I hit something firm, pushed at it for a moment and then heard a magical sucking sound as the water breached the clog and spiralled away into the sewery beyond.

She said, "What was that?"

And I said, "That was victory."

I cleaned up, washed out the basement sink and climbed the stairs, high on drain opener fumes and the sweet liquor of success. There is no feeling like that, the feeling of having solved a seemingly insoluble problem, the feeling of coming to know your home just that little bit better, the feeling of an errant splash of Liquid Plumber slowly burning its way through the top layers of skin on your forearm.

This is the joy of home ownership.

November 28th, 2004 - In Walden, Thoreau wrote, "I have travelled a great deal in Concord," which my friend Todd thought was an asinine thing to say. Todd, who lived near Walden Pond, thought Thoreau was serious, that he was a self-important blow-hard who wrote about living on his own in the dark woods west of Boston but had dinner at his mother's house every Sunday. And while some of that may be true, I think what old Henry David was trying to get across was that you don't have to go far to experience an awful lot, that the real adventure is inside your own head.

We spent four days in our little place in Whitingham, VT, splayed out on the couch with a pile of books and magazines. Four days with no television, no newspaper, no Internet. Four days to find a counter space at Dot's Diner and order up a plateful of eggs and homefries. Four days to walk at the southern end of Lake Whitingham, by the dam, to see the moon reflect off the water at Lake Raponda, to sit on our front porch with the dog and look out at the trees. Four days.

To relax.

But it didn't happen. Four days in Vermont and all I could do was beat back the encroaching tide of anxiety, shapeless, irrational anxiety that thumped in my chest and left me fidgety and uncomfortable. Nothing I brought to read, and I brought quite a pile, held my interest. The lakes were pretty and the moon was full but they were only momentary diversions. I tried to do some house work, to finish painting the last of the bedrooms upstairs, but that didn't help much. We ended up driving in to Brattleboro for dinner two nights running, but that was only marginal distraction.

This, in case you've just joined the action, is more imminent-parenthood-anxiety. Brittney and I decided to spend Thanksgiving in Vermont, away from family because we figured, with the baby coming, there will be plenty of family together time in the coming months. We were trying to enjoy our remaining days as a dynamic duo, trying to relax together before the onslaught of the holidays.

Instead we spent four days wringing our hands and mourning the loss of our independence. I confessed to Brittney that I am worried that once the baby comes she won't have any time to take care of me anymore. I, it probably goes without saying, need a lot of taking care of. Who will pat my head and tell me everything is ok when I've had a bad day at work? Who, I ask you, will humor me? I didn't even realize before this weekend that this was something I needed to worry about, but apparently I did.

I am also desperately afraid I won't like fatherhood, which is not to say that I suspect I won't love our child. I am certain that I will fall deeply, madly in love with our slithering, fork-tongued infant as soon as it springs, still frothy and slime-covered, from its mother's womb. But I'm not so sure I'll love full-time care giver status. When will I walk around the city and take pictures? When will I read books? When will I blog for chrissakes?

In short (too late), what will happen to me when we become us?

Brittney has many of the same worries, and we talked about them at length last night lying face to face on the old wrought iron bed that came with the house. She is sad for the loss of what we once were, carefree, spontaneous, irresponsible. There is the question of sex too, future and past, that I'll leave out of this discussion but was very much a part of last night's.

And again I discovered what everyone knows is true, that it's good to talk about your feelings, to unburden yourself. I felt much, much better having said everything I had to say, sort of like when you're nauseous and finally find the strength to vomit. The process is unpleasant, uncomfortable, but in the end you feel relieved.

So having barfed my troubles and anxiety all over my wife before reaching up and shutting off the light last night, I woke up today refreshed and somewhat more optimistic. We have had our time together as a young couple, running out the door to meet friends at a moment's notice, dropping obscene amounts of money on small portions of high cuisine, travelling on ill-planned but highly entertaining adventures. We have done all that and now settled into a slightly monotonous routine of working and coming home and working and coming home, which could, of course, go on forever if we were unwilling or too unimaginative to make an entirely new life for ourselves, a new kind of adventure.

Together, Brittney and I have been to see the German Alps, the steaming geisers of Iceland and the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza. We've been to San Francisco and New York and London and Mexico City, to Munich and Reykjavik and Washington D.C.

But we've never been parents before. We've never looked at the parent-child paradigm from the other side, never been on the other team. For us, the point of having children is not the doing-what-comes-nextness of it; it's the finding-out-what-that's-all-aboutness.

I was thinking about my father the day I decided I wanted to have children. This was a summer day, last year. Up to that point I was pretty sure I was too self-involved to enjoy parenthood, and anyway there was so much to do that would be made infinitely more difficult dragging the ball-and-chain of a family. But I was thinking about my father and how it was to be his son and suddenly I realized how limited my perspective was. I wondered if I could really pass a whole lifetime and skip over the experience of being someone's father. Almost immediately I decided I couldn't.

So fast forward to this morning, a year-and-a-half later, my wife, eight months pregnant. We are going through the process of becoming parents, and we're nearly to the end. She says to me that she misses the way we were. She is sad, and, to be quite honest, impossibly large and round. She wishes we could just have one week of the old us. It was heart-rending. It was hard.

And, looking at her then, so ripe, so beautiful, I completely understood my own anxiety and maybe, just for a second, the anxiety of real parenthood. You see, we can revise the past to be as good or bad as we want it to be, but the future is inexorable and fully beyond our control.

Our baby is coming. There is no pause button, no rewind. Our loose ends will only get looser as our child grows, skinning its knees, maybe breaking an arm at some summer camp to be named later. If touching down in Mexico City and navigating the sea of yammering cab drivers to locate a safe ride into town is harrying, then having a child is like tearing a hole in the space-time continuum and hurling yourself into the howling abyss. The cramped calculus of identity that goes on within a family, especially a young one, is far beyond the limits of my pathetic, private school math training. It is mind-altering, and not at all like the drugs I did in college.

Up to this point I viewed the anxiety as a thing unto itself, a thing seperate from and maybe alien to the process of making a family. Honestly, I thought there was something wrong with me because, in the late days of my wife's first pregnancy, I was racked with mental anguish instead of walking on bright, cheery sunshine. Now I see, as maybe Thoreau saw, though I'm probably stretching way too far now, that anxiety is inherent in adventure, that you don't have to leave Concord to have seen a whole lot of the world as long as your eyes are wide open.

My eyes, after four days of rest and relaxation in Vermont, very clearly are.

November 23rd, 2004 - This is likely the last time I'll have time to sit down and write before we take off for Vermont tomorrow, so I'll go ahead and tell you everything (or nearly everything) I'm thankful for now.

1) My wife - Honey, if you're reading this, I love you. I think I could spend every second of my life with you. In fact, I plan on it. Now that you're pregnant with our child I almost can't look at you. I get butterflies. I feel overwhelmed all the time. I'm dizzy with love.

2) My family - The older I get the more I understand why we stick together.

3) Eddie the Dog - Master of physical comedy. Straight man for all my slapstick. He is the welcoming committee. He is the alarm clock. He is always good for a laugh. He is a very good dog.

4) My friends - Look, I don't know why you like me, why you return my calls, but I appreciate it. May you win Pulitzers and Grammys. May you finally beat Madden Football. Above all may you be happy. You deserve it.

5) Words - People use words to impart information, to spread knowledge, both of which I need. As bad as my days ever get, a spell on the couch with a decent book usually smoothes me right out. Words give me hope that all my curiosities have potential satisfactions, and that's no small thing.

6) Soccer Players - For dancing the brutal ballet of the beautiful game, for filling my day dreams with swooping arabesques and wickedly bending free kicks, for doing magic with a ball and a patch of grass.

7) The Internet - I am not generally a lover of technology for the sake of technology, but any technology that allows you to connect to the world in more meaningful ways is deserving of thanks. You can have my Palm Pilot. You can have my scanner and fax machines. I can get by without them. But the Internet is a most wonderful invention. For me it's a church I go to to see my friends, to learn what's happening in the world, to cast my humble lot with the rest of civilization (or at least the wired portions thereof).

8) My house(s) - A person like me, one who eschews hard work, one who is almost never willing to do what other people want him to do, one who is essentially opposed to authority, probably doesn't deserve to own a home. But I own a home. We own a home. We bought it five years ago when we never believed we could afford it and found out we could. This year I was fortunate to stumble across a listing for a hundred-year-old schoolhouse in Southern Vermont and add to the number of places we can call home by one. Houses are buildings you live in, and I want to live as much as I possibly can.

9) My camera - I wrote about photography recently, so I won't go through it all again. Suffice it to say it's good to have a hobby.

10) My wife - I love her so much she had to be my begining and my end, both.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

November 22nd, 2004 - We were at childbirth class all weekend. 10-5 on Saturday. 12-5 on Sunday. In a windowless lunch room with flickering fluorescent lights.

Saturday morning, nine couples filed in, each with two pillows, as instructed. There was Eric and Toni, a young Italian-American couple. Ririka and Hiro, recently imigrated from Japan. Ahmed and Sonia, she quiet and he with a lilting Arabic accent. Anne and John, him big and American, her thin, pale and Irish. James and Annetra, both heavy set and black, him friendly and voluble, her quiet and pretty. Michael and Gauri, a bit older than the rest of us, him American with a beard, her Indian with a disarming smile. Amie and Ronan, another Amer-Irish mix, but this time him with a hard brogue and dark wavy hair, her gabby and mid-Western, from Michigan. And finally, Kevin and Stephanie, a youngish Korean-American couple, more American than Korean.

I have to say, they were all very nice, and above all it was very soothing to be in a room, albeit a windowless and badly lit one, with a large group of people all going through the same things we are. The normal, awkward, social construct that usually dictates the interactions of a random grouping of people was dispelled, almost immediately, by the shear power of shared anxiety. And with nine women all within six weeks of delivering their first baby, there was plenty of shared anxiety in the room.

The instructor was a poorly groomed woman with a hyphenated last name and an annoying speech pattern that made her statements sound like questions, the last word rising in tone to a high mousey squeak. Her hair seemed in the process of refashioning itself into an asymmetrical, dreadlocked fountain of tangles and her socks had holes in them.

As the class began she pulled posters and other visual aids from a random assortment of bags. The posters were all dog-eared and torn. The doll that served as her demonstration baby was dingy and gray. The first and most amusing thing she said was, "Oh shoot, I forgot my uterus at home."

Still, I think we both managed to learn quite a bit the first day. I mean, we knew where babies came from before, but to step through the birthing process with detailed anatomical drawings put a much finer point on it, a helpful point. And lucky for us, about midway through that first day, the instructor pulled out what looked like a pink, wool hat, but was actually her model uterus. She promptly shoved her dingy, gray baby in it and cinched tight the top.

Other gems from the first day came from the "complaints session" during which each of the women in the room claimed to be tired, irritable and constipated. Gauri, the tiny Indian woman, wondered aloud if anyone else was having problems with hemorrhoids. There was also a group session in which Brittney and I were paired with Kevin and Stephanie. The assigment was to talk about a time in your life that was particularly scary or painful and explain what you did to get through it. After Brittney and I shared some fairly low-grade stories of past tribulation, Kevin and Stephanie looked at each other, smile and laughed. Neither of them, they claimed had ever had a difficult or scary experience in their lives. Finally, we watched a video of a birth that seemed to have taken place in 1978. It was like the deleted scene in a bad porno. I glanced across the room and caught Eric shielding his eyes to keep from throwing up. Apparently he has a weak stomach.

Day two went much like day one, except we spent more time talking about what to do after the baby comes. This, for me, was much scarier stuff, though exciting. I had butterflies in my stomach until the instructor put in another ancient birth video. This one seemed more realistic than the first one with a heavy set woman grunting and straining and moaning until a little, pug-nosed creature emerged from her crotch covered in slime. Up to that point, I was feeling somewhat put off by the video, but there's something about that moment when the baby comes out and you see the parents' reaction and suddenly you find you're stifling tears because you're overwhelmed with a sudden rush of emotion.

Late in the day there was a question about cervix dilation or placenta previa or prolapsed cords or something like that, and the instructor said, "Oh shoot, where did my placenta go," and Stephanie, sitting next to us said, "Did you look in your uterus?"

By the time five o'clock Sunday rolled around I really felt like I'd been in class all weekend, tired and overwhelmed and a little bleary from the fluorescent lighting. The instructor gave out photocopied certificates that said we'd completed the class and people gathered their pillows and shuffled out, smiling, shaking each other's hands and saying "good luck" over and over and over again.

November 16th, 2004 - A brown paper bag. I got it yesterday at Rosini's with a chicken pesto sub in it. When I took the sub out (a monster I ate in one sitting) the bag was just like new except for some crinkles up at the top. I couldn't bring myself to throw it out.

Since I was at work I tried to think up some vaguely amusing new purpose for the bag. I contemplated blowing it full of air and then popping it, but then figured I could make a loud banging sound by just "accidentally" knocking my monitor of my desk so I passed on that one. Briefly I thought about writing "LOOK INSIDE ME" on the outside and "What were you hoping to find?" on the inside, but I rejected that as too pretentious.

What the hell to do with this bag then? It is the size of most everything you want to carry, except a tune. Get it? A tune?

I wonder, this bag, could I write my way out of it?

It's shear utility prevents me from throwing it away. Think of all the great brown paper bags through history. The Gong Show's Unknown Comic. The fans of the hapless 1980 New Orleans Aints.

Brown paper bags are good for ripening tomatoes or making hand puppets.

They remind me of my grade school lunches and how my mother used to make ham sandwiches with butter instead of mayo and mustard because my father is British and they like it that way. Eventually she stopped doing it after I complained. She also stopped making me tuna fish that would rot and moulder in my locker in the August, Alabama heat. Fruit roll-ups were the gold standard of elementary school cafeterias then, cafeterias that smelled of spoiled milk and chicken fried steak.

Back then I threw my bag out every day without even thinking about it. My dad never threw his away. He hated/hates to waste anything useful. He had a drawer full of used bags at his office, and occassionally he'd bring home a pile of them and then they'd get recirculated to me, all crumpled and soft.

Brown paper bags also remind me of high school art class where we'd use them for texture and perspective exercises. Our teacher, Mrs. Compton would play George Winston while we drew, and old George would doodle away on his Windham Hill keyboard in the background. I remember always leaving class with graphite smeared across the fingers of both hands and sometimes on my forehead.

Brown paper bags smell like dead leaves. Their brown-ness is earthy, not like those waxy white paper bags that muffins come in sometimes.

I just don't know what to do with this bag. Every time I see it I think: REDUCE>RECYCLE>REUSE. I think of my father with a desk drawer full of bags. Oddly, my own desk drawer is filled with plastic shopping bags, the kind that everything you buy, everything other than chicken pesto subs from Rosini's anyway, comes in now.

Remember that scene in American Beauty where the plastic shopping bag just floats around on the wind for what seems like an eternity while the wacko pot dealer kid talks about how the world is so beautiful sometimes that it hurts his chest? Remember that?

I think the same kid sold his weed in small, brown paper bags, but I could be wrong about that.

Maybe I could take this bag back to Rosini's and when they go to bag the next sandwich they're going to make for me, likely the Laschiacciata, which has ham, salami, provolone, capicola, sopressata, tomatoes and onions and comes on focaccia, I'll just tell them I brought my own bag and see what they say.

November 15th, 2004 - The truth is we're afraid to have children (though really, we're way, way beyond the point of no return on that one). We're afraid of what it will do to our relationship, afraid of what it will do to our senses of individuality. Brittney's afraid she'll never quit her job and go back to school. I'm afraid I'll be stuck in cube-dwelling wage slavery forever, that I'll never write another word in anger again.

It's the real fear of imminent parenthood, not the easy and obvious fear of not knowing how to take care of a baby. Common sense and some experienced help will get us through that. No. We don't fear for the baby. We fear for ourselves.

And before you start to think that I'm completely fixated on what might be bad about parenthood, let me be clear that, of course, there's excitement. Nearly everyday I press my face to Brittney's belly and ask the baby how it's day went. "Hello, worm," I say. "Don't listen too closely to your mother. She swears like a sailor." I rest my hand on it and feel it kick and squirm. "That's a squirmin' worm," I say to Brittney.

But still there's this undercurrent of sadness and aprehension. In all our conversations it's there. Even when we're quiet, the tension of it hangs in the room like curtains filtering the light.

We spent the weekend in Vermont with Brian and Diana, like us in their early thirties and recently married. And like most all married couples our age, they've wrestled with the question of whether or not to have children. We sat in the big living room of our little Vermont schoolhouse and talked about it, them giving all the reasons for not having kids just yet, us countering with good reasons to do it, just what you might expect from a couple eight months pregnant and clinging to the notion that they're doing the right thing.

And at some point in all of this I said something approximately like this: "What you find out is that you are always yourself. Personal boundaries stop being important. In order to be married you have to allow the other person in close, both emotionally and physically, and I don't think it's going to be any different with the baby. It'll be hard at first, figuring out where the baby stops and we begin, but we'll figure it out. It will change us, but we'll still be ourselves. It's the next step."

Or some such crap like that. At the time I felt I was pleading a case more than delivering a sermon. But as time wore on I started to believe myself more and more.

Yesterday, on our way home, I said to Brittney, "We have to stop being afraid to live our lives. The baby is coming and it's going to be great, because we're going to make it great. This isn't something that's happening to us. It's something we're doing."

And Brittney knew just what I meant. She turned and smiled, and for the first time in a long time I didn't feel so afraid. I was just excited then. The bluish dusk turned to dark. The moon was a sicle, and the dog, curled up in the back, slept like all was right with the world.

November 11th, 2004 - I really enjoy taking photographs.

Before Brittney bought me a digital camera for my 30th birthday (nearly three years ago), I never really had any strong inclination toward photography. I always perceived it as something of a craft. In order to take good pictures one had to understand the dynamics of lighting and aperture, shutter speed and exposure. These were technical details that I found alienating, as I do most technical details (note the archaic HTML this site is scripted in by hand and not using an alienatingly complicated site editing tool).

And let me be clear when I say that photography IS a craft. People like Eliot, Rachel and Khoi have an understanding of pictures and picture taking that I will never possess. I take a lot of inspiration from what they do. When their shots come out a certain way there is some small bit of intent. They take great pictures, and not just by pointing, shooting and getting lucky.

Digital photography has turned me into an occassionally lucky pointer-and-shooter. Freed from the constraints of film waste and developing charges I roam the Earth clicking away like a geiger counter at a Chernobyl survivor's reunion. In the period after my first camera (a Canon PowerShot G2) was stolen and before my second and current camera arrived (another Canon PowerShot G2...I didn't want to deal with learning another machine...) I had access to Brittney's Nikon 6006 film camera but didn't take a single picture with it.

I had performance anxiety.

Anyway the pictures are almost incidental to what I like about photography, and in this way I do think of myself as something of an artist. Because what I enjoy about photography is walking around and looking for things to take pictures of. There is, pardon the cliche', another way of looking at the world, a way of seeing ordinary things in different ways. This is what I really like about photography. In as much as I take pictures for the simple sake of taking them, rather than for the express purpose of showing them to other people (though I do that too), I feel some connection to photographers of more discerning vision and talent.

I believe that taking great pictures takes great patience, and that's not something I have. We are constanly being exhorted by self-help books and pop-psych svengalis to enjoy life's journeys as much as its destinations, but I am not that kind of person. If I have somewhere to be, I put my head down and go there as quickly and directly as I can. I am almost never thinking of the thing at hand. I am too preoccupied with what comes next.

With a camera in my hand, or even secreted away in my bag, I suddely have my head up looking at people, assessing their photogenicity, composing shots with bicycles and trees and buildings, seeking out things, like bricks or traffic cones, that appear in patterns. When I'm taking pictures I'm really seeing what's around me, and gaining that level of awareness has been the best part of photography for me.

Today I assailed my co-workers with a little portraiture practice, and it was very instructive. I learned that I spend too much time looking at the focal point of the picture and not enough composing the background. For example, I took a nice close-up of Rob that captured his disarming smile and the rough edge of his constant stubble. But I left a framed picture on the wall behind him coming out of his left ear. I got a good one of Kirsten too, but shot it from an angle that makes it look like she has no neck.

She does though. Have a neck, I mean.

I have come to think of photography as my one true hobby. Unlike writing, which, despite the results, I actually work fairly hard at, I put almost no energy into picture taking other than the brief and sporadic flexing of my right forefinger. I take pictures to distract myself from the million other things I am barrelling toward at any given moment, love, money and respect to name a few. Unlike the dull and dreary work I crank out in an anonymous, tweed-lined cube every day, what I get out of photography is far greater than what I put in.

Occassionally I take a nice picture, too.

November 9th, 2004 - My father is Welsh, the oldest of eight kids born and raised on Cwmcignant Farm just outside the village of Bettws in mid-Wales. He's the only one of his brothers and sisters to have left Wales, so I have a large extended family there and when I visit now I feel like the ugly, American cousin, almost ashamed of the broad, flat vowels that come careening off my tongue to collide with the silky, lilting speech of my aunts and uncles. I drink the sweet, creamy tea and try not to come off as too big a cad.

As a kid, it was different. Over on summer vacations, I played in the hay bales with my younger cousins, explored the dairy and milking parlor and rode the three-wheeler up one end of the farm and down the other in search of fun. Everyone treated me like a visiting dignitary then. My cousins actually wanted to spend time with me, the oddity from across the pond.

Visits to Wales always center around Cwmcignant, where my uncle Cyril and his wife Mair live (Cyril took over the farm from my grandfather at some point. I don't know when.). Phil and Shirley live at Pantmwr the adjacent farm, and Cyril and Phil farmed the two patches of bright green rolling land together until they sold up and retired a couple years ago. Now they just live in the houses and rent the land to other farmers.

Cyril and Mair have two children, my cousins Haley and Melvin. Haley is older. She was a rosey-cheeked tomboy when she was younger, and in all my visits she was my primary partner in crime. As a boy, Melvin was always quite small and runtish, with thick glasses and pale, almost milky skin. He tagged around behind us as best he could, and I imagined he would always be that way, skinny and sallow and running to catch up.

I was wrong.

When work took me to London about six years ago, I made a weekend train trip up into Wales for a quick visit. We don't, as a rule, ford the Atlantic without stopping in to say hello, and this was an opportunity to see far away family with someone else paying for the tickets. Cwmcignant was much changed then, the tiny, galley kitchen I remembered from my childhood had pushed through a wall into a storage room that quadrupled its size. Neither Haley nor Melvin was living at home. Haley had shacked up with a guy named Sam who she would later marry, and Melvin had joined the Welsh Guards, the Welsh branch of the British Army. Fortunately he was home at the time of my visit. He was convalescing from a motorcycle accident that had broken one of his arms rather badly and precluded him from participating in normally scheduled army training.

At that point I hadn't seen Melvin in nearly ten years, and I realized that when I thought of him I always thought of the willowy wisp of a kid he'd been then. I was not at all ready for the guy sitting in Cwmcignant's now roomy kitchen hunched over a bowl of cereal.

Though shortish still, he was wide as a doorway and muscley. His neck sloped gradually away from his ears and blended with his shoulders. He was trapezoidal. Solid.

Apparently he'd exploded at puberty and taken up rugby as sport, livelihood and religion. Even now he plays for the British army team on exhibition tours. At the time his broken arm was keeping him off the pitch. The surgical scar that ran up his bicep to his shoulder bisected a band of tattooed barbed wire, and the skin on either side didn't match up anymore, so a tattoo that was once a sort of silly attempt at toughness now looked legitimately frightening.

I said, "Melvin, how are you? You're changed a bit since I saw you last," and he cracked a broad smile and said, "Yeah, I reckon I have."

Melvin is what the Welsh call a tidy bloke. He's polite and funny and good to be around. In his early army days he got himself into a little trouble with the local constabulary, home on leave and full of lager, but people overlook that now because he's generally so good natured. Over time, being in the army seems to have smoothed out his rough patches.

On that visit, Melvin took me and a work colleague I'd dragged along out to the pub and we had fun. It was good getting to know him as an adult and to see that he wasn't running to catch up anymore. That was the last time I laid eyes on him. He's been traipsing around the world on training missions ever since. Every time I manage to speak with Cyril and Mair they tell me he's in the Canadian Rockies or on some other foreign soil, often playing rugby.

And I'm thinking of him a lot lately because at the moment he's in Iraq. I believe he arrived around the first of the month, and I have no idea what he's doing or where he is exactly. I imagine he's in Basra with most of the other British troops. Mair told me before he shipped out that he wasn't much worried about going. He figured it was his job and what he was training for all along.

Tonight I'm telling you his story, or at least the parts of it that I know, because I'm not much of a prayer, and I'm hoping that somehow my thoughts (and maybe yours) will keep him well. It's easy for me to be against this war in Iraq on principle alone. You can take all the weapons of mass destruction. You can have despotic Saddam and his evil sons, and you can throw in the rest of Iraq as a stepping stone to democracy in the Middle East. To me, that's all so much crap aimed at inflating America's sense of self-importance, so much reinforcement for our breast-beating righteousness, our horrid sanctimoniousness. I don't have a lot of time for proselytizing Baptists and Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses, and I imagine the Iraqis don't have a lot of time for proselytizing capitalists, the would-be liberators holding out the flower of democracy like it's the answer to all their problems. "We can save your mortal souls," we seem to be saying, "you just need to live like we do. We don't care much for how you're living now. And if we have to kill you to get you take the cure, well, we're alright with that too."

I'm angry enough about the war without worrying about what it might do to the pale little sack of skin and bones that Melvin was twenty years ago, or even the bull-strong man he's become since. I feel terrible for all the troops who have died already, Americans, Brits, Spaniards and even Poles, not to mention the Iraqi civilians who had the great misfortune of surviving a brutal dictatorship only to perish in their own emancipation.

H.G. Wells said, "If we don't end war, war will end us," and I believe that.

In the meantime, I just hope Melvin comes back in one piece. He is, after all, a tidy bloke.

November 8th, 2004 - I don't know how life gets so out of control so quickly.

First, it's summertime. The living is easy. The cotton is high. Or rather I'm riding around our sprawling Vermont lawn on a hundred dollar riding mower thinking I'm the King of freaking Siam. Brittney is in her second trimester, not yet too round to move or sleep well. Her nausea has passed. We're more excited than scared.

Then it's the fall. My brother moves in with us, filling our basement with his other worldly (does Florida count as another world?) possessions. We lose our only full bathroom to a last-minute, pre-baby renovation. Brittney, or at least the front of Brittney, has grown to a nearly unmanageable size. Work becomes frenzied. My brother's transition to New England city living takes up most of my time. The bathroom project goes on and on. The baby is coming soon and we're not nearly ready.

But then, who is ever ready?

And what is busy really? I used to work with Brazilian guys who put in 80-100 hours per week, and not lame ass office work either, bussing tables and cooking and washing dishes. Seven days a week. They slept three hours at a time. They weren't busy, just driven. Busy is different. Busy is taking on too much and then swimming in it, loosing your brain into a sea of details, floating away from the here and now on a raft of different things to do.

Tomorrow I will drop Brittney's car at Krank It Up (for real) the autosound place, where they'll install the stereo I bought her on eBay. I'll walk the dog. The plumber will come and give us the gifts of toilet and sink. I'll go to work, hire someone to write 40 lesson plans for the front of a computer text book I just wrapped production on. I'll step through a set of complex spreadsheets with my brother, hoping he'll see, somewhere in the arcane symbolic logic of strung together equations, the way we convert incoming pages to outgoing bills. I'll ride the train and bus home and cook dinner. I'll paint something, some piece of trim or expanse of wall, either in the guest room or bathroom, or else I'll clean out the dining room which has been packed full of uninstalled bathroom fixtures until just this morning. I'll finish the night here in front of the computer, squeezing some hardly intelligible stream of crap from my raw and racing brain. If I'm lucky I'll be able to keep my eyes open for ten minutes of reading before Brittney leans across me and turns the light off.

I don't know how it gets this way. Honestly, I don't. And if there's some bit of wisdom to be gleaned from all this, I don't know what it is. Maybe you can tell me.

Downstairs Brittney is curled up on the couch. The baby she's carrying, our baby, is thrashing around like an epileptic at a Pacman convention. We're too busy at the moment, but better times are coming. Better times are coming.

I don't know how it happens, but it does.

November 7th, 2004 - Babys R' Us, or we are them, all grown up. Is that what that means? I spent much of the afternoon turning the grammatical implications of the store's name over and over in my head. Who are the babies? Is the store owned by babies? Do they sell babies there? If you know the password, if you've "done the deal" with some shadowy criminal out in the parking lot do you push your way back through the Employee's Only door to the baby warehouse in back?

Fortunately, Brittney had done a week's worth of research, so after we registered at the front desk and got our bar code gun from the teenager working there, we were off around the store shooting strollers and car seats and crib sheets with wild abandon. It wasn't until we were picking out tiny clothing that a wave of almost nauseous anticipation swept over me.

All of this equipment, all of these tiny little clothes, are for a tiny little person who is going to arrive in our lives in about eight weeks' time. Baby really will be us then.

Incidentally, if babies are us, then us must be babies. If A=B, then B=A, right? Us are babies. Us are babies. The implications are almost more than I can handle.

Since we were really babies, mostly in the '60s and '70s, someone figured out that people will spend scads of money on useless accessories for their infants and toddlers. So today you can buy a small, padded contraption with compartments in it that is called a baby-bath-tub-kneeler. You kneel on the padded part while you wash your baby in the bath tub. The compartments hold shampoo and other lotiony ointments that get smeared on fannies and on tiny heads. We didn't zap one of those with our gun. We haven't lost our minds completely.

We did, however, buy a rectal thermometer.

You've reached an odd crossroads in your life when you find yourself standing in a giant, retail multiplex, the love of your life by your side, and the two of you spend a solid minute to a minute-and-a-half discussing which rectal thermometer to buy. And none of the other adults nearby laugh and point either. In fact they listen in, cause they're going to need a rectal thermometer too.

You hear them saying, "Honey, have we shot a rectal thermometer with our retail zap gun?" "No, dear, I don't think we have." "We better get on that. We're going to need one of those."

In the hour-and-a-half we spent criss-crossing the store I must have burst into loud and sudden laughter a dozen times. First of all, baby clothes are funny. They're impossibly small and invariably covered in duckies and bunnies. I find duckies and bunnies hilarious. Also, we're going to be parents and shopping for ducky and bunny covered objects drives that point home in a way that miracle of birth films on PBS never quite do. That we're going to be parents is also very hilarious. It's so absurd.

I said to Brittney, "It's like we decided to go bungee jumping and now we're up on the platform with the giant rubber band wrapped around our ankles."

And she said, "When you're still standing on the platform, it's not too late to change your mind and climb down to safety. We're not on the platform anymore. We've already jumped."

We've already jumped. Babys R' Us.

November 4th, 2004 - I am not going to waste time brooding over the reelection of George W. Bush. I have, over the last year, squandered huge numbers of hours reading about: the various candidates for the democratic nomination, the back and forth of the evenutal presidential campaign, the subtle shifting and tilting of foreign affairs in the days leading up to the election and the great frustration and recrimination post-vote. I was hypnotized by it all. I did less work. I wrote less meaningful prose. While right up to date on what was happening in Najaf and Ramadi and Fallujah, I was, on some level, less aware of what was actually happening around me.

In my relatively short lifetime I have become perilously preoccupied by a number of things, beer, marijuana, cigarettes, angry, angry music, and lately, politics. And now it's time to get back to living in the present tense rather than wringing my hands over the future. Iacta alia est. The die is cast. We have crossed the Rubicon. Enough.

On my way in to work this morning I zipped down Charles Street on the scooter. Charles Street runs along the base of Beacon Hill where John Kerry lives, and I thought about him secreted away up there in his brownstone, likely sleeping, that improbable bush of salt-and-pepper hair sticking up at all kinds of crazy angles, the heavy bags under his eyes left to hang, untouched by the makeup artist's brush. And I wondered if he felt like I did, a little bit relieved. He must be tired. He must be wondering what comes next.

The good news is that most of us woke up the morning after the election and continued to be more or less exactly what we were before. For me that means: a hack writer, an amateurish photographer, a soon-to-be father and a reluctant office worker.

On that evidence alone, I'm optimistic.

Brittney came home tonight after her pre-natal yoga class and, pointing at her beautiful, round belly, said she was glad to be able to think about the most important thing happening in our lives again. I leaned forward over that belly and hugger her, a long hug like you'd give someone who'd just returned from a trip. Then I went back to making dinner.

This weekend I'm going to rake the leaves that have fallen in my yard. I might paint the guestroom. Brittney is going to go to one of those giant baby stores and register for things we apparently need in advance of the birth of our first child. I am, no doubt, going to complain about what everything costs.

I'm going to make some time to shoot pictures with the camera I just bought to replace the camera I had stolen at the end of the summer.

I'm going to shave.

I'm going to sleep late and wake up with bed-head just like John Kerry's.

November 3rd, 2004 - Mostly speechless today, but I'll say this. I am frightened. I am angry. I am racked by uncertainty. Yesterday, we were denied parole, and all I can think is: four more years

I feel less represented by the man who is our president now than I ever have before. I feel further out of touch with "mainstream" America than I ever have before.

I fear our country is becomming radically christianized. After all, one in four Ohio voters identified themselves as born-again. These are the people running the show now, just as the jihadists are running the show in Iraq.

Hopefully tomorrow I'll have something more to offer than this. I am really struggling to wrap my head around what's happened.

October 31st, 2004 - Two days before the election, I can't resist the urge to make a last political statement. Tune out now if you've already had enough of this from the million-and-a-half other sites you no doubt read before coming here.

For those of you who choose to stay, let me make a dramatic opening statement: Party politics are slowly dragging the United States down off its high pedestal as the world's top super power. As subscribers, or at least apathetic witnesses, to this two party system of republicans and democrats, we surrender our best ideas and noblest intentions to the grinding wheel of unilateralism. If you are a republican, you support a party platform that advocates state's rights over the primacy of the federal government. If you are a democrat, you believe the federal government is best capable of delivering social and protective services to the electorate. If you are a republican you are opposed to abortion rights for women. If you are a democrat, you are in favor. If you consider yourself a republican or a democrat, and you didn't recognize any of your opinions in the foregoing, I apologize. But I didn't make the parties. I just described them.

The problem is that political parties offer us stock positions on issues, not solutions to problems. They are aggregators of power. They are tribal groups.

And by allowing ourselves to be hustled into political parties, we give up our powers of reason. We join the group think, which is tantamount to not thinking at all.

Now it is certainly true that both of our political parties have done good things, even over the last four years. But how much more good might have been done if our leaders didn't swear allegiance to their parties first and their constituents second.

There is a certain utopianism to party politics, as if a carefully cultivated viewpoint and strict adherence to the party rubric will deliver the country to the promised land of peace, security and financial well-being. And yet, despite the endless shifting of power, back-and-forth, between the donkeys and elephants, the country manages to somehow lurch its way forward. Slavery was abolished. Women were given the vote. We banded together with our allies to beat the Nazis and more importantly to end the holocaust. We expanded civil rights. Of course we also wasted hundreds of thousands of lives in an ill-conceived police action in Vietnam, failed to lift a finger to stop a genocide in Rwanda and bankrolled a motley crew of dictators and despots from Saddam Hussein to the Taliban, but every super power is allowed a mulligan occasionally, right?

Our unique democracy was built around three branches of government, executive, legislative and judicial. Each has a way to check on and balance the power of the others, and I think most advocates of democracy would agree that our system seems well suited to the task at hand.

But undermining our tri-partate system is bilateral infiltration by democrats and republicans such that partisan executive, legislative and judicial powers can be expected to collude against their opposition en masse. Power that was once checked and balanced is, in the end, consolidated and wielded like a billy club against the minority party of the moment.

I have ranted on a number of occasions about the need for a strong third party in this country, and I have received a couple of good emails challenging my views. As a result, I am now ready to revise my position.

Political parties are bad whether they are the majority, minority or third party. They are obsolete. They are impediments to progress, empty power vessels aimed at consolidating power rather than governing responsibly. That a credible third party has yet to crack the surface of national politics is a direct result of democrats and republicans (for once) working together to prevent one from doing so. Great effort is put into keeping third and fourth and fifth parties off ballots when that effort might be better spent confronting problems like poverty and homelessness.

I believe a momentous thing happened in 2001 when Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont left the republican party and instead of joining the democrats chose to serve as an independent. What Jeffords came to realize was that his views often fell afoul of the republican party's stated position and that to identify himself with a group with whom he often disagreed was disingenuous and confusing to his constituents. Senator Jeffords isn't having any trouble representing his state without his old party affiliation, but his old party is having trouble wielding its power without their old senator.

Party affiliation has become the short-hand of American politics. Candidates for office save time discussing issues by declaring themselves either democrat or republican and leaving the public to make whatever assumptions they will. And they, we actually, make a lot of assumptions. We assume we are electing people of principle, when actually, it seems, we are only electing people of ambition. Such is the ambition of our elected congress that they will pass no legislation of any substance this year because, quite simply, it's an election year.

Finally, a word on this election. I have heard a lot of people characterize the 2004 presidential election as a race between George W. Bush and anybody-but-George-W.-Bush. John Kerry, it must be admitted, does not connect with the average American quite the way the president does. Who can know why?

But this is a movie with no likable characters. This is the multiple choice question without the "none of the above" option. This is the would-you-rather-drown-or-crash-in-an-airplane scenario.

This is what a two party system produces sometimes. Two bad choices.

October 28th, 2004 - What can you say? Nothing. You never expected it to happen. You were sure they'd lose to the Yankees. And when they won you couldn't really believe it and you read the papers for days afterwards and still couldn't really wrap your brain around it. They'd beaten the Yankees. They'd beaten the Yankees. You could hardly parse the words.

You kept saying over and over again, "I can't believe it. I just can't believe it."

And then you thought, "Holy crap! Could we win the World Series?" And you thought, "I think maybe we can win this thing." But you didn't say, "Maybe we can win this thing." You said, "The Cardinals are really good" instead.

And then just like that the Red Sox swept the Cardinals.

You stayed up to watch the end of every game, but you couldn't believe they won the first one, and you couldn't believe they won the second one, and then you were sure they wouldn't win the third game, in St. Louis, but they did.

By the time game four rolled around your insides were roiling with it. You didn't dare hope for a sweep. You worked out the complex calculus of lineups and starting pitchers and figured that the odds were good that the Red Sox might win a fourth game and thereby win the World Series, but you didn't say that. You didn't discuss it with your co-workers. You kept your powder dry.

Because you didn't dare believe it was possible.

In New England we only know suffering. Joy is not on the menu. Or rather, only fleeting joy is on the menu, and we have become accustomed to waiting for these brief spasms of happiness. The winter is cold and miserable, but if we wait, we will get halting bits of sunshiney spring before the hot, humid summer sets in. Fall comes as brief respite from the heat, and then we're neck deep in snow until April again.

The Red Sox hadn't won the World Series for 86 years, but we waited and we won. Asking whether or not it was worth the wait is a pointless exercise. There was no choice. We had to wait, so we waited. Men were born and died since the last World Series win in Boston. Those still around, especially the old-timers shed tears of joy last night.

Now we've won, but we're completely incredulous, not because winning was so impossible, but because we didn't dare hope it would happen. We didn't dare hope. And to me, that's what being a Red Sox fan, in fact, that's what being a New Englander is all about.

In a strange way, having won the World Series just yesterday, I almost don't feel like a New Englander anymore. Without despair to unite us, what are we but a loose collection of states with bad weather?

At least we don't have to stay up half the night watching baseball anymore.

October 25th, 2004 - Most bathtubs are 5' long and 30" deep. I don't know why. I suppose someone, an actuary probably, determined that people of some acceptable range of heights and girths could get in a tub that size and bathe themselves without sustaining serious injury. No one really takes baths anymore, so tub comfort isn't the hot issue it once was. Now we're all just concerned with water pressure and nozzle height.

The bathtub we've decided to put in our new bathroom is of standard length, but the enclosure our carpenter friend Patrick built to house it overlaps the end by two inches. He had to do it that way to make room in the wall for plumbing and the motor that drives the whirlpool jets. That leaves us with an enclosure that is 58" long. It is also 2" deeper than most tubs, again we need space for jets, so we end up with a space 58" x 32".

Now if you go someplace like Home Depot (not that I would recommend it) you can buy one, three and five piece shower enclosures made of a variety of materials that will slot right into a normal 60" x 30" space and keep water from splashing on the walls while you shower yourself. And I can report with some confidence in the information that I'm about to impart that each and everyone of these enclosures that are widely available at places like Home Depot (though why would you every go there?) sucks ass. Most of them are made of some flimsy, plasticky material approximately one mil thicker than a kitchen garbage bag. In fact, you would be better off standing in a tall kitchen garbage bag and dumping a pot of water over your head than taking the time to put one of these enclosures in your bathroom.

The first one I bought didn't fit. That was my mistake. It was only 30" deep. And it's ill fit was a blessing anyway, because it was a turd, a wide, white, pressed-plastic turd.

The second one was the correct size, or at least the box said it was the right size. Then again, the box said a lot of fairly confusing things, none of which completely convinced me that I would ever see it stuck to my bathroom wall with industrial strength adhesives. Patrick pulled it from its box this morning and determined that it was even crappier than the first one I bought, and that though it would technically cover the space I need covered, it would only do so by having its corners rounded out with styrofoam packed in behind to give it some structural strenghth. Also it was broken in two places. THANKS HOME DEPOT!!

Patrick said, "I have a general rule that if I wouldn't put something in my house, I won't put it in yours." That Patrick, you can always count on him for a heaping helping of truth.

So we decided to give up on Home Depot (way, way, way too late to salvage the last, tattered bits of my sanity) and try Friend Lumber, a store with no clear connection to a monstrous, national chain (we would find out later that Friend is an Ace Hardware affiliate though the staff was shockingly interested in helping us find what we needed anyway) and a name that suggested at least the pretense of decent customer service.

I met Brittney there after work.

Friend Lumber is nice, if a little pricey. The store is clean. Everything has a price on it. It's smaller than Home Depot, but seems to have just as much useful crap. Right away I felt I had made a mistake in not going to Friend Lumber first and avoiding the Home Depot altogether (in case I've not mentioned it already, you should avoid Home Depot like it was a telemarketing Jehovah's Witness with a glandular sweating problem).

At Friend Lumber (what a nice name, as if I was going over to my buddy's place to borrow a tool or something) a very nice salesman with blond hair and a funny, wispy goatee took all of five minutes to locate a perfectly acceptable shower enclosure that would fit our tub space and didn't require a special order. I pulled my truck across the street to their warehouse, picked up a very large, white, rectangular box and strapped it down in the back before driving home.

Tomorrow I have to go to Hell, um...Home, Depot to pick up the bamboo flooring that I ordered a-month-and-a-half ago. They told me at the time that it would be in in seven to ten days. Since then no one from Home Depot has called me even once to say my flooring was back ordered. I've had to call them every Monday since early September to have some apathetic troglodyte put me on hold for five or ten minutes before reporting that my floor wouldn't be in for yet another week.

Home Depot's slogan is "Home Depot: You can do it. We can help."

I think they should change it to "Home Depot: You can do it. We can help...but we're not going to."

Tomorrow, Patrick will pull our new enclosure from its packaging and, with a little luck and about three tubes of Liquid Nails brand construction adhesive, stick it to the carefully prepared green board wall in our new bathroom. He'll brace it in place while it dries and then caulk it up.

And if all of that goes well, and if the caulk cures sufficiently in the moist fall air, we might, it is possible, there is a small ray of hope that, we could actually bathe in our own home for the first time in about five weeks.

I don't know why we didn't just have the fucking thing tiled.

October 21st, 2004 - It's not a sports story. Sure the Red Sox did what no other team in Major League Baseball history had ever done; they came back from three games down to beat the New York Yankees 4-3 in their best-of-seven American League Championship Series. When you measure it in balls and strikes and hits and runs, I suppose, it IS a great sports story.

But it's more than that.

This morning, the improbable morning after the game seven win, normally dour Boston was completely wired. Forget the kids that ran riot late last night. The real story is the grown ups who got up this morning, despite being hopelessly sleep deprived, and went to work happy. The day was overcast and gray, but the mood in town was beyond buoyant. It was bubbly.

Years of accumulated pain was expunged. A great sucking sound could be heard as the karmic balance of the universe shifted. The Red Sox, once straw men for New England's bitter disappointment, the embodiment of our provincial inferiority, have vanquished their pin-striped demons. The great tribe of New Englanders, outfitted in vain hope, has won a great battle over the urban monolith. Today they lick their wounds as we have done so many times before. Today they know what it is to lose.

My friend Christine had a line of drunks serenade her with Sweet Caroline, a Fenway seventh inning favorite, as she walked by on her way to the office. Christine is a Cubs fan, but she has a big, soft spot for the Sox now.

Her boyfriend, Tom, called me on my cell phone a little after midnight last night. He said he wanted to leave a two word message: FUCK YES!

Brian watched the game with his father at the family home in Union, NJ. Mr. Donohue has been a Red Sox fan since Ted Williams carried the torch for Irish-Americans in the '40s. The Italian families in the neighborhood were all Yankee fans, worshiping at the feet of Williams' bat-wielding rival, Joe Dimaggio. When Brian was coming up, if the Yankees beat the Sox on a Saturday night, the Donohue's would hear about it at mass on Sunday. Even as New Jersey natives, they have worn the Red Sox like a red badge of courage for sixty years.

Last night when Pokey Reese fielded Ruben Sierra's grounder at second, turned and threw him out at first, Brian and his father jumped out of their seats, hugged and danced around the living room like they'd just won the lottery, the same living room they were sitting in when Bucky Dent hit the 1978 home run that beat that Sox to the pennant that year. Brian was seven then, and his father held him in his arms as he cried.

When I was a kid I was gonzo about baseball. My friends and I played with trees for bases, and ghost runners did most of the scoring. I stood back by the six foot pine fence in our yard, trying to recreate those at-the-wall catches that saved games, and ended up mostly climbing over to retrieve the ball from the neighbor's pool. I collected cards, thousands of them, and committed statistics to memory.

In adulthood I have cooled on the game, preferring soccer or a good book on most nights. If pressed, I will complain that there's too much money in baseball and that it's not evenly enough divided. I will admit that the Red Sox with the second highest payroll in the league are a big part of the problem. I will tell you that the game moves too slowly. I will tell you that I just don't have time for it anymore, except, occasionally, at playoff time when the old town team is involved.

And even though I swore I'd never get sucked in by the Sox again after the epic meltdown at Yankee Stadium last year in game seven of the ALCS, the pull is irresistable. Everyone you meet wants to talk about baseball. Everyone wants the Sox to win.

And today I realized it's not about sports. It's that everyone wants to wake up in the morning, even a gray and drizzly morning like this one, and feel like a winner.

October 19th, 2004 - I spent a generous portion of my work day today trying to hire translators for a couple of Spanish language social studies programs that just came in.

As with anything, translation is more difficult than it appears. It is not enough to be bilingual. You need to be bilingual and have a preternatural sense for what is good grammar in both languages. You need to have a command of the various regional colloquialisms in both languages and work hard to eliminate them from your work. You need to have experience applying a predetermined glossary of words to large pieces of manuscript. You need to be able to adjust your translation to match the reading level of the text being translated. Further, in our unique scenario, you need to know some basic things about educational publishing like how text books are commonly put together and what each piece is called. If you don't know what pedagogy is or you're uncomfortable talking about back matter, you're probably not qualified. Also, you need to be fast.

All of the people I spoke with today were qualified to do the work we need done, though some were more on the ball than others. One woman chastised me for not offering her more work. Then she asked for a higher rate per word than I have in any of my budgets.

Oh, yes.

Translators are paid by the word. I was hiring at $.08 per word. Most everyone I spoke with today wanted $.10. Some wanted as much as $.13. Can you imagine? $.13 per word!!!! It's scandalous!

Now imagine spending hours bargaining over pennies...tiny, copper Abraham Lincolns. Eventually those pennies translate to dollars of course, in some cases as much as five and six thousand dollars worth, but still I spent my day arguing over pennies. I felt like Sisyphus, pushing his rock up the hill. His rock didn't have a heavy Spanish accent though.

At one point, I was given a lecture on the current economics of translation. Because the Euro is strong and the dollar is weak, I was told, Spanish translators from Spain, who regard themselves as the best, are too expensive. The cheapest at the moment are the Argentines. Their economy is in the crapper. They're working for $.05 a word. The suckers!! I was told that I could be given access to some of the best Argentine translators for a "nominal fee." I wondered, in light of the pennies I had to throw around, what might actually constitute a "nominal fee."

I didn't even bother to explain to the person delivering this treatise on current translation economics that I wasn't interested in either Spaniards or Argentines. First of all, sometimes Spaniards can be a pain in the ass because, while their opinion of themselves is very high, the work you get from a Spaniard is often not quite right for the U.S.'s overwhelmingly Central American Spanish speaking audience. Also they live in Spain, which is very far away. The manuscript is paper, not electronic, and I don't have the time or energy for international Federal Express.

I ended up bargaining a well-respected woman in Virginia down to $.09 a word to take on a big chunk of the work. Another guy we've been working with for the better part of the last year took on the lion's share of the rest at $.08. He is Colombian (we love Colombian Spanish for some reason) and has his sister, niece and cousin working with him. Finally, we found two women, both in Massachusetts, who accepted $.08, and got smallish bits of manuscript to work on.

When I left work I thought of that movie Lost in Translation, which I didn't think was nearly as clever as most everyone else, though Bill Murray was brilliant in it, wasn't he? Anyway, I think it probably cost them a lot of money to film in Tokyo. They should have set it in Argentina. Bill Murray and Scarlett Johanson's love still would have been lost in translation, but it wouldn't have cost them nearly so much to find out.

When I got home I did some math and discovered that just the portion of the day I spent on the phone with Teresa and Rocio and Adela and Paty cost my employer 195,000 cents. At $.08 per word, this blog entry would earn me almost $60.

Boy, that sure would be nice.

October 14th, 2004 - Here is the nightmare I envision: the Yankees beat the Red Sox in a grueling seven game series, crushing the collective spirit of the town I live in, then a short time later, George W. Bush is reelected to another term in the White House, plunging the country's standing in the world even deeper into the crapper. I shudder to contemplate such a confluence of bad mojo. I can only avert my eyes from the coming apocalypse.

To be honest, I can live with the Sox losing. That is, after all, what they're there for. They are the Washington Generals to the Yankees' Harlem Globetrotters. The Red Sox are cultural straw men for New England's cynicism and disappointment. They're not meant to win, but rather to find new ways to express our enduring heartbreak, a heartbreak born of cold winters, religious austerity and provincial inferiority. I almost think it would be dangerous for the Sox to win. Rivers might burn and run backwards. The phone company might improve its customer service.

But this presidential election scares the living shit out of me. Before W was president I didn't want him to be, but back then I didn't know how bad it could really be. I mean, sure, I thought he was stupid, and I thought it was a tragi-comic farce when he was appointed President by the Supreme Court, but I thought we'd endure four years of bungling-but-mostly-harmless ineptitude before putting a centrist Democrat back in office.

Instead, we've had four years of over-the-top incompetence leaving us mired in international conflict, national debt and epic self-deception. If the 2000 election, between Gore and Bush (Gush and Bore) was so close, what is going on this time? Presidential elections tend to be referendums on the incumbent much more than straight up contests between two candidates. Gore found himself in the unenviable position of having to distance himself from Clinton, who was highly effective, but morally bankrupt. Clinton had to go, but Gore couldn't fill the gap, so Bush found a way, a very narrow way, in.

It is true that George W. Bush did not win the 2000 election, but it is also true that Al Gore lost it.

Fast forward to the present day and we're looking at another referendum on the sitting president, except this time America seems to have gone completely crazy. We're staring down the mounting casualties in Iraq, the mounting debts of the federal government, the coming social security crisis, a lingering recession and the reality that our terrorist enemies are no weaker now than they were four years ago (in fact, they're likely stronger) to decide that George W. Bush is a strong and resolute leader, a man of god, the guy we need to lead us out of the darkness. Can someone tell me where they're handing out the crazy pills (the high-priced, non-Canadian crazy pills)?

Evidently, I need some.

I am somewhat heartened by two things. First, the Yankees are getting into the weaker part of their starting rotation just in time for the series to move Boston. If the Sox can beat them twice, running up big scores in both games, they can steal the momentum back and get themselves a shot at the World Series. Second, John Kerry won all three debates in pretty convincing fashion and has recovered in the polls. He's a strong finisher. And while I happen to think he's a shameless compromiser on certain issues of civil liberty and equality, he's our best bet for a safe and reasonable future.

And in the end, that's all I really want.

October 12th, 2004 - My wife is having a baby, our baby, our first baby. She is six-and-a-half-months pregnant. We went to the doctor this morning and she did the glucose uptake test, the one where you drink this really sugary soda and then wait an hour and then have blood taken. I'm not sure what the point is. I think it has something to do with diabetes. Brittney wrinkled her nose at the orangey soda and barely choked it down in her five allotted minutes.

This pregnancy thing is completely fucked up and weird. It defies belief. I can't believe Brittney is pregnant. I couldn't believe it when the silly, drug store piss test told us it was so. I couldn't believe it the first time we went to the doctor and they treated us like a couple expecting a baby. I couldn't believe the ultrasound when the technician smeared jelly all over my wife's belly and showed us black and white pictures of our future child.

It's like knowledge and belief are at pitched battle inside my head. I can look at Brittney, as I did this morning, perched on the edge of the wax-papered exam table in the obstetrician's office, her basketball belly making a nearly perfect dome of her red maternity sweater, and know that she's pregnant. But knowing and believing are two different things. Belief requires, on some level, acceptance, and it is rarely that I can overcome my fairly narrow view of myself and what my life is like to accept the knowledge that a baby is coming to rock my world.

Belief comes in only my most lucid moments. It is bedtime and I've just switched off my bedside lamp. I roll over and put my arm around Brittney and feel the warm, pulsing lump of her and there in the dark I believe that I will be a father soon. I lay wide-eyed and silent for a few minutes before dropping off to sleep.

Or Brittney is standing at the mirror in the morning, getting ready, and I am watching her which is something I do, and there's nothing I can see but that she's pregnant, that she's changed and changing all the time. I smile then and say something stupid like, "You're gonna have our baby," and she smiles an incredulous smile and says, "I know. I can't believe it either."

This particular morning, at the obstetrician's, I experienced a long and intense period of belief in my future fatherhood, and, staring at my beautiful wife, I nearly cried for joy. I can't imagine how I'll feel when that squirmy, squishy, little human finally emerges from Brittney's crotch and begins wailing for all its worth, when the nurse or doctor hands it to me and I look in its tiny eyes for the first time. These are the moments when you discover you're narcoleptic, when the whole system goes into hard reboot and the synapses arc.

I can't believe it will really happen.

October 11th, 2004 - I have a friend who is a writer of some standing in the world of international journalism. I won't name him by name, because, as he has pointed out, it could be very bad for him professionally if his off-the-cuff and off-the-record writings somehow found their way back to the desk of his employer, one of the world's top papers. And while I think his right to self-expression far outstrips his employer's right to hold him responsible for something he wrote to one of his moronic friends in a cross-continental email, I can only dream that one day I'll be lucky enough to have a job where I have to worry about shit like that.

This friend, whom I'll call Malcolm (because Malcolm is a nice name), wrote me a very nice note this morning, and I'd like to share it with you, even though no body really likes it when I reproduce email threads in my blog. I mean, I don't care, it's my freaking blog, right? I'm including my response too, mainly because I like to have the last word, but also because it took a long time to write.

First his note (including all the nice shit he said about my web site):

Coach, (a college nickname)

You -- well, your blog -- have become part of my weekly ritual the last few months and said some things along the way that have had me thinking. Now, I think, is probably the time to put something down...

First of all, I am sorry to hear about your grandmother's death last week. But you wrote a touching tribute to her that didn't varnish over some difficult things. I hope that some day one of my grandkids is wise enough to do the same when I go...

Second of all, I take time to read you each week because you have created something that I enjoy reading. I don't know how to give a greater compliment. The only thing that makes me uneasy is that I feel that I am learning more about someone I care deeply about each week than I ever knew before...

Third of all, your politics -- or at least the glimpse of them I got a month or two back -- have continued to frustrate me. Here is why: I admire your principles and your desire not to vote for someone like Kerry when you think he is a shoo in to grab Massachusetts' electoral college votes. But I think the idea that the US is going to be somehow better off if a strong third party emerges is misguided. I just watched a small-minded, proto-fascist get elected to a fourth straight term in Australia, largely because the parties left of center in Australian politics don't have the wherewithall to unite behind one candidate, preferring to remain divided and draw joy from small victories that allow them to remain ideologically pure rather than significant ones that would allow them to actually change the frightening path the nation is travelling down... And I fear that, once again, the same thing is going to happen in the US.

I've stopped blaming corrupt Republican election officials in Florida for the fact that Dubya has been ruling the most powerful nation in history for the last four years and fucking up the world along the way. I blame the people who voted for Ralph Nader. Without them we would have had Al Gore as president, the US would not have gone to war in Iraq, and tens of thousands of people would not have lost their lives. Moreover, I wouldn't be watching the Islamic world's view of the US going even further down the toilet...

That may seem unfair. But it's true. And it's what frustrates me most about watching this US election from afar... I don't understand how anyone can vote for Bush. I don't understand how anyone can NOT vote for Kerry. And I certainly don't understand how anyone can vote for Nader or any other third-party candidates. Politics is about pragmatism. And so is Democracy. Kerry is not the lesser of two evils, he is the alternative to IQ-deficient evil. In Kerry you have a good man who over 20 years has learned that you have to win the center to be able to do anything in life. You can accuse him of being wishy-washy, of not having a clear vision, of being too ambitious. But at the end of the day he is an intelligent, thoughtful, and well-credentialed man, a man who would be a good president and do much for the standing of America in the world. No one who has watched either of the debates could argue that he and Bush amount to the same thing, or even represent anything remotely approaching the same thing.

So why should you vote for him in Massachusetts when he will win anyway and a vote for the Green party candidate may help that party get federal funding down the line? Because the world is watching and there would be no greater symbol of hope for the world then for people out here to feel that Americans got it, and the only way to do that is by handing a major victory to Kerry, wherever that may be... The alternative is pretty grim...

That's a rant, by the way, that isn't necessarily directed at you. I'm venting frustration right now... and you're only on the receiving end of this because I like you and I remember you writing some thoughtful stuff about politics. Thanks for letting me vent...

Malcom

And my overly long and lame ass response:

Malcolm,

You've said a lot, and in the absence of a proper conversation I feel inclined to respond fairly specifically here in writing.

Here goes:

First, last week was a very, very hard week for me. My grandmother's death, far from being an emotionally draining tragedy, became a logistical nightmare to go along with all the other logistical nightmares I've been dealing with lately. The various publishing projects I'm responsible for all seemed to go radically off schedule and off kilter last week. The bathroom renovation we've undertaken stalled, leaving us showerless. My brother, the now permanent house guest, continues to present challenges to our privacy and sanity. Overall, I was in a bad place mentally, and my grandmother dying made things oh-so-much-worse. Eventually I felt I had to sit down and pound out as many of my thoughts as I was capable of getting down and that ended up being a haphazard blog entry. I don't know whether it was a fitting tribute or not, and I don't know if I want the same kind of treatment from my progeny. I guess, if I'm lucky, someone will just feel compelled to express something (anything) about me after I'm gone. I think that's the best we can hope for.

Second, simply to be read is fulfilling and thrilling in ways I can't explain but don't need to because you already understand. To be read by someone whose writing you admire and whom you respect intellectually is another thing entirely. I only hope I can hold your attention.

And what is it that makes you uneasy about learning more about me? That there's no reciprocity to it? You're learning all my deep dark secrets and I remain blissfully oblivious to yours? Or does it seem voyeuristic to you? What gives? Do tell.

Third, my politics, my politics, my ever-changing politics. Let me tell you, first and foremost, that I agree with you wholly and completely as regards George Bush. Far less than evil, Bush is stupid. Short-sighted. Sanctimonious. Vapid. I am not underestimating his intelligence. The man is not smart. He is the tool of the powerful interests he represents. No more. And the United States, not to mention the world, would be far better without him in his current job. For that reason and that reason alone, John Kerry should be elected President.

This, however, is where we diverge, and not because I am right and you are wrong, but rather because I have become unreasonably idealistic and you have become, perhaps against your own nature, overwhelmingly practical. You are probably more right than I am, but a lot of thinking has gotten me to two basic philosophical positions that now inform all my political views.

First of all, you have to start from first principles. The mind-bending complexity of geo-political crises in places like Israel, Iraq, North Korea, Sudan and Uganda make it impossible for me to express a sufficiently informed opinion to be of any use to anyone. The mistake most people make is believing they understand what's going on. Taking Iraq as an example, the shifting sands of tribal and religious loyalties, the legacy of Baath party totalitarianism and the now disproportionate influence of an occupying nation come together to produce a violent and chaotic mess. For anyone (ANYONE) to say they know what needs to be done to put the situation there right is insulting to my intelligence and yours.

And so recognizing that I can't say anything true or useful about Iraq, I'm forced to fall back on first principles (my first principles). I think it's wrong to invade a sovereign nation and kill people, and so we shouldn't have done it. It is manifestly clear, I think, that we're not wanted there anymore, so we should go, even if going means leaving a power vacuum that will, ultimately, be filled by the same sorts of ayatollahs and mullahs who have turned Iran into one of our seemingly mortal enemies. Self-determination is self-determination, and you can't espouse it without living with the consequences. If democracy is right for Iraq, and I haven't heard any compelling evidence to suggest it is, then we should recuse ourselves from the process of its taking hold.

That naive and impractical viewpoint leads me to my second, closely related belief: Idealism is the most important thing.

If we're not idealistic in our ambitions for peace, for democracy and for freedom, then we're doomed to failure. Idealism is the driving force behind progress. Once you let it go, you resign yourself to fighting reactionaries and fascists with physical violence. I realize I'm making a giant, untethered leap here, but I think this is exactly the conclusion Ghandi reached. Once you decide you believe in freedom and equality and peace, you have to have faith that they'll win out in the end. If, as George W. Bush is so fond of repeating, democracy and freedom are what all people want, then all people will get them, whether you shoot every perceived insurgent, terrorist and radical, or not.

Finally, a word about my belief in the need for a viable third or even fourth party in this country. My objections to the Republicans and the Democrats are less an ideological objection to their various positions on the critical issues, but rather an objection to the way they form those positions. They are, both of them, inundated with the money of the powerful, so much so that it's difficult to discern where the politician ends and the special interests begin. And this, I'm told, is the practical reality of our current political system. In order to get anything done, you have to play the game. Except the game is flawed to begin with. It's not set up so that the people win in the end. It's set up so that some people win, while others languish in poverty.

Pull up your muck boots, it's getting deep now.

I believe a third party, one with a true populist message and grassroots support, could shift the intransigent incumbents off their comfortable haunches and get us moving in the right direction again. I know. I know. Not likely,