July 27th, 2005 - Hot. Hot. Hot. And not the Buster Poindexter version that STILL has middle-aged white people shaking their money-makers at weddings across America. Not caliente, like the Sunday afternoon dance show on the Spanish channel, Univision. Not hot like sexy or hot like popular, but hot like REALLY FUCKING HOT. And humid. Both at the same time.

There is a heat index to think about. And a dew point. Relative humidity, apparently, is very 2002.

If you were walking the sidewalks of our fair city any time in the last couple of weeks, you would have noticed a distinctive odor attacking your nostrils. Like dead thing. You know, rotting organic matter. The dumpsters and trash cans, teeming with their summer-time bounties, are veritably simmering like over-sized crockpots. And believe me when I tell you the stew does NOT smell just like Mom used to make it.

There is a public pool down the street and around the corner from our house. Today there are more kids than water in it. Let us not even contemplate the uric acid levels in that poor, sky blue body of water. It makes me shiver despit the heat. Holy Christ! Even our Brazilian neighbors have retreated to the relative safety of their air-conditioned house. The resulting quiet is almost eerie.

My parents, who are still staying with us (though they think they're moving out on Monday), have confined themselves to the bedroom all day, where the conditioned air is being whipped into a frenzy by the ceiling fan. Even the dog, he of the long, lolling pink tongue, has secreted himself away in our dark bedroom. How would you like to have to displace all the heat energy in your body through your tongue? You wouldn't like it, I bet.

And I realize full well that complaining about the weather (one of my favorite things to do) is a little like complaining about the inevitability of the reaper's knock at your front door. It's hot, but so what? Life goes on. This is like when my friends from Alabama complain about how cold it is when the mercury drops to 50 in Mobile. Or how they shut down Atlanta every time there's a dusting of snow.

Still, it's amazing to me what the palpable differences are between 83 and 93, especially when there's a lot of water in the air. It makes me worry about the coming effects of global warming. It makes me worry that the hotter it gets, the more we run our airconditioners, the more coal the power plants need to burn to meet the heightened need. Let's not even contemplate the embarrassing double whammy of running the a/c in a giant SUV.

Maybe they won't have to worry about it being cold on Mobile Bay next winter after all.

July 25th, 2005 - We were in Vermont again. Merciful Vermont. Calming Vermont. Soothing Vermont. Owen even slept well this time.

Saturday was the breakthrough day, the day we went to the West River Valley Bluegrass Festival and Owen napped in his stroller instead of having to go home and sleep in his crib. We ate hamburgers and listened to music. To you it sounds like any Saturday. To us it was transcendent.

Oh, and I mowed the lawn, which is something you should assume I've done if the word Vermont appears anywhere within spitting distance of the post you're reading. The lawn in Vermont is large, like an acre total, rimmed by crabapple and fir trees. It is a veritable crime that we have not yet organized a whiffle ball game there yet, a tournament even. And as happy as the bluegrass festival made me, I have to admit that I take some odd pleasure from mowing too. The smell of fresh cut grass is just about the best smell of summer (as wood smoke is the best smell of fall and winter), and I love that time when the grass is still matted in thin rows where the mower's wheels rolled, when perfect order settles over the expanse of it. Lest I romanticize it too much, I think the real pleasure I take from mowing is the way it allows me to scratch my perfectionist itch. So there you have it. I was well rested and not itchy.

On Sunday Brittney went horseback riding (oh, the priveleges of the monied few) and I went to the lake with Owen (Brittney came later, smelling like horse). I swam out past where I could stand up and let my body sink under the water until I couldn't hear a thing but the far off whine of power boats. It was the first time I'd gotten my head under that lake water since Owen was born. I walked out with my pockets full of cold water and sunned myself on a rock.

For me, happiness can be a fleeting thing. I wanted to share some with you while I still had it.

July 22nd, 2005 - Quite a day. In the morning, I fired someone. They deserved it. Saw it coming. Didn't protest. Apologized. Walked out. Then I tried to negotiate a raise for myself (I haven't had one in about two years and in that time I've taken on responsibility for two other project managers, all the inhouse recruiting and the management of the copyediting and proofreading team). In the end, I settled for offloading some responsibility. There won't be any raises until the new year. Whatever.

All this work shit is just too complicated for me say anything meaningful about it here. I feel driven to do good work, to take on more and more responsibility, to be the hero whenever possible, but then I get all depressed and resentful when the company doesn't recognize my effort. In this case, the complication comes from the fact that my immediate superiors and co-workers all treat me really well. It is acknowledged that I make a big contribution. It is admitted that I deserve more money.

But we are ruled by the evil corporate office. No raises. No nothing. So I put an end to it. I said, you can't have all this extra effort for the same old pay. More pay or less effort. Your choice.

They chose poorly.

As for the firing, it was bloodless. Sometimes someone fucks up so obviously and so consistently that they basically fire themselves. I didn't agonize over it at all.

The first time I had to fire someone, when I worked at Guitar Center about two lifetimes ago, I almost cried. And the guy didn't take it well. I was, in a very bumbling, uncomfortable way, trying to let him down easy. But he really took the fuck-you approach. In the end, I slid his final check across the desk and said, "I'm sorry. You're done here."

My boss at the time told me afterward that firing people was just about his favorite thing to do. It made him feel better about himself and his place in the world. His advice to me was to realize that work is personal and that those around us who don't pull their own weight are actually keeping us from making more money, and by extension, from being able to provide for our families. "If that guy took a hundred dollars out of your pocket," he asked, "how would feel about firing him then?"

Believe it or not, I have actually employed that advice to some reasonable effect on one or two occasions subsequently.

In a way, in fact, I employed it today, not while firing the profligate employee, but rather as I was telling my boss that I was no longer willing to let the company take hundreds of dollars out of my pocket. It wasn't quite, "Take this job and shove it," but it felt pretty good anyway.

July 20th, 2005 - It is true that babies seem to grow and change every day. One day your child can't hold anything in his left hand, the next day he's passing things back and forth between his two mitts like a circus juggler. I have really enjoyed watching Owen develop so far, and on Wednesdays that is particularly true. Wednesday is my day of the week at home with him.

And so, here is what is going on with Owen:

1) He is not crawling yet, but he is pushing himself forward on his legs, inching across the floor with his nose to the carpet. He is rolling and reaching and ratcheting himself around to get to toys that were previously beyond his sphere of influence. I would say something stupid like, "he'll be crawling this time next week," but I have learned that often babies appear to be on the verge of some big milestone for a long time. Nonetheless, it's very cool to see him on the move.

2) He is not talking yet, but gosh oh golly is he babbling. You can see that he is testing the limits of his vocal range and exploring the effect of different mouth movements on the sound issuing forth from that hole at the front of his face. For the last two or three days he has been blowing raspberries non-stop. I can't tell whether that's commentary on my appearance or some vital stepping stone on the path to inter-human communication. Possibly it is both.

3) He doesn't have hair yet, but his fuzz is lengthening and darkening. If you look down on his head from above it looks like the satellite picture of a hurricane, a blurry swirl with a small, neat eye at the center. I can't wait to give him shampoo mohawks in the tub.

4) He might know that his name is Owen. When you say, "Owen," he turns his head and looks at you. Of course, he sometimes also turns his head and looks at you when you say, "motherfucker!" after stubbing your toe.

5) This is less about Owen specifically and more about babies in general. There is really nothing better than making your baby laugh. I do it as often as I possibly can. Surefire ways to get him giggling include: pretending to eat his belly, taking him into the walk-in closet in our bedroom and beginning to laugh yourself (seriously, I don't know what it is about that closet, but it's like the giggle chamber as far as Owen in concerned), getting the dog stirred up and bouncing around the room, playing peekaboo.

6) There is actually one thing that might be better than making your baby laugh, and that is rolling over next to him on the bed and having him look right up into your face from very close. I look right into his eyes, and he looks into mine, and I can tell that he is studying me, trying to understand what I'm all about. There is something very moving about that, and I'm sure I'm not explaining it well, but there it is.

There it is.

July 19th, 2005 - Beware the Scooter Mafia! I was scooting to work (on my retro-styley Honda scooter), when I found myself sitting at a light with two other people on scooters. There we were, all in a row, waiting for the light to change, the surrounding cars eyeing us like we were some hit team from the Scooter Mafia (or maybe that was just me fantasizing about being part of a hit team for the Scooter Mafia (or for that matter, just dreaming up the existence of an actual Scooter Mafia, which, as far as I know, does not exist)).

There was a guy on another retro-styley scooter, though his was a Yamaha, and we immediately struck up a conversation about the best way to thread your way through Cambridge, Land of a Thousand Red Lights. This was a guy with whom I very clearly shared a point of view, talk of short cuts quickly segueing to a discussion of the overwhelming benefits of riding a scooter around Boston's twisty, turny maze of a road map, rather than a car. The third scooter, a bright blue Vespa, was piloted by a woman who didn't turn her head or give us the time of day. Perhaps, as the only owner of a real Italian scooter, she actually was a member of the Scooter Mafia. Or perhaps she was just a bitch. Who can know?

In brief, getting across Cambridge quickly is a matter of avoiding as many lights as possible. As with many road systems, Cambridge's collection of glorified cart paths is set up to route traffic through a precious few "major" thoroughfares. Of course, the rub with Cambridge is that those "major" roads are the same, overcrowded, two lane paths that crisscross the rest of the city. The only real difference is that there are a lot more lights on them.

So the trick to scoot down all the parallel roads, the ones governed not by lights but by stop signs. Also, and this is way more info than you could possibly have wanted, the lights on Broadway are timed far better than the ones on Hampshire, on which it is well-nigh impossible to get through more than one light at a time.

You will notice that I haven't spoken to the traffic issue at all. That's because scootering allows, legally, for the use of the bike lanes and interstices between moving and parked cars. In other words, when traffic is stopped I just go around it. In a traffic choked city like this one, that is a benefit whose value can not possibly be overstated. The best part of my morning is the part where I zoom past all the cars virtually parked on the Longfellow Bridge between Kendall Square Cambridge and the Charles Street rotary in Boston. They must sit through that light five or six times. I can't even imagine it.

For me, the second benefit of scooter travel is the efficiency of it. My hog gets 80 miles to the gallon, which means that for roughly $2.30 I can put a gallon of premium unleaded in my tank and ride back and forth to work all week long. As a point of comparison, the same back and forth commute by bus and train costs $21.50, or $18.25 if you have a monthly pass. And I create less pollution on my scooter than a car, or even, I imagine, my share of a twice daily bus ride. The noxious black clouds the bus belches each time it pulls away from the curb contain more green house gases than my scooter leaks in a year. It's cheap. It's clean. What more could you want?

Well, for starters you can park it anywhere. I leave it by the bike rack at work. I chain it to parking meters around town. Parking is just not an issue.

Also, because my scooter's engine is under 50 cubic centimeters, I don't have to register it with the state, put a plate on it or buy insurance. That's right, no insurance costs.

Did I mention that it's fun? Let me tell you, after a hard week's work, zipping home by scooter on a sunny Friday afternoon is one of the better things you can do with your time. Need some groceries? It's great for a quick trip to the store, and it's got a small trunk under the seat and a bag hook behind the steering column for hanging any other purchases.

Really the only draw back to scootering that I've experienced is that there are still an army of assholes driving around in cars, trucks and SUVs, which is not to say that every person that drives one of these other types of vehicles is an asshole, but rather that there are a select few who feel the road belongs exclusively to them, and they feel free to give vent to their feelings with blaring horns and rolled down windows.

The guy on the Yamaha imparted a story to me, as we buzzed down Arlington Street by the Four Seasons, of an incident in which he was actually bumped at a red light by a carful of drunks who proceeded to berate him as the wound their way across town. And though I've never had anything quite like that happen to me, I've received plenty of the one-fingered salutes and honking contempt. I think it's resentment.

July 18th, 2005 - Over dinner my mother accused me of, on occasion, aiming this blog directly at her and my father, to make some point, to get something across, to achieve some end. I don't know. I told her I really didn't think that was the case, that I write about what's on my mind and if they happen to be on it, they happen to end up in my blog. Of course, I am aware that they're going to read what I've written, but I decided a while back not to censor myself. It's not like I'm libeling anyone here. You would be hard-pressed to show me one instance where I've said something bad about my parents.

I explained all that to my mother, and then I went on to say this (begin paraphrase):

I think parents go on evaluating their performances as such even well after their kids are grown adults. They torture themselves over whether or not they are responsible for their kids' problems. This is eminently unfair both to parent and to child for the simple fact that it ascribes all the bad and none of the good to the parent, and denies the child any personable responsibility for his or her happiness.

With specific reference to my brother and me, it is true that we've both had problems with alcohol and depression (cue country music ballad), but it is also and equally true that we're smart, happy men with fantastic families. If that doesn't qualify us as successful adults, I don't know what does.

The flip side of this coin is the obvious fact of my own parenthood and the way I myself worry about how I'm doing with Owen. And so the platitudes I spouted to my parents across the dining room table apply equally to me, and I really, really, really need to learn to lighten up. That Owen doesn't giggle as much my friend Dave's kid is really not a problem. That he will develop in a different way and on a different timetable than other kids is not cause for hand wringing and sleeplessness. And one day, if he suffers some depression or develops a problem with alcohol (or, cue death metal intro, something worse), that's all part of the deal.

The measure of your success as a parent lies in your ability to enjoy your children and their own ability to find happiness in life.

Right?

July 17th, 2005 - I have arrived at that place where my brain no longer belongs to me at all. First there is the boy, laughing, screaming, writhing on the floor in the first ructious stages of crawling, the part where he's not yet crawling but he's a hell of a lot more mobile than he was just last week. Next, there is the wife, the tireless servant of the aforementioned boy. She requires backup, relief, assistance. She needs massage. Then there are my parents, my poor parents, who have set up camp in the living room where CNN and Peter Jennings repeat in the afternoon and evening all the news the New York Times gave them in the morning. Their condo still isn't ready, or rather, their condo is ready, but the elevator that will bring them to it is not. And so they are still living with us. It's going far better than any of us expected, and yet we will all be massively grateful when it's over.

Did I mention the dog? He needs to be walked. Today he got a bath. He is a minor concern, primarily because he doesn't have an effective way of complaining about all the attention he's not getting of late. In many ways, I feel the most empathy with the dog. We are both living around the edges of the house, trying to find a cool, quiet spot to be alone. And failing.

I was previously unaware that thought required both mental AND physical space.

And now my time is up.

July 11th, 2005 - We're back. Oh, are we back, not quite fresh from eight days in Vermont during which we were both sick, it rained more than half the time, and Owen gave us a crash course in how to vacation with an infant in tow.

Let me address that last item first. How to vacation with an infant in tow. You have to be ready because infants need to eat and sleep at very specific times. You can not be at the flea market in Newfane during nap time. You can not get caught at Lake Sadawga without a bottle or a jar of pureed pears. Timing is everything.

What you have to do is be ready with a detailed plan of action that you can spring into motion as soon as your infant wakes from his/her nap. When that little body stirs and puts up its first plaintive I'm-awake-now cry, the clock starts ticking. You have three hours to feed, drive, recreate and return to crib. Failure to adhere to this strict schedule may (and did) result in sleepless hours late at night, hours spent sheltering from the not-so-dulcet tones of one very, very, very angry baby boy.

And then there was the rain. It rained on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. You may choose to take your infant out in the rain, but I don't personally recommend it. And because Vermont is a place where fun is had outside, we were presented with still further barriers to our generally revelery. Instead we spent much time playing peekaboo over the back of the couch and pacing in tight circles trying to keep the aforementioned baby calm.

It has rained so much in Vermont recently that the lake we usually frequent was without the twenty or so feet of beach front it normally offers. Instead of basking in the sun on the big slabs of rock that rim its perimeter, we confined our lake time to the drizzly evenings when the clouds broke dramatically across the surface of the still water and the nudists who congregate on the east side were the only ones interested in splashing around in the rain-warmed shallows.

All of this follows the first day we woke up in Vermont, the Sunday before the 4th. We rose some time around 4:30am, again to the wailing and screaming of our little bundle of joy. Brittney celebrated by throwing up, which she continued to do all day, confining herself to the downstairs couch and a few bites of dry white toast. I was similarly, if not identically, afflicted, caring as best I could for Owen, between visits to the loo. I call it the "loo" here because that's a cute, British thing to call the toilet, isntead of something more appropriate to the actual circumstances that day, something like the "disaster area" or the "hell hole."

So the last thing you want to do is complain about vacation. It's a mark of true hubris, an affront to those who stayed behind to work. BUT. We started our vacation with a stomach virus, flailed around for a day or two trying to get our kid to stop screaming long enough to enjoy a quick walk in the woods, then were confined to quarters for the last half of the week. I don't think I'm stretching too far to say: IT SUCKED.

And when I went in to work this morning, I was instantly reminded of why I needed this vacation so desperately in the first place. I have way, way, way too much work to do. And now I'm back. To do it. I'd continue complaining now, but I actually have to go review a series of contracts that accounting needs feedback on in the morning.

Contracts!!! Oh boy!!!!!

June 30th, 2005 - I have never been so manic in all my life as I have been since Owen was born. The lows are a despondent sort of depression with thoughts of lost identity, lack of time, extreme fatigue and blinding frustration swirling around in my head. The highs are an illuminating happiness and contentment, a realization that you are as in love with your wife and child as it is possible to be in love with any two people on the earth, a certainty that you have done exactly the right thing with your life, that it doesn't, as the cliche goes, get any better than this.

I have always been a fairly up and down kind of guy. Read any five consecutive posts to this blog and you'll probably get that sense. The difference now is that the highs are much higher. It would be easy and neat to say the lows are lower, but they're not. They're different. I have a lot of fear about losing my way as an individual. So much of my time has been subsumed by the family collective. And I am a guy who needs alone time to get my head straight.

So now I have a crooked head.

I am probably doing a disservice to those who are genuinely and diagnosably manic depressive, like the travel agent at one of my old jobs who always acted like Tinkerbell on speed, but, as we found out later, went home every night and drank herself into a muddy stupor.

I am not like that. And I never book flights for people I don't know.

Mercifully and thankfully and finally we are going away on vacation next week (leaving Saturday actually). We will have nine days in Vermont. Nine days to sit and read and mow the lawn and catch up on some sleep and swim in the lake. Nine days to walk around the house naked without fear of running into my parents, lounging on the couch with CNN at top volume. Nine days email free, with no one pestering me for a schedule or a workflow or an errant batch of manuscript.

As Jimi Hendrix said, "Manic Depression is a frustrating mess. Music sweet music, I wish I could caress." Perhaps if Jimi could have vacationed in Vermont he wouldn't have OD'd on smack and then asphyxiated on his own vomit.

June 28th, 2005 - Owen won't remember that this morning, some time around 5:30, I walked into his room and found him face down in his crib. He won't recall that he picked his head up, swung it in my direction and broke out in a warm grin. Owen won't remember these things because his brain is still in the connection making phase, not yet in the memory making phase.

I sometimes wonder what I'll remember from these first months and years of his life. Will I remember the way he flails his limbs in excitement whenever I pull a bottle from the fridge? Will I remember him lunging for the remote control to the television every time I pick it up? Will I remember the way he giggles when I bite his feet?

Thankfully he doesn't yet possess the faculty necessary to parse what mommy and daddy are saying while he sits in his swing in the kitchen. We haven't quite managed to clean up our language, though we both know we have to. I don't want the first words out of his mouth to be, "those fucking assholes," even though that would be pretty funny.

More than anything I'm struck by how intensely I'm experiencing right now, how my mental hard drive is cramming itself full of Owen related facts, and how Owen, though also living very intensely as he sees, hears, smells, feels and tastes things (sweet potato the other day) for the first time, is storing nothing as recallable memory. Sure, he'll be able to remember what sweet potato tastes like tomorrow, but he won't remember the cooing and growling sounds I made at him the first time he ate them.

While I blunder along not noticing the dogwood branch fluttering in the wind outside the kitchen window, a branch he stared at for fully five minutes one morning while he polished off his breakfast bottle, Owen is drinking in the world for the first time, bereft of context and still awed by it all. He watches the branch, its pink blooms swaying in the breeze, soaks them in, is captivated by them, and then forgets them.

He is experience and no memory, and I am all memory and no sense. None at all.

June 27th, 2005 - When I was twelve or thirteen my mother drove me the ten or twelve hours north from our home in Mobile, AL to Camp Falling Creek, deep in the North Carolina woods. I went to Falling Creek because my friend Bobby and his brother Jimbo went there. I believe the place has since closed down because the camp owner and director got caught fondling some small boys. Maybe I'm wrong.

Anyway, at Falling Creek you spent the first couple days assembling a schedule, picking out the activities you wanted to participate in, and trying out for various teams. I made the soccer team. I also took tennis lessons and signed up for swimming.

In order to swim in the big lake around which camp life was arrayed you had to pass a swimming test, which consisted of demonstrating basic knowledge of two or three strokes and then treading water for twenty minutes, which is, as you can imagine, quite hard. Somehow, I made it, though I remember my arms and legs both going weak, my breath getting very short, and a panicky feeling rising within me, sure I wouldn't last.

And today, whenever I use the phrase 'treading water,' I think of Camp Falling Creek, of the narrow dock that reached out into the lake, of the high dive at its end, and of the giant inflatable "blob" that was the centerpiece of most swim time fun. But most especially of that weak-limbed and breathless feeling.

Right now, I am only treading water.

The relentless pace of baby care and work leaves little time for anything but a regular shower and a minimal amount of sleep. As when treading water, we are focused on what we are doing, repeating the same motions, clean the bottles, change the diaper, feed the child, read a story, do the laundry, start again, and though sometimes breathless, there is a certain victory in merely surviving.

As the blood runs short of oxygen it gets harder and harder to keep your head up, harder and harder to keep your thoughts straight. And so, Brittney and I talk a lot about what needs to be done next, bottle sterilizing or bath time, and very little about politics, the books we're reading (or not), and the price of tea in China.

And though I'm high as a kite with how quickly and amazingly Owen is developing from a baby into a real little boy, I am, on some level, really stressed out about not ever having time to think very much about anything. I feel I've lost my way intellectually. And it doesn't help that I have so little time to sound myself out here in this blog. (Of course, my parents are still staying with us, and the computer is still in the guest room, so that doesn't give me a lot of opportunity to spend time with you, my Internet friends).

At the end of the twenty minutes, I remember paddling over to the ladder on the dock and climbing, limp and a little water-logged, back onto terra firma. I remember feeling relieved and elated to have met the physical and mental challenge, and I also remember thinking I could have gone on a bit longer if I'd had to.

June 20th, 2005 - I'll have the pulled pork sandwich with a side of collards and some hushpuppies, vinegar sauce and a root beer, please. This is lunch on Father's Day, my first Father's Day, a lunch during which my beautiful son slept curled against my shoulder while the women at the table behind us gasped and whispered about how precious he was.

When he woke up, he smiled at them. He's a lady killer, that boy of mine.

Now normally I wouldn't buy into Father's Day much. I sort of resent all these manufactured holidays, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Valentine's Day, occasions for which Hallmark has a plethora of appropriate greetings, not to mention the flowers and ties and other tributes that are called for, the deep wellspring of cliched sentimentality.

BUT.

Yesterday was my first Father's Day, and so there was a forced reckoning that took place in my mind as I sat there, pulled pork going cold as I held my boy tight to my chest. I was forced to admit that I am now, undeniably, a father, that this nearly six-month adventure is not a finite experience that will someday expire, leading me back to the carefree days, the sleeping in, the time when moments had spurs on which things could be done. No. I am now and will henceforth always be a father.

And further, I really fucking love that.

Oh my god, what a complete thrill?!? How massively, movingly enormous to be the source of safety and comfort, the guiding force, for a child, and more specifically, for my Owen. I have spent these five months and seventeen days trying desperately to wrap my head around parenthood, to know whether it was the right thing or the wrong thing, to figure out whether I am happier now than I was then, as if any of that mattered after one small boy exited one beautiful wife. And yesterday, over lunch, it crystallized for me, and I could see clearly that it is the right thing and that I am happier, and that more importantly the future has a meaning now that it never had before. It's freighted with an excitement and a built in thrill I didn't know was possible.

And you know, I've never been honored with a holiday before. They don't have skinny, uptight, white guy day anywhere, as far as I know. Father's Day is a hokey holiday. I paid $2.75 for a card for my own father, and then we went out to lunch, where I dropped another $60. The restaurant was crowded with other people doing the same thing, kids sleeping on dads or running circles around their chairs, enormous plates of steaming ribs and chicken disappearing into great pot bellies.

I loved it.

June 16th, 2005 - I am having trouble tuning in my thoughts, too much noise, too much static. Let me give you some of the details of my existence. You have my full permission to project some sort of coherence on it all. If you come up with anything good, drop me a line and let me know.

My parents have been here a week now. My mother has taken to cooking dinner every night. My father has been cleaning. These are unequivocally good things.

And yet, I am reminded how complicated a puzzle even a small, nuclear family can be. There are only four of us, my mother, father, brother and me, but we with our four-sides are far more vexing than a six-sided Rubic's cube. Twist one of us the wrong way and the other sides become hopelessly muddled. Hopelessly.

Owen, the guiding beacon of my waking (and many of my sleeping) hours, is growing, growing, growing. He is in the midst of a desperate struggle with physics, gravity and a paucity of muscle mass. He wants so thoroughly to crawl, even to stand and walk. But he's only a baby still. He writhes around on the floor, grunting and straining. He rolls over and over and over. He pushes and heaves and cries out in frustration. It is completely thrilling to watch.

Brittney is ill, a sore throat, a stuffy nose. She had an infection in one of her eyes, but after applying ointment (yes, eye ointment) for a few days, that seems to be at bay now. Work is subsuming her as well. She's on the hook for a very important component of a very important release that her small software company is trying to get out the door. This is, as nearly as I can tell, no fun.

My own work is also bereft of pleasure. A normal project load for me is two or maybe three projects, each in one state of completion or another. Currently I am launching five projects simultaneously, while maintaining two others and recruiting staff to fill the rosters for still other jobs. I am buried. It makes escaping to a house full of parents and wives and babies seem like a sandy stroll on a sunny and distant shore.

And lest this entry take on the character of a complaint, as so many of its predecessors already have, I am generally pretty happy. Though short of sleep and patience, though staring a daunting workload and a complex home life squarely in the face, life is good. It's ice cream weather. I've a good book in my bag, and a feeling that I'm doing pretty well despite the adversity. The boy grows. The wife glows. The work gets done eventually.

Oh and by the way, Shawn and Rachel, for those of you who read the May 26th edition of this blog, have had their child, Aidan Trot Donnan, born in Sidney, Australia on May 8th, ten days late. Shawn called last night to find out whether or not I thought he should have the little scamp circumcised. I said, "You are not going to have the end of that boy's penis cut off, you barbarian!"

And he said, "Yeah, I probably am."

June 13th, 2005 - Sorry for my recent absence. An infant who is increasingly active, rolling over, learning to sit and sometimes stand on wobbly legs, napping more sporadically than we'd like, smiling and laughing and generally demanding all our time, has limited my time in front of the computer. Also, my parents moved in with us.

Yeah, see they sold their house in New Jersey, but the condo they bought here in Massachusetts isn't quite ready yet (has a contractor ever completed construction of anything, anywhere, ever, on time?), so their stuff is in storage back in the Garden State and their selves are in my guest room, which is where the computer lives.

Other than cutting me off from the Internet, which may not actually be a bad thing, the folks are pretty innocuous as house guests. Either that, or my preoccupation with the aforementioned infant has rendered me blind to a myriad of parental irritations. I have noticed that either my mother or my father keeps taking the soap out of the shower and leaving it by the sink, so that I find myself naked, wet and wishing I was a jedi capable of levitating that bar of Irish Spring across the not-all-that-vast expanse of ivory white counter top and into my dirty hands. Still, if this ends up being my big complaint, I will count this temporary cohabitation a success worthy of a ticker tape parade.

Another thing that has limited my creative output is the weather. It's been as hot as a Vietnamese rain forest here, which means we've been hiding out in the basement a lot. It's cool in the basement, if not dusty and cluttered. There is no computer in the basement, though there may be soon.

I am pounding out this entry from the ancient Mac I use at work. I will email it home, steal into the guest room while my parents are downstairs watching Peter Jennings, and upload it to my increasingly lonely Web server. Then I'll have a crisis moment wherein I will realize that my inchoate writing career has completely stalled. I'll hatch a new plan to carve some time from my daily regimen, an hour perhaps, to spend in front of the computer (relocated to the basement). I will return downstairs to my family, my creeping neuroses assuaged, if only momentarily.

The greatest likelihood, however, is that it will take me a week to get the computer moved and set up in a dark, subterranean corner. I will waste most of my time down there reading the political writings of people who say things I agree with and looking at pictures of strange women's breasts. I don't know why, but these are the things that interest me.

Then my parents will move out, and Owen will go off to college.

June 7th, 2005 - Summertime can be a bit trying in my neighborhood. Though most everyone on my street has owned their home for decades, our tree-lined drive is a connector between two busier stretches of asphalt and so we find ourselves awash in more transient elements. This is especially true in June, July and August.

All of Boston anticipates the weekends in late spring when the college students who make up such a large part of our population matriculate. Moms and dads arrive from suburban locales, pack their young adults into SUVs and family wagons, and leave our city, quieter, cleaner and far more pleasant to live in.

The dodgey part of that yearly rite is that some of the kids stay. They move out of the dorms and into summer sublets. Free of the university's watchful eye, they stretch out, relax and release the pent up energy of roiling late adolescence.

Because we live just a few blocks from Tufts University, which, by virtue of its strict admittance policies, generally attracts smarter and more genteel kids, we get a fresh batch of summer sub-letters in the sea foam green triple-decker diagonally across from us each year. Some summers we don't hear a peep. Others, we get to know the night operator at the police station, who takes our calls wearily and dispatches a patrol car to let the kids know that screaming and throwing things off the third floor balcony at 3am might constitute a disturbance of the peace.

The first year we were in our house, we felt badly about calling the cops. No one likes to be the neighborhood killjoy. Hey, I was a college kid once, screaming from balconies and urinating in the bushes of strange homes on my way back to the dorm after a night of beer-fuelled recreation. I really have no right to stifle the festivities for today's co-eds, but then, life's not fair and no one likes to be woken by a drunken asshole at 3am on a work night.

This year we seem to have gotten a crew of young lesbian women, who are, thus far, quiet.

The other variable in our summertime, and frankly this one worries me much more than the college kids, is the high school kids. They too have been loosed from scholastic confinement, and in our town they roam the streets like packs of feral dogs. Just this morning I watched a pair of them, thin and gangly, strut their way up the street in search of fun. I was a teenage boy once, too. I know what they're capable of, and I hate to leave my home, even dead-bolted with the dog inside, vulnerable to their craven whims.

A third factor in our summer fun is the city itself. Despite its proximity to Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Arlington and Winchester, Medford is a little bit behind the times. The city's web site is maintained by one of the city councillors...poorly. The mayor has no email address. We get street cleaning twice a year. The city sidewalk across from our house, and abutting the train tracks, gets trimmed and manicured once a decade, I think, which means the high school kids take cases of beer down by the tracks at night. This produces two things: 1) train horns at all hours, and 2) cases of empties that get left on our sidewalk, or, sometimes, chucked in our hedges.

The lack of street cleaning is a problem, not because of the beer cans which I just stick in my blue recycling bin, but because there's a convenience store on the corner. With a bus stop in front of it. The lethal combo of cheap snacks and authorized loitering results in bushels of litter skipping and bouncing and blowing its way down our street and into the aforementioned hedge. We could fill a grocery bag with garbage every day if we were fastidious about cleaning up.

We're not. Cleaning the bushes feels too much like Sisyphus pushing his rock up the hill over and over and over again.

Another thing that happens in summertime is that our Brazilian neighbor, Y, spends more time outside. Y goes no where without very loud music as an accompaniment. Our favorite Y trick is the one where she turns the music up loud enough that she can still hear it while she mows the lawn. Y, like all good Brazilians, enjoys a good barbecue, at night, late, like after 10. If she was playing death metal instead of samba we'd call the cops on her too, but she's a permanent fixture, a neighbor, so we put up with it.

June 5th, 2005 - We've been away, pressing the giant, Vermont-shaped reset button on our lives. Vermont, where everything is for sale, and cheap, where you can hunt insects with a .22, where they have 'mud season,' where New Yorkers go to ruin everyone else's fun, where we own a slightly run-down but entirely inhabitable old schoolhouse. It was an excellent trip.

Though as hot as blazes and completely aflame with mosquitoes, flies and beatles, Vermont soothed us. It is quiet there. People do not honk their horns as they drive by your house in the middle of the night. Wayward teenagers don't dump cases of empty beer cans in your hedgerow. In Vermont, the city does not encroach on your dreams.

Last night, as we sat down for a light dinner, cool breezes wafted in and the tall, green trees that hem our little property swayed gently in the twilight. This is not an experience that is available in Medford, MA where now I sit to tap out these words. In fact, a car alarm just went off, honked and farted its horrible sound for a half minute and then shut off. People don't lock their cars in Vermont. Or their houses.

To me, and this is perhaps unfair to Vermont, the lion's share of Green Mountain State's charm is simply its otherness. It is away from here. It is someplace else. In Vermont I don't have a job. I can't do laundry. It is a place where I am not obligated to do anything at all, except mow the lawn, which I did this weekend and didn't mind doing because it's my lawn in Vermont, the place that is not this place.

Having a vacation home, albeit one with a leaky roof and paper thin walls, was a luxury well beyond any of my expectations for the small and inconsequential life I am living. And yet, on this first real weekend of summer, there I was, lazing on the front porch, waiting for the wicker to make its odd, pebbley mark on the backs of my legs.

It was sublime. Ridiculous.

And while there, I came across this Kurt Vonnegut poem in a recent New Yorker:

JOE HELLER

True Story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.
I said, "Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel 'Catch-22'
has earned in its entire history?"
And Joe said, "I've got something he can never have."
And I said, "What on earth could that be, Joe?"
And Joe said, "The knowledge that I've got enough."
Not bad! Rest in peace!

This poem reproduced with absolutely no one's permission.

June 1st, 2005 - I have recently become preoccupied by the previously innocuous piles of stuff secreted away in our closets and basement, the old stereo components and VHS tapes, the plastic container filled with various PC cables and adapters, the back-issues of obscure magazines. Why do we have all this stuff I will hereafter refer to with the generic term 'crap?'

I think it has something to do with the influx of baby-related crap that came with the baby. Most of this crap is made of shiny, brightly-colored plastic. A lot of it takes batteries and plays nursery rhymes through pathetic little plastic speakers. It makes our house look like the set of the Electric Company, though I have yet to run into Rita Moreno in the dining room. Really, the only redeeming feature of the baby-related crap is that it entertains the baby, a small, often-fussy little person, who requires constant entertainment.

So my theory is that every house has a theoretical Crap-Saturation-Point (CSP) that is slightly variable depending on the number of humans inhabiting the dwelling and how much those humans like having a lot of crap. I would say that our CSP is rather low given the paucity of closet space in our 100-year-old home and our natural aversion to clutter. Our house is roughly 1500 square feet, and there is roughly one cubic hectare of crap in it. We need to reduce that to approximately 42 rounded bushels of crap, give or take a peck.

We are throwing things away, if only to return the house to its pre-baby CSP.

In the last weeks we have discarded a plethora of domestic detritus, including clothing, old linens and the gifts we received last Christmas that were still sitting in the guest room waiting "to be put away." I have also sold off a small stack of books on-line and placed fully half of our collection of VHS movies up for auction.

Soon I will reorganize the closets and the basement and more purging will go on, a veritable crap pogrom. The container labelled "Childhood in a Box" will find a new home in the dark, damp portion of the cellar where it will be left to moulder until the Nobel committee sends a representative out to discover the source of my limitless genius. I will likely throw out all the old PC cables and a generous portion of the wrapping paper scraps. Unless you want them.

In fact, if you would like any of the following, speak up now, and I'll send it to you: my back issues of 4-4-2 magazine (a European soccer rag, these are mostly from the mid-90s), back issues of The Believer (the unbelievably pretentious but still quite good magazine put out by McSweeney's), my old comic books, my collection of observed trials mountain biking videos (I watched them all and practiced as much as I could, but I was never any good at hopping my bike over abandoned cars and park benches), my pile of Manchester United videos (including the nearly unbearable "Eric the King," a feature length tribute to the ego and brilliance of Eric Cantona), a HandSpring personal organizer, a nearly complete set of Major League Soccer media guides from 2000-20003 (be the only one on your block to have them all), the kitchen table from our old apartment (Brittney and I made it. It has a blue tile top), an antique dining room set (partially refinished, I just ran out of motivation on that one), a ton of cassette tapes (mine and Brittney's, mostly from high school, which means 1985-1991), and anything else you see that you like, assuming you're within driving distance and I don't also like it.

It will be very good to be rid of these things as we have been dragging them along with us like so many albatrosses strung from our necks (Is albatrosses the plural of albatross, or is it just one albatross, many albatross?). Their disappearance will also, no doubt, make room for new crap, for the flow of crap into and out of a house is a bit like the ebbing and flowing of the tide, which is, it must be said, also full of crap the beach will eventually want to be rid of.

May 26th, 2005 - Shawn Donnan's first child is due today. Shawn Donnan who is roughly twice my size. Shawn Donnan who slept on the floor all through college and introduced me to Pernod, which is a really foul annise flavored liquor that the French like to drink watered down and poured over ice. We used to drink it on the narrow wooden porch that hung off the back of the apartment he shared with Mike Doherty and Ben Cagan.

There was a time when Shawn would get very angry with me for not taking world politics more seriously. Angry, like yelling and calling into question my status as a "smart" person.

Shawn met Rachel, the patient-oh-so-patient woman who should be bearing his child today, before Brittney and I got together, which would make them the longest running couple in our circle of friends, except they broke up for about a year when they lived in New York.

Shawn loves the Red Sox and called me from his home on another continent to say he "couldn't fucking believe" they'd won the World Series. He was crying at the time.

Shawn has Canadian and Australian citizenship, though, as far as I know he's never lived in Canada. He grew up in Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Australia, France and Massachusetts. It was a running joke among our friends that his father worked for the CIA, which, as far as I know, could be true.

Shawn went to boarding school, where he was on the varsity cycling team. That was nearly two decades and a million cigarettes ago.

Shawn is the type of guy who is always introducing you to a cousin or an uncle who is not actually a blood relative but rather some very close friend of his CIA-agent father or Austrian mother. These people are invariably New York bohemians or New England academics.

Shawn and I once drove a car with only half a transmission from Franny Donohue's parent's house in Union, NJ to Montague, MA, swerving in and out of the breakdown lane to let properly-functioning cars get by. It took us six-and-a-half hours, which isn't too bad considering. Also, it was a lot of fun, or at least in retrospect it seems fun.

OK. Enough details. Now the substance.

My friend Shawn is a hell of a guy. He is a writer of considerable quality and reputation. He gives me no end of good, honest and invaluable feedback on my own writing, and he's a reliable recommender of books, which is something I would say about exactly one other person on the planet. He is big and sweet and earnest like the retard in Of Mice and Men, except that he's also thoughtful, intelligent and quick. Shawn has an immense personality. He can play the part of the boisterous big man, the overbearing host, even when he's the guest. He is intense like blue cheese, a bold flavor that sticks with you.

I am friends with Shawn because we are mostly alike. Opinionated. Self-doubting. Impatient. Self-important, but also self-deprecating. We take ourselves too seriously, but won't blame you if you don't. Shawn is one of those guys I can feel very close to despite only seeing him every other year or so, because I think I understand him pretty well. And, more importantly, I think he understands me.

I hope that somewhere on this planet Earth tonight there will be a grunt and a straining and out will come a baby child, and that somehow my good wishes will make the birth a little easier and the parents a little happier.

May 24th, 2005 - Today it is raining. And cold. The mercury will flirt with 50 degrees Fahrenheit, though I doubt they'll consummate the relationship. It's another shitty day in a long string of shitty days at the end of what will be the coldest May in recorded history here in the metro-Boston area.

And though recently I denigrated the advertising industry, referring to it as "a bulbous goiter hanging off the neck of the greater good," in light of our recent weather (and by recent I mean since the last ice age) I have come up with a new slogan for the New England states, one aimed at fostering a greater appreciation among middle-westerners and left-coasters for the real value of having a densely packed corridor of bitter and disaffected fellow citizens tucked away up here in the north east.

My new slogan for the land area encompassing Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine: New England - Restoring the Karmic Balance Since 1620.

You see, 1620 is the year the Pilgrims established themselves at Plymouth. Fleeing the religious intolerance of their English home, they spent some 12 years in Holland before moving on, finally, to the American continent. Once here, they lived out their inchoate Christ complexes, revelling in the suffering and abnegation visited on them by the harsh New England winters, rainy springs, humid summers and wind whipped autumns.

And so it is, nearly 400 years later, that New Englanders turn their collars against the wind driven precipitation of what should obviously be a beautiful, early summer day, curse resignedly to themselves and go on about their dour business.

The message we need to send to the rest of America is that we are owed. Our suffering provides the karmic balance for their happiness. The sea, sun and sex of bucolic locales like South Beach and So Cal owe their utopian consistency to the rain, snow and chill of our rocky, barren soil. The only time we get a cloudless spring day is when the mud slides and twisters wreak their damage on the otherwise peaceful climes of our brethren. That such natural disasters are beyond our control only provides further fodder for the guilt we each bear, the self-same guilt that makes it so nice on the Carolina coast.

A secondary slogan that might go along with the "Karmic Balance" campaign: New England - We're Not Happy Unless We're a Little Bit Sad. Also - New England: Screw You, Get Out of My Way, this latter ad only appearing on cable stations, after 10pm.

I actually believe that the continued shittiness of our spring weather, following after what was a really bone-jarringly awful winter, can be traced directly to the Red Sox winning the World Series. In that crystalline moment when Keith Foulke tossed the ball to Doug Mientkiewicz for the final out of the 2004 Fall Classic, such joy was unleashed in the hearts of New Englanders, that a sudden and serious shifting of air currents and barometric pressures was necessary to offset, to restore the leaden misery of our accursed populace.

April showers have not brought May flowers. They've brought May showers, which will bring June mosquitoes, big, biting, disease carrying mosquitoes.

New England: The weather is not beautiful; be glad you're not here.

May 23rd, 2005 - I'm feeling particularly sorry for myself today after another night in infant insomniac hell. This sort of mopey self-pity isn't getting me anywhere, I know, but it's what I'm good at, so...

Non-parents will read what I've just written and assume that my problem is a lack of sleep, which, to some extent, is true. Parents, on the other hand, will know that there are components of fear, helplessness, stress and confusion involved as well.

Yes. I am tired, but being tired is made particularly difficult because I fear I am going to go on being tired for the foreseeable future because Owen's sleep has become suddenly fractured and difficult and I have no idea why. I don't know how to fix him, or at least I'm not sure I know how to fix him. Brittney and I have been reading books and doing on-line research and we have the semblance of a plan, but no idea whether it will work. And we have no idea whether it will work because, in part, we don't know what's wrong. Is he teething? Does he have an ear ache? Have we simply created the wrong sleep associations in his tiny mind, so that now he absolutely needs a pacifier to get to sleep, and he needs to be rocked, and the planets have to be aligned at the zenith of their orbits?

This is where the stress, confusion and helplessness come in, the not knowing.

Did I mention guilt? I should have mentioned guilt, because not knowing how to help your child sleep makes you feel like an inadequate parent, not to mention the additional guilt you feel upon realizing that you're complaining about how you feel first, and worrying about what might be wrong with your child second.

I suggested to Brittney this morning that there is a process of ego-destruction that goes on in early parenthood during which you learn to think of your child first and yourself second. I'm not quite there yet. I haven't yet got beyond the idea that Owen is intentionally and willfully not sleeping in order to punish me, even though he was clearly exhausted this morning when I finally woke him to go to my sister-in-law for day care.

We are now learning the meaning of the term "Ferberize," debating the merits of pacifier weaning and questioning the possibility that this might all be chalked up to a case of itchy gums. But then, I suppose parenthood is all about learning on the fly.

When you're tired.

And feeling sorry for yourself.

May 22nd, 2005 - Last Sunday I wrote all about how Owen had slept through the night and how I'd received the shimmering epiphany of eight good hours of sleep. Well, this Sunday I'm here to sing a different song.

Last night I put the boy down around 8pm and then got up with him at 11, 1, 2, 2:15, 2:30, 4:30 and 6:00. I tried feeding him. I tried holding him. I tried rocking him and changing his diaper. Nothing seemed to keep him asleep. The stretches between 2:30 and 4:30 and then 4:30 to 6:00 were only achieved by sleeping with him cuddled up next to me, on the couch in his nursery. Last night was the worst night we've had yet, the singular embodiment of the parental nightmare, a shrieking insomniac baby bent on patricide by denial of shut eye.

And while I was the model of loving patience early in the night, I came apart pretty quickly after 2am. I thought seriously for a few minutes of getting my keys, padding out to the car and driving away. I grew a keen sense of empathy with those monsters in the state pen, the ones serving 25 to life for smothering or shaking or otherwise silencing the interminable crying of an infant. These are horrible thoughts, like the subtle urge to jump you feel peering over the edge of a high roof. Perhaps it's the possiblity, the chilling feasibility, of thoughts like this that make them so uncomfortable to pass betwixt the old synapses. They make you shudder and writhe in guilt, though they come unbidden.

Of course, I will never harm my child. I would sooner slink out to the back garden and brain myself with a shovel. They'd find me out there in boxer shorts and flip-flops, the baby snoring peacefully to himself in his crib.

My poor boy. He's been a whiny wreck most of the day, careening between fitful sleep and crying jags since he woke up. I suspect he's got an ear ache or something. Brittney and I are STRESSED OUT, not able, for the first time, to soothe him. He's in his crib now, and we're both sitting, her on the couch downstairs, me up here in the office, with one ear cocked, waiting for him to sound the alarm.

This is not a happy way to be.

May 17th, 2005 - Commercial advertising is a pox on humanity, a bulbous goiter hanging off the neck of the greater good. Brittney gets irritated with me sometimes for the relentless angry spew I aim at the television during commercial breaks, but I can't stand being lied to. The brazenness of modern advertising stirs the bile in my gall bladder. People complain about SPAM in their email, but for some reason they tolerate the incessant parade of ads that pop-up in the middle of cable television broadcasts, despite the fact they actually pay for that cable content by subscription.

Having said all that (and I could say so much more), I am finding it interesting of late how I relate to the archetypal characters who invariably populate prime time television commercials. As I age, making the long slow march from target demographic to target demographic, I become more acutely aware of how advertisers identify and target me and in turn how I identify myself.

There was a time (oh such a long time ago) when I was the hyperactive and hyper-happy child bouncing through the bubble gum commercials, blowing impossibly large bubbles and cavorting against neon colored backgrounds loosely affiliated with fruit flavors. Then I was the teen malcontent pestering my parents for my own phone line and perpetually slamming my bedroom door against invasions of my privacy. Also, I was insecure about the state of my complexion.

Following that period, I was the sloppy-dormed college kid forever begging for money from his bemused parents and eating mass-produced pizza. This phase gave way quickly to young adulthood. Tousle-haired look-alikes went driving off lots in first cars, chose a bank and looked for affordable restaurant faire to consume with like-minded young adults on Friday evenings after work.

There was something subtle about this progression from bubble-blowing kiddie to mortgage shopping adult, or perhaps it wasn't actually subtlety on the part of the advertisers but rather an easy acceptance on mine that made the climb up the advertising ladder seem so smooth. In each case I was eager to identify with the character in the next set of targeted ads. When I was just a kid, fantasizing about video games and happy meals, it was easy to see the pure, unadulterated joy and implied independence of teenagerdom. When finally a teen, I could see that real happiness and independence came from breaching the outer limits of the parental nest and flying away to college. And then, of course, it takes becoming a responsible adult, with credit cards and a car payments, to be taken seriously in the world.

Just recently, though, a disturbing paradigm shifted. In stepping into the next demographic ring on the advertising agencies' dart board, I realize that I've become the thing I once defined myself in opposition to before, that is, a parent.

It happened during a Coca-Cola commercial (and let my mentioning the brand by name not serve as an endorsement of any kind). This kid, about eighteen, long-haired, slightly uppity, is at the refrigerator, and he fishes out the last can of Coke. Just then his father calls from the other room, "Hey, can you grab me a Coke while you're in there?" The kid looks at the can, then he flashes back to moments when he has tested his father's patience in the past. There is a bad haircut, a backing-up of the family car through the family garage door. Back in the present the kid smiles, yells, "Yeah. Just a sec," and then makes some rebellious quip at the end, something like, "He can get his own ice."

Let's not get into the deep and cosmic significance of this ad. What is important, what was important for me, was that I found I identified with the father more than with the son. I was thinking, "You ungrateful dumb ass! Give your dad the Coke! He paid for it!"

What is this? Some kind of joke? Has it really taken a Coke commercial for me to realize that I no longer identify myself as hip, young and cool? That I no longer represent the young and entitled, but rather the old and embittered? And what comes next? Do I start seeing myself in Viagra ads? Or as the irascible older man in the Depends Undergarments commercials?

I can only take solace from the indisputable fallacy of it all. Like Orwell's 'newspeak,' issuing forth from the ever present television speaker, advertising only serves to narrow our focus, to cast in terms we wouldn't have understood previously that which we must now accept as manifest. We're getting older. We're getting less attractive.

We need more money.

May 15th, 2005 - It is only now that Owen has begun (only just) sleeping through the night that I am coming to understand the thick cloud of fatigue I have been operating in for the last few months. I was telling Brittney just last night that I am really struggling to find equilibrium in parenthood, trying and failing to feeling just like myself. One day I am high on the distilled fumes of fatherdom, the next I'm wallowing in the depression of lost identity.

Through it all (and on balance, I'd say I've been high more than I've been low), I had marvelled at how much easier the not-sleeping was than I thought it would be. Because Brittney has major difficulty getting back to sleep once she wakes up in the night, I have been getting up with Owen at 1:30 or 3:30 or 4:30 (oh fickle youth!) most nights of the week, heating and serving a delightful bottleful of mother's milk and then tucking him back in roughly 45 minutes later. Brittney then rises at 6am, showers, gets dressed and wakes the boy around 7 for a quick feed before she departs for work. I get up (if it can properly be called getting up) between 6:30 and 6:45 so that I can walk the dog before Brittney leaves and I am back on baby duty until 8:30. That's when I drop him off with his Aunt Y for the day.

It sounds gruelling, but until today I thought I was doing pretty well, dispatching all my responsibilities, functioning reasonably well at work without being an asshole, and generally not falling asleep in my dinner plate. I have come to know that it is very hard to get up two or three hours after you've gone to bed, but that after four hours of sleep it's much easier. This has something to do with sleep cyles and/or REM sleep or something like that, I'm sure. I have also learned to doze with the baby on my chest or tucked under my arm. This half-sleep isn't entirely satisfying, but it sure beats the hell out of being awake.

Now I see that the true horror of a good zombie film like Night of the Living Dead is that the zombies don't know they're zombies. The stricken look on my co-workers' faces make so much more sense now that I know I've probably been ripping their limbs off and eating them every morning in fiscal Q1. More importantly, the general helplessness and desperation I've felt of late has come more clearly into focus.

Last night I climbed aboard the fantastamagical sleeping machine we call our bed at about 11pm and slept straight through to 7:30 this morning. That's eight-and-a-half hours sleep by my reckoning. The shear force of it seems to have reattached all my withering synapses like a fresh set of spark plug wires on an old jalopy.

In this new, sleep-charged state I become wholly aware of the cognitive dissonance that has been fermenting in my muddled mind, the sleep shackles that have prevented me from running headlong into paternal happiness. Heretofore, I was unaware that my mood had been so fundamentally altered by the fragmented nature of my sleep. By the simple miracle of waking in a good mood, I came to understand that many moons have passed since last I faced the day with a smile on my face.

All of this came tumbling out of my head via my tongue this morning on a long walk we took as a family, Brittney, Owen, Eddie the Dog and me. I have been bandying about terms like 'identity crisis' to describe my recent state of mind. This morning I saw that what I was really experiencing was fatigue-inspired grumpiness. Being able to articulate that to my wife and dismiss the notion that there was some deeper psychic malady developing felt really, really good.

I am not, as the saying goes, a new man yet, but I hope to be one day soon. I hope to be.

May 11th, 2005 - Sorry about yesterday's post. We all have our moods. Big thanks to those who dropped me a line to explain why they read and/or write blogs.

As a gesture of atonement for being generally grumpy and unkind, I offer you a quick look at the site redesign I am working on. Send me your criticisms now before I blight the Internet with this.

May 10th, 2005 - I have, at least temporarily, lost my faith in the inherent interestingness of the minutia, the small things collecting dust on shelves, the lint accumulating in your dryer vent. It seems that a great many blogs can be filled up with minute examinations of shoes or books or toothbrushes. And let that not come off as a shot at blogs. I am just as guilty of navel-gazing self-indulgence as anyone else.

This is about my current state of mind. I just seem to have run out of patience with the small stuff, with words for the sake of words, the old trick of making something really important by talking about it a lot. "The thing about sweaters that you've never thought of before is...." Well, there is a reason none of us is thinking about sweaters.

Maybe it's that I have a child now, a single focus for all my thoughts, or maybe it's that I have simply written too many words to express too few ideas. Maybe I've transcended my enthusiasm for the sublime beauty of the written word and discovered that most everything I've ever written (and don't take this wrong, but also most everything YOU'VE ever written) is boring.

I have abandoned the vain hope that I am doing something here that people are interested in.

Ok. Ok. This is all getting a wee bit maudlin, isn't it? I am not proposing to stop keeping a blog, nor am I encouraging you to stop. It is, I am sure, only through volume that we can ever hope to realize a profit. I guess I just wish we were writing TO each other more and AT each other less.

Look. I don't want to be a killjoy. I am sure there is some significance to my discovery, today at lunch, that the local 7-11 has a machine that dispenses both chili and melted cheese, each with the press of a button. If this is not somehow akin to the conquistadors' search for Coronado, the City of Gold, then I don't know which way is up.

But I'm having trouble parsing it all. I'm having difficulty identifying which details are important and which are not. The woman who sat across from me on the train yesterday morning had on a crisp red skirt with a clean white overcoat. The combination was really rather arresting. Is that important? When I changed Owen's diaper last night he reached up with both hands and grabbed his toes, refusing to let go, which made it awfully difficult to remove his pajamas and replace his soiled shorts. What does that mean? Is the meaning of life bundled up with the laundry, like a spent dryer sheet? Or are we ignoring the big, heavy ideas because, well, they're too big and heavy?

My sense is that most of us are writing walls around ourselves, building up layer after layer of amusing anecdotes, to shield ourselves from judgement by our readers. We're filling space with words, but why? The harder it is for me to find the time to write, the more I ask this question.

So tell me, friends and bloggers, why do you do it? What are you hoping to achieve? And if you don't have a blog of your own, why do you read them? Amusement? Enlightenment? Are you trying to find out something about yourself?

I write in this space to get better at writing. What I'm realizing now is that, for me, that doesn't necessarily mean: better at stringing words together or better at turning a phrase. It means better at communicating ideas to people with words. Words without ideas have no meaning.

Would you like chili and cheese with that?

May 8th, 2005 - F was relieved to hear that I'm enjoying fatherhood. He's been married about year. He knows his time is nigh. He doesn't have a biological clock, but he hears a ticking anyway. F figures that if I like being a dad, he'll like being a dad, that if I don't feel crushed beneath the burden of it, then he won't. I am not sure my experience has any bearing on what his will be like, but I tried to reassure him anyway.

I tried to express what I liked about this whole crazy, having-a-baby thing, and mostly failed. I said, "He's different every day." I said, "When he starts to interact, when he starts to know you, then it's really cool." I said, "It's fun. I don't know why, but it's fun." I said, in essence, nothing.

I have begun to wonder how many times I can press my mouth to his fat, round belly and make that sublime and perfect farting sound that makes him erupt in smiles and squeals. I have performed this manoeuver 638 times now. It does not appear to be getting old. For either of us.

I am the parent who talks about his kid all the time. I am the father who shows you pictures of his drooling progeny, whether you asked to see them or not. I am the irritating yuppie in fleece and comfortable shoes, walking into the coffee shop with a baby strapped to his front. I am that guy I never imagined I'd be.

F surfs and writes and watches the birds clustering on the multivariate feeders he's rigged up in his back yard. F listens to baseball on the radio and takes great satisfaction from the dark richness of the compost he spreads on his garden. F has got it so good.

And what? A baby is going to drop, stork-wrapped and pink, into his life and make it better?

Well no. And yes.

I have only been at this fatherhood thing a shade over four months. I don't know anything. Every day I struggle to identify the emotions that fill me up and overflow on the floor around my feet.

What I can say is this: I am no longer myself, with time to poke and prod in the squishy underbrush of introversion. I don't have the brain space to sustain the feeble attempts at art and exploration I once made. And every moment I steal for myself, to read a book or tap away at this blog, I feel guilty, because there are diapers to change, stories to read, burdens to bear.

And I can also say this: I have a son who smiles when he sees my face, who I will teach to catch a baseball, to kick a soccer ball, to read. I will tell him the names of the birds who land in our yard and show him the high, bald spot in the Fells where you can climb up and catch a view of the Boston skyline. And when he's sad or hurting he will come to me and want me to hold him, because he will take comfort from my simple presence and he will trust me to take care of him.

And none of this, I realize, sounds like the earth-moving, life-changing thing that it is, but, and after talking to F I realize this too, it doesn't have to sound that way, because it absolutely feels that way, and F, you'll feel it too.

One day soon, I hope.

May 3rd, 2005 - Owen, who is in the next room dining on boob, turned four-months-old today. He is now, very plainly, not the baby we brought home from the hospital. Then, he was a pale slug with cloudy eyes and four nearly immobile limbs that remained curled up next to his body. His hair was only the briefest suggestion of a dark colored fuzz. He was silent, unless crying.

Today he is fat and pink. And big. He came home 8 pounds and now ways in the neighborhood of 16. He's quite literally twice the man he used to be.

The fuzz on his head is thickening, but it is still the softest thing I have ever touched, even the stubble that's beginning to fill in the bald spot on the back where his skull meets the crib. This fuzzy, soft head is addictive. If you are holding Owen, you will find yourself kissing it. Over and over. You can not resist.

His ears seem quite large. Do they grow, I wonder? Or do they come full sized and we grow into them? The same goes for his eyes, big and dark, sometimes blue, sometimes green, possibly turning brown. These eyes are much more active than they were in early January. He fixes you with a steady gaze now, follows you around the room, squints when he smiles. His eyes say he is tuned in.

The nose is still a button, and the lips, which are always wet, are more expressive. When he was born his lower lip was partially tucked in, as if he'd been punched in the mouth. Speaking of that mouth, producer of much drool, gateway to a burgeoning sense of taste and relentless need to validate the existence of objects by cramming them inside. That mouth is busy. When it's not loosing a stream of sour, milky vomit, it enjoys chattering away in broad vowel sounds, in chirps and shrieks of amusement and annoyance. Owen is all mouth now. And glistening chin.

His neck, which rolls and rolls like the ocean in a squall, has become the repository for the spoiled, lactic cologne that is his chosen scent. If you nuzzle your way in and make a fluttering, farting sound against the fatty warmth of his neck, he will sometimes squeal and smile. Not sometimes actually. Always.

The chest is a narrow rib cage and and two tiny, barely pink nipples, one of which is inverted. The arms that extend from this trunk are flailing sausage rolls, culiminating in broad hands with fast growing nails. The hands, recently returned from the mouth, are also always wet.

The belly. The belly, the belly, the belly. A bowlful of jelly. Not a beer belly, but a milk belly, milky and paunchy and soft. It would hang over his belt, if he wore one.

His butt is a pair of uncooked dinner roles, utterly lacking in definition of any sort. His manhood is his own business. I'll not start discussing it here.

The legs are, like the arms, just tubes of marbled fat. He has no ankles. His knees are dimpled.

The feet are a second set of hands, not quite as busy, but nearly as pliable. Brittney demonstrated for Owen this evening that his toes can go in his mouth just like everything else in the house. Let's hope he doesn't make toe-sucking a habit. I love him, but I hope one day he'll fall in love and move out of our house.

The other things that are different about Owen and his rapidly evolving physicality are that he sits and stands now, with support. He likes to be carried around in a front-facing, seated position, as if the crook of my arm were a sedan chair and he a young pharoah. He also likes to press himself up to standing and, with a pair of big hands under his small arms, wobble back and forth like a drunk. Though he gets steadier every day. Maybe he's sobering up.

I hope the pictures I post on this site's main page are doing some justice to his growth. Here at home with Owen we are slack-jawed. Struck dumb daily.

May 2nd, 2005 - If our families are the scars we carry through life, then our friends are both major injuries and the bandages that heal the wounds. This very evening, as I was cooking dinner, the phone rang twice, each call from a friend in one or more positions requiring great care and compromise, both calls demanding my absolute attention, the greatest depth and subtlety of my understanding. As I hung up and turned to the steelhead trout and rice pilaf steaming on the stove, it was hard not to feel as if the inside of my skull had been hammered smooth by the tiny rap, rap, rapping voices coming through the phone.

Friendship demands greater faith and subsequently greater investment than familiality.

If your family is an interminable one act play in which your character never grows or ages, your frienships are sharply episodic. In Act XXXIV the relationship between A and B fails, and you (as C) step in to comfort B, fully aware that A was perhaps too immature to sustain said relationship and yet unable to remind B that, in Act XVIII, your character had cause to inform B of A's evident shortcomings. Regardless, B comes to you, cries on your shoulder, because F is unavailable and/or H is out of town. H's troubled history with A also disqualifies him from giving an impartial take on the situation. It doesn't matter. You're in this scene and probably some others. Leave your phone on the hook. They'll be calling back.

I love my family. I do. But being a son and a brother and a father comes with a set of expectations that is fairly rigidly defined in made-for-TV movies and the discounted bestsellers they're based on. I love my friends because I never had any expectations for them.

Who are these people? How did we pick each other from the stream of humanity washing over us in our every day? People talk about "having things in common" or "sharing a perspective," but I think that dumbs it down too much, makes common that which is decidedly uncommon. It doesn't allow for the alchemical reaction of real friendship, that moment when you express genuine concern for someone who doesn't share your DNA. Or help them move.

My brother sometimes says that I make him feel like he's the younger brother and I'm the older one. He is, for the record, eight years my senior. But he just says that because I'm a scolding, judgemental prick a lot of the time. I can't actually be the older brother any more than I can be a father to my father. Family roles are fixed.

Friendships are more fluid. There's more give and take, like dancers taking turns at the lead. Friendships that are too one-sided stop being called friendships. One person becomes a "father figure" for the other, or a "big brother" of sorts. We tend to drop people who require too much of us without giving anything back. We stop returning their calls.

In fact, maybe that's a good definition of a friend, a person to whom you are not related by blood with whom you are able to maintain emotional equilibrium without being deliberate about it. It's symbiosis, the lichen and the tree from your seventh grade biology text.

The happiest people are those who make family of their friends, and friends of their family. Go figure.

April 26th, 2005 - Family. Is there a more treacherous minefield, a thornier topic than familial relations? Hey, what is that supposed to mean? What's thorny about our relations? I don't have a problem with you. Do you have some problem with me? Why do you have to write about this stuff? We love each other. We're a normal family.

Normal family. Icy hot. Jumbo shrimp. Working vacation.

My parents were here over the weekend (Hi, Mom! Hi, Dad!), and so we had dinner on Saturday night with my brother and his family, my Cousin L and Aunt K. My mother and I spent most of the day cooking. Then we slid the extra leaves into the dining room table and all gathered round to consume roast pork over rice and meatballs with spatzle. There was ice cream for dessert.

Mom and dad are moving to Massachusetts very soon, and that will mean that my immediate family, them, my brother and I, will all be living in the same state, very nearly in the same zip code, for the first time in more than a decade. When clouds come together suddenly like this, they sometimes form pretty cloud sculptures, a dog maybe or a clown face. Other times they form lightning, which starts forest fires, and thunder, which frightens small children as they lie in their beds.

Conversational politics. We spent the weekend trying to determine, variously, whether we had been good parents, sons, brothers. We capered for each other's approval. We assured and reassured. We set boundaries, even as we were drawing each other closer.

I remember Lloyd Bentsen telling Dan Quayle he was no Jack Kennedy during a 1988 vice-presidential debate. At the end, Quayle stood there like a big boy and shook Bentsen's hand. Thank you for the ass-kicking, Mr. Bentsen. But political debates are nothing as compared to family dinners. In a political debate there is no love lost between the debaters. At a family dinner, there is, quite often, too much love found.

We love each other so much that we feel entirely qualified to judge each other for our mistakes and hold them over one another's heads, dangling like the Sword of Damocles, or the ten ton weight from Acme Corp meant for the Road Runner, but always squashing the Coyote. In other words, we love each other so much, we end up damaging ourselves.

At the beginning of the evening, as we were working our way through my brother's hot wings and my aunt's bacon-wrapped water chestnuts, I said,, "Don't you think your family is like a scar. You don't necessarily like it, but it's there for life and at some point you just have to get over it, learn to love it."

Aunt K said, "No. I disowned half my family (the other half, thankfully) last weekend."

"Ah," I said. "Plastic surgery." She didn't laugh.

When I was younger, a twenty-something trying desperately to convince the world I was an adult, I really didn't feel comfortable at the family dinner table, where my parents still treated me, despite their best intentions, like a child. But then, for that whole awkward decade, the family dinner table was always located in another state, so my discomfort never lasted much beyond Thanksgiving Day or Christmas Eve.

Now that I'm a little (only a little) older, and a father myself, paradigms have shifted. As the family draws together geographically I am less and less fearful of the emotional storms to come. This weekend was a good dry run for physical proximity. At one end of the table, my father laughed easily and stuffed himself. My mother, sitting next to me, regaled us with family history, her memory sharper than anyone else's, or her brain more willing to fill in missing details. My brother, once cast to the wilderness for bad behavior, was fully restored, his two-year-old son sitting in his lap, his wife and older son across from him. And then, of course, there was beautiful Brittney, my wife, and soft, pink Owen, my son.

The conversation was so good I don't remember any of it.

April 20th, 2005 - There is something so right about the single lamp that lights this room. It is small and warm and bright. And in its cone my taxes and bills and the really egregious clutter of the desk melts together like one big printed pile, like so much critical correspondence, as if I'm important.

The top of its shade is burnt yellow by the bulb, and its round, white base harbors a thin skin of dust. 40W isn't enough to burn it off.

At night, when it's cold and dark outside, I feel so comfortable sitting here, as if I have a warm, clean sweater on, as if the sun shines just for me, and just in this place.

At work, I leave the fluorescent overheads off in the morning. They're like sandpaper on your eyeballs. If light could abrade, these fixtures would exfoliate, would grind smooth the wrinkled mass of your brain, would wear the rough spots of your soul to a sheer sheen. When my officemates arrive we flip just half the switches, enough to see, not enough to torture.

Consider, too, the glow of the monitor. This one, at home, is a flat panel, bereft of glare, rich in color. The one at work is a giant, propped up on two reams of copier paper to save my neck, its broad glass front catching and amplifying even the half-portion of fluorescence we've rationed. Staring into its blinding maw, I feel my insides illuminated. I feel like one of those transparent fish that lives in the ocean's deepest depths.

If only I could work here, in the evening, when the light is right, and my brain, slowed and steadied by the fatigue of the day, is ripe and ready to think. If only...

April 19th, 2005 - Yesterday was Patriots Day here in Boston. That means most of the city had the day off (I didn't) to watch the Boston Marathon and a Red Sox matinee (which they won 12-7 behind two home runs by Manny Ramirez). Patriots Day is meant to commemorate those early days of the American Revolution when Boston and the surrounding areas served as the setting for events like the Boston Massacre and the midnight hi-jinks of one Paul Revere.

Not many people know that Revere rode through Somerville and Medford, passing less than a mile from the house I live in, on his way to Lexington and Concord. When historians invoke the "cradle of liberty" they are invariably alluding to the quaint and pastoral towns west of us, and not so much to the run down, working class towns on the way there. For what it's worth, on our morning runs the dog hardly notices the signs on High Street that commemorate Revere's route.

To celebrate the wondrous history of our inchoate democracy, I left work at the usual time and found myself swept into the labyrinthine traffic jam of the Marathon. Like a moron, I tried to ride my small red and white scooter up Berkeley Street to Commonwealth Avenue, not remembering that the finish line in Copley Square would subsume all of Back Bay in its foot-trafficked, post-race festivities. People with those odd silver blankets littered the sidewalks, chaperoned by their supporters and a broad swathe of city-living, merry-makers who had come to witness the event and take advantage of food and drink specials. Yay, democracy!!!

The Boston Police, ever the un-prepared, were doing a really crappy job of directing traffic, and since the entire city, south of the race route, had become a creeping, crawling parking lot, the crappiness of their effort only compounded the problem. I found myself swept into the trafficky abyss, winding in between and past the cars all the way down to Fenway Park where I finally realized that there was NO WHERE to cross the race route and gain free passage north through Cambridge.

I did the only thing I could. I headed back down town.

And really, if I had been in a car I would likely have just parked it and bedded down for the night, such was the crush of honking, smoking automobiles. As it was, even unfettered by the girth of my vehicle, it took me twenty minutes to work my way back out of the mess. I crossed over on Arlington Street, a mere block east of the site of my initial impasse, and buzzed down Comm Ave to the Mass Ave bridge.

For once, I didn't mind the interminable traffic lights of Cambridge, a town that bears the strident belief that no car should ever drive more than 150 yards without pausing to reflect on the deeper meanings of the colors yellow, red and eventually, begrudgingly green. I got home an hour-and-a-half after I left the office. It made me wonder if, next year, I might not be better off calling in sick on Patriots Day. It also made me wonder if we might not have been better off as the over-taxed, under-represented dependent of what was, at the time, the strongest nation state on the planet, but that's a much larger question, isn't it?

April 15th, 2005 - I was standing in the bathroom at work on Wednesday when it struck me, not that it's important where I was standing, only that I could have been anywhere, doing anything, the first time my knees buckled under the heavy load of paternal concern.

I was, for some reason, reviewing the events of Owen's birth. I was recalling the way I felt when they pushed me out the delivery room door and wheeled Brittney away on the gurney to be prepped for her Caesarean. I was remembering the way the doctor strode into the room, surveyed the scene and then in a very deliberate, demonstrative way said, "OK. This is not an emergency. Everyone relax."

I have often thought, since then, that what he was doing was communicating in doctor code that it was, in fact, an emergency, and that though they should all pretend that this was standard operating procedure for the happy couple, the ones struggling to understand what was happening beneath the blue sterile sheet and the antiseptic, white light, they had all better hustle to get that bun out of the oven before it expired.

Owen, or "the baby" as he was still known then, was having trouble maintaining a steady and sufficiently high heart rate during Brittney's drug-induced contractions. Every time she shuddered in pain, his little heart would stutter and stammer and struggle to keep beating. The doctor suggested a C-section. Bewildered by the suggestion, but wanting to do the right thing, we assented. Thus began the fire drill that was Owen's birth.

Since that day, of course, I've replayed these events a hundred times, but never quite the way I did on Wednesday. On that particular hump day, I found myself dwelling on the possibility that Owen was very near death when modern medicine intervened and instead cut him, writhing and bloody, from his mother's womb. In the aftermath of careening emotions and physical exhaustion, we just didn't have the time or energy to think about what might have been.

But on Wednesday, finally, I found the time. I nearly peed down my leg.

Maybe for the first time, I was aware of what I would have lost. In the last two weeks Owen has really become a little human, smiling and cooing at us, following things with his now-focusing eyes, snuggling his fuzzy head into our shoulders when he's tired. He does this amazing thing when he first sees one of us. He looks up, realizes who is there, flashes a quick, gums-and-drool grin, and then turns his head away as if he's shy.

What would we do without him? And if this is the fear that grips the parental heart when something could have happened but didn't, what must the fear of the thing that hasn't happened yet but still could be like?

April 12th, 2005 - Talking. I need to be able to talk to my child. My friend C who has a five-year-old son sent me a note to confirm that things get a whole lot cooler once conversations can take place.

Today I thought about all the things I want to tell Owen.

First of all, the blue Slurpee is enticing. It's blue for chrissakes! But it doesn't taste good, and it turns your mouth blue, which will be cool when you're five, but not so much when you're thirty and walking into a meeting with clients. Opt for the cola Slurpee. Not only is it the best tasting, but it is the most mature of all the Slurpee flavors.

The Red Sox. Let me save you a lot of grief. You will not seem clever or rebellious by picking the Yankees as your favorite team. You will seem like an asshole. You were born six block from Fenway Park. Accept your fate. You are a Red Sox fan. You were born just 68 days after they won their first World Series in 86 years. If you are very lucky you will see them win it again in your lifetime. But if you don't, that's ok. The first thing to learn about being a Red Sox fan is that you can't always get what you want, and despite what Mick Jagger says, even trying sometimes doesn't get you what you need. It's complicated, but it should all make sense by the time you get to college.

Food. Food is good. Nearly all of it. You should try everything at least once. You don't have to eat squash, but you can't skip dinner and expect to get dessert. Fried clams should be eaten whole, not as strips. Raw shellfish should be consumed at every opportunity, either with cocktail sauce (you should mix your own and make it extra spicy) or with lemon. Never eat seafood with cheese on it. Never eat cheese that comes in a can or can be poured. Don't ask what's in hot dogs. Just eat them.

Politics. There are no good politics. Politics is what happens when seemingly mature and reasonable people are unable to find solutions to pressing problems. Do not rush to align yourself with any party. Unless it's a birthday party and there's cake involved. Batchelor parties we'll discuss later.

Religion. Like Politics. There are no good religions. Religion is what happens when seemingly mature and reasonable people are unable to decide what makes the universe go. Note: it is not that important what makes it go. Rather, knowing that it goes is sufficient and deciding what to do while it's going is perhaps the most important thing of all.

Music. The Beatles best album was Magical Mystery Tour. The Rolling Stones best record was Tattoo You. No matter what your mother tells you, Neil Young doesn't suck. He just has a funny voice. Bob Dylan is a genius, but no, he can't sing, and you don't have to pretend he can. Husker Du was better than the Replacements. Minor Threat was better than Rites of Spring. Country music was better in the 60s. So was R&B. Generally, a band's first or second album is their best one. There are exceptions, but not many. When listening to radio, focus your attention at the bottom of the dial. When listening to live music wear earplugs. Trust me on that. Wear earplugs.

Bad words. Shit. Crap. Fuck. God damn. They're just words. They're not bad or good. There are probably better ways to express yourself most of the time, but if, once in a while, you scream SHIT at the top of your lungs, I think you'll feel better about the world, and the world, despite its protestations, will be none the worse for wear.

Television. Television is bad. Except when you're bored shitless or want to shut your brain down for extended periods of time. I'm not saying you've got to read books. I'm just saying that you can waste an awful lot of time watching people experience life on television instead of experiencing life yourself. Why watch a program about trees when you could be climbing trees? Why watch Cops when you could be knocking over liquor stores yourself? Do you see where I'm going with this?

Sex. We won't get to this for about a decade, but when we do, just know that I don't care whether you're gay or straight.

Your mother and me. You should know right up front that we're not the smartest people in the world, though your mother IS actually the prettiest. Also, take all my advice with a grain of salt. In fact, forget my advice. Figure it out yourself. But listen to your mother. Seriously. Don't get me in trouble.

April 10th, 2005 - I have a problem with my brain, and it is this: once I am irritated, I remain irritated until some point in the future at which time my brain decides it has fully processed the irritation and is ready to move on. Note, I don't make the decision; my brain does. I am talking about my brain as an independent actor, a free agent, a mass of chemical and electrical activity well beyond my ability to understand never mind control.

On Saturday, I woke up irritated, about what I don't even know, possibly that the baby was screaming. I remained irritated all day despite my best efforts to shrug it off. It's was as if there was a chanting in the back of my mind: THE BABY IS SCREAMING...THE BABY IS SCREAMING...THE BABY IS SCREAMING, and it wouldn't stop, all day. I don't even know if it was the baby's screaming that set me off. I think it was actually something else, some other grievous offense committed by a complete stranger wholly unaware of the effect they were having on me. You know, what does it even say about my fragile mental state that I can't remember the thing that was bothering me ALL DAY on Saturday?

The cure was fairly simple. I laid down in bed for about an hour with my eyes closed, and though I didn't fall asleep, I think I got close enough that my subconscious took hold of the tiller and sailed my mental ship into calmer waters.

This morning I got up with the baby at about a quarter to six and felt just fine. I fed him a little and then we dozed together on the couch until around eight. Today I was tired, but bubbly. How? I don't know.

It really bothers me that small things can set me off and ruin my day. Sometimes I'm in a bad mood for whole weeks at a time. That woman who drove the wrong way up our street last week, she had me clenching my teeth and hating the world for three solid days. I can't believe I gave her that kind of power. I can't believe petty crap like that matters so much to me.

One of the things I've been mulling over lately is why I get so angry. I don't believe that people driving the wrong way down the street is really the issue. I think I invest enormous amounts of frustration and rage in peripheral events to keep it out of the main part of my life, but then what is it that I'm really mad about?

My gut tells me I'm mad at myself.

I'll not recount here all the things I'm pissed at me about, but suffice it to say I think I'm capable of a hell of a lot more than I ever accomplish. Either that or I'm bitterly disappointed that I'm not capable of more that this. Two sides of the same coin, I suppose.

F says I'm too hard on myself, but then F and his co-workers won a Pulitzer Prize last week while I was busy copyediting a sixth grade literature textbook.

April 6th, 2005 - I live on a one-way street. But because I live in Massachusetts, and more specifically because I live in Medford, Massachusetts the one-way sign posted at the top of the street is treated more as a suggestion than as a hard and fast rule.

This morning, as I was standing on the corner with my child in my arms, a woman came screaming up the street the wrong way. I said (ok, I yelled), "It's a one-way street!"

And she said, "I know. I live here."

And I said, "Well, if you know, then why are you going the wrong way."

And she yelled back, "Fuck you. Don't tell me what to do. I live here," and sped away.

This is what Massachusetts, this is what Medford, is all about. Our drivers are known as Massholes. Medford in particular has a reputation for its rude, uneducated populace. When you tell people you live here, they invariably reply, "Oh, Mehfuh," and then laugh at your misfortune.

In general, I like it here. It's close to downtown Boston, and we have easy access to all the major highways without being able to hear any of the major highways. We are ten minutes from a 2,000 acre park. And we get many of the benefits of city living while also having a yard and a garden and driveway to park in.

What I don't like about Medford is the Masshole traffic, the litter and the attitude. I found a half case of empty Coors cans tossed in my hedge this morning. Then a woman said, "fuck you" to me for suggesting she shouldn't be driving the wrong way down a one-way street.

You should hear my barber, Joe, talk about all this. Mention all the garbage on the streets and his blood boils. And he's lived here for sixty years.

We often say we'll hang onto this house forever. The location is too good, and some day it will be worth more than we can possibly imagine. But on mornings like this one, I don't think I can see a future here. Can I send my son out to play in these streets? Can I fill a trash bag from the front sidewalk every week and maintain my sanity? I just don't know.

April 4th, 2005 - Yesterday, Owen was three months old. We celebrated by sitting on the couch and watching his favorite team, the Red Sox, lose to the Yankees in the first game of the season. Owen fell asleep shortly after the third inning and didn't wake again until his late night feeding around 11pm.

Today, Brittney went back to work. We celebrated by oversleeping, scrambling our way through showers and dog-walking and arriving late at work. Owen went to my sister-in-law's for the day. He crapped through two sets of clothes and came home in his jacket, the last piece of clothing not caked with baby poop.

But this is not a meditation on feces.

There are complicated things going on in the heads of my little family. Owen, when awake, is performing the complex calculus necessary to bring his left hand in alignment with his mouth. Could it be that he'll end up left-handed? The early evidence suggests he might, in which case we'll have to take him down to the river and drown him as devil spawn. Or get him a left-handed baseball mitt. Whatever makes sense.

Brittney is wrestling with the idea of working full-time again. Much to her surprise, she liked staying home with the baby. She liked grocery shopping during the day, and doing laundry and going for walks. What neither of us quite understands is how it is that we can't afford for her to stay home. Have lifestyles become that much more expensive since we were kids, or has something fundamental in our economy shifted away from middle class? To be clear, we are not a family that sees itself in some sort of traditional Daddy works/Mommy stays home configuration. Mommy makes more money than Daddy, and Daddy would stay home happily. Again, if we could afford it.

As things stand, life is going to get much more demanding for us. We'll both need to be out of bed pretty early, because we'll both need to get to the office. That means doing more prep at night, before bed. That means spending weekends catching up on laundry and grocery shopping. Sleep and exercise are going to get harder to come by.

All of this is just detail though. To me, it doesn't matter that much.

The stuff that's kicking around in my head mostly concerns some very confused feelings about my young son. In the roughly 90 days since his birth I have really enjoyed watching his mother bond with him (though watching her choke back tears as she left for work this morning wasn't a hootin' hollerin' good time). I have also spent a lot of good hours with him asleep on my chest, or propped up and smiling as we make cooing sounds back and forth at each other.

But what I feel toward Owen isn't love like I've experienced it before. To be sure, sometimes I look down on his tiny head as it bobs around, taking in the world, and I tear up, overwhelmed by the shear intensity of laying eyes on another human of my own creation. And when he cries I feel sorry for letting the world produce some condition that makes him sad. At the same time, I just don't know what to make of him. I don't know how to interact really. I can feed him, and I can change his diapers, and I can rock him to sleep, but I don't know how to get through to what's going on in his head. Probably I'm asking too much of a still-undeveloped brain. He's still working on the stimulus-response model, and in as much as occasionally I'm stimulus that produces a happy response, I should be glad.

I think I'm frustrated that we can't just talk. In fact I've had a number of dreams in which he can speak. I had one while we were still in the hospital after his birth. And in these dreams I'm equal parts dumbfounded that such a tiny infant can speak and ecstatic that we can communicate and I can begin the process of talking him through life.

Look, I don't know what any of this means. I don't really set much store by dreams or what they might mean. We sleep and our brains go on thinking, unfettered by the bonds of our waking neuroses. Something similar happens when we're drunk.

I think my problem is that I've been waiting for parenthood to make sense, but it doesn't. And now that Brittney is back at work, that struggle is going to get more intense, because up to this point she's been my intermediary, negotiating with Owen on my behalf. Now she's busy redefining her relationship with him, and doesn't have time to clue me in as to his daily developments, his constant growth and change.

It's odd, being a parent. It really does open new vistas of perspective on life and love and all that crap. And no matter how hard you try (note: I try pretty hard), you always wonder if you're doing it right. Not just are you taking care of your child in the right way, but are you feeling the right way about it? Are you crazy in love with him or her? Are you resentful in some small way of the intrusion on your time? Are you more tired than other people? Are you paying attention to the right hings. Are you horribly worried about how your kid will be in ten years? In twenty?

What I'm finding out is that, yes, you are.