TwoBusy

Before you head off for the weekend...

1. New DadCentric post. More blows against the Disney empire. Enjoy it with someone you love.

2. Check out In Three Words -- it's a mind game, it's a writing exercise, it's... well, it's just a cool, cool idea.

3. We finally saw Let The Right One In last night... a really interesting take on the vampire concept. Somehow we landed a version that was dubbed instead of subtitled (and I'll be clear: whoever was responsible for the Swedish-English translation and dubbing should be clubbed), but in the end that wasn't enough to detract from a movie that led us in all kinds of interesting and unexpectedly moving directions.

4. Sorry I'm kind of sucking at this posting thing. My contract job is keeping me irrationally busy and stressed out. While I'm grateful for the income, it's clearly detracting from my ability to lie around and think up stupid things to type online. Sorry about that.

5. On that note, I offer a little music to send you off happily into the weekend. For whatever reason, it's a bit less disturbing than the stuff I usually tack on in this space. My apologies: I promise I'll make time next week to find something really unsettling. In the meantime... enjoy.

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New Jersey: A User's Guide

Reflections following a long weekend visiting family in the Garden State...

• The Jersey Shore is many things to many people, and a lot of those things are (for better or for worse) (by which I mean: primarily for worse) defined by the Boardwalk experience: fried foods, trashy looking women, trashier looking guys sporting the Gotti 'do, boatloads of attitude and Yankees paraphernalia, and a consummate lack of peace and quiet. That being said, there are pockets of relative calm — and we were taken to one on Saturday. Just south of the nightmare that is Belmar, the shore abruptly becomes peaceful. Calm. You can actually hear the waves over the braying of Jersey accents and bad rock blaring out of flashy car stereos.

For almost an hour and a half, our kids - and their kid - played in the sand. Yelled and danced and chased each other around. Got their feet wet in the (f#@$ing freezing) water. Were not - as was the case last year - dissuaded from approaching said water by a thick layer of brown slime floating just feet from the shore.

It was close to 80 degrees on the Jersey Shore on Saturday. And for a little while, even though the calendar said April, it was midsummer for my kids. They were salt-splashed. Sun-soaked. Grinning, gleeful and happy beyond reason.

Nice.

• We stayed in a hotel about three miles from their house. A Marriott. I'd booked two rooms, but when we arrived we asked if we might reduce that to one room and just add a cot to the remaining two-queen room. Their answer: No. Why? "Because all of our cots have been stolen." Oh.

• On Sunday, my sister led us to some chain restaurant for lunch. I don't name it here because, honestly, I've forgotten the name — something horrifying and senior-dependent that doesn't exist in New England, thank god. Anyhow, about half an hour into the meal my daughter Butterfly started complaining that her tummy hurt and she needed to go potty. As designated potty bitch, I dutifully stood up and walked her over to the men's room. Unnervingly, she seemed to get more upset with each step we took, and by the time I finally got us into a stall she was crying. "Do you need to go potty, or are you going to be sick?" I asked. Her response: "I drank too much chocolate milk! I drank it too fast! I... (gagging noises)"

In a heartbeat, I pulled up the seat and leaned her over the toilet — and almost instantaneously, a giant wet ball of BLEAARRRRGGGGGHHHHH erupted from her digestive system and launched into the bowl. Thereby creating a phenomena not unlike that which causes tsunamis, wherein sudden, massive shifts of solid(ish) matter cause significant amounts of water to displace... and begin moving with great force and ferocity. In other words: she puked, and half a second later a big hearty bloomp of pukey toilet water launched up from the bowl and splashed into my eye.

Unfortunately, this did not mark the most disgusting part of the weekend.

• Do you know what's fun? When you stay at a hotel with young kids, and they get upset because they have to stay in separate rooms, and after a looooong day of driving and doing New Jersey things and finally getting to the room they take about 90 minutes to calm down, and then they finally pass out - at about 10pm, some 2 hours past normal bedtimes - only to be awakened howling some four hours later when several hundred profoundly drunken revelers return from a Jersey wedding and start yelling at each other in the hallways, slamming doors, puking in the elevator (although you don't discover this until the next morning) and generally reminding you of why Americans are hated around the world.

And by "fun," I actually mean the opposite of fun.

• At one point Sunday evening, as I was doing prep work for the dinner I was cooking as a thank you to my sister and her family, my brother-in-law walked by singing to himself. And it took me a minute to place it, just because the context was so... out of context, but I realized he was singing the Little Mermaid song "Part of Your World."

Um.

So I stopped him, and asked if I was indeed correct in thinking I was hearing what I was hearing. "Yes," he said. He loveslovesloves all the songs from that movie. "Really?" Really. Then he resumed singing and walked out the door to go play with his wife and son.

On the one hand, there's something that I completely respect about the fact that he honestly, legitimately and truly didn't give a fuck about what I thought: he loved the song, and wasn't going to be shy about it. On the other hand... The Little Mermaid?

• We left on Monday morning, and almost immediately upon pulling onto the fabulous Garden State Parkway were cut off - and I'm talking by inches here - by some Gotti-haired jackass with whom I instantaneously began a heated and energetic exchange of finger gestures. Which my kids enjoyed profoundly, until he pulled off at the next exit so he could get to his job as a fucknut.

Less than an hour later, we found ourselves mired in a terrible traffic jam in the Oranges. Just a complete dead stop on the highway. Awful. By that point, we'd already broken out the in-vehicle entertainment system, and the kids were watching a newly-purchased copy of The Jungle Book... when my other daughter Rabbit began complaining. This was, in and of itself, nothing unusual — she's an emotional girl, giving to sudden and extreme fits of upset at the drop of a hat, only to return to her normal state as a smiling little ball of sunshine a minute later.

But. She kept getting more and more upset. Saying she was thirsty, and that something and everything hurt, and that she wanted to be home, and that somebody was hitting her, and that she couldn't see the movie, and... her volume rose and rose, and the entire thing was becoming completely irrational, and TheWife was turned around and trying to calm her down when suddenly BLEAARRRRGGGGGHHHHH

And uuuuuuuuup came that morning's half-bagel, and cereal bar, and chocolate milk (goddamn you, chocolate milk) and... well, apparently just about everything she's ever eaten. All over herself, and her seat. In several great, wet, purging gushes.

As we sat there. In gridlock. On the Garden State Parkway, in Orange, New Jersey.

This is the definition of hell.

• About half an hour later, we were finally able to get to a rest stop. A tiny little gas station. We pulled in, extracted the poor little Rabbit, and while TheWife took her in to the bathroom to get her cleaned and changed I... well, I got to clean up the mess left behind. (All of this happening while the poor, horrified Hurricane sat just inches away, trying desperately not to get sick himself.)

Twenty minutes later, TheWife and a now near-naked Rabbit emerged, looking as though they were in a near-state of shock. I'd finished scrubbing as best I could, and while I opened the back (it's an SUV) so that TheWife could change Rabbit, she relayed to me with a shudder that the bathroom was the single most awful place she'd ever been and it was horrifying and beyond disgusting and - oh, yeah - she'd left something there, and could I go get it?

So I did. And...

Well. I won't get into detail, because what I saw defied description. But let the record show that the most revolting place in the entire world is the bathroom of the gas station at the rest stop just north of Orange, New Jersey. If you're ever given a choice between using that bathroom and, say, stabbing yourself in the eye with a fork, I'd go for the fork. No question.

• And then we got to drive for four hours in a car that smelled like vomit.

Coupla things

• New DadCentric post, in which I yell at cartoons. It's all in good fun.

• Speaking of which, I strongly encourage you to check out this DadCentric post from Holmes... great, great writing.

• Speaking of which, if you're not already doing so, start reading Woman in a Window. Seriously. Reading her makes me want to give up writing, because she's so good it makes me feel embarrassed for the crap I generate.

• So if I ever give up writing, you now know who to blame.

• On a completely unrelated note, I hope you all had a Happy Easter/Passover/weekend. We went to two ham-saturated Easter dinners on Saturday and Sunday nights, and subsequently brought home about 10lbs of leftover pig parts, potatoes and assorted vegetable-type things. Which we had as leftovers on Monday and Tuesday... but by yesterday, we didn't feel up to facing the remaining 8lbs of food. So, while I took the kids upstairs for a bath after dinner, TheWife decided to get rid of it all by... that's right: feeding it into the garbage disposal. Which choked. And spun. And choked.

The fun part is that the clog moved far enough into our plumbing that now not only is our kitchen sink stopped up, but it backfilled and kinda spurted out of our basement sink — subsequently leaving tiny little wet ham bits on the floor, on the wall, and all along one side of our washing machine.

• Which is why I'm now waiting for the Roto-dude to come to my house and make my plumbing work again.

• This isn't a problem for me schedule-wise, as my contract job is still chugging along... I'm not sure how it's going, but they keep giving me work and I keep getting paid, so we'll see how long it lasts. The good part is that I'm working from home most of the time, which frees me up to do stuff like... uh... this.

• There is also some news about my ex-company... but I'm going to have to think through it first before I say anything. Lots of ambivalent weirdness there.

A brief list of places I'd like to see before my twin daughters start dating and, subsequently, I drop dead.

1. New Zealand
It's not just a Conchords thing, although I'll admit that the show's blend of ultra-dry/absurdist humor only serves to heighten my expectations. I mean, what's not to like? First off, you've got some of the most insane landscapes in the world packed together into two neat little islands. All those insane vistas from the Lord of the Rings movies? That's that's exactly where I want to be. Right now. And what's more, I want to be looking at those vistas while drinking a nice glass of Sauvignon Blanc from NZ's Marlborough region. And when I finish that, I'll open a bottle of Marlborough Pinot Noir and suck that down as well. And then I'll burp a big, happy Kiwi burp and ride a sheep down the mountainside to whatever Kiwi village happens to be nearby, at which point I have little doubt that I'll walk into a pub and hear the next generation of Kiwipop and have my mind blown in all kinds of violent and fascinating ways.

(Kiwipop? Anyone? Verlaines? Chills? Straitjacket Fits? The Bats, fer crissake? Anyone?)

2. Iceland
Look, I'm no science guy, but there's so much cool stuff going on in Iceland from both a geological and evolutionary standpoint (and, in a not-entirely unrelated development, a cultural standpoint) that I can't imagine that it's anything other than completely fascinating. Geology? That's right: fascinating. Because if you were to suck all the water off the planet (note: I strongly discourage this) you'd discover that running the entire length of the center of the Atlantic Ocean from north to south is this enormous phenomenon called the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Speaking plate tectonically - you don't mind if I speak plate tectonically, do you? - the floor of the Atlantic is two different plates. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge is where these two plates meet in what's called a divergent boundary, where new magma flows up, forms this mountainous ridge, and ultimately pushes the two plates outward. Iceland? Sits right on top of a hotspot on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge — and, as a direct result, is home to some of the most fascinating volcanic activity you'll find outside of Hawaii. Which means crazy geysers, new mini-islands suddenly springing up off the coast... all kinds of cool stuff.

Plus! Plus! It's way wicked far north, but the North Atlantic Current keeps it more temperate than you'd expect — which means you get this crazy combination of cold weather phenomena (like glaciers) in the midst of a climate far more mild than you'd think possible in a place just south of the Arctic Circle. And! And! It's very isolated, which means you've got evolution doing weird things just like it does in the Galapagos, plus all kinds of crazy wildlife in the surrounding ocean (Whales! Fish! Greeland sharks!).

Factor in the knowledge that this is the place that spawned Sigur Ros, and I'm hooked. (Albeit more than a little afraid that I'd be forced to eat herring at some point. Gag. Gagging. Am now gagging.)

3. Scotland
I once spent a year in Ireland, and despite the fact that I had two Glaswegian roommates and ultimately made my way across the Irish Sea to both England and the European mainland... I never got to Scotland. Which I've always regretted. Hell, if it weren't for all these damned kids and the fact that I don't have a job, I'd grab TheWife and head over there right now. And why not? Great music (Trashcan Sinatras, The Blue Nile, Idlewild, Jesus and Mary Chain, Teenage Fanclub, Mogwai... the list goes on and on), great landscapes, great cities (I had friends in both Edinburgh and Glasgow while I was in Ireland, and was subsequently sold on both), impenetrable accents, and - if Monty Python is to be believed - a great athletic tradition.

Works for me!

4. Wrigley Field
To be honest, I'm kind of embarassed I haven't been there yet — and clearly, I need to make a pilgrimage. Along similar lines, I'm gonna need to catch a game at Pac Bell Park (which was still under construction when we moved out of San Francisco) (and which I'm now seeing is no longer called Pac Bell Park. Stupid corporate licensing.), Dodger Stadium and PNC Park in Pittsburgh, which I'm told is lovely despite the fact that it tends to host Pirates games.

5. Tierra del Fuego
Because it's the end of the earth. And if there's anything cooler than that, I don't know about it.

Anyhow. Not a complete list... but a start. How 'bout you? What do you want to see before I drop dead?

Meanwhile...

In case you missed them, here are a coupla stupid things I put on DadCentric — one of which features ghosts and Santa, the other of which doesn't.

on the other side of the equation

I am bathed in light
surrounded
and at once I imagine what it is to feel warm
lost calm happy free
and in that moment, in the distance between my teeth and
tongue
I taste the fusion of tired stars
I count the motes of dust that hang in the air
I breathe and
dream the quiet press of my lungs brought vivid on
solar winds...

so

this is how it must feel
to live as one of the chosen
elevated from the crawl of days into a different air
where the flickering of lash against light
ripples outward in great joyous waves of elegance and grace
and all that was broken comes whole

healed

as if by time and mercy
the chasms might close
and the cold waters within give way to new life

as if

there were an always to be believed in
an evermore just ahead
hovering somewhere in the faint motion
beyond the depths of my perception
somewhere
you could reach

to

find there, intertwined among the deep swirls
and tender hairs
tiny wrinkles and hints of decay
a touch that matched your own capacity for

love.

I am bathed in light.
I feel the moment passing.
But I wish, I wish: this, now,
forever.

Six

 

It seems impossible to me that you are now six years old.

everything here is yellow and green

Nine songs for a new season:

1. Springenfall — Died Pretty
A thousand years ago, I spent a summer living in a welfare motel on Cape Cod. It was great fun. I spent my mornings working at a local bookstore, stocking the shelves and trying not to disturb the well-heeled vacationers who prowled the aisles. Afternoons and evenings - most of them, at least - were spent a few miles away, churning out pizza and subs. D'you know how enjoyable it is to spend an impossibly humid summer in a place with no air conditioning? Imaging that joy redoubled by a job that requires you to repeatedly thrust half your body into an enormous 400+ degree oven dozens of times each hour. That's a feel-good experience, guaranteed.

Every couple of weeks, I'd find myself with a day off — a complete stretch of daylight where I wasn't trading my hours for minimum wage. Given that spending this time in my swinging bachelor pad wasn't really an option... I'd get in my car and drive. Explore. Sometimes my ambitions would take me to the Lower Cape — to soak up the colors and energy of P-town, or the more gentle and genteel ambiance of Wellfleet. Other days, I'd head over to Woods Hole. Watch the ferries roll out of the harbor, bellies stretched with families on their way to Nantucket or Martha's Vineyard. Imagining myself standing on the deck, my arm draped over the shoulder of someone who might love me.

Or I would jump onto Route 28 and see where it took me — creeping along the road, my tiny import hidden among the minivans and SUVs, the air thick with the cadence of cicadas and sounds of a world at play. Occasionally I'd find myself at a ballpark, and take in a Cape Cod League game (go Kettleers!). Other times, I'd meander into Chatham or Hyannis and find someplace to park. Get out and walk around. Pretend that I was like everyone else. Like I was free.

Hyannis - and the village of Hyannisport - is best known as the playground of the Kennedy clan. It's where their famed compound is located; where Jack and the boys played football on the lawn, learned to sail off the shore, grew up and entered the world and too often died young. That was the other Hyannis; mine was a crowded downtown filled with t-shirt shops and restaurants, motels and ice cream parlors.

And a record store. Where I found - for $2.99 - a used cassette of Died Pretty's Lost. I didn't know anything about them, other than the fact that the band name and album title described my state of mind more perfectly than anything I might have imagined possible.

I remember sliding the cassette into my tapedeck when I got back to my car. Unsure but excited by this new discovery, eager to experience how it sounded, how it felt, to be lost and to die pretty.

The answer: it felt right. There was one line from Springenfall - I’m wrapping up this empty world and I will wallow in it all - that might as well have been tattooed across my chest. This music knew me.

I remember it. I remember it all.

2. The Colour of Spring — Mark Hollis
Once upon a time, Mark Hollis' reedy, expressive voice was the sole component that linked Talk Talk's early days as a post-Duran Duran synthpop band to mid-period successes in reinventing the sound of Roxy Music's Avalon - the time when I first discovered them - to their late period of experimentation, where their groundbreaking Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock transcended attempts at categorization while simultaneously laying the groundwork for what would, eventually, become the post-rock movement.

A few years later, Hollis released his one and only solo album. It features this song, which shares a name with Talk Talk's third album (although, to add to the confusion, that album does not feature a song by this name).

It is perhaps the quietest album ever recorded. It's more than that; it's fragile. It's the slender veil of mist ghosting over grass, in the moments just before the rising tide of sunlight. It is music that is easily overlooked and requires attention to be appreciated — and that rewards that effort with a rare and ethereal kind of beauty.

3. Spring — Rites of Spring
Rites of Spring was Guy Piciotto's band before he joined Ian Mackaye in Fugazi, and while I enjoy Fugazi as much as anyone... I honestly don't know that they ever put together an album that, as a whole, is as powerful and cathartic as End on End. This is music that was emo before emo became a dirty word: combining the muscular chaos and breakneck speed of American hardcore with thoughtful, intensely personal lyrics and passionate vocals to create something immediate, and emotional, and truly and honestly goddamn moving.

4. Rite Of Spring — Angels & Airwaves
And now I'll completely subvert any illusions that I might be cool by admitting that I really enjoy this band. Although I'll also admit that I'd enjoy them a lot more if Tom DeLonge's lyrics didn't suck.

To be clear: they really suck.

5. Rite Of Spring — Bill Morrissey
First off, allow me to clarify: beyond the title, this song has nothing in common with Angels & Airwaves. It's 1:51 of Bill Morrissey sounding as spritely and chipper as Bill Morrissey ever sounds — his broken croak of a voice chugging through a sweet little love song about a girl who loves the Beatles and the Dave Clark Five. Which is something of a departure for Morrissey (no, not that Morrissey), whose songs generally come off like something akin to Russell Banks or Raymond Carver set to music... but no less charming a song for that departure.

6. Love Goes Home To Paris In The Spring — The Magnetic Fields
Count me among those who loved, loved, loved the Magnetic Fields back in the days before Stephin Merrit decided he was a genius, recorded 69 Love Songs and stopped being any fun. Remember those days? When listening to the Magnetic Fields meant wonderfully hyperliterate, irony-drenched lyrics delivered in a deadpan, near-monotone voice laid over kinda cheesy-sounding synths and drum tracks, creating something strange and remarkable and great? I do. I still remember sitting in my tiny attic bedroom in the first apartment I ever rented (not counting welfare motels), listening to The Charm of the Highway Strip over and over again, wondering "who is this guy?" even as I found new reasons for delight with each new listen.

It feels like a long time ago. (Probably because it was.)

7. Spring Rain — The Go-Betweens
Music nerds always point to The Go-Betweens as one of the great coulda-woulda-shoulda-been-huge bands of the 80s... an Australian band that released a series of albums that sent reviewers into great heaving paroxysms of rapture, none of which ever made even the faintest dent in the Americas. Songwriters Robert Forster and Grant McLennan went on to release several acclaimed solo albums (including McLennan's Horsebreaker Star, one of the great lost treasures of the 90s) before reuniting for pair of new Go-Betweens albums in 2000 and 2005. Unfortunately, just as they were (finally) starting to gain a little mainstream traction... Grant McLennan died of a sudden heart attack in May of 2006.

Spring Rain is one of their best-loved songs, and rightfully so: it captures their blend of edgy melodicism and sunny jangle in a charming and memorable 3:06. In another world, this is what I would've been listening to as I drove around Cape Cod that summer — sun on my face, wind in my hair, fingers bouncing on the steering wheel.

Young and happy.

8. Spring Provides — Matt Pond PA
I'm baffled by the fact that Matt Pond PA isn't tremendously successful. Why? What's not to like? Great melodies? Thoughtful lyrics? What? Tell me you can't imagine hearing this song on the radio and liking it. Somebody explain this to me.

9. April - Chapterhouse
You knew that sooner or later I was going to slip some shoegaze in here.

I'm not going to apologize for it, either. Just crank up the volume, close your eyes, and let the waves of sound wash over you. Consider it a musical colonic, only without the invasive properties.