A Way to Close out the Year

Fast forward Thanksgiving to Xmas. Easily one of the better holidays with selling a 2 ½ old on all the nuances & mysteries surrounding Jolly Ol’ St. Nick. She was a tad disappointed, though, thinking Santa was supposed to hand deliver her doll house & tea sets in person. As usual, the rest went with a blur of food, drink, family & friends.

Then cometh the bonus gift of the year. A week or so before Christmas we found out we were pregnant with number two. Stemming back from the last pregnancy, we knew we always had potentially risky beginnings so we wouldn’t tell Maggie until we knew the ship was steady. The results from the first appointment were on the spot. The sack had formed, she was pregnant. Today we would go for the first big checkup, the check for fetus & heartbeat. It was there.

And so was another one. And then almost a third (an empty yoke sack).

So there it is. We are expecting fraternal twins. And if it is two more girls, may god have mercy on my soul.

What a year 2008 has turned out to be: a master’s degree, a 1,500 mile move, a change of profession, purchase of a brand new home & then we closed it out with a set of twins (and a near miss at triplets). What a year 2009 will be.

Palinesque Sentencing

Read an article today about the tension between the old GOP and the “new” movement. Of course the article rested on Mrs. Palin, and the polemic between some of the GOP wanting to euthanize the monster it created, and those who feel she is the face of the party—that she is the new and now of our culture. If anything, I thought the recent election represented, at least, that the culture was shifting, but the cynical side of me thinks perhaps those believing Palin is the face of the franchise may have a point.

So here are some notes from the under-intestine, and all replete with Palinesque logic systems:

From college Americans 20-24yo:

“In any type of collaborative knowledge project, some degree of government should be perhaps required”

“Certain things just wouldn’t function without a leader, like in a workplace. It couldn’t function without a manager figure like how a classroom wouldn’t function without an eraser at the chalkboard”

“It would not be economically efficient to spend so much money on a fake leg when a cadaver leg could be used for so much less, especially when we have so many homeless john does dying in New York. We can harvest in the cities.”

“In this world people should not be controlled by the government just like Fukuyama states with Biotechnology, but politics should be able to control peoples emotions because if they do people would all be the same and life would be more fun than being told what to do by governments.”

“Scientists believe that human beings just go to school to learn just in textbooks and take tests and become professionals without understanding that humans also go to church and enjoy other extracurricolor activities like hunting in the snow”


I refrained from any inter-commentary on this one. Too easy.

Change

With tonight's sweeping message of change, I hope some is set aside for the process of voting. I questioned all the rhetorical bombardment about how far we have came in the last few centuries as I stood in line (for the second time) while a 95yo lady hand wrote my name on a spiral notebook to log me into the "books." The old lady, who was apparently hard of hearing, was having my name dictated by another older lady who only stopped once for a piss break. There simply has to be a better way. This is only a step-up from a show of hands or getting a section of the bleachers to cheer at a pep rally. For an encore, the voting booth (1 of 2) was in a church near the pulpit. On the wall was a blue & purple tapestry with the misspelling: Redeemption.

So it goes...

New Hobby

Zimnizzle has been emailing me random quotes (possible blurbs?) from current students that sometimes make me poop a little when I read them. They also remind me of those moments during graduate school when the morning light of South Florida—pale, mocking, smiley—fell in bars over my desk, the tumultuous stacks of student papers. And then I would get that golden sentence, the one of utter, joyful incomprehensibility. Not a sentence of brilliance, but the sentence that provoked—How in the hell did this human being decide these words should be aligned together in a linear fashion? Or as one of Cory’s students suggested: “All the miseries of war are like moist toilets on the eyes” (I’m paraphrasing here, but not with the moist toilets on the eyes—a phrase I question should belong in any language).

I preface this because I truly miss those sentences, sentences I swore I would compile one day and publish as an English teacher potty book. Furthermore, since I rarely have anything of real biographical interest to blog about, I figured now would be a good time for me to dig through the sepulture of student writings I have saved on the HD for shits and giggles. I’m not quite sure if I forced my students properly to waive their intellectual property rights on their “writings,” but I’m quite sure (from their work) that they aren’t out on the internet or the real world reading for fun. My students would never read this even if I assigned it in class and tattooed the address on their privates. So like any aging Jackdaw, it’s time to spread out my worthless treasures in the nest and look at them.

To kick this off, I’ll start with some lines from an essay responding to some Foucault’ Fo’ Sho. Note: No edits have been made. No animals have been violated in the reproduction.

“After reding Michel Foucault’s essay, “Panopticism”, I understood that I may not or may be being really watched but it is the allusion of being watched, or I could very well have someone watching me. Panopticism is all around me.”

Eat your heart out Joe “the plumber” McCarthy. “Reding” I won’t touch. I was always stuck on the “allusion of being watched.” It has something poetically possible with its brain knotting logic. Being watched by something that isn’t really there? Or knowing you are not under watch, but an implication of being watched that nudges the possibility of being watched? Maybe that is the suffocating glory of panopticism, or more precisely, how panopticism is all around me.

“In school I would always notice that all the desks in the classroom are mostly the same, and all look alike. Panoptism is every where in school.”

Um…yeah. Had no idea the desk manufactures were in on it too.

“The teacher can see the whole classroom but the students cannot.”

That works on so many levels. Deep.

“Christian churches have a wordy panoptic affect on the Christians.”

Wordy came to mind many times when reading this essay. The string of Christian, wordy and affect is different.

Last one, I promise:

“Connected with the prisoners the Christians do not know if God is really watching but it is the suggestion of being watched, hence the panopticism and those who like religion”

No, this isn’t out of context. This was a self-standing conclusion. Those who have taught freshman English know that getting a robust conclusion is damn near impossible. The close as you come is a copy and pasted introduction. Other than that, I can’t unpack this last quote. I was sort of there with 'Christians connected to prisoners', but the last hurricane of logic left me feeling like the student who can’t see the classroom.

Moving to Surburbia

The longer the spans between blogs, the longer it seems to find a starting place. So here goes the thirty-day tour-de-force.

The Gulf hackle raisers, Gustav and Ike, the Storms That Will End All Storms, came and went with little fuss. The new job is moving along well and I’ve been doing a great deal of graphic design with some expensive software I know little about. My role is starting to crystallize: everything document related is me—product reviews, sales pitches, savings presentations, business letters, logo creation, tutorials, etcetera. It’s one of the first times in my life I drive to work not really knowing what I will be doing or trying to do that day. That’s not a complaint.

Other news is the purchase of a new house. Here are a couple pics.

Jean and I have historically moved fast on things like this. From first thinking to buying was about a week. We will close on Oct 24^th but want to move that up to the 17^th.

Between the storms and buying the house, Centenary hosted their annual Book Bizarre, arguably one the main reasons I moved back here. I picked up a collection of Carver, Cheever and three Beckett novels. I grabbed some Faulkner (Light in August, The Unvanquished, Requiem for a Nun, The Wild Palms) to complete my collection. Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills, Dubus’ Dancing After Hours, and Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time were some cheap snags on authors I had been on the fence about. Also found an original copy of Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, a new staple edition to the toilet library. There were a dozen more I can’t name offhand. All of it came to about $8. One criticism of the Bizarre, though. The sale was at a large gymnasium, chock-full of tables with the bleachers retreated. Around 100 tables and +15,000 books (they estimated)—all of this—and not 1 book of poetry. The books are all donated. This explains the biting sarcasm and overriding anger I notice in every poet I’ve known.

Yukon Ho!

For once, I don’t have to spend a few minutes pondering an excuse for not blogging. I have a job, and a real one this time. I actually wake up early, go somewhere for most of the day, and then come home. I got on as a tech writer for a really American company. We sell drugs and guns. We also make the technology for people to buy those guns and drugs, which is where I come in. I work with a team of programmers—code ninjas—as they are often nicknamed. In short, they build software and I build web authoring (the stuff that flies open when you hit the Help button), or at least that’s what I’m attempting to do.

I’ve always thought of myself as pretty techno-geeky, but I’m clanking through the Nordic Bronze Age compared to the know-how of some of these guys. I enjoy it, though. My love for minimalism may very well pay off.

Some shots from the hip.

Jean was in Canada the last few days (and as good timing works, Maggie gets bit on the eyelid by a mosquito in the night, and wakes with it swollen shut. Got some nice looks from the folks in town when I was out and about with her). I then got a voicemail from Jean mentioning that she had called her mother about “the storm,” and they had made plans to leave New Orleans, if need be. My reaction: What storm? I pulled up the radar and found Gustav, the loose tropical depression, at best, hanging over Cuba. For a second I thought maybe it was a message that was lost in the air some years ago before Katrina. This couldn’t have been the storm I was looking at on the radar. I called Jean back and she confirmed that she was speaking of Gustav. To her credit, she was in the boondocks of Canada and the only information that made it that way was some micowaved media mush. Hours later I was at the drive through buying chicken fingers at Cane’s. It was taking forever and the drive-up window person apologizes, claiming that the system was running slow because of the “storm.”

I said, “It stopped raining hours ago. It’s crystal clear out here.”

She said, “No, the big storm, Gustav.”

I said, “That’s still way, way down there.”

“I know. Our computers run off our main office down in Baton Rouge,” she said. (I won’t even go into how many other things are wrong about that answer besides basic physics.)

Maybe there is another Baton Rouge in the Haiti, I think to myself. There was a pretty strong French influence there at one time.

I mutter something to Maggie about the human race, and whip on home only to find a flier taped to my door from the apartment manager. It’s an evacuation plan. A fucking evacuation plan for us living in Shreveport roughly 300 miles from the coast.

What kind of culture of fear have we become? I read a headline on Google: New Orleans Plans Mass Evacuation, Braces for Catastrophic Hurricane. Jeeez, maybe this is serious I think. Then on about the 4^th line of the “news” article it reads that experts say the storm could hit from the inner panhandle of Florida to southern Texas, and could be anywhere from a Cat 2-5 hurricane. WTF? So they are saying that the storm (that’s already in the gulf) will hit somewhere else in the gulf? And then the storm could be just about any size or shape that hurricanes can be? This is news? I feel so embarrassed when I read things like this.

It’s bad enough hearing them speak with an air of disappointment when a storm misses someone, but this is a new low by ramping up weather possibilities in the same sensationalists manners of all other journalisms. What’s next? Pollen levels? Maybe plain old oxygen, since it is the chemical that causes cell aging and destruction. We’ll soon be on oxygen alerts and conservation. Breath shallow and less often, Timmy, we are Code Blue right now. Lots of air out there today.

I remember my beginner courses in journalism and propaganda in grade school. Some of the first things taught were tools of bad journalism, bad tactics, and using them was merely the benthic feeding ways of tabloid magazines. I’m not naïve enough to believe that our respected sources of information haven’t drawn upon those tactics in the past, but we seem to be in a Golden Age of them now. What was once unethical and unprofessional has become the preferred and only viable tactics. Red herrings and false analogies are probably still taught in those beginning courses, but aren’t taught as cheap, discrediting devices to be avoided.

Then I stumbled over another great article to end my night. I know, I know, I shouldn’t be reading TIME news to start with, but today I came across a gem. It seems the FBI nabbed their bionutcase for the anthrax incident, an incident that had fallen from my radar. I couldn’t make it through the first paragraph when the writer exposed what she thought was the overwhelming evidence in the case:

“there were electronic records documenting Ivins' late-night sojourns in the lab, e-mails revealing a mind wracked by paranoia and an inventory of a November 2007 FBI search of his home, which turned up a paperback copy of Albert Camus's novel The Plague.”

The Plague. Our new Catcher in the Rye, I guess. I have both books on my shelf so Bradbury’s library police should come busting through any minute now. This is one of the lamest attempts at taking a kidney punch at literature readers and the constant American paranoia towards the intellectual. The irony of this jab. The Plague is essentially about pervading the preoccupation with dread, suffering, anxieties, about the need to act instead of wallowing in rat feces and hopelessness—unless I totally misread the thing—the old cliché of living on your feet instead of dying on your knees. In fact, I felt the book may have been a little too optimistic at times, a little heavy handed for my taste. And it wouldn’t be that far of a stretch to transplant the plague with something like terrorism if a modern reader chooses to do so. It’s a sort of call-to-arms, but in the opposite direction this reporter, Laura Fitzpatrick, clumsily tried to insinuate. In short, we have a work of literature that maps ideas on how a culture can surmount, or should at least try to surmount, mass hysteria and paranoia, but, in turn, Fitzpatrick name-tosses it out there as linked to the support of terrorism. Thus, adding more lubrication for the fear machine, propagating more paranoia, and spreading more media plague. Abracadabra, Presto!

Around 9pm, Jean finally gets in from Canada (apparently there was no delay from the storm). I can’t help but think maybe Maggie and I should have just met her up there. Yukon Ho!

Transition complete

Officially now moved to Shreveport. Even the final boxes have been unpacked, those last-packed boxes that are ridiculously eclectic—a toothbrush, a couch pillow, DVDs, silverware, power cords for unknown gadgets. The steamy sweat-sock air of South Florida wasn’t escaped. On the move-in-day it was 106 degrees in S-port, 99 at about 930 one night. Maggie was a trooper through it all, probably more relaxed than any of us. She does ask about her old friends, her school, some places we use to visit.

The new apartment is surprisingly much nicer than ours in Deerfield, and also unbelievably cheaper. I thought I had a haunt in my new office. Every few minutes late at night I’d here this deep breathing sound from something large and sleeping. Jean came in to confirm the sound. Jean then dispelled it when she noticed the sprinkler sweeping the side of the apartment. So there goes my ghost.

I’m slowly getting back into the swing of things. Reading, writing, thinking. I have an interview tomorrow for an entry level position as a tech writer at a pharmaceutical company. Hopefully that goes well and I can be a productive citizen again. Even though it is still suffocating hot, you can sense fall closing in and the prospect of winter. It’s been four years since I’ve had to don on a coat and gloves. My writing is not one of color, sun, and puffy white clouds, making it difficult for me to write in South Florida. I can’t wait until the first run of overcast days of damp and unmoving air.

Operation Phoenix

One of the marks of the recently retired punk band Good Riddance was dubbing in political speech clips into their songs. Some were then subverted, and some stood as overtures for the call-to-arms music which usually followed. I have a scratchy copy of Operation Phoenix, and one clip drove me nuts over its source. I had a faint memory of the speech from a sociology class. Thanks to the Google and YouTube machine, I finally found it. Here it is:



I think this goes well with coffee in the morning.

And speaking of questioning the machine, I think there needs to be a large scale investigation into the company of Kraft, particularly the Macaroni and Cheese department. I have a hard time believing enriched starches and powdered cheese sauce mix can create such a universal good for children. Yellow 5 and Yellow 6 must have some addictive properties.

Animatronics

I’ve added animatronics to my personalized hell. My new hell would be stuck on “…it’s a small world” with animatronic clowns singing a commencement speech (in musical) to the tune of “…it’s a small world” with the only chance of escape is to grade giant stacks of freshmen papers on the topic of globalization. Maybe to boot would be having one of the real life Disney princesses (which is difficult at times to distinguish from an animatronic) as my ferryman/ferrywoman to my hell.

Despite the inherent creepiness I find in much of Disney, it’s still a kick ass place to go. Maggie was able to do much more this time around and we covered most of the Animal Kingdom and Magic Kingdom easily. It’s interesting to see where Disney is headed: Country Jamboree by the hillbilly bears (it baffles me that is still running) verses Monsters Inc. Laugh Floor. The Monsters Inc. is our hope to conquer the animatronic. The Laugh Floor is digitized puppetry with real improv comedians working behind the screen, creating real interactivity—no mawkish puppetry, no pneumatic hisses when turning, no clicking eyeballs and klacking mouths here.

In recent weeks Maggie has been into “scaring” (I use the quotations on purpose here), and being scared. She has also become truly skittish on some things so we weren’t sure how she would react to some of Disney. She went through the Haunted Mansion reserved and skeptic. At the end she turned to me and said “more ghosts?” That’s my girl.

I started reading Diane Shoemperlen’s Forms of Devotion. Not really a Disney time kind of read, but it is a book with pictures. Usually I don’t like books that juxtapose images (most look like eighteenth century anatomical or religious sketches or engravings) with its prose. The distance she creates between the two is rather nice. Many times one (image or prose) doesn’t seem to foreground the other, nor do they seem wily-nilly. Much to go in the book though. Luke warm on it at the moment.

Stuck on the Covers

The first time I stayed awake plus 24 hours was due to Skate or Die and Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out on a rented NES. Almost twenty years later, video games still have a purgatorial effect on me. 9:30pm, blink blink, 2:30am.

Consciously avoiding any intellectual projects, I’ve been stuck on covers, cover songs that is. It started when I picked up a CD of cover songs by Ministry succinctly named “Cover Up.” Some good ones, some laughable ones, some which were terrible, terrible because the original was terrible. (Their version of “Radar Love” will soon be staple in strip clubs across America. A thankful refreshing.) And this is where I get confused. The term “cover” doesn’t always make sense. By remaking a song already on record, isn’t that an act of “uncovering?” But then if you take a crappy song and overlay it with a new and legitimate version, that seems more like a cover? This seems like a true cover, like when a cat rakes litter over their shit and the crystals absorb all the toxins giving us the chemically-reacted mountain rain scent. But like the kitty litter scent, it only smells “better” because we know how bad the original smelled.

I’ve always been a sucker for the good cover, though. With a better organized music system, I was able to pin down roughly 180 cover songs in my collection. Punk bands noticeably were responsible for roughly 70% of what I had. Through them runs a pattern of subversion, songs that are wonderfully irreverent. Me First and the Gimme Gimmes are probably responsible for most of these. Shot through with punk energy and subtle sarcasm, many of the “classics” become laughable if they were not already. The Gimme Gimmes also have their moments of cover magic when they simply produce a good version without apparent subversion (Cash’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down” comes to mind). I’ve noticed another strain that I don’t care for, the "karaoke" cover. I notice this with many tribute records where a band basically plays the same song the same way with the only difference being the musical technology--Wow, you played a Presley song through a Marshall amp and added crunch distortion.

One that really disturbed me was a Misfits tribute record. There were some good ones, but some sapped all the dirty, garaged, and literal slashed-speaker sound out to replace with clean guitars and distinguishable snare drums. The worse I have is a cover of The Bangles' “Manic Monday” by a band called Relient K. This version was pure turd polishing. It looked like a promising trashing song, but quietly performed it much like the Bangles. One version of that on record was enough.

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When I started this post I thought I would say something about dead George Carlin (I see the Stygian did one, though). I re-read Napalm and Silly Putty and Brain Droppings as a personal tribute. My conclusion was that any elegiac thoughts may cause a haunting from Mr. Carlin. So long George, and thanks for all the stuff.

Finding something to do

So at 30 years old, I can still pass a Marine Corps physical fitness test—by a hair and probably a beat or two away from a heart attack. Question is whether I can keep it up. In regards to fizzling out, both my writing and reading have been on a strange hiatus. The writing feels sort of deserved after the brain-sapping thesis. If creativity can be compared to ejaculation, a romantic notion, then I’m currently spent. The reading hiatus is more bothersome for me since I am now free to rummage through books of my choice without a tower on my shelf that I “ought” to be reading. Much of it seems to stem from a paralyzing wave of sudden downtime and the inability to find a starting point: “then how should I begin.” There are several Jean Rhys books I want to read including a less taxing re-read of Good Morning, Midnight. I started Ames’ Wake Up, Sir, a raconteur novel derivative of Wodehouse but darker at times, and often less funny. The differences Ames has injected from the Jeeves and Bertie Wooster sagas has yet to impress, and unless a distinguished story arises besides being dirtier and more grotesque, this book may sail away to the land of the unfinished. I am also giving it more time because it has simply been quite some time since I read an organized narrative. The dark arts of poetry and “vanguard” short fiction may have caused irreparable damage on my reading habits.

I seem to be inching closer to the federal jobs. I got a notice yesterday that my resume package (package is a good word to describe all the shit you have to put together) was sent up for a print media job for the Army in Colorado Springs. Colorado Springs…that I can do. My name is still in the mix for a job with the NIH in Maryland. That one is much brainier than the Colorado gig. I’m surprised I even made the candidacy. Looks like a busy ending to June. Besides preemptive packing, there will be a Disney trip, and then Eric and Shannon are flying in for a few days.

Going to eat mudbugs

Going to skadattle to Louisiana this weekend. On Saturday we are having a birthday party (v.1) for Maggie. She is starting to get the concept of a birthday although she still sings Happy Birthday every time she eats cake or ice cream. The birthday party is also a crawfish boil. It’s been a while since I’ve eaten my favorite bottom-dwelling, caraspaced, arthropod. I finished packing today and feel embarrassed on how “electronic” I have become. Packed was: portable DVD player, ipods, laptop, digital video camera, digital camera, cellphones, and a rat nest of chargers (which I’m sure I am still missing 1 or 2).

My “squaring away” continues, cutting into my posting. I’ve managed to get every scrap of music I own onto my computer and loosely organized. I noticed a slight rub today as Itunes automatically coded recent imports into mp4s. While I understand mp4 is better than mp3, it doesn’t work in my car. Hopefully I can figure out an easy way to convert.

I need to start keeping my camera handy. On the interstate the other day I zoomed by a wonderful scrap of American culture. Here is the image: Toyota pick-up, lowered, early 90s model with only the “YO” part of the logo left on the back; one-tail light; expensive wheel rims on one side; FEAR GOD bumper sticker; fake bullet-hole stickers on the back windshield; 17” Blue LCD screen…on the dash…with some action movie playing; and then my favorite…blue florescent lights shining from the undercarriage. The latter was my favorite because as I whizzed by the 55mph driver, there was only one headlight working. We all have our own criteria for the word “priority,” I suppose. Encounters like this make me think about the ongoing evolution/intelligent design/creationism debate. The debate is a waste of time. Evolution is over. And I’ll close on that optimistic note.

Headed West (for now)

Because the bureaucratic speed of the federal government hasn’t seemed to change since I was last employed by it, we have made plans to move back to Louisiana, likely Shreveport. We hope to be there by August 1^st. It looks as though the fedjob process will take longer than expected, so I will need to find a filler. So it makes sense to take a filler job in an area where the cost of living is much lower. Biggest upshot is that Maggie is around the rest of the family for a while. Downside is that I actually hate to move, despite my track record. If the fedjobs pull through in the summer, those plans will be nulled. With my luck, they will call right after I get settled in Shreveport.

My office is cleaned out. All student work I’m not legally bound to hold onto has been trashed. All the grad work and thesis drafts are in a tub that weighs the same as rhinoceros. If nothing ever comes of my work, I think I can claim responsibility of at least some sort of environmental damage.

I received copies of my thesis via Lulu last week. Half the price of the university stuff and without that awful blue binding. Plus you can customize the cover through MS publisher, or Photoshop as I did:

Maggie was able to feed the ducklings at the pond yesterday. She almost caught a nip from the voracious warthead duck that flanked her during the feeding. These ducks remind of the seagulls in Finding Nemo, only dumber and more aggressive.

Inaugural Post

Our life is frittered away by detail, says Thoreau. With the MFA and its accompanied disillusionments in the bag, I have been working on some simplification of my own as I look for a new job which is a full-time job itself. I’ve written so many CVs/resumes that I’m almost tempted to log in “writing resumes” under “key skills.” The simplifying process started with Jean’s anticipated honey-do list—all the things we’ve been letting slide while I bivouacked in my office experimenting in the dark arts. After remodeling Maggie’s room via IKEA, we worked through all the other bourgeois hoardings in the house. I turned the attack to my computer. I think I have about 4 blogs, a LJ or two, a Good-Reads, maybe a facebook (I’m not sure). In sum, I dumped everything I could still remember the password on. The others will join the insane amount of net sterility out there. Does the internet have a John/Jane Doe system for web pages, blogs, etc? So from scratch, here comes my sole new blog (the Stygian, of course, is still there…needing much attention). Another reason for cleaning up my digital clutter is because I’m inevitably shutting down shop again to set up again…somewhere. So this time I’m trying to keep better contact with both past and present.

In other news, I’ve finally went Ipod. I grabbed the Shuffle. I couldn’t convince myself of anything larger. My life is quite music orientated, but I can’t forsee the ipod upstarting my existing fixes: 20gig MP3 in car, music library on PC. If I’m not in my car or at my PC, then I’m not listing to music. The Shuffle is for—*cough*—because I’m working out and running again. The longest I could ever foresee me running would be a marathon (a new goal), and that is 26miles, roughly four hours at an average pace. I think the running amount of time for the Shuffle I grabbed is right over a day. The iTunes interface/program rocks. My library is quite eclectic, so the random playlists are fun. As I’ve typed this post, I’ve heard Social Distortion (enjoying less as I get older), Slipknot (a band I’m still giving a chance), a string quartet covering Tool's Aenima, Mephaskapheles, something from Alexandro Bartos (didgeridoo), and a 7-Seconds’ cover of 99 Balloons. I had checked in to iTunes a few years back and was turned off. The body of music was shallow for the stuff I am most interested in. Different river now. I have scoured the net for Funeral Oration—the sickly underrated band from Amsterdam—and iTunes has the whole caboodle. 30$ up in smoke.

On the homefront, Maggie and I are spending another summer together at the moment. Pool, beach, parks, zoos, the Bee Movie, Jungle Book, Bug’s Life, Monsters Inc., Robots, imaginary cooking, endless hide-and-seek, Old McDonald, chicken nuggets, mac-n-cheese, watermelon, strawberries, feeding ducks, feeding fish, Butterfly World, jumping on the bed, Jamba Juice, Wocket in My Pocket, Fox-in-Socks and checking on the moon every thirty minutes it seems. Game on. Soon the Flickr will be up. Tomorrow she starts her first full day in her new “room” (2-3yr olds). They are potty training. She doesn’t do it, but makes Duckie, her half-blanket, half-stuffed animal, use the potty.