Three Six (And Rising)

Realized something fairly interesting this morning; that even if I were able to relieve myself of lamentable human drama as I have wanted (and having your primary focus be a 4 week old baby really helps in that), I'd miss it a little bit.

I thought of the gentle and sensitive man who taught a room full of ruffian fathers-to-be how to diaper a doll, and how he said that when an infant gets past that near-constant screaming and shrieking stage, you will kind of miss it. I mentally called bullshit at the time, but now I think I kind of get it.

I miss waking up to presents to open, I miss angel food cake and Skate King parties possibly called off for snow. But then I think that I'm okay, and I just want to miss them.

This year I did not wake up with an "ah-ha" moment, with a complete understanding of myself and my place in the world.

Maybe next year.

Drive By Christmas

Quick like bunny - work is kicking my ass today.

It was sort of a strange, transitional Christmas this year; a whirlwind Christmas caught between different family traditions and a time to make our own. It feels like we were given a little breathing room this year, that folks stepped back and allowed us to take in the still calm of the eye of the hurricane of Christmas chaos that will tear into our lives from here on out.

We hit Bremerton for Christmas Eve, much as I have every year before that I have spent that particular day in Washington. The ferry trip over was Riley's first boat trip, and he spent it in the car nursing. It was sort of relaxing though, listening to his contented noises while the Puget Sound rushed past the car's window. We got to Grandma's, all the aunts took their turns holding the baby and I roamed around talking to cousins. It felt a little strange to not have my parents or my brother there with us, but it was comfortable nonetheless.

One of my cousins brought a tape of Christmas Eve celebrations from 1987 and 88. It was a trip to see my family once again from nearly 20 years ago. It was heartwarming to again see Aunt Betty laughing and Uncle Bud playing his guitar, it made me catch my breath to again see Grandpa alive for a brief second, strong and wily. And all those kids running around - all those kids that are now in college, or having kids of their own. I could feel it, it all sang a verse of a song of transition.

I took Riley up on deck for the return trip. The cold blast of the front proved to be too much for him, so we headed to the aft where it was almost warm. I stood at the rail with him, listening to the dark water below and watching the Christmas lights on the shore drift by.

We took our time getting Christmas Day started, there were only gifts for Riley anyway and he was passed out while we opened them. We listened to the poor weekend guys who had to man the posts at KEXP for the holiday. I was pleasantly surprised to hear them play Alan Parsons In A Winter Wonderland by Grandaddy. But I was dismayed to hear that James Brown, the hardest working man in show business, had passed away - but then it did seem appropriate somehow that the man would shuffle off on what for most is the biggest day of the year.

Thank you James Brown, your music made me also want to get on the scene, like a sex machine. You will be missed.

We went over to Mandy's (sans Jason) for dinner for another delightful festive-type feast of turkey and dressing and potatoes and what-nots. Good stuff, good times, but still this strange hovering feeling of transitions and new traditions. I thought about the family we had made for ourselves, Bif and I. Not just the baby, but the amazing friends we have surrounding and protecting us; the beautiful ones who were so excited for us even when we were terrified, the ones who believed in our abilities when we couldn't. I gotta tell you, I was tired and beat, but it felt good. It felt like the sort of great Christmas present that you get that you never even asked for.

American Cream

I was going to bring up something about the walk in this morning, about the fizzy wave of comfort falling with Girlfriend Is Better on the headphones and pre-dawn industrial lights sparking faded memories. Something about the grid work atop the baseball stadium brought back something about the permanent orange glow that is Southern California at night and my stumbling around grimly through its industrial parks.

But then Gorgeous brought up how she had at one time had a problem with dipping fries in ranch dressing. This seemingly innocuous statement sent all sorts of memories tumbling of days in Santa Barbara.

When Greta May and I were both living in Santa Barbara, both attending UCSB and both relatively miserable, we used to spend many evenings at JK Frimples. Frimples was one of those restaurants from another era, a diner of sorts that was open twenty-four hours and was filled with comfy booths. Frimples was on State Street, in Santa Barbara proper and not over by the campus, so it attracted little in the way of student traffic. Frimples had been built around an enormous tree that still grew in the center of the restaurant.

Greta May and I would go sit in a booth, me drinking mug after mug of coffee, and play Spite and Malice with two worn decks of cards. If one of us had some extra money, we would order cheese fries and a side of ranch - standard.

We would talk about the things that excited us to talk about, developing personal jokes and a language that would mutate and change over the years. This was back when I was sure we would be wandering, drunken writers together. It seems funny to think back to a time when there was no Chris in the picture, when I didn't know who Bif was. To think back to a time when neither of us had any idea that one day we would run off together with our significant others and marry together in a blurry, scotch-fueled haze in Reno. It's odd to think back to a time before there was no Built to Spill in our lives, back when we had no idea we would visit Prague and Venice and Greece together.

It seems sort of innocent and charming to think back on it, and not as turgid and desperate as it seemed at the time.

We were kids, playing at being adults and trying to figure out who the hell we were. She had just had her resilient heart shattered and I was in a perpetual state of being in the wrong place and thinking massive amounts of Jack Daniel's would fix it. I remember her being upset a lot, trying so hard to figure shit out, and I remember feeling as though I had wandered into a prison that was so nice I didn't realize it was a prison. I remember a vague frustration constantly floating around me.

Honestly, I remember a lot of difficult times, but I like to remember is a bright spot in all of it filled with genuine laughter and calm and cheese fries with ranch.

Oh, and hey, sort of related, but not at all: We were in Greece together when the four of us found chips that were "American Cream" flavored. We thought that was so funny and couldn't wait to find out what American Cream tastes like. Tastes like ranch. Turns out Europeans have no idea what the hell "ranch" is.

Big Night Out

Last night, Biff and I went out on our first solo date since Riley bounded into our lives. The grandparents took charge of baby duties and we went and had us dinner and beers. We talked about the same stuff that we used to, I at one point started singing Janie Jones by The Clash because I couldn't stop singing Most Wonderful Time of the Year the way Will Ferrell did in a SNL sketch, and we discussed short distance plans.

At one point, Bif mentioned, sort of dismayed, that she kept waiting to feel like this major shift would happen to her, that one day she would suddenly feel like a mom. I knew what she meant, while the evidence is right in front of me a lot of the time, I don't yet really feel like a dad. In fact, it feels a little weird to type the words 'I'm a dad'. I told her that I think a lot of people go into parenthood with this certain image of what a parent is and try to fit themselves into that mold. I felt like we were taking this on in much the same way as our marriage, in that we were not different people on the other side of a particularly amazing day. I'm still a dopey dreamer, she's still this beautiful woman who makes me smile when she laughs at the stupid things I say, only now we have this amazing little boy to be with us in all of it.

Coincidentally, we ran into kay-see at dinner and met her parents. It was coincidental enough, being one of many restaurants in a major city, but what's really eerie is that earlier in the day I had asked kay-see that if I were the one who had to break the news of her dad's death to her, would she want me to do it in knock-knock joke form.

I also worried for a second about keeping up the potency of kay-see ‘your mom’ jokes after actually meeting the woman, but I feel there is nothing to worry about.

We jokingly told her parents that we had put the baby in a box and the cats were watching him, which made me think of the great proliferation of abandoned child movies.

Do you realize that both Home Alone and Baby's Day Out are the 'children' of John "The Breakfast Club" Hughes? What is it with this guy? What about a child left to their own devices when criminally negligent parents leave them seems like a good idea for a movie to this guy? C'mon, he wrote the immortal line, "you look good wearing my future".

And while I haven't seen it, I have to imagine that Unaccompanied Minors, a delightful romp with a pre-pubescent mob left to their own devices in an airport, is some kind of crappy.

And while I have no idea how anyone can help me with this, but: There's a movie coming out called Bridge to Terabithia, and man I KNOW this title but I cannot place it. It's based on a book, but I'm pretty sure I haven't read it. Why are there alarm bells ringing from the memory halls of my childhood in regards to this title? WHY?

Okay, snap out of it Badgley. I love you all, make it a great one out there.

I Heart I Heart Huckabees

I can't say what it is necessarily, maybe it's the fundamental understanding of questioning of self and the desire for an existential detective, but I love it all.

The performances all seem a little stylized, but somehow work. The script seems to bite off a bit more than can be chewed, but I admire the over-reach terribly. There is something wonderfully philosophical going on there, but I laugh hysterically every time I watch it - usually at completely different things than the last time I watched it.

There is an understanding that is achieved towards the center of the movie, that you can reach this Zen state of "pure being", but will inevitably be pulled back into the bullshit of human drama. Ain't it the truth?

This mad love is probably not helped by the fact that I seem to have taken on one of the character's obsession with the dangers of petroleum. But seriously, car emissions are more unhealthy for you than the secondhand smoke so many are ranting about, those emissions are literally destroying our planet, and they only reason we are involved in the wholesale slaughter of human beings in the Middle East is because we willfully refuse to let up on our gas consumption.

And while I'm ranting here for a second: There has been a wave of power outages up here in Washington due to trees blowing over in a storm and knocking out power lines. Somehow, this turned into a run on gas stations, with people waiting in lines for fear that they would run out of gas. Um? What does one have to do with the other, a rational person might ask. Well there are the people who are using gas fueled generators, and in areas where the power is out, as stations are unable to pump gas without electricity, but the lack of electricity does not at all hamper the tanker trucks bringing gas over our plentiful highways. And, if you need gas so damned bad, there is more than likely a working gas station within 20 minutes of where you are. It all smacks of people's gullibility into hording this precious, precious resource in the face of already manufactured price gauging. We're awesome...

Anyways, I Heart Huckabees, on my list of favorites. Marky Mark gives an unusually good performance, and there is a lot going on here that is worth getting to if you take the time. For some reason, Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin repeating, "How am I not myself?" to Jude Law over and over again makes me laugh, and breaks my heart all at the same time.


Song Stuck in My Head Right Now: You Make Me Feel Like A Whore by Everclear


Confidential to "Betrayed in Kansas City": As the mighty Bono once said, "it's no secret that a liar won't believe anyone else". Consider it a gift.

Codename: Tea Wrecks

When you're at work, typing away on your keyboard, do you ever pretend that you’re hacking a particularly difficult computer mainframe?

Do you pretend that your whiles, your intelligence, your skills will get you past the network security systems and into that particular file which will give you the information that you need, the information that may very well save the world?

Do you then pretend that the security forces are after you and the only way to cover up your tracks is to win a game of solitaire to throw them off of your trail?

And when you have that necessary information, do you fantasize about transferring it to some innocuous item to transfer it out of the building? Like maybe downloading it to a Rubik's cube? And then you can mess up the Rubik's cube and the only way to get the information out is to solve said Rubik's cube - in the safety of your underground location.

And then you can take the information to the proper authorities and bring down the awful corporation responsible for the murder of children and puppies, responsible for the degradation of the American way of life. But then you find out that the people you yourself work for have sold off the information that you have struggled for so that they could have a larger slice of the pie, and that they have caused an influx of bad corporate music, hackneyed and formulaic romantic comedies and a proliferation of feminine hygiene products?

Do you then begin gathering and arming your rag tag forces, training them into a skilled army, high on fumes of righteous indignation and household cleaners in an attempt to begin Armageddon?

Me either.

Frustration

If frustration could be rated by awful ice cream flavors, today was broken glass in vomit flavor; dog vomit after said dog had eaten its own poo. If frustration was a serial killer, today was Hannibal Lecter being raped by Ted Bundy.

It didn’t help that the day started off with disappointing news. And then things just began to pile up, like all of those cars I passed on the walk home locked up in stop; all of those people willingly ignoring their responsibility for the melting ice caps.

Know what else didn’t help? The Zen mantra voice, telling me that I am the perceiver, meaning that I’m the one perceiving the day as frustrating, that didn’t help.

If frustration were a voice, it would be my prissy, Zen mantra voice.

Oh, and coworkers who willingly neglect the work they’re supposed to do which conveniently leaves it to me to take care of tomorrow? Yup, another glass and dog vomit sundae.

But sitting here at home, downing my Brother Thelonius Belgian style ale from North Coast Brewery and listening the Riley make his little monkey chirps, well it’s a little easier to shrug it off.

And talking to Greta May for about five minutes at the end of the work day made it seem not that bad. There was that easy give and take that made us feel as close as cousins, thick as thieves. She was tired, I was tired, I could hear it in our voices. But we were okay; we were golden.

I knew it was okay when I was crossing the street, coming back from the store with Riley strapped to my chest in a sling, and some hyper aggressive freak tried to run me down in the crosswalk. Their enormous, bright yellow (because the sheer size of the vehicle wasn’t attention grabbing enough) truck blocked off a busy lane of traffic while I insisted on taking my pedestrian’s right of way. This lady then felt it necessary to flip me, my wife, and my two week old son the bird. Where normally, after a day of frustration building like magma below a volcano’s peak, I would have felt the need to scream obscenities until I ran out of breath, I just slowly shook my head and rubbed my sons back.

I’m looking at you Tomorrow, let’s make it better.