you can't stop yourself from falling

it starts with someone singing from leonard bernstein's "the mass" in the rectory of st. paul's, where miracles happen.

it is my father's birthday today and we are avoiding tvs. i've taken the day off, to talk to some high school students. my old teacher asked, and he pulls no punches and i couldn't say no.

the bean and i go to kohl's, first. they're having a sale, and he needs shoes. no baby vans in stock, sadly, so he has to go the frat boy route and get baby new balances. woe.

anyway, there's a fire truck outside when we leave, idling in front of the grocery store and stocking up. the bean's all kinds of fascinated so we wander over and the driver puts him behind the wheel and i realize i am about four seconds away from crying so i mumble something like "thank you for your service" and run away before there is some sort of scene.

it's like that all day, really, a series of near misses.

carter asked me to come in and talk to his u.s. 2 kids, his current events class. juniors and seniors. when i was thinking about what i'd say i realized with a start that these kids were in fifth, sixth grade when everything tilted. they don't know the world any other way.

four years ago i was still grieving. i stood in front of a group of kids who looked just as young if more frightened, still, and talked about that grief. about the things i saw and the things i smelled and the eerie sight of soldiers on georgetown street corners with m-16s.

now it's five, and the grief becomes anger. so i talk to them, about how years of foreign policy failures led up to that day, about a defense and state department locked into a cold war framework they were unable to break free from, to see another way. that that very framework is why, iraq.

i talk about iraq and puppet governments and how we put hussein into power, about oil and politics and how many of those who sought to be martyrs were saudi.

someone brings up ishmael and isaiah and we talk about that, too, because why not? i talk about abu ghraib and gitmo and this, i say, this is america? is this your america because it is not mine.

someone says well of course you disagree with the president you are a democrat and i say listen, kid, black and white are passe and these days there's nothing on earth that isn't grayscale. listen kids, because i was where you are once and the trick is to question everything you believe because you either become more sure or you change your mind and i won't tell you which way i hope it turns out, but i will tell you i'll respect you a lot more if you can stand up to questioning. if you can defend what you say and what you think you know with something more than "daddy told me so."

this is your world to make, i say, your generation will inherit the country that is being made now so start asking those questions early and demand a proper inheritance. bobby k says history is a relentless master, i tell them. those who hold fast will be swept aside and we are seeing that, right now, in ideologies long dead and in policies overused and it's time to demand more, of our country, of our government. of each other.

and maybe it's silly and idealistic and stupid and maybe it was just an excuse for them not to finish the next chapter's reading. i don't know.

except at the one-act auditions a kid came up to me after and said maybe i had a point, about some things. he wasn't sure, and he still didn't like my selection of plays but maybe there was something to be said for digging deeper.

so who knows. maybe there's hope.

or maybe it's just kind of late on a day i wanted mostly to spend in bed. maybe it's somewhere in between. maybe somewhere a handful of ghosts born on a day i can't ever forget are loosening their hold, just a little, finding a more comfortably detached orbit.

hope springs.

happy sixtieth, old man.

thinking about chicago classics, and punk planet is no more. because i have lived in the kind of vaccuum that only a small child can create, i had no idea until shana mentioned it this weekend as i was wandering around vaguely trying to find the latest issue. which is in my hands now, and is as good as the previous 80. i feel like this magazine deserves more of a eulogy than i'm capable of at 8:30 in the morning, trying desperately to avoid the work piling up on my desk. it was one of the places i've been published, an independent voice that recognized punk for what it was, something that, no matter how much you tried to commercialize it or put it in a box, was a movement that could never truly be defined. punk planet was a voice of protest, savvy about politics and music and all the ways in which there are connections in between. thanks for the memories.

random celebrity sighting

shana and i had one of the best celebrity sightings we've ever experienced this weekend, in chicago of all places. sunday morning, 10am, michigan ave hilton hotel elevators. tall guy gets on and stands up close next to me (it's a little crowded). i'm eye level with his shirt: FIGHTING FOR PEACE IS LIKE FUCKING FOR VIRGINITY. i laugh a little, look up and realize, um, it's BILLY BALDWIN.

we're all trapped watching the miniature cnn feed in the elevator, which is broadcasting this ridiculously stupid commentary about how "somehow" small time tragedies get elevated to national news stories, and billy and i exchange derisive comments about the ridiculousness of that and how g.dub will attend virginia tech funerals but not those of soldiers and she mumbles something about loving his shirt and then we're in the lobby and part ways.

for the record, he looks better than i'd expected (he's 44, but only one of his brothers has gotten better looking as he got older) and that classic curl that flops over his forehead? totally seems to be unstyled, because he was clearly just out of the shower and half-awake and it was fully activated. hot.

this is the song that never ends

a true war story is never moral. it does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. if a story seems moral, do not believe it. if at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. there is no rectitude whatsoever. there is no virtue. as a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil...

you can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. if you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote. send guys to war, they come home talking dirty.

i reread tim o'brien's the things they carried over the past couple of days. today, i'm sending that dog-eared copy to washington. it's such a silly small act and it won't land on the desk it needs to, but, you know. it's beginning to feel like a nightmare from which we'll never wake up.

old enough to know better, young enough to pretend

when i was ten years old, my old man and i did a mini-ironbutt through the upper midwest. for those not in the know, the ironbutt is/was (i have no idea, it's been a long time since i've had anything other than passing contact with that subculture) a nationwide motorcycle ride, named thusly for reasons i assume are fairly obvious.

i don't know why i'm stuck thinking about that this morning, maybe it's the weather. spring's dipping a tentative toe in midwestern waters, the kind of glorious day that sends college kids out into quads in shorts and flip-flops to play frisbee for the first time in months, forty degree temperature be damned.

i think maybe it's when i first fell in love with the road, with the possibility that existed and the seemingly endless stretch of concrete that always ended up taking you where you wanted to go, even if you didn't know it at the start.

i don't get to roadtrip much these days, not on my own, nor in a crappy, rundown van with some of the best people i will ever know. comes with the territory, i tell myself, and most days that's okay. most days i keep my wanderlust in check in recognition of the fact that at some point most of us have to grow up and realize that the things we did so easily at twenty are not so at thirty. and that's okay, because there are things i'm doing at thirty that are far better than anything i ever imagined a decade ago.

we traveled several hundred miles during that trip, my pop and i. that first night we were on the road late, later than a guy with a ten-year old kid on the back of his bike had any right to be, but there was a bible conference or something, no room at the inn. so we raced north, mississippi to the west and the moon above. ended up at some bed and breakfast in alma, last room left a double that left just enough room to turn around and walk out. the trains ran every hour across the street.

didn't matter, exhausted enough to sleep like the dead and what i remember most is even then, at ten, understanding that this was something special, something unique, that there were things that obligated you and tied you down and that little piece of freedom, of just following the road until the destination presented itself, was a gift and not an entitlement, and that opportunities for that same feeling would be less and less frequent as i came into my own.

and here i am, all growed up and chained to a desk in ways i never anticipated with the adult understanding of the sacrifices you make to give those pieces of freedom to the people you love, to give them something to daydream about themselves, during spring's first blush.

i can't wait til he's old enough for a road trip. destination unknown.

my quarter-life crisis

there's a hockey puck on my desk, signed by the great one, and it's either a sign of my general ambivalence toward gretzky or my lack of appreciation for quote-unquote memorabilia that instead of putting it under plexiglass or hiding it in a box somewhere it's the thing i play with most when i'm brainstorming, or thinking, or whatever. i used to have a hockey stick but h.r. got a little nervous about that for some reason.

speaking of things boxed up, do you remember when you were a kid and you used to practice writing your signature? page after page of childish scrawl on wirebound notebooks so cheaply made they rarely made it a semester with both front and back cover intact? i found one, middle school, i think, a couple of different variations on last name that are too mortifying to include here but let's just say the least embarrassing of the group was wahlberg, and i'm one hundred percent certain i wasn't referring to mark.

i've been blocked like crazy, lately, and it's one thing when it happens recreationally but fully fifty percent of my job involves writing on a regular basis and these days i'm stuck in some sort of holding pattern. i don't know, maybe it's the weather, the snow that doesn't quit and the cold and sky that's perpetually some variation on grey. maybe i need to get the hell out of dodge for longer than twenty-four hours, on my own terms, but getting the hell out of dodge these days is logistically next to impossible.

whirlwind trip up to st. paul last week. a chance to try fried green beans and to take the bean to an underwater aquarium and i don't get the fascination but he wanted to stay, shrieked when i made to leave, some sort of kindred fascination between him and a giant sea turtle named elsa.

dc next month, the 25th through 27th, more free time than usual with these kinds of trips and i can't help but remember how bittersweet it felt last time. too much of me is too tied into geography, i think. i can't ever seem to just relocate.

and it happens too fast to make sense of it

i'm on the mailing list for the metro and the fireside, the two venues that meant the most to me back in the day, not because i'm generally willing or able to hop in a car and drive the ninety miles to chicago, but because it feels in some way like i'm keeping tabs on the past. the fireside stopped being an active venue back in 2004, although it now deigns to host shows by the likes of dave matthews tribute bands, the fact of which makes what there is of my heart weep.

whatever, it combined three of the midwest's finest things: bowling, live music, and really crappy beer, and it was a place that felt as familiar to me as that hole of an apartment that sean and i shared. the first time i saw death cab play was on that stage, the faint, too. it was a great supporter of the local music scene, one of the best places to view the up and comers in chicago's indie scene, home away from home for the trio, and i think pete and patrick and company took a turn or two on that stage before it shut its doors on the kids who were doing too much damage to the property, allegedly.

but to commence with the overt reminiscing, it was july of '95, summer in chicago which is only ever truly beautiful if you have the luxury of enjoying it from some penthouse suite on lakeshore. eighteen, and trying to figure out what i really wanted out of life, looking north and wondering if college was really going to do me any good. turns out it did, although not for the reasons the admissions office would have you believe, but that's neither here nor there.

july of '95, and the $wingin' utter$ were onstage, all the usual suspects in the crowd, messengers and skaters and rejects and everything in between and the air conditioning went out. it must have been 110 in there, easy, and no one stopped to care, just pushed up against one another and the music and the heat and turned it into something else, made it brighter and hotter and somehow all the more real. alive.

i remember, after, backs to the wall outside and dripping wet, the lot of us, passing cigarettes and a couple of bottles of beer we'd smuggled out, grinning at each other and at absolutely nothing in particular and thinking it could never possibly feel any better. sometimes i wonder.