The Frozen Heart of False Spring

On a Sunday afternoon, I'm upstairs in my music room. The sun has that look it usually only gets in spring -- on Sundays in springtime, for some reason. It's got that trumpet-brightness, as if it's marching ahead of a parade of flowers that isn't so very far away, blaring the message that life is ready to start crawling out from under the frost. It throws a corny, poetic, clarion light that warms my hands on the piano keys even though people pass on the sidewalk in coats.

My sons are downstairs and I can hear them laughing and pleasantly chatting over a game of Mario Brothers. My wife clicks away at the downstairs computer. The house has that after-church peacefulness it tends to get.

Soon, through the window, I see two boys -- friends of my older son -- rolling down the street on their skateboards.

The Soul of Hats

Someone asked me, today, why I so seldom write about the news. Where are the posts, she wanted to know, about the rebellions in the Middle East? -- the union issues in Wisconsin? I almost felt guilty for a second. But, no, in the end I don't. (In my defense, however, I wrote a cracking piece about Happy Meal regulation, once).

Why not feel guilty, you ask? Because we can't ignore the heart for the sake of the body or the home for the sake of the city or the city for the sake of the state or the state for the sake of the world. What's inside can't be neglected.

We can't forget ourselves -- I mean, literally, our selves -- in all of this. There are those who speak out about politics, quite well. There are those whose voices ring above the rest when it comes to world issues. These people are important. But I would argue that we need a place to come to look into ourselves a little. If this blog serves that purpose for you, I have all I can ask as its creator.

Self-Baking Fruitcakes

I once knew a guy who idolized David Lee Roth. He thought the essence of all music was "pizzazz". He'd wear Spandex and hop around on stage during band shows. Well, not "hop". He sort of blumpthed. I know that's not a word, but that's what he did, for criminey's sake.

And, let me tell you, Spandex is a mystical, magical fabric. The pressure per square inch inside that suit must have been immeasurable, forced outward as it was by his unreasonable rotundity; yet, it did not burst. It does, however, have opacity limits, as only a drummer, like myself, can see from his unique vantage point when a singer decides to crawl toward the audience, a la Roth.

So, this pumpkin of a chap would loll around on stage, wrapped in bumpy neon slipperiness and hocking out his own version of "Jump" in front or a room full of frozen, open-mouthed faces. If I were a woman, I would venture a guess that the mere sight of it would have been enough to instantly turn me asexual.

Good is the New Bad

Once, while helping a friend of mine to move, I took out a desk drawer, as is the protocol, and I saw three glossy, black-and-white photographs of a naked girl staring up at me. She was in her twenties and posing proudly -- shamelessly -- for an anonymous photographer. She was standing in the bathroom -- in a hotel or a dormitory or something.

Having had no respect whatsoever for the privacy or feelings of my friend, as was the dynamic of my group of twenty-something pals at the time, I yelled: "Yo! Who is the naked girl in your desk drawer?"

My friend, sweaty and annoyed by the work of the day stepped into the room, mopping his brow with an old shirt. "What?"

In Defense of the American Teenager

"Derned kids."

For a few days, I have been struggling to come up with a post. A rarity for me. Not because I didn't have an idea -- I knew exactly what I wanted to do: rip into a whining (irony intended) teacher who trashed her students on her blog and then argued that she didn't intend for the world to read it. But I won't. Still, I might be able to help.

Um, Natalie . . . I'm no one and people in Japan, Egypt and Belarus read my blog. See, there's this thing called the "interweb" . . .  If you want only your friends to read your blog, you need to make it private. There are buttons to click for this. Your lazy, whining, sub-standard students could explain this to you in about six seconds.