Winter Melody

One of the ways in which I am a True American is in my emotional weakness for shitty music. Don't get me wrong, I like good music better than shitty music, but I am susceptible to the charms of crappy pop songs, overwrought ballads, dad rock and various other musical vagaries that would shame any self-respecting music nerd. I've memorized way more Bob Dylan songs than Billy Joel songs...but that still means I've memorized a shit ton of Billy Joel songs, I ain't gonna front. That's the thing about music, any music. If your guard is down and you run into a melody--even if you're not really sure how it goes, but it's sad and it's sweet and you knew it complete when you wore a younger man's clothes--you're gonna feel the impact. And my guard, more often that I'd like to admit, is prone to slippage.

Sixteen years ago on brisk winter night in Orange County my uncle died. He was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer in August and he was gone by late December. I had spent much of my time in the intervening months at his side, along with others in my family, in what I can now recognize as the most intense emotional period of my life. Driving home from the hospital, on my way back to Vista to tell my mom that her brother was dead, "A Long December" by the Counting Crows came on the radio, with lyrics about "the smell of hospitals in winter" and so now that song is part of me, and that's just the way it is.

I take refuge in art and love and the simple pleasures of a Sunday morning, but I also cloak myself in a layer of emotional armor that can block out the light and I wish I could stop doing that. I wish I could lay down my weapons and study war no more. But the rawness of a December night can still cut me to the quick when I take out the trash, no matter how happy I am, no matter what joy and beauty wait just inside the doors of my house, and when that happens I get scared, so fucking scared, and I find ways to chase it off. But I want to stop fighting it. I want to feel it, to become who I am in that and every moment and in so doing persevere, bloody but unbowed, despite the absence of armor. That's what I'm after, and in that regard here's hoping that next year will better than the last.

Should We Talk About the Weather?

There's something undeniable about a burst of late spring rain. It makes me feel like a witness to something holy and eternal, the universe capping off the season of rebirth with a baptismal sprinkling of distilled life. There is so much beauty right outside the window, and it's all growing stronger and more harmonious by the minute.

But in spring begins the journey to winter, of course, and if my binge-watching of "Game of Thrones" has taught me anything, it's that winter is coming. (And then it's just rinse and repeat, for as Shelley reminds us spring is never far behind.) All that blooms and grows will wither and die, and in the blink of an eye the life-affirming shower turns into a torrential downpour. The knowledge of which should only serve to make days like this more precious and beautiful for the evolved mind that understands both that we were born to die and that death is not the end. 

And so there's my mood today, changing as fast as the clouds shift in the oblivious sky. Things outside are looking California, to borrow a phrase, but I'm feeling Minnesota. And that's alright with me, for now at least. I'm not interested in forcing myself into or out of a particular mood today. I think I'll just play it as it lays, and resist the urge to make some grand dramatic gesture borne out of what could either be hope or desperation (they can look so much alike.) That may come later, and if so I'll need to save my strength. 

So for now I'm looking out the window, listening to the birds sing and trying to shut the fuck up for awhile. It's not a bad way to spend the day, all things considered.

R.I.P Ringo Dingo Dawg.

There are worse things in the world than digging a hole to bury your dead dog in the front yard in the dark so the boys don't see his body in the morning and hitting a root or a rock or cement or the limit of your own shallow strength or Whatever with the shovel and tripping backwards, somehow, and spasmodically (I'll call it falling but empirically you would really have to say it's more accurately termed) flailing into the street and hitting your gimpy shoulder, which is gimpy because now you "swim to stay in shape", flat on the curb, as if Tony Soprano had kicked you. There are worse things. I've experienced, them, and god fucking knows (or willing) I'll experience them again.

But let's just say this wasn't the best night ever. Let's just say that.

We don't know how old he was. We got him when Robbie was about a year old I think, a little more maybe, because we had decided it was time to get a dog. Like you do. We had the house, we had the baby, we had just built a fence....so next comes the dog. Natch. Dawn wanted to be selective, to go through a service, to look at labradors and golden retrievers and such. Like you do. Me, I wanted a mutt. A mangy mangled moppy mick of a mutt. Who needed a home to go to, and a bowl to drink from, and a door that would open.

And though she may deny it, I didn't really have to make too hard of a sell once we saw him. He reminded her of Scruffy, the old family dog that patrolled the backyard of her youth, and he didn't have a harmful bone in his body. He passed the "kid test" with flying colors--you could yank and pull and pinch and poke the fuck out of him, and he was cool with it in his mangy way. So of course we got him. And of course we called him Ringo.

My work friends didn't know I had a dog and were always shocked to find out I did, because they always talked about their dogs like their dogs were kids, like you should recognize the name of their fucking dog when they use it in a conversation. I referred to myself as a 1970s style dog owner. We feed him and give him a place to sleep and clean up his shit when we get around to it and pet him when he seems to want it and he, in turn, acts like a dog. And it's cool.

And he got old quick. He got deaf, and then he got mostly blind, and then he pretty much got totally blind. And we didn't know what to do for him, after awhile, the last few years, except just make him comfortable, and give him a place to be who was, and so we did.

He seemed better lately, Dawn had just said. But he wasn't, not really. I wonder if we broke his heart, a little bit, when we got Candy this spring. A beautiful fuzzy little puppy with the best credentials that we paid a bit less than one month's mortgage to secure and had been waiting for and talking about for weeks upon weeks. We acted like we had never had a dog before. We treated her like a kid. We expected other people to recognize her name when we use it in conversation. I wonder if that fucked him up on some level.

But he did liven up the last few months, with a puppy nipping at his heels. He got a bit of a hop to his wobble. This morning when I woke up he was just standing in the hallway staring blindly into the computer room. And I wondered what he was seeing, in his mind's eye, where his journey was taking him. And I patted him on the back, or at least I'm going to choose to believe I did, and he in that moment knew I loved him.

Because I did, godammit. I did.

RIP Ringo Dingo Dawg. RImuthafuckingP.

A Narrative of the Recent History of My Thoughts Told Through Hyopthetical Internet Search Terms

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Be The Noodle

One night last week I found myself alone in a crowded, trendy "gastropub" near my office scoping out a seat at the bar within view of a big-ass television on which to watch Game 6 whilst imbibing a red ale from a microbrew that you've probably never heard of and scarfing down bold reinventions of classic American comfort food resulting in a bill big enough to feed a family of 12 at a place that served classic American comfort food, minus the bold reinvention, which I think means cilantro. Or sea salt.

That's not what happens most nights. Most nights I go home to my family and boldy reinvent whatever I do or don't feel like boldly reinventing on my own damn time. And that's the way I've come to like it, by Jimminy!! But I had an evening to kill before a softball game, so there I was. I found a seat, eventually, and watched the game and ate the sea salted delicacies and drank the Very Earnest Beer. I was sitting right next to a couple of Japanese dudes wearing waiter uniforms from what I presumed to be a Japanese dining establishment having a conversation in Japanese and drinking Bud Light and eating turkey burgers, I shit you not. About halfway through the game the first guy got up to go smoke a cigarette (as I gathered after the fact by the the smell on his clothes when he came back) and the other dude very drunkenly decided to engage me in conversation. The conversation consisted of him holding his iPhone up to my face and showing me pictures of food while loudly saying, respectively:"Japanese Noodle! Japanese Noodle!", "Japanese Steak! Japanese Steak!", and finally "Japanese Cake! Japanese Cake!"

It went on from there. A few beers in I was playing international fucking pictionary with the guy and his friend trying to tell him, Hey, I stayed in Roppongi once for three days! In good time we parted in good company, left with no fucking idea what the other party said throughout most of the conversation. Later, I thought, wait....did that guy show me all those pictures of food because I'm so fat? Because I kind of think he did. I'm Godzilla to that dude. He was taking the piss, as the British say.

But everybody plays the fool, like the man says, so fuck it. Maybe he was. Maybe he wasn't. You can choose to stay home all the time or to not stay home all the time. You can choose to just connect, like the other man says, or you can just turn it off.

Later that night I ejected myself from the softball game in the 9th inning for telling a guy to go fuck himself after coming dangerously close to a fistfight for the third time in the last few months and then got mad at my wife for not showering me with sympathy when I got home and before I fell asleep I thought: Japanese Noodle, motherfucker! Accept the noodle. Or at least the picture of the noodle. Slurp it up. No...Be the noodle. Be the fucking noodle.

So I'm going with it. I'm a Tom Noodle! I'm a Tom Noodle!

Stay tuned to see how that works out. As if you don't already know.

Mi Padre

I figured out that my dad was different somewhere around the same time I figured out that most people are kind of just assholes, really, somewhere around the time when "different" started to mean "better." And so I was never really embarrassed, not really, not where it mattered. In case you don't know my dad lost his voice to cancer of the larynx when I was 2 years old. Thereafter he had a hole in the middle of his throat through which he breathed, and he spoke with an artificial voicebox that he held up to his neck, and he sounded like a robot, and that was just how my dad sounded and it never seemed weird to me, not for years, because that was just my dad and so the fuck what? And by the time I understood what the fuck what, I was smart enough to know that what the fuck what didn't mean fuck-all for fuck's sake, so go fuck yourself, motherfucker.

I think actually that my dad taught me was how to be happy and smart and sensitive and special in a place like Vista, which means really in a place like Anywhere, which means really how to be different, how to be happy, how to be who I am. How to love the things I love and do the things I want to do and then just kind of filter out all the rest of the bullshit one piece of bullshit at a time.

And no matter how tight I hold my kids today, no matter how warm and safe and loved I feel today, no matter how much I enjoy Father's Day as a "father", I still am also and ever and always a son, and of course it breaks my fucking heart. It breaks my heart not to have my dad here, in my patio, eating steak and bratwurst and watermelon and pistachios and strawberry shortcake. No to have my dad here by my side watching Game 3 of the the NBA Finals, with my puppy in his lap fast asleep. It breaks my fucking heart and I miss him so fucking much.

Goodnight Dad. I love you.

This Man's Art and That Man's Scope

I stood inside a boat this evening that was docked to the shore and mildly rocking with the tide, and within a minute I broke out in a sweat and then didn't want to go down the stairs and then had to come back up the stairs and look out at the horizon and then suddenly had to get off the boat, right away, with the dog in my arms and everything. And as I stood on the dock, in my socks, as my wife and children waved from the deck, I thought--yep, I'm the guy on the dock, in his socks. I will always be that guy.

And in the past at points I may have felt sorry for myself for being the guy on the dock, or romaticized myself for being the guy on the dock, or been angry at myself for being the guy on the dock, or vowed then and there that I would get my shit together and figure out how to stop being the guy on the dock by the time I turned thirtywhatever. But tonight I just thought--that's cool, I'm the guy on the dock. Look at all this cool shit I can see from the dock! I think maybe I'm actually kind of done trying to be what I am not, and I understand that I am most happy when I am being who I am, or at least engaged in an activity that I think will help me understand who it truly is that I in fact am. Or maybe I'm just tired of wanting to be someone else.

We are, all of us, weak and fragile creatures, subject to the winds of circumstance and the fluctuations of time. I've chosen my constants, the things from which I will not waver. Everything else is just a change in the weather. My heart is my reason. My body is only an umbrella.