Category Archives: Feels like home

Aaaah, bliss.

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You know, sometimes it’s just good to be exhausted.

Now that Peanut has adjusted to Daylight Savings Time, a little government intervention I like to call The Fcuk with Parents Solstice, which was clearly invented and perpetuated by old men with no sense of empathy for the month that it takes to re-regulate a child’s sleep patterns after the shift, I’ve decided to join a gym that opens at 5am so I can workout before Peanut and Spouse wake.

This seemed more self-cudgelingly painful and ludicrous than volunteering for a lifetime of respecting my child’s needs, but the first morning I slipped out of the house before dawn, every moment was glorious. I woke groggy, but that was no different than the days Peanut wakes me in the wee hours. (Background: I have a kid who doesn’t sleep well. Never has. He wakes every 3 hours or so. He sleeps no more than 9.5 hours total, even with the waking. Totally normal, well precedented in my family, yet totally eroding the little patience with which I came to this parenting game. [NB: Do not email me with Babywise bullshit. Letting your baby cry is not parenting. Throughout the world children do not sleep until 3 or 4. It’s just biology. Stop telling me to force my kid to be different. He goes to sleep fine. He has nightmares. He wakes and needs us. Just because it’s killing me doesn’t mean I need your child abuse handbook.] And because of his sleep pattern, if I spend a little time in the evening with Spouse, and either clean or write, I’m looking at 6 or 7 hours of sleep, which is almost hourly interrupted by either a screaming child or a yowling cat. Daily considering asking the SPCA to take both.)

Being alone in a quiet house was exhilarating. Driving alone in the dark, without having to explain why, yes, we need to share the road with other cars and trucks, and that, if you really don’t want to share you ought find yourself a job and some money so you can build your own infrastructure, because the logistics of buying out the freeway system so you can watch the world go by from your car seat with a view unobstructed with other humans is a little out of mommy’s purview this week, was almost orgasmic. And the foggy sunrise was delicious. But far away the best part of getting up after 5 hours of sleep to exercise my wayward body into some semblance of energy was that I got to start, finally, Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace’s collection of essays.

This is my definition of heaven.

I would do the elliptical backwards for four hours straight to read that man’s writing. (I wish I could footnote in wordpress [not for some hackjob parody, but because I really need to add a few notes that are too long to put into the text], but I’m angry about the new design so I’ll do parenthetical asides, instead.) (To wit: ) (This month, I have to do the elliptical backwards because of the cast I’m in for the next month. And I get my actual fitness from the erg, but I can’t read while I row, and I can’t get my pedal stroke to functional at all well the cast. So elliptical backwards until I lose feeling in my foot, then switch to the erg, silently debating Wallace’s arguments in my head until I can feel my toes again.)

And Consider the Lobster,  and thoughtful and moralistic and borderline self-righteous (in all the right ways) collection of essays (predominantly articles he’s written for some of this country’s finest magazines) has eye-rollingly pleasurable topics nestled within. I’ve often recommended that my fair readers read or re-read Infinite Jest. But honestly, I may have found my favorite DFW piece, blissfully ensconced as I now am, seven pages into Wallace’s review of a grammar usage text. This chapter/article/review has me deliriously happy.

Without fail, Wallace’s writing brings me to two, independent, and wonderful conclusions. One, I am not crazy, but if I am, I am not alone in my particular breed of insanity. If no one else does, David Foster Wallace understands me. [NB: Yes, I know I should use the past tense. But because I am still coming to grips with his death, and because I prefer the critical approach of reading the text as always present tense, as always available to us regardless of the author’s state of being, I will say that he understands me, by which I mean that I feel understood when I read his work. I attribute no intention to this sensation, for I do not believe he wrote for me, personally. Issues with the whole “not knowing me,” bit, and all.]  Two: I need to get one hundred times smarter and better each day, and read more and write more because I am compelled to express myself as beautifully, compellingly, intelligently, and hilariously as this man did. I won’t get there, but I’ll live trying.

Now, of course, wiping away tears in the gym, thrice, I have a new conclusion, one I’ve been working on since September 15 when I found out: This world, each day, is poorer for having lost him. I, again, offer condolences to his family. And I, again, roll myself into an intellectual black hole wanting more of his mind spread—-like a freshly blended hummus made from a secret family recipe that will be lost after its last knowledgeable chef burns it in a passion-fueled fire and vows, because of the pain cooking causes him in the wake of a divorce from a woman who was his gustatory muse, never to blend that garbanzo-tahini-garlic extravaganza again—-across the pages of book and magazine. May Hollywood never, never violate his words with a film version. (Just saw Into the Wild last night, finally, and found, yet again, that the book was far better. Sorry, Mr. Penn. Love your work. But the film didn’t do justice to the epistelary memoir.)

Wallace’s review, the fourth piece in Consider the Lobster (after a riveting and pathetic look at the porn industry’s Oscar night, a scathing review of Updike’s latest self-absorbed book, and a brilliant explanation of what I’ve always found interesting about Kafka’s work—that it’s funny in a way few people comprehend) offers frenetic  grammatical satisfaction to those among us who cringe at the general linguistic ignorance of those around us. If you get off on words, and are passionate about the language in which you read, write, and speak, turn to “Authority and American Usage.” It strokes the grammar wonk’s ego, it oxygenates the fires of grammatical anger, and it offers 62 juicy pages of critical argument about the political nature of language.

62 mathafuckin pages, y’all.

Laugh all you want. I gladly fly my geek flag, higher today now that I know Wallace’s flag is right there in my courtyard, too.  To read that DFW, a man whose work I admire more than any other author I’ve read, in whose words I’ve found a friend and a home, and for whose memory I plan a long critical academic career (which might well having him doing subterranean 360s), gets just as frothy as I do when college students submit their first papers riddled with such eggregious errors that we feel the need to conduct an emergency English grammar seminar in our classrooms, pushing literature and critical thinking off the gurney and diemboguing our linguistic scalpels with the sole intent of making the world a better place to read.

I’m actually ready to get out of bed every morning, with maybe five hours of sleep behind me, to read David Foster Wallace’s essays again and again. I only wish I hadn’t quit reading his work during my grad school and baby years, because I feel like I’m playing catch-up, devouring his writing like a person who finds herself, after a full day of unblinking focus on a newborn, starving and ready to eat anything in the house; and just as she scours the cupboards for something edible, she turns around to find a gorgeous, tasty, well balanced, hot meal from a caring and likeminded friend just sitting there, as though it’s been waiting for her.

Goddamn he’s good.

Thanksgiving for Santa.

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Peanut has been in an intense no-sharing mood for almost a year. So he’s intrigued lately with the concept of giving presents. You give someone stuff, but you’re not sharing. It’s not yours; it’s theirs. You don’t get it back. There is no control after the giving. But there is control in the choosing.

He likes this.

He’s picked out birthday presents for friends, telling me exactly what his friends get and what they don’t. He usually picks out something for himself, too, though he’s perfectly willing to have it put away until birthday, Hanukkah, Christmas, Nana’s birthday (which is a great holiday at our house–Nana’s birthday is a couple days before Christmas, after the all important Solstice. Nana’s birthday is a holiday nobody else gets (except, well, Nana). We love Nana’s birthday. We get presents for no other reason than because we’re lucky enough to have her in our family.)

So we’ve been talking about Santa in our house for two years, because I knew it would come up, and, like making spiders and owls and wolves friendly, and fairy tales completely non-scary, I wanted to manage how this once-benevolent and now out-of-control commercialist holiday is portrayed in our house. I want him to believe in magic and hope and love, but not in getting stuff because you’re good. So I researched Santa Claus and found that the original dude, on whom the St. Nick character is based, was intensely into charity. He gave to the needy. That, Spouse and I discussed, is something we can be down with.

We taught Peanut that Santa, when he was around, gave to people who need. Santa’s not around anymore, but remembering him makes people want to give. True. Not as true as I’d like it to be, but still. (And yes, I did just teach my kid that Santa’s dead. So? He’s a myth. He’s fun to talk about and believe, and being honest now makes it less upsetting to find out later that Santa’s a myth.)

So each year, as often as we can, we give to people who need. After we moved, a truck came to take all the gently used things that we don’t need anymore, but another family might. He was totally fine giving stuff to the truck, because we said it was like Santa’s truck. When we read books about Christmas and Santa has a bag of toys, we tell him that it’s like the fire station and the library having Toys for Tots barrels. Santa has a bag of toys because the family left them out for Santa to take to people who need. Santa’s not bringing to the people in the stories. He’s taking, so he can redistribute. (That’s called being nice, you pre-election hatemongers.)

So I asked Peanut what he wanted to do for Christmas to help like Santa. Last year he wanted to bring toys to the dogs and cats at the local shelter. He loved every minute of giving, in part because he got to choose which dog got which ball, and which cat got which feather. This year he wants to bring apricots to the Food Bank. Because he says they don’t need raisins, but “if they need apricots, I give them apricots.”

Then he said, and I won’t let him forget this ever, that maybe some people just need someone to cuddle them. Maybe, like the babies Grandma cuddles at the hospital, maybe some people just need friends. He would like to find them, he said, and listen to them and cuddle them and make them feel better.

So that’s what we’re doing for Thanksgiving. We’re going to try the local retirement community, and see how he reacts to cuddling seniors. He tends to be wary of older people, so that might not work. Then we’ll bring apricots to the Food Bank.

And we will head to the animal shelter again this year. At least once a month. Because those dang critters love them some attention. And though it’s hard for me not to bring them all home, it makes Peanut feel very important to cuddle small creatures who don’t have families yet. He needs to feel important. And lots and lots of people and pets this year need love. So Spouse and I are going to try to meet as many of those needs as we can, and teach Peanut in the process that the best thing you can do is give.

Santa didn’t come to our house last year, and won’t be coming to our house this year. We don’t need anything. But we’ll make sure that we help whomever we can.

So let us know if you need a cuddle. ‘Cuz we’re ready for ya.

Oh my heavens, it’s the best birthday EVER.

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I wish I were a twitter gal, because we just found, in a desperate attempt to avoid buying Charlie and Lola (whom we all adore because who doesn’t like sassy British kids left to parent themselves?) videos for poor tv-deprived Peanut, that hulu has Silver Spoons! The pilot, and 22 episodes. I could twitter every commercial break, all atwitter.

I was going to tell you about the cake Peanut made for me. (We altered Moosewood’s pilfered Six Minute Chocolate Cake recipe to include blackberries. He’s been reading Bread and Jam for Frances twice a day for a week, so he wanted to compromise when I said no frosting. His suggestion? Jam. So we added a cocoa-raspberry glaze.) But I can’t, CAN’T be writing to you about cake when a ‘tweeny Ricker is on my computer.

Sigh.

Dreamy.

Sigh. I’m so. so. so. old.

Can’t we just live at The CheeseBoard?

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The center of my sense of home and community is The CheeseBoard Collective on Shattuck. Living near there formed some of the most important pieces of who I am, and visiting now brings back a flood of revelations, realizations, and nine-plus-senses pleasures that make me happy to my core.

So I took Peanut there.

He’s been before, but this time we went to the store/bakery and to the pizza joint. The latter is not at all the CheeseBoard where I lunched countless afternoons in the ’90s and ’00s. It’s bigger, since they took over the shop next door and expanded with more tables (shock), a bathroom (gasp), and a full area for the musicians.

The pizza of the day was roasted cauliflower, caramelized onion, mozzarella, cheddar, chive, and garlic olive oil on the trademark sourdough crust. It was gorgeous and drippy and wonderfully flavorful. But I’ve rarely had a bad slice there.

The band was the California Honeydrops. They sunk their teeth into a soulful performance and totally captivated my son.

So we ate, me a slice of heaven and him a cheese roll from the Collective. We listened to the blues. We watched the locals and newbies, alike. We basked in the glow of the new paint, the cheerful tile, and the clean bathrooms.

And he said to me, of my favorite place in the world, (except my aunt and uncle’s house at Thanksgiving), “this place make Peanut happy!”

I cried. “Me, too, bug. This place make mommy happy, too.”

I love you, CheeseBoard family.

Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings—-review, sort of

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Let me begin with a caveat: I’m not a music critic. I’m not a professional reviewer or musician, and, quite frankly, don’t know what I’m talking about. But Counting Crows’ music has always had a place in my life, for various reasons, and my response to the new album is different than I expected. So I thought I’d throw it our into the blogosphere. Be gentle. These are just personal reflections.

(The short version: I started out not liking most of the tracks. Then David Foster Wallace died and I can’t stop playing the album. What seemed trite and pedestrian is now deeply meaningful. What failed to resonate is now rocking my soul. I guess I wasn’t depressed enough for a Counting Crows album until last week. Now, the band that used to know my confusion and delusions once again speaks to me. The album was growing on me with repeated play. After the suicide, though, I can’t find many faults with it. It probably won’t ever pluck the chords of my self-seeking and disillusioned gypsy soul the way previous albums did, but we’ve all turned a corner in our lives,  and at least I have a friend in the CD player again. The lyrics still grate a bit. But the instrumentation intrigues and the album finally feels like the old friend I’ve always found in the Counting Crows.)

The unapologetically long version:

Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings was purportedly intended as a musical chronicle of the hard living/remorseful hangover pattern most of recognize from some point in our lives. I figured the album would have little in it for me, since my Saturday nights can not have one iota in common with Adam Duritz’s, and my Sunday mornings are farther from my idea of a Sunday morning than I ever thought they would be. We’ve taken different paths, The Crows and I, and, even though we were never even on the same road, I was sure that this album wouldn’t even have a shadow of the hope-doubting, 3am-ceiling-staring, surrealist aspirational beauty I so crave from this band.

The earliest Crows’ albums hit me in two ways. Some of the surreal and intensely soul-wrenching lyrics pluck a moment of my inner world and echo its exact vibrations for the duration of the song. Others wrap me into a world I can’t know, but allow me some enormously cathartic empathy surfing. All of their early songs find me in a crowd, resonate within me, and then leave me speechless, jolted out of complacency and scanning my surroundings to find something familiar. For some reason Duritz often hits chords, metaphorically, that know me, shake me, and comfort me. Each of the early albums seemed to understand my current stage of hopeless hopefulness. The Counting Crows always felt like home, even though they left me feeling achingly isolated and out of place.

So I imagined that this album would disappoint me, not musically, but in its capacity to find and touch me. I’m sure that, on the artists’ list of creative and musical goals to accomplish, finding a way to address their hopes, joys, and mental anguish to me personally ranked somewhere around 365,741,980th. But I was willing to taste that morsel, stuck to the tread of the boots worn by some roadie who swept up after a Dublin concert.

As I expected, I have little in common with the Saturday Night Crows. I don’t particularly like “1492.” “Hanging Tree” is lovely and catchy, but foreign to everything in my dizzy life. “Los Angeles” bandies about all that I loathed about living down there, and makes me yearn for my “ghosts in San Francisco” even more. Now that I’ve moved back, and DFW found the soullessness of LA too much, I like the song infinitely more. While the Boston reference in “Walkaways” still makes me cry, “Los Angeles” and its mentions of Boston leave me cold. “Sundays” sounds fine, and “I don’t believe in anything” either. On paper I can really get into (Except the skinny girls bit, which will always be offensive for so many reasons.) “Insignificant,” is now playing incessantly in my head on runs–a good sign that this is old school Crows. I, too, don’t want to be insignificant, or feel so different. Similarly, the lyrics of “Cowboys” resonate, and the tune is wearing off its original shiny annoyingness to feel like worn old leather. In my original review draft, I was beginning to think I was just dead on the inside, in the little spaces where a batlike Adam Duritz used to hang upside down and keep watch on my neuroses while I closed my eyes for just a minute. David Foster Wallace swept the cobwebs from my terror, my anxiety, my literary mind; now the song is like a blanket on neurotic nights.

The album’s first half sounds fine, and, as I said, I’m not a skilled enough ear to tell you if their work here is genius or artistically middling. And I don’t care. They’re entitled to be brilliant in their hard living, fast driving chapter if they want. That’s not my world. Maybe it’s because the secret fears and horrifying sights the Crows used to paint just captivated me is now composed in a angry, driving, rock and roll voice that I just don’t have the energy to hear anymore. I’m getting too old for this.

And maybe that’s why the Sunday Morning Crows feel like they’re in the same neighborhood, if not actually home. I thought morning-after laments and impulses would irritate and alienate me (way to prejudge and artist’s work), but I find (probably in the desperation that comes from hoping you still find at least something worth in an old lover, else re-foment your otherwise forgotten regret) exactly what I remember and want and need in the band’s Sunday Morning section. It helps that they began the Sunday Morning segment with a ballad that aches of homesickness and nostalgia, for I groove on those motifs, always. Duritz’s surrealism is decidedly more obvious, overexplained, and approachable on this album, which irks me. But the music itself is more intense, nuanced, and compelling than earlier Crows’ orchestration. Though there were high points in previous albums (think This Desert Life’s “High Life” and its unexpected but gorgeous instrumentation), this album is more consistently arresting musically.

For example, the music on “Washington Square” weaves a classic Crows rock with a haunting Irish fairy dance, allowing each to ride over each other and fade in a phase-shifted wave oscillation kind of way. It’s intensely beautiful. The two lines come together then dance apart to create three musical stories beneath the lyrics.

I still haven’t heard most of “On Almost Any Sunday Morning” because the harmonica leads me off to other, lovely places. The lyrics of “When I Dream of Michaelangelo” frustrates me in their references to earlier songs, even though intertextual references are part of the Crows’s appeal for me. The song could be so strong on its own, with the friendless electrifying dance on vulnerable skin, that the angels’ presence irritates me. This is the place on the album I feel most strongly that Duritz’s surrealism has departed from a stream of consciousness that I can follow. I like to wend and stumble through his mind without having my hand held. This imagistic walkway seems to have airport-like, overly obvious signs proclaiming its otherworldliness. As it grows more worn with play, tough, I forget how out of place the play-by-play seems. And I cut him a whole lotta slack because I can’t have any more brilliant but tormented artists off themselves. I need these guys.

“Anyone but You” recalls August and Everything After. I’m still not in love with it, but its complex themes and chording are still working their way into my consciousness.

“You Can’t Count on Me,” like “Sundays” feels like a track from the Hard Candy album, which is not a bad thing, but that album was also running a course tangential, rather than parallel, to mine. The two songs are lovely and tied in knots and weren’t my cup of tea. Until Wallace’s death. (This repeated reference is getting old, I know, but it’s true, and cathartic to realize how one moment on a Monday totally shook me to the core, and how this album has a been a soft, neurotic place for me to nurse mself back into combobulation). I just fell into these Sunday morning songs like I do the couch at grandma’s. I don’t see them for what they are, but for the comfort of not having to think about them.

In beckoning us to dance, “Le Ballet d’Or” strikes me as a wilted, gravelling smoker’s siren song. In it I recognize the Moulin Rouge and theatrical back alley drinkers. Doesn’t mean I won’t go to the ball. Just means it’ll take a particularly remorseful morose impulse to get me to dance my cares away. Before DFW’s suicide I resented that the Crows didn’t even notice I need a babysitter before I can drag my sad old self to the dance. Now it sounds really, really nice to just forget myself in its repetition.

Even further from my reality, “On a Tuesday in Amsterdam,” takes all the compelling old elements—the highwire, the turned back, the rider—and fades them into a repetitive whimper that allows only the piano to shine. And man, does it.  Makes me think Ben Folds.

But the newest Counting Crows album ends with “Come Around,” which closely enough resembles the Crows I know, to suggest that the little pieces of me that echo with their music will again see them come around back to a reality I can recognize.

There. You have my rambling review. My overall advice is, keep listening. They’re a different band now, but if you let them into your life, they’ll start feeling as though they belong. I’m not sure yet if this album cracks my top three Crows albums. But only the top two are thus far insurrountable, so that third spot may be theirs, if life keeps playing out the way it is this fall.

(Side note, YouTube is a conflicting place for me. I was all excited, in an unrelated Google search, to find a clip of the band playing Washington Square on lower Sproul. Talk about surreal. It never occurred to me, as a music lover not a star f*cker, to ever research the singers, songwriters, or bands that make the music I love. I don’t know about personal lives, I don’t listen to interviews, and I don’t visit fan sites. I like the music I like, and that’s it. I don’t even go to concerts. So it was unsettling to see Duritz on Sproul , only because I always thought that hearing his music and thinking of Berkeley, of successes and failures under the broad-reaching halo of theCapanile , was coincidence. Thinking now that I might have heard Berkeley in his music because there IS Berkeley in his music, that an iota ofDuritz and a particle of me link through Oski’s bloodline is more than strange. And I don’t have time to rethink all my Counting Crows associations, the bulk of which are either from Boston missing California or from California missing a me I was trying to be. So I’m kind of mad to have found those videos. And I’m not linking to them, ‘cuz I’m still a little discombobulated about it all. It feels like a one-night stand you only barely remember, having formed all your stories and meanings about it in a vacuum, then hearing the real story from the real person rather than the idealization.)

Peanut wants to go home.

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The move went off reasonably well, and we’re hanging out in temporary digs until we either find a house we love, find a financial crisis that scares us out of the real estate market, or get tired of the utter bullsh*te of the Berkeley housing market, whichever comes first.

And we’ve been preparing Peanut for months: Daddy’s going to live with grandma in San Francisco while we find someone to pay for our house. Then we’ll live with Daddy, all the family together, in a temporary house, just for a while, until we find a new house. Then we’ll move to the new house all together and live there, all together. Yay, new house. Usual response: “Peanut SITED ’bout new house.”  I’m excited, too, buddy.

He’s been fine all along. He knows the script, he recites it along with me. He waved goodbye to the old house and made sure all his friends (stuffed animals) and his sister (doll who used to be his baby, and whom he nursed for a long time, and who he has now decided needs a brother, heaven help me because he loves babies and says he wants one–a real one) and his toys and his books were all in the truck so we could take them to the temporary house and the new house.

He knows all this intellectually. But he’s two and a half. He likes concrete nouns, not intangibles. He likes today and tomorrow, not two months from now. He likes things the way he likes them (“no mommy hold Sweetpea, Peanut hold Sweetpea; no mommy walk first, Peanut walk first; no Mommy eat hummus, Peanut no share hummus; no Peanut go escalator, go elevator first, then escalator”) and he doesn’t like that everything is different.

Today he said, “Peanut want go home.” Sure, I told him. We just need to get cat food and we can go home. “No want temporary house. Want go home.” Oh, thank goodnes you’re a quick-to-rebound kind of guy, Peanut. ‘Cuz this is gonna be rough.

“Um, well, you remember when we packed your toys and we said goodbye to the old house?”

“Yem.”

“Well, someone who paid for the house lives in that house now, and we live with Daddy. And we’re going to find a new house and move to a new house. Maybe that house near the playground that has a yard.”

“Hmmmm. No. Peanut no want new house. Peanut want go home.”

Guilt. Sadness. Buck thyself up, adult. You are the adult, you are in charge, you get to decide. This is a good move for good reasons and you want the whole family happy here, else you’ll wind up in Portland to finally give Spouse a shot at being happy. “Well, bug, for a little while, the temporary house is our home because a home is where the people you love are. And after we find a new house, that house will be home. Because home is wherever Mommy and Daddy and Peanut and the cats are.”

“Hmmmm. Peanut no like cats. Peanut no share toys with cats.”

“Ah, I don’t know what to say to that.”

“If baby comes to Peanut house, Peanut no share toys baby.”

“Um, okay.”

“Name Peanut going?”

“Temporary house.”

“Peanut want go home.”

“I know. But we aren’t going to that home. We’re going to the temporary house.”

I’m sorry, buddy, that we took you away from the only home you’ve ever known. We, the alleged grownups, always knew it was a temporary place, but I guess we never told you. I know the yard and the hiking and the creek for rock-throwing and the awesome community of yoga ladies and the nearby parks and the R family and the D family were all home to you. But I swear, now that Mommy is home, things are gonna get even better. Mommy wasn’t happy there, bug. Mommy likes San Francisco. And Daddy needs Mommy happy, because Mommy is simply beastly when she’s unhappy. Remember our thrush? Mommy was out of her head bestly. Remember the teething nights when you woke Mommy 12 and 15 times a night? Mommy was call-an-exorcist beastly. Remember how much fun Mommy can be? Well, I know this is hard because it’s all new to you, but I swear, we’re going to have fun here.

I haven’t said anything for a while, so he chimes in. “Peanut no like Berkeley. Peanut angry Mommy want new house in Berkeley. Peanut like Aaaameeeeda. Peanut like Sasso-siso.”

You and me both, buddy.

It’s good to be home. I just wish you knew it as home.