back!

Out of action for a few days there. Was attacked by a snake. Hahaha not really. Really, this python was the most normal animal displayed by one of the stangest small-town fair traveling menageries I have ever seen. Who needs zoos when you have enthusiastic-but-shady families of people willing to drive their RV's full of poisonous reptiles and insects right to you?

Hey, and the local paper did a very nice article on our house in the Sunday paper--almost all the quotes are almost all accurate! The online version has a link to the left with a photo gallery.

After the passing of both Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett today, my friend Travis pointed out that momentous events are often said to occur in 3's. Travis was wondering what that third happening would be, and that is when I realized that it was here, in my own house: the amazing quesadillas I made tonight. They were so good.

It is a little strange to be connected to two such famous people in this way, I mean, why me, right? But really, we're all just tools of the cosmos and sometimes, to remind us of this connection, all it takes is a little of that not-all-that-old lime you have sitting under some bananas squeezed onto your quesadillas. What a day.

In other news, it breaks my heart, but I am considering having our dog Smokey put to sleep. It's one of the saddest decisions I can imagine making, but . . . she just won't stop panting in my face. It's driving me crazy, and the vet says there's nothing we can do. A shame, really, especially because she's in perfect health.

Photos for a mother who is on the road for a week with the Vera Bradly RAAM team.

We went for strawberries but here Michelle and J get caught up in a swath of early raspberries.

Mike taking a free sample. What are the rules on this, I wonder. I made up a rule that most of the strawberries I ate had to be somewhat blemished or touching the dirt, and that seemed to work okay. I swear, when you kneel on the straw between the rows and throw that first strawberry in your mouth, no other food seems relevant or necessary to life on earth.

And then the second one is good, but not as good, and you end up trying to recapture that first berry, which doesn't ever quite happen but this is not really that serious of a problem in the big picture.

Mr. Mike is patient. B's latest catch phrase is "better luck next time, old boy!" He looks like he could be saying that here, but I don't know.

Two nights of camping practice in a row now. Instead of ghost stories, I read "gnome legends" out of that old book about gnomes--the one with the gnome skeleton and pictures of actual naked gnomes. I'm pretty sure it's a kids' book, at least. The legends have a lot of dying in them, though.

Things that have been in the house recently:

A sandwich.

New glasses.

A baby.

You might think you're done with babies but then you spend time with one and you can't help but think "awww . . no, that's crazy." How do they do that? Even the cry makes me smile. I love it when this one cries, like the idea of an infant's problems are cute to me or something. I wonder how long that will last with my own kids; I already find myself worrying about how it will feel when I know that they are genuinely depressed or sad or anxious or down on themselves, and that's saying something, because I basically gave up worrying in the fall of 2001, which was kind of a strange time to do that with 9/11 and all, but that's how it happened.

But babies, dang. They are always trying so hard. Everything they do, pure concentration. How do you get that again? I have been trying to listen to less music, and that has helped, but we're not quite there yet.

The third-ever season of "Hamlet Tag" just concluded, and I finally got some photographs to document this growing sport that combines agility and inevitability into one of the few athletic challenges out there that really asks the big questions.

A short primer on the rules that I remember: In the middle of this image is "Hamlet," who is shown in the act of pursuing various other players like the "player-king" and the "gravedigger" because the "ghost" player is on the field, spurring him to his revenge.

When the ghost is on the field, then, players caught by Hamlet yelp "I am slain" and fall to the ground. When they get bored, they can get up and run around again.

Here we see Hamlet being chased because the ghost has left the field, making him lose his resolve. When I was a kid, we called this "smear the queer," but I don't think we were aware of the ugly connotation at the time.

When Mr. Hill is on the field, everyone has to stop and talk about "how postmodern this game is." Eventually, the poison flag is thrown, everyone dies, and the Fortinbras player steps onto the field, announcing "I win."

We had a couple of strong teams this year, and one was even allowed to play at full-speed, the first time that has happened since season one.

Such great classes. I'll miss them.

one of my life goals is to never own a mobile phone, but this iphone app is the kind of thing that tempts:

Spinning vinyl ipod app from Theodore Watson on Vimeo.

I got to go back to Detroit recently. I love it there. It is the anti-Chicago. Or maybe it is Bizarro Chicago. But anyway, when you go back to a place you like, you go to the places you used to hang, and this is one of them, the John King Books just south of Nine Mile. The other bookstore I used to hang out at is now a pool hall. The clerk at John King said the owner of the other one sold at a good time and is "enjoying retirement." But then a friend I met in Ann Arbor that day said that no, he was forced out and is very sad about it. So I get to choose which story to believe and today I choose that he is happy.

I found these things at John King. I couldn't remember if I already owned the Donald Hall book, but I bought it anyway because I love that series of Poets on Poetry books and I wanted to be safe, just in case I didn't. The Jack Spicer book was a score, though, because I thought it was worth more than the $6 I paid for it and it turns out that decent copies sell for $80-$100. I won't sell it though because Jack Spicer is crazy as hell and I need that book. The Rexroth book I got just because I don't like to buy books in 2's.

I can't believe I did not buy this one though. The one that got away. I picked it up and saw that it was just transcripts of Bob & Ray sketches and I thought "why would I want that when I can listen to the recordings?" and then when I was driving home I thought "for fun Cath and I could be Bob & Ray and act out the skits," so now I'm a little devastated at my lack of foresight.

This was my first apartment after college, in the town I helped prepare for its eventual gentrification: Ferndale, Mich. I think the gentrification ended while I was away though. The balcony was ours, where we would try to play Yo La Tengo songs on our new guitar. It was a dumpy place, but I can only remember loving it.

It wasn't all great. The eventual wife and I were doing what some people would call "living in sin," but if we had talked about it at all, which we didn't, we would have said only that we knew that we wanted to be together. We felt this in the way that you know things when you are young and know almost nothing else.

The landlord downstairs would throw big parties where there must have been a rule that you had to smoke at least two cigarettes at once because smoke would pour through the heating grates in our apartment until the clothes in our closets smelled like other peoples' clothes. This happened like all the time.

And then after the parties, the landlord and her boyfriend would yell at each other. Once, he locked her out and then at 3:00 in the morning on a work night she was yelling to the neighborhood "Somebody please call the cops! I have been locked out of my house! Please somebody call the cops so I can get back in my house please!" I can't remember if I called the cops. I like to think I did, but it is also possible that I thought she needed to be away from her violent boyfriend for awhile and therefore didn't call.

Basically, 2-3 times a week, Cath and I would be upstairs listening to some kind of badness downstairs, asking each other "should we call the cops?" I really don't think we ever did. I really think that for us, we felt like outsiders and that maybe that was just a different kind of life that was normal for some people and who were we to call the cops on it? It would be like judging them, we thought, I think. When you are older, it is very hard to remember yourself when you were 22 and not be stunned at how much of an idiot you were.