"You broke my dreams," he said.

Before bed, he comes into the living room and softly says to me:

"When you yelled at me earlier, you broke my dreams. Now I'll never get to dream what I wanted."

Trying not to feel guilty about having yelled at him, I answered, "But you weren't sleeping when I yelled at you."

Joshua replied, "I know. My dreams were trying to get started and now they're broken and now I'll have bad dreams tonight instead."

I don't recall what I said to that. Something reassuring, probably. Something that neither of us really believed, but it was good enough for him to go bed after the standard hug and kiss.

He can be such a wild mess sometimes that I can forget how sensitive a little guy can be. His sister has the market cornered on sensitivity and I'll have to remember to look extra hard for those times when he might need a little more love and attention.

How I Get My Calcium

...and Leesa reminds me that they're good for my breath. ;)

Smile, jump, and be happy. It's the point.

One in the morning. Finally watching Capote for the first time.

God, I can't take my eyes off of Philip Seymour Hoffman's performance.

"Protect Ya Neck," say the Wu-Tang Clan. I really should do that.

For a week or so, I've had the most terrible pain in my neck. Any movement feels so restrictive. I can turn it maybe 45% or so and then it's a battle to turn it much more at all. My first thought was to blame it on my habit of drinking too many sodas each day. All that sugar! I have no substantiated reason to think that's the cause, but it's the only vice I have. What else could it be?

Then a friend suggested that it could just be stress. A quick search on the Internet did bring up a lot of talk of stress-related neck stiffness. Lord knows, I stress enough. I go on enough about the reasons why on this blog and I won't blather on more tonight. Anyway, maybe I just need a massage. It's been years since my last one. My friend thinks I'm stressing about my upcoming vasectomy. I don't think so. Weirdly, I'm kind of looking forward to that. Another experience, um, under my belt to ponder and write about, I suppose.

All these thoughts about my neck and what might be the cause of its limited ability to do what it does and the reason finally comes to me tonight. Last week I slipped on the kids' wet bathroom floor, the top of my six foot frame sliding and crashing down next to the tub and onto the thin rug by the sink. Surely that's the incident. I fell and now my neck hurts. My slight but week-long headache is from that slippery spill last week. Balance was lost and the ensuing hard fall has left a mark. Curiously, it's only now that I've put two and two together. It puzzles me that the obvious has eluded me this long. Too much soda? Too much stress? How about the fall, the crash of noggin to linoleum? Yep. That's gotta be it.

I'll take some aspirin and try to stop over-thinking every little thing that happens to me. Wait. I have a blog. Over-thinking is what I do. It happens and I share it. To what end I don't know, but I do it anyway.

Thanks for reading.

"Deciding to Live"

Climb. (NPR. This I Believe.)

"Give it a name."

I know a woman whose first name is the same as her last name. (Well, similar anyway. First name Robin, last name Robbins.) I wrongly assumed that she acquired that little fact through marriage. In fact, she is married but chose to keep her maiden name because she's in marketing and her name is so much more memorable to people this way. She's very successful in business and I imagine she's got a point.

So with that, I offer to my wife a suggestion: This little baby of ours? The one who is likely due in April 2009? Boy or girl, let's name the baby Beziat Beziat.

I await her reply.

[Edit to add: I'm revising my idea. Now I'm thinking Beziat Boutros Boutros-Beziat. A name both political and rich in alliteration. Awesome!]

Carla Bruni sings and my brain turns to mush.

I'm listening to Carla Bruni's second album, entitled No Promises. While her first release, Quelqu'un m'a dit, is sung entirely in French, this release, with lyrics from the poetry of Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Dorothy Parker and others, is sung in English. I like it a lot.

Where Quelqu'un m'a dit sounded very fresh and exotic to this unilingual American's ears, 2007's No Promises, while quite beautiful, sounds more like Margo Timmins of Cowboy Junkies singing with Jack Johnson's band. That's not criticism; these songs on No Promises make for quite the escape from the noise and clutter of day to day life. If it's solace and beauty you're seeking, then you can't go wrong here. There are many rich pleasures waiting within Carla Bruni's breathy interpretations of these classic American and British poems.

Still, for me, there's just something about a gal singing in French...

Feel Good Friday - "Mad World"

This is maybe a strange choice for something called "Feel Good Friday," but ever since I first heard this song a few years ago, it's always done a good job of helping me feel peace in my more quiet and worrisome moments. Although I consider myself a fan of Tears For Fears, this Gary Jules cover was my introduction to the song. And now that I've finally seen the excellent Donnie Darko, it's back in my head again.

Gretchen: You're weird.
Donnie: Sorry.
Gretchen: No, that was a compliment.

Check Your Work, People

I'm no grammar genius. I never went to college and I've never taken any writing classes beyond what I was taught in high school. This blog is for my entertainment and hopefully some other people enjoy reading it as well, but I don't consider myself a serious writer by any means. I don't even proof read anything before I post (I just cringe later when I get bored, read through my archives, and see any number of mistakes). That's cool though, because no one's making or losing money here. It's just a blog. For the same reason, I don't get upset when I see writing errors on other people's blogs. I read them for the stories, not for the punctuation.

However, in big print media? In advertising? I think that what's forgivable on a blog can be quite shameful elsewhere. Take the back page of this week's Scene for example:

Loosing? Loosing your home? The folks behind that little ad couldn't be bothered to check their work before sending it out to be seen by all eyes that take a glance at that back page of a free and widely circulated weekly?

Or maybe stuff like that gets a free pass these days. Maybe I'm being a bit of an English snob. (Mr. Stackhouse taught me well. English, not snobbery.) Does the general public overlook errors like this and take it as the ad intended? Or worse, possibly most don't even notice an error.

Whatever. Seeing it gave me something to blog about. That's something.

(I wonder how many errors I made writing this. I don't care. I'm going to bed.)

And By The Way, Which One's Pink?

Too much Twitter these days. I don't even know what a blog is anymore. Or maybe tomorrow is another day and I'll think of something that takes a few paragraphs to get out and absolutely must be shared! 

Or I'll just make myself write some stuff down right now. Like this...

I'm listening to the latest Coverville podcast tonight. Nothing but Pink Floyd covers. I like it so far, but I'm reminded of the fact that I currently own way too little Pink Floyd. It's a shameful thing to share, indeed. Over the years, be they 8-track tapes, cassettes, albums, or CDs, I've bought and re-bought pretty much everything they've done. It's time (beyond time) that I add the good ones to the iPod. So far, and with thanks to a friend, I've got Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, and Meddle. It's a decent start, but there are several must-haves remaining, notably, The Final Cut and the Roger Waters solo stuff.

Anyway, I recommend checking out Coverville 502 if you want to here some interesting Pink Floyd covers.

Goodbye Blue Sky.

When Obama Speaks

I just finished listening to Obama's Democratic Convention speech again this morning. No matter what happens over the next few months, whether or not Barack Obama is elected as our next president, he should be chosen to stand up and talk to America a couple of times every year. The way he inspires when he speaks, the way he shares his compassion and hope for America and the American people, I always feel good about the future when I hear him on stage.

Like a good liberal, I've been known to download his speeches to my iPod, put one bud in my ear and go to sleep listening to Obama talk of change and opportunity. Let's get back to the days of economic surpluses, more jobs, and the promise of better health care for Americans.

I had the pleasure of hanging out with the lovely Jane Q. Public the other night. We both think it'd be cool for a bunch of us to get together to watch the upcoming presidential debates.

• Sept. 26: The first presidential debate, at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, will focus on foreign policy and national security. John McCain and Barack Obama will stand at lecterns and answer questions from moderator Jim Lehrer.
• Oct. 2: The vice presidential debate will be held at Washington University in St. Louis.  
• Oct. 7: The second presidential debate, at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn., will have a town-hall-style format. Moderator Tom Brokaw will call on audience members and pose questions submitted through the Internet.
• Oct. 15: The final presidential debate, at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., will center on domestic and economic policy. Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama will sit at a table with moderator Bob Schieffer.
  
  (Associated Press)
  

Good idea? Maybe the good folks at Drinking Liberally are already organizing something. I want to experience these debates in a social setting. Let me know.

Have a nice day.

Borderline Tedium Within

Thanks to my dad's generous spirit, I've got a pretty good collection of jazz CDs to listen to. Artists on my playlist include Bill Charlap, Bill Evans, Chet Baker, Coltrane, Miles, and Getz.

I'm currently listening to Charles Lloyd play the always beautiful and somewhat melancholy "Georgia." It's simply perfect listening for a night like this.

The weekend is over and I'm glad to be getting back to the workplace tomorrow. I never know what to do with myself after too much time on my hands. At least I wasn't the typical "hermit from Hermitage" for once. On Saturday my visiting brother treated me to a movie ("Vicky Christina Barcelona") and Sunday night found me getting home at 4 a.m. after hanging out with a fellow blogger. (Finally I have touched a Wii and I like it much. Finally I have seen Donnie Darko and I keep replaying bits from it over and over in my head.)

Today I stayed home all day and I stayed grumpy all day. The reasons are all too tedious to bore you with here, but suffice it to say I'm pretty embarrassed by my inability to get out of my head sometimes. I just need to get back into my work routine and focus on helping people and winning bread. As my young son likes to say when I leave for work, "Be careful of cars and make enough money for McDonald's." I'm doing my best.

Or maybe I can do better.

From the Hands On Nashville website:

Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee needs volunteers Tuesday, September 2 to prepare food for Hurricane Gustav evacuees located in our area.

 

Volunteers are needed to prepare sandwiches and hot meals at Second Harvest's facility in MetroCenter.  You will need to wear closed toed shoes and a long sleeve shirt.   

 

 

Volunteer Location:

Second Harvest Food Bank

331 Great Circle Road

Nashville, Tennessee 37228

One Volunteer Shift Tomorrow, Tuesday September 2:

8:00am-11:00am

Please email Brian Williams at brian@hon.org to volunteer.

Check the Hands On Nashville website for more information and volunteer opportunities.

Nashville Opera News

Nashville Opera's Noah Liff Center is being built in Sylvan Heights.

WSMV has the story and video.

[Edit to add: I just mapped the new center on Google Maps. I used to live exactly .5 miles from it. How nice would it be if I still lived there and got to work for Nashville Opera in some capacity? I'd never complain about walking to my job if that were the case.]