Did The Druids Make Any Music? (Because That Would Be Convenient To Make This Flow)

Atlanta won't be winning any awards for having the pulsing heart of a great American city, but I have my affections for it.

Among other things, it does have two of my most-favorite names for roads, off of Interstate 85:

1.) North Druid Hills.

That just sounds really cool. I don't live there, but if I somehow found myself living there, I would spare no opportunity to say, with a solemn pretension, that I lived in the "Druid Hills."


2.) Beaver Ruin.

I laugh every time I see this exit. Every time.

Beaver Ruin Road.

So ... blunt.

I'm proud to say I've never walked that road of Beaver Ruin.

P.S. The other road next to it on the exit sign -- "Lilburn."

---

But on to why I'm really here tonight ...

And not speaking of which ....

Bon Iver was a trascendent performance on Sunday evening down there at the Varity Playhouse.

The well-known story -- for fans like me --goes that Justin Vernon's life went into the shitter, so he retreated for three months to a remote cabin in the middle of winter in Wisconsin with no plans but isolation and whatever might come from that.

He wound up making some beautiful music with barest of means, including in that chopping wood to keep warm and killing deer to provide his means.

And I'm a bit jealous of his transformative experience. You don't come by them easy.

What impressed me about him last night -- among other things that I won't go into because ... well, I don't personally know anyone else besides my wife who likes him -- is that he took whatever it is he brought with him from that cabin and shared it, expanded upon it, and made it into something that we all were a part of.

Electricity sometimes ruins musical artists who made their names without it, but not in this case, where something is being carefully built with each tool available used to construct the greater masterpiece.

He dubbed his voice a million times over while in that cabin to create a texture of sound that you could squeeze in your hands.

When he implored the audience to sing the end to his song, it wasn't a showman's ploy.

It seemed he wanted a bigger piece of something, woven by sound waves, to touch.

I don't know to what he extent he planned the touch and texture of his music -- but the bass drum, each time it was sounded, felt as if it were physically rescusitating my heart, which hasn't been beating like it should these days.

I love transformative experiences.

Music that blesses you with feelable matter.



and ...

Bon Iver -- Re: Stacks

Sham-A-Lama-Ding-Dong

Why is the ShamWow! guy wearing a headset while he's doing the informercial?

Is it because we could talk to him directly if we call? Is it that they want him to look like he's too busy to explain something so obvious that we'd be stupid not to buy it?

Or is it a corporate down-sizing thing where they're simultaneously recording the radio ad?

Isn't it also a curious advertising strategy that a product pushed on television would start with "sham?"

I know he beat up a hooker.

I'm just saying -- these are the questions that trouble me ...

Winning

I can't call it an epiphany.

More like a new understanding -- in the way that it's new only because I was the only one who didn't understand.

It's not a secret that I don't get my youngest boy -- 6 years old -- as much as I do my oldest -- 9 years old. There's nothing wrong with that, because I appreciate who he is. But oftentimes it's more as an observer of who he is.

I don't care if my hands are super-clean before I eat. I don't find comfort in rules or standard procedures. I want to be better than other people at things.

My oldest is virtually a carbon-copy of me. For the good and for the bad. The comparable traits are too lengthy to list.

But something happened the other night that offered me a remarkable insight into my youngest little boy -- the theatre kid, the uncoordinated one, the one who loves little girls and isn't afraid to put himself in the spotlight.

I felt the essence of who he is -- in a moment, the kind of moment that is transformative even if it is only a moment.

---

Aden has never really cared about winning. He just wants someone to tell him he's done well.

I've come to learn that when he argues with his brother about who won something, it's not because he brought up the subject of who should be winning. He only argues about winning to defend himself from someone saying he has lost.

When he says, "Did we win the baseball game?", he only asks because it's what people talk about after a sports event. I tell him that I can tell him he didn't lose (because kids hitting a ball off a tee if they can't hit a pitch thrown to them by the coach doesn't result in a winner or a loser).

I remember when Asa first learned to play video games, winning was foremost in his mind. He's destroyed video games because he couldn't beat them. I always understood how he felt and understood what it's like to feel like you're not having fun unless you're winning.

The thing is, Asa has beaten me at things. And he lets me know it.

Aden never has.

That changed though.

Thanks to SpongeBob SquarePants.

---

Aden had been begging me to play this SpongeBob racing game on the computer, one of those where you use the arrow keys on the keyboard to accelerate and drive.

I don't have a lot of practice at that.

He's played quite a bit.

He wanted me to play it because he thought it was cool. He wanted me to be a part of it.

But he didn't care about beating me.

As I slammed Patrick's race car into walls repeatedly and couldn't figure out how to back up and get straight and then went the wrong way ... he smoked me.

Two minutes -- two minutes -- after he crossed the finish line, I richocheted my way to the merciful end.

All the while, he told me I was doing OK. Every little wall I managed to scrape away from was a "good job."

When I crossed the finish line, I was "awesome at this game."

"High five, Daddy."

And that's when I understood.

I can't articulate exactly what it is I understand.

I just know that I do.

ADEN'S AMAZING BASEBALL SLIDE:

Time And Space

I wish that what seemed "just like yesterday" actually was just yesterday.

Happy Birthday, Dude

About 10 minutes before 1:12 a.m., my oldest son began crying in his sleep.

Ten minutes from his 9th birthday and he was certifiably sick.

Five minutes before that, I ran my fingers through his hair, kissed his forehead, marveling at how far he has come in the nine years since he was a little baby that I could almost hold in the palm of my hand.

He had had a big day planned at school this morning ...

An awards ceremony for making all A's. Little spherical rice-krispie treats with baseball threads that my wife made for all 24 kids in the class. His name announced over the speaker, proclaiming it his day because he was the only one in the school born on April Fool's Day.

But it wasn't to be.

He was too sick to go to school.

I was barely awake when I decided that I was staying home with him. And not just because it was a rainy day.

I can't tell you how much I wish I could re-live those first days when he was born -- when spring's first flashes of pink, violet and powder-blue blooms begin to emerge tree-lined streets between the hospital and home.

Just to hold him and move him effortlessly. To watch the slightest turn of his lip, a hint of a smile that proves baby's want to be happy. To watch him wake up crying for food, being fed and happy, and then crying before he went back to sleep.

And then doing it all over again the course of a few hours.

I didn't really have any idea what I was doing, nor could I see beyond what I expected fatherhood to be compared to letting it be what it was going to be.

I didn't necessarily handle it well. And I can't say I do now.

However ...

Today was the closest I've been to living that time again.

He woke up and played his Madden '09, then came to wake me up.

He laid in the bed with me.

I told him how I was going to take care of him like when he was a little baby home for the first time.

I described his routine back then. He laughed. I told him how we had to set him beside a window because he was jaundiced. I didn't actually say "jaundiced." I said it was because his skin was weird and the sun would fix it.

I told him how he would squeak when he had the hiccups. I did an impression of that. He giggled.

I told him we would lay on the couch, him resting on my chest, and watch the Final Four

I gave him his medicine and cooked him eggs and sausage. He ate the sausage. The eggs weren't that good.

I ordered him the "Madagascar 2: Escape To Africa" movie on pay per view. It could play all day.

He asked me to play his WWE wrestling video game. I asked him to let me sleep for an hour. He came in frequently to wake me up for various reasons. I woke up and asked him if he was ready to play. He was asleep.

I opened up his little tin baby capsule. There was a lock of hair from his first haircut. A copy of the hospital's discharge paper on April 2, 2000. A ticket stub to his first Gamecock football -- September 21, 2002 vs. Temple.

When he woke up this afternoon, I asked him if he was ready. He told me he was, but that he wanted to watch the "Suite Life of Zach and Cody" first.

Of course he could.

Last night, I took the remnants of the Rice Krispy cutouts and molded them into a crude resemblance of circle. My wife painted some baseball threads on it but insisted that the mutated monstrosity wasn't going to school.

This morning, I put nine candles in that concoction and had him make a wish and blow them out.

Over the course of the day, he ate the whole thing ... one foot in diameter.

We played the wrestling game. I was Shelton Benjamin. He was Shawn Michaels. He won, because he's better. I let him download whatever music he wanted.

We picked his brother up from school. I let him sit in the front this time, because it was his birthday.

We went to a Walgreen's to pick out some sunglasses for baseball. I had promised we would do that. His eyes are sensitive like mine. While inside, he found a wrestling figure by the name of "MVP." It was $9.99. I bought it, because it's his birthday.

He came home and acted out a match with his new figure. And watched the Madagascar movie again.

Like a little kid who didn't just two days before -- as his team's starting pitcher for their first game of the season -- work his way out of bases-loaded jam and strike out one of the best hitters in his league.

That's where he is now.

On an edge between the babyhood I don't want to vanish and the growing kid who sometimes lapses and involuntarily calls me "dude" if I'm frustrating him.

"Dude."

He's embarrassed when I bring up that habit.

These years go by.

It's getting to where one day isn't enough to contain them.