Category: Life

  • Earworm Wednesday: Not the Happiest Song

    Somewhere around 1998 or 1999, I friend of mine gifted me a very, very bootleg copy of a bunch of Radiohead singles that weren’t on any of their albums. I love Radiohead, and I like how their music just doesn’t fit in any one box, and same goes for their fans, to be honest.

    All of the singles on the bootleg were awesome, but one stood out to me as being the most melancholic of a downer song imaginable, and I loved it! What hooks me is the very beginning of the song – it’s just hypnotic.

    Oh, and I can only listen to this song a hand full of times in a week, or it starts to make me depressed. So, you have been warned and handle with care.

  • Ode to My Dog Who Sleeps All Day

    Oh, my little dog.

    You do nothing all day.

    To move from your bed, to my bed, to under my bed, to the couch, then under the dinning room table, ending on the middle of the floor; you are so tired.

    When I am at my desk, you lay under it. I look down at you, and though you act like you are sleeping, I see your side eye.

    What do you wonder? What do you dream?

    You do not understand time, but you understand pattern.

    Where is the lady? Where is the kid? Why are you still here? I think I will sleep. No! I will lick my left front paw. THEN, I will sleep. Hey you’re moving… I will follow you to the couch… where I will sleep next to you.

  • Fatherhood: Baby Teeth Edition

    The kid needs to lose one more tooth and then she can get braces. At least that was what I was told by the orthodontist. As such, we have been going to town trying all the tricks to get that last baby tooth out. Within reason, that is. She’s been eating crunchy vegetables and wiggling the tooth with her tongue. My father suggested the old tie a string around the door handle and the tooth trick, but that one seemed to scare the kid a little. Odds are that the tooth will come out in the next couple of days. I feel the act/desire to have to the tooth out is what is causing the tooth to stay in – as that is how the Universe works for most things.

    In a larger sense, I never imagined how much time I would spend in my fatherhood worrying, dealing with, and caring for the loss of baby teeth. I imagined quite a few scenarios of being a father, but grappling with baby teeth wasn’t one of them.

    I feel like there is a book there, waiting to be written, “Everything I Had No Idea About When It Came to Being a Dad.” I think I have written several blogs about this, though right now, I can’t think of any of those issues.

    That’s the other thing about fatherhood; what was odd and new today, is normal and old by tomorrow.

  • Tottenham Dodged That Bullet (Unedited)

    I was out of town this past weekend for Memorial Day. The wife had found a cabin in the Vermont woods. A very last minute find and deal at the same time. I say all of this because we, as a family, were attempting to disconnect for three days in the woods and spend time together.

    Except for Sunday morning, when I had to take my phone, and hide in the back bedroom to watch and see if Tottenham was going to get relegated.

    I, several times in fact, had written off Tottenham Hotspur’s season. I had high hopes with Thomas Frank coming in at the start of the season, but I had hope, so there was my first mistake. I gave up on the team, first time around, at the end of 2025. For me, that was the moment that I realized that Spurs was not going to make the top six on the table, so not chance for European play next season. Then I gave up on the team, the second time, when they sacked Frank. Then the third time of giving up on them was when it looked like they were about to get relegated, and West Ham was going to squeak by.

    But the “Relegation Fight” turned out to be way more exciting than I expected. Exciting in a gallows humor sense, I guess. I mean, I was expecting the worst. And to be honest, I sort of felt like the club deserved it. (Not the players, of course. I don’t fully blame them for what happened.) Almost seven years of mismanagement was finally coming to a head, and in a weird way, I thought the only way for Spurs ownership to learn their lesson was for them to go down to the Championship, pay out the nose, and have a half full world class stadium on match day. And the true salt in the wound would be how American football would come into Hotspur Stadium and sell the place out.

    What I got was a mediocre match between Tottenham and Everton. The person I felt very back for was Pickford giving up a goal to these losers. (Good thing Pickford plays better in the World Cup than for his club.) But a winning goal is still a winning goal, and though Tottenham could have made it through with a draw, I was happy that the season did end on a win.

    That will leave next season. I hope Madison stays healthy and can get back into the starting lineup. Same thing for Kulusevski. Maybe some more help on the attack would be good. And the backline still feels like it’s missing one piece to make it solid. I’m not expecting Tottenham to win the League, but I would be happy with a top ten finish.

    Anyway… I got a World Cup to get through, and then I can start putting all my efforts into getting my hopes.

  • Earworm Wednesday: It is a Magic Number

    I wasn’t the biggest Blind Melon fan when they were around, but I didn’t have a problem with them. It was a tragedy when their lead singer Shannon Hoon died of an overdose, as I think the band still had years of good work ahead of them.

    A little treasure of a song they recorded for the “Schoolhouse Rock! Rocks!” tribute album was “Three is a Magic Number,” which has been played in my home since the day we brought our daughter home from the hospital. There are lots of ear hooks in this song, but for me, it’s the drums that get stuck in my head.