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Showing posts from October, 2008

Early Voting Day concert, November 1, 2008

For those of you in the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area, please be apprised of an upcoming concert this Saturday morning November 1, 2008. In honor of Early Voting Day, The dB's will be headlining an amazing show at UNC-CH's Graham Terrace, adjacent to the Morehead Planetarium. The lineup is nothing short of stellar: Portastatic Regina Hexaphone Greg Humphreys (of Dillon Fence and Hobex) Bowerbirds I Was Totally Destroying It Megafaun Ivan Rosebud Superchunk (acoustic) Billy Bragg The dB's (guest bassist Mitch Easter ) Music starts at 9am (don't worry, there's coffee and doughnuts available) and goes 'til it's over. A musical reminder to get out and vote. Hope to see you there.

Lost in song

Continental Drifters at the Warehouse Cafe, New Orleans LA 1992 (with Dave Catching and Pat McLaughlin) (Honestly, I don't remember who took this picture, but if you do, let 'em know. I'll take it down or give credit where it's due.)

Car stereos I have loved

Driving to the Harris-Teeter, lost again. I'm in Smart Wife 's little economical Honda Civic with Bob Dylan crooning "You Left Me Standing in the Doorway" from Time Out of Mind . Time has necessarily gone out of my mind on this ever-lengthening ride, since I can't remember what street the Harris-Teeter was located on. I've lived in Durham for two and a half years now and there are some landmarks that I could not tell you how to find. My regular grocery is a Kroger by I-85, but any other supermarkets are consigned to a messy mental void that encompasses the diverse byways of University Highway, Hillsborough Street and Guess Road. We're not talking about a massive city when we speak of Durham; it's under three hundred square miles in area. I'm just slow on the uptake of learning anything other than the simple routes I use to get to a couple regular destinations. My wife will not be able to tell when I start having senior moments, as it won

Bye/Hi

Two weeks shy of the third anniversary of my first blog entry there and closing in on forty thousand views, I'm shutting down my MySpace page and blog. My Facebook page is already gone. This lovely little landing strip will stay put, and more energy will go into keeping it current, in our mutual interest. The decision had been building for a while, but it came to a head today. My head, actually. My fifteen-year-old asked if I had to be a friend with her on Facebook. In my dad-like way, I was enjoying this new avenue of communication with my kid, but failed to recognize the obvious cringe factor involved in having your own parentals somewhere in the virtual room with all your cool friends. So I said no, I did not, and I removed her profile from my friend list with maybe a little pause, then a bigger pause. It struck me how much time I was spending every day on these two sites, deleting messages and event invitations to gigs in Scotland and Mississippi. And now deleting someo

Jungle gym

Day before yesterday, after school, I got to watch the five-year-old put hand after hand on the overhead ladder and get himself from one side to the other. It seemed like only days ago that he'd been struggling, worried about how to get from one rung to the next, how far down he would fall and how badly he'd be hurt if he did fall. Now he boldly traversed the ladder with me ten feet away, hearing "watch this, Daddy" and looking on, gapemouthed and amazed. I remember having that feeling about ten years ago, out at the lakefront park in New Orleans, watching my daughter struggling the same way for weeks of her trying and dropping to the sand, sadly defeated for all her effort. Until one day, she swung herself to the next rung, stayed attached then did it again with a look of intense exhiliration in her face. She was incredibly proud of her victory, as was I, and she has excelled at gymnastics and physical education ever since. There's one more child that I get to