New Numbers

Eva continues to grow quickly, both physically and behaviorally. Her personality is much more complex now than it was even four months ago, and she's picking up words and concepts now almost like they were toys. It's amusing and at times a bit amazing to see what she does, and how.

At times, however, it's just plain hilarious to watch her and listen to her. She's a largely unselfconscious bundle of inquisitiveness, playfulness and affection, balanced by a pronounced stubborn streak and a good old-fashioned temper. I like her.

Kate tends to be much more active in teaching Eva specifics like the alphabet, numbers and of course signs. I'll do such things in a more desultory, accidental way. I prefer to simply be around, provide her with a range of toys or an environment like going outside, and mostly let her discover her own amusements. Of course I play with her too, but Kate takes a serious initiative in things like this. She's a much better mother than I am.

Both with our explicit instruction, and through the Signing Time videos, and through just paying attention, Eva's loading up her vocabulary almost on a daily basis. A brief (not complete) lexicon of Eva-speak:

Kitty (formerly kit-tieh): cat

Doggy (formerly dog-gieh): dog

Tawaz: colors (i.e. crayons)

Bass: bath

Sawah: shower

Gapes: grapes

Nana: banana

Sasu: dinosaur (among her stuffed animals)

Side: Outside (i.e. I want to go outside!)

Out: Up (i.e. pick me up! We're working on this one)

Aa' done: All done (frequently screamed during a tantrum, or said when she's scared of something)

Sat: What's that?

Ta-ta: cracker

Waddah: water

AAHHH-gin: again (i.e. do that again!)

Sauce: Applesauce

Pizza: (she's gotten this one perfectly since she was 9 months old)

Wainjuh: Ranger (grandma Ande's--i.e. Mima's--Ranger 4-wheeler)

Dink: Drink

Seep: sleep

The list could go on and on, but that's a decent sampling of how her language approaches English pretty well, though she rarely puts several words together. She's still pretty much a one-word-at-a-time speaker.

What's more interesting is her personality, how she's learning coyness and even some skills at manipulation. But there's no mistaking when that temper shows up. Sometimes it's in deadly earnest, when she's howling with all her might for something different than what we're giving her, like some nights on going to bed, or frequently being strapped into her baby seat in the car. A recent development is brief flashes of the temper, when she logs a more or less perfunctory protest but seems to know she's going to lose.

She pulled one of these last night, after we'd lowered her into her crib for the night. Part of the new ritual in putting her to sleep is letting her finish her bottle of water before we take it away and turn out the light. So she stalls, sips the bottle slowly, rolls over on top of it and generally refuses to give it up. Some nights she's more charming than others, but still, by and large, when your baby wants to stretch the day out and make sure you keep her company, it's a wonderful thing. Still, bedtime is bedtime.

Eva had selected, among her many dozens of stuffed animals, a small gray koala to go into the crib with her (along with four other bears, a doll and a couple of blankies). I dropped the koala into the crib next to her as she clutched her bottle and resisted giving it to Kate.

Kate remained patient, counted to three, and then took the bottle from Eva's grasping hands. As soon as she'd lost the bottle Eva yelped sharply, grabbed the koala and threw it straight up into the air. It flew up, came back down and landed right in front of her. She ignored it and began a sullen pout, sucking on her red blankie while staring straight ahead.

That was a new kind of protest. It wasn't a genuine attempt to escape or sway us to her will. It was an expletive, a single burst of frustration followed by resigned acceptance of the truth. I was blown away. (I was also laughing to the point of coughing my lungs up.) Our 20-month-old baby had effectively just sworn at us.

Eva's also learning to count. Kate's taught her much of the alphabet (she tends to lose focus if I try to run through it backwards), so now she's turned her attention to numbers. Kate will make the ASL sign for each number in turn, and Eva will speak them. First up to ten, and now up to twenty. Based on tonight's effort, she has a little way to go. A recap of Eva's responses as Kate made the signs:

(1) One!

(2) Two!

(3) Fee!

(4) Fouah!

(5) Five!

(6) Six!

(7) Semmen!

(8) Eight!

(9) Nine!

(10) Ten!

(11) Leven!

(12) Twel!

(13) Benteen!

(14) Benteen!

(15) Benteen!

(16) Benteen!

(17) Benteen!

(18) Twunny!

(19) Twunny!

(20) Twunny!

So Eva's got a little ways to go with the numbers, but I think she's off to a fine start. She told her first story the other day, speaking a string of words which implied an actual sequence of events: "Mama. Dada. Kitty. Pizza. Sauce. Dink. Bass. Seep." Kate heard it and was pretty amazed.

So she's doing a fine job growing up, eating plenty of yogurt and getting her calcium, still in the 99th percentile for height and 75th for weight--tall and slim. Since I'm not so physically imposing myself, I'm hoping Eva winds up 6'6" and scares 98% of the boys away so they won't pester her in high school.

The Wishing Tree

I love Irish music, and have for over a decade. I became aware of how much I loved it during the winter of 1997-98, when I was living in Philadelphia. I was attending U. Penn that year, studying Greek and Latin and making the decision whether to go into ancient literature as a teaching career (obviously no). I did spend lots of time in bars. I was emerging from an extended phase of drinking heavily, which had begun during my sophomore year in college, and continued on-and-off until just about then.

The death of my father in 1996 from brain cancer shook me into the awareness that my prolonged adolescence was over and it was time to start living a life I respected, and actually accomplishing a series of things I could call a career. In other words, it was time to grow up. I still drank quite a bit that year in Philadelphia, but I was putting an end to the problem. I realized that it's not enough to discover, as I did after sophomore year in college, that alcohol does damage to a person's life, brain and body. When the addiction has become physical, merely wanting to end the addiction is too weak a motive.

Alcohol damages and ends friendships, family relationships and careers. It precluded any scholarship I might have done in college. It deadens the conscious part of the personality, freeing the more primitive urges to express themselves.

This is why drunks tend to act crudely and boorishly, and be undesirable company in general. But if you cultivate the habit of not acting on those crude desires, but only let them loose in your mind, then being drunk can actually become a means to discover what is happening further down in your brain than the consciousness is willing to travel. That's important for thinkers and artists.

There's also the fact that drinking helps destroy relationships and career prospects. It engenders a general sense of shame in a person. And that shame itself can be useful--it is particularly strong acid on many of the assumptions in life, on social and religious conventions, and on identities based on race, nationality and class. In short, drinking heavily can train a person's mind to disregard as unimportant many of the things held sacred by reputable folks. Only your immediate emotional needs survive. If you're a writer or an artist, that is invaluable. It's a prerequisite for the vocation.

The society we've built up, including religion and government, certainly has its basis in our own psychology and in the world around us, but not all of it. Any system includes its own arbitrary limits, declarations peculiar to that system, and not necessarily to any other. Christians make Jesus Christ, only-begotten son of God, the focus of their religion. No other religious system does. Capitalism enshrines the idea that each person has the right to buy and own as much as he or she can afford. Not all economic systems are so. To step beyond those conventions takes hard work, both intellectually and emotionally.

So drinking has its benefits. But I decided against creative writing as a career, so I knew I had to sober up. It took a while, especially since I didn't want to go dry, and preclude the possibility of ever having a social drink again. I knew weaning myself of habitual drinking, without giving it up altogether, would be more difficult than going cold turkey.

But even so, it wasn't enough to simply want to give up drinking. I needed something else I could turn to, something I'd rather be doing instead of drinking. Otherwise, in my bored, solitary moments, I'd be too likely to find myself at a bar again, drunk or well on my way. I needed something similar to what Alcoholics Anonymous calls the "higher power". During that winter in Philadelphia, I found it: ballroom dancing. Ballroom dance was my avenue back toward being social again, making friends, meeting women, and doing something which was fun just by itself. A dance with a decent partner whom I might never see again after that dance is still a fine thing.

My six months of dancing in Philadelphia would be a long story in themselves, so I won't tell it here. But the lessons I took at that studio with my teacher Shana were, altogether, perhaps the biggest single step I took toward forgetting the drinking problem. Still, that didn't mean I wasn't drinking that year. I was, and I got to know plenty of bars around Philly. Philly is just Irish enough--not like Boston, but more than, say, Dallas--that many of the best bars have Irish themes. My favorite--and I have no idea if it's still there--was The Bards, in Central City. It was a modest pub, featuring its own in-house brew (Yard Ale--amber, as smooth as Guinness, but not as heavy), and no TVs. Conversation reigned at The Bards. A person might sit down at the bar, order a pint, pull out a book and start reading. It was a great place, an alcoholic coffee shop (and I was already in love with coffee shops). More than that, it featured musical Sundays.

A widespread custom in Irish bars all over the nation is that Sunday evenings feature a session of musicians who come in with their instruments and play. They tend to know each other, of course, but there's nothing formal about it. It's more of an open mic, though there's rarely any singing, and no mic. Traditional Irish music is something like jazz or blues, with some standard sets and chords and the potential for a band to simply improvise variations endlessly. I fell in love with pipes, fiddles, flutes, guitars, and Bodhran drums. I actually took some violin lessons that spring but decided I didn't have the time to invest.

Aside from becoming a Sunday evening chronic at the sessions, I snatched up a bunch of CDs of Irish music (ITunes didn't exist then, remember). I listened to those discs dozens and dozens of times. My Sunday morning breakfast-and-laundry ritual had an Irish soundtrack, to the point that I'd start making breakfast--either French toast or pancakes with coffee--and be sitting down to eat at pretty much the same point of the same song each week. It was almost choreographed.

Beyond the simple sound of the instruments and the varying rhythms, I loved the emotions the music was so full of. There is the endless, inconsolable lament, which I was sensitive to through the shipwreck of my late teens and 20's. There is also the inexpressible and orgasmic joy, a feeling of celebration which overwhelms everything else. Irish music by itself is nearly the perfect musical expression of the tao principle of yin and yang, two utter opposites forming one whole. I found in it my own psychology.

Two songs were my favorites, one joyful and the other melancholy. First, the happy one. It comes from one of the first discs I bought, actually a 2-disc set of various Irish artists playing tunes both traditional and original. It was composed by the piper Davy Spillane, and it's called "Sliverish". Because of that tune I feel that a banjo makes a fundamentally happy sound.

(And please forgive the crappy audio. It's the best I could do without a sound studio.)







My melancholy favorite is called "The Wishing Tree", composed by Seamus McGuire. It's not so much purely mournful--those tunes can be pretty horrid--but is more an even mixture of joy and sorrow, the combination of both which resounds through the ages of human existence. I think of a tree, somewhat like the tortoise of Asian and Indian mythology, which spans many human ages and comprehends all possibilities of existence, almost beyond life and death themselves.

The illustrations I've posted to this blog entry--one treelike, the other more of of a stylized celtic pattern--are actually concepts of the Norse mythical tree of creation, Yggdrasil. But Yggdrasil has much in common with my concept of the Wishing Tree. It participates in all things foul and fair, beautiful and ugly, good and evil, deadly and life-giving. Everything that can be wished for is already part of our concept of creation. And any wish soever must always have the contrary and unexpected consequences we fondly know as life.

The Wishing Tree implies to me a person's engagement in life, in setting hopes and aspirations, and whether attaining or not, engaging in the struggle which has defined our species throughout its existence. Victory is always attended with sorrow--whether through the austerity and discipline of the preparations, or through the consequences of winning, or by other means. Nothing in this life comes without cost. The stronger and deeper and more sincere a person's expression of life, the stronger the elements of triumph and tragedy exist within that person. Ultimately a person wishes for life or wishes for nothing. To the extent he or she wishes for life, that person learns the wisdom of the Wishing Tree. You cannot wish for part of it: you can only wish for all.

The piece itself is a melody which repeats three times, each time with additional instruments. The first run is a cello with very little accompaniment. A violin takes over the melody in the second repetition, with more strings in the background. The violin continues in the third, but with a swelling background which eventually takes over for the melody and then fades away.






In that tune I hear three generations: grandfather, father and son. By the time I first listened to the Wishing Tree, my father was dead and I had no immediate prospects for a family of my own. I thought of my grandfather, dad's father, and then my father, and me. Dad barely knew his own father, and I of course never met him. There was a mythical character to this distant man, seen in a few black-and-white photos and some fragments of handwriting, even taller apparently than my own father, a skilled musician who brought his accordion to his hospital ship during the war and played for the convalescent soldiers. He was also the man--a gynecologist who wooed and eventually married the younger sister of one of his patients--who wrote home that he was burying the boys he'd delivered earlier in his life. I'm told he returned from the war a broken, desolate man who committed suicide a few months later. I envisioned the deep-toned cello as his voice, sounding its wisdom alone through the echo chambers of time. He is followed by my own father, singing the same melody but higher, more plaintively, closer to the present. I saw myself as the third verse, surrounded by the cacaphony of life today, but producing a melody that hasn't changed.

It's easy to transfer this concept down one generation, with my father becoming the cello, me the second verse, and little Eliot due to become the third. He'll know my father as I knew my granddad, as a quasi-mythical presence who becomes larger due to his absence. When I hear the tune I start to think of this continuity, and then think metaphorically about the quality and the nature of my own wishes on the Wishing Tree. I'm at a crossroads of my career, and life, perhaps lacking the resources to continue on the professional path I've selected. Heroes choose their way, and I've frequently been overly meek and not had enough faith in my own ability. My failures at Dartmouth and later are painful enough evidence of this. I frequently return to the thought that my wishes on the tree have been too small, and that I've asked too little of myself. A crossroads like this in life is another chance for me to define who I am for the rest of my life. Which way will I go? I don't yet know.

* * *

To focus simply on the music for now. I'll list my favorite pieces of non-pop music, holding to my categories of those which have a mournful or somber character, and those which are ecstatic. In no particular order, because I couldn't rank these:

Sorrowful:
-Beethoven's 7th Symphony, 2nd movement (Allegretto);
-Mozart's Requiem, Lacrimosa;
-Samuel Barber, Adagio for Strings;
-Brahms' Requiem, Alles Fleisch ist Wie dem Grass;
-Seamus McGuire, The Wishing Tree;
-Dougie MacLean, These Broken Wings;
-Randall Thompson, Alleluia.

Happy:
-Leo Kottke, Stolen;
-Leo Kottke, Morning is the Longest Way Home;
-Altan, Dulaman;
-Hapa, Olinda Road;
-Davy Spillane, Sliverish.

(You might note more entries in the melancholy category. So be it. I'll add, however, that quite a few of the happy--or happy in their way, at least--songs which I love are of the pop/rock variety, like the Beatles' Savoy Truffle, Zep's That's the Way and Boogie with Stu, and Pearl Jam's Bugs. So there.)

A note also about the Beethoven Allegretto movement (and I think Brahms based his Alles Fleisch movement at least partly on it). Last night Kate and I watched The King's Speech, about how British King George VI overcame his stammering problem and was able to speak effectively to his empire during World War II via radio. King George and Winston Churchill combined through the radio to provide the leadership which British citizens needed during the Nazi siege on England, and during the worldwide onslaught of the Axis. The movie concludes with King George delivering his first major address of the war, as hostilities with Germany are about to begin. Churchill has just been elected, all attempts at peace have failed, and Germany has taken Poland by blitzkrieg in a matter of weeks. The Nazi military machine is faster and more fearsome than anything in history, and it is soon to turn toward England.

With this backdrop, the King--Berty as he is known in the film--steps into the broadcast room and prepares to speak. His speech therapist Lionel Logue is with him, and coaches him through the most strenuous effort of his adult life. The development of the film to this point has made it quite clear that the main role of the king is to communicate with his subjects via radio. Berty, with his stammering problem, has no greater weakness than speech. He knew as well as anybody the desperation of England's position in the coming war, and the importance of his own role. And he knew better than anybody that his weakest quality was at the same time his country's greatest need.

As the King prepared to speak, the first chord of Beethoven's 7th, 2nd movement, played. I thought, How strange--that sounds like Beethoven. The scene continued, and the movement carried on, and I felt that the choice of music was wrong, too heavy a setting for what should have been more combative or triumphal. But as the scene progressed--shots of Berty laboring to speak, hesitating and stopping, with Lionel standing in front of him desperately coaching him on in silence, alternating with shots of people around the country focused utterly on their radios--the import of his words became obvious. And I realized more and more that the choice of music came to fit the scene perfectly. The stark somberness matched the head-throbbing effort the King made to speak clearly. The darkness and urgency suited the eve of war.

It was a good film--not one of my favorites, but a good film--but that scene by itself is unforgettable, not least for the choice of music.

Fausto

As Kate reports, we're expecting a son. Now suprises can always happen. I was supposed to be a girl, and if expectations had held my name would have been Stephanie. Of course, this was in the pre-ultrasound days, and the doctors' best method of guessing the sex of the fetus was by its heart rate. Girls tended to have quicker heartbeats than boys, and I clocked out as a girl. So Mom and Dad were surprised when I turned out to be male.

But the ultrasound tech was pretty confident--98% sure, she told us--that Kate's carrying a boy. So we have the name lined up, which I won't reveal online until the little tyke is actually born--until then, and maybe after, I'll call him Fausto. The explanation will come later.

Still, the thought of having a son is tremendously consoling to me. I wanted at least one child of each sex. Should we go for #3 or beyond, it won't matter to me whether it's a boy or girl. There's also a subtle one-upmanship among guys, it seems, that if you're fathering girls, you're firing blanks. A Texan coworker once told me that a man's size determines the sex of his children--you have to be big to have a son. (That idea sums up Texan culture pretty well in my mind.)

Of course I also wanted a child to carry on our family name, since Eva will likely surrender hers to a husband someday. Basically, I've got all the culturally-conditioned neuroses operating nice and strongly in my brain to make me want a son. On top of that, I just want the variety, of having one of each. Boys and girls each present very different challenges as they grow up--boys tending to be reckless and get in trouble, and girls being the focus of all male attention in their vicinity--that I wanted to take on both.

I feel an instinctive connection with my daughter, and by staying home without a job to raise her, I'm seeing her habits and growth on a day-by-day basis that I never would otherwise. I can't say that I'm always the most patient or creative parent, but I do try to keep Eva safe, busy and learning. (Including letting her discover the fun of soaking herself thoroughly in a puddle.) When I think I've been too wrapped up in my own work, or showing too much frustration toward her, she toddles over to my knee, flops her hands on my leg, looks up in my eye and says "Hiii."

Then I know I'm not doing things all wrong.

But the thought of a son is a bit more daunting. I had a decent relationship with my own father, but it was very incomplete. His own father died in 1945, six months after he'd returned from serving as a doctor in World War II. Dad was eight.

The official reason was a heart attack, though it's always been thought within the family that he committed suicide, from despair and depression following the war. I've heard the story of when Dad was told the news. "Father is gone," the children were told. "Can I go too?" Dad answered immediately.

It's fair to say that Dad grew up without a father showing him implicitly how to be a father. I knew that when I was a little kid, Dad was a giant--six-foot-seven, with a deep and powerful voice--who walked with a tread like a feather and who rarely raised his voice. My impression even as a child was that he was afraid of his own strength. Mom spanked me probably hundreds of times. Dad never spanked me once.

He'd been a very good athlete in his youth, being scouted in high school as a pitcher by the Yankees, and then starring on his college basketball team. Dad was everything I wasn't, apparently: big, strong, athletic and popular. I was a mousy runt who liked books, singing and drama. There wasn't much overlap in our interests. So when I ran around a soccer field like the proverbial headless chicken, and never seemed to show much concern with practicing or getting better, Dad said not a word. He let me be myself.

As I grew into high school, I began having social trouble like most all teenagers do, feeling isolated and inadequate and at times altogether friendless. I saw the group of popular athletes and grew terribly jealous, but by then I knew that I was too bookish, and not nearly good enough at any sports, to ever join them. So I remained, like I'd always been, a mama's boy.

I was pretty stupidly a mama's boy, too. I was really convinced that my mother knew everything. And by that time--when I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen--I largely knew my father as the big lumbering brute who came home, collapsed in front of the TV and watched news for two hours, and lost all his arguments with Mom. I took this as proof that he was stupid and Mom was much smarter than he was--it never entered my mind at that age that he might be letting her win the fights because he didn't want to argue. (There was obviously much more to their communication than I ever learned about, as I know realize with my own marriage.)

Still, underneath that surface level of disgust, I did have an almost religious reverence for my father. It was due partly to his height--it's difficult not to respect someone who's huge--but even more, and more subtly, to his demeanor. Outside of the occasional fight with Mom, within the confines of our own home, I never knew Dad to lose his composure. (Well, except maybe for the time he burned out his little old chainsaw cutting the winter's firewood, then hurled it with a screamed expletive at the woodpile and smashed it to pieces. Relieved, he walked inside, took a shower, changed, drove down to the hardware store and bought a new, much more powerful, chainsaw.)

I also had a subtle sense, from all his volunteering around town for various (and important) positions like fire department treasurer and school district treasurer, that he was very highly regarded in the town. And Dad never mentioned any sense of pride over this in the house. Toward his own son, as toward nearly everyone else, my father was very understated.

It wasn't until Christmas vacation of my freshman year in college, when I worked at the bank where he was president, that I learned just what kind of professional persona my father had. I was in a back room, stuffing forms in folders and filing them, but I saw the impact that Dad had on everyone there. He'd walk into a room and everyone was paying attention to him. He'd quietly ask for something and walk out once he had it, with no fuss or waste of time. In short, he was a leader. He had a charisma as understated as everything else he did.

I was blown away. "That's my DAD!", I thought to myself. The tired, floppy guy who came home at night was just the reverse image of the man who ran a bank, served a community, directed over a hundred people and was responsible for over a quarter billion dollars.

Though our relationship didn't overtly change after that, I understood much better just what Dad did, and who he was. At the end of my freshman year at Dartmouth--my only good year there--when he and Mom came to pick me up, after loading the car I threw my arms around him and thanked him for everything he'd done, namely pay for it all. Dad didn't react much at the time, but this moment came back eight years later as he lay dying of brain cancer.

He'd been diagnosed in June 1996 with advanced brain melanoma, with 13 (likely more) tumors growing all over his brain. The onset, as is typically the case with cancer, was subtle and gained speed with time. In December 1995 he began noticing that he was losing dexterity in his left hand, and over the following months the problem worsened. Mom later recalled occasional memory lapeses or bursts of hostility (she never stopped blaming herself for missing the disease's approach). At a family vacation in Connecticut--days before his diagnosis--I recall playing pinball with him, the venerable "Addams Family" game. (Someday, I'd like one of those in my basement.)

Now, Dad was born in 1938, and was a teenager in the 50's. He grew up on pinball and rock'n'roll. Factor in his well-above-average athleticism...well, he could kick my ass at pinball any old time he liked. It wasn't even anything resembling a contest (like it was in basketball, where I could at least rely on his tiring out after five minutes). Dad never lost at Addams Family.

That day in June, he lost. He couldn't score any big points. I later recalled, the money button on that game is on the left side of the machine. Dad simply couldn't hit it. His hand was no longer answering his brain. By the time Dad drove up to New Hampshire that following Monday to see the doctor, he was really scared.

The whole family gathered once we heard the diagnosis, inoperable brain cancer with three to four weeks to live. I spent two of those weeks at home, keeping Dad company and helping Mom with some of the work. Lisa and Julie were there too, of course, particularly Lisa who still lived in Moultonboro.

During one of the weeks I spent at home, I was sitting next to him holding his hand when one of his closest friends walked in, Rick Buckler. Only the best of friends were admitted to see Dad as he deteriorated, and Rick was one. Rick had proven his friendship as steadfastly as a person can, helping us several times during Dad's decline (stories I'd rather not go into right now). Rick was a trusted and beloved friend.

He walked into the room where Dad and I were and they began talking. After a few minutes, Dad wandered onto the topic of my freshman year at Dartmouth, and how I'd hugged him and thanked him at the end. Tears were rolling down his cheeks as he told Rick about this. It had been the first of perhaps two times I'd ever told my father I loved him, and only eight years later did I see how strongly it had impressed him. As he died, at last, Dad and I were becoming friends.

I'd gone back down to Boston, to resume my job and wait to travel back up to visit him again. It was now three and a half weeks after diagnosis, and though Dad's condition had worsened dramatically--he couldn't leave his bed and could barely talk--still hope wouldn't die. On a Wednesday afternoon, for no particular reason, I called home from my job, asked for Dad to be put on the phone, and told him, "Dad, I'm really proud of how you've been handling all this. I love you. I'll see you soon."

At five-thirty next morning I got the phone call that he had died. One small thing I had no regret over: I'd told Dad the most important single thing I had to say, and he died knowing how much I cared for him. That little, at least, mattered in my mind.

My biggest regret since he died was that we never fully became friends as adults. Needless to say, as I've flip-flopped my way through successive decades--it's now nearly fifteen years since he died--I've come to resemble my father more than I did as a snot-nosed college grad. I feel more compatibility with his occasionally dirty sense of humor, his social instincts (though I'll never develop them as highly as he did his), his wry humor with himself.

I've come to admit that no man on earth will ever resemble me as much as my own father did--with the possible exception of my son. But as I struggled into the responsibilities of adulthood, namely career and family, it would have been tremendously comforting to have a man I could turn to and trust implicitly, to talk with, share laughs with, and even suffer criticism from. Honest criticism, courageous, blunt and loving. There are many times I could well have used it.

As I think about my own son, hopefully on the way, I look forward to taking my memories of my own childhood and father, and being a good father to him too, as well as Eva. I'm looking forward to seeing how like and unlike me he is. (And I won't grudge him being a mama's boy and thinking I'm an idiot.)

As for the nickname.

I'm a baseball fan. I root for the Red Sox no matter what. In the years before 2004, when the championship drought was 70+, 80+ years and counting, my allegiance was always with the Sox. Didn't matter how much they stunk, how close they came, or what the Yankees did. I was for Boston.

Then 2004 happened, and fans like me learned what it meant to win. It was a good feeling.

Fast-forward to 2007, when Boston won again. But before that, the Yankees met the Cleveland Indians in the divisional playoffs. Now any old-school Boston fan is also a Yankees hater, so I was pulling for New York to lose. Boston was in its own playoff series, but on this one night, I was watching Cleveland, at home, versus the Yankees. And again like any old-school Boston fan, I had a secretly paralytic fear of the Yankees, that they were simply a juggernaut waiting to burst out and steamroll all opposition. So I was desperately rooting for the Indians to defeat what I feared might be an undefeatable opponent.

I think the Indians swept that series, so the Yanks weren't so immune to defeat. But on that one night, a pitcher by the name of Fausto Carmona took the mound for Cleveland. Cleveland's strength was in its pitching, with Carmona, and ace CC (Chesterton Charles! No wonder he goes by CC) Sabathia (now a Yankee), and a bullpen featuring the twin Rafaels, Perez and Betancourt. It was quite a fearsome lineup, and they pretty much had their way with New York (and also with Boston, for the first four games at least...then the Sox won the last three).

But on this night, as I watched, Fausto Carmona stood on the mound, facing down possibly the best lineup of hitters in baseball. The Cleveland fans were screaming crazily from all sides, as Fausto pitched and pitched again. I was awed by his presence on the mound, cap pulled down to the tip of his nose, glove brought up to the cap's brim, looking down to the catcher with a violent scowl.

The scene called to mind the Roman Horatius, a lone man holding a bridge against the invading army of Etruscans; it recalled the Spartans holding Thermopylae against the Persian hordes. Or, to cleverly foreshadow events, it was like one of my favorite short stories from childhood, Leiningen Versus the Ants. Only that night, it was Fausto Versus the Bugs.

The fate of baseball rested on one single pitcher, staring with dour ferocity down from the mound. Through seven innings he held them scoreless. Then came the bugs.

Apparently, on warm nights in Cleveland during the spring and fall, it's not unusual for millions of midges to rise from the shoreline mud of Lake Erie and swarm the city, infesting everything as they go. Suddenly the ballfield was a thick cloud of bugs, visible even on the TV screen. They swirled in clouds around the pitchers, winging jerkily in all directions and seeming only to grow thicker.

Fausto only bore down harder, growing even more icy and pitching with the same precision and strength. Unfortunately for the Yankees, their man on the mound was Joba Chamberlain.

Joba had been a revelation that year, coming up from the minors as a relief pitcher, throwing in the high-90's and over the course of his first 11 or so innings in the majors not allowing even a single hit. (The first to get a hit off him was Boston's Kevin Yooouuuuuukilis. Youuuuk!)

So that night, needing to keep the game close, Joe Torre sent Chamberlain to the mound in the bottom of the 8th. The bugs were out, and within about a minute it was clear that they were really getting to Joba. He took his hat off, swung at them, stepped off the rubber, and generally made an idiot of himself. Without going back to look at the box score (so I might have some of my game details already a bit wrong), I'll say Joba allowed a run or two of desperately-needed insurance for the Indians. I do recall that Torre pulled him off the mound before the inning was over and inserted Mariano Rivera, in a last-ditch bid to preserve the chance of winning. To no avail--Cleveland won.

I'll always have a warm spot in my heart for what Fausto did that night--since then he's been up-and-down as a pitcher, never quite living up to his early promise, though far from a bust. Simply put, Fausto is a decent major-league starting pitcher, a tremendous accomplishment in itself. But for that one night, Fausto's game was solid gold, and that's all I asked.

Then he stunk it up against Boston and I loved him almost as much for that.

So there's that, plus I just think the name is very cool. Faust + o, Fausto. I love the sound. But Kate won't hear of actually naming a kid that, so I'm stuck with using it as a nickname. Oh, well.

It's a BOY!

By the way, did I mention I'm pregnant! I'll be 19 weeks tomorrow, and one week shy of being half way to term! Kind of unbelievable how fast time flies! Of course this time around I'm working full time and when I come home in the afternoons I try to get in as much quality time with Eva as possible (with Michael too of course, but much of our quality time now is spent sharing quality with Eva). Strangely enough though having less time idle has given me more time to worry about all the possible complications that could potentially happen. The excitement of having a boy this time around kind of ups the ante too. The prospect of welcoming a new life, male or female is thrilling in and of itself, however after already having gone through the experience of having a baby girl, the whole "new and different" aspect of raising a little boy has both Mike and I kind of on the edge of our seats!

I suppose now you all might be too! ... Although many of you already knew I was pregnant, because the very day I found out I blabbed it to just about everyone in our immediate families. It was Christmas day, and my mom and step-father were here visiting. Mike and I had started "trying" again in early December (since I nursed Eva until mid October) so I stocked up on pregnancy tests a couple weeks later. By Christmas day I was down to my last test out of three, (the first two were negative of course because I took them much too early) and with it being Christmas day and all I fantasized about what a wonderful gift it would be to find out that day! The digital stick promptly read "pregnant" and a second later I was announcing it to Michael, my mother and step-father (and Eva)! I followed the announcement by insisting we keep a secret at least until it was doctor confirmed, but then my sister called to say Merry Christmas, and it just popped out of my mouth! - And then I just couldn't stop!

It didn't occur to me at the time, but now I'm sure the reason I couldn't hold it in, even for a minute, was because when I got pregnant for the first time it was a surprise even to myself. Although I couldn't have been happier, there was a bit of uncertainty surrounding the issue. I was slightly nervous to tell Michael (but he quickly alleviated every once of that within moments of my telling him), I very a bit more nervous to tell our families, and wracked with fear to tell my grandmother, with whom I was living with at the time. It took me a month to muster up the courage to tell her, but when I finally did she offered her blessing just as happily as everyone else! This time around, our situation, being married, and already having a child, seems to

automatically lend itself to celebration! So with no fear of judgements being passed this time, any hesitation to announcing my pregnancy was tossed to the wind!

I'm not going to get into it here, as my husband might on one of his infamous diatribes, but I will suggest to you all to watch Kill Bill II if not for the genius of the film alone, but for the wonderfully hysterical scene where Betrix first discovers she's pregnant while on an assassination mission.

There a beautifully awkward, yet honest exchange between her and another female assassin just after she realizes what it means if the strip turns blue. Needless to say the other woman lets Betrix and her unborn child live, and ends the scene as any typical woman would after finding out such news! Trust me, it will leave you with a smile, if no other scene does!

Returning to our story though, the pregnancy was indeed confirmed a week or so late

r and we've been anxiously anticipating "the" ultrasound to find out just who exactly is in there.

The day finally arrived last week and we were both happy to find out that the new little life we created is a boy! Had michael not been holding Eva when the ultrasound tech informed us, I do believe he would have jumped clear through the ceiling! Having some more testosterone in the house will be an adjustment for me, as 90% of my family consists of estrogen! Eva has made it quite clear in the past several months that she is die hard daddy's girl, so I am deeply hoping this little guy will turn out to be a mama's boy! It will be fascinating to watch Eva interact with her new little brother too of course, and how she deals with no longer being the baby, and to see if all that we've taught her on how to be gentle with the kitty will transfer to how she is with him. Mostly though I can't wait to have another infant in the house, and ALL that, that entails!

It will be another 21 weeks before we get to welcome him into the world, mean while he's movin' and a groovin' in his cozy home inside my belly, and I'm enjoying that quite a bit! The actuality of being a mother and raising a child is wonderful, but all that leads up to that is just as amazing if not more so! Creating life, carrying life, and bring it into the world is, to me, by far the most spiritual experience there is. I struggle to find adequate words to describe how pregnancy, labor and delivery make me feel, the closest I can come is; Fulfillment. I adore being the vessel with which to bear life, and could do it a hundred times if I had the opportunity! In fact the the idea of being a surrogate has crossed my mind on several occasions, and if my body allows might one day seriously consider it.

For now though, I'm enjoying OUR little boy and planning for his arrival in early September!

Courage

It's nearly 2 PM now, creeping toward the time when Eva wakes up, and is either surly and groggy for an hour, or is bright, chirpy and running all around. In either case, especially since it's raining intermittently, it spells the end of my quiet reading/writing period of the day. (I resume somewhat when Kate comes home for the evening, but only for a little while.)

I mentioned in the last blog that I'm back to reading history of the American oil industry, which is fascinating in so many respects, including that it forms the unseen skeleton of the general histories of this country you might read: our population explosion, our expansion across the continent, the rise of our industrial and military might. Oil is the only reason we've become militarily involved in places like Iraq and Libya (agree or disagree with the interventions as you will).

But I think oil could really serve as the exemplar American industry, exactly how Herman Melville thought whaling was in the mid-1800's. He published Moby Dick in 1851, only 10 years before the first successful oil well was drilled, in Titusville, PA by "Colonel" Drake. Melville's choice of the characteristic American industry--whaling--was eclipsed within two decades by oil. Still, his choice for a symbol--the white whale--of the nemesis each person carries within works much better than The Great White Oil. Or whatever color you'd want to make it. The whale's a living thing and just makes a better symbol.

Of course, that's all nonsense. The point of this blurb was altogether different: courage. See, between 2001-2008, I wasted a lot of time watching cartoons. During study breaks, after the day's work, whatever. I pretty much knew the Cartoon Network's whole lineup, and the (few, honestly) shows that I liked. One of these was Courage the Cowardly Dog, about this little pink dog named Courage, who's afraid of everything.

He has bad teeth and somehat mangy fur and his main abilities are: (1) pulling all kinds of equipment and costumes out of his butt when he needs them in an emergency; (2) screaming; and (3) doing absolutely anything for the love of Muriel, the kindly old woman who takes care of him. (Muriel's husband Eustace hates the dog, of course, the source of much of the cartoon's humor.)

Muriel is a sound sleeper. Her snores shake the timbers of the house. In one episode, an insomniac Sandman snatches Muriel's ability to sleep, so that he can get some rest, and leaving poor Muriel without a moment's bit of slumber for weeks. (Of course, it's up to Courage to get it back.)

That puts me in mind of another reference to sleep I enjoy, from one of my favorite action novels: The Three Musketeers (worth a post of its own, but in essence: D'Artagnan is not the true hero of that story. Who is?). A few of my favorite quotes come from that book, especially:

-Wine makes a man either happy or sad. It makes me sad...

(Athos, drunk, beginning to tell the story of his past to D'Artagnan in the basement of an inn)

In this case, the passage I have in mind isn't so much a full quote, as just the use of what I'm sure must have already been a cliche in Dumas' time. On D'Artagnan's first full day in Paris, having rented a room and having no money for food, he lay down on the floor and "slept the sleep of the brave." That phrase was new to me, and it grabbed my attention hard. That the quality of sleep could describe a person...well, of course. Those with sound consciences, masters of their fear, sleep well.

So I look at Jasper on the couch next to me, and think, Damn, if I could sleep like that, I'd be twice the man I am awake.

Captains and Kings

Real quickie post here. Kate and I have Netflix, and our latest disc was the first two parts of her favorite miniseries (one she watched while I was in the Gulf last summer), Captains and Kings. (I guess it was a bestseller book before it was made into a miniseries, but since I ignore bestseller lists, I might never had heard of it otherwise.) It's about this Irish immigrant Joseph Armagh, who so far is an amalgam of Joe Kennedy and John D. Rockefeller. I'll pick up other historical references as they're tossed into the mix. So the guy becomes rich and powerful and goes through all kinds of family tribulations and betrayals, same old thing.

The movie so far is better than I expected, though Kate and I were pretty much laughing at the first bedroom scene between Armagh and his then-lover Martinique. The actress playing Martinique is pretty creepy and not all that attractive, with heavy black curls and one eyelid that droops a little lower than the other. She's supposed to be some darkly passionate enigma with a murky past but she comes off kind of like a bat. And their bedroom scene could have been lifted from an old-school horror film, with foreboding music, rain pelting the windowpanes, and frequent lightning and thunder. Makes you think Martinique will have some sort of unfortunate influence on things down the road (think Roy Hobbs), but I confess to not caring.

I'm more into the historical references to the oil industry and the war (like I didn't care about the white whale allegory in Moby Dick--I have no idea what the whale stood for. I was into the portrayal of whaling). Anyhow, from the reading I've done (not all that much, sort of dilettante-level), Captains and Kings is pretty accurate about the oil industry and the war, including the reference to Standard Oil's system of rebates and penalties with the oil-shipping railroad companies.

So my point? Just this: the movie makes me think of one of my favorite U2 songs, Silver and Gold (which never made it onto one of their regular albums, at least in its studio version--I think it was part of some benefit CD). I love the low pitch and echo of the guitar, and I love the images in the lyrics (albeit images of oppression, but they're evocative). The lines which come to mind:

Captains and kings

In the ship's hold

They came to collect

Silver and gold.

I love that song, and the line. I suppose Bono had read this book, seeing as how he's Irish and all. Just a neat little connection. Maybe he'd never heard of the book at all and then got slapped with a copyright infringement suit after the song hit the airwaves. Dunno...but it's fun to think that he had the story in mind.

Sheen's Giant Bomb of Suck

Gorgeous early spring day here, topping out around 60 degrees, though quite windy at the park. We went there this morning (getting out of the house by 11:15 AM on a weekend counts as a victory of warlockian proportions for us). After about 15 minutes at Wilson Park--one of Kate's happy places, and Eva is quickly taking after her--my hands were cold, and I was quietly looking for excuses to leave. It didn't help that I was looking wistfully around at the play area itself--a small section of the park as a whole--and the people in it.

Wilson Park is the center of children's, and even adults', outdoor sports in North Kingstown. There are four tennis courts, three or four baseball/softball diamonds, and room for up to five soccer/lacrosse fields. (It was a tykes' lacrosse game there last spring which gave Kate and me the lacrosse bug...yeah, we've really followed up on that.) In addition to the athletic playing fields is a giant sandlot with several climbing jungle-gyms and a few swingsets. It's becoming Eva's little empire, since she's not used to sand.

The ground around our home is pretty hard-packed, with well-established grass, and a few thickets of trees or else hedges, and of course the paved driveways and road. There's no sand, and very little diggable dirt to speak of. So sand is still a new thing to the little girl, and she hugely enjoys just picking it up in her hands and throwing it into the air. She was doing that today, and tackling a few of the jungle gyms, as I surveyed the park and the many families, not unlike the three of us, taking the sunny spring morning outdoors as well, and wondering how long any of this will exist.

Of course we all have fits of thought driven by surges of emotion, which come and go like waves up and down a seashore. Still, I consider how the ultra-rich are doing their very best, out of sight, to terminate democracy and gather all available wealth to themselves, and I wonder for how much longer towns like North Kingstown will be able to provide even simple things like parks for the general public. An irrational thought, you might say, a weak theory of conspiracy baked too long until it's hardened into a cinder. But I read about the state-by-state lobbying groups funded by the likes of Charles and David Koch, at the state level pushing savage policies attacking the working class, such as the abolition of collective bargaining rights for public employees, and in Maine, even the abolition of child labor laws. It's hard not to read this news and feel the kind of foreboding which makes it difficult to keep food down.

And there's the case of Fox News, run by another billionaire, Rupert Murdoch, and wholly dominated by his persona and outlook (as well as that of his hand-picked deputy Roger Ailes). Fox News, including every one of its news and opinion hosts, has a slender allegiance--at best--to the facts, and often an outright antipathy, as the network as a whole acts to forward a libertarian viewpoint often blurring with anarchy. (Bill O'Reilly proudly touts his belief that the moon has nothing to do with tides. It's worth wondering, if you watch O'Reilly or any other Fox host, how rudeness, insult and the display of willful ignorance have come to be so prominent in major American media.) In short, Fox News is not legitimate news. But in the words of the immortal Sheen, at the moment they seem to be on the side that's winning.

That is as far as I'll go into social and political issues now, as this is a family blog. But a deep and growing fear for the future of my country is very much a part of my thinking these days, and it's not something I can altogether avoid when I write. I believe in some collective sacrifice on the part of every individual for the sake of a community, whether on the local level, or for states, or for our country, or above all the whole planet. Paying a fair amount of taxes and doing perhaps some physical service for the community are certainly part. The further we turn to an attitude of securing only our own benefit, the more we destroy this nation we grew up in and are protected by.

So these thoughts, and fingers turning white in the chilly breeze, had me wanting to leave the park well before Eva did. Sometimes I'm the crump in the family, the one who backs out of a thing because I'm not feeling up to it. I don't even have the perfectly good reason, like Kate, of being pregnant to just check out of commission for a day. With me, the trouble is usually in my head. My body just follows along.

Except for yesterday, when I did a bit of work for Kate's boss Cheryl, spring cleanup of their yard. Cheryl and her husband have a very nice log cabin--a genuine log structure, not a frame house with log-looking siding--on a small pond. (The small pond has the look to me of a kettle hole, a big hole in the land left by a melting chunk of ice as the glaciers melted back. If the glacier had been floating on the ocean, like Arctic ice, such melting chunks would have become icebergs. Over land, they fall onto the ground, rivers of meltwater pile sand and gravel all around them, and they gradually melt to leave huge holes where the ice had been--kettle holes.)

So Cheryl and her husband live on the shore of a kettle hole, surrounded by oak trees. And with all the terraces and retaining walls around their place, there are plenty of spots where the wind eddies around and drops oak leaves. It seems the oak leaves from half the pond's shoreline end up in Cheryl's yard. Eight inches thick in places, wet and starting to mulch. I can tell you, raking, pitchforking and then hauling these things away in a tarp was a tougher full-body workout than anything I'd done at the Y in the last two years. I practically had to drag myself back to the car when I finished (for the day--I'm going back next Saturday), with sore quads and hamstrings, sore hips, extremely sore shoulders, and wanting to go to sleep. This was the kind of whole-body fatigue and soreness that makes it painful to roll over in bed.

So this morning, the blahs were probably 65% in my mind, but still a good 35% was post-strain soreness still, and wanting just to flop down in a comfortable chair, dig into a good book, and start thinking about something. Standing in a park with the wind whistling through my fingers just got me onto a mean path of thought that took me to the bleak place I described just above. This morning, I suppose my body led my mind.

As for the reading, I'm back into the history of the petroleum industry. I'm taking a break for a bit from philosophy and the whatever-it-is you'd call Finnegans Wake. If reading Kant is like using a pickaxe to get through a bed of coal, reading the Wake is like blasting through granite, and reading some history is like digging in sand. Compared to the first two, it's practically a vacation. Besides, it has me thinking about yet another writing project (beyond the Deepwater Horizon project) that I'd like to embark on.

Meanwhile, on the way to the park this morning, we listened to a bit of sports radio. Kate and I have the rough policy that the driver picks the radio station--common sense enough, though when the family travels together I usually drive, so that means I dominate the radio.

I adore sports talk. I fell in love with it in the fall of 2005, when I was living in North Kingstown and taking classes up at Harvard, and I would drive up and back once a week, and for the two-hour trip started listening to those guys yelling and screaming about local teams all day. Only, by and large, listening to the noonday and afternoon hosts, I found them to be pretty reasonable guys, by and large, though certainly pushing certain issues which would get a response out of listeners (such as critizing an underperforming player or team).

The real trick of a successful host is to successfully manage the callers, who range from very knowledgeable to idiots oblivious to the facts. Entertaining shows draw many callers, and of course a slew of regulars who don't mind spending an hour a day on hold just to talk on the radio for 30 to 120 seconds. (I confess to having called in five or six times, once to advocate that the Sox sign Barry Bonds to a one-year contract. If the Red Sox, after 2004, were viewed as the Evil Empire Lite, well, why not eliminate the "Lite" part? Anyway.)

So I like sports talk radio. We listened this morning for about half the trip out to the park, before I changed the station to one of the pop-dance stations that Katie likes and I despise so much (she says sports radio puts her to sleep, so I try to listen to it at the start of our trips to and from Maine). The weekend shows tend to be pretty dull, I admit, since the top-line hosts have the days off, and the majority of games are in progress. So this morning the guys were talking about Charlie Sheen.

I'm not exactly a pop culture maven. I grew up on pop and rock music, checked out of rap, and have been more or less unaware of new groups and performers since 1995. (I think U2 is a modern Rolling Stones--great lead singer, good lead guitarist, plus two guys--and I believe that Led Zeppelin might never be approached for musicality, once they narrowly edged the Beatles in that category.)

I resolutely ignore reality TV, since it's more contrived than anything, and I have a visceral dislike for people intentionally making fools of themselves for the sake of attention. (Physical comedy is something else--that requires talent. But people being petulant, violent jerks to one another is simply demeaning, to everyone who participates and watches. Kate watches BrideZillas, and it makes me wish I had an office in another room.)

My reality TV is live sports. Here you've got guys--or women, when I watch skiing or skating--who are among the very best on the planet at what they do, honestly competing. (Okay, some dog it from time to time, and sometimes the refs are questionable, but that still doesn't approach the all-around voyeuristic worthlessness of reality TV.)

I avoid sitcoms for much the same reason--dullwitted characters, with uninspired writing, foundering their way through contrived plots. Though I do watch cartoons, including (occasionally) Dragonball Z. Any watcher of reality TV or sitcoms might want to skewer me for that, but (a) the writing is often better, and (b) at least the ridiculous nature of the cartoons is obvious, not concealed.

I don't want to go into an even longer digression here, but there are two television shows (aside from live games) I do watch: House and Breaking Bad. All I'll say now is that, I'm proud to have introduced Kate to two of her favorite shows and characters: Metalocalypse (and Pickles), and Breaking Bad (and Walter White). She introduced me to House, and has compared me to him on numerous occasions. So every once in a while I play along and walk with a limp.

I've seen, total, maybe ten minutes of Two and a Half Men. It fits perfectly into the category of dullwitted sitcom I so despise. Charlie Sheen has been part of some pretty fun movies--Hot Shots! and Major League come to mind--but I had pretty much no reaction at all to his ongoing role on this show. Of course, it's impossible to navigate to a news website these days without idiotic Lilo-Britney-type gossip prominently getting in the way, so I've seen more than I ever cared to about Sheen's professional meltdown. (I suppose it's been accompanied by a personal meltdown of sorts, but who really knows?)

He got himself fired in spectacular fashion from a very successful TV show, while revealing a huge amount of disgust (concealing even more jealousy?) for the show's creator. During a round of interviews Charlie gave, he let loose with a series of almost inspired quotes, including drinking tiger blood (I hear he's trademarked it and has sold the name rights to a drink manufacturer--PETA will love that), and my favorite, riding the mercury surfboard. (Mercury is liquid at room temperature, though Bill O'Reilly might not be so sure--but in any case, who cares? The idea is too much fun.) Winning, the warlock thing and "defeat is not an option" are much less clever and much more mockable.

So Sheen torched his present job (though there's a small possibility he might have it back next fall), and then arranged a 20-city tour of his new one-man (and two-goddess) tour, the "Violent Torpedo of Truth/Defeat is Not an Option" tour. He might have called it the "Huge Bomb of Suck/Defeat is Highly Likely" tour. The first show occurred last night (April 2), in Detroit, Michigan. Why not on April Fools Day?

Apparently Charlie rambled pointlessly, the audience booed frequently and Sheen at many points derisively mocked those who heckled him, including with the taunt that they'd already given their money to him. Too bad, because he could've really turned this tour into something. Apparently Sheen wrote the whole thing, if you can call it that. That was his first mistake. Furthermore, he goes over the events of his divorce from CBS and subsequent talk-show rampage. That was his second.

I say, Sheen should've hired five or ten good comedy writers to put together a series of vignettes, of comic one- or two-person scenes illustrating various ideas, or really not related to anything at all. The whole show could've had a general thrust in the direction of life as a star, or some of the reality of putting together a weekly show, or something actually new to the audience. You know, something vaguely educational, a comic show about a slice of experience unknown to the people attending.

Rule #1: don't even mention Two and a Half Men, or anyone associated, or CBS, by name. Let any reference be implicit. Rule #2: have a planned, rehearsed series of one-man character vignettes (Sheen could play two guys at once, like one-man-show actors frequently do) that he's rehearsed and knows cold. I think Sheen has the charisma and acting ability to hold a stage for 90 minutes by himself. If he'd followed those two rules, I think this tour might have turned into something pretty successful. As it is, it's likely to end before he wanted it to. I don't see the theaters in cities #10-20 hanging onto such a lame no-show. (Apparently those extremely quick sellouts weren't people going...they were scalpers and secondary ticket agencies, who are now losing lots of money because they can only sell the tickets at a loss.)

Tough luck, Chuck. At least Sarah Palin--another charismatic dope--has a few handlers who know what they're doing.