Keep It Up...

When I was young, one of the hundreds of living room games that we played in my family started with everyone standing in a circle facing each other and someone batting a balloon into the air. Someone else batted it, and then another, and another....

With every hit, the balloon echoed with a brief, thin resonant thud, the smallest of all of the timpani, the sound muting quickly, as if the upward direction of the ephemeral sphere didn't allow for a truly resonant thud.

Two, we chanted with each successful bat, Three...Seven....Fourteen, Fifteen,

and by this time, people are shrill, diving everywhere. There have been close calls, dangerous-near-misses, a precarious bounce against the chandelier. Screaming: Get it! Get it! and Keep it UP!

TWENTY! TWENTY ONE!

I didn't understand the sociology of keep it up when my parents introduced the game to us. It seemed fun and enjoyable, but I didn't get how profound the metaphor. How complete the transfer of training would be -- if I could but apply the lessons.

That all the Most Engaging, Most Unified moments of human endeavour were all aimed toward:

Little bats,

floating, air-filled plastic,

Enthusiastic Chanting and Wild Diving all so that we could:

Keep it up!

High Stakes, Lost Focus and a WMD...

which just happens to look like a red canoe....



In case you can't tell, Addison is hurtling through the air (those are the high stakes) in this blurry index of future family memory (something got lost...focus? memory? the strangers' knee?).

I personally think that this picture is a lot cooler looking if you make the sounds-of-a-heart-pumping-blood-through-a- microphone with your mouth. Just make a tight "o" with your lips and push air out loudly with the rhythm of a beaing heart.

Once you've mastered the sound, stare at the picture. Now imagine yourself ENTERING the picture...

As for the WMDs in the title...its a reference to my recent venture into pre-blogging...braided with a bit of Where's Waldo....and GW's game where strange satellite blips become a kind of UN hide and seek game...so? Any guesses where the WMD in the picture is? Don't you think its strange that there just happens to be a "red canoe" in the corner of the pool room at the YMCA?

p.s. I'm definitely off pre-blogging

So Far So Good

I think I'm a big fan of pre-blogging. Instead of blogging about the predictable and so-so 'what's been going on around here"...pre-blogging registers some wishes with the good folks at Karma4U. Who knows what pantheon of deities might just be reading this blog and be kind of interested in what I hope for.

I'm referring of course to my scripting out of yesterday on my blog before everyone woke up. Sure, I missed on many points, but overall (and this is the important part) a Rachel Portman score would have been just perfect. I made an obnoxiously large omelet for my dad before we all went off to school and then after school we went to Gymnastics.

Sitting in those bleachers between my parents was perfect. My mother got a digital camera just over a year ago. Since that time she has out-shot Ansel Adams, Man Ray and Henri Cartier-Bresson. She does not go anywhere without her history-establishing device, and so her persistence in looking for the Perfect Shot at gymnastics was very comical. She was hanging off of the balcony, balancing her tripod on the knee of the man in the bleachers next to her ("Would you *mind* terribly if I just, balanced, this, just...Now hold still.") Of course the comic nature of the quest was only enhanced by the fact that she was trying to capture the perfect shot of her grandchildren, zooomed across a football field's distance of gymnasitcs mats, jumping. And in case it was hard to read that sentence because of the way that I situated the distance clause: She was going to great lengths to take pictures of my kids, jumping.

In a less heightened reality script, I may have let her know that I would have the kids jump for her in the living room when we got home, but as it was, her passionate quest in the middle of a bunch of tired sububan dual income parents and a few desperate housewives was much more enjoyable to watch.

We had birthday dinner at a joint just north of town, owned by Bill and Molly, two seventy year-old bohemians who gave up being beatnicks to become big game hunters. The restaurant is FULL of stuffed game and they serve steaks by the slab. In a reversal I couldn't have predicted, my in-laws arrived to join us for dinner. Happily, the conversation went bumping along well. My mother may be the most animated story teller currently living and her stories about Greek Immigrants to Chicago at the beginning of the last century and the state of smog in Thailand were riviting and hilarious. But all of her stories are. Unlike the average humiliated crew of quarterlifecrisis-ridden-waitstaff, our waiters sang a blustery anthem of happy birthday which combined shouts, whistles and clapping. Once Addison was allocated a bit of Daddy's ice cream (we were celebrating Jaelyn & My birthday), peace was restored and dinner was completed or wrapped to go.

We ended the day as my dad fired up the old slide projector and screen and we watched seven trays of slides detailing the travelogue of my parents trip to Thailand. Apparently my father ate a dog, preached wearing an Ahka vest, and Thai people who live in the suburbs (which, apparently in Thailand, means living in grass huts on stilts on the tops of mountains -- the lengths people will go to in order to be trendy!) in general have the curious habit of looking unnaturally young until they are thirty and then when they are forty, suddenly, they look eighty. I found this claim to be a little suspicious, but it was a travelogue and there were pictures involved with these claims. And who can argue with pictures.

We all had warm brandies and ambled off to bed.

So today's pre-blog is going to be a little terse, since the rehearsal of yesterday's Act One took a bit longer than I thought: Today, I'm aiming for a turn of adventure. Someone will get lost. Someone will have Very High Stakes. And one of the pictures my mom takes will end up having implications for international intrigue.

Alright. Let's see how that goes. Seems promising, eh?

*some literary license may have been taken occasionally in this retelling, but hey. we all tell stories, right? my mother's got her camera. I've got this blog. We all do what we can to reshape history in our interests....

Soundtracks and Set Pieces

After I watched the Royal Tennenbaums, I wanted to repaint every room in my house in shades of pepto-bismol and pomegranate. I'd play Elliot Smith and Nick Drake the whole time that I painted. And probably wear a plaid suitcoat at the same time.

My parents arrived late last night for a three day visit. I'm sort of hoping for a Rachel Porter soundtrack for their visit, with nostalgic lighting. I'd like for them to tell familiar stories with startling and delightful new details slipped in. And we'd all be drinking strong decaffinated tea and sitting around in long flannel pajamas with lambswool slippers.

Maybe I should draw up some storyboards to help everyone share my vision before anyone wakes up this morning and we get started with the real thing.

Coming to You From Across Time *&* Space....

At Jaelyn's Birthday Party, my friend Matt the funny cognitive psychologist was doing a bit of blogging flogging.

"I blog." He laughed. "I type up ideas that I have in a word document and if one of my friends asks me what I think about that idea, I'll print out my document and give it to them. See! I'm blogging!"

Some poopoo'd him loudly, I agreed that there's no conceptual difference between his blogging and how most blogs function. Other blogger floggers took their opportunity to take their lame and cliche potshots. Yeah! They shouted into the fray of conversation. Why would we want to pour out our guts in front of a bunch of strangers! We can hardly bring ourselves to talk about these things with our friends!

"I just don't crave boundlessness." Continued Matt-the-funny-and-occasionally-wise-cognitive psychologist, "Isn't that what the internet is all about? No boundaries! I like living with my limits." The theological concepts of finitude and creaturliness are two of his favorite talking points....(and his talks on them are entrancing...)

I think he's partly right. Blogging is a kind of will-to-immortality. It is an attempt to tesseract across time and space to be with people who are far. It does try to cheat distance and locale in order to tie together people who do not do life in proximity....

Obviously I'm not drawing the lines in the same places he is...but...I am interested in developing a more coherent way of thinking about how we choose to diffuse our identity throughout various mediums....