dreams, nightmares, and the irresistible middle ground

warning: this post is unrepentently verbose. you may think of it as an attempt to make up for lost time, but really i just didn't care to stop myself. read some of it, read none of it, read the whole thing twice; i ask only that you, as i always do, follow your bliss.



when i was not quite four, my parents surprised me with my first real bed, a floral-print twin mattress and boxspring. up until then i had been sleeping happily, insistently, and, as a tall-for-her-age not-quite-four-year-old, rather snugly in the crib i had started out in as an infant, and the new bed was not a welcome surprise. i loved my crib; it was high and enclosed and safe, like a cotton-lined aerie. i did not want a big-girl bed. i wanted my bed, where i had cooed and dreamt and preened like a downy wee bird, but my parents, like, i understand now, all good parents must, were tumbling me out of it. i found it all inexplicably and unnecessarily cruel, and so began one of the first arguments i had ever had with my parents.

the new bed was, in truth, less a gift or rite of passage than a necessity: my mother was pregnant with my sister, and the new baby was going to need a place to sleep. so they persisted, and after much cajoling and some outright pleading they convinced me to lie down, just once, just to see. i did, and immediately began to cry. the bed was HUGE! it was mammoth, endless, i felt as if i were floating in the middle of the ocean. i was terrified, and the terror itself was terrifying, because i had never really been afraid before. making matters worse was the fact that i was extremely aware that my parents were not only failing to save me from this horror but were, in a way, inflicting it. it was a brutal disillusionment; my trust in my parents was shattered, and in that moment, as i wailed and struggled to sit up and they held me back against the pillow, smiling and sweet-talking and—were they? they couldn't be, but, yes, they were; how could they?—now and then laughing, insisting that i give it one more minute, i hated them.

but it was to be the bed, things being the way they were and me so small and powerless and not yet prone to disobedience. it was a difficult transition, though, and i began, for the first time, to have nightmares. i would run into my parents room, wide-eyed and shuddering, and they would steer me back toward my own room, bleary-eyed and muttering, and after enough nights of this routine in a row bedtime became a dreaded punishment that began weighing on everyone's hearts the moment the sun started to set. then they started in with the pep talks.

the gist of the motivational speech was that i was going to be a Big Sister, and Big Sisters have to look out for their little sisters, and that meant i had to be Brave, because sometimes taking care of someone means protecting that person from things that are Scary, even things that we're afraid of ourselves. my sister and i were going to share a room eventually; what if she had a bad dream and woke up scared? how could i tell her that everything was o.k. if i was scared too? didn't i want to be a Good Big Sister?

had my parents realized how solemnly and seriously i would don my new role as Fearless Protector of Innocents, they might have foregone the speech and simply purchased a nighlight or two. but they had no way of knowing; as the eldest children in their respective families, it's likely they heard similar speeches themselves, and no lasting damage was done. but i was not them, and the events leading up to the situation converged in my peculiar child's mind in a very, very strange way.

here is what i knew: my parents, who i had been certain would rescue me from any and all dangers, had turned on me and chosen to force me into a known and massive danger night after night. they could not be trusted or counted on, not in the least, and therefore my baby sister was going to need all the help she could get. i, according to all reports, had been designated her guardian, and i was not about to leave her stranded in this unpredictable place. i began training.

every night, after my parents had performed the prescribed bedtime rituals, turned out my light, and left me to the shadows, i would scan the room for an eye-catching shape—a bathrobe hanging from the back of the rocking chair in the far corner, say, or a mound of toys spilling out from behind the closet door. the shape didn't have to be threatening outright, only potentially threatening; it had to suggest, at least obliquely, some other shape that would inspire dread. i would fix on the chosen object and stare, and stare and stare and stare, until the suggestion became the reality—the bathrobe was suddenly a hunched witch in a black cloak, eyeing me in salivatory anticipation, the jumble of playthings by the closet a skulking troll. once these monsters appeared i would seize on them, expand the ghoulish details of them until my heart was racing and my little jaws clenched tight against a shriek, and then i would close my eyes and will myself to fall asleep. when the inevitable nightmare woke me sweating and gasping, i resisted the desire to run to my parents, my heartless, treacherous parents, and instead rolled over to face my bête noire. the witch, by now, had rolling yellow eyes and toadlike skin, and her long, ragged fingernails rasped against one another as she lurched toward me, cackling under her breath. i stared at her, stared and stared and stared, shaking and panting and fighting tears, and whispered,

"you can't eat me. you're a bathrobe."

and so she was. slowly and not always so surely, i walked myself back from the brink of hysteria, reminding myself that the world was the world, and maybe it was packed to the gills with trolls and hags and hideous things, but this was my room, and that was my chair; all of these monsters, at least, were things that i knew and could explain to myself. i named them, one by one, night after night, and by the time my sister was born i was afraid of nothing. i was proud of my accomplishment, but also alone within it. i felt like a superhero, invincible and isolated, my great strength a secret i could never fully share.

i think that, in a way, this process is similar to the one christian bale undertakes when selecting and playing a role. having, to put it tactfully, studied (*ahem*) bale as he's inhabited various personas over the past fifteen or so years, and after watching some of his films enough times to commit entire scenes to memory verbatim, i feel qualified to argue that the connecting thread between almost all of his characters and certainly all of the recent ones, the thing that draws him to them, is terror—of the character, of the character's situation, and of the knowledge that, with some relatively minor shifts in circumstance, he, or any of us, could find himself in that terrifying place. undoubtedly this allows him to stretch and perfect and prove himself as an actor, but that can be accomplished, for most, via all kinds of characters. bale consistently opts to embody harrowed, haunted, desperate men, and specifically those whose desperation stems from an awareness that they are plummeting toward a state of being something not quite human, something callously, unrepentently animalistic, and knowing that they don't want it, and having no means of stopping it. talk about inviting a nightmare. did his early work in empire of the sun have a damaging psychological effect? or was he drawn to the work even then, as a twelve-year-old boy? could it be innate and inescapable? after all, his name is christian bale, a not-uplifting moniker better suited to a james joyce novel than modern hollywood. whatever the cause, the trend is undeniable.

bale's latest foray into tortured misery is rescue dawn, directed by the mad and exalted werner herzog, whose film sets are historically nightmarish regardless of plot. the story is based on true events and builds on an earlier work by herzog, little dieter needs to fly, released in 1997. in the current film, bale plays dieter dengler, a u.s. navy flyboy about to embark on his first official mission: the secret bombing of guerilla targets in laos in 1965, when the american involvement in vietnam and the far east was just beginning to reveal itself as engagement in war. dengler's plane is shot down early on in the mission, and, after successfully outrunning them at first, he is taken prisoner by a band of militiamen, some viet cong, some local tagalong thugs. presumably, for bale, since he hurls himself toward it time and again with such unflagging, all-in commitment, this is where the real fun begins. naturally, by "real fun" i mean endless days and sleepless nights of starvation, gruesome physical abuse, and sadistic psychological torture. and this is before he reaches the p.o.w. camp. you see where this is going.

oh, christian, how i fear and fear for you and your unemotional, single-minded, seemingly joyless devotion to these romps. as for the machinist, bale dropped close to sixty pounds over the course of the shoot—about thirty more than he'd initially planned to lose—whittling himself down to a shaggy, rag-clad scarecrow; in a later scene, bale wades into a river and his pant leg lifts up as he hoists his knobby knee over a rock, revealing a taut calf the circumference of the average teenage girl's forearm and a shark-finned ankle bone you could lose an eye on. yet i am hopeful that bale may finally have put himself through this enough times to have exorcised whatever demon was at the root of the compulsion: unlike his other wraiths, who plod and seethe through their sentences like enraged automatons, not wanting to go on but unable to stop, dengler is an optimist who believes he is the maker of his own fate and whose faith in his ability to propel himself to salvation never winks out. he is perhaps the most embraceable of bale's characters so far: a suffering man surrounded by evil and the muffled voices of the defeated, yet insistent upon the ultimate triumph of the human mind and heart. in the camp, he says that he is still hoping his fiancée will wait for him. he bolsters his fellow-prisoners, distracting them from the hopelessness of their surroundings and comforting them in their lowest moments. he is the kind of friend everyone wants to face death by disease and/or starvation and/or random, unprovoked execution alongside. there comes a moment, of course, where dengler finds himself up against something even he can't stare down, and in the aftermath of it it is clear how perilously close he is to losing, if not actively discarding, the humanity he has fought so consistently to retain. but up until then he is generally upbeat; remarkably stable; and, when he is not eating live insects, the warmest, most endearing character bale has portrayed since newsies. this, of course, makes the break all the more devastating, but i have convinced myself that it suggests that bale is ready to submerge himself in some slightly less icy and turbid waters. of course, he has said that he wanted this role largely because he was crazy about the idea of working in the jungle with herzog, so only time will tell.

to be fair, herzog suffers through most everything his cast and crew suffer through, and as traumatic as those goings-through may be, no one could accuse him of not knowing what he's doing. rescue dawn is visually flawless, filmed in a color range and with a hint of graininess suggestive of 1970s nature documentaries. the work is hypnotically devastating from its opening scenes, a protracted montage of warheads being dropped in pairs on bamboo huts in a rice field, the shells blossoming in slow motion into smoldering anemones that dissolve into gaping rosettes of orange flame. and it doesn't let up: nearly every shot is framed to evoke not only the mood of the central character or characters but also the ambient mood of the surrounding environment, and, if such a thing can be captured on film, the environment's feelings toward the characters—typically indifference at best and active, immolating resentment at worst. the latter is ever present in the second half of the film, but most strikingly so when dengler, after hacking through dense shrubs and tangled, snarling undergrowth for days, comes across a clearing containing the remnants of a small village. the huts have been almost completely reclaimed by the jungle: from a distance, their shapes are barely discernible, their exteriors a seamless, faintly contoured mat of interwoven vines. it is an image capable of inspiring either comfort or panic, depending on the perspective of the viewer: the earth, in the end, will always win out, try as we might to force ourselves on it, and all the work we undertake with the belief that it is of such great importance will be swallowed and digested in instants by that earth if we aren't there to stand guard over it. only we believe in ourselves; the rest of the world is scratching at us like a rash, waiting for the blasted infection to heal.

earlier on, though, herzog presents the relationship more gently, with the jungle regarding its human trespassers as merely nonentities rather than enemies. dengler, in an attempt to signal an overhead plane, climbs a hill and then scales a rock outcropping rising above the drop-off. standard hollywood form would be to shoot tight and close on dengler as he fights his way up the rock, his boots slipping against the crags, his fingers stirring up dust and sprays of pebbles as they scrabble for a grip, the sweat beading up on his creased brow and tracing clear swaths in the caked dirt on his grimacing face. *yawn* but herzog, because he is better than this and because he believes that we, the audience, are better than this, widens the shot to take in the entire rock, the hillside, the stony cliff beyond it, and the jungle unfurling endless and claustrophobically thick below. the camera is pulled back so that dengler is a speck on the skin of all this immensity. the sound is natural and unamplified; we hear dengler's small grunts of effort from a distance, and the clattering of gravel pushed over the edge of the rock by his foot is piffling and devoid of moment, like the tapping of chalk on a sidewalk heard from inside a building. this is, of course, the accurate, in-the-instant relationship. dengler is not the center of anything on an honest, real-world scale; he is just one man, tiny, without allies, standing on a rock, holding an inches-wide flat of mirrored glass up toward the infinite sky, too minuscule to attract anything's notice. the plane flies by and doesn't circle back.

these are nightmare outtakes, the scenes and sensations that send us shooting up in bed drenched in sweat, that bring on panic attacks in crowded trains and elevators or in wide-open parks. all at once we realize that we are one of many in so much space, points in a field that extends forever, and we know nothing of that space, because that is what we are. we are human in the way that we conceive of being human because we insist upon it; no law makes it so, and if our discipline wavers, nothing will save us. the life we trust, in the order we trust it to keep to, can—is probably trying to—unravel. and are you strong enough to force it to cohere? if your plane went down, would you stand up and follow the river?

the scene cuts, production closes, the lights come up, you wake in a familiar place and inhale, the dream falls away. you can let go of the question then, if you need to, if the darkness at the edge of the room is too dark, if the world is too large, if you can decide there's nothing worth confronting today. but some people need an answer; fortunately for them, there is no shortage of nightmares with which to test their mettle. but for bale's sake, i hope that it is equally true that on some night each of them wakes up assuredly in control and tells the bathrobe to shut the hell up, it's just a bathrobe, and falls into a far more peaceful sleep, and that the knowledge that this can be done is enough.

sunday best-of blogging

best album to hem a dress to: penthouse, luna. i met this band in providence, ri, when i was 18 and made them sign the poster i stole off of the door to the club they were playing at, and it was dorky and pathetic, and we all knew it, and i didn't care. i love you, dean wareham. thank you for not laughing at me to my face. if it matters, i bet you'd like the dress.

artist most frighteningly devoted to his craft:



here's christian bale the way most of us know and love him, ripped like jesus and relieving my lungs of their troublesome burden of air more swiftly than a cannonball to the solar plexus. while i know mostly nothing about him as an individual and can't speak to his character, i can say with a great deal of certainty that this is the body i would program into my vanilla sky lucid dream. it's perfect, people. perfect. i crave it in a way that makes me blush even when i'm all alone in a dark, silent room. and here's christian making me want to die in a much less fun way in the machinist, which i got for christmas from my mom and watched for the first time on thursday:




MOTHER OF GOD. i've loved me some skinny men, but christian's body was so luridly grotesque in this film that it made me physically uncomfortable; i had a hard time sitting still in my chair while i was looking at it, and not at all in the happy, goose-bumpy way i've come to expect from past times with mr. bale. i was honestly uneasy. now, i know the movie came out a while ago and the sixty-plus pounds he dropped for the role are sort of old news, but they were old news to me, too, and i still got queasy watching him haul his jangly skeleton around for an hour and a half. a lot of that was the movie itself, though, which i think was great, although i probably need to watch it again to be sure. it was definitely troubling. christian plays a (drumroll, please) machinist who hasn't slept in a year, for no readily knowable reason, and he's a little edgy. the entire film is shot in overcast, brushed-metal tones and moves like a snowball rolling down a mountain, gaining density until what started out as a four-inch ball of packed powder ends up razing entire villages in the viewer's muddled, flinching head. at first i was annoyed by its orchestral score, sort of a cross between a scaled-down "peter and the wolf" and the instrumental background of every cheesed-out 1950s sci-fi debacle, but by the time the whole story finally came together i was so tense and distraught that i felt a tiny bit insane myself, so i guess it worked better than i expected it to. let me put it this way: the sixth sense didn't surprise me, and this movie made me pull my hair and talk back to the screen. (lest anyone be overly concerned for his health, christian finished the machinist and immediately transmogrified back into his hale and beautiful self in order to film batman begins.) congratulations, cast and crew, and thank you, christian bale, for being the only boy on the planet talented enough to make me sweat and/or recoil in horror at your command. you so crazy. oh, and just to be self-indulgent, let's take a moment to remember christian the way he was when he first caught my dewy little junior-high eye:



heh. dork. but heaven knows i'm soft for 'em. swing heil, indeed.

most poignant exchange from grey gardens:

big edie: that cat's going to the bathroom over there, right behind my portrait.
little edie: oh, that's terrible. isn't it terrible? it's just terrible.
big edie: i think it's wonderful. it's wonderful that someone here is doing exactly what they want to do.

now, maybe you know about grey gardens and maybe you don't, but the fact is, big edie is absolutely right—the cats peeing in the corners, and i guess the raccoons getting fat on wonder bread in the attic, are the only ones in the house who aren't endlessly mourning, or at least constantly reliving, the choices they didn't make, the chances they didn't take, the lives they're still sure they were meant to have but never will. when the camera zooms in on the face of the terrible/wonderful cat, its expression is one of utter calm and contentment; while big edie, at 79, has the bearing and attitude of a lot of older folks who are well past caring what the hell any of the rest of us think of them, it's still an expression i have a hard time imagining on either woman's face. i don't know if i want to recommend this movie, exactly, but i do believe a dedicated viewing will encourage you to think a bit differently about what course of action in any given circumstance is truly the least regrettable. i love my mom, and i've shot myself in the foot a few times trying to take care of her, because at the time it seemed like The Right Thing To Do, but there's no way i'd let us end up like this.

best e-mail alert: i have an extensive list of puerile sound clips that i rotate through as my mood shifts, but this one is my favorite right now. i'm on the hunt for some classic ren & stimpy quotes, so stay tuned. as if you could help it.

sunday best-of blogging: the travel issue

best song to wake up over the atlantic ocean to: "pure imagination," as sung by gene wilder, the one true willy wonka.

best reason to pinch malcolm gladwell rather hard on the arm: here's malcolm during the q & a after a speech made for the commonwealth club on january 20, 2005:

the word "intuition" does not appear in blink for a very deliberate reason, and that is i intensely dislike that word. i dislike the connotations that are associated with it, i dislike its fuzziness, i dislike the fact that it's, among many people, synonymous with something that is irrational, and, you know, it's called women's intuition—why is it called women's intuition? not as a way of honoring it, but as a way of degrading it, right? of dismissing it. but my biggest problem with that word is that it suggests that what is going on in an instant is not thinking, it's feeling; i'm sorry, it's thinking, it's just a different kind of thinking, and it may manifest itself as a feeling, but it didn't start out that way. it didn't start in your heart, it starts in your head ….

if you listen to the audio (this part starts around 8:55 of the q & a), you'll notice how emphatic he gets about all of this; by the end he's nearly yelling. you'd believe that he really, really hates that word, the way my high school english teacher hated it when people described things like weather and paintings as "nice," or the way i hate it when people put unnecessary and inappropriate quotation marks around words they want to emphasize. i listened to this on the plane heading in to paris (lsz, if you're wondering, the ums [which i've omitted in my transcript] worked like a charm) and thought to myself, malcolm, aren't you a cheeky little monkey, because here he is in his september 12 new yorker article on rick warren and the saddleback church:

"The Purpose-Driven Life" is meant to be read in groups. If the vision of faith sometimes seems skimpy, that's because the book is supposed to be supplemented by a layer of discussion and reflection and debate. It is a testament to Warren's intuitive understanding of how small groups work that this is precisely how "The Purpose-Driven Life" has been used.

cheeky! it's okay, malcolm, i still love you, but you need to remember that the world is watching, and there's always going to be one crazy person who'll remember everything you say and call you out. you're lucky, because today it's me, and i'm pretty swell for a crazy person. next time, though, it might be zp, and you won't be in for a paltry pinching then—she'll just beat you like a redheaded stepchild. for the record, though, if anyone asks, you are officially my bitch. you may decide how you feel about that in either your heart or your head, i'm not fussy.

most satisfying combination of elements in a return-flight movie: christian bale, cillian murphy playing an evil madman, ninjas, and, of course, batman, in batman begins. now, all of these perfectly blended spices were still not enough to mask the slimy, dirty-nickel-flavored core of the movie's banal and one-linery dialogue (i think the actual comic books took more care with their writing), and katie holmes is positively vampiric in her ability to drain a scene of any and all vitality, but she's not in that many scenes, and the boys atone for her almost every time. i'll tell you, though, when even the batmobile kicked it ninja style and went invisible without moving from the middle of a three-lane highway, i did the happiest dance i could do without rising from my cramped non-aisle seat, and i think cillian might be the new ronnie "z-man" barzell. it wasn't good the way i tend to want my movies to be good, but i liked it better than charlie and the chocolate factory, which came on after it, and some rainy weekday when i didn't have anything pressing to tend to, i'd be happy to watch it again. in a roomier space, mind you.

best location for a children's birthday party and/or easter egg hunt: il parco dei mostri di bomarzo, the one place we visited in italy that i never wanted to leave. i thought perhaps i would live here, and it would be sort of like living on a boat, which i've also always wanted to do. but my friends said, no, juniper, you can't live in the sacred wood of bomarzo, and i said, why not? i can forage in the woods for acorns and berries, and i can use the giant ashtray by the gift shop for a toilet, just like those stray cats, and they said, put your soggy ass in the fiat, juniper, we're going home. and i did, and we got there and it was cold and on the kitchen table there was a plate full of gnawed chicken parts that our hostess's roommate had left congealing in its horrible fats, and i didn't say it, but i thought, i knew i should have stayed.

best translator: renaissance le corbeau, who handled the site for the parco dei mostri and offers us this delightful bit of slain grammar: "The sculpture represents the descent into hell (but where did the soul of the beloved wife?) of Baccus."

friendliest stray cat: the suave gray tabby we encountered on our way back to our car after exploring the largely abandoned mountain village of casteluccio, on the eastern edge of umbria. he was such a charmer that i didn't even mind when he covered my thighs with tiny muddy pawprints as he worked his sly, stealthy way into my lap. i should have minded, because i only packed two pairs of pants, but what the hell. i may never be loved by another italian tomcat, and that outboard-motor purr went straight to my head. i know, i know, i'm easy.

best random search: the blue ribbon goes to montreal's trudeau airport, where i was made to remove all of my jewelry after passing through the metal detector and being given the once-over with the handheld. a stocky woman with hairspray-crunchy curls asked me if it would be all right if she went through my bags; i assume that i had the right to say no, collect my things, and hitchhike back to massachusetts, but i had nothing to hide except one box of matchsticks that i got in a restaurant in florence, and i could live without them. she rifled through my dirty socks forever, but in the main part of my suitcase she glanced at the folded clothes for a fraction of a second and moved on to the inner pocket, where she became obsessed with my soap. i had packed it in its original cardboard box, which she turned over and over and over, stopping occasionally to sniff at it with great suspicion. at long last she worked up the nerve to open it, and when she saw that it was indeed soap and not an incense-scented wad of plastique, she tucked it back in its place and waved me off. she never looked into any of the three small bags that i had packed inside of my larger book bag, which, of course, are where i would have stashed the explosive i had tidily tamped into eyeshadow compacts so i could then light it in the airplane bathroom somewhere over the nothingness between montreal and boston with the firenzian matches she had failed to find, were i the sort of awful person who wanted to use my genius for ill. but i'm not, and don't any of you be, either. random acts of destruction are wrong, unless they're committed by nature, who tends to have an excellent reason. i'm a good girl, and that's why i'm so annoyed with the impotent renditions of safeguarding we're supposed to feel protected by. if you're going to search me, for pete's sake, do it well. otherwise you're wasting everyone's time.

best job of rearranging an entire apartment in a single free afternoon: that done by my bad, bad roommate, who: removed all of my and toadie's belongings from the shower and hid my little waterproof radio under the towels; threw away all of our sponges and replaced them with one wedge of pepto-bismol-pink foam; threw away half of our food and moved what was left to the back of the bottom shelf of the refrigerator; set a nauseating mango candle on the kitchen stove, where it was free to compete for air space with the even more revolting chocolate-mint candle burning in her bedroom; took all of the kitchen chairs away from the kitchen table and stacked them in a corner of the living room; put toadie's cat's empty dishes next to the sink after, presumably, failing to locate her food (and the faucet?); dumped an entire box of scoopable cat litter into the litter box in the bathroom on what we think must have been the day we got home, because under the layer of bright new litter was much more than a day's worth of unpleasantness; threw away whatever mail had been left by us on the front hall table, because if we had deemed it too unimportant to open before we left then it couldn't possibly have been worth keeping around; threw away the cardboard boxes by the living room windows that the cats like to sleep in; and came into my room and turned on my laptop, which i had shut off and removed the power cord from. many months ago, when i started coming home and finding every application on my computer open because bad roommate doesn't know how to operate a mac, and after twice having to reload my internet software, i implemented a password. i know she didn't give up hope that maybe it was a phase i was going through, or even a mistake, because she kept sneaking in while i was out. you can't shut the computer down once it's up until you've logged in, you see, so she had to just walk away from it with the log-in screen up and do what she could to act like nothing had happened. one time i came home and the computer wouldn't turn on, and it was because she, in her desperation to get online and buy more hideous crap from old navy, had turned it over and seen a little dial with a picture of a locked padlock at nine o'clock and an unlocked one at twelve, and had turned it towards the unlocked one, thinking this would, of course, be the solution. but all it had done was pop the battery out, and she just left it that way, set the computer back down on its table and walked out of the room. it's like living with a three-year-old. anyway, since she had so much time with the place all to herself she must have decided to try to crack the code, because when i got home monday night the computer's sleep light was winking at me, and when i opened it up i saw that she had tried and guessed incorrectly so many times that the computer had offered her a hint. all of this computer business would be sort of funny if she didn't consistently deny having anything to do with it. THERE WAS NO ONE ELSE HERE. the hint now reads, "give it up, you sneaky rat," and that mango candle is in her closet where it belongs.

best thing to come home to: my little cat curled up on my bed, and no trace of anxiety-induced regurgitation anywhere in the house. i expected her to be prissy and snub me for a bit, but she didn't even, she just ran on over and started up her engine, and she's been pasted to my body ever since. i'm a crazy cat lady and that's fine with me, i've embraced it, and i have no qualms about admitting to you that i was in knots about leaving her with a fairly lousy person and not having any way of being reached. it led to some unsettling dreams, in fact, and i'll tell you about them later on. but she's healthy and lovely and didn't pull out any fur, and we're both pleased as punch that she's back on my shoulders.

best future jaunt already in the works: mine to nyc to see the lemonheads in two weeks. yay! and i won't even have to worry about scraping cheese off of things, because my hotel room has a full kitchen, so i can pack a little cooler with two days' worth of nummies and nosh with an easy grin. double yay! i wuv my toadie, but everyone needs a little alone time now and again, and i haven't taken a trip on my own since i moved to boston almost four years ago. that's too damn long. and anyway, any road trip that ends in two consecutive nights of evan dando is a mighty fine road trip. how long do you think it takes to walk from the bowery to central park? i say i can do it in an hour and a half, if i get onto park avenue at union square and don't have to wait too long at intersections. you all place your bets now, and we can divvy up the pool in time for you to spend your winnings on last-minute holiday gifts.

there's going to be a disgusting amount of in-depth travel narrative over the next few weeks, and eventually some (hopefully attractive) photographs, but i'll try to break it up with more universal material. thanks to all of you who have been checking in, and i'm sorry if my procrastination in announcing my safe return made any of you nervous. i'm sure you understand if i needed some silence.

i missed you.