A part of my was a little sad when I mailed off that invoice today. I want to keep going, keep writing. The problem is that blogging isn’t satisfying me this time around. It all seems a little trivial, a bit of vanity writing. Sound and fury. I need something ‘real’ to write. That was what made the textbook writing so satisfying – the fact that it is going to be published in old school book form, that undergraduate students are going to be forced to buy it and that maybe, just maybe, it will help someone learn something useful. Unlikely, I know, but a guy can dream.

I want to write something real. But what? I love reading fiction but can’t fathom writing it and, as a friend in publishing told me – ‘nobody wants fiction from new authors, fiction doesn’t sell.’ Nonfiction it is then. But what to write and, more importantly, when? I knocked out 20,000 words in a week by taking some days away from work, but I knew that there was a payday at the end. I’m not sure I could convince Dr. O’C to get the kids out of the house on a Sunday afternoon on a whim. A fantasy.

On a tangentially related note, today is the first official day of summer.  I’m going back to four days a week at work over the next few months to get some time with the boys and so Dr. O’C can go back to work full time. I’ve stored up enough leave time to take every Wednesday from today through the end of February home with the boys. For the first year or so we were in Oz, I did that and generally enjoyed the time I had with Boy Z. Then Not Max came along and Dr. O’C was on maternity leave and my work got a bit out of control. And, to be honest, I was a bit scared to deal with the two of them on my own. But we’re doing OK today. We’ve spent the morning messing with marsupials and the boys have been charitable enough to take good long naps simultaneously. I reckon they realise I’m out of my league, here.

Behind you, mate!

——————————-

The Indigo Girls’ “All That We Let In” is available from .

Image credit: Writing

Today is also the first day of Spring in Australia and it’s about damn time. We don’t have snow or frost but we get an endless barrage of rain and the other thing we don’t have is central heating. It is grey and rainy again today but the hope of sunshine and days at the beach in the not too distant keeping me sane in these lingering days of muddy kids and nights spent huddled around the fire.

This blog has been another victim of my career affair. My last post was nearly a month ago. And the only reason I’ve made the time today is fatherly guilt over missing the birthday of one of my spawn. And all I’ve really got in me, with a diesel fuel headache and a stunning view of endless red dirt and scraggly gum trees is a feeble family update.

We’re getting a new dog. Because of what happened with our last dog, we’ve opted for the dull, but reliably family friendly, Labrador Retriever. When asked to choose between the two handsome fellows to the right, Boy Z chose, as boys do, ‘the BIG one’. Apparently he’s going to be called “Woody” (as in Toy Story). But that’s better than “Wags”, which was Boy Z’s original preference.

Speaking of Wags, I’m going to climb out on to the loser limb and tell you how much I’m enjoying The Wiggles. Maybe it is my love of my new home, but these four aging Aussie gents and their ‘animal’ posse make me smile. And they do make one feel like dancing. One of the joys of being housebound in a rainy Australian winter evening is the joy that comes from dancing to “Old Dan Tucker” with the boys. That being said, if I have to watch the tea party song one more time, I might just change my opinion. Boy Z’s going to see The Wiggles when they come to Adelaide with his Nana and I’ve got to admit that I’m a little jealous.

I’m done. In more than one way, actually. I’m coming down with one of the endless string of winter ailments that the boys bring home and sitting here in the Whyalla visiting faculty office I’m just out of steam. The early morning lectures, working at home late into the evenings, the travel and the hundreds of students have just gotten me to the point that I’m ready to collapse. Sixteen days until Spring Break.

But Happy Birthday, Boy #2. We’ve had kind of a rough road, the two of us, but I still get a big smile from you every time I walk into a room so I think we’re bonding a bit. A year in. Sorry to miss this one, but I’m pretty sure you’re not going to remember it. And we’ve got heaps more to come.

—————————–

The Wiggles “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing” is available from .

In the suburbs
I learned to drive
And you told me we’d never survive
Grab your mother’s keys we’re leavin’…

In my younger days, when the stress tide was rising, I used to pop on my favourite record at the time, crank the volume up to maximum and bathe in an anodyne sonic sea. Cheaper than Valium and a bit better for someone of my addictive nature.

I’ve been a bit tightly wound these last few weeks and the release of The Arcade Fire’s new record, couldn’t have been better timed. All the way home from work today, I was looking forward to a little music therapy. I can usually get some music blaring in the boys’ witching hour between dinner and bedtime.

Boy Z doesn’t get it, he’s got too much of his mother in him and is as likely to order me to turn the music down as he is to dance around the lounge. Not Max, however, he gets it. He’s a rocker. All it takes to turn him out of a bad mood is “Paradise City” at maximum volume. So when Dr. O’C and Boy Z took a trip to the supermarket this evening, we pulled out the new record. Delighted in the anticipation as the cellophane was pulled away from the jacket and those expectant moments of quiet as the disk slid into place and the CD player chirped to life and the speakers roared to life.

It has been three years since the last offering from The Arcade Fire – a long three years. The Montreal band’s two previous offerings are easily among my top ten favourite albums of the last decade. They were, quite simply, masterpieces. I’ve actually been a little bit nervous since the announcement that their third full-length record was due this week. Could they do it again. Could they make another album that becomes an inherent part of the soundtrack of my life. One of the things that The Arcade Fire does well is to make a concept album that isn’t a novelty album. Their 2004 debut, “Funeral”, was about loss – a theme that struck close to home for me at the time as well. Their sophomore effort in 2007, “Neon Bible”, was all about spirituality and salvation – as was my 2007.

And this one, as you may have guessed from the title, is about suburbia. And an album about suburbia in all its banality, uniformity and, yes, even its hidden darkness is perfect for me in 2010. I grew up in the virulent Florida suburbs in the 1980’s and spent much of the last twenty years trying to escape their  of the 1990’s trying to escape their clutches. The irony of landing two decades later in the bosom of suburbia on the other side of the world is not lost on me.

While the record is as cynical as I am about the suburbs, it is also nostalgic. It’s not a condemnation of the endless 21st century sprawl as much as a resignation to its inevitability. This is the way we live. This is the reality of the 21st century. Win Butler and his merry men see a world slowly crumbling away. And who doesn’t? Maybe not your idea of the way to quiet the grinding gears of your mind on a suburban Friday evening.

But then there’s the music.

It’s bigger, but not as bombastic as the previous two. The band has made good use of the last three years, delivering an album that is more lush, more mature than their previous efforts. They’ve also embraced a wider range of musical styles veering from straight-ahead punk rock to intricate, even challenging, orchestration. Despite hinging thematically on the banality of the day to day, it’s musically epic. But above all, beautiful and compelling.

Not Max probably missed the thematic overtones and the intricate instrumentation, but he seemed happy enough with the music – and he certainly liked the flavour of the cover. He’s not afraid to let me know when he thinks something sucks. If I’m playing the indie folk for which I’ve got a penchant these days, he’ll fuss and grizzle until I turn on something with a barrage of electric guitar. And as we bathed in a musical barrage, I found the musical narcotic that I needed. As for suburbia?

It is what you make of it, I suppose. And I’ve spent Friday evenings in worse ways.

Hey
Put the cellphone down for a while
In the night there is something wild
Can you hear it breathing?

And hey
Put the laptop down for a while
In the night there is something wild
I feel it, it’s leaving me

—————————–

You can, and absolutely should, buy The Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs” from but if you buy it directly from the band, you get a nifty synchronised artwork version of the record – and it’s cheaper than iTunes as well.

Today is also the first day of Autumn in Australia and appropriately the first day of a new semester. I spent a good part of the summer herding failing nursing students through their first and second year subjects and most of the one week break between semesters listening to twice-failed nursing students beg for mercy. The new semester is going to be a bear. A grizzly. A kodiak. I’m involved in teaching six different courses. Those of you who teach secondary school will have little sympathy for me, but for a delicate university lecturer this is a crippling load. I’m also taking a couple of courses for my back up plan.

I recently started working toward a back up plan B, which involves me keeping the job I’m in by doing what the university wants me to do – produce research and research money. I’ve started tinkering around in an immunology lab, hoping to pull some quick publications out of my…hat. I’m not an immunologist. But I’m also not a pathologist and that hasn’t stopped me teaching pathology, nor has the fact that I’m not an anatomist stopped me teaching anatomy. Etc. My real enemy is the time, or lack therof, in the day to fit in all these back up plans as well as doing the job for which I was hired. I fear that things are going to start to suffer. Like this blog.

What the hell? This was supposed to be about Not Max and here I am blathering on about me. Shut up, Chris.

Happy un-birthday, boy #2, the neglected one, laughing boy. Keep working at it and you’re bound to get you father’s attention over the next six months.

Finally,  I couldn’t resist this photo of Boy Z. He’s learned to trust his cape.

——————————–

This is the second track from R.E.M.’s 2001 album “Reveal”. I’ve never thought of it a a great R.E.M. album, but it’s sounded pretty good this summer. As an aside, one of my students told me that R.E.M. was “old people’s music” last week, to which I responded with a suggestion that she could kiss my backside.  R.E.M.’s “Reveal” is available from .

It’s not that I don’t like the boy, it’s just that he doesn’t do much.

Dr. O’C has recently, and rightly, begun to point out the inherent unfairness of this situation. Whenever I enter a room, Not Max turns to me and sprouts a big baby smile. One which typically gets ignored in favor of whatever Boy Z is doing at the time. On an academic level I know that it isn’t a good idea to play favorites. But on a practical level, I have a limited amount of time on the ground at home and figure that I should dispense it where it is most valued.

“He’s going to spend his whole life trying to get your approval, Chris”, I’ve been chastised on more than one recent occasion.

Well, as someone who spent a fair bit of my teenage and young adult years in a quest for paternal approval, I could relate to that. Therefore, I’ve been trying to improve the quality of my interaction with young Not Max. It’s getting a bit easier as the boy has added rolling over and laughter to his repertoire.

But he still hasn’t featured much in the space. So, in the interest of reducing future therapy bills, I wanted to give Not Max a blog post in which he featured as a main character. On the rare occasions that the boy gets hot and bothered and it isn’t about food or sleep, the best way I’ve found to make him happy is music. Preferably loud and preferably with paternal vocal accompaniment. Recently we introduced the tried and true door frame bouncer, which offers an extension of our musical appreciation from listening to active participation.

Ah, let me just show you.

Without further ado, here’s your Not Max in his first starring (or at least co-starring) roll:

I would just like to point out that I didn’t choose “Copacabana”, it just came up randomly on my iPod. Truly.

—————————–

If you must, Barry Manilow’s “Ultimate Manilow” is available from .

This is the best I’ve got so far:

I’ll keep trying.

I’m also trying to find the ultimate Antipodean Christmas song. So far, the best I’ve got is Rolf Harris’s “Six White Boomers”. Now I like old Rolf, really I do.  But come on Aussies, is this the best you can do?*

I’ve been remiss, well, about a lot of things. But specifically, I wanted to draw your attention to a couple of links that are well overdue.

I did my monthly The Greenists post a week or so ago. Time’s been tight lately, so I cheated a bit and slightly modified a post I wrote for this site a while back. (Shhh, don’t tell Courtney). However, if you haven’t read about The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, head over there and have a look.

I’m a big fan of a good interview and an even bigger fan of myself, so I signed on for Neil’s Great Interview Experiment. Bovidine** blogger Nanny Goats in Panties came up with some great questions, so for even more of me go over and check out the interview on her site.

Finally, and I hesitate to post this one, but I’ve done another guest appearance for everyone’s favorite blog review site. I hesitate because I really did not like this lady’s blog, so I was a wee bit more caustic than I could ever have been in real life. That’s the beauty of an alter ego. At the time of writing, my guest post was not up yet, but have a look some time on Friday for the nastier side of your underwhelming correspondent.

And with that, good night.

UPDATE:

Ask review won’t be up until Tuesday.

————————

“The Best of Rolf Harris” is available from .

*Also, if you guys lose to the West Indies tomorrow, I’m sending my sons to play cricket in England.

** It’s possible that I made this word up.

I loved seeing them. My sister and I flew up to northern Ontario for a couple of weeks every summer. Those were the best of times – long northern summer days in the woods with my cousins and my grandparents. There was a freedom and a light heartedness up there that we couldn’t conjure up at home. There was a chance to spend time with my grandparents, to get to know them, to have them shower us with grandpaternal affection. It was awesome.

But I was always a little jealous of my cousins. They lived in the same town as my grandparents and saw them a couple of times a week. My grandparents were a part of their lives in a way that they could never be a part of ours. It is the minutiae of day to day live that drags a family closer together.  In the back of my mind during those halcyon summer days of childhood was a niggling insecurity that my cousins were closer to my grandparents than I was. Because no matter how close we got during the weeks we spent together, we never built the relationship that goes along with a daily interaction.

I know there was a difference because when I was a teenager, my father’s parents moved to our small town in Florida. Now as a teenager, I didn’t take as much advantage as I should have of this proximity. But I know that in the few years before he died, I was able to build a special kind of relationship with my paternal grandfather, one that I wish I had a chance to build with my maternal grandfather.

I wish I was in a position to offer my sons that kind of relationship with all of their grandparents. But one of the adverse effects of an international relationship is that  there is no conceivable way that Dr. O’C and I can live in the same country as both sides of our family, never mind the same city.

My boys will grow up with one local grandparent. Dr. O’C’s mum lives in the southern suburbs and comes up to dote on her grandsons at least a couple of times a week. They adore her and I’m grateful that they are going to have her in their lives on a daily basis.

Dr. O’C’s Dad is in Queensland, which is about as far from us as New York is from New Orleans. Thus, he’s been an infrequent presence in my sons’ lives so far.

And my parents? Well, my parents are in Florida – 16,000 km away. Not conducive to that daily interaction with their Grandkids. And this is a fact that pains me. I’ve gone through all the permutations, but there just isn’t any way that there can be more unless we move back to the States (not going to happen) or they move down here (ditto). So, we’ll have to look forward to the too infrequent visits and make the most of them when they come around.

Like now, for example. Right now they’re probably about 8,000 km or so away – on a flight somewhere over the Pacific.  They are on their way here – my Mom and Dad and my maternal Grandmother. They arrive in Sydney tomorrow and Adelaide on Sunday. We’re headed off on a barnstorm trip to Sydney to meet up with them and get Not Max his U.S. citizenship.

At just shy of three weeks, they will be here for too short a time. And who knows when the next trip will be. But I’m glad that my parents are going to have a chance to get to know their grandsons and that my sons will have a chance to begin to get to know their grandparents. I’m grateful that we have a chance to be together and am going to make the best of the time we have.

——————————-

Eels’ “Blinking Lights and Other Revelations” is available from 

There is a possibility that I am becoming obsessed about food. My guest post for The Greenists is about food. Again. Still, I think it is pretty good so you should go and check it out.

The research for this one freaked me out a little bit. I try to trudge through life looking pretty much right in front of me. When I start to look too far ahead, when I start postulating about the future, I have a tendency to become very slightly unhinged. I can not, for example, deal with the fact that there are going to be another two or three billion people on the planet before I leave it. I don’t like people very much, one of the reasons that I was happy to move to one of the most sparsely populated nations on the planet. Anymore than I can deal with thinking about my boys as teenagers. There is no more repulsive animal on the planet than teenage boys. I just can’t fathom that these two gorgeous boys of mine will be making the transition to oily, pimply, testosterone addled thugs in just over a decade.

It isn’t just the big things either, I get pre-emptively depressed if I think ahead to Saturday night.

So, I try to keep it in the day. Put one foot in front of the other. Keep an eye on what is under my nose. And speak in clichés.

What is under my nose today is a hell of a lot of marking. And my boys.

It’s becoming clear that Boy Z is going to share his mother’s complexion. If you look closely at the photo above you’ll see the tell tale signs of freckles beginning to dot the bridge of his nose. I’m thrilled. I always wanted freckles as a kid – could totally relate with Judy Blume’s “Freckle Juice”. Dr. O’C tells me that it wasn’t that great, that she was constantly scorned as a “Freckle Face”. Though, as a goofy looking bespectacled kid with a big nose and a bad haircut I would have taken ‘freckle face’ over a lot of the verbal spears that were chucked my way.

I feel like Boy Z gets most of the face time around here. So, in the interest of equal time, here’s Not Max – freckle free for now.

—————————-

Welsh alt-rockers Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci were odd, but their 1999 album “Spanish Dance Troupe” is good fun. Check it out at .

Friday:

Boy Z came to ‘work’ with me. On the bus. The bus, apparently, was the best part of the trip.

I’m pretty sure he was convinced that I worked as a bus driver, so it was a bit of a disappointment to him when we got off. Nonetheless, he found the ‘big kids’ at my university endlessly fascinating.

Surprisingly,  I didn’t get much work done, but we did do a fair bit of  ’sploring of the university campus. I like where I work.

That evening, Dr. O’C and I had out big evening out. With grownups. And music.

Saturday:

It is starting to feel a lot like summer in South Australia. So, Saturday marked our first trip of the season to the beach.

Sunday:

No weekend can be perfect.

I don’t think I want to write about football anymore this year.

 But meeting other bloggers has turned out to be good fun in the past and it certainly turned my Sunday around. Brunch with the charming Headbang8 will cure all that ails you.

We lazed the remainder of our weekend away; boys lounging in the first real heat of summer.

I’m really rather fond of this little family of mine.

—————————-

Since Friday night, I’ve been listening to Gomez’s back catalog and it really is quite good. “Hamoa Beach” was one of my favourites from the show and is featured on 2006’s “How We Operate”, available from . And if you ever get a chance, they are very good live. They are headed back to the UK for a tour later this month.

I was going to tell you that after two weeks off for paternity leave/spring break, I was ready to get back to work. I do particularly like my job, but that’s not the whole reason. My ass was kicked after a fortnight of full time parenting. I was going to write that after a couple of days where things looked good on the Not Max sleep front, we were back to sleep deprivation and irritability. How, even when he was sleeping, Not Max grunts and snores and coos his way through the night. How I was out of patience for Boy Z and the incessant messing – little hands constantly groping, grabbing, pulling, breaking. And the whining. Oh my god, the whining.

I was going to write that I was ready to get back to my quiet little office at the university. To sit in blessed silence interrupted only rarely by a whining undergraduate.

I know all of this would have made me sound ungrateful, bitter and, well, whiny. That is one of the reasons that I decided not to write it. I know it would have made me sound like the very kind of parent for whom I have no patience, the ones who spend all of their conversational energy moaning about their kids. But that’s where I was at the time. I was broken. After Boy Z was born, I was jealous that Dr. O’C got to stay home with him while I had to trundle off to work every morning. After Not Max, I know that I’ve got the better end of the deal.

That’s what I was going to write.

And then the other night during one of Not Max’s 4 a.m. wake up binges I lay down on the couch and popped on an episode of “Six Feet Under”*. One of the story lines had the Fishers doing a funeral for a baby who had died of SIDS. And that episode hit me like a freight train full of shut the hell up. For some reason, since becoming a father I can be moved to tears by even the sappiest father-child story line. I think I started sobbing while watching “Father of the Bride 2″ not so long ago. I know I teared up during the Georgia-LSU game when they cut to Joe Cox’s Dad after what should have been his son’s game winning touchdown pass. And the other morning, as the story on the TV unfolded I was distracted, listening obsessively to my younger son’s breathing as he lay on my chest. I didn’t sleep well for the rest of the night and actually welcomed his snoring as reassurance that everything was as it should be.

And I realized I was being self-centered ingrate.

A self-centered ingrate that needed to shut the hell up and get on with the business of raising his kids to the best of his ability.

That realization hasn’t made life perfect. It is still really hard. There are still the tantrums and the messing and the whining from Boy Z. I still don’t know what the hell I’m doing most of the time with Not Max. I’m still not rallying to the new family dynamic. I’m still throwing tantrums to rival Boy Z’s and doing a lot more shouting than I am strictly comfortable with. And I was pretty excited to be back at work today. I kept my door closed all afternoon to dissuade the casual whining student.

But I’m also grateful. Grateful that I’ve got two beautiful, healthy sons. As much as they can drive me right up to the verge of losing it, I don’t want to imagine life without them. I can’t think of anything worse. Because, as any parent knows, moments of wonderful completely erase hours of horrible.

Still and all, I am looking forward to work again in the morning.

————————–

Due to my connection to the place, I’ll always listen with a tender ear to any band from Athens, Georgia. But Laminated Cat is pretty special, regardless of where they come from. There seems to be a bit of a resurgence of Sixties-esque garage psychedelia happening right now. I’ve been hearing a few bands that sound like they were the spawn of 13th Floor Elevators. These Athenians, however, are the best that I’ve heard, seemlessly blending psychedelia with fuzzy grunge guitar. Laminated Cat’s “Umbrella Weather came out last week on Garden Gate Records and is available from . If nothing else, Jeff Tweedy fans have got to love the Loose Fur reference.

—————————

*Thanks to Courtney, Headbang8 and Kerry for this recommendation. I’m fully sucked in. Great damn television.