Uncrush my hands

Moby - “Spiders”

Yeah, like everything else he’s done in the last ten years, this is as slick, cheesy, and overproduced as a car commercial soundtrack. It will probably be a car commercial soundtrack sometime soon, if it hasn’t been already.

All the same, it’s a great fucking rock anthem, dramatic and inspiring. I heard it by chance on the radio a couple days ago, downloaded it from a P2P network, and have been listening to it compulsively ever since. Its effect on me is difficult to explain; it seems to represent a kind of nostalgia, not only for some particular glam-rock messiahs, but for a whole time of fuzzy-ego’d youth when it seemed possible for the right rock n’ roll band to save us from ourselves. As I’ve gotten older, of course I’ve learned that no single musician holds the keys to salvation in his guitar. That’s just experience, and I’m a stronger person for it, but at the same time it seems to distance me from things. I just can’t get swallowed utterly in the sound the way I used to, and part of me will always miss that.

I guess that’s always the way with nostalgia; it’s not the times we miss, but rather who we were in those times. And this cheesy Moby song captures that whole feeling for me. I’d like to sit out the old McDowell Hall steps after midnight and crank this a few times out of a fucked-up old boombox, singing along with my friends. Like it says on the back of my copy of Ziggy Stardust: TO BE PLAYED AT MAXIMUM VOLUME.

Black and Steel

Pacific

David Rees is a goddamn genius

Okay, so we knew that already. But this eradicates any lingering doubt.

Waiting, Barely Breathing

[Cross-posted from Baby Makes Three.]

After this morning, the latest in a series of ultrasounds, we have been told that the most likely explanation for what is happening is a form of miscarriage called anembryonic gestation, or “blighted ovum”. Lorie’s HCG levels are continuing to rise, and the gestational sac is still growing, but no yolk sac or embryo shows up on ultrasound. What we’re finding especially difficult to take, at the moment, is that we can’t know for sure. The doctor wants us to wait for two weeks and come back for another ultrasound. We have decided to go ahead and wait, rather than elect a D and C now, because we want to give this pregnancy every chance. There is still a chance things will turn out well, but we admit that it’s pretty damn small chance, and to be honest we are not especially hopeful.

I can’t begin to express how much everyone’s thoughts, prayers, and well-wishes have meant to us. Naturally, we received all sorts of advice, including that perhaps it would be wiser not to tell people about a pregnancy until it’s further along, because of the risk of miscarriage in the first trimester. I am here to say that even if this does end in miscarriage, I will never be sorry we chose to start sharing our news when we did. Had we followed such advice, I cannot imagine the idea that at least we didn’t tell anybody we were pregnant would be very comforting right now.

Please keep your fingers crossed, everybody.

Flight number dorkage

I really ought to be posting this news to an electronic music bulletin board somewhere. Since it’s been a long time since I really kept up with one of those, I’m blogging it instead: our flight number from Oakland back to Chicago was 808. Pretty neat, for a techno dork like me.

Flowers of Berkeley

The vacation is brief, but we sure are enjoying it so far.