Security, my ass
Thunderstorms rolled through the northern edge of the Very Large Metropolitan Area last night, bringing with them a little bit of rain, a little bit of hail, a little bit of wind and a lot of lightning. This meant my son, who's afraid of nothing except storms, was downstairs in bed with us. Then came the inevitable power outage. Then, the screaming.

The Wife and our then-insurance agent talked me into buying a "security system" when we moved to Texas. Everybody up here in Plastic White Suburbia has one. I've always been opposed to such a thing; in the event of a break-in, all it would do is further scare the crap out of you. Last summer in our little suburb, a homeowner was shot to death by a police officer responding to the homeowner's burglar alarm in a very sad accident. My solution would be simply to pay to have the little sign out in my front yard. That would stop the amateurs, at least.

The main function of our security system is to sound its high-pitched wail whenever there's a power outage. The battery backup in the system apparently isn't working properly, and we don't use the damn thing enough to think to fix it until it starts wailing when the power goes out, as it did about 3 a.m. today. This was two hours into the power outage, and we already were starting to become uncomfortable from the lack of air conditioning.

A quick call to the equally sleepy technical support guy achieved nothing. "Turn off the power," he said. The f---ing power is already out, you idiot. "Oh." Basically, I opened the thing up and beat it with a screwdriver until it stopped screaming. I think I broke it. I don't really care. (Can you tell I got 37 minutes of sleep last night?)

While all this was going on, both of my daughters slept placidly upstairs -- the 7-year old and the 18-month-old. I can count my blessings.

The Old Daughter was rousted at her usual 6:45 a.m. She looked out the window and said, "Hmm. Looks like it rained a little bit last night."

What's this?
I'm a designer. Typography is my specialty. As such, I have always known that sans-serif type reads easier on a computer screen that does serif type. I designed this site with serif body type, in direct defiance of the above, because, well, I'm a serif personality. However, now I've given in. This is the first stage of what I expect will be a massive overhaul (coming soon! as they say). Please share your thoughts.

Must. Play. Music.
Realized that in all the time I've been spending at work and on the Freelance Gig and all the other assorted distractions I call my life, I haven't picked up my guitar lately. I need to fix that soon.

The instrument is a black Fender Telecaster -- a Japanese model, not an American Standard, unfortunately. It was the first thing I bought with my first paycheck as a full-time newspaper writer in October 1988. I play it through a lunchbox-sized Fender Blues Box amp. Fifteen watts of unstoppable power.

Despite the fact that I've been playing off and on for almost 20 years, I'm not very good. I'm the personification of the Guitar George character in Dire Straits' "Sultans of Swing." I know all the chords, but it's strictly rhythm; I don't make it cry or sing. I play southern rock, blues, country and a mix of my own stuff; I'd play a few of those songs in public, maybe, after about 10 beers.

Back in Anytown, I used to sit in with a bar band after work and play covers of Lynyrd Skynyrd and Cars and Doobie Brothers songs. When we came upon a song I didn't know, I just turned the volume down and guitar-synced. Noboby noticed.

I've never had formal guitar lessons. What ability I have is mostly genetic. Pretty much everybody on my dad's side of the family can play, to varying degrees of proficiency. My dad was OK; his twin brother is quite good; one of my crazy uncles taught me how to build an entire song around a "D" chord, techniques I still use today; another one of my crazy uncles, the one who gets married every five years whether he needs to or not, is the best of the bunch. He can make it cry and sing, despite the fact that he's missing most of the first two fingers on his left hand.

My Telecaster is in desperate need of new strings (for the record: GHS Boomers, .011 to .048; I used to play .009s but I don't feel the need to try to play fast anymore. It's all about depth) and I need to repair the volume knob. The pickguard is cracking, the intonation is a little bit off and I probably should have it re-fretted. I've been saying for a while that I'd buy an American Standard and a real amp with my next big bonus from work, but something else always seems to get in the way.

And even if I did get another guitar, I'd never part with this Tele. It symbolizes some accomplishments of which I'm very proud. It's the only possession that has followed me through all the various stages of me over the last decade and a half.

Time to wrap this up. I gotta go buy some strings.

Asterisk-worthy
Boston's Derek Lowe throws the first no-hitter in the AL this season, against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. My question: If you no-hit the Devil Rays, does that actually count as a no-hitter?

Elementary composition and advanced parenthood
We all learned very early in our writing careers that the basis of any good story is conflict. Us against them, them against somebody else, a race against time, Capulets vs. Montagues, me against the bill collectors; whatever, you need some sort of conflict in order to tell a good story.

This explains why there's so little to tell about my recent life. When you have small children, you do everything you can to keep conflict out of your life. Conflict is not good for small children. Note that there's no conflict in The Foot Book, or Go, Dog, Go, or most of the other literature my small children like. (Does Sam vs. the Narrator in Green Eggs and Ham count?)

One of my children, however, is not so small. She's 7 now. And boy, is she looking for a conflict.

I thought I had a few years yet before I had to start worrying about having a kid with a pre-teen attitude. Nobody warned me that with my kid, apparently, 7 is pre-teen. I don't know where she learned the phrase, "That's not fair!" or why she thinks it needs to be said at the end of every sentence. I don't know what made her think it would be a good idea to tell her teacher today, "I'm not going to do the subtraction test. It's too hard." I don't know what synapse is disconnected in her head, causing her to require being asked 11 times to do anything. I thought that having nearly five years between kid No. 1 and kid No. 2 would reduce sibling rivalry; boy, was I wrong about that one. How could a 7-year-old girl have a problem with a 3-year-old boy? Oh, if you only knew.

But, now, at least, there's some conflict in my life. It won't even make a good story, most days, especially to the non-parents in the audience. And I know it's only the beginning; I still have middle school and high school to look forward to.

But it's my life, and I wouldn't trade it. Here's why.

My oldest daughter is one of the neatest people in all the world. She's showing signs of being a standout writer. She's very intelligent, at least when it comes to remembering facts. She'll beat me at chess without assistance within the next six months. And when she's not declaring everything around her to be unfair, she's actually very nice, and thoughtful, and caring, and sensitive, way beyond her years.

I'm not one to gush about my kids, really -- some might think I'm too quick sometimes to point out their shortcomings -- and I'm not going to burn a bunch of kilobytes or waste a lot of your time with my kid stories. But my family is why I am who I am, and why I wake up every day with a smile. The Uncle Who Made Good gave me a great piece of parenting advice: "Make sure your kids know that the world is a better place because they're in it." I can certainly say that about all of my children without any fear of contradiction.

And I say that to them, every chance I get.

Thanks for the memories ... I think
It's well known that music has tremendous power to evoke memories. But I'm mystified by what I feel when I listen to Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms, as I did tonight while working on the Freelance Gig. This album evokes memories so powerful it's almost painful to listen to ... and I can't figure out exactly what I'm remembering or where it's taking me back to. No other piece of music does that to me. Despite the fact that it's one of my favorite records, I don't listen to it very much for that reason. Normally, it's pretty easy for me to pin a song to a time in my life. With Brothers in Arms, it's just a generalized late-'80s angst ... or, not even angst, really, just something I can't quite put my finger on.

Random musings

Item: Says here it's OK to quit your job. The Texan says: Whew. And all these years, I thought I was just a disloyal jerk. In 16 years in the work force, I've worked at four different companies, and I've never felt particularly loyal nor disloyal to anybody who wrote me a paycheck. The deal is this: If somebody comes along and offers me a better paycheck in a better place to live, I'm there. My dad was loyal to his company. The reward: A pink slip after 12 years. This story is a pretty interesting read, though; saw myself in it more than a few times.

Item: Prominent NASCAR car owner Jack Roush critically injured in crash of "experimental aircraft." The Texan says: I would put the words "Experiemental" and "aircraft" together only at the end of this sentence: "You'd never get my ass on an ... "

Item: Lakers 95, Blazers 87, Lakers lead series 1-0. The Texan says: The Blazers are very capable of beating the Lakers in this series. They won't, but they're very capable of doing so.

Item: Awful lot of heavy shit written on this web site lately. The Texan says: Yeah, I noticed too. I've been fairly inspired lately, but don't confuse quantity for quality. There's been a lot of the former and somewhat less of the latter. It's springtime, for Pete's sake; I'll try to provide some lighter reads.

168 seconds of silence
I sing a lullaby to my children. It's a song I wrote in 1989, before I was even married, but it's a song I knew I was going to sing to my children someday. On April 19, 1995, I was singing it to my then-9-month-old daughter, trying to gently persuade her to take her afternoon nap. A line in the song goes: "I hope that you will understand/This old world isn't really that bad ... "

On that line, I clutched, hard. Tried not to join the little girl in crying myself. Shielded her eyes, even though I knew she wouldn't be affected anyway, from the television, which was showing images of dust-covered people and rescue workers and frantic parents in a place called Oklahoma City. I was trying to convince my little girl that the world wasn't really that bad, when all of a sudden, I wasn't so sure myself.

------------------------------

Five years later, we were living in Texas. My daughter, not yet 6, asked me about the bad men who blew up the children in Oklahoma City.

I replied with something really intelligent, something along the lines of, "What?"

My daughter told me that her friend across the street was back from a weekend visiting her grandparents in Oklahoma City. Her friend had told her that bad men had blown up children in Oklahoma City a few years ago. My daughter wanted to know why.

I thought I was several years and a few history books away from having to explain this. Apparently, I wasn't. I went over several options in my head for about 12 seconds, and finally settled on the barest of details. Told her that 168 people died in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, because a man was mad at the government. I told her the man may or may not have known there was a day-care center in the building, but 19 children died. I told her the government caught the man, and that soon the man would be put to death himself for his crime.

The wheels were turning in her mind. She thought about it for a second, and she said, "I know what I'd do if there was a bad man coming to blow up a building. I'd look for an "EXIT" sign, and I'd go out the door, and I'd find a policeman and tell him. That's what I would do."

I think she was trying to make me feel better. I was glad, because I didn't know how I was going to make her feel better.

--------------------------------

A few weeks after that, the rest of the family was gone on a family trip. I had to work, so I stayed behind, with the house and a Sunday to myself. Doing what I used to do when I was alone and bored, I got in the car and started driving with no destination in mind.

A few hours and several twisty back roads later, I found myself in Oklahoma City. It was April 2000, the weekend after the Oklahoma City National Memorial opened. I don't know why I was drawn there, but I was.

I found a parking space in the Sunday-afternoon downtown and walked to the site. I took off my hat as I walked on the ground where the Murrah Building had stood. The 168 chairs -- 19 of them in a smaller size -- were lined up along the long side of a rectangular reflecting pool.

The news media had already been and gone. A few people were somberly walking through the chairs, obviously looking for specific ones. I went to the chairs and looked for Baylee Almon's. It wasn't hard to find. It was decorated with stuffed animals and toys that would have been age-appropriate for a girl who was born three months before my daughter, a girl that would have turned 6 the week before.

I walked around the reflecting pool to the Survivor Tree, an elm that withstood the blast. Young children were climbing the tree while their parents stood by. I saw the instructions for firefighters and rescue people that had been spray-painted on the wall of the damaged building next door, damage which hasn't been repaired and probably never will be. I saw the inscription; I don't remember exactly what it says, but it was something along the lines of, "God will forgive, but we will not forget."

Then, the children's memorial. Drawings by children from all over the United States. Drawings acknowledging the heroic work of the rescuers and the pain and suffering the parents and brothers and sisters felt.

I was there for about an hour. I walked back to my car just as rain started to drip from the clear blue sky. I got in my car and pointed it south, toward home. About five miles out of OKC, the skies opened in a torrential mid-spring downpour.

Then, about 10 minutes later, spanning all four lanes of Interstate 35 south of Norman, Okla., a rainbow. Just as clear and as beautiful as you could imagine.

The sight jolted me out of my mourning for people I would never know. And I was reminded: This old world isn't really that bad.

A bad day for a bad day
What an f-ed up day. First, this. This week's candidate for the Worst Story Ever. Then, tornadoes blow through the Very Large Metropolitan Area. The damage was nowhere close to me or mine, but close enough that we had to mention it in the newspaper. This is one of the reasons I desperately miss being a sports writer. In the sports section, it's very rare that somebody dies or loses his/her home. In the real world, it happens every day, in some very bad ways.

I shouldn't let it affect me so much. But I do, and it does.

Guess I'd better renew my license to write
I have no idea at all why I feel I need to defend the act of blogging, but I will anyway. I read somewhere today (see "The Industry" link at left) a piece in which somebody denigrates weblogs as places "where no thought goes unpublished."

To that I say: So?

I find it annoying when people believe that writing -- or drawing, or photography, or playing music, or any other art -- is best left to "trained professionals." Coincidentally, it's usually these trained professionals expressing such thoughts. Maybe people write or draw or take pictures or play music just because they like to do so, or because it makes them feel good, and maybe they don't give a shit what anybody else thinks about it.

There is a place -- and a need -- for heavily edited publications, for writing which actually provides information. You're not going to find it here, and I'd hope you wouldn't expect to. I'm annoyed at myself for feeling the need to join in the hand-wringing at all. But since I did, I say to the hand-wringers: Chill.

But the chairman of Augusta National is still named "Hootie"
Couldn't help but notice: Amid all the talk of the lack of diversity in golf, the top five at the Masters going into today's play were guys named Vijay, Retief, Angel, Padraig and Sergio.

A hell of a way to get out of work
I'm taking a sick day today. Not because I'm sick; I couldn't be healthier. It's because my children were sick yesterday, and my wife is horrendously sick today. Basically, she called in sick. The kids are 7, 3 and 1, and they're not going to watch themselves. So, I stayed home. And, I might add, I'm working way harder than I would be had I gone to the office.

I was once very proud of never having taken a sick day. I used one sick day between 1986 and 1998. That's not a typo; that's one in 12 years. It's not because I'm a workaholic (really); I just don't get sick very often, and when I did, it always seemed to be on my days off or during vacations. And I have an annoying conscience that prevented me from taking a discretionary sick day.

Since my second child was born, however, I've come close to using my allotment every year; occasionally for me, more often because I need to stay home with kids because the truly vital employee -- The Wife -- is out of service. She's pretty tough, but she catches everything they catch, and she caught this one full-on. It takes a lot to knock her offline. Send her some get-well wishes.

Trust, freedom, friendship and the Internet
A blog I very much enjoy reading may have to go underground. The author is a teacher, and one of her students stumbled across it. She mentions that under normal circumstances, she might worry less about it because she could defend anything that might raise eyebrows on freedom-of-speech grounds ... but she's overseas, in a place where "freedom of speech" doesn't exactly stir patriotic fervor.

Bringing this back around to Texas: It reminded me of some of my own sudden Net-driven paranoia, and a sad observation.

I know that anything you type can and will be used against you if somebody can find it, and if it's in a computer, somebody can always find it if they look hard enough. Therefore I rarely blog (can you use "blog" as a verb?) at work. I probably shouldn't read blogs as often as I do at work, but I do; usually, they're the most interesting things I read all day.

Further, to protect the innocent, I don't link to other people's personal sites without express written consent (and sometimes not even then, just to be cautious), and I don't post links to my employer's web site. I keep personally identifiable details to a bare, almost laughable minimum in the posts, although if you read deep enough, you can probably piece together most of what you'd need to know about me.

I only very recently became comfortable enough with what I was writing (both its quality and its suitablility for mass consumption) to reveal the existence of the site outside of a very close circle of long-time friends (literally, three people).

A fellow blogger -- also a family member, the person who inspired me to do this (and who claims me as his original insipration; to him I say, no, thank YOU) recently posted a link to this site on his site. I am a daily reader of the other sites to which he links. It's good to be among that company. It's mostly a large circle of his close friends; most happen to be his current and former co-workers.

Which leads me to the sad observation: Aside from a very few people, I can't think of any of my current co-workers who I would want reading this -- or who would care enough to do so. It's one of the downsides of working for a large company; the percentage of my co-workers who I could even pick out a lineup is pretty small compared to places I've worked in the past.

I also work in a newly created position in a small department. There are four other people who do essentially what I do (i.e., we all report to the same person), but we don't sit together and we don't really work the same hours. Nobody quite knows where we fit into the Very Militaristic Newsroom Hierarchy (are we managers? editors? artists? flunkies?), so nobody knows whether or not to trust us. And though the six of us worked very closely on a large project for eight months, we've kind of scattered since then. We don't send a lot of gag e-mails to each other; we don't go out to lunch very often; we don't do most of the camaraderie-building things that most traditional workgroups do.

I miss that, a lot. It could be argued strongly that I should be somewhat less pathetic and actually try to get some friends outside of work, but anybody who works non-traditional hours understands how difficult that can be. (I am a rare exception: I'm not married to a fellow journalist. There's a reason why so many others are.) Until I do become less pathetic, I'll read blogs.

People who blog (there's that verb again) do so for highly personal reasons, and then they make it generally available to the entire world. That's why it's such an interesting medium. It's a shame when self-expression has to lead to self-censorship. But I understand why it does. I hope all of my daily reads stay available as long as possible. And to those of you who give up a minute or two of your life that you'll never get back to read this stuff, a sincere thanks.

Now that we have readers ...
You have the opportunity to be the first to add your 2 cents. Click the "Comments" link and fire away. A reminder: Anything you post in "Comments" will be seen by the other two readers of this site. For more discreet communication -- or long tomes -- continue to make liberal use of the "Hit me back" link.

And you thought your morning sucked ...
Traffic reports are a staple of morning radio here in the Very Large Metropolitan Area. We're not big believers in mass transit in this part of the country. I drive to work every morning; so does everybody else. When the traffic report comes on the radio, we listen.

Many were listening this morning at 7:58, when the local all-news station's traffic reporter was hovering over the city, rattling off the usual tie-ups during Traffic and Weather Together on the 8s. Something along the lines of "I-30 from Dalrock to Jim Miller is slow; construction on southbound I-35 is causing delays ... " Then, in the background, you hear a woman's voice say, "Oh my God." The traffic reporter continues, talking faster: "175 westbound to Pennsylvania; 635 westbound from 75 to 35 is just a mess AND WE ARE GOING DOWN."

The traffic helicopter, carrying reporters from three different broadcast outlets, made a "hard landing" on a busy street in the northern part of our city. After an engine failure, the pilot managed to put the chopper down, on its skids, in the street without hitting power lines or trees. In a further burst of serendipity, a red light had just stopped oncoming traffic seconds earlier. All four occupants walked away; one reporter was taken to the hospital with minor injuries.

The pilot was being lauded for some quick decision-making that turned a potential catastrophe into merely a "hard landing."

It's a pretty good bet that when I go to work tomorrow, nobody's life is going to hang in the balance based on any split-second decision I make. That's very humbling. It does, however, take some of the pressure off.

Somebody's really overthinking it
Just read a piece ruminating on the rapidly blurring line between weblogs and journalism. Just in case anybody's not clear on this (and when you read on, you will be): What you're reading here ain't journalism, not in the least. Whether you think what you read here is fact, fiction or opinion is totally up to you. I do this solely for my own entertainment; any resemblance this bears to quality writing or presentation of fact is purely coincidental.

That Day
I had a story jarred loose by the good folks at RER. I've started and stopped writing it probably 15 times since I launched this thing. It's time now.

I was early for work that evening, Tuesday, Nov. 24, 1987. High school basketball season was getting cranked up, and I had a bunch of stories I had to write and a game to cover before taking a couple days off for Thanksgiving. It was raining like hell, so I didn't want to get caught in traffic. I was early, but I was still in a hurry.

I was stopped at the entrance by one of my co-workers. He was rushing out as fast as I was rushing in. "Steve needs to see you," he said as he walked past. "Now."

Steve was the boss. This couldn't be good. Wonder whose name I misspelled?

I rounded the corner toward the Sports department, and was met head-on by the boss. "Your dad's been in an accident," he said. "He's at the hospital. Go now."

Even as my body turned around to go back out the door, my mind wasn't quite connecting. But I still have five stories to write, I was thinking. Got an interview to do, a phone call to make at 6 ... the game ... My brain had finally engaged when I got hit full-force by the rain after walking out the door. I jogged to my truck and headed toward the hospital. On the way, I picked up my girlfriend, who was in town for Thanksgiving break. She went to college in Columbia, three hours away. "Come with me," I said. I didn't have to tell her where we were going. She knew it was bad.

I was driving like Dale Earnhardt to the hospital. At least, I thought I was, which was why I was stunned to look down at my speedometer and see I was going 25 mph. It was raining that hard; rain you couldn't see through. At 6 p.m. in November, right after sunset, the rain and the dark combined to make my path nearly invisible.

We got to the hospital. Other family members were already there. I don't even remember who. It was a lot of people. The person who would become my wife -- not the aforementioned girlfriend -- was there, with my sister, her best friend. They were juniors in high school at the time. I looked for people who would be able to answer my questions and started asking. What happened? When? Whose fault? And the question that nobody could answer, How bad?

At 6 p.m. on Nov. 24, 1987, my father was in a coma. He had made a left turn from a parking lot into the path of a vehicle approaching from his left. The other vehicle, a full-size van, hit his Plymouth Reliant at 40 mph -- the speed limit. The van hit his car at the point where the front fender meets the door. My dad was not wearing a seat belt. He had suffered no obvious injuries, other than a couple of minor cuts and bruises.

He had, however, suffered a profound head injury. In the intensive care unit, an electronic monitor measured the swelling on his brain. I intently watched the a number on the device, even though I had no idea what I was watching. I don't remember who my source was on this -- a nurse? a doctor? one of my uncles? -- but somebody said that if the number hit 24, that would be fatal. The number was at 19. Then 20. Then 22. Then 23.

Then, 6.

At 7 p.m. on Nov. 24, 1987, I was 19 years old. My sister was 16. My stepmother had been married to my father for five years. She was only 28, and suddenly thrust into the worst possible nightmare one could imagine.

Of course, I didn't realize that at the time. I think I thought my dad was going to wake up and be better, now that the swelling in his brain had subsided. I didn't know that he wasn't going to begin to wake up until April 1988.

When my dad began showing signs of responding to external stimuli, he had spent more than two months in a head-injury rehabilitation center in Dallas. He was moved there after nearly four months at the hospital in Anytown. Now, the family was standing vigil more than 400 miles from home. We were an organized bunch. An apartment had been rented in the Dallas area so whoever came to visit would have a place to stay. I had a friend in Dallas; she was a person of faith and a strong spirit -- two things I'm not -- and she was a great help to me.

All of us began to redefine "normal." I was going to Dallas whenever I could. My stepmother worked four days and had four days off. On her days-off blocks, she drove to Dallas. My sister somehow managed to get herself to school on a daily basis. I went back to work, getting paid to watch ballgames. I even took another stab at college. I got promoted to a full-time position at work. My sister graduated from high school and started college. I moved out of my parents' house.

Then my dad came home. Christmas 1989. He came home, but it wasn't the momentous occasion we all thought it was going to be two years previous. He was going to be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He was basically paralyzed on his left side. His short-term memory was non-existent, his long-term memory foggy. He would require 24-hour care for the rest of his life. You could hold a very rudimentary conversation with him, but nothing more.

In the 12-plus years since, little has changed. It's never going to.

I never had a simple relationship with my father -- I couldn't begin to explain it here, although someday I might try. He was 37 on Nov. 24, 1987; your quick math reveals that he was 18 when I was born. He and I kind of grew up together. My sister and I stayed with him after my parents divorced in 1980. For most of my childhood, he didn't understand me and I didn't really understand him. But at 19, I was starting to. We were finally starting to communicate on a common level, and despite our disagreements and the fact that he worked too much and I was rapidly following in his footsteps in that regard, we were starting to get to know each other fairly well.

I had finally forgiven him for getting remarried in 1982, which was a good thing, because my stepmother has been an absolute godsend in this situation. Think "above and beyond," and take that up about 25 levels. She has given up her life entirely for him.

I'll revisit this and fill in some details later. I'll leave you with this: I still owe my dad $20. I had borrowed money for gas on Nov. 21, 1987, to cover a game in Kansas City. Every time I see Andrew Jackson's face in my wallet, I'm reminded of that -- and the fact that I owe my dad so much more.

Red-flagged
My racing weekend got washed away. It's floating down the Trinity River on its slow way to the Gulf of Mexico. Exceedingly disappointing. I got teased; I got to see 116 laps of the Busch Series race on Saturday, nearly 40 of which were under yellow. The tow trucks that were driving around Texas Motor Speedway in an attempt to dry the track went faster than the cars did, most of the time. The main event on Sunday was washed out completely, postponed until Monday. Tough cookies for me; I had to work. Thank God I didn't buy the tickets; that would have been $200 headed down the Trinity, also.

Oh, well.

I did get to re-connect with a good friend from Missouri. He came down for the weekend to go to the races, and was very good company. Like all of my friends, we only see each other sporadically, but you'd never know. We can pick right up right where we left off with no difficulty whatsoever. He's taking a hiatus from the working world to get a degree in computer science, and playing Mr. Mom to his two kids. Good for him.

The weekend ended on an odd note. The uncle from whom I got the race tickets works in another part of the state. He's the oldest of my dad's many siblings, and I don't know him very well. In fact, he had given the race tickets to another one of his siblings, who forwarded them to me. This was why I found it odd to hear his voice when I was startled out of bed at 12:30 a.m. Monday by a ringing phone. I thought he wanted his race tickets back. Turned out he was stuck at the airport; his flight from Vegas had been canceled. All air travel going through our area was disrupted by the same storm system that had washed out the race. All the area hotels were full, as was the airport. He was calling to ask if he could crash on our couch; he wasn't going to be able to get another flight until Monday afternoon. Sure, I said. So he hopped a taxi for the 40-some-mile one-way trip from the airport to my house. That ride probably cost as much as a pretty nice hotel room would have.

Again, though I hadn't seen him for probably three years, it was like he was any other family member. I took him back to the airport on my way to work, and learned lots of interesting things. He's an interesting guy, and he gave me another glimpse into my incredibly diverse gene pool.

So it was by no means a totally lost weekend. They'll be racing next year. I'll try again then. In the meantime, I'm going to reflect a bit on the loyalty of family and friends, no matter how distant. I've crossed paths lately with a lot of people who have for years operated on the extreme outer periphery of my life. I'm sure it means something. I must figure out what.

Nothing matters and what if it did?
I still hold a mostly unjustified hatred for my job. I still have too much to do and not enough time to do it. I still haven't shaken off the malaise. But none of that matters, 'cause this weekend, I'm going racing.

NASCAR brings its loud screaming machines to my part of Texas this weekend, and thanks to some serendipity and a generous relative, I'll be there. I'm a sucker for NASCAR. Always have been, ever since I was 5 or 6 years old and saw Petty and Pearson and Yarbrough driving 'round the track. Back then, they drove cars that looked a lot like real cars, cars with chrome bumpers, Mercury Montegos and Dodge Challengers and Oldsmobile Cutlasses. Now all the cars are the same, no matter what manufacturer's name they bear, and they look very little like the actual cars they're supposed to represent. No matter. They go fast, they bump into each other every once in a while, and I love it.

The only major sporting event I've seen in person was the 1997 Daytona 500, which Jeff Gordon won under caution after Dale Earnhardt wrecked right in front of us on the backstretch with five laps to go. Earnhardt got out of the car, the ambulance came, Earnhardt told the ambulance to f--- off and he got back in the car and tried to start it to finish the race. I was genuinely saddened when he died behind the wheel, although I must concede it was a fitting way for him to go.

I lost my undying love for most sports a while back, and I'm not sure NASCAR deserves my undying love after some of the fallout caused by Earnhardt's death, but what the hell. Everybody's got to have a vice. I don't smoke, I don't drink a lot and I don't chase loose women. I might as well watch the racin'.