I have to say, it was a bit of a relief to turn away from politics. Limiting myself to a few blogs in the morning, and no cable news coverage, allowed me to get a much-needed break from the day-to-day back and forth that was grinding away at my soul.

The polls seem to be trending in Obama’s favor — but as with McCain’s advantage two weeks ago, any kind of advantage in popular opinion so far out from Nov. 4 (which would mean any day other than Nov. 4) should really be taken with a grain of salt. This is going to bounce back and forth both ways until the election, and then it’ll come down to enthusiasm, GOTV, and Diebold’s representatives in Ohio.

Politico has a story up today about how race is impacting Democratic voters and their support for Obama. This is hardly a surprise, after all. An acquaintance of mine who has long been involved with political campaigns (and ran for congress himself many years ago) told me as early as last spring that this race will come down to whether or not white working class voters can bring themselves to vote for a black guy. If anything, this Politico story proves the point, but I if Obama’s core supporters — ie young people — are as underrepresented as I suspect they are in polling, the level of disadvantage may not be what people presume. I’m not saying it isn’t, I’m just saying that the outcome maybe surprising. We’ll see.

Robin Williams, who is rarely funny these days, had a moment of brilliance on the Late Show with David Letterman last night where he addressed the greatest fears of these voters about Obama. I’d post the YouTube if it was available, but it made me laugh. Let’s just say Williams revealed that Obama is secretly DMX.

I’m still kind of bummed about David Foster Wallace’s suicide. Stories about him continue to trickle out over the Internet and depress me whenever I read them.

I’ve been playing the SOCOM: Confrontation beta all week. It’s got a lot of problems still, but it’s more playable. If only my damn Bluetooth headset wouldn’t keep running out batteries …

David Foster Wallace, author of such books as Infinite Jest, Girl With Curious Hair, and A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again, is dead, of suicide.

Not sure how this news hits me — I greatly enjoyed Wallace’s essays and short stories. Infinite Jest was something I struggled to finish, and ultimately abandoned, but I appreciate his talents and the things he brought to literary fiction (such as copious footnotes). He certainly had great ideas and a unique command of language — he was a huge young literary star in the mid-1990’s only to be supplanted by David Eggers, Michael Chabon and the young writers of the McSweeny’s movement. But you couldn’t have had McSweeny’s without Wallace to pave the way.

One wonders why he decided to take his own life. It’s saddening, and of course, it adds to my overall sense of melancholy.

Last night, while Tina and I were trying to watch Alan Ball’s incredibly tedious, idiotic vampire drama, True Blood, we heard a knock at the door. And then, suddenly, the door knob began to violently shake, as if someone was trying to get into our apartment.

I jumped up and quickly locked the deadbolt.

“Who’s there?” I said, cautiously.

No response.  Then the door knob began to shake again, as they continued trying to get into the apartment.  It continued for another moment, and then whoever it was left and began trying to get into another apartment.

“Maybe it was a drunk who got lost?” Tina wondered.

Occam’s razor would say that was probably the case.  But I’m not so sure.

There are times when you realize that living in the city isn’t as safe a proposition as you sometimes think.

Some of my friends have reminded me that I haven’t blogged in awhile, so here I am.

I’m pretty depressed by the election.  Longtime readers may recall my depression during the primaries — as well as my conviction that my guy (Obama) would lose.  He didn’t!  Huzzah!  But now we’re going into the general and the inevitable smear campaign has begun.  I used to like John McCain, but now I don’t.  He’s become a complete tool, and his incompetence and bad judgment has been on full display, despite the “liberal” media looking the other way.

Apparently the only way he can win is to make everyone think Obama is unacceptable.  That means smears — racial, political, even religious.  There’s a rumor going around evangelical circles that Obama is the Anti-Christ.  Seriously, you can’t make this shit up.  Longtime observers of the evangelical movement may recall that there was a time when Mikhail Gorbachev and Saddam Hussein were both the Anti-Christ in the 1980’s and the early 1990’s respectively.  The world didn’t end then, and it’s not going to end now.  But if it was going to end, I’d say John McCain’s proposed war with Russia would be a good place to start.

If Obama reveals a high school Advanced Dungeons and Dragons habit, we’re all going to be sunk.

On the home front, the girls are getting bigger, but the potty-training is not coming along as well as we liked.  Apparently some kids can be resistant to  potty-training.  It doesn’t surprise me that mine are.

I’ve seen a total of four movies this summer: Indiana Jones, Incredible Hulk, Iron Man and Batman.  That’s more than all of 2007.  They’re actually letting me out of the house, again.  My favorite of the four, shockingly, was Incredible Hulk.  Edward Norton’s Bruce Banner is a real guy struggling with his demons — there may be three big action set-pieces in the Hulk sequel, but the meat of the film is with Norton’s struggles with the monster inside him.

Although I liked The Dark Knight, I wasn’t as blown away by it as many of my friends.  Heath Ledger was good, but I think he’s suffering from the inevitable halo effect of tragedy.  Brenden Lee’s performance in The Crow experienced similar support.

The Dark Knight somehow managed to take the creepy villains of the torture porn genre (i.e. Saw, Hostel, etc.) and apply that archetype to the Joker.  This means he’s not a real character so much as an inexplicable force for terror.  Granted, it’s watered down, but I was troubled by the amount of marketing dollars spent trying to get children to the theater.  The Dark Knight is a dark (I know, haha) film geared towards adults.  There’s no good reason for them to have made action figures and sold them at Walmart.  If you ask me, the movie should have been rated “R.”  My girls would have nightmares for months if they even saw a photograph of the Joker.  Being a parent has definitely sensitized me to the sale of violence to children.

On the music front, I’ve bought a number of great records.  Throw Me The Statue’s Moonbeams is a phenomenal pop record, and I’ve grown extremely enamored of Bowerbirds’ Hymns for a Dark Horse, which is in the “Americana” genre of indie rock occupied by such favorites of mine as Andrew Bird and Joanna Newsom.  Bird’s Soldier On EP is definitely worth a few hundred listens. The addition of American and European folk traditions to indie rock has been an incredible breath of fresh air.  Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that guys like Will Oldham and John Darnielle have been doing this for years.

I’ll leave you now with a live performance of Bowerbirds performing “Dark Horse,” which is available on  Hymns for a Dark Horse:

Well, I’ve been thinking about watching Good Night and Good Luck again on DVD.  It’s one of the movies I bought during the first year of my girls’ lives when I couldn’t sit down and watch anything without being interrupted.  I believe I had to watch it with the volume down, and the only way I could understand what was being said was to turn on the captioning.

So, I’ve been toying with the idea of pulling it out of my collection and giving it another spin, but I wonder if its impact is important, anymore.

At the time it was released, it was one of the few mainstream Hollywood films that put the Bush administration on notice for what they were doing to us.  The McCarthy/Bush parallels at the time were incredibly strong and anyone who opposed the war or the administration was scared that some big ugly jack boot was going to drop.

But now with Bush on the way out for good, I think there’s a sense among many on the left that our problems are over.  Me personally, I’m not all that fired up about it anymore.  With the Dems in control of too houses of Congress, most of the damage to our civil liberties is now contained.

So without the specter of an all-powerful witch hunting political party hanging over our heads, does Good Night and Good Luck still work?  Maybe as a historical document, but like later seasons of Battlestar Galactica, it’s lost a lot of its potency as a work of politics.

Valerie Dryden, a photography student at the Corcoran College of Art in Washington, has been photographing our family for the past several months. Taking thousands of photos, actually, as part of her senior thesis. That thesis is now finished, and last night was the opening of an exhibition of her photos at the Corcoran. Tina has more photos up on her blog if you want to see them.

I have to say, it was a bit odd to see myself and our family up on the walls of the gallery. Stranger still to see people recognizing us from the photos. The public nature of our participation in the project began to sink in for me — that we really had opened up our lives for people to examine in a way that we have not in our various blogs, podcasts, etc. In all our projects, we control the message — but here, the camera controls the message. It’s objective, and with thousands of photos taken, any effort to try to control how we’re presented is more or less lost. What remains is the real thing, unfiltered, unmanaged. Granted, the photo selection was managed by Valerie and her professors — and the selection has its own thesis, tells its own story — but it was weird to realize that we had opened our lives up to this. And in many ways, it is a more honest depiction of who we are than anything else we’ve done or participated in.

There was one photo in particular — where Tina and I were kissing each other goodbye — that showed us in a way that we rarely reveal to our friends and family, much less the world at large. My friend Jake pointed out to me that he had never seen us kiss before — therefore, the photo was his favorite, because it showed a side of us we never reveal even to the people we’re close to. And I have to admit, I was surprised to see the photo on display, maybe even a little embarrassed. We actively suppress intimate moments in our relationship — we keep them private, just between us. We’ve made a lot of our lives public, from the original Restaurant Fuel ‘zine, through our blogs and now through our three podcasts. So it was a shock to see us up there on the wall, gigantic, kissing. Our true inner lives on display.

And that I suppose is just why Valerie’s project was a success. Because even with subjects who are actively aware of how they’re perceived and are accustomed to managing and compartmentalizing their public persona, the truth came out. And it’s truth — whether objective or subjective — that makes the best art.

The girls are now in the other room with their mother, who is trying to get them to fall asleep. Every few moments, Rachel stirs from near slumber and shrieks, “I can’t sleep! I want to play!” It is a harsh sound, filled with anger and pain, like a knife blade jabbed in your back. Meanwhile, her sister babbles happily, not at all close to falling asleep.

No, I really am not going to get any rest tonight.

It happens like this often. We go to bed about midnight, and one or both of the girls wakes up shortly thereafter, screaming bloody murder. The only thing that calms them down is coming into the living room and turning on the television. After that, they’re wide awake, and won’t be asleep again until 4:30 - 5:00 am. But the crying stops, which does our neighbors a serious favor, even if it ensures that we’ll never sleep.

So I’m looking at maybe not quite two hours of sleep tonight. I don’t know how I’m going to function at work tomorrow. I don’t know when I’m going to sleep again.

A long time ago, I held onto the fragile belief that this gets easier over time, but it doesn’t. It gets harder. And harder and harder.

It’s times like these, when I wonder what it must be like to be in normal family, with kids who sleep the night.  Do such families exist?   You have to wonder.

I found this quote over at Andrew Sullivan’s blog. It’s very similar to something I wrote a short while ago.

“… it is crucial that people who do not have a sky god and don’t have a set of supernatural beliefs assert their belief in moral values and in love and in the transcendence that they might experience in landscape or art or music or sculpture or whatever. Since they do not believe in an afterlife, it makes them give more valence to life itself. The little spark that we do have becomes all the more valuable when you can’t be trading off any moments for eternity,” - Ian McEwen, in The New Republic.

Salon posted an interview today with Georgetown theologian John Haught about his response to the New Atheism as embodied by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others. It’s worth reading insofar as it reveals that those on the “spiritual” side of things really don’t understand atheism in a very fundamental way, just as atheists don’t really understand religion and the need for god. And I should know — I’m an atheist. The need for faith is something I can understand on an intellectual level, but not on an emotional one.

Here’s a quote:

But why can’t you have hope if you don’t believe in God?

You can have hope. But the question is, can you justify the hope? I don’t have any objection to the idea that atheists can be good and morally upright people. But we need a worldview that is capable of justifying the confidence that we place in our minds, in truth, in goodness, in beauty. I argue that an atheistic worldview is not capable of justifying that confidence. Some sort of theological framework can justify our trust in meaning, in goodness, in reason.

By referring to hope, what Haught really means is hope for life after death, hope that there’s something more than the natural world. He believes that atheism is a state of nihilism and negativity, that without hope for a future after death, life itself is without meaning.

But for me, it’s the finite span of life — the blink of an eye and you’re gone reality we all face — that gives me hope. It’s the great fortune to have experienced all this, to have fathered two daughters, enjoyed art and music, that gives me hope and meaning. The luck of it all! If the wrong sperm fertilized the wrong egg at the wrong moment, none of us would be here. To have come as far as we all have is truly remarkable.

Everything around us is dependent on a chain of stunning coincidences going all the way back to the Big Bang. Is that so terrible? The awesomeness of an infinite Universe, propelled along by accidents is far more humbling to me than the idea of a vengeful creator who forced his only son to suffer so that the rest of us could absolve ourselves of our mistakes. I don’t begrudge other people their need to believe in the myth, that it’s the only thing that keeps them going, but why does it trouble them so much that there are people who cannot bring themselves to pretend to be religious? And why do they have to project despair on us, as if our lives are meaningless without what George Carlin referred to as a “Magic Man in the Sky” to guide our way from birth to death?

As a boy, I never really believed in God, despite going to church, or the magnetic evangelical influence of certain friends and family. When I looked into my dying father’s eyes and saw a man broken by sickness and filled with fear of death, I didn’t glimpse God so much as the inevitable end we all someday face alone. The realization that there’s nothing more than life brought me a peace I’d never been able to have with religion — an acceptance that someday I will die. And it’s not all bad — it’s just the way things are.

When my aunt visited me last year and was startled by how much I reminded her of my father, it was clear to me that some part of my father was in me. That he continued after death, and when I look at my daugthers and see so much of myself in them, and so much of my mother and my wife, and the grandfather they will never meet, I know that this is how we reach everlasting life. By passing our traits down through our children — through genes and nurturing love.

And so I don’t fear death. Because although my own consciousness will end, never again to return, there will be bits of me alive in my children. And that is what gives me hope. That they will live long lives and live to see themselves and the people they love in their own children and carry on the wonderous chain of life.