Tina is out attending a meeting of the Craft Mutiny, and I am home alone with our girls. Dora is on the television, and the Arcade Fire’s “Neon Bible” is playing on the stereo. Moments ago, Anya and I danced around to “Keep the Car Running.” She knows it so well that although she can’t sing the words, she goes “Ohhh Ohhhh” in all the right places.

I can’t describe how much I love “Neon Bible.” Arcade Fire means more to me than any other band, and this follow-up may not have the impact on my life that “Funeral” did, but it’s still remarkable. Where “Funeral” centered around loss, grief and personal redemption, “Neon Bible” is about life in post-9/11 America. A lot of bands have taken on this topic (see: Q and Not U, Different Damage; Green Day, American Idiot), but none have really covered the sense of grim despair many of us feel when we turn on the news. The feeling of wanting to run, but not having anywhere to go.

Tina and I luckily got tickets to the band’s upcoming show at DAR in DC. Not quite as intimate as the 9:30 Club, where we saw them just after learning that we were having twins, but great just the same.

Last week, I was home alone with the girls. While I was in the kitchen cooking, Rachel fell down and started to cry. Before I could move to help her, Anya was already by her side, holding her face to her chest, telling her it was okay. It was such an amazing act of compasion. A few minutes later, Anya got Rachel to smile, and I snapped this picture with my camera phone:

It startles me every day just how capable Rachel and Anya are of acts of tremendous love and kindness. They’re only about a year and a half old, and yet they have learned to comfort each other and to comfort us. I’m watching the bond between them grow every day — the twin “bond” people talk about isn’t supernatural, just a strong connection between two people who have never known a time apart from their sister. We were in Target over the weekend, and I took Anya on one cart to pick up half of our supply list, and Tina took Rachel on another car to get the other half.

All during our time away from the rest of the family, Anya kept saying: “Mama, Sissy, Mama, Rachi?” over and over again, obviously puzzled why her mother and sister were away from us. And Tina reported when we reunited that all Rachel said was: “Daddy, Anya?”

As I sit here apart from Tina and the girls, I feel a similar absence. I miss them and look forward to seeing them again in a few short hours. But the wait, the delay, is becoming unbearable.

Callum Robbins, the son of J. Robbins (Jawbox, Burning Airlines, Channels) needs your help. He’s suffering from a rare disease that may kill him before his second birthday.

J., as many of you know, works as an indie recording engineer. Obviously, he doesn’t have the health insurance necessary to pay for his son’s expensive treatments. Tina and I have donated what we can, and we urge you to do the same.

Desoto Records has set up a page with more information on how you can help. You can click here to view it.

J. has given so much through his music and his support of young bands. Now is the time for his fans to give back to him and his family.

I woke up this morning thinking about the expression, “He’d give you the shirt off his back.” Unless you’re talking about an expensive shirt, or unless the gift of said shirt occurs in the middle of a blizzard, then it’s really not much of a gesture.

Thinking more about it, though, I suppose in the 19th Century or whenever the expression emerged that a shirt was a valuable thing. How many articles of clothing did an average person have? Probably not a lot. It wasn’t as if it was possible to buy a shirt for $9.99 at the local Walmart.

I recently deleted a post regarding my experiences at the Small Press Expo on Saturday. In it, I described an unsuccessful attempt to chat with an old acquaintance and Restaurant Fuel contributor, who I mistakenly believed was actively ignoring me.

This was not the case. As he explained in a personal email, he simply did not remember what I looked like, and I was mistaken that he did.

What I wrote was wrong, uncalled for, and quite frankly, unprofessional. I let my own disappointment and depression about the failure of my comic book at SPX effect how I interpreted things. I apologized to him personally, but I would also like to publically say that I am sorry, and that my account of our non-meeting was the result of a misunderstanding.

So, I met John Kerry the other day. Working in a public affairs office in Washington, D.C., I’ve encountered many famous and “important” people through the years, but most of them have been Republicans. It was nice meeting someone I’ve voted for, and actually talking to Kerry in person was completely and utterly surreal. He was incredibly nice and personable, and I got the strong sense of an individual who is decent and sincere, something that doesn’t convey quite so well on television. Although I was an avid Dean supporter, I have to say that John Kerry would have made a great president. He could have been the next FDR — and from me that’s a huge compliment, as Roosevelt is my favorite President.

I really, really liked John Kerry. And some of my Republican co-workers confessed that they liked him, too. Even admitted that had they met him back in 2004, they might have voted for him. I’d go with Gore in 2008, if he runs, but given a choice between Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Mark Warner and John Edwards, I’d have to go with Kerry. Like Gore, the guy needs a second chance. And his positions have gotten a lot clearer in recent months — something he should have also done back in 2004.

I’ve just gone through a bit of minor online gaming drama. The group I founded back in 2003 is essentially no more — a lot of my friends have moved on to form a new World of Warcraft guild. But there’s still a few of us left, and it looks like we’re going to start fresh with a new XBOX Live group. If you own a 360 and are interested in playing with a bunch of adults with real lives — people who years ago were hardcore gamers, but now play a couple of times a week — send me an email. I’ll let you know what my gamertag is.

On another note, my new Restaurant Fuel template is almost complete. Expect a new site look in about a week or so.

Things have been quiet here at Restaurant Fuel central lately, because I haven’t had much time to blog in the midst of everything else. Work has been supernaturally busy, and I’ve been struggling to get my application packet together for that creative writing program I’ve been blogging about (but am beginning to doubt whether it’s what I really want to do).

Also, Tina needs me to do the DC Craft Mutiny website, and the twins are — as always — a major focus of time and energy.

I’m sure I’ll be blogging regularly again in a few days. But for now, an apology.

Yesterday, I woke up with that feeling I used to get in the fall. I knew somehow that things were about to change, but wasn’t quite sure how. The air was crisp and cool, as if summer had died of a sudden heart attack, and the sky was smeared grey from the impending hurricane, or tropical depression, or whatever the meteorologists will ultimately decide it is. It was not unlike a late August day back in 1992, when my parents loaded up the station wagon and drove me to the University of Maryland to start college. Less than a year later, I was driving the family car between home and school, and cancer killed my father.

Today is Tina’s first day at home with the girls — daycare is done, and we walked out of the center last night with a twinge of sadness. The girls spent much of their first year of life in that building, with the teachers and other kids. Now they will likely never return. Although it’s exciting that they’re staying home, it’s hard not to mourn the relationships they’re leaving behind. I will miss the sense of community I shared with the other parents, and watching the girls interact with their peers.

That’s one change, and it’s a big one. But there are others to come this fall — parenthood isn’t a constant state so much as a surfboard riding huge waves of growth and development. Every day, watching the girls leap forward, I am more keenly aware of the shortness of life, the importance of each tiny moment. In as much time as I’ve been living outside my mother’s home, my girls will grow old enough to drive a car. It seems like just a few years ago that I went off to school, but in reality it’s been a large number of years. So short, so long.

Being a parent makes me think of mortality a lot. And I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that it’s my own mortality that obsesses me.

Another big change – this morning my friends Michael and Edie at long last adopted a child. It would be wrong of me to divluge the details of their lives to some 3,000 monthly unique visitors, but I will say that there are no two people on planet earth who deserve to be parents more than them.

Okay, back to more productive activities.

Giant yellowjacket nests are beginning to appear all over Alabama. This is insanely scary. Read it here (and view a disturbing picture).

I’m nearing completion of my short story, “The Purple Girl,” a project that has dominated the summer. I’d hoped to use it to apply for grad school in the fall, but the plan was a bit too ambitious. Now I will be using it to apply for school in the spring. What had started out as an attempt to 1) tell a story from a different perspective (in this case, by writing in a female voice), and 2) discuss identity and conformity has transformed into a story that, while retaining its female narrator and identity-related themes, is also about a sort of haunting. I don’t want to say much more than that, but obviously I failed in my attempt to write something that isn’t “weird.” I can’t escape genre, no matter how hard I try.

Archie is back home and in lots of pain, but he’s alive. We haven’t lost him, yet. He looks like someone gutted him and then roughly sewed and stapled him back together. It was a bit of a shock, seeing his belly threaded with so much metal, but now I’ve gotten used to it. A friend asked me if it was worth the cost, but I feel that as his owner, I have a responsibility to try as much as possible to keep him going. I’m not sure if we could afford cancer treatment, but if this operation makes him feel better and gives us another few years with him, I’ll take it.

Lately I’ve been listening to The Mountain Goats, Final Fantasy (Owen from The Arcade Fire), Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Tapes ‘n Tapes and Q and Not U. My EMusic subscription refills tomorrow, so that’s 40 more songs I get to download. EMusic has saved my life.