the monns

Fourth day of my vacation and I’m pretty content. The kid is happy and is learning to swim. We caught a crab this morning with a net put back of our condo. It was too small to cook, and we had eaten a dozen the night before, so it was a good day to be a crab.

Jennifer just emailed me this pic of Ags at the beach. Wish I were there today….

So, this blog is getting a facelift this week and will become a monn family oriented blog.

I started a new blog that will be mine and mine alone over here: A Shining Circuit.

I’ll be posting music reviews, my thinkin’ and writing there.

really great photos of people in elevators by Bill Sullivan.

here

here is a playlist that I made that might keep you looking up for an afternoon of disk washing and other meditative tasks:

Here is something that Rick and I recorded over the weekend. This is the raw session, just an hour of what we were playing including the stops and starts. We’re working to polish and mix some excerpts, but maybe you’ll enjoy this in the meantime (warning: it is a .m4a file… iTunes aac):

click to play or right click and choose to save.

post apneatic

You said that you were watching the birds’ flights:
A hundred pigeons turning around the square,
that mathematics fell from their wings like lace,
that today the morphine weighed like ropes and rocks.

You told me to turn on Old Potomac and pull over by Welty Bridge.
We squinted for the light out the window and you pursed your lips.
I sat looking at the new length of guardrail
a while after you got out.

I followed you down to the creek
where you were standing at the water
looking down at it.
You walked straight in to your shoulders’ depth
and I worried about it being the end of November
about your getting water in your incision. About explaining this.

And then I ran and dove into it
and I swam to you.
Under the water I saw ten thousand rays of light
reflected up from his shattered windshield.
Blue glass at your feet wove and knit the sun
through the silt and onto your body.

You had been drowned 24 years in dreamless sleep and been undrowned:
a tube for breathing now, dreams and light again now.

I was looking through a ton of files that I had backed up for work and I came across a huge, old folder full of pics from when ags was just a kid:

I had the privilege to get a listen to Tim Hecker’s new record, Harmony in Ultraviolet last week and I think that it is really phenomenally great. Take a listen to a track that he’s put out early for everyone to hear and if you like it be sure to pick up the release come 10/15:

Dungeoneering

So we had a wonderful weekend, the three of us. Saturday morning we cut up a loaf of bread into little bits, hopped on the bikes and rode to the pond at Prospect Park to feed the ducks and geese. Agatha really loves to do this and if you feed them in the morning you can usually get more than a hundred birds to come to you. Sometimes it can get a bit scary to have so many birds around, but Ags loves it: she screams “HERE BOY, HERE GIRL” as she throws bread around (about half the time she totally misses and throws the bread over her shoulder.)

After this, as we rode around the park drive on the bike Ags asked if we could go to the zoo. Prospect Park has an amazing zoo on the east side. It is inexpensive (relative to the Bronx Zoo) and you can’t beat the location. We spend some time checking out the turtles and red pandas on the discovery trail, hanging out with the alpacas and the ginormous Agatha (the cow) in the farm area and we got to see the feeding of the sea lions, which is really actually quite a show. Agatha made friends with a boy named Sasha and I chatted with his dad for a while. A nice time.

And then on Sunday we all went to La Villa for italian. If you live in the slope and you like good traditional italian restaurants you should go here for dinner sometime. Jennifer likens it to her favorite italian places in Rhode Island. Very good and Agatha had a blast. She seems to have settled in to preschool very well (she was sad that there was no school today) and has such a sweet disposition. We had a few weeks of constant tantrums in August and September, but she seems to have really come a long way. She is dealing with a bigger world, though — you can see her churning through some very difficult emotions sometimes — like, say, about bubble gum and her inability to get any, but overall she seems so happy and secure. What more could I want out of life than for my kid to feel like that?