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Category Archives: nate

I Have Always Practiced Social Isolation—Pt. 3

Keeping the kids busy hasn’t been terribly hard. Keeping them from engaging in periodic sibling head-butting is the main issue, though they’ve shown remarkable restraint (why is restraint always remarkable?) and have yet to bludgeon, guillotine, or otherwise massacre each other. As mentioned, until their school sets up tele-classes, or what have you, we’ve given […]

Greeeeeonk!

                Back from Destroy All Monsters! with Nate. Mike: How was the movie? Me: About what you’d expect. Giant monsters battling each other. Mike: Uh huh. Me: Though the ending still gets to me. It shows Godzilla, 60 years later, sitting on his home’s porch dressed in a […]

Begorrah!

                    Talking to my Wife (Not verbatim, but close.) Me: Nate told me all about the leprechaun traps they set at school. Wife: Yes, I heard about those. They come in and mess up the classroom. Me: Uh, you know he made a trap for home […]

Cryyyyyyyyying, OOoooooverrrrrr Yooouuuuuuuuu!

The surprise that Obama would choke up (“show emotion,” as ABC’s site refers to it) while thanking his staffers reminds me of the older relatives who think of me as one of those “new fathers”—that is, a guy who’s deeply involved in raising his kids. They mean it admiringly, but it’s funny that in 2012 […]

The Creative Process

Mike, Nate, Flynn, and I are on our way to the beach house we rented in Michigan. It’s located some ways off the main road, requiring a series of twisty turns through the greenery. Mike asks me to review the directions on the Post It notes she scribbled out the other night while speaking to the […]

Protector of the City

Nate: Dad, I want to be a Protector of the City. Me: What’s that, bud? Nate: A protector. He wears a cowboy hat. Me: Yeah? Nate: And sometimes a bathing suit, but not always. And he wears purple sunglasses. Me: Okay. What else? Nate: Sometimes he wears green glasses, but not anymore. And then he’s […]

That Reminds Me…

My wife and I have yet to mind-fuck our four-year-old son and arrange to have a bizarre and embarrassing photo chase him down for the rest of his life. What I want to know is NOT why people do things like this (simple answer, with 6 billion of us on the planet, a large percentage […]

Loveliness

Haunted by Gretchen Dow Simpson, by Chris Ware

Son-Printed Sunprint

Studies in Window Crayon, A Collaboration Between Me and My Son