infinite possibility

Shoveling the walk from under a weak inch of slush and snow. Some of it parallel brick, some of it curved and cracked, some straight fading concrete. A typical fractured New Jersey confederacy, no agreement from patch to patch, everybody losing their minds by themselves on their own little plots.

Rose bushes swollen bent trapped in ice, puddles freezing strategically around fat crystals of rock salt. It snuck in in the middle of the night: Impostor cold, past its globe-warmed prime cold, cold to be acknowledged and cherished in the manner of our elders, neither long for this world.

Good times with Nat today, watching him scheme and burble and roll on an warm ocean of carpet, picking him up so he can look out at the snow. He just takes it in, without any precocious sense of school-close or sledder's optimism. With sense data more than concepts, bright or brighter and his palm held against the front door window, digging the cold.

That opposed to the lame grownup way, where the world is a prop supporting lame concepts and boring utility. My game when we talk is to tell him the names of things, as if the concepts are right at the threshold of his understanding. Welcome, my son... to the machine.

Andrew Bird was on PBS tonight. His songs are dense and nuanced, escaping traps of expectation every couple bars. His manner of performing them live, as a one-man band layering track upon track, is frustrating. Like watching a virtuoso wrestler try to take himself down. Like the scene at the end of "Lawnmower Man," infinite possibility being tried by one too-bright guy all at once. The lyrics don't combat the air of solipsism. (Pot picks black to distinguish other pot.)

This tour he's mostly performing live with a full band again, and oh-shucks-pedal tricks aside that sounds like a better plan. But I wonder if it ends up him letting other musicians run through a maze of delay he's set up on the fly, dungeon master style.

Maybe it's a friendlier read to see him as a mad inventor, building robots that are quite passable dancers, dancers you'd watch on TV, celebrity dancers that turned out to be robots with wires and circuits loose and who shot sparks as the credits rolled, their owners looking nervously on from backstage, extinguishers at the ready. Probably better listening if you can put away your concepts.