In six weeks on the road I collected a book full of notes and a few dramatic photos, I ate, drank, visited, toured, drove, rode, flew, hiked, canoed, dreamed, pondered, wondered, felt elation, disappointment, numbness, and unfathomably intense stimulation. I’ve been to cities and towns and deserts and lakes and rivers and oceans and islands… Read more

I have known Amanda as long as I’ve known my wife, because they have known each other all their lives. It is late July, a Saturday evening at Seal Beach, California, and within the hour Amanda will marry George. We have traveled 6,000 miles in the past week, and not in our best clothes. But… Read more

A couple of weeks ago, I knelt on a Lego, demonstrating once again where Noodle gets some of his more thoughtful expressions. It was late. We were cleaning up, and I figured it was fair for me to chip in. After all, I did my share of the building. Now, I’m not one to play for… Read more

Millennials are shape shifters, hard to draw lines around in ways that their critics find familiar. The generation who raised them barely recognizes their children’s and grandchildren’s dreams, desires, and motivations — an irony not lost on Millennials, if even celebrated in their willful mis-appropriation of decades-old fashions, minus their retro-decadent mores. This isn’t anything new under… Read more

I realized one morning last week, in a way that I’ve never realized it before, that I am smack dab in the middle of my run. This year I turn 40. I like being in the second half now, as the first was a bear-wrestle from time to time, and I’m the kind of guy… Read more

This post is composed of three scenes from around Auckland. The thought that motivated the project is as follows: “For as complex as these descriptions might be, they make me consider Noodle’s complexity as well. I create my own space from time to time and reorient myself in it; am I giving him the space… Read more

Day one, I started Noodle on a sonic diet of Motörhead. In the time leading up to his birth, I learned quickly that jingle-jangly kids’ music drives me nuts. We’ll compromise, I figured: I choose the tunes, he chooses when to pee on me. Turns out that in the throes of pure exhaustion, fuzz-tone and… Read more

Yesterday, when I returned to the car after paying for gas, Noodle announced, “I was saying rude words.” I always leave his window open so that I can chit chat with him while pumping, and it occurred to me that he might have been shouting obscenities at passers-by. This would be embarrassingly in character; he’s… Read more

Hey Noodle, let’s go on an adventure. My notebook is nearly full again. It’s tattered, worn, scribbled in and on, the corners are turned up, folded over, and the whole thing looks like it’s been soaked in coffee and done double duty as a cookie sheet. It’s time for a new one. You know better… Read more

In the southern hemisphere, May means Winter’s settling in, and it’s starting to shape up like last year, which by all accounts was like any year. When winter hits in Auckland, it rains. And it keeps raining, and when it isn’t raining, it’s just damp. That’s the way the climate goes, but it’s all building… Read more

Two bicycles lay next to a bench, unlocked. The beach is nearly empty on the south end, but then it’s more shells than sand down here. The tourists stick to soft sand on the north end, but the locals know this is the place to sit. The tide is out and I watch Noodle run… Read more

Let’s face it: kids these days have it easy. School used to be harder, we didn’t have big screen televisions and video games, we hunted our own food, cultivated our own crops, wore fig leaves for clothes. Parents sometimes love to compete back and forth in a hyperbolic holier-than-thou tailspin, seemingly unable to recover a… Read more