08-22-11 London, UK: 20:42. I am sitting in a small and dimly-lit room. The street outside my window is growing darker, the streetlights glowing brighter. The window is open and the air is cooling for the fall. The music I am listening to is familiar, and that is all tonight’s music needs to be. It is a Monday night in London that started on a Sunday morning in Chicago. I am being held together by the melody and the crisp air.

More at the London blog.

Last night some Somalis caught a break. It is not my intent to trivialize the great pain and suffering that continues in their famine-struck country. But small victories can sometimes go long ways. Small victories are sometimes about as big as they come, in fact. Last night the al-Shabab rebels left Mogadishu. They left behind all the wretchedness that they engendered and exacerbated, but they left. They left by the truckload and in the middle of the night as residents poured into the streets and cheered, they left. Just the idea of this fleeting moment gives me chills. On top of the short burst of relief the people must have felt, there is the notion of it coming in the middle of the night, when even the mundane seems sometimes magical. I think it’s safe to assume that we have all experienced at least one moment of elation late in the night. It is something special that the day cannot touch; the day, in all of its cruelty and oblivion, doesn’t even know. I am not in Mogadishu and so I cannot say for sure, but I’ll bet some of those people that ran cheering into the night won’t make it all the way out of this thing. And that is surely not made any less hard by last night’s events. But, in that moment, there was maybe some brief joy that wasn’t there right before it, and that won’t get a chance to be there again after. And that is at least something. It is not enough, but it is something. It’s important to remember that every single thing around us can change in just one second.

Memories are liars. Manipulators. The sooner that is understood the better.

Every now and then I smell something that transports me immediately to a different time, a different city. It floors me that I can be riding my bike on a street in Chicago and in one breath be looking through the cloudy eyes of a child walking into a candy shop in Eagle River, Wisconsin. Fudge. Caramel. Little green army men carried home in a pocket and parachuted down to a stretch of grass near the lake. Sitting in a steel chair on the back porch with a BB gun at dawn. Grandma. Grandpa. Coconut twists for breakfast.

The memories from Eagle River are mostly good. If I look hard enough, there are some not so good ones as well. But that’s all fine. I don’t spend much time with either. The one breath is all I get. It’s all I want. Which is good, because it’s all that’s left. I take it in and move on.

more…

Way back when I had a car I had a Subaru. I had two of them, actually. A gray one at age 16 and a green one several years later. The wrong I did in both is pretty substantial. If the day ever comes when I look back on all of it and don’t feel sick, I’ll know that I failed somewhere along the way.

Still, I’m glad the memories are there. As much as I think I’d like to take them all back, or throw them all away, I know that they’re necessary. I had (and still have) a lot to learn. And I’ve only ever been capable of learning The Hard Way.

But there is at least one Subaru memory that involves no direct wrongdoing on my part. It might be the only one, but that’s probably an exaggeration. In any event, it’s not a good memory. It’s as vivid and somber as ever and it’s on my mind a little tonight. So here we are.

more…