I have a tendency to get bad songs stuck in my head. Then I troll Facebook by posting something like, “Man, is there a worse song to get stuck in your head than ‘I Saw the Sign’ by Ace of Base”? Then everyone who reads that immediately has that song stuck in their head and posts death threats in the comments.

However, I also sometimes get good songs stuck in my head, but generally only if it’s something I’ve been listening to recently. Bad news is much easier to take if it’s accompanied by good music.

For the record, I’ve been listening to some terrific music lately.

Sometimes when someone has a trivial preference that’s different from mine (like preferring Mr. Pibb to Dr. Pepper, for instance), I will ask if that person also hates God, America, apple pie, and motherhood. Which is silly. After all, who could hate motherhood?

Well, I don’t suppose anyone hates motherhood, but moms really don’t get much respect in this country. In this post-birth control world we’re living in, becoming a mother, i.e. having a baby, is just one lifestyle choice of many, and not a particularly fashionable one at that. It’s something women do when they’re in their late 30′s, after they feel like they’ve already lived their real life and need to do something to silence that ticking clock.

This isn’t to say that mothers don’t get any support, just that they don’t get much esteem. You see it played out in small ways everywhere. 100 years ago, the typical 20-year-old was married and probably had a child, and felt sorry for an unmarried 30-something. Nowadays, it’s the total opposite.

People dress to emulate the admirable people in society. If mothers were those admirable people, you’d have women without children trying to dress more “matronly”. Instead you get 45 year old women trying to dress like they’re 23 and single.

Well, I’m all for motherhood! Thanks, all you moms out there! Thanks for making the babies who will staff the hospitals that I’ll be visiting in my old age. Thanks for making my future employees, should someone be foolish enough to put me in the position to hire people.

The world need more young people with dreams and ambitions and a complete lack of wisdom that might let them know that their ideas are ridiculous and will never work. Since, you know, sometimes those ridiculous ideas do work. And the only way we’ll get those young people is with mothers. Keep up the good work!

And double-happy mothers day to my two favorite mothers, the one that made three very handsome boys and the one that made me.

Then when I entered toddlerhood, I lost all my baby fat and ended up rail thin. Then sometime around the sixth grade, someone threw the emergency brake on my metabolism and I got a bit “husky”, as my grandmother would say. And my weight stayed on a…

I was going to say a “glide path”, but that implies that my weight went down slowly and steadily, instead of going up slowly and steadily. So, whatever you would call an inverted glide-path, that’s what my weight was on. I think I peaked at 220, breifly got in decent shape and slimmed down to 185 or so, and then, despite my indolence and Taco Bell-based diet, I ended up holding stead between 200 and 210.

My last job, as you might recall, I worked with transrectal ultrasound prostate scanners. Or “anal probes” as I usually called them when I wanted to freak out the squares. This was a great job for several reasons, and not just that I now have lots of stories that I can’t tell during dinner time.

The biggest thing I got from that job was face-to-face contact with old age. I mean all people under the age of thirty know, on some level, that they’re going to get old someday. But that’s like knowing that, at some point, the sun is going to swallow up the earth. You know it, but you don’t really internalize it. However, nothing really drives home the reality of old age like seeing an obese 70 year old on an operating room table getting his prostate cut out.

So, having decided that, no, seriously, I was going to get old and it was going to be ugly if I didn’t do something about it, I decided to shape myself up. I did some research, read some blogs, and embarked on what I called The Program, which consisted of cleaning up the diet (¡Adios, Taco Bell!) and about 45 minutes of vigorous exercise a week. In the process I managed to lose about 50 lbs.

I look like a totally different person. I feel great; I’m usually in a better mood. Really, there’s hardly any area of my life that hasn’t improved.

It’s too late to make a long story short, but the reason I mention this is because I’ve noticed that people seem to just assume that if a guy is thin he must have won the metabolism lottery*, and therefore never had to struggle with his weight. And I realized that most of the people I interact with now have no idea that I used to be about 1/3 bigger than I am now. I also realized that I don’t interact with most of the people who knew me when I was wearing Big Boy jeans.

So most of the people I know are walking around with an incomplete picture of me. They either visualize someone who needs to lose at least 20 lbs, or they can’t imagine me needing to lose 20 lbs.

So, how do you really know someone else? Everyone has a past and a present. The guy from high school who always wore that Misfits t-shirt, for all you know, is now a successful accountant. Or in prison. In any case, hopefully he’s not still wearing his Misfits t-shirt. But who’s the real person? The accountant or the sullen, Glenn Danzig-obsessed teenager? Or is both? Or neither?

* Actually, I think my metabolism has speeded up considerably since I started, but that’s more of an effect than a cause.

I think I got decent at small talk (I still don’t want to say “good”) the way comedians figure out how to deal with hecklers: practice. For most of my life, any social interaction could and often does have a tendency to turn awkward and uncomfortable at any second. This still happens, but I’ve learned to notice when things are about to veer into incoming traffic and either steer things back into the correct lane or make a joke about the head-on collision that just happened.

Although I admit that I cheat at it. My questions and answers are slightly different than other peoples. This puts me at a decided advantage over the person that I’m talking to, since I can usually anticipate his side of the conversation but he has no idea what’s coming next from me. Thus the awkwardness ends up a bit better distributed between me and the person I’m talking to.

But every now and then, I get completely blind-sided and I am left completely speechless. Like tonight at the gym.

I scan my card, hang my keys on the tote board and before I can get to whatever it is I was going to do, the guy who had been vacuuming the floor turns off the vacuum, walks over and says, with nothing in the way of introduction, “Hey, I saw you at Trader Joe’s last week.”

Mind you, I haven’t exchanged a word with this guy. In fact, if I were called in for questioning, I doubt I could pick him out of a lineup. And yet, he apparently recognized me and it had such an impact that he remembered it and mentioned it a week later.

I don’t know what facial expression I was giving him, but I suspect it wasn’t the sort of poker face that would win any money in Vegas. I quickly tried to decide how someone responds to something like that and came up with nothing. So I said, “Um… all right!” and walked away.

I felt like I was 8 years old and one of my dad’s coworkers had just told me he knew me when I was two. (By the way, I still don’t know what a good reply to that statement might be.)

So anyway, apparently my small talk still needs some work. And that guy’s small talk needs a whole lot of work. There’s probably a way to deftly ease that statement into a conversation and that guy didn’t even come close.

And maybe I need to start wearing a fake mustache when I go out.

Every time I go back to St. Louis, it still seems very familiar, but it seems less and less like home.

That said, I had a very enjoyable evening. I had dinner with Allan, a classmate of mine and last I heard the #2 Yelp user in St. Louis. He’s exactly the sort of guy you call up when you’re going to be in town for 16 hours.

ME: I’ll be in town on Saturday. Any good restaurants open recently?

A: I know just the place…

The place, in this case, was the Szechuan Pavilion. It’s a sparsely decorated place in an unassuming strip mall in one of the less desirable suburbs. There’s absolutely no way I would have found this place on my own, even if I still lived there.

When we walked in, it was the sort of scene where if it were a movie, the record would have scratched and stopped playing. I was the only non-Chinese guy there, including Allan, as it happens. After getting assurances from Allan that I can handle spicy, he orders two dishes totally off the menu in Chinese.

Shortly thereafter we got a dish with some kind of dumplings in a very spicy broth of some kind. It was very tasty. By the time I finished eating it, my tongue was slightly numb. Apparently the place was using Sichuan peppercorns. Then we had some very spicy noodles with more Sichuan peppercorns, and I couldn’t feel my lips either.

After that, we walked next door to a place called Hooked Seafood restaurant, a Cajun/Vietnamese fusion place. We had the fried oysters and split the Bahn Mi. The Banh Mi was excellent. The problem with Bahn Mi at most Vietnamese places is that the bread isn’t fresh. As Allan pointed out, they use the same bread they serve with the Cajun dishes to make the Bahn Mi, so the bread turns over faster. Which means it’s fresh and delicious.

I also met another guy for coffee in the Delmar Loop, the old stomping ground. That was an eerie feeling. On the one hand, I didn’t recognize anyone. But on the other hand, I recognized everyone there. Which is to say that everyone I’d known had moved onto other things. But new people almost exactly like them had moved in to take their place.

Actually, I take that back. That one crazy guy with the piercings in his face who walks around with drumsticks shouting nonsense to nobody in particular was still there. That was encouraging. In informed the general vicinity that he was born in Bosnia and grew up in a castle.

Anyway, a very good day. Although really, the highlight of the trip was that I got to sleep in a bed all by myself, with no boys sneaking in the middle of the night and kicking me in the face repeatedly until dawn. Although — wouldn’t you know it — I ended up waking up at 6:30 and couldn’t get back to sleep.

However, this morning, as I drove down Jefferson, I saw a guy waiting for the bus wearing a fez. Like one of these things here:

He did not look like he was Moroccan, and it didn’t have any embroidery like you’d see if he were a Shriner. This dude was just wearing a fez.

So was this guy just being eccentric, or is he on the bleeding edge of fashion? Personally, I don’t think I can take that chance. So I’ll be picking up a fez today. I’d hate to be the last kid on the block wearing one.

Anyway, now I’m nearing the back-end of my 30′s and I realized that at some point, I stopped being a young Gen X-style cynic. And I became an elderly curmudgeon. This transition was so seamless I didn’t even realize it was happening. I suspect the differences are pretty trivial and went unnoticed by everyone I know.

I’ve kind of been kicking around starting up the old blog for a while. Among the things that pushed me over the edge was this essay from the great Paul Graham. In it he makes the following point:

Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them.

I can back this up with my own experience. One of the things I miss about writing is that I tended to have more interesting ideas pop into my head when I had an outlet for them. And the ideas get more full-formed when you write them out.

I suppose I get some outlet from posting random comments on Facebook, but it’s very limiting. You can’t let your thought meander. You can’t build something longer than a few words, and sometimes I have a few paragraphs to say.

So I’m restarting the blog. The first blog, the one I did most of my writing on. I’m returning to my roots. For your convenience, I imported everything from the other two blogs into here.

The tumblr was somewhat less constricting than Facebook, but not a whole lot less. And the Detroit blog kinda put a brand on what I’d write about. Detroit’s interesting, but it’s not everything.

So it’ll be All Dog, All the Time™. As per previously, I will continue to write about whatever the hell I want to, whenver I get to it.

Stay tuned!

In anticipation of our first date, I made the lovely and talented Sherry three (count ‘em!) CD’s. She said she was into British music but wasn’t quite able to dig too deeply into it.

So with some assistance of my younger brother, I put together a collection of notably British music from the previous 30 years, right up to what was then the present day. I tried to balance out stuff everyone would have heard with stuff hardly anyone has heard, favoring the more mainstream.

I’d say compressing 30 years of UK music into 3 CD’s worth of music was certainly the most ambitious thing I ever attempted and overall it turned out quite well. Sherry is partial to #2, although I think I prefer #1.

1977-1986
Wire – Strange
The Buzzcocks – Ever Fallen in Love?
Gang of Four – Ether
Gary Numan – Cars
The Police – Message in a Bottle
Joy Division – Transmission
The Jam – That’s Entertainment
The Clash – Rock the Casbah
The Human League – (Keep Feeling) Fascination
The Beat – Save it for Later
The Smiths – Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now
Frankie Goes to Hollywood – Relax
Dead or Alive – You Spin Me ‘Round (Like a Record)
New Order – Bizarre Love Triangle
The Cure – Close to Me

1987-1996
M/A/R/R/S – Pump up the Volume
Happy Mondays – 24 Hour Party People (Jon Carter Mix)
Cocteau Twins – Carolyn’s Fingers
Pop Will Eat Itself – Sick Little Girl
The Stone Roses – Fools Gold
Ride – Seagull
The Sundays – Here’s Where the Story Ends
The Charlatans – The Only One
Blur – Girls and Boys
Portishead – Sour Times
Oasis – Supersonic
The Chemical Brothers – Chemical Beats
Lush – Ladykillers
Spice Girls – Say You’ll Be There
Suede – Beautiful Ones

1997-2006
Ocean Colour Scene – Hundred Mile City
Bluetones – If…
Manic Street Preachers – If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next
Robbie Williams – Millenium
Tom Jones – Motherless Child (ft. Portishead)
Mansun – Repair Man
Super Furry Animals – Ysbeidiau Heulog
Kylie Minogue – Can’t Get You Out of My Head
Franz Ferdinand – Darts of Pleasure (Demo)
The Streets – Has It Come to This?
The Libertines – Vertigo
Belle & Sebastian – Step into My Office Baby
The Go! Team – Junior Kickstart
Goldie Lookin’ Chain – Half Man, Half Machine
Girls Aloud – Biology
Supergrass – St. Petersburg
Depeche Mode – A Pain that I’m Used To (Jacques Lu Cont Remix)

I think I now know what they’re talking about. Even though Sam is baby #3, being there for the baby to make its grand entrance upon the world state makes me feel like I’m the world champion of life.

My problem, from the standpoint of writing a birth story, is that, while it was absolutely a thrill having the little man come into the world, there wasn’t really too terribly much to report. Unlike Gus’s story, there was no car chase or near miss on an impending anal probing.

Every birth is its own special thing, but if there’s such a thing as a routine, textbook birth, Sam’s might be it.

Here’s how it went down:

Actually, let’s back up a couple of days. Sherry was already overdue by about a week. She had been feeling odd all day and the baby wasn’t moving much. We conferred with her midwife and given the aforementioned car chase we had with Gus – complete with 70’s style music and squealing tires as the car takes a corner – we all agreed to take her to the hospital and get checked out.

The hospital is about a mile from here, but we have two other boys to worry about. It was after 10 and they were completely passed out, so we called the person we’d lined up to babysit, and headed over with the bag, in case we needed it.

As it happened, Sherry was dehydrated, which was giving the baby a highly elevated pulse rate. So they gave her a bag of IV fluid and she started feeling normal. Or as normal as you can get if you’re pregnant and a week overdue.

So, a few days later, Charlie was having problems sleeping, and had for most of the last week. I suspect he knew something was up. He wanted to sleep in our bed and this usually involves him turning himself 90 degrees and then kicking me and/or Sherry in the head all night. Since Sherry was plenty uncomfortable enough already, she decided to go to sleep on the couch.

Sherry was in my room before my alarm went off, digging through the dresser. As I stirred, she said, “I don’t think you’ll have to go to work today. I’m in labor. And this time I’m sure of it.”

Labor had started around 2 in the morning apparently. So we got Charlie and Gus ready to spend the day with the babysitter, a process that has all the logistical complexity of a moon landing. We dropped them off and returned to the hospital.

If there’s one upside from the false alarm a few days ago, we were already in the system and knew exactly where to go. So our exposure to bureaucracy was mercifully brief. And after a brief check to determine that yes, Sherry was in labor, we were led to the new, fancy birthing room in the far corner of the maternity ward.

The room was awesome. It looked about 20% like a hospital room and 80% like a hotel. It had an actual bed. Like a real bed, not a hospital bed. It had a beautiful window that looked out upon the roof of the parking garage and east Detroit beyond it. Well, one of the nicer parts of east Detroit.

Shortly after we got situated, Mary, the midwife showed up. Despite being younger than me, she gave off an air of command and competence. And fortunately for everyone, she had a sense of humor. I say “fortunately”, because childbirth is a tense situation and tension causes my irony level to go to 11.

It also makes me hungry. So as Sherry and Mary took a walk, and after I ascertained that she wasn’t going to have the baby in the next 20 minutes, I headed off to grab bland, unappetizing lunch from the hospital cafeteria. Sherry wasn’t hungry for some reason.

With my appetite under control, I did some walking with Sherry. Everything was going fine except that her water refused to break. So Mary asked and Sherry agreed to break it for her.

Things began to progress pretty quickly at this point and Sherry climbed into the shower/tub and Mary, the nurse*, and I took turns using the water massager on Sherry’s lower back, to help with the discomfort. I suspect “discomfort” is a bit of an understatement. After about an hour of that, Sherry said, “I think I need to push now.” Mary did a brief inspection and said, “Yeah, the baby’s coming!”

We got her out of the tub (the one step to get out of the tub was apparently a doozy for her), and let her to the bed. She crawled into the bed and began to push. And literally two minutes after she got out of the tub, there was a baby! Like I said, it was an amazing feeling seeing the new baby right in front of me. Although I figured she would have to push more than once to get the little guy out.

So after a total of about two minutes of pushing, Samuel Alexander LeBlanc arrived on the scene.

They gave us lots and lots of time with the little man. Sherry hugged and snuggled the baby, did a bit of breastfeeding, and enjoyed the feeling of new motherhood. I suspect she felt even better about it than I did.

Mary asked if I’d like to cut the umbilical cord. I replied that I would absolutely not like to do any such thing. I’m bad enough shaving myself. The last thing anyone needs is me wielding a pair of scissors around a newborn.

Then eventually, they took little Sam over to the station for the vitamin K, eyedrops, and collection of vitals: 8 lbs 5.7 oz, 20 ½ inches.

About an hour between breaking the water and delivering the baby. No complications at all. Well, none for the childbirth at least. Like Charlie, Sam had ABO incompatibility, and had to spend an extra day in the hospital with jaundice. A bummer, but far from the worst thing that could happen. And there were the two other boys, who had nobody but me to supervise them.

All in all, a splendid job was done by everyone. Most especially me.

Welcome to the world, Sam!

P.S. Sam, if you’re reading this in the future, please don’t think that because I didn’t finish writing this until weeks after you were born that I don’t love you as much as your brothers. Just that having three boys in the house has been a monumental amount of work.

P.P.S. Those of you interested in a compare and contrast between a mother’s perspective when it’s fresh on her mind and a father’s perspective a bit later, you can go here and read a much higher-quality version of this story. Just to make it interesting, I have not actually read Sherry’s version of her birth story before composing mine.

* Whose name eludes me. This is why I should write these things the day they happen, not weeks later.