halloweenhead

i've said this blog is supposed to chronicle my adventures as a punk rock dad, and i realize that it rarely has been since i've started it. this is partly due to the fact that liz was sort of freaked out when she saw i had posted a few pictures of our kids. kind of just paranoia about the possibility that my band has some deranged obsessive fan somewhere, and kind of just a desire for privacy. i get that, i hadn't thought of it. i'm probably a bit naive about that sort of thing. that got me thinking about what it must feel like for all those big old rock stars doing reality tv shows about their families, and i started wondering if jack and kelly osborne would have been better off if their parents never invited mtv cameras into their house. probably, right? so here's to hoping that one day we'll come off some big monsters of indie rock tour and have to worry about grandiose matters such as these. actually, i hope reality tv has ceased to exist by then.

i did want to tell you another story about my 4 year old son jackson though. i'll tell you some about elijah soon. jackson is my little rock and roller in training. one of my favorite quotes about having kids is in the movie lost in translation when bill murray is telling scarlett johanssen about how when you become a parent, your life as you know if it gone, never to return. "but then," he says, "eventually they learn how to crawl, and walk, and the grow into the most fascinating people you'd ever want to know." i'm paraphrasing, but that's totally how it's been for me. I prefer the company of my kids to that of anyone else.

Jackson, my older son, is 4 and he's alot like me, which is to say he's a sweetheart, kind of aloof, handsome, and pretty strange and random. He's invented 4 or 5 imaginary bands already. the first one he came up with when he was three was called "action motors" which i still think is an amazing name. he was really into the white stripes at the time and my niece grace was going to play drums and he was going to sing and play guitar. another band was called "Darkness in the Shoes" which i thought was pretty poetic, and amazing how it showed the way the kid's brain and imagination works, like he was thinking about that dark place in a pair of shoes lying on the floor, and fascinated enough by it to name his band after it. I totally want to hear what that band sounds like. the other day he started telling me about his new band, a halloween band called "The Creepy Creepy Crawlers." Then he asked me if he could borrow one of my sharpie markers, or "permanent markers" as he calls them (we instilled the difference between his play markers and my permanent markers into his head after an unfortunate incident with a pillow case.) Anyway, he takes the sharpie and a few cd-r's from the spindle on my desk and starts designing "album covers" with drawings of skeletons and guitars and drums for each of the creepy creepy crawlers' albums. he did 4 in all, and i helped him hang them up on my wall with thumb tacks. the best part is that they all have totally real and awesome sounding album titles: The Creepy Creepy Crawlers Come Alive, Beware of the Creepy Creepy Crawlers, The Creepy Creepy Crawlers at Night, and of course the self-titled The Creepy Creepy Crawlers. Needless to say, i couldn't have been prouder. Actually, earlier today he told me the name of his new halloween band. This one is called "Deadness of the Gosling." So weird. So amazing. I can't get over it.

here is a song that is only marginally related to what i've been talking about, that i sort of love:
ryan adams - halloweenhead
(via keptshut.com)