It is very exciting: my new photogallery site is up and running. It's called photogratify.com. Go there. Submit your photos. God will reward you with his favor.

When you're done with that, go rent the movie Bandits. Hell, go buy it. It's that good.

Oh, and call your mom.

I wanted to write a long, newsy entry today.

It's good to want things.

I am too work-coma to be newsy. Tomorrow, maybe. Today, I will simply tell you that Kirk and Mo had a really very delightful barbeque yesterday, and I will offer as proof the latest photo in the hostile yak series. I think this one is the most hostile yet!

When I was 11, we moved from Mequon, Wisconsin to the suburban wasteland of Warwick, Rhode Island. We left behind the yawning prairie sky, air redolent of growth, the kindness of strangers, and my grandparents. It wasn't until I'd experienced the provinical, insular, badly landscaped fortress of Rhode Island that I was able to appreciate the patchwork ground we crossed on our way out. Conversely, I knew the second we boarded the eastbound train: in leaving my grandparents, I was leaving the most treasured and beautiful part of my childhood behind.

Every morning, my mom and I would drop my brother off at the junior high. We'd spend the remaining hour before my school in McDonald's, crying into our hash browns. Those were the best of times and the worst. My mom will always be my best friend, but those mornings were an incredible and unrepeatable journey, and it was funny and horrible and hard.

There's no definitive end to this story. Eventually we stopped crying in the mornings, and stopped eating Egg McMuffins, because you can't go on living doing either. I made friends, and my mom learned to live halfway across the country from her parents, and we were okay.

And you really can't ever go home again. It's hard to see changes when you count your life in hours and days, but time is a hurricane. Look away for a year, and when you glance back, the landscape is ravished. Mom and I spent the next summer with my grandparents. In the midst of my desperate attempt to recreate my youth, my grandfather had his penultimate stroke, and he was left with a second childhood that he didn't ask for. It would be another few years before the last stroke would put him to rest, and he spent those years sweetly, lovingly, and broken.

I know I can't hold on to them forever, but in the center of my soul, time is standing still. My heart lives in a universe of portraits: my grandma bathing me in the kitchen sink, my dad giving me a sly sip of Heineken on the 4th of July, my mom dancing with my tiny arms around her neck to The Rainbow Connection, my brother giving me airplane rides on the floor of the den, and always, always, my grandfather walking through the door, preceded by the smell of chinese takeout, taking off his coat and calling us to come in and eat.

I love rollercoasters. I really really do. What I don't love is 10 hours on my feet, encased in a prison of sweat.

The thrill of the chafe is gone, and all that's left is the agony of de feet.