Good word

"No body can play and sing country music with long hair. Waylen Jenkins has got long hair and you cant hear all of his words sometimes and his band is beatnicks and rock and roll."

--Lester "Roadhog" Moran

Home at last

I can't wait to tell you all about the trip to Tennessee, especially the motherfucking backstage passes to the motherfucking "Grand Ole Opry," but for tonight all I want to say is: I'm glad to be home. I'm glad that tonight I will sleep in my bed with my four pillows, and tomorrow morning I will brew coffee so strong it will hurt me to drink it.

I also can't wait to tell you about the exciting flat tire on Illinois' exciting Northwest Tollway, but that, too, is a topic for a later blog. (Don't worry: we're fine, and it was as painless a flat tire as a northern Illinois flat tire in late December could be.)

Let's not go shopping

After doing Christmas with the family all day yesterday, I was excited to show Ereck around Nashville a bit today. But once we had hit a few highlights--this is my prep school; this is the large university next to my prep school--I began to remember one of the realities of Music City on Sunday afternoon, a reality brought into sharp relief on Boxing Day: there's not much to do. So I showed him where I went to grammar school.