So I'm at home watching the kids while the wife does another Somerset din din with the girls on a night when the Black Lips and the Gris Gris and the Hank IV play their respective versions of rock music to a mostly nodding but desperately trying to boogie Tuesday night audience. I'm sure large adjectives will be posted on Internet boards and I'm sure that those words will vaguely represent the occasional emotional states and visual perspectives of the posters. And I'm sure I'd have enjoyed it, in a vacuum, but that soundless, responsibilityless tunnel is a mythological void these days, and one I best yield to the young. It's happened. I'm one of those people, at least tonight I am.

Me? I just put the buggers down and I'm listening to Electric Wizard's Dopethrone. It's supposed to be heavy. Perhaps it is. Mostly, I have gas from too much frozen pizza and microwave popcorn. It was, after all, State of the Union night. The Sharks are off for the All-Star Break and I saw enough of the SOTU to know that post-script reading analysis is unnecessary. I have maybe another hour to read or watch TV or stare out the window, so maybe I'll have some ice cream and then stare at the ceiling for awhile.

I read an article today by a professor arguing that an existential approach to the world is life-affirming, a view with which I happen to wholeheartedly agree. The author was Robert Solomon, a prof at UT-Austin, a guy who gained the briefest celebrity by appearing in Richard Linklater's Waking Life, and a man who has delivered a number of Teaching Company lecture series that I've enjoyed. At the end of the article, the brief bio said that Robert Solomon was... Turns out he dropped dead in a Swiss airport three weeks ago. I got into my car and popped in the lecture tape and there was his disembodied voice, which took on an eerie resonance in the light of his death. I felt very strange, like the time I read Fred Exley had died. I don't know what any of this means. Maybe living life up to the hilt has nothing to do with going to rock music shows on Tuesday nights. Maybe it means trying to understand our mortality and what qualitative journeys to the hilt might be. I'm going for a glass of lemonade.