WHAT YOU TALKIN' BOUT, CAMEL? No, Morgan, I didn't spend the weekend in the Denver airport lounge.

Instead it was a whirlwind weekend, with family in from the Detroit-ish area and all manner of outbound events (the Lincoln Park Zoo, the Chicago Botanic Garden, a mom-mandated trip to Chipotle, etc.) on our schedule (pronounced "shed-yule").

Don't know where to start so I'll just start...

Woke up sweaty at 4AM...actually, wait...went to bed at an unchacteristically early 9:30PM last night and, given my current work schedule and recent habit of late nights and early flights (wow, that would be a great yuppie album title: LATE NIGHTS AND EARLY FLIGHTS), woke up sweaty and ready to work at 1:15AM. (Another great yuppie record title: SWEATY AND READY TO WORK; could also work as a porno title.)

So at 1AMish my dog Vladi was conducting his nightly toe-nail-noisy shuffle from the bathroom tiles onto the hardwood and then plopping onto his understuffed bed with a leaky sigh. I knew how he felt. My lower back was sore from doing basically nothing but living, I was sweaty from humidity and a 12-hour decongestant, and I was running through my upcoming itineraries and deadlines in my brain. Somehow I drifted off again into a sweaty dreamscape for another three hours or so, but at 4AM I knew there were no more slumbers coming for this blogger. I adjourned to my study, checked the weather and sunrise time on my computer (this despite the fact I'm an avowed non weather-checker), then set off for an hour walk-jog around my little corner of Chicago.

I thought of a David Eggers piece I read yesterday in SPIN, a sort of celebration of the band Big Country, especially their album THE CROSSING. And I remembered thinking, as I read it, that Eggers is not a better writer than me (okay, okay, feel free to pot-shot me here and now, readers), but that he's just more fearless and honest. Celebrating Big Country, a band most take for one-hit wonders! What stones, I thought as I came across the article. This Eggers will write about anything.

And then I read it and I know he's right, he's right, and I start mentally digging for my Big Country discs, all part of the Great Unwashed Music Pile (GUMP) that litters my study and the basement and my car's trunk, so much so that I've considered hiring someone to sort through and re-case and re-file all my wayward music. I come across the song "In a Big Country" on my wife's 80's disc as I drove home last night, and it is almost too poignant to be true: "I'm not expecting to grow flowers in a desert, but I can live and breathe and see the sun in wintertime." Amen, Stuart.

So many other things came to me, visited me on my walk, to the extent that I remembered thinking on some earlier walk that I should never be walkless again, because walks are when my brain has a chance to defragment, to clean up lost clusters and/or find new hard disk space for future memories.

Bought two new discs last night (and I thought this morning about the phrase "chasing the dragon," meant to describe how drug addicts [especially crackheads] are constantly re-seeking that high, the feeling, trying to "get normal" by catching the dragon's tail [you know, the firebreather, the crack pipe] just one more time, and I thought how that's sort of like how I buy records and books, hoping that maybe just one of them will hit just the right note, get me off the consumption treadmill, answer The Question), the new one from The Cure and then a new one from some group called PepLab. And the first sounds like it should and will hopefully grow on me, but the second is just a full-on dance party right out of the box, what the label sticker describes as Rick James meets Crystal Method. It fulfills the "soundtrack for a big black car" requirement, music that complements the leather seats and the lightly tinted windows and my chin-down driving style. In the words of Freddie "Boom Boom" Washington, it's music that has a certain "Hi there" quality.

My two-year-old son answers the following questions expertly:

Q: What does Ed McMahon say?
A: Hi-O!

Q: What does Hank Kingsley say?
A: Hey now!

Q: What does Fonzie say?
A: Aaaaaaayyyyyyyyy!

Q: What does Mork from Ork say?
A: Shazbat.

Q: What does Gary Coleman say?
A: What you talking 'bout Willis?