I can hear nature lullabies coming out of the bedroom where Wally's asleep in that little bassinet he can now barely fit into. I’ve gotten so attached to his room and find it hard to picture packing up a month from now what was so recently arranged. By most people's standards it's hardly arranged, not something you could reasonably call a nursery as it’s just the changing table, one blue wall and a few books and toys (plus my papers and clothes all strewn about). It’s funny to think of showing Wally pictures years from now and telling him “this is where you first lived,” a place he’ll never remember but one so important and intimate and imprinted for me. My little dog book came out in January -- Test Your Dog. I couldn't manage to get a picture of Sky on the front, but there is a little one on the back flap (with her name spelled wrong). Actually it's from a Memorial Day picnic 4 years ago, just a few weeks after she had gotten lost for two days. It's amazing and no one can ever believe, including myself, that we were lucky enough to find her. Denise, a one-time Dimestore bassist, is pregnant. Dorothy is singing with the Duelists. Alex is playing reggae now. There are so many other former members to give updates on and yet I can't stay with any one thought long enough. I am hoping things will change -- like I'll be able to string words together and form sentences and remember things I've seen and heard -- once I can get a full night's sleep. So many baby announcements you read about how the parents are tired or they're up every 2 hours at night or they are finally getting some sleep and I always used to think "who f*cking cares how well you're sleeping?" as I hit control + D and now I understand b/c the lack of sleep really starts to define you and distort everything and change your personality. Not just the physical strain but the way it morphs your emotions, not to have that release at night, not to ever complete a full sleep cycle. I remember one night when I looked at the clock at 8:45 and had the bed all ready to jump into and knew I didn't have to get up until 9:45 and it felt so lavish and luxurious to be hopping into bed and setting the alarm a whole entire hour ahead. I have had a few more bouts of sleep paralysis --when your mind is fully awake but body still paralyzed so you can't move. In my case I can't see -- though others tell me they can, just can't move their body. And it's not like a sluggish...ugh, I can hardly move. You literally can't until your mind and body re-align and the body comes out of the REM sleep mode. Wally and dimestore scenario and all the jokes about “will he play the drums?” and why the two are so connected (that is, why I would write about Wally on this site). See – I can’t even manage sentences. These are questions I feel like I should answer. I thought I'd be able to keep playing but I could not. There are so many things I didn't finish, dozens of recordings we had started working on after Joe left the band last March. I feel like I really have to finish “Flood” and “The End of May” which I meant to finish by last year’s end of May and now won’t even finish by this one. Another thing was that after all this time I have had this sense that I had to write something   big and powerful that would capture the strange, amazing, unfathomable time and yet I can't even come close to doing it. I was always personally offended when I heard about someone having a kid. I couldn't (and still can't) give up that sense of being one myself. Daylight savings came so early and Easter came so early and all the months rushed together. In the early days and weeks the overwhelming sense was how fragile he was. How unf*ckingbelievably fragile this little creature is that's completely entrusted to your care. Every minute you have to make sure they are carrying on just the basic functions of a living organism. Sky seemed so strong and hardy in comparison. Not to mention absolutely effortless to take care of. How could I possibly begin to explain the joy and ecstasy of having the most precious thing on the earth and at the same time the severe dehydrated, sickening, suffocating nightmare of having in your care that very thing? Once it’s on the earth you’ve opened the way for unbearable despair because you wouldn’t be able to stand losing it and they just seem so precarious and breakable and easy to lose. I keep missing earlier versions. That first one: no butt, the wobbly mouth,  quivering arms, the little high chirps,  skinny chest, each day saying to him "this is your third day Wally" or "this is your fifth day Wally" and just feeling in total awe of what that would be like to just have landed on the planet. What my mom wrote after the first week when she went back up to Massachusetts:   "I can easily conjure up Wally --his skinny chicken legs and long wrinkled feet, his little starfish fingers and the smell of his neck. His adorable little mouth and the little squawks that emerge. His eyes darting about and the other-worldly look of wisdom on his alert face. " I had this moment when we first brought Wally home and I was alone with him in the bedroom listening to U2 Rattle and Hum and wondering what he thought of it. He was moving his arms in that uncontrolled way babies do, conducting an invisible orchestra, and it looked like this sort of ancient wise being from a science fiction movie. I had this thought that even if something happened and I lost him and only had those two days with him, and even though the two days were so physically painful and exhausting and emotionally taxing beyond belief, they would still probably have been the two best days of my life. This is starting to sound like a sign-off and that’s not what I meant. It should be the beginning because I’m finally able to …there are moments when I hear music and it catches me by the throat again and I think “How can I not do that?” (Oh, I think not drinking more than a glass of wine here or there is also really taking a toll on my personality). It just felt to me like the flood was coming and…Neeta’s great line months before we left Hanover “I’m trying to think of ways to stop the end from coming.” I just felt like the flood was coming whether I wanted it to or not, whether I admitted it or not, there was no way around it. webmaster@dimestorescenario.com