When in doubt, take the jeep.

I've been going on a sonic binge of David Gray lately. I'm finding that the more I listen to his album White Ladder, the more I'm impressed with what I'm hearing. What I'm hearing—how to describe? It's rare to encounter an album that that wears its soul as a badge. All albums, novels, songs, and poetry are about creativity and expression, but it is much rarer to come across a piece of work that proclaims, as deeply and as intrinsically as warp and weft, that this particular creation is the result of an artist putting the totality of their creativity into a piece of work.

It's a particular sound and smell, that totality, that is a hair's-breadth away from desperation. It's a completeness, a frustration, a lack of holding back, which shows in everything from words to instrumentation.

After returning home in the early afternoon from a quick shopping trip with Kat, I came home to find a business card shoved in our door. It was a card from the Athens Police Department, with a handwritten note on the back that said, "Please call," and gave his direct line.

Now, granted, I'm a good little law-abiding citizen, but the first thing that popped into my head was, "Wait. Even if I had been bad, I haven't been through Athens in months!"So, I returned the call and got the bane of current-day corporate-America: voice mail.

Approximately an hour later, he returned the call. (So as not to be a total jerk, I'll not print the name of the person he was asking about.)

"Do you know a person named C.A.J.?" he said?

(Side note: the webcam's back up. I'll point it at the cats when they're in the room with me. Enjoy.)

Several months ago, I stopped questioning why I was writing for this site and simply got into the business of writing for it. In the end, I think it was the right thing to do; instead of wondering about my motives and my variously interesting neuroses, I decided to do what I enjoy most: the arranging, scattering, and recombination of words.In the almost-365 days since I started writing for this site last year, I've written about a little bit of everything. From dealing with marriage and death and joy and confusion, it's all here, in varying shades of clarity and obfuscation.

In my way, I had my own Walden-esque goals: to write about the things that mattered—and not just the things that matter today, but the people and events that will still matter to me ten, twenty, forty years from now.

More often than not, inferences about my life can be drawn from what I do not write about here on domesticat as well as what I do write about. Since beginning this weblog-turned-journal-turned-something-else-entirely a while back, there have been events in my life that I have not written about here.

Each time, the choice to withhold has been a deliberate one, made after much thought. I've come to grips with the fact that my life is, to some small degree, on display here—but that's for another story, another night. Tonight I'm tipping into the wider half of a bottle of Chardonnay, left unfinished from a night that we had friends over, and trying to dredge up a bit of bravery.

Two generations of my family are best defined by the things they almost never discussed with me. For my grandparents, it was the desperate poverty of the Great Depression, followed by the heartbreak that was World War II. For my father and mother, the event that shaped the years of their early adult lives was the Vietnam War.

I am a member of the first generation of my family who, upon looking back, cannot claim to understand what they went through. My generation has nothing of the kind—and this, as my mother once said quietly to me, is probably the greatest blessing we will never comprehend.When I was ten, I was given a school assignment: to interview an older member of my family to learn what their life was like when they were my age. I picked my maternal grandfather's eldest sister, Belva Davis.

I love that phrase. Always have. I came across it when I was a child—I think it was the first time I learned that a language such as Latin existed, and I became fascinated by it. It has stayed in my mind ever since.

Water is a refuge, and my refuge of choice is a boiling hot shower. Andy and I share opinions in that regard: we both agree that coming out lobster-y is the best way to go.