I was looking up more things in Fargo, and thought I’d use Google street view to see the house where I grew up.

It’s blurred. An interdimentional rift has settled over the place, and the strange and incomprehensible shapes on the other side shimmer and glow. Or, something was on the camera lens.

Hey, wait a minute

I used to look at my house on Street View and see the whole thing. Turns out that this is a feature Google provides: you can request your domicile be blocked for all time, and the block extends backwards in time as well. The neighbors to the north must have done it. I can think of no better way to make people wonder what you’re up to.

But that’s not fair. It’s natural to think that, and also what the Redditors would say is a sign of copbrain - they love the -brain suffix - but there’s no reason you have to submit to the indifferent eye of the Google Cars.

That banner above could’ve been me in 1967 or so. There’s something bittersweet about being caught like that in an unguarded moment of sudden wonder, looking at the car: what is that thing? Is it from the future? Jeepers, it’s cool

Of course no kid says jeepers anymore.

Ordinary day. No seizures. Woke, ate my usual omelette with relish, but not in the hotdog sense, then emembered that the water was going to be shut off today for five hours. I filled the water bowl and coffee maker and then discovered . . . well, sorry no, I need that for the Friday column. Did the Gallery of Regrettable Food Substack, had a boring lunch, filed the weekend NRO column with a note to the editor that it was dark and bitter enough to be passed off as boiled-down Turkish coffee.

By the way, a kind letter-writer this week said he hoped NR was paying me well. Hah! You’d be surprised how little they pay. But it’s something, and everything helps.

HOT. Birch did not want to take a walk to Centennial Lakes today. We got a ways into the park, and he stopped: nope. Might have been the storm clouds. He wanted to go back into the cool car, so we did. Some grocery shopping, home, nap, steak, radio show, walk. You can see the strange structures going up in Sunderwood Park:

I would also like to note that he has made an appropriate protest to the sticks that make up the new fence. TROPHY STRUT!

Ordinary in every way, except for a curious lack of mental fugue recitations of grievances and slights and hurts and such. I still feel like I’m the bad guy for not working on a future relationship, for not being concerned about how she’s doing, but I have to remember she was the one who sang Heave ho, Heave Ho, it’s Off to Fred You Go.

Divorced people who got the big nix know you exist in a state of tremulous connection for a long time. The fact of being over is not enough. It’s not over until many things click into place and other things settle like sediment. There was one other time in my life I knew something was over, but it happened in advance.

Saturday night I tried to find the tune I heard when I realized that the most important part of my life was done. It’s one of those moments that hits you with such clarity, with such unexpected force, that you know it’s absolutely true, and you’d best open up and let it in. I remembered it last Saturday night because I was up, and got myself a Grant’s.

Back up: Mad magazine used to do ad parodies, and when I was a kid reading Mad I didn’t necessarily know the original reference. But I remember they did a parody of a Grant’s whiskey ad, the tagline of which was “As long as you’re up, get a me a Grant’s.” Great Don-Draper era stuff. I know I've mentioned this before, because when I searched for ads a 2019 Bleat came up. Now I've given it hues:

I have been a Grant’s fan since 2016, when I sat down at the bar at Washington National Airport and looked at the whiskey list and settled on the Grant’s, simply because I was remembering a parody of an ad I’d never seen. When I sipped the drink it struck me as uniquely delicious. I was tired and we still had the flight home to come, and it had been a day. This reward . . . it was marvelous. At the time. It’s reasonably good blended Scotch. I’ve had a bottle in the cupboard ever since.

I can see the terminal now - a futuristic circular space I visited when I lived in DC, because this was where the flights back to MSP originated. You had to go down a tunnel to get to it. The walls sloped to meet the floor.

(Video framegrab from 1992)

Now I was back, two decades later, accompanied by Daughter and Emma, the French Foreign Exchange student. We’d taken her to DC, and then-Wife had gone back to Minneapolis, after which I took the girls to New York. We’d stayed in the Roger Smith, my old home, and had a suite on the top floor with a dining room and a living room, upgraded perhaps because they looked at my history and saw I’d been staying there since the Stone Age. I had to tell the girls that this was not the standard New York hotel experience. You’re getting something special. We wandered around the bright blaring lights of Times Square on warm night, Rockefeller Center, all the Gotham glories. The day we left began in the sweltering and odiferous hell of Penn Station, where we took the fast train down to DC to head back home.

I’d taken that train many times. I hadn’t lived in DC for years but it still had its pull. I was sitting a row back from the girls, and listening to a Pat Metheny playlist, and a composition came up - it struck, deep, as some of his work does, and I remember looking at the world flashing past outside the window, and Natalie and Emma talking and laughing, and I knew that even though her graduation was two years away, the character of Fatherhood as I’d known it was already done and dusted. It was just playing out the coda now.

Of course, there’d be so much more. The hell-summer of 2017 with the search for Ghost Scout. The rituals of the senior year. The meetings for the Rotary trip that would beam her out of my life entirely. The addition of Birch. But that was clean-up. On that train, with that composition playing, the sight of her confident and laughing and happy - I knew my job was done.

Of course, it’s never done.

But you know what I mean. It’s all details and repetition and reinforcement from now on. The realization that this phase was done felt final and inarguable, and it was right there that I knew the autumn of my life had begun.

Sitting on the balcony looking west on a summer Saturday night, sipping a Grant’s, listening to Metheny, I thought: I was absolutely right.

Let's lighten the mood with some Amazon Krep! I was looking at toasters for The Last House, since the Bella is so light you sneeze and knock it over, and I want something substantial and dependable. I'd considered a Cuisinart, but the reviews make me wary. I think it's best to avoid their electronics.

Amazon suggested somthing that looked nifty! And look what you get!

ENDLESS JOY!

IT FOLLOWS SO NATURALLY FROM ONE TO THE OTHER:

Mmmm Blueberry Egg Toast. But I wonder if this brand has a consistent set of amusing characters you will fall in love with:

Let's check the one-stars: