10. Post-Bypass Dave

Chalk it up to wishful thinking, but Letterman after surgery is more relaxed, less gratuitously mean, has more, for lack of a better word, heart than the Old Dave.  Not that many of you care, considering Leno’s inexplicable appeal among You Kids Today.  So why is this cool?  Because, for better or worse, Dave is the Late Night Voice of My Generation, and it’s good to see him having a better time of it.  He even mentions the girlfriend, for cryin’ out loud!

9.  New Van

Yes, it’s “foreign” (whatever that means in this post-industrial economy). But you know what?  Our new Honda Odyssey was clearly the best vehicle for the money, and I’m just too poor to be principled.  Besides, it’s named after a great piece o’ literature.  Could there be anything cooler for an English teacher’s ride?

8.  Kennedy Death Car

We visited Henry Ford Museum this summer, and seeing the actual limo in which John F. Kennedy was shot was, if you’ll pardon the expression, a mindblower.  I just stood there thinking, “Wow, so this is the car,” remembering that day, reflecting on all it’s meant.  Cool because you don’t often get to be in the presence of history in 3-D.

7.  69 Love Songs

This three CD set by toast-of-the-underground New Yawker Stephin Merritt has been in heavy rotation on my player since it came out last Valentine’s Day.  There’s no real summarizing its charms here, but you may want to consider the accomplishment suggested by the title: it took Merritt about a year to write this set of bona fide love songs, and there ain’t a stinker in the lot.  Coolness?  Well, ya gotta love the way the guy spells his first name, for starters. 

[Runners-up: Transcendental Blues by Steve Earle, Daisies of the Galaxy by Eels, and Songs From An American Movie, Vol. One by Everclear]

6.  Breakfast at the Northside

The whole family went to my favorite Ann Arbor break

fast restaurant on my birthday.  I had the Kitchen Sink (a mix of hash browns, onions, mushrooms, and tomatoes, smothered in cheddar), biscuit, small OJ, and coffee on the house.  Then we spun over to Borders Books for a two-hour power browse.  Family + free breakfast + Borders = Way Cool, or my idea of a perfect morning.

5.  My Dark Places

This memoir of obsession by crime fiction writer James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential) completely took over my life for two days.  I literally could not put it down, spending every waking moment not engaged in child care or other essential task plowing through Ellroy’s tale of his attempt to solve his own mother’s decades-old murder.  “Dark” is putting it mildly, yet at the same time the book chronicles a triumph of the human spirit, which is always cool.

[Runners-up: Zippy Annual by Bill Griffith, Rocco Vargas by Daniel Torres, and The Secret of the Old Mill (original edition) by Franklin W. Dixon]

4.  Babe

Babe, a beautiful, smart, affectionate Brittany, came into our lives the day after Thanksgiving, and has done a wonderful job of filling the hole in our home after the untimely death of our previous dog, Bailey.  There’s nothing like a dog, and nothing cooler than the unconditional love they offer.

3.  Getting to Know Jack

This would be my one-year-old son, and hanging out with him is one of the things I looked forward to most this summer.  Well, mission accomplished, except you don’t hang out with a child that age so much as you just spend a lot of time physically manipulating him (changing diapers, feeding, etc.).  Yet this is stuff I don’t do as much of during the school year, and the result is a deeper relationship, a better awareness of just who this incredibly strong-willed critter is.  And what could be cooler than getting to know a kid named after your own dad?

2.  Waiting for Casey with The Boys

Walter’s my three-year-old, and he is stone train-crazy.  We live three blocks from a nice set of tracks, so more days than not, usually after dinner, we put Jack in the stroller and the three of us (four on nights Julie’s not working) set out to see Casey Jones (legendary engineer who Walter assumes pilots all trains in our town).  Jack’s been really getting into it of late, to the point where his first word was “Casey!”, so it makes for a really cool way to pass an hour between dinner and bath time.

1.  Movie Nights with Julie and Walter

Julie is my fabulous wife, and once upon a time, we used to make popcorn on Friday nights and watch a great show on NBC called Homicide: Life on the Street.  Sadly, it was cancelled a couple seasons back, leaving a void that was finally at least partially filled this past summer, as we let Walter stay up late a few times to watch videos and have popcorn.  Sure, he wasn’t quite ready for American Beauty (fine film, three stars, but overrated), but Stuart Little was plenty charming, and if you could have witnessed what an absolute gas he thought it was to stay up with the big people... well, it was one of those moments that makes being a family man such an utterly cool experience.