We're not going to BlogHer 2008. As tempting as it would have been to rent out the Fatty Arbuckle suite at the St. Francis and throw a raucous party with plenty of champagne bottles, the chances of it ruining my blogging career would have been too great. Don't rupture any bladders without us, girls.

I think the very idea of traveling with these two kids to a city where I used to enjoy unfettered childlessness was too much to even consider. I can't imagine going there with them until they're old enough to be bored while I drag them around town saying, ". . .and this is where daddy saw his first drag show." I think it's great that the event is being held at a historic hotel in the heart of San Francisco. For those attending who hope to get out of Union Square (and I do recommend getting out of Union Square), I wrote up a top nine list of our favorite things to do in San Francisco right before we left two years ago [number ten? walk around our old neighborhood]. I'm sure some things on there have changed, although Clement Street undoubtedly still smells like fish guts and dried-Chinese fungi. But if you're headed there this weekend or anytime in the future, nothing could make me happier than internet strangers seeing any of these parts of that beautiful old city. Well, I suppose I would be happier if it was me seeing them again. Without two kids.

Every year on a September Saturday my high school German teacher would borrow one of the athletic department's 15-passenger vans and take eighteen of his German students to Chicago. This teacher was a wise and fabulously lazy man who grew up in the very small town of Watervliet, Michigan before attending college and settling down in the slightly bigger town of Kalamazoo. Looking back, I believe he saw his role in our lives as more than a mere martinet of Teutonic grammar; he considered himself a mentor whose mission was to expose young provincials to the possibilities of the wide world beyond their petty secondary-school social upheavals. Not to get all Mr. Holland's Opus on you, but if men and women like him weren't out there sacrificing the exciting lives they could have led in Berlin or New York to inspire the pubescent petite bourgeoisie to get liberal arts degrees and move away to bigger cities, there would be no embittered penniless hipsters living out their thirties in cramped Brooklyn apartments writing short stories about embittered penniless hipsters living out their thirties in cramped Brooklyn apartments. And without them and all the other urban paralegals, copy editors, consultants, lawyers, editorial assistants, government employees and research associates bored out of their fucking minds at work, who would be left to read and write blogs? If no one had inspired us to break up with our high school sweethearts and seek something more from life than throwing empty cans of Milwaukee's Best into the rock quarry every Saturday night, there probably wouldn't be any blogger conferences to go to in Chicago. Danke Herr Holland!

Back in Chicago all those years ago, wir deutsche Kursteilnehmer were supposed to spend the morning on a brief architectural tour, followed by a few hours in the Art Institute, and later dinner at the Berghoff. But between Nighthawks and the Schnitzel, we were allowed to roam the city as we pleased. Most everyone headed up Michigan Avenue, straight for Niketown. I remember Niketown being a very big deal to people. If you told someone that you went to Chicago, you were always asked if you went to Niketown, and if not it meant you had a lousy trip where it was assumed your parents made you do all kinds of boring crap. I don't think Niketown is such a big deal anymore, now that downtown Chicago has ESPNworld, OldNavyburgh, Hollisterworld and HighSchoolMusical2Land.

Skipping the not-so-magnificent mile, a few of us hopped on the elevated train and headed up to see Cabrini Green before it got knocked down. We did not consider this to be dangerous; all our knowledge of Cabrini Green came from the movie Candyman, so we figured if Virginia Madsen could almost survive it, three high school guys from Kalamazoo should have no problem. People there just glared and made us feel like the assholes we were, so we left to try to find Al Capone's hotel, which was also scheduled for demolition. After we stared up at that crumbling old building ("that's probably where he killed that dude with the baseball bat!") we rode the train down to Chinatown and laughed at the crazy and smelly goods in the stores and wandered around the surrounding area filled with abandoned buildings until we found a paper bag stuffed with about twenty little plastic baggies of a resiny drug none of us recognized, along with a wad of about seventy dollars in cash and a .38 caliber revolver. We tossed the drugs and split the cash, and I saw the guy who picked up the bag put the gun into his jacket's inside pocket. "The best place to find shit is where people are always running from the cops," he said. The whole afternoon was just like that "going to town" scene in Wet Hot American Summer. Only real as fuck. By six we were back in the Loop with our classmates and their Niketown bags, eating spaetzle.

I wonder sometimes how horrified I will be when Future Juniper does stuff like hop on a train into an unfamiliar city and walk around places where she could very easily get sold into white slavery or get forced into running guns for the Yakuza. This is a curse of parenthood, I suppose, desiring nothing more than for your kids than for them not to be as fucking stupid as you were. I read an article a few weeks ago about how over the course of four generations, an eight-year-old British boy's freedom to move had been restricted to 300 yards from his front door, while his great-grandfather had enjoyed the freedom to walk six miles every day to go fishing. I thought of my own youthful wanderlust, spending all day hiking through endless forests (that are now endless subdivisions). I think of days like that one in Chicago, formative in a way of what I still find fascinating and interesting about the cities of the world. And then I wonder if I am committing Juniper to a life of virtual house arrest, even though my fearful colleagues in the suburbs are largely doing the same thing.

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"Psychogeography" is the study of the specific effects of a geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. In 1958, Guy Debord wrote the seminal psychogeographical text Théorie de la Dérive, or "Theory of Drifting," what he called, "a technique of transient passage through varied ambiences." In a dérive you (or you and a friend) drop your existing relationships for a few hours, you drop your work and usual leisure activities, ignoring all your other usual motives for movement and action, and let yourselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters you find there. Sights and attractions intended as touristic are to be avoided along with itineraries, your journey instead becomes "dependent on chance and the spontaneous subjective impulses and reactions of the wanderer."

Debord had been inspired by the situationalists, particularly the study Paris et l'agglomération parisienne, in which Chombart de Lauwe noted the narrowness of the real Paris in which most individuals actual lived, in comparison to the grand, touristic idea of Paris. Most Parisians, he suggested, dwell exclusively within an extremely small geographical radius. Lauwe diagramed all the movements made in the space of a single year by a female student living in the 16th Arrondissement. Her itinerary formed a small triangle with no significant deviations, the three apexes of which were the School of Political Science, her residence and that of her piano teacher. Why live in Paris at all? One naturally wonders.

We spent the past weekend in Chicago. On Friday we followed our itinerary, visiting friends and beautiful old buildings, finally ending the day on Navy Pier---a tourist destination with a character seemingly defined by the absence of reality---to visit with people we only knew through the internet. On Saturday we took the train to uptown and walked back towards the tall buildings. I love Chicago. Beyond the city's obvious charms, there are still so many wonderful thoroughly unspectacular things to see there. It is never the grandeur that impresses me most, though I can certainly see the appeal of gothic skyscrapers and miesian monoliths as well as the bustle of a vibrant city center. I love the dirty Italian beef stands in Chicago, the old movie palaces turned into Mexican dance clubs, the Indian funeral homes, and the bars with glass-brick windows and faded Old Style signs hanging above the door. Tourists are almost always in a better position to partake in the dérive: seeing the familiar as new, bisecting the small triangular ambulations of the locals as we walk down streets with no idea where they'll take us.

We are back in Detroit now: house, market, playground, our own comfortable triangulated rut. But beyond the joys of seeing old and new friends, getting over to Chicago for a couple of days reminded me of the pleasure of wandering that so consumed me when we first moved to Detroit. Tomorrow I'm going to turn left where I usually walk right.

You never know when you're going to come across a paper bag filled with drugs, cash, and a gun.

I spent the weekend standing around a lemniscated pool of lukewarm water at the center of an architecturally-confused Hyatt filled with 17 acres worth of scattered beaux-arts fountains and statutary, buddhist bas reliefs, bird engravings from the nineteenth century, and, on this particular occasion, hundreds of brilliant and gorgeous women. I have had worse weekends.

And it's a good thing that as a result of frantic packing on Friday afternoon, I forgot my stash of potent opium, because I just know I would have had a bad trip, perhaps imagining myself as a lowly eunuch confined to childcare duties or fanning Ariana Huffington in the stately pleasure dome of Kubla Khan's court, while laid-off dad frolicked among the Abyssinian maids and damsels with dulcimers and I just stood there with the dour, bitter countenance expected from my detesticled kind; so, instead, after snarfing down two bottles' worth of free wine, I found myself at my lowest point, elbows on the bar telling the perverted bartender in my drunk's voice: "just mix whatever combination of reds and whites you got left, bub." In such a state, I'm sure I offended in both conversation and odor, speaking wild-eyed and belligerently to whoever was kind enough to engage me in a drunken colloquy. So I begin this post with an apology to all the fine women bloggers who tolerated my crashing of the pool party at their postmodern Mediterranean hotel.

In ancient Rome every year the mysteries and secret rites of the Bona Dea (the "good goddess" of both chastity and fertility) were held and men were not allowed. During the rites, even paintings or drawings of men or male animals were forbidden in the rooms. The secret rites became the subject of widespread speculation among Roman men, who imagined it to be something along the lines of Roman Matrons Gone Wild, with the lifted togas and woo-hooing and all that. The mystery became too great a temptation for the patrician demagogue Publius Clodius Pulcher, who dressed up like a woman and snuck into the rites in 62 BC, which were being held in the home of Julius Caesar (think of John Belushi right before the ladder fell from the sorority's window in Animal House). The outrage of a man seeing the rites in Caesar's home grew to rumors that his wife had arranged it in order to sleep with him, so Caesar divorced her outright, responding to all the evidence that his wife was innocent by saying, "Caesar's wife must be above suspicion." What a dick.

Any illusions I had of kinship with Pulcher in drag, despite all the boob cupping, butt smacking, crotch grabbing, and face licking going on under the palm trees in San Jose, were dashed when I saw how many other men were at BlogHer. Dozens and dozens of dudes. I had believed this was going to be a space for women, free from the burning evil of the male gaze, and I was prepared for my presence there to be brief and limited, respectful of a space that was clearly not designed for the likes of me. Partly, though, I had also hoped to use the lack of other men as a crutch for my shyness, for my intense social awkwardness, and as a reason to walk away from a crowd rather than joining it, as I have always done at events like this, listening with immediate regret to the sound of laughter slowly evaporate behind me.

It turns out I didn't need that crutch.

For much of the day on Saturday, while Wood was attending the sessions I sat with Juniper by the edge of the swimming pool trying to coax her into the water. Early that morning, she pointed out of our hotel window towards the pool and said "wa wa!" and I asked her if she wanted to go swimming and she responded, "yeah." I put on our swimsuits and carried her into the cool morning water of the outdoor pool. She dug her fingers into my flesh and started screaming as soon as her toes struck cold. I could not calm her until we were back in our room.

Later that morning, while Sarah Gilbert's sweet little Truman splashed on the steps of the pool, Juniper again expressed a sincere interest in the water. This time I let her approach it at her own glacial pace, shifting towards Truman, taking a step back for every two forward. I asked her now if she wanted to go in the water but her response was a singsongy "Nooooo." For hours she looked at the pool and pointed at the other "babies" who were swimming, and a yearning to join them was clear in her brown eyes. And yet, even after Wood got in the pool, and we sat on the edge together and showed her how her doll could swim, Juniper's reticence eclipsed the allure of the water. She never swam that day.

I see so much of me in her, from the sometimes-crippling shyness, to the eons it takes for her to warm up to something she knows she's supposed to love. I feel a strange compulsion to try to help her overcome these things I've struggled with my entire life. It seems absurd that I'm still trying to overcome them myself.

On Friday night, Wood and I spent an hour by ourselves, drunk, talking with our feet in the pool. Saturday night somehow found us joining multiple conversations that the previous evening I had been too nervous to jump into. Melissa has described some of her relationships as "friends with training wheels" and over the weekend I was unable to shake that idea from my head. To pilfer her metaphor gayly, it felt like having water wings in a tumultuous sea of strangers, some of whom weren't strangers at all but faces you recognized from the flicker of 1s and 0s through a series of tubes, and hearts and minds you partly understood from having read thousands of their words and thoughts.

But God, it is so eerie to look across a pool and see a face and read its eyes which seem to say, "I know you."