Bringing Some Pablove To KCRW—Tonight At 8 p.m.

Happy Thanksgiving Eve.... It's been a long, strange 2008. It was nice to wake up today, on the eve of he holiday season.

To kick off the season, I have a pretty unique announcement to make:

Tonight at 8 p.m. LA time, I will be a guest on KCRW, talking to DJ Jason Bentley about the Pablove Foundation / Filter Magazine / Urban Outfitters charity compilation. With the double-disc set finally being available online, and the holidays coming, we are launching the second phase of our marketing effort for the project. Erin Chandler, our college radio promotion guru at Dangerbird, pitched Jason to have me on, and Jason loved the idea. Thank you Erin! I love it when things are that simple. This is an especially gracious invitation from Jason—on Monday morning, he will take the reins as the station's music director, and host of its world famous morning show 'Morning Becomes Eclectic.' Not sure how long we'll chat, but I hope to talk about the amazing spirit of the music project and how it lines up with the positive, loving energy of our community (you!) and Pablo's treatment and recovery scene at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles. We'll spin at least a couple tracks from the comp as well.

To tune in on your computer via browser or iTunes, click here.

• To listen via the KCRW media player, click the LIVE tab to the right of the KCRW logo

• To listen via your iTunes program, click the LISTEN TO iTUNES link to the right of the red LIVE CHANNEL button

On a related note, Hrishi from The One AM Radio/Dangerbird is spearheading a holiday party to benefit Pablove Foundation at the new Urban Outfitters on Cahauenga/Sunset. It will go down from 6-9 p.m. on 16 December. A handful of Dangerbird artists (tbc) will perform very short sets. There will be some food and drink. And, of course, the Pablove Foundation comp will be for sale. We'll post full deets closer to the date.

OK, now for today's regularly scheduled post....

What a night we had here in Silverlake! Mommy was sick in bed all day yesterday. Grady spent the night in his room studying for a big test. Pablo and I finished out the night with two gnarly rounds of Sorry! (we each won a game). Toward the end of the second game, Pablo said those magic words—'Papa, I'm tired. After this game, I want to go to bed'—that make any loving parent jump for joy inside. But my post-Pablo recreation time was not as fruitful as I'd hoped. An hour after getting him into bed, the power went out. At first, I didn't realize the power had gone out. I was upstairs, alone, talking to Tony on my mobile phone. The first thing I noticed was that the light outside had changed. As the house lights and street lights in Silverlake valley went off, the moonlight took over as the predominant illumination. It was a once a year moment, and I'm glad to have witnessed it.

Downstairs, Jo Ann and Grady were fishing around under my side of the bed, looking for my emergency Maglite flashlights. We found both of them. Jo Ann took the biggest one, and shined it on the pages of 'Twilight' and kept reading. Grady took the other and returned to his desk to continue studying. That left me with...the light shining off my Blackberry screen. Which was enough to get me up the stairs to look for the LED cycling light in one of our kitchen drawers. The light I found was mainly red, but it gave off an incredibly powerful light. So, I snuggled up on the sofa in the playroom, and red a run of pages in the new Malcolm Gladwell book 'Outliers.' After about an hour, the power came back. I kind of wanted it to be off all night. It's exciting. In a strange way, it felt like a relief to have something to fix other than Pablo's cancer.

In the middle of the night, Pablo woke up screaming. 'Papa! Papa! I had a bad dream!' It was 3:30 a.m. I jumped out of bed, shoulder blocked the door jamb in our room (as I have many times before) as I flew down the hall to P's room. He was standing on his bed, crying his eyes out, snotting everywhere, gasping for breath. As soon as I gathered up the pieces of the scene, I sat on his bed, grabbed him and held him in my arms, and began crying too. I am not sure if I am supposed to cry when my son cries, but it happens—it's a natural response that comes up in me. And I do not swallow the tears. F that. It's taken me a coupla decades to to feel my feelings, and I'm not going to get all stony with my boy, and turn him into a freezy freaky feeler. On the other hand, if Pablo invites me to a therapy session in 20 years to tell me I'm a wuss or that I ruined his ability to laugh at men who cry, I'll work it out then. In 2028. When he's 25, and I am 56. For now, I'm gonna stay with the tears on demand program.

Once Pablo breathed through his fear, and nestled into my arms, he was ready to go back to sleep. There was no way he was gonna let me tuck him back in his bed and walk away. He wouldn't talk about his nightmare. Without prodding, I could tell it was a real mutha for ya. We couldn't sleep in Mommy and Papa's bed since Jo Ann was sick—worse than I was—and we can't risk him getting ill while he's on chemo. It'd be a bad scene. So, we went up to the playroom and set up shop. The sofa in that room is actually meant to be a guest bed (the cushion is a Tempurpedic mattress), so all we had to do was grab our pillows and hit the hay. As we laid down, I told P the story of the power going out, and how we searched for Papa's emergency flashlights. He liked the story of those mysterious and revered heavy torches being put to use—finally, after all the times I told him he couldn't play with them. When I finished, he revealed a bit of detail about his nightmare. I hadn't even asked (even tho I waned to). 'There was a giant bunny. It was a bad bunny.' And that was all he'd say. The omerta of Pablo and the giant nightmare bunny.

When we woke this morning, the first thought on P's mind was to rip into his new fave game, Dread Pirate. I felt like a guy with a paycheck hangover who was being cajoled by a Jazzercize-crazed girlfriend when that one hit. Ouch! Once we got the game up and running, it was incredibly fun. Dread Pirate is a complex game that P and Polly started playing, um, yesterday. The dude was dropping terminology on me about skirmishes, dies (as in the singular of 'dice') and all kinds of intricate rules of the sea. I've said this many times before here at Pablog HQ: I love to see this little boy's intellect and wonder develop. Somehow, I think he's just fine missing kindergarten this year....

More later.