National Childhood Cancer Month

September is National Childhood Cancer month. People Against Childhood Cancer needs your help getting President Obama's attention to plead for an increase in funding for childhood cancer. This is a worthy cause. If you want to help out, click here to check out their site. There's a letter template there.

Letting Go A Little More

I have carried these two cards in my wallet for five years. Today, I'm letting them go. Gonna mail them to myself—from the office to the house. When they arrive at home, I will put them in a memento box. The mailing part is something I made up. Don't ask me what it means. It's just a way to symbolize and formalize the letting go-ness.

I've carried these cards around for the exact reason you might think. They remind me of Scott. And I like to be reminded of him. Five years is a long time. 1,825 days. Almost the entire length of Pablo's life. In all those days, these cards made me happy, sad, angry and, ultimately, proud of the time Scott shared with me in his life. They always remind me of one thing Scott said to me the night before he died. I was sitting at the foot of his bed, my head on the covers. I was tired. Spent. Flattened. He was temperature immune—not in need of a blanket or a sheet, or even a shirt—just laying on his hospital bed, flitting in and out of sleep. As I lay in my study hall sleeping pose, I felt him lift his foot off the mattress. He rubbed the top of my head with his foot in a playful way. I looked up at him. In his almost-gone voice, he said something to me so simple, so hard for me to accept. Such a gift. He said, 'You're a good guy.' I felt so many things in the moments after those four words hit my ears. Seen is one of them. Scott always saw me, and always made me feel seen and heard. He took so much time out of his life to be interested in my life, particularly when I was in my formative years. Scott was seven years older than me, eight years older than Dean, so it's especially powerful that he reached back for us. The age disparity would rule that out in many peoples' lives.

I have tried to live up to Scott's assertion. Hasn't been easy. Sometimes I feel like a complete f*** up. Who doesn't?

Before I pull out the memento box, let me tell you about these cards.

The yellow one is a frequent drinker punch card from Intelligentsia in Chicago. This was years and years before Intelly Silverlake came about. In fact, Scott would have sold his house in Chicago and moved here in an instant if he'd have known this single fact. I swear! He'd be simply stunned at how supportive James Marcotte, Kyle Glanville and the Intelly LA crew have been with The Pablove Foundation. Scott, Dean and I started going to Intelly when there was only one location, on Broadway. Then they opened one in the lobby of the Monadnock Building in the Loop. That building was the first skyscraper. Right in the thick of the streets that Scott loved. The streets lined with buildings whose stories Scott knew by heart. When Scott was in the hospital that last time, he had a unquenchable thirst for Mexican Coke. In Chicago, you can't find that stuff as easily as you can in LA. Intelly had it. At one point, we'd bought both Loop locations out of stock. And he still wanted more!

The blue one is a Chicago Transit Authority card. I did many train rides from Midway and O'Hare airports to Scott's house south of Grant Park and the Loop. One time I got all the way to the Loop and realized I'd forgotten my suit in Midway. Had to jump off the train, drop down the stairs and ascend to the other side of the platform. It was my final and longest trip to Chicago. It was clear to Scott and to all of us that he was near the end of his life. That's why I was carrying a suit. I was frazzled running all the way back to Midway, feeling I was disappointing my brother by adding an extra 90 minutes to my arrival time. Plus, I didn't want to have to deal with buying a new suit if it had been nicked. In the end, all was alright. The damn suit bag was exactly where I'd left it, draped over the back of chair.

I feel better having told you all this. Thank you for listening.

Remembering Scott After Five Years

Dean, Scott and I on May 17 2003.

Today is the five year anniversary of my brother Scott's death from cancer. He was 39.

Today, I'm reminded that I'm a double winner. My big brother and my little boy are both gone from this part of life—the human part. They've moved on to the next square on the sidewalk. They're not available to talk to me anymore. I mean, I can talk to them all I want. It's just that I haven't figured out a way to hear them speaking back. I can tell them that I've learned from them the most valuable things I'm ever gonna learn. And I can wait one of them to respond. I can tell them I feel robbed because the fruits of their teachings hatched as my legs were cracking in half under the weight of grief as they departed this life. And I can wait for one of them to respond.

I can tell them that I am lonely and I want to be with them. And that I have thought a lot about it and I'm sure I've done everything in this life that I want to do and I'm ready to be with them. And I wait—achingly—for one of them to respond. Like a soldier waiting for his travel orders while overstaying his time in the battlefield in a double tour of duty, I wait for them to respond. I wait for a sign that I might be able to see them, join their world where clocks are door stops, where worry is a comedic device in theatrical performances about the folly of man, where Pablo and Scott run and run and run and never become winded. Their world, where I don't have to watch their chests rise and fall and feel for their pulses to wonder if they're OK. Their world. It is a good, sensible place after so much senseless medical aggression tore their bodies to shreds.

I can talk to Pablo and Scott anywhere and everywhere. I can tell them anything. I assume they are with me always and anywhere, to the point when I mess up, I feel shame.

Them. They. Last year it was just Scott. Today, a year later, Pablo is not snuggled up next to me snoring his ass off as I type away at 11:52 p.m. Today it's Them and They. Today, I feel shame when I raise my voice or one of my many shortcomings roars into action. Shame because Pablo is watching. When he was here, and I could sit down with Pablo, the little boy who, along with his physical self, was my son, I could show him my humanity by explaining my mistakes and apologizing for exposing him to them. Now, I don't know what to do. I'm stuck in the middle of this life and afterlife business. I am told it will get easier. Reading my post on this date last year, I yearn to have Pablo back. And the knot in my stomach that I talk about in the post. For the rest of my life I'd live with that knot. Last year on this day, the theme of the post was acceptance. Gotta say, I'd like to blow up that word with a ton of C4 right now. Someday soon, I know I won't feel this way.

Somewhere in there, I am certainly happy that my big brother can finally have a conversation with Pablo. Two weeks before his death, when it was clear to him that his body was beginning its descent into death, Scott sat and wept as he looked at the one-and-a-half-year-old Pablo playing with Grady. When he caught his breath, he explained his sadness. 'I thought I'd be able to make it long enough to have a conversation with Pablo,' he said. Words we'll never forget.

That photo up there was taken 35 days before Pablo's day of birth—May 17 2003. It was my 31st birthday that day. We took the photo at the Frank Gehry-designed Edgemar complex on Main Street in Santa Monica. At the time, one of the only two Peets Coffee shops in LA was located there. That was long before they opened on Larchmont. In 2003, if you'd have told Scott that Intelligentsia was gonna open their only shop outside Chicago in LA—right down the block from my house—he'd have sold his house off Michigan Avenue and moved here that week. He loved Intelly that much. We ended up across town at Peets cos my brother Scott was always in pursuit of the best, most authentic s**t. Peets fit that description in those days. There wasn't any better caffeine source in LA.

I look at my face in that shot, and I see the same anguish that grips my body today. I think about contemplating some random question, such as, 'How much can one person endure in this life?' I stop short of this self pity rhetoric, and focus only on the answer to such a toxic—for me—line of questioning.

The answer is, I can take a lot. Scott and Pablo taught me that the human body stays strong for a long, long period of time. Even while being hammered from the inside. Scott and Pablo taught me that it's possible to laugh and find joy.

No matter what.

More Pablove Across America

The Pablove bike

The Pablove helmet.

I forgot to include a couple important things in past week's Pablove Across America gear post—namely the Pablove bike from Felt Bicycles, and the Pablove helmet from Giro. For the bike geeks out there, the bike is a a Felt FC with SRAM Red gruppo, Zipp 404 wheels, Powertap SL+ rear hub, Zipp stem and bars. The helmet is a Giro Ionos with a custom Pablove heart-pink strap on one side, and a touch of Livestrong yellow on the other side. Elated and proud to say all these companies are our sponsors—along with Velo Pasadena, who are building our four bikes—fully backing us on the inaugural PAA ride.

We'll be stoked to ride this bike with this helmet strapped on our heads. By the way, was I clear in last week's post that I'll be doing this cross-country excursion with my dear friend and coach, Rick Babington? When I say 'we,' it is he who makes up the other half of my team. Throughout Pablo's treatment, Rick would come over to the house to ride with me, hanging out with Pablo afterward. He brought Pablo a book about a dude who rode across America with his Chihuahua in his backpack. Pablo loved the book, and asked about it often. Other people will join us along the way—but, sadly, no dogs will make the trip.

Back to the gear.... The bike was designed by Bob Thomson at Felt. His other job is playing bass in Big Drill Car. I met him through another rock and roll cyclist, guitarist Michael Ward. Another example of our community lending a hand to help us along the way. Bob originally heard about Pablo through one of Lance Armstrong's blog posts or Tweets. Only after read a ton of the Pablog did he realize that we had a mutual friend in Mr Ward.

Felt is based in Irvine, CA and are one of the coolest road bike makers around. I've ridding a Felt DA time trial bike for the past 18 months, and love it. Rode it in last year's Malibu Triathlon, and will ride it in this year's event as well. Felt sponsors one of the best pro cycling teams, Boulder-based Garmin-Slipstream. Interesting fact about Team Garmin: one of their top riders is Christian Vande Velde—a killer all-rounder, and the son of former pro John Vande Velde. John played an Italian in the most famous American cycling movie ever, 'Breaking Away.' Remember the scene where the Indiana townie kid goes out riding and meets up on the road with the Team Cinzano riders, and one of them sticks something in the kid's front wheel? One of those dudes was Christian's dad. Pretty badass.

The Pablove helmet—a Giro Ionos—was designed by Eli Atkins, the man who handles Lance Armstrong's constant stream of custom-designed headwear. I met Eli though Bob at Felt. Eli slapped Rory's Pablove logo and typeface all over this thing. He nailed it on the first draft. Note that the fine grey design covering the entire helmet is Pablo's smiley-face drawings. Cannot w a i t to hold this thing in my hands! The design was sent to Giro's factory in China where it will be printed and molded to the helmet. I can say without a doubt that Pablo would love this helmet. I'm smiling just thinking about it.

Dean reminded me that Pablo called these face drawings 'punch guys.' I'm gonna re-post the drawing here to explain why he called them by this strange name.

One day, Pablo said to me, 'Papa, you know how on cartoons, when people get punched in the face, their eyes turn into Xs?' He really wanted to know why their eyes were Xs. If you look at the eyes in this drawing, they're all Xs. All these dudes have been punched. Pablo mentioned this all the time. I can recall him talking about it from his car seat while we were driving to Larchmont Boulevard one day. Punch guys—drawn by him or some Bugs Bunny dudes back in the '40s—were infinitely fascinating to Pablo.

I'm infinitely fascinated by the love and dedication that's going into the planning of the PAA ride. The marketing, the fundraising, the sponsorships, the route and logistics. It's been a ton of work for a small army of people. And today, after six solid weeks of plotting and scheming, things are looking great. Seriously can't wait to announce it all late next week. Once we do that, I'll put up a post illustrating the above stuff and who's been behind it.

Thinking A Lot About Not Thinking A Lot

Sitting in the living room. All alone. No one else is home. Thinking a lot about not thinking a lot. Not going so well. Thinking a lot about what could have been. What could be. What should have been happening today. School is starting soon at the Oaks, where Pablo was enrolled for kindergarten. That's on my mind. Of course it is.

The sound of children playing. Detecting the sound of my little boy's voice in the midst of two dozen screaming and squealing kids. Watching through the back window at the Walther School as the kids assembled on the back steps for their end-of-day ritual, always hoping that Pablo wouldn't see me. He never did. He was always excited to see me, or Jo Ann or Polly when we picked him up. He always ran up to me and jumped in my arms or lap, ready to read a few books. We'd usually end up with a couple of Pablo's friends snuggling up with us to read an Elsa Beskow book, or some other fine volume about farts or very bad, no good days. The other day I wondered to myself if I could go to the Walther School one day and sit on the couch and read to the kids. Then I thought that would be too hard, too weird, too much. My heart was in the right place thinking that. But it's too soon.

Thinking a lot about the fires burning in the mountains that my friends and I love so much. On any given day, I can look out the windows on the east face of our house and see the mountains. Our whole field of vision around here is mountains. Nothing but mountains. For the past few days, the field has been filled with thick white smoke. We're in the jet stream exhaust path for these fires. It's our lot in life here in Silverlake. We get the heat, the smog and the smoke.

Every place the news talks about is a well-worn path for us: Big Tujunga Canyon, Mt Wilson Observatory, Clear Creek, Highway 39, Glendora, Acton, La Canada. To many people in LA—even lifelong Angelenos—these locales are just names heard on the TV news. Faraway places where a police chase might happen, a train may have crashed, or a bear may have been sighted in broad daylight. These places are just names. Always somewhere else. Always somebody else's problem.

I'm familiar with both sides of this concept. On one side: we have been living the dream life of somebody else's problem for the past 15 months. Dream life, in this use, means we could wake from our dream at any moment and find it never really happened that we fell into the most feared, rarest column in life. On the other side: a friend and I always joke about all the strange cities in the LA area, places you hear about on the radio where car dealerships exist, or mattress superstores are perpetually going out of business and having the most outrageous sales, but you have no idea where the city actually is. Cerritos is the one that always got us. Sorry if you live in Cerritos. I know where it is now, but back in the day, it was the funniest thing—Cerritos.

The fires and the mountains and all that is and will never be. These things are on my mind today as I wait for the friendly Western Exterminator bugman to show up.

Help?

Our bed bug friends are back. We're out of our depth in this business of getting rid of them. Anyone got experience with ridding a home of bed bugs? We're looking for a consultant or a reliable company that can guide us through the entire process. From looking online, we have learned that to truly get rid of these things, we need high temperature steam on the offending bed and ancillary furniture. We're ready for it. We just need some direction from a reliable consultant or exterminator. Looking things up online and calling random places hasn't yielded a whole lot.

If you have any leads, please send them as comments. If you include your personal contact info, I won't post that info as a public comment.

Thank you.

—Jeff

Pablove In Australia

I have come to love this Pablove across the world business. It's cool to follow the dots around the globe, and to figure out a theme every time I get enough pictures to weave into a post. Today, I don't have to come up with a theme. Dangerbird's Sydney, Australia band Dappled Cities made it easy. Lead singer Dave Rennick wore his Pablove shirt all over Oz, as the band did promotion for its new album 'Zounds.' The band's manager Troy Barrott was an old friend of Pablo. They spent a lot of time together when Troy lived in LA. Troy and his family sent Pablo a very cool gift last summer—'Never Mind Your P's and Q's Here's The Punk Rock Alphabet.' We loved paging through that book. I remember one time the band came over to our house for dinner or something, and Pablo thought a band of pirates had invaded our crib. Not because they had swords and muskets—because of their gnarly accents.

I'm pretty sure Pablo sprinkled some butterfly dust over his piratical Aussie homies—'Zounds' entered the Australian chart this week as the #1 indie record.

Check out the Pablove Tour Down Under:

On Channel V

Onstage at the Splendour In The Grass festival (above and below)

On MTV News

The Many Faces Of Pablo

Pablo drew faces a lot. This is one of our favorite pages of Pablo artwork. If you look at all the faces, each one is different. Each one shows a different shade of emotion. I've looked at these for long periods of time, and I'm convinced Pablo was onto something with this facial study.

Rory Wilson at Dangerbird—the man who effortlessly designed the Pablove P-Heart logo—made a wallpaper out of Pablo's faces. Then the wallpaper was worked into the cycling kit—ie, the spandex clothing that non-cyclists love to make fun of—for the Pablove Across America ride. Click on this image of the gloves and you'll see what I'm talkin bout.

The clothing is being made in Italy and will be here first week of October. Can't wait to hold this stuff in my hands. For now, I look at the designs every day on my computer. The thing I love looking at the most are Pablo's drawings embedded into the garment designs. The detail on the rest of the kit is kinda hard to see, but the below panel gives you a general idea of how the overall kit looks.

The cap and gloves would have been Pablo's faves. As you know, he loved a comfy cycling cap. And he loved wearing cycling gloves. He and I used to buy size small women's gloves for him. We'd crank the Velcro extra tight on the tops of his wrists. Then we'd pedal like hell as fast as we could and Pablo would scream with joy and squeal with laughter. Which is exactly what I'm gonna do every day as we cross the country in his honor.

Weaving Pablo's faces into the Pablove cycling kit is my way of taking him with me when I ride my bike. I always wanted climb mountains on two wheels with Pablo beside me. Today, I can do it with Pablo in my heart, and covering my skin. Not the first draft of my dream. Today, it's the final—and only—draft, and I'll t a k e it!

Bugs

'Bugs' is a song by Pearl Jam. Probably their least popular song. I never knew why I liked it until the exterminator and his peppermint scented fogger showed up at our front door. Now this song is the soundtrack to our lives. The pulsating accordion is the sound of Jo Ann's horror when she wonders if she'll ever be able to sleep again in our home. (I think she will.) The questions posed in the lyrics are my confusion over what to do—or if we'll ever know—and a little bit of the humor I find in the sheer absurdity of our mad lives.

If you'd like to sing along with our theme song, here are the lyrics

i got bugs
i got bugs in my room
bugs in my bed
bugs in my ears
their eggs in my head
bugs in my pockets
bugs in my shoes
bugs in the way i feel about you
bugs on my window
trying to get in
they don't go nowhere
waiting, waiting...
bugs on my ceiling
crowded the floor
standing, sitting, kneeling...
a few block the door
and now the question's:
do i kill them?
become their friend?
do i eat them?
raw or well done?
do i trick them?
i don't think they're that dumb
do i join them?
looks like that's the one
i got bugs on my skin
tickle my nausea
i let it happen again
they're always takin' over
i see they surround me, i see...
see them deciding my fate
oh, that which was once...was once up to me...
now it's too late
i got bugs in my room...one on one
that's when i had a chance
i'll just stop now
i'll become naked
and with the...i'll become one

Remembering Doug 'Pikul' Kratz

Doug 'Pikul' Kratz

Today is the eighth anniversary of the passing of our friend Doug 'Pikul' Kratz. Doug was a video executive at Virgin Records. He was covering an Aliyah video shoot in the Bahamas and died alongside her in a private plane crash on the way home. Doug was part of the path of Jo Ann and I meeting each other—he was the label commissioner on the video we met on. The band was Scapegoat Wax. I was their manager. The song was 'Aisle 10.' The director was Evan Bernard. Jo Ann was his executive producer.

Doug was a serenely gentle man who smiled like a prince and was loved wherever he went. We talk about Doug all the time. We Pablo about him many times, too. Over the past eight years, we have missed him dearly. Eight years we couldn't have known that a little boy would be born in 2003 and his name would be Pablo and that his grave six years later would be a five minute walk from Doug's. But today, all of this is true. And today, we drop a flower on Doug's headstone every time we bring flowers to Pablo.

Looking at photos of Doug today, I am taken aback by something—how young he looks, how far away his hair styles look, how much I enjoyed being in his presence. Whenever I think of Doug, I always go back to one particular meeting with him in his office at Virgin. We were supposed to be talking about the Scapegoat Wax video, but all we talked about was indie bands in Silverlake. It shouldn't surprise me that Doug hasn't aged. Still, it really did stop me in my tracks. I ought to get used to this. Even as we all age and lose our hair and get grey, Pablo's shining face, like Doug's, won't change at all.

Before I go, I have to tell you another thing about Doug—another powerful link between him and us. He was very close friends with Silversun Pickups, long before there was a Dangerbird Records, and at a time when I only casually knew Nikki, the band's bassist, and Joe, the keyboardist. A couple years after Doug's passing, when SSPU had signed with Dangerbird and were coming up with a title for their debut EP, they decided to name it after Doug's nickname, Pikul (pronounced pie-KULL). Like the many Pablo dedications that have sprung up in our community, the 'Pikul' EP carries Doug's spirit...forever.

We miss you, Doug.