One of my favorite grafs this summer comes from my cousin Nic, in this June comment, about how one puts action to the songs in one's head.

In a show this weekend and engaging those head songs nightly — where does mine find encounter with the world, and how can it find chorus with other performers, with the choreographer's structures? Maybe eternity is found in moments, like subdividing a beat or number infinitely, instead of by expansion. I think I grow momentarily younger and older, and on the whole I hope to accumulate increasing fineness: more discrimination, more perception, more nuanced understandings, more ambiguity.

I think I liked this quote so much because, while Nic and I haven't seen each other in years, most days here I write for the same reasons. The initial aims of freeing a narrative impulse and writing as exercise, and even the subsequent directions of comfort or ties through observation, they're harder for me to find now. The tiny notebooks I carried in my pockets, bags and consoles have been gone for years. A lot of days I get to the evening and can't remember a moment worth capturing.

That memory's wrong — both incorrect and culpable — disappointing. There are always moments worth capturing, and it's an injustice when people dismiss everyday life to nothingness. In that frame, to look to the day and come back empty becomes a failure to serve. And blame could go different ways but shouldn't. The tree-lined river speed drive, any sidewalk-less minor highways and the glass boxes refracting on Outlook and concepts are the environments they always have been, in slipcovers but putting you and I no closer to being Halloween ghosts.

Or the shadows a pile of clothes on the dresser throws up in the dark. We're the ones turning over in bed, with our eyes reset behind their lids in dreams and with minds determined enough to be involuntary, to guerrilla-style glimpse whatever shapes might be worth knowing later. Gray and white and clouds of black, tracking and holding, until what goodness? I'm not sure the pocket notebooks beat the restlessness.

In the order in which I've learned them. (Is this an exercise to help me feel like I know something instead of nothing about this trip? You bet.)

1. Salzburg is in Austria.

2. It's been a long time since the Blessed Sacrament geography bee.

3. The Salzburg Academy on Media & Global Change is not a scam.

4. The Sound of Music owns Salzburg. Don't fight it.

5. The Springsteen tour will be in Spain at the time.

6. Schedule will permit some things but probably not Spain.

7. But the Salzburg summer music festival will be happening.

8. I need to visit the salt mines (and take a picture there), fortress, funicular, Sound of Music tour, Mozart house, and city market.

9. A funicular is not a funnel cake.

10. I need to eat everything else, like chocolate, tortes and pretzels.

11. I'm flying Lufthansa, spelled with a super-quiet "h."

12. Neither my phone nor BlackBerry will work in Salzburg.

13. I don't own a watch, so I'll carry an unusable phone as a watch.

14. Tom Stoppard is going to be in our general vicinity for a week.

15. Traveling to Europe takes as long as traveling to California.

16. My electric razor and unusable phones need a electric converter.

17. My laptop just needs a plug adapter. We'll also root for wireless.

18. Best Buy staff have grown sharper. Radio Shack staff, less so.

19. The Salzburg music festival was the Von Trapp escape scene!

20. I'm gonna be sleepy.

21. Salzburg is currently six hours ahead of the East Coast.

22. Leave 3:20p ET, arr 9:25a local. Leave 8:30a local,  arr 3:15p ET.

23. Temps range from 50 to 80, so I'll need to bring all my clothes.

24. The #1 song is Austria right now is Emilíana Torrini's Jungle Drum.

25. Aka Grey's song when the icicle hits Cristina. Am I ready to go yet?

The hermit crab to which my cousin's son Andrew introduced me at the beach this year was friendly but had no name. The hermit crab was so getting ready to flip that home. In this housing market, you ask? That's what I said. Also, I learned hermit crabs are the sweet potatoes of the crab family. Likeable frauds.

Make the monkey the star. The star. That's all I'm saying. Monkeys are maybe the funniest things in the world. The longer you hide a monkey from your audience, the more frustrated the audience is going to get.

If choose to ignore the monkey for songs about self image, suburban disaffection and life stages, you may even make the audience sad. If your performers sing about waiting for a mail-order monkey, picking at the box the monkey is inside in order to open it and – SPOILER ALERT – mourning the monkey's quick escape, you certainly make me sad.

Giving the monkey a single song? Really? What Am I Doing in This Box is the show's highlight. I'd watch a whole show examining the monkey's life and mail order. Which is what I expect your musical to be. Yes, you follow the writing technique of Chekhov's Monkey, but your monkey ex machina isn't adequate. Get me rewrite and bring me more monkey!

Wondered minutes earlier was I awake, here. Then alarm, little moon.

Absolutely insulting comments in today's Post. If I didn't have other people in my season-ticket package, I'd cancel the damn thing right now. The commenters on the story are similarly fired up over these quotes. Are these guys kidding us? Are they really okay being the biggest losers in baseball? Do they really think the fans are holding them back? The hell with all of them. The apologies better come fast and furious. This is disgusting. We should blast air horns outside their houses until they lose some damn sleep. Losers, every one of them.

Before the game, down in their clubhouse, the Nats did their usual ballplayer things, dressing and watching TV and kibitzing. Willie Harris, a utility player, sang along with Michael Jackson and dismissed the notion that a losing season could dampen his mood: "I'm not going to lose sleep because I lost a ballgame. I lose sleep when my mother's sick."

He turned to Zimmerman and said, "Hey, Zim, do you get bummed out if we lose?"

Not after he leaves the ballpark, the third baseman replied.

Sitting at his locker, Joe Beimel, a relief pitcher, acknowledged that losing can make it tough to get excited about going to work. "I keep saying it can't get any worse, and then something happens," he said. Referring to the fans, Beimel said: "I've been kind of shocked no one gives you a hard time around here. Maybe they just don't care enough."

Somebody doesn't care, Joe. I don't think it's the fans. How this team can find so many ways to break our hearts, I just don't know.

Brother Rob, cousin Greg and boyfriend-of-cousin Matt II joined good natured strangers to catch all kinds of dolphin fish at sea this month. In a Cooper tradition of catching animals other than fish while fishing, my brother caught a bird. But  the bird let go, and everyone was fine.

And I'm going to be away at the beach. So, I'm going to root for rain at Gannett Field while I'm gone. But if it doesn't rain, I hope the team can pull out a couple huge wins. At 5-3, we're the No. 2 seed, and we play the No. 3 IT team on Monday for a spot in the championship game. The winner of our game plays the 7-1 Production/Circ team, whom we beat earlier this year but to whom we lost 15-10 on Monday. Go Sultans go.

Update: I wrote this post weeks ago and forgot to publish it. The Sultans lost but remain victorious in the hearts of good people everywhere.

It's funny as your bookmarks stack up to realize some have collected around a theme. At one end, there's Meghan O'Rourke on Cristina Nehring's A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century. "Nehring yearns for a revival of a messier ardor," O'Rourke says, praising much and questioning a few conclusions. "But Nehring's paean to unconventional ecstasy is a bracing reminder of how narrow and orthodox our vision of love has become," O'Rourke concludes.

Since when are longevity and frictionlessness, Nehring prompts us to ask, themselves a sign of "success"? … Only we can judge how a relationship changes us — what new spaces open up inside ourselves, or how a turbulent encounter may enlarge our view of human nature…

Lastly, O'Rourke calls up excerpts from a poem by Jack Gilbert, "Failing and Flying." The poem's a beautiful read, and the Poetry Foundation has put the full piece online. "Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew. / It's the same when love comes to an end, / or the marriage fails and people say / they knew it was a mistake, that everybody /said it would never work. That she was / old enough to know better. But anything /worth doing is worth doing badly." It goes on, and the end is great.

At the other end of the bookmark stack, there's a message board post from a part-time DJ in Sweden. The guy mentions briefly a story some of us know already — how a conversation with Springsteen outside his hotel in 2005 led to the first playing of Fade Away in 24 years. He goes onto explain how last month he was on a quest for the first E Street run at the song in 28 years. The '80-'81 version is perfectly desperate.

We hear about a talk with Little Steven, a string of shows — "Come the rainiest gig I've ever been to on the 4th. They didn't play it. Come a rainfree but cold gig on the 5th. They didn't play it." — and a sign.

The happy ending to the story is one of the cooler tour moments:

None of these bookmarks are apropo of anything except each other. Next to them, and their love-and-suffering theme, there are bookmarks for "The Poem that Can't Be Written" and a choice Emerson quote, "All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen."

The poem, after a few reads, comes to the same place: "In the poem that cannot / be written there is no danger, / no ponderous cargo of meaning, / no meaning at all. And this / is its splendor, this is how / it becomes an emblem, / not of failure or loss, / but of the impossible." What's beyond what we can see or do or achieve drives us forward, working in the space up to that point. As for what that space is, that nearer side of possibility, nothingness is only one interpretation.

My favorite new metaphor for the financial crisis, in this piece:

Margaret Atwood, in her recent book "Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth," notes that in Aramaic the words for "debt" and "sin" are the same. When we ask for forgiveness from our trespasses or call Christ the Redeemer, we are employing, as she put it, "the language of debt and pawning or pledging." She goes on, "The whole theology of Christianity rests on the notion of spiritual debts and what must be done to repay them, and how you might get out of paying by having someone else pay instead." (By this standard, America really is a Christian nation.) She adds, "It rests, too, on a long pre-Christian history of scapegoat figures — including human sacrifices — who take your sins away from you." For the repayment of our debts, we look to the government, the TARP, you might say, is Jesus.

As for expiation, we endeavor to find the worst offenders, whose transgressions can stand in for everyone's. Atwood discusses a medieval character called a Sin Eater, an outcast who took on the sins of the dying and bore them until another Sin Eater-the greater fool-came along to take them off his hands. (If Sin Eaters existed now, someone would securitize them.)