Yes, it is a season of great change in the Cooper household. New TV, new stand, new phone (post to come), and a new desk chair. The new chair arrived months ago, but the old chair has been slow in departing.

The old chair has sat by the windows and watched the leaves fall and the days grow shorter. I thought I might find fresh purpose for the old chair. But in a studio apartment, there is only so much room, and there can only be so many chairs. In a horribly twisted game of furniture, the studio's constraints force the chairs themselves to play musical chairs.

We go back a long way, the old chair and me. After we met just before college, in '98, the chair has come with me to: Evanston, Washington, Evanston, Washington, Evanston, St. Petersburg (I think?), Evanston, Washington, Evanston, Atlanta, Washington, Silver Spring, and finally Arlington. Oh, the stories that chair could tell. The seat doesn't go up and down any more. Screw tops and then screws have fallen out. The front of the cushion is worn from the back of my knees, trying to write a next word, anxious, fidgeting without thinking, for almost 12 years.

With sadness, I ask the old chair to show itself out. The chair rides the elevator, in silence, to the ground floor and rolls to the loading docks. I help it leap into the waiting Dumpster. I turn away and don't look back.

In honor of today's double rainbow over our fair city, I'm starting a blog category devoted to them. The photos this blog can blog when this blogger has a phone that can take decent photos with speed…

I was out sick today, fighting a vicious cold, but Twitter tells me they announced a "rainbow alert" on the NPR intercom system. Well done.

On a Thursday evening after work, Lori and I drove up to Asbury Park, New Jersey. We stopped for crab cakes at Chesapeake House, found a string of Christmas stations on the radio and got in late. There was no signage outside the hotel, and workout professionals were wrapping up their holiday party, spilling into the lobby with shouts and big hair.

We were glad to be in New Jersey, with this glowing down the street.

In the morning, we had the boardwalk and the ocean to ourselves.

We proceeded to explore the town, once a bustling shore destination, then a ruin, now a comeback, with music, antiques and art as draws. 

We were there primarily for the music — Gaslight Anthem in its native Jersey, on a Friday night, one last concert before recording anew, in Asbury Park Convention Hall, built in 1927 and somehow still standing. 

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But the yarn snowman knows.

And so does this guy, whoever he is.

Tigers!

Friend Max designed this year-end rock shirt, and digital bosses gave it to us. It immediately became the NPR T-shirt I'm mostly likely to wear.

Yes, take my photo at 9:15 a.m. as I rush to finish holiday shopping. I may look sleepy and confused, but that's just how I like my photos.

Take my picture before you break me, that's what I always say. Like, if you're the Newseum, don't let me enter the gift shop from the outside. That would be too easy and not make you, Newseum, enough money.

To get to the gift shop to buy holiday presents, send me through full museum security. On my way to work, have me take off my coat, empty my pockets, walk through the scanner, and let two guards each take a bag of mine and work them over. Then help reassemble my bags and have another staffer take my picture in front of a big green screen. At 9:15, rushing to the gift shop before work, this is exactly what I want.

Later, on the Web, attempt to charge me $30 for a digital copy. Hope I don't hit Print Screen and paste into Microsoft Paint! Oh no, too late.

Then direct me to the Newseum admission desk where, in order to get to the Newseum gift shop, I must sign in. There is no way to get to the gift shop without fully entering the museum. But then raise the stakes. When I get to the admission desk, tell me the gift shop isn't open yet. The Newseum opens at 9. The Newseum gift shop doesn't open 'til 10. Guess which fact the museum doesn't post on its site? At the holidays, why would you want to make it easy for people to shop at your store?

"Leaving already?" the photo-taker asked.

What a fail. Tweeted the Newseum, heard nothing back. Friends and I brainstormed later about the metaphors — legacy media and paywalls, usability and failing. I finished my Christmas list at search-free stores. Happy holidays, Newseum, at $21.95 a head. Best of luck in 2012.

One of my favorite New Yorker writers is Aleksandar Hemon. He finds a balance between detail and emotion few others do. In the December 5 issue of the magazine (yet another famous Cooper Conde comeback is underway), Hemon writes "Mapping Home." The piece at first appears to be a story about Sarajevo, but it shifts into a story about Sarajevo and Chicago and about broader personal eras. You could replace the cities with your lovers and friends. But you wouldn't want to replace them entirely, as places and people catch up in each other so tightly.

The story ends up the magazine's most evocative in a while, for me at least. Strong emotion on a subway platform is surprising but welcome. The piece is behind a mag paywall here but generously retyped here.

An excerpt:

In my ambulatory expeditions, I became acquainted with Chicago, but I did not yet know the city. The need to know it in my body, to locate myself in the world, had not been satisfied. I did not know how to live in Chicago, how to communicate with it in the urban language I had acquired at home. The American city was organized in a fundamentally different way from Sarajevo. (A few years later, I would find a Bellow quotation that perfectly encapsulated my feeling about the city at the time: "Chicago was nowhere. It had no setting. It was something released into American space.")

In the Sarajevo I knew, you possessed a personal infrastructure: your kafana, your barber, your butcher, the landmarks of your life (the spot where you fell and broke your arm playing soccer, the comer where you waited to meet the first of the many loves of your life, the bench where you first kissed her); the streets where people would forever know and recognize you, the space that identified you. Because anonymity was well nigh impossible and privacy literally incomprehensible (there is no word for "privacy" in Bosnian), your fellow Sarajevans knew you as well as you knew them. If you somehow vanished, your fellow citizens could have reconstructed you from their collective memory and the gossip that had accrued over years. Your sense of who you were, your deepest identity, was determined by your position in a human network, whose physical corollary was the architecture of the city.

Chicago, on the other hand, was built not for people to come together but for them to be safely apart. Size, power, and the need for privacy seemed to be the dominant elements of its architecture. Vast as it was, Chicago ignored the distinctions between freedom and isolation, between independence and selfishness, between privacy and loneliness. In this city, I had no human network within which to place myself. My displacement was metaphysical to precisely the same extent to which it was physical. But I couldn't live nowhere. I wanted from Chicago what I had got from Sarajevo: a geography of the soul.

Today is the first day of winter, a day offering more darkness than any other day of the year. Which is terrible. But for today, I offer this song.

The St. Louis Symphony performed Take Me Out to the Ballgame last fall on the way to the Cardinals' World Series victory. I wasn't a fan of the Cards, but I respected them. But this rendition was one of the best I'd ever heard — "ferociously precise," Alex Ross called it — and it seemed the version to bring us out of winter sooner rather than later. Play ball!

Take that, winter.

Conversation on train with a woman presumably suffering from mental illness immediately following a wave goodbye from the woman above:

"Are you happy?"
"Yes!"
"Are you a conservative racist?"
"No?"
"Well maybe I misjudged you."

Thank you.