On this day, July 21st, 2008, I have reached the age of 30.

Looking into the mirror this morning, I strained in search of signs of my body’s increasing decrepitude and infirmity. With some chagrin, I noted the dark areas and wrinkles beneath my eyes, as well as the budding harvest of gray hairs that crown my head with shame. Certain images came to mind as I pondered my body’s inexorable march toward physical decay…

I have to say that, in all seriousness, my 30th birthday finds me in a healthy, happy spirit. I am married to a beautiful, insightful, loving woman who shares and reinforces the values I live by. I am a part of a dynamic, committed church community that rewards and enriches my life in many ways. God has blessed me with a stable career that I love (this is a particularly sweet blessing, given that the first half of my twenties was marked by failure and unhappiness in my professional life). My relationship with God is peaceful and renewing these days, and my intellectual pursuits challenge and inspire me. I love being with my family, I deeply enjoy the company of my friends, and, somewhat less importantly, I have two cats.

Having said all that, it’s important to note that none of that means a thing without this blog. The John Larroquette Project is indisputably the most important thing in my life, without which I would have driven into a ravine years ago.

Seriously people, without this website I am nothing.

So my weekend basically sucked. Here are some notable details:

On Saturday afternoon, while we were out, some lovely individuals broke into our house. They shattered the window slats on our sunroom, cut the screen, and wandered through the house. They rummaged through drawers, and took my new 80 gig iPod. Bridgette was working an overnight shift, so I was alone to deal with the mess and call the police. After the cops left, I realized that they had also taken the spare keys to the house and to our Toyota Camry, along with an extra garage door opener. I called the police with this information, but they got annoyed and told me to call back on Monday so they could file it in the report.

Saturday night was an anxious time. Thankfully, Todd and Adam came over to keep me company, and after securing the house as much as I possibly could, I went over to Kevin’s to spend the night. It sucked, but I read the Bible a lot and talked on the phone to my wife pretty regularly. We were both exhausted from stress, crying, and fear.

I spent Sunday morning working on re-programming the garage door opener and calling around to get quotes on security systems. Around noon, as I was on the phone, I peered out my window and noticed that our garage was opened. Running out the door, I saw that the Camry was gone. In a blind panic, I called 911 and saw that two of my neighbors were already outside on the phone with the police, having watched the whole thing happen themselves. They said three 15 or 16 year old kids with oversized white t-shirts and black do-rags managed to get the garage door open and peel out of the driveway achieving heretofore unknown speeds down the alley with my 2001 Toyota. Stunned, I waited for the police to arrive and we all gave our reports.

(Incidentally, that police officer apologized profusely for taking 10 minutes to get there – he said he was working down near Plymouth and got called up to us because of how drastically undermanned they are. Thanks, Mayor Rybak.)

All things considered, the afternoon was actually pretty cool. My parents showed up, along with my brother, and together we put in new locks to the house, put in a new secure door between the kitchen and sunroom, and made a number of other helpful improvements. It seemed like our whole neighborhood was out and about, talking with us about what happened. I had a hugely encouraging phone conversation with Mark, the pastor at the Rock, who seemed to know just what to say.

Sunday evening around 9, just as we were trying to settle in for a routine evening, our doorbell rang. It was Maria, a 10 year old girl from our neighborhood to tell me that she had seen the three boys break into our house on Saturday and she asked them what they were doing, but they yelled at her, so she was too scared to do anything about it. The whole time we were talking, she was nervously looking over her shoulder down the block. Eventually, she told me that the kids with the oversized white t-shirts and black do-rags were playing basketball down the street. We thanked her, and called 911 again. They said they’d send out a squad car, and we figured that was it.

20 minutes later, the doorbell rang again, and this time it was a police officer. He told me that he had ID’d the three kids, but there wasn’t a ton to hold them on (Maria apparently clammed up in front of the police). He told me they’d get taken in for questioning that night, and that I should call the precinct every day to keep bugging them about my case – the squeaky wheel gets the grease. This didn’t seem very encouraging, so I asked him about the car. He said he’d read a report earlier in the evening that it had been recovered after a brief chase, but that the kids inside scattered. He didn’t know if it was trashed or not, but he didn’t seem particularly hopeful.

I went inside and hugged Bridgette, thankful that at least we were each safe and with one another. Also our cats had not been mutilated beyond recognition.

We’re each feeling a million things right now, and I think it will be a long while before we feel really comfortable about the situation. We know that God allowed this to happen, and we know that ultimately, a ton of people (including Mark) are going through much worse than the expenses and emotional craziness we went through over the last 48 hours. We know we’ll be okay, and that God is good.

Let’s just hope that those three punks in the oversized white t-shirts and black do-rags who like to play basketball at 5315 Fremont Avenue see justice. Maybe I’ve been reading Kevin’s blog too much, but I’m not very optimistic.

Bridgette and I recently engorged ourselves on an opulent pasta-feast at the home of my old friend Adam Betker and his wife. Once the unpleasantries were concluded we retired to the living room and nestled comfortably into their overstuffed sofa. With a knowing smile, Adam popped in a DVD of a project he had just completed.

Backstory: when the Betkers were going to the Rock, he served as Rock TV’s computer animation master. Now in retirement from our ministry and attending another church, he apparently thought it wise to apply his technical wizardry to the world of music videos. I smiled as I realized that he was showing us an unsolicited video he had completed for “First Ship Out”, a song from my album The Silent Era

“First Ship Out” (a song about a girl who falls in love with the wrong guy, though Adam puts a much more literal take on things in the video) was always one of my favorites from that album, so it was fun for me to see somebody’s interpretation of it. I like animation a lot - it’s like a modern take on Terry Gilliam’s old Monty Python bits. Adam was nice enough to give me a copy once he had finished it up, and I was nice enough to put it online and waste 3 minutes of your time with it. So I guess we’re both good guys.

Enjoy!

Hey guys, I’m still having too many ear issues to feel particularly funny this afternoon, but I thought I’d use my normal day off to pass something along to any who might be interested…

Two weekends ago, I was stuck at home, sick as a dog. I sat on my couch, absent-mindedly strumming my guitar and reading Psalms, and a song suddenly popped out. Literally, this song wrote itself in probably two minutes - the words are lifted from Psalm 42. A couple hours later, I recorded a little 4-track demo of it. My voice is pretty weak in it from being sick, but I think that’s part of the appeal of it.

The song is called Hope, and you can download the demo here.

Last evening, I spent three hours engrossed in HBO’s awesome new miniseries, John Adams based on David McCullough’s fine book (which I reviewed here). Thanks to Thom who illegally burned and delivered a DVD of the first three episodes to me, I was able to sit in the warm comforts of my cable-less home and thank Providence for using Thom’s illicit piracy operation to bless me so bountifully.

Featuring Paul Giamatti as the intelligent yet stubborn Adams, and Tom Wilkinson as the crafty Ben Franklin, the cast for this film could only have been improved with the inclusion of Harrison Ford has a gruff, finger-pointing Alexander Hamilton.

With HBO’s financing and Tom Hanks as executive producer, the production and attention to detail was excellent - reminiscent of HBO’s earlier Band of Brothers, only with fewer explosions and more petticoats. Episode 2 was particuarly inspiring, as you watch Adams push the Continental Congress toward independance while Franklin tries to quietly keep the ship together and Thomas Jefferson stuns the both of them with his first draft of the Declaration. The only way this could have been better is if Chris Tucker would have been there to make fun of everything.

The filmmakers wisely don’t obscure Adams’s deeply held religious convictions and devote quite a bit of time to an examination of his famously loving marriage with Abigail. I was particularly touched by their famous letters to each other when reading the book, and their moments together thus far in the film have been among my favorites. She was a woman admired by Adams’s contemporaries (probably more than he was, to be honest) for her wit, intelligence, and fierce loyalty to her husband.

She was also super hot, for a 1700s chick.

At any rate, this miniseries has now been graced with the official JLP Stamp of Approval. Let me know if you want to watch it with me sometime - maybe we could arrange a historical viewing party where we all dress up in britches and watch it together and get smallpox.

And if you have HBO, tune in this Sunday for episode 4, when John Adams invents drugs.

I had another goofy post all lined up for this morning, but it will have to wait. Last night on our date, Bridgette and I saw one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.

We went down to the IMAX theater at the Minnesota Zoo and saw U2:3D.

The title more or less explains the the movie was about. National Geographic Films has come up with a new technology for 3D, and this is its first use in a live action film. From the moment the concert began and the Edge appeared to walk 4 feet from me and play the guitar riff for “Vertigo”, we were blown away. I spontaneously uttered, “holy crap…” and smiled for the next 85 minutes.

My problem with “3D” movies in the past is that
a) the colors always seemed to look a bit messed up, and
b) the image didn’t look three-dimensional, it looked like multiple “planes” of two-dimensional images.

This technology suffered neither of those problems. It felt so real and lifelike that it gave me the actual kinetic rush that you feel when you meet somebody famous. The sense memories of the U2 concerts I’d attended in the past came rushing back, except this time I wasn’t stuffed in amongst sweaty men and people obnoxiously texting their friends. Instead, I was sitting there, transfixed by the intimacy and sweep of the film, and counting the hairs on the Edge’s forearm. It felt like what people first must have experienced when sound movies premiered in 1927, and I’m being totally serious about that.

Checking out some review sites this morning, I noted that the film has a remarkable 94 rating on rottentomatoes.com, and USA Today writes:

It’s U2 writ XXL, not just visually and sonically but emotionally and theatrically. In keeping with the band’s tech-savvy tours, high-def never overwhelms high drama, nor does the razzle-dazzle drain the ritual of its intimacy or fraternal spirit.

Now, some of you might be saying to yourself, “Sure you loved it Peter, you’re a huge U2 fan.” Yes, that no doubt played a big part of it, and the strength of those songs added an emotional wallop that made the experience that much more remarkable. However, that could have been Dexys Midnight Runners on that screen, and they would have become my new favorite band. As a matter of fact, the prospect of seeing “Come On, Eileen” being performed in lifelike 3D is enough to make me shit down my pants.

The movie is playing at the Apple Valley IMAX for the next couple weeks - consider checking it out there. If not, it will be opening at a number of other conventional theaters on February 15th. I would be happy to accompany you, so long as you do not tell my wife about this, as she would yell at me again.