I’ve been back from Ukraine for exactly a week now. The jetlag is gone, my coats and boots are packed away and the sounds of that beautiful place are fading.

Left are the memories, photos and one wicked-huge bottle of pepper vodka.

More thoughts on my amazing trip soon. In the mean time, hit up my flickr album of all the photos, and soon, videos.

Testing my fancy new Android wp app

Hello dear readers. You’ve stuck with me through years of deep thoughts, drunken ramblings and the occasional “wtf was he thinking.” In order to repay you, I’ve giving you the opportunity to make one helluva impact on a wonderful 3-year-old and his terrific family. If you haven’t already, I’ll wait while you read the above poster.

That cute (and fashionable) kid above is Lucas, and Lucas is set for a bone marrow transplant in January, not to mention a long recovery period. His mom and dad, both cute and fashionable kids themselves, will be moving from Jacksonville to North Carolina to be with him during the procedure. Not fun for anyone involved, but their spirits are high and their souls are lusty.

If you happen to be in Jacksonville or the area on Dec. 17, stop by Bold City Brewery and have a beer. They’re donating $1 from every pour to Lucas’ benefit. You can also donate, send a well wish or just see a bunch of cute photos of Lucas until you feel compelled to donate or send a well wish. Your call.

With the din of bad news flying about lately, good news inherits an extra coat or two of gloss, so allow me to brag for a moment.

The Times-Union, Jacksonville.com and our primary Twitter feed, @jaxdotcom, won this year’s Folio Best Of awards for local news website and local twitter account. Not a meaningless distinction I assure you, considering the contest is voted on by Folio’s entire First Coast audience and Folio’s generally boot-in-the-ass approach to the Times-Union.

Congrats to those who won this award. Who, to be clear, is not those of us maintaining the website or Twitter feeds, but those lusty souls who continue to produce compelling and meaningful content in the midst of constant change and uncertainty.

Here’s the brief, epic and entirely missed connection between your lovely host and one of his favorite bands.

The Walkmen opened for the Fleet Foxes in Jacksonville this Tuesday night. Luis and I bought tickets months ago. The Fleet Foxes are great and all, but The Walkmen is who we wanted to see. The Rat, Victory, Angela Surf City, While I Shovel The Snow. Yeah, awesome, all of it.

This story begins at Indochine, a Thai restaurant in downtown Jacksonville. Diana and I were seated super-late, about 10 minutes until 8 (when The Walkmen were scheduled to take the stage) and Luis and Beth managed to join us while we ate. Figuring no-one in the history of music has ever started a concert on time, we enjoyed our beers and satay.

I noticed two guys sitting two tables away. The one facing me caught my attention because he was kinda gangly (like me), ginger (like me) and wearing a khaki suit that can only be described as perfectly bedraggled, like he spent a lot of money to look so unkept. I also noticed that two buttons were missing from his right suit jacket.

Blah blah, whatever. I know you’re judging me for noticing his suit jacket buttons. But I notice that sort of stuff, OK?

Missing jacket buttons and his tablemate left a few minutes before 8. We finished 30 minutes later and made it to The Florida Theatre not long after, only to realized we missed The Walkmen set. Crushing loneliness set in.

Fortunately, the Fleet Foxes were as amazing in person as everyone says and our worries drifted away in Ragged Wood and $7 pours of Johnnie Walker Black…until I checked the photo gallery from the show on Jacksonville.com

Above, my friends, is the photo of my favorite frontman playing his concert at The Florida Theatre in Jacksonville. Two buttons missing from the right jacket of his perfectly formless khaki suit. Ugh.

Chalk this one under the Missed Connections section of your favorite local alternative weekly. “Ginger with all of his buttons looking for ginger missing two buttons.”

If you’re a close friend, you’ve heard this story before, so close this tab and tune back next week when I discuss how uncomfortable the word “taint” (in all uses) makes me.

New visitors and non-friends, here we go.

Nuinca is the phonetic translation of a Romanian phrase for “Not yet”. It’s not that I love the phrase, but I do love the flow of the letters, and hell, having a six-letter URL is awesome. If you happen to be married to a Romanian *cough*, Nuinca is pronounced “New-Inca”, but whatever, it’s my word now so pronounce it however you’d like.

There’s another reason behind the Nuinca madness. This guy (I refuse to his name here, in fear of cross-tainting my SEO with his) happens to share my name, along with at least one accomplished novelist, a British parliamentarian and some guy who created the AutoIt automation language.

So there’s your explanation. Google Jonathan Bennett and you’ll get dozens of pages of ugh. Google Nuinca and you’ll get exact what you’re looking for.

Regardless of how the details above change, I’m always nervous before my travels. Within the last 18 months I’ve had the fortune to visit the soaringly beautiful Guatemala, the bottomless expanse of the Grand Canyon (while snowing!), a surprisingly sunny Seattle and the drum-circle-and-hackey-sack crunchiness of Asheville.

All of them started the same way; travelling-induced insomnia and a huge appreciation for what might next be. How often am I introduced to truly new situations? How often am I expected to spend x days on somebody else’s turf, in a new city, a new state? It’s all fantastic, really. I haven’t done enough travel to be satisfied (will I ever?), but as long as pre-flight nights are long and nervous, I know my excitement to chase that ghost is still here.

See you in Chicago*

——————-

*please don’t break into my house and steal all my stuff or I’ll have El Train come visit you in the night.

He and I had been parts of another team for the past three years, but we always felt we could summon the collective might of our friends and make the movie always lingering in our minds.

So we did. Pierce from Columbia, Ren from LA, Forrest from Doucheville, Nathan from SmokedatShitistan and others gathered this year for 48 hours of mayhem. How did we do? Allow me to illustrate.

That’s us freaking out at the rough edit. Joy, love, hugs, boners and so on. Smug superiority doesn’t come close to how Luis and I approached our screening night. We had been through this before and this time we were bringing with us a product capable of crushing the competition. As we predicted, it wasn’t even close.

But we didn’t make the top 5 Jacksonville films. I’m not fully self-aware enough yet to truly say why. It’s always easy to blame the judges or the moon phases or the judges being absolute cocks or small mindedness, or the judges being blind, rabid quasi-intellectuals with training diapers and meth addictions, but we remain an also-ran team. Le sigh.

What I do know is that 16 people crowded into our house one weekend to make a movie. What we all left with was one the sort of time that sure as shit makes a top 5 list for each and every one of us.

Go, team boner tears!

“That is why there are no glorious living, but only glorious dead. Heroes turn traitor, warriors age and grow soft – but a victim is changeless, sacrifice is eternal.”

Beautiful.