vulcan high five

Sorry not to have posted in a while. Connie and I have been busy being idiots in Australia. In lieu of a blogpost, you get my diary.

Thursday, September 17, 2009, 10:48am
Waiting at Tullamarine Airport for our flight to Cairns

This is what we have done in the last few days. We got in on Monday at 10:45am after a fourteen hour flight from Los Angeles followed by a two hour flight from Sydney. On the fourteen hour flight, Connie and I watched Star Trek, the best movie on the planet, and devised a special Vulcan high five to celebrate Starfleet victories. We learned that the in-flight entertainment system permitted IMming between seats, and Connie wrote me immediately to say, “God these kids are so annoying.” There were six kids sitting next to us. We slept, and also played cards. I had told Sonia about my plan to surprise Connie with the $4.99 pack of cards that I had refused to buy from the newsstand. Sonia had said, “What is the point of your performance?” Art, Cup!!! The point was to entertain Connie, and it worked.

Waiting for our flight at Sydney, I found a discarded Daily Telegraph and we read it and learned about Australian culture, which is exactly the same as American culture except in their version of football the ball has rounded ends, and about Serena Williams’ outburst against the line judge in the semifinals of the U.S. Open. We have so far repeated the phrase “If I could, I would shove this fucking tennis ball down your fucking throat and kill you” thousands of times, and taken pictures of ourselves posing with tennis ball packages at W Mart saying the same.

We took the shuttle in from Tullamarine to the city, saying that we had spent a thousand dollars and taken a fourteen hour plane ride to land in Missouri. I am convinced that the fourteen hours in flight we just circled over the Midwest before touching down in St. Louis. We ate soft serves at Hungry Jack’s, which is Burger King. I just looked over at Connie just now and told her that my bowel movements were “All or nothing,” meaning I have been drinking lots of milk trying to induce diarrhea since apparently I can purge no other way. Connie method of dealing with me has been to ignore me, which I just think is funny. She has pointed out that I say “Stupid!” in a disdainful tone of voice about Richard quiet a lot, which I do, and which is surprising to Connie because I am careful not to express disdain about the other people in my life. I do this to Richard when he says genuinely stupid things, like when talking about a Victoria’s Secret model who apparently has "not only a perfect body but a really cute face too." I like that when I said “Stupid!” about this particular comment, he insisted that I look before I judge, as if I called him stupid because I disbelieved his assessment of her hotness rather than because he was being a stupid gross boy (and in front of his girlfriend, too!).

Anyway, let me recount our activities before I forget. On Monday, we first dropped off our stuff at Richard and Aimee’s apartment right in the central business district. They live in a nice new apartment building with a small pool and gym and central heating and carpeting and other nice things. They had bought a bed at Ikea just for me and Connie, which was really sweet of them. Richard’s apartment was full of Gloomy toys that Richard had won at a midway arcade in Sydney. [Incidentally, I just went to this arcade and lost $5 trying to win a digital camera to replace Powershot. Sorry I didn't get it, Con!] Connie and I posed pretending to eat their giant plush hamburger, their giant plush ramen box, and their giant plush yang le duo. Our favorite activity thus far has been posing like idiots and taking photos next to statues, sculptures, signs, etc. Then we had sandwiches at the café down the street from the apartment. I learned that a "flat white" is milk with a drop of espresso in it. Then we walked down through the tiny CBD, to the library to see Ned Kelly’s armor (Ned Kelly being an asshole who killed three cops and made armor out of ploughboards and then became a figure of heroic libertarian antiauthoritarianism), to Chinatown for a pearl milk tea, to Flinders Street Station, to Federation Square, to Richard’s dental office. Along the way, Richard acted as a tour guide and made pronouncements, a third of which were informative, a third of which were wrong (such as his declaration that Max Brenner was a Sydney shop), and a third of which were just plain crazy (such as making up shit about deadly “drop bears” that drop from branches onto the heads of unsuspecting, gullible tourists).

Richard no longer does drill-and-fill dentistry but orthodontics now. [ . . . ] Richard strapped our heads into a standing x-ray kiosk and took three-dimensional x-rays of our heads that produced many creepy and wonderful images, such as colored 3D images of our skulls and bones that could be scrolled through like a Google map. Richard talked to Connie for a long time about the source of her jaw pain. He noted that Connie’s TMJs are unevenly spaced. He then looked at my x-rays and said that we have the same problem with the collapsed arch at the front of our upper jaws, and pointed out that my sinuses are “huge,” occupying much of the space where my brain should be. The roots of my molars poke up into my sinuses, actually. There was a set of toy teeth that chattered when wound up. It had feet.

We then walked to the top of the Shrine of Remembrance. Richard complained that the walk was “Really, really far away, like thirty minutes.” It was half a mile and about ten minutes away from his workplace. Richard also wanted to take a tram four blocks down LaTrobe street to his apartment, because the road was “uphill.” Richard is the O.G. lazy fucker; I realize this is why Oliver seems so familiar to me, because he is just like my brother! At the Shrine, we tried to decipher the three flags on the flagpoles, then we stood at attention while the Australian flag came down. The hapless soldier first allowed the flag to drap in an undignified, curtain-like manner over his head, and then to drag on the ground. Some French people failed to stay silent and stand for the flag ceremony, which caused Richard to curse at them in Chinese. Richard says “we” when he means Australia. I think it just means that he is proud to live here.

It was so sweet and nice that we hung out for three days, and that Richard had prepared the room and had specially bought wines for me and Connie to try, and that he wanted to show us all his pictures from New Zealand and the videos of the Japanese spitz they had for four weeks, and take us through his daily life on Google Maps’ street view of Sydney, and that he shared his special peatsmoke-infused expensive whiskeys. I also find Richard really funny, such as when was making fun of a post-pregnancy, newly-fat Kimora Lee Simmons by calling her “gravid,” which describes lobsters who carry egg sacs around their exoskeletons, and appreciate that we actually have similar tastes and experiences (such as when he sings “I have no legs” and I can follow up by making the sound of coins rattling around a can, a Kids reference). He also told me that he remembered the day that we heard the news that our grandfather died, and how Mom was leaning against the wall crying and Dad was crying hysterically. This was 1983, so I don’t remember any of it, but he was almost six then, so his memory is better. He also remembered them crying about Tiananmen Square. We have actually shared a lot as siblings even though we have not been in the same place in a few years. [ . . . ] Connie and I have been talking about the best strategy for convincing Richard that two more years of school is not a prohibitive reason not to move back to America. I have been applying the Hu method of criticism (e.g. "Stop being stupid and move back to America"), but Connie suggests less vinegar, more sugar. It was nice also to spend time with Aimee, whom I like because she laughs at every single thing I say, and because she is really generous with her time and did incredibly thoughtful things like pack us food for our day trip and wake up earlier to cook dan bing for us.

Back to the recollection of the days. On Monday, after the Shrine, we took a tram back to their apartment. I had to ask for change from a stranger since the ticket machine did not take bills, so I applied my Yankee charm and confessed to being a stupid tourist. I am holding up my end of the bargain I struck with Connie: she makes travel decisions, I talk to strangers. We relaxed in the apartment for a bit watching some television, and then walked past Victoria market to get Korean barbecue. We crashed.

On Tuesday, we woke around 4:30a and slept fitfully until 6, and then had breakfast with Richard and Aimee. Aimee steamed us chao shao baos – more thoughtfulness! After they left, Connie and I ventured out to find Pancake Parlour, which we had difficulty finding because it was on Bourke Street, not Little Bourke Street, which was labeled “Lt. Bourke Street,” which Connie and I both thought was Bourke Street because we just assumed that Bourke had been a lieutenant. At Pancake Parlour, we had Ragu sauced poured into a pancake that cost us $30. Then we walked down the Yarra River, a closed Ferris Wheel, and then the Melbourne Cricket Ground. There we posed as cricket bowlers and batters, and then tried to charm our way into the stadium (failing), and then proceeded to touch every single thing in the gift shop, including stressball versions of cricket balls and Australian footballs, giant pencils, loser team jerseys, and keychains. We grilled the cashier about who to root for for the upcoming finals. I have chosen the Bulldogs because the other team, the Pies (Magpies), is the Yankees of Australian football.

Then we met Richard for lunch. We went to his workplace, which was very busy. I liked seeing Richard in his business wear, but I criticized him for his pineapple hair, which made him a little prickly (HAHAHA). I saw him leaning down and talking to a little boy about orthodontics, which I liked. I said to the receptionists, “I am here to see Dr. Richard Hu…my brother!” and everyone laughed. We had Thai food that gave me diarrhea in forty minutes. In those forty minutes, Connie and I walked to the Victoria markets and bought fruit. Then we went back to the apartment. Connie fell asleep and I had diarrhea and then watched half of The Fellowship of the Ring, and then all of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and remembered the very important role that franchise played in forming my curiosity about the world and about travel and my romantic but completely unrealistic expectations for the weirdness of faraway cultures. Richard and Aimee came home, and we watched Twilight, with Richard making disdainful comments about having butt sex with Edward Cullen. It was his way of expressing displeasure about Aimee’s crush on Robert Pattinson. He also muttered, "Why didn't I delete this movie?" right when Edward Cullen and Bella started to suck face. I realized that that movie is terrible but perfect, and I instructed Richard to pay attention because that movie represented everything that a woman wants, including a lover whose desire for you so overwhelms him that he shakes and furrows his brow when he finally kisses you. Later, Aimee was singing along to the Iron and Wine song, and from the toilet, Richard called out a low, reprimanding, “Aimee.” This was very funny. We ate noodles and crepes, and then bought a pillow from W mart and came home to sleep.

On Wednesday, yesterday, Connie and I did a twelve hour nausea tour of rocks along the Pacific Coast Highway a.k.a. the Great Ocean Road. A nice Irish woman named Imelda whom I was sure was going to elope with Peter our tour guide gave me a tab of ginger to ease my roiling stomach, and the LA girls sitting behind us gave me two ibuprofen tabs to help me with my sinus headache. Connie says I am hypochrondriac and that learning that I have huge sinuses has made me believe I have sinusitis, but it is true that I have sinusitis. The views were spectacular in exactly the same way that views along all of the California coast are spectacular, so Connie and I grumbled all day about this. We counted time by saying, “It is now 11 a.m., and we have an entire workday of nausea ahead of us” or “It’s noon, so it’s as if we have just finished reading nytimes.com for the first time in the workday and we still have a workdaylong of nausea ahead of us.” We continued in our tradition of taking idiotic pictures and complaining. I did a b-boy freeze on a post and Connie pretended to eat two of the Twelve Apostles. Connie paid $3.90 AUD for a Sprite. I told her about my “What the fuck!?” reaction I had to the first time I had an orgasm, which she thought was extremely funny. We returned to Melbourne at 8p, bought wine and Jack Squire porter (pretty good! No head, though) for Richard and then half-assedly watched Blood Diamond with Richard and Aimee and did Aimee’s MASH for her (Brooklyn, Brad Pitt, three children, one of which will be named “Panda”). We watched video footage from Richard and Aimee doing their bungee jumps in New Zealand, and laughed at Richard’s rag doll fall off the ledge and Aimee’s screaming. Richard poured out two wines and a whiskey for us to try.

Today I took a jog around Flagstaff Gardens while Connie woke up, and then we got ourselves to the airport. We got here two hours early, and I have been writing and drinking milk in an effort to induce diarrhea.

I have also discovered that there is no Dr. Pepper in this country so the pepperoni pizza Combos I bought in LAX are still going unpaired with their perfect complement.

kimora

Richard is describing Kimora Lee Simmons being fat as "gravid," like a lobster. Lobsters that are gravid are pregnant with egg sacs around their abdomens. Now he is telling us about a documentary he saw about it and is acting out lobsters dancing on the beach and shaking out their eggs.

MASH on the great ocean road

Here in Melbourne at Richard and Aimee's for only a few more hours. I will blog more about C and me getting our heads 3D x-rayed by Dr. Richard on the first day and discovering that my sinuses occupy roughly one third of the volume of my head, repeating the phrase "If I could, I would take this fucking tennis ball and shove it down your fucking throat and kill you" about a thousand times, taking photos pretending to eat Richard and Aimee's amazing collection of oversized plus food simulacra, and other Aussie adventures, tomorrow from Tullamarine Airport. Until then, let me leave you with the insights I have gained on the Australian accent:

- Short "e" and "i" sounds are pronounced like the long "e" sound

- "O" is a dipthong pronounced "oir"

- "Er" is non-rhotic ("uh")

- The long "i" sound is not exactly "eye" like the American "I," but more like "oy"

The best way to practice the accent is to repeat the phrase "Like a bridge over troubled water." Say it: "Loike I breedge oiva trebled wadda." Try it! Also, the phrases "We are going to recycle some bottles in Cairns" and "We are going to recycle some bottles and cans" have exactly the same pronounciation. Furthermore, today C and I did each other's MASHs on our twelve hour bus tour of rocks along the Victoria coast. In the future, C will be living in a shack in the Great Barrier Reef with Edward Cullen, enjoying her second career as a fishmonger. She will have an internet affair with Takeshi Kaneshiro eight times a week. An interest she will unexpectedly develop in her 40s will be making wire bicycles. She will hike the Appalachian Trail. I will be living in a house in Brooklyn with Olympia and working as an untenured professor of English at a community college. I will have a constant, one-sided love affair with OZ. I will take up antiquing and will raise well-behaved, conscientious children. Now we are doing Aimee's MASH. Will update on the results soon.

venice beach

I'm not starting work until November 30 so I have some time to travel. For the last week I was in North Carolina feeling so much love for a person it was at times literally nauseating; at other times it felt like being supine with a hippo standing on my chest; but most of the time it felt like riding a beach cruiser in the surf with a warm tailwind on a sunny day. More on this later.

Right now I am in J's place in Venice. J and E picked me up from LAX last night saying that they had almost gotten into four car accidents in the hundred yards of the arrivals loading zone, including with one cab driver who looked over and gesticulated with two fingers at his eyes in the "Look where you're going, asshole!" style. We stayed up in J and R's apartment taking turns with the guitar (E: Buddy Holly and Willie Nelson covers; J: two JayMay covers; me: two originals from The Cleaver Streeters' repertoire) and very slowly drinking gin and tonics. J is doing fine in her doctoral program but suddenly thinking about being a doctor; E just left television writing for comedic film writing and is already wildly, wildly successful; she left early to rest for her Saturday meeting with a very famous ex-SNL actress-turned-film-star who is shepherding her newest screenplay.

J and R and I walked the dog around the neighborhood and J invited me to sniff a large white ginger flower, which produced a scent like falling in love for the first time. We passed by another man with a dog who pet J's dog and kept saying, "You look just like Bambi. You reincarnation - you look just like Bambi." Then I spent the night on the click futon with a golden pit bull mouth-breathing on the Ikea Poang next to my head. This morning J and R and I walked to a coffee shop where the baristas and baristos all wore black vests and tattoos and served espresso drinks with great flair. We passed by a Gold's Gym and they told me about a man who walks up and down Venice Beach boardwalk in an American flag speedo, white socks, and white tennis shoes, and invites tourist ladies to walk arm-in-arm with him down the path; apparently Speedo Man also works out at Gold's Gym at midnight on weeknights.

Later we walked the three blocks from their house to the beach, passing by a woman who sat in her fenced-off front yard and passively sold billowing batik shirts and a hundred people with skin of sunny cowhide. I told J and R about S, and J recalled that she had excellent, "voluminous" hair and perfect skin, and was skinny and smiley. She remembered what S wore on the day we went to improv comedy in July 2007, the same day that J and R mocked us for realizing we knew the same person with the same highly-trafficked political blog. We lay on a king-sized towel looking at the surf. J and R are both surfers. R is newly interested in sailing, and as we lay on the towel he explained the semaphores for different types of storms: one red triangle for small craft warning, two for storm warning, one square red flag with a black square for gale force winds, two such flags for hurricanes. R explained the concept of a nautical mile.

R left for his job; J and I bobbed in the surf and she taught me how to dive under breakers. I still got swept up in a couple and tumbled all around in a panic, so we were not in the water long before I wanted to go back to shore and drain my sinuses of saltwater. On the sand we talked about readiness for relationships and R's family; on the boardwalk we walked along eating badly melted ice cream, buying miniature bicycles made of twisted wire, touching knick knacks, and fondling $5 underwear in the American Apparel factory outlet store. We passed by a medicinal marijuana store, and J opined, with no basis of knowledge, that all marijuana did was make a person speak in a whisper and then apologize profusely for speaking too loud.

We shuffled in sandals back to her apartment and then shuffled around Venice eating things and looking in stores. J bought a ridiculous pair of slippers covered in beaded tendrils, and I bought a tin of anchovies for the plane ride to Melbourne. Back at the apartment, J spent a few minutes researching used hybrid bikes and I strummed some disgusting sounding chords on the guitar. Now J is on the guitar playing Ben Harper ("This guitar is impossible to play," she has just said, and now, strangely, "Hey, this piece of muscle is riding a bike like the one you just bought! This piece of muscle is taking the path of least resistance for powerful treatment of insulin resistance!" (her atlas is pharmaceutical swag from her surgeon father, and its cover depicts of muscle cell riding a teal bicycle)) and I am ticking away on this tiny laptop.

I'm meeting C in 2.5 hours for our 20 hours of flying and laying over. First, I must go eat ramen. This city is paradise! I will write next from Melbourne.

national park

Here: a very, very long way of saying that I had a good time in Colorado. Read if you'd like.

On Thursday, I biked west on Highway 160 to Mesa Verde. I woke early, dawdled, talked to Terry, and then packed up my stuff and rolled my bike down Goeglein Gulch Road. It wasn't until about 9:15 a.m. that I started my trip; knowing what I know now about how hot it gets between 2 and 5 p.m. here, I would tell that unsunburnt, untired enthusiastic Thursday morning biker to start a few hours earlier to avoid the midafternoon brain bake. And how I baked on Thursday. It got to be about 85-90 degrees by midafternoon, with no shade at all in sight, only tan ground covered in low scrub oak at the side of a two- to four-lane highway with cars going by around 75mph. The scenery was lovely - first curving around the edge of the San Juan Mountains, then down through the Mancos River Valley, then the long downhill approach to Mesa Verde and then the final climb up through the sandstone and shale verticality of the park - but the speed of the cars and the poor quality of the shoulder, which varied from a comfortable 6-7 feet to a frightening foot or so in the descent into Montezuma County, made it hard for me to think of anything else except my proximity to death. Drafts from semis blasted me off the shoulder. I was already feeling pretty shaky because the panniers rattle at high speeds and make my handlebars wiggle under my hands. I braked a lot on the descents - probably didn't get going much over 25mph, although there were places that a better biker could have just gone screaming downhill.

I made stops in Durango West, an eight-mile climb out of Durango, to sit in the shade of the post office boxes and eat granola, in Hesperus, the peak of the eleven-mile uphill west of Durango, to eat a chili dog, 20 oz. of Dr. Pepper, and a king-sized Snickers ice cream bar, Target Tree Campground, the midway point between Durango and Mesa Verde, to stand under a pine tree, and Mancos, a town ten miles away from Morefield Campground, for chai with soymilk and a Colorado peach. By the time I got to Mancos, around 3pm, I was worried about brain damage. I had a headache and I couldn't cool myself down. I had slathered sunblock all over myself, but I was sunburnt all over anyway, and the spots I had neglected (under my wristwatch and the top of my left ear) were glowing pink. I also don't believe that sunblock is sweatproof; as the sweat beaded up along my arm, I could see the chalky substance lifting away from my skin. Maybe I shouldn't have mocked Olympia so mercilessly for her SPF 30 long-sleeve travel shirt.

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At 4 p.m., I rode down the final stretch of the Mancos River Valley before hitting the turnoff to Mesa Verde. It was flat scrubby land with ranches on either side of the road, and a roadside store selling Indian trinkets with 20' fake arrows shooting into the ground. I got to the base of Mesa Verde, snapped a few photos of my bike and peed behind the National Park sign, scattered some skinks to sit in the shade, and poured water on my head for a few moments before attempting the last four miles up into the campground. I had thought earlier that it was only my aerobic fitness holding me back, but by then my muscles were also spent and I was tired as hell. The grade was very steep, as it was the approach up into the mesa. I walked the bike for three of the four miles. Cars drove past me and the drivers either looked puzzled or delighted. I got lots of thumbs ups. I got into the campground 50 minutes after entering the park and then fell down on the gravel pad of my campsite and poured water on myself until the sun went down; I wasn't able to function until the heat receded.

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The campground was huge: there were apparently 400 campsites stretched along two miles of road. It was also fully equipped with showers, laundry, all-you-can-eat pancake breakfast, and a general store that sold spinning LED pens painted with skink images on the left side and groceries (including some fine microbrews) on the right side. I made friends with the West Indian ladies manning the cash registers, and stopped in over my four days in the campground to make conversation. I gave the three of them three of the beers of my six-pack, since I couldn't possibly have finished it all, and they were really friendly to me after that.

I stayed in the campground three nights. The first night took a little getting used to; it was also the most crowded of the three nights. Half of the people coming through seemed to be middle or northern European tourists. Lots of Germans, Belgians, Dutch families whom one could tell were not accustomed to making eye contact and nodding hello to strangers in the American fashion. There were also some American families, and groups of college-aged American kids; two of the last parked themselves at the faucet next to my campsite and washed dishes for forty-five minutes on Thursday night, and made loud declarations that made me hate them ("All rap is basically the same, except with different sound effects, which I could probably make on a drumset," and "For beetles, it's phyllum, and then class, and then species...Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's what it is - oh, and plus order," and declaring that certain kinds of insects were better than others) and plug my ears with Durango Hometown Hostel's free earplugs and stew in my tent for a while. There were fewer people the other nights for me to feel curmudgeonly about, or I just got more settled in my site and started to focus more on things - like the fact that I was sleeping on a beautiful sandstone-capped mesa that was under swampwater 90 million years ago - other than the people around me.

I had a little gravel pad for my tent and a picnic bench where I locked my bike up, and an adjacent empty campsite, where I did my cooking and eating. No sense in luring critters to my own campsite; a family of deer stared intently at me several times over my stay in the campground; I saw lots of squirrels; and there were many posted warnings about black bears, although I didn't see any traces of those.

In front of me was Prater Ridge, a steep 1000' hill capped with a shelf of beige sandstone whose silhouette blacked out a quarter of the sky in front of me at night; behind and to the right were Knife Edge and Point Lookout, other sandstone features lifting out of the top of the mesa. I walked the twelve miles of trails on these on Friday, which gave me exotic and abundant blisters but also a panoramic view onto the valley two thousand feet below. On my first night at the campsite, I walked around trying to find a place that wasn't crowded by camper vans or where the dull vibrations of acoustic guitars were muffled or where the stars weren't dimmed by the lights of the camp bathrooms, but when I found this stretch of road, I was frightened by the solitude, and by the threat of being watched in the darkness by a hungry mountain lion, and I went back into my site.

The next two nights I was nervier. This transition made me happy. On the second night, I bought the aforementioned six-pack of Black Butte Porter (Deschutes Brewing Co. from Bend, Oregon, God bless you) and a packet of Handisnacks from the camp store and sat by myself for two hours, getting buzzed and spreading fake cheese on crackers with a little red plastic stick, feeling unhurried, half drunk, and totally pleased with myself.

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I had made plans to meet up with a bus tour on Friday morning, but because of national park regulations, the bus wouldn't stop at the campsite to pick me up, and I had to get back down to Highway 160 to wait for it. I started out walking the four miles but saw that I wouldn't make it in time, and I stuck my thumb out. It was 8:45 a.m. in a national park and there wasn't much traffic. Five cars passed me in a hurry before one finally stopped, twenty minutes after I first started trying. (At least it was not the hour and a half I had to wait on the Blue Ridge Parkway.)

It was a white SUV with Virginia plates driven by a nice dad named Jim in the front with two toddlers strapped into car seats in the back. Jim said they were from Northern Virginia, his wife was stationed in Afghanistan with the State Department, and the two kids had one German name and one Spanish name; they were excited and gregarious, and they chirped, "Our mom usually sits there!" when I got in the car and then showed me their backseat TV screens, on which they'd watched Clifford the Big Red Dog and Madeleine in Paris on the drive across the country. They dropped me off on the wrong side of the highway, since Jim said his GPS narrator, which he referred to as "the voice of my conscience," would scold him for deviating off the route, if he had driven me all the way.

I walked across and found a concrete block in the sun upon which to sit and wait. While I waited, I called Connie, to congratulate her on her last day on the job, and then Stern, who said that she was in midair skydiving when I called her and then later said that she couldn't make time to see me when I am in New York in November because she planned to be washing her hair from November 17-23 ("By the 23rd, I'll probably be only on conditioner"). I moved to the shade and continued to wait; after two hours of this, and a sunburn on the tops of my thighs, I gave up and hitchhiked back up to the campsite. The first car I approached stopped for me; Chuck and Rosemary, originally from Madison, retired in Hot Springs, Arkansas. I kept up the friendly prattle but can't remember a thing we talked about.

I wasn't too disappointed about missing the tour, even though it meant that I wouldn't see the cliff dwellings that day. The cliff dwelling sites were twenty mountain miles away from the campsite, and I didn't think I had the legs to do the forty miles roundtrip of biking. I'd have been biking at an altitude of 7500-8500', on steep single lane roads, and have expected to do a couple thousand feet of climbing; there's no way I could've done this the day after my Durango-Mesa Verde ride in my state of unfitness and altitude sickening.

But I knew I would be in Mesa Verde a few days, and I'd see the cliff dwellings later, so I spent Friday afternoon hiking and learning about the plants, animals, and geography of the region. In twelve miles, I didn't come across a single person; I guess people go into Mesa Verde to drive to the ruins, not to hike on the mesa, so I had the overgrown trails to myself. The eight-mile hike in sandals ruined my feet, so I did the last four miles in my bike shoes, with my cleats spinning me all over the sandstone. (I had a stroke of inspiration after returning to camp: remove the fucking cleats.) I dodged what I thought was poison oak all day until I came down from my hikes and picked up a trail guide that revealed the plant to be gambel oak, a scrubby low oak that produces little low-tannin acorns that can be eaten without much processing. I spent about two hours sitting still during these hikes, to eat lemon bars and beans from a can under pine trees and to write in my journal. I hooted a bit on the far side of Knife Edge, and listened to the echoes. On Point Lookout, I got some miraculous cell reception and I called my mom to tell her I was fine. She asked if I had located any Jeffrey Dahmer-types in the campsite, and I said I had to get off the peak in a hurry because I could see lightning touching down in the valley below. This was true.

In this way, I had a lot of time to myself on Friday. As always when outdoors, I got distracted thinking about my sensations: where I hurt, what I could see, the slope of the ground below my feet, the mysterious rustling in the trees, petrified branches that looked like gopher snakes (and the one gopher snake that I came across, threw rocks at, and ultimately dashed away from whilst squealing like a kettle). From my journal entries: "I am very hot. I lifted my shirt up to my bra for just a moment on Prater Ridge and immediately got two bug bites in the formation of Dracula's fangs on the fattiest pt of my stomach. I am very dusty all over. It is very quiet up here except for the flies. My bowels continue to digest (very poorly) the calzone from Wednesday. I counted switchbacks (32) to pass time and took my heart rate each time I stopped. On the uphills: 164 max. On level ground: around 120. Saw a big lizard/toad thing - too fat for lizard, too many toes/joints/not-toad features for toad."

During the mesa top phone call, mom asked me why I was doing this, and I was anxious about not having an answer. I thought lots about this on the hike, but my brain was uncooperative all weekend: when I tried to think about my motivation to come to Mesa Verde, I would become distracted singing a hybridization of Beautiful Dreamer lyrics over the Moon River tune; when I tried to force myself to think about Stephanie, the abstraction I once called my lover who ostensibly turned thirty two Fridays ago, I could only think about Boo. I stared giddy-drunkenly at a flashing point on the horizon for a few long moments on Friday night, and then tumbled into my tent and said, in the manner of lovingkindness meditation, "I love you" to everyone I could think of whom I loved, and thought about how nice it was to not be in a hurry to do anything and to be responsible for almost nothing and to be outside and to work up a sweat just for its own sake and to run away from snakes for a few days, before passing out. I woke up the next morning with the right side of my body numb from my deflated sleeping pad. These to me seemed as good of reasons as any for my trip.

-


I got a seat on the tour the next day. The driver felt bad for having missed me yesterday and agreed to pick me up at the campground, so I didn't have to hitchhike back down to the highway. In our green SUV was just me, Robert the tour guide, and a retired couple from Chicagoland, Trudy and Klaus. Everyone was nice and friendly, but I felt very disoriented the whole day. This could have been because we were moving three times faster than I had moved in five days, but I think it was because I felt that the mainstream values of national park tourists were at odds with my moral and politcal identity. This feeling was exacerbated or caused by the crazy-inducing nonsense coming out of the mouth of the tour guide. In describing the culture of the ancestral Puebloan people, Robert made lots of absolute statements, many of them about gender and sex differences. "Spin ten men and ten women around in a circle and nine of the men and none of the women would be able to locate magnetic north without a compass," and so on. I couldn't tell how he'd cast his vote; he said things like, "Well, you see the way things are going in our society, we're going to reach a breaking point like they did in Rome, or Greece, or whatnot, because people get fed up with authority and the government getting in their business," which sounded very reminscient of those dirty teabagging protests from earlier this year; but he also said leftish things like, "Patriarchy and patrilinearity causes all of our problems," and professed that if we could go back to the matrilineal systems of the ancestral Puebloan people, the globe would stop warming and people would be happy as maize and squash farmers. I asked Robert how the resource distribution or geography of the southwest could have caused ancestral Puebloan peoples to form matrilineal cultures, and his response, I quote in full, was "Women are better at nurturing, so these people didn't have wars." He referred to me and Trudy as "ladies," as in, "You two ladies probably wouldn't have wanted to cut down and haul all this juniper." All of this was vigorously assented to by Trudy, who also suggested that tuberculosis could have been caused by the low percentage of protein in a maize-based diet. Robert also misused words constantly, or said "utilizations" and "reasonings" when "uses" and "reasons" would do, and said "lo and behold" in the way that people say "um." I know I am a perfect little bitch for fixating on these things; Robert and Trudy and Klaus were so friendly. But after nine hours of captivity with my deeply untrustworthy narrators, I wanted to fling open the doors of our moving Ford and escape like a wild turkey into the gambel oak. Also, the forest ranger ingratiated himself to our little tour group by choosing one girl from the group and one boy, and making them pretend they were married, which everyone thought was so funny and cute, and Trudy instructed me that I should find a husband because they were helpful in retrieving lost glasses cases - all in all, I felt like a fraud being so broad-shouldered and masculine and pussy-loving but telling Klaus that my last boyfriend was a German like him. Technically not a lie, but a self-betrayal nonetheless.

-

Josie and her new boyfriend Kevin were sitting on each other on the picnic bench next to my tent when I got back to the campground from my tour. Josie is my ex-girlfriend's ex-girlfriend who in 2000 almost became my ex-girlfriend, except that I was sleeping with our co-op roommate while conducting a relationship with my ex-girlfriend, who almost became Josie's ex-girlfriend one night in Boston Common after a bottle of whiskey. Two of these characters had worked at a car-themed lesbian cafe in Davis Square where baristas with regrettable tattoos (e.g. "CHARLIE DON'T SERVE" across the neck) shot me icy looks whenever I walked in, because they hated outgroup girls; it was all so childish and so long ago.

We escaped this period of hormonality. She grew out her hair, took out the lip piercings but left in the tattoos, and in 2005, she stayed with me a month in New York and I stayed with her a week in Moab. I went to law school and lived in New York and Chicago and bought and adored an expensive suit. She is the only friend I have who has opted to live rural and poor, but it is where she came from.

I had written Josie a few weeks ago to tell her I'd be staying in Mesa Verde for a few days, and never heard back from her, so I didn't expect that she'd turn up, but she called on Friday night to say that she'd be driving in from Moab the next day. They drove up in Kevin's ruined old blue Toyota Tacoma: the seatbelts were all knotted up because they no longer retracted; the tailgate window was held open by a pair of clamp pliers; odd bits of rusted metal from DIY repairs were bolted into the chassis; the spedometer stayed at 30 when we were moving about 10mph; and the interior was littered with climbing and sleeping gear, bags, tools, carabiner-handled travel mugs, golf balls, cutoff Metolius gloves, dirty shoes, plastic tubs filled with canvas sheets and lumber scraps, a woven basket carrying Josie's homegrown vegetables, cast iron fry pans, a mirrored medicine cabinet, and a book called "One Heartbeat Away," about confronting one's own mortality.

I offered them my remaining bottle of Black Butte Porter, but Kevin only grinned and said, "Oh, we brought our own favorite local brew" and hauled a case of Miller High Lifes out of the bed of his truck. We drank and they watched as I ate my evening gruel - canned beef stew with instant rice, made palatable by the addition of Josie's zucchini and okra - and then we moved to seats inside the tailgate so they could roll their cigarettes without being fined for having an open fire in a very high fire danger zone. We talked until late, and they unfolded a foam pad in the truck bed and fell asleep very soon. Kevin had lived out of his truck for a while in Moab, and Josie had lived out of her van for a while in Somerville. Kevin called this the "dirtbag lifestyle," and they seemed very pleased to have found each other.

I realized afterward that they didn't ask a whole lot about me - I haven't seen Josie in years but she didn't even learn, e.g., what I was doing in Chicago - but I didn't mind that we filled up the evening with stories about their cast of characters in small town Utah. I liked to see how wrapped up they were in their little patch of desert (despite the tattoo around Josie's wrist that says "wanderlust" in an elaborate script font). Josie works in a community garden and a bookstore part time; Kevin produces mountain bike races in Utah, Vermont, and West Virginia. They know people whom they call names like "Knees and Elbows," "E-O," "Icy Mike," "the methhead with one of those names that can be pronounced more than one way, like Brianna," "Big Gay Larry," "Sticky Nick," and "The Bleeder." We spent four hours on Sunday morning sitting under an oak tree thinking about business ideas for Moab; it needed a sushi place, a strip club, an independent movie theater, and a machine shop. They told stories like the one about the guy who got stabbed in the liver at Lollapalooza with a syringe filled with port-o-potty fluid - there was no more information to be known; Kevin said, "If this guy who got stabbed told me 100% of the information he had, I've told you about 85%, and there is nothing more to the story" - about attending town council meetings to convince the city to permit chicken on residential property, about Utah liquor laws, about smoking out the brakes on a big rig on Molas Pass and expecting to die, and about catching rattlesnakes with tubes and rope. I asked Kevin if he killed the rattlers after catching them. He responded, "Hell no, woman, that's my spirit animal."

I kept wondering if their knowledge of the geography and cultural history of the southwest were a result of them being avid rock climbers, or if people in the rural southwest just cared more about their natural environment than people in big cities, or what. Kevin told a story about stumbling across a painted potsherd in the middle of nowhere Arizona while scouting out a climbing location. He had dropped down into a chimney, and his friend above him was sending rocks onto his head, so he hid under a boulder; there, he found a portion what must have once been a beach-ball-sized Hopi pot. He said the climbers don't touch sites with petroglyphs or artifacts, whether out of superstition or respect for culture or federal law.

As we drove to the less-trafficked half of Mesa Verde, they pointed out geographic features in the Four Corners states. We could see the La Sal mountains near Moab, the San Juans, the La Platas, the Navajo reservation in New Mexico. Way in the distance was a flat stretch of land with a very tall chunk of rock seeming to rise from nowhere. Though the day was hot and clear, the air in the distance was hazy and it looked as if this big rock were floating in the sky. This was Shiprock, they said. A big old fucking rock in the middle of nowhere, apparently very sacred, apparently very tall.

I couldn't imagine the places but I liked the names they rattled off: Monument Valley, Valley of the Gods, South Mesa, Indian Creek, Big Mitten, Lone Cone. They discussed the difference between a mesa, a butte, a tower, and a spire, and ignored my lawyerly questions about how to classify buttes that were taller than they were wide but the size of mesas. Josie played some mixes but the speaker next to me kept giving up, so we got Doc Watson and Belle and Sebastian from only the right side of the cab. I sat cramped up in the passenger overflow spot behind the driver's seat, and let the wind whip my hair into a dusty tangled mess around my head.

-

Wetherill Mesa had about a thirtieth of the visitors that Chapin Mesa had. This is because it is a forty-five minute drive from the visitor's center to get out there. We passed two cars going in and three cars coming out. To me it felt that were were driving to the end of the world.

I always thought mesas were table-flat on top, but this one was rolling and hilly. Mesa Verde is not a mesa after all, but a cuesta, because it has a seven percent grade from north to south; this kind of information means exactly nothing when you are on top of a huge rise of soil and cannot tell one end from another. Portions of it had been scorched in wildfires; in these places, all you could see were burned our husks of juniper trees and the low grass that pushed up in the decades after the blaze.

We made tortillas with peanut butter on the tailgate, but I ate sitting by myself in the roasting cab because I could not bear to be under the sun. After lunch, we scurried down the path to Step House, as much to get in the shade as to see the ruins. Josie and Kevin kept looking up at the sandstone overhang and saying, "Yep, this could be climbed." It was a half mile to the alcove.

I have said almost nothing about the cliff dwellings that give Mesa Verde its designation as a UNESCO World Heritage site. I find it difficult to explain, even through pictures, because the experience of the people who lived here 800-1000 years ago seems so remote from mine. So this is a mesa or a cuesta about 7500 feet above sea level. The mesa top is dryland farmable, and here ancestral Puebloan people would grow that special combination of corn, beans, and squash that could coax the right balance of nitrogen out of the land. But water on the mesa top is very scarce, this being the high desert of the southwest, and the atmosphere is harsh. The mesa is comprised of a layer of crumbling, porous sandstone on top, underlaid by a layer of nonporous shale. Rain and snowfall leeches through the sandstone and hits the shale and then comes out through seep springs; these springs carve away alcoves on the sides of sandstone cliffs, creating what would be ideal locations for human habitation - water and natural shelter from the elements - except that they are high up on a canyon wall. But humans will do what they can with what they have, so these ancestral Puebloan people decided it was better to live in an alcove 120' high and 200' wide and 60' deep, hundreds of feet up on a steep slope or cliff, and carry fifty-pound pots of water on their heads up and down near-vertical rock faces, than shrivel up and die on the mesa top. So they cut bricks out of the sandstone and piled these up and made apartments and plazas and streets and social and ceremonial spaces and lived out their short lives on the side of a cliff.

This is totally fucking insane. I am glad I went to see them because it is totally fucking insane. The ranger-led tour of Long House gave us the opportunity to step through the ruins and actually go all the way to the back of the alcove, where it was possible to touch the sandstone roof and see how hundreds of years of fires created soot that survived to be pet hundreds of years later by tourists, and to see the corn-grinding slabs where Puebloan ladies ground up sand with their maize and eroded the teeth of their people. I asked all sorts of inane questions of the ranger, such as "Did they wrestle instead of playing ball sports because you can't retrieve a soccer ball that goes bouncing off a cliffside?" and "What is the purpose of this square hole in the ground?" and pulled juniper berries and acorns off bushes and put them into my mouth, and stabbed myself on a yucca spine.

I learned that sitting every day of your life in a covered pit with a fire burning inside will kill your lungs pretty quick, and that adobe could be made of sand, clay, ash, and urine. One could stand at the edge of the alcove and see down into the valley, and then look across to see the canyon walls a few miles across the valley. Inside the alcove was very temperate and very quiet. There wasn't much sound except for the swallows.

-

Our day on Wetherill Mesa also restored my faith in American friendliness, after my day with Robert and Trudy and Klaus had made me so nervous about democracy. On our tour of Long House were several midwesterners, my new favorite kind of people. One older man who took a liking to me was Michael Kearney, a retired computer room cleaning specialist from St. Louis. We walked down into the alcove together. I saw his Cardinals hat and said, "So you're from St. Louis?" and he immediately broke out into a huge smile and laid his hand on my shoulder. He was about 75 and wore a towel wrapped around his neck and tucked into his collar. He said absurd things, like telling a group of visitors passing by us "Watch out for the ice!" (it was 90 degrees out and sunny out) and made jokes about his wife driving off with his car and abandoning him in the national park, or about how he would pitch his kids off the cliff dwellings if they had lived there ("Or I'd say, where's the orphanage, hm?").

He asked me what I did, and seemed very concerned about finding me a non-lawyering job because I had expressed some doubts about my career. I told him I liked plenty just listening to stories. He said that as a salesman he was a story teller. He said that he stole lines from other salesmen, one of which was to say to customers in a very solemn voice, with a slight South Carolina accent, "Sir, a data wave is as reliable as a cement driveway." He said he had no idea what a data wave was but it didn't matter, because you knew then that it would be reliable.

I didn't tell him very much about my personal life, but I also felt that I could have, and he would have understood. Mom warns me about Jeffrey Dahmer, and Olympia writes to say that I am too old to hitchhike and be discovered cut up into pieces in the trunk of a car, but I haven't yet learned not to trust strangers the way I do. It only seems right that in my experience of a national park, my connections with other Americans are just as prominent as my time seeing the sights.

-

Josie and Kevin gave me a ride back to Durango. Thank God; I wouldn't have been able to stand the hot, scary ride back and would've had to hitchhike. I didn't want to do that. In Durango, we ate bad sushi that was still infinitely better than the zero sushi they had in Moab, and then they dropped me off at the hostel, where a Bernese mountain dog named Kodiak was delightedly wriggling around in the parking lot. Josie and I hugged and promised not to let years go by between seeing each other again.

Well, I don't know. We don't have that much in common anymore; each day she spends in rural, white, local, poor, outdoorsy Moab makes her experience more remote from mine, in the city, among yuppies, among politically active queers and people of color, with no sense of whether it is sandstone or shale or granite or gneiss or arkose or God knows what else lies beneath the asphalt. I don't romanticize the former, and I don't want to live in it. Happy as I was to be whipping around single lane roads in the cab of a fifteen year-old truck, I am scared of shotguns and big utility cars and racial homogeneity.

But it was very nice that my short trip to Colorado, and my time with Josie and Kevin in particular, gave me some access to this. It made me focus on something entirely different for a few days, not Chicago, not moving, not missing my old lives, not making travel arrangements for the next three months. I have been sleeping very well. Many of my muscles are pleasantly sore. I have been writing now for four hours; when I finish this paragraph, I will walk to town, eat pizza, find a bike box, and get myself on a plane home to San Francisco. It has been a fine week here, and I am ready now to go.

hermosa

I fell asleep at 9:30pm and slept very fitfully until 7:45am, and in between had very vivid dreams, all of which I have forgotten except the one in which I was playing either a bone flute or a clarinet very loudly from my hostel bed. This morning in the hostel I made friends with a Durango divorcee named Terry who was very kind to me and who burned me a CD with four albums of music from the Irish and Scottish highlands; then he took out two dozen carbon fiber arrow shafts and let me hold a razor-edged titanium elk-hunting arrowhead and instructed me on the hubcap-sized patch of animal that one must hit in order to get a heart or double-lung strike to kill the animal there. I peppered him with questions about weapons while he sat at the kitchen table scraping the plastic feathers off his used arrows. I had a cup of coffee and waited, to no avail, for my bowels to move yesterday's Wendy's breakfast meal out of my body, and then slowly shoved unnecessary supplies into a pannier and made my slow way through Durango, up Highway 550 to County Road 203 to Hermosa. My chain fell off immediately -I'd overshifted - and then my left shoe got stuck to the pedal because a bolt fell off my cleat and I was flailing about trying to figure out how to stop without freeing my foot before I remembered that my other foot was free. Also, the altitude is still not easy to overcome; walking up a flight of stairs leaves me breathless, and today's flat, 28-mile ride with only one half-loaded pannier should've been pretty easy but wasn't. Other than these little glitches, all goes well and I have not been leveled by one of the millions of SUVs or trucks out here. I probably should've known that Colorado would be this full of rural white people. Maybe it's that Colorado people aren't as friendly as midwesterners (i.e. not as responsive when you grin and wave at them or when you want to make conversation with them), or maybe it's that my season of playing bluegrass has tricked me into thinking that I actually have access to the all-white world of country strangers, but I admit to being a bit disappointed by how many people either walked away from me or blankly stared when I did my friendly midwestern jawing to them today. Whatever, I had a delicious five-pound calzone for lunch and that was enough to make me happy. Also making me happy was the scenery; it was sunny almost all day today and the Animas River valley was very lush and the weird reddish rock formations shooting up around it - I wouldn't really call them mountains because they come from nowhere and appear to be made out of rock, not earth - were very pleasing to view from a slowly-changing angle of approach at 12 mph. When I bike alone I think mostly about sensations - leg pain, back pain, neck pain, sun burn, fear of cars - and then I think about next steps - distance to destination, tasks to be completed at next destination - and when I drift from this, I think stupid things like Will I be superheroically fit when I return to California now that I am acclimated to Colorado altitude? and Did the Anasazi from Mesa Verde ever take trips to the Animas River valley, and if so, how long did it take, and did rival groups of Pueblo people live there or were they relatives and friends, and did they ever get over to Moab where the red rocks must have seemed so different and strange? Ordered thinking almost never occurs when I am biking. I can't tell if this is good for my brain, which is crowded from an emotionally taxing move from Chicago, my new love, my job ending, my ex's 30th birthday, or whether I ought to be using this time to make general conclusions about vexing life questions. I started at 10am after handling Terry's arrowheads, took a two hour break to wait for my calzone and write in my journal, and got back into town around 4pm. Roadkill seen today: many birds, many chipmunks, something that looked bigger than a chipmunk but was similarly furry, and a totally flattened black (and now also red) garter snake. Food eaten: oatmeal, calzone, banana, handful of trail mix, Colorado peach, soup from a can with instant rice, two Reese's peanut butter cups from the hostel free pile. I got in bed at 8:30pm but couldn't sleep, so I got out of bed on a premonition that SL might be online, and she was! I am a shaman. It made my night so sweet to talk to you.

durango

In dry, high Durango, Colorado now. Got to Durango in after two flights and a migraine. Movers took my stuff away yesterday. Spent the night camped out in the living room with Olympia, woke up, shipped off stuff, ate last breakfast on the stoop and was surprised to find myself overwhelmed with emotion when thinking about leaving. The altitude here is making me verrrrry dizzy. Just gave away my fourth copy of Professor's House this month to a man at the hostel who shared his dinner with me. Altitude recovery tomorrow. Very, very dizzy. Bed now, more later.

the weekends after memorial day

I found this old journal entry that will fill up space on my blog until I have more free time to put down some thoughts about what I have been doing recently:

7/1/09

The weekends after Memorial Day:

One weekend after Memorial Day: C in town. Bike ride, Cubs game. C and I dominated the karaoke place in Chicago's Chinatown that we went to upon O's advice. It was a meeting of TAP, the Taiwanese American Professionals organization. I was on my game. We sang "Total Eclipse of the Heart." (We'd watched some funny YouTube spoof videos, where the lyrics were rewritten to describe what was literally happening during the video, so we were prepared for the song.) We rocked the house. Strangers applauded. Everybody paid attention. C and I walked out of there saying, "Total domination."

Two weekends after Memorial Day: Thursday night flight got in delayed, crazy hotel (Hudson - more like a hunting lodge-cum-nightclub than a hotel, tiny little room, sleeplessness), watched the Lakers win the championship in a deli, watched men watching women. Friday, ridiculous last meeting, they had no idea what to say about me besides generalities because I never did anything for that organization, I left for C's and slept for five minutes on the futon on the ground while she slept (in the middle of the afternoon) in her bed because she had swine flu. I met up with R. Massage in Chinatown, S met up with us. S and I then went to Guitar Center for tambourine, then Center for quickie in and out glance at older lesbians playing card games (we declined to join), then to Cubbyhole for some mass flirtation. We then went down to IB's apartment and spent three hours just chatting and sipping beers and whiskey and smoking cigarettes and forcing each other to mime scenes ("Okay, now you're walking down stairs...now every other stair..."). We inspected the weirdness of the former tenant of IB's apartment, who left behind an advent calendar composed of chocolate squares, a cabinet filled with diet pills, a fridge filled with diet Red Bulls, cat posters (I brought the white Bengal tiger one to S in Brooklyn), high heeled shoes, photographs. What was even weirder was that IB kept all of these things around despite having lived there for four months already. I snagged the high heeled shoes that C later told me probably cost $200. I look like a tippy clown in them. There was some sort of Swedish or German or Austrian or Irish low-budget porn-like movie being filmed directly downstairs. We watched rats run around; IB called it his "favorite game." I walked back uptown to C's. On Saturday: I dropped my bags off at S's, then met up with JS for 2-3 hour walk around Prospect Park, restoring our confidence in one another. Met her friend Jen. Went back to S's for dinner party with Connie and Raj. We sang in harmony. Everyone left. S and I had soft serves, discussed our business plans ("Zen Cone" [get it? Zen koan, zen cone?!?!], which would have a pastry skirt on the lip of the cone to catch drips before they reach your hand), and walked around Park Slope for two hours in a light rain. We walked by Ginger's, went inside momentarily, and left. It was a replay of the night before, at the Center. We found an erotica book on the cement and later read bits of this to each other, which, I was embarrassed to find, turned me on. I thought I might want to make out with S. We didn't; she fell asleep. In the morning I awoke late, and then I took the train up to Harlem to see K and IB. I've described my lazy Sunday reading with IB in an entry a few posts back. That was a good weekend.

Three weekends after Memorial Day: T and K's wedding in Boston. New York, night at Connie's. Trip up on Chinatown bus. D and AK's Brazil photographs. A Sikh man handed me a Mountain Dew and a Coke through the window of D's car as we drove past him in Union Square. Took a death cab to the wedding; nearly dead throughout the evening. Cambridge Common. AK and J and I played guitar into the night. I admired their mastery of Brazilian-style guitar rhythms. AK had to close four doors between the living room and the bedroom so that L and her brood would not be awakened by the noise. I felt inadequate all weekend and realized that my last six years have been very unlike the five years that preceded those; the people I have surrounded myself with in recent years are brilliant, but less competitive about their intellects than the people I went to college with. This may implicate the difference between people who go to grad school to develop ideas and people who go to professional school to develop skills. I didn't mind, in the end, although I felt like I was wasting something. The following day was brunch at T's house, which was nicer, smaller, and more low-key. We chatted, played with SM's babies. I asked RR to be my friend again. She hasn't written since then, or called, so I guess that's not going to happen; this is a source of sadness for me, and I cried a week ago when I realized that she wasn't going to respond to me. Still I am proud of myself for having reached out to her, because it is better to be rejected in my friendship overtures than never have made them at all.

Last weekend: sleep, B and RI's bridal shower, and then karaoke event. I played some Beatles songs and "Take Me Out To the Ballgame" with B's mom Marti for the crowd. I bought 96 kazoos so everyone had one to play along with. Marti loved it. B later told me she'd said, "What a rush! I didn't want it to end!" I found this so endearing. She asked me for advice about buying guitars and I just wanted her to hurry up and buy anything and make music because it obviously brought her so much joy. It was out in Oak Park. I wore new sandals that I returned the next day at REI. Later I met up with SL on the first car of the Blue Line and we went up to Montrose for karaoke at a seedy, huge suburban small-town bar that nonetheless was within Chicago limits. There are worlds out there I know nothing about! We didn't stay long. Somebody bought SL a drink. She looked pretty. Sunday: puttered, band practice, puttered, pride parade dregs, an hour of laying on the pier at North Avenue beach, reading a New Yorker, then all-you-can-eat sushi with Asian homos at Sushi Para Two on N. Clark. Didn't really connect with anyone, was too hungry and sunburnt, went home. O wasn't around this weekend and I couldn't be bothered to call anyone up so I missed having someone to goof off with. C'est la weekend.

A backpack button I saw and liked last weekend: "My karma ran over your dogma." Clever, I thought.

celebrity

She calls the game Celebrity "Proper Nouns in a Bowl."

[swoon]

since feeling is first

There is some stress; work is ending in two weeks and I haven't nearly enough time to do everything I need to. There are three summary judgment motions, a two-bedroom apartment to clear, three months of unstructured time (and health insurancelessness) to plan for, and my parents are in town and would like me to accompany them to floor 103 of the Sears Tower and other such Chicago landmarks. There is some triumph; my roommate and I performed many times in the past week, quite well, and it feels good to find a music-making partner whom I respect so much and with whom I feel so comfortable and compatible. This I will miss above all when I leave Chicago. Finally, there is happiness; I am in love with somebody who is in love with me. We spent a week in Chicago being a pair of fools. Although my happiness often comes with neurotic fear about losing the source of my happiness, right now the giddiness is overwhelming the anxiety. How did that happen? Who knows? What will happen? Only God knows which way the wind will blow. Does it matter? I had a stunning week, y'all.

Anyway, I think I will cool it on Bananarchist for a bit. After I get myself through the next few weeks, I'll have some time to write about the entertaining preoccupations of summertime in Chicago: the improv class, the week of music performance, the friends who have come through, stories about Brahms, the elements of a cause of action for a breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing in Colorado. Until then, I leave you with a something my dad said to me, in English, totally out of the blue, as we walked along Lake Michigan on a 98 degree Saturday: "Believe it or not, [Bananarchist], when I was younger, before I met your mother, I thought that when a man married a woman, if it was a time of famine, he could cut off her feet and eat them, and they would grow back. So I married your mother because I knew I would never be hungry."

whoa

I haven't written in a bit because I've been somewhat unexpectedly demolished by love. It's a new wonderful development and my heart is singing a sustained note of happiness right now. I'll write some more when I find some more time.

a long time ago

New song. Olympia on the violin. I tried to be genuine with this one since all of my other songs, I've been told, are farces, which is in keeping with the fear of emotional expression that I wrote about yesterday. Anyway, here are my innards, have a look.

Half of my heart’s on a holiday
Half of the night I’m lying awake
All of the summer I’ve been running on low
Feels like I knew you a long time ago

From your last letter, I should have known
“Don’t bother to find me, for I have just flown
“I know where you’re going, but I will not go.”
The things you said, darling, a long time ago

Life in the city goes on as before
This part of the story I don’t know anymore
I can’t be bothered by what I don’t know
Someday it’ll all seem a long time ago

I’m easy to love and I am easy to know
I’m a wary old rover with a long tale of woe
I’m full of confession but have nothing to show
Someday we will all seem a long time ago

you've got me feeling emotions

I have been thinking recently about how to become a better performer. Generally, in life, and also specifically, a more mobile and expressive music performer, because the Corvairs’ first show was last Saturday, and although I felt triumphant about the quality of our amateur musicianship and with bantering with the audience, which was composed mostly of kind friends who guffawed generously no matter what was said, a trusted adviser on musical performance offered this criticism as soon as I asked for it: “You might want to work on lower body movement.” I had thought I was doing a fine job emoting with body language, but a later viewing of footage shot at the show confirmed that what I had thought was emoting involved subtle movements of the eyebrows that did not register to anyone else besides me, and that the four of us moved almost nothing except our wrists while standing on stage.



Performing emotion has long been difficult for me. My improv instructor announced at the start of last Thursday’s class that the evening would be devoted to “emotional work.” This struck a tritone-filled chord of sustained terror in my heart. I can pretend to stuff a nonexistent owl. I do great with exquisite corpse word games. I can describe invisible mise en scène like a champ. But tell me to convey the feeling of being wildly in love with someone who will not return your affection to a roomful of people simply through movements and nonverbal sounds, and I will excuse myself and stay in the bathroom until it is time to go home. I guess this is why I am taking improv, to get over this desire to flee from emotional performance.

The first exercise was simple. The class stood in a circle and pretended to pass an invisible ball. Each time you got the ball, you were supposed to respond with an emotion; any kind of emotion was fine, as long as it was exaggerated. One boy did a fine job of this, crying on the ground until a long, viscous string of saliva descended from his mouth and touched the carpet. Most people, on the other hand, failed spectacularly at this task. The anger was unenthusiastic, the ecstasy was obviously mimed, the grief was undermined by nervous, self-conscious smiling. When it was my turn, I choose disgust, because the emotion invites satire – even genuine expressions of disgust are often laughable in a way that genuine expressions of sadness or anger aren’t – yet even so I could not commit to more than a modest “Eeeeew!” and some tensing of the upper body.

It’s hard to communicate in words why it’s so hard to communicate without words. I find that I am turning to statements like “It makes you feel vulnerable to open yourself up” and “You really have to let go,” which, like all clichés, fail utterly at describing something to someone who has not experienced exactly what you are trying to describe. So look at it this way. Imagine someone who irritates you. Say, a person who talks incessantly, about herself, and talks much more than she listens. You suspect that she doesn't just exaggerate her stories but flat out lies from time to time, usually to make herself seem stronger or more heroic or more charming or more modest than she actually is. Now imagine this irritating person telling you about a new puppy she has just rescued. And it’s so cute. And it makes her coo. “It’s so fwuffy!” she says, in a dolphinesque whine. And she leans her head against the imaginary puppy and an expression of post-coital bliss crosses her features (which, by the way, are all compacted in the center of her face). And all you can do to keep yourself from vomiting is imagine a cold giant octopus coiled around her head, its expressionless goat eyes watching yours, its eight tentacles gripping different percussion instruments, as she says these things to you.

Now you see what I fear about emotional expression. There’s a chance that your emotions will be so obviously insincere that you will make people revile you as a fraud. I think this is what “it makes you feel vulnerable to open yourself up” actually means. Of course, the better you can express emotions, the more interesting your stories and music and presentations will be. But if you don’t succeed in conveying that emotion, your audience takes pleasure at the image of an octopus occupying the space where your head should be. Expression is high risk but high reward, and expressionlessness is no risk; your reward is the steady state, which is often not so bad. It’s much easier not to express at all.

I don’t think it’s my destiny to be a timid Asian woman. My trusted musical performance adviser performed a lion dance in the living room as an example of demonstrative body movement, and I learned a lot from it. I intend to lay down a rubber snake on the stage and leap back from it with leonine surprise at the next Corvairs show. I have also done some Googling today along the lines of “how to be a better performer” and “how to move your lower body when playing music.” It was interesting to think about things I'd never thought about before. This is what I have learned.

Five Steps to Becoming a Better Performer of Poetry.

STAND with your feet slightly apart, ground yourself. If you stand, it is easier to draw the poem, and your breath, from your whole body and not merely from your mouth. Later you will perform from a wheelchair, or from somewhere in the air.

Step Five (bell)

TALK to the audience, not at them. Before you start look at them, and without a word tell them, with your body and your eyes: thank you and fuck you. Read the poem for yourself as well as for them, conscious of every word. Weigh the words as you read, perform to discover your words as if anew, find new false notes not visible otherwise. Use performance to defend and stand behind your words, and to defend yourself against your own private self-enchantment.

(end with three bells one after the other, played clearly but much softer than above, with a one second pause between each bell; the last bell should be played to linger and echo slightly.)

Your Speaking Skills Can Make You a Better Performer.

Speech writers know that you have to grab the audience's attention in 30 seconds. That's where you make your biggest impact. If you ever see a musician get up on stage and fumble a "Hi. Um. We're the Barnyard Owls," you know what I mean.

As musicians, we can grab the audience's attention with a song. But it helps to think about other ways to captivate your audience too.

Wasn't it KISS who used to shout, "Are you ready to rock!" The phrase might sound cliche now, but it serves the point. KISS knew you had to draw your audience in fast to make an impact and put on a great show.

Or perhaps you prefer non-verbal hooks. You can use a light show. Or imagine band members quitely meditating next to their instruments before they jump up and rock the house.

This has nothing to do with how to become a better performer, but a lot to do with the Futurist Movement and performance studies. Performance: A Critical Introduction.

Despite a strong interest in the physical body in such manifestos as these, futurist productions very often emphasized the mechanical, surrounding (and even hiding) the actor’s body in the trappings of modern technology, for which futurism had an inexhaustible passion. Turning bodies into machines or replacing bodies by machines certainly can be found in modern performance, but the tendency of futurism to move toward theaters of puppets, machinery, even colored clouds of gas, on the whole ran counter to later more determinedly body-oriented performance. Most futurist performances also followed a variety format, with a sequence (or a simultaneous presentation) of bits of short performance material – skits; acrobatics, mechanical, lightning, and sound effects; rapid display of movements or objects. This dazzling and quickly moving variety was essential the futurist aesthetic of speed, surprise, and novelty, but it resulted in a presentation format that on the whole looked backward to the performances of cabaret, the vaudeville, the circus, and the variety stage rather than forward to the performance art of more recent times, which has been largely devoted to the display of individual acts, even if these are of very short duration.

Fundamentals of Stage Movement.

The actor must develop grace in movement...opening and closing doors, answering the telephone, picking up objects, rising, sitting. While these are daily activities in home, school,etc...they are also common business for the stage, television, and films. The actor must use the upstage hand or foot for the aforementioned, because it is more graceful to watch, BUT there will be exceptions.

These methods have been found to be the most graceful ways of accomplishing simple actions, and so they have been called BASIC TECHNIQUES. They are simply techniques because they accompish the movement with the least amount of action and commotion.

And, of course, one learns from Freddie Mercury. Riot At the Opera: Queen Triumphant.

Freddie is not pretty in the conventional sense of the word; like Mick Jagger of '64, he is his own convention. Also like the Jagger of that time, his stage persona and action is unlike anything else. Although it borrows - like most of the group's plagiarisms - slightly from Zeppelin, in tandem with Freddie's supreme assurance and belief in himself - he always refers to himself as a star - it explodes into something that is a constant delight to watch.

He reacts to his audience almost like an over-emotional actress - Gloria Swanson, say, or perhaps Holly Woodlawn playing Bette Davis. At the climax of the second night in Bristol he paused at the top of the drum stand, looked back over the crowd and with complete, heartfelt emotion placed his delicate fingers to lips and blew a kiss. Any person who can consume themselves so completely in such a clichéd showbiz contrivance deserves to be called a star.

Freddie's real talent, though, is with his mike stand. No Rod Stewart mike stand callisthenics here, just a shortee stick that doubles as a cock, machine gun, ambiguous phallic symbol, and for a fleeting moment an imaginary guitar. He has a neat trick of standing quite still in particularly frantic moments and holding the stand vertically from his crotch up, draw a fragile finger along its length, ever closer to the taunting eyes that survey his audience.

It is wonderful to be alive! You can learn a new way to embarrass yourself every day.

coffee table

It is the second consecutive Monday morning that I have stumbled out of the house at 5 a.m. to go to work after a sleepless night. I got to work at 5:20 a.m. exactly at the moment that my judge walked in the door. It's all fine; in two hours I will be slumped over my desk, fast asleep. Meanwhile, this feeble brain gets to make some decisions affecting litigants in federal court.

During the very early morning hours, I puttered around the apartment, picking up random books and reading a few pages of each in no particular order, eating peanut butter toast, throwing away electronics packaging, cleaning out the fridge, and so on. I also decided that it was the right time to document everything on my coffee table. The objects are in bold.

The coffee table itself is composed of two $12 birch veneer particle board end tables from Ikea; I pushed two together on a brown rug left behind by Erica Christoff, the former tenant. It was $60 cheaper to arrange my living room this way than to pay for a real coffee table. Underneath the table is Olympia’s mandolin, rented from the Old Town School of Folk music for an eight-week course in bluegrass mandolin. She has so far missed more than half the classes, but it is no big deal because Olympia’s familiarity with the violin, which is tuned just like a mandolin, puts her left hand capabilities far above those of her classmates. We made improvements on this mando: I bought new strings for it and together we spent a few minutes cutting a length of orange parachute cord into a shoulder strap.

There are also 2.5” inch DKNY tan embroidered high heels, size 9.5, which I rescued from the Hungarian swimsuit model who was the former tenant in Ilya’s apartment. When Sonia and I visited him there in June, we discovered that Ilya had left untouched many of the swimsuit model’s ornaments, including a dressertop full of elephant figurines and other southeast Asian iconography, a jewelry tree holding many rings, posters of cats (including white Bengal tigers, lions, and a drawing of a cat looking in a mirror (posted next to the bathroom mirror)), and had not thrown away the diet pills, diet Red Bulls, photographs, high heels, and clothes that the woman left behind. All her possessions were so gender normative as to be exotic, and they became even weirder when left in place in Ilya’s apartment. The heels fit me just fine and have given me hours of delight, although I have yet to wear them outside the apartment.

Also under the coffee table is my first tambourine, the $10 “economy” one that I bought in 2007, which cradles ten thimbles, which I bought to play my washboard with. Just to the left of this is my percussion rig for the bluegrass duo: one of Erica Christoff’s leftover pillows, with my brass cymbal tambourine (much nicer sounding than the economy model and four times the price) resting on top, and a big hardcover book (The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Knots and Ropework) on top of that. I stomp on this. It is calibrated just right: the hard surface of the book acts like a pedal platform, and the springiness of the cushion restores the tambourine to its resting state in preparation for my next stomp.

On the left side of the coffee table are two sets of Martin acoustic guitar strings, an A major harmonica, my Rubik’s cube, a purple egg shaker, and a set of postcards that Desiree took from her librarian conference as a gift for me. They read “Hawai’i is a Book Lover’s Paradise!” and show images of white people from the early part of the 20th century riding surfboards; none of them depict reading, except for one in which a woman resting on a surfboard in the surf looks over a hardcover at the photographer. There is a quart-sized Ziploc bag filled with Olympia’s inedible Asian candies, including a red bean-flavored Kit Kat bar from Japan, a fistful of hard coffee suckers, some azure suckers, squashed Lindhoff chocolates, and melted mini-Snickers bars. The books on this side of the coffee table are Bluegrass Fiddle, Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, and Poetry (which I turned to for inspiration in writing a song this weekend), Acoustic Rock for Guitar, and Rise Up Singing. There is a short length of bike chain that the kind worker from Rapid Transit Cycles gave to me. There is a sleigh bell bracelet that Stephanie and I bought close to Christmas 2007 to entertain Malcolm with (with great success—he loved it), and sixteen miniature kazoos leftover from Bridget and Raul’s wedding shower, where Bridget’s mom and I directed the crowd to buzz along with us as we sang “Yellow Submarine.”

On the other side of the coffee table is a papier mache watermelon half that I bought from the Museum of Mexican-American Art, in Pilsen. Olympia and I have filled this with our guitar and mandolin picks. There is the Mason jar that I usually keep full of peanut M&Ms, but that I have let sit empty since mid-June because I don’t know whether we’ll finish another jar before I leave. More things related to bikes can be found on this half of the coffee table: Olympia’s long road bike pump, her pedal wrench, her allen wrench set, a bungee cord for my bike rack, my Harvard Cycling Team water bottle (which, because my diploma is lost, is the only non-testimonial evidence I have that I went there; but the letters are rubbing off, so all this evidence says is that I went to "H RVA D"), my small crescent wrench, my SPD pedals, a saddle maintenance kit, and spare saddle tensioner. There are two spent AA batteries that I keep around until I can find a place that takes batteries for recycling. There is a half-eaten bag of trail mix that Desiree left behind last week, which I have been steadily reducing since her departure. There is a pencil made from recycled Chinese newspapers that Olympia quarried from one of her recent meetings or conferences. The books on this side of the table are The Professor’s House, which I have read intermittently this weekend, Learning Through Listening: An Introduction to Chinese Proverbs and their Origins, Hot Licks for Bluegrass Fiddle, The Fiddle Fakebook, and Mandolin Chord Book. There is also a lot more sheet music on this side of the coffee table, including a badly photographed copy of Bach’s Concerto no. 2 in E major, which Olympia must have studied when she was younger because it is covered in markings and stars and has a little rainbow sticker in the upper right corner of the first page. There are also Partita no. 3, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Op. 3 (Concerto for Violin and Orchestra), Spring, Mendelssohn’s Concerto for Violin and Piano, Op. 64, Forty-two Studies by R. Kreutzer, Introduction et Rondo Capriccioso, Op. 28, by Camille Saint-Saëns, and many photocopied pages of fiddle music bearing titles like “Jenny Lynn,” “Evening Prayer Blues,” and “Pig in the Pen.” Under Olympia’s music is my tablature for the ragtime and blues songs I have attempted to learn over the years.

Up until Saturday there was a pile of unread Chicago Tribunes under the coffee table and by the front door—Olympia got suckered into a subscription because somebody came to our front door with a sad story about how paper delivery routes gave troubled children a way to make money and stay out of trouble, and the papers just piled up unread day after day. On Saturday, I got sick of kicking newspapers out of the way to reach my shoes, so I filled a garbage bag with Tribunes and dumped it out in the recycling bin behind the house. There is now a newspaper-free path from the front door to the shoe pile to the coffee table, which will never look this way again.

the professor's house

I am in the midst of planning a bike trip in southwestern Colorado, starting in Durango and ending in either Durango or Montrose or Grand Junction. I'll be going alone, right before Labor Day, and hauling all of my camping crap with me. This may be a very bad idea. Yesterday a cab grazed my right arm as it sped past me on Dearborn Street. I caught up to the driver and asked him why he hadn't given me more clearance. I took a tone that was more wounded than angry. He screamed at me. "This is a city! What do you want me to do!" he said. "Give me six more inches so you don't kill me," I said. "Why would I want to kill you!" he said. His eyes were red. He gunned the engine and sped off as soon as the light changed. This is the scariest part about biking, the drivers who refuse to acknowledge that their recklessness could scatter you like the seeds lifting off a dandelion head.

Nonetheless, I feel very compelled to go to Colorado. I want very badly to see the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde National Park. I didn't understand where this irrational feeling came from, until I recently remembered that one of my favorite passages in one of my favorite books, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, focuses on the protagonist's discovery of and relationship to cliff dwellings in the southwest. Willa Cather traveled to Mesa Verde National Park in 1915 and stayed for a week. Out of that experience came Tom Outland's story (in The Professor's House) and an article on "what Mesa Verde means" for the Denver Times. I know my imagination is more romantic than reality, and my experience of Colorado probably won't be revelatory but dangerous, exhausting, or merely banal - maybe I will focus more on the clouds of gnats swarming at dawn than the sunrise - but I haven't anything better to do and I might as well see.

I bought another copy of The Professor's House because the first was Stephanie's. It arrived today. The quality of the printing is so poor that it is intrusive - it is like the Dover Thrift edition of the Dover Thrift edition. The publisher put an unnecessary statement underneath the title: "This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today. Parents might wish to discuss with their children how views on race have changed before allowing them to read this classic work." Also, all the diacritics are messed up, as if the document was created in one word processing program and opened up in another, and nobody bothered to edit it: "That summer Charles kept him for three weeks in his oleander-buried house in the Prado, until his little brig, L'Espoir, sailed out of the new port with a cargo for Algeciras. The captain was from the Hautes-Pyrénées, and his spare crew were all Provençals, seamen trained in that hard school of the Gulf of Lyons." This is distracting.

Still, what a pleasure to read:

The thing that side-tracked me and made me so late coming to college was a somewhat unusual accident, or string of accidents. It began with a poker game, when I was a call boy in Pardee, New Mexico.

One cold, clear night in the fall, I started out to hunt up a freight crew that was to go out soon after midnight. It was just after pay day, and one of the fellows had tipped me off that there would soon be a poker game going on in the card-room behind the Ruby Light saloon. I knew most of my crew would be there, except Conductor Willis, who had a sick baby at home. The front windows were dark, of course. I went up the back alley, through a tumble-down ice house and a court, into a 'dobe room that didn't open into the saloon proper at all. It was crowded, and hot and stuffy enough. There were six or seven in the game, and a crowd of fellows were standing about the walls, rubbing the white-wash off on to their coat shoulders. There was a bird-cage hanging in one window, covered with an old flannel shirt, but the canary had wakened up and was singing away for dear life. He was a beautiful singer - an old Mexican had trained him - and he was one of the attractions of the place.

I happened along when a jack-pot was running. Two of the fellows I'd come for were in it, and they naturally wanted to finish the hand. I stood by the door with my watch, keeping time for them. Among the players I saw two sheep men who always liked a lively game, and one of the bystanders told me you had to buy a hundred dollars' worth of chips to get in that night. The crowd was fussing about one fellow, Rodney Blake, who had come in from his engine without cleaning up. That wasn't customary; the minute a man got in from his run, he took a bath, put on citizen's clothes, and went to the barber. This Blake was a new fireman on our division. He'd come up town in his greasy overalls and sweaty blue shirt, with his face streaked up with smoke. He'd been drinking; he smelled of it, and his eyes were out of focus. All the other men were clean and freshly shaved, and they were sore at Blake - said his hands were so greasy they marked the cards. Some of them wanted to put him out of the game, but he was a big, heavy-built fellow, and nobody wanted to be the man to do it. It didn't please them any better when he took the jack-pot.

I got my two men and hurried them out, and two others from the row along the wall took their places. One of the chaps who left with me asked me to go up to his house and get his grip with his work clothes. He'd lost every cent of his pay cheque and didn't want to face his wife. I asked him who was winning.

"Blake. The dirty boomer's been taking everything. But the fellows will clean him out before morning."

About two o'clock, when my work for that night was over and I was going home to sleep, I just dropped in at the card-room to see how things had come out. The game was breaking up. Since I left them at midnight, they had changed to stud poker, and Blake, the fireman, had cleaned everybody out. He was cashing in on his chips when I came in. The bank was a little short, but Blake made no fuss about it. He had something over sixteen hundred dollars lying on the table before him in bank-notes and gold. Some of the crowd were insulting him, trying to get him into a fight and loot him. He paid no attention and began to put the money away, not looking at anybody. The bills he folded and put inside the band of his hat. He filled his overall pockets with the gold, and swept the rest of it into his big red neckerchief.

I'd been interested in this fellow ever since he came on our division; he was close-mouthed and unfriendly. He was one of those fellows with a settled, mature body and a young face, such as you often see among workingmen. There was something calm, and sarcastic, and mocking about his expression - that, too, you often see among workingmen. When he had put all his money away, he got up and walked toward the door without a word, without saying good-night to anybody.

"Manners of a hog, and a dirty hog!" little Barney Shea yelled after him. Blake's back was just in the doorway; he hitched up one shoulder, but didn't turn or make a sound.

I slipped out after him and followed him down the street. His walk was unsteady, and the gold in his baggy overalls pockets clinked with every step he took. I ran a little way and caught up with him. "What are you going to do with all that money, Blake?" I asked him.

"Lose it, to-morrow night. I'm no hog for money. Damned barber-pole dudes!"

Now go and buy this book, and then read this informative criticism.

You're welcome.

a pensioner going shopping

A hilarious but probably not very productive exchange.

Clinton Trades Jibes With North Korea

On Thursday, the Foreign Ministry in North Korea issued a statement criticizing remarks Mrs. Clinton made this week to ABC News, in which she said the best response to North Korea’s behavior would be to ignore it, as one would a child clamoring for attention.

“We cannot but regard Mrs. Clinton as a funny lady as she likes to utter such rhetoric, unaware of the elementary etiquette in the international community,” the North Korean statement said. “Sometimes she looks like a primary schoolgirl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping.”

not right in my head

New song for bluegrass project is up on my MySpace. You can also find it here, where I'm just collecting previously recorded bluegrass songs for The Cleaver Streeters. Please help me change the line about sniffing undies into something less creepy and more performable.

lest you forget

Boo is damn cute. And has great posture.