This is how it goes...




Colleagues,

There continues to be late breaking Ed Center
funding modifications and changes that will impact
our staffing. i am pleased to share that the
modifications and changes appear to be more positive
for our school. The modifications and changes should be
more clear prior to Spring Break. Therefore, the
Optional Staffing Update Meeting scheduled for this
Wednesday, March 10th has been cancelled.

The Optional Staffing Update Meeting is being
rescheduled for Tuesday, March 16th @ 8:00 a.m. in
the Lecture Hall. I am hopeful that the information
will be more complete by that time.

Best regards,

I wrote those last two posts in a total woe-is me voice, which is not the one I intended. “Oh, poor me, we got land to build our little cabin in the woods on. Oh, my life sucks, I have more people I love than I know what to do with. Ohhhhhh the horror, I have a great job in an air conditioned building with a chair and a phone and everything. Oh someone deliver me from my misery, I have a reliable car, two adorable cats, an knitting habit and an amazing camera I get to capture life with. It’s wretched!”

One post is only an hour or so old and I already need to apologize for it. Deep seeded Catholic guilt trapped in my DNA? Mayhaps. Realizing what a shallow, whiny brat I sounded like? Definitely.

I’m a lucky, blessed, and thankful girl. I’ve worked damn hard more than half of my life. I’ve collected a lot of great friends who understand me (even when they don’t) and I have an amazing man to share my life with that understands me too (even when he can’t stand me).

I am thankful for APE and that they allow me to stick around and lend my ::snicker:: talents to their cause in my free time. I’m thankful that I get to take pictures of people and places I care about. I’m thankful that my body still works given that I’ve neglected and abused it over the years. I’m thankful that my brain still works and that I can afford hosting and a domain name to purge my thoughts.

And right now, having spent the last 30 minutes working in a damn spreadsheet, I’m thankful that I can say in approximately 9 months (provided I maintain the current trajectory, which I may increase/improve) I will be completely debt free.

Effe yeah, that feels gooooood.

Towards the end of 2009 I was burned out. Burned. Out. Work was kicking my butt and I had too many social irons in the fire. There was no one to blame but myself, which sucks because it’s so much more simple when you can blame others for your own problems. I’ve seen plenty of people do it (myself included) and we all make it look pretty easy.

I started backing out of things and trying to explain to friends that I just couldn’t do it anymore. I’m not sure they understood. If I was them, I’d have thought I was being dramatic.

In baby steps, I stopped writing for Atlanta MetBlogs and stepped down as city captain. After a year of successful Atlanta TweetUps, I stepped away from hosting them. I stopped making as many dinner play-dates during the week. I regained focus on my finances, my relationship and myself.

Last weekend the weather in Atlanta was perfect for errands and spring cleaning, it was one of those prefect early non-winter days that have everyone in the city out playing in parks and holding hands down the street. I did both and then some. I ran errands with The Mc which included us picking out new glasses frames for each other (be afraid) along with seventy other things and actually made for quality time. I paid off an old lingering debt with thanks to a nice tax refund and a baby bonus from [redacted]: LIBERATION! I cleaned the loft and consolidated my to-do lists. Even after a day of errands and chores, the list still a mile long…how is that possible?

What’s left that’s still filling my yellow sheet? Does it matter? There’s more, there’s always more.

I tell friends there will be crap in their inbox when they die, and there won’t be anything on their tombstone about how much they got done, or with what efficiency – what’s my problem?

Meh. I’m not trying to be a selfish a-hole, it’s just working out that way. It doesn’t mean I don’t miss you or I’m not thinking about you, because I am. You can probably feel it.

I’m working diligently to make it so that one day very very soon my to-do list will be shorter, and that I’ll be a better friend and blogger. Truth is: I miss you. I also miss me.

I wonder if you’ve ever been where I am, and how you got out of it. Backing out of commitments clearly isn’t enough, and not loving as many people as I do isn’t an option…and OMG can someone get me to stop COMPLAINING about this boring, boring crap?!

This year, it starts early:

Yesterday, March 3, 2010, I attended a special Administrators meeting where
the district provided schools with their respective staffing allocations
for 2010-2011. It appears from the data that we will have to make
significant reductions to our Certified and Classified staff for next year.

I am planning to hold an informational staffing meeting on Wednesday, March
10, 2010 in the lecture hall at 8:00 a.m. The main purpose of the meeting
is to share the staffing information that we have to date and the
challenges/ implications that we as a staff will be facing.

Please note our intent is to keep you informed about our 2010-2011 staffing
in a timely manner. I am aware that you may have other meetings planned for
the morning of March 10th. If you cannot reschedule your meetings and
cannot attend this meeting that is OK. However, since we are not scheduled
to have another staff meeting until next month, I thought it would be
prudent to provide you with this update ASAP. Therefore, I scheduled this
optional and voluntary meeting for certified and classified staff that
would like to be updated about our staffing projections prior to Spring Break.

Best regards,

Over two years ago we conspired over a series of meals and cocktails, forming our perfect plan for world domination to build the life we wanted.

I sold my condo and moved in with him, then he sold the big house later a year later and we eventually bought a loft. Part one of the plan: complete.

Part two proved considerably more difficult. How do you begin a collaborative painting on an empty canvas when one of you has an affinity for Romanesque and the other worships Dali? When one wants to buy 30 acres of land but can’t decide where or what it should look like (on the water or the side of a mountain with a view? North Carolina, Georgia?) and the other just wants to get. it. done.

One conversation at a time, during long road trips of knitting, podcasts, and debates that shouldn’t be engaged in when you’re trapped in a vehicle moving 70mph. I created a second blog with no links to this one, where we tracked our progress and posted ideas for the future.

We made an offer, we had a survey done, we rescinded our offer. We made another offer, we had an inspection done and we rescinded our offer. I fell in and out of love like a tween in heat. Each one “could be it!” became an annoying anthem, which could have only been worse if Celeine Dion had been the one singing it. I started thinking the blog and the conversations with friends were jinxing our plans – because you know that me talking caused that one house to have polybutylene pipes.

We changed our minds about where and when. We drew lines in the sand, set deadlines and missed them. We fell disheartened, discouraged, deranged. We had Sir Isaac Newton moments where we were clunked on the head with red apples shining from sea to sea – but were they Newton’s apples, or Adam and Eves?

Something happened new years eve as we were about to leave for the night that had us giddy and scouring real estate website search results for a particular area – we’d had an epiphany about where. Now: when? Things started to fall in as it should, as you could only hope and dream and wish for, as you can only truly appreciate when you’ve worked and looked and had your hopes dashed. Disappointment breeds gratefulness?

Less than two months later (last Thursday), we closed.

We’d found it – rather our agent found it for us. It’s a 1ac lot, not 30. It’s on a finger of a lake, not on the water itself and not off a goat trail. It’s in a gated community with a 24 hour guard, so he doesn’t have to worry when I go up by myself. There are 3 lakes for me to drop my kayak in. There are 30 miles of groomed trails for me to walk and run, there is a fundamental love and respect for nature there – where we’ve seen deer, grouse, turkeys and even a wolf on our visits. There are a number of other bits to be giddy about but mostly this: it’s ours.

We are (almost) officially city mice and country mice. Now we just have to decide on our cabbage (cottage + cabin) design and make that part happen. It could take the rest of our lives, but I doubt it…we’ve got momentum now.

 LOL!!! LOL!!! Ow, I'm getting a migraine from LOL'ing so MUCH!!!!!!

Like, haul videos are like the most AWESOME THING EVER.  

Young people RULEZ CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER!!!!

I mean, I am so TOTALLY full of "AWE," you know!!??



(P.S. Addendum for 1 March 2010 - By the way, I'm not actually this stupid or effete—I heard about haul videos on NPR, watched a bunch, and couldn't go without making a reply of some sort or another. I've actually gotten email from people who think I'm serious, which means (a) my socratic irony was well-done, and (b) hell is other people. Hurf durf.)

In the last month, I’ve lost my step grandfather and my pseudo mother in law. It’s been both a heart wrenching and brilliantly beautiful couple of weeks – filled with unexpected trips (to Seattle and South GA) and family reunions. Brimming with celebrations of long lives, surrounded by unseasonably beautiful weather, and riddled with cloaked lessons.

“With every goodbye we go to seed again, this is how we come to make family from strangers, this is how we learn ‘always’, we are candles lit from each other.”

I’ve butchered a poem that held me enraptured in my teenage years, one that resonated with me and made my bones vibrate with an understanding of grief I didn’t realize anyone else was capable of. Here it’s like cheap beef stew meat in a styrofoam boat – still delicious but not nearly as much as if you’d been given the entire mess of meat to do admire.

Just the same, the words are still there. Sixteen years since I lost my mother, fourteen since I lost my father. Now I stand on the sidelines of life’s gymnasium – watching people I love find their rhythm in the dance of the mourning. I’m just the awkward girl with the glasses, the lazy eye and the ill-fitting dress, they’re the football quarterbacks trying to figure out what to do with their hands and attempting to look relaxed.

We all suck at this. We’re supposed to. It’s not supposed to be easy or come naturally, it’s supposed to ravage us and spin us around, and when we get our equilibrium back in check, when we can focus on the horizon again without tipping over, we’ll see a present there with pretty little bow.

If there’s one gift those I’ve/we’ve recently lost have graciously and silently granted, it’s their example of this: live. Work hard, and live the life you want to live.

Bill spent the last 20 years on a lake almost every day, fishing. He shared his passion and his love with his grandchildren, his friends, and his wife of 60 years. Karleen spent the last 16 years cooking, baking, visiting with friends and family, and driving her sister half mad (*giggle*). She died in the same house she was born in – the house her father built, on the farm he owned and worked, and it was exactly how she wanted it to be.

While I’m still trying to figure out how to balance the greedy “want” from the soul filling, world rewarding “want” and what that means for my actions, activities, hobbies, etc., I’ve found yet another quote to pin to my mental lapel (in hopes others will see it even without seeing it):

“I don’t want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.” – Ernst Fischer

I couldn't find my li xi envelopes, so everyone's gettin' nothin', but I suspect I'm the only person even mildly celebrating Tết on my block, so it's probably okay. It's not quite as fun these days, now that I don't work with a dozen doting Vietnamese aunties and uncles who give me li xi and find my pathetic pidgin Vietnamese to be cute, if a little perplexing, anymore, but I'll take it over the sad drunk-fest of western New Year's Eve any day. If you see me burning money on the front porch later, don't call the fire department—I'm gonna keep the bad vibes on the run this year if it kills me!

Chúc mừng năm mới, everyone!

I've been working on my manuscript again, balancing my netbook awkwardly on my lap as the train trundles between my home town and where I work, in Baltimore. It's a document built up from back-up copies and archives from about six years ago, when everything turned upside-down, because in the brief stretch of my career liberation where I should have been able to finish the thing, something went haywire in my head and all I managed to do was make a huge chaotic mess of the thing. You think you grow and learn and mature as a writer, but you can fall back, too, and I had a run of that, too, when every time I'd pull up an essay from the manuscript, I'd end up hacking at it like a surgeon trying to excise moles with a chainsaw.

What happens to me might be something familiar to all artists, but I shouldn't project. There are just these times when I sit back, looking at what I've done, and ask myself why bother with this? It's true for me with my writing, my music, and my performances—the same old sensation of complete futility that comes in little waves, lapping at my feet when the tide's coming in. Maybe it's a highly-localized form of depression, targeted solely to the tools of production, or maybe it's something more. I do best when I stop reading, if I'm intending to write, or when I stop listening to music, when I'm compelled to make some, and I stave off the feeling that way, creating a tiny and contained cosmos where I can just do what the muscles and sinews of my hands want to do.

People say I think too much, and that's the stigmata carried by all the people in the world who can't stop themselves from building things, the tails-face to the coin of genetics and upbringing that fills me with this jittery, itchy urge to scratch out a navigable path through the churning landscape of thoughts caught in a hurricane. You beat out the plowshares and cut your furrows, and the drives and impulses carry on even when you just want to stop for rest and live a settled life for a moment or two. You set this machinery in motion and it's got a lot of mass to carry it along even when it's finished its job, and so you build whole lifetimes and wreck them in the same motion, trampling the ruins over and over until you run out of steam.

My poet friend died, almost a month ago, and I've suddenly become the interim guardian of his lifetime of work, something like fifty shaggy cardboard boxes of his writing, his tapes, and the raw materials of his unfinished projects, and it set the gears in motion again, just being there in the room with all of it, in a quiet room lost in the Baltimore skyline. I'd always chided him for being as much a master of self-demolition as he was an artist, but that's not entirely true. He was a genius, a brilliant synthesist of language with the delicacy of a bonsai gardener and the bravado of a street wrestler, and his work is stunning, at times, just…stunning.

He was a misery to work with, of course, and a real expert in generating states of distraction, but it's not hard to go off course. You can be the best driver in the world, but turning your steering wheel a sixteenth of an inch the wrong way for a fraction of a minute will send you into the grille of a B-flat, double-clutchin' semi every single time. It's so easy to do this, and the people in the world who are happiest as the consumers of the product of the makers seldom understand that it's not hard to write. Really. It's easy. Give me my headphones, a good mood, and a seat at my writing desk without distractions and I'll pound out ten thousand words without hesitation or particular effort, because those stories are always done long before I put my fingers to the keys.

It's the rest that does me in. It's the distractions, the whims and impulses, and the forbearance of the weight of the everyday—the bills to be paid, the leaky faucet, the dog pawing at me to play. It's the doubt, the uncertainty of motivation, and the complexity of trying to answer why should I bother when the answer is because not bothering isn't an option, unless I want that roaring, unkempt energy to find another way out, and legions of artists have found out the hard way that that's the worst thing you can do. It's that strange flash of hopelessness that comes from the intimate disjunction between the real and the invented, when you're sitting there on the cusp of discovery and the everyday intrudes, making you wonder why you're not applying yourself to something more rational, and to tasks that can be conceived, executed, and completed without leaving behind mountains of fragments.

I'm a fascist at heart, lusting after completion, symbolic integrity, and a skyline of architecture that fits together like puzzle pieces, and this is a fault that feeds the doubts, so I find my way around the rigidity of my intentions by enforced exercises and the introduction of chance processes and random oracle systems when I feel the old urges to unite the masses coming over me. I'm arch, pretentious, overly clever, and smug, too, and these things creep in when I'm drifting out of balance and overwhelm the subtlety of what I can do when I just unclench and let things happen as they will. I have to acknowledge the things I do wrong and the bull-headed instincts I have towards self-defeating processes—not to deny them, give them more room than they deserve, or worse, to seek to eliminate them in a sickly rush to purification.

That's the thing, see—

A kite flies because of the tail.

It's all that baggage we carry that holds us upright, to orient us to the wind and the forces that can carry us, when we place it properly and give it the respect and understanding it calls for. The weight of the world isn't pinning us down, but it's hard to remember that when you're feeling nothing else but that weight, bearing down on you till it feels like you'll never get up again. We just need to shift the load, to find the balance, and to take a breath and let it go without feeling the hitch of uncertainty, doubt, and regret.

So I sit there, each day, on the train, the landscape rolling by alongside the rails, and I have another go at my manuscript. My friend's death happened several months into this revival, when I'd just barely managed to recover the original work from the gantries and architectural ornamentation I'd buried it under in that sad stretch half a decade back when I was working to become a prominent writer™, but it was just a distraction, another bow tied in the tail of my kite, and I'm working again, albeit in tiny steps. I page through 204 pages of narrative, correcting rough passages and typos, rearranging bits here and there and changing the names to protect both the innocent and the profane, and I keep it foremost in my mind to not know where I'm going. It's easy to make wrong turns when I'm working off a map, and impossible to do so when I'm just traveling, just following the impulses of the fine muscles in my hands and fingers that turn a story into an actual thing.

The result will not be perfect. It will contradict itself, follow erroneous instincts, and make egregious, humiliating errors in spelling, grammar, and typography. I will deal with those things when it's time to do so.

Sometimes, saying that and making it so is the hardest thing in the world.

The writing, though, is easy. It's the wind that fills the sails, a force that stays constant, whether it's tearing my house apart or carrying me somewhere. The craft is in the construction, the way we come to catch the force of it, whether we're smart enough to use it or frightened enough to let it knock us down.

I scroll down by a line or two at a time, circling in search of the loose connections and the half-assed engineering and showy excess that'll do the whole thing in, getting a little better all the time, and I challenge each doubt to prove its authority, at least when I can.

Every day, the train passes the same points on its way, following the old rails up and down the same twenty-some miles of track, and every day, there's something worth seeing out there, some little detail or some new event unfolding, and as long as that's true, I'll be writing and rewriting, even in the face of the biggest doubts of all—why bother? What's the point? Isn't this all just futile?

"Good morning, sir," I say, smiling at the conductor, and I climb three steep steps and look for a seat.

Dear blizzard drivers of the Mid-Atlantic,

It's a blizzard, stupid. Get off the road right now, or risk being hit by a snowball and being given an unflattering portrayal in my hugely popular blog. Get off the road, go back to your house, and read a book, okay?

I'm an enthusiastic pedestrian, by association if not purest necessity, and I'm sick to death of the whole stinking lot of you morons blowing through the pedestrian crossings, driving diagonally across parking lots and then looking surprised when I don't dive out of the way, and otherwise being complete and total jackasses. In the snow, you're a hazard, a fleet of suburbanized wastes-of-skin instinctively lurching around the icy roads out of some desperate desire to get to the grocery store to buy some sugar-filled crap in a bag to shove in your li'l darling's pie hole to shut them up or milk or whatever other thing you think is so freaking important that you drive sideways to get it. Get off the road right now.

Congratulations on buying a rear-wheel drive SUV, too, you dimwitted media zombie. How's that working out for you in the snow? Umm…well I know how it's working out, seeing as you've nearly hit me about fifty times now, skidding past where I've had to hurl myself into a snowbank as your freaking pseudo-manly luxoboat came lumbering by, almost perpendicular to the flow of traffic, with you looking wild-eyed and yelling into your cellphone. Maybe you've got the car crammed full of your ill-bred brood, all wrapped up tighty-tight to find a snowy hill to sled down, and they're all screaming, too. At least you weren't an idiot, believing the general buzz out of a billion gobs about how "you can't beat physics" and how much safer it is to be sitting four feet high in a tippy leather-lined phone booth. How often are you really going to need four wheel drive, anyway?

Get off the road right now.

Of course, you didn't buy that SUV because you're a wussified social climber, crawling with fear at the thought that you'll look whipped in a minivan or worse, in a—heaven forfend—station wagon. No one thinks that about you, no one at all. I'm proud of you for not getting on the lesbian bandwagon and picking out a sensible all wheel drive wagon. You are the one true original in the parking lot at the business park, even if your little blue/silver/black/champagne trucklet doesn't really stand out so much. This is America, gosh darn it, and we can drive what we want!

Get off the road right now.

That said, my lovelies, you've lost this round. The roads belong to us—to all the walkers, the cyclists, and those of us who take the alternate routes. Take a load off, settle in, make yourself a meal out of whatever you've got around the house (get creative!), have a nice cup of tea, and read a book. It's beautiful at home, on days like this, to just fling open the blinds and let the brilliant light come in, and to sit back and feel like, just for a moment, you don't have to play that game you play because you've been forced into it, day after day, year after year, until you can finally settle back into the slackness of retirement and die. Seize the day! Fix something, or read something, or write a story. It's fun! I'm doing it right now, in fact.

Get OFF the road RIGHT NOW.

Heck, put some bread bags over your Nikes with rubber bands, dress up all nice and warm, and go for a walk. It's glorious outside, at least in Laurel, Maryland. The local news anchors are coining words like "snowpacalypse" and "snowmaggeddon" and more, but they're just mad because they're trapped in their newsrooms, forced, at long last, to bond with the lighting guy, and it's probably a scary place for them. You, on the other hand, can be free. You don't have to go to work, and you will have all the time you need to get the Ferguson report revised while everyone else is also getting caught up. You can be alive and engaged, and filled with the joy and wonder that comes with a change in the weather that makes the whole world a new and amazing place overnight. It's simple. Just—

GET OFF THE ROAD RIGHT NOW.

Seriously. Put down the snow shovel, put the keys back in the little bowl by the door, and go back inside. You never know when some crazy left-wing crank could be down in his basement, hammering nails into homemade spike strips and caltrops, do you? There could be anti-car terrorists out there right now, actual terrorists on the streets of Laurel, Maryland, just like the Republicrats will tell you, prowling like rats with their evil liberislamogay agendas, out to hurt your family. Haven't you seen the news? They're everywhere! Don't take chances, my beloved countrymen—

GET OFF THE ROAD RIGHT NOW.

Just to make sure, though, I'll sacrifice myself, and go out on patrol. It's a dangerous job, this never-ending vigilance, but it sure is pretty outside. Leave the car or trucklet at home, will you? I'll be sure to let you know when it's safe to come out.

Your pal, Joe.

Revisiting Arrested Development as it's being rebroadcast on IFC, I'm reminded how absolutely mind-boggling it is that a steaming lump of shecky-shecky stand-up schtick like Seinfeld managed to stay on the air for almost a decade, with legions of dimwits dully mouthing the catchphrase of the week around the water cooler and hurf-durf laughing like they've said something just hilarious, oh my GAWD.


You know, maybe it's just too hard to watch a brilliantly-written comedy without a laugh track. I mean, you people have jobs and mortgages and important things to worry about, like the manufacturers of Crocs going out of business and which emasculated overmarketed idiot pop star will be best to stave off sexual curiosity in your girl children. Hell, I'm with you there—it's just crazy hard to know when to laugh without someone pushing a button on a panel to make robots laugh the way you're supposed to laugh. God forbid I have to draw on my own experiences, interests, and personality to know what I find funny. Time is money, people!

What do I know? People sat on their big asses and guffawed like hyaenas at Everybody Loves Raymond, which I watched a time or two out of curiosity, before having to switch off the television and lie on the floor with a cool damp towel across my forehead. That experience, at least, was useful to me as a writer, giving me an essential understanding of what drives people to suicide, but I'm still a little damaged and twitchy in the aftermath. It's not that I'm some effete middle-class borge who haughtily claims "oh, I only watch PBS" (and admits to watching Project Runway as if it's some hip and naughty, naughty little vice instead of yet another tiresome habit of effete middle-class borges)—I have seven episodes of Jackass on my DVR, for pete's sake. It's not dumb humor that makes me despair—it's humorless humor.

It's just, well, you watch something like Arrested Development and suddenly, it's so clear how very, very tired most TV is. I mean, there are people out there who still think The Simpsons is "edgy." Can you really name one edgy thing you've seen the writers on The Simpsons do in, say, the last five years? The once-rich characters have drifted aimlessly, being rewritten to suit one celebrity product-placement episode after another (hint: they're ALL celebrity product placement episodes now), the plots just plod, the dialogue is just one wannabe catchphrase after another or one more we're-so-clever metafictional rehash that's not nearly so funny as the writers think.

So Homer gets dumber for twenty years, that crazy Jerry gets in another zinger, and everybody still loves Raymond even though he makes me want to hurt small children and then myself, and Arrested Development goes off the air in three years. I'll give you one thing—it makes American politics make perfect sense.

Now my head hurts again. I'm going to get in the tub and read a book, and maybe drop the toaster in the water, too.

Dear DNC-apologist Obamamaniacs,

A year's gone by and it's increasingly less likely that Gitmo will ever be closed. Are you actually surprised and angry? Really? Obama's Bushlike position on the updates to FISA to let telecom off the hook for spying on US citizens, his Bushesque Patriot Act support, and his Bushish and delightful disdain for equal rights for all Americans didn't make you think that, I dunno, he might just be a politician, and not the Democratic messiah after all? Well, at least he talks good and is saving us from the shame of the Bush years. Who cares if Thing 1 and Thing 2 aren't really so different when it comes down to it? The guy seems like a breath of fresh air, so he must be one! Isn't Lost starting again soon?

Love, Joe



Dear tea-baggin', tax-hatin', Gawd An' Kountry conservatives from Colorado Springs,

Enjoy your dark streets, your brown parks, and don't expect us to get all worked up right off when you dial 911. Hell, people, that stuff is socialism, what with mah tax dollers goin' to pay for them communist firefighters and those Soviet Union-style streetlights. Power to the middle class, man, and the free market! Coming soon—Colorado Springs™, brought to you by Carl's Jr. and Ted Haggard's Superfun Happy Camp for Young Christian Men. Paying taxes for services delivered in the common interest of the people ain't patriotic and Amurican…except it is, stupid.

Ha!

Yours in keee-rist, Joe



Dear 1886 Supreme Court of the United States of America,

Thanks so much for deciding, in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, that a corporation is a cute little person with rights and freedom, gosh darn it, because it was just so obvious that a group of anonymous, legally-isolated committee members tasked solely with the job of producing a profit at all costs is, in reality, just a regular Joe like you and me. 'Course, a black person didn't count at all back then, but I think that's in the Bible somewhere, so it's okay. Congratulations for finishing the job in 2010. Let the FREEDOM ring, baby! (FREEDOM™ is brought to you by Carl's Jr. )

Officially yours, Joseph

P.S. Dear Democrats, thank you for getting batsh!t crazy angry about the Citizens United v. the FEC ruling exactly 36 hours after you could have possibly made a difference. That's cool how you do that, being all smug and overconfident and dismissive of your opponents, because of course everyone agrees with you and needs no convincing, ever. It was so fun and silly after Prop. 8, all that marching and outrage ('cause hell, we just didn't have the time to do it beforehand—we're such very, very busy people!) and man, you've got me slappin' my knees all over again. Oh, the fun we're going to have over the next few years.



Dear carmakers of the world,

Thanks so much for hybrids! How else could we spend an extra $10k to get a car that's way more complicated than my 1981 Datsun to almost get the gas mileage I was able to get back then in my crappy old car. Who needs light, efficient cars with loads of interior space? Please make more BMW Minis, and if you can possibly make them even smaller inside, or fill them with foam and computer-controlled airbags for our ankles, we'd be ever so grateful. After all, it wasn't like millions of people bought and loved those crappy old ones with their terrifying excess of interior space (agoraphobics rejoice!). We need more computers, radar in our mirrors, video screens, rear-facing video cameras, On-Star, giant bumpers, SUV fortresses and more because it's just so hard to learn to drive safely and respectfully. Hell, isn't Lost coming back on? We don't have time to learn stuff! Get out of my way, idiot!

Sincerely, Smokin' Joe



Dear makers of Suave shampoo,

Thanks so much for giving me less shampoo for my money, packaged in an attractive curvy bottle. I was really bored with getting a great product in a plain, simple package for a good price. Now I want botanicals, lamb placenta, and that just-washed look! Screw those stupid thrifty people—what did they ever do for the world!?

Foamily yours, Joe



Dear people who think Obama is a communist,

Umm, read a book, you dull-witted wannabe John Galts. History really isn't that hard. That said, I'd be honored if you'd all go Galt on us and withhold your brilliant, amazing selves from us lumpen commies. Take a load off and have a little vacation. Heck, you can all teabag each other until you're properly relaxed.

Your pal, Joey!



Dear folks who keep saying we should let the people vote on "gay marriage," because that's how democracy should work,

I concur heartily. I mean, look how popular civil rights for black people were back in the sixties, if you asked the average guy on the street. Hell, we'd have all been equal years earlier if we'd just asked the white people in Alabama if black people were as good as white people, right? Democracy isn't about noble principles, for heaven's sake—it's about getting the population worked up into a frenzy of fear and then handing them loaded guns. Hasn't anyone been paying attention? While we're at it, I think we should vote on whether we give those socialist churches our god-given tax dollars to support their communistic mission. That Jesus guy was a real dangerous hippie, you know—I hear he committed terrorism against the capitalistic moneylenders in the temple! That's just unamerican. Let's vote!

Your friend on the ballot, Joe



Dear Livejournal,

I feel much better now. Wish you were here!

Cheerily yours, Joe-Joe Dancer!

I've finished, edited, and uploaded the next installment of my ongoing ambient series, 12 Minute Travelogues. #9 is up and running, so if you've already subscribed, it'll come in with your next refresh. You can subscribe or direct download at the podcast page. If you get it via iTunes and like what you hear, please review/rate it there.

I'm particularly happy with this one. I let myself use more silence, more dynamic range, and used repetition without repetition—where things return, changed, in each rendition, drifting and mutating into new shapes. It's good headphone music, even if I do say so myself.

Nine down, three to go. Listen slowly.

...and I just registered my recently-acquired Miata with historic tags. Hell, my MGB/GT was only 12 years old when I got it, roughly six hundred million years ago, but it's strange to think of a Miata as being a classic. It is definitely a classic, though, except minus all the built-in British Leyland tragedies. I guess I'm gonna get skin cancer and look like a goonish mid-life crisis sufferer for a while.

Still, I get to drive a kickass little go-cart, which makes it all better.

Now I just need to find one of those weird Miata batteries.

“Joe, I'm wondering if we could get a grant to charter a helicopter to record the bells,” said David, with the kind of regulated urgency I often heard in his voice. I just lay in bed, clutching the phone, squinting at the double image of a clock across the room.

“David, what time is it?” I asked.

“It's three o'clock.”

“Are you in the kitchen?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sitting by the radiator?”

“Yes.”

“Do you see the sign pinned to the wall next to the window?”

“Yes.”

“What's it say?”

“Wait, I need to get my glasses...umm, it says 'AM or PM?'”

“Do you remember why there's a sign on your wall that says 'AM or PM?'” I asked, in a tone as close to that of my mean first grade teacher as I could muster.

“What do you mean?”

“David, it's three in the MORNING.”

“No, it's not, Joe.”

“Is it dark outside?”

“It's overcast, yes.”

“Not overcast. It's three in the morning.”

“Did I wake you?”

“I believe you did,” I said. “And we've had this discussion, which is why there's a sign on the wall that says 'AM or PM?' so you'll make sure it's not some insane hour when you call me asking if you can charter a helicopter, unlike what you've done tonight, which is to call me at three AM to ask me if you can charter a helicopter.”

“You don't need to be confrontational, Joe.”

“Besides, the helicopter blades would drown out a recording. Go to sleep, and if you call me at three in the morning again, I'm going to murder you, as we've discussed.”

“Goodnight, Joe.”

Now that he's gone, of course, all the threats of murder, grievous bodily harm, and scandalous biography are for naught, but David Franks was the kind of guy you really, really could picture pushing you over that razor-thin line between composure and insanity. The thing was, at least for me, he was undoubtedly the most brilliant, disturbed, and amazing creative mind I've ever encountered, which is why my periods of permanently swearing off all contact forever and ever with David tended to last less than a few months, except in one case.

I've worked with amazing people, and I've worked in amazing places. Hell, I'm working in a giant clock tower right now, waiting for the steam pressure to level out in the main feed line so my tenants won't end up murdering me. David, though, was something else. He was capricious, petulant, child-like, both in good and bad ways, and he left wonder and ruination wherever he went. If one's life can be an artform, he'd come up with a pretty distinct aesthetic for his.

He wound up in my life because of a collaboration that finally burst at the seams when he insisted that he could not, under any circumstances, perform unless he was allowed to stop the show right in the middle of a concert by a well-known artist and put a plastic novelty wedding ring on the finger of every single woman in the audience. I ended up playing his part that day, the tape-recorder operator thrust into the limelight, and I skulked around him for a while after that, in what I call his body glitter period, where he would leave a trail of sparkles to let you know where he'd been. I didn't have to skulk for long, though.

“That part's so lyrical, isn't it?” he asked, as we listened to the never-ending repeats of f,r,o,z,e,n,t,e,a,r,s in what would ultimately end up as a four year recording session. I clicked the spacebar to stop, pulled the cursor back, started again.

“Let me fade in the underwater rain part right here.”

I moved the audio around, colorful blocks of sound sliding around the screen, and built up a little logarithmic fade to slide it in almost imperceptibly under the notes of acoustic guitar. Sometimes I wasn't even sure what I was working on—it was one of his projects, a sort of symphony of disjointed sounds based in the arbitrary shapes of blocks of music arranged visually, to spell out words and phrases. Not my thing, really, but he was focused and fervent, and had driven others insane on the project long before it fell in my lap.

“That's good,” he said, and it was a distinct pleasure to get that response almost right off the bat.

“I've got to stop,” I said. “My ears are worn out from chasing the white whale today.”

“Let's get lunch at the Korean place.”

“That'll work. Don't embarrass me, okay?”

Of course, I knew he would, and he did. He had a camera, the Korean place had a wall lined with paper cranes made of gum wrappers, and the woman who ran the place was young, gloriously beautiful, and patient with a tall, elegant gentleman in a long coat. As shock therapy for social anxiety, an afternoon out with David would do the trick or kill the patient.

I'm not sure how I fell into all these projects. In the last, and most vexing, of them, I spent almost six years fighting with him over a web site—fighting, building, researching, structuring, editing, and fighting some more. What was odd was that he didn't exactly know what he wanted, but he knew, in a strange, complicated way, how to tease it out of the sweat of my brow. At times, I imagined it's how a hapless silk-screening assistant must have felt, working for Warhol, but the times kept me fed, with stories and disasters and discussions that came from nowhere, and went nowhere, albeit in a lovely way.

In the last several years, the cancer came, and the strain and the reward got tangled up, and I realized that, in a realization that, while I'd chased him down to be a mentor of sorts, I'd found a whole other world. Going through his library, through his papers, sifting through photographs and listening to the hours and hours of tapes of his work, it was like I'd found myself in the workshop of some great undiscovered Beat writer, and it was humbling to dig deep in the archives, picking out pieces for the web site. The man was, flat-out, a staggering, off-center genius, though his skill in creation was met dead even by his skill at unraveling his own successes.

The conversations were endless.

“What have you done to this machine?”

“Nothing.”

“David, someone's completely reconfigured your computer. I don't have a clue how to fix this.”

“Maybe someone broke in.”

“Someone broke in?”

“Yes.”

“And created a new user account on your computer to connect to Verizon?”

“Yes.”

“Smart burglars.”

“Apparently.”

I hung in. The cancer dug in, clawing deep. He worried, to the point of panic, that the warnings in the paperwork from the hospital to the effect that chemo could cause dementia were accurate.

“How would anyone be able to tell if you had dementia, David?”

“No, seriously, Joe, I'm worried.”

“Well, you better get busy writing me a proper bio for your web site, then, before you get too demented.”

“Maybe it'll be better if I was demented. Less concern for the boredom of truth.”

“See, that's a way to look at it.”

It staggered him, though. The illness, the chemo, the everything. When his kitten escaped, he teetered off into the cold in a long coat over silk pyjamas, armed with a giant, cartoonish net, and alienated half of Baltimore by climbing over fences to stalk cats on other peoples' fire escapes. In the end, she came back, though it was after he'd caught and brought home several cats that, of course, bore no resemblance to his kitten.

At the worst, though, in the confusion and the chaos, the wit was there, and the rejoinders.

He took a trip to California, and I walked him through packing his suitcase, down to making a list for him.

“David,” I called as he clattered around the other room, “You better not have packed a smoking jacket in here like last time.”

“That was a beautiful trip, Joe. Cary Grant wore smoking jackets. It's all in the grand manner,” he opined, looking in on me.

“Maybe so, but you don't have space for the grand manner.”

I took my list and opened his bag. He'd packed a swim suit, a pair of goggles and flippers, one shirt, one sock, toothpaste (no brush), a hairbrush, and exactly seventy-two tubes of topical testosterone gel.

“David, what the hell is this? Didn't you read the list?”

“Is something missing?”

“Clothes.”

“There are some there.”

“Okay, more than a shirt and one sock. And, seriously, why are there seventy-two tubes of topical testosterone gel in your suitcase?”

“I might get lucky.”

“And whoever you get lucky with is going to get a goddamn mustache from overexposure to testosterone, I suspect.”

“Why?”

I just clenched my entire face into a knot.

“Unfortunately, you're going to be brutally murdered before your trip, so you won't have a chance to try it out.”

“You say that, but, you're not going to murder me.”

“Oh, I am, and I'm going to make a fortune writing a scandalous hatchet job biography about you. I'm going to describe your genitals as 'bijou', too.”

“Bijou!” he laughed. “Like the movies!”

“Yeah, David, tiny movies. Indies.”

“That's not the grand manner.”

“So watch it, okay? Go and get me three white shirts.”

Maybe it's me. You stare these things in the face, and you've got to laugh back, or be destroyed. I made it a point to threaten him with murder at least once a day, for the notoriety and all that.

“Joe, this is serious,” he said one night, as we wrapped up a long, long, exasperating day of labor on the web site. “I'm really scared for my life here.”

“You're too annoying to die,” I said, but I knew the feeling well. I just wasn't going to give in, because I couldn't.

I got him on the plane. It nearly killed me, as it turned out. I'd pinned notes into his coat, contact information and instructions, because he'd been having a rough stretch, where reality and David never seemed to be in the same room at a given time, and I followed him right up to security, panicked that he'd be refused boarding, and after talking with the airline and the folks at security, we suddenly ended up getting escorted through without any checks at all, shuttling down the guarded lane behind a TSA agent. I stood there, talking with him, going over his plans, explaining where he needed to go, and suddenly, I realized that, having just come from work at the Visionary, I was still wearing two multi-tools and the TSA had just put me right inside the secured area.

“David, holy shit, I'm inside the airport with four knives,” I whispered. “I'm gonna get shot to death!”

He grinned a broad, almost demonic grin.

“No, you're too annoying to die.”

“David, I'm not kidding.”

“Well, then I'm going to be the one to write the scandalous hatchet job biography of you!”

I tried not to look wild-eyed, but I was wild-eyed inside.

You always wondered with him, sometimes, what was real, and what was a bit, a piece, or a fragment of work he was mulling over in his mind, but I stood there, inordinately concerned that, at some point, someone would find me wandering the airport with a belt full of knives and take up the issue.

“And you're going to be the one who's 'bijou',” he laughed.

It amazed me that he'd remembered that, when so much was slipping through his grasp, but nothing got by, even at the worst, as long as it mattered, in the grand manner, or in the sense and systems of poetry. You think someone's lost, that they've gone away, and there they are, if only for a moment.

“Just get on your goddamn flight, and call me when you get there so I know you made it.”

“Sweet dreams, Joe,” he said, and headed for his gate.

I dug my hands deep in my pocket and tried to saunter out of the airport, knives and all, with a casual, devil-may-care bearing and the composure of someone who's got no reason at all to be shot to death by the police, but I've never had the knack that he had. That day, I was probably just lucky, but then I have been lucky, for a quite a while.

I could go on, but there's not enough time in the world. In the end, it's fragmentary, and disjointed, because it's too hard to get a handle on how to write a history so soon.

Someday, though.

Damn.

I woke up early, ready to go back to work and face the challenges of a new decade, with a simple, lovely quote circulating gently in my head like the strata of sweet-smelling pipe tobacco smoke.

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

    - Albert Camus

It's a good way to start a year, drifting out of dreams to the words of a presumed absurdist, and I walked to the train station, rode to work with the landscape rolling past in shades of grey, and worked a reasonable, if a little frustrating, shift. At lunch, I thought of Camus again, eating my can of soup in front of the computer with Bach quietly counting the minutes on my little radio, and idly sat there, blowing on my spoon and reading about Facel Vega automobiles like the one that killed him—sleek, gorgeous, magical things...

The time drifts, some days.

At home, I curled up on the bed with the dog, aimlessly watching a little television and rooting through the random alleys of the internet, and I tuned in a familiar website about the kind of automotive minutia that gives me an odd sense of pleasure. Odd, too, that today's the fiftieth anniversary of the day Albert Camus died in that Facel Vega, wrapped around a tree with a train ticket in his pocket for the trip he'd meant to take, but was talked out of by his publisher.

I wonder how I know such things, and how these awkward moments collide.

I was still thinking of the coincidence, or whatever you'd call it, when an unseen hand, or at least the impression of one, turned the doorknob on the closet door on the other side of the room. The door clicked open, then gradually swung open with a theatrical cre-e-e-e-eak. I felt the electric thrill of gooseflesh, and wasn't sure how to react, except to tense up slightly in expectation.

The dog was less circumspect, and was on her feet, hackles raised in a twenty-two inch mohawk running down her spine, ears pricked, and letting out the kind of deep, visceral growl dogs make when they're not fooling around. I sat up, watched the door swing, then pause, then swing fully open, in what was probably just one of those tricks of an old and uneven house.

The closet was just the closet, packed solid with my excesses.

The dog was not assuaged.

I stroked her, if only to feel the bristly ridge of raised fur and the low rumble of an ongoing growl, and chuckled.

"Mister Camus, I presume," I said, to no one in particular, and went back to my distractions.

Hell, I never could make heads or tails of The Stranger, but you have to love an invincible summer.